Guest Blog~ The Mechanics of Fiction by Martin Goodman

Reading…this fertile miracle of communication amid solitude…

Marcel Proust, Pastiches et mélanges, 1919

Everywhere we are surrounded by stories of the imagination in novels, cinema, theatre, and on TV. Instinctively, we often know where a story is heading and whether a particular character is well-intentioned or not. We know this because of the techniques writers and directors deploy to engage the reader or spectator. These techniques comprise part of the authorial toolkit that lies behind the completed story. They are the sinew that holds the narrative structure together.

This article briefly examines the main elements of this toolkit as used by novelists. The aim is to help enhance the reader experience by improving their skills in judging the novelist’s ability to craft and convey a story.

Authorial perspective

Before a writer even starts to pen a story, they will consider the perspective from which their novel is to be told. They determine whether the narrator is to be invisible and omniscient i.e. they know everything; or whether they will write in the first person, in which case the narrator’s access to knowledge is limited. Compare, for instance the opening lines of the following novels:

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath,1939)

Only dead people are allowed to have statues, but I have been given one while still alive. (Margaret Atwood, The Testaments, 2019)

There is no right or wrong here. Steinbeck’s sweeping, elegiac introduction sets the scene for a descriptive chapter that captures the harsh, arid rural environment and the suffering it causes individuals who work the land. The narrator is everywhere. He describes the ‘darkening sky’, the ‘hooves of the horses’, and the thoughts of men ‘busy with sticks and little rocks’ with equal levels of confidence and conviction.

The third person narrative enables the writer to examine the internal monologue in the minds of each of their characters. This technique is well-developed in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway which follows the title character’s thoughts and memories on the day she is preparing for a large house party. As she shops and wanders, the novel enters the minds of people she passes and meets, and the reader encounters a cross section of London society, five years after the end of the Great War:

…this couple on the chairs gave her quite a turn; the young woman seeming foreign, the man looking queer; so that should she be very old she would still remember and make it jangle again among her memories how she had walked through Regent's Park on a fine summer's morning fifty years ago.

Woolf also uses free indirect speech i.e. third-person narrative which blends some of its features with first-person direct speech. Examples are highlighted in italics below:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.

When we compare Atwood’s introductory sentence with the beginning of Steinbeck’s novel, we encounter something quite different. Here we have a short, blunt sentence which engages us with the thoughts of a specific individual. Atwood’s is a disarmingly simple sentence, but it immediately raises questions in the mind of the reader. Such as: who is this person? what has she done to merit a statue? Perhaps, even, would I like this person? So, the reader is immediately drawn into the story that is about to unfold before them.

With the first-person narrative there is potential for knowledge gaps, misunderstanding and even mystery. Consequently, the reader needs to have confidence that the narrator is credible and reliable. After all, how do we know when or whether they are telling the truth? A classic example of the unreliable narrator can be found in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a superbly crafted murder mystery in which Christie did the previously unthinkable. Yes, the narrator, an unassuming doctor, did the dastardly deed. Despite this ‘spoiler’, this almost century old novel arguably remains one of the greatest murder mysteries ever written.

The first-person narrative also provides access to a protagonist’s immediate thoughts as if there is no intermediary writer. James Joyce was perhaps the greatest innovator here with Molly Bloom’s lengthy and absorbing stream-of-consciousness soliloquy in the landmark novel, Ulysses (1920):

…I love flowers I’d love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven there’s nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying there’s no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something…

Ulysses also deploys a wide range of different styles of text, incorporating first and third person, theatre script dialogue, and poetry.

Why so tense?

Another early decision a writer will take is to consider the tense they will use. Are events happening now or in the past? The present tense has the power of immediacy, as in the following opening sentence:

A boy is coming down a flight of stairs. Maggie Farrell, Hamnet, 2020

Again, this approach draws us into the narrative. This short sentence comes from nowhere, the boy and the story are in motion and our minds urge us to follow. We want to know who the boy is, where he is and where he is going. This is arguably a very different sentence from, say: ‘Hamnet walked down the stairs.’ One might say that this sentence lands with a thud. The action is over and there is little to draw in the reader.

We can also see that, whereas Steinbeck starts with the cosmos as his backdrop and gradually focusses down to the individual level, Farrell does the opposite i.e. she starts with a single human being and then gradually paints the context in which he exists and relates to his environment and others.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, 2010 is another historical novel that uses the present tense to bring its characters to life, as in:

‘May as well,’ Morgan says, ‘as go fighting by the river, without profit to anybody. Look at him— if it were up to me, I’d have a war just to employ him.’ Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink, chink, with enticing slowness. He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold. ‘Listen,’ Kat says, ‘we grew up here, there’s probably people that would help Tom out…’

As far as I am aware, no reader has argued that because this novel is set several hundred years ago and the reader knows what’s going to happen (Sir Thomas More is executed!), the past tense should have been used!

Novelists may decide to switch tenses and formats as story progresses. Hannah Kent’s 2013 Icelandic thriller, Burial Rites, begins with a Prologue in the present tense using the first person - with an unknown voice speaking directly and shockingly to the reader:

THEY SAID I MUST DIE. They said that I stole the breath from men…

Kent then provides the reader with a short letter correspondence which sets the context of the story. Subsequently, the novel progresses as a third person narrative.

Correspondence as a vehicle for narrating a complete story, the so-called epistolary novel, first came to the fore in the 18th century both in England and in France with such writers as Samuel Richardson (Pamela, 1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Julie, or the New Heloise, 1761). This approach is particularly well-illustrated in Bram Stoker’s 1897 story, Dracula which is told through letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, and various other documents.

The world of the novelist

The social, economic, and political context within which the novelist is writing may also be reflected in an unfolding story and can provide a strong framework for the novel. For instance, Charles Dickens’ novels tell us a lot about the Victorian world, especially social attitudes towards the poor. Dickens saw himself as a social commentator and used his novels to critique issues such as poor housing and sanitation, education, child labour,

workhouses, and prisons. Other writers have used fiction to comment on inequality and discrimination. One of the early key voices here is Joseph Conrad whose gripping 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, provides an horrific commentary on imperialism and racism, with parallels made between two ‘dark places’: London (‘the greatest town on earth’) and Africa. Today, race remains a frequent theme in novels. (See, for instance, Andrea Levy, Small Island, 2004 and The Long Song, 2010).

Novelists make conscious decisions about when and how to use dialogue. For instance, they may decide to use the vernacular or everyday language as a way if reinforcing a character’s social class within a particular context. We see this, for instance, in the American-African dialogue used by Alice Walker in her novel, The Color Purple, 1982:

Pa call me. Celie, he say. Like it wasn’t nothing. Mr. _____ want another look at you. I go stand in the door. The sun shine in my eyes. He’s still up on his horse. He look me up and down. Pa rattle his newspaper. Move up, he won’t bite, he say.

Novelists sometimes alter the lengths of adjacent their sentences or phrases, as in:

I had to pass through three barriers at the station. The last was manned by a soldier with a pustule on the point of his chin. Mean eyes. Fully armed. He’d probably been snatched from the backstreets of some small industrial town, shoved into a uniform, buried and brutalised at a training camp, had his head filled with anti-Semitic claptrap and been marched into Belgium. All before the age of eighteen. Katharine McMahon, The Hour of Separation, 2018

This text creates interest and movement, especially when accompanied by alliteration of ‘p’s, ‘b’s and ‘s’s. We can imagine the pushing and shoving as the narrator is hastily jostled through the gates. We know that the soldier is a wretched individual who has been bruised and battered, while his uniform doesn’t fit him. McMahon also demonstrates how selectivity can draw the reader’s attention to certain of the soldier’s characteristics, notably the spot on his chin and, indeed, his social class. However, there is no attempt to describe other facial features or his uniform because this would not help drive the narrative forward. Further, while the authorial voice is always present, we do not know whether the views expressed about the soldier’s experiences and his job are those of the author simply as narrator of this particular novel, or whether they are held by the author as an individual in reality.

Using figures of speech, and metaphor, is staple fare for novelists. So, for instance, in McMahon’s novel, we find in post-Blitz London:

Walls teetered like old teeth,

and on a train,

Ticket inspectors burst into our compartment, demanded that we all take out our papers, then hauled a poor man off his seat, ranted at him and shoved him away before they reached us. Lions sated with a kill.

It’s all about time

Novelists have often experimented with non-chronological timelines incorporating flashback and flash-forward as a way of creating or sustaining tension and reader engagement. Although a frequently used cinematic technique, time resequencing predates cinema. For instance, it is used memorably in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, 1843. The entire novel can even be frozen in time by, for instance, providing a narrative about an individual’s thoughts at the very moment of their death – as in William Golding’s, Pincher Martin, 1956.

The terms fabula and syuzhet, which derive from Russian formalism (Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 1928), are often used by literary theorists today. They describe the difference between the story as it happened in chronological order, and the story as it is actually told. There are many examples of this distinction, including Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, All the Light We Cannot See, 2015 which incorporates time shifts and parallel plots. A distinction between fabula and syuzhet is most frequently found in the murder mystery where the story typically starts at the end, with the murder, and unwinds backwards as the sleuth deciphers the clues and moves towards discovering the killer.

A handful of novelists have incorporated multiple endings to their narratives. One of the most celebrated of these is John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1969. This is a complex novel about a love story, and it incorporates three different endings.

To conclude, to succeed in writing a good novel, the author will be able to select these techniques judiciously but will still need to be able to tell a story that connects to the reader and the world they live in. As American playwright Edward Albee wrote, ‘A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.’ The same is true for the novel.

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Martin holds a PhD in Modern Languages from Leeds and an MA in Comparative Literature from Birkbeck College, London