JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #72
October 7, 2021
Last week I was wondering whether the metric of story should guide all works of fiction, and this week I want to consider what quality makes something fictive, what connects all fiction as a broad category, encompassing everything from emotive flash fiction to plot-heavy epic novels. It seems to me that the quality that separates the fictive mode from other kinds of writing might be the dramatized scene constructed from clear, specific, and significant details. Other kinds of writing can employ the fictive mode for various purposes. Even the most abstract philosophical inquiry might employ a concrete scene in order to explore an idea through specific example. A piece of journalism might dramatize a scene in order to better convey information. Fiction too can slip into summary or abstraction or other modes for various reasons. Nevertheless, the basic quality of the fictive mode seems to lie in the presentation of dramatic scenes evoked by specific and important details.
The advice to "show," rather than "tell" is a facile approach to fiction because of our expectation for this rudimentary quality of the vivid scene. Because we have the expectation in fiction of metaphorically "seeing" characters and action through the words on the page, it is no wonder that the most common advice given to writers is to "show" the reader such a scene. Likewise, simple nouns and verbs, inasmuch as they attach to specific objects and actions, are understood to be the most evocative kinds of words: we are told to use "concrete" words that appeal to the senses and provide clear direction for the reader to produce a mental representation of the fictional situation. Abstractions are frowned upon except as is absolutely necessary because they do not inherently "show" the reader anything, so they must be minimized. After all, the most important thing for fiction is the concrete detail of the mental imagery.
I don’t mean this as a judgment. The execution of the fictive quality in any particular piece of writing does not make it good or bad--it is simply the defining feature of fiction at its most basic, and it is what we as fiction writers must seek to master.