Jeffrey R. Schrecongost

Greed. Guilt. God.

The big ones, yes? The ways in which the three interrelate are what I seek to explore in my fiction. People who need more than they need. The pain of remorse. The nature of a faith that comforts some and confuses and disappoints others.

To unite these themes, to create the vivid dream, I strive to employ the following: poetic prose to enhance atmosphere; tight, realistic, substantive dialogue to propel the plot and reveal characters and conflict; internal tensions and gradual, deliberate character revelation to maintain suspense and verisimilitude; and allusions to music, film, and other elements of popular culture to shape and/or reflect mood and setting.

It’s a good plan, for sure, but how does the writer keep all those syntactical fireworks from either 1) sputtering out or 2) burning down the house?

Careful (as in life or death careful) word choice.

Faulkner, in As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald, in “Winter Dreams,” do it this way:

Faulkner writes, “The lantern sits on a stump. Rusted, grease-fouled, its cracked chimney smeared on one side with a soaring smudge of soot, it sheds a feeble and sultry glare upon the trestles and the boards and the adjacent earth.” The lantern is first personified, making for a more-important-than-average lantern. Its role, its purpose, is to illuminate the creation of Addie’s coffin, so it deserves the attention it gets here. Next, we learn that the lantern is in bad shape – rusty, greasy, broken. But the lyrical fashion in which the author gives us this information is particularly effective. Faulkner’s use of alliteration – with ‘s’ sounds — reflects the lantern’s dirty, slippery surface. Smeared, side, soaring, smudge, soot, sheds, sultry. Additionally, these ‘s’ sounds mimic the flame’s hiss which, in turn, enhances the creepy mood. Faulkner then gives us more on the lantern’s condition. The light is feeble yet sultry. Sensual? Torrid? Passionate? Yes. It is a light languid and sexual in nature. Like the way a brothel room’s dim, solitary light dances with darkness to reveal a leg here, a breast there, closing eyes, slow-moving hands. This dense, poetic imagery works to liken Cash’s coffin construction to something resembling sexuality by calling attention to his mysterious physical movements and manipulation of the boards. Oh yes, it’s weird, gloriously weird, and it’s all accomplished in just two sentences.

Let’s see how Fitzgerald does it. He writes, “The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around them, he stopped his coupe in front of the great white bulk of the Mortimer Joneses’ house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the damp moonlight.” Wow. Again, we have personification in the neighborhood’s introduction. But first, there is this surreal shattering of the darkness, an image suggesting the power of wealth. Then the homes loom. They threaten Dexter as old money always has. The Joneses’ home is a white giant, dazzling even in its slumber. But the key word here, the astonishing image, is drenched. The moon heaves a silver wave over the home. It drips with the shimmering of everything Dexter thinks Judy is not. So, Fitzgerald has, with one sentence of dreamy, lush, poetic imagery, given us an atmosphere that is a story in itself – a story about both the possession and lack of wealth, power, and privilege. When the prose is this great, most individual passages in a text can, on their own, stand tall as thematic microcosms of the larger piece.

Lombardi, in Writing Fiction, states that, “With fiction, more than anything else perhaps, it’s the description that envelops you because really everything in a work of fiction, except for the dialogue, is a description of some sort. […] [With great description, the] reader will be swept along by the words, believing every moment of the story, as if it’s a dream or a movie, or as if it were actually happening.”

A dream. A movie. Actually happening.

Faulkner and Fitzgerald are masters of poetic description, and their prose works to mingle multiple forms of sensory data to create that dream-like, filmic, and/or realistic experience. But, as Ringo Starr reminds us, “It don’t come easy.” Hard choices must be made. My relationship with a story’s first, final, and next word is always rocky. It might, for days, weeks, months, remain on the page — my perfect, lovely word – until a more appealing word saunters by and my loyalty fades. Or maybe that perfect, lovely word draws too much attention to itself and so must go. Maybe all the surrounding words hate its guts (I’ve seen this happen – Flagstaff, AZ, 1994), and who wants to get in the middle of that? As a fiction writer I suffer many falls, but getting that one, best word down on paper, followed by the next best word, and the next best word, until all the words are my best words, well, that’s what gets me up in the air.

Jeffrey R. Schrecongost received his M.F.A. from Converse College and teaches English at Ivy Tech Community College and Spartanburg Community College. His fiction has appeared in Blood Lotus, BlazeVOX, and Gadfly. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his loyal Golden Retriever, Molly.