JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #71
September 30, 2021
I’ve been thinking about this a bit recently and talked about it for an upcoming episode of the podcast, so I thought I’d write something here. One of the guiding questions we’ve adopted in the workshop thanks to a former member is to ask of any piece, "Is this a story?" Although various definitions of a "story" can be rather vague, I think there are a few core elements that help define a story in order to guide our assessments when considering the question of whether a piece achieves its potential. Recently, however, I’ve been wondering if this is the right question.
I should say right away that in most cases the answer is yes: most works of fiction are trying to be a story in the traditional sense, and we should judge them as such when considering feedback to help the author. Nevertheless, there are some works of fiction that very deliberately eschew the requisites of story for explicit and purposeful reasons. It’s very unlikely (though not impossible) that a novel can succeed without the semblance of a story at its core, whereas flash fiction relies much less on traditional aspects of story for its effectiveness. Between the two is a vast gradation.
Rather than story, a piece of fiction can strive for a particular emotional impact, to cause the reader to undergo an emotional experience. Other pieces might explore a philosophical inquiry through the fictive mode. These won’t be stories in the basic sense, but more like arguments, taking guidance for their structure from, for example, a deductive syllogism. Some of Plato’s Dialogues can be classified as fictions of this sort, and there’s a rich tradition of mimicking this form.
For non-story fiction, the guiding assessments will be different. We might ask, "What is the emotional impact?" or "Is this a valid argument?" or any number of foundational questions that lead to useful guidance for craft and revision. The key is to know what presumptions are relevant for the piece being considered, and more and more often I find myself looking beyond story structure for answers.
Next: On the Fictive Mode