The Fire in Fiction (33 page)

What strikes you most about Jordan Groves's house? Is it the banisters made from interwoven deer antlers? Is it the portentous

hidden drawers or unadorned windows that let the outer darkness in? The house is indeed a model of rustic Adirondack style, but by themselves those are just empty details.

It is the truth behind them that makes them matter: The house is entirely an expression of the masculine needs and ego of Jordan Groves. Banks's passage is littered with foreshadowing, but that too would have little effect if he did not first clue us in to Groves's own selfishness, which will be his undoing.

Banks understands what I wish more novelists would grasp: Description itself does nothing to create tension; tension comes only from within the people in the landscape. A house is just a house until it is occupied by people with problems. When the problems are presented first, then the house builds a metaphor.

Similarly, description of anything can create tension by working backwards to make plain the conflicts of the observer. How would you describe a yak? Let's take a look at how satirist Christopher Moore does it. Moore's novel
Lamb
(2002) is subtitled
The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal,
which tells you pretty much what you need to know. Biff and Josh, as Christ is called, take a road trip across Asia and the Middle East during Josh's formative years. At one point, while killing time at a monastery in China, Biff is put in charge of the monks' yaks:

A yak is an extremely large, extremely hairy, buffalolike animal with dangerous-looking black horns. If you've ever seen a water buffalo, imagine it wearing a full-body wig that drags the ground. Now sprinkle it with musk, manure, and sour milk: you've got yourself a yak. In a cavelike stable, the monks kept one female yak, which they let out during the day to wander the mountain paths to graze. On what, I don't know. There didn't seem to be enough living plant life to support an animal of that size (the yak's shoulder was higher than my head), but there didn't seem to be enough plant life in all of Judea for a herd of goats, either, and herding was one of the main occupations. What did I know?

The yak provided just enough milk and cheese to remind the monks that they didn't get enough milk and cheese from one yak for twenty-two monks. The animal also provided a long, coarse wool which needed to be harvested twice a year. This venerated duty, along with combing the crap and grass and burrs out of the wool, fell to me. There's not much to know about yaks beyond that, except for one important fact that Gaspar felt I needed to learn through practice: yaks hate to be shaved.

Oh, that Biff. What a cut up. What would you say is his attitude toward yaks? Conflicted? I'd agree. More to the point, what does Biff's wry outlook tell you about the journey he is taking with Josh? Ah. Christopher Moore has a big problem in writing the story of Jesus: We know how it turns out. Creating narrative tension is therefore a bit of a challenge. There's really no way to do it except by finding tension elsewhere, and that is primarily within Biff. Moore teases out Biff's conflicted feelings about being the Messiah's buddy for hundreds of pages, keeping us wondering whether he will hang in there all the way to the Resurrection.

Given that emotional conflict is a nuclear generator of tension in all dimensions of a novel, you would think that writing about pure emotions by themselves would be a sure bet to keep readers involved. Not so. Plain emotion can be as dull as description. Just because a character is feeling something doesn't mean we will feel anything other than indifferent.

Susan Minot's highly-praised, and later filmed, novel
Evening
(1998) tells the story of Ann Grant, who in 1994 is dying, and whose memory of the one passionate love of her life is rekindled by the smell of a balsam pillow. In 1954 she travels to a wedding in Maine and there falls in love with fellow guest Harris Arden. Their affair is intense and brief. Then Arden's girlfriend arrives from Chicago for the wedding with the news that she is pregnant. Arden decides to do the right thing. After making his choice, Arden examines his feelings:

Harris Arden came up around the side of the house. He was not used to so much emotion. It wore him out. This had all caught him off guard. He'd come upon a new road and taken a few steps down that road and now he saw it wasn't the road he was going to take after all. He was going back to the road he knew and would continue walking where he'd been walking for a long time. He'd been walking on that road for a long time for a reason. It suited him, didn't it? Well there wasn't any use in asking whether it suited him or not, it was where his duty took him and where his life had put him and where he would go.

He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him. It had been too sudden. But hadn't it been sudden with Maria also? Why, it could go on being sudden with girls if you let it, one had to put a stop to it somewhere along the line. Having a baby would put a stop to it. Maria was the one he would stop with. And Maria loved him, that was certain. He could not be certain about this new woman. After the brightness faded who knew what would happen, he hardly knew her.

Minot's handling of Arden's feelings is deft. Note how in the first paragraph his reasoning is plodding and detached. Then he thinks of Ann: "He smelled his sleeve, that was her. She was like a flash of light, surprising him." For a second his mind is alive, but then he shuts it down again, rationalizing his choice. Is he worn out by emotion, as he supposes? No, he is pushing it down. He is suppressing his anguish. Had Minot merely portrayed Arden's sadness it would have been fine but it would also have been ordinary.

Because Arden is struggling, we are drawn in. Without being aware of it we are wondering whether he will think away his passion or whether his heart will win. It is a small tension, perhaps, but enough to keep us reading a few pages farther.

Foreshadowing foretells peril—not for the characters but for the novelist. Why? Have you ever groaned over a thudding and clunky piece of portentousness? Then you know. Foreshadowing can have the opposite of its intended effect. Is there a way to cast a shadow without being ridiculously obvious?

E.L. Doctorow's
The March
(2005) was awarded the National Book Critics' Circle and the PEN/Faulkner awards, as well as nominations for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It is the story of General Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas late in the Civil War. The burning of Atlanta was just the beginning. A sixty-mile-wide swath of destruction followed behind Sherman. Doctorow uses five points of view to dramatize this calamity.

Toward the beginning of the novel, a plantation family, knowing what is coming, packs their valuables in wagons and departs. They leave behind their slaves who, wearing their Sunday clothes, wait for the emancipation that they believe will arrive with the Union Army. Elder slave Jake Early is the first to sense its approach:

Jake Early did not have to counsel patience. The fear they had all seen in the eyes of the fleeing Massah and Mistress told them that deliverance had come. But the sky was cloudless, and as the sun rose everyone settled down and some even nodded off, which Jake Early regretted, feeling that when the Union soldiers came they should find black folk not at their ease but smartly arrayed as a welcoming company of free men and women.

He himself stood in the middle of the road with his staff and did not move. He listened. For the longest while there was nothing but the mild stirring of the air, like a whispering in his ear or the rustle of woodland. But then he did hear something. Or did he? It wasn't exactly a sound, it was more like a sense of something transformed in his own expectation. And then, almost as if what he held was a divining rod, the staff in his hand

pointed to the sky westerly. At this, all the others stood up and came away from the trees: what they saw in the distance was smoke spouting from different points in the landscape, first here, then there. But in the middle of all this was a change in the sky color itself that gradually clarified as an upward-streaming brown cloud risen from the earth, as if the world was turned upside down.

The world of the South and these slaves is indeed about to be turned upside down. What best foreshadows the destruction to come? The columns of smoke on the horizon and the sickly brown hue of the sky are ominous outward signs, to be sure. I wonder, though, if they would bear the same dread had not Doctorow prepared us first with the slaves' hopeful anticipation, wearing their Sunday best, Jake Early wishing they would appear "a welcoming company of free men and women."

Foreshadowing, I believe, is most effective not when it thunders at us but when it stirs within the story's characters a shift of emotion. The signs in the sky are only smoke, really, unless they mark a subtle contrast with characters' feelings.

Every story has static moments; that is, times when nothing in particular is happening. Can those be put on the page? Many writers inadvertently do so. That may seem a failure of self-editing, but I believe that many writers pen such passages because they sense something important in them. What is it they are hoping to capture? And what is the point in trying when there is nothing at all with which to work?

Scottish mystery writer Josephine Tey (1896-1952) did not publish many novels, but one of them featuring her detective, Alan Grant, made her famous: In
The Daughter ofTime
(1951), Grant solves a long-standing historical mystery without ever leaving his hospital bed. Laid up with a broken leg, using only history books and pure reason, Grant uncovers the truth of whether Richard III murdered his nephews.

As the novel opens, though, Grant has nothing to do but stare at the ceiling:

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He had made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

He had suggested to The Midget that she might turn his bed around a little so that he could have a new patch of ceiling to explore. But it seemed that that would spoil the symmetry of the room, and in hospitals symmetry ranked just a short head behind cleanliness and a whole length in front of Godliness. Anything out of the parallel was hospital profanity. Why didn't he read? she asked. Why didn't he go on reading some of those expensive brand-new novels that his friends kept on bringing him?

"There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought."

"You sound constipated," said The Midget.

Constipated? Alan Grant is bored. Like Sherlock Holmes needing a fix, he craves a mystery to engage his mind. Until then it is the ceiling. He is able to find in it animals; it recalls geometric formulae. But how does he feel about it? He loathes it.

I ask you, what is it in this classic opening paragraph that actually captures our interest and keeps us reading? The ceiling? No. It's just a ceiling. What keeps us in suspense is whether Alan Grant's boredom will be relieved.

In other words, tension can be made out of nothing at all; or at least, that's how it can appear. In reality it is feelings, specifically

feelings in conflict with each other, that fill up an otherwise dead span of story and bring it alive.

Do you feel that your manuscript is brimming with tension? Do agents, editors and reviewers, and vast legions of readers agree? Not yet? Then there is work to do; specifically the work of finding the torn emotions in your characters and using them as the foundation for true tension in dialogue, action, exposition, and anywhere that tension is needed to keep us unsure of what will happen next.

Where is that tension needed? Everywhere.