Fiction Technique

There are two aspects to any story: the idea and the execution. As discussed in another article, the first can’t really be taught. As for the second, all it takes is practice..

The greatest problem beginning writers seem to have is with pace and structure. A contemporary master of pace, and narrative structure in general, is T.C. Boyle. I would suggest students look his novels Water Music or World's End to learn how to cut and splice a scene and how to keep the reader wanting more of the story. There is nothing so effective, and powerful, as a full stop or a break in a scene. Scenes and sentences both have their own momentum that continues even after the prose has stopped. The energy of the scene carries over into the white space and slips into the psyche even as the next scene has begun. The slight skip in time, whether it covers months, days, hours or just seconds, has, like a change of key in music, the effect of re-aligning our perspective on what we're reading. It provides a momentary summing up of what has come before and allows the author to retain control of the narrative energy. Other contemporary masters of this include Tim O'Brien and Raymond Carver.

While Boyle achieves great success by cutting and splicing his work in a way that creates the illusion of plot, he has a shortcoming in the writing of solid, concrete scenes that take the reader into the action instead of holding them at a distance. It's this distance that provides Boyle with the room to display his formidable verbal skills at the expense of telling us much of what is happening at a given moment. Look to Carver and O'Brien, instead, for how to bring a reader into a scene.

Carver usually does not allow himself much space to tell his story. Think of the opening to "Gazebo":

"That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I go, 'Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop.'

We are sitting on the sofa in one of the upstairs suites. There were any number of vacancies to choose from. But we needed a suite, a place to move around in and be able to talk. So we'd locked up the motel office that morning and gone upstairs to a suite."

Right there, he has you; you're in the scene, in the suite with Holly and Duane.

Or look at a section from Going After Cacciato, both for opening and closing a scene:

"Even Paul Berlin, who enjoyed the peace, felt a hankering for action.

Then they were arrested.

It happened only minutes after the beheading.

A mild winter's afternoon..."

In four sentences O'Brien has closed one scene and immediately rocketed us into the next by offering us several tidbits. First, the fact the company was arrested. The action contrasts the peace referred to in the close of the previous section. Then we are told this arrest happened only minutes after a beheading. With that we find ourselves wanted to know what happened with the arrest, but what happened before that. We are eager for the story, and for the story that will follow it, but O'Brien keeps us at bay by slowing the narrative down and building up to the beheading. He closes the section thus:

"'Clams,' Stink Harris kept saying. He wanted clam for supper, so they went in search of clams, but instead they were arrested.

Again, no warning.

Oscar blamed it on Eddie, and Eddie blamed it on Stink, who kept insisting on clams.

'Fucking clams,' Eddie said on the ride to police headquarters."

Once again the closing scene launches us right into the next; and note how this time the fact of the arrest is played down, offered in contrast to searching for clams.

Carver, of course, is also a master of voice and tone, but for raw power I would turn to Thom Jones, and to his literary hero, Dostoevsky.

Here's the opening to "Cold Snap":

"Son of a bitch, there's a cold snap and I do this number where I leave all the faucets running because my house, and most houses out here on the West Coast, aren't 'real' - they don't have windows that go up and down, or basements (which protect the pipes in a way that a crawl space can't), or sidewalks out in front with a nice pair of towering oak trees or a couple of elms, which a real house will have, one of those good old Midwest houses."

Unlike in "Gazebo", no real conflict or tension has been presented, but nevertheless, we are carried along by the energy of the language and the urgency of the voice.

But for one of the greatest voice pieces in literature, look no further than Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground:

"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think my liver hurts. But actually, I don't know a damn thing about my illness. I am not even sure what it is that hurts. I am not in treatment and never have been, although I respect both medicine and doctors. Besides, I am superstitious in the extreme; well, at least to the extent of respecting medicine. (I am sufficiently educated not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, sir, I refuse to see a doctor simply out of spite. Now, that is something that you probably will fail to understand. Well, I understand it. Naturally, I will not be able to explain to you precisely whom I will injure in this instance with my spite. I know perfectly well that I am certainly not giving the doctors a 'dirty deal' by not seeking treatment. I know better than anyone that I will only harm myself by this, and no one else. And yet, if I don't seek a cure, it is out of spite. My liver hurts? Good, let it hurt still more!"

It doesn't take long for the narrator to infuriate and intrigue us.

The best example of the ultimate novel, though, remains War and Peace. Not necessarily the best work of literature ever written (no one piece can aspire to that - if it could, why write?), but the epitome of everything a novel can achieve. It includes in its scope the entire spectrum of human experience. What more could a reader want than to have the world brought to him or her?

But to explain why any of these examples work is impossible. The answer is, They just do. You offer them in the hopes others will see what you see. If they don't, there's nothing to be done about it. Surely they will see in other works what you are blind to, which is the enigmatic, delightful, unteachable nature of fiction.