Elements of Fiction by Walter Mosley

Author:Walter Mosley [Mosley, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780802147646
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

Description: Odds and Ends Emotional Description

Physical sensations can be among the most difficult experiences to describe. An itch for instance: in most cases just the word itch works well enough. Usually all we have to do is talk about intensity. Is it a mosquito bite or one of those unreachable, almost painful attacks that wrench you out of sleep and keep you tearing away at a distress that refuses to respond?

But what if you were speaking to someone who did not have certain tactile neuronal responses? This person has never felt an itch or a tickle. How could you explain, without boring technical jargon, what it’s like to experience this physical phenomenon? In the physical sense, how would you explain the word feeling at all? Maybe this person does experience hunger, headache, exhaustion, and a dry tongue now and again. Maybe you could suggest that the pain of a headache might be winnowed down to a pinpoint existing just below the skin on your wrist. You say that it seems like, if you could just dig at that point with a fingernail, it would break off, taking the irritation with it. But when scratching it, the pain, the itch only gets worse.

Not a perfect description. But it might do. And, more, it could lead to a metaphorical entrée into the heart of the story you’re telling—the discovery of an itch to a man who has never had to scratch.

But what if we were talking about that classic seven-year itch? What if we were trying to explain love? You could say that Joe loves Josephine or that Josephine no longer loves Joe. Both these statements could be true. But they are bland and without depth. We don’t know what either Joe or Josephine feels, because love is like a mutant itch; it’s different in every heart.

When you want to create the intensity of love (or hate or infatuation or nationalism) you can’t just say that that’s how the character feels. A character cannot say “I love you” without some corroboration in the surrounding prose.

For example:

Whenever Joe saw Josephine his hands began to quaver and his breath came up short. He would suddenly remember a chore that needed to be done and hurry off.

One day, when he saw Josephine standing in the hallway with Janine Murphy, Joe dropped his Styrofoam coffee cup and rushed up the stairs, mumbling something about needing to find a mop.

“Every time I see Mr. Cordon,” Josephine says, “he seems to be running off.”

“I think he likes you,” young, redheaded Janine said, smiling with her teeth.

“Noooo,” Josephine replied. “He doesn’t even know me …” Then, with a suggestive, shrewd smile, she added, “… yet.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.