David L. Robbins (Virginia writer)

David L. Robbins (born 1954) has published eight novels. He wrote War of the Rats which the movie Enemy at the Gates is partially based. He resides in Richmond. He is currently writer in residence at his alma mater, the The College of William & Mary.

Literary Ethic

David L. Robbins has proposed a number of practical rules and heuristics for fiction writing which, though unpublished and extant only diffusely throughout his lectures, together comprise a coherent system.

Fiction writing, for Robbins, seeks a particular sort of emotional efficacy. This provocation of feeling occurs through empathy, the alignment of a character's overall affective state--the structure of her motivations, her disposition towards other characters and her milieu, and so on--with that of the reader. A work of fiction thus becomes a vicarious experience , or what Robbins terms an episode of the human heart. To achieve empathy, the writer ought in most cases to exercise certain techniques, listed below. Note that these are not universal maxims, but statements which describe the effects and effectiveness of certain literary strategies under certain textual conditions.

Point of View Constraints

For Robbins, good stories elicit empathy for the protagonist. The point of view from which a narrative arrives, then, must greet in the reader in such a way that she understands from the inside what the protagonist thinks and feels. The story must tease from the reader affective states which mirror the character's, without undue work on the part of the reader. Additionally, this moment of empathy occurs as a realization, not the transfer of explicit information from page to consciousness. Because of this, Robbins prefers works written in a third-person POV to those written in the first-person. To elicit empathy, most descriptive elements of the story, that is, the diction of its modifiers, the moments and facts it highlights as significant, the sensible aspects of the environment, and so on, must arrive as the protagonist would interpret them. A writer would not, for instance, indicate that the protagonist's eyes are bloodshot unless the protagonist is aghast at here appearance in a mirror. In this regard, the reader assumes that descriptive terms reflect elements of a character's mind state without overt reference to the process from which the character derived the term. Robbins discourages writers from stating that, for example, "Cathy looked behind the tree and saw the deer," but rather, "A deer stood behind a tree."

The Fivefold Structure of a Story

Truly empathetic stories exhibit five features:

1. An active protagonist/antagonist who acts from a clear and authentic motivation
2. A strong, precise, and clear point of view
3. A primary reliance on action and dialogue
4. A narrative arc organized around transformation and "stakes"
5. A setting in a vividly portrayed and consistent time and place