writing lore

Character-driven fiction, plot-driven fiction

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Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

Last year I wrote about dysfunctional narratives, a type of story that Charles Baxter first identified in the 1990s and which now seems overly prevalent today. He quoted a description of them by poet Marilynne Robinson, who also identified this type of narrative. She called it a “mean little myth”:

One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.

In my post, I wrote about a “Cambrian explosion” of dysfunctional narratives in our culture since the 1990s, this sense that we’re being overwhelmed by them. They’re in our magazines and books, in our cinema, in our newspapers, and on social media. “Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” Baxter wrote, and his observation seems as acute today as it did back then.

Last year I offered a few explanations for what energized this explosion. Recently I thought of another reason to add to the list. It’s a concept repeated endlessly in creative writing classes and how-to guides on writing fiction, namely, character-driven fiction versus plot-driven fiction. Respectable authors are supposed to write character-driven fiction and to eschew plot-driven fiction, which is largely associated with genre fiction.

When I first heard this edict of character versus plot, I accepted it as sage wisdom, and sought to follow it closely. Over the years, I kept hearing it from instructors and successful writers, especially writers of so-called literary fiction. I heard it so much, I began to question it. What exactly is character? What is plot?

I began to pose these questions to my peers. Their response usually sounded like this:

“‘Character’ is all the things that make a character unique. ‘Plot’ is the stuff that happens in a story.” A character-driven story is supposedly rich with humanizing details, while a plot-driven piece is a fluffy story where “a lot of stuff happens.”

Aristotle is not the final word on literary analysis, but his opinions on how a story succeeds or fails is far more nuanced than what many of my peers and instructors in creative writing programs could offer.

Aristotle defines character as a set of human traits imitated in the text. Traits could be run-of-the-mill personality markers, such as a character who is studious or arrogant, or complex and contradictory, like Hamlet’s brooding and questioning nature. Before modern times, playwrights often used traits associated with the four humors to define characters in a play.

The four humors

For Aristotle, plot is the series of decisions a character makes that propels the story forward. These decisions generally take two forms: The character speaks, or the character acts. In line with the saying “actions speak louder than words,” Aristotle holds that a character’s actions are more significant, and more revealing, than the words they mouth.

When one of the salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross announces he’s going close a big sale that night, and then crosses the street to have a cocktail, his actions reveal the hollowness of his words. Both decisions (speaking and acting) are also plot. Plot proves what character traits merely suggest.1

In other words, plot is not “stuff that happens.” (Note the passive voice, as though plot elements are forced upon the characters.) Rather, plot is a sequence of decisions made—and readers are very interested in a character’s decisions.

To be fair, inaction by a character is a kind of decision. Certainly there’s room for stories about characters who ponder a great deal and do little about it. In successful fiction, though, the final effect of inaction is almost always ironic. (Two good examples are Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs” and Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”) The problem is when inaction in literary fiction is treated as sublime.

The inaccurate, watered-down definition of plot-driven fiction—”A story where a lot of stuff happens”—has led to contemporary American literature’s fascination with flabby, low-energy narratives. I’ve met authors proud that the characters in their stories don’t do anything—never get off the couch, never pick up the phone, never make a decision of any consequence. Literary fiction has come to regard passivity as a virtue and action as a vice. A writer crafting a character who takes matters into their own hands risks having their work classified as genre fiction.

For decades now, creative writing programs have been pushing an aesthetic emphasizing character traits over character decisions. It’s frustrating to watch, year after year, the primacy of character-driven fiction getting pushed on young writers, with too many of them accepting the mantra without further consideration.

And this is why I think the Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives is tied to this obsession with character-driven fiction. Passivity and inactivity are keystones of Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives. In his essay, he notes the trend toward “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”) over “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”).

This is why I’m wary of character-driven writers who do not permit their protagonists to make mistakes, instead strategically devising stories where they make no mistakes, and are therefore blameless. No wonder plot—that is, decision-making—is being eschewed, when this is the kind of story being upheld and praised.

  1. Aristotle’s Poetics are obviously far more complicated than my three-paragraph summary, but the gist described here holds. ↩︎

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Ten years of blogging: Flaubertian three-dimensionalism

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Flannery O’Connor

Previously: Writer’s block

The year that was 2020 will most likely go down as one of the most significant years of my life: The COVID-19 pandemic, lock-downs and masking, the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots, all leading up to the most contentious presidential election in memory that some still deny was properly tabulated.

In contrast, 2019 had been for me a rather productive year creatively, and I wound up publishing two novels in 2020 back-to-back: Stranger Son in April, followed by In My Memory Locked in June.

That aside, as 2020 trudged onward and the pandemic fevered on, it grew apparent normalcy would not make an appearance any time soon. I began to suffer a low-grade depression, a toothy rat gnawing at the ankles of my mental health. I needed to do something creative to keep a hold on my fragile state.

I made a personal goal of putting out a compact book—my previous two were unusually lengthy for me, with In My Memory Locked clocking in at 120,000 words. I had been binging on streamed movies (and who didn’t that year?) Viewing the masterful The Day of the Jackal motivated me to pick up Frederick Forsythe’s original novel, which I learned was inspired by his tenure as a journalist in Paris reporting on the assassination attempts made on Charles De Gaulle’s life.

I committed myself to write a taut thriller about the pandemic and lock-downs, short and sweet, with as little fat as possible, and saturated with paranoia and claustrophobia. The result was Man in the Middle, published in November 2020 and my most overlooked book. I’m proud of it, though, especially considering the conditions I was working under. I also believe it to be the first novel published expressly about the COVID-19 pandemic—but I cannot prove that.

As for blogging in 2020, I put out a number of short series which garnered some interest. At the start of the year, I did a mini-series on Dungeons & Dragons, including my take on Gary Gygax’s Appendix N, which was his book recommendations he included in the first AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. Another series took at look at Hollywood novels, which gave me a chance to write on a few books I’ve been meaning to cover for some time, including The Day of the Locust and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert

But the post I’m most proud of from 2020 regarded a bit of writing advice I’ve heard on and off for years now in writing groups and at writing conferences: “Use three senses to make a scene come alive.” Invariably, this advice is attributed to Gustave Flaubert.

As far as writing lore goes, this one is rather economical in expression. It’s also not altogether obvious why it’s true. Why three sense, and not four or five, or even two? The resulting blog post was satisfying to write because investigating the origins of this saying led naturally to explaining why it appears to be true.

There appears to be no evidence Flaubert ever made this statement, at least, not in such a direct manner. Rather, the textual evidence is that it originated from Flannery O’Connor, who in turn was summarizing a observation made by her mentor, Caroline Gordon.

Now, I’ve read many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories—anyone who’s taken a few creative writing classes will eventually read “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” her most anthologized work. I had never read anything by Caroline Gordon, however, so it was fascinating to delve briefly into her work.

It’s a shame Gordon is not more well-read today. It’s probably due to her work not taking the tangents and experiments that other American modernists risked (such as Faulkner and Jean Toomer). She remained a formalist to the end. Her How to Read a Novel is an enlightening book, and while a tad dated, would make fine reading for anyone serious about writing a full-bodied, red-blooded novel.

Mostly, my pride for “Use three senses to make a scene come alive” is that it’s a solid essay: It starts out with an interesting question that leads to more questions, takes a couple of detours and unexpected side-roads on its journey, and ends on a note of successful discovery. It’s about all I can aspire to when I sit down to write.

“Use three senses to make a scene come alive”


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Ten years of blogging: Writer’s block

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John Turturro in Barton Fink

Previously: An all-too-familiar utopia
Next: Flaubertian three-dimensionalism

From a novel-writing perspective, 2018 and 2019 was a creative interregnum. After publishing Hagar’s Mother in late 2017, I found myself juggling energy between two books. One was the third installment of the Bridge Daughter series, the other a futuristic detective novel where society has essentially become a giant social media simulation. While working on the former, 2018 fizzled away with a fearful lack of progress. As 2019 marched on, a slow panic developed inside me. Would I burn off a second year with nothing to show for it?

I learned a hard lesson: Writer’s block is real. Before this, I’d read articles by well-known writers who either denied it existed, or called it a semi-phony condition covering for laziness. The cure for supposed writer’s block, they explained, was to turn off your Internet, silence your phone, and write.

The early chapters of the Bridge Daughter sequel emerged in fits and spurts. Like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift, I couldn’t find second gear and launch the story forward. Eventually I admitted that I’d hit something like writer’s block. I recalled what the Coen Brothers did when they were blocked developing Miller’s Crossing: They wrote a movie about writer’s block, Barton Fink.

While I didn’t go that meta, I used the problem to pivot to my science-fiction detective novel. Encouragingly, I was far more productive. It was also a much longer story. As a tightly-wound mystery, it was vital the chronologies of the different characters matched up, as story events were occurring in the background that the detective only learned about later. This required a fair amount of revision to clean up and synchronize.

The pivot did unblock me, and in a big way. During a stay in Tokyo at the end of 2019, I finished the remainder of the third Bridge Daughter book over a six-week sprint. Unlike the grind of the detective novel, Stranger Son spilled forth all at once. It and In My Memory Locked were published in 2020.

Photo of cappuccino with leaves drawn in the foam
Cappucino by Scott Rocher (CC-BY-NC 2.0)

The other writing outlet I used over 2019 to break my writer’s block was this blog. It’s no surprise my focus that year would be on the writing process itself. I blogged about keeping a writing notebook on your phone, story revision, story structure, and even on (bad) cover letters. Basically, any problem I faced while writing, I at least attempted to compose a post about it. (Most were never published, trapped forever in my blog software’s Drafts folder.)

So desperate to write anything to keep the blood flowing, I even wrote about writing in cafes. It couldn’t have been more flagrant: Sitting in a cafe, desperate to jump-start the creative engine, I started writing about what I saw around me. What began as a lark grew into a lengthy diatribe on the different cafes I’d written in over two-and-a-half decades, and the varieties of cafe patrons and owners I’ve had to put up with.

The cafe I wrote that post in was near-perfect for my writing habit. Plenty of seating, open late, electrical outlets, free Wi-Fi, good drinks, good food, reasonable prices, a cozy college student vibe—and a mere one block from my apartment. That’s why at the end of the post I didn’t reveal its name. I feared it would be discovered and ruined.

Well, not long after posting, the cafe changed owners. One by one, the wonderful perks disappeared, prices crept upwards, and hours were reduced. By the end of 2019, I was on the hunt for a new cafe.

A few months later, my preference for writing in public spaces would become a very distant problem.

A quarter-century writing in cafes


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“Use three senses to make a scene come alive”

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Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert

One bit of writing lore I’ve heard many times, and always attributed to Gustave Flaubert:

“Use three senses to make a scene come alive.”

I’ve written before on my skepticism of writing lore. Lore too often follows a pattern: Some nugget of keen insight for writers to follow closely, usually attributed to a big-name writer to burnish the saying with a little authority, but with little supporting evidence provided. Certainly this pattern is being followed with the “three senses” quote.

In this case, though, my skepticism is firmly tucked away. This is one bit of writing advice that’s well worth following (and not because Flaubert supposedly said it).

“She had learned from Flaubert”

Let’s start with that “supposedly” qualifier. I’ve been unable to locate a direct quote of Flaubert making the three-senses pronouncement in any variation. All roads in my search lead to an essay by Flannery O’Connor titled “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”:

A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.

Already the lore around the three-senses maxim is being chipped away. It’s not make a scene come alive, it’s make an object real. The three senses are described here as “three activated sensuous strokes,” an odd phrasing. It could be construed as indicating the object’s three sensory details do not have to originate from different senses. (For example, an old beat-up table might be described with three different sights: the paint color, the length of its legs, and the shape of its surface.) And notice how the unnamed writer “believes” the three sensuous strokes are connected to the five senses—in other words, she is reading into Flaubert’s maxim rather than paraphrasing it.

If he uttered the maxim, of course. A Google search for Flaubert and the original “three sensuous strokes” phrase always leads back to this passage by O’Connor. As mentioned, searching for Flaubert and other variations of the quote, including the most famous version above, don’t pan out either.

What’s more, O’Connor’s unnamed writer friend “learned from Flaubert” this bit of wisdom. There’s some ambiguity here. It could be read as saying the writer had discovered this technique by studying Flaubert’s work, rather than receiving it directly from him via an interview or essay.

And that’s probably what happened here. The unnamed writer is most likely Caroline Gordon, a Southern novelist and critic who tutored Flannery O’Connor. Gordon’s How to Read a Novel returns repeatedly to Flaubert and his techniques for making a novel come alive, which she calls “Flaubertian three-dimensionalism”:

Flaubert never told you what a flower, for instance, was like. Instead, he tried to give you the illusion, by the use of sensory details, that you could not only look at the flower he was presenting for your admiration but could smell it and feel the texture of its petals.

Caroline Gordon

She continues with effusive admiration for Flaubert’s techniques, particularly his use of narrative distancing: One passage away from his characters to observe their situation, then moving in close for intimate details, and then moving into their interior to plumb feelings and thoughts. Gordon plainly admired Flaubert’s writing. It makes sense she would have passed on the “three sensuous strokes” observation to O’Connor.

In other words, the advice “Use three senses to make a scene come alive” may not have sprung from Flaubert or O’Connor, but Caroline Gordon. What’s more, she was discussing objects and not scenes, although I think the generalization is forgivable.

As much as I believe in the three-senses maxim, this is why writing lore—and lore in general—deserves questioning.

Why it works

Provenance aside, I’ve taken the accepted maxim to heart in my own writing. Unlike other writing lore I’ve come to question, the three-senses maxim has served me well, both in making scenes come alive, and in making objects seem real.

I first heard it over twenty years ago—attributed to Flaubert, naturally—during a writers conference at Foothill College. Those years have given me time to take advantage of this advice and ponder why it works so well. Why three? Why not two, or four, or all five senses?

If a story limits itself to two senses, it will likely focus on sight (the most dominant of the human senses) and sound (because sound—dialogue—is our primary means of communication).

A novel of nothing but sight and sound may be compelling in subject matter, but readers will feel locked out of the book’s world. (“You almost aren’t present.”) Scenes will play out as heads talking to each other. Objects will be nothing but photographs displayed from afar for the reader to observe. A very short story may be able to sustain this, but it takes a special kind of novel to keep this up.

By employing three senses, the dream-vision of the story becomes less boxed-in and more nonlinear (“Flaubertian three-dimensionalism”). The other senses—taste, smell, and touch—have less communicative power, but are evocative to the reader. They’re not as cerebral and more bodily.

Naming a paper bag of popcorn identifies the object. Allowing the reader to smell the yeasty aroma, or taste the melted butter, or feel the heat of the kernels through the paper like small coals: These details inflate a flat object into a tangible thing. Imagine the possibilities of foiling expectations with sensory details: The popcorn smells of cigarettes, for example, or tastes soapy for some reason.

Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O’Connor

This is why I think the three-senses rule works: It almost always forces the writer to break away from sight and sound, which dominate the story’s telling, and activate the other senses. The story evokes an experience rather than catalogs a series of events.

While I don’t think four or five senses in a scene is necessarily too much, doing so consistently will over-inflate the story with picayune details. I’ve tried it on occasion, only to cut much of it later as excess fat weighing down the scene. Three senses seems to be the sweet spot.

Flannery O’Connor saw all these problems when she wrote “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”. After mentioning Gordon’s lesson on Flaubert, she cautions,

Now of course this is something that some people learn only to abuse. This is one reason that strict naturalism is a dead end in fiction. In a strictly naturalistic work the detail is there because it is natural to life, not because it is natural to the work. In a work of art we can be extremely literal, without being in the least naturalistic. Art is selective, and its truthfulness is the truthfulness of the essential that creates movement. [Emphasis mine]

Keeping the number to three helps limit the writer to selecting only the most essential details, rather than flooding the reader with a surplus to create a sensory shotgun effect. It’s “the essential that creates movement.”

And, yes, there are exceptions to all of the above I’ve discussed. Fiction writers who seek hard rules to follow militarily will soon discover surprises and disappointments. Familiarity with proven techniques, and knowing when to deviate from them, is what separates art from assembly-line manufacturing.

O’Connor’s caution also reminds that the purpose of sensory detail is to invite the reader into the story rather than have them observe it. Sensory details are not the story itself. They are subordinate to the characters, their motivations, and their decisions. Use three senses to make the characters’ world come alive, but only alive enough.


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Kurt Vonnegut on story shapes, writing with style, and running experiments

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Recently I picked up Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, part of the Literary Conversations Series from University Press of Mississippi. The collection offers interviews and profiles of Vonnegut published between 1969 and 1999. The first comes shortly after the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five. The subsequent rocket ride of literary stardom Vonnegut enjoyed—or endured—follows.

The collection seems rather complete, culling all manner of sources, right down to a softball Q&A with Harry Reasoner for 60 Minutes. The collection is breezy if thought-provoking reading, much like many of Vonnegut’s books, but it still held a few surprises for me. (Apparently after the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut contemplated throwing out Breakfast of Champions when he realized he could now sell any book he wrote no matter its quality.)

The more I learn about Vonnegut, the more I’ve come to see how pragmatic he was when it came to the craft of writing. Vonnegut often lists Robert Louis Stevenson as one of his favorite authors because, as a boy, he was “excited by stories which were well-made. Real ‘story’ stories…with a beginning, middle, and end.” His essay “How to Write With Style” is advice of the roll-up-your-sleeves variety, featuring watery chestnuts like “Find a subject you care about” and “Keep it simple.” More interestingly, while teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he led a course to help students make a career out of writing after graduating—teaching, technical writing, ad copy, anything to put bread on the table. Apparently the course was not well-regarded by the other faculty.

One popular meme is Vonnegut’s lecture on the shape of stories. The audience chortles as he chalks out curves and lines graphing a set of basic story structures. (Maya Eliam’s infographics of these shapes are lucid and wonderful.) Most likely many in the auditorium thought he was satirizing when he said story forms could be graphed mathematically or analyzed by a computer, but his lecture is in earnest. This was his master’s thesis in anthropology, after all.

In a 1977 interview with Paris Review—the most in-depth interview in the collection—Vonnegut drops a mention of his story shapes:

Vonnegut: Somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way…

Interviewer: If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.

Vonnegut: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. … When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.

The last sentence may be the most plainly spoken argument against the avant-garde I’ve read.

Vonnegut even compared writing novels to experiments, which I’ve explored myself. He felt experimentation was in his nature due to his education as a chemist and an engineer. (I believe this is the first time I’ve read another fiction writer describe creating fiction as a kind of experiment.) Here he talks with Laurie Clancy about Breakfast of Champions (still unpublished at this point):

Interviewer: Could you indicate what direction your new work is taking?

Vonnegut: It’s in the nature of an experiment. I don’t know how it’s going to come out or what the meaning’s going to be—but I’ve set up a situation where there’s only one person in the whole universe who has free will, who has to decide what to do next and why, has to wonder what’s really going on and what he’s supposed to do. … What the implications of this are I don’t know but I’m running off the experiment now. I’ll somehow have a conclusion when I’ve worked long enough on the book. … Regarding [God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater], I said to myself “Well, all right, what happens when you give poor people money?” So I ran the experiment off and tried to control it as responsibly as I could.

The Clancy interview is one of the best in the book. Vonnegut is engaged, thoughtful, and revelatory.


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Ray Bradbury on getting stories published

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I’ve been dipping into Wayne L. Johnson’s 1980 book Ray Bradbury the past couple of months. It’s part of the Recognitions series published by Frederick Ungar, a series featuring critical work on genre writers who’ve transcended their genre.

Johnson’s Ray Bradbury is a biography of the author tracked through his output rather than a stiff-backed recounting of dates and locations of events in his life. Bradbury’s short stories are grouped by subject matter and style as a strategy for analyzing the author’s approach to fiction. Johnson’s book paints a picture of a man who delved deep in the human imagination and returned with some fantastic stories for the ages.

Ray Bradbury was one of the most prolific short story authors of the 20th century because he never abandoned the form, unlike other authors who move on from them to novel writing. Bradbury capitalized on his bounty by disguising his short story collections as longer work (The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man). Even Fahrenheit 451 is itself a maturation of a shorter work first published in Galaxy Magazine.

What caught my eye (and sparked the idea for this blog post) was a brief aside in Johnson’s introduction about how Bradbury was able to sell his prodigious output of short stories across the spectrum of American publishing:

Convinced that most editors were bored with seeing the same sort of material arriving day after day, Bradbury resolved to submit stories which, at least on the face of it, seemed inappropriate to the publication involved. Rather than send “Dandelion Wine” (later a chapter in the novel) to Collier’s or Mademoiselle, therefore, Bradbury sent it to Gourmet, which didn’t publish fiction. It was immediately accepted. “The Kilimanjaro Device” was snapped up by Life, which also didn’t publish fiction, after the story had been rejected by most of the big fiction magazines. … Bradbury insists that he places complete faith in his loves and intuitions to see him through.

Bradbury was certainly a known quantity when these short stories were published but, as Johnson indicates, he still faced his share of rejection slips. I don’t think Bradbury’s wanton submissions were ignorant of market conditions; it sounds to me he was quite savvy with this strategy. (Sending “Dandelion Wine” to Gourmet magazine is kind of genius, actually.) But Bradbury’s strategy transcends the usual mantra to “study the market.”

Galaxy Magazine (February 1951). Bradbury’s novella “The Fireman” was the nucleus for Fahrenheit 451.

I’ve been a front-line slush pile reader at a few literary magazines, and I can tell you Bradbury’s intuition is spot-on. When you’re cycling through a stack of manuscripts, they begin to look and read the same. Too many of those short stories were treading familiar paths. Too often they introduced characters awfully similar to the last story from the pile.

A story with some fresh air in it certainly would wake me from my slush-pile stupor. The magazine market has changed dramatically in the past ten years—and absolutely has reinvented itself since Bradbury was publishing “Dandelion Wine”—but I imagine similar dynamics are still in place in the 21st century. Surprise an editor with your story and you just might have a shot at publication.

And if you’re banging out short stories and fruitlessly submitting them one after another to the usual suspects, try taking a risk and following Bradbury’s lead. Trust me, if you can put on your next cover letter that your short fiction was published by Car & Driver or National Geographic, that will surprise editors too.


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The absence of technology in literary fiction

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Smartphones by Esther Vargas. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Smartphones by Esther Vargas. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

One of my complaints about literary magazines—both the small lit mags of university English departments and the literary lions like New Yorker, Tin House, and so forth—is the peculiar absence of up-to-date technology in their fiction. Characters don’t send much email. People rarely text each other. Voicemail is about the most modern of the Information Age conveniences in contemporary literature, and even then, it’s usually summarized by the narrator rather than “heard” by the reader. Why?

It’s no longer cyberpunk for your characters to have instant access to cyberspace in their coat pocket. It’s not science fiction for your character to read the morning news on a handheld view screen. Literary fiction often preens itself as being “realistic” compared to genre fiction, but how realistic is it today for a mother of two in Long Island not to have a 4G touch tablet in her purse or a FitBit on her wrist reminding her she’s not burned enough calories today?

Unless it’s set in the past or some truly remote locale, you forfeit your right to call your story a work of realism if your characters don’t have access to the Internet and they’re not using it fairly regularly. Digital access is simply that pervasive, worldwide. Yes, there are exceptions. I’m certain some writers think their characters or their settings are those exceptions. Probably not, though.

One reason for technology’s absence in literary fiction, I suspect, is that modern tech screws with storytelling. As greater minds than me have pointed out, we live in a age bereft of bar bets. The Guinness Book of World Records was originally conceived to settle pub arguments, but it was Wikipedia that ultimately fulfilled that burning need. Any question we have about the world or history, the answer can be located in an instant.

It carries into personal relationships as well. People no longer craft letters and post them in a box, then anxiously await a reply over the next days or weeks. When I was young, a friend might say he would call at eight—and so I would have to wait by the phone in the kitchen at eight o’clock, telling everyone else in the house not to make a call because I was waiting for one. My parents would wake my brother and I up in the middle of the night to say hello to our Midwestern relatives because the long-distance rates dropped after 11pm. (Remember paying a premium for long distance calls?) For years, many of my extended family members were nothing more than a tinny voice at the other end of a phone line and a yellowing Kodachrome print in my mother’s photo albums.

For all the nostalgia value of these tales, I’m happy to no longer be bound by such ancient analog technology. The key word of modern communications is instant. Unfortunately, such friction-free gratification often runs counter to a lot of storytelling precepts, things like tension (which involves time) and desire (which involves immediacy).

But mostly I suspect the writers of contemporary literature simply don’t like modern tech. Receiving a pop-up on your phone for an email explaining a long-forgotten lover’s death lacks a certain airy elegance that a hand-penned note on hospital letterhead offers. The terseness of SMS and instant messaging grates against the literary author’s desires for eloquence and nuance.

More broadly, there’s a general disdain for popular American culture in our contemporary literature. SUVs and dining at Olive Garden are often literary code words for boorish, crass people. Sympathetic characters tend to read the New York Times on Sunday mornings, walk to work, raise a vegetable garden, and run into friends at farmers’ markets.

This is one reason why I don’t buy the assertion that contemporary American literature is realistic. Too often it presents a world the writer (and their readers) would like to live in. That’s not hard realism. And this restrictive view of proper living feeds back on itself: literary magazines print these stories, developing writers read these stories and think they represent “correct” fiction, and so they write and submit likewise.

Give your characters the technology they deserve. If you’re writing about the past, that’s one thing, but if your story is set in modern times, don’t shortchange your characters’ resources.

Instead of viewing commonplace technology as a liability to storytelling, consider how vital the technology has become for us. Watch this magic trick, from Penn & Teller’s Fool Us:

The audience feels the risks the emcee is taking when instructed to place his own phone in an envelope. The surprise when the mallet is brought out, the tension it raises. Look at the audience’s visceral reaction when the mobile phones are hammered up. Even though Penn & Teller see through the act, there’s a kind of narrative structure to the magician’s “story.” At each step of the act, the stakes are raised.

Do this: The next time you’re out with a group (people you know and people you’ve just been introduced to), pull up a photo or a message on your smart phone, and then hand your phone to someone else. (Or, if someone offers you their phone, take it, twiddle with it, and hand it to another person.) Rare is the person comfortable with this. We don’t like these little things leaving our grasp.

That means, as writers, these devices are a goldmine.

We are wed to our new conveniences in ways we never were with “old” modern technology like microwaves, refrigerators, or even automobiles. Americans may love their cars, but they are married to their smart phones. Our mobile devices are lock-boxes of email and text messages, safe deposit boxes of our secrets and our genuine desires (versus the ones we signal to our friends and followers). Gossipy emails, intimate address books, bank accounts, baby pictures, lovers and lusts—our lives are secreted inside modern technology. This is rich soil for a writer to churn up, this confluence of personal power and emotional vulnerability.

Why dismiss or ignore this? Why not take advantage of it in your next story?

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