Help, Help, I'm Being Held Prisoner in an Uninteresting Story

 Of all the many cautionary taboos brought to the table as warnings to the beginning writer of fiction, the one most offensive to you is the adjuration against writing what one does not know.  You have railed against this injunction in classroom, workshop, coffee house, beer parlor, and the hoary redoubts of your own mind.  The sheer folly of such a dogma would have deprived the Common Era of its most notable works of imagination, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Tarzan on Mars, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey exemplifying the possibilities, and by a simple extension such works as Romeo and Juliet and Huckleberry Finn.  These latter two make the list because in each case the author, a male, does not know from first-hand experience what it is to be a woman, and can only guess, extrapolate, or invent, hopeful of not offending too many women readers who know a thing or two by which to criticize any attempt at a portrait of their gender that has the temerity to come from the male writer.

The better taboo is the one against writing anything for which you have little or no interest, a taboo that in its more general reach can be made to include characters as well as subject matters and locales.  This particular taboo is actually useful because it precludes setting forth on journeys where the writer has no stake, no emotional baggage bouncing along, no real concern for outcome or effect.  Your own support of this measure is based on the belief that the more interest the writer has in a person, place, or thing--any noun for that matter--the greater the likelihood that some vital and transforming association will want to tag along for the ride.  You believe such associations provide greater emphasis and plausibility to the nouns in the story, making them in turn more interesting to the reader.  Such an example is in the story, "The Talent" you published some years back in which the protagonist, applying for a job at a university, was sent to have her photo taken as a step in the process.  The photographer was reading The Heart of Darkness, a detail you argued with through several drafts of the story, first putting it in, then removing it.  What possible effect on the outcome of the story could there be in the title of a book being read by a photographer? The exact number of insertions and deletions of that one detail are lost in your memory's darkest corners, but with the final decision to leave that detail in the story came the answer and thus the conclusion to the story.  The title of that book the photographer was reading became the metaphor for the entire story; you were saying then and continue to believe even now that someone entering a university is in effect entering a heart of darkness.

How then, progresses the rhetorical question, does one inject a character, a story, a setting, an unspecified noun, with that quality known as interest?  Why, of course, by investing the noun with one or more details of interest to you, or by asking the direct question, What would it take at this moment to interest me in this noun?  Then you shut up and listen to the answer that comes, seemingly from the bottom of a well into which your interest has fallen, shouting Help, get me out of here.

When a detail is more than a car wash

Of all the actors performing in a story, Detail earns the least applause and gets the lease acknowledgment--until it is overused. Then it is booed off the stage, called by a host of unflattering adjectives, and is viewed with suspicion the moment it tries to earn its way back.

True enough, the skilled actor can impart authenticity and resonance to the most banal story, but equally true, Detail is one of the first tools an actor reaches for when defining a role. Detail is not merely some battery-powered doer of all things, it is a special tool, a relic from the actor's own life, connected with a family member or the memory of some long vanished workshop, stored with all the actor's other interior treasures.

Give a character a name and you have already given the character a lurching step toward recognition. Give a character one added detail--a limp, a jones for marshmallows, a facial tic when pressure mounts--and you have brought that character (who is now named) out of the shadowy world of the background and into the world of definition.

The same is true of an apartment. Two identical floor plans in the same building, same furniture, same view. One has a leaky faucet.

Or a meal in a restaurant.

"Waiter, there's a fly in my omelet."
"Actually, sir, it's probably the beginning stages of a butterfly.'

Or a relationship.

He: "Why are you so hesitant? I thought you wanted to."
She: "I do. I very much do. But--"
He "But what?"
She: "I've never made love with a sixty-five-year-old man."
He: "Neither have I."

The details give us the sense that the fictional is real because the details chosen are the details that validate the reality of the characters, the situations, and the places; they convince us that these persons, places, and things have a resonance because the details affirm our own understanding of the vast opportunities of our dreams and the brick walls of our waking moments.

A Sense of Story

"in the story"--a condition in which the writer is actively immersed in the activities and details of a story to the extent of proceeding in the process without thinking; being in the emerging, creative details of a narrative.

However well planned it may be in the beginning or, conversely, however much in the moment the developing story stands, it is a place on an emotional map for the writer. Being too thoughtful, too mindful of readership or audience removes the writer from a precise place on the emotional map, opening the door for too much detail, too much explanation, too much self-justification from the various characters. All of this contributes to the writer being evicted from and thus "out of the story", needing to sneak back inside if anything more is to be done.

Time enough during the revision process for critical thought, rearranging of scenery, meddling with time lines.

How to get "in" the story? Find out what the characters want, then set them free to secure the goal, watching to see what ruses they will employ, and to what depths they will reach to gain an advantage. Next step, consequences emerge, demanding payment.

Distraction

distraction--a character, event, or detail that will shift attention away from the main goal in a dramatic narrative; an accidental or deliberate device having the effect of arousing the reader's curiosity and possibly as well the interest of one or more characters within the story; a detail that because of its being noted by writer or character has the power to change the direction of the story in which it appears.

Distractions appear as a result of authorial laziness, authorial intervention into a narrative, or through random accident. Distractions may be deliberate calculations, sometimes no more than a word, much of a piece with a skilled magician using some device to distract the audience from seeing the mechanics of an illusion. The point to be emphasized is that distractions take the reader's attention from the procession of story elements. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on the writer's intent. A distraction or digression will raise expectations in the reader and, possibly, within other characters, triggering the reader-as-matchmaker instinct, causing the reader to make assumptions, to wait for a payoff which might not come.

Even though the writer is as conversant with the necessary elements in a story underway as a director is aware of the throughline in a written narrative, the most efficient mental state for the writer at work is the state of being "in the story," or completely immersed in the movement of events. Unanticipated details emerge from such states. It is a good policy to include them and move on until the next convenient moment for revision and possible rethinking. In other words, do not think about these distractions as they appear, waiting instead for a thinking mode--a revision mode--to decide whether they stay or go. Yes; you heard that correctly: details come rushing forth during the writing mode. Like guests wanting the maitre d' to seat them in the restaurant, they must be given appropriate scrutiny. Do they belong? Do they enhance the story? Or, like the fabled tourists with white belts and loafers, worn with green polyester trousers, are they distractions?

Spare me the details

details--one or more portions of a larger vision of a character, a place, system, institution, or thing; a discreet, identifying trait; pieces of a defining trait; traces of emotional elements in a story.

In order to be effective as ingredients in a story, details must have embedded in them a feeling or the power to evoke a feeling. Details are the useful adjectives and adverbs, humming about a narrative like mosquitoes on a summer afternoon, looking for a landing site. Details may also contain facts but they are best presented as though they also bore emotions, which is to say that facts presented only as empirical sources will lead to boredom. Readers want accuracy in their details but when they turn to story, the facts they are after are insights and revelations about human and animal behavior.

There is a relationship between the degree of confidence a writer has and the control with which that writer deploys details, the more confident the less the need for details. The more comfortable with the reach of the story, the less likely the writer will feel the need to defend rather than merely tell the story.

Hint: Avoid laundry lists. Use only those details that relate to the narrative point of view (as opposed to the need for the author to intervene). Each character will have thresholds of awareness, sensitivity, tolerance. A character who is a painter or photographer will have an eye for nuances of light. A musician will be more likely to not details of a voice or sound. A chef might have a nose for the subtle smells and flavors of an atmosphere. A prepubescent child will experience details of time in a different manner than a septuagenarian. As the writer "becomes" and takes on the sensitivity of his own characters, the writer will experience a sense of the right impressions and details for each character. More than any use of physical details in her portrayal of her character Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, author Denise Mina focuses on Paddy's frustrating encounters with diet, the extreme measures she sometimes takes, how she falls off the dietary wagon, and how she dresses, hopeful of effecting a camouflage.

In his novel Brooklyn, Colm Toibin allows his Irish characters a differing set of awareness than his Italian characters, allowing readers of neither ethnicity a richer vision into their respective cultures. He is similarly apt in his depiction of sports fans, and the feel of commercial and domestic settings. In her novel The Shipping News, Annie Proulx uses detail to produce the sense of cold in the Newfoundland setting with stunning effect. More to the point, neither Toibin nor Proulx over detail; each uses excellent choice in the amount and the way the detail is brought into context.

At one time--the 1940s and 50's--writers of the so-called Naturalist inclination thought to define their characters through lists of products they used, types of clothing they wore, specific foods they enjoyed or detested. For all their sincerity and devotion to their approach, their characters stood out for readers in the details of their actions and attitudes.

Devices and Deadlines

device--any stratagem, trait, or narrative technique that triggers consequences in a story; a framing pattern for including one or more stories within a longer work; a catch-all for narrative technique, metaphor, props, mistaken identity.

Although the reader may not see the device immediately, its cumulative effect begins to tell at some point and the reader goes forth, making assumptions about the left-handed individual who walks with a slight limp, causing the reader at the appropriate moment of hearing the sound of a halting step behind the protagonist in the alleyway to suspect that the protagonist has been betrayed and is about to suffer unknown consequences. 

Another such device is a frequent cliche in low-grade horror films where, #1, the protagonist is specifically warned about going up to the attic, and #2, the protagonist goes up to the attic, where it is quite dark and, #3, steps on something that produces an eerie yowl. #4, the genesis of the yowl was a cat, identification of which produces the catharsis out of early Greek drama, setting the protagonist for stepping something which produces an eerie yowl but the something is not a cat, it is the reason the protagonist was warned against going to the attic in the first place.

Device may also be point of view, particularly if the use of that particular point of view goes out on strike against a convention such as having a story or novel narrated by a dead person, such as the narrator of Machado de Asisi's Epitaph for a Small Winner or Alice Seybold's The Lovely Bones.

See also Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, in which two identical-appearing boys have their roles transposed, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, in which the character Viola pretends to be a young man, in which guise her love is sought by a woman, a device that could have stopped right there had Shakespeare not recognized the added device of having Viola fall in love with the man she is now serving as a confidante.

See also alternate universe novels such as those of the His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman, in which the device becomes an entire universe parallel to but slightly different from our own.

See also details.

deadline--the time by which one or more characters in a story have to make a decision; the time by which a character was to have completed an assigned task.

Often a moment of exquisite tension, the arrival of the deadline is a threat even in the abstract sense of the main characters in a story being reminded that the meteor will strike in one day, the dam will burst by noon tomorrow, the planet Earth is doomed in two years if scientists cannot determine a way to shift the tilt of it on its axis, a patient in an episode of House, M.D., being consumed by her own immune system and only five minutes left in the episode, a wrongly convicted man facing lethal injection in six hours unless... Thus time running out; the guttering candle, the remaining grains of sand in an hour glass, the needle flickering even on a hybrid auto's fuel tank.

Deadlines are stress situations writ large; they infuse story with a necessary sense of inevitability, which is, after all, one of the ways story takes an alternate route from life.

The Mysterious Stranger

There's always something going on in the background, babies crying, dogs barking, a dropped garden hose spraying anyone who gets in its way, serious-looking individuals on the front porch, wanting to talk about God. This is the background against which stories are set, backgrounds made plausible by their implausibility.

Story doesn't exist in a vacuum, a fact we do well to remember because sometimes, when we are too focused, we tune out the sensuous materials that ratify the authenticity and plausibility of story. In real life, things can happen in vacuums, thanks to such social advancements as gated communities, restaurants with a modicum of sound proofing, homes instead of close apartments.

Marlow was always hearing things while interviewing clients or driving to assignations, smelling things in the hallways, catching refrains of anomalous songs from across the way; these things made Chandler's prose near eternal. He may have been dead for fifty years but the scents, sounds, sights linger in the hallways and dark streets of the L.A. Basin. His elevators creak, have the faint odor of someone having been sick; his automobiles growl, wheeze, exhibit internal rumbles. More than his metaphor and wry observation, his sense of a place attaches to his stories like a limpet grabbing onto the pilings of a pier.

An observation then: adjectives and adverbs are better spent describing the senses than the qualities of action. Story is more than individuals forced to walk the plank of plot, rather it is the atmosphere in which thinkable and unthinkable things play our their fizzle of light, matches struck in the dark, giving us a brief vision of the parts not dark, not hidden, but nevertheless not fully revealed.

Shakespeare was performed in the blackness of the theater without setting, without flats or scrolls of scenery and yet the text is filled with enough suggestion that the story emerges not only with its own collisions and near misses but with the acute sense of where everyone is and what's going on in the background. Even Beckett, that stern minimalist, has his characters dress inform us of a greater absurdity that the setting suggests.

An actor can steal a scene merely by focusing attention on a point somewhere on stage or off, regarding it with apparent curiosity. An actor can steal a scene by swatting an imaginary fly or mosquito. In the best of worlds, a character can steal a scene, certainly from the other characters present but as well from the author, which brings us close to the scare atmosphere of creative potential, an atmosphere ripe with its own sounds, sights, smells.

Stories with safety nets end up defeating the writer, causing the writer to think how easy it is to rely on artifice instead of risk.
A bunch of ham actors, standing around the scene, watching the Alpha Players do their things, wondering what movement can change the entire tenor, shifting from tragedy to the comedic, letting the dog of pathos out the door and into bathos. Suddenly the atmosphere is charged with the electricity of impending storm; suddenly the story is changed from safe and predictable to risky and revelatory. Where does it come from? The characters growing bored with the same old prospects, you becoming bored with the possibility of ending in sight.

The "it" comes from that secret packet we all carry about with us, the thing we may show on occasion to strangers, knowing we'll likely never see them again; the "it" is the thing we often feel the most uncomfortable about, the thing we don't want friends to know about us or perhaps the thing we want family or friends to think we're comfortable with.

What better strangers to show it to than readers.

The Quantum Physics of Fiction, or Those Devilish Details

1. This tale begins with an orange tabby named Dodger, which in addition to its orangeness and tabbiness is coated with charged particles of authenticity.

2. I learned about Dodger by accident; Dodger is by no means my cat. I have never seen Dodger, but I feel Dodger's presence, and just as you will have to take Dodger's creator at her word that she has never had an orange cat named Dodger, you will have to take my word that for me Dodger lives, does things cats do, and perhaps even some things cats don't do.

3. It is something in the way that Dodger's creator wrote about Dodger that made me immediately see the cat, leaping after a fly at the window, a sleepy ball of fluff in the sun, an insistent pawing for affection and recognition.

4. The cat belongs to Square 1, the charged particles of authenticity that reside about Dodger's orange coat come also from Square 1. The dynamic is the same with the details we set loose in our fictional and nonfictional terrains--if we are doing our job properly.

5. The right detail makes me believe a story because that detail validates the reality I am trying to create, allows me to imagine other details as though they were real.

6. 'When I believe the details, the story has a life of its own, a world I no longer have to describe or defend but rather to investigate.

7. Sometimes the details come from flashes of memory that are given to me; sometimes these flashes of memory explain mysteries I didn't even know existed, but now appreciate as not merely a flash of detail but a snippet of a history under construction.

8. These snippets come about as a product of muscle memory. Some subjective choice is being made each time I isolate and use a detail; each time I make the choice, the muscle memory is strengthened.

9. Each time the muscle memory is strengthened, my sense of belief in the story enhances itself.

10. Details make the venue come to life.

11. Details make the characters and their goals come to life.

12. With luck and the constant use of muscle memory, I will be able to see the gap between what the characters say and what they feel.

13. As a boy I often had either a yo-yo (Duncan, of course) or a string-wound spinning top or one of those gyroscopes advertised on the back of comic books, stored in my pocket. There was often a small magnifying glass to examine things and start fires. Licorice cigarettes.

14. Some things don't change. As an adult my pockets remain bulky. The pocket knife is still there. So is a Leica Delux 3 camera.

15. Neither of the above pocket contents is better than the other; each is to help take the measure of details, to store them away in the kind of memory that is the writer's tool kit.

16. A conventional proverb of convenience attributes the devil to being in the details, meaning among other things that complexities may be vexing but necessary. Flaubert had his own take, that God was in the details. All well and good, and take your choice if looking for a proverb. But consider this as well: Story is in the details.

17. Blessings on thee, particule-charged orange tabby.