Try: Tethering
Why going light on character description might be better
I worry, often, that the ubiquity of screens, of T.V. shows, and of movies, has misled people when it comes to fiction. Too many stories feel like screenplays. That’s certainly the case in my early drafts, and I have to work hard to fight it.
One way this shows up is writers trying too hard to have readers see precisely what is in their mind’s eye, particularly when it comes to character descriptions. Of course, precise observation is important, but we must recognize that our words are porous and do not have the fidelity of images. Instead of trying to transfer 100% of the information, better writers, I think, transmit the essence. A few light brushstrokes can transmit an essence.
So that’s the first part: let go of high-fidelity.
The second bit of craft guidance has come to me through my Retyping of Dickens’ Great Expectations.1 I’m up to Chapter 15, and I’ve noticed that he tethers certain words to certain characters almost like a signature, and that this has an accumulative effect. When you analyze, he actually hasn’t listed a bunch of adjective-noun pairs that paint a picture of a character. Rather, he has continually used an emotive word so that you create your own portrait the details of which are irrelevant but the emotional content is controlled. The best example of this in the first fifteen chapters is Estella. When she is mentioned, we are always told that she is “pretty” which is very vague and can mean anything to anyone. We all have our own notions of “prettiness” but just as tethered as “pretty” are the words —“scorn”, “derision”, “despise”—all tethered to her eyes and gaze.
So, while we may not know how many centimeters there are between her eyebrows, we do know that she is pretty and always has a scornful gaze—those few brushstrokes, when repeated countless times, lead us to form our neurological constellation that it is consistent. Every time Estella appears on the page, these ideas are being reinforced.
By Chapter 15, you feel like you know her; we aren’t constantly re-meeting her in high-fidelity. We are just re-igniting a known emotional valence.
For us practitioners, let us let go of fidelity and open ourselves up to fiction’s capacity to draw from lightness and accumulation. Are there any characters from world lit that you can think of who, similarly, despite not being given a lot of visual detail about, you feel as though you know well?
Written by Raghav Rao
Illustrated by Sophie Lucido Johnson
Office of Modern Composition is a Chicago-based writing studio that both makes compositions and fosters composers. We offer one-on-one coaching for writers and take on commissions for things you need to have written. We also host free events like our in-person and online co-writes.
 | A guest post by
|