The excerpt below comes from “Between the Shadow and the Soul” in Lauren Groff’s story collection Brawler. The main character has just connected with someone beautiful and new:
At midnight, the dark road swerved in the windshield on the way home. When she climbed out of the car, she didn’t want to go into the house, past the dog groaning on his bed in the kitchen, through the dark parlor, up the stairs, into the bedroom where Willie was sleeping. Instead, she stood for a long while out in the clear, cold air, smelling all the new green in the world, feeling the sap rising, the trees awakening, the tender grass just now showing itself in the fields. Her old friend the river spoke loudly, swollen with snowmelt and spring rain.
Settings can become more interesting as characters move through them. Here, Groff shows a character’s excitement as they don’t move through a setting, one that probably feels too familiar and mundane in this moment. Details of the house are still important, and Groff provides them. The order and the connotations of the details are not accidental, nor is it an accident that the character doesn’t want them. Not wanting Willie in their bedroom shows how the main character feels and is changing. What a character doesn’t do can reveal them to readers, perhaps as well as their actions. Instead, the character waits outside in the spring weather, and the words in the sentences that describe her there include specific images of newness, “sap rising,” and rebirth.
Rather than an action, how might a character’s inaction or a change in their expected behavior show new feelings? What can inaction reveal to readers about a character?
Writing Fiction 