There is a problem all fiction writers must face if they want to create unique and substantial characters. Characters, at least those personages who are going to be important to the developing narrative, require context. They can’t simply be flung onto the page as though they had metamorphosed from warm mud. Darwin put an end to that. Freud too. Parthenogenesis doesn’t work for human beings, not yet and probably never, unless being human becomes something other than what we know. Characters in books need to be supplied with a childhood of some sort, with parents at the very least, sometimes even grandparents.… Parents influence children, stiffening or weakening their resolve, and no credible novelist is going to reduce that assumption. Even in the most Kafkaesque dreamscape there are certain elements that cannot be subtracted from substance, geography, family, blood. Everyone is someone’s child, and a novel, in the crudest of terms, is a story about the destiny of a child. There is always a bank of DNA pressing its claim.…
In my view, it’s not necessary to provide a complete genealogical chart; hardly any contemporary readers have the patience for that heft of information. Only a few vital family traces are required, the sense that the character isn’t self-invented or arbitrary. Jane Austen, even though she is pre-Darwinian, always goes back at least one generation, and sometimes two. She knew the importance of grounding.
—Unless
This need to set the story in a context goes back to the Middle Ages and the beginning of fiction as we know it. Fiction was frowned upon by the Church, and thus stories often began with an apology, a lie, for example: “I found recorded in a very old book …” or “A traveller returned from several years at sea with this account …”
There may be times when we want to approach a story in this convoluted way, when we want to slow down or speed up the story. Certain themes require slower revelation. There is probably a reason why most police fiction is told swiftly and briefly—about a hundred and forty pages is average, I’m told. And why fantasy often requires four hundred pages. Knowing when to cut and when to thicken is important.
I’ll talk about cutting first since it is something most of us find hard to do. There is still, floating around, a residue from the Hemingway ethos, the belief that a story must not contain one single extraneous detail, even though we all know that extraneous details give shading to character, furnish a scene, contribute to a sense of place and modify the tone of a piece. The right detail in the right place, though it impinges not at all on the movement of the story, can linger long after the story is forgotten. But overindulgence slows the story down and needs cutting, which is painful. A nice psychological trick is not to cross out, but to cut out with scissors, store your verbiage in your files and kid yourself that this is something you might want to use someday.
Cutting does tidy a story, increases the pace, and it can—and this is something to bear in mind—change its nature. I was once asked to cut a 110-minute play to a 40-minute one-act piece. The play, once a social comedy, is now a breakneck farce. There is almost no shading, but I have to confess, it has a kind of hectic energy that may be just as valuable.
Thickening is something else, and it leads me to what I see as one of the most persistent problems in fiction—the failure to understand that fiction is made up of scenes. Very often scenes are merely sketched; there are too many of them and they are almost invariably rushed. Unlike the scenes we’re accustomed to in film, the scenes in fiction have to be more than a fleeting image. They have to be solidly built and furnished. They have to be introduced, allowed to develop and conclude in such a way that the next scene is prepared for.
Part of scene-making comes from details of place, and I think this is what Jane Austen does so superbly. We all know what is going to happen in a Jane Austen novel: a young woman of marriageable age pursues and captures that singular object, the marriageable male. Why do we keep turning those pages? I think it is because Austen is able to build a world, albeit small, that we can enter and where we can be certain of our footing. The solidity of that world is amazing. It has a top, a bottom, and a precisely outlined perimeter. There are rules—and every breach of the rules is pointed out. There is a small cast of characters, and any intrusion from the outside is identified as an intrusion. The small excitements of each scene become ours; all the proportions are right. We, many of us anyway, can be thankful that Jane Austen didn’t set her novels in Tahiti or Hong Kong or we might have lost the treasure of her village-world and our participation in the scenes she provides.
Where then did Jane Austen find the material for her novel? Every writer draws on his or her own experience; where else could the surface details of a novel’s structure come from, especially a novel as assured in its texture as Pride and Prejudice? But it is not every novelist’s tactic to draw directly on personal narrative, and Jane Austen, clearly, is not a writer who touches close to the autobiographical core.
—Jane Austen: A Life
Besides a sense of place and a secure placing in time, a scene can be expanded, thickened, and sustained by the use of dialogue, that most immediate of story variables, dialogue that reveals character, moves the story forward, and provides, sideways as it were, the pieces of information we need, which would otherwise sound self-conscious in the narrator’s mouth.
How long, it might be asked, should a scene be sustained? As long as it is still level, inventive, beguiling and yielding answers to that important overriding question I mentioned earlier: what is this story about? The development of scenes, besides prodding writers into the concrete, non-abstract world, and besides opening up dramatic possibilities, also makes the lot of the writer easier. The story falls into manageable units once the concept of scenes is grasped, and one is less likely to feel overwhelmed by a huge mass of material. A scene at a time. A step at a time.
There is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” …
—”Flitting Behavior”
Occasionally, the pace is distorted by what I think of as a failure of transformation. All writers draw on their own experiences, though very few, I think, draw directly. The reason it is fiction and not autobiography is because an act of transformation has taken place. Sometimes this involves relocation or renaming or reshaping or, most importantly, reinterpretation and re-imagining. Occasionally, the process is incomplete. You know you’re dealing with this problem if there is an element in the story that seems to belong in another story. But, the writer says in defence, this is how it really happened. I remember once seeing a story in which there was a rather awkward page in which a woman character heard a doorbell ring and had to go down a flight of steep stairs to answer the door. The story slowed down at this point. Why not have the woman on the ground floor? I asked the writer. Because that’s the way it happened, the writer said, and seemed unable to see outside the pattern already incised on the experience and then on the story.
Moving people around in space, as a matter of fact, can be tedious and often adds fat to the narrative. There is a wonderful V. S. Pritchett story in which a character receives a letter from a woman who has a piece of information for him. Will he come to the city where she lives? The next paragraph starts along the lines, “Two hours later he was on her doorstep …” I marvelled at this neat solution. I would have had him putting on his overcoat, backing the car out of the garage, getting onto the highway, consulting a street map, and so on, and for what reason?
An important part of pacing is releasing pertinent information at exactly the right moment, and not too much at one time in case the reader feels force-fed. Sometimes Alice Munro’s stories stop in the middle and the narrator says, “I forgot to tell you that …” Now, she hasn’t forgotten to tell you at all. It is only now that she wants you to have the informatio
n. This is not the same thing as teasing the reader, but it clashes with Dickens’ old bit of advice: “Keep them laughing, keep them waiting.”
The handling of time, in fiction, is extraordinarily difficult, and I speak as someone who is still struggling with this. One summer, not long ago, dismayed by my bank balance, I read a number of popular bestsellers, the kind of fiction that is called drugstore fiction, the kind you buy by the pound to carry off to the beach. The common element I found in these books was the unimaginative handling of time. Chronology was strictly adhered to, a conveyor belt straight into the future, this despite the fact that we know the human mind is frequently dwelling on the past and on the future and only occasionally on the present. Interesting and complex time structures occur in almost all serious fiction, but they are difficult to make credible or acceptable.
It’s important to trust the reader, but many readers are less than a hundred percent conscientious and forgiving and so they must be placed firmly in time. I think it’s a good idea for beginning writers to set their works in manageable time chunks. Chapters that begin “Sixty years later …” tend to ask a great deal.
The mismanagement of flashbacks is another problem, and transition seems to be the key. Past action must be carefully introduced and not allowed to swallow up a disproportionate part of the story. For example, it would be unwieldy if a story of three thousand words were to have a thousand words cast in the past. There must also be, I think, a reason for a time diversion. Perhaps some piece of information must be supplied. Is there another way it can be done? Perhaps in a section of dialogue dealing with the past. Perhaps a brief paragraph of meditation on a past event would be less disruptive than moving the actual narrative to the past. If flashbacks are what you decide on, I think a piece of fiction is better balanced if there is a pattern of some kind. If there is a single flashback in an entire novel, there is a danger of unbalancing the whole ship. If there are several flashbacks, fairly evenly spaced and of somewhat the same length, the reader will come to anticipate and accept them more readily and be less likely to be thrown into a state of confusion.
Another problem: that little bundle of words that gets us to those other places and times is ridden with clichés. The word “meanwhile” makes us think “meanwhile, back at the ranch …” “Suddenly” seems hokey. Also: “at that moment” or “the next thing he knew” or “without further ado” or “his thoughts drifted back to …”
All writers know about the magic of opening sentences, the golden door that takes you into the story, pushes at the future and nudges your expectations, setting the tone and carrying you over that threshold into the fictional world. These sentences work best when they carry on their back an implied question. One of my favourites is John Cheever’s “Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea.” That we. A married person’s we? Each year—the cycle of habit suggested. Rented, not owned—more information. A house, not a cottage—a suggestion of class, of wealth. The sea, not the ocean or the lake—an unnamed sea—a suggestion of East Coast perhaps. And the implied question—how will the statement be subverted? What will happen this year to alter the smooth presumption of the announcement—Each year, we rent a house at the edge of the sea.
It’s easy to get too cute, too obvious, about an arresting first sentence, and it is wise to avoid such openings as: “ ‘Jesus,’ Mavis said, opening the envelope, ‘not again!’ ” or “Ronald knew the minute he woke up that it was going to be one of those days” or “It was midnight when we arrived in the empty flat, and the first thing we saw was a note pinned to the door.”
Pacing can be controlled to some extent by the skilled use of breaks. This means knowing where to break and start a new chapter, and also where to break a paragraph. These breaks, I think, act as miniature signposts, allowing the reader, subconsciously perhaps, to feel out the pattern and order in a work, and this feeling of order gives assurances that one is not wandering in an unmapped jungle. Mavis Gallant, who frequently writes rather long paragraphs, will occasionally throw in a paragraph composed of one short line, or even one word—a signal that something important is happening. She is underlining something for you, telling you to pay attention.
There is an old saying that the climax of a piece of fiction should come shortly before the end. You probably do need one major event or confrontation. This need not be a scene in which there is a physical upheaval, but merely, perhaps, an unfolding of understanding. Generally, some planning must go into the generating of this scene—a number of smaller scenes may build toward it. There should be some foreshadowing, those little brushstrokes of possibility, so that when the dénouement does arrive, it will both surprise and satisfy some level of expectation.
There are many kinds of endings, those that reach back into the story and restate what has happened, or those that go sliding off the page, taking a chance, risking the subversion of the story, but suggesting some new pattern in which the events of the story may be imagined.
There are stories we read quickly, others we read slowly, and again and again. Style, a quirky syntax, a challenging vocabulary help set the speed, but ultimately it is the writer’s ability to communicate with passion that keeps the eyes moving along the lines of print and the pages turning over.
In Brief …
The crucial elements:
• Story: A story is about moving from one state to another, a movement that may be psychological, involving a growth of awareness that comes in a series of revelations.
• Tension: The simple bonding of one’s self to one’s writing can create tension, that sense of urgency that underlies certain books, a feeling that this story is being told because it has to be told.
• Pacing: Pacing involves the selection and placement and timing of the variables of the story, the way in which the story is unrolled for the reader, the manner in which it moves from revelation to revelation. An important part of pacing is releasing pertinent information at exactly the right moment; too much at one time can make the reader feel force-fed. Pacing can be controlled to some extent by the skilled use of breaks.
• Framing: Framing is often unnecessary; it can bury or muffle a story. It can be easy to edit out the framing—a simple cutting of the first and last paragraphs.
• Cutting: The right detail in the right place can linger long after the story is forgotten. But cutting extraneous detail can tidy a story and increase its pace, and can also change its nature.
• Dialogue: Dialogue provides a sense of place and time. It reveals character, moves the story forward, and provides information we need that would sound self-conscious in the narrator’s mouth.
• Scenes: One of the most persistent problems in fiction is the failure to understand that a story is made up of scenes. Scenes have to be more than a fleeting image. They have to be solidly built and furnished. They have to be introduced, allowed to develop and conclude in such a way that the next scene is prepared for. Sustain a scene for as long as it is still level, inventive, beguiling and yielding answers to what this story is about. Scenes help the story fall into manageable units. A scene at a time; a step at a time.
• Transformation: A story is fiction and not autobiography because an act of transformation has taken place. Sometimes this involves relocation, renaming or reshaping or, most importantly, reinterpretation and re-imagining.
• Time: It is difficult to handle time in fiction. Interesting and complex time structures occur in almost all serious fiction, but a good idea for beginning writers is to set your works in manageable time chunks. Past action must be carefully introduced and not allowed to swallow up a disproportionate part of the story.
• Opening sentences: Opening sentences take you into the story, push at the future and nudge your expectations, setting the tone and carrying you over that threshold into the fictional world. These sentences work best when they carry an implied question.
• Climax: You probably do need one major event or confrontation—this need not be a p
hysical upheaval; it can be an unfolding of understanding. Some planning must go into generating this scene—a number of smaller scenes may build toward it, some foreshadowing, little brushstrokes of possibility, so that when the dénouement does arrive, it will both surprise and satisfy some level of expectation.
• Endings: Endings may reach back into the story and restate what has happened, or go sliding off the page, taking a chance, risking the subversion of the story, but suggesting some new pattern in which the events of the story may be imagined.
• Style: A quirky syntax, a challenging vocabulary, help set the speed, but ultimately it is the writer’s ability to communicate with passion that keeps the eyes moving along the lines of print and the pages turning over.
~ 8 ~
WHERE CURIOSITY LEADS
THERE WAS A PERIOD IN MY EARLY LIFE WHEN MY FRIENDS AND I, spurred by romantic yearnings, I suppose, spent great widths of time talking about the possibility and need of “truly knowing someone.” The phrase chimed with half a dozen others in our vocabulary: the exposing of the soul, the opening of the heart, the completion of one person by another, and so forth. We believed this kind of intimate knowledge was possible, and moreover that it was desirable.
Somewhere along the way, I lost faith with the enterprise. What interested me, instead, was the unknowability of others, their very otherness, in fact. It was apparent to me that members of close, loving families resisted the forces of coercive revelation, and that even partners in long, happy marriages remained, ultimately, strangers, one to the other. Although we are living in the age of communication, it became clear that people who “spilled their guts” sacrificed a portion of their dignity in so doing, and that, in any case, what they spilled was suspect, either self-pitying or self-aggrandizing, or else projecting a single, touched-up version of who they were and how they preferred to be registered at a particular moment—for it was understood that a variant self could be brought forward the next day, or even the next hour.
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