In a post on his BookFox blog, John Fox says something as simple as a list can add layers to multiple elements in your fiction. “Lists are the vanilla flavor of fiction, the most basic tool the writer can have in their toolbox,” he says. “Yet in its multiplicity, in its overwhelming flush of details and abundance, there’s also something deeply pleasing.”
Lists can help you show multiple sides of a character, setting, or action. “It’s the literary equivalent of a 360 degree rotation in a movie,” Fox notes. “The overwhelming abundance of details helps you to know the thing being described in a deeper way.” Fox identifies five ways you can use story lists to enhance various elements in your fiction.
- Foreshadow the future. In A Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes opens his story with a list of the narrator’s memories, foreshadowing revelations to come.
- Describe a person. In Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack, a character enters an old barn and describes what he sees in great detail, including items the average reader probably wouldn’t recognize. “It’s these farming-specific items that convince me of the author’s knowledge of farming, and establish his credibility,” Fox says. “This is also wonderful characterization: this is a man who keeps everything, everything that might be useful for his job of farming the land.”
- Control time. A list of dates and places can help you condense the passage of time for your reader. In My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk lists of the sites of a city where three companions travel. While the journey must have lasted a day or more, Pamuk condenses the time into a paragraph. More than a recitation of buildings or shops, the images are precise and conjure up a sense of specific place, in addition to conveying the passage of time.
- Create theme. In Gold Fame Citrus, Claire Vaye Watkins uses a list of a baby’s favorite things as a way to show her character, as well as those of her caregivers. “Watkins could have taken time to create scenes that showed the baby’s character, but instead she made this list which gives us a rapid-fire sense of who this child is and what she’s like,” Fox says.
- Astonish your readers. “What about lists that are unruly and unmanageable? Lists that capture the wildness of existence and raise the hair on the back o your neck?” Fox asks. In “The Aleph”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a 475-word list with astonishing details, from the personal to the abstract, from the mundane to the insightful (You can read it in full in Fox’s blog post…). “You should be sweating after reading that,” Fox says. “You should be on the floor with your mouth open.”
“Even though lists are such humble tools, in the hands of a fantastic writer they can transform into something magical and almost verbally supernatural,” Fox concludes.
