The door to great telling details: your character's fridge

Jane opens Brenna’s fridge and sees neat rows of French mineral water, bins stuffed with fresh veggies, and hiding behind a row of organic condiments, a half-eaten shoo-fly pie.

Who is Brenna?
A) A Southern grandma who runs Jane’s quilting circle.
B) An upwardly-mobile, urban gym-addict who’s ashamed of her rural roots.
C) A disorganized, free-spirited artist who rarely remembers to eat.

image from blog.zealousgood.com

If you guessed B, then you know that what’s in a character’s fridge tells you a lot about her. Specifically, it can tell you about the following:

relationship to food
Does she love to cook and have lots of interesting ingredients on hand? Does she eat only out of necessity and give little thought to food?

level of tidiness and ability to plan
Is her fridge dirty or sparkling? Is it bare or full enough to feed an army at a moment’s notice? Are foods in logical places? Do oddball items find their way inside?

health-consciousness
Is she a raw-foods vegan? A junk-food junkie? All organic? Cares only if the food is quick and tasty?

level of sophistication
Does she eat only plain, all-American foods or does she try cuisines from all over the world?

socioeconomic status (or strivings)
Is her food pricey foreign imports, middle-America name brands or cheap generics?

willingness to indulge herself
Does she allow herself a tiny pint of Ben and Jerry’s or a freezer full of it? Does she have a freezer-burned 5-gallon vat of generic vanilla ice cream because it’s a “good value”?

spending priorities
Does she skimp on one food category to spend more on another? Is eating organic more important than, say, having cable TV? Does she stick to only WIC-covered items?

ethnic or socioeconomic background
Does she keep specialized ingredients on hand from a particular culture? What are her childhood comfort foods she hides?

place on the traditional to trendy spectrum
Does she have Tupperware containers of leftover tuna-noodle casserole or cartons of takeout from the hip Vietnamese place? Ranch dip or hummus? String beans or edamame?

What's in your character's fridge? What ways have you used food to help build your characterization?

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Digging deeper to build a setting that matters

I love my critique group. They're gifted and enthusiastic and most of all, thoughtful. They've given me the courage to take big risks in my writing, but they also won't settle for less than the best from me.

The manuscript I've been plugging away at diligently seemed to me to hit a bump in the "break into act 2" --that moment when the protagonist moves out of the known setting and into the unknown. When my group told me this scene wasn't really grabbing them, I had to agree. It wasn't grabbing me, either.

My character walks into the setting of a grandparent who hoards. And if you've ever seen more than one episode of Hoarders, you know there's something fascinatingly pathological about the phenomenon. But random piles of stuff stacked to the ceiling  isn't actually that interesting to read about.

photo by Marcin Modestowics, morguefile.com

I needed to dig deeper. Because this grandparent is at the epicenter of a lot of family dysfunction. What he hoards (and how he hides it) needs to communicate information about the roots of his anxiety and how other family members were effected by it.

The more I've researched the psychology at play in this family, the more ideas began to suggest themselves. I have a better sense of ways to make this setting stand out, to communicate volumes with a few well-chosen details. Much of the research actually upended my understanding of this grandparent's inner workings.

If you find yourself at a loss about how to make a setting that matters, I suggest going deeper with your characters. Beyond the obvious. What drives them? What are their aspirations? How do they like to present themselves to the world? How divergent are their inner and public personas? What past wound to they expend energy hiding or compensating for?

One of the most powerful examples of a telling character/setting connection I can think of is J.K. Rowling's Dolores Umbridge. Everywhere she goes, she works hard to put forward an image of sweet femininity, dressing always in pink, wearing a girlish bow in her hair and speaking in a high-pitched childish voice. She decorates her public reception area in rose, puce, and petal, and prominently features frolicking kittens. She likes to appear tame and cute. What better disguise for an ambitious female in a chauvinistic world? She's every bit as ambitious and cunning (and sadistic) as the men around her, but she knows these traits are shunned in women. So she takes on an uber-feminine, uber-girly princess-and-tea-parties persona as a smokescreen.

Had Rowling made Umbridge a bit more like Miss Trunchbull in Roald Dahl's Matilda, she wouldn't be quite as chilling. And certainly not sophisticated enough a villain for as grand and mature a series as Harry Potter.

Go deeper in understanding your characters' psychology, and stand out settings and details will begin to suggest themselves to you, too.

In what books or films have you found the settings and details psychologically interesting? How might you pump up your work with details that play against expectation or serve as a smokescreen?

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Fridge face: get to a character's heart through his stomach

Jane opens Brenna’s fridge and sees neat rows of French mineral water, bins stuffed with fresh veggies, and hiding behind a row of organic condiments, a half-eaten shoo-fly pie.

Who is Brenna?
A) A Southern grandma who runs Jane's quilting circle.
B) An upwardly-mobile, urban gym-addict who's ashamed of her rural roots.
C) A disorganized, free-spirited artist who rarely remembers to eat.

If you guessed B, then you know that what’s in a character’s fridge tells you a lot about her. Specifically, it can tell you about the following:

relationship to food
Does she love to cook and have lots of interesting ingredients on hand? Does she eat only out of necessity and give little thought to food?

level of tidiness and ability to plan
Is her fridge dirty or sparkling? Is it bare or full enough to feed an army at a moment's notice? Are foods in logical places? Do oddball items find their way inside?

health-consciousness
Is she a raw-foods vegan? A junk-food junkie? All organic? Cares only if the food is quick and tasty?

level of sophistication
Does she eat only plain, all-American foods or does she try cuisines from all over the world?

socioeconomic status (or strivings)
Is her food pricey foreign imports, middle-America name brands or cheap generics?

willingness to indulge herself
Does she allow herself a tiny pint of Ben & Jerry’s or a freezer full of it? Does she have a freezer-burned 5-gallon vat of generic vanilla ice cream because it’s a “good value”?

spending priorities
Does she skimp on one food category to spend more on another? Is eating organic more important than, say, having cable TV? Does she stick to only WIC-covered items?

ethnic or socioeconomic background
Does she keep specialized ingredients on hand from a particular culture? What are her childhood comfort foods she hides?

place on the traditional to trendy spectrum
Does she have Tupperware containers of leftover tuna-noodle casserole or cartons of takeout from the hip Vietnamese place? Ranch dip or hummus? String beans or edamame?

What's in your character's fridge? How can you use this exercise to know your character better, even if a fridge peek would never fit your story?

*repost from Sept. 2010

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What is not there

While washing my hands at work, I realized my left hand looked a little strange. Naked. The spot where my engagement ring and wedding band usually sit was empty. Stranger still, the now-exposed skin was shiny with scar tissue. The finger seemed atrophied below the knuckle, slimmer than its neighbors. Over a decade of ring wearing had left its mark.

I'll return the rings to their rightful spot this afternoon; my dry skin is better today. Seeing that strange indentation and scarring got me thinking. Long habits mark us, and absence can become as palpable as presence.

A powerful way to portray a character might indeed involve showing the traces of what is not there. Virginia Woolf ends Jacob's Room with a pair of empty shoes, a powerful image of loss in wartime. Artist Sophie Calle photographed places in Berlin where the traces of its communist history had been effaced. Her book Detachment: A Berlin Travel Guide catalogs those images, as well as remembrances--real and imagined--from those who pass by the spots where monuments of the GDR (East Germany) once stood.

Where have you seen in books or life the traces of what is not there? Have you used this idea in your own work? Where might this idea deepen one of your characterizations?

This is a repost from December 2009

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