
The following is a letter I wrote to a friend who asked me to help them get started reading fiction. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Fernando,
As I said before, I'm honored that you’d ask me to read with you. I’m sure it’s a bigger deal for me than it is for you. I’m a person who thinks about books constantly. You asking me about reading is like asking a butcher about cows— no one ever asks him about cows, so, when someone finally does, he gives more than they probably wanted. Sorry, not sorry, I suppose.
In that spirit, here are some thoughts on how fiction works. I hope they will guide you on your way. Weirdly, I’m not going to start with fiction, but poetry. After all, poetry did come first, historically speaking. Long stories used to all be in verse like the Iliad or Dante’s Divine Comedy. In fact, novels are pretty new. Most peg Cervantes as the first novelist with his book Don Quixote, written in 1605. But I also have a practical reason to discuss poetry: it always helps to explain one thing by comparing it to another.
I.
Poetry (and fiction) is about pleasure and meaning. It’s concerned with how words make us feel and how words reveal truth. This makes perfect sense to the Presbyterian mind. We confess it’s the chief end of man to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Therefore, enjoyment and knowledge, pleasure and meaning, always go together. Poetry is about locating exactly where the two shake hands.
II.
Regular life is an ugly colloid of meaning and apparent non meaning. It’s harsh, confusing, a mixture of tragedy, comedy, transcendence, and boredom. Meaning gets muddled in all this ephemera, like when too many watercolors mix together. Poetry tries to tease life apart, reverse this process, focusing on individual pieces. It tries to get emerald green and robin’s egg blue, not that ugly brown.
III.
All art focuses on different aspects of our meaningful life, different ways of experiencing it. Poetry focuses on words, the way words mediate the world. The way words mean things in relationship to each other. The way they sound in our minds and on our lips. Poetry is to writing as music is to noise, or painting is to sight. It’s a riff, a manipulation of something familiar, something we take for granted. In the case of music, you can imagine a rock, hucked by a caveman, ratting off the wall of his cave a stuttered rhythm he later begins to mimic, banging sticks on logs, chanting the rock’s clickety-clack. From that raw, natural noise he makes music. Notice the caveman is taking something raw and cultivating it? Poetry does the same thing, but with words. Poetry is about the pleasure of words like music is about the pleasure of sound. Poetry plays with how words make us feel, like music plays with how noise makes us feel.
IV.
Fiction, obviously, plays with language too, but with one important addition: time. Fiction authors are playing with time + language. Poetry has the luxury of explaining things that are timeless. Poets write about ideas, memories, colors, feelings, a rose. These don’t require sequence to exist on the page. There is no this happened, and then, this happened; no once upon a time. Poets can set their language within a time frame if they want to, tell a little story, ponder a series of events. But the key is: they don’t have to. Fiction has to.
V
Poetry sounds and feels different then fiction because of the time factor. It’s the fiction writer’s job to make you feel time, to manipulate your sense of it. This is done to create drama, a sense of what happens next. If the beauty of a fiction writer’s language gets in the way of the reader’s experience of time, then it has to be replaced by simpler, more straightforward language.
VI
So, fiction needs words in the same way poetry needs words, but fiction needs words that describe things in time. What does that mean? Why does it matter? On the face of it, it means that fiction describes action. It’s about the pleasure and meaning of time passing, the way one event follows another. This can happen on a micro scale, contemplating a fly, for instance, crawling across the face of a peach. Or, it can occur on a grand scale, tracking the rise and fall of generations, or mapping political epochs. In any case, fiction writers feel an innate sense that the way things and people move through time is very, very important. It reveals something that the snapshot of poetry cannot.
VII
What about characters? Characters are stand-ins for ourselves; who we want to be, who we are, who we were, who we never want to become. They serve as a way to draw us into time, into that dream-flow of one thing happening after another. The more visceral our reaction to them (negative or positive) the more we’ll care about what happens to them next. This can only happen if two things happen first: one, the character has strong desires, strong enough to disrupt the world around her. And two, the character experiences strong resistance, strong enough to scuttle her vital plans. As long as every paragraph, every scene, every chapter holds this tension, a book is off to the races.
VIII
Plot and theme; story and understory. This gets deeper into what fiction does, what's going on beneath the hood. Everyone’s heard of plot. Romeo falls in love with Juliet. Tom Jode’s got to get out of Oklahoma. It's the who, what, when, and where. Theme is about meaning. Romeo and Juliet is about love, prejudice, the ironic nature of life, politics, family dynamics, blah, blah, blah. Grapes of Wrath is about America, class, family dynamics, and a million other things. Another way to say it: plot is about what the author tells you about the characters. Theme is what the author doesn’t say about the characters, but is making clear just the same. The best authors make the two communicate, plot becoming a tidy metaphor of theme. When reading, pay attention to how the character’s desires lead them to act, then look at what is keeping them from getting what they want. That’s plot. Then think about what that tension is saying about the characters. It’s in this way that theme is inescapably moral. Theme is always telling us something the author thinks is true (or, at least it should be).
IX
Mistakes. Early fiction readers make mistakes. There are too many to list, let alone explain, here (as if I could!). But, there are three that come to mind.
Mistake, the first:
Early fiction readers read fiction like they would a newspaper article or users manual. This happens when readers don’t have the habit or experience of reading for pleasure. What tends to happen is: they get frustrated. They ask the text questions it isn’t prepared to answer. They see the text as a puzzle, a problem to solve because they don’t understand what it’s trying to do. I suppose this is reasonable. What else are they supposed to do if they don’t understand something? However, in their zeal to find the answer they overlook something obvious. Fiction is, first and foremost, a pleasure. It's a leisure activity. Many of the first novels were French. The same guys who invented Bordeaux, Soufflet, kissing. Readers shipwreck themselves when they approach fiction in any other way. Fiction writers write to excite you, satisfy you, keep you on the edge of your seat, instigate grief, joy, longing, contemplation. Approach fiction as if you are prepared for these things to happen.
Mistake, the second.
Early fiction readers can over-trust the author. This means they gloss over confusion, assuming they are not smart enough, or don’t know enough about literature. This creates a shallow reading experience and quickly short circuits the reader’s fun. Sure, there is challenging fiction. But most books give you the tools you need to interpret them. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to read. Some books make you hike for it. But a good author does this on purpose, hiding goodies in your backpack, rewarding you for the effort. In other words, the work is a part of the experience, baked in for your benefit. Good authors are kind, wise, generous people whose gift to the world is hard won imagination. Trust that and hunt for their gifts.
Mistake, the third.
Early fiction readers under-trust the author. This is aimed at Christian readers. Now, I’m not talking about Paul’s injunction to take every thought captive for Christ. I’m talking about cynicism, a tendency for Christians to suspect authors. Christians suspect authors in two ways. We suspect them of malicious intent and we suspect them of ignorance. I am not saying authors cannot be malicious or ignorant. However, those whom I’ve heard accuse authors of malignancy and ignorance haven't read a piece of literature written after 1950. The fiction diet of most christians, when you push past Fantasy and Sci-Fi, is a smattering of High School syllabus stuff. Real hip Christians may read Steinbeck, or James Joyce. Flannery O’Connor or TS Eliot sometimes poke their heads in. But never anything new. This means that too many Christians have virtually no ground to stand on when criticizing modern literature. Their suspicions are unfounded, not because the suspicions are impossible, but because those who hold them have no right to have them.
An Overdue End.
This is woefully incomplete. But, it’s my hope it gives you some vocabulary, some ways to approach the beast of fiction. The fact that you asked me to read with you means you're willing to enter the fray. Christians need to be involved in the arts, patronize the arts, create art, have real, honest to God, opinions about art. If they don’t, they leave the meaning making up to a lost world. But also, just as importantly, the uninvolved Christian becomes shallow. They don’t have the vocabulary to describe the suffering of the world, the beauty of God, the joys of righteousness. Hopefully, with that in mind, this overdue end will result in a good beginning.
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