The Fire in Fiction

by Donald Maass

  a financial windfall. As important as that, though, is the allure that the Codex exerts on scholars—and eventually on Edward too, who slips into addiction to a weirdly realistic computer game that mimics his search for the Codex and may be connected to it in ways not immediately obvious.

  Rare books are also involved in John Dunning's mystery series featuring Cliff Janeway, an ex-policeman turned book dealer. In The Sign of the Book (2005), the fourth title in the series, Janeway investigates the murder of a collector of first editions at the request of his girlfriend, Denver criminal attorney Erin D'Angelo. The case grows complicated as Janeway learns that the victim was Erin's first love and also that the confessed killer, the collector's wife, is likely not guilty.

  Dunning takes a different approach to creating the milieu of rare books. Instead of a establishing the importance of a particular special book to Janeway, Dunning reveals Janeway's perspective on the rare book trade itself, mainly that he feels it has changed for the worse thanks to the Internet:

  The next day I made some bold predictions.

  In a few years much of the romance would disappear from the book trade forever.

  The burgeoning Internet, as it would later be called, would bring in sweeping change. There would be incredible ease, instant knowledge available to everyone: even those who have no idea how to use it would become "experts." Books would become just another word for money, and that would bring out the hucksters and fast-buck artists.

  No bookseller would own anything outright in this brave new book world. One incredibly expensive book would have half a dozen dealers in partnership, with the money divvied six ways or more when it sold. "I might as well be selling cars," I said.

  Janeway not only knows books but the book trade. His nostalgia for the way it used to be combines with bitterness over the way it

  has changed. Janeway's opinion is strong and grounds the reader in the rare book business. We know where we stand. The world of rare books is alive for us even as its romance is dying.

  The lesson for us is that a milieu exists not in a time or place, but in the mind and hearts of the characters who dwell in it. Their memories, feelings, opinions, outlook, and ways of operating in their realm are what make it real.

  SETTING AS A CHARACTER

  Sometimes the setting itself may participate in the story. Blizzards, droughts, and other natural phenomena are obvious ways to make the setting active. But there are certainly more.

  Find in your setting specific places that have extra significance, or places where events recur. You know, those spots that are legendary. Maybe in your hometown there was a quarry turned into a swimming hole, where boys tested their nerve, girls lost their virginity, and the cops regularly busted potheads or fished bodies from the water. Such a place was legendary, right? What about where you live now? What's the spot that everyone knows but isn't on any tour?

  In my neighborhood in New York City that's the 72nd Street entrance to the Dakota apartment building where John Lennon was murdered in 1980. No plaque or statue marks the spot, but every neighborhood resident brings visitors by to point it out. When giving out-of-towners a personal city tour I also like to show them an unremarkable bar in Greenwich Village that is called the Stonewall Inn. It was a riot there in 1969 (some of the rioters in drag) that began the gay rights movement in America.

  New York City is chock-a-block with special places, needless to say. One of them is the boardwalk on Coney Island. It has been featured in countless movies, songs, and novels, but one of my favorite uses is in a recent novel in Reed Farrel Coleman's gritty series of New York mystery novels featuring ex-cop turned P.I. Moe Prager. The James Deans (2005) won the Shamus, Barry, and Anthony Awards. In Soul Patch (2007), Coleman focuses on Coney Island. The novel begins with a meditative prologue that slowly zooms in, cinema style, on the boardwalk a number of years before the action of the story, to a group of four men:

  At the steps that led down to the beach, one of the four men decided he was having second thoughts. Maybe he didn't want to get sand in his shoes. No one likes sand in his shoes. The man standing to his immediate right waited for the rumble of the Cyclone—several girls screaming at the top of their lungs as the roller coaster cars plunged down its steep first drop—before slamming his leather covered sap just above the balking man's left knee. His scream was swallowed up by the roar of the ocean and the second plunge of the Cyclone. He crumpled, but was caught by the other men.

  It was much cooler under the boardwalk, even at night. The sea air was different here somehow, smelling of pot smoke and urine. Ambient light leaking through the spaces between the planks imposed a shadowy grid upon the sand. The sand hid broken bottles, pop tops, used condoms, and horseshoe crab shells. Something snapped, and it wasn't the sound of someone stepping on a shell.

  The Drifters's song "Under the Boardwalk" just doesn't sound the same to me now. As Soul Patch unfolds, an old friend of Moe Prager's, the NYPD chief of detectives, gives him a tape of an interrogation of an informant who was said to know who really murdered a drug lord of the early 1970s, Dexter Mayweather. Soon enough the chief of detectives himself turns up dead, an apparent suicide. It's up to Moe to dig up the truths of the past and present.

  What is it that gives the boardwalk at Coney Island its mythic significance in this passage? The Cyclone? The smell of pot smoke and urine? There are other places that have those things. It is rather that something violent—and symbolic—happens there. Without

  that, the boardwalk is just a place to get a decent hot dog. To make a place iconic, make something big happen there. Something bigger than cotton candy.

  As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is also possible to give natural phenomena a plot function, as well. Mystery novelist Nancy Pickard did just that in her stand-alone suspense novel The Virgin of Small Plains (2006), which we also discussed in chapter three. Remember the tornado described by two different characters in those passages? That's a perfect example of a natural phenomenon at work in the plot. But Pickard has others at work as well.

  As you might recall from the plot description, twenty years before the action of the story a nameless teenaged girl was found in the small town of Small Plains, Kansas, beaten to death, her face unidentifiable. The crime was never solved. The citizens of Small Plains took up a collection and gave the girl a grave and a headstone. This grave has now taken on mystical power. The Virgin, as she's known, is said to heal. Pilgrims come as if to Lourdes.

  The Virgin of Small Plains takes a perfectly flat landscape and finds in it an amazing variety of moods and meanings. Toward the beginning Abby Reynolds, a principle point-of-view character and owner of the town's plant and shrub nursery, is working in the graveyard. Abby's life was upended on the night when the Virgin was found (her high school boyfriend, Mitch Newquist, disappeared that night) and now something in the Kansas prairie stirs in her a resolve:

  When Abby couldn't see Verna's car anymore, she stood up and scanned the horizon.

  She could never look out over such a span of prairie without thinking about the Indians who used to live there. Her mother, who had loved facts and dates and history, had made her aware of them from the time she was old enough to look for arrowheads in the dirt. And now Abby found herself thinking about another time and another crime that nobody talked about, just like Verna Shellenberger didn't seem to want to talk to her about the murder of the Virgin.

  Once, the Osage and Kansa tribes had roamed forty-five million acres, including the patch of ground on which she stood. They had shared it with thirty to seventy-five million bison. If she used her imagination, she could almost hear the pounding hooves and see the dark flood of animals pouring over the fields. But the Indians had been chased and cheated down to Oklahoma, including a forced exodus in 1873. The bison had been killed. Abby had friends who owned a bison ranch, and she had toured it, had stared into the fierce eyes of an old bison bull. In search of native grasses to plant and sell, she had also walked
onto the land of Potawatomi, Iowa, and Kickapoo reservations that remained in the state. She had a natural affinity for underdogs, and she thought she had at least some small sense of what it must be like to feel helpless in the path of history. She couldn't solve those million crimes, by she thought that maybe she could help solve one crime.

  On her way out of the cemetery, Abby whispered a few words to her mother, and then she touched the Virgin's gravestone.

  "If you tell me who you are," she promised the dead girl, "I'll make sure that everybody knows your name."

  How the horizon, arrowheads, bison, and the forced exodus of the Indians should combine to fuel in Abby a resolve to learn the truth about the Virgin—"she had at least some small sense of what it must be like to feel helpless in the path of history"—is a non-linear progression and irrational motive that nevertheless feels exactly right. Abby is a Kansas woman connected to the land; more, she knows its meaning.

  What does the setting of your current novel mean to the characters in it? How do you portray that meaning and make it active in the story? The techniques of doing so are some of the most powerful tools in the novelist's kit. Use them and you will not only give your novel a setting that lives, but also construct for your readers an entire world, the world of the story.

  Do you have style?

  My agency's office in New York City is close to the Fashion Institute of Technology, a college for the rag trade. There also are many photographers' studios and modeling agencies in the neighborhood. In the suite next to ours are the offices of a trendy, high-end fashion magazine. Now, I am not on any worst-dressed lists (that I know of) but I am surrounded by daily reminders of my limited fashion sense.

  I wonder how these stylish people do it. It's their business, true, but clearly their flair for personal expression through clothing comes not from their closets but from inside. So it is in fiction. Voice, that fuzzy literary term that embraces everything from prose style to sensibility to seriousness (or silliness) of purpose, is in the first place a matter of who you are.

  Some authors have a plain prose style. That is said often of John Grisham, James Patterson, and Nicholas Sparks. They are strong storytellers and bestsellers so I dare say they are not much bothered about it. Other writers are known almost entirely for their way with words. Reviewers swoon over their "lapidary" prose (I had to look it up) and their "closely observed" take on their subjects, which I sometimes think is code for not much happens. Prose stylists can sell

  well too, which, for me, implies that fiction's punch and appeal is achieved in part by writing with force.

  Now, by that I do not mean just words as bullets; I mean that impact can be felt from the many ways in which the author's outlook comes across. Having something to say, a theme, is important (we'll examine that in chapter nine) but just as powerful can be how you say it, or how your characters say it.

  What's your narrative style? I don't care about your choice particularly, but I do care whether or not you have a distinctive way of telling your tale. That is part of your power. Let's look at different ways in which voice can shout out.

  GIVING CHARACTERS VOICE

  In your circle of friends, who is the most outrageous? Do you have an acquaintance who will blurt out anything, wears horrible bow ties or skin-tight jump suits zipped down to the naval, flies to Borneo on a whim, flirts with your mother, shoots cactus tequila, believes in astral projection, named a cat Richard Nixon, does calculus for pleasure, drives a hot pink hearse, got arrested once in Omaha? No? Wouldn't it be fun? It would be great to meet some outrageous characters in manuscripts, too, but I rarely do.

  Most characters I meet are ordinary Joes and Janes. (Well, in romance novels they might be named Cyan and Blake.) It isn't that all characters must be outrageous. That would be exhausting; more to the point it isn't right for most stories. On the other hand, why do characters have to be uninteresting? Did someone pass a law while I wasn't looking?

  Any character can stand out without being a ridiculous caricature. It may only be a matter of digging inside to find what makes him different and distinct from you and me. It can be as simple as giving him his own unique take on things.

  Criminals definitely look at things in a different way. (Or do they?) Since Fifty-Two Pick Up (1974), Elmore Leonard has brought us inside the world of crooks, killers, and con men, mostly in Detroit.

  Leonard's ear for street dialogue is unmatched. In Killshot (1989), he spins the story of real estate agent Carmen Colson and her ironworker husband Wayne, who accidentally happen upon an extortion scheme run by two killers and enter the Federal Witness Protection Program, only to find that it isn't much of a place to hide.

  Leonard opens Killshot in the point of view of one of the bad guys, a half-Ojibway, half-French-Canadian hit man named Ar-mand "Blackbird" Degas. Blackbird gets a phone call in his Toronto fleabag hotel offering him a hit. He hondles for a better price, musing about the way punks talk to each other:

  The phone rang. He listened to several rings before picking up the receiver, wanting it to be a sign. He liked signs. The Blackbird said, "Yes?" and a voice he recognized asked would he like to go to Detroit. See a man at a hotel Friday morning. It would take him maybe two minutes.

  In the moment the voice on the phone said "De-troi-it" the Blackbird thought of his grandmother, who lived near there, and began to see himself and his brothers with her when they were young boys and thought, This could be a sign. The voice on the phone said, "What do you say, Chief?"

  "How much?"

  "Out of town, I'll go fifteen."

  The Blackbird lay in his bed staring at the ceiling, the cracks making highways and rivers. The stains were lakes, big ones.

  "I can't hear you, Chief."

  "I'm thinking you're low."

  "All right, gimme a number."

  "I like twenty thousand."

  "You're drunk. I'll call you back."

  "I'm thinking this guy staying at a hotel, he's from here, no?"

  "What difference is it where he's from?"

  "You mean what difference is it to me. I think it's somebody you don't want to look in the face."

  The voice on the phone said, "Hey, Chief? Fuck you. I'll get somebody else."

  The guy was a punk, he had to talk like that. It was okay. The Blackbird knew what this guy and his people thought of him. Half-breed tough guy one time from Montreal, maybe a little crazy, they gave the dirty jobs to. If you took the jobs, you took the way they spoke to you. You spoke back if you could get away with it, if they needed you. It wasn't social, it was business.

  That could pretty much be Leonard's own philosophy of voice. Punks. They have to talk like that. It's business. Leonard's business is to get it down the way it sounds, unadorned, fragmentary, all muscle, subtle in the way two fingers poking hard against your chest is subtle. Street shit.

  What's the lingo of the lawyers in your courtroom thriller? Do the cowboys in your romance talk like real ranch hands, or do they sound more like English literature majors? Everyone's got a style of talking. You use words that I wouldn't and vice versa. (Hey, I'm from New York, fuckin' get over it.)

  Characters' outlook can be as distinctive as their way of talking. Their opinions speak for the story and, in a way, for the author. Why, then, are many fiction writers reluctant to let their characters' speak up? Often when I have finished reading a manuscript I cannot tell you much of anything about what the protagonist believes, loathes ,or even finds ridiculous. People have opinions. Authors are people. What happens to them while writing to muzzle their views and dampen their voices?

  Nick Hornby, in novels such as High Fidelity (1995) and About a Boy (1998), has established himself as a wry and witty observer of British shortcomings and discontent. In How to Be Good (2001), he introduces Katie Carr, a doctor who is married to a major malcontent, David, who trumpets himself in his newspaper column as "The Angriest Man in Holloway." Fed up, Kate has an affair with

  an unexpected consequen
ce: David has a deep and sudden religious conversion and decides to give up his anger in favor of being good.

  Being good, it turns out, is massively inconvenient and irritating. Be careful what you wish for. At any rate, David's new focus causes Kate to examine many aspects of her life and question what it really means to be good. At one point she reflects on the pervasive English delight in cynicism:

  I got sick of hearing why everybody was useless, and ghastly, and talentless, and awful, and how they didn't deserve anything good that had happened to them, and they completely deserved anything bad that had happened to them, but this evening I long for the old David—I miss him like one might miss a scar, or a wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. You knew where you were with the old David. And I never felt any embarrassment, ever. Weary despair, sure, the occasional nasty taste in the mouth, certainly, flashes of irritation almost constantly, but never any embarrassment. I had become comfortable with his cynicism, and in any case, we're all cynical now, although it's only this evening that I recognize this properly. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it—I like too many things, and I am not envious of enough people—I know enough to get by. And in any case it is not possible to avoid cynicism and the sneer completely. Any conversation about, say, the London mayoral contest, or Demi Moore, or Posh and Becks and Brooklyn, and you are obliged to be sour, simply to prove that you are a fully functioning and reflective cosmopolitan person.

  As shocking as it may be to discover that Demi Moore causes eye-rolling in England, there's no doubt that Katie is a woman of definite opinions, capable of missing her husband's sourness. She is one who reflects on the inner life of her countrymen and women. Or is she? Come

  to think of it, the passage above was actually written by Nick Hornby. It is not Katie who has a voice, in point of fact, but her author.

  What kind of opinions do your characters have? How do they express them? You can develop the way they talk, or their outlook and opinions, or both. In doing so you will be developing not just characters more interesting to read about but a voice of your own that speaks with greater force and authority.