agent orange

OK, I'm pretty sure everybody already knows about it at this point, but I have been really enjoying Nathan Bransford's blog. He's an agent who uses his real name, which is refreshing, but he's also as sharp and un-pretentious a peddler of literary fiction as you are ever likely to find. I'll own it, I guess, I tend to have literary aspirations even when I write genre (which is often). I mean, I love a good pulpy plot just as much as anyone but when I write just want to go deeper, you know?

At the same time, I find myself bored to tears by 90% of literary fiction and/or the authors of said fiction. I'm glad to learn from Bransford's blog that I'm not the only one. I had always worried that it was some deficiency of character that kept me from enjoying those tales of repressed individuals undergoing mid-life crises, all rendered in ornate prose. Mix in tedious familial relationships and vaguely opressive religion and you've got yourself a literary blockbuster, but not one I can stay awake through.

Anyways, Bransford did a great job of articulating what's missing from these stories - a plot. As he points out, even Lit Fic needs a plot. It just needs a different kind of plot. He divides plots into internal and external categories. Genre fiction, romance and thrillers of every stripe rely primarily on external plots - the characters are responding to pressures or forces in the physical world. The novel ends when the lovers are reconciled or the bomb is defused (or both, ideally!).

But Lit Fic needs a different kind of plot, an internal one. Note that an internal plot still has a conflict, a rising action and some ultimate resolution, but these happen within the hearts and minds of the main character or characters. There may be external events as well, in fact there almost certainly will be, but these only indirectly impact the plot. Actually, all the external events are ideally orchestrated to reveal the internal state of the character(s). The so called "pathetic fallacy" is the most obvious method of doing this - if Jack is depressed, make it rain. Hey, it's crude but effective.

There are lots of more subtle ways of working these things, though. It's easy to see how this kind of approach could go off the rails - a disconnect on either the author's end or the reader's could leave the latter totally in the dark about what's going on or wondering why the book ended before the hero made it home, or whatever. And of course if the reader simply doesn't care enough about the character to make the effort, the author's valiant efforts to communicate their dire and complicated inner turmoil will be stymied from the get-go.

In spite of all the ways that the internal plot or so called "literary" approach can go wrong, it's amazingly satisfying when it works. For that reason alone I think that one should always strive to have an interesting internal plot, even when a strong external plot is already the focus of the story. I believe it enriches the experience for the reader, elevating your gee-whiz-cool twist into something more meaningful and memorable. And sometimes, if you've got the right character, in the right story, you might not need the bells and whistles of that external plot at all. You might be able to directly open a window to another life, whether it be beautiful or terrible or sad, or all of the above. And that, my friends, is Literary Fiction.