Consider This

Let's get started.

Think of a story as a stream of information. At best it's an ever-changing series of rhythms. Now think of yourself, the writer, as a DJ mixing tracks.

The more music you have to sample from—the more records you have to spin—the more likely you'll keep your audience dancing. You'll have more tricks to control the mood. To calm it down to a lull. Then to raise it to a crescendo. But to always keep changing, varying, evolving the stream of information so it seems fresh and immediate and keeps the reader hooked.

If you were my student I'd want you to be aware of the many different "textures" of information at your disposal. These are best defined by the examples that follow.

When telling a story, consider mixing any or all of the following.

Textures: The Three Types of Communication

Description: A man walks into a bar.

Instruction: Walk into a bar.

Exclamation (onomatopoeia): Sigh.

Most fiction consists of only description, but good storytelling can mix all three forms. For instance, "A man walks into a bar and orders a margarita. Easy enough. Mix three parts tequila and two parts triple sec with one part lime juice, pour it over ice, and—voilà—that's a margarita."

Using all three forms of communication creates a natural, conversational style. Description combined with occasional instruction, and punctuated with sound effects or exclamations: It's how people talk.

Instruction addresses the reader, breaking the fourth wall. The verbs are active and punchy. "Walk this way." Or, "Look for the red house near Ocean Avenue." And they imply useful, factual information—thus building your authority. Look at Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn, and how she plants recipes within the story.

In my own short story "Guts," I lapse into a long passage of instruction: "…go buy a pack of those lambskin condoms. Take one out and unroll it. Pack it with peanut butter. Smear it with petroleum jelly. Then try to tear it. Try to pull it in half." The shift from moment-to-moment description to an instructional aside creates tension because it cuts away from the action for a beat. Then, boom, we're back in the description of events.

Granted, most of what you ever write will be description, but don't hesitate to shift to instruction. Likewise, onomatopoeia shouldn't be limited to the "pow" and "blam" we see in comic books. In my novel Pygmy, every time I needed a mid-sentence beat of something to accentuate the end of the passage…"Trapped all day, then could be next walk to toilet, pow-pow, clot knock out brain." I get a greater effect at the end of the sentence by interrupting the flow with a beat of special-effects noise.

In closing, my freshman year in college, before an early-morning German course, a guy was telling a story that went, "…so we're going around this long curve—skreeeeech! vrooooom!—and we pass this police car…"

A listening girl leaned close to me and whispered, "Why do men always use sound effects in stories, but women never do?"

An excellent observation. Learn from it.

Everyone should use three types of communication. Three parts description. Two parts instruction. One part onomatopoeia. Mix to taste.

Textures: Mix First-, Second-, and Third-Person Points of View

Think of a good joke. "Yesterday I walked into a bar. You know how it goes. You walk into a bar, and you expect a bartender, maybe some video poker. A man needs his distractions. No guy wants to get off work and go into some bar and see a penguin mixing drinks…"

In conversation we switch between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The constant shift controls the intimacy and authority of our story; for instance, "I walked" has the authority of first person. Second person addresses the listeners and enlists them: "You walk." And the shift to third person controls the pace, "No guy wants," by moving from the specific "I" to the general "guy."

Arguably, first person carries the most authority because it gives us someone responsible for the story. As opposed to the third-person narration by some hidden, unknown godlike writer. Second person worked well in Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City. It can have a hypnotic effect, but it can be tricky. Unless a story is well plotted, fast paced, and short, constant second person can annoy.

The rub is that using all three POVs means the story must ultimately be told in first person. But even second and third can be mixed to create a sense of some undeclared narrator. In Bright Lights, Big City the narration is second person, but every time it depicts something other than itself the narration is effectively third person.

So much of this book will be about recognizing what good storytellers do intuitively.

If you were my student, I'd tell you to shift as needed between the three POVs. Not constantly, but as appropriate to control authority, intimacy, and pace.

Textures: Big Voice versus Little Voice

You've seen this in a zillion stories. Every time Carrie Bradshaw hunches over her laptop to write her Sex and the City newspaper column…Every time Jane Fonda spills her guts to her psychiatrist in Klute…a story lapses into big voice.

The camera is little voice. The voice-over device is big voice.

Little voice (also called Recording Angel because it seems to hover and watch) depicts the moment-by-moment action. Big voice comments on it.

Little voice remains objective, giving us the smells, sounds, flavors, textures, and actions in a scene. Big voice muses.

Little voice gives us the facts. Big voice gives us the meaning—or at least a character's subjective interpretation of the events.

Not many stories exist without both voices. On Star Trek it's the captain's log. In Flashdance it's the confessional in the Catholic church. In the film The Social Network, the big voice expository sequences are the legal deposition scenes. At regular intervals a character is going to discuss his life with a therapist. Or she's going to write a letter or diary entry, but she's going to rise above the meat-and-potatoes reality of physical verbs. He's going to ask rhetorical questions on behalf of the reader, à la Carrie Bradshaw's "Am I the only one who's not enjoying anal sex?" Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning will use a citizens band radio to talk to her dead mother. Margaret will ask God, "Are you there?" Or Charlize Theron in Young Adult will lapse into the coping mechanism of writing as the teen narrator of her character's YA books.

In my own books, the device for introducing big voice is usually some nonfiction form that emerges from the character's life. In Invisible Monsters it's the "postcards from the future" that the characters write and discard. In Survivor it's the cockpit flight recorder of the doomed airliner. In Choke it's the Fourth Step, the written history of an addict in recovery. It begins the novel, but quickly shifts to a physical scene.

That said, consider that big voice might not be your strongest way to hook a reader at the beginning of a story. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald devotes much of the first chapter to a rambling description of the narrator's broken heart. As does the opening monologue in The Glass Menagerie. Both stories have to establish that the events will take place in hindsight. They ask us to care about the narrator's regret and lost innocence. Only then do they go into flashback and specific detail to demonstrate how that heart was broken.

Yes, the Victorians loved to "put a porch" on the front of a novel. For example, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…yada yada." But that's a tough sell nowadays. My apologies to Nick Carraway, but few people will be hooked by a soy boy's mansplaining about his self-professed broken heart.

These days a good story is more likely to begin with a physical scene—people finding a dead body or being menaced by zombies. Little voice, not big voice. Blame this on movies. It mimics the opening "gripper" scenes in movies. As Thom Jones told me, "Action carries its own authority." The audience will engage with action. An aside: Your overseas translators will adore you for using concrete verbs. Like the action in action movies, verbs in fiction play effectively in other languages. A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh.

In the second scene or the second chapter, then you can risk big voice. Remember: First we see Indiana Jones rob a tomb and fight to escape past poisonous snakes and rotting corpses. Snakes, skeletons, and poison darts trigger our physical reaction. Once we're flooded with adrenaline, then we see him giving a boring lecture in the classroom. It's only in porn that the talky parts work better at the beginning.

Also consider that big voice might not always occur in words. Look at the stories in which a vast art project serves to comment on or clarify the main character's thoughts. In The Day of the Locust it's the huge mural that Todd is painting in his apartment. Called The Burning of Los Angeles, the work in progress depicts all the novel's characters involved in a classically inspired inferno of ridiculous architecture. Similarly, in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss externalizes his obsessive thoughts by spending much of the film sculpting a room-filling replica of the Devil's Tower in Wyoming. In the film version of my book Choke the past accumulates as yet another mural.

And yes, a small amount of big voice goes a long way. It works great for setting a scene. And it works great for underscoring a plot event. If you were my student I'd tell you to keep your big voice philosophizing to a minimum. Each time you shift to big voice you bump your reader out of the fictional dream, so too much commenting can slow the story's momentum to a crawl. And it can annoy by being too clever or too preachy, dictating how the reader should react.

However, switching to big voice for short stretches will allow you to imply time passing. And it can also buffer between scenes in which lots of physical action takes place. And it allows you to briefly summarize preceding action and deliver a witty or wise meme about life.

Textures: Attribution

By attribution I mean those little signposts inserted in dialogue that tell us who said what.

For example: "Don't make me stop this car," she said.

Or: He asked, "Who died and made you Ross Perot?"

Too often we see page-long cascades of unattributed speech. Characters exchange quips without a hint of gesture or action. Soon enough we're confused and counting backward to establish who said what.

In silent pictures actors flailed and mugged to communicate, with only an occasional line of dialogue flashed on a card. The early talking pictures became the opposite. The crude microphones required everyone to cluster in static groups near them. No one dared to move. It was years before filmmakers could combine the huge physical vocabulary of the silent era with the smart, stagy dialogue of the early sound era.