The city dissolves about us, and its walls
Are mountains of rock cruelly carved by wind.
Sand streams down their wasting sides, sand
Mounts upward slowly about them: foot and hand
We crawl and bleed among them! Is this Senlin?
In the desert of Senlin must we live and die?
We hear the decay of rocks, the crash of boulders,
Snarling of sand on sand. 'Senlin!' we cry.
'Senlin!' again . . . Our shadows revolve in silence
Under the soulless brilliance of blue sky.
From "Senlin: A Biography" by Conrad Aiken
Lesson 3: character (showing not telling)
- Don't patronise the reader - make him work, be active
- Give the reader control; don't do all the work on his behalf. Readers may go down different paths
- Consider a character entering a bookshop. He might have one reaction if he speaks the language that the books are written in and another if he doesn't
- Images can be interpreted in many ways. Put two objects next to each other and the meaning of each is affected by the other
- Imaginitive idea -> writing -> book = doomed to failure. Shepherd readers down a broad path, providing some guidance but not complete control
- Offer fertile ideas and allow reader to interpret them. Provide subliminal information
- How do you convey information about a character without telling?
- body language eg gestures or barriers such as hand in front of mouth, fiddling with cufflinks, crossing legs, turning your back on people, standing up or sitting down, eye contact
- dialogue, eg accent, dialect, education, speech volume, gent or spiv
- clothing eg shoes, jewellery, casual, genuinely fashionable or posing, scruffy but confident, tattoos, utility of clothes, tidy or not, colour coordination. Context is important: you wouldn't wear a suit down a mine shaft
- Physical eg wrinkles. skin colour, reaction to physical attributes
- First impressions linger. Do not introduce your character in non-typical mode
- Everything reveals something about character. Whatever you put down will be interpreted
- Don't give the reader an impression that you subsequently overturn eg suggesting a skin colour which subsequently turns out to be wrong!
- Work out what the centre is and reveal parts of that
- Be subtle
Back to writing course
