Tag Archives: the writing process

Who’s telling this story, anyway

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The last two novels I’ve finished were written in the first person, but with my new WIP I’m trying third.

I’ve been struggling a little bit and finally today I realized why. With the first person POV, I didn’t have to think about who was telling the story. It was my protagonists. So all I had to do was imagine my protagnoists talking to a girlfriend, and presto I had my voice.

But with third person, my tendency is to fall into a more detached and literary tone. The attitude is more cool; it feels like I’m toying with my characters rather than living them from the inside out. Pushing them around on the plate with my fork.

I don’t like it — I don’t like how it feels to write it and I don’t like the prose that comes out at the other end.

I’m going to start revising. Only first, I’m going to figure out who is telling this new story I’ve got working. It won’t be anyone who is ever identified and she won’t be part of the novel. But she exists, and when I’ve found her voice I have a feeling things are going to begin falling into place with this book . . .

Step away from the book

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In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?

On agency

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Diana Peterfreund has a thought-provoking post on her blog about characterization and agency — in the sense of acting or exerting power. She writes, in part:

When you have a very normal character in a very extraordinary situation, there is a strong temptation to just let things happen to her. Let her be swept along in the tide of all the extraordinary things. Let the extraordinary people around her start making her decisions for her. I guess it works, but for my money, the really unforgettable stories are when the ordinary person overcomes these forces and makes decisions for herself. Maybe they’re the wrong decision, but at least they’re decisions.

She also makes an observation about the protagonists of Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland: Dorothy exhibits agency; Alice does not.

Another layer of interest to that comparison is that at the end of Alice in Wonderland, it’s revealed that the adventures were a dream. Alice was therefore de facto cast as a passive observer, the dreaming self, or perhaps even more precisely the waking self observing the dreaming self.

(Not that dreams must always be experienced passively; I often alter mine, sometimes scripting whole storylines — an experience very close to that of writing fiction, incidentally.)

Beginning a new book

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It’s the balm, they say, that soothes the query-monitoring itch.

I’m excited about it–the new book–but it’s scary too, vertigo-like to start to peer into the widening crack that’s now opened into yet another world and realize I have no choice, if I’m going to capture it for the telling, but to squeeze through the opening, close my eyes, and let go . . .

Got a nibble

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I have a draft of my new novel done, I’ve started querying, and I’ve gotten my first nibble: request for partial came in late yesterday, emailed it out today.

Nothing in the world is more fun than this. Even though I know what a long shot it is . . . how hard it is to fall short. It’s still about the most fun of anything I can imagine.

More on literary vs. popular novels

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From Michael at 2Blowhards, the transcription of a speech by novelist Richard Wheeler. Wheeler notes that the novels “we call classics . . . were largely written for ordinary people, not educated elites” and then offers this explanation for the creation of “literary fiction” as a category:

[T]he distinction between literary and popular fiction is quite recent, three or four decades old. When I was a youth it didn’t exist. Yet today it is a given: we assume that there have always been two branches of literature, and we writers need to make one or the other our own. Where did it come from? I had no idea how it evolved until my friend Win Blevins, who has an advanced degree in criticism from Columbia University, enlightened me. The distinction between literary and popular fiction arose, he told me, about the time when colleges began to offer workshop courses in creative writing, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

Teachers used the term “literary” to describe what was to be taught in these workshops. These seminars would teach students the art of writing a “serious” novel, and not something light or transitory or appealing to popular tastes. This distinction gradually became the norm, and in modern times “literary fiction” has become a distinct branch of literature.

Wheeler also says this, but doesn’t elaborate further:

Until recently, authors who wrote popular fiction thought it provided a better income than literary fiction. Publishers threw their publicity resources behind blockbuster and midlist novels, and the result was real rewards for the commercial novelist. But times are changing and who can say what the future will bring? I suspect that just now, most literary novelists earn more.

I wonder if that’s true, and why it is . . . are there too many pop fiction writers out there eating from the same pot? Is pop fiction a commodity, whereas literary fiction is a luxury, and so able to command higher prices?

Interesting questions . . .

Posted about this subject as well here.

Update: and here.

What he said

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Just when you thought one could hardly find a new virtue to ascribe to the blogosphere, we have this, in a piece at 2Blowhards about pulp fiction:

I was brainwashed, er, educated into reading and appreciating upscale fiction, yet my own temperament much prefers popular fiction. Games with words and concepts can amuse me for a while, but on a gut level I love narrative. In this, I’m like most people, of course. It’s funny the degree to which the upscale set has made so many readers feel apologetic about preferring story to intellectual shenanigans and art-games, isn’t it? Story is basic, after all; without it, there’s no such thing as fiction in the first place. Where highfalutin’ artists and audiences often see narrative as a to-be-regretted necessity, I see it as an inviting and giant playground. Where the upscale set often experiences the requirements of story as getting in the way of creativity and visions, I see narrative as what makes expression possible.

I can remember exactly when I realized that for me as a writer, it was about telling stories. I was an undergraduate, a Comparative Literature major, and reading all kinds of High Literature, but on the side I’d begun collecting volumes of folk tales at second hand bookstores, I’d become fascinated with literature’s oral roots, with the image of people gathered around a communal fire, trading stories, and how once in awhile someone would come along who was just that much better at telling them; someone who knew how to embellish an old tale just so, how to draw out the suspense, how to time the climax.

I was a hair’s breadth from becoming an academic, applying to graduate school and embarking on a writing career that would have hinged, always, on writing for other academics. But I broke.

I went for a long time afterward not writing much fiction — too much other stuff to sort out — but my fundamental commitment had been made. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to write books that people draw up to, transfixed, the way they once listened to storytellers spin tales around those ancient fires.

Do I have the chops? I don’t know. But that’s my aspiration.

I hang out on a chicklit forum on Yahoo (a fabulous resource for anyone who writes commercial women’s fiction) and once every couple of months someone will post a link to yet another review that sniffs at the chicklit genre for not being Literature, for not being High Art.

And every time, I feel like I’m looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope — something far away. And preternaturally tiny . . .

Update: posted more thoughts on literary versus popular/genre fiction here.

Draft one, done

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Completed the first draft of my current work-in-progress yesterday. Surprisingly emotional moment for me, which I hope means the book’s ending will have an emotional impact on readers.

It’s short, at 57K, but one of the items that I backburnered this round is the further development of a couple of the minor characters, so the revision process is going to bulk it up some.

All the same, it’s doubtful that it will hit the 80K range which seems to be the minimum target of most commercial fiction.

I plan to blog about the ever-perplexing “length” issue soon but not today. Trying to keep my attention on writing, still, not writing about writing ;-)

Worlds within worlds

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I’m fascinated by the question of whether there really is a line between one’s inner and outer experience. How much of what we “objectively” experience is “in reality” ha ha ha a projection of our inner lives?

I’m not going to prove out the answer to that question on this blog. Leastways not right now :-D However, when it comes to fictional worlds, the conclusion is foregone. By definition, the world a novelist creates is an inner world — interior to the writer as it’s created; interior to readers as it’s read.

Yet it must also depict what appears to be an “outer world” from the perspective of its characters.

And here’s where the fun begins, because from the perspective of the characters, that outer world must be an extension of their inner worlds. Perhaps, in real life, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar. But in a novel, it must always, always be something more, because the novelist can’t spare a single word. Williams’ “no ideas but in things” is not a pretty platitude. We are slaves to it. We must wield every “thing” in our novels as the ideas that they are. If we don’t, the novel becomes cluttered with dead weight, and quickly renders itself irrelevant at best, unreadable at worst.

A SORT OF A SONG

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

William Carlos Williams

I’ve been writing professionally for years, and making quite a decent living at it, but the writing I’ve done for my day job has been article-length stuff. And then I did a non-fiction book and was amazed at how it stretched my mental muscles, to manage something so long. But even non-fiction can be broken down into chunks — that’s what an outline is, after all, the book’s subject matter divided into pieces, and each piece treated as a discrete piece of writing.

Not so with a novel. With a novel, even if you work from an outline, you can’t really treat each piece discretely; they are all part of the whole, and sooner or later as you work you are going to have to hold that whole there, in your mind, and all at once. The characters’ inner and outer lives, every last scrap of them, and by that I don’t just mean the part that will end up on the page — the part that ends up on the page is the tip of the proverbial ice berg, thank you very much, the tip you’ve laid down just so, to suggest the shape of the behomoth below the surface — what you must hold in your head is 1000 times more. 10,000 times more — you must hold in your head the world, and the worlds within the world.

Even reading a novel doesn’t come close. When you read a novel you are fed the tip, and from that you make inferences. And inferences are light, and easy to wield — even when they are charged with feeling — it is like watching the worlds from a window.

Much easier.

Writing novels is hard.

Writing novels is hard.

(Somewhat related: the perils of abstraction in writing.)