JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #4
June 11, 2020
Writing is mind control. We get to excite very specific neurons in the reader's brain with the way we put our stories together, and each word in the context of each sentence illuminates something new in a cascading light show. All of the power of the story comes from the sequence in which this is done.
Stories ravel a state of understanding as we progress through them. As John Gardner describes the experience, "We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.... We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work."* The writer's job is to guide this experience, to create the dream-state, and in order to do so, we must pay careful attention to each word, to each clause, to each image and expression and the way in which they provoke the reader's understanding as a moment within a continuum.
We might call it the flow of the story. The way each sentence extends, build on, or even diverts the developing dream can either press the reader forward or hold them up. We can't be held responsible for ordinary, external interruptions in the reader's own life, but when the reader is held up or startled out of the story by something we have written, whether it's confusing or out of place or repetitive or disjointed, we are culpable for breaking the dream. That is why, once the broad strokes of plot and character and setting are established, we must hone our prose until it is clear and smooth.
In order to accomplish this, we must study the connection of language to understanding, how words and expressions shape our apprehension of the world. Everything we choose to write matters to the unfolding understanding we create for the reader. Words are like lenses that give us the means of understanding the state of affairs within the world, and the more specific the lenses we deploy, the more precisely we can guide the reader's apprehension of the state of affairs in our fiction. Likewise, syntactic structures provide various semantic construals. For example, whether something is written in the active voice or the passive voice will change how we understand the arrangement of elements within the story, including character choice. Likewise, whether we present action as continuous or completed (a semantic property of verbs called "aspect") changes how we understand and view the contours of that action, including whether it can be interrupted. The conceptual order of modifying clauses and whether there are ambiguities in what they are modifying will affect the clarity of the reader's dream. Every sentence and every word in every story is a deliberate choice we must make to enliven a specific set of neurons in the reader that generate the fictional dream, and we should not leave this to our unconscious generative capacity.
* John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist (1983) p. 5
Next: On Voice