I was listening to a radio programme about glue last night. I got stuck halfway through. Only joking. Actually the glue programme was real. At first I was fascinated by their sheer nerve: putting on such a dull-sounding discussion. Of course, it was anything but dull.
Apparently glue isn’t particularly sticky. Everything is sticky. Glue just has its molecules assembled in such a way that their stickiness can be felt. It got me thinking (oh, I have such a one-track mind) about stories, as usual. I was simultaneously reading a Stephen King, you see, and I noticed that King’s words were having a similar glue-like effect on my brain. Why were they sticking? What makes stories stick?
My Rule 3 of writing is more of a reminder: Fiction is memory. What I mean, I think, is that fiction isn’t an imitation of reality. It’s an imitation of memory. Fiction isn’t anything like reality, which is full of extra gumph that is irrelevant or tedious. But fiction is like our memory of reality. We construct our memories like stories – and, by the same token, the stories we read stay in our heads like fabricated memories.
I believe this is because both memory and fiction are constructed not of events, but of meanings. We remember what has meaning for us. Suppose you live near a wood. You won’t remember any random tree. But you might remember the biggest, oldest oak. If this oak has someone’s name carved in it, you’ll remember it more. If it was you who did the carving, the significance is greater still. And even greater if you carved it with your childhood sweetheart. So we have a scale of significance, from weak to very strong: tree>oak>oldest oak>my oak>OUR OAK. Towards the top end of the scale, you could imagine it playing a part in a real story. E.g. “Let’s meet up at Mike’s Oak.”
If you read Stephen King’s best work (I’m now reading “Lisey’s Story”), you find the text absolutely alive with details like this. Nothing is flat; everything juts out from the page gluey with meaning. These are the details you are likely to remember; they stick to your mind, like those sticking-out molecules in the glue. Apparently, one of the stickiest things in nature (apart from a stick) is the foot of the gecko. It sticks to anything, even glass, because it has thousands of tiny hairs that use the adhesive force between molecules. Mind-blowing or what.
The best writing acts like the gecko’s foot. (Yes, I know I come up with some weird comparisons). Only the thousands of tiny hairs are the little details, the observations of character and everyday life, that stand out from the page and turn a smooth, flat text into something that grips you like superglue. Maybe that’s what they mean by a gripping story.
