Two weeks ago I started addressing elements of fiction writing one-by-one. I knew I wanted to write about plot and character, but I didn't exactly mean to turn this blog into a tutorial.
Then again, it seems like I have, so everyone can suck it.
Having written about plot and character, that leaves me with theme, setting, narration, and narration's flirtatious sibling dialogue still to discuss, at least so far as I can tell. I mean, I'm sure there's more to fiction writing than just six elements, otherwise you would be better at it, right?
Well actually there aren't. These elements sort of shift around (and as I need more material I will doubtless start exploring each of these elements in even closer detail until eventually I just go crazy and start repeating myself myself myself myself myself). Some sources list conflict as separate from plot, some sources lump dialogue in with Narration, and some call narration voice for some reason or another, but I've got six elements. That's the way it is, and I like it.
In terms of narration, stories usually break into three categories: stories, which are good; mumbles, which are bad; and ramblings, which are worse.
Stories have concise verbiage that is rich and evocative. They have meaningful words that sound good: in a real story, you don't just hit somebody - that's lame! You pummel him, you pulverize his face, you knock him into next Tuesday! The author of a proper story has spent time and energy hunting for the right word, and now having found it he makes use of every part, letting nothing in it go to waste, living in a wigwam and roaming the plains and selling their land for colorful glass beads. Some of that seems to have gotten away from me.
Then, along comes some mumbler who thinks he is being concise when he is in fact being at best terse. In their most inspired moments, mumblers think they are Raymond Carver - raw minimalists who dip their pens in the stingiest ink to scratch out threadbare words that scratch and scourge the consciousness. Some amazing lines come out of skinny and simple language: to be or not to be; upon all the living and the dead; nada y naday pues nada; Caddy smells like trees!
But this is not what a mumbler does. A mumbler, unused to reading and writing alike, is unable to express any but the most rudimentary thoughts and actions with the simplest language. No, a real mumbler is no minimalist, but is a never-will, a can't-do, someone who fancies himself a writer but does not or will not practice putting ink to pulp. It is, I think, a misplaced sense of entitlement which allows mumblers to gird up their loins and join a writing workshop in the first place, and once there to slowly slip unnoticed away, or (and this is a rare treat) to learn to put some fat on those typewritten bones.
Because for all the shortcomings of a mumbler, it is easier to teach someone to add than to teach someone to take away. The spectral opposite of the mumbler, rambler thinks he has already learned everything there is to learn, and he and his thesaurus will not take "no" for an answer. Like the worst of the Victorians, he will never use one word to say what he could with forty. Every word is a precious gift to the eyes of his reader, and every suggestion or criticism is a heresy.
And to be clear, I do not mean the gorgeous but oppressively lengthy (by design, mind you) prose of Nabokov or Faulkner. The tangled stuff that wraps around the reader like a gnarled anchor rope and pulls him down deep into the primordial and black thoughts of the author or the crushing despair of the fictive time and place. No, I'm talking about the words that someone writes so that they can read them back later and get a chubby over their own supposed grandiloquence.
In other words, these people are wordy as all hell, and nothing exemplifies the rambler's wordiness more than one of my least favorite words: somewhat.
"She was somewhat proud, somewhat beautiful, and somewhat intelligent," writes the rambler about a fantasy girl he has only somewhat actualized. Is she proud? Is she beautiful? Is she intelligent? No. She's only somewhat anything - like Mr. Rochester's criticism of Jane Eyre (and Victorian women generally) that she only plays "a little" piano, only embroiders "a little" and so on.
"The day was somewhat cold." Hey, you're somewhat of a shitty writer. When it comes to narration, say exactly what you mean to say, nothing more and nothing less. "Somewhat" is a word that people use in conversation as a dodge, as a way of saying something noncommittally - like telling your boss that you were "somewhat" offended by what he said about your wife, or telling your wife yourself that she's gotten "somewhat fat." It's a mincing, weak little word for half-formed little ideas and if you open one of your stories in word do a find -> replace all on "somewhat" with nothing, I all but guarantee your writing will improve.
(In the interest of fairness, it's not like "somewhat" doesn't have its uses, and it's not like that 's the only word one should avoid like the plague. In the interest of brevity, and of having something for later, that will wait for another time).
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