Roy Peter Clark starts off this week’s advice for writers with a cautionary tale:
Years ago, I worked with a high school student who had written a story for the school paper about a wheelchair bowling league. A group of students met with the bowlers and had the chance to see what it was like to overcome a disability. The student wrote a short but inspiring story about the triumph of the human spirit.
Later, she revealed to a class that it had been a horrible experience for all the students at the bowling alley. Some of the wheelchair bowlers were cranky, dismissive, angry, horny, obnoxious. I asked why she hadn’t written that. “I wanted to write a good story,” she said, “about people overcoming obstacles.”
The idea that all people in wheelchairs who bowl are noble is what Don Murray would call a “cliché of vision,” a distorted picture of reality based on the requirements of a story form. Tool #38 in the book “Writing Tools” advises writers to “Prefer archetypes to stereotypes.” But even archetypes can be dangerous.
Clark has touched on one of my fears as a writer: that I will become trapped in that “cliché of vision.” He lists a few examples in another column:
In “Writing to Deadline,” Murray lists common blind spots: victims are always innocent, bureaucrats are lazy, politicians are corrupt, it’s lonely at the top, the suburbs are boring.
Two archetypes are so pervasive in our media culture that they have turned into cliches of vision; not coincidentally, they are mirror images: The Ugly Duckling, and The Emperor’s New Clothes. These stories are satisfying to our sense of justice, to our hopes and dreams, and to our sense of what makes a good story. The danger is that they can blind us to reality:
That’s the problem with ancient story forms. They have strict requirements that force us to select some details but reject others. Real life — unlike reality television — is not scripted and staged. In real life, the swan was pretty cute as a duckling, and the emperor may not be dressed in gold, but at least he’s wearing a golf shirt and Bermuda shorts.
“Use archetypes,” argues Tom French, “just don’t let them use you.”
Clark is talking about journalism, but I think these precepts should also be applied to fiction. Fiction is the lie that tells a truth, and you aren’t telling the truth when you leave out inconvenient details.
Check out the link to Tom French above. French’s column is directed to high school journalists, but there are lots of good tips there as well, about finding stories, selecting a point of view, and using detail and observation, that apply to all kinds of writing.
