Michael Knight
I PICKED UP SO MANY BAD READING HABITS IN LIT CLASSES. It was my experience (and things haven't changed all that much, I imagine) that literature was generally taught in one of two ways: with an eye toward writing academic papers or with some kind of historical or social or political context in mind, both of which are mostly useless to a writer. That sort of reading tends to generate a kind of conditioned response. I'll ask a student what she liked about a story and get an answer like this: “I enjoyed this story because it sheds light on the plight of abused women.” Which is baloney. The student liked the story because she wept when the wife was trying to cover her black eye with makeup. Or because she was scared to death when the husband was creaking up the stairs to give her a beating.
That's the honest response. Sure, if a piece of fiction is intellectually empty our response to it will most likely be empty as well, but emotion must come first. How does a writer generate emotion? Image and action. Show, don't tell. That's such an old saw I'm almost embarrassed to repeat it, but it's so easy to forget. Just this morning, I wasted three hours trying to describe how a character felt. Note to self: if you want your readers to have an emotional response to a piece of fiction, you must allow them to experience that emotion, along with your characters, rather than explaining it.
Below are two exercises I almost always use in class. I've been using them long enough now that I can't recall if I made them up or stole them from somebody else, but I imagine most teachers employ some variation of these regardless.
EXERCISE 1: Describe the view from a window—any window, bedroom, barroom, bus, wherever—as seen by a character who has just received either some very good or some very bad news. Have some specific news in mind but do not mention it in the exercise. Don't even hint at it. The reader should be able to deduce if not the exact nature of the news, the tenor of it, whether it's good or bad, simply by the way you describe the view. The object here is to give the reader a sense of a character's internal life by relying on meaningful imagery alone.
EXERCISE 2: Write a scene, lots of dialogue, lots of body language, lots of concrete detail, and so on, in which one of the characters is keeping a big-time secret. She's pregnant. He's got cancer. Like that. Don't mention the secret in the scene. Instead, focus on how keeping such a secret affects your character's behavior, how he or she reacts to the environment and to the other characters. No, this is not an exercise in deliberately withholding information. The point is that the secret itself is less important than your character's reaction to it. Even if the reader isn't privy to the secret, we should be able to sense the tension it causes, its emotional effect.
In both exercises, try to avoid the obvious manifestations of a particular emotion. If, for instance, the character is sad, steer clear of storms, dark clouds, and the like. If the character is happy, avoid birds chirping, sun shining, all that. Also keep in mind that the reason we use imagery and action to capture emotion instead of explaining how a person feels or what he thinks—the reason we show rather than tell, the reason we dramatize in the first place— is that emotions are generally much more complicated than happy or sad. In a good story, the character's response, that original and particular and individual reaction, is the way he feels. It's the only possible way to make clear something that's more intricate than adjectives and adverbs.
Even talented writers—maybe especially talented writers—get into trouble when they make the mistake of imagining that readers care what they think. They don't. No matter what readers say. Remember, they've probably picked up all those bad habits in lit class, too. Readers care what you see and they respond to how your observation of the world makes them feel. And you can't make anybody feel anything if you aren't rendering real emotion on the page.