Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (25 page)

A few years back, Roddy Doyle, widely regarded as Ireland’s best contemporary novelist, stunned an audience gathered in New York to celebrate James Joyce by saying “
Ulysses
could have done with a good editor.” Warming to his topic, he went on to muse, “You know, people are always putting
Ulysses
in the top ten books ever written, but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.”
⁸

People like to tackle
Ulysses
in part because it’s such a hard read that making it to “the end” is a testament to their intelligence (if not endurance). But no matter how smart they are, few people actually enjoy reading it. The trouble is, even unread, such books can do great harm. According to author Jonathan Franzen, books like
Ulysses
“send this message to the common reader: Literature is horribly hard to read. And this message to the aspiring young writer: Extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect.”
⁹
And therein lies the real problem.

There is a school of writing that holds that it’s the reader’s responsibility to “get it,” rather than the author’s job to communicate it. Many writers of experimental fiction graduated from this particular
school with advanced degrees. Thus, when we readers don’t “get it,” the fault is not assumed to be theirs, but ours. This attitude can foster an unconscious contempt for the reader, while freeing the writer from any responsibility beyond his or her own self-expression. It also tends to presuppose the reader’s interest and earnest dedication from word one—as if somehow the reader owes it to the author to choke down every single word.

The trouble is, reading novels freed from the supposed plebeian constraints of plot, character, and even a nodding acquaintance with cause and effect, quickly becomes work. But unlike most of the work we willingly undertake—like heading into the office every day, weeding the garden, or housebreaking that cuddly new pup—it can be hard to see what reward slogging through to the bitter end will bestow. That is, unless reading a book meant to bore you so as to give you the experience of being bored sounds riveting (which, of course, would defeat the purpose). Much more common is the experience a student recently shared with me. She’d just gotten an MFA from a very prestigious university and confessed that many of the books she was required to read made her cry—because they were so mind-numbingly boring. Probably not the author’s intention.

But there’s a deeper, and more interesting, question in play here. Given that story is a form of communication, one we’re wired to respond to, what are these novels, anyway? Are they stories at all? In many cases, the answer is a resounding no. This isn’t to say that a select group of readers might not learn something from them—after all, we learn from textbooks, math equations, and dissertations. And there can pleasure in them too. But the pleasure doesn’t come from the joy of reading a compelling story as much as from having solved a difficult problem, which is genuinely intoxicating. It makes you feel smart, like doing the Sunday crossword puzzle in ink. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What is wrong, though, is the notion that if you’re really enjoying a story, it automatically means that both you and the story are woefully
lowbrow. The irony is that the hardwired pleasure a good story brings proves it’s necessary to our survival. Just as we evolved biologically to find food tasty so we’d eat it, story triggers pleasure so we’ll pay attention to it.

As writer A. S. Byatt so eloquently says, “Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape.”
¹⁰

And who would want to? The good news is that experimental fiction can be harnessed to what the reader is wired to respond to. In fact, the best of it already is. Which brings us right back to Jennifer Egan—who, having avowed that the most important thing is that the reader wants to know what happens next, adds, “Now if I can have that along with a strong girding of ideas and some kind of exciting technical forays—then that is just the jackpot.”
¹¹

Hitting the jackpot means finding the narrative thread that gives meaning to everything that happens in your glorious experiment. So let’s get back to figuring out exactly how to do just that.

Whether experimental, traditional, or somewhere in between, we know a story plays out on two levels at once—the protagonist’s internal struggle (what the story is actually about) and the external events (the plot)—so it’s no surprise that cause and effect governs both, allowing them to dovetail and thus create a seamless narrative thread.

Since stories are about how what happens affects someone—Joe, for instance—the reason he popped the balloon is more important than the fact that he popped it. In short, the
why
carries more weight than the
what
. Think of it as a pecking order: the
why
comes first, because it drives the
what
; the
why
is the cause; the
what
is the effect. Let’s say, for example, Joe knew Clyde is secretly a killer clown and was about to use the balloon to lure a trusting tot into the deserted big top. Although Joe’s dream has always been to pile into that teeny tiny car with all the other clowns, he knows he will never be able to live with himself if he doesn’t stop Clyde, so he pops the balloon. Thus the
story-wise
cause and effect is not about
how
your protagonist gets from point A (being in clown school) to point B (not being in clown school), it’s about
why
. The internal, story-level cause-and-effect trajectory tracks the evolution of the protagonist’s inner issue, which is what motivates his actions. It reveals how he makes sense of what happens in light of his goal, and how he arrives at the decision that catapults him into the next scene.

It may come as a surprise that this is, in fact, what’s meant by that perennial old saw, “Show, don’t tell,” which might just be the most woefully misunderstood writing maxim on the books.

If there’s one thing writers are told from the get-go, it’s “show, don’t tell.” Good advice. Trouble is, it’s rarely explained, so it’s often completely misconstrued by being taken
literally
, as if “show” inherently means visually, from the outside in, as if you were watching a
film. So when a writer hears, “Don’t tell me that John is sad,
show
me,” she spends hours writing how “John’s tears fell like a torrential rainstorm, flooding the basement in a glittering release of everything he’d held in for so very long, knocking out the power and nearly drowning the cat.” No, no, no! We don’t want to see John cry (the effect); we want to see
what made him cry
(the cause).

What “show” almost always means is,
let’s see the event itself unfold
. Instead of
telling
us that when John’s father unexpectedly booted him out of the family business in front of everyone at the yearly stockholder’s meeting, he cried a river,
show
us the scene in which he was ousted. Why? There are two very good reasons:

In short, “telling” tends to refer to conclusions drawn from information we aren’t privy to; “showing,” to how the characters arrived at those conclusions in the first place. Thus “show, don’t tell” often means
show us a character’s train of thought
. I once worked with a writer whose protagonist, Brian, had a habit of swearing he’d never do something and then, for no apparent reason, doing it. Because this completely undermined Brian’s credibility, I advised the writer to
show
him making each decision. What I got back was a manuscript full of passages like this:

It wasn’t until I read the sixth or seventh such passage that it dawned on me the writer had indeed taken my advice. Sure enough, he was “showing” Brian making decisions. Which, of course, was not at all what I meant. I was talking about Brian’s train of thought, the reasoning that led him to change his mind. Very often “show, don’t tell” refers to the progression of the character’s inner logic. As in, don’t
tell
me Brian changed his mind;
show
me how he arrived at the decision.

So, does “show, don’t tell”
ever
refer to showing something physical? It absolutely does, primarily in two instances: