Building a Chapter for Emotional Impact
By Kathryn Craft | November 4, 2016 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Backstory: when do you include it? Waiting until a question has been raised to which only an earlier scene can provide an answer is a sound way of maintaining psychological tension while dipping away from your ongoing story. In the fifth chapter of his bestselling and Pulitzer-winning novel, The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen uses plenty of backstory that addresses no burning questions. He clearly built this chapter for emotional impact alone. Let’s look at it together and learn what we can from his mad skills.
Although the chapter continues fluidly, with only three line breaks, I will divide it eight ways, analyzing its contents with the admittedly nontechnical word “chunk” to show you how it stacks up.
Chunk 1: Suspicion
Perhaps James Bond could slumber peacefully on the bed of nails that was a spy’s life, but I could not.
The South Vietnamese General who has long confided in the Captain (our narrator, a communist sleeper agent) is about to open a liquor store in mid-1970s America, where he and the Captain are refugees after the fall of Saigon. The General summons the Captain to attend the opening, and a friend explains it’s because the General suspects an informer in the ranks. This understandably sets the Captain—and the reader, who is in the know about his dual loyalties—on edge.
Chunk 2: Lust
Although I would not have asked for this favor in September, by April our relationship had taken an unexpected turn.
To attend the opening, the Captain must ask off work from his boss, Ms. Mori. The Captain then takes a couple of sexually charged pages to show how he and Ms. Mori got to the point of the “sweaty, condomless intercourse” in which they are now regularly engaged.
Chunk 3: Hilarity
Ever since my fevered adolescence I had enjoyed myself with athletic diligence, using the same hand with which I crossed myself in mock prayer.
We do not need backstory to understand the Captain’s lust for Ms. Mori. Lust simply is. Yet what comes next, gaining the whiff of shame against his Catholic upbringing, is a detailed depiction of the thirteen-year-old Captain-to-be’s first sexual experience—with a dead squid. With phrases like “my maniacal manhood leaped to attention,” “my cephalopodic bride,” and “from then on no squid was safe from me,” the Captain evokes the universal, urgent hilarity in discovering one’s sexuality, and what lengths he took to cover his tracks knowing that his impoverished mother had carefully counted the squid for dinner.
Chunk 4: Horror
Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene. Not I! Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.
The way he doubles back with this twist, delivered with epistrophe that shines a spotlight on “obscene”—pow. Even before the smile has left the reader’s face—while in that heightened, giddy state—the Captain skewers home his point. He describes the torture he has witnessed: wire twisted tighter, tighter around a man’s neck during interrogation; “the communist agent with the papier-mâché evidence of her espionage crammed into her mouth, our sour names literally on the tip of her tongue.” These severe consequences of treason weigh on the Captain’s mind when he gets to the grand opening of the liquor store.
Chunk 5: Threat
Have a seat, the General said from behind his desk
Such a simple line, now loaded with such threatening subtext! Next: “The vinyl chairs squeaked obscenely when we moved.” Note the repeat use of “obscene,” previously planted in the reader’s mind with regard to masturbation. The General opens a drawer…like the Captain, we wait breathlessly for him to produce a pistol…but it is cigarettes and scotch he was after.
Chunk 6: Gratitude
You had to get close enough to give a marine a thousand dollars before he’d haul you up.
The next section recaps the desperate flight from fallen Saigon that brought them to this meeting, which makes them feel lucky to still be alive, and reminds us of how the Captain was charged with high-stakes decisions as to who could leave in the General’s plane and who would be left behind.
Chunk 7: Deception and Relief
I had scored a coup, much to my chagrin and purely by accident, throwing the blame onto a blameless man.
When the General says outright that there is an informer, he looks to the Captain for confirmation. We know full well the way the Captain’s stomach is roiling. But when the General names his suspect, it is a major that the Captain chose for evacuation because he had always seemed harmless.
Chunk 8: Unavoidable shame
Do you agree that you must correct your mistake?
Suspicion. Lust. Hilarity. Horror. Threat. Gratitude. Deception and Relief. Unavoidable shame: to save his own life, our relatively peace-loving Captain must murder a man he knows to be innocent. What an emotional roller coaster!
By this point in the novel we have already seen the escape from Saigon. We are already well aware of the Captain’s torn allegiances. Yet this layering of backstory, while not essential to our understanding of the story, builds complex layers into the Captain’s characterization that bonds us to his humanity (yes, I bonded with a communist double agent!), at once heightening our emotional engagement and deepening our understanding of the stakes. Mad skills.
Over to you: What has been your approach to weaving in backstory to create subtext? What do you think of the technique Nguyen uses here? Is it one you can envision using?
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
How have I typically woven in backstory? In a word, clumsily. I readily admit to being a reforming info-dumper. One of my problems has always been that I have this whole damn world that I’m so excited about! It took me a long time to rein that in, and focus on telling on the story.
I think I’ve finally come upon a technique that helps me with my “issues” and seems to be one readers like, as well (so far, fingers crossed). And it’s very much like your post. I introduce each chapter with a blurb from a historian/scribe who’s written about my world and the events in it, from the perspective of the decades just subsequent to the story. They’re each a paragraph or two, a combination of world-building and semi-pertinent backstory. And because the author is a scribe who lived in the era, I can go full-blown archaic and get my geek on. They’re brief and (hopefully) informative, but I honestly think that a reader who disliked them could skip them and still enjoy the story.
Interesting and fun post, Kathryn. Nguyen definitely has mad skills.
“Reforming info-dumper,” meet “reforming perfectionist,” lol. We all have issues! I’m glad you are coming up with an approach you think works, and a structure that supports meaning in your novel’s world. Each book is so different in this regard! The proof is in the early reader/editorial feedback.
I read The Sympathizer as satire. Like good satire, it’s built on human foibles and the tragedies of history. Catch 22. Bonfire of the Vanities. Carl Hiaasen. It’s like those.
Satire allows tension to grow from both circumstances and humor, but your point is about emotion. Suspicion. Lust. Hilarity. Horror. Threat. Gratitude. Deception and Relief.
Honestly, lust is difficult to portray unless humorously. Threat builds but horror arrives in shocking moment. Suspicion is a sick dread. Deception is a desperate ploy. Gratitude and relief only feel good following a lengthy build up of fear.
Should one attempt all that in a single scene? Nguyen won the Pulitzer so it obviously worked for him but, honestly, I wouldn’t recommend it unless one is writing satire.
I mean, how else are you going to make political betrayal and squid masturbation work in the same scene?
I know it is meant as satire, but due to my particular family background, satire feels an awful lot like life so I have a weak detection meter for it. Yet particularly that turn from the heightened humor to the horrors of torture really made me sit up and take note of what he was achieving in layering these disparate scenes. I agree though, Don, that this intense emotional stacking is not a ploy for every chapter in a book, lol!
“Satire feels an awful lot like life.”
Oh, ain’t that the truth!
I’d like to offer a distinction between satire and black comedy.
In satire, there is a society with rules, but though they may be stifling or oppressive, they are not insane or destructive. The hero or heroine tries to succeed within that society, but through a series of ironic failures, comes to recognize the folly of the “success” she has been seeking. Think Austen with Emma. And in the end, though the society remains unchanged, there is a “marriage” or a self-revelation that permits the hero/ine access to some deeper truth that permits him or her to live at a wiser level.
Black comedy deals with a system that is not just stodgy or prejudiced, it’s openly destructive or mad. The systems usually portrayed in black comedy are therefore the military (Catch 22, Dr. Strangelove), politics (Wag the Dog), finance (Wolf of Wall Street), and organized crime (Goodfellas), but increasingly the entertainment business and even divorce (War of the Roses) have been used in the form. Here, though, the hero strives to succeed and in order to do so commits immoral, violent, and destructive deeds (in accordance with the system’s code). The hero has no self-revelation; the reader/audience does instead.
Given this, I’m curious to know whether The Sympathizer is truly satire. (If nothing else, this post and the comments have made me want to read it.) Or whether it simply uses irony and humor to leaven an otherwise dark tale. Or whether it might rightly be considered black comedy.
Just wondering.
Thanks for the genre clarification David. To tell you the truth I haven’t finished it yet so not sure of the personal revelation part. Two more chapters and I’m away for a week so it has me hanging!
Hey David, I’ll go with Black Comedy. Why not?
Kinda feels that way to me — espionage and war as insane, destructive systems. But like Kathryn I’ll withhold judgment until I’ve read the book. (Just loaded it onto my Kindle.)
Okay, no more Calamari for me. As I was reading these chunks (I like this word!) it struck me that there is way more than emotional impact being delivered here. There’s context. It’s world-building on some level, and the Captain is a product of this world. For me, every decision my MC makes (or avoids) is based on her past. Sometimes it’s a sentence worth of recollection, and other times it’s more, but it’s always a ping back to some other time that echoes the present. Now I think I have to read this novel! Thanks, Catherine.
Oh Susan that first line made me laugh and laugh! I think I would refine your comment to say this backstory provided “immediate” context. That feels true, since by this chapter the challenges of this era, and his role in them, were established. This takes us deep into his POV to see how his experiences impacted his emotional makeup, and added great tension to the scene with the General.
Hi, Kathryn:
Your post reminds me of the importance of voice, especially when the plot turns are this severe in emotional terms. I can’t imagine that we would buy into squid love segueing into betrayal, etc., without a character with a truly compelling and commanding voice.
I also think your example underscores the worth of placing backstory in the context of making a profoundly difficult decision. The past provides context both for why the decision is so difficult, and provides insight into how the character views the circumstances that oblige the choice.
We would understand the main character’s predicament purely on the grounds of his being a double agent. But by supplying the background of Saigon’s fall, we understand how tenuous and random (but also cherished) survival was. By providing the masturbation scene, we gain a ridiculous but all too human glimpse into the character being obliged to murder an innocent.
Wonderful post. Thanks so much.
Yes, awesome. Thanks David!