Forum / Paragraph About Writing
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Ramon CollinsMar 10, 11:17pmIn "How Literature Saved My Life," David Shields paraphrases Kurt Vonnegut: contemporary writers who leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorian writers misrepresented life by leaving out sex. Shields also quotes Elif Batuman: "A lot of the writers I know are incredibly good email writers. I often find their emails more compelling than the things they're writing at the time."
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T.R. WolfeMar 11, 03:37pmCompletely agree. Humans have had a relationship with technology since the beginning.
In an odd twist, I've recently begun reading steampunk fiction, which has an interesting and beautiful take on technology.
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James Lloyd DavisMar 11, 06:36pmThat's an interesting, though frightening thought... that humanity is slowly, inevitably weaning itself away from the beauty, the anarchy, and the terror of the natural world.
It explains a lot if you take the thought down the road... for one thing? Like how meaningless, emotionless abstraction and utter fascination with fascination becomes more the norm in fiction, with zombies and vampires, games for life-life for games... archery sets and sorcerers with glasses on brooms, yo?
Give me real pain, real pulse... Thank God for country music and the liberating pain of tornadoes, hurricanes, mortality, passion and war... love et al.
Just kidding. Sort of... maybe.
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Marcus SpehMar 12, 08:12pmIn a writing group I was in a while back, we would meet, chat and then spend the evening writing flashes whichwe'd read to each other and critique on the fly. Once, a young writer who might have been driven by Vonnegut's devils, challenged us to incorporate technology in our stories for that day. We groaned but we did it. Interestingly, the technology, though it was noticeable in all stories I remember, easily took a back seat. Contrary to what I had expected: I feared it would take over. I learnt something about strong storytelling that day (all group members were strong story tellers; their e-mail writing on the other hand, sucked) and I somehwat lost my own fear of mentioning technology in non sci-fi stories. I still feel reluctant to engage with it because I do feel, rightly or wrongly, that too often it acts as a placeholder for more traditional narrative elements, which means the story is weaker as a story.
he story I wrote then was later published (as part of a threesome) in Wilderness House Review. See if you can even spot the technology in this flash...http://bit.ly/Spiderportal
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Frankie SaxxMar 12, 08:57pm
I have been reading weird young adult books lately. I find they are much more likely to mention technology. It doesn't overwhelm the stories; it's like cars and electric lamps, just part of the character's normal, every day world to text on their mobile.
I don't think this necessarily means that the natural world takes second place. Books, like films and TV, are attractive partly because the characters are out doing things and experiencing things, not working nine to five, then sitting on the couch and watching TV and playing video games and surfing the net until it's time to go to bed so they can get up and do it all over again.
I think it's a bigger concern with technology that it will date a book, and quickly. I'm noticing it now in movies from the 90s. Should scrounge up some books from the late twentieth century and see if it's the same.
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Matthew RobinsonMar 12, 09:26pmI think the idea behind the idea here is to eliminate anything that will constrain your writing, that will make it unnatural in voice terms. In other words, it seems mostly a cosmetic type of thing. Unless technology is paramount to your story, it may serve as a bump in the road to smooth, cohesive narrative. For instance, if your characters are exchanging text messages rather than speaking directly, how you format that dialogue (normally, or with linebreaks and a different font?) can be the difference b/w a smooth read and an awkward one.
In terms of human nature, many of us are growing more dependent on technology in myriad ways. I carry a very tiny, very very powerful computer in my pocket at all times (iPhone) and frequently refer to it for bus schedules, note taking (sorry, all the tiny notepads in my desk with the first few pages written on), and whether or not my girlfriend wants teriyaki for dinner, and, lately, to play a video game in which the purpose is to evolve a disease to eradicate the human race (one of the more amusing ways I choose I waste my time). I'm trying to leave the phone at home when I go out to socialize, and find it increasingly difficult to do so. I grow more driven by distraction by the day, and I know I'm not alone. There's something to be said for that, but how to do so, exactly, without inhibiting that very thing? How to convey it in an engaging, meaningful way without simply mimicking it? Maybe that's why Vonnegut said just skip it, just another distraction.
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Ramon CollinsMar 12, 11:45pm
Wow! There's a lot of Food For Thought in this thread; thanks for participating.
I've never owned a cell-phone and only talked to the damned invasion of privacy once. Never play video-games and haven't watched prime-time TV (except for PBS) since getting NetFlix over two years ago. Refuse to watch porn 'til it's transmitted in 3-D with little red/green cardboard glasses. I'm a dinosaur.
I think everything written has to have some element of fiction (especially autobiographies), except technological training manuals. When I read a fiction story, or see a film, my reaction is; Did the writer or director convince me the story really happened?
I have a deep-seated fear that technology will start breeding and make human beings expendable: "Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards." -- Aldous Huxley
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Matthew RobinsonMar 13, 01:39am
Or maybe it's the opposite of what I said. Appears I misread that first post entirely...
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 04:34amI've been writing about nukes lately. It's hard to find a balance between the art and the technology so it's not a news article. I'm working on it because I think it's a huge sword dangling over all our lives. Global warming, too. I agree with Vonnegut.
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Marcus SpehMar 13, 08:28am
@Matt if you skip it you're still paying attention to it. I agree with you that there's a life altering quality to electronic consumer technology in particular that is quite unparalleled in history...at least with regard to its global touch and culture-unifying quality and the pervasiveness for our communication. Invention of the letter, the phone...were the other big things on that scale, which pulled people in because they made them active (rather than passive) consumers. I like your formula "How to convey it in an engaging, meaningful way without simply mimicking it?" - I think your story-studded statement achieved exactly that.
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Marcus SpehMar 13, 08:53am
@gloria nukes and global warming...as someone who spent his childhood in the shadow of the iron curtain and its imminent threat of nuclear extinction, I resonate with the need to grasp these dangers...but I'm also now much more aware of the mythological properties of these things: they're placeholders, too, not just a bundle of scientific or military facts. To write about them as if they weren't (like journalists do) is missing an important point.
This reminds me of the feud between H G Wells, the very political writer of action-driven grand human designs (and also consummate storyteller) and Henry James, who consciously stayed away from any contemporary dialogue, political crisis or technological excitement (of which there were many in his day, his grownup life having unfolded between the Civil War and WW I) and was heavily critisized by Wells for that. Interestingly not by G B Shaw, a writer no less political than Wells (rather more so). Shaw saw more clearly, I speculate, that the deepest commentary on humanity is not to be had by commenting on the action of man but by exploring character and setting characters against one another. To complete this quartet, Another thinker and writer comes to mind, Bertrand Russell, who went yet another path by writing his most influential English non-fiction series specifically targeting topics of the day: modern marriage, religion, philosophy, history...when all these things still meant something, before the great wars and the Holocaust melded them into one thing that's very hard to describe and do justice to.
Four radically different (European) approaches to the Vonnegut problem. If I had the time and nerve I'd like to write an essay or a book on these Victorian characters who have influenced my thinking greatly.
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Marcus SpehMar 13, 09:39am
...one might also add that Victorian writers may have represented Victorian life much more by leaving out sex than if they had included it.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 10:15am
I totally agree nukes should not be written about as journalists, who don't write much about them anyway, and that the mythology is huge and I am struggling awkwardly with that as a writer.
And then, related in politics as mythology, there is George Orwell who wrote in his essay "Why I Write":
And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.Wonderful essay.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 10:19am
Orwell also emphasizes not writing about politics as a journalist.
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 01:24pm
"That's an interesting, though frightening thought... that humanity is slowly, inevitably weaning itself away from the beauty, the anarchy, and the terror of the natural world."
James, it's interesting that you say that. It seems obvious on the face of it, living a life that goes couch to car to cubicle.
But I wonder, is it really so?
In some ways, I think the reliance on technology brings the beauty and the anarchy and the terror into sharp relief. Especially when the technology that we rely on to feel safe fails us.
And technology opens up new access to the natural world--without technology, there are no man versus nature stories set on Mars.
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James Lloyd DavisMar 13, 01:47pm
Actually, fear of technology is another one of those end-of-the-known-world-as-we-know-it intimations for literature.
Content for fiction will always contain that which excites and gives hope to the galley slaves trapped by cubicles, cars and couches. It's the human spirit, which never really surrenders hope and loves to dream beyond the scope of its reality.
Technology hasn't diminished everyone, but has even enhanced the horizon of experiential possibility... consider extreme sports... bungee experiments, people in glider suits, plunging headlong down the face of rocky cliffs, skydiving from space...
Genre novels have not diminished, but continue to thrive while literary novels decline... not because people have changed, but because literary novels have changed, moving away from the vicarious life and death thrill in content.
It's all about content. An MFA will get you a crafty sentence structure, but it will never trump life and true experiential knowledge of life's razor edges for content.
I would be willing to say that while people love pretty sentences and sensitive observations, but action, passion, and meaningful situations keep us plugged in. What is fiction if not an exploration of what we dream, what we fear? It's no coincidence that art becomes life eventually, fiction becomes reality, since whatever we can dream, we can accomplish. It's not prophecy, but possibility.
I ran off the track, but there it is...
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 02:21pm
I don't think you went off the track, James.
I wonder if there is a tendency to absent technology from our work because, like the Victorians and sex, we're conflicted about it. We both desire it and fear it.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 02:31pm
But what is fiction without conflict?
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James Lloyd DavisMar 13, 02:45pm
Technology is only white noise, background stuff... human emotion can play out its drama in any venue. Use it, don't use it. Matters not. In the end, it's the story that counts, not the scenery (unless you make the scenery the story... which is another omelet altogether and probably the stuff of avante-garde, which is only palatable in small doses without consistent application of chemically altered sensibilities and perspectives [but I digress]).
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James Lloyd DavisMar 13, 02:56pm
Whether or not your characters use a rotary dial phone with a receiver that could be used as a defensive weapon for its heft... or a cell phone... or one of those Igadgets about which I know nothing... conversation is still dialogue and subsequently human. Content doesn't change much, only the colloquialisms and the style... A Bogart type in a grey fedora might say, "Say, doll..." A Ryan Gosling type with a two day manicured stubble and a black tee might say, "Hey, girl..." But the meaning's pretty much the same.
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 04:06pm
"Technology is only white noise, background stuff... human emotion can play out its drama in any venue. Use it, don't use it. Matters not. In the end, it's the story that counts"
I guess, like most things, it depends on the story. Sometimes it is background noise, sometimes it is just scene dressing. And sometimes it's more--how to use it, how not to use it, how it will save us, how it will destroy us, are all a constant thread in dialogs happening around the world. Gloria's nukes, clean energy, file sharing and encryption, stem cell research, missions to Mars...
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 05:37pm
Writing about politics and technology greatly overlap and both seem avoided and taboo.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 05:38pm
Technology has been relegated to Science Fiction.
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 07:27pm
There's a robot that vacuums my house. I live in science fiction.
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Marcus SpehMar 13, 08:46pm
The general, abstract conflict we feel about technology may be interesting for non-fiction writers, but to turn a solid pot of fiction from the clay of life, someone, a fictional character needs to be conflicted about technology, the use, the lack or the price of it, etc. and the conflict felt by this character must affect relationships with other people and cast a scenic shadow which makes us dream. At a deeper level touching values that are bigger than anyone, the stuff of love, life, death and evil. The conflict itself, the relationship, the reader's trance and the values are all totally untouched by any specific technology. Technology and other contemporary predilections are mere vessels that can be, and have been, swapped for others in the past. That's why technology, I believe, just like particular sexual practices, attitudes or habits, culturally defined forms of sexuality or technology (or religion, to name another contentious topic, or gender politics etc) are dispensable when writing quality fiction. When they're given too much weight, they distract from (at best), or destroy the fictional dream (at worst). I exempt genre and hack writing because obviously they follow different laws...
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 08:54pm
But really, as Frankie points out, just like a cigar is sometimes a cigar, sometimes a roomba is just a roomba. It's just an object that moves and characters all have differing emotional relationships with objects, as do we.
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James Lloyd DavisMar 13, 08:59pm
On the other hand, Vonnegut wrote a marvelous and believable castigation of technology as villain in Player Piano.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 09:14pm
Times do change. And not all technology is equivalent.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 09:18pm
We're all having this conversation on "technology."
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 09:20pm
And Vonnegut could sell anyone the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 09:46pm
Finally, Player Piano was science fiction in every sense and opens up the can of worms of what science fiction has to say about technology, which is a lot.
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 10:17pm
Player Piano... next on my list. I've been having a Vonnegut phase. I just finished Mother Night and Slaughterhouse V.
Didn't technology (or science, I guess) bring about the apocalypse in Cat's Cradle, in the form of Ice-Nine, too? I haven't reread that one yet.
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DolemiteMar 13, 10:22pm -
Frankie SaxxMar 13, 10:22pm
If it helps, I'm conflicted about the Roomba. They can't be allowed to roam without supervision or they run over cat puke & get it everywhere, which is more work to clean up (& out of a Roomba) than just manually vacuuming & seeing the cat puke & cleaning it up would've been.
But.
Vacuum robot!
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 10:35pm
Maybe in the future your phone will vaccuum too. It's just stupid.
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Gloria GarfunkelMar 13, 10:40pm
Sir Crisp: VERY high tech
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Frankie SaxxMar 13, 10:50pm
Love that video, Crispy Crime Dawg. Love.
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Frankie SaxxMar 15, 04:15pm
This washed past in the stream of my Tumblr today and I thought of you, James Lloyd Davis.
Let Us Be Men
For God’s sake, let us be men
not monkeys minding machines
or sitting with our tails curled
while the machine amuses us,
the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.
—D. H. Lawrence
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James Lloyd DavisMar 15, 05:29pm
Mr. Lawrence! Sir, please step away from the player piano!
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