The Fiction Toolkit, Part 5
Shelly Lowenkopf -- September 17, 2006
Another in a series of excerpts from Shelly Lowenkopf's forthcoming book, The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. In this installment Shelly examines two more terms you should understand, "habit words," and "Schrodinger's Cat." These will help you do your best writing and will confound agents, publishers, and other book people over cocktails.
habit words -- The unintentional repetitions of words or phrases in a text; overabundant use of terms or expressions to the point where they become irritations to the reader, slow the story, and distract attention from the events being portrayed.
It is the rare speaker in daily conversation who does not resort to such habit words as "You know?" or "I mean." Writers are equally capable of falling in love with words or phrases which they insert into their narratives, often in blissful ignorance of doing so until the time comes for revision, at which point they cringe.
The term was coined by a prolific genre writer, Helen Rosburg, who then became a book publisher, issuing web-site warnings to her authors about the need to check manuscripts for these pesky intruders. Any word, overused, can become a habit word, some of them, such as "and" or "but" may seem innocent enough at first. One or two fleas on a dog are innocent enough. When they turn into a family picnic, they are major distractions. Other habit words such as "that" or compound tenses such as "had" contribute more clunkiness than confusion to a narrative. One particular habit word, the verb "said," is conventionally held to be invisible, but a page or two of dialogue with "said" attributes, particularly if there are only two characters in the scene, can become as grating as an evening at home riddled by telemarketing interruptions.
First-draft situations are too early to think about removing habit words. Somewhere about the fifth or sixth run through a manuscript, these pests will begin making their presence known. Once a pattern is isolated, you can use the tracking feature on some word processing programs -- notably MS Word -- to ferret the undesirables out of the text. Another approach would be to read all or portions of a manuscript aloud.
A final caution: Resist the temptation to substitute cute or imaginative synonyms for habit words. It is far better to have your characters jones out on said than to allow them retorts, rejoinders, expostulations...
Schrodinger's Cat -- an existential conundrum proposed by the German physicist, Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate the dual nature of matter; another, more literary-related way of looking at the famed Frank R. Stockton short story "The Lady or the Tiger"; an illustration of the role played by choice in fiction.
Schrodinger's presentation imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing cyanide. If the atom decays -- and it surely will over time--it will open the vial. The cat, inhaling the cyanide fumes, will be killed.
When the box is closed the observer does not know if the atom has decayed or not. This means that the atom can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time - which clearly does not happen in classical physics.
The parallel between the cat and a given story is waiting to be drawn, so let's draw it. When asked to list vital constituents of a dramatic incident (story), writers will supply such ingredients as character -- "How can you have a story without character?" -- and such other elements as plot, suspense, and reversal. It is the rare, thoughtful professional who will add one of the key qualities inherent in the fiction of the twenty-first century -- ambiguity.
If we imagine story and Schrodinger's cat to reside on opposing sides of the equal sign, we can "see" the power of ambiguity in story. Fiction with the built-in element of duality provides an opening for reader participation, that condition where the reader feels not only close to the characters and events but immersed in the outcome.
Since about 1950, endings -- conclusions, or payoffs -- in fiction, particularly in the short form, have tended to move away from the highly visual, seemingly inescapable conclusion, drifting toward uncertainty, opaqueness, and choice. Some of this tendency can be related to the uncertainty of the times
Shelly Lowenkopf's soon-to-be-published The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. is more than a lexicon. It defines a conceptual language for thinking about fiction, providing the writer with the tools to raise the level of craftsmanship of his own work.