Reality for the Writer: Verisimilitude for the Reader

What’s easy about being a fiction writer? You need a marketable “concept” that “captures the reader’s or viewer’s imagination, excites their senses, gets them asking ‘what if,’ and sparks them to start imagining the story even before they have read a word.” – Jeff Lyons

Then after completing a novel executing that concept, you still need an agent, marketing plan, publisher, maybe a publicist. How do you keep one foot in the marketing world, and the other in the one your imagination built? A smidgen of reality facilitates all those challenges:

~ Admit your goals.

Which matters more: the book you long to write, or its publication? If the latter, don’t write chick lit after its time has passed. Don’t invent a revolutionary point of view or have sixteen protagonists. Be honest about what you want to facilitate achieving it.

~ Put a beautifully-shod foot forward.

Agents—and readers—appreciate not just Concept, but quality. Don’t shop your book until the scenario is strong, the characters multi-dimensional, the tension high, the plot causal, and the writing musical. Plus whatever else makes your novel all it could be.

~ Persevere.

Hard as this is, you mustn’t take rejection personally. Agents have bad days and unfair biases. Publishers aren’t raking in dough. Readers have a zillion choices. Here, it’s not the early bird that gets the worm, but the bird that tried over and over and over. And over.

Tip: Stupid as it sounds, you need realistic goals and a realistic strategy for accomplishing them.

That’s the writer part. What about the reader part?

Fiction is far less about reality than a simulation of it that imposes greater credibility, causality, and morality than daily life. As Mark Twain put it, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”  What to do?

~ Eliminate coincidence.

            

If it happened, we must accept it. In fiction? Not so much. Perhaps not at all!

~ Make us believe.

Lauren Groff notes, “as a writing teacher of mine once said, very gently, to a student who handed in work formed out of the rough stuff of her life, ‘That it happened doesn’t make it true.”  The novelist must make it seem true—with all the complexity and effort that entails.

~ Grant justice.

Who wants bad guys winning and good ones losing? That’s what the news is for.

Tip: Good fiction doesn’t re-create reality; it imitates it.

Does Your Novel Behave like a Story or like a Sestina?

Even if you’re unsure what a sestina is, you don’t want your novel resembling one. Novels must thrust forward, rather than circling around plot, theme, or character emotions.

What’s a sestina? A complex 39-line poem dating back to 12^th century France. Since novels can be 390 pages, the two forms illuminate in distinctly different ways.

The sestina takes the last word of the first six lines (123456) and creates this pattern from those six words: 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. The six words reappear one last time in the final three-line verse. By repeating and revisiting, the sestina reveals different conclusions about the same idea, which—ceases to be the same idea.

Though this might seem excessive, each recurrence changes the word’s context, even its meaning. If you’re curious about the sestina, check out what Elizabeth Bishop does with the simple words “house,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears.”

The technique is not only terrific for poets but an excellent exercise for deepening a novel. You might quite usefully compose a sestina about dilemma, subplot, or backstory. But it’s no way to structure the book itself.

Here’s why. Lauren Groff liked Joshua Ferris’s “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour,” but said of the protagonist’s arc: “If I never found the novel an ‘opera of bracing suspense,’ it may be because I was so worn down by O’Rourke’s incessant circling around his self-hatred and fear and inability to make a substantive effort, that when change does in fact come to him, it feels a bit limp and clammy.”

Novels generally trace the journey from weakness or difficulty to strength and power. Progress won’t be steady. There’ll be set-backs, wrong turns, resurrection of self-destructive habits, and worship of false truths.

This doesn’t mean you get to repeat as sestinas do. How can you avoid that?

~ A scene goal outline.

Check how often the protagonist progresses or retraces.

~ Physical/emotional balance.

The more characters ruminate, worry, and plan, then the more static your novel will feel.

~ Motivated dialogue.

Do conversations actually advance plot, or exist only to break up the narration?

~ A character arc.

Do events cause the character to grow, or is success sudden and inexplicable?

Tip: Life often seems to go in circles, but readers don’t want novels imitating that.