Finding the Turn

Exercise Your InkTank
What A Character

The language we use to talk about character often has to do with movement and shape. We like characters to be dynamic rather than static and round instead of flat. We also talk about development, complexity, and psychological believability, but those might just be different ways of talking about the same thing. Some argue that plot is merely a way of talking about character. If we look at it through that lens, the character has to move in order to be. And if the character lacks depth, the events of the plot seem like facts narrated by newscasters. Put another way, the vertical elements of the story (character) and the horizontal elements of the story (plot) combine to create a believable being. But making an interesting shape that moves isn’t quite enough, is it? In order to be compelling, the character/plot has to take us somewhere, from one point to another; it has to take us to (or through) the turn. Understanding the turn is one big step. Executing it is another. Let’s start with one and see if we can talk our way to the other.

Does this story have a turn?

“Housewife” from Tumble Home by Amy Hempel

She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, “French film, French film.”

How about this one?

“A Man from her Past” from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father. I say to myself: Mother ought not to have improper relations with this man “Franz”! “Franz” is a European. I say she should not see this man improperly while Father is away! But I am confusing an old reality with a new reality: Father will not be returning home. He will be staying on at Vernon Hall. As for Mother, she is ninety-four years old. How can there be improper relations with a woman of ninety-four? Yet my confusion must be this: though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.

This one?

Untitled by Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Turn
Try to take us from one point (vertically and horizontally) to another point with just a few words. Hemingway gave it a shot at six words. But he was a badass. Shoot for a few stanzas or a few paragraphs or a short scene. Take us to a turn.