Not long ago, I finished The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade. It is a very good novel. When trying to read like a writer, I’m working to notice not just sentence-level techniques but larger narrative structures as well. Here are some thoughts on that level about The Five Wounds.
Since there are spoilers here, it might be best to read the book before reading this post.
- Religion is a real part of the characters’ lives. It influences how they feel about themselves, their drinking, their children, plot events, and their own and each other’s actions. I’ve no idea how Valdez Quade feels about religion, but she uses it to round her characters. Specifically, her use of religion reminds me of Faulkner’s phrase from his Nobel Prize speech: “the human heart in conflict with itself” alone is worth writing about.
- Consider variations on tropes. Valdez Quade uses a terminal illness as a ticking clock. Initially, the ill character won’t get treated and won’t ever tell others (including friends, children, and grandchildren) that she might die. Along with other methods of characterization, the emotional danger this represents to other characters was scary, fascinating, and seemed like likely behavior.
- Another variation has to do with entrepreneurship. “Get a Job,” from Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, suggests ways the economic realities characters face can be useful for writers. Valdez Quade builds on this. A character’s efforts to provide plays a significant role in the novel. It presents real tension in several scenes.
- Consider the reactions of flat, almost-part-of-the-setting characters. In The Five Wounds, a bored medical student is in the background, playing with a stethoscope, while the attending physician delivers a diagnosis. The diagnosis is specific medical jargon that neither most readers nor the character being diagnosed can understand, but the medical student does. The student suddenly stops playing when hearing the diagnosis. That reaction and the doctor’s seriousness shows the significance of the diagnosis.
- I’m generally wary of flashbacks. Obviously, the content of flashbacks can characterize. So too, at least as Valdez Quade uses them, can the number of flashbacks. Younger characters have very few. Despite their tramas, they live in the present. Older characters seem to spend most of their time in the past. Much more often than the younger characters, they live there. The extent to which characters live in the past can significantly differentiate them from each other for readers.
Writing Fiction 