The Rules are Myths (5): Undoing growth and revelation

Let’s do away with the idea that fiction is meant to console or mollify a reader.

Here’s a rule that’s so embedded in how most people think of fiction that to even state sounds redundant: that by the end of your story, the central character or characters must have underdone some sort of change; learned a lesson or had a revelation, gained new insight. It’s the kind of rule that in application can force your hand into writing out the obvious, or worse, enforcing melodrama, pinning a pat rose on a story arc that we imagine can only end one way.

Of course, any story can end in any way. They don’t even have to really end. They can just stop in midst of motion, leaving us suspended in a state without conclusion, allowing then the reader the emotional landscape of remaining turmoil, unresolved, which can be as valuable or more valuable a position than simply playing a timeline out. Expecting every problem to resolve in one clear way or another, or having a character by definition come to an end in their own mind, is as unreasonable as expecting it happen to real life; it simply sometimes just does not.

Worse in all of this is when the expectation is that the change must be necessarily for the better; as if fiction were a vehicle of religion, sculpting minds. We even hear that characters should be in some way likeable or relatable, so as to keep the reader on board side by side. What are we, a bunch of eight year olds? We only play with who we like?

Let’s do away with the idea that fiction is meant to console or mollify a reader. Let’s imagine that this is not how the world works; that sometimes we can learn the most from going into darker places, ones where we feel exposed, unsure of what to lean on, what is coming, what can’t be dissuaded, grown from, taught to change; finding what perhaps more difficult or elusive insight can be derived from putting one’s self in a place we don’t want to be, turning around inside that skin, trying to understand it; trying to reach beyond it, too, in imagination, understanding that what’s on the page is not all of what is there; that sometimes revelation comes in reflection, in the turn of a single moment well-preserved; in something hidden amid language.

Instead we should hope to write from a place that moves us, regardless of its character, condition, what it wants. We should understand that each of us are the only person who can say what we are saying, here and now; there won’t be time left later.

READINGS

Christine Schutt, “The Blood Jet”

Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long”

Geraldine Kim, from Parallel Processing

EXERCISE

Write a piece told from the perspective of someone you find repugnant, who will never change.