And then what?

I am deep into prepping courses and reading pieces I might want to teach, as well as reading manuscripts for a stint teaching at Breadloaf, and I’m noticing one specific aspect of writing that really sings and captivates—simply how one sentence leads, pours, or feeds into the next actively, in forward motion. In very good writing, this forward movement between sentences lifts above individual thinking and opinion and perspective and makes contact with the level of the universal. Great writing moves forward from one sentence to the next in a way that echoes our experience of the natural world—sun rise and set, gravity, the seasons, the tides, our circadian rhythms. The clock moves forward around a circle, the hands never skip across or move backward. Nor do our lives, nor does time as we agree upon it. The reader, who has experience of how the world turns, recognizes in the movement between sentences that are cognizant of forward motion that they are in a rushing river in a safe boat. Here’s an example from a book lying on my desk:

“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it. She dove beautifully, and a moment later she was swimming back to the side of the pool, her head of short-clipped auburn hair held up, straight ahead of her, as though it were a rose on a long stem. She glided to the edge and then was beside me.”

So much is happening here, I could write pages about it, but I’ll stick to this one quality of the writing constantly reflecting what we understand about how the world and our perception of it works. A young man notices a young woman, and vice versa, and contact is made when the woman asks the man a favor. Note: the exchange of a material item is powerfully symbolic of what passes between people—in this case, glasses, the ability to see. The young man agrees, and watches the woman walk along the diving board with what must be familiarity born of much experience. She has been on the diving board a lot. She is myopic, a characterization that will play out in the story. Yet she is confident in this place that we don’t yet know but can begin to guess about—a diving board, young people by a pool—and she doesn’t hesitate to climb up on the board, walk to the edge, and dive—beautifully. The young man is watching closely, and so are we, because the action is easy to follow, one thing follows the last, the movement is forward, there is nothing to interrupt the action except for the aside about the myopia, by which we learn not only that Brenda has a flaw, she really does need glasses, but also that the story is being told from a vantage point in time where that fact has become known to the speaker, and we therefore understand that we are in the hands of a narrator who is out ahead of the events he is telling us—and he’s telling us this because he already knows that these events are significant and worth our time. After the dive Brenda swims back to the side of the pool, her head held up above the water, her short auburn hair and her erect posture causing him to think of—a rose on a long stem. Okay, so the image that comes to his mind is one associated with romance, in case we didn’t already get where this is going. She swims—glides—back to him. With each step the sentences have ended with an invisible question—and then what?

And then what? And then what? And then what?

Another writer may have begun the same novel like this:

I was at my cousin’s country club in a Jewish suburb in New Jersey when I saw a girl I was attracted to immediately. I never saw girls like her where I lived in Newark with my aunt and uncle in a row house with a cement back yard. I didn’t see them in the big Newark Public Library where I worked, either. We exchanged glances and she walked over, took off her sunglasses, and handed them to me to hold while she went for a swim. I looked through the lenses—wow, a seriously intense prescription! How could she even see anything? But she climbed up the diving board and dived off it with no problem. She knew her way around this place, she must be a regular, I thought. I’d have to ask my cousin about her. She swam around with her head above water and finally returned to where I sat on the edge of the pool and asked for her glasses back.

Why is the first alive and the second isn’t? Here is where the old saw about show v. tell comes in. Even though both passages proceed by narration rather than dialogue, the first shows, and the second tells. The first is full steam ahead, showing what is happening directly. The incident is depicted, and the reader sees it. There are no explanations of where, why, when, to distract from the scene, so our own imaginations can take hold of the words and quickly transform them into a picture.

The second version invites the reader to sit back and receive knowledge about what is going on. It veers from the country club to Newark to the row house to the library, and Brenda is explained not by what she does but what the I voice thinks about what she does. The writing is at a remove from the dramatic action and doesn’t trust the reader to dive into the book as Brenda dives into the pool. The first example, the opening lines of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, trusts the reader, and holds off on parceling out all the other information I frontloaded into the second example until it is a relevant part of the forward movement of the story. How can a flashback or prior facts be part of the present information? They become part of the dramatic present when they affect what is going on in the now of the story—when the protagonist thinks about the past because of something happening in the present, or finally understands something that spurs a forward move in the present.

The thing is, the clarity of Roth’s opening is hard to do. Some people naturally get this, but most do not. (Not me.) One way to start making a shift to showing is to look carefully at the sentence you have just written and ask that sentence and then what, and then what, rather than either helping the reader along with explanations or proceeding by means of your own word association. Be in relationship to the sentence. Where does it lead? Look no further, nor backwards. As Doctorow said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I went back and looked up profluence in John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. Remember how that word jumped out at you when you first came across it? I sure do. That was one of the writing books I strained to understand when I was starting out. Yup, what I’m thinking about here is along the lines of profluence. Always loved that word. An ambition to rival affluence.