When I retired, I decided to try my hand at writing fiction. I remember thinking, “How hard can this be?” I’d already written a couple of successful mathematics textbooks and published dozens of research papers. Novels were like textbooks, and short stories were like research monographs, right?
You can stop laughing now. Of course, that’s not right.
When I tried writing fiction, stories danced in my head, all fire and ice. But when I put them on the page, they turned to ashes and fog. I tried to imitate authors I liked, but while their stories were full of life and depth while mine were dead and flat. I now know that I was striving for the wrong things—and sometimes looking at the wrong authors!
When I wrote mathematics, my approach was holistic. I knew the conclusion—the QED at the end of the theorem. I knew the clever argument to get to that QED. I knew the readers’ goal, too: to understand the argument and the conclusion. I knew the content. I knew what the readers wanted. I knew what I wanted. QED.
The problem was, I didn’t know any of these things when I started writing fiction. Even worse, what I thought I knew was wrong.
But fortune smiled on me. Out of nowhere, a guy named Timm sent me a critique to a story I’d posted on Writing.Com. He was pretty scathing, but he gave me a reason for everything he said. I could see his comments made sense, so I revised the story. It was still pretty bad, but the revision was clearly better. That led to more reviews from Timm, and I reviewed him, too. Before long, he invited me to join a private writing group on the site, and several experienced and talented authors started to explain craft to me. I learned about point of view. They explained the difference between showing and telling and why it mattered. I learned about tension and pacing.
In short, I learned the building blocks of creating an effective story. To my mathematical mind, these were like learning the axioms and basic theorems of mathematics, the essential precursors for the textbooks and research papers I’d written. In mathematics, the techniques might involve obscurities like Zorn’s Lemma or the Banach-Alaoglu theorm. In fiction, they involve things like third person limited, the three-act play, free indirect discourse, scene/sequel pairings, and many other techniques. Learning the techniques opened my eyes as both a reader and a writer.
It made all the difference.
I still tend to write holistically. I’ve learned a lot about craft. Some of it is now even second nature to me. I still tend to think of “craft” as the foundation of fiction, like the axioms of mathematics. But craft and axioms are not the same thing. Not exactly, anyway. Craft is the accumulation of techniques that other authors have used effectively over the years. Free indirect discourse dates all the way back to Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre. The three-act play is even older, with roots in Greek drama. Dwight Swain first formulated the scene/sequel concept in 1965. Craft is continuously evolving, just like research mathematics.
Further, the author’s artistic goals determine how and why craft works. The fictional dream, the prevailing theory in commercial fiction, demands one sort of craft. But expressionist fiction has different goals. Kafka’s absurdist goals in The Metamorphosis are different from the realism of Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea, and the authors’ choice of craft is correspondingly different. Waiting for Godot and A Streetcar Named Desire are two examples of wildly different artistic goals from theater.
I already knew that different axioms lead to different kinds of mathematics—consider the curved geometries of space-time compared with flat Euclidian geometry. So, too, do differing artistic goals lead to differing choices in craft. There’s no one-size-fits-all, not for math and not for fiction. Not for life, either, now that I think of it.
Originally, I’d intended to write about perfect verbs this month. But I had a recent happy encounter with a friend, a distinguished professor in the English department at my former university. My friend had known me only as a dean and a mathematician. When I revealed to him that I’d published several novels, he lifted an eyebrow and said I must have used completely different parts of my brain to write fiction. That got me to thinking about how my brain works, and here we are. I’m still using the same boring old brain as before, just in new ways. I hope this is at least interesting. In any case, I’ll do perfect verbs another month. See you then.
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