The Stuff Stories Are Made Of, Part 1

When I decided to be an English major, one of the things I remember being disappointed by was when I learned that literary criticism didn't really concern itself with matters of what was good and bad. It was concerned with meaning. There would not really be an attempt to reason with what stories—novels or short stories—were good or bad. That was just subjective. And in the one and only creative writing class I took, we were told, when critiquing each others stories, not to suggest plot points to each other. Just tips on writing. There was one quite good reason for this, which is that if you told someone what should happen in a story, it stopped being their story, and started being your story. But on the other hand, often what was wrong with the stories was that the stories were just bad stories. Uninteresting. I didn't care what happened to the characters. By saying that the we couldn't critique the events in the story, the class was effectively saying, there are no bad stories, just badly told stories.

But I think there are such things as bad stories, and good stories, separate from the how they're conveyed to their audience. You can have a well made movie or a well written book, and they can still have good moments, well-cut action sequences or beautifully florid passages of description, but they still won't add up to much and most people won't enjoy seeing them or reading them.

So what makes for a good story? What elements make for stories that people want to read/watch? There are elements that people say they read things for, or go to movies, that are not related to form. Good characters. Lots of people talk about how important characters are. Or suspense. People read to see what happens next. Or conflict. Conflict is really important. Most plots center around some central conflict. People read on to see the conflict resolved. Mystery. Maybe there isn't some tension are work in the story any more—the killer has already killed, or something—but people want to know what actually happened. They want the unknown revealed. Little moments. Some stories ain't even all that great, but there are some moments in it that are really good. Little moments of quiet sadness, or uproarious comedy, or touching kindness, or shocking cruelty. Many comedies are comprised of really pointless plots that are just excuses to string along a series of funny bits on (Monty Python and the Holy Grail jumps to mind as a masterpiece of this format). And of course, in the big stories, they want some commentary, or insight, on the human condition, or life and the universe or something. In order for a story to be great, it usually needs to knock us around a bit and leave us thinking big thoughts.

But what makes these things interesting and meaningful. What makes for good characters? What makes something suspenseful? What makes us want to see a conflict concluded, or find out what we didn't know? What makes those little moments special? What makes comedy funny and tragedy cathartic. What makes a story great?

So this is what I thought about.

And the answer, I decided, is irony.

Now, when I say irony, I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. I don't mean it the way people mean it when they talk about people being ironic, or how they meant it when, after 9/11, everyone was talking about the Death of Irony. Usually when people use it in that sense they just mean either verbal irony, or base sarcasm, or something in between. And this misuse has lead to a lot of blather about how no one really knows what irony really means.

That's nonsense. Irony is a very simple concept; all it is the going against of expectations. And what stories need to be interesting is irony. In fact, I think you could say that stories are built out of ironies. Big ironies and little ironies.

Why irony? Well, any good story has to fulfill two somewhat contradictory things. They need to 1) justify why the story is unique enough to be told and 2) be relatable to the rest of human experience.

No one wants to hear a story where nothing interesting happens, like the last time you went grocery shopping. Nor do they want to hear a long string of pointlessly absurd events that have no relation or meaning to each other. Now, you could create art out of such situations. You could write a good poem about going to the supermarket, and the average episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus is basically an series of absurd and unrelated events. But that doesn't mean your poem about going to the supermarket is a good story, and no episode of Flying Circus has anything like a continuous plot (with the possible exception of the one about Scott of the Antarctic, but I think that one just has one really long sketch in it).

An ironic situation manages to fulfill both qualities. In fact, irony is inherent in the fulfillment of both qualities. Any ironic situation is more unique than most situations, since it goes against what is expected—that is, what usually happens. And of course, an implicit aspect of any ironic situation is that, though it goes against expectations, it's rooted in some logic, some sense that what doesn't seem to make sense actually does. Thus it's relatable. If the situation doesn't make sense, then it's just absurd, and absurdity isn't really interesting or relatable. (Although absurdities can be used quite well as a set up for ironies. They heighten the relevant factors by stripping out other, complicating factors, that would undermine the situation. Beckett and Python do this a lot.)

So in any ironic situation there is a kind of return. Let's call it the Ironic Return. The Return is the way in which the ironic moment offers some insight into the world, and thus makes some comment upon it.

More later.

Forms of Narrative

I have been thinking, off and on today, about the various forms of writing in narrative fiction, and have some preliminary thoughts.

The latest book I have been reading, The Belgariad by David Eddings, seems to be written in a form that I would call straight narrative. For it is basically a straightforward description of events placed in chronological order. The depiction of the internal thoughts of characters is kept to a minimum, usually only used to explain why a particular character acted in a certain way.

Most fiction is probably written in this manner. It's the standard approach of paperback airport novels. The Harry Potter books certainly are, and I think you can throw Dickens in there too. Probably Jane Austen too. You can certainly produce great works of literature in this style, but it's also exceedingly hard. There isn't really any room for flights of fancy or lyricism. You are fairly constrained to the description of events as they occur. As a result most straight narrative, and by extension most novels, tend to read kind of dryly, at least compared to poetry and most other forms of novel writing.

Stream of consciousness is not so much a form independant as a form that gets grafted onto other forms, but it's important enough in itself. The depiction of the pathway of the thoughts of of one or more characters. Joyce mixes straight narrative with stream of consciousness in many of the earlier sections of Ulysses. The last section, the Molly Bloom one, is probably the purest example of the form imaginable. Updike used it a lot, I think. It is probably easiest to contruct an entire narrative in this fashion when using 1st person narration. Probably easier to write a more "literary" work in this fashion.

Then there is what I would call distorted narrative, more a number of approaches than a single technique. This is when the story is told within a certain frame, or narrative technique, or the authors freely uses poetical devices that distort or control the narrative that results. Many of the later chapters of Ulysses use this. The hospital section, which events are passed through the prism of diction presenting the evolution of English; the penultimate section, set up as a catechism. Finnegans Wake is all distorted—so distorted it might actaully cease to be narrative—through a haze of dream language and reasoning. I think this form pops up most in Modernism. Brecht's Epic Theatre is probably related to such experiments. Pale Fire definately qualifies.

Then there is what I would call fractured narrative. Stuff like Gravity's Rainbow. It's when the narrative is deliberately obscurred and strambled. Events are depicted out of order, or are left out. It often overlaps heavily with distorted narrative. Often poetic or lyrical techniques are used, details accumulate and shove aside the passage of events. Important items are related offhandedly, far froom thier necessary context. It's basically the house writing style of post-modernism. Try to obfuscate the point that you are telling a story. Often, reading such stuff feels more like an exercise in technique than storytelling, and can often be used to hide the writers inabilty to tell an actual story.