Stein on Writing Part 10

To provide your readers with insight, you become an explorer. That's what we've been doing here, exploring territory in your memory that has been-and continues to be- hidden from public view, but that can make your stories sing.

What a waste! In our daily work and play, our senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell define the world for us. Then, as writers, we let three of our senses atrophy, as if our characters had lost part of their humanity and didn't need to touch, taste, and smell.

Never mind that laymen neglect their senses. We writers have an obligation to use all five senses in our work if we are to enrich the laymen's experience.4 And we cannot neglect the sixth that haunts our lives and our literature.

I caution you. Even the sense of sight, the one we use the most in our life and work, needs to be honed beyond the everyday needs of the laymen for whom we write. We need to see more acutely so that we can record what is fresh.

We take our senses for granted. When we let their use atrophy, it often takes conscious effort and exercise to restore our awareness of the ways in which we take in the world around us. If you were to shut your eyes and remove your keys from a pocket or purse this moment, could you describe what a key feels like in a way that would be understood by a person who came from a country in which keys were not used?

What have you observed or felt about your keys? If I handed keys to you, by what signs would you know that they were yours and not someone else's? Not knowing our keys from keys that are similar is symbolic of our neglect of our senses. We deprive ourselves and our readers. Most writers use sight and some conventional sounds, and little else. This chapter, then, is a course in enrichment of your sensory awareness, and through that awareness an enrichment of your writing.

Is the sound a cat makes meow or mrkneow! James Joyce, who had an acute ear, used mrkneow. Some people contend that the vocabulary of cats is extensive. There's no point to your using Joyce's sound or the cliche meow. Listen to your cat and see if you can't come up with something that your readers will recognize but perhaps will never have seen in print before.

Do we listen closely? Is the sound made by a baseball being hit thwack or crack! Or some other?

There are cliches for most common sounds. I hope to persuade you to describe sounds not in cliches but as you hear them after careful listening. Some of my students have come up with wonderfully original sounds that enhance their work. A young child at the piano: bonk, bonk, bonk. Or the whump of two automobiles coming together.

Sound, of course, is not continuous. It is interrupted by pauses, by momentary silences, the absence of sound that makes music possible. Let's look at an extreme instance of the use of sound in Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. In it, you may recall, a ten-year-old boy who is abandoned by his parents in Europe during World War II wanders through a nightmare of savagery and love in which he loses the ability to speak because in speaking he might give himself away. After the war, at the end of the book, a skiing accident lands the protagonist in the hospital, where something wonderful happens to his long silence: [I] was about to lie down when the phone rang. The nurse had already gone, but the phone rang insistently again and again.

I pulled myself out of bed and walked to the table. I lifted up the receiver and heard a man's voice.

I held the receiver to my ear, listening to his impatient words, somewhere at the other end of the wire there was someone, perhaps a man like myself, who wanted to talk with me. ... I had an overpowering desire to speak. Blood flooded my brain and my eyeb.a.l.l.s swelled for a moment, as though trying to pop out onto the floor.

I opened my mouth and strained. Sounds crawled up my throat. Tense and concentrated I started to arrange them into syllables and words. I distinctly heard them jumping out of me one after another, like peas from a split pod. I put the receiver aside, hardly believing it possible. I began to recite to myself words and sentences, s.n.a.t.c.hes of Mitka's songs. The voice lost in a faraway village church had found me again and filled the whole room. I spoke loudly and incessantly like the peasants and then like the city folk, as fast as I could, enraptured by the sounds that were heavy with meaning, as wet snow is heavy with water, confirming to myself again and again and again that speech was now mine and that it did not intend to escape through the door which opened onto the balcony.

The universe of sound available to the writer extends from a simple bonk, bonk, bonk to Kosinski's protagonist rediscovering his ability to speak.

Humans see the world. Other animals smell it. Watch a cat investigating anything new, a surrounding, a possible food. It leads with its nose, just as its larger sisters in the jungle do. Cats and other animals define the world first by smell. In some human cultures, the sense of smell is treated as if it were an unwelcome adjunct to the "good" senses, fit only to be deodorized or perfumed.

For the writer, the sense of smell provides opportunity. It is important not only to be aware of and use smells, but to be accurate in rendering them. Rubber bands have a marked odor. An old book smells musty. Unseen wind has a smell. If you don't smell anything, what might you smell? A single flower in an imagined vase on your desk?

What he first noticed about Detroit and therefore America was the smell.

That's the first sentence of a short story by Charles Baxter called "The Disappeared" from the Michigan Quarterly Review.

A writer can use the sense of smell to good effect in many ways, for instance, to help a reader experience a setting: I could tell we were coming to the kitchen. The odor of fresh-baked bread drifted into the hallway like an invitation to follow where it led.

Smell can be used to establish a relations.h.i.+p: Malcolm came through the back door, the football in the crook of his arm, his sweats.h.i.+rt emblazoned with a dark b.u.t.terfly of sweat. He put the football down, and positioned his arms around me. I closed my eyes and could smell the earth of the playing field and what I had come to think of as the aroma of his presence.

Characterization can benefit from the use of smell: Sally fluttered in, enveloped in her newest perfume.

This tells us that Sally habitually uses too much perfume. Smell can also be used to establish atmosphere: Down and down we went. I stopped counting the stairs. The dank smell told me we were well below ground.

Or this: Terry glanced skyward and sampled a lungful of the chilled air. The universe smelled fresh, as if everything could now start over.

The absence of smell is also useful to a writer: "They've bred the smell out of roses," Gloria said. "Don Juans are my favorite climbers because their touch is velvet and the rose breeders haven't robbed them of their smell. Yet."

A gifted young woman named Ketti McCormick was briefly a student of mine some time after she had lost her sight. She still continued to see colors, not those in her field of vision but those refractions of colors previously seen that remained inside her head. Her contact with the external world, like that of other blind people, was now mainly through the sense of touch, which most of us neglect. Ketti once had trusted her eyes to keep her out of danger. She had to develop a greater sense of trust in others that they would not leave things in her path that she might trip over. She was angry at males who left the toilet seat up.

A blind person surmises how I might look by feeling my face. Try that some time. Blindfold yourself and have someone brought into the room whom you haven't met before and who wouldn't mind if you found out what they looked like by touching his or her face. You might describe each feature-nose, cheeks, forehead, ears, chin, hair-and have someone write your descriptions down. Then, with the blindfold off, look closely at the person and at your description, and offer an apology for your probable inaccuracy. You are in all likelihood deficient in your use of the sense of touch, as we all are. It would benefit our writing greatly to improve how we see with the ends of our fingers.

There's a way to do it. And you won't need a cooperative new acquaintance, just the blindfold, though it might help to have a friend or family member around to empty the contents of your purse or pocket on a table after you are blindfolded. Feel each object with your fingertips, describing it as best you can as if to someone from another planet who wouldn't know what those strange objects are that you carry everywhere you go. You can't say a credit card feels like plastic. You have to particularize. That exercise alone can work wonders in letting you experience your sense of touch: As soon as they came in from the cold, Eric reached into his pocket for a slim metal tube and brought it to his lips. He realized that he hadn't uncapped it even before he heard Sheila laugh. He pulled the cap off the tube, turned its base to bring the waxy plug up higher, and rubbed it first across his top lip, and then his bottom lip.

In the example, the sense of touch fortifies the characterization of Eric as absent-minded, an improvement over the author intruding to tell the reader that.

Does the handshake of an athlete feel the same as the handshake of a wimp? Does the hand of a child feel the same as the hand of a seventy-year-old? Does the surface of every wooden chair feel the same? What does water feel like when it is too hot? What does your favorite cat or dog feel like when you are petting it? Would you dare write a love scene omitting the sense of touch?

Your writing can only gain if you attempt to use the sense of touch at least once in every scene.

That imaginary guest from another planet can also be useful to you in cultivating your ability to describe what you taste. Your guest has never experienced the kind of food you are eating. See if, from memory, you can describe in detail the foods that you tasted in the last meal you ate. Your guest has never heard of bran flakes or strawberries. You'll have to invent similes and metaphors to tell your guest what they taste like. It's not an easy exercise, but it will accelerate your skill as a sensuous writer. You wouldn't feed cardboard meals to guests. Don't feed cardboard meals to your characters. Make your reader's taste buds pop, even if he's from outer s.p.a.ce.

We speak of a "sixth sense" as a sensation we cannot identify with seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, or tasting, but which we know is there. "It" can be anything imagined or real, a person or a higher power. Some people refer to the phenomenon as extrasensory perception, or ESP. A writer can make excellent use of a "sixth sense" in mainline fiction as well as in mystery and suspense fiction. You are alone in the house, and you hear a door close. Is it the wind? But there is no wind inside the house.

An exercise to develop your sixth sense is worth trying. Close your eyes. Imagine who is in the room with you. Turn all the lights on. There's no one here. Good. You can relax. Is your watch ticking louder than usual, or are you imagining it? Why is today different from other days, what is supposed to happen? Why isn't the phone ringing? If it does ring, who will it be? Close your eyes again. Are you sure someone isn't in the room with you? What if you're wrong? What if it's ... ?

It doesn't take much for you to feed your hungry imagination. Through practice, you can establish a link between your imagination and the so-called sixth sense.

I've left the most important sense, sight, for last because it is the one least neglected by writers. Yet improving your eyesight, sharpening your ability to describe the visual, can be productive.

The first thing you see is usually a cliche. We see the tall man, the attractive woman, the room full of people, the clean-cut lawn. These are the easy images that leap to mind. The writer's job is to look for distinguis.h.i.+ng detail, the particularity, in visualizing what his reader is to see: the man whose wavy hair wouldn't stay under his cap; the woman who looked ready to shout at just about anyone, the partygoers jammed together as if they were on a crowded subway train; the virgin lawn that looked as if it had never been walked upon.

Ideally, the writer sees something that everybody will recognize but that no one has seen quite that way before.

A technique used too seldom involves changing the sense: Zalatnick led me into the shop not as if I was a fellow looking for a job but as if I was a friend of a friend. I was sure the men in the shop could smell the difference.

"Smell" isn't meant to be taken literally. Switching the sense from seeing to smelling creates a metaphor that gets the point across to the reader quickly.

Here's how one might use each of the six senses to characterize players in a story: Gloria kept wrinkling her nose as if she were trying to sniff the truth of what everyone was saying to her. (smell) Greg knew that his handshake hurt people. (touch) On the phone Mary's voice was like music. I couldn't hear the words, but I knew what she meant. (hearing) Lucille s.h.i.+elded her eyes like a make-believe Indian examining the horizon. (sight) Barry savored each spoonful of melon as if it were ambrosia he would never be allowed to taste again. (taste) Garret could swear someone had come in behind him, yet hesitated to turn around for fear he would be right. (sixth sense) If you look at those examples again, you'll note that each of the characterizations is an action. Somebody is doing something. There's no need to stop a story to characterize or to use the senses.

The main concern of this chapter is the most common kind of love scene in literature, between a man and a woman. But there are other kinds of love that provide writers and readers with appealing stories: love between an adult and a child; same-s.e.x love affairs; love between a human and an animal; love between children, and love in odd combinations.

To begin with the last, we already know that a major source for writers of fiction involves bringing together people from different social or ethnic backgrounds who meet and fall in love. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between are outstanding examples. In theater, the vitality of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is attributable in large measure to the clash of backgrounds. Sometimes the differences are bizarre-for instance the love of a monstrously deformed person for a normal-appearing human (or vice versa). It is useful to study the cla.s.sics such as Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame with an eye toward understanding how emotions are generated in the reader. The interplay in the audience's emotions may arise from the conflict of repugnance slowly overcome by affection. Young people are much more interested in and accepting of the grotesque in such fantasies. If you enter this difficult but rewarding territory, be mindful that your story to be acceptable must be sufficiently different from the well-known cla.s.sics.

Love stories of great poignancy can be fas.h.i.+oned out of the love between an adult and a child because once upon a time everyone was a child. A child can be desperate for love. Adults are sometimes too busy with the mechanics of living (job, homemaking, the behavior of other adults) to respond to a child's need. The denial of a child's craving for affection touches many readers. Love between a parent and child, or unrequited love between a parent and a child (in either direction), or the belated recognition of parental love or love of a parent, or a child or parent who rejects affection-all are possibilities. However, any s.e.xual conduct involving a child raises the issue of child molestation, a difficult subject for fiction and one involving psychopathology rather than love.

Affection between people and their pets or other animals is frequently the subject of children's books, and has long been important in such adult books as the Tarzan stories and Jack London's The Call of the Wild. It takes skill to make an animal believable as a character, and the best method is to give it a particularity just as you would a human character, a distinctive characteristic and preferably one that relates to the story-for instance a cat that jumps up into the lap of everyone but the person who loves it.

A mistake made easily in stories that involve animals is to neglect particularizing the human character. Also, it is important that the animal have a clear want of its own and not be merely the pa.s.sive recipient of human wants.

The writer who wants to write about the relations.h.i.+p of a human to an animal has to cross two tripwires. There seems to be a greater limit on imaginative story possibilities than in the relations.h.i.+ps between humans. So much has been done with human/animal material that innovation becomes difficult.

Also, the trap of sentimentality is present and ready to snap. It may amuse you to know that George Stevens, a long-time editor of J. B. Lippincott, once a venerable American publis.h.i.+ng firm, actually wrote a book that contained the three most common ingredients in the bestsellers of his time. He called his book Lincoln's Doctor's Dog.

Same-s.e.x love affairs have been the subject of fiction for a long time, though some books, like Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness were often banned, and E. M. Forster's Maurice was not published until after the author died. During recent decades, h.o.m.os.e.xual love stories and h.o.m.oerotic fiction have come out of the closet. A special market has developed for these stories, and h.o.m.os.e.xual attraction has made an occasional appearance in mainstream fiction.

Infantile and child s.e.xuality raises profound discomfort and disbelief in many readers, requiring great skill in the writing. However, a child showing immature affection for another child (sometimes called "puppy love") is widely acceptable. This is not a frequent subject of fiction and is difficult to do well.

Which leads us to the princ.i.p.al topic of this chapter, romantic and s.e.xual love between adults. I have some bad news.

Editors will tell you that love scenes are often among the worst-written scenes not only in rejected work but in published work. Such scenes are often mechanical, overly physiological, hackneyed, or sentimental. However, editors know that trying to discuss the flaws in love scenes with their authors is like walking across a mine field. One never knows when a flaw in the writing of a love scene derives from a buried discomfort in the author's life.

In recent decades we have had both a s.e.xual revolution and a counterrevolution. Along about 1960, a prominent publis.h.i.+ng attorney named Harriet Pilpel asked me if I was willing to go to jail for Henry Miller. I was then heading an upscale book club whose judges were interested in distributing a forthcoming Henry Miller t.i.tle that dealt with s.e.xual matters explicitly, and Ms. Pilpel, well known as a civil libertarian, seemed quite certain there was then a real risk of allegedly criminal conduct in distributing works by Henry Miller that are today found in bookshops throughout the world.

A few years later the floodgates opened not only to books that treated s.e.xual conduct openly and with some degree of seriousness, but also to transient novels that mocked adult lovemaking as much as misnamed "adult" movies did.

Adults are in general knowledgeable about the physical apparatus and actions involved in lovemaking, and concentration on these can quickly become repet.i.tive and boring. Some people, and consequently some writers, have never learned that mechanical description of s.e.xual activity does not usually arouse readers who are no longer adolescents. Moreover, female readers, who account for the purchase of most hardcover fiction, often lose patience with male writers who continue to fabricate love scenes solely from a male point of view. Men who write love scenes as if they are dealing with the mechanical parts of an engine should know that such scenes have zero erotic effect and do not accomplish their primary mission of evoking a loving experience between people.

Readers remain interested in pa.s.sion, if not in the mechanical details. Moreover, any novel accrues an advantage by including a love story. It is one of the easiest relations.h.i.+ps to plot, a fact that is most obvious in the field of musical comedy. A handsome young man appears at one side of the stage. A beautiful young woman appears on the other side. The audience immediately wants them to get together. It is the author's job to keep them apart as long as possible.

The gestation of love can be the central dramatic event in the lives of characters. The loss of love is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a human being. Both possibilities can generate enormous emotion in life and, if skillfully handled, in fiction.

The gain of love and the loss of love are powerful combustibles. It is doubly powerful to have both gain and loss of love in the same story. Suspense, tension, and conflict inhere in love stories. An endless cornucopia of relations.h.i.+ps is available to the writer.

Of course, disadvantages offset this. The prevalence of love in so much fiction requires the writer to exercise his imagination in order to come up with scenes that will seem fresh. Love stories also carry the danger of sentimentality.

The writer invokes sentimentality when he elicits superficial emotions that are exaggerated, excessive, or affected, obviously designed to elicit the reader's sympathy. Sentimentality in fiction usually comes across as patently insincere, mawkish, or maudlin, and should be avoided. A writer's sensibility should be directed toward evoking a depth of feeling in the reader, not to fabricating superficial excesses of emotion on the page.

The main flaw in most love scenes is similar to that of the main flaws in all other scenes: the reader's emotions have been insufficiently considered by the writer. The primary erogenous zone is in the head, and that's where the reader experiences writing.

The reader wants to identify with a character. Love scenes can be especially effective when the reader is identifying with both characters-that is, with the hoped-for success of the relations.h.i.+p-experiencing more than each of the characters individually. This can be accomplished if the writer considers the love scene from the point of view of each of the characters even when writing from the disciplined point of view of one of them. The reader needs to understand the relations.h.i.+p between the lovers better than either of the lovers do.

The two most essential ingredients in love scenes are tension and tenderness. A crisis in the relations.h.i.+p or postponing lovemaking, keeping the lovers apart as long as credibility permits, generates tension. It's a mistake to let the reader know early the likely outcome of the scene.

No love scene should be the repet.i.tion of a familiar ritual. To sustain the reader's interest in the outcome, the attraction should seem new even in a longstanding relations.h.i.+p.

Interruptions in a love scene can be useful. Not the grocery boy ringing the doorbell, but the lovers themselves noticing a picture, listening to some special music, talking about memories that arouse-all the while postponing the consummation to increase the tension of the scene. Literary foreplay does not necessarily involve physical contact. If the possibility of contact is in the air, nuances in actions and dialogue can affect the reader's emotions. A woman brus.h.i.+ng her hair can have a powerful aphrodisiac effect. Less produces more in the reader. In the following example a couple stand in front of the door of his house. The reader senses that once inside the house, they are going to make love. The writer's first temptation might be to let them in the house, to get on with it. But delay builds antic.i.p.ation. It can be accomplished by minutiae: I was waiting for him to say something. Instead he reached into his pocket and removed a key ring with three keys on it. Holding the first key, he said, "The garage." Then he held the second key, dangling the others, and said, "The back door."

He must have seen me smile.

He took the third key between his thumb and forefinger and said, "The front door." Then he handed the key ring with all three keys to me and said, "Welcome."

Among the many advantages of a love scene is that it provides excellent opportunities for characterizing both partners and for creating sympathy or antipathy toward one of the characters.

Love stories exist about each of the seven ages of man. Three of those ages are most useful to the writer.

The youngest lovers may be inexperienced, tentative, nervous, worried about pregnancy, disease, getting caught. Any or all of these can become a writer's Petri dish for brewing conflict and drama. External obstacles loom in abundance. The young lovers may be separated by distance because of school, work, and family. They may have to overcome cla.s.s differences, family incompatibilities, peer pressure, or rivalry from another young person, or from an older, more experienced individual. Keep in mind that you don't want to tell the reader what they are feeling, but to evoke feelings in the reader as a result of what the young lovers say to each other and what they do. It helps to make each of them vulnerable in a different way.

With adult lovers in the child-bearing age group, one of the most powerful forces of nature is at work, the drive toward procreation, often unknown to or unacknowledged by lovers. The human race is perpetuated by drives that are endocrinal in origin. Romantic love, as it is experienced by most (but not all) people, is a cultural invention. While these are things that the average reader doesn't want to hear about, it is important that the writer know them.5 Love scenes deal with the consequences of these physiological drives and cultural customs. Writers need to be knowledgeable about the nuances of human relations.h.i.+ps and the origins of feelings; hence, it helps for writers to know and understand as much as possible about the psychology and physiology underlying love- what the pulls are, whether or not the partic.i.p.ants are aware of them.

An obstacle commonly faced by adult lovers is the threat of a competing person and the consequent loss of security in a relations.h.i.+p. An adult wandering from a relations.h.i.+p can get involved with persons of questionable character and can blunder into acts of violence. The consequences of infidelity have inspired hundreds of plots. Some obstacles encountered by adult lovers are internal, such as guilt over conduct disapproved of by the person or by society. Also casting a shadow over both old and new relations.h.i.+ps is the fear of pa.s.sing age boundaries, of getting older.

In plotting a love story, a writer must remind himself that plot grows out of character. What happens in a love scene should come out of the writer's understanding of his characters and their motivation, and the clash between such characteristics or motivation in different characters. Some basic questions to ask yourself about your prospective love story: Does each of your lovers have one thing that distinguishes his or her physical appearance from that of other people? Is there something distinctive in the way your lovers dress?

Keep in mind that the most boring kind of relations.h.i.+p is one in which there are never any problems. He loved her and she loved him, they never quarreled, is the ultimate turnoff. In devising a love story, search for the root conflicts based on character and upbringing, but also ferret out surface conflict by asking yourself if you have depicted your adult lovers at a moment of crisis. If not, can you add a crisis that will increase the tension of the relations.h.i.+p? Does the woman want something reasonable that is refused by the man, perhaps for reasons that he keeps secret and that arouse her suspicions? Does the man want something that is refused by the woman because she is afraid of the result? Whatever your plan, remember that if there is no friction between the lovers, there is no interest on the part of the reader. And if there is ma.s.sive friction, will the reader be convinced that they are nevertheless in love? If they are not, you don't have a love story.

One exercise writers in my cla.s.ses have found to be exceptionally beneficial is writing an exchange of ten lines of dialogue, alternating between two lovers. The object is to have the reader experience two things from the ten lines: that the characters are quarreling and that they are lovers (not ex-lovers). You might want to try your hand at the exercise yourself. You may use more than one line for each turn, but keep the exchanges short: Lovers' Quarrel in Ten Brief Exchanges He: She: He: She: He: She: He: She: He: She: The "Lovers' Quarrel" exercise is not easy. Some writers, in their early attempts, find it as difficult as rubbing the belly with one hand while patting the top of the head with the other. But that is precisely the kind of thing a writer must do in the best of scenes, have more than one thing going on at a time. Students have been known to revise and rerevise drafts of this short exercise week after week until they achieve the objective: having the reader feel that the characters are in love and are quarreling. Let's look at a bad example: He: Where are you off to now?

She: None of your business.

He: You step out of this door, we're finished.

She: I'm glad you noticed. He: Noticed what? She: That we're finished, stupid. He: You're not taking my car.

She: It's half mine. Community property. Now get out of my way. He: I'll report the car stolen.

She: I'm sure the cops will love finding out you reported your car stolen by your wife.

What's wrong? We have a quarrel but no indication that, though married, they are still lovers. Let's look at another example: He: You touched me. She: I've got a license to touch. He: I just got home, hon. She: I know.

He: Hey, I haven't even had a chance to wash up. She: I know.

He: I'll fall walking backwards. She: I know.

He: The couch is in the way. Hey! She: Gotcha!

It's clear that they're lovers. There is tension in the scene, but they are not really quarreling. The wife's repet.i.tion of "I know" is a nice touch, and the exchange has a coherence, but it is not a lovers' quarrel. The point of this exercise is to learn how to do two things at the same time. When students develop their skill, I encourage them to add some narrative to the dialogue and even to increase the number of lines, if necessary, to complete the scene. The following miniscene is what one of my male students came up with after some revision: "I never wanted to see you again." "Then why did you come back?" "The roses," he said.

She turned in the archway, gilded by rays, back to him, walled, protected, and stared into the tangle of exploded flowers. They had opened and fallen back upon themselves like silent film stars, dried leaves, brittle branches.

"You came to see a dying garden, Ryan." "We planted it together." "I didn't know you were coming." "Meg, I didn't know you would be here."

She felt his eyes on her back. The Bukhara sucked in his footfalls as he crossed the room. He edged beside her.

"It needs water, care ... "

"Maybe it will rain," she said.

"Can't count on rain. It needs ... some care."

"You were always too busy," Meg said and turned slowly toward him. "It was beautiful once. Wasn't it?"

"Like a meteor shower," Ryan said. "I'm sorry." "So am I."

We know they are still lovers. At the outset they are having a strong difference of opinion. The reader can't help feeling some emotion when reading this short scene. I encourage you to try this exercise from time to time as your skill develops. You may find a story or even an entire novel blossoming from it.

Another age group to consider is older lovers, perhaps from the age of fifty to the so-called golden years celebrated in the film On Golden Pond. The underlying drive toward procreation is at rest. Companions.h.i.+p increases in importance. Shared experience in the past becomes a vital part of the present. Security, both economic and emotional, becomes more important. And there is the omnipresent fear or acceptance of inevitable death. But one should consider certain liabilities of this fertile ground for the writer.

In Western countries, sadly, there is far less respect for the wisdom that comes with age than in Eastern countries. As a result, among the young there is little interest in the aged. When love relations.h.i.+ps among older persons are handled expertly, the results are felt by audiences of all ages, but the marketing of such material is enc.u.mbered with difficulty. As the population in developed countries lives longer, however, there may be a s.h.i.+ft in interest that will make love stories involving older characters easier to market.

Questions to ask yourself if you are considering a story with older lovers: In developing your love scene, is there a hovering notion that the lovers do not have all the time in the world?

Have you included the need for companions.h.i.+p, often the most urgent need of older people?

Have you included touching or some other physical relations.h.i.+p that will enhance the poignancy?

The key to writing an effective love scene is to imagine it from the perspective of each of the partners. If the writer is a woman, she should give special thought to the perspective of the man in the scene. If the writer is a man, he should give special thought to the perspective of the woman. Then the scene can be written from the third-person point of view, or from the first-person point of view of either of the characters, but the writer will have imagined the thoughts and feelings of both partners, which should enable the scene to be written as richly as possible.