Oh damn, and it’s gone wrong already. I was all set to reaffirm my 90s preference for Blur (posh boys with talent) over Oasis (working class heroes with Beatles fixation and annoying mannerisms.. suuunsheeeeyine). The Daily Mail, hate-filled pedlar of warped mediocrity that it is, reported this week that Noel Gallagher thought Britain was better under Thatcher. Turns out he doesn’t think any such thing, and is in fact actively looking forward to celebrating her death. So actually this week I learned that Noel Gallagher isn’t a Tory. Which is nice. As to his sentiments regarding the wicked witch of the 80s — I’ve always stood roughly with Elvis Costello on the issue. Except as I grow older I find it hard to celebrate the dementia or death of anyone, even the most toxic. Here’s Costello.

Apparently, there’s a crisis in critical theory. As reported by MHP Books. I don’t have much to say about that, except to ponder who it will inconvenience?

[The door to the room is broken down]
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand admission! We demand admission!
LUNKWILL:
Hey! What?
FOOK:
Hey, hey, hey!
MAJIKTHISE:
Come on, you can’t keep us out!
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that you can’t keep us out.
LUNKWILL:
Who are you? What do you want? We’re busy!
MAJIKTHISE:
I am Majikthise.
VROOMFONDEL:
And I demand that I am Vroomfondel.
MAJIKTHISE:
It’s all right, you don’t need to demand that.
VROOMFONDEL:
Alright. I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand! That is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!
MAJIKTHISE:
No we don’t! That’s precisely what we don’t demand.
VROOMFONDEL:
Oh. We don’t demand solid fact! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts! I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel.
FOOK:
Who are you anyway?
MAJIKTHISE:
We are philosophers.
VROOMFONDEL:
But we may not be.
MAJIKTHISE:
Yes we are!
VROOMFONDEL:
sorry.
MAJIKTHISE:
We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other professional thinking persons.
VROOMFONDEL:
Um-hmm
MAJIKTHISE:
And we want this machine off, and we want it off now.
FOOK:
What is all this?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that you get rid of it.
FOOK:
What’s the problem?
MAJIKTHISE:
I’ll tell you what the problem is mate: demarcation. That’s the problem.
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that demarcation may or may not be the problem.
MAJIKTHISE:
You just let the machines get on with the adding up and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much.
VROOMFONDEL:
yeah.
MAJIKTHISE:
By law the quest for the ultimate truth is quite clearly the unalienable prerogative of your working thinkers
VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right.
MAJIKTHISE:
I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may -
VROOMFONDEL:
Or may not be
MAJIKTHISE:
[Softly] …or may not be… [louder] a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you ‘is telephone number?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
DEEP THOUGHT:
Might I make an observation at this point?
MAJIKTHISE:
You keep out of this metal nose.
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem!
DEEP THOUGHT:
If I might make an observation…
MAJIKTHISE:
We’ll go on strike!
VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT:
Who will that inconvenience?
MAJIKTHISE:
Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!

Nick Mamatas reported that, according to an Oklahoma writer’s group, romance is for straights only. Romance Writers Ink, in other words, banned same-sex entries from a short story competition. I was considering submitting the sex robot story I have lined up for workshop in a couple of weeks. That has plenty of entries, and almost none of them are same sex. As it happened, though, they cancelled the competition, so no robot-monkey-rumpy for them.

Back in the golden days of Doctor Who, according to Andrew Hickey an entire series was rewritten at the last minute so that one of the Doctor’s assistants magically changed his face for a couple of episodes. The reason? A bout of chicken pox.

There is a version of the excellent writing package Scrivener available for Linux now. It’s beta, and a little shaky in places, but it works fine. This makes me happy.

What do you mean you don’t run Linux? Did you know it’s free? And that you get access to thousands of applications any of which you can download and install on your system with a single command? Why pay big corporations for stuff that’s freely and legally available? OK, never mind. I’m not going to change any minds here, am I? Enough Linux/Open Source advocacy rantage for now.

According to Piers D Britton in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Design for Screen SF) science fiction movie and TV designers aspire to something called extended common sense. This is the kind of design that annoys pedants (actually drives them near insane), but keeps fans happy. It’s really about fulfilling an audience’s expectations so that plausibility is maintained. But..

“It is worth laboring the fact that the apparent, not theoretical, possibility of existence is the real concern of the sf designer” p341

So we accept explosions and noisy fighters in the vacuum of space because these scientifically incorrect aspects of Star Wars appeal to our expectations of arial warfare.

Advances in literary technology have been baffling readers for longer than you think. This clip is over ten years old, but it was new to me this week.

Do you agonise over person when you start out on a story? Your choice of first person (”I”) versus the third person (”he” or “she”) suggests a whole set of possibilities and restrictions. In this post I’ll be replaying a few of the traditional arguments about choice of person. In fact, the distinction isn’t as clear-cut as you might think, but I’ll get to that next time.

In part, the received wisdom is this:

Third person narration enables you to hop between characters should you wish. You can shift your narrative’s point of view as you move from chapter to chapter, from one paragraph to another, or even with a single sentence. On the whole, most narratives stick to a small number of point of view characters, and tend to make transitions as clear as possible. However you make the shift, you can create a rich story with multiple voices. You can also reach all the corners of your stories. You can pop into a victim’s head in the moments before his murder, and then hop over to the detective as she arrives at the crime scene.

A first person narrative tends to limit you to one viewpoint. Your narrative is filtered through your point of view character’s senses. If she doesn’t see or hear something, then you usually can’t show it. That’s why first person characters are forever hiding behind curtains, and listening in at windows. Or they’re hearing stories recounted by conveniently articulate friends.

In the third person story you can make the narrator seem to disappear, become impersonal. In that seeming-absence you can conjure the illusion that your reader’s relationship with the point of view characters in your story is unmediated. With this highly focalised approach, the narrative is tightly bound up with the perceptions of the character, and there seems to be little standing between the reader and the character. This engenders a sense of immediacy.

In another third person variation, you can opt for an omniscient narrator. This narrator is not personified as such, but exists outside of story’s characters as well as within them. It can pan out to see things a character can’t, and comment ironically upon any character’s thoughts and actions.

In fact, typically, a third person narrator will slide between the omniscient and the focalised. Even when closely identified with a character, a narrator may kick off a scene with a ‘long shot’ that the character cannot strictly see, or may portray a character from without as well as within. This issue of proximity to characters is one I’ll cover a little in part two.

A first person narrative can distance you from the point of view character. That might seems strange, since the point of view character and the narrator are the same person, right? Well yes. But in a past tense narrative the “I” of the narrator is speaking from the character’s future. The narrator knows more than the character. In fact, often she knows how everything turns out. This means we approach the “I” the character through the “I” the narrator. The narrator here distances us from the point of view character. Not only that, but we know the narrator is lying to us. She’s withholding information, eking out revelations. “Little did I know,” she says, “that things were about to get much much worse.”

On the other hand, a first person narrator can make a virtue of this distancing effect, and foreground the present moment at the expense of his past self. John Banville’s The Sea is a good example of this. The story of a childhood tragedy and a more recent bereavement are shown from the perspective of a man in late middle age, struggling both with the mutability of memory and his own mortality. So here the trade off is between the dramatised voice of the narrator and unmediated access to characters within the story.

Next time, I’ll undermine some of this, and argue that person may not always be the best way of dividing up these choices and issues.

The population of ancient Rome was equivalent to that of Wolverhampton. That is about 250,000 inhabitants, apparently. Of course as soon as I learned that, I had to go and unlearn it. The figure set some alarm bells ringing for me, so like any good academic I headed straight for Wikipedia. Which claims ancient Rome reached a population of 1 million, possibly much more.Incidentally there’s a helpful page that informs me that the distance between Rome and Wolverhampton is 1006 miles. The distance between ancient Rome and Wolverhampton is might be more interesting. Though it looks as if Wolverhampton only started really doing city-like things sometime after 600 AD. Having said that, not existing didn’t stop the town from being a point on a mystical network of ancient Woolworths stores. In fact it turns out, with a bit of judicious selection, you can apply some of the dodgy maths that has been used to find meaning in the placement of ancient monuments to any scatter of sites. I still like the image of prehistoric pick and mix, though.

An ability to speak French is a sign of suspicious liberality. If you are a xenophobic right wing American voter, that is. Popular amphibian Newt Gingrich smeared his only slightly less unpleasant opponent Mitt Romney by suggesting he routinely let disgusting French vowels drip from his venal liberal mouth. It now turns out that Newt may be suspiciously polyglot himself. What to do? Agents of purity could imitate the Great Escape and have French operatives follow hopeful candidates around yelling “Bon Chance!”until someone slips and replies “Merci!”. The quisling operative will then point and shout in accented English. “HE SPEAKS FRENCH! HE SPEAKS FRENCH! TAKE HIM AWAY! (Can I have my cheese now?)”

In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all debate on the origin of language. The problem of course is that language, being language, is not something that hangs around to be carbon dated. Especially in pre-literate societies, which any society that has just somehow agreed to call all bananas HUURG probably is. You can imagine how it might have worked though. There’s the give me a banana gesture, which is a little gimme gimme gimme dance accompanied, half by chance, by a particular moan. And after a while it seems like a whole lot less effort to just lie around and moan until someone gets off his fat paleolithic arse and fetches you a banana already. And thus was language born. Next week. Fire.

An adult human could crawl through the aorta of a blue whale. Actually, I had to switch this fact in. Originally it was going to be a tidbit I gleaned from my son who maintains that a blue whale’s heart only beats once every five minutes. However I can’t find any evidence of this anywhere. Here’s the best I came up with on a quick search. He swears he read it in a book, but I told him “link, or it isn’t true.”

According to Claire Squires, writing in Judging a Book by its Cover, “By 2001, five companies (Bertelsman, Perason, HarperCollins, Hodder Headline, and Hachette) had just over 50 percent of market share in the UK, thus controlling over half the market.” To me, that’s so self-evidently a Bad Thing that I’m tempted not to say anything else about it. It is, perhaps, to publishing, what Francophone candidates are to American politics. Just wrong. A much linked articleby Rebecca Swift describes the impact of the collision between commercial and creative imperatives.”Good writers still need to play. They still need space, time and respect to practice their craft, make errors if necessary, and come up, if they want, with something new.  Creativity was ever thus. If publishers don’t understand this, surely it will be at their, or the culture’s,  long term peril?  Publishers currently run the risk of  losing important writers  in the long term on the basis of short term decision making. Money people can say ‘it doesn’t matter as long as we earn money’ but in the long run this is to fail to have a healthy understanding of what books, or the ‘product’ is.”

In The State of the Novel  Dominic Head writes that a literary novel is “the kind of book that is shortlisted for literary prizes.”This seems like an excellent model for a definition. Similarly, racing cars are the kind of cars that get entered for races, and school children are the kind of children who go to school.More seriously, though, there is a good point being made here, whether intentionally or not. The literariness of literary novels is a notoriously slippery category. We might say that a literary novel emphasises character over plot, or that it is concerned with form, that it challenges conventions of structure, that it references a canon. All these things may be true, but they can also be true of genre novels. And which genre authors are selected for elevation to literary status is also up for grabs. This Booker brought us the much-attacked ‘readable’ shortlist. I’ve just completed A.D Miller’s Snowdrops which I enjoyed. I couldn’t tell you why it’s more worthy of shortlisting than any number of other thoughtful thrillers (Child 44by Tom Rob Smith, for example).Like pornography, it seems, literary fiction is hard to define, but we know it when a judge sees it. There’s only one thing for sure. You won’t be seeing science fiction on the shortlist any time soon. Unless it’s by Margaret Atwood. And then of course, it won’t be science fiction. Will it?

Perfect daily bread. 500g strong white bread flour. 200g wholemeal bread flour. Two teaspoons of salt. A 7 gram packet of dried yeast. 450ml water. Stir it all up until its a proper ball of dough. Leave for ten minutes. Knead for a few minutes on a heavily floured worktop. Put it back in the bowl for up to an hour, until it is half again, or twice its original size. Knead again briefly. Roll it up into a bread shape and leave covered for another half hour or so on a floured baking tray. It should be slightly alarmingly puffed up. Slash two crosses in the top, and sprinkle some flour. Bake for 15 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius. Then another ten minutes or so at 170 degrees Celcius. (This is my hybrid of recipes by Dan Lepard and Linda Collister)

Read on to win a three month Audible.com membership worth 45 dollars. Free audio books!

Have you ever been so busy you end up doing nothing at all? Whenever you begin a task you so feel bad about all the other jobs you should be doing that there’s nothing for it but to have a little lie down. I swear, it’s amazing I get up at all sometimes.

So Inflatable Ink has been on hiatus for the last month or so thanks to post-nano exhaustion, college commitments, a day job, contract work, my own writing, and yet another trans-Atlantic trip.

On the up side, audible.com recognized my obsessive reading habits this holiday and kindly gave me a three month account to pass on. That means free audio books with no commitment. It’s not like one of those introductory offers which force you to enter credit card details at the start and then ‘accidentally’ charge you when the period is up. No card information is required and there’s no automatic billing. Apparently they also offer something called personalized concierge setup.. which probably isn’t a man in a peaked cap turning up and adjusting your device. But you never know.

To be entered leave a comment to this post telling me about a resolution, a hope and a fear for 2012, writing-related or otherwise. If you don’t want the prize, leave a comment anyway–it would be great to hear from you, and just mention you’ll pass on the freebie. I’ll draw the winner at random on Saturday 21 January at 6pm GMT.

Here are mine:

Resolution: To write smarter. To finish then submit the projects I start.
Hope: That I’ll make a short story sale, or place in a competition.
Fear: That I’ll spin my wheels, start a hundred projects, gather some nice comments in workshops, and get precisely nowhere. Time’s getting on. Tick tock.

At the time of writing, my NaNoWriMo effort stands at 38500 words. So I’m in with a chance even though my plan fell apart like a wet pizza sometime into the second week. I almost walked away from it then. But I’m too stubborn for that even though I had to take a few days out for deadlines. So when I returned to it, with wordcount to make up and no decent plan in place, panic seized me every time I looked at my keyboard. It was time for a new approach. It was time to go meta.

Someone overheard my description of this MetaWriMo trick in a writing workshop this week and jumped to the conclusion that I’m an utterly pretentious wanker. I could see it in her face. Oh well, I have no pride left anyway.

In fact going meta involves merely pretending that you’re an utterly pretentious wanker. You need to tell yourself that suddenly your NaNoWriMo novel has become a postmodern story about the writing of a novel. But wait! It’s just a trick, because you’ll strip out the meta-wankiness when you come to the edit. It’s really just a way of bringing your planning and discovery work into the novel so it can be used as legitimate wordcount.

So here are some MetaWriMo tricks I tried this time round:

1. Take the plunge and redefine your novel

This is the first step, and you really just take it in your head. You know what your novel’s about, right? It’s about a band of experimentally intelligent lab squirrels on quest to find a mythical Golden Nut, is it not? Or a campus feud at Reading University in 1973. Right? Wrong. Whatever your book was about, it’s now about the process of writing a NaNoWriMo novel. This mental twist is your essential first step into the world of MetaWriMo. Once you’ve accepted this, everything else becomes possible. Does this mean you’re abandoning your real novel? Absolutely not. But the process of defining that novel is interesting too. What’s more, it’s useful. You’ll be using your NaNoWriMo novel to learn more about your story, your world, your characters. You’ll learn what works, and what doesn’t. You’ll have the freedom to take risks, and to back up and take them all over again. You’re accepting that writing a novel top to tail isn’t for you, and you’re creating a portfolio you’ll use for your next draft. What’s more, you can’t fail. After all it’s all wordcount.

2. Create a meta-narrator

Your meta narrator exists really to make you feel better about using the NaNoWriMo process for planning and for free writing as well as writing the novel proper. Your meta narrator is your fig leaf and your master of ceremonies.

The meta narrator is a framing device you can use to thread all your story discovery work together so that when it comes time to submit your novel on 30 November, you can say yes, this is a novel. It’s an experimental novel, but a novel nonetheless. The narrator story-izes what might otherwise feel like a collection of notes and exercises.

He’s not necessary to the process, but he’s fun, and you can have him muse about story options, so he can end up making discoveries for you during the writing process.
Have fun with the meta-narrator. You’ll be stripping him out in the rewrite, so you can go crazy. Make him a computer intelligence from the year 2372, or a magic imp.

3. Go meta

Now you can do anything you like, really. The aim is to find out who your characters are, to explore your setting, and to discover where your story is heading. Here are some things I had my meta-narrator introduce when the going got sticky:

a. Write some back story

How did we get here? Trace a scene back into your novel’s pre-history.

b. Interview your characters

There are character interviews all over the internet. There’s a good one right here, too. How many of your NaNoWriMo characters are two dimensional? Story is driven by character, so back up and explore some of your novel’s walk-on parts. Maybe they’ll end up being more important than you thought.

c. Rewrite a scene

Did you hurry through a good bit? Try rewriting it from the top. Think back for likely scenes, and add them to your writing list. Favour scenes in which more detail might add depth, and yield more story branches.

d. Write mutually exclusive scenes

Not sure which way the story should twist at a key point? Have your cake and eat it. Try both. Maybe a character gets killed in one scene. In another version she escapes, and has all  sorts of adventures. This is post-modernism. Go and read Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams. You see? Actual real, good, proper novelists do this stuff.

e. Go into what-if mode

Make a list of potential scenes. Don’t think about it too much. Get as many ideas down as you can. Let each idea spark others. Have your meta narrator narrow the field down a bit afterwards. Refer back to this passage when you’re stuck for something to write.

f. Go into setting mode

Rewrite a scene in setting only. Describe buildings, and objects, but nothing else. When the edit comes you’ll be able to bring your layers together. Do the same with smells and sounds. Write scenes in gesture only. If you start to feel guilty about this, have your wanky meta-narrator say something profound and post-modern to justify it.

g. Change the point of view

Write from the point of view of your antagonist. Or rewrite a scene from the perspective of a minor character.

h. When all else fails, skip ahead and write the best bits

There’s something cool about your story, right? There have to be some scenes you’re looking forward to writing. Don’t wait. Write one now. You can shuffle things around later. If you’ve written all the exciting scenes then try section e (above) again, and sketch in some new ones. And remember, you probably rattled through the cool stuff too fast first time round, so don’t be afraid to try them out again.

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There is no shortage of books about literary criticism and critical theory. There are also plenty of popular how-to guides for writers. Poking about Blackwell’s Bookshop the other week, though, I came across Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction by Catherine Brady. Brady is a professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco. This is a rare hybrid: an academic work aimed at creative writing students. As such it’s not a light read. I think it more than repays the effort it demands, though. From it, here are some things about ambiguity and the hidden in fiction I (think I) learned this week.

Good stories are ambiguous
Ambiguity lies at the heart of literature. Brady is talking primarily about literary fiction here, where conclusions are rarely drawn tight. However, even in a genre story, you should leave work for your readers. Fiction is a partnership between writer and reader, after all.

If you want to find good examples of unstable meaning in popular story, take a look at grown up TV dramas like The Sopranos and The Wire. Is Tony Soprano a thug or a lovable gangster? A family man or a philanderer? No episode of The Sopranos ended with a pat conclusion. Instead, the viewer was left with the uneasy feeling that everything she knew about the story might be wrong.

There’s a tension between the clear and obvious things the viewer has seen. A kiss, a murder, an argument about a car. And the murky world of meaning. That tension is the interesting part of the story, it’s the part that lingers in the mind, and carries on cooking long after the closing credits.

The duty of a story is to raise questions, not to provide answers
It may be the job of a polemic, or a piece of investigative journalism to lead a reader to a clear set of answers. In writing fiction you’re freed of that task. Instead you provide the evidence, and then let the reader decide:

Like a judge, the writer remains silent at critical junctures—but not silent on which information is relevant to judgment

And it’s here that we cheat of course. We skew the case. If we’re smart, though, we don’t nail the conclusion down too tight. A story with no room for interpretation is presented to the reader pre-suffocated.

The gaps are as important as the scenes
A plot is a series of actions. First this happens, and then that happens. But in any plot there’s much more gap than action. Some of that omission is irrelevant, of course. There’s a lot of teeth cleaning and TV watching that doesn’t get described. But there’s also meaning implicit in much the writer leaves out.

Imagine a scene in which a man is happily setting out for a night on the town. He’s slapping on aftershave, and dancing to something silly on the radio. He’s making plans on the phone. And now imagine a scene in which the same man is disheveled, and drunk, and sitting on the edge of a railway bridge as dawn breaks. He is bleeding from a cut on his face. Put those scenes together. Which part is the most important? The first scene? the second scene? Or the omission that sits between them?

A gap in a story implies a causal relationship. Often that will be uncomplicated, a simple matter of omitting unnecessary detail. But it’s the troubled and troubling gaps that can help make a story. It’s in these gaps that the reader must consider.. what happened, and what it means. The story becomes a complex thing, without the need for complexity on the page.

Separate action and consequence
One gap we all know about in fiction is the cliffhanger. The most obvious example of this is the Doctor Who or Dick Barton moment. The hero is moments away from obliteration by a fiendish zap gun, so let’s end the episode here. Often, though, the cliffhanger does not reside in the question “what will happen next?”. Instead it calls up the question “what will be the consequences of this unexpected event?”

When Jane walks in on Peter garotting the family dog, the event has already occurred. It’s a done deal. But we’re still hooked. We want to know how Janet will react, and what it was that drove Peter to this drastic action in the first place.

Brady suggests you can take this a stage further, though, by omitting the immediate consequence altogether. Writing about Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, she says:

[The wrong body is found in a grave.] An amateur would have dwelled on the characters’ reactions  at the gravesite, most likely having them address the questions in the reader’s mind and worry about the next step in their thwarted effort, draining off dramatic momentum rather than banking on it. What we don’t know yet keeps us hooked, so Faulker skips over their reactions and in chapter 5 jumps to the moment when Aleck, Chick, and Miss Habersham return to town, the white space emphasizing that their discovery compels further action and that it’s underway.

So, after Jane discovers Peter throttling the dog, rather than stay with the confrontation we might instead find ourselves at a doctor’s office, with the couple barely talking to one another. The reader will get her reveal soon enough, but not quite yet. We can spin it out, and we can let the mystery animate the ongoing action. Brady again:

The really developed action of a novel occurs before or after decisive action, in the lead time or the lag time between literal revelation and its emotional cause or consequence..

A story is two stories
Every story is perceived first at the literal level. This is where things happen, and we see them happen. But there is also a secret, implicit, story beneath this surface. This figurative level is the place of ambiguous meanings. Peter strangles the family dog. We find out later that this criminal act was provoked by a row about money and vet bills. Well that’s that, right? Clearly not. There’s a lot more to discover. It’s a detective story. There’s something pretty rotten at the heart of this relationship, and we’re only seeing the symptoms here. As Brady says:

…literal events enact the implicit tension of the hidden story.

The extent to which the hidden story remains hidden and the extent to which it is obliquely related to the visible will depend upon genre to a certain extent. A literary story will tend to emphasize ambiguity. A one to one relationship between portrayed events and submerged meaning is seen as mechanistic. With meaning pinned down, emotional and thematic complexity is reduced. With meaning open, a reader might use the literal story to conjure a number of different, even contradictory, hidden stories.

This can leave literary stories, especially literary short stories, open to the accusation that they are wilfully obscure. It’s true, I think, that in reading a story by Raymond Carver one has to understand there are conventions at work. It’s a little like the hidden rules of cryptic crosswords or Mornington Crescent (don’t let’s get started on that one though).

In a genre piece the hidden story is likely less buried or ambiguous, but it will be there. Good characters have motivations that run below the surface. So when they act, they do more than careen from event to event. They are driven by deep needs and conflicts. These are revealed by their actions, and this forms the hidden story. As TV shows like Mad Men, The Wire, and even Battlestar Galactica have recently shown, popularity and accessibility are not incompatible with complexity. As Brady writes:

It’s harder to conceive of plot as engineering a relationship between a visible story and a hidden one, but it’s a lot more fun

The climax is the hinge for the literal and the figurative
By convention a story’s climax is tied to a reveal. It’s at this point that the figurative story is closest to the literal story. In literary fiction this connection often remains oblique. A less successful story may provide an epiphany in which a protagonist achieves complete understanding of some facet of themselves. Brady argues that this is too obvious,:

As you compose a first draft, try this strategy of telling one story in order to tell another. Approached in the most literal-minded way this will deflect your attention from making a point and force metaphorical meaning along an axis of tension. Instead of steering your character straight at realization (an epiphany too much on your mind), struggle with the machanics of making one story yank another to the surface. This will lead you to discovery. I can vouch for it.

So the climax should offer a moment of illumination, but it should not convert the figurative story into a literal one. In other words don’t give the game away. If you explain everything you close down room for doubt and interpretation. The figurative story dissolves and becomes literal, albeit retrospectively. This rather defeats the point.

Crucially, though, the moment of illumination should be transformative. The reader’s understanding of both the hidden story and literal story is altered at the moment of climax.

When the potent charges laid in the rising action fire simultaneously at the climax, a story offers a convincing surprise. In terms that do not require realization in the form of an epiphany, the climax can be defined as a decisive action that convincingly reconfigures what has come before; at this moment the visible story comes closest to the hidden, untold story.

The hidden story is itself changed at this moment, because we’re introducing new evidence to the puzzle, and this necessarily reconfigures our understanding of deeper meaning.

The climax in a genre story has a similar transformative role, although ambiguity is less important here. The actions of a protagonist result in a crisis in which his character is both tested and revealed. In understanding more about the character, we can then read back over the story from a new perspective.

Genre stories also tend to offer a twist which entirely transforms the meaning of the story that came before. This reveal is often cruder and more decisive than that offered by the literary story. The detective was the poisoner all along, the entire world is a computer simulation, and so on. There’s a satisfying click as the puzzle piece falls into place, and the picture we then see is not what we expected. Whatever the nature of this revelation, it transforms our understanding of the literal story, and unveils a whole new set of implications, offering us an alternative or substantially transformed hidden story. In effect we have to tell the story all over again in order to understand it.

Introduction The write way Geoff Dyer
Getting started New writers … dive in Jill Dawson
Character A kind of organised dreaming Andrew Miller
Point of view In two minds Rachel Cusk
Voice Who are you really? Meg Rosoff
Dialogue When all is said and done DBC Pierre
Description By strength or submission Adam Foulds
Plot Rising action Kate Mosse
Plot The dark art of creating suspense Mark Billingham
Revising & rewriting Cut, then cut again MJ Hyland