To make every word count, weigh its capacity to either carry the story forward or invoke a setting or atmosphere.
Note the word “invoke.” Rather than telling your reader what to feel, trust her to feel what is evoked out of her own experience. It is possible she’ll find in your writing something that you never intended – perhaps never could have written about –because it is outside your experience. But it can touch her profoundly by reflecting to her the gift of her own intuition or mythmaking.
The film Tree of Life (Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Jessica Chastain) strikes me as an experiment in minimizing the guidance that is offered a reader. It is a series of snippets of a 1950s middle-America family that portray love, socializing, favoritism, anger, shock of death, playfulness, insecurity, hopelessness, burgeoning sexuality, destructiveness, hatred, loss of employment, big dreams, pets, church, gardening, quest for meaning. The storyline is minimal and is chopped up with scenes of our spectacular home planet, nebulae, dinosaurs, one of the children as an urban adult – even interspersed with a few seconds of blank screen and silence.
The story could have been another of thousands about the emotional interactions of the family, presented chronologically or through backstory. Perhaps I and my friend would have had an empathic response or an interest in the handling of the developing neuroses of the characters.
Instead, through the constant shift of scenes in time and space, the characters remain undeveloped. But each of us was struck by incidents reflective of our very personal journeys and their place in the broadest perspective of evolution and cosmic unfoldment.
Filmmaker Terrence Malick did not tell me what he wanted me to experience. Instead he invited my whole life’s experience to be called forth for re-examination or emotional reconsideration. For some, it might rekindle a trauma, for others the holding and stability of the postwar era, yet others could gain insight into the reality of family drama.
For me, it held the perspective of the Lord giveth and taketh away – that we each are given a lot in life to make sense of and find peace with. For my friend it called up experiences both as an unprotected child and as a mother unable to protect her own children, experiences that she now sees with a sorrow that is objective: life does hurt in spite of good intention, eating vegetables and doing homework on time. The film was like a template on which to lay one’s singular life, to discover what it might signify – and what is still unlearned.
As a writer, you can invoke settings, moods, emotions without using enthusiastic descriptors like thrilling, incredible, stunning, awesome, horrible, terrifying. Using simple prose or prosaic dialogue you can portray the inner impressions of a character, or describe the simple facts of a landscape, even convey an atmosphere, especially by choosing words that have the appropriate tonal/textural quality (meandering, mellifluous, sensuous – or crackly, staccato, stinging, prickly).
Example: describing the progression of landscapes in my fantasy travelogue toward death: “Jutting peaks softened to rolling hills which melted into a spare, flat, (he hated to use the word) ‘boring’ scrapple-grassed sandscape, bare of markers but for a scattering of brambles.”
There’s no need to overdo your enthusiasm or emote yourself onto the page. Thirty words have transitioned from drama to dullness and conveyed the character’s attitude.
Until next time, delight in the process.
Download PDF: DCC Don’t count words