La Muselivre

Bored of most spare, “realistic” fiction – although until recently that’s precisely the sort of thing I’ve tried to write – I’m seeking out psychological novels, books that delve into a character’s thoughts and motivations and idiosyncratic take on the world. For years I’ve struggled to write in a clear, straightforward style unencumbered by adjectives, adverbs, and especially abstractions. I’ve avoided the passive construction, opting always for active verbs: he kicked, he punted, he slept, he killed her. Feelings, I’ve thought, and emotional states, should be rendered through action, through concrete detail. The protagonist may feel sad, but the writer does not say that. She notes that the protagonist’s stomach tightens, that he frowns, that his eyes turn far too often to a portrait of his dead mother. To use abstraction in a story, to directly explore a character’s feelings or psychology, is to violate an unspoken rule that contemporary fiction should be as much like a screenplay as possible. Storytelling increasingly is influenced by film. The physicality of characters, rather than their emotional states, is paramount. And to probe a character’s inner life in any but the most detached, ironic way, is to engage in a quaint, outmoded, Nineteenth Century custom. It’s the literary equivalent of using a shaving mug. Undoubtedly there are reasons to disfavor abstractions. When they appear, too often they clutter the prose, popping up so often, and without reference to physical detail, that they become contentless. What’s more, psychological fiction easily shades into melodrama.