Writing in Other Senses

[scribblemyname]

Every story can be a wonderful opportunity for the writer to learn. I have learned a lot in the course of writing—and rewriting—"Dowse and Bleed." When I first shipped the 7600 word monster to my beta, she came back with tons of helpful advice, which happened to include this snippet here:

Have you ever read the book Perfume by Patrick Suskind? I don't mean seen the movie, but read the book? It's a murder mystery told from the POV of someone with an amazing sense of smell. That sense of smell absolutely permeates the story. Everything is described with such attention to scent, because that's the predominant sense for the narrator.

I haven't read the book, but I got the point. Immersing inside the character meant taking on the way that character perceived the world. And I finally understand the reflexive reaction my main character, Rachelle aka the Database, has to her world. She holds everything and everyone at bay as much as she can. Why? Because everything in her world is steeped in connections, in unavoidable knowledge of others and her environment, and in pain. It hurts her when she senses too much. In this story, she almost always senses too much.

"Thank you," Killinger said as they stepped through the door onto threadbare carpet in a small square of a studio apartment.

It was crawling with black coats, Core law enforcement officers in traditional garb. The team wasn't one Rachelle recognized: a clean-cut early-thirties detective in the middle of the apartment looking up with a surprised frown at the pair of them and surrounded by five or six male officers and a forensic tech, also male. Killinger's computer tech, Jarod, hunched over his portable on the tiny rectangle of kitchen counter, oblivious to their arrival.

Rachelle handed her coffee to Killinger, who took it, then pulled off her denim jacket to hand that over as well and unbuttoned her overshirt. She curled her lip at how thick the air was with pathogens—influenzas, autoimmune viruses, sewer's plague, and a host of lesser infections.

"Killinger. Who is she?" the detective demanded, his white rank star almost glowing in the meager light of the one naked lightbulb overhead.

Killinger had a badge; Rachelle had a history. She let Killinger walk over to explain in hushed tones the way things worked.

Rachelle went to circle the apartment, sticking close to the walls. Leftways ran the tiny kitchen, all appliances and appliance tops and bottoms for laundry and cooking, sanitizing and incinerating, then that tiny bit of counter. Food and food-related bacteria seemed to stick to her skin where it hit her. "It's a wonder he's not sick and retching," she muttered. Incredible how immune systems in the Squares could be so hardy.

Past the kitchen, the corner and back wall of the apartment were packed with the sorts of necessities that closets and pantries were designed to hold, neatly stacked but overflowing. She imagined thumbprints over all those papers and clothes and bottles of food and dishes and almost curled up on herself at all the human traffic that had marked them with genetic material. Animal entries could have been meat, strays, or pets—no telling.

She moved on in the direction of the bed and a knot of three black coats. One glanced over his shoulder and frowned before hunching his shoulders against her. She almost brushed past the other forensic tech, avoiding him by centimeters and absorbing another smattering of entries with distaste.

Writing the world through genetic material is... strange. I had to stop and research melanin-producing genes to figure out how she worked with that. I have to think about the terms of what she knows about people. She observes as frequently with her eyes closed as open, registering what people could be—and nurture's room for variation—before evaluating what they are. There is no off-switch, only things that help her move through the data faster or seclusion, which reduces the number of new things she encounters.

What happens to a character when simply experiencing the world around them causes pain? It's never explicitly stated in this story—at least not in no uncertain terms—but Rachelle's body is essentially a storage device that's running out of space. What used to be a temporary predicament for her, a need to archive and compress data, is now entering a permanent downward spiral. She flinches from physical contact with anyone new but registers everything that much faster, that much more intently, in an effort to get rid of it as soon as she can.

I've never written a story from inside a sense I didn't have before, but it means that every moment I write a new sequence of paragraphs, I have to stop, think, query her body for what it's up to and what she's feeling. I understand now why she numbs herself out to it when she can, backburners it, reacts by lashing out when she can't. Too bad for Jarod he makes a really good target.

Have you ever had a character with another sense besides the usual five or one who viewed the world through a different sensory lens than yours? Anything you had to keep in mind to make it work?

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[pygmymuse.livejournal.com]

Oh.

I think I should have read this before I sent that email.

I think I know what's bothering me about the story's current incarnation.

I can't stand the way she experiences her world. The constant pain is real enough to where it makes me, as a reader, squirm. That's it.

:(

I kept wanting to call it too visceral, and I'm not sure that's the right word, but I do feel uncomfortable reading Rachelle as she is now.

[scribblemyname]

Ah. That makes perfect and total sense. Hm. :thinking on that:

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

It could be that everything I've written has been through a different sensory lens than mine, although not in as extreme a way as Rachelle's. You just read my last completed work and told me it was the wettest book you'd ever read. I tend to think the whole story is infused in water. It's not one character hitting the reader over the head with it, but it really does infuse everything in it. So was that successful?

You should read Perfume. I stand by that as one of the most amazing pieces of writing, and anyone writing about a sensory-based character should check it out.

I have a character now who experiences things by the measure of heartbeats and breathing in a lot of cases. There's a slow level of focus that goes along with that, an alertness and an awareness I sure don't have in my everyday life. It's fun to write. I'm very method-actory when I write, and like to feel what my characters feel. If I can't feel it, then I can't convey it. I sure don't know how to do all the things all my characters can do, but I have to find some common ground with them in order to make them seem like real people. Once I do have the common ground, then it works.

[scribblemyname]

I've got to say, there was nothing about Denny's book that wasn't successful. :grins: And it was definitely the wettest.

I don't actually read murder mysteries. Like horror, it's one of the few places I put my readerly foot down, though it sounds fascinating.

And that last story sounds fascinating.

I'm anything but a method writer I think. I play out characters in scenarios in my head, and I'm under their skin, but I don't actually need any common ground. I just need under their skin and into their perspective and then I can write them without being under their skin. That first draft of "Dowse and Bleed" was a prime example. I wrote it but not from inside her. This version's from inside her, which is weird and different in a big way.

Hmm... Must ponder your methodology.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

we're very different types of writers, you and I. I find you to be an outstanding storyteller. I find my own so-called specialty to be characterization, at least in that grandiose writerly world in my brain. Who knows if I'm successful.

So ponder the methodology and always feel free to try out other things, but stay true to yourself as a writer, that's the most important thing.

There's a fascinating book about methodology (at least part of it is about methodology) that you might be interested in, Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. It was published before the two of them split up (and obviously way before Michael Dorris' suicide) but it's a fascinating look at two writers and the ways they cohabited and cowrote. I've been a Louise Erdrich fan for years. Her book Love Medicine is one of my very favorites. She writes with a lot of heart, so I was curious to see how she and Dorris (who by all reports really did a lot of micromanaging of her work) got along and managed to make things work for a time. I should probably read it again.

[scribblemyname]

Hmm... One, thanks for the tremendous compliment. Two, now I'm wondering if all this headache with "Dowse and Bleed" is worth it, but ah, well. I need the challenge. It's almost too rich when I'm working on it. I get a scene moved along and then that's it. I just can't stay immersed enough to write any more in the day. But it's a nagging sort of story. I can't write much else while I'm working on it, so I really would like to finish it.

I'll check out that book—if I can figure out how to get it. I'm still on a no-extras budget, which is why I haven't been able to buy Scrivener yet, a subscription to Duotrope, or any books. Thank the Lord for free review copies and online fiction! I'd go mad without reading material.

Thanks for taking the time to think through this stuff with me. It helps me to analyze my own process and "to mine own self be true."

:goes off to think deeply and poke at story: