Cody Klippenstein #001 VOICE through pathos!

    If you want to add VOICE to your writing, Cody Klippenstein is the one to turn to. She has won many major writing awards for her short fiction, including “Case Studies for Ascension,” which won the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Contest. It’ll be our study text for this week and it’s up on Zoetrope’s site at CASE STUDIES IN ASCENSION

One of the first ways she gets readers emotionally involved is by quickly creating pathos for the protagonist. He’s an anthropologist who has clearly studied the “ways” of the unusual family he’s investigating, but also, clearly, he has not lived their life. When he first meets the young girl, he says,

“Wait–matte kudasai,” he says. “Do you speak English?”

She answers with “Is that a serious question?” showing that yes, her English is just fine, thank you very much, and he feels like he has insulted her in some way. Then, when she goes out to give his shoes a good shake on the porch, she comes back to discover…

“When I return Obaa-san is already in the kitchen, sitting in her usual chair at the head of the table, folded over….I can tell by the worry lines on the anthropologist’s brow that he did not make his introductions to Obaa-san in her native Japanese. This was a mistake.”

So he insults the young woman by assuming she doesn’t speak English, and he insults the grandmother by speaking English to her. It’s like he can’t win, no matter what he does.

Klippenstein adds to the discomfort later on:

“Wait,” he says. His hand is on my shoulder again. “I don’t think you’ve told me your name.”

I look down. Focus on my feet. “No.”

He waits for me to speak.

When I don’t, he lets me go.

and a third time, just to sink it home:

“Since what?” he wants to know, a cube of faded blue chalk resting in his palm.

“I don’t know. Since–” I point toward the ceiling and shrug. He waits for me to say more, but again I disappoint him.

          Just as the anthropologist wants to know more, we, the readers do as well. We’re put in his place and we experience the situation bit by bit, being held off the same way he is. It makes his awkwardness jump off the page, and we feel it too. In this way, pathos is one of the tools Klippenstein uses to create a strong voice, to create emotion from paper.

Try this:

Create a social situation that your protagonist FIRST believes she really wants to be a part of. Then, once she’s there, it’s NOT AT ALL what she expected, and yet she’s forced to spend time there, one embarrassing situation following another, like dominoes.

Coming tomorrow: Same story, different techniques. We’ll be going microscopic, looking at softness, simplicity, and syllable counts. Yes, syllable counts.