Immediate Fiction

by Jerry Cleaver

  All right, are you still with it? The same amount? More? Less? Most people are even more involved. Why? First, because the character took action against the problem. Second, because the plot "thickened," as they say. "Thickening" means the trouble gets worse, more threatening. What makes it worse is almost always another person, in this case David. Here's the next part:

  Most days I could do it, not nag that is. Even if an irritable mood is out there itching to sneak up and grab me, I can push it away. But when I see every goddamn cabinet open, I lose it. I just can't take it. It drives me -mid.

  All right, where are you? The same? More involved? Less? Most people are sliding away with this passage if not a good deal less involved. There's a writing reason for it, always—a craft/technique reason for every problem. Can you figure out what story technique is at issue here? How about telling? Ideas versus experience, remember? Let's go over the piece bit by bit so that you can see what's working and what's not.

  "Most days I could do it, not nag that is.' "Most days"? Why is the character (author) taking us off into "most days." We don't care about most days when we're right in the middle of this day and this tense, high-energy scene. Next: "Even if an irritable mood is out there itching to sneak up and grab me, I can push it away." This again is an idea (telling), but even more abstract and intangible. It further interrupts the scene, which was unfolding so well. Last: "But when I see every goddamn cabinet open, I lose it. I just can't take it. It drives me wild." These lines are ideas, general statements that tell us what we've just seen happening with out own eyes. We've lived it, so we don't need to be told what we've just experienced.

  If I were editing this piece, I would cut this passage, this telling, out. I left it in because we learn most from mistakes and from fixing them. It's important to understand that every writer does this. Every writer tells, overstates, drifts off into the abstract, points out the obvious. There's no way to prevent it, because you can't control what flows out of you without getting in the way and getting stuck or blocked. So, don't try. Just pour it on the page and then go back and rework it later. And the telling is certainly no reflection on this writer, who is doing a fine job. Here's the last of this piece:

  It's worse than white Jockeys or Gold Toed socks hanging out of the dresser drawer. Just one nudge of the finger is all it takes to make everything neat. Just one nudge. But I guess that's too hard.

  "David," I say as I lean against the kitchen door, arms folded in front of my chest like a shield.

  He looks up from his TV chair with cool, watch-what-you-say eyes. "Yes," he says.

  His eyes spook me, and a shiver trills up my back.

  How was that stretch? Are you back into it? Most people are, in a major way. Why? What's going on in that stretch that wasn't before? Action again, but directed at the real cause of the problem (obstacle), at the more threatening part—the person himself.

  That's all there is of this scene. But we can still work with it—not only with what's there, but with what isn't. The question is, Is it over? Of course not. Can you figure out a possible ending? It shouldn't be hard, because you have a real beginning (want + obstacle + action). When you have a real beginning, the ending almost writes itself. "The end is in the beginning" is the old writing rule. What that means is you have two forces (want + obstacle) pitted against each other. One wins, and one loses (resolution). In this case, some possible resolutions are: they split up; he agrees to be neat; she agrees to put up with his messiness; or they both agree to try to be more flexible— to name a few. It's a victory or a defeat for the main character, the woman, or a mixed victory.

  In terms of this character's emotions, she's angry and upset and worried. But the words angry, upset, and worried were not used. Her emotions were expressed in her thoughts and her actions. Here irritation and frustration come across nicely with: "Just one nudge of the finger is all it takes to make everything neat. Just one nudge. But I guess that's too hard." We don't need to be told what she's feeling, we need to be shown it in scene, in action. Scene is the purest form of showing. Scene is experience happening in real time, moment by moment, word for word, right before our eyes. Here's the beginning of the last piece:

  Ever since I told her I was a lesbian, my mother has taken to talking about me in the past tense.

  How are you with this piece? A provocative opening? Most people are with it with this first sentence. Why? Because there are a want and an obstacle—a mother who is not pleased with her daughter. Here's the rest:

  "You were such a beautiful baby," she says, her large, sea green eyes filling up with a lethal mixture of nostalgia and longing.

  I groan.

  "You were the very essence of femininity." Her voice trails off dramatically. I begin to tap the toe of my cowboy boot very lightly on the tile floor beneath the kitchen table, bracing for the assault.

  She shrugs, and in the sagging folds of her Eastern European face I see a ragtag clutter of disappointment and despair. Her mouth, which is usually bow shaped and generous, tightens slightly as she looks at me.

  "Your walk, your voice, your body . . . everything about you was perfectly feminine." She shakes her head as she ponders this and the tap tap tap of the tip of my cowboy boot begins to pick up speed.

  "For God's sake, mother, this is an absolutely ridiculous theory—and it's easily the third time you've presented it this month."

  "Please hear me out," she says and I sag under the intensity of her conviction.

  As I lean back in my chair, she leans forward and puts her hand—a smaller, more time worn version of my own—on my arm.

  "I believe we—your father and I, that is—gave you a perfectly healthy endocrine system."

  I can feel the slight pressure of her hand on my arm as I close my eyes. Through clenched teeth, I give her one last chance to explain her "theory" of my lesbianism before I explode. "What's that supposed to mean, 'a perfectly healthy endocrine system'?"

  "Well, it means, it's not our fault," she says, letting her hand slide off my arm and hit the table with a small thud. She shrugs again, heaving her bosom. "So, the warp must be in your psyche. It's the only possible explanation."

  That's it. How did it go? Whatever problems you might have with it, it's a strong piece that takes hold of most readers and hangs onto them as these two characters struggle with each other.

  Let's look at it from the story angle. Who wants what? The daughter wants to be accepted as she is. The mother wants a straight daughter, ideally, but short of that, the mother's going for something else. What is it? She wants to be guiltless and to blame the daughter, the daughter whom she's trying to convince (action) has a "warp" in her "psyche." The daughter is putting up with her, for exactly what reasons we don't know. So we have want, obstacle, action. There is no resolution yet—neither scene resolution nor story resolution. Can you figure out where this is going? You should be able to, since it's already going in that direction. Victory, defeat, mixed victory.

  So, that's the story form and technique. Conflict (want + obstacle), action, resolution, emotion, showing. Just five elements. If you stay focused on these five elements and don't let yourself get distracted or sidetracked, if you master these five, no matter what else you do wrong, you will succeed. You will succeed, because you'll be creating strong stories. The world—agents, publishers, editors—will bend over backwards for a strong story. Stephen King, for example, can be

  a sloppy writer (he himself says that his writing is like a Big Mac and an order of French fries), but he's one hell of a good storyteller.

  All right. This has been a long stint. I've hit you with a lot. Conflict is tricky and elusive, so we'll revisit it and its finer points in the next chapter. For now, you need only be aware of these elements, to understand how they work and relate. But remember, awareness and understanding aren't mastery. Mastery takes practice. It'll come soon enough if you stay focused. The main thing is, don't expect too much. Just write and let whatever comes flow onto the
page. You're just creating some raw material to work with, to turn into a compelling story—eventually, once you master the craft. For now, it's just practice.

  So, it's time to try it, get loose, let go, warm up a bit. I want you to put something (anything) down, throw some words onto the page. But I'm not going to desert you. I'm going to give you some scene setups to help you get going.

  Now, if you have something you're working on and want to use that, do so. The main thing is to write for 30 minutes. If you don't have 30 minutes, or you run out of energy, do what you can (5 minutes, 10, 15). When you have time or you feel up to it, come back and do some more until you've written for a total of 30 minutes. If you have no time and you're not going to have any time, go to chapter 12 and find the time plan that's workable. Use that plan to do these exercises or something from chapter 12 if you like that better.

  EXERCISES

  Here are a few scene ideas. Pick one and see what you can do with it.

  • Blind date. First is getting set up, including the character's worries, fears, and hopes. Then the first contact on the telephone, which needs to raise both anxiety and hopes. The want is to have a wonderful lover. The obstacle is having to go

  through the anxiety and sense of humiliation to find out if this person is the one or is even worth the effort.

  • Going home to visit family (parents, siblings, etc.) for a holiday visit or after having been away for an extended time. Now, if it's a wonderful family, don't bother. It has to be difficult. The character needs to be anticipating trouble and trying to figure out how to avoid it. The want is to get through the visit avoiding trouble/pain. The obstacle is the difficult family, who are going to give the character a hard time about as much as possible.

  • Trapped on a ski lift, on an airplane, or in a taxi with someone who starts talking or acting strange. The want is to be left alone, to be at peace, to be safe. The obstacle is this weird person who is acting strange and maybe is dangerous.

  Now, if none of those grab you, here's a much looser exercise. I'm going to give you three sets of unrelated words. You'll pick one set of the three and write a scene using the three-word set you pick. Here they are:

  • Buddha, loveseat, belch.

  • Albino, pistol, strawberry.

  • Muzzle, telescope, nude.

  The thing to do is to just hang loose and let the words stimulate you. Here's another exercise to do if you don't want to do any of the above. In this, I'll give you a list of settings. You pick a setting that strikes your fancy. Then I'll give you a list of characters. You pick two or more of the characters and have them interact in the setting.

  • Settings: Cemetery, gas station, pawnshop, porn shop, porn theater, tavern, ballpark, church, train, doctor's office, dentist's office, airplane.

  • Characters: Priest, cop, prostitute, nurse, vampire, doctor, burglar, tramp, cab driver, baby, mayor, gangster.

  Don't worry about the story form, unless you feel like trying it. It's new, so it's not going to (and is not supposed to) feel comfortable. If you want to try it, see if you can establish a want and an obstacle (or obstacle first, then want, as in the Larry scene) and an initial action. But the main thing is to write. If trying to create want and obstacle gets in the way, forget it and just write. If you're using your own project and you feel up to it, work to create a want and an obstacle. On the other hand, if it takes off, after you create a want and an obstacle, go on and have your character take action, confront the problem, and push it through to a resolution (victory or defeat).

  Here's the piece, from the writer who wrote the spider piece that appeared earlier.

  As near as Clayton could recall, they had been talking about God when he mentioned the spider, no larger than an infant's thumbnail, that lives in mid-air at altitudes as high as 12,000 feet. This particular type of spider, in spite of the extreme cold and buffeting of air currents, is able to stride in the thin atmosphere like a pond insect using the water's surface tension, and even weaves webs, using water droplets or crystals of ice as anchors for the mooring threads. These free-floating webs, wet with woven rain or white with frost, have been known to dance across the windshields of airplanes, like handkerchiefs dropped by flirtatious angels—there and gone so quickly that pilots often never even noticed them.

  Not until the dawn of aviation was there any record of these spiders (the first recorded sighting being that of a balloonist who had gone far too high and encountered what he called "a

  bright cathedral window in the air." Reaching out to touch it, his fingertips broke the tenuous film of water in the interstices of the web and he came away with only a few thin strands on his dampened fingertips). Not until the early 1920s was the first specimen captured. Clayton remembered that a controversy still surrounded the origins of the spiders: How had they come to live at those altitudes? Had a few daring arachnids stepped off a Himalayan mountainside thousands of years ago? How did they live? Did they draw nourishment from the air as some orchids did?

  Clayton's point had been that until the advent of a particular type of technology, any knowledge of these spiders or their webs had been the subject of myth or superstition. Every so often, these webs slipped through a trough in the atmosphere, perhaps down through an eddy of air current. At sunset or sunrise, especially in the Western states, you may catch a glimpse of a web spiraling down to the earth, glittering at all its dewy points. The Navaho and Sioux told tales of Grandmother Spider.

  As usual, her response to his argument had been unexpected. The thought that there was a type of spider that could, at any moment, fall upon her, web and all, kept her in the house for days. When he suggested that she might be overreacting, she answered: "You know I hate spiders. Why did you ever tell me about that one?" In some odd way, he felt she was right. He knew she was afraid of spiders and snakes and fiberglass insulation and empty metal boxes.

  So, there's the spider again. When I read this, I asked this author if there was such a spider. He said, "Hell no. I made it up." Not only was the image of this spider vivid and real, but the author turned it into a bone of contention between the narrator and his wife. The image, as

  striking as it is, is not enough to make a story. For that we must have want, obstacle, and action. The author went on to raise the tension and drama with the following:

  Tonight, he had planned on telling her about the place where people fear the rain (who knows what effect that might have had on her), but when he drove up the driveway, he found the house dark. When he entered the house, he found that she had not gone to bed early. And when he went into the kitchen to have a beer and call her mother, he found the note written on a piece of brown paper shopping bag, secured with two red magnetic letters to the freezer.

  I can't take it any longer. I'm sorry.

  I'm taking the baby with me.

  —Hugh Schulze

  You should know that this author had been writing for years. Don't get intimidated by someone else's writing. You can do this. The next chapter gets into the finer points of how it's done.

  [4] Fine-Tuning

  After a Bulls game, a reporter asked Michael Jordan how one of the new players, Luke Longley, was doing. Jordan said that Longley was doing fine, but that he had to learn their system. The Bulls have a plan, Michael said. Everyone who comes to the Bulls must learn their plan, their system. Every player has to know the plan inside and out, forward and backward so it becomes part of him and he doesn't have to think about it. When the team is winning, they just play basketball. They don't worry about the plan or anything else. They just go. But when they're losing, when they're in trouble, they switch to the plan immediately. Everyone knows where to go and what to do. Everyone focuses on doing his job. Then, when they're back on track, they just play basketball again.

  All right, why do I tell you this anecdote, and what does it have to do with writing? First of all, what I gave you in the last chapter, which is also what I'm refining in this chapter, is your plan—a plan you
will use for the rest of your writing life. When things are going well, when you're writing and loving it, don't bother with the plan. Just go. But when you get into trouble (and you'll get into trouble a lot, as did the

  Bulls), go to it immediately. Go to want, obstacle, action first—always. If those elements aren't in place, aren't set up and working properly, nothing else you do can make up for it. If you don't attend to them first, you will waste an enormous amount of energy working on something that will not fix the problem, and your story will shut down no matter how hard you work to keep it going.

  So, when things aren't going right, do not let yourself get distracted by anything else—go to your plan (want, obstacle, action) immediately. Ask first, "Who wants what?" If no one wants anything, that's your problem. Nothing can happen without that. You'll be wasting your time if you work elsewhere. Once you have the character's want established, ask, "What's the obstacle?" If there is no obstacle, you have no conflict and no dramatic tension to move the story. After you've created a threatening obstacle, ask, "What's the character doing (action) to overcome the obstacle and fulfill his want?"

  If you have these three story elements working, your story will be moving, and you won't be wondering what's wrong. I've never seen a story that was failing where the problem wasn't in one of these three story elements. They are the one, two, three of dramatic movement.

  Getting into trouble is inevitable. The important thing is how quickly you get out of it. How fast you get out of trouble and back on track determines whether you spend a month to a year writing a novel or whether you spend three to five to ten years doing it. The difference between writers who write novels quickly and those who take years and years isn't how much time they spend writing, but how much time they waste trying to write. Your greatest weapon is understanding the story form and the story elements—mastering the plan.