::mslexia workshops::

Write on the Wild Side #15
a writing workshop with Margaret Wilkinson

THEME: OBSERVING PEOPLE

INTRODUCTION

PROSE WRITERS and poets can both learn some important lessons from Sherlock Holmes. Occupation, motivation and temperament can all be deduced from tiny details of a person’s appearance – and conveyed in a piece of descriptive writing.

From The Speckled Band
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

‘You have come in by train this morning, I see.’

‘You know me, then?’

‘No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove. You must have started early and yet you had a good drive in a dog-cart, along heavy roads before you reached the station.’

The lady gave a violent start and stared in bewilderment at my companion.

‘There is no mystery, my dear madam,’ said Holmes smiling. ‘The left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left hand side of the driver.’

In the following exercises the aim is not to mimic an interview, but to stimulate a piece of writing based on observational skills fundamental to a revealing interview. If you want to submit work for the ‘New Writing’ in Issue 17, you can try applying these ideas to an actual interview situation.

EXERCISES

#1
Find an ‘interviewee’
Choose someone whose face and form you can bring to mind, but who you don’t really know. Someone who lives on your street, for example; or someone you met briefly on holiday; your newsagent; a distant relative. Or select someone from your past, an adult you may have only seen through a child’s eyes, perhaps, and transport them, as they were then, to today. For example: a teacher you had in primary school; a friend of your parents; a neighbour.

If you don’t already know it, give your interviewee a name.
Choose from the letters of your own full name (using some, not necessarily all) to create as many new first and last names as possible. Pick the one that suits your subject best.

Pin them down and focus close
Picture your chosen subject in your mind’s eye. Describe only what you see, but see carefully, precisely. Take a detached approach, as though they were a specimen under a microscope. Don’t let them move around much. Let them drink a cup of tea or coffee at home or in a café, but no more. Simply describe them doing nothing but drinking and sitting still.

Find the telling details
Notice their facial expressions; tiny gestures; hair; clothes; what they’re holding; how they’re holding it. Imagine you’re sitting opposite and study your subject intimately. But stay aloof: you cannot know their inner thoughts. You can only make educated guesses from what you see.

From this picture, try to find one distinguishing detail and emphasis it: a loose button, for example; an open button; a chewed button. Imagine what it might signify.

Ask your subject to empty their pockets or handbag. List what they carry. Like Sherlock Holmes, try to deduce from observation alone where your character has been and where they’re going once the interview is over.

#2
See it slant
The most vivid effects are often based on surprising comparisons. Notice how E Annie Proulx’s brief descriptions use unusual similes and metaphors to convey far more than a list of precise details:

lines around his mouth like ice tongs
an ear like a pastry circle

From Accordion Crimes, by E Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate)
Beutle’s laugh came from a chest like a stuffed mattress
his swarthy face was dished as though a cow had stepped on it when he was a child

Try getting the same effect with the following exercises:
Compare your interviewee’s eyes to something edible
Compare their torso to a large (or small) piece of furniture
Compare their hair to an accident or disaster (‘Hair like a table leg burned in a fire’, for instance, suggests not only hair that’s black, but shiny with the scorched, frizzled texture of charred wood.)

Experiment with objects associated with various professions
Choose the world of dentistry, for instance, or farming; first aid, or hairdressing, as I have done below.
‘an ear like neck brush’
‘a laugh like a crimping iron’
‘a hand like an open razor’
Beware, though. A little of this goes a long way. Try to limit yourself to one. Explore and sustain. Here’s E Annie Proulx again:

His wife was warm and it was possible to stand close to her and feel the heat that radiated from her as from a little stove. Her hands seized children, plates, chicken feathers, goats’ teats with the same hot grasp.

#3
Convey the context
Now go back to your original description and rewrite it to show, or suggest, that the person is: newly married, hard of hearing, suffering from toothache, homeless, trying to give up smoking, violent, having a secret affair, stingy with money, frightened of dogs, bankrupt, bereaved, elderly.

How about putting two of the above together: Elderly and pregnant; homeless and trying to give up smoking?

Try to communicate everything you see as an observation, not as a conclusion or deduction. Do not say what each detail implies. Let the reader draw their own inferences.