Novelists are storytellers, so it is said, but the sort of story a fiction writer tells is different from the sort of stories we tell one another.
The stories we tell one another – other than being frequently a bit dull ( I went to the shops today and a woman stood on my foot then refused to apologise, my dog has fleas and I can’t get rid of them) are usually fragmented and unstructured. Whatever comes to mind, so to speak.
Children are masters of the unstructured story. As Nigel Watts, who wrote an excellent book called How To Write a Novel And Get It Published’ remarks, ‘Young children have no sense of plot. Listen to their stories: “This happened and then this happened and then this…” Love them though we may, there is only so much prattle we can listen to before we tire…’
A fictional story is not spontaneous – unless you, perhaps, are Jack Kerouac, the abstract expressionist of novelists – but designed. It has a shape, and this shape is to some extent inescapable.
