There are fiction writers who are able to tease out tangled skeins of suspense into balls that can be unrolled logically and delightfully from the first loose end to the heart at the center, and can smooth out the last kink. People love intricately plotted mysteries and thrillers.
Fortunately there are others who find the subtler shadows of motives, reactions, and emotions as beguiling as more concrete entertainment. They’re the ones for whom a plot is secondary because it develops from the characters the writer creates; it’s their lives the author is trying to connect to his readers’.
Wondering how to master both approaches makes me remember a remark made to me by the acclaimed author and teacher Wallace Stegner. I had written to him saying that I wished I were able to sit in his classroom. He replied that the older he got (“and I get pretty old”), the less he thought one could teach anything about writing. That sentence has provided plenty of food for thought over the decades since he wrote it.
The impetus for writing is supposed to be “having something to say.” It’s tough enough to write a letter or a sympathy note without that something. Since most writers are writing because they feel compelled to do it, they need to find a reason to keep at it. That’s where both the play and the lesson should come in.
Just running through the reading that has made psychic dents in my life with an eye to figuring out how the authors got started makes me see that if there hadn’t been some element (however perverse it might appear) of joyful gamesmanship in their drive to teach their readers something, they might never had put down a word.
The subjects on which instruction is offered are as varied as the needs of each potential reader. Their universal appeal lies in their ability to find a way to touch a host of readers. The “lessons” of the best fiction are seldom identified as such. The dents they make don’t even have to show until long after they were made. Sure, the stone makes ripples that disappear, but if we we’re paying attention, we might even put ourselves in the way of — or at least be able to find it later — resting on the bottom, if we dive for it.
©2012 Joan L. Cannon for SeniorWomen.com
Photo of Wallace Stegner, author, from Wikipedia
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