Think of Citizen Kane, which used the device of a newsreel to summarize the plot at the start of the film, then used faceless journalists to tie together the subsequent scenes. The interviews become the device for transitioning between different points of view and time periods. And all the while, the fact that they’re “reporters” injects the melodramatic story with a gravity and reality that sells it to the audience.
Nonfiction forms have shaped our most famous authors. Hemingway’s first writing job was as a reporter covering the crime beat on the Kansas City Star. He took to heart the paper’s in-house style guide, which demanded short, choppy sentences filled with active verbs. And for the rest of his career he wrote terse prose based on that same highly readable newspaper style. Likewise, Fitzgerald’s first writing job was to crank out advertisement copy. Forever after, his fiction was filled with images of advertising, brand names, and the seductive lyrical sentences that still charm us.
So if you were my student I’d tell you that a nonfiction form will allow you to make even the most fantastic, the most maudlin, the most silly story seem completely plausible.
In so many of my own novels I’ve used nonfiction forms. In Choke the form is the fourth step of the 12-step recovery program, a written summation of the addict’s life. In Rant it’s the form of an oral history, numerous interviews intercut to tell the story of someone now absent. Among my models for that book was Jean Stein’s Edie: An American Biography, the story of Edith Sedgwick. And much of the structure of my Invisible Monsters was based on the chaotic layout of the fashion magazines I’d see at the laundromat where I washed my clothes each week.
Besides lending fiction a greater sense of reality, a nonfiction form dictates the structure of the work and the ways to transition between scenes. In fashion magazines, for instance, articles simply “jump” to a designated page elsewhere in the issue. In oral histories each new speaker is designated by his name and a colon placed before his statement.
My Pygmy appears to be a series of “dispatches” sent by a spy reporting on his progress during a secret mission. It was Chelsea Cain, in workshop, who suggested that I used black blocks to occlude certain details and make the “document” seem redacted. The effect worked so well I wished I’d used it more. Consequently I did, by placing “real” rose petals and pills on the pages of Fight Club 2, to hide characters’ faces and thereby undermine the sincerity of what they might say. Or to hide their dialogue and negate its cleverness. Thank you, Chelsea.
Any aspect of the nonfiction form that seems like an innate flaw—the jerky camerawork in Cloverfield and over-the-top acting—becomes an asset when you mimic it while using that form for fiction. The graininess of black-and-white security cameras, for instance, adds another texture and a fresh point of view to conventional film. In the film Fight Club director David Fincher cuts to such footage for an “objective” perspective that shows the narrator fighting himself.
So if I were your teacher, I’d tell you to study how each nonfiction form isn’t perfect. Find its flaws and use those to make your fiction seem more real and less polished and writerly. Authority: Forget Being Likable
Welcome to America, our never-ending, great popularity contest. And to capitalism, where likability trumps everything else.
If you were my student, I’d tell you to forget about being liked. Tastes change over time, public taste as well as personal taste. Your work might not be immediately celebrated, but if it remains lodged in someone’s memory you have a good chance of being embraced over time. The first time I read the books foisted on me in college—Jane Eyre, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Caucasian Chalk Circle—I hated them. But over time I’ve gone back to reread them, and they’ve become my favorites.
Witness the movies that premiered to damning reviews. The Night of the Living Dead. Harold and Maude. Blade Runner. They found a place in public memory, and time has made them classics. So do not write to be liked. Write to be remembered. Authority: Write from Within
the Point of View
This next skill might be the most difficult part of writing you’ll ever tackle. But once you get the knack of it, it will make writing easier and more fun than you ever could’ve imagined.
Instead of writing about a character, write from within the character.
This means that every way the character describes the world must describe the character’s experience. You and I never walk into the same room as each other. We each see the room through the lens of our own life. A plumber enters a very different room than a painter enters.
This means you can’t use abstract measurements. No more six-foot-tall men. Instead you must describe a man’s size based on how your character or narrator perceives a man whose height is seventy-two inches. A character might say “a man too tall to kiss” or “a man her dad’s size when he’s kneeling in church.” You may not describe the temperature as being one hundred degrees. Or trips as being fifty miles long. All standardized measurements preclude you describing how your character sees the world.
So no more five-year-old girls. No more seven o’clock. No two-ton trucks.
Yes, it’s a pain, having to break down the details and translate them through a character’s point of view. But only at first. With a little practice you’ll begin to see the world via the character’s experience and the descriptions will come naturally.
Eventually, it will even be fun.
Getting inside a character might seem like a vacation from being you. But face it, you’re never not you. No matter what world you
