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

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…

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…

Tolkien: A Novel Approach

I’ve just posted a new article – Tolkien: A Novel Approach, which originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine. You’ll find it in the articles section of the website.

Regards,

Matt

Television – Take It or Leave It

As you probably know, I write quite regularly for Death Ray magazine. SF Diplomat has posted a review of issue eight (the current issue) over on his blog – he’s previously reviewed issues one and two as well.As you’ll see from the reviews, SF Diplomat’s opinion of the magazine has diminished somewhat. I actually think SF Diplomat is rather unfair in surmising the magazine’s decline based entirely on a single issue, but that’s not really the subject of this blog. What interested me in particular was SF Diplomat’s criticism of the amount of coverage the magazine gives to television, and the nature of that coverage, too – ‘the usual toothless fluff’ as SF Diplomat calls it. I don’t entirely disagree with this statement, as it happens, but I don’t think it’s Death Ray’s fault, I think it’s something in the nature of television.

There’s a tendency for TV series to get an easier ride than either books or films, and thus to appear to be more favoured and subject to less critical scrutiny. With television, if you get a bad episode here and there, people write it off – there’s another episode along in a week or so, and short of a really protracted bad run, nobody really notices. Films and books are single, largely self-contained works and hence any weakness throughout reflect on the whole thing. Overlooking individual flaws in a TV series is easy; to do so with books or film is much harder, with such flaws being seen as much more of a blemish.

There’s also the difference in viewing habits. In many cases, people watch TV when they’re doing nothing else. It’s time they know they would otherwise have wasted, they’re just slobbing around in their living room and so they don’t care as passionately about the quality of what they watch. The effort required to read a book is vastly more – it takes enthusiasm, and that can transform into harsh criticism of a disappointing read. The same applies to films, to an extent. The length of most films and the cost involved in seeing them at the cinema means that watching a film represents a significant outlay in both time and money, an expenditure again sufficient to arouse strong feelings and passionate opinions. Television rarely arouses anything like this strength of feeling.

For most people, books and films are also much more occasional experiences than TV – many people will watch television numerous times in a week, following a great many regular series, but the number of books they read or films they see will be much smaller – perhaps just a few in a month or even a year.

Some might assume that these more numerous television offerings would actually result in audiences being even more selective, but in truth it seems to simply create a sort of aggregating effect – unless a TV show is the very worst of the worst (or the very best of the best), it will probably meet that rather meek standard of approval best described as ‘okay’, ‘not bad’, ‘pretty good’ or something equally harmless.

With a medium that arouses such moderate opinions, it’s perhaps inevitable that the good is lauded more than the poor is condemned, and when reviewers follow this course it gives the impression that television is being fawned over – but it just isn’t the case. If television escapes the kind of zealous and minute scrutiny that books and films are commonly subjected to, it isn’t because Death Ray, or any other magazine for that matter, has shown it preferential treatment – it’s because television just really isn’t worth it.