Learning from Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin has a lot to teach. Here is a paragraph from late in A Wizard of Earthsea.

They passed between Kornay and Gosk in foul weather, seeing neither isle in the fog and rain, and knowing they had passed them only on the next day when they saw ahead of them an isle of pinnacled cliffs above which sea-gulls wheeled in huge flocks whose mewing clamor could be heard from far over the sea. Vetch said, “That will be Astowell, from the look of it. Lastland. East and south of it the charts are empty.”

This is a paragraph of description. The paragraph before it sums up a conversation between Ged and Vetch. Summary and description are interesting when reading Le Guin. For example, in addition to summary, the paragraph I’m not quoting here builds the world of the story by describing magic and mentioning historical figures in that world and sharing their wisdom. One character watches another and reacts in ways that characterizes both. The last sentence is a portent of things to come. All of the sentences, in other words, are working in multiple ways, doing more than one thing.

The paragraph of description I have quoted above describes the fictional world and uses sensory language to do so. Sensory language is far more interesting to most readers than abstract language. Sensory language reminds us of how we experience the actual world so it can help connect us to a fictional one. Readers can draw or dream or film the passage between the islands and sailing past Lastland. That landmark is important enough to the characters that they speak of it and their speaking of it helps make it important to readers. The order of the sentences in the paragraph is not random or haphazard. It ends with “empty,” with the characters leaving not only civilization behind but any safety besides their boat. Like the paragraph before it, this one ends with a portent that increases the danger the characters face. The paragraphs are escalating tension in the story, as George Saunders suggests.

The sentences and the paragraphs do more than one thing. They characterize as they world build as they escalate as they engage reader’s senses as they provide portents/foreshadowing as they summarize. It’s excellent.

Toward characterization

These prompts are inspired by Ted Gioia’s “My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character.” I’ve revised his techniques to create fictional characters.

What childhood experiences formed your character? List three and write a paragraph about each.
How do they handle their time and material resources? What do they do with their free time? What sorts of things do they surround themselves with?
Identify what irritates your character the most about others. (This may be the trait or flaw they dislike most in themselves.)
Describe your character’s long-term relationship(s) so that it reveals what the character longs for and what they think they deserve or will settle for.
How does your character treat people assigned to serve them, especially people who have no power or influence over them?
Does your character cheat at small things? (Why would or wouldn’t that guarantee they will cheat at big things?)
How do they handle unexpected problems? Do they exacerbate the issue (intentionally or not), try to ignore it, negotiate, or attempt a solution alone or with others?
Describe the character’s inner conflict. What do they want? What will they not do to get it?

Learning from Johnson

I’m enjoying At the Mouth of the River of Bees, one of Kij Johnson’s short story collections. I plan to go looking for more of her work. Consider this sentence from her story “26 monkeys, also the abyss”:

These are some ways Aimee’s life might’ve come apart:

After this sentence is a short list of three or four events which, it is clear, did not happen to Aimee. This list of things that did not happen is a kind of narrative negative space but not on the level of the page. It’s not an empty or unoccupied area around paragraphs, at the ends or beginnings of them, or a gap between sets of them. It’s an empty narrative space because it is an explicit list of things that did not occur in the character’s life. But telling readers what is not there kind of implies what is. It’s characterization by what has not happened to a character. What hasn’t happened also suggests the kind of person Aimee is. I’ll probably try this technique by suggesting what could have happened to a character, but didn’t.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Johnson’s novel The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe.

Learning from Mandanna

Consider the last two paragraphs of The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna:

She, Mika Moon, would not be the witch who transformed the world, but she was making it a little better, day by day. She had once believed witches would never have friendship, community, and each other, but here they were. She had once believed she would never have a family, but here they were, too. She, who had once believed she would never leave a mark on anybody, knew now that the marks she had left were unerasable, as much a part of forever as the sea.

And, really, who could ask for more than that?

Endings are tricky. No one strategy will fit all of them, but this ending works really well. The techniques behind it include a summary of the book in this paragraph (the scenes that make up the book are excellent in themselves as well), anaphora, and epistrophe. The length and variety of the sentences keep the anaphora interesting: “She . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” “She had once . . . ,” and “She . . . knew now . . .” The same is true of the epistrophe: “but here they were” and “but here they were, too.” Prose writers worry about repetition, but these strategies succeeded in creating emphasis and emotions as the book ends (at least for me). Consider trying them.

Learning from Moore

Here are two paragraphs from Liz Moore’s God of the Woods:

She saw everything. She sat on the edge of the stage that overlooked the community room, watching her campers in all of their triumphs and failures, the ones having genuine fun, the ones pretending to have it.

If she believed in a God, it was in one who functioned something like Louise in this moment: rooting for her charges from afar, mourning alongside them when they were rejected, celebrating every small victory that came their way. She noticed the lonely ones, the ones at the edge of the crowd; she felt in her heart a sort of wild affection for them, wanted to go to them, to stand next to them and pull them tightly to her side; and yet she also knew that to intervene in this way would disrupt something sacred that—at twelve and thirteen and fourteen years old—they were learning about themselves and the world. And this, too, was how she thought of God.

Consider characterization by thoughts about the divine. Characters might not believe at all or might not believe as aggressively and fervently as the most devout evangelists or believe to various changing degrees. What characters consider divine (their money, spouse, time with their phone or family, God) reveals them to readers as well. Does what characters consider divine put them at odds with some of the other characters around them? Does it make them a member of a community or organization? How do they feel about that membership? How do people important to them feel about it? If you’re writing literary realism, is there a faith tradition you want to mention specifically? If you’re writing fantasy, do you need to invent a pantheon? How might meeting aliens change your characters ideas about all of this? What other life events might strengthen or weaken a character’s resolve, whatever their position?

Moore’s paragraphs above quickly show readers Louise’s view of the world, other characters in it, the setting, and a bit about her view of herself. That kind of quick characterization is valuable for writers.

Learning from Rundell

What part of a character enters the room first? What is a reader’s very first impression? Consider this sentence from Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures: “His eyebrows were so bushy they would, Christopher thought, enter a room several seconds before the rest of him.” A single sentence characterizes the point-of-view character (Christopher) and the character they are meeting.

Sometimes, the first part of a character to enter a room is their reputation (see Voldemort and everything that is said and is not said about him). In contrast, consider Darth Vader’s arrival in Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. Visually, Vader is very different than the environment around him. The music suggests a reputation, possibly, but his actions after he arrives show viewers who he is.

Consider the value of being premeditated about this; you might decide whether a character has a reputation that precedes them (and what the presentation of the reputation might reveal about the character who makes it) or if a character’s actions almost as soon as they arrive reveal them.

Learning from Kushner

I enjoyed reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. Like all good books, there is a lot that could be said about it. From sentence to sentence the writing seems strong to me. Here are two of the elements of craft of the many that stood out:

We read, “You simply don’t like her, I didn’t say.” Kushner directly states what her main character didn’t say, which lets readers know what the character knows and is considering but doesn’t do. It’s characterization by decision-making but decisions on paths not taken. Implying options the character has shares their world with readers. The economy of expression increases the tension at the sentence level as well.

I have tended to avoid spoilers, but describing the next technique without revealing interesting plot details is difficult. You might stop reading now, though I’ll keep things abstract. The main character is involved in spying for a mysterious organization. She provides reports and tries to influence the people she watches in minor ways. Tension increases for readers and the character when her assignment changes. The change means she is no longer employed to just deceive but to actually harm. It’s a simple and direct move by Kushner that grabbed me.

Learning from coincidence

Coincidentally, I was reading Terry Pratchett’s Color of Magic and Victor LaValle’s Lone Women at the same time. Central to the plot of both is a large piece of luggage. The characters’ attitude toward that luggage characterizes in both books. This reminded me of Alice LaPlante’s “Emptying Pockets” exercise from the making of a story and how some characters are associated quite closely with objects: Biblo/Frodo and the ring, Dorothy and the ruby red shoes, Cinderella and the glass slippers, Kane and Rosebud etc.

The objects characters choose to surround themselves with can let readers know about them. As a step toward characterization, then, consider these questions:

What three things does your character carry with them? Why?
Which thing, carried with them or not, is most important to the character? Why?
How might the important thing/object function symbolically?
What are differences between what it means to the character and what it means to readers?
What does the object reveal about the larger setting of the story?
To what degree is the object a character? How might it become more or less one?
How aware is the character of their own attachment? How do they feel about their attachment?
How hard would the character fight to keep the object if it were taken from them? Would they shrug, argue, scream, start a fist fight, call a lawyer?
What event would lead the character to willfully give the object away?

Learning from Child

I haven’t read all the Jack Reacher books, but Lee Child says several interesting things in the introduction to Killing Floor, at least in my edition. He starts by talking about reading as a writer: “that yard of books did more for me than provide excellent entertainment. For some reason the McGee books spoke to me like textbooks. I felt I could see what MacDonald was doing, and why, and how, as if I could see the skeleton beneath the skin.”

Continuing to quote, here are some important points:

I discovered I was the audience.
Character is king. . . . People remember characters.
If you can see a bandwagon, it’s too late to get on. . . . I was going to have to do something a little different.
You can’t design a character too specifically.

I’ll summarize some of what he says about his third and fourth points. The main character bandwagon Child noticed included a repertory cast, fixed locations, jobs, friends, family, and pets. He wanted a main character that avoided those things.

The danger of designing a character too specifically, Child writes, is becoming bound to a mental checklist and trying to please too many types of readers. Jack Reacher reflects, however, Child’s interests and things he noticed. Finally, he believes characters with a nonchalant, “insouciant self-confidence [form] a more enduring bond” with readers.

Learning from Pamuk

From My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk:

We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.

A quick list of techniques I want to try after reading the sentence above:

Is there something inherently more interesting in long, really long, sentences? See “Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence” by Ed Simon for examples.
Begin with a general state of affairs that might be resolved in more than one way. Let each word and detail that follows engage readers but deny resolution. End with a surprise or reversal.
This sentence could be a prompt; specifically, begin with the first phrase and tell the story this sentence tells but in a different location. LA, rather than Istanbul, for example, or the Grand Canyon.
Explicitly include motion and spatiality in a journey: “He was in front,” “turning and twisting,” “climbing and descending,” “passed,” “beside,” and “beyond.”
List the mundane (“endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls”), but make the supernatural and religious detailed.
Consider variations on the first phrase (“We were two women in love with the same man,” “We were two boxers who hated the same manager,” and “We were two teachers hired at the same elementary school,” for example). What implications might follow?