Manual For Fiction Writers

by Block, Lawrence

  If the story's worth telling in the first place, it could stand by itself, unsupported by a framing device. What one Venusian tells the other could be related directly to the reader, either by the Venusian in the first person, or through third-person narration. What do you suppose are the effects of using a frame?

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  You mentioned distance, sir.

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  Indeed I did, and that's the most obvious result of building a frame around a piece of fiction. You create distance between the story and the reader. Right off the bat, you make him?or her, Gwen?conscious of the fact that this is indeed a story. Fiction owes a lot of its impact to the fact that we lose sight of this while we're reading. Our voluntary suspension of disbelief enables us to become convinced that the story is happening as we are reading it.

  Let's consider a frame of another sort, one in which the framing device is not a conversation but the passage of time. An example that comes quickly to mind is True Grit, the novel by Charles Portis. The book takes the form of the first-person narrative of a fourteen-year-old girl's pursuit of her father's killer, but we are being told the story years and years after the fact, by the woman into whom that fourteen-year-old girl has grown.

  You would think that this would gut the book of its suspense. Mattie, the heroine, is in danger of death at the story's climax, yet we know with absolute certainty that she is destined to survive for at least another half-century. It is a measure of Mr. Portis's considerable skill that Mattie's story remains highly suspenseful in spite of the fact that we know she has lived to tell the tale.

  Still, distance is distance. There's no frame in the film version of True Grit, and I'm sure it was an easy decision to dispense with it. I think we would have to acknowledge that some suspense and some immediacy is lost as a result of the frame device. Are there gains to offset this loss? And what might they be?

  It seems to me that there's a significant gain in dimension. In Portis's novel, we see Mattie's whole life, not just the portion she tells us about. We learn by means of occasional asides that she never married, that she has become a rather hard-nosed businesswoman, that her neighbors and associates have come to regard her as somewhat eccentric, and by learning this while watching her perform as an adolescent we are seeing an illustration of Wordsworth's observation that the child is father of the man (or, in this case, mother of the woman). We watch the unfolding of the story itself through Mattie's fourteen-year-old eyes and from her vantage point as a mature woman, and this gives the book scope that it would not otherwise have.

  A Covenant With Death, by Stephen Becker, is similar in that the narrator, a middle-aged judge, recounts a case that took place early in his legal career. Again, how that experience looks from the perspective of age, and how it shaped and colored the intervening years, is part of the story.

  The frame is not a device I employ frequently, but I did write one which appeared not long ago in Gallery. It's set in an unnamed island in the South Seas, where two brothers, a planter and a trader, are trying to get the better of one another in an exchange. One has a legendary bottle of 1835 Cognac, while the other has as his ward a nubile young woman of mixed ancestry. Each consults the local doctor in the hope that he can devise a method by means of which the other may be cheated, and this the cunning old doctor does.

  It would have been simple enough to tell the story without a frame. Instead I elected to surround it with a fictional superstructure. I had as my narrator a younger man, a writer on the rebound from a broken relationship, who in the course of his travels finds himself as the doctor's dinner guest. As they sip a postprandial brandy, the doctor offers to recount an incident in which he played a part, one which he thinks the younger man might be able to turn into fiction.

  The doctor then tells the actual story. At its conclusion we return to the frame, and the doctor explains how he actually tricked both men in the course of pretending to help them, thus winding up with the Cognac himself and enjoying the first embrace of the young lady.

  Why did I use the frame? I may have done it in part as an act of homage to Maugham and other writers who used to do this sort of thing all the time. It seemed to me that a South Seas story just plain belonged in a frame. I was using a sort of old-fashioned plot, and by telling it in a similarly old-fashioned manner I felt I was following in hallowed footsteps.

  Another reason I used the frame?or at least another effect of having used it?has to do with distance. Of course the frame created distance between the reader and the actual story of the doctor's machinations with the two brothers. I felt, though, that such distance wouldn't adversely affect the story's impact. The story is one of plot, and its appeal is more intellectual than emotional. Distance doesn't hurt it.

  At the same time, a frame cuts one sort of distance while creating another. Remember a few moments ago when we were talking about those two Venusians in the bar? The reader, I pointed out, was in the position of an eavesdropper on a nearby barstool. If he's distanced from the story, he's simultaneously brought closer to the two people who are having the conversation.

  The frame device I used had a similar effect. Assuming for the moment that the story does what I wanted it to do, the reader is drawn into that tropical dining room. Like the narrator, he sits at the doctor's table, sipping brandy and listening to the older man's dry voice.

  O. Henry sometimes used frames to great advantage. I'm reminded of a story called The Man at the Top. The narrator is a professional gambler, and he tells how he and two other crooks, one a burglar and the other a con artist, came into a sum of money. The burglar used his share of the proceeds to open a casino, and the narrator tells how he rang in decks of marked cards to cheat the burglar out of every cent he had. He concludes by boasting that he has invested the proceeds in something solid, and we learn that the signature on his stock certificates is that of the third criminal, the con man. The frame device gives that surprise ending an impact it could not otherwise possess.

  Every story within a story does not represent a use of a frame. I can recall a story of mine, for example, in which one of a pair of lovers tells the other a fairly lengthy apocryphal anecdote. The anecdote makes a point about the lovers' relationship, and as a result of her telling it, the relationship is brought to a conclusion. That's not a frame, however, because the real story is what's going on between the two of them. The story within the story is conversation, something to move the plot, and no more a central element than the play within the play of Hamlet.

  I wouldn't advise any of you to use frames for your stories, not for the time being, at any rate. The risk is usually greater than the potential reward. But it might be valuable for you to notice how some other writers do make use of this device, while avoiding it yourselves unless you should happen to hit on a plot that demands this type of treatment.

  Do you have a question, Arnold?

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  More of an observation, sir.

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  Oh?

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  You might say, sir, that you've used a frame in this chapter. Drawing the reader in by casting the chapter in the form of a dialogue with an imaginary class, and then cutting out the interruptions once you've got him hooked and getting directly to the heart of the matter.

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  You might say that, I suppose. Yes, Rachel?

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  And then you bring us back at the end to finish off the frame, eh, sir?

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  Something like that. Yes, Gwen?

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  Did you hear what Arnold just said? You've got him hooked. Why not make it him or her?

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  Why not make it Venusians? Well, it looks as though our time is up, and not a moment too soon. Good morning, class.

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  Good afternoon, sir.

  CHAPTER 34

  Documentary Evidence

  Saxtons River, Vermont

  26 August 1979

  Mr. John Brady

  Writer's Digestr />
  Dear John,

  It's a reasonable facsimile of Paradise up here. Fresh air, cool temperatures, green hills, no billboards, no litter. We've got four days before we head back to the city, and I don't wanna go.

  I've been thinking of writing a column on experimental narrative techniques?writing novels and stories in the guise of diaries, collections of letters, etc. There were several contest entries of that ilk this year, some good and some bad, but one thing I noticed during the judging was how quickly those narrative forms draw you in. The special pleasure, I suppose, of reading someone else's mail or sneaking a peek at another's diary.

  I myself became very much interested in these approaches to fictional narrative ten years or so ago, when I found myself souring on the whole concept of the novel, which came to have an artificial feel to me. For a while there I even found conventional novels hard to read because they seemed unreal. Whose was this disembodied voice with omniscience over the lives and thoughts of all these characters? And, even when I read a first-person narrative, I found myself quibbling. When was it that the narrator was recounting all of this? How did he remember such minutiae as what so-and-so was wearing months previously? My bout of extreme literal-mindedness put me off novels of the usual sort, and I found myself drawn to books which pretended to be actual documents?letters, diaries, journals, whatever.

  This sound like a viable topic to you? I'll spend the next two weeks kicking it around. I may not come up with enough to fill a whole column, but I think there's something here worth dissecting for WD's readers.

  Best to Rose and all the gang. Hang in there, big fella.

  Larry

  DATE: 28 August 1979

  PLACE: Saxtons River, Vermont

  TIME OF RUN: 7 p.m.

  DISTANCE COVERED: 6 miles

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  Comments: I'm going to miss running in the country. Another couple of days and it's back to grinding out the miles on the West Side Highway, pounding the concrete and gulping down the smog. I'll miss the fresh air and the scenery, but I won't miss the dogs. If I ran around here all the time I think I'd wind up carrying a gun.

  Spent most of today's run musing about the next WD column, which will probably concern experimental narrative techniques. Question: why call them experimental? When I first thought about doing a book in diary form, I thought of it as an experiment; ditto when I started writing a book in the form of a collection of letters. Why? There's nothing new about it. The technique's as old as these hills I've been running through. Consider?the first novel written in the English language, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, took the form of a collection of letters from the titular heroine to her sister. (Q?was it her sister? Should probably check this. This is what comes of having taken a course in the eighteenth-century novel without reading a majority of the assigned books. Such chickens always come home to roost.)

  Defoe's early novels were similarly experimental. Journal of the Plague Year, Robinson Crusoe, etc. Moll Flanders, while closer in form to the conventional first-person narrative, was deliberately cast in the form of a memoir.

  I suspect early novels took the form of fake documents because readers weren't prepared yet for fictional prose narratives. These transitional forms prepared the eighteenth-century reader for the novel as it came to evolve. Goal for Tomorrow's Run: Same six miles. And if that Airedale chases me again I swear I'm gonna kick his face in.

  New York City

  4 September 79

  Mr. John Brady

  Writer's Digest

  Dear John,

  Hope your Labor Day weekend was a good one. Mine was, well, laborious. We got back from Vermont and ran headlong into a mound of correspondence for the vegetarian restaurant guide.

  Midway down the pile was your response to mine of 26 Aug. I was dismayed to learn you think the column topic is too slight and specialized, as I've been having further thoughts on it and feel it's a solid one. It seems to me there are a lot of angles I can cover.

  For example, just how important is verisimilitude? On the one hand, the reader knows that the book he's holding in his hands is a novel, that some myopic fictioneer made up the whole thing and penned (or more likely typed) all the letters or diary entries. This being the case, one might argue that all other considerations should be subordinated to Telling the Story.

  This certainly was the case in the first English novel, Richardson's Pamela. It's hard to believe Pam would have written at such length. The form is simply a device by means of which the author tells the story.

  Same thing goes for two contemporary successes, Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al, and John O'Hara's Pal Joey. While the narrative voice of each conveys the writer's character perfectly, we can't really believe that Lardner's baseball player or O'Hara's nightclub entertainer would actually write letters of this sort. Yet the books work, and could hardly work better.

  On the other hand, there's a special treat for the reader when the writer does try for verisimilitude. When I can read a book and believe (in the sense of that voluntary suspension of disbelief essential for the success of fiction) that I'm reading real letters or a real diary, my enjoyment is greatly enhanced.

  Example: Month or so ago I read A Woman of Independent Means, by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, a so-so seller in hardcover which word-of-mouth has made a paperback bestseller. The novel takes the form of a selection of a woman's correspondence over her entire lifetime. The lead character strikes different attitudes depending on the person to whom she's writing, omits certain points, bends the truth, and is thus revealed between the lines of her own letters and emerges as one of the most wholly realized characters I've met with in many years.

  Another example, in a lighter vein: Some writers have enormous fun with this sort of format, especially in a couple of books that come to mind featuring not merely the letters written by the lead character but letters written to him as well. Wake Up, Stupid, by Mark Harris, is a wonderful example, as is Hal Dresner's The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books. I made a modest attempt of my own in a book called Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man, but since it sold perhaps eighteen copies I don't think I'll bother referring to it in print.

  Donald E. Westlake's Adios, Scheherezade deserves mention in this context. His narrator is trying to grind out a formula sex novel, but keeps wandering off the subject and typing fifteen-page letters to himself and/or the world instead of the fifteen-page chapters he's supposed to be writing. His desperate attempt to make himself write the book, and the sense you get of him hammering away at an out-of-control typewriter, helps make the book the delight it is.

  Well, I'm rambling. I hope you'll reconsider and approve, even if grudgingly, a column on?what's the generic term for this sort of book, anyway? Novels in letter form are epistolary novels, but is there a term to cover them and diaries and similar gallimaufries? Documentary novel won't do; it sounds like some sort of non-fiction novel or faction or something.

  I'm going back to the bean curd and the organic hot dogs. Keep punching, tiger.

  Larry

  DATE: 9 September 1979

  PLACE: New York City

  TIME OF RUN: 8:30 a.m.

  DISTANCE COVERED: 16 miles

  Comments: Lord, everything hurts. It's good I don't write with my feet, critics' observations to the contrary, because I couldn't manage it today. The nice thing about running back and forth on the West Side Drive is you don't have to worry about forgetting the route. The bad thing is everything else. But I covered sixteen miles today, and at this rate I ought to be able to run the Jersey Shore Marathon in December. Imagine how horrible I'll feel after that-

  Note in yesterday's mail from Brady, giving an unenthusiastic okay to the column idea. One thing that bothers him is that the column would only deal with novels, while a large proportion of WD's readers are more interested in short fiction.

  I spent maybe nine of this morning's sixteen miles trying to refute this argument. While the diary and epistolary forms may have been used more frequently in n
ovels, there have certainly been short stories in these forms. Both Pal Joey and You Know Me, Al were published as magazine stories before being collected in book form. Back in the forties the Saturday Evening Post had a continuing series of stories about one Alexander Botts, a traveling salesman for Earthworm Tractors, the stories consisting of Botts's letters reporting on his progress. (Have to check author.)

  Sue Kaufman liked novels in document form, and was particularly deft at writing them. Cf. Diary of a Mad Housewife. She did a piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, an article in the form of a fictional diary, on her reunion at Vassar or her memories of Vassar or something like that. What was the title?Confessions of a Vassar Gel? Diary of a Vassar Gel? Something like that.

  There was another story called Address Unknown which I read at least twenty-five years ago. Published in Reader's Digest, I recall, and I believe there was some question as to whether it was fiction or not. (I read it years after its original publication, in some long-lost anthology.)

  Premise of story: American Jew is corresponding with German business associate during Nazi period. The exchange of letters reveals that the German is acquiescing in the Nazi treatment of the Jews, and fails to aid a relative of the American letter-writer, who seeks revenge in an unusual manner. Knowing his letters are read by the Nazi censors, he writes in such a manner as to cast suspicion upon his German correspondent. His last letter concludes with the line, May the God of Moses stand by your right hand, and it's returned stamped Address Unknown, and we infer that the intended recipient has been arrested as an enemy of the state.

  Wish I could find that story. Be useful to cite it when writing column. Goal for Tomorrow's Run: Simple survival. Five easy miles is plenty.

  New York City

  12 September 79

  Ms. Rose Adkins