How "realistic" should a novel be? I've been wrestling this question, because some of the reactions I've had to early sections of the novel that I've been drafting have amounted to: "Yes, but is it realistic? How can I feel that these people really exist? How can I believe in these bizarre situations that you describe?"
I find some of this surprising, simply because a lot of the novel (so far) is based on real life - or, at least, my experience of it. I've always been accused (when recounting anecdotes in pubs) of exaggeration and hyperbole, and that's fair enough. But exaggeration only exaggerates - obviously - it doesn't invent, doesn't make up things out of nowhere. Exaggeration is a distilled form of realism.
But actually, a lot of the novel-so-far isn't exaggerated, or not much: I really have met people like I describe, and I really have come across the bizarre situations I recount. People in real life really really (really really really) do the most strange things, behave in the most strange ways. That's why I've always preferred Dickens to George Eliot or Trollope - the world I inhabit is more Dickensian than Eliotian; the people I meet everywhere (and I don't exempt myself from this) are often full of oddities, tics, neuroses, cartoonish gestures, catchphrases, and so on. They don't always behave with forethought; consciousness and rationalism don't always rule their actions. Dickens - as far as I'm concerned - is much more realistic than Eliot, or Trollope.
But none of this stops people accusing Dickens of caricature (as if it's a bad thing) and of being unrealistic. And I've realised that it's something one has to watch out for when writing a "fictional" novel. You have to persuade people that what you're saying is possible in the so-called real world. In a memoir, on the contrary, because it's assumed that you're talking truth - whether or not you are - you can be as outrageous as you like. You can talk about bizarre, outlandish, weird situations and people. You can describe the most unlikely scenarios. You can be as over-the-top as you like ... and all because memoirs are assumed to be "true," however out-of-the-ordinary the experiences you describe. It's all a question of genre.
And the novel genre demands something different. Ironically, our culture demands that a fictional work be MORE, not less, realistic than a true one. In writing a novel, you're supposed to be moderate, talk about situations which are immediately recognisable to everyone - just do not be too outrageous, or you won't be believed. Tone down the characters' oddities, tone down the strange things that happen to them, take real life and add water: this often seems to be the unwritten rule of fiction writing.
But I've not yet decided whether I'm going to accept it. I'm not yet sure I want to write a novel which doesn't, or doesn't quite, reflect the surreality and grotesqueness of everyday life in modern-day U.K. I think I might just carry on regardless, trying to describe a reality which, frankly, does a great job of exaggerating itself.
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memoirs. Show all posts
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Sunday, 30 March 2008
Novels and memoirs
I've been spending quite a lot of time recently writing. Not to give the game away (I'm not superstitious about these things, but I don't want to hex what I'm doing), I'm currently in the middle of a first draft of a novel. I've been writing it since September, having been thinking about it for years.
What's surprised me about the process of novel writing is how different it is from writing a memoir. It's a much more structured process, in some ways. This may sound rather basic, but suddenly I've noticed that PLOT seems to matter. I've never thought much about PLOT before - a lot of my short stories are so short that the PLOT amounts to one small thing happening to one small character in one small place. The thing with a novel is that - in order for it to last 70,000 words - you need more than one thing to happen. You need a string of things to happen, one after the other. This is a new experience for me, writing events in order, cause, effect, cause, effect, etc.
In terms of the memoir, the structure was very different - things didn't happen in such a linear way. I had to find different ways to structure the memoir, threading together little quantums of story - little anecdotes - into complete, homogenous chapters. The "story" here was closer to essay-writing - each chapter was a kind of essay, in a very loose sense. So it was possible to connect together events which were distant in time; it was possible to jump from present to past to distant past to near-past, all within a few pages. Flow was, of course, of crucial importance, but the flow wasn't that of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." The flow was in the writing, in the connecting up and threading together of distant events and anecdotes in terms of themes and shared images.
A novel, it turns out, is very different. You talk to and read all of these critics who say that PLOT is passe, that nineteenth-century novelists packed too much PLOT in their Wuthering-Middlemarch-Bleak-Eyres, but now novelists "know better" and PLOT isn't that much of a concern. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers are interested in something else.
Quite what that something else consists of is beyond me. With the possible exception of Wuthering Heights, I've never really understood the criticism of nineteenth-century novels as having "too much PLOT." It always sounds a bit like a jealous person criticising someone else for having "too much money." And, on trying to write my own novel, I'm now finding quite how crucial PLOT is. Things have to happen in a novel, and they have to matter to the people they happen to. And then other things have to happen after those first things. And then more things have to happen, and so on. There's no way round it, no way of avoiding it - or at least, no way I can see.
Even when novels pretend to be experimental and "non-linear," this normally just translates as "they've got some flashbacks in them" or "you know how it ends from the start" or something like that. None of this actually subverts the centrality of PLOT to the novel - and none of it really undermines the basic linearity of the novel form. A novel consists of a linear plot, by and large, even where that linearity is slightly confused or complicated by the narrative jumping backwards and forwards in time. "Backwards and forwards" - those very words imply a kind of linearity.
So, to my surprise, writing a novel is a linear process in which I have to learn to think in a linear way - which is a very different way of thinking and writing to the memoir. I am, for once, writing forwards rather than sideways, diagonally, or in complex hexagonal shapes.
What's surprised me about the process of novel writing is how different it is from writing a memoir. It's a much more structured process, in some ways. This may sound rather basic, but suddenly I've noticed that PLOT seems to matter. I've never thought much about PLOT before - a lot of my short stories are so short that the PLOT amounts to one small thing happening to one small character in one small place. The thing with a novel is that - in order for it to last 70,000 words - you need more than one thing to happen. You need a string of things to happen, one after the other. This is a new experience for me, writing events in order, cause, effect, cause, effect, etc.
In terms of the memoir, the structure was very different - things didn't happen in such a linear way. I had to find different ways to structure the memoir, threading together little quantums of story - little anecdotes - into complete, homogenous chapters. The "story" here was closer to essay-writing - each chapter was a kind of essay, in a very loose sense. So it was possible to connect together events which were distant in time; it was possible to jump from present to past to distant past to near-past, all within a few pages. Flow was, of course, of crucial importance, but the flow wasn't that of "this happened, then this happened, then this happened." The flow was in the writing, in the connecting up and threading together of distant events and anecdotes in terms of themes and shared images.
A novel, it turns out, is very different. You talk to and read all of these critics who say that PLOT is passe, that nineteenth-century novelists packed too much PLOT in their Wuthering-Middlemarch-Bleak-Eyres, but now novelists "know better" and PLOT isn't that much of a concern. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers are interested in something else.
Quite what that something else consists of is beyond me. With the possible exception of Wuthering Heights, I've never really understood the criticism of nineteenth-century novels as having "too much PLOT." It always sounds a bit like a jealous person criticising someone else for having "too much money." And, on trying to write my own novel, I'm now finding quite how crucial PLOT is. Things have to happen in a novel, and they have to matter to the people they happen to. And then other things have to happen after those first things. And then more things have to happen, and so on. There's no way round it, no way of avoiding it - or at least, no way I can see.
Even when novels pretend to be experimental and "non-linear," this normally just translates as "they've got some flashbacks in them" or "you know how it ends from the start" or something like that. None of this actually subverts the centrality of PLOT to the novel - and none of it really undermines the basic linearity of the novel form. A novel consists of a linear plot, by and large, even where that linearity is slightly confused or complicated by the narrative jumping backwards and forwards in time. "Backwards and forwards" - those very words imply a kind of linearity.
So, to my surprise, writing a novel is a linear process in which I have to learn to think in a linear way - which is a very different way of thinking and writing to the memoir. I am, for once, writing forwards rather than sideways, diagonally, or in complex hexagonal shapes.
Thursday, 31 January 2008
A paradoxical dedication
Last week, I was teaching on the M.A. in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, which was fun, if a little strange, in that one never meets the students but chats to them via the keyboard: a disembodied experience which was strangely more intense than a real-life seminar ... in a good way.
Anyway, the subject of discussion was memoirs, and I was asked about the dubious ethical status of memoirs, and writing about other people. These questions always come up when it comes to memoirs for good reason: they are the central questions posed by the genre. If you're not tortured, or at least exercised, by the moral questions posed by the genre, then you shouldn't be writing memoirs, as far as I'm concerned.
In my book, the dedication reads: "This book is dedicated to my father, John Taylor (1928?-2001), who would probably have hated it." Obviously, this dedication itself poses all sorts of ethical and moral problems. Should I have written a book about my father if he would have hated it?
When my brother first read the book, he said to me: "Well, yes, dad would have hated the book when he was ill, given the paranoia and paranoiac fear of being talked about in the local papers or elsewhere. But, if he'd been well, he would have liked the book, because when he was well, he loved writing and reading." My father was, after all, a very cultured man.
So this makes the book a deeply paradoxical enterprise.
Put it this way: when he was ill, in the early 1990s, my father used to come into the dining room (where I was typing fantasy-science-fiction), shouting: "HE'S WRITING ABOUT US, YOU KNOW! HE'S GOING TO EXPOSE US IN HIS WRITING!" ... and he was proved right retrospectively by the future, but not at the time, when the thought of writing about my own family hadn't even crossed my mind (Tolkienesque fantasy seeming more relevant to my life back then).
But, as my brother says, before he was ill and paranoid, perhaps he would have loved the book ... the problem being that then the book would not have been possible or conceivable. After all, the book is partly about his illness, dementia, Parkinson's, paranoia. My father would have loved the book when he was well, but the book is posited on the fact of his latter-day illness. So the book is a strangely impossible paradox in ethical terms. My father would have loved a book which is partly about an illness which would have made him hate it, if you see what I mean. Or, in other words (and there are so many ways of putting this), he would have loved a book which is about a later self who would have hated it. Or my father would have loved a book if he could have gone forwards in time as he was before the illness, read it, and then gone back to experience the horrendous illness so it could have been written at all.
These are the kind of ethical ambiguities and time-travelling paradoxes and questions that memoir-writers have to confront. I don't think there're any simple answers, and I don't have any to offer.
Anyway, the subject of discussion was memoirs, and I was asked about the dubious ethical status of memoirs, and writing about other people. These questions always come up when it comes to memoirs for good reason: they are the central questions posed by the genre. If you're not tortured, or at least exercised, by the moral questions posed by the genre, then you shouldn't be writing memoirs, as far as I'm concerned.
In my book, the dedication reads: "This book is dedicated to my father, John Taylor (1928?-2001), who would probably have hated it." Obviously, this dedication itself poses all sorts of ethical and moral problems. Should I have written a book about my father if he would have hated it?
When my brother first read the book, he said to me: "Well, yes, dad would have hated the book when he was ill, given the paranoia and paranoiac fear of being talked about in the local papers or elsewhere. But, if he'd been well, he would have liked the book, because when he was well, he loved writing and reading." My father was, after all, a very cultured man.
So this makes the book a deeply paradoxical enterprise.
Put it this way: when he was ill, in the early 1990s, my father used to come into the dining room (where I was typing fantasy-science-fiction), shouting: "HE'S WRITING ABOUT US, YOU KNOW! HE'S GOING TO EXPOSE US IN HIS WRITING!" ... and he was proved right retrospectively by the future, but not at the time, when the thought of writing about my own family hadn't even crossed my mind (Tolkienesque fantasy seeming more relevant to my life back then).
But, as my brother says, before he was ill and paranoid, perhaps he would have loved the book ... the problem being that then the book would not have been possible or conceivable. After all, the book is partly about his illness, dementia, Parkinson's, paranoia. My father would have loved the book when he was well, but the book is posited on the fact of his latter-day illness. So the book is a strangely impossible paradox in ethical terms. My father would have loved a book which is partly about an illness which would have made him hate it, if you see what I mean. Or, in other words (and there are so many ways of putting this), he would have loved a book which is about a later self who would have hated it. Or my father would have loved a book if he could have gone forwards in time as he was before the illness, read it, and then gone back to experience the horrendous illness so it could have been written at all.
These are the kind of ethical ambiguities and time-travelling paradoxes and questions that memoir-writers have to confront. I don't think there're any simple answers, and I don't have any to offer.
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