Story: Sympathy and Significance

The integration of character with plot moves us as few things can. Here’s an example. Among three 4-D shorts at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium is “Sea Monsters: A prehistoric Adventure (National Geographic, 2007). 

That genre and topic might sound irrelevant to the contemporary novel. Actually, though, the story of a young marine dinosaur named Dolly provokes acute understanding of evolution,  fossil hunting, and one prehistoric creature’s existence. The movie exploits adventure and mystery to teach science and connect with distance that’s difficult to conceive. Whether animated film or fiction, story lets humans remember, relate, perhaps even rectify. That’s the common thread between dolls, dolomite, and Don Juan, along with billions of other possibilities. All of it starts with character.

~ Character

The star of this particular story is a Dolichorhynchops from the vast inland sea of Kansas 80 million years ago. That world feels close and vital less due to 4-D (including rumbling and a bit of splashing) than a protagonist with a plight culminating in more than one happy ending.

Empathy comes from identifying with another being—human or otherwise. Fortunately, face-to-face experience evokes kindness in most primates. But from afar, when beings vastly differ in appearance, lifestyle, habitat, or time span, empathy comes harder, too often disintegrating into a sense of “Other”: “You’re not like me, so I don’t have to care.” 

That where story comes in. Once readers connect, they feel compassion, even when the species has an unfamiliar, unpronounceable name. Happily, characterization often shatters distrust of “Otherness.”

~ Plot.

Dolly’s Super-Objective, or primary goal, is surviving long enough to reproduce. Around 80 million years later, paleontologists from Kansas to Australia, from 1918 to 2002, have their own Super-Objective. What can they learn about Dolly from the fossil she has become? Like all good stories, theirs has elements of mystery, of change.

The journey of a character, whether from another world, timeframe, or continent, always involves external pressure. The interaction between environment and Super-Objective instigates plot. The secret behind all those childhood favorites (“Curious George,” “The Velveteen Rabbit,” “The Little Engine that Could”) is the same secret that drives novelists from Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston: Will this character I’ve come to care about get the job done? By the deadline?

Strong plots follow the classical pattern: The protagonist is in trouble. As Charles Baxter put it, “Hell is story friendly.” Then the protagonist must have enough perseverance, chutzpah, and skill to continue struggling even when it seems hopeless. Dolly has quite a battle with that shark. And the entire audience breathes a huge sigh of relief when she escapes with only the small wound that will solve the mystery of her life story (a fragment of shark tooth embedded in her skeleton). 

Plot and protagonist must be inseparable. Unless we care about the character, no amount of plot will matter. Unless something’s relentlessly progressing, even the best-drawn  character can’t sustain the story.

~ Theme.

It’s the reward for integrated character and plot. Depending on how you interpret theme, every story has it, even if it’s mainly that detectives must look beneath the surface to compute whodunit, or love’s better the second time around, or look before you leap.

The themes in this short film are immense. The rocks are full of stories. Fossils are stories. The stories of the dead live well beyond their material existence. And those who hunt those stories become stories themselves. 

Tip: Whatever you want to say, let your story—and only your story—say it.

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.

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.

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?

Time, Tides—and Writers

Waves and tides ebb and flow, occasionally punctuated by unpredictable upheavals, as anyone knows from standing in the surf or gliding across it.

Tip: Pleasure comes from both patterns and unexpected disruption of them.

Most writers discover the rhythms of language one at a time. The most obvious one escalates from conflict to climax. But like those varieties of ocean waves, novels offer many interacting rhythms.

~ The protagonist’s journey

Christopher Vogler famously argued that the rhythm of all fiction, from screenplay to novel, comes from a hero reluctantly agreeing to confront a troubled world and change it. Ideally, this rhythm climaxes with self-knowledge for the hero and justice for the world.

~ An arc for each sub-plot.

The best novels intersect several interconnected journeys. For each of these, relief disappears over and over until the final pages offer resolution—or failure.

~ Scene versus sequel or summary.

Regardless of what you call whatever’s out of scene, every novel has a basic rhythm of drama, condensation, drama, condensation. The trick is creating seamless flow.

~ Rhythm within the sentence, paragraph, scene.

Humans appreciate three-part structure: issue, development, resolution. Happily, you can employ this to revise fiction at every level.

That’s lots of patterns. Now what?

·         * Notice. Just considering the relationships between patterns helps you see your manuscript more clearly, so you can revise it more effectively.

·         * Vary. You want tension on every page, yes. But do you want all tension all the time? No.

·        *  Accentuate. The fun of patterns is enjoying relief until—whoosh—a monster wave changes the landscape. That gets everyone’s attention. Use emphasis to reveal significance.

·         * Surprise. The reader didn’t see that breaker coming any more than the character did. Astonishment is among fiction’s greatest joys. But not by cheating. Every gigantic groundswell must feel probable. In fiction that means you provided a clear yet subtle hint a while back.

Pattern-recognition originally helped the earliest humans distinguish tall grass from predator, something to eat from something to avoid. In fiction, pattern and disruption control everything from aesthetics to momentum, tension, and empathy. Use the rhythms of your fiction to make waves.

Only a Click Away

Tip: The better you see, then the better your readers will.

Sit in a public place and observe the people with their phones. Don’t whip out your own and start photographing or texting. Don’t call or email anyone about what you see. Resist that temptation. Obsession, maybe? Just watch. Remember that?

A smart phone lets you see with a camera instead of only with your eyes. The views differ radically. Once you frame the world to fit a rectangle or panorama, you’ve changed it, however slightly.  And that affects your readers more than slightly.

Good novels create a reality that’s sharper, acuter, and more “real” than reality itself. Can video, slo-mo, burst, or series of clicks capture the fullness and intensity of the entire world? What camera can compete with the five senses plus the human imagination?

Well over a century back, Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this. “Each and All” mourns the fact that snippets and souvenirs can’t reproduce the forest or seashore:

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

Is photography depriving you of what Emerson calls “the perfect whole”? If so, that deprives your readers, as well. Perhaps a bit of sensory immersion would help.

Put down your phone. Disconnect yourself from everything except the physical world around you. Take a moment to touch, hear, see, smell, maybe taste. In this scene…

What’s most beautiful?

What’s ugliest?

What’s most intriguing?

What contains potential danger?

What contains potential pleasure?

How would you make someone care about the least interesting detail here?

How would you make someone care about the least empathetic person here?

What astonishes you?

What’s a metaphor to describe “the perfect whole”?

Don’t give up until you have a good answer for each question.

What Ezra Pound called making it “new” is less about seeing something different than finding what’s different in the presumably ordinary. It’s more comfortable to reach for the exotic. But if you’re a writer, originality is your job. Take it all in so your readers can. According to Kurt Heinzelman in “Make it new: The Rise of an Idea,” the writer’s task is renewing via a “return to origins.” Where do you find that? Many things originate in the external world—and at least sometimes you need to view them without the frame a camera imposes.

Transformation of, by, and for the Novel

Many of us write novels because there’s truth we want to express, an ideal we want our characters to portray. We may even hope to promote change. Yet those truths and ideals raise the question of whether books exert any substantial and lasting power.

Some argue that they do. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he purportedly said,  “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War?” Lincoln was right about so many things. But maybe not about this. Can fiction really change thoughts,  beliefs, politics, or lives? How much influence do books really have?

English profs read many novels. Yet lit majors aren’t necessarily more moral or compassionate or better-adjusted than anyone else. Does this suggest that every insight evaporates once the eyes scan “The End?” Transformation is elusive. It’s mysterious. You can’t measure it empirically—which doesn’t prove that it never happens.

Lots of people retain faith in the capacity of “art” to transform, to change what we do or how we feel. The local paper here listed a speech by Favianna Rodriguez called “How Art Can Shift Politics and Stop Rape Culture.” Elton John reminds us that “When all hope is gone/Sad songs say so much.”

At its best, art is universal because it probes the very deepest places in the human mind, the terrain where differences of culture, gender, race, or worldview dissipate. Deep inside there, most of us are remarkably similar—and have remained so for centuries. That’s why Shakespeare and Poe, Bach and Beethoven, Austen and the Bronte sisters still work.

For the novelist, the capacity to transform might begin with the perception of everyday reality. If your vision lets you detect the thrillingly extraordinary in the tediously ordinary, then you’re on your way to building a world, shaping a set of characters, and planning a series of events more credible and causal than life itself.

If the events you introduce transform your characters in a believable way, you’ve opened the door to transforming readers. After all, hasn’t fiction been doing that what since it was born?

Say you do transform a reader. Even before the novel ends, this person truly identifies with your characters—sees them as fellow humans rather than stick figures, empathizes with their plight. As the book closes, this reader feels that maybe X needn’t hate Y, that sharing with Y would feel good, that reaching out to Y might be possible.

If this represents true transformation, how long will it last? Hard to say. But if your book, however briefly, makes just one reader wiser, gentler, more generous or compassionate , isn’t that worth a great deal? No matter how long it lasts? Or doesn’t?

Even if your book is only one grain on the beach, one droplet of a single wave, over time, a lot of grains or droplets can produce major change. It takes a long, long time to build a mountain. It can take a long, long time to tear one down. Perhaps the transformation of readers—on our own time scale—is similar. Such patience doesn’t come easily when our beliefs are strong. But perhaps we need faith in time, in readers. In art.

Tip: Open yourself to transformation, and you’ll never know how much you affect someone you’ve never met.

The Good Guy, the Bad Guy, and the Opening

The average novel reader wants the protagonist to offer above-average appeal—instantly. The antagonist can be more leisurely. Unless the character evokes a big, fat yawn or shrug, you have more time to build in complication. But how do you get the protagonist to compel readers right away?

·         Raise the stakes.

Make whatever the character must gain or transcend mightily important.

·         Make us believe—absolutely—in the value of those stakes.

Ideally, the stakes aren’t just personal but also moral and social.

·         Incorporate vulnerability.

Male or female, this is a hero—but one cursed with an Achilles Heel.

·         Promote empathy.

Readers care most about protagonists who remind them of themselves.

·         Give your protagonist a fighting chance.

Why risk life or limb if there’s no hope of saving the drowning baby, the dying country, the vanishing world? If your hero can hope, so can we.

Once your protagonist begins the journey of dreadful choices resulting in personal growth, you can simultaneously develop protagonist and antagonist as they impinge on each other. How do you make your bad guy terribly, terribly bad, yet not exclusively so?

·         Even the stakes.

If we already know that the antagonist must or can’t win, why read the story?

·         Share the antagonist’s version of truth and justice.

Help us believe this interpretation, however wrong it obviously seems.

·         Humanize the antagonist.

Does he contemplate murder yet always produce a Mother’s Day card? Is he your own version of “Mad Men’s” disgusting yet intriguing Don Draper?

·         Sprinkle in a smattering of backstory.

If you had as rough a deal as your antagonist, maybe you’d tell that story also?

·         Make the antagonist mirror us.

Help us see, understand, and better accept our own foibles.

           

Tip: Make your protagonist instantly appealing and your antagonist potentially complex.

Not at All yet Completely New

At a Mount Holyoke College commencement speech, Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen warned that “Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘Bleak House,’ ‘The Sound and the Fury,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘A Wrinkle in Time,’ you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel.” Now that’s discouraging! But then she added this: “Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”

How true. And it isn’t just that each writer has an individual voice. Unless that voice captivates—and instantly—then we’ve heard it before, and it’s yesterday’s news.

Writing about death, dragons, and denial? Nothing new there. But watch what D. L. Burnett does in this passage from “In the Kingdom of the Dragons”:

“Death wasn’t as easy as Gaspotine the Dark expected. He tried denying it, choosing to believe this a fever-induced nightmare. Or perhaps he’d stayed in the Continuum too long and exhausted his flesh. Shortly he’d return to his Cavern of Diamonds, strong and virile.

The Niede, a primordial instinct like hunger and thirst but ninety-three times worse, demanded his spirit rejoin his body. He tried again and again until he’d lost half his mist.

He must really be dead.

Gaspotine thrashed his tail. The tip flew off. Shocked, he froze. These deteriorations had never happened before. But then he’d never died before, either.

Code decreed another Dragon must devour his remains, easing his spirit’s permanent transition into the Continuum, preventing him from returning to dead flesh. Tallasha the Resplendent had done that, but without diminishing the Niede.

Dragons shouldn’t die, especially the greatest current rider, Gaspotine the Dark.”

By creating a new world for us, Burnett offers insight into our own world. Imagine a Continuum where we survive after we’ve died, where we can ride silver waves and see the future. Imagine the lifeless body struggling to merge with the surviving spirit. Imagine feeling yourself too powerful—too special—for death to claim?

These are a dragon’s feelings. But how many humans have experienced them? More than empathy entices here (and empathy for dragons is pretty special): It’s the voice. Snappy sentences set off long ones; strong verbs like “thrashed,” “flew,” “froze,” and “devour” propel this forward.

The other strength here is harnessing the external to convey feelings. This wouldn’t work if Gaspotine whined about weakness, frustration, and anger. Instead, Burnett supplies the concreteness of “fever,” “Diamonds,” “hunger,” “thirst,” and the specificity of “ninety-three.” Those images lay a foundation for the shocking cannibalism of the Code and grip of “the Niede.” Burnett’s voice creates this new world—and our empathy for this tormented dragon.

Tip: It’s not necessarily your job to offer something “new.” It’s your job to use your voice to make whatever you describe feel completely new.