The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (14 page)

Metafiction, deconstructive fiction, and jazzing around all have this much in common with conventional fiction: They all delight us, or, as Nabokov used to insist, “charm.” Whether a given work is boisterous, like a circus, or quietly elegant, like a sailboat, or disorienting, like an unpleasant dream come alive, or something else, all good fiction has moment-by-moment fascination. It has authority and at least a touch of strangeness. It draws us in. In the case of what I’ve called conventional fiction, it’s easy to describe the basis of our attraction. For unconventional fiction, that is not so. Mystery is its soul. Sometimes when we look closely at an unconventional piece of fiction, we discover that in fact it’s a simple achievement of genre-crossing—for instance, the folktale and the early Hollywood murder mystery—but we may be discovering more than the writer knew. As we’ve seen, conventional fiction takes immensely careful planning if it’s to be really good, and metafiction and deconstructive fiction take similar care. Jazzing around takes a special genius, in which the ability to plan plays hardly any part. It requires inexhaustible imagination (think of the work of Stanley Elkin, for instance) and the taste to know when the magic isn’t quite good enough. The two gifts, one extraordinarily childlike, the other highly sophisticated and mature, almost never show up in one person. Occasionally they show up in two, as in Gilbert and Sullivan, and the two fight like devils.

PART II
Notes on the Fictional Process

Common Errors

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing. It is as if a playwright were to run out on stage, interrupting his characters, to remind us that he has written all this. I am not saying that a novelist cannot noticeably treat his characters as puppets in a stage-set world, since puppets and a stage set are also things we can see and to some extent empathize with. Even the most “objective” fiction, as Robert Louis Stevenson called it, is still fiction, still dramatization.

If the principle of vividness and continuity is clear, we can turn to some technical implications.

A scene will not be vivid if the writer gives too few details to stir and guide the reader’s imagination; neither will it be vivid if the language the writer uses is abstract instead of concrete. If the writer says “creatures” instead of “snakes,” if in an attempt to impress us with fancy talk he uses Latinate terms like “hostile maneuvers” instead of sharp Anglo-Saxon words like “thrash,” “coil,” “spit,” “hiss,” and “writhe,” if instead of the desert’s sand and rocks he speaks of the snakes’ “inhospitable abode,” the reader will hardly know what picture to conjure up on his mental screen. These two faults, insufficient detail and abstraction where what is needed is concrete detail, are common—in fact all but universal—in amateur writing. Another is the failure to run straight at the image; that is, the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: “Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks.” Compare: “She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting.” (The improvement can of course be further improved. The phrase “two snakes were fighting” is more abstract than, say, “two snakes whipped and lashed, striking at each other”; and verbs with auxiliaries [“were fighting”] are never as sharp in focus as verbs without auxiliaries, since the former indicate indefinite time, whereas the latter [e.g., “fought”] suggest a given instant.) Generally speaking—though no laws are absolute in fiction—vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as “she noticed” and “she saw” be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.

The technical implications of the continuity principle—the idea that the reader should never be distracted from the image or scene—cannot be treated so briefly. In the work of beginning writers, especially those weak in the basic skills of English composition, the usual mistake is that the writer distracts the reader by clumsy or incorrect writing. Characters, of course, can speak as clumsily as they like; the writer’s job is simply to imitate
them accurately. But the standard third-person narrator can never miss. If the narrator slips into faulty syntax, the reader’s mind tacks away from the fighting snakes to the problem of figuring out what the sentence means. The distraction is almost certain to be emotional as well as intellectual, since the reader has every right to feel that the writer’s business is to say what he means clearly. In good fiction, the reader never has to go back over a sentence just to find out what it says. He may read a sentence twice because he likes it, or because, through no fault of the author, his mind briefly wandered, musing, perhaps, on the larger implications of the scene; but if it’s the author’s carelessness that makes him read twice, he has a right to feel that the author has violated the fundamental contract in all fiction: that the writer will deal honestly and responsibly with the reader. (This, it should be mentioned, does not rule out use of the so-called unreliable narrator, since the unreliable narrator is a character inside the fiction.)

Clumsy writing is an even more common mistake in the work of amateurs, though it shows up even in the work of very good writers. Some of the more frequent forms of clumsy writing should perhaps be mentioned here, since faults of this kind are a good deal more serious than the amateur may imagine. They alienate the experienced reader, or at very least make it hard for him to concentrate on the fictional dream, and they undercut the writer’s authority. Where lumps and infelicities occur in fiction, the sensitive reader shrinks away a little, as we do when an interesting conversationalist picks his nose.

The most obvious forms of clumsiness, really failures in the basic skills, include such mistakes as inappropriate or excessive use of the passive voice, inappropriate use of introductory phrases containing infinite verbs, shifts in diction level or the regular use of distracting diction, lack of sentence variety, lack of sentence focus, faulty rhythm, accidental rhyme, needless explanation, and careless shifts in psychic distance. Let us run through these one by one.

Except in stock locutions, such as “You were paid yesterday,” “The Germans were defeated,” or “The project was abandoned,” the passive voice is virtually useless in fiction except when used for comic effect, as when the writer mimics some fool’s slightly pompous way of speaking or quotes some institutional directive. The active voice is almost invariably more direct and vivid: “Your parrot bit me” as opposed to (passive) “I was bitten by your parrot.” (The choice in this case may depend on characterization. A timid soul fearful of giving offense might well choose the passive construction.) In a story presented by the conventional omniscient narrator—an objective and largely impersonal formal narrative voice like, say, Tolstoy’s—the passive voice is almost certain to offend and distract. Needless to say, the writer must judge every case individually, and the really good writer may get away with just about anything. But it must be clear that when the writer makes use of the passive he knows he’s doing it and has good reason for what he does.

Sentences beginning with infinite-verb phrases are so common in bad writing that one is wise to treat them as guilty until proven innocent—sentences, that is, that begin with such phrases as “Looking up slowly from her sewing, Martha said …” or “Carrying the duck in his left hand, Henry …” In really bad writing, such introductory phrases regularly lead to shifts in temporal focus or to plain illogic. The bad writer tells us, for instance: “Firing the hired man and burning down his shack, Eloise drove into town.” (The sentence implies that the action of firing the hired man and burning down his shack and the action of driving into town are simultaneous.) Or the bad writer tells us, “Quickly turning from the bulkhead, Captain Figg spoke slowly and carefully.” (Illogical; that is, impossible.) But even if no illogic or confusion of temporal focus is involved, the too frequent or inappropriate use of infinite-verb phrases makes bad writing. Generally it comes about because the writer cannot think of a way to vary the length of his sentences. The writer looks at the terrible thing he’s written: “She slipped off the
garter. She turned to John. She smiled at his embarrassment,” and in a desperate attempt to get rid of the dully thudding subjects and verbs he revises to “She slipped off the garter. Turning to John, she smiled at his embarrassment.” The goal, sentence variety, may be admirable, but there are better ways. One can get rid of the thudding subjects and verbs by using compound predicates: “She slipped off the garter and turned to John”; by introducing qualifiers and appositional phrases: “She slipped—or, rather, yanked—off the garter, a frayed, mournful pink one long past its prime, gray elastic peeking out past the ruffles, indifferently obscene” (etc.); or by finding some appropriate subordinate clause, perhaps: “When she had slipped off the garter, she turned to John”—a solution that gets rid of the thudding by lowering (hastening) the stress of the first “she.” (Compare the two rhythms: “She slipped off the garter. She turned to John” and “When she had slipped off the garter, she turned to John.”) All this is not to deny, of course, that the introductory infinite-verb phrase can be an excellent thing in its place. Properly used, it momentarily slows down the action, gives it a considered, weighted quality that can heighten the tension of an important scene. It works well, for instance, in situations like these: “Slowly raising the rifle barrel …” or “Gazing off at the woods, giving her no answer …” Used indiscriminately, the introductory infinite-verb phrase chops the action into fits and starts and loses what effectiveness it might have had, properly set.

Diction problems are usually symptomatic of defects in the character or education of the writer. Both diction shifts and the steady use of inappropriate diction suggest either deep-down bad taste or the awkwardness that comes of inexperience and timidity. There seems little or no hope for the adult writer who produces sentences like these: “Her cheeks were thick and smooth and held a healthy natural red color. The heavy lines under them, her jowls, extended to the intersection of her lips and gave her a thick-lipped frown most of the time.” The phrase
“Her cheeks were thick and smooth” is normal English, but “[Her cheeks] held a healthy natural red color” is elevated, pseudo-poetic. The word “held” faintly hints at personification of “cheeks,” and “healthy natural red color” is clunky, stilted, slightly bookish. The second sentence contains similar mistakes. The diction level of “extended to the intersection of her lips” is high and formal, in ferocious conflict with the end of the sentence, which plunges to the colloquial “most of the time.” There may be slightly more hope for the writer who uses steadily elevated diction—sentences that pomp along like these: “The unique smell of urine and saltwater greeted him as he stepped through the hatchway. He surveyed the area for an open sink or shower stall but, finding none, had to wait in line.” (“Had to wait in line” is of course a sudden diction drop.) The writing here has most of the usual qualities of falsely elevated diction: abstract language (“unique smell”), cliché personification (“[the smell] greeted him”), Latinate language where simple Anglo-Saxon would be preferable (“surveyed the area” for “looked around”), and so forth. If a writer with difficulties like these sticks to the relatively easy kinds of fiction—the realistic story and the yarn as opposed to the tale—he can get rid of his problems simply. He can learn by diligence to eradicate all traces of fancy talk from his vocabulary, using direct, colloquial speech in realistic stories and in yarns imitating the conventional backwater narrative voice (the rural Southerner, the crafty old farmer of New England, or whatever). Serious tales, which by convention require elevated, almost stately tone, are likely to prove forever beyond this writer’s means, since no one can write in the high style if he cannot tell real high style from fake. It’s a limitation no writer should happily accept, as a few phrases from Melville should remind us: