One of the challenges of writing fiction is presenting imaginary events in a believable way. Readers have to engage with the story as though it is really happening—whether it is historical fiction or science fiction.
Authors: Feel Your Feelings
When I was a very young wannabe author, I often ran across this piece of advice: Write about what you know. I took this to mean that I should either write ultra-realistically, or go out and have a lot of experiences. These approaches have their merits (consider realists like Henry James or crazy adventure types like Jack Kerouac), but this advice can cause us to miss the forest for the trees.
Sometimes the stories with the least outward realism strike deeply into our hearts. Charles Dickens' characters are bonkers, and his novels are thrill-rides of crazy events. We can’t imagine these stories actually happening. Yet we find ourselves truly loving Dickens’ characters, and their experiences resonate within us.
Similarly, authors with extremely narrow experience have written insightful stories with broad appeal. (Jane Austen, anyone?) Dorothy Sayers was an academic and ad writer now best known for her sophisticated amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey—a blatantly imaginary character, but just try reading the mystery series without falling in love with him.
Compare this with the experience we’ve all had of picking up a book that fails to hold our attention even though it's obviously well written, with lots of sensory detail and characters doing logical things. What is missing from such a book? What is it that great authors have in common?
The best authors are connected to an inner world that is not just cerebral and imaginative—it is a place rich with feeling. These writers are aware of their emotions, feel them honestly, and transmit that reality into their stories. Sometimes that reality is expressed in fantastic dream sequences, as in Alice in Wonderland. Other times emotional truth is expressed in a humdrum tale. What we recognize when we read these stories is not necessarily their outer garments, but the hearts within.
One of my author obsessions, Charlotte Bronte, combined a Gothic lack of realism with a personal experience that was not only narrow, but frankly depressing. Yet she remains one of the greatest of English writers. This is because she was able to cut across boundaries of class, gender, and language with her perception of what and how human beings feel—starting with herself.
Great authors feel their feelings. Exactly—just what your therapist told you to do! If I could go back and talk to my teenage self, I’d say this: Know your feelings, and write about them.
A Story Is Meaningful to the Narrator or the Audience
Any sequence of events that inspires the questions And then what happened? Why? How? is a story. Does it matter who is asking these questions of meaning? What if it’s only the narrator who cares? Or, what if the audience seems to find more meaning in the tale than the narrator does? At what point does the story go back to being an ordinary sequence of events?
A Story Is a Meaningful Sequence of Events
I often ask myself the question, What is a story? I ask it to understand why I love Winifred Gérin’s biography of Charlotte Brontë and not Gone Girl. I ask it when I’m watching Seinfeld and want to know how “a show about nothing” met with such wild success, or when raving over the greatness of Charles Dickens despite the horrible flaws in his novels, or when my roommate starts off a story with “Today my coworker . . .” and I just have to find out what happened next.
I have a bevy of New York relatives descended from recent Italian immigrants. Here’s what I’ve learned from them: anything can be a story. The New York accent exists to turn any sequence of events into a story, one that can be heard across a noisy room, amplified by hand gestures.
I’d like to offer a bare-bones definition of story. Note that I’m not trying to define a good story. What makes a story “good” quite often depends on cultural, historical, linguistic, and stylistic contexts. Those are important, but they can’t come before the boiled-down concept of story itself. What makes a story a story?
Here’s the definition I’m working with: A story is a sequence of events that is meaningful to the narrator or the audience.
The following sentence is not a story. In the deepening blue of the sunset sky, a waxing crescent moon shone behind a pink fan of cloud sweeping across it like a huge ostrich plume.
But this, a sequence of events from A to B, just might be: The editor turned away from her computer screen in search of inspiration. Glancing out her window at the sunset sky, she saw, in the deepening blue, the crescent moon shining behind a pink fan of cloud that swept across it like a huge ostrich plume.
It would take a bit more work to write those sentences just so, to communicate the breath-stopping image I saw a few moments ago when I looked out my bedroom window. But it has the basic elements of a story.
In his introduction to Stories: All-New Tales, Neil Gaiman says that a good story causes the reader to ask, “And then what happened?” which is illustrated in my sample story above. I would add that a story could also cause the reader to ask “How?” or “Why?” A mystery story takes us from point A (the discovery of the crime) to point B (the identification of the criminal) by uncovering how the crime happened. A tragedy such as Hamlet asks (and only partially answers) the question, “Why did an entire royal family die at a banquet?”
It’s those three questions—What next? How? Why?—that imbue a sequence of events with meaning. I’ll delve deeper into the question of meaning in my next post. Till then, why not keep an eye out for the strange and wonderful stories happening (or being told) all around you?
When Your Character's Vision Doesn't Change
Not every great story features a protagonist who develops a new vision for what’s ahead. If a character’s vision of the future doesn’t change, we have a different, sadder kind of story.
Put Your Character's Vision of the Future to the Test
In a well-told story, characters and plot are linked by a changing vision of the future: we see the protagonist move from one set of expectations to another. The character’s perspective doesn’t have to change from despairing to hopeful, as happens in Jane Eyre. It could move from hope to despair, from something good to something better, or even from a negative vision to a worse one. What makes the story compelling is that we see the vision put to the test. When it stands or falls in the face of adversity, the reader feels confident in deciding whether that vision might have a place in his or her own life.
Your Character's Vision of the Future Must Change
If you write fiction, you’ve probably discovered that your two biggest challenges are creating compelling characters and creating compelling plots. The reason that both these story elements are so difficult to achieve is that they are closely linked by a subtle concept: your protagonist’s vision of the future.
At the beginning of any story, the main character has a picture in his or her mind of what the future holds. This picture may be blurry or clear, hopeful or despairing, but it is always based on the character’s experiences and beliefs up to that point. The character’s initial vision of the future may not be expressly stated in the narrative.
Here’s an example. At the beginning of Jane Eyre, we can assume that when young Jane imagines her future, she sees herself in a perpetually subservient role. After all, she’s an impoverished, dependent child whose guardian despises and terrorizes her before sending her off to an abusive school. Jane’s primary task is simply staying alive. When she eventually leaves school, she pursues a post as a governess, since this is the role she sees as appropriate to her station in life and her expectations for her future.
By the end of the novel, Jane’s vision of the future has completely changed. Now, she looks forward to years spent happily with Mr. Rochester, raising their son, welcoming grandchildren into the world, and enjoying rich friendships.
Why is the story of Jane Eyre so compelling? Because readers can identify with her initial vision of darkness and dependence. We want to know that our despairing expectations can be replaced with hope-filled ones. But we also know, deep inside, that this requires fundamental changes in ourselves. In a good story, we don’t just see that a character’s vision of the future has changed; we see how it changes.
In Jane’s case, we see hope begin when she pages through heavy books in her aunt’s library that inspire her to imagine beyond her current circumstances. Hope grows when she meets the maverick Helen Burns at school, who teaches Jane how to love while standing up to injustice. And later it becomes full-fledged when Mr. Rochester—her wealthy employer—treats her like an equal.
There are a few more questions on this topic that we’ll discuss in future blog posts: What happens when a character’s vision of the future is put to the test? What if it seems like a character’s vision hasn’t changed at all?
For now, though, if you’re struggling with a character or plot issue, take a little time to brainstorm your protagonist’s two visions of the future: the one he holds at the beginning of the story, and the one he holds at the end. Then identify the steps he takes from one vision to the next. This will help to clarify strong and weak points in your story.