The Fire in Fiction (18 page)

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 consequence: 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.