Elements of Fiction
by
Walter Ellis Mosley

[Note: all underscoring for emphasis is my own. JH]

This monograph is concerned with the hope of writing a novel that transcends story in such a way as to plumb the depths of meaning while, at the same time, telling a good yarn. (v)

There’s one last thing to say before we get into the main body of this disquisition, [a formal inquiry into or discussion of a subject] and that is condensation. Even though I haven’t used this word in the main body of the text, it is a major unspoken element of fiction writing. That’s how you write a novel: you take a small section of the larger world (for example, retired cop culture in Saint Louis) and then crush the subject down to only those elements that are salient to the story being told. Once you’ve achieved this end you add as little of the commonplace as possible to make a story that seems large and real and pedestrian and, hopefully, revealing. The middle-aged cops of Saint Louis become the reader’s entire world—large as, larger than, their minds can comprehend at any given moment. That’s what our experience of the world is. Good novels are the same. (vii-viii)

In This Year You Write Your Novel I gave the simplest bases for novel writing. I said to write each and every day, to decide on a point of view to tell your story, to understand the concepts of metaphor and simile, plot and story, character and character development, and the importance of language, poetry, and, of course, the fact that writing itself was the act of rewriting. (ix)

The act of writing a novel organizes the mind. It sends us on a journey that is uniquely personal. (x)

Plot is the structure of revelation. (1)

If we chose the right moment to reveal a truth about the story, we might create an epiphany for the reader that is striking, maybe even life altering. And yet the potential for epiphany is a minor benefit compared to the trace elements that come slowly to awareness during the unveiling of the story being told. (2)

What matters is that the emptiness is challenged by concepts and images trying to open a door to your story; trying to reveal some subject, some pathway to the mountain that will rise under you, bringing with it the truth that was forgotten in words crafted by your desires and your faithfulness to the child who has always needed to understand and explain. (8)

The blank page is the writer’s friend. It is an invitation to discover the words that will guide you to the story. You may have already have a good idea of what your story should be: the blank page will help you sculpt the idea into something real. You might have no idea of what will come from your writing. All you know is that there was a field somewhere that once bore wild strawberries and is now a parking lot. You feel that story and through the blank page you will deliver it. (10)

Then the shadow of a thought intrudes. The fact of that spring light is also a fact of fiction. Something has to hold it all together. Sharon? Yes, but not really. New York? Only inasmuch as the story has to unfold somewhere. A woman’s predicament? Yes. But this light is still only diffuse in your novel; it has no direction, nothing for it to illuminate or reflect upon. And then you remember suffrage: a strong wind raging toward freedom. Suffrage: an abrasive, loving, demanding, uncompromising voice that calls out and shouts down beliefs that have been held for centuries. Suffrage that echoes the word suffering, which in turn is Sharon’s bitter life.

Yes, of course, you have character, story, plot, dialectics, narrative voice, and an intention to reveal; but the fiction you’re writing, the novel that attempts to transcend more story into meaning, also needs context. (16)

Context is the world we inhabit, the light of morning, children, belief in god, or maybe it’s a hunt or an escape, a passion or an emptiness so profound it can be filled only by death.

Melville’s context was the ocean and the great white whale. Dickens had the poorhouse. Many of Mark Twain’s tales had us navigating the Mississippi River with both intention and abandon. (17)

The moment you and your story are overwhelmed by the furious storm of the times—that when the real novel begins. (18)

The echoing magnitude is your novel. The answer is in the writing, not your conscious mind. Like that child throwing herself into the pond, you throw yourself into this story, letting it toss you and your characters about the detritus in a whirlpool. (18)

(What is the context of Absent Son beyond Charleston in 1865: Isolation? Connection? Reconnection? Loss? Purpose?)

Character presents the lens or lenses through which the novel is experienced. (19)

Character is a beast of burden. It carries our food and tools, our weapons and journals, our dreams and desires, along with all the bits and bobs that accumulate over a lifetime. (19-20)

Sometimes we load up our players with knowledge and understanding that they don’t really have access to. Sometimes, instead of revealing a truth, we simply have one of our players say it or act it out. Our beasts of burden can carry a tin skillet, but that doesn’t mean they can prepare a mess of grits; they exist in a world of sublime articulation, but they themselves often have little idea of what transpires in that world. (21)

Revelation for and through character is one of the major, and certainly most irreplaceable, pillars of your novel. (21)

I meet my characters the way I encounter people in life—at a place and in a situation where I have less knowledge than I’d like and am almost always, at first, paying attention to the least important details. (23)

The transmogrification of a person most often depends on interrelations. (32)

Whether you work up a bio on your characters before writing the novel or just jump in hoping to find their quirks and certainties while the story develops, you need the characters to grow or diminish and change, for better or worse. The world of fiction is always in flux, and its inhabitants are flotsam, seeking refuge in each other on the relentless tide of story. (32)

Every story is a mystery of one sort or another. The reader might first be drawn in by something inexplicably beautiful or confusing, something that seems strange, or maybe just slightly out of place. Interest might be piqued by a turn of phrase or a bald truth that is familiar. Sometimes the first words are bold enough that the reader wonders how the writing could prove its boast. But after a while the reader wonders only two things: 1) what happens next, and 2) what does it all mean: how will it turn out in the end? (33)

It is worthwhile, I believe, to attempt to tell a story from its negative spaces, to allow the reader to wonder what is real before you reveal the truth, affording the reader an understanding of the lies told to keep the narrator safe and sound—she believes. (37)

Often just the fact that you love me is enough. But sometimes, more often than we’d like to believe, that schism between what I say and what you understand can bring us to treacherous territory. Great for fiction, not so good for the characters therein. (38)

Describing a human life—its passions, beliefs, scars, and successes—while having on the use of words is a daunting task. This difficultly is only increased when you realize that this is just the first step in a novel. Now have to take this fully realized person and detail his or her journey and subsequent metamorphosis through the obstacle course of story. No photographs, recordings, musical accompaniment, props, or environments are available to help the reader—or writer. All either of you have is language and a smattering of punctuation. (39)

Language. The word sounds like a root vegetable kept in a wooden crate on the winter porch. Soil-encrusted rutabaga or carrot, parsnip or leek. It sustains you but does not have the spark of a spring day or the solemnity of a hurricane. Regardless of these limitations, language is and always be the New World. It contains our history and potential. Language condemns us or sets us free. The subterranean, subconscious warrens of our words contain and reveal us without our full knowledge. (39-40)

Or, when the conversation between Joe and Morley is over, the third-person narrator can jump to Morley’s shoulder and follow him into the next phase of the story.

The ability to jump shoulders makes third-person narration extremely flexible. You aren’t limited to one point of view but are admitted to as many characters’ experiences as necessary to understand the world. (42-43)

Every word is important; every word. And every words is about your characters, the world they live in, and how that would transform them while it transforms around them. (47)

Every word is important. This means you have to use the right words to tell the tale, and it also means that you must use these words frugally, parsimoniously. There are so many things happening at any given moment in any situation that it would take thousands of pages to describe the smallest of events in its totality. (48)

A novel is not a laundry list but a story with a purpose. It’s about character and place and time and society and politics and… so much. Our job is to pare away the extraneous while accenting the essential without letting it seem that what we’re presenting is anything other than the everyday, the pedestrian experience of life that leads now and then to the unexpected and extraordinary, the satanic and divine. (51)

It would be a good exercise for any writer, all writers, to place themselves in what they deem a very simple setting and then try to make an exhaustive description of the environment. I expect that for most beginning writers, this would be an enlightening exercise. Describe your kitchen or the process of you responsibilities and activities during the first hour of work; this is to include a detailed description of your work area. Use you acumen and imagination to find and explore every element of the place or task. Approach this chore assiduously and you will experience the avalanche of detail involved in even the smallest part or position of your day (51)

[Note: recall Scotty’s brushing your teeth program assignment.]

When crafting this [encounter in a busy Grand Central Station] we want the reader to feel the hustle and bustle, the sounds and mirth, the distinctly human desires , and the workaday world: humanity in all its potential and decline. We want everything, but we need only the snatches here and there: an elderly woman barely able to stagger through the crowd, a toddler boy who eyes only for his mother, young and old lovers, cops, and maybe a pickpocket pretending to be having a conversation on a cellphone. ( 53)

The everyday. The ordinary. It sounds so simple, but as we saw above, it takes a great deal of specificity and choice. We can’t present the ten thousand souls passing through Grand Central Station in the background of our story. But we can’t ignore them either. An aged woman, a cop, a pickpocket. The guy selling hot dogs has an understanding of human nature that is so deft, he asks Charles, “Was she worth it?”

Just enough for the reader to believe—not a syllable more. (55-56)

And you have to remember: only the important, the salient, the revealing details should be used in describing any place, situation, person, or thing. These details can’t seem so important when we read them, but they are the necessary building blocks of the world that the reader will have to believe in.

The open piano sitting like a croc waiting for its next meal. Martin’s dead eye somehow expressing ecstasy. The oversize beer can that fits in his fist like a shot glass. Small, pedestrian, poetic—it doesn’t matter. Get in there and show us whatever we are, what we’re facing—then get out and the let the readers do their job.

You and the reader make the novel. (56)

You need poetry in your life or your words will never sing with the divinity of the ordinary. (65)

The novel is a journey of character, the roadmap of the emotional transition he and/or she will experience. The closer we can stay to the action of the novel the more clearly and intensely we will feel those changes. (75)

Third person is just that—a story told by someone outside the center of the tale as it unfolds. Because this narrator is not directly vulnerable to the events as they transpire, it cannot have as deep a connection. As a matter of fact, I have read and been told that the third-person narrator is an objective voice. I can understand the desire for this restriction. Once you allow the third-person narrator to have an opinion the exhibition of emotion makes that voice, on degree or another, unreliable.

I understand trying to keep your third-person narrator unopinionated; that way, from shoulder to shoulder we can rely on the honesty of interpretation.

I understand, but at the same time I know that a human being writing anything has an opinion, regardless of the rules. The trick is to modulate the narrative voice so that it doesn’t conflict with characters that speak and experience the story. (78-79)

Finally, I read a batch of changes, see problems in the work, and yet realize that I have no answers. That is when the book is finished.

The novel will never be perfect and neither will you. (84)

We have to remember that a novel attempting to rise above the level of mere story does not get there because of our knowledge and certainty, our education and intelligence alone. The novel flourishes when its author begins to take risks. (88)

It’s like magic, the relationship between the writer and the writing, the rewriting and the real world that impinges upon it. Intelligence, education, sophistication, and the craft of writing all potentially hinder a novel that is trying to be born. The story isn’t there to expose the writer’s brilliance or her intricate interpretations. It, the novel, is there to drain her lifeblood, to challenge her morals, and say that there exists a more vital life than her own.

To that end, when the Voice of the novel asks, Why not take this detour and see if you can get something out of it—you should listen. (89)

We may know the truth about the story we’re telling but, given a little freedom on the leach, the story, if it comes from our heart, knows more. (91)

Why write a novel if the only goal is to inform, instruct, and explain? You believe in the politics of this story the way a farmer believes in the spring. But what dos that farmer think when he looks out over the distance and sees a mile-wide tornado bearing down on the farm?

That is the right question. (93)

The consciousness of the novelist is at times unbearable. He or she becomes stuck on an idea and in doing so loses the playfulness, the true drama, the humanity of the work. The novel has slowly turned into a treatise on gender interactions or the history of Hawaii—something wrought purely of thought, ideas, and ideals. The writing has taken on a religious tenor that believes in the truths it espouses before the character can speak or even think them.

The novel is bigger than the writer’s head. It is a mountain and she is an ant. It is a globular planet when he first thought it was a vast flat plain. A novel is a realm of discovery, a place where characters and the writer and the evening news come together to create something that had not, they could not, have known beforehand. (99)

Fiction is not a science experiment, but there are hints and smidgens throughout a good novel that make the story a deeper, more powerful and entertaining form. Advice from a madwoman to a child, if properly formed, might instill sympathy in the reader. This reader will want to know more because of the dissonance and truth the madwoman brings into the life of a little girl. This interaction might not have a concrete connection to the story, but without it the light inexplicably dim. These few lines of conversation might set off a vibration that, unexpectedly, comes up off the page and into the hearts of your audience, bringing the rest of the novel with it.

These literary trace elements can take many forms: the weather, music playing on the other side of a wall, a fly that seems to live for weeks. A trace element could be the effects of a neighbor’s diet over a dramatic period in another character’s life or a quixotic clock that never quite tells the right time. (101)

So, rather than a crude outline or flowchart, the structure of the story is an elemental rampage ripping apart the mundane reality of watching crops grow, children grow, parents growing older. Maybe survival is an iron bathtub that resists the winds, or the clawing bloody fingers of a grandsire who feels alive for the first time in decades. (111)