A Kernel on How Not to Let Plot Pressure Get to Your Writing
and what makes fiction worthwhile (part 1)
I’ve long felt a dissonance between what I’m told is needed from plot and perspective in modern literature and what I want from these two elements. Recently, you could say I had an epiphany about the reason for this dissonance, although that word is somehow too clean and organized for what happened to me. And the source of this dissonance has a lot to do with what makes great literature great literature.
Problem 1: Plot
Life can seem so linear, and yet the novel form has the ability to transcend this structure or illusion. Something from five years ago can affect me today. I believe a linear life is an unexamined life. Thinking critically in the present about things that occurred in the past—or simply having abstract thought unrelated to a point in time—is enough to throw linear reality out the window. Thoughts as conveyed in novels break the linear trap.
The emphasis on plot in modern day novels—plot as necessitated by a physical placement in time and space—has been influenced by movies and visual arts. I love story, in all its forms, but I believe this emphasis on plot has come from our screened existence, and I reject it in my writing. Please note, I take no issue with a good plot in whatever art form, but I also think it's increasingly fair to resist its imposition in literature.
In a short story I am writing there's a scene wherein a girl tells a friend about the way she views the world. Immediately the criticism I received was that this wasn’t grounded enough. I get this critique not infrequently, so I firmly planted them in bathroom stalls and made it the second scene, after a very visual opening scene involving a description of a peach. The next round of criticism was that the truth one character was saying to another was too much exposition, too slow, too much up front. Did the reader really need all this information? It wasn’t in-scene. The peach though, the peach was great. Everyone who reads the story loves the peach. I can honestly tell you, the more people love the peach, the less I want to hear about this peach. The peach was the most arbitrary part of the whole story.
It is as if people want literature to read like film. It’s a different medium, with different strengths. I’ve gotten to the point where I think that if a book would make for the worst movie, then it is a great book. A Writers on Writing discussion panel with Joshua Cohen, Junot Díaz, and Tommy Orange has shaped my thinking on this. Cohen observed that contemporary readers often complain novels are too slow when they aren't visually driven. He also notes readers’ obsession with wanting to know where a character's voice is coming from, whether it’s identity or place. "But where is Proust during all of Proust," Cohen said. "Above us, all around us."
The claim is that we've become televisual, and I agree. But literature is weak at what visual mediums do so beautifully. So what is the particular beauty of writing? What are the strengths to fiction that our plotty counterparts are not so good at?
The beauty of writing isn’t in our ability to describe surroundings and in grounding, it’s the opposite, it’s in the inner voice. Like Junot Díaz says in the same panel, “The voice broken free is of great interest to me, and film and movies can’t capture that.” Tommy Orange agrees that teachers of fiction will ask you to describe where you are in time and space and that it can sacrifice voice. So I’m trying to read and write literature that models consciousness, as Cohen puts it, more than it models plot. In my writing I’m hoping to infuse voice and thought like the introspective Jon Fosse in Septology or Marcel Proust in Swann’s Way. While televisual novels like Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel of mystery, or Horse by Geraldine Brooks, a novel of historical fiction, that stay in-scene are successful in their aim and loved by many, they don’t quite capture the interior complexity that I’m striving for.
Literature that models consciousness, as Cohen defines it, “is constantly circling over and over the same ground in order to tread deeper and deeper in, and when we lose that circularity of thought, which most people at this point find annoying…you lose that picture of consciousness… When they lose [this] they lose a lot of the empathy that develops through reading, they can’t recognize another mind; they merely recognize another story vying for their attention, and so it’s easier to reject a story as opposed to rejecting a mind.”
The challenge to me is clear, like it is to Cohen, “It becomes more difficult especially under the reign of the screen and the computer to get away from our eye and the way things look on the page and to trust our ear.” We forget that, as he says, “the voice is the mouth and the ear and not the hand and the eye.”
Let me know of some non-plotty books and in the meantime I'm going to continue exploring writing that does not rely on the visual.
My kernel of advice: Be willing to forgo the pervasive opinion on plot.
My issues with the discourse around perspective will be addressed in my next Kernel installment.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
“So Late in the Day” is one of Natalia’s all time favorite short stories, and she enjoyed its pairing with two other great stories in the book by the same name, which she read this week. How these three unrelated stories were paired together by what corrupts what could be between women and men was adept and provided a good point of comparison for Natalia’s novel-in-progress. She also had a meeting with an agent as part of the Tin House Winter Workshop to review her query letter this week. It gave her insight into the questions she still needs to respond to in her novel.
This week, Neidy finished reading Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties. She was very happy to find that it lived up to all its hype. Machado masterfully grounds fantastic elements in real-world situations. Neidy also applied to two workshops and tied up her work obligations in anticipation of her travel to AWP!
Sarah’s MFA classes started back up this week, and she plunged into heavy readings/film screenings for a literature course on Southern Environmental writing, which included Deliverance and Beasts of the Southern Wild. She’s also taking workshops this term in fiction and creative non-fiction and is a teaching assistant for a class on Literature of the Future(s). Still, she managed to spend some mornings writing her novel, applying to summer workshops, and preparing for her first AWP!
Shelby assembled three bookcases this week, and, even with the additional space, her books don’t all fit. While organizing books onto the shelves, one in particular called out to her: Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger. Originally, Shelby thought it’d land in the donation pile, but she instead started reading it and doesn’t know what to make of the story yet.