Movement through Space

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Here's an exercise almost everyone can use:  How to give the reader a sense of movement through space and time as your characters travel from one destination to another.  In The Folding Star,  by Alan Hollinghurst, two friends leave the city in a convertible to drive to a beach house several hours away. As they leave the city and head for the coast you can almost feel the wind in your hair and the city disappearing in the rearview mirror behind you:

I panicked again under the huge sweep of sky that opened up. The city was suddenly behind us; I looked back, and above the warehouses and estates the cluster of extravagant towers rose into view again;  they became the city; then they dwindled and were blurred in haze.  We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from…

There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea.  Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove.  A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own.

In Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, the main character describes a carpool ride to school in seventh grade:

I'm looking out the window [of the station wagon] while Mrs. Drexel's cigarette uncoils a rope of smoke.  We head into the heart of Grosse Pointe.  We pass long, gated driveways, the kind that always fill my family with wonder and awe…  We rumble past privet hedges and under topiary arches to arrive at secluded lakefront homes where girls wait with satchels, standing very straight.  They wear the same uniform I do, but somehow it looks different on them, neater, more stylish.  Occasionally there is also a well-coifed mother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden. 

And again, a couple of months later:

The car is full of girls. Mrs. Drexel is lighting another cigarette.  She's pulling up to the curb and getting ready to lay a curse on us.  Shaking her head at the view -- of the hilly, green campus, the lake in the distance -- she says, "Youse girls better enjoy it now.  Best time of life is when you're young." (At twelve, I hated her for saying that.  I couldn't imagine a worse thing to tell a kid…"

I love how those authors show us more than just movement through a particular setting. They give us their characters' emotional reactions to the experience as well.

Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex

Engaging the Reader

I was going through some of the early scenes in my novel recently and realized, sadly, that several of them are just really, really boring and probably at this point irrelevant. Time to wish them a fond goodbye and throw them out with the trash. There were others, however, that were just as boring but necessary to move the story forward.  Those I'll need to keep and revamp. What they're lacking is any kind of tension or emotion-- something, anything, to engage the reader and  make him want to read on. 

Donald Maass, author of Writing the Breakout Novel, says that most writers are aware that having tension on every page is the secret to great storytelling, but that few of us want to put in the time and effort to make it happen. In his Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook Maass shows how even a brief dialogue between buddies can be loaded with tension as in this passage from Harlan Coben's novel Gone for Good.

Another way to add tension to your fiction (or nonfiction) is to create reader anticipation for what's to come.  A few years ago I came across an exercise that was part of a piece by Eric M. Witchey in "The Writer" ["Step by Step: Get the emotion into your fiction].  In this excerpt Witchey illustrates how a writer can take a simple action and expand upon it to "create sympathy and reader anticipation by implying or explicitly revealing future dramatic events":
 

While developing the short story "The Mud Fork Cottonmouth Expedition," which appeared in Polyphony 4 from Wheatland Press, I was faced with my own flaccid prose:

Gordon parked the moped, and we started our hunt.

This line delivers facts, but the reader response is, "So what?"

Contrast that line with Witchey's expanded scene below. To flesh out the scene and develop the reader's experience, he forced his narrator (Rick) to interpret every detail based on attitude specific to his current emotional state.  In the revised scene that follows, "the two boys have just driven a moped to the river to hunt snakes.  Gordon wants to amuse himself.  Rick wants to impress the older boy. As you read, consider how and where the text creates sympathy and reader anticipation by implying or explicitly revealing future dramatic events:

               He pulled a little black pack out from under the seat of the moped.  It unrolled like one of Dad's wood-working tool sets.  Inside were tools and some cigarettes.  "Want one?"

              "Nah," I said.  I tried to sound like I might have said yes, but he laughed anyway.

               He flipped the lid on his Zippo lighter and lit it up.  "Keeps the mosquitoes away."

              "Yeah," I said.  "So, these moccasins.  How do you catch 'em?"

            "Different ways."  He followed a gravel trail behind the bridge abutment guardrail, past the concrete footings and down under the steel span that held up the pavement.  On the broken concrete below the bridge, he picked his way down to the water's edge and walked right into the river up to his knees. 

              "Come on," he said.

               I picked my way across the rubble.  "I'm coming." At the water, I hesitated. 

              "Afraid of leeches?" he asked.  "Smoke in the blood keeps 'em off."  He grinned around the edges of his Marlboro. 

              "Bull----."

              "So, what's keeping you?  It's easiest to walk in the water."

               It was my moment of truth.  I was about to put my brand new Converse tennis shoes into the water of the Mud Fork, water I shouldn't have been anywhere near, shoes that were supposed to keep me through the coming school year, with a guy who was smoking, and we'd got there on a moped, and I didn't have permission for any of this, and if the leeches did get me or if I drowned or if I even fell and got cut, I'd be grounded for freaking ever!

               Gordon didn't care.  He didn't have to ask.  He could smoke.  He had keys to the storage and a moped.  He turned and waded away in the brown water.

               I stepped in, and the water was up to my waist.  My feet sank into the muck on the bottom.  Pockets of iridescent oil rose to the surface of the water and trailed away from my legs.

In the same article (from a different story), Witchey gives us an example of another missed opportunity to create emotion, tension, and reader anticipation:

                        Marletta walked down the street looking for a place to hail Vincent's cab.

Here the character is involved in a goal-oriented action.  We know what she wants, but as readers, we are not engaged. There is no tension in that single sentence, no emotion. In the revised scene below, the author allows his POV character to interpret the setting based on attitude--Marletta's current emotional state--as she pursues her goal. Notice how the author creates tension and reader anticipation by implying or explicitly revealing future dramatic events:

      The pay-me pumps were a given in her business, but three-day old slush wasn't.  Slipping and bouncing buns on the concrete would total her fox vest and the silk-slink dress she used to display her goods.  Vincent's cab would be along in a few.  He was a clock-work kinda guy, but the slush under her bucking spikes didn't care.  She hobbled along under shop awnings, one foot in the melt by the building and the other slipping in icy slime.  She tried to sway with the slip from knees and hips in case Vincent drove up behind her.  A patch of salted sidewalk under an awning invited her, but it was Gustav's Deli.  She'd only have a minute there before Gussie came out with his broom.  Her faux Rolex said four-twenty.  About right.  Grabbing the awning crank mounted on the brick building, she stepped out of icy slime and stood in front of Gustav's window.  She opened her fox vest to the Canadian cold front and hoped her charms could convince Vincent to help her feed the kids.

Eric M. Witchey's fiction has appeared nationally and internationally in magazines and anthologies. He has published in multiple genres under several names. His how-to articles have appeared in The Writer Magazine, Writer's Digest Magazine, Writer's Northwest Magazine, Northwest Ink, and in a number of on-line publications. His fiction has won recognition from Writers of The Future, New Century Writers, Writer's Digest, and www.ralan.com. Click here for a short, mini lesson from Eric on the ABC's of how to get emotion into your fiction (from the series "Five Minutes on Fiction").

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Writing About Guilt

This first exercise is from one of my favorite writing books: Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood:

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Guilt is taking the responsibility for wrongdoing. Or for perhaps even something larger – breaking a law, committing a sin. We have characters who are adulterers, murderers, liars, cheaters, thieves. Often, a story is shaped around a guilty character who feels remorse or finds redemption at the story's end.

Sometimes, however, simply confessing to or revealing the wrongdoing (or sin or crime) is the end of the story. This implies that true guilt is never really relieved. The character gives us her side of the event, demonstrates the guilt, but cannot be unburdened.

An bad example (a not so great way to show guilt):

My heart is ripped apart by guilt. I will never be the same again.

The weight of guilt is not so easily confessed or explained. It is too complex an emotion for such glib self-awareness. For this reason, the reader doubts the confession. The character simply wants to feel guilty, perhaps as a way of forgiving himself for whatever he has done.

A good example:

The narrator in Amy Hempel's short story "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" cannot stay with her dying best friend while she dies. In fact, she leaves her to die alone. What follows is a description of that moment of deciding to leave…. Hempel turns around the cliché of twisting hands by pointing to it as a cliché:

"I have to go home," I said when she woke up.

She thought I meant to her house in the Canyon, and I had to say No, home home. I twisted my hands in the time-honored fashion of people in pain. I was supposed to offer something. The Best Friend. I could not even offer to come back.

I felt weak and small and failed.

Also exhilarated.

Exercise: (part 1): What is the worst decision you can imagine making? In Amy Hempel's story, it is leaving your best friend to die alone. Find a place in the story or novel you are currently working on, in which a character must make a moral decision that will leave her guilty for the rest of her life (if none of your characters make such a life-altering decision, find a place where they feel at least some small amount of guilt over an action or decision that they make). Show the reader this character's guilt in 500 words or less. Remember, that at the point of deciding, Hempel's character feels "weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated."

Objective: To show how the roots of guilt are not necessarily in evil, and that guilt, like all emotions, is a complex blend.

Exercise (part 2): Take the same character you used in the above exercise and have her confess her guilt to a different person. How does she feel after the confession? Relieved? Embarrassed? Does she feel unburdened or does she still feel the guilt?

Objective: To explore the complexities of the emotion of guilt and to see whether a confession leads to redemption or not.

Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood is available to order online: IndieBound