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[dragonyphoenix]

This is a writing exercise I tried the other day. Forgive the cludgy text I wrote; they are early drafts.

 

I'm reading John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist and come across this:

“One of the best eyes in recent fiction belongs to the novelist David Rhodes. Look closely at the following:

The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their gray Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands. ...

The first visual detail in this passage, the abstractly introduced pot-luck dinner, is not especially remarkable: anyone dealing with this culture might have thought of it, and Rhodes doesn't dwell on it, though it's worth including as a quick way of characterizing Della and Wilson Montgomery. The “gray Chevrolet” is a little more specific, with its useful connotations of drabness, humble normality; but it's with the next image that Rhodes begins to bear down: Della waving, Wilson “leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands.” The image of Wilson, though not extraordinary, is specific and vivid; we recognize that we're dealing with a careful author, one worth our trust. We see more than that Wilson leans over the wheel and steers with both hands: we see, for some reason, the expression on his face, something about his age; we know, without asking ourselves how we know, that he's wearing a hat. (Hints of his nearsightedness, nerviousness, age, and culture lead us to unconscious generalization.) In other words, by selecting the right detail, the writer subtly suggests others; the telling detail tells us more than it says.” NB: I added the italics.

 

I decided to try it myself. I took a character I created and tried to see what might be telling details and then rewrite the description. Here's my original description (and keep in mind this was a first draft so it wasn't worked to be good yet):

The wind was picking up, but the woman didn't notice. She was staring through a window into a restaurant. Inside was well lit, the kind of place people went to be seen, but there were also candles on the tables. The men wore suits. The women were dressed in a variety of trendy outfits, the kind of clothes the woman had never felt comfortable in, the kind of clothes she no longer had an occasion to wear. The man she was staring at was holding up a glass of champagne, clinking his glass to that of his partner, an almost-girl twenty years younger than the woman.

 

She felt a hand on her arm. The woman looked to see the maitre 'd standing next to her, out there in the night. “I am sorry, but I must ask you to leave.” He didn't recognize her. She could tell. A month earlier he'd been joking with her while she and her husband were waiting to be seated, and now he didn't know her.

 

“Of course,” she said. And now she wrapped her jacket more tightly as she walked down the dark street.

 

Next I did a bit of clustering (you can do a web search on “clustering writing technique” to get a definition) using the character's name, Molly, as my starting point:

And then I rewrote the description:

Standing in the street as the wind in the night cooled the air around her, Molly Sennett's gaze had a hungry edge as she stared into the restaurant. While her jacket, a light lavender in color, would lead the uninitiated to think Molly fit into the world behind the window, Anya could tell, even without being interested in current fashion, that the jacket was a few years out-of-date. Based on the couples inside the restaurant, the jeans alone would have kept her out. The sneakers, worn and dirty, were a definite mismatch.

 

When someone stepped out of the restaurant, both obsequious and condescending at the same time, to tell Molly to move on, her response, “Of course,” while perfectly clear, reminded Anya of the whine of a puppy that had been kicked too many times.

 

I definitely prefer the second description, but the original was a first draft, meaning I'd be rewriting it at least once before I thought it was good. Still, I like how her clothes, dressiest at top and most disheveled at the bottom, reflect a descent into poverty, and I would not thought of giving her a whine to her voice without the clustering. While the resulting paragraphs do need some rework to get rid of the kludgeness, I do like the images I came up with. All-in-all, I think this worked well.

Comments

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

I'm really big into the clustering thing at the moment. I got it from a book my Dad got for me (Writing the Natural Way by Gabrielle Rico).