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Fictional Narrative Basics - Description
Unit Completion Date: End of Week 5
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In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner discusses the importance of creating for the reader what he calls "a vivid and continuous dream." The concept is also discussed as producing in the reader "a willing suspension of disbelief." Both phrases point to the importance of getting a reader to enter into the fictional world of your story and remain there throughout the action of the story.
In some ways this is very easy, because as readers we are conditioned from childhood to do just that: accept the authority of the narrative voice without question and involve our attention with the characters and their situations. This is the kind of reading that takes place when people talk about "losing themselves in a story" or "traveling in a book."
Most of us are so conditioned, in fact, that we accept certain types of writing as reflecting the real world around us with some level of accuracy. A whole body of fiction has emerged precisely to run counter to this conditioning and make us aware of the ways in which traditional types of fiction operate. We'll look at examples of this later in the course, but it is important at this point to understand that reading fiction is a behavior that readers undertake under certain conditions, and those conditions are maintained though a wide range of techniques.
Many of those techniques are covered in other sections of this discussion unit. Breaks of point of view, lack of dramatic tension, "unbelievable" dialogue or character actions can all shake the reader from this "vivid and continuous dream," cause her to think about the writer and writing rather than the story and characters. Techniques of description support the narration, the character development, and the plot presentation, weaving them all together into a seamless whole. Many stories live and die on the quality and texture of the writer's description, regardless of the other elements.
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