Argumentative Fiction
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What teaching college essay-writing taught me about fiction
One day, I hope to make my living writing fiction, but for now, like most writers, I make ends meet with other work. For me, it’s teaching expository writing classes for college freshmen. Most of the time, I feel like I’m trying to balance my work responsibilities with the time I devote to what I really care about: my work in progress. When I’d rather be working on my novel, it’s easy to resent the time I spend grading papers, preparing lesson plans and writing lengthy emails to my students, explaining for the thousandth time that yes, their thesis still needs more focus. According to my course evaluations, these emails are as frustrating for them as they are for me.
But as I have come to realise recently, my begrudging commitment to the forcible development of my students’ writing might be more valuable to my own writing than it sometimes feels. It’s not just that the ability to write a clearly-worded sentence is as important in fiction as it is in college papers. Sure, I know what a dangling modifier is called now, and how to explain what’s wrong with one, but I knew how to use grammar correctly before I started teaching, if only by mimicking what I read. No, the aspect of my fiction that’s taken a huge leap forward in recent semesters is the construction of my scenes.
Effective Scenes
Over the thirteen years I’ve spent working on various short stories, novels and novellas, I’ve written scenes that I’ve been really proud of—scenes that sang to me, in which characters and settings seemed to jump off the page and dance—and I’ve also written scenes that fell flat on their badly-described faces. Writing the former rather than the latter always seemed to me like a matter of luck, more or less. There was no way to tell from the description of the scene in my plan how it would turn out when I tried to put it onto the page.
It’s only in working on my current project that I’ve started to make those singing-dancing scenes crop up more frequently. And the way I’m doing that is by constructing scenes not in terms of plot, but in terms of argument.
Of course, to convince my readers to keep turning a novel’s pages, I need to have things happen on most—if not all—of those pages. But what about those scenes which need to be there but aren’t as eventful as some others? And what about the ones in which plenty of things happen, but which still come out sounding just as interesting as my Monday to-do list? The way to improve them isn’t just to refurbish them with new character motivations and spruce up the interiority, although those things can help. It’s to find the nugget, the heart, of what I want to say and to focus the scene around that.
Argument in Fiction
So what does argument look like in fiction? My freshmen are writing about gun control this week, but I’m not trying to say that every scene in a novel should be a fictionalised campaign for some political agenda. Across the whole scope of the plot, the book might indeed have a big message or universal theme behind it, if a subtle one. But the type of argument I’m talking about here is smaller than that; it happens on the scene level. At first sight, it might not be recognisable as an argument at all.
Like a good essay, a scene can’t just provide information, describe things. It needs to convince the reader to see them in a certain way, to look beyond the obvious components of what’s there to reach a deeper level of understanding. As I say to my students, if their papers just summarise a bunch of information that I could have found by googling the topic, there’s no point in them writing about it. The point of writing is to communicate something only you can get across. That’s what I’m trying to do in every scene I write now.
Sometimes, my argument might look something like the defence of a general assertion. I start out the scene by making a claim: about a setting, a character, a tradition, or even about human nature if I’m feeling ambitious. The first scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a great example of this. “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.” Then the rest of the scene goes on to provide evidence to support this assertion. Mr Dursley has a very normal, boring-sounding job; Mrs Dursley has ordinary concerns such as what the neighbours are doing; the couple defend the normalcy of their existence by ostracising people they find unusual; the list goes on. The result is not just a description of various character traits that have little to do with each other. In fact, the writer is not so much describing the characters as building a case against them, for it’s clear from the tone how we’re supposed to interpret what we’re told. The Dursleys are petty people whose fear of social exclusion leads them to cruelty.
Other times, my argument takes the form of a contrast or a comparison. If you, like me, learned to hate those words by the end of your secondary-school English lessons, then bear with me. Because simply describing a room, a street, an alien planet, is so much less interesting than comparing it to somewhere else. It can be easy for writers of fiction, especially fantasy, to assume that because we’re writing about a world we’ve invented that it is interesting in and of itself. But there’s a reason that we don’t just publish the answers to our world-building questionnaires. Stacks of undifferentiated information don’t allow us to experience a place. The experience of it can come through a character, like in the following comparative thesis: this new location is different from my protagonist’s home. But comparison doesn’t have to come through character, and the above example isn’t particularly good anyway because it isn’t focussed. Better would be something like this town is louder/colder/wilder (pick a superlative) than the neighbouring town. From that, we get more of a sense of the setting’s identity, of what it would be like to go there.
Here’s another option, and perhaps my favourite. A great professor once told me that an effective way to frame an argument about literary theory is to use the template you might think that [blank] but in reality [blank]. In my opinion, this is also a wonderful way to frame a scene for a novel. Think about what the boring, obvious version of that scene would be, and then persuade your reader that this scene isn’t that.
This week, for example, I’ve been editing the chapter in which my main character travels from her home town to the big city in which most of the novel’s plot will take place. While it’s not particularly eventful, I didn’t want to skip over the journey, because this is a momentous day in my character’s life: it’s the first time she’s ever travelled any distance on her own, and she doesn’t know when (or even if) she’ll return.
The first draft I wrote of this scene was horrible. Trees flashed past the window, there were lots of train-noises and commuters bustling about in a hurry, and my character sat there thinking about what a big deal this journey was, and it was boring.
Advice on this topic from the writing guides I’ve read in the past can be summarised in the words motivation and conflict. These are the two things that drive scenes forward, we’re told, and to an extent, that’s true. But the problem with my train-travel scene wasn’t that my character lacked motivation; in a scene in which a character sits on a train, the motivation is obvious—she wants to get to her destination. While it’s true that the scene lacked conflict, and I did consider manufacturing some impediment that would threaten to prevent my character from reaching her destination, in the end, I think that would have felt contrived. Eventually, I figured out that the scene was boring because I wasn’t telling my reader anything that they wouldn’t already have assumed about what it would be like to travel by train to an unknown city.
Yesterday, I returned to that scene and re-wrote it. Now while my character sits and contemplates her journey from that hard, wooden seat by the window, I try to convince my reader that although she looks nervous from the outside, and has good reason to be, there’s something underneath all that. That, in fact, it’s not only a relief for this thirteen-year-old to be putting her hometown behind her, but in leaving, she’s beginning to realise that she was never really at home there at all. My whole scene is focussed around that idea; every description and interaction either adds to or qualifies it. Hopefully, that means that each of these moments also feels unexpected in some way.
There are more forms an argument can take than I have space to list here. But by making it a priority to be sure that every scene you write does have an argument in some shape or form, you can prevent your prose from descending into the mushy mashed potato of words that characterises those scenes that never get off the ground.
A Good Thesis
Of course, depending on the point of view you’ve chosen to write in, this argument might express what your character has to say, rather than what your narrator or you as an author have to say. I’ve often heard the advice that narration and setting descriptions are only interesting when seen through the unique perspective of whoever is conveying it. But even if my character sees a tree in a way that other people don’t, these standalone snippets of information aren’t enough to make the scene hang together. For that, we need focus.
A compelling scene has all the components of a good essay in it. It has concessions, counter-arguments, evidence and analysis. Most importantly, however, it has a thesis. And a thesis, whether expressed explicitly or implicitly, makes an argument cohesive across multiple paragraphs; it stops those paragraphs from getting distracted and veering off into irrelevance, or from ending up as simply a list of unrelated things to say.
Something to Say
Of course, this is easy enough to understand in theory. It’s much harder to put into practice. I’m sure that the reason my students struggle so much with their thesis statements isn’t because they don’t understand the concept of focus. It’s because they haven’t found that kernel of something that they want to communicate to the world. And, let’s face it, why would they? I’ve given them a topic which they sometimes have little to no interest in and asked them to generate a new and interesting take on it, almost out of thin air. The artificial environment of the freshman writing seminar is toxic to the fledgling argument.
In fact, if I really dug down into what the average paper I grade is trying to communicate to me, it’s that the student who wrote it really wants an A. That they’ve done their homework readings, gained a reasonable understanding of the topic and tried to check as many of the boxes in the assignment instructions as possible. I try to be mindful of this when I give them feedback on their papers. Ultimately, I hope that I’ve taught these students well enough that they’ll be able to express their ideas with sophistication when, eventually, they do have something they want to write about.
But as novelists, we’re doing this work because we already have something to say. For the many writers out there who, like me, are not currently getting paid to write, that something-to-say brings us back to our notebooks and tablets week in, week out, regardless of the fact that our coffee-shop habits are costing us more than our writing might ever make back. It might not be a broad, philosophical revelation that will carry a whole novel; in fact, not having that caused me a lot of anxiety when I first started writing fiction. But those types of messages develop gradually.
In the more immediate task of scene-writing, that something-to-say is often just a different way of seeing something, a quirky take on a person or a place or a practice, perhaps. And the seeds of those somethings are already in our writing, even if they’re not developed yet. If there’s one sentence in a scene that stands out as interesting, see if you can figure out what it’s trying to tell you, and extrapolate that idea into an argument that you can hang the whole scene from.
Although I wouldn’t say that I’m looking forward to starting on the pile of papers that I have to grade this week, it’s a comfort to know that the time I’ll inevitably spend trying to articulate exactly what an argument needs in order to stand on its feet won’t be a waste of time. Even if it’s wasted on the students (who sometimes don’t even read my feedback), it won’t be wasted on me.
