March 19, 2004

emotional short cuts

filed under characterization | prose matters

So, if you are studying the way emotions are telegraphed in fictional terms, you'll have noticed that either you get concrete descriptions or (what I'm calling) short-cuts.

concrete:

his mouth drooped at the corner
a double groove appeared between her brows
Sam's eyelid twitched convulsively
Maria's nose wrinkled

Some concrete descriptions are so spot-on right that they have ended up as cliches. "His eyes sparkled" is a sentence I would strike from any work I was beta reading, because it makes me cringe. Do eyes sparkle? I think they do, when somebody is really happy or very mischievious. But sparking eyes have outstayed their welcome in the novels of the world, and you just can't use the phrase (at least, not unless you're going for a particular kind of comedic effect. And then, good luck.) I once had a student in creative writing who handed in a short scene riddled with cliche. In response to my pointed commentary he said "But I'm experimenting with cliche!"

The answer to that is: no. Maybe Toni Morrison can experiment with cliche and make it work, maybe Alice Munro could pull it off, but the average college student? Nope. So concrete detail works, if it's finely observed without being overwrought or cliched. And note, I haven't yet got to the point where metaphor or simile are added to the mix.

Sometimes the concrete is joined by an observation (either yours, or another character's); that is, you start with show and then you tell):

Maria's nose wrinkled in disgust.
George's lower lip curled disdainfully.
Mr. Brown's cheeks puffed out in surprise.
Dr. Langacre's chin shivered with suppressed delight.

So what if you can't come up with an interesting, effective, yet simple detail to make Minerva's smile jump off the page and make your reader say Yes! I know that kind of smile, I can see it!? Because the plain truth is, mostly you won't be able to come up with something unique. Pretty much everything has been done; the most you can hope for is that once in a while, if you work hard and have an ear for the language, you'll come up with exactly the right combination of phrase and characterization and your reader will be overcome with the power of your vivid prose.

But mostly you'll be more concerned with getting past Minerva's smile to the dialogue (which is where everything really important happens, after all; forget all that stuff about epiphany), because this is the bit where Minerva tells Susan, oops, I forgot I was supposed to feed your cat this past week while you were in Oslo, but he was really kinda portly anyway, wasn't he? So you'll take a shortcut in describing the emotion on Minerva's face, that odd, eerie, edgy smile that means she's got something difficult to say. Shortcuts look like this:

A look of surprise (anger, confusion, disgust) came over her (his) face.

Basically, a short cut is telling rather than showing. You won't have to look very far to come up with lots of examples of emotional short-cuts. Everybody uses them, simply because it would be overkill to attempt to describe every physical cue your characters might toss your way. You'd be exhausted, and your readers would soon run and hide. The trick is to learn how to balance the occasional concrete detail and fine observation with the short-cuts. Or at least, that's one of the tricks. More tomorrow.

March 19, 2004 12:07 AM

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Comments

What I used to tell students about cliches is that while they don't belong in finished work, they do make excellent placeholders in early drafts. If you write, "Her eyes sparkled," knowing full well that it's a cliche, you'll also know to come back to the line later and think about it. What's really happening in the scene? What is the emotion you want to convey? In my own work, I've sometimes found that returning to one of these sparkling-eyes offenders and scowling at it results in an unexpectedly sharp line of dialogue that's exactly what I wanted all along.

Posted by: Karen Palmer at March 19, 2004 08:29 AM

that's an excellent suggestion, Karen. I'll have to remember that the next time I teach.

In my own case, I would be so worried about not catching that *sparkle* on the re-read that it might be counterproductive. I often used brackets [smiled] if I know I need to think harder about a phrase or scene, and then I can search for them.

Posted by: sara at March 19, 2004 10:57 AM