A Featherweight Observation

A rather common theme in fiction (which you hardly see in nonfiction, if that's any indication of its real-world implications) is balance. Good and evil—evenly matched from start to finish, light and dark—literal and metaphorical, fate and chance (a favorite of mine). The implications of this are clear (though often not actually implied), and perhaps even archetypal: "The fate of the world hangs in the balance."

Now, this evokes a nice image: the wispy blackness of fate dotted with the sapphire skies and emerald earth of our world, hanging in a brownish-gold brass plate. The other side of the balance houses evil—or good (intentions?)—in its infinite ignominy and ruby red rage. Who wins? Almost invariably, balance is restored and the world is saved. Right?

That's what people want, anyway. Save the cyberpunk rebels and pessimists (realists?), that is what we want, and that is what we get. After generations of world-balance stories, we've actually gotten pretty good at making the archetype interesting. Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books are all about balance: inner self versus outer self, evil versus evil (and questioning your definition of "evil" every single page), even something so superficial as time-management—Dexter (the character) is a professional balancer.

The fact of it is... all of that is superfluous in light of our real topic: composition.

As easy (relatively) of an art as archetypal balancing is, keeping your story level is tremendously difficult. Even some of the best literary works today (as selected by a panel of unbiased, layman jurors...) fail dismally at this.

In order to keep a story balanced (and therefore more enjoyable to read, and oftentimes less overwhelming), there are a few things you need to watch out for:

• Voice
• Entertainment
• Depth
• Truth

I'm sure you could divide these points any number of ways, splice-and-dice, mix-and-match, and boil 'em into a stew, but that's how I'm going to do it.

Every story has a narrator: fact. As the story's writer, that narrator is you: crap. Actually, chances are, if you're narrating your own story, I don't want to read it. How interesting can you really be if you're sitting down and writing fiction for hours a day? Really? Also: how interesting can it be for you to sit down and write fiction for hours a day and then have to read it back in your own voice?

Compound a boring voice with a bored writer and you have a truly awful piece of work. There are obviously some exceptions: if you're a very funny person, and you can entertain yourself and others fairly easily, have at it. But if you'd really rather not have a discussion with yourself for ten minutes, let alone for three hundred pages, don't use your own voice.

I know, for a fact, writing time for me is escape time. I want to get as far away from the world as humanly possible without LSD or 'shrooms. The last thing I plan on doing is listening to my boring self narrate a potentially interesting story and end up shooting it (or myself) in the face. That's a waste of my time and my readers' time. Instead, I use a narrator befitting of the story. If my story's depressing, my narrator points out the atmospherically depressing details and avoids optimistic metaphors like a wasp's nest. My depressing narrator isn't going to be sarcastic or overbearing, because—chances are—the story doesn't call for it.

Quite often, a story's narrator is the main character himself. This works well, because (unless you're so narcissistic as to be writing about yourself) you have a very solid ground for the narrator's voice, and it's not your own. In third-person (omniscient) narratives, thinking too hard about how the story's written will wind up punching a hole in the fourth wall, but that's better than being boring, after all. It's why we're writing fiction, isn't it?

That's just one solution of many, though. For this year's National Novel Writing Month, I plan on experimenting with my narrator. She won't be a character actually present in the story, but one significant to the story. This way, I avoid duck-duck-goose head-hopping between thirty-six different narrative voices, and I can have a stylistic balance between internal (narrative) and external (dialogue) voice.

Whomever (or whatever) you let narrate your story, make sure they have a distinct voice, but aren't the only voice.

Even though you have voice, that doesn't mean you're set. Hardly. On to actual composition and structure, your story also needs some sort of entertainment factor. If you just plan on dumping fact upon fact about your world or scenario without any sort of excitement to keep me coming, consider me a lost customer.

On the flipside, if you plan on barraging me with action and swords and car chases and zombies and pirates and ninjas and magic and giant fighting robots without telling me where any of them came from, you might keep me busy enough to finish your story, but don't think I'm coming out with any good reviews. Sure, action movies are a great way to unwind after a long day, but they're essentially society's lowest common denominator.

Contrary to the theme of "balance," purely action stories are entertainment overload, and are not—in my opinion—truly "good" stories. But, as I insinuated above, there are infinitely many ways to judge the quality of a story, and I'm certainly not qualified to tell you how to think.

The third—and perhaps most abused—quality of a balanced story is depth.

Consider a swimming pool, perhaps ten feet deep—enough for a good dive or to just play around in. In a pool like this, you'll usually find a deep end (where the diving boards are, hopefully), and a shallow end (maybe three or four feet deep). Not much swimming ability is necessary to get around the shallow end, as the greater portion of society would have no trouble just walking right through it. The deep end, however, is for the more advanced swimmers—who might then meander over to the shallow end for a breather.

But what if you only had three feet of water in the pool? Obviously, the shallow end would be empty, and you'd probably be starved for divers, too. On the other hand, you could wall off the deep end and only fill the shallow end. The pool is more accessible, but still restricted.

The same holds true when you're writing a story. If you want to write something with depth (overarching metaphors, societal commentary), don't forget to put enough water in to fill the shallow end, too. If there's nothing (engaging) on the surface, reading (or watching) your story is like diving into a ten-foot pool with three feet of water. It hurts. A lot.

Take, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (linked above). A solid month of high school AP English was dedicated to reading and analyzing this piece of work. It's deep. It's probably closer to a twenty-foot pool, considering all the analysis time we put into it. But the story is fatally boring. It's a travelogue, so not much can be expected in the way of plot, but the story is dull and dry, and I'd wager that twenty-foot pool has a foot of water... maybe.

On the other hand, restricting yourself to just the shallow end amounts to about the same as writing an action flick. It's there, and it's accessible, but it's not very high quality.

Finally... your story needs some truth to it. Even the wackiest science fiction or fantasy story should optimally ground itself in fact. This hearkens back to my previous post about rules: readers will be expecting something they can relate to. If what they find doesn't make sense, you need to explain it in the terms of your own world. However, if everything is different, and the reader has nothing to relate to, it's just overwhelming, and the story becomes difficult to follow—very. In essence: a balance between new and old, expected and unexpected, is necessary.

Unfortunately, I don't have a creative acronym for "balance" like last time to wrap everything into one nice, neat package. Instead, I have just one more thought: You can't change yourself overnight. (Truthfully, you don't even need to change yourself—these are just my own thoughts.) Just like your story's composition, you need to keep yourself in balance. Introduce a little bit of something new into your life every day, and if you pace it right, soon enough you'll find something entirely different.

Hopefully, at the very least, you've got a good idea of what not to do if you want to sell me a book.