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Meditate, Louise Hawes said. What?
Some writers take acting classes to find a character’s voice, said my then teacher at Vermont College of Fine Arts, but her favorite method was meditation. When you close your eyes and breathe, she promised, you will become your character.
Not me. I was too fidgety; I felt ridiculous sitting on the sofa.
But my writing was flat in my work in progress. I was describing events more than living them through the eyes of Dillon, my protagonist. I was decades away from adolescence, and I needed to get in touch with my inner 13-year-old boy.
The cure? Poetry.
Poetry works as a path to the heart of a character because it requires you to focus on specifics. The red wheelbarrow. A Bird on the Walk. Writing down what you observe in a finite group of words is the beginning of a poem. As Ted Kooser noted in The Poetry Home Repair Manual, “Meaning arrives almost unbidden from an accumulation of specific details.”
Good poetry cannot have generalities. Something stops your mind—a broken laundry basket on the highway median, a hand gripping a child’s lunchbox—and it evokes something in you. Mary Oliver observed, “the poet used the actual, known event or experience to elucidate the inner, invisible experience.”
We know our own internal landscape. The trick, then, is to uncover the invisible landscape of your character. What telling detail will trigger an emotional response in your character?
This exercise has worked for me over and over. I don’t always love the poem I’ve written at the end, but I always feel a new connection to what my character wants. And not coincidentally, the poem usually gives me a scene idea. The specificity of the images gives my character something to do. It’s through doing that character is revealed.
Here’s what happened when I wrote in the voice of Dillon:
Clean Shaven
Mom told me
he shaved off his moustache
right before he left
for Desert Storm
I hold his photo
next to my face
Our eyes match
My nose is hooked
like his
I jut my chin out
checking for a shadow
I run my hand down
my cheek
It’s smooth
like his
in the soldier picture
Ten years gone but
everyone will see
we are father and son
Immediately I knew the core of my novel. The story, which had many other plot twists, was fundamentally about the rebuilding of the relationship between Dillon and his father. Dillon’s every action must stem from a desire to please his father.
So if you are stuck, write a poem. Take a close-up of your character. The short form requires words with impact. Verbs and nouns can’t be weak; the sound and rhythm of the phrases must sing. Words are what matter, after all. Slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence, you will write a novel with characters made real by specific details.
And if it doesn’t work, try meditating.
Jennifer Gennari is the author of My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2012), an Association of Booksellers for Children Spring 2012 New Voices title and an American Library Association Rainbow List title. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and a former reporter, her poems have appeared in the Marin.
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2 Comments on Opening the Heart of Character Through Poetry: Jennifer Gennari, last added: 4/3/2013
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“Meaning arrives almost unbidden from an accumulation of specific details.”
I have a new character I'm ready to meet. This is timely for me!
Glad to hear it!