Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is a hefty tome, full of close analysis and careful considerations, all leading the reader toward being an intentional, considerate reader and writer of fiction. I’ve chosen just a couple of topics from the book to reflect on here, and they are so intertwined that in the end, they’re the same topic: telling and showing and the use of reliable commentary.
In his chapter on telling and showing, Booth somewhat addresses the fact that for the modern writer this notion has become a sticking point, a dogma that infects individual writers and entire programs. I think he gets at an important truth when in his discussion of Boccaccio he argues that his “artistry lied not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing” (16). I was glad to read this section that both acknowledges showing as a superior form of narration and the place of telling in elevating the whole. I’ve grown tired of writers who react in a knee-jerk, non-specific way to lines that “tell”. It was the section on the use of reliable commentary that moved this for me from a notion to a specific idea about just what I love about a certain amount of telling, and why I need to keep working on refining that balance.
Booth suggests that commentary must be intentional and provides some reasons why the writer might choose to comment on her story, such as providing facts, manipulating mood, molding beliefs, and some more. Some questions I came up with for myself after reading this section include: Does the reader have to know it now? If so, what is the best way to get it across? Can you explain why commentary here enhances the work as a whole? The last and most important question seemed to me to be: who decides? My answer for my own work? I do. I’m happy to have this insight as I move into this next revision of my novel, that I know is full of lines that tell when they should show. The task for me will be to keep asking myself those questions. It would be an affront to my own style and vision of the story to simple hack it all away. It’s fascinating to me how this question of good writing doesn’t necessarily translate when the writer moves from short story to novel, as I did.
For many years, I wrote only short stories, always keeping this notion of showing in mind, and for the most part, writing stories that showed more often than they told and told at the right time. There were times even when I was criticized for not telling enough, leaving the story too raw. As I began to write novels, something interesting happened. I wrote good scenes of showing, but was inclined to stitch them together with too much telling of information. This is true in the current draft of my novel. You see, I was so terrified that I wouldn’t get to the end, that I’d get lost somewhere along the way, that I kept checking in with the story. Because of this, what I ended up with is something sketchy, something that I now need to go back to the beginning of and add more detail and color to. After reading these sections, I’m beginning to see this question of telling and showing as something different than before, or maybe just as I’ve always seen it, but was not able to articulate or assert with confidence. Showing is supreme art, but commentary that is intentional is like the perfect mat and frame for the portrait.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son impressed me in many ways. Though it’s a collection of stories that mostly stand on their own, it also works as a novella, and is an example of knock-your-socks-off first person narration. The persona Johnson creates in these stories drives the entire work. His careful use of imagery, common language and comparison are three examples of how he creates a complete picture of the man introduced even in the first two words—the title.
So much characterization happens in how the first person persona sees things, in the imagery he provides. “We drove with the windows down. The mild spring evening, after several frozen winter months, was like a foreigner breathing in our faces. We took our passenger to a residential street where the buds were forcing themselves out of the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens” (18). This bleak description of spring as a violent intruder, forced and full of pain, says so much about how our protagonist views life, without hope or even desire. He keeps living just because he does, not because he is particularly thrilled about living, as indicated in his response to the overdose that could have been him, but because of circumstance, wasn’t, “He died. I am still alive” (42). He sees death, decay, and fragility all around him, a sign of his own depression, lack of purpose or want of a better life. He sees dead crops “like rows of underthings” (51), how the “cows [stand] around smelling one another’s butts” (49), and eyeballs that look like they came from a joke shop. He may be technically alive, but he is not participating in the things that connect us to each other, like love and compassion and vulnerability. He is an outsider looking in, like he was when he was spying on the Mennonite couple, and that is why what he sees is so dark and desperate.
The words are simple but brooding and they are put together as simply as possible, without dwelling too long before moving on to the next thing, as in “It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere” (11). He packs as much into a sentence as possible without extra words or clauses, an imitation of the resigned attitude of the narrator, “ I saw Jack Hotel in an olive-green three-piece suit, with his blond hair combed back and his face shining and suffering” (35). The economy and simplicity of the language fits a character who both thinks deeply about things and has little faith in the hope of human progress.
A good metaphor will do it for me anytime, but one that is not only good, but perfect, because it serves a larger purpose than just to make the story more vivid is divine. Johnson’s metaphors were perfect, all feeding into what is ultimately story after story of characterization. His comparisons are born from the mind of the unnamed heroin addict / writer who narrates the stories. They reveal the darkness of his mind, how unromantic his view of humanity is, “Back in the O.R., Georgie dropped his mop and bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers” (71). Again and again, he sees the filth and desperate longing around him. Johnson becomes the writer/actor in feeding us comparisons that further feed our understanding of the narrator. I imagine him transformed at the keyboard, not Johnson at all, but this other unnamed character, this Jesus’ Son, seeing things as he would see them.
There are all sorts of applications to my own writing in closely analyzing Johnson’s work, perhaps most importantly just the subtle influence that reading good writing has on the mind, how it influences in ways unplanned and often unrecognized. However, it’s Johnson’s master characterization that I’d like to really channel for my own work. I have a tendency to focus more on theme or the big picture, or to try to paint too many characters. I believe that focusing on my protagonist can help strengthen the areas in which the current draft of my novel is weak, such as in point-of-view and sustained elaboration. So, can I get back to it, now? 😉

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Goia and R.S. Gwynn contains one or more stories by fifty-two different authors. Each author’s section is followed by a section called author’s perspective that includes some reflections by the writer on the craft of writing. The back of the book has an extensive glossary, discussion on the elements of fiction and approaches to criticism. This is a book that will scare your reluctant reader because of it’s—even in paperback—massive size. I had started reading this book some time before I chose to finish it for graduate work, so yes, I did read the entire thing. The collection was refreshingly diverse in style and author background. In trying to decide what to write about, knowing that I should only choose a couple of stories to focus on, I first went through and circled all the stories listed in the index that moved me. You know, the kind of story that leaves you awed and inspired, a little tug behind your navel suggesting, this is it, this is it, this is what it’s all about. There were twelve. I’m going to write about two here, because I think that there are some similarities between them that make them a good pair. “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Swimmer” by John Cheever both use irony and symbolism to invite the reader into the experience of the story and characterize their protagonists.
Cheever’s Neddy outwardly seems uninhibited and happy from the very first scene where he “slid down the banister that morning and [gave] the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack.” And from there we see him inspired with this idea of swimming across the county from backyard pool to backyard pool, and he is delighted with himself for thinking of it. Thus he swims from the Grahams to the Hammers to the Lears, and on and on, a seeming never ending journey from house to house. At first, he slides in easy and is welcomed, seems so at ease wherever he goes, even taking off his trunks and swimming nude in the Hallorans pool, because that’s how they did it. As Neddy swims closer to his house, there are increasing indications that under this surface delight, there is a powerful disorder, and we are not shocked, but not entirely expecting either when at the end of the story we find him standing in front of an empty house to stare at his own delusions. Chopin use this technique as well when she sets us up in the first line for a protagonist about to be crushed by the news of her husbands death, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the new of her husband’s death.” The story is nearly over before we get her true reaction of “Free! Body and soul free!” The story ends with yet another irony, the surprise of finding out that the fact that her husband is alive, not dead like the first line suggested, is the thing that puts her life in danger and in fact, kills her.
Chopin and Cheever use symbolism throughout to lead us to their ironic endings. Chopin uses the imagery of the sky our of the open window, the window itself, and the flight of the bird, to represent the opening up of Mrs. Mallard’s inner life and her desire for freedom. Cheever uses river symbolism in an interesting way here in that his main character makes his own river, even naming it, in his swim through the county. We know that the river symbolizes life and choice and direction, and are immediately cued into the fact that this protagonist is embarking on a quest. So, we have to ask ourselves, where will it lead? The houses he visits, all families, all named—and there are so many—symbolize the possibilities for family life. When in the end, we find that for him there is no longer any possibility, we are sorry for him, we’ve seen so many varied possibilities. As he gets closer to home, the families he visits seem to know his story, give hints to the reality that his wife left and something is wrong with his daughters, and as this begins to happen, the weather, that has so far been as pleasant as he has been delighted, begins to sour, symbolizing what he must face in the end.
So, how can I take this thing that I noticed in these two stories and apply it to my own work? In cultivating an appreciation for surprise, for playing on reader expectation, on using imagery to compliment larger themes in the story. I’m left with these questions to ask myself about my own writing: Do the images in the scene all contribute to something larger? Are there places where going against expectation would be more effective?

Buy my books here.

Interested in hiring me as a coach to get you boosted with your writing goals?
Find free resources and information here.
Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone