Number 1

The first thing I’ve learned is that fiction is comprised of a series of elements, that is structure, point of view, character, language, vision, story, and the like. And that each one of these things can be a tool, that is if you are having trouble with a story, it is a good idea to take one of these elements, say point of view, and change it. The way this seems to work is that by making the change it is possible to discover something about the story or characters that you didn’t know before. The change isn’t just a way of trying to get a story to work, but a way of discovering things.

This came about from reading an essay by F. R. Leavis. He says, more or less, that when someone changes the form of a story, from, say, drama to poetry, the author will learn something that was unknown. It seemed to me that if this worked for changing from one form to another, why then it would probably work when you changed one element, that is, point of view or structure and the like.

For instance, let’s say you are writing a story about a man and a woman who are having breakfast. They are also breaking up. But it doesn’t work. So, the first thing would be to change the point of view. If it’s told from the woman’s point of view, change it to the man’s. If that doesn’t work, change it to the point of view of a neighbor who is listening through the wall of the next door apartment and if that doesn’t work, have him tell the story to his girl friend. Or, maybe tell it from the point of view of a burglar who has broken into the apartment where the man and woman are having an argument, and who is hiding in a closet and listening to them.

Anyway, the idea here is to say that each element of fiction, character, structure, language etc isn’t so much just a word, or a critical notion, but a tool. Almost every aspect of writing a piece of fiction is adjustable, and it is this possibility that makes for really good writing.

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Number 2

As Robert Graves once said, there is no such thing as good writing. Only good rewriting.

Number 3

Leaving room for the reader. This is best summed up by Albert Camus’ Essay on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Camus says that the reason that Kafka’s characters are so powerful is that they accept their outlandish circumstances without question. When Gregor Samsa wakes up in the morning and finds that he is an enormous bug, he doesn’t say, “O, my god! O, look I’m an insect.” Instead, he says, “How am I going to get to work?”

It is this acceptance that gives the fiction such power.
What this means, I think, is that it is important to let your readers enter your story their own way. The idea is to leave them room to experience what you write, without beating them over the head with it, although I think there is room to point them in the right direction. Understanding that a reader discovers is worth ten times the understanding that you hit him over the head with.

In the example of Kafka, letting Gregor Samsa accept his circumstances allows the reader to say, “My god, my god, this guy has turned into a bug.” So, this is something you want to get the reader to say, but you can’t say it yourself.

And, in fact, your authority as a writer is diminished if you tell a reader something that he or she already knows. This is the kiss of death. They instantly think, well, I know that. How come the writer thinks it’s necessary to say it?

This is particularly true if you have done the work to let a reader know what is happening. That is, let us say that you write a story about a man who has been stood up on his wedding day. You don’t have to say, “He felt terrible.” If you have done your job, the reader will know that and you won’t have to say it, and more over, if you do say it, it will damage the work you have already done. As much as possible, you want to let events speak for themselves.

Number 4

A story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the beginning, the reader sees some circumstance or a character who is interesting, and in the middle things get more complicated, and in the end they are simplified or made more clear. A story almost always has some kind of movement, complicating actions, or the sense that things are developing.

To show what I mean by this I am going to give you a melodramatic story. I’m going to mention melodrama because it is so clear, but the same structure works with far more subtle things.

A man is described in an apartment. He is building a bomb that he puts in a brief case. He puts in the dry cells, the dynamite, a timer, etc. He goes out with the briefcase and gets on a bus. A young woman is standing next to him, and she has the identical briefcase. The bus goes around a corner, and the briefcases, which are on the floor, fall over and get mixed up. The man picks up the woman’s by mistake. He gets off the bus, opens the briefcase and sees that instead of the bomb there is a tuna sandwich and a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

It is at this point that the story exerts gravity on the reader. It pulls the reader in.

Or

A less melodramatic version would be the story of a woman who decides she doesn’t want to get married. She decides this on the day of her wedding. She is an honorable woman and she isn’t going to leave the groom at the church door without telling him. So, she writes a letter, gives it to a bridesmaid, who is supposed to deliver it, but doesn’t. The woman realizes the letter hasn’t been delivered only when the ceremony is about to begin. She goes to the church, opens the door (now dressed in just a sweater and blue jeans). The congregation looks at her as she begins to walk up to the groom….

It is at this moment when we feel that gravity.

This can exist in many ways, but usually it is when our interest is piqued, when we want to know what is going to happen next, when we sense danger or some surprise that is headed the character’s way. This tension is absolutely essentially. It doesn’t have to be melodramatic, as in the examples I have just used, but it has to be there. The tension can be psychological, social, criminal, exceedingly delicate, blunt as a club, but this tension is usually what makes a story work. It’s nice when this tension is complicated, or when more than one element is at play.

One of the things writers have forgotten in the modern age is that there are three important things in a novel or a piece of short fiction, and they are story, story, and story.

To try to cut to the heart of the matter, as to what a story is, I’d like to invoke E. M. Forster, who says in a collection of critical essays called Aspects of the Novel, “The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.” It is also the thing that makes us want to know what is going to happen next. We don’t have to feel this in the first line, but at some point our curiosity has got to be engaged.

Often, in writing fiction, it isn’t the first good idea for a story that will do the job (as in the Metamorphosis), but how the main idea is validated by a lot of small ones. Usually, it isn’t the first idea or big idea for a story that makes something successful, but the accumulation of small supporting ones, and so the work in writing a story isn’t the big idea, but the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth small idea, all of which add up to making the world of the story believable. In Kafka it isn’t just the idea of the transformation, but small things, too, like the little glue-like stuff that comes out of the creature’s feelers and the stains on the wall, etc.

Number 5

George Orwell once said that what we ask of a writer is to say what he or she really thinks.

Number 6

Along with story, story, and story, there are character, character, and character, since, of course, character and story are so intimately related. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster said that the test of a character as being any good is “whether or not the character is capable of surprising” the reader “in a convincing way.”

The predictable character is a dead duck. It is this element of surprise that is critical. It doesn’t have to be a big surprise, but I think the possibility of one is essential. I think it was Forster who said that one of the great pleasures of writing a novel is seeing how it all comes out.

I’d like to mention one last word about character. One of the ways you can tell if your characters are successful, in addition to their ability to surprise, is the extent to which the reader can feel their isolation. If you can feel a character’s loneliness, why then you can feel the character.

Number 7

Then there is the matter of sensibility. By this I mean, what is the attitude of the piece of writing? Funny, sad, dramatic, moral, vicious, inflammatory, or charming (like David Copperfield), or any of the almost infinite ways in which a human being can show attitude.

I often think that when a fiction writer tells a story from life, or out of his or her own experience, the fiction writer doesn’t say what did happen, but what should have happened, although this “should” is a very complicated item. I think that for each fiction writer this “should” is a mixture of one’s fears, hopes, sense of beauty, sense of fate, humor (particularly humor), love, and, of course, the surprising nature of what it is like to be alive, as it appears to each one of us.

Number 8

Being transparent.

The best writing, or so I’m convinced anyway, is what I like to think of as transparent. That is the writer knows what is going on and the reader knows, but it is never mentioned. For instance, in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald never says that this is a book about the brutality of the American class system or how the desire to pursue dreams can be toxic. Or how brutalizing matrimony can be when power isn’t shared equally. We just know it, and yet it is never mentioned.

Number 9

Descriptive language. By this I mean language that lets us see the objects, people or landscape in a story. In the Alexandria Quartet a character is killing bats. The dead ones are described as looking like “bits of a torn black umbrella.” In Bellow, a man with a shiny, bald head is described as looking like he had “furniture polish for blood.” This language reveals sensibility and shows precision. It demonstrates the power of your imagination. Everyone likes to be in the presence of this power.

At the same time I hasten to add that it is not a good idea to do so much of this that it calls attention to itself. A little bit of precise language establishes your authority as a writer. Too much seems like showing off or that you are afraid of doing some essential thing.

Number 10

A couple of words about structure. It’s probably a good idea to have a general idea of this in mind when you begin. Of course, the simplest structure is to move straight through time. It is important to realize that as structures go up in terms of complexity (moving around in time and with different points of view) there is a down side, which is that it is harder to be clear. Most readers, although there are exceptions, don’t want to approach a book as though it is a puzzle.

Screen writers have a saying about structure. It is that in the first act you get a character in a tree. In the second act, you throw rocks at him. In the third act you get him down. I think that a passing appreciation of how important structure is in a screenplay isn’t a bad thing for a fiction writer to know about. Not, by any means, that a novel or a short story should have a cinematic structure, but there are times when a beginning, a middle and an end are handy items to have.

Number 11

Pressure to work. I think there is a perfect amount of pressure to produce good writing, just enough to keep you on your toes, but not so much that you feel there is too much to do.  Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I think this removes the terror of all writing, which is expectation. If you can get around that, and the anxiety it causes, the chances of writing well are increased.

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