Describing Characters

Writers of stories give each other advice all the time on how to write better. You won't have to search very hard to find more than enough blogs to read on the subject of writing, written by writers. Since I am not a writer of fiction, I can't join in that crowd of experienced advisors, but I do read fiction and perhaps some advice from a reader instead of another writer might be an unusual change of pace - not that readers know anything about the finer points of writing, but I do know that I start to read many books and never get past the first couple of chapters, and I do know why I finish the ones I finish. Here are the 10 reasons, in order of importance, that make me finish a book:

1. Story

2. Story

3. Story

4. Story

5. Story

6. Story

7. Story

8. Characters

9. Theme/genre

10. Atmosphere/setting

This is some exaggeration, but my point is that a good story makes me overlook a considerable lack of writing skills, and I seldom remark on how well an author with no story to tell puts together wonderful sentences, or how vividly he describes his characters.

Character development is important (though not number one) and I don't mean to make it seem less important than it is. Sometimes, though, I find some writers get caught up with character development attributes and forget to have the characters DO something. I must admit that I like a good character, and the first step in the character's introduction into the story is his initial description.

Recently, I wrote (copied down, I mean) in this blog, or one of my blogs, the beginning pages of Charles Dickens' description of his main character, Ebenezer Scrooge. Dickens (as all writers of the classics are) was a master at description. I really enjoyed his first description of Scrooge. It made me want to find other famous characters in famous stories and read how the authors had initially described them when they introduced the characters into their story. I found a few and set them aside until a later day which has now come. Here is one.

"He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."

Since this is an American author, the above may not be instantly familiar to non-American readers. The earlier one was from Dickens, though, so it is the American author's turn.

The above example is too easy and too obvious, but I am asking anyway.

Writing fiction

On the southernmost fringe of the tanglewood forest, beyond the kingdoms of men, in the midst of a purgatorial wasteland blighted with perpetual winter and savaged by endless storms, there stands an inn where the battle-lines between sanity and madness meet. Here, where soul-consuming demons walk freely as men, where nightmares parade their garish hues like common whores of the street, where only the boldest or the most benighted seek to tread, our story is enacted.*
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See, that's why I don't write fiction. It never comes out like that. I have written fiction (not going to tell you where to find any of it) but, trust me, I am not even halfway up the mountain.

Challenged to write a short story by my very best friend recently, I succumbed, but nothing has improved with time. Oh, I have no trouble writing - the words seem to just bubble out with the least bit of priming - indeed the trouble is shutting off the flow - but those words still don't emerge as good fiction. When I see things written by Ken Armstrong or Catherine Sharp (not to mention my best friend) I tend to get intimidated and stop trying to write fiction.

Also, I don't take criticism well, so there's that. As a result, my occasional forays into the world inhabited by actual talented writers are few and far between.

Someday, maybe I'll be brave enough to let some of it see the light of day.
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*This fantastic piece of writing is on the blog called "Out of Ruins". The short story is Tanglewood. If you want an escape from Relax Max's amateur drivel, go read the story.

Why do you blog?

This subject has been brought up many times in the past, and you have probably already read a post or two about it, or maybe even written about it yourself. Usually, the question elicits lists of possible reasons why people blog. Such a list might look something like this:

To keep a diary or journal

To make money

To make friends

To express yourself

To generate interest in a project

To talk to yourself

To publicize (or analyze) some subject you care about

To interact; to discuss things; to debate things

There are more, of course. These just come to my mind. I don't know why YOU blog, so this post is an analysis of why I blog. I hope, though, in the comments, you will talk about why YOU blog as well as make observations about why I blog.

In addition to liking to write, I also like to take photos and collect music (mostly old music.)

One time I was on a photography forum and the question was posed to photographers, "Why do you like to take pictures?" The first answer that popped into my head was the same as it would be if the question had been about writing or collecting music. All three things bring me joy.

If I dig deeper though, and ask WHY those things bring me joy, then I get a better idea of why I do them. I'm not sure I can tell you why I enjoy collecting music. One the one hand, it has the same attraction as collecting coins or stamps or butterflies or anything else: to own examples of each variety and variation.

On the other hand, music satisfies a larger need in me that collecting coins probably couldn't satisfy: listing to it stimulates memories and invites dreaming. I have read that if you expose your young child to Mozart, he will do better in mathematics. I don't know: I really like Mozart, but I am not good at (or even particularly interested in) the higher mathematics. I do know that when I am alone and listening to music (in the background, so to speak) I am aware that I seem to get greater clarity and more original ideas. I must admit I am not talking about rap or hip hop music here.

This is not necessarily true with writing or with photography. Of course photography can be used to document examples of varieties and variations. Before photography, Audubon painted beautiful pictures of all the varieties of birds he could find. He documented them. His paintings often show even more idealized detail than a photograph would have.

You can buy reference books on many subjects. A reference book on trees, for example, would have photos of many varieties of trees, with close ups of their leaves and their seeds and their fruit.

So, one reason people take photographs, or write, is to document things; to tell what a thing consists of, either by describing it in writing or by taking a photograph of it.

Another reason, I think, is to represent a larger meaning than may be immediately evident; to try and convey some larger purpose by taking a photograph or creating a painting. Often paintings are created from the inside out in that respect. When you look at something like Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night", you just KNOW you are looking at more than a rather primitive, even hurried,  picture of a dark night with stars in the sky. It might take you a few moments to contemplate what that "something" is, but you FEEL something inside when you look at it. Suddenly it becomes very personal indeed. Even if you are never able to explain it to others with words, you somehow KNOW what it means to you. You, in some weird way, are able to connect your own life experiences with Vincent's, and identify with him for a brief moment.

This can be accomplished with skilled photography as well, although I don't think you see that many great photographs like you used to see with the so-called masters of early photography. This, I think, is because in its infancy photography was STILL almost like painting. Painting with light. It is still that today, but most people now use it to simply capture a scene which they want to later share with others. There is not nearly as much artistic effort made to create photo essays or photo collages or photo series which together carry a larger meaning. Using a series of photos to expose a social injustice (such as child labor, or the plight of immigrants) is almost becoming a lost art.

So I return to my original premise of why I blog and why I take photographs and restate that the reasons, for me, are the same: I want to explain things clearly. I want to present the larger makeup of things through the unique filter of my own eyes and my own life experiences.

Some of us have an uncontrollable urge to find out the inner meaning, or, at least, the TRUE meaning of things, if we can. Some of us spend our entire life as investigators, as lifelong learners. Like the child who takes things apart to see what makes them tick, we have never grown up in that respect. We are not always so interested in putting them back together again once we learn their secrets.

We soon learn, however, that there is not much money to be made with learning more and more information to the point of being walking encyclopedias. No, the only way such people as we can earn a living is by SHARING what we have learned. So, long ago, I have learned to be an interpreter by trade, not just a gatherer of facts for my own delight. I share by writing stories and analyses; I share by documenting the facets of things - exposing their essential makeup; describing with words and describing with photographs.

The urge inside me that I cannot shake is the will to translate life as I pass through it, and so I write and I think and I document the makeup of things with photographs and even more writing, and sometimes with musical backgrounds to those things.

And I blog.