Chiropractic for MSS

manipulation--an arrangement of dramatic elements to produce an emotional effect in a story; distortion or exaggeration of narrative events; the deliberate bending of perspective and/or time in a story; use of implication and subtlety to engage readers; use of a red herring to alert or divert readers' suspicions.

Writers are the literary equivalent of chiropractors, adjusting, kneading, articulating; they are looking for a design pattern to provide the best posture for a story. A basic approach to such adjusting is to rearrange the time sequence. Mystery writer and teacher Leonard Tourney is an advocate of "a slice of the crime," in which he advocates beginning a narrative with a crime being planned or executed by individuals we will meet later on in the text. James Joyce manipulated temporally in his Finnegan's Wake, beginning the huge, complexity of a novel with the last half of the opening sentence, then, hundreds of pages later, ending with the first half of the sentence. Tim Gautreau's The Missing, narratively acute and suspenseful from the opening line, actually manipulates dramatic convention in the sense of providing a double hit of backstory before the main issue is introduced.

In addition to time manipulation, the writer may perform narrative chiropractic with point of view, choosing first-, second- third-, omniscient, and multiple points of view, and in some cases venture into authorial intrusion to make commentary on the characters and their doings. This last approach is amply demonstrated in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and William M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Characters, their motives and activities, may be manipulated to the extent of influencing the way other characters and readers will respond to them, and indeed, motives may be manipulated to provoke reader sympathy or antipathy.

Manipulation works best when it does not call attention to itself but seems the most natural presentation. Such control is exemplified in the entire presentation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

A Chicken Sandwich on Wheat Toast, Hold the Lettuce, Hold the Tomato, Hold the Mayo, Hold the Chicken

withholding dramatic information--a strategy for creating narrative tension and/or suspense; keeping information from the reader or one or more characters; using the curiosity or lack thereof in a character to influence agenda; creating awareness in the reader and/or characters of secrets relating to the theme or actual outcome of a story.

Story, however ambiguous in nature or elliptical in orbit, is an outgrowth of a natural inclination to assign narrative to events, whether they are as complex and intertwined as generational family history (and thus a search for unifying theme) or as seemingly random as boy-meets-girl, boy-meets-boy, or girl-meets girl. Story is implicitly and sometimes explicitly a tale told to provide evidence that life has a meaning, that certain events were ordained if not pre-ordained, that human behavior and destiny is not merely a series of random events, atomic particles spinning about in a reactor or collider that has been turned off for the night. Thus the domino theory (see), causality (see), and determinism; thus the parallel between story and the precedent-setting direction of many forms of legal evolution.

The skilled writer accordingly has learned to withhold vital information, making the reader curious about it, avid for more. Thus curiosity ranks just below tension and suspense as an important mortar, holding the isolated bricks of dramatic detail together. Until the reader has become interested to the point of empathy, details about a particular character often bore more than they illustrate. Some of the background material, for instance, about Eilis Lacey, Colm Toibin's protagonist in his 2009 novel, Brooklyn, is inconsequential until the reader has seen Eilis performing in social situations, at which point they become poignant to the point of being heart wrenching: this information has been artfully manipulated so that it appears to emerge from the character rather than Post-It notes from the author.

"Never tell the reader more than the reader wants to know" is an effective restraint for the reader to keep in mind: Withhold, then pay out in slow, incident-related doses. The downside of too much withholding can be seen in fiction such as the novels of Ian McEwan (see Saturday; The Innocent;The Child in Time), where the secrets to be discovered and the defining moments present on closer consideration the image of a highly skilled dealer at a casino rather than, however bravura his technique, a story teller such as Michael Chabon (see The Wonder Boys; Secrets of Pittsburgh; and The Yiddish Policeman's Union).

What is the right balance between withholding and being manipulative? First of all, forget any stigma attached to the word "manipulative;" all story tellers manipulate, having chosen the beginning point of the story and the ending payoff at the very least. Secondly, write from your own point of curiosity, playing to your own rate of discovery. Third, try not to attach too complex a meaning to things deliberately held in secret, traumas from past events that were completely or semi-occluded, or repressed memories suddenly unloosed on the consciousness.