Chap05

Just as the scene gives your story its power, as we explored in the last chapter, details, particularly telling details, make your story unforgettable. A scene carries us into the action, but details enliven the quality of that action. Think about it: often what you bring away from a book you’ve read is a striking detail that you can’t get out of your mind. The plot may fade, the characters may blend into others, but a colorful detail stays with you forever. In this chapter we’ll look at how language—its sensory impact, its construction of a sense of place, and its creation of action—creates those details that make your story memorable.

One of the most delightful discoveries we make as young readers is the difference between denotative (literal) and connotative (contextual) meanings. While as writers we of course must know a word’s denotative meaning, its possibilities exist in its connotative qualities, because that’s where imagination and the singularity of a writer’s voice and style reside.

Connotative language makes a word and what it represents personal and specific by removing it from the realm of fact and placing it in the world of imagination. One of the ways the writer connotes meaning is through imagery.

Imagery imbues language with vitality, while at the same time, as Sue William Silverman notes, “writing our senses helps us remember the past while also allowing us to make sense of it” (71). As humans, we ground our experience in sensory detail, in what something feels like through the range of our five senses. If we’re lucky, the sixth sense becomes engaged as well: through vivid writing, the reader begins to intuit aspects of character, plot, and setting.

The basic unit of figurative language is the metaphor. When Homer speaks of the “wine-dark sea” in The Iliad, he imbues the water with the intensity and bloodshed of war. Denotatively, water is not often “wine dark,” but figuratively, the image resonates. As writers, we use metaphors to personalize meaning. When we make the choice to connect two things or sensations via metaphor, we telegraph deeper meaning to the reader.

By making our writing metaphoric, we ask words to behave in specific ways. In I Could Tell You Stories, for example, Patricia Hampl, while discussing writing about her childhood piano lessons, seizes on the detail of her red music book: “Now I can look at that music book and see it not only as ‘a detail’ but for what it is, how it acts. See it as the small red door leading straight into the dark room of my childhood longing and disappointment” (31). Anyone can say her childhood was lonely, but to compare a music book to “the small red door” that leads into longing packs much more power. We want to make our language work hard, to evoke our experience so that someone reading our story who does not know us can feel what we’re describing.

Related to metaphor is the symbol, which refers to a word or concept developed through context and layered by repetition so that it takes on larger meaning. Symbols abound in religious writings and iconography. An example is the cross in the New Testament. By the time we’ve read about the betrayal, death, and resurrection of Christ, the cross has come to stand as a symbol of both suffering and a path to redemption. Such a symbol becomes familiar and yet retains its meaning in vernacular expression: when we describe someone as “a cross to bear” we convey the idea that the person, and our relationship with him or her, is complex and difficult. Another example is the strong reaction many have to the insignia known as the swastika, evidence that it has continued to be a symbol of intolerance long after the end of World War II.

Fairy tales are rich in metaphors and symbols: houses are made of gingerbread and can be eaten, greedy creatures sprout extra arms and legs, and tears heal blind eyes. Because such stories appeal to the imagination and thus the senses, they’re peopled with characters and objects that behave like their emotional meaning. For instance, the sense of home nourishes us; a house built of food shows that visceral connection. That’s the real gift of figurative language: it’s automatically both tactile and dramatic, immersing the reader in the experience of the story.

We can look at the workings of a simple metaphor when Willa Cather describes the New Mexico sky in Death Comes for the Archbishop: “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky” (232). By contextualizing things as uncontainable as “world” and “sky” as having a “roof” or a “floor,” the metaphor draws a figurative boundary around the bigness. It also firmly implants the notion in the reader’s mind of how dominant the sky is—the land grounds its vastness as a floor anchors a room.

If we think of the New Mexico sky as Cather does, as a vast witness to nature and human activity, then we enter the realm of the symbol. A symbol almost always has an ineffable quality, in this case a spiritual connection as well as a physical or descriptive one.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Choose a scene from a memoir and identify the kind and quality of metaphoric language used as the protagonist remembers the past or paints a picture for the reader of a specific time or place. What are some specific ways the writer involves you in the sensory images of the scene by using metaphor or symbol? Note any techniques of using figurative language you find compelling that you might use in your story.

Writing: Take one of the scenes you were working on in the exercises in chapter 4, or one of your possible entry points for the occasion of the telling in chapter 1, and experiment with creating metaphors for the action or characters. Use the list below to help you create comparisons that enhance the experiential qualities of your writing. In each case, use figurative writing to connote a sensuous comparison for a feeling, movement, or description.

Animal characteristics: We often compare the qualities or movements of animals to human behavior. Foxes, for example, are thought of as clever, magpies as thieves. Play with the animal characteristics your narrator and characters already possess and see what comes of it.

Color: Many people experience emotional states as colors, and even for those who don’t, color imparts mood and tone. What does blue mean to you? Red? Yellow? Are your associations visual? Emotional? Physical? Do you hear certain things when you see certain colors? Try assigning each character in your memoir a color. What color are you?

Texture: Not only have sewing and weaving metaphors come to signify layers and levels of storytelling, but how something feels or looks in three dimensions grabs our attention. How does that blanket, that beach, that cold doorknob feel? Show it on the page.

Sound: Auditory cues are a powerful sense for most people, and the earliest stories were spoken aloud rather than written. Use sound to evoke metaphoric feeling—the longing of a train whistle, for example, or the harsh clanging of a locomotive. If you re-create sound effectively on the page, there’s no need to name the emotion you’re trying to convey, because the auditory cue will serve as metaphor or, perhaps, actually sound like the feeling you’re trying to convey (onomatopoeia).

Smell and taste: The most primitive or limbic of our senses, odors, and tastes can resurrect the past. Are there foods that take you back to the first time you tasted them, smells that place you in a moment from your past? Pick one and write about it.

Objects: As Alfred Hitchcock showed us in movies like Suspicion (where the glowing glass of possibly poisoned milk in Cary Grant’s hand signifies murderous intentions), an object strategically placed can stand in for events or emotional changes and transport us to another moment. Try thinking of an object as fodder for a cinematic quick cut in your memoir and see where it takes you. Even something as simple as a screen door can open (pun intended) into possibility.

Telling details and metaphors can help us embellish both the setting and the landscape of our memoirs. Nature writers like Craig Childs and William deBuys, who explore the physical, emotional, and spiritual geography of the American Southwest, utilize language in particularly graphic ways. Setting, where we want to paint pictures for our readers and otherwise immerse them in a scene, gives us great practice with metaphor and leitmotifs.

In The Desert Cries: A Season of Flash Floods in a Dry Land, Craig Childs describes the Arizona desert using human anatomy as a leitmotif: “The drainages cut into the desert’s smooth ground, coalescing into larger and larger arroyos like threads drawn together by a hand. A waist-high forest of creosote bush dominates the vegetation. Gangly arms of ocotillo grow in isolated stands” (15).

Note how the desert in this description is a living organism, its arroyos “like threads drawn together by a hand.” The author anthropomorphizes the vegetation: forests are “waist-high,” and creosote bush “dominates,” while ocotillo has “arms.” The sparse vegetation in the shape of human figures takes on the trappings of a dominant image, almost as if our minds need to populate the vast land with the illusion of a human presence. The bushes and cacti become spiritual witnesses that counter the emptiness.

One important benefit of writing about place is that doing so particularizes your story: each place is specific, with telling characteristics. The best nonfiction writing personalizes and characterizes; objects—as well as natural forms of earth and rock, plants, and animals—come alive as unique characters. As Childs illustrates, vivid nature writing doesn’t merely list details about setting, it animates them. Similarly, a strong setting doesn’t just anchor your story; it also imbues it with a living context that allows you, its author, to layer its meaning.

In a related example, Childs uses the sustaining metaphor of river imagery as he describes a thunderstorm: “The thunderstorm first boils into southern Nevada. Balls of hail 2 inches wide blanket Las Vegas. Then the water comes, flooding the streets. Cars are thrown into each other like reckless barges, scraping sideways along medians. Tropicana Avenue becomes a river 50 feet wide. In the middle of this avenue, a fire truck drives in, acting as a dam to protect a stranded car” (99).

Childs compares rain with the power and force of a mighty river, using words like “boils” and “flooding.” Cars are helpless in the storm, “thrown into each other like reckless barges,” so that a rescue vehicle acts “as a dam.” These descriptions add an agency and urgency to a simple rainstorm, dramatizing it as a ferocious force of nature.

In The Walk, a testimonial to the New Mexico spirit and landscape, William deBuys describes standing in a forest after an apocalyptic burn and contemplating its cycles of growth and destruction: “Here I stand in a forest riven with illness, out of balance, disordered, a place of problems. Yet it is undeniably a delight to the senses…. The caress it offers may be the touch of the misshapen hand, but the caress is no less delicate, sensuous, and welcome. The forest asks us to love what is marred. It shows us the scarred face of beauty, the smile of broken teeth” (29).

In this excerpt deBuys builds a leitmotif of nature as a lover; his experience, which he invites us to join in, dramatizes the natural world as an intimate familiar.

As we discussed in chapter 3, a strong setting for your story makes organic sense in the same way that the right structure does: it cements the disparate sections of your story together. In poet Rachel Hadas’s memoir, Strange Relation, the decline of the narrator’s husband, George, is inextricably linked to the New York City landscape. When George takes a different route to his tennis match in Central Park, deviating from habits the narrator has witnessed for thirty years, it marks a turning point for her in his progressing dementia: “The new route involved less than one extra block to walk to get to the park. Still, this unexplained change in route and routine made no sense to me. We’d always gone the other, shorter way; and harmony lay precisely in habit. The fabric of our days was woven from routine” (105).

When it is eloquent, we often compare gesture to poetry in motion. But, always, as we write and weave together place and character, the body in space is revealing as well as poetic.

Sometimes, in addition to serving as landscape and grounding, the setting takes on symbolic meaning and transcends place, giving us details of milieu and of mood as well as mere location. For example, Annie Dillard’s Pittsburgh is not just a city and its environs but a place during a specific era, the 1950s of her growing up. At the beginning of An American Childhood, Dillard tells the reader that when everything else is gone from her brain, Pittsburgh’s topography will still trigger specific yearnings and memories in her psyche. This symbolic landscape re-creates an epic representation of childhood as a state of being and the past as a magical place, the city animated by embellished memories.

Dillard’s Pennsylvania setting in An American Childhood provides the ground for her imagination to manifest itself. In this way, place is inseparable from experience. Humans ground experience not in a vacuum but rather in a specific place. Because the memoir is in part an exercise in resurrecting a specific past, setting is therefore integral to the scaffolding of its meaning. Metaphorical detail about place encapsulates the memoir’s episodes for the reader: place locates experience.

Since place and time period are so intertwined, often specifics of place are metaphoric of milieu as well. While both The Year of Magical Thinking and The Liars’ Club partly take place in the 1970s and 1980s, they are very different. Didion gives the reader scores of details not only about her life in New York City but also about the qualities of an urban artist and intellectual who occupies a particular social, professional, and economic sphere. The details of people, restaurants, events, and travel pinpoint an era and interlocking subcultures of class and taste as well as place. Contrast this with Mary Karr’s book, which captures a rural, southern, working-class culture.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: Choose a memoir and record your impressions of how details of place affect the action and mood in one or more chapters. How do details of landscape highlight certain experiences in the memoir? Are there images that recur and acquire symbolic power? How is that achieved? List aspects of social and cultural environment that are also revealed.

Writing: Create a visual representation for a sequence in your story: on a large piece of paper, map where the key events in your story occur. Insert images or metaphors that bring the place to life. Feel free to draw pictures and circle words. You may want to visually trace the connections between your various characters or graph the arc of the plot as well. In this way, you may discover a key setting where your story comes together or pulls apart. In any case, you’ll discover new correspondences by activating your visual sense with the physicality of drawing and writing.

We usually think of action as something occurring in the physical world—a body falling off a cliff, a tank rolling through the countryside, a gun going off. Yet much of the movement in your story comes through the way you use language to create the rhythm of events by evoking either the movement of time, the real-time action of dialogue, or the quality of silence.

We mentioned time in the memoir in chapter 4 during our discussion of rising action in scene and plot. In this section, we’ll show how you can use language to control the experience of time, or duration, through scene, summary, and description. The emphasis you place on various happenings in your story, highlighting and extending some sequences while glossing over others, allows you to control the movement of time in your memoir.

Both summary and description lead us back to kairos, the holy time we mentioned in chapter 4. Kairos exists in the narrator’s perception of events, as opposed to the literal “facts” of the plot, and therefore determines the emphasis of the story. For example, if a writer says something like “The first ten years of my life were inconsequential,” she is minimizing that time in her life. Alternately, if a writer spends a hundred pages on the moment when the narrator realizes his life has changed, let’s say on the death of a loved one, he signals to the reader that this elongated moment has much importance.

As the perception of actual time in scene is familiar to us both from daily life and from scenes in film and onstage, we’ll use the trope of film to look more closely at summary and description in Mira Bartók’s award-winning memoir, The Memory Palace. First, the narrator summarizes one year of her life after an accident when she says: “For the rest of the year I wear a black patch over my left eye. It isn’t easy to see. I run into furniture and trip over my feet. At home, in our apartment, I pretend I am blind” (35). Because the telling moment in that year for the narrator is her eye injury, the patch becomes the symbol of this time.

The narrator then recounts a moment during her recovery when her mad mother, who believes she is alone, races around the living room, stumbling and talking to herself. At first the narrator thinks her mother is just imitating Crazy Guggenheim, a favorite television character of the 1960s. But then her mother appears to become someone else, so terrifying the narrator, who is still in kindergarten, that time appears to stretch infinitely, an attribute that descriptive language can capture:

Suddenly my mother turns into someone else, someone I can’t recognize from TV. She makes slicing movements in the air. She’s holding something now, something long and shiny. She spins around fast as if someone has just crept up behind her. She is spinning and spinning, obscenities rolling off her tongue, words I’ve only heard my grandfather use. There is the smell of burnt toast and cigarettes, no music coming from anywhere, no radio or TV…. I don’t know how it ends, this scene—the beginning of knowledge, the knowledge that I have a secret I must keep from the outside world. In this scene, my mother is forever spinning, wielding a knife…. She is forever spinning and I am forever watching her with my one good eye—a small child frozen behind a wall. (37)

During this sequence, where the reader shares with the narrator the sense of being frozen in time, sensory details also arrest the action into a tableau: the visual imagery of the spinning and spinning and the movement of the knife, the smells of burnt toast and cigarettes, the sound of cursing and yet the absence of sound from the radio or TV (the narrator has told us the radio always plays). Even the image of the child watching with one eye conveys an impression and colors the bizarreness of the scene almost in the way that a fish-eye lens distorts our sense of time and reality. The description, the sense of time stopping, and the sensory images all lend a surrealistic air to the moment.

In addition to creating a sense of actual time, dialogue can also capture character and tone. As writers we want to discern the differences in the word choices our characters use to show their emotional states, the qualities they have as people, and the color and mood, or tone, of a scene. Nothing reveals character more quickly than the particular way people speak.

Dialogue tells us what people pay attention to and, therefore, what their motives and priorities are. In addition, how people talk contains the seeds of the way they think. The modernist writer Gertrude Stein wrote in the 1930s about how the complete person is revealed by the repetition of their speech: “I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different” (138).

In dialogue, word choice (diction) and the arrangement of words (syntax) say as much about a character as the content or implication of what he or she is saying. Dialogue reveals each character’s motives through either what the person says or what he or she omits.

While many memoirs are longer on description and telling by the firstperson narrator, others employ dialogue, particularly in scene, to marvelous effect. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert uses dialogue to establish the character of Richard from Texas. His insouciance and commonsense approach to life come out in his speech:

“What’s got you all wadded up?” he drawls, toothpick in mouth, as usual.

“Don’t ask,” I say…”And worst of all, I can’t stop obsessing over David. I thought I was over him, but it’s all coming up again.”

He says, “Give it another six months, you’ll feel better.”

“I’ve already given it twelve months, Richard.”

“Then give it six more. Just keep throwin’ six months at it till it goes away. Stuff like this takes time.” (148)

Richard’s colorful way of speaking, with a touch of Texan in both word choice and rhythm (“wadded up,” “keep throwin’ six months at it”), nonetheless dramatizes his casual, no-nonsense approach to life. At the same time, it contrasts with Liz’s naive earnestness and stubborn reasonableness (“I’ve already given it twelve months, Richard”). And both characters’ dialogue emphasizes the humor of the situation and therefore reinforces tone. Eat, Pray, Love became a best seller partly because of its combination of tragicomedy and whimsy about one of life’s most common plots: woman needing to change her life drastically divorces her husband and goes on a quest to find herself. But it also owes much of its success to Gilbert’s ability to use dialogue to reveal character.

This brief snippet of dialogue also shows us strongly the sense of relationship between these two characters: they are so comfortable with one another that they can be completely direct. Their language is casual, not formal, indicating familiarity: they pull no punches. Dialogue can therefore show closeness or, if one character uses more formal language than the other, create distance. For example, if during an argument one person says, “You’re unfair to me,” and the other responds, “To what do you refer?,” the second person’s formal diction pushes the first person away. The use of elevated diction is also a play to establish dominance over the first speaker. There are, of course, many ways that dialogue, or the lack of it, can show distance.

Sometimes a single line of dialogue can define a character. In Oscar Hijuelos’s memoir, Thoughts without Cigarettes, the narrator listens to his father, who was born in Cuba, talk about the death of his brother: “He was my life, and my blood, who taught me everything I know” (64). From this one sentence we absorb the father’s tone of nostalgia as well as his heartfelt grief. The father, a character slightly bigger than life to the narrator, speaks dramatically, but at the same his diction and syntax suggest the Spanish rhythms of his background, including a more formal tone than colloquial American speech.

As anyone who appreciates the dramatic work of Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter can attest, silence plays powerfully onstage. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Pinter’s Betrayal, the meaning and implication of the drama come between the lines, or in the pauses between the characters’ lines.

This is of course true in actual life as well. Think of an argument or a conflict you’ve recently been involved in and you’ll realize how little of each person’s issues are actually revealed in detail by what he or she said. Body language plays a big part, as does Stein’s comment above about repetition. One person might say, “You don’t listen to me,” over and over, while the other repeats, “Tell me what’s wrong.” But especially in times of high emotion, people often say very little. The real tremors happen under the surface.

An exception to the “tip of the iceberg” theory comes when a character is intellectual or very articulate; in this case, that character’s very volubility may disguise discomfort. In addition, the way people speak in stressful situations often shows whether they first respond mentally or physically. For example, in The Glass Castle, the narrator, a bright and precocious child, has just moved to a new school in the fifth grade and has been mistakenly put in a class for students with learning disabilities. Her teacher refers to her by telling the class that some people think they’re so special, they don’t have to follow the rules. When the instructor asks the class, “Who thinks that’s not fair?,” everyone but the narrator raises an arm in the air. When the teacher calls upon the narrator to explain herself, she attempts to dazzle the group by saying: “Insufficient information to draw a conclusion” (138). Her brainy response backfires and makes her more of an object of ridicule than she was before.

It’s one thing to establish mood or move a scene through dialogue or description and another to slow the rhythm to a standstill. Writers often establish a sense of silence in memoir by creating space. Patti Smith accomplishes this toward the end of her memoir, Just Kids, when she realizes that she will soon lose Robert. One day, when they are alone, he says to her: “Patti, I’m dying. It’s so painful.” Patti helps him to the couch and sits with him until he falls asleep. As she thinks of how unendurable his life has become, she thinks: “The light poured through the windows upon his photographs and the poem of us sitting together a last time. Robert dying: creating silence. Myself, destined to live, listening closely to a silence that would take a lifetime to express” (276).

In this case, Smith uses description that gives the impression of cessation. She lets us feel time shutting down, thought shutting down, and thereby allows us to experience this long moment during which they exist side by side. By listening so closely to this moment herself, the reader too stops and listens. Smith envelops the moment in silence.

Another writer may focus on the natural world to convey silence, narrowing the reader’s focus until he feels an opportunity for meditation along with the narrator. Here is William deBuys looking at the Swimming Hole, a pool in the Río de las Trampas, the river of traps: “The other current does not escape the pool. The farther half of the onrushing stream pours crashing in, but the standing waves shoulder it aside. It veers and turns on itself. It gyres into a deep, froth-topped eddy, dark and cold, that cycles and circles, round and round, corkscrewing inexorably to the black, down-sucking center. I stare into it transfixed. The eddy spirals and spins…. I see in the eddy the embodiment of irresolution—everything pulled round in a cold circle, nothing escaping” (51). In this passage, deBuys creates an infinity of movement that nonetheless stops time. The narrator can only stare, mesmerized and immobilized. Both Smith and deBuys employ repetition and rhythm to paradoxically create stillness.

SPOTLIGHT EXERCISES

Reading: From the memoir you chose in the last spotlight exercise on setting, isolate passages that show action in ways that highlight psychological action as opposed to physical action. For example, look at how the narrator’s reflections move the story along in a particular scene. How does word choice play a part in addition to rhythm and mood?

Writing: Construct a scene using only dialogue between two characters. How can you show each character listening as well as talking? How can the dialogue show relationship? Conflict?

Reading and writing: Explore a moment of silence in a memoir of your choosing. How does the author use words, the lack of words, rhythm, or repetition to convey silence or cessation of time? Now imagine a silent moment in your story and construct three versions, one using gesture only, one using description, and the last using rhythm and/or repetition. Which example most fully telegraphs your intention?

By examining these sequences that show “time out of mind,” we observe the elasticity of language and its ability to construct action across a wide spectrum. Whether the action is physical, emotional, psychological, or spiritual, it requires its own vocabulary and rhythm.

Action in a story is sometimes overt and at other times covert. The hidden meanings you may have found when analyzing dialogue in the exercise above reveal the layerings of story we call subtext. It takes a book to uncover all the marvelous possibilities of subtext, and for that purpose we refer you to Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext. As Baxter explains, “You put in the foreground, the staging area, the story that is going on now. This story gradually reveals what has happened in the past, where the chronic tensions are, and whose echoes are still audible” (26).

Subtext is a particularly powerful tool in the writing of a memoir because a memoir’s power often resides in the unwrapping of those chronic tensions. “Denial battles with desire every day” (72), Baxter tells us, and “sometimes, what you don’t hear tells [us] more than what you actually say” (81).

A searing example of subtext can be found in Linda Gray Sexton’s Searching for Mercy Street. Gray’s mother, poet Anne Sexton, asks the nine-year-old Linda to pretend that she is thirty-four, Sexton’s age at the time, so that Anne can pretend she is nine. The subtext beneath the dialogue here is harrowing: How could a mother carry such a “game” so far?

“Could you be thirty-four now?”

“Pretty soon,” [Anne] promises….

“Mommy?” I plead. “Please?”

“No,” she pouts. “I’m nine.”

“Please,” I say and start to sob, my chest heaving its burden up and down.

“I’m nine!”

“Please be thirty-four!”

“I can’t be thirty-four—I’m just a little girl. I’m your little girl. Don’t you want me anymore?” (59)

In this scene, the mother’s actions and words show her abdicating her mothering role. The scene is a microcosm of the relationship of mother and daughter. As the memoir establishes over and over again, Anne Sexton desperately wanted her eldest daughter to take care of her, pushing Linda Gray Sexton into the role of parent. It was a role she had no training for, particularly at the age of nine.

Subtext can also be revealed via detail and gesture: a character may say one thing and accompany that statement with a gesture that tells the reader he means something else entirely—without the narrator explaining to the reader. One of the beauties of subtext is that it requires us to participate as readers: we must make the decision about the meaning of the contradiction and what the narrator is showing us. Readers are eager to fill in the gaps, to see through characters long before the characters themselves understand their underlying motivations. The writer’s construction of subtext in her story—part of the scaffolding of meaning we’ve talked about before—encourages the reader to be part of the story. Involvement increases the reader’s commitment to your story.

In this chapter we’ve explored ways of highlighting place, time, rhythm, and mood. While language creates action, details provide the momentum and the lasting impression for the reader. As Francine Prose reminds us, “Details aren’t only the building blocks with which a story is put together, they’re also clues to something deeper, keys not merely to our subconscious but to our historical moment” (207).

In the next chapter we’ll look at how writers establish a compelling voice and style and show how you can develop a voice and style uniquely your own.