CHAPTER 9 | Fiction

■ Story and Plot

■ Scene and Summary

■ Backstory and Flashback

■ Text and Subtext

■ Fiction Format

The writer of any work must decide two crucial points: what to put in and what to leave out.

Annie Dillard

WARM-UP

Where is this? Who are they? What problem do they face together? What problem arises between them? What happens next? What's the story? Tell it in exactly 250 words.

FICTION 200

YOU HAVE A CHARACTER IN MIN... something: to be loved or accepted, resp... the world. You have a pretty good idea c... at the start of this thing that looks like it... ation will lead to fulfillment of the desir... you proceed?

Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who... literature, famously said that a story mus... end. This is less obvious than it looks. As... answer are: Where shall I begin? Where w... you have made these decisions, you have...

Story and Plot

Humphry House, in his commentari... everything the reader needs to know to... plot as the particular portion of the stor... "present tense" of the narrative.

The story of Oedipus Rex, for example... the oracle predicting that he will murder... includes his birth, his abandonment with... his foster parents, his flight from them... crossroads, his triumph over the Sphinx, ... in Thebes, his fatherhood, the Theban pl... his self-blinding and self-banishment.

When Sophocles set out to plot a pl... at dawn on the very last day of it. All the... necessary to understand the plot, but th... can Oedipus get rid of the plague in The... it is the revelation of the past that make... of discovery that gives rise to the significa... begun with the oracle before Oedipus's... significance could have been explored.

E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Nove... tinction between plot and story. A story, ... ... the chopped off length of the tape wa... arranged in their time sequence. A plot... emphasis falling on causality. "The king... is a story. "The king died, and then the... sequence is preserved, but the sense of c... "The queen died, no one knew why, unt...

259

grief at the death of the king." This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development. It suspends the time sequence; it moves as far away from the story as its limitations will allow. Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say, "and then?" If it is in a plot we ask, "why?"

The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order. Once we have the facts, we inevitably look for the links between them, and only when we find such links are we satisfied that we "understand." Rote memorization in a science bores almost everyone. Grasp and a sense of discovery begin only when we perceive why "a body in motion tends to remain in motion" and what an immense effect this actuality has on the phenomena of our lives.

The same is true of the events of a story. Random incidents neither move nor illuminate; we want to know why one thing leads to another and to feel the inevitability of cause and effect.

Arranging for Plot

A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance.

Here, for example, is a series of uninteresting events chronologically arranged.

Ariadne had a bad dream.

She woke up tired and cross.

She ate breakfast.

She headed for class.

She saw Leroy.

She fell on the steps and broke her ankle.

Leroy offered to take notes for her.

She went to a hospital.

This series of events does not constitute a plot, and if you wish to fashion it into a plot, you can do so only by letting us know the meaningful relations among the events. We first assume that Ariadne woke in a temper because of her bad dream, and that Leroy offered to take notes for her because she broke her ankle. But why did she fall? Perhaps because she saw Leroy? Does that suggest that her bad dream was about him? Was she, then, thinking about his dream-rejection as she broke her egg irritably on the edge of the frying pan? What is the effect of his offer? Is it a triumph or just another polite form of rejection when, really, he could have missed class once to drive her to the X-ray lab? All the emotional and dramatic significance of these ordinary events emerges in the relation of cause to effect, and where such relation can be shown, a possible plot comes into existence.

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STORY AND PLOT

FICTION 262

Ariadne's is a story you might very we... needs to cover only an hour or two, and tha... pressed form of the short story. But such a cl... this short compass. Might it be more grippin... she stumbles? Leroy comes to help her up a... her field of vision. In the shock of pain she i...

Choosing Where to Begin

Here is another example of a quite standa... her older sister, who always tells her she's... "low self-esteem," poor grades, and a stu... stays at her computer most of the time. H... therapists, but nothing brings her out of... big basketball dance, and won't go alone, ... computer system that runs the gym ligh... who knows she's a computer whiz, gives h... catches the eye of the handsome center (... and lets down her hair, right?). And they...

This Cinderella story line shows up ov...

The question is, how can you make it fre... your plot begin?

You may start, if you like, with the in... parents from Lithuania. But if you do, it's... may close the book before she's born. You r... of Cinderella, with the background situatio... summarize, generalize, and focus on minor... time holding our attention. Begin with the... If so, you'll somehow have to let us know all... dialogue or through the girl's memory; but y... you have an opportunity to show the sisters... the telephone call from the coach? Is that pe... scene, an immediate conflict that must lead...

TRY THIS 9.1

By now you have from your journal entr... fifteen minutes to list all the events of this... List everything we will need to know in c... fear of water results from the time his... when he was five—and we will need to kno... he won't go out in a boat at twenty-th... chronological place.

• Find the item exactly halfway down your list. Write the first paragraph of your story, beginning it there.

• Take the last item on your list. Write the first paragraph of the story, beginning it there.

• Pick the right item on your list for the beginning of the story. Try these: Begin with a line of dialogue. Begin with an action. Begin with an image of danger. Begin with the weather. Begin with the protagonist's thought. Begin with a long shot. Begin with a close-up.

It is a cliché of critical reaction—and not just for the work of beginners!—that "your story actually begins on page 3." I think there is good reason that this failure of technique afflicts even professional writers. When you begin a story, you are very properly feeling your way, getting to know your characters, bringing the setting into focus, testing the sorts of voice and action that will work. Since you're a little unsteady on your literary feet at this point, it's tempting to fiddle with the dialogue, alter this phrase, perfect that image. The writing, thus polished, starts to look valuable—so it's hard to see that the reader doesn't need the same extended orientation that you did. Sometimes you need a few weeks' distance, or somebody else's insight, to recognize that you can move farther faster.

TRY THIS 9.2

Take the manuscript you worked on in Try This 9.1. Toss out page 1. Try beginning with the first whole paragraph on page 2. Doesn't work?

Then:

Print out the first three pages of your story. Put them side by side and start cutting—a descriptive phrase here, a line of dialogue there. Do away with a flashback, an adjective, a dialogue tag. How much can you do without and still begin the story? Can you condense the first three pages to a half-page paragraph?

Scene and Summary

A child in a tantrum screams, throws toys, lies on the floor, and kicks in the air. The parents say, "You're making a scene!"

Jerome Stern

Summary and scene are methods of treating time in fiction. A summary covers a relatively long period of time in relatively short compass; a scene deals at length with a relatively short period of time.

Summary is a useful and often necessary device: to give information, fill in a character's background, let us understand a motive, alter pace, create a transition, leap moments or years.

SCENE AND SUMMARY

FICTION 263

264

Scene is always necessary to fictior... detail is to the senses; that is, it is the cru... to experience the story with the character... or a crisis occurs at given moments tha... and cannot be summarized. The form of... change, and therefore requires scenes. As... Shapely Fiction, when you want everyone'... like a child in a tantrum, using the writ... physical reactions, gestures, smells, sound...

It is quite possible to write a short s... summary at all. It is nearly impossible to... summary. One of the most common erro... to summarize events rather than to realize...

One quite common and effective tech... a short summary and then move to a sce... following paragraphs from Margaret Atwe... been walking home from her Brownie ta... tease and terrify her with threats of a bad...

The snow finally changed to slush and t... the hill of the bridge in two rivulets, one... itself turned to mud. The bridge was dan... branches turned yellow, the skipping rop... the afternoons, and on one of them, whe... off but was merely discussing the possibi... actually appeared.

He was standing at the far side of t... ing a bunch of daffodils in front of him. ... old nor young, wearing a good tweed coa... He didn't have a hat on, his taffy-colore... gleamed on his high forehead.

The first paragraph of this quotation c... a period of a few months and then makes... the second paragraph specifies a particul... summary sets us at a distance from the ac... sary to its life: snow, path, bridge, willow br... introduced when an element of conflict a... threatened bad man does appear and that... ises a turn of events and a change in the... need to see the moment when this change...

Throughout Lady Oracle, which is by... the pattern recurs: a summary leading up... represents a turning point.

My own job was fairly simple. I stood at the back of the archery range, wearing a red leather change apron, and rented out the arrows. When the barrels of arrows were almost used up, I'd go down to the straw targets. The difficulty was that we couldn't make sure all the arrows had actually been shot before we went down to clear the targets. Rob would shout, Bows DOWN, please, arrows OFF the string, but occasionally someone would let an arrow go, on purpose or by accident. This was how I got shot. We'd pulled the arrows and the men were carrying the barrels back to the line; I was replacing a target face, and I'd just bent over.

The summary in the second excerpt describes the general circumstances during a period of time: This is how things were, this is what usually or frequently happened: I'd go down to the straw targets. Rob would shout. Again, when the narrator arrives at an event that changes her circumstance (I got shot), she focuses on a particular moment: I was replacing a target face, and I'd just bent over. Notice that the pattern summary-to-scene parallels in time the spatial pattern of long shot to close-up.

Since the changes in your story will take place in fully developed scenes, it's important to limit the number of scenes, and summary can be useful to get you from one to another. Frequently, the function of summary is precisely to heighten scene. It is in the scene, the "present" of the story, that the drama, the discovery, the decision, the potential for change, engage our attention.

SCENE AND SUMMARY 265

FICTION 266

Consider, for example, David Foster... Children," (p. 000-000). This story is wr... tion. Nevertheless, there comes a momer... "...and leaned their little boy back on t... softened tabs and tried to remove it res... was hot, their baby's diaper burned the... water'd fallen and pooled and been bur...

The tragedy here has been going on... with the moment of terrible discovery, a... ing other than shame and grief.

TRY THIS 9.3

Look at the list of your story's events. How many of them belong in summary? How few scenes would it be possible to use and still tell the story? Those three dinners with dad—could they be conflated to one? The quarrel on the morning after—could it happen the same night? Which of them involve moments of discovery or decision and should be scenes? List the events of the story that represent its essential scenes.

TRY THIS 9.4

Identify the crisis of the story you are... with details involving at least three sense... Pick a scene and write it quickly, in no more than two pages. Then rewrite it beginning with a method or a mood you've never used before. Begin with a cliché. Begin with a line of angry dialogue. Begin tenderly. Begin with an action no bigger than a breadbox. Begin with the outcome of the scene and then go back to get us there.

In Chapter 6, I said that the crisis point of a story must always be manifested in an action. Another way of saying this is that the crisis is always a scene. At the moment the protagonist's situation will change, we as readers must be there. What is important about this crisis action is not that it be violent or even external, but that its intensity signal a turning point in the character's fortune or outlook. Often, the intensity of the moment will require that all the senses come into play.

Backstory and Flashback

The narrative does not lead... to the future, but more deep...

Clearly, if you are going to begin in med... then parts of your story will have to be b... tively new term that started out in film... refer to any information about the past-... begins and is necessary to make the stor... revealed in dialogue, or in the character... When the narrative actually travels back... past in scenes, it is called a flashback—a...

There is, I think, one cardinal rule... us more than we need. As with opening... author you need to know so much about y... real and complex that you may think we... But if your characters are interesting and... in the twenty-first century—accustomed... with the lessons of psychology—we will u... odd behavior, and tolerate a degree of in... lot of psychological explanation. On the... on with the story is as powerful as it was... we are likely to be impatient with too mu...

When intrusive passages of childhoo... to come early in the story, before we are...

whether there is any story on its way. Dialogue, brief summary, a reference, or a detail can often tell us all we need to know, and when that is the case, a flashback becomes cumbersome and overlong. If, four pages into your story, you find there is more action happening in the character's memory than in the present action, you may not yet have found where the story lies.

TRY THIS 9.5

Find a place in your story where you either do or could use a flashback. Instead, use your journal for exploring background. Write down everything, fast. Then take a hard look at it to decide just how little of it you can use, how much of it the reader can infer, how you can sharpen an image to imply a past incident or condense an emotion into a line of dialogue.

Frequently it's best to trust the reader's experience of life to understand events from action and attitude, and to keep the present of the story moving.

That said, flashback is still one of the most magical of fiction's contrivances. Effectively used to reveal at the right time, it does not so much take us from, as contribute to, the central action of the story, so that as readers we suspend the forward motion of the narrative in our minds as our understanding of it deepens. Because the reader's mind is a swifter mechanism for getting into the past than anything that has been devised for stage or even film, all you must do is give the reader smooth passage into the past, and the force of the story will be time-warped to whenever and wherever you want it.

A connection between what's happening in the present and what happened in the past will often best transport the reader, just as it does the character. Where possible avoid blatant transitions such as "Henry thought back to the time," and "I drifted back in memory." Assume the reader's intelligence and ability to follow a leap back, as in this excerpt from Nadine Gordimer's July's People, where the protagonist and her husband, Bamford, have escaped an African uprising to hide in the village of their former servant:

The black man looked over the three sleeping children bedded-down on seats taken from the vehicle. He smiled confirmation: "They all right."

"Yes, all right." As he dipped out under the doorway: "Thank you, July, thank you very much."

She had slept in round mud huts roofed in thatch like this before. In the Kruger Park, a child of the shift boss and his family on leave, an enamel basin and ewer among their supplies of orange squash and biscuits on the table coming clear as this morning light came. Rondavels, adapted by Bam's ancestors on his Boer side from the huts of the blacks. They were a rusticism true to the continent; before air-conditioning, everyone praised the natural insulation of thatch against heat. Rondavels had concrete floors, thickly shined with red polish, veined with trails of coarse ants.....

BACKSTORY AND FLASHBACK 267

FICTION 268

Here both a memory from her child... sketched with a few details, points up... impeding the flow of the narrative.

When you end a flashback, make... the present again. Repeat an action or... ber belongs to the basic time period of... the paragraph with "Now...." will acco... accomplishes it by returning from the ge...

This one was a prototype from which a... all returned: below her, beneath the iro... spread the vehicle's tarpaulin, a stampe...

TRY THIS 9.6

Put your character in motion, on foot... something. What does he or she need? flashback of no more than three sente... recalled, thought back to, and others of the...

Add a character. In dialogue, let us kr... past.

Add music. Let the music trigger a m... dialogue. Let the memory reveal someth... more than two sentences.

Text and Subtext

As a writer you are always trying to mear... logue to convey information and characte... and propel the action, you want clothing... betray thought.

You can do this, and your reader can... ate this way in their daily lives. We expr... words, sometimes by choice and sometir... ing to conceal for the sake of friendship...

How many times have you sat through... all polite, anecdotal, and bland, but ever... anger, anxiety, or the need to control?

The text is what is stated in any... remains unstated—with the usual impli... really going on.

Imagine a restaurant scene in which... shrimp. Lex passes them by way of his w...

the way. There are none left for Bill's wife, Jane, who says she didn't want any more anyway. Imagine how the dialogue, gestures, glances, facial expressions, tones of voice differ in this scene if Lex suspects that Bill is having an affair with Sara; and/or Jane is pregnant, which Sara knows but her husband doesn't; and/or Jane feels herself to be superior to the rest of them, including her husband; and/or Sara and Lex had a quarrel just before they left home in which Lex accused her of selfishness; and/or Jane is trying to get home early to intercept a phone call from Bill's mother, who may have cancer; and/or Bill wrote a report that he suspects will get Lex fired. Any combination of these complications probably means that all four of them are sick of the friendship anyway, and looking for a way to end it. Yet they may not. Situations of this complexity occur every day.

Here is a passage from Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, in which an American Baptist minister and his family sit with a Bantu council in the Belgian Congo:

Father tried to interrupt the proceedings by loudly explaining that Jesus is exempt from popular elections. But people were excited, having just recently got the hang of democratic elections. The citizens of Kilanga were ready to cast their stones....

Anatole, who'd sat down in his chair a little distance from the pulpit, leaned over and said quietly to Father, "They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains."

Father ignored this parable. "Matters of the spirit are not decided at the marketplace," he shouted sternly. Anatole translated.

"A bu, kwe? Where, then?" asked Tat Nguza, standing up boldly. In his opinion, he said, a white man who has never even killed a bushbuck for his family was not the expert on which god can protect our village.

When Anatole translated that one, Father looked taken aback. Where we come from, it's hard to see the connection.

Father spoke slowly, as if to a half-wit, "Elections are good, and Christianity is good. Both are good." We in his family recognized the danger in his extremely calm speech, and the rising color creeping toward his hairline.

In this passage, while a controlled form of political negotiation goes on, the participants vie for status, and we have a dozen or more clues to the political and personal subtext. The contrast between the Congolese's parables and the American's abstractions, the conflicting logic, the gestures, bodily movements and expressions, the genuine calm of the translator as opposed to the bottled-fury calm of the father—all these reveal the unspoken meanings. In addition, they are interpreted through the point of view of a daughter who, in spite of her youth and relative innocence, has reason to understand the signs.

TEXT AND SUBTEXT 269

FICTION 270

TRY THIS 9.7

Choose three characters from your st... scene where they must decide on a nam... a dessert, a building...). Write the dialog... you like, because this scene will probably... it will help you identify their attitudes an...

Subtext is a necessary result and c... around saying what they meant all the... and a lot more pain—but it offers a glor... characters let us know by action, tone, ... the tongue, contradiction, or backtracki... worth of the truth submerged, the read... words.

TRY THIS 9.8

All of the following are the opening lines... them famous. Pick one and use it to writ... Write fast.

• My classroom was on the first floor, ne...

• She stood with her black face some six... and wondered when on earth it would...

• Foreman likes to hoist the new ones up...

• There had been some discussion of dea...

• It was Sunday—not a day but rather a g...