Notes on Craft

No More Notes: Write About Now

2007-09-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

Notes on Craft has moved, been re-named, and is going to be better than ever. If you've enjoyed reading this blog, you're going to love the new one: Write About Now. To make the transition smooth, I copied over most of 2007's NoC posts. The archive here is going to remain only, too, so it will always be accessible.

The sub-title of Write About Now is "a travelogue of the world as it really is." Although fiction is about making things up, it's a way to see parts of reality that we wouldn't otherwise be confronted with. Drama is its own sort of scientific method, a way of discovering different kinds of truth. The important thing, it seems to me, is being honest about the world around us -- seeing things for what they truly are. Write About Now will chronicle my own efforts at doing that.

The Mystical Cachet of Writing Manuals

2007-09-14T15:31:00.000-07:00

When I was a boy, I discovered a leather duffle in my dad's closet, and inside was a cache of paperbacks by Dale Carnegie, including How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was fascinated. This secret power of influencing struck me as a good thing to possess, and any book that taught it must be worth reading. So I did. My expectations weren't exactly met, but that didn't stop me from believing that, whatever arcane skill one might like to acquire, its mysteries were revealed in a book. It was only natural, when my interests turned to writing, for my shelves to fill with how-to manuals.

Again, my expectations were unmet. There are excellent books on fiction, and there are mundane ones. My guess is that you can learn quite a bit from them all. Two new ones sit unread on my desk: Sandra Schofield's The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer and Peter Selgin's By Cunning and Craft. A couple of others are en route -- I went on a bit of a buying spree recently. For whatever reason, I have always found it impossible to read more than a few pages of a how-to manual without putting it down and writing -- and that's a great problem for a writer to have!

Reading these books, I'm always struck by how much I don't know. Just flipping through The Scene Book, for example, convinced me I know nothing about writing scenes. On the other hand, the manuals often reduce the writing process to something formulaic, mechanistic. This makes it easier to talk about and teach, but it's not really how it works. The process is organic. Even so, my organic process has benefited greatly from reading other people's formulaic, mechanistic books on writing.

Here's the thing. Like Dale Carnegie, the writing manuals don't deliver on what they seem to promise. They can't. But they serve a purpose all the same. A steady diet of these things can be motivating. The really great ones can be much more than that. While it's probably true that you can learn more about writing from reading great books than reading how-to books, I still keep buying and flipping through the things, because they still retain the mystical cachet I attributed to them in childhood. Books about writing fiction have become one of my favorite genres of nonfiction, and for all the wrong reasons.

Sponge vs. Conduit

2007-09-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

Every author has his influences. Originality is a relative term. When we're asked where our ideas come from, an honest answer might be: "From other writers." Good authors borrow, great authors steal, and all that. Still, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The author's mind is often compared to a sponge -- it's always soaking up ideas. I'm going to suggest that some authors behave as sponges, which is good, and others act like conduits, which is bad:

The sponge accumulates influences and gives them time to reconfigure in his mind. He takes what others have done but repurposes it in keeping with his own vision. When you read his work, you can probably identify some influences, but you aren't left thinking, "Hey, I've encountered this story before!"

The conduit is less artful, more derivative. He plunders whatever is popular and cranks out his thinly disguised version of it. In some cases, the process is so brazen that readers (or the author himself) can make one-to-one identifications.

If you want to know the difference, it's that sponges are influenced while conduits merely imitate. There are some very successful conduits out there, writers who take every trend and crank out their own version of it, but I think there's something ultimately unsatisfying about such work. It's not just originality that's absent, but in some mysterious way personality seems missing, too.

Why Novels are Better than Movies

2007-08-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

You're being sniffy, I told myself. And defensive. Standing up for the novel when nobody's attacking it. He didn't say movies are better than books, he just said his dream was to become a filmmaker, and everyone's entitled to a dream. But for some reason I felt the need to point out just how impotent a director is in comparison to a novelist.

"With film," I said, "you have to rely on so many people. A novelist has absolute control. He writes the script, casts the roles, performs the parts and dresses the sets. He controls the camera. He doesn't answer to producers because he doesn't need a budget. No one looks over his shoulder and second-guesses. The director has to work through others to achieve his art, which means he's a manager as well as a creative. The novelist is free to sink or swim on his own merit."

I had a little experience to back this up. One of the hats I'd worn throughout the nineties involved writing and directing corporate training videos, so I knew what it was like to intend one outcome and end up with something altogether more modest. Sometimes the set designer couldn't give us the look we wanted, given our limited budget, and sometimes the cameraman couldn't get the shot. The talent we could afford to put in front of the camera wasn't always top notch. By the end of a long day of shooting, I knew that things would never turn out quite how I wanted, and I was fine with that. "It's not art," I'd remind myself.

But what if it had been? Film and stage directors who manage to put their stamp on a work have my utmost admiration, because I know just how difficult that can be. When I talk to aspiring filmmakers, I often come away with the feeling they don't know. Because the technical side of low-budget movie-making has gotten so easy, they assume that it all has. But the artistry is every bit as illusive, I think.

Still, that's no reason to discourage a beginner, and that's precisely what I was doing -- trying to convince him that novels are a nobler thing and that to write them is a much worthier goal toward which to aspire. Why was I being so petty?

My own insecurities, no doubt. When you've thrown your lot in with the novel, you can't help getting a little defensive. All the signs point to obsolescence. Fewer people are reading at all, and the ones who maintain the tradition don't exactly inspire us with their choices. (The situation seems so desperate, though, that it seems ungrateful not to say something like, "At least they're reading" or "Anything that gets people reading again is a good thing.") Aspiring to write novels feels a little bit like opening a hat shop. You spend as much time admonishing people for going around bare-headed as you do plying your trade. The fact is, people don't want what you're trying to sell, and that makes you touchy.

But the thing is, I love the movies. In another lifetime, I can't imagine anything more satisfying than to be able to point to an hour and a half of black-and-white film, or a Criterion Collection DVD, and say, "I did that." I love talking about movies as much as I love talking about books, and I find aspiring filmmakers fascinating. Whenever I meet one, I ask about influences, share favorites, and try to be as encouraging as I can be -- because let's face it, the path of the novelist is easier than that of the director. If you think convincing a publisher to put a few grand into your big trial balloon of a novel is hard, try convincing investors to dig deep and finance your film.

I wasn't being an encourager this time, though. Quite the opposite. In effect, I was telling this guy that his dream was impossible, even more so than mine. Why was I doing it?

You know the feeling. The words come out and, while they're your words, you don't exactly own them. You'd like the conversation to end, but your mouth won't stop moving. You're saying things that reveal too much about your inner life, only you don't know what they reveal because this is new territory. It's as if you're your own therapist, trying to weigh the import and implications of each sentence only to be interrupted as the next one comes. I was -- to use an archaic term -- venting my spleen. I'd stored up some resentment and something cut it loose.

I resented the fact that, having put so much into writing, I seemed to have so little to show for it. I resented my disillusionment. Because of the choices I'd made, I would never be a director, and I must have resented that too -- the idea that this guy might become something that, years ago, I might have been. It's complicated and banal, the way resentment usually is. Maybe I resented his talent, or felt I'd wasted my own. Who knows? Feelings like this don't bear much scrutiny. Better to purge them and move on.

And now I wonder, what would it be like if novels were made like films? A separate author for each character, specialists to supply scenery and sensory detail, a director to shape it all into a coherent whole. Some novels, of course, are collaborative efforts -- but not usually in the sense that movies are. When I contemplate such a change, I can't help thinking the novel would suffer. You can't do art by committee, I tell myself. But a lot of art is done collaboratively. Some art can't be accomplished any other way. Why should the novel be any different?

Really, it's a question of temperament. Some of us hunt in packs, others alone. The loners tend to gravitate toward the forms where their sensibility is respected. If I'd been more outgoing, more willing to work with others, I might have found directing a more amenable project, but since I preferred to be in control of everything, with no responsibilities except to myself, writing fiction proved more hospitable. It's not as if artistic disciplines are mutually exclusive -- actors can write novels, poets can direct films, etc. -- but I wonder whether practitioners of the lonely arts tend to stick with those avenues, and practitioners of the communal arts do likewise?

Perhaps in every art, we must be sometimes lonely and sometimes communal. My resentment, come to think of it, must have stemmed from the frustration that my lonely art had not yet flowered into something communal. I had been forced to keep it too long to myself, and it began to erupt and assert itself in inappropriate ways. I'll never know. Fortunately, my bad mood seemed to go unnoticed by the would-be filmmaker. He indulged me the way you would a crazy uncle, but didn't take anything I said too much to heart. I'm glad. Sometimes our feelings prompt us to say things we don't really believe. Sometimes we don't know what we believe. This is one of those occasions when, in retrospect, I was happy to be ignored.

The Alley is Becoming a Runway: Tone in Fiction

2007-08-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

We found a teenaged girl sprawled on the pavement in the alley behind our building. Her shoulder dug into a brick wall and an impossibly long leg -- pale and bare -- extended straight out. The other was bent, like she'd slipped, and it must have been a terrible slip the way her body was twisted around. I stopped in my tracks, but Laurie kept going.

"This is a popular spot for them," she said over her shoulder. "I've been running into them all summer."

Them? Who were they? I peered into the doorway beside the girl and sure enough there were several others standing around, conferring with one another in whispers. I gazed again at the girl on the ground, and she looked more dazed than hurt. Eerily thin, too, with a pallor than glowed in the shadowy doorway. Ah, I thought. Drugs.

Shouldn't we do something? Laurie kept moving and, indifferent Samaritan that I am, so did I. As we neared our car, though, I stole a glance sideways to see if the girl had managed to get up. That's when I noticed the people with her in more detail. Two women in their mid-thirties. One of them held a piece of what looked like shiny foil, and the other hefted something black and menacing in her hands. A camera. Then it dawned on me. The contorted, heroin-thin girl on the pavement wasn't a junkie. She was a model.

That was the first of several encounters I've had with models in the past two weeks. Whenever I fetch the car from the alley, I can't seem to steer clear of them. Once I had to step aside to let a file of statuesque blondes march past, each one a little taller and a little older than the last. A family of models, presumably. Monday, I had a conversation with my pastor out in the alley, standing beside his parked car, and as we spoke a girl in a pink tutu ran and leapt in the air. Again and again, right over his shoulder. The photographer was tucked near the wheel well of an SUV, clicking away with intensity.

"Are we in the way?" I asked nervously.

"If you are," she replied, "I'll tell you."

I certainly felt like I was in the way. It's hard not to notice when someone's jumping a few feet away -- hard not to stare -- but I'm the sort of person who insists on not taking notice, not gaping like an idiot. My ideal facial expression at all times is unsurprised. The models make it hard, though.

My alley is a runway -- but it's hardly glamorous. The pavement's broken up and often slick with oil. The buildings that back onto the alley are uneven and slipshod in comparison with their facades. Layers of painted signs cover most of the surfaces, the newer ones slapped on over the obsolete without quite covering them. In comparison to the picturesque streets all around, our alley is a scarred, dystopian cityscape. In other words, it has atmosphere.

That's what brings the photographers, I think. They're looking for more than an interesting background. They want their photos to have a tone. Sure, they may be shooting local girls on behalf of some homegrown retailer, but they want to do it with a certain amount of style. I've never seen the resulting pictures, so I don't know how well it's turned out -- but the fact that so many different photographers bring so many different models here suggests that something's working.

Tone is one of those qualities authors often struggle to bring to their work. Tone is treacherous, easy either to forget or overdo. In other arts, tone might consist of a certain sound, or a certain look. It suggests mood and theme. It helps bring unity to the work. In prose there is nothing to see, nothing to hear. We can't bring out laptops out to the alley and start writing. For writers, tone is an abstraction waiting to be embodied.

Some basic words we use to talk about tone are dark and light. When we say something's light, we either mean that it's comic or that it's inconsequential (which is not the same thing). When the tone is more serious, we might describe it as weighty. Tragedy is dark, but darkness sometimes implies cynicism, too. The book of Ecclesiastes is dark, while the Song of Solomon is light. Revelation is dark, too, and the Old Testament prophets are weighty. This isn't very precise language, but it's our way to describing the feeling that goes along with the content.

As an artist, you can juxtapose content and feeling. The photographers in my alley are doing just that. They take fresh-faced girls in nice clothes and pose them against a patch of scorched brickwork, constrasting light and dark. This time of year, the way the sun filters down through the alley, choked back by the high buildings, creates a similar contrast. An author who handles tragedy with a light touch creates the same effect, and so does the one who takes trivialities seriously. The safe thing is to match tone and content, but the safe thing doesn't always produce the best results.

It would be safer, for example, to put pretty girls against pretty backgrounds and take pretty pictures of them. I'm guessing that's what at least some clients would prefer -- just as some readers or editors might. But the artist's instinct seems to stray unerringly toward these juxtapositions of light and dark. We do the unexpected -- and do what's expected in unexpected ways. It's not a question for originality as much as it's a search for texture.

Drifting

2007-08-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

This is a daunting consideration if you happen to be a contemporary author. On the one hand, I hear Eliot's advice and it rings true. As a reader I set great store by old books. But as an author I wonder if this doesn't cast a shadow over my own efforts. Am I just another cog in some contemporary 'mass movement,' or am I one of the few individuals? Eliot considered it harder than ever in his own day to be an individual, and I don't imagine it's gotten easier since then. I would be flattering myself, I suspect, to classify myself in the sacred camp, which means that by passing along Eliot's advice with approbation, I am in essence telling you not to bother to read my work. At the very least, you should wait until I'm dead and history has had an opportunity to give its verdict.

If I'm not an individual, I would at least like to believe that I'm striving to become one, and that self-awareness is the first step. Last summer, I was much inspired by something Evelyn Waugh said on the subject:

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.

Most of the artists I know are not reactionaries. The opposition they offer is very much in tune with the tenor of the age. They have quite conventional views on most subjects and are only able to fancy themselves as rebels by imagining some great unwashed Other that opposes their principles. In fact, the uniformity of moral and political opinion among the creative class is somewhat notorious. Our art may transgress, but our opinions rarely do. Or if they do, the people they offend are the uncouth, easily-manipulated masses. We tend to side with the elites.

George Orwell understood this. In an unfinished essay on Waugh, he wrote:

. . . the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacificist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system.

Not that Orwell did either. But Evelyn Waugh did, and it made him stand out as a novelist. Orwell continues:

In our own day, the English novelist who has most conspicuously defied his contemporaries is Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's outlook on life is, I should say, false and to some extent perverse, but at least it must be said for him that he adopted it at a time when it did not pay to do so, and his literary reputation has suffered accordingly.

According to Orwell, Waugh's is the "only loudly discordant voice" of his generation. Naturally, Orwell had no sympathy for Waugh's Christianity or his conservative politics, but I think we'd all agree that George Orwell was an individual and it appears from this essay that he recognized Waugh as one, too. Over the summer, I finished Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, which follows the adventures of a WW II officer named Guy Crouchback, who begins the conflict with chivalric ambitions and ends it with the desire to imitate Christ through self-sacrifice. Waugh is not content to tell us that war is hell, or even that war is crazy; instead, he shows that while its horror and absurdity make sport of the desire to pursue glory, they are redeemed by the decision to pursue Christ. This is a perspective which, as Orwell says, does not pay, but it is certainly out of step with the mass movement of Waugh's contemporaries.

Abraham Kuyper, in his Stone Lectures, speaks of marching "under the banner of the Cross against the spirit of the times," as if to be under the one is invariably to be against the other. It's an implication worth pondering for a Christian in the arts. "When the contemporary novelist is an individual," T. S. Eliot writes, "thinking for himself in isolation, he may have something important to offer to those who are able to receive it. He who is alone may speak to the individual. But the majority of novelists are persons drifting in the stream, only a little faster." And a Christian novelist has more reasons than most to come up out of that stream.

Eliot did not mean, of course, that we should have a stream of our own to swim in, with cleaner water and less traffic.

And the last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world. What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested.

Christian readers, in other words, must be individuals too, people of whom something more is expected, not just something different.

These reflections leave me with a greater desire for independence from my artistic and intellectual influences. They prompt me not to be so beholden to what I admire. For me, the rhetoric of individualism is largely bankrupt, but now I want to find a new way to talk about becoming an individual, not out of a desire to be rugged or self-sufficient, but in the hope of being more than just one more voice in the contemporary chorus -- the supposed cacophony that is all too regular in pattern.

Together in the Same Direction?

2007-08-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

T. S. ELIOT
"Religion and Literature," in Essays Ancient and Modern, p. 107

Mechanisms of Influence

2007-06-28T09:03:00.001-07:00

Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer's ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his rebuilt motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz.

CLIVE JAMES
Cultural Amnesia, p. 28

Tell, Don't Show?

2007-06-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

"Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers -- namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine 'dramatic' showing with long stretches of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling, and the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out -- don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams 'yay' and jumps up and down for joy -- when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing."

FRANCINE PROSE
Reading Like a Writer, p. 24

How Big is the Learning Curve, Really?

2007-05-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

It takes years for a novelist to learn his craft. That's the conventional wisdom. For me, it has proven accurate. I have learned my lessons slowly, and have also had a tendency to forget them over time. My guess is that, for many of the people who teach writing, the same thing could be said. The best teachers are often people who have struggled with the subject, because their own problems equip them to help with the roadblocks of others. I've met very talented writers, people for whom it all came easily, who were not very good at teaching for precisely this reason. They did what they did without thinking. In the same way that the writer who struggles for years in obscurity before landing a publishing deal has much more advice on the subject than the one who finished his first draft, e-mailed it to the agent, and had it accepted by the first editor to have a look. The longer it takes to get there, the more you learn on the way.

The problem is, if I served a long apprenticeship that included countless books and seminars and many years in graduate school then it stands to reason that, when asked, I will say all this is essential. You can't just sit down with a paper and pen and write. But the thing is, you can.

Okay, maybe you can and maybe you can't. The point is, just because I couldn't doesn't mean you can't. Some kids, when the training wheels are removed from their bicycles, ride like the wind, possessing an innate sense of balance. Others veer left and right, crash down, get up, and eventually develop a feel for staying upright. If you have innate balance, you don't want the weeble-wobble teaching you to ride, because he'll make it all harder than it needs to be. Same thing with fiction. If you have an innate gift for narrative, all the checklists and formulae and seminars will only slow you down.

Try it on your own first. Find out what your problems really are. Only then will you know what the learning curve really looks like.

Some Kind of Interesting Trouble

2007-05-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

"I don't think about structure and form when I write. I don't think, 'Now I've got to avoid an epiphany, and I've got to bring in a counterpointed character.' Nothing that I've thought abstractly, as far as craft is concerned, is much help in the first drafts. I try to see the characters, hear them, and get them into some kind of interesting trouble. It's only in the revisions and the rewriting that those techniques help."

CHARLES BAXTER
in Novel Voices, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

Showing Up for Work

2007-05-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

"I love the writer William Stafford's advice. Someone asked him, 'What do you do about writer's block?' Stafford said, 'Lower my standards and keep on going.' That's such beautiful advice. What you get done doesn't have to do with how gifted you are or how much ability you have; it has to do with your attitude toward it. If your attitude is 'This is my work: this is what I do every day, and I don't have any expectations except that I will have worked today,' then you will get a tremendous amount done. Some of it will be good. Some of it won't be so good. But you're showing up for work, putting in the hours. And, anyway, perfection is an illusion. I don't teach writing. I teach patience and toughness, stubbornness and willingness to make the mistakes and go on. And the willingness to look like an idiot sometimes. That's the only way any good thing ever gets done."

RICHARD BAUSCH
in Novel Voices, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

Some thoughts on "literary" as an adjective

2007-05-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

"Literary" is one of those terms, like "Christian," that will always have a little play in the definition. Two reasons: (1) the people who use the word in a positive sense do so in a variety of different ways, and (2) critics impose at least part of the range of meaning, and their definitions often incorporate distortions. I won't even attempt to untangle the nuances. If there was a checklist for determining what is literary, then it really would be just another genre. But I'm going to throw out some thoughts, for what they're worth.

1. In spite of the fact that the debate is often framed as "literary vs. genre," the two concepts are not antithetical, and they aren't mutually exclusive. Literary novels often incorporate genre elements, and genre novels often achieve a literary sensibility.

2. If you think the argument between literary and genre is spiteful, try listening in on the argument between crime noir and cosy mysteries. Even in "pure genre" contexts, there are many disputes about what fits and what doesn't.

3. Who gets to define the terms? Authors should always have the freedom to apply whatever labels they like to their work, even if the results are ridiculous. I have heard romance novelists talk about their style as literary because they used flowery language, and I laugh at that. When I call my own work "literary noir," I imagine someone else is laughing at me.

4. When it comes to defining what is literary, you have to make peace with the idea that there are no absolutes. I don't know of any succinct definition that couldn't be qualified with exceptions. But guess what? This is true to a lesser extent with the various genres, too. Just ask the poor ladies trying to figure out the difference between romance, chick lit and women's lit.

5. In grad school, "literary" was used as a synonym for "good." You often hear people these days say things like, "The classics were genre fiction," to which a grad school prof would say, "No they weren't -- they were good." If a genre writer wrote a good book, it was considered to have "transcended the genre."

6. I've actually read a fair bit of nineteenth century genre fiction, and while it's quite literate by today's standards, there is usually a qualitative difference between the classics and popular genre books. This is why, when the canon is changed to emphasis not literary merit but marginalized voices, the reading isn't as enjoyable.

7. Others may disagree, but for me "literary" is a synonym for "whole." Some people emphasize plot, others emphasize character. A good literary piece includes a strong plot, strong characters and a strong style. At Relief, I don't reject stories for having detectives in them or romance. I reject because they're lacking in one of the essentials.

8. I read genre fiction. I write genre fiction. I help other people write genre fiction. It's unfortunate, I think, that so many genre authorsfeel like they have to adopt literary rhetoric -- or denigrate it -- because there's no shame in writing genre books.

For what it's worth....

The Artist's Development: 2 Stages or 3?

2007-05-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

My undergraduate years can be neatly divided into two periods: the time when I had no friends, and the time when I did. The first era took up the whole of my freshman and sophomore years, and since I was friendless, I spent most weekends barricaded in my dorm room reading book after book. At the time, I hoped to graduate college and go to work for the CIA, ridding the world of the Red Menace, so a lot of my reading consisted of spy novels. I read John Le Carre, of course, but I also read a lot of Robert Ludlum -- enough to realize that each of his books was essentially the same book, and that the best of them all (The Road to Gandolfo broke the mold. It was only natural, then, when it came time to pen my first novel, that I feel back on a familiar form. My epigraph came from Chaucer, but the plot and characters were pure Ludlum, albeit leavened with a cynicism I'd picked up from reading The Second Oldest Profession.

I share this little anecdote because I think it illustrates the way many writers develop. We begin as consumers, then make the decision to contribute a book of our own. A voracious reader reaches the point where he "gets" what's going on beneath the surface. There was a time when, given a ream of paper and an open weekend, I could have produced a passable imitation of a Ludlum novel, simply because my brain was so full of them I'd begun to think in Ludlumesque ways. Sure, the resulting book was derivative (though I'd like to think it was more than the sum of its parts), and if I'd been consuming Proust or Faulkner or Salman Rushdie I might have produced better, though equally derivative, work. But Proust, Faulkner and Rushdie seemed not to know about the Walther PPK and how every story needs one, so I read Ludlum instead.

The problem with 2-Stage Development, moving straight from consumer to contributor, is that the results can be derivative and thin. I saw this in my own work, and I've noted it in the writing of friends and colleagues, too. I have mixed feelings about my graduate school experience -- mainly because my own shortcomings prevented me from making the most of it -- but one thing I'm grateful for is that it shoe-horned a remedial stage into my development. I learned to be critical.

Critics are to writers what internal affairs is to cops. We tend to admit their necessity in theory and then object to every evidence of it in practice. In this case, I'm not saying that thanks to grad school I became a literary critic. If anything, my brush with theory had the opposite effect. I appreciate what such folk do, but couldn't pull it off myself. Here, what I have in mind is just a combination of detachment and self-awareness. I learned to think about what I'd read and what I wanted to write. As simple as that seems, it's missing in a lot of developing artists, who focus on "how to" at the expense of "what" and "why." As a result, technique is fetishized and people begin to talk about writing fiction as if it's just a little less complicated than brain surgery, when the fact is that most reasonably educated, well-read people with a bit of time and determination could probably right a decent novel. (That's only a threatening admission, by the way, if you think writing a "decent" novel is good enough.)

I'm not saying that critical awareness solves all the artist's problems, but it does tend to put things in perspective. It comes, of course, in a variety of guises. The accomplished genre novelist who knows his market and keeps up with what his fellow writers are publishing displays a critical awareness that the fellow who just reads and reproduces often lacks. Commercial awareness is part of that middle stage. But it isn't the whole thing (or even the most important thing). For me, the critic stage is where I stopped thinking in terms of imitating someone else and started thinking about dialogue and influence instead.

Of course, it's possible to write novels without even reading them, let alone thinking about them, so my little 2 Stage vs. 3 Stage diagram only goes so far. I've experienced it both ways, moving from consumer to contributor, then going from consumer to critic to contributor, and I think the latter option is better. Which means that if you're reading this and it rings true, you want to start looking for ways to develop a critical appreciation. For me, it was easy -- I had one forced on me in grad school, and then went from there. Outside the academy, you face some challenges, and perhaps we'll talk about those in a future post.

Save It Till the End of the Scene

2007-04-24T15:02:00.000-07:00

You're writing a scene. The dialogue is crackling, the action is intense, and for everything you say you're leaving plenty more unsaid. You're in the zone. In fact, you're punching above your weight, writing better than anyone should be allowed, and loving every second.

And then it happens: you go internal.

You never made a conscious decision. The scene just veered off. And now, between every line of dialogue and every action beat, there are a string of inner questions, a chunk of each character's psychology plopped on the page. Every point is belabored, every effect overdetermined, and suddenly all the story questions are exhausted, all the suspense dead and gone. Your wave crested the moment you opened up your characters' brains.

There is a place, of course, for internal musings, a place for heroes and heroines to ponder their conflicted motivations. Authors often come up with these motives during a scene, and so it seems natural to insert them there. Maybe it works -- I'm sure it does sometimes. But I happen to think that the inner life of characters is a resource best used sparingly. If you do want to probe a heroine's doubts, dont' do it in the middle of her conversations. Instead, save such ruminations for when they would naturally occur in life: after the talking is done, when she's trying to figure out what made her say those terrible things!

This strategy has two virtues. It keeps your scenes moving, and it also adds clarity to a character's emotional arc -- because, when inner thoughts are used like punctuation between lines of dialogue, these emotions seem to ping-pong back and forth. Obviously, there's a way to pull off most anything, and my advice stems from my own inability to make such things work. If you can do it, more power to you. Just make sure you really are pulling it off.

Working on My Work, Which No One Understands

2007-04-19T13:53:00.000-07:00

Today, my agent posted a list of "impolite types in the business" that is worth checking out. It's customary, of course, not to point out such things, but I don't think a dose of honesty is going to hurt Chip's bad boy image, and it might just help some folks who aren't aware that what they've been doing sabotages their efforts. One point in particular rang true with me -- because I've been there:

Why is it bad writers always think their work is going to improve if they can explain it? Do they plan to visit each buyer of their book in order to explain their concepts in person?

I saw this happen time and again in grad school. After a ritual evisceration during critique, the author-victim would follow up with a series of arguments and justifications, explaining to the class what they "missed" in the story. Whenever it happened, I could hear the lyrics of King Missle's "Sensitive Artist" strumming in the background:

I am a sensitive artist. / Nobody understands me because I am so deep. / In my work, I make allusions to books that nobody else has read, / music that nobody else has heard; / and art that nobody else has seen. / I can't help it because I am so much more intelligent and well-rounded than everyone who surrounds me. / I stopped watching tv when I was six months old because it was so boring and stupid, / and started reading books and going to recitals and art galleries. / I don't go to recitals any more, because my hearing is too sensitive, / and I don't go to art galleries any more because there are people there / and I can't deal with people because they don't understand me. / I stay at home, reading books that are beneath me and working on my work, / which no one understands. / I am sensitive.

If you've written a story so deep that no one "gets" it, you may be a genius. Then again, maybe you're just fooling yourself. Perhaps the problem is that they do get it, but there's not much there to get. Whatever the case, your work has to speak for itself, because you won't be there to explain it to every reader.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling low and Laurie comes in to ask what I did with my day, I answer in the immortal words of "Sensitive Artist": I stayed home, I tell her, reading books that are beneath me and working on my work, which no one undersands. It makes me feel better for a moment, because I can laugh at my pretensions. The day I stop laughing, though, I'll be in real trouble. Let's just hope I don't start trying to explain my work.

Online Submissions

2007-04-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hard copies aren't exactly a thing of the past, but more and more people have made peace with online submissions. At Relief Journal, we've embraced them. For a publication with editors working all over the country, an electronic workflow makes a whole lot of sense. We can move submissions back and forth through the ether without churning up a small forest or depleting the national supply of novelty stamps. Unfortunately, each new leap forward brings with it a set of new challenges. The industrial revolution gave us the smoke stack, and the technological revolution has burdened us with formatting problems.

Paper is a univeral medium. When you print your manuscript, ink is applied to paper and the results look the same to everyone who looks. It doesn't matter if you used Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, Apple's Pages or a simple text editor to type the story, once it's on paper there are no compatibility issues. Online submissions are different. The file you send is either your original word processing document or an export from your software to a (hopefully) compatible format. The editor on the other end of the tether may or may not be able to open your file, and if he does, the file may or may not retain the proper formatting (assuming you formatted it correctly to begin with).

What does it matter? Well, I'll tell you this. During every reading period for Relief, I have received at least one submission that I could not open, and at least more that, when opened, was unreadable gibberish. The stories might have been works of genius, but I'll never know, because I never had the opportunity to read them. Yes, I could get in touch with the authors and ask for a different file format or some troubleshooting, but you know what? Editors are busy. They have a lot of reading to do. And an author who doesn't bother to send a file that I can open seems like someone who doesn't care much about the work -- and how can he expect me to invest more effort in his work than he does?

If you're submitting online, then it's in your best interest to think through this compatibility issue. Believe me, it's simple, the easiest thing in the world to get right. But people still get it wrong, so I offer this advice to anyone with ears to hear.

1. Send a Microsoft Word document. You might not use Word or even like it, but for now it is pretty much the standard. If you send a Microsoft Word file, no one will have any trouble opening the thing, and it will retain its original formatting. This makes the editor's job easier and, if the story is accepted, the typesetter's too. Personally, I don't compose manuscripts in Word. For the last couple of years, I've been using Pages, a component in Apple's iWork package, and now I'm thinking about giving Scrivener a try. Before I submit a manuscript, I just export the file to Word format. Simple as that.

Needless to say, once you exports a file to Word format, you need to open it in Word and make sure that everything looks right. I've found that exports from Pages are usually clean, but occasionally the page numbers in the header need adjustment. Make the necessary tweaks to the Word file before sending it out.

2. Don't send RTF, PDF or Word Perfect files. I know that some people are going to read #1 and think that it's better to send a Rich Text files, or maybe a PDF, because these are univeral formats. Rich Text will work, but I still think a Word document is better, because it's a format people are more likely to be familiar with. I'll concede that RTF is an acceptable risk, though. The same can't be said for PDF. Don't get me wrong, I love PDFs, and they are the only way to insure that your original formatting is perfectly preserved. There are some contexts in which I'd send an editable PDF over a Word file -- graphic design is an obvious example -- but I'm going to suggest that PDF isn't a great vehicle for manuscript submissions. Most of the PDFs I receive from authors are not editable, which means that the text, when copied and pasted into a design file, will need to be reformatted by hand. Also, while it's possible to add sticky notes and annotations to a PDF, I find that more people are familiar with the tools for doing so in Word. When I read submissions for Relief, I usually download them all into a folder and then open them one by one in Word. Every time I have to switch software or run into a file that won't convert properly in Word, my frustration level is higher. Is it worth frustrating an editor just to insist on your technological preference?

About Word Perfect. I wouldn't even know it still existed except that I still receive files with that .wps extension from time to time. Most writers using a word processor other than Microsoft Word understand that they'll need to export their document as a Word file to insure compatibility, but for some reason Word Perfect users don't seem to have gotten the memo. Yes, MS Word is able to convert files in Word Perfect format, but relying on that conversion isn't a good idea. Think about it. It's your responsiblity as a writer to send the manuscript in the form you want considered. If I have to convert your file to a readable format for you, then make allowances for any oddball re-formatting errors, that's really asking a lot.

3. Please format your manuscript. In the mid-nineties, when I worked on the Gulf Coast staff, we received paper submisisons and then requested electronic copies on disk when we accepted a piece. For each issue, I'd end up with a foot-high stack of plastic floppy disks. Because of the time involved in the process, I think writers took greater pains to get the details right. Manuscripts looked like manuscripts, not blog posts copied and pasted into a file. Today, I'd say there's a fifty-fifty split between well-formatted manuscripts and ones that look like they were created as part of the author's out-patient treatment for mental illness. Either writers aren't aware anymore of what their manuscripts should look like -- they're more accustomed to HTML style formatting than print -- or they assume we want a raw, unformatted text that we can paragraph and punctuate any way we see fit! Brothers and sisters, it ain't so.

Double-space your manuscript. Indent your paragraphs, but don't add an extra line of space between them. (In a manuscript, which is already double-spaced, this error books particularly bad.) Use a reasonable font. I don't care if it isn't Courier or Times Roman, but at least choose something you'd actually see in a printed book. Keep your type size at a standard 12 points and don't boost the size for emphasis (or any other reason).

All of this advice is designed to do one thing: make your editor's life easier. It has the side benefit of helping you stand out in the pack, because (I'm sorry to say) following basic formatting parameters actually accomplishes that these days. As strange as it sounds, a clean, problem-free manuscript inspires confidence in me. It should be the other way around: the trouble-free manuscript should be neutral, while the problematic one raises red flags. But there are so many problematic ones (not the majority, but a significant minority) that simply getting this very obvious thing right is a point in your favor. Imagine that.

I'm thrilled that online submissions have become widely accepted. I'd take formatting problems over smoke stacks any day of the week. But the crazy thing is, these problems are so easily remedied. They only exist because authors either don't know or don't care. I suppose that gives those who do a slight edge. Make sure you're one of them.

Better than Camus or Sartre

2007-03-22T12:26:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Simenon, Mark Sarvas has posted a detailed report on an LA appearance of John Banville's, including this:

During the questions, we asked him to discuss the Simenon influence: He called Simenon's romans durs - hard novels - "masterpieces .. far better than anything by Camus or Sartre." He found the books "absolutely honest ... I was fascinated by the effects he could achieve with such a seemingly simple narrative and vocabulary ... Of course, it's not simple or straightforward at all. ... Simenon opened my eyes to a different direction in writing."

I've gotten pretty fanatical about these books, so it's nice to know that far better brains than mine are in agreement.

Introducing an Unsympathetic Character

2007-03-21T18:45:00.000-07:00

Simenon does something fascinating in the opening chapter of Le Fiancailles de M. Hire (1933) -- recently released by NYRB with the title The Engagement. Instead getting inside the central character's head, he starts off with the concierge in Mr. Hire's building. She delivers some mail to his apartment, sees something suspicious, and then hunts down one of the detectives who've been conducting surveillance ever since a dead woman was found in a nearby lot. The concierge and the policeman work each other up, and then Mr. Hire leaves the building, only to be followed by a second detective, who shadows him and then compares notes with the first.

In other words, before we meet Mr. Hire as a character, we're introduced to him as a suspect.

Hire is a quiet recluse. Maybe he's not the sort of guy to stir the imagination, but this curious way of introducing him changes that. The suspicions about him add a layer of mystery, insuring that the reader pays close attention to every little thing he does. It's an clever approach to the problem of introducing an unsympathetic character.

Issues are for After-School Specials

2007-03-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

Do me a favor. Don't talk about the "issues" you're going to "tackle" in your fiction. I know it seems like name-checking controversial social issues is a fast-track to serious writing, but trust me, it isn't. That's the logic of the after-school special. As serious as the issues in those specials are, do we ever really take the movies seriously? I don't. There's something hokey, something unrealistic about their efforts at gritty realism. I'm sure there are a variety of reasons, but I suspect a big part of it has to do with approaching the story through the lens of "issues."

Characterization in a One-Liner

2007-03-13T13:29:00.000-07:00

In addition to offering a great example of how a novel can be grounded in a metaphor, Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock displays the author's talent for one-liner characterization, one of the traits we tend to associate with noir. When the protagonist, George Stroud, encounters his soon-to-be mistress sitting in a bar, here's the description he gives: "She was blonde as hell, wearing a lot of black." That blonde as hell tells us something about the woman's appearance, but it also reveals character -- a bit of hers and a bit of George's, too. All alone, it's not much, but in context the line is iconic.

Fearing takes the technique to the next level later in the book, when Stroud gives us his take on Steve Hagen, the dark manipulator behind Stroud's woes. Here's the description: "Hagen was a hard, dark little man whose soul had been hit by lightning, which he liked." That soul hit by lightning is good, but adding which he liked in passing is pure genius. Stroud goes on: "His mother was a bank vault and his father an International Business Machine." In other words, Hagen is all business, a perfectly amoral money-man, but it's no fun spelling it out.

Writers who take the injuction to "show, don't tell" too literally will never come out and tell us such things about a character, and writers who do nothing but tell rarely manage it with such interesting efficiency. Naturally, these one-liners come best from a first-person narrator, and they shouldn't be over-indulged or you'll veer into pastiche. To my mind, they're a great example of saying a lot with a few words, which is the essence of "packed" writing.

Developing Taste: A Bit of a Theory

2007-03-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

Another chart for another theory. This time, it's all about taste. To each his own, that's what they say, but there's no denying some people have better taste than others. But can you quantify such things? I doubt it. Still, it seems to me that there are three stages in the development of taste, and they go something like this. First, there's the "I know what I like" stage, which is where we all start. It's an uncritical acceptance of whatever we happen to love or hate, with no effort to defend or justify our feelings, and little or no interest in governing principles. After we leave this stage, we often look back on it as an Edenic innocence, a pre-critical time when we could simply enjoy.

Innocence is corrupted by knowledge, and the knowledge of the second stage revolves around three poles: the past, the popular, and the provocative. In each case, there are positive and negative polarities. I've tried to illustrate these in my chart. Some people, in developing their taste, christen nostalgia, accepting the premise that the old ways are best. They say "yes" to the past. This affirmative expresses itself in different ways depending on the discipline in question. When it comes to books, they'll prefer the classics. When it comes to clothing, they'll have a predilection for vintage. When it comes to art and architecture, the older the better. They value old things because they are old, first and foremost, the assumption being that we've lost whatever was good and we need to recover it. Of course, there's a negative polarity to this pole as well. Some people reject the past because it's the past, prefering instead whatever is current and new. Old ideas, old habits, old notions of beauty -- all of it is anathema, all of it dated. Again, it isn't so much the value of the individual expressions, it's the fact that they're old that makes them undesirable.

We observe the same thing when it comes to popularity. Some people despise whatever is popular because it is popular, just as some accept it for the same reason. Provocation functions similarly. Some crave whatever is shocking, while others abhor it. In each instance, though, this critical infancy privileges the assumption or principle above the particulars. Things are grouped into categories, judged as a whole, and accepted or rejected based on their consistency with the (often unstated) governing idea.

People in this stage typically look down on their uncritical peers, dismissing them as sheep. The naive inconsistency of the majority seems appalling. Who would want to live such an unexamined life? This snobbery, of course, is a vestige of immaturity. Little do people at Stage 2 realize that the folks who've reached Stage 3 pity them more than they do the uninitiated.

Critical infancy is a stage we must go through, but there's no excuse for staying there. How do you move beyond? I think the answer lies in seeing the either/or assumptions of Stage 2 as false dichotomies. Critical maturity comes when you realize that not all old things are good, not all new things bad (or vice versa), and you begin to judge the particulars, not the generalities. If ignorance involves making no judgments and immaturity consists in judging things on the basis of external abstractions, then maturity lies in jugding them on their own basis. It also involves the ability to place them in a larger context, to link the particular merits and demerits to the world outside, to measure their fidelity to the truth. So critical maturity isn't purged of abstraction, but it roots its general principles in the soil of the specific.

Tough All Over: Doing Art as a Christian

2007-03-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

I've spent a fair amount of time here and elsewhere writing about the problems faced by a Christian who decides to pursue art as an artist rather than a propagandist. In addition to the struggles any artist faces, he takes on the added burden of functioning in a community that misunderstands the nature of his work. In general, his co-religionists pose three problems: (1) They don't understand the nature of the task; (2) They have radically different expectations; (3) They sympathize in theory without being able to recognize specific achievements. Instead of illustrating these with examples, I'm going to point you to the feedback received by Christianity Today's film reviewers. These reviewers are producing some of the best film criticism in the evangelical world. I don't always agree with them -- but then, that's the nature of the beast. I admire them for thinking things through and, more often than not, applying the right standard of judgment. Do they receive appreciation? Some. But what they seem to receive most from their fellow Christians is resentment.

It tracks along the three lines I mentioned above. Read the letters and you'll see there are some folk who just don't understand what a review is supposed to be. They're dismayed that anyone could like a movie they hated, or hate a movie they liked. Others have radically different expectations from the reviewers. Instead of an aesthetic consideration, they want an inventory of objectionable content, thinking that a Christian reviewers job is somehow to "rate" movies for the evangelical audience. Then you have the people who sympathize with the reviewers' approach in general, but have written in to tell them why they're wrong on some particular.

Now this is a snapshot of how difficult honest criticism can be in an evangelical context, so you can imagine the complications involved in doing honest art. But you know what? Things are tough for art all over. Given the church's past patronage of the arts, I suppose I hold it to a higher standard than the world in general. Somehow I'm more frustrated with Christians who are indifferent to the arts than I am with the average man. That's not really fair, I suppose. I want more understanding from them, so I suppose I should start extending some.

The First 50 Pages

2007-02-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, as I waxed nostalgiac over the tenth anniversary of a novel-writing workshop with my Daniel Stern (who recently passed away), I recalled some great advice he'd given about openings:

Dan used The Heart of the Matter as an example of how to begin a novel. Since he's a cellist, he was fond of musical analogies. In this case, the opening of the novel -- the first fifty pages or so -- lays out the theme, and the rest of the book pursues variations and changes. Everything in that opening, he said, should be overdetermined. Everything needs two or three causes. He said, "Set the stage for the end in the beginning."

Now more than ever, I'm convinced that this is good advice. The usual approach to beginnings is linear. An opening, we're told, should hook the reader, establish the characters and setting in their resting state, and then introduce an initial conflict. The beginning of a book raises questions that will be elaborated in the middle and answered at the end. All this is true. But the symphonic analogy offers a fresh perspective on what the first fifty pages are really about.

I've attempted to illustrate the difference in this diagram. In the linear view, the beginning gets the story started and, as we travel forward, it is left behind. The story pushes ahead toward resolution in a straight (or straightish) line. But the progressive view assigns the opening more significance. In addition to getting the ball rolling, the fifty fifty pages define the circle that the rest of the novel will color in. The pages that follow push out from the starting point, but they travel toward a destination that the opening has, on some level, defined. As Dan said, the first fifty pages introduce your themes, and the rest is for changes and variations.

To me, this shift in focus emphasizes the virtuosity of storytelling. With all the technical details of characterization and plot, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that storytelling is, above all, a performance. It is the quality of that performance -- and not, for example, the originality of our ideas -- for which we are ultimately judged. It might be a good idea at this point to hum a few bars of Beethoven's 5th. Think about the way the music develops after the famous opening, realizing that the seed of all the other notes and melodies are contained in some form -- are intimated -- in that introductory blast.

This isn't an either/or proposition. The linear view is right on. It's a helpful way to conceive of your story. But the progressive view is, too, only it doesn't get as much airtime. When you look at the first fifty pages of your novel, try considering it from both perspectives. You may find that while it's strong in the linear, it is weak in the progressive sense -- and that realization could lead to a breakthrough.

Bad Fiction According to Bertrand

2007-02-26T11:13:00.000-08:00

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina like this: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Can the same be said for books? Are good novels all alike and bad novels each bad in their own horrendous way? I won't go that far, but consider this. Good fiction stimulates the pleasure zones while bad fiction engages the critical faculties. Ask me why I like a book and the answers will be brief and definitive, and perhaps a little abstract. It's a bit like being asked why I love being married. Instead of explaining, I'm inclined to say, "Find out for yourself." But ask me why I hate a book and you'll get a dissertation. Happy readers are all alike; every unhappy reader is unhappy in his own way.

So what makes this reader unhappy? Obviously, the absence of the three factors I mentioned in my post on good fiction will always do the trick. If narrative force, layered meaning, and aesthetic force are my sweet spots, then narrative weakness, unlayered meaning, and aesthetic weakness are going to tick me off. But those are unweildy terms, so I've massaged them for the sake of precision. Bad fiction is not the opposite of good fiction, after all. It's a phenomenon unto itself, and here are its traits.

Univocal narrative. Crank the fade knob on your car stereo all the way to one side and you'll find out exactly what I'm talking about. If narrative force is a matter of balance, skillfully developing all the essentials of craft -- character, plot, setting, etc. -- then its opposite is neglect of those essentials. But few books neglect them all. Univocal narrative results when authors develop one factor at the expense of the rest. We've all read books, for example, that pride themselves on being "character studies," in which the author indulges in long swathes of introspection but the character being studied never actually does anything. He's like a lab rat who refuses to get on the treadmill. By the same token, we've read books with over-intricate plotlines whose characters seem to have been written in at the last minute when the author discovered readers pretty much expect them. A univocal narrative is like a bodybuilder who only lifts dumbells with his right arm. The added effort that goes into one essential of a good story only heightens the reader's awareness that the rest were neglected.

Moral naivete. If Soviet art has taught us anything, it's how short a sell-by date dramatized polemic has. The only enduring value it has comes in the form of kitsch. Fiction is not policy by other means, to borrow from Clausewitz. At the other end of the spectrum, fiction is not meaningless. Even the most puerile entertainment has a cumulative cultural impact. In my book, thematic simplicity (or perhaps a better word would be 'simple-mindedness') and thematic indifference are both signs of a story's moral naivete. I guess that means I see the world as a complex but significant place, and can't help feeling that an author who misses this doesn't understand the nature of reality -- or can't bring it to bear in his work.

Tonal Incongruity. If aesthetic force means having the ability to do things with language, tonal incongruity is not having any control over what language is doing. It's not that the language is inert -- though it may be. The problem is that the author isn't advancing the story on the sentence level, through style and tone. My favorite example is when a workmanlike author decides to upgrade his writing, with the result that everything is prettified and thousand pound thesaurus-busters are embedded in the text like landmines. The result is prose the feels like fiction, not fact. It calls attention to its artifice when it shouldn't -- and has no artifice when it should. Tonal incongruity signals a lack of control.

I'm sure we could add plenty to this list, but for my money these are the three hallmarks of bad fiction, the things that will most readily prompt me to set a book aside. An author who can't reveal character through action without shortchanging one or the other, who can't give me anything to sink my teeth into, and lacks control over his bag of aesthetic tricks just isnt worth my all-too-fleeting time. Because these are the things I dislike as a reader, I try to avoid them when writing as well -- though not always with success.