The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  Oh, that Biff. What a cut up. What would you say is his attitude toward yaks? Conflicted? I'd agree. More to the point, what does Biff's wry outlook tell you about the journey he is taking with Josh? Ah. Christopher Moore has a big problem in writing the story of Jesus: We know how it turns out. Creating narrative tension is therefore a bit of a challenge. There's really no way to do it except by finding tension elsewhere, and that is primarily within Biff. Moore teases out Biff's conflicted feelings about being the Messiah's buddy for hundreds of pages, keeping us wondering whether he will hang in there all the way to the Resurrection.

  Given that emotional conflict is a nuclear generator of tension in all dimensions of a novel, you would think that writing about pure emotions by themselves would be a sure bet to keep readers involved. Not so. Plain emotion can be as dull as description. Just because a character is feeling something doesn't mean we will feel anything other than indifferent.

  Susan Minot's highly-praised, and later filmed, novel Evening (1998) tells the story of Ann Grant, who in 1994 is dying, and whose memory of the one passionate love of her life is rekindled by the smell of a balsam pillow. In 1954 she travels to a wedding in Maine and there falls in love with fellow guest Harris Arden. Their affair is intense and brief. Then Arden's girlfriend arrives from Chicago for the wedding with the news that she is pregnant. Arden decides to do the right thing. After making his choice, Arden examines his feelings:

  Harris Arden came up around the side of the house. He was not used to so much emotion. It wore him out. This had all caught him off guard. He'd come upon a new road and taken a few steps down that road and now he saw it wasn't the road he was going to take after all. He was going back to the road he knew and would continue walking where he'd been walking for a long time. He'd been walking on that road for a long time for a reason. It suited him, didn't it? Well there wasn't any use in asking whether it suited him or not, it was where his duty took him and where his life had put him and where he would go.

  He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him. It had been too sudden. But hadn't it been sudden with Maria also? Why, it could go on being sudden with girls if you let it, one had to put a stop to it somewhere along the line. Having a baby would put a stop to it. Maria was the one he would stop with. And Maria loved him, that was certain. He could not be certain about this new woman. After the brightness faded who knew what would happen, he hardly knew her.

  Minot's handling of Arden's feelings is deft. Note how in the first paragraph his reasoning is plodding and detached. Then he thinks of Ann: "He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him." For a second his mind is alive, but then he shuts it down again, rationalizing his choice. Is he worn out by emotion, as he supposes? No, he is pushing it down. He is suppressing his anguish. Had Minot merely portrayed Arden's sadness it would have been fine but it would also have been ordinary.

  Because Arden is struggling, we are drawn in. Without being aware of it we are wondering whether he will think away his passion or whether his heart will win. It is a small tension, perhaps, but enough to keep us reading a few pages farther.

  Foreshadowing foretells peril—not for the characters but for the novelist. Why? Have you ever groaned over a thudding and clunky piece of portentousness? Then you know. Foreshadowing can have the opposite of its intended effect. Is there a way to cast a shadow without being ridiculously obvious?

  E.L. Doctorow's The March (2005) was awarded the National Book Critics' Circle and the PEN/Faulkner awards, as well as nominations for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It is the story of General Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas late in the Civil War. The burning of Atlanta was just the beginning. A sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction followed behind Sherman. Doctorow uses five points of view to dramatize this calamity.

  Toward the beginning of the novel, a plantation family, knowing what is coming, packs their valuables in wagons and departs. They leave behind their slaves who, wearing their Sunday clothes, wait for the emancipation that they believe will arrive with the Union Army. Elder slave Jake Early is the first to sense its approach:

  Jake Early did not have to counsel patience. The fear they had all seen in the eyes of the fleeing Massah and Mistress told them that deliverance had come. But the sky was cloudless, and as the sun rose everyone settled down and some even nodded off, which Jake Early regretted, feeling that when the Union soldiers came they should find black folk not at their ease but smartly arrayed as a welcoming company of free men and women.

  He himself stood in the middle of the road with his staff and did not move. He listened. For the longest while there was nothing but the mild stirring of the air, like a whispering in his ear or the rustle of woodland. But then he did hear something. Or did he? It wasn't exactly a sound, it was more like a sense of something transformed in his own expectation. And then, almost as if what he held was a divining rod, the staff in his hand

  pointed to the sky westerly. At this, all the others stood up and came away from the trees: what they saw in the distance was smoke spouting from different points in the landscape, first here, then there. But in the middle of all this was a change in the sky color itself that gradually clarified as an upward-streaming brown cloud risen from the earth, as if the world was turned upside down.

  The world of the South and these slaves is indeed about to be turned upside down. What best foreshadows the destruction to come? The columns of smoke on the horizon and the sickly brown hue of the sky are ominous outward signs, to be sure. I wonder, though, if they would bear the same dread had not Doctorow prepared us first with the slaves' hopeful anticipation, wearing their Sunday best, Jake Early wishing they would appear "a welcoming company of free men and women."

  Foreshadowing, I believe, is most effective not when it thunders at us but when it stirs within the story's characters a shift of emotion. The signs in the sky are only smoke, really, unless they mark a subtle contrast with characters' feelings.

  Every story has static moments; that is, times when nothing in particular is happening. Can those be put on the page? Many writers inadvertently do so. That may seem a failure of self-editing, but I believe that many writers pen such passages because they sense something important in them. What is it they are hoping to capture? And what is the point in trying when there is nothing at all with which to work?

  Scottish mystery writer Josephine Tey (1896-1952) did not publish many novels, but one of them featuring her detective, Alan Grant, made her famous: In The Daughter ofTime (1951), Grant solves a long-standing historical mystery without ever leaving his hospital bed. Laid up with a broken leg, using only history books and pure reason, Grant uncovers the truth of whether Richard III murdered his nephews.

  As the novel opens, though, Grant has nothing to do but stare at the ceiling:

  Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

  He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn't he read? she asked. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him?

  "There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible tho
ught."

  "You sound constipated," said The Midget.

  Constipated? Alan Grant is bored. Like Sherlock Holmes needing a fix, he craves a mystery to engage his mind. Until then it is the ceiling. He is able to find in it animals; it recalls geometric formulae. But how does he feel about it? He loathes it.

  I ask you, what is it in this classic opening paragraph that actually captures our interest and keeps us reading? The ceiling? No. It's just a ceiling. What keeps us in suspense is whether Alan Grant's boredom will be relieved.

  In other words, tension can be made out of nothing at all; or at least, that's how it can appear. In reality it is feelings, specifically

  feelings in conflict with each other, that fill up an otherwise dead span of story and bring it alive.

  Do you feel that your manuscript is brimming with tension? Do agents, editors and reviewers, and vast legions of readers agree? Not yet? Then there is work to do; specifically the work of finding the torn emotions in your characters and using them as the foundation for true tension in dialogue, action, exposition, and anywhere that tension is needed to keep us unsure of what will happen next.

  Where is that tension needed? Everywhere.

  Is there such a thing as a bad premise for a story? Without a doubt some story ideas feel familiar. Bandwagon syndrome pretty much guarantees that something successful will soon have imitators. If the imitators are successful you can count on a trend. If a trend lasts, then you can put money on it: that kind of story within a few years will be done to death.

  Then again, can we say that whodunits have been done to death? Love conquers all? Save the world? No, these story patterns are durable. They are durable because they are flexible. There are thousands of ways to figure out whodunit. True love has infinite obstacles. The world always needs saving, too, and in different ways in every new decade.

  In evaluating manuscripts I look for original stories, but is there anything new under the sun? Not really. Every novel has antecedents. Every author has influences. It is impossible to be wholly original; even so, some novels feel fresh and shake us with their insight. How is that effect achieved, especially when the novel in question is a mystery, romance or thriller of a type we've read a hundred times before?

  Mainstream and literary fiction too can feel thin, derivative, or lackluster. If you have you ever read a tastily written debut literary novel that left you feeling hungry, or if you have trudged through four hundred pages of well-reviewed women's fiction only to feel like you've

  made this journey to self-discovery before, then you know what I mean. What gives a novel not only freshness but the force of the new?

  Originality comes not from your genre, setting, plot, characters, voice, or any other element on which you can work. It cannot. It isn't possible. Originality can come only from what you bring of yourself to your story. In other words, originality is not a function of your novel; it is a quality in you.

  Are you writing, let's say, a mystery novel? Bad news: you are not the first person to think of starting your story with a murder. Sorry. You are not even close to the front of the line of authors who have created quirky and appealing detectives, either. Too bad. But you do have one advantage over thousands of other mystery writers: You can make your murder and your detective utterly and uniquely your own.

  If you are writing mainstream or literary fiction you're covered, right? No worries that your story will feel overly familiar, yeah? How could it possibly? No one's written this story before. Sorry to say, but plenty of mainstream and literary novels do not show us the world in a different way, let alone rock us to the core. What gives any novel the impact of the new is something that does not come from plot or milieu but from a perspective: yours.

  Where so many manuscripts go wrong is that, if they do not outright imitate, they at least do not go far enough in mining the author's experience for what is distinctive and personal. So many manuscripts feel safe. They do not force me to see the world through a different lens. They enact the author's concept of what their novel should feel like to read rather than what their inner storyteller urgently needs to say. Novelists by and large do not trust themselves. They do not believe that their perspective is important.

  Everyone's angry about something. Everyone has been through different things than you or I. Others notice stuff that you and I miss, get passionate about matters that the rest of us haven't considered, or at least not in that way. People are fascinating, don't you find? That means so are you. Your take on the world is not only valid, it is necessary. Your story is not any old story, it is a story that only you can tell and only your own way.

  That, at any rate, is how it can be but so often is not. Finding the power buried in your novel is not about finding its theme. I would say, rather, that it is about finding you: your eyes, experience, understanding, and compassion. Ignore yourself and your story will be weak. Embrace the importance of what you have to share with the rest of us and you have the beginning of what makes novels great.

  Insuring that your story is powerfully yours is the subject of this final chapter. The fire in fiction is many things, but above and beyond all others it is the fire in you. Let's see how it is sparked and how it can spread in your story.

  OUR COMMON EXPERIENCE

  Do you hate your job? Many do. Many write manuscripts about it, too. Why should we read them? Mostly we don't have to. I mean, who needs a novel to discover out how horrible life can be from nine to five? Read a blog, or perhaps Dilbert, or maybe just punch the clock yourself.

  When novels of workplace complaints do become worthwhile it is because they offer us extra levels of humor and insight. We get something more than someone else's war stories over a latte: We get an experience that doesn't feel like work at all. We get, in short, relief and understanding.

  In recent years nightmare bosses have become fodder for the bestseller lists. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada (2003) and Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's The Nanny Diaries (2002) are two outstanding examples of this genre. But there are many more reasons why work can be a bitch.

  We all have heard how much money young associates at law firms and investment banks can earn; we've also heard that they work like slaves and sell their souls. David Bledin, in his novel Bank (2007), affirms these truths. So beaten down is everyone in the Mergers & Acquisitions department in his fictional firm that they do not even have real names. The narrator is called Mumbles and his fellow spreadsheet jockeys are The Star, The Defeated One, Postal Boy, and

  Clyde, who, perhaps because he has a real name, is doomed. These young associates pull off impossible feats of document prep for bosses like the heartless Sycophant, and consequently have no lives.

  So vile is the existence of these young associates that even a coffee run to Starbucks becomes a maneuver fraught with the paranoid fear of being seen by a boss. After just a few chapters of Bledin's detailing of this corporate hell, one begins to wonder why Mumbles doesn't just quit. Indeed, that is the conflict that drives the story: What keeps Mumbles going when any sane person would walk away?

  Mumbles's justification for sticking it out at first finds its basis in psychology:

  So this is how it works. By the time you're nearing the end of your second year in the banking world, your compensation has been juiced up to one hundred and forty thousand all-in. Analogously, you're also getting accustomed to the mind-numbing tedium of your position. You can crunch comps in your sleep, tame the two-hundred Excel behemoths, whip out perfectly formatted PowerPoint pie charts like nobody's business. Whether you like it or not, you're turning into the Star.

  And let's not ignore the psychological aspect to it, the advent of Stockholm syndrome. The term originates from a bunch of Swedish hostages locked up in a bank vault for six days sometime in the seventies. The hostages gradually grew sympathetic toward their captors, resisted rescue attempts, and later refused to testify at the trial. The psychologists had a field day with this one. The prevailing theory is this:
The human psyche is weak. In situations of duress, when we're surrounded by other humans who wield this awesome power over our ephemeral fates, we grow dependent on them. Dependency leads to affection; affection to love.

  So in short, I love the Sycophant. Well, not yet, but I will.

  This insight does not keep Mumbles propped up forever. Later in the story Clyde becomes unhinged after the death of his father and shows dangerous signs of not caring, such as smoking something outside that is not tobacco. When one afternoon his boss heaps an impossible job on Clyde, The Defeated One calls the other associates to the rescue but they do not see why they should help out self-destructive Clyde. The Defeated One blasts them with a kind of pep talk:

  The Defeated One scowls. "It's like this, jackass. We slave away at the Bank, these missiles of excrement hailing down on us from all of the senior guys, and there's not a single moment of reprieve: no time for our families, our friends, not even five fucking minutes when we get home to satisfy that basic human craving for sex. And so, let me ask you this: What do we have left if we turn on one another? I'll tell you—zip. Nada."

  He takes a deep breath, turning to Postal Boy.

  "Look, I'm not trying to be Clyde's protector, and I'm not going to force you to stay away from the Toad. If you really feel the need to lie down on his couch and unburden your woes, then I won't stop you. But think about what's helping us survive here—not the Toad, not the Sycophant. It's the ability to rely on one another."

  The young associates are, like soldiers under fire, a band of brothers. It is their camaraderie that keeps them alive. Bledin continues their torment for one hundred more excruciating and hilarious pages, holding out meager carrots, moments of petty revenge, and for Mumbles, the promise of a relationship with the skittish The Woman With The Scarf.

  In the end, Mumbles quits. Some of the taskmasters get their comeuppance, but tying up plot threads is not Bledin's main concern. His intent is to show us why and how human beings persist. Working