Fiction is one of the few places where complexity still reigns, where questions endure, and the unknown is acknowledged. But how do we keep a reader engaged in this denser, more slow-moving medium? With the new texting distractions of the last few years, it seems to me that now it is even more important for the fiction writer to endow narrative with a strong and compelling momentum. But how? Over the years, this has been a driving question as I have searched for ways to develop an imagined world that has a level of complexity similar to my own, and still create a narrative through-line that instills urgency. How can I achieve the density that allows for richness without choking momentum?

One way is to ground the character in the primary place of his or her quotidian life, so that when something happens to destabilize it, I can call in the other place, the place where mystery reigns. This other place will change what the reader knows and therefore assumes about the character. It will stretch a line of tension, a buzzing high voltage wire, between the primary place, the place of safety and familiars, and the other place, the place of risk and desire the character must get to.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
AND EDITED BY Marianne Edwardes
(E.P. Dutton & Co., 1912)
PHOTO: Internet Archive

The Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “Rumpelstiltskin,”^[1] illustrates this type of narrative movement. A poor miller brags to the king, “I have a daughter who can spin straw into gold.” Although it is hard to imagine a father who would make such a preposterous boast, fairy tales, like dreams, put us into the world of metaphor where such a claim has psychological appropriateness. Clearly, the father wants the king to know that his daughter is no ordinary woman and by extension, that he is no ordinary guy. His desire catapults the young girl out of her ordinary life and puts her in a state of suspension that destroys her quotidian existence. The king is skeptical. But he is also greedy, so he decides to test the miller’s claim. He locks the poor girl into a room that contains nothing but a mound of straw, a reel, and a spinning wheel and tells her that if the straw isn’t spun into gold by the next morning, she will be killed. Imagine her desperation. There she is, alone with three things she knows, but has never considered using together to create anything, much less, a precious metal. What is she to do? Late in the night, a little man appears before her and promises to spin all of the straw into gold in exchange for a payment. The first time he saves her, she gives him her necklace. The second time, she gives him her ring. The third time, she has nothing to give him. But now the stakes are higher. Now, if she spins straw into gold, the king will make her his queen. So the strange little man promises to spin the straw once again, but only if she will pay him with her first child. The girl has no other choice. She knows that soon she will be in a position of power, so she decides that when she’s queen, she’ll be able to weasel out of the debt easily. Queens can do anything, can’t they? Yet on the eve of the birth of her first child, with guards at every entrance to the castle, the little man appears for his payment. The queen is distraught. She cries and pleads and finally, he relents and proposes a contest. She has three days to guess his name correctly, and if she does, he will let her keep her child.

It seems easy enough. If there is one thing a queen has in abundance, it is people to do her bidding. She sends messengers “far and wide” to discover the little man’s identity. But none of the names they bring back to her are correct. On the third day, a messenger comes to her and reports,

Today I bake, tomorrow brew,
The next I’ll have the young Queen’s child.
Ha! Glad am I that no one knew
That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled.^[2]

Right away, the queen knows that this is the answer. When the little man appears to collect her child, she tells him the correct name, and he gets angry and stamps his foot so hard into the earth he can’t get it out again. The story ends with him tearing himself in two as he tries to free his leg.

So what has occurred on the narrative line? The destablizer, the miller, upsets his daughter’s life. She is placed into a room with ordinary things, straw, a reel, and a spinning wheel, objects with which she’s very familiar. But she is asked to do an impossible thing with them and she succeeds only because she reaches such a level of desperation she cries for help from the depths of her being. That call brings in a representative from the other place. As soon as he appears, the primary place of the story is changed. In the room where the miller’s daughter is imprisoned, the reasonable, the idea that straw cannot be spun into gold, is suddenly pressured by the extraordinary.