Stein on Writing (22 page)

The Secret Snapshot Technique: Reaching for Hidden Treasure

Th
e secret snapshot technique is designed to help writers whose fiction doesn’t touch the emotion of readers, who write from the outside looking in, whose stories are uninteresting to experience because they seem “made up.”

The characters and themes that lie hidden within each author are the source of work that strikes readers as original and real. How do we jog the author to write from the inside, in touch with subject matter and feelings that will enable him to brush the reader’s emotions?

I’ve used the secret snapshot method in individual conferences with writers and in seminars. In the latter, the author whose work is being discussed comes up front and sits in the “hot seat.” The two of us talk. Everyone else is eavesdropping.

I ask the author to think of a snapshot of something so private he wouldn’t carry it in his wallet because if he were in an accident, he wouldn’t want a paramedic to find it. The snapshot we’re looking for is one the writer wouldn’t want his neighbor or closest friend to see. Not even a family member. Especially not a family member.

I call them snapshots because I prefer that the writer start with something visual. Some people jump to the conclusion that a secret snapshot is of something sexual. Wrong. In practice many are not. In one that worked for its author, her snapshot was of a rose in a one-flower vase that was put on her office desk by someone whose identity she never learned. In another, the author’s snapshot was of an audience he addressed years ago. The image remained like grit in his memory because all the while he talked his undershorts kept slipping down. Later in this chapter I convey in detail how a writer of detective stories turned her book around successfully by a snapshot of her two-year-old sleeping in his bed.

Some writers squirm through the process, shifting uncomfortably in their seats. That’s a good sign.

If your reaction to this exercise is “my secrets are nobody’s business,” that’s understandable. But if you want to write something that will move other people, you have to come to terms with the fact that the writer is by profession a squealer. He learns by starting to squeal on himself.

If you’re thinking that you may not have the courage to be a writer, I can tell you that’s what most writers think when confronted with this assignment for the first time. Few people have the natural ability to open themselves up to strangers. The writer learns how. One of the ways is to write down what you see in your most secret snapshot. If you’re tempted to fudge, don’t. If you’ve decided to give us a made-up snapshot, you’ll serve your writing better by changing it to the snapshot you’re hiding.

Nobody’s going to see it. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. What they will see is the
result
of your finding the right snapshot.

Is your snapshot such that any of your friends or neighbors might have one just like it? If so, change it to one that only you have. Your writing is going to be yours, not writing that could come out of anyone else’s closet.

Do you think other people would want to see what’s in your snapshot if they heard what’s in it? If not, you’d better try another.

Please answer truthfully: would you carry that snapshot in your wallet or purse? If your answer is “yes,” perhaps it’s not so secret. The snapshots that work best are embarrassing, revelatory, or involve a strong and continuing stimulus to memory.

If you’re feeling, “Hey, I didn’t bargain for this, all I wanted to do was write stories,” I remind you that the best fiction reveals the hidden things
we usually don’t talk about.

The stories and novels that get turned down are full of the things we talk about freely—the snapshots in your photo album that you show to friends, family, and neighbors. Readers don’t want to see your photo album. They have their own. They want to see what’s in the picture you’re reluctant to show.

You say, “Why can’t I start with other people’s secret snapshots?”

You can. It’s a longer route to success, but it gives you a chance to build your courage. A writer needs the courage to say what other people sometimes think but don’t say. Or don’t allow themselves to think.

If you elect to conjure up someone else’s secret snapshot, it has to be one that you wouldn’t be allowed to see under any circumstance. Can you describe that snapshot? What interests you in that picture? Would
your interest be shared by lots of other people if the person involved were a character in your novel? If not, you’d better change the snapshot. Or improve it.

If you’re stuck, try this. Everyone except liars has at least one person he truly dislikes, maybe even hates. What kind of snapshot would he carry that he wouldn’t want
you
to see? Don’t tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe the second.

Would your enemy pay to keep you from seeing that snapshot? If not, try another that’s really private.

How much would you pay to see a snapshot from your actual enemy? Nothing? Not much? Then it’s not a good snapshot. If you’d pay to see it, maybe people will pay to buy your book.

Here’s a snapshot you probably know. It’s your best friend’s secret snapshot. He or she may have confided in you about it. Or you may have guessed what it might be from a bit of evidence here and there. Or because of your insight.

While you’re collecting other people’s snapshots, how about one of someone you knew who is now dead? Does it make you feel safer?

This method may seem a bit offputting or uncomfortable at first, but experienced writers will tell you they love this exercise because they know how rewarding it can be. Probing secrets is a key to writing memorable fiction.

A writer submitted for my consideration the early part of what she hoped would be a thriller about the hazardous work of a policewoman who works as a decoy, pretending to be a hooker in order to trap a killer.

The students in the seminar liked the plot, but the story had not involved them emotionally. The author moved into the hot seat at the head of the table. The others all listened while I asked questions and she talked.

It became evident that the writer had been on a police force but no longer was because of something that had happened in her line of work. Interesting. But not as interesting as her revelation of what she felt was the worst moment of each day. It wasn’t her hazardous work. It was when she tiptoed into the bedroom of her sleeping two-year-old son to pat his hair before going off into the night to work. That was her secret snapshot.

Hazardous conditions frighten us all. The possibility of premature death haunts our lives. The thought of not seeing a loved one again causes pain. And what love is as binding to a woman as her child, asleep in his innocence, his mother going off to a night’s work from which she might not return?

In that snapshot lay the emotional root of her book. After our session, the writer started her novel with a scene in which the decoy was patting the sleeping head of her child before going off to her hazardous work. As a result, the tone of the book changed from an ordinary though suspenseful story told from the outside, to one readers could feel strongly. From that first scene, the reader wanted to say to the woman, “Watch out! Be careful, come back to your child.” With every danger the decoy faced, the reader thought of the sleeping child. The reader, full of emotion now, read the novel not as an interesting plot but as a moving experience.

Soldiers have to be brave. So do policemen, firemen, miners, and construction workers who walk on the skeletons of high-rise buildings. Test pilots have to be especially brave because they are flying equipment that hasn’t been flown before. Perhaps the bravest test pilots are the men and women who fly into outer space. They see the earth differently than we do, as if they were people from another planet.

Writers who do good work learn to see things with the innocence of visitors from outer space. Their bravest journeys take place when they fly into inner space, the unexplored recesses in which the secret snapshots of their friends and enemies—and their own—are stored.

To provide your readers with insight, you become an explorer. That’s what we’ve been doing here, exploring territory in your memory that has been—and continues to be—hidden from public view, but that can make your stories sing.

How to Use All Six of Your Senses

W
hat a waste! In our daily work and play, our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell define the world for us. Then, as writers, we let three of our senses atrophy, as if our characters had lost part of their humanity and didn’t need to touch, taste, and smell.

Never mind that laymen neglect their senses. We writers have an obligation to use all five senses in our work if we are to enrich the laymen’s experience.
[4]
And we cannot neglect the sixth that haunts our lives and our literature.

I caution you. Even the sense of sight, the one we use the most in our life and work, needs to be honed beyond the everyday needs of the laymen for whom we write. We need to see more acutely so that we can record what is fresh.

We take our senses for granted. When we let their use atrophy, it often takes conscious effort and exercise to restore our awareness of the ways in which we take in the world around us. If you were to shut your eyes and remove your keys from a pocket or purse this moment, could you describe what a key feels like in a way that would be understood by a person who came from a country in which keys were not used?

What have you observed or felt about your keys? If I handed keys to you, by what signs would you know that they were yours and not someone else’s? Not knowing our keys from keys that are similar is symbolic of our neglect of our senses. We deprive ourselves and our readers. Most writers use sight and some conventional sounds, and little else. This
chapter, then, is a course in enrichment of your sensory awareness, and through that awareness an enrichment of your writing.

Is the sound a cat makes
meow
or
mrkneow!
James Joyce, who had an acute ear, used
mrkneow.
Some people contend that the vocabulary of cats is extensive. There’s no point to your using Joyce’s sound or the cliché
meow.
Listen to your cat and see if you can’t come up with something that your readers will recognize but perhaps will never have seen in print before.

Do we listen closely? Is the sound made by a baseball being hit
thwack
or
crack!
Or some other?

There are clichés for most common sounds. I hope to persuade you to describe sounds not in clichés but as you hear them after careful listening. Some of my students have come up with wonderfully original sounds that enhance their work. A young child at the piano:
bonk, bonk, bonk. Or the whump of two automobiles coming together.

Sound, of course, is not continuous. It is interrupted by pauses, by momentary silences, the absence of sound that makes music possible. Let’s look at an extreme instance of the use of sound in Jerzy Kosinski’s
The Painted Bird.
In it, you may recall, a ten-year-old boy who is abandoned by his parents in Europe during World War II wanders through a nightmare of savagery and love in which he loses the ability to speak because in speaking he might give himself away. After the war, at the end of the book, a skiing accident lands the protagonist in the hospital, where something wonderful happens to his long silence:

[I] was about to lie down when the phone rang. The nurse had already gone, but the phone rang insistently again and again.

I pulled myself out of bed and walked to the table. I lifted up the receiver and heard a man’s voice.

I held the receiver to my ear, listening to his impatient words, somewhere at the other end of the wire there was someone, perhaps a man like myself, who wanted to talk with me. ... I had an overpowering desire to speak. Blood flooded my brain and my eyeballs swelled for a moment, as though trying to pop out onto the floor.

I opened my mouth and strained. Sounds crawled up my throat. Tense and concentrated I started to arrange them into syllables and words. I distinctly heard them jumping out of me one after another, like peas from a split pod. I put the receiver aside, hardly believing it possible. I began to recite to myself words and sentences, snatches
of Mitka’s songs. The voice lost in a faraway village church had found me again and filled the whole room. I spoke loudly and incessantly like the peasants and then like the city folk, as fast as I could, enraptured by the sounds that were heavy with meaning, as wet snow is heavy with water, confirming to myself again and again and again that speech was now mine and that it did not intend to escape through the door which opened onto the balcony.

The universe of sound available to the writer extends from a simple
bonk, bonk, bonk
to Kosinski’s protagonist rediscovering his ability to speak.

Humans see the world. Other animals smell it. Watch a cat investigating anything new, a surrounding, a possible food. It leads with its nose, just as its larger sisters in the jungle do. Cats and other animals define the world first by smell. In some human cultures, the sense of smell is treated as if it were an unwelcome adjunct to the “good” senses, fit only to be deodorized or perfumed.

For the writer, the sense of smell provides opportunity. It is important not only to be aware of and use smells, but to be accurate in rendering them. Rubber bands have a marked odor. An old book smells musty. Unseen wind has a smell. If you don’t smell anything, what might you smell? A single flower in an imagined vase on your desk?

What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.

That’s the first sentence of a short story by Charles Baxter called “The Disappeared” from the
Michigan Quarterly Review.

A writer can use the sense of smell to good effect in many ways, for instance, to help a reader experience a setting:

I could tell we were coming to the kitchen. The odor of fresh-baked bread drifted into the hallway like an invitation to follow where it led.

Smell can be used to establish a relationship:

Malcolm came through the back door, the football in the crook of his arm, his sweatshirt emblazoned with a dark butterfly of sweat. He put the football down, and positioned his arms around me. I closed my eyes and could smell the earth of the playing field and what I had come to think of as the aroma of his presence.

Characterization can benefit from the use of smell:

Sally fluttered in, enveloped in her newest perfume.

This tells us that Sally habitually uses too much perfume. Smell can also be used to establish atmosphere:

Down and down we went. I stopped counting the stairs. The dank smell told me we were well below ground.

Or this:

Terry glanced skyward and sampled a lungful of the chilled air. The universe smelled fresh, as if everything could now start over.

The absence of smell is also useful to a writer:

“They’ve bred the smell out of roses,” Gloria said. “Don Juans are my favorite climbers because their touch is velvet and the rose breeders haven’t robbed them of their smell. Yet.”

A gifted young woman named Ketti McCormick was briefly a student of mine some time after she had lost her sight. She still continued to see colors, not those in her field of vision but those refractions of colors previously seen that remained inside her head. Her contact with the external world, like that of other blind people, was now mainly through the sense of touch, which most of us neglect. Ketti once had trusted her eyes to keep her out of danger. She had to develop a greater sense of trust in others that they would not leave things in her path that she might trip over. She was angry at males who left the toilet seat up.

A blind person surmises how I might look by feeling my face. Try that some time. Blindfold yourself and have someone brought into the room whom you haven’t met before and who wouldn’t mind if you found out what they looked like by touching his or her face. You might describe each feature—nose, cheeks, forehead, ears, chin, hair—and have someone write your descriptions down. Then, with the blindfold off, look closely at the person and at your description, and offer an apology for your probable inaccuracy. You are in all likelihood deficient in your use of the sense of touch, as we all are. It would benefit our writing greatly to improve how we see with the ends of our fingers.

There’s a way to do it. And you won’t need a cooperative new acquaintance, just the blindfold, though it might help to have a friend or family member around to empty the contents of your purse or pocket on a table after you are blindfolded. Feel each object with your fingertips, describing it as best you can as if to someone from another planet who wouldn’t know what those strange objects are that you carry everywhere you go. You can’t say a credit card feels like plastic. You have to particularize. That exercise alone can work wonders in letting you experience your sense of touch:

As soon as they came in from the cold, Eric reached into his pocket for a slim metal tube and brought it to his lips. He realized that he hadn’t uncapped it even before he heard Sheila laugh. He pulled the cap off the tube, turned its base to bring the waxy plug up higher, and rubbed it first across his top lip, and then his bottom lip.

In the example, the sense of touch fortifies the characterization of Eric as absent-minded, an improvement over the author intruding to tell the reader that.

Does the handshake of an athlete feel the same as the handshake of a wimp? Does the hand of a child feel the same as the hand of a seventy-year-old? Does the surface of every wooden chair feel the same? What does water feel like when it is too hot? What does your favorite cat or dog feel like when you are petting it? Would you dare write a love scene omitting the sense of touch?

Your writing can only gain if you attempt to use the sense of touch at least once in every scene.

That imaginary guest from another planet can also be useful to you in cultivating your ability to describe what you taste. Your guest has never experienced the kind of food you are eating. See if, from memory, you can describe in detail the foods that you tasted in the last meal you ate. Your guest has never heard of bran flakes or strawberries. You’ll have to invent similes and metaphors to tell your guest what they taste like. It’s not an easy exercise, but it will accelerate your skill as a sensuous writer. You wouldn’t feed cardboard meals to guests. Don’t feed cardboard meals to your characters. Make your reader’s taste buds pop, even if he’s from outer space.

* * *

We speak of a “sixth sense” as a sensation we cannot identify with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting, but which we know is there. “It” can be anything imagined or real, a person or a higher power. Some people refer to the phenomenon as extrasensory perception, or ESP. A writer can make excellent use of a “sixth sense” in mainline fiction as well as in mystery and suspense fiction. You are alone in the house, and you hear a door close. Is it the wind? But there is no wind inside the house.

An exercise to develop your sixth sense is worth trying. Close your eyes. Imagine who is in the room with you. Turn all the lights on. There’s no one here. Good. You can relax. Is your watch ticking louder than usual, or are you imagining it? Why is today different from other days, what is supposed to happen? Why isn’t the phone ringing? If it does ring, who will it be? Close your eyes again. Are you sure someone isn’t in the room with you? What if you’re wrong? What if it’s ... ?

It doesn’t take much for you to feed your hungry imagination. Through practice, you can establish a link between your imagination and the so-called sixth sense.

I’ve left the most important sense, sight, for last because it is the one least neglected by writers. Yet improving your eyesight, sharpening your ability to describe the visual, can be productive.

The first thing you see is usually a cliché. We see the tall man, the attractive woman, the room full of people, the clean-cut lawn. These are the easy images that leap to mind. The writer’s job is to look for distinguishing detail, the particularity, in visualizing what his reader is to see: the man whose wavy hair wouldn’t stay under his cap; the woman who looked ready to shout at just about anyone, the partygoers jammed together as if they were on a crowded subway train; the virgin lawn that looked as if it had never been walked upon.

Ideally, the writer sees something that everybody will recognize but that no one has seen quite that way before.

A technique used too seldom involves changing the sense:

Zalatnick led me into the shop not as if I was a fellow looking for a job but as if I was a friend of a friend. I was sure the men in the shop could smell the difference.

“Smell” isn’t meant to be taken literally. Switching the sense from seeing to smelling creates a metaphor that gets the point across to the reader quickly.

Here’s how one might use each of the six senses to characterize players in a story:

Gloria kept wrinkling her nose as if she were trying to sniff the truth of what everyone was saying to her. (smell)

Greg knew that his handshake hurt people. (touch)

On the phone Mary’s voice was like music. I couldn’t hear the words, but I knew what she meant. (hearing)

Lucille shielded her eyes like a make-believe Indian examining the horizon. (sight)