Concretes

An Element of Fiction

When I consider “concretes” as an Element of Fiction I have in mind very real, yes, concrete things, like cars or rainbows or sneezes or train tickets or long hair of a particular cut or color or… well, you get the drift: I think of things that you can, as you read the story, easily and concretely picture in your mind — they’re concrete enough to cast a shadow (as Faulkner demands a well-drawn character must), or at least a virtual one.

Quite a few writers have pondered this particular element, among them Ayn Rand and I’ll let her open the discussion, “One rule that you need both as a human being and as a fiction writer is: Concretize your abstractions… Project in action (my italics) what any abstraction means.”

Flannery O’Connor, another pragmatic writer, agrees, “As a novelist, the major part of my task is to make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific, as possible.”

As for the more abstract, O’Connor still maintains, “When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality.” (my italics)

She goes on to explain this further, “The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action she describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. She has only a short space to do it in and she can’t do it by statement. She has to do it by showing (my italics), not by saying, and by showing the concrete — so that her problem is really how to make the concrete work double-time for her.”

John Gardner, another practical writer and teacher, elaborates, “The accuracy and freshness of the writer’s eye are of tremendous importance. But one can learn it if one hasn’t got it. Usually. One can recognize that the abstract is seldom as effective as the concrete. ‘She was distressed’ is not as good as, even, ‘She looked away.’”

Back to Ayn Rand, “To make it [an abstraction] real you must project what it means to observe [it]. Not only: How does it feel? but: How do you know it in other people? A writer has to project his abstractions in specific concretes. That he knows something inwardly is not enough: he has to make the reader know it; and the reader can grasp it only from the outside, by some physical, observable means.

“Concretize to yourself: If a man and a woman are in love, how do they act? what do they say? what do they seek? why do they seek it? That is the concrete reality, for which ‘love’ is merely a wide abstraction.”

John Garder muses further, “All our language, all our thought and opinion, all our deeply felt symbolism, Burke reminds us, comes from the world of things, the world of bumping atoms, thoughtless squirrels and trucks, so that before we can get to the great idea True, an emotionally charged symbolic construct for which innumerable women and men have died, we must first stare thoughtfully and long at a tree, Old English treow, which gave us the word true (treow), the ‘deeply rooted’ idea.”

So how do you arrive at the concrete? Any Rand suggests, “One way to have words come to you easily — words which express the exact shade of meaning that you want — is to know clearly the concretes that belong under and support your abstractions.

“For instance, the word table is an abstraction; it stands for any table you have ever seen or will see. If you try to project what you mean by ‘table’ you can easily visualize any number of concrete examples. But in regard to abstractions like individualism, freedom, or rationality, most people are unable to name a single concrete. Even knowing one or two is not enough. In order to be completely free with words, you must know countless concretes expressing your abstractions.

“Young writers often make the following mistake: if they want a strong, independent, rational hero, they state in narrative that ‘he is strong, independent, and rational’ — or they have other characters pay him these compliments in discussion. ‘Strong,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘rational’ are abstractions. In order to fully relay those abstractions to your reader, you have to provide concretes that will make him conclude: ‘This man is strong, because he did X; independent, because he defied Y; rational, because he thought Z.’”

She further reveals, “Every chapter and paragraph of Atlas Shrugged is set up on the same principle: What abstraction do I want to convey — and what concretes will convey it?”

Back to O’Connor, “The world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with un-fleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that makes actual the mystery of our position on earth.”

Salman Rushdie has given this some thought, too — this in regards to his magic realism, “Because it is so precisely rooted in a recognizable real world, the fantasy works.”

As has George Orwell, “The truth is that the written word loses its power (my italics) if it departs too far, or rather if it stays away too long, from the ordinary world where two and two make four.”

And let’s give the last word to Virginia Woolf, who says it so beautifully, “There must be movement as well as some weight, something for the breeze to lift.”

© Wolfstuff

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