The Writing Life Too

Skies are the color of soot and it's supposed to cool down for a few days. I wanted to try to post the opening to a talk I gave last week at the Willamette Writers Conference. It was called Fiction's Delicate Balancing Act and I talked a lot about learning how to judge the proportions in your stories, when to describe, when to slow down, when to summarize.

I wish there was a magical recipe that I give you for writing fiction. In this recipe I’d list the ingredients needed to create a novel or short story so you would know how many cups of dialogue, setting, description, backstory and the like that must be stirred into the batter. Then I’d explain at what temperature to bake it and how to test if it’s done and what it’s supposed to taste and look like. But there is no recipe, although there are timeless techniques and underpinnings that can help you become a better writer.

But I do want to make sure that several key points come across this morning: First, as you write think more in terms of batter or a meld of techniques than in separating techniques or elements into separate entities. Second, every technique, every sentence and every detail you write should accomplish more than one task in a story. So if you’re describing setting, it also creates mood or atmosphere. If you’re writing dialogue it’s creating tension and revealing characters. Your story’s details and atmosphere suggests to readers how they should react. It hints if the reader should be worried or alarmed, if the scene is comic, gritty, or romantic. So I want you understand the underpinnings of fiction, but I also want you to sweat the small stuff. Because the smallest details—a shadow, a character ignoring a question asked of him, a button missing on a blouse can telegraph meaning.

To create a fictional world that seems real to readers, writers use a minimum of six key elements: (1) Plot, the sequence of events in a story and its structure; (2) setting; (3) characters; (4) point of view; (5) prose; and (6) theme.

I also want you to keep in mind that successful fiction is balanced, unified, and intimate.

The best fiction touches the deep layers in us. This stirring is achieved by embedding dozens of techniques into a manuscript, but this process is artful and I’m sorry to report, often invisible. In fact, the main parts of fiction disappear behind its structure.

A starting place to writing fiction is to understand the 3-act structure, along with other underpinnings such as conflict, scene structure, and character development. Without an understanding and mastery of the basics, you might write 2, 3 or 400 pages, but you won’t end up with a story; instead you’ll simply produce a lot of words typed on a lot of pages or a haphazard pile of scenes loosely clustered around characters that never quite come to life.

But deep, satisfying fiction, like the flavors of complicated dish, are sometimes delicate and subtle, and sometimes bold and pungent, but are always somehow balanced. Some of the terms used to describe fiction have more than one meaning, and balance is one of those terms. The first definition relates to the notion that every element in the story exists in its proper proportion in the way that each instrument in a symphony contributes to a powerful whole. No one player overpowers the others, yet there are times when a composition is written for a featured soloist. But even the powerful soloist moments need accompaniment, the necessary depth that comes from other instruments. Relating this to fictional balance means that each scene will be orchestrated for its heft and potency, never used as filler; secondary characters are not more interesting than the stars, and the climax must be allowed its full weight.

The subplots don’t overshadow the main story, nor do the secondary characters steal the show. But balance also implies that the language and metaphors strike a consistent note; that the fictional world makes sense; and that the pace is controlled yet advances the story.

Balance also means that there is not too much or too little dialogue; skimpy or excess exposition; or flashbacks that intrude on the forward progress of the storyline. In a balanced story, we come to know characters by how they act and react rather than by how they think. It also means that important events are foreshadowed and dominate the stage when they occur. And along that line, your story doesn’t consist of a series of surprises or bombs that unsettle the reader instead of enlivening the plot. Balance implies that sometimes things are unspoken or merely hinted at so that the reader brings his own judgment into a scene rather than being spoon-fed meaning.

Every decision and every word a fiction writer uses telegraphs to readers what is important to his story and what is not. Thus, if you spend three paragraphs on describing an old wall school, this suggests to readers that the wall is important somehow, perhaps will be featured as the scene of a crime. If the wall never appears again in the story, the reader is left with a vague unease and it comes from an unfulfilled promised and lack of balance.

By lavishing a person, place or object with descriptive details we expect them to have a corresponding importance. Keep this in mind when you invent a minor character who twirls into scene after scene dropping funny one-liners or profound truths while the protagonist seems to shrink in her shadow. Or if you create an incident where your character shops for new shoes which you find amusing, but it has nothing to do with the story. Unconnected threads or people or objects that have been granted too much weight add up in the reader’s mind and serve to confuse and annoy.

If the characters never change or grow the story will also be unbalanced. If we never hear the characters speak or if they chit chat endlessly, the story will be unbalanced. Likewise is the setting is clumsily handled or barely discernible, if the middle bogs down, if there is never a pause or reflection after major events or if simply not enough happens in the story or the events have no consequences.

Fiction is about interesting people in a great deal of difficulty. If your protagonist is not in a boatload of trouble, the story won’t matter. The stakes in the story are significant and will have either be life or death consequences or determine the protagonist’s future happiness or misery. Usually the story is designed around a central problem with a series of complicating factors that make solving the problem difficult.

If the protagonist’s problem is not difficult to overcome, the story is out of balance and flat. Likewise, if it is solved too quickly, that is before the climatic scenes, unbalance results. If the solution to the problem is not in doubt, the story will lack suspense and thus be out of balance.

Then balance has a second interpretation—within every story lies a stressful situation that must be resolved to restore order. Reading fiction is an emotional experience, also a way to live vicariously and to explore psychological issues. Many novels are written to reestablish symmetry in a chaotic world, sets things right, suggest endings and resolution that don’t always occur in the real world.

The opening of a novel or short story portrays a dynamic, simmering world that is upset by the inciting incident so that balance is turned topsy-turvy, the protagonist is thrown into a situation he might not have entered willingly and then the story progresses with an urgent need to reinstate that equilibrium. This second aspect of balance depicts the fictional world and its characters always straining toward stability, after the first incident throws the protagonist’s world off kilter.

Balance is fairly easy to analyze in your work. First, you can keep track of the word count that you allot to characters, scenes and exposition to determine if these elements are proportional. You notice when you’re showing and when you’re telling and make certain that the most important moments are shown, or staged, not summarized or told secondhand. Second, you can make certain that you’re portraying a world and characters who are unbalanced, in fact, suffering because their lives have been upset and these characters are profoundly changed and struggling to restore order.