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 novels. Show all posts
Showing posts with label novels. 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.
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