Let me start by touching on a related question. What frame of mind do we assume when engaged with a work of literature?
     An answer elegant in its simplicity is Coleridge’s formulation that we bring to literature
                         “...the willing suspension of disbelief.”

     That does not mean, of course, that when a character in a stage play shoves a stiletto into another character, we rush to a phone to dial 911. Coleridge was wise to have given his formula an agnostic spin. Suspending disbelief is not quite the same as believing.
     To put the matter less elegantly than Coleridge, what we willingly suspend on behalf of, say, a work of fiction is our concern with other matters: the weather, the trial of the century, our upcoming IRS audit.
     But that willingness is quite provisional: only initially do we offer our attention for free. To keep it, a fiction must come alive, must bring its world into being—though not necessarily as an echo of the world we live in. As we know, a fiction can violate various principles of our existence with impunity. In fiction, a man can be transformed into a bug, as Kafka has demonstrated. A woman can give birth through her left ear—Rabelais. A priest can levitate by drinking hot chocolate—Garcia Marquez.
     The one thing a fiction must not violate, must not lack, is the quality of greenness, the sense of life. Speaking of the novel, Henry James said it a hundred years ago:

               “The only division of the novel that I can understand is into
                         that which has life and that which has it not.”

     To be sure, the division he referred to was between strong novels and weak novels. Without a show of vital signs, all the rest is insufficient: our sturdy plots, our clever ideas, our admirable sympathies.
     The difference James spoke of is hard to exemplify since the full sense of life is achieved through the cumulative effect of all the passages in a fiction. Nevertheless, an example: this is from the first attempt at a novel by a writer who had published two books of non-fiction but was new to fiction; in other words, a writer who was literate but not yet literary. In this segment, two teen-aged boys, young men, have decided to spend their summer away from home. They’ll meet to discuss that plan after one of them checks it out with his divorced mother. Okay, the scene:

     Lou was waiting for him on the corner. “Well,” he asked when Mike reached him.
     “I can’t go with you this summer,” Mike said.
     “Why not? You said you’d like to.”
     “It would be fun working at a summer resort waiting on tables,” Mike said. “And I like the mountains. But I have to have a regular paycheck that I can depend on. My mother lost her job at the bakery and will need my support.”

     That passage is not yet pulling its weight. Notice, especially, the planted quality of that last speech by Mike. He seems simply to be conveying information to the reader, rather than talking, really talking, to his friend, who, of course, knows where they intended to go. A scene like this one—it’s a confrontation really—should convey not only the information the two characters offer each other but the attitudes, the pressures, from which their words well up.
     Here’s a reorientation of the material:

     Lou was waiting on the corner, in the glow of the street light. “Well?” he said.
     Mike shook his head, looked down at the sidewalk. “Can’t go,” he said. “Least, not this summer.”
     Lou gave him a look like he wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What? Why the hell not? You said you…”
     A jogger came around the corner and they stepped apart to let him pass.
     “You just tell her, you know,” Lou said. “You don’t ask.”
     “Look…” Mike felt his hands curl into fists against his jeans. “Don’t you think I wanna go? A whole summer in the mountains?”
     “Then why…”
     Mike shoved his hands into his pockets. “The fool bakery let her go. My mother. I gotta stay around. Pick up a real job.”

     In this version, Mike does not seem to be talking to the reader but to his friend and to the problem. Both of them speak in part through physical behaviors, that sub-lexicon of talk. In life, people speak not only with their voices but with their hands, their shoulders, their eyebrows. They rub their noses, point their fingers, look at the ground, look at the sky. And this time, our two characters use the language of talk, not of formal report. Talk is a language of elision; it backs and fills, revises itself in mid-air, so to speak: “The fool bakery let her go. My mother.” But why the intrusion of the jogger? Surely he’s not germane to the story. What he does, of course, is manifest the fact that our two characters inhabit a world, that things go around them, that they’re not standing on the moon.
     Which brings us to the matter of physical backgrounds, surroundings. The passage could have filled in the scene, described the tailor shop on the opposite corner, the houses along the street, the cars that drive by. But instead, it has followed Checkov’s good advice: that generally it is best simply to touch in a detail or two—the street corner, the light post—and let the reader sense the surroundings from experience. Too much detailing, and a fiction can lose its animation and go static. The same holds true for descriptions of people, a few details will evoke a stronger visual impression than will the whole world. In short, avoid guided tours.
     Okay, now the writing of introspections, the inner life of a character, her thoughts and feelings. My example is from the work of a quite inexperienced writer:

     Laura parked her car and went into the supermarket. She was in a hurry. As she pushed the shopping cart along, Laura wondered what to get for dinner for her husband Jack and the children. After a bit of thought, she decided on spaghetti, though they’d had spaghetti last night, too. She felt that that was all Jack deserved, for Laura suspected that jack was having an affair. Lately he often came home after she had gone to bed. Instead of spaghetti, she decided to get fish even though Jack hated fish.

     Well, Laura’s fishy revenge does tell us something of her feeling regarding Jack’s fishy behavior. And to be sure, the passage tells us more than that. As a body of information, it’s more or less adequate in itself, that is if we disregard the awkwardness. But too many passages handled in this reportorial fashion will bring a fiction to its knees—with no pulse and no temperature. No technique! The passage doesn’t really bring the character, her situation, her feelings into being. As Flannery O’Connor said, “fiction is an incarnational art.” Which means our words must become flesh.
     So, an incarnation:

     Laura pulled into a parking space, yanked the key out of the ignition, got out and slammed the door hard behind her. She glanced at her watch, grabbed the nearest shopping cart and shoved it through Price Chopper’s automatic door.
     Why, why was she worrying about supper for a man who was probably cheating on her right this very second? If it weren’t for the kids…
     She almost side-swiped a pyramid of cereal boxes with the cart. Damn sticky wheel! She straightened it out, pushed it down the pasta aisle, grabbed a box of Ronzoni extra-thin. Spaghetti again. Two nights in a row.  But it was all he deserved. And the kids wouldn’t mind, they loved the stuff.
     Then she caught a whiff of something and put the spaghetti back. She aimed the cart toward the fish counter. That’s what dinner would be tonight. Fish. Jack hated fish.

     This version turns Laura’s sense of urgency into an action by getting her from car to market in a rushed manner instead of simply asserting that she’s in a hurry. And a character’s thoughts, too, are an action, an action of the mind. Rather than offer a series of announcements about her thoughts, the second version gets the action of the thoughts themselves; and it catches the animus, the disposition they flow from.
     The difference between the two versions is a matter of authorial orientation.
     When we first come to the writing of fiction, most of us have an expository orientation developed by way of all those papers we wrote in high school and college. Everyone remembers the term paper, that excellent formal creature with its appetite for information.
     Well, fiction is a different beast. A beast that walks on all fours and feeds on red meat.