The Secret Sauce of Compelling Writing
Is this just me? Six months after reading a book, I seldom remember the characters’ names and only the most rudimentary elements of plot. Even with books I’ve loved! Character and plot are the foundations of fiction. That’s what writers are taught in classes, workshops, how-to books, articles, and websites. You need engaging characters and a story with tension, conflict, drama, high stakes. Voice, setting, imagery, language are important elements, too, but interesting characters and absorbing plots are vital. But if character and plot fade away, then what qualities create the powerful, resonant fiction that keeps its hold on us long afterward?
I write ‘us,’ but there is no universal ‘us.’ Each reader turns to books for different, varied, multitudinous reasons that can change by the day, by the hour, through the years. As a writer, I wanted to understand what beyond the obvious—great characters, absorbing plot, brilliant sentences—makes a book or a story work on me. Why do I love certain books, when I don’t remember the characters’ names or the twists and turns of plot?
Reasoning that if I looked at the fiction on my shelves, I might gain an understanding, I randomly pulled down some books and flipped through the pages, not reading, only glancing. I found some answers. The check-marked paragraphs, underlined sentences, drawn exclamation points gave me evidence of where I had paused to marvel at what the writer had done, where I had read again, several times, a beautifully worded thought or a startling new angle on the familiar, the places I wanted to return to later, to read again or share with someone else.
From Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle: What kind of block had its own name? What would they call his old stretch of 127th? Crooked Way. Striver versus crook. Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system. The world as it might be versus the world as it was.
From Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters: She sensed that he was speaking without much thought and she knew he didn’t believe much in the efficacy of words, which were, after all, only for what could be said.
In George Eliot’s Middlemarch: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grown and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
In Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers: We say ‘home’ not ‘house.’ You never hear a good agent say ‘house.’ A house is where people have died on the mattresses. Where pipes freeze and burst. Where termites fall from the sink spigot. Where somebody starts a flue fire by burning a telephone book in the furnace. Where banks repossess. Where mental illness takes hold. A home is something else.
From Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: . . . I am now fully aware, thanks to our figuratively speaking marriage counselor, that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication,
These lines I’d marked have qualities that grab me. Sharply-drawn opinion, wit, turns of phrase that transforms the usual, fresh insight into what it means to be alive in all its confusion, these are the moments I love. While interesting characters, absorbing plot, vivid settings, strong imagery, graceful language carry me along, distract and delight me, it’s the breaks in what John Gardner famously called the “vivid and continuous dream,” that move me as a reader. These are the moments I want to create as a writer.
In my town, there is a barbeque joint that advertises, “It’s the Sauce.” Fans of barbeque say that what’s essential is good meat and the right cooking method, but what makes this barbeque special is the sauce. By re-reading the writing that inspires you, by seeking out those specific places that caught your breath, slowed your reading, made you linger with pleasure and wonder, you will discover your own, personal writer’s special sauce.
About Lynn Sloan
Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough and the novel Principles of Navigation, which was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. Fortune Cookies, an art book featuring her flash fiction, was produced by Sky Lark Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, American Literary Fiction, and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. She graduated from Northwestern University, earned a master’s degree in photography at The Institute of Design, formerly the New Bauhaus, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography in the MFA program of Columbia College Chicago, where she founded Occasional Readings in Photography and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure before turning to fiction writing. She lives near Chicago and serves on the Board of Directors of the Society of Midland Authors. Her new novel, Midstream, comes out from Fomite Press in August. For more information, visit www.LynnSloan.com