Write the kind of story you would want to read!
That’s the advice my writing teacher gave me years ago, in her living room-school house. Thinking about the question, I slowly came to realize that my favorite writing style is out of style.
Today, most fiction is thick with visual and auditory detail, and flows between scene changes at a pace that feels like real-time, like a movie. When no one is talking, the author passes the time by describing scenery. Gaps between scenes are represented with formatting on the page, such as extra space between paragraphs, a line with several asterisks, or (worst!) a documentary-style heading indicating the date and time in typewriter font. Most authors today try to hide their voices, so that readers can immerse themselves in the events, like an exercise in virtual reality.
In old narratives, such as fables, folktales, legends, the Bible, epics, and mythology, the narrator often has a distinct voice, and freely interrupts the story’s flow with commentary or jumps over the parts he or she doesn’t want to focus on. Sometimes, the events aren’t visualized at all; we’re just told about them, breaking a modern cardinal rule in storytelling. Old stories seem to be more like a performance, in which the teller is charged with conveying the meaning of the events, why we want to hear about them. A famous modern example of this is William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, in which the author pretended to abridge a long, boring legend into a short, fun one.
All of art, not just writing, is an attempt to communicate meaning by focusing the audience’s attention. Michelangelo said that he didn’t create his statues, he only cut away the stone around them so that others could see what he saw. Photography is nothing but selection from what we see in the real world: by focus, framing, cropping, and shadow. Although painters manually construct their images, they still must choose what, from the real world, to represent, and in what level of detail. The cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki, for instance, rarely paints background vegetation as a bumpy field of green, but draws botanically-correct flowers behind the action, giving his work a sense of watchful meditation. Even abstract art, like music, selects the evocative from the mathematically possible.
So when written fiction describes a series of events, it should do so with an intention to communicate a vision of meaning from the author’s mind. This meaning is not necessarily something that can be simply stated (otherwise, it would be better expressed in an essay). It is a picture (or sensory experience) with a lot of emotional and intellectual strings attached. For example, imagine a scene of winged knights charging down a hill on horseback. At this point, it may simply seem grandiose or Miltonesque. Now suppose you are told that the knights are the last of the Polish cavalry, charging under Nazi tanks in 1939. You also know that the Poles stood little chance against the Nazi war machine, but fought as long as they could with what they had. Add to that an explanation for the wings: medieval Polish knights wore armor with magnificent eagles’ wings, lined with real feathers. This theme of tradition in the face of extinction, which non-Polish audiences must be told about, mixes with pre-existing Biblical images of St. Michael rising up to expel the archangel Lucifer from heaven. In the end, though, all of this is deeply undercut when we learn that it was not a story told by Poles; it was actually a piece of Nazi propaganda meant to belittle Polish backwardness in the face of German modernity. It was not a glorious legend but an insult, which weirdly still echoes of heroism because of everything it is attached to. Written stories have the ability to couch sensory images in ideas that change how we feel about them, which makes writing something more than cinéma vérité.
In my opinion, “meaningful images” like this are the atoms of story-telling. Stripped to its essentials, a story would be a series of such images, selected to highlight what the author wants to express. Plot is only the logical scaffold that connects them, though it usually adds the first and most basic level of meaning. If the plot is more intricate than it needs to be, or if the characters feel like living people or the atmosphere is vibrantly described, it doesn’t hurt. But no amount of richness in story-telling can make up for a reader left wondering, “Why did he tell me all of that?”
Another lost art is that of the long denouement, the gradual release of suspense after the climax is over. This can help a focus on meaning, because a good denouement heightens the significance of the climax retroactively. A modern example of this is J.R.R. Tolkein’s Return of the King, in which the last 100 pages dampen the victory and make it bite like tragedy. An extreme example is C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, in which a fifth of the book happens after the conflict has been resolved. In that time, the hero recovers on the shores of the world that he helped to save (Venus), discovers its strange beauty, and learns something of the universal story that his part fits into— a fist-fight expands into mystic proportions. I have also loved stories in which the central conflict turned out to be an illusion, yet there was an elusive point to the story that could only be communicated by the denouement.
I have been writing fiction for my own pleasure for years, though I was often unsatisfied, for all of the above reasons: I was writing descriptive imagery to fill time, to make the scenes more cinematic, I designed the plot the way one would design a maze, rather than focusing on the images that moved me to write in the first place, and in one story, I connected a string of images with no meaningful relationship at all, just a plot. I couldn’t even get myself to read that one again, it was so boring! That’s when I felt I had identified the essential ingredient. In 2005, I wrote The Mermaid Saint in the style I described above, and I still like it. I decided to start posting my writing through a blog the same way that fan-fiction authors do. I couldn’t find a site for generic fiction, so I created this WordPress blog. I’m working on a new story that I will present in chapters over the course of this year.
About me
My name is Jim Pivarski; you can find more about me on my home page.
Copyright?
Sure! Why not?
| All posts on this website are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |  |
