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.

Opera for the Novelist?

Don’t enjoy listening to it? That’s fine. It’s an acquired taste—like blue cheese or the musty Indian spice Asafoetida. And yet regardless of your genre, goals, or commitment to gravitas, a taste of operatic idiosyncrasy might zestfully season your fiction. And you needn’t endure a single high-pitched note to apply these possibilities.

~ Passion.

Not just with a capital “P.” Rather, an entire word that’s capitalized in boldface. Consider Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux. The Queen loves Essex (Devereux), who’s madly in love with his dearest friend’s wife. It can’t end well. Spoiler: it doesn’t. And this has to do with contemporary fiction because…

…the higher the stakes, then the better. Build Concept. Corner your characters.  Want your audience to feel passion? Escalate the tension. Escalate it even more.

~ Motif.

Many of the loveliest operas revisit musical themes. But exploring themes radically differs from merely repeating them. This concept functions the way a poet plays off the six central worlds that build the sestina form: each encounter differs at least slightly. Same with the scarlet letter in Hawthorne’s novel: always similar, never identical. That familiar yet new variation amplifies tension, resonance, and complexity.  Chillingworth, Pearl, Dimmesdale, and Hester all view that letter differently—and thus readers do, as well. This is relevant to you because…

…the best fiction has texture. Layers of meaning emerge from words and symbols echoing off each other. And recurrent variations let the audience intimately connect your world with their own—the way years of varied encounters cement a friendship.

~ Climax.

People who adore opera rarely notice how long it takes the protagonist to die, while that’s the first thing people who dislike opera mock. Why must it take so long? Because a lot has gone into this ending. Why rush questions like who lives, rules the kingdom, gets revenge, and wins true love (usually no one). This relates to contemporary fiction because…

…big stories need big resolution. Consider proportion. If your scenario is low key, as many good ones are, then hurry up. But if you’ve posed huge dramatic questions, give your audience enough time to savor, wind down, exhale.

~ Theme.

It’s likely a good thing that we no longer fuss much about honor. But the ageless questions of morality, betrayal, hope, irony, and sacrifice matter to you because you’re a contemporary novelist. Those questions will be the crux of story—forever.

Tip: Fiction comes not only from the imagination, but the world. The more of the world you put in, then the more your readers will get out of the fictional world you create.

Are You Omitting Someone from the Conversation?

Could be, unless both narrator and characters participate in dialogue. Why the narrator? Because despite substantial overlap in first person point of view, the narrator’s always a step ahead of the character. As storyteller, the narrator already knows the ending, and describes the trouble, rather than enduring it. Finally, the compassionate, insightful, charming, witty narrator can accomplish many things that characters can’t. Like speed up dialogue.

In rare instances, the tension soars and the dialogue is pitch-perfect. Then the narrator summarizing or describing would damage that white-hot pacing. Usually, though, you achieve optimal grounding, momentum, and insight when the narrator and characters create the illusion of conversation, which isn't much like an actual conversation. In this example from Saturday, Baxter and his accomplice Nigel hold an entire family hostage, including pregnant young Daisy:

Baxter puts his right hand in his pocket again.  “All right, all right,” he says querulously.  “I’ll kill you first.”  Then he brings his gaze back onto Daisy and repeats in exactly the same tone as before, “So, what’s your name then?”

          She steps clear of her mother and tells him.  Theo unfolds his arms.  Nigel stirs and moves a little closer to him.  Daisy is staring right at Baxter, but her look is terrified, her voice is breathless and her chest rises and falls rapidly.

“Daisy?”  The name sounds improbable on Baxter’s lips, a foolish, vulnerable nursery name.  “And what’s that short for?”

“Nothing.”

“Little Miss Nothing.”  Baxter is moving behind the sofa on which Grammaticus is lying, and beside which Rosalind stands.

Daisy says, “If you leave now and never come back I give you my word we won’t phone the police.  You can take anything you want.  Please, please go.”

Even before she’s finished, Baxter and Nigel are laughing.  -- Ian McEwan, Saturday

What if each character talked constantly instead of the narrator paraphrasing? What if you cut what the narrator adds to this passage? No, the narrator and characters must hold their own dialogue, with the narrator speeding, hinting, developing.

At the opening of Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth, the mother and daughter have a brief exchange about being in a strange place, mired in the mud in an unpredictable car:

“We’re going to get stuck,” March’s daughter, Gwen, announces. Always the voice of doom.

“No, we won’t,” March insists.

Three paragraphs of narrator summary bring readers to the climax, omitting the obvious or redundant.

“We’ll get out of here,” she tells her daughter. “Have no fear.” But when she turns the key the engine grunts, then dies.

            “I told you,” Gwen mutters under her breath.

Tip: In dialogue and elsewhere, the narrator and characters must fulfill their respective roles.

Don’t Name That Donkey

You know you want to. Perhaps you already have. Jenny or Jack, Don or Danielle, you worked hard to imagine every aspect of this scene. How big is the pasture, how decrepit the barn, how blue the sky, how scratchy the straw. As a novelist, it’s your job to visualize all that. But that’s not your primary job. What is? Deciding what distracts and cutting it.

So. If Donatello merely shakes off flies rather than motivating or executing the upcoming murder, we don’t care that he prefers clover to alfalfa. And he doesn’t need a name.

Tip: The fact that you created or discovered it doesn’t mean that you should include it.

Why not omit all the extraneous material that clogs novels? Here’s a start:

~ Heaps of adjectives.

            Do you really need more than one? If it’s the right one?

~ Personal memories.

            Does this matter to the story, or only to you?

~ Fun facts.

            Do they make your novel more fun—or less?

~ Repetition.

            Do readers really want watch another character learn what readers already know?

Lack of focus blurs narrative—any kind of narrative. Aristotle laid this down in The Poetics, where he said that fiction imitates reality, but not exactly. 

That’s because story is orderly rather than chaotic; it transforms random details into a credible and causal pattern that an audience can follow. Excessive or irrelevant detail, however fascinating, interferes.  Unless specifics add tension or clarify causality, they actually subtract.

In an intriguing twist, playwright/actor Sean Grennan served on a jury and offered attorneys advice on how narrative engages and persuades. Here’s an excerpt from “Unsolicited Advice,” published in The American Bar Association Journal:

If your practice involves talking to a jury, then your profession is storytelling….Rule # 1: (Less is more. (See also: Try not to bore us.)… In good storytelling, anything that’s not your friend is your enemy, just like Thanksgiving with your family.

Take that wonderful, genius, world-changing, vivid detail you’ve come up with, and if it is a digression, delete it. Anything that slows or distracts or confuses is a problem.

Like the name of that donkey. Make your case. Delete clutter. Let your primary characters breathe and act—without Darcy the darling, dappled, dimple-cheeked, dreamy, drama queen.

Question Whether You Question Enough

Tip: Nonfiction is for answers. Fiction is for questions.

Certainly, fiction has much to teach, and not just about society or morality, but also about ornithology, teen pregnancy, Victoria’s reign, the Song of Songs, and so on. But if fiction accomplishes this teaching with a sound that’s overtly educational, most readers close the book. What’s the solution? Questions.

The questions that propel fiction originate in the writer’s own questions:

~ Who is the audience?

~ Why struggle through this when I might make more money at McDonald’s?

~ Does my plot deliver my theme?

~ Wait. Do I have a theme? If not, do I need one?

Start there. Then consider your writing lifestyle. Maybe, like many writers, you’re addicted to critique, conferences, coaching, and a canon composed of brilliant minds like John Truby’s, Robert McKee’s, Donald Maass’s, John Gardner’s, and so on. Great!

Yet instruction doesn’t necessarily pose questions the way that good feedback does. Do you let rules or explanations bury the fundamental questions?

Whether you struggle with your first or twenty-first draft, work alone or with a group, certain questions always apply:

• Is your scenario original and electric? Too good to ignore?
• Does at least one character evoke empathy?
• Do you capitalize on your point of view?
• Do you open the first chapter, and every chapter and scene thereafter, with a big bang?
• Do the details support the story, or mostly your own subjective interests?
• Do you dramatize what’s truly exciting, and summarize what isn’t?
• Does your plot keep readers turning pages?
• Is your story more important to you than your readers are? (Oh, oh.)
• Are too many of your sentences annoying?
• Does your novel ask more questions than it answers?

The best fiction leaves us with questions. Nathaniel Hawthorne wonders whether hypocrisy is more contemptible than adultery. F. Scott Fitzgerald invites us to decide what the past means. Harper Lee asks if we ever considered the connection between innocence versus racism or sexism. Tracy Chevalier questions whether we noticed how many women influenced a history peopled with men. Jonathan Franzen speculates on the meaning of “purity.”

If you prefer answers to questions, is fiction the best genre for your tastes and talents?

Edit like an Agent

Whether novelists submit paranormal, YA, or literary, the reasons underlying rejections and requests for rewrites constantly overlap, regardless of genre. Doesn’t this across-the-board similarity seem odd? Actually, not at all. Because fundamental qualities apply to every work of fiction—and every agent seeks these fundamental qualities.

Tip: To land an agent, think like one.

So what are some things that agents might be thinking?

~ Begin earlier than you thought you could.

Over and over, I hear about agents asking novelists to cut five, ten, even one hundred pages. Why? Because you need to start where the trouble does. Don’t set up, take your time, create a world, or establish a serenity to disrupt. Instead? Begin with an actual inciting incident. And right away.

~ Eliminate self-indulgence.

This insidious issue can creep in without writers even noticing. Too many characters. Too much amazingly aggravating alliteration. Heartfelt anecdotes about Gram, whom you loved so very much. Irrational contempt for your arrogant brother-in-law. Be on the lookout for stuff that belongs in your diary, not your professional submissions.

~ Delete backstory.

Donald Maass got an audible groan from a large UW-Madison Writer’s Institute audience when he insisted, “Once you’re seventy percent of the way through the book, have as much backstory as you want. Before that? Forget it.”  Agents are readers, and every reader longs to know what happens next—not what happened yesteryear.

~ Shore up the middle.

            What’s worse than hitting page 102 and no longer caring what happens next?

~ Fix clumsy sentences.

It’s human nature to rationalize. “Oh, the sentence isn’t that bad. They won’t notice.” For better or worse, they definitely will. Every awkward sentence conveys one of the following: The author doesn’t know which sentences don’t work, or the author didn’t care enough to fix that one. Seriously. Do you want to convey either of those messages?

In the background, I imagine increasingly audible grumbling. “How do I know how late I can start?” “How many characters are too many?” “This published book I read made all of these mistakes, and so I…”

Forget all that. If you curb rationalization, you already know the answers to all those questions. Objectivity reveals when to start your book, which characters you can cut, and when your syntax is clumsy or cutesy. Pay meticulous attention to everything you already know, and you’ll read like an agent. That’s how you get one.

Do you serve a buffet?

Long, food-laden tables aren’t just popular because of all that food. The variety attracts. So does the freedom. Once you pass the meat and seafood and advance to the salad items, you can always return for one more shrimp. You can circle the table to sample a mini-brownie before you dig into that crab cake. It’s all available at whatever order and pace you choose.

Readers can’t control fiction that way. However obvious it seems, it’s significant that nearly every reader proceeds in a linear fashion. Of course one can skim, backtrack, or peek at the ending. What readers can’t do is position the setting beside the dialogue or help themselves to more of this and less of that. The buffet that fiction ought to provide is the writer’s gift and responsibility.

Why wouldn’t every writer host a buffet every time?

• It’s easier for writers to focus on one thing at a time, such as dialogue.
• It’s easier not to shift gears, because then you don’t need as many transitions.
• If you adore setting, for example, you might overdo it at the expense of action.
• If you see the complete picture already, you might not notice its absence from the page.

 How can you break this habit of offering only desserts or appetizers instead of a full buffet?

~ Improve your skill with transitions.

Make friends with transitions. Once you bridge acting with thinking, tension with backstory, and so on, you’ll shift more willingly, knowing your readers can follow. Build transitions from the underlying similarity between what’s going on and where, between gesture and symbol, and between rumination and behavior.  What better way to engage reader emotions than to create a whole world instead of one part?

~ Read like a reader.

As Harper Lee put it in To Kill a Mockingbird, imagine someone else’s consciousness by willingness to “climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”  This isn’t easy. It is doable.

~ Imitate reality.

When we converse, we still notice surroundings. If we terminate a job, investment,  friendship, or marriage, we experience a range of emotions, all of which impact all our perceptions. For credibility, fiction must re-create a world where more than one thing goes on at a time. That’s reality. Fiction must follow.

~ Accentuate with contrast.

Description matters in novels only when it supports the characters. Tension enhances dialogue, which enhances action. “Light can only be understood with the wisdom of darkness,” said Ka Chinery. Since readers can’t supply what’s missing, make sure that you do.

Tip: Break the habit of long stretches of dialogue, description, or narration. Blend them.