Otherworldly

Look up “otherworldly,” and you’ll find lots on astral projection and interstellar travel. But good fiction is always “otherworldly,” even when it transports us to a world much like our own. As N.K. Jemisin put it in the N.Y.T. Book Review, “Beautiful writing just isn’t enough to save any story from overfamiliarity.”

Fiction transcends the familiar by altering the view. That might be an imaginary world, or simply the transformation of our own: deep penetration of one mind, the exquisite discovery of complexity in the apparently simple, or simplicity in the apparently complex.

What’s the source of this? The camouflaging and exposing of the novelist’s psyche:

Both candor and disguise are valid—even indispensable—ways of approaching the secret life in literature, and both can result in great art, though I believe disguise improves your chances, because the less you rely on autobiographical fact, the more your imagination is of necessity invoked. – David Jauss, “Autobiographobia: Writing and the Secret Life”

Fiction says the unsayable through characters enacting plot. Caroline Gordon is right that “A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”

Only the merger of acute insight with fantastical invention can express those truths. You’ll need:

~ Groundwork.

Probe. Investigate. Observe yourself and others. Discard the rose-colored glasses. Gather the facts. It starts there.

~ Persona.

Create a narrator who represents the wisest, funniest, most objective and articulate version of yourself. You don’t get to comment in your novel. But without guidance, readers get muddled. To help them out, you don a mask. This transforms you into a narrator who escorts readers along the journey your novel captures.

~ Characterization.

The best characters are more credible than real people, even if they’re born on Saturnalia. These characters entice because they’re more driven, coherent, determined, and multi-dimensional than the people who inspired them.

~ Imagination.

It’s about compassion as much as originality. In The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene said, “Hate is a lack of imagination.” Only imagination lets us grasp how the other guy feels. That’s why J.K. Rowling called it “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

With or without aliens, wizards, or auras, find a way to think differently. So your readers can. Albert Einstein noted that “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” That’s as true for novelists as physicists. Logical coherence is indispensable to every world. Beyond that lies the otherworldly thrill of possibility.

Tip: “Otherworldly” should apply to language, plot, characterization, and setting in every novel.

Angle, Emphasis, and Insight

What do you want readers to see? Perhaps you seek a kind of photographic realism, with the proportions between background and character, acuity and obscurity resembling what we see every day. Maybe, however, you want more—want readers to view the world from a different vantage point in order to reach new perception, new conclusions.

Tip: To change your reader’s perspective, you must first change your own.

Albert Einstein said that to solve a problem, you must alter your approach to it—that something must shift to allow new insight. That’s what a device called the camera obscura once provided. This precursor of Kodak is a dark chamber that reversed the image visible on the other side.  Some theorize that 17^th century Dutch Masters like Vermeer used it to study the world upside down, in order to gain greater control of detail via altered perception. Tracy Chevalier describes this exquisitely in Girl with a Pearl Earring.

If you’d like to change your perspective without a camera obscura, what might you do?

~ Listen.

Many of the best novelists are more interested in what others have to say than in their own thoughts, which they already know. And opinions that make you queasy are likely among the most useful. What better way to explore other belief systems?

~ Ask questions.

Why does this person believe what she believes? How does he compartmentalize that way? Not all your characters are like you (!),  so you need a way to understand those who aren’t.

~ Broaden your horizons.

Seen any good paintings lately? Even if art isn’t your thing, a quick web foray can do lots to present the world through lenses rose-colored and otherwise. Some suggestions:

• In Felix Vallotton’s “The Ball,” greenery gets far more precedence than figures or objects. Doesn’t that raise a lot of questions? Which ones?

• “Christina’s  World,” by Andrew Wyeth, again emphasizes landscape. The disabled woman is unable to walk to the farmhouse, which is some distance away. What does the painting reveal about her? About her world? About your own?

• “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” said Rene Magritte, who painted a man painting a woman on the woman, a mirror functioning in reverse of a camera obscura,  a room-sized apple,  a locomotive suspended beneath a mantelpiece. All are true in the details—just not the relationships. What does that say? How are fiction and surrealism related?

Change how you see—what you see—and you can change the view for your readers. Toy with proportion, reversal, emphasis, and irony. Nothing will look quite the same. Isn’t that inherent in the word “fiction”?