Forum / The novel defined

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 09, 08:17pm

  What is a novel?

  There have been innovations and changes through the years. There are types and genres and sub-classes, but what is the novel... basically defined?

  One thread here asks 'How do you start a novel?' The answers are varied, some formulaic, some conceptual, some mechanical. I think a more basic question would be to ask, 'What is it?' Not in the obvious context of what it has been, but what it is and could be. If you have a concrete definition of what a thing is, it's easier to know how to write one... my opinion only.

  Some variations are obvious and driven by audience or concept, like noir novels which often come under the heading of genre and appeal to specific readers... or non-fiction novels, the first of which was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, more of a sub-class. There are smaller novels, defined as novellas by their size, and giants that defy comfortable reading in bed. Size is changing too. These days, smaller seems to be the demand, though in genre novels, size seems more of a bargain to the reader who wants to escape on a regular basis. Even these giants are served up in regular bite-size chapters...

  I'd love to hear some definitions from both rears and writers of novels.

  What is a novel?

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 09, 08:52pm

  Something new? ;-)

• 
  Dolemite

  Dec 09, 08:53pm

  A novel is a longish piece of fiction with something wrong with it.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 09, 10:35pm

  Never mind.

• 
  Gary Hardaway

  Dec 09, 10:51pm

  Novels are complex prose works of imagined or re-imagined events of a length I find myself less and less able to read to conclusion. The best re-arrange the reader's apparatus of perception. The most popular can scarcely be remembered after a week or two until the movie comes out. The important ones tend to inspire either passionate loyalty and regard or profound contempt and derision. The dismissable ones can have significant short term economic impact. The best ones can change cultural directions for decades after their publication. Novels can be among the greatest monuments of cultural invention or, like "Gone With the Wind", be a proper source of national shame forever.

• 
  Dolemite

  Dec 09, 11:06pm

  "Never mind."

  Just as you can’t force your characters to adhere to preconceived “rules of engagement” (if you want your work to be alive), you can’t force others to manifest in accordance with your preconceived concept of what constitutes a proper discussion (on threat you will take your ball and go home),

  My post is a restatement (to the best of my memory) of something I read by a famous critic in reference to Thomas Wolfe.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 09, 11:18pm

  If you find yourself less and less able to read them to conclusion, Gary, maybe, as "John Henry" says, there's something wrong with them. For me a good novel is a really well told story, which, almost by definition, means I can't quit it until it ends. "Important" novels don't necessarily have this, to me, vital element of story. They may be strong in other ways -- unforgettable characters, incredibly profound and beautifully lyrical writing, ballsy in the way they tackle important themes or magical in their ambience, but if they don't have a compelling story I tend to hop around in them and lose interest somewhere along the way.

  Some have become so important in some a priori way that I simply have to force myself to read to the end so I can go to my grave with those title checked off my bucket list. These include Moby Dick and Gravity's Rainbow. The rewards of reading both, beyond the visceral satisfaction of simply having finished them, are themselves complex and hard to define. Both books are forces of nature and simply must be tackled at some point, I concluded. I'm thinking Proust's Remembrances and Joyce's Ulysses might be, as well, but I'm dragging my feet on both. I'll be damned, tho, if I will even pretend to entertain any notion of ever cracking the cover of Finnegan's Wake, boyo.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 09, 11:28pm

  Sorry for the typos. My eyes are going bad from reading so many "important" literary works I'd have been better off skipping in favor of a good James Lee Burke or Ed Gorman mystery.

  Mr. Henry, it might have been Max Perkins himself saying that about Thomas Wolfe, as Perkins, according to legend, was charged with surgically dividing Wolfe's one massive and deeply flawed but exquisitely consuming novel into the three or four manageable chunks that Scribners then published as independent works.

  I still stand by my one word definition, as stated above and duly ignored.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 10, 12:16am

  There are lots of types of novels: I don't know that there is a novel in general. Novels then lack novelty in that sense (get it? pretty good, eh?)

  The beginning of Gary's post seems to me about right.

  When I was teaching, I would do what one does when one teaches such things and make lists. So the usual general characterization goes from the realist novel to modernism, which (in general) makes the conventions of realism explicit, so makes the fictions that organize other fictions, and in the process undermine the assumptions about how a text can stage the world and the relations that obtain with respect to that represented world. So realism is mimetic and modernist pieces undo that by pushing the idea of representing a world back into genre conventions. The po-mo in general fragments the modernist game.

  Of course, these lists have the function of giving an illusion of organization and movement to things. That's what lists do.

  Lately I've not been reading as much fiction as I used to--I think at one point I decided I would just steal from whatever I was reading just like I used to be concerned about listening to Cecil Taylor because I would be a bad impersonation of Cecil for a couple weeks every time I did that. But I've read lots of them and some have bent my way of thinking pretty significantly. I used to really like long books---Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Recognitions, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Man without Qualities, In Search of Lost Time.

  But at some point I got interested in other ways of chopping up texts and using them to explore other ways of thinking about being-in-the world. It's hard to say what did it--Robbe-Grillet, Burroughs, JG Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition all had something to do with it, but so did alot of other things....

  At this point, I'm mostly making maps of the fading of the American empire. It seems to me that there's something symmetrical about using fragmented forms to do such a project. And, from there, questions about the function of other types of continuity appear.

  Arguably, I have had too much carrot cake this evening.

• 
  Jane Hammons

  Dec 10, 12:36am

  Fiction of around 60,000 words that resists definition; once you think you know what it is, someone comes along to show you that it can be something else--and the other thing, too.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 12:38am

  ...ahem...

• XXXX

  Dec 10, 12:56am

  A novel is a story that is too long created for its insights about our lives that are too short.

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 01:40am

  A novel is something that takes too long to write and sells for too little.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 02:17am

  Not if you sell enuf of 'em, Adam. It's all in the marketing. If trash like 50 Shames can go viral we oughta be able to peddle our litter-a-tchure, don'tcha think? Or maybe it's all in the cover. I read somewhere that this is so.

  When I was in the Army the morals police would stage midnite locker raids and confiscate masters theses on arcane topics some publisher sold at the PX with nekkid wimmins on the covers. These books were pronounced "awful" and roughly seized, whereas my Henry Millers and William Burroughses with plain Obelisk covers escaped unscrutinized.

• 
  Gary Hardaway

  Dec 10, 02:19am

  It is easier to define a thing long dead than something still viable and evolving. It would be interesting to re-animate Cervantes and ask his opinion. I suspect he would still recognize the form as it exists today. I think Shakespeare would have trouble finding a tragedy now and Homer would find nothing to compare to the Iliad. The novel doesn't require the cultural consensus needed to support tragedy and epic poems. It is a much more egalitarian notion.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 02:25am

  Kindle Direct would snap those boys up in a heartbeat. "Hey, Bill, get four or five dozen teenagers to swoon over that Hamlet dude in "customer reviews" and we'll put you out front, bubba!

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 02:34am

  Matthew,I think erotic romance is the easiest genre to sell right now. As soon as I can think of a suitable pen name, I'm grabbing my slice of the lust pie.

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 02:36am

  My serious opinion of the novel is that it is a dinosaur, about to be replaced by stories that can be digested in five minute bites.

  I don't think the new readers are interested in wading through 150 pages just to get a story set up. Fast, entertaining and immediate. That's what more and more people are looking for.

  Who even takes the time to read a newspaper these days?

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 02:40am

  Good point. That's why my chapters are short. I'm an ADD writer writing for ADD readers. The big thing now is to walk around staring at a smart phone. Ebooks play right into that fashion. I would hate, tho, to learn that some poor schmuck walked in front of a bus reading one of my novels.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 02:46am

  Pen name for you, Adam? How about Comma Sutra?

• 
  Gary Hardaway

  Dec 10, 03:10am

  Adam makes a point about Gen Y. They are post-literate and frankly don't factor in any discussion of literature. Can an entire generation be flushed?

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 03:11am

  I was thinking maybe "Jack Rabbit"

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 03:15am

  Gary, I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing. IN the 1800's, entertainment was in short supply for a lot of people. There was hardly anything on television and all the good magazines were in the outhouse. A long, drawn out story addressed a need to be entertained.

  Today there's TV, music everywhere and, most importantly, the internet. The Internet provides answers and entertainment almost instantly. This is what the writer has to compete with, and fighting for attention in this environment will often require something with greater immediate impact than a traditional novel.

• 
  Gary Hardaway

  Dec 10, 04:07am

  True, Adam. Hybrid forms emerge. Is the infrastructure that sustains current cultural consumption sustainable?

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Dec 10, 04:20am

  A universe wrapped in a paper blanket.

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Dec 10, 05:13am

  Adam,

  I hear what you're saying about the novel going the way of the dinosaur, in favor of flash/micro fiction. Certain trends do suggest that happening--the emergence of online lit, Twitter, Fictionaut, etc.--but in many ways I feel the opposite. I think flash/micro is the trend, and it's the longer narratives that will endure. I feel in this way in part because I think the internet is a trend itself, but for other, art-related reasons as well.

  The biggest problem with a 500-word story, I'm afraid, is that people will forget them. Unless it's worded as an anecdote that can be borrowed and used at a party, its value doesn't really extend past the moments of its consumption. I'm not saying this to stir feathers, knowing the forum I'm using to say this, but it makes as much sense to say that flash is a trend as it does to say that the novel is dying out.

  I'm not saying that flash fiction isn't a beautiful, tremendously important art form--one needs only to spend a few moments on this website to know that it is. Look for a Claffey story, or a JLD, a Dickes, a Sifre, a Hardaway, a Reese, a Garfunkel, a Vaughn, a Pokrass, a Rainwater-Lites, a Stancek, a Beighley, and beyond: Rohan, Hershman, Epstein, Adcox, Rolli, so forth, and you'll see the best of what flash fiction has to offer, which is not meant to be a backhanded compliment. Those writers help exemplify the form. What I'm saying is, flash fiction is a taxonomy in its infant stage, far too young to crown successor to the longer narrative.

  In fact, short fiction as a kingdom continues to battle a perception problem at large. The fact that an Anthony Doerr story collection, or Alice Munro's new (and probably last) book, or even Claire Vaye Watkins' or Jim Shepherd's story collections didn't/don't/haven't yet appear(ed) on major best seller lists (for crying out loud, Etgar Keret's new book is #18,000 in book sales on Amazon.com) suggests not so much that people largely prefer novels when purchasing fiction, but that people look at story collections (and by proxy, stories) as inferior, or mediocre work. The perception is that people write short stories because they can’t cut it as novelists. I know that's not true, you know that's not true, in regards to the art form, at least; but in regards to consumerism, the numbers speak loudly, if not emphatically. At the risk of contradicting myself, I'm also not saying that sales are the only indicator of success, merely using it as an example towards my point.

  The novel isn't dead, or decrepit, or a fossil. I would love to see the death of the death of the novel, because as a philosophy it’s bullshit. Are attention spans shrinking? Yes, though I don't think it's legitimate to claim that the speed of the modern world and peoples' semi-involuntary reactions to it are preventing people who want to read books of any length from reading them, nor do I think that the weirdly innate desire to write NOVELS will dispatch itself from human nature any time soon. Is flash fiction/online literature a trend? Too soon to tell, but the talent-level of the writers writing them, and quality of work they produce is the only real indicator that the answer might be yes. But is that enough?

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 11:30am

  And then there are graphic "novels", i.e. novel-length comic books. Our public library has a frighteningly large section devoted to them, and I see young people carrying armloads of them to the checkout desk. Young people. The post-literate Gen Y. At least they're reading something besides text messages, unless that's the kind of writing these hybrids offer.

  Then there is the surge in popularity of "young adult" novels. It's a separate marketing category. Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc. Someone recently posted on FB an agent's solicitation from Literary Marketplace -- let me say that again: an agent's SOLICITATION -- inviting queries for young adult novels. I queried her about my latest satiric novel, Sacrifice, teasing her that it was for the "young adult at heart." At least I actually received a response: A form rejection email, chilly, of course.

  Young adults and bored housewives. That's the market if you want your writing to feed the family. Passing trend? Who the hell knows? I shall continue to write for the "young adult at heart", using academic language only ironically. Two things I believe remain constant: readers want interesting characters and they want story. I believe that's in our DNA. Packaging and delivery platforms will continue to vary, if not actually evolve, but character and story will always prevail. Twenty-three skiddoo.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 10, 01:58pm

  A friend of mine, sadly gone, was a philosopher of some note. He used to say: Where is the James Joyce of today? And I would think: Where was the James Joyce of 1921? Marginal, struggling to get by, making work because it seemed important, known within a small circle, not yet benefitting from the succes de scandal that followed from the obscenity trial to which Ulysses was subjected... Where for that matter was Duchamp? Playing chess in NYC...Duchamp wasn't the center of a view of history until subsequent art historians put him there. Joyce wasn't the center of literary modernism until a separate industry put him there. In neither case is this about the works themselves... One of the perverse functions of critics/academics is a wholesale rearrangement of the past---this is particularly true in the case of the construction of the modernist canon---what that sort of rearrangement is about at one level is: here are things I like. Those things are important because I like them. The other function they serve is: ultimately capitalism is rational. Even if almost no-one paid any attention to these people at the time, the stuff they left behind can be used for rearrangements. They may be dead, but at least we can get paid.

  If you go from "the zeitgeist" to fiction, then you'd think that older forms would be getting shaken by technological and ideological changes in the world...and to some extent they are...but the problem with zeitgeist thinking is that it leads you to expect a single reaction to a single What's Happening as if Reason really does animate History and those of us swimming about in its fishbowl just react to it. But this sort of thinking works better when people are all safely dead and the Historian can eliminate what gets in the way of Clarity, which is often (still) making of cultural forms symptoms of some deeper transformation that they know about. The Secret Meaning of Things.

  I gotta go.

• 
  John Riley

  Dec 10, 02:54pm

  The world of novelists and poets was so much smaller during most of the twentieth century. If you read something has recent as the Bishop-Lowell letters you realize what a small, insular crowd the major poets of mid-twentieth century poetry was. Earlier in the century Joyce could publish "Dubliners" and "Portrait" with a small press in Dublin and draw the attention of Pound in London and Harriet Weaver in the U.S. People really gave a damn that Joyce or Henry Miller may have written obscene books. Literature isn't the only thing that hasn't yet adjusted to bullet-pace change that speeds up every moment. The real danger is how far political systems and cultures are lagging behind--but that's for another board.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 03:06pm

  This just in from Talking Writing: (Emily Dickinson, Zombie)

  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/talkingwriting/afGZ/~3/HSdqtTz50CI/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 10, 03:11pm

  Matt R.,

  I'm not saying the length of the book is the issue, necessarily. But instead of spending chapters developing the characters and their internal struggles, readers are looking for conflict, adventure, resolution etc. all in the first chapter. And in every chapter after. The length of the novel is not as important as the delivery method.

• 
  David Ackley

  Dec 10, 03:38pm

  The novel exists and will survive because it is the best artistic aproximation of the experience of a life lived through time.

  Narrative is the form consciousness gives to our life to prove to ourselves we exist.

  "The bright book of life," Lawrence called the novel.

• 
  David Ackley

  Dec 10, 03:54pm

  It seems many of the great, revolutionary works of literature had to climb a wall of adverse criticism or outright dismissal in order to achieve their standing. This includes "Moby Dick," "Dubliners," "Ulysses," and a good many others. Stephen's anti-canonical claim that their standing is a result of a cabal of academics ignores the effect that such works have on the minds of the reader whose thinking and in some sense lives might have been changed by reading them. These are the advocates who elect them to the pantheon.

• 
  John Riley

  Dec 10, 04:11pm

  I think there is an over-emphasis, and in some instances hysteria, about how much new technologies, especially the net, will alter what art is. Two points: first, historically there is usually a process of accretion that occurs after disruptive changes, when new forms find a place beside older forms; second, the readership for fiction has always been self-selected and as the form has sub-divided into genres the readership has fragmented. I wonder if there has been a decrease in the number of readers of "literary fiction" and nonfiction since the advent of movies and television, or if the readership drop off has been centered in more popular fiction? The old pulp magazines were killed by television but does a television sit-com draw readers away from "Infinite Jest" or "Middlemarch?" Does Facebook or Twitter? Does on-line video art or even flash fiction? I've never seen numbers that sub-divide different readerships. Has anyone else?

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 04:14pm

  But...but, Adam, those internal dialogue struggles and foreshadowings can launch the story arc before Ishmael even climbs out of his rack, e.g. "OMG, what a fucking dream! This asshole crazy mutherfucking captain with the peg goddam leg and the malicious monstrous maneating mfing white goddam thing -- whale, whatever...a-and ME in the goddam unfuckingbelievable middle! I wanted to wake up to escape this [string of exceptionally redundant expletives mercifully deleted] deadly duo, but at the same time I didn't wanna wake up because I wanted to know how it would end, knowwhattamean?"

• 
  Jane Flett

  Dec 10, 04:53pm

  Matt makes all excellent points, as does John about literary versus pulp fiction.

  I don't think maintaining the idea of an abstract all-encompassing "reader" who is looking for certain qualities in a story is in any way helpful for a writer. Nor is the notion of "Generation Y" as post-literate irrelevancies. It's not even just that these ideas are false (although they are). It's also that if you're trying to write for a specific imaginary audience, or trying to write for commercial success in and of itself, you're already compromised from the start.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 10, 04:53pm

  My comment simply incorporated a sociological view of canon-formation. There's little in the way of elective affinity: works don't draw audiences if audiences don't know they exist.

  Once people know a work exists, then the question of what might draw them back to it comes up...but the matter of selection/legitimation etc. has to now happened elsewhere, involving quite different mechanisms and selection processes. Critics legitimate themselves by what they can point to; academic teaching is based on the making and repeating of lists; the canon is merely a list.

  Things get wonky when that list is mapped onto accounts of cultural production and legitimation. At this point, you might imagine that the 1913 NY Armory show (Nude Descending a Staircase arrives in the US) or the 1917 Society of Independent Artists show in Paris (the ready mades walk out into the world) representing world-historical turning points and that everyone was hip to this new avant-garde. But it wasn't like that, and never would occur to anyone to argue the contrary were these lists not mediating the construction of the past.

  BTW I have no particular commitment to not using the lists that way.

  One problem everyone who makes stuff runs into these days is the breakdown in older systems of intermediaries---you know those people who tell people what it is they like to like and the ways in which they like to like those things, that spare people the scary situation of having to confront something before which they do not quite know how to react---because what seems to me the main driver of reception (or lack of it) is this intermediary function---this because the central horror that folk apparently deal with on a continual basis is that of making a mistake, of fucking up.

  So say there are 100,000 self-published books and maybe a half dozen intermediary institutions none of which take self-published books seriously. What does that make of this zone of cultural production? A big pool. What does being in a big pool mean? Staying in the big pool. What stories do people like to tell themselves? That an elective affinity will draw Readers to their work as it sits in the big pool and that those readers will make Amazon or GoodReads reviews extolling the virtues and an escape will be had. Insofar as receptions are concerned, the main question (I think) is sociological then...networld brought with is a rapid decentralization of both cultural production (by making it easier to get stuff out into the world) and distribution---but along with that came a breakdown of the older intermediaries, which were predicated on a more centralized system. I don't lament that--I merely point it out.

  A second point: I actually agree with David's comment about the novel above, but see exactly that understanding as a main reason to fragment the form, do other things with it, take it apart, rethink it. Experience in a fading empire is a very strange thing. One of the main characteristics of fading empires, it seems, is the massive denial of fading empire. Of course this doesn't preclude making longer narratives about continuities of experience that are shaped by the various conventions of the genre you choose to work in--it merely suggests that they are not neutral, these genre forms. But the broader context that might enable one to make that argument for real is still in the making, somewhere in that giant pool of material that people make and push out into the networld and that no-one outside their families of social networks has the faintest idea exists.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 05:20pm

  A really catchy cover has helped some amoebae hop out of that pool, surveys have shown. Of course what's beyond the cover should deliver to some extent what the cover doth promise. Also of course, as Jane points out, should this be the route the author chooses, he or she is well advised to anticipate the niggling self-recriminations likely to accompany such compromise forevermore. As my dad used to put it, "You can cry on your way to the bank."

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 05:35pm

  There's something Ionescoan about this comment thread. Parallel conversations that never intersect, and yet participants in each can peek at the other without betraying so much as an eyebrow tic of interest.

• 
  Matthew Robinson

  Dec 10, 07:04pm

  Mathew, I love graphic novels, and comics in general, though my taste might be too specific to really relate to anyone else (I like the violent, over-the-top-strange shit: Young Liars, Stray Bullets, Preacher, Black Hole, etc...).

  Interesting blog/column thing related in general to this discussion:

  http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/2012/12/the-joy-of-burning-down-the-house

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 07:09pm

  Aren't they all like that, Matt?

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Dec 10, 08:10pm

  I agree with Jane. A novel is a wonderfully flexible, forgiving thing. It can be incredibly baroque, astonishingly spare, endlessly rambling or directed and pointed. There can be story or no story and a writer can even kill the main character in the middle of the story (Tale of Genji). There was even a trend recently of writing novels in verse. Anything goes. Its boundaries are limited only by the writer and or reader. As an aside, it's interesting that some of the most inventive English novels were written in the 18th century.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 11:03pm

  JA, I am trembling with perplexity here. A novel with no story? Gasp. I suspect what you mean is the story is so subtle or is in such a myriad of internal segments that its arc is not easily discernible. The clue that I am correct with this assertion would be that something causes the reader to continue turning the pages in sequence until the narrative concludes. Else the volume must be something other than a novel. A reader can follow in linear progression a collection of independent stories or poems, of course, but such most likely would be voluntary. If not, if the tug to follow the orchestration of words in sequence is akin to a hypnotic or otherwise compelling attraction without clear rational choice, I would concede that whatever is contained on those pages as a whole must by definition qualify as...drumroll...a novel. We're referring, of course, only to fiction.

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 10, 11:18pm

  matthew, she might be referring to my "novel"!!! i can't find the story anywhere within its boundaries!

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 10, 11:41pm

  A bunch of related narratives, then? Something must have guided you to put all of that fiction under one cover and call it a novel rather than a collection. Perhaps whatever guided you also guides the reader to follow the narrative. Maybe the real question we should be beating our synapses and syntaxes to answer is the definition of story?

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Dec 11, 01:55am

  Delete story; insert plot. End of story, end of trembling?

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 11, 03:04am

  Linear progression can built through any number of devices. It can be set into motion by establishing and varying of motifs. That lets you build sequences using the principles of counterpoint. The idea, I think, is to make it transparent enough that folk can enter the game, but have the sentences be cool enough that they'll keep going regardless. Eventually, they'll figure it out. Then they'll have to start over. But there's no down side to that. Make the narrative recursive at one level and the elements recursive at another. Thing is that you have to deliver--it's easy to make these things as formal games, but it's not enough. That's why allowing space for failure is key.

  It seems to me there is a game and the opening. From your first move you delimit the options. You get to move first because you make the sentences. You can take the game where-ever you like. It's good like that.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 03:26am

  What David Simon does with Treme. I get it. Lotsa stories in the gumbo. But it's the gumbo that keeps you coming back.

• 
  J.A. Pak

  Dec 11, 03:27am

  Does it have to be linear?

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 11, 04:03am

  Of course not.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Dec 11, 04:07am

  Except that one thing necessarily follows another. It's a constraint that's given with this whole writing thing. There are any number of ways to defeat that. But each is a strategy that comes with it's own assumptions and possibilities. I am interested in one set of options because the possibilities interest me--others can use different strategies to their own ends. The games are genre-constrained of course. What genre you choose is a matter of what moves you. Working in any genre requires alot of time, so---obviously---you have to be into it. Making anything is self-indulgent like that.

• 
  MichaelDickes

  Dec 11, 10:19am

  When well chosen words are arranged in a certain fashion, the length of any bit of writing is of no consequence to me. There is a lot of this presented on Fictionaut. There is a wealth of talent here. I find inspiration and am challenged to write better by some of the work here. Chris Okum's latest post (The Chair) is a fine example of this, in my opinion.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 11:35am

  To be a novel, from my point of view, it has to set up a linear perception in the reader, else one could dip in and out of the narrative at any point with no need for continuity. If a book is set up to allow for such random reading of its parts, it's no longer a novel. Use of flashbacks and flashforwards are nothing new, if that's what one means by "nonlinear", but such flourishes only work -- for me, of course, as I wouldn't dream of dictating my opinion as authority -- to enrich the story (forgive me) unfolding along the way.

• 
  Linda Simoni-Wastila

  Dec 11, 11:38am

  Poked into this thread and spent 30 minutes reading. Great, provocative stuff. I agree with Jane Flett about audience, although I presume once an author has emerged and grown a fan base, you have a built-in audience of sorts.

  What is a novel? As a writer, it is a project that continually kicks me in the teeth and in other body parts.

  But it's the best form to read, at least for me. Few micro/flash fictions and fewer poems really stay with me once read. But a novel well-written is an experience. Characters who stick with you, history made live, prose that sings.

  To write novels also is an experience, to so fully immerse yourself in a world you create. The intangibility of writing large works frustrates but also promises so much in terms of potential and tangents. Once written, a novel never leaves you, it becomes part of your psyche.

  I can't comment on the future of the novel other than to say as long as I am alive I shall both read and write them. But the idea of hybridizing shorts with novels is a current phenomenon. OLIVE KITTERIDGE, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN--all novels told in short stories. Each has this gorgeous, effective container that satisfies like a novel yet allows the reader to pause at short distances, reflect, and move on.

  Peace...

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 01:11pm

  I'm familiar only with "Olive Kitteridge", and I'm comfortable calling it a novel despite its form. I suppose the stories can be considered self-contained chapters, which a reader can select in no particular order without losing any sense of narrative sequence. Part of Strout's art is her choreography of the story order as well as how she presents the narrative within each story, to sustain context without redundancy. This technique can give the author a greater freedom to surprise while minimizing impressions of clumsy or confusing dei ex machina. The reader can hop around in the larger story (the overriding arc of the novel's featured lives), gathering hints from each of the self-contained stories of the developing larger picture.

  The only downside I see is to the author's revenue stream, as such an approach to the novel is apt to obviate the viability of sequels and prequels. I suppose a subsequent traditional novel treatment expanding one or more (all?) of the short stories is theoretically plausible, with only marketability and the author's imagination and love of the characters in question. Heavenly intervention at some point might be worth petitioning.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 01:46pm

  It occurs to me mentioning an author's commercial concerns is unseemly to some, yet I believe consideration of filthy lucre can fit critically in the overall creative equation. Recall Dostoevsky's dire fiscal crisis, which "inspired" him to write The Gambler within a two-month window in order to meet a contracted deadline. Missing this drop-dead date would have had devastating consequences on his future earnings. He met the challenge, and with a novel of enviable literary durability.

• 
  Adam Sifre

  Dec 11, 02:21pm

  I believe that I am a fair representation of today's reader.

  Never mind about novels. I find that most of these blog posts take too long to get to the heart of what the writer is saying.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 03:50pm

  Oh, c'mon, Adam. We scriveners enjoy flinging our words. And, furthermore...etc. etc.

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 11, 03:59pm

  plotless in gaza...

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 06:09pm

  James, for the record, I'm not inclined to confuse "plot" with "story", considering the difference can be vast vis a vis structure, e.g. sequential delineations. Not sure what the hell I'm talking about, but it seems to make sense in a gestalt sort of way, if you catcha my drift.

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 11, 06:17pm

  i gotcha. there's a story in the offing, but the plot that goes with it is a loose confederation of events.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 06:26pm

  Sounds like the kind of story that flatters, tugs at and gives free rein to the reader's imagination, encouraging it to play with plot without the slightest guarantee of authorly interference or concurrence. Being a passive reader, I ordinarily hate that approach myself.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 11, 06:36pm

  I guess it was a silly question. I really wanted to know, because even though I write them, I can't really define them.

  Thanks for the response.

  I don't believe they're dead. Or that they will die off any time soon. But I can't say why. Only that I like them.

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 11, 06:36pm

  yes, that's probably why the agents hate it!

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Dec 11, 06:44pm

  Agents hate all writers except those who smell like money.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 11, 08:09pm

  Money is the key word.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkRIbUT6u7Q

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 11, 09:38pm

  i must bathe in dollar bills then.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Dec 11, 10:33pm

  In "On becoming a Novelist" the late John Gardner defines the novel as a text that creates a "vivid and continous dream" for the reader. He says further:

  "We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open the book and dream that dream again."

  I like this definition. For me it's a beacon that spreads a sure dinger of light across a sea to be navigated with nothing but a pen and some paper in hand. It doesn't hurt that Gardner was a fantastic novelist himself.

  Enjoying this discussion. I am out of words of my own just for the moment. Hiding in the word shadows. Sitting on my own hands while clapping national anthems of forgotten countries. Must be the carrot Stephen talked about. Or those damned dollar bills James brought up.

• 
  James Claffey

  Dec 12, 01:03am

  reading marcus' last entry i was reminded of this from today: http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/21099/engineering-impossible-architectures.html#.UMe5NXD1hSA.facebook

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  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 12, 01:21am

  "...those damned dollar bills..."

  Yo, Marcus.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 12, 01:25am

  ...loved that John Gardner quote. Thanks, something to grin about for a bit. Not 'cause it's funny, but for the reason it makes it seem so much less fruitless.

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