Unheimlich Maneuvers

In the strong belief that one of the major steps a beginning writer has to take in order to progress is to learn to create a strong, effective settings, I have begun my creative writing class this semester with a discussion of setting, why it’s important, and how to create one. For their first exercise, I’ve asked my students to write a two-page description of setting, or a one-page poem.

The exercise looks simple, but it’s not. Apart from a few students who had recently taken a vacation, most of them complained that they found the exercise extremely difficult. “I didn’t know what to write about,” was the most general complaint, of course. That’s why setting is a struggle for the beginner; we don’t see the places we inhabit. We take them for granted, and so, when we write, we skip them.

This is bad, of course, because, as the old saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. A story or a poem with an absent or weak setting will feel “thin” even though the reader may not notice exactly what is missing. But how can you do a good job at recreating (or simply creating) something that you have trouble seeing yourself? The answer is that you must somehow learn to see again. You must perform, if you will, an unheimlich maneuver, learn to make the familiar unfamiliar.  The Freudian concept of the unheimlich or “the uncanny” is extremely useful in creating setting. Basically, it refers to something that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and therefore creeps you out. Think of those dreams where you’re in your house, only it’s not your house somehow. Something’s off, you can’t pin it down. You become obsessed with it; you notice every detail in the attempt to figure it out.

While you don’t want to make all your settings creepy, you do need that unheimlich ability to notice what you normally don’t. When we are constantly surrounded by familiar settings, our brains go on autopilot. You stop seeing the colors on the walls, you stop smelling the air freshener, you don’t hear the constant drone of the air conditioner. You only notice what is different—when something’s burning in the kitchen, for example. This is our brain’s way of conserving energy. Imagine noticing everything all the time—you’d be so overwhelmed with sensory information, you wouldn’t be able to do much.

What is good for our peace and productivity, however, is bad for our writing. We think there’s nothing to describe about our daily settings. Most of us live very dull lives. Home. School. Work. The gym. The mall. The same five or six settings, week after week after week. Every city has the same Target, the same CVS, the same broad avenue leading to a supermarket parking lot. Our worlds become invisible. When I actually make it to the beach, I feel like I’m on another planet. That’s why those students who had recently been on a vacation fared a little better, and why, when given the assignment to write about setting, we often reach for the latest unfamiliar experience like the latest vacation.

You can’t keep your characters on vacation all the time, however. In truth, our stories belong in our daily lives, in those five or six settings that are, well, boring. So, what to do? How can we create realistic settings and rich worlds without truly seeing them or boring the reader? About boring the reader, never you mind. We all have a strong voyeuristic impulse. Your house may be boring to you, but it’s super interesting to anyone else. Just think of the last time you were at a new friend’s house. You know you scanned the bookshelves and the music rack, the paintings and pictures. You peeked inside the medicine cabinet and behind the shower curtain when you went to the bathroom. All the mundane details of your new friend’s daily life—things that she or he probably hasn’t noticed for years—were of extreme interest to you.

So then only one problem remains: your ability to effectively write about something you have trouble seeing. Take a lesson from the makers of air fresheners and candles. Those air fresheners or candles that “cycle” between two fragrances know that the trick to putting your brain back in notice mode is change.

One good way to do this is to keep a journal in which you describe your daily settings daily. The proposition might seem boring, but you’d be surprised what the expectation of having to describe something will make you notice.

Some classic moves involve pretending to describe the place to an alien or a blind person. These don’t work very well, I think. The alien viewpoint makes everything seem, well, alien, and that’s not what you’d be going for in a regular realistic piece. The trick to a rich realistic setting, ironically, is to make it disappear. It’s holding everything together like a great pair of Spanx, but it’s not jumping out at you and overwhelming other aspects of the story. The alien viewpoint will do that. The blind guide viewpoint is a little better, because at least it’s human. The problem with the blind guide, however, is selection. The only way setting becomes boring is if it’s unnecessary, too much. Your blind pal might need to know the location of every piece of furniture in your living room in order to successfully navigate it, but your reader can’t really do anything with the fact that the sofa is at twelve o’clock and the armchair at three.

Additionally, the blind guide viewpoint makes you focus too much on visual detail, which is already a danger given that vision is our dominant sense. Same thing goes for the paint-your-setting idea. What you want is a selection of meaningful sensory detail.

The sensory part is easy. We’ve got five: sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Noticing these is a simple listing task. Sit in the place you want to describe (or close your eyes and imagine it), and spend a fixed amount of time on each sense, listing what you notice on a piece of paper. The result will be a meaningless collection of detail, but isolating each sense will help you notice what you need to.

The next step is to select and arrange the details on your list. First, determine the dominant impression you want to make. For example, if you want to convey a sense of tension, you might want to skip the smell of baking cookies that you genuinely noticed but doesn’t go with your goal. Cross out some things, add others.

These two preliminary steps are mostly mechanical, however, and won’t get you all the way to fantastic. The only way to get there is to step outside yourself and get to know the reader. You must be aware of the reader’s expectations, and play with that. These are the right “stranger’s eyes,” not the alien’s or the blind pal’s. Begin by asking yourself, what does the reader already know about this place? What doesn’t she?

One of the most difficult places to write about is the Caribbean, because people have so many expectations of it. Say so much as the word and immediately it conjures up palm trees, sandy beaches, and clear blue waters: clichés. One of the pieces I make my students read early is “The Caribbean, By a Nose,” a wonderful short piece by Jerry V. Haines. Haines does a good job of recognizing the reader’s expectations about palm trees and the like, and arranges his piece around unexpected details like trash fires and jitney exhaust. It’s a good lesson in “I bet you didn’t know” writing.

Ultimately, however, the best way to get to know the reader is to become one yourself. Reading about the Caribbean or Miami is a real hoot for me sometimes. I love it how Miami, for example, is always somehow Miami Beach. The pastel art deco hotels of Ocean Drive, the Miami Vice vision of the city, so predominate the global imagination that it’s as if the rest of the city doesn’t exist. In truth, Miami Beach is a separate city, and a small one at that. Reading about it, however, creates a really productive impulse in me to tell you what it’s really like, and that corrective desire can be awakening.

Research the places you intend to write about. For example, one intriguing piece I got from my students was a recollection of a visit to Portugal. She describes—quite well!—the delicious taste of samosas. To me, samosas are Indian food, and I’m dying to know about that colonial relationship, and how Indian culture is part of Portuguese culture these days. You may not know these things off the top of your head even if you’re Portuguese, but a little background history can really enrich your sense of a place, and ours.

Places, in other words, are not just sensory landscapes. The beginner forgets sometimes that places are an equation: land + people / time. Just like we are so used to our daily settings that we don’t see them, we often live in places so familiar to us that we don’t see or perhaps don’t know the historical changes that have made them. A great example of how knowing a place’s history can enrich your ability to write about it is Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem (yes, I’m stealing the example from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well). This is a great example of how to write about a place. Not only does Didion describe the physical landscape, but also she knows how the history of the place has shaped the lives of the people who live in it. Suddenly finding out that the city you’ve been living in for the past ten years was founded by mobsters can really make you see it with new eyes. There is always something interesting about places if you dig long enough.

But what if you’re writing about a completely made up place, or just one small room? Even galaxies far, far away have elements of the real in them, so knowing how real places work can help you build fake ones. As far as tiny rooms go, they too have tiny histories. How you decided to paint every wall a different color despite having only twenty square feet of living space, for example, because you couldn’t bear the thought of living with white walls. Conversely, the white walls that came with the apartment and that you never bothered to paint because you always thought you’d be moving “soon.” There’s no such thing as “nothing to write about” when it comes to setting. We don’t live in vacuums. We are always somewhere, even when we close our eyes, even in a sensory deprivation tank. Create a sense of attentiveness—learn to make the familiar new—and you will be surprised at how much you’ve been missing.

Top Mistakes Beginning Writers Make, Part I

It’s time to spruce up the syllabus for the new semester, and that means lots of thinking about the kind of students I’ll be teaching and what they need to learn. I teach an introductory course, so that means truly raw beginners—students who may never have attempted to write creatively before. Over the years, one comes to notice repeating struggles, and, since I’m into counting lately, I thought I’d compile a list of the top mistakes beginning writers make. At first I thought I’d distinguish between prose and poetry, but, as I compiled the list, I soon realized that there’s so much overlap that such a distinction would be misleading. So, what follows applies to all kind of writing, except for the few isolated only for poetry, and those only marginally.

1. Too much dialogue. Perhaps it’s the fact that we watch more movies than read books these days, and movies, as drama, rely on dialogue more than the short story or novel do, or at least seem to do so. In truth, movies that are too “talky” often bore people. My husband hated Before Sunrise, for example, because all Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy did was talk. I still love that movie, and even the sequel, Before Sunset. Great freaking dialogue, but also great characters and a great story, which is the point: the problem isn’t too much dialogue, but, rather, misusing dialogue to tell the story that would be better told through exposition, summary, or action. The beginning writer doesn’t quite know how to manipulate other elements of storytelling, and so relies on dialogue because it’s familiar; we all know how to talk, how to tell a story, and so you wind up with long passages of characters explaining things to one another, or—evil of all evils!—to him or herself. Page after page of dialogue is boring and weird, and makes for skimpy storytelling. Characters should speak only when they have something to say.

2. Not paying attention to pacing. An offshoot of the pages of dialogue problem, pacing is the secret forté of the professional and the bane of the beginner. The beginner starts at the beginning and continues to the end, usually without too much consideration for what deserves attention and what should be skipped over quickly or even entirely. The balancing act between scene (a detailed account of a particular moment) and summary (an express recap of long periods of time) can be one of the hardest writing skills to master, but it’s the secret between boring and exciting reading. Get to the good part, and, when you get there, take it slow.

3, No patience with the story (no development). Also related to pacing is the problem of scanty development. Beginning writers want to tell the story as quickly as possible, and, while there’s a place in this world for flash fiction, even for micro fiction, the question of good development has little to do with word count. You have to learn to give the story the room it needs to be told well, and, too often, the beginning writer tries to shove a novel into a postcard. Writing is a slow, complex process, and, if the only reason why your story is two pages long is because you “just wanted to get it over with,” you’re in the wrong business.

4. Flat characters. Characters are often the first to fall prey to the scanty development bug. This one is good, that one is bad, and we really don’t know why. “She’s a typical ‘hooker with the heart of gold,’” the beginner will say, as if that’s a good thing. Flat characters are clichés (hooker with the heart of gold) or circumstances (the boss), not people. You have to provide motivations for your characters. We need to know why the do the things they do, say the things they say, and think and feel the way they do. Not only does this take time and space, but thought. You can’t just grab a character off the shelf—you must create one.

5. Naïve understanding of life. Part of the problem of the beginning writer is that usually he or she is young. Scientists have actually studied the adolescent and post-adolescent brain and its capacity for complex moral development, and found that young people tend to think in absolutes—good versus evil, for example. A sign of maturity is the ability to see shades of gray. Thus, the beginning writer tends to punish the bad guy at the end of the story while rewarding the good guy, as in fairy tales. No one is either wholly good or wholly bad, of course, but experience must teach you this. Students rankle when I bring this up. Being in college is all about becoming an adult, and it hurts to be reminded in any way how new you are at that, especially when you feel so secretly inadequate in the first place. Some students also argue that they’ve “been through more” in their short lives than “most people have been through at forty” (meaning me, of course!). True. Some people have unfortunate beginnings—poverty, abuse, illness, and death affect people of all ages. The way we process these events, however, changes with time. About one out every three introductory course stories involves someone’s death, for example. As we grow older, however, we come to realize that death is not only natural and common, but, quite frankly, nothing to write about. Most young writers have difficulty understanding how little drama there is to death, illness, even abuse. They may be part of a good story, but not de facto a good story by themselves.

6. No sense of interior conflict. This list is coming out ike a braid; recognizing the role of interior conflict is the next step after realizing that “the death of X” is not de facto a good story. It’s how Y reacts to the death of X that can—maybe—make for a good story. The beginning writer’s world is all about exteriority. Planes crash, bags of money are found, lovers are unfaithful: things happen to the characters, but the characters don’t change in any way, just their exterior circumstances. The good guy may lose his business, be crippled in a car accident, and have his dog stolen by his ex-wife, but, in the end, he’s the same good guy he was at the beginning of the story! Watch any soap opera and observe. Most times, characters weep frantically, scream at one another, and tear things up (notice that these are all also exterior manifestations of interior turmoil) when things happen to them. However, they remain either good or evil despite these circumstances. Learning to write about our interior lives, those inner struggles under apparently normal circumstances that we all experience and that define us more than our exterior circumstances do, is one of the first breakthroughs a beginning writer can have.

7. Senseless plotting. The lack of interior conflict in the beginner’s story often means that there’s a lot going on outside, and some of it just doesn’t make sense. You need to end your story, for example, but, because all you’ve got is a series of circumstances with no connection to fully developed character psyches, your only recourse is some story-ending event. The wedding. The graduation. The death. Even worse, the winning lotto ticket, the alien abduction, or the meteor apocalypse. That’s one kind of senseless plotting, the traditional deus ex machina that ends the story by ending the world or other exterior circumstances. It’s senseless because we all know that weddings, graduations, deaths, jackpots, aliens, and meteors aren’t real endings, just arbitrary ones (well, maybe meteors . . .). A wedding, for example, may or may not be a satisfying ending, depending on the conflict that lead up to it. If the conflict was whether or not the fiancé is the right person, the wedding itself is hardly going to answer this question, since most likely we won’t know for a long time afterwards. Yet, many superficially plotted stories end this way, as if the ceremony could wipe out all previous conflicts (no doubt this is also the reason why there are so many divorces, but I digress).

But that relies on you having identified a conflict to begin with, and the problem with many beginners’ stories is that there is no clear conflict. Characters are just walking around, attending a party, for example, and there’s nothing at stake. There’s no tension moving you from one moment to the next, no quest. You don’t know how to end the story because you don’t know what the story is. We’re peeping in on some people doing some stuff, but there’s no theme, nothing. That’s not a story, that’s an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

8. Misidentifying the drama / Wasting time on bad material. All of which leads to perhaps the most common beginner’s problem, not recognizing where the story is. You write up to the death of X, the devasting breakup, or the big wedding, giving often meticulous attention to all the little events leading up to The Big Event. The first cough that should have sent X running to the doctor but didn’t, the first spat over dinner that foreshadows (beginners love foreshadowing—they learned it in AP English) The Divorce, the meeting of the lovers as they caught each other’s eyes across a crowded room (the room must always be crowded). To make things worse, the beginning writer begins the story with “The day my [or his/her] life changed forever began with . . . .” Zzzzzzzzzz. Not only is no one surprised by these familiar trajectories, but also there’s very little drama before any big event. This is very, very difficult for the beginning writer to accept, that a Big Event on down the line somewhere does not create automatic anticipation. In truth, the more interesting stories happen after: after the death, the breakup, the wedding. How do the characters adapt to their lives after a change? The Big Event might mark some exterior spot on the characters’ lives, but the real story is where the interior conflict is, and that can be anywhere in relation to an exterior event. The beginner writes over and over about garden weddings and rainy funerals, but there’s just nothing there. The story is elsewhere.

9. Vacuum settings. Related to the problem of excessive dialogue, stories set in a vacuum are extremely common. Beginning writers are impatient with setting, and so you have characters running around generic high schools or clubs or whatever, or, sometimes, nowhere at all. Before you roll your eyes and claim that descriptions of setting are boring, consider how interested you’d be in a radio play. Though there are some fantastic radio plays, the form was overshadowed by television for just one reason: we could see the people in the play. The only way for us to be able to see the people in your writing is if you put them somewhere. If you only describe what they look like without telling us where they are, all we’ve got is paper dolls. Put them in cars that drive down streets in specific cities, or on horses galloping down a beach, or, WTF, in the vacuum of space, as long as they’re in a spacesuit tethered to a spaceship full of buttons and light and the smell of the spacetoilet. Characters interact with their settings, and are a product of them. A girl and a boy on a date in LA will not behave the same as a girl and a boy on a date in NY. One couple will ride around in a car, the other take the subway. And that’s just a minor difference. Beginning writers don’t “see” very well, or smell, taste, and feel, for that matter. They have an overdeveloped sense of hearing—people talki ng, phones ringing, music playing, shots being fired, tires screeching. Imagine you are writing instructions to a filmmaker. What should the set look like? Where should the actors be?

10. No idea how to revise. Beyond making a few grammatical corrections, the impatience of the beginning writer is nowhere more evident than in the revision process. The beginning writer often believes that the best writing is spontaneously produced, if you have any talent, that is. That’s the first stumble right there, equating revision with lack of talent. The beginning writer also has a hard time realizing that writing is work. The word “creative” is no help, either. Creative things are supposed to be fun, aren’t they? So, if you have to “work” at something, you’re not good at it, either, not talented. So, the beginner is stuck in an endless stream of first drafts. Even when he or she begins to accept that revision may—after all—be somewhat normal and acceptable, the beginner has no idea how to go about it, how to a) identify the flaws in the writing, and b) address them successfully. The beginning writer is essentially lazy, and would rather ride the adrenaline rush of the first draft than plod through the swamp of revision.

Ah, the beginning writer, that fragile, enthusiastic puppy! You break my heart. Tune in next week for the second half of this post, where I’ll finish with the general psychology and take a look at that other mysterious creature, the Beginning Poet. Till then, wish me luck in syllabusland.

From Davie to Cozumel via Sioux City: Lessons from the Trenches

After three and a half weeks of studying nonfiction, my students and I finally had our first workshop. I’m happy to report it was a success, and full of useful lessons.

The first three pieces workshopped all had a strong sense of place at their center. Yazmin wrote about a trip to Cozumel, Chip wrote about his family’s yearly trek to Sioux City, Iowa for Christmas, and Michael wrote about Davie, a South Florida suburb. Each of these places is pretty challenging, in the sense that they are all laden with expectations. Cozumel, perhaps most of all, is difficult to write about without sounding like a travel brochure. Like all tourist traps, it is a masked place, half real and half fabricated. Sioux City isn’t exactly a Mexican port of call, but Chip’s focus was the road trip there, so he was treading very familiar ground. Similarly, though few people outside of Florida have ever heard of Davie, the topic of American Suburbia is so saturated it’s almost impossible to write about in a compelling way.

Almost.

My students succeeded by being able to step outside their heads for a moment and look at the places they were writing about with two sets of eyes—theirs and someone else’s. Here is the opening paragraph of Yazmin’s piece on Cozumel:

The place seen by many as just another port of call on their ship’s itinerary has a very different and often overlooked side. Beyond the multi-million dollar ship docks, jewelry stores advertising hefty discounts on what they describe as “Mexican gold,” and shops filled not only with authentic Mexican souvenirs labeled “Made in China,” but also cheap tequila and prescription drugs, exists a rather poor city where over 70,000 Mexicans struggle to make ends meet just like many American families do.

Here is the double vision at work: one set of eyes is seeing what one expects of Cozumel, docks and shops, and the other is seeing the real city behind it. The opening works because it quickly discards the familiar, the expected, and offers the reader something new to think about. You keep reading to find out not what is exotic or glamorous about Cozumel (you pretty much had that figured out by the time you boarded the ship), but rather what might be surprisingly familiar.

You also keep reading because of great details like “cheap tequila and prescription drugs.” There’s something seedy and shameful about them that makes it easy to reject the sandy beaches and Margarita-mix visions associated with such places, which is exactly what Yazmin wants us to do.

Cultivating and working this double vision is not as easy as it appears. How can you write road-trip memoir and not despair at the Jack Kerouacs, William Least Heat-Moons, and John Steinbecks that have come before you? At first, Chip struggled:

Driving up Florida, passing into Georgia, through Tennessee, up to Missouri, and ending in Iowa. It is just impossible to explain how beautiful some of the images you see are on that drive.

               

Aw, Chip. No it isn’t:

Tennessee is like driving through thick hilly forest on a road that is carved into the earth like a winding riving. Stone walls on either side of the road over 50 feet high. Frozen icicles hang on for dear life. The colors within the rocks are stunning. Blues, purples, greens, reds—colors you never expect to see from stone.

The key to Chip’s double vision here is the realization, right after giving up on the ability to explain what was so beautiful about the drive, that “blues, purples, greens, reds” are colors you never expect to see from stone. Suddenly, Chip was able to remember what it must have been like to see those colors for the very first time, when all he knew of stone were shades of gray, and the double vision was born. Sometimes the other pair of eyes—the eyes of the reader—are your own, your memory eyes. Tap into your own before and after, and you’ll be able to recreate what was unexpected—and therefore interesting—for the reader.

I’ve always been fascinated by American suburban drama. It’s a genre all its own, but, like all obsessions, it can get pretty boring. How many times can you tell me about the white picket fence and the repressed housewife? Much like quirky retellings of A Christmas Carol or vampire stories, suburban drama is so overexposed, it’s going to take some kind of wonderful to make me like it.

Enter Davie:

The town itself has the feel of fresh plastic surgery. As you drive down the main road you

notice the rodeo at first, mostly because of its sharp contrast to the newer fast-food joints

adjacent to its main grounds. A town grown from a farming and livestock community, the

incestuous clash of strip malls and carefully planned agriculture gives the feel of your favorite band that just sold out. In an area of such diverse ethnic backgrounds, the area's lack of originality gives it the feel of a cultural cemetery.

What’s so great about this passage is that Michael’s able to see, simultaneously, how Davie is like every other American suburb and how it’s not. The irony that any place in the US could possibly aspire to the label of “typical suburban town” is not lost on us. The incongruity of rodeos and strip malls, so aptly described as “fresh plastic surgery,” is immediately apparent. Moreover, Davie’s location, so close to the multi-culti, cosmo-capitals of SoFla, makes the contrast even more ironic.

Apart from how this piece plays with our expectations of suburban discourse, what makes it compelling is Michael’s ability to tap into the town’s intentions. The passages above elucidate the point that places are not just static locations devoid of subjectivity. In Michael’s hands, Davie is something like a starlet in a Poison video, leaving the family farm for a silicone and collagen life on the Sunset Strip. Yazmin’s Cozumel is also a painted lady, jangling cheap bracelets and even cheaper booze. Somewhere between these is a Tennessee road riven into tie-dyed rock walls like something out of a James Fenimore Cooper novel.

It’s going to be a good semester.

Cinderella’s Slipper Vs. Abraham Lincoln’s Hat, or Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, & the Guinea Pig

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Of course not. To the writer, this is an easy question. The writer creates or sometimes recreates experience, which cannot occur without someone being there. You can have the richest setting ever written, the clearest, most compelling prose or poetry, and the most convoluted, original plot—if you don’t have good characters to pin them on, they will fall apart.

I use the term “characters” with some reservations, because what I am about to say applies to nonfiction as well. Even if you are writing about real people, you must find a way to recreate their reality for your readers in much the same way a fiction writer creates a character.

The most common problem for the beginning writer is overreliance on physical descriptions to do the job. When introducing a character or beginning a nonfiction piece, the beginner’s impulse is to always start with something akin to a police report. For some reason, physical details like the color, texture, and length of a character’s hair seem crucial, as do the color of eyes and the kind of clothing.

True, we live in a superficial culture here in the US (probably most other places, too). We put much stock in what people look like and what they wear. Look at all the fashion advice concerning what to wear to a job interview or first date. Look at all the red-carpet coverage.

But if your character isn’t going to a job interview, first date, or red-carpet event, this stuff is meaningless. Fiery red hair and piercing blue eyes aren’t character traits—they’re clichés. Some physical descriptions can be useful. For example, Jo’s long hair and Amy’s nose in Little Women are not just mindless physical traits. Jo’s hair reveals the femininity in the tomboy, and becomes a defining moment for her when she cuts it off for money. Amy’s struggles to have what she thinks of as a refined nose show her “airs.” The difference between a useless physical description and a useful one, as my word choice indicates, is that useful ones do some kind of work to reveal character or perhaps to create a plot point, like Cinderella’s slipper.

But how will a reader be able to imagine a character if you don’t provide a physical description?

That is the wrong question. The right question is whether the reader needs to imagine a particular physical appearance at all. Does it matter whether the reader is envisioning a blond or a brunette? Does it change the nature of the character or the meaning of the events you are narrating? Probably not. One of the most well-drawn characters in literature is the narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby,” and we don’t even know his name. We don’t stop to think what his hair color might be or what he’s wearing, because we know him in a much more intimate way: we hear his thoughts.

But what if you are writing about a real person? Don’t you owe the readers a physical description? Sure. There’s a natural curiosity about what real people look like that you should satisfy if possible. But don’t overdo it, and don’t let it substitute for more revealing information. Chances are, if you’re writing about a famous person, I probably have an idea of what he looks like. Do you really have to tell me about Abraham Lincoln’s hat? I think not. Don’t even tell me about your Aunt Rosie’s missing third finger unless it defines her in some way—it explains her shyness or, conversely, why she became a pianist. Joan Rivers has been giving us the minutest details of what celebrities wear for decades, and we are no closer to knowing any of them for it.

The would-be costume designers among you are incensed. It’s a good thing to think about your writing cinematically; it helps you flesh out setting and specific action. But the demands of film and print are not the same. Actors on a screen (or a stage) must be wearing something, or else be naked. And so, the good costume designer chooses something that makes sense. That works in conjunction with a particular character, time, and place. Even in the most spectacular cases of costume design, the costumes alone don’t make the character. It’s hard to imagine a film as visually striking as My Fair Lady without Cecil Beaton’s gorgeous outfits, but it’s the conjunction of the dresses with Audrey Hepburn’s dramatic personality makeover that create the character of Eliza Doolittle.

In print, however, there are no naked actors walking around (unless you put them there). We can omit physical descriptions and not even miss them. In fact, an irrelevant physical description is as distracting in print as a voice over is on film. There is a tendency now to constantly refer to Gucci this and Prada that. In some cases this is fitting. There is a culture to which designer labels are as endemic as mosquitoes and palm trees are to Florida. Lauren Weisberger could not have written The Devil Wears Prada without the specialized language of fashion. But all this name-dropping eventually starts to sound like product placement. Unless you’re writing for Vogue or someone’s paying you to sneak their brand into your story, don’t succumb to the temptation to show that you know the difference between Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos.

So how do you create character?

The Barbara Walters Method

There’s a reason why Barbara Walters interviews people in their homes. It’s also why you snoop around the boyfriend’s apartment the first time you are over. Drawers full of lacy lingerie, empty cupboards, and miles of shelves displaying mint-in-box action figures from the 80’s are more than just setting. They’re character clues.

One of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered is Horse Badorties, from William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man. There are many reasons why this quirky character is so memorable, not the least of which is Kotzwinkle’s use of the first person. Horse’s voice is so unique it stays with you long after you finish the short novel. But we get to know Horse—from page one—by getting to know his pad, man, his

piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad. Piled with sheet music, piled with garbage bags bursting with rubbish, piled with unnameable flecks of putrified wretchedness in grease.

It’s not just that his “pad” is messy; it’s the way he reacts to it that is so telling:

It’s the sink, man. I have found the sink. Wait a second, man . . . it is not the sink but my Horse Badorties easy chair piled with dirty dishes. I must sit down here and rest, man, I’m so tired from getting out of bed. Throw dishes onto the floor, crash break shatter. Sink down into the damp cushions, some kind of fungus on the armrest, possibility of smoking it.

Far from being shocked or upset by his mess, or even, as so many messy people are, oblivious to it, Horse enjoys the surprises his pad offers, and the possibility of smoking them. We know immediately the sort of person this guy is.

You don’t have to stick to people’s homes. Someone’s car, a desk at work, even the spot they choose to sit in a classroom can reveal character. The interaction between people and places is one of the most versatile tools at your disposal for showing character. Which brings me to my next point.

The Guinea Pig Method

People react not only to places, but to events. There’s an old writing myth I don’t think anyone’s been able to confirm about the existence of something called a “plot wheel.” Mystery writers would spin this wheel, and wherever the pointer landed, the event written there would be the next plot point. Sort of like the old board game Life: get married, win the lottery, switch careers, that sort of thing.

This is the wrong idea about how to create a good plot, but it does have its uses. People’s true natures come out when faced with an unexpected event. The event doesn’t even have to be catastrophic: think of Mr. Smooth on the perfect date, all good manners and pulling out chairs, holding doors open. Then give him a flat tire and watch him turn into a sweaty, cursing mess who berates his date for living on Pothole Place. Aha, we say. In the case of nonfiction, look for similar defining events. Sometimes these events are obvious—to go back to Abraham Lincoln, it’s as difficult to imagine him without the Civil War as without his hat. But defining events can also be the summer vacation that turned into a lifetime’s work in marine biology, or the childhood move to a different city that turned into a reading habit.

Always have your characters doing something. This is where your cinematic imagination will do you good—not by helping you envision what your characters are wearing, but what they are doing. The incessant doodler, the guy with his chair tipped back and his head resting on the windowsill, and the girl in the front row taking copious notes in tiny handwriting are all attending class, but each is different. This kind of detail-oriented action is more subtle than event reaction, but it can add personality as long as you don’t go overboard. If your character is jingling his keys, whistling a tune, and scratching his head, he might be having a seizure.

Perhaps the best kind of action is interior action, especially when it contrasts with exterior action. I used this contrast all through “Mesh and Lace,” a story about a waitress facing her ten-year high-school reunion. Most of what happens in that story stays inside the main character’s head. Outside, she’s waiting tables, dealing with her family, and having normal, banal conversations, but inside she’s questioning her whole life. Here is a scene that will hopefully make the point. Isabel, the main character, has still not decided whether she wants to go to the reunion when she finds out she will have to work that night:

“Isabel,” she says, as I walk up the driveway, “you’ve got to do me a favor. My brother in Jersey is getting married next next-weekend and I need you to do Saturday night—will you?”

I get a little pang somehow. It’s the night of the reunion. “Can’t Cary do it?”

“Cary’s already working on Saturday night.”

I really can’t say no to Sarah. How do you say no to someone who takes care of three kids she’s not even related to for three hours, five days a week? “Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” is all she says to Sarah, who is her coworker, neighbor, and sitter, and it seems—from the outside—that she’s not bothered at all by this development. Her thoughts, however, not only indicate an ambiguity that she’s not fully aware of, but also show her character: uncertain, somewhat afraid to look too deeply into her own feelings, but yet ready to do her job without hesitation. It’s the push-and-pull between Isabel’s exterior circumstances and her interior struggle that helped me develop this idea.

There are many other ways of putting round people on a flat page, but these two—setting and action—always work. Another classic way of capturing someone’s personality is through dialogue. That’s great if you can pull it off, but not many people can. Unless your character is witty or sarcastic, it’s difficult to reveal character through dialogue. It’s also difficult and potentially offensive to write dialect, which is a very popular way of making people sound like they belong to a particular ethnic group or region, or to show they are under or over educated. Stephen King loves it, and recommends it in his otherwise very good book on craft, On Writing. Here is the scene he holds up as an example:

“I don’t know what they say,” Mistuh Butts replied. “I ain’t never studied what thisun or thatun says, because eachun says a different thing until your head is finally achin and you lose your aminite.”

“What’s aminite?” the boy asked.

The boy in this scene is not the only one wondering what aminite (appetite) is; so am I, and plodding through phonetically rendered dialogue is so cumbersome a project that it sucks me right out of the story, making me think not about what is being said but rather wondering how it sounds. Capturing the nuances of syntax and diction is one thing, and if you’re a regional writer with a good ear, you can try it. But attempting to phonetically render dialect is a mistake, and often says more about you than about your characters. A better way to use language for characterization is to write in the first person, where the entire piece is basically the narrator’s voice. Compare the passage I quoted earlier from The Fan Man to the “Mistuh Butts” passage above; one is full of personality and humor, the other feels forced.

Dialogue has a much stronger role in character creation in poetry. The slick, choppy mantras of the pool players in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” is a classic example. But you can also use setting and action to bring to life a person’s whole existence in just a few lines, as Martín Espada does in “Jorge the Church Janitor Finally Quits.” The truth is these methods do not necessarily take center stage as you are writing. When you’re writing, you’re writing. When you’re revising, however, and you know that something’s not quite right, someone’s lying there flat on the page and you can’t find the valve you can pump air into, it’s good to know where to look.

Begin Where You Are

One of the first chapters of Zinsser’s On Writing Well I make my students read at the beginning of the semester is “Writing About Places,” where he gives tips on travel writing. I won’t rehash what he says there, which is excellent. Rather, my intention is to convince the beginning writer of the importance of setting, whether you are writing about traveling or some other kind of nonfiction, or a story, novel, poem, play—whatever.

I remember how, when I was very young, I would skip over descriptions of setting. Impatient to get to the next plot point, I found trees and birds more than irrelevant—they were boring obstacles to my reading enjoyment. Of course, I grew out of this ignorance as I matured and came to understand the world as more than just a series of plot points in a vacuum. I’m often surprised, however, by how many people have not been able to learn to appreciate the recreated world on the page. A piece of writing with a skimpy sense of place is like a stick figure on a white background. It has no depth. But setting is more than just background—it is a crucial element of all good writing, and can influence plots and create character more so than action or dialogue.

Imagine your latest favorite film on a blank stage. No sets, no on-location vistas. No sofa for the characters to sit on, no cluttered office desk, no stark alien landscape. Nothing. Ridiculous, no? We don’t notice the effect of setting in films because it’s all happening simultaneously, but much work goes into producing that sense of immersion into another world that we experience when watching a film or a television show. Imagine the ladies of Sex and the City without New York, or the vampires of Twilight without Forks. Impossible.

In fact, these settings produce the stories that take place in them. Picture the sexcapades of Carrie and Samantha in a small, Midwestern town, or the Cullens going to school in sunny Miami. It’s precisely the cosmopolitanism of New York that enables Carrie and her friends to live as they do, and the remote dreariness of Forks that pushes the pale Edward into contact with Bella, creating the love story. Moreover, both of these stories started as books.

Most of the Great Writers succeeded in creating worlds so rich that their work is inseparable from a particular place and time. Faulkner had Yoknaptawpha, Márquez has Macondo, Steinbeck the Salinas Valley. Just in case you’re thinking poetry is the exception here, let me rush to insist the contrary. The awesomeness of a good poem is that it can transport you somewhere with just a few gestures, a few words and phrases. That’s why we’re so impressed by haikus, because a good haiku can take you somewhere in just seventeen syllables. Amazing.

A strong setting is at the heart of David Bottoms’s wonderful distinction between poetry and philosophy. (Bottoms is referring to a comment originally made by Karl Shapiro, but I have read the original essay, “What Is Not Poetry,” and I find Bottoms’s thoughts easier to grasp.) Bottoms speaks of the necessity for the poet to recreate an experience for the reader, to allow the reader to draw the “philosophy” from it first-hand, rather than get it abstracted, second-hand, from the poet. Read Bottoms’s “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump” and you’ll see what he means. You may have never done such a thing, but suddenly, you feel like you have, you see the “startled eyes” of the shot rats, crawling into the darkness. You know this life, this dead-end existence. You are filled with revulsion, and sigh with relief when the poem is over.

Such a visceral reaction is what a great setting can elicit. The trick is that it must be great, and not everyone knows how to write great settings. Too often, the writer settles for boring descriptions of nature or buildings that have all the artistry of a Google map, or standard descriptions of wind and rain that belong on The Weather Channel. A step above such pedestrian observations is the sort of “five senses” writing your sixth-grade language arts teacher taught you. You feel obliged to tell us about rustling leaves and the smell of laundry.

But do these sensory details make your writing better? Not necessarily. True, we often overfocus on visual details, because that’s our dominant sense, so it’s nice to pay attention to the other senses, like the sense of smell, which can be so powerful. But none of it matters unless you have a specific goal in mind. What’s the point of telling me that there’s the smell of fresh-baked cookies in the air, if the character I’m following isn’t affected by it in any way? I don’t mean to suggest that setting is subordinate to plot or characterization. What I mean is, all these elements must work together. If no one in the piece is going to eat a cookie, or be revolted by the smell (she’s pregnant, or it reminds her of endless shifts at the mall), the mere mention of cookies is not going to add to my reading experience.

In other words, objective descriptions of place add little to the machinery of the reading experience. You must gather as much detail as you can about a place, but you must not dump it willy-nilly onto the page. You must carefully select which to include and which to leave out in order to create a dominant impression. What do you want me to feel as I am reading about this place? What effect does this landscape have on the events and people you are writing about?

To accomplish the desired effect, you have to do more than trot out the clichés, however. We’re not talking about dark and gloomy nights here, or bright and sunny days. You don’t get rid of a cliché just by reversing it. You can have your funeral on a bright and sunny day and it might be an improvement over the black umbrellas, but you’re still relying on that old standard, the weather report. Get rid of the weather as much as possible (I recommend you ditch the funeral as well, while you’re at it). Don’t forget the people, for one thing. Try to describe the mall without them; you’ll have nothing but bright lights and mannequins. The beginning writer forgets that places are inhabited by people, and the character of a place is largely defined by who’s walking around in it. Who are they? What do they look like? Where did they come from? Are they rich or poor? What do they sound like? Where do they work? What do they want? These are matters of setting.

You have to tap into a place’s emotional landscape. One of the best ways to do this is to learn about its history. When was the town founded? The building torn down? Why? You may not be writing historical fiction, but knowing the history of a place (imaginary places have imaginary histories also) will give depth to your present-day description. Think big and small in both space and time. Setting is a bedroom, that bedroom is in a city, and both of these are in a January night in 2011. Or a kitchen on a farm in 1916. Somewhere. Sometime.

Incorporate thinking about setting into your writing from the beginning. Instead of sitting down to write about a woman who switches careers at forty (prioritizing character and action), sit down to write about that neighborhood you drive by on your way to work. Begin with the place, and allow the characters and actions to sprout there like wildflowers. You may wind up doing some of the best writing of your life this way.

I want to warn you, however, against one final kind of cliché. Avoid exoticizing the people and places you write about. Never forget that the people you write about—even completely fictional people—are human. Don’t reduce them to coconuts, clogs, mafia ties, or ancient secrets. If possible, experience a culture first-hand before you write about it, but, even then, look for what you have in common with the people and places you are writing about, and not for what is “bizarre.” Remember that one person’s peanut butter and jelly is someone else’s deep-fried scorpion. Someone who lives on a farm doesn’t necessarily hold the secret to the meaning of life just because you’re feeling a little disconnected from Mother Earth in your urban landscape. Writing about others is really writing about oneself, about discovering, through the differences between us, what it means—for all of us here on this little blue planet—to be human.