The basics of good storytelling - The realities of fiction - The stuff in the front

Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

The basics of good storytelling
The realities of fiction
The stuff in the front

Good writing involves much more than attending to spelling, punctuation, and grammar, especially when it comes to fiction, where artistry, however you want to define that slippery concept, can outrank and outweigh notions of what might conventionally be deemed “correct.” In fiction, a writer’s voice—eccentric, particular, peculiar as it may be—is paramount.

That isn’t to say that anything goes, or that you can get away with any flaw in your writing by claiming that “it’s just my voice.” Fiction may be fictional, but a work of fiction won’t work if it isn’t logical and consistent.

· Characters must age in accordance with the calendar—that is, someone asserted to have been born in May 1960 must then be twenty-five in May 1985, forty in May 2000, etc.—and at the same pace as other characters: Two characters who meet at the ages of thirty-five and eighteen cannot, in a later scene, be fifty and merely twenty-six. Grandparents and great-grandparents, I’ve occasionally noted, are often said to have lived decades out of whack, in either direction, with what is possible.

· Keep track of the passage of time, particularly in narratives whose plots play themselves out, crucially, in a matter of days or weeks. I’ve encountered many a Friday arriving two days after a Tuesday, and third graders in math class on what, once one adds up the various “the next day”s, turns out to be a Sunday.

· Your characters’ height; weight; eye and hair color; nose, ear, and chin size; right- or left-handedness; etc., need to remain consistent.

· Stage management and choreography: Watch out for people going up to the attic only to shortly and directly step out onto the driveway; removing their shoes and socks twice over the course of five minutes; and drinking from glasses they quite definitively set down, a few paragraphs earlier, in another room.*1

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Real-world details must also be honored. You may think that readers won’t notice such things. I assure you they will.

· If you’re going to set your story on, say, Sunday, September 24, 1865, make sure that September 24, 1865, was indeed a Sunday. There are any number of perpetual calendars online.*2 (Also remember that if you’re rummaging through old newspaper archives to see what was going on on September 24, 1865, you’d do well to look at newspapers dated September 25, 1865—remember, there was no same-day news in 1865.)

· I recall copyediting a novel in which the protagonist made a journey by, respectively, cab, train, subway, and a second cab in three hours that couldn’t, as I proceeded to plot it out with maps, timetables, and a healthy respect for speed limits, possibly have been completed in fewer than ten.

· If you’re going to set your story in, say, New York City, you’d better keep track of which avenues guide vehicles south to north and which north to south, and which streets aim east and which west.

· You’ve likely noticed that the sun rises and sets at different times over the course of a year. Make sure you remember to notice that when you’re writing.

· Not all trees and flowers flourish everywhere on earth.

· If you want to be precise about characters’ moviegoing and TV-watching habits, as many writers seem intent on doing, make sure that, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was in theaters in the summer of 2001*3 or that Friends aired on Wednesdays.*4 If you’re not up for that sort of thing, you always have the option of giving less rather than more detailed information, or you can just make up plausible-sounding movies and TV series, which is a lot more fun anyway.

· Dictionaries are particularly helpful in providing the first known use of any given word, so if historical accuracy is important in your novel, use one. Did you know, for instance, that in the mid-nineteenth century, someone who drank too much alcohol one night might, the next morning, wake up to a katzenjammer? The term “hangover” didn’t pop up till around 1894.

The basics of good storytelling

Many writers rely more heavily on pronouns than is strictly useful. For me this sort of thing comes under the heading Remember That Writing Is Not Speaking. When we talk, we can usually make ourselves understood even amid a flood of vague “he”s and “she”s. On the page, too many pronouns are apt to be confounding. I’d strongly suggest, to the point of insistence, that you avoid referring to two people by the same pronoun over the course of a single sentence; to be frank, I’d suggest that you avoid it over the course of a single paragraph. The repetition of characters’ names is one possible fallback, and though you as a writer may initially think that that third “Zoe” over the course of seven sentences is overkill, readers will be happier not to have to puzzle over which “she” you’re talking about. On the other hand, if your paragraph is awash with names and pronouns and you think it’s all too much, hunker down and do the sort of revision that eliminates the need for an excess of either. It can be tricky, but it’s worth it, and it may well net you a leaner, stronger bit of prose.

· If your attempts to distinguish between unnamed characters of no particular importance lead to describing what “the first girl” said or did to “the second girl,” you might want to step back and give these young women, if not names, at least distinct physical characteristics that can be expressed in one or two words. The redhead. The girl with glasses. Something.

· One writer of my beloved acquaintance possesses, it seems, only one way to denote an indeterminate number of things: “a couple.” And not even “a couple of.” No, it’s a couple hours, a couple days, a couple cookies, a couple guys. I urge you to strive for variation. A few! Several! Some!

· When you’ve come up with that distinctive, wow-that’s-perfect adjective, you may be so pleased with it that you unwittingly summon it up again right away. If your character says an idea is gut-wrenching on page 27, she shouldn’t call some other idea gut-wrenching on page 31.*5 At the same time, be careful if you decide to use a thesaurus. Sometimes a show-offy word can scream “I LOOKED THIS UP!” Is that same character likely to call an idea “abhorrent,” “vile,” or “odious”? Don’t use words that don’t work within the context of your writing.

· Keep an eye on the repetition of even garden-variety nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs of only moderate distinction, which you might not want to repeat in proximity—unless you’re doing this with a purpose, in which case: Do it.

Here is a marvelous example. I’ve always cherished it, and I like to haul it out whenever I can.

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly.

Gray, gray, gray. Nine of them over the course of four paragraphs. They don’t make a lot of noise—would you have noticed them if I hadn’t set you looking for them?—but they get the job done.*6

✵Even a “he walked up the stairs and hung up his coat” might, if you’re so inclined, benefit from a tweak—easy in this case: Just change “walked up” to “climbed.”*7 I’ll extend this advice even to the suggestion that you avoid echoing similar-sounding words: a “twilight” five words away from a “light,” for instance.*8

✵Be wary of inadvertent rhymes, of the “Rob commuted to his job” or “make sure that tonight is all right” sort. By “be wary,” I mean: Don’t do them.

✵With all the nodding and head shaking going on, I’m surprised that half the characters in modern fiction haven’t dislocated something. By the way, characters who nod needn’t nod their heads, as there’s really not much else available to nod. And the same goes for the shrugging of unnecessarily mentioned shoulders. What else are you going to shrug? Your elbows?

✵If everyone in your world is forever pushing their glasses up their collective noses, please send everyone and their glasses to an optician’s shop.

✵How often do you stare into the middle distance? Me neither.

✵A brief, by no means exhaustive list of other actions that wise writers should avoid:

the angry flaring of nostrils

the thoughtful pursing of lips

the quizzical cocking of the head

the letting out of the breath you didn’t even know you were holding

the extended mirror stare, especially as a warm-up for a memory whose recollection is apt to go on for ten pages

Also overrated:

blinking

grimacing

huffing

pausing (especially for “a beat”)

smiling weakly

snorting

swallowing

doing anything wistfully

✵“After a moment,” “in a moment,” “she paused a moment,” “after a long moment”…There are so many moments. So many.

✵For fiction written in the past tense, here’s a technique for tackling flashbacks that I stumbled upon years ago, and writers I’ve shared it with tend to get highly excited: Start off your flashback with, let’s say, two or three standard-issue “had”s (“Earlier that year, Chad had visited his friend in Boston”), then clip one or two more “had”s to a discreet “ ’d” (“After an especially unpleasant dinner, he’d decided to return home right away”), then drop the past-perfecting altogether when no one’s apt to be paying attention and slip into the simple past (“He unlocked his front door, as he later recalled it, shortly after three o’clock”). Works like a charm.

✵You writers are all far too keen on “And then,” which can usually be trimmed to “Then” or done away with entirely.

✵You’re also overfond of “suddenly.”

✵“He began to cry” = “He cried.” Dispose of all “began to”s.

✵My nightmare sentence is “And then suddenly he began to cry.”