fiction vs. nonfiction
The sound of sporadic hammering reverberates from next door where workmen are replacing some eavestroughs. The cloud cover slowly thickens, muting the light and diffusing the shadows. Thundershowers are forecast. I'm sweaty from a run through the neighborhood, haven't changed out of my chopped dusty-violet T-shirt and navy athletic shorts. I've just washed the dishes and the kitchen floor; now it's time for a blog post.
Feeling more inspired, I opened up chapter 17 and its corresponding notes document. I spent all my time on notes--again. I have lots of material but only a hazy idea of the structure of my scene. I find myself asking myself from time to time: Why am I writing fiction, again?
It's not a rhetorical question. I feel conflicted as a fiction-writer. As a kid I never doubted its value: I loved novels and was always reading them. From the age of about 12 I knew I wanted to write them. I have had a lot of pleasure, and even some transformative experiences, reading fiction.
But some years ago, I think in the early 1990s, I started going off them. The last novel I can remember reading (as opposed to rereading) with genuine enjoyment was The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in 1992. I was surprised and delighted at how much the characters thought and felt as I thought and felt--they weren't alien Victorian people whose mindset was foreign to mine, but people like myself, living in a different time.
That same year I read another book I enjoyed very much, Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich. It's an account of a season of horseracing at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I come from racing stock--some of my mother's brothers are trainers and more are bettors; my mother and her sister spend every Saturday at Hastings Park here in Vancouver. I've been myself quite a few times; I even tried to write a handicapping program for the old Hewlett-Packard computer in my high school. So I was in a position to appreciate Barich's pilgrimage (he spent the season there in memory of his recently deceased mother, who had developed a passion for betting at the end of her life).
But my appreciation for his book went far beyond the incidental fact of a shared interest in horseracing. His writing is excellent, but even as I was reading it I wondered to myself, "where exactly does the excellence reside here?" It was a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and it was better than any novel. Why?
I summarized it with the word richness. I don't have a copy of the book (I'd borrowed it from Mom), so I can't provide examples, but as I read the book I was conscious of how all the details of description, characterization, and dialogue felt, smelled, as though they had been plucked from the richness of the environment he was in. Each detail suggested the vastness and intricacy of the world that produced it.
I imagined trying to write fiction that could evoke this sense of richness, of reality, and I thought, "I can't." I recognized that I do not have the inventive ability--although my inventive ability is very good. The reason, finally, is that my imagination is not as rich a place as the universe in which it exists.
Ouch. Of course, the very best fiction-writers are able to evoke this sense of richness: I think of James Joyce, Thomas Mann. Another writer who excels at generating this type of richness, in a different way, is Thomas Pynchon.
After reading Laughing in the Hills, I began to compare the prose in novels with Barich's along the dimension of richness. With few exceptions, they come nowhere near it. Not for me, anyway. The fiction-writer, continually serving up stuff from the tap of his or her imagination, is putting imagery onto the blank sheet of the page, while the nonfiction-writer is culling imagery from the inexhaustible abundance of the world. Too often the result is predicability: flat, unconvincing description and simple, unlifelike characters.
Creating richness ex nihilo, from one's imagination, is real work. Bill Barich can briefly describe a couple fighting in an adjacent motel room and conjure a whole world, a whole society; the fiction-writer is hard pressed to spin off worlds with a shake of the wrist, so to speak, paragraph after paragraph, page after page.
My goal is to write with that level of richness--nonfictional richness. I want to believe the novel can still cut it as an art form, that it can provide reading as good as the highest-quality nonfiction. I'm taking my stab at it. Hence I remain quagmired in my notes. In my desire to dish up a surprise with every sentence, I build worlds like film sets that may be seen only glancingly as the characters walk through.
Feeling more inspired, I opened up chapter 17 and its corresponding notes document. I spent all my time on notes--again. I have lots of material but only a hazy idea of the structure of my scene. I find myself asking myself from time to time: Why am I writing fiction, again?
It's not a rhetorical question. I feel conflicted as a fiction-writer. As a kid I never doubted its value: I loved novels and was always reading them. From the age of about 12 I knew I wanted to write them. I have had a lot of pleasure, and even some transformative experiences, reading fiction.
But some years ago, I think in the early 1990s, I started going off them. The last novel I can remember reading (as opposed to rereading) with genuine enjoyment was The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in 1992. I was surprised and delighted at how much the characters thought and felt as I thought and felt--they weren't alien Victorian people whose mindset was foreign to mine, but people like myself, living in a different time.
That same year I read another book I enjoyed very much, Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich. It's an account of a season of horseracing at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I come from racing stock--some of my mother's brothers are trainers and more are bettors; my mother and her sister spend every Saturday at Hastings Park here in Vancouver. I've been myself quite a few times; I even tried to write a handicapping program for the old Hewlett-Packard computer in my high school. So I was in a position to appreciate Barich's pilgrimage (he spent the season there in memory of his recently deceased mother, who had developed a passion for betting at the end of her life).
But my appreciation for his book went far beyond the incidental fact of a shared interest in horseracing. His writing is excellent, but even as I was reading it I wondered to myself, "where exactly does the excellence reside here?" It was a memoir, a work of nonfiction, and it was better than any novel. Why?
I summarized it with the word richness. I don't have a copy of the book (I'd borrowed it from Mom), so I can't provide examples, but as I read the book I was conscious of how all the details of description, characterization, and dialogue felt, smelled, as though they had been plucked from the richness of the environment he was in. Each detail suggested the vastness and intricacy of the world that produced it.
I imagined trying to write fiction that could evoke this sense of richness, of reality, and I thought, "I can't." I recognized that I do not have the inventive ability--although my inventive ability is very good. The reason, finally, is that my imagination is not as rich a place as the universe in which it exists.
Ouch. Of course, the very best fiction-writers are able to evoke this sense of richness: I think of James Joyce, Thomas Mann. Another writer who excels at generating this type of richness, in a different way, is Thomas Pynchon.
After reading Laughing in the Hills, I began to compare the prose in novels with Barich's along the dimension of richness. With few exceptions, they come nowhere near it. Not for me, anyway. The fiction-writer, continually serving up stuff from the tap of his or her imagination, is putting imagery onto the blank sheet of the page, while the nonfiction-writer is culling imagery from the inexhaustible abundance of the world. Too often the result is predicability: flat, unconvincing description and simple, unlifelike characters.
Creating richness ex nihilo, from one's imagination, is real work. Bill Barich can briefly describe a couple fighting in an adjacent motel room and conjure a whole world, a whole society; the fiction-writer is hard pressed to spin off worlds with a shake of the wrist, so to speak, paragraph after paragraph, page after page.
My goal is to write with that level of richness--nonfictional richness. I want to believe the novel can still cut it as an art form, that it can provide reading as good as the highest-quality nonfiction. I'm taking my stab at it. Hence I remain quagmired in my notes. In my desire to dish up a surprise with every sentence, I build worlds like film sets that may be seen only glancingly as the characters walk through.
posted by paulv at
2:59 PM
2 Comments:
I can relate to your comments on the writing of good prose.
I came to fiction writing late after years of teaching and historical/archaeological endeavours.
I have always read more non-fiction than fiction. I find it easy to write an essay, hard to write a short story on the same topic.
Maybe it's the curse of academia?
By
Kriti, at June 21, 2005 8:20 PM
Thanks for stopping by, kriti. Except for a brief, flunking sojourn in 1st-year university, I've never been in academia, so I don't want to blame anything on that. I chose writing instead of academia, and I still read more nonfiction. I do nonetheless give fiction pride of place: I never read more than 1 novel at a time (in fact, usually less than 1).
By
paulv, at June 22, 2005 9:44 AM
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