Writing is this easy....and this hard
"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." E L Doctorow
George Saunders’ Substack is a useful source for writers but I would also recommend his book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain - even though Russian stories are not my preference, his notes on the reading of them and how they work is deeply insightful.
As I am gradually approaching the end of this course - so tiring because it’s so challenging- and editing week… I am obsessing on this quotation.
A story is a linear-temporal phenomenon. It proceeds, and charms us (or doesn’t), a line at a time. We have to keep being pulled into a story in order for it to do anything to us.
I’ve taken a lot of comfort in this idea over the years. I don’t need a big theory about fiction to write it. I don’t have to worry about anything but: Would a reasonable person, reading line four, get enough of a jolt to go onto line five?
Why do we keep reading a story?
Because we want to.
Why do we want to?
That’s the million-dollar question: What makes a reader keep reading?
Are there laws of fiction, as there are laws of physics?
Do some things just work better than others? What forges the bond between reader and writer and what breaks it?
Well, how would we know?
One way would be to track our mind as it moves from line to line.
A story (any story, every story) makes its meaning at speed, a small structural pulse at a time. We read a bit of text and a set of expectations arises.
‘A man stood on the roof of a seventy-story building.’
Aren’t you already kind of expecting him to jump, fall, or be pushed off?
You’ll be pleased if the story takes that expectation into account, but not pleased if it addresses it too neatly.
We could understand a story as simply a series of such expectation/resolution moments.
This is what we used to call close reading, back at school or Uni, studying the classics. Then we were allowed, even encouraged to assume that the writer knew what they were doing - with maybe occasional lapses.
It’s a bit different now, as I am still busy reading my way through a huge pile of psychological thrillers - some of them brilliant, and some disappointing.
And we also ask these kinds of questions at a more structural level - not just sentence by sentence.
For example, apply the question of expectation to the promised “shocking twist” that you will “never guess”.
I do enjoy a really good twist in a story - I like knowing the writer has outwitted me, and I will generally read more of their work if they do it well. But that requires playing fair. There should have been enough information for us to be able to guess - and of course there can also be confounding information - red herrings.
But there’s also a pleasure in being right about how a story turns out. As I have read loads of crime fiction, that’s just as well!
Why? not just who? or how?
This is, for me, the major pleasure in crime fiction. A good writer of crime fiction is someone who understands human nature, in its many varieties. For whatever reason (see me skim over this interesting issue) they have the knack of seeing people more clearly. It’s not that they aren’t capable of being fooled by a charismatic narcissist - indeed, perhaps their skill has developed because they have been. It’s more that once they find out, they can’t shrug it off and look away. They want to understand.
And so, whether it’s Ruth Rendell as Barbara Vine, or PD James, or Sophie Hannah - see Little Face, or Hurting Distance, for example - the payoff for the reader is to discover some hitherto unknown insight into human nature, to be surprised, or to have our deepest fears confirmed.
Some even suggest it’s driven by the will to survive - this desire to find out how people tick.
Speaking of ticking
Suspense is also why we read dark fiction - or watch dark films.
Hitchcock talks about how there’s very little suspense if we see people talking at a dinner table and then out of the blue, there’s an explosion.
However, if the audience is aware of the bomb ticking away, and the characters are - that’s gripping suspense.
Donna Tartt talks about this in an interview about The Secret History. when she is asked why she gives the story away at the beginning of the novel. At the very outset she tells us who is murdered (Bunny) and by whom (his college friends).
Of course we read on because we want to know why, and we want to know who all these people are. What kind of person is Bunny, that his friends decide to kill him? What kind of people are they, to decide to kill someone, anyone?
There isn’t really a big twist at the end of The Secret History - and yet, it’s one of those stories which has really stayed with me.
I’m still reading…
and trying to read as a writer, asking these questions as I go.
As promised, I will write about some of these novels soon. But for now, I really have to get back to the writing course and make the most of it!
Ann