Reading People (and Writing Them, Too)
Dig Up Humanity in the Details
Well, the world outside my window is shaming me again/from the things I haven’t seen cause I’ve been writing about them. That lyric from the song “Perimeter of Me” by Dividing the Plunder haunts me even now because the line often describes me. You, too, if I’m putting money down.
Let me explain. I sent the most recent novel I wrote to an agent I respect for critique. This agent went above and beyond the call of duty, kindly offering five single-spaced pages of notes and paving me a path to publication. The most troubling of the notes nailed something I’ve struggled with for some time: One said, “The dialogue is often meted out in abstractions,” and another said, “We seldom get a glimpse of the inner lives of these characters.”
He spoke true. My novel’s problem had little to do with the prose, its narrative framework, or the interconnectivity of the lives of my characters. Its problem had to do with me sitting inside all day long typing, letting the world outside my window shame me for the things I hadn’t seen because I’d been writing about them instead.
Is this you?
Do you find that you’ve spent so long in the books, so long worried about the craft, going to conferences, sifting through the notes of beta readers, paying library fines, and revising that you’ve actually written yourself out of your own humanity?
Man, I know I have.
DIG UP HUMAN DETAILS, DIALOGUE, AND CONFLICT DIRECTIONS
If you’re not a good human, it really doesn’t matter how good you are at writing, because the foundation below you is quicksand. Good writers are, by necessity, good humans. Cutting yourself off from the world outside won’t help. An alternative exists. You can read real people and then write them—read their dialogue, read their defining attributes, read the direction of their relational conflict. Become a student of the masses.
Lucky for you and me, we’re not the only ones in history to go through this. Hundreds of writers have found ways to reinvigorate their humanity. Hemingway, for instance, would take time every day to push himself into adventures. In his Art of Fiction interview with The Paris Review, Hemingway and The Paris Review’s interviewer made the following exchange:
INTERVIEWER
Archibald MacLeish has spoken of a method of conveying experience to a reader which he said you developed while covering baseball games back in those Kansas City Star days. It was simply that experience is communicated by small details, intimately preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole by making the reader conscious of what he had been aware of only subconsciously …
HEMINGWAY
The anecdote is apocryphal. I never wrote baseball for the Star. What Archie was trying to remember was how I was trying to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions, such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just come out of stir, and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.
His point moves beyond details. Often in MFA courses, my friends in such programs must go out into a busy part of New York—Madison Square or Battery Park or MoMa—and listen to dialogue, transcribing the weirdest things people say as fast as they can type. For many, those snippets become the first inklings of stories that end up in magazines like The Paris Review and One Story. People say strange things, troubling and astounding things. For instance, I transcribed the following real-life conversation, and it ended up in a story I sold to Hatch Magazine last year:
“How’d things work out with the Columbian woman?”
“She killed a guy,” Frank said. “Who knows?”
“She call you? She try to contact you?” Micky asked.
“Nah. It was easy.”
“It doesn’t get any better than that.”
“We’ll know,” Frank said.
“Does the teacher want to be with you?” Micky asked.
“She was so freaked out about it, with the other woman.”
“Does she want you closer?”
“Yeah, but I want to be away.”
“Do you want that distance?”
“Yeah. She has kids.”
“Kids, okay does she—”
“She killed the guy, the father.”
“The teacher did?” Micky asked.
“The Colombian woman.”
“She killed the guy and broke it off?”
“Yeah,” Frank said.
“Oh, she killed the guy and broke it off.”
“Yeah the dog was just hanging there by herself. Had to take care of her.”
“Do you guys communicate well?” Micky said.
“The dog loves me.”
“Not the dog!”
“Ha!”
“Get off the dog!”
“I’m not on the dog!”
“Ha! Stay off the dog, you old dirty bastard. Leave the dog. The woman. The teacher. You like her? You communicate well?”
Sure, kids say the darnedest things. But adults? Their conversations baffle me—I’m reminded of that Lewis Black comedy sketch in which he randomly hears a woman say, “If it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have had to spend that year in college.”
As for digging up the humanity in the details, Mary Robinette Kowal suggests this method: Sit in a room, and describe everything you see for thirty minutes straight. At the end of those thirty minutes, you’ll find yourself writing about the most human details—the things that Hemingway talked about in the interview, the things that show you where the stories are. I did this exercise once on the Long Island Rail Road, and after thirty minutes I noticed a splatter of blood in the shape of a cheekbone on one of the ledges. That was the most human part of the train—cut out half the details I transcribed and end the paragraph on that cheekbone blood, and suddenly you have enough curiosity to drive a story.
READ YOUR PEOPLE, AND WRITE WHAT YOU READ
Or maybe you need to learn some conflict. Maybe your dialogue is fine, and your details are human rather than abstractions.
In that case, your assignment is to truly read people—people as in their collective interactions with one another—to partake in “people watching” of the highest degree. If you see someone order a Chick fil A sandwich with a spouse, see if either of them hems and haws, shuffles his or her feet, or ignores the other person. Are two people being passive-aggressive? What does that look like when it unfolds before your eyes? In my own work, and in the work of most writers, there are far too many shrugs and sighs and smirks. Where are the stretched lips? Where are the tucked knees? The toe-point grinds? The palm-heel strikes? People are much more subtle than we write them. We only write them poorly because we read them poorly. Open your eyes and your ears, and wake up to all you’ve missed.
Let me encourage you: Take a break, grab a pen and a journal, and get into the world outside your window. Let it stop shaming you. Take a good week to listen to and see and read the people in your neighborhood and city.
You might be surprised at what you find. And, in the long run, so will your readers.
In fact, I’ll bet by the time you return to the world inside your window and open your manuscript once more, you’ll be ready to improve by learning from the story craft of others, from your own book, and from workshops, conferences, editors, and the rest.
Be a good human, and you’ll find the big cornerstones have already been laid for you to become a great writer.