Part 10 (1/2)

To provide your readers with insight, you become an explorer. That's what we've been doing here, exploring territory in your memory that has been-and continues to be- hidden from public view, but that can make your stories sing.

What a waste! In our daily work and play, our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell define the world for us. Then, as writers, we let three of our senses atrophy, as if our characters had lost part of their humanity and didn't need to touch, taste, and smell.

Never mind that laymen neglect their senses. We writers have an obligation to use all five senses in our work if we are to enrich the laymen's experience.4 And we cannot neglect the sixth that haunts our lives and our literature.

I caution you. Even the sense of sight, the one we use the most in our life and work, needs to be honed beyond the everyday needs of the laymen for whom we write. We need to see more acutely so that we can record what is fresh.

We take our senses for granted. When we let their use atrophy, it often takes conscious effort and exercise to restore our awareness of the ways in which we take in the world around us. If you were to shut your eyes and remove your keys from a pocket or purse this moment, could you describe what a key feels like in a way that would be understood by a person who came from a country in which keys were not used?

What have you observed or felt about your keys? If I handed keys to you, by what signs would you know that they were yours and not someone else's? Not knowing our keys from keys that are similar is symbolic of our neglect of our senses. We deprive ourselves and our readers. Most writers use sight and some conventional sounds, and little else. This chapter, then, is a course in enrichment of your sensory awareness, and through that awareness an enrichment of your writing.

Is the sound a cat makes meow or mrkneow! James Joyce, who had an acute ear, used mrkneow. Some people contend that the vocabulary of cats is extensive. There's no point to your using Joyce's sound or the cliche meow. Listen to your cat and see if you can't come up with something that your readers will recognize but perhaps will never have seen in print before.

Do we listen closely? Is the sound made by a baseball being hit thwack or crack! Or some other?

There are cliches for most common sounds. I hope to persuade you to describe sounds not in cliches but as you hear them after careful listening. Some of my students have come up with wonderfully original sounds that enhance their work. A young child at the piano: bonk, bonk, bonk. Or the whump of two automobiles coming together.

Sound, of course, is not continuous. It is interrupted by pauses, by momentary silences, the absence of sound that makes music possible. Let's look at an extreme instance of the use of sound in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. In it, you may recall, a ten-year-old boy who is abandoned by his parents in Europe during World War II wanders through a nightmare of savagery and love in which he loses the ability to speak because in speaking he might give himself away. After the war, at the end of the book, a skiing accident lands the protagonist in the hospital, where something wonderful happens to his long silence: [I] was about to lie down when the phone rang. The nurse had already gone, but the phone rang insistently again and again.

I pulled myself out of bed and walked to the table. I lifted up the receiver and heard a man's voice.

I held the receiver to my ear, listening to his impatient words, somewhere at the other end of the wire there was someone, perhaps a man like myself, who wanted to talk with me. ... I had an overpowering desire to speak. Blood flooded my brain and my eyeb.a.l.l.s swelled for a moment, as though trying to pop out onto the floor.

I opened my mouth and strained. Sounds crawled up my throat. Tense and concentrated I started to arrange them into syllables and words. I distinctly heard them jumping out of me one after another, like peas from a split pod. I put the receiver aside, hardly believing it possible. I began to recite to myself words and sentences, s.n.a.t.c.hes of Mitka's songs. The voice lost in a faraway village church had found me again and filled the whole room. I spoke loudly and incessantly like the peasants and then like the city folk, as fast as I could, enraptured by the sounds that were heavy with meaning, as wet snow is heavy with water, confirming to myself again and again and again that speech was now mine and that it did not intend to escape through the door which opened onto the balcony.

The universe of sound available to the writer extends from a simple bonk, bonk, bonk to Kosinski's protagonist rediscovering his ability to speak.

Humans see the world. Other animals smell it. Watch a cat investigating anything new, a surrounding, a possible food. It leads with its nose, just as its larger sisters in the jungle do. Cats and other animals define the world first by smell. In some human cultures, the sense of smell is treated as if it were an unwelcome adjunct to the ”good” senses, fit only to be deodorized or perfumed.

For the writer, the sense of smell provides opportunity. It is important not only to be aware of and use smells, but to be accurate in rendering them. Rubber bands have a marked odor. An old book smells musty. Unseen wind has a smell. If you don't smell anything, what might you smell? A single flower in an imagined vase on your desk?

What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.

That's the first sentence of a short story by Charles Baxter called ”The Disappeared” from the Michigan Quarterly Review.

A writer can use the sense of smell to good effect in many ways, for instance, to help a reader experience a setting: I could tell we were coming to the kitchen. The odor of fresh-baked bread drifted into the hallway like an invitation to follow where it led.

Smell can be used to establish a relations.h.i.+p: Malcolm came through the back door, the football in the crook of his arm, his sweats.h.i.+rt emblazoned with a dark b.u.t.terfly of sweat. He put the football down, and positioned his arms around me. I closed my eyes and could smell the earth of the playing field and what I had come to think of as the aroma of his presence.

Characterization can benefit from the use of smell: Sally fluttered in, enveloped in her newest perfume.

This tells us that Sally habitually uses too much perfume. Smell can also be used to establish atmosphere: Down and down we went. I stopped counting the stairs. The dank smell told me we were well below ground.

Or this: Terry glanced skyward and sampled a lungful of the chilled air. The universe smelled fresh, as if everything could now start over.

The absence of smell is also useful to a writer: ”They've bred the smell out of roses,” Gloria said. ”Don Juans are my favorite climbers because their touch is velvet and the rose breeders haven't robbed them of their smell. Yet.”

A gifted young woman named Ketti McCormick was briefly a student of mine some time after she had lost her sight. She still continued to see colors, not those in her field of vision but those refractions of colors previously seen that remained inside her head. Her contact with the external world, like that of other blind people, was now mainly through the sense of touch, which most of us neglect. Ketti once had trusted her eyes to keep her out of danger. She had to develop a greater sense of trust in others that they would not leave things in her path that she might trip over. She was angry at males who left the toilet seat up.

A blind person surmises how I might look by feeling my face. Try that some time. Blindfold yourself and have someone brought into the room whom you haven't met before and who wouldn't mind if you found out what they looked like by touching his or her face. You might describe each feature-nose, cheeks, forehead, ears, chin, hair-and have someone write your descriptions down. Then, with the blindfold off, look closely at the person and at your description, and offer an apology for your probable inaccuracy. You are in all likelihood deficient in your use of the sense of touch, as we all are. It would benefit our writing greatly to improve how we see with the ends of our fingers.

There's a way to do it. And you won't need a cooperative new acquaintance, just the blindfold, though it might help to have a friend or family member around to empty the contents of your purse or pocket on a table after you are blindfolded. Feel each object with your fingertips, describing it as best you can as if to someone from another planet who wouldn't know what those strange objects are that you carry everywhere you go. You can't say a credit card feels like plastic. You have to particularize. That exercise alone can work wonders in letting you experience your sense of touch: As soon as they came in from the cold, Eric reached into his pocket for a slim metal tube and brought it to his lips. He realized that he hadn't uncapped it even before he heard Sheila laugh. He pulled the cap off the tube, turned its base to bring the waxy plug up higher, and rubbed it first across his top lip, and then his bottom lip.

In the example, the sense of touch fortifies the characterization of Eric as absent-minded, an improvement over the author intruding to tell the reader that.

Does the handshake of an athlete feel the same as the handshake of a wimp? Does the hand of a child feel the same as the hand of a seventy-year-old? Does the surface of every wooden chair feel the same? What does water feel like when it is too hot? What does your favorite cat or dog feel like when you are petting it? Would you dare write a love scene omitting the sense of touch?

Your writing can only gain if you attempt to use the sense of touch at least once in every scene.

That imaginary guest from another planet can also be useful to you in cultivating your ability to describe what you taste. Your guest has never experienced the kind of food you are eating. See if, from memory, you can describe in detail the foods that you tasted in the last meal you ate. Your guest has never heard of bran flakes or strawberries. You'll have to invent similes and metaphors to tell your guest what they taste like. It's not an easy exercise, but it will accelerate your skill as a sensuous writer. You wouldn't feed cardboard meals to guests. Don't feed cardboard meals to your characters. Make your reader's taste buds pop, even if he's from outer s.p.a.ce.

We speak of a ”sixth sense” as a sensation we cannot identify with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting, but which we know is there. ”It” can be anything imagined or real, a person or a higher power. Some people refer to the phenomenon as extrasensory perception, or ESP. A writer can make excellent use of a ”sixth sense” in mainline fiction as well as in mystery and suspense fiction. You are alone in the house, and you hear a door close. Is it the wind? But there is no wind inside the house.

An exercise to develop your sixth sense is worth trying. Close your eyes. Imagine who is in the room with you. Turn all the lights on. There's no one here. Good. You can relax. Is your watch ticking louder than usual, or are you imagining it? Why is today different from other days, what is supposed to happen? Why isn't the phone ringing? If it does ring, who will it be? Close your eyes again. Are you sure someone isn't in the room with you? What if you're wrong? What if it's ... ?

It doesn't take much for you to feed your hungry imagination. Through practice, you can establish a link between your imagination and the so-called sixth sense.

I've left the most important sense, sight, for last because it is the one least neglected by writers. Yet improving your eyesight, sharpening your ability to describe the visual, can be productive.

The first thing you see is usually a cliche. We see the tall man, the attractive woman, the room full of people, the clean-cut lawn. These are the easy images that leap to mind. The writer's job is to look for distinguis.h.i.+ng detail, the particularity, in visualizing what his reader is to see: the man whose wavy hair wouldn't stay under his cap; the woman who looked ready to shout at just about anyone, the partygoers jammed together as if they were on a crowded subway train; the virgin lawn that looked as if it had never been walked upon.

Ideally, the writer sees something that everybody will recognize but that no one has seen quite that way before.

A technique used too seldom involves changing the sense: Zalatnick led me into the shop not as if I was a fellow looking for a job but as if I was a friend of a friend. I was sure the men in the shop could smell the difference.

”Smell” isn't meant to be taken literally. Switching the sense from seeing to smelling creates a metaphor that gets the point across to the reader quickly.

Here's how one might use each of the six senses to characterize players in a story: Gloria kept wrinkling her nose as if she were trying to sniff the truth of what everyone was saying to her. (smell) Greg knew that his handshake hurt people. (touch) On the phone Mary's voice was like music. I couldn't hear the words, but I knew what she meant. (hearing) Lucille s.h.i.+elded her eyes like a make-believe Indian examining the horizon. (sight) Barry savored each spoonful of melon as if it were ambrosia he would never be allowed to taste again. (taste) Garret could swear someone had come in behind him, yet hesitated to turn around for fear he would be right. (sixth sense) If you look at those examples again, you'll note that each of the characterizations is an action. Somebody is doing something. There's no need to stop a story to characterize or to use the senses.

The main concern of this chapter is the most common kind of love scene in literature, between a man and a woman. But there are other kinds of love that provide writers and readers with appealing stories: love between an adult and a child; same-s.e.x love affairs; love between a human and an animal; love between children, and love in odd combinations.

To begin with the last, we already know that a major source for writers of fiction involves bringing together people from different social or ethnic backgrounds who meet and fall in love. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between are outstanding examples. In theater, the vitality of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is attributable in large measure to the clash of backgrounds. Sometimes the differences are bizarre-for instance the love of a monstrously deformed person for a normal-appearing human (or vice versa). It is useful to study the cla.s.sics such as Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame with an eye toward understanding how emotions are generated in the reader. The interplay in the audience's emotions may arise from the conflict of repugnance slowly overcome by affection. Young people are much more interested in and accepting of the grotesque in such fantasies. If you enter this difficult but rewarding territory, be mindful that your story to be acceptable must be sufficiently different from the well-known cla.s.sics.

Love stories of great poignancy can be fas.h.i.+oned out of the love between an adult and a child because once upon a time everyone was a child. A child can be desperate for love. Adults are sometimes too busy with the mechanics of living (job, homemaking, the behavior of other adults) to respond to a child's need. The denial of a child's craving for affection touches many readers. Love between a parent and child, or unrequited love between a parent and a child (in either direction), or the belated recognition of parental love or love of a parent, or a child or parent who rejects affection-all are possibilities. However, any s.e.xual conduct involving a child raises the issue of child molestation, a difficult subject for fiction and one involving psychopathology rather than love.

Affection between people and their pets or other animals is frequently the subject of children's books, and has long been important in such adult books as the Tarzan stories and Jack London's The Call of the Wild. It takes skill to make an animal believable as a character, and the best method is to give it a particularity just as you would a human character, a distinctive characteristic and preferably one that relates to the story-for instance a cat that jumps up into the lap of everyone but the person who loves it.

A mistake made easily in stories that involve animals is to neglect particularizing the human character. Also, it is important that the animal have a clear want of its own and not be merely the pa.s.sive recipient of human wants.

The writer who wants to write about the relations.h.i.+p of a human to an animal has to cross two tripwires. There seems to be a greater limit on imaginative story possibilities than in the relations.h.i.+ps between humans. So much has been done with human/animal material that innovation becomes difficult.

Also, the trap of sentimentality is present and ready to snap. It may amuse you to know that George Stevens, a long-time editor of J. B. Lippincott, once a venerable American publis.h.i.+ng firm, actually wrote a book that contained the three most common ingredients in the bestsellers of his time. He called his book Lincoln's Doctor's Dog.

Same-s.e.x love affairs have been the subject of fiction for a long time, though some books, like Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness were often banned, and E. M. Forster's Maurice was not published until after the author died. During recent decades, h.o.m.os.e.xual love stories and h.o.m.oerotic fiction have come out of the closet. A special market has developed for these stories, and h.o.m.os.e.xual attraction has made an occasional appearance in mainstream fiction.

Infantile and child s.e.xuality raises profound discomfort and disbelief in many readers, requiring great skill in the writing. However, a child showing immature affection for another child (sometimes called ”puppy love”) is widely acceptable. This is not a frequent subject of fiction and is difficult to do well.

Which leads us to the princ.i.p.al topic of this chapter, romantic and s.e.xual love between adults. I have some bad news.