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Rochelle Shapiro is a regular columnist for Authorlink. Watch for her insights every month on Authorlink.
"...writing is a form of entertainment. Writing has personality." —Shapiro
Even if you’re writing a horror novel or a memoir about how you were flattened by a semi, it’s important to keep in mind that writing is a form of entertainment. Writing has personality. It’s easier for personality to come through in a medium such as TV or the movies where you can see Jimmy Fallon playing a drinking game on late night TV (I wish I wasn’t addicted to late night TV) or Craig Ferguson exchanging quips with a skeleton. The writer’s challenge is to engage the reader by capturing gesture, expression, and body language in words, and surprise, most of all surprise.
I was just reading a New Yorker short story by Margaret Atwood called Stone Matters (Dec 19th and 26th, 2011) when I was reminded that one of the ways to create personality in a story is to have something sensational happening that is told in a dry, flat, matter-of-fact, non-sensational voice. Listen to her very first line.
“At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.”
Also, having the character do the very opposite of what he says is another way of creating freshness.
“Verna has made it plain that she isn’t taking a trip to pick up men, that she’s had enough of that. Then that that’s just what she’s doing, casing her fellow travelers at the airport for men. “Old habits die hard,” she explains. And if you don’t think that’s realistic, just observe yourself several days after you’ve made your New Year’s Eve resolutions. If the character sets out to do exactly what he sets the reader up to believe he will, where is the story?
Humor, even and perhaps especially in a story leads to tragedy, gives the writing punch. As Verna is eying the men, the narrator tells us:
“It’s the solitaries who interest her, the lurkers at the fringes. Some of them are too old for her purposes; she avoids eye contact with them. The ones who cherish the belief that there’s life in the old dog yet; these are her game.” In her zeal to find an older man to foist money from, she dabs on cologne. “It’s a mistake to overdo it: though elderly men’s noses aren’t as keen as they may once have been, it’s best to allow for allergies. A sneezing man is not an attentive man.”
"Writing with personality gives personality to the characters." —Shapiro
Writing with personality gives personality to the characters. Whether you’re writing about yourself or a fictional character, what makes the character interesting is inner and outer flaws. As Verne thinks about how to best show off her Aquacize and Core-trained bod, the narrator points out “She wouldn’t want to chance a deck chair in a bikini—superficial puckering has set in, despite her best efforts—which is one reason for selecting the Arctic over say—the Caribbean.” And this observation Verne makes of herself as she looks in the mirror. “Though much is taken, much remains.”
Personality is right in the title of Nathan Englander’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. (New Yorker, Dec. 12, 2011) a play on Raymond Carver’s short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Right off, with the mention of Anne Frank, we cans see that Englander’s story has a Jewish twist It’s easy to forget how important a title is in setting the tone of a story and giving it zip so that a reader will want to read on. Like Atwood’s grizzly, but light-hearted story about a revenge murder, Englander has a light touch in his story about Holocaust survivors and the continued effect of the Holocaust on all Jews.
In this reunion of two couples—one of them Hassidic and the other non-observant Jews, a Hassidic woman who has ten daughters is described with incongruity:
“And Lauren, I met her once before, right when Deb and I got married, but ten girls and a thousand Shabbos dinners later—well, she’s a big woman in a bad dress and a giant blonde Marilyn Monroe wig.”
The story, which begins almost as a comedy of manners, is even more devastating than Atwood’s, but there is always an eye for entertaining the reader, for giving the story verve. All the details are colorful and vivid with an unexpected comparison. Huh? A Hassidic woman with a Marilyn Monroe wig? Certainly an image that will stay with you.
Garrison Keiller described the newly elected mayor of Minnesota in the days when he was a wrestler like this:
“You see him cavorting about the ring, 6’4”, 225 pounds with a fringe of peroxide hair, wearing sort of tie-dyed tights, a man in a grotesque cartoon body…He’s got a mustache and long, dangling earrings. He looks like a CPA at a Mardi Gras.” That last twist, an image both outlandish, but fitting, is what gives the story personality and helps make the character memorable. Making the right comparison is one of the most important things a writer can do to give his work color. In the Poetica, Aristotle said, “By far the greatest thing is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius because good metaphor implies similarity among dissimilars.”
"An eye for the unlikely, both in plot, dialogue, and description are the keys..." —Shapiro
An eye for the unlikely, both in plot, dialogue, and description are the keys to writing with personality.
About Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster) and has published essays in NYT (Lives), Newsweek (My Turn), et. al. Her essay, ESS, ESS, is just out in FEED ME: WRITERS DISH ABOUT FOOD, EATING, WEIGHT, AND BODY IMAGE, ed. by Harriet Brown (Random House, 2009). She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry. She teaches Writing the Personal Essay at UCLA extension. Visit her at: www.rochellejewelshapiro.com or http://rochellejewelshapiro.blogspot.com/
