This is third part in a series where I muse on what makes for a book a reader can get lost in, prompted in part by a recent reread of the devourable YA novel, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Read PART I & PART II.
Something to be established at the outset: I rarely use the word BUT anymore. It could even be said that I am anti-BUT.
Something else to be said upfront: I set out to figure out what it takes to get lost in a book, first as a reader and then as a writer. The truth is, though, I’m not sure I am any closer to articulating a thing I very clearly feel any better than I was when I started.
Which is to say, that though I place value on craft, I also recognize that art—all art, stories and poems included—has, to some degree, an ineffable quality. Something that transcends it from symbols on a page to an experience. This, it seems to me, is very important: art—story—must be experienced. That’s where the flow state is—within the experience.
How do we experience a piece of fiction as a reader? We—bear with me, I know this is obvious—READ IT. Reading is not a passive experience. We pick up a book and open it to the words an author (or in Nick & Norah’s case, authors) has selected and set down upon the page. We, as the reader, without directly acknowledging this fact, are making a pact to surrender to the author—or, perhaps more accurately, to the author’s story. We—stated or not—have an expectation, be it entertainment, escape, information, resistance, emotion, etc. If the author fails to live up to our expectation, it is very likely we will put the book down. If the author fulfills our expectation—hurrah!—we get lost in the words, which make up sentences, which make up paragraphs, which make up chapters, which pull us along from beginning to end (even if the story doesn’t begin at the beginning or end at the end, which many stories purposefully do not).
This week, one of my students asked me why I like books so much.1 I told her that when I was her age (twenty million years ago), they were the form of entertainment I most enjoyed. I liked television and talking on the phone and going to shows and driving around in cars getting up to no good and hanging out on the curb of Dunkin’ Donuts as much as the next suburban teenage girl in the 1990s. Books, though? Books were where I got lost, and where I got found. Books helped me escape, and books helped me find my way into the world.
Also, WORDS. I freaking love words. WHY? Blame it on synesthesia; words are worlds to me.
Words, as a recent note to myself reminds me, are “the door through which we enter [the world created therein].”
Words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters: there are our mechanics. We’re missing something important though, if we’re talking about story—two somethings important—ACTION & IDEA.
No good story (I am almost certain at least one of my readers can find at least one example of something brilliant that proves me wrong; so be it! I stand by the convictions of what I am about to say) exists without ACTIONS and IDEAS.
Why is this? Because we live in a world of action and ideas, and despite the symbolic transfer that happens when we create a story,2 we, as readers, expect a kind of parallel world (realistic or fantastical or anywhere in between) when we step into a story. In this parallel world, no matter how different it may be from our own, we need3 actions and ideas to anchor us. Actions and ideas give us a very different sense than words alone.4
Maybe you remember from POST II that by page 13, our beautifully weird and desire-filled protagonists, Nick & Norah, have kissed for the first time. As far as romance conventions go—and I’ll be the first to say, I am no expert, though I do love a good romance—this puts the books into the “kiss a stranger” category, which generally means that the strangers are besotted immediately but aren’t exactly going to just confess to it right then and live happily ever after (because then we would have no story). MOST of what makes romance work is the (sensual) tension between the two main characters. If that’s going to be kept up, they can’t keep kissing. At least not right away. What in the world will keep them apart?
In Nick & Norah’s case, their external desires (his for his ex-girlfriend; hers to get her drunk bestie home safe) do. As the story develops, some of these desires are sated, and new ones arise to take their place (turns out Norah’s got an ex-boyfriend who’s freshly back in town; Nick just wants his beloved “Salvatore” jacket back. This is not the whole plot, exactly, but tis a rough approximation). Plot summaries do what they do, the magic exists elsewhere.
I can safely say that part of what keeps a reader inside Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist is how well the authors satisfy the demands of their specific genre. There’s something else though too (and and and), which is that they satisfy the demands of a good story through meticulous pacing.
Each story has its own dictates for pacing5 and as a writer you ignore your story’s dictates at your own peril. As a reader, you either get the dictates of the story or you don’t. It is, as a reader, hard to enjoy a book whose dictates for pacing don’t make sense to you.6
I find that after all my thinking about what it means to be lost in a book (as a reader; I hold, after all, that this is a flow state) and how it might translate to writing a book in which readers want to get lost, that I have come to something like a landing place, not exactly a resolution, and perhaps it is expected, after all my refusal to accept anything like an easy answer.
Here it is…
YES/AND
The improv principle that keeps a skit going can also keep a story going—for the reader, and for the writer. There are two people on stage in an improv skit, and there are two people7 meeting in the pages of a book. Good pacing in a story (indeed in a scene—the unit word we use for stage, screen, and fiction) comes down to yes/and. For writers/readers the exchange is necessarily different from what is happening in real time on a stage, because the reader and the writer are not typically in the same room. Still, the writer is tasked with creating a story that generates yes/and in the reader, and the reader is tasked with saying yes/and to the story as they read the book.
Simple as that.8
NOTES
- “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…” ↩︎
- Reading John Holt’s How Children Learn this week, I came across the following passage in a discussion of [visual] art. It appears to me entirely applicable to writing as well—thus I have replaced his use of the word “pictures” with “stories”: “[Stories] are flat; life has depth. The business of turning real objects into flat [stories] is a convention, like language, and like language, it must be learned.” [A footnote on this footnote, to be clear: Story is different from language. I got into this a little bit in XO, and it continues to be a fertile place for my intellectual mind. Humans are not unique among living beings in possessing language, we are unique for our alphabet—codified language—and our storytelling.] ↩︎
- Strong word, I know. Many of our needs—beyond food, shelter, care, community—are societal or cultural expectations; try as we might, it is dang hard to undo a desire for something we’ve been told we need, implicitly and explicitly, our whole life. I’m thinking of some of the translated novels I’ve read over the years, which deal with actions or ideas very differently than my American sensibility is used to, and it isn’t to say that I haven’t enjoyed many of these books—just that the expectations of what the book is trying to do is different and I have to make peace with that before/while I read. ↩︎
- Hence the old workshop saw: Show, don’t tell. (Which, well, let’s just say I’m not going to get into here.) ↩︎
- I’ve written about this before, using Sea of Tranquility and The Book of Form and Emptiness as examples, though the post no longer exists, so I’ll use a really recent comparable example, which is that right after I blew through Nick & Norah, I picked up Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the paperback version of which clocks in at 858 pages and which took me five weeks to read. I’d chalk up the slowness of Strange & Norrell to the time in which it was published (2004, pre-smartphone) BUT Nick & Norah came out in 2006 (also pre-smartphone). They are just different books, meant to accomplish different things, and that is that. That pacing is different in each and THAT IS ON PURPOSE. ↩︎
- Whether this is due to bad writing, bad plotting, or the book not being right for you because of place, time, temperament, or other, is variable. There are craft errors, story errors, and simple human preference to be taken into consideration. ↩︎
- I do not mean the characters here. ↩︎
- *laughs* I am reminded of that obnoxious Staples slogan, THAT WAS EASY. ↩︎