In my last post I mentioned that one of the books I am reading is this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I am now on page 347 of 771.
Overall I have very much enjoyed this book, but reading it gives me an opportunity to make a highly specific comment.

When an author chooses to use the f-word, it needs to be in a very specific context and for a very specific reason. I won’t like it (for reasons I’ll outline below), but I’ll understand why it is being used.
I suppose you could argue that the word is used in this way in this book – two boys, left to fend for themselves by negligent fathers, doing what teenagers living in Las Vegas with no parental influence do – but there is a pitfall.

This word can become a crutch. It can be used to fill space that the author doesn’t yet know how to fill or as an exclamation point when, if the author had dug a bit deeper, a word(s) could’ve been found that would have pushed the characterization forward in a unique-to-that-character way.

One of the “rules” of fiction is that we don’t want our characters doing or saying things that any character in any story might say or do. The question is what would this character say or do in this precise situation.
I guess my frustration with the word is that it is a great generalization. It gives me no insight into the character. It doesn’t hold any of the nuance of point of view that gives a character dimension.
It isn’t interesting or engaging.
The f-word is cliché. It is everywhere in modern American lit, strewn here and there in lit journals, novels, plays, film, and essays.
And every time I run across it I have this same reaction.
It is like “whatever”. It is like “like”.
It is the very least our language has to offer.

There is a tendency (if not the cultural expectation), on Monday morning when we tell each other stories about our weekend, to simply report the events like a newspaper columnist instead of a novelist. We don’t give all the details. We don’t expound on how it felt plunging into the ice cold lake for the first swim of the summer or how we all cheered as grandmother blew out the candles at her 90th birthday party. We simply state that we had a get-together for our grandmother’s 90th, or we went to the lake and opened the cottage for the summer. We smile and ask, “And how was your weekend?” We assume our listener is not really that interested or certainly not that patient. And generally speaking, it is a good assumption. Such economy eases us through our day.

On June 7th and 8th I had the delight of taking my twin 20-year old daughters to the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/printersrowlitfest/). While there, I attended several author talks. One was a conversation between Bonnie Jo Campbell (http://www.bonniejocampbell.com/), Brigid Pasulka (http://www.brigidpasulka.com/), and Justin Go (http://justingo.com/), moderated by Sam Weller (http://www.samwellers.com/).
During this talk, Bonnie Jo Campbell made the following recommendation to writers. [I paraphrase] “Edit your novel manuscript as a series of moments – are you getting all you can out of each moment?”
What she was saying was this:
Reject the temptation to do in your fiction or nonfiction what you do on Monday morning. You are not at the coffee pot or water cooler. And your reader doesn’t have their nose in their favorite newspaper. Your reader is reading your novel, story collection, or true tale precisely because they WANT to feel every splash and sensation. They WANT to hear every cheer and well wish. That is the point. That is why the long form story exists. That is the contract you’ve established with them. That is why you write. That is the coveted product you are providing.

By the way…as the three of us rounded the corner of Harrison and Clark at 2:25 Sunday afternoon, the sunlight glancing in wide spreads between the apartment buildings, mixed with the late spring breeze, and formed that rare temperature – that just-right that causes you to want to walk and walk and walk, soaking in the sounds of the street performers and fire trucks forever and forevermore.

“Favor character interaction over setting.”    – Recent advice from a colleague

What this fellow meant was spend your time – the space on your pages – on character relationships, not on descriptions of setting. I agree with him. It is comparatively easy to write about place. To write of characters locking horns is much more complex. But this is where the story is. No one walks away from a story blown away by how the author described a woodland prairie. In fact, when a novel starts with a description of such a thing all most readers what is for the story to start.

Give enough setting to satisfy the reader (where and when – as plainly and unadorned as possible), then give them characters.

Characters are what they came to you for.

Characters are what they will remember years from now.

A hundred stories from now what the characters said and did are what will become part of your reader’s psyche.*

*By the way, your readers will not likely remember your name. They will struggle to remember who wrote that book with that character in it that they named their first kid after.