ARE YOUR NARRATIVE ‘TELLS’ OBVIOUS?

By Kasie Whitener

Poker players have ‘tells.’ Maybe it’s tapping a pinky on the table, crossing or uncrossing legs, or blinking a little bit longer than usual. Tells are the minor behaviors that indicate the cards dealt the player are either very good or very bad.

Writers have tells, too. Whether it’s a pattern of development that is beyond genre conventions, or a particular phrase a writer favors, writer tells are the things we love to hate about reading the same authors over and over.

Ben Blatt captures these tells in his book Nabakov’s Favorite Word is Mauve. Using a method he describes in this article, Blatt suggests that the frequency of certain words in a piece works like a fingerprint to identify the author.

I’d argue that the fingerprint is just part of establishing one’s narrative voice. Prolific authors, like my favorite Kindle Unlimited romance star J.A. Huss, rely on the well-exercised muscles of vocabulary and voice to deliver stories quickly. I can’t be certain Huss isn’t being intentional about the fingerprint; I’d be more willing to bet she’s writing what she knows will sell.

So where would the identification of the fingerprint be really useful? Blatt explains the method was created to identify the true authors of anonymous writings like The Federalist Papers. Historians are notoriously dogged about assigning credit to things like anonymous essays.

How can the fingerprint concept teach us about our own writing?

While reviewing my novel, After December, before sending to a professional editor, I noticed what I described to my publisher as “The Brady Bunch Habit.” Everybody was looking at everybody else. Eye contact is my go-to narrative action. During this most recent revision, I worked on switching out neck-up action for whole-body action: posture, weight shifts, clothing fidgets, shoe scuffing. Anything to add action to the scene that wasn’t characters looking at one another (or looking away because eye-contact-avoidance is my second favorite).

I’m reading a series now where the author more than once has a character admit to being unable to read another character’s expression. Turns out these people are really bad at recognizing facial tells. Or, more likely, the author loves the way an inability to read one’s listener forces the speaker to take a chance on whatever she’s about to say. It’s an effective device used once per book. Unless you’ve read five of her books. Then it’s a recognizable tell.

On the daily our preferences as consumers are being catalogued by ones and zeroes wherever we leave a digital footprint. Facebook shows us relevant ads, Zappos basically stalks us, and Amazon suggests titles that match our browsing and buying history.

The author’s fingerprint is just another algorithm by which we can code the sloppy, emotional wreckage of creation. Whether it’s sentence structure or vocabulary, as we become better (and more prolific!) writers, we shape our own fingerprint through our work. Now we just have to decide if we’re intentionally telling other players we have a full house.

What are your narrative tells?