Layering Fiction - A Genre Fiction Burden
I had a lot of ideas this month that I thought would make fabulous essays, but in the end, I settled on one that came to me while reading someone else’s writing. It’s important to be able to shift through the many hats of our craft, I think, author, editor and reader, and to grasp what is important to each. As a reader, I’ve come to classify genre fiction most judgmentally on one particular criterion. How real is it?
I’ve mentioned this in passing on other occasions, and it is in no way limited to genre fiction. I have found that different authors tend to dive into, or run away from, layers of reality. For instance, legal thrillers. I don’t know how many times I’ve read a perfectly plausible story - up to a point - only to have the characters start bemoaning circumstances they claim as blockages to the progress of the plot that - in real life - are neither plausible, nor correct. I can continue to read a book like that, but every time the issue comes up, it stops me in my tracks and irritates me.
Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. The world around the characters and the events of your fiction must react to it - and the more fully you allow this to happen - the more believably the interactions and reactions are presented - the deeper readers are likely to be drawn into the story. You can enjoy a story from the surface, but it’s not the same.
A true artist at this is Stephen King. He seems to know intuitively what details will matter. When I am done reading one of his books, I feel an actual disconnect, like I’m unplugging from a familiar world and plugging back into another one. His reality is full, robust, and has the ability to surround me and “take me away”. Most fiction never reaches or even aspires to this level. We work at the depths we are comfortable with, I think, but I have challenged myself lately to try to dive deeper.
When truly remarkable events take place in a city, the police, the citizens, and the press are going to take notice. There’s no way around it in the real world. In fiction, you can just tunnel-vision your way through. If you don’t mention it, it doesn’t happen. If your characters seem to be the only living things in an entire cityscape it’s going to be a problem for some readers, but others will read blissfully on, then forget the book the moment the covers snap shut. The nagging, itching doubt created by things that you know should be there and just aren’t can drive you to distraction, and distracted is no way to enjoy reading.
I don’t think that detailed information is the answer, in most cases. What I see as the magic power of authors whose worlds sweep you up and take you away is their ability to pull back and see the bigger picture. I can follow my plots from beginning to end, and create them as I go. When I’m done, I can usually sit back and grasp the entire project as a whole and see where it went well, where it digressed, and where it really needs help. What I think I need to work on is the ability to draw further back and see larger chunks of the plot at once. I may not immediately, even with conscious effort, be able to pull far enough back to see the novel as a whole … but the wider I can make my lens, the more likely I am to see the interactions, the missing elements, and the errors.
I think that this layering process is a learned skill, at least for most of us. In every artform there are naturals, and I guess they have keys to doors and windows I can only make out through the dust. I know that as I have progressed, certain things that were once difficult for me (or seemed impossible) are things I now take for granted, while new problems I never even dreamed might bother me have surfaced. I can, for instance, apply the pulling back and analyzing process to books I’ve already had published, but was unable to view them in the same way when I was writing, or revising them. I am finding that the realization of this, mostly gleaned by a subconscious evaluation of books I’ve read over the last couple of years, has caused a shift in my mental approach to new work. I find myself stopping and thinking about things in new ways. My characters are getting “smarter,” as I sit back and talk to them, explaining that only an IDIOT would do what I’d just posited that they do, and it didn’t matter how easily it progressed the plot - no character of mine was growing up to be an idiot unless they were INTENDED to be one.
A good example of tunnel vision writing is the TV series CSI. They regularly gloss over things I know can’t be true, and I allow it, but if it was a book I might feel differently. I know you can’t get DNA results as fast as they claim to. I know that you aren’t getting a whole CSI team for one case a week at a time. I know you can’t enhance the quality of an image reflected off of someone’s pocket watch into a rear-view mirror so that you can read license plates in it. I like the show, but I never feel like it’s about the real world. Every member of their team has had a turn being investigated, having an addiction, or being associated with some crime somewhere. Every one of them seems to know more science than your average college professor - snapping off chemicals and ingredients and somehow knowing without thought that it’s a particular cleaning product, or plastic, or paint. Their reality layer, then, is very thin. If I was reading the same stories in book form, and they handled these things the same way that the hour-long time-frame of a TV drama demands, I’d either read it very quickly and forget it immediately, or I’d put it aside and pick up something that could draw me in.
Everything doesn’t have to be perfect, but it’s just like hindsight. Readers see what your characters are doing, and what they’ve done, and they evaluate it against what THEY might do, or have done. If they can’t find a match in their imagination for a type of person who’d react as your character does, it’s going to itch at them, or outright irritate them. In your mind, your characters must be alive. Their world must function as a real world with all the associated problems, pitfalls, emotions and drama that real life presents, honed and crafted into something more intriguing than the real life it represents. Most real stories could benefit from some creative editing, but you can’t hack and slash them into nonsense, and you can’t ignore something important just because it would derail your plot to do otherwise, if you want to be remembered.
It’s perfectly possible (and apparently acceptable) to write very lightly layered fiction that moves very quickly and only holds the attention long enough to drag a reader from page one to the end. It’s an entirely different thing to draw them in and make them sorry they have to go when it’s over. I want people to have that slightly dazed sensation at the end of my books - the one I get when I finish something I have absolutely loved, where I’m simultaneously satisfied with the resolution and wistful - because it’s over and I wanted more. I want people to believe in the worlds I create and to miss them when they’re gone.
My New Year’s Resolution is to try and draw back another few feet from my fiction and to test its depth. This is a business, a craft and an art form that is never fully mastered; I hope I never lose sight of that, and that I continue forward; no retreat, no stagnancy. I am a writer. Welcome to my world.
DNW
Related posts:
- FACTS IN FICTION
- ENOUGH WITH THE BLOODY BISCUITS: Fiction and Conviction
- When It Rains, It Pours: How David Got His Groove Back
- THE NONFICTION METHOD OF WRITING FICTION
- On Failing
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Comments
I could name on a very short list the stories that affected me like this.
Stephen King the Dark Tower
Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings
Harry Potter
Tanith Lee’s Death’s Master / Night’s Master
Clive Barker’s last four or five books.
Neil Gaiman - American gods
Kathe Koja - Kink and Skin
Brian Hodge - Deathgrip
Beth Massie - Sineater
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan - notably Dustof Eden
Rick Steinberg - The Four Phase Man
In fact…most of the folks here whose work I’ve read have, on some level or another, managed to sweep me away, while books by big, popular names barely held my interest.
Thanks for reading, Cameron.
DNW
Thanks, amigo, for including me on that short list of in-depth fiction. Allow me to correct the title of my novel, though: it’s DUST OF EDEN. I actually like your title better, but ASHES didn’t go with the proverbial meaning of creation from dust! And your column is right on, m’man, to start out the new year. The caveat I’ve found in it is that by writing fully realized plots that make sense in the total world you cross marketing forces. The pressure on writers in certain genres to write simplistically and stay strictly with the adrenaline flow and sometimes scatologically shocking stuff can make both maturity and the craft suffer. The editors of such persuasion seem to believe that most readers are puerile. To be sure, there’s a young market that just wants mindless gore, for whatever reason, and can’t get enough of it, but the writer really can’t shirk the challenge to develop material without sacrificing interest if not excitement in how it is handled. You mention King, and to me one of his two chief talents is the ability to create normalcy — set the table — as you describe. He doesn’t seem to be as good at clearing it, but believability in setting things up is primary, and he does have that. As a writer, I think you eventually have to choose between pandering to the simplest (not lowest — that’s a value judgment) common denominator and writing mature books that satisfy readers wanting fully fleshed out reads. So, who are you (the writer, I mean)? Do you need to believe in your books or is it enough to escape into a simplistic genre bias that turns four-course meals into one? Most writers will bore themselves to death if they don’t live true to themselves. And that, my friend, has been the subject of at least half my essays in one way or another. It’s tough enough to learn what it is that being true to yourself means. And then, life is too short to waste on being less than you are.
– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)
You have organized thoughts I have shared since early disappointments and nailed them down admirably. My first experience with the “nagging, itching doubt” you mentioned began in my high school days. Being interested in science, I thought science fiction would hold great appeal for me. That genre was so fraught with negligent slide-pasts that it spoiled any lasting interest in it at all. Unfortunately, the science fiction genre is not the only one to suffer from the malady.
Whatever the reason - ignorance, indolence or both - some writers focus the actions and reactions of their characters along such narrow and exclusive paths, it certainly detracts from a sense of believability and thus from enjoyment of even an otherwise great story.
Thank you for shining a light on such an important and too often neglected aspect of writing.
Excellent piece, Dave
RCJ
Yeah, Sully, and we’ve spent quite a lot of phosphor back and forth on this topic, I know. I think it’s possible to walk the roads of both worlds, but damned hard, and it still doesn’t help you when it comes to getting past that editorial / marketing gateway, because they already know what they want before they get it…and if you didn’t write it, they don’t buy it without a fight…still we persevere. It’s in the blood…and yes, Dust of Eden (man I should have looked that up).
Robert…I’ve all but given up on SF because of that very thing…it is so VERY difficult for me to find any that I can believe in on a deep enough level to be drawn into that world, and without it it feels odd to me to be reading about it.
D
None of that…today is not for thinking. My headache can attest to it…and I had not a DROP to drink last night…just allergy / sinus stuff to start the New Year. Getting things done though..
Dave
“I know that you aren’t getting a whole CSI team for one case a week at a time.”
I also know that the gals who work in CSI aren’t all between the ages of 21 - 35 (Marge seems to be the lone exception in several CSI series), don’t all have voluptuous heads of flowing manes, perfect figures, and dress in tight blouses that emphasize cleavage. That may be a small point in those shows, but it bugs me. Likewise, novels that over-romanticize their characters (male or female) hit me over the head with the un-realness of it all.
And thanks, Dave, for including me on the short list! I’m truly humbled (she said as she tossed her voluptuous head of flowing mane… Okay, I can pretend.)
As to the headache, go to your pharmacy and get some of that behind the counter Suphedrine. I had to pop one this afternoon for the same problem, and it works like a charm. Of course, you have to sign in so they know you aren’t making meth.
Beth
Another good thought piece, Dave. You seem to have a talent for developing them. I think there is a very fine line between developing details that have meaning to the story and including others that just lend them self to the atmosphere. Nothing wrong with the latter, but too often they become the fluff a writer uses to fill in the white space. But when that balance is achieved, I’m with you, those are the stories that you read more slowly as the pages run out.
Frank
Yeah…the difference is - for me - I read some books and sort of wait for them to end…others I near the end and it’s physically distressing that I will have to let it go…
Dave
Frank,
Sometimes a writer comes up with a phrase that one would be truly hard-pressed to better. Your “stories that you read more slowly as the pages run out” is a splendid example of something being so much greater than the sum of its parts. It conjures images and memories of great reads.
RCJ
Wonderful post. I’m going to bed for the first time in the new year with this particularly on my mind, because I want readers of my work to be so fully enveloped in the new reality that they want and demand more. I don’t think one can hope to achieve that without careful layering of detail so that further thinking about what you’ve written reveals previously hidden strata of meaning, as opposed to gaping plot holes and plain old stupid character behavior.
Of course, I can’t claim to be there yet, or even have a road map to my destination… but I’ll be thinking about it as well.