JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #69
September 16, 2021
I was recently reading Curtis Sittenfeld’s introduction to the 2020 Best American Short Stories. She talks about the criteria for good short stories and mentions her MFA advisor’s outline of the three aspects of fiction: structure, character, and language. I like this triad as a lens for dissecting good fiction and thought I might offer a brief comment on each.
Sittenfeld defines structure as "the order of scenes, what happens in them, how information is revealed." I like this brief description and its vagueness. Many excellent resources for writers provide complex and intricate guides to structure, but the revision notes I most often want to give for unfinished stories is a consideration of "how information is revealed." I may have even used that exact phrase in my feedback. Whether or not a story is told in a linear way, with heavy reliance on flashbacks, or in a jumbled set of impressions, each piece provides the reader with a set of information that can and should build upon prior information in order to eventually culminate with an ultimate takeaway, whether a realization, an emotional impact, or something else. It’s probably true that any story can be rearranged in various ways for various climactic effects. Structure can define a story. (I shouldn’t point out that "revealing information" is another way of saying "tell" rather than "show," but if I did, I’d have to leave it to the reader to ruminate on that.)
Consideration of character in a story, according to Sittenfeld, is "what we learn about the people depicted through their actions, observations, and dialogue." I’ve talked about this ad nauseum elsewhere (read: the podcast). The most accomplished writers demonstrate who their characters are by showing us what they do, and in fiction, unlike in, for example, film, it’s very easy to offer the reader a glimpse inside a character’s head so we can see how they think. The decisions a character makes, the way they make their decisions, the way they interact with other characters, depict the true nature of any character. We are fundamentally social creatures with minds evolved to make sense of and size up other human beings with any evidence at all that we can gather. Just as we begin to understand who the receptionist is by the way she greets us as we approach her desk, so too do we understand the inner character of a fictional person by what the author shows us that they do. (I shouldn’t point out that you can add to your rumination from the previous paragraph the fact that in this paragraph I wrote quite a bit in terms of what an author "shows" to the reader, but if I did, I’d probably add that maybe there’s a reason why.)
Last, Sittenfeld identifies language as an important aspect of fiction: "how the sentences do or don’t work." The language of a short story has to convey both structure and character as above, but it should never annoy the reader. Some advice might suggest that the language should vanish or be invisible, that the goal of the fictive dream is that we lose track of the words on the page and lose ourselves in the dream, but I don’t think that’s exactly right. Certainly we don’t want the language of a story to get in the way of the dream, to make it difficult for the reader to actually read the story. But it’s also true that language is itself a part of the experience of reading, that really good sentences stick with us, and a sublime turn of phrase might ring in our ears for years to come. This is one of the purposes of poetry from a certain point of view, and there’s nothing that requires fiction not to be poetic. Language shapes the fictive dream, shapes the way in which we understand and process the story, and particularly apt writing can sharpen the experience in ways that so-called invisible writing never could.
Anyway, I think I’ve gone on a bit too long. The structure of this essay is pretty straightforward, the characters are pretty flat, and the language is -- English. Needs revision. C+.
Next: On Reading Every Word