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Chapter 2 of the 7th edition of Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction is called “Seeing Is Believing.” From that, you can guess we’re now focusing on one of the most famous fiction writing principles: show, don’t tell. We’ll be looking at the technique as it is employed by Joyce Carol Oates in the most anthologized of her stories, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? on page 65 of the Burroway text, or online here. This is a nail-biter of a story. Connie is a beautiful, restless fifteen-year-old, tired of her small town home life, and beginning to get hot and bothered by sex and rock ‘n roll. Arnold Friend is a forty-year-old oddball who stalks about among the teens at a diner parking lot, where, one night, he wags a finger at Connie and says, “Gonna get you, baby.” A couple days later, when Connie’s family is away at a picnic, Friend drives right up to her door and begins seducing her, attempting to get her to open her screen door, get in his car, and leave her life as she knows it behind. The screen door is essentially the gateway, the threshold to the “territory” of the story: life (or maybe even death) in the arms of Arnold Friend. Connie chooses her doom.
Part of what makes the story work so well is the way it involves us in Connie’s fateful confusion. If Oates had written, “Connie felt disoriented,” we would not care all that much about it. We would not be very engaged in Connie’s experience. We want to witness the character in the act of being disoriented—seeing disorienting imagery (or other things the five senses could detect) around her, experiencing bodily sensations that remind us of our own prior experiences of disorientation (like dizziness), or physically expressing that disorientation (wobbling on her feet, looking around everywhere quickly to gain her bearings). Like a movie director, the fiction writer should keep us aware that we’re in a specific location with a specific atmosphere and should direct the reader’s attention to living experience we can witness and feel a part of. Here is a moment where Connie is so under the influence of the seduction of Arnold Friend that she suddenly feels as if her own home is an alien environment: She was panting. The kitchen looked like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run inside but that wasn't good enough, wasn't going to help her. The kitchen window had never had a curtain, after three years, and there were dishes in the sink for her to do—probably—and if you ran your hand across the table you'd probably feel something sticky there… She rushed forward and tried to lock the door. Her fingers were shaking… Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room. Burroway talks about the importance of details being specific and concrete, but also significant. A detail is significant when it conveys a value judgment. For example, when Connie is conscious for a fraction of a second that the kitchen window has never had a curtain and that there’s probably something sticky on the table, we are meant to understand that Connie is feeling disdainful toward her home—as if she can’t imagine herself fitting in a place like this any longer. (A less experienced writer might have been tempted to write Connie looked around at her house and felt like it was a shabby place where she no longer belonged.) There are a lot of ‘echoes’ in this story. Toward the very end, Connie has the surreal sensation that even her heart pounding in her chest and the body that houses it do not really belong to her. These are value judgments. The details aren’t randomly chosen just to remind us that Connie is standing in a kitchen and is breathing rapidly. They signify something unspoken. They are giving us a taste of why Connie feels the way she feels and does the things she does. If we didn’t feel her “startled” ambivalence about her home life, her allurement to the mysterious ecstasy she finds in rock and roll music, and “the pure pleasure of being alive” that she experiences when flirting with boys, we would not “get” why she chooses to get in the car of such an obviously untrustworthy man as Arnold Friend. Connie could hardly be called unobservant or lacking intuition. In fact, she’s quite apprehensive about Arnold Friend’s trustworthiness. How do we know she’s apprehensive? We’re not told, we’re shown how she’s constantly aware of little things that make Friend seem unnatural. One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it. She watched this smile come, awkward as if he were smiling from inside a mask. He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed… Evidently his feet did not go all the way down; the boots must have been stuffed with something so that he would seem taller. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig… …he had a fair, hairless face, cheeks reddened slightly as if the veins grew too close to the surface of his skin, the face of a forty- year-old baby. We get the very distinct feeling, just like Connie does, that “all these things did not come together.” But Oates is careful to keep showing us the girl’s tug of war with lines like, “Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder.” In the first part of that compound sentence, she’s rejecting Arnold Friend. In the second part, she’s inviting him to go on. And in both parts, we’re being shown, not told, about her mixed-up processing of this experience. When you think about it, the ultimate aim of fiction—its ‘big picture’ goal—is also to show rather than tell. Stories lend meaning to life not by preaching to us about how life works, but by letting made-up “life” speak for itself. According to the author, this story was based on the case of the so-called “Pied Piper of Tucson.” This man pretended to be a teenager, seduced and murdered young girls, and cast enough of a spell over the local teen populace that, for a time, many in the high school crowd helped him keep his secret. Oates was attempting to get to the “why” of that real-life story—Why would girls willingly put their lives at risk with this plainly suspect character? Someone writing an op-ed in a Tucson paper at that time might have answered that question with a abstraction or judgment along the lines of “teens struggling to find their true identity will sometimes make rash and tragic choices.” With Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, instead of telling us what the essayist might, Oates puts us in the struggle itself.
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