The Highlighter Method

Reading like a writer, but with office supplies

Here is what I tell students at the start of every writing seminar or workshop: When you’re absorbing a new concept or focusing hard on a certain craft component, you’re probably going to absorb it in three stages:

1. as a reader and observer

2. as a reviser

3. (maybe, eventually) as a drafter*

(*We don’t get there on every element. If we did, first drafts would be final drafts.)

In other words: It’s hard to learn a lot about something (say, how to incorporate more interiority) and then go home and expect yourself to do all that stuff in the very next first draft you write. Rather, you want to read for it and watch for it over the next few weeks, becoming a connoisseur.

That’s what I’m going to talk about here. (Plus we’re going to learn a lot about physical descriptions of characters along the way.)

But first, a sidebar on…

The Formula Fallacy

Every time I post (or teach IRL) about something like endings or interiority or dialogue, always trying to show students the full array of what’s possible, I get a question along the lines of “But wait, you didn’t tell us what order to do this all in, and how much of exactly each thing to do, and in what ratio!”

It’s an absolutely relatable question, but I want to free you from this way of thinking. Writing is not a field where you’re ever going to find some golden ratio (“First one line of action, then two lines of backstory, then no more than forty words on stakes, then…”) and any writing book that purports to hand you this is selling you a formula for formulaic writing. If that’s what you want to do (for instance, if you’re writing a sitcom pilot and want to adhere to very specific industry standards) then great! But if you want to write something that could only have been written by you, please ignore all that noise.

This is the precise formula for ending a short story on a note of melancholy hope.

Reading like a writer is going to help disabuse you of this notion fast, because you’re going to see SO MANY DIFFERENT WAYS that different brilliant authors handle the same issue.

Let’s Raid the Target Office Supply Aisle

Okay, here’s how we play.

Decide the issue you’re fixating on. For today, let’s pick something kind of simple like physical descriptions of character. (“Simple,” I said, not “easy.” This is something I personally struggled with for a long time.)

Imagine that I’m sitting at my computer, freaking out because people have told me that I need to do more to describe my characters physically, but every time I try it sounds like a police bulletin. Instead of bashing my head through my laptop screen, I’m going to pick five books off my shelf, brilliant books that I’ve already read and that don’t have much in common with each other. And I’m going to get my highlighters ready.

Let’s do it! Together! Right now!

I’m going to read through the first few pages (or some random spot) to highlight every word that informs me in any way about a character’s physicality.

Example 1:

This is from Gina Frangello’s short story “Slut Lullabies”:

For accessibility reasons, I don’t want to hide all my text in photos, so I’m going to “highlight” this same thing below by bolding it. (Hey Substack, please give us colors!!)

Alex’s older brother, George, was hot for Sera, but this was of little consequence since he was a prematurely balding, stoop-spined twenty-two-year-old, who worked at their father’s dry cleaners fifty hours per week, lived above the store, and had skin the color of flour-coated dough. If you yelled to him, “Hey, dude, where’d you put the beer?” he would reply in a Spock-like voice, “I believe it is in the vehicle.” He was weird, and while marginally sexy in a dark, mortician kind of way, definitely not Sera’s type.

I’m noticing the way the physical details are part of a direct characterization (i.e., when we’re told what someone is like in general, not just noticing what they’re like in scene), and that they’re interspersed with details about personality. I’m also noticing that this is all introduced under the topic of whether he’s attractive to Sera, so that’s our excuse for spending time on his looks; this isn’t just a random description for the reader’s sake, but a logical topic of conversation.

Example 2:

Here’s a passage from close to the beginning of Toni Morrison’s Sula. (Shadrack has woken up in a mental institution.)

But the yell had brought a male nurse.

"Private? We're not going to have any trouble today, are we? Are we, Private?"

Shadrack looked up at a balding man dressed in a green-cotton jacket and trousers. His hair was parted low on the right side so that some twenty or thirty yellow hairs could discreetly cover the nakedness of his head.

"Come on. Pick up that spoon. Pick it up, Private. Nobody is going to feed you forever."

Sweat slid from Shadrack's armpits down his sides. He could not bear to see his hands grow again and he was frightened of the voice in the apple-green suit.

Here, in contrast to the above, I notice that we’re meeting this character in scene, and seeing him along with Shadrack. It helps that Shadrack is seeing this man for the first time. I also notice that in contrast to our first example, here the description is interspersed in the action—and what we glean about this man’s character (what his ridiculous combover says about him, for instance) is all stuff we have to surmise. (In other words, indirect characterization.)

Example 3:

Here’s one from very early on in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations:

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch.

"Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!" A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

This one is fascinating. We have Dickens’s skill at litany and repetition, for one thing. And a masterful use of the oft-verboten passive voice! And the rhythm here allows him to describe this man for longer than we might otherwise find interesting. But I’m also interested in how he doesn’t ever describe the man himself—not his face or skin or hair—only his clothes, and his demeanor, and what Pip assumes has happened to him. I also notice that Dickens gives it to us all in one chunk.

Example 4:

Here’s an early passage from Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club:

Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to a beauty training school in the Mission district and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.

…

The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days," the instructor assured my mother. I now had hair the length of a boy's, with straight­across bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.

Here, Tan has accomplished the trick of the first-person narrator finding an excuse to describe herself (without, you know, happing to look in a mirror and for some reason assessing herself from head to toe). When there’s a change in someone’s appearance, that gives us an organic excuse to describe it. Plus, so many other things are happening in this passage! Stuff about mother-daughter psychodrama, and assimilation, and race, and ambition, and and and. This does not come off as a passage of physical description, and yet that’s one thing it is.

But wait, there’s more!

Maybe you’ll decide you need two colors of highlighters. Maybe you’re interested in the balance between physical description and more general description of a character’s place in the world.

And so you’d do something like this to the opening pages of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit:

Among many other things, I notice here how Tolkien stops the story midstream and tells us that he’s giving us valuable information that he knows we don’t have. I also notice how he alternates behavior and physicality.

Maybe I want a third color, to point out action. Maybe I want a fourth one, for backstory.

And then I figure out the formula, right?

No. Stawwwwwp.

What you’re doing here is adding to your own toolkit. These five examples were all very different from each other. And you can borrow/steal any of these moves, or they might open you up to doing something completely different.

At the very least, you can see that:

1) There’s no one specific way to do it.

2) All these writers managed the same awkward thing (“Hey, by the way, here’s what my imaginary people look like!”) and maybe it even felt awkward as they were writing, but it doesn’t feel awkward at all when we’re reading.

3) The specific choices you make on this (or any) craft issue are what we mean when we talk about an author’s “style.”

Here’s your homework:

Try this out with whatever craft issue is stymying or intriguing you. Maybe it’s the balance between backstory and scene. Maybe you’ve been told that you need to establish your settings better, so you want to highlight every word that reminds us where we are in space. Maybe you want to see how different authors break up dialogue with physical gesture or other text.

You’ll find a way to use the calculator, I promise

Use your office supplies! Use your glitter pens! Put unicorn stickers in the margins to mark the spots where an author transitions seamlessly into a memory! You know you want to.

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Just a thank-you:

Someone who became a paid subscriber recently sent me a note saying she did it because she knows not everyone can and she wants to help keep my newsletter going. I appreciate this so much; I want to keep the vast majority of my content free and accessible to everyone, and paid subscriptions allow me to devote enough time to keep these posts coming.

I’ve also realized that maybe I’m writing a craft book, in slow motion. If it becomes a real book, I’ll thank you all in the acknowledgements. (I mean, not by name—that would be ridiculous—but as a group. Because you’re amazing.)