On Experimenting in Fiction

You’re likely familiar with the core elements of fiction writing. You might even excel at using them to tell an interesting story. But after a while, the conventions of good storytelling might seem a little dry or constricting—aren’t there other ways to tell great stories?

Once writers have learned the rules, they can start learning how to break them. Don’t let the rules stand in the way of telling your stories—they’re there to guide your writing, not to box you in.

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Close Study: “A Village After Dark” by Kazuo Ishiguro

Read this story here, in The New Yorker.

“A Village After Dark” is a profoundly interesting story, marked by two main characteristics: an aimless, wandering narrator (typical of Ishiguro’s fiction), and a disorienting lack of detail.

Very few details make their way into the story. We know that the narrator, Fletcher, was part of an important group of people who have since disbanded, and that this group is controversial for the present members of this little English village. We know that the narrator has a somewhat hilarious fixation on the inferiority of a man named David Maggis, and we know that this narrator has been traveling a lot. But the particulars—the name of the village, the reason this group of people was important, their ideas and flaws and contributions, none of this is explained.

The effect of this vagueness is twofold. First, it is atmospherically unsettling. There is a constant sense of haunting in this story. The presence of an unspoken past informs the hazy present in such a way that, although there is little action and no stakes in the piece, a sense of tension and suspense strings the reader along. Second, it highlights the details that are important.

What is important?

Pay attention to Fletcher, what he reveals about himself. Shortly after his confrontation with the older village members, he leaves and says “Some of the cottages we passed looked so decayed and crumbling that I felt I could destroy one of them simply by running at it with all my weight.” This is one of the few visually clear images of the story, and it demonstrates the narrator’s inflated sense of self, aided moreso by: his constant belittling of Maggis, his belief that he can instruct the new generation, and his need to constantly defend himself and his famed group of erstwhile, for-some-reason-controversial community leaders.

We also know that he’s not the most reliable of narrators. When he chances upon his old classmate Roger Button, he immediately lies and says he was going to call up Roger as soon as he was free, but we know that Button never crossed Fletcher’s mind before now.

Despite this, the story’s most salient moment occurs during the narrator’s exchange with Button:

“Still,” [Button] said, “it’s time to forgive. You shouldn’t keep worrying so much. As you see, certain things from the past will come back to you in the end. But then we can’t be held accountable for what we did when we were very young.”

“No doubt you’re right,” I said. Then I turned and looked around in the darkness. “But now I’m not sure where to go.”

Despite everything absurd in this piece, including the narrator’s own blurry personality, this moment is something every reader can relate to. Where do we go now that we are no longer in the past? It is no coincidence that the narrator seems to wander aimlessly, that he has lost sight of the girl guiding him through the village, and now his only chance at finding the joyful bus to a room full of adoring strangers is the directions of a childhood frenemy. To Ishiguro, it is the human condition to wander through time, aimless, imposing a sense of order on the past and having no sense of the future, trapped between two vaguenesses.

Will a bus even come to rescue the narrator? We can only hope that, alone in an empty town square in the night’s darkest hour, we will also be rescued, and that joy is coming our way.

Craft Perspective: “On the Finer Points of Experimental Fiction” by Marisa Crane

Read this essay here, in LitHub.

You’re probably familiar with most rules in fiction writing—at least for a Western audience. Show, don’t tell. Use conflict to drive the story forward. Build towards a climax. Use clear, relevant details, and don’t waste any words.

Well, what if you want to say, to hell with the rules?

Plenty of writers have broken the rules of fiction and experimented with new and imaginative ways of telling stories. Crane’s essay does a great job of exploring what that means for the writer. Experimental fiction can repurpose any rule of conventional storytelling. A few ideas for writers include:

• Having an unreliable narrator (who lies to or deceives the reader).
• Writing with something other than sentences and paragraphs. (Some alternatives that have been done: lists, quiz questions, episodic vignettes, crosswords.)
• Breaking the fourth wall and directly talking to the reader.
• Writing in the second person point of view, or writing with the first person plural.
• Erasure fiction—taking an existing story, and erasing text until a new story forms.
• Telling the story backwards. Or sideways, diagonally, starting in the middle and going forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, etc.
• A story where the climax or conflict has already occurred, and we are only exploring the aftermath.
• Borrowing from non-Western story structures. An example of this is kishōtenketsu, a Japanese story structure that isn’t driven by conflict.

I wouldn’t call this last bullet “experimental”, since it’s using existing story structures outside of the West. But, for Western writers, learning from other forms of storytelling can inform new ways of thinking about story.

Take Ishiguro’s story. It breaks several rules. For starters, the lack of detail and backstory would concern any Intro to Fiction professor. There isn’t any sort of tangible conflict—a slight altercation, yes, but it isn’t driving the story forward, and anyway, the narrator’s own unmet desires are never properly addressed. And the narrator, too, breaks rules of fiction by being so vaguely written and described. Any teacher of creative writing will encourage your characters to have concrete visual details, a more developed backstory, gateways for connecting that character to the reader, or at least to humanity as a whole.

And yet, it’s a brilliant piece of fiction, because of the rules it breaks. Those experiments in storytelling create an unsettling atmosphere in the text, and drive home the story’s theme of wandering through time.

This gets to the heart of Crane’s essay: “the experimental form should relate to and enhance the themes and narrative—not distract from it.” Ishiguro certainly takes risks in his fiction, and those risks certainly pay off.

Of course, you don’t have to break the rules of fiction writing. There are plenty of great stories that follow the rules, and plenty of great stories that break them, too. Crane shares these tips for experimental fiction writers, but I think they apply to all writers:

• Don’t forget to play and delight in your work.
• Write the piece with confidence and authority—authority can go a long way in building reader trust and investment.
• Lean into the experiment or metaphor—if you’re going to do it, then really do it.
• Be willing to fail. Then fail again and again.
• Edit, edit, edit. Even messy, out-of-this-world pieces need to be tight and controlled, within their mess, if that makes sense. A good editor will know the difference when they see it.
• The structure needs to enhance the content. Or, in other words, the form must follow the function.