This post addresses the shortcoming that overdone brevity causes in storytelling. To revisit the sample paragraph from the last post, in this scene a teenage boy is approaching a girl’s home for his first date with her, and he’s never been there.
Her mother opened the door as he approached. "Come right in. Kathy isn't ready yet; it'll be just a minute.” He found himself in the living room with her mother, father, and little brother. He tried not to say much, passing the time, trying to get through the ordeal without coming apart.
This paragraph suffers from something that happens in my own writing, although not as skeletally as this example. Novelist Laura Kalpakian, in a manuscript development course I took from her, gave my storytelling high marks for dialogue, description, and pace—but didn’t get enough from my narrative about the characters to truly involve her. My narrative was simply too lean at times, and the story suffered for it. Her wise advice: “Linger.”
In this writer’s sample, his haste to get the boy and girl out the door and to their date caused him to miss opportunities to draw the reader into the boy’s story and build sympathy for his character, not to mention create tension and story questions about what’s going to happen. Anybody who’s been a teenage boy calling on a girl for the first time knows how tense the situation and the boy are. The narrative would be far better served with a brief scene instead of the telling done here. Here’s just one of the rich possibilities:
What kind of a look does the father give the boy (for he would do so, I’m certain), and what’s the boy’s perception/reaction to it? For example:
Kathy’s father lowered his bushy brows and gave Jimmy a look that made him feel like he was lying under an X-ray machine. He jerked a quick little smile and blurted, “Pleased to meet you, sir.” Then he realized how stupid that was because nobody had actually introduced them. The sweat under his arms cranked up to a slow drip.
All too quickly, they escape the girl’s house and go to a dance in the high school gym. There’s close dancing, she gives him signals such as pressing tightly against him while dancing, and he becomes highly aroused. When they leave the dance, the writer gives us this:
At twelve, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. The car heater kicked in nicely as they drove down Main Street and into the countryside. The farms they passed were dark. Jamie turned down a gravel road and slowed.
The night is frosty, but what else is there when they walk out of that gym? There’s no tension or anticipation in this expository paragraph, but great opportunity to build it. Is there a moon out? Mightn’t he gaze at her face and have some romantic/lusty thoughts as he takes her to the car? If it’s like any high school dance I ever saw back in the day, there are kids outside, some smoking, some necking. For example:
At twelve, he guided Kathy to their coats and out into the frosty October air. Laughter and the sweet aroma of cigarette smoke wafted from three guys huddled beside a pickup truck. When Jimmy and Kathy passed a parked car with steamed-up windows, he heard thumping sounds from inside and the car rocked on its springs. He glanced at Kathy and found her gazing at the car. If only...She looked up at him and grinned. She tiptoed and leaned against him to whisper into his ear, pressing her belly against his hand. “I don’t have to be home until one.”
Oh, man…
That little of description and action didn’t take many words, but you get a greater sense of place and time, and the sexual tension between the two is ramped up. As a result, the coming necking and petting when they park will be that much more meaningful.
The two things to keep in mind in spinning a tale are:
1. give the reader pictures, and
2. give those pictures in ways that characterize the players and advance the story.
Flat, postcard-like descriptions do not generate compelling storytelling. Make every picture rich with “story meaning” – character emotions and reactions to settings and happenings that deepen the reader’s understanding and connection.
Pease let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”