Situations: General vs. Routine

Once we accept that our ultimate subject is people, we should give serious thought to the situations we put them in. Choose the right situation, and the story may just write itself. Choose unwisely, and you devote most of your energy to avoiding clichés, extracting suspense from routine, and detaching fiction from memoir— while still failing, finally, to convey your characters’ experiences convincingly, vividly, and with urgency.

Amateur fiction often suffers from an inability to distinguish events from routine. Under routine circumstances, people don’t change. Changes in an individual’s nature are brought about only by extraordinary circumstances.

Working from the baseline of routine, like a seismograph the fiction writer takes the measure of her subject’s responses to upheavals large and small. How her characters adapt to extraordinary circumstances will determine their fate. Ideally, a story should congeal around a single unique event (or a series of them). Such singular events cast life’s routines into the background, where they belong.

15}HO-HUM SYNDROME:
A ROUTINE TRIP TO PLANET B1620-25

No matter how exotic our characters’ daily routines may be, readers are not all that interested.

Take a story set in the future. Matt Starhopper travels on the first day of each month to a space station located on B1620-25, the farthest known planet at the core of the globular M4 cluster. Along the way he confronts the usual interplanetary flotsam and jetsam: green, gooey space aliens, treacherous asteroid fields, and gravitational follies—all rendered with a master’s eye for detail, an astronomer’s love of planetary lore, and an imagination to rival Jules Verne’s.

Yet the faithful reader feels her attention flagging. Her eyelids droop, she yawns and turns on Jeopardy! What went wrong?

In a word: Routine.

Consciously or not, our reader understands that Matt Starhopper has taken this same voyage two dozen times before, and will take it dozens of times more. She’s tracking not a specific but a general voyage. She presses gamely onward in the hope of encountering those two words that signal the start of a true fictional journey: “One day…”

It’s that “one day” that pricks the reader’s ears, that says, “Something extraordinary is about to happen.”

The actual words “one day” need not appear, but they should be implied.

16}LIFE FROM DEATH:
A NURSING HOME STORY

During the Passover Seder the youngest child traditionally asks, “Why is this day different from every other day?” Writers might well ask the same question of the situations they put their characters in.

Emily, a young woman, visits her slowly dying, barely coherent father in a Bronx nursing home, a routine she has followed daily for three years. Why is this day different from every other day?

Several things that occur in the course of the story depart, in potentially significant ways, from Emily’s routine:

1. En route to the nursing home she visits the house where she grew up.

2. She remembers her dead sister, Rose.

3. She has a conversation with a boy who works at the bakery where she buys her father’s favorite pastries.

4. Her father reveals a secret (true or imagined) about her mother’s death.

5. Emily meets the bakery boy for lunch at the hospital.

None of these occurrences, however, rises to the level of an event that lifts the story out of the status quo. The author might consider making one of these events the story’s dramatic centerpiece, and either eliminating the others or making them subordinate. This would provide dramatic tension and give the story its focus— eliminating the sense of bathos that washes over the story’s inventory of sad routines. A dying man is, after all, a dying man. And Emily’s visits, we know, are obligatory. Hence we ask: What is the story really about? Why is this day…?

Maybe the story is not actually about the dying father at all, but about a young woman’s encounter with the pastry shop employee, a boy with little or no experience of life or death and whose blunt attitude she finds refreshing—until their encounter ends with some misunderstanding, revelation, or epiphany, or all of those things.

Whatever happens, the status quo story of the dying father should be shoved into the background where it belongs. The story should be not about death, but about life juxtaposed against death.

Whether your characters journey daily to a nursing home or to distant planets, what matters to the reader is the singular event that distinguishes one day from all the others.⁸

17}

BLURRY NARRATORS:
DIVING BELLS & DRUNKEN CONSULS

As always, there are exceptions.

One can present readers with a fundamentally “static situation” that serves as a framing device through which we experience dramatic incidents or events of the past.

Jean Dominique-Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is an extraordinary memoir by the former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, who suffered from locked-in-syndrome—a rare condition caused by damage to his brain stem after a stroke. Bauby’s memoir wasn’t written but rather blinked out, letter-by-letter, chapter-by-chapter, using only his left eye—the one body part he could still move. To call his situation static is an understatement:

The man was literally imprisoned in his paralyzed body. He died in 1997, two years after being struck down.

Yet the story Bauby tells couldn’t be more dramatic. That the narrator is unable to move is what makes his story so moving. All the trials, triumphs, loves, and joys of his past are framed by a present in which he is immobile. The static present serves as a foil for the active past. It puts that past into high relief.

But a narrator needn’t be paralyzed to offer a static yet illuminating view into her existence. A steady supply of mescal, tequila, and any other liquor at hand did the trick for both Malcolm Lowry and for the protagonist of his masterpiece, Under the Volcano. Lowry plunges—surreally, and at times psychedelically— into his drunken consul’s stream of consciousness. (For all its sublime artistry, however, many have found Lowry’s masterpiece unreadable.)

To construct a story out of such static material is certainly risky, but not impossible.