Imbuing an arbitrary detail with implied meaning weakens fiction. It weakens story. I’m gearing up for a new semester of teaching and this is one of the core lessons I hope to impart. Readers are seldom interested in meaning that is not physically situated in action.
I’m going to share with you three related quotes from Flannery O’Connor’s “On Writing Short Stories” and then an extract from John Le Carré’s ‘A Legacy of Spies.’ Hopefully, together, they succeed in making my argument for me:
Quotes from Flannery O’Connor’s “On Writing Short Stories” -
In good stories, the characters are shown through the action and the action is controlled through the characters, and the result of this is meaning that derives from the whole presented experience.
The fiction writer has to realize that he can’t create compassion with compassion, or emotion with emotion, or thought with thought. He has to provide all these things with a body; he has to create a world with weight and extension.
I have found that the stories of beginning writers usually bristle with emotion, but whose emotion is often very hard to determine. Dialogue frequently proceeds without the assistance of any characters that you can actually see, and uncontained thought leaks out of every corner of the story. The reason is usually that the student is wholly interested in his thoughts and his emotions and not in his dramatic action, and that he is too lazy or highfalutin to descend to the concrete where fiction operates. He thinks that judgment exists in one place and sense-impression in another.
Extract from A Legacy of Spies -
As they reach the footpath, I tag along behind them. A grey-haired woman grants me a polite smile. She thinks she should recognize me. Pedestrians on the public footpath mingle with us. A sign says To Battersea Park. We approach an archway. I glance upwards and see the hatted figure of a large man in a three-quarter-length dark overcoat, standing on the bridge, scanning passers-by below. The spot he has chosen, by chance or design, gives him a grandstand view of three of bastion’s exits.
Having profited from the same vantage point myself, I can confirm its tactical value. Owing to the downward turn of his head, and of his hat, which is a block Homburg with a crown and shallow brim, his face is in shadow. But his boxer’s bulk is not in doubt: broad-shouldered, wide backed and a good three inches taller than what I would have expected of Alec’s son; but then I never met his wife.
Look at the ratio of embodied narrative — lines about what the character sees and does — compared to explicit meaning-making. I’d say only the last line is massively plot-advancing. And there are about 9 lines that precede it. A ratio of 9:1
A lesser writer (me) might have instead written something like this:
I made my way through the tourist-dense streets of central London. Barges plied the Thames. From the lower level riverwalk, I glance up and see a man in a three-quarter-length overcoat scanning passers-by below, a hat shadowing his face. He’s taller than I would have expected from Alec’s son but then I never met his mother.
What’s the difference?
In my rush to move the plot forward, I’ve only thrown in a semblance of place-making with some irrelevant details — tourists and barges — and instead tried to arrive at the major plot point, the protagonist following the son of a former associate.
But JLC is a lot more patient, focused on embodying the character, by filtering the world through the character’s prism. The result? More thoughtfully-selected details and fewer random ones. I threw in barges because I looked at Battersea Park on Google Maps and saw that it was along the Thames. That’s lazy writing. But JLC embodies his character and writes, “she thinks she should recognize me”, referring to a grey-haired passerby. This sensory detail, a woman who never returns to the plot, is not arbitrary. It reveals the protagonist’s state of mind. After all this entire passage is in some way about recognition or rather the expectation of recognition.
Vu Tran, author of Dragonfish, and professor at the University of Chicago said as much as to me — be alert to that which is arbitrary in your writing. It’s a sign of lazy writing or insufficiently revised writing. And be especially careful when you start justifying arbitrariness.
So this is a rejoinder to myself to be more patient, more embodied and less arbitrary. Hopefully it will also help you be a more discerning reader.
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This is so insightful, thank you! I’ve been writing fiction again and struggling with this very topic. It’s nice to have some pointers to ground myself in.