The Static Hiss
By Donald Maass | December 1, 2021 |
I don’t much listen to my car radio. With my phone connected via Bluetooth, I can listen to audiobooks, stream podcasts or enjoy my own playlists. Plus, the top hits of the Eighties and Nineties were great back then but I don’t want them on an endless loop in my head. If I stream a radio station it’s jazz, like Newark’s WBGO.
Still, once in a while I’ll want traffic news or weather or Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” because Steve Winwood always lifts me up. But when I switch to radio receiver what I get is static hiss. I punch the Seek button to find a station. The receiver jumps to the next signal, which might be Blondie singing “Heart of Glass” or it might be static hiss. Yes, I could have presets. I don’t, so I punch. Hiss. Punch. Hiss.
Static hiss is electronic interference to a radio signal. If the signal-to-noise ratio is low then the signal is overwhelmed and rather than music you get hiss. The interference itself comes from different sources. It can be neighboring radio signals, electrical switches, motors, computers, or thermal noise in circuits. There’s also electromagnetic interference such as lightning, explaining why static hiss gets louder when you see a zig-zag flash in the sky. There’s also cosmic background noise coming from the sun and even the center of the Milky Way.
The radiation that produces hiss is, in essence, louder than the radio signal that you really want. It is a signal but it’s random and erratic. Our brains do not process the hissing into anything meaningful. It’s just noise. We turn down the volume dial and punch the Seek button, looking for a stronger signal carrying more intelligible and interesting sounds. Hiss is natural. It’s part of the universe. It’s there in the background all the time but we find it irritating and quickly dismiss it.
Manuscripts are like a radio signal. Too often static hiss interferes with the story. Static hiss is anything we don’t need in order to understand and enjoy the tale we’re reading. It’s the stuff we tune out, if not immediately skip. Hiss. Punch.
Why do manuscripts, and published novels too, present material that we don’t want? Obviously, the author set down what seems important—but is it? Not always. Think about it this way: Is every page of every novel you read absorbing, exciting and memorable? Obviously not. While we don’t expect that level of memorability from every single printed page, we do hope always to get something interesting, or at least something we won’t skim or skip.
Which brings us back to the disconnect. Authors think whatever they put on the page is vital. Readers disagree. They skip it. Who’s right? Ask me, the readers. Static hiss can be anything that’s not vital but from my many years of reading manuscripts, I can tell you that the hiss tends to fall into a couple of common categories.
Counteracting the Static Hiss
First, let’s get over the idea that a story should be an hour-by-hour chronicle of a protagonist’s days. Not every hour needs to get accounted for. We do not need to see your protagonist waking up—ever—nor taking a shower nor having a bath nor driving to the next place. The daily business does nothing for story.
That goes, too, for a POV character’s moment-by-moment consciousness. Just because a character is seeing, thinking or feeling something doesn’t mean that it’s necessary to include or that it in some way enhances the story’s effect. Voice is fine but only when what it says is something we can’t tune out.
Space-filling paragraphs that create static hiss generally are trying to convey one of three things: information, description, or a character’s thinking or feeling. The error is in supposing that readers are automatically fascinated by new information, or need to “see” the environment of a scene, or that what a character thinks or feels automatically matters. None of those presumptions are necessarily true.
Not yet.
The Hiss of Information
Every story needs a certain amount of set up. There are things we need to know. Character backgrounds. The history behind relationships. Historical, scientific or technical stuff. Motivations. Stakes, which is to say why a bad outcome must be avoided and a good outcome is to be desired. All that and more needs to be explained.
The problem with all that explanation is that we, as readers, don’t really care. Sorry, we don’t. Your protagonist has known her best friend since childhood? Not interesting. There’s a power struggle going on at the law firm where she works? So what? Her plot goal turns on a point of law that most of us don’t know? Whatever. What happens will affect real people, bringing them suffering or relief? Yeah? What else is new?
There’s no real reason for me, your reader, to care what the Czars ate for breakfast, or how the Inuit sew with sinew, or to understand that Rohingyas are oppressed. Such information feels to the author urgent, instructional or, sometimes, fun. However, our world news is already full of daily woe. Our car operation manuals are hundreds of unread pages in the glovebox. The meaning of the Tarot deck’s Seven of Swords isn’t inherently fascinating. Not to me. Why should I be fascinated? I play poker. Plus, my car runs just fine and if I want issues, I’ll read a newspaper.
Information only matters when it matters to a character. What gets us, your readers, interested isn’t the information itself but what it means, what it implies, and how it makes a character feel—but only if that those things catch us by surprise. Take, for example, a certain point of law that is not commonly understood: It is legal everywhere for the police to stop and search if they believe that you are carrying drugs, alcohol (in your car), or weapons. The key word there is believe. When is that belief justified and when is it bias? On that point turns some juicy story—heck, real world—conflict.
However, we’re not there yet. Why does the interpretation of that word, believe, matter to your protagonist-attorney? In other words, what makes it personal? I’m sure you can cook up a bunch of backstory reasons—the humiliating debate back in law school, the Black family friend who was shot during a routine traffic stop—but reasons are not feelings, nor do they necessarily cause readers to feel how a protagonist feels. For the information to have an effect on readers, readers have to feel for themselves something about it. That, in turn, requires the author—you—to find a way provoke emotion not in your protagonist but in your reader.
The direct hammer-and-nail approach probably won’t do that. Let’s try two different approaches to lending significance to the information about stop-and-search law. First, this one:
Belief. Sometimes that little word was nothing but an excuse. When their dear family friend Trevor was shot dead during a traffic stop, did the officer who pulled the trigger truly believe that Trevor was a danger to him? No way. Trevor was a dad, a volunteer soccer coach, and now he would never get to see his son kick a winning goal in the state championships. The thought made Sarah seethe.
Okay. Fine. Not bad. That version of the information does a serviceable job. It conveys the unfair, unchecked, lethal power given to a police officer. Sarah’s feeling about that is strong. As readers we should be on board, shouldn’t we? But be honest. Does that paragraph leave you seething, like Sarah, or is there a certain dullness to it? Does it make you want to carry a sign and chant in protest or does it simply check a story box? Try a second version of the same thing:
Belief. What bothered Sarah was not the vagueness of that word in Montana Code 46-5-401—the legal wiggle room that let an officer blow away a soccer dad like her friend Trevor. What bothered her was that the word actually meant entitlement. When the officer who had shot Trevor for no good reason was exonerated by an all-white jury, Sarah had stumbled into a sports bar to settle her nerves, to re-center, recover her bearings. But at a long table his fellow officers were toasting Trevor’s murderer, clinking glasses of cheap beer like dads from an opposing soccer team.
Way to kill ‘em, kid! Cheers!
Never. Never. Again.
Does that version make you a tad bit angrier? The emotion aimed at readers that time is not abstract grief but an immediate feeling of rage. If it works better for you, it’s because what’s stirred are not one-step-removed feelings about the tragedy of Trevor, but the immediate and personal affront to Sarah. How dare the police celebrate! WTF? That was my friend! This is personal, assholes! (And that’s my point.)
The Hiss of Description
Description is what most readers skip and with good reason. No matter how well rendered, it’s flat. A better way to think about setting scene and invoking mood, ask me, is to think of the task not as providing description but as surprising us with observation. That adds an extra element: Not just what a POV character is seeing, but what a POV character thinks about what’s visible in the close-third-person camera lens and how it makes that POV character feel.
Take a room, any old room:
The room was large, the walls eggshell blue and the coffered ceiling gleaming white. A chandelier hung from a plaster medallion. Probably it had once been a dining room. Sarah imagined a long, linen-covered table stretching its length, with silver place settings and tufted plush velvet chairs. Must be nice to have money, she thought.
Again, not bad. Serviceable. We get the picture, but that’s about all we get. There’s a smidgen of envy from Sarah but that too lands flat, ask me, because it’s what we expect her to feel. It’s what anyone might feel. Now try the same room differently:
The room was large, the walls an eggshell blue that had been the height of sophistication in the 1930’s. A chandelier hung from a plaster medallion in the center of the coffered ceiling. Crystal? No, probably glass. Someone evidently had tried very hard to make this once-upon-a-time dining room look like it had been imported from a genuine English country house. It wasn’t. It was faux-everything and nouveau-pretense. Sarah shook her head. At least someone had tried.
Do you feel a difference in those two passages? One is mostly description, the other is mostly observation. In the second version, we get not only what Sarah sees but also her take on what she’s seeing. Her feeling about the room is not a generic, expected twinge of envy but a less expected disdain mixed with a consolation prize of faint admiration. What we as readers must take in and process, then, is not the room itself but rather Sarah’s attitude toward it.
The Hiss of Exposition
The internal thoughts and feelings of a POV character—exposition—are where the static hiss often hisses the loudest. Mostly exposition is reactive: responding with obvious feelings and self-evident thoughts to something that has just occurred. Reactive material doesn’t surprise. By way of example, take our hypothetical protagonist Sarah’s response to the news that the judge before whom she will argue a civil lawsuit for wrongful death is an arch conservative and iron-fisted defender of the police:
Oh, great. Judge Lattimer, or—as she thought of him—Judge Let ‘Em Off. She might as well be trying to persuade a two-year-old boy that a cherry lollypop is bad for his teeth. Her case was already as good as lost. How was she going to tell Trevor’s family?
Once more, not bad. Serviceable. Sarah’s dismay is evident. Her ironic take on the judge is clear. That she will let down Trevor’s family is noted. It is also obvious. The passage fills a manuscript space with hand-twisting but, ask me, doesn’t tell us much of anything that we couldn’t immediately come up with ourselves. The passage repeats what we probably already know and feel. Now try the same passage a different way:
Judge Let ‘Em Off, eh? Sarah knew all about him…about the case of police corruption he’d twisted into a case about media witch-hunting…about the time an officer, drunk, had run over a woman at high speed which he’d turned into an object lesson in witness unreliability. The woman was dead, for god’s sake. It was a plain fact. For Judge Lattimer, though, facts were open to interpretation. Taking down a police officer in Judge Lattimer’s court was going to be like trying to tear down a bronze statue of George Washington in the center of Helena. Good luck with that.
You had to respect Judge Lattimer, though, and she did. But she respected herself even more.
Do you like the second version better? The obstacle to justice that is Judge Lattimer is the same in each case. We know he’s bad. We know that Sarah is likely to lose her case of wrongful death. In the second version, though, none of that is stated directly. It’s there by implication. Further, Sarah’s feeling at hearing unhelpful news is not the dismay we expect. Instead, it is grudging respect for the judge. That’s not as easy for us to get on our own. Because it’s less obvious we must process it more…
…which in turn, gives us a change to arrive at our own emotional conclusion: admiration for Sarah mixed with dismay at the impossible challenge she now faces. The passage is now less about Judge Lattimer and more about Sarah.
Static hiss, then, is expositional noise without new meaning. Unsurprised, we twist down the dial volume and skip to the next station. There might be something more interesting to hear.
The daily grind just grinds on us. Verisimilitude resides not in a cereal bowl but in emotional experience. Stories come alive in our minds when we learn something that matters. We do not read stories for the ordinary but to experience the extraordinary. We get excited by seeing things in a new way. Our hearts are stirred not by common feelings but when we, as readers, feel what we did not expect to feel.
There’s another meaning to the word static: staying still and moving us nowhere new. That is not the effect that anyone wants to have. Information, description or exposition doesn’t have to become static hiss. Handled right, it can be the cosmic radiation lighting up every minute of our reading time.
What are some examples, from fiction that you know, of what might have been static hiss but which work?
[Note: On the day this essay posts, I will be in transit. I’ll do my best to drop in to respond to your comments, but meanwhile the floor is yours!]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
This was brilliant–as always, Donald. As I re-read my ms. before submission I’ll look for static hiss and ways to make interiority more meaningful.
“His breath on my neck smelled like the smell of the mob, sour, like vomit on paving stones and the smell of drunkenness, and then he put his mouth against the opening in the bars with his head over my shoulder, and shouted ‘Open up! Open!’ and it was as though the mob were on my back as a devil is on your back in a dream”
-From For Whom The Bell Tolls by Hemingway
Happy Holidays Don
I love this example, and how you follow the repulsive emotion it evokes with, “Happy Holidays.”
Thank you for appreciating my offbeat humor :)
The hiss of authorial intrusion?
The hiss of too many POV characters?
“At six-thirty, as had happened all week, Everly was abruptly woken by a loudspeaker announcement stating that breakfast would take place in thirty minutes. She bolted upright in bed and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. In many ways this cruise was like summer camp for adults, a reminder of a happy childhood.” This excerpt from the Christmas novel “Jingle All the Way by Debbie Macomber” works because she added how Everly felt about being woken that way.
Merry Christmas
Brilliant. Insightful. Woke me up on this cold, December morning! Thanks!
“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Elmore Leonard
I was thinking this exactly, Ray.
Don, another fine metaphor to remember in our revisions. Thank you.
I constantly worry about this very topic. For some boneheaded reason, I decided that my protagonist would be narrating his story to an omniscient being– okay, it’s dramatically appropriate in several ways, but how do you tell a story to someone who already knows everything?! So every line must have a reason to be told, some sort of intent behind it. Much harder, but also far more interesting, since it’s not just about what happened, or what the narrator thought of it, or the reaction he’s trying to provoke. All of them at once, often in conflicting ways. This guy’s past is *embarrassing.*
And nobody wants to bore a god.
Hey Don — Oddly enough, I was recently flipping around the ole’ FM dial myself, sitting in the car while my wife waited in a Black Friday retail checkout line. Landed on NPR, a TV reviewer ranting about the new Marvel limited series Hawkeye. The reviewer called Clint “the ho-hum Avenger,” and said the two episodes available were “nothing but backstory and setup,” with “low stakes and the seasonal atmospherics of a Hallmark channel romance.” While I’m not a huge Hawkeye fan, I’ve enjoyed some of the writing–particularly the character explorations–in the Marvel series on Disney+ thus far. I just watched the first two episodes last night. I’d filled Mo in on the NPR reviewer’s take beforehand, and midway through the second, I said, “Huh. I guess, for me, backstory is story.” The characters felt motivated, the world felt lived-in, and the stakes–well…Can the world always be about to end? I mean, it’s Christmas in Manhattan. Hallmark may be on to something there. (In other words, I enjoyed it. More than I would’ve, I suspect, had it been nonstop action.)
Speaking of the comfort of 90s rock, I remember 20 years ago, my mother-in-law stayed in our house to watch the dog while we were vacationing in Ireland. She actually volunteered to drive our car to pick us up at O’Hare (!). On the way home I hit play on the CD player. The soundtrack to Lost In Translation was already loaded. I kept the volume low, but thought the atmospheric sound fit the vibe of the night, driving through the city lights. Kevin Shields, the Irish guitarist behind the Shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine had been the soundtrack’s primary contributor. About halfway home, during the song Sometimes by MBV, my dear MIL said, “You lost the station.” I was confused and told her that it was a CD, not the radio. She shook her head, emphatic. “No, listen. This is nothing but static.”
My Bloody Valentine’s album Loveless has been called the pinnacle of Shoegaze, and “pure emotion rendered sonically.” Clearly my MIL was never going to be a fan of the genre, lol. I’m guessing the NPR guy wasn’t really an SFF fan, either.
While I certainly appreciate your point here, I think it’s important to keep in mind that static to one reader could be pure emotion rendered… textually to another. I guess maybe it’s best to seek to know your audience? Only the slightest of caveats.
Wishing you a season full of clarion holiday greetings and fondly shared backstory, and the gift of many skim-free pages filling your inbox.
I went to the bookshelf to find an example and pulled James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, because his descriptions and observations are always a surprise. The first quarter of the book is a young Stephen observing the world, without much dialogue, as he grows up. Sounds like it should be boring, but it is so compelling, to me, anyway, there’s no place to skip. It’s a constant surprise and revelation how his mind is processing and he is becoming a poet, in love with the sounds and meanings of words and feeling like a loner.
An example:
The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.
Another example:
And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song. Always the same: and when the fellas stopped talking in the playroom you could hear it.
Wherever you travel, be safe and enjoy the season.
She never meant to go that far, the cottonwoods marching along the street, the family home still nestled near the corner. Breathing hard, she stopped. Weren’t the original clapboards grey, a kind grey that seemed to embrace the sagging front porch; and the front windows, not trimmed with this burnt sienna that transformed them into wagging tongues. It was cruel change, not transformation, though some things held. Words…words and voices, lingering inside, maybe even haunting what for years had been Wakefield rooms, Wakefield hallways. Nursing taught that an empty room after a patient died was never the same. You’d walk by it, into it, remembering; same for a house—after her mother’s death, she had been inside only once.
Hi, Don:
Interesting experiment. I was going to use the introduction to China Miéville’s The Perdido Street Station as my example only to discover it suffers from a number of the hissing sins you outline above. (Interesting irrelevance: you can’t spell “hissing” without “sin”.)
Information, check. Description, check. Exposition, check.
It isn’t until several pages in that we’re introduced to a POV character, and what makes him truly interesting — his lover, Lin, is a khepri, a human-insect hybrid — isn’t introduced for several MORE pages. Until then we’re in a sort of Dickensian future that is aptly depicted but, yes, flat. Heavy on detail, deftly written. If not for the book’s reputation I might not have continued. But boy howdy, am I glad I did, because it’s one of the most stunningly imaginative books I’ve ever read.
So I guess the moral of my tale is: If you’re going to break the rules, be brilliant.
And how hard can that be?
Wishing you and your loved ones a very happy holiday season.
I draft fast, the hiss often loud, though there are moments when I catch snippets of distant stations. I revise slow, my head tilted towards the dial, my touch light, as I find the stations along the spectrum I want. Presets are selected. Hiss is avoided. If I travel to a different chapter, though, I have to repeat the process. I loved the analogy. Thank you.
Whoa, I love this comment. Beautifully said.
Super helpful stuff, Donald. Thank you.
I love the hiss metaphor, but where this really hits home for me is in the way you show how descriptive passages can be made SO much more effective.
My own suckiness at description often leads me to simply leave it out, but you’ve offered far more useful and effective approaches. Yeah, this stuff is going on my checklist. THANK YOU.
Mass is more.
“Olivia touches his shoulder. They’ve spent fourteen days and thirteen nights closing up a house together, as if, after half a century of planting crops and outlasting the whims of weather, they’re retiring at last to Scottsdale to die hunched, forehead to forehead, over a checkerboard. The bottomless weirdness of the situation keeps Nick up at night. He’s going to California with a woman who pulled off the interstate on impulse, seeing his absurd sign. A woman who hears silent voices. Now, this,, thinks Nicholas Hoel, is a real performance piece.
“People have sex with strangers. People marry strangers. People spend half a century in bed together and wind up strangers at the end. Nicholas knows all this; he has cleaned house after his dead parents and grandparents, made all the terrible discoveries that only death affords. How long does it take to know anyone? Five minutes, and done. Nothing can move you off a first impression. That person in your life’s passenger seat? Always a hitchhiker, to be dropped off just down the road.
“The fact is, their obsessions interlock. Each has half of a secret message. What else can he do but try to fit the halves together? And if they spin out, wake from the dream with nothing, what has he sacrificed but solitary waiting?”
–THE OVERSTORY, Richard Powers, page 199.
Thank you, sir. What a wonderful metaphor. I’m working my way through a draft, and now I know what I’m looking for.
Hey, Don, the article is excellent and I particularly appreciate the practical demonstrations. But I wanted you to know you’ve been on my mind, what with your geography and potential stickiness in travel. Hope you and yours are okay!
You, Lisa Cron, and Disney/Pixar are my go-to touchstones when I get off into the weeds.
Thank You!
Okay, okay. I’ll take out the waking up and showers and some of the coffee….. Thanks, BTW for reminding me to read this.