Write Naked

If you’ve ever laughed out loud or cried or chewed a fingernail while reading a book, it’s because the character came to life for you. The character’s experiences drew you into the story, so you vicariously felt that awkward moment, heartbreak, or fear.

How does an author create that kind of connection with a reader? Through credibility, authenticity, and originality.

Credibility

Credibility makes the reader believe the story is possible.

Research yields facts and knowledge about the story setting and how the character in a specific career thinks and talks and acts. Timothy Browne, M.D., writes medical thrillers set in remote, dangerous locations. He served as a medical missionary in Sierra Leone, West Africa, at the end of their civil war and Haiti after a massive earthquake struck. He has operated in North Korea, Guatemala, and other ends of the earth. Dr. Browne develops his stories beyond his experiences, of course, but between his research and his experiences, he gets the details right.

Authenticity

Authenticity makes the reader feel the story is real.

Great stories leave lasting emotions. Showing your hero crying will not lead the reader to tears. The reader is drawn deep into the story when the hero’s pain becomes the reader’s pain. The way to reach a reader emotionally is by mining genuine emotions from your memories. What experience in your life caused pain, sorrow, heartbreak and brought you to tears? How can you help the reader relate to it? That fresh voice in fiction doesn’t come from imitating other writers. It comes from writing from your uniqueness.

One way to create authenticity is to reveal the character’s emotional state as a changeable thing. Every emotion varies in range and intensity. Reveal the stages of change so the reader can relate to the character’s state of mind step-by-step through the journey. Show the hero’s irritation build to anger.

Another way to create authenticity is to create characters capable of complex and overlapping emotions.

For example, grief at a funeral is expected, but other emotions also surface. Let’s say the funeral is for a violent drunk man. The pastor who gives the eulogy had never met the deceased. As he delivers a “good citizen” summary and praises the late man’s kindness and generosity, children in the front row whisper about being in the wrong funeral parlor. The kids are choking back laughter, which the pastor interprets as outbursts of grief. He loses his place in his notes when he sees the widow reach over to swat the kids. The widow is also struggling not to laugh. What was the genuine emotion of the grieving family that day? Relief.

You have a vast treasure trove of memories on demand. Mine them. Explore them.

Originality

Originality makes the reader pay attention to the story.

If you don’t feel an emotion when you write about it, the reader can’t. Put yourself in your point of view character’s situation and then go to your emotional memories to find the truth of the emotion. Understand your unique emotional memory and brainstorm how it felt and how it manifested. Instead of labeling an emotion, describe what it did to your body, perceptions, appetite, thoughts, and feelings. For example, you could write that a character is hungover or draw on memory to express being hungover in a fresh, original way so the reader can feel the hangover.

When she lifted her head, her pulse pounded her temples, so she eased back down with a groan. She believed she could feel the rotation of the earth. She couldn’t tell if she was swaying or the room was, but it had to stop. Forcing her eyes open, she squinted in the dark. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Water. Get water.

People sometimes express emotions indirectly. A couple arguing about finances bickers over useless expenses, while the subtext (the real heart of the argument) is about suspicion of infidelity. Another indirect way to reveal emotion is through actions, which speak louder than words. A young woman says she’s fine, but her makeup is smeared, newspapers have piled up on her driveway, and she’s wearing pajamas in the middle of the day.

In the following passage from West of Famous, Ruis Ramos discovers the identity of a suspect in his sister’s kidnapping.

Ruis examined enlarged color images of Gregorio’s Florida driver’s license and passport. Ruis imagined sunglasses on his face. It matched the grainy image of one man on the club’s surveillance recording. He burned the image of the suspect in his memory. To memorize a name or other information, he relied on mnemonic devices. Whenever he held a screwdriver or ratchet, he thought of “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” In grade school, he could name the Great Lakes from the word HOMES. Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. He easily burned the name Kuznetsov into memory because the name sounded like what Ruis wanted to do to him.

Remember when recreating an emotion that it can grow in intensity and shift into another emotion. Your hero has an external and internal journey, and the reader wants to experience both.

In addition to creating emotions, authors create that you-are-there experience for readers through the senses. Call it muscle memory or sensory recall, but our senses connect to memories. Certain sounds, like a song from high school, can trigger memories. Smells tend to get anchored deep in memory, perhaps because they help us survive. The smell of smoke, for example, will awaken most sleepers. Muscle memory or training builds up a person’s skill so that a reaction becomes automatic, instinctive.

As a substitute teacher, Carol said she knows which kids live in violent homes because when she reaches over them to hand out papers, they flinch.

Good memories or dreadful ones can be set off by sensations such as sight, taste, touch, smell, and sound. We can also explore other sensations to enhance the reader’s experience. Intuition, pain, balance, motion, time, temperature, and direction are lesser-used senses. Our senses of balance and motion tell us when we are falling or upside down. Does your hero have a solid or weak sense of direction? If your hero is a chef and you don’t describe smells and tastes, then you have squandered an opportunity to connect with the reader.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

By drawing from your life, you convince the reader your character is as authentic as a flesh and blood person. Dive into your emotional and sense memories to boldly describe them in fresh, accurate detail. The expression ‘write naked’ means to bare yourself through your writing. Authors, like actors, create authenticity through the original expression of the familiar.

Resources for further study:

• Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood
• Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway