Tag Archives: Writing
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The Author/Text/Reader Relationship

By on Tuesday, August 24, 2010

In the first semester of my freshman year I was enrolled in ENG 112 “Critical Approaches to Literature” a class which was designed to be the foundation of the literature major at Geneva College (and was also required of writing majors). In the class we explored different schools of criticism (and had to write papers attempting to use some of them). We started with a whirlwind historical survey that covered the great thinkers on literature and then we launched into the real study of the theories of Literary Criticism we would have to imitate: New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and the various forms of “Special Interest Criticism” (Marxist, Feminist, Cultural and Gender Studies). This class was my first C partially because of an ideological struggle that I had with the theories and my timidity at going beyond mere description of what the texts plainly said (after all, I was a freshman and these were great writers like Nathanial Hawthorne and Walt Whitman). I got over the timidity after this class, realizing that I would have to make assertions (no matter how ridiculous or obvious to me) and ‘back them up’ with textual support (however tenuous) to get good grades (and none of my professors ever called me on BS).

For those of you who don’t know what these theories of criticsim are I will give you a brief summary (albeit filtered through my own perceptions). New Criticism seeks to explore the form divorced from context and the author, looking at nothing other than the work in question and the techniques it employs, seeking to divine truth from the form of the work. Structuralism is an application (I struggled really hard not to add ‘mis-‘ to the beginning of ‘application there, but managed not to. And then negated that success by writing this parenthetical, ah well) of Sassure’s linguistic theory that words are merely signs of what is signified and treats the text as an encoded artifact to which the reader applies binary oppositions that create the meaning for the reader (such as Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Man/Woman) again, it is focused on the form (though in this case of meaning) and what the reader gets out of the text. Deconstruction takes structuralism and tries to show that the opposite of any binary pairing is equally valid (so Truth=Lies, Hate=Love and Evil=Good). And the Special Interest Criticisms try to show how various groups are repressed through the work. None of these systems of understanding literature (or any form of art) care about the author and all try to impose their own ideas onto the text.

In my notes I have sketches of the author-text-reader triangle for each of these forms (the triangle is just a way of visualizing how these views relate the different elements, drawn as a triangle with the privileged party at the top) they all have the reader or the text at the top. For New Criticism the triangle has the Text at the top and in my notes I have written in big ostentations script the words “The Text Knows More Than Its Creator” and across the page in distinction I have the triangle as I used to see it with the Author on the top and the words “The Author Owns Your Mind” and in smaller print “and the text”. At the time I was struggling to understand the relationship between the artist and the reader and the art. As a creator and someone who has always had great respect for the creator of works (and as a Christian who believes in an absolute creator) I found it difficult accept that the author had no role other than as a vehicle of blind production of platforms for the exposition of other people’s ideas. The author could not be ignored. At the time I may have over-reacted and gone too far in de-emphasizing the role the reader plays in the creative act.

Since that class, which opened my mind to the world of literary criticism and the intellectual reader-games that the elite play with texts, I have come to what I think is a somewhat more mature understanding of how art works. The author creates the text, which is infused with the way that he thinks and views the world, the text then takes that view to the reader who then interprets the text in light of his own view of the world. This is inherent in the way our minds work. And it is a beautiful, interactive (almost collaborative) process that mirrors the absolute work of art that is God’s creation: God created and we are right now engaging with and interpreting his work in a cycle of incomplete understanding until the day all truth will be revealed. I think that it is the duty of the intelligent truth-seeker to use the text to get at the truth of what the author was trying to say. But I also think that it is the duty of the reader to seek out the truth in any text even when the author was aiming at lies, and that there will, by the grace of God, be truth hidden in any creative work beyond what the author intended. So nowadays I draw the triangle as a straight line with the text between the author and the reader (with God at the top), or I flip it so that the text is on the bottom and both the author and the reader are on top–and then I remove the line between author and reader.

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Reflections on Narrative Voice (Or Making the Best of What You’ve Got)

By on Wednesday, August 18, 2010

During my senior year of college (first semester, so about a year ago) I took a class on Narrative Voice and Character, it was an interesting class to say the least–made somewhat more so because the professor had never taught a creative writing class before and was still caught up in Bahktinian dialogics as the only framework for writing novels. The class itself focused much on how to write a novel, since those are the largest pieces of narrative and tend to have a lot of character. For this class we used a little out-of-print book titled “Thirteen Types of Narrative” (and somewhat dubiously subtitled “A practical guide on how to tell a story”) This book starts with an outline of a “situation to be made the basis of a series of exercises in narrative method, each demonstrating a different technique.” Okay, I can understand that particular way to teach narrative technique, show people how to tell the same story different ways. What really ended up bothering me about this book was the amount of information we were given in the “situation” I didn’t have enough information to make the characters based on the outline alone (without making stuff up) and I was given too much information to make them MY characters. We were told that the scene revolves around an American soldier named Peter Ellison (all of which is completely irrelevant to the scene–other than the American part) and that he is in England (stationed on duty) and has gone up a cathedral tower to take some pictures (for his uncle who used to live in the village and gave Peter the camera) we are given a detailed synopsis of the weather before we get to the important fact that he encounters a fat man (who thankfully does not have a name) who is distressed and intends to commit suicide. We are told quite frequently throughout the outline what Peter is thinking and feeling and (as you probably could have guessed) in the end Peter drops his camera over the edge of the cathedral tower with an attached note and tries to stall the fat guy until help arrives. The outline ends with help arriving.

The book then continues in 14 chapters (one for each ‘type’ of narrative and one conclusion) in which is gives a description of each type along with examples from literature and the authors own envisioning of the initial situation. For class we were tasked with writing journal entries which included writing segments or whole portions of the outline in draft form in various narrative forms from different perspectives.

The Thirteen Types of Narrative according to the book are, 1. Third Person Past 2. Third Person Present 3. First Person Past (As If Spoken) 4. First Person Past (As If Written) 5. First Person Past (Spoken) In Third or First Person Framework 6. All Dialogue 7. In the Form of a Play 8. Catechetical 9. Epistolary 10. In the Form of a Diary (how this is different then First Person Past (As If Written) I’m not sure. 11. Documentary 12. Stream of Consciousness and 13. Series of First Person Narratives in Third Person Framework.

While I still think it is generally rather silly to try and focus in on a single element like Narrative Voice, and I had a strong problem with the way that the outline was set up the class was rather useful to me. First, I originally went into the class thinking that a story could only have one narrative form that would work for it, but quickly realized that this was not strictly true. A story told in a different way is a different story. Choosing narrative framework and viewpoint are highly important to the overall shape and meaning of the story. So now I like to explore other possible viewpoints on stories that I am writing just to see what they could have to say. The other thing I learned is how to force myself to write within someone else’s framework. . . and how to make my own freedoms. In one entry I managed to have the fat man succeed in committing suicide (because the outline only ever said that help arrives, it does not necessitate, though much of the book assumes, that the help be effective. I also wrote Peter as a secretly arrogant jerk who is only seems to be the noble hero that the outline forced him to be. I learned how to have fun within constraints (which interestingly enough helped me later to write my resume.) I also was forced to write a whole lot of stuff in a relatively short period of time.

I still hated that stupid outlined situation. And that book.

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Thoughts On Christianity in Fiction

By on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Yesterday I was reading Smoke and Mirrors a collection of “Short Fictions and Illusions” by Neil Gaiman and I came across a story titled “One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock” which is in Gaiman’s words from the prologue of the collection:

“a story about a boy a lot like I was once and his relationship with fiction.”

The story centers around the character, a twelve year old boy named Richard and his obsession with the Elric of Melnibone stories by Michael Moorcock, which I admittedly know next to nothing about, save that they were pulp Sword and Sorcery stories from the ’60s and ’70s. But this quote about the philosophy of writing, particularly as it referenced C. S. Lewis really caught my attention.

“Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret) his belief in Narnia. From the age of six–for half his life–he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon. . .

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him (. . .) Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.”

I remembered a quote I read in my last semester at Geneva College during my philosophy class about C.S. Lewis. In his essay “Christianity and Culture” Lewis attempts to come to a logical reason why it is acceptable if not necessary and good for a Christians such as himself to engage in creating culture (which in his context means writing stories and essays). He comes to an argument that states that he can, and even goes so far as to say that having some Christians among the ranks of those producing ‘culture’ (as he discusses the issue in the essay) is necessary and good. As part of his discussion he says that:

“In order to avoid misunderstanding, I must add that when I speak of ‘resisting the abuse of culture’ I do not mean that a Christian should take money for supplying one thing (culture) and use the opportunity thus gained to supply a quite different thing (homiletics and apologetics). That is stealing. The mere presence of Christians in the ranks of the culture-sellers will inevitably provide an antidote.”

I agree whole-heartedly with this statement. And it is one of the reasons that I generally frown on what I see as the tendency of fantasy authors who are Christians to both merely target a Christian audience and insist on following in Lewis’s steps by writing allegories of Christ’s death in fantasy. Mind you, since they are setting out to sell, as Lewis says “homiletics and apologetics” they are not necessarily “stealing”, but are they accomplishing as much as they could? I would say no. They certainly are not accomplishing what Lewis saw as good about Christian culture creators.

Lewis was not trying to defraud his readers or slip anything by them. But it could easily be claimed that that was his goal as Gaiman points out. Lewis’s use of strong allegorical elements in the Narnia books is an interesting balance. The Narnia books live on today in part because of these elements and the way that Christian readers have latched onto them, but at the same time they turn some people away. They are what they are because and in spite of the allegorical elements. When I started reading the Narnia books I felt in some ways that the allegorical elements were like a secret code, you could love the books if you weren’t a Christian, but if you were you felt a special connection to them because they were about more, and they were saying something to you that others might not get.

I am a Christian, I tell stories. My goal is not to hide my Christianity, nor is it to preach it through my stories. But I think that Christian art should be so much more than allegory (which the Narnia books were but everyone seems to forget because of the allegorical elements). A story written by a Christian cannot help but be Christian as it is reflecting a Christian perspective on the world and therefore allegory is not a necessary (and even possibly in this day and age a not particularly helpful tool). God created so much more of creation than just the culminating moment of catholic redemption that is Jesus’s death on the cross, he created all of creation and the whole scope of history, writing about any aspect of that can be glorifying to God. Christian art is about where the attribution lies, not the subject matter.

That said. There will always be something beneath the surface of a story. It is in the nature of fiction.

Anyway. This post is probably somewhat disjointed and I feel like it might be trying to say two different things at the same time. Which means that it is about on par with some of my hastily written papers for college. But I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out on paper. I do not claim to have proved anything or accomplished anything really useful in this post. Other than to quote some cool people.

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Thoughts on Characterization

By on Tuesday, August 17, 2010

I know that this is the first time that I have used this site for anything other than posting portions of stories. But I originally intended it to be a much more comprehensive collection of my thoughts and ideas when I started it. I had a thought about how I tend to write characters and started to squeeze it into a facebook status, but it was not to be contained in such an abbreviated format. So here are my current thoughts on character, with some behind the scenes information about Without a Name (which hopefully you can expect more of soon).

Character has always been something of a struggle for me, whether I am trying to tell a story or play a role-playing game. One of the problems is inherent in the way that I write (or play) much of the time. I don’t do a lot of preparation and tend to just jump in where I see the action happening and explore what happens as it ‘happens’ on page (or in game). Which tends to work out pretty well for me as I think faster than I write and can usually keep ahead of myself and that helps to maintain my energy level and interest in what I am writing and I am constantly surprising myself with little gems of information. But it means that I don’t always (read almost never) come up with backstory for my characters unless the character actively ends up exploring their own past. This means my characters are often without a proper framework through which to explore the world save for my own experiences and gut instincts as to how ‘they’ would act.

I often find that it is difficult to flesh out my characters history when I try and so I tend to focus on the character at the moment, attitudes and opinions divorced from past experience. (How important can the details of an unremarkable past really be–I say tongue-in-cheek.) However, as a result my characters are all filtered through my own experiences without a lens of their own to help me focus them, this often leads to my characters feeling very similar even if they have different roles and attitudes. (Mind you, usually they won’t all act the same though they did in one of the stories I wrote, Wingless, because all the characters were, before the story began, essentially boring teenagers in a generally normal world that I didn’t care about and still don’t really know how to deal with.) On top of that my characters all apparently tend to sound like me. (Or so I have been told, I have trouble seeing this particular problem because I’m perfectly comfortable with my idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and word choice and so they don’t register as out of the ordinary to me.)

I have recently been working on Wingless but the lack of characterization kept showing up in problems with the dialog and with the very structure of the plot. So I have set that aside until I can figure out what to do about it. But it got me thinking about my other stories and I evaluated Without a Name with that in mind. And I think I avoided much of problem that has made Wingless so difficult for me.

For Without a Name I came up with a situation for the main character before I came up with anything else. Which is somewhat unusual, but I think that it was very useful to me as I have been writing it. I had this image of a young girl covered in dirt and sitting under a table in a nicely furnished house where everyone pretended she wasn’t there. I knew that this girl was somehow very powerful, so I jotted down a quick scene where a man was tasked with finding this important girl named Underfoot, this later became the prologue. And when I was searching for something to write about in the last two weeks of NaNoWriMo 2008 I found that scene and remembered the image and it exploded into this story. Underfoot channels and amplifies all of my insecurity and reliance on other people, but she has her own reasons and experiences for me to draw on and I hope that makes her at least somewhat relateable as a character.

The other problem that I have with character voice through dialog are compounded by the fact that the majority of the draft that has been posted here so far was written in the course of one week. But this problem is much easier to overcome than actual lack of character and I hope to solve that in later drafts by taking more care with my word choice in dialog and developing more voices.

I hope that this piece has at least been interesting. I must say that I had forgotten how much I rely on parentheticals when I am writing without turning on my ‘formal’ academic style. (Mind you I have lots of parentheticals even then, they are just usually switched to comma parenthesis rather than full parenthesis.)

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