What's your secret?

In his book On Writing, Sol Stein urges authors to dig deep into characters’ lives. He suggests that we imagine a photograph our character may have hidden in his or her wallet, a photograph that person doesn’t want to share with the world. An Achilles heel, it reveals a vulnerability that may be masked with denial and lies.

Word count: 433                                 Reading time: 1-2 minutes

He says the secret doesn’t even have to make it onto the page; it only has to be woven into the character’s identity and motivations. To Stephen Sondheim this unsaid quality must be both clear and mysterious which is a harder balance to strike: Narrative art must be clear, but it must also be mysterious. Something should remain unsaid, something just beyond our understanding, a secret. If it’s only clear, it’s kitsch; if it’s only mysterious (a much easier path), it’s condescending and pretentious and soon monotonous.

Sondheim describes the feeling I have when I close a good book and wish there was someone I could discuss it with. That’s the driving force behind book clubs and sites like goodreads. These groups exist for readers who have sucked through the hard candy coating and sunk their teeth into the soft chewy centre of the Tootsie Roll. The best is yet to come. With unanswered questions and varying perspectives they share and clarify their interpretations of stories. Writers who want to attract strong readers must offer complex characters and plots that will stand up to this scrutiny.

Can’t think of any good clues to your character’s behaviour? Visit Post Secret, a community mail art project where you can read what people willingly offer for public contemplation. It features handmade postcards that express people’s hidden longings, fears, and confessions in eloquent language and images.

Recent examples:

• I’m thankful for the difficult people in my life. They have showed me exactly who I don’t want to be
• I speak English….bitch (written over images of cleaning tools: mop, bucket, scrub brush)
• some of my best traits have terrifying origins
• come home (around the picture of a pretty young woman)
• my family would be shocked to know I am a grandma with a secret life. I’m having a long time lesbian affair with my best friend

You don’t have to copy what you find on Post Secret but these bared souls may stir the creative juices. Perhaps an element of your character’s hidden life is waiting to be discovered there.

What secrets do you know about your current characters? What are they hiding from the world? How does it manifest itself in their behaviour?

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Photo from: Wikimedia Commons

Am I repeating myself?

When we lived in Australia, megabats used to fly over our house just after sunset. The grey-headed flying foxes had wingspans of up to a metre. In winter they sometimes flew 150 kilometres in a single night to forage for food. We often sat on our deck and watched the aerial parade.

Word count: 450                  Reading time 1-2 mins.

So when I saw dictionary.com’s Word Of The Day on Tuesday, battology, it was love at first syllable. Its meaning (the wearisome repetition of words in speaking or writing) was even more endearing and I’ve claimed it as a personal pet.

My rough drafts are littered with battologies. As I revise, I have to keep my eyes peeled for oft-repeated verbs, adjectives, and sometimes even entire phrases. I’m not saying these sins don’t exist in my final drafts, just that I try to minimize them.

I’ve certainly seen the same problem in other people’s work. I read a novel recently where several of the main characters used the idiom anyways. If only one used that expression, it might have been what Sol Stein calls a character marker. (Stein on Writing, Chapter Five, Markers: the Key to Swift Characterization). That is, it might have revealed that character’s social background and maybe even education level. However, when three characters from different parts of the country and different social backgrounds used it, it became a battology.

Once I read a mystery novel by a well-known English writer who used the word portent and portentous three times in the first fifty pages or so. That’s not an everyday kind of word, at least not in the world of the people being portrayed. It was the author’s vocabulary decorating the story, repetitively.

In the five months I have read two bestselling novels by the same author almost back-to-back. Both of her protagonists used Tom of Maine’s toothpaste. This detail leapt out at me in the first book because I had been looking at that very product in a health store the week before. When the second protagonist used the same brand, it slipped from being a character marker to being author repetition.

These three examples all had the same effect: they made me aware that I was reading someone’s writing. They stopped the story, at least for a minute or so. In the first case, I started speed-reading to get to the end of the book. I no longer believed.

The nightly fly-by of megabats past our Sydney home was comforting in its predictability but that’s not good fiction. Predictability kills a good story. If writers repeat themselves, they can ruin the magic they are spinning.

How do you avoid repetition? Have you ever encountered a battology that threw you out of a story?

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Livingston’s Fruit Bat by Ben Charles