Blog Move!

I’ve moved the blog to its own dedicated space on what will eventually become my personal website. Consequently, this blog here will no longer be updated, so visit the Star Chamber at it’s new location now:

thestarchamber.mattkeefe.com

Nice and easy to remember, isn’t it? Good. Go there. The first new post is already up, with more to come soon.

Adios!

Matt

Gulliver’s Travels

I’ve just finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Like many of you reading this, I thought I was familiar with the story – I remember reading the book when I was at school, and in any case so much of the book has entered the common, collective memory that it’s virtually impossible not to have heard of Lilliput, its diminutive inhabitants or the Little Ender and Big Ender factions they divide themselves into.

In truth, however, the book presented a great deal I was completely unfamiliar with. In hindsight, I think I must previously have read only the first two parts (where Gulliver encounters the tiny Lilliputians, and then the giant Brobdingnagians) and it was approached very much as a children’s book. In actual fact, the book contains four parts, and I thought that the third of those – Gulliver’s voyage to a floating island populated by a bizarre astronomer-elite – was far and away the best part. Whether you think you’re familiar with Gulliver’s Travels or not, if you haven’t read it within the last few years – and if you can’t, for example, recall the difference between a Struldbrug and a Laputan – read it. It almost certainly contains more than you remember.

Of particular interest to me on this reading, though, was its narrative style. Three points stand out in particular:

• It has no real plot as such.
• It has almost no dialogue, perhaps two or three lines in the entire book.
• The narrator (Gulliver) ‘tells’ us everything, while the author ’shows’ almost nothing.

Strictly speaking, Gulliver’s Travels is a satire, and as such could be considered as distinct from a novel, but either way the point stands – it doesn’t have a conventional narrative, and doesn’t adhere to the form of what we’d call a novel in the modern sense. And yet, it’s one of the best-known written works there is. When I type ‘Lilliputian’, the spellchecker doesn’t underline it as an error, because the word has entered the dictionary (worryingly, it does however underline the word spellchecker). The word Yahoo is also taken from Gulliver’s Travels. The story is so well known that many more people are familiar with it than have actually read the book (doubtless in part thanks to the various adaptations for film and television over the years, as well as various derivative works, but also due simply to the extent to which the book has permeated the cultural fabric). An unconventional format, then, is certainly no barrier to success, or to popularity.

Furthermore, Gulliver’s Travels actually serves as an example when this kind of disregard for supposed ‘rules’ of good writing – such as ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ – is highly desirable. Everything about the story’s characters, setting and events is told to us in an incredibly plain fashion. Indeed the contents pages contain short summaries, repeated at the head of each chapter, which invariably spell out events before we even read about them. There’s certainly no attempt to construct an unfolding plot. The narrator’s stated mission in most cases is simply to describe to us factually the places and peoples he has met. All this is ‘telling’ of the very most blatant kind, but what it does it ’show’ us something else – something about ourselves, something about the folly of our ways, the preposterousness of our pretend logic, the dubiousness of many of our long-standing arguments, the inaccuracy of our assumptions, the misguidedness of our prejudices, the irrationality of our beliefs and the failings of our institutions.

It seems to me that the theory of ‘Show, Don’t Tell’ is prevaricated upon the notion that the only thing a book is trying to ’show’ us is the story. That’s just not the case. Books can show us a lot more than that, and if they tell us something along, there’s certainly no crime in that.

Matt

Compose Yourself

Haven’t blogged in a while, so what I intend to do – if I can get my arse in gear – is write a few short(er) blogs over the next few days touching on a few topics.

First off, theme.

Gav Thorpe recently posted a blog on the subject, and it’s something I’ve talked to various people about (Gav included) at length in the past. I don’t really want to go into a huge amount of detail on the specific subject of theme – read Gav’s excellent blog for that – but what I do want to do is use theme as an example of what I would describe as a forgotten element of composition.

When preparing to write a novel, everyone knows they need to come up with an idea for their story (the plot), and work out who their characters will be. They also know that when actually writing it, they’ll need to use a good standard of English (or whatever language they’re writing in). That’s all well and good as a starting point.

Looking a little deeper, writers may look to the various books, and increasingly websites, on the subject of writing for advice. This, too, is all well and good, except that in a great many cases the advice given there is really only concerned with those immediate and obvious facets of novel-writing: the story and the characters. Well-regarded sources like the Turkey City Lexicon do contain a great deal of useful advice, but almost all of it regards plots and characters, or the actual writing as it relates to those things (i.e., writing as a way to move the story along or develop characters). What you won’t find in places like that is a great a deal of advice on how to introduce themes – and themes aren’t the only area of writing which I feel are overlooked by those offering this kind advice.

Stories don’t appeal, and certainly don’t endure, on face value alone. It’s the deeper, hidden elements – the theme, the tone, the style – that speak to us and appeal to us, even if they’re not explicitly described. If you like, you can think of a novel as composed of two parts: it’s described elements (the plot, characters and setting), and it’s implied elements (its theme, its tone, its meaning). In most of the advice you’ll read about writing, plenty of attention is paid to the described elements, much less so to the implied elements, yet to my mind they are of equal merit – both are required for a great novel.

I’m not suggesting you throw out the kind of advice you find in the Turkey City Lexicon or books like Character and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card. What I’m suggesting is that you view such advice in context – as advice specifically concerning certain, very obvious aspects of writing – and bear it in mind alongside considerations of theme, tone and the other less obvious, but equally important elements.

There is a mantra I try to remind myself of when writing to avoid forgetting these other, subtler elements. Here it is:

Character, not biography.
Theme, not subject.
Tone, not setting.

None of this is to say that your book won’t contain biography, won’t have a subject and won’t have setting – of course it will, but these are products, end results created by the other stages of composition. They are not requisite parts in the way that character, theme and tone are, hence my distinction between them. I’ll go into a little detail on these comparisons.

The fact that John was born on the 11th of December 1957 is biography. The fact that John is cautious is character. The difference should be obvious.

Likewise, you can describe your setting in all the detail you want, but nothing will immerse the reader in your book anywhere near as well as the proper tone will. You can spend as long as you like building a world, but it’s the evocation of surroundings as familiar as, say, a fog-bound street at night which will really make your reader feel like they know exactly where the story is taking place.

Tone pervades everything – not just the scenery, but the characters’ dialogue (old-fashioned, formal speech if your story is set in the past, for example), your choice of words, particularly your number and use of adjectives and adverbs; it influences your characters’ names, their appearance, perhaps even the length and number of your chapters. Tone is the shade in which you paint the story you have created – it needs to be the right one. The tone itself is only implied, but it is the tone in which everything else is described. Without tone, even good writing will have no colour (or no darkness, if that’s what you’re aiming for).

This started with a discussion of theme as one overlooked aspect of composition, and I’ve mentioned a few more. The above, though, is certainly not exhaustive. You can break the writing process – more accurately, composition – down into as many parts as you want, and someone else will always think of some more. That’s fine, there’s no exhaustive list (and anyone trying to create one would likely be on a hiding to nothing) but the point remains this: there is, when composing a novel, a great deal more to be borne in mind than it might at first appear. Even following all the usual advice there is, I’d argue, still more to think about.

Matt

An Interview With Stephen Donaldson

Online now (and somewhat later than promised – sorry!) is my interview with author, Stephen Donaldson.

I interviewed Stephen shortly before the release of Fatal Revenant, the latest book in his Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series, and the interview touches on both this and his many other works, as well as writing and literature in general. The interview originally appeared in issue 10 of Death Ray magazine, but the version now online contains some material not included in the magazine due to space constraints. The complete interview, as well as an overview of Stephen’s work, and a fact file on the author are online now in the Articles section of this website.

Matt

Selected Reading…

Following on from the recent frenzy of blog-ranting on the subject of narrative styles, I thought I’d post a few examples of some novels which I think demonstrate clever use of the omniscient narrator. Note that I’m focusing specifically on books about the legendary/historical characters that my earlier blog posts centred on – I think we’ve covered that plenty enough already, and besides which I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about the use of narrative mode more generally. These then, are simply three books which spring to mind as good examples of narrative modes other than the most common third-person limited narrator. All three also employ other noteworthy techniques as we shall see…

You can use the comments thread below to leave your own recommendations, and read on to see mine…

Third Person Ltd.

Gav Thorpe has posted some thoughts on the use of different forms of narrative over on his (we)blog, Mechanical Hamster. As part of the ongoing debate, the question has arisen as to why storytelling styles change over time…

In large part, I think, it’s simply changing fashions. Tastes change over time and commercial publishing compounds that as publishers focus on what is currently popular. Writers aiming for publication follow suit and implement those styles in their own writing. Fashions continue to change, of course, and will change again. How quickly and how likely that change is to come about is of course down to how broadly followed the fashion is, which is one of the principal reasons I argue for the use of a greater variety of storytelling techniques.

In the particular case of the omniscient narrator, I suspect one reason for its decline in popularity is the separation of fact and fiction. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’ share a clearly observable common root and once upon a time the two words meant the same thing. Look at any work of literature from the middle ages or earlier and it’s clear to see that it contains elements of both what we would now call fact and fiction; history and story. Indeed, this was the case as recently as the 17th century; it was only the application of Enlightenment era thought to the arts and humanities that produced the idea of history as a discipline where factuality was paramount, and separate from fiction.

With that distinction made, the narrative forms used for fictional and factual writing diverged – journalistic forms of writing, for instance, developed around this time, with the subsequent emergence of the first daily newspapers. The omniscient narrator mode – with its seemingly boundless knowledge and a voice clearly external to the story – has many similarities to those styles used in factual writing, and may for that reason have become unpopular amongst writers (and readers) of fiction.

For the most part, the choice of the limited mode for narration of modern novels is a wise one. That’s not to say, though, that it suits all subjects or all kinds of stories, and to return to the original subject of this discussion, the historic, mythic and epic are stories to which, it seems to me, the third-person limited narrator is particularly ill-suited, and I really think its for the simple reason of the nature of those stories and the characters they contain.All reading, and therefore all writing, is ultimately an experience shared by the reader and the characters in the story; a connection between the two, you might say. Most beloved of the modern novel in achieving this is a sense of empathy, and it’s for that reason that the third-person limited perspective is so favoured. Empathy, though, is in itself a sign of modernity…

No Punctuation

An amusing observation on what it would be like if there was no punctuation…

Matt

It would be better to be omniscient…

As noted in my previous post, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague, Gav Thorpe, has recently started his own blog. He’s even put gone to the effort of writing an interesting post. The post in question is this one, and what particularly interested me was his discussion of the difficulties of writing a novel about what might loosely be termed ‘fabled’ characters.

In Gav’s case, this means Malekith, the Witch King of the Dark Elves in the mythology of the Warhammer World. Malekith is an invention of not more than about twenty years vintage, but given that the character is portrayed as an ancient figure from the pseudo-mythology of a tabletop wargame, I think it’s fair to say that many of the difficulties that apply to writing a novel about Malekith also apply to novels about Alexander the Great, King Arthur or Robin Hood.

There are a great many such novels; novels which attempt to chronicle the life of some great figure from history, or depict some great episode of our past, or further embellish some ancient legend or other. There are lots of these books, more are being released all the time. They seem to be quite popular. I’ll start off by saying that they’re almost universally cack.

I think this, principally, because they are cack. No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. My main objection to them is that for the most part they singularly fail to capture the ethos of their subject, or to tell the story in the manner such tales deserve. They take individuals like Achilles and Alexander the Great, whose names echo down the centuries, and churn out either the kind of melodrama that makes them look like characters in a particularly bad run of Eastenders, or the kind of bloated, completely witless action shite that makes them look like Steven Seagal characters. So many of these books just lack any of the pathos or profundity such stories and such characters simply demand.

This acute failure to produce worthwhile tellings of our oldest stories is, I think, peculiar to novels. I could have put it down to the fact that any fictionalised telling of history is doomed to failure, but I don’t think that’s true. In the modern age, cinema has succeeded admirably many times. Why do novels fail so badly so often to achieve the same? I don’t think it’s that the medium of the novel is inferior or inadequate, I think it’s more a case of how it’s used.

(My) Point of View…

In almost all modern novels (no matter how long ago the events depicted may have occurred) you have the viewpoint character. An equivalent does not exist in cinema. In cinema, we are seeing the film through nobody’s eyes but our own, and we know full well we are looking upon it as if through a window – we are seeing a scene of which we are not a part. This is different to the novel where, to at least some extent, the viewpoint character is the reader. Even if it’s not quite as literal as that, we are in fact relying exclusively on the viewpoint character to inform us and describe for us all that is proceeding in the story. That creates a very unique relationship between the reader and the viewpoint character, and it’s this which makes the use of established characters or historical figures in novels so problematic…

I’m Rubbish! But Gav Thorpe Has a Blog…

I haven’t updated this blog in ages. And after promising to do so as well! Tut tut. How awful. Really, I will try harder.

In the meantime, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague Gav Thorpe has started a blog. That’s not what he calls it, but I’ll let his first post explain that. Visit Mechanical Hamster to read this and other posts – one of which I will be responding to very shortly on this very blog. Honest.

Matt

Stephen Donaldson Interview: Excerpt (& Outtakes)

This month’s issue of Death Ray (issue 10) features my interview with Stephen Donaldson, as you may have noticed from the post below.

As is inevitably the case with these things, a few answers had to be trimmed a little and a few others had to be missed out altogether to fit the space available in the magazine, so there’s a few outtakes and a few extended highlights which I will be posting on this blog over the coming days. For now, however, you can read the full interview in Death Ray magazine, and below is a small excerpt from one of the questions we were forced to cut for reasons of space.

In the interview, Stephen talks about his decision not to write The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – a story he conceived at the same time as The Second Chronicles – immediately after completing the two earlier trilogies, because of his feeling that he needed first to improve as a writer. I asked Stephen if the stories he wrote in the meantime were specifically chosen to help him develop his abilities in certain ways, and here’s what he had to say:

“This question comes up most often in the form of: ‘Do you know what you’re going to write next? What are you gonna do after you’ve finished The Last Chronicles. The truth is I’ve no earthly idea, but I never had had an idea. I don’t try to answer that question until I’ve finished the story that’s right in front of me. Once it’s done then I say ‘oh, ok, now what will I write next?’. And the same has been true for the past twenty years. I haven’t searched for ideas that would help me prepare for Covenant, I’ve just searched for ideas that felt like they were so exciting it felt absolute necessary to write them.”

Read the interview in issue 10 of Death Ray (on sale now) and check back here for more outtakes soon.