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Is this obvious? Can I cite someone as saying this?
Jay says something like, don't tell the reader what the main character is feeling, make the reader feel it too. One standard way is to hope the reader gets absorbed in the scene. One is to hope the reader has empathy for the main character.
But a third is just to have the reader experience the same thing as the character. If it is a surprising, amazing moment for the character, we set up the scene so it's a surprising, amazing moment for the reader.
If the author tells me the surprise is coming, I can still replay the scene in my head and see how the character would have been surprised. But I don't get that feeling as I read.
And, in a lesser way, we do this with grammar.
He runs his hands up her smooth sides -- she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch -- and beneath the inside-out shirt. (King, Mr. Mercedes)
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Here's what Dight Swain had to say about one part of that:
quote:When a character excites and fascinates a reader, said reader wants to read about him...experience with him.
Or, as an editor would phrase it, the reader identifies with Jack or Susie.
If your characters don’t thus intrigue readers, your stories won’t sell. Therefore, it’s worth your while to learn how to inject the elements that excite and fascinate, just in case they fail to develop spontaneously as you characterize by ear.
How do you persuade your reader to identify?
You shackle him to the character with chains of envy.
That is, you make the character someone who does what your reader would like to do, yet can’t. You establish him as the kind of person Reader would like to be like . . . a figure to envy.
Further, and no matter what you may have heard to the contrary, Reader identifies with every truly successful character, not just one per story.
Why?
Because envy knows no limits. You may envy one man his wealth, another his poise, a third his success with women. In one way or another, in one degree or another, consciously or unconsciously, and whether you admit it or not, you envy a host of other writers their achievements. The fact that you focus on one in particular at a given moment doesn’t mean that you can’t feel just as strongly about another, instants later.
And:
quote:Worst of all to be’s forms is the past perfect tense. You can recognize it by the word had—a red flag of danger in your story every time.
For had describes not just a static state, but a static state in the past: “He had traveled far that day:” “I never had realized how much I loved her.”
Each had makes your story jerk, because it jars your reader out of present action and throws him back into past history. Perhaps the jerk is only momentary, as when a lazy writer sticks in a bit of exposition: “John stared at her. He had always wondered why she took the attitude she did. Now, she left him no choice but to force the issue.”
Here the jerk, the shift backward, is hardly noticeable. But throw in enough such, enough hads, and your story grinds to an aching, quaking halt. Forward movement stops. Your reader finds himself bogged down in history.
This is the kiss of death. No one can change what’s already happened. To waste story time on it is, at best, an irritation. What your reader wants is present action—events that have consequences for the future; characters shaping their own destinies. If he doesn’t get this sense of forward movement, he turns to another, more skillfully written yarn.
But isn’t past history sometimes vital in developing your story? Of course. We’ll discuss how best to handle it when we deal with flashback techniques in Chapter 4. For now—get out your blue pencil and eliminate those hads! At least, eliminate as many as possible, within the bounds of common sense. Sure, you’ll need some for legitimate purposes: as transitional words to help you move in and out of the aforementioned flashback situations, for example.
In other cases, however, simple rephrasings will solve the problem.
Thus, a few paragraphs ago, we mentioned that one John “had always wondered,” and so on. Yet the line would read better--and cut the offending had—if we said, “Why did she take the attitude she did? It was time to get to the root of it.”
In general, the trick is to bring the past forward into the present, so that you describe what happens in past tense instead of past perfect.
To that end, translate recollection into action, or link the two tightly together. If your heroine once had loved your hero, make that fact an issue in the here-and-now: “He held her shoulders rigid. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘You’re being ridiculous!’ ‘You used to. At least, you said you did.’”
Or perhaps:
“Her eyes were still the same, Ed decided. Her eyes, and her mouth. “Thoughtfully, he wondered how she might react if he tried to kiss her, the way he did that long-gone night there by the river.”
A little practice on this kind of thing works wonders. Try it!
Thre's a lot more, obviously, but for that you need the book. Still, what he's really saying is to place the reader into the protagonist's viewpoint instead of talking about them.
Hope this clarifies.
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To me, Swain is giving the two standard techniques: Keeping the reader absorbed in the story and having the reader identify with the main character. Both important.
Mine is a third. The argument might be tedious.
Roughly, telling the reader what will happen in a scene (such as that he attacks her) doesn't ruin any empathy/identification.
It in a sense puts that scene in the past, but there are a lot of ways of doing that which don't ruin the scene in the same specific way that specific information does.
The reason it spoils is that the reader cannot have an experience parallel to the character. So that (usually) spoils tension and surprise.
I came up with this idea trying to explain to people why telling the future was a spoiler. (Arguing really -- I had expected that to be obvious.)
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posted
A lot of quoting up there - much more than 13 lines, but I think I'll let it pass. Compared to the full wordage of Swain's book, it should count as fair usage.
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Swain and Bickham's books and Writers Digest Elements of Fiction Writing properties permit "brief" reproduction passages for reviews only. Otherwise, reproduction wants express written permission from the publisher. Plus, Fair Use wants explicit citation: writer full name, book title, and page numbers of cites, at least. ---- "He runs his hands up her smooth sides -- she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch -- and beneath the inside-out shirt." (Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes, 2014. Pocket Books, mass market paperback, pg 284: Scribner, hardcover, pg 182.)
The scene of that cite is complex. Hodges and Janey develop a romantic entanglement while Hodges investigates Janey's sister's car theft and gaslighted suicide.
If the concern is the cite telegraphs a love scene -- the scene's true imports are sexual tension relief and setup of later events, and further characterization of the couple as desperate, dysfunctional, lonely ships that meet at sea. I do not see how that spoils, nor how readers cannot have a relatable experience for romance.
The novel is part mystery, part thriller, and part romance. The scene is an obligatory feature of romance, though early at about the late third-way word count, which implies later substantial transformation of the romance, and apt and timely due to subsequent events that further motivate Hodges. Not Hodges attack on Janey, rather Janey seduces Hodges and overcomes Hodges' reluctance for the events. The scene develops Hodges and Janey's mutual affections and which enhances tension's empathy facet for readers before a later untelegraphed surprise reversal.
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posted
Sorry, I was unclear. PaG is just supplemental to my main idea, but to try to be clear:
"He runs his hands up her smooth sides -- she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch -- and beneath the inside-out shirt."
He almost certainly doesn't expect her tiny jump. And we don't expect King to interrupt his sentence like that. They are both only a tiny interruption. For both, the action continues smoothly once the disruption is noted.
So King gave the reader a punctuation and grammar experience that paralleled what the main character was experiencing.
BTW, using PaG for that seems unusual for King, but common enough elsewhere. There are a lot of ways to do it, but that particular technique again, from an author who does that well:
quote:He nodded and squeezed her hand once more. Then disentangled his fingers from her to pick up the wine glass and -- "Take me to bed." -- swallowed it down the wrong pipe. (Written in Fire, Sakey, page 85 of trade)
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The punctuation and syntax of the King cite is less than the more potent rhetoric uses: catacosmesis and auxesis, and interruption figures anacoluthon, aposiopesis, appositio, hyperbaton, and parenthesis.
The cite recast per standard grammar:
//Beneath the inside-out shirt, he runs his hands up her smooth sides. She gives a tiny jump at his initial touch.// Or //He runs his hands up her smooth sides and beneath the inside-out shirt. She gives a tiny jump at his initial touch.// (Ibid)
The former entails the appositive phrase first, an implied present tense participle (reaching or similar elided [elision]); the latter, the appositive phrase is cast in natural, standard grammar syntax. King's leaves that appositio phrase last for maximum force emphasis.
Those above lose auxesis force, and catacosmesis' chronology emphasis is lost, foremost. The other figures are interruption variants, and only dashes are apt for the interruption's situation, therefore; parentheses, a distant maybe perhaps. Otherwise, the nested independent clause is a grammar error and then would be a "head hop," in fan fiction parlance. Formal composition would want standard grammar and a separate paragraph for Janey's reaction to Hodges' touch.
"swallowed _it_ down the wrong pipe." (Ibid) Entails a pronoun-subject antecedent error and a syntax expletive.
Each cite is patently stream of consciousness' nonstandard grammar uses. And both are distinct in that those streams are from outsider, nearby, invisible bystander narrator viewpoints, as much writer filtered as narrator filtered stream of consciousness.
The method is the middle distance third-person narrator narrative point of view common to novel-length multiple-persona psychic access narratives and cinematic interpretations, for greatest selective omniscience and selective omnipresence flexibility. King's is simple present tense; Marcus Sakey's, simple past tense. King's is somewhat more subjective and immediate to the moment, therefore, of greater appeal potential due to the tense.
However, prose's simple past tense is a metaphoric substitute for simple present and is of a somewhat stronger objectivity than present tense's greater subjectivity. The present tense of King's passage does artfully emphasize the uncertainty of the sexual tension relief scene and intimates that the scene's imports come to bear later.
For what it's worth, a personal reaction to side rib tickles is natural and inevitable, for many. The syntax interruption is a surprise and for emphasis, though, again, natural chronology, even if nonstandard syntax.
posted
So it would work like this. The author says,
I'm going to be hit by a car in four hours, but I don't know that yet. (There Will Be Lies, Lake)
So I know something the main character doesn't. So I don't experience any of the events the way she does, until the car hits her. For example, I felt dread and worry when she did not.
So I can't experience her life, I'm stuck in mine.
I really didn't like that start, even though it otherwise was exactly what I would like. I think I was happy when a car finally hit her.
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