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In our second creative writing segment, we practice our writing craft to develop strong characters. Join us as we look at mugshots from the New South Wales Police Forensic Photography Archive, taken in the early 1900s.
Two friends obsessed with books and writing, we're Shannen and Gareth, and welcome to The Pleasure of the Text Podcast. Reading and writing aren't lonely pursuits, and The Pleasure of the Text lies in the shared imaginative space where readers and writers make meaning together. So tune in and join us as we talk about the books we love, interview remarkable authors, and discuss the writer’s craft.
Shannen: Hello, hello! Good morning everyone and welcome to “The Pleasure of the Text” podcast. We are your hosts; Shannen and Gareth.
Gareth: Hello, hello.
Shannen: And today we are doing another one of our creative writing segments and I'm really excited because Gareth has posted some photos on our Facebook and also our website (thepleasureofthetext.com).
And do you want to describe a bit more about what you are planning on doing with us today, Gareth?
Gareth: I would, Shannon, I would indeed. So basically I had a plan to do some descriptive writing. But then we interviewed Cheryl Sullivan and during the course of the interview we spoke briefly about the forensic photography from the 1930s, uh, or indeed the 1920s, in Sydney and the Sydney Living Museum, which is where all that great photography is housed.
And you know it's a good thing when you're a writer to follow the flow of associations. You don't want to be, you know, really dogmatic and just do what you set out to do. So what we've done is we've decided to have a look at that archive or what we have shared of it, as a writing exercise in text in textual portraiture.
So that's what we're going to be doing. What do you think of that, Shannen? Textural portraiture. Try saying that 10 times.
Shannen: Textural portraiture. Got it, first shot!
Gareth: You did, didn't you? Oh, fine. Whatever. So yeah, have you ever done anything like that before?
Shannen: No, I haven't.
Gareth: Well, you know, I don't know if it comes up a lot in creative writing classes.
But it definitely comes up in art classes. Not the textural bit, but the portraiture and the whole sort of sketching concept. And it's something I think what we're going to discover as we work our way through various exercises over the coming months, is that there's quite a lot of really good knowledge that's housed in other art forms that can be applied to writing.
And that's something that in my experience is not something that tends to be a part of writing classes, but it sure as heck is going be part of what we do. So yeah, I think basically this is going be a shorter podcast, I suspect, for various reasons. But I think really we should jump straight into our first exercise.
We're going do two six minute exercises. The reason why they're going to be six minute exercises is because we have six images. So regardless of whether you’re following this on YouTube or across one of our listening platforms, what I would recommend is that you pop over to thepleasureofthetext.com, head over to blogs, and you'll find mugshots of Sydney in the 1920s.
I think I got that right. If you open that page up, you'll find that within that blog post there are six images, six mugshots, and what we're going to do, over the next six minutes, and we'll put in some chimes or something to indicate each time a minute passes, we're going to describe what we see in those mugshots.
So, you know, you could imagine that you’re a detective. I guess and you’re describing a perp. These are all perps. And so you’re basically describing their appearance and you have a minute to do it. How does that sound, Shannen? What do you think?
Shannen: So I have one minute to describe one perp?
Gareth: Exactly! You’ve got a minute. Whatever you think is worth describing, and then you go through all six images. And as I say, we'll put a chime in or something to say “go to the next image”. Now, it's really important that you don't cheat. You may be halfway through a sentence - too bad baby! You’ve got to move on. That's how we roll here because imagine, you know, you're trying to describe these six perps. They're all in the same room and they're just moving out, and you got to move on to the next one.
You know, life doesn't wait for the writer. So as soon as your minute hits, move to the next image. All right, Shannen, so have you got the blog post in front of you?
Shannen: Yes, I do. And are you happy for me to start the one minute timer?
Gareth: I certainly am, yes. I think that's going to be great. I've got my blue pen and my notepad, and I assume you’re using your computer.
Shannen: Yes, I am.
Gareth: Fantastic! All right, well I think we're ready to roll.
Shannen: Yeah. Okay. I'm pressing “start” in three, two, and one. Go . . .
Gareth: And we’re back six minutes later. How did you find that exercise, Shannen?
Shannen: The first one was a little bit stressful because I was like, how could I describe this in one minute? But then once I got used to it, it flowed really naturally and I don't think I needed the full minute to kind of pick the features that I wanted to describe.
Gareth: That's really good. I'm coming off the back of some wicked insomnia and I found all six incredibly stressful and difficult. So it'll be interesting to see what we got, relatively speaking. Should we do each one in turn?
Shannen: Yeah, sure!
Gareth: Now who was our first subject? I can't remember.
Shannen: Mr Sidney Kelly.
Gareth: Right. So what did you get for him?
Shannen: Okay so Sidney Kelly; two lines across his forehead, the ones that made people believe in the flat earth theory. Bushy brows. A dimple chin. Hair eschewed as if he's just arisen from bed.
Gareth: Very nice. I got, a hang dog expression, short man, big hair, cigarette in his left hand. Tall hat. Trying to seem tall, but only making himself look shorter.
Shannen: Oh, I like that one.
Gareth: Now our next person is E.A.R. Cavendish. I'll go first for this one. We'll take it in turns. So I got a heavy-set man, middle-aged, in a long coat. Small mustache makes his face look fatter. Left side of his body dips down as if from a mild stroke.
Shannen: Oh, I think we've both picked up on the dipping face. So, a lopsided upside-down smile, with the right lip extending far beyond the face’s natural symmetry. His head also lops to the side. Like a weight has been attached to his cheek and his face stretched outwards to the right.
Gareth: Very nice. Very nice indeed. Now the first of our ladies. I'm going to have to rely on you to give me the names every time.
Shannen: Yeah, D. Mort.
Gareth: D. Mort.
Shannen: I think it’s short for Dorothy Mort.
Gareth: Dorothy Mort. That's a very, um . . . I guess I'm picking up on Mort being a word for death.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: I wonder if she was indeed a murderess. Perhaps so. I have no idea. But let's - I now assume that she is, based on her name. Nominative determinism. That's what we're going with. So, what did you get?
Shannen: A long nose and drawn, haggard face. Long and slender, no smile. So no lips needed. How can one smile in jail? Her face is as limp as the bow that adorns her blouse.
Gareth: Wonderful, wonderful! Okay, so I got fairly similar. Thin, almost emaciated woman. Care worn, but possibly younger than she looks. Long drawn out features. Even her collar drops down from her narrow shoulders.
Shannen: Oh, very similar.
Gareth: And I do recall thinking, “oh, I must talk about the bow”. But then the timer went off and I was foiled.
Shannen: Foiled by the timer! So our next portrait is J. Wilson.
Gareth: Jay Wilson. So this is me up first. I struggled with J. Wilson. I found myself looking back for too long. I didn't put this in my writing, but she reminds me tremendously in the longer shot of a ghost. I thought she was quite ghost-like. However I didn't write that down.
What I got was a gypsy-like appearance. A young woman in a first doll. Dresses old for her age, though I suspect that's actually just the fashion of the time. Dark circles under her eyes. That's all I got, I really bombed out on that one. What did you get, Shannen?
Shannen: I also had difficulty with Miss J. Wilson. I don’t know. She’s got - there's nothing quite distinguishing. But she is very distinguishable, if that makes sense.
Gareth: Hmm. It does. It's all the features together, isn't it?
Shannen: Yeah, so you can't just pick one. So blurred lines, a woman hiding from her to see in shadow, and a long fur coat. Dark eyes with darker brows. A strong nose and jawline to carry the weight.
Gareth: Hmm. That's great. Now we have our interesting one. For people who are wondering, what's occurring in that image, just, I assume what's occurring in that image is that I think the gentleman's name is Mr. Chong. And he clearly does not wish to be photographed. And back in those days they had quite long exposures, so you had to sit still. And he was not having a bar of that. So he may not have been moving his head very much, but the effect you get is quite striking, I think.
Shannen: It kind of looks like what I imagine an exorcism looks like.
Gareth: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think we've all seen those movies where character's heads move far too quickly and you get that kind of blurring effect.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Yeah. So we've got a bit of this. But how do you describe it? How did you describe it, Shannen?
Shannen: A shadow face, a mirage, double lips, double eyes, and long nose. Ears with no clearness and hands that hold the moving mass in place before it rises to the sky like a balloon, never to be seen again.
Gareth: Wow. That's really good. Mine's a bit more prosaic. I've got hands on either side of his head, trying to hold him still long enough for the long exposure photograph. A young man. Asian and a dapper dresser.
Shannen: Oh, he is a dapper dresser actually.
Gareth: He’s a very dapper dresser. And I feel this could be a key to his character and perhaps he's unwillingness to be photographed. I feel there's something in that. But who's to say what that is? And that leaves our last subject . . .
Shannen: Yes, Mr. Walter Smith.
Gareth: In many ways he's my favorite. He was the first of the faces that really jumped out at me. So I'll read what I've got. Looks like a boxer. Lots of scar tissue around his nose and brow. A dimple, like a stab wound in his chin, would almost be good looking, but somehow he's too lived in.
Shannen: He’s too lived in?
Gareth: Yeah. I think I heard the timer ago off. So that was probably a better way of putting that, but I just had to get it down. He's too lived in. So what have you got?
Shannen: I do like “too lived in”. So Walter Smith - burnt scarred nose, the mass stretching beyond the obvious protrusion to the rest of his face. A small dimple in the chin, a sunken hole that seems to continue on through the skin, the flesh into the mouth and down the esophagus. Eyes certain.
Gareth: Wonderful. Okay. So, you know. Those are some reasonable descriptions. I wonder how everyone went at home. Probably got similar sorts of things. But could we do better? I wonder? So, I mean, particularly with our fourth subject, I think we in trying to list some features ended up not capturing her at all. And so there's something in this I would suggest that we need to, when we're describing characters and when we're describing the appearance of characters, we need certain focuses or foci.
Now I'm going to share a quote from the following book. David Lodge; “The Practice of Writing”. People may be aware of David Lodge's work. He's a quite a famous novelist. Writes a lot of fiction around the academic sphere. I guess he's writing what he knows because he's also an academic, I believe.
So you get a lot of academic fiction. I'm going to read a quote from a chapter in his book called “Creative Writing”. “Can it, should it, be Taught”. Mostly I'm reading it because I think it's interesting, but it also ties into something else we're going to talk about. Okay. So here we go.
“How does one become a writer? One thing is certain; nobody ever wrote a book without having read at least one. And more. Probably hundreds of approximately the same kind.”
I'll just interrupt myself at this point to say I hope that's still true.
“Most writers, whether they take courses in creative writing or not, are kick started, that is they begin by imitating and emulating the literature that gives them the biggest kicks.
The pleasure and the enhanced sense of reality that you get from reading gives you the urge to try and produce that effect on others. And it is from reading that you acquire basic knowledge of the structural and rhetorical devices that belong to a particular genre or form of writing. To a large extent, this learning process is intuitive and unconscious, like learning the mother tongue.
Three writers who I believe had a formative influence on me when I started to try and write rose fiction with James Joyce, Graham Greene and Evelyn War. No doubt. The fact that all three were Catholics and wrote in very different ways about Catholic subjects was one reason why I was drawn to their work in late adolescents, where I was brought up in that faith myself.
I also read them as a student of modern English literature with exams to pass and degrees to get. But from my immersion in their work, I absorbed many lessons about the techniques of fiction, some of which I did not put into practice until many years later. For example, from Greene; how to use a few select details heightened by metaphor in simile to evoke character or the sense of place from war.
How to generate comedy by a combination of logic and surprise of the familiar and the incongruous from Joyce, How to make a modern story reenact echo or parody, a mythical or literary precursor narrative. I learned many other things from these writers as well. Above all, I would like to think, a craftsman like approach to the business of writing. A willingness to take pains, a commitment to making the work as good as you can possibly make it.”
So I think that's a pretty great quote from David Lodge. And I'll just highlight the sentence that we're going to bounce off here, which is from Greene. “How to use a few selected details heightened by metaphor and simile to evoke character or the sense of place”. So Graham Greene is noted for this. He's very much a writer of characters. It's something that he's always done very well and this has always been noted about his work. Have you read much Graham Greene, Shannen?
Shannen: No, I haven't. In any of the English courses that I've done, I'm just thinking back to high school and then university and then creative writing courses, uh, Graham Greene never came up. We would mostly cover, you know, Australian authors, so Tim Winton’s “Dirt Music” and “Lockie Leonard” kind of thing. Which is upsetting. So I feel like my breadth of other authors is quite limited. But it's ever expanding when I have these discussions with you, Gareth.
Gareth: Well, yeah, no, I don't think we covered Graham Greene when I was going through undergraduate classes either.
Shannen: How did you discover him then?
Gareth: Oh, through my own research. It's, you know, I would say that, I’m going to say something quite scandalous right now, but we'll see if it makes the cut. I don't think really I learned anything at an undergraduate level, at university, studying creative writing. Or rather, I did go on and do honors. And that is strictly speaking, undergraduate, and I started to learn some stuff at that point.
But in my undergraduate degree, proper; no, I don't, I don't think I did really learn very much at all. And really, I mean, I've long held the view that what needs to be taught at schools is critical thinking more than anything else. And then from that point, once critical thinking skills are in place and ingrained, taking a sort of more elastic approach to curricular, I think would make a lot of sense.
I'm not sure that the H.S.C. testing sort of protocols are valuable at all. But I tend to think, you know, if you establish critical thinking skills and allow students to pursue their natural interests, and then take those natural interests and use them as focalizing devices for things that, perhaps, are not such natural interests.
So for example; I would've done much better, I think, or at least I would've engaged more with a subject like mathematics if the math’s classes had been built around narratives. Oh, so controversial though! We'll probably get a letter from the Department of Education now. Cease and desist! How dare you!
Shannen: Oh, well. Or they can come and ask us for advice because Luke and I talk about the mathematics one. The good example is, you know, following that narrative, “your planet is dying and you need to go find another planet”. So then you kind of look at Goldilocks Zones, how long it's going to take to get there, you know, travel, like all this stuff.
So that also mathematics is not just mathematics anymore. It becomes physics as well, it becomes kind of chemistry. So you're weaving all these topics into each other and when you do that, it solidifies all those interconnective pathways rather than everything always set up in our society, like individual silos. It needs to be more, uh, cross institutionalized.
Gareth: Oh, I so agree. I mean, you know, when they talk about stem, which is what science, technology, engineering, and maths, I think, right?
Shannen: Yes, that's correct.
Gareth: Stem, yeah. I think, you know, if knowledge is a tree, The minute you start talking about stems, you've talked about something, you've cut off the tree. It's already dead. Dead and dying. And I think it's a terrible focus. It's a silo and really, you know, imagination is so important in the realm of science and engineering. These things are not mutually exclusive. There is stuff you could learn from the principles of engineering and crafting a novel.
Shannen: Exactly. And I mean, we talked about genres last week, and that's why I, well, we believe that you should read across all different genres. You shouldn't be siloed into just fantasy or horror, because the interactions that you get from that, you're creating something completely different, a masterpiece, if you will. And, um, yeah, literature should not be siloed either, within itself.
Gareth: Absolutely. And there are advances in different genres. Social advances and also craft advances. And because we silo to such an extent, we're so obsessed with genre, you actually get people who are not aware, our writers, who are not aware of what's happening in other spheres of writing.
I just find staggering. I don’t know how we got to that point. But it’s definitely something that should be discouraged. People need to read widely. They need to be aware of the world in a multiple number of ways. It's very important and certainly that's what, you know, hopefully we'll be doing a lot of that in these discussions. We'll be looking at writing from the point of view of this art form or that science. So yes. We don't want to be siloed. We want to be renaissance people.
Shannen: Yes, we do. And can we safely segway from this back to Graham Greene? Do you want to have a shot of that?
Gareth: Let me see. How would we do that? Would you say he’s a Renaissance Man? I'm sure he's had opinions on Renaissance people. And that gets us back to Graham Greene. So Graham Greene had this amazing facility for description, and we've actually got some quotes. Now the way I went looking for these quotes, and the way I did it was I looked on my bookshelf and went, “oh, there's two Graham Greene novels”, pulled them down, opened them to the first page, looked for a character description, went, “that's the one we'll use”.
So this is not a heavily curated selection. But the first extract is from “Brighton Rock”. And Shannen's going to apply her dulcet tones to the reading of it.
Shannen: Yep. Sure. So, yep. Like you said, this is from “Brighton Rock”.
“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong to the early summer sun, the cool wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen's Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air. The new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian watercolor. A race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aero plane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.”
Gareth: That’s some beautiful writing. And well read. What do you make of that passage? What do you see in there?
Shannen: So we are describing Hale here and, um, there's not a lot about him. But from the sense of the passage, I get a good sense of his character. So, I mean, I know he bites his nails. That's the only physical aspect that I have and inky fingers . . .
Gareth: Inky fingers. So we only get a description of him, which is just the tips of his fingers. But it tells us a lot about him. Inky fingers and bitten nails. We have anxiety, we have nervousness. We have a certain kind of industry. He's a writer of some description or a publisher. You know, like this, there's a reason for the ink. It's not just that he was reading the newspaper.
Shannen: Yeah. And also the sentence where it says, “anybody could tell he didn't belong”. So, and then he describes the crowd that he doesn't belong too.
Gareth: Yeah. Exactly. So what we're getting is a description of him, an inverted description. A description is in absence. We get a description of other people that are not Hale and they are not Hale in a very profound way.
So everything we find out about them, we can immediately go Hale is nothing like that. So in actual fact, we've only got the tips of his fingers as actual evidence. But the entire section is a description of Hale and I think it's really interesting because you see a lot in modern writing and certainly amongst emerging writers, a kind of an idea, and this applies to dialogue too, as sort of a, and again, a silo-ing. Okay, we're having a character description now. And so it's put apart and it's, you know, typically, you will often get things like hair color and eye color. Possibly how attractive the person is. You will often get their age. But I often find I can't tell how old people are. Not really.
I think if people looking at this podcast or, perhaps, even might get from our voices that I'm a bit older than you are, Shannen. Maybe? I think if we, yeah, if they're looking at it, they'd be like, “yep, she's still got a youth and, and he's a wreck”. I think they'd sort of make that sort of, draw that sort of conclusion.
So these things are not, you know, there is no bit of the text, which is the character description. The text is the text, and that's a really important idea. And if you read widely and if you read fiction by writers who have read a lot of other writer’s work, you will notice that these things are not put off to the side.
They're not in their own subcategory of character description.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: It's one of the reasons I think that writing software often has a section for characters where you can write what they're like. I do not recommend that to people. Let them develop on the page. If you must cut and paste what develops on the page into your character description section, but don't write it there. Because it is part of the . . .
Shannen: Well, that’s a really good idea.
Gareth: Yeah. It's something to avoid basically. Now with our pictures, our pictures of the forensic photographs, we could describe their hair and eyes, but we're not going be able to talk about the colors because these are black and white photographs. So that complicates matters, which is part of why I liked them for this exercise.
So we've got that off the table. And I'll tell you another thing; a lot of these subjects are much older than they appear because they have had hard lives. And it can be quite surprising actually, how there was one subject, who we didn't pick, and I would've guessed her age at being late sixties, early seventies, and she was 41.
Shannen: Yeah. So you mean they're much younger than they appear?
Gareth: Did I say it the wrong way around? This is where insomnia gets you. Thank God you’re here. Yes! They are much younger than they appear. And that even applies that there are some . . . I think it's interesting actually. If you look at these photographs and I recommend people go to the Sydney Living Museum website, and have a look at these photographs.
There seems to be an age around maybe 16-17, where the subjects are recognizably their age. They hit around 18, 19, 20, and they age dramatically compared to what we would sort of be used to now. Uh, hard lives. Really hard lives. So again, you know, it's interesting because when we use a descriptor like age, we think it means something.
But in terms of these characters, if you were going to describe them because you know they're a certain age, it would not give you an accurate representation of how they look. And if you described them by how they look in terms of age, it would be misleading because they're much younger. So that's something else to think about.
These are all pitfalls of the tropes of description; hair color, eye color, age, and how much you fancy them. That seems to be the four big ones that writers tend to focus on - or to be avoided if possible. So, which brings us to our second extract, which I believe breaks one of these bits of advice in two straight away.
This one's from “The Third Man”, which was made into a wonderful film. Or, in fact, I think it existed as a film before the book existed. With Austin Wells and, uh, who else was in it? I really should research these things better. But it's a fantastic film or do a blog post about it and about Graham Greene film adaptations generally, because there's some crackers.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Next extract.
Shannen: “One never knows when the blow may fall. When I saw Rollo Martins first, I made this note on him for my security police files: "In normal circumstances, a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes, raises his eyes and makes some comment. But I get the impression that really he'd rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worshipped Lime." I wrote there that phrase "in normal circumstances" because I met him first at Harry Lime's funeral. It was February, and the grave diggers had been forced to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna's Central Cemetery. It was as if even nature were doing its best to reject Lime, but we got him in at last and laid the earth back on him like bricks. He was vaulted in, and Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old face.”
Gareth: All right. That's great. So that's actually the, um, that's the beginning of “The Third Man”. The very first paragraph. What did you make of that one?
Shannen: Well, we've like, so we've broken a rule. So we've mentioned his 35 year-old-face. But in this paragraph it's juxtaposed against, you know, the description of his long gangly legs and the tears of a boy running down his face. So it's really well done when you, when he has added that feature in.
Gareth: Yeah, he's framed it. Uh, so it has a reason to be there. It's supporting the description of the tears and the description of Martin’s, as in some ways, childlike. So yeah, that's a way to get someone's age in, without it simply being an arbitrary descriptor. That's a very good reason for it to be there.
So Graham Greene has made a fool of me again. Thank you, Graham. But yeah, seriously, it's these things should have a focus. I would suggest always, whenever you describe a character, you are looking for some kind of frame through which to see them. Now he's got a frame within a frame here. So he says, “I made this note on him from my security police files”.
So what he's about to say is not his impression now. The implication of this is that it may have some value, but it's bound to be, on a certain level, incorrect. Which I think is really interesting. So yes, “in normal circumstances a cheerful fool”. I think we will find out that's not true. “Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble”.
Yes, indeed. Now he has the stuff about; the women and how he raises an eye, but there's an impression that he'd rather not be bothered. I think that's really interesting and that gets developed as we go along and he's never really grown up.
Shannen: Yes, it’s very interesting.
Gareth: Maybe we have the preface to how he looks, but it's also, well, not how he looks, how he presents himself. And then we get this second extract, which is only a few pages later. I just thought they were really good contrast.
Shannen: “A British subject can still travel if he is content to take with him only five English pounds which he is forbidden to spend abroad. But if Rollo Martins had not received an invitation from Lime of the International Refugee Office he would not have been allowed to enter Austria, which counts still as occupied territory. Lime had suggested that Martins "write up" the business of looking after the international refugees, and although it wasn't Martins' usual line, he had consented. It would give him a holiday, and he badly needed a holiday after the incident in Dublin and the other incident in Amsterdam. He always tried to dismiss women as "incidents," things that simply happened to him without any will of his own, acts of God in the eyes of insurance agents. He had a haggard look when he arrived in Vienna and a habit of looking over his shoulder that for a time made me suspicious of him until I realized that he went in fear that one of, say, six people might turn up unexpectedly. He told me vaguely that he had been mixing his drinks—that was another way of putting it.”
Gareth: So that's another great quote. What did you make of that one?
Shannen: I don't know how far along it comes in the first description of him being cheerful and boy-like, but here we have, you know, his haggard look, always looking over his shoulder and, you know, he’s mixing his drinks, which is another way of putting it. So we are getting a sense that he has some form of drinking problem, really.
Gareth: Hmm. Definitely. And I mean, the thing is, you know, he's got these one of say six people who, who may turn up unexpectedly and, you know, do him a bother. And so saying, attaching it to this idea of mixing your drinks shows just how problematic his drinking is.
It's perilous to him in the same way. There's also this idea that he is still not a responsible adult. The further concept of his childishness, we have the women as incidents, things that happen to him. Yeah.
Shannen: I find that one quite humorous.
Gareth: Yeah, it's kind of delightful, isn't it? Like I have this sense of Rollo Martins that he would be someone I would like, but not want to be friends with. If that makes sense. Um, yeah. Or someone you'd meet and go, “oh what a wonderful person to hang out and have a drink with”. And then after knowing him for a while, you'd be like, “oh God, it's him”. I sense that that is very much his character. But again, we have the passage, is really about him. It's about establishing his character.
And again, the only two direct descriptions that I can see are his haggard look. And a habit of looking over his shoulder. And you've got that sound; haggard habit. And I think this, uh, I don't think that's unintentional. I think it's a breathy, anxious sound.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: I think that's also meant to be there, as a clear description of what he's like and the situation he's in. And of course, the situation we're in often defines who we are.
So, yeah. I can see, I think. I don't know about you, but I agree with Lodge. I think Graham Greene is wonderful at building character and it's delightful the way he doesn't silo it into, you know, my paragraph. Describing my character time. So we've got a little bit of a basis and some examples of how it is possible to take a couple of details and unravel them across a page.
That's clearly not the word I was trying for, but essentially we're going to, what we want to do in the first instance now is find these couple of details. So we did six descriptions and they're very worthy descriptions, and we did our best. But now what I want to do is I want to go back.
Yeah, that's right folks! I want you to go back to the blog. Click on it again, now I'll get the hits up. It was all a scheme. And have a look at the blog post again, and we're going to spend another six minutes. And now this time, what we're going to do across each minute is write one sentence. This is going to be the definitive sentence.
You're going to leave a lot out. But what you want to try and do here is capture the spirit of the image for you. It'll be different for everyone. There's no correct way of doing this. But you want a sentence, You know, you don't want a sentence that goes down the whole page. This is, I'm talking about 25 words or less.
In fact, I'm probably talking 12 words or less. See if you can come up with a word every five seconds and that'll get you through your minute. So we'll do our six minutes and we will indicate each time it's time to move on to the next subject. And then we'll have a look at what we got and see what we think.
What do you say, Shannen? Does that sound all right?
Shannen: Yep. Sounds like a great plan. Okay. Starting the timer in 3, 2, 1. Go . . .
Gareth: And we're back. Well, was that difficult?
Shannen: How did you go that time?
Gareth: I felt great that time because you, when you're trying to, you know, narrow your focus, the focus is invariably your own. And so I, you know, began to insert myself into the situation. Which, you know, they say, “write what you know”. That's often actually not very good advice.
But ultimately everything you write will be something, you know, which is to say as you imagine it, and by the very fact of existing and having a consciousness, you are always intruding in your own writing, if you like. So, yes. I liked getting in there, into the shots. How did you find it?
Shannen: It was more fun. I kind of, in some, I was the person writing, and then others, I was the photographer. And yeah, it was a lot more imaginative than just kind of picturing features and going from there.
Gareth: Yeah. So what we immediately have is that you're approaching it from different frames and seeing through different lenses and, you know, again, you'll find in perhaps less thoughtful writing that there is no sense of a lens. It's just the text and the character description part of the text. So yeah, there's something to be learnt from that potentially. But then again, what did we write? Maybe it's all just garbage. Shall we find out?
Shannen: Yeah. Well, after you've used the word garbage, I want you to go first.
Gareth: And I feel that's entirely fair. So yes. Okay. Now it's Mr. Sidney Kelly, isn't it?
Shannen: Correct.
Gareth: All right. So . . . “Head down. He's hooded. A hoodlum in an oversized hat and big boy trousers.”
Shannen: That was great.
Gareth: That's what I got for him. And obviously a lot was left out.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: But for me, that captured what I got from him. So what did you get for Mr. Kelly?
Shannen: “Looking up under his low hat, shadows cast across his eyes, Sidney contemplated the photographer; he wondered if he could porn another cigarette for his good behavior and stance.”
Gareth: Nice. That's great. So we brought in motivation and in a sense he's looking at us.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Oh gosh.
Shannen: This is a little bit creepy.
Gareth: Well yeah, because you wouldn't want to mess with Kelly. He doesn't look like a guy you want to mess with. So, um, the next person is E.A.R.
Shannen: Mr. Cavendish, Cavendish.
Gareth: Cavendish. What did you get for him?
Shannen: “The wounded leg from the war had caused the left tilt to his frame, starting from his crooked hip, his left hanging sloping shoulder. The drooping lip and cheek, and then the stooped hat.”
Gareth: Oh, that's really good. Mine's a little different. And it's interesting because we've both crafted a little bit of story around him. His description actually carries a bit of story with it. So for you, you know, he was in the war. For me, he was in a love affair. So what I've got here is . . .
Shannen: Oh!
Gareth: Yeah, isn't it interesting? “He's a standoffish fellow, hiding his soft belly behind his right shoulder. The left half of his body sloped as if once stepped on by someone he cared.”
Shannen: Oh, I like that one.
Gareth: Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting isn't it, that you get, uh, I like both descriptions. Uh, I don’t know which one I like better, to be honest. They could both apply to him at different times if he was a character in a story. But there are certainly many, many different ways to frame a character description and a way to build it into the text.
Shannen: Yeah, and this reminds me of when you go cafe watching and you watch the people, you make stories about them just by their appearances, and that's kind of what we're doing right now.
Gareth: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good process. It's something that a writer can do anytime they want. You know, if you're in a really boring party and everyone asks you, you know, what you do for a living, and you say writer, and then they say, oh, you know, how many times have you been published or something like that? You can just think, okay, well, you know, now I'm going to describe you in my head.
Shannen: Now I'm going to kill you in my story!
Gareth: I know, right? Yeah. It you gives you a lot of power. Okay, so now we're up to number three. Dorothy Mort. Now in in my description I have cut out almost everything about her. So I've got her blouse slumped at the collar between her narrow shoulders and the weight of the bow around her neck.
Shannen: Oh. Mine is probably a bit more descriptive now of her appearance because it’s just so prominent. So, “the longness permeated throughout her appearance, the long nose, the long shoulders, and the long drawn eyes. Not long now though”.
Gareth: Oh, not long until . . ?
Shannen: The hanging nose! I don't know if they still had it back in ’21.
Gareth: Now isn't that interesting because that's what I was trying to imply with mine, the weight of the bow around her.
Shannen: Oh, really?
Gareth: Yeah. That she was stretched out. So we've gone at it from two different angles, but it's interesting that for both of us, and I don't know, I mean, she could have been done for littering.
Shannen: I think she hers was murder.
Gareth: Oh, was it? Okay. Then. Wow. And littering. Who knows which was worse?
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well I, to be honest with you, I didn't realize that was the case. But beyond the accident of her surname, I just really felt that that bow around her neck looked heavy. But it's interesting how, how you can come from two different angles towards the same conclusions.
And again I think both descriptions give you a sense of her and her situation. So it's not just she looked like this, but there's a deeper character description going on. Should we move on to our boogie woman, J. Wilson? See if we can do better. What have you got?
Shannen: “The bottom of her dress looked like the curtain beside her that petitioned the photography room from the rest of the inmates. The dark circles under her eyes, I wonder if they are from those inmates, shoved into the dark damp cells with their cries of innocence.”
Gareth: Oh my. So she's quite a - I suppose you framed her as more of a victim, perhaps.
Shannen: Yeah. And I mean, the only physical description here of her is her, the dark circles under her eyes, and maybe a bit of her dress.
Gareth: Yeah. Well, that's really good. So I've come at this from a very different angle. “A ghost of white eyes glaring out from the shadowy circles beneath the slit of a mouth there, only to suggest this was still her face.”
Shannen: Oh that's so sinister!
Gareth: Yeah, it was sinister. Well, I find, I mean, you know, again, she's probably a lovely person and I'm assuming they all got done for littering. But, you know, there’s something about her I find quite haunting. To be honest with you I think she was one of your picks, I believe.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: I wouldn't have picked her because she freaked me out too much. But there you go. So this brings us to B. Chong? “He bought his dapper clothes in spite of the attention it drew to him. A young man refusing to sit for his profile”. Just a little bit of political subtext to that.
Shannen: I think I've got a little bit of political subtext too.
Gareth: Goodness me. All right. Let's hear yours.
Shannen: “They say photos steal the soul. He's thrashed about like his very own depended on it. His migrant beliefs construct contrasting against his upper-class dress.
Gareth: Hmm. Yeah. He does, I get the feeling he would've been a very smooth character, kind of like the Fonds. The Fonds of his time.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Yeah.
Shannen: And so kind of in that, you know, the only description is upper class jacket, and, you know, we brought on the fact that he is a migrant, so he's, you know, Asian of some kind.
Gareth: Yeah. See, I didn't even, I didn't even mention that part of his background. It was just a young man.
And it's interesting, neither one of us really described the effect of the face being blurred. That ceased to be of interest for whatever reason, for both of us. And that's interesting, I think, because when you first look at the picture, it's absolutely the first thing you see. But once you start narrowing your focus, sometimes you end up somewhere else entirely. You know, just at the inky tips of the fingers, as it were.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: So we have one more to go, and I believe you read this one out first. This is Mr. Smith.
Shannen: Mr. Walter Smith. “The hole in his chin was almost a mirror into his soul. The empty hollow hole or the blackness of the charge stick that his father had beaten him with across the face when he was seven for stealing that woman's purse.”
Gareth: Lovely. Yeah. I really like, he's got an interesting face, doesn't he? And that dimple in the chin. Which, you know, they always say men should aspire to have a dimple in their chin, but his is a wound.
Shannen: Yeah. It's so depreciated into his chin. It looks abnormal.
Gareth: Yeah. Yeah. He's a very interesting looking guy.
He reminds me awfully of the actor, Patrick McGoohan, who could really do hangdog wonderfully well. He was a wonderful actor. Big props to him. He was the first choice, I believe, to play James Bond back in the day, before the role went to Sean Connery. He would've been a good pick. Although of course Sean Connery was masterful.
So getting back to Walter Smith. This is what I, this is what I came to; “a welter weight, blown out around the middle. The scar tissue on his nose and brow had robbed him of more than the judges ever could.
Shannen: I like that.
Gareth: Yeah. It immediately, for me, I started thinking about the story of a boxer who his best days were behind him.
So he was a good looking welter weight, had been punched in the face too many times, lost too many decisions that perhaps he shouldn't have lost. And at some point the battles in the ring became the battles in the legal system. And so that you have two kinds of judges, boxing judges, and um, judicial judges.
Judicial judges. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. Uh, court judges. Judicial judges, goodness me, Mr. Tautology. Yeah. So what we get from this, I think in each case, whatever people may have thought of the actual descriptions and whether they feel we crafted anything good in the minute we had to do each one, is that there's the beginnings of stories in all of them.
And I would put to you that the color of a person's hair and their eye color and their age and how much you fancy them may not be the basis for a story. So it's very important when building character descriptions to be doing more than simply saying, this is what he looked like, this, you know, these were the clothes she was wearing. There's, there's more going on there, a lot more.
Shannen: Yeah, definitely. And so really today was an exercise at how to build character, characters beyond just the very basic descriptions that is so prolific in Emerging Writers' Works and even published works as well.
Gareth: Yeah, exactly. And also to begin to talk about this idea that the text is the text when you read a book, the text of Shannen becomes intertwined with the text of the book you are reading.
And it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Likewise, everything within the printed text it's a mass of tendrils of inky fingers that are all wrapped around each other. So there is no, there is no action scene. There is no dialogue scene, there is no character description scene. It is the text and these things are woven together. Should be woven together. The more woven together they are, the more subtext, the more meaning, the more open they will be. And the greater the pleasure for the reader. And of course, we are very focused on the pleasure of the text here. So.
Shannen: That's true. So I suppose in concluding, you've said like, it's not just dialogue. It's not just this, not just that. So really, we think to develop your craft as a writer and even as a reader, remove the silos. Make it all interconnected. And we've talked a lot about silos in education as well as literature.
Remove the silos and make it all mean something. Because it all does.
Gareth: Yeah, exactly. And for when you mentioned for readers, you know, the concept of a correct reading, of trying, you know, of focusing on comprehension, rather than empathizing imagining, I would suggest that's a mistake that, somewhere down the track, we'll talk about the concept that all reading is misreading anyway.
But you know, your reading of a book and the way you read around it and the way you read through it and the way you read it, even after you've put it down, that is your reading. And it's got as much value as anyone else's. So not to be afraid of allowing yourself to be inside the book. Because that's where all the joy of it is.
Shannen: Yeah. And, well thank you so much for creating that exercise for us, Gareth. And I would really love to hear what other people have written in their six minute segments, the before and after shots would be fantastic.
Gareth: Oh yes, so would I.
Shannen: Hard to see the contrast with. So head over to the pleasureofthetext.com to see the images if you haven't done the exercise yet. And also send it through to us as well at admin@thepleasureofthetext.com and I could read it out at the next podcast that we do.
Gareth: Yeah, and I mean, even if you don't want to share it, if that's not something that you're comfortable with, send it to us. Let us know. You don't want us to share it. And if you just want to see what we think, that would be fine as well. You know.
Shannen: Yeah.
Gareth: Really, like, we're just interested in hearing from our listeners and finding out what they're thinking and, you know, all feedback is good feedback, if you take it the right way. And we're keen for feedback so feel free to drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.
Shannen: Yeah. And yeah, I've had a great day and I hope everyone has a great day, weekend as well.
Gareth: Yeah, me too. That was really good fun. And I can't wait till we do the next one, which will be something a bit along the lines of those cafe sketches you were talking about. We're going to take what we did today and we're going to animate it and see what happens.
Shannen: Oh I'm so excited! Okay! Over and out!
Gareth: Catch you later!