by TIM TOMLINSON
TIM TOMLINSON (MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts) is president and a founding member of the New York Writers Workshop. He has been teaching both fiction and screenplay workshops since 1991 at such institutions as the New York Writers Workshop, the Writer's Voice, the University of the Philippines, Webster University in Cha'am, Thailand, and the Media Development Authority in Singapore. At New York University's General Studies Program, he is master teacher of writing and contemporary culture. His short stories, film reviews, articles, and haiku have been published in numerous venues, including The NewYork Times, North American Review, The Missouri Review, Downtown Express, and Time Haiku.
The best books and stories can change our lives. I have my list of life-changers,1 and I'm sure you have yours. If it's true, as Saul Bellow said, that writers are readers moved to emulation, then it might also be true that we write fiction we hope will change our lives or the lives of others. That's a noble and lofty ambition.
It's probably a good idea to try to write the life-changers every time out. I mean, otherwise, why bother? But it's important to recognize and accept that each effort cannot be a life-changer, for you or the reader.2 Each piece should have its own integrity. A good short story is better than a bad novel. A good short story will make the reader crave more short stories, more fiction, whereas a bad novel will make the reader reach, once again, for the TV remote.
As Thom Jones (Cold Snap, The Pugilist at Rest) has indicated, you can't write Sgt. Pepper every time out. Occasionally, you even write one for Ringo. Graham Greene, an excellent and professional liar, said that he alternated between serious novels (The Heart of the Matter, say) and “entertainments” such as Our Man in Havana. Beethoven wrote Symphony No. 9 in D minor. He also wrote bagatelles — short, light musical pieces. He didn't feel bad about the bagatelles. He understood an important truth: that a bagatelle can be a good bagatelle, but it can't be any kind of symphony except failed.
What follows is a discussion of the craft of prose fiction, regardless of category (mystery, romance, literary, chick lit, etc.). Whatever your ambition or project, the elements of craft as presented here can help tighten your prose, increase your character depth, invigorate your scenes, and accelerate your story velocity. Hopefully this instruction will also enable you to recognize what kinds of projects are bagatelles, and what kinds might be symphonies; it offers insights into the craft of fiction in order to ensure that your bagatelles are good bagatelles, your symphonies good symphonies.
1 For the record, they are: On the Road, Jack Kerouac; Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller; A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley; Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson; Remembrance of Things Past (later accurately translated as In Search of Lost Time), Marcel Proust; The Flowers of Evil (poems), Charles Baudelaire; Light Years, James Salter; Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone; The Beautiful Room Is Empty, Edmund White; Liars in Love, Richard Yates; and many of the short stories of John Cheever and Raymond Carver.
2 For example, look at my list of life changers. I mention On the Road, but not any of the many, shall I say, weaker books of Kerouac. I mention Tropic of Cancer, not Plexus. I mention Liars in Love, but not Cold Spring Harbor. And in reference to stories, I say many of the stories of Cheever and Carver, not all.
A good place to begin your fiction is out of your own experience. This is not to say you should write autobiography. Instead, look at your own life and to try to make sense of certain moments — perhaps small moments that represent some larger truth.
Regarding the autobiographical impulse in fiction, one of the questions I hear most often in workshops is a variation of this: At which point might I enter the morass of my life and write a story? A handy answer to anyone who asks that question: At a point when something significant changed. A graduation. A marriage. A death. First love. First sex. First heartbreak. Another answer: At a moment that has universal or widespread resonance. Christmas. A birthday. The fourth of July. The festival of Diwali. Tet.
Make a list of five turning points in your own life and note the years in which those turning points occurred. Now make a list of historical connections to those years. What happened in the news, in sports, in politics, in entertainment? Think about how (if at all) your life was influenced or impacted by those apparently surface events. You may discover that moments in your life that felt divorced from the march of history were actually quite connected with the larger picture on some level.
When I recall 1970, for instance, I see myself as a confused and vaguely sad adolescent; in the pictures I form in my memory from that time, I see a certain listlessness and passivity. I'm sure all the marijuana didn't help, but I also recall that that was the year the Beatles broke up. In 1964, when I was eight years old, the Beatles entered my life and the lives of others as a powerful, positive, joyful, rebellious influence. Over the next six years, their music and their lives affected many people on a deeply personal level, often on a daily basis. What did it mean to me then, in 1970, that they had disintegrated in acrimony? With what awareness did my stoned, fourteen-year-old consciousness confront this fact? And what did it mean to others, since I was by no means the only one affected? Autobiography and its connection to history can lead to resonant fiction.
Many stories are built upon life turning points. Tim O'Brien's “On the Rainy River” concerns a character's receipt of his draft notice. Mary Gaitskill's “Secretary” focuses on a first job. Beth Nugent's “Locusts” involves the first time its protagonist is molested by a relative.
Many stories are built around historical connections. Marly Swick's “The Summer Before the Summer of Love” takes place in Ohio in 1966, when the Beatles are making their final concert tour. Gary Krist's “Giant Step” uses the first moon landing. An early Philip Gourevitch story, “Desiree in Escrow,” conflates a child's loss of his mother with television images of the first Gulf War.
I once had a student who said that, to him, writing from personal experience was an indication of a broken imagination. For him, and to others with similar delusions, I offer the following significantly abbreviated list of fiction writers whose work places them in the front ranks of the Broken Imagination Club: Dorothy Allison, Melissa Bank, Toni Cade Bambara, Thomas Beller, Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Frederick Exley, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Gaitskill, Isabel Huggan, Gayl Jones, James Jones, Kaylie Jones, Thom Jones, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Walter Mosley, Marcel Proust, Philip Roth, James Salter, Mona Simpson, Amanda Stern, Robert Stone, Edith Wharton, Tobias Wolff, Richard Wright, Richard Yates.
Another place to start is with a story you were told by someone else. How would you represent that story if you had to write it? Where would the emphasis be? How would you render the setting? How would you capture the voices of the participants?
The first story I ever wrote was really a transcription of a story that had been told to me by my brother about something that had happened to him, not me. He had recently graduated boot camp at the U.S. Marine Corps' Parris Island training grounds. While there, the worst trouble he'd gotten into occurred when the drill instructor discovered that my brother had left his footlocker unlocked. In a rage, the DI overturned the footlocker and spilled its contents onto the floor, where he found, rolling about in the mess, several plums my brother had taken from the mess hall. If failing to lock a footlocker is a misdemeanor, taking food from the mess hall is a high crime. If you know anything about the Marine Corps, boot camp, or drill instructors, you can imagine the paroxysms of outrage the DI went into over the issue of the unauthorized plums.
I knew something about all three — the Marines, boot camp, and Dis. My father was a Marine and served for six years. He went through Parris Island's boot camp not once, but twice (the Corps nullified his first graduation when they discovered that he'd enlisted under an alias while underage), and he returned to Parris Island as a DI several years after his second graduation. I wrote a story of sorts (a bagatelle?) called “The Poor Boot's Fruit,” in which I imagined my father as the DI (of course) and myself (mixed with my brother) as the poor boot.
I attempted to write the story from the third-person omniscient point of view. The only rules I knew about writing were rules I'd gleaned from my reading, and since my reading consisted largely of books that had been published in the 1960s and early 1970s (Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and everything by Kurt Vonnegut up to Breakfast of Champions), I didn't know much about rules. That helped me. I later learned that my story had violated some rules (I was working with a selective omniscience, which is generally reserved for one point of view, but I used several points of view at will and at random), and I then understood why the story didn't fully work — why the story wasn't really a story, but an anecdote, a vignette, a bagatelle. However, I had managed to come up with a piece that did a little of what my brother's story did for me: It made me laugh. And I recognized in it certain character types: a decent enough guy who violates a small, seemingly senseless rule, and a maniacal tyrant who goes ballistic at the slightest infraction. And I recognized certain themes inherent in what had captured my imagination: brutal, perhaps arbitrary authority; rebellion; father-son conflict (later, I would call it Oedipal drama); the world of men, order, regimentation, and physicality; and that world's impositions on the imagination and pleasure.
You can't make discoveries about character types, humor, personal themes, the nature of your imagination, and a whole lot of other things critical to the development of a writer if you don't get the material on the page. And you can't get the material on the page if you're hung up about rules.
I think that starting with a story that makes you laugh is a good idea. Starting with your parents is even better.
Showing Others Your Work
Be careful about showing your work. When I was a student, one of my fellow students asked a teacher what the writer should do if a story might hurt the writer's parents. The teacher said, “Every word I write is an attempt to hurt my parents.” Some of us might want to tread more easily on those who raised us, for better or worse. At the least, protect parents and siblings and friends and spouses and partners from early drafts. Don't show them a story until it's finished — hopefully published. Then it has a life of its own, and because it is an already existing something or other, it's harder for those near to you to see themselves in it.
Another good reason not to show your work to people you know is to protect the most important person in the process: yourself. Any negative criticism can hurt, but it's especially important to avoid negative criticism from those who know how to hurt you, or from those who might be most prone to hurt feelings themselves.
If you are uneasy about including someone you know (or aspects of someone you know) in your work, keep in mind Tom Wolfe's assertion: The only way to hurt someone you know is to leave him out of your book.
The purpose of this exercise is to get started writing by using personal experience, personal habit, and that rich reservoir of material, the dream life.
This exercise also encourages you to hustle through moments; you don't have to expect the individual moment to “solve” the story or to point the direction your writing should take. Instead, move on and wait for connections to materialize, if they ever do, and don't worry if they don't. In fact, not knowing how things fit together is a very good place to be. It allows you to play around, and this kind of play has a way of skipping past inner censors and critics and allowing the work to flow out of the unconscious. You don't need to see the full painting from the first brushstroke.
An absence of connections in your manuscript can raise questions in the mind of the reader, thereby engaging him. The earlier that questions are raised, the sooner you'll have a reader turning pages. This exercise will help you create material that raises questions.
Select a line from a poem that resonates with you. You can substitute a line from anything: a biography, a scientific treatise, a speech. Next, consider a recent (perhaps troubling) dream. Then, recall a problem you're having with another person.
Once you have each of these items firmly in mind, begin a fictional account that weaves these three apparently disparate strands together, following the steps below.
Poem. Write one or two paragraphs based on the resonant line of poetry (or prose) you chose. Then skip a line.
Dream. Write one or two paragraphs using fragments or themes from your dream. (It's unnecessary to make any explicit reference to the text you used for step one.) Again, skip a line.
Conflict. Write one or two paragraphs concerning the conflict you thought of. (Again, it's unnecessary to make any explicit reference to steps one or two.) Skip a line.
Putting it all together. Begin weaving together elements from steps one through three. Follow your impulses. Something is probably already occurring to you.
As an example, I have provided my own attempt at this exercise.
Poem
From a shelf labeled “Staff Picks,” she blindly removed a narrow volume of Stephen Dunn's poems which fell open to: “It was the hour of simply nothing, / not a single desire in my western heart…” Further down the page: “There was even an absence of despair.” She rolled her eyes; even in random books selected by nearly illiterate clerks, she was finding her experience rendered. So much for uniqueness.
She piled her arms with magazines and took a seat on the staircase leading to texts on science.
Dream
Her just-before-waking dream had involved horses, horses with their heads over a fence. She had extended her fist, and a yearling's thick white teeth had scraped skin from her knuckles. At first she'd recoiled, but then she offered the knuckles again. What in God's name could that mean? she wondered.
She looked at her hand now, half expecting to find scabs.
Conflict
The night her brother called, she found her attention wandering. She held the receiver in one hand, the TV remote in the other, and she surfed through the channels, half-listening to his litany of investment successes.
“I bought at lunchtime,” he told her, “called in a put by afternoon, sold in the morning.”
This appeared to have some meaning for her brother.
“That's good,” she told him. “Very good.”
She stopped at Lou Dobbs' Moneyline, then Jeopardy.
Putting It All Together
At the checkout counter, she was almost surprised to find the slim volume of poems among her purchases.
“Great collection,” the salesman said.
The salesman had a horsey face. Reflexively, she covered her knuckles.
“Do you know anything about investing?” she asked him.
He frowned. “Would I be working the register at a bookstore,” he said, “if I knew anything about investing?”
They agreed to meet for coffee the next afternoon.
A discussion of the basics of story structure must begin with plot. Why? Because effective fiction raises a question in the mind of the reader. The reader turns the pages, and continues to turn the pages, in the interest of answering the question. How early the fiction (story or novel) raises that question, how dramatic that question is, how desperate the reader is to know the answer to that question, how long the writer can delay answering that question — all of these are functions of plot.
This is not to say that fiction can't succeed (with certain readers) if it lacks a plot, or that stories must be structured a certain way. But by focusing first on story structure, you stress perhaps the most critical story function — one that appears in the vast majority of stories, from the best-sellers to small-press esoterica. (Because it appears far less frequently, and because its choices seem to be deliberately in opposition to the rigors of plot, the plotless story can be discussed in relation to its more abundant cousin.3
One hears all sorts of definitions of plot and its distinction from story. Story, according to E.M. Forster, is “The king died, and then the queen died.” Plot is “The king died, and then the queen died of grief.” Plot, to Forster, is motivation. Story, according to David Mamet, is “the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal.” In other words, story is the protagonist making choices, taking actions.
So plot involves (1) motivation, (2) choices, and (3) change. The engine of these plot elements is conflict. If you find those qualities in your manuscript, you will be on your way to drafting a well-told story, one that readers will want to finish.
3 Plotless is not a pejorative, it's a choice. Good examples of plotless stories can be found in the collections of Lydia Davis.
In classically constructed fiction (short story or novel), the opening section (passage, chapter, act) introduces character and setting (the exposition), the conflict, and it provides the event that sets the story moving forward in present action. The longer second act will rise and fall, often twice, in an event-crisis-climax pattern. The third act, usually the shortest, might provide a resolution of sorts, and will certainly answer the Major Dramatic Question. So, in the big picture, you have (1) set-up, (2) increasing complications, (3) climax and reversal, and (4) resolution.
Classical structure provides the writer with a checklist, and the checklist provides a fail-safe. Questions you can put into your story's structure are:
Has your opening section provided the set-up ? That is, has it introduced principal characters and setting. Has the conflict been introduced? Does the inciting incident, the event that kicks the story into present action, appear? Does that incident raise the Major Dramatic Question, the question that the reader needs to see answered?
Do the complications of the set-up increase in urgency? Does the protagonist's struggle increase? Are the obstacles in the protagonist's way more and more difficult to hurdle?
Does the struggle build to a climax? Does the climax involve the protagonist taking an action that is dramatized on the page? Does the outcome of that action address the Major Dramatic Question? Does the outcome involve a reversal ?
Does the conclusion resolve the story's tensions? Has the Major Dramatic Question been answered?
When is it advantageous to plot classically? Probably always. It's a bit like asking when it is advantageous to make the wheel round. Round wheels roll; plotted fiction compels.
But, are some wheels rounder than others? In fiction, yes. In the so-called minimalist fiction of the late 1970s through the 1980s, set-ups and resolutions were often effectively abbreviated. Raymond Carver's “Neighbors” sets up in two paragraphs:
Bill and Arlene Miller were a happy couple. But now and then they felt alone among their circle had been passed by somehow. … They talked about it sometimes, mostly in comparison with the lives of their neighbors, Harriet and Jim Stone. It seemed … that the Stones lived a fuller and brighter life.
The Stones lived across the hall from the Millers. … on this occasion the Stones would be away for ten days. In their absence, the Millers would look after the Stones' apartment, feed Kitty and water plants.
In this set up, Carver introduces principal characters (Bill and Arlene), the setting (an apartment building, Anywhere, USA), the conflict (Bill and Arlene envy their neighbors, the Stones), and the inciting incident (Bill and Arlene will be looking after the Stones' apartment). By the third paragraph, “Neighbors” is into its complications. It concludes at the climax; its resolution is implied. But even with the abbreviated set-up and the lopped off resolution, “Neighbors” still rolls. Why? Because the elements of the checklist are there. (For further discussion, see the sidebar, “A Plot Troubleshooting Device” on page 28.)
Stories are usually built around a three-part structure: acts one, two, and three or the beginning, middle, and end. Each part of the structure has its own purpose.
The purpose of the beginning of a story is to introduce character and conflict. Another purpose is to catch and hold the reader's interest. One way to do so is to raise a question in the mind of the reader. Another way is to quickly immerse the reader in the action of the story, to eliminate boring exposition. Frank O'Connor said that “short stories begin where everything but the action has already taken place. Only the action remains.” This is a useful tip to remember. Exposition is implicit in action; action is exposition. The old show, don't tell rule, in other words. By telling — that is, by providing a résumé or a psychological profile for your character — you are providing information in a form that glides past the reader like a software terms-of-use agreement. By showing — that is, by allowing the reader to observe your character in action — you are dramatizing information, and information provided through action stays with the reader. Compare the following approaches to the same story opening.
In college, Janice studied to become a pharmacist. After school she acquired her license and began work in a small town drugstore (she hated that term) in New Hampshire. At twenty-six, she married Neil Pilbow, a commercial pilot eleven years her senior. A lot of people thought she'd be unhappy to turn thirty, but Janice was A-okay with that milestone. In fact, she felt at the prime of her life.
Janice Pilbow slid her lab coat over her head, hung it on a dressing room hook, and studied herself in the mirror. In her yoga outfit, a body-length leotard that she wore underneath her lab coat, she looked the same at thirty as she'd looked at nineteen. “One day,” her husband Neil had told her that morning, fixing his pilot's cap on his head, “I'm going to open the cockpit door, and you'll be standing there in that outfit, and oh boy, those passengers better have their seat belts buckled.”
Conflict, when effectively dramatized, also catches the attention of the reader. The following commonly used story-opening strategies (SOS) capture the reader's interest by presenting immediate conflict. For each premise type, I have created my own brief story-openings. The openings amount to the first few strokes of paint on the canvas — a strategic stroke designed to get the picture painted convincingly and efficiently.
ROUTINE-DISRUPTION
How do you get plot into a story? It's as easy as creating a routine, then disrupting it. Routine-disruption creates plot. It makes the protagonist struggle to restore the order that's been disrupted, or it makes the protagonist accept that the order can never be restored. It causes the protagonist to make choices and take actions, and the actions characters take are what define them. Most of the other story structures discussed here are variations of the routine-disruption premise.
Every morning for ten years, Jim Dorsey ran through his well-manicured suburban neighborhood for exactly six miles. One morning, closing in on mile five, something in the area of his ankle snapped.…
Betty Indick never saw her mother in midtown, until one afternoon, on her lunch break, there her mother was, looking in the windows of boutiques.
Joan Comfort hadn't had a drink in five years. Then, one night, she met an intriguing man with a tempting bottle of …
(Example one is the premise of John Cheever's “O Youth and Beauty.” Example two is the premise of Edwidge Danticat's “New York Day Women.” Example three is the premise of Kate Braverman's “Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta.”)
THE CHANCE ENCOUNTER
The chance encounter is a variation of routine-disruption. The routine is that the protagonist never sees someone anymore. The disruption is when that someone appears. The chance encounter premise provides something of setting (where does the encounter take place?) and something of the exposition (what is the protagonist doing at the time?), and into that setting it slams a character out of the past. That character will introduce necessary backstory and an old issue in the protagonist's psychological development that's been left unresolved. It injects a past problem into a present situation. (And that is the working method of many a Raymond Carver story. Carver, who divided his life into “Good Raymond” and “Bad Raymond” periods, often jammed Bad Raymond experiences into Good Raymond settings. The story “Cathedral” is a classic example.)
He was about to take his dinner on the verandah overlooking the sea when he saw a familiar figure emerge from the shallows, stop ankle deep, and throw back her long, unmistakable hair.
“Scotch,” he said to the waiter. “Double.”
She was preparing to go home for the evening when a knock came at her office door. Without waiting for a response, the knocker entered. Ken, whom she hadn't seen in eleven years, whom she'd believed was dead, stood big as life in front of her desk. He did not appear to recognize her.
One day, while returning from the gym, Bobby heard his name shouted several times before he stopped. From across the avenue trotted Zee, an old college roommate who'd mastered a dozen old ways and invented several new ways to cheat on exams, all while his girlfriend was cheating on him … with Bobby.
(Example one is the premise of Jennifer Egan's “Why China?” Example two is the premise of Helen Schulman's P.S. Example three is a variation of a premise that launches several stories by Mary Gaitskill including the aptly named “Chance Encounter”; it also happened to me.)
ENTER: MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
Enter: mysterious stranger is the name Robert Penn Warren gave to his story strategy for “Blackberry Winter.” The early drafts of “Blackberry Winter” contained lyrical passages and moving descriptions, but nothing was happening to advance the story. So, into those lyrical passages and moving descriptions, Warren introduced a mysterious stranger, a guy who walks up the path toward the house, carrying a switchblade.
Enter: mysterious stranger is a close relative of the chance encounter and routine-disruption. It involves the introduction of a new element into the story's world — an element dynamic enough to cause a significant disruption.
That summer, the office workload increased almost daily. By mid-July, the manager hired a new secretary, but once hired, that secretary refused to work.
Janet didn't like handicapped people — or cripples, as she insisted on calling them. She didn't like the way they bungled about, banging into things or slowing down the progress of the bus. She didn't like the way they just assumed they had to be deferred to. One evening, her husband came home from work with his handicapped friend, a woman in a wheelchair, whose feet had to be braced not to curl inward.
(Example one is the premise of Herman Melville's “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Example two is the premise of Raymond Carver's “Cathedral.”)
THE SHATTERING STATEMENT
Routine: The protagonist has never heard a particular point of view, a particular “truth” before. Disruption: Now he hears it. The shattering statement creates plot by forcing the characters to address a truth that is now out on the table.
On their tenth anniversary, Colin Hough's wife, Deb, informed him, without rancor, without accusation, that she had never had an orgasm with him, and that she didn't believe she ever would.
On a family drive into Brooklyn for a Thanksgiving visit, Tommy leaned into the front seat and said, “I hate Grandma.”
His mother and father exchanged looks.
“You don't hate Grandma,” his mother told him.
“I do, too,” Tommy insisted. “I hate her guts.”
“Hey,” his father told him, “that's enough.”
(Example one is the premise of Richard Yates's “A Natural Girl.” Example two is something that could have happened, and maybe should have, on one of the dreaded visits my family made to visit with my father's mother.)
A first cousin to the shattering statement is the shattering discovery.
The day after her father's funeral, Karen gathered the belongings in his apartment. In a photograph album buried below balls of socks, she discovered pictures of her father naked, in the company of men. In some of the pictures, naked men were doing things to other naked men. Some of the naked men were boys.
EXPECTATION VS. ACTUALITY
This setup establishes what a character thinks a new situation will entail and how that expectation collides with reality. Sometimes the routine is explicitly stated, explicitly delineated, elaborately established. Sometimes the routine is implicit in the portrayal of the disruption. In Raymond Carver's “Neighbors,” a couple has always been curious about the lives of their more successful, high-living neighbors. That's the routine. The routine is implicit in the zeal the couple brings to the opportunity to apartment-sit for the neighbors; it is never explicitly stated.
On moving to New York, Jim expected to land a soap in one week, a Broadway show in two, and a first-class ticket to LAX in three. But by his fourth week, without an agent, without an audition, without even a cattle call, he took a job with a furniture-moving company where all the furniture movers were like him — actors — only older.
Billie had always dreamed of the day when she could cross the boulevard and hang around the parking lot of the diner, where the boys all leaned against the hoods of their cars and smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes about the girls who passed dangerously and deliberately close by. She dreamed how one of those boys would study her, would follow her with his eyes, shyly smile, and one day break away from his friends to ask her, awkwardly, if he might buy her a soda.
She hadn't dreamed that one day, while her parents were gone and she was all alone, that boy would show up at the house with one of his friends.
(Example one is the premise of Jennifer Egan's “Emerald City.” Example two is the premise of what might be the most widely anthologized story in English, Joyce Carol Oates's “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”)
THE ROAD STORY
This is an old and crowded field — think Homer's The Odyssey, Hermann Hesse's The Journey to the East, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Richard Ford's “Rock Springs,” Tobias Wolff's “Desert Breakdown, 1968,” and pretty much any other story or novel in which the characters start in one place and head for another. That's basically the setup: Your characters are in location A, they set out for location B, and things happen between departure and arrival. Once they arrive, the story is over, and that's one reason why it's such an easy and appealing setup. (Of course, they don't have to arrive.)
In this premise, the trip is the disruption of routine. Of course, a routine might be established on the trip, and then that routine might be disrupted. For instance, a couple on their way out of New York to New Orleans might argue all the way from New Jersey through Virginia, but then stop arguing once they approach the border of Tennessee.
A common flaw in the road story is inherent in its nature: Road stories in which the protagonist visits several destinations tend to be episodic. Places (and the characters connected to them) drop out of the narrative once the protagonist gets back in the saddle. The concern then becomes to build resonance through association or contrast. Once you've shown aspects of your character through his interaction with the saloon-keeper in location B, how will you show your character's development through his encounter with the saloon-keeper in location G? If a dog chases the runner at location A, how do you use the dog that appears at location C?
THE PLOTLESS STORY
A good question to ask yourself is How soon does my manuscript raise a question in the mind of the reader? If it doesn't raise a question, the reader won't urgently need to know the answer. Why should the reader continue to turn pages?
W.B. Yeats said that the further music strays from the dance, and poetry from the song, the deeper those forms are in trouble. Story and plot are the simplest components of prose fiction, and the further you stray from them, the more difficult it will be for you to sustain the interest of readers.
That said, there are other elements of fiction that can sustain readers: tone, language, idea, atmosphere, and character. If the tone of a story matches the reader's inner voice, the reader might stick around till “About the Author.” For instance, if a story or novel seems ironically hip, it might appeal to readers who share that sensibility.
Florid or virtuoso language, too, can keep a reader involved. However, a common workshop pitfall is the writer with language but no story. Robert Stone said that fiction requires both elevated (convincing, literary, musical) language and gripping story. One without the other diminishes the fiction. In relation to the Coen brothers filmmaking team, the critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote that they appeared to have become articulate before they became mature. That is the case, I'm afraid, with a lot of voice-driven, Look, Ma, I'm writing diction-fiction that crowds the pages of the small presses and that is championed inside many MFA workshops.
Keeping the reader engaged with an idea is tricky. Most ideas are better expressed in forms like the essay, the tract, and the monograph. However, Milan Kundera's hugely successful novels are idea laden, perhaps even idea driven. He is less interested in characters working out their struggles than he is in characters illustrating his ideas.
Atmosphere can mean either exterior or interior setting. The exterior setting of Ernest Hemingway's “The Big Two-Hearted River, Part One” pulls you in and keeps you because of its lyric specificity, its distillation in prose of the natural world. Many Lydia Davis stories pull you in with interior setting — the intellection of a wounded heroine, a jilted lover, a waiting spouse. What Davis follows, then, is not a character in action who makes revealing choices, but the ripples of thought and emotion in a character pinned, for one reason or another, in stasis.
Many a book introduces a wonderful character, but little drama or action. Depending on the nature of the character, a reader will toss the book or turn the pages. Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes might be driven more by character than by plot.4 Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is a book that seems to provide everything but plot: voice, tone, character, language, setting, idea, rant, erudition, spleen, bile, and humor. It is, at best, intermittently plotted. I have read it through to the end at least a dozen times.
4 In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James says, “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” And David Mamet says that to discuss plot-driven as opposed to character-driven stories is nonsense. Perhaps in the greatest books and stories there is a perfect marriage of character and action, and I agree that that's a marriage worth proposing and, as long as possible, remaining faithful to. But I don't think it's controversial to suggest that in some stories we're more hooked by character than action, or vice versa. Andre Dubus's “A Father's Story” might be an example of a character-driven story; it's because we care about the protagonist that we wait around so long for the action. The little twists and jolts in the action of a Somerset Maugham story are often more interesting than the often one-dimensional characters. The argument really boils down to semantics because in the end, all story elements are inextricably linked. Yet I daresay that Finnegans Wake is more voice than plot driven, the comments of James and Mamet notwithstanding.
As Flannery O'Connor stated about fiction, you can do whatever you can get away with, but you'll probably find you can't get away with very much.
A Plot Troubleshooting Device
Every writer should plug the following troubleshooting device — from Frank O'Connor's book on writing, The Lonely Voice — into his every manuscript. In his book (transcriptions, actually, of lectures) O'Connor says that there are three things a story requires: exposition, development, and drama. You know that the plot portion of the beginning of your story is strong if you can summarize your story in three lines, with each line relating to one of these elements. This device can help you determine if you've established a routine, created a compelling disruption, and given your protagonist something to struggle for. O'Connor's example appears below.
Exposition: John Fortescue was a solicitor in the little town of X.
Development: One day, Mrs. Fortescue told him she was leaving him for another man.
Drama: “You'll do nothing of the kind,” he said.
In line one, the exposition, you learn who the story is about: John Fortescue. You learn what John Fortescue does for a living: He's a solicitor (lawyer). From that piece of information, you can form reasonably accurate impressions of the Fortescues' relative income and social milieu. And you know where the Fortescues live: in the little town of X (not the big town of London). From all this information — quite a lot for one line — you can intuit a routine: the married life of a small-town attorney.
In line two, development, you see the inciting incident of the story — the disruption of the routine. You now know what's at stake in the story: a marriage, and everything connected with the marriage — the routine, the reputation, the self-esteem, perhaps the career.
In line three, drama, you learn what the protagonist will struggle for: the marriage. John Fortescue wants to restore the order — the routine — that's been disrupted.
One of the most important questions you can put to your character is What does my character want? This question should be followed by What's in the way of my character getting it? You can already answer those questions about the Fortescues: John Fortescue wants to save his marriage and the routine that it represents. What's in the way of him getting that? Mrs. Fortescue.
If you try to create an exposition line for your manuscript (X is an X in X), and you can't come up with all the information needed to fill in the blanks, then your story has a problem with exposition. The reader needs to know something about the characters and the world of the story in order to appreciate fully the struggle the characters are about to undergo.
If, when assessing development, you cannot find the one day or the one time that something happened to disrupt a routine, you might have a problem with plotting. Instead of a piece that moves dramatically, a piece in which a character struggles for something, you might have a series of routines without drama.
If you come up blank for drama (or if the drama seems vague), then your story has a problem with conflict and motivation.
If your story withstands the exposition-development-drama test, then you're probably well on the way to telling a solid story.
Probably the most challenging part of writing a solid story will be making the middle, the second act, as vital and focused as the opening. In discussing plot, John Barth borrows language from physics and calls this middle section the section of increased perturbations. In other words, what was problematic in the opening of the story grows more so in the middle until, finally, the problems become so urgent that a climax is forced through choices the character makes and actions she takes. This is the section where a lot of stories — and even more novels — go awry. It's the section where the writer would do well to recall the David Mamet definition that “story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal.” If it's not essential, dump it. If there is more than one goal, cut it or them. If the work in question is a novel with subplots decide if the subplot's protagonist has more than one goal; if so, cut it or them.
Easier said than done, but then nothing about writing is easy. There are, however, a few tricks you can try, and a few wrenches you can twist, to help figure out that perilous middle. One trick is to skip it — skip the middle entirely. As Flannery O'Connor put it, stories do have beginnings, middles, and ends, but not necessarily in that order. If that's the case, they don't have to be written in that order, either. If you're stuck, jump forward: How does your story end? Other questions toward the same solution: What's the best possible ending for my character? What's the worst? What's the craziest? Have fun, write to these questions, and then ask: What events are required to get my character from here (the end of the beginning) to there (the beginning of the end)?5
Those are useful terms to remember: the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. Your beginning ends because something has happened — an event, a revelation, a shift in awareness — and now your middle caroms off that event. And your ending begins where the middle ends, and your middle ends because something happened. What? Where? Who was there? What time was it? How did it smell? How did your character feel when it happened? What will she do now that it has?
The beginning is the setup, the place where the principal characters are introduced, the setting is established, and the conflict is triggered. In Pam Houston's “Selway,” the principal characters decide to set out on a rafting journey against the warnings of park rangers. The middle is their journey, during which events occur that force choices that reveal character and lead to a climax. In Mary Gaitskill's “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” Stew learns over the phone that his daughter Kitty has come out as a lesbian in a national magazine. The middle is Stew's journey into town to get that magazine and to learn what his daughter has said about herself and her family. In these examples, the beginning has established a decision or a course, and the middles follow through quite naturally.
5 The problem with writing is writing. The discoveries in writing will be made in writing. The solutions to story problems — structural, motivational, existential — will be found in writing. If the pages of the story are a locus of anxiety, get out of them — do an exercise for which there is no right or wrong. Just get writing. Your middle will not arrive through thinking, and while it may arrive in dreaming, dreaming is more likely to produce results if you fall asleep while writing.
Follow-through is an important idea. Decisions and events cause the next decisions and actions. In the middle, don't forget what came before. If a dog bites the protagonist in act one, and act two is set in a high-stakes poker marathon, the middle would do well to address how that dog bite affects the protagonist's game. The middle is where you follow through on the beginning's complications, and where you set up the ending (which follows through on the middle).
If you're working on a long short story (say, twenty-five or more manuscript pages) or anything longer, remember that middles have their own beginnings, middles, and endings. That is, an event sets the action in motion, the action leads to some kind of crisis, and the crisis leads to a climax. In “Selway,” when the stakes have risen with the water, the crisis involves the last chance to abandon the journey, and the climax depicts the results of the choice the characters make. In “Tiny, Smiling Daddy,” Stew's private anguish is exposed more and more as he ventures into town to buy the magazine, and once he's made the purchase, his private understanding of the nature of his relationship with his daughter is threatened more and more as he reads. Incremental perturbations, turns of the screw, complications — these are the characteristics of your story's middle.
Reversal
Sometimes the writer gets stuck in a manuscript, wondering where to turn. A good exercise is to turn around, hang a U-ey, reverse direction. Ask: What did my protagonist believe in the story's opening? How can I make that exactly the opposite by the end? What did my protagonist value? How can I have her destroy that thing? What are the circumstances of my protagonist? How can I make those exactly the opposite?
Reversal is a plot element that goes all the way back to the beginning. Remember Oedipus searching for the person responsible for the plague and then discovering that it's himself? In contemporary stories, you'll find reversals in abundance. At the beginning of Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried,” Lieutenant Jimmy Cross values nothing so much as the letters he's received from a girl back home; by the end, he burns those letters. In the beginning of Tom Perrotta's “You Start to Live,” Buddy sits in the back, Laura Daly drives; by the end, their positions have reversed. In Angela Patrino “Sculpture I,” a young woman with a negative self-image moves to a country where she's compared favorably to Julia Roberts.
If your story is stuck somewhere in the middle, try reversal, and go the other way. The trick, finally, is to make the reversal less a mechanical thing and more an organic outgrowth of the story, of why the story is being told. But forcing reversals on stalled stories is good practice for when the real thing comes along.
The short story is, to use writer David Lodge's term, end-oriented, meaning that one picks up a short story with the expectation of soon reaching its conclusion (whereas, with a novel, the ending is some distance away). The impact of a short story is significantly affected by its ending, a novel's perhaps less so. There are many good (and some great) novels with weak or bad endings: Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, which moves out of fiction and becomes a history lesson; Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, which limps with weak motivation to the finish line from the pivot at the act-two story turning point; Alberto Moravia's Contempt, which solves a crucial story problem with a deus ex machina (as does the volume of Marcel Proust called The Fugitive). Still, these are books worth reading. (For balance, a few novels with great endings: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, Scott Spencer's Endless Love.)
Whether you're working on a novel or a short story, ask yourself some of the following questions about your ending:
What is the last action that the reader sees? How can this final action encapsulate, reinforce, and underscore the story's themes?
What is the final language of the story? The last sentence? The concluding phrase? How do these resonate? How do they evoke the story's theme?
In dialogue, does a character express his destiny?
Does the image or action or language work on more than one level (is it both literal and symbolic)?
Basic Manuscript Evaluation
In workshop, the following questions can help troubleshoot the manuscript under discussion and help the writer of the piece (and all the other writers) return to work with a sense of how to approach revision.
What is the world of the story and how convincingly are its details rendered?
The world of the story is its setting in time and place. How well is the story's place established? Are the descriptive details adequate to paint a mental picture? Are there too many details — do you get lost in them? How well do the details participate in telling the story? How convincing is the story's setting in time? Convincing is related to accurate, but not wholly: You wouldn't expect a story set in eighteenth-century New England to include discussion of the Oedipus complex, but you might allow for loose play with facts and history if the license taken creates a more convincing story.
Who is the story about and (a) are we convinced by them, and/or (b) do we care about them?
For characters, dimensionality is the main concern. Do they feel fully formed, complex, fully human? Are they capable of surprising you? Do they convince you (in their speech, habits, costume, thoughts, desires)? Or are they one-dimensional? Are they caricatures? Stereotypes?
Do the events of the story challenge the characters? Ultimately, are the characters' true natures revealed as a result of the story events?
What kinds of events does the story throw at the characters? Do those events sufficiently challenge the characters and thereby reveal their truest nature? Or do the events feel random, ornamental, nonessential? Further, how well are events dramatized? Do they convince? Do they raise questions? Are they representative of more than just the literal action?
How well does the language of the story communicate the story's theme? Is the tone appropriate for the content? Is the writer glib (a common approach in workshops) when he needs to be neutral?
Language is to a story what paint is to a canvas — it's the medium through which the message is communicated. Does the story's language communicate the story convincingly? Are there glitches in the language? If there are unintended grammatical errors, the story will probably suffer. But more important in this category is the syntax — the tone, the voice, the efficiency of the sentences, the music of the prose. The sensitive reader needs the prose and the dialogue to sound exactly right.
What are the stakes of the story? Does the protagonist stand to gain or lose something by story's end? How clear are the stakes?
A critical concern for a story is what's at stake for the characters. The higher the stakes, the more intense the drama. In Pam Houston's “Selway,” Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried,” and Edmund White's “Running on Empty,” the stakes are life-or-death. Those kinds of stakes rivet a reader. Of course, most literary fiction does not concern life-or-death stakes; literary fiction more frequently deals with less urgent issues. The stakes still need to be clear, and felt. What does the principal character stand to gain or lose by the end of the story?
And one final important question to ask: Does the story raise a question in the mind of the reader? How early?
An Example: Pam Houston's “Selway”
In “Selway,” a single woman goes on a whitewater rafting trip with her boyfriend, a man who seeks greater and greater danger in his rafting, and who refuses to commit to his girlfriend.
The world of the story is the river, the raft, and the riverbanks. These are all persuasively rendered. You feel the cold of the water, its violence; you feel the vulnerability of the raft as well as its graceful glide over the less turbulent patches of river. You are provided with details of the camp settings, the particulars of riverbanks. The setting in time is the early to mid-1990s, and the story is true to that time.
The characters are fully dimensional. The boyfriend is something of an outdoor macho man. He is a recognizable type in his relation to danger — he seeks it, he attempts to master it. And he is a recognizable type in relation to women — he wants one in his life, but he refuses to make a place for her. He's complex (or complicated) because he embodies a paradox. So does the girl — the narrator. She wants a man to make a place for her in his life, but she is only attracted to men who won't. These characteristics are, of course, related to the stakes of the story.
The events of “Selway” are relatively straightforward: Against the advice of river guide officials, a couple sets out on a raft journey on a dangerously turbulent river. The things that happen to the characters are the things that happen on rafting trips: variations of calm and turbulence, rolling and camping, talking, observing. The story events build to a convincing climax as the raft approaches the most dangerous of all the whitewater patches. The answer to the question of whether the events challenge the characters sufficiently enough to reveal who they really are is a resounding yes.
The language of the story convincingly represents the consciousness of the girlfriend. The prose renders that consciousness with authority, insight, and eloquence. It also handles the particulars of the descriptive details with authority.
Stakes are clear right from paragraph one: If the characters go out on a raft in this river, their lives will be imperiled. The magnitude of the stakes is convincingly reinforced as the couple proceeds downriver and the water becomes more and more turbulent and casualties of that turbulence are encountered or observed.
These five broad categories — world, characters, events, language, stakes — apply, more or less, to the critique of every piece of fiction. One or two may be more important than others in a given story. (Nuanced characters might not be terribly important in action stories, which tend to be event driven. Nuanced characters are critical, however, in most literary fiction.) Evaluate these categories in your own manuscripts and see how your work fares.
Flashing forward — that is, jumping the time frame of the story — can work a number of wonderful effects on a manuscript. One, it can take the writer out of the anxiety of figuring out what comes next in the course of events. Instead, the question becomes What is the later effect of the events that have already transpired? Two, even if the answer to that question does nothing for the story, it can lead the writer right back into the story by somehow revealing what comes next in the story's time frame. Three, it delays gratification — it suspends. By answering the question of what happens in the future, the writer delays answering the question of what happens now at the moment of the story climax. What happens now is what the reader wants to know, and the flash forward can effectively delay that gratification and thereby increase its impact.
For example, in Junot Diaz's “The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars,” Yunior (the narrator) is on vacation with his Cuban girlfriend in the Dominican Republic, Yunior's birthplace. The trip is Yunior's attempt to patch up a relationship that his earlier infidelity had sent heading toward the rocks. On the trip, it appears as if the girlfriend is plotting some nasty payback. Right at the moment when the tension between the narrator and his girlfriend becomes unbearable — right at the act-two climax, when we'll learn what the girlfriend is going to do, the action that will answer the Major Dramatic Question (MDQ) — Diaz flashes forward to the next period in the protagonist's life. It's about six months in the future, and things have changed. We're dying to know how, and why. Diaz doesn't let us down, he just makes us wait a little longer before the story returns to answer the Major Dramatic Question. This choice created another wonderful effect; while the reader savors the new moment (for its language, for its feeling and tone, for its information about character), the reader is also impatient for the answer to the MDQ. The Major Dramatic Question is the question that drives the story, that turns the pages, that the reader needs to have answered. In “Selway,” will the couple survive? In “The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars,” will Yunior lose his girlfriend? The reader is like a dog in front of two bowls, and a kind of anxious dizziness is induced by the richness of choice.
Give it a try in your story. Jump forward ten days, ten weeks, ten months, ten years. What has happened because of what had happened? How does that new situation inform the past? Is there a way to go back into the story — the past you've jumped from — and address its hanging issues?
A flashback is an event that happened in the past and is presented as a scene, that is, in real time with all the devices real-time scenes might deploy, including dialogue. Flashback is an overused device with many potential pitfalls. If flashback appears early in the story, there is probably a problem with the story entry point; maybe the story needs to begin earlier. If you recall the Frank O'Connor idea that the short story begins where everything but the action has already taken place, you know that the action itself — what you see the protagonist do in the present time — should be sufficient to reveal the inexorable nature of the character and the essential theme of the story.
If a flashback appears later in the story, it may have the effect of reducing present action conflict to a 2 + 2 = 4 arithmetic: The character is behaving like this in the present because that happened to her in the past. Because equals explanation, and explanation is to be avoided. It's antithetical to fiction.
Those caveats aside, flashback can be used effectively. Midway through The Death of Jim Loney, a backstory event concerning Jim Loney's girlfriend, Rhea, is presented in a flashback; this flashback adds to your understanding of Rhea and your sense of foreboding for Jim as the novel moves toward its climax.
Flashback is not the same as backstory. Backstory is information in the story's or character's past, and it can be parceled out effectively in the narration as the story progresses. See, for instance, John Cheever's “The Swimmer,” a story in which the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim home, using the pools of his county as a kind of continuous stream. At each pool, through his actions and through his interaction with others, we learn a little bit more of Neddy's past, and that new information helps us better understand Neddy's present. Cheever parcels out that information little by little as the story progresses; not once does he use flashback.
Stories are about events that happen to people. If we like the people, if we identify with the people, if we recognize the people, we are likely going to be compelled to read about those events. The question is, how do we create characters readers will be interested in? How do we avoid clichés, stereotypes, or one-dimensional caricatures?
First, try to provide information about the characters without appearing as if you're providing information. In other words, it's not just the information, it's the way you present the information. You don't want to provide a formal résumé or a psychological profile of a character. Instead, you want to show the character in action; from that action, the reader will determine the traits and qualities of the character.
For instance, compare these two sentences about the same character.
Bernstein cared a lot about his golf game.
Bernstein slammed his Ben Hogans into the trunk of his Toyota.
In the first example, we have information, plainly stated. What we don't have is effective characterization, which is achieved through action and detail. Example two provides those. Action is exposition: Bernstein is slamming golf clubs into the trunk of a car. This action provides information without explicitly stating the information (as in the first example). That action conjures several possible suggestions about Bernstein: (1) He's careless; (2) he's angry about his game (he lost, he played poorly); or (3) he's angry about something else, and a round of golf has not soothed him.
Details also characterize. Ben Hogans are a type of golf club; they say something about the type of golfer (they are linked to the point of view of the golfer and suggest the amount of investment the golfer has in the game). A Toyota is a type of car, and again, that type suggests something about the owner. Balzac said, “Show me what a man owns, and I'll show you what he believes.” Details work on more than one level. The details are the literal circumstances of the moment, but they also point to deeper truths about the character.
The first example above tells us one piece of information about Bernstein, but the second example actually characterizes him by showing us many pieces of information.
Forget the Rules
Perhaps the most important rule of all writing: Forget about all the rules. A friend of mine who's an avid (and very good) tennis player wanted to take his game to the next level. He hired a coach and began working with the coach twice a week. The coach ran him ragged on the court and constantly made micro-corrections to his form. In less than a month, my friend found his game falling apart, and after two months he complained to his coach. “I get out on the court, I try to remember everything you've taught me, and I can't return a ball over the net.” The coach said, “When we practice, practice as hard as you can. Do every drill, integrate every correction. Then, when you play, forget you ever had a coach, forget every drill, every instruction. Just play your game. The drills and the instructions will filter into your game if you just forget about them and play.” My friend followed the coach's advice, and soon he was at the top of his club, looking for more advanced players to challenge from other clubs.
The same principle applies to writing. Practice hard and often, attempt to do the exercises and the drills while you're practicing. Then, forget everything you've learned and write straight out of the fever (or the grind) of writing. Once you've got a stack of pages, read them, see how they're going, then think about the “rules.”
Characterization through action and detail is one way to avoid creating flat characters. Here are a few additional tips (not rules) to help you avoid clichés, stereotypes, and one-dimensional characters:
RESEARCH CHARACTERS THE WAY ACTORS DO. I don't mean read an entry in Wikipedia (although you can), and I don't mean pile up a stack of books in the library (although you can). Get out among the type of character you're writing. For instance, if you're writing about truck drivers, get in a truck with one. Take a ride, or several. What's in the cabin? What's on the radio? The CB (if they even still have those things)? What does the trucker wear? How does he sound? What kinds of jargon does the trucker use? What's in his glove compartment? What's in his cooler? Does he lie in his logbook? (If he doesn't, he's not a trucker.) Drop in to a truck stop. Listen. Observe. Don't rely on reading a couple of chapters of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Get out there with the real people and study them.
A good case in point: Compare the renderings of prostitutes in Mary Gaitskill's “Trying to Be” with those in Lorrie Moore's “Vissi d'Arte.” One rendering is complex, dimensional, convincing; the other is false, hackneyed, invented.
Lorrie Moore, “Vissi D'Arte”
… Deli was hovering in his doorway. “Mornin', Harry,” said Deli.
“Isn't it afternoon?” asked Harry.
“Whatever,” said Deli. “You know Harry, I been thinking. What you need is to spend a little money on a girl who can treat you right.” She inched seductively toward him, took his arm with one hand and with the other began rubbing his buttocks through his jeans.
Harry shook her off. “Deli, don't pull this shit on me! … Don't start your hooker shit with me now.”
“Fuck you,” said Deli. And she walked away, in a sinuous hobble, up to the corner to stand.
Mary Gaitskill, “Trying to Be”
Stephanie wasn't a “professional lady” exactly; tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work, or when she couldn't pay her bills. She even liked a few of her customers, but she had never considered dating one; she kept her secret forays into prostitution neatly boxed and stored away from her real life. She was thus a little dismayed to find herself standing in front of the smeared mirror in the “Shadow Room,” handing her phone number to Bernard the lawyer.
In the Moore story, the prostitute is a flat secondary character with no inner life. So far, okay. Flat secondaries are useful. But this one's straight out of an old Shirley MacLaine movie. You can almost hear the gum cracking and the phony nasal Bronx accent. Her name, “Deli,” makes her a joke — someone the reader can laugh at from a considerable height. Her “sinuous hobble” at the passage's conclusion is an attempt to make the fake character appear real.
In the Gaitskill piece, the prostitute is the protagonist, and by clause two, line one, she's already a complicated figure. She is at odds with the work and with the setting. She has a dual life, a split consciousness. By the conclusion of the passage, the duality of her life is challenged.
PLAY AROUND WITH YOUR ORIGINAL CONCEPTIONS. I remember some good advice I received in grad school from an actress I'll call C.C. I had shown her a few screenplays, and she said that they were really male-oriented. She asked if I wrote any stories about women. I told her I had a hard time writing women — I didn't know them — and C.C. frowned as though she'd just heard something idiotic. She said, “Write a character named Dick. When you finish, change the name to Wilma and adjust all the pronouns.”
I can't say that that helped me know women any better, but it sure helped me write them. Basically, she was saying that women aren't any less complex and dimensional than men.
WRITE SYMPATHETICALLY ABOUT ALL CHARACTERS. If you have a villain, make sure the villain has some positive quality. Anton Chekhov called the scene revealing the good in the villain the petting-the-dogmoment. You've seen this principle at work in James Bond movies, in which the villain often has a sympathetic bond with an animal.
GIVE HEROES OR HEROINES A FLAW. Tobias Wolff pointed out the mileage to be gained by creating a narrator or protagonist who has done something wrong. So, just as you give the villain positive attributes, make sure you reveal flaws (or a flaw) in the protagonist.
AVOID SENTIMENTALITY. J.D. Salinger said that a writer is being sentimental toward characters when he loves them more than God loves them. To invoke Chekhov again, maintain absolute neutrality. Don't lead the reader to like or dislike a character. Instead, just show the character in action and the reader will make his own determination.
WRITING CHARACTER FLAWS
Virginia Woolf said that a writer can't write about the flaws of others until she is ready to acknowledge the worst things about herself. That is, of course, a difficult task. On one level or another, you will be implicated in your work, or you will be seen to be avoiding something, leaving something out. To write from the deepest, most vulnerable part of the self is a struggle that most of us try to avoid — by sharpening pencils, checking the mail, answering the phone, going to the gym; or, in the writing, going for the easy laugh, stopping at the second or third level of self-awareness, and not really digging in to what Robert Olen Butler calls the white hot center of the unconscious. Part of this avoidance has to do with its potential discomfort, part with what might be revealed (to others and ourselves), and part with the intrusions of everyday life and our obligations to them. Eventually the writer has to confront hard truths. The success of your writing will depend significantly on how skillfully, how readily you are able to access those deepest, most vulnerable parts.
This exercise is designed to enable you to skip past the inner censor and access the depths of your characters — their truest nature, truest voice, deepest fears, and most guarded secrets. In so doing, you will probably engage some of your own personal demons.
Imagine you are an interviewer on assignment. Your point-of-view character (or a secondary character) is your subject. Before beginning the interview proper, provide some backstory for the character. Write one paragraph of setting (Where does the interview take place? I recommend setting it where your character lives, “now” or at the time of the story), one paragraph concerning conditions (What day is it? What is the the weather like during the interview? What is around: pets, liquor bottles, etc? What is the subject wearing?), and one brief paragraph highlighting significant events or accomplishments in the character's life. Keep each paragraph short (five lines maximum). Then begin the interview with a series of questions designed to help your character relax, to trust you. Where do you live? Work? Where do you see yourself in five years? You ask the questions, the character answers. And in the answers, you'll hear your character speak.
As the interview proceeds, make the questions increasingly tough: For you, what defines love? Is there anything your creator doesn't know about you? Is there a secret you're keeping from him? Is he preventing you from revealing that secret in the story? Is he being fair to you? If you could tell the story, what would be different?
Take a look at the small-press publication The Paris Review. Find the “Craft of Fiction”/“Writers at Work” interview and study the format. Then use that format for the interview you conduct with your character.
Besides helping you get to know your character better, to learn his secrets and his fears (and to confront, perhaps, some of your own), the interview exercise also enables you to step out of the anxiety of the perfect scene, the perfect sentence, and to allow your character to speak in his own voice — and for you to hear it. Students often tell me that this exercise unlocked the story for them. Give it at least thirty minutes, although you'll probably find that thirty minutes is nowhere near enough.
The writer of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus, was troubled by a tic of speech the novel's narrator had, but he continued writing until he had about two hundred pages. The narrator is a privileged woman from the antebellum South who, in the writing, uses the grammatically incorrect word ain't. Gurganus thought that it was odd for a woman of her position, and from that time, to use the word ain't, and when the habit bothered him enough, he stopped writing the book, took out a legal pad, and across the top page wrote the heading Why I Say Ain't. His answer — actually, her answer — became the 120-page section of the novel called “Why I Say Ain't.” Your interview is similar in intent to Gurganus's exercise. (This is not to say you'll wind up with 120 pages of useful fiction, but you might.)
Your goal in characterization is not only to create a multidimensional character, but a believable one. How? The answer, once again, is Flannery O'Connor's assertion that you can do whatever you can get away with, but that you'll probably find you can't get away with very much. On the other hand, you might be surprised at what you can get away with. For instance, you might not think you could get away with a small-time boxing coach who reads Nietzsche, but with some readers, Thom Jones did (see The Pugilist at Rest). You might not think you could get away with an unbathed, rum-sodden alcoholic having a wild carnal affair with a vivacious young career woman, but with some readers, Frederick Exley did (see A Fan's Notes).
Getting away with it means the reader stays with the story or the book without tossing it across the room or using to it to level the kitchen table. It means that the character you've drawn is convincing enough for the reader to accept the character's actions as convincing, even inevitable, at the same time that they're surprising.
There are a few things to avoid when creating a believable character:
Don't over determine your character by providing too much information. In other words, provide neither a résumé nor a psychological profile (or provide as little of each as necessary); let the actions the character takes demonstrate who the character is.
Watch out for stereotypes. If everything you know about prostitutes came from Shirley MacLaine movies, don't write prostitutes.
Don't tell everything about your character. Keep a secret that only you know, and imagine another secret that the character is keeping from you.
Beginning writers often think that characters are what the narrator tells us about them. That's a mistake. What narrators tell us about characters is merely information: Dr. Sibelius loved the symphonies of Brahms.
Beginning writers often think that characters are what they say about themselves. This is also a mistake. What characters say about themselves is their way — one of their ways — of getting what they want: “I am a sober and trustworthy man,” the young drunk said at the job interview.
Characters are the choices they make, and the actions they take: When the homeless man entered the subway car, Dr. Sibelius buried his head behind the score of Brahms's Symphony No. 3 in F major.
Agent Noah Lukeman says that when he's still not certain whether he'll represent a manuscript, he flips forward to a passage of dialogue. If the writer can handle dialogue, Noah will read another five or so pages before making a decision. But if the dialogue sounds artificial, inert, or dead, the manuscript gets tossed into the rejections heap. So, for one of the hottest agents on the scene today, a lot rides on the element of dialogue.
Over the years, the fear of dialogue has been my students' biggest fear. They know they have to use it — it makes scenes — but they think that when they write it, it sounds artificial or dead. And they're right. (Dialogue is dead in dozens of “literary” books on the shelves right now, and in a few moments I'll show you why.) Their inability to write dialogue baffles them because they speak and hear dialogue themselves every day, all day, even in their dreams. And they recognize it when they see it on the page, and when it's working it looks so easy, looks … just like talking.
There are several types of dialogue: direct dialogue (also called dramatic or real-time dialogue), indirect (or reported) dialogue, stylized dialogue, and asynchronous dialogue. The writer needs to deploy each, to varying degrees, throughout a novel. In my opinion, the most critical form of dialogue to master is direct dialogue. Mastery of direct dialogue requires an ear for all sorts of speech (pick up any Robert Stone novel and you'll see what I mean), from staccato street jive to the dry sherry tones of Oxford. Without excellent direct dialogue, an entire book will feel less authentic — when the characters speak, they will sound as if they're speaking lines, not participating in dramatic scenes.
DIRECT (DRAMATIC/REAL-TIME) DIALOGUE
Direct dialogue happens in a scene, in the present action, in something like real time. To write effective direct dialogue, it's important to remember that on the page, the flow of natural speech can be interrupted with exposition, description, and characterization, all without compromising the immediacy of the moment. Interruptions work like beats in a measure of music. Often, the asides, descriptions, behavioral tags, attributions, and observations provide the beat and anchor the reader. Without them, the piece would look like a play script and feel like a play without actors or direction.
In the passage from Robert Stone's “Helping,” below, a recovering alcoholic enters a bar he hasn't visited in eighteen months.
Jackie G. greeted him as if he had been in the previous evening. “Say, babe?”
“How do,” Elliot said.
A couple of men at the bar eyed his shirt and tie. Confronted with the bartender, he felt impelled to explain his presence. “Just thought I'd stop by,” he told Jackie G. “Just thought I'd have one. Saw the light. The snow …” He chuckled expansively.
“Good move,” the bartender said. “Scotch?”
“Double,” Elliot said.
When he shoved two dollars forward along the bar, Jackie G. pushed one of the bills back to him. “Happy hour, babe.”
“Ah,” Elliot said. He watched Jackie G. pour the double. “Not a moment too soon.”
INDIRECT DIALOGUE
In indirect dialogue, the narrator reports that dialogue has been spoken. Altering the presentation of the dialogue is a way to take control of a scene with runaway direct dialogue. It's also a way to accelerate through moments of dialogue that are largely inconsequential. Take a look at this example from Anton Chekhov's “The Lady With the Pet Dog.” A womanizer named Gurov is walking and chatting with a young woman on vacation.
They walked and talked about the strange light of the sea, the soft warm lilac color of the water, and the golden pathway made by the moonlight. They talked of how sultry it was after a hot day. Gurov told her he came from Moscow, that he had been trained as a philologist, though he now worked in a bank. … From her he learned that she had grown up in St. Petersburg and had been married in the town of S —, where she had been living for the past two years, that she would stay another month in Yalta. …
STYLIZED DIALOGUE
Of course, all dialogue is stylized — it's an illusion. But some dialogue creates a sense of real time passing, while stylized dialogue flows through time without attempting a cinematic full picture. In Kate Braverman's “Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta,” a drug dealer takes a woman struggling with sobriety to a house with a pool and asks her to dive in. (And it's not his pool.) How much time does it take to read the passage? How much story time elapses? And why might the writer give the speaker, Lenny, this kind of steam-roller dialogue (which is really a monologue)?
“Don't tell nobody, okay?” Lenny was pulling his shirt over his head. He stared at her, a cigarette in his mouth. “It's private. It's walled. Just a cliff out here. … Come on. Take off your clothes. What are you? Scared? You're like a child. Come here. I'll help you. … Here. See? Over your head. Over baby's head. Did that hurt? What's that? One of those goddamn French jobs with the hooks in front? You do it. What are you looking at? I put on a few pounds. Okay? I'm a little out of shape. I need some weights. I got to buy some weights. What are you? Skinny? You're so skinny. You one of those vomiters?”
ASYNCHRONOUS DIALOGUE
Tension and drama in dialogue increase when characters disagree with each other and when they respond in an unscripted way — when they throw the other speaker(s) a conversational curve ball. In the following scene from Joan Didion's novel Play It as It Lays, Carter confronts his unhappy wife, who has run away from him. He speaks first. His question is apples; her answer, oranges. When characters respond directly all the time, the dialogue can appear scripted. Discordant dialogue captures the sense of real speech while performing a narrative function.
“What do you weigh now? About eighty-two?”
Maria opened her eyes. The voice was Carter's but for an instant in the bright afternoon light on the sun deck she could not make out his features.
“I didn't know you'd be here today,” she said finally.
“Helene told me you were coming out.”
“Helene is a veritable Celebrity Register.”
“Just calm down. I want to talk about something.” He looked back toward the house. BZ was on the telephone in the living room.
“Let's walk down to the beach.”
“We can talk here.”
“Have it your way, we can talk here.” He kicked aside her sandals and sat down.
In this exercise, write dialogue between two characters in a disagreement. For example, in a sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus, a man pays one pound for a five-minute argument. He enters an office and tells the man behind the desk that he came in for an argument. “No, you didn't,” the man behind the desk tells him, and they're off. “Yes I did.” “You most certainly did not.” And so on. The sketch goes on, hilariously, for another five minutes.
All you need to do in order to get some charged, dramatic dialogue flowing on the page is to bring two characters together and have them disagree.
“Nice weather we're having.”
“This?”
“What's wrong with it?”
“What's right with it?”
“Well, it's not Florida, true, but —”
“What in the hell do you know about Florida?”
Keep writing for ten minutes without stopping, and remember the primary condition: The characters must always disagree.
You know from experience that when you present an argument to someone and that person says, “You're right, I agree,” the conflict is over. You can call out for pizza and reach for the remote because there's nothing further to discuss. Your characters must disagree.
As long as characters are in disagreement, you have conflict, and if you have conflict you have a scene, since the dramatic tension will be created by the questions in the readers mind: How will the conflict resolve? How will character A attempt to impose her will on character B?
Once you've written for at least ten minutes (since characters, like people, have a lot to argue about, ten minutes may not be nearly enough), go back through the scene and consider your usage of interruptions, attributions, asynchrony, and stylization. Dialogue should be fun, snappy, crisp, and it should reveal something about the people speaking it. The second your characters are in accord, your dialogue is in trouble.
Things That Kill Dialogue
When characters say to each other what they already know: “Hello, I'm your brother, who graduated top of his class at Yale.”
When characters respond as if they expected to hear what the other said.
“Is there anything to eat here?”
“How about some eggs?”
“Yes, thank you. You know how I love eggs.”
“I love them too.”
“We have quite a lot in common.”
“We share a love of eggs.”
“I couldn't agree more.”
When characters state the issues of the scene explicitly. Don't write:
“I'm angry at you for withholding emotionally.”
This reads like the script for a Lifetime movie.
Instead, write:
“Would you pass the salt?”
“Get it yourself,” he said, not looking up from the television.
She reached for the salt, and threw it through the TV screen.
“Now,” she said, “would you pass the pepper?”
Dialogue tags are part of the writer's arsenal. Their first function is to keep the reader aware of who's speaking and when, all without getting in the way. In most cases, the reader should and will experience dialogue tags like punctuation — as utterly unobtrusive — if they're used sparingly and if they keep clear who's speaking.
The second function of dialogue tags is to affect meaning. “What are you doing?” she said, feels different from “What,” she said, “are you doing?” Use the tags to create the desired effect, to communicate the reality of the moment. The tags will still be unobtrusive, but the reader will register and interpret them.
Raymond Carver used dialogue tags to create both emotional and musical effects. By frequently repeating them (using he said for every line of dialogue), Carver created a sense of monotony and a kind of drunken emphasis. By moving them around (leading a sentence with she said, then following with said he, then dropping the tag, then placing it in the middle, etc.), he demonstrated how words on the page are like colors on the canvas: They're experienced by the reader and they can be deployed to certain effect. They are not solely to remind the reader of who's stating the line.
A summary is narration that reports on the passage of time or the circumstances particular to a place.
Early that summer, the heat became unbearable. By July 4, the lawns started to brown, and in August the front yards in the neighborhood resembled sandboxes.
In the above summary narration, a summer passes in one sentence. Summary can collapse time and accelerate narrative.
In Helena's absence, Maris applied himself to the guitar. His finger-tips went from sore and tender to callused and impervious by the time she returned.
Summary can eliminate the steps of an action or behavior and present the reader only with what is necessary. It's an efficient way to skip past, as Elmore Leonard puts it, the parts that the reader skips anyway.
Summary can also prepare a reader to enter a new space by providing some sense of what one might typically find there.
The Lucky Strike featured a pool table with felt that looked as if it had been chain-sawed and a jukebox that stopped at 1959. On Thursday nights, “Ladies Night,” women drank half-price. Of the dozen or so regulars who weren't hookers, at least four would have black eyes. After Happy Hour, at least six. The men didn't fight the men until after ten.
A scene is a dramatic unit that begins at one fixed point in time and ends at another. It depicts action, and that action can and often does include dialogue, although it doesn't have to. (For instance, in Ernest Hemingway's “The Big Two-Hearted River, Part One,” the scenes of Nick Adams making camp and fishing are scenes without dialogue.) Scenes, in contrast to summaries, show us an action or sequence of actions in something that usually approximates real time — that is, they move forward the way we feel time moving forward. (Of course, that sense is an illusion created by effective prose rendering of actions.) Scenes are often constructed around a character or characters struggling for something — some objective. In order to achieve their objectives, characters use a variety of means, usually starting with the least expenditure of energy and building as required, in an individual scene or across several scenes, until the objective is either gained or lost, or until the outcome is put on hold by the author to create suspense.
A scene might cover five minutes of real time in about eight pages (as in Robert Stone's “Helping”), or it might cover three hours of real time in two hundred pages (as in Marcel Proust's The Guermantes Way).
SCENE RULES OF THUMB
There is no rule on how long a scene must be, but there are some general rules of thumb for composing effective scenes.
One rule of thumb is to get in late and leave early. That is, join a scene that's already in progress. If the scene involves a couple having an argument (as many great scenes do, including Raymond Carver's “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please,” Ernest Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants,” and Mary Gaitskill's “Stuff”), you don't need to show the husband pulling into the driveway, putting the car in the garage, then ignoring his kids on the front lawn as he makes his way up the path to the front door. Instead, you can begin the argument at the point when the husband pours his second scotch, or third. Join the scene in progress, and leave it early. And you don't have to wait until the argument is over to end the scene. Maybe the wife says something that encapsulates the whole meaning of the argument, of the scene, of the marriage. You might want to get out there, not at the point where the husband walks out of the room and picks up the TV remote.
Another rule of thumb is to intersperse narration in dialogue. Scenes, as I discussed in the dialogue section, can benefit from narration in their midst. In other words, don't rely solely on dialogue to drive your scenes. When you find your characters are talking too much (or more than you want them to), when you find that what they're saying is running away with the scene, take the control back from them. Report what one or the other says; don't use direct dialogue. For example, notice the difference in these two scenes:
Daphne and Martin met for a dinner date at a quiet restaurant in the neighborhood. Their waitress had just placed their main courses.
“I like potatoes,” she said.
“Marvelous,” he told her.
“I like carrots, too.”
“Imagine that,” he said.
“And celery. Asparagus. I can't say much for yams, but I do enjoy a beet now and then. A red beet. Turnips, too. Yes, asparagus, beets, turnips, too. Did you know that the turnip was a staple of Iroquois cuisine? Or was it Mohican? Or am I confusing the turnip with maize, which is really just another name for corn after all, isn't it? What's the difference between corn and Indian corn? Do you know, I mean botanistically speaking? I know it's different in color, but is it a different animal altogether? Cornus Indianus or something? But corn — I'm talking about regular corn now, not Indian — corn I'm rather fond of. Not creamed corn. Corn on the cob, fresh corn. You wrap it in tin foil and put it on the grill, or you boil it, then you drown it in butter. I love it when it's drowned in butter. You can ladle melted butter over the boiled ear, or you can twirl the ear along the top of the butter stick. Which method do you prefer? God — I just remembered candy corn!”
This scene would benefit if the author took back a little control.
Daphne and Martin met for a dinner date at a quiet restaurant in the neighborhood. Their waitress had just placed their main courses.
“I like potatoes,” she said.
“Marvelous,” he told her.
“I like carrots, too.”
“Imagine that,” he said.
“And celery. Asparagus. I can't say much for yams, but I do enjoy a beet now and then. A red beet. Turnips, too.”
Daphne continued to identify her vegetable preferences. Martin consumed the contents of his plate, nodding occasionally. He never cared much for vegetables, or at least the discussion of them. He thought they represented themselves rather well without the interference of language. His eye followed their waitress. What did she think about carrots, he wondered.
“But corn — I'm talking about regular corn now, not Indian — corn I'm rather fond of. Not creamed corn. Corn on the cob, fresh corn.”
Martin stuck his fork into Daphne's pork chop and removed it to his own plate.
“I love it when it's drowned in butter.”
“You don't say,” he said, chewing.
HALF-SCENE AND SCENE SNIPPETS
Although it is often effective to insert a little summary into a scene, you can also do the exact opposite — inject scene-like devices in the midst of summary. Why? Because narrative summary veers dangerously close to the informational. Like boiled chicken, it requires a little spice. Not the red hot chili peppers of a Thai soup, but maybe just a few shakes of the salt and pepper.
Italo Calvino pointed out that in fiction, time doesn't take a lot of time. If a character walks across a room and looks out a window, we don't need a fastidious description of how she put her left foot in front of her right, then her right in front of her left, etc.: The shouting startled Sally at her desk. From the window, she could make out forms at the edge of the yard. …
If a relationship of several years goes sour, it isn't necessary to detail each plodding step of growing dissatisfaction in order for the reader to grasp that the thrill is gone. Instead, the writer can cheat a little — by which I mean that the writer can tell, in narration, of the relationship's deterioration over time. But in order to get away with the narration, it is useful to sprinkle it with the salt and pepper of a half-scene or scene-snippets.
Half-scene refers to the use of scenic devices and present-action moments in the midst of summary or narration. Half-scenes and snippets make the summary more alive, less static or informational, and more dramatic; they can be used to characterize (a snippet may contain a behavioral tag that can be exploited); they can accelerate or facilitate movement through time. Snippets provide the scenic detail that makes a narrational moment more vivid. Compare the snippetless, Their day passed in boredom and lassitude, with, Their days passed in boredom and lassitude, their half-drunk glasses of iced tea crowded the kitchen table.
Consider the following consecutive passages of Melissa Bank's long short story “My Old Man.” In the first passage, which addresses the routine of working at home, Bank uses no present action — that is, no scene — whatsoever. Instead, she tells us how things ordinarily were with this couple, and she makes that telling feel more immediate, more alive, by including what might ordinarily be said, or what might ordinarily be carried (the iced tea); in other words, she includes scene snippets, which create the sense of half-scene.
The second passage addresses the routine of lovemaking (or, perhaps more accurately, lovemaking and its discontents). Again, Bank works not with present time, but with unparticularized time. She's working in the conditional: This is what would happen, this is what might be said. This passage concludes with the only present action in the two passages.
In the evenings, he'd work upstairs in his study, and I'd edit manuscripts at the big mahogany table, where I could worry a sentence for an hour.
He'd come down to refill his iced tea and look in on me. “What is it?” he'd ask.
Standing behind me, he'd read. He'd take the pencil out of my hand and cross out a word or a sentence or the whole page. “There,” he'd say. It took about thirty seconds, and he was always right.
Each time, Archie was mystified. Each time, he told me it had only happened to him once, years ago, when he was blind drunk. He'd light our cigarettes and lie there, staring straight ahead.
“It's not you, babe,” he said one night.
I nodded, as though consoled. The thought had never occurred to me.
The passages above depict routine action, action that takes place routinely, several or many times. Routine action is not the same as present action, which is the kind of action you see in a scene — an action taking place at one particular time. Routine action is the action of summary: Every Saturday she would go to the bookstore. Present action is the action of the particular time: In the reference section of the bookstore, she perused Rocket Science for Dummies and thought, Of course, I can do that.
For this exercise, follow the model the Bank passages provide. Think of two routines that might define two characters — a couple. Bank's routines are working at home and lovemaking (and its discontents). What two routines might represent the reality, over time, of your couple? Using conditional constructions (he would, she would) or language that represents routine time as opposed to particularized time (each time, every time), create two consecutive half-scenes that open with routine action.
Describe the conditions of the routine: Each time, she would be smoking. Each time, he'd be choking. Include description of details typically there in the action (an ash tray, a magazine), and statements of what might typically be said: “Each time,” she'd say, “I hate the way you choke when I'm smoking.” Braid the dialogue into the moment, then cut back to routine action.
Larry Brown's story “Facing the Music” begins:
I cut my eyes sideways because I know what's coming. “You want the light off, honey?” she says. Very quietly.
We don't know why the narrator cuts his eyes sideways — we don't know why he can't look the woman (his wife?) in the eye. And we don't know why she offers to turn out the light. So the story opens with two questions, and those questions remain unanswered all the way until the story's end. On the journey between question and answer, we learn enough about the characters to sympathize with them, despite their flaws (which are also delineated in the story).
With two unanswered questions operating just under the surface of the story's action, Brown generates effective subtext. We know the characters are doing what they're doing for a reason, but we don't know what the reason is.
You can create the same kind of effect in your fiction. Try following Brown's example. Begin a story with an action that suggests some kind of motivation, but don't disclose what that motivation is. As you work through your story, perhaps you'll discover why the character does what she does at the opening. When you make a discovery in fiction, you have a living piece.
In order for scenes to really play in fiction, they require a certain tension. One way to create tension in present-action scenes — in moments that occur, so to speak, on-screen — is to have some ongoing off-screen event affect the behavior of the character we're watching. The behavior we see occurs in the way it occurs because of the off-screen event(s).This device drives much of Leo Bloom's behavior in James Joyce's Ulysses, it drives much of Rabbit Angstrom's behavior in John Updike's Rabbit Redux. And it drives one of Raymond Carver's masterpieces, “Are These Actual Miles,” in which a man waits at home drinking and contemplating his failure while his wife is out trying to sell a car — for cash, by any means necessary — to a slimy salesman.
As an exercise in creating this kind of tension, write a passage that follows the actions of character A while character B (someone she loves) is off doing something that might profoundly humiliate A. How is character A's behavior affected by something that's occurring many miles away?
In my teaching over the years, the biggest, most persistent problems I've seen concern the element of description. Description is often either ignored or botched. In order to create the fictional dream, the writer needs to render place effectively enough for it to convince the reader. A good way to practice descriptive writing is to look at examples of effective description and follow them. I often tell my students to take the focus off the character — off what the character does, says, thinks — and instead write at least three descriptive sentences about setting before the character is even referred to, then several more sentences of setting description (preferably elaborations of earlier description) without the character, then go back to the character again. This way you have the character entering a place that already exists in the reader's mind.
Another benefit of approaching a moment from this vantage point is that you can include metaphor or symbolism in your details. Further, you can present the details in a way that reveals point of view; that is, you can use the details to reflect how the character sees them, sees the world. So, finally, you don't have simply description, which runs the risk of sounding like a travel brochure. Instead you have description and characterization and metaphor.
Good examples of leading with description can be found in Ernest Hemingway's stories “The Big Two-Hearted River, Part One” and “Hills Like White Elephants,” which opens like this:
The hills across the valley of the Ebrol were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.
Notice how Hemingway starts out wide — that is, his focus in line one is some distance from the characters. In line two, he's closer, in line three, closer still. It's not until line four, after three full lines of setting, that the characters are introduced. Their introduction is linked to setting.
Your exercise: Select something you've written that begins with character and rewrite it, this time leading with three full lines of description before introducing characters. Start out wide, as Hemingway does, and line by line, bring your focus closer in toward the characters.
What will this do for your fiction? Well, in the immediate example, it will place your characters in an already clearly existing space. The fact that the place precedes the characters could say something about the characters' relationship to that space, as it does in the Hemingway story (they will be gone, and the place will still be there as it was before their brief interlude at the station).
The poet, essayist, and novelist Steven Dobyns uses the terms primary information and secondary information to discuss movement through a piece of fiction. Primary information, he says, is Bob shot Alice. Secondary information is It was the third week of a hot July and all the lawns had turned brown. Cars baked in the driveways and kids leapt into the weak pulse of sprinklers.
Primary information advances the narrative. The reader wants to know primary information: why Bob shot Alice, how badly she's hurt, whether he'll be arrested. Secondary information provides context, metaphor, idea, etc. Although the reader is impatient to know the primary, without secondary, you have a flat, one-dimensional story in the spirit of, say, James Bond. Too much secondary, and you wind up boring the reader.
So much of the writer's job involves getting out of the head — getting out of thoughts, words, abstractions, figured-out solutions — and going into the senses. A good practice in your early revisions is to ask of each paragraph: What am I giving the reader to see, feel, smell, hear, taste? If you can't find details that appeal to the senses, add them.
Gustav Flaubert said that in order for an image to work it needs to appeal to three senses. To which I respond yes — but keep in mind that Flaubert lived with his mother. He had the time to conjure three appeals per sentence, and we in this terribly busy twenty-first century might not. For your prose fiction, try to include at least one sense per paragraph. And don't rely on sight always or primarily.
Some readers are interested solely in primary information (the James Bond novels sold very well). Some will tolerate massive amounts of secondary information (Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping begins with about sixty-five pages of it). Most of us fall somewhere in between, with the more literary leaning toward the latter in varying degrees.
The point to remember is that description reinforces the fictional dream. If the fiction strays from the real world too far or for too long — that is, if the writer is stuck on providing information or explaining an idea or running a riff with language — the reader's immersion in the dream is imperiled. Even on page 299 of a 300-page novel, the writer is providing descriptive details (proofs, John Gardner calls them) that paint the picture and reinforce the reality of the story.
What is the right amount of description? How many details are enough? That answer changes for every story. In the twelve- or thirteen-page Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” perhaps four or five details are provided to flesh out the setting. In Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried,” there are often four or five details per sentence. Each story is brilliant, each is completely realized. In your own work, the idea is to determine what's needed and then to provide no less, and no more.
Remember the old Hemingway dictum: You can leave out what you know; you can't leave out what you don't know. Put in as much detail as you can imagine or remember and then take away as much as you can. In my own writing about scuba diving at coral reefs, I used to cram in every single marine biology detail I know, and I know a lot. Then I realized that I was just killing the story with stuff I loved (the lower spines on the pectoral fins of roughspine sculpins extend well beyond the fin membrane) but that had no real weight in the story. Little by little, I started trimming until I arrived at the requisite number of details to communicate the reality of a coral reef and of the worldview of the character diving at that reef.
Again, there are notable and abundant exceptions. I often say, On every page of your story, your character is somewhere. Where? And how are the details of that place participating in telling the story? But my admonitions to include these types of details aside, many stories successfully omit them. Denis Johnson's story “Dirty Wedding” ends with three description-free pages. Many Lydia Davis stories are tortured cerebrations without place or detail. Long passages in Alberto Moravia's works involve interior processes, not the things of the world.
I tell my students in session one that in session two I'll contradict some if not all of what I said in the first session. That's the nature of writing. While there are general guidelines for writing fiction, there are no hard and fast rules other than to make the reader want to turn pages. But beginning writers do themselves a disservice by worrying about readers turning pages. Beginning writers need to keep their focus on writing pages, and worrying about anything that sounds like a rule is self-defeating.
Sometimes I suggest a student try something a little different, and I hear, But that's not my style. And I have to say, respectfully, that at this point in your development, you don't have a style. Your style will emerge through practice. Your practice will reveal to you your eye for detail (just as it will reveal your ear for dialogue, your instinct for pacing, etc.). Some of what you discover from your practice will please you and some will not; your practice will also reveal weaknesses. That's what practice is for.
Think about the element of description, and how much attention it requires, once you have a stack of pages. Then think about the needs of your readers.
Point of view (POV) refers to the perspective from which a story is told or narrated. The three broad categories of POV narrator are first-person, second-person, and third-person.
A first-person narrator tells the story from his point of view: I was eleven years old when these events occurred.
A third-person narrator tells the story from the perspective of another: He was eleven years old when these events occurred.
A second-person narrator, the least common, creates a curious effect by telling the story from the perspective of the person she's addressing, using the second person pronoun: You were eleven years old when these events occurred. The second-person narrator creates the sense that you are in the story. Second-person narration can also give the feel of a first-person narrator telling her story from the distance of a second-person narrator.
Although there is still much fiction told from the first-person POV, you often hear editors and agents say that they're not interested in first-person narrator fiction. To their trained and weary eyes, a first-person narrator reads like first fiction, like workshop stuff, like autobiography. Nonetheless, first-person narrator fiction still appears in great abundance and with great frequency. I wouldn't take too seriously the sweeping generalizations of editors and agents; they certainly don't.
The perspective of the first-person narrator is obviously limited. Since I is telling the story, the only consciousness I is privy to is her own. I cannot tell us the thoughts of others, but instead must rely solely on observation and speculation (observation is better, since clearly rendered behavior will communicate to the reader what the characters might be thinking about). First-person narrator work can seem young and coming-of-age autobiographical if it fails to fully address the larger world outside the head and behavior of the first-person narrator.
One of the great advantages of the first-person narrator is the intimacy it creates: Readers can form a deep bond with someone who is spilling her guts with apparent honesty, someone who might otherwise be repellant to readers. Two recent examples: Chappy from A.M. Homes's The End of Alice; Precious from Sapphire's Push.
There are at least as many liberties as there are restrictions attached to the third-person narrator. First, the liberties: The third-person narrator is not bound to one consciousness. It can know — and, in some cases, it can present — the thoughts of several, even many characters. The ability to relate the inner thoughts of other characters is called omniscience. Total omniscience is exemplified in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, a novel in which even the thoughts of Napoleon are available to the reader.
Tolstoyan omniscience is not very common today for a number of reasons. One reason is that we've developed the sense that all points of view are subjective, so it's inherently false to employ a narrator who purports to know everything. It's presumptuous. At best, the narrator knows his own world, and only from a perspective necessarily shaped, if not limited, by socioeconomic conditions — class, race, religion. A narrator's subjectivity often reflects the writer's subjectivity. A writer whose subjectivity remains unexamined may create narrators who share his limitations.
Great talent and great vision may, to some extent, transcend those conditions, but even great talent and vision are constructed in a particular context, a context whose “truths” may differ from the “truths” of another context. So a writer's stance toward her material is also, consciously or not, an ontological stance. Some writers, recognizing this, have their narrators communicate the sense that it's impossible to know anything with certainty, even one's own self. Other writers give the third-person narrator a limited (selective) omniscience, in which the narrator remains close to the consciousness of one character.
This brings up an especially critical element with the third-person narrator: modulation of distance. A third-person narrator closely linked to the consciousness of the protagonist is still distinct from the protagonist and therefore can know more than the protagonist. The third-person narrator knows the outcome of the story, while the protagonist does not. The third-person narrator might know the meaning of the story even if the protagonist doesn't. In order to communicate the distinction between narrator and protagonist, the narrator modulates the distance between herself and the protagonist. That is, the narrator steps back from, or out from proximity with the protagonist's consciousness and offers an insight, a speculation, a piece of information, or a perspective unavailable to the protagonist. Once that is accomplished, the proximity with the protagonist is reestablished.
Limited omniscience with effective modulation is demonstrated masterfully in John Cheever's “The Swimmer.” In this story, protagonist Neddy Merrill's life is already in ruins, but Neddy is unaware of that fact. The third-person narrator knows, but although closely linked to Neddy's consciousness, it never lets on. Instead, the narrator follows Neddy through his swim across the county and presents all events through the filter of Neddy's awareness.
Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth? Then in the distance he heard the sound of a tennis game. This cheered him, cleared away all his apprehensions and let him regard the overcast sky and the cold air with indifference.
Here the third-person narrator is very closely linked to Neddy's consciousness; the narrator is privy to all of Neddy's questioning, remembering (or lack of it), hearing, and regarding. When, however, Cheever needs to pull back and to comment on the nature of Neddy's journey, he does so in language that reinforces the fact that the third-person narrator is distinct from the consciousness with which it is so often closely linked.
Had you gone for a Sunday afternoon ride that day you might have seen him, standing on the shoulders of Route 424, waiting for a chance to cross. You might have wondered if he was the victim of foul play, had his car broken down, or was he merely a fool.
Use of the third-person narrator creates a kind of contract with the reader. Once a point-of-view character has been established (that is, once it is clear to which consciousness the narrator is most closely linked), that character's POV will be the only POV, and to introduce another POV violates that contract (that rule). In a novel with multiple POVs, this “rule” might apply to a section. For instance, in Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, three main characters have their own sections. When Hicks is the protagonist of the section, Stone gives us Hicks's POV, etc. In James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, in which many POVs are deployed, the “rule” remains the same; each section has its own POV character. For instance, consider this story opening:
Jimmy thought of himself as generally a decent guy, but today, for some reason, he felt the urge to get indecent.
The reader of this story will automatically assume that the point of view for the rest of the story will be Jimmy's. If on page eleven the point of view of Jane appears, the reader will experience a bump (to use John Gardner's term); the contract will have been breached. So a rule of thumb is, once you introduce a POV character, that character's POV can be the only POV.
How strict is that rule? Not very strict. Remember Flannery O'Connor's assertion that you can do whatever you can get away with, but that you'll probably find out you can't get away with very much.
One way to get away with dual or multiple POVs in a short story is to introduce the other POV(s) early so that the reader makes accommodations for the device right away. Another is to provide clearly marked, roughly equal sections for each POV. In “A Romantic Weekend,” Mary Gaitskill shows the POVs of two young people about to engage in some sexual experimentation; Amy Bloom's “Faultlines” is an eleven-page story with four POVs.
The thing to remember is that any choice you make in a piece of fiction will have consequences. If it is your intention to enfold the reader as much as possible in the world of the story (and that is the prevailing intention in fiction), then you'll want to adhere to the conventions as much as possible. Any device that appears at all unconventional tends to knock the reader out of the story world, and switching POV is one such device. The negative effect is even greater if the switch in POV is mishandled.
The second-person POV is the least common, the most unorthodox, the most risky, and sometimes the most fun. Perhaps the most famous example of second person is Jay McInerny's delightful debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, with its damaged second-person narrator marching though a cokeaddled New York City in the mid-1980s. The second-person narrator is often used in “how-to” stories, that mini subgenre that every writer should give a try. Examples include Lorrie Moore's “How to Become a Writer,” Pam Houston's “How to Talk to a Hunter,” and Junot Diaz's “How to Date a Brown Girl.”6
The risk of second-person narrator is its unorthodoxy — it's a gimmick, and some readers can never make the adjustment: What does she mean “you”? Me? Her? The character?
The unorthodoxy of the second-person narrator is also its pleasure. The gimmick becomes something of a high-wire act, and the reader is aware of both the tightrope walk and the story. That's why it's most often used for short stories; it's hard to sustain a gimmick for an entire novel. Readers don't have that kind of patience.
6 My own contribution to the genre is “How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is Crazy,” published in Hampton Shorts, Summer 1999.
The choice of POV has to do with what works best for the material. Richard Ford once yanked a novel that was already in galleys and took a full year to rewrite it from another POV. Scott Spencer nearly went mad with Endless Love, trying several different POVs over the course of years, rewriting the book in its entirety several times before arriving at the voice that now tells the novel (first-person narrator). Sometimes the choice of POV has to do with a writer's predilections and/or strengths. Robert Stone rarely uses the first-person narrator, and never in novels. Mary Gaitskill, too, favors the third-person narrator. Junot Diaz, on the other hand, often writes in first person. These choices appear to be the writers' strengths; on the other hand, the choices serve the material well, and that's the biggest consideration.
I recommend playing with POV. If you've written mostly first-person narrators, try a second-person narrator, and so on. The rule of thumb used to be that the aspiring author had to write a million words before arriving at her authentic voice. You can do a lot of experimentation with a million words, and the practice of writing virtually demands it. Experiment on, and bring your monsters and angels to life.
With apologies to Jack Kerouac (a man and spirit I adore), good writing involves hard revision. That doesn't mean that the first draft (or second, fifth, tenth) got it wrong, it means that each draft is a step toward the finished product (as much as a piece of fiction can be finished), much like the rehearsals of a play. The audience sees the apparently effortless unfolding of a riveting drama. What they don't see is all the rehearsal, all the revision that went into making the production appear effortless. Revision resisters (and I think we all fall into that category at least at one point or another) think they stumble upon ammunition when they read the seemingly artless stories of Raymond Carver, or the drugged out wigginess of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. To borrow an expression from another wigged-out druggie, Dennis Hopper's photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, wrong! Raymond Carver's revisions were legendary: First, because they were manifold; second, because they never stopped; and third, because he published alternate versions of quite a few of his stories. And Denis Johnson's magnificent collection of stories began as poems, years before the publication of story one; he kept on revising the poems, trying to make them work, until finally, at the point of abandoning the material, he used the beginning of one poem as the opening of the piece of fiction that became “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” The rest spilled forth.
I've already discussed the advantages of experimentation, of mucking about in the fictional tool kit and changing around initial impulses — making a first-person narrator a third-person narrator, lopping off a story's beginning, changing character gender, that kind of thing. All of these suggestions are suggestions in revision, and they are all big, tectonic plate-shifting types of revisions, revisions that restructure the entire piece and create a brand new topography, not to mention a brand new (hopefully less volcanic) middle earth.
But smaller revisions are also essential, so I offer here a couple of suggestions for simple mechanical revisions to help you tweak what you have on the page, torque it up. These types of revisions can (and often do) open up elements in the psychology of the story of which you were hitherto unaware.
Motivation. At every moment, every character in your story wants something. What? Go back through each one of your scenes and ask yourself: What exactly is it that Q or X wants here? Is it clear that he wants it? What's in the way of his getting it? Write the answers to those questions. If you can't answer them clearly, your scene might have a problem. Add at least one sentence per scene that somehow (subtly, explicitly) addresses the desire or issue most urgent in the scene.
I was worried that she had told him about us, about me and her.
— Robert Boswell, “Glissando”
I didn't want to be left alone with the blind man.
— Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”
She was thinking that he must be drawn to her vast emptiness, could he sense that she was aching and hot and always listening?
— Kate Braverman, “Tall Tales From the Mekong Delta”
Significant details. Look for your details (an ash tray, a fork, a drug, the name of a street). Choose at least one per scene and write one more piece of description that elaborates on that initial detail. Each time you do this, you'll be adding a full sentence between detail and whatever follows. The purpose of this exercise is to go deeper. Find something else to say about the detail that makes it earn its place. Is there something about it that your character might consider, might dwell on? Is there something about it that suggests themes of the story? Work it. But don't make it decorous. Think vertical, not horizontal: Go deeper.
The paint had flaked off in spots, and a gray like bad skies shone beneath it.
— Robert Boswell, “Glissando”
He imagined bare feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, … and though it was painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon.
— Tim O'Brien, “The Things They Carried”
Repetition of detail. Find a detail you mention on page one of your draft. Repeat it on page five and page ten, putting some new spin on it with each new appearance.
It was a boy with shaggy black hair. …
… he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig. …
He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig. …
— Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Recounting of story events. Somewhere in the middle of your story, in the territory of act two, have your POV character recount or ruminate on the major story events up to that point. This can keep you well-anchored in the drafting, and the reader well-anchored in the reading.
I wondered why I had told Frederick that I thought he was nice. Probably for the same reason I had sweet dreams about a petty sadist. I tried to think of my dead sex partner, but my memories of him were truncated, and gray with elapsed time.
— Mary Gaitskill, “Turgor”
Since the predominant mode of instruction in MFA programs is the short story, why even bother discussing the novel? I'll attempt to answer that in a moment. First, an explanation for the widespread focus on the short story: It's shorter, and the majority of its concerns are the concerns of the novel as well. Participants can get through a short story in a sitting (Alice Munro and Harold Brodkey short stories perhaps excepted). They can learn structure, scene, summary, voice, dialogue, setting, and any other issue of craft from the short story. And they can try their hand at the short story (maybe several) in a single semester. The novel doesn't lend itself to such utility.
However, it is not uncommon to find MFA workshops devoted to the novel. Many MFA candidates submit novels (as did I7) for their thesis. And the novel is the form that, eventually, any career-minded writer will have to undertake, for better or worse. It's the nature of the business. I might add that the New York Writers Workshop has been conducting courses in the novel right from its inception, my own course being Fiction in General, the Novel in Particular. Other courses in the novel are taught by Maureen Brady, Sarah Van Arsdale, Sheila Kohler, and Kaylie Jones.
Those exceptions aside, the MFA focus on the short story can lead to problems in writing the novel. Several years ago, the novelist and short story writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni was asked to read the novels nominated for the National Book Award. It was a daunting task — if I remember correctly, she had some sixty novels to read in six months. What made it more daunting was a pattern Divakaruni discerned about one third of the way into her task, a pattern that sustained itself throughout the entire reading period. In the article she wrote describing her discovery, Divakaruni said that all the novels started out brilliantly. Their language was exquisite, their characters compelling, and their initial mechanics dynamic. Then, after somewhere between thirty and fifty pages, they all fell apart. Divakaruni was describing the effect of MFA programs on writing: their stress on the perfect surface and their tendency to homogenize prose. She was also noting one of the major differences between the short story and the novel, which might be called (to return to Flannery O'Connor) what you can get away with.
You can get away with a lot in short stories. From the reader's perspective, they're a minor investment, a short time. The flaws in a writer's vision, the limitations of a writer's skills, might not be so readily apparent in a short story. The novel, however, will turn the klieg lights onto flaws and limitations. Think of the pleasures of the poems and short stories of Charles Bukowski; now think of the puerile and static nature of his novels. A writer with razzle-dazzle language, a writer with a couple of interesting experiences and the acquaintance of one or two interesting characters, the writer with a quirky way of thinking, of living, might be able to get those strengths onto the page and hold the reader's attention for the length of a short story. A short story (even an Alice Munro short story) is short, compared to a novel; it represents a small investment on the part of the reader, so its flaws won't be as crippling, its disappointments as profound.
7 I use the term novel in the broadest sense, and only because that's what I called it then. I think of it now as a detestable impertinence.
One somewhat common circumvention of the novel's dangers is the socalled novel-in-stories, a collection of short stories, often told by the same narrator or POV character, that focuses on the same character or characters and builds, somewhat novelistically, over a period of time (say, childhood). Such is Isabel Huggan's The Elizabeth Stories, Susan Minot's Monkeys, Tom Perrotta's Bad Haircut, and so many others.8 These are excellent books all, by excellent writers. And they're smart substitutes for the long haul of the novel. But their satisfactions are less than novelistic.
In general, the novel is less forgiving of flaws; it is more revealing of limitations. But the novel is more forgiving of certain specific tendencies than is the short story. If a reader has invested one or two hundred pages in a four-hundred-page book, he's not going to throw it aside just because the narrator takes a detour into the mythology of the whale, say, or into the socioeconomic history of Route 66 or into the rhapsodies of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet K. 581. What a novelist knows, what he's studied, what he's passionate about, might find its way into a novel without killing the novel's ultimate impact. So the novelist can get away with a little instruction, a little rumination, a little denunciation, and the overall story might not suffer too terribly, if at all. Think of Russell Banks's wonderful novel Continental Drift, which thrives on the instruction it provides as its two separate stories draw nearer and nearer to intersection. But material like that would be terribly out of place in the taut and unforgiving form of the short story.
8 The writers Gary Krist and Amy Bloom each began something along these lines, and it's interesting to see how far the strategy took them. In his collection Bone by Bone, Gary Krist has three interlinked stories called “The Ericcson Stories.” These were initially intended to be part of a novel. In Amy Bloom's Come to Me, the two stories under “Henry and Marie” were intended to be part of a novel. It is always useful to look at writers at work, especially when we can see the thinking and the sweat and tears behind their decisions. Junot Diaz's work — his collection of stories called Drown, and the stories that appear periodically in The New Yorker — are at once excellent stories and illuminating examples of Diaz's struggle with the novel form.
There is another difference that deserves our attention, and that is the difference between what the forms take out of you as a writer and as a person. The demands of the short story, cruel and debilitating as they are, are not on the same level as those of the novel. A good short story — its initial draft and even some revision — can be done in a sitting, a week, a month; the really tough ones may require longer. A novel, however — even a short one, even a bad one — takes a long time: assuming the best-case scenario and the shortest of novels, six months. More likely a year, and a year is short. Then there's the day-to-day struggle with the material. In a way, it's the difference between raising a family with a spouse and moving from lover to lover; the one is a long struggle with gratifications suspended and sacrifices common, the other a series of fun but perhaps repetitious and less productive challenges. Short stories might not challenge the writer on levels as deep as the novel does.
The novel is the oracular form, it's the opera as opposed to the parlor song, it's the place to declaim and decry and emote from the diaphragm up to the eyeballs. It's the place to present many sides and to wrestle with massive contradictions and to reconstruct ups and downs. It's the place to show the reader what you've got: What do you know? What have you done? What have you learned? How does this piece of the puzzle fit with that piece? What does that mean? These are not the demands of the majority of short stories. A failed short story is a few weeks of fruitless work; a failed novel is a dead child.
The short story is end oriented: If the ending's no good, the story suffers considerably, even fails. The novel is less dependent on the perfect ending. Consider Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, for instance. Its ending fails for more than one hundred pages, but the novel is still considered classic. That's because the seven hundred or so pages that precede the failed ending are marvelous. The same is true of Marcel Proust's multivolume novel; the final two volumes are considerably less effective than the earlier four or five masterpieces, but that doesn't compromise the excellence of the earlier volumes. Nor does the failure of Lawrence Durrell's Mountolive and Clea undermine the excellence of Justine and Balthazar, volumes three and four and one and two (respectively) of his uneven Alexandria Quartet. In regard to more contemporary work, the disastrous end-strategy of Susanna Moore's In the Cut doesn't cancel out the finely observed and dynamically paced first 150 pages.9
9 This novel might be a special case, since it aspires somewhat to genre fiction — it is an urban sex/crime mystery. Its ending, therefore — a literary gimmick that a good teacher would have saved her from, and a good editor should have — feels as if it landed from another planet: Planet MFA. The same type of MFA eureka-spasm occurs at the conclusion of a Dani Shapiro's Picturing the Wreck; did they have the same editor, one wonders?
Although novels and short stories differ in all these important aspects, they are similar in just about every other way. Concerns about language, about dialogue, about description are all identical. The novel as an art form accommodates as many experiments and permutations as the short story. The novel can deploy multiple points of view. The same story can be told four or five different ways by four or five different characters. It can be told in letters, in diary entries, in laundry lists. It can include newspaper clippings, existing poems, invented poems, movie reviews.
The novel as commercial art form resembles the conventional short story in that it tells a coherent story which can be charted like the structure of a film: in three acts, with tension-and-release devices sustaining interest over the long haul.
A well-paced novel is constructed on chapters that each raise a question, just like a short story, and then delay answering that question for as long as possible. But each chapter's answer hooks into the next chapter instead of ending the story. So, in novels, answers create questions — those questions are the inner dynamic of the novel, and they suspend the answer to the Major Dramatic Question, which was presented in the novel's opening.
For the most part, I have been discussing classically constructed fiction — stories and novels whose structures resemble the three-act structure of drama and film. In the classically constructed piece of fiction, the opening act introduces character, setting, and conflict, and it provides the event that sets the story moving forward in present action. The longer second act will rise and fall, often twice, in an event-crisis-climax pattern. The third act (usually the shortest) might provide a resolution of sorts, and will certainly answer the Major Dramatic Question. In the big picture, the novel contains (1) setup, (2) increasing complications, (3) climax, and (4) resolution.
How do you plot classically? That answer's easy as well: Create an order, or routine, then disrupt it. Some argue that there is really only one plot: to restore the order that's been disrupted. (This echoes Freud's notion of the pleasure principle's mandate to gratify appetite, eliminate tension, and to arrive at stimulus zero.) And again, it's useful to remember all the tips provided in the earlier sections:
Begin your story close to the point of its climax.
Begin your story where everything but the action has already taken place.
Give your protagonist one goal to pursue, and provide only the essential incidents of that pursuit.
Follow through on events — remember event C causes event D, etc.
Complete a process of change.
Not all stories and novels do those things, and not all stories and novels are classically constructed. Do they have to be? Absolutely not. Think of the symphony, which is in sonata form. Which musical forms do not adhere to the sonata? The impromptu, the nocturne, the bagatelle, the polonaise, the prelude, the fugue, the lyric, the ecossaise, the gnossienne, the pavane. You can make up your own forms. And you probably should. In the end, you'll probably find yourself working close to classical structure anyway (again, the round wheel rolls).
But when might you disregard classically plotted fiction? The best advice I have to offer here is: once you've written the draft. Consider Tim O'Brien's story collection, The Things They Carried, which is a sort of novel-in-stories. Here is a book that contains several classically plotted stories (the title story and a few others), and a whole bunch of impromptus, nocturnes, preludes, bagatelles, and maybe a fugue or two. There are journal entries, letters, lists. There is meta-fiction. O'Brien appears as a character in some; in others, the narrators are never identified. My guess is that this collection cohered when someone — and that someone might be Tim O'Brien — said, Oh no, all the rules are broken here, but so what? It's still a beautiful read and a powerful experience.
Some pieces of fiction satisfy their own internal orders. Chekhov and Hemingway, two “classical” writers who established the norms of the contemporary short story, gave themselves the liberty to do anything. While many of their stories are classically constructed (“The Lady With the Pet Dog,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”), many are not. Browse a collection and see what these two giants allowed themselves; you are allowed the same range.
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is loose, so loose it threatens to fall apart in many places. The organization, such as it is, is thematic and associative rather than narrative. The novel's loosely constructed four sections are crammed (unequally) with rant, vision, and narrative. Its first section is the least narrative. Here, crablike, the Miller narrator scuttles back and forth across Paris, time, and characters. Still, an act one of sorts is achieved, since this opening section (some sixty or so pages) introduces all the major characters, themes, and conflicts. The opening rants create the liberty for Miller, later on, to interrupt the pacing of narrative moments for long speculations of a philosophical sort. The ideas are as important to Miller as the stories within the larger narrative.
Compare Miller's novel to James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, a masterpiece of compact, three-act-structure storytelling. It comprises many short chapters with alternating points of view (all in third-person), each chapter advancing an inevitable story outcome that might be the example par excellence of the transcendent ending. Each voice and each section works close to character and event, and any commentary on action, setting, history, or context derives from a particular point of view.
Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street uses a similar approach — the short-chapter mosaic — with a somewhat different intent. Welch's novel, a tragedy, joins the narrative in the same way taut short stories do: as close as possible to the point of climax. Cisneros's fragmented novel builds like pieces of a puzzle to form an impression of a family epic through the coming-of-age of a principal character. Its time frame is wider, more comprehensive. You might say that her trajectory is horizontal — across time and events — whereas Welch's is vertical — going deeply into fewer events. Of course, Cisneros goes vertical in each of the short sections, mining each for whatever ore is in them.
The question What is the novel? may have seen best answered by novelist Don DeLillo, who said, “The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time.” That is, each novelist invents the form every time out, and every invention is legitimate. His message: Don't worry about what anyone says the form is, just write. You can do whatever you can get away with, and worrying about conforming to established conventions is tail-chasing.
The amateur's crisis of confidence as she begins her first short story is the writer's crisis of confidence at the outset of every new project. This is unique to writing. Once an architect knows how to design buildings, she designs buildings. On her next assignment, she doesn't wonder, How do I design buildings? Maybe I'm not really an architect. … Once an orchestra conductor knows how to conduct orchestras, she conducts. Faced with a new score, she doesn't think, Oh my god, how do I conduct symphonies? Maybe I'm not really a conductor. But the writer faces that first vast empty page (or screen) of the new project and thinks, I wonder if the mail's in. Jeesh, my pants are tight — should I go the gym? Who's on Oprah? I can do some sit-ups and watch Oprah. Maybe it's Maya Angelou. Or maybe there's something inspirational at the cineplex. And how the hell do I write this damn thing anyway? Who cares what I write? Why should they? Maybe I'm not really a novelist. Maybe I'm not really a writer. (Maybe I should have tried something easier, like designing buildings, or conducting symphonies.)
That's the good news and the bad news. The bad news, because it means that confronting terror and humiliation is part of the job description. Good news, because it happens to everybody, it comes with the turf, and each time out will be like the first time. First love only happens once, but first-fiction terror and euphoria can happen again and again.
So haul out your Moleskine or boot up the iBook, and go scare the hell out of yourself. Then fall in love. Repeat when necessary.
Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace.
Exley, Frederick. A Fan's Notes.
Kohler, Sheila. One Girl.
Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer.
Salter, James. Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime.
Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers.
Welch, James. The Death of Jim Loney.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence.
White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room Is Empty.
Bloom, Amy. Come to Me.
Cameron, Peter. The Half You Don't Know.
Carver, Raymond. Where I'm Calling From.
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever.
Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To.
Houston, Pam. Cowboys Are My Weakness.
Johnson, Denis. Jesus' Son.
Nugent, Beth. City of Boys.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories.
Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.
Perrotta, Tom. Bad Haircut.
White, Edmund. Skinned Alive.
Yates, Richard. Liars in Love.
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. 5th ed. New York: Longman, 2000.
Checkoway, Julie, ed. Creating Fiction: Instructions and Insights From Teachers of Associated Writing Programs. Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press Books, 1999.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
Hills, Rust. Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular: An Informal Textbook. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
Madden, David. Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers. New York: New American Library, 1988.
O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Sel. and ed. by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1972.