The Soul of the Person

Basic Translation to the e card pictured above:

I listen,

Not to the words;

I listen,

To the glances, the gestures;

I listen,

To the soul of the person.

I ran across that picture on Facebook – sometimes curated content is fairly awesome.  The translation might not be exact (my Italian is very limited) but that’s the gist of it. 

As much as it is an amazing instruction for living your life – it also struck me as dead on when it comes to fiction writing.  I struggled for a long time with the “Show, don’t tell” thing.  When you take yourself out of the work enough, you can see it… you can certainly read it in other people’s work.  When you spoon feed too much information on what your reader is supposed to think/feel/understand, the characters ring empty.  You’re telling me who they are, but I don’t really believe you.

I’ve read a lot of writers (published and non) who use the dialog to “show” you who their characters are.  Technically, it’s not telling if you have one character explaining himself to another… except it is. 

I listen, not to the words…

Well, that sounds a little counterproductive to us writers, doesn't it?  They’re all words. 

Except what you really want is for the words to disappear.  You don’t want to be so overly enamored with the way you sling a phrase that your characters have no soul.  That’s what you need to capture – their soul.

How do you determine the soul of a person in your real life?  Is it what they say to you?  If you have a person who tells you how smart they are, do you believe them?  My general rule is that when a person has to tell me they are smart, they’re not.  Either they’re not confident in their mental prowess and are attempting to overcome that by becoming the persona they’re putting out there.  Or they’re just wrong.  And quite frankly, an idiot doesn’t tend to know they’re an idiot.  Often when someone hands you boastful characteristics that they’re attributing to themselves, they’re lying. 

While we can tell the reader certain things, the character can’t be real unless your reader can listen to their soul.  You have to show this.  In real life.  In fiction. 

A lover might say, “I love you” often.  But, if that same lover cheats, forgets your birthday, puts his own needs and wants above any thought of you, do you believe him? 

Love is an action.  The words don’t matter; it’s the act, the movement, what’s shown.  Character is not the words.  You can speak words of great character, but unless you’re walking the walk – just like life, they’re just words.

The tricky part is aspiring to make your writing more than just words.  So how do you listen to the soul of the person?

Talk is Cheap

Most of the time, telling someone what you’re going to do doesn’t go over so well.

“I’m going to write the great American novel.”

If they’re polite, they’ll murmur words of encouragement. If you watch really close, they’re trying not to laugh in your face. This is mostly your fault. You’ve dumped this lofty goal on their head with nothing to back it up.

Of course, creative people know that non-creative people don’t always understand our goals. They use words like pipe-dream and delusions of grandeur. Most people stop being so cynical your creative ambitions once you’ve reached this level or that level, though not always. Creative people aren’t the only people these rules apply to, though, they apply to everyone.

The guy who talks endlessly about gardening, telling you where each vegetable and flower should be planted, but he doesn’t have a garden. The guy who can tell you brick by brick how he’s going to build a fabulous new addition, but five years later there’s not a lick of work done... he’s still talking about it, though.

With big dreams and goals, it does help to plan out how you’re going to get there. It does help to have people to bounce your progress off of and who support you. But it’s a fine line – are you talking about it, or are you working toward it? If the act of discussing it diminishes the drive to do it in any way, go out and buy some duct tape and apply it to your mouth. You’ll thank me later.

Talk is cheap in life – telling someone what you’re going to do has little impact. Showing them what you’ve done speaks volumes. The same rule applies to fiction. This, of course, directly correlates to the oft-repeated Show, Don’t Tell thing. But I’m finding that, show, don’t tell, is more nuanced than I realized at first.

I’ll use first person as an example. First person can be comfortable and awesome to read. You sink into it and it almost feels like this great friend is leading you through the story, when the author is very capable. And because it’s comfortable and easy to read, it looks a lot easier to write than it is. There are limitations with first person that can be hard to get around and I notice that some authors take short cuts to get over this. They tell.

You’re in the main character’s head already, so instead of writing out scenes of importance, the character tells you what happened. Or worse, they tell you what they feel, and if the character has a good enough voice, it can keep the reader in it for a while, but it diminishes the impact of the story. It’s just not believable. Most people don’t talk to themselves in such detail that another person (if they could listen in to your head) would know what the hell you’re talking about). So using internal thoughts to drop backstory, or give foreshadowing, or tell us what the character’s real motives, etc. etc... it doesn’t ring true. First of all, we don’t explain what we already know to ourselves. Second, and probably more important, most people aren’t that honest with themselves – we don’t always understand our own real motives. When we do understand our own motives, we don’t always admit to them.

But from the story standpoint, the most important thing is the effect this has on the reader. Showing them the reactions, scenes, little hints of what your character is about is how your reader engages in your story. If you tell them everything, they don’t get the fun of figuring it out, of playing along, of getting to know your character. Whether intentional or not, it reads as a lack of confidence in your readers’ ability to understand the story. And there’s nothing quite worse than getting the feeling the author thinks you’re stupid.

I haven’t yet mastered first person writing – not sure if it’s just not my speed as a writer or if I just haven’t worked on a story it’s a good fit for yet. I tend to be more comfortable with close third person, but the same foibles apply here. If you go on long winding internal dialogue in close third, it’ll take the same things away from the story.

How about you? Do you notice some of these ‘tells’ in your favorite books or in your own work? And do you find talking about your work in progress is a good way to work out the kinks or does it just diminish your urge to write it?