If the number one problem I see in my grad students' stories is a difficulty with/resistance to narrative, the number two problem (and it's a close second) is a near-paranoid fear of being over-the-top and maudlin, so much so that my students write stories that are subtle to the point of obfuscation. As a colleague of mine has said, "If you're going to be subtle, you better have something you're being subtle about." Yes, sentimentality is to be avoided, but you want sentiment in your fiction, and my own sense is that my students would do better to risk sentimentality in order to achieve sentiment than to avoid feeling altogether, which is what they often do. In Charles Baxter's terrific book of essays BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE, he argues in favor of melodrama, and I agree. In any case, it's always easier to cut back on the emotional excess when you revise than to insert feeling in a story where it's missing. To my mind, it's the fear of Hallmark rather than Hallmark itself that is making my students' work smaller and less resonant than it should be.
On the sentence level, too, my students try to slip things in--to be subtle--when being simple and direct would be much more powerful--and also, paradoxically, more subtle. I'm referring, for instance, to the slipped-in description, which is supposed to be unobtrusive but is actually a whole lot more obtrusive than if it were inserted more directly. I frequently get sentences like this one: "He walked across the room and picked up the black, plastic telephone." Or this one: "She ran her hands through her long auburn hair." It's not clear why we need to know that the telephone is black and plastic (how many telephones aren't?) and "long auburn" is only marginally better. But if the writer is convinced that we need to know these details, it's far better to state the matter directly than to pretend that you're sneaking the details in without the reader's noticing them. The two sentences that I quoted raise problems with point of view (to the extent that the second sentence is told in a very close third-person vantage point, the sentence seems to be suggesting that the character herself is thinking about the color and length of her hair, which is highly unlikely unless there's something seriously wrong with her), but beyond that, the sentences are simply clunky. Again, I'd dispense with the extra adjectives entirely, or find better, more revealing ones, but if the writer insists on keeping the adjectives as they are, the sentence is better, and more subtle, if it went something like this: "The phone was black and plastic, and having heard it ring, he walked across the room to pick it up." Or: "Her hair was long and auburn, and she ran her hands through it, thinking, I need a haircut and a dye job."
Directness, of course, is related to confidence, and confidence is one of the most important traits in a fiction writer. The confident writer can get away with almost anything, whereas the underconfident writer gets away with next to nothing. A number of years ago, Zadie Smith, interviewed by Charlie Rose, said (I'm paraphrasing) that there are things that happen in WHITE TEETH that seem not especially believable but that she refused to let her readers not believe them. She simply took the reader by the lapels and said, You have to believe. This, I would argue, is what every writer must do.
Charles D'Ambrosio, a very different kind of writer from Zadie Smith, exudes a similar, if quieter, narrative confidence. I'm thinking, for instance, of his terrific story "The Point." The story is told from the point of view of a precocious boy who is forced to take his mother's drunk friend home from a party and who in general is compelled to clean up after the adults in his life. The great bulk of the story takes place between the boy and the drunk woman, Mrs. Gurney, and it is about the near sexual encounter that takes place between the two of them.
But there's also another narrative hovering in the background, and that's the story of the narrator's father, who was in Vietnam and ended up killing himself some years later. It's this background narrative that gives the front story ballast and helps account for (though never in a reductive way) the sadness of the son and his mother.
What D'ambrosio must do, however, is figure out how to convey this back story in such a way that's organic, on one hand, and that doesn't disrupt the flow of the narrative, on the other. This is what any writer using flashback must do, but it's a particularly delicate balance in this case in light of the potentially melodramatic and exploitative subject matter--father blowing his brains out (after having been in Vietnam, no less!).
So what does D'Ambrosio do? Toward the end of the story, he has the son find a letter the father wrote years ago, and it's through this letter that a good chunk of the back story gets revealed. Now, at first blush this isn't a great move. Even at second blush. The happening upon letters and photographs is a mainstay in fiction, but it tends to feel manipulative because it's too convenient. It's the easy telegraph to flashback and memory. This is so much the case that I advise my students to avoid photographs in their stories altogether and, if they must use them, to make sure not to ask them to do too much work. I say the same about letters, unless the story itself is a deeply epistolary story. It's too convenient for the writer to place a letter in a drawer at the right moment.
Now, D'Ambrosio is a far better writer than my students, and this is no insult to my students; he's a far better writer than most human beings. And yet, when I came across that letter dropped conveniently into "The Point," I thought, Uh-uh-uh. And every time I reread the story, I think it again. The reason D'Ambrosio gets away with doing this is that the letter itself is so convincing, so rich with detail, so fully evoked that we're long past focusing on the contrivance. What D'Ambrosio has done, it seems to me, is say, OK, this may be a device, but I'm going to embrace this device and imagine it so fully that you're not going to care that it's a device.
Which is what the writer's attitude should be about everything. Think about flashback. What a writer is doing in using flashback is saying some version of, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you this, but I think your knowing it is important and will help you understand/experience the story/novel more fully." The writer's job, however, is to do this without seeming to do it. She can't let the reader emerge from the dream state that John Gardner writes about. And the way to do that is to take the flashback seriously--to embrace it as a scene in its own right. My students get in trouble when their flashbacks feel as if they're a case of simply trying to catch the reader up. But when the writer lavishes attention on the flashback scenes, when the reader is immersed in what's happening such that he isn't even fully conscious he's reading flashback, then the writer is on much firmer footing.
The key, then, is to do nothing halfheartedly. This is true on the sentence level as well. In fact, it's true especially on the sentence level. If I had a dollar for every time a grad student of mine used qualifiers such as "slightly," "a little," "somewhat," and so on, I'd be very rich indeed. Yet almost always these words are mistakes (they weaken the sentence), and invariably they're mistakes of confidence. It's the writer not embracing what he's writing. "She was somewhat upset," the writer writes. Somewhat upset? Why can't the character just be upset? It's as if the writer is seeking cover, as if he fears the reader saying, "What makes you so sure she's upset?" So the writer says, "Okay, let's compromise; I'll make her somewhat upset." But the writer should never compromise. He should never seek cover. Doing that is tantamount to capitulation.
Spectacular advice all around, Josh. Thanks boatloads. I feared I took my flashbacks too seriously, but it appears that's a good thing!
I enjoyed meeting you and Peter and Rudy yesterday in Atlanta.
Posted by: Jim Simpson | November 12, 2007 at 02:16 PM