#21725 - 01/26/12 01:03 PM
What about the senses of our characters?
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Cyrano
Pooh-Bah
Registered: 12/17/01
Posts: 1733
Loc: San Francisco / Isle of Mull.
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When we write (type) our characters into a story it is easy to forget that they have the same senses we, their creators, have.
Five senses:
Sight
Sound
Smell
Taste
Touch
And one other; a sixth sense!
It is with these senses we create characters. It might be a worthwhile exercise to write a paragraph or two encompassing all 'six' senses.
My example below is from a book I am currently reading:
The Life of Pi: page 47-8 By Yann Martel
I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one’s arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word—faith. I became loyal to these sense impressions even before I knew what they meant or what they were for. It is my heart that commands me so.
How many senses do we recognize while reading this paragraph?
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#21733 - 01/29/12 10:09 PM
Re: What about the senses of our characters?
[Re: Cyrano]
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Ravenwood
member
Registered: 11/11/08
Posts: 170
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I set out to write a paragraph, Cyrano, as you prescribed, and a tale came instead. So flog me. Make a doll and stick it with pins. Send over a Mustang GT. A red one. Whatever. 
R
................................................
My name is Rascal. My father wished to name a child for his father, James Roscoe Canyon, but the name would be a rather odd one for any of the three girls. There would be a boy, father insisted, and when the last of the girls was finishing high school, mother’s tummy swelled again. A tumor this time, she feared. But it was me, James Roscoe. The James was set adrift into never-never land, and I was called Roscoe, just like Poppy. Somewhere between my third and fourth birthdays, my Roscoe went to never-never land also, and mother never called me other than Rascal afterward. I’ll leave it with you to decipher the cause.
Poppy was delighted. He confided to me that his own mother had called him ‘skunk’ until he was near grown. When I was nine, Poppy retired from the mill. Retired to the shed behind his house and I retired there with him for most of the summer daylight. And into the nights. Some of the floor was concrete, but most was dirt, smelling of the elixir of oil that dripped from the Model A Ford he coveted. His hands smelled the same. Magic hands. Large, but with the dexterity of a surgeon’s.
A single bulb drooped from the two-by-four rafters, hanging by a braided golden cord, but the shop never seemed dim. Too immersed in Poppy's laughter. The shop and me, both.
Neighbors brought lawnmowers that wouldn’t start, and returned later for a Stradivarius. At first, I didn’t know what he did to the machines, just caressed them with those hands, it seemed to me.
He would remove a plug wire from the running Model A. Then a second. Then a third. Readjusting timing and throttle with each succession. Then we would climb aboard and putt-putt up and down Main Street on the one cylinder, always stopping at the Malt Shoppe.
He taught me the engine things, how to pull and replace the pistons. He would torque a bolt in place with just a break-over bar on the socket. He placed his ear near the bar’s handle: listened and felt for the correct creak of the tool. Then have me test the result with the torque wrench. He was never more than five percent from perfect.
“Evans will be here today,” he’d sometimes say. Or Wilson. Or Smith. Sometimes he just said "Someone', with no name. He had no phone, and I’d been in his every waken hour. How he knew they were coming was beyond my understanding. But they most always showed, just as he forecast. Fine-tuning their cars, Poppy would set a glass of water atop the air cleaner lid. He would remove half the plug wires and turn the carburetor air-bleed screws gently in and out, watching the water intently. Lost in the exercise. If the owner asked a question, he didn’t hush them. He didn’t hear them.
If someone stopped with a drip under their vehicle, Poppy would place that crooked ring finger—the one he’d broken and then reset himself—into the droplet and place the fingertip to his tongue. He knew whether the vagrant was water with antifreeze (and whether the antifreeze was sufficient), whether engine oil, transmission oil, and whether the engine or transmission needed attention for other than the leak.
“Dang-funkel” visited the garage occasionally. Those were Poppy’s only swear words, as best I know.
Dang-funkel later came with increasing regularity when Poppy grew to misplace his glasses, or tools, more than usual. And when he found it harder to rise from the creeper, and harder to straighten when he had risen. And then we both were surprised that he could no longer cite the firing order for most American engines. And his stories grew to be more of the past than the present.
When I was eighteen, he didn’t answer my tap at his door.
We laid him next to Grammy, and I insisted that I would add more than date-of-death to his head stone. No one disagreed, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. So in section four, row seven, plot six of Milburn County Cemetery, a headstone reads......'NEVER MORE THAN FIVE PERCENT FROM PERFECT’.
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#21735 - 01/30/12 12:25 PM
Re: What about the senses of our characters?
[Re: HULSEY]
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Cyrano
Pooh-Bah
Registered: 12/17/01
Posts: 1733
Loc: San Francisco / Isle of Mull.
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Indeed, Hulsey. Ravenwood constantly drags my senses to a before time, and his writings often place me back there as though each memory were the present.
Hulsey, you’ll remember the Austin A35, my first car. There was only one repair shop on the island. It was owned by a man my father called ‘Sparky’ and the thing I recall about Sparky was the smell of his overalls. Whenever I had to take my A35 to him, which was often, being that it came to me with over 40,000 miles on the clock and 100,000 miles was considered scrap for most engines. All the senses used by R in his tale connected me, immersed me in my past, put me back in the seat of the A35, feeling the vibrations coming through the thin steering wheel as I sped at thirty mph around the island.
Everything about how that little four cylinder engine ran seemed to instinctively be connected to how smoothly it turned over when he lifted the bonnet (hence the glass of water imagery) and whether there might be tapping sounds, for Sparky (named so because he always tried to sell you champion spark plugs) would always have a screwdriver handle to his ear with its blade touching different parts of the engine.
I enjoyed R telling us about that ‘sixth sense’:
“Evans will be here today,” he’d sometimes say. Or Wilson. Or Smith. Sometimes he just said "Someone', with no name. He had no phone, and I’d been in his every waken hour. How he knew they were coming was beyond my understanding.
Sparky is dead now, but my memory is of him standing in front of the workshop holding the 'bell' of an SU carb in his hands, polishing the inside to a smooth shiny surface; more importantly, as the man who somehow managed to get my A35 to a staggering 60,000 miles.
_________________________
For me writing is a national park of underdone thoughts and ideas.
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#21739 - 01/30/12 08:00 PM
Re: What about the senses of our characters?
[Re: HULSEY]
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Ravenwood
member
Registered: 11/11/08
Posts: 170
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What a sad, but delightful story, Ravenwood.
Thank you, Hulsey. Your kind acknowledgement is most appreciated from one who writes so well. I have long enjoyed your stories, and I have greatly missed your insights/expertise being shared in the forum.
And thank you for being a buffer, lest Cyrano think my effort in non-compliance with his assignment. I shall remember, and I may require your services as my barrister when that gentleman is not so agreeable as he was today.
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