The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  I urge you to read that passage again. It is impressive first of all because Delinsky begins her novel with a big no-no of openings: a description of the scenery. How does she get away with that when less experienced writers would be slapped down by their critique groups? Delinsky's opening is beautifully written, but also notice the subtle tension with which she infuses her images:

  Like everything else at the lake, dawn arrived in its own good time.

  Analyze that line. It conveys a feeling of the natural rhythm of the lake, yet there is also a note of apprehension, almost impatience, introduced with the phrase "in its own good time." Like there is any other time frame? Well, yes. John lives at a faster pace than the lake itself. Man and nature are at odds. Quicker than our brains can grasp the discord, we're subconsciously ill at ease. We speed ahead to the next line looking, faintly, for relief.

  Look at how Delinsky continues to compile tension:

  He wasn't ready for summer to end ...

  He felt it. His loons felt it. ... they were growing restless, looking to the sky ... with thoughts of migration.

  This was why he had returned to the lake ... [why] he had reversed himself at forty ...

  Reversed himself at forty? Why exactly? After the tiniest of pauses, Delinsky tells us. Question and answer. Tension raised and relieved without us even being aware of it. Micro-tension (see chapter eight) is the secret behind page-turning fiction, and Delinsky uses it here to make a no-no opening riveting.

  Next, take a look at the scenery itself. Is it generic? It would be except that Delinsky filters it through a morning fog, not quite letting us see the usual lakeside sights of autumn leaves, dock, or house but merely a hint of their colors. How would you sum up the mood of a lake on a foggy morning? Delinsky dubs it a "protective cocoon."

  No sooner has she presented us with some unusual visuals than Delinsky immediately introduces feelings:

  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 ...

  Now, this regret over the passing of summer is nothing out of the ordinary. If that were the only emotion in the passage, it would be unremarkable. Delinsky, however, does not leave it at that. Have still another look at that last paragraph:

  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's 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.

  Look at how much we learn about John Kipling in these few lines: he once hated the lake but came back at forty, there's a cloud in his past, plus he owed something to his father. No wonder John likes the loons. Compared to all that messy stuff the loons are simple. He longs for what is uncomplicated. Family, flight, fog, cold, longing, and contentment just out of reach ... What is Delinsky up to here? Is she setting the scene? Yes, but more than that she is building a metaphor for her protagonist's precarious inner state.

  What grabs you more in Delinsky's passage, the specific images or the strong emotions? For me, the author makes both work together. The elements are not cobbled together but instead form a unity of man and nature, lake and loneliness, longing and peace. Scenery openings generally have me reaching for the next book on my pile, but in Lake News Delinsky rapidly brings the world of the story alive.

  MEASURING CHANGE OVER TIME

  There are other ways to bring setting alive. One of them is to measure the change in a place over time. Of course, most places don't change much—only the people observing them do.

  Kristin Hannah's On Mystic Lake (1999) is yet another heading-home-to-heal novel. Once more the lake in question is on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, which I figure will soon have a lock on ever-so-special childhood places. In this case, however, the wounded heroine of the story, Annie Colwater, is a native of the suburbs of Los Angeles; indeed, the middle of the novel is framed by two sequences set there.

  In the first part of the novel, Annie, immediately after her seventeen-year-old daughter's departure for a semester in Europe, is devastated to learn that her husband wants a divorce. Don't be shocked, but he has taken up with a younger woman at the office. It's

  a humdrum set up, yet Hannah deftly uses the very ordinariness of Annie's world as a starting point for building tension. In this passage near the novel's beginning, she details springtime in L.A.:

  It was March, the doldrums of the year, still and quiet and gray, but the wind had already begun to warm, bringing with it the promise of spring. Trees that only last week had been naked and brittle seemed to have grown six inches over the span of a single, moonless night, and sometimes, if the sunlight hit a limb just so, you could see the red bud of new life stirring at the tips of the crackly brown bark. Any day, the hills behind Malibu would blossom, and for a few short weeks this would be the prettiest place on Earth.

  Like the plants and animals, the children of Southern California sensed the coming of the sun. They had begun to dream of ice cream and popsicles and last year's cutoffs. Even determined city dwellers, who lived in glass and concrete high-rises in places with pretentious names like Century City, found themselves veering into the nursery aisles of their local supermarkets. Small, potted geraniums began appearing in the metal shopping carts, alongside the sundried tomatoes and the bottles of Evian water.

  For nineteen years, Annie Colwater had awaited spring with the breathless anticipation of a young girl at her first dance. She ordered bulbs from distant lands and shopped for hand-painted ceramic pots to hold her favorite annuals.

  But now, all she felt was dread, and a vague, formless panic. ... what did a mother do when her only child left home?

  Shows you how much I know. L.A. always feels pretty much the same to me; but then again, I grew up in New England. Who knew that the change of seasons could be measured by visions of Popsicles

  and cutoffs? By showing me the minute seasonal changes that a SoCal native would notice, Hannah nails spring as seen by Annie Colwater. But that's not all. This spring, Annie's usual "breathless anticipation" is replaced by dread. The contrast is jarring—in a good way.

  In the middle of On Mystic Lake, Annie heads home to Mystic Lake, her gruff-but-wise father, and a rendezvous with an old almost-flame, now a local police officer, Nick Delacroix. Nick has grown bitter, distant, and boozy due to the suicide of his manic-depressive wife, Kathy, the third leg of their teenage triumvirate. His morose mood is especially damaging to his six-year-old daughter, Izzy. Izzy has stopped talking, has been suspended from school, and wears black gloves because her fingers are disappearing one by one, or so she thinks. She eats and dresses with two fingers of her right hand, the only two digits that are left.

  At Nick's request, Annie begins to babysit Izzy while he's at work, and slowly Izzy begins to come around. (The moment when she can again see her lost fingers is one of the novel's many tear-jerking high moments.) Harder to rehabilitate is Nick. His alcoholism grows worse and eventually he bottoms out. As painful as his decline is, worse still is the news that Annie is pregnant at forty, and not by Nick.

  When Annie's remorseful husband himself shows up, dumped by the office hottie, and shortly before their daughter is due to return from Europe, Annie is persuaded to return to L.A. to honor her vows, have their baby, and give their marriage a second chance.

  And so Annie returns to L.A. Readers at this point probably are, as I was, screaming, Don't go! But Hannah is too good a storyteller to make Annie's choices easy. The wayward husband makes a real effort. Life is comfortable and familiar. Even L.A. itself creates opportunities for healing. In this passage late in the novel, Hannah again paints a change of seasons in Southern California, this time the turning to autumn:

  Autumn brought color back to Southern California. Brown grass began to turn green. The gray air, swept clean by September breez
es, regained its springtime

  blue. The local radio stations started an endless stream of football chatter. The distant whine of leaf blowers filled the air.

  It was the season of sharp, sudden changes: days of bright lemon heat followed by cold, starlit nights. Sleeveless summer shirts were packed away in boxes and replaced by crew-neck sweaters. The birds began one by one to disappear, leaving their nests untended. To the Californians, who spent most of their days in clothes as thin as tissue and smaller than washrags, it began to feel cold. They shivered as the wind kicked up, plucking the last dying red leaves from the trees along the road. Sometimes whole minutes went by without a single car turning toward the beach. The crossroads were empty of tourists, and only the stoutest of spirit ventured into the cool Pacific Ocean at this time of year. The stream of surfers at the state beach had dwindled to a few hardy souls a day.

  It was time now to let go. But how did you do that, really? Annie had spent seventeen years trying to protect her daughter from the world, and now all of that protection lay in the love she'd given Natalie, in the words she'd used in their talks, and in the examples she'd provided.

  Leaf blowers, crew-neck sweaters, empty roads heading to the beach . Hannah uses these details to delineate the change in her protagonist's perception of a place. There is emotion, as well; specifically, Annie's inadequacy in knowing how to protect her now nearly grown daughter and Annie's inability to let go, even now as the turning season demands it.

  These two passages on either end of Hannah's novel are one of the ways in which she creates a sense of dynamic movement—movement that doesn't depend on plot. By measuring change by minute degrees she not only heightens the tension in Annie's dilemma but also amplifies the world of the story in ways that make it inseparable from her heroine.

  Is the setting a character in On Mystic Lake, or is it the character of Annie Colwater whose perceptions make L.A. feel alive? I'd say it's the storytelling skill of Kristin Hannah that makes the question moot. Character and setting meld into one.

  HISTORY IS PERSONAL

  Historical novelists think a lot about what makes the period of their novels different than ours. They research it endlessly. Indeed, many historical novelists say that is their favorite part of the process. When the research is done and writing begins, though, how specifically do they create a sense of the times on the page? With details is the common answer, but which details, exactly, and how many of them?

  And what if the period of your novel is not terribly far back in history? If your story is set in the 1970s, is it enough to mention Watergate, or do you need to be even more specific about disco, VWs, horizontally striped polo shirts, and oil shocks? How about contemporary stories? Does one need to convey a sense of the times when the times are our own?

  To start to answer those questions, read the Op-Ed pages in the newspaper. Does everyone see our times in the same way? No. Outlooks vary. That should also be true for your fictional characters. What is your hero's take on our times? As in so many aspects of novel construction, creating a sense of the times first requires filtering the world through your characters. For examples, let's travel to Venice.

  Joseph Kanon's richly layered debut mystery novel, Los Alamos (1997), won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He followed with The Prodigal Spy (1998), The Good German (2001), and the tragic and complicated Alibi (2005).

  Alibi is set in Venice in late 1945, immediately after the close of World War II. Rich Americans are returning to Europe, among them widow Grace Miller, who migrates south to Venice, having found Paris too depressing. Grace invites her son Adam, the novel's hero and narrator, who has been newly released from his post-war

  service as a Nazi hunter in Germany. As the novel opens, Adam tells of his mother's return to the expatriate life:

  After the war, my mother took a house in Venice. She'd gone first to Paris, hoping to pick up the threads of her old life, but Paris had become grim, grumbling about shortages, even her friends worn and evasive. The city was still at war, this time with itself, and everything she'd come back for—the big flat on the Rue du Bac, the cafes, the market on the Raspail, memories all burnished after five years to a rich glow—now seemed pinched and sour, dingy under a permanent cover of gray cloud.

  After two weeks she fled south. Venice at least would look the same, and it reminded her of my father, the early years when they idled away afternoons on the Lido and danced at night. In the photographs they were always tanned, sitting on beach chairs in front of striped changing huts, clowning with friends, everyone in caftans or bulky one-piece woolen bathing suits. Cole Porter had been there, writing patter songs, and since my mother knew Linda, there were a lot of evenings drinking around the piano, that summer when they'd just married. When her train from Paris finally crossed over the lagoon, the sun was so bright on the water that for a few dazzling minutes it actually seemed to be that first summer. Bertie, another figure in the Lido pictures, met her at the station in a motorboat, and as they swung down the Grand Canal, the sun so bright, the palazzos as glorious as ever, the whole improbable city just the same after all these years, she thought she might be happy again.

  There are several things to note in this highly atmospheric opening. First, Kanon weaves an undercurrent of tension through these two paragraphs, a tension that derives from his mother's longing for . well, what? Paris is dissatisfying. Venice, seemingly untouched by the war, is full of sunlight and memories. A mood of nostalgia would

  be enough here, but Kanon himself is not satisfied with a mere rosy glow. Venice is "improbable" and Grace's lift of spirit is tinged with doubt: "She thought she might be happy again."

  That word "might" is a calculated choice. Do you get the feeling that Adam's mother will not re-create in Venice the happiness of the pre-war party of the 1920s and 1930s? You are correct. Grace is courted by a distinguished Italian doctor, Gianni Maglione, whom Adam immediately dislikes—with good reason, as it turns out. When Adam begins a love affair with Claudia Grassini, a Jewish woman who survived the camps by becoming a Fascist's mistress, he is drawn into a tragic conflict. Claudia accuses Dr. Maglione of wartime collaboration and, worse, condemning her own father to death at Auschwitz. Adam's mother wishes to leave the past buried, but Adam, given his background and love for Claudia, cannot leave it alone.

  Kanon's opening also effectively evokes Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. Paris is "grim" and "grumbling." Grace's Paris is specific, too: Kanon mentions not just the city's streets, cafes, and markets, but Grace's flat on the "Rue du Bac" and the market on the "Raspail." For all I know, Kanon could be completely making up those places. It doesn't matter. It is their specificity that brings this Paris of food shortages and long memories alive.

  Venice, by contrast, is full of false sunlight and sweet memories. These memories themselves are highly specific: afternoons on the Lido, striped changing huts, Cole Porter. Kanon plucks from his research a few choice tidbits that hint at a life of gay carelessness and privilege. His narrator's casual familiarity with them contributes to the passage's reality. But it's not only that. The details and the mood, Grace's naive longing and Adam's cynical foreknowledge all roll together into a couple paragraphs that create a unique moment in time.

  Renaissance Venice attracts many novelists. The story of Christi Phillips's debut novel, The Rossetti Letter (2007), springs from an historical footnote: In 1618, a Spanish conspiracy to overthrow the city was exposed in a letter written by little-known courtesan Ales-sandra Rossetti. Meanwhile in the present, graduate student Claire

  Donovan is writing her thesis on Rossetti; however, her ambition is threatened by the news that a well-known British historian, Andrew Kent, will be publishing a book on the same subject. Claire wangles a plane ticket to Venice by chaperoning a troubled teenage girl. There she plans to hear Andrew Kent lecture and thus learn if her thesis is doomed.

  As in A.S. Byatt's Possession (1990), Phillips spins her tale of a
cademic obsession in both present and past. In the past, we follow courtesan Rossetti's unfolding story of love and betrayal. It begins with Rossetti delivering the fateful letter that will expose the Spanish Conspiracy:

  They turned into the Rio di San Martino, then into a narrow waterway that circled west toward the Piazzetta dei Leoncini. In their wake, small waves gently slapped against stone foundations smothered in clumps of thick, glistening moss. She could reach out and brush the damp stone with her fingertips is she desired, so close were the buildings, and she inhaled their familiar grotto scent with a kind of reverence. Traveling through Venice at night always filled her with a rising excitement, but tonight her anticipation was tinged with fear. Alessandra tried not to think about what waited for her at the end of her journey, which was quickly approaching.

  The Piazza was bright with torchlight, alive with music and revelry, but she could not join in the general high spirits; the sinister maw that waited for her in the dark courtyard of the Doge's Palace filled her with dread. The bocca di leone, the lion's mouth, was a special receptacle created by the Venetian government to receive letters of denunciation. Into this bronze plaque went accusations of theft, murder, or tax evasion—the last a particularly heinous crime according to the Great Council, the Republic's ruling assembly of two thousand noblemen. Alessandra had never imagined, until recently, that she would ever avail herself of it. Behind the bocca di leone's grotesque, gaping mouth lurked every terror hidden within the depths of the palace, the prison, and the Republic itself; surely unleashing that terror was a fearsome act not to be done with indifference.

  By now I'm sure you can spot for yourself the mixture of specific details of place, as well as the courtesan's taut emotions, that together make this historical moment vivid and real. Take another look at Phillips's passage and pick them out.