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.
Reader's Question: What to do when other passions get in the way of writing?
Q: I have a hard time balancing my love of photography and my love of writing. Is there something else you enjoy doing that sometimes gets in the way of your writing?*
A: Um, yes! I had almost exactly the same problem. I used to spend a lot of time with darkroom photography in the days before digital. And while photography and writing are by no means incompatible—indeed, I took a whole class in college exploring the relationship between the two—there is a certain school of thought that says you don’t want to use up your creative energy on anything else but your writing. The poet Mary Oliver writes about how she always chose to do boring, crap jobs so she wouldn’t be too intellectually stimulated (or satisfied) at work. Here’s the quote I’m thinking of: “ I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.”
For me, something was lost in the switch to digital, and when I no longer had access to a darkroom, I more or less let photography go. You can read about my nostalgia for darkrooms here. But that doesn’t mean you have to! See if you can find a way to bring the two interests together. One way is to do writing that complements your photography, another is to use photographs as starting points for writing, still another is to bring in what you know about photography into the world of your stories by making it important to one of your characters.
*Question courtesy of the National Writing Project·and readers of Figment.com for the National Day on Writing. Read highlights of the event in·this post·or listen to me and four other guests talk about the National Day on Writing for the NWP blogtalk radio program here.
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.
