by Charlotte Gutzmer
How do you craft a lasting story? Most people will tell you that the work begins with compelling characters, strong plots, and resonant themes. But beyond these basics lies the secret to creating stories that will endure the test of time and ingrain themselves in the hearts of readers: connection. Phong Nguyen knows that lasting stories all foster relationships between plot, setting, character, and theme, synergizing their strengths to build a narrative that leaps off the page.
Phong Nguyen is an award-winning author who has published three novels: The Bronze Drum (forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing, 2022), Roundabout: An Improvisational Fiction (Moon City Press, 2020), and The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016, winner of the Prairie Heritage Book Award); and two short fiction collections: Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Mastodon Publishing, 2019) and Memory Sickness (Elixir Press, 2011). He is also the Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing at the University of Missouri. On Tuesday, May 18th at 7pm, join him in his upcoming CVWG craft talk: “Building Strong Connective Tissue: Beyond Plot, Character, Setting, and Theme.”
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Phong Nguyen about his phenomenal writing and his upcoming craft talk. Read on to learn all about how nourishing the connections and establishing powerful emotions can strengthen your work, as well as how collaborations between community and literature create lasting impacts on writing.
Charlotte Gutzmer: In the description of your upcoming craft talk, you stress the importance of creating connections between plot, character, setting, and theme. What makes these connections so engaging and important, and how do these connections contribute to a story?
Phong Nguyen: The specific connections we will be discussing in the talk are those between character and plot ("Why is this character in this particular story?") and between character and setting ("How does this character's internal conflict manifest in an external action?"). These connections are vital because you can have the most compelling character and the most interesting plot but if there is no sense of why these events are meaningful to that character and how they affect their future, you will leave readers with the question "So what?" It is not enough to have crafted each of these discrete elements; they need to relate to one another in order to answer that question.
CG: In your short story collection Memory Sickness, I was impressed by not only your ability to craft lasting stories, but also by their emotional intensity. How can a writer weave these powerful emotions into their craft?
PN: If a writer is striving for emotional effect, one prerequisite is that the reader feels close to the characters; they need to feel real. For the characters to feel real, they should be highly specific. If you think about the people you know in your own life, they are highly specific-- the more we know someone, the more aware we are of their contradictions and complexity. Character in fiction works the same way; familiarity and identification go hand in hand. Another prerequisite is that the characters want something urgently, whatever that may be. That way, when their yearnings are denied (or fulfilled), the reader has been with them on the journey all along, yearning alongside them and sharing in the glory or tragedy of its attainment.
CG: Many of your stories feature a clear connection between internal characterization and external plot. What advice can you give writers who want to know more about how internal character affects external story?
PN: The most important aspect of this relationship is that the internal conflict must manifest as an external action. Most writers intuitively understand that their character(s) must experience some internal conflict; the trick is to manifest that conflict in a scene. You might call this the "slipper fits" moment. Theoretically, in the Cinderella story, the Prince or his representative could have simply seen Cinderella and recognized her from the ball, and they lived happily ever after. But that would be narratively inert and unsatisfying. It doesn't matter that the internal conflict is resolved. It never manifested. Therefore we need that "slipper fits" moment to make the conflict real and indicate a narrative destiny for the characters through scene.
CG: Where do you find inspiration for intriguing plots, characters, and conflicts?
PN: My answer is "yes." In other words, I find inspiration anywhere I can: life experience, dreams, research, stories, games, you name it. I try not to limit myself by drinking from only one fountain of inspiration.
CG: Several of your novels and short story collections focus on alternate realities or literary retellings, including The Adventures of Joe Harper and Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History. How, in your opinion, can our own lives and realities be affected by exploring these alternatives?
PN: I'm fond of collaborative writing and collaborations in general. Ancient myths were not created by individuals but by communities over vast spans of time. In the same way, I see The Adventures of Joe Harper as a collaboration with Mark Twain, and I see Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History as a playful collaboration with real historians (the highest compliment I receive from Pages is that readers often feel the need to go back to read the real histories after they read the alternate versions). As far as how our own lives and realities are affected by this, I suppose that such collaborations make us less self-centered and egoistic. It's important to remember that we are single links in a long literary chain.
CG: In your craft talk, you’ll be exploring the most difficult aspects of strengthening the connective tissue between the various aspects of fiction. Could you give a sneak preview from your craft talk that will help a writer overcome these difficulties?
PN: One exercise that we will undertake is to look at summaries of stories I've received that succeed on every level when it comes to discrete elements of storytelling but fail when it comes to making connections between them. Those who attend are invited to provide solutions to the lack of "connective tissue" between plot and character, and between character and setting. There will be time for attendees to write their own summaries of stories that make such connections.
So what are you waiting for? Register soon (link forthcoming!) for Phong Nguyen’s craft talk to learn all about how you can craft lasting stories and strengthen the connective tissue between the various aspects of fiction.