Thinking About Fiction

Hello all, hope this finds you having a great weekend. I know there are a lot of folks in the class who are working on fiction, whether its short stories, novels or fragments of writing that might someday be joined to make a longer text.
There are a few elements of craft that might be interesting to you, some things to try when launching into the wild and exciting world of fiction.

1. Practice Imagining
Fictional writing is centered in the world of imagination, and your imagination, like your triceps, must be exercises regularly in order to be strong and supple. The world of the imagination is like a vast, undiscovered continent to which we all had passports as children. Inventing and imagining freely is one of the best parts of being a child. But at some stage in our development “making things up” stopped being called “imagination” and started being called “lying”. So as adults, there is not much of a role for imagination in our everyday lives and as writers, we may find that the muscles involved in imagination have fallen out of use. So practice imagining. See those two people sitting across from you in Starbucks? Which one of them is the international spy and what is in the briefcase on the floor? See that guy riding his bike? What did he have for breakfast this morning and what nightmare does he have that keeps recurring? As the poet Mary Oliver said “The world offers itself to your imagination.” Look around you in your everyday world and start seeing past what is actual to what is possible.

2. Create Plots
Plots in fictional stories need not be complicated or overly dramatic, but they should involve some series of actions so as to keep your reader active and interested in the text. Look through the last great novel you read or remember the last great movie you saw. Can you summarize what happened in that book or movie in a single sentence? (Ok, it can be a very l o n g sentence!) For example, the “plot” of the Wizard of Oz might be: “A young girl gets blown by a tornado into a different world where she has to fight an evil witch in order to get home again.” Try doing this to get an idea of the plots of the stories you are reading. See if you can summarize your own on-going story or novel in this way. What happens? Like characters and landscapes, plots too are drawn from our everyday experience of living. Look around you and notice what is happening. If the guy in line behind you in Safeway forgot his wallet, then use that as your launching point and crank up your imagination. Was the wallet stolen if so by whom? Has he lost his memory, and if so how and why? Is he trying to hide his identity, and from whom? And remember, there are some wonderful novels and stories out there that do not have huge or exciting plots, but something always happens, no matter how small.

3. Find Themes
If plots are the tip of the iceberg, the part of the story that is above the waterline, then the Themes of a story are the bigger part of the iceberg, the part that is below the water. What is the Wizard of Oz REALLY about? Is it about going home? Is it about the power of true friendship? Is it about the fact that all the things we most want from others (brain, heart, adventure or courage) are all the things we must find within ourselves? Or hey, maybe its just a big Technicolor cautionary tale about one kid’s closed head injury sustained in the tornado alley of Kansas. The “themes” of any story, no matter how small, are the ways in which the story connects to our universal human experience. Make a list of the themes in the story or novel you are writing. What do you want your reader to see or understand about those themes by the end of your story?

4. Invent Memorable Characters
When you think of the novels or stories you have enjoyed the most, you probably remember the characters in them as if they were real. And “real” characters are those who are most fully human, which means interesting, quirky and unpredictable. As readers, we pay much more attention to heroes who we don’t always love and villains who we don’t always hate. Making a character memorable is often a byproduct of making that character specific. What type of cigarettes does your villain smoke? How old are those cowboy boots she’s wearing? What kind of car does your main character drive? What 5 things does he have in his pockets? What did his father do for a living? Learn who your characters are, and keep track of the information. Go through magazines until you find an image of your character sitting at her desk. Keep flipping through the magazine until you find a picture of the car she stole this morning. Find a postcard of the town she grew up in. Collect all your character data in files and look at how you weave specific description into the story. Look at the “characters” who surround you everyday and create amalgams, take the annoying habit of your next door neighbor and add those fuzzy slippers your roommate wears and then put them all on the body of your 12th grade biology teacher. Make characters we will remember, long after the story is over.

5. Begin to Notice Narrative and Scene
In all types of fiction you will eventually be working with “narrative” (in which you tell us what is happening) and “scene” (in which you show us what is happening).
Narrative would look something like this;

“Over the next 3 years, his family moved four times and each house they lived in was more awful than the last”

Whereas a Scene might look like this;
Brian walked into the living room of the new house and tried to identify the terrible smell coming from under the kitchen door. “What is that?” he asked his brother “Have you ever smelled anything that bad?”

Both narrative and scene are necessary, especially in novels, but every book and story has a different and unique ratio of narrative to scene. Sometimes you will need to tell us the information and sometimes you will have to let us see it (and hear it, and smell it) for ourselves. Start to notice these moves in the books you are reading. How much of the story is accomplished narrative? How much is rendered in scenes? Practice writing both and work intentionally on whichever one you find hardest to do.

6. Detail is Everything
As someone who teaches writing everyday I’ve been seriously considering having this phrase tattooed somewhere on my forehead. But unfortunately it’s true. The details always matter. For example, one could write a story in which “an orphan kid is terrified as he travels to his new school”. Or, (as JK Rowling did in Book One), one could say;
“And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead.” By bringing in the sensory details of any scene or moment, you invite your reader to be active, to be a participant in the story instead of a spectator. When you describe an important character or location or series of actions in a story, make sure that you are giving us all the details that are necessary. It is, of course, possible to overindulge in detail, but that’s a Cadillac of a problem to have. Its easier to add too many details and take some away, then to have no details at all and rely on that one lonely blue checkered tea towel to symbolize the entire mansion in the Hamptons. Notice the sights and colors and sounds and textures and objects that already populate your world. And choose your details skillfully, well-chosen and strategic details that we can SEE may relieve you of have to TELL us everything.

As you know from being a reader, well-written fiction has the ability to go places that other genres cannot.
So invent away and have fun!
All the best,
Max