Technique

"I'VE GOT THE STORY but I don't have any technique," a student once told Flannery O'Connor. At its worst, technique appears to be nothing more than a highbrow term for formula. But a formula demands that you follow it faithfully; technique is studied so a full range of devices may be used by a writer to make a story tellable, artful, which in some cases includes breaking with conventions. Formula imposes limits on a writer; technique frees a writer to expand the methods of convention, should he or she choose to take that path. The only rule to observe when breaking convention is extremely simple. Do not purposely confuse the reader. Make clear the new method you're employing. If the reader cannot follow it, you've failed. If the reader can, you've done what Flaubert did-invent a new convention (in his case, modern point of view) for literature's future use.

"Technique is a word they all trot out," O'Connor wrote, lamenting the cartbefore-the-horse approach to storytelling, which characterized her student's confusion about the act of discovery. For although technique can be studied, technique alone will never produce a story. What's more, one can never claim to have a story yet lack the technique for telling it. That's the same as saying I've written the story, now I just have to write the sentences. What O'Connor's student had was the idea of a story, not the story itself, which is inextricable from the "words on the page" used to tell it. And these words, just like Flaubert's innovations concerning omniscient point of view, are discovered solely in the act of writing.

"The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories," O'Connor said, "is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you've actually got the story in front of you." Sound, unassailable advice. Also the last thing many apprentice writers want to hear, because getting the story in front of you is terrifying, painful, and in many cases nearly impossible. Technique, we naively hope, is a miracle cure, some kind of combination tranquilizer-antidepressant-pain reliever for our distressed literary condition. It isn't.

"Technique," according to Mark Schorer, "is the means by which the writer's experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and, finally, of evaluating it."

Without a masterful understanding of literary technique a writer is doomed never to fully communicate his or her story, its rendered experiences and their various meanings, to a reader. "The writer capable of the most exacting technical scrutiny of his subject matter," Schorer believed, "will produce works ... which reverberate with maximum meaning."

From The Workshop (edited by Tom Grimes)