“Awwww” versus Awe

Neither including the sound "awww" nor "telling about the concept "awe"is likely to evoke the desired reader response. But "showing" either?  Perhaps juxtaposed? Ahhhh. Here’s why.

Awe comes from perceiving perception, as in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See:

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away.

Or from spirituality versus practicality in Colson Whitehead’sThe Underground Railroad: 

Poems were too close to prayer, rousing regrettable passions. Waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you. Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

Don’t you experience awe when someone explains the incomprehensible?

Looking a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept with sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn't afford them anymore. ― Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

In contrast, “Awww,” like ice cream that never melts, is cleaner and happier: 

Although there are times I'd give anything to have her back, I'm glad she went first. Losing her was like being cleft down the middle. It was the moment it all ended for me, and I wouldn't have wanted her to go through that. — Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

But perhaps most effective of all is an unexpected pivot. In Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sabbathday River, the shift from “aww” to awe represents not a doll’s murder, but a child’s:

 She saw, freshly, the two blond little girls in smocked dresses on the television commercial; she could hear the happy jingle extolling the doll's mind-bending ability to wet. And her name: Sallie Smiles! (The exclamation mark thoughtfully provided by the manufacturer.) Naomi Roth's parents--they of the Little Red School House and Pete Seeger persuasion--had been horrified, naturally enough, but she must have had her fill of ant farms and nonsexist creative discovery objects. The small blond pixies on the television were the company she kept in her fantasy of the parallel childhood she was not leading. She coveted the doll.     

When it disappeared, less than a week after her birthday, she had waited before panicking.Then she approached her parents, whose unmistakable relief over her carelessness--the carelessness they assumed, despite her denials--was clear. Naomi's older brother declined to shed light on the situation, but months afterward it was from his window that she saw her doll again, grimy in city filth on the roof of the apartment building next door. It lay on its stomach against the asphalt, its bright face obscured, its fleshy pink hue bleached to stark white, and the legs between which it had wet so endearingly splayed to the extent of its somewhat limited hip sockets.

Tip: Expand your novel’s world by capturing rather than mentioning “aww” or awe.

Within reason, novel readers enjoy extravagance. After all, novels must be novel, meaning lavish but not excessive, offering abundance without melodrama. Without emptying your bank account with out-of-season fruit and always out-of-season jewelry, how might you accomplish this?

~ Scenario.

Does yours magnetize? Do you embody an idea into a concrete place like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad? Instead of just courtroom drama, do you reinforce spiritual questions with Biblical references as Jean Hand Korelize does in The Sabbathday River? Is there more you can do with your Concept, or your original, haunting, and compact design?

~ Larger than life Characters.

You don’t need a heroic, gorgeous, wealthy, or powerful protagonist. Great characters, like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in The Death of a Salesman, remain memorable. Are yours?

~ Language.

Whether ironic, humorous, lyrical, or idiosyncratic, is something about your voice lush? Consider what that word symbolizes and rhymes with. Character clothing might be plush, and even slush can beckon when flavored rather than coating sidewalks. Experiment with poetic techniques until sighing all the way, you must cut, cut, cut. But you can’t cut what you never composed.

~ Setting.

“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” (Star Wars), “a dark and stormy night” was vivid. Not anymore, and readers still expect a sense of place.  As John Gardner puts it The Art of Fiction, the writer 

must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole orld in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...” 

Setting isn’t backdrop; it’s part of the whole, and no cliche can create a landscape that feels palpable. There’s more than one path to that vividness. Here’s the terrain in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness:

All brightness was gone, leaving nothing. We stepped out of the tent onto nothing. Sledge and tent were there, Estraven stood beside me, but neither he nor I cast any shadow. There was dull light all around, everywhere. When we walked on the crisp snow no shadow showed the footprint. We left no track. Sledge, tent, himself, myself: nothing else at all. No sun, no sky, no horizon, no world.

~ Goodness/morality. 

From the start, fiction has been a vehicle for the best in human nature. Include in your characters’ yearning a passion to fix or at least improve the broken world.

Tip: Treat your readers to the extravagance that fiction can provide.

Tracks in the Snow: Mystery, Meaning, and Metaphor

Last weekend we woke to unidentifiable footprints out the front door. After omitting the usual suspects (Cat? Dog? Raccoon? Fox?) we were at a loss. Still are. Still perplexed. And slightly perplexed is mightily entertaining. It triggers the imagination, invites you to solve a puzzle, and keeps you alert and engaged. Will there be a different, better hint?

Tip: The great secrets of fiction leave you wondering, long after the clues melt away.

In this sense, every novel is a mystery novel—whether or not you include corpses or detectives. Your readers try to guess what’s ahead, what this detail signifies, and how the protagonist earns the ending. If you’re doing your job right, they continue guessing. Until the end. That’s where the surprise materializes. Not a total one, of course. The best endings leave readers scratching their heads over all those clever clues—not one of them misleading—that cause the ending. But never obviously. That’s where ambiguity comes in.

Milan Kundera observed that “The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.” To approach an almost-imitation of life, fiction can’t be too clear. After all, in reality, when is any choice or belief or outcome ever crystalline? For example, is the borderline between life and death always a given?

That’s why Joyce Carol Oates said that novelists toy with “The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to ‘overcome’ doubt.”  If you already know all the answers, are you sure that fiction is what you want to write? 

Like Oates, Scott Turow, famed for legal thrillers, believes that “The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.” What motivates folks to keep reading if you spell everything out?

Readers want footprints—visible, but not unequivocally identifiable. One of the best ways to get there? Metaphor.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse relies heavily on the central metaphor of its title. But what exactly does it mean? The unattainable? The illuminating? The permanent in the face of mortality? Art? Love? All of the above?

The fun is guessing, just as it’s fun to speculate why Jonathan Franzen called his book “Purity,” why Shauna Singh Baldwin chose the title “What the Body Remembers,” or the precise meaning of the bloom at the center of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The White Rose.

Guessing keeps people turning pages. Or pondering pawprints. Those melted before we could figure them out. And that’s okay, because “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity,” Sigmund Freud claimed. And ambiguity is the privilege of drawing your own conclusions.

We can continue daydreaming about what marvelous creature strolled across our yard in the dark of night. Ambiguity lets things linger in memory. Fiction holds that same power. If you let it.