Stein on Writing Part 2

A visual element can almost always be introduced to perk up a lead. This one conveys the att.i.tude of the person without the cliche of "maintaining his innocence." We haven't yet found out what Carl Gardhof did. It'd be nice if it was for something like this: Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning for stealing a Bible.

But even if it was for punching a policeman, or a third offense of shoplifting, or whatever, that first sentence has it made because of the visual that starts it, which needn't be a head held high: Carl Gardhof, who had trouble keeping his eyes on the judge, was sentenced in Superior Court to six months in jail this morning for his fourth conviction of flas.h.i.+ng in public. : Most reported offenses sound ordinary. A visual touch can make them seem out-of-the-ordinary and stimulate the reader to continue with the story.

If court reporting can be lifted out of dullness, think what technique can do for the reporting of routine social events: George Brucell was led into the meeting room by the chairman.

Again, blah.

George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the chairman ushered him into the meeting room.

Head-ducking is not much of an action, but a reporter who is a keen observer of small detail would have the advantage of the novelist in picturing Brucell and giving him an action, however small, like ducking his head: George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the chairman ushered him into the meeting room to loud applause.

Better because of the introduction of sound.

The following are all from the New York Times. Note how they involve the reader by focusing on a person: Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis, Andy Torok has become less and less steady on his feet, and his worries have acc.u.mulated along with the hand prints on his apartment's white walls.

That story made page one. Its real subject was the suspension of auto union talks because workers were loath to chip in for health care costs. All the facts are in the body of the story, but the reader, hooked by a beginning that focuses on an individual, gathers the facts as he reads an interesting piece.

In enhancing journalism with the techniques of fiction, caution is required. It's easy to overdo the attempt at a.n.a.logy. One can feel the New York Times reporter straining for effect in the following attempt to lure the reader into the sometimes dull material of a House of Representatives vote: Was.h.i.+ngton, Aug. 5 [1993]-If politics is theater, as the skeptics say, tonight was cla.s.sic Hitchc.o.c.k, with a very large dose of Frank Capra.

There on the House floor, Bill Clinton's budget package and his Presidency clung to credibility every bit like Eva Marie Saint in "North by Northwest," clinging to the face of Mount Rushmore. Mr. Clinton's Democratic supporters held a 216-to-214 margin.

The following Times story starts the right way: It is nearly 10 p.m. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge's Manhattan Plaza is near the end of her s.h.i.+ft. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She glances out the window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She then pushes a b.u.t.ton to electronically post the fare on a display screen.

In a practiced movement, she reaches out for money. She hands back a token or change. She does this 300 times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of stop-and-go.

Such are the labors of one of life's invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles. This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a jerky surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is about to become a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed at gunpoint this year, already three times the number in all 1992.

A black car stops. A man in a ski mask thrusts a sawed-off shotgun through his window. As quickly as the human mind can perceive and respond, the toll taker shoves a trayful of money into his hands. The car lurches into the darkness.

So far so good. The writer, Douglas Martin, has pulled you through four paragraphs of a story about robberies at tollbooths by focusing on an individual. But the hazard of overdoing it is there. The next paragraph reads: The woman pivots to catch the license plate number. Then her head drops like a rock, her back heaves convulsively and she bites her lip. An armed sergeant is at her window in 10 seconds. The robber has not been caught.

That paragraph needs editing. The account turns melodramatic. The toll taker's head drops like a cliche, her back "heaves convulsively"-and unbelievably. She cliches her lip. And suddenly there is an armed sergeant at her window. Did she get the license plate? We'll never know.

Journalists seeking to pack as much information as possible into the opening paragraph might usefully attend to the following by Natalie Angler, from the science section of the New York Times: As any serious migraine sufferer knows, an attack can bring pain without pity or horizon, a pain so stupendous that it obliterates work, family, thought, otherness. Yet for all its galactic sweep when it strikes, migraine is a mundane and commonplace ailment, afflicting about 12 percent of the population. It is a trait pa.s.sed along from parent to offspring with the seeming ease of wispy hair or nearsightedness: three-quarters of all sufferers are thought to have an inherited predisposition to the disorder.

Note the use of metaphoric language, "pain without pity or horizon." How much stronger "horizon" is than "endless" would be. Note also "galactic sweep," an effective and original way of conveying degree. Contrast helps. In the same sentence as "galactic sweep" the ailment is characterized as "mundane and commonplace." ("Commonplace" alone would have served. See "One plus one equals one half," page 205.) Instead of just tossing "genetic predisposition" at the reader, Angier talks of "wispy hair or nearsightedness." It's a writerly paragraph that arouses our expectation not only of information but fine writing as well.

Here is a short list of reminders that can help if you're drafting a first paragraph in a hurry to meet a deadline: Does your first sentence trigger curiosity to make the reader want to continue? What will the reader see in that first sentence? Have you focused on an individual? Have you given us a visible characteristic of that individual? Have you portrayed the individual doing or saying something? Is there a startling or odd fact that will trap attention?

Let's see what some experienced writers of features, articles, and books have been doing with first sentences.

Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people viewing his remains are mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.

Note the visual parallel. An obit or memorial piece doesn't have to be dull. That was Stuart Klawans, writing in Grand Street. Jay McInerney knows how to make his opening sentence visual: A year after his death, the recurring image I a.s.sociate with Raymond Carver is one of people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening.

A novel comparison also makes a good hook: At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civil Auditorium is flanked by four giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like sullen art deco n.a.z.is.

The sentence might have been improved by omitting "or so it seems to me" but the comparison is startling and strong nevertheless. It was by Stanley Elkin for Harper's magazine. Here's another: I'm talking to my friend Kit Herman when I notice a barely perceptible spot on the left side of his face.

That's Randy s.h.i.+lts in Esquire focusing on an ominous blemish. Here's a lead that might be a turn-off: The doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.

But Anatole Broyard was a brilliant as well as brave writer, and here's how he actually started his essay "Intoxicated by My Illness": So much of a writer's life consists of a.s.sumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.

He enhances the hard fact with contrast, resonance, and surprise. In death, life.

Can you bring a fresh insight to your first sentence? Fiction writers are said to "reach down their throats" for truths that enable them to write from the inside. Can candor at the beginning help your article, perhaps something you would rather the world not know that you might keep secret if you were not a writer?

Alternatively, can you mint a new description for a familiar object the way Stanley Elkin did when he saw the Academy Award statues as Art Deco n.a.z.is? Let's look at some examples of first sentences from short nonfiction that has endured: Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent ...

That's just the first half of the first sentence of George Orwell's essay "Reflections on Gandhi." We don't think of judging saints. And Orwell inverts the usual "innocent until proven guilty," producing two attention-getters in half a sentence.

Orwell, though best known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, was one of the best nonfiction writers of the century. No journalist, whether or not he covers political events, should miss reading Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language."

Can good writing about natural history hook the reader at the start? Here's an example by Loren Eiseley: I have long been an admirer of the octopus.

Octopus? Admirer? That opening is both surprising and a touch amusing. One goes on reading, which is what first sentences are supposed to encourage.

A first sentence can be used to announce a theme dramatically. Witness the following by Robert Warshow from Encounter magazine: The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the Westerner: men with guns.

To demonstrate the use of effective first sentences in longer nonfiction, I have selected first sentences from two autobiographies by authors I knew well: Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am confident that I have not solved them. I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my private life.

Both examples entice with a slight surprise because they do the opposite of what we expect. Both seem to be disclaimers. Each is a cover-up for a fault. They both might be characterized as pseudo-candor, which can be as effective as candor. They are both interesting beginnings that invite us to go on.

The first is from Sidney Hook's Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. The second is from Bertram D. Wolfe's A Life in Two Centuries, a book important enough to make the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

Let's move from first sentences in longer nonfiction to first paragraphs that invite the reader to continue: From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a "sight" for the village. I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a "sight" outside of the city. It did not occur to me-possibly because I am an American-that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.

That first paragraph is by a then largely unknown writer named James Baldwin. The last sentence in the quoted paragraph could have been its first, an immediate hook, but if the author had done that, the paragraph would wind down instead of building toward a climax, which is more effective.

The subject of another first paragraph was the republication by Scribner's of Peter Fleming's first book, written right after an adventure when he was only twenty-four. A blah lead-in would have been: Peter Fleming was only twenty-four when he experienced and wrote his Brazilian Adventure. Here's how it was done: Children, those energetic dervishes, are too busy testing themselves against the world to know the meaning of boredom for very long; high adventure waits for them in every breakable object. It is in adolescence that boredom, time without life, insinuates itself into each pa.s.sing day. But the adolescent with a good mind and a university education to acquire may wait until he is 24 or more before life begins to pall. That is precisely the age at which Peter Fleming, in 1932, answered an advertis.e.m.e.nt.

The fact in the last sentence of the paragraph would normally have gone into the first sentence. It was put last for two reasons. It was given the job of thrusting the reader forward into the next paragraph. More important was the establishment of tone.

In my first reading of nonfiction I sometimes find that a good lead is buried elsewhere in the draft. Brought forward it can replace a less worthy beginning and help ensure that a reader will be turned on to reading the whole.

Thomas Henry Huxley was a nineteenth-century physician credited with popularizing Darwin's ideas and other scientific thought of his time. Popularizing? Try, if you can, this opening paragraph of his famous essay "The Method of Scientific Investigation": The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those of an ordinary person as there is between the operations and methods of a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex a.n.a.lysis by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one case and the balance in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working, but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other and of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.

Huxley's essay, believe it or not, is used as a model in some twentieth-century textbooks. It is not, to put it mildly, a model of clarity, and it certainly isn't interesting to read. Let's look at someone else's treatment of the same material: Scientific investigation is a precise yet commonplace way of examining information. A baker or a butcher weighing out his goods and a chemist performing a difficult and complex a.n.a.lysis with finely graduated weights are doing the same kind of thinking.

The edited example contains fewer than one quarter the words yet gets the idea across. It is not the brevity that counts but the fact that the Huxley version is bloated with abstractions and is boring to read. Huxley may have done his work as a scientist but not as a writer. I would be willing to wager that any writer who has absorbed the material in this chapter could write an opening paragraph that's a lot more interesting than Huxley's.

Which leads me to an important point. The craft of creative writing is at least as complex as the craft of science. I have one student who is an aeronautical engineer and another who is an obstetrician, and I dare say both would admit that writing to a professional standard involves craft at least as complex as their occupations. You wouldn't want a layman walking into a hospital operating theater to deliver a child. Nor would you want a layman to design the next airplane you travel in. But writing? Can't everybody do it?

Imagine this: You are in a theater in the midst of a packed audience. The curtain goes up. The stage is set, but you don't see actors. You can hear them talking offstage, though the words are unclear. By the sound of their voices, the actors must be doing things. But what? It's all happening offstage!

The audience is restless. Everyone wants the actors to come onstage so that they can be seen. Such is the yearning of today's audiences for what we have come to call "immediate scenes," scenes that take place before the eye.

In the nineteenth century, novels and stories were filled with summations of offstage events, past or present, almost always told to the reader in summary form. These clumps of narrative summary are not experienced by today's readers with the immediacy and excitement of a witnessed event. With good reason. Even in societies that are not technologically advanced, a high proportion of the people born in the first half of this century experienced the phenomenon of moving pictures, which revolutionized entertainment even for the illiterate. In mid-century, the advent of television brought a visual medium into homes. Television and movies are full of immediate scenes, visible to the eye, ready to be experienced firsthand. This has influenced stories and novels more than we realize. Twentieth-century audiences now insist on seeing what they are reading. If you examine twentieth-century fiction, you'll find a dramatic increase in immediate scenes and a corresponding decrease in narrative summary. There has also been a decrease in descriptions of indoor and outdoor places that put the story on hold, making impatient twentieth-century readers start to skip.

Understanding the difference among the three main components of fiction-description, narrative summary, and immediate scene-can be of immense help to a writer of nonfiction also. The nonfiction writer who learns to use immediate scenes wherever he can will also find a dramatic improvement in the reception of his work. Nonfiction writers should pay close attention to the three forms of fiction-which I am about to define again-because the principles involved relate to their work as well.

Description is a depiction of a locale or person. The Latin root of the word "depiction," pingere, means "to picture" or to fas.h.i.+on a visual image.

Narrative summary is the recounting of what happens offstage, out of the reader's sight and hearing, a scene that is told rather than shown.

An immediate scene happens in front of the reader, is visible, and therefore filmable. That's an important test. If you can't film a scene, it is not immediate. Theater, a truly durable art, consists almost entirely of immediate scenes.

Just as every form of writing that is expected to be read with pleasure moves away from abstraction, every form of pleasurable writing benefits from conveying as much as possible before the eye, onstage rather than offstage.

John Cheever is a master of using description to do much more than describe. Witness the beginning of Bullet Park, which describes a railroad station in a manner that is also a depiction of the narrator's state of mind at the outset of the book: Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the heart of the matter. We travel by plane, oftener than not, and yet the spirit of our country seem to have remained a country of railroads. You wake in a pullman bedroom at three a.m. in a city the name of which you do not know and may never discover ...

Cheever's description is not static. It is part of the storytelling, and that is a key to description as it is used by our better writers: It has more than one function. For instance, in The End of the Affair, Graham Greene uses description of a room to characterize the person whose room it is: I had never been in his study before: I had always been Sarah's friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah's territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment. Everything was used there; just as in Henry's study I now felt that very little had ever been used. I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott was only there because it had-probably-belonged to his father, like the bronze copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

Narrative summary, if written well and briefly, can transport the reader from one immediate scene to another, though this isn't always necessary. Fiction and reporting have now borrowed a film technique called "jump cutting," moving from one scene into the next with no transition for time to pa.s.s or locales to change. If the scenes must be linked, brief narrative summary can do the linking. How brief?

Martin double-locked his door and went to work. In the office ...

In the first part of the first sentence, we actually see Martin locking his door. That's immediate scene. "Went to work" is narrative summary. Just three words get us from one scene to the next.

Narrative summary, if kept short, can be useful in setting up an immediate scene: I am lying on the familiar couch, listening to the sound of Dr. Koch breathing, waiting for me to continue talking. I'd been telling him about the botched weekend, about Bill and Thoma.s.sy. I don't want to talk any more, to him or to anybody. Finally, I tell him I'm fed up, I don't want to be in therapy, I want to be back in life.

"You do not stop living," he says, "when you take time to stop and think."

We can visualize the narrator on the psychiatrist's couch, listening to the doctor breathing. When the doctor speaks, we are back in the immediate scene.

If a narrator tells the reader that Herman sat at a lunch counter "drinking endless cups of coffee, waiting for Jill," that's narrative summary. The reader cannot see "endless cups" of anything. A summary of repet.i.tive action does not create a clear image. It's easy enough to fix: As Herman sipped the last dregs of coffee, he looked up to see the counterman holding the pot ready to refresh his cup. When the steam stopped rising from the cup, he sipped again. As the counterman approached for the third time, Herman shook his head, and got up from the stool. He reached into his pocket for bills, and tossed two singles on the counter. Jill could go to h.e.l.l.

The tiny bit of action keeps the author from intruding with a summary. The reader is able to feel something of what Herman feels when he is kept waiting.

Editors tell us that a primary reason for the rejection of novels is that they consist of far too much static description and narrative summary. Even a successful writer like P. D. James can tax a reader with an excess of description that does not move the story along: There is Miss James's insistence on describing absolutely everything. ... so much of her scene-setting serves no other purpose than to create impenetrable atmosphere. For instance, pages are devoted to describing in loving detail the locale of a lunch that Dalgliesh eats with a friend ... yet the story never returns there. ... A character can't enter a room without being lost in its furnis.h.i.+ngs. A result is the loss of all sense of pace.

That public reprimand from the chief daily book critic of the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, appeared in a review of James's 1995 novel Original Sin. If an experienced writer like P. D. James can slip, why hazard the ice? My advice to writers yearning for publication is to minimize description, and be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.

Though today's readers want immediate scenes as the primary source of their experience, editors still see too many ma.n.u.scripts with a plethora of narrative summary as if written for nineteenth-century audiences. The news is that the authors of these ma.n.u.scripts are writing for audiences that are dead. Readers today insist on seeing characters onstage.

That doesn't mean we can't enjoy the works of previous centuries. We can and do. But as creatures of our time, we often find the pace of earlier writing slow, the descriptions languid, and the recounting of offstage matters less involving than scenes before our eyes. Imitating nineteenth-century writing impedes the chances of publication.

I am not arguing for so-called action as it is abused in popular media. In fiction, action consists of what people do and say. Hemingway said it perfectly: "Never mistake motion for action." Adversarial dialogue is action. Combative words can excite readers' emotions more than sword-play. When characters speak, we see them as they talk, which means that dialogue is always in immediate scene. Stage plays are in immediate scene. So are films, and now, for the most part, novels.

To keep the reader reading, you want his involvement to be a continuous experience. The best reading experiences defy interruption. I think I am especially sensitive to glitches that interrupt the reader's experience because of my years as a playwright. In the theater, we instantly know if there is a loss of audience attention. Playgoers, if taken out of their experience even for a moment, cough and rustle in their seats. Writers of books don't have the advantage of seeing and hearing their audience's reaction. We have to train ourselves to detect and remove interruptions of the reader's experience. Static descriptions interrupt the story. So does a summary of what has happened offstage between scenes or elsewhere.

The ideal is not to break the reader's experience even for a few seconds. Which leads me to a common fault of the inexperienced writer. He is writing a scene that the reader can experience, but he feels the need to provide some information. Instead of finding a way to have the information come naturally out of the characters in the scene, he states the information baldly. The author's voice interrupts the scene.

When I speak to groups of writers, I sometimes hold up a large pane of gla.s.s. I ask the writers to imagine that the gla.s.s separates the writer from his readers. The readers are having their experience entirely on the other side of the gla.s.s. If they hear the author even for a phrase or two, it interrupts their experience. Information that seems to come from the author rather than a visible character is an intrusion from the other side of the gla.s.s. Writers are directors of what transpires on the other side of the gla.s.s. They are not one of the actors.

In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.

Think of the novels you have loved most. Do you remember a character you lived with page after page, perhaps hoping the book would never end? What do you remember most clearly, the characters or the plot?

Now think of the movies you've seen that affected you the most. Do you remember the actors or the plot?

There's a book called Characters Make Your Story that you don't have to read because the t.i.tle says it all: Characters make your story. If the people come alive, what they do becomes the story.

Writers of literary and much mainstream fiction usually begin by imagining a character. The same is true of the writers of the most popular mysteries centered around a character: Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, or Kinsey Millhone. The characters engage us first and are remembered most. The plots of individual books are chapters in their lives.

Some writers of popular and transient fiction begin with a character, but a large percentage who write category books (e.g., adventure, spy, westerns, science fiction, romance novels) start with a plot, then populate it with characters. That method usually results in hackwork, at which some writers have become so skilled that they have made millions with stories that even their devoted readers acknowledge seem "made up."

Other writers can't help starting out with a theme that obsesses them. They imagine characters whose lives might involve the theme, or they work out a plot first. If their allegiance is to character, their theme-originated story has a better chance of survival.

During all the many years in which I was an editor and publisher, what did I hope for when I picked up a ma.n.u.script? I wanted to fall in love, to be swept up as quickly as possible into the life of a character so interesting that I couldn't bear to shut the ma.n.u.script in a desk overnight. It went home with me so that I could continue reading it.

We know what love is, we think of the other person at odd moments, we wonder where they are, what they are doing, we seem a bit crazy to the rest of the world. That's exactly the feeling I have about characters I fall in love with in books.

From those experiences I am convinced that we need to know the people in the car before we see the car crash. The events of a story do not affect our emotions in an important way unless we know the characters. Some books center on catastrophic events that don't move me at all. The characters in those books come across as stereotypes with names. If they are not alive, why should I care if their well-being is threatened?

Let's look at proof that characters come first: Harry jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. The typical reaction is "So what?" Who's Harry? Suppose we add just one word, a second name of someone you may remember, a popular singer and film star. With the addition of a second name, does your reaction to the sentence change?

Harry Belafonte jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Suddenly the sentence means something. If you remember the singer Harry Belafonte, you can visualize the character. Why did he jump? With no characterization beyond a name, because it's someone we know about, we begin to care. Of course this example has nothing to do with the real Harry Belafonte, whose name we have borrowed for this demonstration.

One of the devices used by successful thriller writers is to give a small role to a real person, usually a high officeholder. That's what Jack Higgins did in his breakthrough novel, The Eagle Has Landed, in which Winston Churchill makes a cameo appearance. Writers who use this technique do not attempt to characterize famous individuals in depth. A trace to jog memory is enough. Watch what happens in the following: Harry Truman was not a man to be governed by rules. When he was President, he used to take long walks each morning to destinations of his own choosing, trailed by Secret Service agents who sometimes had trouble keeping up with him. What few people know is that once, when visiting New York, Harry Truman decided to stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge against the advice of his Secret Service escort-he never listened to them. Halfway across Truman saw another early-morning walker, an old man wearing a fedora pulled down almost to his eyes, trying to hoist himself up onto the railing. Truman, the most universally admired President of the last half century, realized instantly that the old man could have no other purpose than to jump.

We get interested in the action of a man about to jump off a bridge because we know the observer. What will Harry Truman do? The engine of the story has turned on. Our curiosity is involved. We want to know more.

When neighbors report gossip to us about people we know, we can be t.i.tillated or sometimes even moved. A writer cannot depend on "sometimes." His characterization must elicit emotion from a wide variety of readers without fail. How does he do it? He learns the art of characterization, adding details and depth until he has created a character whom we may know better than all but our closest friends.

Let's take it one step at a time. How does a writer characterize in simple ways?

What we do in life is lazy. We say the first thing that comes into our heads. Think of a ticket taker at a movie house. He sees people pa.s.sing in a stream. He can only make quick generalizations. That man is tall, that woman is skinny. How does a writer deal with similar facts?

Frank is so tall, he entered the room as if he expected the lintel to hit him, conveying the image of a man with a perpetually stiff neck.

The man is not just tall, he is being characterized through an action.

What about the woman who was described as skinny? How does a writer deal with that fact?

She always stood sideways so people could see how thin she was.

Again, the writer is not just describing; he is characterizing by an action. We individualize by seeing characters doing things and saying things, not by the author telling us about them. Don't ever stop your story to characterize. Avoid telling the reader what your character is like. Let the reader see your characters talking and doing things.

Let's look at some examples of characterization by novelist Nanci Kincaid, in her talented first novel Crossing Blood: Once we looked in Patricia's window and saw her in her half-slip. ... First she curled her eyelashes, holding a mirror in her hand. Then, out of the blue, she picked up a lipstick, smeared it on, and kissed the mirror. Kissed it. She made little kiss marks and looked them over real close, studying them. She was dead serious about it. Jimmy got mad and made us get down off the trash cans and stop looking. He swatted Donald to make the rest of us stop laughing at Patricia.

The same author will now introduce a character called Skippy. Kincaid doesn't tell us Skippy was brave; she lets the reader experience Skippy's bravery through an action: Skippy will pick up a snake as quick as he will a cat. He will let one crawl on his neck and down his arm, a black snake, until me and Roy go crazy watching him. More than once he let me and Roy hold one, which we did, but we had to practically quit breathing to do it.

Exaggeration is another technique for characterizing: Laverne weighed two tons naked.