Nov 04 2009
NaNo Day Three: Rrgh
480 words last night.
Yeah.
The getting-up-early didn’t happen, nor did the writing at lunch. Prose On a Train did happen, at least, and that’s where most of the 480 came from.
Which, y’know, I’m okay with this, as it was only Day 3, and I have a couple of weekends forthcoming that will allow for more writing time. Also, that makes my total word count 3979. I’m 1022 short of “on-schedule,” but that’s not so terrible.
Burning question, of course is, if my first two days produced stuff I’m going to scrap, how did day three go?
Y’know? Not so bad. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, either. I think in those 480 words (and the two pages of chicken-scratch I churned out on the train this morning), I have a better sense of the characters than I did with everything that came before.
One thing that’s eating at me a bit: descriptions. I don’t like listing someone’s attributes (hair color, eye color, clothing rrgh). It feels clunky. I prefer to let that information come in bits and pieces as I go. Somewhere, someone — Christopher Moore? — said “You can tell me more about a character by the way she turns her head than I’ll learn knowing the color of her hair.” (I’m paraphrasing badly. My apologies to the Author Guy or whoever actually said it.)
So when I’ve got Clay sitting at one table, looking over at the four people at another, I’m trying to get his impressions of them down without falling into “Here’s what Jack looks like. Here’s what Lucy looks like. Here’s what Mia looks like, and here’s what Regina looks like.”
Like I said, for a lot of things, I’d let this slide and introduce them as I go. One of the people at that table has about two more pages to live, though, and I’d really like to make the reader give a shit when she goes.
Time to do a bit of reading-as-research, methinks, and see how other authors do it. I could tell you what Door looks like, and Logen Ninefingers, and Frannie Goldsmith. As many times as I’ve read The Stand, though (don’t ask me to count. A lot.), I could easily point out where King describes the I-want line that creases Frannie’s forehead, but that’s it. I know the rest of her physical description’s in the book, but I don’t know where. Which means it was done in a way that doesn’t drag the reader out of the story*, and that’s what I’m aiming to do as well.
I’m casting this one out to you guys for help, too — do you have a favorite author who does their descriptions well? Who is it? Which book? Which characters?
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*If a character glances into a mirror on page two, I brace myself and groan. I’ve seen the “Let me show you how my character looks by describing his/her reflection” thing done well only on rare occasions. Most of the time, it’s just lazy writing.
