On Becoming a Novelist (8 page)

Say, for example, that the writer has decided to tell the story of a man who has moved into the house next door to the house of his teen-age daughter, a girl who does not know that the man is her father. The man—call him Frank—does not tell the girl—she may as well be Wanda—that she is his daughter. They become friends and, despite the difference in age, she begins to feel a sexual attraction.

What the foolish or inexperienced writer does with this idea is hide the father-daughter relationship from the reader as well as from the daughter until the last minute, at which point he jumps out and yells: “Surprise!” If the writer tells the story from the father’s point of view and withholds the important information, the writer is false to the traditional reader-writer contract—that is, he has played a trick on the reader. (The so-called unreliable narrator favored in much contemporary fiction is not a violation of the contract. It is not the storyteller but a fictitious narrator, a character, that we must watch and learn to distrust. If the storyteller
himself
is unreliable, we avoid him as we would a mad sea captain or axe murderer.)

If, on the other hand, the story is told from the daughter’s point of view, the device is legitimate, since the reader can only know what the daughter knows; but the writer has mishandled his idea. The daughter is simply a victim in this story, since she doesn’t know the facts by means of which she could make significant choices—namely, struggle with her feelings and come to some decision, accepting her role as daughter or else, conceivably, choosing to violate the incest taboo. When the central character is a victim, not someone who
does
but someone who’s
done
to, there can be no real suspense. Admittedly it is not always easy to see, in great fiction, the central character’s agency. The governess in James’s
The Turn of the Screw
would hotly deny that she herself is acting in complicity with the forces of evil, but gradually, to our horror, we realize that she is; and some stories—for instance those of Kafka—adapt to the purposes of “serious” fiction the central device of a certain kind of comic fiction, the clown-hero knocked around by the universe, a character we laugh at because his misapplied strategies and beliefs parody our own. (It is not that Kafka’s heroes—or Beckett’s—do not try to do things; it is only that the things they try don’t work.) In the final analysis, real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.

The wiser or more experienced writer gives the reader the information he needs to understand the story moment by moment, with the result that instead of asking, as he reads, “What’s going to happen to the characters next?” the reader asks, “What will Frank do next? What would Wanda say if Frank were to …” and so on. Involving himself in the story in this way, the reader feels true suspense, which is to say, true concern for the characters. He takes an active part, however secondary, in the story’s growth and development: he speculates, anticipates; and because he has been provided with relevant information, he is in a position to catch the mistake if the writer draws false or unconvincing conclusions, forcing the action in a direction it would not naturally go, or making the characters feel things no human being would really feel in the situation.

If Frank is clearly drawn and interesting, a lifelike human being, the reader worries about him, understands him, cares about the choices he makes. Thus if Frank at some point, out of cowardice or indecisiveness, makes a choice any decent human being would recognize as wrong, the reader will feel vicarious embarrassment and shame, as he would feel if some loved one, or the reader himself, were to make such a choice. If Frank sooner or later acts bravely, or at least honestly, selflessly, the reader will feel a thrill of pride as if he himself or some loved one had behaved well—a pride that, ultimately, expresses pleasure in what is best not just in the made-up character but in all humankind. If Frank finally behaves well, and Wanda shows unexpected (but not arbitrary or writermanipulated) nobility, the reader will feel even better. This is the morality of fiction. The morality of the story of Frank and Wanda does not reside in their choosing not to commit incest or in their deciding they
will
commit incest. Good fiction does not deal in codes of conduct—at least not directly; it affirms responsible humanness.

The young writer who understands why it is wisest to tell the Frank and Wanda story as one of dilemma, suffering, and choice is in a position to understand good fiction’s generosity in the broadest sense of the word. The wise writer counts on the characters and plot for his story’s power, not on tricks of withheld information, including withheld information at the end—will they commit incest or won’t they, now that they know? In other words, the writer lays himself wide open, dancing on a high wire without a net. The writer is generous, too, in that, for all his mastery of technique, he introduces only those techniques useful to the story: he is the story’s servant, not a donzel for whom the story serves as an excuse to show off pyrotechnics. This is not to say that he’s indifferent to the value of performance. Those techniques he uses because the story needs them he uses brilliantly. He works entirely in service of the story, but he works with class. On this, more later.

It is the importance of this quality of generosity in fiction that requires a measure of childishness in the writer. People who have strong mental focus and a sense of purpose in their lives, people who have respect for all that grownups generally respect (earning a good living, the flag, the school system, those who are richer than oneself, those who are beloved and famous, such as movie stars), are unlikely ever to make it through the many revisions it takes to tell a story beautifully, without visible tricks, nor would they be able to tolerate the fame and fortune of those who tell stories stupidly, with hundreds of tricks, all of them old and boring to the discriminating mind. First, with his stubborn churlishness the good writer scoffs at what the grownups are praising, then, with his childish forgetfulness and indifference to what sensible people think, he goes back to his foolish pastime, the making of real art.

The remaining qualities in good fiction, and the personality traits in the writer that are likely to help him achieve them, need not delay us long. Good fiction, I have said, is intellectually and emotionally significant. All this means is that a story with a stupid central idea, no matter how brilliantly the story is told, will be a stupid story. Take an easy example. A young newspaperman discovers that his father, who is the mayor of the city and has always been a hero to him, is the secret owner of brothels, sex shops, and a vicious loan-shark operation. Shall the newspaperman spill the beans on his father? Whatever his secret life, our newspaperman’s father taught our newspaperman all the values he knows, including integrity, courage, and concern for the community. What is the newspaperman to do?

Who cares? The whole story is a moronic setup, good enough for writers of pop fiction but useless as a vehicle for art. The first thing wrong with it is that the clash of ideas implied is a clash of boring ideas, namely, which is more important, personal integrity (telling it like it is) or personal loyalty? Only very odd people don’t realize that truth-telling is always a relative value. If you’re living in Germany during World War II and a Jew is hiding in your basement, you do nothing wrong in the sight of God by telling the Nazi at the door you’re the only one home. Personal integrity (not telling lies) is so obviously bendable in the name of a higher integrity that the question’s not worth talking about. And in the case of this hypothetical story, the father’s nastiness is so deep and broad (at least as we’ve set it up) that only a fool would agonize over the claim of personal loyalty. Almost no one doubts that personal loyalty is a good thing, up to a point: the worth of the value is transparent and needs no defense. It will be objected that the fictional situation I’ve just set up is almost exactly the situation in Robert Penn Warren’s
All the King’s Men.
I am tempted to answer, yes, that’s so, and notice the streak of sentimentality that impairs that novel, from its tour-de-force opening blast of rhetoric through all its gothic delays to its end; but in fairness to the success of that book, despite its sentimentality, I must say, anticipating the next point I mean to turn to, it is Penn Warren’s characters that save what might have been, in another writer’s hands, a bad idea for a novel. If the essential plot idea is melodramatic, the complexity of the characters enriches and complicates the idea and partly saves it.

What is most deeply wrong with our newspaperman story idea is that it starts in the wrong place, not with character but with situation. Character is the very life of fiction. Setting exists so that the character has someplace to stand, something that can help define him, something he can pick up and throw, if necessary, or eat, or give to his girlfriend. Plot exists so the character can discover for himself (and in the process reveal to the reader) what he, the character, is really like: plot forces the character to choice and action, transforms him from a static construct to a lifelike human being making choices and paying for them or reaping the rewards. And theme exists only to make the character stand up and
be
somebody: theme is elevated critical language for what the character’s main problem is.

Consider again our story of Frank and his daughter Wanda. One might write that story very well without ever bothering to figure out what the theme is: it would be enough for the writer to understand clearly that Frank has an interesting problem (some details of which the writer will have to pause and figure out). For some reason (any persuasive reason will do), Frank has moved next door to his daughter; he knows her, she doesn’t know him (any explanation of this odd fact will suffice, as long as it’s so convincing that no reader would think of doubting it); and he decides not to tell her (by reason of something in his character and situation; again, any reason will do, so long as it’s convincing and fits with everything else in the story). Our character’s interesting situation, then, is that
(a)
perhaps somewhat to his surprise, he begins to feel a father’s love for, and maybe pride in, the daughter he never knew, and
(b)
he likes seeing her, the oftener the better, but
(c)
she’s beginning to feel an undaughterly love for him, so that he must either tell her how things are or not tell her, and in either case the ultimate question is, What are they going to do?

Every detail that enters the story will have an influence on the degree to which the characters suffer and eventually on what they choose. Say the daughter lives with her stepfather and her mother is dead. If the stepfather is indifferent to her, or a drunkard, or crazy, or always away on trips to Cleveland, her admiration of Frank and her opportunity for seeing him will increase. Say Frank lost his daughter and now-dead wife because he spent seventeen years in prison, a fact of which he is bitterly ashamed. In this case both his longing for his daughter and his fear of telling her the truth may be intense. Obviously it doesn’t matter which particulars the writer selects—if he’s smart he’ll simply select those details he’d most enjoy finding in a story by someone else—but whichever details he chooses, he commits himself to exploring those details for all significant implications.

The Frank-Wanda story, as we’ve begun to flesh it out, may at first glance seem as much a situation story as the newspaperman-and-his-father story, but on closer inspection we see it’s not. The initial situation in the Frank-Wanda story exists because of a conflict within Frank’s character: he simultaneously wants to reveal his identity to his daughter and also hide that identity, or to put the problem in broader philosophical terms, he wants to be both independent and involved—an impossibility. The internal conflict inevitably leads to an external conflict, easily dramatized: Wanda, falling in love with the man she doesn’t know to be her father, must necessarily send out signals of her sexual interest and must necessarily receive confusing signals in return. We can predict the line of action: from joys to trouble and distress to spats and tears to revelation and decision. (There is nothing wrong with fiction in which the plot is relatively predictable. What matters is how things happen, and what it means that they happen, to the people directly involved and to the larger humanity for whom the characters serve as representatives. Needless to say, it is always best if the predictable comes in some surprising way.)

In nearly all good fiction, the basic—all but inescapable—plot form is:
A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.
In a novel the pros and cons of the character’s project get complicated (each force, pro or con, dramatized by minor characters, subplots, and so on), but the form, however disguised, remains. The “victim story,” as I described it earlier, can never work because the victim cannot know and, out of that knowledge, act. (If the victim’s desire is not to be a victim, and if he or she acts on it, the victim’s story is not a “victim story.”) I have said “nearly all good fiction,” since we do find exceptions. I have already mentioned Kafka’s use, and Beckett’s, of the always unsuccessful clown-hero, and I should register in passing the special case of the “epiphany” story as Joyce developed it in
Dubliners
—a story form in which, for all practical purposes, the reader takes the place of the conventional central character: it is the reader who actively pursues, the reader who, at the climax of the story, achieves his “win”—a sudden shift of vision, a new understanding, an “epiphany.” Not all of the stories in
Dubliners
work this way, of course; for example, “The Dead” does not. In any case, no one denies the effectiveness of epiphany fiction; but if my analysis of how it works is correct, it is closer to convention than it appears at first blush.