Making the shy speak: Quiet characters
I have a problem: one of the main characters of my new novel-in-progress is shy, quiet, tongue-tied. She's also passionate, secretly sensual, and fiercely dedicated to what she cares about. But how do I get her to speak? What does it mean for narration when a character is quiet? Do I write in the third person? Or would that be like saying that, because she's shy, Naomi can't speak for herself?
You'd think I'd know what to do with Naomi since I am, myself, rather shy. It's something that few people realize because I tend to project a bubbly personality--probably an overcompensation. Teaching, too, has helped me to be able to turn "on" even when I'd rather go hide behind a filing cabinet. But as this website all about shyness (and famous people who were shy) says, "Shyness is not who we are, but something we feel while we do the things we do."
Okay, so Naomi doesn't = shyness. But I believe she is--unlike me--the kind of shy person that other people recognize as shy. For the boy who'll fall in love with her, that shyness is part of her mystique.
But what does the inner voice of a shy person sound like? If, for example, Naomi has trouble finding the words she needs to speak, does she nevertheless feel very strongly--inside--what she wants to say? How can I capture this contrast?
For my own confessions about overcoming shyness in the classroom, check out this post.
What Courage Sounds Like
To ring in 2012, I offer you this scene: a Paris Metro car full of people on their way home, their facial expressions ranging from impatient to bored. In the middle of us all, a woman with her amplifier strapped to a dolly, sings into a microphone that lets us hear her loud and clear (whether we want to or not) as she croons "Sway" with a very thick French accent.
At first, I found it a bit annoying to have my eardrums accosted by accordionists, singers, and other performers on the Metro when all I wanted was to get home from work and see my boys. But then I began to really pay attention to these performers. Some clearly were doing it just for the money--the handful of change they shamed or pressured travelers into giving them before they finally stepped off the train and went to inflict auditory torture on someone else. The instrument they carried was basically just an accessory to their panhandling efforts.
Other buskers were different--well dressed and apparently indifferent to whether or not they received donations. I have a theory (perhaps totally bogus) that these performers see the Metro as a kind of endless open-mike opportunity. They have a captive audience, after all.
But for my shy self, the proportions of their courage boggle the mind. A captive audience, yes, but a very cranky audience determined not to be moved by their music. Is it the challenge that appeals? And has a Metro crowd ever burst out into applause? I'd love to know.
While I have sometimes wanted to pay the Metro performers money to please, please STOP playing, our little boy Liam is a huge fan of all music, no matter how bad. He'll sway to an out-of-tune accordion, elevator music, or even a cellphone ringtone. So I guess--when he's with us--the buskers can count on at least one appreciative member in their captive audience.
And maybe, with enough courage, one real listener is enough to make it worthwhile. That's what I'm trying to remember this new year, knee-deep as I am in scary, rough-drafting for novel #3.
Getting inside an Explosion
There is an explosion in my new (third) novel. How do I write it?
It's strange the things we manage to draw on when we're writing. I reckon that the shock I felt when I had a small-scale kitchen explosion didn't measure up to what explosion victims and survivors experienced. But. It's a starting place.
For me, sometimes the best thing when it comes to bringing a scene to life is finding some kernel in my own life that I can write out of, no matter how much I may need to magnify, distort, or otherwise alter the experience.
It's mostly about finding a way to capture an emotional truth, something that feels truly lived and therefore resonates with the reader.
There are a couple of scenes in The Knife and the Butterfly, for example, that I wrote out of memories of being awake after everyone else in a house had gone to sleep. One finds Azael sitting in the bathroom of an abandoned apartment, contemplating a message scrawled inside a cabinet.
Probably it doesn't matter to anyone else how I imagined my way into this scene, but for me finding that link between my life and a character's life is everything. To get Azael to think thoughts he can only have when he feels cut off from the world, I summoned that sense of unbearable silence in my grandparents' house when everyone was asleep. I craved noise--any noise. Movement--any movement.
Maybe my kitchen explosion will be enough to help me tuck myself into my characters' experiences.
