Ten Obvious Truths About Fiction

Ten Obvious Truths About Fiction
Image by Magda Ahlers

The following essay was previewed in the class that Stephen Graham Jones taught for LitReactor, Your Life Story Is Five Pages Long.


1. The reader should never have to work to figure out the basics of your story.

Who’s whose wife or husband, what the time period is if that matters, why these people have broken into this house, and on and on, just the basic, ground-level facts about your story. If you don’t relay that stuff up-front, as quickly and efficiently as possible (and please don’t be fancy), then your story becomes a game of three-card-monty, with you hiding information under this or that shell, trying to keep everything moving fast enough that nobody knows what’s going on. Which is to say your story becomes about the reading of the story, not the experience the story is trying to get the reader to engage. And you don’t want to just write a game, because games are either won or lost, then walked away from. You want to write something that can feel like a memory, that, five or ten years from now, the reader might wonder if this was something they lived or something they read.

2. The reader is smarter and more sophisticated than you think.

Meaning you don’t have to lay every last detail of every last thing out. Your character can move from the living room to the bedroom without you having to find some clever way to make the hall interesting for us. Just bypass that hall. Halls are stupid anyway, and we more than likely know they didn’t teleport, or use a magic wand. The best writers are the ones who can cover the most distance with the fewest words. The ones who can suggest and imply. That puts the story in the reader’s head, where it should be. You’re not drawing a map, you’re telling a lie, and the way to make a lie convincing is to let the person you’re lying to think they came up with this or that by himself, to make them complicit in the creation. With fiction, you don’t always have to render every last moment of falling in love, say. We’ve all fallen in love to some degree or another, and will write our own stories in over the text anyway. Why not leave us room to do that?

The best writers are the ones who can cover the most distance with the fewest words.

3. Readers expect a story to keep the promises it makes.

It can be as simple as if the story opens with what feels like a dramatic frame—two people sitting by a fireplace, talking over brandy—then we already expect the story to circle back to that fireplace. But this isn’t a Chekhov’s gun kind of imperative, where if you show something you have to use it. It’s more a case of, if your story is about a baseball player, then we fully expect the story to have its big climax on the baseball diamond, somehow. If not, then why a baseball player? And, everything you do in the first ten or fifteen percent of a story, that’s a promise. Keep those promises diligently, always, and the readers will repay you with their loyalty.

4. Each page needs to hook the reader all over again.

You open with a hook, of course—the title—then you hook with the first line, then, usually at the end of the first paragraph, you set that hook. But each new development, each new scene, it has to be a hook as well. Not a sudden dinosaur in your fast-food order, maybe, but a hard left turn within the rules of your story, just one of those built-up-to soap opera moments, those “You mean you’re my mom and my dad?” kind of things. So, if any of your scenes are simply delivery-service scenes, to get us from what happened before to what’s coming, then consider cutting them. The same goes for any scene that’s solely providing exposition. Really, any scene that’s only getting across what’s happening on the surface of that scene—two guys loading boxes into a truck, say—then that scene’s dead. Instead, let those two men load boxes, but only one of them knows the other’s tranquilized pet is in one of the boxes. It changes everything, for the better.

5. Readers are reading in order to be taken somewhere else.

They’re not reading so you can render for them their already quotidian lives. If that’s what they were after, they’d just take more stimulants, so as to experience more of their jobs, more of their home life, more of riding the bus. No, they want their world, but heightened. Made exciting, made vital, such that each decision made has so much import that it’s almost ridiculous. Granted, each reader’s sense of ‘heightened’ is different, but that’s what the different genres are for: some people are into tea parties and some people are into space warfare. In either case, though, the reader takes how important the decisions in that story were back into their own lives, and, for a while anyway, they can imagine their lives are that exciting, their decisions that momentous.

6. Make sure the key scenes actually happen on the page.

It seems obvious, yes, but every stack of manuscripts, you see it: a mom, dad, and kid at the park on a Sunday, the mom’s ex suddenly there, harsh words exchanged, and, instead of actually showing the dad trying to use a plastic fork to stab his wife’s ex in the throat, which is a dramatic, intense scene, we get the slow pan over to the kid in the sandbox, building a very thematic castle. Yes? And the writer feels literary and subtle and properly indirect for showing the story’s tensions through that falling-apart castle, sure, but what’s really happening is that writing about attempted murder with plastic picnicware is very difficult to do. People actually do stuff like talk with exclamation points, and throw stuff like punches. It’s all very plebeian and beneath certain castes of writers to scrabble in the cut grass like that. But it’s also very wimpy, it’s them lying to themselves about what they can and can’t do. Be better than that. Make that fight real. You might have to write it fifty times, then go pick a fight at the park to figure out the exact mechanics, but, nobody said fiction was going to be easy, right?

7. Readers are very aware of contrivance.

Of developments that are dramatically convenient, that serve as a necessary bridge for the story to move from A to B. What they want, what will let your story be real, are developments that are organic, that are from the world, not from your own need or laziness. Contrivances break the dream, make us see this fiction as written. And any time the reader sees that—when they’re not supposed to be seeing that—they usually stop reading. Reading that reminds the reader that they’re reading is a strange kind of loop for fiction to take, or want to take. It can be a rhetorical device, of course, if the story has that many levels to it, but if it’s done on accident, then the story nearly always fails. And, like I was saying, the readers out there, they’re sophisticated, they’ve been played before. But they go into a text trusting you nevertheless. It’s your duty to be worthy of that trust.

Being intelligent is the wrong game to be playing with fiction, really, because sooner or later you run into a Nabokov, a John Barth, a Borges, and it hits you all at once that you’re not so smart after all. You were just good at talking the talk.

8. Readers can tell when you’re trying to be smart on the page.

And, sadly, it has just about the same effect as trying to be smart at the office cocktail party: pretty soon nobody wants to talk to you.  Instead of being smart, though, instead of showing off that you can pull off these pristine, convoluted sentences, that your vocabulary is stunning, your education bulletproof, try to be smart like Vonnegut: with insight, delivered with the lightest possible touch and no small amount of irony. Reading Vonnegut, you came away impressed with how capable he was on the page, not how intelligent he was. Being intelligent is the wrong game to be playing with fiction, really, because sooner or later you run into a Nabokov, a John Barth, a Borges, and it hits you all at once that you’re not so smart after all. You were just good at talking the talk. An MFA can give you that, granted. But you have to learn to write past that, to a simpler space. A more direct space.

9. Readers expect any given piece of fiction to adhere to the rules and conventions they’re already accustomed to.

This isn’t to say don’t innovate, either. Without innovation, fiction dies. But, if you’re going to use punctuation in a specifically ‘wrong’ or untraditional way, or if you’re going pull off some Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker kind of vocabulary or syntax, then, first, keep it all consistent—don’t break your own broken rules—and, second, have a good, in-the-text reason for doing it. Just doing it to be different (thus attracting attention) or because you think it looks cool—not using apostrophes or quotation marks, say—that’s twisting the form of your story just for the sake of twisting it. Which is fine and good in your own notebook, but isn’t nearly enough to qualify it for mass consumption. We don’t want your doodles, we want your real work that you’ve written in blood. And then we want more.

10. Readers don’t go for endings that are vague.

Ambiguous can be all right, as it effectively doubles the meaning, and a merely ‘suggested’ but not quite said ending can work as well, if you’ve shaped the story towards that, given us a few false runs as conditioning for that kind of ending, but vagueness, all that is is the writer being unwilling to take the necessary risk at the end, to try to ‘mean’ something, finally. To tie it all up or leave it all untied in a meaningful way. Like Richard Hugo said once and forever, though, the writer’s job, it’s to come as close to that line of the melodramatic as possible, then not quite step over. Which is to say take that chance, don’t be afraid of coming off sappy or sentimental or cheap. Instead, balance right on that line as best you can, wave your arms around to keep steady. It’s a tightrope act we as readers love to watch. And you fall sometimes, sure, that’s part of it. But sometimes you don’t.


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Comments

James the Liar's picture
James the Liar from Cleveland, Ohio is reading 'Gone Girl' by Gillian Flynn, and 'The Book Thief' by Markus Zusak January 16, 2019 - 7:10am

My favorite article on LitReactor so far (which is saying a lot). I think I fell in love with it when I read the word 'quotidian.' Surely this is thesaurusing from on high. I mean, it wasn't enough just to google the definition ... I had to somehow trace out how the author found this beautiful little word.

Other stuff was good too.

Redd Tramp's picture
Redd Tramp from Los Angeles, CA is reading Mongrels by SGJ; Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk; The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault January 29, 2015 - 2:27pm

Boone, I don't think this necessarily advocates easy-to-read fiction, more just reminds writers of certain "obvious" ways your work should be accessible to the reader, obvious in quotes because we (at least I do) get too worked up over having the words do as much as possible, often forgetting some of the basic functions a story should fulfill. If you read some of Stephen's stories (take your pick, there are a million) you'll see this; they're not super easy to read or overly simplistic at all. You still have to pay attention and think about the layers of meaning. Rather, they do exactly what they need to do. They have intent. 

Redd Tramp's picture
Redd Tramp from Los Angeles, CA is reading Mongrels by SGJ; Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk; The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault November 3, 2014 - 7:03pm

Oh my god. OH MY GOD. Thank you thank you thank you. This essay is gold.

Richard's picture
Richard from St. Louis is reading various anthologies May 17, 2013 - 7:59pm

LOVE

Boone Spaulding's picture
Boone Spaulding from Coldwater, Michigan, U.S.A. is reading Solarcide Presents: Nova Parade October 25, 2012 - 1:41pm

Love this article for its conciseness. And, I feel myself resisting it. I feel that it describes obvious rules for obvious fiction for lazy or inexperienced readers.

Why?

One of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, defied pretty much every rule listed here.

Eh. I have a love/hate feeling for this article. On one hand, the article is a great argument for clean, effortless-to-read fiction. Then on the other hand, it makes me feel slightly contemptuous for anyone that would drop a book when it began challenging them....

I know: no article is going to have THE rules for fiction. And I really love this article. But, if every short story or novel were effortless to read...it would seem a little "over-produced," like some music is over-produced.

So - I see the value of the article and the truths of easy-to-read fiction. But the very reason I love some of my favorite writing is because of the challenges the author presented...

I'm conflicted (and I would have loved to have taken this class...). 

Teri's picture
Teri March 29, 2012 - 11:56am

8. Readers Can Tell When You're Trying to Be Smart On the Page  ~

 

I always like it when this gets said by someone that people will listen to. It's an easy trap to fall into, and I'm not saying I never ever have, especially with the sometimes passive/aggressive atmosphere of the internet, to become enamored with our own cleverness and then it carries over into the writing, the want to prove  'Look at me, I'm smart. Look what I figured out, look what I can do.'  How much better to give credit to us all, to the reader, say we're all that smart, and you know, just be cool. Metaphor? Everyone at the party knows the liquor cabinet with the good stuff in it is unlocked, or that Sally and Tommy are in the basement making out, don't be the person at the party going around telling everyone else just to prove that you know it too. How much better to say nothing but then have Tommy's girlfriend or wife show up and want to know...where is he? Because does anyone like the person who blurts "He's in the basement with Sally!" or who tells everyone that the liquor cabinet is open? There's only so much to go around. Let the cool, smart kids find it for themselves, everybody's ( or the smart kids are) drinking the good hooch, they're getting it from somewhere. Let Tommy's girlfriend/wife find him on her own, or not, much more interesting.

 Unless the character being written is particularly clever with a massive vocabulary, or you're trying to create that character whose too smart and needs to prove it, it does just read like what it is, the writer trying to show off their own brain pan.

 

7. Contrivance,

 I think I struggle with this one in terms of learning how to move it along, just new to me is all, the mechanics of longer stories, what to leave in, what to leave out.

great atricle.

Jack Durish's picture
Jack Durish March 27, 2012 - 2:14pm

You're correct. These are obvious. But it's good to have them repeated repeatedly. As even the best baseball players take batting practice before every game, even the best writers have to keep these principles in front of them.

Renfield's picture
Renfield from Hell is reading 20th Century Ghosts March 23, 2012 - 8:57pm

I'm sure I've read this dozens of times. It's always kind of life changing, that or life affirming, or somewhere between. The best advice I've ever gotten that made my writing much much stronger came in a few passing comments in SGJ's class.

I WANT TO BELIEVE (that I can write as good as this essay suggests I should write)

Nikki Guerlain's picture
Nikki Guerlain from Portlandia March 23, 2012 - 6:54pm

We are backwards weird so somehow seems okay.

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs March 23, 2012 - 6:32pm

Comments are backwards. Weird.

Nikki Guerlain's picture
Nikki Guerlain from Portlandia March 23, 2012 - 5:55pm

I'm with you Bradley re endings.

Cassandra L.'s picture
Cassandra L. from Melbourne is reading A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole March 23, 2012 - 4:30pm

 . . . don’t be afraid of coming off sappy or sentimental or cheap. Instead, balance right on that line as best you can, wave your arms around to keep steady. It’s a tightrope act we as readers love to watch. And you fall sometimes, sure, that’s part of it. But sometimes you don’t.

 

As someone who has always struggled with endings, I think this is brilliant. 

Bradley Sands's picture
Bradley Sands from Boston is reading Greil Marcus's The History of Rock 'N' Roll in Ten Songs March 23, 2012 - 4:10pm

I think we've talked about vague endings seeming to be the convention with literary fiction-type stories. I wonder if the writers think it's okay to do since reading a short story is less of a commitment than reading a novel, so perhaps they will feel less cheated at the end. But not me.

wickedvoodoo's picture
wickedvoodoo from Mansfield, England is reading stuff. March 23, 2012 - 10:47am

The best writers are the ones who can cover the most distance with the fewest words. The ones who can suggest and imply. That puts the story in the reader’s head, where it should be. You’re not drawing a map, you’re telling a lie, and the way to make a lie convincing is to let the person you’re lying to think they came up with this or that by himself, to make them complicit in the creation.

Boom. This should be the opening paragraph to every guide-to-writing in the world. Wise words, Mr Jones.

Nikki Guerlain's picture
Nikki Guerlain from Portlandia March 23, 2012 - 10:12am

Great article on writing. Thx.

bryanhowie's picture
bryanhowie from FW, ID is reading East of Eden. Steinbeck is FUCKING AMAZING. March 23, 2012 - 10:02am

I love this so much:

write something that can feel like a memory, that, five or ten years from now, the reader might wonder if this was something they lived or something they read.