Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (11 page)
Authors: Lisa Cron
Brilliant, isn’t it, the way George uses a mundane event like deciding to make jambalaya as the leaping off point into the heart of a decidedly different matter? Notice how she does it by giving us a ride on Kerra’s train of thought as it pulls out of grounded reality and heads into metaphor, where microwaving people sounds like
a good idea. Notice, too, how we instinctively know that it’s not George who is asking these questions but Kerra herself. In fact, both the “she decided” and the “she wondered” could be eliminated, and we’d still know.
Often, a character’s thoughts help establish voice and tone, thus setting the mood—beginning on the very first page. Here is the second paragraph of Anita Shreve’s
The Pilot’s Wife
. All we know thus far is that the protagonist, Kathryn, has been awakened before dawn.
The lit room alarmed her, the wrongness of it, like an emergency room at midnight. She thought in quick succession: Mattie. Then, Jack. Then, Neighbor. Then, Car accident. But Mattie was in bed, wasn’t she? Kathryn had seen her to bed, had watched her walk down the hall and through a door, the door shutting with a firmness that was just short of a slam, enough to make a statement but not provoke a reprimand. And Jack—where was Jack? She scratched the sides of her head, raking out her sleep-flattened hair. Jack was—where? She tried to remember the schedule: London. Due home around lunchtime. She was certain. Or did she have it wrong and had he forgotten his keys again?
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Notice how every fact in that attention-grabbing paragraph has meaning that compounds in light of each new detail. In other words, it adds up. What emerges is a candid portrait of Kathryn, her family life, and how she processes information as she struggles to quell the growing suspicion that something is very wrong. It’s not just her thoughts, which are very simple, but her thought pattern—staccato, ragged, confused—that drives the scene forward. The minimal tags Shreve gives us—“She thought in quick succession,” “She tried to remember the schedule”—serve to highlight the thoughts themselves, establishing a style, and a voice, that is fresh, compelling, and hard to resist.
But is a tag really necessary? Do we need the author to tell us that we’ve slipped out of the narrative voice and into the character’s head? Nope. In this snippet from Elmore Leonard’s
Freaky Deaky
, there is no tag or signifier at all:
Robin watched him drink his wine and refill the glass. Poor little guy, he needed a mommy. She reached out and touched his arm. “Mark?” Felt his muscle tighten and took that as a good sign.
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Is there any doubt that it’s Robin, rather than Leonard, who sees Mark as a poor little guy in need of a mommy? Yet there are no quotation marks, no italics, no “she thought,” “wondered,” “realized,” or “mused.” There is nothing at all in the text that flags this as Robin’s opinion. Why? Because none is needed. We get it. Just as we understand that it’s Robin’s
opinion
that Mark’s muscle tightening is a good sign. As far as Leonard is concerned, she could be totally wrong—which is one of the things that keeps us reading. We want to find out.
Notice that, as when writing in first person, a character in third person can’t make a definitive statement about how anyone else feels or what they’re about to do. Just as in life, characters can only assume. And very often that assumption then tells us something about the character making it, as evinced by Selevan and his self-possessed goth granddaughter, Tammy, again from
Careless in Red
:
She nodded thoughtfully, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she was about to twist his words and use them against him as she seemed only too expert at doing.
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George is not telling us that Tammy
is
going to twist Selevan’s words. Rather, it’s
Selevan
who is drawing that inference from her expression. From this we learn three things: that he’s positive it will happen; that it might not; and, most revealing of all, that he feels she misunderstands just about everything he says. So since
Careless in Red
is written in third-person omniscient, if George wanted to make it clear that Tammy has, in fact, not misunderstood Selevan, could she reveal it in the next sentence by taking us into Tammy’s head?
No, she couldn’t, because that would be committing the sin known as “head hopping.”
No matter whose point of view you’re writing in, you may be in only one head per scene. Thus, since George began the scene in Selevan’s head, there she must stay. Why? Because switching POV in the middle of a scene is often so jarring it instantly breaks the flow. It looks something like this:
Ann paced, wondering when Jeff would snap out of it and tell her what happened. Had he finally told his wife Michelle about them? Why did he look so heartbroken? She wanted it to be a good thing, but try as she might, she couldn’t come up with a single hopeful reason why he would sit hunched in the corner of the couch, staring at the frayed rug that, she realized, was in dire need of cleaning. When she could stand it no longer, she turned to him, “Jeff, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She knows, Jeff thought. I can feel it. Sure, I told Michelle about her. Who knew she’d laugh and say, “Go ahead, run off with that loser. I bet she’s the kind of woman who has a houseful of dirty rugs.” I’ve been such a fool. But how do I tell Ann it’s over? Maybe if I just sit here and stare at the rug, she’ll figure it out. Women are pretty intuitive that way, aren’t they?
When Jeff didn’t answer, Ann’s heart sank. It could mean only one thing: he’d told Michelle, and she’d mentioned that dirty rug thing again. She’s been obsessed with it, ever since she opened that rug cleaning business back in March. God, Jeff is such a fool!
Disorienting, isn’t it? So why do writers do it? Because they see it as the only way to convey information that is crucial to the scene. But is it? Not exactly. There is, in fact, a language that speaks louder than words. Let’s have a listen, shall we?
Imagine you’re walking down the street; you turn a corner, and two blocks up you see a figure ambling away. Although from behind it could be anyone, you instantly recognize your best friend. How? By his gait.
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Welcome to the world of body language.
Body language is the one language it’s impossible to really lie in. As Steven Pinker says, “Intentions come from emotions, and emotions have evolved displays on the face and body. Unless you are a master of the Stanislavsky method, you will have trouble faking them; in fact, they probably evolved
because
they were hard to fake.”
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In other words, body language is the first thing we humans learned to decode, because even back in the Stone Age we knew that what a person grunts and what he really means might be two very different things.
The same is true of your protagonist. In a story, the goal is to show us how a character really feels—especially when there’s a big discrepancy between what he
wants
to say and what he
can
say—through his body language. The most common mistake writers make is using body language to tell us something we already know. If we know Ann is sad, why would we need a paragraph describing what she looks like when she’s crying? Rather, body language should tell us something we
don’t
know. At its most effective, it tells us what’s really going on inside the character’s head. This is why body language works best when it’s at odds with what’s happening—either by telling us something that the character doesn’t want known
Ann pretends to be completely calm but can’t stop her right foot from nervously jittering.
… or by dashing a character’s expectations:
Ann expects Jeff to be glad he’s finally left Michelle; instead, he sits there, hunched, staring mournfully at the embarrassingly dirty rug.
We feel Ann’s pain, because the author made sure we already knew what she expected—that Jeff would return grinning, with luggage. Instead, he’s come back frowning, with baggage. Unless we’re aware of
both
what Ann wants and what she then gets instead, all the body language in the world will be rendered mute. This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often writers forget to let us know what a character
hopes
will happen, so that when it doesn’t, we have no idea their expectations have been dashed.
With that in mind, let’s revisit Ann and Jeff, this time using body language to convey the information:
Finally, when she could stand it no longer, Ann turned to him. “Jeff, what is it? What’s wrong? Did you tell Michelle about us or not?”
Jeff said nothing, slouching further into the sagging couch, eyes downcast as Ann paced back and forth with such force that dust flew from the mangy rug. She saw him glance at her face, his eyes quickly darting away, and quickened her stride.
Ann’s heart sank; she knew Michelle must have mentioned the dirty rug thing again. Why else would he just sit there, staring at the damn carpet, the coward. He was probably waiting for her to figure it out and send him packing. Jeff’s such a fool, she thought. I’m better off without him.
In this version, even though we don’t hear the exact details of what Michelle said to Jeff, Ann’s insights go a long way toward filling us in on their dynamic. And see how clearly we understood what Jeff was thinking simply by reading his body language? Since we know what Ann wants (Jeff), and what she’s realizing she’s not going to get (Jeff), her body language told us what was going on in her head as she paced. Just as Jeff’s body language reveals his reaction to hers. It is purely visual. It works because, story-wise, we know what it means, emotionally, to both of them. Otherwise, the scene would be opaque. Sure, we’d know something intense is going on between them, but we’d have no idea what.
But wait. Instead of all that, couldn’t you just leap in and tell the reader how they’re feeling? And while you’re at it, give us the heads-up on who’s right and who’s being a little bit of a jerk? I mean, what if the reader gets it wrong?
And that brings us to another common pitfall: editorializing. It’s what writers resort to when they don’t trust the reader to get it.
Make
us feel, and believe me, we’ll know who’s right and who’s probably not.
Tell
us what to feel, on the other hand, and what we’ll feel is bullied. That’s why when you’re checking to make sure you’ve conveyed how the action affects the protagonist, you want to resist the urge to jump in and take it a step further, by telling the reader what to think or feel about it as well. Editorializing is perfectly fine in a newspaper (remember those?) op-ed piece, where the whole
point
is to tell readers what you believe they should think or feel. In a story, telling readers what to feel not only annoys them but pushes them right out of the story. The reader’s goal is to experience the story on her own terms, not to have it explained to her or be herded toward a specific hard-and-fast conclusion. This even applies to something as seemingly benign as exclamation
points. They’re almost always distracting! Really!! What’s worse, they pull the reader’s brain right out of the story by giving her an overt order rather than trusting the story to trigger her reaction all by itself.
So if you want us to think that John’s a bad guy, show him doing bad things. It’s just like in life: Imagine your coworker Vicky is telling you about her next-door neighbor, whom you’ve never met. “That John,” she says. “He’s such a jerk; he’s the most self-centered, unscrupulous man I’ve ever met.” Now, even though this may be an absolutely accurate assessment of John, because you don’t know him, nor do you have any idea what Vicky’s basing
her
assessment on, you have no way of knowing whether it’s true. But you
have
been listening to Vicky rant on and on about how awful he is. And it sounded sort of bitter. So now you’re wondering what she did to make John into such a meanie. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of her intent.
But if, instead of telling you how to feel about him, Vicky tells you that John steals from his grandmother, shoves past everyone on the train, and spits in his boss’s coffee, you’ll not only agree with her, but you might dislike John even more than she does.
Your job is not to judge your characters, no matter how despicable or wonderful they may be. Your job is to lay out what happens, as clearly and dispassionately as possible, show how it affects the protagonist, and then get the hell out of the way. The irony is, the less you tell us how to feel, the more likely we’ll feel exactly what you want us to. We’re putty in your hands as long as you let us think we’re making up our own mind. That’s why, as omniscient narrator, it’s probably not a good idea to write this:
“I don’t think I can marry you Sam,” said Emily, in that condescendingly bitchy way women who think they’re better than men all seem to have.
Sure, if this were a first-person narrative told by a bitter protagonist named Sam, it would be spot-on. However, if this is the author
talking, he is probably telling us a wee bit more about himself than he intends. Which—not to frighten you—is par for the course. As Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, who knew a thing or two about dancing with the devil, said: “Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.”
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Which means it might be time to reexamine that old stalwart: “Write what you know.”