Immediacy

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The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.



Immediacy

When your readers feel that they are really there, that the narrative is happening right in front of them, you’ve achieved immediacy. Immediacy comes from sharp description, crisp dialogue, and vivid action.

Whether you use first, second, or third person, you still want to create immediacy. Present tense intensifies the sense that the action is going on at that moment:

I jump up and grab the fat tree branch. The bark scales my hands and I lock my fingers together over the top. I hang straight down and start to swing my legs forward and back.

You swing until you feel the blood going out to your feet and filling your shoes. Your hands don’t feel real anymore, as though they’re hooks holding you to the tree.

Dexie keeps swinging, letting his body go numb and rigid, like he’s a pendulum, a piece of wood, if he just keeps his hands locked, he’d be part of the tree, never have to let go, never have to touch the ground again.

But past tense can be just as successful in creating immediacy:

I felt as long as I hung there I was just me, and not my family, not my little brother yelling, “Leave it along, leave it alone!” Not my sister with the scissors saying, “Shut up, they’re not supposed to have ears,” and the puppy yipping from under the house, too smart to come out.

You just stood there, too afraid of her, not only the scissors in her hand but her mouth that would call you a sissy and stupid and a baby, and you’d somehow know it was true even though you were older than she was.

Dexie hung until he thought his interlocked fingers had melted together; his scraped wrists felt like stretched rubber and his arms had become straight sticks. He felt as though he couldn’t let go if he wanted to; his head lolled forward like a man hanging from his own gallows. He looked down at his floating shoes, untied laces, and the dirt below, and swayed slowly.

Flashbacks need to have a similar immediacy:

I remember when my father had shown me insects caught in spiderwebs. In our red plaid jackets, we’d squat together in the tall wet grass, and he’d put one arm around my shoulder and point with the other into the depths of the bushes. He’d steady me, pull me close, and turn my shoulders so I could see what he saw. I’d nestle into the wet wool and my eyes would follow his stubby finger to the tiny, silvery webs.

You saw glinting minute flies enmeshed in thin filaments, some still vibrating their almost invisible wings, and you’d see the spiders, sometimes even smaller than their prey. They’d dash out from darkness, run along a thin strand, circle the buzzing insect, then climb round and round him, as if wrapping string on a ball.

Dexie remembered how his father wanted him to marvel at the spider, at his purposeful movements, and perhaps to have pity for the prey. He wanted Dexie to understand it’s all nature, it’s all natural. But what fascinated Dexie was neither spider nor fly – it was the web, the thing made, its silvery shape, sometimes like a funnel or a net but often more like a haze of light.

Immediacy is possible even when you deal with long stretches of time. In his trilogy U.S.A. John Dos Passos encapsulates a childhood, the years of high school, or a stint in the military in single paragraphs. But the rhythm of his sentences and his attention to specific images and single details give those sections as much immediacy as fully rendered scenes.

See Mis-en-scène, Scene.