Techniques of Best-selling Writers
How to Bring to Life Characters, Settings, and Events
Aug 19, 2009
A skilled writer brings to life the characters, setting, and events in a story; and because these things become temporarily “real” in the minds of readers, readers experience the emotional responses the writer intended to evoke. For example, when someone reads a horror scene in a Stephen King novel, the scene evokes feelings of dread and perhaps even sheer terror because, for the moment at least, that horror is real.
Moreover, when a writer creates realistic characters, readers can relate to what the characters are feeling because the characters are not mere cardboard cutouts masquerading as people, but, in the readers’ imaginations, flesh-and-blood human beings who are capable of intense emotions, for example, hate, anger, despair, happiness, or sheer terror.
In other words, a skilled writer can use words in such a way that readers “willingly suspend their disbelief” (a phrase coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge); and when readers enter this state of mind, they can believe the unbelievable and accept as real what is not real at all but merely fiction.
Denotation and Connotation
Denotation refers to a word’s literal meaning (dictionary definition), whereas connotation refers to the emotional associations surrounding a word. Of course, it’s important to note that although some words often have similar dictionary definitions, those words do not necessarily produce the same emotional response in people.
For example, the words “home” and “residence” are both defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary as “a place where one lives; a dwelling place; an abode; a house, apartment, etc.” The word “home,” however, conveys certain connotations (feelings) of warmth, security, love, and family that “residence” fails to convey.
When developing descriptions, writers keep this difference in mind and try to use words that elicit certain emotional responses from their readers.
Subjective and Objective Description
Writers also strive to a blend objective and subjective descriptions. An objective description, though, presents only the facts, while a subjective description conveys emotions and perceptions. Yet, by blending objective and subjective descriptions, writers suggest a dominant impression, which is the overall sense of (or feeling about) a place, character, object, or event.
Objective Description
A Kenworth is a brand of tractor-trailer, commonly called a semi or eighteen-wheeler, which has a detachable trailer and is normally used for transporting products from one destination to another.
Subjective Description
Tammi Jean watched an eighteen-wheeler top the crest of a ridge almost two miles away, watched it slide into view and then disappear, only to reappear again, riding the undulating hills like a gigantic black whale rising and then plunging over waves in the sea. A few minutes later, it topped the final hill and began its descent. A Kenworth, its chrome-plated exhaust stacks and running lights flashed in the sun and its powerful diesel engine growled as it bit off the distance to where she waited.
Combining Everything Into a Narrative
Every story is a narrative, and narratives usually, if not always, unfold chronologically: first this happens, then something else happens, then something else, and so on until the story is told. However, narratives can also include flashbacks to the past and/or introspection on the part of the characters; but flashbacks and introspections should not be inserted without a purpose; they must help move the story along and/or provide insight into a character.
By using connotation and denotation, as well as objective and subjective descriptions, writers add life to a narrative, but these things alone are not enough. Writers must also stir dialogue and action into the mix.
Example of a Narrative
She didn’t bother to try to avoid his fist, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her recoil. To hell with him, she thought, though she didn’t say it, just stood there and waited for the sound of bone against bone and the white hot flash of pain, even welcomed it, knowing that blow was at least something she could count on, unlike anything else she’d ever known in life.
It had not always been this way. Melissa often thought of the first year of their marriage, recalling those days fondly the way one did a favorite movie, watching them unreel in her mind and smiling in pleasure over particular scenes. The Saturday Luke and she went to the county fair and he spent a fortune tossing baseballs into baskets until he won the giant panda she so admired. Or the August afternoon they drove to the beach, watched the setting sun turn the Atlantic to molten flame and then a full moon change it to liquid silver. And the best scene of all, one she played in slow motion and often paused frame by frame, that November day when, three months after they’d wed, he came home from work and she told him what the doctor had confirmed—they were going to have a child.
What It All Means
Applying these techniques can help ensure that one’s readers enter that state of suspended disbelief and accept as true what is merely fiction; and they are not reserved solely for the Stephen Kings of this world; they are techniques any writer can learn to apply and, in so doing, create realistic characters, settings, and events.
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