Much of what passes among and between human beings happens — drum roll, please — indoors, within a home, an office building, or some other place people have put to a particular use. This is a factor of great significance in a writer’s attempts to imbue his fiction with the virtue called realism.
Did that stir up the mud at the bottom of your psychic reservoir, Gentle Reader? Or did it cause a sudden wave of precipitation, such that much that was once cloudy has now become clear? Either way, it’s part of the challenge I face in nearly every story I write, because nearly all the significant events in my stories occur indoors.
Realism, at its core, is about hewing to the reader’s convictions about how people think, act, and feel. For example, it would be a great offense against realism if character Smith, whom you’d established earlier in your narrative to be a good person of deep empathy with others, were to witness the torture of a child while feeling pleasure and satisfaction. Good people simply don’t react that way, no matter how badly the little bastard at issue has been behaving lately.
But with regard to the “indoor” problem, my focus today is on how most people treat their homes and places of business. Such places tend to be orderly, such that encountering this or that object in a particular place is almost never cause for heightened attention or concern. Thus, when a character chooses to notice some object in such a place — more important, when the narrator chooses to make mention of it — it had better be an event of significance to the story. Remember Chekhov’s Law:
“Everything not essential to the story must be ruthlessly cut away. If in Act One you say that a gun hung on the wall, then in Act Two or Act Three at the latest, it must be discharged.“
(That’s Anton Chekhov, the immortal Russian playwright, not Pavel Chekhov of Star Trek fame.)
That guideline, added to the demands of realism, tends to make “indoor” fiction rather spare in terms of description of setting. After all, we also have Brunner’s Laws:
- The raw material of fiction is people.
- The essence of story is change.
(That’s the late John Brunner, author of Stand on Zanzibar and other classics of science fiction, not Scott Brunner, retired backup quarterback for the New York Giants.)
Therefore, what your characters are saying, thinking, and doing is the whole point of your tale. You mustn’t distract the reader from those things with irrelevancies about the physical setting. That leads directly to an economy of description that readers generally appreciate, but which the “literati” abhor. There’s no help for it, unless you want the reader to conceive of your characters as slovenly types, the inanimate features of whose environments are forever startling them.
The evaluations attached to fiction produced in accordance with these observations runs the gamut from “dry and sapless” to “focused and tight.” If you’re looking for acclaim from some literary prize jury, you’ll lean toward the former, whereas if you want to sell millions of books that reliably bring readers to the edges of their seats, you’ll prefer the latter. Remember Leonard’s Law: Try not to write the parts that people skip.
(That’s the late Elmore Leonard, novelist extraordinaire, not “Dutch” Leonard, celebrated lefthanded pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers.)
Granted that it’s possible to write boring stories even when you eschew excessive description, by which I mean description of inanimate details irrelevant to the Marquee characters. But that points to a fault independent of the problem of realistic setting: boring characters whose lives don’t challenge them significantly or teach them any lessons of importance. During the period before Kafka burst onto the European scene, there was an abundance of such stories — stories, as an old professor of mine once put it, “written about dead flies in the bottom of cracked tea cups.” I have no idea what sort of audience such stories garnered. I do know I don’t want a readership that would be satisfied with such a tale.
What about you, Gentle Reader? If you like my stuff, it’s likely that the fictions of the Dead-Fly School don’t please you terribly much. If you don’t…well, there are no certainties in that case, but what do you read fiction for? And if you’re a writer, for whom do you write? Folks who want to see the laws of reality acted out in the lives of vivid characters who might not grasp them perfectly, or who might be determined to challenge them? Or folks to whom dead flies possess deep and enduring symbolic significance?
The best description of all sorts is intimately married to what the viewpoint character is thinking and doing. That maxim, which leads me to avert mine eyes from the usual physical trappings one finds in homes and offices, shall henceforth be known as Porretto’s Law.
(That’s Fran Porretto, storyteller and opinion-monger, not…oh, never mind.)