The Storyteller's Art:
How not to bore your reader to sleep, tears, or homicide
Francis W. Porretto
Smashwords Edition
Copyright (C) 2010 by Francis W. Porretto
Cover art by Donna Casey (http://DigitalDonna.Com)
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==<O>==
Foreword: The Curmudgeon Speaks!
[FWP: A few words of explanation are in order before you proceed. The essays below were written by my "alter ego," the Curmudgeon Emeritus. Translated from the Obscure, a "curmudgeon emeritus" is "an ornery old coot who's earned the privilege." The old boy seems to think he's the second coming of W. Somerset Maugham. There's no point arguing with someone that pigheaded; at any rate, I gave up long ago. With that in mind, please forgive me for allowing his essays to share my byline here at Smashwords. I'll try to atone later.]
Your Curmudgeon once knew a man who believed that "everyone has at least one book in him." It's possible he was correct...whether or not that's a good thing.
The problem is, not everyone knows how to tell a decent story.
The demise of the oral tradition, both in fiction and in social history, is part of that. Time was, everyone was expected to be able to tell a story properly. Of course, that included stories composed by others; not everyone can compose an original story.
Hot Flash to the Dubious: Yes, storytelling is a necessary skill. If you're in business at any level, whether as an office drone or a tradesman, you need to be able to tell a story -- granted, a non-fiction one, but a story nonetheless. That ability is critical to effective communication with your customer: i.e., whoever pays your salary or your invoices. Not because you need to deceive him, but because the correct sequencing of events, the correct delineation of causation, and the correct placement of emphasis, is vital to conveying a message of any sort. A plumber needs it quite as much as a CEO.
This little book is a compendium of essays on -- drumroll, please -- the principles of effective storytelling. They address fictional stories specifically, but the principles that apply there are portable to any other sort of narrative. They aren't many, and they're by no means obscure. But they are imperative. Rigorous adherence to them will, at the very least, preserve your reputation among your friends and companions. At best, they'll make you into the next Stephen King.
What's that you say? You don't want to be the next Stephen King? You'd rather be the next E. Annie Proulx or Dom DeLillo? Sorry, then this book is not for you.
Sorrier still, no refunds!
==<O>==
1. Say Something!
As we all know, stories come in many lengths. A story may be as short as a few dozen words, or as long as Robert Jordan's multi-million-word The Wheel Of Time series. But many persons, and no few would-be storytellers, never ponder what it is that dictates the length of a particular story.
The subject is at some remove from fundamental considerations. The major elements of any story are:
-- theme,
-- plot,
-- characterization,
-- and style;
Length is not among them. Which of these, if any, should dictate the appropriate length at which to tell some particular story?
Many would nominate plot. After all, a long plot, with lots of separate skeins and events, will necessarily take a lot of prose to relate, won't it? It surely will -- but is the plot the story? If it is, ought it to be?
If you've never encountered a novel that seemed unbearably long, despite its profusion of related events, you're a fortunate soul. Your Curmudgeon could rattle off two dozen titles without pausing for breath, at the conclusion of each of which he ardently wanted to know whom he could sue for a refund of the time he'd wasted.
Plot is a major element of all fiction, but it's not as fundamental, and therefore not as determinative, as theme. Indeed, plot's whole point is to express or illuminate the story's theme. If the plot, which one would accurately assess as the "proximate cause" of the story's length, overruns what's required to express the theme, the story will be perceived as too long and possibly heavy handed as well. If the plot is insufficient to express the theme, the story will be perceived as either too short or, worse, themeless.
Virtually everyone understands plot, characterization, and style, both as mechanical matters and as necessities without which one cannot write fiction. But a depressing number of writers have no grasp of theme. Indeed, themelessness and thematic incoherence are probably the most common failings in the fiction of our time.
***
It's often been said, and in university classrooms at that, that what one likes or dislikes about a particular storyteller is his style -- that is, the particular way in which he chooses to string words, sentences, and paragraphs together, with specific attention to his use of literary devices, descriptive images, and wordplay. This sentiment is in keeping with the prevailing trends in American "literary" fiction, which tends to emphasize style so greatly that plot, characterization, and theme are all but effaced from the scene. It's your Curmudgeon's firm opinion -- and no, it's not a humble one; it's actually rather arrogant, but it's quite firm for all of that -- that this is the reason most readers cannot abide "literary" fiction. For a rather remarkable extended exegesis upon this subject, please refer to B. R. Myers's now-famous essay "A Reader's Manifesto."
On the basis of a nearly fifty-year acquaintance with the written word -- in all its forms but, most apposite to this discussion, especially with fiction -- your Curmudgeon has rejected the "style uber alles" gospel with extreme prejudice. Style, divorced from theme, is as pointless as prestidigitation. It's pure packaging, devoid of content. Its proper place is to tell a story that has a worthwhile theme. When fetishized, it deprives the reader of his fundamental reason for reading: to acquire new knowledge about life, or a new perspective on it, by viewing it through the eyes of a perceptive and articulate observer.
But why, then, does a reader become especially fond of some writer or group of writers? Style is their most obvious distinguishing quality, is it not? If it's not their style that holds his affection, what could it be?
Your Curmudgeon proposes: sensibility.
Yes, writers have very different styles. Some are austere and distant, formalists of classical discipline who regard a dangling preposition as something up with which one should never put. Others strive for a Hemingwayesque simplicity, They write short, single-clause sentences. Those sentences contain nothing but nouns and verbs. They leave all else to the reader's imagination. Still others are Faulknerian in the luxuriance of their prose, every sentence a labyrinthine maze of baroque elaboration decorated with as many descriptive and evocative elements as one can digest before running out of breath. But this is packaging for a story and, beneath the story, supporting it with relevance and timeliness, its theme.
A writer's sensibility is composed of the sorts of themes he likes to explore, and the angle from which he approaches them. It partakes greatly of his moral vision. Indeed, it cannot be separated from his grasp on the moral order of the universe...whether or not he believes there is one.
Gentle Reader, have you ever encountered a writer whose command of the language is superb and precise, but whose stories proclaim ideas that you simply can't abide? Have you ever encountered a writer whose works, despite serious shortcomings of style, throb so powerfully with truth that you can't imagine ever forgoing them? If so, you're peering down the barrel of auctorial sensibility. You're staring the bullet of theme right in the face. It's the ultimate weapon in the battle for the reader's time, money, and attention.
***
Needless to say, a writer's sensibility can only interlock with the affections of readers who share his fundamental moral views. That's why your Curmudgeon can't abide John Irving, despite his stylistic gifts, and why he owns every mark on parchment Robert B. Parker, no stylist as the term is generally understood, has ever produced. Ardent admirers of John Irving resonate to his moral and political views; they see the world as he sees it, which gives his stories the ring of truth and significance to them. Few of them would have any patience for Parker's quite different vision.
A writer's sensibility, which compounds his moral views and his sense of human character into themes that can be fictionally explored, is near to unalterable. Probably no writer of note exemplifies this better than the late Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein wrote for more than fifty years. In surveying the sweep of his works, one can see a dramatic evolution in his style, and comparably large changes in his attitude toward plot. But his underlying sensibility -- his penchant for writing stories about men compelled to be competent and independent in the face of severe challenges -- never changed. His fiction was always an expression of his innermost convictions about the nature of Man and the obligations incumbent upon manhood. Much the same could be said about Jack Vance.
Many a writer discovers his sensibility by trying to violate it. Ayn Rand wrote a dramatization of this titled "The Simplest Thing In The World," whose protagonist, desperate to break into the world of commercial fiction, strains without success to write a story whose theme cross-cuts his own moral code.
Your Curmudgeon has his own sensibility, of course; it should be quite evident from the stories on display in the Fiction wing. It's a sensibility that's out of step with what's currently commercially favored, but what of that? To try to set this "ill-favoured thing, but mine own" aside in favor of something that would sell would nullify whatever piddling value your Curmudgeon can bring to a story. It would eventuate in themelessness -- the inability to say anything worth reading -- or thematic incoherence -- a hard-driven clash between the actions of the story's characters and the writer's convictions about the nature and motivations of Man. It would be a waste of perfectly good words.
***
There are a lot of aspiring writers in the world. No doubt a few are readers of Eternity Road. There's a lot of advice being offered to aspiring writers, often at high prices and mostly by people who couldn't produce a decent shopping list. Though there are no magic formulae by which to achieve publishability and commercial renown, there are definitely fatal errors by which one can lose one's writerly self-respect, a commodity for the loss of which no degree of extrinsic success will compensate. The biggest and most seductive of the fatal errors is the betrayal of one's sensibility.
When you write, say something. Always have a conscious theme. Make it something that's critically important: to you, and hopefully to the larger world. That will energize you and call forth your passions in service to your prose. Then make sure your story's characters act in such a fashion that the story's events, and above all its ending, are foreordained, and express your theme with all the clarity and grace you can muster.
If you already know your sensibility, stay true to it. If you don't -- if this entire discussion has appeared to you like water to a fish -- you can only discover your sensibility, and bring it to its peak of expressive power, by choosing your themes according to your passion for them, and then by writing from the heart. When you've done that for a while, return to this essay. Your Curmudgeon guarantees you an "of course!" experience.
==<O>==
2. Felicity of Style
As Robert A. Heinlein once said, you can't make an enemy by telling a mother her baby is beautiful. And so, with the following E-mail, reader Linda has placed herself at the top of your Curmudgeon's Christmas list:
I greatly enjoy your op-eds, and always look forward to new ones, but your fiction blows me away. But something puzzles me. When you write about fiction writing, which I hope you'll do more of, you always seem to be running down style as a factor in good fiction. Yet you have one of the most unique styles I've come across in all my years (don't ask how many) of reading. What gives?
Gentle Reader, that was enough to light up your Curmudgeon's day, as you can imagine. He fancies himself a fair wordsmith, but the above is...well, let's just say he feels unworthy. Still, it's stimulus enough to provide the topic for this morning, apart from anything your Curmudgeon might read later in that bete noire of his life, whose crossword puzzle the C.S.O. insists she cannot live without: the Sunday New York Times.
***
Semi-obscure French writer and naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon once said that "The style is the man himself." Even if we discount his nationality, we must suspect that Le Comte spoke out of a raw place in his writer's soul, where he hid his frustration at having little to say, and no gift for character or plot. Certainly many of those who've parroted him since have been thus moved. But the notion took hold, and has greatly influenced the evaluation of fiction in our day.
Possibly no other idea, however high-flown, would have done an equal degree of damage to stylistic grace. For consider the implications: if the style is the man, then the man (by the symmetric property of the equivalence relation "is") is the style. Therefore, to be more than what one currently is requires elaborations and refinements of one's style, without regard for substance.
But style is packaging. Though ideas require packaging -- no story or theme can be conveyed in a completely style-free fashion -- style itself has no essence to which one can recur for knowledge, wisdom, or spiritual sustenance. Therefore, a monomaniacal concentration on style robs the writer of the chief instrument by which to imbue his works with enduring value. It impels him to slough content and worship form.
One of the greatest geniuses ever to set pen to paper, James Joyce, fell into this quagmire after the completion of his novel Ulysses. Joyce's earlier writing was limpid of style and rich in thematic value. His novella "The Dead" may be the finest work of fiction ever set down in English. But for reasons at which we can only guess, he became bored with his fund of themes and the more or less conventional Dublin backdrop against which he painted them. With Ulysses, he began a journey away from his earlier lucidity and into the twilight of the subconscious. Thence, his journey continued into the darkness of sleep and dreams, whose terminus he reached in the tragically unreadable Finnegan's Wake.
Joyce, having used up his fund of themes and stories, turned to ambiguities of style in Ulysses and thence to complete opacity in Finnegan's Wake because that was all that was left to him. Clever seinings of the latter for its "deeper meanings" are uniform in their risibility. The book's incoherence, often disdaining even to use real words, guarantees that any "interpretation" offered for it will reflect the premises and beliefs of the interpreter, and not some deeply buried message from Joyce. When he wrote Finnegan's Wake, Joyce had nothing else to offer. So was a mighty intellect betrayed by its own power.
***
Your Curmudgeon's first conviction about style is that it must remain subservient to the telling of the story.
"Aha!" you exclaim. "He leads off with a platitude and expects us to think him profound!" No doubt it might seem so. But there's a partially defined term in the statement that ought to receive its due: story. Many would say that the story is the "plot": the sequence of events in which the story's characters are involved. In point of fact, that's the story's plot line; plot is more complex. Still: if a story is not the sequence of events it depicts, or is something more than that, then what is it?
The starting point is the distinction, once emphasized in formal studies of literature, between "plot line" and "plot." If one simply writes out a time line of a story, with names, events, places, and dates, one has constructed its plot line. A simple plot line would read as follows:
The king died, and then the queen died.
Note what's missing from the above: causality. The two events are not given any relation to one another except sequence. The transformation from plot line to plot begins with the injection of causal connections:
The king died, and then the queen died of grief.
The causal strokes delineate what the writer is really interested in writing about. Kings die; queens die; stockbrokers, beat cops and novelists die; moreover, some of these persons are found freshly dead every day. There's no substance to the matter unless we delve into why.
"Why" may be the most potent word in any language. ("If" is the most frustrating, "but" the most irritating, and "should" the funniest.) When we speak of the reasons for things, we are exercising humanity's defining difference: our ability to assemble time sequences into causal relations. When we get them wrong, we sow the seeds for new crops of tragedy. When we get them right -- when we penetrate to the true and reliable reasons why A in the vicinity of B causes C -- we grow as individuals and acquire something of value to convey to others of our kind.
The embryonic plot above could be refined in several directions. The queen's grief caused her death...but why did she grieve? For the loss of her beloved husband? Over her imminent descent into a dowager's irrelevance? Or because the next king was sure to abuse her or her people? The deeper, wider, and more coherent the causal explorations become, the more story the storyteller has to tell.
Yes: Your Curmudgeon is saying that "story" lives in the causal interstices of plot. Those causal representations are the writer's model of human motivation. He sees certain categories of people as moved by certain influences in specific ways; the story's characters are intended to symbolize those categories, and their decisions and actions present a template according to which, in the writer's opinion, all or most of the people in those categories would act. Abstracted from the specifics of the story, its embedded causal model and the conclusions one may draw from it are the writer's message, or theme.
(A side note: One cannot layer too much causality onto a plot line as simple as "The king died, and then the queen died." A complex depiction of human motivations and interrelations will require more events, structured more elaborately, than a simple one. But this is a topic best left for another screed.)
***
Style must be subservient to story because the story is the point of the affair. The style must serve the story's needs for pacing, emphasis of decision points, and clarity of resolution. Thus, a story such as "The Dead," which follows writer Gabriel Conroy through an awkward formal dinner with his extended family, probing the distance that's grown between him and them, while depicting the more painful rift that had grown between him and his wife in gentle dabs of detail, needed to be plainly told. The setting had to be laid out simply. The third-person narrator had to relay the actions and statements of the characters without embroidery. Joyce's discipline in this stunning piece was the hallmark of a master -- and the more impressive because even before Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, he had exhibited a penchant for high-flown articulation and a willingness to carve verbal arabesques to match and better the best.
By contrast, there are writers who seem determined not to tell a story in your Curmudgeon's sense. Instead, they revel in ambiguity. They bewilder the reader with alternate explanations of crucial decisions and events. They withhold critical information that would permit the reader to know the whys of the affair. Sometimes they deliberately introduce "red herring" characters to muddy the waters of implication and motive. The point is to deny the reader a clear causal depiction, leaving him on his own to decide "what it all means."
Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe rose to prominence on the strength of such a story: "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus." The bones of the tale are plain: a young first-person narrator character who's never called anything but Number Five is being experimented on to his detriment by his father, who is determined to know why his clan does not rise in power and prestige. The boy waxes in resentment and determines to murder his father, as his father had done in his turn. The sole connecting link offered for this chain of brutality and tragedy is that the boy is a clone of his father, as his father was of his grandfather.
The story is littered with characters of questionable relevance: a half-brother, a robot, a whore, a visiting xenoanthropologist, and a personality simulator who functions as the narrator's tutor. The focus is never squarely on what Wolfe would have us take as the central point of his tale: how monomania can lead one to work against the very things he claims to desire. It meanders murkily through several thousand words, all in a most involute style, allowing the ambiguities to mount all the way to the end and never resolving them. It's some measure of Wolfe's talents that he keeps the reader going through such deep, dark thickets...but the story concludes unsatisfyingly all the same.
To be as fair as possible, "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus" has some color. There were reasons to read it and enjoy it, and apparently many people did, as it was the winner of several awards, some of them awarded according to a popular vote. But it wasn't coherent, it offered no message or theme, and so it failed as a story.
It is likely that, given that he was determined to emphasize the ambiguities in his story, Wolfe could not possibly have told it in a straightforward fashion. But your Curmudgeon must also note that the obvious and considerable effort Wolfe put into stylistic flights did not create a core of causal substance where none had existed before.
***
Finally for today, your Curmudgeon will comment briefly on the linkages among style, tone, and setting.
Master suspense writer Lawrence Block, in his writers'-advice book Telling Lies For Fun And Profit, presents the following example of the use of an arch tone to specify a setting:
The elevator, swift and silent as a garrote, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard's penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster-white. They could have been chose to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us. [From the opening of Block's story "This Crazy Business Of Ours."]
The description is entirely of Colliard, an elderly professional hit man making the acquaintance of a young one, but the tone is highly effective for coloring, in the reader's mind, the surrounding physical environment. Without saying a word about it, Block leads us to see it as plush, expensive, and faintly antique. Simultaneously, he informs us, sotto voce, that the story will concern grim deeds done in casual defiance of the norms of society, norms the principal characters have decided not to take too seriously.
Block's command of the arch, faintly mocking style shown above allows him to dispense with perhaps two hundred words of description, while simultaneously providing the reader with a wealth of indicators about the characters' stations in life and the attitude of the narrator toward the events to follow. A better example of narrative economy would be hard to find -- and it was done by the adoption of a style far distant from the more plainspoken one for which Block is best known.
Careful, boys and girls: Lawrence Block is an expert. Try this at home if you like, but be sure to string a net first.
Most of us are plainspoken men, most of the time. Your Curmudgeon is a little off-axis in this regard; his speech and writing have an archaic bent, which some people find charming and others consider pretentious. But the most salient thing about a style is that it should come naturally. It's a tool in the writer's toolbelt, to be used to convey the stories he chooses to tell, but it should be a tool that's natural to his hand. It's not infinitely adjustable. The more he has to think about how to hold it and wield it, the more stilted and forced his prose will be.
One of the oldest maxims of the fiction world is that one should write about what one knows. This applies broadly: to situations, to physical settings, to varieties of people and systems of belief, and so forth. It also applies to style. In fact, a strong corollary of that maxim is that, if a writer's style seems inadequate to the material he wants to write about, he should probably be writing about something else.
Do not attempt gothic fiction if you can't bring yourself to deal in macabre metaphors about shadow-infested settings and intimations of doom looming in the gloom.
Do not attempt "advanced" romance if you can't deal with suggestive looks and fleeting but meaningful brushes of hands or feet, or write indirectly but evocatively about sexual desire.
Do not attempt fantasy if the depiction of suffering, honor, or the clash of good and evil makes you cringe with embarrassment.
Do not attempt science fiction if you're a technophobe incapable of bringing a sense of wonder to the description of an imagined device.
Do not attempt "high literature" -- at all.
Your Curmudgeon's style is mated to his limitations: his affinity for a somewhat archaic mode; his fascination with things unseen and things of the spirit; and his conviction that each of us is a treasure house of power, knowledge, and fortitude, with the key already in the lock, waiting only for the right hand to turn it. He could never write a war novel, a hard-boiled detective story, or a Harlequin Romance...unless there really is a package of Microsoft Word® macros for composing the latter from a twenty-five word statement of place and time. (Visual Basic for Word is powerful stuff; Roald Dahl's "Great Automatic Grammatisator" could be closer than we think.) He sticks to the subjects to which his style is suited, and gives regular thanks that they're the ones to which he's most powerfully drawn.
And you, Gentle Reader, should you elect to try your hand at this crazy business of ours, would be well advised to do the same.
==<O>==
3. Meditations on Character
Quite a lot of aspiring writers think the enterprise requires no more than "a way with words" -- that is, a fetching style. (A lot of other writers think it requires no more than a word processor, but that's a subject for another screed.) Your Curmudgeon has expressed himself already on this conviction. In consequence, he's received a fair amount of E-mail to the general effect that those who can, do, while those who can't, criticize. One correspondent noted, quite acerbically, that what your Curmudgeon hasn't done yet is talk about the real sine qua non of the fictioneer, whatever he thinks it to be.
Sigh. A good player never shows all his cards at once. Still, perhaps the time has come.
The late John Brunner once expressed a two-requirement guide to the creation of good fiction:
1. The raw material of fiction is people.
2. The essence of story is change.
There's a whole education in reflecting upon how utterly invisible these rules can be, when one is reading good, satisfying fiction. By implication, when one is dissatisfied with a story -- assuming it wasn't simply told in execrable grammar -- they point the way to its most likely flaws.
Whatever the story, it must be acted out by people -- "people" being generically interpreted as "delimited beings conscious of their own identities and capable of acting on their desires." Some of those people will be more important to the story than others. The usual hierarchy looks like this:
-- Marquee Characters: The persons whom the story is mostly "about."
-- Supporting Cast: Persons involved with the decisions and actions of the Marquee Characters, but whose fates are of less importance.
-- Spear Shakers: Persons who appear where they do in the story simply because there has to be someone in that slot; unimportant except as stage dressing.
(If you're interested in literary history and its major controversies, the best possible giveaway that "Shakespeare's" works were not written by "Shakespeare" is that very name. It has to be the hugest joke ever embedded in the literary arts.)
Some of the incidentals of the hierarchy are of interest in themselves. For example, Supporting Cast members very seldom get to be "viewpoint characters," through whose eyes a third-person narrator sees the unfolding of events. Spear Shakers just about never do, except in stories deliberately written to make fun of the rules. Supporting Cast members may have their own "supporting casts" -- families, employers, friends, tormentors, and favored car wash attendants -- but these, though occasionally referred to in passing, are not allowed to intrude upon the action of the story.
A good story's Marquee Characters will be relatively few in number. Even the most complex and extended story can't be kept coherent if a large number of supremely important characters participate in its events. For one thing, their motivations have to diverge, which will make them tug against one another. For another, the author will have a great deal of difficulty keeping all of them animated and differentiated. The typical piece of well-crafted fiction has from two to five Marquee Characters.
If we recur at this point to Brunner's rules, it becomes clear that the story's plot must be about events in the Marquee Characters' lives, and the consequent changes to their motivational foundations. Not all events are significant, of course; few writers will linger over their protagonist's choice of socks for the day. Some changes of motivation are equally insignificant: a story that focused on its protagonist's change of allegiance from Wheaties® to Cheerios® would hold few persons' interest...well, outside of General Mills, anyway.
The focus must be kept on the major motivators in the human psyche: the characters' most powerful, most passionately held desires, fears, and convictions.
In this process, the writer encounters one of the most rigid maxims of the fiction trade, at its most compelling: Show, Don't Tell.
Breathes there a would-be storyteller who doesn't have that commandment tattooed on his eyelids -- the inside surface of his eyelids? It's the most important instruction in all of fiction, but it's honored far more often in the breach than in the observance, to the great detriment of many a story.
"Show, don't tell" is precisely about how the writer must reveal the changes in a Marquee Character's motivational structure. He can't simply say, "And so it was that Smith realized, after years uncounted in the wilderness, that putting mayonnaise on roast beef was wrong." It doesn't matter how many thousands of words he uses to say it. He has to show the change through the decisions and actions of the character.
In comparison to this stricture, the much-excoriated practices of "embedded exposition" and "in-stream backstory" are the mildest of venial sins.
There are other aspects to the thing, of course. Motivational changes must be plausible, and their revelation must be properly paced. They must proceed from one of three sources, which Willa Cather called the three basic plots:
-- Interaction with other human beings ("Boy Meets Girl");
-- Self-discovery through introspection ("Man Learns Lesson");
-- Self-discovery through a challenge from the external world ("The Little Tailor").
Finally for this screed, motivational changes must not be "telegraphed." Though they can't come like lightning from a clear blue sky, neither should they be visible at a great distance. There has to be some degree of uncertainty, even mystery, about what sort of changes the Marquee Characters will undergo. Formula fiction of any kind is usually unsatisfying to the discriminating reader specifically because it lacks that characteristic; it's simply too easy to see the outline of what's coming, even if the precise details are hazy.
A side issue that nicely illuminates this subject is the well-known phenomenon of Marquee Character Immunity (MCI). MCI has been denigrated as a cross the writer inflicts on his reader: once the reader knows who the Marquee Characters are, he also knows that they'll survive the action, no matter how bloody the stage might become. This is inherent in the nature of a good story well told. Death, while it's definitely a dramatic change, is a terminal condition; its occurrence leaves the "affected" character with nothing to do with his lessons. Alongside that, if the author has done his job well, the Marquee Characters are those the reader has been most inclined to identify with and root for -- and though blissful endings, with the hero getting all the trophies at no cost, are out of fashion for good and sufficient reasons, "happy" endings, in which the hero pays a bearable, worthwhile price for victory, are near to mandatory. There will be no telethons for "ending the scourge of MCI in our lifetimes."
As usual, there's an infinite amount that could be said about this subject. But if you yearn to tell tales that will enthrall, instruct, and uplift, pay proper attention to your characters. Arrange them in their ranks, put the most important ones through changes dramatic enough to hold the reader's interest, keep the process plausible and properly paced, and reveal the resulting motivational alterations through the characters' depicted actions, rather than by narrative exposition of their internal states.
Sounds easy, doesn't it?
==<O>==
4. Confinement, Tension, and Trial
If you're going to write fiction -- a hazardous decision, really; shouldn't you think it over for a few more years? -- you have to come to terms with the fundamental dramatic requirement of fiction, that which gives it power to hypnotize and compel:
Drama only exists when men must suffer for being good.
That's not to say that things shouldn't turn out well for your hero in the long run. In most cases they should, for the moral law of the universe is quite in harmony with its physical laws. However, if he faces no difficulties as a consequence of his moral beliefs or discoveries, or if the price he must pay to resolve those difficulties is unsatisfyingly light, there will be no drama to your story.
"For each fine cat, a fine rat," wrote Robert A. Heinlein, no stranger to the creation of fine, dramatic fiction. The "rat" might be an antagonist-villain of great power and cunning, or it might be a situation in which the protagonist-hero finds himself caught in an antinomy -- a seemingly absolute clash of two equally compelling needs or values -- or it might be a struggle against his own weakness. But there must be something, some trial of power, intellect, or conscience, that compels the hero to enter what Sol Stein called "the crucible" -- and to remain there until his aim has been achieved.
"The crucible" is the cauldron of opposing forces with which your hero must contend. He must be unable to back away from the conflict, whether for circumstantial reasons or because his values and convictions forbid it. The closer it comes to breaking him, the more drama you can wring out of his story.
One of the reasons for the popularity of techno-military fiction of the Tom Clancy / Stephen Coonts / Dale Brown variety is that the crucible is ready to hand. The stakes are obviously very high, and the reasons for the hero to remain in the game, despite great cost and risk to himself, come ready-made. In fiction that deals with conflicts of materially smaller scale, sketching in the conflict and the forces that bind the hero to it can be a formidable challenge.
Much modern fiction is psychological in orientation. That is, its central conflict is one that exists in the mind of its protagonist, rather than as an external challenge to his values or convictions. In the popular cant, he must "wrestle with his demons." Some writers are equal to the task of dramatizing such an interior struggle, but unfortunately, they're in the minority.
In part, the failings of inadequate psychological fiction arise from its writers' reluctance to reify the conflict -- that is, to move it from the realm of abstractions to the realm of concrete decisions and actions. Some simply scorn the necessity. Others are uncomfortable with the world of objective things and deeds. Still others fail to grasp that psychological conflict must involve motives, whose significance is null unless they move the hero to do something. Whatever the reason, the discriminating reader will detect the problem easily. He'll be unlikely to forgive the waste of his time, so don't!
To return to the main thread of this screed: to achieve drama, you must construct a crucible and contrive to keep your hero in it, where his most important convictions will be sorely tried right up to the end. The crucible will involve opposition, as already noted, but it must also exert confinement: your hero must not be able to walk away from the conflict without irremediably sacrificing something more precious to him than what he risks by remaining in it.
What might the price for escaping the crucible be?
-- Someone he loves;
-- Something he loves or values highly;
-- His pride;
-- His conception of himself as a good man.
This decision must accompany your decision about the main conflict of your story, for unless the reader can be persuaded that the hero cannot abandon the contest without prevailing, your story will lack the other sine qua non of good fiction: plausibility.
If you can keep him in the crucible, you can make him suffer. That is, you can make him struggle to achieve his aim, or pay to defend what he values that drew him into the conflict in the first place. If he can overcome the forces opposed to him, his suffering will be worthwhile. If he can't...well, there are always sequels and New Wave art cinemas.
For an example of a simple crucible with obvious trials and an obvious confining element, consider my story "Equalizer." For an example of a subtle crucible, whose trial is much more abstract and whose confining power is revealed only at the very end, consider my story "Foundling." Which of these approaches appeals to you more? Your answer will tell you much about the sort of fiction you're inclined to write -- and read -- if you don't know that already.
==<O>==
5. Ideas
A poll of fiction writers concerning what questions they're most frequently asked by non-writers would undoubtedly turn up two strong commonalities:
-- "How much money can you make at that?"
-- "Where do you get your ideas?"
We shall pass quickly over the first of these. It's rather embarrassing to note that even well-published novelists usually have to have "day jobs" to make ends meet. The stupendous commercial successes of a fortunate few, such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy, cast an unmerited glamor over the fictioneer's trade. Yet the prolific, highly popular Roger Zelazny worked for the Social Security Administration until the day he died. Many writers wait tables, tend bar, or drive taxicabs: paying trades they share with their brethren in the acting field. As James Michener famously said, a writer can get rich in America, but he can't make a living.
The second question is also a source of frustration, for the typical writer himself doesn't really know. He gets them; he writes them; they work, or don't work; and that's that. His consciously considered problems begin after the idea has occurred to him. They involve character definition, details of plot and pacing, how long the finished work ought to be, and to whom he ought to offer it. He simply doesn't think about the "story ideas" themselves.
So where do they come from?
Well, some of them come from you, Gentle Reader. Your Curmudgeon has fashioned a number of stories from real-life episodes, either from his own life or narrated to him by friends and acquaintances: "Ceremony," "A For Effort," "Learning By Doing," and "The Gift Room" were all fictionalizations of real-life events.
Other ideas arise as "corollaries" of ideas explored by other writers. For example, the basic idea of "The Warm Lands" flows from two premises embedded in much other fantasy: that magic is powered by something physical, rather than being a favor done for a sorcerer by some puissant non-human creature; and that that power source can wax or wane with time and exploitation. When your Curmudgeon combined those notions with one of his own -- that an excessive concentration of magical power in a place where no one was using it could create spontaneous catastrophes that might then be blamed upon "witches," as in Salem -- the story was born. Pursuing the diametrically opposite premise -- that magical effects are invoked by a spell, but the sorcerer must get the spell exactly right and say it exactly fast enough to receive supernatural assistance -- produced "Equalizer."
Third, but probably not last, an idea can just happen. "Foundling," wherein a baby vampire becomes the ward of a most unlikely guardian, was one such; "Ghosts," in which an eventful Hallowe'en introduces infant superman Louis Redmond to the "ghosts" of his lifelong faith, was another. Modern science cannot trace the genesis of such ideas, though research continues.
Note that the ideas above, intriguing notions with many implications, were the foundations for short stories rather than novels. It's one of the seeming paradoxes of fictioneering that the shorter a story is, the more powerful an idea is required to make it work, and vice-versa.
A really strong idea can bowl the reader over in five hundred words. Dilute ideas require too much supplementation by character development, description of setting, and thematic evolution to "get the job done" in so short a space. Some novels require no ideas at all. That's not meant as a jab at the modern novelist, or at least, not at all of them. Judith Guest has written three magnificent, emotionally gripping novels around the most mundane imaginable ideas: a teenager's suicide attempt (Ordinary People); an abused child who runs away from his abusive family (Second Heaven); a family whose father is dying of cancer and is struggling to adjust (Errands). But the value of such a book must rest almost entirely on its characterization, themes, and style. Fortunately, a novel provides ample scope for these.
The strong idea / short story correlation is one of the main reasons why science fiction, a literature of ideas, has been so firmly oriented toward the short story -- and why magic-oriented fantasy, which has evolved so few new and intriguing ideas, has been dominated by the multi-volume novel. Also, consider the dearth of short stories produced by the best-known novelists; once one gets used to having hundreds of thousands of words to roam around in, one's idea-discipline is likely to atrophy irretrievably.
Marc Steigler, author of Earthweb and David's Sling, made a poignant comment some time ago about writers who fear they'll "run dry" of ideas. Such writers are often seen trying to use an idea eminently suited to a short story as the basis for a massive novel. Why? Because they "don't want to waste it." But the waste occurs in the verbiage wrapped around an idea that ought to be dressed sparely and left to stand before the reader in Spartan splendor. If it can be put across in five thousand words, why expend fifty or a hundred thousand? The only consistent explanation is that the writer fears that, after he's "used up" his idea, he won't have another. Ironically, larding extra words around a strong idea is one of the most discouraging things one can do to one's readers, who will frequently ask "is he being paid by the word?" Therefore, when implementing a strong idea, one must keep it brief if one is to keep one's audience.
The remedy for the fear of idea-exhaustion is attention to one's surroundings and an appreciation for the naturalness of ideation. Ideas aren't an exhaustible natural resource; we create them out of our impressions of reality and our sense of possibility. As with any sort of art or artifice, practice helps immensely; doing well by the current one will make the next one easier to unearth, clean, and polish. The more a writer writes, the higher his confidence grows, and the more he is able to write.
==<O>==
6. Scene Construction
In the creation of fiction, the writer must move purposefully or not at all. Every word he writes must carry its own weight at the minimum. For there are two essential purposes to be served at all times, and a word not put to either one, if not both, is a word wasted.
***
What is the point of storytelling? Why do we do it?
It's a big question. The answers range all over the intellectual map. But when seined for their common aspects, they reduce to two:
-- To dramatize a theme;
-- To evoke readers' emotions.
Your Curmudgeon has already blathered at length about theme and its importance. Yet there are still writers out there who don't believe theme is necessary. Sigh. What fools these mortals be. But a lone crank from Long Island can only accomplish so much.
Themes are important bits of truth that will resonate with a large number of readers. A common approach to dramatizing a theme is to have a protagonist violate it and then have reality hand him his head for his mistake. Another is to show two protagonists in action, one in keeping with the theme and one in defiance of it, so that the reader can compare the results. There are others. Mostly, they exploit the story's plot -- its chain of causally-linked events and decisions -- for their effects.
But a writer chooses his theme not only for its veracity, but also for its power to move the reader when cast into fictional form. One can't write compelling fiction about Archimedes' Law or the Pythagorean Theorem. So while the truth-value of a theme is necessary to its employment in fiction, it's not sufficient. The theme must also have emotional resonance.
Such resonance comes from what sort of drama one can wring from it.
***
All but the shortest stories are constructed in scenes: swatches of story time that involve at least one Marquee character, whether in the action as depicted or as the point of the action. Conventionally, scenes are separated from one another by a typographical device, either a line space or a centered trio of asterisks being the most common. The reader understands the scene to be coherent in several dimensions:
-- It will be continuous in time;
-- Changes of place, if any, will be depicted explicitly if briefly;
-- There will be either a single viewpoint character or none at all.
There are other understandings about the individual scene, but they're subtler and of lesser importance.
The scene is like a single link in a chain, of which the story in its entirety is the whole. As with a chain, a single faulty scene can render the story ineffective. For example, a scene that persuaded the reader to discard the plot for implausibility, perhaps by introducing details or decisions wholly incoherent with the rest of the story, would drain the story of value. A bad choice of viewpoint character, for example one who got no emotional impact out of the events of the scene, could cripple a story just as effectively. A scene that stops the dynamics of the story, either by diverting the reader unnecessarily from the action or by giving him a reason to cease caring about the protagonists, will kill a tale as well.
Even though writers write in words, sentences, and paragraphs, the scene has a much better claim to being the atomic building block of fiction. The words of which the scene is composed are more like quarks: important, to be sure, but of no moment in isolation from one another and the scene they depict.
***
Each scene of a story must:
-- Advance the plot toward its conclusion, or:
-- Strengthen the reader's reasons to empathize with the protagonist(s) and/or detest the antagonist(s).
It's possible to do both at once, sometimes, but to fulfill either one is sufficient much of the time. For example, in "The Warm Lands," one scene placed near the midpoint of the story, which depicts Gregor and Laella in the aftermath of their first lovemaking, was written solely to allow the reader to learn a few details of Gregor's exile, of Laella's swiftly growing love for him, and of the conflict he feels at his perception of her love. The story, in the crudest terms, is sitting still; no one does anything but talk, and the talk appears to be solely historical and conjectural. But if the reader were not allowed to sense the intensification of the emotional bonds and the conflicts they engender, he'd find much of the rest of the story pointless and senseless.
The fourth scene of "A For Effort" is in the opposed pattern. In quick succession, it describes a series of events distributed over several weeks, but treads lightly on emotional ground. But the reader must be told of those events; they undergird the rest of the plot and the emotional development of the concluding scenes. While the reader is given no additional reasons to identify or empathize with Morgana, they do learn about the enormous self-willed, self-engineered changes that give the rest of her story its emotional effect.
The final scene of "Equalizer," in which Michael learns that it was not Acorn's seemingly sorcerous device that protected him but rather some form of divine intervention, addresses both purposes. The reader is simultaneously told the true climax of the plot, informed that all was not as he'd been led to believe, and is shown the depths of Michael's faith as he exhorts Acorn to bring the tale to Father Declan in all its particulars.
***
Your Curmudgeon's preferred approach to a scene is to make two passes over it: Write first with attention to plot, and then edit with attention to emotional evocation.
This comes up hard against a common dislike among writers: many of them hate to rewrite. They feel they're "getting nowhere," that they ought to "get it right the first time" and move on to whatever comes next. This is an immensely destructive attitude.
Ernest Hemingway once told of having made, not two, but thirty passes over much of his Nobel Prize-winning novel The Old Man And The Sea. When a colleague asked him what he was doing with so many revisions, he replied, "Getting the words right."
Granted, there have been exceptions. Victor Hugo's novels were all published from the author's handwritten first drafts. But he who fancies himself fit to walk in Hugo's footsteps is likely to need a dose of humility, to say nothing of a stout pair of wrist braces. Overwhelmingly more often than not, good writing is rewriting.
Your Curmudgeon outlines his plots and pre-sketches his Marquee characters. From there, he proceeds scene by scene, typically making two passes over each one before proceeding to the next. The first pass is "skeletal." It concentrates on getting down the specific plot details to be covered, and treats only lightly with description or internal monologue. The second pass is "muscular." It lays emotional flesh on the bones of the plot skeleton, by recoloring dialogue, adding descriptive details key to evoking the viewpoint character's reactions, and pointing up the visible or audible indicators of the other characters' emotions to the extent allowed by the narrative structure.
After that second pass, any major incongruities between the scene and the overall direction your Curmudgeon wanted the story to take will usually be garishly visible. Most frequently, it will have become apparent that the viewpoint character isn't the man your Curmudgeon thought he was -- that his real motivations were quite different from those originally conceived. It can be a disagreeable surprise, as it suggests that there's a lot more rewriting to be done, but it can also illuminate one's theme better to oneself, such that the ultimate outcome is a much improved, much more affecting story.
==<O>==
7. Character Development: Two Approaches
Your Curmudgeon holds that character development is the toughest of all the tasks of the fictioneer. Few succeed at it. Of those who do, a healthy fraction reuse their successful Marquee characters over and over, through endless strings of novels, to avoid having to do it again. Of course, some who don't succeed at it reuse their main characters endlessly, too, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Many would-be writers complain of their difficulties at "coming up with ideas." Bosh. Anyone not completely numb to the passing scene will have more "ideas" than Carter has Little Liver Pills. What the complainers lack is the combination of idea with personality that yields a plausible story: in other words, a believable and appropriately motivated main character.
How complex are the central ideas in these famous works:
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville
Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
These five novels are regarded as grand masterpieces, the pinnacles of great authors' careers with the written word. Each one is founded on an idea that can be expressed in a few words:
The Scarlet Letter: the impossibility of concealing one's passion.
The Old Man And The Sea: the inevitability of ultimate failure.
Billy Budd, Foretopman: the destructiveness of envy.
Of Mice And Men: the grip of fate.
Wuthering Heights: the power of thwarted love.
These novels work beautifully because their creators matched their central ideas to appropriately imagined Marquee characters, whom they turned loose in settings in which their major drives were bound to get them into deep trouble. Readers thrilled to these stories because the authors had succeeded in making their Marquee characters both believable and vivid.
Once a writer has picked his theme, the main challenge in writing a successful tale is almost always the development of his Marquee characters.
The title speaks of "two approaches." In fact, there are many approaches to the development of a character. The two your Curmudgeon has in mind are poles of a sort; that is, they exemplify the most extreme practices possible, which are usually compromised with other tactics. Interestingly, they're also mirror images of one another.
The first approach is to take a "normal man" -- often, someone the writer knows from real life; perhaps even himself -- and start editing. He inserts features and characteristics he expects will be dramatically useful, and prunes away traits he finds irrelevant or too distracting from his theme. We might call this the Everyman Gambit, for any innocent person who lodges in the writer's mental viewfinder might some day be used as raw material for it.
Everyman protagonists can often be found in works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Their fundamental ordinariness gives rise to immediately exploitable tensions when they're dropped into strangeness of the sort that's common in those genres. Alice of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking-Glass is a quite ordinary little girl. Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels is likewise a very ordinary man. Carroll and Swift chose to make them so, modeled upon ordinary individuals of their direct acquaintance, precisely for the dissonance their mediocrity would ring from the settings into which they were dropped.
Modern commercial fiction offers many examples of the Everyman protagonist. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, probably modeled on Clancy himself, is a well known case. Similarly, we have Greg Iles's Mississippi lawyer-author Penn Cage (The Quiet Game) and Scott Turow's prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Presumed Innocent). These are successful morphings of real human personalities into believable characters who find themselves enmeshed, largely against their will, in momentous events where lives hang in the balance -- in Ryan's case, over and over.
But success is not guaranteed. Sometimes the "normal man" drawn from real life rejects the required new characteristics as contradictory to his essence, or proves non-viable once his "irrelevancies" have been pared away. That's the flip side of the technique. It's easier by far than crafting a character out of nothingness, which is why it's so popular. But all can come to naught if the "raw material" proves to be less amenable to molding than the writer requires.
The other technique is to start from a burning passion, or a combination of two or three (more is not always better), that the writer conceives as central to the particular theme he wants to explore. He then shapes a protagonist character around that passion, adding verisimilitude with touches peripheral to the passion, or perhaps wholly disconnected from it. We might call this the Avatar Approach, for the character is brought into being specifically to personify the all-important central passion that rules him, around which the rest of the story is constructed.
The Avatar Approach has its virtues. It's more work than the Everyman Gambit -- creating life in a test tube is simple by comparison -- but the writer needn't worry about the sorts of clashes that can mar an Everyman protagonist; his character shall be exactly and only what he wishes. But its hazards are considerable as well. For a character ruled by a single powerful passion is supremely difficult to make believable; such men have few counterparts among the living.
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