So how does description help us to avoid being mediocre puppet masters? Well, I've taught writing for many years, and what I've noticed is that students coming to writing often assume that what matters is the impressive stuff. Big emotions, exciting ideas, or hair raising plots. Emotions, ideas, and plots are needed, but those things only get you part of the way. What's really needed is the basic, humble, hard work of creating a fictional world. That fictional world is brick and mortar. It's made of roads, trees, rooftops, people, rain, and bread. It's made out of the material. As the great Flannery O'Connor wrote in her essay,The Nature in the name of Fiction. The fact is that the material of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. One thing to warn you about is that writing a short story or a novel excerpt is slow work. I have a poet friend who is always making fun of fiction writers. I'm so glad I'm a poet and not a fiction writer, he says. Being a fiction writer is so much work. You guys have to describe every little thing. Bob opened the door. Bob walked out the door. Bob walked down the sidewalk to his car. Bob opened the car door and got in the car. Well the truth hurts. He's kind of right. As fiction writers we're having to move our characters through time and space, though it must be nice to be a poet. I'd like to watch this short clip of Margret Atwood talking about what is hardest about writing novels from her point of view. Even though the word Atwood uses exposition as a literary term is different from our topic description. Margaret Atwood's point still applies. Much of the writer's task is very basic, even mechanical, moving characters through time and space. Even if you do not describe these movements. Because you do not want to write like the poet says, Bob open the door, Bob walks to the car. Even if your fiction is the most fair or impressionistic or nonlinear sort. You still must be aware of fictional time and space for yourself. Because you are the creator of the story world and you're the dreamer. How do you move your characters through time and space? Well, let's start with time. How do we move characters through time? Here are two new words, scene and summary. What is a scene? A scene is the basic building block of narrative fiction. A scene covers a relatively short period of time, often just several minutes or hours, in close detail. Summary compresses a relatively long period of time, hours, days, or even years, into a relatively short amount of text. A scene in fiction is not unlike a scene in a stage play. It takes just about the same amount of time to read it or act it as it would take in real time. Scenes mimic real time in that they follow the actions in a play by play, moment to moment manner. But fiction often encompasses a longer duration of time then that of a play. Years or generation, and in order to do that you need its summaries to provide background or context or condense time or events. So scene and summary function together in a kind of intuitive dance on the part of the writer. When a moment really requires vividness however you do what anyone wants attention knows how to do, you make a scene. The best way to understand what scenes can be is to read some of the great ones. I'd like to pause now while you read D.H. Lawrence's highly persuasive story, The Odor of Chrysanthemums. This story written by Lawrence in 1909 describes a woman in rural working class England waiting for some bad news. Read it attentively but don't clench too tightly around it, or around anything you don't understand. Allow yourself to enter the dream, and to wait with Elizabeth, then let's return and think through this story together.
