10

[ WORKING THE MAGIC ]illustration

When attempting to teach the fundamental components of a story — interesting characters, a well-established setting, one or more conflicts, and some degree of resolution — I often use The Wizard of Oz as a model. One reason I use that particular film is that most people have seen it, and, even if they haven't, it has woven its way so completely into the fabric of contemporary culture that they usually have a general idea of the plot. But my primary purpose in using it is that it does everything that a story should.

Because I mention it so frequently — and sometimes even resort to playing a cassette recording of its rousing overture when my charges need recharging — more than a few students over the years recommended that I read a novel called Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. To put it mildly, I didn't leap at the prospect. I've read some novels based on existing characters created by other writers and, with the exception of John Gardner's Grendel and a few of the Sherlock Holmes resurrections, I haven't been that impressed.

But Wicked is indeed a horse of a different color. It is, in fact, one of the best-crafted and most enjoyable novels that I've read in a while. Here's why: The author, Gregory Maguire, infuses his story with excellent description page by page, actually line by line. As importantly, he sustains suspense and drama throughout, in a time and place that was already sufficiently fantastic, in my mind, and is enormously more so here. Add to that a cast of characters that I really came to care about, including the witch, who I certainly never cared about before, beyond trying to hide my quivering, six-year-old body under the seat in the old downtown movie theater in Palestine, Texas, the first time I made her acquaintance. Maguire gives her and the other characters doubts and inclinations and motivations that are not all that much unlike mine and creates a setting — complete with Munchkins and yellow brick roads — that is entirely believable in its context. In short, he works considerable magic.

There are many ways to bring this magic about, and in this chapter we'll focus on a few of them. But first, let's take a look at the opening paragraph of Wicked and see what Maguire used to set his story in motion:

A mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind's forward edge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sent wheeling away by the turbulent air. White and purple thunderheads mounded around her. Below, the Yellow Brick Road looped back on itself, like a relaxed noose. Though winter storms and the crowbars of agitators had torn up the road, still it led, relentlessly, to the Emerald City.

Notice the perspective we are given in the first sentence. We aren't actually in the setting but far above it, looking down at something specific: the curving road. Remember the macrocosm that we talked about in chapter seven? That bird's, or in this case witch's, eye view gives us a glimpse at where the story is going to take place before we swoop down into it, it being both Oz and the story itself. We immediately have a witch, which is in most cases unbelievable, in some turbulent weather and dark thunderheads, which are commonplace occurrences. Then we have the yellow brick road, which we already know something about; but it is in bad repair due to winter storms — that makes sense — and crowbar wielding agitators, foreshadowing of a conflict that we hadn't expected. It's no coincidence that the simile regarding that road involves a noose, which is hardly ever a harbinger of anything cheerful. The end result of all of it, at least for this reader, is that it is a mix of things I expected and things I didn't. And that's a perfect formula for making me want to read on.

First impressions are — as your parents and your high school speech teacher used to tell you — quite important. And this paragraph certainly makes a dandy one. But one thing that sets excellent authors apart from simply good ones is how they maintain the level of wordsmithing used at the first all the way through till the end, as this writer does.

So how should you go about it?

The complete answer to that would fill up a shelf full of books. But let's have a look, paying special attention to setting and description, at five things — alteration of reality, selection of the title, crafting of the first sentence, placing a specific setting within a much larger one, and blending your story and your voice — that will help you accomplish this artful manipulation that is at once difficult to pull off and absolutely essential to the success of your fiction.

MODIFYING REALITY

Often, in order to end up with fiction that comes off as realistic, the author has to do a good bit of tinkering with what is really real.

To find proof of this, you might not have to look any further than your kitchen on a typical weekday morning. Let's say you're about to write a scene that involves a husband and wife having their last cups of coffee before they each leave for work. So you figure you'll record your and your significant other's dialogue one early morning, word for word, so as to infuse your novel with authenticity. When you play the tape back, here's what you might have to work with:

“Almost out of coffee.”

“Get the dark roast this time. This is too weak.”

“Don't put in so much water. You put in too much water.”

(Shuffling of papers)

(Pause)

“Get the dark roast.”

“We need milk. Two percent.”

“Can't go today. Gotta meeting.”

“I'll go.”

(Shuffling of papers)

(Pause)

“This stuff is worthless. Get the dark roast.”

Now, our subject in this chapter is working magic in your writing. Well, I've got news for you; if you use that little conversation verbatim the only magic that will ensue will be your reader making your book disappear.

I stated in chapter two to be on the lookout for details everywhere. And I haven't changed my mind now that we are in chapter ten. But finding all of those particulars doesn't mean you have to use all of them, and it also doesn't mean that you, as a writer, shouldn't manipulate them in order to make them fit into your story. Sure, you shouldn't change the date or the location of the Titanic's demise, but you can — and you'd better — modify that business about the coffee that we just read.

In your scene that takes place in the kitchen, you'll want little details to show the reader where things are taking place. You can have these two finishing off the coffee, and maybe even have one of them suggesting that they try a darker roast. But to have this pop up for absolutely no purpose is clutter. In real life, things like this pop up all day long, but in fiction everything should be there for a reason. For instance, maybe one of the characters in your novel wants to make some big changes in his life, and this little thing — wanting a different kind of coffee — will call the reader's attention to those bigger alterations. Remember, seemingly insignificant details are often the best ways to amplify a theme, mood, or conflict.

In the first act of Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman comes home late from a business trip. He's tired, argumentative, and worried about the fact that he's pretty much washed up as a traveling salesman. To cheer him up, his wife suggests that he eat a little something; she tells him she bought some new kind of cheese. “It's whipped,” she tells him. Willie goes on with his tirade about his current dilemma and then stops, thinks, and asks “How can they whip cheese?” It's a great line. Not because Arthur Miller might have heard it somewhere and decided to use it in his play, but because it enlarges what Willie is feeling. The world is changing too quickly around him, leaving him behind, and something as inconsequential as whipped cheese calls attention to it.

Look back at the transcript of that morning conversation. Words are left out; sentences are incomplete; there's no connective theme. It's a mess.

So how could you use it? Answer: You change it. You lift out exactly what you need — that bit about wanting stronger coffee to spotlight your character's desire for bigger changes — and you rework the dialogue:

Ted glanced at the headlines, then flipped over to the sports section to see if the Dodgers won. He sipped his coffee.

“This stuff is horrible,” he said. He put the mug down on the counter. Pushed it away from him. “It's like colored water.”

Alice looked up from the metropolitan section. She looked at him over the tops of her half-frames.

“It's the brand we've used for years,” she said. “I make it the same way every day.” She put the paper down; took off the glasses. Thought. “You've never complained before.”

Now we've got something that comes a heck of a lot closer to working in a story or novel. The dialogue is smoother and makes more sense. The little conflict is obviously there for a reason, and the wife just might be picking up on the reason there at the end.

When writing fiction, you'll have to modify reality constantly in order to work your magic. That oddly decorated pawn shop you pass on the way to work every day will work much better in your story in a different location. The mutt in your neighbor's back yard becomes a Great Dane. The cute newscaster on Channel 11 becomes in your novel the weather girl with whom your protagonist is infatuated.

The many, many tidbits of reality that you gather will ultimately need to be adjusted, enlarged, narrowed, or modified in some other way to finally fit nicely into the story that you want to tell.

YOUR TITLE

The single most important first impression your fiction will make on your potential reader — other than the cover of your novel or the illustration of your story, neither of which you are likely to have any control over — is your title. So you'd better spend some time coming up with a perfect one.

Sometimes titles will emerge from your own manuscript, bubbling up out of your wordsmithing like The Catcher in the Rye must have for J.D. Salinger. Other authors have used the title to magnify a significant theme, as Robert Harling did when calling his play about a group of scrappy southern women Steel Magnolias. I am among the legions of writers who have stolen their titles outright from the Bible, The Windows of Heaven (Genesis 7:11), and from poets, Into That Good Night (Dylan Thomas), A Place Apart (Robert Frost). I haven't pilfered from Shakespeare, who has provided more titles than any other single author, but I'm not done yet.

When it comes to setting and description, your title can work wonders for both. Many titles evoke the primary setting in the reader's mind before they have read one word of the text. Just a few examples are Chesapeake, London, Across the Great Divide, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Dubliners, and Winesburg, Ohio. Other titles aren't so bold, but only hint at the type of place or the geographical location, like The Big Sky, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Cider House Rules, Islands in the Stream, Tobacco Road, and Where the Red Fern Grows. And many authors use the title to help define a character, conflict, or situation; some examples are The Ugly American, Rich Man, Poor Man, A Time to Stand, Bound for Glory, Girl With a Pearl Earring, Our Man in Havana, In Dubious Battle, and The Once and Future King.

Choosing a title might be one of the last things you do in the writing process. In fact, I'm inclined to suggest that it should be; as your plot and characters constantly change in your thinking, the perfect title might emerge. When writing a novel that begins with a little boy waiting for the first cold front of the season on his grandfather's farm and ends with that little boy having become an old man, I had a short list of several titles that I had lifted from several sources. Finally, I settled on Touching Winter, which hadn't been on my original list at all, and which I didn't have to steal from anyone, because of the double meaning of the boy waiting for the season to change and the old man in the winter of his life.

Face it, your title is an extremely important bit of business. It is the moniker by which everyone will refer to this thing that you sweated and strained over for so long; it is the flag that will fly over your book or story for as long as people read it and refer to it. So choose wisely.

Here's one last thing regarding titles. More than a few have firmly rooted themselves in the public mind, so leave those alone. Whatever the legal or ethical implications, if any, you'll look mighty foolish sending your novel set in Dallas and Fort Worth in to a publisher with A Tale of Two Cities on the cover sheet.

FIRST SENTENCES

I once heard about an acquisitions editor in New York who takes three manuscripts to work with him every morning on the subway, because there are three subway stops between his apartment and his office building. He gives each of the manuscripts exactly the time it takes the subway to make its way from one stop to the next, and if the author hasn't grabbed his attention by then, that project is down the drain, at least as far as that editor and that publishing house is concerned. This may or may not be a true story; I can't vouch for it. But, fact or fiction, it's a good reminder for writers who want to be published to provide their reader with the very best first sentence, and paragraph, and page they can concoct.

The primary function of that initial sentence is to make the reader want to read the second one, so it has to be a real grabber. “Once upon a time” won't cut it, and “There lived, once, in the city of Paris a …” isn't likely to, either. It needs to be engaging, maybe a little quirky, and it wouldn't hurt if it had a smidgen of mystery or foreshadowing.

When brand new fiction writers in my classes and workshops bring in their first stories to the critique table, we have to sometimes wade through a great pile of clutter before we get to what might serve as an effective first sentence. Often it is buried in the second paragraph, or the second or third page, hiding there like a gold nugget waiting to be dug out. That's because human beings usually have an innate propensity to take a long time getting to the point. Either that or they've been so thoroughly trained to write thesis statements that their first sentence might be something like “The murder of Erica Bennington was committed by Wallace Weeks, her spurned lover.”Which, provided this story was supposed to have been a whodunit, would hardly be the best way to begin.

Just keep this in mind: This first arrangement of words is your reader's initial taste of both your story and your voice. So work substantial magic here. And it sometimes offers an excellent opportunity to get a toehold into your setting and description.

Let's look at several first sentences and consider why they work. We'll forego the very famous ones — like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” and “Call me Ishmael” — and concentrate on some that are equally as effective but are probably less well known. Here's how J.R.R. Tolkien begins the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy:

When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.

First, there is the pleasing alliteration of the name, followed closely by that unexpected number — eleventy-first — and finally the promise of something exciting that is going to happen: a party. Then there is the first use of two of Tolkien's magical place names — Bag End and Hobbiton — which begins to establish the setting. Much is accomplished here, in not very many words. It's a fine little attention-getter of a sentence that pulls the reader quietly into a riveting, oftentimes horrifying saga that will wind its way through the next thousand plus pages.

In her novel Summer, Edith Wharton starts with this:

A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.

At first glance, it seems simple enough, almost as if it had been dashed off quickly in order to get a start. But I suspect Edith Wharton never dashed off a line in her life. Closer examination shows the thought and craft that went into this beginning. We have, in this first little taste of the novel, a girl for whom we are not given a name or an age; Wharton knew that sometimes the best description is no description. The owner of the house is identified as a lawyer, which throws open several possibilities; the girl might be his daughter, or then again she might be a client. Then we're given the name of the town or city, North Dormer, which might make some readers wonder if there is a South Dormer, followed quickly by proof that it is most certainly a town, and a small one, since there is only one street. These twenty-three words provide a good bit of information, and one important question: Who is this girl and what is she up to?

Now here's Jeffrey Archer's opener for his novel First Among Equals:

If Charles Gurney Seymour had been born nine minutes earlier he would have become an earl, inherited a castle in Scotland, 22,000 acres in Somerset, and a thriving merchant bank in the city of London.

This one foreshadows a character's actual situation — whatever it might turn out to be — with what it would have been, had fate been a bit more prompt. Archer chooses to start with irony, and one that most if not all of his readers have had some experience with: the old woulda, shoulda, coulda slings and arrows that destiny sometimes hurls. Beginning with something that the reader can identify with is a very good way to launch a story or novel. In your own writing, look for situations that might make the reader connect with the story, and you might have found a fine place to begin.

Another good way is to start with a relationship, more than likely one that involves a conflict. Frederick Busch begins his novella A Handbook for Spies with this:

Willie thought of his parents' life together as an inverted pyramid, a vast funnel, a tornado that stood still.

There's any number of ways this author can go from here. But you can safely bet the narrator's parents — and their odd relationship — will be a large part of it. So he anchors it in the reader's perception at the outset. Sometimes it's best to provide readers with a strong image like this one right up front, one that will stick with them throughout the story.

Whatever your leadoff sentence ends up being, it had better be interesting and promising enough to keep your readers on board. And the best way to do that is to give them just enough to make them wonder what's up, and to make them want to stick around to find out.

YOUR SPECIFIC SETTING WITHIN A LARGER ONE

In my creative writing classes and workshops I call this “the thing and the bigger thing.”

The “thing” is the specific storyline or, more often, an individual scene. And the “bigger thing” is something that impacts more people than the few characters in the scene. For example, here are Huckleberry Finn and Jim, the runaway slave, drifting along on their raft on the wide Mississippi, the countless stars spread out above them in the night sky. That scene is the “thing,” but it is just one small component of several bigger “things,” like the Fugitive Slave Act and the prejudicial societal norms of that era.

In regards to setting, this disparity between the two things — the small setting and the much larger one (which includes not only places but other things, like philosophy and customs, as well) — provides an excellent opportunity for you to firmly establish the time and place where your story takes place.

Go back to chapter one and look over those paragraphs from Underworld. The specific setting is a baseball game at the Polo Grounds in Brooklyn in 1951. But notice that the setting is significantly more than that. It is other places in greater New York where people are listening to the game on the radio, it is four famous people who we recognize, it is the love affair of a city and a nation with baseball, and it is the advent of the age of nuclear weapons, to name just a few.

Now, how can you use this enlarged, wider macrocosm to enrich your own setting and description?

Let's revisit that husband and wife that we left with their weak coffee. We'll say that the coffee is being drunk in a kitchen in an old neighborhood of Oxnard, California, with tree-lined streets and lots of picket fences. That neighborhood — along with the husband who wants to make some changes in his life that don't include Oxnard or, perhaps, that wife who is staring at him — is the “thing” of your story or at least of this one scene. The “bigger thing” might be the entire state of California, or of the western seaboard, that is undergoing energy cutbacks that affect our characters and their situations. Or maybe the divorce laws in California are stricter than they are in other places — I don't know that. Look it up; it's your story, and that impacts this fellow's decisions. Or maybe something going on on the other side of the planet affects these two and the changes the man wants to make; maybe their son is in the front lines of a war.

Here's the point. When writing fiction, look beyond the obvious setting and situation that you establish. One reason to do it is to keep yourself out of trouble with your editor. If you have a lawyer in your novel flirting with a pretty woman in the front row of the jury box during a trial in 1903, you'd better think again. Because there would, almost certainly, have been no women in jury boxes in this county in that year. But a better reason to set your sights higher and wider is to take advantage of the many societal, historical, and geographical implications that you can use to make your story stronger and better.

LEAVING YOUR READER WITH A TASTE OF YOUR STORY AND YOUR VOICE

Some of the strongest magic you'll have to work will be after the fact. You'll need to leave your reader with a lingering flavor of both your story and the voice in which you told it.

So how do you do that?

Here's the one and only answer: constantly. This fusion of these two effects on the reader isn't something that you can go back in and fix after you're done. You've either built a fine story line by line or you haven't. And you've either conveyed it in a dependable, consistent, unique voice or you haven't. If you haven't done these things, you have a real problem on your hands. If you have done them, then you might just be home free.

A good way to check to see if you are balancing story and voice is to print out chapters or scenes as you finish their first drafts and read them back over carefully. I have two suggestions here that might or might not work as well for you as they do for me. First, make sure you actually print the text out on paper and read it with pencil in hand. I maintain that we bring a slightly different mindset to reading something on a page than we do to seeing it on a screen. Unless you end up publishing your work as an e-book, your reader will see it on paper, so it's a good idea to read it back to yourself in the same medium to see if your story and your voice are emerging. Second, put the printed pages away for a day or so before reading them. Go on and start working on the next part, and come back to this section later. That way, the words won't still be ringing in your head as you look at them again. That fresh viewpoint, even if it is only a day removed from the first one, will make a great difference. And you'll see things, good and bad, that you are likely to overlook when reading what you have just written.

Waving the Magic Wand

Here's a checklist to help you make sure you did the best job possible on that manuscript that you're ready to start sending out to prospective publishers:

Will the finished product be something you'll be proud of?

There's no one model that I can share with you here, because these things have to work throughout entire stories and novels, not in just a paragraph or two. But think of a piece of fiction that you particularly enjoyed and that stayed with you, then look back over it and determine why it worked so well for you. There will be many, many little things that the author did to warrant your overall satisfaction. But I'll bet the main reason you were impressed and entertained was this combination of story and voice.

SUMMARY: THE LITTLE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

In this chapter, we looked at several places where you can work some of the magic required to tell a story effectively. Modifying realistic things and actions so that they will fit smoothly into your fiction is essential, as is choosing a good title and first sentence. You might use a specific setting within the larger context of a more inclusive one, and you will definitely need to balance the story you are telling and the unique voice in which you are telling it.

Since we opened this chapter with references to The Wizard of Oz, it seems only right that we close it with one.

Do you remember when Toto runs forward and pulls the curtain away to reveal that the horrific, fire-breathing Wizard is nothing more than a not very impressive little man pulling at levers? Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but that's you back there. And it is me.

The writer is that little man behind the curtain, working constant magic and manipulating and tinkering and wordsmithing to such an extent that, if he or she is any good at it at all, readers won't see any of the seams or the inner workings. What readers should see is a smooth telling of a good story that appears to have been no trouble at all to dash off.

We know better, don't we? We who sit down in quiet, lonely places and put ourselves through the rigors of writing know that, however proud and contented we might feel when the work is done, the writing itself is often a staggeringly painful and aggravating enterprise.

But that can be our little secret.

EXERCISE 1

Go on a shopping trip for a title for that manuscript you've been writing. Look in all of these places and come up with one from each:

Now choose the best one, close your eyes, and imagine it in bold print above your name on the cover of a bestseller.

EXERCISE 2

Using the same manuscript, circle any sentences in the first several pages — or maybe even further along — that might work as the very first sentence of the story or the chapter. You might just come up with one or two that will be better than the one that currently occupies that place of honor.

EXERCISE 3

Jot down five adjectives that you believe describe your creative voice, the unique style that you employ to tell a story. Just a few possibilities are friendly, laid back, serious, humorous, ominous, dynamic, ironic, formal, and informal. Then, when you're confident that you've chosen the five best words, look for examples of each in your writing. You will probably confirm your self-appraisal, but, who knows, you might discover that your voice is actually different than you thought.