“A Muse of Fire”

Shakespeare’s Henry V begins with, “O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention,” a plea to transform the bare stage of the Globe into a French battleground. This great storyteller then asked something of the spectators: “let us…on your imaginary forces work.” Suppose that “when we talk of horses, that you see them.” Here’s the climax: “‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.”

Tip: The audience, reader or spectator, completes the picture.

Like the playwright, the novelist sets the stage, introduces the cast, and pits characters against each other. But that’s not worth much if everything is so blatantly clear that the audience can’t participate, or so painfully unclear that the audience can’t participate.

How do you let readers use their own imaginations just enough? Other than Aristotle himself, few people have sharper instincts about the mechanics of fiction than writer/agent Don Maass. His cardinal insight is that if it isn’t original, readers won’t buy it.

This is a classic argument. Plato and Aristotle, his pupil, disputed whether the truth of facts trumps the originality of story. We now agree that neither history nor story is superior. Each has a different purpose: fiction’s is to create a compelling, causal whole from what happened.

Tip: The quality of story comes from infusing a chain of events with your individuality.

To do that, you must dive deep inside. As Robert Browning urged, the “reach should exceed the grasp/Or what’s a heaven for?” Sometimes, of course, you reach down, and—nothing’s there.  Your antagonist upstages your protagonist. A scene feels challenging beyond your abilities. When novelist heaven seem beyond your grasp, “C’mon, baby, light your fire.”

~ Distract yourself. Run, dance, commune with your music. Media can also work, though less effectively because it can deaden rather than invigorate.

~ Stimulate yourself. Do a little research, interview your characters, change your plot line, write scenes out of order. Remind yourself what you love about your book, your writing, and you.

~ Tease yourself. Forbid yourself backstory. Introduce secrets. Base conversation on what’s implied rather than said (subtext). End chapters within scenes (interrupted scene). Break habits!

At its best, fiction gives just enough, so that like Shakespeare’s play, battlefields arise from a combination of the author’s words, the characters’ actions—and the reader’s mind.

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.

The Language of Rapture, the Rapture of Language

People usually associate “rapture” less with ascension into heaven than the experience of heaven here on earth. This often relates to romantic rather than spiritual passion. According to A.E. Housman, “If truth in hearts that perish/Could move the powers on high/I think the love I bear you/Should make you not to die.” That’s a whole lot of emotion in not very many mostly one-syllable words.

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte is less understated. But the expression of Catherine’s love for Heathcliff could make anyone yearn to reject the fiancé and instead become a ghost inhabiting the beloved for eternity: “he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

Words might seem less rapturous than other art forms, because language affects daily life in ways that sculpture or sonatas don’t. But as Diane Setterfield puts it in The Thirteenth Tale, “There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”

And while poets possess many crafty devices not entirely available to prose writers, novelists possess a very large bag of rapturous tricks. Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants is about love between friends, between humans and animals, and between spouses: “I stroke her lightly, memorizing her body. I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin. I lie motionless, savoring the feeling of her body against mine. I’m afraid to breathe in case I break the spell.” 

But rapture in language is neither mainly about love nor exclusively from poetry. Any genre can capture rapture, whether romance, passion, spirituality, philosophy, or morality. Here’s a beginning by Neil Gaiman from Anansi Boys: “The great beasts were sung into existence, after the Singer had done with the planets and the hills and the trees and the oceans and the lesser beasts. The cliffs that bound existence were sung, and the hunting grounds, and the dark.”

Tip: To find the words to express rapture, you must first visualize rapture in your novel’s world.

That’s what novels can do to readers—for decades, for centuries. However weightless, words originate magic. As Shakespeare observed, “If this be error, and upon me prov’d/I never writ nor no man ever loved.”

“Hamlet” and the Concept of Story

If you can possibly see American Players Theater’s superb version of Hamlet or any other version, go for it. Why would today’s novelists care? Because this isn’t just a psychoanalysis of a neurotic guy or a righting of the moral order (“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!”). Shakespeare tackles the nature of storytelling itself.

The play cleverly opens with someone other than Hamlet confirming the validity of his murdered father’s ghost. We know the ghost is “real.” But only Hamlet hears the instruction to wreak revenge, and “there’s the rub.” Does the ghost seek justice, or does it ascend from hell to doom Hamlet’s soul? In other words, how do we know what’s true?

The entire play flirts with this. Hamlet looks to theatre for the answer. He’ll study the king’s response to a dramatization of the ghost’s version of events: “The play’s the thing,/Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

To gather information, Hamlet feigns madness. Yet even Ophelia’s ridiculous dad (Polonious) says of Hamlet, “this be madness, yet there is method in‘t.” Method indeed. Hamlet’s step-father (Claudius) freaks at the re-enactment of how he poisoned his brother to steal throne and queen. It’s a lot more convincing than mere “Words, words, words.”

But when Hamlet unwittingly kills his “girlfriend” Ophelia’s father, she goes quite literally mad. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Now Hamlet’s supposed friends become enemies, and enemies (like Ophelia’s vengeful brother) become friends. Treacherous Claudius convicts himself, leading directly to “The rest is silence.” The play concludes with nearly every character dead, and only Hamlet’s loyal friend Horatio left to fulfill Hamlet’s last request: “Tell my story.”

This tragedy transcends one story to capture the power of storytelling itself—an art so persuasive that Plato wanted to drive all storytellers from the city. As a novelist, you’re a storyteller, and whatever genre you write in, this play teaches some new old tricks.

~ Convince us. (Shakespeare uses a ghost to prove that Hamlet isn’t mad.)

~ Tease us. (The ghost is tangible. But is its message real?)

~ Play us. (Hamlet refuses to be played on like an instrument. But in the end, he, too, is dead, as we both did and didn’t expect.)

~ Entertain us. (Even in this tragedy, there’s flirtation, sensuality, and both wry and broad humor. Tragedy needs humor; humor needs edge.)

~ Persuade us. (As Hamlet puts it, “More matter with less art.” Focus on the substance, not just the style.)

~ Move us. (The uncertainty, pain, vulnerability, and courage—Hamlet is all of us.)

Tip: As Cole Porter put it, “Brush up your Shakespeare.” You won’t be sorry.

The Timeless Story

Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” and Verdi’s opera “Rigoletto” were originally set in Italy, around the 16^th century. How amazing, then, that you can move either of them four centuries forward, to an iconic location like Las Vegas or New York, and watch the same characters unfold the same story, conveying the same emotions and themes. If the heart of a story is true, it can happen anywhere, any time. It’s eternal.

Baritone Zeljko Lucic admitted that it made no difference to him whether he played Rigoletto as a jester in Mantua or a comedian at a strip club: the character stayed the same. He’s an archetype: a father whose cruelty and vengeance destroys his beloved daughter, just as irrational hatred destroys Romeo and Juliet or Tony and Maria.

How timeless is your story?

Could you move your story to ancient Rome or futuristic Marstopia and reveal identical truths? Wouldn’t it be great if you could?

·         Reduce your story to fundamentals. It doesn’t matter whether the protagonist is a NASA

astronaut or a Greek philosopher. What basic dilemma does she face, and how will the plot

skeleton resolve that? (Incidentally, this is the best approach for a logline, if you’re working on

that.)

·         Free your plot from specific conditions or circumstances. If those disappear, so does your plot. So do your characters. Eternal stories come from the human foibles and passions that endure wherever people are.

·         Unearth the changeless conflicts of your story, like love versus duty, or survival versus freedom.  These may not be obvious. But they’re in there. If they’re really not, discover them. Add them. Build your story around them.

Tip: Dig deep to compose a story that isn’t about this group of people, but all people everywhere.

The truths that unite everyone make novels haunting. Isn’t that what you want for yours?