King goes on to discuss Wolfe's new novel in more detail, and lists a bunch of things he didn't much like about it, and ultimately grades it as not very good. He gets back to his central point eventually though, as he laments Wolfe's failings in this novel:

In King's view, it's better to have tried for a masterpiece and failed than it is to just spend 200 pages with some disaffected post-college student whining about their miserable life and the traumas of their childhood. I get the feeling that King views Wolfe's novel as equivalent to the work of those "self-centered postmodernists," and even though Wolfe's doesn't really work, King likes that it actually tried to work and that it did work in some ways, which is more than can be said for lots of other novels.

As I said, I don't read much literary fiction. I do skim it often though, mostly in the form of short stories. My mom got me a subscription to Glimmer Train last year, and I've since received 3 quarterly installments of this very literary magazine, each one filled with more than a dozen short stories. All of them brilliantly-written, all of them very clever in some way, and all of them ultimately pointless and empty, since nothing ever happens in any of them. At first I thought it the stories were sort of flukes; but when almost every story in each issue was the same basic thing, I came to believe. They never really suck, but none of them every stand out for any reason, and in every case the only thing propelling me to keep turning the pages is the quality of the prose. I don't travel in those circles, so I don't really know the idea or point of that sort of writing. My impression though is that it's a strange sort of vanity, in which it's almost seen as a weakness to use the crutch of a plot or any sort of action or conflict to keep the story going. A true artist/author should be able to craft a compelling twenty pages without a single event or conflict the reader will remember more than ten seconds later.

Here's a typical passage from a typical story in Glimmer Train. This one is from Issue 52, Fall 2004, My Search for Red and Gray Wide-Striped Pajamas, by Peter Selgin, page 21.

I'm not singling this story out for any special reason; it's just a good example of the sort of writing you'll find in this magazine. The point of the story is that a nebbish loser type of guy in NYC is trying to find a pair of pajamas with wide red and gray stripes, just like the ones his dad used to wear. His search is complicated by a girl he's fucking whose father keeps throw her at him to try and get married, and by the fact that none of the stores have the type of PJs he wants. There are requisite flashbacks to his idiosyncratic and wacky childhood, he's got a requisite physical problem (fainting spells), and every paragraph is filled with half a dozen lovely sentences, all with beautiful similes or metaphors.

The problem for me at least, is that nothing ever happens, and that the whole story basically reads as set up for some later tale that we don't have access to, and which may not, in fact ever exist. In fact, this particular story has a lot more plot than most of its kind; the guy does eventually find the PJs he wants, but only after one last fainting spell, which convinces him that he doesn't actually want them at all.  So he doesn't buy the PJs, but of course the reader doesn't give a shit one way or the other.

Almost all of the story is like the two paragraph example here: it's all full of clever observations and beautiful writing and introspection and such... but there's nothing to keep you reading, and even if I do it's just out of a desire to see what happens, even though I know nothing ever will. I've read most of the stories in 3 issues of Glimmer Train now, and dozens of them years in the past when my mom used to subscribe to it for me, and there's not one story in all that time that I remember in any detail at all. I read every word of maybe 10% of the stories, skim parts of 40%, and give up entirely on 50%, when the lack of a plot or narrative pull bores me, and the writing isn't good enough to keep me going just to see what happens (even though I know that nothing ever will).

When I read Glimmer Train and other stuff like it, I am always reminded of the stories by this brilliant and sensitive artistic type guy I knew in college writing classes. He would have written about red and gray striped PJs, and been overjoyed to do so. The thing that always drove me crazy about the guy I knew (I'd say his name if I had any idea what it was.) was that he could turn out these beautiful-arranged stories, with excellent writing all the way through, an then when they ended... they just ended. I clearly remember one where the narrator was a man in his 40s, and he spent the entire 15 pages of the story standing in the shower, thinking about his daughters and his wife and how the magic is maybe fading away from their relationship, all while the girls were in another room getting ready for a party they were going to, and in the end the guy got out of the shower, (which actually took about 2 minutes in reality, despite the fact that he thought back over his entire life, his entire marriage, the future, etc) and went to get dressed, at which point the story ended.

My usual comment (everyone wrote some comments on their copy of the submitting author's story, since feedback is very helpful for a writer) was something along the lines of "You write so well... have you ever considered writing something with a compelling plot and action that rises towards a climax or some kind? I would love to see you do a real story someday."

I was a bit more diplomatic than that, but my sentiment was clear. And I didn't mean to be mean; the writer was a very nice guy, a quiet, introspective, peaceful pre-hippy, and I enjoyed chatting with him before class. In retrospect, I don't think he chose to write like that for some trendy or elitist reason; he just liked stories like that and read them a lot and naturally wrote his own in that style. A style I find boring, but that someone must enjoy.

I also don't mean to imply that my own stories of that time were works of art, since they certainly were not. They weren't written all that poorly, but I always tried to do way too much in terms of plot, character development, etc, and they either sprawled to 40 pages and lost all focus, or were 20 pages with too much stuff crammed into them. I don't consider short stories my strong suit, even to this day, though I'd like to spend more time writing them, and much more time writing in general.

The point though, if there is one, is that I think the quality of writing that dozens of authors possess is quite impressive, but it's all quality in terms of word manipulation. They are very good with characters also, so long as it's one particular character thinking about his weird life. What's odd is that that's come to represent the forefront in American fiction. Meanwhile lots of other authors sell 1000x the copies, churning out mediocre crap for the mass/crass audience. Most of those types are hacks, true enough, but it's strange how the talent to write a good story, to think up a good plot, the ability to structure a novel with the rising tension and an ever-approaching climax, the talent to invent and describe interesting characters, etc, all of that is undervalued. It's like anyone can write a great story with crazy stuff happening and weird characters interacting, but you've got to be a true artist to throw together 30 or 50 or 200 pages of slice of life vignettes in which the most dramatic moment is something a character remembers from their childhood.

I wanted to mention my ideals for writing, and the work of good authors who do plot and brilliant prose, like Clive Barker, but it's late and I'm having a lot of trouble making sense here. So more on this subject some other time -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow if anyone emails with some relevant comments/disagreements/whatever about this issue.

February 16, 2005

After a rambling and fatigue-crippled first pass at this topic on Monday, I'm returning to it today and adding in a bunch of stuff I meant to write in the first place.

First of all, the fact that different types of stories have very different qualities is precisely why I created my categorized rating scale. For fiction, I score a novel (or short story, I suppose) from 1-10 on the following elements:

Plot: x
Concept: x
Writing Quality/Flow: x/x
Characters: x
Horror: x
Humor: x
Fun Factor: x
Page Turner: x
Re-readability: x
Overall: x

When I made this ranking up (and it's evolved a bit over time, with a few more ratings being added and the emphasis of others changing) I didn't consciously think, "This way I can say if a story has a great plot and no good writing, and/or vice versa." but that's pretty much how it turns out. Ideally a story does well in all areas: has a plot that keeps you turning the pages, interesting dynamic characters, funny scenes, scary scenes, exciting action scenes, good conversations, and it's all written well enough that you stop every now and then and think, "Man that was a well-written passage."  Needless to say, I don't see novels like this very often, and it's virtually impossible to have all of those things in one short story, just due to length considerations.

You can cram all of that in; I tried some with my early short story efforts, but it doesn't work and the tale ends up over-decorated. It's like comparing a nicely-decorated house you'd like to live in with a store that sells decorations; you might like seeing all the options for a kitchen, but you don't want your house to look like a Home Depot Expo.

Character change is especially difficult in shorts. It's very hard to pull a reader so tightly into a short story that they feel an investment in the characters, and you need to do that to make the reader care if/when the characters change. This makes it almost impossible to have truly dynamic (changing) characters in a short story of any reasonable size. You can make them change; that's easy. What's hard is to work a plot that makes them change for some logical reason, and gives weight to how they were before and after changing. You can easily start off a story with a real asshole of a character; show him beating his wife or something, and then he gets scared by a near-death and becomes a much nicer guy. Or you can build up a character, then have something happen at the end of the story that should change him. In either event, he's changed, and he's technically a dynamic character, but will the reader buy it? Probably not, since in one case we didn't really know what he was like to begin with, and in the other we don't know if he'll really stay changed, or will just go back to the same old thing.

So for a short story, it's generally better to just have some interesting characters and have them do what they do, with the interest to the reader coming from the way you reveal the character's traits and behaviors when faced with various stimuli. That can be as good or better than having them be dynamic, since it doesn't require the rest of the plot to support it so obviously, but it still gives the reader something new every few pages, and each new facet of the character that gets revealed should add depth to the character and to their impact on the story. Quite a few novels get away with this their entire 300 or 500 or 1200 page length; none of the characters change a bit (Lord of the Rings, for example, some hobbit bravery excepted) during the story, but there are a lot of facets to the characters so we're always seeing something new and interesting about them. This is also why so many sequels don't work; the characters are all established and there's no new discovery about them to pull the story along, which makes the sequel too dependent upon the plot events, or upon new characters who are inevitably less-interesting than the original ones.

Short stories can also go the other direction, and be almost entirely about their plot, as lots of action movies are. Throw some stock characters into a wild situation and describe how they struggle for survival. "Man vs. nature/whatever," to go with the old classification system. You should let the reader get to know them some as they struggle; it's not all just mindless action since then there's no reason to care who wins or loses (a problem that most action movies seem to be afflicted with of late). Readers have to have a rooting interest, whether they love your good guys or hate your bad guys, and you can throw in the most amazing and fascinating settings and events ever, and readers will greet them with a yawn unless the characters are at least somewhat compelling.  A good example of this type of writing is pretty much anything by Lovecraft. His characters are 99% boring and interchangable; almost always a cipher of a main character who is some surprised scholar/antiquarian, one who changes not a bit during the story (unless he succumbs to the monsters), and we watch as he faces ageless horrors of the world. I enjoy Lovecraft stories for the plot and the setting and the mythos, but none of them are any good, in a strict, "How a short story should be written." sense.

And turning full circle from Lovecraft, we are back to the Glimmer Train style of artsy introspection (which I wrote about in Monday's blog), which generally have very little to no plot, humor, fun, etc, but are brilliantly-written. Hypothetical paired ratings:

Just to be clear, I'm not rating any story in particular, just sort of hitting the overall average archetypal tale from each source. Some of each type of story would be better or worse than these ratings, of course. I'm also not pretending to be objective or even-handed about this sort of thing. The Lovecraft scores aren't really that much higher than the Glimmer Train scores, if you actually add them up, yet I value an interesting plot and setting and concept far higher than I value writing quality and flow, which is why I've read every Lovecraft story many times, and seldom get through more than half of a given issue of Glimmer Train literary magazine.

Interesting, each have pretty high re-readability, simply because if you get through them once, you'll probably get through them again, just to appreciate what you enjoyed about them.  The Glimmer Train style of literary fiction is never very compelling (to me) since nothing ever really happens in the stories; if you enjoy them you are enjoying them for the quality of the writing and beauty of the language, and you might even appreciate that more on a re-read. Lovecraft is much the same, but with the initial and repeated interest based entirely on the mythos, the background info revealed, and the horrific events of the tale. I've read some of Lovecraft's better stories well over a dozen times (over the course of the 15 or 20 years I've been a fan) since even though I know what's going to happen, I just enjoy hearing about the mythic demons and monsters and such. I haven't yet felt compelled to reread any of the Glimmer Train stories, but that's because pretty writing isn't something I value highly enough to read a story just for the sake of it (and I abandon at least half the stories in a given issue out of boredom). If I did, and I'm sure lots of people out there do, I can see them re-reading a particularly good (in their opinion) short from Glimmer Train over and over again, wanting to appreciate the author's genius with the language, and to see how he/she did it, how the story was structured, how it all fit together in the end, etc.

My favorite short stories, which I suppose I have to mention here at some point, are ones that do it all, and the best author for those I've ever seen is Clive Barker. I haven't read any shorts by him in at least a decade that I thought were brilliant, but his early work, largely collected in the Books of Blood, is just outstanding. I don't love every story, but if I were to compile my hypothetical top 20 short stories ever, Barker would have at least a dozen spots on it, and I still think In the Hills; the Cities would rank as the best short story I've ever read, even after reading hundreds of shorts in various collections, best of the year compilations, etc. And that rating is probably 90% due to it having the most amazing and inventive plot of any short story I've ever read.

Barker's work isn't loved by everyone; the scope of the imagination and the weirdness of them is too much for a lot of people who prefer more conventional horror. Steven King, for instance. I like King's work as well, especially his early shorts, but they're basically like his novels; weird things happening to regular people, in a world just like our own. Lots of readers prefer that, especially since King generally delves deeper into his characters, and makes them quite sympathetic, which forges a stronger connection between them and most readers. I can remember numerous interesting and sympathetic characters from past King novels, while when I think back on Barker's novels, the worlds and the events and the mythos is what sticks in my mind. As for Barker's shorts, they are almost always stranger and more inventive (than King's) by an order of magnitude, with the world being tweaked in some fundamental way, and the events in the story almost always being something you greet with a "how the hell did he think of that?" sort of reaction. Barker is also a master of prose, and in all of his better work I find myself regularly stopping and thinking, "Christ that was well-written." I very seldom have that reaction from King, or other non-literary authors.

I also realize as I'm writing this that I definitely value plot and originality and setting more highly than character and other things; and you can see that I prefer Barker to King (while liking them both) for much the same reasons I rate Lovecraft higher than artsy lit fiction (while not liking them both). A great concept, ideally something very weird and removed from everyday life, is what moves me in a story, and I can get through a poorly-written one (Lovecraft) easily, if the plot and events pull me along. Conversely, a story with no plot and no concept other than everyday life bores me, no matter how brilliantly it's written.

I'd say this is true for most readers though; just look at the best seller list. Ideally a story has it all, but if you're going to weight them by mass appeal it's obviously better to go with involving characters and plot and world. Compare the sales of the Harry Potter novels, The DaVinci Code, every Stephen King novel, etc to literary fiction, which very seldom ranks on the best seller list at all, despite being what almost all critics prefer.

Lucky for me and my potential future riches, my own writing interests lie in the plot/character/setting camp, even though I do spend a lot of time trying to make the words sing (that's largely why my novel is going slowly and I'm spending so much time rewriting and editing as I go along) even though lots of readers won't ever really notice. And most of the critics and readers who might notice wouldn't admit to liking it, due to the subject matter.

Oddly, given my above-stated preferences, my greatest critical scorn is heaped upon stories that are nothing but plot and setting and events, with dreadful writing. I don't seek out and read literary fiction, and even while most of the stories in a typical issue of Glimmer Train bore me, I don't feel the need to quote from them and ridicule them in my blog. For one thing, no one would care since no one reads those types of stories anyway, but in a larger sense I don't think they suck. I know I don't personally enjoy them very much, but I can see what they're trying to do, and even if they execute it perfectly, it wouldn't much appeal to me. I think they're sort of a waste of time and are misguided, and they remind me of the artsy guys I knew in my college creative writing classes, but while those stories are not my cup of tea, I don't feel a need to spill their blood in wrathful displeasure.

Compare that to my reaction to popular fiction, best selling sometimes, that I think is hack-tastic, and feel a need to decry at length. As my occasional critical comments on R A Salvatore, Anne Rice, Terry Brooks, John Saul, etc make clear. Oh, and read those bits quickly, since when I get published (or closer to it) I imagine most of those painfully honest critiques will have to vanish from this site--at least until I've got a few best sellers under my belt, and gain the clout to once again speak my critical mind online.