Writing Prose Flashcards
How would you remove narrative distance in this prose and get us into the narrator’s head?
“Our car raced down the street at breakneck speeds, whizzing past all of the other vehicles and almost running over a pedestrian. This pace continued as we maneuvered down the highway until we finally ran out of gas twenty miles later.”
We need the narrator’s point of view, which means “the camera” needs to be inside the car. Instead of getting a global understanding of what is happening, we need to see only what the narrator is witnessing.
Here is one way to write this:
“How could I get Johan to slow down the car? He was angry. I got that, but did that mean putting both of our lives in danger? There were just inches separating us from the car in front of us. If that car slowed down by just ten miles, we’d plow into its backend. Johan swerved just in time. I wonder how long he planned to continue at this pace.”
How would you remove narrative distance in this prose and get us into the narrator’s head?
“The man slammed his fist into my face. He pounded into me over and over again until he was too tired to keep inflicting pain.”
Here is one way to write this by getting into the narrator’s head:
“I felt a searing pain in my stomach. Suddenly, I realized I’d been hit. I barely had time to register the next fist coming toward me. I instinctively covered my head with my arms, but he was stronger than I was.”
Three interiority mistakes
1) Character is internally too Passive
Even if the character is physically restricted, such as put into a jail, the character should be internally active. The character can analyze what is happening and plan the future. The character should want something and plan steps to get it.
2) Character only reflects on the present moment
Whenever something happens in every scene, the character shouldnt just think about whats happening in the present moment. The character should reflect on what has happened in the past and what the character’s expectations are of the future.
3) Character knows what the writer knows
The writer knows a lot about what has happened or what will happen and how the world works. But the character doesnt. So the character should ask questions about it or think about it in the interiority. Make sure what the writer knows is actually on the page and not assume that the character already knows something the character hasnt learned yet.
How to add Subjectivity in below character description?
“She was wearing a purple sweatshirt as she leaned back in her chair. The sweatshirt was emblazoned with the word “Harvard” across the front.”
When it comes to describing your characters, the most important advice I can give you is to be subjective. By subjective, I mean that you need to interpret your characters for your reader and not just provide a physical description.
A better description would be something like:
“Her sweatshirt was emblazoned with the word “Harvard” across the front. I imagined her days were filled with dreams of attending that Ivy League college. Would she get in? Would she make her father proud? I had no idea what that was like, to have come from generations of overachievers.”
So what did I just do there?
I took the very same objective facts that I used a little bit earlier. And I interpreted those facts for the reader. I added subjectivity to help the reader understand what this character is really like.
In fact, you might notice that this description is as much about the narrator as it is about the character I’m describing. And that’s exactly what a good memoir description does — it lets us in to the mind of the narrator. Everything you describe in your memoir should be filtered from the narrator’s point of view.
Being objective is boring. Believe it or not, your reader actually wants to be told what to think about the people you write about.
