This is a substack (I know--hate me!) I wrote about the problems of sacrificing characters and what can happen when you first let them live.
And now I'm wondering... How do YOU draw the outlines of loss? How do you give shape to the hole that is left, making a real ghost and not just a vague nothing?
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https://imprompt2.substack.com/p/the-last-of-us-and-characters-who
@allisonwyss This is a good question, and one I’m pondering…
tl;dr: I illustrate the characters’ complicities in their losses through forgetting.
In “Whiskey Nights…” Harland spends his whole time wondering about a watch that he lost. Maybe a too-obvious metaphor, but the things he’s lost due to his alcoholism are bound up in it.
In “Laureneum 43” the loss is more complex, since loss liberates her, but she’s also left with holes.
I actually love wondering as a literary technique. It does let you draw the shape of a thing, even if it's not there. And you know--reading about a thing that is meant to be physical in a story and reading about at thing that is meant to be imagined--those are actually the same freaking experience for the reader. Ghosts and musing live so well in fiction. They are just as much alive as whatever is meant to actually be alive.
I think I know what you mean, but I'm curious about the difference between enacting and describing for you. I don't think it's quite as simple as the old show vs tell (not that that's simple either)--or is it?
@allisonwyss I think of enacting as literally leaving gaps, so the reader experiences the same loss, instead of saying “she couldn't remember…” I sometimes do the latter too; it depends on the narrative distance.
I'm trying to think of a work that does this, as there are many, but nothing is coming immediately to brain.
Got it. So what I'm thinking about then is how to draw the outlines of those gaps. You don't want them to be blah nothingness. You want them to hold the shape, somehow, of what is gone. So the reader doesn't step right through eh nothing, but feels it as a tangible loss.
Scars do this. Cookie cutters do this. Gaping wounds that are still raw and bleeding do this.
A shape that we think of as default that is not that could do this. Like calling it a triangle, but we can literally see it only has two corners so we imagine the broken off edge of it...
Like if you see the shadow cast by a thing that is itself gone. Or you see its imprint somehow.
So an erasure is a great example. It does leave behind a shape or an imprint (whether or not they give us clues as to what is gone).
But the point is it only works if you make a READER see the odd shape and think of a triangle. If you only show them the odd shape, they don't necessarily know it hasn't always been that way.
@allisonwyss Yeah, therein lies the challenge, giving the reader just enough. But also assuming they have certain expectations of what should be there and isn’t.
This is one thing I'm trying to learn from Woolf. I think De Maurnierr's “Rebecca” does this well too. You know things are missing. Mandalay is already lost, but it's a locus for other lost things.
This is a really tricky question.
Like how the opening dream creates its ghost. And then--it's been a long time since I've read--the garden as it occurs in the dream. It's there and also in ruins somehow. I may be misremembering.
It's a good example and also I never mind wandering away from the topic.
What I wish for is that mental rolodex that could bring me examples more quickly.
@allisonwyss So, I have one sequence where my MC is telling someone how he threw a troubling coin into a fountain in a trailer park. And I end the sequence with “What he didn’t tell her was his wish: that he just wanted to forget.”
And I struggle because I wonder if that's too much awareness, too much of a tip off. If he wanted to forget, would he even remember wanting to forget? Anyway, that's my strug.
A line like that makes me think that the character can't forget. That he wants to, sure, but keeps coming back to it.
But the question of including references to what the narrator or POV character truly has forgotten is really fascinating to me. Those lines like "they didn't know X" or "they had forgotten that Y" are sometimes little cheats against POV, but also they are delightful little cheats. Of course, I don't believe in such rules anyway. But...
The folks who have self-deputized against "POV violations" can be quite vicious. I don't think all that many readers mind, but it's a thing workshop and writing classes teach writers to watch for especially hard when giving feedback.
And, you know, I agree those not-quite-following-POV-rules moments do change the feel of a passage.But not necessarily for the worse. It just depends what you're going for.
Oh yes, playing with narrative distance is a great idea! And you know, if you figure out that you have a narrator who zooms in and out a bit, sometimes inside the head of a. character and sometimes knowing what they don't quite know--well, that's going to be useful in other places too.
Also while my rolodex never works for what I've read, it sometimes works for what I've written, which makes me remember this thing about forgetting in The Memory Police (and also The Memory Police, itself).
https://loft.org/writers-block-blog/memory-police-and-forgetting
@wendyparciak @colorblindcowboy
I think they are, for sure, if we want to get picky about it! Like, perspective IS bias. But I also worry that saying so collapses what folks usually mean when they talk about certain kinds of unreliable narrators.
@wendyparciak @colorblindcowboy
It's really great. It's such a "because I say so" sort of book and I love those.
And I haven't considered it in light of reliability. I HAVE considered it in light of narrative authority. I feel like the narrator has tremendous authority.
And it's interesting to think about how reliability and authority tangle with each other--or perhaps don't.
@allisonwyss @wendyparciak I think they really do entangle. Some of the most unreliable narrators are very concerned with establishing their authority, telling you why, where, and how they told the 500-page story they are about to tell you in great detail.
But, yes, “Orlando” is a total “because I say so" book.
@colorblindcowboy @wendyparciak
Oh but how brazen Lucy Snowe is with her withholding! I gasped aloud at certain points!
Thank you!
@allisonwyss ooh I know I'm doing a terrible job of this in my book. Sebastian's big loss is a loss of home, but I didn't feel like writing (aka couldn't find an engaging way to write about) what home means specifically to him. Hopefully it comes off as "too painful to talk about" instead of "vague and boring".
As for hows, I have him excitedly start to mention some specifics, then cut off. Also I added a phone call home in the latest revision which hopefully hits like a truck.
I like how starting to say something then cutting creates a sort of mental trajectory for the reader to follow to that ghost of the thing that is missing. I think it works best if those specifics are truly specific and vivid--enough to spark something alive.
I can't know, obviously. But a sore thumb is certainly vivid!
@allisonwyss There are definitely deaths of characters in PoM. You might say that the loss of loved ones is the central trauma that the MC spends the entire story coming to terms with. And I think that's the key. Losing someone you love is devastating, and showing anything less than that utter destruction does everyone—the lost chars, the survivors, & the reader a massive disservice.
That loss can't be shrugged off, and it can't be ignored to make room for future plot or characters
@allisonwyss Put another way, characters who are killed should never be "written out of a story."
If anything, a character's death should more firmly "write them *into* the story" in a way that's inescapable. Their deaths should take root in other characters' minds and motivations in a way that living characters simply can't... live up to (pardon the pun)
Yeah. And I think one really powerful way to do that is to let them truly live before they die. Then they take root not just in the characters left behind, but also in the reader.
It's the "readers have come to like" that is so important, I think.
Allison Wyss
Colorblind Cowboy
Wendy Parciak
nebulos
K. N. Brindle (they/them)
Dave Dawkins (D. Harrigon)