This Is How It's Done, Folks.

Two weeks ago, with tongue firmly in cheek, I posted this blog offering advice on how to write bad fiction. I laid out six guidelines for creating dull, clumsy, awkward prose guaranteed to make you sound like a sixth grader in the process of failing a creative writing class.

I would now like to offer an excellent counter-example — a demonstration of how to do it right.

This is the brilliant opening paragraph of Lori Roy's superb debut novel Bent Road :

Celia squeezes the steering wheel and squints into the darkness. Her tires bounce across the dirt road and kick up gravel that rains down like hail. Sweat gathers where the flat underbelly of her chin meets her neck. She leans forward but can't see Arthur's truck. There is a shuffling in the backseat. If they were still living in Detroit, maybe driving to St. Alban's for Sunday mass, she would check on Evie and Daniel. But not now. For three days she has driven, slept one night in a motel, all five of the family in one room, another in her own car, and now that the trip is nearly over, Arthur is gone.

Please indulge me for a moment while I break down how Roy fails to follow each of my guidelines for writing bad fiction, with magnificent results.

1. She uses simple, active verbs like squeeze, squint, bounce, kick, rain, gather, meet, and lean. Until the last sentence, Roy doesn't use any passive being verbs (aside from "there is a shuffling in the backseat" and the conditional "were" in the part about Detroit). And when she does use "is," she uses it powerfully with the short, strong line, "Arthur is gone."

2. She discloses an enormous amount of important and interesting character and situation information here. But she does it through the careful deployment of the details she shows us, not by just stating it. This is perhaps the most impressive aspect of this paragraph. A less capable author would have opened with a block of boring explanatory exposition such as, "Celia was driving from her home in Detroit to her new life in Kansas. She was tired, because she had been driving for three days. Two of her children were in the car with her..." etc. You would immediately realize that you're in for a long slog. If you were an agent or publisher, you would probably stop right there.

Consider how much she has conveyed to us in a single paragraph, without saying any of it directly:

(a) Celia is nervous. Roy is establishing that she feels anxiety about relocating with her family, and that sense of discomfort will be a continuing theme throughout the book. Roy doesn't tell us that Celia is nervous, but she shows us how she squeezes the steering wheel, sweats, leans forward, and squints into the darkness searching for Arthur. Which brings us to...

(b) She is following her husband, not just literally in her car right now, but from their former life in Detroit to their new life in Kansas. This is his move. For him it will be a homecoming, a return to his roots. For Celia it will be a jarring and disorienting transition. She struggles to keep up with him, losing sight of him in the darkness, a wonderful little bit of symbolism.

(c) This scene takes place in a remote, rural area. Although Roy has not yet given the location as Kansas, the mention of dirt and gravel immediately convey the setting. Celia's feeling of isolation and loneliness is central to the plot, and Roy wastes no time letting us see the trepidation instilled in Celia by being in a place that feels, to her, like the middle of nowhere.

(d) Celia is a healthy, young and slender woman. Did you catch that? Roy very cleverly tosses in a single, subtle detail: "the flat underbelly" where "her chin meets her neck." By contrast, Roy will later describe how Arthur's mother Reesa (Celia's mother-in-law) has a blubbery dewlap. Reesa is a large woman from years of eating country meals featuring cheesy casseroles, heavy soups, and fried chicken, and concluded with cakes and pies. The rituals of preparing and delivering food form a major current within the story, and become one of the sources of tension between Reesa and Celia.

(e) They are a Catholic family, and going to church is a regular part of their lives (as revealed by the reference to St. Alban's and Sunday mass). This, too will be a critical component of a story that features several important developments that happen at the local church, and Bent Road is a novel that ultimately deals with issues of judgment, condemnation, forgiveness, and redemption.

(f) Celia and Arthur are members of the working class. Although they have the resources to make this move, it entails driving for days, sleeping in the car, and cramming the entire brood into a single motel room for the night. An upper-class couple would fly to their new home, or would at least be able to afford separate rooms for the kids.

That's an amazing amount of information to divulge in what seems, on the surface, to be a description of a woman driving. It pulls you in, makes you care, makes you want to learn more.

3. Her language is plain, unpretentious, and straightforward. Roy avoids platitudes, hyperbole, and trite, overused stock phrases and expressions.

4. She uses very few modifiers. The only adjectives are hardly noticeable words like "flat," and the only adverb is the harmless and unobtrusive "nearly."

Just for comparison, look what happens when you load a sentence down with unnecessary adverbs and adjectives.

Celia squeezes the steering wheel tightly and squints worriedly into the gloomy darkness. Her tires bounce wildly across the dusty, rutted, uneven dirt road and kick up coarse gray gravel that rains down thickly like dense, stony hail.

Notice how much more effective and evocative that sentence was before we ruined it with all that extraneous verbiage.

5. Her sentences are short and easy to follow. While they are never convoluted, repetitive or strangely constructed, they are varied enough to be interesting.

6. Although she does write in the present tense, which can often be weird and distracting, in this story it works because of three factors:

(a) Lori Roy is a very skilled author, and she knows how to pull it off.

(b) Her unadorned, minimalist style makes her use of the present tense hardly noticeable.

(c) The story is told from multiple perspectives, rotating from one point of view to another within each chapter. This gives the story an urgency and immediacy that helps to sustain interest and suspense. In this context, keeping it in the present makes sense.

It's always a pleasure to read a strong, well-written book. The awards and glowing reviews have already been pouring in for Bent Road, so I won't sputter about how great it is. I'll just say thank you, Ms. Roy, for showing us how it's done.

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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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