WENDY'S NEWSLETTER: THE WRITING PROCESS: The Writing Process: Faces and Fiction

Consider: putting a good face on it; facing someone down; facing it; facing up to things; being two faced; facing the consequences

The physiology of the faces has its own message system: We refer to the eye being the

window to soul; hollow eyes; haunted eyes; shadowed eyes; bright eyes; folded lips; wide smile; rigid jaw.

We use faces in our prose to indicate feeling, drama and action.

His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human. Carson McCullars

Aspects of the face are part of the action in our prose

Is there an art in finding the mind's construction in the face? Frowning, raising eyebrows; smiling widely; grinning, winking, smirking, winking, leering, sneering, glowering, eyes narrowing. Every micro expression has meaning that you may use.

Of course the face is a work in progress. It tracks the passage of time: faces seem to remain the same yet alter through time: plain faces become handsome, distinguished with time; pretty people become plain with the passage of years. Faces are the place where the act of living maps your experience: he had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom. P G Wodehouse.

A child's face is hard to paint and hard to write. How do you paint or write a blank canvas? Even great painters have problems with children, Look at the work of Van Gogh! We can portray children more through their emanations and actions, their wriggling and rolling, their screaming and chattering.

Distinctive genres do use direct description to establish the character so that we know very quickly the appearance of the hero/ine so we can fit them into the shorthand stereotype of handsome hero, surly but good-looking detective, beautiful maiden, sultry temptress, dark but handsome villain; or/burly but attractive action man. Guidelines for purely genre fiction assert quite rightly that we need to see our main characters early in the novel. Straight description can be very efficient for this kind of fiction.

My own preferred way is to use the face in the process of the story-telling. I prefer not to describe directly but to allow the reader to infer indirectly as the narrative develops. What happens in the face is part of the gradual unfolding package of the novel as we get to know the characters, their age and demeanour, their motivation, their transitory meaning as part of the ongoing narrative.

What different things happens in your characters’ faces as they speak to someone they love, they hate, they despise, they admire, they desire, they need?

What happens when your character focuses on a particular task? e.g. the tip of my tongue shows when I am concentrating on drawing or writing

My comfort is that old age,

that ill-layer up of beauty

can do more spoil

upon my face
Shakespeare.

Of course the face can tell lies. God has given you one face and you make yourself another.

Here’s Shakespeare again:

False face must hide what false heart must know

and

I never see thy face but I think on hellfire.

And one from JG Salinger: - She was not one for emptying her face of expression.

Of course we don't have to make our characters gurning, grinning puppets but the use of the mobility of the face to indicate character, drama and action is available to us and if we use it artfully and with restraint it will add vivid layers to our prose.

**To illustrate: here are some words from The Pathfinder my very newest title**

'... He spoke to them in the old tongue but both brothers answered in Latin. Kynan grinned at Magnus’s surprise. ‘Our father had us spend two seasons in the house of a merchant in Rome, an agent who sold our lead right across the great inland sea...'

(In the context of the narrative the word grinned has much more meaning here than said. See also the significance of the face for the cover design. W)

(In the context of the narrative the word 'grinned' has much more meaning here than the baring of teeth,..,,)