Seeking Truth in Fiction
By Kathryn Craft | January 10, 2019 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
A few weeks after my first husband’s suicide, when I was able to think again, one thought pulled me forward through the difficult years of recovery to come: I was meant to write about this.
But how? Back in the late 90s, the memoir revolution had not yet gained purchase. People would read books about family suicides by Joan Rivers and Judy Collins, but who would care to read about a dance critic from Allentown, PA and her two sons? Memoir was out.
I considered self-help. I’d become a bit of an aficionada after all, gobbling up any book with clues to help me through and beyond, but lack of credentials and platform discouraged this route.
Journalism seemed an obvious choice, if somewhat of a genre hop. I’d already been a dance critic for fourteen years. Yet gathering facts and analyzing statistics, while a valuable exercise, did not promise what I was really seeking: a way to write a better story for my family.
When the need to express myself smacked against the cold hard wall of publishing pragmatism, I turned to fiction.
Creative writing is not an escape. It’s the opposite. Fiction demands that we dive headfirst into puddles of conflict others might choose to sidestep. It asks that we scratch and dig until we unearth emotional truths, and then find a way to convey them so that a reader we’ve never met can share the same journey.
With this challenge in mind, I want to share a few passages from novels whose authors’ mad skills rely on details, yes, but not facts. They are rooted in feelings. They made me pause to think, “Wow, that is so true.”
In The Trouble with Goats and Sheep by Joanna Cannon, two girls set out to find a neighbor who has gone missing. You have to love a writer who can help you see anew something as pervasive as heat.
There was nowhere to escape the heat. It was there every day when we woke, persistent and unbroken, and hanging in the air like an unfinished argument. It leaked people’s days onto pavements and patios and, no longer able to contain ourselves within brick and cement, we melted into the outside, bringing our lives along with us. Meals, conversations, arguments were all woken and untethered and allowed outdoors. Even the avenue itself had changed. Giant fissures opened on yellowed lawns and paths felt soft and unsteady. Things which had been solid and reliable were now pliant and uncertain. Nothing felt sure anymore. The bonds which held things together were destroyed by the temperature—this is what my father said—but it felt more sinister than that. It felt as though the whole avenue was shifting and stretching, and trying to escape itself.
With this excerpt from The Cottingley Secret, in which a woman and a girl, a century apart, try to cling to their belief in fairies, author Hazel Gaynor made me recognize exactly what it is like when you give in to the excitement of spilling a secret.
I felt my words seep into the walls of the bedroom and under the door. I felt them slip through the gaps in the window frame and wished I could take them back, because when Elsie went to work the next day, she would take the secret with her. It would leave 31 Main Street and travel to Bradford, where it would spread like a fever down the long line of girls who did the spotting work with her. It would be there at every mealtime, passing between us like salt and gravy. It was part of the house now, captured in the wind that whistles down the chimney and in the floorboards that creaked on the stairs.
In An American Marriage by Tayari Jones, a couple is torn apart when a man is wrongly accused of a crime. Their first letters to each other, after the husband is sent to prison, speak of love in different voices, but in ways that feel equally true. The first is written by the wife, the second by the husband.
Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.
…
This love letter thing is uphill for me. I have never seen one uless you count the third grade: Do you like me ___ yes ___ no. (Don’t answer that, ha!) A love letter is supposed to be like music or Shakespeare, but I don’t know anything about Shakespeare. But for real, I want to tell you what you mean to me, but it’s like trying to count the seconds of a day on your fingers and toes.
I could go on and on with the examples, of course. In fact, I’d love to. For me, such passages rise to our highest callings as fiction writers: to make stuff up so that we can find what feels really true.
I’d much rather hear more examples that have resonated with you. From your own writing or reading, what are some passages from novels that made you pause and think, “Wow, that is so true”? Has your writing led you toward any unexpected truths? Warring, impossible-to-reconcile truths? Drop them into the comments.
[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.
Here’s one from a lovely book I read recently (When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead–middle grade fiction):
“Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It’s like how turning out a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to. It was like that when I asked Alice Evans to be my bathroom partner. I wasn’t one of the girls who tortured her on purpose, but I had never lifted a finger to help her before or even spent one minute being nice to her.”
That’s a great one, S.K., thanks for sharing it. I can think of so many other instances when turning off a light so clearly leaves behind ghosts of sudden awareness that it seems they are burned into your retina. This does feel true.
Thank you for sharing this. These are the things I have edited out as purple prose, or even refused to put down at all. Maybe I can now write them or leave them in.
Hi Bob, this is an interesting comment. Typically, the prose is only deemed “purple” if you are begging an emotional involvement that has not been earned. The examples from Gaynor and Jones happen late enough in their respective novels that the reader is already well invested in the characters’ inner lives. The only example taken from an opening is Cannon’s, and since it is atmospheric and suggests the way place can incite arguments, it actually works to enhance the reader’s emotional connection to the work. I found myself saying, “Yes, that kind of heat.” It felt true even though I’d never before thought of heat that way.
For me, the prose would have been purple if the passage was trying to manipulate me into feeling a way I was not yet prepared to feel. A common violator is novels that open at funerals, for instance, where we are to feel sorry for a character who is crying buckets because clearly we all know that funerals are sad.
But funerals aren’t always sad—or not solely sad. Sometimes they are a celebration of a long life well-lived. Sometimes death is a relief. Those tears could be from regret, or because of something that happened outside the church, or because the one crying has cancer, or from a complex combination of all of the above. So aiming for high emotion without first orienting us to the conflict at hand can lead to purple prose.
Hello Kathryn. I’m inclined to agree with Bob Cohn about the first two quotes you use (perhaps it’s a matter of–shudder–gender). But Bob defines purple prose as I would define sentimentality–the effort to compel readers to feel more than the circumstances deserve.
Your first two quotes–in my view–are guilty of something else: an effort to poeticize the prose to excess, to engage in fine writing. This is different from purple prose: fine writing draws attention to itself, at the expense of momentum and focused clarity. The writer has gotten so caught up in his or her wish to capture a state of feeling that the mission has been forgotten. Or so it seems to me. When this happens, the intelligent reader knows the writer is not in control.
Interesting, Barry, as I see these examples as and artful use of setting to carry emotional impact, to foreshadow, and to move the story forward. Then again, I pay attention to poetics like this in my own writing, which most likely wouldn’t suit you.
In the manuscripts I edit, purple prose stands out as confusing and unwanted. I’m either unsure of how I’m supposed to feel or confused as to why the situation is so emotional. It feels like the cart before the horse. Whereas I welcomed these passages, which elegantly illuminated aspects of the story world or characters’ hearts in a way I recognized as true. I welcomed it.
As in all things creative, we always come to this: it is subjective at every level, and thank goodness for it. Every step of the way, we are looking to find the work that speaks to us. These excerpts spoke to me.
Hi Kathryn.
Thank you for this article. I love your approach to your story. I believe we can work through our feelings and losses through fiction. After two business books, I have finished my first novel, an emotional drama set in the old west where a father and daughter become estranged (I know this truth) – her with deep anger at him for her childhood and plotting revenge, he seeking forgiveness. Here’s a few lines from the story when Allie returns to the house where her mother died ten years earlier…
“Allie slowly climbed the remaining stairs. At the top, she turned to the left and peeked in her room. Empty. Her bed appeared before her in a haze. The raggedy mattress and itchy wool blanket with it. Her small dresser, always taller than she was, stood in the far corner. The window to the back was now shattered, allowing all of those sounds and shadows that so scared her as a child to come and go as they pleased. Not many nights did she fall asleep with sweet dreams dancing in her head—darkness and evil lurked outside the window, sometimes across the hall, and too often both.”
***
Hi John, welcome to the world of fiction! That broken window and all you’ve done with it is great, and really drops us inside Allie’s perspective—then, and now. Whether real or imagined (hard to tell without larger context), I feel the truth of these fears for her.
I always read your posts, love the things your quote and go back to look at my work and apply your ideas. Maybe this fits with what you are zeroing in on. Beth
His hands had become slick with sweat, even in the settling cold of this October night. A ticking clock echoed in his head, making him think he might explode with the sensation of it—time washing away, the lake becoming inky dark, the sky deepening in clouds and shadows. Rain began, the streetlights came on, the darkening pavement shining, dotted with fallen leaves—a slick black galaxy pricked by useless stars. But he had to wander back to his car, drive home, his anger increasing, because he could not find him, a street person, omnipresent. It made him chew at things he’d heard, at a school board meeting, the night he mentioned the possibility of arresting the man who whistled at the schoolyard fence, arrest the guy for loitering.
Thanks Beth! Ooh, I love this kind of atmospheric writing that almost seem to merge with the character’s psyche. My favorite phrase: “…a slick black galaxy pricked by useless stars.” I never thought about wet pavement that way, but it felt true.
Of course I don’t know where in your story this falls, but the phrase also felt like foreshadowing due to the menace of the wet leaves. Anyone who has spun out on them knows that cars, wet pavement, and leaves are not only a useless constellation, but a dangerous one as well.
Thanks, Kathryn, you made my day.
Kathryn,
The examples you chose are gorgeous and accomplish so much more than worldbuilding. There is deeper meaning between those lines, in contemplation, memory, and universality. I feel so much vulnerability in those passages, and the strength that follows experience, too. There are stories untold beyond what’s on the page. Thank you so much for sharing those selections.
For my part, I decided to share a passage written by Brian Doyle, who is one of my absolute favorite authors of both fiction and nonfiction. This is the tail end of a chapter in GRACE NOTES entitled Advice to My Son:
“I love you with a love ferocious and inarticulate and thorough and mysterious and tidal and always will love you even when you have not as yet picked up the wet towel on the floor which if you do not pick that up soon I am going to roar in such a manner that birds in faraway countries will startle and wonder what has shivered the air beneath their holy and extraordinary wings.”
Brian Doyle is a master of presenting small vignettes that encapsulate a lifetime of character and relationships.
Oh my gosh, Melissa. What a sentence! Its meaning accumulates and complicates as the words pile on. Thank you so much for this. Brilliant! And there’s so much truth.
Brian Doyle is one of my favorites too. He was a master at writing about emotions without sentimentality.
“What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline cracks.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
“A man’s greatest treasures are his illusions – Durzo Blint”
― Brent Weeks, The Way of Shadows
“Dying well is easy, it only takes a moment of courage. It’s living well that I couldn’t do. What’s death compared to that. – Durzo Blint”
― Brent Weeks, The Way of Shadows
Hi Brian! Wow, are you somewhat of a collector? An underliner or folder of page corners? These are great. Simple truths that stop you in your tracks to see through to their deeper wisdom. I could relate to each one. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this inspiring post and the wonderful excerpts. I have been working hard on inner dialog and foreshadowing. I hesitated to share, but this is a bit from the chapter I am currently writing in my work in progress (First draft):
The fierce dancers, in a parody borrowed from Dante’s Inferno, tormented the Spanish conquistadors in a battle that signaled an end to the hostilities. The war against the demons had ended and the faithful emerged triumphant.
If only I could scare off my demons forever, Nico thought. A sadness came over him. One that felt familiar. It was almost as if he relied upon this sadness to know himself. Their shadows grew longer as they walked back to the little house on the river. Tica held her husband’s hand and their laughter echoed off the buildings. The two teenagers had removed their frightening masks and Nico saw they were brother and sister, now playfully chasing each other down the lane toward home. He felt the air heavy in his chest as the light went down on them like a grey wool blanket. Hearing the river, he lifted his head. A lamp, like a beacon at sea, had been left on in the living room.
Hi Luna, I know what you mean and commend your bravery—thanks for sharing. This snip is actually quite unsettling. There’s a lot going on here that I like and can relate to—the fierceness of the dancers, unmasked to be playful teenagers. Needing your sadness to know yourself—so true. The heavy air, the light like a wool blanket, the lamp left on…keep up the great work!
Thank you Kathryn. I am grateful for the encouragement and will continue to plow ahead. I am still on the first draft and will delve deeper in my second pass. I look forward to WU and your posts.