So if you were my student, I’d urge you to cut your narrative like a film editor cuts film. To do this, you can use a repeating chorus: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about…” Or, “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God.” Thus cuing the reader with a sort-of touchstone that indicates: We’re about to jump to something different.
Or you can keep the action flowing and increase the momentum of the energy by using a regular series of unlikely conjunctions.
If you were my student I’d tell you to listen to a child. Listen to someone who’s terrified of being interrupted and has developed tricks for hogging a listener’s attention nonstop. Granted, their stories might be boring, but you can learn some natural tricks for rolling your own fiction on and on and on. Tension: Recycle Your Objects
If you were my student, I’d tell you to recycle your objects. This means introducing and concealing the same object throughout the story. Each time it reappears, the object carries a new, stronger meaning. Each reappearance marks an evolution in the characters.
Perhaps the best definition is by example:
Think of the diamond ring in Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn. We first see it while the narrator’s riding the subway in New York, en route to her group therapy session. A stranger winks at her. She worries he’s a mugger so she twists the ring around so it looks like a plain gold band. She slips it off her finger and drops it into her bra. At the therapy session she finds the mugger has followed her. Brandishing a gun, he robs everyone in the group, finally pointing the gun at her chest and demanding the ring. The police take a report, and the ring is forgotten.
The ring reappears in flashback. When she gave birth to their first child, her husband gave it to her. During the labor, their newborn almost died, and now they’re a family with the ring symbolizing the greatest moment of their love. Here the ring is described fullest, as a huge snowflake, something of incredible brilliance and value.
Much later in the novel, after endless events, after we’ve forgotten the ring, the police call to say they’ve caught the thief and recovered it. The narrator claims it and finds a stone is loose—an omen, she remarks. She takes it to the jeweler who first sold it to her husband, and he marvels over its beauty. Offhand, he says he’d always buy it back at a good price. Impulsively, she sells it for fifteen thousand dollars. That’s the amount of money she needs to walk out on her failed marriage. Again, the ring appears, disappears, appears, disappears, appears, and disappears, each time to serve a new purpose in the plot.
That’s what I call recycling an object in a story. The reader is thrilled to recognize something that seemed lost. And because the object is not a character and can’t have an emotional reaction, the reader is forced to express any related emotion.
Another fine example is the ring in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It appears as something worthless, a child’s toy buried in a box of Cracker Jack. The protagonist’s former husband gives it to her future suitor, and the ring disappears. Once the suitor is dating Miss Holly Golightly, the ring reappears as an object they can have engraved at Tiffany’s. It disappears into the jeweler’s hand, and only reappears at the moment of greatest crisis. Then the suitor produces it—now engraved—and presents it. It fits. In the film, they fall in love. In the novel, Golightly accepts the ring but is lost.
Also consider the gold cigarette case in Cabaret. It’s offered by the rich man to the poor man, is rejected and disappears. It reappears, falling out of the rich man’s pants, and is hesitantly accepted. Note: Anytime an object falls out of a man’s pants, guess what that implies? Of course, the poor man is seduced by the rich man. The last time we see the cigarette case the poor man is compliantly lighting the rich one’s cigarette. Note: In parallel action, the rich man has given a fur coat to a woman, and the coat is sold to pay for an abortion. It’s a shame that the cigarette lighter remains unresolved in a similar important use.
Now consider the dog, Sorrow, in The Hotel New Hampshire. It dies. It’s stuffed by a taxidermist. It falls from an exploding jetliner. Washes up on a beach. Is found and dried with a hair dryer. Wrecks a sexual tryst. Hidden away, it’s eventually found and prompts a heart attack.
The dog’s name alone prompts a major chorus in the book: “Sorrow floats.”
Lastly, consider the green velvet draperies in Gone with the Wind. Miss Ellen’s portieres are a symbol of status and of the matriarch herself. After the family has fallen on hard times and Miss Ellen is dead, her daughter pulls down the drapes and sacrifices them to make a gown she hopes will prevent the family from losing their greatest source of power, their land. One symbol evolves to become another.
An aside: In a forensic unpacking of the era, green was a popular color, deep green, because rooms decorated in emerald green seldom harbored houseflies or fleas, spiders or any other pests. For some miraculous reason you could leave windows open and green drapes seemed to repel mosquitoes. Families such as the O’Haras could lounge in their deep-green sanctuaries, unbothered by yellow-fever-carrying insects. Unknown at the time, emerald green or “Paris Green” dyes contained heavy amounts of arsenic. The deeper the color, the more poisonous the fabric. Up to half the velvet’s weight could be arsenic, thus six pounds of Scarlett O’Hara’s dress might contain three pounds of dissolved arsenic.
Green draperies, wallpapers, upholstery, and carpets killed any bug that came near them. Those people who dwelled in those rooms developed the wan, pale appearance the Victorians prized as a status indicator. Now picture Scarlett sashaying off to seduce Rhett,
