Frenzied Daddy

As I learned “creative writing,” whether it was at an after-school class or at a meeting of young writers, one exercise kept coming back. Write a paragraph to describe someone. I did it a few times, where “few” means “a few hundred.” One of my favorites, not written by me, is “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull. Of the hundreds I wrote, I rewrote and worked on one in particular where some horsemen appeared out of the fog as a young man stood in the grass and took the time to describe the lead horseman in what I thought was great detail. But a description is more than a catalog of appearances.

Charlie Fletcher describes a character in Stoneheart and nails this technique to the wall.

George looked up. He saw a man made from tarnished bronze from the bottom of his army boots to the top of his tin helmet. The Gunner from the war memorial looked back down at him as he broke the revolver in his hand, shook out the spent shells, and reloaded in a movement so fluid that he didn’t seem to need to look at his hands while he did it.

He moved so fast that he snapped the reloaded revolver back together while the shells were still tinkling at George’s feet.

George felt his nightmare wasn’t over. He scooted away from the Gunner, but not fast enough. The Gunner grabbed him and yanked him back against the wall and then stepped in front of him. Protecting him.

Charlie didn’t explain the horse braids on one shoulder or go into every detail about how the creases of the bronze are a brighter color than the flat surfaces. He didn’t list all the features, and he left enough ambiguousness that your mind can fill in the rest. Stoneheart is full of descriptions like this; they’re very well done.

If I had any inkling that you could used character studies like this in a novel without sounding as wordy as Tolkien, I may have tried harder to pull it all together.

I’m responding to this post over on a scrapbooking board, but twisting it slightly from a “journalling slump” to a “blogging slump.” Well, not so much a “blogging slump” but “when there’s something I want to say but I can’t get it started.” The words get all balled up in a snarl of fishing line and then it’s a real pain to unsnarl them.

Physical, rhythmic things help a lot; hitting the elliptical or just going for a walk. The “priming the pump” image isn’t just fluff. So I’ve seen when I’m trying to get those thoughts in a line, if I can get into my head while I’m doing it, while I’m getting into the flow, that’s the best place. Which makes it hard for Ms B to talk to me or Miss K to climb up my back and sit on my shoulders while I’m thinking. That sort of thing keeps me in the here and now; which is good, but it doesn’t directly help the flow.

Another thing that helps is reading other things; I spend a lot of time (too much time) just browsing the internet, keeping up with other people’s blogs, you know, just reading. That helps because sometimes it gives me things to write about, or helps gel together the thoughts I have in my mind that want to come out too.