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Even if the real world cannot be used as a blueprint for your fiction, it can be a starting point. But ONLY a starting point. As you look around you begin to invent. Start asking questions. Then provide your own answers, without worrying about whether or not they are “true,” for the life you witness around you must only be a starting point for that other world your imagination must build.
And what kind of world will this be? As Robert Penn Warren says,“a world purged of the distractions, confusions, and accidents of ordinary life.”
What this means is that your major characters will have to be provided with reasons, good reasons, for doing what they do. Time is compressed as much as possible, so there does not appear to be any lag as the story or novel progresses. Only those incidents which develop the theme and advance the story will be written about in detail, as much of the minutiae of daily life is overlooked: meals, rest room breaks, irrelevant quarrels and conversations,annoying but pointless delays, and so on. The dialogue will be to the point, developing character and helping advance the story line. It is, in short, a streamlined world---and one designed, essentially, for maximum dramatic impact.
Naturally, this is a deception---a lie about life---which means that the writer must be an expert prevaricator, able to create the illusion that this formalized, speeded-up universe he or she spreads before the reader is real when in fact it is only an elaborate fabrication. This is not a simple task, indeed, the writer who cannot convince the reader of the reality of the unreal world has failed in the writer's primary task. But it can be done. Writers are doing it every day.
How, for instance, does Kafka make us believe that a man could be transformed overnight into a gigantic cockroach? By simply stating this fact in his opening sentence: As Gregor Samas awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.The clear statement of Kafka's premise enables Kafka to go on from that point with perfect fictional logic. And indeed, what follows is perfectly logical.
And that last is an important point to remember. Unlike the illogic of much that happens to us in this real world, that fictional land we are creating---even the nightscapes of Kafka---must follow a rigidly logical cast. The most fantastic tales are but logical development from a single basic premise stated at the outset by the author and accepted by the reader, no matter how illogical or contrary to the laws of nature this premise may be.
Once the reader accepts that Gregor Samas has been transformed overnight into a cockroach, for instance, the reader will accept as well as that which logically follows from that premise---and as long as Kafka develops his story from that premise and does not violate it arbitrarily, the reader will find himself within the walls of that terrible bedroom watching in horror as Gregor's little legs struggle wildly, futilely....
In short, unlike life, little of worth happens in a story or novel by chance or arbitrary accident. Though life may be filled with marvelous coincidences and cluttered with annoying and sometimes deadly happenstance---all apparently without design---the novel or short story cannot afford that luxury. It must be compressed, ordered, and---above all---logical.
You would do well to think of fiction, then, as a story or novel created by one who has deliberately set out to construct a world and inhabitants “purged” of the untidy clutter of the real world, as the writer compresses time, alters some facts, and embellishes others. And this tidily compressed world in which people know where they are going and managing somehow to get there is a world demanded by the reader, who sometimes wants to be soothed, at other times enlightened, even horrified---but always entertained.
Of course, mention of the reader's role in all this may surprise some---and offend others. And certainly no one has ever determined scientifically just why the reader seems to need in their fiction what years of reading and writing fiction have convinced me they do. But the writer must never forget that the reader is the other half of the equation he or she is trying to solve---and any dismissal of that fact will only gain for that writer's efforts a massive indifference such arrogance deserves.
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T.T.F.N.
William Pattison
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