Authors: Jordan Rosenfeld
SIGHT
Sight is perhaps the most important, and most ironic, element of scene writing. At no time do you actually draw images or pictures while writing, yet the reader must come away from your wall of text with an experience of
seeing.
He must be able to draw in his mind images of what your characters look like, what the world in which your characters interact looks like, and all the minutiae in between. This means that you must have a pretty good visual idea of the world you're writing about so that you can help provide the appropriate cues that will turn words into pictures in the reader's mind.
All that can be seen in your scenes is the fictional equivalent of evidence provided in a court case. In court, you can't get away with saying, "The bloody knife was about yea long, and imagine a carved wooden handle here, and some speckles of blood here. Trust me, it was a big, nasty-looking knife, and definitely the murder weapon!" The lawyer must provide an
actual
knife that meets those specifications for the jury members to set their eyes upon. So must you provide evidence in your scenes. No matter if the piece of evidence proves that someone's lover was just at the house—a cigarette butt covered in suspicious lipstick still smoldering in the ashtray—or if it's graffiti on the side of a house that gives away a vandal; until the reader can
see
proof, it simply does not exist.
When including details of sight in your story, remember that point of view is not only a vehicle for understanding character, it is also the camera through which the reader sees whatever your characters see. A fictional world takes shape to the reader through the eyes and experiences of your characters. Still, many writers fall into the habit of pointing out that a character sees something—"Jimmy saw a huge cloud of dust rise up on the horizon"—which is a habit I call double vision. The point of view establishes that Jimmy is the one seeing. Therefore, when you tell the reader that Jimmy saw, you are literally calling attention to the act of sight rather than to the huge cloud of dust on the horizon, which is the important point of action in the scene. You are saying to the reader: "Look, Jimmy is seeing!" Rather than, "Look at that huge dust cloud! Wowsers, I wonder what it could be!"
The more you can place readers inside the vision and point of view of your characters and remove the
act
of them seeing, the more directly the reader will interact with the sights, smells, and other senses in the scene.
Blindness
When a character loses sight, or never had it to begin with, the writer is no less obliged to describe the physical world, even though that world no longer exists through the character's eyes. Blindness gives way to all the other senses, which must take over. This is a powerful technique to use, as it not only forces the character to experience the settings in a unique way, it provides you with unique challenges.
Jose Saramago's stark novel
Blindness
has the entire world going blind in the course of a few days—except for one woman, a doctor's wife. The novel centers on a quarantined ward of people who are among the first to go blind. Chaos soon erupts as the ward fills to overflowing and is eventually abandoned by the government when they, too, go blind.
You can count me out, said the first blind man, I'm off to another ward, as far away as possible from this crook. ... He picked up his suitcase and, shuffling his feet so as not to trip and groping with his free hand, he went along the aisle separating the two rows of beds, Where are the other wards, he asked, but did not hear the reply if there was one, because suddenly he found himself beneath an onslaught of arms and legs. ...
Saramago relies heavily upon the next sense, touch, to delineate the world for the reader.
What the characters see, the reader sees. Remember to extract yourself, the author, from the picture, so that the reader is looking directly through your characters' eyes like he would through a pair of binoculars focused on a far-off stage.
TOUCH
Though the philosopher Rene Descartes would have us believe it is our thoughts that make us who we are ("I think, therefore I am"), touch is one of our first ways of knowing. Young babies do not think about their blocks and stuffed animals; they grab and grope, prod and poke their toys (and their parents) to learn about them. Touch is a bodily experience. Every character in your fiction will have a unique relationship to his body and to touch, and as the writer, you will need to determine these zones of comfort and contact and the meanings that are layered in.
Practical Touch
What are practical forms of touch? When a character rubs a piece of beach-weathered glass between his fingertips to feel its surface; touches the rough bark of a tree; inspects the edge of a knife for sharpness; runs his fingers over piano keys; or smooths out a bedspread. These forms of touch aren't necessarily significant to the character or the plot; they are actions taken between dialogue or other actions. However, practical touch is sort of like punctua-tion—you need a little bit in strategic places, because without it the scene would not be fully formed. But it shouldn't call attention to itself.
Practical touch can come in handy when you have a lot of uninterrupted dialogue between characters. A character could stop to touch the smooth surface of a marble countertop before launching an angry salvo, or grip a beer bottle tightly in his hand before defending his action. People tend to be tactile. When we're nervous, we fidget, fumble, or unconsciously drum our fingers. In fact, a character won't get more than a couple of minutes into a day before he begins to interact with the world by touching things.
Perhaps your character has a phobia of germs and wears gloves or refuses to touch certain things—like doorknobs or glasses. This example still shows details of touch. Whatever you determine for your characters, remember to let their fingers do the walking at least a little in your scenes, and know what kind of "toucher" each of your characters is.
Personal Touch
Personal touch is
a range
of physical contact that expresses information about your characters and relates to how they physically interact with other people. While personal touch refers to contact between characters (from the platonic, to the downright naughty), it also refers to ways that your characters interact with the world—offering readers insight into your characters' personalities. For instance, you might create a character with a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder who cannot stop from touching strangers' noses, light switches, mailboxes, etc. Another character might have an obnoxious habit of gesturing wildly with his hands when he talks, knocking things off shelves. The way your characters touch their physical world is important information about who they are.
When characters touch
each other
(or themselves—for instance, your character might be a "cutter" who wounds herself for emotional release), the reader will also take notice. Touch between people is important because it's a way of communicating with one another. In real life you notice when a stranger puts his hands on your shoulders without permission. Your characters should also pay attention to these forms of touch between each other. A character who was sexually abused may not like to hug or be hugged. Yet another character might come from a culture where close physical proximity is normal and has to learn the hard way that another character does not appreciate this. Remember that when characters touch each other, they are
communicating,
so try to be conscious of this communication and what it means to your scene and your plot.
In chapter seven we'll talk about body language as a way to develop and build characters without even using dialogue.
SMELL
Remember a time when you caught a whiff of the scent of a flower or food, and the smell evoked a childhood memory, making you cry, laugh, or even get embarrassed? It's as if memories are housed inside scents, and once your nose gets a whiff, the memory is unlocked and, with it, feelings. The sense of smell—our olfactory sense, as it's known to scientists—has a direct link in the brain to memory and emotion. Since experiencing a scent is one of the most common experiences that people have, your characters need to have these experiences too, and you can use the sense of smell to dramatic effect in scenes.
For a moment, let's classify smells into two basic groups: those that smell good, and those that smell bad. If your scene involves a conflict between a morally good character and morally corrupt character, let us say, but you don't want to rely on any narrative tricks of telling the reader which is which, scent can help you get this distinction across. If Jack, your bad guy, smells of cigar smoke and day-old greasy Chinese food, while Bill, your good guy, smells like juniper and fresh air, who do you think the reader will see as bad or good?
Now I can already hear you saying, "What if I hate the smell of juniper?" Point taken. However, in the world of scents, even an unsophisticated reader is likely to believe that juniper smells better than cigar smoke, and that there is a reason you've gone to the trouble to make Jack smell worse than Bill. Or you might opt for a smell that is generally considered good, like the scent of roses.
Also, a character might use perfume or cologne for sentimental or vanity reasons. A woman might wear Joy perfume because her mother and grandmother wore it; it's a part of her wardrobe, and therefore a part of her character. Or a male character might persist in wearing stinky cologne that keeps women from wanting to get too close to him. There are ingenious ways to use scent to reveal details about your characters.
Have you ever been to the movies or out to dinner and
smelled
a person entering before you saw her because of her perfume? Scent is a fabulous way to demonstrate that a character has arrived on the scene: "The pungent sting of bourbon in the air told Jeannie that Sam had let himself into the house
and
the liquor cabinet."
Finally, harking back to the link between smell and memory, you can invoke scent as a way to transition into a character flashback. If you need to go back in time to a scene from your character's past and you can use the smell of peaches at a grocery store to drop Becky into the peach orchard where she first met Eduardo, the love of her life, by all means use it. Scent is a subtle way to transition that won't jar the reader.
SOUND
Sounds can describe a physical setting almost as effectively as visual descriptions. With eyes closed, you can probably tell the difference between a train station and an airport. The places your characters show up have sound signatures, which you can use to enrich a scene's other details.
In a restaurant, for instance, your character, with eyes closed, can hear dishes, glasses, and silverware clinking, the sounds of wait staff calling out orders to cooks, and taking orders from customers. There is a certain kind of buzz of conversation that goes on in restaurants that is different from the sound of a real estate office, for instance. The more you pay attention to these small details when building a scene, the more real the scene will become.
Here are a few different examples of the way sound creates or enhances atmosphere and contributes to the tone and theme of a story.
In Irene Nemirovsky's novel
Suite Frangaise,
set in German-occupied France, 1942, sound marks the contrast with the silence of people hidden away in fear of air raids:
The streets were empty. People were closing their shops. The metallic shudder of falling iron shutters was the only sound to break the silence, a sound familiar to anyone who has woken in a city threatened by riot or war.
In Anton Chekhov's story "At Sea," the following sound description sets a raucous tone that is appropriate to the story of sailors acting on baser impulses:
Crowded together in the crew's quarters we, the sailors, were casting lots. Loud, drunken laughter filled the air. One of our comrades was playfully crowing like a cock.
Finally, here is a description of the first time the character Francis Macomb-er hears the lion that will change his fate, from Ernest Hemingway's story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber":
It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river. It was a deep sound and at the end there were sort of coughing grunts that made him seem just outside the tent, and when Francis Macomber woke in the night to hear it he was afraid.
Sounds enhance mood, set tone, and create atmosphere, and should not be forgotten when setting the scene.
TASTE
One of my pet peeves about writing is that you don't very often see characters eating. Food is an important part of life, and, I believe, an important part of a good story too, when it can be factored in. While many of your scenes may have no need to invoke the sense of taste, you might ask yourself if there are places in your story where you could add in the act of tasting something. Taste provides great moments of potential conflict and intimacy, such as:
• A mother asks her a son to taste her soup, which provides an opportunity for him to be honest with her about her terrible cooking, leading to either conflict or unexpected closeness.