If you’re a fiction or a non-fiction writer (did I leave anyone out?) I wanted to talk with you about something. It had to do with the departures that a story about a killing might take. And it has to do with time. That is, it has to do with my usual penchant for taking the parts of a story as it occurs to me and putting them into chronological order. If left alone with the pieces of a story for very long I will inevitably start sorting them into the things that happened first and the things that happened later. If you do that long enough you’ll have everything in order from first to last, though in your memory the last thing may have been the first you took up as you tried to sort things out. And you found your way to the first thing only at the last. This is my biggest problem right now. I’m confused or unwilling to allow things to stay in their “found” order.
There are undoubtedly all kinds of “order” for the items in any set. The best order for things in a story might be (1) to leave them as you FOUND them, or (2) to hack them into the chronological order of events in real time. Or (3) to arrange them in what might be called the dramatic order, one that would most effectively present the parts of the story, regardless of time or fortune. The dramatic might also be called the supenseful order. It’s the order you’d use for a film or a stage play or the sequence you’d use when telling the story to someone in a bar. I’m pretty sure I can get the sequence right for the time-based order, the rendition I’d prepare for a writer or an editor or a director. These might be notes I’d use to help them figure out what they’re going to do with the tale/plot. Of course the order most susceptible to variety would be the one where the order is arranged for dramatic effect. There might be just one place to start the story, but in between the beginning and the end there might be an infinite number of collations for the parts.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Sunday, March 22, 2009
No Idiot Savant Yet
Been reading Chekhov over the last few days and admire him so much. But what I’m finding to admire is not the canned short story structure I may have mentioned yesterday but the haphazard way he wanders back and forth to get the story told. He hops off here or there, mentions a character or an animal (like the little dog in the LADY WITH THE TOY DOG) and may never bring it up again in the story. And the next thing you know he chops off what you expected was the next valued piece of exposition, and probably proves that the dropped fillip wasn’t needed anyway. That ellipsis would probably be treated as an issue by the writing teacher. Yet there are no required features, apparently, in successful stories that others have written.
The wretched truth is critics will lift factors from this or that story and turn them into rules. It's their job. As if every critic one wants to publish rules they can sell to the high bidder in the world of creative writing, or creative criticism. Any rule I’d offer must be some kind of antidote for the poison delivered by the compulsive critic who wants to be identified as the master of the master. That critic, however, admit few names to the list of deserving contemporary writers. And when a modern critic does say something nice about a new movie, for example, I notice the blogs sport crowds who want to tear the straw man down. Like beauty taken to be an average of all the faces or noses in the world, fiction probably has a beauty to brag about that is no more than an average of all the stories every told, all the endings ever ended. You could hope for more, but the truth lies in the next paragraph.
And here it is: What is most important is the story that succeeds and to hell with the analysis. The best model for the fiction you are trying to tell about is the one in the last story that worked well doing that particular kind of work. The story you should write about some lovely lady vacationing in the Crimea may not have a toy dog to kick things off. But if your tale holds the reader in rapt attention, who needs a puppy? Your successful story is the winner on all counts.
Not that I know how to write that story. But I’d rather find out it did not come from a menu of ingredients, a recipe for success, and maybe that goes without saying. If it filled out the list of all the ingredients mentioned in the recipe and did succeed, the reader or critic in this case might do well to ignore the list of requisites and figure out what else worked. The real things that mattered may have been someplace in between the items that contributed to the success. Hell, I don’t’ know. But I think I’ll learn more from examining successful Chekhov stories than I will most of the rest of the stuff picked as ingredients of stories by the ingenious. I certainly don’t know for sure what will work ahead of time. But I’ll keep writing, or trying to write spontaneously about humans, or what they see/hear/know. Whatever is human in me is my best helper at the keyboard, and not necessarily whatever comes from a list. I want to keep soaking up Chekhov’s and others’ techniques by reading him/them carefully, and then letting my need for ventilation drive the tale, and provide entertainment for the reader. Does that cover the topic for this morning? Hell, I don’t know, but I do know I’m now on page two and my freewriting sample is done for the morning.
Next: On Rewriting Seven Times
The wretched truth is critics will lift factors from this or that story and turn them into rules. It's their job. As if every critic one wants to publish rules they can sell to the high bidder in the world of creative writing, or creative criticism. Any rule I’d offer must be some kind of antidote for the poison delivered by the compulsive critic who wants to be identified as the master of the master. That critic, however, admit few names to the list of deserving contemporary writers. And when a modern critic does say something nice about a new movie, for example, I notice the blogs sport crowds who want to tear the straw man down. Like beauty taken to be an average of all the faces or noses in the world, fiction probably has a beauty to brag about that is no more than an average of all the stories every told, all the endings ever ended. You could hope for more, but the truth lies in the next paragraph.
And here it is: What is most important is the story that succeeds and to hell with the analysis. The best model for the fiction you are trying to tell about is the one in the last story that worked well doing that particular kind of work. The story you should write about some lovely lady vacationing in the Crimea may not have a toy dog to kick things off. But if your tale holds the reader in rapt attention, who needs a puppy? Your successful story is the winner on all counts.
Not that I know how to write that story. But I’d rather find out it did not come from a menu of ingredients, a recipe for success, and maybe that goes without saying. If it filled out the list of all the ingredients mentioned in the recipe and did succeed, the reader or critic in this case might do well to ignore the list of requisites and figure out what else worked. The real things that mattered may have been someplace in between the items that contributed to the success. Hell, I don’t’ know. But I think I’ll learn more from examining successful Chekhov stories than I will most of the rest of the stuff picked as ingredients of stories by the ingenious. I certainly don’t know for sure what will work ahead of time. But I’ll keep writing, or trying to write spontaneously about humans, or what they see/hear/know. Whatever is human in me is my best helper at the keyboard, and not necessarily whatever comes from a list. I want to keep soaking up Chekhov’s and others’ techniques by reading him/them carefully, and then letting my need for ventilation drive the tale, and provide entertainment for the reader. Does that cover the topic for this morning? Hell, I don’t know, but I do know I’m now on page two and my freewriting sample is done for the morning.
Next: On Rewriting Seven Times
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Flat Faces
Watched "Body of Lies" (2008) last night with DiCaprio expressing everything through degrees of squint. There’s this much available in Hollywood lore about holding back the moment when your fans tire of you: keep a flat face and you last as a commodity longer on the screen. Lots of winces and harrumphs tire the audience. Give them a lot of expressions and they learn your entire inventory of gestures in too little time. It’s what leads to over-exposure. Showing no emotion in moments of crisis lets you make a zero impression where you would expect to provoke a horrified scream from a normal human. Zero impressions help you last longer in public, before your admirers move on to newer faces. If I had written a story that when filmed left the viewer totally in the dark half the time, I too would dream up a title like “Body of Lies” to suggest that the viewer is watching intrigue rather than sloppy exposition.
Introduction
No excuse for this, starting another blog. But I have a need. And it centers around the poor shape I've given to other blogs I've created in the past. I understand that folks go around inventing blogs by the dozens or hundreds all the time, so I'm not doing anything particularly unique. In any case, here's one more attempt. Bear with me, and we may break through to real news and information, stuff you'd like to know about art from the commoner's point of view.
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