Elizabeth Peters, a favorite author that I’ve followed for over twenty years, wrote a story back in the 1970’s about this character with a huge nose.  I know, this has been done many times.  But the way she wrote about this character, The Nose became a runny (sorry, couldn’t resist) running background to the story and part of the plot.  She did it in a very subtle way so that it didn’t become a prop or a cliché, or a mean dig at people with larger protuberances.  I was thinking about this today when someone in Yahoo Answers was struggling with how to picture a character in her writing.  She couldn’t figure out how to bring the character to life because she couldn’t ‘see’ him and wanted to know what other writers did.

I’ve talked about description before, and how hard it is to write just the right amount so that a reader can picture the scene, setting, or character the way they want to see them and not the way the author tells them they have to see someone.  Mention dark hair, and I’ll find the shade I want.  Yet there has to be seeds of description or the character is a piece of human-shaped white board.

I imagine there are lots of writers out there who can picture a character they’ve created, fully formed in their mind.  But I think most writers are observers.  When they are out in public I’m sure they are watching people, like I do, and thinking how they could use that awful dated pompadour hairstyle, or those fantastic body piercings.  Writers see the way people move, interact, express their emotions through body language, etc., and that all transposes to the written page.  Same with how a person looks. So observing the surroundings is a great way to learn how to visualize and describe a character, if you can remember until you get home to the story.

Personally, I find it more useful to print out photos.  I’ll see an actor or actress and think, ‘hey, those ears stick out all the way to Montana’ and look the person up, print out a photo, and file it in my ‘faces’ folder.  Then when I’m writing, I’ll pull out photos that contain the parts I need for the characters I’m building, and spread those photos out around my writing space.  Whenever that character walks into the scene, I’ll glance at those faces and visualize how those ears are going to go up when the person talks, or turn blue in the cold.  The faces folder becomes a reminder of the character I’m creating.

This doesn’t mean that I write a character who looks just like Sean Bean (one of my favorite actors).  But I might use his hair.  The characters are still mine, I just borrow parts.  And that’s how I imagine my characters.  It would be interesting to find out what works for other writers.

Continuing the theme of the ‘Poet’ post, I’ve been thinking not only of the importance of making sure each and every word is vital to the piece of writing as a whole, but also of the importance of listening.

First, we listen to the rhythm of the words.  This is important, and most writers know to read their work out loud and listen to how the sentences flow, how the dialog sounds, and so forth.  The ear hears what the eyes sometimes miss.  If, in reading out loud, certain words are skipped over, or a sentence comes out verbally different from how it’s written, it’s probably because the way we read it sounds more natural.

Second, we as writers need to listen to our characters.  This isn’t as common, but is just as important.  In an early piece years ago, I had a character actually say to another character, ‘I’m so bored with all this.’  This bit of dialog showed up mid way through the story, in the infamous ‘sagging middle’.  The editor I was working with made a very kind notation in the margin that sometimes our characters tell us when something is wrong.  How right she was.  I rewrote, and made sure that character didn’t get bored again.

A friend of mine, recently published, has an interesting tool for when her story sags or stalls.  She sits down at the dining room table with her characters and talks to them.  Asks them their opinions on the story, and so on.  She then jumps up, runs to another chair, becomes the character, and answers the writer.  In this way she found out that the character she had pegged as the murderer, wasn’t, and an elderly female character really wanted to be the murderer and had excellent reasons for that desire.  My friend laughs, sheepishly, when she talks about this, and hopes no one ever sees or hears her.  But she has found an even more intimate way to interact with her story than just listening to the characters.

Honestly, I’m not sure I’m that uninhibited.  After all, when I read my writing out loud, I whisper.

But at least I’m listening.

I have always positioned poets up on a pillar.  Seriously.  I admire them from far below, because as I’ve mentioned before, it takes me 80,000 words to get a story across and poets can do it in a few stanzas.  If you question whether a poem can tell a story read the one I’ve posted over on the sidebar.  Trust me, if you’re a writer the poem will haunt you with all the unknown back story and unsaid threads.  I don’t understand poetry, I’ve failed at writing it, I know nothing about the types, styles, or whether something is a cinquain or a haiku.  I still covet the ability to write them though.

I have two friends and one nephew who write amazing poetry.  Their words transport me away not just to place, but to emotions.  They can call up peace, melancholy, even deep homesickness when I’m sitting on my favorite chair at home.  I study their words and take away this lesson that is self-evident but I need to repeat often.  Every single word counts.  And taking the effort to think about each word makes a significant difference.

When I’m in the throes of writing though, I can’t slow down to study each word.  I speed along, caught up in the story, and worry about whether it’s the perfect word or phrase during editing.  I imagine poets edit, too, but I have this idealized vision of them sitting alone, looking very much like a poet, and channeling beauty into the first draft.  Makes me envious.

Poetry seems to me to be the very barest of bare bones of a story.  So for a challenge, sometimes I take my novel and try to write the entire plot into a poem.  I call it a free-style poem simply because I have no idea what I’m doing.  The end result though, has been interesting.  If I can surgically remove everything to end up with the poem/plot, suddenly what I am left holding is a synopsis.  Definitely not poetry.  But a synopsis that clarifies what I’m doing and makes me take a second look at all the subplots, making sure they are relevant and needed.  Trying to think like a poet forces me to be ruthless with all the prose I think is so literary and perfect.  Without fail I find that less is better.

Stephen King says something similar in his book On Writing.  He says the final draft is the first draft minus ten percent.  Heck, I think my final draft is the first draft minus fifty percent.  Or even more.  Some day I’ll learn to cut as I write.  But I doubt I’ll ever get to the point of writing a poem.