I have a deadline this week, and my future-space-sex-bot-love-story won’t write itself. So I’ve not learned much this week, apart maybe from those near invisible discoveries that come with a new writing project if you’re lucky. I did, however, come across an amazing video via io9 this week. As their category has it – this is awesome.
Here we go again.
Oh damn, and it’s gone wrong already. I was all set to reaffirm my 90s preference for Blur (posh boys with talent) over Oasis (working class heroes with Beatles fixation and annoying mannerisms.. suuunsheeeeyine). The Daily Mail, hate-filled pedlar of warped mediocrity that it is, reported this week that Noel Gallagher thought Britain was better under Thatcher. Turns out he doesn’t think any such thing, and is in fact actively looking forward to celebrating her death. So actually this week I learned that Noel Gallagher isn’t a Tory. Which is nice. As to his sentiments regarding the wicked witch of the 80s — I’ve always stood roughly with Elvis Costello on the issue. Except as I grow older I find it hard to celebrate the dementia or death of anyone, even the most toxic. Here’s Costello.
Apparently, there’s a crisis in critical theory. As reported by MHP Books. I don’t have much to say about that, except to ponder who it will inconvenience?
[The door to the room is broken down]
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand admission! We demand admission!
LUNKWILL:
Hey! What?
FOOK:
Hey, hey, hey!
MAJIKTHISE:
Come on, you can’t keep us out!
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that you can’t keep us out.
LUNKWILL:
Who are you? What do you want? We’re busy!
MAJIKTHISE:
I am Majikthise.
VROOMFONDEL:
And I demand that I am Vroomfondel.
MAJIKTHISE:
It’s all right, you don’t need to demand that.
VROOMFONDEL:
Alright. I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand! That is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!
MAJIKTHISE:
No we don’t! That’s precisely what we don’t demand.
VROOMFONDEL:
Oh. We don’t demand solid fact! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts! I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel.
FOOK:
Who are you anyway?
MAJIKTHISE:
We are philosophers.
VROOMFONDEL:
But we may not be.
MAJIKTHISE:
Yes we are!
VROOMFONDEL:
sorry.
MAJIKTHISE:
We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and other professional thinking persons.
VROOMFONDEL:
Um-hmm
MAJIKTHISE:
And we want this machine off, and we want it off now.
FOOK:
What is all this?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that you get rid of it.
FOOK:
What’s the problem?
MAJIKTHISE:
I’ll tell you what the problem is mate: demarcation. That’s the problem.
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that demarcation may or may not be the problem.
MAJIKTHISE:
You just let the machines get on with the adding up and we’ll take care of the eternal verities, thank you very much.
VROOMFONDEL:
yeah.
MAJIKTHISE:
By law the quest for the ultimate truth is quite clearly the unalienable prerogative of your working thinkers
VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right.
MAJIKTHISE:
I mean what’s the use of us sitting up all night saying there may -
VROOMFONDEL:
Or may not be
MAJIKTHISE:
[Softly] …or may not be… [louder] a god, if this machine comes along the next morning and gives you ‘is telephone number?
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!
DEEP THOUGHT:
Might I make an observation at this point?
MAJIKTHISE:
You keep out of this metal nose.
VROOMFONDEL:
We demand that that machine not be allowed to think about this problem!
DEEP THOUGHT:
If I might make an observation…
MAJIKTHISE:
We’ll go on strike!
VROOMFONDEL:
That’s right. You’ll have a national philosopher’s strike on your hands.
DEEP THOUGHT:
Who will that inconvenience?
MAJIKTHISE:
Never you mind who it’ll inconvenience you box of black legging binary bits! It’ll hurt, buster! It’ll hurt!
Nick Mamatas reported that, according to an Oklahoma writer’s group, romance is for straights only. Romance Writers Ink, in other words, banned same-sex entries from a short story competition. I was considering submitting the sex robot story I have lined up for workshop in a couple of weeks. That has plenty of entries, and almost none of them are same sex. As it happened, though, they cancelled the competition, so no robot-monkey-rumpy for them.
Back in the golden days of Doctor Who, according to Andrew Hickey an entire series was rewritten at the last minute so that one of the Doctor’s assistants magically changed his face for a couple of episodes. The reason? A bout of chicken pox.
There is a version of the excellent writing package Scrivener available for Linux now. It’s beta, and a little shaky in places, but it works fine. This makes me happy.
What do you mean you don’t run Linux? Did you know it’s free? And that you get access to thousands of applications any of which you can download and install on your system with a single command? Why pay big corporations for stuff that’s freely and legally available? OK, never mind. I’m not going to change any minds here, am I? Enough Linux/Open Source advocacy rantage for now.
According to Piers D Britton in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Design for Screen SF) science fiction movie and TV designers aspire to something called extended common sense. This is the kind of design that annoys pedants (actually drives them near insane), but keeps fans happy. It’s really about fulfilling an audience’s expectations so that plausibility is maintained. But..
“It is worth laboring the fact that the apparent, not theoretical, possibility of existence is the real concern of the sf designer” p341
So we accept explosions and noisy fighters in the vacuum of space because these scientifically incorrect aspects of Star Wars appeal to our expectations of arial warfare.
Advances in literary technology have been baffling readers for longer than you think. This clip is over ten years old, but it was new to me this week.
I spend a lot of time studying and researching. And, let’s face it, a lot of the rest of my time idly clicking from link to link to link. I come across many truths, half-truths, and complete untruths, which stew and boil around in my mind and torment me half to death. They have to go somewhere or I’ll go mad, I tell you. Blooming insane. Here are seven things I learned this week.
The population of ancient Rome was equivalent to that of Wolverhampton. That is about 250,000 inhabitants, apparently. Of course as soon as I learned that, I had to go and unlearn it. The figure set some alarm bells ringing for me, so like any good academic I headed straight for Wikipedia. Which claims ancient Rome reached a population of 1 million, possibly much more.Incidentally there’s a helpful page that informs me that the distance between Rome and Wolverhampton is 1006 miles. The distance between ancient Rome and Wolverhampton is might be more interesting. Though it looks as if Wolverhampton only started really doing city-like things sometime after 600 AD. Having said that, not existing didn’t stop the town from being a point on a mystical network of ancient Woolworths stores. In fact it turns out, with a bit of judicious selection, you can apply some of the dodgy maths that has been used to find meaning in the placement of ancient monuments to any scatter of sites. I still like the image of prehistoric pick and mix, though.
An ability to speak French is a sign of suspicious liberality. If you are a xenophobic right wing American voter, that is. Popular amphibian Newt Gingrich smeared his only slightly less unpleasant opponent Mitt Romney by suggesting he routinely let disgusting French vowels drip from his venal liberal mouth. It now turns out that Newt may be suspiciously polyglot himself. What to do? Agents of purity could imitate the Great Escape and have French operatives follow hopeful candidates around yelling “Bon Chance!”until someone slips and replies “Merci!”. The quisling operative will then point and shout in accented English. “HE SPEAKS FRENCH! HE SPEAKS FRENCH! TAKE HIM AWAY! (Can I have my cheese now?)”
In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all debate on the origin of language. The problem of course is that language, being language, is not something that hangs around to be carbon dated. Especially in pre-literate societies, which any society that has just somehow agreed to call all bananas HUURG probably is. You can imagine how it might have worked though. There’s the give me a banana gesture, which is a little gimme gimme gimme dance accompanied, half by chance, by a particular moan. And after a while it seems like a whole lot less effort to just lie around and moan until someone gets off his fat paleolithic arse and fetches you a banana already. And thus was language born. Next week. Fire.
An adult human could crawl through the aorta of a blue whale. Actually, I had to switch this fact in. Originally it was going to be a tidbit I gleaned from my son who maintains that a blue whale’s heart only beats once every five minutes. However I can’t find any evidence of this anywhere. Here’s the best I came up with on a quick search. He swears he read it in a book, but I told him “link, or it isn’t true.”
According to Claire Squires, writing in Judging a Book by its Cover, “By 2001, five companies (Bertelsman, Perason, HarperCollins, Hodder Headline, and Hachette) had just over 50 percent of market share in the UK, thus controlling over half the market.” To me, that’s so self-evidently a Bad Thing that I’m tempted not to say anything else about it. It is, perhaps, to publishing, what Francophone candidates are to American politics. Just wrong. A much linked articleby Rebecca Swift describes the impact of the collision between commercial and creative imperatives.”Good writers still need to play. They still need space, time and respect to practice their craft, make errors if necessary, and come up, if they want, with something new. Creativity was ever thus. If publishers don’t understand this, surely it will be at their, or the culture’s, long term peril? Publishers currently run the risk of losing important writers in the long term on the basis of short term decision making. Money people can say ‘it doesn’t matter as long as we earn money’ but in the long run this is to fail to have a healthy understanding of what books, or the ‘product’ is.”
In The State of the Novel Dominic Head writes that a literary novel is “the kind of book that is shortlisted for literary prizes.”This seems like an excellent model for a definition. Similarly, racing cars are the kind of cars that get entered for races, and school children are the kind of children who go to school.More seriously, though, there is a good point being made here, whether intentionally or not. The literariness of literary novels is a notoriously slippery category. We might say that a literary novel emphasises character over plot, or that it is concerned with form, that it challenges conventions of structure, that it references a canon. All these things may be true, but they can also be true of genre novels. And which genre authors are selected for elevation to literary status is also up for grabs. This Booker brought us the much-attacked ‘readable’ shortlist. I’ve just completed A.D Miller’s Snowdrops which I enjoyed. I couldn’t tell you why it’s more worthy of shortlisting than any number of other thoughtful thrillers (Child 44by Tom Rob Smith, for example).Like pornography, it seems, literary fiction is hard to define, but we know it when a judge sees it. There’s only one thing for sure. You won’t be seeing science fiction on the shortlist any time soon. Unless it’s by Margaret Atwood. And then of course, it won’t be science fiction. Will it?
Perfect daily bread. 500g strong white bread flour. 200g wholemeal bread flour. Two teaspoons of salt. A 7 gram packet of dried yeast. 450ml water. Stir it all up until its a proper ball of dough. Leave for ten minutes. Knead for a few minutes on a heavily floured worktop. Put it back in the bowl for up to an hour, until it is half again, or twice its original size. Knead again briefly. Roll it up into a bread shape and leave covered for another half hour or so on a floured baking tray. It should be slightly alarmingly puffed up. Slash two crosses in the top, and sprinkle some flour. Bake for 15 minutes at 230 degrees Celsius. Then another ten minutes or so at 170 degrees Celcius. (This is my hybrid of recipes by Dan Lepard and Linda Collister)
There is no shortage of books about literary criticism and critical theory. There are also plenty of popular how-to guides for writers. Poking about Blackwell’s Bookshop the other week, though, I came across Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction by Catherine Brady. Brady is a professor of creative writing at the University of San Francisco. This is a rare hybrid: an academic work aimed at creative writing students. As such it’s not a light read. I think it more than repays the effort it demands, though. From it, here are some things about ambiguity and the hidden in fiction I (think I) learned this week.
Good stories are ambiguous
Ambiguity lies at the heart of literature. Brady is talking primarily about literary fiction here, where conclusions are rarely drawn tight. However, even in a genre story, you should leave work for your readers. Fiction is a partnership between writer and reader, after all.
If you want to find good examples of unstable meaning in popular story, take a look at grown up TV dramas like The Sopranos and The Wire. Is Tony Soprano a thug or a lovable gangster? A family man or a philanderer? No episode of The Sopranos ended with a pat conclusion. Instead, the viewer was left with the uneasy feeling that everything she knew about the story might be wrong.
There’s a tension between the clear and obvious things the viewer has seen. A kiss, a murder, an argument about a car. And the murky world of meaning. That tension is the interesting part of the story, it’s the part that lingers in the mind, and carries on cooking long after the closing credits.
The duty of a story is to raise questions, not to provide answers
It may be the job of a polemic, or a piece of investigative journalism to lead a reader to a clear set of answers. In writing fiction you’re freed of that task. Instead you provide the evidence, and then let the reader decide:
Like a judge, the writer remains silent at critical junctures—but not silent on which information is relevant to judgment
And it’s here that we cheat of course. We skew the case. If we’re smart, though, we don’t nail the conclusion down too tight. A story with no room for interpretation is presented to the reader pre-suffocated.
The gaps are as important as the scenes
A plot is a series of actions. First this happens, and then that happens. But in any plot there’s much more gap than action. Some of that omission is irrelevant, of course. There’s a lot of teeth cleaning and TV watching that doesn’t get described. But there’s also meaning implicit in much the writer leaves out.
Imagine a scene in which a man is happily setting out for a night on the town. He’s slapping on aftershave, and dancing to something silly on the radio. He’s making plans on the phone. And now imagine a scene in which the same man is disheveled, and drunk, and sitting on the edge of a railway bridge as dawn breaks. He is bleeding from a cut on his face. Put those scenes together. Which part is the most important? The first scene? the second scene? Or the omission that sits between them?
A gap in a story implies a causal relationship. Often that will be uncomplicated, a simple matter of omitting unnecessary detail. But it’s the troubled and troubling gaps that can help make a story. It’s in these gaps that the reader must consider.. what happened, and what it means. The story becomes a complex thing, without the need for complexity on the page.
Separate action and consequence
One gap we all know about in fiction is the cliffhanger. The most obvious example of this is the Doctor Who or Dick Barton moment. The hero is moments away from obliteration by a fiendish zap gun, so let’s end the episode here. Often, though, the cliffhanger does not reside in the question “what will happen next?”. Instead it calls up the question “what will be the consequences of this unexpected event?”
When Jane walks in on Peter garotting the family dog, the event has already occurred. It’s a done deal. But we’re still hooked. We want to know how Janet will react, and what it was that drove Peter to this drastic action in the first place.
Brady suggests you can take this a stage further, though, by omitting the immediate consequence altogether. Writing about Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, she says:
[The wrong body is found in a grave.] An amateur would have dwelled on the characters’ reactions at the gravesite, most likely having them address the questions in the reader’s mind and worry about the next step in their thwarted effort, draining off dramatic momentum rather than banking on it. What we don’t know yet keeps us hooked, so Faulker skips over their reactions and in chapter 5 jumps to the moment when Aleck, Chick, and Miss Habersham return to town, the white space emphasizing that their discovery compels further action and that it’s underway.
So, after Jane discovers Peter throttling the dog, rather than stay with the confrontation we might instead find ourselves at a doctor’s office, with the couple barely talking to one another. The reader will get her reveal soon enough, but not quite yet. We can spin it out, and we can let the mystery animate the ongoing action. Brady again:
The really developed action of a novel occurs before or after decisive action, in the lead time or the lag time between literal revelation and its emotional cause or consequence..
A story is two stories
Every story is perceived first at the literal level. This is where things happen, and we see them happen. But there is also a secret, implicit, story beneath this surface. This figurative level is the place of ambiguous meanings. Peter strangles the family dog. We find out later that this criminal act was provoked by a row about money and vet bills. Well that’s that, right? Clearly not. There’s a lot more to discover. It’s a detective story. There’s something pretty rotten at the heart of this relationship, and we’re only seeing the symptoms here. As Brady says:
…literal events enact the implicit tension of the hidden story.
The extent to which the hidden story remains hidden and the extent to which it is obliquely related to the visible will depend upon genre to a certain extent. A literary story will tend to emphasize ambiguity. A one to one relationship between portrayed events and submerged meaning is seen as mechanistic. With meaning pinned down, emotional and thematic complexity is reduced. With meaning open, a reader might use the literal story to conjure a number of different, even contradictory, hidden stories.
This can leave literary stories, especially literary short stories, open to the accusation that they are wilfully obscure. It’s true, I think, that in reading a story by Raymond Carver one has to understand there are conventions at work. It’s a little like the hidden rules of cryptic crosswords or Mornington Crescent (don’t let’s get started on that one though).
In a genre piece the hidden story is likely less buried or ambiguous, but it will be there. Good characters have motivations that run below the surface. So when they act, they do more than careen from event to event. They are driven by deep needs and conflicts. These are revealed by their actions, and this forms the hidden story. As TV shows like Mad Men, The Wire, and even Battlestar Galactica have recently shown, popularity and accessibility are not incompatible with complexity. As Brady writes:
It’s harder to conceive of plot as engineering a relationship between a visible story and a hidden one, but it’s a lot more fun
The climax is the hinge for the literal and the figurative
By convention a story’s climax is tied to a reveal. It’s at this point that the figurative story is closest to the literal story. In literary fiction this connection often remains oblique. A less successful story may provide an epiphany in which a protagonist achieves complete understanding of some facet of themselves. Brady argues that this is too obvious,:
As you compose a first draft, try this strategy of telling one story in order to tell another. Approached in the most literal-minded way this will deflect your attention from making a point and force metaphorical meaning along an axis of tension. Instead of steering your character straight at realization (an epiphany too much on your mind), struggle with the machanics of making one story yank another to the surface. This will lead you to discovery. I can vouch for it.
So the climax should offer a moment of illumination, but it should not convert the figurative story into a literal one. In other words don’t give the game away. If you explain everything you close down room for doubt and interpretation. The figurative story dissolves and becomes literal, albeit retrospectively. This rather defeats the point.
Crucially, though, the moment of illumination should be transformative. The reader’s understanding of both the hidden story and literal story is altered at the moment of climax.
When the potent charges laid in the rising action fire simultaneously at the climax, a story offers a convincing surprise. In terms that do not require realization in the form of an epiphany, the climax can be defined as a decisive action that convincingly reconfigures what has come before; at this moment the visible story comes closest to the hidden, untold story.
The hidden story is itself changed at this moment, because we’re introducing new evidence to the puzzle, and this necessarily reconfigures our understanding of deeper meaning.
The climax in a genre story has a similar transformative role, although ambiguity is less important here. The actions of a protagonist result in a crisis in which his character is both tested and revealed. In understanding more about the character, we can then read back over the story from a new perspective.
Genre stories also tend to offer a twist which entirely transforms the meaning of the story that came before. This reveal is often cruder and more decisive than that offered by the literary story. The detective was the poisoner all along, the entire world is a computer simulation, and so on. There’s a satisfying click as the puzzle piece falls into place, and the picture we then see is not what we expected. Whatever the nature of this revelation, it transforms our understanding of the literal story, and unveils a whole new set of implications, offering us an alternative or substantially transformed hidden story. In effect we have to tell the story all over again in order to understand it.
