 As many of you know, I'm struggling to write a novel entitled The Only Life We Know.
The novel consists of twelve stories, set in Earth's future after a
virus has reduced human population to 150 million people. For reasons
that become clear in the novel, centralized government has disappeared
from this future Earth, and its people almost all live an idyllic and
leisurely life in small, self-selected and self-governing communities
in harmony with nature. The culture of these communities has, due to
the self-selection mechanism by which they have formed, evolved in
wildly and delightfully divergent ways: There is absolutely no
homogeneity whatever to the way in which the communities live, love,
act, think, speak or make a living. Each community is like a strange
and different world.
Although there is no central government, no central economy, no central anything
in this future world (it is truly a World of Ends), the communities are
not isolated -- there is state-of-the-art multimedia communication
between communities, and plenty of more-with-less technology and
innovation as well. No hunting (except for knowledge) and not much
gathering. In most of the communities portrayed, one's teenage years
are spent exploring other communities: One month blocks of time living
and working with the people in other communities has replaced formal
secondary education, and is the future world's rite of passage -- finding your true home.
There is a universal language (I won't say what it is, because its
evolution is important to the story -- but your first two guesses are
probably wrong) as well as unique community languages that have evolved
in each community. Because of the affluence of these communities, and
because of the re-discovered importance of community, several of the
key artifacts of civilization have crumbled and disappeared -- most
notably the (social and physical) family unit and the concept of
private property. The societies are built on collaborative rather than
private enterprise, and young people learn to find self-actualization
through invention, discovery and cooperation rather than through
acquisition and competition. That's not to say these communities, and
their members, are free from conflict. Some, but not all, of the
stories in the novel revolve around such conflicts. Some of the stories
are adult fables, like many of the stories of Earth's aboriginal
peoples.
So my novel has to work on three different levels,
and therein lies the challenge: It is an horrendous balancing act, and
I have already thrown out hundreds of pages of writing and at times
despaired of ever getting the novel finished. The three levels are:
- Each chapter occurs in a completely unique and evolving
community. Each chapter is, therefore, a short story in its own right.
And soeach chapter has to work as a short story, with characters that need to be adequately developed within
the chapter, since only the narrator (a traveller and story-teller)
appears in every chapter. It has to wrench the reader out of the
comfort of the previous chapter and present her with a completely new
setting and set of characters, as alien from the last as is humanly
possible for someone in our modern homogeneous society to imagine. This
is jarring to the reader, and also staggeringly difficult for the
writer. A friend told me this requires "not just a great imagination,
but great imaginations". And, as Frederick Barthelme's Center for Writers explains in The 39 Steps, the first step in good story-writing is:
Mean less. That is, don't mean so
much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it,
needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places,
insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make
it up, please. Don't let it make too much sense.
One of my readers, David M., sends me articulate critiques of my fiction, and he has passed along advice from EM Forster (via Willaim Gibson)
about what Barthelme means by this: The story cannot be merely a
didactic vehicle for your message, where the characters say unrealistic
and absurdly intellectual things to further the author's argument, and
where the plot and the characters serve as relentless propaganda agents
hammering home the author's intended moral to the point where they
become inauthentic and contrived, and to the point where the reader
gets annoyed at being so baldly manipulated. This is a failing of
Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B and of JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello.
I love these books because I profoundly share the authors' beliefs and
concerns, so I am willing to overlook the fact that the characters in
these books are shallow and inauthentic. But I want my
book to appeal to a wider audience, to persuade those that aren't quite
ready to believe that there is a better way to live than the way we
live today. I want each story to be real, inspiring, credible, a place
my readers would like to live, with characters they'd like to know. So
my writing has to be better than the era's greatest philosopher's, and
better than a Nobel prize-winner in Literature's. Yikes.
So I have to let my characters write each chapter's unique story in
their own way, and just be the channel, the scribe for it. It's very
hard. At times, thanks to my lazy imagination (in the face of
aggravating distractions like needing to decide how to start getting
some income flowing in to pay the bills), my characters just refuse to
get out of bed and do anything. They tell me they're waiting for
inspiration, and ask me annoying questions like how do I know they
wouldn't want Ferraris just because they're self-actualized and hence
don't need them (they rarely complain about the absence of SUVs at
least). Even worse, they have this infuriating tendency to go off and
do things just for the hell of it: My scientists want to learn to
dance, and my artists are often spaced out on drugs which, living in
such a paradise, they shouldn't want or need (they say it helps in the
creative process, even though we all know it doesn't). And they want to
have far too much sex. Damned ingrates. I put them in paradise and look
how they treat me.
- The novel must work as a satisfying mystery (interspersed
among the stories are flashbacks to the 21st century that explain how
the world got from here to there). And writing a mystery is another
form of the art entirely -- it has to move forward at a fast pace,
dropping clues, and walk the narrow line between being too obvious and
too obscure. Some, but not all, readers need to be able to guess the
ending before it occurs. And it needs to have some interesting twists
and turns, and to be, well, entertaining to read. And you all know I'm no fun, so this is an especially difficult challenge for me.
- The novel as a whole must 'hang together' and work as a Future
State Vision (a model to show people that there is a better way to live). The
whole needs therefore to be more than the mere sum of its parts, as a
'normal' book of short stories is. When a friend of mine suggested that
I was writing a moden-day bible I groaned -- but she's right, most
religious texts are, in fact, collections of stories that teach people
how to live.
All of this should have been enough to make me give up. This is,
surely, setting myself up to fail. But every time I ask myself "If you
don't want to write this novel, what do you want to do?", and make a list of the alternatives, it makes me realize I am a writer. This is what I do. And so I reopen my laptop and unfold the storyboard and wake up my characters, and plug on.
So now I've told you my problems, but I haven't really answered the
question posed by the title of this article: What are the elements of a
good story? I've already written
about the elements of a good speech, how to write clearly, how to write
dialogue, the importance of a good editor, how to write a good essay,
how to write funny (they say those that can't do, teach), the need for
a big ego and aesthetic enthusiasm and passion, and the need for the
writer to pay attention, care, and be honest. But that's the how. The elements are the what of the story, and I think there are six:
- Characters who are authentic and sympathetic. What they do and what they say has to be real.
- A narrative that transports the reader, takes him/her away from where they are and puts them there, in the story.
- Entertaining events and dialogue. We can be entertained in
different ways -- amused, shocked, reminded of something in our own
lives. But if we're not entertained, with every page, we're going to
stop turning pages.
- Surprise. The unpredictable is engaging, funny, terrifying,
saddening. It's the shortest way to our emotions. But it has to be
plausible. We've outgrown stories about gods and aliens that come out
of nowhere and smite everyone. Well, most of us have.
- Well-crafted imagery. By imagery I mean appeal to all the
senses, not just the visual. Good writing lets you see, hear, smell,
taste, feel what your narrator and characters do. Supports the
transportation (element #2).
- Style. This is hard to define, but you know it when you see
it. It's a little bit Point of View. Turn of phrase. The 'voice' of the
narrative and (if there is one) the narrator. It's humility -- you need
a big ego to presume to write something others will care to read (and
maybe even pay for the privilege), but don't let that ego show in your
style. Writer-reader is a peer-to-peer contract. Writing is a little
bit like wooing and a little bit like making love -- pouring out your
heart, showing you really care, being honest and polite, listening,
being patient with the foreplay, a little bit of flattery and
seduction, and finally, holding nothing back.
There is one thing that is critical to keep out of a good story as well: Waste. Every word, every phrase, every line of dialogue that isn't essential to the story detracts from it -- Get it out of there.
Time for me to get back to practicing what I preach.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
REFLECTION 11/11 - BY CHRISTOPHER KEY
