I love New York City. I should. I lived
here my entire life and I have to tell you, I've seen every corner of
my beloved metropolis. Being from Brooklyn I had the opportunity to delve
into the more seedier sides of the city. Her dark ports, her dim
bars, her shadowy nightclubs and I loved every second of it. The real
thing is that when I wrote Cover of Darkness, I wanted to move though
the city, through it's denizens and to do so with an economy of
words. I'm growing to be a minimalist in my writing, describing things briefly and
allowing my reader to fill in the blanks. Now is this fair?
If I don't describe a city down to it's
basic elements, missing nothing in my observations, wouldn't I be more
of a benefit to my reader who would like to know everything there is
to know about the city? Is that what I wanted? And is this what I
wanted for my second book, Edge of Darkness?
I explained in great detail how I wrote
the book Cover of Darkness in September 2014, where I think I vented a spleen. I
wanted to try out my new style so badly that I wrote a series of
books to get the feeling of how I wanted to write. But New York, to
serve her properly, should be described down to its minutest detail,
no?
Well how about this: let's take things
apart and look at it and we can then see what's more important. Let's
take a nightclub. A simple building. That's basically what it is. Do
you want to describe it's plain looking features, brick walls, arched
doorways, gruff and burly doormen dressed in black suits and white
shirts? You can, but are you putting anything interesting down on
paper? Isn't that why we write every sentence, every scene? Don't we
want to put something interesting before our reader so that they'll
turn the next page with baited breath?
Instead of describing the building with
it's awning and/or the location of the club, such as in the Flatiron
district or the village, with some deep explanation of the
neighborhood, I would much rather focus on the people. I would much
rather focus on the people crowding the front of the building. Is
there a crowd? It must be a happening place. How are the people
dressed? In trendy, hip clothing? In casual wear? In formal wear? You
can see the questions being answered without words in the mind of
your protagonist approaching the club, and most likely in the mind of
the reader. They can deduce the club, it's type and feel, it's
clientele and have an inkling of what's going on inside. To me,
that's interesting.
I would then, after setting the
atmosphere outside without an explanation of what it looks like, would
quickly go inside. Hey, it looks like a building, end of story.
But picking out what's interesting is
the job of the author. He/she is to pick out what facets of a scene
make the most sense, what are the most fascinating bits of data that
paint a picture without words. A simple fight breaking out in the
line of people waiting to enter goes to show the reader that inside
are most likely a bunch of roughnecks. Let the reader come to that
conclusion, don't tell them that the protagonist read in the papers
how rugged the club was, or a police blotter of how many arrests
occurred over the past month. This is planting information, not
showing information.
But then I go to my original questions:
isn't a minimalist description of the city a cheat to the reader?
Aren't I shortchanging my readers with the description of New York?
No. Not in the least. I am so confident in the first book that I
moved the venue of the next book to Vermont to cast my minimalistic
eyes on a small town, the exact opposite of the big city. Wait! Isn't
my aim to talk about New York, to open up the city and expose its
bones? What am I doing moving my protagonist to a rural setting? Am
I abandoning the city? My City? Oh no. I'm hungry to use my new
style, with as little exposition as possible, in another setting. Is
this good? Is this safe yanking my readers from the city that they no
doubt were enjoying to the countryside? In Edge of Darkness I do just that. I want
to be versatile. I want to move around and I desperately needed to
delve into the life of the protagonist, which, in fact, I didn't do
in the first book. I got right into the story and skipped all of the
back story. I wanted to know how that felt and more importantly,
could it be done without tearing the reader from the novel because of
having too many unanswered questions.
The fact is, you'll never tear a reader
away because of unanswered questions. The reader reads on for
answers, and if the question is a tough one, they'll hang on just to
get the answer. Well, do you have to give it to them at the end of
the book? Of course not. Especially if there is another book. It
gives the reader a vacuum to fall into. That's why I fearlessly
changed the setting from New York to Vermont for the second one.
I left many unanswered questions for my
reader which the second book answers, but instead of going through
the torturous back story, thereby telling my reader about my
protagonist, I go to the protagonist's home and interview their family
and friends. If I need any back story, I'll have the characters
relate it. I introduce friends who are shifty, sketchy, protective. I
introduce family relations that are strained and the reasons why. I
open up the life of my protagonist just as if I am walking next to
them, learning about them by being with them. If it takes flying my
character to Vermont to answer these questions without useless
exposition then that's even better.
I'm bringing the series back to the
gritty city in my third book, Pale of Darkness, but until then I'm not
afraid to go where the answers are. Give your book dimension. Don't
spend unless pages explaining what the protagonist's life was like in
Vermont, and their relationship with friends and family there. Why
not have the protagonist go to Vermont and deal with them? Or, if you
just HAVE to keep your story in it's original setting, such as New
York, then why not bring the relatives or friends to the city to help
relate the back story that your character desperately needs.
But don't be afraid to change settings
and move around in foreign locales. And don't feel the need to
explain everything in this new locale down to the history of the
place as well as the design and construction of the buildings in the
town or city. Stay with what is interesting in your story, and you'll
have to agree, 9 times out of 10 the most intriguing thing about your
novel are the people in it. People are indeed multifaceted beings
that you can make more intriguing than an explanation of a building,
street, neighborhood, town or city.
Don't be afraid to move about and go
about. And don't feel the need to bog the reader down with tiring
prose that only goes to show that you did your homework but does
nothing to move the story.
That's all that I have to say. Maybe
the next time I'll talk about the city more and how I handled it in
greater detail in another post.
Or maybe, even more importantly how
characters can paint incredible pictures of their surroundings better
than you can describe them. Trust me.
Show. Don't explain.
Gregory
