Educación y liderazgo social al servicio de la comunidad

now to those criteria. Mine work like a system of screens, from coarsest to finest, or, in another sense, most basic to most refined. to be acceptable, stories need to pass the first two screenings. to be actually accepted, probably three or four. the first, most funda-mental screening must be for the most essential virtue:

Honesty

What, honesty in a craft dedicated to artifice? Yes, because only sincere lies will do.

Your imaginary details must come from an alternative environment so real that you’re not alibiing when you talk about it. Building air-castles is fine, but unless you create the ground they stand on and the beings that live in them as well, you’re not going to convince anybody that they exist. Your first duty as a fiction writer is to know that other place like a native, not just an occasional visitor. Anthony trollope was so well acquainted with Barsetshire that he knew what its people were doing even when they

weren’t in the story. William Faulkner “lived” in Yoknapatawpha County as surely as he did in Jackson, Mississippi. You’ve got to do the same. Being familiar with the setting is the only way to cover the doings and sayings, goings and comings of your imagined world’s residents accurately and thoroughly enough to take us there with you. that’s the essence of honesty—giving the reader a direct view of the lives of people who exist only in your unique mindland.

How does an editor know when a story is dishonest? the same way you’d spot any con job—it smells fishy. As an example, let me recap my first attempt at fiction writ-ing. twenty-five years ago i knew little of fictional honesty. What i did know was that i could give Good Housekeeping’s readers a better story than they were used to getting. i’d have to sacrifice some seriousness and subtlety, but with just a little scaling down of my lofty standards, i’d treat them to a real gem of a yarn. So i went and wrote a slander-ously false account of a gawky high school intellectual’s helpless infatuation with a glamorous cheerleader. the story bore no resemblance to life as it is lived. Worse, it was insufferably patronizing, strutting and swaggering, casting snide glances at a presumed throng of enchanted admirers. the sad moral of this bad fable: Don’t write out of pride or greed, and don’t write about what you can’t believe in. in short, be honest.

efficiency

By this, i mean the principle that in fiction, nothing’s there for nothing. Fiction may look like straight life, but the resemblance is superficial. Scratch a story and you get, not blood, but contrivance: structure, logic, symbolism, all sorts of synthetic goodies.

Events happen only because some author-god makes them happen. in the real world, we seem to enjoy a measure of free will, but the world of fiction is driven entirely by the will of author-gods. Authors can literally make anything happen. they can say, “Let there be light,” and there will be light. Because they are all-powerful, author-gods have an absolute responsibility to play fair with both their puppet characters and their show’s spectators. And the basic rule of fair play is: give readers as much as, but no more than, they need to know to get the point of the story. So the presentation of evidence in fic-tion is highly selective—what helps the reader get it belongs; what doesn’t, doesn’t.

i’ve returned hundreds of potentially strong stories that failed mainly because of in-efficiency. Every year i read dozens of narratives that seem to be nothing but records of actual experience. the raw data can’t be doubted, but i always have to wonder why a read-er should be curious about the random episodes of somebody’s pread-ersonal life he doesn’t know from Adam or Eve. Such a confessional ego trip is a waste of editorial time. We try to pretend it’s really fiction and so to make sense of the authorial persona’s spiritual jour-ney, only to find in the end the joke’s on the reader, there’s no real point after all.

Efficient stories never quit pushing ahead, never relax their search for answers to the questions they raise. the result is a rich, dense illusion of life that manages to pack large meaning into a few pages.

Few, but not necessarily very few. Efficiency isn’t simply brevity. Some of the clas-sical masterpieces of efficiency like James Joyce’s “the Dead” and Anton Chekhov’s

“the Lady With the Dog” would take thirty or more pages. Efficiency isn’t pure velocity

either. For sheer speed ian Fleming’s spy novels are hard to top, but for real pace—that feeling of powerful purpose unfolding, surging inevitably on like a great river to spill finally into a vast resolving sea—give me Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent any day. Pace is set by the rate a story’s central idea develops, not by the noise level of the plot. So if you’re tempted to introduce some sex or violence just to liven things up, ask yourself instead why your story’s so dull. if it’s not going anywhere anyway, no amount of gra-tuitous hype will save it.

coMPLexity

Eudora Welty says a good story is a “continuing mystery.” that means, no matter how often you read it, a story worth reading will always be larger than your comprehension of it. You can’t wear it out because its central question is the question life itself asks.

Life gets more profound the more we know of it, and so does the expanding universe of serious fiction. What gives a story this quality of complexity is its author’s determi-nation to accept no easy fixes, to settle for no less than the depth and range of actual experience. Specifically, this means 3-D characters involved in 3-D predicaments.

it’s so tempting to sell out. Human nature yearns for simplicity, because life’s so complicated. We want fairy tale solutions—“and they lived happily ever after.” it’s tough enough to live problems, we feel. Why should we have to face them in our stories, too?

Because stories, the best stories, are the finest life-problem decoders and life-crisis stabi-lizers available. Of course there’ll always be escapist fiction, too, for those times when we really need to run rather than cope. nobody’s up to fighting trim every day. But nobody with any gumption wants to spend more time running than coping. Hence, the mission of serious fiction: to see life steadily and see it whole (thank you, Matthew Arnold).

When i was trying to work myself up to read J.r.r. tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, i asked those who’d read and liked it what there was to get interested in. Fan after fan told me, without hesitation, i’d be fascinated by gollum. When i got into it, i saw why: gol-lum is tolkein’s little go at Dostoevsky. no raskolnikov, but still a truly tormented soul that makes us ponder Faulkner’s everlasting problem of the human heart in conflict with itself. Stories that fail the Complexity test do so because they try to deny human nature, to tell us life is a bowl of pitless cherries. good fiction gives us the cherries, pits and all.

the essence of complexity is quality workmanship throughout, uniformly top-of-the-line components, and no skimping on characters or theme or plot or setting. Henry James recommended that you try to be one on whom nothing is wasted. if you practice that kind of sensitivity, and add honesty, you’ve got complexity.

autHority

Hard to define, but easy to feel. the honest story that lacks authority may well be the single biggest category of rejected fiction. Because poor authority is so tough to de-scribe, writers often think editors capricious, arbitrary, or evasive when they report,

“Your story didn’t quite come off,” or “interesting, but not quite compelling.” Such re-marks usually mean, “Close but no cigar”—a compliment. if you’re new to the craft, be encouraged. A little more experience should bring the authority you need.

But what is this mysterious “authority” and where does it come from? i’d call it a wise and easy authorial confidence that both guides a reader’s attitude and spurs his thinking. How to get it? Exercise. Practice. i mentioned earlier that you had to be able to live in the elsewhere of your story. the air of that elsewhere is words, and you’ve got to breathe words. When you’ve made and remade enough sentences that the scribal act is the most natural and familiar routine of your life, you ought to feel comfortable enough with words to write with authority. not that the verbal flow ever turns smooth or steady, but its trickle/gush can become as mundane as heartbeats.

the common name for authority is, of course, style. But style is really authority in action, authority showing itself verbally. Or concealing itself: the best style is usually invisible. When writing calls attention to itself, ordinarily it’s a case of words upstaging ideas, which puts cart before horse. Poor style of any kind—from “purple” to sloppy—is a distraction, and so an enemy of concentration, and so an enemy of good writing, fic-tion or otherwise. Of course there are excepfic-tions to this rule. H.E. Francis’s stories, sev-eral of which KQ has had the good fortune to publish, are always very gaudy stylistically.

But only because they reflect the tortured minds of their main characters. rodney nel-son used poetic diction in “John root is gone” to capture the aura of his roethke-like central figure. Stephen Dixon’s “Cy” can’t very well keep his strangeness from showing itself in his narrative voice. But the rule stands: good style is normally a colorless, odor-less, textureless medium of conveyance. What’s conveyed may have color, odor, texture, but style shouldn’t be a distorting lens the reader has to correct for. When a reader’s under the influence of style/authority, it’s like following the Pied Piper.

originaLity

nothing is rarer than genuine originality, nothing artistically finer. Of course it’s easy to be different. Anyone can perform a weird masquerade and get folks to point at him.

What’s hard is to be different and still get folks to hear and believe. that takes genius.

Meaning it’s out of reach for most of us? On a daily basis, probably yes. Beethoven, Shakespeare, Michelangelo—a handful of creative giants seem to have enjoyed steady runs of original vision. But for most of us garden-variety specimens it’s a case of now-and-then, off-and-on flashes of “inspiration.”

the most important thing to remember about originality is that it absolutely can’t be forced. try to force it and you’ll get nothing but oddity. the most you can actively do is to cultivate your eccentricity. Don’t let your natural uniqueness die of neglect. if you spend your life imitating others, socially or artistically, you can’t expect to turn out very original. it’s not even necessary to be a recluse in some isolated garret. Just don’t lose your identity in the crowds. Hold fast to your observer status, to that perspective that sets you apart. You needn’t look down on people or think you’re a privileged character.

But you can’t hop on the bandwagon and also march to a different drumbeat.

Some young fiction writers worry about a lack of freshness in their plots or unusual-ness in their characters or novelty in their style or format. remind yourself that Shake-speare’s plots were all derivative and his dramatic technique was conventional, and quit worrying. if you have the potential of originality, be yourself and it will show through.