The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  The world of a story is a hyperreality. In a passionately told tale, characters are larger than life, what's happening matters profoundly, the outcome is important in the extreme, and even the words on the page have a DayGlo fluorescence. A certain verisimilitude is required, of course, otherwise a story would not feel real. But that's a trick. In a passionate story the particulars of life are magnified.

  A depressingly large share of manuscripts that I read fail to heighten much of anything. Protagonists, places, and problems don't stand out. There's a sense of same-old to them that's not a good thing. If I want same-old I can phone my brother-in-law. From a novel I want an experience more unusual, or at least more vivid, than the humdrum beat of a regular day.

  In practical terms, what constitutes a hyperreality? How does it get on the page? To find out, it will be useful to have a look at the methods of our top satirists. Satire by definition exaggerates. That's how it works. Luckily, the techniques of satire have applications in every story. And if it is satire that you specifically are aiming for, then it will be good to study the systems of the very best.

  But first let me tell you why most satiric manuscripts fall flat.

  THE SECRETS OF SATIRE

  Life is full of irony, isn't it? Sometimes you have to laugh. If you didn't, you'd scream. In fact, at times the world is so absurd the only thing to do is to write about it.

  Others have felt that way too. From Daniel Defoe to Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut to contemporary practitioners like Steve Aylett, Douglas Coupland, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, satire saturates our literature. Laughing at others is essential. Making fun of ourselves, it seems, is even more necessary.

  Whether you have spent decades on Capitol Hill or gone no further than college, you, too, probably feel a need to poke fun at the world. How do I know? Because I receive countless manuscripts that intend to satirize. Queries also frequently pitch us stories that are "by turns tragic and hilarious."

  So why am I not laughing?

  Sadly, comedic manuscripts almost never live up. The biggest problem is that they aren't funny. They rarely deliver even chuckles, never mind the whoops of laughter that their authors intend to provoke. Why not? It is not because their authors are humorless

  trolls. Most are funny people. The problem is that their humor comes through on the page only a little.

  It's one thing to crack a joke or be occasionally witty; it's another thing altogether to be funny for four hundred pages. But that is what it takes. Humor is cumulative. Laughter builds. Have you ever enjoyed a comedian's routine? When do you laugh the hardest, at the beginning or at the end? Toward the end, of course, because the comedian's outrageous outlook takes a while to overwhelm you.

  So it is with fiction. For humor to come through in a novel it needs to be bigger and more relentless than most authors realize. You can crack yourself up at the keyboard but barely raise a smile on your readers' faces. To slay those readers you need to hammer their funny bones like Noah nailing the Ark.

  The malnourishment of comic manuscripts is a shame, too, because the methods of mirth are so plentiful. They're even free. Here are a few of them, on me:

  • hyperbole

  • wit

  • biting comment (think insults)

  • ironic juxtaposition and reversal

  • escalation of the mildly ridiculous

  • being extremely literal ("Who's on first?")

  • funny name and word choices

  • deadpan delivery of dumb remarks

  • deliberate misunderstanding

  • unlikely points of view

  • extreme personas or voices

  • stereotyping

  There are a thousand ways to be funny but it is hyperbole that I wish all fiction writers would master. It's a universal leavening. It is a crucial element that can punch up description regardless of the type of novel you are writing

  If I describe the pancakes served at a diner as humungous, you get the idea. But if I instead have your waitress, Dixie, slam down

  a platter of whole grain banana-peach pancakes that are the size of Firestone Extreme Service truck tires, doesn't that have more visual impact? That's hyperbole.

  Those novelists who intend to be hilarious need not use only hyperbole but a whole grab bag of comic techniques. Where to start? Almost anything can be made funny, but recognize that humor depends in part on the readers' familiarity with your subject. You can't effectively riff on something if your audience is completely ignorant of it. Thus, it's useful to target first some things that everyone has in common.

  FUNNY PEOPLE, FUNNY PLACES

  Some people should not be taken seriously. Think wine stewards, spiritual gurus, or productivity teams. Certain places also make us grin: Chuck E. Cheese, nude beaches, Baptist karaoke bars.

  Yeah well, okay, maybe nude beaches make us wince.

  Regardless, is making a person or a place a screaming riot simply a matter of choosing a ripe target? No. Even naturally funny subjects have got to be mined for their humor. By the same token, any person, place, or thing is funny if you know how to look at it. Take your hometown. For you, is it bathed in nostalgia or is it a memory more like Alcatraz?

  In Jonathan Tropper's The Book ofJoe (2004), hero Joe Goffman's hometown is Bush Falls, Connecticut. It's also the subject of Joe's autobiographical novel, a bestseller and scathing expose of small town sins. Joe expects never to go back. If he does he certainly won't be welcome. But when Joe's father has a stroke, Joe is forced to return to the place where he was raised:

  Bush Falls is a typical if small version of many middle-class Connecticut towns, a planned and determinedly executed suburbia where the lawns are green and the collars predominantly white. Landscaping in particular is taken very seriously in Connecticut. Citizens don't have coats of arms emblazoned above their front doors; they have hedges, fuchsia and pachysandra, flower beds and emerald arborvitae. A neglected lawn stands out like a goiter, the telltale symptom of a dysfunctional domestic gland. In the summer, the hissing of the cicadas, invisible in the treetops, is matched by the muted machine-gun whispers of a thousand rotating sprinklers, some dragged out of the garage after dinner, others installed beneath the lawns and set on timers. Soon, I know, the sprinklers will be put away for the season, replaced by rakes and leaf blowers, but for now they remain heavily in evidence as I drive down Stratfield Road, the main artery connecting the residential section of Bush Falls with its commercial district.

  Did the passage above have you howling? Me neither. It isn't meant to be riotous, just a wry take on a white-collar suburban town. For me, that intention takes hold with the line, "Landscaping in particular is taken very seriously in Connecticut." Of all the things one can take seriously in this world, landscaping? It's the conjoining of the words "seriously" and "landscaping" that makes this humorous.

  Developing his theme, Tropper lands another nice line with, "A neglected lawn stands out like a goiter." If he had chosen "sore thumb" instead, the line would not work. What would you have chosen to stand out? An elephant? An outdoor albino wedding? The first is too common and the second stretches too far. Neither one evokes ugly, either. Goiter is smack on. It's both true and over the top, like all good hyperbole.

  Can you pick out other hyperbole in Tropper's passage? My favorite is "the muted machine-gun whispers of a thousand rotating sprinklers." Sprinklers are a suburban necessity. Describing their sound as "machine-gun" (but at a whisper) is ridiculous but exactly right. Here Tropper's exaggeration gives the image an especially nasty edge of meaning. Could the line better convey Joe's contempt for his hometown?

  Along with hometowns, college is a frame of reference that authors can mostly count on sharing with their readers. In Tom

  Perrotta's Joe College (2000), the university in question is Yale and the hero is Danny, a junior coping with typical undergraduate woes. Not least of these is his crush on smart and beautiful Polly, who of course already has a boyfriend, in this case
a professor. One evening after walking Polly back to her dorm, they find the professor waiting. Danny must yield her. Perrotta handles Danny's sense of humiliation at this delicate moment this way:

  My face felt hot, like I was standing too close to a fireplace. I gave a shrug of what was supposed to be mature resignation and headed off down College Street as thought it were all the same to me, as though I'd expected the night to end like this all along. It seemed important not to look back or give too much thought to what they might be doing or saying, so I tried to distract myself by whispering the word "fuck" over and over again, in unison with my footsteps, and thinking about how cool I would be in the leather bomber jacket I was sure I would someday own.

  Where exactly in that passage does the humor lie? It's in the third sentence when Danny blithely tries to distract himself with ... well, what? Here is the turnabout. We expect something mundanely diverting, but instead Danny mutters fuck to himself repeatedly. Had Perrotta begun the paragraph with that detail, it wouldn't be funny. Instead, he sets up our expectation and then reverses it, a classic comedy technique.

  Elsewhere in the novel, Danny gets a chance to dance with Polly. What kind of dancer do you think Danny is? You're right: the worst. Since you already expect that, making Danny's gyrations goofy is going to be difficult. To milk the moment for its humor, Perrotta becomes wildly hyperbolic:

  It was strange and awful at the beginning, a bad dream made flesh. I was the Dork-in-Chief, the Anti-Dancer, the Fred Astaire of Spaz. My arms moved and my legs moved, but these movements had little to do

  with the music, and even less to do with fun. They were abrupt and jerky, the flailings of a defective marionette. I needed oil. The beat was a distant rumor. If I'd been in water I would have drowned. To make matters worse, everyone else on the dance floor suddenly seemed improbably fluid and limber, full of tricky spins and Soul Train swivels. I mean, they were Yalies. Molecular Biology and Biochemistry majors. People who petitioned to take seven courses in one semester so they wouldn't have to choose between Introductory Sanskrit, Medieval Architecture, and that senior seminar on Finnegans Wake. Where had they learned to dance like this? Gro-ton? Choate? Some special summer camp my parents hadn't heard about?

  Perrotta's hyperbole here is grounded in his narrator's sense of humiliation. Feeling like a jerk is a universal experience. The fun lies in pumping up the emotion so that it inflates like a blimp. Bad enough to be a spaz on the dance floor, but on a dance floor full of Yalies? Ouch. Notice, too, how much time Perrotta spends developing Danny's I'm-a-bad-dancer diatribe. In satiric fiction it doesn't hurt to pile it on.

  What about your manuscript? Are your similes merely apt? Are your metaphors mild? How do you paint emotions? Try feeding them amphetamines. Rev them up like a motorbike, maybe to a point where they become ridiculous. That's the idea. When infected with a case of the blahs, a novel doesn't need less, it needs more. It doesn't need small, it needs big.

  The right medicine may be a dose of hyperbole.

  SENDING UP SOCIETY

  It's hard to compete with the great social satirists of our day, such as Tom Wolfe, but it can be done. What does it take? Again, I believe it begins not with choice of subject but with a will to point out what is puerile, peculiar, and pernicious in our world, and then to do so

  with gleeful malice and at great length. Satire is not a simple tone to adopt; it's a mission to embrace. Satiric novelists are, to me, less like occasional wits and more like Marines.

  Does America seem to you controlled by corporations? If not actually running the country they certainly control the majority of many people's days. The cube farm must be a noxious place to work because corporate satires are easy to find in my agency's slush pile. Unfortunately, few of them work.

  One corporate satire that does work is Max Barry's Jennifer Government (2003), which posits a future where the functions of government have been surrendered completely to corporations. This privatization is so extreme that schools are sponsored by companies and people adopt their corporation's names as their own. Barry's novel is set in the "Australian Territories of the USA," and it is there that hapless shoe company employee Hack Nike is sucked into a devious scheme. His company has created massive demand for a new athletic shoe by refusing to sell it. The next step is to make purchase of the shoe more difficult still by assassinating some shoppers who try to buy it. What a brilliant idea!

  Unaware at first of this dimension of the campaign, Hack signs a contract to join the marketing team. Only later does he read the fine print and find out that he's supposed to do the shooting. Naturally, Hack wants to escape his contract. Following his girlfriend's sensible advice he brings his problem to the police, who also are now a corporation. At the station house a detective talks with Hack:

  "So what's your problem?" He flipped open a notebook.

  Hack told him the whole story. When he was done, Pearson was silent for a long time. Finally Hack couldn't take it anymore. "What to you think?"

  Pearson pressed his fingers together. "Well, I appreciate you coming forward with this. You did the right thing. Now let me take you through your options." He closed the notebook and put it to one side. "First, you can go through with this Nike contract. Shoot some people. In that case, what we'd do, if we were retained by the Government or one of the victim's representatives, is attempt to apprehend you."

  "Yes."

  "And we would apprehend you, Hack. We have an eighty-six percent success rate. With someone like you, inexperienced, no backing, we'd have you within hours. So I strongly recommend you do not carry out this contract."

  "I know," Hack said. "I should have read it, but—"

  "Second, you can refuse to go through with it. That would expose you to whatever penalties are in the contract. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you they would be harsh. Very harsh indeed."

  Hack nodded. He hoped Pearson wasn't finished.

  "Here's your alternative." Pearson leaned forward. "You subcontract the slayings to us."

  The police making hits? Why not? The police are well suited to solve Hack's problem, or so he thinks. But look closely, going beyond that funny development to notice the care with which Barry sets it up. For half a page it looks like the cop is going to help Hack in the way we expect. "We would apprehend you ... So I strongly recommend you do not carry out this contract." Hack's anxiety grows. The cop offers three options: 1) bad, 2) worse, 3) ironic reversal.

  It's a classic joke structure, leading you by steps to expect one thing then springing on you something logical but out of left field. You would think we'd grow inured to that pattern but we don't. Bar jokes work in the same way. With every new variation of a-priest-an-Irishman-and-a-duck-walk-into-a-bar they hook us over and over again, as does Barry.

  Another approach to sending up social institutions is through parody. Where satire sends up social mores, parody sends up a literary form. Parody also automatically shoots down whatever happens to be the targeted genre's subject matter.

  To show you what I mean, let's look at a prison story. In the following passage, a young and diminutive political prisoner named Hassan is recovering from a gunshot wound, but nevertheless receives hard treatment from his American jailers:

  The door of the cell clicked open and a plump female jailer entered, complaining to Agent Mike that the jail had no clothing on hand that would fit a traitor and murderer as puny as this one, and that something had to be specially ordered, which took most of the goddamn day and which the little piece of shit didn't deserve. "Put it on!" she shouted, throwing a set of gray clothes at the boy. The outfit fell from his grasp to the floor. "Pick it up!" she shouted now.

  It seemed to take an excruciatingly long time for him to remove his hospital gown and pull on the little T-shirt and pants, and indeed Agent Mike grumbled, "Christ—finally," when Hassan was done. Glancing down at the outfit, the boy didn't think he could be any more humiliated than this. A row of figures was stenciled on the front.

&nbs
p; "That's yer number," said the jailer, enunciating angrily as if the suspect might not understand, or might pretend not to understand, these simple words. "From now on. Don't forgit it."

  Grim stuff, wouldn't you agree? We know without being told that Hassan is in for a bad time at this jail. Now let's take a look at the way that passage originally was written in Clifford Chase's Winkie (2006), in which the title character is a sentient teddy bear abandoned in a cabin and hauled in when the FBI raids the woods looking for a mad bomber:

  The door of the cell clicked open and a plump female jailer entered, complaining to Agent Mike that the jail had no clothing on hand that would fit a traitor and murderer as puny as this one, and that something had to be specially ordered, which took most of the goddamn day and which the little piece of shit didn't deserve. "Put it on!" she shouted, throwing a set of gray baby clothes at the bear. The outfit fell from his grasp to the floor. "Pick it up!" she shouted now.

  It seemed to take an excruciatingly long time for him to remove his hospital gown and pull on the little T-shirt and pants, and indeed Agent Mike grumbled, "Christ— finally," when Winkie was done. Glancing down at the baby outfit, the bear didn't think he could be any more humiliated than this. A row of figures was stenciled on the front.

  "That's yer number," said the jailer, enunciating angrily as if the suspect might not understand, or might pretend not to understand, these simple words. "From now on. Don't forgit it."

  Quite different when the political prisoner is a teddy bear, isn't it? But have another look. Generating humor around this toy depends first on building the believable context for the unlikely element. In Chase's scene, the sneering contempt of the prison matron and the excruciating exchange of hospital gown for prison garb are simple devices but effective for creating irony, considering that this extreme hostility is directed at a cuddly stuffed animal.