The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  It was close, he realized with an inner start.

  The wind was kicking up in front of it.

  He could see the lightning now, hear the rumble of thunder.

  It was spectacular. He didn't know how he had lived without seeing this for so many years. He felt as if it was made of sheer energy—which, he supposed, it was—and that all of it was starting to infuse him with something that felt exciting. Ions of excitement.

  That passage would be enough to convey the tornado's power, but The Virgin of Small Plains is a big novel and Pickard wants a big impact. A second point of view on the twister is that of a young woman, Catie Washington, who is in the terminal stage of cancer. As the tornado approaches, she lies on the Virgin's grave:

  When she reached it, she turned over and lay spread-eagle, her face to the clouds.

  All around her, the branches of the trees danced and the trees themselves leaned one way and then the other. There was a howling all around her, and then there was a roaring like a train coming closer to her. She felt like a damsel tied to the tracks, but that's how she had felt for months in the path of the cancer that was killing her. This was no different: No one could rescue her.

  No strong, handsome man would come along to pick her up this time.

  This was her third go-round with chemotherapy for her brain tumors. Each of the first two times, she had "known" she would lick it. When the third diagnosis came in, she lost the will to fight. She would endure one more round of chemo, she told her doctors, but that would be it. In the other two rounds, she had fought to control the nausea, using acupuncture and medicine, using whatever worked, and for a while, it had seemed to work.

  It wasn't working anymore, nothing was working anymore.

  She was in pain a lot of the time, and so very ill.

  Now, from under the black, black oily layer of clouds, she watched the funnel form high in the air, watched it dip down once, watched it rise, back up again, always moving in her direction.

  When it traveled over her, it was one hundred feet wide at the tip.

  She gazed up directly into the mouth of it, where she could see the revolution of the air and things—objects—

  whirling around inside of it. The roar was deafening and terrifying. She felt her whole body being picked up as if she were levitating, and then being laid back down. And then some of the things inside of the funnel began to fall on her. She closed her eyes, expecting to the killed by them. But they fell lightly atop her and all around her.

  When she opened her eyes, she discovered she was covered with flowers.

  The unexpected and solace-giving rain of flowers is one of the novel's remarkable high points. There are other perspectives on the tornado, too: townspeople, the sheriff, and Abby, who owns the town's nursery and gardening center, which, as it happens, is the one place where the tornado touches down and where it picks up the flower petals that comfort Catie Washington.

  In the immediate aftermath of the tornado's passing, Mitch and Abby meet for the first time in seventeen years. Is the tornado a symbol? Certainly, but it's also an event that unlocks the town's secrets. It turns out that Mitch did know the Virgin, but his involvement with her was not as expected. Who really killed her and why Abby's father battered her corpse's face with a golf club on the night of her death (an event Mitch witnessed and which sent him on the run for his own protection) takes a little longer to learn.

  What gives this sequence the force of a tornado? Is it Pickard's selection of this common plains phenomenon for her climax? Is it her descriptions? Is it the healing rain of flowers on Catie Washington? Is it how it brings Mitch and Abby together?

  I would argue that it is not one aspect of the tornado or its effect that gives Pickard's sequence its power; rather, it is the cumulative impact of all of them. A tornado is just a tornado. To create the tornado effect on the plot, Pickard had to put a number of Small Plains residents in a whirl.

  What is the Big Event in your current manuscript? How many people does it change? How many of those changes do you portray? To create the Tornado Effect, you will need to portray all of them. It's extra work but the extra impact will be worth it, don't you think?

  In certain fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.

  Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, it doesn't seem that anyone can say exactly how to do it.

  Do you ever skip description in a novel? I do, too. Obviously, merely describing how things look, sound, taste, feel, and smell is not, by itself, going to bring a location to life. Something more is required. Is it a setting that is unusual, exotic, or unexpected? If so, our job would be easy. We merely would have to find a spot on the face of the Earth where a novel has not previously been set. The Gobi Desert?

  Unfortunately, the Gobi Desert won't do when your novel is about pioneering the American West, coming of age in 1950s Minnesota, suburban angst, or vampires. If those are your subjects you will have to find new ways to bring to life Durango, Lake Wobegon, Levittown, or sexy urban nightclubs. Others have visited your setting before, too, and may even have colonized it.

  Does anyone dispute that the tidewater Carolinas are the kingdom of Pat Conroy? After The Prince of Tides (1986) or Beach Music (1995), who would be crazy enough to set a novel in that unique territory with its Charleston gardens, Gullah dialect, and marshes of waving cattails? Yet Conroy is far from the only contemporary novelist who has effectively set novels in the coastal Carolinas. Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Alice Monroe, and Dorothea Benton Frank are just a few who come to mind. That Conroy got there first hasn't hurt those authors' sales, or even diminished their settings.

  The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is uniquefor your characters, if not for you. You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your characters' experience.

  In other words, you must instill the soul of a place into your characters' hearts and make them grapple with it as surely as they grapple with the main problem and their enemies. How do you do that? It takes work but the basic principles of powerful settings are not exceptionally hard to grasp.

  Let's look at some examples.

  LINKING DETAILS AND EMOTIONS

  As a child, did you have a special summer place? A family beach house, or a lake cabin? One that's been in the family for years, rich in history, stocked with croquet mallets, special iced tea glasses, and a rusty rotary lawn mower?

  For me the special summer place was my Great Uncle Robert's farm on a hillside near Reading, Pennsylvania. "Uncle Locker," as we called him, was, as far as I knew, born old. He loved his John Deere tractor but didn't particularly like children, especially not after my younger brother dropped the tin dipping cup down the front yard well.

  Uncle Locker raised sheep. He stocked the lower pond with trout. He had connected a Revolutionary War-era log cabin with a Victorian-era farmhouse, erecting a soaring brick-floored, high-windowed living room between them. In that living room was a candy dish that each day magically refilled itself with M&M's. (I suspect now that it was my Great Aunt Margaret who was the magician.)

  In the evenings Uncle Locker would read the Reading newspaper on the glassed-in porch, classical symphonies crackling on his portable transistor radio as summer lightning flashed across the valley. That, today, is my mental image of perfect contentment. When I hear a radio crackle in a storm, I relax. I miss my Uncle Locker with a sharp pang.

  Now, let me ask you this: Without looking back over what you just read, what do you remember best about
what I wrote? Was it a detail, like the dipping cup, the M&M's, or the lightning? Or was it the feeling of contentment that, for me, accompanies an approaching storm? Whatever your answer, I would argue that you remember what you remember not because of the details themselves or the emotions they invoke in me, but because both those details and personal feelings are present.

  In other words, it is the combination of setting details and the emotions attached to them that, together, make a place a living thing. Setting comes alive partly in its details and partly in the way that the story's characters experience it. Either element alone is fine, but both working together deliver a sense of place without parallel.

  Father Andrew Greeley, an Irish-American Roman Catholic priest, is a durable novelist with some sixty novels to his credit, including The Cardinal Sins (1981), the science-fiction novel God Game (1986), and mystery novels featuring the Irish-American Roman Catholic priest (later bishop) "Blackie" Ryan. Needless to say, Father Greeley has had to deal with a lot of settings, though Chicago and Ireland recur frequently in his work. In one of his novels, though, a lake surrounded by summer homes is the main locale.

  Summer at the Lake (1997) is about three friends the Irish-American Roman Catholic priest "Packy" Keenan, university administrator Leo Kelly, and the woman whom as young men they both loved, Jane Devlin. Now turning fifty, these three return to the lake where one summer their lives and almost-loves were disrupted by a tragic car crash that was

  no accident, that may have been intended to kill Leo and certainly led to Jane marrying (unhappily) the driver of the ill-fated auto.

  Learning that Jane, now divorced, will once again visit the lake, Leo also returns to meet her again, to learn the truth behind the accident, and finally, he hopes, to lay to rest the ghosts of the magical and mysterious summer that was his life's turning point.

  Half way through the novel, Leo contemplates the lake, or, rather, the homes surrounding it:

  ... All I can recall are images of the Lake, images perhaps shaped by nostalgia for the summer of 1948 when Jane and I loved and lost one another.

  Our side of the Lake, as I came to call it, though nothing in it was mine except my friends, had been settled first, at our end before the turn of the century. Indeed some of the sprawling Victorian homes with their gables and turrets and porches and balconies dated to the first summer settlements of the late 1880s and early 1890s before the Columbian exposition in 1893. Each of the Old Houses, as they were called by everyone, boasted a neatly manicured lawn rolling down the hill to the Lake and a freshly painted gazebo and pier—usually with a motor launch of some sort, steam first, then internal combustion (idle during years of the War). On the road side of the house there would usually be a park of trees, all carefully maintained and landscaped and protected by a wrought-iron fence and gate with the family name scrolled always on the gate and sometimes on the fence too. Art deco swimming pools, with pillars and porches and fountains and classic statues graced some of the homes—though not the Keenans'. (Tom Keenan: Who needs a pool when you have a lake that's warm for three months?)

  Then I thought the homes were the most elegant houses in the world, the kind of places I read about in English mysteries or ghost stories. Later I would realize that they were in horrendous bad taste (and the people who lived in them for the most part new rich). Still later I would agree that they are interesting museum pieces from the Gilded Age and the Mauve Decade.

  Is there anything more evocative of summer than Victorian homes with their wide verandas, wide lawns, gingerbread trim, and bright colors? The promise of badminton, lawn parties, and lacy parasols has probably seduced more homeowners into the money pit than any other style of architecture.

  In the above passage Greeley invokes Victorian elegance with encyclopedic detail, skipping quickly over the "gables and turrets and porches and balconies" in favor of dates and a catalogue of decorative styles. His images are, to my eye, a bit generic: "wrought-iron" gates and fences, "classic" statues. Although I love American domestic architecture and enjoy spotting it the way some people identify trees or birds, to me this part of the passage feels dry.

  What makes an impression on me is not Greeley's knowledge of Gilded Age style but Leo Kelly's changing perception of the "Old Houses" around the lake. Once splendid and romantic, in later life they seemed to him tacky, and still later academically "interesting." This progression of feelings about the lake houses mirrors Leo's own life: evolving from a young middle-class guest at a rich resort, to a jilted would-be lover, to a detached university functionary.

  A summer home of the Arts and Crafts era is the focus of Susan Wiggs's Lakeside Cottage (2005). In this tale of returning home—in this case a summer home—Seattle journalist Kate Livingston brings her mildly difficult son Aaron for a restorative summer at the once brimming family cottage, now left to Kate alone by her dispersed family. There Kate takes in a teenage runaway and resists (sort of) her growing attraction to a secretive neighbor, JD Harris, a medic who is hiding a heroic self-sacrifice that led to national celebrity and the destruction of his privacy, poor guy.

  As Kate and Aaron arrive at Lake Crescent in Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, Kate harks back to the treasured family summers of years past:

  Some practices at the lake house were steeped in tradition and ancient, mystical lore. Certain things always had to be done in certain ways. S'mores were just one of them. They always had to be made with honey grahams, not cinnamon, and the gooey marshmallow had to be rolled in miniature M&M's. Nothing else would do. Whenever there was a s'mores night, they also had to play charades on the beach. She made a mental list of the other required activities, wondering if she'd remember to honor them all. Supper had to be announced each evening with the ringing of an old brass ship's bell suspended from a beam on the porch. Come July, they had to buy fireworks from the Makah tribe's weather-beaten roadside stand, and set them off to celebrate the Fourth. To mark the summer solstice, they would haul out and de-cobweb the croquet set and play until the sun set at ten o'clock at night, competing as though life itself depended on the outcome. When it rained, the Scrabble board had to come out for games of vicious competition. This summer, Aaron was old enough to learn Hearts and Whist, though with just the two of them, she wasn't sure how they'd manage some of the games.

  Susan's memories of summer traditions are as sweet as her family's s'mores. (What is it about M&M's?) The daily dinner bell, solstice croquet, rainy-day Scrabble ... don't you wish you had been invited to spend an August with Kate's clan?

  The details in this passage stand out because they are made highly specific: S'mores not just any old way but the Livingston way, charades not in the living room but on the beach, croquet played not simply at length but until sunset on the year's longest day. These details are not generic. They are the particular memories of a protagonist who has lived them.

  But how does Kate Livingston feel about these memories? When she looks back on past summers, how do they appear to her now? Bathed in a rosy glow, I would say. This sweet nostalgia is nice, but

  also exactly what we expect Kate to feel. What happens when less expected emotions are plumbed?

  Barbara Delinsky's Lake News (1999) is another story of returning to a summer home for healing. In this case, the place is Lake Henry in New Hampshire. Two wounded protagonists come back: Lounge singer Lily Blake, who has been devastated by the publicity surrounding an untrue accusation of an affair with a high church official, and John Kipling, a burned-out Boston journalist. Lily hates reporters; John is now running the local newspaper. See the conflict coming?

  As Lake News opens, John Kipling has been back in Lake Henry for several years. Early one autumn morning before work, John paddles a canoe out on the lake to visit a family of loons that will soon start their winter journey south.

  Like everything else at the lake, dawn arrived in its own good time. The flat black of night slowly deepened to a midnight blue that lightened in lazy steps, gradually givin
g form to the spike of a tree, the eave of a cottage, the tongue of a weathered wood dock—and that was on a clear day. On this day, fog slowed the process of delineation, reducing the lake to a pool of milky glass and the shoreline to a hazy wash of orange, gold, and green where, normally, vibrant fall colors would be. A glimpse of cranberry or navy marked a lakefront home, but details were lost in the mist. Likewise the separation of reflection and shore. The effect, with the air quiet and still, was that of a protective cocoon.

  It was a special moment. The only thing John Kipling would change about it was the cold. He wasn't ready for summer to end, but despite his wishes, the days were noticeably shorter than they had been two months before. The sun set sooner and rose later, and the chill of the night lingered. He felt it. His loons felt it. The foursome he watched, two adults and their young, would remain on the lake for another five weeks, but they were growing

  restless, looking to the sky lately in ways that had less to do with predators than with thoughts of migration.

  In time, the loon closest to him stretched his neck forward and issued a long, low wail. The sound wasn't unlike the cry of a coyote, but John would never confuse the two. The loon's wail was at the same time more elemental and more delicate.

  This one was the start of a dialogue, one adult calling the other in a succession of haunting sounds that brought the distant bird gliding closer. Even when they were ten feet apart, they continued to speak, with their beaks nearly shut and their elongated throats swelling around the sound.

  Goose bumps rose on his skin. This was why he had returned to the lake—why, after swearing off New Hampshire at fifteen, he had reversed himself at forty. Some said he'd done it for the job, others that he'd done it for his father, but the roundabout truth had to do with these birds. They signified something primal and wild, but simple, straightforward, and safe.