The Shopping Cart and the Novelist

Consider this random grocery list, left behind at a supermarket.

Anything strike you?

That’s what this blog’s about. Not a suggestion that if you can’t fix a passage or find a publisher, stock up on butter pecan ice cream, toffee peanuts, chocolate syrup, and marshmallow fluff for topping. Nor will the following suggest how to build a character from a mash-up of income, hair color, education, favorite TV show, and place of birth. Instead, here’s the deal.

Tip: The wonderfully unexpected is available everywhere; you only need to notice.

And that’s mostly a matter of habit. Because finding pattern in chaos approximates the age of humanity itself. Things have changed, though:  

Surprise, the unknown, is all around us, but due to the way human beings live now, our lives are built to streamline through, to desperately try and cut through surprise, mystery, or ignorance. All the information in the world is available from a computer screen. — J.P. Shiel, “The Element of Surprise: A Storyteller’s Secret Weapon”

For creators in any field, including fiction, the price paid for that instantaneous knowledge is high. We’re no longer continually on the hunt for the observations to protect our families, no longer sifting and sifting to recall a particular fact. It’s easier just to look it up, and that includes storm watches and warnings.

This means it’s harder for the cook or woodworker or novelist to surprise herself. That’s not good, because as Jane K. Cleland puts it, “The best surprises add significant insights to the characters involved in that surprise, while setting up future suspenseful situations.” It’s why people don’t want to know the ending of the book or movie in advance. Surprise is fun.

Now what’s this got to do wth shopping carts? Scrutinizing details is among the many potential strategies for perceiving pattern and producing surprise. For example, what can you infer from the list above?

     Lots of brand names

     Both fancy tortellini and pedestrian hamburger

     Few carbs

     No desserts

If you wanted to, couldn’t you use this list to build a profile, shape a character, compose a backstory? You probably don’t want to, because that’s unlikely to improve your novel. Here’s what will, though:

~ Notice everything around you. Seek the unfamiliar in the familiar.

~ Recognize “found art.” Ruminate on its meaning.

~ Check for patterns in the apparently random. This might take practice.

~ Look for potential organization in what seems totally chaotic.

~ Train yourself to brainstorm without censorship. Inhibition thwarts creativity.

Next time you find someone else’s list, imagine the story behind it. This will open you to a more insightful and original version of that story you really want to tell.

What Can Cats Teach Novelists?

Cat tales arrive as Puss in Boots or Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, along with a presence in romance, mystery, fantasy, and mainstream. This collection purrs, speaks, intimidates, and remains aloof. But do the cats teach? As they themselves might say, this depends on how you look at it.

Cats either represent or illustrate attributes useful to every novelist:

~ Curiosity 

If there’s a box—they’ll test it; a drape—they’ll climb it; a noisy thing that moves—they’ll chase. While their owners prefer to have the drapes left alone, as a novelist, it’s a fine idea to contemplate everything. And then? Catlike, you decide it isn’t actually all that interesting and move on to the next possibility. What better way to uncover the ultimate entertainment? What better way to discover what’s worth pursuing?

~ Mystery

Part of feline wisdom is awareness that everything’s rich with possibility, potential hiding places, and relentless struggle between predator and prey. Have you left enough to your reader’s impressive imagination? Do your characters reveal what you never consciously imagined? Does your plot surprise? As the great mystery master confessed, “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” - Edgar Allan Poe

~ Solitude

Critique groups and writing partners are great: they provide the objective feedback every novelist needs. In the end, though, it’s just you and a blank sheet or screen. Cats understand that many magical moments occur alone, in covert crannies where no distraction can touch you. It’s just you and your own world, whether that’s beside the fireplace, under a blanket, or inside the one your own mind created.

~ Patience

The scent of a mouse, however long-gone, can keep a crouched cat eyeing the tempting territory for hours, returning to check over and over. After all, anything there once could return!  Tenacity helps you continue revising until the page does what you intend—no matter how long this takes. Tenacity fortifies through the long process of completing a novel that meets very high standards. The kind cats would impose if they chose to read.

~ Sensuality

When fiction works, it’s as luxurious as a cat stretched full-length, purring softly because its this moment offers the perfection every cat expects as an inherent birthright. If novels aren’t sensual, what are they for?

Cats charm not only as companions, but as symbols. Inscrutable and self-contained, yet within reach. As Ray Bradbury observed, “That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.”

Tip: Not every novelist needs a cat. But every novelist needs the best qualities of cats.

Taken by Surprise?

What astonishes you enough to stop and notice your world? It could be the ivy shadows on the bricks at dusk. Or a shining moment of generosity from your cheapskate brother. Or a hideous smirk of jealousy in this woman who’s always kind. 

Surprise happens when the outcome contradicts the assumptions or expectations. Who knew that evening light could make the house look so exquisite? Or that Mike could be so great, or Eve so naughty?

Aristotle said that “the secret to humor is surprise.” It’s also the secret to momentum. If readers can anticipate everything ahead, why continue reading?

Forward propulsion depends on wondering what happens next and worrying whether the character who magnetizes you will make the right choice. Surprise intensifies both wondering and worrying.

According to Dr. LeeAnn Renninger, co-author of Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected, “Research shows that surprise intensifies our emotions by about 400 percent, which explains why we love positive surprises and hate negative surprises.”

Whenever you astound your reader, you intensify emotion. Astound your character also ramps up emotional response, in turn, eliciting an even greater emotional response from the reader rooting for—or against—that character.

But why limit surprise to plot and characterization? Why not startle readers by planting it everywhere?  In your syntax, your imagery, what you omit and what you include.

For example, here’s Richard Powers from Galatea 2.2 on a highly advanced computer attempting to grasp human communication:

She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech’s stockhouse except what they mean?”

Ashwin Sanghi observes that “Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.” Absolutely. Except that the principle applies not just to authors of thrillers but to every novelist.

In the reality, there’s no correlation between surprise and causality. In fiction, though, set up makes surprise plausible.  Prepare the stage for surprise so readers can simply enjoy that 400 % increase in emotion without feeling manipulated by the improbable, convenient, contrived, forced, or false.

Tip: Readers adore surprises, but only if they never feel like cheating.

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.

What’s in That Bag?

I picture my friend’s kids eyeing their holiday presents on the coffee table. “Whaddy’d I get? Whaddy’d I get?” I think of another friend bringing a surprise dessert secreted in a fancy bag, and although I’m supposedly more sophisticated, my question’s exactly the same. What enticing surprise awaits me?

Novels, of course, operate on the same principle. An opening that gorgeously packages the promise of surprise presents a present. You can’t be sure what wonder hides under the foil and ribbons, but, man it’s gonna be good.

Tip: Don’t ruin the surprise!

Of course not, you protest. I want my readers entranced, suspicious, empathetic—all the great stuff that comes from a set up that stays secret until that exquisite paper is slashed, revealing contents even more exciting than what veils them. Then why give away too much? And, alas, it’s so easy to do.

Here’s how to ruin the surprise:

·         Set up so carefully that there’s no possibility of wondering or guessing.

·         Set up so obscurely that there’s no possibility of wondering or guessing.

·         Divulge the right clues, just at the wrong moments.

·         Divulge useless clues, though at exactly the right moments.

·         Explain everything.

·         Explain nothing.

So how do you wrap with as much wham as the secrets it masks?

ü  Set up adroitly. Careful packaging foreshadows fun, and that’s what the packaging’s for. Tease us about the joy of eventual disclosure.

ü  Play with disguise. What if it looks as if you could expose the contents one way, and yet—maybe there’s a more original solution? Maybe no one ever used before? There’s more than one way to wrap a gift.

ü  Disperse clues cleverly. Who wants to guess how to remove the paper or ribbon. We want to shred that covering ourselves! We don’t want to break fingernails, though,—or minds, or hearts, wrestling until quitting suddenly seems more attractive.

ü  Remember what you’re wrapping—and for whom. If you put holiday paper on a birthday present, someone will complain (as well they should). If the tape shows or the edges bulge, it kind of says, “I don’t love wrapping (writing) or you,” or, at best, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Don’t ruin the mystery. Don’t ruin the gift!

That’s what a novel is. But its true value arrives with its climax. Until then, hide shrewdly, so the reveal feels as thrilling as receiving a present from someone who wants the lucky recipient to enjoy every moment—from snazzy bag to even better surprise within.

Great Fictional Expectations

Fiction must fulfill certain expectations.  It needs to feel original, fun, true-to-life, and causal rather than contrived. Otherwise, it’s not surprising—simply disappointing.  At some point, though, fiction must overturn expectations instead of merely meeting them. If readers can predict everything to come, why continue reading?

Readers derive the greatest satisfaction from characters that astonish while remaining believable. Readers enjoy situations that make sense yet yield plausible outcomes no one could possibly predict.

Sounds great, but how do you accomplish that? It’s easier than it sounds. Millennia ago, Heraclitus said that “Character is fate.” In other words, who a character is—at the deepest essence—determines what she or he is capable of—what it’s possible to do or achieve. This observation about human nature generates several choices in terms of plotting plausibly but unpredictably.

a.)    Create situations of such duress that character surprise themselves with their accomplishments, whether physical, moral, or psychological. Often, people can’t even meet their own expectations until circumstances demand that.  If characters surprise themselves, they surprise those reading about their fate.

b.)    Create characters of such complexity that they not only get themselves into complicated situations but also devise complicated strategies for ultimately achieving their goals. Characters shape destiny through their own choices.

c.)    Create an environment that determines fate, whether because of cataclysm, status or even the protagonist’s own dreams (or nightmares). This source of possibility contains more choices than you might think. Whether futuristic, current, or historical, whether urban or rural, fictitious or factual, the trick is how setting impacts every one of your characters—but particularly your protagonist. This is less about geography than a combination of culture, luck, and constraint. How does that generate the surprise of true character?

Tip: Probe the commonplace and familiar deeply enough to summon true yet nevertheless surprising truths.

Each of these solutions requires pre-planning. Genuine surprise arises not from gimmicks but understanding character, plot, and setting so comprehensively that your fiction works from a solid foundation of credibility to yield what feels inevitable, but only after the climax. The very best fiction surprises even its own author.