The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  In other words, exposition always matters. Yet the exposition in many manuscripts and published novels gets the purple highlighter. The most common reason is that such exposition merely restates what is obvious from what we have read: emotions that we felt earlier, thoughts that have already occurred to us. My private term for this is churning exposition. It's easy to skim because there's nothing new in it.

  Scott Westerfeld's series of futuristic young adult novels—Uglies (2005), Pretties (2005), Specials (2006) and the companion novel Extras (2007)—has been a big hit with young readers. The stories are set in a future world where at age sixteen kids are given an operation that makes them perfectly beautiful, thus erasing troublesome differences, jealousy, and conflict. That's the theory. But of course teenage angst doesn't go away just because everyone looks like a supermodel.

  The second volume, Pretties, finds heroine Tally Youngblood settling into her perfect life as a Pretty, enjoying parties, drinking, and pig-out meals that are easily purged with a pill. Everything is bubbly except that Tally wants to be accepted into one of the New Pretty Town cliques, the Crims. The party at which the Crims are to vote on her is marred by a visit from a masked Ugly from her past, the intrusion of the enforcement Specials, a dive from a balcony, and a cut on her forehead. Despite this, Tally is admitted to the Crims.

  Back home at her apartment, Tally listens to a ping (voice message) from friend Peris with the good news, and then digests what it means for her:

  As the message ended, Tally felt the bed spin a little. She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow sign of relief. Finally, she was a full-fledged Crim. Everything she'd ever wanted had come to her at last. She was beautiful, and she lived in New Pretty Town with Peris and Shay and tons of new friends. All the disasters and terrors of the last year—running away to the Smoke, living there in pre-Rusty squalor, traveling back to the city through the wilds—somehow all of it had worked out.

  It was so wonderful, and Tally was so exhausted, that belief took a while to settle over her. She replayed Peris's message a few times, then pulled off the smelly Smokey sweater with shaking hands and threw it into the corner. Tomorrow, she would make the hole in the wall recycle it.

  Tally lay back and stared at the ceiling for a while. A ping from Shay came, but she ignored it, setting her interface ring to sleeptime. With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future. The bed beneath her, Komachi Mansion, and even the city around her—all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

  It was probably just the knock to her head causing the weird missingness that underlay her joy. She only needed a good night's sleep—and hopefully no hangover tomorrow—and everything would feel solid again, as perfect as it really was.

  Tally fell asleep a few minutes later, happy to be a Crim at last.

  But her dreams were totally bogus.

  Needless to say, what's going on in Tally's world is not so nice. Pretties, as well as being made beautiful, also are inflicted with brain lesions that make them lazy, self-centered, and conformist; that is to say, manageable. Although she has temporarily forgotten, Tally is an Ugly who volunteered to become a Pretty in order to test a pill that will reverse the effects of the brain lesions. Tally is in for more trouble.

  Take a second look at the passage above. Overtly, all it does is state what we already know Tally will feel upon being made a Crim: happiness. The end of the passage hints that this happiness is "tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty." Even before that, though, Tally is trying too hard to convince herself that her life is now perfect, that "all of it had worked out." Westerfeld overemphasizes her elation to get us to anticipate that it is "bogus," and so we do.

  Westerfeld constructs conflicting feelings in this passage. On the one hand Tally is happy, relieved, and content. On the other, she is worried. We unconsciously want her conflict resolved, and so this simple dichotomy causes us to continue reading to see what will happen.

  The same effect can be produced when it's not emotions that are involved, but ideas. Thinking can be as conflicted as feeling. Pure intellectual debate is not often found in fiction for the simple reason that it is dry, but even so, wrestling with one's own mind can produce dramatic tension.

  In 1980, novelist Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel, and was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second novel, Gilead (2004), came twenty-four years later. This time she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

  In Gilead, the year is 1956. Seventy-six-year-old Rev. John Ames is ailing and writing an account of his life and faith for his six-year-old son by his second, and much younger, wife. Ames meditates upon his grandfather, his father, his sermons, and his struggles, especially his struggle to find Christian forgiveness with respect to John Ames Boughton, the ne'er-do-well son of his best friend and his namesake. Late in the novel Rev. Ames hits a point where forgiveness completely eludes him:

  I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I've scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it seemed to me always rigorous and good. I believe it was recommended to me by Edward, and also by my reverend grandfather when he made his last flight into the wilderness. I may once have fancied myself such another tough old man, ready to dive into the ground and smolder away the time till Judgment. Well, I am distracted from that project now. My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.

  Admittedly, Robinson's dense prose isn't easy to gloss. Give yourself some time—can I offer you a cup of coppery Ceylon tea?—and reread the passage at your leisure. It's quite beautiful. Have you ever described frustration as a "Kansas"? Have you ever felt that your own sense of inadequacy is "rigorous and good"? Ames stretches to find the beauty in being unable to find forgiveness in his heart.

  Is he successful? I'll leave that decision to you. What interests me is that Robinson plagues Ames's mind with contradictory concepts: judgment vs. forgiveness. He tries to find beauty in his dilemma. He is searching for grace and not finding it. Despite that, his attempt to feel good about his desolation is simultaneously a deep expression of his faith. Ames is fighting a battle between conflicting ideas and thus we have a strong reason to keep reading. How will it come out for Ames? Fifty-five pages later in Gilead you will find out.

  How do you handle exposition? Are there passages of interior monologue in your manuscript that are just taking up space? If there are, you can cut them, or possibly you can dig deeper into your character at this moment in the story and find inside of him contradictions, dilemmas, opposing impulses, and clashing ideas that keep us in suspense.

  To put it another way, exposition is an opportunity not to enhance the dangers of the plot (exposition doesn't do that) but to put your characters' hearts and minds in peril. Remember, though, that true tension in exposition comes not from circular worry or repetitive turmoil; it springs from emotions in conflict and ideas at war.

  TRANSFORMING LOW-TENSION TRAPS

  Weather openings are common—and dull. At my office, we toss them aside with grunts of impatience. "Weather opening" somebody mutters, and we all nod. Most writers are trying to use the weather as foreshadowing, a hint of storms to come. That's fine, but most of the time tension wafts away.

  The Uses of Enchantment (2006) was Heidi Julavits's third novel, following The Mineral Palace (2000) and The Effect of Living Backwards (2003). It begins one afternoon in 1985 when a sixteen-year-old girl, Mary Veal, disappears from the grounds of her prep school

  in the Boston suburb of West Salem, Massachusetts. Julavits begins her opening this way:

  The following might have happened on a late-fall afterno
on in the Boston suburb of West Salem. The afternoon in question was biting enough to suggest the early possibility of snow. The cloud cover made it seem later than the actual time of 3:35 p.m.

  The girl was one of many girls in field hockey skirts, sweatpants, and ski shells, huddled together in the green lean-to emblazoned with Semmering Academy's scripted S. It had rained all morning and all afternoon; though the rain had temporarily ceased, the playing field remained a patchwork of brown grass and mud bordered by a rain-swept chalk line. Last month a Semmering wing had torn an ankle tendon in similarly poor conditions, but the referee refused to call the game until 4 p.m. because the preparatory school extracurricular activities rules and regulations handbook stipulated that "sporting events shall not be canceled due to weather until one hour past the official start time."

  At 3:37, the rain recommenced. The girls whined and shivered while Coach Betsy glowered beneath the brim of her umass crew baseball cap. These girls were not tough girls and they had little incentive, given their eight-game losing streak, to endure a rainy November afternoon.

  At 3:42, the girl asked Coach Betsy if she could be excused to the field house. The girl did not say, but she implied that she had her period. Coach Betsy nodded her reluctant permission. The girl departed from the lean-to, unnoticed by her teammates.

  The Uses of Enchantment got many starred and glowing reviews, and yet it opens with the weather. What gives? Are rainy November afternoons inherently more interesting in Massachusetts, or because

  the author's previous two novels were notable? Is it actually the girls in their field hockey skirts that hook our attention? I don't think so.

  Julavits uses the drizzle not to invoke atmosphere but as a concrete factor in the story's kickoff, or rather, as an element in the doubt she is planting. Check again her opening line: "The following might have happened on a late-fall afternoon ..." (emphasis mine). You may not notice it, it passes so quickly, but that tricky little phrase triggers subconscious suspicions. Is the author telling us the truth?

  Julavits deepens the mystery as Mary Veal goes not to the locker room but across the street to clamber into a lurking Mercedes—or does she? The remainder of the novel, inspired in part by Freud's "Dora" case history, teases us with the truth. The weather, here, is not the point. The point is that everybody, including the author, spins their stories in ways that serve their unconscious desires and needs.

  To put it differently, the weather has an effect on us not because it is an outward portent but because it is tied to an inward storm. A lightning flash in the sky is just a cliche until it is fused to a bolt of interior tension. Describe the plain old weather and who cares? Provoke anxiety in the readers first and then—brrr—the icy November drizzle gives us a chill.

  Surveying-the-landscape openings are just as common as weather starts, and equally ineffective. Most of the time. Reed Farrel Coleman's mystery novel Soul Patch (2007), discussed previously in chapter four, was a nominee for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Coleman's gritty series is set in Brooklyn, in this case on Coney Island. Coleman opens Soul Patch with the following take on his setting:

  Nothing is so sad as an empty amusement park. And no amusement park is so sad as Coney Island. Once the world's playground, it is no longer the world's anything; not even important enough to be forgotten. Coney Island is the metal basket at the bottom of Brooklyn's sink. So it is that when the County of Kings is stood on end, Coney Island will trap all the detritus, human and otherwise, before it pours into the Atlantic.

  Coney Island's demise would be easy to blame on the urban planners, especially Robert Moses, who thought it best to warehouse the niggers, spics and white trash far away from the crown jewel of Manhattan in distant outposts like Rockaway and Coney Island. If they could have built their ugly shoe box housing projects on the moon, they would have. It is no accident that the subway rides from Coney Island and Rockaway to Manhattan are two of the longest in the system. But Coney Island's decay is as much a product of its birth as anything else.

  Coney Island, the rusted remnants of its antiquated rides rising out of the ocean like the fossils of beached dinosaurs, clings to a comatose existence. Like the senile genius, Coney Island has lived just long enough to mock itself. And nothing epitomizes its ironic folly better than the parachute jump. A ploughman's Eiffel Tower, its skeleton soars two hundred and fifty feet straight up off the grounds of what had once been Steeplechase Park. But the parachutes are long gone and now only the looming superstructure remains, the sea air feasting on its impotent bones.

  So what is it about Coney Island that gives it extra interest? Is it the details of its decline? Is it the thumbnail history? I'd say neither. In fact, as presented there is nothing inherently interesting about Coney Island at all. That's the point. It's the ragged end of nowhere. There's nothing left of it.

  Nothing, that is, except the evident sadness—or is it anger?—that the narrator feels about the state of this one-time seaside playground. Read the passage again. Is this narrator dispassionate? Hardly. Is Coney Island itself to blame for its misery? That explanation doesn't satisfy me, but that's not important. What keeps me reading is that the narrator demands an answer to an impossible question. He needs to understand something that cannot be understood. Tension exists not in the place itself but inside the one observing it.

  Backstory is the bane of virtually all manuscripts. Authors imagine that readers need, even want, a certain amount of filling in. I can see why they believe that. It starts with critique groups in which writers hear comments such as, "I love this character! You need to tell me more about her!" Yes, the author does. But not right away. As they say in the theater, make 'em wait. Later in the novel backstory can become a revelation; in the first chapter it always bogs things down.

  But there are exceptions. Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy revolves around power struggles in the kingdom of the Six Duchies. The second volume, Royal Assassin (1996), places young FitzChivalry Farseer into the middle of this mess, charged with protecting the heir apparent while an invasion looms, a usurper schemes, and the king is dying. As the novel opens, Fitz quietly occupies himself with writing a treatise on magic:

  Why is it forbidden to write down specific knowledge of the magics? Perhaps because we all fear that such knowledge would fall into the hands of one not worthy to use it.

  Right away, Hobb creates below-the-radar apprehension in the readers. Will Fitz get into trouble for setting down his knowledge? Will his discourse on magic fall into the wrong hands? Is he himself unworthy in some way to handle magic entrusted to him? Fitz even pauses in his writing to question his own understanding:

  But when I sit down to the task, I hesitate. Who am I to set my will against the wisdom of those who have gone before me?

  Hobb does not rely on any hypothetical inherent interest in how magic works in her world to carry the readers along. Wisely, she knows that it is Fitz's own inner conflict that makes his musings matter. A little later in the opening, Hobb takes Fitz on a deeper exploration of his motives and, therefore, his fitness (or not) to employ magic:

  Power. I do not think I ever wanted it for its own sake. I thirsted for it, sometimes, when I was ground down, or when those close to me suffered beneath ones who abused their powers. Wealth. I never really considered it. From the moment that I, his bastard grandson, pledged myself to King Shrewd, he always saw to it that all my needs were fulfilled. I had plenty to eat, more education than I sometimes cared for, clothes both simple and an-noyingly fashionable, and often enough a coin or two of my own to spend. Growing up in Buckkeep, that was wealth enough and more than most boys in Buckkeep Town could claim. Love? Well. My horse Sooty was fond enough of me, in her own placid way. I had the true-hearted loyalty of a hound named Nosy, and that took him to his grave. I was given the fiercest of loves by a terrier pup, and it was likewise the death of him. I wince to think of the price willingly paid for loving me.

  Always I have possessed the loneliness of one rai
sed amid intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who cannot trust the completeness of his heart to anyone. I could not go to Fedwren, the court scribe, who praised me for my neat lettering and well-inked illustrations, and confide that I was already apprenticed to the royal assassin, and thus could not follow his writing trade. Nor could I divulge to Chade, my master in the Diplomacy of the Knife, the frustrating brutality I endured trying to learn the ways of the Skill from Galen the Skill Master. And to no one did I dare speak openly of my emerging proclivity for the Wit, the ancient beast magic, said to be a perversion and a taint to any who used it.

  Not even to Molly.

  Notice how much backstory Hobb slips into the above. We learn a lot about what happened to Fitz in the trilogy's first volume. But is that the point of the passage? No; it is, rather, to develop Fitz's sense of duty toward King Shrewd and set it against his feelings of isolation.

  He can confide his problems to no one yet he longs to open his heart. You see? Inner tension. That in turn stirs our own curiosity to learn what will happen to Fitz. Nothing in the backstory itself does that; only Fitz's torn emotions cause us to care.

  To put it more simply, Hobbs uses the past to create present conflict. That is the secret of making backstory work.

  There was a time when aftermath passages were considered essential to a novel. Even today, some fiction instructors preach the pattern of scene-sequel-scene. The theory goes that after a significant story development, the protagonist (and the readers) needs a pause to digest the significance of this new situation, to make decisions and gather resolve to go forward.

  I do not believe in aftermath. The human brain moves faster than any author's fingers can type. The importance of any plot turn is, for most readers, immediately apparent. Mulling it over on the page doesn't add anything fresh. The readers' minds are already racing ahead. In any event, I find that most aftermath is the easiest material in any manuscript to skim. It lacks tension.