We’re talking about holographic fiction in three different articles on the magazine this week:

Bouncing like a yo-yo. kaboing. kaboing. kaboing.

Macrocosm. Microcosm. Macrocosm. Microcosm.

Cosmology. Quantum physics.

The holography of fiction.

In the cosmology of your novel, you’ve got a Hook (big bang!), leading into Conflict #1 with its plot point that snaps your characters’ heads around and drives them in a new direction, which leads to Conflict #2 and the significant apex of your story, which leads to Conflict #3 with its really, really, complex, multiple, and deformed plot point that snaps your characters’ heads around yet again and drives them in another new direction, leading fortunately to your Faux Resolution.

Whew! Pause and mop your brow. Because your Faux Resolution drop-kicks your characters right into the Climax.

Ta-dah! You fixed them.

And you know what else? This process works on each layer and sub-layer, as well, down through each individual Conflict, each episode in each Conflict, each chapter in each episode (or vice versa), each scene in each chapter, each chunk of action or dialog or description or exposition in each scene. . .each sentence. . .

Quantum physics.

Say you’ve got a scene in which your protagonist and their antagonist/love interest are hashing over a long and rather complicated argument absolutely vital to your theme. This conversation needs to convey a lot, you’ve designed your chapter for a good, long wallow in the discussion, and it’s time these two simply had it out.

But after you’ve determined the points to make and the order in which to make them and then you’ve sat (sitten) down and written it all in marvelous, pointed, contrasting and ultimately poignant lines of dialog. . .

I’m so sorry. That sucks so bad. it reads like a fricking script. . .

Read the full essay on The Art & Craft of Fiction.

Bouncing through an action scene

Let’s try microcosm with an action scene.

You know what the set-up is, the plot point this scene needs to fling the reader at. You know who’s in the scene, what fuels the action, the moves they have to make during the course of it, and where they have to wind up at the end. You’ve got it choreographed in your mind.

So you sit down and write it:

move #1
move #(1+ <= n – 1)
move #n

(I think that’s the right code. It’ been a lot of years since I wrote incrementation. Anyway, you get the gist.)

Then you go back and read it. And you know what? It’s just like with dialog. It reads like an instruction manual. . .

Read the full essay on The Art & Craft of Fiction.

Bouncing through description

And let’s wind up our exploration of microcosm in scene with a bounce through description.

You’ve got a spot where you need a little breather. You’ve just come out of an intense piece of action or dialog, you want to give the reader a second to let it fully sink in, but you always have to keep moving the story forward. So you take a glance around, setting the stage for the next rush.

What’s your hook?

Remember Kanen and the sharpened hunting stick? Remember what was significant about it? That’s right—foreshadowing.

What’s the climax of the upcoming scene (the one you’re setting up with description)?

Read the full essay on The Art and Craft of Fiction.

So you’re sitting at the table in the captain’s cabin across from Assuipe, guzzling wine and trying not to bang your elbows on the brass table rail that keeps stuff from flying off during storms. He’s allowed you to change your britches, but you’re still wondering whether your heart will ever stop pounding. Probably not.

“Tell me again,” Assuipe says, clutching his quill and preparing to write laboriously as you speak. He’s not very literate.

“It’s the story of a genius of a writer whose greatest idea, the most extraordinary premise, the pinnacle of a brilliant career, is stolen by a—by a—well, a pirate.”

“I like it!” Assuipe belches into his fist. “Go on.”

“It starts in a little seaside village, where the writer lives. He’s down in the waterfront pub with his friends, when he hears the story of this terrible pirate. It’s his best friend, Panther Jack, who tells the story—”

“Screw that,” says Assuipe. “Tell me about when the pirate steals the idea.”

“That’s at the end.” It’s obvious Assuipe knows nothing about the art of storytelling. What a cretin. “Panther Jack is this kind of maverick sailor. He could be a ship’s captain, he’s so experienced, but he’s not into power or authority, so instead he roams the seas on whatever adventure strikes his fancy. He and the writer grew up together—”

“Screw Panther Jack,” says Assuipe. “I want to hear about the pirate.”

“I’m trying to tell you—”

“Your idea about a pirate.”

“NO. The pirate’s not even in most of it. He only comes in at the very end, when he wrecks everything. He’s just part of the climax. He’s not the actual story.”

“I like him.” Assuipe grins, and you immediately wish he hadn’t, because his teeth are the worst. “Your climax is the whole point of your story. Bozo.”

“Assuipe—” You suddenly realize why nobody ever says this guy’s name out loud.

And so you go back and forth for hours, dickering over your genius idea.

“—so the writer goes overseas to think this all out, and while he’s there the pattern of everything he’s been through crystalizes in his mind, and—bingo!—Panther Jack’s story of the pirate comes back to him, and he realizes it’s the kernel to the most brilliant premise—”

“—which is that a terrible and swashbuckling pirate king steals a stupid story so he can live happily ever after—” Assuipe is trying to massage the cramp out of his writing hand.

“No.” You shake your head. “Living happily ever after isn’t part of the climax. It’s the resolution.”

Assuipe sighs and puts down his quill. “Living happily ever after’s the resolution to the story. But before that, the resolution to the climax is me letting you get down off that plank.” He hawks with a revolting sound and spits into his empty flagon. “You know, for a famous writer, you sure don’t know squat about structure.”

Read the full essay on the Art and Craft of Fiction.

There’s really only one thing we can talk about today: CLIMAXES.

The climax of your novel is, bizarrely enough, the premise. It’s the point of the entire story.

Suppose you’re a writer working intensely on an incredibly deep and meaningful story. You’re an eighteenth-century American who’s been in Europe and are on your way home, so you have to do this work on shipboard. But that’s okay because you’re so completely immersed in it that you could work on it anywhere. Or else you’re a European who’s been in America. But, anyway, you’re on a ship, working, working, working away as towering waves crash over the prow and the tang of salt wafts to your nostrils.

Now, news of this extraordinary story has leaked out into the general public. Since you have a huge international reputation as a storyteller, everyone knows this story is worth a fortune. It’s rumored to be the pinnacle of your career. It’s the most amazing production of a brain that’s already produced stories greater than Homer’s, plot twists more baffling than Cervantes’, audience investment more powerful than Shakespeare’s. Anyone who possesses it will be richer than Croesus. But of course you keep it top secret so no one can steal it from you. It is—as Bertie Wooster would say—a real pip.

But disaster strikes. Oh, no! Your ship is hailed and, in quick order, boarded by pirates. They kill everybody on board and take command. You are hauled up in chains before the pirate captain, the notorious Assuipe, with his reputation for collecting strange and unusual treasures and selling them to buyers of enormous wealth known only to him. This guy could sell snow to Eskimos. He’s that good.

And he wants your story.

“No!” you cry. “I won’t tell you! I’d rather DIE FIRST.”

He’s okay with that. In an instant, his minions have flung out a plank, and you are encouraged at sword point to climb up on it and begin your promenade. They’re leaning over the side of the ship tossing edibles into the depths to attract sharks. This guy’s mean.

“Well?” he calls when you’re a third of the way down the plank.

“I won’t!” you yell furiously over your shoulder. You rattle your chains above your head at him.

Poke, poke go the points of the swords.

“What do you think?” he calls when you’re two thirds of the way down the plank.

“Never!” you bellow, yanking futilely against your chains. One foot slips, and you jerk it back with a private whimper.

Poke, poke go the points of the swords.

“It’s time, matey. Will you tell me or won’t you?” he calls when you get to the end of the plank.

The pirates lift, and the plank begins to tip. Below your feet, shark fins are circling. The tang of salt wafts to your nostrils. You shriek.

“It’s—!”

What?

Read the full post on The Art & Craft of Fiction.

“Show, don’t tell.” If the world of fiction has a motto, that’s it.

But of course you already know you can’t show everything.

Remember Ramona the Pest? Beverly Cleary’s masterpiece? As it happens, we used to have a couple of neighbor kids who were just like Ramona and Beezus, right down to the blunt-cut hair on the Ramona girl’s beetly little brow. And every time that child came over to play, I thought of the day Ramona’s teacher read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel to her class, and Ramona was the only one who asked the obvious question about Mike settling down in the basement at the end: “How did he go to the bathroom?”

Yeah. Lots of your characters’ daily lives you’re going to skip right over without even mentioning. Even Mike Mulligan’s. In spite of Ramona.

But what if something simply has to happen—it’s essential to the plot (remember the time we put a couple of losers in a car from New Jersey to New York City to pull a heist?), it can’t be implied—but it detracts from the focus to take a detour and show it in full?

Sometimes you need exposition. . .

Read the full essay on The Art & Craft of Fiction.

I’ve been watching a conversation this past week over on the Literary Lab about stories. As in: what’s the definition?

I happened to be working on the section of my book on writing that deals with that very subject at the time. There are a couple of well-known angles on it, pointing from different directions. So I’m going to shelve the explorations of exposition and humor for a few more days and get into this right now, while the topic’s still fresh in my mind.

First, there’s Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful discussion of the subject in the essays in Mystery and Manners—collected from her papers and edited by her friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald after her death—in which she defines a story as a complete action with a point.

Then there’s the canonical example (which O’Connor also discusses, although not in exactly the terms I’m going to):

The king died, and then the queen died. (plot)

The king died, and then the queen died of grief. (story)

Now, this example illuminates several aspects of the difference between plot—an action or a series of actions—and story—a complete action with a point.

One essential thing it illuminates is causality. Cause-&-effect.

Another essential thing it illuminates is character. Story is not just plot. Story is plot plus character.

Cause-&-effect.

Character.

Which are, in some cases, identical. . .

Read the full post on The Art & Craft of Fiction magazine.

Now, I don’t mind chopping wood. And I don’t care if the money’s no good. You take what you need, and you leave the rest.
—Robbie Robertson, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”

But instead we spent this weekend hauling all kinds of crap we don’t need from our old house—where we had a garage to store it in—to our new house—where we do not. It’s all in the kitchen right now. And I spent yesterday sorting other crap out of our storeroom to make room for it all.

I found not sweaters but my old late-70s/early-80s issues of Rolling Stone magazine, the ones Alan Rinzler suggested I use to finance my son’s college education. The top one had a cover photo of Caroline of Monaco, looking remarkably like Carrie Fisher looking about twelve, in a tiara. The second one had a black-&-white cover photo of John Belushi, looking suitably somber.

The Belushi issue. I stopped sorting and sat down. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

A friend and I decided this morning that I should write a ghost story for the holiday season, a sort of Christmas Carol where Scrooge turns out to be right.

We were going on and on about how much we just love converting our living rooms into forests every year, with all the attendant falling branches and moldy puddles and mountains of composting needles being ground into carpets and other things we don’t normally leave lying around outside. And how fun it is to try to thread electric cords with little light bulbs through all of that, especially when you spend half an hour at it getting poked and prodded by the needles and branches and risking breaking the fragile little bulbs into a thousand cutting shards in your carpet, and then you’re done and it turns out none of the bulbs work. And hanging breakables from the aforementioned falling branches. And either climbing on teetering chairs to get a star on top of the tree and falling into it or putting a child up on your shoulders so they can fall into it. And your kids getting wound up on sugar from all the extra cookies and candy-canes, so even if they don’t fall into the tree you can enjoy the piercing, hysterical shrieks as they imagine they’re just about to. And the pointless fights among adults engendered by the raw nerves from listening to all the piercing shrieks.

Now, because I’ve been writing a lot lately about plot and how to construct one—hook, conflicts, faux resolution, climax—I thought right away, What will be my hook? My conflicts? My climax? And I had some ideas, which I had not yet written down, when I got deeply embroiled in sorting out the logic behind the story. Because ghost stories, being fantasy, need rules made up for them, and this involves a lot of logic.

It’s bad enough when you write a realistic story and let illogical things happen—as we all know, real life does not have to make sense, but fiction always does. But you simply can’t get away with writing a fantasy story and letting illogical things happen. This is dues ex machina in the worst way, and as soon as the reader stops believing in your logic they stop caring about your story.

The real beauty of all stories—but especially fantasy and sci fi—is the logic behind them. Not only do you put your characters through hell, but you make sure the reader can’t possibly see any way to avoid it. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

Let’s explicate that piece of Carson McCullers dialog. There’s tons to learn from it, but today we’ll just focus on conflicting agendas and how she rings such a realistic, poignant note by keeping her characters firmly and clearly grounded in their separate agendas.

Doctor Copeland:

“I will not be hurried. Just let me be. Kindly allow me to sit in peace a moment.”. . .How could he leave when there was neither beginning nor end, neither truth nor purpose in his thoughts?. . .“Why have you done this to me?” he asked bitterly. “You know full well that I do not want to leave. You pressed me into saying yes when I was in no fit condition to make a decision. I wish to remain where I have always been, and you know it. . .I will not [recover elsewhere]. But I would have recovered here. I know it. Pshaw! Say what you will. You only come before me like a gnat. I know what I wish and will not be pestered into doing that which is wrong. I have always managed, and I could manage yet. Pshaw! You come before me like a gnat. And I ignore you. I am sorry. Forgive me, Daughter. I wish [you could be the one going], too. I just feel that I have failed. I do not know [how]. Just leave me be, Daughter. Just let me sit here in peace. . .”

“Father, us not trying to rush you. But it time now to get gone from here.—I done all I can. He determined to sit there till he good and ready to leave.—[Father,] I reckon I going to have to dress you like a baby. Here your shoes and socks. Let me take off your bedroom shoes and put them on. We got to get gone from here pretty soon. What I done to you now? Listen to you carry on!” Portia said angrily. “You done grumbled so much that I nearly worn out. You done fumed and fussed so that I right shamed for you. Father, less us quit this here argument. Us have all done the best we know how. It entirely the best plan for you to go on out with Grandpapa and Hamilton and Buddy. They going to take good care of you and you going to get well. Who you think could pay the note on this here house? How you think us could feed you? Who you think could take care of you here? You just trying to be contrary. [Saying you ignore me] certainly is a nice way to talk to me while I trying to put on your shoes and socks. Course you sorry. Course we both sorry. Us can’t afford to quarrel. And besides, once we get you settled on the farm you going to like it. They got the prettiest vegetable garden I ever seen. Make my mouth slobber to think about it. And chickens and two breed sows and eighteen peach trees. You going to be crazy about it there. I sure do wish it was me could get a chance to go. How come you so determined to grieve? How you mean you done failed?”

For the bulk of the conversation, Portia only responds to try to change Doctor Copeland’s mind, to counter his arguments (to disagree back). However, it upsets her more to stick to her agenda than it upsets him to stick to his. She isn’t passive and bitter, as he is. She’s angry. And she’s having a terrible time controlling herself—she swings back and forth between conciliatory and angry, back and forth, without equilibrium.

But why is it harder for her than for him?. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

So let’s talk some more about Point-Of-View. Because this is quite a sticky widget.

Once upon a time it was first-person limited.

Fortunately, keeping the aspect limited rather than omniscient also optimizes immediacy and intimacy. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.

The actual writing is what you live for.
—Raymond Chandler

Carson McCullers was only twenty-three when she published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, her classic story of the fragility of human connection—nearly a child prodigy.

Within the amorphous struggle to understand life, as portrayed through WAY more protagonists than most novels can handle, McCullers’ structure is of necessity complex but crystalline. . .

Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.