A Story-Telling Decalogue - New English Review

By Guido Mina di Sospiro (January 2020)

Portrait of a Writer: Philip Roth, S. Guérot, 2013

A novel is like a symphony: the exposition should be crisp and engaging, then if the themes are sufficiently fertile, the development can take its time.—Joscelyn Godwin[1]

1) The Ernst Lehman[2] principle. “Never tell the audience what it already knows.” Too many times one sees in a film or reads in a novel that a certain thing has happened. Then the character who has become aware of this development tells another character, who is unaware. But the watcher, or the reader, is, indeed, aware. This is not only redundant, but dead time, i.e., a pace-killer.

2) The rosé principle, or, the Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson[3] principle. A couple at a restaurant. “He ordered a rosé wine. ‘Why rosé?’ she asked.” The better way of putting it is: “He ordered a wine. ‘Why rosé?’ she asked.” Information must be withheld to the last second. It’s what can be called writing backwards, a faux pas for non-fiction writers, a must for novelists.

3) No coincidences. While coincidences—and indeed synchronicities, even for the not semiotically overcharged—do occur in life, when they do in a story, they reek of deus ex machina. The author is stuck, doesn’t know how to make the narrative progress, and surely a coincidence seems providential. But the reader is wary of coincidences. It’s as if the author took the easy—but often implausible—way out. Of course, should an author stick to this principle with absolute devotion, then occasionally he could break it, precisely because a coincidence is the last thing that a reader would expect from him or her.

4) In medias res. In his Ars Poetica Horace reminds us of how the ideal epic poet does not begin the Trojan War from the double egg, i.e., the earliest possible chronological point, but snatches the listener straight into the middle of things, in medias res. The advice is sound, provided that the author inserts—

5) Flashbacks. One of the most arbitrary story-telling techniques, yet one utilized from time immemorial. One must not exceed in the use of them, and must make sure that they satisfy the curiosity of the reader while at the same time propelling the narrative forward to unexpected places. In the closing scene/dénouement of the novel Tell No One, Harlan Coben uses to great effect the technique of partial flashback, a clever addition to the canon. The protagonist is hearing at gunpoint the final confession from an unexpected villain. The police are hearing along with him, as he is tapped. Suddenly the villain turns up the TV volume. Static noise intrudes in the policemen’s headphones, to which the author cuts. As the police try to come up with a countermove, normal hearing is resumed. The reader is led to forget that, in fact, he’s heard only a partial confession. Other things were revealed to the protagonist while the police were only hearing static noise. The protagonist now flashes back to that part of the conversation only, clearing up all remaining doubts.

7) Start a scene late, finish it early. Starting late pushes further the start-in-the-middle-of-things principle. The reader may have to do some guessing as the scene unfolds before his eyes. Then, just when he has caught up, the scene should end, abruptly, leaving him hanging. Of course this must not be done with astronomical recurrence, lest it become predictable. Also, some readers are slower on the uptake than others, so this technique can backfire.

10) Mind-bending and time-warping. I often tell this story for experimental purposes and unfailingly observe the same reaction in the listener. Our cat found us, and we took her in. She was very small, and initially preferred to live mostly outdoors. My wife worried that soon she would start producing litter after litter. So I reluctantly took her to the veterinary for her to be neutered. Then I went home and prayed fervently for the operation to go well. After some time the phone rang. “There’s been a slight glitch,” said the veterinary. “Yes?” I said, trepid. “We put her to sleep and when we shaved her, we noticed the scar where we were going to operate. Your cat has already been neutered. She’ll wake up in a while and be just fine.” So, what was I to think? That my praying had had a retroactive effect? But how could that be? Or had the cat chosen us in answer to the prayers I hadn’t yet said but I would one day say for her? This kind of mind-bending and time-warping technique can be confusing, so it must be used sparingly, if at all. At the same time, it certainly adds a certain je ne sais quois that makes the narrative leave the mundane, linear, Euclidean, and trespass into something not quite so familiar.

Appendix 1:

Character-driven vs. plot-driven. The dichotomy need not exist. Complex, nuanced, ambiguous characters can and should coexist with a multilayered, fully orchestrated, fast-paced, suspenseful plot. One way of killing this satisfying but hard-to-reach balance is to use a ponderous prose. Economical yet elegant writing is necessary, most of all if the novel has an esoteric foundation and resorts to principles 9 and/or 10. The more “fantastical” the story, the better served is it by economical prose.

Appendix 2:

One-trick ponies that cannot be used again:

The narrator is the murderer: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

I agree only with Monsignor Knox’s seventh rule of his Decalogue: “The detective must not himself commit the crime.”

Appendix 3:

[2] Ernst Lehman, Hitchcock’s favorite screenwriter, nominated six times for Academy Awards for his screenplays. I took a few of his classes while studying cinema production at USC.

[3] British author, publisher, legendary editor and now literary agent, an old friend and mentor of mine.

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