The Novel in brief

I don't write long books.  Sometimes I read them, but I don't mind if the last page comes in at under 400.  And if I read a good book and it has fewer than 300 pages, I'm impressed, because that author broke current conventions about what makes a novel.

Some of the best novels I've read have been short.  It used to be allowed.

• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (full text online)
  
• The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
  
• Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
  
• A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson
  
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach (full text online)
  
• The Jeeves & Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse (My Man Jeeves full text online)
  
• Many of Kurt Vonnegut's books...

Some people feel that they aren't getting their money's worth if the book is short.  Where did this idea come from?  Do they believe they're paying for the paper it's printed on, and not the story?  A mediocre book will waste more of my time if it's long.  And that's somehow better?

There are websites devoted to the short book.  They aren't difficult to find.  So I'm not alone in my admiration of the succinct.  But as far as modern publishing is concerned, there are only a few types of (fiction) books that are allowed to be tiny, such as romances and cozies, and they're usually paperbacks.  The message is clear: these are books to gobble and then leave at the library, and the speed you can read them denotes the importance they carry.  Fast food books in cheap paper wrapping.  Quick and unimportant.

On the other hand, the very-long novel is supposedly fine.  Stephen King produces Monsterpieces (I confess that one of my favourite books is It, 1392 pages.)  Science fiction and fantasy series can go on for a dozen thousand-page bricks and this is considered normal: Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series had a glossary in the back of each so you could keep track of the hundreds of characters you met from volume to volume.  And I've seen young people collapse in library aisles under the weight of Jonathan Strange and Mrs. Norrell.  Let us not forget the classics, but do you really know anyone who has read and adored War and Peace?  Paying by weight, you always get your money's worth with these guys. But how many times do you read a book and think, "It didn't have to be that long"?

Those short classics I've listed are unforgettable, their stories and characters staying with the reader much longer than the time it takes to pick up the next book.  I believe it can be the same of modern fiction, if we drop our prejudices.  Brevity does not denote a lack of anything, except perhaps lengthy sub-plots, extended bouts of description, and in extreme cases, poor editing.  Good short novels are stories boiled down to the most powerful.  Their themes are not reduced because they make their point in less time.  The Haiku of novels has its own kind of power.

Feel free to tell me some of your favourite short novels.  Or, tell me some of your favourite long novels instead, and why short novels don't cut it.

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Photo: Chinese Diary by rogergordon at flickr

Remembering the reader

When I first began writing I did not care about my readers.  It isn't that I thought, Readers will love my writing no matter what.  I am naturally awesome.  It's that I didn't consider any reader out there anywhere.  They didn't exist.  I had no audience except myself.  It was all about the writing.

Now I care.  I'm proud of producing work that I want to show to the world.  And boy is it exhausting.  Not caring about my readers seems like an old fairy tale, a childhood myth like Santa Claus.  That lovely childish certainty: The gifts will come!  It'll be great!  Without the adult reality: How am I going to pay for all this stuff?

The truth is that without readers, writing can be incredibly rewarding for all kinds of skill-building and therapeutic reasons.  However, if your goal is an eventual audience, it's no good pretending that knowing what they want to read is as easy as knowing what you want to write.  There are a lot of great books out there.  There is also a lot of trash.  Readers have learned to be discerning because they must.  Otherwise we'd all still be slogging through that copy of that classic that we figured we should read some day.  Or we wouldn't be reading at all because it would have become such a chore.  Sometimes being able to give up and put down a book is the best freedom in the world.

This occurs to me because the novel I'm writing currently-- my NaNoWriMo novel-- is terrible.  And when I decided to stop worrying about my audience (not mildly, the way we must stop worrying just to get the words out, but entirely, as in "This novel will never be read by anyone") it got even worse.  Remembering my readers is a safety catch on the machine of Bad Writing.  It stops me from giving up when a scene is tough, or taking the easy way out when more conflict is required.  The audience makes me work, but it also makes me better.  I know how to write for myself.  I want to write for other people.

So I stop, remember, and get back to work.

Re-telling our stories

"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before."
  - Mark Twain

According to some, there are a finite number of stories to be told.  Occasionally a writer or literature professor will try to break them down into exactly five, or exactly seven, or exactly ten: the hero's quest, tragedy and comedy, the fall and rebirth, whatever.  Some people would say there are fewer than that, perhaps just one, to represent humankind's eternal struggle with divinity, or humanity, or the meaning of life.

 
One of my favourite stories is a tale of rebirth.  Kisa Gotami lost her only child, and in misery and mourning she asked the Buddha to remove her suffering.  He said he would, if she would go into the village and bring him a mustard seed from a household that had never known that grief.  So she went door to door, but couldn't find a single home that hadn't known death.  With that greater understanding she no longer wanted to be divorced from her grief.  She was no longer alone.

Grief is something we all understand.  A story told about grief will be understood.  And whether we've had enough with one or ten or a hundred in a day, that story will never become useless simply because it's been told before.  Instead, the fact that it has been told before gives it power.  This is the cumulative power of human experience.

Like perfume that inevitably changes depending on the chemistry of the skin, the stories we tell are filtered through ourselves, our expectations and experiences, the palette we've collected, the words we know how to use (and some that we don't.)  And writing is a lonely thing, and so is reading, and yet the roles they fill-- communication and the translation of our thoughts and feelings into words-- are the opposite of lonely.  They are essential to the human experience.

"The bees pillage the flowers here and there but they make honey of them which is all their own; it is no longer thyme or marjolaine: so the pieces borrowed from others he will transform and mix up into a work all his own."
 - Michael Eyquen de Montaigne
   (translated from French)

"Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em."
 - Jonathan Swift

Pure understanding of NaNoWriMo

Seven years has passed since I wrote my first NaNoWriMo novel.  It was called Of a Demon, and it was about an organization of psychics who policed themselves, except for one (the main character) who they suspect killed his twin sister in order to absorb her power, but actually he was framed.  It was awful, in fact the worst, and this is not surprising.  I didn't expect to do anything with it.  I just wanted to finish a novel.

My best NaNoWriMo novel was the fourth.  It was called Stephen's Story and it was the expanded story of a character from another novel I'd written.  He was a member of an intelligence service and had a failed marriage and too many secrets to keep.  It's the only one of my NaNo novels I enjoy re-reading.  I have to wonder: is it the best because I was already familiar with the world and the character?  Was it the best story idea full stop?  Or did I peak there in 2007, and that's it?

This year's NaNoWriMo novel is more like my third: more experienced and coherent than the first and second, not nearly as inspired as the fourth, or even the fifth.  So maybe I did peak.  Great.

There's a competition in Canada and the US called The William Lowell Putnam Competition, administered by the Mathematical Association of America since the 1930s.  The median score is something like 2 out of 120.  It's what you might call "fiendishly difficult," or at least it takes a certain kind of mind and certain kinds of skills.

When taking Mathematics at university, you're told about the competition in 1st year, but it's 2nd year when you're most encouraged to enter.  In 1st year you don't have the skills, in 3rd year you know too much.  There's a pretty middle-ground where you know enough without all those facts complicating your pure understanding of the math.  Lovely.

Some people defy these statistics.  A professor of mine at the University of Victoria is known for doing well every time.  Somehow he can figure out these problems without letting his years of experience cloud his understanding.  It's a gift.

I didn't have that gift with the Putnam Competition.  And I wonder if this is what has happened to my NaNoWriMo output.  I learned what I could learn about producing a novel in 30 days, and then I learned too much, or I tried or expected or demanded too much.  So I can't get back to that pure understanding of what I was actually trying to write in that timeframe.  I've overcomplicated my skill-set.  I've un-learned my naivity.  Put me out to pasture with a Moleskine and a fountain pen.

Or maybe this is just an excuse because I've reached the notorious second week of NaNo, when the book can seem to fall apart beneath your sore and frantic fingers, all great plans for nought.  I should really just get back to writing.  The third week is bliss.

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Man interrupted at his writing (1635) by Gerrit Dou

Twitter trends from racism to censorship

Censorship was shoved to the top of my mind pretty roughly today by the Twitter trend #thingsdarkiessay. It has been in the top 10 trends for a while. Reaction has been varied. From "oh dear what ever next" to comments far less reserved. Generally, it hasn't gone over very well. We are not surprised.

The origin of the hash tag quickly became obscured by outcry about its content. At some point remarks began about whether the outcry came from black people or white people, (eg. "more whities than darkies mad at this lol") and whether this was relevant. A cry came up to start a #thingswhitiessay trend, but it didn't catch on.  Then, some tweets came through stating that the hash tag had originated in South Africa, and if you weren't from SA, "you won't get it." Someone explained: "'Darkie' is used ironically by black South Africans to refer to themselves and is not considered racist." They were saying that it wasn't offensive, taken in context.

But the rushing, random format of Twitter brought it pretty well out of context. And perspective of the twitterers was skewed by ignorance, too. Someone said, "Only in America is #thingsdarkiessay allowed to be a TT!!!... "land of the free" my ass!!!"  Assuming that the entire reaction had to be American.

Then someone who had at least heard of Europe asked, "So can US (& UK) reaction to #thingsdarkiessay be indication that black people within those spaces feel they determine what is appropriate?" General response to this spoke that Yes, black people world-wide thought they had a right to feel it was inappropriate no matter the context.

And of course the platform of the entire debate was eventually called to answer: "Twitter look at the trending topics, you need to do something about this."

That's where censorship comes in.  On the very same internet sensation that brought us the #IranElection hash tag, kicking oppression in the nuts with the steel-toed boot of free information, we have a cry to "do something about this," maybe make the hash tag invisible on home pages, or worse, delete tweets that cite it.

Deleting those tweets would not delete the original intent of the hash tag, good or bad.  It would not delete the opinions of the people who responded either for or against it, whether they understood it or not. It would not increase understanding in any way at all.  And it certainly won't stop the next revolution or misunderstanding, what it might be, from exploding out of the internet and into the brains of the connected. It would not even convince those who are afraid of the trend that they were safe, although it might give a little salute to those who would like everything to be squeaky clean on the outside at least.

There are now thousands more tweets in the #thingsdarkiessay trend than when I started writing this post.  Most of them are the same: they say the trend is sad, they swear their indignation, they suggest that if everyone stopped complaining about it the trend would disappear.   In the whole, I haven't seen more than a few that respond to the idea of saying what a "darkie" might say, and those that have are mostly nonsense.  I, too, think they're sad.  It's a poor thing to witness when there are a lot of other better trends in human thought that might be seen.  But I still hope that it isn't censored.  I don't prefer blindness to sight in any situation.  It just doesn't do any good.

NaNoWriMo is not what it used to be

NaNoWriMo is not what it used to be.  When I started, back in 2002, it was a little website with a few thousand people, and now there are hundreds of thousands of people and the website is regularly broken--

Wait though, it's not a website. It's an group that organizes a massive write-a-thon, although the buddies lists don't work and the forums are filled with chatter and noise--

No, that isn't right either.

The website itself calls NaNoWriMo an "approach to novel writing" that values "enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft." It is "for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved" and "the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output."

So NaNoWriMo is an approach to novel writing.  And that approach is definitely not what it used to be, because it used to be for me, and now I'm not so sure.  Really, I'm not what I used to be.

Every time I read NaNo advice that explains how to break up contractions to add words, I wince.  When I come across blog posts extolling segues into other stories (like the famous "If your book starts to suck... have one of the characters start their own book, right in the novel!") I slink away.  I shrug my shoulders at people who question if they can participate by writing 50,000 words of free association or describing everything they see, because I'm unwilling to discourage someone from writing, no matter the method.  Don't even get me started on people who write 30 or 40 thousand words and then stop, saying, "Well I know I've won, because I know I would have finished."  This stuff is not for me.

I'm happy to value enthusiasm and perserverence over painstaking craft, at least sometimes.  I think that when you're starting to write, then anything that helps you write is a great thing.  I know NaNo worked for me when all I'd written was a few dozen poems, some short stories and the beginning of about a hundred novels.  It worked to make me finish a novel, so I could figure out what I wanted to write.  So I could finish another novel, and then edit.  So I could finally write and edit something to the point when it was good.  Anything that helps that process has got to be worthwhile.

But when I come to this: "the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output," I have to face up to the fact that I've changed.  And after mourning for a moment, I can realize that this is a wonderful thing, to have changed.  That my writing and my writing habits are better** than they were.  I'm no longer using NaNoWriMo to make myself write, because I'd be writing the rest of the year anyway.  Now I use it for the sense of community, and to allow myself to experiment with new styles of writing, new genres, and themes I might otherwise avoid.  It's become a month-long stretching and breathing exercise to look forward to during the other eleven months of hard work.  Hard work is great, but sometimes you just have to breathe.

So my NaNoWriMo has changed, but my NaNo experience is not every person's NaNo experience.   And whatever works for whoever participates is exactly what that person needs.  They know, deep down, whether they're "cheating" and whether their plans will help their writing or if it's just something to do.  And it's okay if it's just something to do.  It's also okay to break the rules.  This is why the NaNoWriMo Rebels exist: they have recognized the value of the idea beyond the set guidelines.  And only each individual participant knows if it is worthwhile for them, or if they shouldn't bother.  It's not for others to judge.  NaNo is not a website or a group, and it doesn't even have to be an approach.  At its heart it's an idea, and a great one: "If you want to write, you should write."  Hallelujah, amen.

I'm not a rebel.  I'm going to write the 50,000 word original novel within the 30 days, and validate as instructed.  And I'm going to continue stepping sideways out of conversations that question whether others' participation is valid.  Good luck to everyone, whether it's your first time or your tenth, and good luck to the Rebels also, however you're doing it, however it's useful to you, and even good luck to you 50,000 word free-association people: there, I've said it.  It's November.  Get writing!

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** Listen. When I say "better" I mean "better for me." Not necessarily you. That's the point of this post. All right? Good.