I'd like to hear from other readers about what causes a story to linger vividly in their awareness. I'm looking for something more than "It's the characters." What I'm really interested in is what the author does to achieve this effect. Any comments?

For the fiction writer, the setting, the characters, the plot, the dialogue are the story's flesh and muscle. The transparency and authenticity as the writer connects with the reader are its soul and heart.

I'd like to focus on the memorableness aspect. For example, one story that I read recently and that has lingered and replayed in my mind is "Roses, Rhododendron," by Alice Adams. The main character recalls with an almost palpable longing her girlhood experience of being emotionally adopted into a family in a rural Southern setting. At the end of the narrative she comprehends with a shock that her presence in the household was what made it the family she saw, and that in her absence it had been an altogether different environment. In some sense, then, it had been her creation. The revelation of the disparity between the appearance and the reality comes as a surprise and yet was foreshadowed in a way that we can recognize once we know the truth. Those elements made for a very powerful jolt and brought sharply into focus the question of how great a part each of us plays in forming our own experience, even when we think we are having no effect on those around us.

So I'd say this story was memorable not just because of the characters and not just because of the author's insights into and revelations of their hearts and minds but because it delivered a surprising lesson in perspective.

But will I still remember this story and think of it a year from now, ten, twenty? I don't know. I can talk about some stories that I read in my youth and that still touch me today. What made them special?

Do you have any such examples?

When I taught literature, one of the terms very much in vogue was "universality," which was broadly defined as the ability of a work to have an application beyond the specifics of the work. It touched upon some general truth, or it revealed something about human nature, or it developed some fresh insight, or something like that. Alas, I suppose that, in all this message-hunting, some of us literature instructors neglected to mention that reading fiction should also be enjoyable and entertaining.

Though I can't recall many specific stories (I'm better with longer works), I do know that what makes something I read memorable is that I have some point of identification with the story. The specifics may be quite unlike anything I've experienced and the characters may be quite unlike me, but there's an idea or an insight that I've not encountered before. It's a kind of "Aha" experience; I may have had that idea or insight in a fuzzy sort of way, but the story made it much clearer to me.

In my case, one of the most remarkable results of reading when I was younger is that I often suffered from what I thought was "terminal uniqueness." I thought that nobody else experienced some of the feelings and thoughts that I had because nobody else talked about them. Then, when I read stories in which the characters had some of those feelings or in which these ideas that I thought were so unique to me (and even peculiar), it was a relief and a comfort to discover that I wasn't alone. A memorable story, I would like to say, says something meaningful about the human condition.

I know that's rather vague, but I've reached a stage in life when I'm convinced that analyzing experiences tends to spoil them. When I experience a good story, I don't devote much effort to analyzing its effect on me. I just let it (whatever "it" is) happen.
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Rich Turner (The Curmudgeon Himself)

Last Edited on 30-Jun-2007 9:37 PM

Usually, the book has to have a good plot and characters that carry me along with them. I may identify with the characters, but I'm not sure that's always necessary. And if it doesn't have a good plot, I probably won't have the stamina to stay with it.

I remember reading Gone With the Wind when I was 16 years old. While reading it, and especially during the last 100 pages, I was right there with Scarlett. I was devastated when Rhett didn't "give a damn" anymore. Even today, I can remember and even "feel" Scarlett walking through the mist back to Rhett.

Jack London's books always had a strong effect on me. I'm not sure if it was the adventure that attracted me or that the world of which he wrote was so different from mine.

I liked Hawthorne's works as a kid, but I read House of Seven Gables as an adult and thought it was wonderful. Perhaps it is an adolescent love of eerie things, but the stories of Poe, du Maurier, and the Brontes still hang around in my consciousness.

I don't think that that books I have read as an adult have had stayed with me like the books I read when I was young.
Maybe I have lost that sense of wonder, or maybe there is not as much that is new to me--or maybe my memory is just not as good as it used to be.

And on the same subject of authenticity, something else that has stayed with me since being revealed a quarter of a century ago is my great-grandmother's diary of the early 1900's. Her story may hardly be considered literature, but some who have read it have been amazed how this poorly educated individual manages to relate so much in so few words. I most fully realized just how bad was the poverty and hard life she lived when I came to a two-word sentence, "We hungry." She was family. How could I not be moved in a permanent way?

Last Edited on 24-Aug-2007 8:47 PM