Puntitas is feeling blog blank. This happens sometimes. She’s grateful because she’s not feeling blank about her job related writing and because she’s got ideas and eagerness to work on her own writing. But she hasn’t written in the blog because she hasn’t had many writerly thoughts.
Well, there was one. It’s a technique oriented observation from a book Puntitas read. She likes the trick and wants to use it herself in a piece of writing, possibly the next novel in the queue, the one she’ll start after she finishes everything that is on the hard drive now.
The novel I read is Broken, erotica or maybe porn. I’m not sure what the difference is. At any rate, it’s about a woman who meets with a stranger once a month to share lunch in a park. After several innocuous conversations, they fall into a pattern: he tells her about a sexual encounter he’s had that month.
The novel is complex. The woman is married, but she no longer has a physical relationship with her husband because he had a skiing accident five years before, and she doesn’t have much of a marriage because of the emotional after effects of the injuries. The meetings with the stranger give her a fantasy life, which only highlights the many ways her marriage isn’t what it once was.
The technique I want to borrow is this:
The stories about the stranger’s sexual encounters follow a sort of formula. They tell the reader how he meets his one-night-stand, how she comes on to him, what prompts him to make his first move, what kind of sex they have, and how the encounter ends. The details about him are consistent from story to story, minor behaviors blossoming into telling details, but new information is also added. The effect is that what begins as a stock character becomes … hmm … fully fleshed and that we get to know his appeal for the married woman listening to him, which means we get to know more about her as well. It’s a great technique because it allows him to become a meaningful character while the obvious energy and focus of the story is on the woman’s marital conflict.
It occurs to me that I have a short story that uses a variation of this technique. It contains several scenes in which the narrator is playing cards with her uncle and having a conversation about the same guest. This may be why I noticed it. But the book uses the technique to achieve a more sophisticated effect. I think too now that it would actually work well in my novella, which includes a couple of scenes that recur in variation.
Puntitas reads _The Proposition_ by J. Ivory, _Broken_ by M. Hart, and _The Serpent’s Tale_ by A. Franklin.