Thanks for the tips, y’all. I will tackle that bathtub ring this weekend. Various and sundry pieces of unexpected madness assaulted me yesterday complete with altered deadlines, so I never got around to it.
A Note On Language & Character Portrayal
A fellow player mentioned to me last night that they were having difficulty ascertaining the best way to both figure out the present day depth of their character as well as portraying it. They knew very well who their character was in the past, but were uncertain as to who he was in present game time. (Side note: The tense shifts in that last sentence hurt my soul.) They were concerned that the result of their efforts would be an unwieldy info dump more suited to a CS than a thread.
At twenty I had the incredible advantage of learning some aspects of the trade from the late Peter Christopher. They called him “the bad boy of fiction”. He did things like speak at workshops that people such as Chuck Palahniuk attended while warming up for Fight Club and said things like too much will never be enough and fuck the jugular, go for the whole soul. He trademarked the term “dangerous writing” that I swallowed into my self and forced to become a part of me. I will never let it go.
Twenty was a dark hour of my life and listening to him was one of the only things that woke me up, got me out of the cesspool of crap that kept trying to suck me under. I never should have passed his class. Disaster struck my life a week before our final project was due. It was worth one half of my grade. I never finished it. Instead I wrote him a note apologizing for that failure and thanking him for what he had taught me despite, saying how I understood that I would not pass but that I still had taken more from his workshop than any other. He deserved more from me than that, but it was literally all I had at the time.
I did not hear from him, but when semester grades were released, he not only passed me, he passed me with an A. The next day I received an email from him, one sentence long.
A century from now I don’t want to be the guy who failed you in fiction writing. – Pete.
It is still the largest compliment I have received, and one I’m still trying to live up to.
The most important thing relative to writing I took from Christopher was the concept of “dangerous writing”. Dangerous writing has multiple definitions and it can mean different things to different people or even to the same person in a different work. Distilled down to the core, however, it ultimately just means don’t censor yourself.
If it is ugly. If it is petty and mean. If is too base, too graphic, too raw, too honest, too real, too personal, too emotional, too anything, then it is probably of the best things you have ever written. Writers are too often afraid of what their readers might think of them, might assume, might opine, based on their work. This is not without base. A good writer can portray a character fifty years their senior, a thousand year in the future in a profession they have never held and still be bearing their own soul in the process. The only thing that works for me to overcome this natural fear is pretend while writing that my words will never be read. I keep telling myself that right up until I submit.
That is one aspect of dangerous writing. Another is not being afraid of your words. It is wholly possible to convey in description alone the mindset of a character from their emotional state to the very detail of their thoughts. Description for desciption's sake can be irritating, even boring no matter how eloquently it's composed. Description used like the cheap whore it is (I will repeat that over and over until it stops amusing me) is, on the other hand, a writer's most compelling ingredient.
The trick is simple. You hear it from everyone who ever tried to say anything about writing since the beginning of time. There is a reason for this. It's true. Show don't tell. There, I said it too. So? So you take out the excess. You write like Hemingway. Every word falls like a brick. Delete anything and everything unnecessary to the story and that means deleting lines of thought, eviscerating entire paragraphs and zeroing out explanations.
But these things are necessary to the story! You say. No, they're not. Not if you're doing the rest right. Not if you're using the hell out of description in showing your story. I mean evocative language as I briefed over in my post before last. I mean motif. I mean, I mean, I mean take the way a character walks into a room and make it say everything explanation and their thoughts would have. Compose a block of dialogue that tells everything the reader needs to know in what is not said rather than what is. Make it work. You're the writer. You have complete control.
The exception to this is obvious -- you earn in the course of your story the right to break the "show not tell" rule. How do you know when you've earned it? Come on. You'll know. If you're honest with yourself.
You take this and you plunk your character down into interactions with other characters. In game, you do this with NPCs or PCs. Doesn't matter save that self moderated NPCs over which you have control clearly make it easier for you to mold the communication with your reader. Why? Because without interaction with other characters, your character whom you put so much effort adding backstory and layers and facets and depth will come across flat. It is completely impossible to communicate all aspects of a character when they are alone. The saying that "actions speak louder than words" holds water in writing too.
I have examples, lots of examples, but I'm running out of time. This scrap was supposed to be a lot shorter and and I still haven't finished saying what I wanted to at the start. It is going to have to be continued... |