The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
Victoria Mixon
Copyright
© 2010 by Victoria Mixon. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-0-9845427-1-0
Published by La Favorita Press at Smashwords
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to every single one of my editing clients and blog and magazine readers for their honest, essential feedback and enthusiasm, which made this book first something to dream about, then something to wrassle with, then something real. I am especially grateful to my friends Carolyn Cassady, for her perfect grasp of proper grammar, Lucia Orth, for her support and encouragement, and Amy Bowman, for her developmental advice, humor, and Yahtzee expertise. Above all else, I am eternally grateful to my husband, the writer Jeff Osier-Mixon, who did absolutely everything to create this book except write it—edit, format, publish, photograph the cat, everything—and my son, Haven, who kept me supplied throughout with whipped cream and strawberries and always, every day, his extraordinary joy in living.
Introduction
Excavating the Bones of Storytelling
Book I: Writing
Chapter 1: Writing from the Internal World with Jane Bowles
Chapter 2: Understanding Copy, Line, & Developmental Issues
Part 1: Developmental Issues
Chapter 3: Bewitching Your Reader with Isak Dinesen
Distinguishing Between Storytelling & Fiction
Pushing Your Reader Off the Rainbow
Character is Content
Chapter 5: Telling the Truth With Emily Brontё
Chapter 6: Delving into the Mythic Life
Creating the Look of a Character
Creating a Name for a Character
Creating Action for a Character
Creating the Character in a Character
Plot is Context
Chapter 7: Finding a Story to Tell with Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter 8: Plotting Your Way Out of a Paper Bag
Pouring Your Story into the Dramatic Paradigm
Chapter 9: Hooking Them in the Jaw
Starting with Famous Last Words
Pulling Out the Crook-Neck Cane
Chapter 10: Running Them Like Rats in a Maze
Chapter
11: Lulling Them into a Dream, Then
Whacking
an Epiphany Out of Them
Faux Resolution: Tuning a Harp on a Cloud
Climax: Walking on Water with a Pen
Resolution: Succumbing to Dramatic Overwhelm
Part 2: Line Issues
Chapter 12: Watching Your Language with P.G. Wodehouse
Prose
Braving the Dark & Stormy Night of Clichés
Not Going Gently into that Adverbial Night
Indulging in the Passive & the Active—Grammatical Voice
Discovering Your Own Language—Stylistic Voice
Tensing—Past, Present, & Future Tense
Speaking—1st-, 2nd-, & 3rd-Person Narrative Voice
Seeing—Limited, Unlimited, & Omniscient Point-of-View
Scenes are Showing
Structuring & Punctuating Dialog Correctly
Hearing What Your Reader Reads
Focusing Characters With Their Words
Exposition is Telling
Chapter 18: Sketching in Story
Part 3: Copy Issues
Chapter 19: Learning Simplicity with Hemingway
Parsing 101: Making Sense With Sentences
Parsing 102: Writing With Clarity & Manners
Parsing 103: Unwinding Henry James
Using Punctuation Marks Correctly
Part 4: Revision
Chapter 22: Gaining Distance with Time with Truman Capote
Chapter 23: Cutting & Trimming
Chapter 24: Editing & Critiquing
Book II: Being a Writer
Chapter 26: Facing the Bad News with Flannery O'Connor
Loving & Hating the Tools of Your Trade
Writing Sanely in an Insane World
Committing Random Acts of Literature
Chapter 28: Writing for Love or Money
Chapter 30: Professional Habits
Composting Your Writing Skills
Chapter 31: Stepping into History Through Literature
Conclusion
Tilting at Windmills with Miguel de Cervantes
Appendix
Everything You Need to Know About Writing a Novel, in 1,000 Words
Excavating the Bones of Storytelling
Why do human beings tell stories?
When did humans first begin telling stories?
Why do we continue?
Say it’s 30,000 years ago. Say you’re a member of a small tribe living out there on the surface of the planet without the benefit of fancy engineered stick-frame housing, electricity, interior plumbing, or 911. You lose members of the tribe fairly regularly to gangrene, food poisoning, hungry predators, and the occasional fatal illness masquerading as evil spirits. So you’ve got a lot on your mind.
Every night the dark comes back, and you’re stuck inside your lonely little head out there, with nothing between you and excruciating death but the fire and a bunch of relatives you might not even like very much. What would you want?
A story.
A story about someone like you—a human being—who doesn’t have to live this way. A story about this someone facing the same stuff you face so it's believable, but maybe dressed up symbolically so it isn't so terrifying.
(It’s not a lion that’s going to eat you, it’s a wizard who’s going to make you their slave. It’s not your favorite aunt who got cold and stole your goatskin, it’s a demon that’s taken over her body. It’s not your chief, your hero, who killed his wife in a fit of jealousy, it’s some mysterious person who had more cunning, secret reasons for wanting her dead, and your chief is going to be extremely happy with you if you can prove it.)
This someone just like you faces this scary symbolic stuff, goes through your terror, stretches their resources to the utmost, almost doesn't make it (as you're so deathly afraid you won't)—and, unexpectedly in the eleventh hour, wins!
Hurrah! Huzzah! The long, dark night is defeated, the fear is vanquished, and you’re safe. Forever.
It’s the same life, but it’s different. They’re overwhelming troubles, but they’re magically surmountable. You’re the same scared person inside, but you’re stronger, smarter, luckier, more attractive, and people like you. The ones who don’t like you simply misunderstand you.
The world is sane, and your life makes sense.
For just an hour in the darkest part of your day, when you can’t see beyond your tent and the lions are making dinner conversation back and forth over your head, you get to hide in this imaginary place.
This is why humans began telling stories. It's why they drew on the walls of caves, why they painted designs on their bodies.
“We can transcend the madness,” they were saying.
And this is why we still tell them. Why we listen to them. Why we read, even cheap mass-market paperbacks—sometimes especially cheap mass-market paperbacks—desperate for anything to satisfy this eternal longing to know that everything, finally, ended okay. We made it through in one piece. It was all worth it, after all.
Maybe it even turned out we were cool.
But what about tragedies?
You don’t get to the end of Romeo and Juliet and think, “What a relief, everything ended hunky-dory, just like I hoped it would.” Not while you’re picking your way across the dead bodies, you don’t.
You don’t read Richardson’s Clarissa and say, “Thank heavens that poor child was saved in time.” She wasn’t.
The ancient Greeks didn’t get to the end of Medea and say to each other, “I knew those weren’t really their children she fed to him.” No. They really were.
A funny thing happens at the end of a tragedy. A funny and entirely pivotal thing: everybody dies—except the audience.
In fact, even the actors don’t die. The fictional characters in the stories don’t die. (Like zombies, fictional characters are always ready to be resurrected on a whim.) The publisher, producer, editor, agent, and guy stoking the fire around which we all huddle don’t die. The author or storyteller doesn’t die.
Everything turns out all right, in spite of death, destruction, and mayhem.
As Paul Bowles so accurately said, you are not I.
Readers love this. Now, granted, it’s harder to sell fiction these days in which the heroine and hero go down with the ship. Titanic, the movie, pretended to, but actually didn’t. We’re a spoiled race in a comfortable era. We don’t do a lot of cowering by the tent while a lioness sports with one of our grandparents’ bodies. We don’t live under the constant taxation of armies rampaging back and forth across our little fields, trampling the crops we need to survive the winter and brutalizing our relatives in front of our eyes and kidnapping us into lifelong slavery. We don’t even cope with the daily caution not to run out and catch the bubonic plague, like the Elizabethans who first brought Romeo and Juliet and their author their equivalent of blockbuster status.
We live a fairly pampered life, all things considered, so maybe we have less of a stomach for seeing everyone dead and dismembered in the end, leaving us to rejoice in our fully-memberedness. We are fully-membered. We have doctors and—just in case—lawyers. Dying of dismemberment isn’t really one of our concerns.
And maybe what’s going to keep us up all night turning those pages isn’t whether or not Medea really cooked the kids, but whether or not she got a new lease on life after she recovered from empty-nest syndrome.
Maybe our idea of really scary obstacles is a bit tame by comparison.
You've got to expect a population to eat up the stories that give it a sense of comfort over its own very real nightmares. Lots of mass-market fiction characters lose sleep over their struggle for celebrity. To the average modern mass-market enthusiast, this seems like a very real concern indeed.
We writers ought to understand. Emma Bovary, c'est moi.
Tell me a story about someone who loses their job to the economy, loses their home to the real estate crash, has to cash in their 401k, winds up divorced, and now their teenagers hate them. How do they cope? And please don’t just leave them there and call it a tragedy, because we’re simply not that hardy. We won’t feel good enough, looking at our own kids later and saying to each other, “At least they’re not skinheads.”
Or tell me about creatures who feel just like me, facing troubles weirdly like mine, only with magical powers—people in the future, people in the past, people from other realities crossing the line into ours, easily-recognizable archetypes, anyone just like me but one step removed.
Tell me how they make it.
Or else tell me a story about someone beautiful, wealthy, sensitive, adored—an icon of my culture—who loses their best-beloved to cold-hearted evil and intrigue but finds even better love in the end.
It’s not me, but it could be.
It could be.
But, then, why are so many of us trying so hard to get ourselves on the speaking end of this deal?
The truth is it's more comforting to be the audience than the speaker. It's easier to listen than it is to invent. It's simpler to read a story than it is to write it. This has always been the case.
Oddly, though, the perception of that has changed in the past century. And the change has accelerated with alarming speed most recently, as books are cranked out faster and faster, their publishers—desperate for unexpected blockbusters to pay their bills—snatching up lesser and lesser works with a greater and greater sense of panic. All of this creates a composting heat for the extraordinary number of amateurs writing today, making it only too easy to read the publishers' hunger as an open invitation to gamble on the reading public's lack of discernment.
So nowadays we often get into storytelling, not for survival, but for notoriety. Fame! Fortune!
It looks so simple.
In this hyper-literate era, pretty much anyone can stick both arms into writing up to their armpits and squish it around like mud. We can mold it. We can recycle it. We can throw it at each other. And this is what many of us do.
Years ago, I went with a friend to an art show at UC Berkeley, the culmination of a year’s worth of MFA student efforts. We walked through room after room of canvases and sculptures, photographs and installations, up stairs and down, pausing in doorways to look ahead and behind.
When we came out the other end, my friend asked me what I thought.
“This might very well be the insides of these people’s heads,” I said. “But there are the insides of some people’s heads I don’t want to see.”
Now, Jackson Pollock can get away with enormous canvases that look as though they’ve been driven like cars through a paintwash. Maya Ying Lin can design two surfaces of polished black granite to reflect the infinity of death into the faces of survivors. Charlie Chaplin can stick two forks in bread rolls and caper for an audience for a hundred years.
But many aspiring writers don't want to do that. No, they don't. They want to create art about themselves.
Fortunately for the rest of us, the role of the professional artist is not to look in a mirror and, like some gruesome coroner, pull open their abdomen to admire the contents, then photograph it and offer it for sale (although it might be kind of interesting if they did). We all have guts. We might be fascinated by our own, but we're not fascinated by each other's.
The role of the professional artist is to look outward, into life, and select more than one disparate real thing—a skull and a hollyhock, a child’s toy and the notes of an octave, a dying woman and a piece of driftwood—and find in them the essential truth about life basic to them both. Georgia O’Keefe, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and Rebecca West found these real things, linked them in the essential, and gave them to the rest of us.
It's not easy. And not everybody who tries will hang in there long enough to get good at it. But for those who do—like our ancestors drawing on the walls of caves 30,000 years ago—even after their lives are long over, the movement of their lives continues on through ours.
This is the part of the artist that’s worth knowing. This is the nature of art that remains.
Book I
WRITING
Writing from the Internal World
with Jane Bowles
The relationship between writer & work
Paul Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky day by day, in bed in North Africa, using each day’s experiences for his work. Although the plot rambles a bit, the writing's beautiful. (Well, of course, it’s Paul Bowles.)
But my favorite thing about Bowles is his wife, Jane.
Jane Bowles was also a writer. In fact, she was the writer who first inspired Paul to try his hand. He was originally a composer, a protégé of Aaron Copland, while she’d been writing since she was quite young. Her first completed work, now lost, was written entirely in French. (She was American, educated in Switzerland.) One of her most powerful works is a very brief puppet play.
Sadly for us, she wrote little and published even less, due in part to her tendency to lose manuscripts, one left behind in a taxi and another apparently blown out an open window in Mexico City.
I found Jane’s work in a used bookstore on lower Polk Street in San Francisco in about 1994. (The proprietor asked me if I was interested in Paul, too, and offered to sell me some of his records, but I’d never heard of either one of them and had almost no money, so I declined, for which I’ve never forgiven myself.) I bought only two volumes: My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles and A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles by Millicent Dillon.
Those two books kept me absorbed for years.
Jane wrote in the most oddly un-literary style imaginable. There’s the strong suggestion that she didn’t, in fact, know how to write at all. (Paul castigated her for her sloppy pages—she casually dismissed him.) Her sentences are often ungainly, her characters inexplicable, her choice of detail bizarre. Her plots aren’t experimental, but they certainly give the impression she didn’t know where they were going. Some authors can bumble along like that, and you never know. But with Jane. . .you know.
Her one novel, Two Serious Ladies, begins with a startling portrait of a highly unlikable character, Christina Goering, who at about thirteen years old bullies her sister’s friend with her religious zeal. As a portrait, it’s wonderful: exact and powerful, unflattering and still ringing almost unbearably true. The mania with which Christina demands that the other child cooperate in the “game” and the other child’s unwilling cooperation are absolutely typical of children’s interactions. Jane might have been describing a real event, except for one thing—the author’s voice swings from understatement to exaggeration with precision, creating a portrait not only unbearably true, but hilarious.
And that’s the end of that childhood story. The next thing we know, we’re with the adult Christina, and the rest of that section of the book is about her, her friendships with the feckless lout Arnold and his wicked but charming father, her hostile companion Miss Gamelon who, ridiculously, becomes Arnold’s “Bubbles,” and her eventual abandonment of home and friends to seek an enlightenment even she doesn’t understand.
You’d think that would be enough story for one novel.
But, no. There’s another serious lady. (There were originally three, but Paul convinced her three was one too many.) Frieda Copperfield is a faintly-disguised self-portrait of Jane herself traveling in Central America with her fond, bemused, and distant husband, a sincere neurotic in his own right. (Jane and Paul had traveled in Central America for their honeymoon on the money she inherited when they married.) The events and descriptions are vividly authentic. They’re also, in their different way, as hilariously idiosyncratic as those involving Christina.
Frieda is fussy and persnickety rather than bossy and overbearing, while expressing herself with childlike sincerity and a weird sort of profundity.
Frieda doesn’t want to be in Panama, but she loves her husband, and this is where he wants to be. It takes her practically no time at all to find, in her fussy, weird way, something in Panama that speaks to her so profoundly she becomes hopelessly addicted to it and, eventually, even chooses it over her husband—a brothel run by a no-nonsense British expatriate and peopled by Pacifica, the powerful and almost maternal prostitute, and her uncontrollable hangers-on. For some reason, this brothel feels to the easily-terrified Frieda like home.
Frieda, like Christina, lives in an internal world so bizarre it’s actually unintelligible from the outside. Yet its logic is magical to the woman who lives inside it.
Jane wrote often of this internal world, where what was strange to others felt natural and “sweet” to her. It forms the basis of her entire body of work, small as that is. Her characters are tormented, desperate, grasping—they fight for the words in their mouths, the gestures between themselves and others, the very thoughts in their own heads.
Every day we wake up wondering what the characters we are will do today. Humankind works so intently upon creating an external world of order and sense precisely because each of us lives alone in an internal world designed around logic peculiar to the individual. In that way, we’re all in the closet. We can’t ever join the living the way we long to—wholly and completely, with every fragment of guilt and shame healed. We know this about ourselves. And, just as importantly, we know it about each other.
The external world contains the stuff of fiction, the material we need in order to share the stories we tell. But it’s in the unique logic of the guilty, secretive, convoluted internal world that we find our essential links.
Understanding Copy, Line, & Developmental Issues
The relationship between writer & world
Now, you should know that editors talk in terms of copy editing, line editing, and developmental editing. This is not an editors’ secret handshake. This is because it takes that many distinctions to discuss in detail the intricacies of the art and craft of fiction. And if you want to learn to translate your daydreams into literature, you’ll want to learn these terms, too:
Copy Editing
Copy editing refers to grammar and punctuation. (Sometimes both copy editing and line editing are referred to as copy editing, and sometimes both are referred to as line editing, but they are in fact two distinctly different things.) Copy editing is about written communication, so it's just following the rules. There is, honestly, very little of either art or craft to it. You simply have to learn the rules.
Line Editing
Line editing refers to prose. It's about the craft of writing, and that means paragraph structure, sentence flow, word choice, and language-related techniques. That also means voice, style, readability, and forward movement. And in fiction it means the difference between scenes and exposition. The only way to hone your skills is to stay away from crap and read great fiction. Read it, read it, read it.
Train your mind to expect certain things in certain orders. Train your language to come out of you in simple and pleasing rhythms. Use short, declarative sentences interspersed with long, melodious ones.
When you edit, cut every single unnecessary word and be willing to rewrite anything and everything, whether it needs it or not. Take your time. Revise until it’s just right. In this way, you know you have written your story in exactly the words it takes and no others. That's craft.
Learn to recognize clichés.
Understand clarity.
Developmental Editing
Developmental editing refers to storytelling, both the art and the craft. This involves not just plot structure, but also character development and motivation, theme, premise, symbolism, tension, pacing, and the author's search for truth.
Truth? Yes, truth. That's the art of storytelling.
There are rules to developmental issues that, while not enforced through venerable documentation like grammar and punctuation guides, are enforced by readers who put down badly-imagined books and walk away.
And there are expectations readers bring to fiction that you really need to understand. Readers read stories for two purposes:
1) to learn something they don't already know about survival
2) to be reassured life is actually worth surviving
No matter what you write, no matter how you approach it, no matter what you expect to gain by it, you can never afford to forget these two expectations.
They are your reasons for what you do.
Part 1
Developmental Issues
Bewitching Your Reader
with Isak Dinesen
What is a story? characters in a plot
Isak Dinesen knew an enormous amount about the art of storytelling. She took as her sacred text The Arabian Nights and believed everything you need to know about storytelling can be found among the thousand and one nights of that fourteenth-century Arabic manuscript. Her classic story “The Deluge at Norderney” ends at dawn after eighty pages of extraordinarily lush, complex, absorbing multiple narratives, a Rube Goldberg exercise in storytelling, on the French line—terribly unfair if you speak no French—”At that moment of her narration, Scheherazade saw morning arrive and, discrete, fell silent.”
What did Dinesen see in The Arabian Nights that she saw nowhere else in the fiction available to her in her era, the first half of the twentieth century? Keep in mind that she was a native Dane, a highly educated aristocrat, who spoke Danish, English, and French, as well as enough Kikuyu, Swahili, and Maa to act as doctor and judge for those living on her land in the mountains of Kenya. The number of stories available to her was vast. And she read—read and analyzed and thought and talked about fiction with great eloquence and insight.
Dinesen said she began her writing career telling stories to her nieces in the evenings, making up the plots as she went along, from the germ of a sentence given to her by one of the girls to a finale that wrapped the story like a Möbius strip back onto its original premise. In this way she taught herself how to create out of a seed of an idea, how to bring characters alive, how to plot, how to embellish, how to pace, how to give her characters' dilemmas meaning, and most of all how to keep an audience’s attention. This was the pivotal element of The Arabian Nights in Dinesen’s eyes—Shahrazad’s very life depended upon her ability to keep her audience’s attention.
Dinesen loved the cliffhanger element of each of the individual thousand and one nights. She loved that ending, “Morning arrived, and Shahrazad fell silent.”
The thing you always hear in the publishing world is that there are two types of story: character-driven and plot-driven. Apparently nobody ever told this to Dinesen.
Dinesen's characters are mythical: the wonderful and cryptic Fanny and Eliza De Connick hold a feast for the ghost of their beloved dead brother; the strange child Jens claims his adoptive mother is the birth mother he can’t possibly remember and turns out to be right; the mysterious and bewitching Pellegrina says she could not be accused of selling her soul to the Devil when she'd rather give it to him as a present.
At the same time Dinesen's plots are miracles: intricate, detailed, carrying an extraordinary sense of place and time (almost always in the past).
The universe Dinesen created was rich and profound, bigger than life and at the same time nearly microscopic. It seems impossible to keep a reader’s attention through the labyrinths she forced on her characters. And yet she’s hypnotic. Her stories go on and on like fascinating dreams. Her characters tell stories. Their characters tell stories. The levels drop down and down, into the subterranean passages of the collective unconscious. By the time you come out the other end, you’re changed. You’ve seen the other side of the world’s tapestry.
If there is one thing we can learn from Dinesen, it is to go deep. The surface of your story—the simple progress of your characters toward their fate, the bare bones of their dilemma—is only the beginning. Write your story, and then write it again more honestly. Then write it again. And again.
Eventually, you find yourself wandering the halls of the universe in the caverns inside you. Strange things live there, awkward creatures and inexplicable plot twists, actions and dialog both familiar and incomprehensible. You don’t worry anymore about explaining this world to your readers. Just describing it is enough. You can look up to the light and see the reflections on the glass ceiling above, refractions from beneath the ocean. You are below the surface. You are under the wave.
Find out the truth about what’s there. You’re wading in the primeval sea, where the collective unconscious was born, and if you’re very, very tough and very, very hardworking and very, very lucky, maybe you’ll make it back into the world of light with a fragment of it in your very own hand.
Then dawn comes. And, like Shahrazad, you fall silent.
Storytelling
How to tell a story
Distinguishing Between Storytelling & Fiction
The only reason I know for writing fiction is to tell stories. And the only reason I know for telling stories is the same as that for telling jokes: to get to the punchline.
Once I had a client who was writing a brilliant story about a group of children trying to pry the truth about life out of a new baby. They asked the baby questions. They threatened and cajoled. They banged their heads with frustration. In the end, they had a food fight.
When I described my day to my twelve-year-old over dinner that night, he laughed himself off his chair. “They squirted mustard and ketchup all over the living room!” He loved it!
That was storytelling.
Those of us who have been writing fiction for a long time know how easy it is to get caught up in the act of writing, in the characterizations, structure, descriptions, dialog, polishing of language, and—that most hair-rending of all issues—whether or not it’s ever okay to use words ending in -ly. We wrack our brains over this stuff. We read intensely for hours on end, taking notes, researching how the greats handled it. We lie awake nights and weep.
And yet the questions, “What happens in Madame Bovary? What’s the point of Moby Dick? Why read about Scrooge?” have simple answers: “A woman who read too many romance novels became so deranged she killed herself. A sea captain blew his entire life chasing a single whale. A guy who hated giving learned from a couple of ghosts why it matters.”
My client told the story of how a bunch of children made a mess.
Only someone like John Gardner is going to explain that Moby Dick’s nearly 1,000 pages of nineteenth-century technical authority is brilliantly established by its brief first sentence. Only Flannery O’Connor is going to point out that Madame Bovary contains some of the most exemplary descriptive passages in the English language (although it was written in French). And only I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that, if you can’t learn from ghosts, you can’t learn from anybody.
The basic act of fiction is the art of telling a story. You can—and will—spend far more hours and energy on the craft of writing fiction than you do on creating the story itself, but the reason for writing a story remains the same: to tell it.
This is true for all the arts. The basic act of creativity is saying something worth saying. If you’re a painter, you say it on a canvas. If you’re a dancer, you say it through movement. If you’re a sculptor, you say it in stone. If you’re a musician, you say it with melody. And if you’re a storyteller, you say it in so many words.
But if you have nothing to say, it doesn’t matter how good you are at your medium. You have not created anything.
Whatever else you do, whatever other skills you learn, however many years you spend bent over your desk, never lose sight of the purpose behind writing fiction.
You’re here to tell a story.
You know, nobody wants to write fiction about what they know. If you were interested in what you already know, you wouldn’t waste so much time making up fiction, now would you?
Besides, we keep hearing that literary fiction is dead, fiction for the sake of beautiful fiction is dead, the only thing selling these days is genre. Thriller. Mystery. Fantasy. Science Fiction. Historical. Romance.
But nobody lives that way!
Then again, you wouldn’t be writing fiction if you were in love with journalism, either. Hey, everyone, let’s do some research! There’s a conversation-stopper.
I was at a party once with friends who lived in a big converted house full of little artsy apartments. I was working with abused children at the local Battered Women’s Shelter at the time, and I got in an argument with a neighbor who had what I considered less-than-accurate views on the subject. The argument grew heated. I held my ground. I cited statistics. She finally conceded, but grudgingly and with bad grace. The next day I got a call from my friend who told me she’d chastised her neighbor on my behalf, saying, “For crying out loud, you acted like Victoria made those statistics up!”
“I did,” I said. “But I was still right.”
This is why I write fiction. I like making stuff up.
Does that mean we should all write stories we know nothing about, just get in there and say whatever we feel like saying, crank up the fictional volume, really let it fly? Should we flout that old fuddy-duddy control freak who sputters, “Write what you know, you hooligans! Write what you know!”?
Sorry. Don’t.
There is no question that a really good writer—someone who’s earned the name—writes about what they know. It’s inevitable. That knowledge is the source of all telling detail.
But how do you know about your chosen genre? How do you know about murder investigations, future quantum physics, witches’ zombie covens, seventeenth-century Southeast Asia, sky-diving over K-2, and love that never falters, fades, or succumbs to child custody disputes?
Two ways. The first is that ever-horrible sucker of the creative soul, research. If you hear screams, they’re from me. But if you’re interested in it enough to write about it, you’d better be interested enough to learn about it. Otherwise, write about something else.
The second is human nature. You’re human. You haven’t lived in a closet all your life. This means you have two resources at your disposal, resources so fundamental and all-encompassing that, although great fiction has been written without research, no great fiction ever has been written without these both: personal knowledge of daily human life, and personal knowledge of the people you know.
Now, I'm not suggesting you go out and concoct the perfect plan to murder the one you hate most in the world, however good that might sound in passing. I am not suggesting you spend your evenings in a mad scientist’s laboratory in your walk-in closet investigating alchemy, or experiment with belladonna, or adopt a Thai beggar, or fling yourself off a Himalayan peak. (Go ahead, fall in love, it really is great—but be prepared for the therapy bills.)
I am, however, suggesting that, if you resurrect Captain Nemo and give him a unicorn buddy and set them investigating the murder of innocent Wiccan Tibetan athletes who love each other with a timeless love, you imbue them all with the mannerisms, foibles, blind spots, nervous ticks, conversational oddities, and overriding passions with which you’re most familiar.
Make them spill their coffee. Give them clothes they forget to mend. Put pebbles in their shoes, telemarketers on their phones, glitches in their Internet connections. Let them have bad breath in the morning. Let them screw up. Let them get lost. Let them fight.
Let them lose.
And, whatever else you do, pretend to hide their greatest lifelong shame while scribbling it all over the sky for the other characters to see. Give them not only pride, but humility, not only confidence, but despair. Make their lives suck in exactly the way your life so often sucks.
Write what you know.
Pushing Your Reader Off the Rainbow
Raymond Carver studied under John Gardner and said later that Gardner had absolutely no use for shock endings. Gardner felt it was dishonest to deliberately withhold information from the reader. Why? What possible good could it do? It’s not like writing's a practical joke.
The writer who turns their work into a trick or a gimmick doesn’t know what writing is. Writing is not about fooling your reader.
Writing is about sharing everything you have.
Writing is an art form that communicates directly, by way of the lingual brain through which we process direct thought, between the writer and the reader. Writing is as close as you can get to sitting at the kitchen table with your reader, taking their hands, and saying in the nakedness of your soul, “This is how life is for me.”
Is that the moment to yank their chair out from under them?
Once, a friend told me the story of a man who raised his little child to jump off a table into his arms. Week after week, the child jumped off the table into his father’s arms, until one day the father stepped aside and let the child fall to the floor.
“That’ll teach you never to trust anyone,” he said.
Do you want that idiot to be you?
Your work as a writer is to create a world your reader can believe in. You go into it the way you’d step into thin air, blindly, in unavoidably two-dimensional faith.
There is nothing between you and this new world but a page. At first, the page looks like all this new world is: two dimensions, two colors, black and white. Nothing else. Just you and this painful, simple truth.
You have nothing yet to believe in.
Then slowly and methodically, carefully and with the most single-minded attention, you open yourself up to this world and begin to take notes. Why do you want to be there? Why would your readers? There's something in this world that means everything to you, and it’s your job to find it and write down everything you possibly can about it.
Write. You’re a writer.
This world must be visible. It needs specific light and dark, scenes, sights, and objects with shapes and sizes and colors. It must be audible. It needs sounds and silence, voices and a lack of voices. It must be tangible, with textures and temperatures, tastes and smells, bodily experiences and the absence of them. It must be a real place. You are here to record that real place.
And while you're learning everything you can about this world, you look for the characters who own it. You watch them from a distance, paying attention to their physical bodies, their ages, their mannerisms, the sounds of their voices. You see how they interact with each other, what words they choose and do not choose. You ask yourself, “Why say that? Why not say the other thing?” And you listen for the answers. You note down their body language, their tics and gestures, how they move around each other and through their environment, whether or not they touch, if they do how they do it, if they don’t why. You keep asking yourself, “Why? Why this? Why here? Why now?”
You can introduce yourself to them, but don’t try to make yourself part of their story. You’re not. You’re the writer.
You pile up scenes on paper and in your mind, watching these characters living in their world. You begin to see the links between the scenes and realize that certain scenes, when put together in a certain order, create certain episodes. Aha! you think. That’s very interesting!
You play around a little. What if the scenes really go in this other order, maybe not that scene but another one, and they end in a scene you haven’t seen yet—what episode does that create?
Oh, yes. That episode tells much more about this world. That episode clarifies so much.
The episodes begin to pile up and bear resemblances to each other. You realize they’re following a trajectory. Some episodes you figured out later happened before the first episodes you figured out, but that’s all right. The trajectory is beginning to make sense. You see where the base of the rainbow is. You see where it’s going.
There’s the first disaster! You can tell because it hurts, but it hurts in a kind of subtle, complex way. There’s the second disaster! That one hurts more—it changes things. There’s the third disaster! That one's a double-header, and it wreaks real havoc.
Your characters are damaged now. But they’re undaunted. They’re made of tough stuff.
You’re at the peak of the rainbow, and you can see in all directions. Of course. This is where it was all leading. With their personalities, in this world, under these circumstances, with that series of disasters behind them—where else could they have wound up?
You stop awhile, sit down, dangle your legs, and ask yourself in all seriousness, “Where else could they have wound up?”
As though it were a holograph of the whole, you move into that possibility. What’s there?
Then you spend some time thinking about rewriting the entire thing.
This is the work of creating a novel. It’s complex, it’s exhausting, and it takes a really long time. If you’re in a hurry, I wouldn’t bother to start. You’re not going to fly through becoming a writer any more than you’re going to fly through becoming a high-diver. At least a failed writer doesn’t wind up in the hospital.
Because after you’ve explored this entire new world, climbed the rainbow with your characters, taken in the view, made sure you’ve looked under every rock and turned over every leaf, written it down, written it down, written it down—you still have more to do. You must get your characters back to earth. It’s going to take everything you have and know and believe. These are their lives you hold in your hands.
And while your characters are surviving or not surviving whatever you have to do to them, your readers are falling off the rainbow into space, taken there by the naked insight into what means everything to you.
You don't push your reader off the rainbow by driving your story into them like a car. You do it by leading them to an extraordinary, vivid, real view and leaving them standing out there, on the thin air of faith.
Character is Content
Telling the Truth
with Emily Brontё
Stories are about human beings
Wuthering Heights' story of the remorseless Catherine and uncontrollable Heathcliff bears all the marks of a particularly rancid 1970s trade romance. An impetuous, selfish young woman falls in love with a brooding, vicious man who finally admits he loves her back. There is no sweet, shy heroine to save them. They destroy their own lives and the lives around them with their violent shenanigans. That’s all.
No wonder her contemporaries rolled their eyes in horror.
And yet Emily Brontё was one of the greatest of the greats. With a single novel, she made literary history.
Brontё managed a feat the rest of us can only dream of—she told the appalling story of an unsympathetic couple in such a classical manner that readers elevate her characters to the status of archetypes and her conflict to the realm of Greek tragedy.
How did she do it?
The story of Wuthering Heights is told through an unusual structure: a frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame. That is, the narrator—so unimportant his own name and life mean nothing to the reader at all—relates the story as told to him by a servant, who grew up with Catherine and Heathcliff and personally supervised them through their tumultuous drama. By all accounts, this structure should remove the reader so thoroughly from the action it becomes hardly more than a summary. Even the double first-person narrative voice can’t overcome the fact that the reader never actually gets inside the head of either Catherine or Heathcliff, never feels their feelings, never thinks their thoughts, never follows the logic of their internal conclusions to the rationale that would make their highly idiosyncratic behavior even the slightest bit justified.
Nobody should be able to identify with these people.
And yet we do. In spite of the amazing unlikelihood than any of the millions of readers who’ve loved Wuthering Heights in the 160 years since it was first published ever destroyed either themselves or their families through the reckless narcissism of their combined self-love and self-loathing in such a spectacular and memorable way—we identify. Something in Catherine and Heathcliff lives in us.
What the double distance of Brontё’s complex structure does is allow her to show her characters externally in the most intense terms she could possibly imagine. Catherine taunts, mocks, slaps, and raves. Heathcliff kidnaps people, locks them up, beats, torments, and kills. They’re monsters! But they’re removed so effectively from the reader that they become theater, in exactly the same way that Greek tragedians were able to tear out their own eyes, marry their own parents, even—horribly—feed each other their own children and still bring their audiences back for more.
At the same time, Brontё loads her characters with almost unbearable internal conflict, a devouring obsession with each other that reveals her wonderful, agonizing insight into the depths of human nature.
Deep in the infantile recesses of the subconscious, Catherine's and Heathcliff's passion is how we love a single partner throughout life. We do confuse our beloveds over the years in our own minds with ourselves, with our own hopes and fears, our own desires and phobias, our own wants, our own selfish concerns, our very identities. Brontё doesn’t tell us what Catherine thinks about this. She makes Catherine say it.
And Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s acting-out of their confusion is unpredictable, tormented, and, inevitably, disastrous. Heathcliff finally admits he loves Catherine—he’s rising from his knees, embracing her—and she grabs his hair and yanks him back down. This is how we feel at the height of emotion, after decades of sharing a heart with only one other person. We do want to both keep them and reject them, to pull them to us and punish them for abandoning us, to cling to them no matter what it does to them, just to control them, to finally control them. Brontё doesn’t tell us this is what Catherine wants. She makes her do it.
In all its complexity, ambiguity, hunger, and heartbreak—this is what it’s like to love.
Emily Brontё never loved a man other than her brother and father. She didn’t flout authority, taunt her siblings, insult, pull hair, kick, or laugh at others’ misery. She didn’t gamble, trespass, maliciously betray love, force anyone to marry, or hang anybody’s lap dog. She didn’t know anyone who did. She lived a quiet life in the cold stone house where she grew up, baking, cleaning, writing secret poetry about an imaginary country, trying to avoid having to teach school, and periodically firing her father’s gun for him when he became too blind to shoot holes in the church tower outside his bedroom window for himself.
She didn’t want to theorize about how it would feel to love and hate the man in her dreams, the archetype who visited her late at night in her tiny room as she bent with a candle over her portable lap desk. She didn’t want to wonder what it might be like if that man were real.
She wanted to know.
And through meticulous, specific portraits of the impossibly conflicted characters she pictured, she did. She gave that to all of us.
Delving into the Mythic Life
How to create character
Creating the Look of a Character
There are only so many auburn-tressed, emerald-eyed, white-skinned, spunky/seductive/mysterious temptresses in the world. And, unfortunately, all of them have already made it into print.
You know who’s there with them? The curvaceous, giggly blondes and the sultry, sloe-eyed brunettes. They fell in love with and married all of the strapping/hunky Ken dolls with chiseled jaws and molded abs a long time ago, and now they spend their Saturday nights as a gang down at Cyrano’s throwing back the shots and swapping house keys.
Their children, I’m afraid, are in rehab.
So who’s left to populate your stories? Faceless characters in the land of Godot, sitting on invisible furniture in empty space and trading banal conversation to prove they’re real?
No, that’s the kids before rehab.
I’m afraid there’s only one type of character left for stories being written these days, and there’s only one place to find them. They’re real people out there living their lives in the real world.
Yes, I know you’re not writing realistic stories about real people. You’re writing fantasy about dragons and fairies and haunts. You’re writing about aliens without space suits colonizing New York City under the guise of celebrities. You’re writing about beautiful people seducing each other with just that light touch of brutality that makes them charming in bed. You’re writing terrifying thrillers with authentic weaponry and technical covert-operations expertise. You’re writing about cowboys who never get out of the saddle, not even to do their business, who can spin a sharp-shooter on one finger while simultaneously lighting a cigarette on a horse’s hoof (provided, of course, that the horse is cooperative). I know.
But you still have to create real people.
I am so sorry. Really, I am. I have created my share of ideal women and men to live out the adventures I imagined and solve the riddles I posed for them. I have given them lovely faces, thrilling voices (thank you, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for the thirty-six mentions of Daisy’s low, thrilling voice in less than two hundred pages), and insightful commentary. I didn’t always mention it, but you know every one of them had perfect skin.
Then I had to go back and scrap them all. I saw them at Cyrano’s.
Here’s what I did after that: I took a notebook and pen and started hanging out at sidewalk cafés. I lived in downtown San Francisco at the time, a half-a-block into the notoriously scary Tenderloin neighborhood below Nob Hill, in what I affectionately called Nob Valley.
I spent hours on the weekends in my own neighborhood and on my lunch hour near my job South of Market (before it got gentrified, when it was still the place no one went unless they were looking for a newspaper plastered to a chain link fence).
I was surrounded by material.
And I wrote. I didn’t make anything up. I just wrote. Long, detailed descriptions of everyone I saw. Most of those turned out to be the homeless who wandered by because, frankly, the homeless can be pretty amazing.
There was the emaciated, bug-eyed woman in a dirty tennis dress scuffing along, muttering, her reddened heels sticking out the backs of her broken tennis shoes, looking like she’d been freeze-dried. There was the gaunt old man in a drooping grey forty-year-old suit, with one black infected toe sticking horribly out of a hole in his shoe, who stood up suddenly and deliberately let his pants fall off. There was the woman in the bright yellow, baggy clown britches and enormous green and purple leather boots, her face spotted with acne and her hair curled almost too perfectly in Marlo Thomas rolls to her shoulders. There was the wreck of a young man with a once-classical fine-boned face who dragged himself up the steps of a bus and croaked with what appeared to be the last of his strength, “Y’goin—y’goin—y’goin to Chinatown?”
Now, I can hear you cry, “But I’m not writing about the homeless!” Of course you’re not. Okay, you in the back, you are. But nobody else is. That’s not the point. The point is that writing about real, living, startlingly interesting-looking people trains you to notice and note down the unique characteristics of everybody.
I started doing it at bars. This was harder, because people have a tendency to hit on anyone with a notebook who looks like they might be A Writer—a tip for those of you still on the prowl. But I managed. I saw archetypes (and, in reading these, please keep in mind I’ve been out of the bar scene for years).
There was the young man with short hair dyed flaming yellow and orange with dark roots, who accessorized his look with black-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses. There was the woman with pancake white on her face, straightened black hair, fire-engine lipstick, and scrolling Egyptian eyeliner. There was the chrome-plated couple with rainbow hair and studded dog collars and permanent hip disdain. There was the shaved-bald bartender with the baggy, day-glo T-shirt whose world-weary correctness didn’t involve actual words.
The plethora of piercings and tattoos was staggering. And each unique instance of each particular character type had a mole here, a zit there, a pair of especially large or small front teeth, a squint in one eye or the other, a misshapen nostril or ear or finger or lip, a bruise or band-aid, a way of jerking the head or picking a tooth or coughing into a fist that made them different from all of the other instances of their type around them.
What I learned is that, even when we try to blend in with the crowd, we can’t stop one crucial, inescapable fact from slipping through the disguise: we’re real people. We live our lives out here in the real world.
Once I figured that out, I started taking serious risks. I started describing my friends. Not right in front of them—not when they were looking, anyway—but late at night after I’d been with them, back in my apartment. I noted their uniforms, the clothes and hairstyles they used to make themselves look like each other, all in meticulous, scientific detail.
Then I noted the crucial, inescapable facts of their personalities that slipped through—the body parts that twitched, the nervous picking at themselves, the coughing and sneezing and hiccupping and winking. It was all there, just waiting to be noticed and noted.
We’re really such transparent creatures. We live inside these bodies bearing almost grotesque resemblances to our parents, doing our best to disappear in our crowd, doing our best to be a cliché of something we admire. And yet our humanity always slips through.
Creating a Name for a Character
Uriah Heap. Oliver Twist. Herbert Pocket. Pip.
Guess who was really good with names.
Naming is a serious issue in the creation of character, and I will tell you why: because Bob and Susan Smith could be absolutely anybody. I’m sorry, they could. Your characters must be unique.
I happen to know an editor who wants to see a name on every character, however fleeting. But Lorrie Moore’s breakout story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” is about the Mother, the Doctor, and the Baby. Characters don’t have to have names. There are no Names Police.
I, personally, have suffered terribly over the incredible significance of character names. In my early writing days, I was so struck by option paralysis I sincerely wanted everyone to be called the Woman, the Man, the Guy with the Hat. I wrote stories of deep, poignant significance in which the characters could only be identified by their looks:
“It wasn’t like that,” said the man with the bent nose.
“How would you know?” The woman with the long earlobes toyed with a pocket knife.
“He’s lying,” said the man with the dreadlocks in two ponytails.
“The truth would be a lie for him,” answered the woman with the fingernails with no moons.
I wrote a whole novel about characters with completely fantasial names like Miff and Gumbo, until someone said, “Are they aliens?”
Then I buckled a little and started letting characters have real names, but only names I would consider for my own children—lovely, melodious, slightly unusual names that reminded me of people I’d loved in passing (or wished I’d known) years before. It was great when they did totally banal things.
Theodore Isaac Peter blocked the door with his tennis shoe. Isabella Louisa, outraged, knocked him into the wall with her umbrella. Anna Mathilda Magdalena Rebecca looked the other way and picked her nose.
But even then I couldn’t bring myself to give my characters last names. It just seemed too. . .portentous.
Then one winter my husband and I spent the coldest months face-to-face in rocking chairs on either side of our woodstove—partly because we couldn’t afford heat and partly because he’d just installed wireless Internet and we could—and I laughed so hard over Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto that I felt compelled to write my own faux-twelfth-century Gothic comedy.
I mean, Otranto’s got everything. Drama. Passion. Terror. Death threats. Thwarted romance. Thwarted death threats. Threatening romance. Denied birthright and forgotten history and secret catacombs and one heck of a hilarious ghost giant. Plus some guy gets squished by a gigantic helmet.
It took about six weeks to write a first draft of my own, and in order to make it authentic I looked up Medieval English names.
And I stumbled on the motherlode! AEleueua, Aunphelice, Aylyetta, AElfuini, AEdilualch—that’s just the A’s.
But, wait. There’s more. I looked up surnames, too. Smalbyhind, Aydrunken, even the cryptic Latethewaterga (Let the Water Go).
Those were some people who knew the real significance of names.
The thing is, like everything else in fiction, it does your reader no good for you to include details that do not in any way illuminate your characters. Rebecca West put a character into The Fountain Overflows who poisons her husband to death and serves prison time for it, while her daughter and unbelievably hapless sister go live with the protagonist’s family. Ditzy, delicate, floppy Aunt Lily would lose her head if it weren’t screwed on. But her murderous, remorseless sister is Queenie.
Of course, I probably would have named them AEglyuu and Mogg. But I also probably would have tried to work a squishing by gigantic helmet in there somewhere.
Collect names. Whenever you hear or see one that strikes you as interesting or poignant or particularly telling, jot it down. Read baby name books. Browse bookstores for author names. Once I interviewed a local sheriff’s deputy for a murder mystery and nearly died when I heard his name, Sheriff Schnitzius (pronounced Snitches). He said he has a cousin who’s a detective in Oakland. Is that rich or what? A friend was telling me the other day that she was reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, and I said I don’t think a person with a name like that should have to write books to go along with it—the name is enough.
List the names you collect alphabetically. I know this sounds nuts, but it’s a fact that if you give more than one main character names beginning with the same letter, it slows the reader down sorting them out and wakes them from, as John Gardner described it, the fictional dream. I keep a list scribbled on a sheet of paper by my elbow when I’m writing a first draft to make sure I don’t accidentally name a new character something too similar to somebody already up and about. And if I do, I go back later and change one of them.
Anne of Green Gables was absolutely right when she insisted that not only every person but every object in the world should know what it's called. How can your characters reveal their true selves if nobody knows their true names?
Creating Action for a Character
I recently began reading Syd Field’s canonical work, Screenplay. And what an eye-opener it is!
I decided to study screenwriting specifically for plot. I mean, what’s a movie if not a plot? Right? Even Down by Law has a plot (although action-wise it makes The Bridges of Madison County look like Rambo).
I’m five chapters and fifty-five pages into the book, and you wouldn’t believe what Field—one of the stars of the screenwriting world—has been talking about this whole time.
Yep. Character.
Field has a list of things that comprise character:
personality
point of view
attitude
behavior
identification
revelation
He splits character into:
interior (what happened to the character before the story)
exterior (what happens to the character during the story)
He discusses:
content