The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

EMPHASIS AND SUPPRESSION

A story is made up of a succession of happenings, some of major and many of minor importance, and in telling it the writer must emphasize the most important events to impress their significance upon a reader. It will not do to relate the whole, indiscriminately, with as much vividness as the writer can command, for the fictional value of the whole necessarily resides in the relation between its chief events, and that relation can be made apparent only by showing them in high relief. The most important events of a story must be emphasized; events of some but not of controlling importance must not be stressed too much; and the very trivial events, which are usually matter of transition, necessary only to the mechanical progress of the story, should be suppressed by narrating without detail and in general terms.

Fundamentally, emphasis and suppression are matters of weight, while proportion is a matter of space. There is a real relation between preserving proportion and laying emphasis, but it is accidental. When an important event is somewhat complicated, as a love scene, proportion requires that it be narrated in detail, for it would take some time to happen in reality; and due emphasis will be secured by detailed narration. But when an important event is inherently simple in character and brief in the time it would take to happen, proportion requires that it be given not too much space, while emphasis requires that it be stressed. To stress such an event, the writer's sole recourse is vividness in narration. The physical details are few, but they must be made strikingly impressive. Where an event is essentially complicated, a knot of many details, emphasis may be laid by detailed narration, by expansion, and proportion will not be violated. In the case of the important but inherently simple event there are no great number of details to be marshalled on the page, and the writer can only strive to invest his few words with power.

The writer should consider the matter of proportion in allotting the space of a story before writing, as has been stated. In writing, the mere fact that he follows events in detail with his pen will lead him to emphasize by expansion, where the subject matter naturally calls for that mode of securing emphasis. Where expansion is impossible on account of the absence of details to be narrated, the writer's realization of the importance of the event will lead him to cast about for the vivid word. That is to say, in dealing with the important events of a story the way to write is to visualize the procession of happenings and to follow them with the pen in detail, seeking the vivid and emphatic word where the event is vivid and emphatic. When the event is a bundle of many details, setting them down will emphasize the episode by expansion; and where the event is simple, and a mere detail in itself, as a blow, vividness in narration will counterfeit the force of the episode.

Normally, the succession of chief events will take up the greater part of the space available for a story, and, if the work of construction has been done properly before writing, the writer will have his attention free to visualize each successive happening and to picture it. The difficulty will be to express perfectly. The process is natural. It cannot be too strongly insisted that the way to write the strict story part of a story is to strive to see the thing in imagination and to get it on paper with the breath of life in it. By following his vision with his pen the writer will take care of the matters of proportion and emphasis without detached calculation looking to that end.

But that is not quite true in narrating secondary events and writing general matter of transition, the part of a story that gives the main events a natural sequence and proper spacing, or that develops character. The main events exist only for the story; they are the story. The secondary events and matter of transition exist largely for the sake of the reader. Such events prepare the characters, for instance, that the main situations may have true and full dramatic value to the reader, while the general matter of transition serves to give the main events spacing and the story plausibility. And in narrating secondary events, and writing matter of transition, the writer cannot have an eye solely to imagining the procession of little happenings and to reproducing them in detail. If he wrote so they would bulk as large as the main events, and the short story would fill a novel and the novel an encyclopaedia. Instead, the writer must realize the reasons that led him to choose or devise each secondary event while constructing the story, and must narrate each minor event so that it will just perform its designed function and no more. The major events of a story are primarily significant, and it is sufficient to narrate them so as to counterfeit them as they would be in reality. The minor events of a story are not significant in themselves, but only in relation to something else, and in narrating them the writer should develop only their significant phases. They must be given reality and verisimilitude, but their aspects and implications unimportant to the story should not be detailed and thereby stressed. All aspects of the main events are to be detailed simply because all aspects of the main events are important to the story. They are the story.

The discussion is somewhat abstract and involved, but necessarily so. The technique will be easier to practice than it sounds, much easier, for instance, than to narrate the simple but important event with due emphasis through vividness. That necessity is supremely easy to state or realize, but supremely hard to meet in writing a story. The technique of handling secondary events and matter of transition is hard to state abstractly and to grasp from mere discussion, but when it is grasped it is comparatively easy to apply in writing, for it calls for no executive power, merely the negative power to leave out the insignificant.

It will be seen that the process of narrating the minor events of a story is not natural, but highly artificial. The process of narrating the main events is natural; it consists merely in imagining and reproducing them with as much body and color as possible. Where undivided attention to phrasing is most essential, the writer can give it; where it is least essential, in setting out a minor event, the writer must give much attention to what aspects of the episode he should emphasize. He cannot reproduce it in full detail simply for what it is in itself. Just narration of secondary episodes and transitional passages is a matter of calculation; just narration of the more important events of a story is a matter of warm creation and verbal power.