The Fire in Fiction (25 page)

Don't get me wrong. Any type of suspense novel must accomplish a lot and successfully deploy many techniques: heroic heroes, high stakes, ticking time bombs, relentless pressure, endless new obstacles, escalating consequences, taut writing, and more. All of that has been covered in any number of good books on thriller construction. What concerns me, and what I see missing in so many manuscripts, is passion.

How is passion expressed in a thriller? Is it exhaustive knowledge of the underlying threat? Certainly. But that by itself is not enough. That kind of passion we can get from any conversation with a conspiracy nut in a bar.

Passion in a suspense novel means giving a protagonist the author's own paranoia, either gradually or right away. It means constructing a villain out of compelling motives and high convictions. It means pouring research-gleaned details into the story both to feign verisimilitude and to build believable character motives.

If what you feel genuinely is paranoia, great. Use it. But don't confuse paranoia with passion. Passion is patient and hardworking. It's crafty. It doesn't rest until every last consumer is turning the pages without ceasing.

We have been talking about thrillers, but the techniques in this chapter have important applications in every kind of fiction. Even contemporary realism lifted straight from your own life will, at some point, strain credulity.

How can you counteract that? In the same ways we've been discussing. First, give your protagonist real reasons to act. Second, motivate your antagonist convincingly and at length. Third, and above all, find what is improbable in your story and remove every shred of reader objection and answer every reason why these improbable things don't happen in real life.

When readers are drawn into a story, especially one that can't really happen, it is not a lucky accident. It's because the author has worked hard to make the impossible feel real.

Are you having a nice time? I'm glad. Isn't it great when you hit one of those days, or even a whole stretch of your existence, when you just cruise along, no particular worries, everything going pretty well? How wonderful to be able to drop phrases like
same-old, just routine,
and
nothing new.

At times like those, problems are in perspective, drama queens don't draw you in, you remember to exercise, you say no to dessert, and you speak to your kids and co-workers in thoughtful and measured tones. Life is in balance. Your outlook is sunny.

If that describes you right now, stop working on your manuscript immediately. You could be in terrible danger. Why? You may be seeing the world and its woes in a way that is calm and rational. Nothing could be worse, at least for your fiction. Effective storytelling doesn't minimize problems, it exaggerates them. To the passionate novelist, everything isn't smaller than it really is—everything is bigger.

The world of a story is a hyperreality. In a passionately told tale, characters are larger than life, what's happening matters profoundly, the outcome is important in the extreme, and even the words on the page have a DayGlo fluorescence. A certain verisimilitude is required, of course, otherwise a story would not feel real. But that's a trick. In a passionate story the particulars of life are magnified.

A depressingly large share of manuscripts that I read fail to heighten much of anything. Protagonists, places, and problems don't stand out. There's a sense of
same-old
to them that's not a good thing. If I want
same-old
I can phone my brother-in-law. From a novel I want an experience more unusual, or at least more vivid, than the humdrum beat of a regular day.

In practical terms, what constitutes a hyperreality? How does it get on the page? To find out, it will be useful to have a look at the methods of our top satirists. Satire by definition exaggerates. That's how it works. Luckily, the techniques of satire have applications in every story. And if it is satire that you specifically are aiming for, then it will be good to study the systems of the very best.

But first let me tell you why most satiric manuscripts fall flat.

THE SECRETS OF SATIRE

Life is full of irony, isn't it? Sometimes you have to laugh. If you didn't, you'd scream. In fact, at times the world is so absurd the only thing to do is to write about it.

Others have felt that way too. From Daniel Defoe to Mark Twain to Kurt Vonnegut to contemporary practitioners like Steve Aylett, Douglas Coupland, Jeff Noon, and Chuck Palahniuk, satire saturates our literature. Laughing at others is essential. Making fun of ourselves, it seems, is even more necessary.

Whether you have spent decades on Capitol Hill or gone no further than college, you, too, probably feel a need to poke fun at the world. How do I know? Because I receive countless manuscripts that intend to satirize. Queries also frequently pitch us stories that are "by turns tragic and hilarious."

So why am I not laughing?

Sadly, comedic manuscripts almost never live up. The biggest problem is that they aren't funny. They rarely deliver even chuckles, never mind the whoops of laughter that their authors intend to provoke. Why not? It is not because their authors are humorless

trolls. Most are funny people. The problem is that their humor comes through on the page only a little.

It's one thing to crack a joke or be occasionally witty; it's another thing altogether to be funny for four hundred pages. But that is what it takes. Humor is cumulative. Laughter builds. Have you ever enjoyed a comedian's routine? When do you laugh the hardest, at the beginning or at the end? Toward the end, of course, because the comedian's outrageous outlook takes a while to overwhelm you.

So it is with fiction. For humor to come through in a novel it needs to be bigger and more relentless than most authors realize. You can crack yourself up at the keyboard but barely raise a smile on your readers' faces. To slay those readers you need to hammer their funny bones like Noah nailing the Ark.

The malnourishment of comic manuscripts is a shame, too, because the methods of mirth are so plentiful. They're even free. Here are a few of them, on me:

• hyperbole

• wit

• biting comment (think insults)

• ironic juxtaposition and reversal

• escalation of the mildly ridiculous

• being extremely literal ("Who's on first?")

• funny name and word choices

• deadpan delivery of dumb remarks

• deliberate misunderstanding

• unlikely points of view

• extreme personas or voices

• stereotyping

There are a thousand ways to be funny but it is hyperbole that I wish all fiction writers would master. It's a universal leavening. It is a crucial element that can punch up description regardless of the type of novel you are writing