Bravo, Clevenger. He takes a sensation we’ve all felt and uses it as a bridge to understand something we might not have experienced. He effectively communicates the physical effects of a painkilling drug.
That’s using what I call “cultural precedent” and moving the reader from a common experience, through several intermediary, escalating examples, and ultimately arriving at an extreme the reader could’ve and would’ve never accepted if you’d presented it from the start.
I love this form. In arguably my most successful short story, “Guts,” I tell a series of increasingly funny and unsettling anecdotes about failed experiments in masturbation. The first gets laughs. The second anecdote gets laughs but ends badly. The third gets a lot of laughs, so much laughter that I’m forced to stop reading aloud until the laughter subsides, but by then the audience has been charmed beyond the point of no return. That third anecdote takes a sudden turn and barrels full-speed into horror. If the audience had any idea where the story would end, they would’ve walked out at the beginning.
Likewise, with my story “The Toad Prince” (originally titled “The Garden of Ethan” for obvious reasons), I move the reader through more and more extreme-yet-common examples of body modification. Each creates more dread until the final extended reveal.
It’s a useful structure, stringing anecdotes together to illustrate a theme. And it gradually walks the reader from the believable to the incredible.
Also consider how past stories create a precedent for new versions. Among my favorites is the “burning animal” story. One example is the story “Strays” by Mark Richard. Another is the anecdote about the burning mouse in David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames. On a book tour, as a publicist in Los Angles was driving me to the Skirball Center, she pointed out a house we were passing in the Hollywood Hills. She explained that friends had bought the house and couldn’t understand why it stank during cold weather. It jutted from a steep slope. Floor-to-ceiling windows seemed to hold up the flat roof. She said that the living room featured a gas fireplace where blue flames danced on an open bed of crushed white granite.
As the neighbors eventually revealed, the previous owners had a cat. The cat had always used the crushed granite as a litter box, and each time the fireplace was turned on it became a stinking barbecue of broiling cat shit.
I told that story to a publicist in Seattle, on the same tour, and she told me an almost identical version. Friends of hers had actually come home late one night and switched on the heat. Something, some screaming banshee demon, had exploded from the fireplace and set fire to the living room curtains. Their cat, it turned out to be.
There it was as perfectly formed as myth: A new example of the burning animal story. Horrible and sad, but acceptable because existing cultural precedent made it familiar to the reader.
If you were my student I’d tell you to read the story “The Enormous Radio” by John Cheever. Then read “Call Guy” by Alec Wilkinson in The New Yorker. Then imagine some kid ordering the typical X-ray specs from an ad in the back of a comic book. The precedent exists for the omniscient device. The eyeglasses actually do allow the kid to see through clothing. The ring of familiarity will allow your reader to buy it. Only instead of sexy nakedness, the kid sees scars, bruises, the hidden proof of tragedy and suffering. His favorite teacher has a swastika tattooed on his chest. His best friend, the toughest boy in school, has a vagina…
Use what the reader already knows to gradually move to the fantastic. The tragic. The profound. Authority: Subvert Reader Expectations
The linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath has said that readers value surprise above all else in a story.
If you were my student I’d tell you to create a clear scene. Render the setting and physical actions without judgment or summary. Use simple Recording Angel as if you were a camera. Allow your reader to determine the meaning of the events. Let your reader anticipate the outcome, then—boom—spring the actual intention, the surprise.
In chapter 20 of Fight Club, for example, we assume Tyler is bullying Raymond K. Hessel. As the scene unfolds, the reader assumes it’s a robbery and that Tyler is taunting and humiliating the man, and that Hessel is a victim. People love this scene because it turns out that Tyler is practicing a form of tough love. First, he finds out the dream career that Hessel has abandoned. Then Tyler reminds the man of his mortality. Lastly, Tyler threatens to return and kill the man if he fails to take action toward achieving his dreams.
That scene was among the first I ever read in public, and the crowd response was jubilant. It ranks among everyone’s favorite scenes in the film.
So direct and misdirect your reader, but don’t tell her the meaning of anything. Not until she gets it wrong in her head. In “Guts” the narrator describes the climactic scene (pun intended) in fine detail, describing how an impossible serpent is trying to drown him in the swimming pool. This misdirection allows the reader to realize the truth before the narrator does. The horror is mixed with laughter as the narrator remains in
