Curious Tale Saturdays: Little Actions, Big Problems
Today I thought I’d talk about something that you will perhaps notice in this space a week from now, in the Prelude and I’m framing it here as “one of my chief weaknesses as a writer.” And that is: visual personal action in prose.
One day not long ago-June 9, in fact-I was walking around the ring road at a Sunset Constitutional, daydreaming a snippet of conversation involving Silence and another character. Silence was explaining that she didn’t much care for little birds-those plump, chirping, tiny songbirds that so many people find endearing. I don’t remember who was there talking with her, but that person made a friendly, clever, yet unflattering comparison between Silence and someone or something else, and I remember that it made Silence laugh.
And a very particular sort of laugh it was.
Stop and think for a moment on all the different meanings that can be encompassed in a laugh. Think about how many different kinds of laughs there are.
In my daydream it came perfectly naturally. It’s the kind of laugh that we’d all recognize in real life. Yet still it was such an interesting and uncommon enough that I stopped my daydreaming and asked myself, “How the hell am I supposed to write what she just did?”
You see, there was no word for it, at least as far as I knew. It happens in real life, but almost never in writing. It wasn’t chortling or chuckling or snickering or guffawing or any of the other words you’re going to find in the thesaurus. None of those words captures the necessary nuance in the minds of most people. It was a gasping exhalation, mild in intensity, of astonished but amused disbelief. But functionally it was a laugh; a risible action; there could be no mistake.
So how to write that down? As best I could tell, I had four options: two of them completely unacceptable and two of them highly objectionable.
First: I could lie to the readers by choosing a description that isn’t literally accurate but does a good job of preserving the meaning. So, instead of presenting her action as anything resembling a laugh, I could describe it completely differently. That option never sits well with me, because precise language is so deeply a facet of my style. Also, no such alternative comes to mind.
Second: I could mislead the readers by using the right language, but in a way that they wouldn’t understand. So, I could simply write that “Silence laughed softly” or something like that. This option never sits well with me either, because it makes the reader think the wrong thing. If I wrote “laugh” or any synonym thereof and didn’t explain what I meant, the readers would draw the wrong perception about the action that’s actually happen. If I’m not going to say what I mean, why even bother writing it at all?
That would be my third option: I could just not write what had happened. I could omit it because the description is too cumbersome. Sometimes a writer has to omit something important for the sake of the flow of the story. Going into detail on Silence’s laugh would disrupt the scene, so for the sake of the scene I could leave out that detail.
My fourth and final option is the opposite: I could sacrifice the flow of the scene in order to supply a sufficiently complicated description, or I could invent new vocabulary to achieve this more succinctly. In either case I would necessarily impose upon my audience all the encumbrances and inconveniences that go with such tactics, for the sake of delivering a truly proper description. This option works sometimes, but I find it incredibly problematic. Sometimes you don’t want to spend a paragraph or a long footnote explaining a simple action, ya know? Silence’s laugh wasn’t important to the progression of the scene.
And yet, it is important to the scene itself, and the story overall. It is a stroke of color that I found to have a richness and impact that illustrated both the character and the scene. But I so very much would not want to dwell on it. What I wanted, in that moment, was a single, clear word-or two or three words at the most-that everybody would be able to interpret correctly, immediately.
In the end the scene never got written anyway, being one of many such daydreams, but what happened to me that evening was not an isolated incident. I have to face this same challenge all the time in my writing. Not in the context of how to describe a laugh, but in the broader sense of how to describe behavioral actions in general.
As a visual thinker, it’s impossible for me not to see the visuals of the action in the story I’m telling. It’s also incredibly hard for me to resist including those visuals in my prose. I’m always thinking about the movements of the body, the movements of the face, the sounds and vocalizations of the body, and so forth. These little personal actions are very important to me, and my writing is absolutely filled with descriptions of them.
And one of my chief weaknesses as a writer is that I’m not actually very good at this kind of writing-despite using it so frequently. I think I do a damn clunky job of it when I try to describe something like the orientation of a person’s head, or the movement of their hands, or the nuance of their laugh.
Many writers either do a better job of this kind of writing or, more often, don’t attempt it as often in the first place. And I’m well aware of the arguments for omitting it, foremost of which is that I’m mixing my media, trying to fit a scene that belongs on film or stage into a written book. Indeed, such descriptions as I am discussing are akin to imposing upon readers a system of stage directions for the acting of the characters, and there’s a lot to be said for simply leaving such things to the imagination in a written work.
But that’s not me. Such descriptiveness is an intrinsic aspect of my style as a writer. Nor is it merely aesthetic. These little actions, these tiny nuances of behavior, to me are an important part of the stories that I try to tell. They’re critical to that richness of scenery I keep spouting off about. In my mind, their omission is like switching out a train ride for a teleporter trip when the purpose of the journey is to enjoy the landscape. Aesthetically, I simply don’t have the choice of omitting such details much of the time. Most writers do; not me.
That leaves me with the choice of improving my writing skills in this area, or accepting that I’m just not a very good writer in this area, or some combination of both. When laid out objectively it probably seems like such a choice is no choice at all: Become a better writer! The problem of course is that old friend of ours, named “Easier Said Than Done.” The more writing one does, the better one is likely to become, yes? Yes, but variably, and, for as much as I do this particular kind of writing in my prose, I haven’t improved at it nearly as much as I’d like.
My most elegant solution-and honestly my only solution to date-is to go ahead and use the larger descriptions andor new vocabulary, but, instead of including them as overlong descriptions where their clunkiness is maximized, weave them into the broader flow of the narrative as tiny vignettes.
However, this adds considerable length in text and only works in the minority of instances where significantly inflating the text is viable. When it comes to something like Silence’s laugh in reply to the comparison made of her, I wouldn’t have that option. I want it done in passing, quickly and casually, in two or three words at the most, which would seem to compel me to either do a clunky description or invent a new word.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the ATH Prelude (which I think I have since edited), to better illustrate what my problem:
Galavar laid his right hand on Benzan’s left shoulder and turned him toward the south, then released him and folded his hands at rest behind him. Benzan crossed his arms, and together in silence they beheld the City of Sele.
They’re standing on a bridge high above the ground. Galavar reaches for Benzan and physically turns him to look at the city, then releases his grip on Benzan and folds his hands behind him.
There are so many ways I could improve upon the quality of that description in the prose, but when you stop and accept that all of the actions I described have to remain literally included, you may realize just how many of the alternatives evaporate.
If it were a motion picture, it would be immediately clear to a film critic why those actions are there. Likewise, if you visualize the action, and forgive the clunky writing, you’ll see how elegant the action itself is. But in the written medium, I think all that most people are going to see is how clunky and awkward and seemingly superfluous the descriptions are.
And, yes, I think there’s merit to the manta of “Adapt to your medium.” A book can’t be a motion picture. I know that. And I know that if I’m trying to convey stage directions and cinematography in a printed medium, I’m bound to run into problems even if I do improve my writing quality. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly hard for me to seriously consider abandoning those kinds of details from my work. Viscerally, I am much more inclined to leave them in and accept a lower quality of writing than I am to omit them and do a better job of “adapting to the medium,” which to me is just highfalutin code for “perform to expectations,” which I’m not interested in doing. I really don’t want to leave this stuff out.
So why complain? If I’m that deadest on it, why fret? Why not just put it all in and let the chips fall where they may? Because I’m not just a writer. I’m a professional writer. When I discern a lack of quality in my work I want to improve upon it. My problem in this instance is that I want a completely different solution from the one that’s available. And I don’t have it.
And that’s worth a yak or two.
Next week, when you read the Prelude, I’m interested in what you think about this. It’s possible that I’m overestimating the problem. Not likely, but possible.
Speaking of which, next week’s Curious Tale Saturdays will be superseded-I hope-by the Prelude itself.
One day not long ago-June 9, in fact-I was walking around the ring road at a Sunset Constitutional, daydreaming a snippet of conversation involving Silence and another character. Silence was explaining that she didn’t much care for little birds-those plump, chirping, tiny songbirds that so many people find endearing. I don’t remember who was there talking with her, but that person made a friendly, clever, yet unflattering comparison between Silence and someone or something else, and I remember that it made Silence laugh.
And a very particular sort of laugh it was.
Stop and think for a moment on all the different meanings that can be encompassed in a laugh. Think about how many different kinds of laughs there are.
In my daydream it came perfectly naturally. It’s the kind of laugh that we’d all recognize in real life. Yet still it was such an interesting and uncommon enough that I stopped my daydreaming and asked myself, “How the hell am I supposed to write what she just did?”
You see, there was no word for it, at least as far as I knew. It happens in real life, but almost never in writing. It wasn’t chortling or chuckling or snickering or guffawing or any of the other words you’re going to find in the thesaurus. None of those words captures the necessary nuance in the minds of most people. It was a gasping exhalation, mild in intensity, of astonished but amused disbelief. But functionally it was a laugh; a risible action; there could be no mistake.
So how to write that down? As best I could tell, I had four options: two of them completely unacceptable and two of them highly objectionable.
First: I could lie to the readers by choosing a description that isn’t literally accurate but does a good job of preserving the meaning. So, instead of presenting her action as anything resembling a laugh, I could describe it completely differently. That option never sits well with me, because precise language is so deeply a facet of my style. Also, no such alternative comes to mind.
Second: I could mislead the readers by using the right language, but in a way that they wouldn’t understand. So, I could simply write that “Silence laughed softly” or something like that. This option never sits well with me either, because it makes the reader think the wrong thing. If I wrote “laugh” or any synonym thereof and didn’t explain what I meant, the readers would draw the wrong perception about the action that’s actually happen. If I’m not going to say what I mean, why even bother writing it at all?
That would be my third option: I could just not write what had happened. I could omit it because the description is too cumbersome. Sometimes a writer has to omit something important for the sake of the flow of the story. Going into detail on Silence’s laugh would disrupt the scene, so for the sake of the scene I could leave out that detail.
My fourth and final option is the opposite: I could sacrifice the flow of the scene in order to supply a sufficiently complicated description, or I could invent new vocabulary to achieve this more succinctly. In either case I would necessarily impose upon my audience all the encumbrances and inconveniences that go with such tactics, for the sake of delivering a truly proper description. This option works sometimes, but I find it incredibly problematic. Sometimes you don’t want to spend a paragraph or a long footnote explaining a simple action, ya know? Silence’s laugh wasn’t important to the progression of the scene.
And yet, it is important to the scene itself, and the story overall. It is a stroke of color that I found to have a richness and impact that illustrated both the character and the scene. But I so very much would not want to dwell on it. What I wanted, in that moment, was a single, clear word-or two or three words at the most-that everybody would be able to interpret correctly, immediately.
In the end the scene never got written anyway, being one of many such daydreams, but what happened to me that evening was not an isolated incident. I have to face this same challenge all the time in my writing. Not in the context of how to describe a laugh, but in the broader sense of how to describe behavioral actions in general.
As a visual thinker, it’s impossible for me not to see the visuals of the action in the story I’m telling. It’s also incredibly hard for me to resist including those visuals in my prose. I’m always thinking about the movements of the body, the movements of the face, the sounds and vocalizations of the body, and so forth. These little personal actions are very important to me, and my writing is absolutely filled with descriptions of them.
And one of my chief weaknesses as a writer is that I’m not actually very good at this kind of writing-despite using it so frequently. I think I do a damn clunky job of it when I try to describe something like the orientation of a person’s head, or the movement of their hands, or the nuance of their laugh.
Many writers either do a better job of this kind of writing or, more often, don’t attempt it as often in the first place. And I’m well aware of the arguments for omitting it, foremost of which is that I’m mixing my media, trying to fit a scene that belongs on film or stage into a written book. Indeed, such descriptions as I am discussing are akin to imposing upon readers a system of stage directions for the acting of the characters, and there’s a lot to be said for simply leaving such things to the imagination in a written work.
But that’s not me. Such descriptiveness is an intrinsic aspect of my style as a writer. Nor is it merely aesthetic. These little actions, these tiny nuances of behavior, to me are an important part of the stories that I try to tell. They’re critical to that richness of scenery I keep spouting off about. In my mind, their omission is like switching out a train ride for a teleporter trip when the purpose of the journey is to enjoy the landscape. Aesthetically, I simply don’t have the choice of omitting such details much of the time. Most writers do; not me.
That leaves me with the choice of improving my writing skills in this area, or accepting that I’m just not a very good writer in this area, or some combination of both. When laid out objectively it probably seems like such a choice is no choice at all: Become a better writer! The problem of course is that old friend of ours, named “Easier Said Than Done.” The more writing one does, the better one is likely to become, yes? Yes, but variably, and, for as much as I do this particular kind of writing in my prose, I haven’t improved at it nearly as much as I’d like.
My most elegant solution-and honestly my only solution to date-is to go ahead and use the larger descriptions andor new vocabulary, but, instead of including them as overlong descriptions where their clunkiness is maximized, weave them into the broader flow of the narrative as tiny vignettes.
However, this adds considerable length in text and only works in the minority of instances where significantly inflating the text is viable. When it comes to something like Silence’s laugh in reply to the comparison made of her, I wouldn’t have that option. I want it done in passing, quickly and casually, in two or three words at the most, which would seem to compel me to either do a clunky description or invent a new word.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the ATH Prelude (which I think I have since edited), to better illustrate what my problem:
Galavar laid his right hand on Benzan’s left shoulder and turned him toward the south, then released him and folded his hands at rest behind him. Benzan crossed his arms, and together in silence they beheld the City of Sele.
They’re standing on a bridge high above the ground. Galavar reaches for Benzan and physically turns him to look at the city, then releases his grip on Benzan and folds his hands behind him.
There are so many ways I could improve upon the quality of that description in the prose, but when you stop and accept that all of the actions I described have to remain literally included, you may realize just how many of the alternatives evaporate.
If it were a motion picture, it would be immediately clear to a film critic why those actions are there. Likewise, if you visualize the action, and forgive the clunky writing, you’ll see how elegant the action itself is. But in the written medium, I think all that most people are going to see is how clunky and awkward and seemingly superfluous the descriptions are.
And, yes, I think there’s merit to the manta of “Adapt to your medium.” A book can’t be a motion picture. I know that. And I know that if I’m trying to convey stage directions and cinematography in a printed medium, I’m bound to run into problems even if I do improve my writing quality. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly hard for me to seriously consider abandoning those kinds of details from my work. Viscerally, I am much more inclined to leave them in and accept a lower quality of writing than I am to omit them and do a better job of “adapting to the medium,” which to me is just highfalutin code for “perform to expectations,” which I’m not interested in doing. I really don’t want to leave this stuff out.
So why complain? If I’m that deadest on it, why fret? Why not just put it all in and let the chips fall where they may? Because I’m not just a writer. I’m a professional writer. When I discern a lack of quality in my work I want to improve upon it. My problem in this instance is that I want a completely different solution from the one that’s available. And I don’t have it.
And that’s worth a yak or two.
Next week, when you read the Prelude, I’m interested in what you think about this. It’s possible that I’m overestimating the problem. Not likely, but possible.
Speaking of which, next week’s Curious Tale Saturdays will be superseded-I hope-by the Prelude itself.