In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 232.
Whether your novel is about baseball or spelunking, the subject will offer specific vocabulary. A baseball player does not refer to his passion in the same way as someone who organizes her life around extreme caving.
Using jargon aligned with your subject immerses readers in the world of your book. Science fiction writers talk about “world building.” In fact, all novels are world building, even when that world is realistic.
I appreciate Paul Harding’s advice to write to your smartest reader. You can use technical vocabulary not only to describe the scenes involving baseball, but also as metaphor in other scenes. Don’t rush to explain this vocabulary. Readers will understand.
To do this well requires homework on the writer’s part. I once opened a book that described a string quartet composed of a violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The standard quartet literature is written for two violins, a viola, and a cello. The author could have finessed this by calling out the exception, but instead, it read like an error. You wouldn’t put a quarterback on a soccer team, nor have a butcher work in a bakery. This blooper took me right out of the story.
We all want to avoid bloopers! I knew I had to nail the dance motif in Three Muses because early readers kept asking why Katya, the protagonist, was driven to dance. I had no answer for this, just as I could not answer what motivates me to write. Nevertheless, motive is key to character building. I couldn’t keep asserting that Katya loved what she did without proof.
My solution was to put the reader into a ballet class and have them go through her routine, inhabiting her body. I could do this because I remembered taking ballet as a child. But this information would be available from the most basic search; ballet barre warm-up is the same the world over. So, Katya straightens her shoulders and sucks in her tummy, feels the quieting of her upper body and her leg muscles limbering. She embraces the routine, gives in to the music, and feels a release and euphoria that are unique to this experience. By the end of her class, I hope the reader feels what she feels.
Similarly, why does Adam, the protagonist of Duet for One, play violin? Here again, I had him engage in the nitty gritty of his calling. I put readers in Adam’s practice room, described the blue silk bag in which he keeps his violin, how he must rosin his bow before he can brush it across the strings. I specified the notes of the scale he plays, the callouses on his fingers, and how he feels listening to his sound ricocheting around the room, filling his body “from belly to skull.”
Our characters have bodies. I learned that we can’t assert what they feel without literally walking them through the motions. My theory was to let the reader experience the physicality of these activities and make their own inferences.
If I have a writing process, it is in filling out and capturing granular detail. I describe characters’ bodily movements, and in between their movements, they think about what they are feeling and doing. I call this “splicing.” Another Paul Harding-ism—always write in scene. I put my characters in scene, have them do or say things, and then splice in what they feel when they do what they do. I tend to start with a skeletal version of the story and then fatten the paragraphs and fill out scenes as I write subsequent drafts. Other writers have the expectation that they will cut big chunks of their drafts as they go.
Whatever works is what is right for you; it’s all about paying attention to the words on the page.
Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Toll is a recipient of multiple artists’ fellowships and residencies. She serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. in Music, and her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. from Boston University School of Law and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice.
image credit: Providence Doucet