In this article, and I still prefer the word article to the word
blog, I’m using the joke to expand on one of the most important tools available
to a writer when creating character, show, don’t tell. It’s an oft-quoted
phrase in creative writing, but it can be a slippery concept to nail down, so I
hope this article will help.
Here’s the joke we’re working on, incase you haven’t read the other
article.
A man goes up to the doorman of a nightclub.
‘You can’t come in,’ the doorman says, ‘you’re not wearing a tie.’
The man goes back to his car and searches around for something he can use. All
he finds is a pair of jump leads. In desperation he ties them around his
shirt’s collar in place of a tie. When he goes back to the nightclub, the
doorman eyes him suspiciously.
‘Alright,’ he says, after a while. ‘You can go in – just don’t start
anything!’
A joke is the ultimate paired down narrative, but it’s amazing what
the reader’s imagination will do with very little. And that’s what you want to
happen, because the more your make their minds work, the more they’ve engaged
with your narrative. It seems counter intuitive, but often the less you
explain, the more the reader will know.
In our joke, we have the simplest of openers, a man walks up to a
doorman; but this shows us a whole street scene, which in a novel we are at
liberty to paint, but is still here never the less in the joke. Yes, one wants
a novel to be deeper and more complex than a joke, but as an exercise, it
should be possible to cut every chapter down to a few, key sentences that are
doing the work most critical to your story. If you can’t reduce your chapter
down to this level, it might mean that your chapter lacks focus, that you’re
too much padding, or that you’re over complicating things, which can cause your
narrative to lose the plot, so to speak.
Most characters have a public persona and a private one, and the joy
of any narrative is how those two are revealed to us, and how they relate to
each other. Not many memorable characters are exactly how they appear to be;
the aloof woman is actually a passionate lover, the charming man is actually an
evil psychopath and the boring accounts clerk has the heart of the hero beating
under his polyester suit.
In the joke, we’ve got the man and the doorman. Doorman carries a
certain loading with it – it’s unlikely that he’s is five foot one and skinny,
so we see him as imposing, possibly aggressive, maybe even a bit thick and
possibly with a few convictions to boot. We might also see him as a ‘job’s
worth’, someone uncaring and officious. This is his public face, the first
impression we have of him, the fun comes when we play with the reader’s
expectations.
The man, the hero at the start of the piece, doesn’t have a tie, but
he still wants to get into the club. This shows us that he’s out of his comfort
zone, he’s not a regular patron, but something is driving him to try and get in
there. He’s a man on a mission, and even if the mission is one we wouldn’t be
interested in, a mission makes him more interesting and engaging that a couch potato
who’s doing nothing. We feel he’s the sort of person not willing to give up in
the face of a seemingly implacable obstacle; he’s drawing on his inner reserves
to fight for what he wants.
We’re not told the quest is important to gim, but shown it when he
returns to his car to search for something he can use as a tie. Had he been
simply trying his luck on a drunken night out and not really that bothered
about the club, he could have just wandered off again, but instead he tries to
think around the problem. He’s probably not an intellectual in the traditional
sense, because there’s something desperate in his search, something
directionless, but he is making the effort.
He’s also a bit of a chancer – because who else would think that a
set of jump leads would pass as a tie? But the tension is mounting; time is
passing, so he hits on a solution however bizarre. If he were a logical person,
he might have gone up to a stranger and offered him money for his tie, or found
a 24 hour super market; if he were a violent person he might have punched the
doorman or robbed someone for a tie – but his choice is not to be a criminal,
or a quitter but to try his luck. This makes me at least see him as a loveable
looser, not a villain, maybe a bit of a rogue, perhaps even a romantic, hoping
for luck to smile on him for once? He’s a glass half full kind of a guy against
all the odds.
By the way, you’re welcome to argue here that the jump leads are
merely there to set up the punch line, as if he’d found a string of sausages
the joke wouldn’t work, but the principal stands firm – he decides to give it a
go against all the odds. Besides, plot and character are inextricably linked in
any narrative – this is writing, and we read for more than just facts, but for
entertainment.
Now, back to the doorman. The joke has shown him as the implacable
face of authority, then he’s confronted again by the man with the jump leads
round his neck. If he were simply a one-dimensional thug, he could have told
him to shove off. He could have even taken offence and accused the man of
mocking him – it is quite an inflammatory thing to do in a way, lampooning the
whole tie rule – but no. He knows he’s had the ‘micky’ taken out of him, but he
appreciates the joke, and it allows him a killer punch line, so he’s not going
to follow orders when fate hands him a chance to be funny. He’s a bit of a
rebel on the side – by the end there’s certainly a warm heart beating under
that hard exterior, not to mention a love of word play.
Perhaps also at the end there’s a sense of sadness here – because if
the man goes into the club with a set of jump leads round his neck, no one else
will get the joke, or accept them as a tie. Perhaps he’ll end up looking like a
fool anyway, because he clearly doesn’t fit in, and his desperate antics will
come to nothing, when he discovers that getting through the door is the least
of his worries. How often have we been there, to struggle for something only to
be disappointed when we get it? The man is likable but flawed, and how real is
that?
Reading back over what I’ve written, it might be argued that none of
this is in the joke at all, I’m just using my imagination to draw these
conclusions – but that’s exactly what I’m trying to show you, this is what our
brains do. It’s the same mechanism that makes us see faces in floral wallpaper
and on buildings, and the clever writer knows this and uses it.
Even with this paired down joke, I’ve already created a sense of character
for myself, I’ve invested in them, and now I’ve invested in the narrative. If
this was not a joke, but the set up for a story, chapter one, I’d already be
wondering what it is about the nightclub that make the man so desperate to get
in, and anxious to see if the author will dash his hopes, or if he’ll
ultimately win. I’ve got a sense of who he is, and I’m on his side, and I’d
even like to find out a little more about the bouncer. To ‘tell’ the reader
that this is what the characters are like, you’d have to write the joke much
more like this:
There is a man, he’s a little bit of a looser but he’s ok really,
and he’s sometimes a bit of a lateral thinker, but under pressure he can make
some odd decisions that sometimes work out, though perhaps not as he intended.
He wants to get into night club for some reason, but the bouncer on the door is
really stern, he’s not going to let anyone in because he’s trained for years to
be a bouncer; besides, he did time when he was younger and this is the sort of
job he can do with a record, but he’s a good sort really, he’s not a bad man
but he looks bad…
Now I’m wadding through the back-story of the characters and I’ve
lost the plot. All of that detail can come later when you’ve established your
narrative – and if you use your characters actions to show their inner world,
much of their back story will be already be there in the mind of the reader, so
when they come to read it later, it feels authentic, because it’s not coming
out of the blue, but out of the seed you’ve already planted in their minds.
They will think ‘Yes, the man would do that, because that’s how he reacted when
he tried to get into the Night Club; he tried to solve the problem but in a way
that smacked more desperation than intelligence’ and that makes him seem real.
And when he learns to think first and not panic, or not want to get into the
nightclub that shows us he’s grown as a person by the end of the narrative. If
he does, of course.
As a writer, you need to know every detail about your characters,
but to make those details come alive for your reader, show your characters in
action and know how they would react in any given situation. Then, they can get
under the skin of your reader in the most effective way, almost without the
reader noticing.
