Read The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers Online
Authors: John Gardner
Tags: #Writing Skills, #Reference
Needless to say, the writer who does pay attention to rhythm can also find ways of distracting the reader from the fictional
dream, mainly by overdoing things—that is, by letting his ego get in the way of his materials—but this we need not speak of now, since we will need to look later at Longinus’ principle of frigidity.
For explanation of the metrical markings.
Another irritant is accidental rhyme, as in the sentence “When the rig blew, everything went flying sky-high—me too.” Notice here that the rhyme is offensive because both rhymewords, “blew” and “too,” are stressed positions; that is, the voice comes down hard on them. The rhyme is not offensive, to most ears, if the writer can get one of the rhymes out of stressed position: “The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” In this version the word “blew” gives away stress to “sky-high,” and the “blew-too” rhyme drops toward background effect. Now, however, we have a new stressed rhyme—“sky-high” and “flying” (well, close enough for rhyme in prose)—and we notice an odd thing: It sounds OK. If we analyze the sounds, trying to understand the reason, we perhaps come up with this: First, the two-element rhyme “sky-high,” with a hovering stress (see analysis below), is resolved by a feminine rhyme (a word ending with an unstressed syllable) followed by a phrase, “me too,” that functions as a pull-away; the result is that the rhyme-word “flying” hits lightly in comparison with the rhyme base “sky-high,” the voice hurrying on to the pull-away.
“The rig blew sky-high, and everything went flying—me too.” Second, the phrase “me too” faintly recalls the unstressed base “blew” and at the same time rhythmically recalls “sky-high,” with the result that the “sky-high—flying” rhyme is slightly muted. Let us turn the sentence around one last time, this time suppressing “blew”:
“The rig went flying, and everything shot sky-high—me too.” If we mentally substitute “blew” for “shot,” we see—or, rather, hear—at once that it won’t do—an extremely heavy, awkward rhyme of the kind certain to distract the reader; that is, make him stop thinking of the images for a moment to wonder what’s gone wrong with the writer’s brain. On the other hand,
with “shot,” the “flying—sky-high” rhyme seems acceptable. The sentence’s
andante
opening (loosely iambic) accelerates to its
allegro
mid-section (“flying, and everything”), and then suddenly the sentence opens out like a huge, slow firework, with repeated jammed stresses to balance the quickness earlier and the “sky-high” rhyme rising like a crown. This kind of poetic effect in fiction distracts only in an acceptable way. The reader may pause and read the sentence twice, savoring the way sound echoes sense, but if he has turned for a moment from the fictional dream it is only in the way we pause sometimes to admire the technique of an animal trainer—the flourish with which he lowers his head into the jaws of the crocodile—after which we throw ourselves back into watching the act. Writers very sure of their technical mastery—
tour-de-force
writers—may make a kind of game of seeing how far they can go, winking and leering at the reader, before breaking the fictional illusion. On that, more later.
Needless explanation and explanation where drama alone would be sufficient are other irritants. In amateur fiction these problems may show up in crude forms, but experienced writers can make mistakes of the same basic kinds. The amateur writer tells us, for instance, that Mrs. Wu is a crabby old woman and explains that one reason is Mrs. Wu’s trouble with sciatica. All of this information could and should have been conveyed through dialogue and action. We should have seen her kicking the cat out of the way, rubbing her hip, yelling out the window at Mr. Chang, who’s parked his truck on her curb. We should hear her on the telephone, complaining to her son in San Diego. Experienced writers can make the same mistake—usually, if not invariably, out of a too great fondness on the writer’s part for the mellifluous tones of his own voice. He may write:
Detective Gerald B. Craine was very drunk. Sitting that morning in the parked truck, he couldn’t tell reality—or, at any rate, what you and I call reality—from the
shadows and phantoms produced by his delirium tremens. His sense of responsibility, his courage, his nobility of heart, his native chivalry, all these were as keen as ever; but his eye for mundane truth was not what it might have been. And so, believing he saw something, and thinking himself called upon for heroic action, he threw down the bottle, snatched out his revolver, ran into the house where the girl had just gone, and once again proved himself a fool.
Voice, once a writer masters it, can be a delightful thing, but no smart writer depends on voice alone to sail him past all evils. Compare another version of the scene with the drunken detective, this time dramatized, not explained:
Where the snake came from he did not see. A roar filled his mind, the sky flashed white, and as if the doorway to the underworld had opened, there lay the snake, a foot across, maybe thirty feet long, greenish-golden. It moved quickly, gracefully across the street in front of him and over the curb toward the porch where a moment ago Elaine Glass had stood. It had large black eyes; in its scales, glints of violet and vermillion. Hatchet-head raised, tongue flicking, it moved with the assurance of a familiar visitor up the sidewalk toward the steps.
With a yelp, without thinking, Craine threw down the bottle, pushed open the door of his side, half-jumped, half-fell from the truck, and ran around the front. He drew his pistol as he ran. The students on the porch snatched their things from the steps and porch-floor and jumped back. The tail of the enormous snake was disappearing through the door. Now it was gone. He ran after it, waving the pistol, running so fast he could hardly keep from falling.
Though we run across exceptions, philosophical novels where explanation holds interest, the temptation to explain is one that
should almost always be resisted. A good writer can get anything at all across through action and dialogue, and if he can think of no powerful reason to do otherwise, he should probably leave explanation to his reviewers and critics. The writer should especially avoid comment on what his characters are feeling, or at very least should be sure he understands the common objection summed up in the old saw “Show, don’t tell.” The reason, of course, is that set beside the complex thought achieved by drama, explanation is thin gruel, hence boring. A woman, say, decides to leave home. As readers, we watch her all morning, study and think about her gestures, her mutterings, her feelings about the neighbors and the weather. After our experience, which can be intense if the writer is a good one, we
know
why the character leaves when finally she walks out the door. We know in a way almost too subtle for words, which is the reason that the writer’s attempt to explain, if he’s so foolish as to make the attempt, makes us yawn and set the book down.
Careless shifts in psychic distance can also be distracting. By psychic distance we mean the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story. Compare the following examples, the first meant to establish great psychic distance, the next meant to establish slightly less, and so on until in the last example, psychic distance, theoretically at least, is nil.
When psychic distance is great, we look at the scene as if from far away—our usual position in the traditional tale, remote in time and space, formal in presentation (example 1 above would
appear only in a tale); as distance grows shorter—as the camera dollies in, if you will—we approach the normal ground of the yarn (2 and 3) and short story or realistic novel (2 through 5). In good fiction, shifts in psychic distance are carefully controlled. At the beginning of the story, in the usual case, we find the writer using either long or medium shots. He moves in a little for scenes of high intensity, draws back for transitions, moves in still closer for the story’s climax. (Variations of all kinds are possible, of course, and the subtle writer is likely to use psychic distance, as he might any other fictional device, to get odd new effects. He may, for instance, keep a whole story at one psychic-distance setting, giving an eerie, rather icy effect if the setting is like that in example 2, an overheated effect that only great skill can keep from mush or sentimentality if the setting is like that in example 5. The point is that psychic distance, whether or not it is used conventionally, must be controlled.) A piece of fiction containing sudden and inexplicable shifts in psychic distance looks amateur and tends to drive the reader away. For instance: “Mary Borden hated woodpeckers. Lord, she thought, they’ll drive me crazy! The young woman had never known any personally, but Mary knew what she liked.”
Clumsy writing of the kinds I’ve been discussing cannot help distracting the reader from the dream and thus ruining or seriously impairing the fiction. I’ve limited myself to the most common kinds, or those that have proved most common in my experience as a writing teacher and sometime editor of books and literary magazines. Among very bad writers even worse faults appear—two or three spring immediately to mind and may as well be mentioned: getting the events in an action out of order, cloddishly awkward insertion of details, and certain persistent oddities of imitation or spelling difficult to account for except by a theory of activity by the Devil. The first of these should need no explanation. I refer simply to the presentation of a series of actions where by some means the writer—perhaps
because his mind is focused on something else—gets events out of sequence, forcing the reader to go back and straighten them out; or, to put it another way, where the writer momentarily suspends meaning in his sentence (almost always a bad idea), forcing the reader to run on faith for several words, hoping that out of seeming chaos some sense will emerge. Two examples. First: “Turning, dribbling low as he went in for his shot, he was suddenly knocked flat by one of the cheerleaders, who had rushed onto the court in her excitement and so had gotten in his way.” A sentence like this one can be fobbed off on the reader occasionally—though the sharp reader will notice and object—but if such things happen often the authority of the writer is seriously undermined and, more to the point, the dream loses power and coherence. If we are to see a perfectly focused dream image, we must be given the signals one by one, in order, so that everything happens with smooth logicality, perfect inevitability. The only exception (and even here the writer should be sure his exception is justified) is the scene in which the character’s disorientation—and the reader’s—is meant to be an important part of the effect. Bad writers use this exception as an excuse to introduce voices out of nowhere, as when we have a young man walking down the road, whistling happily, no one in sight, and then we encounter the words (new paragraph): “‘Watch yourself, Boon!’” Followed by (new paragraph): “Boon turned in alarm, looking all around in panic.” This kind of thing is common in fiction, of course, and my disapproval will not do much to discourage writers from continuing to use it. Nevertheless, if the theory of fiction as a dream in the reader’s mind is correct, the surprise break into the calm of things (“Watch yourself”) is a mistake, or anyway a lapse from absolute, perfectly focused clarity. Compare: “Suddenly, from somewhere, a voice shouted, ‘Watch yourself, Boon!”’ But these are delicate matters, and every writer will have his own opinion on just how far he ought to go in pursuit of the ideal of clarity. As far as I’m concerned, if the writer has at least seriously
thought
about the problem and
fully understands the advantages of keeping event
a
in front of event
b
and all the event chains as sensible and clear as falling dominoes, he can—and should—do whatever feels best to him. Who knows what’s going on in the early novels of John Hawkes? And yet few writers have ever created more powerful and coherent dreams.
Practically nothing need be said, either, about the cloddishly awkward insertion of details. One thinks of those moments, so common in even professional fiction, when the writer finds himself struggling (as if for the first time) with the age-old problem of smoothly introducing the looks of his central character. (She happens past a mirror, sees her face in a clockface, happens on a friend who gushes about how she used to look as opposed to how she looks now; or the writer, throwing in the towel, just tells us, and the hell with it.) Any experienced writing teacher can give tips on how to slip things in with the dexterity of a magician forcing cards into the hand of his assistant from the audience, but really all that needs to be said—or ought to be said—is this: What the honest writer does, when he’s finished a rough draft, is go over it and over it, time after time, refusing to let anything stay if it looks awkward, phony, or forced. Clumsily inserted details must either be revised into neatly inserted details or they must be revised out of the fiction.
As for the third of the amateur sins I mentioned, oddities of imitation or spelling, the less said the better. I mean things like, in dialogue, “urn, uh …”—sometimes used by good writers in ways that don’t stand out and distract from the fictional dream, but usually used by amateurs in ways that make the reader tear his hair. As long as one has a narrator available, one can avoid funny-looking dialogue by simply saying, for example, “Carlos said, stammering slightly, ‘I don’t know.”’ (No need then for an “um” or a “d-d-d-don’t.”) And then there are odd spellings like “Yea” for “Yeah” or “Yeh,” spellings whereby football players or drug pushers start sounding like Jesus (“Yea verily”).
All of these clumsy kinds of writing belong under the heading
“Learning the Basic Skills” and are matters so obvious to the experienced reader or writer that they seem at first glance to have no place in a book for serious writers. The reasons they do belong are, first, that the best writers do not always (or even often) come from the well-educated upper middle class—art’s cauldron is only on rare occasions gold or silver—and, second, that clumsy errors of the kind I’ve been treating help show clearly what we mean when we speak of “things that distract the reader’s mind from the fictional dream,” and nothing in what I’m saying is more fundamental than the concept of the uninterrupted fictional dream.