You know when you throw away a pair of socks, or old undies, or – as I did today – miscellaneous soft things that have been hanging about attracting mould, and then you throw normal rubbish, like food scraps, into the bin on top of it and it creeps you out all the way to the tips of your fingers?
I am waiting for the fictional moment that requires just such a metaphor.
I’m not a huge reader of poems, and I think that’s exactly why I posted Epithalamion, come upon randomly in an anthology of homosexual literature throughout the ages. It goes beyond an overabundance of words – pours words out until they sit in dense clusters of meaning and images that create something altogether new. A sensory world arrived at by the mind.
Being a romance writer, wordy overabundance is all part of the job. Being any kind of writer, I sit on the wordy end of the scale. I am no Hemingway to say things baldly, despite the previously discussed wisdom of Just Saying The Thing.
So I feel like I have a lot to learn from that lusty, movement-filled poem.
Of all the romance writers I read, I think Meredith Duran puts wordiness to best use. From her gorgeous new book, A Lady’s Lesson in Scandal:
Together they crossed the threshold into the bedroom, sat onto the bed, still kissing, so earnestly, yes, this was earnest; he would have kissed this woman for hours no matter where he found her. He swept his hand up her back, into her hair, and realised his hand was trembling. Hot and desperate and gluttonous and hesitant and uncertain and tentative as a boy with his first woman: this moment, this simple bedding, was turning into something strange.
“Just say the thing.” It’s become a kind of catch-phrase for me and Cat, and is most often accompanied by knowing smiles and head-shaking.
“Just say the thing.”
It was first uttered between us when Cat was re-reading the Summer Tree series by Guy Gavriel Kay. She was trying to figure out how he injected such a strong feeling of destiny into the text, thinking it would take some strenuous critical reading. Turned out there were lines like “she looked at her and was overcome by a feeling of destiny.” He just said the thing.
It came up again the other day in the response to special k’s critique that my characters are all too ambiguous. I was telling Cat, “So he was like, ‘I don’t even know who this guy is!’ and I was like, ‘OK, so should I put in a line, Bae was a her best friend and a trickster type thing?’ And he was just like, ‘No, I mean, why is he even on the ship? Is he an engineer?’”
At which point the knowing smiles and head-shaking started. “Just say the thing.”
special k really pushed me to have a draft of my YA novel that he could read. He is now reading it, which is not the easiest thing for me, because he’s basically told me to bugger off and leave him alone to read it.
This means anxious bed-time hours, listening to him read, turn over, turn the pages, waiting for him to put it down and never pick it up again, wondering if I might get – not a laugh – but a little outward breath of amusement…
This morning he said, “Can I give you some feedback?” and everything in me froze up. “Er, I don’t think so?” I said, because nothing he said right then would have been useful.
Fastforward about an hour, and I was ready to hear it (I had reached the point, basically, where not knowing what he thought was wrong with it was going to be much worse than knowing).
He started talking, and I remembered how damn good at narrative he is.
The main feedback that is just spot on is: Every character is intense right from the beginning; everything is innuendo or insinuation; there is no definitive point to stand in the narrative.
This, in a way, is really positive feedback, because I want my characters to be ambiguous. BUT that doesn’t work at all unless you know the characters first – I never did the “naive young boy from the country” scenes that begin any fantasy. Act One, according to the people who know these things, should show a character in their normal, everyday life. This is the opening scene of any horror film, before anything falls apart.
Then there’s the specific feedback, like, “So the spaceship isn’t attached to the end of the kite’s string? Okay, but if she’s floating a remote control on the kite, how is she controlling the remote control?”
At this point the little brother chimes in, “And if she can fly the ship by remote control, why have a huge, complicated control room? She could just fly it while she’s watching TV…”
The road is long.
ah, my attempt at a witty, punful heading!
My latest pet-hate with my writing is this: my characters are always, always looking. At each other, not at each other, out the window, across the room, up from the book, etc.
Of course, we do live eyes-first, so I can see why this problem has arisen. When you write in very close third, as I do (third person narrative, but glued so tight to the perspective of one character that their internal world is inextricable from the external), the narrative unfolds through a character’s gaze. The world only exists as they are looking at it/not looking at it.
A look indicates interest: open, suppressed, lack of.
The eyes are the window to the soul. I’ve thought often about this, because eyes are not the endless portal they seem to be, but are covered in a particularly slimy, shiny variety of skin. They are as closed off as the rest of us, except that they relay a sensory experience right to the brain – an experience that is no more true than sound or smell or touch, but that we allow to invade us all the same. The world enters our flesh through the eyes.
(I’m also using the word “flesh” far too much.)
Possible solutions to my problem: If the eyes allow the invasion of the world, then my characters can relate that experience, rather than simply looking. Or react to that experience. Seeing is an assumed state, if something is being described by a seeing character.
Maybe I can use my eyes, look around me at the other ways people give themselves away than simply by looking.
Maybe I can close my eyes and find the ways I do the same.