A good fictional character is built by a combination of story actions and, usually to a lesser extent, descriptive narrative. Technically, dialogue can be the most useful way a character expresses emotions, emotions that often give special impact to a reader because the character is often unaware of what they are revealing . . . the pulse of dramatic irony working. In dialogue sections, there are a number of thoughts and skills an author can use to create consistent characters with plausible emotions said in realistic, yet often and necessarily surprising, ways. Here are a few guidelines.

1) No exposition. In some writing, skillful exposition is possible and necessary. But when building characters who will engage the reader and evoke sympathy, exposition through dialogue pushes the reader away, reminds the reader that the character is only a tool of the writer to tell a story, rather than a unique fictional individual worthy of caring and involvement.

2) No author presence. In fictional dialogue the character is speaking for him or herself. The character is not a marionette for the writer. Nothing that tints of an author's idea or presence can be permitted for excellence. (The writer can effectively use narrator as storyteller and incorporate ideas there.) Writers must honor the character they build and not use the character’s personality for their own needs and aggrandizement. Let the dialogue build him or her. In genre and memoir, the author writes characters often using their own (the author's) ideation, experiences, and syntax. The result is a sliding scale of author/character speaking that weakens character credibility and development.

3) Don't insert character-antithetical cleverness. Few if any jokes and never clever sayings in any character that isn't Noel Coward or Oscar Wilde work in serious fiction. These are almost always the writer seeking admiration for their wit. Let humor come from the inherent thinking between the characters, and irony in the plot. Irony, sarcasm, metaphoric-layered contrast are the humor tools for the writer of serious fiction. Slapstick can detract from credibility and erode dramatic momentum necessary for good prose.

4) Make dialogue believable. Absolute adherence to character saying what the readers think they would say if perceiving themselves as the character is essential. A writer must know and target the reader. This builds trust and binding with character that results in memorability and uniqueness.

5) Let characters react to other characters. Sophisticated, seamless description of characters reacting to other characters, or reaction through the dialogue, strengthens the emotional, often subliminal,  impact on the reader. Rather than describing a character's emotion, let another character see it and react.

6) Consider dialogue among characters a valuable source for answering questions in the minds of the reader about plot, characters, or what story is about. It advances the story and integrates character into story momentum.

7) No soliloquies (honor the character). Few characters will be created so the expounding, or even the hint of expounding, on extraneous topics is credible or useful for character development.

8) Gage dialogue to character intelligence (not some other standard). Don't make the dialogue smarter or dumber than the character that has been created.

Character-based fiction is a gift by a fiction author to the characters created. Let the characters be themselves and never let them default as tools for the author to tell his or her story. Well-fashioned characters begin to grow, imbed themselves in a reader's memory, and evoke emotions in ways no other prose–or visual or auditory storytelling–is capable of. To master effective dialogue is not an easy process and not attainable by all, but to try is well worth the effort. And most importantly, it is one major essence for the writing of good fiction .

Here is a story that has lasted for hundreds of years. It will serve as an example to clarify the meaning of character-based story.

Once upon a time, in a village near the deep dark woods, Little Red Riding Hood wanted to take Grandma, who was very ill, a basket of goodies. She would have to walk through the woods for half an hour to get to Grandma's house, which was in another village. 'Be careful,' her mother said. 'Go straight on the path and do not talk to strangers.' So Little Red goes into the woods and meets a wolf who wants to eat her but can't because there is a woodsman nearby. The wolf asks her where she's going, whom she will visit, and where. Red tells all. The wolf runs off and Red continues her journey, leaving the path to chase butterflies, and pick bluebells, and dip her toe in a cold refreshing stream. When she gets to Grandma’s house, the wolf has already arrived because she failed to heed her mother's warning about staying on the path. He imitated Red's voice to gain entrance, and he devoured Grandma. Then he dressed in her night clothes and crawled in bed under the covers. Little Red arrives. He tells Little Red to come in. As the wolf exposes himself little by little, Red listens to his smooth talk when she asks him about his big eyes, hairy arms and big teeth. Unsuspecting, she gets in bed and he devours her.

What has held this story in the collective consciousness of humans for centuries? First, it carries three significant messages. Listen to your parents. Innocence and naïveté can cause irreversible harm. Don't trust a wolf in grandma's clothing . . . you can get devoured. There is also the effective metaphor of the wolf for a child predator. But the significance of the story is mainly carried by the narrative story structure. Little Red is a character-based story. The plot moves forward because of Red's human characteristics — especially her human foibles: she holds onto her childhood innocence, and she disobeys her mother.

This story could be framed as genre fiction. It could still be interesting, but it might not be as lasting because of the structure. Here is a possibility.

Red Riding Hood is kidnapped from the woods near her house. A few hours later some bones and scraps of skin are found at her grandmother's house a mile away. The police are called and discover from the gray hairs trapped in grandma's hand-woven throw rug that the wolf did it. The wolf escapes. Red's mother grieves.

This version is a statement of happenings. Red is a part of the plot, but she is not driving the plot with her disobeying her mother and her wallowing in her innocence . . . and also the author would lose the effectiveness of the wolf metaphor when the story moves from fantasy to a more reality-based police procedural.

Here is another genre framework for the story. An action-adventure genre story. Something like this.

Red decides to go to Grandma's house for a visit. In the deep dark forest she meets a woodsman. The woodsman is tracking a wolf that has eaten two children in the last two weeks. Red wants to help find the culprit. The woodsman agrees and sends her out as a decoy. The wolf tries to attack Red, but she stabs him with a knife the woodsman has given her. The wolf runs away, but the woodsman is able to follow the trail of blood. He finds the wolf near Grandma's house, and after a life-threatening duel, the wolf is killed. Red falls in love.

In this story, again, all that happens in the plot is circumstantial. Who Red really is makes little difference. What she says, thinks, or wants would be irrelevant to the story. The same story could be written with Pinocchio as the major character.

To drive home the point, an author could restructure so that Red's decisions do drive the plot to become more character-based again, but in another way. And the story gains meaning.

Red Riding Hood's grandma, who lives in another village, is very rich and has a new dress, a box of Swiss chocolates, and bath oil waiting for Red Riding Hood for her birthday party the following week. But Red wants her presents now, even though her mother tells her to wait until her father can go with Red through the woods, which can be very dangerous. But Red goes anyway to get her presents early, meets the wolf in the forest, and is devoured.

Red is back driving the plot again, and there is significant meaning related to Red's human attributes. Greed and impatience can be disastrous. The writer seeking to write great literary fiction can take two important points from Red Riding Hood story: Structure the story to display what it means to be human through character-based plot, and make the story significant. In Red's case, the significance is partially related to the dire consequences of getting eaten by a wolf after Red's seemingly almost innocuous actions.

Click here to learn more about narration of stories and characterization.

"Put your glasses on," Margaret said to her son.   He touched his neck wet with sweat and wiped his hand on his tee shirt.  The back window was down a few inches for ventilation and gave a steady breathy growl at highway speeds.

"The glasses, Ben."

He picked up the thick lenses from the seat and with a couple of missed tries, pulled down the temple straps over his head.

"We'll play a game, Ben," she said.  "You want to play a game?"

"Play game," he said.  She passed an eighteen-wheeler leaving plenty of room when she tucked back into the slow lane.  The sun was mid morning and wavy lines of invisible heat from the road were already distorting the view.  Ben rocked back and forth; she let him go on for a while.

"Can you see the clouds?" she asked.  There was a line of cars slowed in the fast lane . . . and bumper to bumper.  She kept a good distance to let them sort it out.  Ben stopped rocking and was shaking his head from side to side.

"Look up," she said.  "In the sky.  Clouds are in the sky, Ben.  Next to where God lives."

"God live," he said.  He strained against the seat belt to lean forward and look up through the windshield.

"Can you see them?"

"See them," he said.

"Well, we'll find one and we'll name it.  Tell what it is.  There are all sorts of things up in the sky."

"I do good," he said.

"Of course you will."

"I do good," he said again.

"Find one up there.  Keep looking.  Tell me what it is."

He put his hand on the glass.

"You can't touch them, Ben.  They're far away."

He took his hand down.  "Far," he said.

"What does it look like, Ben?  Does it remind you of something?"

Ben stared.  Finally he said: "Weekie."

She didn't respond for a long moment.  He was looking at her, grinning.   

"She's gone, Ben."

"Gone," he said.  He continued to look.   "Story?" he said to the cloud.

"She's gone, Ben.  She's in heaven with the angels.  She won't be here to tell you stories anymore."

"I love you," he said to the cloud.  Sorrow altered his usual smile and his eyes were moist.

"It's okay, " she said, talking to herself as she often did these days.  What if he did believe Weekie was a cloud?   There was no harm.  

He slept a while.   So as not to wake him, she passed the rest stop where they would have exercised.   A truck horn blast woke him.    She said, "Look, Ben.  More clouds."

In less than an hour she drove into the closest city to their small town.  She found her ex-husband sitting in the park near the museum where he usually was in the mornings on the rare days she had to find him.  She parked at the curb on a yellow line and honked a few times.  He folded his blanket into a long rectangle and wrapped it around his neck.  He stuffed gloves and two long scarves into a laundry bag, then put on a woolen ski cap that he pulled down over his ears.  She couldn't tell if he was sober.  She hadn't seen any bottles near him as he packed up.  He came to the car, opened the back door and climbed in.

"It's Daddy, Ben."

"Daddy," Ben said.

She made no effort to greet her husband.  Her intense aversion had turned to dispassionate distaste a couple of years ago.   Even from the front seat she could smell the sweet acrid breath of bad booze and indigestion.  

"Hey, my little man," he said.

"Lil' man," Ben said without looking around, and he started rocking backward and forward.

She pulled to the side of a street and took a city map from a folder in the side door pocket.   She studied the map on the steering wheel. 

"He's no better," her ex-husband said.  "He seems worse."

"Weekie died," she said, following a street on the map with her finger.  "There's no one."  She looked up in time to see her ex-husband shrug in the rearview mirror.  She pulled back into traffic.

"You got the money?" he said.

She didn't answer. 

"All three hundred?"

"Three," Ben said.

"I ain't doing this if you ain't got it all," her ex-husband said.

Ben looked up, but they were in the city now and it wasn't easy to find clouds.

"You got it all?"

She paused at stop sign looking up the street for the office building. 

The lawyer was not in today.  But the receptionist was a notary.

"Won't a lawyer need to sign?" Margaret asked the receptionist.  The receptionist looked at the papers.  "He’s already signed," she said.  She looked up.  "I'll need identification."

She knew her ex-husband wanted the money first, but the presence of the receptionist kept him quiet.  She handed his expired driver's license that she kept for him so he wouldn’t lose it to the receptionist who studied the picture intently for a few seconds and then looked at him.  "Sign here," the receptionist said.   Her ex-husband wrote his name.  Then she let go of Ben's hand and signed below her ex-husband’s scrawl.

Outside her ex-husband grabbed her arm. 

"Don't touch me," she said.  She backed away and reached into her purse.  She gave him the money and waited as he counted. 

"I'll drop you at the bus station," she said. 

He seemed more subdued now that he had the money.  She thought he was probably on his way to the Carolina coast for a while before he headed South for the winter.  But she could never be sure.

She let him out at the bus station.  He said nothing as he left.  She turned off the motor.  She took Ben's suitcase from the  trunk and opened it on the back seat.  She got a clean shirt and changed it for the already damp one he had on.   She left the suitcase on the back seat.  As she slid in the front, she checked her folder again.  She had the signed papers with her now, thank God, and the health records from the doctors and the hospital.  She strapped Ben back into his seat. She drove following the route signs out of the city where she rarely came for business or pleasure.  In twenty-five minutes she was back on the freeway. 

"Look again for clouds, Ben.   See what you can see."

Ben stared and after a while he said, "See."

"That's good, Ben."

"I did good."

"Yes."

She paused before she said, "Always look for clouds Ben, and think about me coming to visit."

"Whizit," he said.

"Visit means come to see you.  Come to be with you."  But she knew she could rarely get off work to make this long drive.

She drove well under the speed limit for another two hours.  The signs marking the distance to Gowanda were now interspersed every few miles.  Ben had been looking out the side window; for the last few miles his attention had been still on the sky.

"Cloud," Ben said excitedly.

She glanced up.  "It looks like a cow."

"Mommie!" he said.

She laughed.  "Mommie doesn't look like a cow," she said.  But she was deeply touched.

She patted the side of his head with the palm of her hand while keeping her eyes on the road.  She put her hand back on the wheel.

She wished she could feel better about his new accomplishment.   But he'd forget her soon enough and she'd be lost in the sky with Weekie.  Her heart ached so that she frowned and took her eyes off the road for an instant to look at him.   When she looked back to the road, she could just make out the sign for Gowanda–34 miles.

She tried not to think of the relief she hoped would come when he had caregivers.  But an unformed dream of future normalcy had invaded her heart and mind, and it brought on ever-present pain of guilt.               

She pulled into a rest stop and took him into a stall in the ladies restroom.  After he finished, she bought him Goldfish from a vending machine and opened the bag for him when they were back in the car.

He'd finished the Goldfish and she gave him a Mars Bar with the wrapper off.  He ate it slowly but took big bites.  She wiped stray chocolate off his hands and mouth with a tissue from a box she had under the seat behind her feet.

"What is it, Ben?"

He pointed to the sky.  He turned.  "Mommie."  He grinned.

She followed the signs.  The road was two-lane now.   She wanted to stop the car and take him in her arms, envelope him with a hug he'd never forget.  But it would only confuse him, scare him.  She saw the three-story institute, it's main building with a clock tower and a wing on each side, like open arms, the grounds not well tended.  She pulled up a long drive that curved to the front entrance.  She could see paint peeling on the windowsills, and the brick walls pocked with holes from lost mortar and crumbled bricks.  A door to the side of the main double door had two pieces of white typing paper tacked side-by-side at eye level and "Reception" written in black marker.

"I did good?" Ben asked as she unbuckled his seat belt.

"Yes, Ben. You did real good."

It is 1941.  Isaac the Jew and Rebecca, his wife of twenty years, stand in line at the checkpoint between Germany and Switzerland for three hours before they reach the barrier. 

“Passports,” the guard says in German.  Isaac hands over his documents.

“You are from . . . ?”

“Born in Munich,” Isaac says.

“You are going to Zurich?”

“No, no.  To Basel.  I must meet my brother’s daughter now orphaned.  She is alone and will be waiting at the train station.  Friends have sent her.”

“You, woman,” the guard says, “where are your papers?”

Rebecca does not look up from her frantic search in her bag.  “I cannot find them,” she says.  She has slipped into her native Polish.

“She will find them,” Isaac says.

“Go to the back of the line,” the guard says.  “Next.”

Isaac grabs Rebecca’s arm and takes her to the side.

“Incompetent,” he whispers.

“I thought they were here,” she pleads.  “Maybe you have them.”

“Why would I have them?  He sets down his satchel then empties the contents of her bag on the ground.  Unzips, unbuttons, unwraps . . . but there are no papers.

“I must go to meet Anna.” Isaac says. “She will be frightened.”

“I cannot stay here,” Rebecca says,  “One of the women said Gestapo make arrests.”

“You must find your papers.”

“They were in my bag.  Someone has stolen them.”

“The papers must be found to cross the border.  Stay here.  I will be back the day after tomorrow with Anna.”

“You don’t care that I can’t go,” she sighed.

He held her shoulders and brought his face close to hers.  “I am not the cause of your carelessness.  It will soon be over.  Anna will be with us.”

She cries.  “You care more for your brother’s illegitimate child than your own wife.”

“Hold your tongue,” he says.

He releases her.  “Hide for your safety.  Do not be conspicuous.”

He goes back to the line and passes into Switzerland without restraint.  At the Basel train station he finds Anna sitting alone on a bench against the outside station wall under an overhang to keep out of the rain.

Anna looks up.  “Is that you, Papa?

He takes the child in arms.  “Yes, it is me.  Your Papa.”  Her likeness to her loving mother pleases him with sweet memories of their time together.

“Mama said you were a small man,” she says looking up at him after he puts her down.

“Your mama was a good woman.  Grab your things and we will go to a new life.  It is all arranged.  Do you have your papers?”

“Yes, Papa.”  She pats the pocket of her sweater.

“They are not safe there,” Isaac says.

He takes the papers from her, opens his satchel, and tucks them in the top slot between his other papers.  

It takes a half a day to walk to the border.  At the official Swiss booth Isaac shows the agent his papers from his pocket.  Then he opens up his case.  He hands papers over.

“You are Rebecca?” the Swiss agent says in French.

Anna laughs.  “Non, Monsieur.  Je m’appel Anna.”

Isaac opens his case again.  He finds Anna’s papers in the top slot. 

“Excuse moi, Monsieur.”  Isaac says with a strained laugh.  He holds out the papers to the agent.

“And who is this Rebecca?” the agent says handing the papers back.

“She is my wife, Monsieur.”

Isaac trembles and the papers flutter to the ground.  Anna helps collect them.

“You must be more careful with your documents,” the agent says.

“It is my eyes, monsieur.  I lost my glasses and do not see well.”  But he had kept Rebecca’s papers to prevent her from talking to Anna.  Rebecca must never know his relation to the girl.

Anna’s papers are accepted.  They pass into Germany.  Isaac begins searching for Rebecca.

“She is old with hair like cobwebs,” Isaac says to Anna.  “She does not know about your mama or that you are ma petite poupée.”  He smiles.  “She thinks Uncle Aaron was your father.  That will be our secret, no?” 

“Will we see her soon?”

“She is probably hiding,” Isaac says.

After two hours of searching in alleys and behind buildings, Isaac knocks on doors of homes in the village.  Maybe someone has taken Rebecca in for the night.  They look.  But no one has seen a woman called Rebecca.

In the town square the butcher remembers seeing a woman in the street hiding in the shadows near the end of yesterday.  But he does not know where she went.

“What will I call her?” Anna asks.

“We will call her, Mama,” Isaac says.  “Can you do that?”

“I think so,” Anna says nodding.

The baker has been busy from four AM making the dough for fresh loaves and baguettes. 

“Yesterday before dawn,” the baker says,  “the Gestapo herded Jews and people without papers into a truck.  I saw her.  But no one knows where they were taken.”

Anna takes her father’s hand and pulls him away.  He is dry-eyed, his mouth open, his chapped lips cracked.  “Will we find her, Papa?” Anna asks.

“Yes.  Of course,” he says.  He hides his trembling hands in his pockets.  “She is here . . . somewhere.”

We left our two snowmobiles, crossed a frozen river that I knew wouldn’t carry the vehicles with my brother-in-law Errol weighing 340 stripped and riding his twelve year-old stepson, Sean, my sister’s kid by her first husband.  I led the way shouldering my Winchester 70, Sean with a 22 rifle, his legs spread wide trying to keep in my snowshoe tracks, and Errol with a Savage 110.

We checked traps. Two snares were empty and one of the spring loaders had a small hind leg in the clamp claws but something had ripped off the body.

“Coyote did it,” Errol said.

“Bigger than that,” I said.

We began to circle back to the rigs.  Sean’s 22 discharged.        

“I’m hit” Errol moaned to scare the kid.

Sean started to cry.  He didn’t think good and had no schooling.

Errol slapped him on the back of the head.  “Grow up,” he said. “I was joking.”

Sean stood.  “Bear,” he said pointing to the edge of the clearing.  The sun was low and the shadows long over the snow cover, and the trees in the forest seemed welded together.

“He’s big,” Errol said. 

Sean fired a shot. The bear reared back on his haunches. 

“He’s government protected.  You hurt him, the boogie man put you in jail.”

The bear had dropped on all fours and was walking toward us in a squiggle line.

“Let’s move.” Errol said and broke into a run.  But Sean fell.  I stopped.  Earl reached his rig and took off.  I got the kid standing.

“Don’t run,” I said.  “But move fast.”  We only had a hundred feet to go when the bear hit full stride on all fours. 

We mounted, and I got the rig moving, Sean straddling a gas can. 

We caught up to Errol.

“You left the kid,” I said.

Errol shrugged. “He’s your blood kin,” he said, “not mine.”

A cloud cover rolled in and we had to camp early.  We rigged a nine-foot high platform on four sturdy pines for me and Errol to sleep.  Within reaching distance, I strung a hammock high up for Sean.

The moon reflected pewter patches of light on the snow.  We were unable to sleep.  After midnight we heard limbs cracking.  The bear was on us.  Errol reached for his gun but his weight shifted, and he tumbled to the ground, his gun trapped under him.  The bear tore at him.  Errol screamed, then gurgled a moan.  Then nothing. 

“He going to eat us?” Sean asked.

I could see the whites of the bear’s eyes, his snout slashed with Errol’s blood. He swatted at us with his claws and the platform rocked.  I clutched a tree trunk and looked for a gun. 

The bear turned from Errol and roared.  The kid whimpered.  I needed a distraction.  I unsheathed my knife and cut the rope to the kid’s hammock thinking he’d be a momentary diversion.  He fell. “Run,” I yelled.

But the bear caught the kid in the air.  The kid screamed but was silent by the time I shinnied down the farthest pine and ran for my rig.

I drove twenty miles and dismounted at the top of a ridge.  First light painted me with warmth I knew was imagined.  In minutes the sun broke the horizon, blood red with an orange halo, and the distant cloud underbellies turned purple.  I’d never seen such beauty.

“Thank you, dear God,” I yelled as the sun exploded into the sky.  I was alive.   I was special.  “You the man,” I yelled to the heavens.  My echo faded.  Behind me, a coyote howled in the landscape.  Then I heard the cracks of a dead tree limbs . . . something big, something heavy.

His sweet troubled son, alone in his room; he and his wife sitting downstairs irritated by the bass thrust of the loud music coming from the second floor.   They knew he had taken drugs, taken him to a psychiatrist, paid for the Prozac that insurance didn't cover; but they didn't know that he had taken a loaded shotgun from the locked cabinet, a gun that he put with the stock on the floor and while sitting on the bed placed the barrels under his chin and pushed down on the trigger. 

After the explosion they were quickly inside the room.  The gun had fallen to the floor.  His son had fallen to one side; his face gone: the lower jaw blown away, a few upper teeth haphazardly clinging to flesh.  Nose and lower lids gone, the deflated eyeballs wrinkled like a fallen soufflé.  His son’s legs, then his arms, went into spasms; he was alive but without air.

I'm a surgeon, he thought.  Focus.  Think like a doctor and not a father. 

His wife had crumpled to the floor, her hands over her eyes, wailing.

He held his son's head with both hands; straightened the torso.  "Get up," he said to his wife.  "You've got to do this."  She stood.  "Slide the pillow under his shoulders."

He let the head fall back hoping to find the glistening end of the trachea.   There were no landmarks, only flesh and blood, and bits and slivers of bone.

"Bring me a razor, a tooth brush, towels."  He needed tools . . . and he needed to keep her busy.

His wife was sobbing now.  Her bare feet made a dampened sound on the wooden floor of the hall.

He supported the head trying to find a position so his son might suck in air. He pressed the chest, to see if expulsion of air could show him the trachea.  Should he let his son die?  He saw no air.  If he lived, he'd have no life.  He'd be blind, unable to eat or taste, never smell, might be deaf.  Never talk.  He'd be trapped in the dark with no way to communicate.

She returned.  He swabbed with the towel, told his wife to press, to stem the ooze.  He used the smooth end of the toothbrush to separate tissue.  "Bring me some dental floss," he said. 

It would be a blessing for his son to die.  But he refused to wish his son had been more thorough, not left him with these decisions.  He saw the glint of the tracheal cartilage.  He slipped the handle of the razor behind it.  His son could live, at least to get to emergency.  There was the swhoosh of the intake of air.  It would have to be now, before she came back.  He still had time.  How crucial for her.  It could allow her grief to shrink to a memory with time.

His wife handed him the dental floss.  Now he could firmly isolate the trachea, knot it gently, hold it in a position until a cannula could be inserted when help came.  "Bring wet towels," he said.

He looked at the head of the son he had loved, a head he would never recognize again.  His heart ached.  He leaned forward and kissed the one ear that was left.  Was there movement?  He touched the ear again running his finger along the pinna.  Yes.  The head seemed to move, as a bee is attracted to a flower.   He could not let his son die. 

He adjusted the trachea opening to assure air would pass.

At the sight of his son, the ambulance crew froze with an instant perception of what the future might bring.

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William H. Coles

Read an excerpt from the book

WHC

I'm in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the Fine Arts Work Center to attend a workshop on fiction writing by Julia Glass. Julia is a winner of the national Book Award for fiction for Three Junes. She is also the author of The Whole World Over, I See You Everywhere, and The Widower's Tale.

WHC

I'd like to thank you, Julia, for talking with storyinliteraryfiction.com.

JG

I'm honored to speak with you. I love the site.

WHC

Thank you very much.

My first question is about story—what story means to you. How do you see story acting in our lives today? Is it taking on increased importance? And story delivery seems to be changing . . . reality TV as an example. Overall, what has become of the prose story?

JG

Well, I am extremely resistant to a lot of modern versions of story. In particular, reality TV, which I've hardly seen. YouTube, to some extent, now provides miniature swatches of story that people pass around to one another. So I would rather address story in a narrower sense, if you don't mind. I mean story as fiction in the old-fashioned sense, as compared with movies and television for instance—because I do love movies and I occasionally watch some television . . . there is a lot of fine story telling on cable television these days. I have to admit, even though I didn't have cable for years, I rented all episodes of the Sopranos recently, and though I wanted to dismiss it, I found that, after watching an entire season in a week (which is a frightening thing to do in terms of your dreams), I was so amazed how equally character- and plot-driven that series was. So there is much to be admired in fiction that is not told through prose. That said, I do believe prose as something we read to ourselves at our own pace will always fulfill a certain desire. . .

WHC

A human need?

JG

Need might be too strong a word. We can survive without fiction. First of all, one of the big differences between watching a movie and reading a book is that one is entirely visual and one is in words. One could say "I'm a visual person" or "I'm a verbal person" —leading to a preference for one medium over the other —but you go at your own pace when you read a book. That's not true for a movie. I [do] find it harder and harder to find long periods of time when I can read, and [I] come at it a different way if [I'm] able to do that, but the experience of reading a story or a book in print is a more and closed experience than watching a movie or a television show. And it allows you to immerse yourself in a more leisurely way—and leisure might not be the right word—but we all have rhythms; we have clocks, and I feel a story as we read it has a very personal rhythm to it.

I'm actually a very slow reader and I don't read as many books as I would like to read. Many people are astonished that I'm not up on as much contemporary fiction as I would like to be. But—this is the thing—the true paradox of reading meaningful, good, affecting fiction is that it's something you do essentially alone, yet what it does is make you feel not so alone. Great stories are about human endurance, about getting through ordeals, whether it’s war or loss of a love, or illness . . . how we go through and get through all the obstacles and all the pain that we experience as human beings. Stories about these themes underscore how those ordeals are solitary, much like the experience of reading a book or a story is solitary. And that's the power of fiction. Another role of fiction is to put us into the shoes of people that we'd never know otherwise, and into other cultures. Or we can experience it as travelogue . . . like how cool I'm getting to see Ethiopia. But we see how human nature is shaped by the experience of being in another culture, or being in poverty, or being an immigrant, or being a child soldier. I could think of a billion experiences. So in that respect, fiction is the greatest teacher of empathy.

WHC

You mentioned the power of fiction. Certainly most [fiction] readers would agree that fiction gives an advantage in understanding and perceiving significance in a story. What should writers be aware of as to how to structure stories to take advantage of this special attribute of fiction? Are there parallels to film? In terms of internalization and other technical advantages that fiction has—and are not available [as readily]—compared to filmmakers?

JG

First of all, I’ve never been involved in movie making. I romanticize that world like the next person. But one thing I do know is that any movie or television show is the product of several people. You have a director, actors, writers, but also many other minds that come together to create a movie or a television show. And that’s not the case with a work of fiction.

WHC

Is that an advantage or disadvantage?

JG

Both. Because you have more control than people who make a movie have. And the disadvantage, though I don’t [really] want to call this a disadvantage, but a more specific requirements for the effective storyteller or good writer is that you really must be good at language. Movies [do] have different strengths. I was just listening to a conversation on the beach about Terrence Mallick’s "A Tree of Life" —it's been much maligned and much admired, and one person was saying that as long as you understand it doesn’t follow a conventional storyline, as long as you go into it knowing it will simply be this visually extravagant, glorious thing, you’ll enjoy it. I thought, Can I do that as a novelist? And I suppose you can say that in some fiction, style is what you’re reading for; you're reading for the gorgeousness of the language.

But I have to have some human involvement there too, whether it’s a character study . . . maybe not a lot happens . . . or it’s a story I can’t put down because I must know what happens to these people. So I think that filmmakers have a broader range of talents than writers do. Now, some writers are better stylists than others. What does that mean? They have a more noticeable style. For other writers, their greatest strength is creating unique and engaging characters. But their writing, for my purposes, has to be more than merely serviceable. You can create fine characters but if your skill with words doesn’t match, you're going to lose a lot of readers. I would venture that you cannot create great character or vivid settings—something a movie can do by holding a camera up to a sunset—if you don’t have real control over language.

I’m not a big fan of Hemingway, I’ll just say it; I find his style too noticeable, it takes me away from the story because I’m noticing Hemingway’s style . . . but people love him. So, different writers have different sets of verbal skills. We’re called writers, right? We aren’t storytellers, we’re storywriters. At some level when you’re watching a movie, at some level there is probably, at the base of it, good writing, but there are a whole lot of other skillsets that go into movies that are contributed by a lot of people.

WHC

So in literary fiction, what, in your mind, makes a good, memorable, lasting character that entices a good literary reader?

JG

First of all, for me, the most intriguing characters are those who are, from the start, extremely flawed . . . possibly disagreeable or repugnant in some way to the reader. In some ways that’s because, as we read on, we discover what we’re uncomfortable with, what we’re least comfortable with, and such qualities are often those we have in common with the characters. Flaws that we share and we recognize.

There is always a mirror aspect to the novels we relate to the most. We may not know why. As I like to say, all good fiction is emotionally autobiographical. I believe that writers writing powerful stories are creating meta-situations that are running like a stream alongside their own lives. When I wrote Three Junes; it didn’t occur to me until after I finished that it came directly out of a very tough period of time I had before and during the time of writing that novel, when I went through three terrible things at once—a divorce, the loss of my only sibling to suicide, and the diagnosis of breast cancer in my mid thirties. And yet, there was a suicide in that book; there is a character who takes his life because he is dying of a terminal illness. There is disease in that book, though it's not cancer. Divorce is not an important part of the plot line. What I was writing about is this: how do I go on? How do I get through these seemingly insurmountable sorrows that, by the way, are hitting me all at once? We never do get over the loss of a sibling, or the loss of a loved one, to suicide. And you never have the same attitude toward your health once you have cancer. I mean, I’m fine now, but that changed me forever. And divorce is a very sad event no matter what, even if you’re glad to be free of a marriage as I ultimately was. So, what was I doing there? I have three characters, each of whom has to get past a significant sorrow. It’s as if Three Junes was like a river running parallel to my life that I kept dipping in to. When I wrote that book—it was my first—I was more unconscious of what I was doing than I have been since. . And that's not necessarily good. I really don’t like to know too much about why I’m writing what I’m writing.

WHC

Was it therapeutic for you to write Three Junes?

JG

Well, yes, I think it was. And, you know, I’ve had conversations with writers who say that if your fiction writing feels therapeutic, it is somehow flawed. That real art is an aesthetic act. Well, what I have to say to that is an expletive that I’m not going to say aloud, because I actually think that powerful fiction can be a consolation to the writer, an act of self-exploration.

We’re questioning God in a way. It’s like God won’t answer these questions for us, so who’s going to do it? We’re going to try to do it. There may be something slightly heretical about that. And grandiose. Because we are taking on questions that all people have been asking of the gods since they lived on Mount Olympus.

WHC

When a novel has a close relationship to the author’s life, can there be timeline confusion and loss of credibility if details and ideas are not story authentic? The dual stream idea? How do you keep author opinion, thought, feeling, time detail, that is contemporary say in 2011, from creeping from one stream to the other when writing in the past, say the nineteen fifties, or twenties? In essence, every story takes place in the past; that’s the nature of storytelling. When the author carries the authorial immediate present back into story time, doesn’t that weaken the power of characterization, the credibility of character? Do you think about that? Do you revise to adjust for it?

JG

Did you just ask me ten questions in one?

WHC

I did. (Apologetically.)

JG

I think I know what you’re asking. And let me add, just to be a bit of a whippersnapper, that there are fine novels set in the future . . .

WHC

But even in the future, the story is told as if it is in the author’s past, of necessity in storytelling. And the time differences can still play a significant role for credibility and clarity in a futuristic story.

JG

Right. I am always in a desk chair in this moment of time. And by the way, I admire historical novels, but I doubt I’ll ever have the guts to write one. Also, I don’t want to spend a lot of time in the library, even though I spent most of my childhood there, because I really don’t want to do a lot of research. What I love most is the actual experience of marinating in my characters’ lives. But what you’re pointing out, or what you’re leading toward, in my mind, is that human nature hasn’t changed over the millennia. Questions of love, heartbreak, conflict, whether it’s cultural conflict or military, between children and parents, all these things remain the same. Those human themes can be revisited authentically by us if we can authentically imagine ourselves in the context of any particular time. And since you were just taking my workshop, you've heard me talk about how, when you create a character who is not the same age as you, even if you are the same age, you have to watch yourself at every step to see what assumptions you’re making about what it was like for that person to be eighteen, or eight, or be in Alabama or Paris, France. You must examine every detail.

WHC

Yes.

JG

The first step is to pretend to know more than you do when, say, you imagine what it was like to be eight or eighteen in Paris in 1962. At first, character matters more than authenticity. What I’m essentially concerned with is this human being. This psyche. At first I don’t want to feel too overburdened with research and chronological authenticity, but then I will do research. My favorite way to do research is to interview a person who is close to that character, rather than to go to the Internet or the library. The main character in The Widower's Tale is a librarian at Widener Library, so I interviewed a librarian who'd worked there for years. She's about ten years younger than he is, but she witnessed firsthand the number of earth shaking changes that happened at that library, which in the novel become metaphors for the great many changes in my protagonist's life. And that was very helpful. She also recommended that I read a history of Widener Library, which I did. And that too was very helpful to me.

WHC

Would you agree, then, that knowledge and research allow you as an author to create more within the context of the character and not have the authorial influence from another time [other than the story time]? The reason I ask is to discover ways to prevent the breaking of the fictional dream or the engagement of the reader in the story because the facts are accurate, the time accurate, and the author is thinking inside the character and the character’s story time. So, as you’ve said, the creation is credible to the reader because of the research you’ve done?

JG

Right. You actually have two concerns. One, as you pointed out, is that you don’t accidentally place some glaringly wrong detail in your story (say, someone in 1960 has a cell phone ring in his pocket), but on the other hand, you can’t burden the story with every last detail from your research. That's when, as I like to say, the research creaks. And that’s why I do my research later: because I’m the kind of person who finds out a lot of cool stuff and I can’t bear not to include it. But if I write the story first and then go back and lay over (or under) it the details I found out, the story I created will not allow me to shoehorn in things that don’t belong.

WHC

How do beginnings engage a reader? Of course it varies from story to story, but what are the principles for a good beginning? I don’t mean particularly the rules that are often taught—don’t start out in the past perfect tense, don’t start with dialogue . . .

JG

My new book I read from the other night starts out with dialogue!

WHC

Not my rules necessarily, and just to augment the idea that rules in writing all fiction are often not useful. But are there trends that authors should be aware of so the reader engagement is solid?

JG

Well, there are many choices you make in the beginning. You have to question yourself. Why am I doing this? When am I starting the story? I like to say that, to my mind—and all these rules are meant to be broken—an engaging story starts in a moment of change, opportunity, crisis, conflict, or self-realization. There is a reason you are starting a story at this particular moment.

For me, it’s what a high school English teacher taught me: you start in the middle of the middle. If you look at most fiction, that’s where the story starts; you're carried forward from there, you want to know what happens next, but you’re also carried back on some fashion, usually through conventional flashbacks, where the reader finds out how the character got to this moment in the first place. So the middle is usually a great place to start. Then you have to ask, what’s the voice going to be? And here‘s where what you’re reading can unduly influence you. Let’s say you start instinctively in the first person. Go ahead and write a few pages, then stop and ask yourself: Does this really belong in the first person? So try it in the third person limited point of view. I'll compare the two voices and ask myself which works better. How close do I want the reader to feel to the main character, or the narrator, or to the point of view that I’m presenting? Do I want to feel as if I’m sitting, as we are now, two people facing each other? (Look at the beginning of The Memoirs of a Geisha: the geisha addresses the reader as if they are sitting in a room together and having tea. It's a very daring way to start a book, but it serves the story perfectly because what is a geisha but someone who is taught to engage a companion in intimate conversation? (She’s not a prostitute, by the way.) So I really admire that. I have no idea how long it took Arthur Golden to find that perfect beginning.

So what is the voice? And what is the tense? Maybe it’s not so true now, but maybe ten or twenty years ago the present tense was all the rage and you could hardly be a contemporary writer if you were still writing in the past tense, especially if you were writing a story you wanted the reader to feel in the moment. I go back and forth now. But I often use present tense when I know I’m going to have deep layers of flashback. And that’s a mechanical decision, because if I’m going to have flashbacks within flashbacks, I don't want to get bogged down in tenses. I’m a real editor's writer; I’m very fussy about those kinds of details, so that helps me. But I also like an old-fashioned story that starts in the traditional past tense.

WHC

In class you made a good point that the major thing that engages a reader is the confidence that the writer is a good writer, and I would project on that that they are good storytellers. If readers can feel that, they’ll stick with it regardless if a rule has been followed or not.

JG

Right. And I want to add a point. Language is music. It’s a real pleasure to hear language inside your head. For me, all the more so because I’m such a slow reader. And I don’t like audiobooks. I’ve come to see why those are great for many people but I’m not good at listening to fiction. But even when you're reading silently, you're hearing the author’s voice, so the rhythm the author has chosen is a very important part of entering the dream, as we say. In the movies, it’s interesting to see the dailies, or what ever they’re called, before the music is overlaid. Very few films, even now, are without music. Music is a huge part of the movie. That’s a great tool for establishing both mood and pace.

WHC

It’s poetry, in a sense.

JG

Interesting point. You’re saying music is like language, and I’m saying language is like music. But here's something else: Some writers try to set a certain mood by borrowing lyrics from a certain song or mentioning an iconic piece of music. What's funny is how rarely that works. For instance, simply alluding to Beethoven’s Fifth or Swan Lake won't stir in your reader the emotions that the actual music will. In a way it’s your responsibility to set the ambiance in the way you use language . . . and dialogue. Dialogue can be very snappy and funny. Some very fine fiction writers hardly use dialogue at all, and some use it so much you wonder why they’re not playwrights. You have writers with different strengths, different preferences. But there must be a coherent rhythm of some kind. Or if not, then why not? You’re writing about someone who is schizophrenic perhaps; is there a way to changing up the moods through the language? But that’s one tool. Language is the writer's only tool. You’re not creating some multimedia work.

WHC

You said something interesting. You felt there was not a change necessary for a character in a story.

JG

Someone else said that.

WHC

Do you feel change is necessary [in a character] for a story to be successful?

JG

A character has to go through something, has to endure something. They ultimately meet a challenge, come to a different realization. But that doesn’t mean that the person’s going to change in nature. The character’s nature probably won’t change. Right?

WHC

Right.

JG

But what that character knows about him or herself, or about the world, or about his or her place in the world, that could be what changes. A character goes from A to B, or A to C, but not A to A.

WHC

. . . and it can be something very subtle . . . that the world is not the same now at the end of the story as perceived [by the character or the reader] at the beginning of the story.

In fiction there seems to be a blurring between what used to be considered literary fiction and memoir (and autobiography). In your view, has this weakened the literary story delivery? Strong memoir is enjoyable, and strong literary fiction is enjoyable. But when you combine the two approaches in a single work, does that help or hinder?

JG

Well, first of all, I’m sort of biased against the so-called fictional memoirs that have come out recently, so I haven’t even read some of these works. I certainly haven’t read memoirs that turned out to be somewhat fictional. I’m absolutely disgusted that James Frey’s editors and agent should try to back-pedal when it turns out that they published something that was promised as a memoir and then it turns out to be significantly fabricated. They actually defended its ultimate lack of credibility. You know, that’s bogus. I’m sorry. It’s like Clinton's defense about the relative definition of “is.” I mean fiction is fiction. Memoir should be grounded in actual events.

I loved A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exely, because while he sets out to write a story about a particular period of his life, he tells you up front that it’s going to be both fiction and memoir (1). And somehow, it really works. There is nothing coy about it. What I don’t want to read is something that is half memoir-half fiction because someone couldn’t fully fictionalize their life on the one hand or, on the other, couldn't face being fully honest about it. It's fine to take your life and turn it into a novel—I often talk about that beautiful novel, A Stone Boat by Andrew Solomon which is based on his relationship with his mother and what he went through when she died of cancer. That’s fine. But if you can’t write a memoir because you can’t tell the whole truth, and you can’t write a novel because you can’t figure out how to cross the fictional membrane, then—you know what?—you’re not going to write a good book. I would just firmly state that.

Another thing I want to say about story and memoir, because I didn’t talk about that at the beginning, is that a great memoir is a wonderful book. But there is an awful lot of memoir written today that does little more than satisfy the prurient voyeuristic sense all of us share to some extent. We all want to witness somebody suffering. That’s a very different kind of reader experience than a piece of fiction where a character goes through a passage of suffering. There’s something psychologically different, even if you know it’s made up, even if you buy it as potentially real, even after you finish it and think to yourself, Gosh, I wonder if this author really did go through this chemotherapy, fight in this war. That’s fine. The story feels so authentic that you have to question how much it is based on the author's own life. But that’s different from knowing that the human beings in the book you read really existed and did live those lives. If I read a memoir, and occasionally I do, I want to know that I’m on solid ground. And maybe I’m very fussbudgety about this. That’s my particular taste.

WHC

This seems to relate to the ability to be able to dramatize fiction, particularly narrative descriptive fiction. How does a fiction writer dramatize a narrative passage? How does one do that mechanically? Does it depend on momentum and conflict at the prose level? Do you insert conflict among the characters, the protagonist and the environment?

JG

Creating momentum and drama in fiction happens to some degree organically but then you have to attend to the rhythm of the events in your prose, the pacing, as well as to the prose itself. A woman I met at a party, who reads a lot, told me, “You know, I really don’t like novels where a lot of things happen. I really like novels where I’m just inside somebody’s psyche and get to see why that person acts in ordinary life the way he or she does.” You know, that’s a very particular kind of novel. To a certain extent, my fiction goes there. As I said earlier, I like to marinate in my characters, explore their motivations deeply. But I also like to create dramatic tension, and sometimes it isn’t until I’ve been working on a story for a long time, and by that I mean many months or until I’m reading it over in a final draft, that I notice things have gotten very slow, and then it’s my job to quicken the pace or add a subplot that captures the reader’s interest. You can’t keep a reader unless there is something he or she wants to know. Maybe they only want to know why Maisie stays inside her house, how she gets through her day. There’s a kind of fiction that borders on portraiture. But I want things to happen to my characters. And that requires a lot of manipulation and control.

WHC

What is voice? It seems hard to define. Yet the term is frequently used in different ways. How do you teach voice?

JG

First of all you have to be very interested in burrowing under the skin of other people. It’s like being an actor. Patrick White said he became a novelist because he couldn’t succeed at being an actor. You’ve got to want to play a lot of roles. It’s got to be fun to do that. I also think you’ve got to read a lot of fiction that takes you into different voices to see what’s possible. If you read the same author, the same fiction, all the time, you’re not going to be swimming in a sea with enough temperatures to create your own. I think of Marlon Brando: you’ve got to choose a character you’re really interested in, and you have to try to go deep inside. I think the deepening of character is part of revision—reading over and over and over, catching vocabulary, knowing the character's every tic, taste, and habit: what music would this character listen to, what is something she wouldn’t wear? It’s a matter of getting to know that character. For some writers, that involves another reader. I work very much alone, but there are many successful writers who rely on other sets of eyes to notice, for instance, when a given character is out of character.

WHC

Is that revision process helped by distance? Pausing and then going back to your work months later?

JG

Sometimes, but not necessarily. I don’t write every day, so I have three- or four-week gaps when I’m only thinking about my characters, not writing about them, and when I go back I do have a certain distance from the writing. But I don’t do this deliberately. Then when my editor sees it, I get another break, and when the manuscript comes back to me, I’ll go in and catch things then too. So, yes, distance can be important.

WHC

If one of our readers would like to study with you, how could they access you as a teacher?

JG

I teach most often through week-long workshops here at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The other places are catch-as-catch-can. I just taught a workshop at the Humber School in Toronto. I don’t teach regularly at any one place. You can Google me.

WHC

Do you have that information on your website?

JG

I don't have a website, but my publisher very kindly established a public Facebook page for me with all my events. I sometimes blog and put photos up there, too. www.facebook/authorJuliaGlass.

WHC

Great. Thanks.

WHC

What are you working on now? What can we expect in the future?

JG

I’m halfway through a novel that I see as a quest novel. I’ve always wanted to write a novel in which a hero has to go out and find a specific thing. It’s about a man in his early forties, raised by a single mother, who has never known the identity of his biological father; he's come to accept his mother's refusal to tell him this fact, but his wife demands to know it for the sake of their children. Because he’s in crisis in his life for other reasons, he steps forward to find that out. And of course, as should happen in all the greatest quest stories, in the course of his search, he finds other, more important answers as well as the one he seeks.

WHC

I’d like to thank you very much for your time and valuable insights about writing. I’ve learned a lot.

JG

It was a real pleasure. Thank you.

(1) “Though the events in this book bear similarity to those of that long malaise, my life…I have drawn freely from the imagination and adhered only loosely to the pattern of my past life. To this extent, and for this reason, I ask to be judged a writer of fantasy. ” A Fan’s Notes. Fred Exely

William H. Coles

Lee K. Abbott was born October 17, 1947, in the Panama Canal Zone. His family settled in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Abbott received bachelor's and master's degrees from New Mexico State University. After studying at Columbia College, he earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arkansas in 1977. He has taught at Colorado College, Washington University, Rice University and Case Western Reserve University, where he lectured from 1976 to 1989. He is currently a Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

His work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Southern Review, Epoch, Boulevard, Crawdaddy, and The North American Review. His fiction has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories and The Prize Stories: The O'Henry Awards. He is the author of Dreams of Distant Lives, Strangers in Paradise, Love is the Crooked Thing, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, Living After Midnight, and Wet Places at Noon.His latest collection of stories, All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories, was published by Norton in June 2006.

June 22, 2011

I'm at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, attending a fiction workshop taught by Lee Abbott.  We are in the lounge in Pierce Hall, on a campus busy with summer programs, where Lee, with his fellow Jess Lacher, is teaching nine students.
      Lee attended the University of New Mexico and received his MFA from the University of Arkansas.  He is Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at The Ohio State University.  He has published seven books of short stories, the latest is All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories

WHC

Lee, I’d like to thank you for speaking to storyinliteraryfiction.com, a website devoted to providing resources for writers of literary fiction.

LKA

I’m honored to be asked.

WHC

I’d like to start with your conceptualization of story.  What is the essence of story?  What are the features that are important to you?

LKA

At the heart of story, for me, is character.  Any longer, I don’t remember what has happened in a story as much as I remember who it has happened to.  I get my thrills by being obliged to inhabit the life of someone different from me, though they might be struggling with the same things that I, away from the page, have been struggling with.  So I would begin there, Bill, with the whole notion that Ahab is the reason we have Moby Dick, [the notion] that writers are busy committing to each other those people who galvanize their imaginations.  That, to me, is where story begins.

WHC

Does a story have to have a beginning, middle and end?

LKA

Yes.  I consider myself very old fashioned in that regard.  So, yes.  I’m convinced that the stories I respond to best do have beginnings, middles and ends.

WHC

In traditional concept of a short story, what are the comparative differences between essay and memoir?

LKA

Well, I’ve actually written a short story that I call an essay, because I imagined the writer thinking of it as an essay.  It is also a cheap trick to persuade the reader that the stakes are really higher because it actually happened.  Of course, it’s an act of the imagination.  But I don’t like to otherwise, it seems to me, confuse or inflate the different genres; I like to sit down to a personal essay with the belief it actually happened, as the writer says it did.  That it is actually true. 

Now memoir.  We all understand the personal essay and the memoir are constructed.  It’s not possible for us to remember all these conversations that took place thirty years ago or more.  But I trust the writer to reproduce a sort of faithful simulacrum of the events.  They are true in so far as they address the heart of the moment.  And they do so without contrivance, without duplicity, without anything else that lies within the fiction writer’s toolkit.

WHC

How important is short story in our contemporary lives?

LKA

Well, if you talk to the commercial sorts, they tell you it’s not very important at all.  And it is true, I’m guessing, that most of us who write short stories know—and beginning short story writers quickly learn—that there is no market for short stories.  Yet, I persisted in writing short stories, because it’s the thing, it turns out, that I can do.  I don’t have the patience, or the intelligence, or the discipline—or the knowledge—to write a novel.

WHC

So the short story has decreased in popularity, and it seems TV and film have become the primary media for delivery of the short story.  Why has prose as an important source of short story decreased?

LKA

Reading is work, [in the way] watching TV isn’t.  And remember, the good short story writer is taking advantage of all those tools, as I call them, that the TV, film, or stage writer doesn’t have to deal with.  For me, a story is a whole lot more than the actions that happen in the dialogue that is spoken.  For me, much of the importance of the story lies in the feelings and the thoughts that would otherwise go unrecorded were I to be in a different genre.  So, it’s just work.  Picking up a story is just work.  You’ve got to know those words, you’ve got to have a memory, you’ve got to give it enough time—you know the story is not going to be over, as a TV program [is], after twenty-three minutes.  It might take shorter, it might take longer.

WHC

Do you have any feeling about the type and quality of short story that is now being selected and published being different than the traditional stories of James, or O’Connor, or Chekhov?

LKA

I think there is a lot more variety now.  It’s not bad.  I’m not here to say it’s bad.  As Don Bartholomew used to say, he found it difficult to find a point of view kinky enough to call his own.  Culturally speaking, that might be the case; but I think when it comes to imagining the real world, we’ve got a dizzying variety of writing styles, writing approaches, writing aesthetics, writing material.  It’s fun.  It’s one of the fun things about going to a bookstore, is that if you’re not surprised by what you find there, you’re not paying much attention.

WHC

And you don’t see any influence on the change in popularity of the short story?

LKA

No.  I think because we’re in the media age, the short story is suffering the same way poetry used to suffer.

WHC

You’ve expressed the importance of voice.  And voice seems important in contemporary short stories.  I don’t mean to be flippant, but what is voice?

LKA

Well, I’m glad you asked.  I actually have a definition.

WHC

Good!

LKA

I think it’s the last thing that comes to a writer, and I think it’s a function of material.  My notion is we’re put on earth to write about something.  And I was put on earth to write about six hundred miles of Southwest desert where all the things that happened to me first [occurred], [where I found] a language unique to that place.  So I think it has to do with material.  Can you imagine Updike, who wrote florid prose, can you imagine that [prose] without [his] being a preacher’s kid, being a schoolteacher’s kid in rural suburban Pennsylvania?  Can you imagine Faulkner being anything other than he is without Oxford, Mississippi?  Can you imagine Cormac McCarthy being anything other than he is absent El Paso, Texas, Santa Fe?  I think we find our material, and once we acknowledge our material, embrace our material . . . along with it comes a way of talking about it.  And that’s voice.

WHC

Those examples seem to relate to setting.  Is voice, then, dependant on setting completely?

LKA

Setting is one feature.  I’ve been asked, what kind of stories do I write?  I have a kind of stock answer, nonetheless a true answer; I write about things that interest me.  The things that interest me on the page are the relationships between men and women, the relationships between father and sons, relations between men as friends, and I’ve got this whole category that I call trash compactor story, which is Walt Whitman meets the ayatollah of rock and roll . . . post apocalyptic stuff, which I get an opportunity to use up those great lives that belong to someone else.  So for me, material is coupled with a kind of language I find myself speaking whenever I sit down to do a story; I turn into a somewhat different guy, with a much different tone, as it were.

WHC

Would you agree that voice could be everything that a character does, thinks, says in a story?

LKA

I guess it would be true that part of the way I say things depends on the way I see things, or hear things, or experience things.  My job usually is to follow one person through a series of events, noting for the reader how those events register.  I suppose that’s a function of the way I am away from the page.

WHC

The reason I ask the question is that beginning writers have difficulty digesting what voice is.  Then they have trouble creating voice, and then it seems, in order to create voice, they fall into a hyperextension of personalities, salacious material, overwrought prose, thinking that’s the answer.  How can the beginning writer approach finding that voice, other than looking to setting, and simply following the character through events?

LKA

I don’t want to sound too mystical, but I think voice finds the writer, and not the other way around.  I published a lot of stories that you would not believe I had written, because I don’t sound in those stories the way I sound in the stories that I’m best known for.  I published a lot of stories that were very craft smart . . . smartly put together . . . polished to a high shine . . . but they were ultimately empty.  There was nothing invested in them other than the desire to make, well, a story.  My mantra is, now, that that getting on the page ought to cost you something.  That is the kind of thing I tell myself when I find myself two pages into a story that is only a puzzle, or is only a scarf joint.

WHC

S-c-a-r-f . . .

LKA

Yeah.  It’s one of those weird things I know how to do.  [See scarf joint.]

WHC

You brought up an interesting concept the other day, and that was, when working in the first person you used a double . . . ah

LKA

“Double I” is what I call it.

WHC

“Double I.”  Thank you.  I’d like to come back to this, but first, I’d like to know what your thoughts are on the advantages and disadvantages of the first person.

LKA

Earlier in my career, I thought that the chief advantage of the first person point of view was that it was nearly impossible to violate.  You either had to be there to witness what had to be witnessed, or you had to hear about [it from] somebody else, but you just couldn’t report it.  I, as a writer, couldn’t tell anything about the “I” as a character when the character didn’t know it.  And then I reread Moby Dick and discovered that Ishmael relays a lot of conversations that he is not around to witness, which is to say that Melville wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the [veracity] of the point of view he had chosen.  But nowadays, I think there are no limitations on the first person, as I understand how complex it can be.  I’m thinking of The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion, which is a first person book, but at the same time, the narrator manages to report conversations and events that she wasn’t around to witness, about a character who is dead before the book begins.  So it seems to me it is every bit as rich in possibility as third person is, even third person omniscient.  That was fun to discover, but I only discovered it when I discovered the exploiting of what I call the “double I”.

WHC

The “double I” seems to be able to create a narrator . . . almost an objective narrator through the first person.  So you’ve got your “I,” and you’re separating this “I.”  You can do that by time . . . an older narrator and a younger narrator—the same person but at different times in his/her life.  Can you do that with other features: differences in changes in attitude, for example, or changes in political parties, or religious beliefs, et cetera?  So there is a sense of the “double I” established?

LKA

You can tell the first person story that’s about a discrete sequence of events, but you can bring to that events that lie outside the story.  As I always say, in theory there are two first persons in a story.  There is the one who experiences it, and there is the one who tells about it.  The one who tells about it is privy to all the events before the first word is written.  Naturally, the second “I” brings a different understanding to what’s happening in the dramatic present than the “I” who experiences it.  And sometimes great hay can be made between the tension of what I once was and what I am now.  The importance of that is what “I am now” can bring to shine on what “I once was then.”

There are two persons in a story, the one who experiences it, and the one who tells about it.

WHC

Is this also an opportunity for irony?

LKA

Oh, indeed.

WHC

How does that mechanically work?

LKA

Well, it’s like . . . I like irony of a special kind.  I like narrators who have irony about their former selves.  I don’t like the sort of irony that some writer’s indulge that gives them an opportunity to lampoon their characters or trivialize them; I don’t want to be in that category.

WHC

Or ridicule?

LKA

Yes.  I don’t want to be in that business.  I see this as one of the benefits of adopting the “double I.”

Henry James invented “central consciousness.”

WHC

When you go to the third person, narration becomes more complicated in different ways.  Do you think, when you’re thinking of the narration of the story, as the character acting out the story, the narrator delivering the story, and the author creating the story?  And when you think that way, then the narration falls to the narrator.  The narrator, of course can be collapsed into the character.  There always seems to be a set of rules that are taught in academics.  You have to stay within this character’s POV, which cannot be violated.  Yet Virginia Wolff, The Common Reader, and Henry James, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, write about their views [see also James Wood, How Fiction Works].  How, as an author, do you approach these inconsistencies and difficulties in narration, because it’s not just choosing a point of view and sticking to it?  How do use them effectively to develop the characterization that’s so important to you as a writer?

LKA

Well, lets not underestimate the importance of white space as a device to signal to the reader that change is afoot.  I can use white space to change place; I can use white space to change time; I can use white space to change the point of view.  I think of white space as the great escape.  You can write a story in a series of limited thirds [third person POVs].  The first one is James’s, the next one is John’s the next Jeff’s, then Judy’s.  And you can tip the reader off with white space.  With respect to violations, I think that there is the long honored tradition as a writer—one hallmark of your ability as a writer—of your ability to cling to a single point of view.  I have this thing I call “the contract with the reader.”  I used to have a teacher named Jim Whitehead, who used to say that by the end of the first sentence of a story, you’ve been taught not only how to read it but how the writer will write it.  Which is to say, if I write the first sentence in a limited third, but by the third page I find myself in somebody else’s mind, then I violated the contract I [developed] with the reader in the first line.  I deceived him.  I promised him in the first line this would be third person limited, but no, it turned out to be third-person omniscient.  In that case, lets go back to the reader and make it clear that it is omniscient.  So I’m a big believer as to what happens very quickly in a story.  Establish the tone, the language, get the POV right, announce the focal character, plant the stout stake, as [Henry] James says.  That’s why we’ve spent, as you know, so much time on the first two paragraphs of a story [in class].

WHC

If you can conceptualize a story world for each character as sphere that contains all the experiences and thoughts, and then you think of the narrator, not always, of course, but a distinct narrator who can have a distinct sphere that is different than the character.  This narrator, if you’re going to use a separate POV, has his/her own world with distinct experiences, views, thought, opinions, memories.  All stories have happened, and quite often the narrator’s sphere is later, often much later, than the character’s sphere.  Does a writer need to pay attention the narrator’s sphere as compared to the character’s sphere?

LKA

I’m a big admirer of Henry James.  He invented a variation of third person limited called “central consciousness” that you discover by playing the following game.  The story is told in the language of the focal character, if the focal character can tell his own story.  But of course the character can’t, so that falls to the narrator.  So I like to think . . . in my stories, you cannot discover a narrator.  You can only discover more of the character—in the third person in particular—because I’m drawn to the language you leave to Jeff on the page.

WHC

I’d like to consider an author sphere.  So we’ve got the character sphere, the narrator sphere—sometimes those are together—and then we’ve got this author sphere.  The author sphere is everything about the world that the author knows about the real world and the story world, [and contains a variety of information depending if the author has a narrow or broad knowledge of the real world].  But author’s sphere knowledge often seems distracting, if not negative, for story development and quality story created.  Shouldn’t [for most good stories] the character and narrator’s spheres be sacrosanct to the author’s sphere?  Do you see what I mean?  Do you agree?

The author’s “second self.”

LKA

Well, I do know what is called the author’s second self.  When I sit down to put my finger above the keyboard to tell a story, I’m no longer Lee K. Abbott who raises children or married his wife or was once upon a time an Episcopalian; I am the Lee K. Abbott who writes stories.  Also, I’m an author who has been taking his measure for a long time, and I know that the Lee K. Abbott who tells stories has blind spots, weaknesses, predilections, ticks even, so the Lee K. Abbott who pays his taxes is smart enough to recognize that the Lee K. Abbott who writes stories might be a three trick pony and that’s it.  So it’s time to learn new tricks, et cetera.  So I do believe I become somebody else with the same name who has told all these stories in the past, who has got a way of telling a story.  Now, that’s it for me.  That’s where I am.

WHC

What we’re talking about, it seems, is authorial intrusions, and this sounds like a legitimate way to decrease the possibilities of unproductive authorial intrusions.  However, I sense for most contemporary writers, author involvement in the story is a given.

LKA

Those writers who are more experimental, more post-modern than I am, the whole point of the story is to draw attention to how smart the writer is.  It’s all been done before.  [I’ll do something else.]  This is not something I believe.  [But] these are things that form the aesthetic of someone who is in the business of playing author.  And I’m not.  I go back to where I could have said the form has meaning too.  I try to use form in story to try to say something else about character.

WHC

Do you find that your liking of a story, even when you’re critiquing it, relates to the attitude of the writer towards writing, attitudes towards how and why a writer writes, as well as attitudes toward the conceptualization of the theme and meaning of the story?  Particularly, do you see writers who want to be writers—I’m going to get published and therefore I’m going to sit down three hours every day and write—as opposed to the writer who wants to create a story that has an impact on a reader, and tells them something about what it means to be human, that entertains them?  Is that a fair question?

LKA

It is a fair question.  All the questions about the writer’s art are fair.  I’m not much interested in philosophy for myself.  I’ve got nothing to tell anybody.  I have imagined experiences to share, but I’ve got no lessons to be learned.  We have a form for that; it is called expository essay where there are points to be made.  No.  I’m not here to make points.  What I am here to do is to try to connect a reader to something made out of words.  And oblige them to share that world for it’s duration.  Any longer, my sole criterion for an effective piece of fiction is—if it moves me.  If the writer has done the work and I have forgotten about myself, I’ve had these ups and downs, and I’ve been moved by them.  I left my world and entered that world, had that complete experience and ravished it.

WHC

Is that related to the idea, as a reader, that you never see the world again exactly the way you saw it before your read the story?

LKA

Yes, it is.  I can tell you dozens and dozens and dozens of stories and novels that have made me, for better or worse, me.  And [they] still have an enormous effect.  I think, as a citizen and a human being, I’m far better off for having spent so much time with Robert Stone or Eudora Welty’s works.

WHC

You mentioned recently that you were sad that humor was leaving the contemporary story.  You gave an example of a story giving a zinger at the end.  Quite often you hear, now, in readings, humorous pieces utilizing surprise and reversal.  As you work for that kind of humor, is it antithetical to the theme and meaning of the story?  In other words, do you, when you’re working in humorous stories, negatively affect the ability to create significant meaning in the characters?

LKA

I don’t think so.  No.  I think it’s a perfectly legitimate way to tell us about the specie, by making us laugh at it, laugh with it.  I just worry about a culture that won’t take its comics seriously.  Its literary comics.

WHC

Because that’s laughing at self?

LKA

Maybe a lot of people think comedy is a cheap art.  And yet, we take such pleasure from it.  We love to laugh.

WHC

Well, we have to.  It’s part of living.

LKA

And I don’t mind making comedy part of the world on my pages, because it exists in my life.

WHC

Do you include in that conceptualization the use of irony?

Why write a story if you know how it’s going to turn out?

LKA

Oh, yes.

WHC

It’s not just guffaw?

LKA

No, no.  It’s a spectrum . . . like anything else.

WHC

In writing stories, do you advocate outlining and blocking?

LKA

I’ve never done that.  I always see that as curious.  Why write the story if you know how it’s going to turn out?  That’s my answer to that.  Yet, lots of writers I respect do that, so my advice always—to anyone who is interested in my advice—is to do whatever. . . go about it any way that results in a story.  If you need to outline, do so.

WHC

If you’re wedded to emotion and emotional arcs in stories, would you think it’s helpful to outline, not necessarily on the page, but in the mind, to be able to capture the progression of that emotion through the story, so that when you’re writing a scene, and the character’s action in that scene, it’s consistent with what’s going to happen and what’s happened before?

LKA

Well, I think if you’re looking for continuity, or unity as it were, that’s easy to do in a short story.  I would think it is much more difficult to do it in a novel.  I can see the wisdom in making notes about the progression in a really longer piece of work, but in the [short] story you’re thinking about four or five, six at most, moments at most.

WHC

I see.

LKA

I think you can keep those [moments] between the ears.  And one of the things I like about stories is that they always take a turn.  In the middle.  After the opening move.  At the end.  They go someplace that you haven’t anticipated.  And if you’re really smart about your work, you’ll ask yourself, “Why am I going there?”  I think the answer, then, lies in the stories.

WHC

And that’s a process of discovery, rather than determining ahead of time the switch or change?

LKA

I’m like an architect who doesn’t design the whole building, but just designs the front door.

WHC

What is drama?  How is drama in prose different than drama in film?

LKA

It’s all about conflict.  About “X” wanting something and being denied it.  Or getting it and being dissatisfied with it.  (Laughing.)  It’s what Faulkner calls the human heart in conflict with itself.

WHC

So conflict can be internal as well as external.

LKA

Oh, indeed.

WHC

It doesn’t have to be plot related conflict?

LKA

No, no, no.  Many of the stories in the Dubliners, including “The Dead,” take place between somebody’s ears.

WHC

And that results in change in character and reader?

LKA

It can.  But as we talked about in class the other day, I don’t believe character has to change for you to have a story.  Character may change, but I don’t’ think that is a requirement.

WHC

Could you give us advice on revision?  What are the goals?  What are the techniques you find effective in the revision process?

LKA

Well, I’ll quote the former director of the Iowa Writer’s workshop, Paul Engle, who said, “Writing is rewriting what you’ve already rewritten.”  And he’s right.  Never mind how poetic that sounds.  I think God gives you one [story] that comes out of your head whole and doesn’t need a blue mark on it, but for the most part it is discovering your mistakes and fixing them, discovering the artistic infelicities that we all want to make.  Finding the inconsistencies.  Getting rid of the self-indulgence.  Getting rid of the superfluous.  It’s heightening the stuff you gave short shrift to earlier on.  These things you can only learn by doing.  I know now, and I’ve written and published a zillion stories, for me it’s seven, eight, nine drafts before I’m fairly confident I’ve discovered everything wrong.  No matter how tickled I was by it before.

WHC

Does this relate to a very helpful approach, which you demonstrated in class, to ask those essential questions: How could that have happened?  Why did she do that?  Looking for motivations, looking for veracity of facts—being a fact checker, but also being sure the timeline is correct.  Those details?

LKA

Oh, yes.  I give everything to my wife at home.  And she’s no literary critic, and she has no desire to be, she’s just a reader.  But when I give her the story, I give her the story with a bunch of questions in my mind.  Like: “Pam, did you understand why he did what he did on page three?”  And if she says, “No,” then I say, “Okay, then I didn’t account for motivation in sufficient detail.”  Those are the kinds of things.  “Do you know how many hours passed between this and that?”  You have to learn to become your own best critic.  You have to learn what questions to ask and not be afraid to ask the questions that [might] reveal how idiotic you are.  How dumb or blind you’ve been.

WHC

Thanks, that helps a lot.  And it was very helpful in class observing you and Jess [Jess Lacher, fellow] in action working on the stories.

LKA

It’s been fun.

WHC

What are you working on now and what can we look forward to in the future?

LKA

Well, I’m trying to reinvent myself.  Working on a series of stories where the point of view gets handed off every fourth page.  That is, we begin in X’s mind, follow X through the story, go to white space, have Y pick up the story, ditto for [Y and] Z.

I’ve been doing those.  I’ve also been mixing points of view, that is, having a story have both first and third points of view.  I felt myself getting in a kind of rut.  So I made a vow that I would not write another story entirely in the first person.  Not because I thought I was doing it badly, but because I thought I was doing too much of it.  My desire is to improve as a writer every day.  By offering myself these challenges, I hope I rise to meet them.

WHC

Terrific.  I look forward to reading the new work.  If a writer wanted to study with you, what are the opportunities, the portals to learn?

LKA

Well, a writer would have to go the The Ohio State University.

WHC

Do you do any private teaching?

LKA

I do.  I do.  I’m made very uncomfortable by it because I just want the expectations to be clear that there are no guarantees [about] anything except that I will read X’s work as closely as I can and be as forthcoming as I can—and thorough as I can—but beyond that I can’t guarantee the people at Harper’s [will be] keen to see the results of someone who works with me.

WHC

You teach here at Kenyon in the summer.

LKA

This is my first time here.

WHC

Are there other venues where you teach in the summer?

LKA

Yes.  I used to teach (for a whole decade) at the New York Summer Writers’ Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.  For the last four years I’ve been teaching at the Gettysburg Review Writer’s Conference—it’s a little shorter than this.  I’ve taught at the Iowa Summer Writer’s Workshop.  Every summer I do at least one.  The money is good.  The company is great.  And it doesn’t cost me anything to go out of town and hear applause at the end.

WHC

I see.  Lee I’d like to thank you very much.  I learned a great deal.

My admiration for you as a teacher and a writer continues to soar.

LKA

My pleasure.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.