Writing a piece of Fiction

I've just finished reviewing a book for Amazon. I normally read these books without putting them down, but this one I have to take in little portions, mostly because it is such a delicious book, a pleasure to hold in my hand as well as read, with characters who wriggle their way into my heart, protesting all the way. It is about a little eleven-year old cynic, and a fifty-year-old cynic, who manage to entertain themselves with their cynicism to their own satisfaction. Now there's a basis for a story! You can read the review at Amazon, if you can find it, and lots of better reviews as well, he said humbly. Here, I'm more interested in the whole matter of writing fiction. Something my blog fans (ahem, if I may be permitted the phrase), both of them, may not know is that I, too have attempted to write fiction. Everything I say below applies to me, and may or may not apply in general. (The tendency to make unwarranted generalizations is a characteristic of the immature intellectual, a tendency to be admired in youth, but deplored in adults. So let me deplore myself right away and get that out of the way.) When I write, I start with characters, because in my case I write in order to make people who will keep me company! (Now don't you worry about me; I'm not as sorry a case as that may lead you to believe, but let's face it, the company we keep may not always be the company we want to keep. KnowaddImean? .) This may be a foolish idea --a fancy, or a "conceit", as literary folks are wont to say-- but it seems to me that my favorite authors begin with characters that they love, warts and all. What happens next? In the case of authors who need to make a living out of writing, they need to go on to creating a situation that is entertaining, absorbing, or relevant to the current state of society. Above all, they need readers, and they need to persuade publishers that they will have readers, so --at least initially-- the readability of the story is paramount, followed only in importance by the ease with which the story can be sold to a publisher. In the case of authors who desire to make a moral point, or illustrate a social phenomenon, or showcase a condition that fills them with indignation, they need to create situations that further their educational goals, though of course these educational goals must be disguised. Unfortunately, people are too clever for their own good, and often see through the agenda of the author, especially if they have had the misfortune to have read an earlier work of theirs. (Oh to have been so unfortunate as to have read Dickens before his later works were published!) In order to further the needs of their story, they now have to invent characters who are the very opposite of their beloved protagonists: people who are the enemy. In the case of authors who are fictionalizing events they have witnessed, or have played a role in, in one sense they need to invent very little. The ingenuity here is in reducing the number of characters by telescoping several of them into a single composite character, simply to keep the task of following the story easier. (I don't bother with this, and consequently, my own stories are impossible to read. That's the way I like it. If that sounds defensive, you might be right.) That horrible aunt you discovered when you were thirteen, and that awful seventh-grade teacher who was such a vicious bastard can be fused into a single villain of some indeterminate gender. At this point, most of the planning ought to be complete. Remember that not just people, but places (On Golden Pond), institutions, pieces of music, and pieces of art or literature too can be characters in the story, such as a bicycle or automobile (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, by Ian Fleming), or a magical mask (The Mask). The reader must be introduced to the characters, after which your story must unfold. At this point, what happens is a symbiosis of (a) what the characters want to do and say to each other, and (b) what you want to happen. The more you fool with (a) in order to accomplish your hidden agenda, the less effective and organic your story will be. Rather than force (b) on the story, it is better to re-think the personalities of the characters, and let what needs to happen, happen of its own accord. Rebecca West explains this far better than I could ever conceive of doing:

the non-sentimental artist has an intention of writing a book on a theme which is as determined and exclusive as the tree’s intention of becoming a tree, and by passing all his material through his imagination and there experiencing it, he achieves the same identity with what he makes as the growing tree does. Now neither tree nor artist has eyes, neither has ears, neither is intelligent: simply they are becoming what they make. [. . .] But the sentimental artist is becoming nothing, he has ears, he has eyes, he is being intelligent, he is playing a game, he is moving certain objects according to certain rules in front of spectators. Those objects one may take as the isolated units of his material which he has passed through his imagination by an unfortunately discontinuous process. He sees that one of those objects occupies a certain position on the ground, and knows that he will score a point if he can remove it to another position; he therefore sends another of these objects rolling along to displace it. Shock . . . one hears that ugly sound.

(Here Rebecca West makes explicit a fact which I, for one, would prefer to forget: that all our characters are merely ourselves, in disguise.) Rebecca West denounces the modus operandi of the most vile sentimental artist as one who interferes with the organicity of a story by manipulating circumstances in order to score points. Instead of being a tree, the work of art becomes an Eiffel Tower, which is good enough for engineering, but not good enough for art, at least in her estimate. (The same organic nature of a work of art is present in music; great music has an inevitability when it unfolds, to which lesser works cannot hope to aspire.) All this, most likely, any would-be author would have his or her opinions about, and which way to go is something between the writer's conscience and his or her art. But there are so many other things, on the surface so mechanical, that we could talk about for days!