 
Francis W. Porretto

### The Storyteller's Art:

How not to bore your reader to sleep, tears, or homicide

Copyright (C) 2015 by Francis W. Porretto

Cover art by Donna Casey (http://DigitalDonna.Com)

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==<O>==
Table Of Contents

Foreword

1. Say Something!

2. Felicity Of Style

3. Meditations on Character

4. Confinement, Tension, and Trial

5. Ideas

6. Scene Construction

7. Character Development: Two Approaches

8. Passion And Obsession

9. The Sin Of Over-Management

10. Pacing And Tone

11. The Telling Detail

12. Devices

13. Motifs

14. Wordings

15. The Animal Force

16. Confounding The Archetypes

17. Give Them What They Want!

18. Cliffhangers

19. Targets

20. Beginnings

21. Using Others' Stories

22. "Your Future"

23. Adventures In Speculation

24. Workshops And Similar Torments

25. In Conclusion

About The Author

Foreword: The Curmudgeon Speaks!

[FWP: A few words of explanation are in order before you proceed. The essays below were written by my "alter ego," the Curmudgeon Emeritus. Translated from the Obscure, a "curmudgeon emeritus" is "an ornery old coot who's earned the privilege." The old boy seems to think he's the second coming of W. Somerset Maugham. There's no point arguing with someone that pigheaded; at any rate, I gave up long ago. With that in mind, please forgive me for allowing his essays to share my byline. I'll try to atone later.]

Your Curmudgeon once knew a man who believed that "everyone has at least one book in him." It's possible he was correct...whether or not that's a good thing.

The problem is, not everyone knows how to tell a decent story.

The demise of the oral tradition, both in fiction and in social history, is part of that. Time was, everyone was expected to be able to tell a story properly. Of course, that included stories composed by others; not everyone can compose an original story.

Hot Flash to the Dubious: Yes, storytelling is a necessary skill. If you're in business at any level, whether as an office drone or a tradesman, you need to be able to tell a story -- granted, a non-fiction one, but a story nonetheless. That ability is critical to effective communication with your customer: i.e., whoever pays your salary or your invoices. Not because you need to deceive him, but because the correct sequencing of events, the correct delineation of causation, and the correct placement of emphasis, is vital to conveying a message of any sort. A plumber needs it quite as much as a CEO.

This little book is a compendium of essays on -- drumroll, please -- the principles of effective storytelling. They address fictional stories specifically, but the principles that apply there are portable to any other sort of narrative. They aren't many, and they're by no means obscure. But they are imperative. Rigorous adherence to them will, at the very least, preserve your reputation among your friends and companions. At best, they'll make you into the next Stephen King.

What's that you say? You don't want to be the next Stephen King? You'd rather be the next E. Annie Proulx or Dom DeLillo? Sorry, then this book is not for you.

Sorrier still, no refunds!

==<O>==
1. Say Something!

As we all know, stories come in many lengths. A story may be as short as a few dozen words, or as long as Robert Jordan's multi-million-word The Wheel Of Time series. But many persons, and no few would-be storytellers, never ponder what it is that dictates the length of a particular story.

The subject is at some remove from fundamental considerations. The major elements of any story are:

  * theme,

  * plot,

  * characterization,

  * and style;

Length is not among them. Which of these, if any, should dictate the appropriate length at which to tell some particular story?

Many would nominate plot. After all, a long plot, with lots of separate skeins and events, will necessarily take a lot of prose to relate, won't it? It surely will -- but is the plot the story? If it is, ought it to be?

If you've never encountered a novel that seemed unbearably long, despite its profusion of related events, you're a fortunate soul. Your Curmudgeon could rattle off two dozen titles without pausing for breath, at the conclusion of each of which he ardently wanted to know whom he could sue for a refund of the time he'd wasted.

Plot is a major element of all fiction, but it's not as fundamental, and therefore not as determinative, as theme. Indeed, plot's whole point is to express or illuminate the story's theme. If the plot, which one would accurately assess as the "proximate cause" of the story's length, overruns what's required to express the theme, the story will be perceived as too long and possibly heavy handed as well. If the plot is insufficient to express the theme, the story will be perceived as either too short or, worse, themeless.

Virtually everyone understands plot, characterization, and style, both as mechanical matters and as necessities without which one cannot write fiction. But a depressing number of writers have no grasp of theme. Indeed, themelessness and thematic incoherence are probably the most common failings in the fiction of our time.

#

It's often been said, and in university classrooms at that, that what one likes or dislikes about a particular storyteller is his style \-- that is, the particular way in which he chooses to string words, sentences, and paragraphs together, with specific attention to his use of literary devices, descriptive images, and wordplay. This sentiment is in keeping with the prevailing trends in American "literary" fiction, which tends to emphasize style so greatly that plot, characterization, and theme are all but effaced from the scene. It's your Curmudgeon's firm opinion -- and no, it's not a humble one; it's actually rather arrogant, but it's quite firm for all of that -- that this is the reason most readers cannot abide "literary" fiction. For a rather remarkable extended exegesis upon this subject, please refer to B. R. Myers's now-famous essay "A Reader's Manifesto."

On the basis of a nearly fifty-year acquaintance with the written word \-- in all its forms but, most apposite to this discussion, especially with fiction -- your Curmudgeon has rejected the "style uber alles" gospel with extreme prejudice. Style, divorced from theme, is as pointless as prestidigitation. It's pure packaging, devoid of content. Its proper place is to tell a story that has a worthwhile theme. When fetishized, it deprives the reader of his fundamental reason for reading: to acquire new knowledge about life, or a new perspective on it, by viewing it through the eyes of a perceptive and articulate observer.

But why, then, does a reader become especially fond of some writer or group of writers? Style is their most obvious distinguishing quality, is it not? If it's not their style that holds his affection, what could it be?

Your Curmudgeon proposes: sensibility.

Yes, writers have very different styles. Some are austere and distant, formalists of classical discipline who regard a dangling preposition as something up with which one should never put. Others strive for a Hemingwayesque simplicity, They write short, single-clause sentences. Those sentences contain nothing but nouns and verbs. They leave all else to the reader's imagination. Still others are Faulknerian in the luxuriance of their prose, every sentence a labyrinthine maze of baroque elaboration decorated with as many descriptive and evocative elements as one can digest before running out of breath. But this is packaging for a story and, beneath the story, supporting it with relevance and timeliness, its theme.

A writer's sensibility is composed of the sorts of themes he likes to explore, and the angle from which he approaches them. It partakes greatly of his moral vision. Indeed, it cannot be separated from his grasp on the moral order of the universe...whether or not he believes there is one.

Gentle Reader, have you ever encountered a writer whose command of the language is superb and precise, but whose stories proclaim ideas that you simply can't abide? Have you ever encountered a writer whose works, despite serious shortcomings of style, throb so powerfully with truth that you can't imagine ever forgoing them? If so, you're peering down the barrel of auctorial sensibility. You're staring the bullet of theme right in the face. It's the ultimate weapon in the battle for the reader's time, money, and attention.

#

Needless to say, a writer's sensibility can only interlock with the affections of readers who share his fundamental moral views. That's why your Curmudgeon can't abide John Irving, despite his stylistic gifts, and why he owns every mark on parchment Robert B. Parker, no stylist as the term is generally understood, has ever produced. Ardent admirers of John Irving resonate to his moral and political views; they see the world as he sees it, which gives his stories the ring of truth and significance to them. Few of them would have any patience for Parker's quite different vision.

A writer's sensibility, which compounds his moral views and his sense of human character into themes that can be fictionally explored, is near to unalterable. Probably no writer of note exemplifies this better than the late Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein wrote for more than fifty years. In surveying the sweep of his works, one can see a dramatic evolution in his style, and comparably large changes in his attitude toward plot. But his underlying sensibility -- his penchant for writing stories about men compelled to be competent and independent in the face of severe challenges -- never changed. His fiction was always an expression of his innermost convictions about the nature of Man and the obligations incumbent upon manhood. Much the same could be said about Jack Vance.

Many a writer discovers his sensibility by trying to violate it. Ayn Rand wrote a dramatization of this titled "The Simplest Thing In The World," whose protagonist, desperate to break into the world of commercial fiction, strains without success to write a story whose theme cross-cuts his own moral code.

Your Curmudgeon has his own sensibility, of course; it should be quite evident from his stories. It's a sensibility that's out of step with what's currently commercially favored, but what of that? To try to set this "ill-favoured thing, but mine own" aside in favor of something that would sell would nullify whatever piddling value your Curmudgeon can bring to a story. It would eventuate in themelessness \-- the inability to say anything worth reading -- or thematic incoherence \-- a hard-driven clash between the actions of the story's characters and the writer's convictions about the nature and motivations of Man. It would be a waste of perfectly good words.

#

There are a lot of aspiring writers in the world. There's a lot of advice being offered to aspiring writers, often at high prices and mostly by people who couldn't produce a decent shopping list. Though there are no magic formulae by which to achieve publishability and commercial renown, there are definitely fatal errors by which one can lose one's writerly self-respect, a commodity for the loss of which no degree of extrinsic success will compensate. The biggest and most seductive of the fatal errors is the betrayal of one's sensibility.

When you write, say something. Always have a conscious theme. Make it something that's critically important: to you, and hopefully to the larger world. That will energize you and call forth your passions in service to your prose. Then make sure your story's characters act in such a fashion that the story's events, and above all its ending, are foreordained, and express your theme with all the clarity and grace you can muster.

If you already know your sensibility, stay true to it. If you don't -- if this entire discussion has appeared to you like water to a fish -- you can only discover your sensibility, and bring it to its peak of expressive power, by choosing your themes according to your passion for them, and then by writing from the heart. When you've done that for a while, return to this essay. Your Curmudgeon guarantees you an "of course!" experience.

==<O>==
2. Felicity of Style

As Robert A. Heinlein once said, you can't make an enemy by telling a mother her baby is beautiful. And so, with the following E-mail, reader Linda has placed herself at the top of your Curmudgeon's Christmas list:

I greatly enjoy your op-eds, and always look forward to new ones, but your fiction blows me away. But something puzzles me. When you write about fiction writing, which I hope you'll do more of, you always seem to be running down style as a factor in good fiction. Yet you have one of the most unique styles I've come across in all my years (don't ask how many) of reading. What gives?

Gentle Reader, that was enough to light up your Curmudgeon's day, as you can imagine. He fancies himself a fair wordsmith, but the above is...well, let's just say he feels unworthy. Still, it's stimulus enough to provide the topic for this morning, apart from anything your Curmudgeon might read later in that bete noire of his life, whose crossword puzzle his Significant Other insists she cannot live without: the Sunday New York Times.

#

Semi-obscure French writer and naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon once said that "The style is the man himself." Even if we discount his nationality, we must suspect that Le Comte spoke out of a raw place in his writer's soul, where he hid his frustration at having little to say, and no gift for character or plot. Certainly many of those who've parroted him since have been thus moved. But the notion took hold, and has greatly influenced the evaluation of fiction in our day.

Possibly no other idea, however high-flown, would have done an equal degree of damage to stylistic grace. For consider the implications: if the style is the man, then the man (by the symmetric property of the equivalence relation "is") is the style. Therefore, to be more than what one currently is requires elaborations and refinements of one's style, without regard for substance.

But style is packaging. Though ideas require packaging -- no story or theme can be conveyed in a completely style-free fashion -- style itself has no essence to which one can recur for knowledge, wisdom, or spiritual sustenance. Therefore, a monomaniacal concentration on style robs the writer of the chief instrument by which to imbue his works with enduring value. It impels him to slough content and worship form.

One of the greatest geniuses ever to set pen to paper, James Joyce, fell into this quagmire after the completion of his novel Ulysses. Joyce's earlier writing was limpid of style and rich in thematic value. His novella "The Dead" may be the finest work of fiction ever set down in English. But for reasons at which we can only guess, he became bored with his fund of themes and the more or less conventional Dublin backdrop against which he painted them. With Ulysses, he began a journey away from his earlier lucidity and into the twilight of the subconscious. Thence, his journey continued into the darkness of sleep and dreams, whose terminus he reached in the tragically unreadable Finnegan's Wake.

Joyce, having used up his fund of themes and stories, turned to ambiguities of style in Ulysses and thence to complete opacity in Finnegan's Wake because that was all that was left to him. Clever seinings of the latter for its "deeper meanings" are uniform in their risibility. The book's incoherence, often disdaining even to use real words, guarantees that any "interpretation" offered for it will reflect the premises and beliefs of the interpreter, and not some deeply buried message from Joyce. When he wrote Finnegan's Wake, Joyce had nothing else to offer. So was a mighty intellect betrayed by its own power.

#

Your Curmudgeon's first conviction about style is that it must remain subservient to the telling of the story.

"Aha!" you exclaim. "He leads off with a platitude and expects us to think him profound!" No doubt it might seem so. But there's a partially defined term in the statement that ought to receive its due: story. Many would say that the story is the "plot": the sequence of events in which the story's characters are involved. In point of fact, that's the story's plot line; plot is more complex. Still: if a story is not the sequence of events it depicts, or is something more than that, then what is it?

The starting point is the distinction, once emphasized in formal studies of literature, between "plot line" and "plot." If one simply writes out a time line of a story, with names, events, places, and dates, one has constructed its plot line. A simple plot line would read as follows:

The king died, and then the queen died.

Note what's missing from the above: causality. The two events are not given any relation to one another except sequence. The transformation from plot line to plot begins with the injection of causal connections:

The king died, and then the queen died of grief.

The causal strokes delineate what the writer is really interested in writing about. Kings die; queens die; stockbrokers, beat cops and novelists die; moreover, some of these persons are found freshly dead every day. There's no substance to the matter unless we delve into why.

"Why" may be the most potent word in any language. ("If" is the most frustrating, "but" the most irritating, and "should" the funniest.) When we speak of the reasons for things, we are exercising humanity's defining difference: our ability to assemble time sequences into causal relations. When we get them wrong, we sow the seeds for new crops of tragedy. When we get them right -- when we penetrate to the true and reliable reasons why A in the vicinity of B causes C -- we grow as individuals and acquire something of value to convey to others of our kind.

The embryonic plot above could be refined in several directions. The queen's grief caused her death...but why did she grieve? For the loss of her beloved husband? Over her imminent descent into a dowager's irrelevance? Or because the next king was sure to abuse her or her people? The deeper, wider, and more coherent the causal explorations become, the more story the storyteller has to tell.

Yes: Your Curmudgeon is saying that "story" lives in the causal interstices of plot. Those causal representations are the writer's model of human motivation. He sees certain categories of people as moved by certain influences in specific ways; the story's characters are intended to symbolize those categories, and their decisions and actions present a template according to which, in the writer's opinion, all or most of the people in those categories would act. Abstracted from the specifics of the story, its embedded causal model and the conclusions one may draw from it are the writer's message, or theme.

(A side note: One cannot layer too much causality onto a plot line as simple as "The king died, and then the queen died." A complex depiction of human motivations and interrelations will require more events, structured more elaborately, than a simple one. But this is a topic best left for another screed.)

#

Style must be subservient to story because the story is the point of the affair. The style must serve the story's needs for pacing, emphasis of decision points, and clarity of resolution. Thus, a story such as "The Dead," which follows writer Gabriel Conroy through an awkward formal dinner with his extended family, probing the distance that's grown between him and them, while depicting the more painful rift that had grown between him and his wife in gentle dabs of detail, needed to be plainly told. The setting had to be laid out simply. The third-person narrator had to relay the actions and statements of the characters without embroidery. Joyce's discipline in this stunning piece was the hallmark of a master -- and the more impressive because even before Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, he had exhibited a penchant for high-flown articulation and a willingness to carve verbal arabesques to match and better the best.

By contrast, there are writers who seem determined not to tell a story in your Curmudgeon's sense. Instead, they revel in ambiguity. They bewilder the reader with alternate explanations of crucial decisions and events. They withhold critical information that would permit the reader to know the whys of the affair. Sometimes they deliberately introduce "red herring" characters to muddy the waters of implication and motive. The point is to deny the reader a clear causal depiction, leaving him on his own to decide "what it all means."

Science fiction writer Gene Wolfe rose to prominence on the strength of such a story: "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus." The bones of the tale are plain: a young first-person narrator character who's never called anything but Number Five is being experimented on to his detriment by his father, who is determined to know why his clan does not rise in power and prestige. The boy waxes in resentment and determines to murder his father, as his father had done in his turn. The sole connecting link offered for this chain of brutality and tragedy is that the boy is a clone of his father, as his father was of his grandfather.

The story is littered with characters of questionable relevance: a half-brother, a robot, a whore, a visiting xenoanthropologist, and a personality simulator who functions as the narrator's tutor. The focus is never squarely on what Wolfe would have us take as the central point of his tale: how monomania can lead one to work against the very things he claims to desire. It meanders murkily through several thousand words, all in a most involute style, allowing the ambiguities to mount all the way to the end and never resolving them. It's some measure of Wolfe's talents that he keeps the reader going through such deep, dark thickets...but the story concludes unsatisfyingly all the same.

To be as fair as possible, "The Fifth Head Of Cerberus" has some color. There were reasons to read it and enjoy it, and apparently many people did, as it was the winner of several awards, some of them awarded according to a popular vote. But it wasn't coherent, it offered no message or theme, and so it failed as a story.

It is likely that, given that he was determined to emphasize the ambiguities in his story, Wolfe could not possibly have told it in a straightforward fashion. But your Curmudgeon must also note that the obvious and considerable effort Wolfe put into stylistic flights did not create a core of causal substance where none had existed before.

#

Finally for today, your Curmudgeon will comment briefly on the linkages among style, tone, and setting.

Master suspense writer Lawrence Block, in his writers'-advice book Telling Lies For Fun And Profit, presents the following example of the use of an arch tone to specify a setting:

The elevator, swift and silent as a garrote, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard's penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster-white. They could have been chose to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us. [From the opening of Block's story "This Crazy Business Of Ours."]

The description is entirely of Colliard, an elderly professional hit man making the acquaintance of a young one, but the tone is highly effective for coloring, in the reader's mind, the surrounding physical environment. Without saying a word about it, Block leads us to see it as plush, expensive, and faintly antique. Simultaneously, he informs us, sotto voce, that the story will concern grim deeds done in casual defiance of the norms of society, norms the principal characters have decided not to take too seriously.

Block's command of the arch, faintly mocking style shown above allows him to dispense with perhaps two hundred words of description, while simultaneously providing the reader with a wealth of indicators about the characters' stations in life and the attitude of the narrator toward the events to follow. A better example of narrative economy would be hard to find -- and it was done by the adoption of a style far distant from the more plainspoken one for which Block is best known.

Careful, boys and girls: Lawrence Block is an expert. Try this at home if you like, but be sure to string a net first.

Most of us are plainspoken men, most of the time. Your Curmudgeon is a little off-axis in this regard; his speech and writing have an archaic bent, which some people find charming and others consider pretentious. But the most salient thing about a style is that it should come naturally. It's a tool in the writer's toolbelt, to be used to convey the stories he chooses to tell, but it should be a tool that's natural to his hand. It's not infinitely adjustable. The more he has to think about how to hold it and wield it, the more stilted and forced his prose will be.

One of the oldest maxims of the fiction world is that one should write about what one knows. This applies broadly: to situations, to physical settings, to varieties of people and systems of belief, and so forth. It also applies to style. In fact, a strong corollary of that maxim is that, if a writer's style seems inadequate to the material he wants to write about, he should probably be writing about something else.

Do not attempt gothic fiction if you can't bring yourself to deal in macabre metaphors about shadow-infested settings and intimations of doom looming in the gloom.

Do not attempt "advanced" romance if you can't deal with suggestive looks and fleeting but meaningful brushes of hands or feet, or write indirectly but evocatively about sexual desire.

Do not attempt fantasy if the depiction of suffering, honor, or the clash of good and evil makes you cringe with embarrassment.

Do not attempt science fiction if you're a technophobe incapable of bringing a sense of wonder to the description of an imagined device.

Do not attempt "high literature" -- at all.

Your Curmudgeon's style is mated to his limitations: his affinity for a somewhat archaic mode; his fascination with things unseen and things of the spirit; and his conviction that each of us is a treasure house of power, knowledge, and fortitude, with the key already in the lock, waiting only for the right hand to turn it. He could never write a war novel, a hard-boiled detective story, or a Harlequin Romance...unless there really is a package of Microsoft Word® macros for composing the latter from a twenty-five word statement of place and time. (Visual Basic for Word is powerful stuff; Roald Dahl's "Great Automatic Grammatisator" could be closer than we think.) He sticks to the subjects to which his style is suited, and gives regular thanks that they're the ones to which he's most powerfully drawn.

And you, Gentle Reader, should you elect to try your hand at this crazy business of ours, would be well advised to do the same.

==<O>==
3. Meditations on Character

Quite a lot of aspiring writers think the enterprise requires no more than "a way with words" -- that is, a fetching style. (A lot of other writers think it requires no more than a word processor, but that's a subject for another screed.) Your Curmudgeon has expressed himself already on this conviction. In consequence, he's received a fair amount of E-mail to the general effect that those who can, do, while those who can't, criticize. One correspondent noted, quite acerbically, that what your Curmudgeon hasn't done yet is talk about the real sine qua non of the fictioneer, whatever he thinks it to be.

Sigh. A good player never shows all his cards at once. Still, perhaps the time has come.

The late John Brunner once expressed a two-requirement guide to the creation of good fiction:

1. The raw material of fiction is people.

2. The essence of story is change.

There's a whole education in reflecting upon how utterly invisible these rules can be, when one is reading good, satisfying fiction. By implication, when one is dissatisfied with a story -- assuming it wasn't simply told in execrable grammar -- they point the way to its most likely flaws.

Whatever the story, it must be acted out by people -- "people" being generically interpreted as "delimited beings conscious of their own identities and capable of acting on their desires." Some of those people will be more important to the story than others. The usual hierarchy looks like this:

\-- Marquee Characters: The persons whom the story is mostly "about."

\-- Supporting Cast: Persons involved with the decisions and actions of the Marquee Characters, but whose fates are of less importance.

\-- Spear Shakers: Persons who appear where they do in the story simply because there has to be someone in that slot; unimportant except as stage dressing.

(If you're interested in literary history and its major controversies, the best possible giveaway that "Shakespeare's" works were not written by "Shakespeare" is that very name. It has to be the hugest joke ever embedded in the literary arts.)

Some of the incidentals of the hierarchy are of interest in themselves. For example, Supporting Cast members very seldom get to be "viewpoint characters," through whose eyes a third-person narrator sees the unfolding of events. Spear Shakers just about never do, except in stories deliberately written to make fun of the rules. Supporting Cast members may have their own "supporting casts" -- families, employers, friends, tormentors, and favored car wash attendants -- but these, though occasionally referred to in passing, are not allowed to intrude upon the action of the story.

A good story's Marquee Characters will be relatively few in number. Even the most complex and extended story can't be kept coherent if a large number of supremely important characters participate in its events. For one thing, their motivations have to diverge, which will make them tug against one another. For another, the author will have a great deal of difficulty keeping all of them animated and differentiated. The typical piece of well-crafted fiction has from two to five Marquee Characters.

If we recur at this point to Brunner's rules, it becomes clear that the story's plot must be about events in the Marquee Characters' lives, and the consequent changes to their motivational foundations. Not all events are significant, of course; few writers will linger over their protagonist's choice of socks for the day. Some changes of motivation are equally insignificant: a story that focused on its protagonist's change of allegiance from Wheaties® to Cheerios® would hold few persons' interest...well, outside of General Mills, anyway.

The focus must be kept on the major motivators in the human psyche: the characters' most powerful, most passionately held desires, fears, and convictions.

In this process, the writer encounters one of the most rigid maxims of the fiction trade, at its most compelling: Show, Don't Tell.

Breathes there a would-be storyteller who doesn't have that commandment tattooed on his eyelids -- the inside surface of his eyelids? It's the most important instruction in all of fiction, but it's honored far more often in the breach than in the observance, to the great detriment of many a story.

"Show, don't tell" is precisely about how the writer must reveal the changes in a Marquee Character's motivational structure. He can't simply say, "And so it was that Smith realized, after years uncounted in the wilderness, that putting mayonnaise on roast beef was wrong." It doesn't matter how many thousands of words he uses to say it. He has to show the change through the decisions and actions of the character.

In comparison to this stricture, the much-excoriated practices of "embedded exposition" and "in-stream backstory" are the mildest of venial sins.

There are other aspects to the thing, of course. Motivational changes must be plausible, and their revelation must be properly paced. They must proceed from one of three sources, which Willa Cather called the three basic plots:

\-- Interaction with other human beings ("Boy Meets Girl");

\-- Self-discovery through introspection ("Man Learns Lesson");

\-- Self-discovery through a challenge from the external world ("The Little Tailor").

Finally for this screed, motivational changes must not be "telegraphed." Though they can't come like lightning from a clear blue sky, neither should they be visible at a great distance. There has to be some degree of uncertainty, even mystery, about what sort of changes the Marquee Characters will undergo. Formula fiction of any kind is usually unsatisfying to the discriminating reader specifically because it lacks that characteristic; it's simply too easy to see the outline of what's coming, even if the precise details are hazy.

A side issue that nicely illuminates this subject is the well-known phenomenon of Marquee Character Immunity (MCI). MCI has been denigrated as a cross the writer inflicts on his reader: once the reader knows who the Marquee Characters are, he also knows that they'll survive the action, no matter how bloody the stage might become. This is inherent in the nature of a good story well told. Death, while it's definitely a dramatic change, is a terminal condition; its occurrence leaves the "affected" character with nothing to do with his lessons. Alongside that, if the author has done his job well, the Marquee Characters are those the reader has been most inclined to identify with and root for -- and though blissful endings, with the hero getting all the trophies at no cost, are out of fashion for good and sufficient reasons, "happy" endings, in which the hero pays a bearable, worthwhile price for victory, are near to mandatory. There will be no telethons for "ending the scourge of MCI in our lifetimes."

As usual, there's an infinite amount that could be said about this subject. But if you yearn to tell tales that will enthrall, instruct, and uplift, pay proper attention to your characters. Arrange them in their ranks, put the most important ones through changes dramatic enough to hold the reader's interest, keep the process plausible and properly paced, and reveal the resulting motivational alterations through the characters' depicted actions, rather than by narrative exposition of their internal states.

Sounds easy, doesn't it?

==<O>==
4. Confinement, Tension, and Trial

If you're going to write fiction -- a hazardous decision, really; shouldn't you think it over for a few more years? -- you have to come to terms with the fundamental dramatic requirement of fiction, that which gives it power to hypnotize and compel:

Drama only exists when men must suffer for being good.

That's not to say that things shouldn't turn out well for your hero in the long run. In most cases they should, for the moral law of the universe is quite in harmony with its physical laws. However, if he faces no difficulties as a consequence of his moral beliefs or discoveries, or if the price he must pay to resolve those difficulties is unsatisfyingly light, there will be no drama to your story.

"For each fine cat, a fine rat," wrote Robert A. Heinlein, no stranger to the creation of fine, dramatic fiction. The "rat" might be an antagonist-villain of great power and cunning, or it might be a situation in which the protagonist-hero finds himself caught in an antinomy -- a seemingly absolute clash of two equally compelling needs or values -- or it might be a struggle against his own weakness. But there must be something, some trial of power, intellect, or conscience, that compels the hero to enter what Sol Stein called "the crucible" -- and to remain there until his aim has been achieved.

"The crucible" is the cauldron of opposing forces with which your hero must contend. He must be unable to back away from the conflict, whether for circumstantial reasons or because his values and convictions forbid it. The closer it comes to breaking him, the more drama you can wring out of his story.

One of the reasons for the popularity of techno-military fiction of the Tom Clancy / Stephen Coonts / Dale Brown variety is that the crucible is ready to hand. The stakes are obviously very high, and the reasons for the hero to remain in the game, despite great cost and risk to himself, come ready-made. In fiction that deals with conflicts of materially smaller scale, sketching in the conflict and the forces that bind the hero to it can be a formidable challenge.

Much modern fiction is psychological in orientation. That is, its central conflict is one that exists in the mind of its protagonist, rather than as an external challenge to his values or convictions. In the popular cant, he must "wrestle with his demons." Some writers are equal to the task of dramatizing such an interior struggle, but unfortunately, they're in the minority.

In part, the failings of inadequate psychological fiction arise from its writers' reluctance to reify the conflict -- that is, to move it from the realm of abstractions to the realm of concrete decisions and actions. Some simply scorn the necessity. Others are uncomfortable with the world of objective things and deeds. Still others fail to grasp that psychological conflict must involve motives, whose significance is null unless they move the hero to do something. Whatever the reason, the discriminating reader will detect the problem easily. He'll be unlikely to forgive the waste of his time, so don't!

To return to the main thread of this screed: to achieve drama, you must construct a crucible and contrive to keep your hero in it, where his most important convictions will be sorely tried right up to the end. The crucible will involve opposition, as already noted, but it must also exert confinement: your hero must not be able to walk away from the conflict without irremediably sacrificing something more precious to him than what he risks by remaining in it.

What might the price for escaping the crucible be?

\-- Someone he loves;

\-- Something he loves or values highly;

\-- His pride;

\-- His conception of himself as a good man.

This decision must accompany your decision about the main conflict of your story, for unless the reader can be persuaded that the hero cannot abandon the contest without prevailing, your story will lack the other sine qua non of good fiction: plausibility.

If you can keep him in the crucible, you can make him suffer. That is, you can make him struggle to achieve his aim, or pay to defend what he values that drew him into the conflict in the first place. If he can overcome the forces opposed to him, his suffering will be worthwhile. If he can't...well, there are always sequels and New Wave art cinemas.

For an example of a simple crucible with obvious trials and an obvious confining element, consider my story "Equalizer." For an example of a subtle crucible, whose trial is much more abstract and whose confining power is revealed only at the very end, consider my story "Foundling." Which of these approaches appeals to you more? Your answer will tell you much about the sort of fiction you're inclined to write -- and read -- if you don't know that already.

==<O>==
5. Ideas

A poll of fiction writers concerning what questions they're most frequently asked by non-writers would undoubtedly turn up two strong commonalities:

\-- "How much money can you make at that?"

\-- "Where do you get your ideas?"

We shall pass quickly over the first of these. It's rather embarrassing to note that even well-published novelists usually have to have "day jobs" to make ends meet. The stupendous commercial successes of a fortunate few, such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy, cast an unmerited glamor over the fictioneer's trade. Yet the prolific, highly popular Roger Zelazny worked for the Social Security Administration until the day he died. Many writers wait tables, tend bar, or drive taxicabs: paying trades they share with their brethren in the acting field. As James Michener famously said, a writer can get rich in America, but he can't make a living.

The second question is also a source of frustration, for the typical writer himself doesn't really know. He gets them; he writes them; they work, or don't work; and that's that. His consciously considered problems begin after the idea has occurred to him. They involve character definition, details of plot and pacing, how long the finished work ought to be, and to whom he ought to offer it. He simply doesn't think about the "story ideas" themselves.

So where do they come from?

Well, some of them come from you, Gentle Reader. Your Curmudgeon has fashioned a number of stories from real-life episodes, either from his own life or narrated to him by friends and acquaintances: "Ceremony," "A For Effort," "Learning By Doing," and "The Gift Room" were all fictionalizations of real-life events.

Other ideas arise as "corollaries" of ideas explored by other writers. For example, the basic idea of "The Warm Lands" flows from two premises embedded in much other fantasy: that magic is powered by something physical, rather than being a favor done for a sorcerer by some puissant non-human creature; and that that power source can wax or wane with time and exploitation. When your Curmudgeon combined those notions with one of his own -- that an excessive concentration of magical power in a place where no one was using it could create spontaneous catastrophes that might then be blamed upon "witches," as in Salem -- the story was born. Pursuing the diametrically opposite premise -- that magical effects are invoked by a spell, but the sorcerer must get the spell exactly right and say it exactly fast enough to receive supernatural assistance -- produced "Equalizer."

Third, but probably not last, an idea can just happen. "Foundling," wherein a baby vampire becomes the ward of a most unlikely guardian, was one such; "Ghosts," in which an eventful Hallowe'en introduces infant superman Louis Redmond to the "ghosts" of his lifelong faith, was another. Modern science cannot trace the genesis of such ideas, though research continues.

Note that the ideas above, intriguing notions with many implications, were the foundations for short stories rather than novels. It's one of the seeming paradoxes of fictioneering that the shorter a story is, the more powerful an idea is required to make it work, and vice-versa.

A really strong idea can bowl the reader over in five hundred words. Dilute ideas require too much supplementation by character development, description of setting, and thematic evolution to "get the job done" in so short a space. Some novels require no ideas at all. That's not meant as a jab at the modern novelist, or at least, not at all of them. Judith Guest has written three magnificent, emotionally gripping novels around the most mundane imaginable ideas: a teenager's suicide attempt (Ordinary People); an abused child who runs away from his abusive family (Second Heaven); a family whose father is dying of cancer and is struggling to adjust (Errands). But the value of such a book must rest almost entirely on its characterization, themes, and style. Fortunately, a novel provides ample scope for these.

The strong idea / short story correlation is one of the main reasons why science fiction, a literature of ideas, has been so firmly oriented toward the short story -- and why magic-oriented fantasy, which has evolved so few new and intriguing ideas, has been dominated by the multi-volume novel. Also, consider the dearth of short stories produced by the best-known novelists; once one gets used to having hundreds of thousands of words to roam around in, one's idea-discipline is likely to atrophy irretrievably.

Marc Steigler, author of Earthweb and David's Sling, made a poignant comment some time ago about writers who fear they'll "run dry" of ideas. Such writers are often seen trying to use an idea eminently suited to a short story as the basis for a massive novel. Why? Because they "don't want to waste it." But the waste occurs in the verbiage wrapped around an idea that ought to be dressed sparely and left to stand before the reader in Spartan splendor. If it can be put across in five thousand words, why expend fifty or a hundred thousand? The only consistent explanation is that the writer fears that, after he's "used up" his idea, he won't have another. Ironically, larding extra words around a strong idea is one of the most discouraging things one can do to one's readers, who will frequently ask "is he being paid by the word?" Therefore, when implementing a strong idea, one must keep it brief if one is to keep one's audience.

The remedy for the fear of idea-exhaustion is attention to one's surroundings and an appreciation for the naturalness of ideation. Ideas aren't an exhaustible natural resource; we create them out of our impressions of reality and our sense of possibility. As with any sort of art or artifice, practice helps immensely; doing well by the current one will make the next one easier to unearth, clean, and polish. The more a writer writes, the higher his confidence grows, and the more he is able to write.

==<O>==
6. Scene Construction

In the creation of fiction, the writer must move purposefully or not at all. Every word he writes must carry its own weight at the minimum. For there are two essential purposes to be served at all times, and a word not put to either one, if not both, is a word wasted.

#

What is the point of storytelling? Why do we do it?

It's a big question. The answers range all over the intellectual map. But when seined for their common aspects, they reduce to two:

\-- To dramatize a theme;

\-- To evoke readers' emotions.

Your Curmudgeon has blathered elsewhere at length about theme and its importance. Yet there are still writers out there who don't believe theme is necessary. Sigh. What fools these mortals be. But a lone crank from Long Island can only accomplish so much.

Themes are important bits of truth that will resonate with a large number of readers. A common approach to dramatizing a theme is to have a protagonist violate it and then have reality hand him his head for his mistake. Another is to show two protagonists in action, one in keeping with the theme and one in defiance of it, so that the reader can compare the results. There are others. Mostly, they exploit the story's plot -- its chain of causally-linked events and decisions -- for their effects.

But a writer chooses his theme not only for its veracity, but also for its power to move the reader when cast into fictional form. One can't write compelling fiction about Archimedes' Law or the Pythagorean Theorem. So while the truth-value of a theme is necessary to its employment in fiction, it's not sufficient. The theme must also have emotional resonance.

Such resonance comes from what sort of drama one can wring from it.

#

All but the shortest stories are constructed in scenes: swatches of story time that involve at least one Marquee character, whether in the action as depicted or as the point of the action. Conventionally, scenes are separated from one another by a typographical device, either a line space or a centered trio of asterisks being the most common. The reader understands the scene to be coherent in several dimensions:

\-- It will be continuous in time;

\-- Changes of place, if any, will be depicted explicitly if briefly;

\-- There will be either a single viewpoint character or none at all.

There are other understandings about the individual scene, but they're subtler and of lesser importance.

The scene is like a single link in a chain, of which the story in its entirety is the whole. As with a chain, a single faulty scene can render the story ineffective. For example, a scene that persuaded the reader to discard the plot for implausibility, perhaps by introducing details or decisions wholly incoherent with the rest of the story, would drain the story of value. A bad choice of viewpoint character, for example one who got no emotional impact out of the events of the scene, could cripple a story just as effectively. A scene that stops the dynamics of the story, either by diverting the reader unnecessarily from the action or by giving him a reason to cease caring about the protagonists, will kill a tale as well.

Even though writers write in words, sentences, and paragraphs, the scene has a much better claim to being the atomic building block of fiction. The words of which the scene is composed are more like quarks: important, to be sure, but of no moment in isolation from one another and the scene they depict.

#

Each scene of a story must:

\-- Advance the plot toward its conclusion, or:

\-- Strengthen the reader's reasons to empathize with the protagonist(s) and/or detest the antagonist(s).

It's possible to do both at once, sometimes, but to fulfill either one is sufficient much of the time. For example, in "The Warm Lands," one scene placed near the midpoint of the story, which depicts Gregor and Laella in the aftermath of their first lovemaking, was written solely to allow the reader to learn a few details of Gregor's exile, of Laella's swiftly growing love for him, and of the conflict he feels at his perception of her love. The story, in the crudest terms, is sitting still; no one does anything but talk, and the talk appears to be solely historical and conjectural. But if the reader were not allowed to sense the intensification of the emotional bonds and the conflicts they engender, he'd find much of the rest of the story pointless and senseless.

The fourth scene of "A For Effort" is in the opposed pattern. In quick succession, it describes a series of events distributed over several weeks, but treads lightly on emotional ground. But the reader must be told of those events; they undergird the rest of the plot and the emotional development of the concluding scenes. While the reader is given no additional reasons to identify or empathize with Morgana, they do learn about the enormous self-willed, self-engineered changes that give the rest of her story its emotional effect.

The final scene of "Equalizer," in which Michael learns that it was not Acorn's seemingly sorcerous device that protected him but rather some form of divine intervention, addresses both purposes. The reader is simultaneously told the true climax of the plot, informed that all was not as he'd been led to believe, and is shown the depths of Michael's faith as he exhorts Acorn to bring the tale to Father Declan in all its particulars.

#

Your Curmudgeon's preferred approach to a scene is to make two passes over it: Write first with attention to plot, and then edit with attention to emotional evocation.

This comes up hard against a common dislike among writers: many of them hate to rewrite. They feel they're "getting nowhere," that they ought to "get it right the first time" and move on to whatever comes next. This is an immensely destructive attitude.

Ernest Hemingway once told of having made, not two, but thirty passes over much of his Nobel Prize-winning novel The Old Man And The Sea. When a colleague asked him what he was doing with so many revisions, he replied, "Getting the words right."

Granted, there have been exceptions. Victor Hugo's novels were all published from the author's handwritten first drafts. But he who fancies himself fit to walk in Hugo's footsteps is likely to need a dose of humility, to say nothing of a stout pair of wrist braces. Overwhelmingly more often than not, good writing is rewriting.

Your Curmudgeon outlines his plots and pre-sketches his Marquee characters. From there, he proceeds scene by scene, typically making two passes over each one before proceeding to the next. The first pass is "skeletal." It concentrates on getting down the specific plot details to be covered, and treats only lightly with description or internal monologue. The second pass is "muscular." It lays emotional flesh on the bones of the plot skeleton, by recoloring dialogue, adding descriptive details key to evoking the viewpoint character's reactions, and pointing up the visible or audible indicators of the other characters' emotions to the extent allowed by the narrative structure.

After that second pass, any major incongruities between the scene and the overall direction your Curmudgeon wanted the story to take will usually be garishly visible. Most frequently, it will have become apparent that the viewpoint character isn't the man your Curmudgeon thought he was -- that his real motivations were quite different from those originally conceived. It can be a disagreeable surprise, as it suggests that there's a lot more rewriting to be done, but it can also illuminate one's theme better to oneself, such that the ultimate outcome is a much improved, much more affecting story.

==<O>==
7. Character Development: Two Approaches

Your Curmudgeon holds that character development is the toughest of all the tasks of the fictioneer. Few succeed at it. Of those who do, a healthy fraction reuse their successful Marquee characters over and over, through endless strings of novels, to avoid having to do it again. Of course, some who don't succeed at it reuse their main characters endlessly, too, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.

Many would-be writers complain of their difficulties at "coming up with ideas." Bosh. Anyone not completely numb to the passing scene will have more "ideas" than Carter has Little Liver Pills. What the complainers lack is the combination of idea with personality that yields a plausible story: in other words, a believable and appropriately motivated main character.

How complex are the central ideas in these famous works:

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Billy Budd, Foretopman by Herman Melville

Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

These five novels are regarded as grand masterpieces, the pinnacles of great authors' careers with the written word. Each one is founded on an idea that can be expressed in a few words:

The Scarlet Letter: the impossibility of concealing one's passion.

The Old Man And The Sea: the inevitability of ultimate failure.

Billy Budd, Foretopman: the destructiveness of envy.

Of Mice And Men: the grip of fate.

Wuthering Heights: the power of thwarted love.

These novels work beautifully because their creators matched their central ideas to appropriately imagined Marquee characters, whom they turned loose in settings in which their major drives were bound to get them into deep trouble. Readers thrilled to these stories because the authors had succeeded in making their Marquee characters both believable and vivid.

Once a writer has picked his theme, the main challenge in writing a successful tale is almost always the development of his Marquee characters.

The title speaks of "two approaches." In fact, there are many approaches to the development of a character. The two your Curmudgeon has in mind are poles of a sort; that is, they exemplify the most extreme practices possible, which are usually compromised with other tactics. Interestingly, they're also mirror images of one another.

The first approach is to take a "normal man" -- often, someone the writer knows from real life; perhaps even himself -- and start editing. He inserts features and characteristics he expects will be dramatically useful, and prunes away traits he finds irrelevant or too distracting from his theme. We might call this the Everyman Gambit, for any innocent person who lodges in the writer's mental viewfinder might some day be used as raw material for it.

Everyman protagonists can often be found in works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Their fundamental ordinariness gives rise to immediately exploitable tensions when they're dropped into strangeness of the sort that's common in those genres. Alice of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking-Glass is a quite ordinary little girl. Gulliver of Gulliver's Travels is likewise a very ordinary man. Carroll and Swift chose to make them so, modeled upon ordinary individuals of their direct acquaintance, precisely for the dissonance their mediocrity would ring from the settings into which they were dropped.

Modern commercial fiction offers many examples of the Everyman protagonist. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, probably modeled on Clancy himself, is a well known case. Similarly, we have Greg Iles's Mississippi lawyer-author Penn Cage (The Quiet Game) and Scott Turow's prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Presumed Innocent). These are successful morphings of real human personalities into believable characters who find themselves enmeshed, largely against their will, in momentous events where lives hang in the balance -- in Ryan's case, over and over.

But success is not guaranteed. Sometimes the "normal man" drawn from real life rejects the required new characteristics as contradictory to his essence, or proves non-viable once his "irrelevancies" have been pared away. That's the flip side of the technique. It's easier by far than crafting a character out of nothingness, which is why it's so popular. But all can come to naught if the "raw material" proves to be less amenable to molding than the writer requires.

The other technique is to start from a burning passion, or a combination of two or three (more is not always better), that the writer conceives as central to the particular theme he wants to explore. He then shapes a protagonist character around that passion, adding verisimilitude with touches peripheral to the passion, or perhaps wholly disconnected from it. We might call this the Avatar Approach, for the character is brought into being specifically to personify the all-important central passion that rules him, around which the rest of the story is constructed.

The Avatar Approach has its virtues. It's more work than the Everyman Gambit -- creating life in a test tube is simple by comparison -- but the writer needn't worry about the sorts of clashes that can mar an Everyman protagonist; his character shall be exactly and only what he wishes. But its hazards are considerable as well. For a character ruled by a single powerful passion is supremely difficult to make believable; such men have few counterparts among the living.

Among recent thriller writers, the name of Lee Child stands out in high relief. His novels center on former military cop Jack Reacher, a hero of the old style with an eccentric modern twist. Reacher is resolved never to be tied to one environment. His family is entirely deceased. He has no home of any sort; upon detachment from the Army he began to travel continuously, by foot, bus, or thumb. He throws away his clothing when he's sweated through it and replaces it from the cheapest nearby source. He allows himself no lasting involvements. He fears nothing quite so much as stasis. Yet chance and associations from his military career pitch him repeatedly into kill-or-be-killed situations where the stakes are immense. He never hesitates to pick up a thrown gauntlet, for his ruling passion is for justice. His plausibility is testimony to Child's unusual feel for how such a man, from such a background, would react to chance encounters with predators, victims, and agencies of chaos.

Jack Reacher could have been a comic-book character: too good to be true and impossible to hurt. Such a figure would have touched far fewer readers. Reacher fails of his aims on occasion, always for reasons that don't compromise his heroic status. He stretches the moral envelope if he thinks the cause is just and success demands it. He suffers plausibly from severances and wistfulness, for his got-to-be-moving-on resolve is more willed than natural. He frequently falls in love, seldom admits it, and carries many a torch down the road to his next adventure. Child did not neglect to include enough fallibility and vulnerability in his creation to render him simpatico.

The aspiring fictioneer will find one of these two approaches closer to the pattern he requires for the stories he wants to tell. Whichever he picks, he'll compromise it in certain ways -- all writers do -- and begin the process of tinkering his creations into believable, dramatically useful life. And if he perseveres long enough, he'll find himself consumed by a question every dramatist must eventually confront: "How much of my heroes -- and my villains -- is taken directly from what I imagine about myself?"

==<O>==
8. Passion And Obsession

Aha! You read the title and immediately started thinking about sex, didn't you? Well, your Curmudgeon can't blame you, this time. But really, that's not the subject of today's drivel.

There aren't many things that stir the interests of large numbers of persons. There are even fewer things that will get any (decent) person worked up to the heights of emotion. Good versus evil. Genuine heroism. Defiance of a seemingly inevitable fate. True devotion. Romantic love and its pitfalls. The price of gasoline.

It therefore follows that these few, passion-coupled subjects will be the ultimate foundations of the most memorable stories. And indeed, when we recall the truly great works of fiction, that's what we find. But how does a storyteller wrap one of these primitives in an original tale, such that, however timeless and well-worn its emotional core might be, it nevertheless appears fresh, unique, and compelling for its own sake?

Come now, you don't expect your Curmudgeon to have all the answers, do you? But he'll take a stab at this one, in his usual veering way.

#

The critical step is choosing a theme. It always is.

As your Curmudgeon has said elsewhere, a conscious theme -- a distinct vision of cause and effect presented in a fictional setting -- is indispensable. But it's not the writer's usual first step. In the vast majority of cases, his initial inspiration will be a clever, original-seeming plot motif: some archetypal interaction among men that's both unusual and laden with emotion. He'll get a clear vision of such a thing and start mentally playing with it. His path could go in either of two directions: he could strive to elaborate the motif into a more complete, more time-extended plot, or he could seek to distill the motif further, to reveal to himself more completely the emotional foundation that gives the idea its power to move him. Your Curmudgeon favors the latter approach. When he's tried the former, the results haven't satisfied him.

A good writer will always write from his personal passion. When he's clearest in his own mind about why his story grips him as it does, he'll be at his most effective.

In the best stories, passion and theme are interwoven so tightly that they can't be separated from one another. The theme derives its power from the passion; the passion finds its sense in the logic of the theme.

As you've read the maunderings about theme in these "Storyteller's Art" pieces, you've probably wondered, now and then, just why it was so important. Truth be told, it's the passion evoked by the theme that's really important. However, the writer can't simply scream at his readers, "Feel deeply for my characters!" That would be akin to an actor trying to evoke audience emotion without a script, by the sheer power of his expressions and poses. That's called "emoting," and no self-respecting theatergoer -- or reader -- will stand for it.

Theme, as embodied in plot and character, is the conduit by which the writer transmits his passion to his readers. There's a conservation law at work here, though not one you'd study in first-year physics: passion can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transmitted from artist to consumer. The passion originates with the writer. He strives to infect his reader with it. His vehicle for doing so is his theme.

#

Perhaps it's now becoming a bit clearer why theme matters, and why it must connect to human fundamentals such as love, courage, justice, and so forth. But there are a staggering number of writers, including some successful ones, who confuse passion with obsession -- their own personal obsessions, about which only like-minded fetishists are likely to care.

Some writers are obsessed with sex. Others with guns. Others with intrigue, or spacecraft, or car chases, or some particular institution to which they've taken a dislike. (Dan Brown, call your office!) It hardly matters what the object of their affections is. What does matter is that their obsession compels them to make these things the centerpieces of their tales, without regard for the disconnect between their fetish and the emotional dynamics of the greater part of mankind.

Because they're obsessed, they make an object, itself devoid of emotional power, the subject of their stories.

Obsession is a form of passion, but it's a stunted, interpersonally impotent form. Smith's obsession cannot be used to induce emotion in Jones, unless Jones already shares the very same obsession. One might say that finding readers who share one's passion is the essence of fiction marketing, but the essential emptiness of obsession-based fiction is revealed by its ephemerality. Seldom does an obsessive return to a favorite tale for a second read; rather, he forgets the diversions of today as the sun sets upon them, and sets out in search of new ones with the morrow's sunrise. By way of illustration, the low-grade romances marketed by several publishing houses that cater to the romantic obsessive have a shelf life of only one month, after which they're returned to the publisher, at the publisher's request, and replaced with fresh offerings of the same kind. The same is true of certain interminable pseudo-science-fiction "novel series" derived from popular movies or video games.

The fetishized object can even be a character. Your Curmudgeon has one particular writer in mind, a man of obvious intelligence and demonstrably high writer's gifts, whose tales have all left your Curmudgeon shrugging and saying, "So?" He's utterly in love with his perennial central character, and can't bring himself to write about anything else. But his fascination with her is essentially fetishistic; his stories don't have the power to affect one who isn't as immediately mesmerized by her as he is. With luck, he'll eventually move on; ability like his would be a shame to waste. But it won't happen before he confronts the essential emptiness of his obsession.

Does all this mean that an inanimate object (or an unchanging character) can never be used as the focus of a story? No, but one must play the game to win: one must use the object as a symbol of something deeper, to evoke desires and emotions more widely affecting than its objective self. Your Curmudgeon's story "A New Look" is a case in point. On the surface, the story is about a young girl's acquisition of a pair of "forbidden" high heels. However, the shoes merely represent the girl's tragic yearning to become something to which her race, her background, and her community are all but immovably opposed.

#

An utterly wringing encounter with obsession led to one of your Curmudgeon's most memorable wastes of his infinitesimal free time and steadily dwindling energy. A friend whom he'll call Mary was approached by a friend of hers, who shall be called John, to critique the just-completed manuscript of his brand-new novel. Mary, a literary writer who specializes in Christian themes, found herself unable to read the MS; it just "wasn't her thing." She passed the opening segment of it along to your Curmudgeon, suggesting that "it might be the kind of thing you'd enjoy."

Gentle Reader, the only adequate short description of John's book would be "gun porn." John had started from a moderately interesting plot concept -- a Serbian general condemned as a war criminal escapes from NATO custody, seizes power by assassination, acquires biological weapons from a Russian lab and long-range missiles from North Korea, and uses them to blackmail the rest of Europe -- and had larded it over with dozens, nay, hundreds of pages of interminable technical descriptions of weaponry and its uses. Whenever your Curmudgeon looked up from all the rhapsodizing about weapons, he found characters so lifeless that to call them "wooden" would be an indefensible slur on the lumber industry, striking cliched poses and delivering set speeches to one another as if each were alone in a room of his own. It was about 200,000 words long, and finishing it took all the cool determination and steely resolve your Curmudgeon possessed -- approximately enough to have made him a character in John's novel. Still, he did his best to critique the opening five chapters, more or less rewriting them from the ground up, and to make helpful suggestions concerning where to take the rest.

John was dazzled. (It didn't take much to dazzle John.) He pleaded with your Curmudgeon to continue as he'd begun. As an inducement he offered half the proceeds from the eventual sale of the book, an event in which he had a religious faith, because "I know someone who knows Tom Clancy."

Never in his life has your Curmudgeon had so much difficulty repressing laughter.

The hell of it was that there was potentially a good story in there, if the characters could be brought to life and the gun porn thinned out. Well, your Curmudgeon has always been a soft touch for anyone who comes bearing praise for his literary gifts. So he sighed, agreed to rewrite the book, and proceeded to do so.

It took nearly eight months, during which your Curmudgeon was several times seriously ill, habitually refused to answer his phone, and seldom had a good word for anyone. But at the end, John's MS had become a fair-to-middlin' novel of political intrigue and warfare, peopled with actual characters to whom a reader might just possibly feel some emotional connection. No, it didn't sell; that genre is glutted, and the story wasn't so original as to hint at a marketplace breakthrough. But two different agents took it on, and tried for three years in total to move it, which is more than many an unpublished novelist can boast.

#

Passion, yes; obsession, no. That's the long and the short of it. The writer who connects with his passion, infuses his themes with it, and populates his plots with characters who live their roles as vividly as real people would, will succeed. The writer who can't quite grasp why editors and agents aren't as enthused as he about watermelon, saddle shoes, or the '57 Chevy Bel Air will forever grope for an audience that isn't there, and will sometimes waste considerable ability in the process.

But all is not lost even for that latter artisan. The industrial press can always use a few good men willing to write about...well, about anything you can name. A dear friend has spent much of her free time this past year writing brochures and press releases for a concrete supplier. Another friend has made a nice chunk of change providing copy for a retailer of prefabricated homes. And there you have the essential glory of the good old U. S. of A.: however specialized one's wares, if he looks hard enough, he'll find a demand hungry for what he can supply.

==<O>==
9. The Sin of Over-Management

All of human endeavor conforms to a simple pattern, which your Curmudgeon thinks of as "The Algorithm":

  1. Select a technique that you think will get you what you think you want.

  2. Will this technique require you to lose body parts, go to jail, or burn in Hell?

    1. If so, return to step 1.

    2. If not, proceed to step 3.

  3. Do a little of it.

  4. Are you at your goal, approaching it, or receding from it?

    1. If at your goal, stop.

    2. If approaching, return to step 3.

    3. If receding, return to step 1.

The creation of fiction conforms to it, too, with one all-important proviso: The author must recognize the limits of his authority. In other words, he must remember to respect the bounds of reality, even within a completely fantastic setting.

The dictates of reality never go completely away, even when the author has decided to set natural laws as we know them completely aside. The reason? John Brunner's Two Commandments of Effective Fiction:

1. The raw material of fiction is people.

2. The essence of story is change.

"People" does not mean solely homo sapiens terrestrialis. To qualify as "people," a character must be:

\-- Conscious of his own identity and its continuity over time and space;

\-- Possessed of desires he can't satisfy merely by wishing;

\-- Less than omnipotent, and therefore capable of being opposed and thwarted.

One cannot write a satisfying story in which God Almighty is the protagonist. He'd triumph merely by virtue of being who He is. An end that foreordained would leave even the most accommodating reader shrugging. On the other hand, Satan could be made into a Marquee Character, if one has the required chutzpah. Steven Brust pulled it off in his early novel To Reign In Hell, the triumph that first brought him public attention.

This set of constraints is part of why your Curmudgeon is fascinated by fictioneering, despite its many irritations and frustrations. It's economic in nature. The requirement that one's characters be people, with people's inherent natures and limitations, drives Ludwig von Mises's axiom of action deep into the enterprise. In this sense, every plausible story is a mini-lecture on practical economics.

But what does this have to do with "over-management," whatever that means?

Simply this: Once you have defined your characters -- i.e., once you've given them their powers, their desires, and their constraints -- you must allow them to act in accordance with those things. Beyond that, you must permit the reader to learn about your characters from the characters themselves.

One of the oldest and most frequently trumpeted of writers' rules -- "Show, don't tell!" \-- once again rears its ugly head. It implies that valid character depiction must be of three and only three kinds:

\-- What the character says;

\-- What the character does;

\-- What other characters say about him.

You are not permitted to reveal the character to the reader by direct narrative description. For one thing, it would rob the reader of a great part of his reading experience. For another, it would put you in danger of a fatal error: You might attribute qualities, convictions, or powers to your character that contradict what he must do to act out the story you have planned for him.

Your Curmudgeon has struggled with this. He has a terrible habit of making his Marquee characters too powerful, such that they prevail too easily. This cannot be fixed by narratorial intrusion; the character must be redefined, such that he and that which opposes him, be it man, mountain, or machine, are nearly equal in stature -- with the nominal edge going to the opposition. Many a novice fictioneer quails from this requirement; he wants his hero to win, and win big. In a despairing attempt to provide dramatic tension even so, he'll often drape emotional chains around his hero's neck, to inhibit the full use of his powers. But a truly powerful hero would be conscious of his power; he wouldn't be plausibly albatrossed by the sort of inhibitions that would hobble him seriously in a serious conflict.

Several otherwise excellent novels have displayed this failing. Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master Of Hed series comes to mind. Its ending is too obvious; McKillip's attempt to tie her enormously powerful protagonist's hands with self-doubt and reluctance to act simply doesn't satisfy.

This doesn't mean that characters can't have rich internal structures that feature important conflicts. It does mean that characters must be internally consistent; their emotional landscapes must be consistent with their objective powers and constraints. Character design often fails to take this into account. One who lives with a particular quality for any appreciable time will integrate that reality into his emotional structure. Superman will not hold back from a fight out of fear or a conviction of powerlessness; Jack Ryan will not hold back from his duty out of moral uncertainty. If the author attempts to "manage" such a character via narratorial intrusion, his story will fail to convince.

Characters and plots must be fitted to one another. A struggle between badly mismatched forces isn't much fun to watch. The author who's in love with a particular character can't simply jam him into whatever sort of plot he pleases. He must contrive to present that character with challenges that can only be surmounted, and opponents that can only be defeated, by the full exertion of his powers, after personal growth that exacts a significant price. As Robert A. Heinlein wrote in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, "For each fine cat, a fine rat." For best results, the rat should be the bigger of the two.

Try a "Doc Savage" or "Lensman" novel if you want to see why this must be so. Try to stay awake through a whole one. It won't be easy.

This limitation on auctorial authority is slightly different from the proscription on excessive exposition. The latter is a technical rather than an emotional fault; it can often be corrected without redrawing your characters or rewriting your plot. This is about letting your characters act in accordance with the natures and desires you've given them, rather than shoving them around by auctorial fiat, or forbidding them to use their abilities when those abilities would be most apposite.

Don't over-manage your characters. Allow them to be who they are. They'll love you for it, and so will your readers. That's a promise.

==<O>==
10. Pacing and Tone

Many an aspiring writer would view these essays and the topics they cover with despair. He'd say to himself, "Good God, if I have to keep all this in mind with every sentence, I'm beaten before I start. I can't imagine how anyone could do it."

There's a hidden grain of truth in there: no one can do it. The point of these explorations isn't to present checklists against which every sentence must be measured. They're intended to stimulate thought and discussion, and to plant seeds which are most likely to sprout, not when you're writing, but when you're reading: reading fiction produced by others.

The best writers are all highly skilled readers. They read slowly, and with attention. They gauge the quality of a story as they experience it, and never cease to ponder why. After one has done enough such reading, he's ready to write naturally, for the critical faculty developed during his reading hours will have insinuated itself into his subconscious, where he can draw on it at will and without undue effort.

#

Pace, colloquially, is the speed at which a story's events occur in the reader's mental framework. This is quite different from the rate at which they occur in story time. If your thousand-word story covers fifty years in the lives of your characters and relates "only" four or five events therein, it will be very rapidly paced. This is well illustrated by Isaac Asimov's story "In A Good Cause." Conversely, if your two hundred thousand word novel covers a single day in story time, and relates twenty events therein, it will be languorously paced. Consider James Joyce's Ulysses, for example.

A story's pace should be tied to its other emotional vectors. What emotions do you want your reader to experience as he walks with your characters down Plot Line Road? Do you want to pull him onto the edge of his seat with excitement? Do you want him to feel trapped in a pit of immutable despair? Do you intend to convey love, passion, anguish, need, or hatred? Each of these things works best when depicted at a particular pace.

A long story or novel is likely to present several emotional faces, each in its turn. Here, too, the guideline above is sound. Your pace must be accelerated or braked to conform to the dominant emotion of each scene. It's one of the less appreciated requirements of the extended story.

When you've decided on your story's emotional target(s) and its projected length, you've also decided on its pace. Beware! A story's length is not easy to control. "The Warm Lands" was intended to be no more than five thousand words, but justice could not be served in so compressed a trial. Your Curmudgeon had more luck with "Land For Peace," because of the rich, universally known backstory that provides the foundation for the encounter narrated therein. Early decisions about story length will frequently need to give way to the proper depiction of its events and the proper development of its themes -- in other words, to the pace these things demand if they're to affect the reader as you desire.

Pace is closely related to one's choice of tone. Not all combinations of pace and tone are compatible. For example, Tom Clancy could not have used Robert Bolt's tone in A Man For All Seasons to write The Hunt For Red October. Even if we omit the archaisms of sixteenth-century speech, Bolt's stately verbal architecture, so well suited to the series of conversations he depicts, would never work in a narrative of high-speed, high-tension warfare. One simply cannot have one's characters declaiming to one another in a lofty tone when there are torpedoes in the water. Nor could Bolt have used Clancy's lean, clipped narrative style to describe the travails of Thomas More and family as his enemies' schemes close on him in sequel to the schism of Henry VIII. Those characters' tensions were protracted far too greatly to be caught in telegraphic prose.

Many writers believe themselves to be stylistically limited. They believe they possess a single idiom, or in the prevalent term, "voice," and are forever compelled to remain within it. This canard has gained traction these past few years largely due to the exertions of writers with little storytelling talent, who seek to get by on stylistic whimsy: basically, imagery and wordplay to distract the reader from the emptiness of the stories they tell. Your Curmudgeon considers this a cheat, and will discuss it no further.

A good writer can command whatever style he needs for his story application. This includes tone, which is an element of style.

Here are two examples of skillful management of tone and pacing, at two greatly different rates, from the pen of one of the most popular writers ever to write in English. The first:

He racked the telephone, twisted the gooseneck of the desk lamp so it threw a spot of light on the wall, put his feet up on his desk, and brought his hands together in front of his chest, as if praying. He extended his index fingers. On the wall, a shadow-rabbit poked up its ears. Alan slipped his thumbs between his extended fingers, and the shadow-rabbit wiggled its nose. Alan made the rabbit hop across the makeshift spotlight. What lumbered back was an elephant, wiggling its trunk. Alan's hands moved with a dextrous, eerie ease. He barely noticed the animals he was creating; it was an old habit with him, his way of looking at the tip of his nose and saying "Om."

He was thinking about Polly, Polly and her poor hands. What to do about Polly?

If it had just been a matter of money, he would have had her checked into a room at the Mayo Clinic by tomorrow afternoon -- signed, sealed, and delivered. He would have done it even if it meant wrapping her in a straitjacket and shooting her full of sedative to get her out there.

But it wasn't just a matter of money.

And the second:

David grabbed the bar of Irish Spring and began to lather himself with it. He didn't bother with his legs, there would be no problem there, but worked from the groin on up, rubbing harder and generating more suds as he went. His father was still yelling at him, but now there was no time to listen. The thing was, he had to be quick...and not just because he might lose his nerve if he stopped too long to think about the coyote sitting out there. If he let the soap dry, it wouldn't serve to grease him; it would gum him up and hold him back instead.

He gave his neck a fast lube-job, then did his face and hair. Eyes slitted, soap still clutched in one hand, he padded to the cell door. A horizontal bar crossed the vertical ones about three feet off the floor. The gap between the vertical bars was at least four inches and maybe five. The cells in the holding area had been built to hold men -- brawny miners, for the most part -- not skinny eleven-year-old boys, and he didn't expect much trouble slipping through.

At least, not until he got to his head.

Quick, hurry, don't think, trust God.

Both passages are from Stephen King: the first from Needful Things, and the second from Desperation. The first passage is intended for emotional evocation, and is structured and paced that way. Protagonist Alan, the sheriff of Castle Rock, is shown to be a deeper, more emotional and more contemplative man than a typical reader would expect from a typical small-town cop. The second passage is a masterpiece of tension building: little David is preparing for a jailbreak directly under the eyes of a demon-animated carnivore. The beats that power the two segments could hardly differ more; the contrast between the tones is equally sharp. Yet they possess about the same "density" of events.

There's a great deal more that could be said about the management of pacing and tone, but the best possible knowledge of such things comes, as was intimated at the opening, from reading with attention. If you find yourself in the midst of a passage that strikes you as particularly well told in these ways, let your Curmudgeon know!

==<O>==
11. The Telling Detail

Many a novice fictioneer labors over description -- when to do it; how much of it to do; what to leave in and what to leave out -- as he does over no other aspect of the narrative craft. Strangely, the preponderance of the anxieties felt in this regard are unnecessary. Description is actually a much easier, and more easily comprehended, matter than most writers think.

Granted that first-class description can produce a unique effect:

Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness. [J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, "The Two Towers"]

...one cannot over-indulge in such effects without losing the reader.

Why? Because of Brunner's First Law of Fiction: The raw material of fiction is people. More specifically, what your characters are saying, doing, and doing to one another.

Elmore Leonard, famed for his humor-laced thrillers, was once asked by a fan why he wrote so few descriptive passages, and kept them so short. Leonard smiled and replied, "I try not to write the parts that people skip."

Ponder that. The typical reader skips descriptive passages. Why? Not because they're badly written, though some surely are; they're skipped because most description contributes nothing to the forward movement of the story!

Remember how a typical reader chooses the books he'll read:

\-- He heads for the section(s) of the bookstore where he can find his favorite genre(s).

\-- He looks first for authors whose works have pleased him in the past.

If he doesn't find any unread works by familiar, approved writers, he scans spines and covers for clever titles and provocative art.

\-- When a title or cover painting catches his fancy, he picks it up and reads the back-cover or dust-jacket blurb. If it fails to intrigue him, he puts the book back on the rack and resumes his search.

\-- If the blurb has, at the least, not dimmed his tentative interest, he opens the book to the first chapter and reads one or two pages. If these don't impress him, he passes on.

\-- If the first page or two engage his interest, he might riffle the pages of the book, scanning it for "density." That is, he looks to see how tightly the words are packed on a typical page. If it's too high -- that is, if descriptive and pure-narrative passages overwhelm dialogue and character interaction \-- he passes on.

\-- Finally, if all the above tests have been satisfied and his funds will allow, he buys the book.

To be agreeable to the overwhelming majority of readers, fiction must concentrate on dialogue and active events in the lives of his characters. A writer who forgets or disdains this pattern and concentrates on description might get invited to a lot of faculty teas, but he won't sell many books.

For all of that, some description is necessary if you want the reader to see your fictional world vividly. But there are guidelines to make it plain when it's necessary, how much of it there should be, and what specifically one should describe. These guidelines are nicely synopsized in the imperative: Cultivate an eye for the telling detail.

Let's unpack that command a bit.

What is an "eye for the telling detail"? Where does one find it?

Probably the best approach to acquiring this "eye" -- that is, the sense for what ought to be described and when -- is to concentrate on the consciousness of one's viewpoint character. That is: the sensorium, sensitivities, and priorities of the viewpoint character, through whose "eyes" the story is currently being told, should dictate what one describes.

For example, let's imagine that your viewpoint character is a doctor who labors, as so many do, in a hospital. The hospital is his typical frame of reference. While the precise details of the hospital do matter to him, on a typical work day he doesn't take active notice of ninety-five percent of them. He would not fix his attention on a respirator that he passes twenty times per shift. He would not muse upon the height, shape, or color of a reception desk. He would not remark to himself that Joe Smith is wearing a stethoscope, unless that were in itself an unusual thing that should trigger heightened attention (e.g., if Joe were a janitor, or a serial killer whom your character had thought confined to a jail ward).

Since the goal of good fiction is to involve your reader in the emotional lives of your characters, your descriptive prose should be guided by a cognizance of the sort of things your characters would care about, and the sort they would glide past, whether from their regularity or from their irrelevance.

What is a "telling detail?"

In keeping with the guideline above, a telling detail is a detail that tells the viewpoint character something that ought to arouse his active interest. Note the phrase "ought to." It might, or it might not; after all, he might be having a sub-par day. But either way, it should, because the detail itself is important to the course of the story:

\-- It indicates a difference in his environment -- either in the physical setting or the people that inhabit it -- that will factor into the plot.

\-- It characterizes a figure with whom he'll be involved in the subsequent action.

\-- It impels him toward his deeds in the subsequent action;

\-- It enables him to do something he'll need to do, or constrains him from doing something he'll want to do, in the subsequent action.

The way to describe a telling detail is through the viewpoint character's perception of it, including those aspects of its setting that make it significant. Note how, in the Tolkien passage above, the author makes note of the "change of clime" and that "spring was busy" around the hobbits from whose perspective the details of Ithilien were described. These features of the physical environment are why Frodo and Sam noticed their surroundings; they constituted a noticeable change -- and a most unusual one, given that their course was taking them toward a land of limitless foulness.

Here's another illustrative passage:

Lori took in the situation with a glance, glared at Aaron, and immediately slapped the code call button. Andrew went to Berglund's bedside and sank to his knees. Incredibly, he groped for the patient's flailing hand and folded it between his own. The volunteer's eyes closed and his lips moved rapidly.

The etheric sense Aaron had cultivated over his years of exploration of the dark forces quivered like an alerted hunting dog. A miasma of power was forming in the room, hovering over Andrew's head. It was not a familiar one. Aaron's inner eye watched it wax in potency. It grew blindingly bright, then descended and wrapped itself around the thrashing, dying man.

Berglund's eyes closed. His spasms slowed, became progressively gentler. By the time the team with the crash cart had arrived, the old man was still and his breathing had ceased.

The glowing cloud of power was gone.

Andrew rose from his knees and deposited the limp hand onto its owner's motionless chest. He turned to the crash cart team, who had frozen in place upon first confronting the strange tableau.

"He's gone." The technicians started forward, but the volunteer held up a hand. There was an ineffable authority in him that halted them where they stood. "Let him be."

Lori was trying to jam her fist into her mouth.

Andrew slipped past the emergency team, wrapped an arm around Lori's shoulders and coaxed her from the room. [From "Virgin's Prayer"]

The viewpoint character, Aaron, doesn't dwell upon the mundane features of the scene before him. Indeed, he hardly notices them. He's fixed upon the things that matter most to him: the immanence of a great cloud of supernatural power, apparently invoked by Andrew; Andrew's own assumption of authority, before which everyone else at the scene automatically gives way; and Lori's reaction to it all. These aspects of the scene are critical to the action that remains; nothing else about the scene matters at all.

How much description is enough? Is there a way to know?

In a word, yes.

Enough description is description that follows the guidelines above. It tells the reader what the viewpoint character is thinking and feeling about his surroundings. It also tells the reader what the viewpoint character ought to notice, whether he does so or not; this is particularly important in stories with an element of mystery. Finally, it's married to what's happening to and around the viewpoint character at the moment, rather than being a superfluous lump that sits in the way of the action.

This gives us a third guideline that proves most useful in practice: The best description is married to what the characters are doing.

Consider the following passage:

The tall, ungainly woman walked haltingly up the winding, tree-lined path that led to the large, green-shuttered sprawling old white mansion. Her old, arthritic vein-corded hands gripped her silver-topped cane, and its worn brass ferrule stabbed feebly at the unyielding earth with every faltering step she took.

To the best of your Curmudgeon's knowledge, that passage is not from a published story. Lawrence Block uses it as an example of overwriting in his book Telling Lies For Fun And Profit. But it's also an example of pointless description. It's unmated to any significant action of the viewpoint character -- not clearly revealed here, though one might assume from this snippet that it's the old woman being described -- and advances nothing in which the reader might take more than a yawning interest.

Here's another passage, from a masterwork by one of the funniest and most creative writers ever to scatter words upon a page:

"Well, then," Sir Gules said, leading his guest down the carpeted floor past the silent manservants to a high wainscotted room in which a cheery fire snapped and crackled in the great onyx fireplace.

Marvin did not answer. His eye was taking in the details of the room. The carven armoire was surely tenth century, and the portrait on the west wall, half-hidden by its gilt frame, was a genuine Moussault.

"Come, sit, I pray thee," said Sir Gules, sinking gracefully to a David Ogilvy half-couch decorated in the Afghan brocade so popular that year.

"Thank you," Marvin said, sitting upon an eight-legged John IV with rosewood handles and a backing of heart-o'-palm.

"A little wine?" Sir Gules said, handling with casual reverence the bronze decanter with gold chasings engraved by Dagobert of Hoyys.

"Not just at the moment, give thee thanks," Marvin replied, brushing a fleck of dust from his stuff-colored outercoat of green baptiste with lisle froggings, made to his measure by Geoffrey of Palping Lane.

"Then mayhap a touch of snuff?" Sir Gules inquired, proffering his small platinum snuffbox made by Durr of Snedum, upon which was portrayed in steel-point a hunting scene from the Orange Forest of Lesh.

"Perhaps later," Marvin said, squinting down at the double-furled silver thread laces on his dancing pumps. [From Robert Sheckley's Mindswap.]

If you're not rolling on the floor, just barely keeping your sides from splitting, it's not your Curmudgeon's fault. Sheckley has brilliantly pinned the very worst failings of innumerable writers of historical and Gothic fiction, so funnily and perfectly that comment is unnecessary -- as was every one of the interminable details of that passage. A novice writer can learn better what not to do by studying that passage than from any dozen books on the writer's art.

Bad description is almost always over-description. It's "the parts that people skip." Your reader's principal reward for consuming your work is the emotional journey he takes alongside your characters. That's the prize. Everything else is, well, just details.

==<O>==
12. Devices

One of the most striking things about the effusions of those who prefer to write "literature" rather than tell stories is their penchant for overdressing everything:

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddle-legged, clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace like a gorgon in an autumn pool. [Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses]

While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. [Ibid.]

In the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening. [Dom De Lillo, White Noise]

She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clutched in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking. [Annie Proulx, Accordion Crimes]

(Dear God, please never allow Your humble servant to write that way. Thank You for Your kind attention. Yours faithfully, Francis W. Porretto, Curmudgeon Emeritus to the World Wide Web.)

What's happening in the snippets above? Your Curmudgeon assures you, they're taken straight from the cited books, with absolute fidelity. Is it possible to imagine that bringing clarity to the events described was numbered anywhere among the respective authors' priorities?

Storytellers don't write that way. Only writers in love with the sound of their own voices write that way. It bespeaks the exaltation of the author's ego over the story he has chosen to tell—a demotion of the story to a place so low among the author's priorities that one must wonder whether he'd have preferred that it not be present at all.

But then, you ask, given that a storyteller does want his reader to feel certain emotions within a defined context—that's the whole point of storytelling, isn't it?—how is he to evoke them, if not with elaborate verbal arabesques and a profusion of devices?

By telling the story, damn it!

Here's a snippet from a contest-winner your Curmudgeon wrote a few years back:

I swung back the stable door and slipped inside. No one noticed.

There were only the three: man, woman, and child. A single frail candle burned against the back wall of the stable, casting their silhouettes at me like inverted shadows. The woman had wrapped the baby in a loose cocoon of white muslin, leaving only its head exposed, and was laying it in the feed-trough that stood between the rows of stalls. She straightened, stepped back, and wordlessly collapsed into the man's arms.

Around the little tableau, the horses were silent.

I stepped forward, started to address the couple, and stopped. He cradled her in his lap, his arms tight about her, his face ablaze with uxorious devotion. Her eyes, large and luminous, were fixed upon her new child.

It took all my strength to produce a voice. "Do you... require anything?"

Her gaze remained locked upon her child. He assessed me with a glance and nodded with a certainty I could not help but envy.

"Some water, perhaps."

I nodded and started for the inn, but something held me. I bent to the feed-trough, pulled the muslin back from the tiny face and looked into it, not knowing why or what I hoped to see.

The baby's eyes were open.

The eyes of the newborn are never open.

You know what story's being told there, though it provides only the most minimal context and gave you no identifiers at all. So how do you know? And given that you know, was it needful that it describe anything more, indulge in more devices, or attribute any more explicit emotions to the narrator?

The story itself should be enough. If it is, then when told with clarity, with a maximum of immediacy and a minimum of decoration, it will pierce to the heart. A profusion of modifiers, devices, and obvious symbols indicates either that the author doesn't trust in the story, or that he considers the display of his verbal pyrotechniques to be more important.

Every literary prize jury in the English-speaking world would denounce your Curmudgeon as a philistine and a villain for saying that. But consider who sits on those prize juries, how fraternal they are toward one another's members, and then tell me if you would have expected anything else.

The fundamental error rampant among the "literati" is quite simple: they deny that literary devices, from clever wordplay all the way to the most complex metaphors and symbolism, are supposed to serve a purpose. They've made devices and the display of cleverness with them into an end in themselves.

Among other things, this involves seeing oneself as a competitor: with other writers, with the story itself, and with the reader's tenuous purchase on the story as it's being told. A storyteller faithful to his calling does not compete. He serves:

\-- He serves the story he's telling with clarity and appropriate focus at the appropriate points;

\-- He serves the reader by conveying the story to him in a meaningful, emotionally accessible form;

\-- He serves the storyteller's art by reinforcing its norms and perpetuating its values.

To serve, one must be humble. One must not see oneself as the superior of those one serves.

But surely literary devices have their place, don't they? Why would innumerable legions of high school English teachers have drilled their definitions into our heads and compelled us to enumerate them in the works of all those dead white Western European male running-dog lackeys of the patriarchal capitalist conspiracy if they were naught but dross? Of course they do! They have the same place as any other tool: to perform a job that can't be performed with any other tool.

Consider the following snippet from your Curmudgeon's novel Which Art In Hope:

From dinner onward, their evenings were a barely restrained revel, a celebration of excited anticipation expressed in giggles, absurd jokes, and looks and gestures of endearment that a complete stranger couldn't miss. Each night the hearthroom rang with song, with clapping, with the inarticulate delight of voices raised in affectionate japes and ripostes. It went on until, drunk to bursting with family, the couple rose to take their leave and, against wails of protest from the others, retire to their bedroom.

There, bathed in the light of a single candle, they explored the dominion of bliss. They gave their bodies to one another without reservation. Theirs was the fire of youth and the wholeness of love, wherein the oldest things are made new. Each caress, each tenderness, each whispered word became a new skein in the bond that knitted them together, a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy.

You could hardly say that passage is free of devices:

"a barely restrained revel"

"drunk to bursting with family"

"the dominion of bliss"

"a new stone fitted to their rising edifice of joy."

But your Curmudgeon used them consciously, to serve a conscious purpose: the "high-altitude" depiction of the days after two young adults became engaged and opened to one another sexually. Since your Curmudgeon had a broad period to cover, he eschewed descriptions of specific evenings in the company of their family. And of course, specifics about physical lovemaking are almost always deemed crude. Instead, your Curmudgeon used broad devices: nonspecific but evocative descriptions and metaphors.

Literary devices can be useful, just as any tool can be when a task to which it's suited is at hand. But the accomplishment of the task is the important thing, not the tool. Mechanics aren't rated according to how many wrenches they own, are they?

The aspiring storyteller who wants to add a literary touch to his prose would be well advised to practice restraint. Literary devices aren't like crushed walnuts, to be scattered liberally over a cake's frosting, and the more the better. Like every other keystroke, they should be harnessed to the story and the point of its telling: to give the reader a reason to feel for, and with, your Marquee characters. A paucity of devices might strike some readers as "stark" or "bald," but a profusion of them...well, either you got the point from those "literary" passages your Curmudgeon cited at the opening of this essay, or you didn't. In either case, as Digger O'Dell famously said, "I'll be shoveling along now."

==<O>==
13. Motifs

As was mentioned in the essay above, literary devices have their place. The simile, the metaphor, the vivid image, the allusive symbol, the metonymy, the synecdoche, and the litotes are all tools that should be found in a fictioneer's box. But these are his lesser tools, not his greater ones; they're like jeweler's screwdrivers that, when properly used, can be used to tune up a bit of prose with detailed adjustments. There are far more powerful items, the equivalent of jackhammers and pneumatic wrenches, upon which he should rely: sound plotting; a conscious, stirring theme; strong characterization, and a smooth, generally transparent style.

But between the jackhammers and the jeweler's tools lies an intermediate realm of hand wrenches and calipers: approaches and measures that give a story its second-level structure, and whose skillful deployment is inadequately addressed in most tomes on the fictioneer's art. These intermediate tools are more interesting in certain ways even than the high-powered devices used to give a story its overall cast; among other things, the writer usually has to fashion them himself. We shall call these hand tools the story's motifs.

#

A motif is a block of interrelated specifics, used more than once, that strongly colors a story. In other words, when a writer decides to elevate some group of interrelated details to a place of importance in his tale, he's creating and employing a motif. That's more than a little abstract, so a few examples will be necessary.

Motifs are of three general kinds:

\-- There is the plot motif: a pattern of events used several times to emphasize the regularity of causation within the tale.

\-- There is the character motif: a pattern of motivation used to delineate one or more of the Marquee characters.

\-- There is the setting motif: a pattern in the physical, social, political, or cultural backdrop for the story which strongly affects the characters and their decisions.

In Carrie, the first of his novels to reach a large audience, Stephen King made repeated use of the spilling of blood as a plot motif. The subtle shadings of sexuality, revulsion, and violence King was able to invoke through this pattern indicate that he understood, at least subconsciously, the symbolic centrality of bloodshed to our perceptions of our vulnerability and mortality. For example, the story begins with Carrie's menarche. It's an event she doesn't understand. It terrifies her, because her sex-hostile mother has neglected to educate her about the development of her body. Her terror amuses her schoolmates, revulses her mother, and moves schoolmate Susan Snell to "adopt" her as someone in need of special assistance. Thus, it undergirds the development of what follows. The revolting prank played on Carrie at the prom, and the homicidal spree that follows, were all developed from the bloodshed motif at the opening of the story.

Lawrence Block's marvelous novels of private detective Matthew Scudder are stippled with character motifs of several kinds. Scudder's a dry alcoholic, and hasn't been seriously tempted by liquor in many years, but he attends A.A. meetings at frequent intervals. He's a former cop, who left the force out of revulsion at some of its more common failings, but he reluctantly maintains relationships with several Manhattan police authorities, without whose assistance his private work would be more difficult. He's a secularist, with no perceptible religious inclinations, but he regularly tithes himself of his earnings and deposits the result in the poor box of whatever church is nearest to hand. He has a strong sense of justice, and is dogged in its pursuit, but his best friend, Mick Ballou, is a gangster and a murderer, whom he's assisted with various criminal undertakings upon request. The Scudder novels show him regularly confronting these seeming conflicts and finding ways to harmonize them with his highest motives.

Master fantasist Steven Brust has proved adept at the use of motifs of setting. His novels of Dragaera, a world populated by two related but quite different sentient species, are rich in such patterns. Non-human Dragaerans, politically the superior group, fall into seventeen different physical and emotional patterns, or Houses. Each House is based on some non-sentient beast whose genes were spliced into basic Dragaeran stock by a vanished, quasi-divine race called the Jenoine. Within those Houses, the characteristics breed true. Crossbreeds are anathematized and live as Houseless outcasts, a handicap of extreme importance in the highly politicized Dragaeran environment. Feuds between two Houses can last for millennia, are propelled in large measure by those Houses' beast-derived characteristics, and can range from frequent duels between individuals all the way to large-scale private wars. Yet most of the time, these motifs are as much a part of the backdrop as the bricks in the buildings of Adrilankha, the Dragaeran Empire's capital city; the reader becomes aware of them only when climactic events call them forward.

From the above examples, one might think that motifs are primarily of interest to the novelist, who has room to fiddle with such things. Not quite. Even in a short story, motifs can and do play a role:

Alia chose that moment to screech, "Are you going to be our new daddy?" at a pitch that could have shattered the pyramids and roused the pharaohs from beneath them. Heads throughout the restaurant turned to look. Melissa resisted the urge to hide under the table, but just barely.

"Alia, sit and be quiet," he said. The six-year-old reddened at the steel in the words. She was about to go back to her coloring, but Beaufort looked her in the eye and silently compelled her attention.

"I might be, Alia. It will depend on a lot of things. One of them is how you behave while we're here." As Alia's lips twisted into a toddler's petulant pout, he smiled and continued. "If you're really good, I might decide that you don't need a new daddy. Or if you're really bad, I might decide that you just have to have one."

Melissa's mouth dropped open. He flashed her a wink.

"Now," he said, "would anyone like something to eat?"

Here, co-protagonist Ron Beaufort is allowed an important character motif: his penchant for asserting himself at unexpected times, and for reassuring his "victims" immediately thereafter. The pattern repeats twice more in the course of the story. Ron has a full, justified fund of confidence in himself, in every way but one; the exception is the central filament of the tale's resolution. The character motif delineated above was your Curmudgeon's way of heightening the contrast and making evident the depth of Beaufort's agony over his handicap.

#

Of course, motifs must be subordinated to the larger architecture of the story. That is, plot motifs must fit coherently into the overall plot; character motifs must be consistent with the character's overall nature; setting motifs must not clash with one another, nor with other perceptible features of the story landscape. Yet, for a change, this is as easily done as said, for one of the easiest ways to create plots, characters, and settings is to assemble them as collections of motifs. At least, that's often the way your Curmudgeon does it.

It often seems to your Curmudgeon that most storytellers, even the best ones, use motifs subconsciously -- that is, the patterns they create don't rise to the surface of their thoughts as they create them. Stephen King once commented to that effect. But even if this must be so, a debatable point, it's well to be able to recognize one's motifs in the rewrite, for it's then that one must address any contradictions or incoherencies they might create.

What striking examples of motifs have occurred in your reading or writing?

==<O>==
14. Wordings

Brace yourself, Gentle Reader. You're about to read heresy. For your Curmudgeon is emphatically not of orthodox opinion -- orthodox among persons who write about fiction writing, anyway -- when it comes to one's finer-grained stylistic choices. In this regard, he's either a radical or a reactionary, depending on one's baseline.

And damned proud of it, baby.

#

Modifiers

The fashion among today's "stylists" -- yes, those are sneer quotes -- is to suppress modifiers and overload on images and devices. Now, there's nothing inherently objectionable about the use of imagery or image-evoking devices: similes and their more elaborate offspring. Whenever one compares anything to anything else, he's trying to invoke an image from the reader's experiences and harness its power to his story. But writing that completely eschews conventional modifiers -- adjectives and adverbs -- yet insists on deploying comparisons in every sentence takes the reader on a visit to Simile Hell.

Simile Hell is where the analogically obsessed writer is fated to spend eternity. It's a murky place, where one can never be sure whether one is looking at the conscious focus of one's attention, or at something that's merely like it.

Similes are of varying quality, of course, like the goods on a department store's shelves. Good similes expand upon the reader's perception and understanding of the thing being compared, like a magnifying glass that also clarifies color and fine detail. Bad similes are irrelevant comparisons that jerk the reader away from the scene being described, as if one had sat down to a fine Italian dinner only to be grabbed by the necktie and hauled down dark, dank steps into a dungeon, where one is compelled to endure a lecture about the evils of Rosicrucianism and the importance of flossing.

Then there are the hilarities of simile, best exemplified by Douglas Adams's classic: "Huge as office blocks, silent as birds, they hung in the sky in precisely the way that bricks don't." That simile, once read, embeds itself in the memory like a barbed splinter.

Simile Hell is a place of indistinct borders and indeterminate shapes. Nothing there is ever allowed to have its own characteristics, but is described merely as being like something else, as if some malevolent god had decreed that the denizens of that cruel place could only see one another, and the things around them, as reflections from one another's clouded, distorted surfaces.

Clearly, a writer who permits similes to proliferate without limit, like John Wyndham's Triffids, will end up feeling like a slave chained to a runaway machine of unknown purpose. His ability to describe founders under the weight of constant comparisons, and his prose diction becomes as repetitious, as indistinct, and as ineffective as, you know, like, whatever.

Done laughing yet? Well, then let's proceed.

One of the reasons similes and other image-evoking devices get out of control is the prevalent fear of conventional modifiers: adjectives, adverbs, and modifier phrases. While these, too, can be overused, the vacuum they create by their exclusion has obvious detrimental effects.

From your Curmudgeon's own, ridiculously insignificant and distorted perspective, what offends him most, sending his fever-addled brain careening through the borderlands of irreal malice and into the many-shadowed canyons of homicidal insanity that lie beyond, is the obsession with modifiers.

There are two varieties of obsession with modifiers. The first is to avoid them religiously. The second is to drown the reader in them.

The really maddening cases are those writers who, seized by an ineffable ambivalence about the entire, controversy-strewn topic, ping-pong between the two opposed poles. In perusing these, the reader finds himself at times swimming lugubriously through a chow-mein sea, strewn, as though by some malevolent god from the depths of Lovecraft's unrecorded nightmares, with every conceivable kind of adjective, adverb, participial, gerundive, and ablative absolute known to the logophilic hordes. Sentences of a complexity that would have choked William Faulkner, involute as the general theory of relativity and twice as opaque, festooned with terms of that obfuscatory anfractuosity that characterizes the inferior mind struggling to pass itself off as a temple of erudition, wrap themselves around the reader's forebrain in braids of simulated profundity seldom properly equipped with the appropriate punctuation marks which after all are supports to both reading rhythm and comprehension and really shouldn't be dispensed with no matter what the effect the writer is striving to create. Then will come a paragraph break.

After the break, the writer is gripped by the other pole of the obsession. His sentences are all simple declaratives. His writing becomes as terse as a first-grader's primer. No commas are required. Your Curmudgeon's read a lot of stories like that.

Okay, you can go back to breathing normally again.

Is there a "rule"? Not really. What matters, and all that matters, is the effect your words have on him who reads them. This is extraordinarily difficult to judge, even if you've formed a clear profile of your reader, his experiences, his preferences, and his level of reading comprehension. It's one reason -- admittedly, far from the only one \-- that fictioneers are always looking for "test readers," who'll deliver a not-too-painful opinion on whether their latest bit of prose "works."

Words and devices are the storyteller's tool. Like all tools, they must serve the application or be set aside. So what you want is for each word to "carry weight." None of your words should be disposable, and none of your devices irrelevant. Conversely, a word or device required to achieve your purpose should not be omitted, even if it is one of those dreaded adverbs.

If you can transform that somehow into a reliable rule for evaluating your prose, do please send it along. Thanks in advance.

#

The Tom Swifty

When your Curmudgeon decided to make fiction writing into one of his studies, one of his first investigations was into the abjuration of adverbs alluded to above. There are only eight parts of speech; to eliminate adverbs from the writer's toolbox would deprive him of 12.5% of the available tools. It struck your Curmudgeon as absurd. So he plumbed the matter until he found the reason editors wince over adverbs in the works of awkward writers.

What he found was the Tom Swifty.

The Tom Swift books feature some of the very worst prose ever written, but in particular they overuse tonal attributions -- that is, the use of an adverb to color a line of dialogue -- to such an extent that the reader finds himself desperate for a simple, undecorated "he said." A trivial example would be something like:

"You can't talk to me like that," she said angrily.

"Angrily"? Really? Not lovingly or boredly or thoughtfully? What an incredible surprise.

The adverb in that example is not only an unnecessary word; it's an insult to the reader's intelligence. Why is it there?

Because the writer knew his line of dialogue was cliched and weak, that's why. Because he preferred to hack it with a tonal attribution rather than give his character and his story enough thought to come up with something strong enough to carry itself. In other words, because he's a lazy bum.

Lazy bum writers don't attract a lot of readers. The ones they do get are less than penetrating.

Of course, the classical Tom Swifty, for example as celebrated at this site, is the intentional use of an adverb to create a humorous clash with the dialogue, as for example:

"My girl prefers lamb's-wool sweaters," Tom said sheepishly.

"What our team needs is a man who can hit 60 homers a season," Tom said ruthlessly.

"I'll have another martini," Tom said drily.

The tonal attribution in the hands of the inept writer doesn't entertain as those do. It merely makes the reader more conscious of the weakness of the attributed dialogue. Clumsy tonal attributions are probably the most common reason for an editor to reject a submitted story without reading it to the end.

But this is not sufficient reason to excoriate all use of adverbs.

Consider the following passage:

The strangeness of the district disturbed his rhythm. It caused him to shift his attention away from his pace and footing. Inevitably, moving too fast for the surroundings while gawking at the mysteries around him, he tripped and fell.

He collected himself painfully, brushed the dust from the arms of his windbreaker, and looked about for the cause of his tumble. A pace away, a large black cat, the sleekest specimen of felinity he'd ever seen, sat staring at him as if amused at his clumsiness.

Must've tripped over her. Haven't done that in a dog's age.

Despite his pratfall, the internal play on words caused him to smile. He nodded courteously to the cat, who stared at him a moment longer, then turned and slinked away with a cat's typical sinuousness into the open door of a shop he hadn't yet consciously registered.

[From "The Gift Room."]

Your Curmudgeon employed the adverbs "inevitably," "painfully," "courteously," and "consciously" in defiance of the "prohibition." Were they unnecessary? One reader thought so. Did they contribute usefully to the coloration of the scene, and the mental state of the narrator? One reader thought so. It will always be a judgment call, and ultimately for the reader to decide.

Consider again:

Jerome Huygens padded into the kitchen, his burden squirming feebly against his chest. The infant's eyes were closed. Its limbs moved sluggishly, as if the little body barely contained enough force to move them. He laid it down on the great oaken table, stood a moment looking down at it, pulled out a chair and sat.

From ["Foundling."]

Once again, one reader excoriated the use of the adverbs "feebly," "sluggishly," and "barely," while another praised the passage as one of the most evocative openings to a short story she'd ever read. The reader will decide; the writer must use his judgment -- what E. B. White called his "ear."

To develop that "ear," you must read. In particular, you must read extensively within your chosen genre: dozens or hundreds of books by the authors who dominate it and who set its measure. There's no other way to internalize its customs and standards. Many writers, surprisingly, find this hard to do. In the process, some discover that they're unsuited to writing in the genre they've always enjoyed most. It happened to your Curmudgeon.

#

Active, passive, and cognate voice

One of the most frequent bits of detail advice given to developing writers is to prefer the active voice. Strong verbs in the active voice, we are told, give a story drive and pace. Passive verbs and cognates -- verbs of the "to be" family, and related verbs such as "seem" and "appear" -- don't provide that propulsion, and lend themselves to convoluted sentence structures as well.

This isn't wholly false, but like most unconditional rules, it omits a sheaf of important cases:

\-- Scenes where one wants to maintain a slower pace, or deliberately "wash out" the picture to provide contrast with more dramatic scenes;

\-- Scenes where the viewpoint character is himself acting passively;

\-- Scenes where the viewpoint character is being manipulated by more powerful others.

Words are tools, not dictators. You should prefer whichever of the voices is appropriate to what you're narrating at the moment. Consider:

Carl Harris stuck his clipboard under his right arm and shouldered open the door of the little storefront. The assortment of unrelated objects he'd seen through its grimy front windows told him nothing about what kind of business it was. He hadn't targeted this shop specifically. It wasn't on his rolls, and that was enough to warrant a look. When he let himself see and smell the place, he regretted his decision to enter.

The shop was small, dank, and dimly lit. The air hung still and dusty. No one else was in sight. The bare counter he faced from the doorway stood unattended. Harris scanned the room for some indication of what kind of business was transacted here.

The place was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed to their edges with junk. An old chrome toaster stood next to a battered teddy bear, which leaned precariously over an antique shaving mirror. Beside them stood a jumble of shabby jewelry boxes, their fabric hinges frayed to uselessness, and a matryoshka doll whose painted surfaces were more chips than paint. There were tarnished candleholders of rococo design, and decorative candles in fanciful shapes, some that had been lit, some that had not. Ancient clocks and watches abounded. Commemorative plates and mugs were everywhere, proclaiming the glories of places no one in his right mind would ever visit. Over all of it hung an odor of mildew and decay.

The driftwood of innumerable lives had washed up on this lower Manhattan beach. It was a junk shop, not even a pawn shop, and there was nothing more unpleasant for a retail inspector.

From ["The Object Of His Affection."]

You'd be hard pressed to find a "strong" verb in the above. More, the dominant verb is "was," of the dreaded cognate voice. But the passage above describes the viewpoint character's dour assessment of an unpleasant-looking little store, which he's about to enter in the thin hope of a little graft. Are the chosen verbs appropriate to that setting and mission? Would "strong, active" verbs have performed it as well, or would they have detracted from the musty, static, futureless atmosphere of the shop?

#

There's more to say, of course -- your Curmudgeon has omitted a section on idioms, cliches, and the difference between them, in the interests of brevity -- but that's enough for one day.

Probably the most important personal attribute a fiction writer can have is confidence. It allows him to write without agonizing, and to face chores such as rewriting, editorially mandated alteration, and the sneers of critics with equanimity. But no writer's confidence is perfect. Oftentimes the chinks in his armor come from his knowledge that he's violating some loudly, widely trumpeted rule. So your Curmudgeon is here to tell you:

1. In fiction, there are no absolute rules.

2. Rule 1 is not binding.

Be not afraid.

==<O>==
15. The Animal Force

"I've reached an age where sex is constantly on my mind, but seldom on my agenda."

That delightful line was given to the character of President Tom McKenna, played by the late Rock Hudson in World War III, a made-for-television production about a Soviet invasion of Alaska that eventuates in the title disaster. But as piquant as it was in its original setting, your Curmudgeon imagines it even more appropriate from the mouth of many a contemporary novelist.

It seems to be common among American writers that the older they get -- and by implication, the less sex figures into their real lives -- the more sexually focused their fictions become. But their borderline obsessions with what they're not getting doesn't render their stories more appealing. Sometimes it spoils them completely.

Granted that the taboos against sexual depiction have all fallen flat these past thirty years. Granted further that an awful lot of editors are uninterested in books that contain no sexual component. Copious writing about sex does not imply eroticism, wisdom, or skill in doing so.

Sex is a fundamental aspect of human life, and eminently suitable as a motif with which to explore the proper subjects of fiction: the virtues, the vices, their expressions in action, and the emotions that move us among them. But it is only a motif. A story of which sex is the whole point is pornography, and pornography is boring.

Some would argue that point, but the refutation is contained in the title of this essay. Lust is an animal force, not a rational or emotional one. Brunner's Laws of Fiction:

1. The raw material of fiction is people.

2. The essence of story is change.

...demand that in a good story, one must be able to observe changes in people. But changes in people, as distinguished from changes in animals, are about those things that make us human: our rational faculties and our emotional ties to one another. The sex act itself changes neither of these, except as an adjunct to other developments of higher, wider import.

Some extremely skillful writers have turned out one excellent novel after another without ever describing even the build-up to a sex act. Fantasist Steven Brust comes to mind in this regard. In his entire oeuvre, one of the most exciting bodies of work in contemporary fantasy, he's described only a single fleshly clinch, and even there he discreetly drew the curtains before the consummation of the event. Others who rate plaudits in this regard are science fiction giant David Brin, master fantasist Glen Cook, and the immortal Jack Vance. A fine writer who has defaced several otherwise high achievements with gratuitous sexual depictions is Gregory Benford.

In their book Self-Editing For Fiction Writers, Renni Browne and David King gently suggest going counter to the current, sex-drenched trend: "Sometimes the most erotic thing you can write is a line space." Your Curmudgeon concurs. Among other things, it gives readers' flabby imaginations some room to stretch and exercise.

Roughly he thrust his throbbing tool into her quivering quim. "Aaaah!" she wailed, caught fast on the jagged border between lust and outrage as her passion eclipsed her fury at his presumption. Their rhythms conjoined as their bodies had, her alabaster globes heaving in perfect time to the strokes of his velvet-headed love hammer. They moaned and surged as one, willing captives of the tidal forces they had loosed. [From "The Eternal Triangle"]

Where's the imaginative room to roam in that? Your Curmudgeon wrote it as the punchline to a fictional joke, and submitted it to a writers' workshop expecting it to draw, if not guffaws, at least a chuckle or two. It's some measure of the lack of imagination of most aspiring writers that only one of a roomful got the gag; the rest only criticized my excessive use of modifiers. Yet it's merely an ornate equivalent to much of the sexual writing one could find with a random swipe at the shelves of any bookstore. Any section of any bookstore, at that.

Writerly discipline should include sufficient strength and clarity of purpose to eschew the cheap thrill.

Let it be said, however, that your Curmudgeon does not condemn erotic writing as such. Sexual depiction can be purposeful and graceful. Consider the following scene, from the pen of the aforementioned Steven Brust:

"I'm glad Aliera is good at revivification," I said.

"I suppose so."

"For both our sakes," I added, because I meant it.

She looked at me carefully. There was a moment when time did strange things. If I had thrown my stones right, I could have kissed here then. So I did. Loiosh flew off her arm as our lips met. It was hardly an intense kiss, but I discovered that I'd closed my eyes. Odd.

She continued looking at me, as if she could read something in my face. Then she said, very deliberately, "My name is Cawti."

I nodded, and our mouths met again. Her arms went around my neck. When we came up for air, I reached up and slid the nightgown over her shoulders and down to her hips. She pulled her arms free and began working at the clasp of my cloak. I decided that this was insane. She would never have a better chance of getting one of my daggers and finishing me. Verra, I thought to myself, I think I've lost it.

My cloak dropped to the floor, and she helped me take off my jerkin. I paused to remove my boots and stockings, then we fell back together, and the sensation of her small, strong body against mine, her breasts against my chest and her breathing in my ear, my hand on the small of her back, her hand on my neck -- I'd never felt anything like it before, and I wanted to stay just like that, forever, and not take it any further.

My body, however, had its own set of rules, and let me know of them. I began stroking her lower spine. She pulled my head away and kissed me; this time we both meant business. I tasted her tongue, and that was nice too. I heard myself making small moaning sounds as my lips traveled down to her throat, then to the valley between her breasts. I kissed each one, carefully, and went back to her lips. She started fumbling for the catch to my breeches, but I interfered by finding her buttocks with my right hand and crushing her to me again.

We drew back and looked at each other once more. Then we paused long enough to send Loiosh out of the room, because love, like murder, shouldn't have witnesses. [From Yendi]

It's a pity that space considerations should compel your Curmudgeon to sever this scene from what preceded it. The narrator, Vladimir Taltos, is a professional assassin. Cawti, the woman to whom he's about to make love, is another -- and Vlad was her target only a day before. The grace of the scene is heightened still further by the unusual context, but the above excerpt is sufficient to display Brust's grasp of the essence of erotic writing: the evocation of the emotion of desire, and the unanticipated directions in which it can pull us.

Obviously, sex and eroticism in fiction is a huge subject that can't be exhausted by a piddling thousand words. Your Curmudgeon will return to it in a future essay, but for the present, let this summation suffice:

Eroticism is about desire.

Pornography is about plumbing.

==<O>==
16. Confounding the Archetypes

Character definition is hard. It's finicky, requires attention to consistency and plausibility, and demands care in the scripting of dialogue. There are no magic tricks to make it easier...which is why so many mediocre-to-poor writers are known for their unconvincing, cardboard-cutout characters.

But the difficulties don't end there. Character sculpting is also hemmed in by role archetypes: the popular bounds on what sort of character is permitted to have what sort of motives, and how far he'll go in acting on those motives. This is a bound both "from above and below:" a character whose role archetype demands that he be a "bad guy" cannot easily be made into a hero, but making him too bad a bad guy risks trading an archetype for a stereotype, invokes the "been here, read this" effect, and loses reader allegiance.

Role archetypes are culturally formed. For example, in American society today, a high corporate executive is not readily made into a hero; he's presumed to be money-centered and largely indifferent to compassionate concerns or the demands of "social justice." However, go back a century or so, and you'll find that the businessman's role archetype was quite the opposite, as illustrated by the wildly popular fictions of Horatio Alger. Other lands will have other takes on the archetypes attached to particular roles; one must have some familiarity with the milieu to appreciate them.

Your Curmudgeon purely loves to go against the archetypes. It's part of why he sells about one story a decade.

She'd been too reserved for most of the men she'd known, too proper, too Catholic. Not for him. When she'd told him of her determination to remain a virgin until marriage, he had merely nodded. His assent had been so natural as to say but of course, as if the matter hadn't needed to be voiced. [From "Ceremony"]

Here and there around the Internet, she had scattered nuggets of treasure: binary packages that the roaming Shiva would eventually find and absorb into its knowledge base and decision / action machines. No program but Shiva could decode their contents, for the structure she had chosen was one of cascaded enhancements to Shiva's executable code. It depended on intimate knowledge of Shiva's inner workings, especially upon Shiva's ability to modify itself as it ran. Something else the fools had missed. [From "Upgrade."]

Two men could hardly appear less alike than Louis Redmond and Georges Chennault. Vivienne's father was tall and broad-shouldered, craggy of face and brooding of aspect, an intuitively proper fit to his somber trade. Louis was short and slender almost to frailty, had features so soft that they almost disappeared beneath his piercing, miss-nothing eyes, and seemed never to be without a smile.

Yet the similarities went much deeper. Both men exuded a commanding presence. Both were perfectionists, keepers of stratospheric standards. Both were physically powerful, graceful beyond expectation, and possessed endurance equal to any trial. Both lived with the memory of enormous personal loss, and bore it in silence. The thoroughly masculine bond between them was like a living thing. [From "Bargains."]

Indeed, it's your Curmudgeon's contention that a story that absolutely respects all role archetypes and refrains from ever challenging them is about nine-to-one odds-on to be utterly unoriginal and fatally boring.

A character who stays within his role archetype for the duration of the story cannot change enough to be interesting to the reader. At best, he'll be Supporting Cast, if not a Spear Carrier.

This is not to say that role archetypes aren't useful -- as poles. A character can be made interesting by moving him away from his role archetype, or toward it. More, role archetypes can be used to jolt the reader out of "thematic complacency:" the assumption that he knows who the good and bad guys are and can more or less predict what the ultimate conflict between them will be. Isaac Asimov's story "The Dead Past," from his collection Earth Is Room Enough, exemplifies the use of a role archetype to create a stunning surprise of this kind.

In challenging a role archetype, one must be careful not to fall into a trendy cliché. For example, one of today's thicker currents in horror fiction is to promote vampires as good guys. Please! This was original at one time, but at this point it's become monotonous. It's easy to see why it's popular among mediocre horror-fiction writers; after all, what else can one do with an evil vampire but hunt him down and stake him? Yet simply to contradict the vampire archetype gets one nowhere at all. Spike's moral and emotional evolution in the final years of the Buffy, The Vampire Slayer television series shows more imagination by far.

Also, one must not ask the reader to go too far. For example, if one makes a corporate mogul into a hero figure, one must refrain from suggesting that his business activities are driven solely by altruistic motives. It's not necessary to depict him acting like a power freak or a greedy son of a bitch, but the writer must at least nod toward the profit motive, corporate political considerations, and the need to ace the competition. Arthur Hailey's Wheels failed on this score by making protagonist Adam Trenton simply too good to be true, though in many other ways the book was readable and entertaining.

It's wise at your outset into a tale to select one character, whether protagonist or antagonist, whose role archetype you'll challenge. Sometimes in the composition of the story, another character will demand similar treatment, but it's usually bad policy to set out with two or more targets in mind; it's too likely that you'll miss both of them.

Remember, finally, that role archetypes, like archetypes and stereotypes of all kinds, exist because significant numbers of people conform to them. This often has evil social effects; a few excessively sharp businessmen who play the angles too closely, or a few thugs whose attitude toward others is submit or be gunned down, can tar the reputation of the much larger category to which they belong. But the problem you face is not the disproportionate attention such persons get in the popular press; it's the images in the reader's head, and the effort he must exert to set them aside to make room for your character conceptions. The more you ask of him in this regard, the more and better reasons you have to give him for it, just as with any other aspect of reader suspension of disbelief.

==<O>==
17. Give Them What They Want!

Quite a lot of aspiring writers have a very hard time giving them what they want. Such writers tend to fix on preconceived plans of the sort that amount to one-way demands for collaboration, which are by their very nature unenforceable. Unfortunately, if you don't give them what they want, your story will lack both drive and pathos, no matter how intricate your plot or how compelling your theme. They will manifest indifference to your motifs, yawn at your scenery, and shrug at your conflicts. Giving them what they want is the indispensable first step to making them your absolute servants, having them utterly in your thrall, ready to leap to your every command. You can get them to turn out their pockets before your very eyes if you just give them what they want.

What's that? You've never heard anything quite so obvious from one who presumed to dispense advice to other writers? Of course the writer has to give his readers what they want! It's the first principle of all entertainment of any sort.

Well, friend, that's where we part company. Your Curmudgeon wasn't talking about your readers, but your characters.

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In recent years, it's become fashionable to partition stories into plot-centric and character-centric. The former are propelled principally by a progression of thrusts and counter-thrusts between their protagonists and their antagonists; the latter focus on the changes taking place in the protagonist's character.

Of course, a plot-centric story will have a protagonist; however, the ways in which the other elements of the story affect him -- specifically, the ways in which the events of the story cause him to change emotionally -- will absorb less of the writer's effort than the business of keeping the action going. Tom Clancy's The Sum Of All Fears is an example of a good plot-centric story that, while adequately charactered, is deliberately biased toward action and pulse-pounding suspense. The ultimately plot-centric story would be one whose protagonist changes in no perceptible way; at the end of the tale he's exactly the same guy, with exactly the same values and motivations, as he was on page one. If you've suffered through The Da Vinci Code or Angels And Demons, you have a fair idea of what sort of story your Curmudgeon means.

Conversely, a character-centric story must have a plot of some kind; it's just not going to be as intricate or relentless as that of a plot-centric story. An example of a fine character-centric story that also offers a weirdly compelling plot is Stephen King's masterpiece The Green Mile. Death Row boss Paul Edgecombe is in the final stages of a crisis of conscience when supernaturally gifted John Coffey and profoundly evil William Wharton converge on his place of employment to work their respective wonders. The ultimately character-centric story would have so minimal a plot that after he'd finished it, the reader would be inclined to forget it; it would make no impression on his memory, the dramatic evolution of the protagonist having absorbed all his attention. Many a "literary" writer -- yes, those are sneer quotes -- aspires to this "ideal."

The ideal your Curmudgeon prefers is balance. The protagonist should be vivid, clearly the center of events, and possessed of at least one powerful unsatisfied desire, but constrained from attaining it easily. The plot should be strong with events that will lead the protagonist toward his desire and the payment for it, or toward growth that can only come from forsaking it. In other words, the story should emphasize human change.

Change in human beings arises from three and only three sources:

\-- Interaction with other people;

\-- Introspection / contemplation;

\-- A challenge from the physical universe.

For this reason, all worthy plots must make use of one or more of these three elements. But wait: weren't we speaking of what the characters want? Seems to your Curmudgeon that we were. How does that factor appear in the plotting / characterizing equation?

The answer is backstory.

Every character except a newborn baby -- and how interesting are they, really? -- enters his story with a set of qualities and a history. Among those qualities will be the things he most values and the things he most desires. The writer must embed in his protagonist's history a set of reasons for those values and desires. Those reasons must be powerful enough that the protagonist will persevere in his desires despite significant opposition from others or from Nature. If the writer intends that those values are to change, the character must be faced with life lessons that teach him that what he seeks would come at a price he's not willing to pay. (Perhaps he never realized what the price was.) If the writer intends that the character's values are to remain constant, the backstory / plot combination must extract a large cost from the character for prosecuting them: a need for personal growth to remain constant and true.

What your protagonist wants, baldly speaking, is a reason to grow. Whatever backstory you give him, your plot and other characters must enmesh him in difficulties from which he cannot escape without paying an unacceptable price, but which the process of navigating past them will render him more than he was.

In this sense, every good, strongly charactered story is in some way a Bildungsroman: a story of self-discovery. Without significant growth in your protagonist character, you won't have a tale of substance; you'll have a comic book.

Of course, there are some thorny questions remaining. What sort of growth is appropriate and achievable? That depends on your theme and your character's general design. In "Bargains," fourteen-year-old Vivienne seeks the gateway to maturity: she wants to be taken for a serious adult, especially by Louis, the object of her unspoken affection. Vivienne's design makes that a plausible direction into which to steer her, which it wouldn't be if she were a thirty-five-year-old retired porn star. In "A For Effort," Morgana wants to free herself of some obvious social handicaps, so that she can have a love life. She discovers along the way that she needs to give as much as to receive: a bit of knowledge her handicap had concealed from her. In those two tales, the enabling element was a part of the character's skeleton: a characteristic deliberately called to the reader's attention, that would serve to distinguish them from "generic" persons regardless of their other histories. By contrast, in "The Gift Room," co-protagonists Gordon and Marilyn are given very ordinary character skeletons, but a semi-tragic backstory of parental desires unmet, whose frustration chilled their passion for one another. To get what they want, they must rise above their common weakness -- their willingness to surrender to events -- and reach toward one another regardless. (Which they do, with a little help.)

Characters other than your protagonist must be supplied with challenges and desires that will cause them to change, as well. A villain who strives mightily before his defeat, but at his ultimate humbling merely shouts, "Curses! Foiled again!" will excite little interest from your reader, no matter how well you've done with your protagonist. Your Supporting Cast characters should also bear motivations that will make their ongoing interaction with the Marquee characters plausible and dynamic. The best stories have everyone want something from someone else, whether those desires are made explicit or not.

Oftentimes, your Curmudgeon doesn't know what his characters want, or ought to want, until he's written many thousands of words about them. He suspects that this is often the case with other writers as well. But finding out what they want, and then charting a shoal-strewn course for them to navigate toward it, is what gives birth to the most enchanting characters enmeshed in the most compelling plots: the best balanced, most memorable stories.

==<O>==
18. Cliffhangers

Your Curmudgeon doesn't know specifically when or how the term "cliffhanger" was coined. However, the meaning of the term is clear from its visual imagery: it's a climax to a fictional scene, chapter, or episode that leaves the reader in a state of high tension, uncertain of what will happen next, and (hopefully) badly needing to know. The old Saturday serials were fertile ground for cliffhangers, which only stands to reason: the idea is to get the audience to return for the next episode.

Because the idea is so simple and seems so compelling, the cliffhanger is easily misused or overused by writers with an inadequate set of tools. To leave the protagonist hanging by a thread scene after scene is formulaic and ultimately self-defeating. After all, he comes out of it just fine in the next scene, doesn't he? Don't you think the readers are likely to notice and draw the moral? Don't you think they'll get just a bit peeved over such a crude, repetitive attempt to manage them?

But wait! Might there be more than one kind of cliffhanger? The simple sort involves a simple crisis: usually, a crisis that involves physical danger. What about other sorts of hazards and uncertainties? For example, hazards to the protagonist's career, or his good name, or his self-image, or his image in the eyes of his beloved? Can a good storyteller craft a subtler form of cliffhanger from those?

Well, of course. In fact, one of the measures of storytelling skill is precisely that ability. If you're good, you can take anything that's important to your Marquee characters and make it a source of high tension for the reader. But not only must it be visibly important to the relevant character; you must make it important to the reader, too.

The Fox dramatic series 24 shows the versatility of the cliffhanger in the hands of a skilled dramatist. For some twenty episodes of the fifth season, the plot was principally concerned with physical dangers, most particularly the possible use of nerve gas to commit mass murder. However, that danger has passed; as of the episode of a week ago, the nerve gas is no more. What remains is for Jack Bauer, the protagonist, to discover the identities of the malefactors within the United States government and bring them to justice.

For several episodes, the audience has been fed "misdirectors:" a skein of scenes and incidents meant to mislead the viewer into believing that the vice-president has been at the pinnacle of this season's conspiracy. That proposition has emotional supports that flow from the vice-president's largely powerless position, and the typical ambition of the men who've occupied that office to rise to the top spot in their turn. But at the very end of last night's segment, it was revealed that the kingpin is actually President Charles Logan, seemingly the person most threatened politically by the ongoing crisis, whom Bauer and his supporting cast believed themselves to be aiding and supporting all this time.

This is a cliffhanger of motivation: why would the president of the United States, inarguably the most powerful public official in the world, orchestrate a grand conspiracy that could murder thousands of Americans and bring ruin upon his own administration?

You won't find out all at once; 24's scriptwriters remain true to their established form. The resolution of the affair is spun out to the very end. More, in fulfilling his mission and doing justice as he understands it, protagonist Bauer will be compelled to pay a terrible price. (Though, if you've followed the series since its inception, you might justifiably wonder what prices are left for the man to pay.)

The way the president's characterization has been handled is of special interest. Throughout the series to this point, he's been portrayed as more acted upon than acting, a bumbler who lacks the strength of character demanded by the office he occupies. The advisors and agents who surround him have all eclipsed him in moral certainty, readiness to act on their perceptions and convictions, and arguably most important of all, their acceptance of the possible and actual consequences of their actions. Given everything we've been shown, one would easily dismiss Logan as an accidental president -- he was elected vice-president, and reached the Oval Office upon the death of the president during season four -- doomed to be remembered as a caretaker, rather than imagine him as the mastermind of a grand plot of any sort.

Therefore, audience interest must hang on the twin hooks of why the president would involve himself in a conspiracy -- he's reached the peak of all political power; what more could he aspire to? -- and how that much malevolence could have remained so carefully hidden behind his facade of ineptitude.

A writer who seeks to craft an absorbing thriller should ponder the various supports for a cliffhanger. For the reader / viewer must have a reason to go on from each chapter to the next. A story that can exploit several sources of tension -- physical, political, financial, psychological, familial, romantic -- to keep its protagonists in motion will enmesh its audience irresistibly; it will end with them wanting more. A story that excites only one such source had better be kept compact and wound up quickly, as innumerable boring books, movies, and television dramas have demonstrated. The last thing you want the consumer to say about your effort is that "it could have been much shorter."

==<O>==
19. Targets

Every aspiring writer is at some point counseled to do the following things:

\-- Read heavily in the genre in which he plans to write;

\-- Read particular books on the craft of writing;

\-- Attend a writers' workshop;

\-- Write a romance;

\-- Write a murder mystery;

\-- Write a thriller;

\-- Attend a writers' conference;

\-- Chalk it all up and do something constructive with his time.

Item 1 is always advisable. Item 2 is usually advisable, if the books be well selected; quite a number of writers-on-writing aren't worth the powder to blow them to Hell. Item 3 is occasionally worthwhile, though not for the techniques one might learn there; rather for exposure to the prevailing degree of writers' self-absorption and angst. Items 4, 5, and 6 are only relevant to those who want to write in those genres. Item 7 is of value only if one already has a finished, well polished novel to sell and needs to generate contacts with agents and editors. Item 8...well, perhaps we shouldn't go there.

But note: Items 1, 2, and 3 pertain to the technical aspects of creating good fiction. The remainder (except for item 8) pertain to the process of marketing it. (With regard to items 4, 5, and 6, those genres have the largest annual sales volumes and the highest turnover, and are therefore the easiest to sell. Ask any agent.) Before any of that is relevant, one must choose one's targets.

"Targets?" you cry. "What targets? I already know what I want to write!" Undoubtedly you do. But you're likely to be thinking about something quite distant from what your Curmudgeon has in mind.

Every worthwhile writer -- i.e., every writer who's not a pandering hack -- comes to this venture out of a love of fiction. But what made him love it? There are only three possibilities:

His gut: He's fallen in love with fictional excitment, the pulse-pounding, edge-of-the-seat feeling he gets from his chosen genre. This often results from an immersion in adventure-oriented genres, such as Clancyesque techno-thrillers or international intrigue.

His head: He's felt his consciousness expand from his reading, such that more of the world makes clearer sense as a result. This usually stems from acquaintance with great novels of ideas, such as Hugo's Les Miserables, Melville's Billy Budd, or Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

His heart: He's been touched by great emotions, brilliantly depicted by writers with a sense for the eternal verities. One who's loved Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, or Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings will be of this sort.

A writer almost always wants to give his audience the same gift the fiction he's loved has given him.

This often causes the aspiring writer to turn away from the genre that was his first target. Lawrence Block, in one of his wonderful books on the writing trade, narrates how, when he first set pen to paper, he intended to write science fiction, the genre that had most thrilled him as a youth. But he discovered in short order that he could most effectively create the sort of tension and excitement he loved by writing crime thrillers: detective procedurals and the like. No doubt he set science fiction aside with some reluctance -- no one abandons a passion like that easily -- but anyone familiar with his accomplishments would have to admit that it worked out for the best.

Also, one's choice of target can constrain his technical choices, at times rather closely. The most obvious of these is story length. Idea-oriented fiction, intended to appeal primarily to the intellect or the imagination, can often be quite short yet highly compelling. Science fiction, of all genres the most idea-oriented, abounds with writers who specialize in blowing open the reader's skull in 5,000 words or less. (Indeed, many an SF novel could be compressed to 5,000 words with no loss of its value and with a great savings of the reader's time and patience.) However, thriller fiction almost always needs extensive development. The writer can't get the reader onto the edge of his seat in so few words; he has to build up the reasons over the course of many scenes and chapters.

But what one's target most narrowly determines is his choice of theme.

The modern thriller writer must stick closely to good-versus-evil constructions. He'll often weave a very imaginative plot, but because his target is the gut, he can't afford to allow more than a trace of thematic or moral ambiguity. The crux of his creation is always the struggle by that which is plainly good good to prevail over plainly evil opposition, against enormous odds. He must keep his readers' attention focused there if he wants to keep their loyalty.

Idea fiction, aimed at the head, rides a different vector. Isaac Asimov, well known for his very cerebral fiction, kept to themes of imagination, discovery, and the importance of alertness to possibilities. He seldom explored a moral theme, and in consequence his stories seldom had explicit villains. Mostly, his protagonists struggled against the forces of Nature, or against their own lack of comprehension of them: What you don't know can hurt you, and what you do know can save you.

Emotional fiction, aimed at the heart, has little or nothing to do with romance. It depends wholly on the writer's grasp of a great moral truth, and his ability to dramatize it within a plausible context. Since drama only exists when men must suffer for being good, the depiction of such a theme will involve anxiety, frustration, pain, sacrifice, counterpoised necessities and fears, the paying of great prices, and (hopefully) a final evaluation that "it was all worth it." To produce a story of this sort requires both fortitude and endurance, for the writer will usually suffer right along with his protagonists. At the end, he might well wish he had written a nice romance.

Ultimately, every writer writes for himself. Yet every writer hopes that he can find readers that will love the things he's loved, for the same reasons and in equal measure. Whether his target is the gut, the head, or the heart, the writer's core intention is the same: to share that which has stirred him with a similarly minded reader, that they may know, if only for an instant, a commonality that erases all the other differences between them.

==<O>==
20. Beginnings

"Beginnings are such delicate times." -- Lady Jessica, in Frank Herbert's Dune

Well, yes, at least when writing fiction. But not because the principles of a good beginning are difficult to comprehend.

There have been many formulas advanced for how one should light off a compelling story. Most of them are variations on "hit the ground running." That's not bad advice. In general, a writer who follows it will at the minimum get his readers to turn the first page, a consideration of supreme importance in selling books. But it fails to go to the heart of what makes fiction truly compelling: that is, what causes the reader to invest emotionally in the story being told. A grasp of that fundamental truth makes it unnecessary to remember any formula for effective storytelling, whether at the beginning, the middle, or the end.

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This is not a subject about which a writer-on-writing should be coy, so your Curmudgeon will get the root principle down right away.

Many a mediocre novel begins well. The beginning makes the reader care about the results of the action to come. In some cases, the reader can foresee the development; in others, it will take him completely by surprise. But to get your reader to finish your story, you must compel him to invest emotionally in one or more of the Marquee characters: to want to see them fight past the obstacles before them and prevail over their enemies.

A storyteller who succeeds in making his readers care about the efforts and well-being of his protagonist(s) will never lack for fans. If you've wondered at the popularity of series-character novels, such as Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels or Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, you have the explanation right here. The enduring protagonist character enters each subsequent adventure with the reader's love already firmly attached to him. (This approach also minimizes the author's character-development work, but today I'm specifically concerned with the reader's response.)

Therefore, a writer who wants to fasten his story immovably to the reader's hands will usually introduce a Marquee character with the first sentence, and give the reader a reason to care about him within the first page. A variation on this principle comes easily to mind: Immediately introduce a hateful villain doing hateful things, such that the reader desperately wants to see him get his comeuppance. However, that's a harder trick to pull off, and can undermine the story's ability to fascinate with mystery, so it should be approached with caution.

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Here's an example of how a writer with a suspense tale to tell might seduce a reader into immediate emotional investment with a Marquee character:

At first, there was only darkness, and a dim sense of upward motion, like swimming through dark water. Then there was light, and noise, and incredible pain.

Christine half-remembered the crash, but had no idea where she was or what was being done to her. The flood of pain from her face blocked her rational powers. The perception of restraint threatened her sanity. A single phrase roared through the torture.

"She's coming awake!"

She surged upward against whatever was holding her. Strong hands pressed her back. Something metallic attached to her face, pulling upon it, tore loose and fell off to rest against her ear. Her scream could have shattered stone.

A needle pierced her arm. Her terror flew beyond any recall. She dropped back into the darkness, certain she would never see light again.

That's the opening to On Broken Wings. Obviously, Christine is in a lot of pain, and possibly in quite a lot of trouble as well. The deliberately under-described setting could be an operating room, but it could easily be something much more sinister. The reader must continue reading to find out what's going on, and what will come of it. The pace suggests that the plot will accelerate rapidly, which it does, at least for the first ten thousand words or so.

Of course, if the overall pacing of your tale will be more sedate than the sort of wild adventure implied by the above, you should gear your opening toward it. For example:

On the day it began, I was at work at Onteora Aviation. I was on my way to somewhere. I can no longer remember where. Once there, I would do something required by my middle management job, with indifferent cooperation or bored resistance from some other middle manager. After that, I'd return to my usual routine, which was mostly juggling figures and composing reports that had only a tenuous relation to anything in the real world.

I was headed downstairs, with a folder of papers tucked under one arm. I reached the landing between floors, wheeled to continue down the next flight, and found myself staring helplessly at the most beautiful woman God has ever put on this sorry ball of mud.

She was tall, about five feet eight, with a buxom-slender figure from an adolescent fantasy. She wore a navy blue skirt suit that hugged her with a lover's fervor, and matching high-heeled pumps that transformed her already magnificent legs into instruments of erotic torment. Her dark brown hair brushed gently over her shoulders as she climbed. When she raised her face and her eyes met mine, the impact should have thrown me back against the wall. Those eyes were huge, luminous, and so kind that I couldn't imagine her ever speaking a word in anger.

No woman had shaken me that way since Bea left me.

That's from "The Middle Years," a short sentimental romance. The as-yet-unnamed narrator character has clearly been smitten, quite by surprise, by the encounter on the stairs. If the reader has a twinge of sympathy for the narrator and taste for that sort of story, he now has his reason to finish it. (Of course, readers with "a twinge of sympathy for the narrator and a taste for that sort of story" tend to seek their preferred fiction in magazines with titles like Sappy Implausibilities For The Geriatric Romantic rather than on right-wing Websites, but that's another subject.)

The writer of "world-building" fiction, where an exotic setting is quite as important to the story as the interactions of the characters, has a special problem: he must induce both character investment and intrigued involvement with his fantastic setting, more or less simultaneously. For example:

The night-gale had abated with the touch of the sun. Gregor stirred, slid a hand to his eyes and teased his cloak away from his face. Day was returning to the Great Waste.

He shielded his eyes from blown grit as he uncurled and stretched his cramped limbs. If Aral was correct and the wind spoke true, he would reach the next oasis that day. He fished a jerky strip from his pack and chewed it without pleasure as he set off, head bent against the wind and the sun at his back.

The sun was just clear of the horizon when he planted his staff upon the western ridge and peered down at a verdant plain.

The green expanse stretched toward the horizon. Hovels and huts dotted the land, from the foothills of the mountain he bestrode as far west as he could see. Smoke rose from chimneys and cooking fires. In the distance, beneath a belt of low-hanging clouds, lay a hint of an obstruction, perhaps another range to girdle the tranquil vale that beckoned from below.

It was a bastion against the wastes, a protected space where life yet sustained itself.

The etheric aroma of plentiful mana rose from the greensward, curled around his brain and teased at his powers, making him momentarily dizzy. He reeled with a hunger not of the body, yet as commanding as any physical humor could be.

At the center of the plain was a large structure, perhaps sixty feet square and forty feet high, apparently all of stone: a noble's castle, small but definite. Men moved along its ramparts. Around it, a broad brown area had been trodden smooth.

Gregor's last brush with nobles and subjects and civilization lay thirty leagues behind him, in the charnel-festooned ruins of Beluz where no living thing remained. Where he had left the greater part of his soul.

Fulfilling his charge without entering the settlement would mean considerable privation. After six days in the wastes, his food was almost gone, and his mana was down to nothing. Even so, he searched for a path around the edge of the greensward. Perhaps he might go past the town without encountering its denizens, yet still replenish his stores.

The need to see another human face welled up inside him. It beat back his fear and revulsion.

He hefted his pack higher onto his shoulders, took a firmer grip on his staff, and plodded down the shallow crevice in the mountains, toward the oasis at his feet.

That's the opening scene to "The Warm Lands," a fantasy novelette set in an unknown place and time. It was equally important to involve the reader with Gregor, the protagonist, and to introduce the critical characteristic of the world through which he moves: its overall lifelessness, such that a human habitation is a rare and precious discovery. From here on out, the reader is on notice that such communities are few, far between, and in constant danger of dissolving into the wastes that surround them.

A beginning passage can fail for a number of reasons. One of the most common is the desire to emphasize something other than a Marquee character: some aspect of setting, time, or technology, or worst of all, a Supporting Cast character. Here's an example from Chosen One:

Let me tell you of the place I love, and I will follow with the story of him whose grace taught me to love it.

Onteora County is a kidney-shaped, semi-rural swatch of central New York State, just about equidistant from Manhattan and Buffalo. It's mostly forest, quiet and green, hot and damp in the summers, cold and snowy in the winters. It has no well-known businesses. It has no tourist attractions. The big apple orchards are mostly further downstate, the Seneca Wine Trail doesn't reach quite this far, and the Finger Lakes vacation trade managed to miss it as well. It's noted for nothing of importance to anyone outside. That's the way we like it.

The county has one city of sorts, also named Onteora, which sits at its center. Although not quite half the size of Rochester and possessing no major assets to speak of, the city dominates the county socially, commercially, and politically. Truth be known, it's not much of a city, but it's what we have.

The economy's not good here. It never has been. Most Onteorans have to work brutally hard to stay level with their bills. There are a few well-to-do families, and one genuinely rich one, the Forslunds, but no one would mistake this for Westchester or the Gold Coast of Long Island.

The mistakes in that passage are innumerable. The worst of them:

The narrator character, though he's important to what follows, is Supporting Cast rather than Marquee status.

He refers to someone who's obviously more important to the story than he, but provides no information about him whatsoever.

The next three paragraphs are an eighth-grade geography lesson about a fictional place.

Worse, those paragraphs are phrased in negatives, not positives, such that even an eighth-grader passionate about New York geography would have a hard time imagining what the place described is like.

As flat as the quoted passage is, the scene that it opens is even drier and less compelling.

GAHH! What an abortion! Yet your Curmudgeon is unable to alter it. The setting is critical to no fewer than five novels, this being the opening to the first one. The unnamed narrator character returns to narrate six Intermezzo segments which link and buttress the nine episodes of the novel. Indeed, he returns as narrator and co-protagonist of one of those episodes. Even though he's not the emotional focus of the novel, his critical position in the life of the true protagonist convinced your Curmudgeon that he had to let him have his say right at the outset. That's what happens when the author surrenders his authority to a mere child of his mind. (Yes, yes, the narrator proves to be a supernatural creature with a terrible mission and mind-bending powers of several kinds, but that's really no excuse.)

"As ye begin, so shall ye finish." It's as true in fiction as in anything else.

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To recap: for the writer to fasten an inescapable grip upon the reader's attention, his opening scene should involve the reader with a Marquee character. As a secondary task, the opening scene should suggest the tenor of the material to come, whether in pace, setting, or emotional tone.

That isn't hard to understand, but it can be hard to do. It can be far easier to slide one's way into a tale, just telling it linearly as it occurs in one's mind, without regard for the reader's annoying tendency to toss a book aside if it doesn't grip him right off the rack. Indeed, a case could be made that lazy openings, insufficiently infused with reasons for the reader to care about what comes next, are what keep dust-jacket and back-cover blurb writers in coffee and cakes. While your Curmudgeon is all for full employment, it's just as important that a storyteller know how to build reader interest on his own.

Incidentally, if you've wondered about the modern tendency among publishing-house editors to disdain prologues -- backstory material presented in advance of the "real" opening scene of a novel -- you have the explanation here. Prologues are nearly always emotionally colorless. They convey information, rather than establishing Marquee characters or the trials they must face. In those cases where the information is indispensable to the reader, but could not be woven into the "real" story without seriously distorting it, the writer has a tough decision to make.

No, the principles of a "good beginning" aren't hard to understand, but they can be awfully hard to obey.

==<O>==
21. Using Others' Stories

The world of English-language fiction is extraordinary in its breadth and depth. Hundreds of thousands of novels, and tens of millions of short stories, have been published over the last century alone. A number of these are widely enough known to have become part of the "Twenty Questions" space: the 220 bits of information that constitute our common culture at this instant in time.

Have you written any of those beloved works? No, your Curmudgeon neither. But writers are aware of them at all times; they form the plateau from which we launch our own efforts. It is therefore natural that we will sometimes attempt to ring resonances from them by alluding to them, borrowing a character or a motif from them, or stealing their worldscapes outright.

It's not illegal...well, not all the time. (It's sometimes not immoral, and it's never fattening.) Indeed, a well placed reference to another writer's story can be the special touch that makes your story truly memorable. But like any other opportunity, it has some associated hazards.

The most obvious hazard is plagiarism. It's the sole unforgivable sin of fiction writing; no one has ever recovered from it. It casts a pall over everything else a writer might do, before and after the fatal act. Readers will forever after wonder whether his works are truly his own, or were "borrowed" from others.

The definition of plagiarism is fairly loose; one can refrain from copying another's exact words yet still cross into forbidden territory. For example, were Smith to appropriate a Marquee character from Jones without permission, and without openly designating his story as "fan fiction" -- i.e., directly derived from Jones's oeuvre -- he would be committing plagiarism. The same would be true of the use of another writer's original fictional setting. (Original fictional setting: we all have equal rights to Maine and to Mars, but Stephen King owns Castle Rock, and Edgar Rice Burroughs owns Barsoom.) To remain in the safe zone, these are practices one should always avoid.

Your Curmudgeon once had to endure a bit of plagiarism of a less obvious sort at a writers' group meeting: a new attendee read us an interminable bit of poetry about a quest for a magic sword. That poem featured:

  * Elves,

  * Dwarves,

  * Orcs,

  * Trolls,

  * Good wizards,

  * Evil wizards,

  * \--...and an ongoing struggle between good and evil forces for the fate of the world.

Sound familiar? When your Curmudgeon objected to it on those grounds, the "writer" got huffier than huffy, demanded to know what was "really" wrong with his "creation," and then lapsed into sullen silence. Truly, it was one of those moments when one either understands the issues intuitively, or one will never grasp them at all.

There are "subcreations" and "homages" that are quite all right; Glass Hammer's stirring Journey of the Dunadan and Robert B. Parker's fine Perchance to Dream are of that sort. But friends, these folks are experts. Experts know what sort of permissions to secure before setting out on such a course. Know what you're doing before you commit yourself.

A second risk, seldom appreciated by the novice writer, is that of "getting lost in the sauce:" that your story will be eclipsed by the power of the classic to which you've alluded. Notice how averse contemporary commercial writers are to citing the works of Shakespeare? It's not just because no one understands Tudor English any more.

In contrast to the hazard of plagiarism, this problem is somewhat "genre-locked." That is, it's a greater hazard for those who work in the newly respectable fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror than for those in other categories. Because there are few persons with J.R.R. Tolkien's vaulting imagination, an awful lot of modern fantasy simply screams out his name. Because there are few persons with Stephen King's sense for the truly horrific, quite a bit of contemporary horror is either flat as a clapboard or an inferior retelling of something King has already covered. And it's well past time we closed the book on "traditional," spacefaring science fiction adventure; Poul Anderson and Larry Niven have left us no room in which to work.

He who lacks the required originality of vision will frequently be seduced into unwisely leaning upon landmark tales such as The Lord Of The Rings, The Stand, Tau Zero, or Ringworld, in the hope that some of their magic will rub off on his creation. It usually works to his detriment. The last thing any writer would hope for is that his readers should forget his works as they return to some classic he's cited, but that's exactly what happens to those whose ambition exceeds their talents.

A third risk, subtler than the two above but arguably just as destructive, is of losing your story altogether: not in the sense of having it taken away from you by legal or illegal means, but in the sense that you the author might lose sight of your theme, or the central thread of your narrative, because of an unwise invocation of another's works.

After all, why does one cite or allude to another's tale? Because it has power. But fictional power is...powerful. It can move, break, and warp. Its first effect is on the mind of the writer, who must somehow channel its energy into his preferred direction, without allowing it to rechannel him away from the intention with which he first sat down to write. That can be a very hard job.

For example, your Curmudgeon's story "The Warm Lands" walked a tightrope because of a fantasy motif upon which it depends: the finitude, and therefore the exhaustibility, of mana: magical power. Larry Niven's fantasy series, beginning with his award-winner "Not Long Before The End" and continuing through his The Magic Goes Away novel, uses a similar idea. The Niven stories, which focus on the impending exhaustion of all the mana in the world, have an apocalyptic power about them, which has made them exceedingly popular. But in "The Warm Lands," the apocalypse has already occurred, and men are struggling to survive in the aftermath. Yet throughout the story, your Curmudgeon had to resist the urge to go back in fictional time and explore how the disaster came about, with plenty of mock-history and just enough mathematics to illuminate the inevitability of the catastrophe. He'd set out to write about a particular kind of clash of motivations; he had to stay faithful to that end, or his story would have collapsed to something little better than a knock-off.

If this makes it sound too risky ever to make use of a better-known writer's works, well, better that you be too scared than not scared enough. The path is strewn with rocks and thorns, and includes the possibility that your borrowings might undermine not only your work-under-development but also the maturation of your own talent. Borrowings, blatant or subtle, are a less likely road to attaining the fullness of one's powers than a strict cleaving to one's own visions and style. Besides, how many times do you think the Three Stooges had to practice that poke-in-the-eye prank before they got it just right? Do you really have the patience for that?

==<O>==
22. "Your Future"

Time was, one could easily find coin-operated scales in public places that would, for a penny or a nickel, tell you your weight, profile your personality, and "calculate" your horoscope. They're all but extinct now, as are many devices that were once made available to the public, but the memory lingers...and provides your Curmudgeon with the seed material for this essay.

Devotees of fantasy and science fiction are aware of the critical importance of attractive "world-building." The author must construct a fictional realm that can seduce the reader into the all-important suspension of disbelief. The task has many facets, among which the following stand out:

\-- Enough similarity to the real, familiar world to keep it from being unacceptably alien;

\-- Enough difference from the real, familiar world to make it intriguing and evocative;

\-- An adequate, but not overpowering, degree of detailing;

\-- Coherence around the particular assumptions the author has made about its laws, the way they operate on people, and the way people operate on them.

It's no easy task, as you might imagine. Probably the hardest part of it is separating the "design decisions" that must be made up front from those that should be deferred until the author's imagination and his assumptions about his world have had some time to work on one another. But one way or another, the work must be done if a speculative setting is to have enough appeal to counter the reader's innate skepticism and laziness.

Indeed, the work must be done even if one is writing putatively non-speculative fiction. There are powerful reasons for this that many writers never grapple with.

A story's fictional setting must accommodate the story's characters, plot, and theme. If the protagonist is a heroic sort, whose tale is one of struggle nobly undertaken against formidable odds, the setting is as responsible for providing him those things as is his antagonist. For example, if the plot centers on a conspiracy of powerful men, the world around it must be one that would accommodate such a thing, rather than one in which conspiracies would have no chance to form. Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle provides a case study. Alternately, if the plot is a tragic one, wherein the hero fails but goes down fighting for his ideals, the surroundings must not be so hostile that the outcome is foreordained in the reader's mind. Also, there must be room for a Supporting Cast that will appreciate the hero's nobility and sacrifice, and perhaps form the nucleus around which a movement to fulfill his vision will grow. Robert Silverberg's A Time Of Changes, though seriously flawed, provides an example of this sort of setting. Third, if the protagonist is an anti-hero, crushed by circumstances and destined to remain so, the surroundings must be made overpowering, and the protagonist given scope within the narrative for the sort of self-depiction that will allow the reader to bond to him despite his inevitable doom. There's no better example of this sort of world than George Orwell's immortal 1984.

Some exceptionally talented writers have failed utterly at this task. For example, Patrice McKillip's Riddle-Master trilogy, while wonderfully imaginative and written with considerable grace, completely scamps the critical requirement of that sort of fantasy adventure: establishing the reasons for the struggle over the control of the world in which Morgon, her protagonist, becomes embroiled. The setting, a world in which "land-law," the natural laws that sustain all life, must be carefully superintended by human stewards, was apparently central to the conflict, but how? Perhaps the genesis of the Riddle-Master War was buried in her backstory, but she failed to give the reader enough clues to infer it.

The point is that the writer must establish the plausibility of the central conflict and its outcome. Of course, it's well known that a hero must never triumph easily; it gives rise to yawns. But when a hero is destined to fail, he must have adequate reasons. This is especially the case when the "hero" is a Winston Smith-type character who doesn't have a chance in hell, but is resolved to assert himself anyway. For the reader will assume that the protagonist, however mousily he's depicted, possesses a hero's character, and perhaps a reserve of strength of which even he is unaware. Readers are like that. More to the point, readers assume that protagonists are like that.

Lurking behind the curtains of setting and its proper adjustment to characters and plot is the importance of theme.

You've sat down to your typewriter or word processor to write. Very well, but to write about what? A character? But why? What makes him interesting enough to be worth your time, or that of your readers? Unless you provide him a setting that allows him to stand out, and presents him with a challenge worthy of his excellences, what point will there be to his existence? What do you plan to use him to say?

Characters and plots must be fitted to their settings because only by creating the appropriate degree of inexorable conflict among them can the writer express a conviction about human nature, the individual's relation to his society, or the destiny of Man. This is true even in the softest and silkiest of genres, where the apparent point is merely to evoke desire or romantic allure. The romance writer needs a sense of mission -- a sense of having something to say about people, how they cope with life, and how they cope with one another \-- just as much as does the architect of grand and fantastic worlds.

Rather than press the point too brutally, your Curmudgeon will now depart the stage to provide a humorous example of thematic incoherence and its consequences: the "tandem story" of Laurie and Carl.

Rebecca and Gary

English 44A

SMU

Creative Writing

Prof Miller

In-class Assignment for Wednesday

Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

\---

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel." Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth \-- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.

You total $*&.

Stupid %&#$!.

Get the idea?

==<O>==
23. Adventures in Speculation

The speculative genres -- science fiction, fantasy, and horror -- exert a powerful attraction upon the young writer. (Romance is not a speculative form, no matter how ardently you disbelieve in love.) Many of them conceive their desires to write from the pleasure they've taken in reading spec-fiction. When such a writer first sets his fingers to the keyboard to embark on his own journey of the imagination, the odds are about even money that before the first keystroke he'll be asking himself, "How on Earth do I do this?"

Spec-fiction appears to promise freedom. The promise is not entirely illusory, but the benefit comes at a cost: a rather substantial amount of work.

The character and quantity of the work the writer must undertake depends upon his orientation within his target genre. For example, science fiction is partitioned more or less firmly into "hard" and "soft" sub-genres. "Hard" science fiction leans heavily on the wonders of imagined advances in technology and what they might enable Man to do, whereas "soft" science fiction focuses on the emotional and sociological impacts of a set of imagined changes to society. The approaches required by these sub-genres are entirely dissimilar, as are the audiences that delight in them. Few writers who succeed in one are competent in the other.

To compose a worthy story in a spec-fiction genre requires:

\-- A speculative point of departure -- that is, a conception of a world whose natural laws or technological achievements vary in some way from our own;

\-- A plot concept for a conflict or challenge that depends closely upon that departure;

\-- A character concept for a protagonist and, in about half of the cases, a matched antagonist who will act out that conflict;

\-- Enough thought about the details of the notional world to be able to make it seem real and substantial to the reader despite its variation from our own;

\-- Skill at writing in a well-disciplined style, for the one thing spec-fiction cannot withstand is poorly controlled writing.

A young writer whose "eyes are bigger than his stomach" will often approach his first spec-fiction work with rather too much speculation and not nearly enough character conception or hard thought. That's central to the temptation toward spec-fiction writing: the freedom to play with all these delightful ideas and possibilities that mundane reality currently refuses to support. But stories are not "about" science, technology, magic, gods and demons, or "things that go bump inna night." They're about people, their desires, fears, and convictions, the ways in which their environment shapes them, and the ways in which they change and are changed by their environment and one another. Always remember Brunner's Laws of Fiction:

1. The raw material of fiction is people.

2. The essence of story is change.

For this reason, your Curmudgeon's advice to the young writer first addressing a spec-fiction genre is to start small.

There are three components to this advice:

\-- Make your speculative motif as modest as you can.

\-- Keep the story's cast of Marquee characters very small: no more than two or three.

\-- Confine yourself to a short story of a few thousand words at most.

This isn't motivated by the conviction that spec-fiction is unusually hard to plan and write, though its challenges do contrast with those of "reality fiction." It springs from the sense that the writer new to his chosen spec-fiction form has to develop several aptitudes at the same time. He should strive to keep any of them from so dominating his thoughts that it causes him to shortchange the others. In practice, that militates toward a short story with a single speculative motif and a small cast.

Your Curmudgeon's first venture into speculative fiction was his short story "Discount." It's a "Twilight Zone" style urban fantasy. It won an original-fiction contest and has garnered many accolades. Note all the following:

  * It's short: about 4500 words;

  * It has a single Marquee character;

  * \--Its speculative motif is quite compact: a "divine intervention" that tests a wastrel's ability to withstand the temptations that arise from having his wish granted.

The construction of that story was a revelation to your Curmudgeon, who had always delighted in "big production" science fiction and fantasy: The Lord Of The Rings, The Foundation Trilogy, and Ringworld. It taught him that to touch the reader's sense of wonder does not require clashes to the death between demigods at whose lightest footsteps continents heave and heroes quiver, nor incomprehensible technologies that can whisk a man across the universe and back before breakfast. There was a considerable sense of accomplishment to accompany the sense of enlightenment.

So if the one of spec-fiction genres appeals to you, but you're not quite sure where to begin or your animating idea seems to demand a ten-year, two-million-word commitment, consider instead the advantages of starting small. Among other things, it will be easier to find test readers -- and they're more likely to actually read what you give them!

==<O>==
24. Workshops and Similar Torments

The compelling theme, the unique plot line, and the vividly original character all demand to be shown off. Once you've imagined them, you'll be impatient to bestow them on others. This impulse is in equal parts an expression of the generosity of the creative mind, a desire for the approval of others, and the nagging fear that if this stuff is that good, someone must have thought of it before.

So, if you're a more-or-less typical writer, you'll hunt for readers even before your work is finished.

You're expecting a proclamation of judgment, aren't you? But in this regard your Curmudgeon is quite as typical as you, and so would be judging himself. That's something he tries to avoid. Besides, there are plenty of others eager to do it for him.

Among writers-on-writing, the consensus, strong but not overwhelming, is that it's usually a bad idea to show incomplete or unpolished work. Let's assume this to be true; the reasons advanced:

  * It breaks the flow of the creative process;

  * It's an imposition on others who aren't privy to the creative process;

  * A willing reader is a scarce resource; if you "use him up" on snippets, he might not -- probably won't \-- be available for other, more serious duties.

...are all strong ones. But there's that terrible need to know whether you're on the right track. Is the theme a resonant one? Is the plot elegant or contrived, original or derivative? Are the characters plausible, consistent, and appealing?

Be very careful. Be a little afraid. In the early stages of their development, your story and your characters are like newborns. What pride and pleasure you might get from showing them around must be weighed against the possibility that they might catch something, or that someone will mishandle and drop them.

This is a particular danger in that form of self-flagellation known as the writers' workshop.

#

The typical writers' workshop or critique circle is composed of people who can tell a story affectingly but lack confidence in their technical skills, alongside people who couldn't wring a tear out of you with the tale of the Crucifixion, but won't hesitate to tell you how you ought to do everything, down to the smallest detail. Come; let's peer over the shoulders of a few archetypal attendees together.

Smith, a man of good will, holds up a story for comment. It has its rough spots. There are a few unnecessary modifiers. One character's voice isn't quite established. In one or two places the point of view isn't perfectly clear. Yet Smith plainly has the storyteller's gift. His story speaks from his heart to the hearts of the audience, and despite the shortcomings of his prose, they are moved.

Jones, not a man of good will, is touched by the story, perhaps despite a determined attempt to remain unmoved. Envy surges in Jones. Feeling diminished by Smith's achievement, he resolves to sully it. He marshals his eloquence and attacks Smith's story in ways that are not germane to its thrust, attempting to depreciate its power and belittle its themes.

Smith is horrified. An emotionally evocative story is a personal statement; to be attacked on it isn't far from being attacked personally. Even more poignant, since the whole point of writing the piece was to touch the reader's emotions, Jones's off-center comments cause Smith to doubt whether he has any business writing at all. Look how far this obviously intelligent reader drifted from the point of the story! If Jones was so caught up in the side issues on which his comments focused, the story couldn't have been properly told.

Davis has been sitting quietly in the corner. He was moved by Smith's story, but is impressed by Jones's intellect and willing to concede that, in some of the criticisms he made, Jones was at least technically correct. Davis is unlikely to rise to Smith's defense. He'll fear to expose himself as "maudlin," the common, contemptuous dismissal of emotionally responsive readers. He won't want to challenge Jones on the points where he's technically right. And of course, he won't want Jones's guns trained on him, when his time in the hot seat finally arrives.

Jones tends to win the day. Smith might never show up at another workshop. Davis might well be deflected from emulating Smith, or studying what it was that gave Smith's piece its power. This, of course, is what Jones wanted. It might be his whole reason for attending writers' workshops.

For numerous reasons, there's a strong competitive tendency among writers. A lot of people who've written about writers and writing have commented on it. It pokes its head up in writers' workshops and groups all the time. And it is not entirely negative: the competitive impulse is a spur to improve one's skills.

However, there's a dark side to this that tends not to be addressed, because of its ugly implications: envy and the acts it engenders. Not the "envy" that amounts to "Gee, I wish I were as good as he is"; the original, ravening, 200-proof hatred of the good for being the good that says, if only to itself, "I hate that person for being better than I am, and I wish him harm, even though it would do me no benefit whatsoever."

Among writers, envy can attain a destructive power that boggles the mind.

Why envy? Because no other motive can animate the kind of deliberately hostile, deliberately rude, destructive criticism that plagues writers' groups everywhere. And because, to the man who feels no envy but becomes its target, it is beyond comprehension in rational terms.

Your Curmudgeon has attended a number of workshops, and has read a lot of incompetent prose. He's never heard anyone be deliberately rough or offensive in criticizing it. That's right: never. You'd think such opportunities for ego exaltation would be too good to pass up, wouldn't you? It doesn't seem to happen.

The outright assaults your Curmudgeon has witnessed, unmistakable attempts to belittle a writer and make him doubt his own worth, have always targeted the ones who had storytelling talent, needed only a little more polish before they crossed the threshold to publishability, and gave indications that their confidence in their abilities wasn't perfect.

Most aspiring writers who have talent also have confidence problems. The ones whose confidence is unassailable, who slather condescension and contempt upon the works of others, are usually the ones who couldn't write a decent shopping list. Strange, but true.

#

How do you protect yourself against this kind of emotional vandalism? Ideally, by never exposing yourself to it in the first place. But when it arrives, there are three principles to remember:

No one bothers to attack that which is worthless.

When confronted with writing that doesn't engage us, that has no spark of passion nor grace nor flair to tease at the mind, we find a way to move past it. We don't linger over it, enumerating misplaced commas and pontificating on ambiguous point-of-view. Uninteresting stories and hopeless prose are usually shuffled out of sight as quickly as is consistent with politeness and fellow-feeling.

Therefore, if someone chooses to attack your story, the attack itself is a badge of merit, though it might not seem so at the time.

It is what we know to be unworthy within us, that we fear and despise most.

Typically, the incompetent storyteller is incompetent because he's never learned to tap his own wellsprings of emotion for story themes and character energy. The motive power of your storytelling is what you care about deeply; there is no other.

It's not easy. It requires that you face yourself as you really are, with all your warts and weaknesses. Worse, you must accept that, if you're going to edify and entertain others with words, you have to show what you find in yourself to your reader. Worst, some readers will not accept your gift, which means: they will not accept you. There's nothing that hurts more than that.

The incompetent attempts to assemble stories without making those connections and taking those risks. Even when the mechanics of the thing are perfect, the lack is obvious and unbearable. When he offers his work to a workshop for review, no one is engaged. But because the failure is at so profound and personal a level, no one attempts to grapple with it aloud. The group shuffles its metaphorical feet and passes to another offering as quickly as it can. The embarrassed lack of comment and haste to be away tacitly confirm the unsalvageability of the piece.

Is it any wonder that the incompetent hates the writer who has done what he cannot?

Even the most assaultive criticisms contain nuggets of truth.

When you've been on the receiving end of an outrageously hostile review, your most powerful urge will be to run and hide, and if possible to forget the entire event. Run and hide if you must, but don't forget. Even a critic motivated entirely by envy will provide you with suggestions you can use.

Because he will focus on mechanics, your attacker will help you to locate low-level faults in your work that your absorption in your story's themes and its characters' predicaments caused you to overlook. This is a valuable service. Many a story that pulsed with life has been rejected by a junior editor who'd been told to count up to a certain threshold of easily spotted mechanical flaws, and then toss the manuscript aside.

Use the technical comments, and, to whatever extent is possible, the stylistic observations of your most hostile critics. For the purpose of improving your prose and making it marketable, they're likely to be the most valuable things you hear. Who improves from being praised?

#

However, it is better \-- unambiguously and categorically better -- not to expose a work in progress, or a piece thereof. There are few persons to whom you should show anything in advance of its publication. You might know persons you can trust to comment sincerely. That's a judgment call, of course. (In your Curmudgeon's opinion, it's best if they owe you money.) If you seek "dead tree" publication, inevitably you'll show your work to publishers' editors. (Here, too, it's best if they owe you money. The more, the better.)

But this seems quite restrictive. It limits you to a tiny, intimate audience, or to work you believe to be "ready for its close-up." What can you show around widely that's frankly unready, that demands to be chopped up and sewn back together for the betterment of your art?

  * Stories you never expect to publish;

  * "Test drives."

Every writer accumulates stories he deems unmarketable. Sometimes, the theme cross-cuts the prevailing convictions or trends; sometimes, the subject matter is too provincial, or too controversial; sometimes, the style is considered out of fashion. But these are not wasted efforts; they're rich material for cross-fertilization with other writers, who'll have (doubt it not) their own piles of unmarketables to exchange with you. Because you've abandoned the hope of selling them, you can much more easily withstand criticism aimed at them. It's not exactly detachment -- no writer ever detaches from his own work -- but it provides the same sort of cushion.

A "test drive" is another sort of vehicle. It's usually a character sketch, or a vignette that doesn't pack a lot of dramatic power. The idea, of course, is to "test" the character in a fictional setting, to see if you can make him live and breathe before committing him to a larger idea. Most writers produce these in some quantity, too; it's almost obligatory when concocting a Marquee-level character and straining to make him vivid. For reasons which alternate between obvious and obscure, we tend to write these more naturally, and with more assurance, than our to-be-marketed stuff. And sometimes they surprise us by leaping out of their playpens, or by germinating entirely new stories of great power and potential; that was the genesis of both "Equalizer" and "The Warm Lands."

These are safe harbors for the writer who absolutely must have some external reassurance before he plunges on.

#

A few years ago, your Curmudgeon was seized by a character conception that absolutely hypnotized him: a young woman of great beauty and power who'd been captured by a sadistic motorcycle gang and made into a sexual slave. The full conception included a number of other elements; for one, she has no memory of her past prior to her enslavement, and knows nothing about herself except her first name: Christine. But after years of abuse, she gets a chance to free herself when the bike on which she's being carried drops well behind the rest of the pack. She deliberately flips the bike, slewing it into a concrete bridge abutment. The biker is killed, and Christine wins to freedom at the price of a faceful of horrible scars.

This vision of bravery and marred beauty was to become co-protagonist of a novel. But before she was permitted to undertake so challenging a role, your Curmudgeon determined to "test drive" her in a number of simpler, less dramatic settings: two character sketches and a short story. He showed those around freely; the feedback, while often harsh, helped him to sharpen his sense of direction while sparing him (and his readers) premature exposure of "the main event." The experience improved Christine's character, and her eventual starring role, considerably.

As always, remember that no tactic is equally applicable to all needs, and no approach works equally well for all writers. This one has worked well enough for your Curmudgeon to leave him comfortable about recommending it.

==<O>==
25. In Conclusion

Your Curmudgeon's intent in these "Storyteller's Art" pieces wasn't to set himself up as some sort of Grand High Pu-Bah of the fictioneer's art. It's merely a tour of one storyteller's workshop, where he forges his peculiar brand of fiction. It's intended, as is all your Curmudgeon's drivel, to stimulate thought and conversation. You're more than welcome to disagree. Politely, of course. If you have another approach and are willing to talk about it, do so! We might all learn something.

#

Your Curmudgeon believes passionately in the importance of storytelling as a discipline. He'd love for everyone to be capable of it. The contemporary milieu and the writers who dominate it have disappointed him more often than not.

The world is filled with stories. If we except the hard sciences, the usual way in which important information is conveyed among us is by a story. Most people don't have the patience for scientific treatises or rigorous proofs.

Do you want to tell stories? Do you want your stories to be memorable? Vivid? Perhaps even life-altering?

Do you think you have worthy stories to tell? Plots that embed real knowledge about the ways of men and the trials that evoke our true natures?

Do you have characters in mind? Characters that haunt your dreams, demanding that their lives be developed and presented to the world beyond your private imaginings?

Do you think you have the discipline to unite all the above, without overdressing your plots or distorting your characters to make them serve a theme for which they're ill-equipped?

Start now.

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About The Author

Francis W. Porretto is a fictioneer and commentator. His commentary appears at the Liberty's Torch Website (http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Esteemed Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun.

You can email him at fran.porretto@yahoo.com

Thank you for taking an interest in his work.

