Progress

[Update: Due to the vagaries of Blogger, this essay was originally published as if it were written on April 26. Thanks to Ken, I've learned how to adjust the time stamp, so here it is, as if it were new.]

I just got round to reading an essay/review by novelist/critic James Wood published a month or more ago in The New Yorker. It begins as a reaction to Reality Hunger: a Manifesto by David Shields, and then goes on to review Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered both in terms of the Shields book and Wood's own stance as viewed through the lens of the Shields book.

(A discerning reader, merely from a glance at the above paragraph, will conclude that during the course of this article Mr. Lee's book gets totally boned. He will be right.)

The article begins by asking "Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering?", and then goes on to point out, "while anyone painting today exactly like Courbet, or composing music exactly like Brahms, would be accounted a fraud or a forger, much contemporary fiction borrows the codes and conventions—the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration."

(I should like to point out right now that anyone writing today "exactly like" like Flaubert or Balzac would not be published, except perhaps as a curiosity, or a pastiche, or a parody. And that while writers may use Balzac's "basic narrative grammar," contemporary painters very much use the same "basic painterly grammar" as Courbet without painting exactly like him. So we have a problem with Wood's argument right here. But this isn't the meat of it, it's an illustration, so let's press on.)

Wood then zooms back to the Sixties with a recap of theorist Roland Barthes' notions of the "reality effect"--- "realistic fiction, like ideology, tries to palm itself off as the most natural and real of literary modes but is in fact the most artificial and unreal. Barthes is ninety-nine per cent right. His rightness is felt every day by any novelist who sits down to a blank piece of paper or a computer screen and tries, despairingly, to think beyond the familiar grammar of narrative. All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization! Who does not want to explode it, do something truly new, and rouse the implication slumbering in the word “novel”? [Let's just leave aside the dozens of writers I know personally who don't want to explode this machinery at all. Anyway, none of them are people Wood ever heard of.] Avant-garde anti-realists probably err in assuming that realist novelists are just complacently or venally recycling convention; my experience is that many intelligent novelists are painfully aware of their bated means, their limitations and timidities and uncertainties, and look with writhing admiration at writers like Beckett or Saramago or Bernhard or David Foster Wallace, who seem to have discovered new fictional languages."

But fortunately, Wood notes a problem with Barthes' argument: "Convention may be boring, but it is not untrue simply because it is conventional . . . [People's lives] do possess more or less traditional elements of plotting and pacing, of suspense and revelation and epiphany. Probably there are more coincidences in real life than in fiction. To say “I love you” is to say something at millionth hand, but it is not, then, necessarily to lie."

Well yeah. Good that someone finally pointed this out.

Wood gets to the Shields book finally, which apparently features sentences like this: "I love literature, but not because I love stories per se. I find nearly all the moves the traditional novel makes unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless. I can never remember characters’ names, plot developments, lines of dialogue, details of setting. [Brave of him to confess himself such a bad reader.] It’s not clear to me what such narratives are supposedly revealing about the human condition. I’m drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdom-seeking."

(Ah well, bravo for him. We're all for enlightenment here, though perhaps next time Shields wishes to seek wisdom, he should enter a Zen monastery instead of picking up a novel, and stop criticizing novels on the grounds that they're not Zen monasteries.)

Wood claims that since Shields doesn't give very many examples, doesn't do literary criticism, and doesn't want to offend anyone by explaining what they're doing wrong, the manifesto has a tendency to flail away without grounding itself anywhere in particular--- in other words, that the manifesto demanding reality fails to ground itself in the aforesaid reality. All I get from Wood is the vagueish sort of feeling that Shields prefers reality to artifice, and nonfiction to fiction. (Wood could, of course, be completely wrong about Shields, so it's not necessarily Shields I'm talking about here, but the version of Shields that belongs to Wood.)

In any case, that's all fine, except that, y'know, fiction is what I do, so naturally I have an opinion.

Also, as a writer I am deeply committed to story, not simply because I like stories, but because story is what makes the reader want to turn the pages, and as I writer I'm always hoping to keep my readers turning pages.

Should I ask somebody, "What did you do this morning?", the answer might in theory be a list of random, disconnected events, rather like certain kinds of literary works, or like my memory when I've just got up in the morning. Odds are, though, that the answer is going to involve a story. It may be a boring, repetetive, unoriginal sort of story (personally I will stop listening to any story beginning with the words "I went to the store") but you're pretty much guaranteed to get a story of some kind.

We are hardwired both to create and to consume stories. Fiction does not have to address that particular function in our psyches--- you can make fiction that's about nothing but beautiful writing, or fiction that's so choked with matter that it's impossible to arrange it into anything like a story (see Pynchon), or didactic fiction where the plot is only an excuse for the characters to engage in long rants about white supremacy, the inevitable triumph of Marxist-Leninism, or the virtues of selfishness. You can do these things, though you run the commercial risk of losing that part of the audience that reads only for story.

But it has to be said that, for me at least, story will keep me going when the writing, or the cool stuff, or even the rants that I happen to agree with, otherwise fail.

Wood notes that the lives of actual people can feature plots, revelations, coincidence, and epiphany. True, but it all depends on where you start and end. If your fiction consists of nothing but lists of everyday objects your protagonist finds on the supermarket shelf, there's not a lot of any of those "basic narrative grammars" on display. If you start ten minutes before an accident, take your protagonist through the car crash, and end with her waking in the hospital, then you've got a story.

The point being, you still have to pick and choose what goes in your fiction. Even if you're writing an autobiographical novel (as Wood has done), you still have to sort through the bits and pieces of your life in order to find the gems that are worth writing about. And you then have to put these in some kind of order, in such a way as to sustain narrative tension or at least interest, and before you know it you're in the plot business again, dealing out climaxes and epiphanies like the most seasoned commercial writer.

Or, to put it another way, fiction is not real. It's choice, and the imposition of order, and the impulse to narrative. Fiction is an artifact. So a call for real fiction is like a call for apples to produce peach pits. Any perceived reality in a piece of fiction is strictly a function of the skill of the author, and whether or not she can convince you that what's happening in her narrative is real.

What Shields is really calling for is fiction that produces the illusion of reality better than the predictable stuff that he's bored with. Which is fine. I'm all for that, too.

While what Wood (and Barthes) seem to be calling for is novelty. They're bored with stodge, with the same old stuff over and over again, and they want writers to produce anti-stodge. (At least Wood seems to realize that nobody produces stodge on purpose.)

So what it call comes down to is a plea for us all to Do It Better.

Okay, let's! We can all do better! Let's do that! Let's all produce novelty and excitement and the illusion of something real! Rah!

We can all do that. Right?

I note, by the way, that Wood never answers the question he begins with: Does literature progress?

I assume he doesn't get around to answering that question because the answer isn't very exciting. The answer is No. Fiction evolves, but it doesn't progress. (Evolution and progress are not necessarily the same thing.)

The tools of fiction haven't changed, and we all get access to all of them. Some fade from fashion. (Epic verse, the Homeric simile) Some go into fashion and out again. (Stream of consciousness, long social novels with plots that depend on coincidence) Some tools remain useful no matter what epoch you're working in. (Irony, foreshadowing, raising the stakes)

The tools are all there. We can use them or not. We can use them well or not. We can use them to produce Shields' idea of realism or not. It's all up to us, and of course our talent.

Fiction doesn't progress. But writers can. Get busy.

Thought for the Day

If you don't give your reader the ending you promised, then the ending you actually write better be three times better than the ending the audience expects.

The Terror. The Terror.

I was visiting yesterday with some friends, and one of them put on the first ten minutes of Team America: World Police. (For those who haven't seen it, the first ten minutes are the brilliant part of the movie, and after that it's just so-so, except for Kim Jong Il's plaintive little song halfway through.)

Imagine my terror when I saw, parodied in the film, some dialog I had just written for my characters a couple days earlier. Parker and Stone had parodied one of my scenes years before I'd even written it!

What they had parodied, of course, was some dreadfully cliche'd dialog, dialog which I hadn't realized was so completely dreadfully cliche when I wrote it.

Rewrites are now under way. I am trying not to panic.

Thirty Years Before the Keyboard

January 1, 2009 is a memorable day for more than just the usual reasons.

As of today, I have been a full-time, professional writer for thirty years, earning my living exclusively by my craft.

God, I feel old . . .

A Writer's Life, Again

Amazing how much difference a couple days can make.

On Monday, I wrote at some length about the distractions that were preventing me from properly thinking about my work, let alone getting much of it done.

Most of Tuesday I was a total wreck. I blame the fact that we were socked in by rainclouds. I'm a solar activated person, one reason I live in an area that's sunny 360 days per year. Clouds and gloom weigh on me like, well, clouds and gloom.

Tuesday I could barely drag myself out of bed. I was so down that I couldn't even summon up the energy to play computer games. The best that could be said for me was that I got some reading done.

And then, late in the afternoon, the mood shifted. (Not coincidentally, the clouds were dissipating.) I did my workout on the Total Gym, soaked my sore muscles in the hot tub while watching a lovely sunset, then cooked a healthy dinner of tuna steak with mushrooms, asparagus, and a salad.

Then I went to the laptop and wrote like a demon for several hours. Wrote well, finishing more words on the one night than I'd managed for a week or more.

I completed a chapter. It helped in building momentum that the end of the chapter was in sight, because this chapter was one of those accompanied by a lot of second-guessing on my part. The chapter was almost all exposition, and as I worked I kept thinking, "Maybe I should deal with this piece of information later. Or earlier. Or maybe I should just cut it."

It's impossible at this early stage to know whether I made any of the right decisions. But at least the chapter is done, and I can deal with all those issues later.

When I finished in the early hours of the morning, I felt very pleased with myself.

This morning was sunny, and so was I. I bounded out of bed full of energy. I started the day with martial arts, ate a modest and healthy lunch, spent the afternoon dealing with the sort of trivial annoyances that had so vexed me on Monday. I ran for an hour on the elliptical machine, did my stretches, watched sunset from the hot tub, cooked myself another tuna steak. Then I listened to the presidential debate while playing Rome. (The score: Obama 3 for 3, more because his opponent kept shooting himself in the neck than because Obama was so brilliant. And also I am kicking Rome's butt. A good day for sports.)

So now I've got the laptop fired up and will be launching more genius into the fictionsphere. Excelsior!

Forecast for tomorrow: Sunny. Warmer. Wordier.

A Writer's Life

Some of you, I'm sure, wonder why I'm not more prolific, like those other SF writers.

A description of my day might give you a good idea.

I rose this morning, fed the cats, ate a banana, and went out into the breezeway to do martial arts. I did about a quarter-hour of kata before repeated telephone calls and other distractions wrecked my concentration, so I gave up. I showered and had lunch. I went to the office supply place, but they didn't have everything I needed, so I had to go someplace else. I bought groceries, filled the gas tank at one place, then went to the tire store, where I read a book while my tired were rotated.

It was Columbus Day, so I didn't have to spend any time reading mail.

By this time it was 4pm. I read and answered email, did a modest amount of web browsing, then ran on the elliptical machine for an hour. I did my stretches, relaxed for a bit in the hot tub, then made and ate my dinner.

I must admit that I spent the next couple hours playing Europa Universalis Rome--- actually it should be called Roma if they're going to title the whole thing in Latin, shouldn't it? At any rate, I take full responsibility for those hours, as our politicians would say.

I wouldn't have played so long if Ptolemy hadn't put a contract out on my general, forcing me to invade him and teach him a lesson.

It is now 11pm, and I'm now ready to start writing--- after I prepare a package for Federal Express to pick up tomorrow morning, and call FedEx to get schedule the pickup. All the other things I was going to do today, like deal with the insurance company and the Social Security Administration re: my mom and a few other things, are going to be postponed till tomorrow.

I really need a secretary/dogsbody to handle most of this for me, but I can't afford one. I've shoved off as much work as I can on Kathy, who is surprisingly cool with it.

How do people who work eight hours per day manage?

Okay. To work now.

Sprint to the Finish

I just finished writing the sprawling middle bit of This is Not a Game, the current novel.

The middle bits are always the problem. When I start a book I always know the beginning, and I always know the end. Getting from one to the other is sometimes easy, and sometimes it's like getting from the British side of the Somme to the German side of the Somme in April of 1916. Intact. Without a tank. With your 80 pounds of gear. And all your friends.

I generally know many of the "beats" in the middle part, but somehow it doesn't seem to help. The plot points keep accumulating in that aggravating way they do.

That's the problem with writing character-driven fiction. You keep finding new ways and new places to illuminate character. Sometimes I wish I was just a hardware guy. "Build your zap gun. Then zap. The end."

This is Not a Game has been fun to write despite the inevitable mid-book sprawl. Another piece of good news is that the narrative has sprawled, as it were, in the direction of the climax. The more stuff I deal with in the middle, the shorter the finish will be. I only have two chapters left to go.

My deadline is April Fool's Day. Can I finish my two chapters in time?

Any bets? Either way?

Cloacal Obsession

My current audio book is The Religion by Tim Willocks, a big sprawling action/romance set in and around the siege of Malta in 1565. If you haven't read it, you might think of it as a sort of overlarge Bernard Cornwell book with a better vocabulary and a wider fictional range. There's a lot of larger-than-life handsome, big-shouldered swordsmen, beautiful, courageous ladies in gorgeous gowns, scheming Inquisitors, thick slabs of historical detail, epic battle scenes, and a rather astounding amount of piss and shit.

This book has a really high body count, and no one dies without voiding his bowels and/or bladder. I would have thought this a result of some kind of weird cloacal obsession on the part of the author, but I've read a lot of action fiction over the last few years that make a point of including this sort of detail, so it seems to be a feature of the genre.

And if it's not bowels voiding, it's bellies, with details descriptions of innards being pierced, spilled, toasted, fed to pigs, or whatever. A subspecies of action fiction that dotes on these sorts of descriptions has been called "war porn."

Which I avoid, by the way.

There seems to be some kind of movement toward Xtreme Action Fiction, providing the same sort of gruesome detail that you get in the more graphic video games. Or worse.

I suspect it's the sort of grim, realistic detail that authors who have never been in war themselves provide in order to show that they know their stuff.

May I just offer the suggestion that it's time to stop with all the p. & s.? I asked Sage Walker, who in civilian life is an emergency-room MD, whether bowels and bladders void on receipt of traumatic injury, and she said not. (It might be different if you're hanged, she said. She never worked on anyone who had been hanged.)

So now, if you're reading one of these novels in which your chevalier is wading ankle deep in the doo-doo in order to smite his enemies, you can just sneer and mutter, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about."

So there.

Best Crit Ever

Last night we had our monthly meeting of Critical Mass, our local workshop. Usually our critiques tend to be a bit rambling and tentative, or at least mine do, but last night's most incisive crit came from new writer (and my former Clarion student) Ian Tregillis.

I reconstruct it as best as I can:

"If I'm feeling oppressed and need to unburden myself, and my choice of audience is between a woman who loves me and the man who tortured me by running electric current through my balls, then I'll pick the woman. Even though I don't love her and she might misunderstand and cause a problem I'll have to deal with later, I'll pick the woman, because at least she's not running an electric current through my balls!"

That summed things up rather well, I thought.