Posts by Donald Maass
Johnny stole a pencil. Johnny is a third-grade student at Central Elementary. The pencil he stole had pictures of rocket ships on it, and a big eraser on the top. It belonged to his classmate Susie, who was upset. When the teacher discovered the pencil in Jonny’s desk, she referred the matter to the principal, Ms. Kindly.
Ms. Kindly brought Johnny to her office and non-judgmentally explained to Johnny that he had made a choice. The Central Elementary rule was no stealing, which Johnny knew, so the choice he had made was inappropriate. Choices have consequences too, and so Ms. Kindly said that Johnny would miss recess that morning. He would stay inside, apart from the other students, and reflect on his choice and its consequences.
Ms. Kindly asked Johnny to think about how his choice had affected Susie, who wanted to be an astronaut and who received the pencil on her birthday. Susie, who was a nice girl, now doubted whether she could trust Johnny. Johnny sat and reflected. When the recess was over, Johnny apologized to Susie and returned the pencil to her, freshly sharpened.
Good outcome. Caring principal. Johnny’s choice had a negative consequence, but he learned from it and became a better decision maker, an important life skill. Now, let me ask you a question: Is the story of Johnny and the stolen pencil a good story?
Never mind. Answer: no.
Why not? As I’m sure you can see, Johnny’s story is complete. It has a beginning, middle, an end and a sharp point—literally. However, it is low in drama. The transgression is mild. The conflict and characters are simple. Johnny has no inner struggle. The outcome is easily achieved. There is a lesson to be learned, sure, but it’s obvious and inarguable.
To put it succinctly, Johnny’s story isn’t heightened. It only mildly moves us. It doesn’t cause us to think anything we couldn’t have thought on our own. What would it mean to heighten Johnny’s story? To find out, let’s look at the handling of choices and consequences in a couple of novels.
Specifically, let’s look at novels that touch upon the topic of voyeurism. No, not that kind. If you want erotic fiction of that flavor there’s plenty of it out there, knock yourself out. What I’m talking about are stories about seeing and hearing what you shouldn’t: choices, consequences, and how they become big.
The Warning
Hannah Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber (2021), is set in Wisconsin’s most crime-ridden city, Black Harbor. Hazel Greelee takes a job as a police transcriber. Her job is to sit in a dark room at night, remotely transcribing detectives’ interviews of suspects. The sessions begin with a detective saying from the other room, “Hello, Transcriber” (hence the title). Naturally, Hazel hears disturbing things. Her life lacks purpose, and she thinks that what she’s overhearing in the dark could turn into a good novel. Can you see what’s coming? Hazel ‘s curiosity gets her mixed up with detective Nikolai Kole who involves her in the case of the Candy Man, a drug dealer to children.
All is not as it seems, of course, and the consequences of Hazel’s choices are harrowing. Should Hazel have known better? As she is recruited in the novel’s opening, Hazel is clearly told […]
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[Note: This post is occasioned in part by a discussion of “what to write now” begun here in January by Rachel Toalson and David Corbett.]
Last month I suggested that any work of fiction has one of two main purposes: 1) to show us what to do, or 2) to show us who we are. I like breaking fiction down into dichotomies. It clarifies things. I stand by last month’s dichotomy, and the loose association of those purposes with two types of stories, stories of fate or stories of destiny.
Another useful dichotomy is to look at fiction as having one of two effects: to cause us to fear, or to cause us to hope. It’s a spectrum. Dark to light. Horror to healing. When we understand a story’s primary purpose and intended effect, then it is easier to shape that story to give it the desired impact.
The problem, as I suggested last month, isn’t choosing one story purpose or effect over another; rather, the problem is that in many manuscripts the writer seems not to have made a strong choice in the first place. The story’s purpose is muddy. The story’s effect is soft.
I sense this especially when in manuscripts “good” and “bad” are tacitly assumed and weakly defined. We are supposed to fear something, for example, but more for its possible evil and for its scary implications. Similarly for antagonists: Bad people are signaled as bad but less often do they actually do terrible things.
Likewise hope: Good outcomes—that for which we should yearn—are assumed and unspoken, not detailed and specific. Likewise, people. Good people often are not demonstrably good but instead are presumptively good because they are victims of bad: they are put upon, powerless or in some other way, to some degree, objects of pathos.
This hazy blending of good and bad, right and wrong, weak and strong, may feel realistic to the writer, but for the reader the result is fiction of low impact. What can help? Like I said above, it starts with understanding the primary purpose—the intent—of a given story. That intent, in turn, points to the effect that you want to have on readers.
Every writer thinks that they understand the purpose of their story, and believes that the story is having a strong effect, but I rarely find that’s true. Manuscript reading doesn’t bear that out. This month, I’d like to strengthen those understandings with a longer list of primary purposes that a given story might have, which in turn will suggests ways in which to sharpen that story’s effect.
So, here we go. These are some primary purposes that I believe that any given story might have:
Which of those most strongly expresses the primary intent of your WIP? As last month, the answer “all of above” is not allowed. Choose one primary intent. Go with your gut. Choosing one primary purpose is important in counter-acting vagueness of intent and low effect, which I see […]
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Have you made your New Year’s resolutions? Good for you! And good luck! May your resolutions prove easy to enact and the year ahead be a year of fulfillment.
Resolutions and goals are good, but today I have a different New Year’s challenge to bring to you. It’s a list of questions, the point of which is to help you refine your moral inventory as a storyteller. “Moral inventory”? What is that, a step in some writing addiction recovery program?
No, it’s a way to clarify your view of our human experience. And why is that important? We’ll get to that. But first, the questions. For each of the following questions, choose and write down the option which you feel best represents your own outlook and your overall view of the human experience. Make a list.
Here’s the catch: the answer “both” is not allowed. For each question, choose one option only. Don’t think too hard. Go with your gut. The option that weights strongest for you is the right option. There’s no judgment. Results are private.
Ready?
The Questions
The Mirror and the Arrow
Done. You should now have a list of words that are associated with how you fundamentally see yourself and our human experience. I’m particularly interested in your answer to the final question. Why? Because it tells me the unconscious intention underlying your stories. It says whether your stories are mirrors or arrows.
Those terms represent the two primary aims of fiction, which are either to 1) reflect our condition and tell us who we are, or 2) show us our possibilities and point us to who we can be. Those contrary intentions in turn tend to lead to two fundamentally different story types: stories of fate or stories of destiny.
In stories of fate, adverse conditions befall. Things happen to main characters. Such characters do not, at first, have pre-existing power. By contrast, in stories of destiny main characters have inherent agency, which is the pre-existing ability to bring about needed change. They are presented with a task.
Fate characters are challenged. They are trapped but, eventually, feel hope and find a way. They struggle, survive, gain strength, endure, heal, overcome guilt and achieve forgiveness, especially of themselves.
Destiny characters are charged and appointed. They know what to do but it isn’t easy. They already have the needed skills and tools but, at some point, those fail. They face their fears and find courage. They fight, prove themselves and triumph.
Now, if I know you, you may well be thinking: How come a story can’t do both? Why can’t a character be both victim and hero? People […]
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Hello from Bisbee, Arizona. Have you been? Everything here is named Copper Queen This-or-That, after the played-out copper mine outside of town. Today you mine the antique stores for copper kettles, cast iron skillets and Western wear. There are historical hotels and outstanding meatloaf.
What am I doing around here? Teaching at a writers’ retreat, naturally, at a ranch deep in the southern New Mexico desert. The land around is vast and empty, a dried-up prehistoric seabed where now you can walk and hear nothing except your crunching footsteps. At night the Milky Way hazes serenely in the velvet black sky. It’s a place to hear your inner thoughts. Day or night, nothing moves.
Which brings me to manuscripts, and this week’s students. As is often the case with developing fiction writers, there are recurring issues in manuscripts as well as skills to impart, ranging from stronger narrative voice, to scene shaping, to emotions on the page, to micro-tension and more.
However, primary among the topics to tackle is the one that I term sequential narration. What that refers to is the tendency of newer fiction writers to spin out a story as if it is a transcript of the movie in the mind, a flowing visualization that walks alongside the main characters from the opening moment in time to the concluding moment in time.
The most obvious shortcoming of sequential narration is that it produces lulls, pages that present low-tension business such as lengthy arrivals, traveling between scenes, domestic humdrum, and so on. For the most part, those things are presented visually in the belief that anything that a protagonist might be doing matters if we can “see” it.
Summary—the collapse of time—can help with that, but that trick masks a misunderstand about what it is that conveys to readers that a story is progressing. What accomplishes that is not entirely what we “see” any more than it is the passing desert, seen through a car window, that gives one a sense of making progress over the land.
Drive along Highway 80 and you’ll understand what I mean. One mile of desert is very much like another. The desert going by is dull. After a short while, one’s sense of movement arises not from the car rolling along, mile by mile, but rather from road signs, monuments, far-off mountains, tiny towns and the thoughts in your head.
Newer writers believe that it is the plot events that provide a feeling of story progress. That’s true, in part, but another sensation of story movement comes from inside, including—and perhaps most importantly–from readers’ experience of human moments. Every time we “get” it—meaning not what a character feels but what a story moment feels like—then we inwardly take a step forward.
Call it emotional beats, if you like, but this kind of movement arises not from what characters are going through, but from what readers are going through. And one thing that readers can go through—if you make it happen—are human moments of recognition and connection.
Human Moments
In creating moments of human connection for readers, there are several variables. The first is narrative distance. However, it doesn’t matter how “close” we are to characters or not. What matters is whether what you are writing about on any given page produces […]
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This past summer, a strange thought entered my mind: I am done with superhero movies.
I wonder if you’ve felt similarly? For me, the increasingly intolerable aspect of such summertime fare in an underlying assumption of what makes a hero. In particular, what a hero must do in the end to show heroism.
Violence.
You’ve seen the movie. There is an attempt to humanize the superhero. There is self-doubt. Moral qualms. A Dark Knight, made vaguely “dark” by backstory tragedy. An ambivalent spider-bitten teen. A wolfman who is not his best self in every single corner of the multiverse. Gee, superheroes are human, just like us. They might even be hunted, exiled or get bad press. Poor mutant beings. But, in the end they come through. When it’s down to the final twenty minutes, they fight. And fight. And keep getting up to fight some more. That’s what you have to do to be a hero.
And who are the superheroes fighting for? Well, sometimes an estranged or captive girlfriend, the can’t-live-with-him-can’t-live-without-him, forever out of reach dream girl. More often, anonymous crowds of screaming civilians running in the streets or trapped in office buildings unfortunately in the way of the Titanic Battle.
And what principle are the superheroes upholding and fighting for? Some vague sense of democracy. Some vague feeling of freedom. Some vague idea of goodness, which we know because the super villain stands for badness.
Am I wrong? Is the superhero genre redeemed by one origins film that explains what went wrong for The Joker? It the genre okay because superheroes aren’t perfect? For me, the part I’m increasingly unhappy with is the persistent, ultimate attribute of a hero: The willingness, ability and mandate to be violent.
Go to the movie theater and that is the message blasted on the big screen, at ear-shattering volume, to the largely teen audience. That’s the lesson. To be fair, the same message is sent on TV shows, in some sports, and in no small number of novels. And, certainly, there are times to fight, even if the wars in our times don’t always feel fully justified or right in their conduct.
So, if you share my thinking—you don’t have to—and doing violence doesn’t strike you as the ultimate attribute of heroism, then what is? And do we actually need heroes at all anymore? Do they still have a place in Twenty-First Century stories or are heroes obsolete, an old-fashioned trope, as quaint now as slide rulers or rotary phones?
The Purpose of Heroes
Our literary era is replete with dark heroes and heroines. Tons of them. They reflect how we feel about our condition, our world and our leaders. Do you feel in full control of your life? Do you think our world is heading in the right direction? Do are leaders seem to you honest and genuine? Or do they seem like packaged political products, right down to their ghost-written autobiographies?
I’m guessing that you feel a little bit cynical about our condition, direction and leaders. When we are helpless in the economic winds, when our mindfulness doesn’t change anything, when we are lied to constantly and our neighbors lap it up, perhaps it’s no wonder that we have taken to highly cynical main characters and unreliable narrators.
At least those […]
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This month I’m departing from my usual craft advice to share something from the other side of my work as a literary agent, the business of publishing. It starts with a sad story.
The other day a writer pal phoned me. He told me that a third writer whom we both know was upset. An unscrupulous publisher had stolen a story idea of hers, given it to another writer, and now there was a Big Five contract and a movie deal.
I was sympathetic but skeptical. Ideas as such are not subject to copyright protection. Nevertheless, I phoned the Aggrieved Writer (we’ll call her “AW”) and got the full story. First, AW is a published author of a dozen or so books. She was formerly repped by a Big Agency, is repped again by another agent, but the situation in question happened between agents.
For income, AW had been copy-editing for an indie publisher—himself also a former client of the Big Agency. (We’ll call him “TIP”, The Independent Publisher.) TIP suggested that AW write something for him that he could publish. AW mentioned a cute suspense idea she had. Then—the story really starts here—TIP wrote a 10K word outline and AW wrote 30K words of a manuscript.
However, things were not working out financially, so AW discontinued working on the manuscript. AW assumed that the idea and the words which she had written belonged to her. She told me that was the deal.
“Deal? What deal?” I asked. “Was there a contract? Verbal? Written?”
There was a written contract. As we spoke, AW e-mailed the contract to me. I opened it and immediately recognized the type of contract it was. My heart sank. Work-for-Hire. (Shorthanded in the industry as “WFH” or sometimes nowadays styled as “IP” deals, for “intellectual property”.)
WFH
In case you don’t know, WFH is a designation under the copyright law which allows for copyright to be held not by an individual author but by an entity, when the writer is contributing to a collective work. There are nine types of work which can be designated WFH under the copyright law:
Absent from that list are works of fiction. Yes, you read that right. Fiction cannot, under the law, be a WFH. So how are Star Trek and Star Wars novels WFH? How is that allowed? It’s not, but readers want to read, and writers want to write, and publishers want to publish, fiction which is based upon characters and story worlds which have been developed and are, practically-speaking, owned by others. Thus, commissioning tie-in novels as WFH is a longstanding industry practice.
However, there’s a lot you need to know. Take it from this agent.
As far as I know, fiction as WFH has never been tested in the court system. (Attorneys, correct me if I’m wrong.) If it were, I believe that copyright would belong to the author, not an entity, because novels, for instance, are too singly authored to be “collective” works. But hold on, Hollywood attorneys figured that out long ago and so the language of WFH agreements […]
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Problem: you’ve got someone or something to write about, but you’ve got no plot. Perhaps you’re not that kind of writer. Perhaps you dislike plot templates. Perhaps the tricks and tropes of genre fiction turn you off. What will keep your readers reading, you might hope, is the magnetism of your prose and the inherent fascination of your subject…except…
…except, well, there is that sinking feeling that readers may not actually be lit up by the same things that light you up. They might not relate. They may lose interest. They might want things to happen in your novel, more than you know how to devise. Which brings you back to the basic problem: no plot.
So, what do you do when there is no overt problem for your protagonist to solve? What if there is no dead body, dragon or danger to avert? What if what interests you is a multi-faceted human being? What if it is relationships, the human heart…heck, the human condition that you want to write about? Isn’t plumbing the depths of people as important to write about as saving the world?
There are many approaches to non-plot driven storytelling, the kind of novels that center around not events but people, what in editorial parlance is generalized as “character driven” fiction. What human beings go through is interesting…or rather, unhelpfully, interesting to you but not necessarily interesting to readers.
If you think about it, readers have plenty of their own things going on. They have families, hurts to heal, secrets to keep, situations which are deeply felt. Readers undergo the full range of human misery and joy. Grief. Loneliness. Longing. Desire. On and on. Readers have their own dramas underway, so why do they need your story?
They don’t. That is, until they do. What is it that causes readers to value a story about someone who could be anyone? Someone regular but whose experience, in your mind, but not necessarily theirs, requires exploration and is special enough to merit in-depth treatment?
Drive
My daughter just started college. One weekend this past summer, I took her on a father-daughter bonding trip to the Six Flags amusement park in California. She’s a thrill seeker and so we rode roller coasters, or rather she did. I bailed on most of them. Luckily after a day of hot California sunshine, she was done. The next day I drove her down Rodeo Drive and through West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the canyons, Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
I pointed out the headquarters of Paradigm talent management on Wilshire, with whom we sometime co-agent, but she wasn’t interested in that. She wanted to see the big houses and enjoy the car I had rented, a luxury-loaded Mercedes. (There was an option for Alfa Romeo, but sadly she’d never heard of that brand.) She wanted me to put the car through its paces and so on an evening drive out to Ventura Beach to see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, we hit an empty stretch of Route 126 and I floored it.
Say this for Mercedes: It’s a helluva car. It flattened us back in our seats as it shot down the highway, flexing its muscles, sprinting for the gold or possibly for its life. It was, as they […]
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Have you ever been reading a novel and asked yourself, “Why should I care?” Have you ever set a novel aside because the answer is “I don’t”?
If you have, then you have experienced a common reader feeling—and a common writing shortcoming. Even novels with sparkling prose, a strong narrative voice, a clever premise, all the goodies, can leave us feeling “meh”. We just…don’t…care.
That can even be true when the characters that we meet are sympathetic, heroic, witty or in any other way attractive. Their troubles alone won’t do it. The effect of a hook opening line lasts only one second. Not even saving the cat will necessarily rescue our sense of indifference. Put the world in peril, put anything at stake, personal or public, and there’s a chance that we still…don’t…care.
Why is that? Is it because this is fiction, and just because a hero wants to save his brother or forgive his father, it isn’t real? It doesn’t matter? Is it because we don’t “connect”—as editors are wont to say in declines—because a given heroine’s life circumstances or problems aren’t the same as ours? Certainly, we read to our tastes. (See Kristin Hacken South’s post on that topic HERE.) However, we can also quickly come to care about, and keep reading about, protagonists whose worlds, lives and problems are vastly unlike ours. Scout. Celie. Frodo.
What then, really, is the difference? If it isn’t a hook, intrigue, voice, heroism, pathos, atmosphere, story questions or any of the other scores of engagement factors that we might pack into page one, then how is it that certain novels snag our hearts instantly, while others utterly fail to woo us onward, pull us deeper, sometimes not even to page two?
As usual, the answer lies in asking the right question. The question isn’t what makes us care, but who. The protagonist? That’s the odd thing. You’d think, but actually who makes us care is someone other than the main character.
To find out who that is, let’s look at the openings of a couple of recent novels.
Look Closely
To help us I’ve chosen novels of three of different types, with varying narrative perspectives and different degrees of narrative distance.
The first is Alix E Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January (2019), a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Set in the early 1900’s, the novel’s heroine—named January—is the ward of a wealthy collector of objects. On the day before she turns seventeen, she discovers a book which tells of Doors between worlds—Doors which may lead to her lost father and Doors which her guardian has been closing.
But all that lies ahead. The opening does not yet present us the plot problem or the stakes. Instead, it is a voice opening: January speaking directly to the reader…
When I was seven, I found a Door. There—look how tall and proud the word stands on the page now, the belly of that D like a black archway leading into white nothing. When you see that word, I imagine a little prickle of familiarity makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. You don’t know a thing about me; you can’t see me sitting […]
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There’s no getting around it. Times change. Authors worry about that. Specifically, what if one’s novel becomes dated? Details will do that. Bell bottoms. Flip phones. My Space. Will those someday require footnotes? More to the point, will one’s novel still be read in the future time when such footnotes will be necessary?
The fact is, we read and are affected by novels written in eras long before our own. Next year, The Great Gatsby will be one hundred years old. To Kill a Mockingbird will be 65. Pride and Prejudice will be 212! The authors of those books lived in and were shaped by their eras. All authors are. It’s inescapable. Your fiction will reflect your times, and in turn your sensibility and concerns. The era in which a given novel is written is locked in.
That’s true even when novels aren’t contemporaneous; when they are, let’s say, speculative or historical. For instance, read the science fiction of the Golden Age. Its vision of the future is particular to the dreams and problems of the people of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Historical fiction meanwhile can be revisionist, granting to people of former times attitudes which are more common in ours.
Every genre of story reflects, and evolves with, its times. Indeed, if they are to survive, genres must adapt. So, why worry about that? It’s pointless to fight who you are as an author, or to imagine that your upbringing, circumstances, beliefs or experiences won’t be detectable in your stories. Like it or not, you are a child of your times and that will be reflected in your novels and should be.
Then again, all authors hope that their novels will be read long after they are written; maybe even long after they are gone. So, given that you are inevitably a child of your times, how can you speak to readers in the future when it is certain that their times will be different than ours? If it’s not the times that make a novel timeless, then what is it?
Here’s the answer. What makes novels timeless is not what must inevitably change but that which never changes: people.
Not Just Anybody
That probably sounds like good news. Every novel has people in it. Your WIP has people, doesn’t it? If people are the answer, you’re all set, right?
Not so fast. If it were that simple every novel would be timeless, and obviously that’s not true. It must be, then, that there is something different about timeless characters. There is. Timeless characters aren’t just anybody. They are in one way or another, all of us.
What I mean by that is that timeless characters exemplify and elevate some aspect of what makes us human. They are heightened. Timeless characters have one notable quality. Or, they exemplify some way in which we wish to be. Or, they experience what we dream about or fear the most. Or, they are subject to social forces. Or, they pointedly illustrate the human condition.
Timeless characters stand in for us but are larger than we are. They take journeys that we cannot. Where we get stuck, they struggle and triumph. We live in a muddle; their stories achieve meaning. Timeless characters are deliberately shaped and supersized to make human qualities and […]
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A writer whom I know, Benjamin Brinks, is in a critique group. At a recent meeting, he ran into a problem. He’s working on a novel set in 1953. Its main character is a beautiful young woman who at first is a mystery, but whom we later learn aced the exam to join the Foreign Service. However, she is denied a diplomatic position because women (at the time) tended to leave for marriage.
In the scene his critique group was reading, his main character is given the bad news by a Foreign Service recruiting officer. Brinks’s heroine objects and counters that marriage is far in her future. She is, at that point, an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr and insists to the recruiting officer that she is not in college to obtain her MRS degree.
That stumped Brinks’s critique pals. They are not young, but neither are they as old as Brinks. They are also men. They asked, “What is the MRS degree? Is it an arts degree, or…?” Brinks realized that this—to him—obvious colloquial term needed an explanation.
(In case you too are stumped, a once common put down of women college students was that they sought higher education only to seek husbands, hence the “Mrs.” degree.)
A similar issue arose in the comments on a recent “Flog a Pro” post by Ray Rhamey here on WU. The first page of the post’s target novel, Carley Fortune’s This Summer Will be Different, finds its heroine dockside in picturesque Prince Edward Island. At a lobster shack a family is eating and a young girl is wearing “fake red pigtails and a straw hat”.
That threw me. Other commenters, though, obviously more familiar with Prince Edward Island, pointed out that fake red pigtails are for sale at tourist shops, a souvenir referencing Lucie Maud Montgomery’s Anne of the Green Gables. Ah! See, until then all that I knew about Prince Edward Island is that the best mussels come from there. Carley Fortune could have explained fake red pigtails for me but didn’t, and so I was, for a moment, kicked out of the story.
Which brings me to today’s issue: How do you know what in your novel requires explanation for clueless readers, and what doesn’t? And how can you fill those readers in smoothly, without hammering them with flat, factual, idiot-proof info dump?
What Needs to be Explained
This issue is faced not only by writers of speculative and historical fiction, but by anyone writing stories set in a particular world with special terminology, rules and customs. Circus. Courtroom. Prison. A particle accelerator lab. Colonial India. Magical realm. We can’t possibly know how things work in those arenas nor what every term means.
There’s a related issue: Your novel automatically presumes certain familiar knowledge on the part of your readers. For instance, if your story is set in the American suburbs, you don’t—for North American readers—need to explain what the PTA is, or why the Fourth of July is a holiday in the USA. But what if your novel is translated into Thai, Turkish or Arabic?
Those readers won’t necessarily share your bank of familiar knowledge. On the other hand, you obviously don’t want to write your story as if your readers are aliens from another planet:
The humanoid designated “Joe […]
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Writing fiction requires imagination. So does reading fiction. But what kinds? Are both writing and reading imagination the same? Let’s take a closer look.
Daydreaming is passive imagination, thought clouds drifting by. Solving math problems uses cognitive imagination. Designing a table to be constructed in your garage woodshop, or mentally planning the route you will drive to a football game, involves practical imagination. Picking your wedding colors engages esthetic imagination. Rearranging your closet to put your clothes into a new pattern is the use of active imagination.
Writing fiction is a heavy exercise of creative imagination, the forming of new concepts and imagery. Readers, meanwhile, employ receptive imagination, which allows them to form mental pictures out of what is, at first, only text.
Writers. Readers. In creating and in reading stories, the types of imagination used are similar but somewhat different. This is important. It has implications for the writing process. Some of what you write will stimulate readers’ imaginations. Other things that you write will not.
To sort out one thing from the other, we first have to go deeper down the rabbit hole of how imagination works as a process in the brain.
Down the Rabbit Hole
The human brain has twelve “regions of interest”, areas of processing. The right brain is vision related. The limbic system stores images, emotions, smells and behavior. It’s also the repository of long-term memory. Perception and imagination share the same neural mechanisms which allow us to “see” the sunset, “smell” the salt air, “hear” the waves.
Story imagination is only possible, then, because of data stored in the brain: memory, thoughts and even self-awareness. Everything that you’ve seen, seek, want, been through…all that makes you who you are, is the stored data that makes imagination possible. You draw on this data to write. Readers draw on this data to imagine your story.
Pause on that. Your own stored data goes into what you write. Literally, you write what you know. However, readers are drawing on their own separate bank of stored data, which is not exactly the same as yours. Thus, you can only stimulate the reader’s imagination when the reader has something similar or analogous in the storage bank.
There’s something else, the “salience network”. This means that what is perceived, processed, and stored is then prioritized. Repetitious and routine experiences like opening a jar of jam will not be prioritized. You’ll quickly forget that this morning you opened a jar of jam. Higher priority is given to what is new, novel, unexpected and emotional.
Now, if you are a member of my extended family, your brain will give higher priority to the experience of opening Christmas jams that are homemade and shipped annually by moi, Donald Maass; jams which are made with my special flavor combinations of blackberry-cinnamon, strawberry-anise, golden-plum-cardamom and peach-spice. Those jams have high impact: olfactory, taste and emotional. Yeah, I know. That sounds like bragging, but those jams are eagerly anticipated and highly appreciated by my family. In my family’s memories, the experience of opening those jams is prioritized. (Sorry, it’s a limited release and I don’t take orders.)
So, readers can imagine your story when there are 1) sensory cues, and 2) emotional cues, which connect to what they, readers, have experienced in the past. You […]
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I’m writing this post in a public library. It isn’t a research library, the awesome university kind where you might go to dig up fabulous story details. It’s a humble branch library. The patrons are either kids from the nearby high school or their moms. The adult fiction shelves are not deeply stocked with classic novels but rather with plastic-jacketed titles from recent decades, the kind of stuff that regular people want to read.
It’d say that 70% of the fiction titles on the shelves are mysteries and thrillers. We’ll come back to that.
First, a nod to my fellow WU contributor Ray Rhamey. His monthly Flog a Pro posts are popular, and with good reason: They highlight first pages and ask us to judge them, yes or no, would you turn to the second page or not? Brilliant.
Ray knows a lot about first pages. His website has a checklist of things that a first page should accomplish. There are two primary areas. With respect to character, something should go wrong or challenge the character; the character should desire something; the character should take action. With respect to setting, the reader should be oriented, what’s happening should be happening “now” not “then”, set up isn’t needed.
The final element is a story question. Got all that and you get a gold star. I like Ray’s checklist; it is a good, basic starting point for beginnings, which bring us right away into the story action and are how the vast majority of manuscripts begin. Ray is the first to say that his checklist is only a guideline and that’s wise. There are many ways to open a novel besides kickstarting the action. There are atmosphere openings and voice openings (sometimes called the letter to the reader) among a variety of other approaches.
Whatever the opening strategy, in my observation effective openings offer us the following:
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What is the purpose of fiction? There are reasons to read. There are reasons to write. Much ink has been spent on those things. I propose, however, that the various purposes so often discussed break down into the following categories of what fiction is intended to bring us:
For writers of fiction, it’s important to think about the purpose of one’s stories—which mostly are multifold—since awareness of one’s intent allows one to sharpen a story’s impact. When you know the impact that you’re seeking to have on readers, you can consciously (or via intuition) deploy the storyteller’s methods and tools.
I use entertainment in a broad sense, encompassing all story effects which engage and play upon two primary emotions: hope or fear. Mysteries puzzle us. Thrillers keep us in suspense. Horror takes us through our terrors. Those story types are fear-based. Romances stir in us anticipation. Women’s fiction often takes us to healing and reconciliation. Quests are a journey to a destination, both outside and in. Those story types are grounded in hope.
We can think of entertainment as novels largely grounded in their plots, meaning what happens: conflict or problem or need, actions taken, obstacles encountered and overcome, success or fix or resolution.
Meanwhile, observation is fiction’s ability to cause us to see. When we vividly visualize, recognize people and their behavior, experience made up moments as if they are real, then we are observing things as they are. Observation is a primary value in literary fiction, which uses imagery and evocative capture to create a heightened sense of reality. Such fiction seeks “authenticity” and “illumination”. It is often described on jacket flaps or in reviews as “closely observed” if not “lapidary”.
Self-examination is the effect of holding a mirror to ourselves. That is evident in not only the inner struggle and individual change that we call arc, but also the portrayal of personality types, social conflicts and forces at work in history and its various eras. In portrait novels and friendship tales we can feel that we are reading about ourselves. Historical novels, sprawling epics, generational sagas and fantasy sweep us into different worlds that also feel, somehow, like ours.
Empathy is an effect of fiction not only felt in reading, but proven by science. When we experience other cultures, times, orientations or identities, or simply go through what others go through, but which we have not, then we are lifted out of ourselves. We have the enlarging effect of breaking out of the prison of our own emotions, beliefs, biases and histories. We pass through the mirror, walk in different shoes, live in a different world. We become greater than ourselves. We join hands with everyone.
Wisdom, put simply, is acceptance. It is an earned peace, a letting go of strife, an awareness of the inevitability of change and the continuity of life. It is the end of self-blame, blame-shifting, and the beginning of plain being. When self-examination is done, there arrives self-awareness. The self is no longer wounded or lost, but whole and found. Nothing more is needed than that now and to be.
When novels go beyond fulfilling a protagonist’s responsibilities but, more, celebrate endurance, reward humility, demonstrate compassion, or enact goodness, then what we experience in reading them is the arrival […]
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What’s your state of mind? What condition are you in at the moment? Are you in a state of curiosity? Fear? Amusement? Apathy? Disbelief? Detachment? Celebration? Rage? Sorrow? Bewilderment? Confusion? Loneliness? Relaxation? Joy?
Or, perhaps, you are in a state of faint disgust at the knee-jerk outrage expressed by certain Hollywood luminaries at the “snub” of a certain director of a hit movie, having failed to be included in the Oscar shortlist category of Best Direction, presumably because the director is a woman and despite the fact that another woman was nominated, and that the nominations overall are more inclusive in more ways than ever before, and that the film in question was actually an aesthetic, political and world-building mess of a movie with feminist aphorisms for dialogue and a plastic portrayal of “patriarchy” which even so made the story’s villain the most understandable character (in song!) and which sought to reconcile the contradiction of a certain toy’s retro idea of femininity with modern feminism, a moral juggling act which the toy itself had already mastered? (Unless the film is enjoyed as a take-down comedy, in which case it did produce plenty of chuckles?)
Not, you understand, that that is my own state of mind at the moment. Just giving an example.
Seriously, the point is that at any given time each of us is in a mental state, whether conscious or unconscious, intentional or occurrent, bodily or belief-based, rational or irrational, or whatever. Our state of mind is subject to many factors. The point is that there are factors. We are influenced, pushed this way and that, stimulated to sink in despair or rally to a fight or any other state of mind that we might find ourselves in.
Our state of mind is the effect. What puts us into that state is the cause. Sounds obvious, but it’s worth thinking about because all fiction puts us in a state of mind. At least, we hope so. But which effect exactly, and what precisely causes that?
The Range of Effects
There are certain states of mind that we want fiction to put us in. When we read horror fiction, we expect to be in a state of dread. We want mysteries to put us in a state of puzzlement. We hope that romances will evoke desire. (Which shade of desire? That has evolved over time.) We want espionage to cause us to feel alone and terrified, conspiracy novels to make us paranoid, and war novels to stir us to sorrow and patriotism.
The effect of other novels is harder to pin down, or may be multifold, but some effect is present otherwise we wouldn’t read them and certainly wouldn’t remember them. All states of mind, however, fall under one of two main categories—hope or fear—and what keeps us reading is, simply put, another state which we can call anticipation.
Anticipation. That effect is caused by the question, what will happen? There are ancillaries to that question, such as what does that mean? Why did that happen? Who is behind it? It’s even possible to cause anticipation with confusion: What’s really going on? When we turn the first page to keep reading (thank you Ray Rhamey), we are feeling the effect—anticipation—in most cases produced by the cause […]
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