Literary Agent Janet Reid posts an annual breakdown of the reasons why she rejected incoming manuscripts from wannabe authors in the previous year. Though her populist roster may not be pertinent to many (or any) reading this – it makes interesting reading:
Statistics to torture yourself with in 2010
Some of her older posts are informative too.
People (tutors, writers, other students) have told me the same thing in different configurations: “Characters drive the narrative!”
I nod. I agree. I go back to quietly and tightly plotting and planning every aspect of the novel I’m writing – because, actually, I don’t really believe it. I read interviews with writers who say they invent characters and they sort of wander off and do their own thing.
“They’re out of my control!” they cry, “She wanted to spend the entire book weeping in a cupboard”.
Of course, character is important. Characters must be satisfying by whatever criteria you wish to measure satisfaction. But should they be given minds of their own and set free to do whatever they please? Moulded from clay like goylem?
Stephen King claims that’s what he does. Not actually renanimate mud, granted, but he says in his memoir On Writing that he starts with character first and plot grows from what those characters go off and do.
Funny, then, that in every single one of his novels his characters make bad decisions that turn out to be influenced by some guilty secret from their childhood/the past which manifest as destructive supernatural forces.
Because ultimately, it doesn’t matter how comprehensively characters are constructed, they are always invention. As such, they are subject to the same limits of invention as plot. They are fragments of the author.
I say this because, implicit in the notion that character is paramount – that modern fiction must be a facsimile of reality – is the twin idea that plot is redundant. Or, at best, secondary.
Thing is, I like plot. I learned how to love plot from reading science fiction short story anthologies, dozens of them, throughout my adolescence; one tightly described high concept after another. Characters reduced to cyphers.
And while I don’t subscribe to the view that characters should be mere pawns, shifted around in one of a number of finite patterns, I don’t feel satisfied unless I’ve been given a conundrum to solve; a set of ideas to work through.
A story.
And here’s the link that starting me thinking about this, on this cold Christmas morning, instead of presents and egg nog; an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal about a resurgence in plot.
(…) the discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience. The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward’s way out, for people who can’t deal with the real world. If you’re having too much fun, you’re doing it wrong.
Lev Grossman – Good Novels Don’t have to be Hard
How do you break into the literary world? In an interview with Wired, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells us it’s 85% graft, 5% inspiration, and 10% reading lots of fantasy and SF magazines… sort of. Here’s the relevant bit:
“Pocketful of Dharma” was the first story that I sold, and that was really my first attempt at writing something short.
I’d stalked William Gibson at one point at a book signing and had asked him what his secret to success was. You know I was a very hungry, very needy sort of writer and was just looking for any kind of a clue about how the whole thing worked. I sort of hovered over his shoulder while he was signing other people’s books. I hit him with all of these questions and one of the things that he said was that he’d written short stories until somebody would take him seriously and that was when he managed to actually sell a novel. So I sort of took that to heart and went home and sat down and was like: ‘OK, so I need to write a short story. How the fuck do I do this?’
So I bought some science fiction magazines–fantasy and science fiction magazines and stuff– and read all of the short stories in them and went, ‘OK, I just need to write something better than any these things.’ I sat down and started banging away and eventually what I got was “Pocketful of Dharma.”
I’m reading The Catcher in the Rye for the fifth time – following on from a week dipping into Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths, The contrast between these two experiences has been instructive.
One of the themes of Labyrinths is the structuralist idea of reader as author. Borges parodies the notion, belittles and criticises it by making it a joke. In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, a cod-academic narrator unearths a transliteration of Cervantes’ Don Quixote by a contemporary author. He describes Menard’s desire to make the text his own – to create his own Quixote. But, we see that Menard has done nothing to the text at all; he has merely transcribed it.
In a key section, the narrator describes the difference between two identical paragraphs of text:
“The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.”
While this is clearly a stone lobbed in the direction of New Criticism – the “intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley that dictates the irrelevance of authorial intention– I find that I can describe, anecdotally, a similar experience when re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. The text is the same, but the meaning of the novel has changed for me over time, in the new contexts I’ve found myself in and with new experience to compare it with.
I first read it in the 1980s, when I was 16 – the same age as Holden Caulfield, the novel’s protagonist. The cliché is that when you read Catcher as a teenager, you become Holden. That is, of course, what happened to me. The first person narration, the post-pubescent angst, the easy colloquial style all contribute to the sense that your thoughts are Holden’s thoughts. You are disconnected and cynical and you know everything – just like Holden. He speaks with your voice and you, like Holden, are in that limbo between child and adulthood.
I read Catcher again at 21 and, if anything, I was in even more agreement with Holden’s rebellious take on the institutions of adulthood. Curiously though, where I once felt that I was like Holden, this time I felt that he was like me. I had by then a firmer grasp of who I was, what my thoughts and feelings were. They had been shaped by Holden and Rebel without a Cause and John Lennon. Of course, I wasn’t the first person to think like that. Fortunately for me, my relationship with the popular culture I loved didn’t make me want to kill my idols.
I had another go at Catcher at 27. At this point I had been teaching at University level for three years – a job I enjoyed and was good at, but that was rife with political infighting at the institution I worked in. The first cracks in my love affair with Caulfield began to show. I felt ambivalent. I felt accused of selling out. My Girlfriend of the time read Catcher too. She found Holden “annoying”. I didn’t finish the read through.
At 35 my dissatisfaction with Holden had come full circle. I saw him as ungrateful and privileged during that reading; middle class and whiny. His military school scholarship and New York brownstone lifestyle. His artistic siblings and mistrust of the popular. I wanted to slap him. It was, as reactions to made-up people go, a little extreme.
Which brings me to my current reading. Again, I’m enjoying the novel – but for different reasons. I’m detached from Caulfield entirely and Salinger is foremost in my mind. It’s the writing I see now; the narrative and its execution. Holden is a brilliant creation; a flawed and authentic anti-hero. At 40, I can finally read that, see that, rather than looking for points of identification and reflections of self. I see, ironically, that Holden is a construction. He is a fiction. In his own words, he’s phony. I’m the one who’s real.
Take that, Holden Caulfield. You little shit.
Some notes on narrative that, in best Blue Peter tradition, I made earlier. 16 years earlier:
Narratives are made up of units of information. In Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ he states:
“…narrative is never made up of anything other than functional units … This is not a matter of art (on the part of the narrator), but of structure…”
Barthes goes on to deconstruct these functional units, outlining two distinct types of narrative component.
The first type are referred to as ‘functions’, which are essentially the narrative elements of the structure, the units that constitute ‘story’. Functions are “…units of content…”, they are statements that describe actions, (eg: Oswald shot the President) or provide information which is key to the narrative (Oswald had spent some time in Cuba). Barthes’ ‘Functions’ are similar to Hallorans’ ‘Message Vehicles’, which take meanings in terms of codes and sub-codes. To use an example from Barthes; the sentence “He saw a man of fifty” can render several meanings according to the context of the narrative and the position of the reader. It is firstly a description of age. In the context of other message vehicles that would define the text as a ‘spy thriller’, the man is unidentified and signifies a ‘possible threat’. In the context of the eighteen year old reader he is a significantly older man, and so on. Barthes also points out that functions are correlative to one another, contribute to the meaning of one another. The function ‘he replaced the receiver’ only gains meaning in relation to its correlate ‘he picked up the phone’.
The second units given a term are ‘Indices’, which locate the ‘scene’ of the text. Such units provide information about atmosphere, character, time and place. While these units do not directly contribute to the narrative, they serve to place the text into the ‘real’ world. For example, the indice “The night was stormy” gives us information about the temporal context of the narrative (it is night-time) and the atmosphere (stormy – foreshadows ‘doom’).
If narrative can be broken down into ‘units’ it follows, that these units can be ordered into a structure; a structure of messages that relate to each other. In books and films this structure is linear, is the Classic Realist structure of the text.
Decided to do my first semester essay on variable, internal focalisation in Madame Bovary. Want to explore the structuralist roots of perspective as Genette’s Narrative Discourse, the set text, refers to Barthes Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative a lot… And I love a bit of Barthes.
Anyway, for my benefit, here’s a beginner’s guide to focalisation or “point of view”.
Focalisation is the perspective from which we experience the narrative being told. I’m going to find a more concise way of expressing that later… Genette outlines three types of focalisation in narrative:
1. Non-focalised
This is often characterised as “omniscient” and is most frequently a third person narrative. Here, the narrator knows more than the characters about events that have happened and events that are to come, floats among and around them like a God, observing and noting. It’s the classic mode of the story teller, of Dickens and Balzac.
2. Internal Focalisation
Here the story is told from the exclusive viewpoint of the character or characters. It can be told in the first or third person, but presents the narrative through the experience of the focal character. We know what they know, see what they see.
It’s a little more complicated than that, though, as there are three variants:
a) Fixed Internal Focalisation
Here, we experience the text from the viewpoint of one character and one character alone. Classic examples would include:
Catcher in the Rye
A Confederacy of Dunces
b) Variable
In this subtype, we move from character to character within the narrative, experiencing their perspective. This might resemble, on the surface, non-focalised narrative perspective, but in true variable internal focalisation, the narrator knows and channels only the experience of the character she currently inhabits. Madame Bovary could be categorised as a narrative with variable, internal focalisation – but it’s a tricky one… The narrator’s voice begins in the first person, as an observer, for example.
c) Multiple
Multiple internal focalisation is similar to variable. However, we experience different narrative perspectives within a scene. This is the classic device of telling the same story from different viewpoints. There are many examples in film – Four Rooms, Code Unknown, Vantage Point.
3. External Focalisation
This is a rare variant of perspective in literary fiction – in which the action is described by an external observer. This observer doesn’t have access to the thoughts or feelings of the protagonists – and is an entirely external, authorial narrator or a minor character on the periphery. Examples abound in the short stories of Hemingway – but it’s a device most frequently found in genre fictions; crime, horror and the pulpier versions of SF.
Ploughing through the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I’m reminded of several other artists, not all of them writers.
The first is Jack Kerouac. The stream of consciousness narrative, poetic and vibrant real-time description and epic sentences. Full stops are few. My first attempt at reading was fruitless. Only going back and reading as though aloud and in character seemed to work. It was a child-like approach, but once I did that, I was there – in Woolf’s lucidly illustrated world.
The others are film-makers. Wim Wenders and Robert Altman (and his greatest imitator Paul Thomas Anderson). It flits in and out of different threads, from one viewpoint to another, aggregating into a whole. It puts me in mind of the first half of Wings of Desire as we move from the thoughts of one character to another, the focus becoming finer as the story progresses and coalesces. Very modern, difficult and rewarding.