There Are No Rules

"One night [at university] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, 'As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...' When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know that anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As quoted in The Modern Library Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch.

Art transcends rules. As soon as someone says, "Don't," some writer will come along and do exactly what was forbidden, and make it work. I think the quote above captures the danger of a rule-based approach to art: it leads young writers to the belief that some things are not allowed. As if art is answerable to some cosmic hall-monitor, telling you where you can and cannot go.

All things are allowed.

At the deepest level, a writer has to follow their muse, find their own voice, take their writing where it demands, not where some external (or internal) monitor says it should go.

This does not mean that choices don't have consequences. One needs to know the effect one is looking to create and what choices will achieve that effect, as well as what choices will undermine that effect. Technique is not a matter of learning rules, but of familiarizing oneself with the full range of effects that have been achieved in good writing, understanding the connection between one's choices and the effect of those choices, and developing skills in executing the broad range of choices available.

For instance, one of the effects that much fiction strives for is to create an ongoing fictional dream for the reader, in which he or she stops seeing words on a page, and is pulled into the experience of the fictional scene as it unfolds--seeing the rescue plane take off before the hero reaches it; hearing the dog (the reader hopes it's only a dog) rustling through the garbage in the alley below the bedroom window; feeling the hot sand of the Cote d'Azur beneath their feet. And many of the "rules" in fiction derive from the fact that poor grammar, unclear sentences, confusion about who is speaking, phony-sounding dialog, large dumps of exposition, use of cliches, lack of clarity with POV, etc. can all pull the reader out of that fictional dream, and instead leave them confused or annoyed, or even angry, over the writing. (Of course, striving for that fictional dream isn't a rule. Some fiction works by purposefully breaking the fictional dream. John Barth's short story "Lost in the Funhouse" tells a story about a boy and his family going to an amusement park, but intentionally interrupts that narrative to point out the techniques used in telling the story.)

The fact there are no absolute rules also does not mean that writers will never choose to work within a framework: adopting the rules of a given form, the expectations of a specific genre, or the requirements of a particular market.

For example, much of the best poetry in English--from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Keats to Robert Frost--is written in iambic pentameter. A great many English poems make use of a formal rhyme scheme. Both meter and rhyme are somewhat out of fashion these days, but they certainly remain viable options to a contemporary poet. The villanelle is one of the most restrictive poetic forms--specifying not just a rhyme scheme but a specific pattern for repeating whole lines. Yet can you imagine the beauty of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night not expressed through the villanelle form?

In terms of genre, readers will have certain genre expectations. If you're writing mysteries, readers are going to expect a crime, or some mystery, to be solved. You can of course break that rule, but at a certain point, it might become meaningless to call your story a mystery. If you are writing a literary short story, opening with a star ship captain chasing down aliens with his ray gun is going to turn off many readers who have different expectations of the literary genre.

And of course given markets have guidelines. If one is writing for Analog, there needs to be a speculative element in the story. If one is writing a screenplay one hopes to sell to a major studio, one's chances greatly go up if it is at least one and a half hours long, but not (Return of the King notwithstanding) three and a half hours long.

So the writer will always have to deal with the effect their choices achieve--intended or not. And a given writer might choose to adopt the rules of a given form, genre or market. That said, at the deepest level, there are no rules.

Exposition

One challenge in fiction is providing the reader with the background information he/she needs to understand the story, without making the reader feel like the story has come to a grinding halt while you convey that info. This challenge is particularly stringent in short stories, where there is such a high premium on compression.

I see stories with openings structured like this:

Darek knelt behind the boulder, laser drawn, waiting for the Boquacians to make the first move. Darek had left Earth three months earlier--without Judith, staying on Earth made no sense to him. So he had signed on with the Intergalactic Legion, the stereotypical Legionnaire escaping from love gone bad.

But nothing in the Legionnaire training had prepared him to be plucked down in the middle of the Boquacian Civil War. The Southern Boquacians had long complained that the North cut off their trade routes, had stifled their industry. Until finally, North Boquacia had fired--they said it was accidental, South Boquacia said it was intentional--on a Southern Boquacian transport ship, killing 350 people, including women and children. From that, war followed swiftly.

With an opening like this, the reader doesn't have a chance to be pulled into the protagonist's current situation, before the story is off giving background information. Often, as in this case, the background information covers multiple background situations—first we find out why Darek left Earth, then we get a history of the Boquacians Civil War. I’ve received submissions where the story will range through a half dozen background situations before returning to poor Darek, hiding behind the rock with laser drawn, somewhere around page 5.

Also notice what can happen to your verbs in an expositional passage. Suddenly, instead of the crisp past tense of a current scene--"knelt," "fired," "dodged"--we get "had left," "had signed," "had prepared," etc. Using a single "had left" to locate an event as earlier in time, or to transition the reader to that earlier time for a flashback, is fine. But long passages of "had left," "had signed," "had prepared" and so on slows the rhythm of your sentences, and saps their energy.

Another less-than-successful strategy for getting background to the reader is using dialog to convey the information. This leads to unconvincing dialog.

"Is that a Daedalus device?" Bert asked.

“Yes,” Darek answered. “As you know, once activated the Daedalus device will gradually increase the atmospheric heat within the target circumference, forcing any attackers to turn back or be melted. It therefore meets The Centari Accords standard for offering troops a non-lethal chance to withdraw." Darek turned the dial to 11. "Of course, if I set the circumference wide enough, they won't have time to get out."

Providing the reader with the information he/she needs is a challenge for all fiction--the way Sara and Kevin tease as a married couple only makes sense if we know that Sara used to baby-sit for Kevin when they were kids. That said, I didn’t choose science fiction examples above by accident. If the fiction takes place in the present day real world, readers already know a lot about that world. However, in speculative fiction, to understand a story the reader might need to know what new technologies do; how future or fantastic societies are structured socially and politically; how alien races mate; or any of a wide range of things the characters in that future situation will take for granted, but which a reader needs to learn about your fictional storyverse.

So, how do you convey the necessary information to the reader?

1) Ask what the reader needs to know
This is an important question to ask yourself during the revision process. (I'm all for just getting as much down as you can during the first draft.) There are a lot of facts about your characters, their society, the future world they inhabit, etc. that you may have worked out as a writer. However, what of that information does the reader need to know?

2) Kill your darlings
This is advice often given to writers in terms of those lines you love, which sound so good and poetic and quotable, but just don't work within the story. However, this advice also applies to background info. I recently finished revising a sf detective story. In the process of writing it, I had created a long history of the new technology that drove the story--how it first developed for medical use, how a series of Supreme Court decisions brought it into use in criminal investigations, how eventually the technology came to be used in committing crimes. I thought it was a great history, with excellent references to current medical research, legal thinking, supreme court precedent. However, as much as I loved my little future history of this technology, I had to admit it brought the story to a grinding halt, and that it wasn't at all necessary for the reader to understand the story. And so, the only thing to do was cut that passage. (I did, of course, save the passage--while it doesn't have the pithy strength of "Kill your darlings," the real advice is probably "Store your darlings someplace safe, in case you can use them later.")

3) Don't Underestimate Your Reader
Readers create their own background for the events of your story as they read. If you carefully choose your words, images, descriptions, dialog, etc., you can guide them to fill in the story background you want them to have, without ever spelling it out. A quick exchange of snarky dialog between a husband and wife, and maybe you don't have to go back and paint the whole history of their declining relationship. And when it comes to speculative fiction, remember readers are genre savvy. They've seen thousands of faster-than-light drives, they've heard the paradoxes of time travel explained many times, they know vampires hide from the sun. You only have to explain these things if you're subverting a genre expectation.

4) Make It So
You don't need to know how a television works to watch it. Likewise, your reader doesn't need to know how a future technology works to follow a story using that technology. You can state your characters have a time machine, or an incantation to raise the dead, or whatever speculative element you want to introduce into the story, and go from there. In the majority of cases, the reader simply needs to know an element's function, not how it works.

5) Don't write a passage when a sentence will do
Sometimes, no matter how savvy your reader, there will be a fact he/she just needs to know to understand your story, and you have to provide that fact. In most cases it's best to convey that necessary fact on the fly, without stopping the momentum of the current scene. Instead of writing a passage detailing the background info, see if you can boil it down into a sentence. For instance, if the only story-relevant aspect of your time machine is that it can only be used once, you could say: "The time machine degraded the user's DNA, meaning Carl got one chance--lucky he didn't want kids anyway." When you have to provide background, give only what the reader needs to understand the story and the characters.

6) When called for, use a flashback
I've seen writer's guidelines and editor's comments that state they don't like flashbacks. I understand that feeling--many of the submissions I see using flashback do lose a lot, and I do wish the writer had started the story at a different point, and told it chronologically. That said, I hate to suggest a limit on what good writing can do, just because an approach often shows up in less successful work. And, when you need to convey something about a character's past to the reader, going back and showing a scene from their past is often stronger than narrative exposition telling the reader about that past. There are a couple of considerations to making good use of flashbacks. One is, don't make the structure of the story any more complicated than it has to be. If one flashback will do it, don't use a whole storyline of flashbacks. If two storylines--one set in the character's past, and one in the character's present--allow you to tell the story you want, don't jump around between three or four different timelines. I think one of the frustrations editors feel with stories that use flashback is that instead of telling the story with dramatic scenes (whether past or current) that move the action forward, they can devolve into a hodgepodge of thoughts and events from all over the character's life. Another suggestion I'd make in terms of flashbacks is that in most cases you'll want your reader grounded in the current scene before you go to your flashback. One problem I often have with flashback stories is that they'll barely introduce the character and the current scene, before we're off into a flashback. Of course, the best advice with flashbacks is to read writers who do flashbacks really well, and learn from them. I've been reading Alice Munroe recently, and she does a great job weaving past and current scenes into her stories. For a novel that manages multiple timelines, I'd highly recommend Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier.

7) Study Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard said he always looks to take out the parts the reader is going to skip over anyway. That's great advice in general, and specifically when it comes to exposition. And if you want to study a writer who provides background information effectively and unobtrusively, I'd certainly recommend Elmore Leonard. His prose flies, and you never find yourself confused about what's going on.

POV, Psychic Distance and Voice

Below are some definitions of basic terminology relating to Point of View (POV), as well as some related thoughts, possibilities and challenges. This is meant to clarify some terms, and maybe give some ideas for things you might want to try, or alternatively watch out for, in your writing. It's not, however, meant to be exhaustive.

First Person
The narrator is one of the characters in the story, and uses the word "I" to refer to him- or herself.

The first person narrator can be the protagonist. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Huck Finn tells his own story.

The first person narrator can be a supporting character, telling someone else's story. For example, The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway narrates the story of Jay Gatsby. Or the Sherlock Holmes stories, where Dr. Watson narrates stories about Sherlock Holmes.

Stories can be told by alternating between a number of first person narrators. For example, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

The first person can also represent the author as character. Milan Kundera makes use of this in some of his novels, where the author appears as a character, referring to himself as "I."

A writer can also use first person plural, telling the story from the point of view of "we." For example, William Faulkner's story, "A Rose for Emily."

Finally, there's a use of first person, particularly in some 19th century novels, where the story is told in third person, but an "I" storyteller appears at one or more points in the story. For example, Charles Bovary's unnamed classmate, who appears as the "I" narrator at the beginning of Madame Bovary, but then never appears again in a novel otherwise told in third person omniscient.

Second Person
The narration uses "you."

The second person "you" can be the protagonist, and appear to reference the reader him- or herself. The main example of a novel being Jay McInerney's Big Lights, Bright City. I've also read a few short stories using "you" as the protagonist's, which I thought worked, though none come to mind at the moment. (There were a bunch of second person stories--usually in present tense--that surfaced after McInerney's novel, and I suspect winning an editor over with a present-tense, second-person story is still an uphill battle. That said, if you do it well enough, anything can work.)

The second person "you" can also be a character to whom the narrator is telling the story. This device is most common in lyric poetry, where there is often an "I" narrator talking directly to a "you" who is a character in the work, often his/her lover. For example, Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress":

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

This is much less common in fiction--I can't think of an example off the top of my head. However, I think it would make for an interesting technique to explore fictionally.

Third Person
The narrator uses "he" or "she." (Or, in third person plural "they," though I can't think of example of that off the top of my head.)

The third person omniscient narrator knows everything, can go inside any character's head, can be at any scene, can tell any fact whether or not any of the characters know it, can give his/her own interpretation of events--the narrator is basically the god of that fictional universe. Many of those great 19th century novels were in third person omniscient. For example, Stendhal's The Red and the Black.

The third person limited narrator can show any scene the viewpoint character was present at, and can relate the thoughts and subjective experiences of the viewpoint character. The viewpoint character can remain the same throughout the story. Most short stories that use third person limited follow a single POV character. And some novels do this also. For example, James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is third person limited, from the viewpoint of Stephen Daedalus through the whole novel. Or the viewpoint character can switch. Many novels, and a few short stories, use third person limited, but switch between different characters. For example, John Kennedy Toole's novel Confederacy of Dunces uses third person limited, and shifts between the viewpoint of many different characters. Third person limited has become the most common POV used, and I've heard some editor's express a preference for it (along with a preference for past tense over present tense). I do think it's currently the safest POV, in the sense that no one is going to be put off by a writer choosing to use third person limited.

One of the challenges of third person limited (particularly in stories told from a single third person limited POV, as short stories tend to be) is having access to the events you want to use to tell the story. In third person limited, your POV character has to be present at that scene, or at least have learned about it in a plausible way. However, solving this challenge by jumping around between different POV characters carries its own challenges, particularly in short stories: you run the risk (at minimum) of losing a strong reader identification with your protagonist, or (at worse) confusing the hell out of the reader.

POV and Psychic Distance
Within third person omniscient and third person limited the distance (I believe at one point John Gardner called it "psychic distance") between the narrator and the character's experience exists along a continuum. So, all of the following can exist within a third person omniscient narration.

- In the city of P., there lived a man who sold clocks, albeit unsuccessfully.

- Samuel Derrick owned a struggling clock store in Pittsburgh.

- Sam leaned against the counter. Seventeen days since he'd sold a clock.

- Sam felt the counter's edge press into his belly, but didn't move. He almost enjoyed the discomfort--it was immediate, concrete, unlike the dread that his shop was going under.

- Dammit. Sam banged his belly against the counter, enjoyed the sharp pain. Was a customer ever going to walk through the door?

Not claiming any of those are breathless prose. But they all exist along a continuum of third person possibilities. And much fiction moves between those various psychic distances. So a third person omniscient voice can duck in to capture a character's stream of consciousness thoughts, or pull back to describe the history of the town they are in.

POV and Voice
There is another important aspect of all this. Within third person narration, particularly third person limited, one constantly has to decide to what extent the narrative voice is going to capture the voice of the character, and to what extent it is going to access vocabulary, understanding, etc., the the character doesn't have access to.

So, if the writer is using third person limited and the POV character is a child, he can use a third person voice that to some extent works within the child's verbal range. For example, the opening of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

Or, the author can use his full range of vocabulary, diction and understanding when describing the child's POV. For instance, the ending of Chekhov's story "The Cook's Wedding," from the POV of seven-year-old Grisha:

Again a problem for Grisha: Pelageya was living in freedom, doing as she liked, and not having to account to anyone for her actions, and all at once, for no sort of reason, a stranger turns up, who has somehow acquired rights over her conduct and her property! Gisha was distressed. He longed passionately, almost to tears, to comfort this victim, as he supposed, of man's injustice. Picking out the very biggest apple in the storeroom he stole into the kitchen, slipped it into Pelageya's hand, and darted headlong away.

In this passage, though from Grisha's POV, Grisha's experience is not reported through the language and syntax of a seven year old.

So, the writer can either try to capture the POV character's language, diction and understanding in his third person narrative, or the writer can access thoughts, allusions and language the POV character wouldn't use him- or herself. One caution--this second choice can create a technical challenge when the character talks, if the narrative voice is extremely dissimilar from the character's.

Tom moved through each day like a soldier's ghost from Renoir's La Grande Illusion, through a world in which old verities were upended, and existence tenuous as dusk's last light.

"Dude, this bites," Tom said.

It's important to manage (and modulate) the differences in language and diction between the narrator and the character when writing in third person. Particularly in dialog scenes if the author uses a formal and/or poetic style, and the character speaks plainly.

Anyway, there's a quick tour through some POV issues, and a couple of related issues as well. That's not to say you won't come across schools of thought and writers who use some of the terms slightly differently. And the term "psychic distance," which I think I got from John Gardner, is not a generally used term, like the others used above. However, I personally find it a useful concept.

As with any element of fiction, the most important thing in studying POV is to read widely, write lots, think and experiment. Ultimately, what one wants from their study of POV is not a set of rules, but a sense of mastery that comes through in confident writing, and a wide range of available options to use in telling your stories.