Writing Reality: Location and Time
Listening to Ralph McTell’s Streets of London, I’m always struck by a particular stanza:
Have you seen the old man
Outside the Seaman’s Mission
Memory fading with the medal ribbons that he wears
In our winter city,
The rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero
And a world that doesn’t care
It reminds me of what first drew me to the city, embedded it in my heart – apart from the obvious beauty of a silken blue scarf on the horizon, one that all too soon knots itself about the throat in a toxic beauty of pollution. I used to travel into London with my mother to meet my father after work, so my memories are mostly of windows set into antiquated walls that blurred past the train, their golden glow seeming like diamond eyes to my excited ones, though the lives held behind would be working late into an evening full of blue-black shadows.
As I’ve got older, the shine of the city hasn’t diminished, only shifted perspective. I often take walking trips across its myriad streets, one borough to another, all alive with individuality and the traits of whoever happens to live there. Though it’s come to my attention more recently (as a writer), that an environment can inform the personality habits/quirks of a resident, as much as the latter influences the state of their home/workplace.
So while wandering, I take in the welcome glow of polished windows and pub signs, the huddled figures in doorways they can never hope to enter but which offer temporary shelter from the wind. There are those who’ll return to the same park bench each day on their lunch break, out of comfortable habit and to feel a niche of Home; or perhaps to escape the mundane nature of this. Depending on what they have to hand, what their circumstances are, they’ll feed or fend off the ever-present pigeon clouds that alight and clatter away by turns, in that bird’s daze of checkered tree-light and traffic noise.
All these impressions, so many more, tangle me up whenever I visit. I find my eyes lingering on the hidden places of the world, the random moments and meetings, rather than rising as they once did to the glaring lights and tourist eyecandy; the teeth of stone, steel and glass. Hooked alley corners, small pockets of greenery, the shadows that smell of a thousand borrowed cuisines; though these often ring with a binman’s calls, and provide more shelter for that hunched shape of one still evading what had them leave their old life behind
(if they had one at all.)
All under an indifferent sky. Freedom is a hard-won prize.
I use the city as an example for its diversity, but you’ll have your own influences, your own icons and symbolism. When writing a location, framing a fictional narrative about a setting in which your characters exist, how often do you stop to wonder about its influence upon their lives – direct and indirect – how it informs their movements, lifestyle choices, emotional responses?
There are things I’ve had to consider in more depth, when writing my novel. As it’s set mainly in one town (fictional, “Reighton”) and is caught between timeframes of past and present (filtered through two first-person narratives, with additional input from secondary sources) it’s become necessary for me to know that environment inside out. I use that analogy again, of taking a clock to pieces to know its mechanism – should the need arise, I have the same resources to hand for taking Reighton apart, assessing how a relevant plot point can be made where it links to a contextual detail.
Just as characterization hinges upon traits and layered memories, a location may develop a personality of its own. Opinions differ greatly about Reighton, depending on a character’s stance in life and more importantly, what impact the town has had upon them. There are families with generational roots deep in its history, who feel a frustrated affection for its once-great past and sadness for its seemingly stark future. Their ancestors were the pivotal force behind Reighton’s conception, first as a farming community along the river Rei, then – with the arrival of a powerful outside influence – as a multifaceted, prosperous clayworks. The latter effectively put Reighton on the map; it became part of a successful commuter belt.
When the clay business collapsed, those families whose lives had twined about it were left to the whim of the council and any investors who happened to pass through, seeing a trick of hasty housing for yet more commuters. The factories and warehouses now lie barren, the old rail line is a playground for the children, who most likely will never know full-time employment. The once-bustling town is, in its present setting, a shadow of itself; this breeds apathy in some, a fierce desire to escape in others … and in a few of the kid-gangs, a somewhat delusional belief that because the outside world has no need for them, they can in turn inwards and become small Gods.
To achieve all of these plot points – to give them logos as well as pathos – I look for what has influenced my own life. A year spent on the Dole in a town of dying economy, well, that certainly features heavily; as do those childhood days of playing down the abandoned rail line in my old home town.
I wanted to find how these environmental issues might dictate certain character behaviours. In Reighton, lack of work has seen a rise in petty theft and muggings, but also an increase in the tight community ethic. It’s very much an Us vs. Them scenario, with the weary locals – after several decades of declining means and a ream of broken promises from their council – near to breaking point. Morale is low, community-spirit is high, and a thin copper wire of tension runs around the whole town, from the more affluent East side (where the commuter-belt / wealthier locals are, in newer estates or the antiquated mansions of their ancestors), to the impoverished West side of the river, in which many a generation of ex-clayworkers has lived and died.
I pulled influences from my old town, inverting the history of a local parish where I once lived, to add credible details to the history of Reighton. Ridgewood, in the East Sussex town of Uckfield, served as the location for a clayworking pottery through the 19th/20th centuries. As a child, I had no concept of this remarkably layered history; what my friends and I saw were the remnants, two great pits left in the ground for us to play hide-and-seek in, Murder in the Dark, and to sled across when the snow fell on the slopes. My memory of that time is rich with the bittersweet smell of hawthorns, and the wide bowl of open sky; standing on the rim of the larger pit and often finding old discarded hand tools; the proud possessions of whoever once toiled over the clay.
It was a fine playground for any child, and has since been converted into a Millennium Green nature reserve, to preserve it for future generations. Its past is now being brought to light, as when I grew old enough to find an interest in the finer details of my locality, there was little to come by. Said details have made up much of the framework for both my novel’s narrative, and the foundations on which they stand. My local library’s archives were also a priceless resource – use your own wherever possible, particularly to learn the structuring of a town across generations, to gain an insight into environmental and economical patterns (e.g. many towns begin life alongside a river, arable land and/or a major trade-link road.)
Often, character lifestyle choices will be based upon what they’ve learned through a progression of experiences – parental influence, education, home and work environments. A series of locations may well mirror this.
“Mickey was about twenty-six, short, with a small moustache on a pasty face. The romance and glory of his life were behind him. The romance was still the warm East, where he had been a clerk in a rubber firm, and the glory had been the divine facility of living, women and drinking. Now he was unemployed, and wore an overcoat along the hard, frozen plains of Earl’s Court, where he lived on and with his mother… he was famous for his drunkenness locally, being particularly welcome in drinking circles… because by his excesses, he put his companions in countenance, making their own excesses seem small in comparison.” – Pg 42, Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton.
Symbolism can be brought into the act too, once a fictional setting becomes as well-known to you as the reality you walk through; these shadowy messages start to appear in the corners of the bigger picture. Huddled shapes in the doorways of grand houses; a newspaper of today, blowing up the road being built for tomorrow; and indeed, the succession of wealth unto celebrity, an endless parade of tomorrows for as long as both hold out:
“No one wore costumes on the night of her engagement party at the Racquet & Tennis Club, but in the ballroom of that club, that limestone manse sitting like a sphinx on Park Avenue … you didn’t need costumes to have a masque ball. Everyone knew their role and played it… Their names were written in gold leaf on mahogany plaques across the walls of the changing rooms, Whitneys, Phippses, Rockefellers, and they bathed naked together in the Turkish bath and played obscure racquet sports passed down from Bourbon kings and sealed billion-dollar deals with clinks of glasses over lunch. And at these parties, if you were not a member, you were a guest and set your face stern to conceal your awe. You were solemn to foil discovery of the wonder that mugged you of your confidence… then into the grand ballroom that invited you to look down on who you had been just moments before, on the street below. You hated loving being there, and you struggled to conceal yourself, and all of a sudden, you were in costume.” – Pgs 1-2, Mergers and Acquisitions, Dana Vachon.
One of my characters, Garth Hakken Sr., is forever in and out of prison. He is part of the forgotten Reighton generations on the West side, but chose not to go quietly into poverty – his is a life of scrap-metal and shady deals, to keep his family fed. His acclimatization to both this darker side of life, and the legal consequences set against him, inform his thoughts and behaviour. He walks with his head tucked in, as a boxer will to avoid a punch; his tall frame is somewhat curved over, movements neat and confined, to avoid drawing unnecessary attention and out of sheer practicality – he’s spent a good deal of time in a cramped cell.
Do your characters aspire to fit in on a social level, or – due to the level of danger in their surroundings – have they learned to act upon instinct and disappear, before fear takes over? To what extent do socio-economical matters impact upon their lives? How have circumstances changed them from the blush of youth, into the pale years of age; do they wear these marks of another time for all to see, a proud symbol diminished by the world’s neglect?
Memory fading with the medal ribbons that he wears
In our winter city,
The rain cries a little pity
For one more forgotten hero
And a world that doesn’t care
These are considerations to make – running parallel with research for a setting/environment – for potential advancement of plot, based upon what drives a character to react as they do.
Writing Reality: Pathos across Genres
My fiction writing grew out of fantasy. That’s a fairly obvious statement to make, given that the format is based around suspension of disbelief, dreams and whimsy – creating either an entirely fresh perspective, or a warped version of our reality. But I tended to lean more towards the former – mythology, an absence of the technology easily accessible today. Magic was a cornerstone, as were epic battles and soul-quests. I’d cast anthropomorphic animals in the roles, since humans – behavioral patterns, beliefs etc – held little interest for me at the time.
Animals proved easier to understand and write about, being governed more by survival instincts and natural tendencies. Even when personified to include materialistic preferences, the characters I’d read about in such children’s fantasy as Brian Jacques’ excellent Redwall saga, and Robin Jarvis’ Deptford Mice series, still lay closer to the ground than mankind. Their lives were far more interesting; it meant I could conveniently leave out such dull areas (how I perceived them then) as money and religion. There was a mental block in place, which meant I truly believed I couldn’t write human characters with inherent / external powers, or have them engage in interesting quests. I didn’t think anyone would believe me.
With age has come not only an increased interest in my race (learning to trust people was a start), but a crucial awareness of suspension of disbelief. It was a revelation to pick up JG Ballard’s High Rise to discover that yes, human society CAN break down in fiction. The book is a bestseller. The circumstances are close to the bone, still somewhat alien, wholly engaging; and – as with any credible work of fiction – it was the characters who made it so.
When I made inroads on adult fiction myself, several years ago, I stuck to my favourite genre; had no problem dealing with landscapes, abstracts, symbolism. I’m more of a concept writer. Magic and nature are easier to identify with, than the ebb and flow of human interaction and behavior. So while scenery dripped with metaphors and genre tropes were played out trick by turn, characters fell over like stacked dominoes, bland and rigid. I just didn’t know how people worked. I’d never bothered to research, in real time or reading across genres.
Recently, I’ve forced myself to step away from conventions, discarding that which appeals to a target audience, in favour of getting to know people in life and in literature – what makes us tick as a society, as individuals, and typical cause-effect triggers. Turns out that humanity isn’t as boring as I’d first, mistakenly, believed.
Writing people across general fiction, has helped me develop a greater focus on the little inflections that make up a larger picture. All those films and books where seemingly “nothing happens” – they’re a great study of human nature, with little circumstantial distraction. It’s the subtle details that so often instigate events.
As part of the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s three means of persuasion, Pathos is probably the one fiction writers are most familiar with. While genre conventions can work as the basis for certain aspects of writing – in fantasy, the presence of a magical field and casting of spells, mythical creatures; in science fiction, the cultivation of remote planetary settlements, following deep-space exploration – these could be seen more as the fallout, than the actual pivot of a story.
It’s the thoughts and emotional reactions of a mage as a person – one wishing to survive, to countercast, to avenge – that causes them to pull out necessary spell components and speak aloud the words of magic. Transplant this scenario to science fiction, and the reactionary fallout – the magical element, used on the offensive/defensive – can be replaced with weapons technology. Both push the suspension of audience disbelief, working against our reality – but it’s the emotional triggers which make the scene more identifiable.
Or at least, it should be. This is where I’ve been going wrong for some time. My focus has been too much on embellishing the contents of a scene, with little regard for the emotional catalyst, and the character behind it all. It’s their lifestyle and historical context, which govern reactions to each situation, and to fellow beings. From here, plot can advance and narrative can be steered.
Your chosen genre may include fictitious races, with ethos and mentality all their own. But for an audience to identify with their cause, there’s a need for Pathos. Our job, as authors, is to get across to the audience how much they should give a damn about what happens to any one character, whether pro- or antagonist. It’s no good writing a complete badass of a villain, if the reader doesn’t at least have some sense of feeling towards them – even loathing takes consideration. Suspension of disbelief is based upon the audience’s assumption of a pseudo-reality; theirs is a need to recognize, sympathize and perhaps even empathize with character decisions.
Comedy-pathos can work wonders for appealing to audience emotions. Let’s face it, there’s only so much tragedy we can all take, before going numb and perhaps cold towards a character; likewise, constant slapstick and banter wears thin. Handled well, the balancing act between set-up and fall can be heartbreaking as it is rib-cracking. When an author or director invests time in creating and sustaining a character-narrative that’s wholly plausible in its trials and tribulations, the payoff is audience engagement to a bittersweet degree:
“Are you the farmer?”
“Stop saying that, Withnail, of course he’s a fucking farmer!”
“I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.”
– Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson
Withnail’s choice of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a closing soliloquy is a double-whammy of pathos. Not only is the theatrical element present, around which his life has been threadily based; the very fact he delivers such a powerful nest of words to air empty of an appreciative audience, speaks volumes in context. The wolves have little regard for his deliverance; the rain, less so. He appeals to the sky, knowing full well that it can’t answer or deliver the recognition he yearns for. The bittersweet smile says it all, along with his choosing the words of the established bard to get across to the audience the exact level of his pain.
For the Dragonlance saga, authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman created the race of kender to act as both fools and foils for hero and enemy. Agile little thieves (though taking great offence at being addressed thus) with kleptomaniac tendencies, an innocent wit and aggravating humour, they’re also blessed with phenomenal luck. This is handy, considering all races on the fantasy world of Krynn are bound by a desire to be as far removed from kender as possible – for the sake of possessions as well as sanity. They are the comedy sidekick, with a nonstop prattle and jocularity that is a light in the darkness of plot events … and a headache for whoever’s on the other end.
It’s when the kender as a whole, start to notice (and care) about shifting world events, that other races realize the dark depths into which Krynn is sinking. The comedy pays itself off in pathos, with Tasslehoff Burrfoot – a recurring kender-character – acting as a particular benchmark:
“The kender peered around as best he could through one good eye. The other had nearly swollen shut. ‘Where are we?’
‘In the dungeons below the Temple,” Tika said softly. Tas, sitting next to her, could feel her shiver with fear and cold… Wistfully he remembered the good old days when he hadn’t known the meaning of the word fear. He should have felt a thrill of excitement. He was – after all – someplace he’d never been before… But there was death here, Tas knew; death and suffering. He’d seen too many die, too many suffer…He would never again be like other kender. Through grief, he had come to know fear; not for himself but for others…
You have chosen the dark path, but you have the courage to walk it, Fizban had said.
Did he? Tas wondered. Sighing, he hid his face in his hands.
‘No, Tas!’ Tika said, shaking him. ‘Don’t do this to us! We need you!’
Painfully Tas raised his head. ‘I’m all right,” he said dully.'” – Pg 288, Dragons of Spring Dawning, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman.
In opposite effect, it’s when the light of pathos is cast upon the darkest personality, that unusual facets shine; capturing a fuller shape for the audience to see, rather than a flat cutout villain:
“David opened his eyes, sweat pouring down his face, and marched towards the bar.
‘I’ll kill her,” he shouted at the row of bottles.
He thought again of the university girl. Today wasn’t the first time he had seen her… Had she recognized him? No. What would he have been to her?
The stupid idiot who had stood dripping water while delivering a pizza.
She hadn’t even looked at him…just passed him the money, told him to keep the change, and closed the door. And he had stood there on the landing, leaning on the door, crying like a baby.
She was his mother back to haunt him. Same little face, same hair, but healthy and clean. Clear-skinned and bright-eyed. No open sores weeping their disgusting liquid. But she didn’t fool him. He knew it was her…She would pay for what she had done… His grandma had tried to persuade him to go to the funeral, but he owed nothing to the silly bitch who had pumped too much crap into her festering arms.” – Pg 52, I Once was Lost, Sandra Bruce.
Even when a protagonist has the ability to read and manipulate minds, to employ sensory powers out of the control of others, they can still be subject to the same emotional quirks and fluxes that erode the best intentions and upset the most carefully-laid plans – or just create a terrible working atmosphere. A flawless character without emotional reflexes makes for a dull read. We all have rough days; allow your characters the chance to experience the same, if only to offset their better qualities, and to create tension. Relationships make a particularly good crossing-point between genres – especially when inherent powers become as much a blessing as a curse.
“‘I was going to ask her Highness to give me a lift home,” Loftus said, “but I dunno now. Got a date with -‘
He disappeared. A moment later, Ackerman could see him near a personnel carrier. Not only had he been set down gently, but various small necessities, including a flight bag, floated out of nowhere on to a neat pile in the carrier…
Powers joined Afra and Ackerman.
‘She’s sure in a funny mood,’ he said.
When the Rowan got peevish, few of the men at the station asked her to transport them to Earth. She was psychologically planet-bound, and resented the fact that lesser talents could be moved about through space without suffering a twinge of shock.”
“The Rowan felt the links dissolving as the other Primes, murmuring withdrawal courtesies, left him. Deneb caught her mind fast to his and held on. When they were alone, he opened all his thoughts to her, so that now she knew him as intimately as he knew her.
Come live with me, my love.
The Rowan’s wracked cry of protest reverberated cruelly in both naked minds.
I can’t. I’m not able! She cringed against her own outburst and closed off her inner heart so that he couldn’t see the pitiful why. Mind and heart were more than willing; frail flesh bound her. In the moment of his confusion, she retreated back to that treacherous body, arched in the anguish of rejection. Then she curled into a tight knot, her body quivering with the backlash of effort and denial.
Rowan! came his cry. Rowan! I love you!
She deadened the outer fringe of her perceptions to everything, curled forward in her chair… Oh Afra! To be so close and so far away. Our minds were one. Our bodies are forever separate.” – Pgs 142/157, The Rowan, Anne McCaffrey.
The greatest war-campaign may have begun with the “simple” act of one treacherous heart breaking another; the resultant turmoil becomes both back-story and the ripples to reach out and affect / change many lives. The darkest horror story may have the death of a child at its tragic core. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black sees the broken love of the eponymous character become a curse powerful enough to affect the local community and visiting narrator Arthur Kipps. No one is left unscathed after contact; though to my mind, the supernatural element pales somewhat in comparison to the pathos of her grief, and the terrible circumstances under which it was born.
Allowing your characters the chance to emote fully across genre conventions, can form integral links with the world of the audience. Don’t be afraid to include the small nuances of life, the seemingly mundane details that will flesh them out as people. It’s thought, emotion and memory which make us at once unique, and bound by empathy. Regardless of whether it’s a brave new world created, or a close shave with reality, the result should be an understanding between creator and audience.
Writing Reality: Method Writing (Through their Eyes)
I am a method writer.
It’s hardly a new concept; a literary adaptation of the emotionally charged technique used by thespians on stage and screen. Method actors bounce light off of the mirror of personal inflection, bringing into focus the characters they wish to embody as well as portray; they seek “imagination, senses and emotions to conceive of characters with unique and original behavior,” brought about by “performances grounded in the human truth of the moment”.
Which isn’t a million miles away from what writers are after.
Some film directors are known to use/have used versions of the Method, to induce a necessary emotional state in their cast. While working on The Shining, Stanley Kubrick “had his cast watch Eraserhead, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, to put them in the right frame of mind.” This is channeling external creativity, as a form of pseudo-mood input.
Before settling to write, I’ll use the same technique, as well as several others to create a mood within myself that’s relative to a scene and/or narrative voice. Creative outlets – music, film, literature – of similar genres and mood, can be filtered through personal memories to tap into an induced emotional state. The audience only sees the end results, of course. The inspiration stays hidden in the wings, whispering cues.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t maintain a steady mood pattern. We tend to oscillate between whatever’s going on in the immediate day-to-day, and the sort of abstracts that prey on anyone’s mind (existence, climate change, world domination, economy, etc.) That’s before we even get close to creative input, either imposed on us or sought out to entertain ourselves. Picking up a book and reading a few passages on my work break, can cause a U-turn for whatever mood I was in – from wistful (fantasy) to dialed-down sharp (science fiction, crime thriller). Which is fine, so long as I wasn’t intending to preserve the former mood for later writing.
Contrary to popular belief, the Method doesn’t need 24 hour submersion. Prior to writing, I’ll have a “build-up” of mood and character, and will become very careful who and what I allow in through the filters. There’s no call to be rude; it’s just a Fading Out from the real world for an hour or so, prior to and during writing. This is “closing the door”, and for me it’s not only about shutting off external noise. It’s damage limitation where mood is concerned; whatever I hear on the news, read in a book or feel for a song, might colour my writing with an unintended atmosphere. Working with synaesthesia, where sound and mood appear in colours, there’s always the chance that I’ll inadvertently write a character’s “warm” mood too “cool” because of a blue song going on a loop in my head.
A difficult day, a trying time of life, can make all the difference between a good and bad writing experience. If you’re aware of emotional flux, take responsibility for your moods and writing – work them around each other. Work them to your advantage, to avoid writing-blackout. I tend to keep several projects on-the-go at once, all of which have different genres, setting and tone. This allows for a margin of success; more chance of hitting the right note at any point in life.
Look to film directors for affirmation in doing this. If necessary, they’re prepared to work off the cuff, shooting non-linear scenes and forgoing a chronological framework, in favour of getting the best out of the cast and setting(s.) Sometimes the season is out of kilter with the plot; freak weather patterns can emerge. War can break out. A cast member might sicken. A piece of equipment may require updating. To avoid wasting time, other scenes will be filmed instead; the results edited together later.
Use this technique in your writing. Don’t feel bad for working outside a standard chronology of events. Life happens. If your mood fits one scene and not another, why waste it for the sake of keeping to narrative structure? You’ll find an enhanced sense of attachment to your characters; their actions/reactions can become symbolic of your own, and vice versa. A setting can seem your home-base, your emotional playground (or indeed, your personal hell.) The story will feel bound up in your own life-narrative. If it gets the work done – and as long as you take care to leave bread-crumb notes of what goes where – the audience isn’t going to know any better. They may be more likely to feel the story reverberate with what you were going through at the time, though only in emotional terms – the details remain your own.
Generally speaking, real life doesn’t allow for a sudden drop-of-the-hat reaction to a writing mood. I’m lucky enough to have few responsibilities or plays on my time outside of work, and can generally settle to a routine. This has its merits and drawbacks – it’s easy to get complacent. A writer would do well to push themselves out of their comfort zone, to test whether a character’s emotions and mindset are so easy to grasp when set against an entirely alien backdrop.
This is a useful technique when a story’s in pre-development. Take the early outline of a character – their name and whatever specifications are to hand – and write them into a scene of high emotional intensity. It can be outside of the story itself if you wish; I personally like setting characters in a war zone, or at the site of a volcanic eruption. It’s when we’re emotionally stripped raw, that true idiosyncrasies and flaws come to light.
Get to know your phone’s video/audio recording app. With the afore-mentioned dramatic scenes, I find recording vocal inflections and references to mannerisms (facial expressions, paralinguistic features like body language) priceless. Record whatever ad-libs come, symbolic references, interaction with other characters etc – these can all help to develop and strengthen a character’s voice, both in mannerisms and speech. Ideas are often triggered just by speaking in freeflow; the beauty of the app being, you can replay your thoughts at a later time.
A soundtrack crafted around a character’s personality can help enhance and inspire their thought patterns, actions and reactions. When listening to my iPod, a lyric may hangnail in my mind as something a character could relate to – either in general mindset, or at a particular point in their lives. This entry was an early compilation for my novel, End of the Line, when it was in its first draft. Songs attached themselves to characters and scenes along the way.
When creating your own soundtrack, make a point of heading tracklists with a characters’ name, adding notations as to which song is relevant to which scene. Then when it comes time to continue from where you’ve left off – particularly if real life has forced you to quit mid-scene – give that tracklist a listen, either before or during the writing process. It helps to define individual soundscapes for a narrative voice, for each chapter-scene.
This is equivalent to a film’s diegetic / non-diegetic sound; that is, what a character hears in their environment or prefers to listen to, as opposed to what sounds are outside the film-universe, laid over what is being filmed; outside the narrative construct and a character’s experience, but audible to the audience.
Put in a literary context, your Method soundtrack can be layered with the aesthetic and tone of a character – any song you feel fits their personality – as well as sounds mirroring unique reactions to a situation. Try subverting your own expectations of tone by shifting abruptly between a character or object’s signature “theme”, while writing a change in atmosphere and events. The resulting juxtaposition can really get under the skin, becoming symbolic:
(Hellraiser: Deader, Rick Bota)
You might even feel jangled enough to write this crossover into a scene, to evoke the same symbolic tension in your audience:
“What he heard was the clear, clarion call of a trumpet, its music cold as the air from the snow-covered mountains of his homeland. Pure and crisp, the trumpet call rose bravely above the darkness and death and despair, to pierce his heart.
Sturm answered the trumpet’s call with a glad battle cry…Again the trumpet sounded, and again Sturm answered, but this time his voice faltered, for the trumpet call he heard had changed tone. No longer sweet and pure, it was braying and harsh and shrill.
No! thought Sturm in horror as he neared the dragon. Those were the horns of the enemy! He had been lured into a trap! Around him now he could see draconian soldiers, creeping from behind the dragon, laughing cruelly at his gullibility… Fear knotted Sturm’s stomach; his skin grew cold and clammy. The horn call sounded a third time, terrible and evil. It was all over. It had all been for nothing. Death, ignominious defeat awaited him.” – pgs 121/122, “Dragons of Winter Night,” Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman.
Sometimes, circumstances can’t be passed over for writing. It becomes essential to jot down whatever notes you can, to later reactivate whatever you were feeling at the time an idea hit, or an inspirational scene was witnessed. This is memory-sense recall. The idea of key words was, for me, inspired by Alice Hoffman’s The Story Sisters. In the narrative, a girl writes the word “orange” on a scrap of paper, to carry as a constant reminder of one blissful afternoon spent with her family:
“Meg and Claire looked at each other. They could hear the clock over the stove, ticking. They could hear doves in the courtyard. They wanted this moment to last forever. The sunlight was orange. They had to remember that. Meg would make certain they did. She fetched a piece of paper and wrote down the word orange, then folded the paper in half. They could cut up pears and write down all of the colours of the light and listen to people laugh and smell the blooms on the chestnut tree and forget about the rest of the world… they would have this memory of sitting in the kitchen, being happy.” – pg 133, The Story Sisters
You’re looking to evoke the same emotional response you felt, by reading the sensory words and remembering exactly how the light was, what smells were in the air, how the air moved about you. This is Realism – walking back through time, recreating scenes from your life to bring scenes to the page. Reread old blog entries and that of friends, to engage once again with how you once felt in a situation similar to what a character might be going through.
Keeping a diary or journal framed in a character’s voice is a priceless component of Method writing. I regularly dip into the thoughts of protagonists by jotting down notes from their lives – mundane events, love interests, secret fears etc. I often write short poems through a character’s perspective, if they’re so inclined to do so. These may or may not enter the narrative proper; but they’re handy to have on the side, as a means of slipping in and out of character. Connections sometimes leap out of nowhere – things that were not apparent to me at the time of serious writing, but which become strikingly relevant when framed in a looser context.
Free-fall writing is equivalent to dropping stones down a well, listening for the splash. These are stream-of-consciousness sessions, which may or may not have an immediate bearing on an ongoing project, but are written in the style and tone of a piece I’ll be currently working on. These short blog entries are often framed in a character’s voice, or run parallel to its tone, and will sit adjacent to the actual story like a slip-road to a motorway. They are exercises in writing to music, spurts of creative output, for the sheer joy of imagery and often frantic emotional output. Words wind about and through the music, snagging lyrics and tugging them along for the ride, taking leaps between my own thoughts and that of a character. These entries are examples of the freeform style.
The end result often resembles a wordy Pollock painting, but they’re my most honest work next to life-blog entries. All formality, all boring thoughts of perspective and chronology, go out the window. Sessions like this are good for loosening the writing limbs before opening an actual project, or just to shake up the imagination – and they’re great for getting into character / setting tone.
This is Method writing to me. Preparation for what lies ahead; getting comfortable in a character’s perspective, picking up the narrative reins; grasping the sense of what an imaginary world is like, drawing on relevant personal experiences to colour up and enhance a mood and/or theme. Flipping the timer to let inspiration run between reality and fantasy.
Writing Reality: The Silent Story of Show don’t Tell
When it comes to writing, Show don’t Tell can be a priceless component for exposing that which needs more audience interaction. It’s all very well for an author to speak at the reader when there are facts in the offing; but it’s only ever a one-sided conversation.
The truth of art is about interaction – bringing together that which the creator offers, and what the audience already holds as experience/applied knowledge. The result is a bond, a unification of source and meaning; the give-and-take of a ball passed across the court, and if the pitch is right, the audience will make the catch. Perhaps they’ll run off with their own ideas; as individuals, we bring personal inflections based upon memory and mindset.
But if the pitch is out of context – if a generalization is made, where more detail was necessary for emotional engagement – then the ball is dropped, the audience left cold.
Tell-Summaries work like a film’s passage-of-time montage or a video game’s Cutscene; a sequence of events that riffle over an extended period, in which not all details are made available or are necessary to the audience. Those which are displayed are compact, delivered as unassailable fact. A canny director / author knows when such editing is required; perhaps for a shorthand narrative that, while informative, doesn’t require high audience interaction. Narrative and plot points wash over, inform, but don’t necessarily engage.
The intro to Bioshock is an example of Tell; an informative Cutscene, in which the player becomes a backseat audience, unable to control the protagonist for any decisions made. This funnels the audience’s attention onto the facts being Told – setting, circumstance, objective characterization, plot progression – for absorption, and referencing at later points in gameplay. There is no immediate distraction from needing to engage, to keep the protagonist alive.
It’s essential to find the balance between what an audience wishes to – or can – engage in, and what reaction/conclusions they are fine with being led towards, for the sake of narrative progression. Too much Show can bog the latter down. Tell-summaries act as the foundations on which audience engagement is layered, in personal inflections such as dialogue and reactions. They may be paragraphs or pages long. The key is to find which technique fits which context.
Sometimes, a summary of events may be a safer stance for a sensitive subject. Audience engagement is drawn upon in terms of imagination – they’re left to close the gaps in the Tell. Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs can be used as a point of reference, with the infamous ear-cutting scene.
The camera moves away at the last moment, but the build-up of tension in the dance-shuffle, upbeat range of Stealer’s Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You”, and close-ups of the victim’s bleeding face, creates a juxtaposition of fact and imagination – infused with empty air and muffled off-screen cries – that’s more emotionally engaging than any actual portrayal of violence. This can be a critical point where film ratings are concerned, or indeed the level of interaction your audience wishes to have.
An inferred Tell can be a handy way of filling in the blanks, particularly when the primary instinct of fear of the unknown, is engaged. On the flip side, basic human curiosity is pinged like an elastic band, calling the participants back … just to check. If the audience doesn’t have all the answers on the page, they’re more likely to turn to the next one.
If a memory is invoked in a story’s narrative, they will be curious to see what it’s point was, where it might lead:
“At first I was alarmed. Then, as I lay still, gathering my wits, I reflected on how long Eel Marsh House had stood here, steady as a lighthouse, quite alone and exposed… And then, those memories of childhood began to be stirred again and I dwelt nostalgically… I lay back and slipped into that pleasant, trance-like state somewhere between sleeping and waking, recalling the past and all its emotions and impressions vividly, until I felt I was a small boy again.” – pg 123, The Woman in Black, Susan Hill.
Contrast this abbreviated segue between past and present, which invokes a mood of security and trance, with the needle-sharp dialogue and paralinguistic features exchanged between the narrator, Arthur Kipps, and local countryman Samuel Daily:
“He sighed and shifted about uneasily in his chair avoiding my eye and looking into the fire –
‘For God’s sake, what is it you are holding back, man? What are you so afraid of telling me?’
‘You, Arthur,’ he said, ‘will be away from here tomorrow or the next day. You, if you are lucky, will neither hear nor see nor know of anything to do with that damned place again. The rest of us have to stay. We’re to live with it.’
‘With what? Stories – rumours? With the sight of that woman in black from time to time? With what?’
‘With whatever will surely follow. Sometime or other… It’s changed people. They don’t speak of it, you found that out. Those who have suffered worst say least – Jerome, Keckwick.’
I felt my heart-beat increase, I put a hand to my collar to loosen it a little, drew my chair back from the fire.” – pg 147.
This is an example of Show. Dialogue carries the narrative forward with hinged explanations, a drawing-out of events; not only to hook the audience and lead them on, but to invoke the fearful reluctance inside Daily. He is genuinely disturbed by the knowledge he holds, weary of carrying it; there’s faint envy in his tone – “You, Arthur …” His sentence structure is simplistic and staccato, falling from his mouth like stones.
For the same reason, Kipps’ dialogue and narrative are structured along jagged lines, as of hitched breathing, a tight chest – “hand to my collar to loosen it a little.” There’s no need for him to narrate his fear, as Hill creates this effect through his actions, choice of words and repetition:
“God’s sake“, “So afraid“, “With what? Stories – rumours? With the sight of that woman in black from time to time? With what?’
When it comes to characterization, an author would do well to Show the truth of a narrator’s personality through interaction with others. Not just dialogue, but paralinguistic features (body language, tics, tone) and that which they do and say (or do not say); these infuse a character with 3D personality and subtext. More often than not, people do not speak aloud their true thoughts and intentions – based upon social mores, natural reserve, or a reluctance to be pinned down to an actual interpretation of meaning.
Because The Woman in Black travels between past and present, there is some leeway available when older-Kipps refers to his younger self as having a “youthful and priggish way”. Retrospect is his filter in this Tell, and a rueful one at that. In the active past-narrative, this “youthful priggish” nature is made apparent via Show:
“I began to be weary, of journeying and of the cold and of sitting still while being jarred and jolted about, and to look forward to my supper, a fire and a warm bed.”
– The repetition of “and” gives a drawn-out quality to the sentence, as of childish whining en route to a destination that at first held much bearing. Now he’s tired, and peevish with it.
Upon first meeting Sam Daily, his first appraisal is less than positive:
“He was a big man, with a beefy face and huge, raw-looking hands … nearer to sixty than fifty”
– There’s a trapdoor negativity where Daily’s aged, weather-beaten appearance is concerned. Though Kipps reins himself in before becoming outright critical in language, his tone is patronizing:
“His clothes were of good quality, but somewhat brashly cut .. he wore a heavy, prominent seal-ring on his left hand, and that, too, had a newness and a touch of vulgarity about it.”
Hill employs Daily as both protector and foil to unpin Kipps’ character through Show. The countryman’s consistent politeness and willingness to help, effectively send up the young man’s assumptions by subverting them:
“I decided that he was a man who had made, or come into, money late and unexpectedly, and was happy for the world to know it.”
(compare this with Kipps’ reaction to Daily’s questions about his destination):
“I nodded stiffly.
‘You don’t tell me you’re a relative?’
‘I am her solicitor.’ I was rather pleased with the way it sounded.” – pg 36.
This from a man who has already taken mild affront to the “vulgarity” of Daily’s display of financial well-being. He goes further towards making himself less than endearing, by paraphrasing Daily’s description of the local mist and its dangers:
“‘One minute it’s as clear as a June day, the next …’ he gestured to indicate the dramatic suddenness of his frets.” – pg 36.
By deliberately overloading the adjective-fork, Kipps conveys surprise at the other man’s exuberance; the implication is that he believes Daily to be exaggerating. There’s the distancing effect of ‘his frets’. The tone is patronizing, as of an adult hand patting an excitable child’s head.
“‘It’s a far-flung part of the world. We don’t get many visitors.’
‘I suppose because there is nothing much to see.’
‘It all depends what you mean by “nothing.” There’s the drowned churches and the swallowed-up village,’ he chuckled. ‘Those are particularly fine examples of “nothing to see. And we’ve a good wild ruin of an abbey with a handsome graveyard – you can get to it at low tide. It’s all according to what takes your fancy!’ – pg 38.
– Note the repetition of Kipps’ words back on himself, in conjunction with one point of interest after another; the lesson-recitation sentence structure; personification of the graveyard with ‘handsome‘; reference to local knowledge with ‘get to it at low tide”, suggesting authority through Ethos.
In this brief paragraph, Daily undermines Kipps’ first appraisal of him with a teasing that, by its very gentleness, sets him in higher esteem than the protagonist. The latter’s surprise is made interestingly clear with Hill’s use of a symbolic sound-conduit, which effectively ends the conversation’s stand-off mood and sets it on another route entirely:
“‘You are almost making me anxious to get back to that London particular!”
There was a shriek from the train whistle.”
– Another train emerges from the tunnel, reminding them of their shared destination. Perhaps it’s the sight of the “line of empty yellow-lit carriages that disappeared into the darkness” (Show of desolation, cold, the unknown) which appeals to Daily’s kind nature, for he chooses to see past Kipps’ thinly-disguised rudeness, to offer hospitality:
“‘If you care to come with me, I can drop you off at the Gifford Arms – my car will be waiting for me, and it’s on my way.”
Kipps’ disbelief and pragmatism – “exaggeration of the bleakness and strangeness” – have a hollow echo to them, following so soon after his staccato exclamation of wishing to return to London. The inference is that, through a reconsideration of his situation as the foreign element, he’s willing to be mollified:
‘He seemed keen to reassure me and to make up for his teasing exaggeration of the bleakness and strangeness of the area, and I thanked him and accepted his offer.”
– There’s no need for a Tell, nor for an apology. Hill makes Kipps’ feelings clear through Show. He is the alien, on unfamiliar territory and out at night, with its symbolism of the unknown and universal fear. This is imagery that an audience can latch onto.
Using weather to convey the typical mood of a setting (pathetic fallacy) works only for as long as the latter remains objective. For example, the moors of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, tend towards a naturally wild climate that can be easily set to personification – either as stand-alone imagery, or through the behaviour of characters such as the willful Cathy and dark-souled Heathcliff.
To avoid breaking the fourth wall with steering an audience’s perceptions too much, it’s best to stick with what is a natural progression of weather patterns in your setting. Don’t let a character’s mood influence the weather, or there is a risk of creating an unrealistic standpoint (this holds true across genres; even if used as a trope in fantasy, it should fit the context of a character’s powers.) It can’t be stormy everyday in a horror genre. Far more unsettling, is the upending of audience expectations. Keep things normal as a backdrop to the Unusual. The rickety old house set against a bright blue sky and piercing white sun; the children’s playground, wind-torn and empty of life but for lowering nimbus-clouds. This is using setting and scenery as a Show of mood, on a subversive level.
Setting and circumstance can certainly be employed for subjective Show when it comes to cause and effect. Imagine your character in their normal state of mind; perhaps they’re a stickler for neatness and order. What happens when something upsets their life, throws them out of regular habits and safe patterns? They may become lacklustre at the death of a family member or friend; life may cease to hold meaning. Their clothes, so pristine before, may hang wrinkled and loose as their thought processes, from not bothering to iron anything; weight loss from lack of appetite may also be a contributing. Makeup may be applied haphazardly, or not at all – large black circles may ring their eyes, from insomnia. Their garden may go untended, full of weeds where only prim flowerbeds once lay; the house may fall to rack and ruin, by slow degrees of separation from reality and consequence.
There’s little need to Tell an audience that your character is suffering, when it’s plain to see. Dialogue and character interaction can build this further. Last week, after a crazy night of editing, I got into work two hours late after oversleeping the clock.
A co-worker took one look at me and said, “I’ll get the coffee on.”
Were I to put this into a written scene, I’d add a line where, with one hand, I scraped the mass of knots I once called hair out of my eyes, and with the other supported myself in the doorway. Dialogue
(as a direct quote here) would run thus:
“You know me far too well.”
They do at work, when it comes to my caffeine habits – this is through experience, past interaction. But how does this work for the audience? An author has to be careful with how much they let hinge on perceived knowledge. Coffee makes a good caffeine-kick reference; a near-universal fact that can carry a shared joke better than something more specific, such as Red Bull energy drink.
When setting a brand name to your work, check context first – does it belong in this scenario, this genre, this time-frame? Is it an easily-accessible Show, or does it run the risk of dating your work / throwing the audience out of their suspension of disbelief? When making an in-joke about a character’s habit, does it dovetail with the rest of their life, or stick out as an unnecessary plot point?
Sensory language and figurative speech can help Show an audience what is unfolding within a scene, at what pace, and – with the right words – how to find the world immediately surrounding a character. Jeffrey Eugenides is a fine example of an author who has mastered the art of Show/Tell-characterization. The following scene dissembles the projected image of sexual power surrounding the character Lux in The Virgin Suicides, and invokes a very real sense of despair at the futility of her situation:
“Through the bronchioles of leafless elm branches, from the Pitzenbergers’ attic, we finally made out Lux’s face as she sat wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, smoking a cigarette, impossibly close in the circle of our binoculars because she moved her lips only inches away but without sound.” – pgs 145/146, The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
– So near yet so far; the girl of their dreams may well be just this, an illusion brought to some kind of reality through the depth sensation of binoculars. What they see, and what they hear and know for certain, are separate quantities. It’s the equivalent of looking at the moon through a telescope and fancying that you know its face, every contour; how it feels to touch. A sense of yearning is invoked. Lux, as perceived by the boys watching her, is a figure of sexual power. Even while under house arrest, she makes the appearance of preferring a casually arrogant role:
“True, it was impossible for Mr and Mrs Lisbon to see their own roof… but there was the unavoidable prior noise of sneaking down to let the men and boys in, of leading them up creaking stairs in a darkness charged with anxious vibrations, night noises humming in their ears, the men sweating, risking statutory rape charges, the loss of their careers, divorce, just to be led up the stairway, through a window, to the roof, where in the midst of their passion they chafed their knees and rolled in stagnant puddles.” – pg 146
Powerfully evocative language – “creaking, charged, vibrations, risking” – spread out over a meandering sentence structure, which draws the tension out to its somewhat brutal climax (for the egos of the men, brought low into puddles and against their better judgement, by a child.) Contrast this with the description of Lux that follows:
“All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the in-substantiality of her thighs, and one who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water…They spoke of being pinned to the chimney as if by two great beating wings, and of the slight blond fuzz above her upper lip that felt like plumage.” – pg 148
The juxtaposition of positive connotations/abstract imagery – “carnal angel”, “plumage” – with negative concrete reality, “collarbones collected water, jutting ribs” – creates a scene of pathos, and unreliability where Lux’s personality is concerned. For all her power over these men, she is wasting away in body and soul; apparently taking no pleasure from the “measureless charity” she deals out, falling into cinematic pretense of Self that is in no way true to her circumstances:
“She told Bob McBrearley that she couldn’t live without ‘getting it regular’, though she delivered the phrase with a Brooklyn accent, as though imitating a movie.”
Imitation. Phrase. Through the collective narrative of the boys, their observations, Eugendies layers up the sense of a girl living vicariously through the imaginations and expectations of those around her. She distances herself from the painful reality of being housebound with her sisters, losing weight from malnutrition. To her adoring audience, she is a “succubus of those binocular nights” – but the narrative itself tells the audience a very different story:
“Dan Tyco … stepped in something soft at the top of the landing and picked it up. Only after Lux led him out the window and up to the roof could he see by moonlight what he held: the half-eaten sandwich Father Moody had encountered five months earlier…Mrs Lisbon had stopped cooking for the girls and they lived by foraging.” – pg 147
Emotional investment is crucial at times like this. If an author is not willing to allow their audience more than a back-seat view of what is going on, through a generalization where details were needed, then the latter will be unable to engage. The distance is breached when emotional investment and sensory integration are added; spicing up the dull porridge of “he was thin and tall” with the cinnamon of “his clothes hung from his frame; he was forced to duck under every doorway.”
Notice that this took a good deal more words to convey. This will equate to more time spent writing, more thought applied to intention. There’s a need for deferring to connotation (figurative) as well as denotation (plain facts.) As an author, you’re reaching out to meet the audience halfway; giving them the chance to feel as much a creator, as a participant-witness. In this way, the story becomes relative to their lives and the structure is made sound. The narrative becomes credible, and the characters stand as people.
Writing Reality: The Power of Persuasion
When you are pitching a story to your audience, you’ll automatically use persuasive language without putting too much thought towards it. There’ll be appeals to the wider scope of an idea – say, for fantasy genres and campaign settings, a general world-building aspect will be outlined, with details filled in such as economical figures and racial demographics. When it comes to drama or romance, you’ll lean more heavily on the emotional perspectives of your characters; how their cause-reaction interplay with others will affect the plot, and vice versa.
Or perhaps you’ve got a real bad-ass of an anti-hero, who just happens to be slightly less reprehensible than the main antagonist, and has been lumped with the quest or case of a lifetime. He’s coming up with the goods in less orthodox ways than a stalwart protagonist might. How’re you going to convince your audience to back this guy though, when he’s rough to the touch and setting sparks off on either side of the narrative?
Convince. Persuade. Emote. These are key words, key elements of writing both fiction and non-fiction. I’m going to break things down a bit, because I get a kick out of finding a better understanding of literature by taking it to pieces, like a fully-functioning clock, before reassembling to find control and balance.
Let’s define the three core ingredients of Rhetoric, the art of speaking or writing effectively; more specifically, the aspect of these as a means of communication and/or persuasion (Webster’s Definition).
Aristotle knew how to swing an argument. It was he who proposed the three defining appeals of rhetoric, as Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Of the trio, you’ve probably used Pathos the most, in both literature and speech. It’s the emotional tweak of the senses, most notably where sympathy is concerned. Remember when you were a kid and still hungry after dinner? The wheedling language you’d have used on a parent – probably ratcheted up with exaggeration – would have been an appeal to their emotions. Depending on how strong your argument was, a second helping or desert would have been forthcoming. But there’s such a thing as overdoing it, or of using the wrong form of rhetoric, based on context.
Say you’re writing a gritty scene of death on a fictional battlefield. You’re trying to highlight the futile nature of war, the horrendously high number of fallen. You could try reeling off a set of statistics – but it’s most likely going to make your audience’s eyes glaze over, unless they happen to be researching factual effects of war. They’re not likely to be looking for those in a work of fiction.
What comes in handy here is the imagery of Pathos, the emotional appeal to the audience. Numbers can be counted in a metaphor – perhaps the description of rolling fields full of silent graves, row after row, with poppies bobbing above the fallen.
You only have to look at the dramaticatic decrease in global demographics immediately following WWI, to know the heavy losses suffered. The personal accounts of survivors and war heroes drive home the message with the authority of first-person perspective and experience. This is an example of Ethos tempered with Pathos; instilling credibility into an argument via specifics relative to experience, with the emotive language of one reaching out to another to make them understand. On a more professional level, it’s the equivalent of a doctor or scientist writing a medical breakdown of facts for a wider audience, using the correct research data (Logos) to push their argument but also, crucially, favouring denotation (literal definition) over connotation (emotionally-loaded) in the language used. This helps to convey their neutral authority on the matter. It’s far more subtle than verbally whacking an audience around the head with diplomas and degrees. Inferring, rather than continuously referencing, credibility.
These three appeals of persuasion are crucial to writers. You’ll be targeting not only a reading audience, but the marketing aspect of the literary world. Knowing what language to use, based on which form of rhetoric is applicable, can make all the difference to your pitch.
One of my favourite fictional examples to use when deconstructing the three appeals, is Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs. Though essentially crime fiction – which itself has the ethical basis of upholding the law – the antagonistic character Dr. Hannibal Lecter is allowed to escape at the novel’s end. The audience is persuaded to believe that this outcome is, though perhaps not for the greater good (considering his actions), at least acceptable and perhaps even positive.
I’ve always defined three antagonists. Buffalo Bill is the main objective, being the most active and uncontrollable at the point that the novel pitches the audience into Clarice Starling’s shoes.
Dr. Lecter, though by far the most advanced in intellect and self-control, is for a time annulled by imprisonment. That being said, the fact he has the mental capacity to unpin others’ psyche while still behind bars, is testament to what he’s capable of.
His self-proclaimed “nemesis”, Dr. Chilton, is the weakest antagonist but still influential enough to demoralize and distort truth, affecting events. Though supposedly one of the good guys – keeping Lecter away from society – his credibility becomes ever more undermined as he lapses into unprofessional behavior. This is his undoing, both in the eyes of the plot and audience favour; when the novel concludes, the inferrence is made that Lecter will be paying a visit to Chilton in the near future, and in such a way that it even comes across as wryly humourous:
“Next, he dropped a note to Dr. Frederick Chilton in federal protective custody, suggesting that he would be paying Dr. Chilton a visit in the near future. After this visit, he wrote, it would make sense for the hospital to tattoo feeding instructions on Chilton’s forehead to save paperwork.” – Pg 184.
Though written in third person POV, the novel is over Starling’s shoulder for much of the narrative progression, drawing on her perceptions. When it does deviate to take in the perspective of others, it serves as a reminder that this is an omnipresent construct. A wider range of opinions and appeals are drawn upon; there’s less chance of the audience feeling unpinned by an unreliable narrator. This creates a more credible Ethos, for both plot and narrative structures.
Opinion is cast against Lecter right from the off, through the words of Jack Crawford. This man is established as an authority figure – “Section Chief Crawford’s summons had said now” – in Starling’s professional life, from the second paragraph. He describes Lecter as a “monster”, using experience and facts (Logos, Ethos) to back up his argument:
“He gutted Will with a linoleum knife when Will caught up with him. It’s a wonder Will didn’t die. Remember the Red Dragon? Lecter turned Francis Dolarhyde onto Will and his family. Will’s face looks like damn Picasso drew him, thanks to Lecter. He tore a nurse up in the asylum.” Pgs 4/5.
Note the strong connotations of violence and abhorrence in the words used – “tore, gutted, die”. Crawford is impressing the dire nature of Lecter’s capabilities upon Clarice (and by proxy, the audience) in such a way as to make her understand (Pathos.) There’s an intense mixture of the three appeals. Harris has already upped the ante, in a bold early move to expose Lecter’s past. It creates an ominous mood, far more engaging than simply riffing facts.
As Lecter’s custodian, Dr. Chilton’s own experience allows him to paint a broader picture than Crawford is capable of:
“It takes an orderly at least ten minutes a day to remove the staples from the publications he receives. We tried to eliminate or reduce his subscriptions, but he wrote a brief and the court overruled us…We thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity to make a landmark study” – it’s so rare to get one alive… A pure sociopath, that’s obviously what he is.” Pgs 6/7.
Chinks appear in Chilton’s credibility, with Harris alluding towards his unreliable nature and unprofessional stance. Much of his dialogue hinges on personal aspect:
– “Crawford’s very clever – isn’t he – using you on Lecter … A young woman to ‘turn him on,’ I believe you call it. I don’t believe Lecter’s seen a woman in several years – he may have gotten a glimpse of one of the cleaning people. We generally keep women out of there. They’re trouble in detention.” Pg 7.
– “I hadn’t heard your voice in years – I suppose the last time was when you gave me all the misleading answers in my interviews and then ridiculed me in your Journal articles
– “Years of silence, and then Jack Crawford sends down his girl and you just went to jelly, didn’t you?” – Pg 90
Yet Chilton is permitted his own level of Pathos, as Harris tempers the negative connotations of his character with this rather pitiful image:
“I’m not a turnkey here, Miss Starling. I don’t come running down here at night just to let people in and out. I had a ticket to Holiday on Ice.”
He realized he’d said a ticket. In that instant Starling saw his life, and he knew it. She saw his bleak refrigerator, the crumbs on the TV tray where he ate alone, the still piles his things stayed in for months until he moved them.” – Pg 72
The slip of a word can be a powerful message; particularly when it’s plural to single.
Lecter is at first mocking of Clarice – emulating the accent she’s tried to hide, flipping between prefixes of her name in correlation with subject matter:
“You’re tough, aren’t you, Officer Starling?”
“Now that I think of it, I could make you very happy on Valentine’s Day, Clarice Starling.”
“A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.” – Pgs 13/14.
All these serve to test, rather than demoralize her. Interesting to note is that for all this supposed derision, Harris is still at pains to display Lecter’s innate charm. He has a humane side to him, displayed through positive connotations that prove unsettling for any who wish to fall back on the simplicity of using “evil” as a faceless, nameless and potentially deniable aspect:
– “If the add-a-beads got tacky, what else will as you go along? You wonder don’t you, at night?” Dr. Lecter asked in the kindest of tones (note the use of a positive superlative)
– Hannibal Lecter, polite to the last, did not give her his back. – Pgs 13/14.
While much of the novel takes place inside the narrative of Clarice and Lecter, Harris maintains a dehumanizing distance from Buffalo Bill. There’s his habit of referring to victims as “It”, refusing to acknowledge their status as living, feeling creations:
“And an aside to the dog as the voice faded, ‘Yes it will get the hose, won’t it, Darlingheart, yes it will!”‘
And the nurturing of butterflies and moths, showing them tenderness and love, only to insert them in their pupae state down the throats of the women he has murdered and skinned, as an expression of his desire to break free into beauty.
The audience is not permitted to become overly familiar with his habits and thought processes. There’s less chance of finding humanity in him, compassion for him. That being said, there are still some jarring moments of Pathos woven into his narrative:
– “Gumb used the dishmop to tuck his penis and testicles back between his legs. He whipped the shower curtain aside and stood before the mirror, hitting a hipshot pose despite the grinding it caused in his private parts.”
– “A lot of electrolysis had removed Gumb’s beard and shaped his hairline into a widow’s peak, but he did not look like a woman. He looked like a man inclined to fight with his nails as well as his fists and feet. Whether his behavior was an earnest, inept attempt to swish or a hateful mocking would be hard to say on short acquaintance, and short acquaintances were the only kind he had.” Pgs 69/70.
This works in conjunction with Lecter’s own analysis:
“Sometimes you see a tendency to surgical addiction – cosmetically, transsexuals are hard to satisfy – but that’s about all. Billy’s not a real transsexual…Billy’s not a transsexual, Clarice, but he thinks he is, he tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.”
Note the weave of the three appeals. Lecter asserts his authority (Ethos) with references to personal experience / research, via technical language (Logos), while inserting a certain level of Pathos into the final sentence with repetition of the words “tries/tried” and “not.” Pieced together is the image of a confused man, a tormented soul full of reprehensible deeds; able to show loving care towards his dog Precious, while just as capable of watching his latest prisoner sleep with her thumb in her mouth – an obvious play on the innocence of an infant – and still refer to her as “the material.”
But it’s the final meeting between Clarice and Lecter that pulls out the emotional stops, for a real subversion of character-audience expectations:
“They didn’t send me. I just came.”
“People will say we’re in love. Don’t you want to ask about Billy Rubin, Clarice?”
“Dr. Lecter, without in any way… impugning what you’ve told Senator Martin, would you advise me to go on with your idea about- ”
“Impugning – I love it. I wouldn’t advise you at all. You tried to fool me, Clarice. Do you think I’m playing with these people?”
“I think you were telling me the truth.”
“Pity you tried to fool me, isn’t it?” Dr. Letter’s face sank behind his arms until only his eyes were visible. “Pity Catherine Martin won’t ever see the sun again. The sun’s
a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.”
“Pity you have to pander now and lick a few tears when you can,” Starling said.
“It’s a pity we didn’t get to finish what we were talking about. Your idea of the imago, the structure of it, had a kind of… elegance that’s hard to get away from. Now it’s like a ruin, half an arch standing there.”
A wonderful cadence of loaded words falls between them, vastly different to the cat-and-mouse discourse of technical-Logos and Ethos-experience used before.
Love. Fool. Pity. Tears. And that final gorgeous image of a half-built arch, an almost-relationship, now left to stand in silence and incomplete stasis, with the resonance of the word ruin.
Lecter has, after all, helped Clarice. He has issued her with belief and respect, where others have sought to waylay her attempts at ascension through the ranks, or have simply disregarded her credentials based on her inexperience and/or gender. The first-person account of Clarice’s unraveled secret of the lambs, adds the sort of emotive weight a third-person POV couldn’t administer.
The bittersweet dialogue makes the pain exquisite, with repetition of names almost chiming a lover’s song:
– “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the iron dark with the lambs screaming?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and
you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming?
– “Then why not finish the arch? Take your case file with you, Clarice, I won’t need it anymore.” He held it at arm’s length through the bars, his forefinger along the spine.
She reached across the barrier and took it. For an instant the tip of her forefinger touched Dr. Lecter’s. The touch crackled in his eyes.
“Thank you, Clarice.”
“Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”
And that is how he remained in Starling’s mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. – Pg 118
There are appealing aspects of humanity in Lecter’s character, despite the audience’s better judgement; a continuous display of Ethos vs. Logos to produce Pathos, which only enhance the novel’s subversion of audience expectations.
– “First, he sent to Barney a generous tip and a thank-you note for his many courtesies at the asylum.”
– “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.” – Pg 184
The art of persuasion is a delicate finesse, a tightrope for an author to walk. With the correct blend of the three forms of rhetoric, Thomas Harris manages to achieve an altered perspective of Lecter, through subtle diminishing of his antagonists’ authority and the use of more favourable connotations when depicting his personality and dialogue. Lecter’s appeal is complete – defying the conventional Ethos of a crime fiction, with the antagonist winning out.
Look to your own writing, for the use of persuasive language in its three formats –
Logos for facts, world-building, consistency, authority, deduction;
Ethos for mindset, trust, strongly influential mood without resorting to the overly emotional, research, favouring denotation over connotation;
Pathos for touching the nerves of the audience, for invoking their most basic instincts, their own memories and experiences.
It’s about tapping into what counts and where; what makes a difference in the right context. Overly emotional language and imagery won’t fall well into a job application; this is where Ethos, constructive language and proof of credentials comes into play, to convince a potential employer that you’re worth hiring. Likewise, trying to quantify a disease in a medical journal via personally emotive discourse, is perhaps not the most effective way of transmitting vital information.
When it comes to depicting a scene – setting the stage for emotional reactions – Pathos comes into its own. The dancing of poppies against the sky, across a graveyard; the shine of lanolin on a man’s hand, from constant checking and rechecking of his image; the smallest physical contact between two souls, kept apart by circumstance but having met in the middle of life and so full of memory thereafter, of that one brief touch. Something not even the world, with its expectations and assumptions, can erase.
celenagaia 