Another Day Late
Just a quick post to let you know I’m running a little late with my blog post this week. Hopefully I’ll have it up tomorrow.
Dec 11
Dec 4
The Anatomy and Value of Fictional Violence
Two months ago, Sherwood Smith and Steve Gould both urged me to read Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe books
The Purpose of Fictional Violence
Like everything else in fiction, violence is a tool through which we can manipulate the reader’s emotional, mental, and physiological state. Most stories will use it as an accelerant: throw in a fight scene to boost the reader’s heartbeat, menace the hero to ratchet up tension, describe a murder in detail to make the reader uncomfortable. There is a natural sympathetic response when we read violence: our neurons fire in the same sensory areas as the hero’s, our heart rate goes up, our muscles tense. This is natural, and is part of the process by which we draw the reader into the story.
But violence can serve as more than an accelerant. Depending on how violent action is portrayed, we can use it to slow the story’s pace. Cornwell shows us – in scene after scene – how the butchery of war becomes a hard, bitter slog. He takes multiple paragraphs to describe a movement that would take seconds in reality, stretching the reader’s perception of time. And then he does it again. And again. And again, desensitizing us to the horrors of war just as if we were there fighting it.
In many stories, violence is the knife-edge on which the stakes balance. Conflict, and the themes it explores, are crystallized through violent action. A battle makes the political or philosophical conflict concrete, personalizes it, reduces it to an accessible or understandable simulacrum. A fight brings the emotional consequences home to the reader by playing on their sensory perceptions. While not all stories need violence to do so, violent action does make the stakes real in a way that reasoned discourse cannot.
So how does the tool work?
The Components of Fictional Violence
Focus
I keep returning to the Scribblies’ dictum that POV fixes everything, and that’s for damn good reason. The most important component in fictional violence is point-of-view, and more specifically the focus which that POV imbues.
Effective violence relies on the intersection of the reader’s imagination with their sensory perception of the events portrayed in the story. The reader might never have been in battle, but their imagination can supply the smell of smoke, the sound of screams, and the coppery taste of blood. The choice of how to direct the reader’s attention, which details to supply them with, which senses to evoke is one that relies on POV and focus.
Consider a bare-knuckles boxing match told from three different perspectives: one is a technical blow-by-blow in a newspaper article, the other is a sports announcer sitting ringside, and the third is one of the fighters (forgive me for the crudity of these experiments – I just want to illustrate a point):
| Newspaper Article |
|---|
| Mondelo countered Flannery’s jab with a hard right hook, and Flannery went down for the count. |
| Sportscaster |
| Like a cat, Flannery shoots a right jab. But Mondelo just takes it! Takes it on the cheek, and doesn’t even blink. Mondelo’s right hooks around, moving like a meat hammer. Spins the Irishman clean around. He’s stumbling. He’s stepping away. Mondelo’s not touching him – he ain’t moving. The crowd’s screaming, going wild for Mondelo to finish up. Flannery folds up. The ref goes down. Mondelo’s just standing there. And that’s the count! Flannery is out! |
| Boxer |
| Flannery moved so fast, Mondelo never even saw the jab. It was like he’d blinked, just the one surprised blink, and then the blood streamed down his cheek like a salty tear. But his fist was already moving, and from this distance there was no way even fast Flannery could recover. Mondelo’s right crashed into his jaw, and though he couldn’t hear the Mick’s teeth crunch above the crowd’s screams, he felt them crumble up his hand and through his wrist, past his elbow and all the way to where his own face throbbed. Flannery spun around, flecks of bone and blood staining the ref’s shirt. Mondelo didn’t move. Let him go down, he thought. Let him go down, I don’t have another one like that. He couldn’t loosen his fist, like all of his bloodied knuckles had been fused together. Please, God, let him go down. The ring shuddered as the Irishman hit the mat. Below the haze, Mondelo could see the ref counting. The crowd was screaming. And his fist still wouldn’t open. |
Each of these – admittedly rough – passages describes the same violent events, but the sensory details provided in each vary tremendously. It is the POV that informs which sensory details receive the focus, and it is in turn the focus which affects the reader.
Cornwell’s Sharpe series is told from a nearly omniscient point-of-view, which gives him the ability to narrow and widen his focus throughout the unfolding action of a particular battle. At one point, he might be giving us the view from ten thousand feet, describing the movements of entire companies on the field of battle. And in the next paragraph, he may have zoomed in to show us the brutal disembowelment of a cavalry man on the line. Consider the following (from Cornwell’s Sharpe’s Rifles
Those Riflemen began to fall. The centre of the square soon became a charnel house of wounded men, of blood, screams and hopeless prayer. The rain was stinging harder, wetting the rifle pans, but enough black powder fired to spit bullets at the enemy who, crouched in the grass, made small and elusive targets.
The two mounted squadrons had wheeled away to the west, and now reformed. They would charge along the line of the road, and the frozen steel of their heavy straight swords would burn like fire when it cut home. Except, so long as the Riflemen stayed together, and so long as their unbroken ranks bristled with the pale blades, the horsemen could not hurt them. But the enemy carbines were taking a fearful toll. And when enough Riflemen had fallen the cavalry charge would split the weakened square with the ease of a sword shattering a rotten apple.
Dunnett knew it, and he looked for salvation. He saw it in the low cloud which misted the hillside just two hundred yards to the north. If the greenjackets could climb into the obscuring shroud of those clouds, they would be safe. He hesitated over the decision. A Sergeant fell back into the square, killed clean by a ball through his brain. A Rifleman screamed as a bullet struck his lower belly. Another, shot in the foot, checked his sob of pain as he methodically loaded his weapon.
As the above passage shows, the omniscient POV gives Cornwell great descriptive flexibility, as it allows him to communicate information which his protagonist (Richard Sharpe) does not necessarily have. But while an omniscient POV maximizes our flexibility of focus, it carries with a trade-off in the other essential component of effective violence: the level of emotional engagement.
Emotional Context
Violence without emotional context is useless. By giving the reader an understanding of the character’s perception of the violence, and of the character’s investment in its outcome, we make it possible for the reader to have an emotional response. The emotional context for violence is an amalgamation of everything we have learned about the characters involved, and about our perceptions of those characters.
Obituaries – which as a matter of taste and human decency, rarely depict violence – are a great example of this principle at work. The purpose of an obituary is to communicate that a person has died. But that could be communicated in one sentence: “Person X died yesterday.” Or, if we wanted to provide more factual detail, we might say “Person X died in a car crash yesterday.” But that’s not how obits are structured. They give us the facts, but they also humanize the person involved. They imply an emotional context for the event, at the least by mentioning the survivors.
Emotional context works the same way in violence. Violence where the characters lack an emotional stake fails to move the reader. It makes the violence clinical, which at times might be the point (a lot of serial killer thrillers do this), where the absence of emotional context itself becomes its own equivalent.
However, there is a difference between painstakingly writing a scene of emotionless, clinical violence (as in Jeff Lindsay’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter
While technically their portrayals of violence are fine, that violence is frequently devoid of emotional investment. The point-of-view is close, developing an expectation that the focus and depiction of violence will be visceral to the characters involved. But when that portrayal lacks an emotional dimension: the characters are often shown to have emotions, but those emotions somehow vanish when the violence begins. When those perspective characters’ emotions are kept at arms’ length, the reader’s emotions are likewise held at bay, weakening the effect the violence can otherwise produce.
Language and Violence
The language which we use to portray violence also carries significant impact. Historical fiction, quasi-historical fantasy, contemporary fantasy, and science fiction all feature technologies with which most readers are not fluent. But the use of technical terminology, of the correct terms for particular objects or maneuvers, can help establish the world-building of the story (see my earlier discussion of how Ian Fleming and John le Carré use these science fictional techniques).
The sentence, paragraph, and chapter structures can similarly affect the pacing of the action, and likewise manipulate the reader’s focus. Staccato sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters accelerate the pace. When the emotional stakes are established, when the reader is invested, the accelerating pace increases the reader’s tension.
The words used to describe the violence, with their sound, their rhythm, and the emotions they evoke in the reader likewise affect the reader’s response. To describe a sword wound as “gaping” or “weeping” produces a different response in the reader, and this type of response can be played with to good effect.
In Cornwell, the descriptions of violence are visceral: when focused closely, Cornwell describes the wounds inflicted in graphic terms. But for his protagonist, battle is just another day at the office. Richard Sharpe remains emotionally invested in the violence, but there is a purposeful disconnect between his ruthlessness in battle and the graphic way in which Cornwell describes the horrors of war. Sharpe laments the ugliness of war, but he also revels in it. As he says time and time again, it is the only job he was ever good at.
On the Absence of Violence
But not all books – and certainly not all genre books – need violence to be successful. One of my favorites, John Crowley’s Little, Big
Whether the violence involves a broadsword, a ray gun, or cutting repartée, the tools for its depiction remain the same. And that’s because it is not violence that affects the reader, but rather the way in which that violence gets presented.
Nov 21
Structure and Perspective in Children’s Stories and Films
NOTE: For those of you in the United States, since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, I want to wish you and yours a wonderful, fun, and loving holiday!
This past weekend, Skyfall was sold out, so we saw Wreck-it Ralph instead (n.b. It was absolutely delightful: if you haven’t seen it yet, please do! It’s worth it, particularly if – like me – you spent a large part of your childhood at the local arcade.). Sitting in the theater I was struck by an observation I had never noticed before: all of the best (and most successful) children’s movies in recent memory (e.g. Monsters, Inc.
It has become axiomatic that in children’s literature, the protagonist must be a child. Why? And why the discrepancy between children’s film and books? In thinking it through (and discussing it with The Professor), I think it stems from the basic structure of all children’s stories, and in particular from the point-of-view through which that structure becomes most accessible.
NOTE: Forgive me if the thoughts here are a little muddled or plum off-base. I’d love to know what you think, since I feel like these ideas are still a little fuzzy in my own mind.
The Cynical Argument: Parents Should Want to Go
There is, of course, a cynical argument to be made: parents are more likely to spend their hard-earned cash on children’s entertainment that they enjoy, and parents are more likely to enjoy a children’s story that on some level speaks to their adult sensibilities. Children’s movies – through which parents must sit – are more exposed to this commercial logic than children’s literature because kids of a certain age can read books on their own. As a result, one might think that parental enjoyment is less important for books than for movies.
But this commercial argument – while true insofar as it goes – strikes me as superficial at best. If constructing an excellent, enjoyable story were as simple as that, then we wouldn’t have any bad stories. Instead, I think that the methods by which the best kids’ movies and kids’ books are both constructed, and the ways in which they differ, deserve a deeper exploration.
The bildungsroman Structure of Children’s Stories
At its heart, every children’s story is a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story). While this may be a broad, sweeping generalization, I think it remains accurate. Every artistically and commercially-successful kids’ story (in film or print) is a story of personal growth portraying a character who gains a more mature understanding of how to navigate the complexities of the world.
Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles
The same dynamic works in kids’ movies: Monsters, Inc.
Just because these are stories of personal growth and maturation does not make them either formulaic or didactic. In fact, there is no surer kiss-of-death for a children’s story (regardless of medium) than didacticism. Instead, these stories all model the gradual process of maturation, in which by their conclusion the character(s) come to a more nuanced view of the world and their own roles in that world. Children’s stories model the maturation process every kid undergoes, and by doing so provide kids with a framework for dealing with the world’s complexities.
A Question of Perspective
Personal growth is – by definition – an internal, private journey. The perspective from which the story gets told is closely tied to the dramatization of that journey. Children’s books are axiomatically always told from a child’s perspective. Whether they are written in first person, or close third, etc. the point-of-view is invariably that of the child. It is the rare kids book indeed that tries to tell its story from an adult perspective (I’d like to call particular attention to Anna Waggener’s recent debut Grim
We see Hogwarts through Harry Potter’s eyes. We struggle through the Arena on Katniss’ shoulder. We face the horrors of Uglyville and New Pretty Town alongside Tally Youngblood. Children’s books model the child’s experience directly, unmediated by any narrative distance. Authors face the challenge of giving their youthful protagonists agency and the opportunity to exercise it (e.g. “getting rid of the parents”) but once the adventure begins, the reader can experience the journey directly.
Children’s books tell their stories from a very close, very personal perspective. The emotional power of stories like Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Children’s movies that focus on adult characters obviate the need to empower their protagonists with agency. Sully and Mike Wazowski are grown ups, in relative positions of authority within their world. Wreck-it Ralph, though not in a position of authority, is clearly a grown-up with all of the freedom of choice that implies. Mister Incredible and Elasti-girl likewise have theoretical agency, however constrained by circumstances. When children’s movies focus on adults, they don’t need to “get rid of the parents” the way children’s books do.
However, movies are inherently more distanced from the character’s emotional journey than books. Movies generally lack an interior monologue or narrative voice to communicate the internal journey. Camera angles, voice work, shot composition, and lighting all contribute (often significantly) to give us that emotional window into the journey, but the relationship is always at a slightly greater remove.
When they focus on adult characters, children’s movies accelerate the speed at which the character’s expression of agency occurs. This gives the filmmakers the opportunity to rapidly develop the character and their emotional journey through dramatic action, which is key to entertaining the audience and getting us to identify with the character.
Because the adult characters in children’s movies are portrayed with agency, and with clear motivations expressed simply (however complex their underlying logic) kids understand how to interpret them. They may not be able to empathize with Mister Incredible’s frustration at a dead-end job, but they are able to understand the fact of his frustration’s existence. But it is through the adult characters’ relationship with non-focal children’s characters that the real accessibility occurs.
While kids will find it harder to empathize with Mister Incredible’s job troubles, or with Elasti-girl’s marital concerns, they can definitely empathize with the experiences of Dash and Violet, and in particular with the consequences of their parents’ difficulties as experienced by the children. The adults’ personal journey is modeled in the experiences of the youthful secondary characters, and the relationship between the youthful secondary characters and the adult protagonists itself models relationships familiar to the child audience. This gives the story an immediacy and relevance to audiences young and old.
In children’s books, this type of an approach is more difficult: the internal experience of an adult character is a greater (though not impossible) imaginative leap for children to make. Because the written word by its nature yields a more intimate audience/character relationship, this complicates and slows the emotional accessibility of the story.
The Value of Narrative Unity
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think the trick to effective storytelling for children – whether in film, in prose, or in sequential art – ties back to the concept of narrative unity. Whatever perspective the story is told from, and regardless of whether the protagonist is an adult or a child, if the relationships in the story model relationships understandable and relevant to both kids and grown-ups, then the story is likely to be accessible and engaging to both audiences. And those stories where the personal journeys of both adult and child characters are tied together and their resolution is explicitly and emotionally unified are likely to be the most resonant and the most lasting.
Does this concept make sense? We just repainted the upstairs hallway, and the paint fumes might be making me more fuzzy-headed than normal, but it seems a little muddled to me. What do you folks think?
Going to be a Day Late This Week
Sorry, folks! I’m afraid I’m too swamped with day-job stuff today to get this week’s post out. However, I should have it ready to go tomorrow (Wednesday). Sorry for the delay!
Ephemeral Horror and the Diffusion of Genre Markers
Content, when it comes to genre taxonomy, is king: we categorize stories based on the conventions they employ and the devices that show up within their texts. Spaceships, time travel, aliens? Let’s call it science fiction. Magic and knights? Let’s go with fantasy. A five-act structure centered around mutual attraction and misunderstanding? Romance. A crime that needs to be explained? Mystery. (Yes, I know this is a gross over-simplification – but that doesn’t make it wrong.) These devices, the objects and tropes of most genres, can easily be slapped on a cover to communicate the story’s category to booksellers and readers.
But then we come to horror. Peter Straub is right (hat tip to Robert Jackson Bennett for pointing this essay out) when he says that horror is the only genre whose defining characteristic is absent from the text: horror gets categorized as horror because of the reaction it produces in the reader, not because of the devices it employs (although those devices do contribute to the reaction). The ephemeral nature of horror’s defining characteristic is both a strength and a weakness for the genre.
The Strength and Freedom of Ephemera
Creatively, Straub is exactly right when he writes:
…this absence of specificity is not at all a limitation but the reverse, a great enhancement. That no situational templates are built into horror grants it an inherent boundarilessness, a boundlessness, an inexhaustible unlimitedness. If the “horror” part is not stressed all that overtly and the author spares us zombies, vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, hideous things in bandages, etc., what results is fiction indistinguishable, except in one element alone, from literary fiction.
Horror lacks the constraints that more solidified genre conventions impose. We can write a horror story – like Shirley Jackson’s
This freedom means that – in order to be effective – horror must sneak past the reader’s natural defenses, must directly speak to the reader’s perceptions, values, and fears. This is the kind of deep-seated, emotional and perceptual communication that the literary fiction genre has traditionally claimed for itself. But where literary fiction uses such emotional and philosophical intimacy to explore comfortably distanced morality, horror uses a highly sensitized point-of-view to get as close to the nerve as possible, to map even the most painful experiences from the inside.
When a horror story fails to achieve this effect, when it fails to develop such a reaction, it fails to be a horror story. There is a reason why vampires and werewolves and zombies now fill shelves of urban fantasy and paranormal romance: fictional devices that once terrified, now no longer do so. And herein lies the weakness of ephemeral genre definition.
Content is (un)Dead
What is the taste of blue? That is the same kind of unanswerable question as “how can you tell a horror story from its cover?”
There was a time – not all that long ago – when vampires were horrific. Their stories evoked the frisson of terror and repulsion that characterizes the horror genre, and so slapping a vampire on the cover sent a message to the reader that said “This book will horrify you.”
But over time, and in paticular over the last thirty years, we have become acclimated to vampires. They stopped horrifying us, and so have oozed into science fiction (e.g. Peter Watts’ Blindsight
This dissolution of the communicative value of fictional devices is a normal part of the creative cycle, and it affects every genre (and is particularly accelerated in YA). But because horror is defined by the reaction it produces, the genre is more exposed to this danger, and its covers (and sales) are disproportionately affected by it.
The Future of Horror?
I think the future of horror will be much like its past: subject to boom-and-bust cycles closely tied to society’s fluency with and acclimatization to the devices which evoke the reactions that define the genre.
For designers and publishers in the field, I think that the challenge is to disentagle cover design from the devices used in the content. Thrillers and (to a lesser extent, mystery) have both broadly succeeded in doing so: their covers tend towards the iconic, rather than the representational. It is worth noting that cover designs for horror perennials like Stephen King and Peter Straub seem to employ this exact strategy, and I suspect that it helps to smooth the genre’s traditional boom-and-bust cycles.
For authors in the field, I think that the trick to continued artistic success will be to focus on that reaction, on the emotional and perceptual effects which define the genre. Essentially, to stick to our knitting. Those who manage to evoke that sensation of visceral repulsion or terror will continue to sell, will continue to have readership, because the darker facets of human nature have and will always fascinate.
And with that being said, I have to wonder: how does reader reaction and the diffusion of genre markers extend or impact on other genres, like science fiction and fantasy?
Nov 6
What is Science Fiction for?
NOTE: Thank you so much to everyone who wished us health and safety during and after Hurricane Sandy! I’m happy to report that we’ve got power, cell service, Internet, and cable TV all working again. Thanks again. If anyone wants to help those hit much worse than we were, I urge everyone to make a donation to the American Red Cross Hurricane Relief fund.
No matter how many times the community debates science fiction’s viability, direction, and future, a fundamental question goes unasked: What is the purpose of science fiction? The answer to that question is at the heart of every (often recurring) debate about the genre, yet I have rarely seen it asked directly. Consider:
| Quality: Genre vs. Literary Fiction | Science Fiction’s Exhaustion | Award Criteria |
|---|---|---|
|
These are just the most recent paroxysms of genre self-confidence that I can recall from the past year. And in most cases, the resulting discussion is necessary for the continued health of literature (and of our genre, in particular – see my earlier thoughts on that front here and here). But in each discussion, the debaters speak from a particular perspective, heavily informed by their underlying and unarticulated perception of science fiction’s purpose. It is the implicit background which every one of us takes for granted, but which leads to miscommunication, misunderstanding, and grossly divergent conclusions.
The Amorphous Purpose: A Definition
(NOTE: I would love to see a story entitled “The Amorphous Porpoise”. Just saying.)
The purpose of a genre is – by its very nature – protean. It is an amalgamation of methods, effects, and consequences within literature and society. If the concept appears fuzzy and imprecise, there’s a good reason for that: It is. Like so much critical discussion, it is a philosophical abstraction. We cannot apply it to any particular title, nor even to a particular series. To be meaningful, it must be broad enough to contain contradictions, and resilient enough to withstand them.
Despite its imprecision, genre’s purpose remains a powerful critical tool. When Damon Knight says that “science fiction is what we point to when we say it”, he relies on the particular mix of methods, effects, and consequences of a given story to group it with other stories of similar purpose. Conceptually, it is similar to Brian Attebery’s “fuzzy set” of genre markers, but its value goes beyond the merely taxonomic: genre’s purpose contextualizes the stories within the genre, and thus creates a framework for our interpretations and responses.
When Christopher Priest laments the nominee slate for the Clarke Award, or when Paul Kincaid observes the “exhaustion” of science fiction in the Best-of anthologies, their concerns can be reframed in terms of genre’s purpose. Between the lines, they each suggest an indistinct and idealized vision of science fiction. Neither offers a clear prescription, but it is clear that they have set their own bars on the basis of some criteria, whether articulated or not. If we reframe their arguments (hopefully without doing damage to their intentions), we find that Priest observes that the Clarke Award does not reward the fiction he believes aligns best with science fiction’s purpose. Paul Kincaid believes that much of contemporary science fiction aligns with an outmoded purpose, which may no longer be culturally relevant.
In both cases, they leave the purpose of science fiction implicit and unarticulated, which I think does their core arguments a disservice. I think a debate about the purpose of science fiction and its role within literature and society is an interesting and valuable one, from which interesting ideas about writing and genre can both flow.
On the Constitution of Purpose
I think of genre purpose as having three components. There may be more, particularly since this is still a concept I’m trying to wrap my head around. But in general, a genre’s purpose is the combination of its:
| Methods |
|---|
| These are the techniques, conventions, and devices which are employed in stories ascribed to a particular genre. They are directly observable within the text, no one story will ever use all of them, and any one story may specifically reject or subvert one or more of them. |
| Science Fiction Examples: |
|
| Effects |
| These are the emotional and mental responses produced in the individual reader as a direct result of the genre’s methods. They are not observed within the text, but are observed within its individual readers. Certain effects may be generalizable across an audience, but because no two readers experience a story in the same way, the effects are never universal for any story. The effects can likewise be directed, e.g. “fear of science” or “fear of government”, etc. |
| Science Fiction Examples: |
|
| Consequences |
| These are the cultural reactions that a genre produces. They may be expressed outside of the literary sphere, for example in education, cultural sensibilities, or public mores. They may also be expressed within future texts, as a response to or expansion/subversion of the genre’s purpose. |
| Science Fiction Examples: |
|
I believe that all fantastic genres (science fiction, fantasy, and horror), and possibly all literature shares the majority of their effects and consequences, but that they rely on different methods to do so. I imagine – and I hope – that there are people who disagree with this, as their thoughts might provide fascinating insights into the purpose of literature and art.
The Evolving Purpose of Genre
When each of us thinks of a literary tradition – be it science fiction, biography, or mystery – we value different methods, effects, and consequences differently. This is partially a consequence of our individual tastes, and partially the result of our philosophical values. Genre’s purpose – in its abstract philosophical sense – does not have intentionality. But when we begin to discuss a genre’s purpose, each of us prioritizes certain methods, effects, and consequences over others, and this gives genre’s purpose a directionality.
The cycles we see in science fiction – whether it was the gradual move away from scientific romance conventions in the pulp era, or the New Wave’s focus on the sociological, or cyberpunk’s psychosocial aesthetics – are a consequence of genre’s constantly-evolving purposes, which in turn are an emergent property of our consumption of media and our experiences of daily life. The sometimes acrimonious divide between “hard” and “soft” SF merely reflects differences in our community’s priorities, tastes, and philosophical values.
Our individual values, and the intentions they lend to our perception of genre, inform everything we do when it comes to genre. When we write genre fiction, we (hopefully) write what we think it should be, applying and communicating our values. When we review genre fiction, we express how an author’s work is executed relative to our individual conception of the genre’s purpose: did the story successfully align with what we want from the genre? When we criticize genre fiction, we generalize across multiple stories to either gain insight into how genre’s methods, effects, and consequences interrelate or to articulate our generalized desires about the genre.
Perhaps, rather than rehashing the perennial “genre is exhausted/dying/dead” debate it would be helpful to take a step back, and articulate what we think genre should be, and start from there. There will be plenty of disagreements if we do: this is actually pretty complex philosophy, and it has flummoxed much smarter people than me. I suspect that for many of us, it is easier to express our values through our fiction than it is to spell them out. But I think as a community, it is a discussion worth having nevertheless.
But if we want to advance our understanding of the art form, and if we want to advance the quality (howsoever it gets defined) of that art form, shouldn’t we at some point spell out where we want it go?
Oct 30
Hurricaned
So we got hit by Hurricane Sandy yesterday. This time, no trees came down on our property (thankfully), but we’ve been without power since last night. We’ve got hot water, and gas to cook on, but with no electricity and no Internet, I’m afraid there won’t be a typical blog post from me today (typing one out on my cell phone would be hard, and the battery would probably die before I was done).
Sorry about this, but hopefully I’ll be back with a post in the next several days (or whenever they restore power).
Oct 23
Escaping into Fantasy: Thoughts on Transportive Fiction
I’ve got a confession to make: I read for escape.
I don’t just read to learn, or to shape my moral compass, or to consider the deeper truths of life. If any of that happens, I’m ecstatic. I love to think, and I’m thrilled to have to have my horizons broadened. But literature can only achieve such effects when it has engaged the reader on an intellectual, emotional, and physiological level.
There is a difference between being engaged with a story, and being transported by it. Engagement need not be visceral: it can be distanced, nuanced, and cerebral in nature. Escape is transformative, in the sense that for a time I am taken out of my day-to-day concerns and focused entirely on the story and its characters. A story that engages me might hold and maintain my interest. A story that allows me to escape will not let me put it down.
That type of engagement – when we temporarily check out of our day-to-day existence and inhabit a fictional world (whether it is fantastic or not) – opens us up to whatever deeper truths we may find in the written work. And (on a superficial but no less important level) it makes the experience enjoyable. But what makes that kind of escape possible? What makes some stories a means of escape?
The Difference Between Escape and Engagement
When I read, I find that there is a fundamental difference between engagement with the story, and escape. It is not, however, a difference in kind, but rather in degree. I can be engaged with a story, interested in seeing the characters’ fates, curious as to how the plot resolves, etc. without divorcing myself from my everyday reality.
Plenty of good books generate engagement. Many of the Russian classics (Tolstoy
To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of the quality of their stories.
However, I find that their focus on intellectual exploration of “high concepts” keeps me intellectually focused on the topics they explore. It grounds me, in a way that stories which allow me to escape do not. Other SF writers – like John Scalzi
But your mileage may vary. It is entirely possible that a different reader might have an inverse of my experience, and there is nothing wrong in that. It merely suggests that different readers have different tastes, and respond differently to different stimuli.
I believe that stories have certain building blocks, certain broad conceptual components, that are all inter-related and which together affect the reader. The balance between these components will vary from story to story, and certain configurations will produce escape, while other configurations will produce engagement. The configurations that work for a particular reader will be different from those that work for anyone else. And the configuration that works for me today may well be different from one that will work two years from now.
And while the configuration of components that drives escape may vary, I think the list of components is pretty solid.
Character: The Root of All Tension
I like to believe that everything flows from character. The character drives the plot, not the other way around. And yet, character is also one of the trickiest components because it percolates through all of the others: voice, world-building, concept, etc.
As a human being, I have a certain degree of empathy for other members of my species, and so I am naturally interested in understanding a new character whenever I meet one. I respect depth even more than affability, and the degree to which I can understand or engage with a character is a high indicator of the story’s ability to grant me escape.
China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
Mi&eacue;ville’s descriptions are rich and varied, and they imbue Isaac with a depth of character that is instantly engaging. They make me curious about where Isaac will go and what he will do. They make me care. However, this in and of itself would not have been enough to actually transport me. It might earn my engagement, but it would have done little besides.
Miéville manages to transport me by having his words do double (or triple) duty: while his sentences and paragraphs tell me about the character of Isaac, they are simultaneously contributing to the other components of the story, particularly its world-building.
World-building: What Most Folks Think of as Escape
Because so much speculative fiction deals with secondary worlds or imagined realities, and because the portal fantasy structure has played a major role in genre history, world-building is often associated with the concept of escape. After all, we escape to some place, right? And in speculative fiction, we are specifically escaping to a fictional reality that someone else (the author) has made up.
Effective world-building, however, is not a rattling off of hard-to-spell place names, or of cramming eons worth of mythology down the reader’s gullet. Transportive world-building is all about evoking a reality that is compelling and plausible and real for the reader on a sensory and emotional level.
Miéville’s Perdido Street Station
Miéville doesn’t tell us that much of New Crobuzon is reminiscent of a Whitechapel slum. He instead demonstrates this fact by opening his first chapter with the prosaic act of buying groceries. In the space of several paragraphs, he evokes a mood and feel for the environment which will carry through the rest of the novel. In one sentence – where he off-handedly mentions hissing constructs stomping up and down the street – he shifts us into a fantastical mode, where such “constructs” might walk unimpeded.
Taken on its own, this opening would have engaged me pretty quickly. Miéville uses all of the senses to evoke the feel for New Crobuzon. Two passages in particular stand out for me, one olfactory and the other aural:
Below the basket the salls and barrows lay like untidy spillage. The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.
…
Between the stalls stomped hissing constructs. Beggars argued in the bowels of deserted buildings. Members of strange races bought peculiar things.
The sensory detail is fine-grained and carefully selected. It creates a mélange of sensation specifically tailored to convey the chaos and layering of scents and sounds that such a bazaar would have. It is verisimilitude, but of the most fantastic variety.
From these “establishing” passages, Miéville introduces us to the character of Isaac, and here his world-building ratchets into high-gear. While simultaneously introducing us to the character’s values, priorities, and personality, he introduces us to some of the fantastic races that live in New Crobuzon, and paints lines of cultural tension into the city.
This is the point where, for me, Perdido Street Station
Pacing & Tension: A Consequence of Character
To establish a fast pace and build tension, the characters need to be well-drawn. However, I find that well-constructed tension can often over-ride weaknesses in world-building. This is a phenomenon I have observed most often in television, particularly in spy shows like Covert Affairs or police procedurals like Castle.
By giving us characters who we invest in, and then by ratcheting up the tension and the pace, the writers can distract us from the implausible or slapdash world-building that permeates the story. This is, I think, a risky technique because it places escalating tension and world-building in opposition. At some point, the implausibility of the world-building might overpower the tension, and throw the reader out of the story. This, I think, is a weakness often found in much of the thriller genre.
But when the world-building and the tension both contribute to and derive from characterization, when all narrative horses are pulling in the same direction, the effect is to heighten the story’s transportive capabilities.
Intellectual and Moral Exploration: High Concept Escape
Intellectual and moral exploration can be highly stimulating, and I do not doubt that for some readers it provides the imaginative escape that I find in character, world-building, and pacing. But for me, I find that the intellectual dimension on its own cannot transport me. But when the intellectual/moral dimension supports and is supported by the characters, tension, and world-building of the story, then the transportive effect is greatly multiplied.
I am reminded of two very different reading experiences: Peter Watts Blindsight
The Clockwork Rocket
Point-of-View: The Lens which Mediates the World
The more I think about it, the more I begin to subscribe to the thesis put forth by the Scribblies that “POV Fixes Everything.” In terms of enabling escapist reading, point-of-view is the foundation: it informs and shapes the way in which all other tools are applied in a given work.
If a story’s capacity to transport is determined by its characterization, its world-building, its pacing/tension, and its intellectual conceits, these components all must be communicated through the writing. The words we choose, the sentences we assemble, and the paragraphs we construct are all determined by the point-of-view the story is told through.
On a superficial level, the point-of-view determines which details get noticed (read: communicated to the reader), which values get explicitly communicated and which get implied, and which sensory details are presented. At first blush, this might seem to be the same as characterization, but point-of-view and character are not necessarily identical. They may be congruent in a work with limited POVs, but they need not be: the narrator always exists, even if a story is told in close or distant third person.
A story’s point-of-view – which may be distinct from its characters – informs the voice through which it is told. This affects the prose, in terms of its style and lyricism. It affects the way sentences are constructed, and while prose alone cannot transport me, it does constitute the grease that lubricates the story’s engine.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the stories which allow me to escape, those that transport me into a fantastic environment divorced from my quotidien concerns, have one over-arching characteristic in common: every component – their characterization, their world-building, their management of pacing, and their underlying intellectual concepts – are all unified according to the point-of-view(s) through which the story gets told.
What do you think? Which factors – or which configuration of factors – drives your escape into the stories you love?
Oct 16
Balancing Beauty, Language, and Story
Recently, a friend and I were talking about writing (like you do), and he drew my attention to some comments from Jonathan Carroll about the relationship between beautiful language and storytelling. In a 2002 interview with Rain Taxi, Carroll says:
Too often, writers either write well or they story-tell well. Very rarely are they working toward the middle, and a lot of the time the guys who write well are considered hands-off, literary writers. I think that they are forgiven a lot. They may have beautiful language or metaphors, but when I read, I want both. I want to read a good book, and that’s one of the reasons why I don’t read genre fiction, because most of these guys can’t write well. They can story-tell well, but they can’t write well, and I just get bored. To sit on a page with furiously beautiful language: that entertains you for a while, but after a while, it’s like, come on! And if the guy tells a good story only and the characters are like film sets that have a stick behind them, and if you take it away they’ll collapse-no, I want both. I want both in what I read. And I’m trying to do it in what I write.
This is a nice quote because it is succinct and it communicates Carroll’s point clearly. However, I think that taken at face-value it oversimplifies the relationship between language and story-telling (bear in mind that an interview like this doesn’t really provide much room for nuance, and I suspect a writer as good as Carroll well understands the underlying nuance that informs such statements).
I agree with Carroll that beautiful prose and solid story-telling should not be mutually exclusive. However, I object to the use of the term “beauty” as a way of describing prose in any critical sense because it tells us more about the speaker’s literary tastes than about the text itself. It is an over-broad term, useful in colloquial, casual discussion (or in interviews), but useless in exploring how fiction actually works.
What Makes Prose Beautiful?
First, let me start by saying that I do not think that all books are created equal. Some stories are better than others, and some are just plain bad. But the beauty of prose alone, or the degree to which the story takes primacy over style, does not determine “quality” in my estimation. And that is because the style of a given story and the balance struck between story, character, philosophy, and style are consequences of authorial choice.
Consider for a moment three sentences, taken from three different “mystery” novels. While all three sentences serve a similar – technical – function, their constructions differ greatly:
| Sentence A | As our little mules strove up the last curve of the mountain, where the main path divided into three, producing two side paths, my master stopped for a while, to look around: at the sides of the road, at the road itself, and above the road, where, for a brief stretch, a series of evergeren pines formed a natural roof, white with snow. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose  |
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| Sentence B | It’s a long drag back from Tijuana and one of the dullest drives in the state. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye  |
| Sentence C | I opened the front door with my latch-key and purposely delayed a few moments in the hall, hanging up my hat and the light overcoat that I had deemed a wise precaution against the chill of an early autumn morning. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  |
All three of these sentences serve a straightforward narrative goal: they set the scene, they establish the setting in which the rest of the action is to take place. It is a simple goal, but they are each written in a completely different style. Eco relies on a multifaceted sentence, with plenty of subordinate clauses and descriptive imagery. Chandler rejects all of that, and instead offers a flat description of a character’s perception of the environment. And Christie, whose prose Carroll calls wooden elsewhere in his interview, presents an unemotional portrayal of the narrator’s actions, with some characterization implied through the narrator’s value judgments.
Which is the more “beautiful”? Which the more effective?
I posit that they are each “beautiful” in their own way: Eco’s sentence is more complicated, with more components and more images than either Chandler’s or Christie’s. It relies to a greater extent on visual imagery, and its punctuation and rhythm imbues a serene ambiance to the text. Chandler’s sentence, though simpler in its construction, tells us more about the speaker/narrator, and uses an the elongated soft vowel (the “a” in “drag”) punctuated by the short “u” and hard “dr” (in “dullest drives”) to both suggest the experience described and offset it with a hard stop. Chandler’s sentence accomplishes just as much as Eco’s, but in far fewer words. By contrast, Christie’s sentence straddles a position between these two extremes: hers is a sentence verging on the “merely functional,” wherein she includes more sensory detail and more mental context than Chandler offers, but less visual imagery than Eco. One might suggest, as Carroll does in his interview, that Christie’s prose is “wooden” as a result. But I don’t think that is the case: Christie’s prose is functional; it gets the job done, but in her stories she focused her attention on aspects other than the prose.
For me, there is beauty in all three approaches (and I suspect that Carroll too would recognize the beauty in Eco and Chandler at least, particularly in light of his other comments regarding Chandler). But what makes all three sentences “beautiful” is not their elegance, their fluidity, their economy, or their rhythm. Their “beauty” stems from the fact that they are effective: they produce a response in the reader, and put the reader in a certain frame of mind. And they are particularly effective, and so particularly beautiful, because their construction and the response it elicits align with the themes, characters, and plot of their respective stories.
The Right Tool for the Job
When we write, words are the chisels we use to carve our marks on the readers’ minds. In general, we would be unlikely to use a shovel to turn a screw. The craftsman and the artist must both select the tools best suited to the task at hand. If words and the style in which they get assembled into sentences and paragraphs are the tools of a writer, then they should be used as needed for a particular story. This is probably easiest to see when considering the relationship between prose style and pacing.
A complicated style, stuffed to the gills with literary allusions and luminous metaphors, might work very well in a mainstream literary novel. But by its very nature it slows the reader down: to be appreciated, it forces the reader to consider the ways in which a sentence is constructed, to savor each syllable and the way the sentence rolls off of the tongue, to luxuriate in velvety imagery like a lounging cat. There is a place for that.
But sometimes, like when a character is literally hanging over a precipice by their fingernails, the reader doesn’t want any of that artistry. They want to know: will they fall or not? They want to know what happens next, and are on the edge of their seat waiting to get it. Allusions and flowery metaphor, in such a situation, risk just getting in the way of what drives the reader’s engagement with the story (see my earlier thoughts on that score).
And this is why when we write, we need to carefully select and modulate the way in which we write to suit our needs. Because the right style for a particular passage will depend on our goals for that passage, and it will vary from story to story, or even within the same story. I am reminded here of the movie Blade Runner
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For me, this is an excellent example of code-switching, of getting the audience to the right emotional point where they can experience a cathartic moment, and then to amplify that catharsis by a switching into a different style.
Prior to that scene, Blade Runner
That trick worked in the film because of the way the movie teetered on a point between straight detective story and philosophical conjecture. And therein, I think, lies the secret to unifying prose, theme, and character: balance.
When we write, our job is to balance the myriad devices of our fiction to achieve our artistic goals. The “right” balance will vary from story to story: one story might skew more to heart-pounding action, another might teeter in the direction of poetry, etc. But for a story’s prose to unify with its themes and narrative, we must determine where the right balance for that story can be found. Once that has been done, we must “merely” (Ha! Easier said than done!) write the text that adheres to that balance, and hope that the balance that tickled our fancy as writers will likewise resonate with our readers.
The King of Elfland's Second Cousin 