(Un)Real city

Just been reading over yesterday’s post about Zola, and I realised that there’s an unstated assumption about the actual process of writing underlying it.

I don’t think that any writer pulls something from nothing. Rather, I think that the act of writing is an act of interpretation. Details of the world are pulled into fiction and made artificial. One component of that artificiality is the context that they’re given, a context that makes them part of a broader, truth-reflecting argument. Fiction makes truthful interpretation happen by stealing from and falsifying the world.

That process of re-contextualisation starts with observation, both direct and indirect. Direct observation means watching the world, listening to people talk, taking in the look and sound and touch of things. Indirect observation means reading and research; finding out about style, gathering content, understanding the possibilities of fiction, learning from those who’ve gone before you.

I can’t imagine writing happening without such a process. Zola, for example, combined direct observation of the people and places of Paris with in-depth reading and research about the modern times he lived in. He’s a Realist in part because he worked very hard to understand how his 19th century reality worked.

The thing is, seen this way, every good writer’s a realist. The most colourful fantasist; the most operatic science fiction writer; all build their fictions through the same careful process of engagement with the world and its products. Direct and indirect observation combined underpin all effective fiction, because fiction, being a mirror, needs this world to look at in order to create its reflection.

So yesterday I argued that Zola was really a fantasist; today, I’m arguing that fantasists are really realists. Both statements are equally true, and both point to the tension between the real and the unreal that lies at the heart of any decent piece of writing, regardless of genre or aesthetic intent.

(Even more than) 99 red balloons

I was sat in the Red Lion on Kingly Street the other day – excellent pub, it’s a Samuel Smiths house so the beer is both good and cheap, and there’s no music, so instead there’s just the wonderful susurrus of people just chatting – and I overheard someone say ‘I’ve spent four hours making over two hundred fucking balloon animals’.

That struck me as being quite an unusual comment, so I made a note of it. I then totally forgot I’d written it down, so coming on it just now I was surprised again. I can’t help wondering who this guy was, why he’d just spent so much time making balloon animals, and – come to think of it – who needs two hundred balloon animals anyway? A mystery…

Which set me thinking about the process of writing. The balloon animal comment was a piece of disrupted information, torn from its context. If I want to include it in a story, I’m going to have to give it back a context of some description. I could drop it into a broader narrative:

‘Dave had drifted into the balloon animal making world after college, and felt that he was wasting his talents – but he didn’t realise that one day, his skills would bring him fame and fortune…’

Or, I could use it to illustrate a character’s mood:

‘Waiting at the bar, Dave heard someone ranting. ‘I’ve just spent four hours making over two hundred fucking balloon animals’. The comment touched a nerve. The people around him seemed to be equally decorative, equally over-inflated, equally useless.’

And so on. The point is that I’m smoothing out. The comment caught my attention because it stood out from normal discourse. By dropping it into a fiction, I’m removing that quality, turning it into an absorbed part of a wider narrative / thematic whole.

It’s the story as a whole that I want to catch peoples’ attention, not its component parts – they should disappear into its overall impact, contributing to it without drawing too much awareness to themselves.

For me, that gives an interesting insight into the process of writing. Writing fiction is essentially a process of integration, taking a series of disparate elements and fusing them into a single, coherent whole. Each element only has use insomuch as it adds to that whole – if it distracts from it or jars against it, it should be excised.

And I wonder if there’s a broader comment about how we define ourselves lurking in there, too? My suspicion is that, in editing memory to create a working definition of the self, we function as narrative integrators in exactly the same way. We manipulate some experiences to support our own self definitions; we excise others that disagree with them.

Read thus, our selves themselves can be seen as entirely fictional constructs; carefully edited reality sets that support a very clearly defined sense of what we are or want to be. If that’s the case, does that make us less real? Or does it force us to look again at what we understand by fiction, realising that in fact it’s a lot more ‘real’ than it’s usually given credit for?

What’s a person anyway?

So much narrative removes the possibility of change. Although faced by risk, the hero always win out, the quality and correctness of his or her original vision unchallenged.

They’re superficially about progress, but in fact such narratives privilege stasis. The hero might develop new skills (whether practical or emotional) to allow them to achieve their goal, but the fundamental identity that makes that goal worthwhile remains the same.

I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. It comes back to the question of what we are. How static are our identities? At what points in our lives do the deep structures of the self change? Should fiction be exclusively concerned with those changes?

The last question isn’t too difficult to answer. Fictions that deal with static characters can still be wildly enjoyable (take the Solomon Kane stories, for example). The important thing here is not to confuse them with any kind of real life – to do so makes a virtue of personal rigidity.

But what of deeper progressions of the self? That, I think, throws you back onto questions that all honest fiction writers face, sooner or later. What are we? How do we work? What is this *person* thing that I as a writer am trying to model?

Any answers I have are deeply provisional.. and in fact I want to ponder them a bit, so more tomorrow. In the meantime, what do you think you are?

A pirate’s life for me, Pt 2

Well, more on pirate narrative structures. Today, it’s Key Equipment and Supporting Characters, below.

What interests me about this exercise is not so much the usefulness of better understanding pirate stories, but rather the way it reflects onto the construction of fiction in general.

A story of any kind is an end product of a series of questions - who’s my protagonist? What’s their situation? What do they want to change about it? What happens as a result of that desire? etc. The answers to those questions are on one level limitless; the content of fiction can be equally wide ranging.

However, answering those questions - ‘Who’s my protagonist? A pirate’ - and fulfilling the expectations associated with those answers (’this is how pirates behave’) can lead to a surprisingly restricted set of moral arguments. Fiction is infinite; our moralities aren’t, something it’s very useful to be aware of.

3) Key equipment

The pirate is outside a given society. His equipment should represent that outsider status:

a) Living space

An entirely personalised space, springing from the pirate’s obsessions and representing his history. It should be both an accurate representation of his / her character and personality, and easily abandoned.

b) Transport

The pirate should have access to modes of transport (whether virtual or real) that allow him / her to circumvent any restrictions created by the oppositional culture. The OC’s attempts to prevent the pirate from achieving free movement in pursuit of his goals will form key plot points.

c) Armaments

As previously noted, the pirate takes sustenance from the oppositional culture on his / her own terms. He will make use of whatever armaments necessary to achieve this. Again, the type and level of damage that these armaments do to the OC / its representatives are a key plank in the moral judgements that the story expects the reader to reach.

4) Supporting characters

Other characters will either be for, against or neutral towards the pirate. Moral ambiguity is difficult to sustain in such a morally charged narrative.

a) Other characters

Explicitly or implicitly they will share the pirates estrangement from the oppositional culture. Level, type and significance of support will be dependent on their depth of estrangement. Contrasts between the supporting characters’ and opposition culture’s morality cast light on each.

b) Neutral characters

Under certain circumstances, non-judgemental characters could be used to cast an ironic light on the absurdities of both pirate and opposition culture positions, implying a set of moral absolutes that exist above and beyond the set of dualistic oppositions that protagonist and antagonist embody.

Hmm, thought I’d written something about opposing characters - obviously not. Tho’ having looked over all the rest of this, I don’t think I need to. Their narrative function should by now be pretty clear!

And finally…

Aaaarrrrrrrrrr….

*stumps off one-leggedly to look for treasure*

Breaking out of heaven

Non-realist writing is about the creation of transparently fictional, secondary worlds for the mind, imagination and emotions to play in. One of the joys of such worlds comes from the suspension of disbelief needed to enter them. Put simply, you can pretend that they’re real – a complex joy, but a joy nonetheless.

It’s easy to forget that we create fictions of the world around us in day to day life, as well. We build narratives around work, around play, and enter into them wholeheartedly. Here, too, there’s suspension of disbelief; we forget the wider possibilities of the self as we settle ourselves into the restrictive, consensual limits that daily life creates.

It’s when we forget that these limits are defined by a fiction we’ve created that problems happen. We come to believe that the story IS the reality, that we have no choices in a given situation; but that’s rarely, if ever, true. There is no story that cannot be reframed, no narrative that cannot be stepped out of.

There’s an interesting mythical take on this, as well. In the Christian narrative, we fell from heaven so we could have choice. Such a shattering birth has ensured that free will is a core component of our lives. We can never lose as much as we’ve already lost through exercising it; and so, we are absolutely free.

A pirate’s life for me, Pt 1

Well, not much time to write today, so digging through the files I found my ‘how to build a pirate story’ document from a while back. Which set me thinking about how much narrative structure is pre-formed by subject matter in general…

So, in honour of general piracy, here’s Part One, dealing with Subtext and Key Narrative Strategies. Part two tomorrow, about Pirate Equipment and Characters…

1) Subtext

Two basic ways of presenting the story. In both, the pirate represents a critique of a given set of social or moral values. Both are reliant on the pirate’s position as an outsider, an individual who has rejected conventional norms for better or for worse. Any pirate story must embody and explore this tension.

a) Pirate as liberator
An ironic inversion of moral values. The pirate becomes an exemplar of honesty and truth, breaking away from the pretensions / hypocrisies of a corrupted social setting. The important thing is the moral relationship between the pirate / society – character and setting could be widely varied, such as historical, fantasised or deep space.

b) Pirate as dark other
A distillation of fear. The pirate upsets the moral order of a given individual / group of individuals / society, and is used to explore the strengths of that order as the protagonist fights to restore it.

2) Key narrative strategies

An implicitly moral, oppositional story demands certain types of narrative strategy to achieve its effects.

a) Appropriate point of view
Point of view should be such to allow for effortless contrasting of pirate and accepted ethics / behaviours. At no point should the reader’s experience of such contrasts feel forced or difficult.

b) Clearly defined protagonist / antagonist
A dualistic relationship, where conflict allows for examination of the moral / ethical structures that drive each of the characters. This conflict is made explicit, not implicit.

c) Crime in motion
The narrative should be centred on a crime. The reader is expected to reach a moral position regarding that crime. The moral position they reach (approving / disapproving) defines the pirate either as a liberator or a dark other.

d) Crime and punishment
The pirate will either be punished or not punished for their crime. The nature and intensity of the punishment that he / she undergoes will further support moral judgements reached by the reader.

e) Battle of the sexes
Sex of the pirate is relatively unimportant. Sexual contact achieves plot significance in so far as it supports the subversive / conservative nature of the protagonist / antagonist / supporting characters.

f) Self support
The pirate should support him / herself by utilising the resources of the oppositional culture on terms defined by him / her rather than by the culture. The level of hazard / damage to the culture and its representatives, and any moral judgements resulting from these activities, are a key support for the moral judgements that the reader is expected to reach.

The Wall game

Monday again, and time to think about Alan Wall, as he has a ‘how to’ book on writing out. This is very exciting, because he’s a magnificent writer. First book of his I read was ‘China’, which was hugely enjoyable (in part because it’s very well written, in part because it’s mostly set around five minutes walk from where I live), but it was ‘The School of Night’ that really blew me away.

‘The School of Night’ is about Sean Tallow, a rather ineffectual intellectual who combines his Shakespeare obsession (who really wrote the plays?) with a job at the BBC. His life is intertwined with that of his school friend Daniel Pagett, who has become a Richard Branson-like multi-millionaire.

There’s a lot going on in the book; but what really leapt out at me is Wall’s deep, subtle consideration of the innate criminality of the self. Building on Nietzsche, Wall riffs on the way that our needs and desires sooner or later clash with those of the people around us.

When that happens, we have a choice; we either betray ourselves by acceding to the needs of others, or we criminalise ourselves by ignoring or actively working against those needs. To fulfil ourselves, we need to deny those around us.

This – in essence – is the problem that Sean has; the book charts his different ways of engaging with it, contrasting his behaviour with that of the more directly criminal Daniel. And it does so in a memorably focussed way. There’s not a wasted sentence in it – in fact, I started re-reading it as soon as I’d finished it, all the better to appreciate the tautness and precision of Wall’s craft.

So it’s very exciting to see that his guide to writing is coming out. Oh, and he’s also very engaged with Michael Moorcock; as I understand it, he looks critically at Moorcock’s marvellous ‘Between the Wars’ novel sequence in the book. I can’t wait to see what he’s got to say about them; and I can’t wait to see what he’s going to say about writing in general.

Why Alan Moore is god #2,734

Quite apart from the fact that he’s actually met John Constantine twice (’I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it.’), and worships Paris Hilton headed puppet snake deity Glycon, Alan Moore is god because of the original comic version of ‘V for Vendetta’. It’s haunted me ever since I was 15 or 16, but it took me a long time to work out why.

Ostensibly, it’s the story of V, an anarchist superhero in a dystopian post-nuclear war Britain who succeeds in bringing down a racist, fascist government by dressing up as Guy Fawkes, killing several hundred people, and blowing up the Houses of Parliament.

But that’s only a very superficial reading of it. For me, what it’s really about is maturity, and loss, and the relationship between the two. As you grow, you leave so much behind you; and it’s the simultaneous sadness and necessity of that loss that provide the emotional engine of the book.

That depth is centred on Evey, the book’s protagonist. As she moves through the book she engages with and loses a series of father figures (her real father, Scots criminal Gordon Deitrich, to some extent the state she lives in, and of course V himself). Those losses are painful, but they’re seen as essential steps on the road to a hard-won and very real emotional maturity.

These themes echo through the rest of the book, explored in a wide variety of ways by a wide variety of characters. Perhaps the most memorable image of loss and progress combined comes from V himself, at the book’s climax; realising his own obsolescence, he lets himself die. Evey takes over from him, an evolved V (or e-v, in fact) for a new world.

So that’s one more reason why Alan Moore is god. ‘V for Vendetta’ is a profound and emotionally sophisticated piece of writing; and it was one of the key books that opened up the possibilities of fantastic fiction for me, teaching me how to use the unreal to talk about the real, and challenging me to get out there and do it for myself.

Stasis, dynamism

Well, I drafted an astonishingly perceptive and witty blog entry at home last night, which would have thrilled and amazed everyone as well as instantly doubling my on-site traffic, but I’ve left it on my hard drive at home, so instead of that I’m just going to blast slightly randomly about Cervantes and stasis.

There’s a great moment about halfway through ‘Don Quixote’ where Cervantes takes on other writers who’ve been writing their own knock-off Don Quixote stories. He blasts their legitimacy in no uncertain terms, pointing out that he and he only is the writer of the real Don Quixote.

In modern terms, he’s pointing out that Don Quixote isn’t open source – and for me, that’s a key point in the definition of what the modern literary novelist is. Literary novelists don’t write open source material; they create self contained worlds that exist purely to support the narrative / thematic points that their novels are making. Their books, like Cervantes’, are entirely personal and entirely self-contained.

But – as pointed out yesterday – substantial portions of genre writing are very comfortable with open source worlds and characters. And there’s an interesting structural point to be made off the back of that.

That kind of world relies on characters with relatively static, clearly defined characteristics being thrown into a variety of different plot situations. The interest doesn’t come from watching the characters develop and change – rather, it comes from seeing their familiar strengths and weaknesses tested in new situations.

Hence in part literary critics’ often rabid criticism of genre writing. This kind of stasis is antithetic to one of literary fiction’s core concerns; the tracing of emotional change through a clearly defined, highly significant segment of a character’s life. A set of fictional structures which make a virtue of stasis, such an opposed value, can only seem deeply problematic to a literary writer.

So perhaps that’s one way of understanding the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction? In literary fiction, change is internalised, understood as tectonic shifts in character emotional definition. In genre fiction, change is often externalised, understood to be a new environment or other challenge for a clearly defined set of characters to explore.

And how does that relate back to Cervantes? He wasn’t happy to see his characters, his fictional world, changed by other people. But genre writers who create open source characters and worlds know that – in their essentials – their creations won’t change. Rather, new writers will introduce new situations to challenge them and excite readers. They’re not taking control from the original writer; rather, they’re testing his creation in new ways, which is a very different thing indeed.