Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

The Imitative Fallacy

The Imitative Fallacy The imitative fallacy is when a writer attempts to mirror the narrator’s state of mind through some aspect of craft (prose, structure, plot, etc.). The drunker the narrator, the less coherent the prose becomes. The “crazier” the narrator, the less lucid the story’s structure becomes. The more mentally-challenged the narrator, the harder it becomes to follow what’s happening in the story. Beginning writers are drawn to the imitative fallacy to the point that it’s become a cliché. The appeal is that it’s clever, but as I pointed out elsewhere in this book, accuracy is harder—and ultimately more rewarding—than cleverness, cleverness being often obvious and, because it’s overdone, not at all original. The student may argue, “But I want the reader to experience what the narrator is experiencing.” Unfortunately, the opposite usually happens: the reader is reminded that there is an author manipulating the prose and, as a result, feels less inside the narrator’s head, not more. As I often ask my students, would you want to read a story about the world’s most boring guy written in the world’s most boring prose? Of course not. Perhapsacasecanbemadefortheimitativefallacyinfirstpersonpresenttense stories, which would make logical sense because we would be inside the narrator’s head during the most immediate moment possible, but I would likely suggest using a different point of view or a different tense so as to avoid the imitative fallacy altogether. The most familiar logical fallacy story I run across is what I’ll call the “crazy narrator story.” The plots I’ve seen dozens of times are remarkably similar. A narrator slips into insanity, but the insanity is often withheld from the reader. Instead, we pick up on the narrator’s insanity through the imitative fallacy 119 the weird thoughts the narrator has or by the incoherence of the prose. In almost all of these stories, the “craziness” is generic, most likely inspired by TV or movies rather than any actual personal experience or serious research on the subject. Is the narrator manic depressive, schizophrenic, or a sociopath? Whenever I ask for an actual diagnosis, the author shrugs or says, “I don’t know.” This is a problem. I’m not suggesting that the writer needs to have experienced her own descent into madness in order to write effectively about it, only that one type of mental illness isn’t interchangeable with another one, and if the author wants the reader to really, truly believe in what she’s writing, the writer needs to acknowledge the complexity of mental illness and portray it in a way that’s more credible than it’s portrayed in nearly every story where the imitative fallacy is employed. I tend to believe that the more a narrator’s consciousness is impaired (by booze, by drugs, by a low IQ, by mental problems), the harder the writer needs to work in the opposite direction so as not to lose her reader. In other words: the less lucid the narrator, the more lucid the prose. While writing his novel Disturbing the Peace, much of which inhabited the mind of a character who would slip into periods of full-blown mania, Richard Yates told an interviewer, “What I’d like to do is have the man go crazy without letting the book go crazy.” In other words, Yates wanted to avoid the imitative fallacy, and he did. The result is a novel with extraordinarily chilling moments. Midway through the novel, after John Wilder, the novel’s main character, has recovered and is on the set of a movie being made about his time spent in a psychiatric hospital, he begins to have another breakdown shortly after a discussion by cast members and crew of the virtues of a scene depicting the film’s John Wilder character as a Christ figure. Wilder, who leaves the film set, goes for a walk in the woods. His thoughts become somewhat less lucid, but Yates never lets the reader lose grounding with reality. On the same page that Wilder’s thoughts become stranger, Wilder passes a minor actor in the woods, and the actor says, “You okay, Mr. Wilder? You look—” 120 the imitative fallacy “How do I look?” “I don’t know.” And the boy lowered his eyes like a girl. “No special way, I guess; I just—never mind. By the way...