Avoid Accidents!

Accidents can work wonders. People meet and fall in love, and perhaps if no asteroid hit the earth about 65 million years ago, no one could write or read this blog. But accidents and fiction are badly matched.

Plenty of accidents annoy or destroy. We leave the bread in the oven too long, saw lumber a quarter inch too short, delete favorite photos while making space in the Cloud, blurt painful things that never entirely disappear. Only the last one drives fiction. The others are entirely realistic and could deepen plot. Yet something’s missing.

Try this. “Prudence was minding her own business, when suddenly she decided to visit her mother’s grave, quit her job, end her marriage. Or she didn’t decide a thing, yet suddenly got struck by lightning, or a teen toying with his new handgun, or a car careening onto the sidewalk.”

Poor Prudence. Poor reader of a novel about Prudence. Suddenly? That enhances fiction about as much as “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…”

Fiction traces motive. Why suddenly end her marriage, and why’s she ruminating during the storm, especially when a random car veers onto the sidewalk? Why watch her ruminate at all?

Active choices have driven fiction for centuries. Even a novel as blatantly moralistic as Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” (1740, subtitled “Virtue Rewarded “) examines motive. Squire B doesn’t make his move until his mom dies, and Pamela mistrusts her supposed benefactor. After probing human behavior and its result, the novel concludes both happily and morally.

Today’s readers might not call this book “licentious,” balk at class difference, or applaud Pamela’s obsession with chastity. But they might all agree that the book’s core is what the character must learn, just as Darcy and Elizabeth must unlearn pride and prejudice in the novel of that title. Some things never change.

How much can characters learn from random events, however tragic? Such events reveal heroism and weakness. Sometimes they reveal whom we really love or what really matters. Yet fiction’s most intriguing messages involve dilemmas, human choices, and their resolutions. So you might try the following:

~ Watch for the word “suddenly.” Is it an easy solution to a fictional issue you’d be better off solving?

~ Beware external events as plot pivots. Yes, war, tornadoes, and forest fires change lives. But can they contribute as much as revealing human psychology through—human psychology?

~ Trace the consequences of decisions. In real life ambivalence determines lots of outcomes; we simply refuse to decide—and something results because of that. But how powerful is inaction in fiction? How powerful are outcomes based on external forces rather than personal choices?

The greatest stories trace not battles, but character response to them; not famine, but character response to it, not poverty, but character response to it. Does your novel rely on unfortunate or tragic happenstance, or on the outcome characters earn or fail to? We look to fiction for what life doesn’t provide.

Tip: Accidents are part of life but serve minimal purpose in fiction.

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.

Metaphors: Apt or Inept? Part II

People often enjoy lists of ten. Certain writers love commandments about what to do and not. So colleague Angela Rydell and I came up with:

The Ten Commandments of Metaphor

1. Thou shalt honor the similarity between the two things compared.

“Metaphor creates a meaning greater than the sum of its parts, because the parts interact.”  — Richard Sennett

2. Thou shalt not make wrongful use of clichés. 

“From metaphor we can best get hold of something fresh.” — Aristotle

3. Thou shalt not mix metaphors.

Careful what you include. One bad egg can spoil the whole pot of chili.

4. Thou shalt not superfluously ornament thy language with metaphors. 

 “To be successful… metaphor must be functional rather than decorative.” — Stephen Dobyns

5. Thou shalt not state the obvious.

Show, don’t tell.

6. Thou shalt remember meaning and keep it holy.

“A good metaphor fits so neatly that it fuses to and illuminates the meaning.” — Janet Burroway

7. Thou shalt not covet abstract language.

“No ideas but in things.”  — William Carlos Williams

8. Thou shalt dig deeper than obvious comparisons. 

“Metaphor says more in an instant than pages of explication can.” — Michelle Boisseau

9. Thou shalt not reveal how hard thou worked at writing. 

“The language must be careful and must appear effortless.  It must not sweat.  It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.” — Toni Morrison

10. Thou shalt honor precision. 

“The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning-bug.” — Mark Twain

Tip: Work hard at your metaphors. So your readers don’t have to.

Metaphors: Apt or Inept? Part I

Tony Hoagland says that

the only adequate way to describe [a metaphor] is by another metaphor.  It is a mystery hand going into a black mystery box.  The head says, “Fetch me a metaphor, hand,” and the hand disappears under a cloth.  A moment later, the hand reappears, metaphor in its extended palm.... A metaphor... is a fetching motion of the imagination.

That sounds great! But what does it mean? A bit less poetically, John Frederick Nims explains:

“Metaphor” is from the Greek word for transfer. In modern Greece, one can see delivery trucks with the word “METAФOPA” painted on their sides, they are metaphors on wheels, as it were, transferring goods from one place to another.  When we use metaphor, we transfer to one thing the identity of something else that we associate with it, as when we say that the heart of a cruel man is a stone or that a grumpy man is a bear.

Robert Frost called metaphor “saying one thing in terms of another.” More formally, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines metaphor as ”a…figurative expression, in which a word or phrase is shifted from its normal uses to a context where it evokes new meanings.”

Is this relevant to novelists? Orson Scott Card believes that “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” A good plot makes vicarious experience concrete for the reader—functioning as a metaphor for the theme. Metaphors add layers: the Mississippi as the road of life; a white whale as arrogance; a mockingbird as an innocent who only wants to sing.

Harper Lee’s getting lots of attention these days. Why? Because the mockingbird is a perfect metaphor for destroying innocence, whether child, outcast, or defendant. The metaphor she chose is permanently imprinted on our collective memory:

“Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it.

“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.  They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.  That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”  -- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

But what if she said “It’s a sin to kill a goat. After all, they just eat. Where’s the harm in that?” Would that substitution insure our continuing reverence for the name “Harper Lee”? Make us eager to hunt down anything she ever did or would write? To put it another way, “Would anyone still stalk the diamonds she penned?” Yeech.

Tip: A bad or mixed metaphor is much worse than no metaphor at all.

For what reason? If metaphors are so great, so haunting, why not just use them any way you want, as often as you want? Next time, the ten commandments of metaphor will offer ten reasons why.

Cassandra and the Causal Plot

Poor Cassandra was doomed to accurately prophecy but never be believed. This legendary clairvoyant has more to offer the topic of causality than mere alliteration. She raises the question: what makes people believe a prediction? If ancient Greek gods are involved, there’s not much you can do about convincing your audience. But if you’re plotting a novel and want it to seem credible, you need causality—the antithesis of life’s randomness.

In contrast to good or bad luck, causality means that actions have consequences. Foolish or self-centered choices incur costs, while moral behavior eventually bestows a metaphorical pot of gold.

In fiction, causality shows up in two distinct arenas:

~ Foreshadowing.

Cassandra warned the people of Troy neither to welcome gorgeous Helen nor trust the gigantic horse assembled outside the city. The Trojans ignored her—and paid dearly. Novelists, too, must pay for not looking ahead. Unless you sow the seeds for what’s coming, the theme won’t seem any more credible to the audience than Cassandra’s predictions did.

1.      Hint in the very first chapter at the protagonist resources that will produce the ending. Just be sure to hint rather than bludgeon.

2.      Make each scene lead inevitably to the next. Agent/author Don Maass reminds that scenes must be so tightly interwoven that if you remove one, the entire plot unravels. Each scene must cause what follows. No exceptions.

3.      Derive theme from the resolution of the plot. Want your themes to be the icing on the cake? Then directly correlate the protagonist’s choices with what protagonist and reader ultimately discover. Together.

~ Climax.

Whether it’s called “pressure point,” “arc,” “story promise,” or “inciting incident,” the opening impetus needs enough heft to get both characters and readers to the climax.

1. A credible climax develops from the opening launch.
2. An empathetic climax involves human actions and decisions. Avoid your own version of Athena forcing the Trojans to quit ignoring Cassandra.
3. A causal climax reveals how struggle summoned the protagonist’s best. That’s how you earn the ending

Tip: The novel’s opening explosion results in a chain of events that lead the protagonist to the climatic choice, which often resolves the initial dilemma.

You needn’t be Cassandra to know that while readers happily suspend disbelief , they’re terribly unhappy about inconsistency, randomness, or manipulation. Causality helps you view plot as far more fundamentally interconnected than a beginning, middle, and end. Which do you think your readers would prefer?

Ego, Egotism, and Authorship

Both “ego” and “egotism” can have a negative connotation, but only the latter always does. That’s because “ego” has to do with self, whereas “egotism” conveys an inflated sense of that.

If you believe you’re the only one in the world who could write this novel about Beethoven, basketball, or Baltimore, you’re an egotist. But if you believe you can—and should—complete and try to publish is novel about whatever, then you have enough ego to get the job done.

After all, according, to William Knowlton Zinsser, “Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”  Unless you believe you have something to say, why endure the labor and critique when the vast majority of us must keep our day jobs, anyway. Julian Baggini is right: “There is an inherent vanity in writing; believing you have something special to offer the world is built-in to the very act of putting your work out into the world.” 

Still, egoism and egotism remain distinct:

~ An egotist despises constructive criticism. How could anyone know more than she does?

~ An egoist welcomes constructive criticism. How else can you please yourself with the best

   novel you’re capable of producing?

~ An egotist believes he is among the best writers there ever were—if not the very best.

~ An egoist, more often than not, believes that it’s impossible to meet his own expectations.

~ An egotist relishes praise; it’s always well-deserved.

~ An egoist might fear praise; maybe the result was good this time. What if it never is again?

~ An egotist is, at least publically, eternally free of self-doubt.

~ An egoist, alone or out in the world, is rarely free of self-doubt.

~ An egotist doesn’t believe in hard work. Why bother when you already excel?

~ An egoist generally loves hard work, because both the work and the product contribute to

   identity.

Here’s the question: which do you love more, your novel or yourself? According to Thomas Mallon, “George Orwell in his essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946)…indicates a clear awareness that self-loathing and self-love are locked in a tight, procreative embrace.” But is that “self-love” egotistical or egoistical? And is the source of creativity egotism or egoism?

In The Moonflower Vine, Jetta Carleton writes, “Yet none of these things gave him confidence. All they gave him was egotism, which is less the conviction of one's worth than the desire for that conviction.”

Writing is hard work, and as everyone already knows, you won’t always be rewarded, or not as much you deserve, or perhaps not at all. That means you’ll need lots of faith, hope, and stamina to write, revise, and publish a novel. Many writers are fragile souls, prone to “self-loathing” without even a smattering of egotism. Excessive doubt can be as self-defeating as its antithesis.

Tip: Resist the temptation to think either too much—or too little!—of your book and your talent. 

Detail and Shadow

Most writers relish details the way they cherish words: how can you possibly amass enough? Yet details are like chocolate. Continue after you should quit, and the result is queasiness. Or worse.

19^th century writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich said, “I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.”

Here in the 21^st century “wings” are generally restricted to literal flight. The language has changed, but not its truth: the smallest possible number of precise details let readers engineer their own flights.

The right detail is worth ten or twelve almost-right ones. This isn’t just a matter of leaving readers enough space; it also involves perception.

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow. ― Leonardo da Vinci

What underlies this observation? The significance of dimness, of ambiguity, of the part you have to squint to bring into focus—and it might still remain indistinct anyway.

The history of photography, of how we make imagery permanent, has much to offer novelists. Picture yourself in a darkroom, dipping the print-to-be in its bath, waiting for an image to emerge, waiting to see what you captured.  Even though we can now see what we capture as fast as our fingers can move, patience remains the fiction writer’s ally. Yes, it’s great to have 50 chances to get the shot. But you have let all of them go except the one that offers both shadow and light, that guides readers without blocking the view. Present all your attempts, and you’ve erased every shadow.

Keep” taking shots” until you achieve the picture that gives readers of what they sought in the first place: the privilege of discovering where the shadows begin. Here’s an example:

Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed―linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load. ― Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

Powers gives us lots of metaphors, each providing a clue to what’s missing. The details make this happen: “training bra,” “noun” or “verb,” impetuous marriage, and “beams” that offer no support.  In about fifty words, readers discover something about Helen, the person describing her, and the discomfort of non-communication. He loves metaphors—and many of us love him for that! Because the metaphors are never definitive—only suggestive. Each reader can interpret a little differently. Grant your own readers that opportunity.

Tip: Leave room for the shadows.