The Technique of Fiction Writing

by Robert Saunders Dowst

CHAPTER VII
EXECUTIVE TECHNIQUE OF NARRATION

Narration Method—Story of the Commonplace—Story of the Bizarre—Vividness—Suspense—Emphasis and Suppression—Matter of Weight—Expansion and Vividness—Primary and Secondary Events—Transition—General Narration—Blending of Elements.

The writer who has discovered a good plot, so that his interest will not flag in writing, and who has fully developed the conception, so that he can have a single eye to execution, will meet few obstacles in setting down the whole story. Difficulties there will be in plenty, but they will be self-imposed. That is to say, it will be very easy to give the justly elaborated conception expression approximately adequate, but it will be very hard to give the conception verbally faultless expression. If the writer strives merely to tell the story, the labor of writing will be slight; if he strives to write with artistry and power, it will be infinitely great.

This book is on the technique of fiction writing, not on the technique of writing; my aim is to discuss only the matters of technique peculiar to the art of fiction. Thus, in this chapter I shall have occasion to state that the important event should be emphasized, and that vividness in narration is a means to that end, but how to narrate vividly is a question of rhetoric generally, and it is not my purpose to discuss it. Moreover, it is emphatically true that the capacity to narrate vividly cannot be attained by the mere study of examples, the only way in which the matter can be studied. The writer can only strive constantly in his work to write with definition and force. It is all a matter of practice, whether or not the capacity must be inborn. But the principle of fiction technique, that the important event should be emphasized in some way, whether by vividness or expansion, is subject to direct statement and to assimulation from the direct statement. Therefore statement of the principle is all that a work on fiction technique need attempt. The rest lies with the writer himself.[I]

The first chapter on the executive technique of narration took up the two preliminary problems of the mode of narration and of manner or style; this second chapter has to do with certain other matters that must be considered in writing a story, viewed as a chain of events. Character, atmosphere, and dialogue will receive separate treatment, and for discussion of the strict technique of expression the reader is referred to works on rhetoric, except that in discussing the technique of description in the next chapter I shall have occasion to touch upon nicety of expression.

METHOD

The method of narration is necessarily influenced somewhat by the style the writer of a story strives first to find and then to maintain, but the style does not entirely determine the method, or the method the style. The matters are distinct, though mutually influential.

There are two kinds of lives, or at least two kinds of incidents, the humdrum and the bizarre. Likewise and consequently there are two kinds of stories to be told, the humdrum and the bizarre. Each may be fashioned into something worth while. Whether the matter of a story is worth while depends on the significance of the phase of life involved; whether the story itself is worth while depends on its plausibility or verisimilitude, which depends on the way it is constructed and told.

The humdrum story, that deals with the more common actualities of life, the little details that are significant only in combination or in relation to certain characters, can be told as simply as the writer desires. He has only to set down the succession of details that constitutes the story. Each new incident will not only advance the narrative progress of the story, but the commonplace nature of each incident in itself will tend to give the fiction its necessary plausibility. Simply because each incident is common and of universal occurrence the reader will accept it and the story compounded of such elements. Matter of fact phrasing, not phrasing too "literary" in spots, is most suitable.[J] Such a story does not require high lights of expression, and they should not be interpolated.

The story dealing with the strange and wonderful is another matter. In writing it the author's aim is the same as in writing the commonplace story, to give it plausibility and verisimilitude, but the task is infinitely more difficult. Proper construction will aid greatly, and in execution the writer has two resources.