The Millions : Pitons in the Monolith: Jonathan Franzen’s Despair and the Millennials’ Dream

... this form of storytelling [novels] has a future. This isn’t because written language  is somehow better than visual imagery, or because it cures isolation, or even because reading books makes you smarter than watching TV, but because words on a page, as a delivery system for images and ideas, can do things the competition can’t. I would go so far as to say that serious fiction and poetry will survive because of their relative simplicity, not in spite of it.

This is only a very slight variation on something I've said myself on and off: a book is not a movie, but vive la difference! The two achieve different things, for different reasons, and to different ends, and to say that one is somehow better than the other (or, worse yet, better "because of the way we live now" or somesuch silliness) is to miss the point.

B.R. Meyers again:

A Bright Shining Lie - Magazine - The Atlantic

Underlying the hype [about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke] is the silly notion that if a work introduces plenty of characters and traipses after them for enough years and pages, it is ipso facto ambitious. The true mark of an ambitious work is its style and depth. We would recognize Anna Karenina as such a novel even if only its first few pages had survived, because they depict characters with extraordinarily rich and complex inner lives.

I scarcely need to defend the proposition that SF&F make the same mistake: a bigger book, a longer series is by definition a more ambitious one or a better one. It's easy to confuse scope or sprawl with depth.

A Reader's Manifesto - Magazine - The Atlantic

The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in Balzac's Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures when his daughter says "Toyota Celica" in her sleep.

I'm going to be quoting a great deal from Meyers's excellent essay (even better in its full-length book-sized incarnation) in the near future, but I wanted to start with this particular snippet.

"Relevance" is a buzzword, and I sincerely wish it wasn't. When we say this or that work of fiction is "relevant", we typically leave off the phrase to our lives as they are now or something of that ilk. We tend to think of Gravity's Rainbow or better yet something like Charles Stross's Rule 34 as "relevant" because they are about things that are immediate or of our current moment in time. It's reassuring to read fiction (or anything at all, really) that understands what kind of world we currently live in and makes some attempt to address its vagaries and difficulties.

In a previous post I mentioned the quote: "Every pixel you take out of the imagination and put on the screen is a pixel you are taking responsibility for."

I swapped a few words in that sentence and got something even more relevant to where I stand: "Every word you take out of the imagination and put on the page is a word you are taking responsibility for." This goes way beyond "show, don't tell" (which I think should be "show and tell in the right measure").

By "the imagination", I'm referring to the imagination of the reader, not just the writer. Every time you call attention to something, describe something, you are asking the reader to surrender that much more of their imagination for the sake of yours.

Philosophical fiction can do much to improve genre : The Rebel Yell

I think there can be a philosophical novel in this day and age, and it’s more important than ever that one is published. But it faces challenges, which Erdal says are essentially “balance” and the question of what it would look like to consumers.

On the balance of it, SF&F seem to be the most likely place to find the philosophical novels of the age. So much of what they have been preoccupied with for so long has been philosophical discussion of things that affects all of us: artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial sentient life, the impacts of technical progress, etc.

That said, very little SF&F is reminiscent of what I would call the "big novel of ideas" approach, the sort of thing the author of the above piece attributes to folks like "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus and countless others". I will most likely surprise no one when I say I love such books. I'm in the middle of re-reading The Brothers Karamazov now in one of its new translations, and I see firsthand (doubly so in this new translation) what a novel of ideas can do at its most unchained and vivacious.

After all my previous musing about finding audiences and how to appeal to them, I decided I'd start a series of posts where I look at the whole technology, so to speak, of finding and keeping an audience with a given work.

Every piece of work finds and keeps a different readership. It's not always possible to know, in advance, what kind of audience you get — although you can make educated guesses based on what the readership is for previous work in a similar vein. This is where the concept of the target market (I know, yecch) comes from, for good or bad, and I suspect I'm going to be invoking it at least as much as I end up deconstructing it and tunneling under it during these discussions.

For perspective, here's a roundup of all my previous "Human Wave" commentary posts.

• Human Wave 1: To Entertain [2012/03/24]
• Human Wave 2: To Not Inspire Loathing [2012/03/26]
• Human Wave 3: To Not Write Agitprop [2012/03/28]
• Human Wave 4: No Grey Goo [2012/03/31]
• Human Wave 5: Cheat And Run [2012/04/04]
• Human Wave 6: To Be Read [2012/04/06]
• Human Wave 7: To Be Internally Consistent [2012/04/09]
• Human Wave 8: To Not Be Boring [2012/04/16]
• Human Wave 9: To Let Your Work Speak For Itself [2012/04/18]

And the original article that started it all. Read that first if you're wondering what this is about.

What is Human Wave Science Fiction | According To Hoyt

You shall not spend your life explaining why your not-boring is better than your fellow writers not-boring.  Instead you will shut up and write.

In my words: "Your work should speak for itself."

This connects with something I have touched on throughout this series: the justifications writers cough up for why their work is the way it is.

One of the exercises that people do in a writing workshop is to have your work read by someone else to the class, and then to have everyone else in the class give spot reactions to it. The author sits with his mouth shut. He can take notes, but he can't respond out loud. This is a writ-small version of what happens in the real world: the author typically isn't there to respond on the spot to any bewilderment or dismay felt by the reader, and so the work has to stand as much as possible on its own two feet.

What is Human Wave Science Fiction | According To Hoyt

You will not be boring.  Or at least you’ll do your best not to be boring.

By the laws of the aesthete, "boring" is the most damning indictment possible for any work of art. The problem is, "boring" is a subjective term for which you will never get a consistent set of examples.

Here is a list of things people I know have called boring: Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, The Brothers Karamazov, Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, Asimov's Foundation series, The Tale of Genji, Star Wars, 2001, all of Shakespeare, the first four Black Sabbath albums, Casablanca, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, and all three Transformers films. The list goes on. A purely inclusive list of boring things, based solely on someone's insistence, would end up encompassing most every work of art or culture.

What makes something boring, then, has little to do with the thing itself, and stems almost entirely from peoples' expectations.

What is Human Wave Science Fiction | According To Hoyt

You are allowed to write scientific speculation that counters “currently established fact” – just give us a reason why that makes sense in your universe.  (For some universes it can be highly whimsical, for others you’ll need serious handwavium.)

Read as: "Be consistent with your own aims."

Philip K. Dick, god bless his crazy soul, once gave a lecture with the title "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later." In typical Dick fashion, it meanders a bit and takes a rather major detour into the very murky waters of his Exegesis, from which few (Dick included) return intact. But he makes a point I rather like:

 I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. 

In other words, when things fall apart in a Dick novel, it's not because he isn't paying attention. It's because he's using that as a way to tell the story he really wants to tell. The first few times I ran into this, it did feel much like he was improvising his way into (and out of) situations that didn't seem to have any clear throughline. His lesser books do have that flavor about them, but his best ones follow through on their promise. They are consistent in the way they explore being inconsistent. But not everyone is Philip K. Dick, nor should they be, and so most of the time a story has to be built to be consistent on its own terms or it simply doesn't work.

With SF&F, it isn't too difficult to be internally consistent even at the expense of established fact. It takes an attention to detail, but it also takes the courage of one's convictions — the nerve to believe that your idea, once extended to encompass the whole of the story's universe, will be enough to carry the reader all the way through to the end. It takes, for lack of a better word, chutzpah.

The crazier the conceit, the more chutzpah you need to see it through. Sometimes the only way to do this is to play it all with a straight face, as Christopher Priest did in Inverted World (which, in a good example of "popular" and "literary" fiction shaking hands, has since been reissued by none other than the New York Review of Books). By doing that, he took what might have been an unsupportable concept and not only made it supportable but turned it into a larger allegory for human progress as a one-way street.

Sometimes you just need to be as crazy as the material demands, as Brian Aldiss did with Eighty-Minute Hour. There, he made no excuses for what was happening, but sustained it all by being massively entertaining. The consistency was in the tone and the approach, which was uniformly comic and tongue-in-cheek.

Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus  — a splendid book which doesn't get nearly enough press, by the way — walks somewhere between the two. There is one major element which requires suspension of disbelief, and then a whole slew of other ones — but by the end of the story, the whole thing has become a treatise on the nature of suspending one's disbelief and building trust with an audience, both the ones in the book and the ones outside it flipping the pages. I have my own problems with the story being a little too overstuffed and headless for its own good, but they stand entirely apart from how entertaining and imaginative it is — and how the whole thing also works as a sly jab at the way men project their fantasies about women onto the real things, often to the detriment of both.

Consistency, then, isn't just a matter of laying down conceptual rules. It's also a matter of tone and approach, and those are things which readers respond at least as strongly to, if not more so, than the what-if that fuels the story.