Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

Gesture

21 Gesture F R A N C I N E P R O S E C H A N N E L S U R F I N G O N E N I G H T, I watched the last twenty minutes of a made-for-TV movie about a small-town girl who gets pregnant and gives up her baby and leaves her boyfriend. Decades later she is reunited with the baby’s father when the baby (a grown man, minister , about to become a father himself) locates his parents and brings them together. At the end of the film,the long-separated teen parents (now in late middle age) are married by their son, the reverend, after a brief scene in which the groom gets out of the car and goes to pick up his bride. The groom straightens his tie, pats down his hair, paces, checks his reflection in the car mirror,straightens his tie,smoothes his hair, fixes his tie again. It’s not as if a man in this situation might not straighten his tie and smooth his hair,but the familiarity of the gestures,amplified by repetition,shredded the alreadyfragile veil of illusion surrounding this tender scene. Perhaps I should say that my definition of gesture includes small physical actions, often unconscious or semi-reflective, including what is called body language and excluding larger, more definite or momentous actions. I would not call picking up a gun and shooting someone a gesture. On the other hand, 22 ◆ F R A N C I N E P R O S E language—that is,word choice—can function as a gesture:the way certain married people refer to their spouses as him or her is sort of a gesture communicating possession, intimacy, pride, annoyance, tolerance, or some combination of the above. Mediocre writing abounds with physical clichés and stock gestures. Opening a mass-market thriller at random, I read: “Clenching her fists so hard she can feel her nails digging into the palms of her hands she forces herself to walk over to him. . . . She snuggled closer to Larry as she felt his arms tighten around her and his sweet breath warm the back of her neck. . . . She adjusted her cap as she crunched down the gravel driveway. . . .Tom bit his lip.”All of these are perfectly acceptable English sentences describing common gestures, but they feel generic.They are not descriptions of an individual’s very particular response to a particular event, but rather a shorthand for common psychic states. He bit his lip, she clenched her fists—our characters are nervous.The cap-adjuster is wary and determined, the couple intimate, and so forth. Writers cover pages with familiar reactions (her heart pounded, he wrung his hands) to familiar situations. But unless what the character does is unexpected or unusual, or truly important to the narrative,the reader will assume that response without having to be told.On hearing that his business partner has just committed a murder, a man might be quite upset, and we can intuit that without needing to hear about the speed of his heartbeat or the dampness of his palms. On the other hand, if he’s glad his partner has been caught, or if he himself is the murderer, and he smiles . . . well, that’s a different story. Too often,gestures are used as markers,to create beats and pauses in a conversation that,we fear,may rush by too quickly without them. “Hello,” she said, reaching for a cigarette. “Hello,” he replied. “How are you?” She lit her cigarette. “Fine.” He poured two glasses of wine. One might ask why we need to linger over this conversation , why we can’t just be permitted to hurry through it, Gesture ◆ 23 though I suppose the gestures (cigarette, wine) are meant to communicate a certain portentousness. Or something. In any case,the catalogue of gestures will not be improved much if we learn that her hand shook as she lit her cigarette, but it might be given a bit of an edge if we learn that he poured one glass of wine,and then remembered and poured two,or that he poured his own glass—or her glass—much fuller than the other. If a character’s going to light a cigarette, or almost light a cigarette, it should mean something as it does in...