Perception --> conclusion

Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. 
Elmore Leonard

That's a really harsh edict, isn't it? As a reader who tends to skip most descriptive passages, I find myself wanting to skip writing the whole look/sound/taste/smell part of the narrative. But it's so boooooring, I say! I hate describing! I don't see the point!!!

Much of this resistance is me being lazy. But then again, the point is... what's the point? If we don't like writing description, and if after hours of labor we present this paragraph or passage that the reader is just going to skip.... what is the point?

Exactly. What is the point? We're not just writing to fill up pages. So... what's that descriptive passage there for?

Actually, sometimes a description of the setting is needed, to set the stage for action, to outline the context of the conflict, to reflect some aspect of the character. And I think if before I start, I can figure out my purpose here, why I'm describing this, maybe I won't hate writing it, and the reader won't want to skip it.

In deep POV, or in first-person, the essential purpose of description is to show something about what the POV character perceives... and maybe to show what's changing in the character-- what this all means to him/her, how he or she interprets this.

Here's a short passage (end of chapter) in Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris. (Very good book, "boarding school thriller," I'll call the genre.) It's in dual first-person (the good guy and the bad guy). This is the good guy, an old Latin teacher at the boarding school. He's been there forever, and at this point, things are starting to change in ways he doesn't like. So the author uses this "change" to provide an opportunity to describe the place:
     As I said, it's hard to explain St. Oswald's: the sound of the place in the mornings; the flat echo of boys' feet against the stone steps; the smell of burning toast from the Refrectory; the peculiar sliding sound of overfilled sports bags being dragged along the newly polished floor. The Honors Board, with gold-painted names dating back from before my great-grandfather; the war memorial; the team photographs; the brash young faces, tinted sepia with the passing of time.

Okay, notice how very much this is in HIS viewpoint-- the description is filtered through his memories, his values, his affection for the place.  And notice how the beginning perceptions are very sensual, very focused on the experience of the senses in this place. But then, the 'summary" becomes something more personal (my great-grandfather) and poignant (the brash young faces). The nostalgia and sadness of that last (this is in Britain, so the names of many of those "brash youngsters" probably are etched onto the war memorial) leads into the deep feeling of the POV character. This is the paragraph that ends the chapter:

Gods, I'm getting sentimental. Age does that; a moment ago I was bemoaning my lot, and now here I am getting all misty-eyed. It must be the weather. And yet, Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Am I unhappy? All I know is that something has shaken us; shaken us to the foundations. It's in the air, a breath of revolt, and somehow I know it goes deeper than the Fallow affair. Whatever it may be, it is not over. And it's still only September.

Notice that he is commenting on his own description, analyzing what his own choices of perceptions mean. The movement in the first paragraph from pure sensual description to nostalgia and sadness creates a slow accumulation of emotion. And the POV character is the one who, without using the word, identifies that emotion-- dread. Something wicked this way comes.

Description should never just be description. It should be there for some purpose. It should somehow advance the plot, or develop the character-- something that deepens our experience not just of the setting but of the story as a whole.

Why not look at some descriptive passage you have in the last scene you wrote, and tell what the purpose is, and how you furthered that purpose with the sensory description?

Alicia

Question from comments re: sequential action

Arial asks:

I've got one for ya! Setup for the sentence: The heroine is in the saddle, sitting in front of the hero. He has just reached into his saddlebags for a bottle and... 

His arms coming around her, he uncorked a small bottle, took a swig and replaced the cork. 

I'm told that he can't have his arms come around her AND uncork the bottle AND take a swig AND replace the cork all at the same time. I'm told that the way the sentence is written above, that's what I'm describing. Obviously, my original intent was to have these actions happening sequentially, but I loathe writing, "After his arms came around her, he uncorked a small bottle, then took a swig before replacing the cork." BLAH! It's wordy and sloppy. Help! Thanks! Arial 

 Hey, commenters! How would you revise the sentence?

I have to ask Arial a question. Where is the bottle? In the saddlebags? Where are they in relation to the heroine?

Now let's have some suggested revisions!

Actually, this gives me the opportunity to mention a new guideline, but I haven't really formulated it yet. I'm just thinking that the complexity of the action sequence (and the time it takes) might dictate whether it's more than one sentence. I see too often that action is rendered too quickly, so the experience of the sequence is lessened. All the action pieces are made minor, and of equal importance.

So in the above, if this is a romance, it's a lot more important that his arms go around her than that he uncorks the bottle, but putting this all in one sentence makes it seem like they're of equal importance.

(Also it's hard to tell whose POV this is-- either way, though, the arms going around her should be FELT -- perception, emotion, not just movement, should be narrated here, I think.)

So I guess I'm saying, first, I wouldn't do it all in one sentence. And then, I would go into the POV of the POV character and narrate a bit of how it feels, what it means.

Okay, suggestions! What would you all do? Arial, what do  you think would help? Which of the suggestions would you think would work best?

Alicia

Question from the Comments

This is a really good question from Chemist Ken. It was posed on one of Alicia's posts, but I'm going to take it because this is a pet topic of mine.

I have a question about the sample text you wrote:

The grotto was ancient and long-forgotten, the mossy ground soft and rotting underfoot. The tiny pond was filmed with algae, and the air stank with the smell of the stagnant water. Even the rustle of the wind over the water was hushed and abashed.

Would that sentence or series of sentences be considered telling? I'm still confused by the concept.

 You're not alone in this confusion, Ken. The rule sometimes referred to as "Show, Don't Tell" is a shorthand way of advising against the use of exposition. Exposition is a narrative element, a way to categorize the words on the page, which basically refers to text that compresses, summarizes, explains, or otherwise reduces story material into condensed passages. We all learn expository writing in school, so for even the best fiction writers, we sometimes lapse into exposition almost as a default style in places.

Some exposition is necessary in every text. Micro-exposition (things like dialogue tags, thought tags, transitions, and other tiny bits of exposition) are key ingredients in good writing. The trick is not whether you have exposition, but how you use it. Here are some general rules of thumb for exposition.

• Avoid long runs of exposition.
• Avoid using exposition in place of action, dialogue, or description.
• Make sure the interior monologue is actually interior monologue and not exposition.
• Make sure the opening of your novel is as exposition-free as possible. (By "opening," I mean the chunk of text from page one until the start of the rising action, usually a few scenes, a few chapters, maybe 10-25% ish of the text, depending on story)
• When you have to use exposition, keep it as brief as possible.
• Exposition in the form of narrative summary (compressed events within the story's real time line) is useful for shorthanding trivial or repetitive action. But it should be kept as brief as possible.
• Use action beats in place of expository dialogue tags.
• If you're writing in a subjective point of view, eliminate expository thought tags.

I could go on. In fact, I could probably write a post on each of these points, and maybe I will. The point is that the use and misuse of exposition is a broad and complex subject, and "Show, Don't Tell" has become a shorthand rule of thumb for handling exposition.

But Alicia's sample is not exposition. It's description. Description is not "telling" in the same way exposition is, but description does contain its own set of pitfalls. For one, it can be static. If you look at Alicia's example, all three of her sentences contain a verb of being, "was," in some form or other. This is a static word -- not to be confused with passive voice, no matter how many times good-intentioned people insist that verbs of being are passive voice. The confusion on that point stems from this: Static verbs are the opposite of active verbs, and passive voice is the opposite of active voice. "Active" is used to name both things, so people sometimes think "passive voice" refers both to the type of verb and to the type of sentence structure. It does not.

In any case, although we generally say that active verbs are better than static verbs, this is anything but a hard and fast rule. Sometimes we want the emphasis in a sentence to be on something other than the verb, so a quiet little verb of being or appearance can help you accomplish that. Sometimes an active verb is so overused that it becomes worthless -- reach, pull, push, move, look, gaze, stare, and many more besides these, although active, have become associated with weak writing merely because they are repeated so frequently.

So, in Alicia's example, where she was trying to convey a still, dead, stagnant wilderness area, the description relied on static verbs. This makes sense. But if she'd been trying to describe a school playground at recess, more active verbs might have worked better.

I know I'm throwing a lot of concepts into a single post, and I hope it's not confusing. But I thought it would be better to do a comprehensive, if short, answer.

Theresa

Switching senses

When you're in a character's point of view, you're probably observing the world through those "spectacles". What Joan experiences in the scene is what we narrate, right?  So her sensory perceptions provide the details of the description you make of the setting and the experience of the events. We feel with her body; we see through her eyes.

But as we all know from our own lives, the experience of a new place/time isn't always coherent and understandable. Some sensory input leads to overload immediately (smell, sound, and pain-- notice how when we are overwhelmed with one of these, we close our eyes). Sometimes the different senses come in sequence-- we might be more audial and so figure out what we're hearing before we figure out what we're seeing.

Anyway, in a scene, we have to narrate the experience in a reader-comprehensible way.  That might mean going back and forth between an inward experience ("she was overwhelmed by the din of the band,") and a more sequential and more mechanical chronological ("when she could hear again, she looked around and..."). But something that will help this feel more natural to the reader is to take care in switching between senses, with an action bridge easing the transit so that the experience is more than just an explosion of synesthesia (a confusion of the senses, so that the input doesn't result in the expected output, so you "feel" color and "smell" sound).

 Here's an example of how -not- to do this, with several sensory experiences jammed in together without a transition--

His nose was assaulted by the garlic fragrance while a Joy Formidable song played loudly in the background. In the corner a black-and-white Snoopy dog lay chewing on a toy.  Sunbeams streamed in through the open window.

There's no focus there, no connection, no experience. Whoever "he" is stops mattering as the sensory details just occur as if they are not being experienced by anyone, as if they're merely discrete occurrences. The reader is going to have a hard time assembling this into a place or experience. This is, btw, the sort of description that readers skip. They probably sense that it's just a pro forma description, dutifully put in there because scenes are supposed to have description.

So as you edit, consider rewriting such passages to actually create an experience. Some suggestions:

1. Think of this as a moment, a special moment. And choose it well. You don't have to describe the sensory experience of every moment-- that would be way boring-- so choose the moments you want the sensory to, if only momentarily, dominate. Have a purpose then for bringing in the sensory now, describing this moment.

2. The most important moment for the senses is at a shift in setting (when she leaves the hallway and enters the office, say, or goes outside), and when something in the setting changes, like another person enters it, or the tea kettle catches on fire. So whenever there's some change, particularly when the character moves from one setting into another, take a bit of time to describe the new experience. Many scenes will probably start then with a short unified paragraph about the new place. That sets the context for the reader, shows that there's been a change, and provides a way for the reader to experience the scene as if she's there. Describe the change, not just the setting.

3. Put it in someone's point of view. Really. This doesn't mean just sticking in the character name or pronoun (his nose). It means showing this character experiencing this.  That means considering who this character is and describe what he'd notice-- as he notices it.  If in fact he notices in a sort of scattershot way, all sorts of sensory input arriving at about the same moment, say so-- but make it important. Make it signify something about him or the moment he's in: The room was chaos. He couldn't breathe because of the garlic fumes; he couldn't hear anything over the pounding of the CD player. ... Most important, think of how he would experience it. Most of us have a dominant sense, and most experiences have a dominant "feel". What is that? If it's too loud for him to hear, that's likely to be predominant, so say that first maybe. If he's a musician, or loves or hates this band, he's going to have a different reaction than a tone-deaf Sinatra fan. Describe this person's experience, not a sort of generic set of sensory inputs.

4. Link the description to some danger or threat or awareness or emotion. The primary evolutionary reason we have most of our senses (especially smell) is to warn us of danger. Now of course every moment isn't dangerous, but our senses don't know that.  Think of what in the scene needs to be noticed (again, especially when something changes-- we don't usually notice when they stay the same).  If the picture of his mother on the wall is crooked... if a draft is coming in under the door... if the floor is gritty under his feet... those are things he probably couldn't help but notice and mentally remark.

5. You can have one sense dominate. That is, forget that about making sure all five senses are represented. That's mechanical and boring. Go into the experience and think about what it feels like. If she's leaving a dark movie theater and going out into a bright afternoon, for that moment, maybe the visual dominates. Talk about what the experience of dark to bright is like first. You can have her awareness expand as her eyes adjust, but thrusting in the lingering taste of popcorn at this moment will detract from the more primary sense.


6. What do you want it to MEAN? Do you want this to echo some emotion in the character? If she's angry, everything will be objectionable, including the lingering smell of her husband's aftershave. If he's feeling oppressed by a dream he had of his mother's funeral, the crooked portrait of her might amplify his sense of dread. If in fact the crooked painting is a clue that someone's been in the room searching for the papers he's hidden, show that awareness dawning in his head as he sees the painting. You can fill in the blanks around the meaningful bit, like she also angrily notices that the faucet is dripping again.

7. Think cause and effect. The sensory bit causes the character to do something, or he notices it as an effect of something he does. It's not just happening in some static between-worlds moment, but inside a scene where things are happening. Link it to action, maybe-- what he experiences as he moves through the scene or interacts with the setting. He notices that the floor is gritty because/as he walks over to the painting. Not every sensory bit has to be linked to action, but try that first. So he -stops in the doorway- and sees the room. He smells the garlic and waves it away with his hand, or goes to open the window. This will keep the scene moving, and the narrative focused on action.

8. Don't overdo it. Restricting yourself, say, to a paragraph of pure description might seem artificial, and feel free to break any self-set rule when appropriate. But having a guideline in mind will help you be selective about what you choose to describe. Everything isn't equally important, so decide what is important, and that's first and foremost going to be what is meaningful-- what reflects or causes emotion, what shows a change or threat, what he encounters as he moves through the scene.

9. Read writers who do this well and figure out what they're doing right.  Too many writers think of sensory description as a chore-- I know I do-- and so do it perfunctorily to get it over with. But some writers use the sensory moments as a way to convey something in a new and interesting way.  Analyze why you enjoyed this passage, how this writer focused, what the meaning was and how it was conveyed, how the language, sentencing, and paragraphing enhanced the passage.

10. If you're going to shift from one sense to another, try to make it graceful and organic. For example, group like-sensories together.  In the first paragraph or series of sentences, group the visual. In the next, the audial. Find a way to unify. Also, find a way to mark the shift with a transition of some kind. Action here can help as a transition. He stops in the doorway to look at the room (visual). When he notices the crooked painting, he moves towards it and notices the grit under his feet (tactile). Or use a time marker to start the sentence of new input-- "When his ears stopped ringing (audial), he took a deep breath and for the first time noticed the faint tinny smell."  The transition helps unify the different sensory bits, so they don't seem so willy-nilly.
If you're going to describe more than a couple sentences worth, consider a paragraph break when you shift from one sense to another. If that leaves you with a couple one-sentence paragraphs, well, deepen the experience. Say more about what he sees or what it means, so you have more than one sentence in that paragraph! 

The problem, of course, is that we do experience sensory input willy-nilly. In real life, our bodies and brains sort it out immediately. But  when we write, we don't have any way to convey that immediacy and totality. We're bound by the march of words down the page, the temporal limitation that only one word can happen at a time. We have to accept that limitation and make the experience as coherent and meaningful as possible within the restrictions of narrative and prose.  And that does probably mean focusing on the character's experience, but parsing it so the accretion and sequence of input helps create the experience for the reader and adds to the meaning within the scene.

What are some other techniques you use to focus the description and make it understandable?
Alicia

Description and texture

I'm the worst person to talk about description. I hate writing it, and I don't much like reading it either. I'm lamentably un-visual, and so reading what the scene or the room or the world looks like doesn't register for me, and writing it is just an ordeal, as I don't "see" well, and so I almost have to mentally invent the visual aspect of a scene.

However, I think if we think of description as merely description, we might be missing an opportunity here. Description is useful for deepening a scene, for making it seem more real and authentic-- books without much "scene-setting" often seem thin. We are, after all, the children of a visual age of cinema and TV, and we might need the additional details of the setting to make this feel real to us.

Another way we can use description-- perhaps the other important one-- is to create a tone.  A straightforward description of a room ("As he entered, on his left was a closet door, and on the right was the entry to a gleaming modern kitchen. Ahead were two leather couches set in sequence in front of a big screen TV. The effect was that of a tiny movie theater.") accomplishes that goal of making the scene seem real-- the reader can visualize this place.

But the straight description doesn't create much of an emotional atmosphere-- a tone.  I think a lot of us just fall short at this point. We describe what we want the reader to see, but we don't go further to create what we want the reader to feel.  This is a lost opportunity. We've wasted a few paragraphs on something many readers will just skim because it doesn't add much to the experience of the scene. I'd just like here to suggest some ways that you and I (especially I!) can use those paragraphs to deepen the texture of the scene.

1) Description can vary with the genre or the scene purpose.  That is, the same scene (a park, say) might be rendered in a romantic way in a romance or in a scary way in a horror film. It might just be a matter of emphasis, on what details we select. For example, in a romantic scene, what about this park would enhance the romance?  Maybe the sun filtering through the trees and casting beams on the velvety lawn. A lone park bench facing the pond, a pair of swans floating serenely by.
Now take the same park and make it "horror-fying"-- the wind is blowing the fallen leaves around. The sky above the pond grows ominously, paradoxically still.  The park bench is still empty, but now a few of those fallen leaves are trapped against the benchback.

If we can isolate details that help create the genre tone, that will put the reader in the right mood to accept whatever romantic or horrifying or suspenseful event is going to happen momentarily.

2)  Vision isn't the only sense. Describing the sound of the wind or the smell of the stagnant pond or the feel of the grass under the character's feet-- those can individualize and flesh our the description, while giving us more details to select from in order to create that mood or tone.  Most of our sensory information does come in through our eyes, no doubt, but the depth of our understanding of the world probably depends on the addition of our other senses.

Some writers will laboriously tick off each sense and make a line in each paragraph about that sense:

He saw the sun filtering through the leaves, and beyond in the clearing, the campfire. The smell of woodsmoke filled his nostrils. He could almost taste the roasting marshmallows. The crackle of the leaves under his feet woke him from his reverie.

That's sort of dull, and it doesn't add up to much. Think instead about starting with a little topic sentence that might put this in context, like:

The grotto was ancient and long-forgotten, the mossy ground soft and rotting underfoot. The tiny pond was filmed with algae, and the air stank with the smell of the stagnant water. Even the rustle of the wind over the water was hushed and abashed.

Another option is to have a sentence of visual (can't escape that), but then really zing into the most imperative sense.  If this park abuts the town dump, then the smell is probably going to overwhelm the pleasantness of the visual. If there's a bagpipe band playing in the bandstand, then very soon the visual will give way to a recounting of how the lonely music wails across the still air.

3) Don't forget the character. If she's hungry, then no matter how picturesque the scene is, as soon as she sees and hears that ice-cream truck blaring out "Bicycle Built for Two," her mouth is going to start watering and she's going to "almost taste" the creamy ice cream and the nuts on the top of the Drum Stick and the sharp tang of the orange popsicle.

Her emotions might also distort how you describe it.  If she's worried, she might see even the most pleasant scene in a pessimistic way-- those kids on the merry-go-round look hysterical, not excited.
Also consider the character goal. Why is she in the park? If she's frantically searching for her lost wallet, she's not going to notice how pretty the flowers are in the rosebeds. If she's dallying there, waiting for her boyfriend to get out of work and meet her for lunch, she might see everything in a rosy glow of anticipation... or be scoping out the area for a place to sit and picnic.  How she apprehends the scene will vary depending on why she's there, so describe it as she experiences it.

4)  Don't lose the emotion, but use it. What is he feeling when he enters this setting? How does that change what he experiences through his senses? How does the setting change his emotion-- that is, he might grow more agitated if he sees disorder (overflowing trash barrels, cracked sidewalks), or more calm if the breeze is soothing. But show the emotional transition happening, show the setting details that affect his mood.


5) If the character interacts with the environment, the description becomes integrated with the action, and takes on dual purpose. So rather than just describing a muddy playground, we could have our character cross it, trying to pick his way from dry spot to dry spot, worrying about his shiny shoes, stepping accidentally into a  puddle, grabbing for the pole of the monkey bars to extricate himself.

6) One of the most valuable techniques I learned in graduate literary criticism class was to reveal what's not there. Yeah, I read all that impermeable Derrida stuff about deconstruction, but here's what I took away-- what isn't there is as important as what is.  So describing the absence of something can increase the emotional quality of the scene.  An empty swing, creeking eerily in the wind, suggests loss-- of a child, of childhood, of hope. You can mention what's missing ("empty") to add a subtext. As MacLeish put it:

For all the history of grief
 An empty doorway and a maple leaf

Anyway, no need to moan and groan as I do when I realize I probably ought to describe this room where they're going to have the big argument. Stop thinking of it as a "place" and start thinking of it as a "revealer," and describing it might come easier.

Alicia

Possession power

I was thinking more about how to efficiently establish setting and perspective and all that. One quick way to show more setting is to show ownership or possession of objects around. After all, if this is "John's Maserati" in the garage, the reader will probably think that this is John's garage and John's house (rightly?-- if wrongly, we have more work to do to explain why this is John's car in Jane's garage).

That little possessive has a lot of power to convey setting by identifying the "props" or objects lying around more specifically. But you know, possessives can also aid in my crusade to make narration more vivid and concrete. The enemy of concreteness is vagueness, and "the" and "a" in front of a noun can make even the most vivid noun vague.

He stopped in front of a yellow turbo-charged Maserati.

"Maserati," even minus the adjectives, is pretty vivid, huh? But "a" Maserati? Is it "his" Maserati? Is it "her" Maserati? Is it "the mayor's Maserati?" (Hey, the New York mayor could have a Maserati and not be assumed to be taking bribes.) We should use "a" and "the" generally only if the POV character doesn't know whose Maserati it is.

Those little words in front of nouns can help connect the object with a character (a possessive noun or pronoun), or to a previously indicated point ("This Maserati" or "That Maserati," for example, uses the demonstrative pronoun to connect to something earlier in the scene or paragraph). And just that amount of specification can make the description more useful and clear. I don't have to wonder so much whose garage this is if the car inside is identified as "John's."

It's interesting how little it often takes to make a passage more concrete, more anchored in the reality of the story. Has anyone else been working on that?

Alicia

Your Comments About Aggregate Action

A few days ago, I introduced the topic of aggregate action -- my term for when groups of individuals are presented as behaving in identical ways, much like a chorus line on the page. Sometimes this can be a useful shorthand, but it also contains many traps. Today I thought we might take a closer look at some of your comments to that post and see if we might come up with a list of rules or guidelines for aggregate action. But first, let's review the example we worked from:

The girls huddled together along one side of the gym and pretended not to watch the boys along the other wall. The boys were bolder. Their shoulders squared up to the girls in a forthright manner, though most of them also slouched enough to prevent direct eye contact. Feet shuffled. A shower of giggles erupted from one cluster of girls, followed by a squeal, a high-pitched protest, and more giggling. The boys seemed to take courage from this and bumped each other as they milled about in the casual manner of athletes in a huddle. Any moment now, they would begin pairing off.

So let's begin with this comment from Jordan:

IMO, at least the shoulder squaring needs to be individualized. I found it confusing to read that they squared their shoulders—oh, no, wait, they slouched. Then I'm off wondering whether you can do both.

Yes, this is one of the classic problems associated with aggregate action. Sometimes, the group does not function like a perfect chorus line. Sometimes, one guy high-kicks while the others are shuffling off to Buffalo. So from this, we can derive our first rule.


Rule The First
Action can only be presented as aggregate when all members are performing the same moves at the same time.


Green Knight suggests one possible fix for this imperfect dance routine:

I would alter 'also slouching' to 'alternatively squaring and slouching' - they try to pretend they're bold whenever they are watched, but they're really not certain.

By changing the way the action is described, Green Knight has resynchronized the group. This is a good trick. Describe the actions as sequential rather than simultaneous, and you're much less likely to drive the characters into mass contortions.

On a related note, Jewel Tones said,

High pitched protest (that one lost me, so I say it needs an identifier)

Good eye, JT. The protest is uttered by a single person, not by the group. Thus it really can't be presented as an aggregate action, and here it's attached to a group of girls rather than to a single protester. (Ditto for the squeal which precedes it.)

The flipside to this is that we have probably all encountered this sort of group behavior from teenagers. The girls huddle, and any one of them could be responsible for the ear-shattering noises emitting from the group. I think this kind of aggregation might work better if viewed through the prism of a pov character's perspective -- a harried mom trying to dash through the mall, perhaps, whose progress is arrested by Those Girls. She wouldn't care, necessarily, which of Those Girls makes which noise. She views the pack as an obstacle, a collective barrier to her progress.

But I think the reason it works, then, is that the pov is clear. Which brings us to this comment from Patty Jansen,

It depends on how deep your POV is. This example reads to me as almost-omniscient, shallow POV. Alternatively, it reads as an observation by a third person who is watching while all this happens.

Yes. Exactly. This type of writing is necessarily omniscient because it's a form of narrative summary -- the mechanics of this are a bit complicated, but just trust me when I tell you that narrative summary veers sharply to objective, rather than subjective, on the pov sliding scale. Even when we're in a narrator-character's subjective pov, when we shift into NS, that pov will shallow out.


Rule The Second
Aggregate actions are almost always presented as narrative summary, which can change the pov.


This means you lose a degree of intimacy between the reader and the character whenever you rely on aggregate actions. There are times this works without a hitch. When are those times? The answer lies in comments from PatriciaW and Alicia.

PatriciaW: The entire thing read fine to me, as a setup for individualized action to come.

Alicia: I was okay until the giggle from the "cluster". I felt like by this time, we should be narrowing in on the main character.

Both of these comments seem to rely on the same assumption, that this passage would lead us from the omni into the specific pov of a particular character. This is a good assumption, actually, and not just because of the way the example was framed. It's also because of a nifty pov trick that Alicia discusses in her pov book. (You've all read this book, yes? You should. It's really the only book that tackles pov from the writer's perspective rather than from the scholar's or analyst's.)

In the beginning of a new scene, we have some leeway to play with depth of perspective in pov. We can start more objectively and, as Alicia puts it, drop the reader down gradually into a deeper subjective pov. This means that aggregate action, which is naturally more objective anyway, will fit better into the start of a scene.


Rule The Third
Aggregate action, if used at all, is probably best used in the first lines of a scene.


Which, of course, is because we can occasionally fool the reader into not noticing that we're wandering out of limited pov at that particular point in a scene. It's best not to do this too often as it will begin to take on the appearance of an affectation, unless you're writing highly stylized, mannered prose, in which case, rock on.

But even then, keep in mind one of the pitfalls of aggregate action, hinted at in the comment from Cathy in AK,

If we're in Kendra's POV, and she is neither the squealer nor the protester, I'd say attribute those to single characters.

This type of writing doesn't really specify the relationship of the individual to the group, right? IOW, we don't know if Kendra is the squealer or the protestor or even if she's inside the huddle. And we won't know until the pov deepens again. And even then, the reader will have already made some assumptions about where Kendra is, which means that the eventual clarification of this point might break the fictive reality the reader established independently. This is not good.

Yes, there are ways to write around this orientation/reorientation problem, but why bother? Why not just avoid the problem in the first place? How do we do that? By keeping the introductory aggregate action short, and by getting into character pov before the reader can draw too detailed a scene.


Rule the Fourth
Keep it tight, and get into subjective character viewpoint quickly thereafter.


When you do that, you can start getting into the details recommended by Dominique,

Since you mentioned that the main character is worried about her position in the pack order, I think you'd want to point out the two leaders.... we might want to individualize an action related to the guy she'd like to pick her. Something to highlight characters of importance in her life.

Beautiful. Yes. The essence of drama is in the relationships between the characters. If all the characters are mashed together in an aggregate, then the relationships between them are blurred or abandoned altogether. But by separating the characters and showing their relationship with and their importance to the pov character, now we have hints of tension and drama. Kendra doesn't watch that boy because he's in that group. She watches him because he's the one she likes. That. Specific. Boy. But he's not looking at her ... or is he? (See how easily the tension loads into that precise moment now?)

Anyway. All of this is can be boiled down to a paired principle: Stick with the specific, which is where the drama lies, and if you use aggregate action, hit it light and fast and then get on with the scene.

Theresa

Aggregate Action

We ran into this concept recently in a manuscript by one of my private editing clients, who was kind enough to consent to a discussion of the topic here on the blog. Though the client's work inspired the post, all examples are mine.

Here's the issue in a nutshell: When do we present actions undertaken by groups of people as aggregate actions, and when do we isolate individuals and track their actions as representative of the group?

Generally, we're going to be better off with the specific, unique example. In fact, that will be true of almost every case. But sometimes aggregating the characters can be a quick shorthand for setting a scene or accomplishing other tasks. The dividing line between these two choices -- the individual and the group -- isn't drawn in a permanent location, but it's almost always going to be better to stick to the individual.

This might be clearer if we consider an example. Your heroine is a 14-year-old girl, a freshman in high school, and the event is a gym class in which they're learning to dance. Class is assembling but has not yet been called to order. Our heroine -- let's call her Kendra -- is with a cluster of her girlfriends on one side of the gym. The boys are all milling awkwardly on the other side of the gym. There's one boy in particular Kendra would like to have as a partner, but at the moment, her more pressing concern is where she'll fall on the pecking order. She doesn't want to be the last girl picked, or even in the bottom half.

If we describe the entire event in the aggregate, we might have something like this:

The girls huddled together along one side of the gym and pretended not to watch the boys along the other wall. The boys were bolder. Their shoulders squared up to the girls in a forthright manner, though most of them also slouched enough to prevent direct eye contact. Feet shuffled. A shower of giggles erupted from one cluster of girls, followed by a squeal, a high-pitched protest, and more giggling. The boys seemed to take courage from this and bumped each other as they milled about in the casual manner of athletes in a huddle. Any moment now, they would begin pairing off.

So, let's start with this question: Which of these pieces of action is better off being isolated and attached to a single character, and which would you leave in the aggregate?

Theresa

The Language of the Senses

For some time now, I've had a note on my desk that reads, "Blog about that comment about smell/language." There was a time when I knew which comment this note referred to -- one of you posted something interesting and should be recognized for it, even if I can't for the life of me remember which comment or commenter it was. (My brain has been a sieve all summer. Counting down until school starts again, and can I get an amen on that one?)

Oh, well. If any of you remember posting a comment about writing the sense of smell, please pipe up in the comments so I can credit you appropriately. Luckily, I do still remember what I wanted to say. This is all about the words we have at our disposal to narrate the physical senses. Our language doesn't treat the senses as equals, and this can sometimes present writing challenges.

Vision

We have an extensive vocabulary to describe what we see:

• concrete nouns
• verbs of action
• verbs of appearance
• verbs of being (sometimes)
• adjectives
  
• some other modifiers

Usually, when we narrate an action, we're doing it by accessing the sense of sight.
The little girl skipped rope.
Bobby tapped his bat on home plate.

When we read these words, we get a visual image from them. Each of us may get a slightly different visual. Doesn't matter. The point is that most of the words in most narratives will draw on the sense of sight. Our language is rich and evocative and packed with possibilities for describing what we see.

If you don't get what I mean, try an exercise just for kicks. Write 150-words about a woman grocery shopping for ingredients for a dinner party. Now write the same piece from the point of view of a blind man. What is the experience like when you strip out the sense of sight? How does it change the narrative? What words can you use with the sighted woman that you cannot use with the blind man? There are probably quite a few changes that have to be made, if only because what we see is such a large part of what we narrate.



Sound

Look again at our sample sentences about the kids on the playground. Either of these are suggestive of the sounds, too -- the slap of rope against asphalt, the thud of wood against plastic. We see the images first, and perhaps we also hear.

Sound creeps into the narrative in many ways through action verbs, but there are more obvious uses of sound, too. Dialogue is spoken by characters, and if you're anything like most readers, you "hear" those words differently in your silent mind as you read them. (How many of you shifted your inner ear to accommodate the quotation marks around the word hear in that sentence?)

Then we have words we use, usually verbs and adverbs, to describe the quality of the character's speech. People yell and whisper. They speak throatily or brightly. This manner of conveying sound qualities in speech has fallen out of favor, but we still have the vocabulary to accomplish it.

Then there are the fleets of nouns to describe non-spoken sounds -- hoots, thumps, scrapes, rustles, and so on.

If you look at the vocabulary set for vision and sound, the words directly describe the sensual impression conveyed. When you read the word hoot, you get a direct and instant knowledge of what is being heard. When you read the words little girl, you get a direct and instant knowledge of what is being seen. No need for translation or further interpretation.

Smell

Not so with the sense of smell. For narrating scents, we have a blended vocabulary, you might say. Some of the words are direct -- pungent, acrid, cloying, and other similar terms all describe the native characteristics of a smell.

But this vocabulary in English is not as well developed as the vocabulary for sight and sound. We just simply don't have the words to accurately convey a sense of smell as directly as with sight and sound.

Take, for example, cloying. We know our response to a cloying scent. We don't like it. It's invasive, and not in a pleasant way. But is it sweet like cheap perfume? Or disgusting like roadkill? Either of those scents can be cloying, but they're cloying in entirely different ways.

We can work around this as writers by drawing on comparative language. When I asked the questions above about cloying, I used the word like both times. This is no accident. Our vocabulary for the sense of smell almost demands this kind of usage if we're going to be precise about what we're trying to convey. It's not always necessary -- we do have some good, robust, precise words for smells -- but this particular sense does often demand an indirect approach in the narrative.

There are other work-arounds. Sometimes context will control the way a reader interprets a word meant to describe a scent. Yeasty, for example, can be used to describe the smell of bread (a pleasant smell) or the smell of an infected body (an unpleasant smell). If the word is used in a hospital ward, the reader will know which way to lean.

The bottom line is this: Pay attention to the way you're using language to evoke a sense on the page. Not all senses are handled alike.

Theresa

Another Paragraphing Point, Sort Of

A friend emailed me with a question related to the following three sentences, and she has graciously agreed to let me post it here. Here are the three sentences:

“So do you see why I need your help?” he asked.
“You need my help?” she asked.
Although her features remained subdued in the way of most mourners, a small note of eagerness had entered her tone.

The question was whether the third sentence should be a stand-along paragraph. (Dialogue tags were added to clarify the he/she speakers, but we can assume they would not survive editing. We're in "his" pov.)

Right away, I noticed two things about that final sentence.


First, the Progression of Ideas

The second and third sentences progress like this:
"dialogue"
Facial expression
tone of voice

The tone is separated from the dialogue by a lot of words. These two pieces, tone and dialogue, do fit together. So it might be work to put both sentences into the same paragraph, but the intervening words were a little disruptive of the link between those pieces. Speech, facial expression, tone of voice.

This, in fact, is probably what led my friend to think of this as a paragraphing issue. Does she attach "his" impressions to "her" dialogue because of the tone of voice reference? Or should those impressions be set off on their own? She was approaching the matter as a pov question, which at first blush makes sense. We wouldn't normally attach a dialogue beat of internal monologue from the pov character to the dialogue of the non-pov character.

So my first thought was to reverse the order of that second sentence, something like:

A small note of eagerness had entered her tone although her features remained subdued in the way of most mourners.

But before I even went so far as to think through whether that sentence was any better, a bigger second problem showed me a different solution.


Second, the Abstraction

her features remained subdued in the way of most mourners

What is this? You might be tempted to call it description, but what does it describe? I bet if we ask ten people what subdued mourning features physically DO, we would get a range of answers. Is the mouth downturned or held tight? Are the eyelids held open or dropping down? What is happening on the forehead and in the jaw? Is the angle of the head affected?

We don't know, and the reason we don't know is that this isn't clear description. It's his conclusion, his interpretation of the meaning of her expression. He sees something on her face, and interprets it as subdued mourning. We don't know what he sees, though. We only get the conclusion.

So is it interior monologue? No, these are not his direct thoughts, his brain's chat reel. It's a summary statement of his conclusion but it's not presented in interior monologue.

This is "telling," in other words, a very small-scale intrusion of narrative summary -- very small, so small that I nearly missed it. And I am a dragon about this sort of break in the narrative, so that's saying something.


My Advice

So here is what I wrote to my friend:

I suspect what's throwing you off is the leading adverbial clause.

IOW, the pov in that clause is diluted because it's summarizing his conclusion rather than reporting what he witnesses. What do subdued features look like? Is she droopy and mournful or stoic and grim? How can we tell the difference when we look at someone's face? What actions or physical conditions key the emotion?

So for example --
Although her lips tightened with the mourner's effort at self-control, ...

Or,
Although her eyelids drooped with the customary mourner's sorrow, ...

Or whatever.

But the point is that you would be shifting the verb toward a physical action (tightened, drooped) and away from the abstract summation (remained).

Once you do that, I think you'll realize that the paragraphing choice here has more to do with emphasis than with logic flow. (Because you'll be tightening the logic at the small scale.) So then you can decide whether you want to link the dialogue to the actions as a supplement to the dialogue, or offset the actions for more emphasis on the actions.


My recommended fix accomplishes two things. There's no longer the impression that a character's thoughts are being attached as a beat to another character's speech. And the clause is now firmly in the realm of action, something that makes a much better beat.

Because it's set up like a beat now, she can attach it to the dialogue or not, as she chooses, to create the emphasis she wants.

Yes, I left the main clause alone. And yes, there were things I wanted to tinker with there, too. Two things. Anyone care to guess what those two things might have been?

Theresa

Your Embellished Sentences, Part 2

Before we move off the embellished subjects which we discussed here, I want to foreblog some ideas from the comments and make sure we have some parameters for when to use an embellished subject.

To begin, Erastes rightly suggests,
Stick to the names once you know them, or "him" or "he" if it's not confusing - don't think you are being clear by using epithets because you aren't. I thoroughly agree that before you know that person's name - e.g. "The elderly woodcutter wiped his brow and said, " my name is..." but after that. NO NO NO. don't do it.

I don't think I can dispute that in any way. Once the character is established (more on this to follow), you want to avoid using labels or designations. "The elderly woodcutter" and similar character tags work best for new characters who don't yet have names. My corollary warning: Don't use multiple, disjointed character tags for the same character. He can't be "the elderly woodcutter" in the first paragraph, and "the cheerful baker" in the next.

Which begs a question: how do you handle it when an unnamed character remains present for a long stretch of sentences? The first reference should be a character tag with strong visuals. From there on, use a pronoun or, if necessary to avoid confusion, re-use the original character tag or use action beats relevant to that character tag. That is, the first time, he's "the elderly woodcutter." Down the page a bit, where you need something to clarify things, you might use a bit of stage action related to his age or occupation. "He dropped his axe and hobbled toward the door." See this post for more tips on using this technique.


Deb Salisbury points out,
The amount of description I'd include would depend on how important the character is, and what the reader needs to know for the scene to make sense.

Yep. It all goes back to relevance. One of the reasons secondary characters can often appear to "take over" a scene is that we weight them incorrectly. We give them too much room on the page, too many lines of text relative to their function. Or we give them super interesting characteristics and actions that make the reader more attracted to the secondary than to the mains. (Ooh, look! The sidekick just went Rambo on the bad guy, and his only weapon was a travel-sized bottle of shampoo! Hero--what hero? You mean that guy dialing 911 in the corner? Bah. I want more of shampoo man!)


Leona says,
sometimes I think people are too general and emphasize the wrong thing because they are too lazy to look at a better way. "the green eyed wizard" was a good example.

Yes. This is an old, familiar problem. Unless we're in a police lineup and eye color is a clue, who cares if the wizard's eyes are green? (N.B. Romance readers might care, in any case, because physical characteristics can contribute to their suspension of disbelief in the romance. Even there, you're better off limiting this kind of reference to fertility markers, rare features, and other factors which the opposite sex views as highly attractive.)

But Leona's main point is one I strongly agree with. Don't be lazy. Make your descriptions memorable. Which is more intriguing --

The little girl played in front of the house,
or
The plump-cheeked toddler drew chalk circles on the driveway.

The thing is, if the kid and her toys are important enough to mention, you might want to mention them in a way that isn't boring. Relevance is still the guiding force, but if it's relevant enough to include, it might be worthy of specificity and authorial care. There's a middle ground between a dull sentence and a detailed treatise on Sidewalk Chalk Drawings: Color and Form. (Which is sort of where we started this whole topic, isn't it?)


Finally, thank you to Dave Shaw for making this point,
If the social role matters to the plot or to how the character appears or behaves, I think it should be brought in as early as possible.

Dwight Swain said there are four aspects of character which an author can use to create a dominant impression on the reader: age, gender, vocation, and mannerisms.

If my slush pile is anything to go by, vocation (or what we've been calling social roles) and mannerisms are least often used to good effect. Of these two, social roles are used appropriately when they're used (but they tend to be underused), and mannerisms tend to be least effectively used. We either see mannerisms so clumsy that the character reads like a collection of twitches and compulsive behaviors, or we don't see mannerisms at all. (Or we see trite mannerisms -- the ubiquitous hand pushed through hair to signal frustration or anger. These don't tell me anything specific to the character, and remember, we're talking about ways to identify characters for the reader now.)

I asked a question in the last post, and I think the answer may have been too obvious to warrant much discussion. How does the context influence your choice to use a gender noun (man/woman) rather than a social role noun (woodcutter/waitress)? When would you include an adjective?

The answer lies in Dwight Swain's four aspects. Look for character labels that hit on as many of those four as possible. Instead of man, dad -- which is both a social role and a gender noun. Instead of boy, Cub Scout -- which is indicative of age, gender, and social role. What other examples can you share?

I think we've about beat this to death. It's a useful topic because it so often gets botched in beginner manuscripts, but it's probably not important enough for us to dwell on it much beyond this post. So if you have any remaining questions, ask them in the comments and I'll address them there.

Your Embellished Sentences

In our last substantive post, I asked you all to embellish a sentence. We presented a few key concepts in that post.

1. Action, dialogue, interior monologue, and other narrative elements can be rendered descriptive by word choice.
2. These elements can also be made descriptive by slowing down the speed at which the events are related.
3. These elements can also be made descriptive by demonstrating the way the characters respond to or interact with the details
4. This form of "descriptive writing" is not the same thing as "description."
   

I also want to frontpage one of the ideas in the comments. We discussed what might be called the Mystery Clue Exception. Think of it this way. The general rule is to allocate space in the narrative which is roughly equivalent to the importance of the detail being presented. Important details get more words or lines. But if we did that with clues in mysteries, we would give it all away. In those cases, we want to minimize the space (and downplay the presentation) of the important detail and throw the reader's focus onto other matters.

With that said, let's take a look at some of the embellished sentences. The original sentence was,
The man walked through the snow to get his mail.

The Man
Some of you chose to embellish the man with an adjective:
The young man, The old man (Murphy)
The blond man (Livia)
The young man (Jami G.)
The gnarled man (Iapetus999)
The old man (Dominique)
The leather-faced man (Rachel)

And some of you chose to substitute a different noun, something more evocative than plain old man.
The minister (Dave Shaw)
The pensioner (John Harper)

In general, which is better? That depends. The substitute nouns are genderless, so if the sex of the character is relevant (or if it hasn't been previously established otherwise), using a plain noun like man or woman will be a good choice. If you do this and add an adjective, remember that descriptiveness is the goal. Which of those adjectives gives you a fast, unique visual impression of the man? I lean toward gnarled and leather-faced, both of which are strongly evocative and concrete.

But if the gender has already been established, tagging the character with a social role such as minister or pensioner will give the reader a way to understand the nature of the character in a slightly less visual way. There may still be visual elements -- pensioners are generally elderly, and ministers tend to wear those collars. But in this case, the descriptive element is about the nature of the character rather than the strict visual presentation.

Special tip of the hat #1:
The elderly trapper (Dave Shaw)

Here, Dave combined both approaches, using a role-based noun and padding it with an adjective. It's a trapper -- a job title that carries connotations of outdoorsiness, maybe burliness or other indications of physical strength, maybe jeans and flannels and boots. The adjective is the right kind of adjective, too, providing a layer of detail not implied by the original noun. It's a strong combination.

Special tip of the hat #2:
Lisa's brother (Suelder)

Here, Suelder used a noun that states a relationship, brother, and then created the relationship with the use of the possessive. It's not just any brother, it's Lisa's brother, and now we all know who we're talking about. So this is something like the social role nouns of trapper and minister, but it's enhanced by the stated relationship to another character. It might not be a highly visual subject, but remember that we're not talking about pure description but about "descriptiveness." By presenting this relationship between the characters, we know something we might not have known before. So this is a very effective subject, but it should be used sparingly. Once the relationship is made clear for the reader, we wouldn't want to keep seeing it detailed in the narrative.

Before we move on to other aspects of the exercise sentences, I want to toss out a question for discussion. Let's say that generally we have the following choices for our subject:
adjective + generic noun
"social role" noun
adjective + social role noun

Let's also assume that a proper name is not an option. How does the context influence which of these three options to choose?

Theresa

Description and Descriptive

We've had several requests to talk about ways to handle description. It seems there's some anxiety out there about this topic. How do you incorporate description without slowing the pacing? How do you layer description into the text so that it doesn't interrupt the action? How much is too little, and how much is too much?

Before we can really tackle this topic, though, we ought to take a look at a related matter that might prevent you from ever needing to contemplate these questions. Let's start with definitions.

Description
Narrative which sets out the details of setting and the sensory impact of the characters and environment.

Descriptive Prose
Narrative which, although its primary purpose is to convey action, interior monologue, dialogue, or exposition, achieves a descriptive impact through word choices and sentence structures.

Before you can begin to assess how much description your narrative can (or should) include, you need to assess the overall descriptive impact of the prose. Do you write,

The woman ate a bite of cake.

Or do you write,

The cook-off judge tasted the caramel fudge torte.

Or do you write,

The cook-off judge dipped her fork into the caramel fudge torte. A strand of amber filling stretched across the pathway to her lips, and the spectators leaned forward to stare. She tasted, and almost as if unable to help her reaction, her eyes temporarily drifted closed and she lost her blank, stiff judge's posture.

Now, there's a lot more to these passages than additional text. The length does matter, of course, because you want to grant actions as much weight as their relevance requires. If the pov character baked the cake, then the third passage might make more sense. If the pov character is a cop searching the crowd for a suspect, maybe not so much detail about the gooey goodness.

Now, here's about as close to a rule of thumb as you'll ever get. Relative to the total narrative, you want to spend enough visual space on relevant details as is necessary for the reader to understand their relative importance.

In other words, if your text is very fast and light and streamlined, a very small relative amount of descriptive prose can shine a big spotlight on a moment. But if you write detailed, leisurely prose, you'll need to grant even more space to important details if you want them to register with the readers as important.

(Some of you right now are thinking, But if it's not important, why include it at all? This is where art comes in. Otherwise, all romance novels could be printed as, "These people fell in love. The end." And mysteries could be printed as, "A guy died, and another guy caught the killer. The end.")

The question is not whether a detail is important at all, but whether a detail is important enough to warrant the amount of space you assign it.

Other than the amount of space given to this moment, though, look at some of the other changes. We have highly specific nouns -- not just a woman, but a cook-off judge. Not just a cake, but a caramel fudge torte.

We have precise and vivid verbs -- not just ate, but tasted. And look at the additional verbs in the third passage. Dipped, stretched, leaned -- all verbs of motion that convey things we can see with the mind's eye.

Finally, in the third piece, we've broken down the act of tasting a cake into several separate steps, each described not just in terms of the visuals, but in terms of the impact on the people involved. The crowd reacts. The judge reacts. These reactions enhance the impact on the reader.

Let's try one in the comments. Here's a plain jane sentence -- your task is to do two new sentences, one light but more descriptive, and the other more developed for greater impact.

The man walked through the snow to get his mail.

Have fun with it!
Theresa

Medic!

Just when you thought you'd forgotten that horrid sentence exercise from last week, we're going to revisit it.

She looked at the lush purple heather glowing faintly crimson under the striped pink-and-orange sunset and the puffy tinted clouds.

You did a wonderful job reworking this mess in the comment thread, and now I thought it might be useful to diagnose the actual problems we were trying to eliminate.

Weak Main Clause

The main clause, "she looked," is on the slow train to snoozeville. And yes, that is the technical name for it. (It is in Theresa Land, anyway, where I can so name things! lol) Looking is not an interesting activity, and it's wildly overused in most beginner works. She looks at clouds and flowers, and we look at her looking at them, and then everyone takes a nice nap. Unless there is some significance there -- for example, she has been color blind since birth, but the genius doctor hero cured her with his magic probe and the power of lurve -- skip the looking and find something more interesting for the characters to do.

Insane Prepositional Phrase

Everything following, "she looked," is a prepositional phrase or builds off the phrase. It's long, but it's linear, so its insanity is not derived from crazy structural problems. No, the content is the problem. It doesn't make sense. Heather doesn't glow, faintly or otherwise, and even if it did, I doubt whether it could glow in different colors. And are the clouds both puffy and tinted, or is the author implying something about puffy being a tint? A little punctuation would clear that up. Also, heather may be lovely, but it's probably not best described as lush. A bit scrubby, almost wild, but lush? Eh. Nah.

Give That Clown a Rolaids

Color is a great detail for waking up a scene. Color choices can be symbolic or thematic, and they can reveal much about character, setting, and tone. But this much color all at once reads like rainbow clown barf. Use color judiciously to signal deeper meanings and imbue the text with some vividness. No real hard and fast rules of thumb, of course, but it's something like scent -- one every five or ten pages or so might be enough. A cautious and controlled writer can get away with more or less.

The Cure Is Worse Than the Illness

We see this all the time: an author tries to pump up a weak idea by slathering on all sorts of extra crap. Because she looked is boring, the author tries to wake us up with all that purple (and pink and yellow) prose in the back end of the sentence. So the sentence is unbalanced both in terms of structure and content.

Reactionless Viewpoint

What does "she" think of this view? Does she think it's clown barf, or is she a little girl with a little girl's taste for sparkle and pastels? We don't know. Looking is so passive an activity that it implies nothing whatsoever about how the character is interacting with the environment. This, by the way, is the main reason that much description fails. It's not enough to tell us what the world looks like. We have to see the characters interacting with that world, too.

I feel as though I'm forgetting something. Am I?

Theresa

The Words Not Spoken, The Steps Not Taken

I'm reading Stone's Fall by Iain Pears, an exquisitely talented mystery writer whose first book, An Instance of the Fingerpost, is a near-perfect clinic on first person narratives. This new book is gorgeously written in reverse chronological order similar to the movie Memento, but covering a much broader time span.

But I'm struck over and over again not by the structural pyrotechnics but by the simple way he incorporates missing details that lesser writers might just leave out. Instead, by referencing the words not spoken and the actions left undone, we get a richer, more complex narrative. This is not an author who merely watches scenes unfold in his head and then records where the characters are standing and what they are saying. This is an author who embraces the totality of events from every angle.

Here's the first place I noticed this technique, on the bottom of the opening page. We're at the funeral of a woman so old that the narrator, a friend from decades ago, didn't realize she was still alive until he read her obituary in the morning paper.

It was a fine enough service, I thought, although I was not an expert. The priests took their time, the choir sang prettily, the prayers were said, and it was all over. A short eulogy paid tribute to her tireless, selfless work for the unfortunate but said nothing about her character. The congregation was mainly freshly scrubbed and intense-looking children, who were clipped around the ear by teachers if they made any untoward noise. I looked around to see who would take charge of the next round, but no one seemed to know what to do. Eventually the undertaker took over.

The paragraph goes on to describe the plans to inter the body and the procession of pallbearers. But by that point, the main work of the paragraph has already been accomplished. Pears hasn't once referred to the deceased woman's family or close friends, but we all understand they are not present. It's probably the main point of the paragraph, and it's made so obliquely that an inattentive reader might fail to draw the conclusion.

So how does he do it?

That phrase, but said nothing about her character, jarred me right out of the otherwise mild and pleasantly correct catalog of details of a very old woman's funeral. Instantly I wondered why the eulogy of an old, rich woman known for her charitable works would not reference her character. Normally, we might expect such a eulogy to talk about her kindness, her warm heart, her empathy or her sympathy. That's the key signal: Hey! Wake up! Important things are missing here! Pay attention to what's being left out!

Then we get fidgety children and casually brutal schoolteachers. There's a sense of duty attached to their presence, but no real feelings of mourning. Then the service ends, and right at the point where a family member or other designated spokesperson would talk about the next steps in the process, no one steps forward. But Pears handles it so deftly that but for that earlier key signal, we might not reach the proper conclusion.

A lesser writer might have written something like,

While the choir sang, I looked for familiar faces but found none. Of course, she'd never had children of her own, but what about the rest of her family? I also couldn't find a single representative of her husband's family. Or her second husband's family. No friends. No one even close to her age. No one but the dutiful and the curious and a cluster of children from the charity school she founded.

To be candid, that's not an entirely ineffective technique, even if it lacks Pears's masterful sleight of hand. A narrator who notices what's missing is an engaged and thoughtful narrator, and he's more likely to be interesting than the narrator who merely watches the scene unfold and records,

It was a pretty church with a small altar and vaulted ceilings. The pews were filled with school children from the charity school she'd founded. They fidgeted while the choir sang prettily, and their teachers clipped their ears to make them stand still. The priest gave the eulogy and talked about her many charitable works. It was a fine service, I thought, and at the end of it, the undertaker invited us all to the interment that afternoon.

Do you see how that works? It's a technically smooth paragraph with many of the same physical details as the Pears paragraph. But without the active mind of the narrator noting what's missing, the writing feels flat.

This is a technique Pears uses over an over to great effect. Look at how he focuses on what's missing here:

Not all journalists are editors, not all artists are members of the Academy. John Praxiteles Brock, my fellow lodger, was not then a success; his torment at having to look out every morning at the proof of unattainable glory in the next street was balanced by his desire to rub shoulders with the famous, who might assist him in his career. He would come home occasionally bubbling with excitement and pride: "I said good morning to Sargent this morning!" or "Henry MacAlpine was buying a pint of milk in front of me today!" Alas, it was rare that either said good morning in return. Perhaps his desperation frightened them; perhaps the fact that his father was a sculptor (hence his unfortunate middle name) of retrograde opinions and unpleasant temper put them off; perhaps they felt that youth has to fight on its own. Now he is more successful, Brock gives little encouragement to others, either.

Gorgeous, isn't it? Look at all the ways he uses negative statements and awareness of what's missing to paint a clear picture of this character. Can you spot them all?

A writer's work is as good as her powers of observation, and this includes a sensitivity not just to what is recordable, but to what is missing. Pay attention both when you're reading and observing, and ask yourself, What is being left out? How is it relevant? Because there's more to good storytelling than recording where the characters are standing and the words they speak. Sometimes the most significant details are those the characters leave out.

Theresa

An example of how to do emotion in omniscient POV

Susan made a great point here in response to the example of the cloaked woman watching the carriage arrive:
I like omniscient; that's not the issue. I just want something to connect with emotionally, some sign of what I should be feeling. Anticipation? Fear? Excitement?

This is a reader preference thing, entirely. But I want the adjectives to set the mood more than I want the cold reporting of hair color and horses.


Susan, you're right-- maybe it would be good to subtly work in a tiny bit of emotion. What's she feeling when she sees that carriage? That can be done in omniscient by showing the emotion in her actions, like she "impatiently" or "hastily" or "hesitantly" wiped away the fog? Her anticipation or fear or anger would affect how she moves, and the more objective viewpoint would show the emotion in her movement-- not in her head, as we're not there, but in her movement. She's presumably alone, so she doesn't need to mask the emotion.

Good point! And you are right-- the emotion can be delicately inserted in the modifiers, the adjectives and adverbs around the main words.

I tend to overdo when I embed emotion, you know, the "mossy walls" and the "lowering sky" and the "threatening clouds" and the "frigid air." (Okay, already! We notice! Grim! Got it! Check!) But one or two precise modifiers can set the mood without changing the action or deepening the penetration.

Alicia

Description, literary edge of genre

I'm reading a PD James mystery, and am contemplating the differences you find on the literary edge of a genre. For example, the "mystery" part of this mystery has developed very slowly (the murder happens well into the book), and much of the setup is detailed backstory and introspection of several characters as they enter the story action. (Thus the sleuth is introduced very late, only when he's called to the murder scene.) But I was also struck by the depth of description, even from those characters who don't seem that observant. Here's an example. Note the topic sentences at the start. This is an interesting technique: She states the conclusion first, and then describes what brought her to this conclusion. That is, she shows the POV character's judgment of what this means, and then what can be seen or heard to prove that to be true:

Without turning her head, she couldn't resist a glance at Dalgliesh. No one was better than her chief in concealing anger, but it was there for her to read in the momentary flush across the forehead, the coldness of his eyes, the face momentarily hardening into a mask, the almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles.

She told herself that Emma had never seen that look. There were still areas of his life which she, Kate, shared, which were closed to the woman he loved, and always would be. Emma knew the poet and the lover, but not the detective, not the police officer. His job and hers were prohibited territory to anyone who had not taken the oath, been invested with their dangerous authority. It was she who was the comrade-in-arms, not the woman who had his heart. You couldn't understand the job of policing if you hadn't done it.
She had taught herself not to feel jealousy, to try and rejoice in his triumph. But she couldn't help relishing from time to time this small, ungenerous consolation.

First, watch the (I think) less than adroit handling of the name/pronoun issue (two women-- "... she, Kate," then a "she" following "Emma" when "she" is really Kate), and yeah, I'm absurdly obsessed with this.

Also notice that descent into the personal at the end-- very nice. Kate starts out making a general assessment of her boss's behavior-- she can tell he's angry-- then describes what about his mien leads her to know that. Then there's that descent into her own psyche. She uses this awareness of his mood to tell herself that she knows him better than his fiancee does, to comfort herself that she is his colleague, if not his lover, and that might actually be better in some way. That she is almost consciously fooling herself is shown by that little "thought tag" (and this is why I think the "she thought" and "she mused" alternatives can be useful even or especially in deep POV) -- she told herself. If this had been "she reflected," we might have just thought she was stating the truth, but "she told herself" indicates subtly that she doesn't quite believe it herself, that she's trying to convince herself that she is in fact important to him.

I like that funnel technique, and think it can be used not just in these POV passages, but in scene design, from a general, somewhat impersonal approach, narrowing into the personal, the deep, perhaps the emotional. We might try that when we're working on a suspenseful scene, starting wide but aiming at a particular emotion (dread, fear) at the very end of the scene. We might even try a narrowing of POV from an almost-omniscient opening of the scene to a deeper POV for the action and then end the scene deep into the character's POV, feeling the emotion that results from whatever happens in the scene. The contrast between the opening distance and the ending closeness might intensify the intimacy.

Alicia

More about names and pronouns

I was thinking about when a descriptor other than the name or pronoun works for me, and I think it might be a POV issue (of course :). When we're in Joan's POV, how would she think of the other person? I don't mean the actual words necessarily, but the relationship of "me" to "her." That is, consciousness starts with our distinguishing ourselves from everyone else, so the first descriptor would be "other," that is, "not me." So that's why, I think, you frequently see in a passage that's in one character's POV a reference to "the other man" or "the other woman," meaning the non-POV character.

I suspect the reader will have no trouble distinguishing with a term like this, and will have no objection-- that is, if we're seated solidly and deeply in Joan's POV, the reader will go along no protest with a term that Joan would use to describe (consciously or no) the other person.

That's why, with Dave's example, both clg and I thought of describing Podgorny as "her opponent," because that's what she is right then in Sally's POV-- the opponent. If we were so deep in Sally's POV that we were in her voice as well as viewpoint, that term might be more, um, colorful. But the term would describe the relationship at that moment. If Sally and P would both survive the fight and shake hands and go out for a drink together (okay, five drinks) and share sad tales of fights that didn't work out so well, in the scene where they drunkenly stumble back to the barracks, warbling Sting songs in two-part harmony, it might be "Sally and her new friend," or "Sally and her one-time enemy," or "Sally and her drinking buddy." That is, the descriptor would change because the relationship has changed.

(This reminds me of my sons, who were both home this weekend so they're on my mind. When my younger boy-- and see, there I am, using a descriptor instead of his name-- was born, the older one wasn't yet two, and of course he regarded A as an intruder. Once he started talking, he referred to the baby only as "that other little guy." It wasn't until they actually started having a relationship that he started referring to A by name, and then "my little brother." And I noticed this weekend, now they're both theoretically grown, he refers to A just as "my brother." I pointed this out to A-- "He doesn't call you his little brother anymore," and A said gruffly, "He can always call me that. It's okay with me." :)

Anyway, in deep POV, it seems to me that the descriptor should always be something that reflects how the POV character would think of this Other. (Again, this is not necessarily the exact words, as long as we're not "in voice"-- that is, writing the narrative in the character's own voice.") So if Sally initially doesn't know her opponent's first name, the narration shouldn't refer to her as "Olga." But after their drinking time begins, and Podgorny says, "Oh, hell, call me Olga," the narration could start referring to her as "Olga."

In omniscient POV, probably any descriptor that the reader would associate with that character would work, but not more than a couple for each. The goal is to limit confusion, not spread it, and too many descriptors for each character could get confusing. ("Which one is the redhead again?") I'd also suspect that pairing descriptors could get annoyingly clunky ("the redheaded detective") though Homer used them (cf. Homeric epithet).

What about in multiple POV? Well, in multiple, you're always (or should be always) in someone's POV. You just shift within a scene to another POV as needed. So whatever character's POV you're in at that moment should dictate what descriptor is used, and yeah, that can mean "her opponent" or "the other woman" refer to different people at different times in the scene. I think as long as you are deep in a character's POV -before- that point, the reader will follow no problem.

What do you all think?
Alicia

Redlines Five: Description-itis

Recently, we have looked at ways to structure short passages for a variety of effects. This month, we’re going to change directions and look at sentence mechanics. Specifically, we’re going to look at how to create descriptive impact within the parts of a sentence.

Let’s start by reviewing the structural parts of a sentence. For our purposes, there are three parts of a sentence: subject, verb, and object. The subject is the actor within the sentence. The verb is the main action taken by the subject. And the object-- when there is one-- is the receiver of the action.

Here are a couple examples, with and without objects:
The dog ... barked.
subject ... verb

Sometimes dogs just bark.

The dog ... barked ... at the intruder.
subject ... verb ... object

And sometimes, the dogs bark for reasons we can identify. The action is directed at something. This is the object.

(Note to grammar gurus: Yes, “intruder” is the object of a preposition. But for our purposes, we are breaking the predicate into two pieces, and for convenience, the second piece will be called the “object.” Please forgive this sleight of hand-- this is not a grammar lesson, but an attempt to provide writers with practical tools to control the flow of their sentences.)

Both examples are simple sentences with clear action, but not very descriptive. Sometimes, we want to convey more descriptive information. Description, after all, brings readers into the scene in a vivid way, and helps them visualize the scene events.

But not all description is good. Here’s what happens when we add description to all three parts of the sample sentence:

The brown mangy dog, his spindly legs trembling as his paws scrabbled at the packed earth, barked loudly and wildly in a series of staccato bursts at the black-cloaked intruder who moved like a shadow against the fence.

The subject, “dog,” is loaded with adjectives (brown mangy) and dependent description (his spindly legs ... packed earth).

The verb is still “barked,” but we have added adverbs (loudly and wildly) and a descriptive phrase (staccato bursts).

And the object, the intruder, now sports a black cloak and moves in a certain way in relation to a certain object.

Let’s consider the impact of that string of words on a reader. C’mon, now, be honest. Your eyes glazed over before you reached the end of the sentence, right? It’s information overload, plain and simple. Description-itis, an inflammation of the sentence caused by too much information and leading to bored readers and bad reviews.

Luckily, there is an easy cure for description-itis. All you need is a bit of authorial judgment, and a decision about which of the three parts of the sentence is most important.

If the subject is most important, then keep the description about the dog and cut the rest. The sentence becomes:

The brown mangy dog, his spindly legs trembling as his paws scrabbled at the packed earth, barked at the intruder.

All of the descriptive focus is on the dog, and the reader’s mind stays on point. A sentence like this would be useful if, for example, the point of view character is more concerned about the dog than about either the barking or the intruder.

But that’s not too likely, is it? The intruder seems more interesting. So let’s look at how the sentence reads when the descriptive impact is focused on the object.

The dog barked at the black-cloaked intruder who moved like a shadow against the fence.

Not a great sentence, but it illustrates the point. The description focuses the reader’s attention on the object -- the intruder, who now seems both intangible and threatening.

To complete the example, let’s say that the most important part of the sentence is the verb. Maybe the point of view character isn’t concerned about the pending battle between the intruder and the dog, but really wants some peace and quiet. In that case, loading the verb with description highlights the noise.

The dog barked loudly and wildly in a series of staccato bursts at the intruder.

The sentence is a little clumsy. In fact, it suffers from having the subject and object separated by all those words, but that is a topic for another column. The main point here is that modifying the verb keeps the reader’s attention focused on the action of the sentence, the barking. We know what is most important in this sentence -- the noise.

Here is a simple process for fixing overly-descriptive sentences.
1) Identify the most important part of the sentence. Where do you want the reader’s attention focused? What is the most important purpose of the sentence?
2) Identify which words in the sentence link back to that important part. If this gives you trouble, it may be because you have two ideas competing for supremacy. Pick one.
3) Now cut everything that’s not linked to the most important idea. Leave the subject, verb and object intact. But otherwise, be ruthless. You can always put things back in, and see how they impact clarity, once you are sure that the sentence is clear to begin with.

Now that we have had our refresher course on the three main parts of a sentence, next month we’ll look at passive and active constructions and how to manipulate them for impact.


This is the fifth in the series of my dusty old Redlines column.
Redlines One (on paragraph logic faults) can be found here.
Redlines Two (on dialogue sequencing) can be found here.
Redlines Three (on using frames within scenes) can be found here.
Redlines Four (on avoiding the need for "sequel") can be found here.

Theresa

Dynamic Change: The Reversal's Kid Brother

We've looked at sentences that contain reversals -- concepts which are the opposite of each other -- as a way of building immediate interest.

There's another kind of sentence which can produce a similar effect without turning ideas in an about-face. Any sentence which contains action describing a change in circumstances -- dynamic change -- will also be very interesting to readers.

Let's start with an example.

At the intersection, the light was red.
At the intersection, the light turned red.

These sentences describe the exact same concept, a red light at an intersection. They are identical but for one word. We can probably all agree that the second sentence is the stronger of the two, but why should that be true?

I can't pretend to understand the medical science behind this, but our eyes and our brains are hardwired to be alert to change. It's physiological, and probably a survival mechanism, but whatever the scientific reasons, it's certain that our eyes and our brains work together to sense change.

This sensed change can be movement, as the blur of motion in your peripheral vision that triggers you to hit the brakes and swerve to avoid an accident.

This sensed change can be static, as when you enter a room and know that something has been moved from its rightful place, even if you can't immediately see what's different.

This sensed change can also be fictional, as when your eyes scan a page and your brain interprets the words to create a story picture in your imagination.

Eyes and brains working together to identify change. They're always alert for change.

So when we write
At the intersection, the light turned red.
what we're really doing is tapping into that almost primal alertness. The eyes are saying, "Yo! Brain! It was yellow, but now it's red! React if you need to!"

And the brain says, "Red light! Change! What do we need to do about this? Hey eyes, give us some more visual clues."

In other words, it's a motivation to keep reading.

Smart writers leverage this all over the place -- scene action and dialogue, of course, have dynamic elements built in -- but it's also useful in opening scenes and in description.

As to his face, whose rapid changes of expression bespoke him of a southern race, there were in it both tact and power of character. His eye, which could express every feeling, seemed to read the soul of any one on whom it rested. His complexion, naturally dark, had been rendered darker by exposure to a warmer sun than ours.
- Alexandre Dumas, Memoirs of a Physician

Dumas could have said, "He was tactful and powerful, observant, and suntanned." But instead he delivered those descriptive elements in the context of change -- changes of expression, eyes which express every feeling, skin that becomes darker. There's a feeling of movement and change in all of this.

I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.
- Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

The narrator's age changes, then changes back, wavering between two numbers, a much more dynamic way to give a character's age than the simple, "I am ninety." Worth noting: even though age itself is static, this description works on the same principle of dynamic change because the reader's eyes are still perceiving a change and communicating it to the brain. Age is not a thing in motion, but the change element makes it dynamic.

Theresa