So I wanted to write about a brief sentence I read just last night in Pynchon's Against the Day. It was a little thing he did with dialog, which I was going to blow up into a larger thing we could all learn from.
But, leafing through the book, I can't find the line anywhere. It should, shouldn't it, be somewhere just to the left of the bookmark? Apparently, a few nights ago I put the bookmark in the wrong place, and so last night I resumed reading about 100 pages ahead of where I had actually stopped. Here's the thing: I did not notice. I am used, with Pynchon, to not remembering who each character is, and not knowing exactly where I am, setting-wise, in any given section. I had given myself over to the gestalt of the thing, and was reading along quite happily.
This is not so much a criticism of Pynchon (or me) as an aspect of the experience of reading him, which I think is mostly a fine one: sort of riding the whirlwind rather than trying to parse it. Parse away if you want, but I don't think it's strictly necessary to enjoy or even "get" the work.
On the other hand, after visit #2 in three days to Kitty ER, I was not at my sharpest last night. Keep a good thought for Zee. She is tired but feeling better--for much longer, this time, I hope.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Inspirational words about writing to compensate for incipient crazy cat-lady behavior
Our cat Zee spent yesterday in Kitty ER. She is OK now--this was apparently a flare-up of a chronic intestinal condition, if by "flare" you mean...well, you can get the picture. That picture includes, at least for the moment, a special diet, which means I am spending this morning keeping Bella away from Zee's food and Zee away from Bella's (formerly Zee's as well). Obviously the simple solution is to only feed them at certain times and then *put the food away,* but they are so plaintive and manipulative that it seems easier just to get up every 10 minutes and chase somebody into another room. Did I mention that the special diet smells?
So for today's post about writing, I will simply refer you to this nice piece on procrastination by A.L. Kennedy:
So for today's post about writing, I will simply refer you to this nice piece on procrastination by A.L. Kennedy:
I have, in my professional life, met numberless writers who seemed paralysed by their own desire to write, who had intelligent and reasonable excuses for not starting, not committing, not getting on with it, who could trump any arguments or suggestions I might make towards putting anything on paper. It is nice to win arguments, but not if it means you deny yourself the chance to do something beautiful and intensely alive.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Revising from something rather than nothing
So I've been revising novel #2 for a week. Maybe two weeks. I've lost track. This thing is a mind-sucker. Keeping track of all the details of the murder mystery, like who knew what, and when, and who believed what, and why, and how the investigation got all screwed up but plausibly so...and I'm not even into the string theory section. Yes, really. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.
Still, it's going well. And once again I must attribute it to my new practice of (relatively) rapid prototyping, i.e. getting *something* down and moving on and not worrying too much about anything until the whole draft is done. Because, here's what I keep discovering, to my eternal astonishment: You just need something to work with. That something need not be good; it need not even have that much to do with what you now understand your story to be.
Years ago, when I thought I was a visual artist, I used to go through the process of gessoing canvas. Gesso is that white stuff you put down first, to keep the paint from soaking into the canvas; I understood that the tedium of stretching the canvas and gessoing it was supposed to be meditative or something, but I was usually really impatient to just get started, and I turned to writing because I thought there would be less laborious prep and you could just, you know, do the thing. Joke's on me! Turns out the first draft is the gesso. You still have to do it, but the good news is that the second draft almost entirely covers it up. The first draft is really not much more than a layer to put the revisions on.
You just need something, rather than nothing. That's all.*
*Speaking of something rather than nothing, Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance posted a very interesting discussion of that question--Why is there something rather than nothing?--a few years ago. It's worth reading the whole post to follow the reasoning, but the overall point is that it's actually not a good question. Our "experience" tells us that the presence of "something" is somehow significant, and less "natural" or "simple" than the state of nothingness. In other words, we assume that the presence of "something" has to be explained (i.e. by the existence of a god or similar). But according to Carroll, there's no reason why nature itself should "prefer" nothingness. It's not necessarily a simpler state, so the presence of "something" does not necessarily demand a special explanation.
Still, it's going well. And once again I must attribute it to my new practice of (relatively) rapid prototyping, i.e. getting *something* down and moving on and not worrying too much about anything until the whole draft is done. Because, here's what I keep discovering, to my eternal astonishment: You just need something to work with. That something need not be good; it need not even have that much to do with what you now understand your story to be.
Years ago, when I thought I was a visual artist, I used to go through the process of gessoing canvas. Gesso is that white stuff you put down first, to keep the paint from soaking into the canvas; I understood that the tedium of stretching the canvas and gessoing it was supposed to be meditative or something, but I was usually really impatient to just get started, and I turned to writing because I thought there would be less laborious prep and you could just, you know, do the thing. Joke's on me! Turns out the first draft is the gesso. You still have to do it, but the good news is that the second draft almost entirely covers it up. The first draft is really not much more than a layer to put the revisions on.
You just need something, rather than nothing. That's all.*
*Speaking of something rather than nothing, Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance posted a very interesting discussion of that question--Why is there something rather than nothing?--a few years ago. It's worth reading the whole post to follow the reasoning, but the overall point is that it's actually not a good question. Our "experience" tells us that the presence of "something" is somehow significant, and less "natural" or "simple" than the state of nothingness. In other words, we assume that the presence of "something" has to be explained (i.e. by the existence of a god or similar). But according to Carroll, there's no reason why nature itself should "prefer" nothingness. It's not necessarily a simpler state, so the presence of "something" does not necessarily demand a special explanation.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Why we need models
Writing models, that is. Not supermodels. Well, I suppose we need them, too. They make us feel fat and old, which causes us to buy lots of clothes from China, which stimulates the economy and allows us keep on existing in the state of anxious pseudo-prosperity we have come to know and love. Or something.
Still with me? On the Ploughshares blog, Angela Pneuman takes up the age-old question of whether creative writing can--and needs to be--formally taught. On the matter of whether MFA programs are helpful to writers, and to contemporary literature in general, she says, "I am--helpfully--100% ambivalent." But she is certain about the importance of models as part of teaching.
Case in point: In one of the most fun classes I've ever taught, I had students rewrite a scene from the movie Ghost World in the style of Jane Austen. Now, assigning students to write in Austen's style wasn't a new idea, though the Ghost World angle might have been. One point of the exercise, of course, was to see what Austen's style "did" to the Ghost World story, to understand that style and story cannot be separated. At the same time we discovered that Ghost World is not as different from Pride and Prejudice as we had thought: The propriety in Austen's voice brought out the rule-bound nature of Ghost World's 1990s suburbia. Enid, the movie's heroine, struggles against these rules, as does Elizabeth Bennet; Elizabeth finds a way to thrive within that setting, while Enid finds another, more ambiguous solution.
But what was really exciting about this exercise was that each student's piece was quite different. It wasn't that some had failed to fully grasp Austen's style (or Ghost World). Rather, because each writer was different, they were drawn to different aspects of that style, and chose different scenes to translate into that style, which further destabilized it. A's Jane Austen was not B's; just as Elizabeth's choice wasn't (really wasn't) Enid's.* The sincere attempt to imitate actually brought out originality.
Having had this and countless similar experiences, though, it's still hard to keep this need for models in mind. There's probably never a point where you can fully dispense with them; conversely, they can always help you, especially if you're struggling with some writing problem. Yet my instinct still says: I want to be original. I want to do this on my own, not copy someone. The thing to remember is that the best models (Pneuman celebrates Virginia Woolf in this instance) show us what's possible, not what's impossible. They show us possibility in general. When we start rejecting models or guidelines entirely, that's when we start to reach for cliches--because that's what comes most readily to hand for everyone.
The other key is to know when you have a good model, one that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Formal education helps with that.
*In fact Enid's departure on the empty bus at the end suggests suicide, which I hasten to say I'm not advocating for writers who find "the rules" or the so-called MFA style oppressive. Please don't off yourself, literally or as a writer, because you find Raymond Carver boring. Let's say instead that you need to take the bus farther out. Look at 18th century literature or international literature or...
Still with me? On the Ploughshares blog, Angela Pneuman takes up the age-old question of whether creative writing can--and needs to be--formally taught. On the matter of whether MFA programs are helpful to writers, and to contemporary literature in general, she says, "I am--helpfully--100% ambivalent." But she is certain about the importance of models as part of teaching.
It is impossible to teach without, on some level, invoking guidelines, and it is impossible to invoke guidelines without invoking the culture’s dominant aesthetic, which is most likely as familiar to us--and often as unexamined--as the air we breathe. We are either teaching to this aesthetic or calling it out and teaching against it, but there is no getting out from under the umbrella of (some) ideology--contrary as we may be, far as our meaning-making systems may be flung.It's true that you need to know the rules in order to break them. And it's not enough to recognize those rules in some abstract way: You have to have engaged them, gotten inside and driven them around as if they were a car. Only then do you begin to realize that total, flagrant, mindless imitation of said rules is much harder than using them to go your own way.
Case in point: In one of the most fun classes I've ever taught, I had students rewrite a scene from the movie Ghost World in the style of Jane Austen. Now, assigning students to write in Austen's style wasn't a new idea, though the Ghost World angle might have been. One point of the exercise, of course, was to see what Austen's style "did" to the Ghost World story, to understand that style and story cannot be separated. At the same time we discovered that Ghost World is not as different from Pride and Prejudice as we had thought: The propriety in Austen's voice brought out the rule-bound nature of Ghost World's 1990s suburbia. Enid, the movie's heroine, struggles against these rules, as does Elizabeth Bennet; Elizabeth finds a way to thrive within that setting, while Enid finds another, more ambiguous solution.
But what was really exciting about this exercise was that each student's piece was quite different. It wasn't that some had failed to fully grasp Austen's style (or Ghost World). Rather, because each writer was different, they were drawn to different aspects of that style, and chose different scenes to translate into that style, which further destabilized it. A's Jane Austen was not B's; just as Elizabeth's choice wasn't (really wasn't) Enid's.* The sincere attempt to imitate actually brought out originality.
Having had this and countless similar experiences, though, it's still hard to keep this need for models in mind. There's probably never a point where you can fully dispense with them; conversely, they can always help you, especially if you're struggling with some writing problem. Yet my instinct still says: I want to be original. I want to do this on my own, not copy someone. The thing to remember is that the best models (Pneuman celebrates Virginia Woolf in this instance) show us what's possible, not what's impossible. They show us possibility in general. When we start rejecting models or guidelines entirely, that's when we start to reach for cliches--because that's what comes most readily to hand for everyone.
The other key is to know when you have a good model, one that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Formal education helps with that.
*In fact Enid's departure on the empty bus at the end suggests suicide, which I hasten to say I'm not advocating for writers who find "the rules" or the so-called MFA style oppressive. Please don't off yourself, literally or as a writer, because you find Raymond Carver boring. Let's say instead that you need to take the bus farther out. Look at 18th century literature or international literature or...
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Return to Pynchon
It has been years, nay even a decade or more, since I last read Thomas Pynchon. Now I'm starting Against the Day (thanks, KS!).
So far it's about a team of balloonists/adventurers on their way to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. How I have missed this sort of thing:
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So far it's about a team of balloonists/adventurers on their way to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. How I have missed this sort of thing:
At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him. Ever since the Chums, during a confidential assignment in Our Nation's Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit), had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, from a furious encounter between rival packs of the District's wild dogs, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board Inconvenience, from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the "dime novels"--though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noticing the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and--the conclusion could scarce be avoided--comprehension.
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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Plot and plotless
Two excellent essays were recently posted on The Millions, arguing somewhat opposite points. Michael Rowe's piece on Philip K. Dick exhorts us to stop getting hung up on Dick's "occasionally terrible" prose style. For whatever reason, Dick was never concerned about style, Rowe explains:
Meanwhile, another essay by Mark OConnell celebrates "plotless novels" like Oblomov, the hilarious-sounding Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, and Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker. In Baker's novel,
Re: PKD. I suspect this is why I have always really enjoyed having the plots of Dick's books told to me; yet I have never made it through a single Dick novel. (One exception was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and that possibly was only due to post-Blade-Runner-viewing momentum.) I should mention, before going any further, that Dick is occasionally quite a brilliant stylist. Especially at the beginnings of his novels, before he's racing toward his deadline, or realizing he has to make a novel out of what was in fact only a short story, or whatever happens to cause the book to collapse like a circus-tent disaster, he zaps off some of the most hilarious, spot-on condemnations of consumer culture I've ever read. Also, I haven't read many of the books people consider to be his best, so I should probably reserve judgment overall. Anyway, Rowe's essay makes me want to give old PKD another shot, and maybe, to be fair, start with the Modern Library anthology edited by Jonathan Lethem.
Still, those collapses are so disappointing--in Clans of the Alphane Moon, for example, when this brilliant premise about a bunch of mental patients governing themselves on a distant moon turns into long passages about a guy loathing his ex-wife. I guess I'm saying that confronted with a whole bookfull of Dick's prose, I'd probably gravitate instead toward a plotless novel, and cop to whatever upper-middle-class anxiety Rowe says that reveals. Style is important to me. However--and this is still something I'm trying to learn as a writer--self-conscious style is wretched. Style for the sake of showing off one's writing ability never works, and is even more off-putting than Dick's desperate scrabbling.
So how would you write a story in which nothing happens, without overwriting to make up for the lack of plot? This seems like a terrific challenge to take up. Especially for those of us whose new short story has just driven itself into a corner.
Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment. So, it isn’t the prose style, but the plot assembly that gases up the moving parts of Dick’s fiction.
Meanwhile, another essay by Mark OConnell celebrates "plotless novels" like Oblomov, the hilarious-sounding Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, and Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker. In Baker's novel,
[p]retty much literally nothing happens; the closest we get to action is when the narrator exhales forcefully in the direction of a paper mobile hanging from the ceiling of the baby’s room, and the paper flutters around for a while. And here’s the thing: there’s not a dull moment in the book. Baker’s brilliance as a writer lies in his ability to make the (apparently) utterly trivial utterly compelling.So: plot or style? PKD or XdM? It's an old question, of course, and ultimately a matter of personal taste.
Re: PKD. I suspect this is why I have always really enjoyed having the plots of Dick's books told to me; yet I have never made it through a single Dick novel. (One exception was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and that possibly was only due to post-Blade-Runner-viewing momentum.) I should mention, before going any further, that Dick is occasionally quite a brilliant stylist. Especially at the beginnings of his novels, before he's racing toward his deadline, or realizing he has to make a novel out of what was in fact only a short story, or whatever happens to cause the book to collapse like a circus-tent disaster, he zaps off some of the most hilarious, spot-on condemnations of consumer culture I've ever read. Also, I haven't read many of the books people consider to be his best, so I should probably reserve judgment overall. Anyway, Rowe's essay makes me want to give old PKD another shot, and maybe, to be fair, start with the Modern Library anthology edited by Jonathan Lethem.
Still, those collapses are so disappointing--in Clans of the Alphane Moon, for example, when this brilliant premise about a bunch of mental patients governing themselves on a distant moon turns into long passages about a guy loathing his ex-wife. I guess I'm saying that confronted with a whole bookfull of Dick's prose, I'd probably gravitate instead toward a plotless novel, and cop to whatever upper-middle-class anxiety Rowe says that reveals. Style is important to me. However--and this is still something I'm trying to learn as a writer--self-conscious style is wretched. Style for the sake of showing off one's writing ability never works, and is even more off-putting than Dick's desperate scrabbling.
So how would you write a story in which nothing happens, without overwriting to make up for the lack of plot? This seems like a terrific challenge to take up. Especially for those of us whose new short story has just driven itself into a corner.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
What's a mystery?
While I'm on the subject of mystery, which I have been a lot lately, even though it may not technically be a "subject" as such because we don't, by definition, know what it is...here's a perspective from Leonard Susskind:
As Susskind's book is called The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, we can be sure that for him (as for me), the answer "[A] god did it" is neither helpful nor interesting. The book, which I am just now starting to read, promises to untangle the seemingly simple (and seemingly wrong) "anthropic principle." I thought I had finally understood this thing awhile ago, but now guess I don't.
Anyway, it does seem worth considering what we really mean when we use the term "mystery." By this definition, a murder mystery really isn't one. It's a...oh, hell, Rumsfeld is a prophet after all..."known unknown."
Now, once more into the cosmological breach.
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[I]n the past few years the science sections of newspapers have been reporting that cosmologists are mystified by two astonishing "dark" discoveries. The first is that 90 percent of the matter in the universe is made of some shadowy, mysterious substance called dark matter. The other is that 70 percent of the energy in the universe is composed of an even more ghostly mysterious stuff called dark energy. The words mystery, mysterious, and mystified get a very thorough workout in these articles.Susskind goes on: "The real mystery raised by modern cosmology concerns a silent 'elephant in the room,' an elephant, I might add, that has been a huge embarrassment to physicists: why is it that the universe has all of the appearances of having been specially designed so that life forms like us can exist?"
I have to admit I find neither discovery all that mysterious. To me, the word mystery conveys something that completely eludes rational explanation. The discoveries of dark matter and energy were surprises but not mysteries. Elementary-particle physicists (I am one of them) have always known that their theories were incomplete and that many particles remain to be discovered. The tradition of postulating new, hard-to-detect particles began when Wolfgang Pauli correctly guessed that one form of radioactivity involved an almost invisible particle called the neutrino. Dark matter is not made of neutrinos, but by now physicists have postulated plenty of particles that could easily form the invisible stuff. There is no mystery there--only the difficulties of identifying and detecting those particles.
As Susskind's book is called The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, we can be sure that for him (as for me), the answer "[A] god did it" is neither helpful nor interesting. The book, which I am just now starting to read, promises to untangle the seemingly simple (and seemingly wrong) "anthropic principle." I thought I had finally understood this thing awhile ago, but now guess I don't.
Anyway, it does seem worth considering what we really mean when we use the term "mystery." By this definition, a murder mystery really isn't one. It's a...oh, hell, Rumsfeld is a prophet after all..."known unknown."
Now, once more into the cosmological breach.
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Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Popular Crime
I'm reading Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, by Bill James. So far it's lighter on the reflections and heavier on the celebration--or at least the giddy interest in piecing together clues and debating theories, which some of us share.
James at least does give cover to readers like me, who hope our interest in certain mega-famous crimes is not *primarily* lurid fascination. He says it's largely driven by a desire to see justice done. I'd add a closely related need for things to make sense. Life's a mystery, like that guy in Shine said. We're surrounded by walls we can't see past all the time: what our parents were really like before we were born; where the universe came from; why that agent who was perfect for my book never even wrote back. Surely, surely one self-contained event--this murder, which left so much "evidence" behind--can be understood, the answer known. But often, it just can't. As I've said before, information does not always add up to knowledge.
For my own problem, I choose to blame The Brothers Karamazov. It tells us that life is not just a mystery, but a murder mystery, and God is the prime suspect.
Anyway, as someone who's dug a little too deep into the Sam Sheppard case, I found James's take on the matter...interesting. At first it seems far-fetched, but then again, the more I thought about it...it does explain a lot. (No, I won't spoil it, but the NYT review did, if you're curious.)
On the other hand, an explanation is not an answer, either.
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James at least does give cover to readers like me, who hope our interest in certain mega-famous crimes is not *primarily* lurid fascination. He says it's largely driven by a desire to see justice done. I'd add a closely related need for things to make sense. Life's a mystery, like that guy in Shine said. We're surrounded by walls we can't see past all the time: what our parents were really like before we were born; where the universe came from; why that agent who was perfect for my book never even wrote back. Surely, surely one self-contained event--this murder, which left so much "evidence" behind--can be understood, the answer known. But often, it just can't. As I've said before, information does not always add up to knowledge.
For my own problem, I choose to blame The Brothers Karamazov. It tells us that life is not just a mystery, but a murder mystery, and God is the prime suspect.
Anyway, as someone who's dug a little too deep into the Sam Sheppard case, I found James's take on the matter...interesting. At first it seems far-fetched, but then again, the more I thought about it...it does explain a lot. (No, I won't spoil it, but the NYT review did, if you're curious.)
On the other hand, an explanation is not an answer, either.
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Thursday, June 09, 2011
Permanent Vacation
No, not a description of my career aspirations, but a fabulous new book from Bona Fide Books: Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks.
Have you ordered your copy yet? Why the heck not? Don't you love the outdoors? Haven't you ever wondered about those people making the beds in the lodge, or repairing the trail after a rainstorm?
What's that? You are/were one of those people? Well, good news for you, too. Bona Fide is taking submissions for a second volume.
Have you ordered your copy yet? Why the heck not? Don't you love the outdoors? Haven't you ever wondered about those people making the beds in the lodge, or repairing the trail after a rainstorm?
What's that? You are/were one of those people? Well, good news for you, too. Bona Fide is taking submissions for a second volume.
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
First and third
A writing teacher of mine once said that beginning fiction writers tend to write in the first person. As they grow, they "graduate" to writing in third.
Like the honor student I used to be, I took this as a task to be fulfilled. I was writing in first person in those days, for god's sake, which meant I was not a mature writer. How embarrassing to be revealed in this manner, when I'd thought my narrators were ever so sophisticated! When I did start using third, and managing not to screw it up completely, I felt I had made it to a new level of respectability. Writing in third meant I was in control, surveying the whole story from a height of my choosing. At least in theory, I was able to incorporate the sweep and scope of the great 19th century novels, the likes of which I didn't particularly aspire to write, but could have. Maybe. The point is, the third-person writer has authority. The first-person writer not only acknowledges her subjectivity but flaunts it, or worse, hides behind it, afraid to deliver any bigger truths than one individual's epiphanies.
However, I have since regressed. My second novel and the new short story I'm attempting to write are both in first. What has happened? All of a sudden I'm finding third person far more limiting. True, you can justify traveling among places and times and consciousnesses in ways you can't do in first--in a realistic first, I might add. But I can't let go of the notion that someone is always telling the story. She may be all but effaced behind the opaque screen of minimalism, or you may have the chatty, confidential "I" of much 19th century fiction, who does not sense his perspective as limited at all. In any case, there is a narrating consciousness. Some may simply decide that's the author's consciousness, with no intervening figure between it and the reader, but I somehow can't see that. To me, the narrating voice is always created, through the act of writing itself; it's artificial, which I don't mean in a negative way. So I feel like I have to understand that voice, and who it's coming from. In other words, third keeps blending into first for me anyway, so why not save a step and just do first?
It may be that first limits you in terms of saying what other characters are really thinking, and keeps you from being in two or more places or times at once. On the other hand, first gives you a tremendous amount of internal latitude. It seems to me it's much easier to justify flashbacks, for instance, in first. We suddenly remember stuff all the time, and having the memory can be part of the story, rather than (god forbid) a sort of pat psychological underpinning for some character. You can also just stop the story and muse (engagingly, of course) on the narrator's pet obsessions: Why does my father insist on wearing those glasses? How can my best friend believe in ghosts? Did the world really exist before I came into it? (Try thinking about that through the mind of a fictional character!)
Anyway, I'm finding there's lots of terrain to explore in the first-person point of view. But I wouldn't rule out authorial immaturity, either.
Like the honor student I used to be, I took this as a task to be fulfilled. I was writing in first person in those days, for god's sake, which meant I was not a mature writer. How embarrassing to be revealed in this manner, when I'd thought my narrators were ever so sophisticated! When I did start using third, and managing not to screw it up completely, I felt I had made it to a new level of respectability. Writing in third meant I was in control, surveying the whole story from a height of my choosing. At least in theory, I was able to incorporate the sweep and scope of the great 19th century novels, the likes of which I didn't particularly aspire to write, but could have. Maybe. The point is, the third-person writer has authority. The first-person writer not only acknowledges her subjectivity but flaunts it, or worse, hides behind it, afraid to deliver any bigger truths than one individual's epiphanies.
However, I have since regressed. My second novel and the new short story I'm attempting to write are both in first. What has happened? All of a sudden I'm finding third person far more limiting. True, you can justify traveling among places and times and consciousnesses in ways you can't do in first--in a realistic first, I might add. But I can't let go of the notion that someone is always telling the story. She may be all but effaced behind the opaque screen of minimalism, or you may have the chatty, confidential "I" of much 19th century fiction, who does not sense his perspective as limited at all. In any case, there is a narrating consciousness. Some may simply decide that's the author's consciousness, with no intervening figure between it and the reader, but I somehow can't see that. To me, the narrating voice is always created, through the act of writing itself; it's artificial, which I don't mean in a negative way. So I feel like I have to understand that voice, and who it's coming from. In other words, third keeps blending into first for me anyway, so why not save a step and just do first?
It may be that first limits you in terms of saying what other characters are really thinking, and keeps you from being in two or more places or times at once. On the other hand, first gives you a tremendous amount of internal latitude. It seems to me it's much easier to justify flashbacks, for instance, in first. We suddenly remember stuff all the time, and having the memory can be part of the story, rather than (god forbid) a sort of pat psychological underpinning for some character. You can also just stop the story and muse (engagingly, of course) on the narrator's pet obsessions: Why does my father insist on wearing those glasses? How can my best friend believe in ghosts? Did the world really exist before I came into it? (Try thinking about that through the mind of a fictional character!)
Anyway, I'm finding there's lots of terrain to explore in the first-person point of view. But I wouldn't rule out authorial immaturity, either.
Thursday, June 02, 2011
Consciousness and character
It seems the whole consciousness thing is as tough a nut to crack as the whole what-is-the-universe-made-of thing. Over at 13.7, Alva Noë suggests a different way of approaching consciousness:
Literature and literary characters give us more direct access to other minds than we have in everyday life. At least we seem to have access, in the form of other people's interior thoughts. On the other hand, this access is limited to what can be expressed in verbal language; and the other people are, at least to some extent, fictional.
I won't wade into the morass of how much language itself creates or forms consciousness. But we do experience a sort of merging of consciousnesses when we read. The author's words steer our minds in directions they might not otherwise go. Her language, for a time, becomes ours, though what we see and feel through that language can't be exactly what the author saw and felt when she was writing. We're drawn in by generalities, a shared language and similar broad-strokes experiences (love, loss, fear, ecstasy). But it's the edges, where the differences are negotiated, that give art life.
About character specifically: It seems to me we could think of characters as consciousnesses, by which I mean ways of seeing and being in the world, which overlap in general ways but not in specifics. I think I've too often pictured my own characters as different, atomized mixtures of my own consciousness (which I'm sloppily eliding here with personality): That one has more of my prickliness and less of my confidence; this one embodies my secret desire to become a hairdresser. But I haven't thought enough about how these guys relate to each other as consciousnesses.
In other words, just like us real people, characters should be aware that others have minds, and be equally aware that they can't quite reach them. They are as alone, and as connected, in their world as we are in ours. And moments when consciousnesses seem to touch and interact--as when an author suddenly shows us an entirely new way of seeing--should be as amazing for characters within the novel as they are for us on the "outside."
For a while now I've been arguing that we shouldn't look for consciousness in the brain. We haven't found it there, and we won't. Not because consciousness happens somewhere else, in the soul, say, or in the environment, or in the collective. But because consciousness isn't something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.Sidestepping the actual question of what consciousness is, I think this discussion has implications for fiction writers. (Well, everything has implications for fiction writers.)
Literature and literary characters give us more direct access to other minds than we have in everyday life. At least we seem to have access, in the form of other people's interior thoughts. On the other hand, this access is limited to what can be expressed in verbal language; and the other people are, at least to some extent, fictional.
I won't wade into the morass of how much language itself creates or forms consciousness. But we do experience a sort of merging of consciousnesses when we read. The author's words steer our minds in directions they might not otherwise go. Her language, for a time, becomes ours, though what we see and feel through that language can't be exactly what the author saw and felt when she was writing. We're drawn in by generalities, a shared language and similar broad-strokes experiences (love, loss, fear, ecstasy). But it's the edges, where the differences are negotiated, that give art life.
About character specifically: It seems to me we could think of characters as consciousnesses, by which I mean ways of seeing and being in the world, which overlap in general ways but not in specifics. I think I've too often pictured my own characters as different, atomized mixtures of my own consciousness (which I'm sloppily eliding here with personality): That one has more of my prickliness and less of my confidence; this one embodies my secret desire to become a hairdresser. But I haven't thought enough about how these guys relate to each other as consciousnesses.
In other words, just like us real people, characters should be aware that others have minds, and be equally aware that they can't quite reach them. They are as alone, and as connected, in their world as we are in ours. And moments when consciousnesses seem to touch and interact--as when an author suddenly shows us an entirely new way of seeing--should be as amazing for characters within the novel as they are for us on the "outside."
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Jumping up and down on the fantasy bandwagon
In the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter says that literary authors are "jump[ing] on the fantasy bandwagon" this summer. All manner of highbrows are now writing about werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and robots, and evidently raking in the cash. Some of us have in fact been riding this very bandwagon for years, hopping up and down and waving our arms; but if this "new" trend means that novels about domed cities, crackpot marketing schemes, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and kind-of-magical babies are now hip--and lucrative--then I am all for it. Have I mentioned that my novel is about a domed city, a crackpot marketing scheme, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and a kind-of-magical baby? And celebrities? OK, just checking.
Apart from yapping after the accelerating Audi of mainstream success, I suspect these literary authors are also taking post-post modernism in another, logical direction. Those who are congenitally suspicious of "realism" may be getting tired of self-consciously playing around with figurative language--with clouding the lens, as it were. (Though not me, God knows.) Entering the imagined worlds normally reserved for science fiction and fantasy is another way of saying, "What do you mean, 'represent reality'? No, really, what do you mean?" Probably more readers will enjoy this second way of asking the question.
Apart from yapping after the accelerating Audi of mainstream success, I suspect these literary authors are also taking post-post modernism in another, logical direction. Those who are congenitally suspicious of "realism" may be getting tired of self-consciously playing around with figurative language--with clouding the lens, as it were. (Though not me, God knows.) Entering the imagined worlds normally reserved for science fiction and fantasy is another way of saying, "What do you mean, 'represent reality'? No, really, what do you mean?" Probably more readers will enjoy this second way of asking the question.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Where the real resides
From the Paris Review's interview with Ann Beattie:
The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.
I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, Ã la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections.
This is very well said, and something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. What makes literary characters seem real to us? What forms the boundaries around character? What delineates it; what processes build it up? I've always thought the "volley" was an important component, and that squares with my being somewhat averse to minimalism. But Beattie's right; minimalists like Beckett (whom I love) trust the reader to supply the "dreamscape." To put it another way, the characters' interior depictions are strong and suggestive enough to inspire that dreamscape.
So who's to say which is a more realistic depiction of character or "the world"? We don't come across people in trash cans calmly discussing life every day, but for many readers and playgoers, that psychological reality is fully recognizable. Perhaps it's more so, because they're creating their own context to a larger degree.
Jess Row is getting at this same issue in his recent Boston Review piece. His point, well worth remembering, is that our sense of "realism" is culturally determined. In part, anyway. (There's quite a dust-up going on in the comments to this article. By God, people do care about literature.)
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
The way we live now
Back, I hope, to the regular blogging schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays.
On this Tuesday, I think it's worth contemplating the words of Cathy Davidson on the HASTAC blog, in response to Bill Keller's fears about Twitter and the human soul:
On this Tuesday, I think it's worth contemplating the words of Cathy Davidson on the HASTAC blog, in response to Bill Keller's fears about Twitter and the human soul:
We are fifteen years into the commercialization of the Internet. We have all made tremendous adjustments to these new forms of technology and social media. I don't know about you but I do not need a new "study" to tell me my life has been changed by email, texting, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon.com, my iPad, my Blackberry, and on and on and on. It's NOT the Technology , Stupid! I hear James Carville shouting. It's about all of the ways life is changing and how technology facilitates, reshapes, redistributes the everyday patterns, facts, and habits of life. And it is about us figuring out the best ways to live given these rapid and continuing changes.I agree that it's time to dispense with laments for the Before Time. This technology stuff is here to stay, and many of us--the relatively privileged, anyway--are now living a good chunk of our lives in the cloud. If that's an expression of a collective soul, we have the opportunity, and obligation, to discover its proper care and feeding. If the soul--the Internet--is dumb, we can make it less so by reading and writing better stuff. If the soul is vicious, we can make it kinder. And so forth. The message is the medium.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Space colony art from the 1970s
Commissioned by NASA.
I love these for the same reason I love the NASA logo itself, the one known as "The Meatball." It's the goofy more-is-more graphic optimism of the early space age. (I don't love the alternative logo, known as "The Worm," which has fortunately been retired.)
Of course I'm biased, since my dad worked for NASA. He was at the research center now known as Glenn, formerly Lewis. They used to have "For the Benefit of All Mankind" spelled out in begonias in front of the building.
I love these for the same reason I love the NASA logo itself, the one known as "The Meatball." It's the goofy more-is-more graphic optimism of the early space age. (I don't love the alternative logo, known as "The Worm," which has fortunately been retired.)
Of course I'm biased, since my dad worked for NASA. He was at the research center now known as Glenn, formerly Lewis. They used to have "For the Benefit of All Mankind" spelled out in begonias in front of the building.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Light needs darkness
I really enjoyed this TED talk on the relationships between darkness and light. It also confirmed my suspicion that institutional lighting can truly make people crazy.
(Link here.)
(Link here.)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
The new novel is napping
On Tuesday I finished the first draft of my second novel. In contrast to the first one, which took six-plus years, this one took less than a year.
One reason is that I had the voice for the new novel in my head right away. It's first person, alternating between past and present. Knowing this meant that a lot of point-of-view problems, as well as tone and mood problems, never arose. First person is quite limiting in other ways, and it didn't work for my first novel; but it seems that if you at least know who's talking and why, you can go a long way.
Another reason this one went relatively quickly is that I've learned to tolerate some remarkably egregious flaws in a first draft. These include:
What all this means, of course, is that revising is going to be a lot of work. But before that is the required cooling-off/baking/resting period, in which I ignore the novel for approximately two months so that I can tackle revisions with a new perspective. I'm shooting for July 1.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: During the next two weeks blogging may be lighter than usual, and/or unpredictable, due to work, travel, and family issues.
One reason is that I had the voice for the new novel in my head right away. It's first person, alternating between past and present. Knowing this meant that a lot of point-of-view problems, as well as tone and mood problems, never arose. First person is quite limiting in other ways, and it didn't work for my first novel; but it seems that if you at least know who's talking and why, you can go a long way.
Another reason this one went relatively quickly is that I've learned to tolerate some remarkably egregious flaws in a first draft. These include:
- A character who, Schrodinger's cat-like, is both alive and dead throughout the first half of the story. I couldn't decide which had to be the case, so I just kept writing till it became clear.
- Another character who becomes three different people during the course of the story. When she first appeared I had one idea of the role she would play, but she evolved out of that. By the end became both the motive for the storytelling (the "narrative occasion," always an issue), and a fully worthy love interest for the narrator.
- Not knowing who the killer was until the last paragraph. Maybe still not knowing.
- The usual instances of overwriting, underwriting, and especially substituting summary for scene. God, why must there be scenes? Why can't everything be summary interspersed with occasional dialog?
- Massive doubts as to whether the story even begins to make sense on any level.
What all this means, of course, is that revising is going to be a lot of work. But before that is the required cooling-off/baking/resting period, in which I ignore the novel for approximately two months so that I can tackle revisions with a new perspective. I'm shooting for July 1.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: During the next two weeks blogging may be lighter than usual, and/or unpredictable, due to work, travel, and family issues.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Of chicks and literature
I missed the initial dust-up in which Jennifer Egan, fresh off her Pulitzer win, described certain works of "chick lit" as "very derivative, banal stuff," prompting Jennifer Weiner, a noted author in that genre, to tweet, "And there goes my chance to be happy that a lady won the big prize." Floodgates have opened; Egan has been widely accused of attacking fellow women authors and setting the cause back 50 years.
Jeez.
Anyway, it's all spelled out in this Millions article by Deena Drewis, who pretty much has the same take on the fracas as I do. I've talked about this issue--expectations for women writers--in a slightly different context before. Bottom line, I think it's great that Egan advised "young female writers" to "shoot high and not cower." Although she may have steered them toward a life of relative poverty. Not, again, that there is anything wrong with chick-lit or women's lit (which I understand are not quite the same thing, inasmuch as I understand what either of these things really is). What's wrong is being shocked when some women say they don't want to write or read it.
In a related development, last Sunday, the "Riff" piece in the New York Times Magazine by Carina Chocano compared two movies that came out 20 (!) years ago, Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman. Chocano points out that while the former was truly groundbreaking, the latter now seems more prescient and contemporary. Unfortunately.
I will just conclude with an update on my plea for complex portrayals of intellectuals in American fiction. How about complex portrayals of women intellectuals specifically? Of women for whom philosophical, artistic, and/or scientific concerns are central to life, not a misguided distraction or displacement of maternal energies?
Jeez.
Anyway, it's all spelled out in this Millions article by Deena Drewis, who pretty much has the same take on the fracas as I do. I've talked about this issue--expectations for women writers--in a slightly different context before. Bottom line, I think it's great that Egan advised "young female writers" to "shoot high and not cower." Although she may have steered them toward a life of relative poverty. Not, again, that there is anything wrong with chick-lit or women's lit (which I understand are not quite the same thing, inasmuch as I understand what either of these things really is). What's wrong is being shocked when some women say they don't want to write or read it.
In a related development, last Sunday, the "Riff" piece in the New York Times Magazine by Carina Chocano compared two movies that came out 20 (!) years ago, Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman. Chocano points out that while the former was truly groundbreaking, the latter now seems more prescient and contemporary. Unfortunately.
I will just conclude with an update on my plea for complex portrayals of intellectuals in American fiction. How about complex portrayals of women intellectuals specifically? Of women for whom philosophical, artistic, and/or scientific concerns are central to life, not a misguided distraction or displacement of maternal energies?
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Lyrical realism vs. the avant-garde
A recent piece by Garth Risk Hallberg revisits a 2008 Zadie Smith essay, in which she compares Joseph O'Neill's Netherland to Tom McCarthy's Remainder.* I was surprised to learn that Smith came out strongly against Netherland as the type of novel she'd like to see--and write--more of. But that's a testament to how unprepared I am to wade into this debate. Not only have I not read Smith's essay, I also have not read Remainder or any of McCarthy's work. This will not, of course, stop me from commenting.
Like Smith, I've grown tired of "lyrical Realism" in contemporary fiction, and suspect that it's holding fiction back from addressing Big Questions. I don't, however, have a strong argument at hand to prove this. It's more a feeling that all the time spent "showing" the raised, doily-like pattern on the china our heroine is setting on the rough-hewn dining room table leaves less time for "telling," or asking, what all this is for. Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? What are our obligations to it? Yes, I know: these questions are all there. They are embedded in the showing of the china, and a more subtle mind than mine would appreciate them that way. I just prefer it when characters and authors wrestle with big questions explicitly, at least from time to time. And some of that wrestling could well spill over into the novel's form, making it what is loosely called "avant-garde."
On the other hand, I really liked Netherland, and I believe it's because, as Hallberg puts it, "the potentially meaningless gets redeemed by fine writing." That's no minor distinction. When the writing is that fine, that important to the story, it becomes its own meta, its own avant-garde. Of course it's extremely hard to do this well; the attempt often results in too much milky light glinting off the aforementioned china, and/or tiresome nosedives into the past. Back to "lyrical Realism" of the most lamentable kind.
Anyway, Hallberg deftly undermines both the lyrical Realist and avant-garde categories, reminding us that the point, for both writers and readers, is not to choose a side. Instead, it's up to authors to rethink and revise form *every time* they sit down to write--not for the sake of form itself, but to properly accommodate the writer's "burning."
*We have now reached the third level of meta, criticizing criticism of criticism. There's probably a point at which this must stop.
Like Smith, I've grown tired of "lyrical Realism" in contemporary fiction, and suspect that it's holding fiction back from addressing Big Questions. I don't, however, have a strong argument at hand to prove this. It's more a feeling that all the time spent "showing" the raised, doily-like pattern on the china our heroine is setting on the rough-hewn dining room table leaves less time for "telling," or asking, what all this is for. Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? What are our obligations to it? Yes, I know: these questions are all there. They are embedded in the showing of the china, and a more subtle mind than mine would appreciate them that way. I just prefer it when characters and authors wrestle with big questions explicitly, at least from time to time. And some of that wrestling could well spill over into the novel's form, making it what is loosely called "avant-garde."
On the other hand, I really liked Netherland, and I believe it's because, as Hallberg puts it, "the potentially meaningless gets redeemed by fine writing." That's no minor distinction. When the writing is that fine, that important to the story, it becomes its own meta, its own avant-garde. Of course it's extremely hard to do this well; the attempt often results in too much milky light glinting off the aforementioned china, and/or tiresome nosedives into the past. Back to "lyrical Realism" of the most lamentable kind.
Anyway, Hallberg deftly undermines both the lyrical Realist and avant-garde categories, reminding us that the point, for both writers and readers, is not to choose a side. Instead, it's up to authors to rethink and revise form *every time* they sit down to write--not for the sake of form itself, but to properly accommodate the writer's "burning."
*We have now reached the third level of meta, criticizing criticism of criticism. There's probably a point at which this must stop.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
True stories about people's lives, and fiction
Still (for some reason) on the subject of David Foster Wallace, self-help, and literature, I very much enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away: 'Robinson Crusoe,' David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude" in the recent New Yorker.
It strikes me yet again that this is a very different kind of literary criticism than I was trained to produce as a grad student. Back in my day, literary study was an utterly sterile environment, an ICU where we hooked books up to large, wheezing theory machines and then watched them slowly die. (I'm sorry. I guess I'm still a little sad about the whole business.) There was literally no place to discuss the work in the context of lived experience. You could, by way of disclosing the position from which you spoke (i.e. your implied authority and/or biases on the subject), mention your race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, but only in the manner in which you would check these off on a form: permission to speak, plus plausible deniability. Check.
Actual personal narratives, however, had no place; and there could certainly be no discussion of the role the work in question played in your own life. Why should there be? In fact, it played no role. It was an object of study. Study was not life. As to how one was supposed to navigate one's non-studying hours--well, those hours or minutes were so brief anyway, why even wonder? One thing was clear: you would never turn to the poems or novels or treatises you were working on for solace or advice or reflection. That would be misuse, and stupid besides.
But now I'm noticing, both inside the academy and outside, a real turn toward lived experience as a central aspect of criticism. Critics are not necessarily exposing their innermost secrets with every piece (and thank god), but there's a sense of literature as part of life, as a pattern of rich threads woven throughout life's fabric. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is one example. Franzen's article is another. What we see in this kind of writing is the process of literature and life enhancing each other. We look through one at the other, and then back again, gaining new insights with every turn. We take literature with us on our journeys, not to pass the time, but to make it.
Franzen does this literally in "Farther Away," traveling to remote Masafuera Island with a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a small box of Wallace's ashes. The resulting article touches on ecology (especially birdwatching), technology, the perils of hiking in fog and rain, the history of the novel, the resonance of Robinson Crusoe today, and Wallace's complex life and cruel death. This last entails the cruelty he showed to others in killing himself, especially at home, where those he loved most would find him. The suicide is not just the delicate artist bidding adieu to the harsh world he can't handle. He added to that harshness in a big way, and his survivors have to deal with that. No wonder the pull of isolation is as strong for those left behind as it was for Wallace.
Franzen's grief expands the meaning of Robinson Crusoe, instead of reducing it, as the hermetically trained critic might fear. And vice versa: Crusoe enhances (which does not mean "worsens") the grief. Pieces like this show the most illuminating way to read cannot be in a library cubicle, surrounded by white walls and buzzing lights and the unrelenting fear of failure. Instead, we could try reading a little, walking a little, nearly falling off a rock, building a campfire, reading some more, crying, sleeping, reading, scattering ashes. Now what does the book have to say to us--and vice versa?
It strikes me yet again that this is a very different kind of literary criticism than I was trained to produce as a grad student. Back in my day, literary study was an utterly sterile environment, an ICU where we hooked books up to large, wheezing theory machines and then watched them slowly die. (I'm sorry. I guess I'm still a little sad about the whole business.) There was literally no place to discuss the work in the context of lived experience. You could, by way of disclosing the position from which you spoke (i.e. your implied authority and/or biases on the subject), mention your race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, but only in the manner in which you would check these off on a form: permission to speak, plus plausible deniability. Check.
Actual personal narratives, however, had no place; and there could certainly be no discussion of the role the work in question played in your own life. Why should there be? In fact, it played no role. It was an object of study. Study was not life. As to how one was supposed to navigate one's non-studying hours--well, those hours or minutes were so brief anyway, why even wonder? One thing was clear: you would never turn to the poems or novels or treatises you were working on for solace or advice or reflection. That would be misuse, and stupid besides.
But now I'm noticing, both inside the academy and outside, a real turn toward lived experience as a central aspect of criticism. Critics are not necessarily exposing their innermost secrets with every piece (and thank god), but there's a sense of literature as part of life, as a pattern of rich threads woven throughout life's fabric. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is one example. Franzen's article is another. What we see in this kind of writing is the process of literature and life enhancing each other. We look through one at the other, and then back again, gaining new insights with every turn. We take literature with us on our journeys, not to pass the time, but to make it.
Franzen does this literally in "Farther Away," traveling to remote Masafuera Island with a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a small box of Wallace's ashes. The resulting article touches on ecology (especially birdwatching), technology, the perils of hiking in fog and rain, the history of the novel, the resonance of Robinson Crusoe today, and Wallace's complex life and cruel death. This last entails the cruelty he showed to others in killing himself, especially at home, where those he loved most would find him. The suicide is not just the delicate artist bidding adieu to the harsh world he can't handle. He added to that harshness in a big way, and his survivors have to deal with that. No wonder the pull of isolation is as strong for those left behind as it was for Wallace.
Franzen's grief expands the meaning of Robinson Crusoe, instead of reducing it, as the hermetically trained critic might fear. And vice versa: Crusoe enhances (which does not mean "worsens") the grief. Pieces like this show the most illuminating way to read cannot be in a library cubicle, surrounded by white walls and buzzing lights and the unrelenting fear of failure. Instead, we could try reading a little, walking a little, nearly falling off a rock, building a campfire, reading some more, crying, sleeping, reading, scattering ashes. Now what does the book have to say to us--and vice versa?
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