Three Things Every Novelist MUST Do
I spent a lot of years telling rooms full of just-out-of-J-School reporters to “picture groceries.” For a decade, I gave up a few days every summer to teach at state press association “boot camps” where the goal was to whip the newbies into pros over the course of a single week. Impossible task, of course, but I do love a challenge.
I started every class the same way. I’d say just two words: picture groceries. And then I’d just stand there.
The room would get quiet. Silence is a great tool that few speakers use well. It’s best if you let it drag out until it’s teetering on the edge of uncomfortable before you say anything else. When you do, you’ll have the rapt attention of every person in the room.
“What comes into your mind when you think: ‘groceries?’”
Sometimes I’d pick on some poor schlep who demonstrated extremely poor judgment by sitting on the front row. I’d single her out—way too skinny, owlish glasses, look of studied concentration on her face.
“So Miss…”
“Susie Snodmotz,” she’d tell me helpfully.
“Yes, Miss Snodmotz, what picture forms in your head when I say the word: ‘groceries?’”
If she was smart, she’d just shrug and keep her mouth shut. But they’re never smart.
“Well…uh… I see…you know…I see ‘groceries.’”
“Really? And tell me, what do ‘groceries’ look like?”
“They look like … you know… like…”
By that time, she’d stewed in her own juices long enough and I’d made my point.
“Ok,” I’d say, “so tell me what you see in your head when I say, ‘a slice of watermelon pock-marked with seeds, pink Georgia peaches, ripe bananas, a shiny green pepper, bulbous grapes and fat cucumbers?”
For some in the class, the light comes on. Most still don’t even know where to look for the switch.
“You can see that, can’t you? The watermelon slice hanging out the top of the brown paper sack, or the pepper and cucumbers falling through a hole in the bottom of those Saran Wrap plastic bags. You can see it. But what else can you see?”
More silence.
Sigh.
“You can ‘see’ something about the person who bought the groceries, right,” I’d prod. “The items tell you something about him without any explanatory statement at all. Who buys watermelon, peppers, carrots and bananas? A wino? No. A hungry college student? Probably not. How about a health nut in jogging shorts and New Balance running shoes? You see where I’m going with this little illustration?”
Silence again.
“That, boys and girls, is what we get paid to do! We get paid to draw pictures in our readers’ heads by describing reality so specifically they can see what we see.”
As it turns out, the real dunce in the class was me, not the students. But it was years before I put it together in my head that the main reason the newspaper newbies didn’t get what I was talking about was that I was not one of them. I spent a quarter of a century as a novelist-in-journalist-clothing. My newspaper career was studded with writing awards because I intuitively knew how to do what every good novelist does every day—draw a picture in a reader’s head.
And that boys and girls, IS our job as novelists. We have to make our readers see what we see—even though we don’t really “see” anything at all. Well, actually, that’s only a third of our job. Another third is to tell a run-away train story that sweeps our readers off the steps of the station and carries them away. And the final third is to introduce them to characters so real they become cherished family members, so well loved they leave a vacant place in our reader’s heart when the novel’s over.
So exactly how is it that we manage to accomplish those three tasks? Ahh, I thought you’d never ask. We’re going to talk about that very subject in the weeks to come.
