Mapping the Formless: A Meditation on the Poetics of Fiction

Poetry gives form to the intangible. A feeling that you cannot quite define, an ache, a wound, the effect of a tree on a heart, a sound, a thought whose words and purpose you don’t yet know. It is a process of thinking on paper, pulling the formeless into the material world, giving it a body (form) and consciousness (words). Poets map the formless. That process requires trust and absolute obedience—to what the voice sounds like, to the words of the poem, to how the poem feels. Fiction, too, demands the same tractability. It requires you to stay faithful to the story, to honour its truth as it comes to you, allowing it to morph and unmorph, as it needs.

When a story idea comes to me, usually as a scene, feeling, a question, a dream, clear as first light, sure of what it wants to be, it sits in my head and I begin imbuing it with curiosities—what if this character died? What if this character slept with the other one? What if I burn this character in a house fire? A push and pull ensues as the story fattens—a process of discovery. When I write the first draft, I include many if not all of these curiosities. Often the story changes into something completely different (and this is good). Then I stop. At some point, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, I always stop. This isn’t exactly what I wanted to write. It excites me, but it is not the truth of what I wanted to say.

I return to my initial instinct, that original idea. I use everything I have learnt about the story from the first draft—the landscape of the setting, its people, plot points, the general timeline, and the feeling and rhythm—in writing the story the way it first occurred to me. In a recent short tale I wrote, the protagonist does something unforgivable to a young boy. The idea was very clear to me when it came. But I was afraid. I didn’t want this tender, tortured, thoughtful, lonely protagonist to be capable of something like that. So when I wrote the first draft I changed the character’s gender, did not dare write about the boy, and added another character who served no particular purpose. It felt untrue. A deceptive kind of untruth. So I rewrote it, obeying that first instinct. This requires trust—of yourself and your intuition. And the tenacity to go back again and again until you write the narrative in its complete verity.

In poetry, space is an economy. Poets must deliver what they want to say in a few short lines, using sparse words to create powerful, concise images. There is no room for lines that do not serve, lines that do not carry entire worlds. Sentences, words or images that do not fit well, flow smoothly or serve a purpose must go. In poetry, lean writing is muscular. The lesson here for those of us who write fiction is the skill of culling the unserving. Each line must work to convey what we want to say. Ridding prose of the useless focuses the story and prevents it from being lost in unnecessary words. This can also be helpful when choosing what scenes to write. Rather than dragging characters (and readers) through pointless interactions that do not reveal anything, and do not push the plot forward, we can choose scenes that actually tell the story or reveal/push/change characters. By removing things that are not needed we can make room to spot any gaps in the story's plot. Sometimes you can do multiple things with the same material, especially dialogue.

Garielle Lutz

During a class some time ago, we read an essay by Garielle Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place.” In it, she seemed to suggest that a certain obsession with the beauty and distinctive accuracy of sentences is required when writing. One must be willing to rework and rework and rework every sentence until it is right. Who has time to obsess over sentences when you have a whole novel to write, I thought. Garielle, girl, I take that back. It turns out I do care about sentences that have, as Lutz puts it, a felicity—that is, a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing.

Sentences like this, according to Lutz, go beyond the usage of correct grammar and syntax. It is about bending and breaking the rules to create language that sounds like you. That responsibility towards lines—how they sound and look, how the words feel next to each other, how they vibrate—is a foundational requirement in poetry. What makes sentences “beautiful” is not arranging words in a way you think you should. It is arranging them in a way that sounds good in your mind and works as an image. Beauty is subjective. It looks different to different people depending on your eye. The language in every writer’s head is a thing of beauty too. Learning to trust that, to let it be unusual, as long as it works, can transform the way we think of writing. Says Lutz,

Instead of speaking the language, let the language speak you.

Think of a story as a vehicle. Its sentences are the outer body, the shiny thing that makes one want to get in and experience it, the thing that carries the plot. A portal of absorption. A body of water, if you will. If a reader is going to go for a ride in a vehicle that you designed, should not everything about said vehicle be distinctly you? Malignant, sure, infectious, unubiquitous, unique in the way that you see things.

Egon Schiele, Seated Male Nude, Right Hand Outstretched (1910)

Another way of looking at this:

A poem is a body. Bodies may have similar forms, but each looks different. Each body sounds different. In fact each body must sound different. Sounding like yourself requires obedience too. Obedience to the language of your own mind. There is a thing upcoming writers do, we write a certain way because that is how famous people do it, or because that is what we are taught sentences should sound like. It is useful in giving you a model to practice on but it is important to understand how language works in your head. Possessing this clarity requires a process of incorporation (what you learn from how other people write, the proverbial rules, how people speak around you, how they tell stories), trial and error (also known as practice), and arson—burning some of the bullshit and keeping what works for you. Remake language if you must.

Part of the beauty of writing poetry is that its abstract nature allows people to understand and interpret it in different ways. As readers, we glean different things from poems because they affect us in different ways. Creating poems involves releasing them once they are finished, at which point they no longer only belong to you. In fiction, once a story or a book goes out there it ceases to belong only to the writer. Said writer must make sure that they’ve said what they wanted to say, as concisely as possible because the story will do its own talking. Readers, critics, students, interviewers will glean what they glean from it. And that is out of the writer's control. Learning to let go of the work is vital and it can be a motivation to ensure that the final draft of the story is its best version and carries nothing but truth. Elena Ferrante said, “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” This to re-emphasize—the story will do its own talking, you just have to let it go.