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.
Allison Wyss
Colorblind Cowboy