How to Write Fiction (6 page)

‘By strength or submission'

You need to immerse yourself in the world in order to describe it truthfully, says
Adam Foulds
. Choose your words precisely and they will propel your plot forward

D
escription is a violent act. A painting, said Picasso, is “a horde of destructions”. Through description, reality is broken down and reassembled according to what you, the author, desire, what you want to see and feel. The resulting words must be formally satisfying, finding an artistic pattern that has only tangentially to do with lived experience per se and yet somehow renders it with the greatest possible intensity.

Description in fiction should always be at least as vivid as lived experience, generally more so. We make and drink a cup of tea without really thinking much about it. It happens in a kind of half-light of inattention, with things as they are taken for granted. But how much more brightly, gorgeously real it is when the cup isn't even in front of us and the milk instead is added by James Joyce in Ulysses: “The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea.” Or later with this close-up on a mélange coffee (a kind of Viennese cappuccino) and a scone: “He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.”

Both descriptions are made real by their spatial precision (“spirals”, “longwise”), by their sensory alertness (“sluggish cream”, “smoking pith”), and by their music, attuned to the activities described. There are the long thick vowels of “sluggish cream wound curdling spirals” which contrast with the lightly sprung, quick vowels and vivid labial consonants of “Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith.” Sound, sense, space – everything arrives at once and the reader is engrossed with the particularity of the experience.

Description masters reality but it can only come after submission to experience, immersion in it. In Four Quartets, TS Eliot meditates on the difficulty of writing and refers to “what there is to conquer/By strength or submission”. There is a subtle insight in the second of these possibilities. Not conquest or submission but conquest by submission. Joyce owns the wealth of experience – that slow spiral of cream, the smoking scone – through his submission to it, his open, rapt absorption. To write good description, therefore, you have to love the world, to gaze at it as at a lover's face, forgetful of yourself, immersed.

Description is, so to speak, a violent act, not only because it remakes the world but also because it dissolves and remakes the self. It is a kind of meditation, one that can procure bliss. Here is Flaubert reliving that liberation from the ordinary boundaries of being an individual person in a letter he wrote at two in the morning, after a day's work:

No matter whether good or bad, it is a delectable thing, writing! not having to be yourself, being able to circulate in amongst the whole creation that you are describing. Today for instance, as a man and as a woman, as lover and mistress both, I have been out riding in a forest on an autumn afternoon, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that they spoke to each other and the red sunlight that made them half-close their eyes, eyes that were brimming with love.

Notice how everything Flaubert talks about describing plays an active part in the scene: the light, the horses, the couple and their expressions. Nothing here is gratuitous and ornamental, everything is live and connected. This is important. When literary writing declines into fine writing it is often because description isn't purposeful; rather, it's filler, virtuoso, it's pretty and in supposed good taste.

We can see how careful Evelyn Waugh is to avoid such a slackening in this deft paragraph from his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust. The paragraph is scene setting, pure description, the creation of a landscape in which events will unfold and that contrasts with the environment in which the “hero”, Tony Last, will end up:

Outside, it was soft English weather; mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills; the coverts had ceased dripping, for there were no leaves to hold the recent rain, but the undergrowth was wet, dark in the shadows, iridescent where the sun caught it; the lanes were soggy and there was water running in the ditches.

Waugh avoids indulgence by not spending too long on this description. The landscape is conjured with rapid notations that follow each other in a single sentence. Waugh resists the temptation to rhapsodise. There is a definite throb of patriotic feeling for this place in that phrase “soft English weather” but what follows is not at all kitsch or sentimental. Certainly there is a note of rapture in that pale sunshine and iridescent undergrowth but it is earthed by the counterweight of dark shadows, leafless coverts, soggy lanes and gurgling ditches. None of the adjectives Waugh uses (with the single exception of “iridescent”) are high-sounding or unusual; they are commonplace and informal: soft, wet, dark, pale, soggy.

And this is all subtly to the point, contributing to the novel's story. The reader here learns how Tony Last's tenderness for this place is born of intimate knowledge. His relationship with it is a marriage, not an infatuation, and that makes his ultimate separation from it all the more painful. All this from a single sentence of description.

The current of story tends to flow more naturally through descriptions of action. Let's end with a moment from Hemingway's short story The Capital of the World. Note how strictly Hemingway keeps to the first person perspective, how sharply attuned his senses are as adrenaline flows through the character, how he notices only what's important to the character, in close-up, how precisely Hemingway renders the spatial arrangement of the matador's posture as he strikes, how he makes the unfamiliar familiar with a homely simile, how rapid action can be conveyed indirectly by the confusing gaps in events after the irrevocable has already happened. This is description at its most purposeful and it quickens the pulse:

He could remember when he was good and it had been only three years before. He could remember the weight of his heavy gold-brocaded fighting jacket on his shoulders on that hot afternoon in May when his voice had still been the same in the ring as in the cafe, and how he sighted along the point-dipping blade at the place in the top of the shoulders where it was dusty in the short-haired black hump of muscle above the wide, wood-knocking, splintered-tipped horns that lowered as he went in to kill, and how the sword pushed in as easy as into a mound of stiff butter with the palm of his hand pushing the pommel, his left arm crossed low, his left shoulder forward, his weight on his left leg, and then his weight wasn't on his leg. His weight was on his lower belly and as the bull raised his head the horn was out of sight in him and he swung over on it twice before they pulled him off it.

Adam Foulds is the author of two novels and The Broken Word, a narrative poem. He has received a number of awards including the Costa poetry prize, the Sunday Times young writer of the year and the Encore award. His latest novel, The Quickening Maze (Vintage), was shortlisted for the Booker prize

Writer's workshop 6

Playing with the power of adverbs and adjectives

N
o description includes every single detail. Description is a matter of making choices: the choice of what to put in, and what to leave out, is the writer's. Everyone's living room is pretty much the same, but ask 20 people to describe their living rooms and you'll get 20 different descriptions.

1
Describe your living room in a few paragraphs.

You've chosen to mention a particular set of details: another person might have chosen a different set. Think about why you chose to mention the things you did and why you left out the things you did. Does that say something about you as well as something about your living room?

This is an undirected description: a description in limbo. Can it be made to reveal something further? First, can your description reveal something more about the room?

2
Rewrite this description, using basically the same information, but change whatever you need to so that the reader can guess at what has just been happening in the room. Use all the senses. You'll have to start inventing here, adding to the real information with pieces that you make up and leaving out anything that works against what you're trying to convey.

Instead of having to tell the reader what's been going on, you can let the description do so in an oblique way which may be more interesting.

There's a second level that the description can reveal: something about the narrator doing the describing.

3
Rewrite the description, showing not only what has just been happening in the room, but how the narrator feels about what has just been happening in the room. You might have to change what has been happening. You will probably choose different kinds of words, perhaps more emotive ones. You may vary the sentence structure by using, for example, exclamations, questions, very short sentences, and so on. You may find an image to focus the feeling. Make sure you're still describing the room, not describing feelings.

Now we will turn to people.

4
Take one of the descriptions of people you wrote in
Writer's workshop 2
and rewrite it without using any adjectives or adverbs.

This will force you to be very specific, and to “show” rather than “tell”. If the character looks hungry or tense, what is it that makes them look that way? Without adjectives and adverbs, you're driven back to verbs as a means of expression and you might find yourself describing the character in terms of actions: body language, gestures, posture, activities. It forces you towards imagery, away from the literal into the metaphoric. For example, if you find yourself writing “his hair was the colour of dirt”, rather than “his hair was brown”, this is illuminating. Why have you chosen to compare his hair with dirt, of all the things you could have chosen? Does that indicate how you feel about this character?

As you write, you might find yourself being forced by the restrictions of the exercise to alter your character by inventing new details, things that can be described without adjectives and adverbs. You may find yourself writing about another character altogether. Follow where the exercise leads – the new character might be more interesting than the original one.

Now that you have an idea of what can be done without adverbs and adjectives, you can choose to put a few back in. They'll be the ones that you really need and they'll also probably be much more vivid than the ones in your first draft, because of the new insights you'll have had by doing without them.

5
Rewrite the description again, using whatever adverbs and adjectives you wish. You may find that this time you're writing about a third character, a composite of the two.

Description can sometimes be a trigger for a story: there's an impulse to write a description, and later on you see where it will take its place in a story.

6
However unlikely it seems, write a scene in which the character you've just been describing is in the living room you described earlier. Put the two elements together and see what happens.

The more bizarre the combination is, the more likely it is to be interesting. Now, of course, the description will start to become action, as the person and the place start to interact in some way.

‘Rising action'

The concept of plot has its detractors, says
Kate Mosse
– but every writer needs a taught framework of cause and effect on which to hang their words

A
story is just the stuff that happened; plot is the intrigue of how and why. Yet in writing courses and workbooks, plot is often the poor relation of those apparently superior skills of characterisation, dialogue and style.

Sometimes plot dare not speak its own name, going incognito as “structure” or “planning”. Stephen King, in On Writing, calls it “the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice”. Ouch! For him, plotting is incompatible with the spontaneity of creation.

Yet a good plot is exactly what draws me to a novel in the first place. And keeps me there. Without it, no amount of sizzling dialogue or exquisite description or beautiful language is enough.

It wasn't always like this

What are the oldest stories we know of? Aboriginal Dreamtime tales are rich in incident – the characters do things and their actions cause change. Greek myths are full of challenges faced and met by interchangeable heroes. In his Poetics, Aristotle himself refers to plot as the most important element of drama, trumping character or setting or even language. The 4th-century polymath coined the truism “beginning, middle and end” and recommended that the events should interconnect.

Fast forward to 1863. Gustav Freytag developed Aristotle's three parts into five: exposition, rising action, turning point, falling action and resolution. The exposition introduces the main characters – who they are and what they want. The plot is about how they try to get it. In screenwriting, we talk about the status quo, inciting events, through lines and crescendos. It's no coincidence that the story told in the sonata form I studied as a junior violinist goes like this: exposition, transition, development, recapitulation, coda.

Writing with purpose

A couple of weeks ago, taking refuge from the rain in a secondhand bookshop, I came upon a yellowed hardback published by Bodley Head in 1933. It was bound in brown ribbed board with the title, in red italics: The Technique of Novel Writing: A Practical Guide for New Authors. The author, Basil Hogarth, laments that: “A tradition has been allowed to arise […] more by default than by deliberate intention, that the novel possesses no technique; that its craft inherits no secrets […] that, in the phrase of Henry James, it is a ‘sprawling invertebrate', a freak of literary creation.”

For me, a novel without a unifying plot is oddly without purpose – its individual stories lying adjacent but unresolved on the page. I sometimes wonder if the prejudice against plot is merely a new way to frame the conflict between literary and commercial. It's nothing new. Swift v Defoe, Dickens v Thackeray. There are, of course, wonderfully picaresque or dazzling episodic novels that revel in their lack of plot. But most authors are not Cervantes or Laurence Sterne.

Plausibility

Aristotle advised that the story should convince. Characters must do and say the things that, if you met them, they would do and say. In Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea, Hester Collyer leaves her husband, an eminent judge, for a flaky former RAF pilot who will never love her with the intensity with which she loves him. She attempts suicide, fails and conceals the attempt. But, because she loves him, she has written her lover a note to tell him not to blame himself. He finds the note and is tortured by the realisation that he drove her so far.

This is the device – and on stage the scrutiny is intense. Does it convince? Without the stumbled-upon letter there will be no chain of interconnected events, driving the action forward to the final, redemptive scene.

It's this tricksy little word, “device”. Perhaps there have been too many letters pushed under doormats and never found, cars that don't start, mobiles out of battery – what again? – and conversations coincidentally overheard. These are the dull tricks Stephen King rightly condemns. In the hands of Rattigan, though, every event has earned its place.

The promise

Plots may be visible. In Dan Brown's The Symbol we collect new facts like Brownies collect badges and every piece of information – how it is given, when it is given – has some bearing on the story.

Plots may be subtly concealed. In Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs, Carla Lemarchant is engaged to be married but dares not proceed. Her mother was convicted of the murder of her husband, Amyas Crale, 16 years earlier. Poirot investigates. We learn everything that he learns, down to the central, incontrovertible clue – the words pronounced by Amyas shortly before he died – and we wonder. Of course we know that Poirot knows and that, in the end, Agatha Christie will keep her promise – the plot that underlies the story will be revealed.

I know very quickly whether or not I will enjoy a novel. There's an attractive conviction to the writing of authors that I trust – I know they won't waste my time. In the end, everything counts.

The spaces between

I'm not advocating suffocating novels, plotted into submission. Good novels are completed by their readers. Bad novels are completed by their authors: overwritten, over-detailed and over-plotted.

But plot needn't be a straitjacket, rather a sturdy skeleton over which the beautiful drapery of dialogue, characterisation, period and location can be shown off to best advantage. Then, if you are at all like me, when you get to the end and all has finally become clear, you can say to yourself: “Of course!” Because that's what plot is – the hidden chain of cause and effect that it takes a whole novel to explain.

Kate Mosse is the author of five novels, including the international bestseller Labyrinth, two works of nonfiction, two plays and many short stories. Kate is currently working on the third novel in her Languedoc series, Citadel, which is published by Orion in September 2012