ROWELIT
So you think you want to write fiction? Great. Go for it. No, seriously. I mean it. Go do it. That’s usually how a writer starts. They decide they want to write fiction and they start writing. That’s how I did it, and probably you too. Stories are deep in the human psyche, and when I say deep, I mean deeper than any of us know. I suspect they go far deeper than many research psychologists even presume—even plausibly preceding language, if you can wrap your head around that. So, it’s a pretty natural thing for you to want to generate fictional stories. People have been doing it—universally across all cultures for tens of thousands of years—probably for as long as people have been people.
But you don’t want to just tell stories. You want to tell good stories. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here reading this. Good on you, as the Aussies would say. Odds are pretty good that you already have some idea of what a story is, and I’ll go so far as to say you probably have a decent, if somewhat vague, idea of what a good story is too.
I took a class one time with a highly-regarded fiction writer—let’s call him Lucas. This was a week-long evening seminar while I was in graduate school. And the thing about graduate school is that it’s very similar to holding down two full-time jobs at the same time—an eighty-hour week, between taking classes, teaching classes, and doing the planning and reading for said classes, is very common. Now imagine a crowd of about fifteen experienced adult fiction writers, overly-caffeinated, on an average of four hours sleep walking into Lucas’s seminar at the end of a long day and watching him begin by asking the question: “What is a story?”
Seriously, he asked that question to a room full of exhausted fiction writers as his opener. And he asked it in a way that suggested he didn’t know the answer—as a philosophical musing. And nobody said a word. We all just listened to Lucas contemplate how stories were these mysterious things that were so important in our lives, that shaped how we learned and grew, and formed our understanding of the culture we operated in, and entertained us, et cetera, et cetera…And then he started talking about myths and whoa! What is a myth!?! And what is the difference between a story and a myth? How do we even begin to…
If you made it through my introduction to these lessons, you’re probably well aware that while poor Lucas was reflecting on these things seemingly unproductively, old Rowe was sitting there absolutely bored to a state of catatonia. Picture a teenage boy in an accounting class with his neck tilted all the way back staring straight at the ceiling. That’s about what I was feeling inside, because if I didn’t already have the answers to these seemingly ponderous questions Lucas was looking to blow our minds with (which I did), I also had a smartphone in my pocket offering instantaneous access to the entire body of human knowledge. These aren’t deep questions for serious people anymore. Serious people have been studying this stuff for hundreds of years and have left their knowledge behind for us to use. If you find yourself in a class where a professor like Lucas is hoping to expand your mind by trying to impress you with the difficulty of defining the topic, they either didn’t have time to think of a better lesson plan, or they’re woefully underqualified to be teaching that class. I liked Lucas a lot. He was a really sweet guy with the right idea and the wrong lesson plan.
Here’s where Lucas was right: If you’re trying to do anything in life, you stand a much better chance of doing that thing if you know exactly what you’re trying to do. But remember, most writers are intuitive, and a lot of them only sorta know what they’re trying to do—probably a lot like you at the start of this lesson.
Today we’re going to define a story. And like all definitions, as we’ll soon see, defining a story isn’t easy (I’ll show you why). But our purpose in defining a story is two-fold. The first is to develop a useful tool for your arsenal, an exact idea of what it is you’re trying to accomplish when you set your fingers on your keyboard. You might do well to think of fiction writing as a game you’re trying to learn—a very hard one. It might be as difficult as that blindfolded darts game with the moving dart-board I described in the introduction. But by the end of this lesson, you will know what game you’re playing—that you’re trying to stick your dart into that moving board, blindfolded as you are. At least you’ll have the objective.
The second reason is that if you ever have a teacher like Lucas, you can pull out your phone and go: “Here. Right here. This is what a story is to fiction writers. Says it right here. It’s necessarily not a perfect definition, but it’s good enough. Let’s move on, please.”
And to that end...
I’ll start with an online dictionary definition:
Story (n.): an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. (Oxford)
That’s probably about what you were thinking, right? It’s not that hard, Rowe. What are you getting at?
Give Lucas his due here and think about what that definition tells us, and what we’re trying to do—create good stories. See if you can pick at the seams of this definition. I’m sure you can. Where is it weak? You might begin by asking something like, “Well, what exactly constitutes an event? A poetry reading? Sure. Grass growing? Maybe. And, what constitutes entertainment exactly? That’d be different things for different people, surely. Or the big question for our purposes: Does this help us figure out what we need to do when we’re staring at a blank screen? Marginally at best, I’d say. It doesn’t do a great job of telling us what we should be aiming at. Here’s why (this may seem like a total tangent, btw, but we’re going to keep running into this same problem over and over again):
Suppose I gave you four words that could be grouped into a category, for example, the category “domicile.” Let’s use the words: house, mansion, shack, and castle. Now, you probably have a fairly good idea of the difference between a mansion and a shack, right? Sure. But let’s say I brought you to a street in a very wealthy neighborhood and asked you to tell me which of the dwellings on this street were houses and which ones were mansions? It might not be so simple. And it would get an awful lot harder if I asked you to develop a precise set of parameters that clearly outlined the point at which a shack became a house, a house became a mansion, and a mansion became a castle. Borders, as David Foster Wallace noted, are porous. Thus, if one is so inclined to be annoyingly pedantic, one can pick away at every border. It’s not profound.
Now the problem gets doubly sticky once you realize that words are categories. We could play the same game we played with “domicile” with a verb like “run.” It’s why there are synonyms like, trot, gallop, sprint, haul-ass, bound, etc. Or with a noun like seat—well, a chair is a seat, so’s a staircase or a stump, and a big enough rock, etc. The problem here is that words are categories. And categories are fuzzy things.
They’re so fuzzy in fact, that cognitive psychologists have three different working explanations for how we categorize things: we fit like-with-like (all the buildings we think look like houses), we use exemplars (the house that looks most like a house), and we form theories (the attributes we think qualify something as a house). We don’t need to go too deep here; we just need to know that when we’re trying to define a story, we’re trying to draw borders using all three of those cognitive techniques at once by: 1. Collating a long list of stories we know to be stories, 2. Considering which stories seem most “story-like,” and 3. Considering the attributes that make a story a story. It’s a hard, fuzzy, moving target. So, Lucas wasn’t exactly wrong, after all. It’s why he was seemingly so perplexed by a question he should have had technical mastery over.
So what do we do?
First, let’s re-consider the Oxford Dictionary definition of the category “story.” Who is that definition written for exactly? Who goes to the dictionary to look up a word? Someone, who presumably, doesn’t know what the word means, right? That’s the type of tool a dictionary is. So, the people drawing the boundaries for the Oxford Dictionary have to consider their audience. It’s not novelists. Presumably they know what a story is, right? Right, Lucas? One would hope.
What we need is a better frame. We need to draw our boundaries for the category “story” with our goal in mind. We are writers who want to write a good story. What is the target we’re aiming at, using all of the best available knowledge, drawn from a diversity of relevant sources, compiled together into a set of attributes that will allow me to understand what I’m doing when I’m sitting at my keyboard pecking away? And here it is:
Written fiction that works is an interest-grabbing set of language-based instructions arranged in an order that cues the reader to simulate an approximate cognitive model of a specific modal universe that changes in such a way across the course of the simulation that it entertains, instructs, or explores the nature of the human condition.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, woah! Rowe, what the hell was that? I thought you said this stuff was going to be easy. What are you doing?
Yes, I did. I’m sorry, I did. And it is going to be easy. But if you’ll also recall, I also said that I was going to give you the exact definition of a story, and I also said that writing fiction might be the most cognitively complex activity a human can undertake. And…fear not. I also said that what we’re looking to accomplish in this lesson is to develop a useful tool to help us understand what a story is and how to write one.
That definition above is what fiction is. That’s my technical definition of what a written story is, and I’ve thought a lot about it. I couldn’t subtract a single word from it if we’re talking technically about what a story is. But, for our purposes, we’re going to shrink that Frankenstein’s monster of a definition down to a manageable size that makes for a useful tool. (I will expound upon the above full definition of a story after the lesson for those readers specifically interested—for the rest of you who couldn’t care less, read on, please…)
Here’s the shortened definition we’re going to use, and I think you’ll agree it’s a more practical tool for our purposes:
Good fiction is an interesting cognitive simulation of a dynamic storyworld that entertains, instructs, or explores the nature of the human condition.
Ah! Much better, right? That’s more like it. It’s shorter, punchy, and much more to the point—or our point at least, which is to develop a target to aim at as fiction writers. And this seems like a much easier target to hit. This is a game we can play. Okay, so let’s pick at the seams of this one a little and see what we come up with.
If we read that definition closely, there are four main propositions embedded in it. They are:
Good fiction is interesting.
It is a cognitive simulation.
Of a dynamic storyworld.
That entertains, instructs, or explores the nature of the human condition.