I’ve been keeping an eye on bookish and writer-oriented sites for a while with a view to a weekly round up. This week, I’m kicking off with a bumper post, covering just a few of the posts and articles that caught my eye over the last few weeks.
If you need a reason to read on past the jump know now that I use the phrase assassinations and breasts not once but three times. And that’s not including this introduction.
Roz Morris at NailYourNovel posted a timely piece on the role of the narrator. She describes a tendency to dominate the voices of characters, thereby failing to let them breath. She calls this kind of overbearing voice barrister narration, suggesting the hectoring manner of a courtroom attorney cutting off a witness. We should instead, Morris argues, let our characters speak, and leave the reader room for interpretation.
Why timely? I happened across a review in the London Review of Books of The Children’s Book by A.S Byatt (almost three weeks old now, but never mind). James Wood accuses the author of almost exactly the sin Morris described. Making puppets of her characters. He also throws in some extremely barbed comments.
Byatt is a very ordinary grown-ups’ writer and a very good children’s writer.
Ouch. It’s worth noting that Wood’s latest book, How Fiction Works discusses the voice of the narrator in some detail. In particular, free indirect style – a mechanism by which a narrator’s voice hovers close to the mind of a character, but maintains a certain distance. It’s in this gap that the narrator retains the ability to reach beyond the character’s limitations of language or viewpoint.
In her blog Stephanie Doyon provides a nice overview of this aspect of the book.
Also interesting in this context is a follow-up letter to the London Review of Books by Isobel Armstrong. She argues that, far from being a fault, Byatt’s domineering narrative voice was part of the point of the novel.
…in a novel that, as Wood recognises, uses the puppet-master as an image for the control that denies freedom to the characters, writing from the inside is not an option.
I have a feeling that I’m enjoying this debate more than I will the book itself, when I eventually get to it. But I guess I’m just a light and frothy soul.
The SF blog io9 had a fascinating post by Charlie Jane Anders on the writing of denouement. That is the post-climax cigarette part of a novel in which loose ends are tied up and the characters are sent on their way. The piece includes a brief interview on the subject with Doug Dorst, author of Alive in Necropolis – which remains on my to-read list.
Speaking of SF, io9 also covered a debate about genre a while back. Kim Stanley Robinson hit out at the Booker prize, arguing that it effectively discriminated against SF authors. He suggests that SF novels are seen as a low form, while the historical novel transcends the bodice ripper in the critical consciousness.
io9 linked to a blog entry by author Adam Roberts, who Robinson maintains should have had a shot at the prize. Roberts quoted comments by Booker Judge John Mullan which effectively confirmed Robinson’s accusation that there is a knee jerk response to the genre.
Of course many serious and seriously good SF novels are published, but it’s interesting to note how many of them get teleported out of the SF section and into the mainstream or literary categories. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is a case in point. Margaret Atwood is so wary of the SF label, that she actively insists that her several future-set speculative novels are not SF, to the evident frustration of Ursula K Le Guin who reviewed The Year of theFlood in The Guardian some time ago.
It’s a big deal, clearly, the decision whether or not to go genre. I guess if your novel has SF elements to it, you have to weigh up the benefits of an eager readership on the one hand against inevitable mainstream critical indifference on the other.
Iain Banks famously deals with the problem by taking a different name on either side of the divide. As Iain Banks he writes well-received and quirky literary novels. As Iain M Banks he writes space opera, most notably, but not exclusively, his popular Culture series.
According to Patrick Ness who reviewed Banks’ latest novel Transition in the Guardian last week, Banks chose to use his SF moniker in the States, but his literary handle in the UK. I wonder what piece of literary focus-groupery prompted that.
To M or not to M is up to Banks, but Transition turns out to fit most comfortably in the “Assassinations and Breasts” genre – which there probably isn’t a shelf for at your local bookstore
I promptly bought and read the novel, which I enjoyed immensely. It seems there is a place in my heart, if not the bookstore, for the Assassinations and Breasts genre. Damn my light and frothy soul!
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the revision process recently because I have a lot of raw material that I need to transform into something wonderful. It could happen. So this review by Blake Morrison in The Guardian of a new version of Raymond Carver’s first collection caught my attention.
I say version rather than edition because these are Carver’s stories before they were fashioned into ducks of a different order by the severe editing of Gordon Lish. Morrison doesn’t hate everything that Lish did to Carver’s work, but the suggestion overall is that trust was breached, and that we’re all the poorer for it. Reading the collections side by side should be an interesting exercise.
Meanwhile back in the writers blogs, Iaine Broome took a potshot on Write For Your Life at those pundits who argue that writers should write their way through every problem. I’m not sure that Broome doesn’t create a straw man of the argument he sets out to defeat. But it’s an enjoyable polemic nonetheless.
On storyfix.com Larry Brooks covered the old conflict between planners and those who write by the seat of their pants. He comes to the conclusion that there’s less dividing the two camps than you might think. What he calls a ‘pantser’ may not work initially on an outline, but a good writer will inevitably think about structure as she writes and revises, and end up in a similar place to the planner, having merely taken a different route. At least if you close one eye and squint that’s what he’s saying. He can’t resist a pop at the pantsers:
If you’re a pantser who ascribes to the principles of story architecture, one who knows what they’re doing and accepts the fate of multiple drafting as part of the process, please know I appreciate you and know you’re out there. I salute you, because chances are if you’ve actually published this way, you are, in fact, a bit of a prodigy.
In other words, he thinks it’s as rare as hens’ teeth. And now, this is the last time I ever publish the word ‘pantser’.
This conclusion was not the shock of the piece for me. That distinction went to Brooke’s revelation that his position on outlining has won him hate mail. Hate mail!
Our endless tendency to form into camps and draw up battle lines, no matter the issue at hand, is truly amazing and dispiriting. If only we could simply agree on more Assassinations and Breasts and leave it at that.
The aim for future roundups: shorter and more frequent.
