Learning the Craft of Fiction

Elements of Craft

These are the elements all dedicated writers work to hone as they develop their skills. Well-crafted, fully developed stories demonstrate mastery of these elements.

Characterization – Using a character's appearance, actions, dialog, and/or thoughts to bring him/her to life

A number of the entries struck me as not being about characters, but comprised primarily of the writer's thoughts, attitudes and ideas. It's true that writers draw from their own lives to imbue their stories with concrete detail and reality, but one must be able to put some distance between one's characters and oneself. Some writers find it helpful to give their protagonists characteristics distinct from their own, lending them the objectivity writing fiction requires.

Almost all the entries could have used more of what is known as specificity: specific details such as the character(s)' age, gender, race, location, job, wardrobe...the list goes on. These specific, concrete details bring a character alive.

Dialog – The spoken interactions between characters

I was surprised to find many of the entries didn't even HAVE dialog. I often enjoy writing dialog much more than describing setting or events (although the latter is certainly important!). Dialog can be extremely useful in conveying character, theme, conflict, and moving plot along. The rule of thumb is to only include dialog that does more than one thing at once and that creates some sort of shift in the narrative.
One challenge in writing dialog is that every character has his/her own way of speaking that can convey so much about him/her. Also, dialog has the responsibility of working double time: moving plot along, demonstrating relationships between characters, giving reader's a glimpse into the speaker's mind, while also implying how what the speaker thinks and what he or she chooses to reveal chafe—often what a character does not reveal, what is not said, can say a lot more. One of the biggest challenges some writers find in writing dialog is making it sound and flow in a natural, believable way. Reading how other authors use dialog in their work, paying close attention to conversations in your own life from a writerly perspective, and calling upon other arts such as plays and movies can come in handy.

Plot – How the sequence of events and their consequences are arranged to show causality in a purposeful and meaningful way

The Basics
Conflict: The friction between a protagonist's desire and the obstacles preventing him/her from getting fulfilling it.
Crisis/Climax: the moment in which the character is poised to either get or be denied what he/she wants—the peak of the dramatic tension in a story
Resolution: The character either gets or does not get what he/she wants
I eliminated many entries because they weren't stories. Nothing happened. I would call such a piece a “premise” or a “free write” because nothing drives the narrative to a foreseeable conclusion. The basic terms above are components of dramatic structure, the structure that conventional narratives take. Virginia Woolf's work is a testament to the fact you can transcend plot, particularly this conventional structure, but you need to understand its function and its basics first. And even though her experimental stories do not have conventional plots, they each contain a major conflict which drives it from a beginning, through a middle, and to an end.
The winning entry was not complete, as there were no events that drew it to a conclusion—but the three paragraphs set up a conflict between the mother and daughter that would move the plot forward if the writer were to continue writing. A good exercise might be to take the first paragraph or two of one of your favorite stories and compare it to the first of those in your own piece. You'll notice in a complete work, a conflict is indicated on some level right away. You'll see the beginnings of the threads that run through the entire work. Revision is crucial because you'll often have to write a few paragraphs or even pages before you discover the actual conflict in your story.

Point of View/Voice - The perspective a story is told from and the lens through which that consciousness is portrayed

Basics:

The fact nearly all the entries were in first-person struck me. I think this spoke to the problem I spoke of in characterization: sometimes there was little to no distinction between the writer and his/her character. Often, point of view, the perspective through which we access the story, whether that's first person, third, or even second, chooses itself. Sometimes, though, if one is struggling to get to the heart of the conflict, despite other pains taken craft-wise, it could be a problem in Point of View. The proper point of view will give the writer and reader access to the information and themes central to the story. One should write from the POV of the character who changes in the most consequential way over the course of the story.
To render a point of view, you need to include details that not only reveal elements of the setting and characters around the protagonist, but also reveal aspects of the protagonist's perspective and who he/she is. A greater challenge first-person narration presents is retaining a voice, diction, and style of description consistent with who the protagonist is. Someone who lives in the midwest and who has never seen the ocean, is most likely not going to compare a dancer's undulating body to a wave or a rocking boat, for example.

Setting – The kinetic landscape(s) the characters move through in a story

One major similarity between the winning piece and the runner-up is that they both utilize setting as a mechanism to convey conflict and character. That's quite impressive, seeing as many beginning writers fail to see the importance of setting—it took me years before I realized I could use setting as a tool to portray themes, tone, character, and even plot. This similarity doesn't indicate uniformity in style between these pieces (the type of details they choose and the way those details are rendered was quite different), but a mastery of this craft element. The setting you choose can even help bring a conflict out: by putting a character in a setting in which they feel ill at ease, conflict is established from the get-go.
But it's not just the setting you choose, it's the aspects of that setting you choose to describe and how you describe them, and what that reveals about the characters. If you've written a scene in which the setting isn't specified or is merely used as an extraneous ornament, try going back and rewriting the scene in a solidified setting. In a number of the entries I read, the setting was described in ambiguous terms that didn't indicate as much about the conflicts, themes, and character(s) in the story as they could have. Further, most of the stories took place in only one setting. However, in nearly every good story, the characters move through multiple settings. There are exceptions of course, but one must think of setting as kinetic, alive, changing—if a change takes place in the character, it should be reflected in the setting or how the setting is rendered. Different settings will allow for other aspects of a character to reveal themselves, as well. A good experiment, if you're working on a story or developing a character, is to take that character out of the setting the character is accustomed to, and write a scene featuring him/her in the place he/she would feel disoriented, confused, uncomfortable, or out-of-place. See what happens.

Narrative Time – How events unfold in time through language

The Basics:
Scene – Showing what happened in realtime or dilated time
Reserved for events that shift the narrative in an important way

Summary – Telling what happened in an abbreviated fashion

Used to implicate events in which only some of the details are important to the story

In some entries there were no scenes, in some there was not enough summary. In one entry, although there was a stronger narrative structure than others, a light was described blinking, moment by moment, until it became repetitive: nothing important changed or happened those drawn out moments. In another entry, the writer summarized a character's shopping trip without grounding the reader with enough concrete details, which caused confusion.

There's a rule repeated over and over in the fiction-writing world: show don't tell. While showing is often preferable to telling in fiction, all stories include both showing and telling. Writing a scene is like putting a magnifying glass on a few isolated moments, drawing them out to explore every instant. You'd want to write a high stakes conversation that indicates a huge shift in the narrative as a scene. But summary has its function, too. Summary can be useful to herald in specificity when you need it most. If you're story is a vignette that occurs over the course of a couple eating dinner during their vacation in Hawaii, you'll probably include a lot of summary about their trip so far, ripe with concrete details: how the flight to the island was delayed; how Debbie's luggage lost, so she had to buy tacky hawaiian t-shirts and shorts and shirts that revealed her chicken-y calves... In some cases, you'll summarize a conversation that only included a few important details. The challenge is deciding what events to describe in scene and which to summarize. Narrative time is also about moving forward and backward in time. In the vignette, you reach into the past to depict the couple's marriage: 12 years of squabbling over toothpaste caps left on the sink, the “gothic” renovations on their tiny flat in San Francisco Jonathan just had to have... If you delve back through a characters memory to the past, do so through a concrete detail that reminds him/her of a memory, and come back through a concrete detail that brings the reader and character to the present again.

Metaphor:

1. comparison between two seemingly unlike things, lending one or both greater significance

2. utilizing an object or image to indicate something else

The Basics:
Metaphor – juxtaposing two things that are comparable only when placed side by side
Simile – juxtaposing two things comparable when placed side by side with “like” or “as”
Conceit – comparison of two things that, in plain juxtaposition, seem contradictory or nonsensical until further explanation is given
One difficulty in using metaphors is avoiding cliché. With centuries of literature behind us, we can't compare a beautiful woman to a rose, speak of “fiery rage,” or “porcelain skin” without the comparison falling flat. If the simile or metaphor is drawing too much attention to itself, i.e. sticking out of the text as clunky, hyperbolic, cliché, or as a superfluous, it should be omitted or changed. Metaphors should fit the tone and voice of the story, and its theme(s). It's easy to use too many metaphors and create “purple prose,” so use figurative language sparingly. Ezra Pound and other modernists favored treatment of “the thing in itself” as opposed to using similes or metaphors that may dilute the uniqueness of things. Unless the connection you're drawing lends depth to the image and your story in a new way—get rid of it

Conceits are rarely-used gems. The most common example is “life is like a box of chocolates” in Forrest Gump. At first, this comparison makes absolutely no sense, until we hear the explanation: “you never know what you're going to get.” Conceits have the potential to be comedic and revelatory. They can also reveal a lot about a protagonist's subjective logic. Conversely, an explicit metaphor, juxtaposes two things to create an image, like this phrase from Alfred Noyes' poem “The Highway Man”: “the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.” An example of an implied metaphor is the crab Jacob captures in a bucket as a child in Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Near the beginning of the book, the crab is depicted struggling up the side of the bucket in an attempt to escape, but it only slides back down again and again. Throughout the story, we see Jacob struggle in a similar way, to escape civilization—but he falls back again and again, restricted by the governing proscriptions of his society, rejecting lovers, suppressing his sexuality, and ultimately dying in a war he has been set up to fight. Ezra Pound describes an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Every explicit metaphor, every concrete detail you refine in the revision process should, on some level, indicate more than meets the eye.

Theme – The ideas and motifs that frame a work

How do writers include only images and metaphors that indicate more than meets the eye? In the first place, what should these images being indicating? Theme is the mold of a narrative's clay, the fine-toothed comb writers run through old drafts, the undercurrent struggling to assert itself in all unfinished. Now, going in to write a first draft, it's probably not a good idea to think, “I'm going to convey this theme and that theme!” and force your characters and story to bend to an imposed theme's will. Writing is a process of discovery. As you write your first draft, things should happen that surprise you. When you complete that draft, and close- read your work, and show it to others, themes will begin emerge. You'll start understand the significance of some of the concrete images and specific details that popped into your head —and which ones should be changed or deleted. You'll start to find traces of a conflict that might be elusive, settings you might need to change, details to focus on... All of these are determined by theme

Theme is repetition. Theme determines your style, word choice, punctuation, and the way you refine all these craft elements here in your story. As I read your entries, I sometimes found myself questioning: what's the point of this image? Why is this person describing this in detail? Does this matter? Is this important? To whom? The character? The story? When I close-read the winning entry, every detail wound up carrying weight in the story because the themes central to it were implicated in each. If you look up “theme” in the dictionary, you'll find it also applies to music: “a prominent or frequently recurring melody or group of notes in a composition.” Songs are played and sung in a certain key—any notes or chords off key strike the listener as discordant. The same happens in a story when a detail, image, word choice or event doesn't fit. Sometimes this happened when I read your entries—the word or metaphor chosen or the style it was told in would strike me as a discordant note.

In songs, as in stories, the key can shift of course, but any shift is a purposeful move on the artist's part, with an intended effect on the audience. Songs are defined through repetition—as are narratives. In the short story “Indulgences” by Gilberto Cuadros, for example, the protagonist's cousin Evelyn, whom he despises, is described as wearing a “flimsy dress” that is a “brownish print” and as having hair “like dry weeds.” Evelyn makes the family uneasy because she is a promiscuous middle aged women—contradictory rumors abound: she sleeps with white men, black men, she's a lesbian. At the time of the story, the protagonist's grandfather has died—and the family accuses Evelyn, his caretaker, of murdering him. Later in the story, after loathing and persecuting his cousin along with his family, the protagonist realizes, as he comes to grips with the fact he too is sexually deviant (in his case, a homosexual), that he may face the same fate as Evelyn: being cast off by his family. The story concludes as the protagonist spies a scarecrow off the road with “dry weeds for hair, a flimsy brown dress, a stake skewered up through the body, arms stretched open as if ready to embrace.” Notice how the descriptions of Evelyn and the scarecrow mirror one and other. The repetition allows Cuadros not only to compare the scarecrow to Evelyn but to implicate Evelyn in the description of the scarecrow. When I read over what I write, I notice anytime I use a description of one character or event or object that evokes another, either in word choice or appearance, or on some other level. Pay attention to moments like that in your writing—sometimes the beginnings of that will happen on its own—but it's up to you to consciously hone that in the revision process.

These are the Craft tools and elements—the ideas that went into judging your entries. These are the guidelines and devices I look for and utilize as I read, write and revise. Reading all of this at once is probably daunting—it was daunting for me to write: it's basically my take on an entire college course. Try doing what we did in my class and write a 300 word experiment for craft element. We did one a week, and met in groups to respond to each other's work. As a result, we improved SO much. Before taking the class, I used to think I could shit masterpieces because I was “so talented,” but when I learned all these craft tools and elements, I realized it's practically impossible to nail ALL of them in one draft! Even professional writers need to revise over and over. Hemingway once said the first draft is shit. If Hemingway's first drafts were shit, ours probably are too. It's through vigilant practice—making a habit of close-reading many different works and writing in an experimental and conscious way—that writers create works that show an effective use of these tools and elements. It's these tools that bring out the conflicts, sensations and emotions that make people tick—the blood and marrow of what makes fiction throb with life. If anything, whether you agree or disagree with things I've written here, continue to read and write. That's the only thing I can say with 100% certainty: write on.