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Immediacy
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Immediacy You start reading abook,andwithoutrealizingit,you’veblocked out everything around you: noises, the room you’re in, the people around you. It’s classic sensory deprivation, similar to what you experience during a good movie in a dark theater when your attention is fully focused on the screen. You are no longer a mere observer. You’ve become a participant. Of course, the opposite can happen, too. If the book isn’t effective, if the words on the page are wooden and the story is dull, everything will distract you from the page: the fly across the room, a car without a muffler two blocks away, the pattern of the wallpaper, your cuticles. There are thousands of things beyond the writer’s control that may distract a reader from a story or novel (stress, a noisy house, exhaustion), and there are issues, such as profanity, sex, or violence, that may distract the reader based on her own thresholds (my threshold for profanity is quite high). But there are also craft-related issues that may either bring the reader closer to the story or push the reader away, depending upon the author’s control of craft. Many of these issues are connected to the concept of immediacy. John Gardner, as I have already noted, wrote that the author’s primary obligation was to create the vivid and continuous fictional dream, “captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel it, may open his book and dream that dream again.” Immediacy is what the writer who accomplishes what Gardner suggests achieves and what, in turn, the reader experiences. Immediacy is that one-to-one ratio of words-toexperience , a transference that may be the most difficult thing for a writer to achieve but one that may make the difference between an effective and 64 immediacy an ineffective story. In stories that aren’t immediate, the reader feels as though she’s reading words on a page, and while she may feel a level of engagement, it’s not as much as it should be. This chapter explores the twenty most common craft-related issues that lessen immediacy for the reader. I’ve chosen these twenty because they are the ones that come up again and again whenever I’ve judged a contest or taught a class or read manuscript submissions for a magazine or anthology. These are, in my experience, the worst offenders. Some of these problems are pretty basic, the kinds of problems that a copyeditor’s pen could solve, while others are more conceptual and not easily fixed. Most beginning writers—and many experienced writers while writing their early drafts—write in what I call “default mode” (see the chapter “Subject Matter”). Stories and novels written in default mode look as though they’ve all been written by the same writer when, of course, they haven’t been. The writer writing in default mode is relying on whatever’s easiest, whether it’s imprecise language or redundant syntax. Almost all of the craft issues that undermine immediacy are a result of default mode writing. Of course, there are those writers who want you to be aware of their prose, writers whose goals are not to create a vivid and continuous fictional dream. In these instances, cleverness and self-conscious prose trump invisibility . But that’s not what’s under discussion in this chapter. What’s under discussion is mimetic fiction: fiction that attempts to capture life without calling attention to the author. If you are a beginning writer, you should go through this list, determine which of these you’re most guilty of committing, and work on those in particular. I’m not afraid to call these a list of rules. I know the cliché, that rules were meant to be broken, and I can think of exceptions to almost all of the rules below, but I suggest you consider these two things before breaking them. One: Think of every craft-related choice you make in terms of cause and effect. If you choose to do “y” instead of “x,” you may alienate your reader. If your goal is to alienate your reader, fine. But then you [44.200.230.43] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:15 GMT) immediacy 65 should ask yourself why that’s your goal. Two: Don’t think you’re the first person in the history of the written word to have broken any of these rules. Too often the writers who...