The Spaces of Fiction

One of the important lessons that I use in teaching the skill of reading is to ask the readers to focus on the how, rather than the what.

- Sundar Sarukkai

Every piece of writing has a content—the what—but the spirit of the writing is present in how the content is expressed. This is an important strategy in reading texts because by focussing on the ‘how’, the reader can focus on the flow of the author's thought rather than on merely focussing on what is only ‘said’.

These skills are particularly useful in reading philosophical, scientific and other academic texts. For example, many read texts by asking what its ‘basic content’ or ‘essence’ is, rather than focussing on how this content is expressed. In fiction, this becomes the common refrain of asking what the story of a novel is. By focussing on the story, we reduce a text to a minor part, and at the same time forget the importance of the skill of how to tell. We can see this reduction in responses to films and theatre all the time.

Writing fiction has made me sensitive to a different quality of fiction, which is the importance of the where question. If content answers the what question, and the flow of the narrative the how question, the atmosphere of a text is related to the where question. When I wrote my philosophical texts, the what and the how predominated. There may be other aesthetic and literary elements in writing, but in general these two aspects remained the most important.

However, in writing fiction, the how was important but I found that my writing was equally concerned about the attempt to experience, cognise and express the Where question. Where are the events taking place? Where are the elements of the story taking place?

The answer to these questions might seem quite simple. An event takes place at the location which is mentioned in the story. For example, suppose I write about walking to the stand-up restaurant near my house and having two idlis dunked in