Fiction Is Not Real: Using Artifice

[FifthView]

The recently derailed thread on "Making It More," and various other topics over the months, have reminded me of a Writing Excuses podcast about dialogue and the way that dialogue is not real speech. I think this consideration applies to other areas of writing fiction.

Here's the podcast: Writing Excuses 5.38: Dialog with John Scalzi

Here are some key comments:

"[T]he problem with that is that dialogue is not actually speech. It is a speech-like process that exists to convey information in a story." [John Scalzi]

"... when you're talking about dialogue, you do have to understand it really isn't speech. I'm okay with saying understand your artifice. Because if we did a lot of speech, basically what we would end up doing is we would have pages and pages of ums and ohs and circumlocutions and people not actually getting around to the point yet." [John Scalzi]

"What you're trying to do with dialogue is you want it to feel real, but not be real.... Any time it stops feeling real, you're kind of straying outside... You're going... You're distracting from the text. But anytime it starts to get too real, you'll actually do the same thing. People will stop, they'll pull out of the text, and be distracted, maybe even be bored. Whatever. So there's that sweet spot in the middle." [Brandon Sanderson]

"What is the best way to convey that feeling that this dialogue is real without actually being real? Are there tricks? I've mentioned before that writing is much like stage magic, where you're wiggling one hand and drawing people's attention while you're doing something important with your other hand. I find dialogue a lot like that. Where you are doing... You are using smoke and mirrors to imply that this is real, that this is actually the way that people would speak. Yet it completely isn't, if you broke it apart line by line. " [Brandon Sanderson]

I think this is incredibly important to remember, but I also think this applies to other areas of our writing. I've added emphasis to one line from Sanderson above. Writing is like stage magic.

The thread on "Making It More" probably touched upon this idea, or was about to, before being derailed by a discussion about rules. (Mea culpa for me, too.) We can add extended thought processes, figurative speech, to add dimension to a character's voice even if, in the moment, the character wouldn't have the time or inclination to pause and philosophize or spin metaphors. Real people can have an extremely fast string of thoughts that might not be entirely conscious at the time, and/or might not take the form of measured and specific internal dialogue—may be a string of impressions occurring in a second—but as writers we can spell all that out and deliver coherent thoughts to our readers. It's a bit of stage craft in order to add that something more to the narrator's voice while also delivering information for a reader. (I'd also mentioned in that thread not always writing in-the-moment, only-conscious front-brain thoughts and impressions.)

In an older thread I also mentioned how we can deliver description, an extended view of an environment, even if a character is not consciously studying everything in that environment. When real people take in a view, they see an extremely vivid picture of everything within their field of view even if they don't notice it consciously. They may focus on only a few items of importance while taking all the rest in at a glance. But readers don't have the luxury of taking all that other stuff in at a glance if the writer doesn't actually write it down. So even in a tight 3rd person POV, we can use a little smoke and mirrors, or stage craft, to deliver other features about our environment even if the character isn't consciously thinking about those things. He is seeing those things.

The goal in all these areas is to give the reader a feeling or impression that what is described is real, even if we have to use artifice to deliver those things to the reader.

Any other areas where this kind of artifice applies?

 

[xxyesenia25]

Wow this is very helpful. Thanks for sharing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[skip.knox]

>Any other areas where this kind of artifice applies?

Doesn't every aspect of writing fall under this heading? The word I use is verisimilitude--the similarity to truth. Or, to invoke another observation: reality is not truth; fiction is truth. Verisimilitude applies even to non-fiction writing.

I cannot come up with a single facet of the writer's craft that is not entirely and exactly this. We do not write literal, we write literature.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Dialogue is unique in writing, because the written word in dialogue can be a literal and exacting representation of spoken words, something description can never do. What makes it fascinating is that real conversations tend to suck. So, the one thing in fiction that can in fact be real, can not be real, because it will come off as crap.

Not to pick on Sanderson, because I wouldn't do that, but the analogy of sleight of hand is iffy, but not as horrendous as the analogies Rothfuss is prone to scrawling in Name of the Wind (see, now that was actually picking on someone!)... there is sleight of hand in story craft, and dialogue can perform sleight of hand, but sleight of hand creates good dialogue is an off analogy, heh heh.

All of writing is either artifice, or not, or somewhere in between, depending on how you want to define and argue your position in my opinion.

 

[FifthView]

Skip,

Yeah, that thought entered my mind soon after posting this, and I had a Homer "D'oh!" moment. Artifice...art. It's all artifice. But I did title this thread "Fiction is not real." And I was asking about "this kind of artifice," not artifice in general, although perhaps I wasn't clear in framing that question.

I do think we can look at various areas in our writing to see how artifice can be used to create the feeling of verisimilitude in those areas–and how creating verisimilitude that is interesting might require straying further away from a near-copy of reality. (I don't think that "literal" as an opposition to "literature" is apt, so won't use it.) All written fiction may be artifice in every aspect, but there may be different strategies for creating an interesting verisimilitude in different areas related to the writing of fiction. Plus, I question whether nearness to "real" might actually destroy verisimilitude, depending on the degree of nearness, or might bore.

So for instance, writing pages and pages of dialogue that never gets to the point, uses lots of "ums and ohs and circumlocutions" as Scalzi said, might more accurately approach a copy of reality, but it wouldn't be very interesting and would have a negative effect on enjoyment for the reader.

In the "Making it more" thread, one approach to creating an intimate 3rd person POV or 1st person POV was introduced in comparison to another type of approach. In-the-moment immediacy might be accurate–a character caught in the moment reacting to immediate stimuli, with nary a thought informed by anything other than the present stimuli–but is this actually verisimilitude? Or is the representation of a voice informed by an entire past more nearly "the truth"? (Do we "make it more" by breaking the immediacy of that POV thinking/reaction cycle?) Naturally, when we speak of "similarity to truth," the question of what is or is not truth arises, possibly confusing the issue; I will concede this point...immediately.

In the OP, I'd mentioned breaking that tight POV via description also, perhaps another way to "make it more." I was thinking of this example I'd previously used, from GRRM's A Feast for Crows:

[In the paragraph before these, Brienne of Tarth has been shown to have entered a market square.]

There were pine and linden shields to be had for pennies, but Brienne rode past them. She meant to keep the heavy oaken shield Jaime had given her, the one he'd borne himself from Harrenhal to King's Landing. A pine shield had its advantages. It was lighter, and therefore easier to bear, and the soft wood was more like to trap a foeman's axe or sword. But oak gave more protection, if you were strong enough to bear its weight.

Duskendale was built around its harbor. North of town the chalk cliffs rose; to the south a rocky headland shielded the ships at anchor from the storms coming up the narrow sea. The castle overlooked the port, its square keep and big drum towers visible from every part of town. In the crowded cobbled streets, it was easier to walk than ride, so Brienne put her mare up in a stable and continued on afoot, with her shield slung across her back and her bedroll tucked up beneath one arm.​

In the first paragraph, GRRM is writing from a tight, intimate 3rd person POV; it is almost as if Brienne is narrating. These are the things she is viewing and her immediate thoughts and reactions to them.

But in the first two sentences in the second paragraph, he breaks away from that nearness, giving a more omniscient POV of her environment. I personally don't think this breaks the POV in the sense of making a reader feel that the narrative has experienced a jarring switch in POV. To me, it feels more neutral: omniscient from an analytical perspective, but not experienced as a sharp break in POV while being read.

That idea of breaking into a type of omniscience was nudged in me by another Writing Excuses podcast I recently linked in another thread. The group is talking about the omniscient POV, giving different types, and Brandon Sanderson introduced one that's fairly limited in use. It's not an omnisicent POV used throughout a book but can be a temporary "pulling out" to give an overview:

It's establishing shot. There are some writers, however, that use these very frequently. They'll pull out and show an establishing shot. You get a viewpoint from an eagle flying overhead. Then... Or you get a viewpoint....

....where you jump out to an omniscient for a few minutes to give an establishing shot or to give some sort of information and then zoom in to a character viewpoint.​

Mostly, he was talking about an intro paragraph or section, for example of a chapter. But this seems to be the same sort of thing GRRM was doing in the example above.

Sometimes I feel that an attempt to create a "true limited POV," or to make it seem like an authentic POV by limiting it so severely, can have similar results to trying to write "true speech" for dialogue: it can be anemic. Does it break verisimilitude? I don't know.

When I mentioned "this kind of artifice," I was thinking about the ways we can use artifice in a conscious way rather than merely rely on the fact that all fiction writing is ipso facto artifice–the ways we can break from attempts to narrowly mirror reality, and how doing so might improve our writing.

 

[FifthView]

there is sleight of hand in story craft, and dialogue can perform sleight of hand, but sleight of hand creates good dialogue is an off analogy, heh heh.

That may be. I think that his primary point is that we writers want readers to focus on things without realizing that what they are viewing is mere illusion, heh.

Perhaps this is related to that idea of the writer not showing his hand. Readers become immersed in the "reality" of the narrative rather than focusing on the writing itself—are not distracted by the writing.

 

[Heliotrope]

I've got one... I hope this fits into what you are talking about:

What Makes Characters Universal (From Writing 21C Fiction by Donald Maas)

In any literary era there are trends in characterisation. Whole decades have been defined by characters who are blithe, survivors, or edgy...

Most recently, the norm has become snarky detachment...

For instance, in our time it's highly fashionable for characters to be obsessed. Obessession can imply focus and strength of commitment, but it can also hammer us like a migraine headache. Sometimes it's just a lazy label. When I see the word in query letters I groan, much as I do when protagonists are described as haunted by demons. Not again!

Why do stereotypes fail? The obvious reason is that familiarity has a dulling effect. There's a deeper reason, though. Stereotypical characters aren't authentic. They lack the startling vividness of people who are unlike anyone we have ever known. In fact, I'll go further. Here's a counter-intuitive principle for you to consider: the more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character will become.

Are you anything like Abileen Clarke, one of the maids in The Help? Are you African American? Do you live in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962? Do you tolerate daily doses of overt racism? Do you ride in the back of the bus to work? Did your son die young? Do you have to scrape by, counting pennies to get by on your forty-three dollars a week wage? Do you bite your sharp tounge every day, grovelling, dissembling, and lying to keep your job? Do you iron pleats and patiently potty train someone else's child? Have you risked everything you rely on to assist an insecure fledgeling author in writing a book that will enrage everyone? Would you bake feces into a pie that you serve to your employer?

I venture to guess that description doesn't fit you. (Am I wrong?) Yet who among us hasn't felt like an outsider, been treated unfairly, scraped by on too little, yearned for justice, and contemplated revenge? Aibileen is all of us, but oddly, she becomes more iconic the more Stockett makes her different.

... Push your characters to ways of being that are extreme, unsettling, or just plain out there.

The more singular the character becomes on the page, the more your readers will see themselves there too. Look, we're all crazy, sane, and sublime in the same ways you are. Show that on the page and you make it okay for the rest of us to be our strange and wonderful selves too.

-

Many people would argue that what they love about GRRM is that the characters feel so real. I've been to parties where people sit around and talk about Game of Thrones as if it were reality TV.

Brienne of Tarth real? Tyrion Lannister real? The Hound real? Seriously? They are as far from real as possible, and yet, it is there strangeness and uniqueness that makes them feel so real. They aren't cutouts.

I love The Office, because I felt like I 'knew" people like Micheal Scott and Dwight and Jim and Pam in real life... but do I really? No. There are not people really like that in 'real life'... but there are people who are nerdy and people who try to hard to find friends and people who can't take anything seriously in real life...

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I've heard this, maybe, described as best sellers are ones where the readers don't see the words. Obviously not literal, but goes to the point of why you don't want too many echoes (of which -ly adverbs are guilty) or sentences that are twisty enough to make people re-read them. I've become very prone to getting knocked out reading by awkward wordings and sentences in other people's writing, but my own are harder to spot because I know what the Hell I'm saying, LOL. Bad analogies are ones that really rock my reading... If it makes me think, that's fine, but if my conclusion is "that's horrid wrong" I can only forgive so many before the book gets put down.

I do think a totally constrained 3rd, let's call it 3rd intimate, exists as well as 3rd limited. To me, 3rd Limited is where you have those pull backs, and I think that's the strength of 3rd Lim. 3rd Intimate as I look at it is to never (or almost never) leave the POV character perspective, becoming a bit closer to 1st. I wouldn't go so far as to call pullbacks Omniscient (not all of the time) but more a mingling of narrative observation of what the character sees around them, although some writers do Omniscient when setting scenes. Limited allows the writer to hover in and around the character's head. LOL.

I greatly prefer 3rd Limited as I define it here.

That may be. I think that his primary point is that we writers want readers to focus on things without realizing that what they are viewing is mere illusion, heh.

Perhaps this is related to that idea of the writer not showing his hand. Readers become immersed in the "reality" of the narrative rather than focusing on the writing itself—are not distracted by the writing.

 

[FifthView]

Many people would argue that what they love about GRRM is that the characters feel so real. I've been to parties where people sit around and talk about Game of Thrones as if it were reality TV.

Brienne of Tarth real? Tyrion Lannister real? The Hound real? Seriously? They are as far from real as possible, and yet, it is there strangeness and uniqueness that makes them feel so real. They aren't cutouts.

I love The Office, because I felt like I 'knew" people like Micheal Scott and Dwight and Jim and Pam in real life... but do I really? No. There are not people really like that in 'real life'... but there are people who are nerdy and people who try to hard to find friends and people who can't take anything seriously in real life...

Helio, I think that's an excellent type of the thing I'm talking about.

Since you posted your comment, I've been trying to think through it to decide what precisely this means, how it is typically achieved.

I've said before that stories tend to be about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. That's a bit simplistic. Maybe sometimes extraordinary people do surprising things. Maybe sometimes ordinary people do extraordinary things; or, surprising things.

This whole business of straying from trying to create a mirror copy of elements in our real world can be difficult to conceptualize because when it works well, we don't notice it while reading. This unreality of characters seems most apparent to me, or more often apparent, in the case of non-POV side characters or supporting characters. One or two traits are emphasized, repeatedly invoked, so for instance there's the always-gruff character or the mischievous joker type—even if at some point, some special situation, he is suddenly witnessed being extremely gentle and caring.

I think this repetition, reinforcement and accentuation of a small set of character traits occurs with MCs also—to some extent. Maybe not quite as obviously as with side characters. It is as if MCs become "The Exceptional Example," which may sound like a paradox. (How can one be exceptional while also being an example of a larger class? Heh.)

I also am thinking about Sanderson's three-prong character development sliders. Sympathy, Competence, Proactivity. Maybe ramping one or more of those sliders up—or far down—leads to the creation of oddball cases, non-real characters.

I think this might be an example of what Sanderson meant by using "sleight of hand" while writing fiction. We draw a reader's attention to key traits or elements, for a reason, which might naturally lead to drawing attention away from other possibilities.

We could look at the negative examples, of newer writers trying to create "authentic" or "realistic" characters. What happens? I don't know. They may be dull characters. Or maybe they often seem to us to react out-of-character: Again, a gruff character suddenly starts joking around then maybe becomes extremely gentle and caring and then.... Hmmm.

 

[AndrewLowe]

Dialogue is unique in writing, because the written word in dialogue can be a literal and exacting representation of spoken words, something description can never do. What makes it fascinating is that real conversations tend to suck. So, the one thing in fiction that can in fact be real, can not be real, because it will come off as crap.

Not to pick on Sanderson, because I wouldn't do that, but the analogy of sleight of hand is iffy, but not as horrendous as the analogies Rothfuss is prone to scrawling in Name of the Wind (see, now that was actually picking on someone!)... there is sleight of hand in story craft, and dialogue can perform sleight of hand, but sleight of hand creates good dialogue is an off analogy, heh heh.

All of writing is either artifice, or not, or somewhere in between, depending on how you want to define and argue your position in my opinion.

I totally agree with this. Every writer has their weak points, but by trying to cover them up, they can become even more apparent.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I think the key as seen in so much fiction is emotionally relatable extremes... Jaime Lannister and what he does for love... A lot of folks have figuratively pushed someone out of a window for love, and in GRRM's case their emotional reactions are oft times what people would like to do, in the recent HBO episode where the Hound butchers folks who killed his friend, played by Ian McShane... a brilliant choice for me personally as I like McShane's characters in so many shows and was ticked to see him offed, LOL... most of us can't really relate to what the Hound does, but there's probably been instances of things in life where we've had that flash of Hound who wants to eviscerate some SOB who just ticked us off. Living vicariously off of an emotional core that most folks never reach in reality.

One of my favorite examples for this is Liam Neeson in Taken... The writers stuck in some "make him relatable" BS with the divorce and personal/work problems, but what really made him relatable? Pretty much every father, and for that matter every mother, in the world would Love to be able to kick the crap out of, maim, and kill anyone who was going to sell their child into the sex trade. The personal stuff was just platitudes to relatability, the real thing was the emotional level of protecting your kid.

If the extreme has no basis in commonly shared human emotion, it will fail. So, if writing a chapter called "What Makes a Character Universal" it could be a one word answer: emotion.

I've got one... I hope this fits into what you are talking about:

What Makes Characters Universal (From Writing 21C Fiction by Donald Maas)

In any literary era there are trends in characterisation. Whole decades have been defined by characters who are blithe, survivors, or edgy...

Most recently, the norm has become snarky detachment...

For instance, in our time it's highly fashionable for characters to be obsessed. Obessession can imply focus and strength of commitment, but it can also hammer us like a migraine headache. Sometimes it's just a lazy label. When I see the word in query letters I groan, much as I do when protagonists are described as haunted by demons. Not again!

Why do stereotypes fail? The obvious reason is that familiarity has a dulling effect. There's a deeper reason, though. Stereotypical characters aren't authentic. They lack the startling vividness of people who are unlike anyone we have ever known. In fact, I'll go further. Here's a counter-intuitive principle for you to consider: the more unlike anyone else you make a character, the more universal that character will become.

Are you anything like Abileen Clarke, one of the maids in The Help? Are you African American? Do you live in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962? Do you tolerate daily doses of overt racism? Do you ride in the back of the bus to work? Did your son die young? Do you have to scrape by, counting pennies to get by on your forty-three dollars a week wage? Do you bite your sharp tounge every day, grovelling, dissembling, and lying to keep your job? Do you iron pleats and patiently potty train someone else's child? Have you risked everything you rely on to assist an insecure fledgeling author in writing a book that will enrage everyone? Would you bake feces into a pie that you serve to your employer?

I venture to guess that description doesn't fit you. (Am I wrong?) Yet who among us hasn't felt like an outsider, been treated unfairly, scraped by on too little, yearned for justice, and contemplated revenge? Aibileen is all of us, but oddly, she becomes more iconic the more Stockett makes her different.

... Push your characters to ways of being that are extreme, unsettling, or just plain out there.

The more singular the character becomes on the page, the more your readers will see themselves there too. Look, we're all crazy, sane, and sublime in the same ways you are. Show that on the page and you make it okay for the rest of us to be our strange and wonderful selves too.

-

Many people would argue that what they love about GRRM is that the characters feel so real. I've been to parties where people sit around and talk about Game of Thrones as if it were reality TV.

Brienne of Tarth real? Tyrion Lannister real? The Hound real? Seriously? They are as far from real as possible, and yet, it is there strangeness and uniqueness that makes them feel so real. They aren't cutouts.

I love The Office, because I felt like I 'knew" people like Micheal Scott and Dwight and Jim and Pam in real life... but do I really? No. There are not people really like that in 'real life'... but there are people who are nerdy and people who try to hard to find friends and people who can't take anything seriously in real life...

 

[FifthView]

I do think a totally constrained 3rd, let's call it 3rd intimate, exists as well as 3rd limited. To me, 3rd Limited is where you have those pull backs, and I think that's the strength of 3rd Lim. 3rd Intimate as I look at it is to never (or almost never) leave the POV character perspective, becoming a bit closer to 1st. I wouldn't go so far as to call pullbacks Omniscient (not all of the time) but more a mingling of narrative observation of what the character sees around them, although some writers do Omniscient when setting scenes. Limited allows the writer to hover in and around the character's head. LOL.

I greatly prefer 3rd Limited as I define it here.

I think this is an important distinction, and I've often wanted to discuss the intimate vs limited 3rd. When discussing 3rd here, I've found myself using them interchangeably or in a combined form ("intimate/limited") because I don't think many are used to the term "intimate" when considering 3rd limited. At least, most comments I've read in forum threads always use "limited" and rarely use "intimate" during discussions.

I also think this is a shame, because newer writers seem to equate the two. In order to write 3rd limited, they write 3rd limited-intimate and the narrative becomes anemic. "Don't break POV!" is carried too far. This might also raise the question of voice vs POV. Pull-back shots might still maintain POV–the narrator adds details/info not on the POV character's mind but still within his view–but while trying to develop a 1st-personish "voice" in the intimate approach such pullbacks are avoided. Here's Sanderson's take in that podcast I linked above:

[Brandon] Yup. The reason I'm making a distinction here is because I view a big distinction between having a narrator that you feel... Someone that has their own voice that is addressing the reader and a sterile sort of omniscient where you're not trying to distract people and create a narrative voice for a narrator. Instead you're trying to give establishing shots.​

Speaking of 1st person....Sanderson also makes an interesting claim about a type of "1st person omniscient." I think it's a useful term and not as odd as it might sound. In the way some types of 3rd omniscient use a storyteller voice, a narrator with personality, a 1st person narrator also has a storyteller voice. And some 1st person narrators are telling stories after-the-fact and already have a type of "omniscient" knowledge of all the factors shaping that story (i.e., hindsight.)

But what's particularly interesting about 1st person narrative within this discussion of "unreality" or artifice is the way some 1st person accounts are meant to be read as if the narrator is only just now experiencing things, isn't looking back at events that have already occurred. How realistic is that?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I agree the don't break POV gets taken to extremes and to the detriment of stories being told. The power of 3rd Limited is the ability to pull in tight to the emotions, but also be able to hover above the head of the character and take a look around at the world with a less filtered narrator's voice. The mingling of character and narrator, the balance between the two is challenging if you overthink it, heh heh..

How much different should I narrate the 10YO girl's POV? The 19YO son of a clan chief? The 17YO female postulant for the priesthood? The 60YO priest? The 98YO priestess? How much filter should there be is a fascinating question. I'm shooting for yeah, it's my voice, but with certain emotional and dialogue inflections and word choice to make them just a little different.

I'm not sure if any POV is more or less realistic than another, but I do know 1st present is a no go for me as a reader, because I am a struggling 1st reader anyhow... Of course, it should be noted that one reason not to read what I don't write is so I don't pick up ticks and bad habits from stuff... The mimic in me comes out pretty easily, reading other writers will mess with my own voice, so reading anything 1st or worse, 1st present, could throw unnecessary wrenches in my flow of writing, LOL.