Experts talk about “neural mirroring” or the tendency for a person to echo back the expressions and energy of another. Zombies, they say, are so frightening because they always display a flattened emotional affect. They show no emotion despite the circumstances. And the fact that they don’t mirror the emotions of people makes them appear all the more hostile and alien.
Whatever the case, I hadn’t worked with the other Chuck a week before I’d adopted his twitch. This wasn’t deliberate. Not like when young people pick and choose from the mannerisms and traits they find appealing, assembling their own presentation. No, the mouth twitch was contagious.
That, that’s the kind of physicality I’d tell you to develop in your work.
To heighten that physical element of a story, it helps to depict characters using drugs, or suffering illness. Depict sex and violence, or medical procedures.
These are all ways to exaggerate a character’s physical awareness, and to prompt the reader to have a sympathetic physical reaction. Whether it’s drugs or sex or illness, it also allows you to distort the normal world so that regular settings and events appear warped and menacing. The rose and the oak tree become the grotesque alien realities Jean-Paul Sartre saw them to be. In my story “Loser” a college student tripping on LSD participates in a television game show, and in struggling through he realizes that the competition to amass huge amounts of consumer goods is insane.
In E. B. White’s story “Dusk in Fierce Pajamas” the onset of pink eye drives the narrator progressively mad with fever as he pores over the pictures in fashion magazines.
Tom Spanbauer would call this “going on the body.” By this he meant focusing on physical sensation within a character. As in, “This would be a good place to go on the body…” It’s a reliable way to unpack a dramatic moment. Just shift from describing the exterior scene to depicting the interior of a character. As the writer Matthew Stadler advises, “When you don’t know what comes next, describe the interior of the narrator’s mouth.” He was joking, but he wasn’t.
If done well, this prompts a similar reaction in the reader’s body. With that complete, you can shift back to describing the scene, or intercut with a big-voice observation, or add a new stressor, or whatever you think will best keep up the tension of the moment.
By going “on the body” you enroll the reader’s body as well as her heart and mind. You usurp his entire reality.
If you were my student I’d tell you to watch what people do unconsciously. Collect the stories they tell to explain their behavior.
For further examples, see the section that follows. Authority: Breakfast at
Brooks Brothers
When my mother died I asked around until someone recommended a Jungian analyst. My aim was to tackle this mourning thing head-on.
Jungian because Carl Jung’s storytelling approach appealed to me, dreams and all that, like keeping a dream log. And every Thursday morning before any of the downtown shops had opened I met this man in his high-rise office. He made me a cup of tea, and we talked about whatever frustrated me that week. I paid him three $50 bills and left vibrating with shame about talking too much and saying nothing significant while resenting how he’d said almost nothing.
His dog was old, he told me. He’d talk about saving its shed fur. A company on the internet would spin the dog fur into yarn and knit him a sweater he’d have to comfort him once the dog had died. A charming idea, still not worth the kind of money I was paying. This went on from around daffodil time until the first tulips bloomed, roughly from the Super Bowl until taxes were due.
Whatever an analyst does, he did it, if that includes watching the birds on the window ledge and occasionally asking if I’d had any dreams. I hadn’t. The silence seemed like a waste of $150 so I kept filling it. An hour would go by, and I’d find myself waiting for the elevator, my throat aching from so much talk about nothing. The walk to my car took me past Brooks Brothers where one morning a sign in the window announced a sale.
Yeah, I had money to throw away on small talk and urban bird-watching, but Brooks Brothers? Some invisible force field kept me walking.
By then I’d talked out most of what I’d known about my parents, both dead. And maybe that was the strategy: to talk until the emotional attachment was exhausted. He’d sneak looks at the clock I knew stood on the bookshelf behind me. The sale signs still filled the window at Brooks Brothers. One morning I went in. At the clearance rack I found a brown tweed blazer and the salesman stood behind me and slipped it onto my shoulders. The sale price was $150. A tailor with a Russian accent waved me into the fitting area and said to step up on a low platform.
“Not like that,” he said, “stand naturally.”
Not like a military cadet, he meant. I stood with my shoulders back, my chest thrust forward, and my stomach sucked flat.
He meant: relax. His lips pursed tight to hold a row of straight pins, he chalked the cuffs and pinned the extra fabric between my shoulder blades. To borrow from Craig Clevenger, I felt as if I’d taken a Vicodin. My body felt warm. I relaxed into nothing less than a Holly Golightly trance. Whatever he was doing, this Russian tailor, pinching the shoulder padding. Patting the front to see if the buttons needed to be relocated. I couldn’t
