Granted, most of what you ever write will be description, but don’t hesitate to shift to instruction. Likewise, onomatopoeia shouldn’t be limited to the “pow” and “blam” we see in comic books. In my novel Pygmy, every time I needed a mid-sentence beat of something to accentuate the end of the passage…“Trapped all day, then could be next walk to toilet, pow-pow, clot knock out brain.” I get a greater effect at the end of the sentence by interrupting the flow with a beat of special-effects noise.

  In closing, my freshman year in college, before an early-morning German course, a guy was telling a story that went, “…so we’re going around this long curve—skreeeeech! vrooooom!—and we pass this police car…”

  A listening girl leaned close to me and whispered, “Why do men always use sound effects in stories, but women never do?”

  An excellent observation. Learn from it.

  Everyone should use three types of communication. Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste.

  Textures: Mix First-, Second-, and Third-Person Points of View

  Think of a good joke. “Yesterday I walked into a bar. You know how it goes. You walk into a bar, and you expect a bartender, maybe some video poker. A man needs his distractions. No guy wants to get off work and go into some bar and see a penguin mixing drinks…”

  In conversation we switch between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The constant shift controls the intimacy and authority of our story; for instance, “I walked” has the authority of first person. Second person addresses the listeners and enlists them: “You walk.” And the shift to third person controls the pace, “No guy wants,” by moving from the specific “I” to the general “guy.”

  Arguably, first person carries the most authority because it gives us someone responsible for the story. As opposed to the third-person narration by some hidden, unknown godlike writer. Second person worked well in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. It can have a hypnotic effect, but it can be tricky. Unless a story is well plotted, fast paced, and short, constant second person can annoy.

  The rub is that using all three POVs means the story must ultimately be told in first person. But even second and third can be mixed to create a sense of some undeclared narrator. In Bright Lights, Big City the narration is second person, but every time it depicts something other than itself the narration is effectively third person.

  So much of this book will be about recognizing what good storytellers do intuitively.

  If you were my student, I’d tell you to shift as needed between the three POVs. Not constantly, but as appropriate to control authority, intimacy, and pace.

  Textures: Big Voice versus Little Voice

  You’ve seen this in a zillion stories. Every time Carrie Bradshaw hunches over her laptop to write her Sex and the City newspaper column…Every time Jane Fonda spills her guts to her psychiatrist in Klute…a story lapses into big voice.

  The camera is little voice. The voice-over device is big voice.

  Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it.

  Little voice remains objective, giving us the smells, sounds, flavors, textures, and actions in a scene. Big voice muses.

  Little voice gives us the facts. Big voice gives us the meaning—or at least a character’s subjective interpretation of the events.

  Not many stories exist without both voices. On Star Trek it’s the captain’s log. In Flashdance it’s the confessional in the Catholic church. In the film The Social Network, the big voice expository sequences are the legal deposition scenes. At regular intervals a character is going to discuss his life with a therapist. Or she’s going to write a letter or diary entry, but she’s going to rise above the meat-and-potatoes reality of physical verbs. He’s going to ask rhetorical questions on behalf of the reader, à la Carrie Bradshaw’s “Am I the only one who’s not enjoying anal sex?” Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning will use a citizens band radio to talk to her dead mother. Margaret will ask God, “Are you there?” Or Charlize Theron in Young Adult will lapse into the coping mechanism of writing as the teen narrator of her character’s YA books.

  In my own books, the device for introducing big voice is usually some nonfiction form that emerges from the character’s life. In Invisible Monsters it’s the “postcards from the future” that the characters write and discard. In Survivor it’s the cockpit flight recorder of the doomed airliner. In Choke it’s the Fourth Step, the written history of an addict in recovery. It begins the novel, but quickly shifts to a physical scene.

  That said, consider that big voice might not be your strongest way to hook a reader at the beginning of a story. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald devotes much of the first chapter to a rambling description of the narrator’s broken heart. As does the opening monologue in The Glass Menagerie. Both stories have to establish that the events will take place in hindsight. They ask us to care about the narrator’s regret and lost innocence. Only then do they go into flashback and specific detail to demonstrate how that heart was broken.

  Yes, the Victorians loved to “put a porch” on the front of a novel. For example, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…yada yada.” But that’s a tough sell nowadays. My apologies to Nick Carraway, but few people will be hooked by a soy boy’s mansplaining about his self-professed broken heart.

  These days a good story is more likely to begin with a physical scene—people finding a dead body or being menaced by zombies. Little voice, not big voice. Blame this on movies. It mimics the opening “gripper” scenes in movies. As Thom Jones told me, “Action carries its own authority.” The audience will engage with action. An aside: Your overseas translators will adore you for using concrete verbs. Like the action in action movies, verbs in fiction play effectively in other languages. A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh.

  Thom Jones

  In the second scene or the second chapter, then you can risk big voice. Remember: First we see Indiana Jones rob a tomb and fight to escape past poisonous snakes and rotting corpses. Snakes, skeletons, and poison darts trigger our physical reaction. Once we’re flooded with adrenaline, then we see him giving a boring lecture in the classroom. It’s only in porn that the talky parts work better at the beginning.

  Also consider that big voice might not always occur in words. Look at the stories in which a vast art project serves to comment on or clarify the main character’s thoughts. In The Day of the Locust it’s the huge mural that Todd is painting in his apartment. Called The Burning of Los Angeles, the work in progress depicts all the novel’s characters involved in a classically inspired inferno of ridiculous architecture. Similarly, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss externalizes his obsessive thoughts by spending much of the film sculpting a room-filling replica of the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. In the film version of my book Choke the past accumulates as yet another mural.

  And yes, a small amount of big voice goes a long way. It works great for setting a scene. And it works great for underscoring a plot event. If you were my student I’d tell you to keep your big voice philosophizing to a minimum. Each time you shift to big voice you bump your reader out of the fictional dream, so too much commenting can slow the story’s momentum to a crawl. And it can annoy by being too clever or too preachy, dictating how the reader should react.

  However, switching to big voice for short stretches will allow you to imply time passing. And it can also buffer between scenes in which lots of physical action takes place. And it allows you to briefly summarize preceding action and deliver a witty or wise meme about life.

  Textures: Attribution

  By attribution I mean those little signposts inserted in dialogue that tell us who said what.

  For example: “Don’t make me stop this car,” she said.

  Or: He asked, “Who died and made you Ross Perot?”

  Too often we see page-long cascades of unattributed speech. Characters exchange quips without a hint of gesture or action. Soon enough we’re confused and counting backward to establish who said what.

  In silent pictures actors flailed and mugged to communicate, with only an occasional line of dialogue flashed on a card. The early talking pictures became the opposite. The crude microphones required everyone to cluster in static groups near them. No one dared to move. It was years before filmmakers could combine the huge physical vocabulary of the silent era with the smart, stagy dialogue of the early sound era.

  Ideally, you should be combining gesture, action, and expression with your dialogue.

  First, use attribution to avoid confusing your reader. Avoid making your reader feel foolish at all costs! You want to make your reader feel smart, smarter than the main character. That way the reader will sympathize and want to root for the character. Scarlett O’Hara is charming and smart and can convince men she’s beautiful. We have every reason to hate and resent her, but she’s too dumb to recognize that Rhett Butler is her soul mate. So we’re hooked. We feel superior and in our patronizing, condescending, voyeuristic way, we want her to smarten up. In a way, we “adopt” her.

  So use attribution to avoid making your reader feel like a dummy who gets lost in long exchanges of dialogue. Better yet, I’d tell you to never use long exchanges of dialogue, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

  Second, use attribution to create a beat of…nothing. A bland, empty moment like the silence between notes in music. The theory is that readers don’t subvocalize “he said.” They visually leap over it, landing harder on the dialogue that follows. For example: “Nurse,” he said, “hurry and get me a fresh pancreas.”

  Use attribution to control the delivery of dialogue, creating the sort of dramatic pause an actor would insert. Otherwise, the reader will race through a line without realizing how it ought to be weighted.

  Third, use physical action as a form of attribution that also underscores or undermines what’s being said. For example: “Coffee?” With her back to the room, she poured the cups full and dropped cyanide in Ellen’s. “I think you’ll like this new French roast.”

  Or: “Vampires?” Declan smirked, but his hand flew to his chest, to where he’d worn a crucifix as a child. “You’re talking nonsense.”

  Create tension by pitting your character’s gestures against his or her words. Your characters have arms and legs and faces. Use them. Use attribution. Control the delivery of dialogue. Support it with actions, or negate it with actions. Above all, do not confuse your reader by leaving it unclear who’s saying what.

  In closing, a reader sent me the results of a study done at the University of California, Los Angeles. People clip these things from Scientific American and send them to me all the time. But this one study focused on how people communicated in conversation. It found that some 83 percent of what people understood came via body language, tone of voice, and speaking volume. The actual words spoken accounted for only about 17 percent of the information passed between people.

  That reminds me—my Italian editor, Eduardo, once took me to see Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper in Milan. You have to make a special appointment. You enter the everything-controlled room through an air lock, and get fifteen minutes to look before you’re ushered out. And in that quick visit I saw how the picture is really a catalog of gesture. The body language transcends Italian or English. Honestly, all the emoticons are there in one painting.

  In short, dialogue is your weakest storytelling tool.

  As Tom Spanbauer always taught us, “Language is not our first language.”

  Tom Spanbauer

  If you were my student, I’d make you create a list of all the quick wordless gestures you use every day. The thumbs-up. The thumb-and-index finger “okay” sign. Knocking your fist lightly on your forehead to “recall” something. Clutching your heart. The hitchhiker’s thumb, which implies “get lost.” The index finger held vertically against the lips for “hush up.” The hooked “come here” finger. I’d make you list at least fifty hand signals. That way you’d always, always be aware of the variety of gestures you can insert into dialogue.

  Textures: What Do You Say When There’s Nothing to Say?

  You’ve been there. You’re having dinner with friends, talking up a storm. After a laugh or a sigh, the conversation falls to silence. You’ve exhausted a topic. The silence feels awkward, and no one puts forward a new topic. How do you tolerate that moment of nothing?

  In my childhood, people filled that pause by saying, “It must be seven minutes past the hour.” Superstition held that Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ had both died at seven minutes past the hour, so humanity would always also fall silent to honor them at that moment. I’m told that Jewish people fill that silence by saying, “A Jewish baby has been born.” My point is that people have always recognized those uncomfortable moments of nothing. Their ways to bridge that silence arise from their shared history.

  We need…something to hide the seam between topics. A bland sorbet. Films can cut or dissolve or fade to. Comics simply move from panel to panel. But in prose, how do you resolve one aspect of the story and begin the next?

  Of course you can move along in one unbroken moment-to-moment description, but that’s so slow. Maybe too slow for the modern audience. And while people will argue that today’s audience has been dumbed down by music videos and whatnot, I’d argue that today’s audience is the most sophisticated that’s ever existed. We’ve been exposed to more stories and more forms of storytelling than any people in history.

  So we expect prose to move as quickly and intuitively as film. And to do this, let’s consider how people do it in conversation. They “whatever.” They say, “Let’s agree to disagree.” Or, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?”

  My friend Ina quotes The Simpsons with the non sequitur, “Daffodils grow in my yard.”

  Whatever the saying, it acknowledges an impasse and creates the permission to introduce a new idea.

  In my novel Invisible Monsters, it’s the two sentences, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.” In the original short story that grew to become Fight Club, it’s the repetition of the rules.

  The goal is to create a chorus appropriate to the character. In a documentary about Andy Warhol, he said that the motto of his life had become “So what?” No matter what happened, good or bad, he could dismiss the event by thinking, So what? For Scarlett O’Hara it was, “I’ll think about that tomorrow.” In that way, a chorus is also a coping mechanism.

  It hides the seams in narrative the way a strip of molding hides the junction where walls and floor meet. And it allows a person to think beyond each new drama, thus moving the story forward and allowing unresolved issues to pile up and increase tension.

  If done well, it also calls up a past event. Our superstition about “seven minutes past the hour” served to reinforce our mutual identity as Christians and Americans. I’d wager that most cultures have a similar device that arises from their history.

  An aside: As a kid during the dawn of television commercials for Tampax and feminine hygiene sprays I loved how one of those ads would spur my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and adult cousins into lively conversation. We’d sit like dumb rocks through Bonanza, but the moment a douche commercial sprang up on the screen, everyone yakked like magpies to distract each other. This is a bit off-topic, but a similar phenomenon.

  Among my friends in college, our coded insider talk was constant. During meals if someone had a bit of food on his chin, someone else would touch that spot on her own face and say, “You have a gazelle out of the park.” On road trips, if someone needed to find a toilet, he’d say, “I have a turtle’s head poking out.”

  My point is that these sayings reinforce our group identity. They reinforce our chosen method for coping with impasse. And they can carry the reader between shifts in prose just as easily as jump cuts carry a viewer through a film.

  If you were my student I’d tell you to make a list of such placeholders. Find them in your own life. And find them in other languages, and among people in other cultures.

  Use them in your fiction. Cut fiction like film.

  Textures: How to Pass Time

  The most basic way to imply time passing is to announce the time. Then depict some activities. Then give the time. Boring stuff. Another way is to list the activities, giving lots of details, task after task, and to suddenly arrive at the streetlights blinking on or a chorus of mothers calling their kids to dinner. And these methods are fine, if you want to risk losing your reader’s interest. Besides, in Minimalist writing abstract measurements such as two o’clock or midnight are frowned upon for reasons we’ll discuss in the section on Establishing Your Authority.

  As a better option, consider the montage. Think of a chapter or passage that ticks off the cities of a road trip, giving a quirky detail about what happened in each. It’s just city, city, city, like the compressed European tour montage near the end of Bret Ellis’s Rules of Attraction. Or picture the little cartoon airplane we see navigate the globe from city to city in old movies, quickly delivering us to Istanbul.

  In Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York, the montage is a list of the daily menus in an asylum. Monday we eat this. Tuesday, this. Wednesday, this. In the Bob Fosse film All That Jazz it’s the repeated, every-morning quick-cut sequence of the main character brushing his teeth and taking Benzedrine and telling the bathroom mirror, “It’s showtime!”

  Whether you depict cities or meals or boyfriends, keep them brief and compress them together. When the montage ends we’ll arrive at an actual scene, but with the sense that considerable time has passed.

  Another method to imply time passing is intercutting. End one scene and jump to a flashback, alternating between the past and present. That way, when you jump back to the present you won’t have to arrive at the moment you left off. Each jump allows you to fudge time, implying it’s passed.