Posts by Donald Maass

The most difficult aspect of craft for participants at the workshops that I teach to master is immersive POV.  (Sometimes referred to as deep POV.)  It’s puzzling, since that narrative perspective is so much like how our human consciousness really is.

Briefly, immersive POV is an enhancement of close third-person POV, that durable perspective on the page which strictly reports only what a POV character would see and hear.  Immersive POV takes that idea a step further.  It reports on the page not only what the camera’s eye and microphone’s ear would get, but a character’s whole experience of what is happening.

The simplest way to understand the difference is that immersive POV adds to any story moment what a character is feeling or thinking about anything in the story environment.  The advantage of immersive POV is that it can capture in words non-material things, such as the mood of a crowd or the effect of a painting on a viewer.

What hangs writers up, I think, is that the content generated using immersive POV at first feels “extra” to the story.  I notice that in the way workshop participants talk about it.  They call immersive passages they write to prompts set by me “going inside”.  They split manuscript content into two categories, “outer” and “inner”.  A common workshop question is, how much “inner” is the right amount? 

That’s like asking how much chocolate is right in making a mug of hot chocolate?  The drink has a milk or water base, true, but why think of the chocolate as something that’s tasted separately?  It’s not.  Hot chocolate is an indivisible consumption experience.  Whether the ratio of chocolate is “right” or not is irrelevant.  There’s only hot chocolate.  (Okay, maybe with marshmallows floating on top but let’s not make this analogy overly complicated.)

The fear that’s felt by writers adopting immersive POV is that “inner” content will slow the story down.  It’s the stuff that critique partners say should be cut.  When inner is handled clumsily, that advice can be on the button.  Handled skillfully, though, and that scissoring advice is forgotten.  Inner stuff can be the best stuff on the page.  However, I suspect that there’s a deeper anxiety at work, one that I think of as the dilemma of narrative distance.

There are two ways to convey the substance of a story: to float apart from it or to dive into the deep end.  There are pluses and minuses to each approach.  Each gives readers a different reading experience.  Standing apart from the story means showing what’s happening to readers, letting readers see the story in their mind’s eyes and feel the story’s effect for themselves.

Conveying characters’ emotional and cognitive involvement in what’s happening, on the other hand, is intimate.  It brings readers right inside the mind and heart of someone else, bringing alive another person’s authentic self and enriching a story with meanings that readers might not have found on their own.

It’s a dilemma, then: Do you trust your readers to “get” the story or do you want them to lift them from themselves and immerse them in another’s consciousness?  In one approach, readers are sure to see the story vividly.  In the other approach, readers are certain to understand what characters […]

Last month, we took a preliminary look at a type of story that shouldn’t work but which, handled properly, does work: episodic novels.  Lacking an overt central conflict or problem, wandering around without any apparent plan through a grab bag of experiences, such novels ought to come across as mere chronicles; sophomoric swaggers around town held together—if at all—only by their own sense of self-importance.  In other words, junk.

However, that’s not necessarily the case.  Unlikely-to-succeed episodic novels can work well, but when they do there are elements, hard to discern at first, which sew up their patchwork jumble of episodes, lending them an underlying unity that keeps us reading.  First among those elements, we discovered, are openings which promise us adventure, assure us that the tale ahead has significance, and that there is a steady hand steering the journey we’re embarking upon.

What, then, about the hundreds of pages that follow?  As we wander from episode to episode, what keeps us going and gives us a sense that the seemingly random walk that we’re taking has a point and which in the end will add up to something greater than the sum of its parts?  Let’s take a look at a few of those elements and see out how they might enhance any novel.

Going Out of Bounds

A promise of adventure is wonderful and awakens the child inside us.  Who doesn’t want to explore, see neat things, taste a bit of danger and have a whole lot of fun?  Count me in!  You too, I’m pretty sure.  However, a promise is one thing and following through is another.  To work, an episodic novel must first of all fulfill the promise it has made to us.

How?  First of all, through the pluck and high spirits of a protagonist.  Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (2011) is the story of Michael, an eleven-year-old boy making a sea voyage, unaccompanied, aboard the ship Oronsay from Ceylon to England in the early 1950’s.  Seated at mealtimes at the “cat’s table”, the one farthest from the captain’s, Michael could be forgiven for keeping his head down, studying algebra to get ready for the new school he will attend, and simply surviving to arrive safely.  But, heck, what fun would that be?

Michael has aboard two friends more-or-less his age: troublemaker Cassius and sickly Romadhin.  For the boys, the ship is a floating castle of wonders and, unsupervised, they resolve to have a blast and experience as much as they can.  Among other impish activities, the three friends take to arising very early and sneaking up to the first-class deck, there to swim in the first class pool and steal food from the first class breakfast buffet, which they then surreptitiously consume under the canvas cover of a lifeboat.  And it’s still early in the day!

It was not even eight o’clock when we crossed the border from First Class back to Tourist Class. We pretended to stagger with the roll of the ship.  I had by now come to love the slow waltz of our vessel from side to side.  And the fact that I was on my own, save for the distant Flavia Prins and Emily, was itself an adventure.  I had no family responsibilities.  I could go […]

Some of the most important moments in our lives could not have been captured on video.  They happened inside.  Those moments define us even more, perhaps, than life’s observable milestones: graduations, marriages, births, trophies, moving, funerals.

I’m talking about the moments that define who we are and whom we are becoming: realizations, revelations, decisions, turning points.  When we relish our triumphs or recognize our follies we, for a moment, pin ourselves to a cork board.  When for a split second we see ourselves objectively, as others must, our experience of our own being is stone solid.  We know at those moments exactly who we are.

When we affirm a conviction we become even more ourselves.  On the other hand, when we change our minds we become someone different.  The self is not static.  It’s dynamic, meaning changing.  Our inner shifts are steps in an journey without end: our search for meaning and purpose, our quest for ourselves.

Call it the human condition but whatever it is, we humans feel a strong need to capture, mark and name those critical moments in our experience.  We journal.  We think in questions and expect that there will be answers.  We hunt for words to express that for which there are no precise terms.

Moments of profound self-awareness are different for everyone, too.  That is as true for fictional characters as it is for our corporal selves.  To bring a character alive on the page, then, requires finding words to capture immaterial inner states.  When something big happens wholly inside, how do you get that across?

Approaches to the Invisible and Inchoate

Despite the difficulty, writers have for centuries found ways to pin down the wispy fog of self-realization.  That is especially evident when an effective story brings a character to what is often called the mirror moment, middle moment or dark moment.  It is not exactly the moment of all-is-lost—that’s a step late in a plot—but rather the time when a character is sunk in despair, hollow inside, lost in the dark with no lantern or map.

Rene Denfeld’s The Enchanted (2014) is a dreamy, magical novel set in a nowhere place in a nowhere time (although there are lightbulbs).  Denfeld’s protagonist is known only as “the lady”, who investigates prisoners on death row.  As the novel opens the lady visits a prisoner called York, who wants to die.  Finding the lady kind and non-judgmental, York opens up to her:

York talks and talks until his words sound like poetry even to him.  He tells her why he has volunteered to die.  “It isn’t just that it is torture,” he says, “being locked in a cage.  It’s never being allowed to touch anyone or go outside or breathe fresh air.  I’d like to feel the sun again just once.”

Her eyes show a sudden distance.  What he said is true, but it isn’t true enough.

“Okay.  I’m tired of being meaningless,” he admits.  “I’m done, okay?”

He talks about the confused mess inside of him.  He says everyone thinks sociopaths are super-smart criminals, but he is just a messed-up guy who doesn’t know why he does what he does.  Except there is like a switch in him, and when the switch flips, he cannot stop.

“If it made sense, I would tell you,” he […]

When we read stories, we fall into a semi-dream state in which people and events which are entirely made up become, to us, quite vivid.  Stories can have an impact on us greater than that of the events of our own lives.  We laugh.  We cry.  We boo.  We cheer.  We are roused, clobbered, affirmed, uplifted or inspired.  We are changed.  When we read, the real world fades away and the story world becomes real.

That effect of stories upon us is possible because of our cognitive capacity called imagination.  Commonly understood, imagination is the ability to visualize what doesn’t exist—at least not yet—and formulate new ideas.  We “see” what isn’t there.  We feel when there is no material reason to do so.  We think in ways that organize experience and lend understanding to our lives.

While the ability to visualize is not universal—see a condition called aphantasia—it is nevertheless how we mostly think that story happens in our heads.  Visualization seems to accurately describe our mental process in reading, so it must also be the foundation of our process in writing as well, right?  Well, not always.  Not exactly.

Actually, there are three primary modes in which a story is imagined.  Writers may engage at different times in all three but are primarily inclined more to one than another.  Each mode has strengths and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages, and that in turn means that manuscripts will shine in some ways but be shortchanged in others.

What, then, are the three ways in which stories are imagined by their authors?  And which is your dominant mode?

The Three Modes

The first is what we can call the Movie in the Mind.  That is when a story unspools continuously in imagination, one action flowing to the next and the next as if the story is a documentary camera that is never shut off.  Many authors describe “seeing” their stories like films, their characters progressing through their days, each day following the next in calendar order.

When writers report that “my characters tell me what they’re going to do”, they can be describing a form of visual imagining.  What is seen in the mind is as vivid as what is actually seen through the eyes.  The upside of this mode can be a heightened sense of reality to a story’s action.  The downside is that this mode can lead to sequential narration, a strict chronicling of characters’ time and activities, as when in beginning manuscripts chapters start with a character waking up in the morning and end with that character going to bed again at the conclusion of the day.

The second mode can be called Marker Moments, imagining fragments or episodes of high significance and emotional force.  In this mode what counts is what matters, meaning that there are certain high moments that define characters’ human experience or change it.  Everything in between in some way leads up to, explains, enhances, or follows the consequences and implications of those highly important moments. It’s like life.  We are shaped by, and define ourselves, not by our resumes but through our most emotional experiences.

When writers think, “I need to show that…” or “Readers need to see…” they are building the body of their manuscripts toward, or sometimes away from, the […]

Which would you rather: 1) Write a novel with a world-changing theme, or 2) Write a novel that captures the exquisite pain and beauty of life?

There are other choices, needless to say, such as write a novel that entertains, reaches best seller lists, earns a ton of money, or is made into a movie directed by Ron Howard.  (Hey, his development team is looking.)  My topic today, though, is not fiction’s commercial appeal but rather it’s literary significance: that is, what makes a novel important, if not memorable, if not a story for the ages.

Theme is frequently mentioned but mostly vaguely understood.  It’s a point.  A lesson.  An instruction, in a way, for what’s wrong, how to fix that, or how we should live better.  A novel’s theme points out something we must heed about ourselves and our world.  Genre fiction, for instance, has overriding messages.  Justice will be done (mysteries).  Love conquers all (romance).  One person can make a difference (thrillers, epic fantasy).  Beware the future (science fiction).  Be kind (women’s fiction).  I’m grossly simplifying and ignoring secondary themes in specific novels, but you get—ahem—my point.

Another type of novel, though, aims differently.  It wants less to tell us what to do, and more to tell us what and how we are.  Its purpose is not to warn or change us, but instead to capture our human existence as it is.  Novels like that are not prescriptive but descriptive.  They tell us not how to change, but that we don’t need to.  We’re beautiful the way we are.  Our world is just the way that it is, and ain’t that grand?

Realistic literary fiction is like that.  So are coming-of-age novels, sagas and historical fiction.  Again, that’s simplistic but, I think, captures a certain literary reality.  The difference between those two intents is the difference between being told something and sharing something.  It’s the difference between heightening human experience or accurately rendering the human condition.

One argues and provokes.  The other mirrors and reassures.  One judges.  The other does not.  One is purposeful.  The other is profound.  One issues alerts.  The other adds meaning.  One pushes hope or fear.  The other reminds us to accept pain and embrace joy.  One warns or uplifts.  The other reassures or laments.

Some stories present events which, for the most part, can’t really happen; other stories portray things exactly the way they do happen.  But there’s a paradox.  Stories that capture ordinary life have the greatest power when their people and events in them are heightened or extreme.  Stories that deal in events extraordinary or fantastic, by contrast, become the most real to us when the people in them are relatable; meaning in some way exactly like us.

Theme versus meaning.  Naturally, you are thinking can’t a novel do both?  Of course.  There are ways to enact either intention, or both.  I have a few suggestions.

Practical Theme, Practical Meaning

Here are some prompts aimed at making your WIP more purposeful and/or more profound, the way life ought to be or the way life actually is:

It’s been a passive autumn—in our discussion of fiction craft, I mean.  It started with Kelsey Allagood’s WU post on September 18th , an excellent and provocative challenge to examine protagonists who are—as Kelsey put it—“not in the driver’s seat”.  I took up the challenge to suggest that the secret of passive protagonists is not their suffering but their seeking.

So far so good but, as several commenters said, there remains the problem of constructing a story middle when a protagonist is, technically speaking, “passive”; which is to say, saddled with a backstory wound or burden, is a victim of fate, is helpless or powerless, has no means to move forward or affect their situations (what we call agency), or when a protagonist’s program is limited to avoidance or delay.  Simply put, how do you make a middle out of a character who is stuck?

Let’s start with this: to fill a middle with wallowing is for the most part ineffective.  There’s not much reader appeal in that, nor much drama.  Hand-wringing, agony, anguish, uncertainty, unfulfilled longing, sadness, guilt, helpless fury, oppression, imprisonment, and victimization are human experiences, no question, but they lead only in one direction, down.  Realistic those states may be but they work against the one essential element that makes a story a story: change.

Writers who successfully construct a middle without movement frequently work that magic trick with misdirection.  They typically fall back on things like the inherent fascination of unusual characters or the power of dazzling writing to carry readers through.  Michael Ondaatje is good at that.  See Warlight (2018) or The English Patient (1992) for examples.

Consider also the middle inactivity in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), which conjures a futuristic nightmare to elevate suffering as a tragic condition, or On Chesil Beach (2007) which suggests that an empty life and a broken marriage can finally become fulfilling through the act of doing nothing.  In those novels, McEwan’s point and purpose is to celebrate being stuck.  They are existential examinations, ennobling the humble and asserting that endurance is a high virtue and, really, the only way through inevitable human suffering.

McEwan’s stories are strong—as his many awards and film adaptations attest—but not every novel wants to travel that arduous road.  (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, 2006, is one that does.)  Most novels are not wholly fatalistic.  Most are at root optimistic.  Most novels want to convey that healing, redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness or finding a measure of happiness are possible, even if—or maybe especially if—those outcomes arrive in unexpected ways.  Which circles us back to the problem of the middle.

Entertaining with unusual characters can be fun but that ultimately that business becomes only an interlude.  Quiet suffering rendered in dazzling prose might be sufficient for the small minority of readers who want only that in a novel, okay, but the magic tricks of truly passive middles inevitably must either hit a dead end, fall apart or finally give way to the necessity of reaching an ending.  Something’s got to give.

The dramatic events that bring about change may come in a last act rush—it’s not uncommon to find that in novels with passive protagonists—but sooner or later they must come.  Sooner or later there must be change.  The most effective passive […]