Rules and Resolutions: Brake or Break?

Something in us loves formulas and fresh starts, vows and pledges. After all, if you aspire to quality, you want to identify which mountains to disregard or hike, and how to discern when you approach the summit. For many, January 1 promises a chance to do better. More exercise and writing, healthier food, less to be guilty about, more opportunities for pride as opposed to arrogance.

Tip: You can’t decide which rules to break—and when—unless you know the rules in the first place.

For better self-diagnosis, read plenty of fiction and nonfiction about fiction (as opposed to fiction about how fiction is actually written and judged).

~ Understand the rules well enough to evaluate when to break them.

There’s oodles of info on this, on the web and elsewhere. For example, at the “Literary Hub,” Amitava Kumar offers “Ten Rules of Writing,” everything from length of sentence to daily practice.

Stephen King has twenty rules, culminating in “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

It continues. In The Guardian, Margaret Atwood suggests:

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

Determined to maintain fiction as art rather than industry, again in The Guardian, Jonathan Franzen insists that “Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” 

~ Use your knowledge of the rules to consciously choose when to break them.

In “Brain Pickings,” Neil Gaiman assures that

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Scott Turow made this point at ThrillerFest (2014): “I think that you must be aware of the existing conventions. … That does not mean that you cannot reinvent them in your own way.”

The better you internalize rules or resolutions, then the more successfully you’ll reinvent them. A preference for “showing” over “telling” is helpful, as is awareness of when readers want a transitional bridge, even though the author writing the scene can follow perfectly. 

~ Sense when you’re being subjective, even self-indulgent. That’s when you want to apply the brakes.

These questions might help you analyze based exclusively on craft:

• Do you merely seek what’s easiest?
• Is your rationale for disregarding this rule or resolution legitimate?
• Is the main motive anxiety that you’ll never devise a preferable solution?

Meticulous attention to rules can breed mediocrity. But complete disregard for rules can breed failure. Like everything else about writing, the goal is candid self-assessment coupled with rigorous follow-through. Resolve to make revision seem not like strenuous tedium, but euphoric fun.

Tracks in the Snow: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphor

Last weekend we woke to unidentifiable footprints out the front door. After omitting the usual suspects (Cat? Dog? Raccoon? Fox?) we were at a loss. Still are. Still perplexed. And slightly perplexed is mightily entertaining. It triggers the imagination, invites you to solve a puzzle, and keeps you alert and engaged. Will there be a different, better hint?

Tip: The great secrets of fiction leave you wondering, long after the clues melt away.

In this sense, every novel is a mystery novel—whether or not you include corpses or detectives. Your readers try to guess what’s ahead, what this detail signifies, and how the protagonist earns the ending. If you’re doing your job right, they continue guessing. Until the end. That’s where the surprise materializes. Not a total one, of course. The best endings leave readers scratching their heads over all those clever clues—not one of them misleading—that cause the ending. But never obviously. That’s where ambiguity comes in.

Milan Kundera observed that “The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.” To approach an almost-imitation of life, fiction can’t be too clear. After all, in reality, when is any choice or belief or outcome ever crystalline? For example, is the borderline between life and death always a given?

That’s why Joyce Carol Oates said that novelists toy with “The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to ‘overcome’ doubt.”  If you already know all the answers, are you sure that fiction is what you want to write? 

Like Oates, Scott Turow, famed for legal thrillers, believes that “The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.” What motivates folks to keep reading if you spell everything out?

Readers want footprints—visible, but not unequivocally identifiable. One of the best ways to get there? Metaphor.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse relies heavily on the central metaphor of its title. But what exactly does it mean? The unattainable? The illuminating? The permanent in the face of mortality? Art? Love? All of the above?

The fun is guessing, just as it’s fun to speculate why Jonathan Franzen called his book “Purity,” why Shauna Singh Baldwin chose the title “What the Body Remembers,” or the precise meaning of the bloom at the center of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The White Rose.

Guessing keeps people turning pages. Or pondering pawprints. Those melted before we could figure them out. And that’s okay, because “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity,” Sigmund Freud claimed. And ambiguity is the privilege of drawing your own conclusions.

We can continue daydreaming about what marvelous creature strolled across our yard in the dark of night. Ambiguity lets things linger in memory. Fiction holds that same power. If you let it.

Question Whether You Question Enough

Tip: Nonfiction is for answers. Fiction is for questions.

Certainly, fiction has much to teach, and not just about society or morality, but also about ornithology, teen pregnancy, Victoria’s reign, the Song of Songs, and so on. But if fiction accomplishes this teaching with a sound that’s overtly educational, most readers close the book. What’s the solution? Questions.

The questions that propel fiction originate in the writer’s own questions:

~ Who is the audience?

~ Why struggle through this when I might make more money at McDonald’s?

~ Does my plot deliver my theme?

~ Wait. Do I have a theme? If not, do I need one?

Start there. Then consider your writing lifestyle. Maybe, like many writers, you’re addicted to critique, conferences, coaching, and a canon composed of brilliant minds like John Truby’s, Robert McKee’s, Donald Maass’s, John Gardner’s, and so on. Great!

Yet instruction doesn’t necessarily pose questions the way that good feedback does. Do you let rules or explanations bury the fundamental questions?

Whether you struggle with your first or twenty-first draft, work alone or with a group, certain questions always apply:

• Is your scenario original and electric? Too good to ignore?
• Does at least one character evoke empathy?
• Do you capitalize on your point of view?
• Do you open the first chapter, and every chapter and scene thereafter, with a big bang?
• Do the details support the story, or mostly your own subjective interests?
• Do you dramatize what’s truly exciting, and summarize what isn’t?
• Does your plot keep readers turning pages?
• Is your story more important to you than your readers are? (Oh, oh.)
• Are too many of your sentences annoying?
• Does your novel ask more questions than it answers?

The best fiction leaves us with questions. Nathaniel Hawthorne wonders whether hypocrisy is more contemptible than adultery. F. Scott Fitzgerald invites us to decide what the past means. Harper Lee asks if we ever considered the connection between innocence versus racism or sexism. Tracy Chevalier questions whether we noticed how many women influenced a history peopled with men. Jonathan Franzen speculates on the meaning of “purity.”

If you prefer answers to questions, is fiction the best genre for your tastes and talents?

A Gift or To Give?

Today’s a time of chocolate, roses, expensive jewelry and store-bought poems. But in either real or fictional worlds, how much love do these offerings convey? Is there something a bit facile about 77% cocoa or a new watch?  What’s the best way to express any emotion, including love?

“All human happiness and misery take the form of action,” Aristotle said. It’s easy to buy carnations, say “I love you,” or keep repeating, “I’m sorry.” Why is the quote that “actions seem louder than words” so famous?

Because it’s true. The opening of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory illustrates:

Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few buzzards looked down from the roof with shabby indifference:  he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr. Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly up at them.

Yes, Greene comments by mentioning “indifference” and “rebellion.” Yet the memorable part is the protagonist’s behavior: braving the heat, tearing at the road, taunting the buzzards.

In Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, she captures atmosphere not by describing it but “showing” hope and connection, however inhuman:

 And then a cat, its belly sagging with young, ambled over and brushed her leg with its tail—the one warm gesture in a cold country.

Marshall needn’t explain that no amount of frustration will make this protagonist give up; the cat conveys this for her. Through action.

Like the cat, characters must do something. Otherwise, the writer forces readers to accept narrator claims about emotions, decisions, and options.

Jonathan Franzen often comments on his characters’ emotions—but only to add depth and insight. These few sentences capture a range of emotion through the behavior of Pip and her boyfriend:

Pip shut the door again, to block out the words, but even with the door closed she could hear the fighting. The people who’d bequeathed a broken world to her were shouting at each other viciously. Jason sighed and took her hand. She held it tightly.

Even without reading this extraordinary novel, you know that the overheard accusations are unbearable, that Jason wants to support her but is helpless to help, and that she clings to him because he’s there and that’s all she has. The physical responses capture this with active verbs: “shut,” “block,” “closed,” “shouting,” “sighed,” and “held.” Something happens.

Something happens with a gift, too, of course. Who wouldn’t want a carefully chosen one? But loving acts exert greater power. And in fiction? Store-bought expressions of love, pain, fury, or terror can only “tell.”

Tip: Nothing conveys emotion like behavior or action.

Purity and Impurity in Jonathan Franzen’s "Purity"

Depending on your definition of masterpiece, this novel might just be one. Pip needs love, money, and her dad’s identity—not necessarily in that order. Impurities and all, I want everyone to read it. So I won’t divulge any of its many secrets. Want the actual plot? Read this book!

It’s not perfect. In crystals, impurities alter the basic structure, adding color and fire; this describes Franzen as well. Some reviewers attack these distortions: self-indulgence, sexism, oversimplification, snobbishness, one-dimensional protagonists, and disconnected narrative threads.

There’s more. Tension can be as low as breadth is huge. The remarkable characterization occurs less from action than backstory. Lots and lots of “telling.”

Maybe. But here’s what else Purity offers:

~ Zingers.

 “Don’t talk to me about hatred if you haven’t been married.”

~ Analogy.

“It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

~ Insight.

“And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.”

~ Irony.

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”

~ The “extra” in “extraordinary”:

“Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was.”

~ Voice.

“The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She realized that, coming from a temperate place like the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d been like a person developing her vision in poor light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the inerconnecteness of all possible smells was not apparent….How many smells the earth alone had! One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk, others had elements of patchouli or fresh horseradish. And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like in the tropics?”

In an NPR interview, Franzen describes fiction-writing as expertly as he describes everything else: “It’s like having this dream that you can go back to, kind of on demand. When it’s really going well...you’re in a fantasy land and feeling no pain.”

You’ll need chutzpah to create that kind of “ fantasy land.” Here’s the thing about risk. Take none, and “good” is the most you’ll get. Defy “pure” convention, and you might fail; you might inspire loathing as well as adoration. Personally, I pray that Franzen keeps doing his own thing.

Tip: Too much risk is—risky. But none at all? No color or fire there.

The Past Lives Still

Ruins (our odd label for the remains of past glory) preserve both culture and aesthetics. The characters in novels, too, retain remnants of who they were. No one can wander there, reverently touching stones, marveling at the engineering, artistry, and longevity. Yet the past controls actions and decision. Even if it remains unexcavated. Still.

Still—both enduring and motionless. And if you’re fortunate enough to discover a corner of an ancient amphitheatre where you can feel entirely alone, that’s enough to still your own heartbeat.

This happens in novels, too. History, either personal or otherwise, constrains the psyche and thus shapes plot. Pip’s boyish willingness to aid an escaped convict ultimately elicits the “great expectations” that will break his heart. To win his first love back, Gatsby slips on the first “gold hat” he finds: bootlegger.  In Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, one torturous night of staring at his uneaten dinner shapes a future split between conning and being conned. As a powerful source of angst, the past is a powerful source of plot.

Even when the ruins of childhood or adolescence don’t engineer the inciting incident, the penitentiary of memory affects everyone. Why else would backstory and flashback attract like magnets? Writers instinctively promote the moments that shaped characters, that influence what they’ll face and how.

Tip: In fiction, the past is a terrific tool unless it overwhelms the present or future.

As Alain Resnais puts it, “The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.” In other words, don’t give the past more “in-scene” air-time than it deserves. More on that from “How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them―A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide”:

 For mysterious reasons, many authors consider it useful to provide a story about a forty-year-old man-about-town with a prologue drawn from his life as a five-year-old boy. ... There’s only one letter’s difference between “yarn” and “yawn,” and it is often a long letter, filled with childhood memories. ― Howard Mittelmark

How to use the past while exploiting momentum?

~ Hurry.

A few lines of backstory go a long way.

~ Imply.

Rather than belaboring how the past controls the present, hint instead of declaiming, “And I knew right then what so terrified me—and why.”

~ Raise the immediate stakes.

The only justification for a character’s past is intensified present-time trouble. The past isn’t there for its own sake, but for the mystery and secrets of the present.

~ Complicate.

            Use backstory to plot, rather than the other way around.

The past lives still. Which doesn’t mean you should let it upstage present-time conflict.     

Who Wants a Window Seat next to the Wing?

Anyone desiring a view will dislike anything blocking it. Aboard a plane or not, which obstacles do fiction readers encounter?

*** Author.

Are you standing between your characters and your readers? As Jonathan Franzen expressed it in The Writer, “I think the most important thing―it may sound strange―is to get inside the character to the point that there is a lot of anxiety and shame. The real struggle is to find a dramatic setup and a corresponding tone that make it possible to dwell in that anxiety and shame without feeling icky as a reader. That’s a big challenge. My approach to that―pretty much with all the characters―was that when it started seeming funny to me, I knew I was there.  If it seemed anguished or earnest, I knew I wasn’t there.” Restrict “anguish” and “earnestness” to your life: use your characters to ban those from the pages of your novel. If, however briefly, you point out “anguish” or convey “earnestness,” you’ve obstructed the view.

Don Maass agrees, observing in Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling that “When your readers (temporarily) believe something that you’re not (ultimately) saying, you’re writing fiction at the level of art….Call it withholding, if that helps. Conceptualize it as misdirection, if you like. However you think of it, make your readers think.” Just so. If you tell them what to think, how can they discover for themselves what’s hidden under that wing?

*** Characters.

Just as you don’t want your ego overshadowing the landscape, you don’t want your narrator over-explaining, pontificating, or overshadowing the action and scenery.

*** Narrator.

But. The narrator controls the altitude and intensity. If your narrator explains nothing, makes no connections, and delivers no insights, either your book will be 2000 pages long or frustrated readers will terminate futile attempts at guesswork and—find a novel that balances character and narrator input. Narrators who guide without belaboring the obvious actually make the characters more visible.

How do you give readers the view they want?

~ Get out of the way. You’re the author—not the wing.

~ Use your narrator to control pace and clarify what readers can’t infer.

~ Let the characters star—they’re why readers choose certain novels, and certain seats.

Tip: Give your readers a window seat on a plane with invisible wings.

Beauty and the Written Word

People rarely compare novels or the sentences composing them to sonnets or cathedrals, to sculpture or symphonies. Yet the artistry is parallel—meticulous engineering that results in capacity to mesmerize. Great plots amaze: A woman proves her loyalty by each night unraveling the tapestry she’ll reweave the next day; a man dooms ship and crew because he confuses the death of a white whale with justice; a boy travels down the Mississippi fleeing “sivilization” and finds it in a runaway’s heart, or a girl discovers how many kinds of mockingbirds exist and why they deserve protection.

What makes these plots gorgeous? For a start, each says something not just important, but profoundly so—about who people are and who they might become. Each plot synthesizes behavior and thought, proving its hypothesis with events both probable and essential—each incident leading inevitably to the climax. That has the haunting power of a symphony, no?

Novels depend on plot. But the best novels contain sentences rivaling the magnificence of scenario, scene, or theme. Here’s a tiny sample.

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.”  -- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“All he knew, really, was digging.  He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep.  He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it.  He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy.” -- T. Coraghessan Boyle, “The Underground Gardens”

“The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. Shutting his eyes, he saw twisted boogers of browning meats on a grille of chrome and hellish coals. The eternal broiling, broiling of the damned.” --Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

How do you start producing increasingly beautiful sentences?

• Know what you want to say—something original. Important. Yours alone.
• Listen for rhythm—in everything you read or hear. It begins with noticing.
• Explore all five senses, and “explore” never means the first thing that leaps to mind.
• Replace vague, distancing constructions like “There were” and “It is.” Tighten up. Get close.
• Take risks. But take them thoughtfully.
• Never rationalize the weaknesses you pretend not to notice in your prose. Ever.

 Tip: Aspire to beauty. You’ll never let your readers down.