All entries for February 2008

Timeliness vs. Untimeliness

Writing about web page http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11BELIEVERS.html?ex=1284091200&en=e1fba32179d284cf&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

The link above refers to an article about two experimental - and successful - US magazines: The Believer and n+1. The former is in the McSweeneys' posse, edited by Dave Eggers' partner, Vendela Vida. The latter I can badly describe as an avant garde journal, commentating on a variety of issues that often get ignored in mainstream US media outlets.

The key discussion, on page 3 of the article, is of how 'untimeliness' becomes the very 'timeliness' of these magazines, in order to make them a part of a zeitgeist. Mainstream journalism has become so focused on promoting the same handful of news stories and reviews of the same cultural output in order to corroborate a mainstream zeitgeist, that it has lost its diversity of content and style. You're left with several opinions of the same few things, which leads to a lack of awareness about what's out there.

The worst manifestation of this phenomenon is the digested articles that have started cropping up. Mainstream dailies, particularly weekend supplements, have started compiling how each others' critics have rated plays, films, books; or giving statistics of column inches dedicated to particular news stories.

So audiences, who are starved by seeing the same old in all the easy reach media, reach further to places like n+1 and The Believer, for commentary and ideas that astonish and delight (to borrow Peter Blegvad's phrase) by their diversity. This diversity manifests in both technique and content.

Philip Gerard, in Creative Non-Fiction's opening chapter, talks about the 'timely' and the 'timeless' aspect of good creative non-fiction. The word has more positive associations than 'untimely', but at the same time starts to smack somewhat of the universal, a term I'm equally wary of. But it's an important point: what translates when a piece of writing dates? Fiction is said to carry an 'emotional truth' through all its specific, contextualised lies. And creative non-fiction has this 'timelessness' that you might say is the human angle, the part that we can all share in, no matter our culture or experiences.

I don't know about that concept of shared humanity so much. I treat it as a belief, one that is perfectly acceptable, but with easy disproofs that leave the idea exclusive. The part of writing the reader can relate to is always dubiously interpreted anyway, even reading work by the best communicators.

But maybe it's that shared understanding of democratised interpretation that lends the idea of universality weight. More questions, as usual.

George Ttoouli : 29 Feb 2008 20:06 |  Tags: Creative Nonfiction Journalism Nplus1 Nytimes Thebeliever |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

World–building revisited: a riposte to the nerds

Writing about World–builders – from the nerd end of the spectrum from Gas-mask City

Ignoring the philosophy of the question of world-building, I'm interested in the technical aspects. I'm arguing that the approach to world-building in fiction generally needs to avoid an abundance of detail, unless the characters demand it.

Think of sparse writing - the point of Carver, or Chekov, or Seiffert is to construct a net of environmental detail - a version of the real world - that holds together just sufficiently to carry the jelly of the story through to the end. If you stop to think about the actual technique of sentences, what concrete detail you're being given, there are numerous gaps, a flatness, a primitivism in the detail, which the reader does the job of filling. Some even have gaps in the syntax, that still works.

The main aim then is to construct the world the characters need in order to not fall through like bad clipping code in an early 3D FPS. In this way, gaping holes that need to be covered must be. But you don't really need a full blueprint of the Death Star in order to believe that the weak point is REALLY REALLY hard to get to.

"Why the desire for ratified, internally consistent universes?" Tim Franklin asks. I think that's a demand of the reader, one that's had their ego swept aside by the skill of the writer (to paraphrase TS Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', as I'm wont to).

The writer's ('story-teller's' would be more accurate) concern is to know their character first, and see how they are in the world. I'm saying this, while also totally aware that China's approach (and I guess MJHarrison's approach) is the opposite - to imagine the world and then locate the characters within it. But you're left with a lot of baggage - reams of description that clog up the story. Sure, it's probably a good enough read if the writer is competent, but it's also indulgent.

If the characters are 'there', the world follows to some extent, even with a minimalist approach. A recent comment a Birmingham film guru made to me was that tests have shown readers will stay glued to a video image no matter how bad the picture is, as long as the sound is top quality. Compare disaster footage on handhelds and mobile phone cameras, where you can clearly hear someone holding the camera expleting.

Similarly, the voice of the character, the narration (the subvocalised soundtrack to the story) is more important (these days? I think it loops back towards oral narrative) than the precision imagery of the world. If the voice is gripping, the hazy shapes of the world don't need to resolve, they just need to give the 'character of place', an atmosphere. I'm sure there are juicy quotes along those lines, but of the top of my head, refer to David Lynch's films, or the atmosphere of 'Dickensian London' as a concept; or as counterexamples, the banal detail and patronising tone of Dan Brown's and JK Rowling's books.

By illustration, Drizzt Do'Urden and Leopold Bloom. The first a fantasy environment totally constructed, that only becomes interesting by virtue of the heroes that inhabit it. The second a real place, Joyce's Dublin, turned unfamiliar, but a believable environment by virtue of the perspective watching it. Both are outsiders to the world's conventions (the point where Lupine and Kindred (or Lycans and Brethren, or whatever they're called in 'Underworld') can exist in the same party) and provide a more interesting view of the world as a result.

One that makes the world a more interesting place for the fan to inhabit after the story ends? I.e. does the fans' desire to create the world in greater detail only come from having seen great stories unfold in those lands?

Backatcha, Tim.

George Ttoouli : 16 Feb 2008 14:34 |  Tags: China Mieville Creative Writing M J Harrison World Building |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Writing Science

Writing about web page http://www.mariopetrucci.com/

I've been talking with Mario Petrucci in recent weeks, setting up a poetry-science project. I've never been comfortable calling something by that phrase - poetry-science - because the collaborative nature of projects located in that region often define themselves by the need to erode boundaries, rather than bring two ghettoes together and watch them vye for power. A new word sometimes seems appropriate in order to acknowledge a new attempt at equal symbiosis.

So the discussions with Mario have been particularly elucidating in terms of successful or failed attempts to cohere the two. One thing Mario said that really jumped out at me was about the difficulty in writing poetry about science. You end up falling into one of two traps. The first in which the poet uses science as a metaphor - and so science becomes secondary to the poem, of an inferior status.

A good example of this is Jo Shapcott's 'Love in the Lab'. In which science and scientists are depicted as repressed and the human rises up, through, in spite of. It's a love poem rather than a science-poem. More examples in Jo's work, where science is used - reined, leashed - to serve poetry's traditional themes well.

The other trap is where poetry is harnessed to provide a conveyance for science. At its crudest, this amounts to mnemonics - SohCahToa, or similar attempts at rhythm and rhyme as an aide to memory. This enslaves poetry to the science - or worse, the education of the science. As Mario put it to me, why waste your time using poetry (i.e. adding bells and whistles, as Peter Blegvad puts it to me so well in discussing so many other modes of writing), when a lucid, clear academic style can be as effective?

David Morley threw another example at me a couple of weeks ago. Heavy Water, the film version of Mario's long sequence of poetry about Chernobyl's reactor, is beautiful, combining documentary footage, collage and actor-delivered renditions of Mario's poetry. At the end, the narration lists - scientifically - the half-lives of various metals, ending with uranium. This, to David, was the most moving part of the film and it consisted of 'raw scientific fact'. I'd argue otherwise (a step further?): this was raw scientific poetry, the point where embellishment falls away and science = poetry, a = b; the one becomes a metaphor for the other and vice versa, to create something new, a product in the imagination. One that is moral, in this context; and moving; and grows beyond its own words, through context and delivery - repetition being the most obvious of the poetic devices employed.

So, maybe this is the territory in which poetry and science combine as equals. That in which the poetry in science is recognised; and the science in poetry, (though I'll admit to not having demonstrated this latter in the examples and perhaps I'm leaning unjustifiably on a notion that when the two are used in equal balance, they become interchangeable). Or to put it another way, which is where I first encountered this theme working with the Poetry Society on Poetry and Science: the point at which science and poetry (scientists and poets) cohere in their mission to understand the world, simultaneously rational and irrational.

Sooner said than done, as usual.

George Ttoouli : 12 Feb 2008 09:00 |  Tags: Creative Writing Mario Petrucci Poetry |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem