The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (33 page)

A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion.

Without a reader there’s no story. No matter how well written, if it isn’t read it doesn’t exist as a story. The reader makes it happen just as much as the writer does. Writers are likely to ignore this fact, perhaps because they resent it.

The relationship of writer and reader is popularly seen as a matter of control and consent. The writer is The Master, who compels, controls, and manipulates the reader’s interest and emotion. A lot of writers love this idea.

And lazy readers want masterful writers. They want the writer to do all the work while they just watch it happen, like on TV.

Most best-sellers are written for readers who are willing to be passive consumers. The blurbs on their covers often highlight the coercive, aggressive power of the text—compulsive page-turner, gut-wrenching, jolting, mind-searing, heart-stopping—what is this, electroshock torture?

From commercial writing of this type, and from journalism, come the how-to-write clichés, “Grab your readers with the first paragraph,” “Hit them with shocker scenes,” “Never give them time to breathe,” and so on.

Now, a good many writers, particularly those entangled in aca
demic programs in fiction, get their intellect and ego so involved in what they’re saying and how they’re saying it that they forget that they’re saying it to anyone. If there’s any use in the grab-’em-and-wrench-their-guts-out school of advice, it’s that it at least reminds the writer that there is a reader out there to be grabbed and gutted.

But just because you realise your work may be seen by somebody other than the professor of creative writing, you don’t have to go into attack mode and release the Rottweilers. There’s another option. You can consider the reader, not as a helpless victim or a passive consumer, but as an active, intelligent, worthy collaborator. A colluder, a coillusionist.

Writers who choose to try to establish mutual trust believe it is possible to attract readers’ attention without verbal assault and battery. Rather than grab, frighten, coerce, or manipulate a consumer, collaborative writers try to interest a reader. To induce or seduce people into moving with the story, participating in it, joining their imagination with it.

Not a rape: a dance.

Consider the story as a dance, the reader and writer as partners. The writer leads, yes; but leading isn’t pushing; it’s setting up a field of mutuality where two people can move in cooperation with grace. It takes two to tango.

Readers who have only been grabbed, bashed, gut-wrenched, and electroshocked may need a little practice in being interested. They may need to learn how to tango. Once they’ve tried it, they’ll never go back among the pit bulls.

Finally, there is the difficult question of “audience”: In the mind of the writer planning or composing or revising the work, what is the presence of the potential reader or readers? Should the audience for the work dominate the writer’s mind and guide the writing? Or should the writer while writing be utterly free of such considerations?

I wish there were a simple sound bite answer, but actually this is a terribly complicated question, particularly on the moral level.

Being a writer, conceiving a fiction, implies a reader. Writing is communication, though that’s not all it is. One communicates
to
somebody. And what people want to read influences what people want to write. Stories are drawn out of writers by the spiritual and intellectual and moral needs of the writer’s people. But all that operates on a quite unconscious level.

Once again it’s useful to see the writer’s work as being done in three stages. In the approach stage, it may be essential to think about your potential audience: who is this story for? For instance, is it for kids? Little kids? Young adults? Any special, limited audience calls for specific kinds of subject matter and vocabulary. All genre writing, from the average formula romance to the average
New Yorker
story, is written with an audience in mind—an audience so specific it can be called a market.

Only the very riskiest kind of fiction is entirely inconsiderate of the reader/market, saying, as it were, I will be told, and somebody, somewhere, will read me! Probably 99 percent of such stories end up, in fact, unread. And probably 98 percent of them are unreadable. The other 1 or 2 percent come to be known as masterpieces, usually very slowly, after the brave author has long been silent.

Consciousness of audience is limiting, both positively and negatively. Consciousness of audience offers choices, many of which have ethical implications—puritanism or porn? shock the readers or reassure them? do something I haven’t tried or do my last book over?—and so on.

The limitations imposed by aiming at a specific readership may lead to very high art; all craft is a matter of rules and limitations, after all. But if consciousness of audience
as market
is the primary factor controlling your writing, you are a hack. There are arty hacks and artless hacks. Personally I prefer the latter.

All this has been about the approach stage, the what-am-I-going-to-write stage. Now that I know, dimly or exactly, who I’m writing
for—anything from my granddaughter to all posterity—I start writing. And now, at the writing stage, consciousness of audience can be absolutely fatal. It is what makes writers distrust their story, stick, block, start over and over, never finish. Writers need a room of their own, not a room full of imaginary critics all watching over their shoulders saying “Is ‘The’ a good way to start that sentence?” An overactive internal aesthetic censor, or the external equivalent—what my agent or my editor is going to say—is like an avalanche of boulders across the story’s way. During composition I have to concentrate entirely on the work itself, trusting and aiding it to find its way, with little or no thought of what or who it’s for.

But when I get to the third stage, revision and rewriting, it reverses again: awareness that somebody’s going to read this story, and of who might read this story, becomes essential.

What’s the goal of revision? Clarity—impact—pace—power—beauty . . . all things that imply a mind and heart
receiving
the story. Revision clears unnecessary obstacles away so the reader can receive the story. That is why the comma is important. And why the right word, not the approximately right word, is important. And why consistency is important. And why moral implications are important. And all the rest of the stuff that makes a story readable, makes it live. In revising, you must trust yourself, your judgment, to work with the receptive intelligence of your potential readers.

You also may have to trust specific actual readers—spouse, friends, workshop peers, teachers, editors, agents. You may be pulled between your judgment and theirs, and it can be tricky to arrive at the necessary arrogance, or the necessary humility, or the right compromise. I have writer friends who simply cannot hear any critical suggestions; they drown them out by going into defensive explanation mode:
Oh, yes, but see, what I was doing
—are they geniuses or just buttheaded? Time will tell. I have writer friends who accept every critical suggestion uncritically, and end up with as many different versions as they have
critics. If they meet up with bullying, manipulative agents and editors, they’re helpless.

What can I recommend? Trust your story; trust yourself; trust your readers—but wisely. Trust watchfully, not blindly. Trust flexibly, not rigidly. The whole thing, writing a story, is a high-wire act—there you are out in midair walking on a spiderweb line of words, and down in the darkness people are watching. What can you trust but your sense of balance?

1
. And, of course, by reading stories. Reading—reading stories other writers wrote, reading voraciously but judgmentally, reading the best there is and learning from it how well, and how differently, stories can be told—this is so essential to being a writer that I tend to forget to mention it; so here it is in a footnote.

2
. For example, read
War and Peace
. (If you have not read
War and Peace
, what are you waiting for?) The greatest of all novels is interrupted now and then by the voice of Count Tolstoy, telling us what we ought to think about history, great men, the Russian soul, and other matters. His opinions are far more interesting, convincing, and persuasive as we unconsciously absorb them
from the story
than when they appear as lectures. Tolstoy was a supremely and deservedly self-confident writer, and much of the power and beauty of his book lies his perfect trust in his characters. They do what they must do, and all they must do: and it is enough. But the earnestness of his convictions seem to have weakened his confidence in his power to embody those ideas in his story; and those failures of trust are the only dull and unconvincing portions of the greatest of all novels.

THE WRITER AND THE CHARACTER

Some ideas written down when I was planning a workshop in fiction, and worked up into a small essay for this book.

Whether they invent the people they write about or borrow them from people they know, fiction writers generally agree that once these people become characters in a story they have a life of their own, sometimes to the extent of escaping from the writer’s control and doing and saying things quite unexpected to the author of their being.

My people, in the stories I write, are close to me and mysterious to me, like kinfolk or friends or enemies. They are in and on my mind. I made them up, I invented them, but I have to ponder their motives and try to understand their destinies. They take on their own reality, which is not my reality, and the more they do so, the less I can or wish to control what they do or say. While I’m composing, the characters are alive in my mind, and I owe them the respect due any living soul. They are not to be used, manipulated. They are not plastic toys, they are not megaphones.

But composition is a special condition. While writing, I may yield to my characters, trust them wholly to do and say what is right for the story. In planning the story and in revising it, I do better to keep some emotional distance from the characters, especially the ones I like best or loathe most. I need to look askance at them, inquire rather coldly into their motives, and take everything they say with a grain of salt—
till I’m certain that they are really and genuinely speaking for themselves, and not for my damned ego.

If I’m using the people in my story principally to fulfill the needs of my self-image, my self-love or self-hate, my needs, my opinions, they can’t be themselves and they can’t tell the truth. The story, as a display of needs and opinions, may be effective as such, but the characters will not be characters; they will be puppets.

As a writer I must be conscious that
I am
my characters and that they
are not me
. I am them, and am responsible for them. But they’re themselves; they have no responsibility for me, or my politics, or my morals, or my editor, or my income. They’re embodiments of my experience and imagination, engaged in an imagined life that is not my life, though it may serve to illuminate it. I may feel passionately with a character who embodies my experience and emotions, but I must be wary of
confusing
myself with that character.

If I fuse or confuse a fictional person with myself, my judgment of the character becomes a self-judgment. Then justice is pretty near impossible, since I’ve made myself witness, defendant, prosecutor, judge, and jury, using the fiction to justify or condemn what that character does and says.

Self-knowledge takes a clear mind. Clarity can be earned by toughmindedness and it can be earned by tender-mindedness, but it has to be earned. A writer has to learn to be transparent to the story. The ego is opaque. It fills the space of the story, blocking honesty, obscuring understanding, falsifying the language.

Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker’s loving difference from the thing made. Without that space there can be no consistent truthfulness and no true respect for the human beings the story is about.

Another way to come at this matter: In so far as the author’s point of view exactly coincides with that of a character, the story isn’t fiction. It’s either a disguised memoir or a fiction-coated sermon.

I don’t like the word
distancing
. If I say there should be a distance between author and character it sounds as if I’m after the “objectivity” pretended to by naive scientists and sophisticated minimalists. I’m not. I’m all for subjectivity, the artist’s inalienable privilege. But there has to be a distance between the writer and the character.

The naive reader often does not take this distance into account. Inexperienced readers think writers write only from experience. They believe that the writer believes what the characters believe. The idea of the unreliable narrator takes some getting used to.