Where to look when something's "on the nose"...?

[Incanus]

Hey Helio, I just wanted to point something out in the example you provided. (If you'll allow me to be a bit off-topic for a moment.)

The way I see it, it is much harder to come up with a nice line like this: Throughout the Piazza glass clinked, bottles poured and music rolled down the cobbled stones like spilled beads.

...than it is to remove (or even rephrase) something like 'hung thick'. (Or to fix "gypsy's", for that matter.)

As long as you're hitting those nice lines from time to time in your first draft, you've got a good thing going (as I think you do!). Because in the future, you will edit, edit, edit! Build on that nice material, add more of it, cut back on the mediocre. Slowly--ever so slowly--the thing starts to take on a nice shine.

 

[FifthView]

When I try to write a story, I'm missing it. Instead of writing "true" I'm trying to write "pretty"… which I know doesn't work in poetry, so why the hell am I trying to do that in my prose? And what I end up with is crap with the same descriptions and sentences and phrasing that everyone else uses…

She turned to face the man…

The scent of perfume hung heavy in the air…

She tried to breath but the air wouldn't' come

Ugh! Instead of writing true I'm writing tired cliches… which feel too me "on the nose."… too deliberate. Too exactly what everyone else is writing with no hint of 'truth' to them anymore… does that make sense?

When I write figuratively I feel like I'm getting closer to truth:

Women in silk gowns and feathered wigs twirled with golden gods, falling stars or the sun in rich brocade. And masks. Too close and too bright. Masks that split faces in half. Masks that looked of death and masks that hinted at folly.

The above feels more "real" to me…

Ok, I'll have to return to this. But I want to throw out there something that has flitted across my mind that might also kind of approach your issue...?

In light of what I already wrote above about on the nose dialogue and characters, consider the narrator as being another character.

So maybe it's something like this:

• Author
• Narrator-Character
• Characters

So. If on the nose dialogue is creating cardboard cutout characters merely to advance some goal of the author, an on the nose narrator might be the same sort of thing. The exposition (and description within the exposition) is utilitarian; the author's advancing some goal. In a flat, direct sort of way, a mechanical way.

BTW, "utilitarian" has been a word popping into my head when I try to wrap my mind around this.

BUT (and following upon what I wrote earlier), a narrator is "vast" also, as a character.

Now, you can see this sort of thing when you clearly have a "storyteller" in a story; remember I once mentioned using bias/opinions to signal that there is a storyteller? So such a narrator might break into an odd consideration about the merits of English pixies vs Spanish pixies, even if the plot doesn't really require that knowledge be put before the reader. That's one of those "random" things a character might do in the middle of a conversation. And this can expand the world, also, or make it more vast by implication.

You can also see this when an intimate 3rd-person approach is used, so that the character almost (but not really) becomes the narrator, as in an example I recently gave elsewhere from GRRM:

There were pine and linden shields to be had for pennies, but Brienne rode past them. She meant to keep the heavy oaken shield Jaime had given her, the one he'd borne himself from Harrenhal to King's Landing. A pine shield had its advantages. It was lighter, and therefore easier to bear, and the soft wood was more like to trap a foeman's axe or sword. But oak gave more protection, if you were strong enough to bear its weight.​

OK, GRRM did not need to go into a drawn-out consideration on the merits of pine shields vs oak shields. He could have merely written that Brienne passed through a market that included X, Y, Z, and a variety of shields. But this is on Brienne's mind. Now, this is a little cheating, because there is in fact a narrator that is not Brienne; but that narrator is stepping back and letting Brienne's vastness pseudo-narrate.

And masks. Too close and too bright. Masks that split faces in half. Masks that looked of death and masks that hinted at folly.

The above are subjective opinions, observations, bias. Also, incomplete sentences, and a certain way of "speaking" that implies a peculiar, subjective attention or focus.

The scent of perfume hung heavy in the air…

This is somewhat utilitarian. Sure, it might accurately represent a POV character's experience. But it's to-the-point, and I even think (relating this to the recent "literary" or "old" voice thread discussion) that sometimes miscellaneous info can be put into exposition merely to show that, "Hey, the POV character has senses" or "Hey, the POV character is experiencing something." "The POV character is not now walking through a vacuum, an emptiness." (Maybe I'm dancing around this too much, however.)

Now, obviously an author has information to get out there, an author knows she's going to have to travel from point A to point B to point C, and sometimes a simple, utilitarian insertion works just fine.* I'd said before that on the nose exposition, description, and so forth are really bad (in my own personal reading experience) when it's all throughout a book or in large quantities. (And generally, dominant.)

*Edit: Maybe I should have made clearer, because I want to be clear, that I'm not really pointing a finger at direct statements or direct exposition. But splitting those hairs will require a little more contemplation.

 

[FifthView]

And what I end up with is crap with the same descriptions and sentences and phrasing that everyone else uses…

By the way, off the cuff, maybe this means that you are using someone else's cardboard cutout narrator?

Philosophically...this could go too deep maybe. We often learn our patterns of speech, habits of communication, from others, or pick those things up without realizing we have.

 

[Heliotrope]

I like deep. I'm at dinner now do I'm being super rude but I have lots of responses on the way...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

T

She turned to face the man…

The scent of perfume hung heavy in the air…

She tried to breath but the air wouldn't' come

Ugh! Instead of writing true I'm writing tired cliches… which feel too me "on the nose."… too deliberate. Too exactly what everyone else is writing with no hint of 'truth' to them anymore… does that make sense?

Since these are the working examples... I think you have 3 different sorts of phrases here, in order: Standard, Cliche, and Ugh.

I have one problem with #1 (I'll note that at the end) but in general it's a line that nobody needs avoid, Cormac McCarthy I'm sure has said this and variants numerous times, pretty much every writer has (outside of my upcoming point), it's just common language. Long form writers can not avoid standards, there's basically no point in trying. What matters is what comes after that line. They are a bit like he said, she said, we just buzz over them. Now for the potential bad: it could be considered redundant, which I could take issue with... She turned to face him, She faced him, the other part is unnecessary. I think when a person finds themselves in these situations, sometimes it's just best to say things in the most straight forward, concise, simple way. McCarthy is very good about that, amongst of course, many other things.

#2 is a cliche with alliteration to highlight its cliche-ness. This particular example is bad because of cliche and it's vague... hung heavy, alliteration that really means, well, not much. If it's important enough to mention, its important enough for some specificity... although depending on genre and TA, most folks would blow right by it.

#3 I can't even call cliche or tired or over-used, I've never heard it before (to my knowledge, maybe I just don't read the right bad stuff, heh heh) it's just flat clunky. It's a line that is good to have in a first draft because it jumps out and says CHANGE ME! I'd much rather have these obvious lines to change than borderline ones.

Do they constitute on-the-nose in any way? Not to me, since cliche already has a designation, and the other two have identifiable issues. So far to me, I don't really see anything that needs defined as on-the-nose, it sounds like your subconscious identifying problems without clarifying why, heh heh.

 

[Heliotrope]

Hey Helio, I just wanted to point something out in the example you provided. (If you'll allow me to be a bit off-topic for a moment.)

The way I see it, it is much harder to come up with a nice line like this: Throughout the Piazza glass clinked, bottles poured and music rolled down the cobbled stones like spilled beads.

...than it is to remove (or even rephrase) something like 'hung thick'. (Or to fix "gypsy's", for that matter.)

As long as you're hitting those nice lines from time to time in your first draft, you've got a good thing going (as I think you do!). Because in the future, you will edit, edit, edit! Build on that nice material, add more of it, cut back on the mediocre. Slowly--ever so slowly--the thing starts to take on a nice shine.

Thanks Incanus, that is very kind of you. And, you sort of answered my question, actually… so is that what you do? You include the crappy bits and then search and destroy later?

 

[Heliotrope]

This followed an example of on the nose dialogue. But I think it's wrong.

Why is on the nose dialogue bad, anyway? Because the characters are reduced to cardboard cutouts. They are there only to fulfill some need the author has for dumping info, or to thinly veil the author herself by using different names and pseudo-characters (mouthpieces for the author), or to move a plot along while pretending to "show" a real conversation.

But real characters (Hah! They are all fictional!) have real motivations, real histories that are vast and full of experiences, real desires, real obsessions. So what may appear "random" to a reader at first, or even to another character, really should flow from within the character that is speaking. If that Fifthview in your example doesn't answer some question about what he wants for dinner but instead mentions a lamp he bought earlier, this is because something in the buying of that lamp is important to him; his attention is focused on it. If that Kenny mentions the effect pineapple has on him, before pineapple has been mentioned by anyone else, it's because he has a history with pineapple and pizza always brings up that history; plus, he probably has a ready-made correlation between pineapple and "the human condition and how it relates to technology" that he wants to share.
--------

So. When I think about description, plot, exposition, action...in terms of being on-the-nose, I also think about this flatness vs vastness. At least, the sort of negative reading experience I have from time to time that made me think of "on the nose" in this larger sense could be vaguely characterized as relating to this flatness vs vastness. But I'm still feeling my way on this, so...

Yeah, and I think that's what I was getting at with my randomness piece… the fact that everyone is all over the place at the same time, thinking about a thousand different things and being pulled in a thousand different directions. Everyone has their own goals and thoughts and needs… so a conversation at any given time will make no sense and be seen as totally 'random' to a by-stander, while it will make perfect sense within the context of the people having the conversion… Does that make sense?

So with my example with FifthView and the lamp, I was getting at exactly what you just described… Fifthveiw could care less about dinner, plus he was too commitment-phobic to make a suggestion . He didn't care whether it was sushi or pizza or vegan lasagna… he was dodging the subject while at the same time excited about his recent steal.

And I'm so glad you picked up on the fact that KennyC mentioned pineapple when pineapple was not previously mentioned! That was exactly it… to a bystander it would be random. Why Pineapple? But within context it would work.

Which I hope highlights the vastness of the human experience. Everyone is bringing their own experiences to the conversation…

? Does that make more sense?

 

[Heliotrope]

O

In light of what I already wrote above about on the nose dialogue and characters, consider the narrator as being another character.

So maybe it's something like this:

• Author
• Narrator-Character
• Characters

So. If on the nose dialogue is creating cardboard cutout characters merely to advance some goal of the author, an on the nose narrator might be the same sort of thing. The exposition (and description within the exposition) is utilitarian; the author's advancing some goal. In a flat, direct sort of way, a mechanical way.

BTW, "utilitarian" has been a word popping into my head when I try to wrap my mind around this.

BUT (and following upon what I wrote earlier), a narrator is "vast" also, as a character.
.

Ahhhhhhhhh, now this is an important thought I think, and a very valuable piece of information. Yes. I see what you mean. I see the difference between simply moving from point a to point b in a shallow sort of utilitarian way, vs. using that deep POV, even if it a narrator POV. This is where I think I may be having my issues. Pulling out of the story myself…

Utilitarian feels "on the nose" to me because it is too obvious. What is the point of it even being there if it adds nothing other than filler? To me, an obvious description is the same as an obvious dialogue strand.

"I hate you because you are mean to me."

Feels the same as:

The cold air smelled sweet like roses and musk… (or hung heavy.)

If there is no opinions, no subtext, no purpose behind the statement, then what is the point?

 

[Heliotrope]

By the way, off the cuff, maybe this means that you are using someone else's cardboard cutout narrator?

Philosophically...this could go too deep maybe. We often learn our patterns of speech, habits of communication, from others, or pick those things up without realizing we have.

Again. I like deep.

Yes, I think you are right. I think I'm picking and choosing instead of letting it come from me. Probably a confidence issue (if you want to get deep.) Other narrators are better than me because what the hell do I think I'm doing trying to write a story anyway?

 

[Heliotrope]

Since these are the working examples... I think you have 3 different sorts of phrases here, in order: Standard, Cliche, and Ugh.

I have one problem with #1 (I'll note that at the end) but in general it's a line that nobody needs avoid, Cormac McCarthy I'm sure has said this and variants numerous times, pretty much every writer has (outside of my upcoming point), it's just common language. Long form writers can not avoid standards, there's basically no point in trying. What matters is what comes after that line. They are a bit like he said, she said, we just buzz over them. Now for the potential bad: it could be considered redundant, which I could take issue with... She turned to face him, She faced him, the other part is unnecessary. I think when a person finds themselves in these situations, sometimes it's just best to say things in the most straight forward, concise, simple way. McCarthy is very good about that, amongst of course, many other things.

#2 is a cliche with alliteration to highlight its cliche-ness. This particular example is bad because of cliche and it's vague... hung heavy, alliteration that really means, well, not much. If it's important enough to mention, its important enough for some specificity... although depending on genre and TA, most folks would blow right by it.

#3 I can't even call cliche or tired or over-used, I've never heard it before (to my knowledge, maybe I just don't read the right bad stuff, heh heh) it's just flat clunky. It's a line that is good to have in a first draft because it jumps out and says CHANGE ME! I'd much rather have these obvious lines to change than borderline ones.

Do they constitute on-the-nose in any way? Not to me, since cliche already has a designation, and the other two have identifiable issues. So far to me, I don't really see anything that needs defined as on-the-nose, it sounds like your subconscious identifying problems without clarifying why, heh heh.

Thanks Dem

Yeah, I may be getting cliche confused with on-the-nose… or maybe I have it clear in my head but it is so figurative that I'm having trouble explaining it…

Like, when I think of on-the-nose dialogue I think of exactly what you said… it is too obvious. It is exactly what the person is thinking… But people never know exactly what they are thinking!! That's why we pay thousands of dollars to therapists.

"I hate you because you are mean to me." Never happens in real life. There is no subtext.

And this is why I think I'm seeing obvious descriptions as on-the-nose…

The chair was red or the air hung heavy with rose and musk… doesn't happen in real life. Do people stand around thinking things like that? "The air hung heavy with rose and musk."

"The chair was red." Really? Just red? It didn't stir any connections to you at all of all the other hundreds of thousands of red things you have ever seen? Was it fire engine red? How about SnowBirds red? How were you feeling when you saw these red chairs?

People have pasts, values, goals, experiences… all that junk they carry around with them every minute of every day… every thing we see carries some sort of background or value judgement on it… That is the subtext, I think, in narrative… Only I was having trouble getting it, and now I think I get it…

The piazza stunk with the vintage rose perfume used by the nobility to mask the stench of their sin. Nauseated, Antonia took shallow breaths to keep herself from gagging.

Macintosh red and shining from fresh lacquer, the chair looked delicious enough to bite into. (Yes, I have red kitchen chairs, and I'm feeling slightly peckish)…

Does that make sense? Like there should be some sort of opinion, or human connection attached to it? The chairs aren't just red, they remind the narrator of macintosh apples and how hungry she is. The air didn't just "hang heavy" with perfume, it stunk and the pregnant, pious character had to keep herself from gagging…

Am I on to it FifthView?

*Edit, which brings be back to my random comment from earlier -

Chairs = MacIntosh Apples.

Perfume = Covering Sin

Random connections that only make sense when shown through the human experience?

 

[evolution_rex]

My current WIP has a ton of symbolism and metaphors. I don't think I'll have any way of knowing if it's too on the nose, but it is something I've worried about. I know I want the main character's growth to be noticeable, because it's the main focal point of the story. But I have been afraid that I'm going overboard with describing my character as depressed.

However, the story is a bit of a puzzle (but not that complicated of a puzzle, I'm hoping), and if you 'solve' the puzzle, you can get the themes of the story. To make it a little difficult, and because I love surrealism and writing down the weird odd visions I have in my head even if they don't make sense, I've placed things that I call 'distraction symbols'. which are little false hints, little uses of creative language or surreal events that might make a reader think it's about one then when it's really another thing. But it also allows the reader to interpret it in their own way, which is something I'd like them to do. My main inspiration for this sort of thing are the Coen Brothers, who are brothers, directors, and writers. Particularly their film Barton Fink, which include many of these sort of symbols. I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I'm taking the risk on it. I'm hoping that these things sort of even it all out, and make it a head turning but enjoyable experience.

 

[Heliotrope]

Thanks ER... Is this your pizza man story? I've been intregued by it ever since you mentioned it a while back. I love surrealist weird. I'd love to read it when you are finished. I'm going for a Pan's Lybrinth feel with my wip, but it was feeling so shallow... So utilitarian. So "on the nose"...

I think now I've figured out where my prose was betraying me...

 

[Chessie]

Hi, Helio. I'm not sure that I completely understand the entirety of your problem, but I want to help. Descriptions and dialogue aren't something I think deeply about when I write. Not sure how much I change afterward, but my guess is that it's very little because I'm hella lazy. Imo, dialogue should be prompt, natural, with people avoiding what they really want to say most of the time. Write what comes out naturally. Organic. Don't dwell on every word.

I have a couple of samples from my WIP to share with you. Now, I'm not very descriptive. I like to say what I mean and move on to the next thing that needs saying. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But maybe something in it might help you since a lot of this learning comes from us reading the work of others and seeing what we can absorb.

The trail led to a deeper part of the forest, gradually uphill, and ended in a grassy pasture. Aged remnants of the former silver mine remained. Abandoned cabins, which housed the miners at one point, barely stood upright with caved in roofs and the weathered signs of mother nature. The wooden posts used to hitch horses had more splinters than she could count, and the area had an eerie vibe to it encased by who-the-hell-knows-what’s-out-there wilderness.

Spoiler: excerpt 2

“I’m thinking of turning in,” Una said and yawned. “Pa wants us back early so we’ll break camp after sunrise.”
“Whatever.” Audie made her resentment known with a quick grumble. Pa left for work early and needed a good breakfast before he left. That task kept Ma in the kitchen while she and Una cleaned horse stalls, milked the cow, and harvested eggs from the coop. Why the old man’s hunger meant she had to wake up at an ungodly hour to scoop horseshit fueled her bitterness on the daily.
“Baby.” Una’s response seemed directed at Audie’s unspoken thoughts. She wiped her greasy hands with a rag and picked at her teeth with her finger. “But before I go to bed...you still haven’t told me how your date with Chancy went.”
Audie groaned internally. She’d been kissed for the first time ever but why would she share that with Una? “He’s a bore,” she said, rolling up the fabric of her skirt with the nugget hidden away. “There’s nothing more to be said about it.”
“I thought you liked him.” Una’s teasing tone was more irritating than her smirk and unwelcome questions. “I see how he looks at you. My experience with men has been such that they only get a flicker of desire in their eyes for women that make them feel something.”
Just go to bed already, Audie thought. “Your habits with men rival those of the whores at the saloon hall, too,” she said, fully meaning to sound insulting.
Una scowled, eyes narrowed with a poisonous tone aching to wound back. “At least men like what they see when I come around. Can’t say there’s much for the eye to linger on with a chest as flat as Ma’s washing board.”

 

[evolution_rex]

Thanks ER... Is this your pizza man story? I've been intregued by it ever since you mentioned it a while back. I love surrealist weird. I'd love to read it when you are finished. I'm going for a Pan's Lybrinth feel with my wip, but it was feeling so shallow... So utilitarian. So "on the nose"...

I think now I've figured out where my prose was betraying me...

Once I'm finished with my first draft, I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.

And honestly, I wouldn't get caught up on whether or not it's shallow. Even if it only has tiny hints of something under the surface of the story, people will love it. Often small amounts of depth are far more effective. Besides, surrealism doesn't need to be complicated. Some of my favorite examples of surrealism are completely abstract works. The only issue I could say is that if there is a twist in your story that you've foreshadowed too often or too obviously. If that's the case, I think it relies on what beta readers think.

 

[Heliotrope]

Hi Chesterama, thanks for posting your samples

For me, right now, my issue is a personal growing pains issue I think…. developing my style and figuring out why I want to write the things I want to write… and how to write them.

I don't have an issue with dialogue. That seems to be Ok for me…

Right now the issue I'm having is with utilitarian descriptions or narrative… struggling with the "so what" of the lines… why are they there? What purpose do they serve? Do they pull any weight?

When I read your first sample the entire thing is obviously there for a reason. The history is built into the subtext, as well as the way the narrator feels frightened of the surrounding forest.

I find myself writing stuff, descriptions, that are there because I feel they should be there… but for what purpose? Usually none. Usually they have no subtext. They carry no weight. This might be an editing issue as well, obviously…

The sculptor glistened from eyebrow to ankle in a thick blue powder.

“Pardon, Sigñor Buonarroti -,” Antonia started, but stopped when the man raised his blue arm toward the raucous in the square.

“I can't work like this.” He bellowed. “You see me?” He opened his arms, lowered his blue beard to her face, and widened his eyes. “This is lapis lazuli, Signora. This paint costs more than gold.” She raised her dark eyes to meet his blue ones.

“Paint, Señor? I thought you were a sculptor?”

“Sculptor. Painter. Candlestick maker. What is it to them? They know nothing.” He spat at Cardinal de Cesena. “They know figs. Figs. They know nothing.”

“Figs, Signor?”


It's lines like that that bug me. What is their purpose? None. I can just as well take it out because it doesn't matter. It holds no weight. Do we really need to be told that her dark eyes met his?

Bah!

"The air hung heavy with rose and musk"… My writing is full of these terrible random lines that hold no weight. That serve no purpose. That are just description for the sake of description with no voice behind them. It gives the entire thing this very shallow, utilitarian feel that drives me insane.

So, I'm thinking it's a voice issue, for sure. Just like how dialogue needs to have subtext… not being exactly what the speaking is thinking, I think narrative also needs to have subtext. It needs to be there for a reason. If I'm going to show the masks of carnival, or tell of the smell in the air, I personally feel it needs to carry more weight than just being a simple description…

Does that make sense?

 

[Chessie]

Yes, it does make sense and to which my answer is: then take them out.

 

[FifthView]

Helio, I have a lot to say—too much, really. So I might hop around a little.

Yeah, and I think that's what I was getting at with my randomness piece… the fact that everyone is all over the place at the same time, thinking about a thousand different things and being pulled in a thousand different directions. Everyone has their own goals and thoughts and needs… so a conversation at any given time will make no sense and be seen as totally 'random' to a by-stander, while it will make perfect sense within the context of the people having the conversion… Does that make sense?

I think it's important to point out that there are different degrees of this. On one extreme, yes, an outsider or in-story interlocutor might be confronted by apparently random responses that make little sense. But on another, there might be much more subtle shading, perhaps a sensible but odd turn of phrase that hints at underlying motives or peculiar focus. I think that in either case, the best use of this will still leave the reader feeling that the speech is not at all random but must spring from some hidden context; so, one might go too far in the "randomness" and end up with something no better than on-the-nose dialogue.

This is a little funny, actually, because if the author goes too far in using randomness, her intention—introducing true randomness in order to make a seemingly not on-the-nose exchange—would become on-the-nose! I.e., merely utilitarian, the result of an author thinking, "Hmmm. I need to make these seem like real people. So I'm going to make the responses of these speakers to each other's speech totally random."

Again. I like deep.

What I was trying to approach, in my comment about the deeply philosophical question...Demesnedenoir addressed rather well. Language is commonly shared; in fact, our understanding of one another depends on this! So some ways of speaking are rather standard, basic, and, as D. said, are as unobtrusive as "he said" or "she said." But then, at the other extreme, cliché is essentially the same. I'd wager that some readers would float over certain clichéd approaches as easily as everyone floats over "he said"—although not all would.

So, when I have mentioned not being against direct statement or direct exposition, while also mentioning the fact that quantity or degree makes a difference in my enjoyment or lack thereof re: on-the-nose approaches...well, I rarely find a book that doesn't cause a single stumble or irritation while I'm reading it. I might float over a phrase or two, an occasional paragraph that is rather blunt and to-the-point. My problem is when that's all there is in the book (or mostly).

So I'm not sure that obsessing over every phrase in order to make sure nothing is on-the-nose will be helpful. Normal communication (what we all share) is probably littered with on-the-nose-ish phrasing. But, importantly, that is not all we do. If you are trying to get someone's attention, wanting them to focus on you and stop running through whatever's going on in their own mind, you're likely to throw out there something that makes them pause and think, "Huh?" An odd turn of phrase. A seemingly (but not really) random observation. And so forth.

A lot of the online reading I've been doing over the last few days re: "on the nose" has focused on dialogue and action. It's a fairly common term in the theater and movie industry, and these are two areas that greatly affect those mediums. They don't have to worry about exposition—at least, not the type of exposition novelists and short story writers use. During my reading, I came across one site that did mention the importance of avoiding on-the-nose writing in prose, and it included these two examples:

On the nose dialogue (and activity) robs characters of their complexity, bores readers, and signals “amateur” to editors and agents. To wit:

Sam knocked on the door, let himself in, crossed the room to one of two leather chairs and sat down. He looked across the desk to his boss. “Good morning. You wanted to see me?”

vs.

There was a knock on the door. Before Turnbull could answer, Sam walked in and sank into one of two leather chairs facing the desk. He ran his fingers through dark hair that had grown considerably since his ouster from Corporate America, then clasped his hands on top of his head. “The furrow in your brow, it’s as deep as anything on June’s face. What’s up?”​

Which of these examples has nuance and mystery? Which has an inner life, something going on between the lines?​

Now, I could be fine with either of these—for a short span. But imagine carrying on and on in the one style versus the other?

Sam knocked on the door, let himself in, crossed the room to one of two leather chairs and sat down. He looked across the desk to his boss. “Good morning. You wanted to see me?”

"Yes, Sam. There's an anomaly in last quarter's financial report. Our shipping expenses have raised 75% despite an increase in output of only 5%. Can you look into that?" Mr. Lewis shoved a report across the desk toward Sam.

Sam took the report and glanced at its cover, then smiled at his boss. "Sure thing, boss. I'll get right on it." He stood and left the office.

The hallway traffic had thinned; most people were taking their lunch. He hoped Abigail was still at her cubical. She could look over the report for him, in no time...​

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I think it really depends on what you mean, which of course is the tricky part with any human discussion, LOL.

I've got a sense of what you are saying, but it's a tricky slope. "The chair was red" does happen in real life, except in present tense, and I might not even really think of the chair or its color at all. What reaches the page is a narrative version of the subtle things that we as humans often don't think of. I may have sat in a red chair yesterday, but in my memoirs it might be a chair so candy-apple red I'd swear they ripped the paint off a Ferrari... This could have the same subtext as a red chair really... eluding to the tastes of the owners, while the Ferrari red could point out the family who owns the chair is really rich, is into cars/ formula racing, or what have you. In addition, it will matter what is around it, context not simply subtext...

The walls of the library were egg-white, the curtains a drab brown. Every piece of furniture in the room was oak stained golden except where Lord Tannenbaum pointed and told me to sit. The chair was red.

But really, whatever you want to call it, on-the-nose or whatever, the main thing is being able to identify what you don't like. The real trouble comes when nobody else likes the parts we do like, LOL.

Thanks Dem

Yeah, I may be getting cliche confused with on-the-nose… or maybe I have it clear in my head but it is so figurative that I'm having trouble explaining it…

Like, when I think of on-the-nose dialogue I think of exactly what you said… it is too obvious. It is exactly what the person is thinking… But people never know exactly what they are thinking!! That's why we pay thousands of dollars to therapists.

"I hate you because you are mean to me." Never happens in real life. There is no subtext.

And this is why I think I'm seeing obvious descriptions as on-the-nose…

The chair was red or the air hung heavy with rose and musk… doesn't happen in real life. Do people stand around thinking things like that? "The air hung heavy with rose and musk."

"The chair was red." Really? Just red? It didn't stir any connections to you at all of all the other hundreds of thousands of red things you have ever seen? Was it fire engine red? How about SnowBirds red? How were you feeling when you saw these red chairs?

People have pasts, values, goals, experiences… all that junk they carry around with them every minute of every day… every thing we see carries some sort of background or value judgement on it… That is the subtext, I think, in narrative… Only I was having trouble getting it, and now I think I get it…

The piazza stunk with the vintage rose perfume used by the nobility to mask the stench of their sin. Nauseated, Antonia took shallow breaths to keep herself from gagging.

Macintosh red and shining from fresh lacquer, the chair looked delicious enough to bite into. (Yes, I have red kitchen chairs, and I'm feeling slightly peckish)…

Does that make sense? Like there should be some sort of opinion, or human connection attached to it? The chairs aren't just red, they remind the narrator of macintosh apples and how hungry she is. The air didn't just "hang heavy" with perfume, it stunk and the pregnant, pious character had to keep herself from gagging…

Am I on to it FifthView?

*Edit, which brings be back to my random comment from earlier -

Chairs = MacIntosh Apples.

Perfume = Covering Sin

Random connections that only make sense when shown through the human experience?

 

[Heliotrope]

FifthView - Excellent examples. Exactly what I was talking about. That "inner life" piece…

*sigh*

Dem - Yeah, I guess it's really finding the balance? For me right now it's finding those key details that serve the story.

He ran his fingers through dark hair that had grown considerably since his ouster from Corporate America,

Serves the story. It says something about the character and his past. The fact that he burst into to room before the other guy could answer… all those descriptions say something about the character. Who he is. Who he was…

Using details that matter and carry weight… even in your description the "drab" curtains give an opinion.

I see now, I think, where I was struggling… I was describing without knowing why.. what the purpose was to the descriptions. Every now and again I would nail it with voice… but there were those sections in between that had no direction.

I think I may understand now what my issue was and why I needed to talk about it so much…

*PS… for anyone else reading this thread, I hope my total incompetence in there area was helpful for you I have no problem looking a fool in the name of education.

 

[FifthView]

FifthView - Excellent examples. Exactly what I was talking about. That "inner life" piece…

Well...In my haste I might have accidentally included a Huh? moment, since Sam/Bob* went from saying "Good morning" to walking through the hall during lunchtime.....lol.

*Fixed the name confusion.