I read the following passage today, which coincided (perhaps cosmically) with a recent defense (in my head) of contrivance in fiction.
Tertuliano Máximo Afonso’s mother, whose name, Carolina, surname Máximo, finally appears here, is a fervent and assiduous reader of novels. As such, she knows all about telephones that ring unexpectedly and of others that ring when you are desperately hoping they will.
-from José Saramago’s The Double
Though too much blatant manipulation will pull a reader out of a story, a certain amount of contrivance is acceptable, acceptable because the very medium of fiction warrants it. As readers of fiction, we come to a story with a set of expectations, namely, in the case of this post’s content, that we will experience a crafted story arc, that a character will end a story different than he began it. To create this, writers rely on two things: 1) a reader’s understanding of the tropes in fiction that have come before, and 2) a reader’s understanding of actual human interaction. The fiction writer’s job is to find the balance between these two data sets. And to do so, sometimes contrivance must be entertained. Sometimes a telephone must ring at the right time.
photo credit:
“Hello? Is this you, Contrivance? Well how are you, my good friend?!”
Great and true musing, Dr. Ross.
Happy nearly end of 2009.
Back at you, Bosworth, PHD.
I forgot to comment on this before.
I always struggle with this kind of thing. Maybe it’s an issue of authorial maturity, like how to know when a description has gone a hair too far, but I worry sometimes in my own writing that my signposts are actually billboards with blinking lights and one of those wacky wavy blowy guys. I nail other writing (and for some reason, a lot of times, Showtime shows) for having a character show up and you think ‘Those two are going to bang it out and it’ll derail the other guy’s investigation so the killer’s going to get away.’ Then, boom, killer’s free. But if that character (or archetype) doesn’t show up, then there’s no story. Was it Hitchcock, maybe, who said drama is life with all the boring parts taken out?
Good topic Caleb.