The Fire in Fiction (28 page)

Try it yourself. Invent any disaster, oh, say an airliner plummeting toward a remote mountainside, both its engines trailing smoke. Now play against the expected tone employing your point-of-view character:

Figures, he thought, wouldn't you know the drinks cart hadn't yet reached his row? He really needed a Jack-and-Coke. Condemned to die, and he wasn't even getting a last request.

In other words, you don't have to make the events of your story funny in themselves. You don't need the zany voice of a first-person comedian. You don't need a big target like Washington, D.C. You don't need a dictionary of words that are automatically funnier than your everyday vocabulary. All you have to do is construct an unexpected contrast to what is happening.

Try it out: Dire circumstances/dry response or dry circumstances/ dire response. Coffee spill? Pull the fire alarm. Dating problems? Compose a list of ten reasons why spending a year knitting pashmina shawls in a Himalayan monastery is a great idea. Get it? Or make up your own comic style. Or steal the techniques. Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker won't sue and couldn't anyway. They're dead.

Besides, this stuff is free.

If nothing else, try a little hyperbole. Every writer wants humor in her novel. Few have it. For me, I would settle for once in a while having my eyebrows raised or the corners of my mouth twisted into a smirk. Whether over the top or mildly heightened, witty jabs or roundhouse humor, it would be great if reading manuscripts got to be a little more fun.

Even a serious novel needs to occasionally exaggerate for effect. Try it out. Who knows? Maybe you will discover that you have the sensibility of a satirist. If so, you can make shish kebab out of everything in life that bugs you.

Then we'll all be having a nice time.

Unfortunately, there is no test that measures whether any given fiction writer has what it takes to be a career novelist. If it did exist, though, for me that test would put heavy emphasis on one particular trait: an instinct for tension.

Conflict
is
story. We hardly need discuss that any further. Every novelist who's gotten beyond the beginner stage knows it. What many do not grasp, though, including many published novelists, is that what keeps us turning hundreds of pages is not a central conflict, main problem, or primary goal.

Think about it. If that was all it took to keep readers involved to the end, then all you would have to do is set a principal plot problem at the outset. Then you could indulge yourself however you like for hundreds of pages.

Imagine.

Of course, it is not like that. Conflict must be present in smaller ways throughout. Most novelists understand that too, or say they do. Despite that, I am able to skim vast swaths of virtually all manuscripts and portions of many published novels.

Have you ever skimmed a novel you were reading? How much of it? A little generally is not a problem. Skim a lot, though, and you probably will give up on that book, am I right?

What is it, then, that keeps us reading all the way? Is it conflict within each scene? Is it a character in every chapter who has a clearly stated goal? Is it avoiding low-tension traps such as backstory, aftermath, landscape, and weather openings, empty exposition, and un-needed dialogue? Is it keeping the action moving? Is it throwing in sex and violence for occasional jolts of adrenalin and allure? Is it luck?

What keeps us reading every word on every page of a novel is none of that. Consider the page-turners on your shelves that
do
open with weather or scenery, or quickly dump in backstory, or linger in aftermath and indulge in exposition. How do those authors get away with it? Are they so successful that we overlook their flaws? Do they have a free pass?

Doubtful.

Conversely, think about those highly plotted, action-packed novels that didn't hold your attention. Think about the violence that moved you not at all and the sex scenes that you skipped. Weren't those novelists doing it right, writing by the rules? Then, how come you set those novels aside?

Holding readers' attention every word of the way is not a function of the type of novel, or a good premise, tight writing, quick pace, showing not telling, or any of the other frequently taught principles of storytelling. Keeping readers constantly in your grip comes from the steady application of something else altogether.

Micro-tension.

Micro-tension is the moment-by-moment tension that keeps the reader in a constant state of suspense over what will happen, not in the story but in the next few seconds. It is not a function of plot. This type of tension does not come from high stakes or the circumstances of a scene. Action does not generate it. Dialogue does not produce it automatically. Exposition—the interior monologue of the point-of-view character—does not necessarily raise its level.

When you don't have micro-tension, you are slowly losing your reader. When you do have micro-tension, you can do anything. You can open with weather, linger over the landscape, leave in backstory, describe at length, write about pure emotion, build anticipation from
a wisp of atmosphere, and even make a riveting passage out of nothing at all.

Micro-tension is easily understood but hard to do. I know this because when teaching it in workshops I watch participants nod in understanding when I explain it, but see them stare helplessly at their pages when they try to do it themselves.

So, let's start with this concept: micro-tension has its basis not in story circumstances or in words: it comes from
emotions
and not just any old emotions but
conflicting emotions.

Let's see how it works.

TENSION IN DIALOGUE

In real life most of what people say to each other is drivel. Transcripts of genuine dialogue, as in police wire taps, is a chronicle of halting, disjointed, nonlinear incoherence. Really, it's a wonder that we understand each other.

Dialogue in novels is, thank goodness, unnatural. The author has time to think it through. Characters express exactly what they mean. They speak in complete sentences. They do not get interrupted. Even so, much dialogue in manuscripts feels unimportant even when there is a lot to say.

That can be especially true when information is being exchanged. Info dump is nevertheless info dump even when it's batted back and forth in dialogue. But some authors can make an exchange of facts riveting. How do they do it? I can tell you one thing: What makes such dialogue gripping is not the inherent fascination of the topics of viral engineering, corporate case law, or somebody else's crazy family.

Early on in her novel
White Lies
(2008), Jayne Ann Krentz faces the problem of explaining to the readers the defining quality of her heroine, Clare Lancaster: She is a human lie detector. Now, this is not so unusual in the world of Krentz's Arcane Society, subject of a number of her stories. Still, being hip to every white lie you're told must be highly annoying, even paralyzing. How does Clare live with that talent?