Much of Gardner’s second chapter is iterative elaboration on the first, so with a pain in my heart, and a tear in my eye, I’ll turn away from criticism of literary criticism for the moment and discuss my own work. In completing the workshopping of a draft of my story I’m nominally calling “The 108 Best R.E.M. Tunes,” I was given a number of ideas from the class, some of which were from surprising avenues of thought that will likely lead to some reworking of elements and details big and small.
Also, in the interest of general improvement and an overall effort at aversion therapy, I sent a draft to several friends and acquaintances that have an inclination toward literature, criticism or any aspects of the story I wasn’t terribly sure about in terms of accuracy (e.g. I’m pretty sure you can hear the serpentine belt running around a compressor even if the A/C isn’t running. I know you can when it is running, but the story being set in winter after that line was written necessitates a rewrite of that line and its supporting sentence and, very likely, the entire paragraph, and maybe one or two others I come across on the way over there.
The problem I mention above is one that Gardner discusses in the second chapter actually. “In all major genres, vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief through narrative voice…the reader is regularly presented with proofs – in the form of closely observed details – that what is said to be happening is really happening.” (26) You tell the reader something about your world, and then you prove it. If your proof doesn’t stand up, the reader knows. May not want to believe, but he knows. I suppose it should be: “May want to believe, but he knows”? I don’t know.
The problem is the same one a stage magician finds in a trick; you misdirect the audience, show them something or fail to show them something and create the illusion of reality, that something impossible just happened. Impossible for the magician because you can’t cut people in half and put them back together. Not easily. Impossible for the writer because none of those things he just told you about really exist!
Immersion is all detail. Devil and all that. Problem with detail in writing is that you have a very limited amount of area to work with, very few materials at your disposal to conjure and convey, sometimes only a single word. Maybe a small word. Picture’s worth so many words is right. It’s essentially empirical truth. But in contrast to that concept, you also see one of the beautiful strengths of the written word. By which I mean, you can discover every blade of grass in a scene, every particulate and tonal emotion, the whole of its reality – both exact and implied – from a time spent with but a brief glimpse of a painting or photograph. But…
But, it only takes one word, one sentence, maybe a page or so if you’re being verbose, to conjure an entire imagined world in a reader’s mind. A world that shifts with each new word, conveys itself not all at once, not exact by any sense, all implied. And there’s a sort of profound intimacy to that notion. You – the writer – didn’t create that world, the reader did. You gave him something to go on, and he took it and ran. His world, completely different from the next and the next. There is a point to this, I swear to God.
It’s this. You have to make damned sure you’re putting effort into filling out those details, making sense of the proofs. Without proper proofs, the world could turn topsy-turvy fast. And that’s not on the reader. You threw him at an upside-down world where people are using the air conditioner in the winter and you didn’t tell him the rules. That’s on you, the writer. When the world pops, when the reader disengages, the writer, the storyteller is the one to blame, as Gardner said, for failing to get the reader to “believe, or forget to disbelieve.” (29)
And that’s not to say that it is something that should be fore and center when evaluating a scene, a word. Utilize is a stupidly overcomplicated word. Just use “use” and move on. Don’t think about it. Who cares how a car works in a mystery story or in some metaphysical nonsense? All the same, if your story – if his world – requires that the reader know how the car works, then it’s up to the writer to hand him the user’s manual.
Unless you’re James Joyce. Then you can do whatever the fuck you want. “May the fireplug of filiality reinsure your bunghole!” What does that even mean?
Fun to say tho, I suppose…