Listen Like a Poet: Let Language Oxygenate Your Fiction (Preview)
by Melissa Goodrich
So you want to write a story. You pack it tight, stuffing the scarecrow with straw. You’ve got plot, characters, a setting, dialogue, and emotional stakes. All those ‘elements of fiction’—that’s good. Essential, even! But is that all it takes? Is it A Story?
A story becomes A Story for me when it starts breathing and moving independently — when Frankenstein comes to life and is able to move around on their own. Plot, setting, character, and all the rest are me gravedigging legs and arms and a torso. Me leaving the figurative graveyard with all these parts piled up in my arms is useful! Helpful! Essential, even! But it isn’t a body. It isn’t oxygen.
I think the elements of fiction can be boiled down to something like that —essential organs, muscles, limbs. The body of a story is its language. And the oxygen—that thing we need or else we die—is listening.
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The poet Mary Ruefle describes writing this way: “To send out a word in the darkness and listen for what sound comes back.”
I say something similar to my fiction students. I say, “Let’s listen to what the story tells us it wants to be.”
What I mean when I say this is that we are not the ultimate masters of the fiction we produce. No more than parents are masters of their children, no more than we can control wildfire once it gets loose. Stories are of us, sure, but they have their own kind of free will; they have opinions and predispositions and personalities. My stories are definitely my stories — they’ve got Goodrich DNA. But the more I try to demand a story be a certain way or do a certain thing, the more artificial it feels. It feels like a kind of suffocation, sometimes, telling a story what to do. So I don’t do that anymore. I give a story space. I remove restraints and preconceived notions and kind of let it root around in the dirt. To bend a line by Mary Oliver, I’ve learned to “let the wild animal of your [story] love what it loves.”
Writing stories for me always starts as a kind of listening—coming to the page is cupping my ears and closing my eyes, listening for a voice or an image to let me into a narrative, before there is even a character or narrative beats.
Writing and listening—language and silence—this is how I keep my stories alive. I’m trying to tell you: the sounds a sentence makes matter. The sounds a story is making tells us the thing it wants to be.
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In his essay On the Many Different Engines That Power a Short Story, Lincoln Michel likes to think of the writer as the ‘driver’ and the elements of fiction as different ‘engines’ that help power a story. Often, the go-to’s for fiction writers are the engines of character and plot. But Michel finds those engines, alone, to be somewhat limiting.
A plot engine is structured around “the big-muscle movements of desire, forces of antagonism, turning points, spine, progression, crisis, climax”—your standard Fretag pyramid. Character-driven fiction is the opposite: “the writer comes up with their characters and the situation first and then lets it play out on the page.”
But what I admire about Michel’s perspective is that he advocates for thinking beyond the plot-character binary. We don’t need to enter a story with preordained ideas—this is what will happen, this is who it will happen to. That will come more organically when embodied by language. He writes, “A language engine doesn’t mean that characters and plot doesn’t exist. It means they arise out of and are powered by the language.”
Melissa Goodrich is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of the fiction collections The Classroom and Daughters of Monsters. Find her at melissa-goodrich.com and tweeting at @good_rib. To view the entire lecture, click here.