The Cambridge introduction to creative writing
Dreaming a fictional continuum
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| Dreaming a fictional continuum In On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner states, Good fiction sets off . . . a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind (1985: 39). In Chapter Four , we saw how Les Murray spoke of the painless headache of writing as an integration of the body-mind and the dreaming-mind and the daylight-conscious-mind. All three are firing at once, they’re all in concert Writing fiction may induce this trance of composition, and of reading, but technique will maintain it for you, and for the reader. As Gardner goes onto say, If the writer understands that stories are first and foremost stories, and that the best stories set off a vivid and continuous dream, he can hardly help becoming interested in technique, since it is mainly bad technique that breaks the continuousness and checks the growth of the fictional dream (1985: 45). Plots and scene Short-term, short-haul pieces of writing do not suit the novelist. A novel is along haul, and a creative writing workshop will not miraculously generate a whole one (a doctoral programme in creative writing presents a modus operandi). Writing Games often make miniatures or set pieces, such as character sketches, exercises in style or point of view. You cannot simply stitch together these set pieces to make extended fiction unless you have decided on a ‘brave’ (and probably clunky) experiment. A fiction writer depends on something larger the dream or fantasy of scenes that are true to life or, at least, carry verisimilitude however fantastic the setting or story. This tone of mind is not really required by poets, except when they are stitching together long poems or thematic collections. It is necessary for the writer of fiction to make this dreaming of scenes a virtual habit for their imagination. 164 Creative writing One matter that checks that trance or dream is a misunderstanding of plot. Even a professed outsider figure like the novelist Stephen King calls plot the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice (2000: 189). Plot is not the story. Plot is a series of events you have devised, and these events may not even occur linearly. In the first paragraph of Chapter One , I asked you to think of the page as an open space. Writing a story creates a four-dimensional landscape in that space. Space and time become one – a continuum. Within that continuum, you must choose one strand of narrative that you intuitively feel will lead you through the landscape. Please notice that you will be led for, as Isabel Allende contends: It is not I who choose the story the story chooses me . . . Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I’m beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it’s actually the other way round. Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative – they colonise us. They commission us. They insist on being told. (Rodden, 1999 : ix, The insistent strand of narrative is your plot, and it will lead you through the maze of narrative possibilities that open, move around, and close behind you in a sequence of discrete but connected scenes. King playfully argues, I believe that plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible . . . I won’t try to convince you I’ve never plotted anymore than I’d try to convince you that I’ve never told a lie, but I do both as infrequently as possible (2000: Some writers prefer not to work this way despite the illuminations of discovery. Instead, the writer plans their story as if they were teasing out an academic essay or storyboarding a movie, sketching microcosmic plots for each part, or chapter, of their story. They then know precisely what will happen on the next page, to whom, and create timelines for these actions. This might suit you as an approach, but it is less likely to engender surprise and inevitability, unless your style is sensational. If there is no surprise for you, the writer, then there is a possibility there will belittle surprise for the reader either, for your fiction might feel predicted and thus predictable. If you tie everything neatly, what is the writer’s or the reader’s role? As you should beware of cliches of feeling, or kitsch, in your writing, you should also be aware of cliches of plot, not that following a traditional plot structure is a bad thing. Gardner nutshells the traditional plot as A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts, and so arrives at a win, lose or draw ( 1985 : 54). In The Seven Basic Plots ( 2004 ), Christopher Booker suggests there are seven standard stories in the world that all fiction uses and recycles. These are summarised as The practice of fiction 165 ‘Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return’, ‘Comedy’, Tragedy and Rebirth, although Booker does extend the franchise to include Rebellion Against The One and Mystery. Booker believes that stories tend to have the same structure because they follow the contours of human development initial success followed by crisis, then lasting successor failure, arguing that: in storytelling the underlying archetypal structures are so constituted that they must always work towards that concluding image which shows us everything in a story being satisfactorily resolved. The mark of a well-constructed story is that every detail in it is contributing in someway towards that final resolution This is interesting but very much open to debate. It is based on the outside- reader looking into plot and psychoanalysing a function, rather than being its co-creator. However, just as retelling myths and legends offers a good Writing Game, your first efforts may mirror these templates. As Toby Litt says, The truly great stories are the ones you already know but want to know again You have to start somewhere. However, you may later choose to play variations, combine them, or confound them. Remember plot is not the story, but an Ariadne’s thread you follow through a labyrinth of scenes. The units that light the pathway of the novel in particular are its scenes, the stages on which small dramas unfold. They show the reader one part of the story, as a frame or picture, but they do not tell. Scenes are often perceived beforehand by the writer as they dream their way through the story. They are usually a location in which characters are seen and heard at close quarters, and they accomplish some action which has an outcome directly bearing on the forward movement of the story. Every scene moves some, if not all, of the elements of your story forwards. Each scene leans into that momentum, however gently, revealing to your reader some further revelation of character. As a rule of thumb, the events that are most crucial to the story will be those that lend themselves to be carried by scene narrative carries the rest. Download 2.89 Mb. Share with your friends:
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