The Test of Time

A recent performance of Romeo and Juliet at American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, confirms that Shakespeare remains as alive and well-loved as ever. Even the famous balcony scene, which could well feel like the most painful of clichés, still captures how the world feels when you’re first in love, with the moon too inconstant for a vow, and goodnight evoking a taste of death. All that stands the test of time.

This early play (1595—a decade before King Lear) blends romance, slapstick, violence, and wit. Each lover undergoes a developmental arc during the brief span between love at first sight and untimely death. Their tragedy affects not only friends and family, but all Verona—and everyone who’s encountered not only the play’s beauty, but its meaning.

Romeo and Juliet accomplishes this not just by lacing tragedy with comedy. Or with quicksilver action proving that major events—pressure points—change people so there’s no turning back. The play’s great strength is its capacity to reveal real people with real emotions, who remain utterly relevant even though we no longer brandish swords and have cellphones to get messages safely through. The play’s great strength is its continuing relevance.

In Good Prose, Pulitzer-Prize winner Tracy Kidder observes that “Revelation, someone’s learning something, is what transforms event into story. Without revelation, a story of high excitement leaves us asking, ‘Is that all?’”

No work can stand the test of time if readers wonder whether “That’s all.” Nor is this a genre issue. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is an early romance, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is science fiction, and Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger is magical realism.

What makes a work stand the test of time? How can your novel have a shot at achieving that?

~ Landscape.

A novel needs characters that inhabit a very particular environment. Readers must be able to enter it, too, and this world must control what characters dream and whether those dreams can come true.

~ Innovation.

Does the novel offer a spin, idea, location, or dilemma distinct from everyone else’s?         Does it possess something only you can offer?

~ Impassioned emotion.

Do the characters evoke at least as much compassion, irritation, or delight as real people? Do readers experience strong feeling about the characters?

~ Texture.

Does the novel have sufficient substance that one could reread it and reach different insights? Will no two readers interpret it identically?

Tip: It’s not a matter of what you write about, but how you write it.

"Anansi Boys": Taking Risks Because You Have a Parachute Handy

Risk creates gorgeous prose, thrilling scenarios, and memorable characters. But risk without a means of protection is merely self-destructive. Neil Gaiman’s great talent is taking wild leaps, yet always landing safely. 

The character Fat Charlie Nancy has endless troubles: his father, brother, job, fiancé, and future mother-in-law. It’s partly his fault, but mostly not. His troubles take place in a world both magical and realistic, both sensuous and scary. How many writers humanely combine mystery with wit, folklore with justice, creepy bad guys with music, mythology, and the essence of family, evil, storytelling, and silliness? It’s all here.

How’d he do it? What parachutes does he use?

~ Create a narrator who’ll let you say what you want to. It’s all about voice.

    “Each person who ever was or is or will be has a song. It isn’t a song that anybody else wrote. It has its own melody, it has its own words. Very few people get to sing their song. Most of us fear that we cannot do it justice with our voices, or that our words are too foolish or too honest, or too odd. So people live their song instead.”

~ Invigorate familiar metaphors. This can surpass creating brand-new ones.

    “Daisy looked up at him with the kind of expression that Jesus might have given someone who had just explained that he was probably allergic to bread and fishes, so could He possibly do him a quick chicken salad: there was pity in that expression, along with almost infinite compassion.”

~ Create character with dialogue. Spider and Charlie each sound unique.

    “The ties of blood,” said Spider, “are stronger than water.”

“Water’s not strong,” objected Fat Charlie.

“Stronger than vodka, then. Or volcanoes. Or, or ammonia.”

~ Characterize quickly and concisely. Go for the sentence that speaks volumes.

    “Ahh,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. She could disapprove with just that one syllable.

~ Stay in voice when you shift time or offer transitions. Don’t freeze up.

    “Like all sentient beings, Fat Charlie had a weirdness quotient. For some days the needle had been over in the red, occasionally banging jerkily against the pin. Now the meter broke.”

~ Go a little wild. Just know where your parachutes are.

    “There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in clichés and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams…”

Tip: Find your own parachute and take your own leaps. You can’t pull back from what you never wrote.