Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

I was looking for inspiration as to how to get my students to plunge a reader into a story through a character, and I remembered Winston Smith. Perhaps he’s not as famous as, say, Peter Parker. But he’s embroiled in quite a web, don’t you agree?

It’s been years since I’ve read (and reread) Nineteen Eighty Four, but there’s an impression of Winston I still remember. He’s shifty and nervous, has a slight limp, and even his eyes and skin are described by Orwell to set his main character in a bleak environment that becomes worse as dystopias go. His skin, I remember, is course. I went back to the book and found how Orwell describes it as being the result of rough soap and blunt razor blades. Just that tiny detail of ablutions helps define what he has been through.

What a way to build character!

Short story writing is particularly challenging. The sequence of events must begin quickly and end at some point soon, within about two thousand words.

So why am I using a novel to inspire short stories? Orwell’s novel is choc-a-bloc with vignettes that make a story more than a series of events. I’ll stay with just three.

Flashbacks. They include flashback sequences that reveal insight into (a) how a character got to be this way or in this predicament (b) What was it like in the past that is so different from the present. Take, for instance, the detail in the first chapter when he pulls a notebook, an pen and a bottle of ink out of a drawer. It transports him — and the reader — into another scene.

It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop in a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember) and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were supposed not to go into ordinary shops (’dealing on the free market’, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way.

It’s this scene within a scene effect (something movies do well) that saturates us with information about the character, and the coercive environment. It sets us up for how Winston will long for a different social and political milieu, and rebel against the present one, to his peril.

2. Sound Effects. On a page, words can only do so much. But the right combination brings a page to life with audio. Take this scene when Winston is in a room witnessing the compulsory ‘two minutes of hate.’

“The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.”

3. Conflict. That famous rats scene lets Orwell paint a picture of O’Brien as a macabre, sadist. The metal cage attached to Winston’s face is not as terrifying as the words they come out of his mouth. The cage is a device to heighten the conflict.

“When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and…”

Conflict could be both internal and external says Wendy Kram, in Writer’s Digest. She cites Silence of the Lambs, in which Clarice must face her own childhood trauma, while dealing with the challenge of catching a serial killer.

There’s no shortage of conflict in this book I’m just reading — “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” (which won last year’s Booker prize). It’s got one of these three elements on every other page. Just as in Nineteen Eighty-four, a dystopian gloom hangs over its central character, Maali. But unlike Winston, this guy is dead, funny, and is still floating around with a broken camera. The ghost story become a political thriller through flashbacks. There’s an uncanny connection: Winston and Maali are record keepers, documenting history in two different ways. The government is out to get them and vice versa. Both become psychological explorations of these political systems they have been plunged into. Bucketloads of conflict, with some wicked insights into life in Sri Lanka.