Writing isn’t just about conjuring words and ideas and everything out of thin air. It’s extremely important to have a good imagination, to be sure, but it’s also important to know what to focus on, and often, the result is that you, the writer, may know more than what actually makes it on to the page – in fact, it’s virtually unheard-of to keep absolutely everything in by the time a story is done (“done” being relative, but a debate for another time…).
This is true for all forms of writing – the best definition of a poem I ever heard was “something where no word is unnecessary,” – but especially so for prose. A memoir can’t really encompass an entire lifetime, or it would take that long to read. Journalism and creative nonfiction both require research and investigation to even find a story to tell, and often the research is just as much to discover what the story isn’t, as well as what it is. In fiction, however, you need to create that “research” yourself.
The best writers out there know their characters better than they know themselves. It might never come up in the story that so-and-so’s favorite color is mauve, or that she’s allergic to feathers, or that she’s never been in a car accident. But if you, the writer, know these little things, then, regardless of whether or not it makes it onto the page, your character will be livelier and more realistic in subtle, but important, ways. By imagining details of a fictional life, what you’re doing is tricking yourself into thinking that your character is a real person, and in doing so, their dialogue, motivations, actions, and decisions are more informed and more realistic, even if you’re not aware of doing so as you write. Some writers will make lists of things about their characters, some will even write biographies for all of them. Other writers are less deliberate, and let the characters slowly evolve, “getting to know them” as they write them. Either way, they know more than the reader will get to in the story. But then, what observer really knows everything about someone they know in life? And we don’t suspect our friends of being fictitious simply because we don’t know what they had for breakfast that morning.
Fiction comes in many forms, and it’s a good idea to keep an open mind with all media when it comes to thinking about craft. Fiction doesn’t just mean novels and short stories – it’s any story that someone, somewhere must have sat down at one point and written. Television shows and comic books are both essentially serialized stories, with recurring central characters and minor characters that come in and out, and in these media one can start to dig deeper and see things in characters, the little moments that might not come out in a single, self-contained work like a novel (or a graphic novel, or a film, or a play, or a musical, or…). And even then, there are plenty of things that exist within these fictional worlds, without the observer being told directly.
One benefit of modern technology is the ease and accessibility of the average person into the processes of things formerly known only to the people in those fields. And a benefit that helps fiction writers especially is the DVD Extra. For about twenty bucks, anyone can see deleted scenes, often with introduction or commentary from writers and directors about why a particular scene was worthy of being filmed, and indeed, almost makes it into the final version, but even though it’s really funny or really poignant or whatever, its own aesthetic value has to be sacrificed for the benefit of the bigger picture. Listen to commentary tracks, too – very often writers will discuss the ways in which they approach central themes, how they balance plot and character development – all things very important to writing prose fiction. Even listen to the directors – in films, their decisions are the equivalent of the narrative voice in prose – the plot and dialogue and action can all be the same, but it’s the function of that voice to create the way it’s perceived.
Which brings me to Peter Jackson.
As both the screenwriter and director for the massively-expensive Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was responsible for virtually every aspect of recreating a world already masterfully imagined in prose by J.R.R. Tolkien. The challenge was no small one, but he is for certain a master storyteller. He made believable a world that should inherently be unbelievable, and he did it by attention to detail in ways that wouldn’t be seen by the viewer on the big screen, but would nonetheless be felt. It wasn’t a movie of cardboard cut-outs and papier-mâché; rather, every prop, costume, and set was designed as though made with a functioning purpose by an inhabitant of that fictional world. There were design flourishes on the insides of costumes, silverware inside cabinets that didn’t need to be opened in the script, extensions of buildings that would be cut off by the framing of the shot. And there were lots and lots of scenes with Hobbits, many of them just shot from the neck up, but for every single take, the actors had to endure hours of makeup time to put on hairy, giant Hobbit feet.
What this did, according to the actors, was to make them feel not like they were being paid as actors to work on a movie shooting in New Zealand, but rather that they were in Middle friggin’ Earth, and to watch out for Orcs. And the more they believed it, the less they needed to act. Acting is a sort of lying, in the same way that good fiction tells a sort of truth, and to that end, a writer shouldn’t be concerned with trying to convince his or her audience that this or that happened, but rather, convince themselves that it happened. When it’s then conveyed to the reader, the reader will believe it, because the writer believed it.
Writing prose fiction is challenging, make no mistake. You are the director and the actor, you are the prop master, costume designer, and set builder, you are the sound engineer and cinematographer, and, let us not forget, you are the screenwriter. Use all these elements to tell a story, but build it bigger than we can know – when you create the whole world, the snapshot that the reader gets will be all the more textured.
So put on your Hobbit feet before you sit down to write, figure out what your antagonist did over his long weekend, and then forget that he only exists as far as you say he does. Then, your reader will, too.