Sneaky Tricks To Create Micro-tension

I’ve mentioned before that literary writing tells stories about insignificant people doing uninteresting things–but in an interesting way. It shouldn’t be thought that this means literary writing should be dull. Done well, it is not at all dull. It has to work hard to sparkle though, and those techniques are worth plundering even if you write in another genre.

As I was re-reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, I was struck anew by how she could weave an ordinary event into a riveting story.

Take her short story, “A Question of Accommodations.” [Spoiler Alert! You’ve been warned. You who read past this sentence are about to find out what happens!] Nothing much happens. A man and his wife attend the wedding of his old high school crush. And that’s it. Seriously. “High Concept” it’s not. Reading about this non-event should be as dull as paint drying…but not in the hands of Lahiri.

She begins with a straightforward account of the couple’s arrival at a hotel:

From the outside the hotel looked promising, like an old ski lodge in the mountains: chocolate brown siding, a steeply pitched roof, red trim around the windows. But as soon as they entered the lobby of the Chawick Inn, Amit was disappointed: the place was without character, renovated in pastel colors, squiggly gray lines a part of the wallpaper’s design, as if someone had repeatedly been testing the ink and ultimately had nothing to say.

This deceptively simple beginning offers tension right from the start: the outside looks promising but the interior (the truth) is disappointing. The unvoiced question is: what else in this story looked promising at first but turned out to be a disappointment? If this were a horror story, we might expect that the disconnect between appearances and truth would turn up a threat to the couple, but since this is character driven story, the most likely thing in danger is the couple’s own relationship. Indeed, as the story proceeds and we learn that the husband has unresolved feelings for the bride, our suspicions are confirmed: “He had loved her, it was true, but because she’d never been his girlfriend there had been nothing to explain.”

Lahiri lovingly paints the past of the protagonist, Amit, investing us in his happiness, so the threat to his marriage, which is basically a good one, gnaws away at us as the backstory unfolds and the story progresses. There is a great deal of backstory, and the main story line involves nothing more than the couple setting up in the hotel and making their way to the wedding. All along, however, Lahiri employs subtle tricks to hype up the tension.

Unlike in a plot driven story, there’s no immediately obvious “goal” the hero is striving to achieve. There’s no ticking bomb he has to defuse. Instead, Lahiri provides micro-goals to drive the story forward. For instance, early on the wife, Megan, discovers a hole in her skirt. How can she attend a wedding like that? The protagonist promises to stand by her side all evening.

This micro-goal is not the goal of the story, but when their pledge is mutually abandoned, this too moves the story forward:

She had moved closer to Ted, and her hand was playing with her diamond earring, a habit of hers when she was nervous. Could it be that Megan was flirting with Ted? Instead of being jealous Amit felt oddly liberated, relieved of his responsibility to Megan, to show her a good time. …Then he saw that the hand by Megan’s ear was the one that had been formally concealing her skirt. Now that she’d had a few drinks herself, she no longer cared, and Amit realized he was free of his duty to stand by her side.

In the context of a marriage, the positive emotions here are all threatening: “liberated,” “no longer cared” and “free of his duty to stand by her side.” Even the fact he is relieved rather than jealous that his wife (might) be flirting with another man is ominous in this context.

Fairly deep into the story the couple has been seated at a table with an engaged couple, Jared and Felicia. Felicia grills the protagonist about having children. This conversation is interrupted briefly:

A spoon clinked on the glass and they all turned their attention to the front of the tent, to the first round of toasts. They listened to friends of Pam’s from prep school and then from college, a few of whom he vaguely remembered drinking with at the Marlin. They were followed by members of both families, and coworkers of Pam’s and Ryan’s.

Okaaaaaay. This is exactly like a thousand weddings I’ve been to. Listening to endless wedding toasts is boring even when you’re there in person, with the consolation of cake, so it’s not promising to be reading about it. But directly the passage continues:

Amit was distracted by a pale gray spider that crawled up the side of the tablecloth and then into the space between the cuff of Jared’s shirt and jacket. He was tempted to say something, but Jared hadn’t noticed; instead he sat there, the same faint smile still fixed on his face, no doubt anticipating the day people would stand up and offer toasts at his own wedding.

The entree was served, plates of prime rib with asparagus and potatoes.

“How was it going from one child to two?” Felicia inquired, picking up the conversation where they’d left it. “A friend of mine told me that one plus one equals three. Is it true? She sliced into her prime rib, causing blood from the meat to seep into the potatoes.

He considered it for a moment. “Actually, it was after the second that our marriage sort of”–he paused, searching for the right word–“disappeared.”

In the flirting scene, Lahiri used innocuous, even positive images to evoke disquiet about the marriage. Here, however, she’s tossed in subtle but much more frightening imagery. A spider; a (knife) slicing; blood. It not the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but in such an understated scene, these images work like a giant robot flailing its pincher arms, bleeping, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”

And sure enough, right after the spider and the slicing and the blood, Amit drunkenly blurts out that his marriage has “disappeared.”

The micro-goal of concealing the hole has failed, but a new micro-goal now propels the protagonist to the climax of the story. He must, despite having had too much to drink, find a phone and call his daughters to check in on them for the night. Cell phones don’t work, so he lurches about, determined… Spoiler Alert… he doesn’t succeed at this either. But by the end, he does achieve the real goal of the story, which, belatedly, the reader realizes was stated in the first page of the story after all, as obvious as Gandalf telling Frodo to protect the One Ring.

What Purpose Do Novels Serve?

Art need not have any pragmatic purpose to be valuable, but my suspicion is that art is not useless. It performs a vital social function–but what?

One possible answer, specifically for novelists, is that through memoirs and novels (and all storytelling media, including the often maligned cinema, television and comic books) people can convey life lessons they’ve learned with enough richness and depth that real transfer of wisdom can take place.

Most people are poor at conveying their life experience to others.

The main things that people learn from life, rather than from being told are reading, aren’t stored in verbal form. As a result, people generally don’t think that they can be represented with words. As a general rule, as people get older, they become less disposed to construct new patterns out of words, and the patterns in their brains become more subtle and nuanced, and more divergent from the simple cliche verbal patterns that are typically exchanged as something like a carrier wave for the real primate communications that determine peoples actions. It takes, essentially, literary talent, to look at the world and construct a novel and precise description of what you see rather recognizing the closest stored pattern and outputting the most appropriate available cliche.

Oppan Klingon Style

Dear lord. Why am I watching this? Three times in a row?

There is, but of course, a translation from the Klingon:

Oppan Klingon Style

Klingon Style

qavan raHtar. be’ ‘IHqu’ SoH. Qapla’ jay’! Ha’
Kha-vaan rach-tar. Beh ich’khoo soch ka-plaa’ jaay, chaa
I salute you, woman. You are a very pretty woman. F*cking success. Let’s go!

‘Iw HIq Datlhutlh. SoH qalegh. Qut, Qut. QeDpIn be’ je. maw’.
Eeww hreek da-tlootl. Schoch ka-lerrh. Khroot, khroot. Kedepin beh jeh. Mao.
You drink bloodwine. I see you. Dirty. Dirty. Science officer and lady. Crazy.

nughoStaH nuq? parmaq, manga’chuq. Qut Ha’ maruch
nu-hrrosh-tach nook. par-maak, maa-ngaat-schook. Khroot, hraa, maa-rootsch.
What is coming toward us? Romance and sex. Dirty. Let’s go. Let’s do this!

If that left you with a lingering blood lust, and the need to say, kill an impala, here you go. You’ll thank me later.

How to Convey Subtext in Dialogue – Part 2

“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I’m not that man.”

Subtext is the art of saying the unsaid and thinking the unthinkable. There are several techniques that authors use to convey this. Among others:

1. Secret dialogue.
2. Actions speak louder than words.
3. Catch phrase or repetition.

In this post, I’ll discuss the first, possibly most common technique, secret dialogue.

Secret Dialogue

In the Fever series, by Karen Marie Moning, feisty heroine Mac and sexy antihero Jericho Barrons have to work together to defeat the Unseelie before they take over the world, starting with Dublin. Unfortunately, they don’t trust each other–and they don’t communicate very well. At least not openly. They have whole “non-conversations” however, through silent understandings, exchanged through glances and conveyed to the reader through italics. This one is from Faefever, the third book:

We looked at each other and for a moment those clouds of distrust lifted and I saw his thoughts in his eyes.

You were something see, he didn’t say.

You were something to feel, I didn’t reply

His gaze shuttered.

I looked away.

As Mac later notes, “The most confused we ever get is when we’re trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie.”

T-shirt: I’m a juicy girl. Barrons: “I bet you are.”

By the way, the Fever series also features a way to use obtext that I didn’t mention in my first post. As in many fantasy series (including the Wheel of Time and The Unfinished Song), magic can be used to force a person to do things against her will, including tell the truth. After Mac has spent time with a sexy Seelie prince V’lane, Barrons is furious and uses this coercion to interrogate her. [To avoid spoilers, I’ve elided the full quote.]

“Have the MacKeltars been spying on me?”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I said, “Yes.”

“Have you been spying on me, Ms. Lane?”

“As much as I can.”

…Aware that I was digging my own grave, one spadeful of information at at time, I told him….

He laughed. As if it were some kind of joke that I knew all his dark secrets. He didn’t try to explain or justify one bit of it. “And I didn’t think you could keep your own counsel. You knew these things and never said a word. You’re becoming interesting. Are you working with the MacKeltars against me?”

“No.”

In principle, since one cannot lie while under magical compulsion, there is no subtext here; in practice, however, the drift of Barron’s questions, especially when it becomes clear he is jealous and worried that she has betrayed him, convey his unspoken feelings for her. The possibility that the subtext (their mutual attraction) will break out into the open drives much of the sexual and romantic tension in the scene.

While we’re on the topic of magical communication, what about telepathy? It depends on the rules of the world. If one cannot lie through telepathy, then like magical truth-telling, this can be a way to insert believable obtext without being “unrealistic.” If telepathy is just like speech, conducted along a private thought-to-thought channel, but still susceptible to manipulation, deceit and lies, then it can also convey subtext.

To be clear, then, when I use the term secret dialogue, I’m not talking about a plot point. The secret is intuited between readers or conveyed directly by the author to the reader.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Swann’s Way, uses this later version of the technique during his satirical examination of the hapless Dr. Cottard:

Dr. Cottard was never quite certain of the tone in which he ought to reply to any observation, or whether the speaker was jesting or in earnest. And so by way of precaution he would embellish all his facial expressions with the offer of a conditional smile whose expectant subtlety would exonerate him from the charge of being a simpleton, if the remark addressed to him should turn out to have been facetious. But as he must also be prepared to face the alternative, he dared not allow this smile to assert itself positively on his features, and you would see there a perpetually flickering uncertainty, in which could be deciphered the question that he never dared to ask: “Do you really mean that?”

I have a great sympathy for Dr. Cottard, I might as well admit. I often have had recourse to that same smile. Especially when people are discussing pop culture icons that I pretend to know something about but have never heard of and secretly care nothing about. However. Moving on.

“Do you really mean that?”

The unspoken reason for Dr. Cottard’s smile is given here, and the question he “never dared to ask” is asked, but only in secret, a secret shared between the author and the reader. In this case, Dr. Cottard probably knows his “knowing” smile is, in truth, a smile of unknowing, but it’s equally possible for an author (especially in omniscient PoV) to share with the reader a truth about a character that is unknown to the character himself.

One could say, “He laughed because he thought he got the joke, though he had missed the point entirely, and fortunately so, for it never occurred to him to ask of his so-called friends, ‘Is this joke actually at my expense?'”

In this example, one has a line of a dialogue that not only doesn’t occur out loud, but doesn’t occur in the interior either; in fact, it doesn’t occur to the character at all and it could not occur. Obviously, this only works in certain forms of PoV — Omniscient or Distant Third. If the author were using a Close Third PoV, which is almost like First Person, then the author could not nudge the reader in this way, and the question of whether the joke was actually at the character’s expense would be even more subtextual. The reader would have to infer it from the context, from the PoV of other characters, and maybe from the joke itself.

Is there anything gained by the author offering, then withdrawing, the question “Is this joke actually at my expense?” If the character is truly oblivious, perhaps not. But the author who says, “it never occurred to him to ask of his so-called friends” might be toying with the reader. The author might be suggesting: It did occur to him, or would have, if he had allowed himself to think about it. His obliviousness might have resulted less from stupidity than from self-protection. He could not ask the question because it would have already answered itself in the asking, and that answer would have been too painful to bear.

Here’s my own attempt to use the same method. As in the Fever series, here Tamio “hears” both the subtext and obtext of what his friend Hadi is telling him about his chances for recovery after a fight. It’s not telepathy, just intuition:

Pain forced Tamio awake. […] Things resolved into shapes and textures: the smell of burning sheep-dung; the feel of woven wool; a wall beside the mound where he lay built up from thin sheets of orange-tinted rock. So he was in Orange Canyon, but in a spacious lodge, not a tent. Nice to know that even injured, he was coming up in the world. Wooden rafters above his head swayed in the haze of smoke. Or maybe it was his head that was still swaying.

“Am I doomed?” he asked Hadi.

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE IN HORRIBLE PAIN! Hadi’s panicked eyes informed him, while his mouth, lagging behind, formed a hoop: “Nooooo, of course not! You’ll be just fine.”

Which to believe? Tamio preferred the idea he would be fine, so he decided to go with that.

Tamio is not only aware of Hadi’s deception, Tamio deliberately colludes in the unwarranted optimism.

Why is it important to include secret dialogue? Why not just present the bald lies characters tell one another and let the reader figure out if the statements are true or not? Is the writer “cheating” by presenting this counter-conversation to the reader in italics, or unvoiced quotes or annoying all-caps?

Everything depends on the author and the author’s project. There is a valid purpose to secret dialogue, however, in showing human (or nonhuman) communication. Namely: this is as much how we talk to one another as what we say. We do voicelessly speak to one another, sometimes in fully formed sentences, sometimes in ways that are clear to both parties (and sometimes with a great deal of misunderstanding). This is one way that authors try to capture that (mis)communication and (missed) conversation.

How To Convey Subtext in Dialogue – Part 1

We all live in a Yellow Obmarine.

Subtext in dialogue is the opposite of the obvious; it’s dialogue in which what goes unsaid is as important as what is said. The opposite of this is not, but should be, called obtext. Screenwriters have a term for dialogue in which characters say exactly what they mean: “on the nose.” I’ll stick with obtext. Sad to say, obtextual dialogue, one obvious and true statement after another, usually sounds unrealistic, because people seldom say exactly what they mean, or all of what they mean.

There are two places you can see obtext used to good effect: children’s stories and comedy.

In children’s stories, characters say exactly what they mean, because this is what children themselves do. That’s why they walk up to the obese woman and ask, “Why are you so fat?” or ask the man with long hair, “Are you a daddy or a mommy?” or comment on their baby brother’s drawing, “It’s just a bunch of scribbles.”

This is precocious until about five, after which it’s obnoxious.

Children learn to efface obtext with subtext with increasing skill so that by the time they are teenagers, they are only capable of talking in subtext. “Enjoy that burger, your hips need the extra calories.” “Have you heard of shampoo?”  “Yeah, I like your taste in art.”

This is obnoxious until college, after which it’s someone else’s problem.

Pinkie Pie’s world is rocked when she meets Twilight Sparkle.

In children’s stories, characters conflict, but they are not coy about it. Here’s a scene from My Little Ponies: Friendship is Magic. No one speaks ironically; the ponies express exactly how they feel, and announce their goals directly to each other:

Pinkie Pie: Surprise! Hi, I’m Pinkie Pie, and I threw this party just for you! Were you surprised? Were ya? Were ya? Huh huh huh?

Twilight Sparkle: Very surprised. Libraries are supposed to be quiet.

Pinkie Pie: Well, that’s silly! What kind of welcome party would this be if it were quiet? I mean, duh, bo-ring! Y’see, I saw you when you first got here, remember? You were all “hello” and I was all [gasps dramatically], remember? Y’see I’ve never saw you before and if I’ve never saw you before that means you’re new, ’cause I know everypony, and I mean everypony in Ponyville!

Twilight Sparkle: [groans]

Pinkie Pie: And if you’re new, that meant you haven’t met anyone yet, and if you haven’t met anyone yet, you must not have any friends, and if you don’t have any friends then you must be lonely, and that made me so sad, then I had an idea, and that’s why I went [gasps dramatically]! I must throw a great big ginormous super-duper spectacular welcome party and invite everyone in Ponyville! See? And now you have lots and lots of friends!

Twilight Sparkle: Ugh, here I thought I’d have time to learn about the Elements of Harmony but, silly me, all this ridiculous friend-making has kept me from it! 

As soon as an adult viewers hear Twilight Sparkle say this (actually, as adult viewers learn the title of the cartoon) they know that the pony will soon learn that making friends is what will enable her to defeat the wicked Mare in the Moon. But young children, who have not yet seen thousands of hours of re-cycled plots, will still find this ending a surprise and a delight. By the way, a six year old will already grasp the story arc more quickly (and cynically) than a three year old. Those mere three years make a huge difference in how children understand fiction.

The premise of the indy film The Invention of Lying is that everything in our world is the same except, somehow, lying failed to be invented at the dawn of human history. So the characters speak on the nose all the time. For instance, when Mark, the schlemiel, shows up for his blind date with beautiful Jennifer, the conversation at her front door proceeds:

The result is hilarious because it’s so true and yet so very, very wrong.

This post has been all about obtext, the opposite of what I promised. Oops! Tomorrow, I’ll discuss subtext.
One last thought: what happens when you watch My Little Pony and assume that everything they say is subtext, not obtext? What are they really thinking?

WiP Wednesday (Blood)

Wing is coming out in ten days; sign up for my newsletter if you want a chance at a free copy.

I haven’t done WiP (Work in Progress) Wednesday before, but I’m going to give it a try.

Here’s a scene from the next book after Wing, the book I’m working on now–Blood, Book 6 of The Unfinished Song.

Not Umbral, but another villain, even more vile, sees Dindi:

Again — If you want to know when The Unfinished Song (Book 6): Blood will be out, make sure you’re on the newsletter list.