Scene: The Big Picture

In a way, every scene resembles a bouquet. Individual elements compose both. The end result must offer a coherent whole with a clear yet unobtrusive focal point. When the elements complement each other, the totality becomes far more effective than a single contribution. It’s the difference between this:

and this:

No one would mistake a couple of flowers for a bouquet. With scenes, though, it’s less clear. Precisely what constitutes a scene?

A scene is a sequence of events that happens at a particular place and time and that moves the story forward. — Randy Ingermanson, “The Art and science of Writing Scenes”

Another slant on the scene comes from Jane Friedman:

A scene is a stylized, sharper simulacrum of reality.

Ideally, the scene integrates everything from both definitions. So a scene needs:

~ Tension.

Unless there’s substantial suspense, summarize instead.

~ Momentum.

The scene must contribute to character arc, or, again, wouldn’t summary be better?

~ Setting.

Although locale mustn’t dominate, characters need grounding. Always.

~ Artistry.

Along with drama, scenes need causality, propulsion, originality, and grace.

~ Credibility.

Only plausible characters and events evoke reader emotion. 

~ Focus.

Regardless of style or voice, tension is the crux of every scene.

Yet novelists conceptualize scenes differently. Drawn to setting or symbolism? You might disregard tension. Maybe you’re an action sort of gal. Will your characters be disembodied? Will you emphasize what they do and ignore why they do it?

Scenes work when novelists disregard personal predilection to provide the whole picture. Who wants a lopsided bouquet? 

Tip: Readers enjoy scenes that balance their elements—that complete the picture.

Pattern and Surprise in Fiction

The relationship between convention and deviation, expectation and revelation drives fiction. That’s exhibited in the pattern of story that’s remained stable for centuries: conflict…development…resolution. Obviously, though, tweak the specifics and that pattern feels different every time. 

Dozens of other patterns also underlie fiction: the structure of the paragraph, the alternation between scene and narrative, the major character arcs, and the moods, moments, or memories that echo each other. 

All those components of fiction involve reader expectations, whether fulfilling them or adding tension and suspense by credibly failing to fulfill them. 

Lisa Cron’s superb blog—“A Reader’s Manifesto: 12 Hardwired Expectations Every Reader Has” (October 9, 2014)—identifies the most crucial reader expectations. What could be more important than how writers handle focus, empathy, pace, and plot? 

Yet, in every instance, the presentation of setting or symbol affects reader response to those critical aspects of fiction that Cron lists.

Tip: Revisit without merely repeating. This satisfies the desire for recurrence plus change.

So if you return readers to a completely parallel or symmetrical exchange, issue, or location, you’ll defeat reader expectations every time. If Taffy again confers with her mom about her husband’s unemployment, something must differ. Maybe Mom thinks it’s time to leave him, or hire him in dad’s factory, or have Taffy work there herself. 

Otherwise, the story feels static. And Jessica Page Morrell is exactly right that every scene captures a progression toward fulfillment of arc. How can that happen if the characters simply repeat what they said before with the same objects in the same place?

Nor can even a conversation with higher stakes occur in an unaltered location. Maybe Ernesto proposes to Tamilla--his gorgeous, ambivalent girlfriend—in a rowboat drifting on moonlit Lake Emerald. However magnificent Lake Emerald, readers will balk at returning there if everything looks identical. Instead, maybe thick storm clouds now hide the moon. Is this boat too old and creaky to be safe? Disgusted with Tamilla’s affairs, perhaps Ernesto’s ready to drown her? Or maybe she’s the one who wants to send a body somewhere the police won’t easily find it.

The need for modification also applies to symbolism. If Gram gave Ernestine an exquisite hand-woven shawl, don’t simply over and over mention the shawl—or the chandelier or the tennis racket. Instead, use symbolic objects to represent how the plot thickens. Does the wood stove scorch the shawl? Must the impoverished family sell their chandelier? Despite the racket that belonged to Albert's renown uncle, does the boy still lose the state championship? 

Things don’t stay the same, though in life, it might feel as if they do. Fiction readers seek the credibility and pleasure of experiencing both the pressure of time and the possibility of growth and catharsis. Meeting those apparently conflicting expectations of familiarity and evolution may not be as difficult as it seems. As Susan Dennard reminds, 

You’re a reader too, so when you go back and read your story from start to finish, you’ll be able to sense if you’re meeting expectations or not.

And variation is a terrific tool for accomplishing that.

More Real than Reality

Story depends on suspension of disbelief, which depends on creating a world that ironically boasts greater credibility and vitality than the everyday one. What’s the source of this term? A conversation between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge about reaching an audience. 

Wordsworth focused on the intensity part, suggesting that the writer’s task is  

to give the charm of novelty to things of every day . . . the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

Altering reader perception remains as important now as then. Coleridge, though. emphasized the capacity

to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. . .

Without believability + electricity, readers won’t linger long. The novelist needs to heighten reality, producing one so acute that readers forget they encounter an imaginary one.

Is getting readers to accept this fictional reality difficult?

The reader picks up a book primed to believe the unbelievable. A reader knows a piece of fiction is fiction. He wants to be entertained by what-ifs and imagine-thats. The writer’s sole task, then, is to keep up his end of the contract, to keep the reader immersed in the reality of unreality. To do nothing to slap the reader into an awareness that what he’s reading is indeed impossible, improbable, and not worth imagining.  — Beth Hill,  “Convincing Readers Your Fiction is Real”

Tip: Unlike literal reality, fiction requires suspension of disbelief. 

Here’s why. Perhaps an author says there’s an animal resembling a miniature version of another animal. This creature is pale, not very big, and unusual in shape and features. The male gets pregnant and experiences violent contractions to deliver about two thousand offspring through a special stomach pouch. Does this seem a bit unreal? Provide a photograph and there’s no room for doubt.

But a fabricated creature is another story—especially when it appears in one. First, the creation of your own mind must be accessible to everyone else. You must convince your audience that the environmental factors of your novel’s world fostered this evolutionary outcome. Finally, this invented creature mustn’t prove too convenient, i.e. coincidentally materializing to produce threat or salvation. 

Fiction must prove itself, accomplishing this by changing the angle, nailing the details, designing the characters, and sharpening the causality. That’s why “but it happened that way” is no more strategic than why can’t they picture how “x” looks. Imagery is the writer’s job—not the reader’s.

Rely too much on reality itself (whom you know or what you remember) and you’ll have a harder time convincing readers to accept the reality you create. Instead, put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Is it vivid? Was it set up? What, given these circumstances, could really happen?

Readers want to accept fiction as a variant of truth. Don’t let them down.

Fiction as Transportation

This relationship is obvious in science fiction, where improbable vehicles ferry readers to improbable places. But all successful fiction—whatever the genre—always transports, and, ideally, in both senses of the term.

Readers choose fiction for the opportunity to travel somewhere new. Even if the setting is one’s hometown, this fictional world feels as tangible as the “real” one, only far more causal, credible, and compelling. Even better? You get there without the misery of heavy traffic, delayed planes, or cramped seating.

But because readers can suspend disbelief, fiction can even more miraculously transport them to the territory within a novel’s covers. And, if the creator of that world commits no gaffes that fling readers back into daily reality, the magic lingers long after the protagonist’s journey ends. Every time you recall the first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”), or wonder if anyone could really be as good as Harper Lee’s Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird, then you’ve confirmed that novels enchant even when you’re no longer reading them.

Tip: The novelist’s hard work makes transportation to a fictional world easy.

Perhaps that’s easier said than done. So what flings readers out of a fictional world?

~ Errors.

Novel readers want to believe in the world they’ve entered. If they didn’t, they’d choose nonfiction. But they can’t ignore the Plaza Hotel standing across the street from Grand Central Station, or female sea horses housing the developing eggs, or “All of it feels badly.” Fiction must be free from mistakes.

~ Motive.

In real life, people frequently behave irrationality. The novel’s job is letting readers escape that. Fiction must imply (though rarely directly explicate) the rationale underlying character decisions.

~ Sentimentality.

Why not leave that to greeting card writers? Fiction must “show” happiness, fear, or anger rather than using abstract generality to label any of these.

~ Conincidence.

Sometimes infants are born on the same day as their grandmothers, and lucky infants have grandmothers who materialize at exactly the right instant. Novels though, ought to avoid the response of “Oh, give me a break,” and accomplish that by setting up and foreshadowing. Fiction pleases most when it links the cause of one event with the subsequent one.

~ Tedium.

To illustrate, try typing up an actual conversation. If you think that’s painful, imagine reading one. Or a detailed description of how the detective arrived at the crime scene. Who cares? Fiction must suggest rather than replicate.

For many readers, a novel that truly transports brings incomparable joy. Don’t you want to write that book?

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.

Taste the Sauce

The best cooks know that a recipe is only the start. Unless you check the final blend of flavors, how will you know if that “pinch” of salt is heavy-handed or lightweight? What if the vinegar is less tangy than bitter, or the flavor of the pepper flimsy or fiery? 

Great cooking is an art. So is great writing. Every novelist can acquire hundreds of recipes for plot, dialogue, characterization—all the way down to the structure of the sentence. But don’t stop there.  

Tip: Recipes are an indispensable starting point, but you still have to adjust the seasoning.

Even the finest, most tried-and-true recipes won’t achieve the following without your personal touch:

~ Plot that feels organic.

Hundreds of plot recipes exist, everything from the Aristotelian arc, to John Truby's 7 Key Steps, to Jack M. Bickham’s Scene and Sequel, to Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method. You can structure plot using templates, sequences, caves, psychological baggage, and pressure or plot points. The terminology differs. But all of these trace the movement from terrible trouble to some sort of climax, usually involving a happy ending, usually produced by the protagonist’s own choices and actions. 

You can construct a solid foundation using any one or any combination of these plotting options. In the end, though, a completely credible plot can emerge only from a completely causal one, where every choice inevitably results in the next outcome, right up to the end. 

Without that? It all feels at least slightly contrived. It’s not entirely believable, and not at all organic. You’re not done until you apply the taste test.

~ Dialogue that propels.

Consider all those dialogue “rules.” Never go too long without some dialogue breaking up the narrative; gradually build every exchange to a climax; insert speaker attribution or stage business every ____ number of lines, and so on.

But doesn’t every single dialogue exchange differ from every other? You can’t plan in advance when or how long characters will speak. Adhere too closely to any recipe or formula, and your dialogue won’t reflect character struggle authentically.

The best dialogue advice is fairly general. Sol Stein reminds of the need to give each character “a different script.” That will always summon a genuine exchange, as will this advice from Robert McKee:

Learn to judge you dialogue by listening past the words and sensing the harmony or disharmony between cause and effect. Dialogue rings true when a character’s verbal actions resonate with his motivation, when his inner desires and outer tactics seem to complement each other.

~ Characters that breathe.

Whether Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, or Toni Morrison’s Sula, no single technique evokes emotion in every reader. The further you stray from prescriptive methods that tend to oversimplify, then the happier your readers will be. 

For example, Dara Marks is absolutely right that the past controls us. Her title, “The Fatal Flaw - The Most Essential Element for Bringing Characters to Life,” offers an excellent recipe. Yet it’s neither the ultimate one, nor the only route to creating character arc. The observation by Heraclitus that “Character is fate” is another recipe, but again, one among the many, many ways to develop complex character and plot. You’re not done until, like a great chef, you add the personal touch.

Want to cook up a great novel? Read a lot of writing recipes. Familiarize yourself with those suitable to you, and you’ll make the place where you create a comfortable and stimulating hangout. 

But not everyone enjoys the same dinner. Or novel. As you put the finishing touches on an offering that’s entirely your own, picture whom you’re serving. That’s the way to perfect the seasoning.

Verity versus Verisimilitude

Verity, from the Latin veritas, means “true” or “real.” In contrast, verisimilitude comes from the Latin likeness to truth. For fiction writers, the difference couldn’t be more dramatic—because drama originates in imitating rather than replicating reality. That’s the source of fiction’s big questions. As Richard Bradley put it in his review of Ward Just’s The Eastern Shore: “What makes a story true? What means of storytelling best capture reality? Are facts a path to truth or a finely constructed gate?”

“Verisimilitude,” Russell Smith notes, “is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.” Because as Mark Twain and numerous others have observed, fiction, however fantastical, must seem more credible than reality itself.

But that’s only part of what fiction requires. In “Realism and Verisimilitude,” Taylor Stoehr suggests that “Fiction does not imitate life in the way that mirrors do, though we sometimes talk about its ‘mirroring of reality,’ nor does it pretend to be real in the way wax bananas do, or in the way that plastic simulates cowhide.”

Every novel creates a new reality, one true within its own parameters. The argument against Plato that Aristotle mounts in The Poetics insists that the most valuable truths transcend the literal facts. The best fiction, whether drama, epic poem, or novel, shapes a reality more causal and credible than the actual one.

How might you construct such a reality?

~ Propel Momentum.

As Robert McKee asserts in Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for the Page, Stage, and Screen: “Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it. Therefore, even in the most realistic settings and genres, credible dialogue does not imitate actuality.”

~ Manage Pace. 

It literally takes hours to prepare a turkey, drive to grandma’s, build a cabinet, or wash and fold the laundry. But no one wants to read logistics in anything approximating real time.

~ Avoid Coincidence.

Of course you could miss every traffic light, leave your identification at home, and be late for the plane. The one that crashes. But the fact that this could, or even did, actually happen doesn’t make it believable. Use subtle foreshadowing and set up to make your plot credible—particularly at its climax.

~ Justify  Psychological Insight.

Here’s McKee again: “beware characters who know themselves better than you know yourself.” The best novelists have explored every aspect of character psyche. But that’s a task for the novelist, not the character. 

~ Earn the Ending.

From the very start, present a protagonist with enough internal assets, however undeveloped, to save the day, and without the aid of convenient external miracles.

Tip: At its best, fiction feels, but should not literally be, more “true” than reality.

Art and Adversity

For the writers I know personally and perhaps millions I don’t know, the aftermath of the US. election was a time of pain, disgust, shock, and perhaps terror isn’t an exaggeration. Right now, working on fiction might seem at best—self-indulgent and at worst—pointless.  In this situation, what’s the role of art? Any kind of art?

On one hand, last May, more than 450 American novelists, poets and literary critics signed an “Open Letter to the American People.” The subject was our newly elected president. If these artists had an effect, it clearly wasn’t enough of one. 

On the other hand , in the NY Time Book Review of February 17, 2015, Mohsin Hamid claims that “Fiction can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power.”

In Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Baxter terrorizes a family, changing his mind about rape and murder because the comely daughter convinces him that she’s the author of Mathew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” The poem stuns Baxter more than the nudity he demanded of her. Credible? Maybe that depends on the reader. Yet, in any case, the semi-miraculous save starkly contrasts with the father’s earlier observation that "His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watched people die.” Throughout McEwan’s work, watching without acting always constitutes a crime.

Where does this leave the novelist? Maybe you want to write because it improves your immediate environment: a bit of reality more credible than reality itself in a world besmirched with socio-political rather than literary fictions. 

Art isn’t only for its audience. As Pablo Picasso put it, “We artists are indestructible; even in a prison, or in a concentration camp, I would be almighty in my own world of art, even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell.” 

According to E.A. Bucchianeri, “While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.”  Personally, I would very much prefer a different source of inspiration than what I, among millions of others, view as tragedy. But it won’t keep me from revising my novel, although it’s not a political one.

Besides, many believe that art, particularly fiction, affects its audience most deeply with drama, metaphor, subtext, and understatement. This suggests that railing about injustice won’t necessarily produce art. Yet, by grappling toward truth whether with paint (consider Picasso’s “Guernica”) or words, isn’t all art “Protest Art”? Isn’t all art at least theoretically political? In my own way, I will continue protesting. 

This is why. Wednesday morning, November 9, I happened to read “In Exile with Don Quixote,” by Ariel Dorfman, who wrote 

Those of us reading Don Quixote in 1973, in an embassy we could not leave, surrounded by soldiers ready to transport us to stadiums and cellars and, ultimately, cemeteries, responded viscerally to the novel. That continuous exultation and practice of liberty, both personal and aesthetic, was inspiring. —NY Times, 10/9/‘16

Dorfman alluded to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s confession in the prologue of this brand-new genre(1605) that this novel was “begotten in a prison where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound makes its home.” If he could compose a form that barely existed from inside a dungeon, what can you do? What should you do? 

Here’s Harry Belafonte on art and politics:

As Paul Robeson said, ‘Artists are the radical voice of civilization.’ Each and every one of you in this room, with your gifts and your power and your skills, could perhaps change the way in which our global humanity mistrusts itself. Perhaps we as artists and as visionaries, for what’s better in the human heart and the human soul, could influence citizens everywhere in the world to see the better side of who and what we are as a species.

Tip: Now more than ever, make your voice heard.

To Violate or Not to Violate

That’s the question for fiction writers. And it’s both complex and crucial. What we call "point of view violations" affect credibility and thus reader response from the first sentence to the last.

Tip: Anything perceived as a point of view violation is one, and anything not? Isn’t.

Individual readers will be more or less tolerant. But to avoid Hamlet’s indecision and the contamination of “something rotten" in the state of your fiction, accept that certain violations are just violations. If this seems harsh, I’m “cruel only to be kind.”  Watch out for these:

~ Switching from one point of view character to another without justification.

Most readers cheerfully accept consistent and graceful use of two or more perspectives. But abrupt or unwarranted shifts are impossible to hide: they feel like violations.

~ Using 3rd person (“he,” “she,” “it”) and first (“I”) interchangeably. 

Every reader will squirm at “Ali loved barns. I’d love to inhabit a converted one, she thought.” That second sentence requires italics or quotation marks. Better yet? The consistency of “Ali loved barns and dreamed of inhabiting a converted one.”

~ Offering inauthentic observations.

Characters can’t explain what they never saw, can’t possibly know, or wouldn’t admit.

But characters can guess. and readers delight in watching them do so. How does that work?

* Let characters infer from physical cues.

    If Marcy tells readers what Alain thinks, that's a violation. If Marcy observes that he draws close, pulls away, and repeats this over 

    and over, this is more an accurate assessment that he's ambivalent about kissing her than a violation.

* Clarify the distinction between narrator and character.

    Start a new paragraph. To make the shift from close to the character to further away, use a transition to bridge the gap. Here's an

    example:

        Sam hated snakes and knew that numerous species inhabited every continent.

       Kenya, where Sam was stationed, was home to five of the deadliest vipers in the world.

* Expand point of view restrictions consistently rather than inadvertently.

    Is whatever sleight of hand you want to execute legitimate? If so, make readers believe it.

In the end, point of view resembles every other aspect of fiction. Set things up meticulously, and you’ll surprise readers so much that you can get away with a lot.  Not everything, though.

Plot Roast

Do it right, and it simmers until every ingredient is equally juicy and tender. Or wait too long, and you’ve got dried-out, unrecognizable mush. The success of dinner depends on what you put together, your means of preparing it, and the cook time. Story is remarkably similar.

The most successful plotters transcend the not-all-that-captivating question: What happens next?

After all, the answer might be, “Esmeralda yawned.” So will the reader. 

Rely exclusively on chronology, and you risk sliding into one or more of the following:

            ~ A series of unrelated, episodic incidents.

          Fiction sometimes works when the protagonist faces one unrelated problem after another, or
          one unrelated villain after another. But the strongest plots emphasize the role of character in
          destiny: choices have consequences. At least in fiction.

            ~ Flatness.

            Protagonist arc can only shift from sad and weak to victorious and empowered because each
            event teaches lessons and summons buried strengths. This stems from the novelist’s emphasis
            on obstacles and solutions, not on the humdrum activity between them.

~ Logistics.

Successful fiction has no room for characters performing morning ablutions, shopping for groceries, logging into the computer, crossing the icy parking lot, or any other detail that merely traces what happens between one drama and the next.

~ Randomness.

Plot based on “If this happens, then that,” rather than “This because of that,” and you risk introducing lots of coincidence. That threatens both credibility and momentum.

And today’s readers expect credibility and momentum. Lots of this is the internet. Every fact is a click or two away, and everything’s presented with teasers (hooks) and sound bites. No waiting. No wondering.

How to achieve that pace in fiction?

*** Summarize everything that’s pedestrian or mundane.

*** Start every scene as late in the action—rather than as early—as logically possible.

*** Hint (but don’t belabor) how each scene results from the one preceding.

*** Launch scenes with a hook—and provide it right away.

*** View plot less as what happens than why what happens is dramatically and emotionally  compelling.

Tip:  Reserve scenes for “someone making a scene,” i.e. struggling with conflict, preferably conflict that forces change.

The Curiously Non-Causal Quality of Coincidence

Does the “curiosity” in the title above merely add alliteration? No, because, sadly, novelists don’t necessarily treat causality and coincidence as antithetical. What’s the cause of that?

A loose definition of plot. Ideally, it stems not from a sequence of events but the sense that choices, usually dreadful until the end, produced this result. E.M. Forster famously observed

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it...If it is in a story we say “and then?” If it is in a plot we ask “why?”

Only causality can explain “why.” Forster published Aspects of the Novel back in 1927, but nothing has changed since. A recent Editor’s Blog reminds that “Coincidence messes with the suspension of disbelief because it so quickly and thoroughly reminds readers that they are reading fiction.”

And the cause of that one? With the same probability each time, life can deliver victories or catastrophes. Fiction doesn’t work that way. The bar for credibility is far higher than for anything based on fact. That’s why you risk sounding contrived any time you record exactly what happened.

Beware these trouble spots.

• Planted Clues

She never checked for phone messages, but because she did, Ellie found the note.

• Fortuitous Accidents

Before Ed could respond, the doorbell suddenly rang.

• Convenient Backup

Good thing Mark remembered to take his gun after all.

• Improbable Meetings

Her first love, out of Sue’s life for thirty years, stood on the subway platform.

• Impossible Rescues

Though unsure of the sergeant’s location, the troops arrived just in time.

Tip: Without credible motivation, responses and actions seem convenient, if not contrived.

How to fix the coincidence issue?

~ Plan your plot—and causally.

As Don Maass put it, “Every scene should be so essential that if you omit one, the whole thing unravels.”

~ Introduce objects and people in advance.

Never add characters, details, or characteristics only as the need arises.

~ Transform sequentiality into causality.

            Build your story not on what happens, but what motivates subsequent events.

Isn’t it curious how often coincidence crops up in fiction?  Convenient as that might be, only causality can earn an ending satisfying to both you and your readers.

Characters with Character

We call oddball eccentrics “characters.” Yet character is also the possession of attributes, often moral, and characters are the individuals enacting a plot. Compile all these definitions, and you get—story.

Story harnesses entertainment to make morality easier to swallow. Based on that, your characters need equal parts moral fiber and zany individuality.  Those are the building blocks for making characters more “real” than real people.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner reminds us that “The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.”  The more your plot delivers that, then the more complex emotions your readers will experience. So you need conflict—big conflict, even the danger is exclusively psychological.

Adversity tests a character’s character. Will you answer the quest? Continue despite seemingly insurmountable odds? Earn the love, happiness, respect, honor, or victory that the antagonist mercilessly struggles to rip from you?

Robert McKee has said that the pressure the antagonist exerts brings out the best in a character. It also brings out the best in the reader, who begins wondering, “Would I fight that hard?” “Are my own struggles as weighty as those the protagonist faces?” “How can I not feel empathy for a battle of this magnitude?” How come the great human issues never change?

Your readers respond that way because of the emotional, causal, and moral nature of fiction. As Robert McKee put it in Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature. We relate to characters as if they were real, but they're superior to reality. Their aspects are designed to be clear and knowable; whereas our fellow humans are difficult to understand, if not enigmatic. We know characters better than we know our friends because a character is eternal and unchanging, while people shift - just when we think we understand them, we don't.

Creating characters who are metaphorical works of art is a tall order. What makes that happen?

~ Breed empathy.

Your antagonist(s) can help.

~ Emphasize resilience.

            Who loves a whiner?

~ Celebrate morality.

Life is unfair. Should fiction be?

~ Liberate your characters.

            Unless you set them free, how can they surprise you or anyone else?

Tip: Don’t just incorporate tension. Use it to reveal and build character.

Dealing with the Devil in those Details

For novelists and everyone else, detail sometimes involves a trick, curve, mystery or problem that’s invisible until—it’s too late. The phrase evolved from “God is in the detail,” and the author of triumphant details certainly achieves a succinct universality unavailable to mere mortals.

Since details are the stuff that novels are made of, how does the devil infiltrate?

~ Tedium.

   

The less new you can make it, then the faster you should say it.

~ Melodrama.

If someone’s dying or a country’s being raped, resist the temptation to explain that this is horrible. Let vivid, understated details convey the point for you.

~ Repetition.

            Why say it specifically, then generally? Or the other way around.  This inadvertent habit

            insinuates condescension. In other words, it presumes that readers can’t figure it out

            without a few versions. So don’t patronize. Even accidentally. Even if you certainly never

            intended ill will. Or insulting your readers is the last thing you want. See how annoying it

            becomes in no time at all?

~ Self-indulgence.

With rare exceptions, detail enhances story only when it enriches character and/or plot. Make the setting reveal character and heighten tension.

~ Uniformity.

            Don’t keep piling up similar details. No matter how vituperative the villain or angelic the

infant or pure the snow, provide nuance and dimensionality.

~ Significance

“Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life” (James Wood). Emphasize the details you want readers to notice. This sounds silly! But it’s easy to distract yourself with the vividness of an image or sound of a sentence and lose track of what matters about this scene.

~ Approximation.

“The truth of the story lies in the details” (Paul Auster). You annoy readers by

confusing the location of Times Square or crucial dates of  WWII. You also annoy

readers by trampling psychological and moral truth in the characters you create.

~ Fogginess.

“Nothing is less real than realism,” Georgia O'Keeffe observed. “Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”  No matter how autobiographical your fiction, choose details to reveal pattern and cement credibility. Offer the focus that reality cannot.

Tip: If the detail isn’t adding, it’s subtracting.

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.

Don’t Name That Donkey

You know you want to. Perhaps you already have. Jenny or Jack, Don or Danielle, you worked hard to imagine every aspect of this scene. How big is the pasture, how decrepit the barn, how blue the sky, how scratchy the straw. As a novelist, it’s your job to visualize all that. But that’s not your primary job. What is? Deciding what distracts and cutting it.

So. If Donatello merely shakes off flies rather than motivating or executing the upcoming murder, we don’t care that he prefers clover to alfalfa. And he doesn’t need a name.

Tip: The fact that you created or discovered it doesn’t mean that you should include it.

Why not omit all the extraneous material that clogs novels? Here’s a start:

~ Heaps of adjectives.

            Do you really need more than one? If it’s the right one?

~ Personal memories.

            Does this matter to the story, or only to you?

~ Fun facts.

            Do they make your novel more fun—or less?

~ Repetition.

            Do readers really want watch another character learn what readers already know?

Lack of focus blurs narrative—any kind of narrative. Aristotle laid this down in The Poetics, where he said that fiction imitates reality, but not exactly. 

That’s because story is orderly rather than chaotic; it transforms random details into a credible and causal pattern that an audience can follow. Excessive or irrelevant detail, however fascinating, interferes.  Unless specifics add tension or clarify causality, they actually subtract.

In an intriguing twist, playwright/actor Sean Grennan served on a jury and offered attorneys advice on how narrative engages and persuades. Here’s an excerpt from “Unsolicited Advice,” published in The American Bar Association Journal:

If your practice involves talking to a jury, then your profession is storytelling….Rule # 1: (Less is more. (See also: Try not to bore us.)… In good storytelling, anything that’s not your friend is your enemy, just like Thanksgiving with your family.

Take that wonderful, genius, world-changing, vivid detail you’ve come up with, and if it is a digression, delete it. Anything that slows or distracts or confuses is a problem.

Like the name of that donkey. Make your case. Delete clutter. Let your primary characters breathe and act—without Darcy the darling, dappled, dimple-cheeked, dreamy, drama queen.

Do you serve a buffet?

Long, food-laden tables aren’t just popular because of all that food. The variety attracts. So does the freedom. Once you pass the meat and seafood and advance to the salad items, you can always return for one more shrimp. You can circle the table to sample a mini-brownie before you dig into that crab cake. It’s all available at whatever order and pace you choose.

Readers can’t control fiction that way. However obvious it seems, it’s significant that nearly every reader proceeds in a linear fashion. Of course one can skim, backtrack, or peek at the ending. What readers can’t do is position the setting beside the dialogue or help themselves to more of this and less of that. The buffet that fiction ought to provide is the writer’s gift and responsibility.

Why wouldn’t every writer host a buffet every time?

• It’s easier for writers to focus on one thing at a time, such as dialogue.
• It’s easier not to shift gears, because then you don’t need as many transitions.
• If you adore setting, for example, you might overdo it at the expense of action.
• If you see the complete picture already, you might not notice its absence from the page.

 How can you break this habit of offering only desserts or appetizers instead of a full buffet?

~ Improve your skill with transitions.

Make friends with transitions. Once you bridge acting with thinking, tension with backstory, and so on, you’ll shift more willingly, knowing your readers can follow. Build transitions from the underlying similarity between what’s going on and where, between gesture and symbol, and between rumination and behavior.  What better way to engage reader emotions than to create a whole world instead of one part?

~ Read like a reader.

As Harper Lee put it in To Kill a Mockingbird, imagine someone else’s consciousness by willingness to “climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”  This isn’t easy. It is doable.

~ Imitate reality.

When we converse, we still notice surroundings. If we terminate a job, investment,  friendship, or marriage, we experience a range of emotions, all of which impact all our perceptions. For credibility, fiction must re-create a world where more than one thing goes on at a time. That’s reality. Fiction must follow.

~ Accentuate with contrast.

Description matters in novels only when it supports the characters. Tension enhances dialogue, which enhances action. “Light can only be understood with the wisdom of darkness,” said Ka Chinery. Since readers can’t supply what’s missing, make sure that you do.

Tip: Break the habit of long stretches of dialogue, description, or narration. Blend them.

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.