Meander, Spiral, Explode

 
Meander, Spiral, Explode
Design and Pattern in Narrative
by Jane Alison

Catapult

2019

 

 

Meander, Spiral, Explode is an examination of the techniques for pacing fiction, and a call to other authors to write narratives that fall outside the traditional rising action / climax / resolution format.

 
Alison based her list of narrative structures on Peter Stevens' book Patterns in Nature, which identifies recurring shapes that arise from organic growth. For each structure, she identifies several existing works that she thinks exemplify the technique. A few of her examples are works I'm familiar with from the creative writing classes I took as an undergrad, and at least one I've read on my own.

 
In terms of pacing, Alison notes that the text can have a 'gap' when we leap over a certain span of time with no narration, 'summary' that moves very quickly over events, 'scenes' that take place in something like real time, 'dilation' where the narrative slows down, and 'pauses' where the text continues even as the plot has stopped. She notes that varying the pace is an important form of authorial control over the way the story is told, and mention Tobias Wolff's short story "Bullet in the Brain" as an example of writing that really shows off these different speeds.

 
The 'wave' structure of a story is the familiar dramatic arc - the rise / crescendo / collapse. 

 
'Wavelets' occur when a narrative vacillates back and forth between two themes, perhaps eventually having one win out over the other, or perhaps concluding with the tension or indecision intact. 

 
'Meanders' often tell a simple story, but pile digression on top of digression to slow the pace and reach the conclusion only indirectly. 

 
'Spirals' employ ordered repetition to show change happening within a routine.

 
'Explosions' contain some key event that everything else flies away from or orbits around. The key events is sometimes too powerful to show directly, or sometimes can only appear at the end. Alison didn't mention them, but I thought of the two key deaths in The Time Traveler's Wife as both behaving this way, as well as Snowden's secret in Catch 22.

 
When the elements of a narrative are ordered spatially, rather than over time, we can think of the story as forming 'cells' and the reader as creating a 'network' of connecting lines in their heads as they read. Alison spends a lot of time talking about WB Sebald's The Emigrants here, because it was the book that inspired her to think about non-arc narrative structures. I think her better example though is Susan Minot's short story "Lust," which is a non-chronological list of sexual encounters that moves from mostly ones that make her happy to mostly ones that leave her unfulfilled. Alison doesn't discuss it, but Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is famously 'spatial' in the way she means it, and his book Mr Palomar is an even better example of how you can still get movement via theme instead of plot, as the vignettes move from the physical to the spiritual.

 
Alison's last structure is the 'tsunami,' which she describes as a wave made of cells. Her one example is David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. If I were her, I would have moved her discussion of "Lust" to this section, because I think her point about thematic movement makes more sense here, while in truly 'cellular' stories, the sense of change comes primarily from the reader's accumulated knowledge rather than from any change in the content.

 

One kind of story structure I've thought about before is one I call, in my own head, the science fictional story structure (SFnal structure, for short.) I imagine it looking like ever expanding ripples in a pond, which I suppose would make it a variation on Alison's explosion structure. 

 

The SFnal structure takes advantage of the existence of certain rules about how the fictional world works, and explores the implications of those rules, often moving from the smallest to the largest. In particular, I think this structure can be playful, by looking for anything that's vague or inconsistent in the simplest statement of the rules, and wiggling a curious finger into those cracks to try to pry them open. 

 

The way that the first season of Person of Interest keeps looking for all the possible ways the investigators could be misled by the single clue their computer gives them is an example of the SFnal structure, I think, as is the surprising reversal at the end of the film Colossal.

The Subplot

 
The Subplot
What China is Reading and Why It Matters
by Megan Walsh

Columbia Global Reports
2022
 

 

The Subplot is a very recent review of fiction written by mainland Chinese authors and read primarily by Chinese audiences. This is a short work, a little over 100 pages, and each chapter covers a different popular genre. Regardless of genre, authors who publish in China are required to treat certain topics as off-limits, and cannot openly disagree with the government's official position on others. Part of the creativity of Chinese literature is trying to write around what's not allowed to be said.

 
Walsh explains her project by noting that Western audiences are usually most interested in books that have been banned outright by the CCP, often by authors living in exile. Meanwhile, in China, fiction accounts for a much smaller proportion of book sales than in the West, and fiction writers have come under renewed scrutiny and censorship after a period of relative openness in the 2000s and 2010s, in the time of Covid and President Xi's increasing authoritarianism.

 
Books by authors who grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and have experienced the rapid change of capitalism, tend to be the most overtly political, and the best known to Western audiences. Authors like Mo Yan and Lan Yianke write historical fiction that incorporates as much criticism of past governments as the censors will allow.

 
Authors who grew up in the first generation to be raised under capitalism (people my age) write about urban life and its amenities, and the pursuit of love and sex, unimaginable under Mao. These writers are often criticized for being vapid, or not sufficiently critical or political. Rural migrants in this age group, who moved to the cities for work, but lack the rights of people born in the city, have a thriving poetry scene that describes the harsh conditions of their lives.

 
Online fiction, roughly equivalent to American fanfic, is extremely popular. The two most common plots are about young men who repeatedly 'level up' in business, defeating foe after foe, until they attain super powers, and eventually godhood, and about young women competing to become the love interest of someone like that. These stories tend to be very, VERY long, some the equivalent of millions of printed pages. Online writers on platforms like Chinese Literature hope to gain enough readers to quit their low-paying day jobs, and dream of maybe scoring an anime adaptation. This genre has been the subject of a recent crackdown, directed by Xi, that's left many writers locked out of their own stories.

 
China also has a print-only underground comics scene that remains offline to try to avoid censorship. Books by non-Han ethnic minorities are subject to much more intense government scrutiny, because authors identifying themselves with their own ethnic group is treated as akin to protest or terrorism. Women are the most common readers of the 'boy's love' genre, whose homosexuality is often among the least transgressive elements, written by self-proclaimed 'rotten girls,' some of whom have been jailed for their writing. Ironically, despite the government's displeasure with these stories, they're a popular source for tv and movie adaptations, as long as the two central men can be officially recast as just friends or just coworkers.

 
Crime fiction was banned under Mao, and Western-style mysteries involving criminals who outsmart the police are still not really allowed. (In both cases because they're seen as implicitly criticizing the government.) Crime writing usually takes the form of police procedurals. During Xi's anti-corruption campaign in the 2000s, crime writers were allowed to depict corrupt officials as the criminals being caught.

 
There's a rich tradition of Chinese science fiction, which can sometimes use imaginary future societies as a basis for political critique. Cixin Liu and Chen Qiufan are currently the best known scifi authors. Pastoral 'cottagecore' style rural utopias have also recently become a popular topic, possibly as a reaction against Covid lockdowns.

Twee

 
Twee
The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion, and Film

by Marc Spitz
It Books

2014

 

 

I'm glad that I finally read Twee, but also glad I got it from a library. I've been wanting to read it, but I ended up wanting to like it more than I actually liked it. 

 
Twee is a cultural history of a particular aesthetic that is more or less the same as 'indie' or 'hip.' The archetypal Twee kid, in Spitz's mind at least, is shy, maybe not friendless but certainly an introvert, who retreats to the safety of their bedroom to immerse themselves in their books, records, or other hobbies. The Twee kid is fussy and proper, hates sports, likes things just so, has encyclopedic knowledge of their own slightly esoteric interests, and probably prefers the controlled neatness of the world inside their head to the messiness of reality.

 
If all this seems a little vague, you might be picking up on one of my concerns with Spitz, who seems to have trouble defining his own key concept. Twee is opposed to mainstream pop culture, but also to what's currently being called 'indie sleaze' - the Mods were probably Twee, the Punks unquestionably weren't. But Spitz also spends a whole chapter arguing that Kurt Cobain should really be considered Twee, so it's hard to know how well defined the term is, even in his own head. Model trains are probably a Twee hobby, superhero comics definitely aren't, but I don't know if he could explain why not.

 
The chapters are roughly chronological, starting just after WWII and leading up to 2014, when the book was published. There's a kind of messiness to the book's structure that annoyed me. Most chapters aren't about just one thing (though a few are!) and I couldn't always sense the logic in what Spitz put together. For a book about the sort of people who don't want any of their foods touching on their plate, I found Spitz's organization surprisingly sloppy.

 
Certainly, the highlights are all here - Belle & Sebastian, Wes Anderson, McSweeney's, mumblecore movies, indie pop music, Garden State, Juno, Gilmore Girls, Zooey Deschenel. We also get a chapter on Glasgow's pre-Belle indie rock scene, one on French New Wave movies, one claiming that Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are presaged the rise of punk, another anointing the Smiths and They Might Be Giants as the Twee equivalents to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

 
Spitz's opening chapter, in the aftermath of WWII, posits that Twee comes from an impulse to create a kindler gentler world, one that is aware of real danger and death, but safe from it, and where sexuality is both intriguing but also just out of reach. A world of precocious, prolonged childhood, in other words, as obsessed with youth and beauty as mainstream culture is, determined to preserve an ideal of 'purity' in a way that's both polite but also moralizing, and seemingly both White and middle-class, that's probably as exclusionary as the other flavors of Nerd culture in the US. That's my critique though; Spitz has nothing but praise. (Incidentally, his opening chapter identifies Walt Disney, the Peanuts comics, Dr Seuss, Buddy Holly, James Dean, "The Catcher in the Rye," Truman Capote, and Anne Frank's diary as key proto-Twee influences. Make sense of that if you can, because I couldn't!)

 
A few final questions worth asking. The answers are not in this book. First, when does the word 'twee' actually first get used to define this aesthetic? Relatedly, just because Twee tastemakers today like something older, is it really fair to say that it was Twee in its time (something I especially wondered about New Wave cinema?) How has Twee changed over time? To what extent is Twee an aesthetic, and to what extent is it a movement of people promoting that aesthetic? How much can we distinguish it from other things indie, hip, or just 'cool?' And seriously, what are the dangers inherent in revering a cocoon of perpetual, mythic childhood and trying to exclude everything from outside it?

Inside the Critics' Circle

 
 
Inside the Critics' Circle

Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times

by Phillipa Chong

Princeton University Press

2021

 

 

Inside the Critics' Circle is part Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology series, like Banding Together and American Zoo, which I enjoyed earlier this year. Chong conducted interviews with newspaper book reviewers, most of whom are working authors who write reviews on a freelance basis. One purpose of her book is to understand the feeling of crisis that surrounds the practice of journalistic book reviewing, which is separate from longform literary criticism and academic writing about literature.

 
Chong argues that book reviewing is characterized by several forms of uncertainty, and that reviewers' sense of vulnerability, and the field's sense of crisis, is largely a reaction to all this uncertainty. First is 'epistemic uncertainty,' which means that reviewers do not have an objective standard they can judge books against, and can't be sure in advance if other people will feel similarly about the books they review. One thing Chong observes is that because book review section editors can't know if books are good or not before they assign them to reviewers, they pick 'important' books rather than 'good' books to be reviewed. Editors also try to make a 'good match' between the book and the reviewer, by picking someone who either is similar to the author they're reviewing, or writes about similar topics or in similar ways.

Reviewers also operate under 'social uncertainty,' because they don't know how other people will react to them based on what they wrote. This is especially due to the 'role-switch reward structure' where authors who will want their own books reviewed in the future are the ones writing reviews. In general, this gives them an incentive to 'play nice,' both because they know how it feels to get a negative review, and because they have reason to fear professional retribution, such as getting revenge reviewed or snubbed for a literary award when the shoe is on the other foot. Reviewers are more willing to 'punch up' against famous authors.

 
Reviewers also experience 'institutional uncertainty,' meaning that the very rules of the game they're playing are unclear. Since most reviewers work full-time at other literary activities and only review occasionally, they have no sense of themselves as 'real critics.' They feel threatened from below by amateur reader-reviewers (like me!) and from above by academic literary criticism. In defending the value of what they do against what they perceive as a widespread question 'do we even need book reviews anymore?,' the reviewers defend their work as both being more accessible than academic criticism, and as being of higher quality and addressing the artistic quality of the work rather than just giving it a thumbs up or star-rating.

 
I have to tell you, I liked this one a lot, both because I enjoy reading book reviews on the New York Times, Lit Hub, and Tor, and because I've been writing so many of them this year. Obviously I'm immune to the 'switch-role reward structure' here - I'm not a working author myself, and also, no one who writes these books will probably ever see my reviews. But I do care about writing these things well. And actually, in the amateur rpg world I sometimes hang out in online, there are the same issues of reviews often being written by people who are themselves writing things for others to review.

Monster, She Wrote

 
 

Monster, She Wrote

The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction

by Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson

Quirk Books

2019

 

 

Monster She Wrote is a history of the most famous and influential women to write Gothic fiction, whether their works would be classified as horror, scifi, fantasy, or just 'literature.' Each author gets 3-5 pages of a vignette biography and discussion of her major works.

 
Most of the book is divided into chronological sections, covering the authors who originated 'the Gothic' like Mary Shelley and Anne Radcliffe, pulp authors from the early 20th Century, the writers of lurid paperbacks from the 80s and 90s, and a few sections in between. The last chapter is organized thematically, and it's overstuffed with names and recommendations.

 
I thought the earlier sections were stronger, but I appreciate Kroger and Anderson's willingness to try to wrestle the plethora of more recent works into a kind of canon to accompany the more-established earlier ones. They certainly offer a lot of help if you want to craft your own Gothic reading list.

Reality Hunger

 
 

Reality Hunger
A Manifesto

by David Shields

Knopf

2010

 

 

Reality Hunger made a bit of splash when it was published because Shields assembled it as much as he wrote it. Most of the text consists of hundreds of quotations from other authors, often modified by Shields, without indicating which parts are quotes, without attributing the original authors, and without indicating whether or how they've been modified.

 
The manifesto Shields assembles argues in favor of an aesthetic where artists mix reality with their own creativity. He cites collage, sampling within rap, various metafictional devices, and hoax-authors like (in their own, opposite ways) James Frey and JT LeRoy as examples of the aesthetic he wants to promote and encourage others to make more of. 

 
Shields defends this style of art against the usual criticisms of plagiarism and deception by arguing that all art builds on what came before, and all art mixes truth and lies - he claims that what he is promoting is sort of one extreme end of a spectrum that every artwork and every artists falls somewhere along.

Understanding Comics

 
 
Understanding Comics
The Invisible Art

by Scott McCloud

William Morrow
1994

 

Understanding Comics is a comic that acts as an introduction to the medium of comics, or 'sequential art.' McCloud looks at the secret history of proto-comic storytelling, including things like the Bayeux Tapestry, the relationship between images and text, the uses of simplicity, and the different kinds of sequences that can be used to tell stories. A nice starting point for learning about comics as an art form, I think.