Writing Right with Dmitri: Lesson One
Created | Updated Sep 1, 2011
Words, words, words. That's what we're made of. Herewith some of my thoughts on what we're doing with them.
Writing Right with Dmitri: De facto Fictionalising
Any number of people on this site keep complaining that we do not take fiction as seriously as we take factual writing, personal experience, and opinion. I believe this to be an untrue statement, and I'm going to tell you why unless you hit the back button on your browser right now.
Still here? Okay, then. I think our real problem is that we (speaking as a group, not editorially) take fiction far too seriously. And that if we don't stop it, we're in danger of not learning how to produce any fiction at all.
Have you got any idea what would happen to The Washington Post if every time a reporter turned in copy, they said, 'Hmm. That's pretty good, but it's not Pulitzer Prize material. Think we'll pass.'? They'd go out of business, that's what would happen. Sure, their writers win Pulitzer Prizes. But nobody expects them to do it every day. Every day on h2g2, Researchers are stopped from writing by the spectre of what somebody might say about their short story or experimental piece. So they hit 'delete' and go write another guide entry on socks or the history of invisible ink. At least in that case, the worst somebody usually says is, 'You've misspelled a word on line 27. How could you be so careless? You must have been dropped on your head as a child.'
In the interest of ameliorating this problem somewhat, I'm going to inaugurate my series of (I hope) instructive rants by telling you what I think the problem is with fiction – and what we can do about it.
Fact, Fiction, or Factitious Fiction?
Why did I say that people around here take fiction too seriously? (I did, didn't I? Scroll up, and smell the coffee.) Because PR all know what makes a good Edited Guide entry, but, frankly, it's harder to tell what makes a short story work. If one more person critiques a piece of writing on this site, fact OR fiction, with the words, 'That's nice, but I would like to have seen…', I will scream. (You won't hear me, but I'll do it, anyway.)
If you would like to have seen it, open your Word program and write it. Then talk about what your fellow Researcher did write.
The reason it's easy for us to start learning on our Edited Guide entries is that by the time we get out of school, most of us know how to write a five-paragraph essay. I can teach anybody to write a five-paragraph essay – just give me a semester. You take one thesis statement, five topic sentences, a few well-founded facts, and a conclusion. Sift, add, stir. No problem.
Before PR stalwarts line up to murder me (in series), I will add that the five-paragraph essay is only the basics. Sure, we're aiming at wit, wisdom, insight, and previously overlooked connections. We're looking for snappy hooks and emotional manipulation. A great Edited Guide entry should tickle your funny bone or tug at your heartstrings. But that's for later: Before you can learn to row to the other shore, you've got to learn how not to fall out of the boat. Which is easy enough to do with factual material. If you don't tip it over, it'll stay afloat while you learn how to steer.
If writing factual material is like rowing a boat, writing fiction is more like water-skiing – you've got to keep your balance while you're moving forward. Trickier than it looks, but there are a couple of things I think can usefully be mentioned about the difficulties of fiction writing.
Mentioning those things is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of this page. You are once again warned about this so that you can hit the back button on your browser in time to save yourselves. I'll meet you on the other side of the header if you're still here.
Holding Up the World
The thing about factual writing is that the world is ready-made. Until the Second Coming happens, things are going to stay pretty much the way they are while you describe one piece of it. Now, personally, I would like to see more EG background descriptions to place events and things in context. (But I never say that, because I don't like hearing myself scream. I just get inspired to write something of my own.)
In fiction, however, the fun is that you get to make up the world. What a heady thought. What an awesome responsibility. You've got to hold that world together for the reader. In an online short story, you might have to play Atlas for a whole 2,000 words or so. This can be an onerous task.
So our first goal as would-be fiction writers is to make that world believable, well-laid-out, and consistent. No fair creating continuity errors. No fair making the reader do all the work. This can be tiring, this world-making. No wonder the Creator rested on the seventh day – He was tired of supporting something nobody else believed in.
Our problem when we're workshopping fiction is that we don't start by helping each other with the nuts and bolts. We jump to the part that's fun for armchair critics: deciding we don't like the characters, or disagree with their decisions. Phooey. The characters may be thoroughly bad eggs, and their ethics may be somewhere south of a used-car salesman's, but that's irrelevant if we can't make out the scenery. Go for the telling detail, the sense of place and time. Worry about moral choices later.
Another problem is that we mistake highfalutin' for insightful. Mark Twain once tried to sneak a long-winded descriptive paragraph past his readers. (You can find a link to the offending paragraph elsewhere in this week's issue of the Post.) The landscape Twain described was ludicrous, but he figured that everybody else was like him, and just skipped those paragraphs of 'fine writing'. He would have got away with it, too, if he hadn't mentioned that there was a 'solitary oesophagus' in the sky, which 'slept upon motionless wing'. Some medical doctor sniffed him out.
Our aim in life should not be to write like William Faulkner. William Faulkner couldn't help it. He was one of those old-style drunken Southerners, and he talked like that. Talking like that is probably why we lost the War. It is certainly part of why we deserved to. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949, but it was not because he perpetrated purple prose. It was because he had true and gut-wrenchingly painful stories to tell.
(My mother knew these stories were true. She just didn't approve. 'There may be people like that,' she intoned, 'but you don't have to write books about them.' My mother grew up in the next county over from William Faulkner, and knew what she was talking about.)
In spite of the purpleness of Faulkner's prose, I think he was a great writer, so listen to him for a second. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, Faulkner said that the purpose of writing fiction was 'to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.' Uh-huh. Then he said something odd – or you'd think it was odd if you didn't remember that he said it in 1949:
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing...1
We probably feel a little safer in 2011 than Faulkner did in 1949. I don't know why, since it doesn't make sense that we do, but we probably do. But what he said about people having forgotten the 'problems of the human heart in conflict with itself' is still true. We need to wake up to what we're doing. We need to get at an honest way to talk about those problems. To do that, we have to learn at least a little bit of what Faulkner knew how to do – create enough space/time with our words to let the characters get to the problems.
Then we can argue about the five-syllable words.
Now, I started by saying that h2g2 took fiction too seriously. And here I am, talking about the high seriousness of fiction in the context of nuclear angst and the nature of the human spirit. Yep. I know that. The only way we're going to get a chance to do this serious work is to stop taking ourselves so seriously, and start taking the subject matter (and one another) more seriously.
Let us help each other learn how to float our boats long enough to figure out which way the shoreline is from here.
