III. LITERATURE AS A PLATFORM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Literature offers the best way of teaching extensive reading skills. Non-literature reading programs, and especially programs for non-native speakers, focus on short passages. Big international surveys such as PISA (or tests of basic skills) are based on many readings of very short passages. Yet extensive reading is a different kettle of fish. To read something longer, you need to stay aware of macro structures such as plot.

Literature offers a way of linking the emotional with the intellectual. If students are to learn reading effectively, they have to remember significant turns in plot, and this will only happen, in the first instance, if those turns have emotional impact. So it harnesses the emotional to the cognitive. When literature does what it should, though, it acts against the alienation of the emotional and the intellectual.

Literature has the power to change destructive ways of thinking on many levels. In my life, poetry has been a wonderful thing. When your emotions bear down on you to see the world in a negative light, and believe that it's not you, it's just real, at a time like that; you need something as powerful as poetry. It can crystallize what you feel at that moment, or it can transform it into something better. I believe in memorizing poetry.

An author builds a narrative with thousands of tiny details.

Even before a reader knows what the book is really about, it’s through the gradual accumulation of these crucial moments, objects, movements, sounds, smells and touches that the power and meaning of the story emerges.

As an editor working with authors on novels, memoirs, short stories and narrative non-fiction, I often see early drafts that try to describe how the characters are feeling or explain what the story is about and how the reader is supposed to react to it. This approach creates a filter that clouds and ultimately obliterates the reality of what’s happening.

What I try to help the author do instead, is select the creative details that put the reader at the center of the each moment, so they can see, hear, and smell the landscape of the character’s experience.

Here are some techniques for creating effective details when building your narrative, whether you’re writing in first person or third:

Creating effective details

Look

Imagine your characters moving through each scene from their point of view. See through their eyes. Consider what they might be feeling, given their problems, conflicts, inner emotions. What do they focus on in their immediate landscape, what are the natural or manmade objects they encounter. Study them. Choose only those that reflect their emotions.

Follow

Track your characters in time and space. Now that you know where they are, what do they do? Create actions that demonstrate either directly or obliquely how well they’re able to function. Do they move in a straight line towards a tangible goal? Do they digress, avoid, circle back. How, specifically?

Touch

Get familiar with the objects they encounter or utilize. Find them in your own life. Handle them, buy them if necessary. Go to the place, the physical location you imagine them, if possible. Do what they do, so you can get a sense of the tactile experience, the feel, the smell of the scene.

Listen

What are your characters hearing? What do they say to themselves or others. Say it out loud and hear how it sounds. Remember that no one speaks exactly like someone else. Delineate your characters and have their words reflect their state of mind: in a hurry, avoiding, deflecting? And remember that written dialogue is not actually everything someone may say in real life, but a dramatic distillation.