November 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

A Story is Not Reducible to Its Controlling Idea

Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.

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Ready to uncover the plot? 

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To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right. 

Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…

A Story is Not Reducible to Its Controlling Idea

16.

Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Interstellar, would have for its Controlling Idea something such as: “Earth’s inhabitants are saved (positive value) when the hero, I.e., Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper, risks his life to enter the black hole in order to gather data on the “singularity” (cause).

In Jane Austen’s Emma, Emma finds marriage and felicity with Mr. Knightly (positive value) when she humbly recognizes and corrects her prodigious habit of self-deception (cause).

In Sophocles’ Antigone, death and destruction fall upon Creon’s house (negative value) after Creon unwisely sentences Antigone to death for according her dead brother, Polynices, the appropriate burial rites (cause).

The point of any story can thus be encapsulated in the Value + Cause of a Controlling Idea. But we must be careful. We mustn’t allow the Controlling Idea to turn into anything but a rough summary of the story’s theme, enough to give direction to the writer’s efforts but not a substitute for the story itself. It is well to keep in mind Flannery O’Connor’s wise words: “People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick out the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open and feed the chickens. But this is not the way meaning works in fiction.”

A story, in other words, embodies the theme or Controlling Idea of a story to such an extent that to separate Controlling Idea from story, to reduce a story to its Controlling Idea, is to undermine the audience’s experience of the truth of the story. The examples of Controlling Ideas given above are not supposed to compel any audience apart from their embodiment in narrative. As noted earlier, a story is not a mere vehicle for a philosophy. The Controlling Idea or philosophy exists in the story like the impress of a signet ring in wax.

“You tell a story,” says O’Connor, “because a statement would be inadequate.”    

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March 20, 2013 1 Comment

Free Indirect Speech, Part 1

Let’s distinguish between what critic James Wood calls (1) direct or quoted speech; (2) indirect speech; and (3) free indirect speech. Here are samples of each:

Direct or Quoted Speech (from Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now)

“Of course I love you,” he said, not thinking it worth his while to kiss her. “It’s no good speaking to him here. I suppose I had better go see him in the city.”

Indirect Speech (from Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags)

For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought; I should have liked to show her my uniform. [emphasis added]

Free Indirect Speech (from James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”)

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.

Direct or quoted speech is just that: the flagging by quotation marks of the actual speech of one’s characters. The example from Trollope’s The Way We Live Now also has an element of indirect speech…

Indirect speech is the author’s narration reporting the internal thoughts of the characters. The emphasized line from the passage from Waugh’s Put Out More Flags tells what his character, Basil Seal, is thinking, as flagged by the author’s use of “he thought.” The first person “I” (“I should have liked…”) is not directly quoted; it is reported by the author within the context of “he thought.”

In free indirect speech the internal thoughts of the characters are indicated without the use either of quotation marks or mechanisms such as “he thought.”

But how? Consider the famous first line from Joyce’s “The Dead.” What is it about this line that takes us inside the thought of Lily?

Think on it–and we’ll return to this tomorrow.

* See the first chapter, “Narrating,” in James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , , , ,
March 7, 2013 Leave a Comment

10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Simplistic Rule-Following from Your Writing

Not to worry. Help is on the way.

 

If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the qui vive for a way to help you over your second act hurdles, or enliven your stilted dialogue, or punch-up some punchless characters. In brief, you’re a sucker for any article you stumble upon with a title such as:

“Five Rules for Creating Suspense (Doled Out One Day at a Time)”

or:

“7 Things the Fiction Writer Can Learn from the Pre-Socratic Philosophers”

There’s just something irresistible about an article that promises to deliver the Long Lost Secret of the Incas in a handful of bullet points.

Speaking of the Long Lost Secret of the Incas, David Mamet claims to have definitively located the Long Lost Secret of the Incas–that is, the secret to writing successful fiction–in three simple questions that any author must answer for himself:

Who wants what from whom?

What happens if they don’t get it?

Why now?

These questions are as good as any I’ve found. But the problem is, answering them is notoriously difficult, and so I often find myself running back for help in some “How-to” article. I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with this. After all, I’m sure even Shakespeare nicked one or two useful items from

“3 Things To Do with Your Melancholy Protagonist When He Refuses To Perform His Princely Duty and Knock-Off His Usurping Uncle”

1. Get him monologuing

2. Introduce a play-within-a-play

3. More monologuing

But bullet points, just like bullets, can be taken too far. Fiction does have its rules–or better, principles, as Robert McKee calls them in his book, Story. But because fiction is an art, the closer the practitioner stays to the “stuff” of his craft the better. Discussion of principles in the abstract must always be balanced by the study of actual specimens.

That is why I love the approach in novelist David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction. In these fifty short pieces, originally published in The Independent on Sunday in the UK and The Washington Post Book World in the U.S., Lodge teaches the art of fiction by putting before the reader specimen after specimen as illustrations of one or other aspect of the craft.

For example: Jane Austen and Ford Madox Ford on “Beginning”; George Eliot and E.M. Forster on “The Intrusive Author”; Thomas Hardy on “Suspense”; James Joyce on “Interior Monologue”; Henry Fielding on “Showing and Telling,” et cetera.

The result is fifty master classes that show the principles of excellent craftsmanship embedded in their proper context.

Indeed, Lodge’s approach is so good that I think I’m going to steal from it here at The Comic Muse. Why should Lodge have all the fun?

Oh. And as for the “10 Simple Ways to Eliminate Simplistic Rule-Following from Your Writing,” they’re right there in your hands. Use those ten digits to order, or to pick up again, Lodge’s delightful book.

Filed Under: The Craft of Fiction Tagged: , , , , ,