It’s Not a Dream!

Fiction is neither as long-winded, random, or forgettable as the scraps of stories that visit us during the night.  The novel’s achievement starts with the creation process that John Gardner describes:

In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again. 

This is narrative at its happiest and best—writing that gives readers a  world more dramatic, realistic and moral than daily routine. But the boundaries of this world are fragile. In fact, as Gardner points out, “one of the chief mistakes a writer can make is to allow or force the reader’s mind to be distracted, even momentarily, from the fictional dream.”

Those distractions come in many shapes and sizes, but the other kind of dreaming goes a long way toward explaining them.

~ Cliché.

If you’re gifted enough, of course it’s possible to write anything. But, for the most part, any version of “Henrietta woke, relieved that it was only a dream” won’t work. Dreams may be messages to the dreamer, but rarely to anyone else. If you want your novel to delight others, everything must seem new, starting with the plot and ending with the details capturing it. Cliches like waking from a bad dream? That is a bad dream. 

~ Grounding

Dreams let us fly out windows, land in foreign countries without deplaning, simultaneously chat with former lovers and elementary school teachers. If there’s anything fun about dreams, that’s probably it. But readers demand a fictional dream that, however invisibly, explains arrivals, departures, changes of location, and everything else that makes any world outside a dream clear, logical, sensible, and compelling. 

~ Credibility

In your nightmare, your patient and adoring Mama turns on you for no reason, viciously humiliating you in front of every teacher you encountered in your entire life. No wonder you can’t wait to wake up! But the point is that fiction, unlike dream, requires motive and causality. It’s logically true to itself. Anything else shatters the fictional dream that Gardner describes.

~ Pace

Often when we narrate our dreams (or are forced to hear someone else’s), events and details emerge with agonizing slowness. Trivia receives meticulous tedium, while grounding rarely arrives at all. In contrast, novels need momentum and context. Without those, readers doze off, blissfully escaping to the other kind of dream.

Tip: Dreaming is the first step for many writers. But it shouldn’t be the last.

Metaphor: Apt or Inept? Part III

Some of us think in metaphor. Is that you? If so, put on the brakes. Not everything is, or needs to be, a metaphor! Sometimes readers just want to know what it is—not what it’s like or represents.

Never think in metaphor? Lots of writers fall in this category. If that’s you, let go. Dream. Compare. Distill. Imagine. Remember. The world overflows with fish in the sea, ants at a picnic, stars in the sky, and so on. All those clichés are simply used-up, non-implicit metaphors, dead because we’ve heard them till we’re ready to you-know-what. Those particular dead metaphors are similes. That’s simply an indirect metaphor containing “like” or “as.” Often, metaphor becomes simile from an instinctive awareness that the comparison is flimsy.

Whether your world brims with metaphor or is empty of it, you can become more adept. It’s as easy as baking a cake—from a mix. Here are three adept examples to admire:

Dark figures hurried past; silent men loaded long trailer trucks, huge tomcats crouched in somnolent wariness in all the shadows and a dog clawed at a box, its stomach sucked in with hunger and frustration.  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. — Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones

In Rosellen Brown’s Before and After, a character sees “that our lives as a family—no, our life as a family, our single life as an eight-legged graceful animal alive under a single pelt—was over.”

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, begins with:

the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America.  On her journey she cooed to the swan:  “In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch.  Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow!  She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan--a creature that became more than what was hoped for.”

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leaving the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory…. Now the woman was old.  And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, “This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions.” And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

As John Drury notes, metaphor “has to make imaginative sense, however surreal or weird it may be…We don’t want our metaphors, any more than our jokes, explained to us. We want to get them immediately.” Their mystery is part of their charm. 

Dorianne Laux suggests that we

Imagine a literal world, in which nothing was ever seen in terms of anything else.  Falling blossoms wouldn’t remind you of snow.  A dancer’s sensuous grace wouldn’t resemble the movements of a lover; the shape of a cloud would never suggest a horse or a sailing ship.  If such a world were possible, it would be a severely impoverished one.

Tip: Metaphors resemble flowers. Too many overwhelm. Too few deprive the world of color, texture, fragrance, and the inspiration for fantasy, dream, and collective memory.

Time, Space, and Fiction

Novelists tend to view time and space in terms of themselves or their characters, i.e. “I never have enough time to write—and I’m never inspired except in coffee shops,” or “My novel moves my protagonist from childhood to seniordom, and no two scenes occur in the same place.”

All perfectly legit. But these observations circumvent a crucial question: how do readers experience time and space in your novel?

Space

Every novel has two kinds of space. The obvious one of course, is the physical one what we call sense of place. Without that, your characters exist in the ether.

But the one more often neglected is described by Stacey D’Erasmo in The Art of Intimacy:

What’s in that critical space beween in fiction? Of what is it composed? What makes it “work” or not? One way into this delicate matter might be to look not so much at individual characters and their motivations or the outcomes of their yearnings and relationships, or even at their interactions per se, but at exactly what is in that space between them, the linkage.

This is where, if you leave room, your readers experience your novel’s world and characters directly. Sure, if you omit all comments, your readers might miss something. Isn’t that preferable to bludgeoning with clarity?  Yes. So, how do you provide that gift?

• Plant clues.
• Use imagery and metaphor.
• Avoid cliché. (Familiar expectations fill space, leaving readers outside.)
• Omit whatever the reader already knows.
• Trust your reader. Trust yourself.

 Time

You’re the ruler of every physical law in your novel. This gives you the power to make time slow down for drama and speed up for backdrop.

• Clarify time’s progress.

A reader wondering about sequence doesn’t constitute pleasurable ambiguity; it’s merely confusion.

• Make time emphasize.

In Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction: As Long as It Takes, she notes that “Slowed time is—or should be— a way of pointing to what’s important.”

• Start where your story begins.

In other words, is the material with which you open the story an arrow pointing toward the unified effect?” ― Julie Checkoway, Creating Fiction

Tip: Make your novel’s world one where time and space never frustrate, only offer endless pleasure.

Clichés, Dull Knives, and Sharp Tools

A cliché is like taking a butter knife to a hunk of steak or a pristine golden pepper. If you want to discard fat or pith, you’ll need a honed instrument. If you want to engage readers, you’ll need honed language. How else can you trim the excess to reach the good parts?

What’s a cliché? A metaphor or expression that’s “dead as a doornail.” Clichés may seem harmless as a sheep in sheep’s clothing. But unless they’re somehow refurbished with evolved genetics and meaning, they’re at best an irritant and at worst an enemy of language, story, and theme.

Tip: Clichés are more treacherous than they seem.

If the character, event, or expression is the first thing that comes to mind, it’s the last thing you want on the page. A trope (dead metaphor or over-used plot device) not only spawns yawns from readers; it’s the enemy of the story that only one person can tell.

Where do clichés come from? According to Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction,  

The world brims over with temptations for the writer, modish words, unexamined phrases, borrowed tones, and the habits of thought they all represent. The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement. Only by rejecting what comes too easily can you clear a space for yourself.

Clichés can “creep in” and “do damage” from “top to bottom.” They’re part of our language, our culture, our consciousness.  They can infiltrate fiction at the level of character, scenario, description, or metaphor. Kidder and Todd observe that:

When metaphors are fresh they are a form of thought, but when they are stale they are a way to avoid thought. “Tip of the iceberg” offends the ear as a cliché, and it offends reason because it is imprecise, if not spurious…

Decimate every clap of thunder” and kiss beneath a full moon. Trust that new stranger in town as you would the plague. Clichés are a plague, a threat to writer origination of events and conclusions and to reader interaction with the clues a good novelist provides.

What’s the “tried and true” cliché test? If it’s “the first thing” that “pops into your mind,” hesitate. Is this “yesterday’s news”? Could you plot this scene differently? Add complexity to this character? Describe the villain, damsel, mentor, surf, robin, or train station in a way no one else could—because no one’s thought about it the way you have. That takes effort. But you’ll like the moment better. So will your readers.

After all, isn’t that what fiction’s for?  In The Writing Class, Jincy Willett reminds that, “Only in art were there clichés; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside.”

Spread some surprise.

The Novel and the Novelist’s Emotions

Like everyone else, writers may be reluctant to wade through their deepest emotions. It’s like a swamp down there—with all the worst quagmire characteristics: rotting material, oppressive atmosphere, fetid odors—the stuff of nightmares. Maybe even the idea turns you off. Who loves swamps, or wants to revisit fear, anger, or pain? At best it puts you in a terrible mood; at worst it hurts.

But dark places can originate creativity: carnivorous plants, larger-than-life creatures, symbolism, secrets.

In Writing 21^st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques, Donald Maass suggests that novelists often gain the greatest impact by probing deep inside—unearthing what they’d rather forget or ignore.

Tip: You’re the best source of the depths that make your characters compelling and real.

The point isn’t self-torture, of course, but the kind of experiment that scientists like Newton have always performed. To whatever extent you can step back to notice or recall profound feeling, you might gain both perspective and stoicism. You might unearth the details that create complex characters, which in turn creates compassionate readers.

Questions to might help achieve that:

~ How would you rank this pain (or fear or lust or rage)?

Scoring helps recall other instances of intense emotion and produces more objective comparisons. This can yield specific examples and strong metaphors. Make yourself take notes so you can later round out your characters—even your minor ones.

~ What’s hidden in your personal swamp?

Perhaps there’s more envy (or competitiveness or greed or selfishness) than you usually acknowledge. But it’s okay, because you’re wearing protective garb: “This is for the writing.” That arms you against hideous imagery and noxious fumes while you dig up the traits that shape intriguing characters. Write down the details.

~ How does intense emotion affect you physically?

Note breathing changes—also your pulse, lips, shoulders, and tongue. Which of the five senses dominates? What happens to hunger, thirst, energy, even digestion? Record your observations to replace clichéd body language like turning, yawning, and shrugging.

 If life dumps you in a swamp, such exercises may feel intolerable. But if you can wade the bog for the sake of your novel and its characters, your discoveries might enrich not only your fiction, but your life.

Seeing the Magic, Making the Magic

Say it’s winter, and you’re lucky enough to be on a southern beach instead of imprisoned in a northern cold front. Say you like that beach enough to put it in your novel. The easy, obvious course is describing the easy and obvious. Here goes: hundreds of folks glistening with oil or tanning lotion splay out on beach chairs facing the sun. Behind them, the waves lap rhythmically, soothingly. It’s true. Absolutely.

But who cares?  No one, really. No magic here. Only the easy and obvious.

Tip: To convey something magical, first you must see—not just skim the surface, but really see.

It’s actually harder to see than to craft sentences about what you’ve uncovered. Seeing is far more than half the battle.  Happily, looking deeply and creatively is a skill. Like any skill, it’s something you can learn. All you need is patience, practice, and determination to keep seeking what’s initially invisible.

A writer I know remarked on wanting to find what’s beautiful and special about any location. Even though many admire mountains and ocean more than farmland, finding magic wherever you are makes you a better novelist.

That’s the whole trick: looking past pedestrian clichés and tired, superficial imagery to the mystery and magic. In that world—which is actually everywhere—magic surrounds you, encompasses you, infiltrates you. Replace sunbathers (yawn) and raucous gulls (yawn, yawn) and lapping waves (not yawn but ouch!). How about a sliver of moon accompanying a star or two when your protagonist’s the only one in the hotel pool at 5 a.m. Or a protagonist who, with only blessing for compensation, walks the beach, forking litter from seaweed and broken coral, stowing other people’s refuse in a giant garbage bag.

~ Find the magic of fantasy.

If you’re lucky enough to imagine what elves lovingly whisper during elf trysts, or the spell an elderly       wizard casts when he knows his long life is winding down, then you transcend the ordinary.

~ Find the magic of reality.

Every novelist needs magic, and not all of us can or want to conjure elves, wizards, or unicorns. But magic is everywhere. All you have to do is really look, and you’ll begin to really see. Abracadabra.

There it is. Yours for the taking—yours for the giving. A version of blessed.