blogorrhea: fiction-writing

Showing posts with label fiction-writing. Show all posts

Monday, January 06, 2014

115 Noteworthy Articles on Writing

If you're a writer, no doubt you've accumulated some bookmarks, over the years, to articles that have proven inspirational to you. That's been the case with me. I thought today I might try to consolidate some of those links in one place, for easy access (not just for you but also for me). I found 115 article links that merit visiting, and revisiting.

Almost any writer, of any level of accomplishment, will find something useful in the following articles, some of which actually point to lists of additional articles.

Get ready for some terrific free reading.

115 Noteworthy Articles and Essays on Writing

If any of the links have gone dead, please let me know (by leaving a Comment below). If you found this list helpful, please do two things. First, bookmark this page. Secondly, share this post's URL with a friend. Thank you!

Firefox 3.6:
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Opera 10.61:
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Acrobat 9.0.0 Pro Extended:
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Sunday, December 29, 2013

The Unreliable and Unpredictable Narrator

One of literature's best-known and most-used devices is the unreliable narrator. The term seems to have been coined in 1961 by critic Wayne C. Booth, if we're to believe Wikipedia (that ultimate midwife of unreliable narrations), but the technique itself is as old as literature.

Think how dreadfully flat and meaningless Fight Club would be were Jack to prove a clearheaded, trustworthy stenographer of personal history. Ditto for Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Nothing complexifies a story like having your reader realize, partway through the story, that objects in the rearview mirror may be less real than they appear.

The narrator doesn't have to be certifiably insane for the technique to work, of course, because selective modification of the truth (let's be honest for a moment) is endemic among the sanest of the sane. Lying is so common, it's hard to get an experimental handle on it. And who lies more than anyone? A storyteller! For a storyteller to embellish a story is not only not unusual, it's expected.

Mark Twain exploits this fact at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when he talks (via the Huck character) about the earlier Adventures of Tom Sawyer: "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." This statement, made in the guise of full disclosure (honesty), frames the entire Huck narrative as unreliable—a brilliant device.

Was Patrick Bateman insane? Or just
crazy enough to believe he killed people?

The takeaway for fiction authors is obvious: If your narrator is unflaggingly honest, you've created a rather unrealistic super-mortal (and more than likely, a dull story).

But there's another kind of narrator unreliability that can be incredibly useful and entertaining, and that's the unpredictable narrator—a narrator who's apt to go in unusual directions without warning. One of the things that made Psycho so jarring for so many viewers, when in came out in 1960, was Hitchcock's decision to kill the film's main character a third of the way into the story, disrupting the unspoken contract between director and movie-watcher (a contract that says the main character normally lives through most or all of a film). Suddenly the viewer was aware that the director could not be counted on to tether the story to this or that familiar handrail; all bets were off.

"All bets are off" is a rather extreme place to leave the viewer or reader, unless you're writing horror or psychological drama. Unpredictability can and often should come in smaller doses. The protagonist might be prone to sudden daredevil acts; or maybe just daydreams. (Lapsing into a dream sequence is a familiar—and some would say, overworked—"unpredictable narrator" ploy.)

Here's an unpredictability writing prompt for you: Have a character begin a turn of dialog by saying to his/her partner "Did you ever [do/think/see/say/wonder][something really odd]?" For example, two friends are driving somewhere. There's a lull in the conversation. Suddenly the driver says to his buddy/sister/GF/BF: "Did you ever want to do something totally random?" The other persons says: "Like what?" "Oh, I don't know, like, paint a watermelon blue and leave it on someone's front porch."

Maybe that's a lame example. The best example of randomness I ever heard (the person who told me this swore it was true) involved some college students in the Sixties—fraternity pledges, allegedly—who got a jackhammer from somewhere, donned construction-worker clothes, set up traffic cones at a random street corner, torn up a section of asphalt, and left.

The point is, whatever random idea your character comes up with, even if he/she doesn't act on it, reveals something about the character. If you want, it can provide a metaphor that characters can return to again and again throughout the story.

Unpredictability opens the door to humor as well. In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Yossarian tells of the hospital patient in full body cast with tubes going in and tubes going out. The tubes going in start from a jar of yellow fluid and the tubes going out lead to another jar, also of yellow fluid. When the top jar runs low and the bottom jar is full, a nurse exchanges the top and bottom jars. This is not only an unpredictable and unexpected occurrence but marks Yossarian as an unreliable narrator, because anybody knows urine would never be administered intravenously to a patient in a hospital. On the other hand, Yossarian has been trying to suggest that everyone around him is insane, and maybe they are. Such an anecdote makes you wonder.

Unpredictability is not only a gateway to humor, it's a good way to get unblocked (if you're writing fiction) when you reach a scene or section of dialog where you're not sure how to begin.

In the comic romance I'm writing, the two lead characters, Tyler Schremp and his new girlfriend Molly Ledbetter, accompanied by their puppets, mini-Schremp and mini-Molly, are out on a date (their first "real" date since their puppets met a week earlier). They've decided to meet at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Clara, CA called Wu Wu. The two stare at each other googly-eyed, holding hands across the table, while the waitress reels off her Spiel. When the waitress leaves, mini-Schremp asks mini-Molly "Did you get all that?" "All what?" "What the waitress just said?" "Um, no, actually. What did she say?"

At this point, Schremp (speaking through his puppet) explains that the waitress said she just finished sacrificing a duck in their honor, in order to make the "duck sauce" sitting in front of them. Molly dips a fried noodle in the sauce, tastes it, whispers something in her puppet's ear. Then her puppet says: "She said it tastes a lot like apricot jam with water."

Mini-Schremp: "Exactly! See, that's the miraculous thing. When prepared properly, according to the five-hundred-year old recipe, the pineal gland of the mallard tastes sweet and fruity, like apricot, with hints of ginger and vinegar..."

Mini-Schremp then goes on to tell how the waitress's name badge says "Aimee" but in fact she's known in Beijing as Dong Sue. She was brought to the U.S. two years ago, after being sold into sexual slavery in Redwood City. But she managed to kill her captors, and now she works for "that big huge guy in the kitchen, right there—the guy with the missing fingertip, see him? His name is Saki Tumi, a.k.a. Wei Wei Fat; he's actually Japanese, a former Yakuza hit man. This is his territory, we're safe here. He opened this restaurant ten years ago, after making a fortune filming snuff movies in Fukushima. Born-again Christian. Nicest guy you'll ever want to meet."

Absurdity, in this case, proves to be a great ice-breaker. The characters go on to have a great time, the reader (I hope) has a great time, the puppets get naughty, a big secret gets revealed, the main character has a realization, and the relationship goes to the next level.

The novel, by the way, is called B.A.T.T.Y., and I hope you'll buy it when it comes out. (I've got to finish writing it first.)

Unpredictable/unreliable narrators are, let's face it, a lot more entertaining than guileless, truth-obsessed court reporters. Have fun with your narrator. Let him or her go a little crazy. It's what the reader wants.

Monday, December 23, 2013

At the End of Gravity's Rainbow

After six weeks of determined struggle, I've finally made it to the end of Gravity's Dictionary (the Pynchon postmodern classic, known to most as Gravity's Rainbow). It's one of those books that you don't read so much as live through (or survive), your friends and family meanwhile asking "Where's he been? Oh, wait, right; he was reading that Pynchon thing . . ." and then you emerge from the study door, like Rod Taylor in The Time Machine (1960 George Pal version), wheezing and hypoxic—in tatters, sartorially and psychologically—every brain cell screaming to its neighbors: "I've got blisters on my fingers!"

Rod Taylor (as H.G. Wells) enters the dining
room after returning from the year 802,701,
in The Time Machine (1960).

Certainly one of the more challenging works of English I've ever read (even admirers of the novel have been known to say reading it is "admittedly a slog . . ."; see a book excerpt here), Gravity's Rainbow sets a high water mark for inscrutability, at least among American authors. (We must give a nod to Joyce here.) Pynchon's style is unrelentingly baroque and macaronic, truncheoning the reader alternately with French, German, and English, layering engineering concepts atop scatological neologisms atop organic chemistry references atop acronyms, with frequent (and annoying) recourse to made-up song lyrics (please, Mr. Pynchon, curb your doggerel), switching from mimesis to diegesis the way Lady Gaga changes stage outfits. Of course, it's all good clean fun until someone loses a mind. Some idea of the vexation the book provokes can be inferred from the fact that despite a unanimous recommendation by the Fiction Jury (consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alfred Kazin) to award the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Pynchon, the larger Pulitzer committee overruled its own fiction judges and gave the 1974 fiction prize to—no one.

Whether Gravity's Rainbow deserves to be ranked among the greatest novels ever written (it has made more than one reviewer's "Top 100" list) is certainly open to debate. Whether it can even properly be called a novel is open to debate. (Well-known NYC book editor Gerald Howard once said of the putative classic it is "not a novel in the generally accepted sense—it is a text, intended for moral instruction.") If you come looking for a plot, you won't find one. There are bits and pieces of story, but in the end, Gravity's Rainbow is about as much an example of storytelling as head cheese is an example of meat. It's more of an accretion of vignettes and daydreams held together with digressions and song lyrics. Should we even bring up the matter of character arc? The main character (the bumbling, oversexed polymath, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop) simply vanishes around 50 pages from the end of the 776-page book.

Pynchon's classic is not without its serious detractors. One reviewer, Walter Kirn, writing for Slate, took up

. . . the question of whether Pynchon's writings are intended for normal human beings. I don't think they are. They partake of what the Elizabethans called "euphuism"—the pursuit of linguistic complexity for its own sake. As such, they're intended for literary monastics, for the tenured priesthood of paid interpreters that sprang up in colleges after World War II with the help of massive public funding from schemes such as the GI Bill and Pell grants. This professional audience for difficult "texts" created the demand that Pynchon first filled with V. and Gravity's Rainbow, the semiotic monoliths whose mix of scientific imagery, Cold War absurdity, and Joycean allusion provided a kind of full-employment program for a generation of rising postdocs.

One can't help but hear in such shrill attacks the voice of the learned classical-music critic trying to come to grips with modern jazz. Would someone who has known only Haydn and Beethoven be competent to pass judgment on an Ella Fitzgerald scat, or a Keith Jarrett Köln Concert? Shall we criticize Miles Davis for not knowing how to carry a melody? Bill Evans for not knowing how to root a chord?

One critic (Dan Schneider) slammed Gravity's Rainbow for its lack of emotional impact, stating "it’s remarkable to think how utterly emotionally unaffecting the book is." This comes much closer to the mark, I think, because it's hard, actually, to recall a novel in which there are so many sex scenes, with so little passion in any of them. Indeed, Pynchon has a curious gift for creating colorful characters that lack life. The villains are flimsy (and of course it's perfectly okay that we make them sexual deviants, since they are Nazis, after all), the sympathetic characters conspicuously unsympathetic; the hero himself unremittingly bland. Slothrop, Pointsman, Eventyr, Tchitcherine, Mucker-Maffick, and the rest are all not just cardboard characters, but soggy, pissed-on cardboard. They materialize and dematerialize throughout the story like apparitions, wearing their affectations like paper armbands, making the masked extras in Eyes Wide Shut seem complex in comparison. (It's telling, I think, that as celebrated an epic as Gravity's Rainbow is, no attempt has ever been made to bring it to the big screen.)

Ostensibly, this is a book about war (World War II), and yet there are no battle scenes (only a hint of a firefight late in the book, amounting to nothing). All of the personnel are stationed in the rearmost of rear areas, Lieutenant Slothrop's most daring venture being a jaunt through Switzerland in the spring of 1945 (followed by a riverboat adventure that brings him, rather late, to Peenemünde). The V-2 rocket, and Slothrop's allusory erections, are the star of the show. We get to hear a great deal about guidance systems, Poisson distributions, dyes and propellants, the incestuous pre-war relationship between American and European industrial conglomerates; we even get Pynchon's charming account (via a parable involving one Byron the Light Bulb) of how incandescent filament life was balanced against the cartel-set price of tungsten and electric power company economic reality. But we see precious little of the human emotional toll of war that, for example, Tolstoy would have shown us. Even Vonnegut and Heller (with all their hyperbolic, tragicomic absurdism) were able to paint a more vivid, lasting, high-emotional-impact picture of World War II than Pynchon has managed to do in Gravity's Rainbow.

The inevitable comeback is "Well but you see now, that's just the point, isn't it? War is a dehumanizingly banal enterprise, in the end; the bureacratic machinery of armed conflict is fundamentally numbing to the spirit, and you can't really expect . . ."

Oh, but we can expect. Slaughterhouse Five. Catch-22. War and Peace. (Dare I say it? M*A*S*H.) We can expect more, much more, from a war story, even a humorously told one, I'm afraid.

Criticisms aside, Gravity's Rainbow will always have a special place in my heart, if for no other reason than its success in refuting the iron-clad dicta of the NYC publishing elite, who demand that a novel have compelling characters with well-defined character arcs, strong plot and subplots (with well-timed reversals), a timely theme, a well-defined genre, and all the rest—all hog-swill, basically. Somehow, Thomas Pynchon gave the finger to all that, and got away with it. No doubt there are other Pynchons out there right now, nascent meisters of the written word struggling to be heard above the white noise of Amazon ratings, Goodreads reviews, Bookbub "featured book" placements, und so weiter. We can only hope some of them will be discovered—and properly celebrated—while there are still those of us who remember how to read more than 140 characters at a time.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Unusual Words from Gravity's Rainbow

Here and there around the Web you'll find lists of vocabulary words culled from Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon's epic postmodern novel about the deployment of the V-2 rocket in World War II. I couldn't resist compiling such a list myself. I've been a professional writer, a student of the English language, for almost 40 years, and like Thomas Pynchon himself, I spent a good deal of time employed as a technical writer. It's not often I come across a word in English I've never seen before, but in reading Gravity's Rainbow, one finds oneself accosted by such words with metronomic regularity; which (if you're a student of the language) is a pleasant surprise indeed.

In the table further below are a few English words I'd not seen used in any novel before. (I've omitted words relating to architecture and fabrics, two areas where Pynchon seems to have developed a fetishistic devotion to lexical obscurata. Likewise, I make no attempt to list engineering terms, which are legion in Gravity's Rainbow.)

In case you want to try to catch a feel for the actual prose whence these words came, a Chinese site has the entire text of Gravity's Rainbow online, as follows:

CONTENTS:

1 Beyond the Zero

2 Un Perm' au Casino Hermann Goering

3 In the Zone

4 The Counterforce

I don't advocate attempting to read the entire book online, nor do I believe anyone would be so foolhardy as to try to do so. (I do strongly advocate buying the book or obtaining it from the library.) These links are meant as sample entry points.

Here, then, without further ado, are a few words I encountered in Gravity's Rainbow that I cannot recall encountering in any other novel in English:

antinomian	Of or relating to the view that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law.
bedizen	(verb) To decorate tastelessly.
dishabille	The state of being only partly or scantily clothed.
doss	(verb) To sleep in a usually uncomfortable place that does not have a bed.
emprise	An adventurous, daring, or chivalric enterprise
firth	Coastal waters in Scotland and England.
gloze	(verb) Make excuses for.
gunsel	A criminal carrying a gun.
nacre, nacreous	Nacre is mother-of-pearl, nacreous is thus a pearlescent or lustrous and iridescent white sheen.
oneiric	Of or relating to dreams or dreaming.
pantechnicon	1. A large van, esp one used for furniture removals. 2. A warehouse where furniture is stored.
passementerie	Ornamental trimming for a garment, as braid, lace, or metallic beads.
preterition	1. The action of passing over or disregarding a matter, esp. the rhetorical technique of making summary mention of something by professing to omit it. 2. (in Calvinist theology) Omission from God's elect; nonelection to salvation.
quai	A wharf or reinforced bank where ships are loaded or unloaded.
rachitic	Of or relating to ricketts, the vitamin-deficiency disease.
sastrugi	Wind erodes snow from the windward side of an obstacle and deposits it on the lee side. Sastrugi are the ridge-like formations of snow thus produced.
scombroid	Bony fish (such as tuna, swordfish) are scombroid fish. May also refer to illness (poisoning) from eating tainted fish of this general category.
spicule	Any of many needle-like crystalline structures that provide skeletal support in marine invertebrates.
talion	A punishment identical to the offense (eye for an eye).
velleity	A wish or inclination not strong enough to lead to action, e.g. "the notion intrigued me, but remained a velleity."