Removing the Scrim--5 Ways to Keep the Fictional Dream
By Kimberley Allen McNamara
In less than a week, our family will get a new addition--we are adopting a puppy. A puppy does not let you forget they are there. Puppies, and the dogs they become, ground you in the reality of the present moment. Likewise, writers need to ground their readers in the fictional dream.
Our puppy will ground our home in the present moment of: feed me, walk me, play with me, pay attention. An author does the same for their reader; they ground the reader in the reality of their characters. Success in the grounding, of making the reader suspend their disbelief and assume the reality of the character, takes a deft hand, a scalpel, and vivid, specific detail.
The writer, John Gardner, called this suspension of disbelief, the fictional dream. In his essay entitled Basic Skills, Genre and Fiction as Dream, Gardner stated:
“If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind…By detail, the writer achieves vividness; to make the scene continuous, he takes pains to avoid anything that might distract the reader.”
The writer, creates the dream, Gardner advises ,by using strong verbs, nouns, and descriptions.
Five ways to keep the vividness and continuous dream of fiction are:
Remove the filtering words. Filter words: those words that put your reader at a distance as if they were observing the action of the character rather than being immersed in the action. Such words (knew, noticed, seemed, watched, wondered, thought, realized, decided…) increase the narrative distance and remind the reader that they are very much, indeed, reading. For example: “Kate charted Lanie as she moved through the throngs of mourners, who reached out to touch her as she passed. Lanie stopped to acknowledge each one before hurrying on toward the front room of the funeral parlor.” Consider Instead: Lanie moved through the throngs of mourners, many touched her. She acknowledged each then hurried to the front room. ***See how much clearer the second pass of this information is. The same moment connected the reader to what the main character noticed without saying Kate (the MC) is noticing. If the reader is in Kate’s head, the reader knows they are at the funeral parlor, the reader is seeing what Kate sees, not what disembodied Kate is seeing. A third pass would make this even tighter.
Avoid weak words. Words such as it, this, just, still, that, really… these are placeholders, with indirect reference, the equivalent of the spoken umm. For more words you should avoid please consult Catia Shattuck’s article: 17 Weak Words to Avoid. Shattuck offers up more than 17 words for consideration; she includes those lovely adverbs and those Be verbs. Also redundant adjectives, cue: armed gunman--what kind of gunman isn’t armed? Shattuck asks. Sometimes, Shattuck concedes these weak words are the correct words to use: sometimes you need to use a Be verb. Shattuck doesn’t say to never, ever use these words, rather you should use them sparingly.
Use an editing program. Editing programs abound: Autocrit, Grammarly, Prowriter, Hemingway, MasterWriter, ProWritingAid, WriteMonkey, SmartEdit, Draft-- a review of each by Carla King may be found at 9 Manuscript Editing Software Programs You Should Consider. These programs tend to offer a trial usage and a premier program for purchase with annual renewal. Many will help you identify the filtering words and the unnecessary tags (said, asked, whispered…) that writers pack into their first drafts. Others offer comparisons of the plot, pacing, dialogue, etc… to past works of published fiction and nonfiction.
Avoid clunky descriptions: Descriptions of characters should not be a grocery list of physical detail. For example: at 5’3”, 175 lbs, sandy brown hair, sun-blotchy skin and faded blue eyes Arnold was not intimidating. Instead: Nearly as wide as he was tall, Arnold’s diminutive stature, sunburned nose, and watery blue eyes made him interchangeable with the jetsam of the Cape Cod seashore he combed with his metal detector each evening. Character descriptions should always offer more than physical details, they should conjure the character for the reader and also comment or reveal the character’s personality. The second description of Arnold paints a more vivid physical form of Arnold and lets the Reader see him, we also learn how he spends his time.
Don’t get lazy. Avoid descriptive placeholders. Use strong verbs, nouns, and descriptions. Telling the reader your main character’s husband looked like John Krasinski or Derek Jeter or Colin Farrell (and yes, I have read these descriptions in PUBLISHED NOVELS), is a cheap trick. Such shorthand, placeholder descriptions cheat the Reader and remove the fictional dream. Did you see the author behind the curtain? You won’t be able to “unsee” the author, the dream will have ended. These descriptions are disheartening particularly when the very same author has expertly employed descriptions of the same husband by stating X was “the kind of man who wasn’t afraid to make love passionately, even if such lovemaking knocked her grandmother’s mirror from the wall.” Now that’s a description of the main character’s husband! The John Krasinski notation is a lazy description. A written description of John Krasinski’s appearance, without the verbal shorthand of his name, could have been achieved by this author without a doubt. Author Richard Russo, in his essay: Location, Location, Location: Depicting Character Through Place, laments the generic shorthand writers offer the Reader when describing the setting. Russo warns against homogenizing settings with placeholders like Burger King. Placeholders are verbal shorthand for “Sorry I didn’t have time, so fill in the blanks.”
When the reader picks up a novel, they anticipate being caught in the fictional dream. The reason why we read: to be transported, to care about someone other than our minutiae, depends on the fictional dream. To accomplish this suspension of disbelief, this dreamscape, the writer needs to be mindful of words that remove the dream. Grounding in the Reader in the fictional dream is elicited by removing the scrim of the filtering words, the unnecessary tags, and by inserting the vivid, specific details and descriptions that sustain the dream.
The best way to sustain the fictional dream is to prevent the scrim from clouding the dream in the first place. To avoid the scrim, learn from your past word choices and subsequent revisions with the help of software, reading your novel out loud, or practice using strong verbs, nouns, and descriptions every time you write. Consider each revision training for your next writing, you’ll get better if you pay attention.
