The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (9 page)

The writer works out plot in one of three ways: by borrowing some traditional plot or an action from real life (the method of the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and many
other writers, ancient and modern); by working his way back from his story’s climax; or by groping his way forward from an initial situation. Since usually one does not work out plot all at once, but broods over it, mentally trying alternatives, taking notes, carrying the idea in the back of one’s mind as one reads or does one’s laundry, working and reworking it for days or months or, sometimes, years, one may in practice work both backward and forward or even in all three of the possible ways simultaneously. Whatever happens in life—a curious fact one comes across in one’s reading (why it is that pit vipers can see in the dark), a snatch of conversation, something from the newspapers, a fight with one’s landlord—all this becomes possible material for the shaping of the plot, or for characters, setting, and theme as they may influence the plot. In a later chapter (“Plotting”), we will examine in detail how by each of the three methods I’ve mentioned above—and by other methods less likely to produce art—the writer builds up his story. For the moment, more general observations and an abstract analysis of just one kind of plotting will serve.

The writer who begins with a traditional story or some action drawn from life has part of his work done for him already. He knows what happened and, in general, why. The main work left to him is that of figuring out what part of the story (if not the whole) he wants to tell, what the most efficient way of telling it is, and why it is that it interests him.

Say the story that has caught his attention is that of Helen of Troy. The myth is large and complex and comes down to us in many forms, some of them contradictory, if not mutually exclusive, some versions strictly fabulous—as when Helen’s mother, Leda, is raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan, or as when Paris stands before the three goddesses, attempting to choose between them—other versions suitable for modern realistic treatment. A given writer may find his interest stirred by almost any of the story’s main events. Troy was a rich, cosmopolitan city; in its ruins, archeologists found jade, among other things, proving
that Trojan traders had contacts as far away as China. The Achaians, on the other hand, whom Helen left when she fled from her husband with her Trojan lover, Paris, were cowherds, goatherds, raiders—from the Trojan point of view crude barbarians. How surprised Helen must have been, to say nothing of how Paris and his father the king felt, when her people dropped everything, called together relatives from far and wide, left their lean-tos and harsh, stone towns, and came after her with a thousand ships. That moment, her alarm at the news, might make a story. Again, when the Achaians pulled their famous trick, the peace-offering of the Trojan horse, which the Trojans dragged inside the walls of the city, unaware that it was loaded with Achaian soldiers, Helen is said to have gone out at night and to have called to the soldiers in the voices of their wives, hoping she could trick them into revealing themselves—but she said nothing to the Trojans of her suspicions. That event, too, has a strangeness that might make a good story.

The writer may decide to treat both of these events, perhaps others as well, in a single work; but to the extent that each event forms a narrative climax, he thinks out the two or more events as separate narrative units, or episodes. For each episode’s climactic event, he borrows from legend or makes up on his own exactly as much as he needs in order to make the climactic event (a) meaningful and (b) convincing. For instance: If we are (a) fully to understand Helen’s surprise at the arrival of her relatives (if the event is in this primary sense to have meaning; never mind the larger philosophical implications), and if we’re (b) to be convinced that her relatives really did come in such astounding numbers, the writer must somehow find a way to show us clearly (1) what these strange people the Achaians are like that they’d react in such a way, (2) what the Trojans are like, and especially Paris, that he should make such a blunder, and (3) why Helen did not anticipate her kinsmen’s response. All this, if the story is to be vivid and suspenseful, the writer must find a way to show us dramatically, by enacted scenes, not
authorial essays or lengthy set speeches by the characters. If the story is to be efficient and elegant (in the sense that mathematical proofs are elegant), the writer must introduce no more background events or major characters than strictly necessary (and, obviously, no less), and must introduce these materials in the smallest possible number of scenes, each scene rhythmically proportionate to those surrounding, so that the pace is regular or, if appropriate, in regular acceleration. In other words, if it is possible to show in a single scene—clearly and powerfully—both what the Achaians are like and why Helen will not anticipate their response to her flight with Paris, the efficient and elegant writer does not use two or three scenes. By
scene
we mean here all that is included in an unbroken flow of action from one incident in time to another (the scene at the breakfast table, the scene out by the chariot two hours later, the scene between Helen and the priest in the temple, or whatever). The action within a scene is “unbroken” in the sense that it does not include a major time lapse or a leap from one setting to another—though the characters may, of course, walk or ride from one place to another without breaking the scene, the camera, so to speak, dollying after them. The action within a scene need
not
be “unbroken” in the sense that it includes no flashbacks or brief authorial interruptions for background explanation. The scene is not broken, in other words, when a character’s mind drifts from present surrounding to some earlier scene, which is then vividly set before us for the time the flashback lasts. The efficient and elegant writer makes each scene bear as much as it can without clutter or crowding, and moves by the smoothest, swiftest transitions possible from scene to scene.

In addition to watching the rhythm of his scene—the tempo or pace—the writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationship, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by that detail within the scene and the story as a whole. Let us say
that at some point Helen steps behind a curtain to look for a lost brooch, and because she is there she happens to overhear a conversation. Since the function of Helen’s stepping behind the curtain is relatively slight and mechanical, the good writer gets her behind the curtain as quickly as possible (having set up the lost brooch earlier, so that her action seems inevitable and natural). If he dwells at length on the appearance of the curtain, or Helen’s gesture as she steps in behind it, the moment’s emphasis is disproportionate to its function and becomes a dull spot in the narrative, or annoyingly misleading since the author’s hoo-rah about Helen’s disappearance leads us to expect some larger outcome than we get.

All these considerations the author bears in mind, consciously or intuitively, as he constructs his sequence of events leading to the climax (Helen’s surprise). If his story plan is to be successful, he must rightly analyze what is logically necessary to the climax. If he shows us what the Achaians are like and what the Trojans are like, but fails to realize that he must also show us why Helen does not guess how her kinsmen will behave, the climax will lack inevitability and, therefore, power. Again, if the plan of the story is to work, the writer’s solutions to the problems involved in authenticating the climax must be credible and apt. If Helen loses her brooch by throwing it at her husband, Menelaos, partly because Menelaos is a drunkard and a lazy oaf and partly because, against her will, she’s falling in love with their guest Paris and his fine city ways, the curtain scene may be conveniently explained, but we are likely to doubt that Menelaos, even with the help of his brother Agamemnon, could organize the huge, stern-minded force that goes after her. Thus in thinking about plot, the writer must also think about character and its effects.

He must think, at the same time, about why it is that the story interests him. Whether he is using a traditional plot, an action drawn from life, or something he’s made up, no writer chooses his story by pure whim or the mechanical combination
of random elements. For the good writer, nothing is easier than making up possible-stories. If pushed, he can spin them out hour after hour, each one of them theoretically sound—a sequence of events leading to some climax, or, in longer narratives, an episodic sequence of climaxes. (Helen’s surprise and helplessness might naturally lead to a second climax, her behavior below the Trojan horse.) But of the thirty plots he can think up in an hour, only one—if even that—will catch and hold his interest, make him want to write. How odd, a different writer might say, that of all the stories one might tell about Helen, this writer has chosen a trivial, psychological climax, Helen’s surprise! What the writer’s interest means is that the climactic event has struck some chord in him, one that seems worth exploration. It’s by the whole process of first planning the fiction and then writing it—elaborating characters and details of setting, finding the style that seems appropriate to the feeling, discovering unanticipated requirements of the plot—that the writer finds out and communicates the story’s significance, intuited at the start. He knows that his first job is to authenticate what I earlier called the story’s
primary
meaning: Helen’s surprise. The surprise is a feeling, one that strikes us as conclusive, an implied discovery. But, like all conclusive feelings, Helen’s surprise suggests some larger,
secondary
meaning, not just one person’s feeling but a universal human feeling, some affirmation or recognition of a value. It is usually in this larger, secondary sense that we speak of the “meaning” of works of art.

The larger “meaning” of a story, we should pause here to note, may or may not come from our abstraction of or thought about what I’ve called above a conclusive emotion. But it does always come (at least this is true in every case I can think of) from feeling. In the classic case—as in the Helen story we’re in the process of making up—it comes with the resolution of irony; that is, it comes at the moment the character knows what we know and have known for some time.
King Lear. Emma. Middlemarch.
In our Helen story, if the writer has done his work
well,
we
know what the Achaians are like and what the Trojans are like, how the Achaian community, though at first glance crude and barbaric, has a profound sense of kin responsibility, a sense of justice and propriety that it is willing to extend even to invited guests (Paris, when he goes to Menelaos’ house and first meets Helen), and how the Trojan community, though vastly superior in its culture and sophistication, superior, too, in its cosmopolitan evolution beyond ethnocentricity, has become morally lax and has perhaps come to expect a similar moral laxity in others (so that Paris does not anticipate the Achaian response); but though
we
know all this, Helen, because something has distracted her attention—a point we must return to—does not know until word comes that the Achaian ships have been sighted. In other kinds of story, the secondary or larger meaning may be released in other ways. For example, it may be our feeling about the whole movement of the story, not the final emotion of the character, that we abstract to an affirmation of values (secondary meaning). In the naturalist mode—fiction like Dreiser’s—the character fights ferociously for something but is finally beaten down by overwhelming forces and ends in sorrow or despair, not fully aware of what has happened to him. It is not the despair that we abstract to some universal value, but the struggle. But however it may be achieved, in all great fiction, primary emotion (our emotion as we read, or the characters’ emotions, or some combination of both) must sooner or later lift off from the particular and be transformed to an expression of what is universally good in human life—what promotes happiness for the individual alone and in society; in other words, some statement on value. In good fiction, this universal statement is likely to be too subtle, too loaded with qualifications, to be expressed in any way but the story’s way; it may be impossible, that is, to reduce to any rule of behavior or general thesis. We
understand
the value, understand it with great precision, but even the shrewdest literary critic may have trouble formulating it in words and thus telling us the story’s “message.”
It is in this sense that the “philosophy” in fiction is “concrete philosophy”: Fiction’s meaning (what I have called secondary meaning) is as substantial, or grounded in the actual, as are the elements of which it is built. So it is that Aristotle tells us that a dramatic action, like life, can imply the metaphysical, so that as the philosopher abstracts from the actual to metaphysical theory, the literary critic or sensitive reader can abstract out the metaphysical implications of fictional events; but fiction’s meaning can no more become, by itself, metaphysical than a cow in a field can evolve into a Platonic idea.

Perhaps an analogy may be of help here. In orthodox Christianity the believer is told that all formal codes, even the shifting codes of situational ethics, are supplanted by “the person of Christ.” “I am the Way,” Christ says, meaning, by one standard interpretation, that if the believer will give up his heart and soul to Christ, letting Christ’s personality “enter in” like a daemonic force, he can then act rightly in every situation, because in fact he is no longer the agent; Christ is—a divinity who can do no wrong. The believer’s actions flow not from any theory of right and wrong but from what an objective observer—a sympathetic non-believer, say—would call an ingested metaphor: the life and personality of Christ. Long and devout study of Christ’s life and works has given the believer a model of behavior too subtle and complex for verbal expression but nevertheless trustworthy.

In the same way, fiction provides, at its best, trustworthy but inexpressible models. We ingest metaphors of good, wordlessly learning to behave more like Levin than like Anna (in
Anna Karenina
), more like the transformed Emma (in Jane Austen’s novel) than like the Emma we first meet in the book. This subtle, for the most part wordless knowledge is the “truth” great fiction seeks out.