More Considerations: Form in Fiction

I recently read a book about narrative form. Wait, don’t stop reading! The book is Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison, an author and writing teacher. Her premise is fairly simple: the traditional story arc is a limited way to imagine the creation of fiction. Why not use other patterns, those found in nature and all around? Why not meander through the text, exploring side alleys. Or maintain a bit more focus, with a plot that spins in a spiral around a central point. Or construct a narrative in which “a powerful center holds the fictional world…tightly in its gravitational force." In other words, an explosion. Alison takes us through a variety of patterns, with examples from literary history and with an eagerness for discovery and creation. For a good summary of the book’s argument, read this.

 

I marked many passages while reading Alison’s explorations, but one stood above all others:

 

“The point now: Sebald’s Emigrants was the first book to show me a way beyond the casual arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative: motion less inside the story than inside your mind as you construct sense. This motion involved pattern, arising (I later learned) ‘from the spatial interweavings of images and phrases independent of any time-sequence of narrative action’ (Joseph Frank, ‘The Idea of Spatial Form’).”

 

Aside from the text mentions, what she’s talking about is that sense of figuring things out, that exercise of filling in white space with what your conscious (and subconscious) is absorbing as you read a story. Plot and character clues, yes, but also the building of elements such as repeated imagery, or the deepening of meaning when a phrase is repeated or used at pivotal moments. Stuff like that. Think about when you’re reading a mystery and something suddenly becomes apparent. A lightbulb moment. That feeling, only it’s about the entirety of the thing you’re reading.

 

And it occurs to me that this has been a preoccupation of mine from the first moment I began to write. My autobiographical first novel, about the experience of being adopted and finding my biological family, was written from the POV of three different women, each with their own story stemming from that event—the adoption—and how it shaped their lives. Alison might call that a radial, or explosion. The second novel I wrote was called ”Good Sunday” and although I did imagine a structure for it, roughly related to the Catholic Church’s Stations of the Cross (don’t ask—I was young!), this novel takes place over the course of the day and really is probably a meander, as it unifies the story and characters through a series of seemingly random events and imagery. In my third finished (and first published) novel, The Qualities of Wood, my initial impulse was to write a book that seemed like a mystery—with a dead body and cast of possible suspects—but surprise!—the real mystery would be the slow revelation of character, which would sneak up almost imperceptibly as the main character thinks she’s actually solving something else. (A note: as it turns out, readers of mystery, by and large, are not thrilled with a book that pretends to be a mystery but actually isn’t).

 

And I’ve yammered on and on this year about my most recent book, Bellflower, which is certainly my most obvious experimentation with form. I won’t say more since I’ve already said plenty, but you can read about its form here.

 

I think anything I write moving forward will start with a consideration of form. If you had asked me where those past projects began, I might have said things like setting, or character, or—in the case of yet another unpublished, untitled novel I wrote after TQOW—an idea. Form is something I deal with as a writing teacher, when I point out the traditional arc structure, show examples of novels that effectively employ it, and then, those that effectively don’t. All of teaching (and learning) about writing seems to follow another type of pattern: Here is what has been written already. Here are some “rules.” Here are things that follow the rules and are wonderful. Here are things that don’t, things that were a deviation and a surprise and yet, are equally or even more wonderful. What’s better than stumbling upon a new, unpredicted path? Writers have always pushed against constraints; form experimentation is nothing new. But flexing your creative muscles with new types of training is always a good idea and form is a good place to start.

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Word Mantras

Every so often, usually around Mother’s Day, lists are circulated which detail the extensive duties filled by anyone with the job title “Mom.” Housekeeper, Chauffeur, Chef, Teacher, EMT, Janitor, etc.—the point being, mothers fill many shoes, on the daily. And it occurred to me that people who choose writing are often expected to master a variety of roles as well. Apart from the artistic requirements of the job (too extensive to get into here), a writer is also Administrator, Secretary, Public Relations, Marketer, and much more. But I think the most challenging expectation for a writer (and mother, for that matter) is to be her own best counsel and at more dire times, her own therapist.

 

The peaks and valleys of the writing life are relentless. Small victories followed by demoralizations; any bit of burgeoning confidence soon squashed by doubt. At least that’s how it seems sometimes. Lately, I’ve been grappling with uncertainty. I started a novel for NaNoWriMo last November but have lost the spark. I can’t decide what it’s about, or remember why I started it in the first place. I’m not sure if I’m writing it for myself, or whether my motivations are murky with outside influences. I can’t determine whether it’s worth pursuing.

 

Outside factors press in, as always. I’m distracted by other, non-writing things. I can’t focus, can’t find time. I wallow. And then, as we writers always do, I began to undertake the long process of picking myself up, dusting myself off, and rebuilding my mental stamina for another round. Basically, I’ve been giving myself therapy. Okay, well really, I’ve been avoiding that damn novel and once in a while, giving it a think until my brain starts to hurt. In the meantime, I’ve been reading and reading. My balm. My respite.

 

I read Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels and for several weeks and almost 2000 pages, let myself get lost in another time and place. Books can do that! my therapist self reminded my despondent self. As I pondered the purpose of writing anything at all, this essay claimed “the purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair.” This seemed like a good litmus test, my therapist self said, should I decide to dive back into that abandoned novel. I mulled this over for days. And when I read a novel that surprised, delighted, and joyfully embraced language, sentence by sentence, (my review here), my therapist self suggested that I break things down to basics.

 

Words, words, words. For some time, I had been obsessing about the word despair. Sitting at the veterinarian’s office, an injured dog came in—panting, head tilted, unsteady on his feet—and I thought: “despair!” In a parking lot, a woman shrieked in anger when someone took her parking spot—and I thought: “despair!” An old man trudged along the sidewalk, mumbling to himself—surely, “despair!” Often, I recalled that Thoreau quote about countless lives of quiet desperation and thought: “Yes, despair!” It was everywhere. I was invoking it and inviting it.

 

Then I found this poem by Wendell Berry, a sun beam that broke through my despair-filled cloud cover.

 

I began to fixate on another word: resolute.

 

From the Latin resolutus, past participle of resolvere (loosen, release, disperse). First known use: 1533. Synonyms: bent, bound, hell-bent, purposeful, determined, set.

Descendants:

Catalan: resolut, resolt English: resolute French: résolu, résous Italian: risoluto, risolto

Portuguese: resoluto, resolto Romanian: rezolut Spanish: resoluto, resuelto

Each version has a crisp, decisive sound, an accented syllable to signify purpose. I highly recommend finding the audio pronunciation online and playing it over and over, when you tire of saying it to yourself.

“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.” –Theodore Roosevelt

“To a resolute mind, wishing to do is the first step toward doing. But if we do not wish to do a thing it becomes impossible.” –Robert Southey

“There is nothing in this world which a resolute man, who exerts himself, cannot attain.” –Somadeva

First and most basic job tile an author must take on: Craftsman or Artist, whichever you prefer. Keep it simple, my life coach/therapist self says. And so I return, once again, to the basics: stories, sentences, words. Resolute. Try saying it a few times, try imagining it on a page, the determined black lines and curves of it. Resolute. It’s a great word.

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My Love/Hate Relationship with Writing Guides Continues

How are you with museums? Avoid them? Love them? I happen to love the idea of museums very much, and I do enjoy going to them and wish I went more often. But I have a definite time limit where they’re concerned. Maybe an hour-and-half to two hours, that’s it. I go in with all receptors primed but by the end of that time frame, I usually hit a wall, when I can’t see/read/hear any more. Just can’t take it in. Sensory overload, I guess. I have a similar threshold where socializing is concerned, but that’s beside the point.

 

I was an English major in college, which means that I read and wrote about fiction. As opposed to a creative writing degree, which seems to have its own benefits. I learned to write by reading. From time to time, I do like to pick up a book about writing, in the interests of gathering information. I’d like to think I’ll remain open to learning, no matter how curmudgeonly and resolute in my ways I become. This week, I read Into the Woods by John Yorke. I’ve no idea how this book came to be on my shelf; I’m assuming I read about it someplace. It’s a writing guide aimed towards screenwriters and most of the references are film ones, but that was okay with me because a good amount of my personal references are film ones as well. The original subtitle of Yorke’s book was A Five-Act Journey into Story, and I can only assume the publisher issued the alternate subtitle How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them after it became clear that a) the book was appealing to writers of things other than scripts and b) there is some division between the 3-act camp and 5-act camp, and no reason to alienate either one from buying the book.

So. I have to share that the cover, as you can see, couldn’t be more awful. I mean, I get that we’re in textbook mode here, but aside from the look of it, it also has a strangely plastic feel and the black ends up with scratches, marks and smears. It’s the book equivalent of those black pants you never wear because they attract every piece of lint and hair in the room. My favorite Amazon review of the book, titled “A five act journey into utter tedium!” agrees with me on this point: “Oh, and the paperback has a horrible plain black cover that is faintly repellent to the touch.” Very true.

 

If you’re starting to think that the rambling nature of this review is an early indicator of my engagement style with writing guides, you’d be right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, the actual text. I started out as I do in museums, totally engaged, neurons firing. I had a pen and was underlining things. Here are a few I like:

 

“What an archetypal story does is introduce you to a central character—the protagonist—and invite you to identify with them; effectively they become your avatar in the drama.”

 

(I like that bit about the avatar.)

 

“Niceness tends to kill characters. Much more interesting are the rough edges, the darkness.”

 

“Three-dimensional characters have both a want and a need, and they are not necessarily the same thing.”

 

There were more, but you’ll have to get the book. Yorke talks about early forms of story, and how the overall structure has generally stayed the same over centuries. There are refreshers on Aristotle and Campbell, which I liked. He differentiates between the three-act structure and the five-act structure (spoiler: they’re sort of the same!), and gives examples along the way. I will say that some examples seemed more shoehorned into the structure than others; it started to seem like a diagram you could argue anything into. But I enjoyed the early sections, the more historical and theoretical parts.

 

The middle section of the book really gets down to details. The chapters had names like Exposition, Subtext, and Character Individuation. If I had been at a museum, this would have been when I started to think about lunch/dinner/nap. There were charts and figures.

 

By the last section, the charts became more complex and I was fully in skim mode. There were lengthy breakdowns of particular films, and long examples of dialogue. There are all sorts of people in the world, and I’m sure some would really enjoy the specifics given, the many, many pages of Notes at the end. But I was already out that museum door.

 

Was the book a loss? Definitely not! I took away some new knowledge, some reminders of things I’ve read before, and several things to think about. I still hope to keep learning new things about writing as I go along, and it’s never a bad idea to break up your routine. I’ll keep this book on my shelf and perhaps refer back to a few sections. After I finished, I had an overwhelming urge to pick up something written by one of my idols, and I can’t help but think that in the end, it will be more inspirational. That’s the way I learned to write, after all, and it would seem I can’t really be retrained.

 

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Author Don't Preach: Making Characters, Not Messages

 

As the mother of four teenagers, I can tell you that one thing they really enjoy is when you sit them down for a lecture on an abstract concept. Like responsibility. Or the importance of work ethic, or something like that. Boy, do they love to be taught things! You will find, when you start speaking, that a sort of calm comes over them; their eyes will never leave your face. It’s truly a joy to watch the process of comprehension. Oh, and make sure you tell stories from your own life; they love that. Also, throw in platitudes and maxims whenever possible. Watch the lights go on. At the end, they may even thank you for sharing your decades of wisdom. Right?

Recently, I read a couple of books, well-received novels (no, I will not name them) that addressed some timely themes and had well-constructed plots, dramatic turns, wonderful historical and/or cultural information, very competent writing and even some moments of brilliance. And never for one moment did I believe that the characters were actual people. I was aware all along, for example, that this one was intended to show that, and this other one was a symbol for something else, and this last one would be bearer of a lesson for the others. Sometimes other alarms sounded: a manner of speaking that didn’t seem to fit, an inconsistency, a flaw or action too exaggerated. Plot points came along when expected; each character marched along, doing what was required, not quite cardboard but certainly lacking spark and hovering just outside the sphere of believability.

Everything was there; each novel was a success in terms of craft, I suppose. Certainly, my opinions of these novels don’t jibe with the general public’s. But during my reading of each, I started to have very stubborn, adolescent-type feelings. I may have rolled my eyes a few times. I get it, I wanted to say to the authors. I get the point you’re trying to make, the statements you’re making about modern life, the lessons you’re preaching, the feelings you want me to have. And although, as a writer, I could appreciate and respect the craft of these books, they could never be loved by me, the reader. Primarily because of the characters and the way they lacked life.

I don’t know what that special something is, why some characters walk right out of books and into your heart and why others remain on the page. I do know that teenagers and readers alike don’t always appreciate a lecture, but they will listen to a story about someone they can relate to, every time.

“I am less interested in setting, really, than a lot of writers. For me, the landscape is often interior, the place is the psyche.” –Richard Bausch

For a master class on characterization, read anything by Richard Bausch but especially “Not Quite Over,” a short story I re-read this week for inspiration. His characters are immediately vivid, achingly real. For real.

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