Be Kind to Your Fictional Beings

So, I know I wrote empty promises last week about my triumphant return to reading fiction, but then I didn't read any fiction except for Kafka, which is glum and written in enormous oppressive paragraphs (he has the world's most annoying refusal, which is a double one: he refuses to make his characters speak distinctly, and then refuses to give each line of their dialogue a new paragraph). Now, please don't get me wrong, I love Kafka; but given that the flavor of fiction I was lamenting last week was Kingsley Amis, you can see how he wouldn't really address my needs. But the other thing I've been doing that may be some sort of fiction sop, is writing fiction. This is a little like knitting someone else a sweater because you're cold, but whatever. It is what I did.

And doing it, I have noticed one of the Worst Things in the World of Fiction, which is a particular problem of voice. I know it is the worst, because I do it all the time when I try to write fiction, and Young Fat Schratz did it ALL THE TIME even when he was writing nonfiction, and now there are certain sentences that I created that haunt me like Erinyes, reminding me not just that I used to be dumb but that I used to, in my dumbness, imagine myself clever. Anyway, the problem is something like "representing thoughts that no one would ever consciously form, as conscious thoughts". I went looking around for examples, and found a quite good one and a quite bad one, in the same chapter of Casino Royale by Ian Fleming.

As for robbing the caisse, in which Bond himself was not personally concerned, but only interested, he reflected that it would take ten good men, that they would certainly kill two or three employees, and that anyway you probably couldn't find ten non-squeal killers in France, or in any other country for the matter of that.

Great reflecting, Bond! Here we have Bond thinking about something he actually would think about (logistics) and that revealing facts about the mission (it's complicated and dangerous), cheery Francophobia (no non-squeal killers in France) and an even cheerier weltschmerz (it's a world problem, not just a France problem). You can imagine how, say, the penultimate attribute could've been gone into badly, if it hadn't had the concept of men who can reliably kill as a lead-in: "Bond checked into the caisse. France, he thought, how pathetically devoid of non-squeal killers!" Or something like that.

Or something like this, again from Casino Royale:

Some of this background...passed through Bond's mind. He was used to oblique control and rather liked it. He felt it feather-bedded him a little.

Gah! Who would think such a thing? Away from his therapist? This is the problem, of course, with free indirect discourse especially and with the head-on obligation to represent another human being that every fiction writer (most fiction writers) takes on: to say things that someone else would say, while knowing all that you, the writer, know about her. Ian Fleming is even more psychologically astute than James Bond, so he is in a position to talk about feather-bedding. I am fairly positive that I, as a thinking thing, have never had the sensation "I rather like this" pass through my mind about anything except food, and even then not often. It's an autodiagnosis that no one makes, but it's exactly the kind of diagnosis that smart writers find easiest to make on fictional beings, including their own. And it drives me nuts, both when I see it and when I do it. So please, fiction writers. Be kind to your fictional beings. Do not force them to say impossible things. They and I will appreciate it.