Beyond Plot: Why Great Reading And Great Fiction Begins With How And Where

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. 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 sambar, the Bangalore way! The ‘what’ is clear in this description and so is the where. The where is the restaurant and based on how I describe this event, the where could also refer to the roads that I walk on.

But is the location of the description the same as the location of the event? Where is my story taking place? At the restaurant? At the time when I am eating those idlis?

Nope. This fundamental paradox about fiction is what sustains fiction and differentiates it from ordinary experience. The location of the restaurant in my story is not the same as the location of the physical restaurant. My story is only a description of a place. The description is linguistically located whereas the place is physically located. And there is a major difference between these two. The quality of the fiction depends on the quality of this difference, while at the same time producing the capacity to suggest that they are actually the same!

The where-ness produces the climate of the story. It takes the restaurant from the dusty streets to some other place. But where really is the story located? In my brain? My mind? My experience? In the language I use to describe it? Or does it find a new place in the reader? If, in the reader, where exactly? In the reader’s brain, mind, experience, in their own languages? It is the interplay between the whereabouts of the story in the text and its whereabouts in the author’s world as well as the reader’s world that really makes fiction work so powerfully over millenia.

Imagination is the word that is often used to describe the act of writing fiction. While there are many elements to this concept, its relation to where-ness is extremely important as manifested in one of the most simple definitions of imagination: the capacity to convert absence into presence and to discover absence in presence. This particular function of imagination is really about the location and where-ness of stories.

Humans are fundamentally storytellers. We produce stories all the time. Even a simple inconsequential act has the potential to become a powerful story. But because of this felicity, we tend to forget the fundamental agent that makes fiction possible, namely, language. Perhaps the greatest mystery of our storytelling capacity lies in our language and the belief that it can capture the real.

Imagination has the power to displace the where-ness of an episode and language has the capacity to somehow capture this new locatedness of the episode. Through this we produce countless stories and countless versions of the same story.

But this act is not devoid of human intervention and human interest. Our imaginations are shaped by the world we live in and the influences that shape us. The language we have is inherited and carries all the strengths and weaknesses of the world that produces and transmits this language. In other words, the power of stories in dis-locating the space of the event is also both its strength and weakness. Imagination is not a plain mirror that can show the world as is. (We don’t even really know the world as-is anyway!) It modifies, distorts, exaggerates reality.

The location of our stories is the location of our imagination and that of the language. We take readers to a new location by showing them a location that they are familiar with or can connect. The new location is filled with other elements that are not present in the real life event. Through this we manufacture a new world for the reader to inhabit, but all the time telling them that it is the real world of their location! To expect the reader to inhabit a radically new world in fiction would be too traumatic for the readers. They have to be first trained to learn to live in the imaginative world. Hence, we write pulp, we write stories that are presented as real-life events or as true stories.

We need the world of the imagination to produce stories, but in our contemporary world we don’t have the stomach to live in it. Fiction is becoming more and more like confessions and memoirs, and marketability is the new location for imagination and fiction. Earlier, stories produced places that allowed us to escape the hard, real world. Today, we have produced the real entirely as fictional, as spaces of our individual imaginations only, without realising that each such imagination is produced by manipulative historical, social and technological forces.

Both my novels, Following a Prayer and Water Days, capture the struggle between imagination, language and reality as ordinary, everyday events and stories. Following a Prayer (Westland 2023) was about a traumatic realisation of a 12-year-old girl, Kalpana, that human language is the primary agent to produce lies. The physical setting is the Western Ghats in the midst of a ferocious rainy season. But the novel is not about these physical attributes of mountains and rains as much as it is about the mental spaces and meanings that each of us have about these entities. Fear of these places is not in them, but within us. The space that had to be produced in this novel had to be in the imaginative and linguistic spaces of a young rural girl.

Locating this space in the world of these three girls allowed me the kind of freedom that I would not have had in an academic piece on prayer. It begins with a simple question of where prayers go and who listens to them. But there is no possibility of literally following a prayer. Fiction can do this because it constructs a space, a location, a where-ness, to which I can take you, a world where Kalpana listens to the sounds of the prayer, which become the rustles of leaves and the flaps of butterfly wings, leading her deeper into the forest. This is the only space in which I can say these things because Kalpana asks questions that cannot be spoken by adults or written in other spaces. She questions the reality of gods and whether the lies of language produce gods. This is the betrayal of language and so she refuses to speak. The whole village and, in particular, her younger sister and friend, try to make Kalpana speak, but she has to confront this betrayal and decide whether she wants to start speaking. Writing about these ‘religious’ themes in India today is so difficult and it is only fiction that allowed me the space to do this in the fictional world created by Kalpana and her two little friends.

This was only a story and yet it was always more than a story. It became the world of the Western Ghats for me and perhaps for many readers since I have had people call and tell me about how they would have scolded Kalpana when she was so obstinate! Compared to all that I had written in philosophy, writing these philosophical reflections as a simple story succeeded in producing this wonderful new where-ness in which the readers and I could co-inhabit.

So also in my next novel, Water Days (Westland 2025). Here, I had to find the imagination and language to produce a new story of Bangalore, a city that had drastically changed after the so-called IT boom. Here, my imagination was more about finding the language to tell this story because I wanted to capture the multilingual world of Bangalore. Although I chose a conventional genre of some kind of detective fiction, the novel is really about the language(s) of a city as well as the language available to us as writers to produce these new imaginations of a city. In this sense, the novel is really not about Bangalore although it is about the physical space of this city. Bangalore itself is a character in the novel, speaking to us as other characters do. But what is its ‘tongue’? The story of the novel—about a changing city, the importance of water, being a girl in that locality and so on—can only exist in the displaced imagination wherein the characters whom we see all around us find a new space to belong to in the words of the novel. In doing so, these characters constantly challenge me as the author as to whether I have the requisite language and tools to reimagine them in that manner.

My fictional worlds are deeply immersed in the everydayness of our lives, yet they are worlds that the readers have not themselves imagined. This space which I want to create, unlike that of the real world, has to be open to possibilities, to dialogues, to alternate viewpoints, and defined by an underlying sense of respect. At a time when our imagination is under siege, writers should be seen as not only producing stories, but producing new spaces for us to think and act meaningfully and harmoniously.

Sundar Sarukkai works primarily in the philosophy of the natural and social sciences. His latest novel is Water Days