Posts by Donald Maass
Do you have a game face? Is your personality different at your desk, on a date, and in the stands at the baseball park? Are you hard-charging at work but relaxed on weekends? Are you foul-mouthed in the privacy of your car but eloquent when making a wedding toast? Can you be patient with children but not with fools? When are you at your worst? When are you at your best?
You are different depending on the day, right? Maybe even the hour. Who isn’t? There are times when you are great to be around. There are other times when the world should quietly tiptoe backwards away from you, palms raised. You no doubt feel that way about others, too. There’s the friend who’s a riot on one drink but blistering to be around after three. In your family there’s the complainer and the saint. There are colleagues who are great company and others who at six o’clock you’re happy to wish a great evening, see ya tomorrow.
Generally speaking, we choose company that is pleasant. People who are warm, open, curious, compassionate and interesting are good to be around. We gravitate to people like ourselves, who share our outlooks, interests and values. It’s nice to spend time with nice people, isn’t it? We want that from others and hope to be that in return.
So, question: What kind of person are you asking your readers to spend four-hundred or so pages with? What sort of company are you providing for your readers to keep? I don’t mean just the temperament of your protagonist but your own. What sort of spirit are you bringing to your fiction? What vibe are you putting out on your pages?
[pullquote]What kind of person are you asking your readers to spend four-hundred or so pages with? What sort of company are you providing for your readers to keep? I don’t mean just the temperament of your protagonist but your own. What sort of spirit are you bringing to your fiction? What vibe are you putting out on your pages?[/pullquote]
In manuscripts I meet many protagonists who are sour, snarky, bemused, self-pitying, singly-focused, disconnected or, frankly, just plain dull. This would seem to fit the framework which says that protagonists should be yearning, obsessed, suffering, isolated and in need of change.
It also means spending time with people who are a drag. Even more, these authors are promising their readers that their every new title will be a slog. The spirit of their fiction is negative. Many would say “redemptive”, since everything comes out great at the end, but the far off outcome isn’t the point. It’s the experience of reading that can either be burdensome or inspiring. It can engage readers’ hearts or turn them off.
The solution isn’t necessarily creating characters who are relentlessly chipper and nothing but fun, though that might be a relief. Yearning, need, struggle and change are essential to good story, yet all of that can be accomplished in a spirit that invites us in more than makes us run screaming. The difference lies in how you, the author, feel about your characters, the story world and everything in general, and how that finds expression on the page. You are what you eat. In the […]
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The fleeting beauty of life. The irony of it all. A nameless dread. The exquisite ache of inexpressible love.
Is there a greater art than evoking a feeling that has no name? When readers feel those it’s magic. It’s pure human connection, silent but nevertheless potent heart to heart sharing. It’s like when couples who’ve known each other forever exchange a look. Who needs words? The look says it all.
Nameless emotional experiences can be dark, too. When we leave the light on, shudder or feel sick inside at the horror of human cruelty, we are feeling something less specific and yet larger than any feeling we can label. The same goes for sensing the presence and reality of God. For those who have felt that even sublime words like humility, joy, wonder and awe are inadequate.
Ironically, in fiction there is only one way to get across a feeling with no name: words. How is that supposed to work? How can you evoke something nameless without naming it? Obviously we are here discussing evoking emotion. We are talking not about telling, but about showing in its highest form.
The least effective way to evoke unstated emotion is with pregnant pauses, “significant” looks, or gestures like shrugs or the dismissive wave of a hand. Overused devices have little effect. Snorts, grunts, and exasperated huffs—Women! Men!—are similarly pale.
[pullquote]Wonder doesn’t arise when readers don’t have to wonder. When the obvious is implied the feeling that readers experience does, unfortunately, have a name: indifference.[/pullquote]
By the same token, why bother to evoke in readers feelings that can be readily identified and which have accurate names? There’s no magic in that. Wonder doesn’t arise when readers don’t have to wonder. When the obvious is implied the feeling that readers experience does, unfortunately, have a name: indifference.
The art we’re seeking is the evocation of tacit feelings that leave the reader helpless to explain and speechlessly certain that they have felt exactly this themselves. Unique feelings are situation-specific. They flare as brightly as fireworks and perish just as quickly, leaving nothing to hold except the memory of having experienced something fragile and elusive, an excitement or trepidation that is at once real yet impossible to convey or recreate.
How can this be done?
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A great deal has been written about openings. Without question they are important. The opening is the first impression. It creates a story promise. It poses questions that need answers. It pulls us into a story world. It sets events in motion or at least establishes a mood. We meet a voice, sense the story’s purpose, get a hint of its meaning and generally settle into the flow of something already moving.
In short, we are intrigued. Indeed, most advice about openings is geared toward enhancing our curiosity. Ray Rahmey’s first page checklist, posted here monthly, is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting. Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages is a detailed discussion of what makes openings uninteresting, listing in order of importance the reasons why agents dismiss manuscripts and suggesting what you can do avoid that. The term “narrative hook” has its own Wikipedia entry.
It’s pretty hard not to get the idea. The first job of an opening is to intrigue.
Or is it?
Research psychology has some interesting things to tell us about why people seek out entertainment and what gets them involved in it. To us it’s obvious why we need stories and why they appeal. To scientists it’s a great puzzle. Why do people get caught up in events which they know cannot be real? What causes people to feel strongly about fictional characters, argue with them and even re-imagine their outcomes?
Yes, scientists really study this stuff. Seeking out a story to experience shows to scientists what they call to “intentional motivation”. The processing of a story then involves “sensory memory”, “working memory”, an “episode buffer” and finally retention in “long term memory” (LTM). While we speak of hunts and campfires, scientists posit “Attribution Theory”, “Cognitive-Experiential Self Theory”, “Cultivation Theory”, “Social Judgment Theory” and “Thematic Compensation Hypothesis”.
Being caught up in a story excites scientists to terms like “transportation”, “anticipatory empathy” and “counterfactual thinking”. Most significant of all is the reason that readers sink into a story at all: “Disposition Theory”.
I’ll save you some time. Here’s what all that means…
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In drafting your novel, would you leave out dialogue? Would you fail to include action or events? Would you ensure that nothing is described? Would you forego theme, forget mood, ignore time, eschew era, not bother with relationships, or erase any traces of voice?
Of course not.
Why then do so many novelists fail to write about the most fundamental, forward and obvious element of our human experience, emotions?
Now hold on, you may be thinking. My manuscript is chock full of feelings. It’s a tsunami of sensitivity, an earthquake of empathy, doused with desire, replete with responses. In fact, my manuscript causes my heart to ache so acutely that sometimes I must set it down and weep.
Uh-huh. That’s you. As for me, manuscripts too often stir in me little feeling. That’s not because I’m jaded. You aren’t either but when was the last time a novel truly took you for a ride on an emotional roller coaster? And how often do novels genuinely have that effect on you? I’m betting not often. There’s a big difference between what an author feels while writing and what readers feel while reading.
Why is that? Do we change when we become readers? It wouldn’t seem so. After all we are empathetic creatures. We mirror others stances and facial expressions. We can pick up others’ moods even from texts on a phone. We are full of sympathy. We may even collectively be swept up in what psychologists call emotional contagion, which is the mood of a crowd. We even feel our era’s zeitgeist.
Reading fiction is not like living life, though. When we talk with friends in person, for instance, we pick up their cues. Our postures mimic theirs. Our facial expressions reflect theirs. We begin to feel what they feel. In fiction we don’t get those cues, not in the same way, not even if they’re written in.
Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi’s The Emotion Thesaurus is not only a comprehensive survey to character emotions but suggests physical signals to convey each feeling. Adoration, for example, can be shown by releasing an appreciative sigh or laying a hand over the heart. Great. That looks like adoration, sure enough, but if reading such signals do we readers actually feel adoration? Not really. Because we recognize a feeling doesn’t mean that we’re feeling it.
The failure of fiction to excite much feeling in readers happens because of several misconceptions. They are: 1) that what characters feel is what readers will feel, 2) that incidental action is charged with symbolism and major plot changes have earthquake emotional force, 3) that writing about emotions will rob the reader of those feelings (better is evoking reader emotions through showing), and 4) that dwelling on emotions slows narrative pace.
Here’s a truth: We do not feel what characters feel. We feel what we feel. That’s so in life and it’s so in reading fiction. Hearing or reading about an experience can stir us, certainly, but when it does it mostly stirs comparison to our own experience. When a friend relates something that happened and how it felt to them we respond, “Oh, I know exactly what you mean. That’s just like the time when I…”
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The surest way to stir emotion in readers can be summed up in one word: change.
Change is a universal experience. We’ve all gone through it. We cannot avoid it. The passages of life guarantee it. Change is necessary, difficult, wrenching and individual. When a character in a story changes we each recall the emotional earthquakes of our own lives. We feel for characters, or so we say. We’re really feeling for ourselves.
Changes can be small or big. In my post Stirring Higher Emotions, I described a method for turning a character toward virtue, the shift with the greatest reader impact. Change can also be momentary, though, as when in a scene a point-of-view character gains insight, makes an intuitive leap, asks the right question, reverses course or steps out of the box of our expectations and acts differently or looks at things in a new way.
Every change, big or small, knocks us readers off balance which in terms of emotional craft is good. Shake us out of our fog and our hearts open. We’re free to feel. What does change mean, then? How does it happen? How can it be built in a manuscript for maximum effect?
In general, what changes in people is belief, behavior, or both. The emotional impact of change lies less in the change itself and more in resistance to it. The effect of change can be amplified by involving other characters, who either validate the old beliefs and behaviors or who open paths to new ones. Change happens both inside and observably. Showing is good. Done right, telling can be too. Why not both?
A character who needs to change is rooted on one side of a polarity: me or you, yin or yang, Jeckyll or Hyde, helpless or reckless, righteous or resigned. Such a character is stuck for good reasons. Wrong belief and damaging behavior become traps because they work. Until they don’t.
Even then they hang on because to change means giving up what is familiar and simple. The old ways boost confidence, compensate for weakness and, sometimes, make one acceptable to a group. Adopting new ways requires becoming vulnerable, facing complexity, accepting ambiguity as well as feeling alone, unsure and at risk. No wonder people backslide.
[pullquote]Change feels good. It’s a relief, liberating, and empowering. It’s a turn away from self-pity and toward understanding of self and others. It brings maturity, perspective, and elevates one to a higher consciousness.[/pullquote]
Once accomplished, though, change feels good. It’s a relief, liberating, and empowering. It’s a turn away from self-pity and toward understanding of self and others. It brings maturity, perspective, and elevates one to a higher consciousness. Change is akin to religious surrender, mystical detachment, meditation, mindfulness, and the state of self-observation achieved in psychotherapy. Turmoil is let go. Peace is found.
Now, how do we turn this into a set of tools for fiction? Here are some questions to help pin down the unique change a given character needs to undergo, what makes it difficult, who helps or hinders, the trigger for the change and the rewards.
Read MoreI’ve been teaching a new kind of craft lately. It’s emotional craft, the understanding and planning of a novel’s emotional effect on readers. Most authors focus on characters’ emotions, principally the much discussed issue of showing versus telling.
That’s fine but limiting. For readers, most of the emotional experience of a novel doesn’t come from the page but rather from inside themselves. They react to what’s happening, sure, but they also reflect. The events of the story cause them to compare.
We can see this dynamic readily in our own conversations with friends. When someone you know tells you a story about something that happened to them you may ask, “How did that make you feel?” but you are just as likely to say, “Oh yeah, that reminds me of the time when I…”
We connect to fiction by association. We bring our biases, baggage and opinions to what we read. We say things like, “I hated that character”, or “I didn’t buy that character’s choices, I would never do that.” We argue with authors in our heads. We wish for different outcomes. We discuss and judge the stories that we read, placing higher value on stories that stir us up than on stories that soothe us and too easily affirm our feelings.
The goal, then, is not necessarily to get readers to feel more of what characters’ feel but simply to feel more themselves.
Doing that is easier when you, the author, are in more in touch with your own feelings. That may sound obvious. You probably think, no problem, and yet the emotional impact of manuscripts usually is light and frequently is obvious. Most manuscripts cause us to feel little more than we expect to feel. They play it safe not only in plot but in emotional effect.
Better is to stir readers wildly. When readers’ feelings gallop out of control that’s good. They are then deeply engaged. That in turn happens when the author is also deeply engaged, bringing to the process an awareness of his or her own wealth of bias, baggage and opinion; basically, all that is disorganized, disorderly, ill-formed and troublesome inside.
[pullquote]If you empower yourself to be imperfect you become not only more human and authentic but also more effective as a storyteller. That’s because the messy emotional experience that you create in your stories works more on readers’ own emotions.[/pullquote]
In other words if you empower yourself to be imperfect you become not only more human and authentic but also more effective as a storyteller. That’s because the messy emotional experience that you create in your stories works more on readers’ own emotions.
The process of writing fiction itself is a tool to do that. There’s a mother lode of emotional effect to be dug up in your own frustrations, doubts, fears and wondering as you go. Mining that gold, though, often proves difficult. A frequent comment I hear from workshop participants is that emotional work is hard.
Read More“Let’s talk about me!”
Generally speaking, that’s not good advice for handling yourself in social situations. Better is to listen and ask questions. Being interested in others is the way to make friends and influence people. (Smile too. That helps.)
In bonding readers to characters on the page, though, the reverse is true. We open our hearts to those whose hearts are open to us. For characters’ hearts to be open to us they must talk to us quite a bit about what’s going on inside them.
Effective narrative voices are essentially an awful lot about “me”. I’m not advocating for first person narration. Third person can draw us deeply in too. It’s less about the choice and more about how narrative voice is handled.
In many manuscripts, whether written in first or third person, the main characters do not disclose very much. Often they simply report what’s happening, a dry play-by-play conveyance of the action. As a reader one longs for color commentary, if nothing else. Even better would be some self-reflection but authors frequently hold that back.
Even witty, ironically detached first person narrators—the default voices of YA, New Adult and Para-Everything fiction—aren’t necessary revealing. Ironic tone can be used to avoid true intimacy with readers. Detached literally means unengaged.
Literary writing isn’t necessarily more honest, either.
Read MoreHow do you see the world? Is it the Land of Milk and Honey or The Hunger Games? Is the glass half empty or half full? Is our human existence hilarious, serene, tragic or full of hope? Do you sort, filter, organize and understand everything around you primarily through feelings, family, cost versus benefit, politics, law, sin and salvation, astrology or whether things add to, or subtract from, the chances of the San Jose Sharks winning the Stanley Cup?
You and I live in the same world and yet we don’t. It’s different for each of us. The quality of my days begins with whether my kid’s school bus is late and the intensity of my morning coffee. The purpose of my days is determined by competing deadlines at work. My days achieve meaning when what I read transports me or if what I write is clear. My measure of self-satisfaction is whether I strike a balance and get through it all with aplomb.
What about you? What, for you, makes a day good or bad? Is it whether things go well at work? Is it whether you eat right and hit the gym? Are days good when you connect with friends or bad when you accidentally take a call from your doctor instead of letting it go to voicemail? Does a Lenny Kravitz tune lift you up? Does the news from Lebanon drag you down? Do you look forward to a good sleep or fear that you’ll lie awake?
What gives you a sense of purpose? Facebook and Twitter? Your inbox? Your kids? Your kitchen? Your manuscript? Your mind? Your prayers? Your mission, whatever it is, and if you sell a lot of muffins at your bake sale? Winning her over? Getting rid of him for good? Finding out the truth? Surrendering to what is?
How do you judge yourself in a given day? With a morning mirror check? By whether you’re on time, in charge, ready and empowered? According to what you get done? By how well you meet your own standards of behavior? Whether you stick to your guns or stand up for your principles? By how well you stay humble, flow, and show compassion for others? Whether you make someone laugh?
What matters more than the details of our days is the disparity in how we experience them. That’s what’s interesting. That’s what’s engaging. That’s what we talk about. To the degree that we’re in accord about our experiences we feel satisfied and safe. When we assert the differences in our days, though, we waken each other and enthrall.
This is important in writing fiction because it reminds us that capturing the world as it is only accomplishes a little. Creating sympathetic characters with whom we can identify is fine but only takes us so far.
Read More“Pure Joy” Photo by Deborah Downes
What was the most emotional day of your life? Google for people’s stories and you’ll read a lot that are probably like your own: birth, death, betrayal, trauma, marriage, divorce, miscarriage, failure, second chance, recovery, a dream achieved, a confession of love, getting a helping hand.
Now, those are events. Let’s look at the emotions they evoke, for these are strong feelings and ones we’d like readers to feel as they read our fiction. We’re talking about primary emotions, maybe even primal ones: fear, rage, passion, glee, ecstasy, triumph, hope, astonishment, grief, humiliation, awe, joy or love.
You likely are not thinking about mild emotions like apathy, boredom, contentment, doubt, fondness, gloom, grumpiness, liking, melancholy or satisfaction. Those are real, everyday feelings but not ones that stick with us. Memorable times are memorable because they’re connected to big feelings; feelings so strong we describe them as experiences.
It would seem then that to give readers emotional experiences we need only work with primary or primal emotions. Unfortunately, from a craft perspective, there’s a problem: big emotions often fall flat on the page. Often that’s because they’re familiar, flatly reported or poorly engineered. Entering a dark basement doesn’t necessarily instill fear. Send a dozen roses to our doorsteps and you don’t automatically deliver love.
How often has a horror novel made you keep a light on? How many thrillers have genuinely made you feel paranoid? Do romances always turn you to mush? Does reading women’s fiction guarantee, every single time, that you will feel empowered or healed? I doubt it, though I have no doubt that you have on your shelf classics or favorites that have had those effects on you.
Reading The Spy Who Came In From the Cold gave me the sick feeling that I couldn’t trust anyone. A totally forgotten category romance by Janet Daily called That Boston Man made me fall in love. To Kill a Mockingbird still stirs in me hope that goodness and justice will triumph, even though in Harper Lee’s novel they do not. I know from these and other reading experiences that fiction can stir big emotions. The question is how.
Emotions have been exhaustively researched, written about, categorized and charted. For our purposes today we can put them into two simple categories: positive and negative.
Negative emotions are the easiest to access and write about. Fear and anger are a cinch to switch on. You can see this, for example, in the prevailing “voice” of our times: the often first-person narrative tone of ironic detachment. This default voice can be funny and entertaining, but that amusement factor springs from an underlying coolness. Ironic narration is attention grabbing but not always deeply engaging. How could it be when it is rooted in pessimism, passivity, distance and distrust?
(Exceptions like snarky narrator Holden Caulfield are exceptions for a reason, but that is a topic for another post.)
[pullquote]Positive emotions are harder to access and more difficult to use. Perhaps that’s because they relieve conflict rather than feeding it.[/pullquote]
Positive emotions are harder to access and more difficult to use. Perhaps that’s because they relieve conflict rather than feeding it. Perhaps. I suspect, though, that positive emotions are simply […]
Read MoreHave you ever grown impatient with a novel? Have you ever restlessly flipped ahead wishing that something would happen? Of course. It’s a common feeling. Put politely, you feel frustrated. Put plainly, you’re bored.
Perhaps your own current manuscript has also had you feeling, at times, impatient. Have you struggled to find a way to make things happen? Do you sense that the inner state of your main character is significant, but that it isn’t turning into events dramatic enough? Do you secretly worry that your beautiful words won’t be enough to captivate your readers for four hundred pages?
If you answered yes then I have bad news for you: Your readers are going to feel impatient too. Not enough is happening. But what can you do about that? In particular, how can you “plot” a novel that inherently lacks one? Even more, how can you work alchemy when your process is exploratory, the opposite of applying a formula?
As a non-plot driven novelist your frustration can deepen when you consider classics and contemporary literary successes. To the Lighthouse. The Bell Jar. The Remains of the Day. White Teeth. I mean, come on. What really happens in these novels? Almost nothing, and yet somehow it feels like everything.
There’s nothing wrong with writing about the human condition. It’s okay to examine characters who are stuck. You could say that about Holden Caulfield, John Yossarian, Jay Gatsby and even Scarlett O’Hara, all characters who are not getting what they want. Yet writers like Salinger, Heller, Fitzgerald and Mitchell make it look easy. It’s not, that’s how it feels anyway.
Fortunately there are ways to “plot” the non-plot driven novel. It doesn’t mean creating an outline. It doesn’t depend on the gimmicky formulae of quest, save-the-world, whodunit or love conquers all. It does, however, require taking a break from writing pages and asking yourself questions about your main character.
First, recognize that what holds a non-plot novel together and what gives it propulsive force every step of the way are two different issues. Tackling each involves similar questions but applied in two different contexts: in the macro-text and in individual scenes.
Second, let’s generalize. If your novel doesn’t, and cannot, have a plot as such then you are in some way or other working with a character who is blocked, frozen, hamstrung, bewildered, wandering, lost or in some other way unable to become whole and happy. There can be a range of reasons for that: internal, circumstantial, past or some combo of things.
It doesn’t matter why your main character is stuck. It’s okay with me if he or she is. Heck, we’re all stuck at times, even you. What makes your manuscript a novel is that which ultimately causes your character to become unstuck. The human condition by itself isn’t a story. Change is.
Read MoreIt was my son’s seventh birthday. We asked what he wanted. He told us. And so…
…we got a puppy.
A boy and his dog. Growing up together. How sweet. How classic. Our son is adopted. He comes from a hard place. He has struggled to attach, a long process of pendulum swings from safety to fear and back again. What a perfect gift for this boy we love so much: a puppy all his own to love too.
Trauma kids arrive with lacks, for instance eye contact, an understanding of cause and effect, and empathy. Trauma kids test and reject you. At the same time they cling with a choke hold. Some days our son follows my wife around, talking nonstop. One day she said, “Sweetheart, I really, really need to take a break.” He said, “Can I come with you?”
We’ve made huge progress, we’re proud of that, but it’s a lifelong journey. How excellent for this stage, we thought, to have a puppy. The puppy will make eye contact with those big, sad puppy eyes. Training the puppy will demonstrate cause and effect. Caring for the puppy will build empathy. All good, good, good.
Our puppy is a rescue. (In our oppressively hip neighborhood you will be lashed if you own a purebred.) She’s sleek and black and wickedly smart. She eats like a horse, has doubled in size, and we love her to pieces.
The trouble began with a corner of our baseboard molding. It looked like a beaver had attacked it. Of course it was Pup. Chewing. Everything. You dog owners can stop laughing now. It’s not funny. Our place is trashed. Carpets are rolled up and put away. When we set the table for dinner the dishes are pushed to the center. Pup also follows us everywhere. She sits outside the bathroom door and barks. She is needy, a bottomless bucket
There is so much we didn’t know or hadn’t considered. We were willfully blind.
Read MoreI spend a lot of time in airports. Wait around as much as I do and you begin to admire airport design. Think the TWA Terminal at JFK, Terminal B at SJC, the International Terminal at SFO, the passenger arrival canopy at PDX, or the mountain range roof of DEN.
Gorgeous. High. Open. Airy. Look up and you’re already in flight.
Look a bit closer, though, and you may also feel afraid. The structural components that support these architectural confections do not inspire confidence. What, really, is holding these buildings up?
Now, shop-welded and field-bolted shear connections I understand. These are the trustworthy plates and flanges that connect steel columns and beams, transferring the bearing load and resisting rotation and bending “moment”. They’re rigid. Strong.
Contemporary design, however, values visible structural elements. Architects want the skeletons of airports to look lightweight. Also in consideration are assembly ease and a tolerance for slightly variable element lengths. In layman terms, if you want passengers to fly before they walk across the jetway you’ve got to work with fasteners that are cooler than clunky old shear connections.
Enter the pin connection.
A pin connection is a fastener between two structural steel elements, which in airports often are tubes. Imagine an elbow joint. In building terms that means a lapped-type connection involving a U-shaped clevis through which a “pin” (a bolt) passes. It is this pin that holds two structural pieces together.
It’s the “pin” that worries me, especially when that pin supports the building’s entire bearing load as in a base connection. Stick with me here. Think about it. The whole weight of the airport is resting on the architectural equivalent of the bolt and nut like one that you keep in a glass jar on your basement workbench.
I mean, seriously? The entire weight of a roof is resting on a little bolt? Those must be some strong bolts. And, of course, they are. They have to be. I’ve yet to be in an airport when the roof collapsed. Structural engineers know what they’re doing.
Thus, I don’t really need to worry. A pin connection is as reliable a way to join steel as is the old-fashioned flange. The airport roof will stay up. I can enjoy my latte and laptop in ease. The airport is securely fastened together. It’s okay to look up. It’s safe to fly.
So what, you ask, does this have to do with writing fiction? Ah.
Read MoreI love necklaces. No, I’m not a hippie. I’m not a cross-dresser. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) I just love the many ways in which women make themselves beautiful. A French twist, a bare shoulder, smoky eyes, a pretty necklace.
Diamond necklaces are stunning. Not that I see them except in the window at Tiffany’s, mind you. But to be gorgeous a necklace doesn’t need to be made of rare gems. More important are design factors like harmony, balance, proportion, movement, contrast and emphasis.
For instance, harmony is achieved by using similar elements in the composition of the necklace. Wood and clay together evoke the Earth. Turquoise and silver also are a natural combination, as you can see in jewelry shops all over Santa Fe.
Distribute the elements of a necklace evenly and you have balance, but as effective can be an asymmetrical composition, or one in which the visual expectation created on one side of the necklace is off-set or reversed on the other.
Contrast, such as alternating beads of onyx and opal, is visually interesting if not symbolically intriguing. Complimentary color-wheel choices are like variations on a theme. Textural contrasts also catch our eyes. Movement is how a necklace visually directs your gaze, explaining why drop necklaces probably are my favorites. Ahem.
In composing a necklace you can also work with proportion, for example making pearls larger as they descend toward the necklace’s nadir. A point of emphasis also draws the eye but remember that the emphasis only emphasizes when it departs from its context.
Now, don’t get me wrong. A single diamond solitaire on a woman’s left ring finger is a beautiful thing. It’s symbolic and emotional. I’m not against rings. But for me an engagement ring and an artfully composed necklace do not compare. One is simple and pure, understood with one look. The other is complex and engaging, demanding that you look again.
A bride is a gem, no question, but a married woman is a necklace. I’m sorry, should I have composed that metaphor the other way around? Never mind. The point is, what’s beautiful in necklaces are not gems themselves but the way in which you arrange them.
Which brings us to words.
Read MoreWhen I was little I hated tomatoes. Not tomato sauce, mind you. When my mother made spaghetti I’d eat three helpings. After dinner I’d lie on the couch, clutch my belly and groan. But actual tomatoes, sliced on a sandwich? Bleech! Go figure. I was a kid.
This tomato aversion persisted into adulthood. Then one day I was visiting a client and his wife at their home in the Catskill Mountains. They’d bought garden tomatoes, still warm from the vine, at a farmers’ market. My client’s wife knew what to do. She cut them up, put them in a blue bowl, drizzled green olive oil over them, added hand crushed sea salt and fresh cracked pepper. Served with a crusty artisanal baguette, we sat down to lunch.
My life, or at least my relationship to tomatoes, changed with one bite. Oh! Like a new religious convert, I saw. I knew. I believed. This was what tomatoes were supposed to be: glorious, sun-warmed, transporting, a gift of hope from God to the mouths of suffering mortals. Summer took on new meaning. I dreamed of gardening. This, you must understand, was just an idle dream. I am to gardens what Godzilla is to Tokyo.
Not long after that I discovered bruschetta. Add lemon juice and garlic to the above, spoon onto baguette rounds, consume with Italian wine, and you are in Heaven. Later at farmers’ markets I ran across heirloom tomatoes, deep red, dusky yellow, even purple. These lumpy antiques proved to me that our forebears ate better than we modern folk. Heirloom tomatoes make the supermarket beefsteak variety look and taste like they come from a 3-D printer.
I wouldn’t say that I’m now a tomato expert, but I have again become finicky about tomatoes. I love them but not just any tomato will do.
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