authors getting away with it
Mar. 14th, 2013 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAn incidental remark I made during my presentation on The Hobbit at the Valparaiso Tolkien conference got more attention in audience comments afterwards than anything else I said.
I was making a point about the actual beginning of the story - By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous ... - and noted that this comes only after two pages worth of expository explanation introducing hobbits in general and Bilbo in particular, and I casually interjected that no author would be able to get away with that today.
What did I mean by that? What I meant is that, despite their long and honorable history, expository introductions seemed to be shunned in contemporary fiction. Stories have to begin with something happening, under some delusion that this is the only way to pull readers in. Tell that to the author who began his book, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," or even more to the author who began his book, "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" - directing you to read some other book first, yet! But that's what authors are told now: you have to grab the reader at the first sentence.
The problem is that authors who follow this advice grab the reader in a vacuum. Because it's all action and no exposition, you don't know who you're looking at, where they are, what's going on. You have to struggle to pick that up as you go along. And, to assist you in that struggle, and since exposition is in fact necessary, it has to be salted in, and that's another problem: usually it's salted in by characters giving little expository speeches to each other so that the reader can overhear them. Even from skilled authors, this is awkward and clumsy. (I once wrote of my irritation with Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the entire plot of which is driven by what Lyra happens to overhear on various occasions.)
And the third problem is that this is all written in a cinematic manner. This is vexing. Movies don't always avoid written expositions: George Lucas popularized expository paragraphs floating through space to begin his unquestionably successful movies. Defenders of movie desecrations of the books they're based on are fond of saying, "Movies are different from books," as if the particular differences in question needed no justification. Well, if movies are different from books, then why can't books be different from movies? But they aren't.
My latest attempt to read a recent fantasy novel was Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, and I single this one out because Powers is a skilled author who's given me great reading experiences before. But this one was too much.
The opening sentence of the novel is, "The felt-padded base of the ivory bishop thumped faintly on the marble chessboard." When I read that sentence, I see a screenplay. "FADE IN. CLOSE-UP: ivory chess bishop thumping faintly as it is placed on a chess square." You don't know who's playing chess or where they are or anything except the date, 1845, on the previous section-title page (title card on the movie screen). In succeeding paragraphs, the camera pulls back, and you see the players, an old man and a girl. It's a movie, not a novel: you still don't know who they are, or their relationship. The old man is described: his face "was in shadow ... and all she could see under the visor of his black cap was the gleam of his thick spectacles."
This is cinematic description again. You are looking at him from the camera POV of the girl, but not through her eyes, because, as you soon afterwards learn, the man is her father and she knows him well. Only a stranger, or a movie camera, would be concentrating on the shadowing of his features; someone who knew those features would not.
Conveniently, the two enter into a conversation about the man's past and the girl's absent mother - conveniently for the reader, who can get the necessary exposition by overhearing them. Well, all right, they might have such a conversation at some point, and that's why the author picked this particular moment to introduce them. But then the old man delivers himself of this exclamation about his wife: "Poor Frances Polidori! Working for wages in strangers' houses now! It was a bad day for her when she became Frances Rossetti, married to this half-blind wretch who earns nothing anymore."
Who would speak of his wife to their daughter in this distant and formal manner? Even the most skilled author can't disguise the fact that he says her names so that the reader can overhear him and learn what they are. By this time, you should be gathering that the protagonists are historical figures, Gabriele and Christina Rossetti, but what an unearthly clumsy way of showing it. If Tim Powers can't do better than this, I thought, I am not sufficiently interested in the remaining 506 pages.
I pointed this out at our book discussion meeting, and the response was mulish. "Oh, so we're just talking about the prologue now, are we?" said one, as if the prologue weren't as legitimate a part of the book as any other, and more important than some, as it's where the reader is introduced to the characters and lured into the story. "It's a stylistic choice," snapped another, as if that somehow excused it from criticism, as if everything in a novel isn't a stylistic choice, as if expressing our personal responses to these stylistic choices weren't the whole purpose of a book discussion meeting, as if we hadn't been expressing those personal responses for an hour of discussion already. As if stylistic choices weren't the way we judge books, and weren't the essence of literary value.
If you want to know why I get grumpy about literature, look to the books.
I was making a point about the actual beginning of the story - By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous ... - and noted that this comes only after two pages worth of expository explanation introducing hobbits in general and Bilbo in particular, and I casually interjected that no author would be able to get away with that today.
What did I mean by that? What I meant is that, despite their long and honorable history, expository introductions seemed to be shunned in contemporary fiction. Stories have to begin with something happening, under some delusion that this is the only way to pull readers in. Tell that to the author who began his book, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," or even more to the author who began his book, "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" - directing you to read some other book first, yet! But that's what authors are told now: you have to grab the reader at the first sentence.
The problem is that authors who follow this advice grab the reader in a vacuum. Because it's all action and no exposition, you don't know who you're looking at, where they are, what's going on. You have to struggle to pick that up as you go along. And, to assist you in that struggle, and since exposition is in fact necessary, it has to be salted in, and that's another problem: usually it's salted in by characters giving little expository speeches to each other so that the reader can overhear them. Even from skilled authors, this is awkward and clumsy. (I once wrote of my irritation with Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, the entire plot of which is driven by what Lyra happens to overhear on various occasions.)
And the third problem is that this is all written in a cinematic manner. This is vexing. Movies don't always avoid written expositions: George Lucas popularized expository paragraphs floating through space to begin his unquestionably successful movies. Defenders of movie desecrations of the books they're based on are fond of saying, "Movies are different from books," as if the particular differences in question needed no justification. Well, if movies are different from books, then why can't books be different from movies? But they aren't.
My latest attempt to read a recent fantasy novel was Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, and I single this one out because Powers is a skilled author who's given me great reading experiences before. But this one was too much.
The opening sentence of the novel is, "The felt-padded base of the ivory bishop thumped faintly on the marble chessboard." When I read that sentence, I see a screenplay. "FADE IN. CLOSE-UP: ivory chess bishop thumping faintly as it is placed on a chess square." You don't know who's playing chess or where they are or anything except the date, 1845, on the previous section-title page (title card on the movie screen). In succeeding paragraphs, the camera pulls back, and you see the players, an old man and a girl. It's a movie, not a novel: you still don't know who they are, or their relationship. The old man is described: his face "was in shadow ... and all she could see under the visor of his black cap was the gleam of his thick spectacles."
This is cinematic description again. You are looking at him from the camera POV of the girl, but not through her eyes, because, as you soon afterwards learn, the man is her father and she knows him well. Only a stranger, or a movie camera, would be concentrating on the shadowing of his features; someone who knew those features would not.
Conveniently, the two enter into a conversation about the man's past and the girl's absent mother - conveniently for the reader, who can get the necessary exposition by overhearing them. Well, all right, they might have such a conversation at some point, and that's why the author picked this particular moment to introduce them. But then the old man delivers himself of this exclamation about his wife: "Poor Frances Polidori! Working for wages in strangers' houses now! It was a bad day for her when she became Frances Rossetti, married to this half-blind wretch who earns nothing anymore."
Who would speak of his wife to their daughter in this distant and formal manner? Even the most skilled author can't disguise the fact that he says her names so that the reader can overhear him and learn what they are. By this time, you should be gathering that the protagonists are historical figures, Gabriele and Christina Rossetti, but what an unearthly clumsy way of showing it. If Tim Powers can't do better than this, I thought, I am not sufficiently interested in the remaining 506 pages.
I pointed this out at our book discussion meeting, and the response was mulish. "Oh, so we're just talking about the prologue now, are we?" said one, as if the prologue weren't as legitimate a part of the book as any other, and more important than some, as it's where the reader is introduced to the characters and lured into the story. "It's a stylistic choice," snapped another, as if that somehow excused it from criticism, as if everything in a novel isn't a stylistic choice, as if expressing our personal responses to these stylistic choices weren't the whole purpose of a book discussion meeting, as if we hadn't been expressing those personal responses for an hour of discussion already. As if stylistic choices weren't the way we judge books, and weren't the essence of literary value.
If you want to know why I get grumpy about literature, look to the books.
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no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 05:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 09:03 am (UTC)I've a lot of sympathy with the latter two points - and the Tim Powers example does look very unfortunate. On the other hand, just because Tolstoy and Twain can write a gripping expository introduction doesn't mean that everyone can, any more than Tim Powers's clumsiness means that all stories that begin in media res contain similar clumsinesses.
Writing a novel, like all complicated engineering problems, is a continual trade-off between different desirable things. Pullman, for example, really does gain something by beginning his book with Lyra hiding in the wardrobe (and I don't mean just the "homage" to Lewis), in provoking the reader to figure out which aspects of the situation are familiar and which don't belong to our world - a task he further complicates by setting the scene in a place that most readers won't have personal experience of, and which is notorious for its arcane and idiosyncratic customs - namely, the inner sanctum of an Oxford college. One might see this as needlessly confusing, but I find it stimulating - and I'm not, as you perhaps know, an unbridled Pullman fan. It's true Lyra overhears a lot, but that isn't all due to narrative technique: some of it is the result of her being a child, and not the kind of person to whom adults would normally confide secret affairs of Church and State. And she is, of course, established as the kind of person who will sneak in to hear things she didn't ought to, right there on the first page.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 11:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:00 pm (UTC)Tolstoy?
I emphatically disagree about Pullman. First and least importantly, though Pullman's opening leaves many essential matters undescribed (what a daemon is, for instance), it's much less vague about where you are and who is there than many such openings; it's not purely cinematic writing. More importantly, I dispute that the "Lyra hides and overhears" technique is at all necessary to produce the desirable effects you describe, in leaving the reader to figure out what is like our world and what is not. (Leaving totally aside the fact that, when the reader does figure it out, it reveals a world that has all the detailed scene-painting of our world, but is otherwise a crude cardboard cutout, a most disagreeable combination.) But most importantly, the real problem lies in the expository lumpiness of the conversation that Lyra overhears. It leaves the indelible impression that the manner of the conversation (the way in which the speakers talk of their subject) and its presence at that particular place and time have been arranged for the sole purpose that Lyra may overhear it, an impression frequently repeated throughout the book whenever Lyra overhears something, most glaringly in the climactic confrontation between Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, which reaches the absurd. The impression is further reinforced by the fact that it's Lyra's discovery of things that everybody else already knows which drive not just her actions, but the entirety of the plot. Everything shifts into a different gear, for instance, after Lyra learns that Lord Asriel is her father, even though all that's changed is that now Lyra knows it.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:15 pm (UTC)I'm certainly not going to defend everything in Pullman's book. I agree the novel's worldbuilding as a whole is uneven (arguably also inconsistent). Exposition at moments of crisis always looks especially clunky - this was one of my few criticisms of Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass - and is no less so when indulged in by Asriel and Coulter. But the opening works, for me: it establishes a good deal about Lyra's character; it sets the reader an interesting puzzle regarding the world they're in; it has tension (will she be discovered? Will Asriel drink the poisoned wine?); and the occasion of Asriel's reporting back to the college is one when an infodump is narratively plausible. Overall, I think that couple of chapters gets the balance about right - for my taste, at any rate.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 11:20 am (UTC)I think there's an actual problem that people are trying to solve in a simplistic way -- like a lot of writing advice. I don't think it's always a problem of "make it like a movie", though when people say that you ought to be able to "see" everything and never mention other senses I do think that's a movie issue. The actual problem is to do with reader investment. The reader needs to care, and that's a genuine issue. But what people are being told to do to ensure that is -- well, it's appealing to some imagined reader who isn't me, who cares about bullets whizzing over the heads of strangers.
When you start reading something, it could go anywhere, but you don't care yet. You have to care, and the beginning has to make you care, and there are a whole pile of ways of doing that. And talking about this sounds really cynical and manipulative, which might be why people put this advice about starting with a bang instead of talking about address.
Actually it's quite interesting to think of books where I'm not part of the implicit "you" being addressed that fail to be interesting to me. Nothing is for everyone.
(I've started books with philosophical reflections, I've started them with dialogue, I've started them with world intros...)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:29 pm (UTC)Certainly a bullets-flying action scene would have been worse, especially if it served only as a crust introducing calmer waters. One could see the movie Memento (in which the hero at times finds himself, for instance, running down the street with bullets flying after him, with no idea who he's running from or why) as a parody of this sort of thing.
Forgetting to make the reader care is a common problem of expository introductions, and if those were common, with the attendant flaws, I'd be complaining about those instead. I'm an equal-opportunity grump. It does occur a lot in summaries of stories, which often begin with explaining the background that the author carefully stitched together over the course of the story. Any summary of The Sandman that begins "There are nine siblings called the Endless" (a fact that the reader doesn't learn until volume 4) or any retelling of The Lord of the Rings that begins by recounting the back-history of the Ring instead of introducing you to Frodo and then letting Gandalf tell him about it (one P. Jackson does this) suffers from this problem.
The cinematic nature of Powers', and many many other lesser writers', writing comes less in the "seeing" per se than in the limitations, particularly on seeing. If the author imagines the reader as physically present at the scene of the action, the then the description will include not just the other senses - in this case, is the room musty, perhaps? Is it warm or cold? That sort of thing - but also a full visual sense of the environs. If a seeing person (and I bet maybe even a blind person) is in a room, you have an immediate and full sense of the size of the room, who and what is in it, the entirety of your surroundings. Powers doesn't do that. All that the first sentence shows is the one chess piece, and the square it's being put on, not even the rest of the board, let alone the players, let alone the room they're in. That's not a novel letting the reader be there. That's a movie director putting the camera's tight focus on the chess piece, not letting the viewer see anything else. That's a cinematic technique, not a novelistic technique.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 12:31 pm (UTC)There are so many things that sift readers; what writers talk about is general patterns, though they can often formulate them as rules. Everybody likes to feel a sense of authority.
Tim Powers' example seems unfortunate, but what of the words around the incident, are they enough to draw in the reader? (Haven't read the book yet, so I don't know if they'll draw me in.)
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-17 02:06 pm (UTC)The identity of the narrator is supposedly a secret. Might it be you,