Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (23 page)

Now add the original slow rhythm of the external environment with your left hand. What happens? If you’re like me, the frenetic pace of the right hand interferes with what the left hand is trying to do. Even though I manage to keep the pace of my left hand slow, the fingers want to flutter between beats. I also notice subtle changes in my entire body. My back tightens, one eye squints a little in concentration. My right shoulder tenses while my left does not. After a while my head begins to nod firmly in time with the left hand, as if helping it along. The soles of my feet press harder into the floor while the heels are raised.

What happens to you?

Whatever reactions you experience can be translated into describing the actions of your character. Understand that
translation
is the key. Otherwise, all your characters will end up portraying your own physical tendencies. This beating-out exercise is merely a way to get your body and emotions involved so you better understand the situation your character is facing. Once you are “hearing” the Inner Rhythm, you can blend it with your character’s personalized traits and mannerisms, and with his Action Objectives for the scene, to create action that is believable and full of emotion.

Inner Rhythm + Personalizing +

Action Objectives = emotive action.

Here’s a real-life example of this equation. At age eleven my daughter loved to sing. Many times when she was happy or content she’d hum under her breath without realizing it. That summer my husband was trying to teach her how to water-ski. She’d finally relented after a few years of refusing because of her fear. As she waited in the water for the boat to rev, she looked calm. But—we heard her purposefully singing. My husband and I looked at each other and said, “She’s nervous.” Now, singing is the last thing most people would do when they’re nervous, but knowing our daughter, we understood this was her unique way of trying to calm her nerves.

In this short scene, my daughter’s Inner Rhythm plus her traits and mannerisms were working together with her Action Objectives to push her into her own unique action. Her initial Action Objective was: “To get up on skis for the first time.” But once she got into the water, her Inner Rhythm changed from resolve to nervousness. This feeling was evidently uncomfortable to her. A new Action Objective then arose: “To deny I am nervous.” Her resulting action was to sing.

To recap, here are the steps to take for applying Inner Rhythm to a character:

1. Beat out the various rhythms of your character in a specific scene. These can include one or more Inner Rhythms, plus the external rhythm of the scene’s environment. Move from the simplest to the most complex. Then try beating two different rhythms at the same time, one with each hand.

2. Note how your body responds while beating the different rhythms. What is each part of your body doing? What are you feeling? Jot down your reactions.

3. Blend your reactions with your character’s personalized traits and mannerisms. How would your unique character respond to these reactions? How would these responses combine with the character’s Action Objectives to create emotive action?

With these steps in mind, let’s go back to the scene between Jay and Cindy. Try beating out Jay’s Inner Rhythm of his guilt with one hand and his fear/desire to run away with the other. First start with the guilt. Is your rhythm slow and methodical? Or full of pauses? Heavy-handed? Is your palm involved or just your fingers? Then add the fear with the other hand. What are the characteristics of this rhythm? How do the two rhythms affect each other? To carry the exercise even further (and if you’re really feeling brave), get up and move around. Stomp out first one rhythm, then the other. What do you feel during each one? What actions might one of your own characters take in Jay’s situation?

You can do this exercise for any emotion or feeling. How would you beat out the rhythm of jealousy? Sorrow? Betrayal? Hunger?

Okay, novelists, if you’re still with me, we can go on to the second technique for hearing your character’s Inner Rhythm. (I’ll bet you’re probably glad about now you’re not an actor.) You can sit down and relax for this one.

Technique 2: Question your character moment by moment through a scene.

Picture yourself as a psychiatrist, with your character on the couch. He’s under hypnosis, and you want him to tell you in detail every emotion he will feel, and every physical action he’ll undertake, when faced with the events of the scene you’re about to write. Let’s use the encounter between Jay and Cindy as an example.

Jay, you’re hanging around on the sidewalk after school and Cindy shows up. What’s the first thing you feel?

I want to run away.

Why?

I can’t face her. I just want to deny this whole thing ever happened.

How does your body respond?

My heart starts beating really hard. My legs get all tight. My throat gets tight, too.

What else do you feel?

Guilty. I know leaving her is wrong, but I just can’t help it. I don’t want to be a father!

What does the guilt do to your body?

It makes my feet feel like they weigh a ton. And my chest hurts.

What do you do?

I turn away from her. But it’s hard to move, I’m so sick inside. I lean against the fence for support.

She’s talking to you, Jay, pleading with you. What do you do next?

I bury my head in my arm. I wish I could block my ears. I just can’t stand this! I care for her, but right now I almost hate her for what she’s doing to me. My fingers grip the fence tighter and tighter as she keeps talking. I can hardly breathe. My stomach is all upset.

And so on. You get the idea.

There’s an interesting twist to this technique. Even though it’s not a physical exercise like Technique 1, as you begin to hear your character’s Inner Rhythm, your body still may respond. For example, when I think of Jay’s tightened throat, I find myself automatically swallowing. As I imagine his first sight of Cindy, my eyes close in despair, and I feel a sick expression stealing across my face. Even if your body doesn’t respond, your mind will begin running with all sorts of ideas for your character’s actions. Again, jot down these ideas, then blend them with your character’s traits and mannerisms, plus her Action Objectives, to discover those actions that will innately display her Inner Rhythm.

After hearing your character’s Inner Rhythm and discovering her subsequent actions through either of the two techniques discussed above, you’ll be ready to write a vivid, compelling scene that your readers will feel. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about specific writing techniques that will help you best present all the emotions and actions you now know of your character. But first, study the following excerpts to better understand the concept of Inner Rhythm.

Study Samples

FROM:
A Tale of Two Cities
(classic), by Charles Dickens.

SETTING: Saint Antoine, an impoverished district of Paris, near the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. For years the common people’s anger has been building against the French aristocracy, who stuff themselves with delicacies and the best things in life while sneering with contempt at the poor, who must scrabble for a mere bit of bread. Wine-shop owners Ernest Defarge and his wife are leaders of the revolutionaries. They and their followers have already swept through Paris, forcing their way into the Bastille and releasing its prisoners. But the mob’s anger against individuals who have persecuted them is still not vented. A week has passed since the storming of the Bastille.

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat, contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense of power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: ‘I know how hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you?’ Every lean bare arm, that had been without work before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike. The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint Antoine; the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.

‘Hark!’ said The Vengeance. ‘Listen, then! Who comes?’

As if a trail of powder laid from the outermost bound of the Saint Antoine Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading murmur came rushing along.

‘It is Defarge,’ said madame. ‘Silence, patriots.’

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked round him! ‘Listen, everywhere!’ said madame again. ‘Listen to him!’ Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had sprung to their feet.

‘Say then, my husband. What is it?’

‘News from the other world!’

‘How, then?’ cried madame, contemptuously. ‘The other world?’

‘Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?’

‘Everybody!’ from all throats.

‘The news is of him. He is among us!’

‘Among us!’ from the universal throat again. ‘And dead?’

‘Not dead! He feared us so much—and with much reason—that he caused himself to be represented as dead, and had a grand, mock-funeral. But they have found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have said that he had reason to fear us. Say all! Had he reason?’

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he could have heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.

‘Patriots!’ said Defarge, in a determined voice, ‘are we ready?’

Instantly Madame Defarge’s knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to house, rousing the women.

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground, famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions. Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven, our suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rip Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy, whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men belonging to them from being trampled under foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew its own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not a human creature in Saint Antoine’s bosom but a few old crones and the wailing children.