Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn From Actors (22 page)

What’s the difference? Inner Rhythm.

This same concept applied to our characters’ emotions can give a novelist some downright smashing results.

Inner Rhythm And The Portrayal Of Emotions

“Rhythm” may seem an unlikely word to apply to emotions. When we hear the word we usually think of music—a song is fast or slow, syncopated or steady. But rhythm doesn’t just apply to music; it’s all around us, in everything we do. There’s the lazy, contented rhythm of lingering in bed on a Saturday morning; the frantic rhythm of dashing for a train; the lulling, hypnotic rhythm of ocean waves. Our bodies respond to certain emotions with rhythm. In tense situations our hearts beat faster, our breaths grow short and ragged. When we stop to think about rhythm in this way, we realize it’s not that we are unfamiliar with Inner Rhythm, but rather we are so familiar with it that we rarely consider its existence. It is as innate and instinctive as breathing. But as novelists, who must constantly study human nature in order to re-create it on paper, we must bring Inner Rhythm to a conscious level, scrutinize its subtleties, and learn how to use it for our characters.

I’m not advocating that you’ll need to discover the Inner Rhythm of every character in every scene. But when you’ve written a scene that seems emotionally flat, or if you’re approaching a scene and can’t quite figure out specific movements or reactions of your character, Inner Rhythm can help.

When everything else is said and done—

when characters are well rounded and

their motivation consistent,

when setting is effectively described—

look to Inner Rhythm to polish the scene.

I once critiqued a novel whose opening scene failed to draw me in to the protagonist’s emotions. Yet all other aspects of the scene were well done. The character had been a spy in a foreign city for two years, plotting and planning for the moment that was about to occur. He knew an enemy army was about to burst through the city and overthrow it. At that moment, he would steal the treasures he wanted and flee back to his homeland. The setting was in ancient times, and the novelist had done a wonderful job of describing the unwitting city and its pageantry. And once the action began, it clicked right along. But I could not connect with the character as he lurked in the shadows, anticipating the army’s imminent attack. I should have felt his tension, his anxiety, but I didn’t.

In reading the scene a second time, I realized what was missing. As this character waited, he displayed very little sign of the Inner Rhythm he would have been experiencing at such a moment. There he was, after two years’ meticulous planning, supposedly poised to spring into action. Numerous thoughts of what could go wrong were cycling through his head. Yet he just stood quietly waiting. No sign in his movements of fear, apprehension, the rush of adrenaline. No feel of his muscles tensing, shivering with the knowledge of action to come. And because he didn’t
exude
it I didn’t
feel
it.

Let me give you a true-life example of Inner Rhythm at its most powerful. I witnessed this scene, and to this day it haunts me.

I’d been on my way to the grocery store and was stopped at a long light opposite the high school. (Yes—another scene of me in my car.) Through the passenger window, the figures of a teenage girl and boy caught my eye. Both had their backs to me. The girl was chubby, her blond hair pulled back into a scraggly ponytail. She stood near the curb, her shoulders rounded, leaning forward toward the boy. She was pleading, sobbing; this I knew without seeing her face. Her arms were held away from her sides, palms up, fingers spread. Every muscle in her body vibrated grief. Even separated by glass, I felt it. The boy was turned away from her, about ten feet from where she stood, pressed face-first against the school’s tall chain link fence. Yet the sidewalk between them seemed a chasm. His baggy jeans, their crotch halfway to his knees, was topped by a white T-shirt, untucked. His torso was twisted, his feet wide apart. His head was buried in the crook of his left arm, his right arm flung out, fingers curled and whitened around the chain link. The hunch of both shoulders and the odd tilt of his frame oozed with a mixture of guilt and fear. Whatever the girl was pleading he knew was right, yet he could not grant her request. He could not even bring himself to turn and face her. Self-loathing weighted his bent neck.

I hit a button and my car window slid down. (Like I’ve been telling you—
watch
life. That means eavesdropping now and then.)

The girl’s voice, choked and raw, tumbled around me. “Pleeease.” The word sounded husky, broken in half. Her shoulders expanded, then fell as she breathed.

The boy wrenched his head toward the right. Wiped his eye against his shirt sleeve. “I’m going!” His answer was hoarse, defensive.

She sobbed. “Then at least say goodbye to your daughter.”

The boy buried his head once more in his arm, pressing further against the wire as if tensed for a fatal bullet.

Then I saw another girl at the edge of this scene. She was tall, willowy, with a baby in her arms, awaiting her cue from the sidelines as these two young parents battled the consequences of one night’s choice. The baby looked ruddy-cheeked and already pudgy, a pink bonnet cradling her head. A tiny yet looming presence intended to persuade. Dry-eyed, the girl approached and handed the baby to her mother, then stepped back.

Mother and baby moved toward the boy. At the sound of her footsteps, a groan rattled through his chest.

The stoplight turned green. I drove away.

No words at first in this true scene. Very little movement. No facial expression, for his back was to me. Yet as soon as I saw this boy, even before rolling down the window to listen, I
felt
his internal struggle. Guilt. Self-loathing. A desire to flee and never look back. I’d never seen this boy before and had no knowledge of the events that led up to this moment. Yet within seconds, I understood what he was feeling.

Why?

Because of his Inner Rhythm, which displayed itself through unconscious action.

Let’s take a closer look at the boy. I’ll call him Jay and the girl Cindy. Here’s how I imagine the events preceding this scene. Jay has determined he’s leaving town. Maybe his parents are divorced, and he’s moving away to live with the other parent—anything to leave his new unwanted responsibility behind. Nothing is going to change his mind. Yet he is not uncaring. Quite the contrary, he does care for Cindy. Perhaps he’s even held the baby a few times, and she wound a tiny fist around his finger. She may as well have wound it around his heart. Jay’s feelings for Cindy and the baby give rise to a general Inner Rhythm of affection whenever Jay is around Cindy. Yet the thought of the responsibility overwhelms him. What about his plans, what about school, his friends? He isn’t ready to be a father, that’s all there is to it. He can’t do it, even though he’s ridden with guilt over running away.

Now imagine Jay getting out of school this particular afternoon, and Cindy shows up to persuade him to stay, supported by her friend, who carries the baby. At first he freezes at the sight of them. At this point his emotions kick into two distinct and contrasting Inner Rhythms that quickly drown out the rhythm of his affection for her. The first rhythm rises from his desire to run. It’s a fast and frenetic pace of fear that causes his muscles to tense, his adrenaline to flow. He wishes he could run to some place where he need never face the consequences of his act again, where he could forget the baby even exists.

But he doesn’t run because of the second Inner Rhythm, which rises from guilt. Jay cares enough for Cindy and the baby to know he’s doing the wrong thing, and he hates himself for it. The Inner Rhythm of his guilt is slow, weighty, cumbersome, rendering him almost incapable of movement.

Notice how these two widely diverse Inner Rhythms affect Jay’s choice of action.

The fear and desire to run propel him away from Cindy but only as far as the fence, because his guilt compels him to stay. As a result of the first rhythm, he leans against the chain link, twists his body to the left away from her, buries his head in the crook of that arm. His shoulders hunch with tension; his feet plant firmly into the ground. He’s not going anywhere, but his Inner Rhythm beats, “I’m running; I’m denying.” These actions are Jay’s way of “burying his head in the sand.” Cindy begins pleading for him to turn around. Soon she is sobbing. Her pain increases the guilt within Jay, and this second Inner Rhythm causes him to react in some amazing ways. He spreads his legs apart. He stretches out his right arm. His fingers clench the chain link. Unconsciously, three-quarters of his body has assumed the position of being spread-eagled before a firing squad or stretched across a torturer’s rack. It is the stance of awaiting punishment.

This is what I knew instinctively when I first laid eyes on him.

I certainly didn’t analyze. I didn’t consciously dissect his every movement and categorize it. That came much later, when I’d had time to pull back from my own emotion and could examine what had so moved me. At the time of the scene I was far too captivated to do anything but watch and
feel.
For on a gut level, from human to human, I sensed this boy’s pain.

Now, imagine my preparing to write this scene in a novel. Without an understanding of these Inner Rhythms and how they would uniquely affect the character of Jay, I probably would not have created the actions described above. I would have thought about Jay’s fear and guilt, and tried to portray those emotions, to be sure. But even if I knew all about his Desire, and his inner values and traits, those emotions may still have been depicted through action bordering on stereotype. Perhaps Jay would have walked away from Cindy, hung his head, turned and retraced his steps, said his one line, then walked away again. Inevitably, readers may have understood that Jay was feeling afraid and guilty. But would they
feel
it?

How To Use Inner Rhythm

Two steps are involved in using Inner Rhythm effectively. First, we need to “hear” the Inner Rhythm of the character. Second, we must translate the Inner Rhythm into action that is believable for that particular character. We’ll look at two very different techniques for hearing your character’s Inner Rhythm. Regardless of which technique you use, the means for translating the Inner Rhythm into action is the same.

Technique 1: By involving your body, you can feel the Inner Rhythm
of your character in a tangible way.

In
Building a Character
, Stanislavsky introduced the concept of Inner Rhythm by asking his students to literally beat on their desks various rhythms of scenes from their own lives, much as one would beat out the rhythm of a song. He asked one student to beat out the rhythm of learning drills in the military. Another student beat out the emotions he felt upon reaching home at the end of the day. For hours they beat out different scenarios from their lives while their colleagues tried to guess what scenes they were tapping. As the students beat these rhythms, an interesting thing happened. They began to feel the emotions of the particular scene building within them, making them relive the moment. Consequently, they were convinced that their classmates would be able to guess what the rhythms stood for. But most of the time the others could not guess. By the end of the long day, the students were all thinking the same thing: “This rhythm business doesn’t work at all.”

But Stanislavsky set them straight. “I gave you these exercises not for the ones who listened, but for you who were doing the beating. It is not important whether the others understood you or not. It is far more essential that the rhythm you were conducting spurred your own imaginations to work, suggesting to you certain surrounding circumstances and corresponding emotions.”

We, too, can use Stanislavsky’s beating-out exercise. To see how this exercise works, let’s start with a very simple scenario. Imagine a woman out for a drive on a country road one beautiful afternoon. She’s behind a slow-moving farm truck, but she doesn’t mind, for she’s simply enjoying the sights. In this case, both her Inner Rhythm and the external rhythm of the scene’s environment will be similar—slow and leisurely. Just for the sake of trying it (and because nobody’s watching), beat out your version of this rhythm with both hands on a table or desk. If you do this for a minute or two, you’ll begin to feel the rhythm within yourself. Notice what this take-your-time rhythm does to your breathing, the way you hold your body.

Now, let’s add a dimension. The woman is behind the same truck on the same country road. But this time she’s feeling anything but leisurely. She is on her way to an interview that could make or break her career. She cannot be late. The freeway was backed up due to an accident, so she took the exit for this road, hoping to make up for lost time. But it’s very curvy, with a double yellow line, and she’s frantically looking for a chance to pass the truck.

Of course, you know this hectic Inner Rhythm will affect the character’s external movements as she drives. But let’s move beyond stereotyped effects such as gripping the steering wheel or muttering in frustration. What might this character do that is natural yet fresh? To discover some answers within yourself, try beating out this frantic Inner Rhythm with your right hand. How fast is the rhythm you’re beating? Is it steady or syncopated? What urgency does it contain? How much harder is your hand hitting the surface than in the former leisurely beat?