HERE ARE FOUR OF LITERATURE’S MOST POWERFUL INVENTIONS THAT YOU PROBABLY USE TO TELL STORIES, BUT DIDN’T REALIZE THE ACTUAL NEUROSCIENCE BEHIND THEM

By El Ochiis

I had an English professor who was considered an eccentric by New York standards; he collected shopping bags. His position was that each bag told a story about the store and the patrons who shopped there – that these containers for capitalism were a most interesting invention. Now this wouldn’t have been such an oddball thing save for the fact that he was as spendthrift as he was inimitable; he never shopped in these stores – merely using them to hold books he had checked out of The New York Public Library.

We waited each week for the bag and its contents therein. He never let us down with each introduction of something new in literature and writing. One week the professor brought a few books in his arms, sans a bag, and announced that he would be introducing us to literary inventions, through the ages, showing how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling any scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind

1. Plot Twist - This literary invention is now so well-known that we often learn to identify it as children. But it thrilled Aristotle when he first discovered it, and for two reasons. First, it supported his hunch that literature’s inventions were constructed from story. And second, it confirmed that literary inventions could have potent psychological effects. Who hasn’t felt a burst of wonder—or as Aristotle called it, thaumazein—when a story pivots unexpectedly? That’s why holy scriptures brim with plot twists: David beating Goliath, parting the Sea of Reeds to escape an evil Pharaoh …

2. The Hurt Delay - this invention’s blueprint is a plot that discloses to the audience that a character is going to get hurt—prior to the hurt actually arriving. The classic example is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, where we learn before Oedipus that he’s about to undergo the horror of discovering that he’s killed his father and married his mother. But it occurs in a range of later literature, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to paperback bestsellers such as John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.

3. The Tale Told From Our Future - This invention was created simultaneously by many different global authors, among them the 13th-century West African griot poet who composed the Epic of Sundiata. Basically, a narrator uses a future-tense voice to address us in our present. As it goes in the Epic: “Listen to my words, you who want to know; by my mouth you will learn the history of Mali. By my mouth you will get to know the story. . .”

4. The Almighty Heart - This invention is an anthropomorphic omniscient narrator—or, to be more colloquial, a story told by someone with a human heart and a god’s all-seeing eye. It was first devised by the ancient Greek poet Homer in The Iliad, but you can find it throughout more recent fiction. The invention works by tricking your brain into feeling like you’re chanting along with a greater human voice.

THE DETAILS ARE IN THE DIALOGUE

By El Ochiis

When critics read my writing, they comment that it reads like a television or movie script.  Both genres use dialogue judiciously. What’s most interesting is that I didn’t have a television growing up – I did have an imagination that produced a lot of imaginary characters.  Though conversations between people appear to be a natural to me, I still rely on some key tools to write good dialogue:

1. Keep characters completely unenlightened

One book that every writer of fiction should read is Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. His advice equally applies to actors and writers.  Shurtleff observed that actors often play a scene as if they know the scene’s ending beforehand. For example, at the climax of one particular scene of a Tennessee Williams’ play, an insane person puts out a cigarette in the palm of the hand of the nurse who’s trying to help her.  But the nurse, according to Shurtleff, wrongly played the whole scene as if she didn’t like the patient.  Shurtleff told the actress: “If you treat the patient really nicely and kindly throughout the scene, and you show the audience you like her, and you’re trying to help her, it’s a thousand times more powerful if she then turns around and puts that cigarette out in your palm.”  That makes a lot of sense.  If you know the how the scene will end before you start to write it, don’t let your character act and speak as if they know where it’s going.  Preserve surprise and the scene will be much more efficacious.

         2. Become the Character

Amy Tan stated that her when she wrote dialogue, her technique was to stare at her shoes until she suddenly became the character.  I use a version of this; I pretend to be each of my characters whilst I drive – this is tricky because I wouldn’t want to be in the character of my villain when I order tea at Starbucks.

         3. Leave Transcripts for Court Reporters

Superb dialogue sometimes just happens, but most often, we have to sit there for a long time until we get exactly the right words we want.   At an audition, a director told me he’d deduct a hundred dollars from actors’ pay for each word they uttered that was not in the script.  As a writer, you aren’t in charge of getting down every single word the characters might say – you just have to report the dialogue that’s most important to the story.

         4. Make Every Word Count – Like You’re Being Charged for Them

Here’s the dialogue on the first page of Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club:

[Mother:] “Auntie Lin cooked red bean soup for Joy Luck. I’m going to cook black bean sesame soup.”

[Daughter:] “Don’t show off.”

The daughter’s three little words tell us a lot about both characters:  1) the mother was trying to one-up Auntie Lin; 2) the relationship between mother and daughter is combative; and, 3) the nature of the daughter who’s hard - she isn’t always nice.  So, when the mother comes back with this retort: “It’s not showoff.”  We know the mother is hurt, we also know that the spelling means the speaker’s first language is not English – “showoff” instead of “show off”.  Use dialogue to provide the evidence of who your characters are and let the reader draw the conclusion.

         5. Read Your Dialogue Aloud, into a Tape Recorder

When you speak your own dialogue, you suddenly know which lines need attention and which lines are fine.

 

THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR

By Kasie Whitener

Christine doesn’t remember anything. I’ve just started a new book by a favorite author and the opening chapter is told from the point of view of an amnesia victim. What an incredible lens through which to bring a story.

Without remembering anything, Christine can’t tell us where she is, who she is, or what brought her into these circumstances. She doesn’t know the people who enter the room despite them knowing her. She is relying solely upon what she sees and feels right now. Unclouded by exposition, this narrator is confused and, as a reader, I am too. Moreover, I’m curious.

The unreliable narrator is a first-person account that can’t be trusted. So often we take for granted that the narrator’s point of view is absolute: it’s how the story really unfolded. But the unreliable narrator makes us question if what we’re seeing is true or just her perception.

Faulkner used an unreliable narrator in The Sound and the Fury. Nick Carraway qualifies as an unreliable narrator in The Great Gatsby. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger both build empathy for their narrator before starting to hint there’s something unstable and untrustworthy about them.

Arguably all first-person narrators are unreliable. Anytime we are seeing things only from a single character’s point of view, we are subject to the lens through which that person sees the world. Experience, values, and ambition all cloud a character’s perception and the first-person narrator is an extremely limiting view point because we only get the other characters through the first-person.

Nick Carraway doesn’t know what Gatsby wants or how he feels, he can only report what he sees and make inferences based on Gatsby’s actions. We think Carraway is reasonable, but with all those parties, he may have been drunk more often than not. In The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins makes one of the narrators an alcoholic. Intentionally casting doubt on what that narrator thinks she saw.

Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson also deals with an amnesia-suffering narrator. The fragments of memory captured in the woman’s journal reveal, slowly, the terrible circumstances in which she finds herself. It’s a compelling thriller made all the more dramatic because for most of the book the reader is as confused as the narrator.

Some dangers to the unreliable narrator are reader confusion and the writer must decide how much confusion she thinks the reader will tolerate before putting the book down. Admittedly, The Girl on the Train had to rely upon a cast of narrators to offset the drunk woman, but it also seemed to turn those other seemingly trustworthy people into unreliables over the course of the novel, too.

Most importantly, the unreliable narrator is both realistic (we are all unreliable because we see things only from our own perspective) and limiting in a way that might frustrate not just the reader, but also the author. But it’s so totally worth it.