Grace and beauty, peanut butter and jelly

As a fiction develops, a writer has the exhilarating experience of losing options, of saying "Of course!" to things that emerge on the page with an aura of necessity about them.

Marilynne Robinson, "Grace and Beauty," Ploughshares

Marilynne Robinson

Imagine desiring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch and then having to select a supermarket from all those in your area, at which you must pick one loaf of bread from all those many available, one jar of peanut butter from all those on the shelves and one jar of jelly from the many different brands and flavors you have to choose from. Thankfully, unless we happen to be in the mood for something different, we already know which supermarket, which kind of bread, which brand of peanut butter and which flavor of jelly we prefer. Thus we can shop with our mind free to ponder more important decisions, such as what to get for that evening's main course.

So is this the kind of "exhilarating experience" Marilynne Robinson is talking about? As a writer makes more and more choices about a story and the characters who populate it, there become fewer and fewer choices yet to be made. The writer is free to focus on more important questions, such as where to go with the story and how best to get there.

But there is something more here, suggested by that phrase "aura of necessity." Those early decisions don't just make the later ones easier. They also make them obvious, or at least more obvious. Many authors speak of their characters as having minds of their own. Once they are given a personality and a backstory, they seem to make their own decisions about what to do next. From the author's perspective, what those characters do is what they must do. Yet somehow in the best fiction, what may seem so obvious to the author never seems obvious to us readers. We are almost always surprised. Perhaps that's because we readers don't know the characters as well as the author does.

Robinson goes on to say this about Charles Dickens, "A great part of the pleasure of reading Dickens comes from the strange compound of utter originality and perfect inevitability invested in his best characters. After one or two brilliant details, every subsequent choice is disciplined by them." The result is grace and beauty, the subjects of Robinson's essay.