The Fiction Toolkit, Part 6
Shelly Lowenkopf -- October 23, 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 literary terms you should understand, the infamous "Pathetic Fallacy," and the "Stress Mouse." These will help you do your best writing and allow you to confound agents, publishers, and other book people over cocktails.
pathetic fallacy, the -- a literary device or tendency of written or spoken exaggeration in which inanimate forces and objects have life-like qualities attributed to them.
The term was introduced by the Victorian-era critic, John Ruskin, who was a staunch advocate of realism in writing and visual art. The pathetic fallacy can be applied to a fire, dancing merrily before our eyes; a range of mountains appearing moody and somber in the sunset; and even a brook, babbling joyfully in its course.
Add pathetic fallacy to the laundry list of injunctions and commandments addressed to writers, as though some literary equivalents of Moses descend from the mountain top from time to time, bearing a new memorandum from God. Thou shalt not split the infinitive. Thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition. Thou shalt not start sentences with but or and. Thou shalt not have the hills become alive with the sound of music. Thou shalt not use one-word paragraphs. And so on. There was even a strongly worded recommendation back in the 1950s from a language maven warning newspapers against using sentences longer than seventeen words.
What they don't tell you, these anointed and appointed arbiters of usage and taste is that anything works -- if you can get away with it. So the question to examine is, can you get away with the pathetic fallacy. There is a probability that the last time you did so, you used it as a cliché. But any time you can make the language at hand give forth a fresh way of looking at the human condition or of our remarkable universe, go for it; it is like getting a last brushing out of a flattened tube of toothpaste or a final shave from a seemingly exhausted shaving cream bomb. The best approach to take with inventive use of language is the Do No Harm Rule.
John Ruskin did not like the idea of liberties being taken with art, and so he went on an attack, leaving a two-hundred-year legacy for our consideration as we put our words down on paper, as Ruskin did, or on the screen, which so many of us do now, and which Ruskin could not visualize.
stress mouse -- a laboratory animal on whom genetic or mechanical interventions have been performed to allow scientific tracking and discovery.
Note the similarity to character, on whom an emotional or mechanical intervention has been performed in order to produce dramatic behavior. A character who is flawed or stressed from some earlier event or series of events is subsequently afflicted with biases and predilections which color subsequent behavior.
Ordinariness in a character does not produce enough energy to inform memorable story, unless it becomes apparent to the reader that the ordinariness is about to undergo some significant change. If Benjy Compson had been invested with a median intelligence in The Sound and the Fury, the main premise for Faulkner's novel would have vanished. If Stevens, the butler-protagonist of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, had not been so focused on his professional duties, the essential quality of Stevens being a naive narrator would have been severely undercut, removing the central irony of the narrative.
The marginal man, woman, or child in fiction has the best credentials for eliciting empathy and interest from readers, providing the writer a larger pallet of dramatic colors.
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.