By Mark 2 Comments
Approximately twenty years ago a female author published a novel that began something like this (paraphrasing):
“In the idealized image of mapmakers, New Jersey is always pink.”
Do you know the title of the book or the name of the author? Do you know someone who might know? Would you ask them?
Because I can’t remember and it’s really, really irritating me.
— Mark Barrett
A few weeks ago I entered a short essay contest at Backword Books. The Grand Prize was a copy of all eight works on the site. Second prize was a single book to each of eight second-place winners, and the contest rules asked each entrant to include mention of which individual book they might like to receive with their entry.
The book I chose, and the book I won with this entry, was Waiting for Spring by R. J. Keller.
How did I choose which book I was interested in winning? Well, a combination of factors. I read all the summaries, so content was probably the most important filter. Then there was subject matter: I like Maine, and I thought it would be interesting to read something by someone from Maine. Third, the cover interested me, because I like snow and cold. The more snow in my world the better, and if you want to drop -50° F on top of the white stuff, I’m down with that. So barren trees tends in a field of white tends to draw me in. [ Read more ]
Two well-thought-out posts from Eli James at Novelr on the formatting of online fiction. Part 1 here, from August; Part 2 here, two days ago.
As noted previously, character blogs in particular and online fiction in general haven’t taken off as I would have thought they might, given that the internet is itself seems a viable new medium. The points Eli raises clearly speak to part of the problem, and I hope to contribute to this issue as well in the near future.
— Mark Barrett
By winnowing the literature of anthropology, Donald E Brown collected a list of some 200 ‘human universals’. Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” includes an alphabetical version of the full list, but I think trying to re-sort it in ‘evolutionary’ order should be more instructive:
…
environment, adjustments to
binary cognitive distinctions
pain
likes and dislikes
food preferences
making comparisons
The list goes on like that for hundreds of lines, and on that point alone it deserves notice. But consider the implications here for creators.
If you’re telling a story, any mix of these traits would allow you to develop a convincing society. If you’re working in interactive, figuring out which of these traits you can simulate would give you a subset of useful traits, and a logical way to create machine-controlled races/species.
Too cool.
— Mark Barrett
Wrapping up Theme Week here on Ditchwalk I want to shine a little light on the dark side of theme. The problem, as we’ve discovered, is that theme in any instance can never truly be known except by the person who originally employed it, and in some instances not even then.
Because of our innate human tendency to create narratives out of any and all events, we tend to believe we can determine a person’s motivations by looking at the choices they make. This leads to the unsupported conclusion that mucking around in a literary work will tell us something about the person who wrote it, and why they wrote it.
In those instances where we admit uncertainty we still assume that people understand their own motivations, but even this is not necessarily true. Think of an erratic act or crime, and a fair portion of the unease you feel will be attributable not to the act itself, but to your inability to make sense of what happened, or the even-more-frightening thought that the person who acted has no idea why they did what they did. Human beings do not like things that do not make sense, at times to such an extent that a theoretical answer (even a wrong one) is better than no answer at all.
As we’ve seen this week, theme is really only useful when it’s employed during the creative process. As an analytical tool it is terrible, and does considerable damage to students who are forced to use it. But even if we posit a master storyteller using theme to maximum artistic benefit, and even if that author reliably expresses the theme employed and the way in which it was used to shape the resulting work, we have no way to say for certain that the author’s testimony is factually true and complete.
I’m not saying the author would be lying, and I’m not advocating that we dismiss what authors tell us about their choices. I’m simply making the point that it would be difficult for a writer to fully and exhaustively document the causal connections that led them to make any one thematic decision, let alone a novel’s worth. [ Read more ]
On Monday I introduced you to Thomas McCormack and his devastating critique of the way theme is taught. On Tuesday I talked about how emphasizing theme and ‘important’ literary works actually discourages some (if not many) students from reading and learning. A helpful reader provided more ammunition in the comments.
The consistent theme in these arguments is that theme should not be deployed as an analytical tool. Readers, students and teachers have more insightful measures by which to judge literature and writing — a sampling of which awaits you in the conclusion of Mr. McCormack’s document. Too, at the highest levels of academia criticism is always in flux, meaning determinations of theme are not simply potentially speculative but inherently transitory.
In short, using theme to reveal meaning in a story is like using divining rods to discover water underground. Many people swear by it, but it has no basis in fact. Theme as a creative technique, however, can be a powerful means of organizing and expressing ideas. By understanding theme in this context we not only learn how to use it appropriately, but also gain insight into why theme is poorly taught, and how theme can be so easily turned to nefarious purposes. (A subject I’ll tackle tomorrow.) [ Read more ]
By Mark 4 Comments
Yesterday I posted an important excerpt from Thomas McCormack’s book, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist. In the excerpt, Mr. McCormack dismantled the way theme is commonly taught in schools and colleges, and I urged readers to forward his essay to others so that we might collectively stop this abuse.
Today I’m going to explain why this is not simply a goofy idea but actually important. By which I of course mean that it involves making money.
If you remember my post referencing the 90-9-1 Principle, you’ll recall that 90% of the people interested in anything are passive about their interest. They want to watch movies, not make them. They want to watch cooking shows, not cook anything. They want to read books, not write them.
In the publishing business, this 90% is variously known as The Audience or Our Customers. Yes, writers read other writers’ books, and editors read books other than the one’s they’re editing. But when it comes to the people who buy and read books and generally provide the medium with a return on investment, that’s the 90% who are not interested in writing books or even in analyzing books. They just want to read.
So it stands to reason that booksellers and book writers would want as many such readers as they can get, and they would want those readers predisposed to enjoy the process of reading, as opposed to, say, hating it. Which is why the way theme is often taught to students is a serious question, and one that deserves addressing. [ Read more ]
By Mark 2 Comments
You were right not to trust theme. You knew it in your gut, but you couldn’t prove it.
Today I am going to give you the proof. If you are liberated by it, as I was when I first came across it two decades ago, I ask you to join me in putting a stop to this fraud. I did not have the internet available to me then but I do now. And I have the generous permission of the author to spread this dismantling of theme far and wide.
Thomas McCormack is a playwright. He is also the former CEO of St. Martin’s Press — a position he rose to in little more than a decade after entering the publishing industry as an editor. While at St. Martin’s Mr. McCormack wrote a book titled The Fiction Editor, drawing on his long experience in that capacity. Composed of an essay and supporting chapters, The Fiction Editor addressed storytelling not from the point of view of criticism or marketing, but solely as craft.
Included in the book (later revised in a second edition and reissued as The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist), was a chapter called Axing Theme. Which did exactly that:
Let’s start calmly: Each appearance of the word ‘theme’ in a literature appreciation textbook should be marked with that yellow crime-scene tape. Samples of the way ‘theme’ is taught should be sent to Atlanta so the Centers for Disease Control can get on it.
Is your heart leaping? Is your mind saying, “Yes!” If so, read on:
I seriously pursue this crusade here, albeit in condensed, almost outline, form, because I believe that what’s being done in classrooms stunts, and even kills, the ability and appetite of many of the best students. This deprives our globe of much talent that would otherwise find itself in writing, teaching, reading . . . and editing.
My relief at being liberated from theme by Mr. McCormack has never left me. As a writer and storyteller it is one of the most important events in the development of my craft. After searching in vain recently for the text of Axing Theme, I changed keywords and sought out Mr. McCormack himself. Finding him on his playwriting website I wrote to ask if I might post the contents of Axing Theme in order to further his crusade.
His response was immediate and unequivocal:
I have no objection to your posting the piece wherever you will — the primary motivation behind my writing that book was not to get rich but to promulgate some helpful things I’d learned in many years of association with storytelling.
The version Mr. McCormack sent me is from the Second Edition. It was retitled as ‘Theme’ and Its Dire Effects, but it is still the weighty axe I remember, honed to a razor’s edge and swung with might.
When you have finished reading it, if you agree it is the proof you always sought, I would like to enlist you. Please take a moment, today — right now — to forward a link to this post, a link to Mr. McCormack’s doc, or both, to anyone who is:
I mean this assault to be viral. I want every student and teacher on planet Earth to get this document. Enough is enough.
— Mark Barrett
By Mark 4 Comments
Aspiring to Art
The question of reviewing fiction is a complicated one, in part because of the complexity of the task, and in part because the task is often supplanted by the blood sport of judging merit as opposed to execution. In my own life as a writer and storyteller I wrestled with these issues at a relatively young age (in college), while coming to terms with how I might be able to judge my own work in-process and upon completion. This need was precipitated by the realization that it was frighteningly easy (here you should see white knuckles crushing the armrests of a wildly-buffeting airliner) to lose one’s way while working on a story.
An obvious and eternal reference point for any storyteller is the beacon of art. To write for art, to aspire to art, and someday to become art is a road rutted with famous followers. Like many (if not most) storytellers, I would like my work — at least my non-commercial work, but maybe even that as well — to be accepted and seen as art.
But therein lies the flaw. To write for art is to grant others the right to determine the merit of your work at a moment in time, which exposes you to the fads of that moment. Even the most delinquent student of history quickly learns that artistic movements come and go like fashion lines, and that the arbiters of such movements often have more interest in their own personal, social and business agendas than in the value, merit or accomplishment of the works on display. [ Read more ]
By Mark 9 Comments
A couple of weeks ago, in a post touching on the question of reviews, I said this:
Turning a static review into a debate strikes me as a good thing, particularly as regards putting the reviewer on notice that they will also have to defend the merits of their words.
Today, Self-Publishing Review provides us a perfect illustration of the benefits and pitfalls of this kind of conversation in the review of Nathan Charlton’s Terra Nova: The Search, by Levi Montgomery.
I will not directly address the story, which I haven’t read, or the review, which I cannot judge because I haven’t read the story. In this case, the reviewer looked unfavorably on the author’s work. But in responding to the review, the author uncovered the fact that the reviewer had failed to read the entire story:
I’m actually curious if you read the whole thing, because everything you mentioned happens in the first 50 pages (and most of it in the first 30).
The reviewer’s defense of this novel approach to reviewing was weak:
I actually read the Prologue and Part One, which would be something over seventy pages, and I neither stated not implied otherwise.
Which prompted the site’s editor, Henry Baum, to weigh in:
I didn’t know Levi Montgomery hadn’t read the whole book. And didn’t assume I had to include the criteria – “in order to review the book you have to read it.”
That it did not occur to the reviewer that he was both required by ethics to read the entire work, or at the very least disclose that he had not read the entire work, seriously undermines his credibility in every other regard. Charlton’s book may be just as Montgomery describes. But having deceived the reader with a lie of omission, and having defended that lie of omission by blaming the victims (readers) for assuming that Montgomery was required to read the entire work before shooting it full of indignant holes, is probably not the right way to go about establishing your credentials as a reviewer.
If the internet is about trust, and in particular about building trust with individual readers, then that cuts both ways. It’s not only the case that authors have a test to meet, but reviewers as well, and in both instances I think readers profit by this kind of interaction. Even if the conversation devolves, as it did in this case, more information is better. Precisely because this existed we now know more about Nathan Charlton and Levi Montgomery and Henry Baum, and we can use that information to make more informed decisions about our content choices.
— Mark Barrett
