writing the heart of your story (20 page)

To Stein, that would be stuffing the envelope—to overflowing. And that’s a great exercise to do to get your visual camera up and running. Sometimes if you close your eyes and picture your setting as if you are your character sitting on a bench or chair or some appropriate seating, you can just wait and watch things happen. You may start to hear people speak and birds call out. You may start seeing little details, like the bits of grass growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk and the way old tree roots have pushed up the concrete and made an abandoned child’s tricycle sit at a funny angle.

But once you are done exploring your setting, you want to look through all those little bits in that envelope that you’ve dumped out on the table and pick one or two things that stand out. Stein says, “I have sometimes described the reader’s experience to students as an envelope. It is a mistake to fill the envelope with so much detail that little or nothing is left to the reader’s imagination. The writer’s job is to fill the envelope with just enough to trigger the reader’s imagination.”

I thumbed through some novels I love when writing this chapter, and snagged some little bits of setting the authors give us:

* “Harold’s place looked much like ours, flat as flat, though the house was more Victorian in style, with sunrise gable finishes and a big porch swing in front. Harold didn’t have as much land as my father, but he farmed it efficiently.” (Jane Smiley,
A Thousand Acres
)

From that brief description she moves on to an event that took place involving Harold and his farm. You notice she only used two sentences to evoke the setting, and since the reader already knows much about her storyteller’s farm, just saying his place looked “much like ours” except for a couple of small differences is enough to set the stage.

* “Leaphorn noticed it immediately—the cold, stagnant air of abandoned places. He was standing beside Thatcher when Thatcher unlocked the door to the apartment of Dr. Friedman-Barnal and pushed it open. The trapped air flowed outward into Leaphorn’s sensitive nostrils. He sensed dust in it, and all that mixture of smells which humans leave behind them when they go away. The park service calls such apartments TPH, temporary personnel housing. At Chaco, six of them were build into an L-shaped frame structure on a concrete slab—part of a complex that included maintenance and storage buildings . . . a line of eight frame bungalows backed against the low cliff of Chaco Mesa.” (Tony Hillerman,
A Thief of Time
)

From there, Hillerman’s characters enter and the scene begins, but the setting has been nicely established in just those few short lines, giving the reader a clear sense of the place, yet allowing for the reader to use much imagination to picture the details.

* “And then we fell out of the sky and into the verdant fields north of Sacramento. Stunning. absolutely stunning, the vastness of a world so intense with growth and birth, in the season of life between the dormant winter and the baking heat of summer. Vast, rolling hills covered with newly sprung grass and great swaths of wildflowers. Men working the land in their tractors, churning the soil, releasing a heady brew of smells: moisture and decay, fertilizer and diesel fumes.” (Garth Stein,
The Art of Racing in the Rain
)

That’s pretty much all Enzo the dog tells us about his first impression of Sacramento, and of course you’d expect a dog to particularly notice both the smells of the area and all the wide-open spaces in which he’d love to run. A great example of getting into character and showing just what he might notice as opposed to what another person (or dog?) might.

Altering the Quality of Time in Your Novel

I want to take a little detour here to talk a bit about something I love seeing done well in novels—and that’s altering the quality of time. In a movie there are all kinds of techniques the director and film editor can use to speed time up and slow time down. One easy way is by slowing down the action to make everything move at a snail’s pace, but writers have to find other ways to do this in a novel. Just putting in an aside to the reader to “read this passage slowly” won’t work.

But I’m going to talk not just about the speed at which time seems to move but also about the quality of time. If that seems like an esoteric concept, it is. But I bet you can think of instances or moments when time has felt different to you. Not just when it slows way down (like when you’ve had an accident or you’re waiting for a doctor to come into the exam room with your test results) or speeds up (getting old, in general) but when it feels different. Do you have any idea of what I’m referring to?

Manipulate Time

Time is an element in your novel. Your story is told over a period of time, be it a few days or forty years. You pace your novel so as to have a smooth passage of time and a coherent one the reader can follow without getting tripped up (or so you hope). But handling time can also be a sort of technique you can use in your novel to evoke emotions, and maybe emotions that you can’t really name or put a finger on.

Have you ever experienced a moment when someone gave you some shocking news? Maybe someone you were close to died in a tragic accident, and you sat somewhere quietly and tried to process it. Sometimes in those instances, time feels muddled, thick, hazy. You can almost give it a physical or tactile description here. Have you ever witnessed an accident—a car crash or something so unexpected that time seemed to stop until you could catch up to it? Yes, it seemed to slow down, but it also had a bright, shattering feeling. Maybe I’m just waxing poetic because it’s really hard for us to put into words such a nebulous sensation such as the quality of time.

Poignant Beauty in a Plastic Bag

Think about your character sitting on a park bench after getting some tragic news. You could write “Megan sat there, shocked, unable to move. She had no idea how much time passed before she realized her hands were numb from the cold winter air.” Okay, I just told you how my character felt and that she lost track of time, but I didn’t help you feel how that time passed.

Now what if you do this? Have her look around her and notice something she’s never paid attention to before. Maybe a shaft of light is hitting the roof of a nearby car and refracting. Maybe her eyes catch on the leaves in the tree next to her shivering as if cold. Sometimes having a character notice something seemingly insignificant shows her inner awareness is shifting, and that often shifts the quality of time. This is a great place to insert a motif!

There’s that great moment in the movie
American Beauty
with the swirling plastic bag. If you saw the movie, you know exactly which moment I’m talking about. It seems like such an odd bit—listening to Ricky (the teen boy love interest) talk as he shows Jane (his soon-to-be girlfriend) a video he took of a bag swirling in the wind. It’s a pivotal and important scene in the movie because Ricky voices the big theme when he says as they’re watching, “This bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it . . . for fifteen minutes. Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel I can’t take it. And my heart is just going to cave in.” Time, at that moment, feels so altogether different from normal. This scene slows the movie down so that this poignant moment can seep into the viewer’s heart.

An Indescribable, Visceral Thing

Besides being a brilliant moment about beauty (what’s so beautiful about a boring bag swirling with leaves and dirt on the street?), while you watch the bag, the quality of time seems to change. The poignancy of the moment does something to time. And so with the girl on the bench in my little narrative. As she starts seeing things around her and noticing details that are small and which no one would pay attention to, time shifts in quality. Emphasis is put on small detail and keen observation.

If you can give the sense of heightened awareness—noticing sounds you hadn’t noticed, like the birds chirping, or noticing sounds disappearing, as if everything goes hush and silent suddenly—you can change the quality of time. At least that’s what I call it, and it’s something I use very deliberately in pretty much all my novels at some key moment or another—particularly when I want the reader to slow down and notice something important that they might miss. Often it’s not something visible, but more emotional or visceral. I won’t even try to define it. But I intuitively sense when I need to grab the reader and get him to—in effect—sit and watch the leaves and bag swirling and notice the beauty in the moment. Maybe it’s a Zen thing.

There are moments in life where we feel strangely and marvelously alive. And there are moments when we feel we are dead and can no longer responding to anything around us. The quality of time changes in those moments too. There are no set rules on how you can emphasize this change-in-time quality, but by having your character notice small things, which slows time down, and explore how she feels in that moment, you may find ways of expressing this very powerful effect.

A great book that spectacularly masters the nuances of time and how it feels is Ian McEwan’s novel
The Child in Time
. He plays with time in that story in awesome ways (as it serves strongly as symbol and motif in the book), and the story is compelling. It’s his best book, in my opinion.

Think about
. . . establishing setting the way Sol Stein encourages—by putting a few little bits in the envelope and letting the reader use her imagination to supply the rest. Go through a scene or two that you’ve written and take a look at your description of setting. See if you can cut it down and leave just a line or two (rewrite if necessary) that not only gives the essence of your setting but provides setting that is felt by your character. Chop out any unattached narrative (meaning it isn’t being observed and filtered by your POV character). Set that material aside, and if you feel there’s something in there that needs to be in your novel, find another place in which to put it, and reveal those details through the eyes of your character. If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you can go also through your whole novel and highlight your passages of dry narrative to go through later with this same process.

Think of a crucial scene in your novel in which a character needs to react to something and you want to suspend the moment and give it a different time quality. Try the technique above to “slow time down” and see what happens.

Chapter 28: The Inevitable Ending

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where youstop your story.”

~Orson Welles

Earlier I covered some tips about creating scenes, and most particularly in discussion about your novel’s first scene. I mentioned that the first scene in your book carries a special burden, and if you’ve been faithfully reading this book, you’ll recall we spent a large number of pages on just your first scene! Now, as we approach the end of this book, wrapping up this intensive look at writing the heart of your story, I want to shift from scene endings to ending scenes.

Are You (More Than) Ready for It to End?

I promise we won’t take eight chapters to go over this pivotal and crucial part of your novel, but it does require some attention. Writers tend to get a bit tired, burned out, and sometimes even a little sick of the story they’ve been crafting for months (years?) by the time they see the home stretch, and often they push through or rush to wrap it all up so they can figure out where they left their life, kids, and keys that seem to have gone AWOL while they were hunched over their computer. But the ending scenes carry the next biggest burden in your novel, and so if you’re feeling the urge to hurry up and get the $%&* book done, or if you’ve already written an ending but it feels flat and ineffective, I’m hoping some of the suggestions I propose will be of help to you.

I recently heard the expression “Get in quickly; get out quickly.” I hadn’t heard that before, and it came from a critique partner who felt my fairly short wrap-up ending to my epic novel Intended for Harm was just right. I recognize the truth in those words, for you don’t want to drag out either the beginning or the ending of your novel. A “not-so-long good-bye” might just be a good thing. But it needs to be oh-so-right, short or not.

Oh Great—Another Burden

So, just as you have to cram in so many elements in a few short pages in the opening of your story, you also have to accomplish a number of big things in your last few pages. I really love writing the last scene in my novels. I feel it’s like a reward given to me for getting to the end. And rather than looking at ending my book as a big chore with the pressure on, it’s usually a high, exciting, invigorating time at my computer, filled with joy.