Characters in a flick of paint

You know how gifted artists can suggest a face – and a mood, a character, a personality – in just a few swift lines?

Well, writers can do the same. So today’s email is just a “stand and admire” type affair. Two writers. Two vastly different techniques. But some surprising commonalities in the way they work…

Dialogue with Big El

How about this from Elmore Leonard:

‘Man, all the photographers, TV cameras. This shit is big news, has everybody over here to see it. Otherwise, Sunday, what you have mostly are rich ladies come out with their little doggies to make wee-wee. I mean the doggies, not the ladies.’ A girl in front of them smiled over her shoulder and Ordell said, ‘How you doing, baby? You making it all right?’ He looked past her now, glanced at Louis to say, ‘I think I see him,’ and pushed through the crowd to get closer to the street. ‘Yeah, there he is. Black shirt and tie? A grown-up skinhead Nazi. I call him Big Guy. He likes that.’

‘It’s Richard,’ Louis said. ‘Jesus.’

The speaker is a guy called Ordell. This is the second page of Rum Punch, so the reader has no prior knowledge of the character. But that little paragraph? It says so much. It says:

1. He talks a kind of cool, urban tough guy English – which is just about right. He’s a ruthless blackmarket operator in LA.
2. At the same time, “with their little doggies to make wee-wee”? Huh? What? This is such an unexpected turn of phrase, we don’t quite know what to do with it. I think, for me, this is sign of a kind of unpredictability. If the guy was angry with you and happened to have a gun in his hand, you’d have no idea which way he was about to leap.
3. And sure enough, it’s straight from that highly unexpected phrase to a very standard pick-up type line (“How you doing, baby?”). From a white power march to doggies making wee to a very basic pick-up line. Our heads are spinning.
4. And then, we get to the point of the scene: “There he is. Black shirt and tie. A grown-up skinhead Nazi.” And oh, OK, we readjust again. Forget the pretty girls. Forget the doggie wee-wees. We’re hunting Nazis. And Nazis are bad, right? No one loves a Nazi. Plus, we assume correctly that Ordell is Black, and so he surely really really doesn’t like Nazis.
5. Only then, yet another switcheroo: “I call him Big Guy. He likes that.” And again: huh? Why are we making nice with skinhead Nazis? Why is Ordell, of all people doing so?

The whole paragraph is barely 100 words, but it’s told us so much already about Ordell – and already locked us into the story, because we know that anything involving Ordell and Nazi Big Guy is going to involve violence and a lot of unpredictability and fireworks.

Big El’s tips for humans:

1. Throw unpredictability into your dialogue. Steer one way, then abruptly somewhere different.
2. Let the dialogue do character description for you. Leonard doesn’t need to tell us that Ordell is highly sexed and ready to try it on with pretty much anyone. He just writes 9 words of dialogue and leaves us to figure it out.

Interior Monologue, with Mrs Robinson

Here is a completely opposite technique from Marilynne Robinson – a technique so opposite, that Elmore Leonard would never use it:

I don’t know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little.

No dialogue here. It’s all interior reflection. And John Ames, the narrator here, is about as far from Ordell as you could possibly imagine.

But we have the same themes at play here:

1. Real unpredictability. Here, the narrator surprises us by telling us that people are asking him (a person who’s alive) what it’s like to be dead. Then he surprises us further, by telling us that elderly people would ask him that even when he was young. Then he comes up with what is maybe a somewhat expected line about going home… but then thwarts that by saying we have no home in the world… before going on to talk about what might actually be the homiest thing in the world, namely a fried egg sandwich and coffee and radio.
2. Let the interior monologue do the character work for you. In just the same way as regular dialogue for Elmore Leonard, Marilynne Robinson doesn’t bother to tell us much about her character. She just lets him narrate and forces the reader to draw inferences.

I was originally going to pick a third novelist to compare as well, but I’m intrigued enough by the basis similarity in approach here – unpredictability plus a lot of reliance on the reader figuring things out for themselves – that I wanted to see how I approach the same  issues.

And – well, it’s complicated. I write first person as Fiona and, yes, Fiona is notably unnpredictable right from her actions through to her word choices. She doesn’t explain herself much. She just is, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions. So in terms of my approach with Fiona, I guess I operate on largely the same lines as the two models here.

But when it comes to Fiona encountering other characters, something a bit more complicated is going on. We’ll look at that next week.

In the meantime, it’s time for…

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FEEDBACK FRIDAY

Give me any chunk (100-200 words max; we want short) that shows deep characterisation in a few swift lines. Look for unpredictability and a reliance on the reader’s own intelligence. It’s going to be interesting to see what you come up with.

When you’re ready, log into Townhouse and share your extract here.

Til soon.

Harry