Free Stein on Writing by Sol Stein Page B

to avoid shattering the fragile innocence of their spouses, some of them simulated not only their orgasms but their entire lives.
     
    Jane’s snapshot of her mother also characterizes Jane. It shows what she, as a young woman, rebelled against. She wanted to go out into the world where you could experience everything. Note that the paragraph starts with a visual image—the parents standing next to their car at the bus station—and ends with the character’s conclusion. Had the order been reversed, the effect would be lessened. Also note that Jane is characterizing not only her mother but a whole class of people.
    Can characterizing a whole class of people be done by a beginning writer? Here’s another example from Nanci Kincaid’s first novel to demonstrate that it doesn’t take decades of experience to use the techniques that writers have developed over centuries:
     
    Migrant kids know they are white trash, so they never speak a single word the whole two weeks they come to school. The rich kids will not sit by them at lunch. They invite each other to birthday parties held at the swimming pools in their backyards. The rich daddies usually go into politics. They slowly get bald and fat and buy up everything for miles around. When the legislature is in session Tallahassee swarms with them. Mother says half of them have girlfriends put up at the Howard Johnson’s.
     
    Is it possible to characterize with a single word?
    In a work in progress, I wanted to reintroduce two characters who’ve been in several of my books, the lawyer George Thomassy, and Gunther Koch, a sixty-year-old Viennese psychiatrist. Dr. Koch is lecturing Thomassy, a successful trial lawyer, about how to detect jurors who might disadvantage Thomassy’s case. The lawyer reacts to being lectured:
     
    Thomassy didn’t take this kind of shit from a judge, why the hell should he take it from this accent.
     
    The word “accent” characterizes not Koch but the speaker Thomassy. He deprecates Dr. Koch because he doesn’t like being lectured. The trace of prejudice against foreigners is especially meaningful because Thomassy has tried hard to repress his own immigrant background.
    If there is a common error among inexperienced writers, it’s that they say too much, they try to characterize with an excess of detail instead of trying to find the word or phrase that characterizes best.
    The words you select depend on the circumstances under which you introduce the character. For instance, when we first see a character at any distance, physical size makes an instant impression. If we are seeing a character at closer range, we often notice the eyes first. What inexperienced writers often do is give us the color or shape of eyes. That’s not as effective as conveying how the character uses his eyes. If on meeting a person he averts his eyes, it usually connotes something negative. Good eye contact is usually perceived as positive. Unrelenting eye contact can be negative to a shy or withdrawn character:
     
    I couldn’t make eye contact with her. She was looking for invisible spots on the wall.
     
    She said, “I don’t love you anymore,” but her eyes belied her words.
     
    She didn’t answer me. She just continued to glare as if her eyes said it all.
     
    Another error of inexperienced writers—or journalists in a hurry—is to confine characterization to the obvious physical attributes. For females, facial features, breasts, hips, buttocks, legs. For males, broad shoulders, strong arms, chiseled features, and so on. That’s top-of-the-head, thoughtless writing. Such clichés are common in speech. We expect better of our writers.
    Instead of clichéd attributes, consider using physical characteristics that relate to your story. For example, if you are writing a love story between a woman and a man, consider the belief of some psychologists that a woman’s most prominent sexual characteristic is her hair. (If that surprises you, imagine a woman you