So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

Take a simple story such as Little Red Riding Hood and reverse the usual point of view, that of the little girl. Write the story from the point of view of the wolf. YOU are the wolf. Get inside the wolf. How does the world look to him? Remember, he is the hero of his own story. Make at least a start on seeing the world through wolf eyes.

  Other suggestions: The Three Bears from the point of view of the littlest bear; Snow White from the point of view of the Queen; Rapunzel from the view point of the witch; Rumpelstiltskin from the point of view of the dwarf. Remember that “villains” are heroes to themselves, and the center of the story and the center of sympathy.

  Exercise:

  Take any scene from your own life and write it, not from your point of view, but from that of another person involved in the situation—perhaps someone antagonistic to you or in disagreement with you. It should prove interesting. Try doing it in the other’s first person viewpoint.

  Exercise:

  Choose the viewpoint of another life form involved in a scene from a story you want to work with from your life or a fiction piece you have been trying to write. Tell the story as the dog or the cat sees it. What does a parrot observe? Get into the body of the animal you are inhabiting and see the world not as you would as a little feathery or furry person, but as a being with a cat or dog’s senses and instincts and desires. See what happens. The results may be interesting, but only if you can actually penetrate the distinct world of the animal. It could be a pet of yours or a wild animal observing you or someone else in the forest.

  Exercise:

  Your viewpoint character is interacting with someone else. He or she makes an assumption about the other character’s motives or intentions that we, the reader, realize as we watch the scene unfold is an erroneous assumption. Thus we understand the situation better than the protagonist does. This is a situation that the reader often enjoys, and that also creates suspense—when will the protagonist learn that their take on the character or situation is wrong?

  9

  Descriptions

  Descriptions are places where writers feeling their oats often let themselves go and readers nod off, put down the book or at their kindest, skip. No description should be skippable; every one should be functional. If you describe something, make it work. In a work of fiction, a description might have a function in the plot. Perhaps you plan to use that jaunty red dingy in chapter four.

  In both fiction and memoir, a description may suggest character, as in describing someone’s bedroom or their apartment or their clothing. It may set a mood. It may place your characters in the socioeconomic spectrum.

  From Small Changes: Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother’s vanity. The mirror had wings that opened and shut. When she was little she used to like to pull them together around her into a cave of mirrors with only a slit of light. It isn’t me, isn’t me. Well, who else would it be, stupid? Isn’t anyone except Bride; a dress wearing a girl.

  Beth could not help seeing herself in the mirror; could never call up a glamorous image as her younger sister Nancy could. Nancy was sulking in the bathroom because her best friend Trudy had called her a dishwater blond. Like Beth, Nancy had naturally curly, almost kinky light brown hair. They were the little ones in the family. Just yesterday she had picked off the floor a piece of paper with gum stuck in it written in Nancy’s fancy new backhand: Nancy Phail is a petite vivacious blond with loads of personality. Nancy could look in the same mirror and see faces from those teen-age magazines she brooded over. But Beth saw Beth lost in a vast dress. She felt like a wedding cake: they would come and slice her and take her home in white boxes to sleep on under their pillows.

  With their married sister Marie’s help, Nancy had written a description for the paper and mailed it in, though they never printed that except for people like, oh, executives’ daughters from the G.E. plant where her father worked at the gate. “Schiffli embroidery and ribbons dip softly over an organza skirt and bodice, with sheer daintily puffed sleeves,” Nancy had written. “The train comes away.” That meant the thing that dragged could be taken off, with a little timely help.

  Description may give us information about the society, if it is exotic to us.

  From City of Darkness, City of Light: He went to Versailles with Turgot reluctantly. None of his talents counted. No one cared about mathematics, social theory or philosophy. They treated him the way people behaved when served the new and nutritious vegetable, potatoes, earth apples. They stared at the objects on their plate and toyed with them. So the bored and haughty courtiers stared at him, an earth apple if they had ever seen one, and attempted to toy with him. Ladies of middle rank flirted. He could not flirt back. He hardly found them of the same species. A woman who took six hours to dress, whose hair loomed a foot over her head, who was painted bright gold with red splashes and artificial moles, who reeked of violets and attar of roses and was packed into a dress that stood out three feet on either side of her, inspired him with nothing but a kind of contemptuous fear. All the courtiers were ranked by absurd roles (the countess who handed the Queen’s first lady of the bedchamber the royal petticoat; the comte who stood on the King’s left as his shirt was buttoned) and their privileges, both formal (who could sit on a stool in the royal presence and who must stand) and informal (the marquis the Queen danced with last night; the lady she smiled at; who had made the King giggle).

  Versailles was an unnecessary city, built on ostentation as if on sand. It was larger in land than all of Paris and enclosed by walls. The streets were lined with the houses of officials whose functions were frivolous, and storehouses that held too much of everything. One building housed two hundred seventeen royal coaches. In Turgot’s coach as they made their way through the crowded street, they passed the residences of men who cleaned the palace fountains, men who helped the king to hunt birds, who tended his packs of dogs, ten men in charge of crows, six of blackbirds. Scores of almoners, chaplains, confessors, clerics, choristers, the hundreds employed in the royal chapel or in providing sacred or profane music, clustered around the churches. Hairdressers alighted from carriages with the air of great generals, as heavily floured as bakers. The amount of flour consumed in a day in Versailles to powder the court’s hair could feed Paris.

  Description may make a satiric point.

  From The Kitchen Man: Wellfleet.

  The summer town where a piece is not a nubile teenager or a triangle of boardwalk pizza but an essay in the New Yorker. The town where 1.4 members of every family has an agent, where psychiatrists block the narrow aisles of the local supermarket and sit cross legged on the sawdust floor counseling their sullen children, “Do you really want to be sticking your fingers through the cellophane wrap on the ground chuck?”

  Lawyers from New Jersey and their wives in unisex resort wear line the sidewalks rubbernecking network newsmen who jog into town for the Times. Ex-cabinet members and Presidential advisers have cocktails on the redwood decks of the colleagues they’ve left behind at Harvard and no one cares more for dressing than to throw a sports coat over what they’ve worn to pick blackberries. You’ll see an occasional Mercedes on Main Street. On a cloudy day a Cadillac full of time-sharing condo owners from Harwichport might pull through on their way to Provincetown to show their houseguests the gays. But the rule is a Ford station wagon, stored on blocks over the winter at a pond-front plot bought in 1954 at twelve hundred dollars—with the house—that is now worth two-and-a-quarter million.

  Wellfleet.

  On any given summer morning Main Street turns into a drive-in movie parking lot, a frozen field of packed cars facing the post office from six directions. The lot has spaces for ten, and in winter, observing local tradition, people get their mail, peruse it quickly, say howdy to their neighbors, and leave. In summer, entire families park, run through the post office front door and disappear through the back to go shopping. German tourists unload their bikes and coast to the beach. Retirees back in their Winnebago vans. The spry second wives of New York
analysts, their children leaning on the horns of vehicles double parked in the middle of the street, cuss out grizzly local oystermen bottlenecked behind them proving that nothing hones rudeness and guile like shopping at Zabar’s.

  But all of the time whatever you place in the work must do double or triple labor; it must have a reason for being there. Descriptions may fill us in on attitudes of the characters, their background, their relationships, according to what is chosen to put in and what is left out:

  From Storm Tide: Yirina had baked both cakes and decorated them. She had sent Judith into Prospect Park where the daffodils were in bloom, to cut some and hide them in a bag pinned into her old coat that no longer properly buttoned. They looked lovely in the vases Yirina had brought with her from Mexico. Yirina had taken out the good tablecloth she always washed by hand, with fine embroidery of birds and flowers. Yirina had had it since her years in Turkey, during The War. Judith’s mother could always make a feast. She could make a celebration out of a chicken, a couple of candles and a bottle of cheap Chianti. She could make a celebration out of a sunny afternoon and tuna fish sandwiches in Prospect Park. For Judith’s father, Dr. Silver, she was wearing her best red dress of real silk and the diamond necklace that went in and out of the pawnshop several times a year. It was very important that they please Dr. Silver. Judith wondered if she ever really pleased him. Was he happy she existed? Did he wish she had never been born? She was always covertly staring at his square face, impeccably shaven, and trying to read his feelings for her.

  Once again Judith unwrapped the flowered skirt that her mother had wrapped in the same paper, carefully opened the night before. Dr. Silver was a stout man of medium height, a bit stooped. His hair was all white, even the hair that bristled from his nose and ears. His eyes were a pale luminous blue, but Judith had dark eyes like her mother. Sometimes she tried to find herself in her father. She had her mother’s dark hair, her mother’s pale skin with an olive tint. Dr. Silver was ruddy. She was small like her mother, small for her age. Her mother could pretend she was ten for several years longer, when they occasionally went to the movies. But she had her father’s hands, what Yirina proudly called “a surgeon’s hands.” Long-fingered but quite strong. She had his long narrow feet. Her mother’s feet were small but wide. Her mother wore size 5C, a size they looked for in sale bins or rummage sales at the nearby churches of Brooklyn.

  My apprentice writing was full of scenes described only because I found describing them interesting, and I suspect that is surely true of a number of you. You may write such descriptions as an exercise, but do not include them in your finished work unless they really belong there.

  Similarly, if you are writing a memoir, the specifics you include will tell us a great deal about your family and your friends. They are precious to you because they are part of what formed you, but only your language and your choice of detail can make them precious to us. It is a case of persuading us that we care whether the kitchen of your childhood home had tan and gold squares of linoleum or terra cotta tile on the floor; whether your bedroom curtains were filmy white or blue velvet; whether you slept with a teddy bear or a Barbie doll or a live tabby cat. You must make us care. You have to involve us in your life and involve us in the meaning, the resonance of these memories through vivid sensory language that carries an emotional message, and through an ongoing story that carries us forward.

  Avoid words like beautiful, pretty, ugly, handsome, unless you do the work to make the scene or the painting or the man or the horse beautiful or ugly or whatever. Learn to describe briefly or in snatches, so as not to stop the story in an obvious way.

  Make your descriptions work overtime to give us local color, reveal character, move the plot along, set us in time and place, fill in the socioeconomic picture, hint at the habits of the characters as they react to their surroundings.

  From City of Darkness, City of Light:

  (Here is Georges Danton arriving in 18th century Paris for the first time, without money but with great ambition and greater energy):The coach dumped him on the edge of Paris, in a slum festering under a black cloud of pestilent smoke. As he hiked through the narrow streets carrying his two portmanteaux, he choked from the stench of shit and rotten garbage. He was suffocated and deafened at once. In the perpetual twilight of the open sewers between dark houses sealing out the sky, every half block some poor soul was singing at the top of his lungs, bawdy songs, ballads of adventure and crime, topical songs, religious songs: all seeking sous from passersby and selling song sheets, scraping away on violins or banging on drums. Women carrying racks of old clothes pushed through the crowds. Swarms of beggars, crippled, blind, maimed, clutched at him. A man slammed into him. He watched his purse. Two men glared; he glared back. He elbowed his way along. Toughs looking into his scarred face saw someone who would readily fight. They let him pass.

  I remember the opening of a memoir written in one of our workshops in which the Greek old world character of the family was given to us through a description of smells of cooking and the food served at a meal characterized by high tension and drama. The emphasis was on the drama, but the food gave us necessary background that made the conflict more understandable.

  Sometimes description does even more than that, because the landscape is a character in the drama. The landscape itself may be an actor, a presence as vivid and as experienced as any other character. In Stanislau Lem’s Solaris, the ocean on the planet is alive and a strong actor in the novel. In Isaak Dinesen’s autobiography, Out of Africa, Kenya is a character, a strong part of the story of her marriage and her life at that time.

  Sometimes “the city” or “the scene” is at the center of a novel, whether it is Hollywood or New York or Paris or Alexandria; and the city must be made new and bright and vivid in those stories. The city may be the destroyer or the seducer or the prize. But it cannot be merely alluded to; it must be recreated. This is equally true in fiction and in memoir. You must make Cleveland or Seattle vivid to us. The story of the writer who goes to Hollywood and is destroyed or falls into temptation and then recovers his or her integrity is an American cliché, but like all such stories, able to be told and retold as long as it is made new and the seduction of the place is created for us so we experience it with the protagonist. We returned a recent submission from a retired professor of English whose description of Chicago was as flat as the city itself. We explained that many major cities have horrific traffic and large parks and rivers running through them and that her Chicago, a place of immense local character, could have been any one of them. She wrote back that we must have mistaken her book for another submission; that in chapter one she specifically mentioned Grant Park and the Wrigley Building. Sorry, not enough.

  Descriptions of people may function to tip us off to the attitude of the character doing the looking, the describing. It may contain enough attitude to suggest something of what is going to happen.

  From Three Women: The next year there was a new student who transferred in from Kansas. They both had history with him. He wasn’t a jock, a club kid, one of the super students who ran the school, or a burnout who would be tossed, but like them, one of the weird kids. He was between them in height and had pale sleek blond hair he wore to his shoulders. His eyes were a dark haunting blue. He had a scar through one light brown eyebrow. His cheekbones were high and sharp, and his profile looked to her as if it should be carved on the prow of a sailing vessel. He always had shadows of stubble on his cheeks that made him seem older, more experienced. Half the guys had just started shaving. Evan had a darkish beard but not much of it. He only had to shave every other day, and it took him about a minute, although she did like to watch, cause it was such a male thing to do. She was almost hairless on her body and never even shaved her legs. To each other, they called the new kid the Decadent Viking. “I want him,” Evan said.

  “So do I,” she said. “We’ll share him.”

  They made up stories of capturing him, tying him up and doing
things to him. His name was Chad. It seemed a silly name for such a fascinating-looking guy. He was broody. He sat at the back, and even when he knew the answers, he sounded as if he resented being right. She sat down next to him in assembly one day. His wrists stuck out below his shirt. There was a scar on each of them. He caught her looking at his wrists. They stared at each other. He did not hide his wrists. Then he smiled.

  If you grew up in Toledo, Ohio, you have to work hard to make it interesting to us; but not if you grew up in Toledo, Spain. Then we want many sensory details of your growing up. If you introduce an exotic locale in your memoirs, we expect that locale to play a part in the story. We expect somehow that the story of growing up as the son of a missionary in the jungle of Paraguay will be different from the story of growing up as a minister’s son in Dubuque, Iowa. If it is not different, that, too, is important to the narrative. If your family recreated a little Dubuque in the jungle, that’s part of your story, and you want to make that real to us with vivid and emotionally engaging description.

  Here is the beginning of a novel about a fourteen year-old girl who has been shipped off to live with her grandmother in the Philippines and who spends all her free time playing fantasy games in cyberspace:

  From leo@fergusrules.com: I insist on durian. I love the sweet taste of the meat, and the rotten cheese stench of the skin keeps the curious from my room. I have the maid bring it up twice a day and leave it outside my door. When you’re chasing Genghis Khan across the Tekla Makhan or gouging the eye from a Cyclops, the last thing you need is to be called down for supper—especially when it’s a plate of hard rice and chicken overcooked in vinegar and soy sauce.