The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (25 page)

If the semi driver hits the pickup by accident or for some reason we never learn, the construction of an aesthetically valid story is more difficult, since the value conflict that propels the story must be derived entirely from the central character and his situation. In this case the semi driver functions as an impersonal force and can have only such meaning as the roadside vendor projects onto him; in other words, the semi must be, for the vendor, a symbol. Let us say that for the vendor transcontinental trucks represent power and freedom, a symbolic contrast with his own life, which he views as constricted and unsatisfying. The wreck of the pickup, then, will be grimly ironic. Having thought it out this far, we find that the story begins to fall into place. The story’s principle of profluence might be a movement from greatest constriction to least constriction—a development abruptly reversed when the semi hits the pickup.

Say the roadside vendor is a redneck bottom-land farmer, a grower of melons, pumpkins, squash, pole beans, yams, and tomatoes in the red-clay country of Kentucky, southern Missouri, or southern Illinois—a man called Pigtoe. (This version of the plot comes from the writer Leigh Wilson.) Constrictions are easy to find for such a man, betrayed by the land, the government, the newly liberalized Baptist Church, perhaps betrayed by life in other ways as well, at least in his own view: His wife, Alice, is worn and haggard, sickly—other men, like his neighbor Pinky Hearns, have healthy, strong wives, good workers. And Pigtoe’s children are too numerous (or not numerous enough, choose one) and rebellious.

The writer might lead up to the climax with three relatively short but texturally rich, at least moderately southern gothic scenes. In the first, Pigtoe is at breakfast with his wife, talking, while outside the children load the truck. The writer can quickly and easily establish Pigtoe’s feeling of being squeezed by life—his feelings about the church, the school, blacks, his children and neighbors, taxes, and the weather. But whereas his family is pretty much stuck on the farm, as they are grumblingly aware, Pigtoe can at least get away a little, see the larger world, meet strangers, selling produce from the back of his pickup, out by the highway. The scene ends with Pigtoe watching as his children finish their careless loading.

A brief transitional scene might show Pigtoe driving down Lipes Ridge Road (or whatever) toward the junction of the state highway and the interstate. We get some of Pigtoe’s thoughts, sharp images of how he drives the truck, and above all a dramatized movement from one world to another. Then the third scene might show Pigtoe with two or three significant customers—a trim suburban housewife, for instance; a university couple—“hippies,” to Pigtoe (they might envy his life “close to the land”); perhaps also a well-off family of blacks in a new Chevy wagon. Through all this and, subtly, from the beginning of the story, we get Pigtoe’s feelings about the people around him: his contempt and bitterness, and his envy, almost worship, of the people who have escaped his imprisonment, the men who drive the chrome eighteen-wheelers. Now the climax is set up.

How the writer comes out of it (in the denouement), the writer must probably discover as he writes and repeatedly revises the story. Pigtoe may be killed, or he may be left staring at the tipped-over pickup, honeydews and pumpkins rumbling down the highway toward Oklahoma. Again, the semi driver might stop (not at all the supremely free being Pigtoe has imagined him); Pigtoe in his rage might seize the old red gas-can from the pickup and try—successfully or with pitiful ineptitude—to burn the eighteen-wheeler. Or any of a dozen other things
might happen. The writer must decide for himself, discovering his ending from within the story.

The risks in this story we’ve outlined are apparent. The good writer will think them out carefully before he starts. The main one, of course, is that the story’s southern gothicism will seem old hat. The fact that the story is of a standard type is no reason not to write it, however. All fiction is derivative, a fact that the good writer turns to his advantage, making the most of the reader’s expectations, twisting old conventions, satisfying expectations in unexpected ways. Because his material is so obviously southern gothic, the writer might choose a style not usual in such fiction, a style as far as possible from that of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, or William Faulkner. Mainly, however, he must see the material with a fresh eye, using his own experience of southern life, choosing details no other writer has noticed or, anyway, emphasized, thus creating a reality as different from that of gothic convention as gothic convention is from reality itself.

Our second story situation, the woman who purposely runs over a flagman, is the opposite of our Pigtoe story, since here the focal character is the aggressor, not (as at the end of the Pigtoe story) the victim. What the writer must figure out, to justify the climax, is (1) what kind of woman would run over a traffic flagman, and (2) why? Either she can know the flagman and have something personal against him, or she may not know him, but sees him as a symbol—a male chauvinist, for instance. I am ignoring, for my convenience, the possibility that the woman might run over the flagman by accident, mainly because in that case we are almost certainly saddled with a victim story. What precedes the climax would necessarily be a set of harassing events that explain the woman’s carelessness. At best the story would be, in the abstract, a duplication of our Pigtoe story: The woman believes one thing—that a certain attitude and way of behaving are effective—and is proved wrong by events.

Let us say, arbitrarily (though in fact the given writer’s
choice would not be arbitrary but guided by his intuition of what would make a good story), that the woman does not know the flagman. What central character shall we choose—for example: a harried, unhappy housewife, a tough female executive, a stripper? Any choice could make a good story, but let’s take the stripper, an idea that might appeal to a given writer at least partly because of our present stage of social consciousness: No writer before our own moment would be likely to see the stripper in quite the way we do. What pressure can we put on our stripper that will account for the climactic event?

Let us say that our stripper, Fanny, is thirty-six, well-preserved, even beautiful, but hard put to compete with younger strippers of the new breed. She’s an old-style stripper, the kind who teases and scorns her male audience, as if taunting them, asking to be tamed—a classic act (she’s been the star for years), but her act, like her body, is slipping. Her act is of the highly polished kind: She unclothes slowly, tormentingly, with artistic style. She has, let us say, trained white doves who fly away with each article of clothing she takes off. The younger strippers, who are beginning to challenge her top billing, are new-style strippers. Nakedness means nothing to them—they take off their clothes as indifferently as trees drop leaves—and their acts, because of their easy and uninhibited sexuality, have no need of high artifice or polish. Whereas Fanny grew up in Texas, of stern, southern Baptist stock, and fled to burlesque in troubled defiance, guiltily but brazenly, the new breed grew up in cities like San Francisco and feels no such inner conflict.

Having worked out this general approach to his story, the writer is ready to start figuring out his scenes. By the rule of elegance and efficiency, he will choose the smallest number of scenes possible—perhaps three. First, the writer might use a scene in which Fanny, fearfully and angrily, watches the rehearsal of a younger stripper’s act. She can tell as she watches that, though the act is technically shoddy beside her own, it is being groomed as a starring act and may well push her from her
billing. In the next scene, Fanny might confront the manager or director and learn from him that her suspicions are well-founded. She goes into a rage. At the peak of this scene she might slap the director, and he, to her shock and amazement, might slap her back, even fire her. In the third scene, Fanny drives toward the flagman, who unluckily smiles a trifle lewdly at her, bringing on the climax. What happens after this—the story’s denouement or pull-away—the writer may know only when he writes it. (Some writers claim they know the last lines of their stories from the beginning. I think this is usually a bad idea, producing fiction that is subtly forced, or mechanical.)

This brief, rough sketch of a possible story raises an extremely important point—a point as fundamental, for the most serious kind of writer, as the concept of the uninterruptible fictional dream. What we have so far, in the sketch we’ve worked out—and what many quite good writers never go beyond—is a projected piece of fiction that, if well-written, will be no more than a persuasive imitation of reality. It shows how things happen and may imply certain values, but it does not look hard at the meaning of things. It has no real theme. This is a common limitation of second-rate fiction and may sometimes characterize even quite powerful fiction, like Eudora Welty’s novel
Losing Battles
. We get an accurate and totally convincing picture of what it feels like to have a death in the family, what it is like to leave one’s husband and children for a new “free” life, how it feels to be sued for malpractice or to lose an election; we do not get close examination of some deep-rooted idea. The writer, in other words, has done the first job done in all serious fiction—he has created a convincing and illuminating sequence of events—but he has not done the second, which is to “mine deeper!” as Melville says, dig out the fundamental meaning of events by organizing the imitation of reality around some primary question or theme suggested by the character’s concern.

The theme of our story about Fanny the stripper might be, of course, male chauvinism; or it might be Art versus Life (or
Nature); or nakedness in all its forms. The writer’s choice of theme, partly Fanny’s choice, will dictate his selection and organization of details, his style, and so forth. For instance, if what seems to him central in Fanny’s struggle has to do with the contrast between Art and Nature, he will focus carefully on the difference between Fanny’s act and that of the younger girls, summoning imagery, etc., that subtly underscores his point of focus. He may pay close attention to Fanny’s mirror, a beautifully carpentered object with a history and, for Fanny, special meaning. And the flagman’s way of doing his job—negligently and artlessly, or officiously and carefully—will have bearing on the climax. If the theme the writer chooses is nakedness, he will choose other details to brood on and develop—the chipping paint on the dressing-room walls, for instance; the psychological nakedness of some character; the manager’s unwillingness to disguise or cover over his lack of interest in Fanny’s well-being or, if it comes to that, his hatred of all she represents. Given this theme, the writer may find himself introducing a decorous old janitor who clothes his every mood in the most painstaking etiquette and who wears, whatever the weather, two sweaters and a coat. These become the “counters,” so to speak, for the writer’s thought: They help him find out and express precisely what he means.

Theme, it should be noticed, is not imposed on the story but evoked from within it—initially an intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer. The writer muses on the story idea to determine what it is in it that has attracted him, why it seems to him worth telling. Having determined that what interests him—and what chiefly concerns the major character—is the idea of nakedness (physical, psychological, perhaps spiritual), he toys with various ways of telling his story, thinks about what has been said before about nakedness (for instance, in traditional Christianity and pagan myth), broods on every image that occurs to him, turning it over and over, puzzling on it, hunting for connections, trying to figure out—before he
writes, while he writes, and in the process of repeated revisions—what it is he really thinks. (How naked should we be or can we be? Is openness, vulnerability, a virtue or a defect? To what extent, with what important qualifications?) He finds himself bringing in black strippers, perhaps an Indian stripper, supported by imagery that recalls primitive nakedness. And so on. Only when he thinks out his story in this way does he achieve not just an alternative reality or, loosely, an imitation of nature, but true, firm art—fiction as serious thought.

I have said that a writer may also plot a piece of fiction by working his way forward from an initial situation. Say he gets the slightly lunatic idea of a young Chinese teacher of high-school English in San Francisco who is kidnapped by a group of Chinese thugs because they want him to write their story, of which they’re inordinately proud. If the fiction is not to be a victim story (hence unusable), some conflict must be established: The teacher must be given a will of his own and a purpose opposed to that of his captors. In other words, he must want—in some desperately serious way—not to write their story. What, we ask, groping toward a story, would make our teacher so unwilling to write the exploits of the thugs that he would cross them, understanding the danger? Perhaps he has his head full of the legends of Mongolian bandits, and perhaps he’s not only a teacher but an ambitious, fiercely dedicated young poet, steeped in the tradition of Chinese poetry and prose. In this case, the story of a miserable gang that does nothing more lofty than knock over an occasional Savings & Loan Association may be a story that so outrages his sense of life and art that he refuses to have anything to do with it. If the gang simply shoots him for his recalcitrance, that’s the end of that; no story. How can we keep him alive and thus keep the story going? Perhaps he does write as they tell him to do, but writes insultingly, legitimately contrasting the petty escapades of his kidnappers with the exploits of great Mongolian bandits. Insofar as his captors are persuaded that they really ought to be
more like Mongolian bandits—and they would not have kidnapped him and asked him to write if they didn’t have some pride—the kidnappers may spare him, grudgingly, learning from him a more dazzling kind of banditry. Eventually, then, it might occur to them that, given rush-hour traffic in downtown San Francisco, thieves might rob a bank and escape if they were mounted on horses, like Mongolian bandits. So we might lead to the comic-heroic image of modern Mongolian bandits clattering across the Golden Gate Bridge in traditional regalia.