Six Considerations for Fiction Writers
More to come in my "advice for writers" series....
Over the years I’ve taught many fiction writing workshops. I have read and commented on untold stories (and poems and creative and academic essays—but for today, I’m sticking with fiction). Here are 6 things I regularly found myself telling high school and college students (and I’m sure some of these were lifted from teachers of my own, interviews, and essays I’ve read). Even if you don’t write fiction, this list may well help you appreciate more fully what good fiction writers do all the time (and you’ll find some reading recommendations as well).
1. Don’t think.
Resist having a reason for something to happen in your story. Forget about making the man represent patriarchy, the priest be a mouthpiece for religious tyranny, the truck driver an example of redneck conservatism. The harder you try to put pre-conceived ideas into a story, the more likely it will fail. A story can’t feel too guided and controlled by the author (you are not the man behind the curtain—more like just another misfit on the yellow-brick road of your imagination). Certainly work to discover what needs to happen next, what characters look like, how they talk, but resist giving them abstract, well-thought-out “roles.” Forget about themes. For one thing, you are shifting too strongly to rational thinking when you do this. Let meaning emerge on its own. Writing stories is like dreaming. We don’t control our dreams. Things happen in them without any conscious input from us, even though we are their progenitors. Let your stories surprise you. As Flannery O’Connor said, don’t write about your characters. Write with them.
2. Give your stories menace.
Listen to Raymond Carver’s advice when he says he likes a story with something “menacing” in it from the get go. Dramatic tension, conflict—call it what you will—just has to be there. In Making Shapely Fiction, there’s an assignment called the “Bear at the Door Story,” and the idea is to write a story that conveys that same degree of urgency (but no actual bears please!). My take on this is that stories are written precisely because of this, because something is off, something needs to be worked out, to be resolved or discovered. Every memorable fictional character is on a kind of quest. I like Rick Bass’s take on this. He says that characters need to get lost and then find their way home.
3. Keep everything in one key.
Just as with music, a coherent story needs to come from one place, one presence. The word choice, the kinds of observations, the rhythm and sense of the language, the voice, tone—everything—all need to feel as if they belong together, like the notes that work in a music key. I’m talking about something more than just point of view. Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction proposes the idea of the “implied author,” who is neither the narrator of a story, nor it’s point of view, nor the actual author. Rather it is a presence created by the author to then create the story. That’s a bit convoluted to think about (though I find it fascinating). For me the music analogy works—similes, metaphors, turns of phrase, the vocabulary of the story itself, the imagery…—all need to feel as if they belong together, and when they don’t, it can be just as jarring as hitting a wrong note in a piece of music.
4. No chit chat.
Dialogue is important in good fiction, but it has to do real work, has to still feel as if it’s in the same key (see #3). All too often young and less experienced writers (and plenty established, experienced writers as well) will have their characters talk to each other just for the sake of it, and nothing is accomplished, nothing is really said. While it may feel “real” in the sense that we often say things to each other that are throw away and utterly mundane, the work of art you’re creating has no room for this. Push to have your characters say provocative things, odd things, poetic things. In Hemingway’s masterful story “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is mostly dialogue, the man says to the woman, “We can have the whole world,” and she replies, “No we can’t. It isn’t ours anymore.” Wow. Dialogue should do real work. It should feel just as important as the descriptive writing and the rest of the prose. And do make sure your characters talk to each other. Don’t spend pages and pages just meandering through their thoughts.
5. Research.
Get it right. Yes, this is fiction, but it’s filled with real things. A director for a play will work to be sure the props used feel authentic, or authentic enough to serve their purpose. Fiction writers need to think about the authenticity of their props, too. They often need to behave as responsibly as good, fact-checking journalists. This is a fun part of writing fiction. You’re learning new things! You also simply owe it to your readers to get things right. When you get something wrong, even something small and seemingly insignificant, the whole willing suspension of disbelief crumbles, the reader awakens from the dream, all is lost…. The amazing short story writer Amy Hempel was once visiting a class of my fiction writers, and a student asked her why she never had any sex scenes in her stories. She answered without hesitating. She said that as a young girl she once snuck a peek at her brother’s private journal. It turns out he was trying his hand at pornographic writing, and she came to the line, “and then he unzipped her negligee.” She said after that, she was always afraid she would get something wrong.
6. What are they watching?
If a television or computer or radio is on, if a character is reading a book or writing in a journal…make sure we get to see or hear what’s being watched, read, written.… This one is very specific, but a common thing I saw over the years (and I see it in published fiction as well). The ending of Ray Carver’s masterpiece, “Cathedrals,” offers a great example of this. Read it if you haven’t already! Just as with that story, what you allow yourself to imagine may even become metaphorically central to the whole story. In Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Bailey is reading the newspaper in the opening scenes, and he reads aloud that a criminal, “The Misfit,” has escaped from prison. Later in the story, the family tragically encounters the Misfit. Imagine if Fitzgerald had never allowed himself to envision T.J. Eckleberg’s famous eyes on that billboard in The Great Gatsby!
I would add one more thing to any list of dos and don’ts when it comes to writing or artistic creation—don’t worry about any rules for now. Just create, write and find a thrill in willing a world into being on the page that wasn’t there moments ago.
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Very useful ideas about writing fiction. I had a go at fiction writing (I got 80,000 words into a novel) but I just didn’t like writing it! Followed my instinct and turned to creative non-fiction instead and feel far more at home. However, writing my novel would certainly have benefited from reading this 😊 I may go back to it one day...