Practical Touch
What are practical forms of touch? When a character rubs a piece of beach-weathered glass between his fingertips to feel its surface; touches the rough bark of a tree; inspects the edge of a knife for sharpness; runs his fingers over piano keys; or smooths out a bedspread. These forms of touch aren't necessarily significant to the character or the plot; they are actions taken between dialogue or other actions. However, practical touch is sort of like punctua-tion—you need a little bit in strategic places, because without it the scene would not be fully formed. But it shouldn't call attention to itself.
Practical touch can come in handy when you have a lot of uninterrupted dialogue between characters. A character could stop to touch the smooth surface of a marble countertop before launching an angry salvo, or grip a beer bottle tightly in his hand before defending his action. People tend to be tactile. When we're nervous, we fidget, fumble, or unconsciously drum our fingers. In fact, a character won't get more than a couple of minutes into a day before he begins to interact with the world by touching things.
Perhaps your character has a phobia of germs and wears gloves or refuses to touch certain things—like doorknobs or glasses. This example still shows details of touch. Whatever you determine for your characters, remember to let their fingers do the walking at least a little in your scenes, and know what kind of "toucher" each of your characters is.
Personal Touch
Personal touch is a range of physical contact that expresses information about your characters and relates to how they physically interact with other people. While personal touch refers to contact between characters (from the platonic, to the downright naughty), it also refers to ways that your characters interact with the world—offering readers insight into your characters' personalities. For instance, you might create a character with a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder who cannot stop from touching strangers' noses, light switches, mailboxes, etc. Another character might have an obnoxious habit of gesturing wildly with his hands when he talks, knocking things off shelves. The way your characters touch their physical world is important information about who they are.
When characters touch each other (or themselves—for instance, your character might be a "cutter" who wounds herself for emotional release), the reader will also take notice. Touch between people is important because it's a way of communicating with one another. In real life you notice when a stranger puts his hands on your shoulders without permission. Your characters should also pay attention to these forms of touch between each other. A character who was sexually abused may not like to hug or be hugged. Yet another character might come from a culture where close physical proximity is normal and has to learn the hard way that another character does not appreciate this. Remember that when characters touch each other, they are communicating, so try to be conscious of this communication and what it means to your scene and your plot.
In chapter seven we'll talk about body language as a way to develop and build characters without even using dialogue.
SMELL
Remember a time when you caught a whiff of the scent of a flower or food, and the smell evoked a childhood memory, making you cry, laugh, or even get embarrassed? It's as if memories are housed inside scents, and once your nose gets a whiff, the memory is unlocked and, with it, feelings. The sense of smell—our olfactory sense, as it's known to scientists—has a direct link in the brain to memory and emotion. Since experiencing a scent is one of the most common experiences that people have, your characters need to have these experiences too, and you can use the sense of smell to dramatic effect in scenes.
For a moment, let's classify smells into two basic groups: those that smell good, and those that smell bad. If your scene involves a conflict between a morally good character and morally corrupt character, let us say, but you don't want to rely on any narrative tricks of telling the reader which is which, scent can help you get this distinction across. If Jack, your bad guy, smells of cigar smoke and day-old greasy Chinese food, while Bill, your good guy, smells like juniper and fresh air, who do you think the reader will see as bad or good?
Now I can already hear you saying, "What if I hate the smell of juniper?" Point taken. However, in the world of scents, even an unsophisticated reader is likely to believe that juniper smells better than cigar smoke, and that there is a reason you've gone to the trouble to make Jack smell worse than Bill. Or you might opt for a smell that is generally considered good, like the scent of roses.
Also, a character might use perfume or cologne for sentimental or vanity reasons. A woman might wear Joy perfume because her mother and grandmother wore it; it's a part of her wardrobe, and therefore a part of her character. Or a male character might persist in wearing stinky cologne that keeps women from wanting to get too close to him. There are ingenious ways to use scent to reveal details about your characters.
Have you ever been to the movies or out to dinner and smelled a person entering before you saw her because of her perfume? Scent is a fabulous way to demonstrate that a character has arrived on the scene: "The pungent sting of bourbon in the air told Jeannie that Sam had let himself into the house and the liquor cabinet."
Finally, harking back to the link between smell and memory, you can invoke scent as a way to transition into a character flashback. If you need to go back in time to a scene from your character's past and you can use the smell of peaches at a grocery store to drop Becky into the peach orchard where she first met Eduardo, the love of her life, by all means use it. Scent is a subtle way to transition that won't jar the reader.
SOUND
Sounds can describe a physical setting almost as effectively as visual descriptions. With eyes closed, you can probably tell the difference between a train station and an airport. The places your characters show up have sound signatures, which you can use to enrich a scene's other details.
In a restaurant, for instance, your character, with eyes closed, can hear dishes, glasses, and silverware clinking, the sounds of wait staff calling out orders to cooks, and taking orders from customers. There is a certain kind of buzz of conversation that goes on in restaurants that is different from the sound of a real estate office, for instance. The more you pay attention to these small details when building a scene, the more real the scene will become.
Here are a few different examples of the way sound creates or enhances atmosphere and contributes to the tone and theme of a story.
In Irene Nemirovsky's novel Suite Frangaise, set in German-occupied France, 1942, sound marks the contrast with the silence of people hidden away in fear of air raids:
The streets were empty. People were closing their shops. The metallic shudder of falling iron shutters was the only sound to break the silence, a sound familiar to anyone who has woken in a city threatened by riot or war.
In Anton Chekhov's story "At Sea," the following sound description sets a raucous tone that is appropriate to the story of sailors acting on baser impulses:
Crowded together in the crew's quarters we, the sailors, were casting lots. Loud, drunken laughter filled the air. One of our comrades was playfully crowing like a cock.
Finally, here is a description of the first time the character Francis Macomb-er hears the lion that will change his fate, from Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber":
It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river. It was a deep sound and at the end there were sort of coughing grunts that made him seem just outside the tent, and when Francis Macomber woke in the night to hear it he was afraid.
Sounds enhance mood, set tone, and create atmosphere, and should not be forgotten when setting the scene.
TASTE
One of my pet peeves about writing is that you don't very often see characters eating. Food is an important part of life, and, I believe, an important part of a good story too, when it can be factored in. While many of your scenes may have no need to invoke the s
ense of taste, you might ask yourself if there are places in your story where you could add in the act of tasting something. Taste provides great moments of potential conflict and intimacy, such as:
• A mother asks her a son to taste her soup, which provides an opportunity for him to be honest with her about her terrible cooking, leading to either conflict or unexpected closeness.
• A character who has just learned of a terrible loss might bite into a piece of his favorite cake only to discover that, in his grief, he cannot taste a thing.
• A character hoping to impress his gourmet lover with a home-cooked meal might see her true colors when, in rejecting his cooking, she also rejects his love.
Taste provides a fabulous opportunity for feelings and interactions between your characters to arise. Through the simple act of lifting a fork to mouth, your characters can come to epiphanies, exalt in simple pleasures, and enact conflicts that enliven your scenes.
Though the senses are separated out in this chapter to help you look at them individually, you will probably find that a majority of these sensory details will emerge naturally in combination when you begin writing scenes. Your own observations will deliver themselves up through your muse as you write. But when you go back through to do a revision, ask yourself if you have overwritten one of the senses and parsed out another, and take opportunities to add or subtract some for sensory balance.
When you put down a book, what do you remember most? Just think about it for minute. Is it the lovely descriptions of city streets? Or the moody, powerful, potent characters who populate them? I'm sure it comes as no surprise that most of us identify most with the characters. Though passages of pretty scenery or buildings collapsing capture the reader's attention for a moment, maybe two, characters bring scenes to life and are the natural focal point. After all, scenes are the primary vehicles for developing these people, particularly your protagonist (and co-protagonists, when you have more than one).
In every scene, you have to create opportunities for your characters to reveal and enrich themselves, and to drive their stories forward in connection with your plot. You also have to give your characters the chance to evolve and transform—and not by magic.
If your characters are the same at the end of your narrative as they were at the beginning, you most likely didn't provide them enough opportunities to act, react, and change.
While we'll look more at other character-related issues in part three, here we'll discuss the basics of character development, and motivation as a core element of the scene.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
The moment your characters are born in your imagination, you should ask: How do they behave in public? With family? Under pressure? Sometimes people act out when they're with family members; a normally compassionate character might have a prejudice that leads him to behave in a cruel or sadistic fashion around people of certain ethnicities; or your character might always be on his best behavior only around his priest or his girlfriend. Your characters won't behave the same in every social situation, and for the purpose of drama, you should try to build in moments where they misbehave, or act in ways that surprise others in response to unusual or unexpected events.
How does your protagonist develop over the course of your narrative? Since you can't invite the reader into his entire history at the beginning of the narrative, you only have the elements of the scene to work with—the scene is sort of like improvisational theater. Look at the following formula.
1. Each scene should provide your character with:
• At least one plot situation or new piece of information to react or respond to. (Of course, you can have more than one, if needed.) Whatever you choose, it must drive the story forward and cause your characters to react (see chapter eight for types of plot information).
• A catalyst or antagonist with whom the protagonist interacts. Other characters are catalysts—they facilitate change and reaction in your protagonist; or they are antagonists—they thwart, oppose, and delay the intentions of your protagonist. Through the interactions your protagonist has with these other characters comes the necessary leverage to develop them into complex people. When there is no other character in the scene, your protagonist will interact only with himself, or with forces of nature or the world around him, in which case you get contemplative scenes (see chapter fifteen).
2. In every scene your protagonist should be motivated by two things:
• The protagonist's intention for the scene. Whatever you decide is the intention for your protagonist in a given scene will fuel his motivation. A scene intention (discussed at length in chapter eleven) must be related to the significant situation of your narrative, but each scene may have different intentions for your protagonist. In one scene the protagonist's intention might be to go into an agency to try to track down his biological mother, for instance, and in another it might be to confront the adoptive mother who withheld that information all his life. We'll discuss how to make sure that a character's intentions add up to a good storyline in chapter twenty-three.
• The protagonist's personal history. One other factor will motivate your character in every scene: his backstory. You can show insight into your protagonist's nature or history through reflective flashback scenes or dialogue. You can also use it just as personal background information that helps you decide how your protagonist will behave next.
3. Each situation or interaction should make your plot and its consequences for the protagonist either:
• More complicated. When the consequences become more complicated, as described in chapter three, you build dramatic tension, create character conflict, and heighten the energy of the scene. Lean toward building more complications in every scene of the first two parts of your narrative.
• Or less complicated. There are a few good cases for making situations less complicated for your protagonist: In the final part of your narrative, when you want to resolve plot threads and lead toward resolution; when you want to pull back on the intensity of a scene; and when you want to lull the reader into a false sense of complacency in order to spring a plot surprise on him.
4. Through these complications, your protagonist should change. They can change beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, allegiances or loyalties, appearances, and motivations.
By narrative's end, your protagonist, thanks to the many opportunities you gave him to develop and change in scenes, will not be in exactly the same place emotionally, or even spiritually, as when you began. He will have changed (see chapter twenty-three).
Now, using that formula from above, let's walk through a scene example from Ann Patchett's novel Bel Canto. At a lavish birthday party for a Japanese businessman in South America, at which are present many important diplomats and a famous opera singer, guerilla terrorists have taken the entire assemblage hostage. Over the time of their captivity, the terrorists and the hostages begin to form bonds and become civil. In the snippet of a scene that follows, a select few hostages have been granted the aid of the female terrorists to help them cut food with forbidden knives. It could almost be a domestic scene, except that Patchett ups the ante on the characters, and provides all the ingredients for developing character that are described above. I have labeled the ingredients in italics within the text.
[The intention of all the hostages in this scene is to prepare a decent meal, since they're all desperately hungry.] Ishmael stopped, examined his work, then he held out the butchered vegetable and the knife. He held the blade out to Thibault. [An interaction between two characters that affects the plot.] What did he know about kitchen manners? Then Thibault had them both, the knife and the eggplant, one in each hand. Deftly, quickly, he began to peel back the skin. [Thibault brings a gourmet's knowledge of food to the scene—that is his motivation for taking the knife from Ishmael. But this is also a plot situation — Thibault is now using the knife, which he is not authorized to hold.]
"Drop it!" Beatriz shouted. On calling out she dropped her own knife, the bl
ade slick with onions. ... She pulled her gun from her belt and raised it up to the Ambassador. [Things have just gotten more complicated for Thibault and the others in the kitchen.] "Jesus," Ruben said.
Thibault did not understand what he had done. .
"Keep your voice down," Carmen said to Beatriz in Quechua. "You're going to get us all in trouble." [Worsening consequences—if they've been heard, the male terrorists might storm into the kitchen in a violent fury.]
"He took the knife."
Thibault raised up his empty hands, showed his smooth palms to the gun.
"I handed him the knife," Ishmael said. "I gave it to him."
"He was only going to peel," Gen said. [Gen's motivation is to defend Thibault because he has a firm belief in right and wrong.] He could not recognize a word of this language they spoke to one another.
"He isn't supposed to hold the knife," Beatriz said in Spanish. "The general told us this.".
"What about this?" Thibault began quietly, keeping his hands up. "Everyone can stand away from me and I can show Ishmael how to peel an eggplant. You keep your gun right on me and if it looks like I'm about to do something funny you may shoot me. You may shoot Gen, too, if I do something terrible." [Thibault responds to the situation by changing, by becoming brave. Earlier he was afraid of these people, now he just wants peace.]
"I don't think—" Gen started, but no one was paying attention to him. He felt a small, cold hardness in his chest, like the pit of a cherry had slipped into his heart. He did not want to be shot and he did not want to be offered up to be shot. [Despite his belief in justice, suddenly Gen displays fear in response to the same situation that turned Thibault brave—two different characters are motivated by different things — Thibault by hunger and pride, Gen by fear. Patchett magnificently develops two different characters in two different ways in response to the same situation.]
Make A Scene Page 6