Is fiction dying? Or, in this early flowering of the ebook age, is it resurgent? You can find advocates for each position, but what continues to fascinate me are questions surrounding what each kind of narration, fiction and non-fiction, can do best.
If you’ve glanced around this site, you know I’ve written and published both fiction and non-fiction, true crime reportage, memoir, short stories and novels. So which kind of writing do I think can have the most impact on a reader’s heart and mind? What form or type has the best chance of delivering what great writing of any sort always offers: an enthralling experience—intellectual, emotional, aesthetic—that somehow imparts a new sense of how life works, the details and dimensions of the human condition, and perhaps even the secrets we keep from ourselves?
Actually, beyond these broad questions, what I’d like to try to get at here is what I’ll call the essence of fiction. What truly sets it apart from other kinds of writing, and how does story-telling in fiction differ essentially from the story-telling of narrative non-fiction? Obviously sci-fi, fantasy, etc., involve imaginative leaps that are beyond non-fiction, but if we put aside questions of genre, which fictional forms do what only fiction can do?
Let’s start with an example from fiction and one from non-fiction that might at first blush seem quite similar: a story or novel told in the first person and a memoir. In fact, if each were not identified as such, the reader might well have a difficult time deciding which was which, even though the memoir is the real life account of actual events, and first-person fiction is more or less the product of the author’s imagination.
(For the sake of moving this discussion along, let’s stick with traditional definitions and look past my oversimplifications here: obviously the fiction writer may make liberal use of actual fact, and the memoirist, as we’ve seen too often recently, may fabricate.)
While fiction using a first person narrator might look like a memoir, it may also contain a complication all its own: that narrator just might be unreliable. No matter how much truth is being told, s/he might at any moment start coloring or stretching the “facts,” or telling outright lies.
Now, of course, the success and value of the memoir will always be measured in part by an estimation of how truthful and candid the memoirist is finally perceived to be. And the memoir can have the unassailable power of factual truth on its side. But first-person fiction with an unreliable voice can manipulate that truth, trash or splinter it, just as so often happens in the complex reality of our everyday lives, and the result can be both engrossing and enlightening.
Still, in both the memoir and first-person fiction, the reader is allowed directly inside only one character…the narrator. Yes, both fiction and non-fiction writers often come up with various devices, tricks and stunts—diaries, letters, communications of all sorts—to offer other points-of-view and give us a window on the thoughts and feelings of other characters. But none of them necessarily has the power and authority of that first-person voice.
What about fiction with a third-person narrator? There are, of course, varieties of such narrators. Some remain at a distance from their characters, looking at them only from the outside and simply reporting on the action taking place in the story. They appear to want the cloak of objectivity and neutrality, and in doing so they are more or less presenting an experience that can seem very similar to that of a piece of narrative non-fiction.
Then there is the narrator who is omniscient. Yes, all third-person narrators can be seen as all-knowing (it’s their story, after all), but there are varying degrees of omniscience, depending on how much their authors choose to go inside their characters and how readily they offer commentary and perspective as opposed to strict objectivity.
Certainly a full-blown omniscient narrator sets fiction apart, the real difference-maker being the ability to present with a special fullness and detail both the outside and the inside of the world being depicted. The outside includes the locations, settings and events that the characters find themselves in and respond to while they’re acting out their lives. And the inside refers to the interior life of those characters, their thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams and secret urges, as they confront life’s challenges and interact with each other.
Now this kind of fiction, taking the reader inside more than one character, can be most adept at offering a glimpse of the enormous complexity of the human drama. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why short stories and novels with a shifting POV have become so prevalent over the past several decades. Maybe the purveyors of fiction have turned to it in part because they have felt themselves under attack from those touting the power of the true, the undeniably gripping nature of the real.
The most intense and, to my mind, effective use of this shifting POV approach is what’s been called the close, or tight third person, in which the writer moves his narrator’s voice right up against a character, whose sensibility, vocabulary, intelligence and perception can then bleed right into the story. The writer/narrator might stay with that character for a few paragraphs, a few pages or a chapter or two. Then it’s on to another character for a while. Writers as diverse as Nobel laureate Saul Bellow and my favorite crime writer and friend Elmore Leonard have employed it with wit, finesse and brilliance.
With the close third method of story-telling, the narrator’s voice blends with that of the POV character, making for often subtle shifts of hue, temper and style. So in effect, the authority of the narrator is joined with the persona of the character in a narrative technique some contemporary lit scholars refer to as the “free indirect style.” This is an often loose-feeling style that lets readers inhabit two or more mind-sets at a time, thus playing to our natural fascination with the secret thoughts and motivations of others.
Something similar can be achieved with a series of first person narrators. But then the writer is mostly limited by the qualities of each narrator: his/her intelligence, memory, knowledge base, vocabulary, acuity of perception, and again, of course, reliability. Whereas, with a close third shifting POV, the reader is normally certain of reliability, and the narrator can take the story anywhere s/he pleases in time and place.
What I’ve learned in writing fiction with a close third narrator and multiple, shifting POVs (and what I hope is evident in my novels The Obsession and The Disappearance) is that there are also great opportunities to play with plot and experiment with time frame and sequence and, in doing so, to create suspense, mystery, momentary confusion and surprise—all of which, if done effectively, can be features of a compelling, page-turning narrative.
With a true crime book like Murder in the Synagogue, my treatment of what happened and when were entirely determined by the factual reality I was reporting. But in writing fiction I create the plot, and how I do it really depends on what I decide will be most revealing and most effective in telling “the truth” about my characters and my story.
Another vital factor in all of the many decisions a writer makes in the construction of every novel is how best to promote the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief, which is at the heart of every piece of successful fiction. But that’s a rich and fascinating topic for another day.
Let me finish with a quick critique of what I’ve just written: it lacks examples! As a way of rectifying this situation and keeping the discussion going, maybe some of you would like to take on the task of supplying titles that illustrate some of the different approaches to story-telling I’ve outlined here. I’ll look forward to hearing from you.
