Joan Cannon: Suspense, Motives, Reactions, and Emotions: How Do Authors Do It?
Trying to make a dent in a reader’s resistance is like trying to freeze the ripples on the water’s surface after you’ve tossed a stone. Yet that’s what most writers are trying to do whether we realize it or not. There are a few mentors who have taught that lesson. I remember with awe those who made an effort to encourage such an ambition.
The art of the written word seems to be most capable of making that kind of ephemeral impression. One reason is that imaginative writing makes the closest approach to painless learning possible for most of us. When it’s effective enough, the impression made won’t disappear in the flood of experience.
Jesse Stuart wrote a book about his youthful adventures as a teacher in an Appalachian one-room schoolhouse. The “thread that runs so true” of the title tells how he discovered that games in teaching can point to how to play the game of Life with a capital L. Children of all ages (into old age) learn with fun.
I attended a writer’s conference where the keynote speaker was Joyce Carol Oates. She was already a celebrity in the literary world, and the attendees were virtually holding our breaths to hear her. She said, “All art begins in play.”
At the time, that approach to art struck me as eccentric and frivolous. I was old enough to know better, but I didn’t. It’s taken a long time for me to begin to grasp the import of her declaration. I confess that as soon as I began teaching, I appreciated Jesse Stuart’s secret even if I never did master it, and it was probably ten years or more into my years of trying to be a writer that I began to grasp Ms. Oates’s dictum.
Eventually I’ve come to understand at least a little of what she meant. The great thing about a story or a poem is that if there’s a message that’s told or written the right way, the author doesn’t have to apologize for having an ax to grind. Not only that, it’s possible that even many months or even years afterwards, the reader will notice what that hint of a moral or secret of success or touchstone for better or wiser or funnier living was.
Even eager students find some studying burdensome, tedious, purposeless. The great artists of fiction could have kept those grim Puritans from struggling against sleep; they might have gone home without the uncompromising certainty that they’d endured a sermon. Everyone could have listened with pleasure and perhaps have left with notions that could linger to develop. Even the bloody tales of the brothers Grimm or the cataclysms of mythology provide entertainment. Suspense and amusement make learning comparatively easy, even imperceptible.
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