The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft

Implicit Narrative

Implicit Narrative Achieving Subtlety while Avoiding Confusion I have lately been seeing symptoms of an insidious virus attacking the work of new writers. What is worse, many of its carriers do not seem to notice what’s happening to their sentences. What’s worse than that, most of those who do see the damage appear to welcome and even to have sought it. As evidence, here is a sampling of recent testimony from students . “I wanted readers not to be able to understand who he [the protagonist] is, because he doesn’t understand who he is himself .” And: “It’s good you can’t tell if the character is a man or a woman. I wanted to make the reader have to guess.” And: “I was trying not to give away where they are [where they are as in—a room? a loud city street? a canoe in the middle of a lake?] so you don’t really know what the guy sees when he says, ‘We have to get out of here.’” This virus, plainly, is narrative confusion. And its insinuation into the basic components of a story—a protagonist’s temperament ; a character’s gender; the physical landscape in which a scene is set—has left me, well, confused. Not confused that the writing itself is murky. We all write murkily at times, especially as we are making our way into our stories, discovering their activity and meaning and population. But what does perplex me, as I say, is the defense and indeed the embrace of this confusion. Confusion as a fortunate accident. Confusion, more worrisome still, as an ambition for the story. Err on the side of obviousness. This was advice an extraordinary teacher once offered me, and because it has been so valuable over the years I have routinely offered it in turn. Certainly, its wisdom does not advocate prose that struggles under the weight of a relentlessly inclusive attention to the setting and characters—narrative as an overly conscientious coroner’s report (and a ‹tting simile, for nothing more surely takes the life out of narrative than a superabundance of indiscriminate detail). Increasingly, though, there appears to be an absolute abhorrence of obviousness about. And more often than not it seems the case that the writer who feels explicitness must be avoided is the writer who does not yet understand that narrative can work both subtly and straightforwardly. He has not learned how to write with an open, a generous, implicitness. An implicitness whose aim is to reveal, not obscure. Consequently he hears that idea—a generous implicitness—as oxymoronic. It is not. Sometimes the cause of confusing narratives appears to be either simple laziness or an impatience with the basic, if unexhilarating , demands of narrative. These are stories made confusing, for example, because they jump around chronologically without informing readers where in time their characters are initially and where they are next. “Months from now, Audrey would recall . . .” “Looking back to that summer, the sisters all agreed . . .” “Two years later, when Rob had just turned eight and moved with his parents to Seattle . . .” Such requisite phrases—as essential and unobtrusive as proper punctuation, and, yes, about as creatively exciting as proper punctuation —do not bother to appear in stories that move from scene 84 / The Stuff of Fiction to scene without the smallest indication that the pages of the narrative calendar are being turned. Or the confusion might occur because we don’t know who is talking to whom or where the conversation is taking place. Here readers confront extended passages of uninterrupted talk, running —ladder rungs of dialogue—down the page, with no informational narrative surrounding them. Not even descriptions of the mouths from which the words ›ow. Again, whatever the root of the oversight—naive negligence, an aversion to the plain demands of description, a simple unwillingness to summon the effort—the result is a product of perfect confusion. And it recalls Flannery O’Connor’s observation, in the Sentences chapter: “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write ‹ction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” But besides an indifference to or rejection of the humble necessities of narrative, there seem to be more prevalent culprits responsible for this outbreak of confusing prose, ones whose intentions are valid but...