One of the biggest mistakes we writers make is thinking that we have to write our own stories. That's what I call "writing from the outside," and it often leads to wooden pieces without any emotional pulse. But when you write from the inside out and let your characters tell their stories, it can produce such powerful work that it will leave you reeling.
Writing from the inside out has two components: one is entering the emotion and the other is entering the body of the character. I'll talk about both in turn.
Imagine right now that you're standing in the middle of a frozen snow field. There is no sound. Fog wisps around you so that no matter where you look, you can't see more than a few feet ahead. Everything is white white white. In your panic, you suck deep breaths through your nose, but with each breath your nostrils contract against the dry bite of air. You tuck back deeper into your parka so that its furry edging circles your face. In that steamy space, you taste your fear. Where to go? You came from the north, you know. But where's north? There? You take one step, and your boot crashes through the crust of snow.
If you were imaging this up as you read, not only would you have heard and smelled and tasted and touched and seen the world I described, but you might also have felt a sense of relief at the end when your name was called.
There's a reason for this: it's absolutely impossible to have an image in our mind's eye without having a concomitant emotional response. I call this the image-emotion coin, and it's the basis for my movies in the mind techniques that I describe at length in my book, Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story. For the sake of this article, though, the important element is this: if you imaged up the passage above as a movie in the mind, your body participated.
Now isn't that the key to writing fiction? We want to pull readers in as participants. We do that through well-chosen details, of course. But the trick to getting the right details is to have the movies in the mind so vivid that all you have to do is chronicle them: simply record what you smell, hear, touch, taste, see, and feel in your mind's eye.
The easiest way to do that is by entering our characters' bodies. With each of them we have to do more than walk a mile in their moccasins. We have to stand in their skin, smelling and tasting and touching and seeing and hearing the world as they do -- from the inside out. Then and only then can their stories really be told.
I call our ability to slip into our character's bodies, our Seventh Sense. It's our capacity for empathy, which Webster's Third defines as "the capacity for participating in or a vicarious experiencing of another's feelings, volitions, or ideas and sometimes another's movements to the point of executing bodily movements resembling his."
Right now, I want you to take a moment and do an exercise that should illustrate what I'm talking about. First of all, I want you to imagine that you're looking at yourself in a mirror. Study your reflection closely. Now imagine that the light is on a dimmer switch. Slowly turn the light up, watching what happens to your face. Where do the shadows fall? What part of your face catches the light? What does the brightening light do to your skin coloring?
Now slowly dim the light, and as you do so, watch what happens to your reflection. Where do the shadows fall? How does the coloring change? And what is the last part of your face you see before the light goes to black?
Turn the light back up so it's at a comfortable level. Now I want you to imagine that one of your characters walks into the room and that you can see him or her walking toward you as a reflection in the mirror. Your character then comes and stands next to you so that you can see both of your reflections clearly. Watch your character studying you. Now study your character. Notice the details. What color hair, shape of face, size of nose? How tall is your character? What's he or she wearing? Try the dimmer switch and see what you see.
After both you and your character have had a chance to check each other out, I'd like you to go one step further. As though you're putting your hand into a glove, I want you to slip into your character's body.
What did it feel like when you did that? Was it a tight squeeze or did it feel roomy in there?
Now I want you to look through your character's eyes at your character's reflection in the mirror. Remember: You are your character; you are looking through his or her eyes.
When I have students do this, they almost invariably express surprise because their character's reflection takes on a whole new aspect. Where before, they saw their character's face in the broad sweep way we see others, when they're looking through their character's eyes, they see as we all see when we look at ourselves -- details stand out vividly; flaws take on an importance that would surprise an outside observer. Emotions also rear their heads.
One of my students climbed into a male character's body only to discover that she felt as though she were in a large, dark, hollow space. And when she looked through his eyes, rather than seeing a face reflected in the mirror, she heard his thoughts:
"I'm just a goddamned failure. They need too much from me. All the family needs too much. I can't give them what they crave. I don't have the earning power. I'll never make enough. I'll never achieve enough."
With these words came a feeling of wanting to flee because everything felt so impossibly overwhelming. This came as a revelation to my student because this character was based on her father, and from the outside, he had always seemed so strong and assured. She said, "It was as if at over sixty years of age I was learning about him and his point of view and for the first time."
Only by getting into her character's body and seeing him through his eyes, could she really come to know his inner life, which is, of course, his motivation.
As you can see, when you're inside your character, it's not just a matter of seeing a reflection. We are able to feel our character's feelings and get a sense of what it's like to be him or her. We can do more as well. From inside your character, touch "your" skin in your mind's eye. (Remember: when you're inside, you are always the character, not yourself.) What does "your" skin feel like? Is it rough or silky? And what do you smell like?
Imagine now that your character is eating his or her favorite food. What is the experience like for your character? Where does the taste touch the tongue? How does it feel to the body? Is there a warm satisfaction or a "yes!" of triumph? And here's a real stretch for you -- a way to know if you're really in your character's body and not just "thinking it": Imagine that your character is eating something you detest. For me that would be mixed vegetables of the frozen variety; it makes me gag to think of them; it reminds me of hiding them under the rim of my dinner plate as a child, of sticking them in my pocket -- anything to avoid eating them. Now, variations of taste being what they are, it would be truly astounding to have a character who had the same visceral reaction to frozen veggies. Try it with your least favorite food and see. And try it with your favorite food and see the difference in your character's response. I've been doing this technique with students for a long time, and the most constant reaction is the sense of awe when a character responds differently than we ourselves would. And characters do respond differently.
I don't know how it is that we can do this -- actually enter the body of our character -- but I've never known a person who couldn't do it to at least some extent.
There are many things you can do from inside your character. For instance, you can let your character speak through you to have a conversation with someone else. When I'm working with students, I'll ask them questions when they're inside the body of the character (with a frequent admonition to, say, a student named Ted of "This isn't Ted speaking here; this is Susan. Susan, get the author out of the way. What do you, Susan, feel?") At first this may seem odd, but very quickly, you'll come to see that in fact the character can speak through your mouth. Equally, you can do this alone with a pen and paper or with a computer keyboard. Record both the questions asked and the answers given by your character. Clearly, though, if you can find someone to ask you the questions while you're "in character," it can be a lot more fun.
Now in writing from the inside out, we don't just stay in our characters' bodies. We have to see them from other angles as well. But the principle is still the same: It's still writing from the inside out because we're letting them tell us their stories. We can do that by observing them.
One day I was working with a student on his character named Hillary while he and I sat at his picnic table in his yard. I said to him, "Do you see Hillary over there by the arroyo?" Yes, he said he could. "What's she wearing?" I asked. He described her outfit in great detail so that I began to see her too -- sandals, a gathered skirt, and, as he said, "a beige shell." And then he added with a bemused expression: "What's a shell?" It was an interesting moment when you know there's real communion with a character. Probably not many men know the word, but my student's character who lives in the 1970s would comfortably use it to describe the sleeveless simple blouse she wore.
I then asked him to have Hillary come toward us and had him describe for me how she walked. He said her stride was confident and graceful, but more than that what struck him was how alive and sensitive she was -- and how aware she was of him. "Who are you?" she asked him. "What are you doing here?" Her inquisitiveness struck him because he had thought he was the one who would be asking the questions.
The most powerful moment for my student, however, was when his character came close and he smelled her: "It was not a manufactured scent; it didn't come out of a bottle. It was her scent, and it was no scent. It was clean mud and wet grass. Where there's grass, people lie in it and the next thing they know they're wanting to eat it because it such an inviting scent. But it's not a scent, it's that you sense something. This scent of hers -- it was not a familiar scent; it was her scent."
It was this scent that most of all made him a believer in writing from the inside out. Hillary's smell caused a physical sensation inside of him, and that was all he needed to know her reality as a character separate from himself.
I should add that this student has been publishing fiction since the late 50s. At first, he was very resistant to working with me, saying to himself as he told me later, "What have I got to learn from her? I'm down the road and way ahead, so why am I looking back at what she's going to be telling me?" But finally he did come to work with me because he felt himself incapable of writing from a woman's point of view, something his story wanted him to do. Not only did he discover he was more than equal to the task, but he found that he had a remarkable capacity for getting out of his own way and letting his characters tell the story --and what a story it was! Nothing he ever could have "thought to." Here's what one of his character's had told him the day before we sat at his picnic table, which you'll see is all the more significant in light of what he experienced when Hillary walked toward him.
My student had been recording the dialogue between two of his characters: the protagonist and his mother, Claire. She's describing the woman he will one day meet:
- "She'll be tall like me but there the resemblance to me should end. Her voice will be special, the quality of it, the gaminess of it--"
- "Gaminess?"
- "I'm an artist not a word person, you know that. Gaminess may not be the right word. It just came to me. And there'll be a scent about her. A no scent, discernible to no one but you. She'll put on a scent for other men but never for you."
A no scent.
In writing from the inside out, you get gems like this -- things that leave you saying, "Where'd that come from?" From your characters is the answer. They're pretty poetic creatures if you give them half a chance.
Now there's more to writing from the inside out than getting into your characters' bodies or observing your character as they move in their worlds. There's feeling their emotions and then writing from those emotions.
When something is written from the outside, we write as observers detailing up the scene. When it's written from the inside out, the emotion colors the things observed.
Here's an example of a passage that was written from the outside.
"The obligatory reception was held in the big house where Savannah had grown up. Looking around at the heavy furniture and antimacassars, Lacey had difficulty picturing her brash, wild- child friend in such stifling surroundings. No wonder her mother was nuts, Lacey thought. She was living amid centuries of someone else's musty stuff."
Not bad, but it lacks the power of this that my student later wrote from the inside out:
"She looked over at Savannah where she had sunk into one of the huge carved chairs. Even now in this profound grief, Savannah was breathtakingly beautiful and so alive. It was like a candle burned inside her, illuminating her from the inside out."
There's a power in those words, a pulse of life that draws the reader in.
This then is writing from the inside out. You become your character, and you let your character tell his or her story. It's one that may surprise you; often you'll find that it certainly isn't the one you thought you were going to tell, but because it's truly your character's story, it will be a much richer tale as a result.
© 1997 by Colleen Mariah Rae
