Welcome back to the Drawing Room.
Last Sunday we started with place. A door, a mood, somewhere to stand. A number of you wrote back with your openings, and I read them. There's real spark in this group. This week, let’s talk about the person who walks into that place.
LESSON 2: MEET YOUR SLEUTH
The way in is through their senses.
Last Sunday you built a place and gave it a mood. This week you find out who's standing in it.
Here's how the two lessons connect. If you haven't brought your sleuth in yet, this is a good time, and a good method, for meeting them. If you already found your way into last week's setting through a character, the way I did with Dan, this is your chance to deepen them. Either way, we're not going to stop and describe this person. We're going to meet them the way a reader actually does: through how they take in the world around them.
Because a sleuth isn't a list of traits. A sleuth is a particular way of noticing. Two people stand on the same street corner and see two different streets. One clocks the security cameras and the unlocked side door; the other smells rain coming and thinks of her mother's garden. You already know something true about each of them, and neither one was described. That's the move today: let the senses introduce the person.
Three things do the work:
What they notice. Of everything in your scene, what snags this person's attention? What they look at first tells us what they care about, fear, or can't help watching for.
What they don't. Just as telling. A character so wrapped up in themselves they miss the obvious, or so rattled the world blurs, is revealed by the blur. Absence characterizes as hard as presence.
What a sensation drags up. A smell, a sound, a change in the air, reaching past the moment into something older. This is where a plain sense turns into a person with a history.
That last one is the deepest, and it's where writers most often overreach. When a sensation pulls something up from your character's past, let it come, but keep it riding on the sense. A whiff of chlorine that tightens his chest, half a line about the pool he nearly drowned in as a kid, back to the scene. The moment you stop writing what he's sensing and start writing paragraphs of biography, you've left the exercise. Backstory earns its place here only when a sensation carries it in, and only in small doses. A sliver, not a flashback.
And if there's genuinely no one in your scene yet, that's fine, you're not behind. Keep building the mood. Just know you're building it for someone, a stage a character will walk onto soon, and when they do, their senses may reorder the whole room. Be ready to look again.
Now… me first. My passage is below my signature, so you can see what it does in context. Here's a brief explanation of what I did and why, before you jump down to read it.
I went into this week's work chasing a sense, and came out having met my sleuth. Let me show you, because it didn't go the way I planned.
Last week I gave you heat and sweat and that dead-fish smell, but nothing to hear. On a road that busy, that someone is running down, that’s a real miss. So I went looking for sound, and I couldn't find it by tinkering. I had to go through Dan. And the moment I did, the interesting thing wasn't what he heard. It was what he couldn't. The traffic he should've heard, the two old men playfully arguing on their porches, all of it drowned under the blood rushing in his own ears. His body in survival mode, the world tuned out to a dull roar.
And chasing that handed me his history without my ever stopping to explain it: a man who was never athletic, who found friends impossible after forty, so far out of his depth on this road that he can't hear past his own heartbeat. I didn't describe Dan. I let what his senses did, and failed to do, testify about him.
One honest confession, since it's the whole warning above. My first swing went too far. I chased the feeling straight into a detour about his meek childhood and someone he can't bear to think about. Too much, too soon. So I cut it back to a sliver and let the sensation carry the rest. I'm holding the deeper stuff. It may earn its place later, in the chapter or the book.
Your turn. This week, meet your sleuth through their senses. Take the place you built last week and let one person move through it. Don't describe them. Show us what they notice first, what they miss entirely, and what one sensation drags up from further back. A paragraph or two. Keep any backstory small and riding on a sense. If you don't have a character yet, keep deepening the mood, and notice who it seems to be waiting for.
And ask yourself the two questions underneath all of it: why is this person here, in this place? And how do they experience it that no one else would? You don't need full answers. You just need the senses to start giving them to you.
Send it my way if you'd like. I'm reading.
Take the week with it — no rush, no falling behind. Next Sunday, we widen the lens: the ordinary world your sleuth lives in, and the people who fill it.
— Patrick / Stone Lyon Society
The chapter, so far.
Here's my opening with this week's work folded in. The new stretch is in bold, so you can see exactly what layering in sound did to last week's pages. Read the whole thing through, though. The point isn't the new lines on their own, it's how they change the feel of everything around them.
The road stretched for miles in front of Dan Odell. The hot Charleston sun beat down on the pavement in front of him, making him sweat as he ran — well, if he was being honest, it was more of a jog… well, if he was being really honest, it was more of a shuffle — today's practice race for his running club. He tried to ignore the stabbing pain in his pudgy side and the thick cotton in his mouth. Why did he sign up for this? What made him think running would be a good way to meet people? He wasn't made for this stuff.
Dan was never the most athletic, even before he turned 40 and it seemed to become impossible to make friends. But for a reason his oxygen-deprived brain couldn't remember right now, he made the brilliant decision to join the Chucktown Runners, a hip new running club whose members were mostly half his age. Now he was panting as his feet plodded onto the steaming black concrete, the heat mounting in the rubber soles of his too-new shoes. Cars blew past him. The breeze they left in their wake felt nice, even if it was brief. He knew he should hear the traffic, too — this area was notorious for it — or even the two old men in sweat-lined tank tops having a passionate but playful argument from their neighboring front porches across the street, but all he could pick up was the sound of blood rushing in his ears, whooshing like waves in rhythm with his hammering heart.
Still, somehow, he continued.
On either side of him, lining the cracked road, a family of willow trees frowned down at him, their sagging leaves like tears. Embarrassed at his sad attempt at a race. Dan didn't have to worry about the finish line yet, though. Just make it past one willow tree. Then the next. And so on. That's what he did, counting the weeping trees. Breaking down the run into little goals.
Finally, the trees gave way to a church. Just a squat brick building with a stained cross. The more opulent churches were up ahead, he knew, in the expensive part of town. Then came a few old houses. The ones that hadn't been gentrified in this neighborhood of North Charleston yet. Eventually, Dan passed an intersection with a Walgreens on one side and a fish market on the other — the smell of dead fish hanging in the humid air. Just ahead was Park Circle, a roundabout with a large park in the center and more roads splintering off like spokes on a wheel.
But more importantly, it was the landing spot for Dan's running group. If he squinted, he could make out the bright running shorts and slick Under Armour of his group mates. How long had they been waiting for him?