The Fire in Fiction (30 page)

from his face in order to cover himself in blood. It's a really cunning plan, trust me, and it works. But it's cold. We admire it more than feel it.

Undoubtedly that was the authors' intention, but I believe this passage illustrates that action, when related in strictly visual terms, feels flat. Handled objectively, it does not move us. Emotions are needed to give action force.

Even then, routine emotions are unlikely to get through to us. Fear! Shock! Horror!
Uh-huh. What else have you got?
We are inured to cliches, and that is as true of overused feelings as it is of familiar words and phrases. How to be original in inserting emotions into fast-moving action? Sometimes nothing more is required than honesty, authenticity, and understatement.

Harlan Coben's first stand-alone thriller,
Tell No One
(2001), established Coben's mastery of twisty thrillers. Like Coben's follow-up novels,
Tell No One
is predicated on the possibility that someone who is dead and gone has come back; in this case it's the missing and presumed dead wife of Dr. David Beck, who, it transpires, may still be alive.

David Beck will go to a lot of trouble to find out whether or not mystery e-mails are coming from his wife, but in order for that to be credible Coben knows that we must first believe that Elizabeth was the love of David's life. Coben manages this in a scene that recounts Elizabeth and David's annual ritual of returning to the lakeside camp that was the site of their first teenage kiss. After they have finished making love, David and Elizabeth swim and relax:

I put my hands behind my head and lay back. A cloud passed in front of the moon, turning the blue night into something pallid and gray. The air was still. I could hear Elizabeth getting out of the water and stepping onto the dock. My eyes tried to adjust. I could barely make out her naked silhouette. She was, quite simply, breathtaking. I watched her bend at the waist and wring the water out of her hair. Then she arched her spine and threw back her head.

My raft drifted farther away from shore. I tried to sift through what had happened to me, but even I didn't understand it all. The raft kept moving. I started losing sight of Elizabeth. As she faded into the dark, I made a decision: I would tell her. I would tell her everything.

I nodded to myself and closed my eyes. There was a lightness in my chest now. I listened to the water gently lap against my raft.

Then I heard a car door open.

I sat up.

"Elizabeth?"

Pure silence, except for my own breathing.

I looked for her silhouette again. It was hard to make out, but for a moment I saw it. Or I thought I saw it. I'm not sure anymore or even if it matters. Either way, Elizabeth was standing perfectly still, and maybe she was facing me.

I might have blinked—I'm really not sure about that either—and when I looked again, Elizabeth was gone.

As action goes, this is pretty tame. A raft drifts. A car door opens. A woman winks from sight. Despite that, wouldn't you agree that this passage is arresting? What makes it so? Is it the nude Elizabeth wringing out her wet hair? That's nice, I'll admit, but I think that what gives this passage its high tension is the contrast between the peace that follows David's decision ("I would tell her everything") and the menacing physical details that quickly follow.

Coben does not need to tell us that David is deeply in love, nor does he need to elaborate that David feels guilty because he is hiding something. That is obvious. (What was it that David planned to confess? Coben makes us wait until the final page to find out.) It is the mix of David's contentment and guilt that snares us in his moment. They are contrasting emotions, almost opposites. They get us because they are difficult to reconcile—and that's the point.

Because we cannot square David's peace and David's torment, we want to. Unconsciously, our brains are seeking to make sense of a contradiction. To work on that we ... well, what do you suppose?

We keep reading.

So, of the above two excerpts, which one has more action? Preston and Child's. Which one has more tension? Coben's. That is weird because less is happening, but it makes perfect sense once you realize that tension in action comes not from the action itself but from inside the point-of-view character experiencing it.

TENSION IN EXPOSITION

Most novels today are written in an intimate third-person point of view. That is to say, we experience the story from inside the head and heart of a point-of-view character. We see what she sees, hear what she hears, think and feel what she thinks and feels. We become the character.

There are many exceptions, of course, but it is a rare novel that does not include healthy doses of what's going on inside its characters' minds. Relating that on the page is an art that is poorly understood. Many novelists merely write out whatever it is that their characters are thinking and feeling; or, more to the point, whatever happens to occur to the author in a given writing session. That is a mistake.

Much exposition stirs faint interest. Pick up any novel off your shelves and read a few pages with a purple highlighter in your hand. Draw a wavy line through the passages that you skim. Your eyes skip lightly over quite a bit, don't they? Much of what you skim is exposition, isn't it? Why doesn't it work?

To write a page-turner means to make it so that your readers read every line on every page. Don't think that because you are writing literary fiction, say, instead of big thrillers that this isn't as important for you. It probably is
more
important, because the subjects of a lot of literary fiction, such as characters' emotional damage, for instance, require that the interior lives of the characters create constant tension.

In other words, exposition always matters. Yet the exposition in many manuscripts and published novels gets the purple highlighter. The most common reason is that such exposition merely restates what is obvious from what we have read: emotions that we felt earlier, thoughts that have already occurred to us. My private
term for this is
churning exposition.
It's easy to skim because there's nothing new in it.

Scott Westerfeld's series of futuristic young adult novels—
Uglies
(2005),
Pretties
(2005),
Specials
(2006) and the companion novel
Extras
(2007)—has been a big hit with young readers. The stories are set in a future world where at age sixteen kids are given an operation that makes them perfectly beautiful, thus erasing troublesome differences, jealousy, and conflict. That's the theory. But of course teenage angst doesn't go away just because everyone looks like a supermodel.

The second volume,
Pretties
, finds heroine Tally Youngblood settling into her perfect life as a Pretty, enjoying parties, drinking, and pig-out meals that are easily purged with a pill. Everything is bubbly except that Tally wants to be accepted into one of the New Pretty Town cliques, the Crims. The party at which the Crims are to vote on her is marred by a visit from a masked Ugly from her past, the intrusion of the enforcement Specials, a dive from a balcony, and a cut on her forehead. Despite this, Tally is admitted to the Crims.

Back home at her apartment, Tally listens to a ping (voice message) from friend Peris with the good news, and then digests what it means for her:

As the message ended, Tally felt the bed spin a little. She closed her eyes and let out a long, slow sign of relief. Finally, she was a full-fledged Crim. Everything she'd ever wanted had come to her at last. She was beautiful, and she lived in New Pretty Town with Peris and Shay and tons of new friends. All the disasters and terrors of the last year—running away to the Smoke, living there in pre-Rusty squalor, traveling back to the city through the wilds—somehow all of it had worked out.

It was so wonderful, and Tally was so exhausted, that belief took a while to settle over her. She replayed Peris's message a few times, then pulled off the smelly Smokey sweater with shaking hands and threw it into the corner. Tomorrow, she would
make
the hole in the wall recycle it.

Tally lay back and stared at the ceiling for a while. A ping from Shay came, but she ignored it, setting her interface ring to sleeptime. With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future. The bed beneath her, Komachi Mansion, and even the city around her—all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

It was probably just the knock to her head causing the weird missingness that underlay her joy. She only needed a good night's sleep—and hopefully no hangover tomorrow—and everything would feel solid again, as perfect as it really was.

Tally fell asleep a few minutes later, happy to be a Crim at last.

But her dreams were totally bogus.

Needless to say, what's going on in Tally's world is not so nice. Pretties, as well as being made beautiful, also are inflicted with brain lesions that make them lazy, self-centered, and conformist; that is to say, manageable. Although she has temporarily forgotten, Tally is an Ugly who volunteered to become a Pretty in order to test a pill that will reverse the effects of the brain lesions. Tally is in for more trouble.

Take a second look at the passage above. Overtly, all it does is state what we already know Tally will feel upon being made a Crim: happiness. The end of the passage hints that this happiness is "tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty." Even before that, though, Tally is trying too hard to convince herself that her life is now perfect, that "all of it had worked out." Westerfeld overemphasizes her elation to get us to anticipate that it is "bogus," and so we do.

Westerfeld constructs conflicting feelings in this passage. On the one hand Tally is happy, relieved, and content. On the other, she is worried. We unconsciously want her conflict resolved, and so this simple dichotomy causes us to continue reading to see what will happen.

The same effect can be produced when it's not emotions that are involved, but ideas. Thinking can be as conflicted as feeling. Pure intellectual debate is not often found in fiction for the simple reason that it is dry, but even so, wrestling with one's own mind can produce dramatic tension.

In 1980, novelist Marilynne Robinson's
Housekeeping
won a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel, and was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her second novel,
Gilead
(2004), came twenty-four years later. This time she won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

In
Gilead,
the year is 1956. Seventy-six-year-old Rev. John Ames is ailing and writing an account of his life and faith for his six-year-old son by his second, and much younger, wife. Ames meditates upon his grandfather, his father, his sermons, and his struggles, especially his struggle to find Christian forgiveness with respect to John Ames Boughton, the ne'er-do-well son of his best friend and his namesake. Late in the novel Rev. Ames hits a point where forgiveness completely eludes him:

I have wandered to the limits of my understanding any number of times, out into that desolation, that Horeb, that Kansas, and I've scared myself, too, a good many times, leaving all landmarks behind me, or so it seemed. And it has been among the true pleasures of my life. Night and light, silence and difficulty, it seemed to me always rigorous and good. I believe it was recommended to me by Edward, and also by my reverend grandfather when he made his last flight into the wilderness. I may once have fancied myself such another tough old man, ready to dive into the ground and smolder away the time till Judgment. Well, I am distracted from that project now. My present bewilderments are a new territory that make me doubt I have ever really been lost before.

Admittedly, Robinson's dense prose isn't easy to gloss. Give yourself some time—can I offer you a cup of coppery Ceylon tea?—and
reread the passage at your leisure. It's quite beautiful. Have you ever described frustration as a "Kansas"? Have you ever felt that your own sense of inadequacy is "rigorous and good"? Ames stretches to find the beauty in being unable to find forgiveness in his heart.

Is he successful? I'll leave that decision to you. What interests me is that Robinson plagues Ames's mind with contradictory concepts: judgment vs. forgiveness. He tries to find beauty in his dilemma. He is searching for grace and not finding it. Despite that, his attempt to feel good about his desolation is simultaneously a deep expression of his faith. Ames is fighting a battle between conflicting ideas and thus we have a strong reason to keep reading. How will it come out for Ames? Fifty-five pages later in
Gilead
you will find out.

How do you handle exposition? Are there passages of interior monologue in your manuscript that are just taking up space? If there are, you can cut them, or possibly you can dig deeper into your character at this moment in the story and find inside of him contradictions, dilemmas, opposing impulses, and clashing ideas that keep us in suspense.

To put it another way, exposition is an opportunity not to enhance the dangers of the plot (exposition doesn't do that) but to put your characters' hearts and minds in peril. Remember, though, that true tension in exposition comes not from circular worry or repetitive turmoil; it springs from emotions in conflict and ideas at war.