CHAPTER 8
Don’t discuss sows’ ears with silken words
Some years ago, I completed a short story for a writing class assignment. I don’t mind telling you, I was very proud of it. It was about an old, uneducated 1770s pioneer on a flotilla going up the Tennessee River to settle what is now Nashville, Tennessee. I recall the first sentence reading something like this:
The sun set in a salmon-colored sky, reflecting off the sharp mountain edges.
Now, that was some fine writing! I could just see that salmon sky, perhaps with little silhouetted clouds lined up just so along the horizon. I’m sure I was puffed up when I gave the story to my critique partner to review. She read it over and looked up at me.
“You dummy!” she said. “This old man is from Virginia, and he’s never even seen a salmon. He sure wouldn’t know what color one was!”
I reread the passage and realized she was right. I changed that first sentence to read something like this:
That sun looked like a big old egg in a black-iron skillet, running down the mountainsides.
Was that new effort great writing? Probably not. But at least it reflected the character’s sensibilities, and not my own. On that day, my writing ability improved two or three notches. Since that great awakening, I’ve been very sensitive to language used in novels, both my own and those of my clients.
What’s the big deal? Well, someone reading that short story as originally written would be aware of a third presence, along with the character and the reader. That presence is the author. While authors should stay invisible, they often unwittingly leave clues to their presence. This phenomenon is called “author intrusion,” a concept I introduced earlier, and one which we’ll discuss later in this book. It manifests itself in many ways. The problem is that when readers become aware of the author’s presence, they are pulled out of fiction’s magic spell.
Here we’ve cracked the door open to a tremendously important writing concept called the “fictional dream.” Readers refer to that experience by saying things like, “I couldn’t put the book down.” The reason is that well-written fiction creates a dream state for the reader, who will on some level actually believe in the fictional world the writer has created. The characters virtually become alive, and the reader lives their experiences as the characters walk down a lane, admire a beautiful sunset, or hide from a killer. The dream is as alive and compelling as a night dream, where both wondrous and horrific things happen to us. When we awaken and remember a dream, we may smile at ourselves for having believed it, but—well, we did believe it when it was happening.
Every fiction writer’s goal should be to create and maintain this belief in the reader’s mind. There are tricks to doing so, which we’ll discuss throughout this book, but an important one is to make sure the writer doesn’t intrude into the story. This can happen in several ways, as we’ll see.
Let me give you an example. Not long ago I was reading a client’s story about an orphaned, teenaged girl who ran away from a prison-like farm to join the circus. Okay, so far, so good. In the course of events, she meets the handsome acrobat and part-time ringmaster and is stunned by his appearance. As the story explained:
She looked deep into his eyes. Why, they were beautiful. They were the blue of lapis lazuli, and…
Whoa! What was that truck that hit me? I had suspended disbelief and was really into the story, when the term “lapis lazuli” hit me square in the face. I’d heard the term before, but had to go to the dictionary to confirm that it was a blue stone mined in Afghanistan for the past twenty-five hundred years.
The point is that this little waif would have known nothing about that stone. The writer would have been much better off to say something like, “as blue as the wildflowers down by the well,” or “as blue as the sky looks before a rainstorm.” The author should have reflected the sensibilities of the character, not of herself.
In this last example, the character was clearly the one who was supposed to have thought the word. In the first example, the story about the old pioneer, the character didn’t necessarily think about that sky. This brings up a point many writers don’t consider; they should use words in the character’s vocabulary for his thoughts and what he says, of course. But they should also use words he’d use for the “glue words;” those words that hold the story together. We want the reader to be enveloped by the character, and using his vocabulary to describe scenes is a good way of promoting that.
Here are examples of what I mean by “glue words.” As our old man hikes from one point to another, we could say something like, “The path was strewn with rocks and limbs blown down in the storm the night before.” That’s discussing it from our perspective, and it’s—well, antiseptic. For one thing, he wouldn’t use the word “strewn.” Let’s say, instead, “Dodging the rocks and blown-down limbs on the trail was like walking across a plowed field at night, as he’d done many times in Virginia.” That puts the description solidly in his perspective.
Instead of saying, “He lay prone on the stream bank and sipped from its soul-soothing, sparkling water,” we could say something like, “He lay on the stream bank and sucked cool water from the stream, pushing away the floating twigs and rotting maple leaves that tried to choke him.” He wouldn’t use the word “prone,” think of the water as “sparkling” or “soul-soothing,” and probably wouldn’t use the word “sip.”
And here’s another example: “The sun was so hot, perspiration flowed down his face onto his clothes.” Let’s change that to read: “Sweat dripped down his face onto his jerkin, which reeked with the foul odor of sour leather.” He’d never think the word “perspiration.” Writing like this lets us see his world from his perspective, not ours.
This means the vocabulary can change from scene to scene. When the king is your POV character, use words the king would use. But when the pauper is on stage, use simpler words to describe his personal world. While the author may want the pauper to use the king’s words to fool him for some reason, he’ll still think like a pauper, so use the pauper’s glue words to show the contrast. Your novel will be the better for it.
YOUR ASSIGNMENT
Study each scene of your first chapter to determine the POV character’s education and socio-economic level, and change words not in his vocabulary, as we did in the examples above.