The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

Nothing is more common than for the beginning writer to devise or discover an eminently worthy plot idea, and nothing is more uncommon than for him to utilize it to the full and develop it adequately. The reason for the failure is simple. The better the plot, the more humanly significant its situations. They are so very significant, in the case of the fine plot, that the beginning writer is led to think that his only task is to outline them. But merely to outline a significant situation or event will not give it the emotional force that fiction must possess, otherwise the newspaper would be read in tears. The event must involve real people, if the emotion of a reader is to be aroused. A newspaper item may state that Mary Smith has committed suicide because deserted by her lover, but though the casual reader will realize intellectually and abstractly the pathos of the situation, his emotion will not be stirred unless he is a more sensitive human precipitate than most readers. To move his heart, rather than his mind, some particular Mary Smith, like no one else in the world, must walk a living presence through the story built about such a theme. The difference is between merely reporting events and picturing life.

Like most other matters of technique, this of giving individuality and life to the people of a story is based on the necessity to achieve verisimilitude and interest. Human life is a great complex of millions of men and women doing certain things, and in a story, which is a picture of a phase of life, the people must be drawn with as much definition and detail as the events, or the reader will not accept the fiction as fictional truth.

In great part, the matter of developing the human elements of a story is a problem of construction, as is the matter of preparing a natural succession of events. The writer first must order his main events as interestingly and plausibly as possible. He then must devise and order his secondary events as to give the requisite spacing and naturalness to the whole, and he also must take care to provide for such action on the part of the characters that when they come to the main events they will be something more than named abstractions. Of course, the writer has means at command to vitalize his people other than to draw them in actions illustrating their peculiarities, but it is difficult enough at best to vivify a character, and the writer who depends solely on his powers of direct description will achieve very meager results. I have already referred to the part the secondary events of a story play in developing character, and have cited London's "The Sea Wolf" as an instance. A great part of the book is devoted to a succession of episodes which develop Larsen's striking personality. It is very skillfully done in this respect, and the result is as memorable a figure as exists in recent fiction. The beginning writer and even the more practiced hand will do well to note the great part that just construction must have played in producing the impression of the Wolf's virility and ruthlessness.

It all may be termed a matter of drawing character, but the necessity is to realize that in constructing his story before writing an author must prepare for the development of its people as well as for the development of its events. The work will have to be done sometime, if the story is to be more than a report, and it should be done before writing, so far as it is a matter of construction. The writer who has conceived a plot of real merit has done much, but he has not done all. The striking events of a plot are significant only in relation to the people of the story, and a reader must be made to feel the reality of the characters as well as the reality of the events. The single concern of the writer of fiction is to lay on his page a picture of a phase of life that is effective because it is plausible, and he must give equal attention to the persons of the story and to what they do, both in construction and execution.[F]

PROPORTION

In planning his story with an eye to giving it the greatest semblance of reality, the writer has one means ready to his hand which is the more useful because somewhat mechanical. I have reference to the preservation of proportion.

Fundamentally, proportion is a mere matter of space or length. In real life events vary in point of the time they take to happen, and in the story proportion may be preserved by dividing the available space justly between the several events. Normally a love scene will take longer to happen than a murder, which is an affair of one high-pitched moment, and in planning and writing a story which contains both a love scene and a murder a proper amount of space should be assigned to each. In the story the reader passes through days in an hour and through hours in a minute; he must not be made to pass through minutes in an hour, and through hours of events as important to the story in a minute. A murder may be more important in the story than a love scene, and so require emphasis, but it cannot be stressed by great expansion without violating proportion. Emphasis must be laid by narrating vividly, a matter to be taken up in its proper place when discussing executive technique.

The mere fact that the writer must narrate the main events of his story in some detail usually will lead him unconsciously to preserve proportion so far as they are concerned. The space necessary to develop a murder will have roughly the same relation to the space necessary to develop a love scene as the duration of a real murder has to the duration of a real love scene. But the minor events of a story function on a different plane from its major happenings, and so cannot be proportioned similarly. If a murderer must sail from London to New York to reach his victim—either on account of the place necessities of the story, or to fasten an impression of his animosity on the reader—the minutes of the days of the voyage cannot be related with as much detail as the minutes of the actual killing. In planning a story, the writer should make provision for the secondary events and the strict matter of transition, as well as for the main events, but he should not plan to narrate in detail until a main event is reached. The beginning writer seems very often to be afraid to narrate in general terms, even where the story demands no detail, and the fault probably arises from a vague feeling that the reader will not accept the author's say-so, but must be "shown." To an extent, that is true. However, where the matter is of transition, merely to forward the mechanical progress of the story, detailed narration is distortion. It will inevitably cause loss of suspense and interest.

Realization of the relative importance to the story of each of its parts will give the writer the standard whereby to distribute its space. In writing the short story the preservation of proportion is most essential; there is so little space at hand that two words cannot be wasted in detailed narration where more general narration will suffice, and it all comes under the reader's eye so nearly at one moment that any disproportion in the treatment of events of equal importance will be detected. In the novel, lack of proportion may be a more secret fault, but it will have its effect.