Telepathy

My family hates it when I get really into a book, because I stop talking to them. I stop cooking for them. The dog goes unwalked, the mail languishes in the postbox, I forget to groom. I want to lose myself completely in the world the writer has created until the very last pages: reality is not allowed to intrude. Reading such books is a little bit like falling in love … or addiction.

Luckily for my family, I don’t come across too many addictive books. Most thrillers don’t thrill me, because I seek character development and description, which they don’t tend to provide. Literary books, which I gravitate toward, aren’t typically page turners. But I have recently devoured two thrilling literary books: The Age of Miracles, a novel by Karen Thompson Walker, and Jesus Land, a memoir by Julia Scheeres.

I finished Jesus Land yesterday, and as I turned the last page I flopped back on the sofa and couldn’t move for a few minutes. I had to give myself a period of stillness, a comma, between the world she’d created (in which I’d been thoroughly immersed) and my own life, which seemed very distant. And as I stared at the ceiling, I thought, what was it about that book that pulled me in so deeply? I was hooked right away, so it was something beyond plot or character, both of which take time to develop.

Both Walker and Scheeres are ridiculously talented, but one knack they share is vividness of description. They paint word-pictures in the reader’s mind, and that ability is the quickest way for an author to yank a person from his own quotidian reality into your narrative world. As Stephen King puts it in On Writing, specificity is the nearest we can get to actual telepathy.

Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8.

Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to be absolutely sure, but I think we do.  … We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room … except we are together. We’re close.

We’re having a meeting of the minds.

I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all, especially that blue eight. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.

To succeed, this kind of telepathy requires descriptions that are concrete and sensual. “A blue sky” is generic; “a hazy blue sky with a hawk circling at the zenith” is vivid. King warns, however, that specificity is best in short bursts: we don’t need an elaborate description of the rabbit cage’s materials, or the breed of rabbit, or the dimensions of the room. This kind of “prissy attention to detail” does exactly the opposite of good specificity: it pulls the reader out of the story. A novel I read recently that I felt made this mistake was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Author Rachel Joyce writes gorgeous descriptive passages, which I admired for their elegance, but which put me to sleep. When reading, I skimmed these paragraphs. When listening on audio, my mind wandered and I kept having to rewind.

My attention never faltered during Jesus Land or The Age of Miracles.

A swiftly slowing planet

From The Age of Miracles:

Christy Castaneda swanned past the library window — it was her birthday too, and not one but two balloons swayed from her delicate wrist, each one signed on the blank silver side in loopy, loving cursive. 

Eyewitnesses reported seeing a bearded man, dressed in robes, howling Scripture on the side of the road. According to their accounts, a station wagon approached from the west at approximately 8:25 p.m. Opinions varied about the speed of the vehicle at the time of impact, but all agreed about the way the man lunged into the path of the car, bent on suicide or miracle. At least six other cars had swerved successfully around him. Ours was the seventh.

Christy is not an important character, but having her full name gives the little anecdote a peculiar sense of truth. Ditto the exact time (8:25 p.m.) and direction of travel (west) in the car-accident scene, as well as the specific number of cars. Just as a liar makes his lie more believable by being precise, so a writer makes her fiction more believable. Such details can veer into the overdescription King warns against, except Walker limits herself to just a few key points, and the scene described is active enough to carry them.

Walker uses a few simple words to create a broad impression: Christy swans, her wrist is delicate, the writing is loopy cursive. These images triangulate to paint a picture that a lesser writer might take an entire paragraph to transmit. You only need a few pinpoints; if they are consistent (swan, delicate, cursive), the reader's imagination will fill in the rest.

The author and her brother David

From Jesus Land:

A group of girls, stuffed into cut-offs and tube tops, their eyes raccoonish with black eyeliner, were leaning against the shaded wall of the cement shack. They sucked on popsicles and cigarettes and jutted out their hips at the trucks and jacked-up Camaros that pulled in for gas.

Deb fries vegetables in beer batter for our supper. We eat wrapped in our towels in her tiny kitchen as the late-afternoon sun falls over the table, warming a handful of marigolds she’s stuck in a chipped-blue vase.

I get out of bed and open the bottom drawer of my desk. There, between the photographs of Lecka, polished seashell and a collection of plastic horses, I find the letter opener I got at a Christmas party gift swap a few years ago. The handle is engraved with Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” It’s metal with a pointed, knifelike tip, and it’s the closest thing I have to a weapon.

The first sentence is near-poetry in its use of internal rhyme, and crackles with staccato-like consonance: stuffed, cut-offs, shack, sucked, popsicle, jutted, truck, jacked. The stage props (cut-offs, tube tops, and Camaros) work together to tell us immediately we’re in the 1980s, without Scheeres having to spell it out. We also get an atmosphere of grimy sexuality.

In the brief description of dinner at Deb’s, we get loads of sensory information, but the action never stops: this is another key to good description. In Harold Fry, Joyce keeps stopping the action to tell us how beautiful the landscape is. But these scenes are static. Humans are animals, and animals react to movement; if you watch a dog or cat dozing, you’ll notice her snap to attention the instant something moves. Same thing with readers: they will get bored if too many words pass without movement. Scheeres couches her descriptions in people doing things; her writing remains dynamic.

The last paragraph, with the letter opener and the plastic horses, has haunted me since I read it. Scheeres does this a few times, juxtaposing an image of innocence, like the horse figurines, with an image of violence, like the letter opener. Instead of informing us that her innocence was stolen from her, Scheeres shows us with these symbolic (and highly specific) objects — and in doing so she makes us feel her fear and loss.

Notice the verbs used in these examples, too: things don’t just exist, they scoot, punch, stuff, suck, swan. I particularly love how “swan,” normally a noun, is used as a verb in the Walker example. You get a twofer with that one: both a sense of gliding, and a visual of the long-necked bird. British writers are particularly adept at turning nouns into descriptive verbs in this way: hooves thunder along a road, silk puddles at her feet, moonlight sieves through the hedgerows. Americans, more literal, have to work at this. When I write a first draft, my verbs are obvious and ordinary. In the rewrite, I take the time to search for more descriptive replacements. (Thank you, thesaurus.com.) A good verb does the work of a dozen adjectives and adverbs.

Now, a challenge for my fellow writer-readers: if you’re reading a book now, or you have a favorite book you keep turning back to, flip it open and find a few descriptive phrases or passages. Think about what makes them work. Share one here if you like, or just write it down in your journal. When you turn back to your own work, see whether this increased attention to detail helps your creative process. I know it does mine.

Smell Discrimination

A few weeks ago, a mom in Seattle was kicked off a city bus because of the stench of her baby’s dirty diaper. The four-month pregnant woman had to walk a mile and a half with her sick child to the pediatrician’s office. (Yes, you read right. Here’s the full story.) Honestly, I doubt that the offensive diaper was the foulest smell to ever roost in that bus (let’s face it, public transportation is well-known to host the worst stenches ever known to humankind), but aside from my outrage on behalf of the mother-in-question, I started thinking about the undermined importance of our sense of smell.

A smell can attract us to a person, food and place, or it can repel us. Smell is perhaps the most evocative of senses. Have you ever smelled a perfume, oil or detergent that brought back memories of your childhood or youth? I read somewhere that “a picture may be worth a thousand words, but a scent is worth a thousand memories.”

Certain scents can be soothing, such as incense, baby powder or the smell of grass after the rain; and certain aromas can remind us that we’re hungry. Have you noticed how we associate the smell of popcorn with movies, pizza with airports and cinnamon rolls with malls?

As writers, we spend most of our efforts on visual descriptions and sounds (what and how a character says something) a little less on touch and taste, but rarely do we bother with smell. So why do we omit it? Perhaps because this sense is more subjective (some may like a particular scent but others may not), plus it’s not easy to define (how do you describe the scent of a man without mentioning a specific cologne, soap or sweat?) Sometimes you may not know what something smells like with accuracy (do you know what a sugar cane field smells like?)

Describing smells can sometimes be risky because it can give readers a very definite mental image that they may not associate positively to your character. For example, in my first novel, the protagonist’s love interest is constantly smoking (hey, it’s the 60’s!) so I have a scene where the main character recognizes his presence based on the smell of cigarette and mint. One of my beta readers was turned off by my hero because of his scent (and thought that a contemporary audience wouldn’t be attracted to a man like this) but another reader thought it was an endearing quality that he tried to cover up the scent of smoke with mints.

In Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates describes smells often and he does it in conjunction to other sensory details to give the reader a more vivid description of place.

“Then he was following her hips up a dim carpeted stairway, and then a door had clicked shut behind him and he was standing in a room that smelled of vacuum cleaning and breakfast bacon and perfume, a high, silent room where everything lay richly bathed in yellow light from windows whose blinds of split bamboo had turned the sun into fine horizontal stripes of tan and gold.”

Smell is also a device Yates uses to transition into characters’ memories through flashbacks or backstory.

“The smell of school in the darkness, pencils and apples and library paste, brought a sweet nostalgic pain to his eyes and he was fourteen again, and it was the year he’d lived in Chester, Pennsylvania—no, in Englewood, New Jersey—and spent all his free time in a plan for riding the rails to the West Coast.”

He even makes smell the source of conflict between two characters:

“He walked over and gave her a little hug; but his smile froze into an anxious grimace against her ear, because in bending close to her shoulder he had caught a faint whiff of  something rancid. 

In the shower, pensively soaping and scrubbing, Shep Campbell wondered what the hell it was that made her smell that way sometimes. It wasn’t that she didn’t take enough baths—he knew damn well she’d had one last night—and it didn’t have anything to do with the time of the month; he had checked that out long ago. It seemed to be a thing brought on by nerves, like a skin rash or a bad stomach; he guessed it was just that she tended to perspire more in times of tension. 

But he had to acknowledge, as he toweled himself in the steam, that it was more than just the smell of sweat. That alone, God knew, could be an exciting thing on a woman. And suddenly he was full of the time last summer when he’d held April Wheeler half drunk on the stifling, jam-packed dance floor of Vito’s Log Cabin, when her soaked dress was stuck to her back and her temple slid greasily under his cheek as they swayed to the buzz and clip of a snare drum and the moan of a saxophone. Oh, she was sweating, all right, and the smell of her was as strong and clean as lemons; it was the smell of her as much as the tall rhythmic feel of her that made his—that had made him want to—oh, Jesus. It had happened nearly a year ago, and the memory of it could still make his fingers tremble in the buttoning of his shirt.”

First edition of Revolutionary Road (1961)

And who can resist Roald Dahl’s description of a witch?

“What other things must I look for to recognize a witch?” I asked.
“Look for the nose-holes,” my grandmother said. “Witches have slightly larger nose-holes than ordinary people. The rim of each nose-hole is pink and curvy, like the rim of a certain kind of sea-shell.”
“Why do they have such big nose-holes?” I asked.
“For smelling with,” my grandmother said. “A REAL WITCH has the most amazing power of smell. She can smell out a child who is standing on the other side of the street on a pitch-black night.”
“She couldn't smell me,” I said. “I've just had a bath.”
“Oh yes she could,” my grandmother said. “The cleaner you happen to be, the more smelly you are to a witch.”
“That can't be true,” I said.
“An absolutely clean child gives off the most ghastly stench to a witch,” my grandmother said. “The dirtier you are, the less you smell.”
“But that doesn't make sense, Grandmamma.”
“Oh yes it does,” my grandmother said. “It isn't the dirt that the witch is smelling.  It is you. The smell that drives a witch mad actually comes right out of your own skin. It comes oozing out of your skin in waves, and these waves, stink-waves the witches call them, go floating through the air and hit the witch right smack in her nostrils. They send her reeling.”
“Now wait a minute, Grandmamma...”
“Don't interrupt,” she said. “The point is this, when you haven't washed for a week and your skin is covered over with dirt, then quite obviously the stink-waves cannot come oozing out nearly so strongly.”
“I shall never have a bath again.” I said.
“Just don't have one too often,” my grandmother said. “Once a month is quite enough for a sensible child.”
It was at moments like these that I loved my grandmother more than ever.

(The Witches, pg. 23-24)

Finally, smell can be used to evoke an emotion in a character (and hopefully, the reader, too) like Robert Goolrick does in A Reliable Wife.

“He sat in a chair by the darkening window. ‘After she left, after he drove my mother away, after my sister died. I would sneak over to the old house, to the villa, and climb the staircase and go into her room. I would stand in her closet and bury my nose in her dresses, breathing in my mother. She smelled like another country, a country where there was always music and dancing. A country lit by candlelight.’”

Are there any scents that evoke memories in you? Can you share an effective description of smell in a work of fiction? Do you believe there is such a thing as an offensive odor, like in the smelly diaper story? Do you think the bus driver had a right to do what she did?