Write From Within Your Characters
Write from within the point of view of your characters. Writing advice from Chuck Palahniuk.
Hand painted sign on wall, Havana, Cuba. Photo: Tanya Chaytor 2000
Sometimes the process of looking through digital photographs can feel an unromantic act.
Clicking, scrolling, clicking again. All those tiny thumbnails in a long vertical line. You select an image only to find it's not quite the one you were looking for.
Of course, there are numerous ways to catalogue and order all your digital images. You can spend hours of your precious time organising them into albums and folders, thinking of clever yet workable naming systems, sharing a carefully edited and curated selection with all your loved ones. What a wonderful thing that would be!
Often what happens in this house consists of me dragging out the large box of 6”x4” photos I keep on the floor of the cupboard in the room where I work. Many of the photos are stacked in envelopes with print lab names such as Truprint or Snappy Snaps. There are many pictures that don't live in an envelope at all. These lie in unison with the rest of their homeless counterparts. A picture of a cat layered with a picture of a family wedding layered behind a tropical beach with palm trees blowing in a storm.
Some of our better holiday photos have the prestige of being collected in an album. Plastic ones with transparent sleeves, pictures that were taken over twenty years ago in countries that have long since changed.
For this week’s writing let's have a think about a point of view. I’m not thinking about the specifics of first, second and third person. Although these are so important for the consciousness of our stories. I’m thinking more about Chuck Palahniuk's advice to write from within the point of view of our characters.
“Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character.
This means that every way the character describes the world must describe the character’s experience. You and I never walk into the same room as each other. We each see the room through the lens of our own life. A plumber enters a very different room than a painter enters.
This means you can’t use abstract measurements. No more six-foot-tall men. Instead, you must describe a man’s size based on how your character or narrator perceives a man whose height is seventy-two inches. A character might say “a man too tall to kiss” or “a man her dad’s size when he’s kneeling in church.” You may not describe the temperature as being one hundred degrees. Or trips as being fifty miles long. All standardized measurements preclude you describing how your character sees the world.
So no more five-year-old girls. No more seven o’clock. No two-ton trucks.”p.47, Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk
I know, I know. This is not easy. But. Try it. Use the photograph above if that helps. Imagine yourself as the person watching the green car drive by. Or be the person driving the car. Or be a passenger in the car. Or a pedestrian walking along the other side of the street. Avoid those abstract measurements that Palahniuk describes in the quote above. See how you go.
Until next week.
