To Dream? To Think? The Contrary Effects of Fiction and How to Use Them
By Donald Maass | September 6, 2023 |
What is the most important effect of fiction? Is it that it causes us to fall into the theta brain wave state in which we visualize a story and feel “as if” it is happening to us?
Of course, in that state we never completely cross the Reality Threshold, tumbling into the realm occupied by people with hyperphantasia, oneirataxia, or schizophrenia. We’re not hallucinating. We have books in our hands. We know that what we’re reading isn’t real. Nevertheless, it feels that way.
When fiction has lured us into its spell, we surrender and float. We walk alongside characters, seeming to become them. We are enchanted, connected, accepting, amazed or in other ways drawn into our hearts. We’re in a semi-conscious condition in which our imaginations run free. We detach from time. We relax. We gain empathy. We dream.
Or.
Is the most important effect of fiction to cause us to set down a book, stare at the ceiling and reflect? When we do, our brains rise through a theta state to a beta state in which we are comparing, contrasting, evaluating, judging…in other words, standing apart from what we’ve read to process and perhaps reconcile ourselves to what a tale is presenting to us.
When fiction has a provoking effect on us, we are intrigued, puzzled, challenged, confounded, affirmed or in other ways sent into our heads to sort out and make sense of the story. We may nod, frown, laugh, disagree, feel validated, or even reimagine events that we’ve just read. We’re in a state of awareness in which our minds are active. We are engaged. We have opinions. We think.
Making us dream. Causing us to think. Naturally, it would be great if the novel you’re writing now could have both effects. It can, but how? What are the mechanics that lull us into dreaming or shake us awake? Once you know what those mechanisms are and how they work, you can use them deliberately.
So, let’s go.
The Dream
What starts the dream? First and foremost, it is the voice of the storyteller: sonorous, assured, promising us adventure, not rushing or presuming our interest but crooking its finger to beckon us slowly forward.
Next, it is a person, place or circumstances that we can buy into. I don’t mean establishing the Ordinary World. When taken literally, that approach can lead to humdrum opening scenes in which characters are merely introduced. That’s static set up: laying out circumstances, sketching in a protagonist’s personal history, explaining relationships, and offering motivation before there is any problem to solve or action required.
What we buy into, instead, are people who are in some way familiar, feelings that we understand, an outlook that is surprising yet so persuasive that we immediately see things that way too. We walk into a story and, in a way, meet ourselves. The tale being told may be—we hope so anyway—elevated beyond our experience, even dangerous, yet nevertheless we are safe.
Perhaps it’s no accident that literary fiction—which aims to capture our condition—thrives in realistic, contemporary settings. Likewise, stories of return, healing and self-discovery usually don’t wander far from home. Such stories become vivid in our imaginations because they catch the rhythms of real life and paint with the textures of the known.
However, the same appeal can also be present in stories less realistic, such as SF, fantasy, horror, historical, adventure, mystery, or thrillers. In such tales we enter an extraordinary world and we buy into it because of the familiar human emotions that we find there. I have previously posted about how that works here.
The Thinking
What in fiction makes us think? It is when we are intrigued, puzzled or confounded by things on the page, things that require thought.
What kinds of things? Characters who present contradictions or are a mystery. Environments that unsettle us. Circumstances that provoke us, that feel wrong, that need fixing. Conflicts that we want to resolve. Ideas that disturb. An atmosphere of uncertainty or foreboding. The arrival of change.
It might seem, then, that the best plan for an opening is for the plot to blast off. Hit us with trouble. Drop us cold into the action, things already underway. Keep the page busy so that our minds must be busy too. Actually, action and media res openings don’t do that. Visual reports of what’s happening may feel vivid when you write them, but for the reader they have a distancing effect. There’s little to grip onto. We’re not yet involved.
Put plainly, action by itself doesn’t get us thinking. (Or feeling, for that matter.) What does engage our minds is what makes us uneasy. That can be many things. A pin dropping to the floor can be more disturbing than a bomb dropping on a city. A feeling that things aren’t quite right can arouse more caution in a reader than events going instantly wrong. When we feel on edge our minds act like razors.
Commercial fiction is good at taking us to perilous situations, but tense plot and high stakes are not necessarily what make us think. Dilemmas, wrongs to be righted, yearnings unsatisfied, relationships that aren’t working, minds that are struggling or split… Prodding readers to think begins with pushing characters into conditions that readers don’t want them to be in.
When that happens, readers work to unravel what’s tangled and resolve what’s unhappy. The uneasy condition in which they find characters is what provokes the most cognitive effort. That can—we hope—be true in commercial fiction but it can also be evident in quiet, character-driven, and non-commercial stories. Ordinary people in extraordinary states. I’ve previously posted more about that here.
Now, let’s get practical.
Story Hypnosis
Here are some prompts to help create story dream:
- Write an opening passage in which your novel’s narrative voice tells us what’s different or particular about where we are, what’s distinctive or unusual about a character we’re meeting, or a pertinent fact about what’s happening that isn’t immediately obvious or wouldn’t be known to the reader.
- Instantly elevate a character, setting their iconic status. (For more on that, see here.)
- From your character’s POV, render an opinion about people in general, an instant judgement about someone in particular, or an observation about anything that we’re going to see pretty soon or that happened just now.
- Quickly take us to another place, teach us something we don’t know, bring us into a wildly different way of thinking, or cause your main character’s soul to yearn or heart to ache.
- Replace description of the scene environment with a paragraph instead telling what it feels like to be there.
- Use a secondary character’s viewpoint, behavior or dialogue to highlight, contrast with, or cast doubt upon what your main character is doing, saying or believing.
- Add something to your opening that we’ll like: a recognizable smell, a witty remark, something magical or comforting or quirky or exceptional or hellish…anything that is delightful, unexpected or that hints to us of adventure, mystery, danger, romance or artfully evoked reality.
- Carefully select your promise words so that we feel promised something. (For more on that, see here.)
Story Exegesis
Here are some prompts to help you make readers think:
- Include in your opening a small hint of big trouble ahead. Uh-oh! What can your main character miss or minimize?
- Present quickly the two diametrically opposed sides of your main character.
- Turn your main character’s problem into a puzzle, dilemma, trap or inescapable maze.
- Present your main character with a challenge they cannot meet, a task they cannot fulfill, a quest that will be impossible, or a journey with no reliable map.
- Give your main character a rule for living, a code to follow, a bias that begs argument, a methodology that (almost) always works.
- Make the main problem so much worse that it becomes an injustice or an outrage.
- Build into your story world a social ill, an ancient grudge, a community breakdown, or anything in this story world that is the opposite of the way things ought to be.
- Choose anything that’s standard if not required in your type of story and reverse it.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are twin imperatives in starting a story: welcome us in, but then make us uneasy. Include things we find familiar but also elements that strike us odd, disturbing or wrong. Make us glad we’re reading, then require us to evaluate. Sweep us away on a dream, then deliver us to the doorstep of our brains.
Stories that make us dream capture our hearts. Stories that make us think keep us intrigued. Why not do both?
As your WIP begins, what will make us dream and what will make us think?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
Many a profound truth is written in fiction. Perhaps it’s not the ‘what’ in fantasy but the ‘what-if’.
This is my opening of a story about the ailing mythical Water Horse of the Scottish Highlands.
[ In hindsight it was several months after my traumatic birth that my true soul came into being. Slowly it developed as a thought of life exposed on light sensitive paper – a formless haze and then, as a ghost surely accumulates color and substance, it formed a complete portrait of a child with silver hair and violet eyes.
Watching my past as an objective spectator, I sense a slight thinning of the air around me from time-to-time, where my soul generates enough electrons to manifest like a shimmering heatwave. It was like having an invisible friend moving closer, whispering in my ear that all was well.
There was a divine reason why Lila’s ‘world stage’ (the illusion of life as a creative play) decreed I could only meet my mother a thousand years after her untimely death. But then, no death was ever ill-timed in those enchanted goddess-spun days when Epona’s clan of wisewomen served her in peace.
We were going home, my mother and me. And since there was a likelihood that I could be born enroute, every contingency was considered. All but one. In hindsight, Mother’s astrologer could have read the stars one last time, but later, as I came to fully appreciate the perverse intelligence of the universe, that ship had sailed. But just then, I felt Mother’s happiness as my own. Dorota was always happy. I like to think she had an amazing smile.
And so it was, I gasped my first breath on board a sinking ship in the North Sea off the eastern coast of Scotland, bleating softly under a bloodied sheet, and promptly fell asleep, exhausted, chilled to the bone, and utterly soulless.
That’s a strong narrative voice at work. Quickly lulled me into the story dream, but then didn’t quickly engage my mind. That happened with this: “I gasped my first breath on board a sinking ship in the North Sea…” Oh! Now I’m both dreaming and awake!
How can I know that I am not now dreaming? Or reading?
One idea for me is that you accept the absurdity of the story while you are reading it, and that helps you to recognize the absurdities in your real life.
This works because dreaming and thinking are both continuous processes like a sentence that has no
You raise an interesting point about absurdity: When presented with that, we’re sent into our heads. How then are our hearts engaged? Wish we could ask Terry Pratchett to expound on that point!
Don, I just finished reading a novel that had me – and has kept me – in a remarkable dream state. Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas. If I could write like that. . . .
Just read the opening–beautiful. Powerful narrative voice. The author also quickly does something smart: disarm the reader’s objection to a story about lost love. Why should we care? Lucas writes, “You’re hung up on the past, my mother said to me earlier tonight. Why carry all that around with you?” Yeah, why? The narrator’s mother asks the question we’re answer and the novel is the answer. Must read this one, thanks Mary.
Speaking of that narrative dream state that grabs you and drags you under…
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.
Hi Don, your advise via classes and these posts has always worked for me. But I’m the writer, not the reader. Will my beginning pull the reader in? (note: the child who screamed…would in italics)
She never meant to run this far, rows of cottonwoods arching overhead, so many crows caw cawing in the swaying branches, Ella Singleton again on Greenwood Avenue, the corner home where Cecile had raised her. She checked her watch, fifty minutes until 3-11 shift… enough time to discover if it was still there, the abandoned house at the end of their street. In childhood, a place of danger, of ignoring Cecile’s warnings…Bingo Gallagher, Rick the Skinny daring neighbor kids to climb crumbling, shattered walls, escape iron rebars reaching out to gouge any kid who scrambled, jumped. A place of escape, child Ella lying on smooth stones, falling asleep under overhanging branches, the tangles of weedy trees magically protecting her during a spring shower…all of this before, the child who screamed.
So…had an ambitious realtor purchased the land, hauled away the crumbling house, its ghosts? Was Ella’s right arm beginning to ache, tissues, pain fibers igniting? A crazy idea, no proven clinical reason, she simply remembering the over-zealous policeman grabbing her arm, insisting she run home, Ella barely seven, but wanting to know…
Dream or nightmare? I love the details and hints of adventure. Bingo Gallagher. Rick the Skinny. A novel with characters named like that is going to be good. As a suggestion, perhaps start not with running toward the house of memories but with the house itself. It’s still there? Great. What does it feel like to see it again?
Hi Don, your advise via classes and these posts has always worked for me. But I’m the writer, not the reader. Will my beginning pull the reader in? (note: the child who screamed…would in italics)
She never meant to run this far, rows of cottonwoods arching overhead, so many crows caw cawing in the swaying branches, Ella Singleton again on Greenwood Avenue, the corner home where Cecile had raised her. She checked her watch, fifty minutes until 3-11 shift… enough time to discover if it was still there, the abandoned house at the end of their street. In childhood, a place of danger, of ignoring Cecile’s warnings…Bingo Gallagher, Rick the Skinny daring neighbor kids to climb crumbling, shattered walls, escape iron rebars reaching out to gouge any kid who scrambled, jumped. A place of escape, child Ella lying on smooth stones, falling asleep under overhanging branches, the tangles of weedy trees magically protecting her during a spring shower…all of this before, the child who screamed.
So…had an ambitious realtor purchased the land, hauled away the crumbling house, its ghosts? Was Ella’s right arm beginning to ache, tissues, pain fibers igniting? A crazy idea, no proven clinical reason, she simply remembering the over-zealous policeman grabbing her arm, insisting she run home, Ella barely seven, but wanting to know…
I don’t have much to say today, because this post sent me immediately to my story, to edit the opening for the last two hours.
Thank you!
Excellent!
I know that feeling, Mary. I’m reading Abraham Verghese’s latest: Covenant of Water and his writing is so evocative, his characters so real–flawed and glorious–and such masterful plotting, weaving together their lives, I have neglected my own stories to be completely immersed in the world of St. Thomas Christians of South India. Hooked from page 1–and about 100 pages from the end. I’ve already wept tears of joy and sorrow and I feel there’s more to come. He’s setting up something more (the book is a door-stopper–I’ve had to massage my wrists it’s so heavy).
Coincidentally, I was in the middle of another doorstopper by a frequent visitor here on WU, Alicia, though it’s on my kindle so much easier on my hands. What I appreciate most is that leisurely unfolding of the story–it’s confident, intelligent. The lives of the rich and famous are the least likely to capture my attention, yet Alicia’s have and I’m looking forward to rejoining them as soon as I can return Covenant to the library (I’m accruing library fines at the moment).
Thank you for a wonderful post, Don. Here’s a story I began before Verghese’s:
A mongoose can starve in America. Yes, the land of plenty. I never meant to come to America. It wasn’t even a concept. No Indian mongoose ever dreams of such things. But I had made a promise to always be with my beloved, my Priya. I don’t think she even remembers. She was just a little girl in kindergarten. One afternoon, when she came home from school in her checkered pink uniform, she gave no thought to her own safety. She saw me, a young mongoose, in the jaws of a cobra, and without hesitation, picked up her older brother’s hockey stick and beat the cobra until he dropped me. I scuttled away as soon as I was free but later, I discovered she had killed the cobra.
From that time onwards, I’ve adopted Priya’s family as my own. I stuck close to Priya since she enjoyed my company. She called me Chu-Chu, which is short for Chuchundar, the Indian word for mongoose. She talked constantly, about what she was building in the sandpit, what the little plastic animals were doing, or the real ones she dug out of the ground, and the books she read. That child talked nonstop. Her mother resorted to periodically saying, “uh-huh” but Priya caught on. She’d accuse her mother of not listening, which was true, and demanded that her mother repeat whatever she said. Of course, the mother wouldn’t put up with such ridiculous demands, so Priya naturally turned to me. She told me everything.
I have Verghese’s book on my kindle, Vijaya. You’ve convinced me to read it sooner rather than later. I loved Cutting for Stone and yes, he pulls you deeply into the story. Thanks for the reminder!
A mongoose narrator? Wow, I’m amazed at how that choice woke me up, while at the same time the narrative voice lulled me into the story dream. “She told me everything.” I’m ready to hear!
Mary, I just finished and closed the book with a happy sigh! I have loved all his stories.
Don, the mongoose was truly a miracle. He will stay :)
Don,
I’m reminded of Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy. Hamlet dreams of escaping life’s pain and worry through death, but he’s given pause by thinking of the unknown consequences. That engages our hearts and minds, and it has tension because his dreaming and his thinking create a conflict that the play then has to resolve. That’s not a story opening, but it demonstrates the point, yes?
MG
Yes. Amazing how a play about a student who thinks too much nevertheless captures us. We’re swept up but at the same time have to question Hamlet’s goal: Kill the king? Really? It’s not his murderous impulse that draws us in, but his indecision.
“What can make us dream? What can make us think?” Your questions and your probing comments make me recall what I recently read in William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, including these words: “The young man or woman writing today [this was in 1950] has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” Faulkner said the poet’s and writer’s duty and privilege “is to write about these things,” helping humanity endure by “lifting our heart,” by reminding us “of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of our past.” Plenty there that still seems worthy to think as well as dream about.
“The human heart in conflict with itself.” Faulkner knew what he was talking about, eh? Wow. We could stop right there. It sums up story’s power in just a few words. Thanks for that.
Don, I am two-thirds of the way through Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead,” and it’s a work that both makes me dream and think, both uneasy and thoughtful. Part of thoughtfulness is the knowledge of the scourge of the Sakler’s deadly pain-pushing legacy, part of the immersion is the longing you feel in Demon’s character, and the dread of tragedy coming that seems inevitable.
The book has heartbreak, valor, heedlessness, stupidity and courage. But I fear what is to come in the final third.
That should be “Sackler” family.
That book made me very quiet for a few days. Powerful.
Be not afraid.
I was wondering whether to read Kingsolver’s new one or not. You’ve convinced me to give it a try!
I’m rereading the late Anne Perry’s amazing novella, A Christmas Journey, as inspiration for a historical novella I’m writing, and as I read your story exegesis, I thought that’s exactly what she did. Then I remembered that she was your client!