The other day I put forward a question on Twitter, “What is the most difficult thing to capture about the human experience in your writing?” For an artist, drawing realistic hands can be difficult to pull off. The amount of detail and character that can be found in the human hand is considerable. Capturing the calloused roughness of a carpenter’s hands, or the tender warmth and care that can be found in a mother’s nurturing fingers, or the miniature innocence of a child’s mitts all present their own challenges. Similarly for a writer, presenting a character in a piece of fiction, whether short or long form, and having them read as truly human is a daunting task. Imagine the difficulty of capturing the entirety of a human being through words. Their hopes, fears, aspirations, ticks and behaviours, not to mention their physical characteristics alone; all of these things are necessary to fully represent what a person is. Stop and think about that for a moment.
***
Try sitting down with a piece of paper and write about a memorable experience. Try to capture it all without it simply being an account of a series of happenings. Once you have finished, read your experience back to yourself, but pay close attention to the feelings that arise within you when you read it. The memories will surely flood back to you. The intoxicating aroma of the gourmet dinner as it comes to your table. The furtive glances your lover gives you, and the resulting anxiety that arises in your stomach, knowing how important this night really is. The feeling of calm that washes over you as her smile makes your resolve stronger than it ever was before. This is just an example of some of the feelings I felt the night I asked my wife to marry me. Now, if I tried this experiment and handed the written story to someone that hadn’t been there and perhaps has no idea of the love I have for my wife or the details of that night, would the experience evoke the emotions I wanted it to? Better still, would all the details that I remembered as I read my own words be properly conveyed to the other person? Chances are they wouldn’t be.
My suspicions seemed to be confirmed with your responses on Twitter to what is the most difficult thing to capture about the human experience in your writing?
@BosaBosaReview: “The obvious”
After all, we all view things differently. Who’s to say we would all think of including the same things in a given situation.
@NatalieZed: “How delicious food is. What waiting feels like. How genuinely exciting the smallest and stupidest things are.”
It’s the little things that are sometimes the most difficult.
@burleyjean: “Genuine Humour”
Just think about the last time one of your friends tried to retell a joke and failed miserably. Enough said.
I loved all of these responses, but I didn’t find the one I was looking for. Don’t get me wrong, these are all challenging aspects of the human experience to try to capture within the written word. There’s never enough space to possibly capture the minutia of our everyday experiences, let alone an entire story and have it palatable. Even if you were to trim a story down to its bare components, there is still one aspect of being human that adds an immeasurable amount of difficulty to the writing process. That aspect is choice.
A perfect example of the limitations of the written word jumped out at me when I was reading the graphic novel version of Robert LePage and Marie Michaud’s The Blue Dragon. I will have to insert a fairly large Spoiler Alert here, as I will need to discuss the “endings” of the story. Yes, I said endings.
The Blue Dragon does an incredible job of presenting multiple facets of humanity through three separate characters intertwined in a love triangle. Each character presents a decidedly theatrical caricature that is all parts of a whole. Pierre, the calm, cool and collected nostalgic, Claire, the middle aged independent, hopeful for the future and Xiao, the headstrong youth living each day as it comes. I could go on and on about the importance of the three characters, their interactions with each other and how it all links together for greater meaning, but the aspect of choice is why I started my rant. At the end of the novel, which was originally a play, we are presented with three alternate endings. Each one of these endings reflects the supposed choices of the three characters, and how they would ideally handle the situation of Xiao’s baby and their love triangle. In one ending (BIG SPOILERS!) Xiao stands at the top of the train station stairs while Claire is descending them with her baby and Pierre departing on the other side, all three waving goodbye to each other. The next ending immediately follows with the same lead in but with Xiao and Pierre arm in arm saying farewell to Claire and baby. The final ending, once again with the same lead in, presents Pierre at the top of the stairs with the strollered baby, and the two women going their separate ways on the steps, and as always, waving a cordial goodbye. In another story, this may have come off as a disjointed ending, but the graphic novel format, with Fred Jourdain’s gorgeous artwork, helped these endings come together as a cohesive whole.
The characters needed to make a choice that had a fairly weighty potential outcome. Instead of hamfisting the characters’ thought processes onto the page, we are presented with three options for the characters to take. We are then able to reflect upon each of these and how their outcomes would suit each character, instead of only being presented with one of the many possible outcomes. Of course these are not the only possibilities, but the authors did a great job at telling the story and the decisions we make as humans. They even did one better and made the reader decide which ending they preferred out of the three.
I concede that the format of a graphic novel or play makes this presentation that much easier to run with. So then, how does a writer create believable characters in their prose and demonstrate the importance of the choices they make and their varied options/outcomes without presenting too much or too little?
I’m going to end my rant here before I get too philosophical, but I want to hear what you think out there. Respond on your Twitter machines to @Ninjahguru (me) with #writersblockCAC in the message and let me know what you think. What are some of your favourite literary works that present humanity perfectly to you? How do you present it in your own writing?
Until next time…
Thank you to our advertising partners!
If you would like to advertise on
Canada Arts Connect,
CLICK HERE for more info.
Find artistic opportunities, such as:
* Jobs * Calls for Submissions * Auditions *
* Events * Space for Rent * and more! *
www.CanadaArtsConnect.com
Latest Listings on CAC
For me the hardest part of the human experience to write is “panic.” I’ve been through that emotion twice, once when my daughter told me she wanted to become a man, and once when second child looked me in the eye and said that he didn’t know the boy I kept referring to, but he wasn’t my son. I can tell you one thing – fear and panic are not the same thing. Fear is something everyone can relate to and finding a common ground is a great way to connect with the reader. But panic is a much stronger emotion, much more personal. I’ve written a full length memoir, Secret Selves by Jamie Johnson, about our experiences and I always wonder if I’ve captured panic. I’ve been told that our story makes the reader laugh, hold their breath, cry, feel releif, feel anger, feel challenged but I always wonder if I’ve really explained the emotion a person goes through when they think they are faced with something that they can not possibly survive, at least with their sanity intact. It’s a very challenging literary task.