style? forget it

A couple of days ago I was talking with my mother about writing. She was saying that one of the things she frets about while writing is how to say something--the issue of style.

I used to concern myself quite a lot with style, but I don't anymore. Or: not much, anyway. Now I believe that if, as a writer, you're focusing on style, you're directing attention at the wrong thing. It's a waste of time for at least two reasons:

1) the most important effects of creative writing are unrelated to style;

2) any style that is self-consciously "used" comes across as affected, which places an obstacle between the reader and the content of the work.

Now I associate "chosen" styles with commercial writing. I think back to writing for hire that I've done, such as a couple of small pieces for Vancouver magazine back in the 1980s. I wrote them in the snappy, breezy style that was the tone of that section of the magazine--and collected my (small) checks. It was perfectly good work, and I myself enjoyed reading that part of the magazine. But if I set out to write a novel in that style, it would be self-conscious and phony exercise (and possibly a work of "chick lit").

I'm no more happy when "serious" writers fool around with their writing style. To me, the work of, say, Ernest Hemingway comes across as affected. Maybe it wasn't; maybe that was his natural and spontaneous way of writing. But I don't think so. It reads, to me, like the work of someone trying to write a "special way" for effect--to impress, in some way.

I'm afraid I can't even exempt my literary idol, James Joyce. Much of Ulysses is a stylistic tour de force. But to the extent that it is such, I'm afraid it is not very powerful--not to me. Such tricks rely on the reader's education in understanding some abstract point or joke being made by the writer. There is then, presumably, a burst of detached, ironic amusement, or some such. Compared to what literature is capable of, this is an empty and arid experience.

I hold much more with E. B. White, who said that style is not something that a writer can really contrive; it is a natural expression of the totality of the writer's being. Your style arises from the sum of your personality, experience, and education. At the moment of writing, you can't change those things; they are what they are, as distinctive as your fingerprint. It's almost impossible to change--and why would you want to?

An excessive concern with style shows that the writer is either ignoring or taking for granted his subject-matter. But this is a bad idea. The first duty of the writer is to have something worthwhile to say. And the more important your subject, the less important the issue of style is. If you've witnessed a genocide and want to write about it, it would be foolish and narcissistic to fuss over your literary style, aiming for precious effects. You've got bigger fish to fry.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, devotes maybe 3 or 4 pages to "diction"--roughly the equivalent of style as I'm using the term here. The rest of the 40-odd pages he devotes to content: your story. That accords with the balance I would propose: spend 90% of your effort on story, or what you're writing, and 10% on style, or how you write it. No: make that 95% and 5%.

The tip I offered Mom was to write the way she might write down a vivid and important dream when pressed for time. If you've only got 10 minutes to write down your dream, how do you attack it? You're not sweating over the fine points of style; you've got something to say, and you've got to get it down--now. That way, you'll rely on your natural style, whatever it is. For better or for worse, it will be you.

I might boil it down thus: don't be clever; be honest and accurate.

notes on finishing Aristotle

I've just finished keying notes from Aristotle's Poetics. This short work is still probably the best overall guide to writing dramatic works, whether as prose or as script. Aristotle focuses on storytelling, which he sees as the core of the poetic art. Art, to him, means "imitation": when we see art we must be reminded of life in some way. In Shakespeare's terms, it is the mirror held up to nature.

For Aristotle, the highest form of poetry was tragedy: serious poetry intended to be acted out on stage. In order to gain the fullest audience involvement, the characters need to be "better" than we are, at least in certain respects. Why? Because the key emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and terror. It is to experience these vicariously that an audience watches tragedy, and they are evoked by seeing superior people undergoing misfortune. When a good person suffers, we feel pity; whereas when a bad person suffers, we feel satisfaction.

It felt a bit strange to read these things, put so bluntly by the great philosopher, and yet he hit the nail on the head. We see it all the time in movies: the bad guy does mean things, and gets his just deserts in the end. The good guy, or girl, braver and more noble than we are, suffers, and we feel pained about that. It's politically incorrect to rate people on a quality scale, and yet that is what popular art does all the time as a matter of course. (For the record: I'm no friend of political correctness--quite the reverse.)

According to Aristotle, comedies are stories about people who are worse than we are. And this is true also: think of the TV sitcom, the staple story of which is about the flaw of one of its characters. Out of jealousy, social climbing, greed, lust, or other motives, a character does ridiculous things, and we laugh. "Ha ha, what a schmuck." The typical sitcom episode ends with the character being chastened, and apologizing for his behavior: all is restored to equilibrium until the next episode.

It gets me wondering though about more modern dramas, that depict gangsters and low-lifes (say) in heroic dramatic roles. Usually gangster heroes (such as those played by, say, James Cagney) were seen as popular heroes by many--admirable rebels against corrupt or unjust government forces. Or some, such as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, are relatively good: he may be a greedy, violent, vengeful, ignorant criminal, but he has principles or a code of honor that his foes lack. He's better than they are.

But then we get to the "grunge" phenomenon of the 1990s: movies like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, populated almost exclusively by the dregs of society: criminal lumpenproletarians who lack redeeming qualities. Both movies were more or less comedic in tone, at least in many places, and so were perhaps conforming to Aristotle's scheme in that way. But I found most of the characters in both those movies revolting, and I cared less about what happened to them than about whether I was about to be subjected to yet more disgusting scenes. I wouldn't want to see either movie again, although I thought there was much cleverness and ingenuity in Pulp Fiction.

But in general I regard shows like that as a measure of the aberrant times we're in. I think about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, how people in that future dystopia attend movies to watch the women and children of their "enemies" being killed, and laugh at them. In many ways, we're there now.

Still, I'll rely on Aristotle. All spiritual training involves the cultivation of virtue--and not just the relative "virtue" of being less cowardly or brutal than one's enemies. The challenge of being human remains the same. And as Gandhi recommended that one should be the change one wants to see in the world, so I think I should create the stories I want to read.

So that's what I'm doing.

have a plan

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with Mom--ham-and-cheese sandwiches at her dining-table while looking out at the milky-green water of Cove Cliff. We talk about many things: psychology, astrology, family, and of course writing (the supposed topic of the lunch symposium). Yesterday we touched on the topic of structure as an important part of creative writing.

We agree on its importance, but many people are skeptical. "Structure" sounds so dry, so...uncreative. Architects and engineers concern themselves with structure: they're making things that have to stand up in the physical world. But creative writers, channeling the Muse, spew free and original ideas on the page, going where their creative spirits take them, discovering images and writing them down...right?

Maybe for a very short piece such an approach could produce something readable. But a longer work, like a bridge or a convention center, has to stand up under its own strength. It's sustaining itself not against gravity and wind-shear, but against the wandering attention of the reader. Why should a reader stick with you?

In his Poetics, Aristotle determined that the most important element of a tragedy (the highest form of poetry, in his view) was plot, or "what happens". (More exactly, plot is "what happens" plus the arrangement or order of what happens.) It forms the structure of a story. Note that plotting has nothing directly to do with writing at all. You could devise a plot using pictures or some other symbolic system. Words are convenient for this, but not necessary.

Plotting is a selection and ordering of events. A good storyteller is someone who does this in a way that is compelling and that generates strong emotional responses in the audience. In theory it could be done entirely in one's head, without the use of words or any other symbols at all--just the arrangement of mental images, like a dream. Committing the story to words is a purely secondary task, as well as a secondary talent. As Robert McKee points out, many people have literary ability--the ability to write good prose. Few have story ability--the ability to imagine and arrange events in an interesting and meaningful way.

Speaking for myself, I find that my writing is easiest and best when I'm describing an event that has actually happened. When I write a scene that has happened in actual life (or in a dream), the characters, setting, and specific actions and dialogue are all taken care of. They've already happened, and I just need to select from among the details and choose how to describe them. There is much more in any real-life scene than could ever be described, so I have a cornucopia of choice. The choices I make put my stamp on the scene: I give it a particular meaning by choosing as I do.

In a simple real-life story, the relationship of the scenes to each other is also more or less a given. You start at the beginning and go on to the end. The structure and content of the scenes has been given you by life; now you really do just have to write it down.

But for fictional works, the writer has to come up with all the material that is supplied by life in the case of a nonfiction story. You have to think up the characters, the setting, and the specific actions and dialogue for each scene, as well as a sequence of scenes that lead to an interesting punch at the end. (In real life, this "interesting punch" already exists--and is presumably the reason you've chosen to tell the story in the first place.)

That's a lot of creative work--and it's creative work of different types.

For the past several months I've been reworking the detailed structure of my story. It's time-consuming and creatively difficult. But before my very eyes I see it leading to a better result. I'm organizing the content of a sequence of chapters, and doing this by way of bullet-points in Word. In the past I've used index cards for this purpose, but I'm experimenting with this even more convenient method (although I do miss the physicalness of the index cards, the heft of a growing deck of scenes that are gradually cohering into a story). I scan down my growing list of bullets, playing out scenes or steps in my mind, like a movie. When I hit a gap, or a step that doesn't feel like a strong, logical result of the previous step, I go back to my notes and start imagining.

"How would this character respond?" I ask myself. Well, that depends--what exactly is this character trying to achieve here? And why? The questions open up backward into the motivational world behind the story. They force me to examine the inner workings of my story-world, to confront the areas that are as yet unimagined, uncreated.

The goal is to create a fictional world that feels as close as possible to my real world: a place in which actual events in an actual world already exist, and my task as a writer is simply to find the words to describe them. In my experience this makes a story much more fun both to write and to read. I'm not fussing around trying to figure out how to describe a guy's fedora at the same time I'm trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. If you really figure out who he is and what he wants, you might also discover whether he really even wears a fedora.

Robert McKee says it, J. K. Rowling says it to would-be writer kids, Strunk and White say it in The Elements of Style, and now Paul Vitols says it: before you write, have a plan. Diving in and hoping for the best means harder work and a poorer result.

And who needs that?

character, cont.

Back to regular life: rain plops from the gray sky outside; and upstairs Kimmie prepares to return to Mother Corporation, as a late colleague of our old training class used to call it.

I was talking yesterday about working on character. I didn't feel that I got to the heart of what I wanted to say--maybe because I don't know what I want to say.
Here is an extract of my highlighted notes from Malcolm Heath's introduction to Aristotle's Poetics (compressed):

Tragedy is an imitation of a certain kind of action. So one constituent part of tragedy is plot, the ordered sequence of events which make up the action being imitated. An action is performed by agents, and agents necessarily have moral and intellectual characteristics, expressed in what they do and say. From this we can deduce that character and reasoning will also be constituent parts of tragedy. Imagine that you have left me alone with your silver spoons. Broadly, there are two factors that will determine whether or not I steal them. One is whether I am honest; this is the kind of thing which Aristotle means by character--an agent’s settled moral disposition. The other relevant factor is how I interpret the situation: do I think that I am likely to avoid suspicion if I take the spoons? This is what Aristotle means by reasoning. Thus character sets my agenda (what would I like to do?), and reasoning relates that agenda to a given situation (what is it feasible to do in these circumstances?).

What he says about tragedy applies to other dramatic forms as well. The actions taken by characters, which constitute the sequence of events we call the plot, arise because of two things: the agent's "settled moral disposition" (character) and the agent's "reasoning".

The question of character (settled moral disposition) is interesting because, as we know, this may not be quite so settled. I'm inclined to use the word values to name this aspect. Each of us holds a number of values, and these can change with circumstance, and also over time. At work I might generally value efficiency, and behave accordingly, but on one project I might have political reasons for dragging my feet--a different value has supervened, at least apparently.

Closely related to our values are our beliefs--what we think is true. These seem to underlie, or perhaps simply provide the rational justification for, our values. If I value efficiency, why do I value it, at least in this one context? Why do I care? There must be some reason, whether I'm conscious of it or not. If you really examine this, it can be quite elusive.

In a work context, efficiency might seem an obvious value. The work exists to achieve some result; accomplishing that result in the shortest time, with a minimum of wasted resources, is clearly a higher-quality approach. And maybe in the case of a task that I have chosen all on my own, freely and willingly, and which I am performing myself, no further explanation need be sought. Efficiency then just means that I achieve my freely chosen aims as quickly and easily as possible.

But suppose I'm an employee. The work is not really chosen by me, but is something I've been hired to do by someone else. Now if I hold (or exhibit) the value of efficiency it has a slightly different meaning. Is it because I value the task as much as my employer does, and therefore completely identify with his values in this respect? Or is it maybe that I wish to get ahead, and therefore want to make a good impression? Or do I have a more abstract and philosophical belief that "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might"--that any job worth doing is worth doing well? Or do I feel a sense of competitiveness with my coworkers, and want to beat them in a race to get things done? Or maybe I've made a promise to achieve something by a certain time, and feel that my word is my bond.

Now the beliefs underpinning my value of efficiency are less clear--maybe even to myself. To become conscious of them would be an act of self-knowledge.

I find that coming to this type of knowledge is as difficult with created characters as it is with oneself. There's an arbitrary aspect, in that a character's values and beliefs are just whatever I decide them to be. But that's not the whole story, because not all values and beliefs are equally interesting to me, or equally relevant to the story.

This seems to be a crux. For the story as a whole--any story--has a meaning, and many subordinate meanings. Only certain values and beliefs will show those meanings in the strongest light. But not even the writer can know what a story's meaning finally is until the work is done, and therefore it's not clear what values and beliefs the characters truly hold until the work is done. Until then it's all a kind of chess game: any given move may be simple, but its underlying rationale may be deep, subtle, and even mysterious.

know the rules

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Aristotle's Poetics. I found the book to be brief, bracing, even exciting. It made me recognize again how thirsty I am for instruction on how to pursue my art--so thirsty that I don't even realize how thirsty I am until I find a drink of cool water.

I have an arrogant and wayward streak with respect to my own abilities. This might possibly, partly, be necessary in order to develop and hold conviction in one's own vision and one's own execution of it. But such a person is also difficult to teach, and generally has to learn things the hard way.

In my own defence, such teaching as I received with respect to my art, creative writing, has been almost entirely informal and outside any institutional setting. By the time I had become a teenager in the 1970s, there had developed an ethos of "do your own thing" in schools, at least as regards creative expression. True, some technique would be taught in art or in writing, and of course you can't demand too much in this respect from public-school teachers; it's not their job to train "professional" artists for their careers.

And yet there was also a wider, cultural process at work. A couple of years ago I talked with an artist who, along with her husband-to-be, had studied at what was then the Vancouver School of Art. She told me that the school had been founded in 1925 by artists who had been trained in Scotland, and who believed in passing on a thorough training in the techniques of the Old Masters--techniques which the teachers were in a position to teach.

By the time that the art school changed its name in 1978 to the Emily Carr College of Art, the outlook was much changed. She said that the school had gotten away from teaching technique, and that students were encouraged to explore their creative urges in any way they saw fit. As a result, artists were emerging who had had only a piecemeal introduction to techniques, often self-taught. I recall too my late brother-in-law Freddie, who had been professor of art at the University of Victoria for many years, telling me that oil painting and other techniques could be learned fairly quickly from a book. He believed in jumping in with what you wanted to do, and gaining technique as you went, learning it or developing it yourself. Indeed, this had seemed to work for him.

There has been a pervasive sense that telling people, even raw newbies, how to do things crimps their creativity. Robert McKee, in his book Story, takes some pains to explain why this viewpoint is wrong and detrimental, which suggests that he has faced this criticism or objection many times. Telling people how to do things is not the same as telling them what to do. In the creative arts as well as in other things, the old adage applies: Know the rules before you break them.

My adolescent self would have bristled and fought against being told how to do things. I would have rebelled, refused, probably mainly simply not done them. I would have been a pain in the butt and might not have learned much. But if I had received that kind of technical instruction from someone who knew what they were doing, I would at least have perceived that there were proven methods, even if I was rejecting them. Later, I would see that I had fouled myself up to the extent that I had not paid attention.

As things stand, I don't think I missed much in the way of creative education. If I had spent thousands in tuition on a creative-writing degree, I probably would have emerged from the program knowing not much more than when I entered it how to execute an effective creative work. I would have read a lot of stories and novels, and discussed them with my classmates. In screenwriting I would have been trained in technique, and possibly also in playwriting. But fiction? The universities were already heading into the wilderness of postmodernism and Marxism, where, as far as I know, they're still lost.

Some of my best instruction was informal and outside the system. A big influence was the late Harvey Burt, who had been a writer and teacher of writing for most of his adult life. When I was a teenager he gave me my first "how to" book on creative writing: The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, a text on how to write a stageplay, published in 1946. I was thrilled with the book, and got my first experience of drinking cool water to ease my thirst for knowledge of the craft.

I've still got the book. I just pulled it out, and flipped it open. At some point, on some rereading, probably around 1984, I highlighted a few phrases in it. Here's one that I opened it to:

What is a weak character? One who, for any reason, cannot make a decision.

Good stuff. It strikes me even now, today, as I read it again. (Does this mean Hamlet is a weak character?)

Here was a book that told you what kinds of effects you should be striving for as a dramatic writer, and how to achieve them. Fantastic! I downed it eagerly, and started making my first fumbling attempts at organizing my creative work around specific intentions, trying to give them structure.

I'm still at it. Aristotle's Poetics is another excellent "how to" text, not written as such, but maybe all the better for being the work not of an artist but of a thinker--one who identified more with the audience than with the creator. My copy is now liberally highlighted.

art imitates life

I'm reading--indeed, am close to finishing--Aristotle's Poetics. The text runs only 46 pages, plus notes. In that brief space he says a great deal.

The text, or the portion of it that has survived, is devoted mainly to tragic drama, which Aristotle regarded as the highest form of poetry yet devised. But despite the fact that his book is about poetry performed as live musical theater--which was how it was staged in ancient Greece--Aristotle's work is still highly relevant to the storyteller of today. This is because, among all the aspects of tragedy, the one he regarded as most important, and making the largest contribution to the power of a work, was the choice and arrangement of the events depicted: in other words, plotting.

As far as Aristotle was concerned, the tragic poet's number-one concern was storytelling. And while the Poetics was not intended as a handbook for writers, but rather as an analysis of an art form to help in understanding and assessing the quality of specific works, nonetheless it is of great potential benefit to crafters of story. Indeed, Aristotle's Poetics is, I see now, the main source of ideas for Robert McKee's teachings on storytelling. McKee's work is largely a matter of explaining, expanding, illustrating, and adapting Aristotle's ideas to the modern storytelling medium of filmmaking.

The ideas are excellent, and still have that quality of freshness and immediacy that all great and original thinking has, regardless of the passage of time (Aristotle died in 322 BC).

Aristotle starts off by saying that tragic poetry, like all other poetry (and indeed all other types of art), is an imitation--that is, an imitation of things in life. Malcolm chose the word imitation to translate the Greek mimesis, rather than the usual representation, because he feels that this is closer to the sense intended by Aristotle. Whereas a representation of something may not look like the thing represented--a dot on a map might represent a city, for example--an imitation is something intended to resemble the thing imitated. The aesthetic experience is the recognition of the thing imitated in the artist's imitation of it: the better the imitation or depiction, the greater the pleasure experienced by the viewer or audience.

I sense that this distinction is important. I think of how "modern" art arose in the 19th century, leading on to nonfigurative art by the turn of the 20th, when, in painting, not only imitation but also representation went out the window. With Abstract Expressionism, the notion that a painter was trying to depict some external visual object was abandoned; the aim was to "express" something within--to project outward the contents of the painter's psyche, perhaps the collective unconscious.

I believe that in fiction-writing and drama, the turn away from story was part of this same trend toward nonfigurative art. Artists and writers wanted to free themselves from the shackles of tradition and do things that were utterly new.

The art may have been unshackled and new, but how effective was it? Through study I have learned how to appreciate and enjoy some nonfigurative art. Once you've learned some of the underlying ideas, there is a certain mind-expanding pleasure in regarding the cubist works of Picasso, for instance. But I can't say that a cubist work like Picasso's "Still Life with Carafe and Candlestick" (1909) has ever struck me with the immediate, visceral sense of power and enjoyment that the painters of the animals on the cave-walls at Lascaux and Altamira were able to generate across a gulf of 30,000 years. And I feel sure that if Picasso's work survives 30,000 years, any proper enjoyment of it will require a guidebook--so we'd better hope one of those survives along with it.

Aristotle is saying that art imitates life, and that in viewing or appreciating such art, we experience the pleasure of recognition, which is at bottom the pleasure of learning. This does not mean that art is or should be didactic, but that in recognizing our world in the forms created by an artist, we necessarily learn about it. There's no need for art to preach; it's enough for it to exist.

So then: the function of art is to imitate life, and the writer's primary tool for such imitation is the sequence of the events of life: story. The difference between a good, well-told story and a feeble, poorly told one is the difference between a successful work of art and a failed one.

into Poetics

Still dealing with the wonky text-input here on Blogger. I discovered that I am not alone, but that others who use the Firefox browser on the Windows 98 platform have this problem. I guess I'm probably hooped.

Yesterday was a mini-Christmas (and quite cool outside, as it happens). I received two shipments from Amazon.com: three books by Aristotle--the Poetics, the Politics, and the Metaphysics--and one book by the 18th-century Scottish statistician William Playfair, entitled An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations, Designed to Shew How the Prosperity of the British Empire May Be Prolonged.

I was delighted with them all. Even though I mainly, for reasons of economy, buy used books, I especially love to get new ones. But the one I was particularly looking forward to was Aristotle's Poetics, a slim Penguin Classic of about 140 pages, most of which consists of the introduction by the translator, Malcolm Heath. Letting the others wait for the time being, I launched my reading period with this book.

I was finally driven to buy the Poetics through my research into the field of literary genre--and especially of my own current genre, epic. Robert McKee lists the Poetics as one of the key reference works for the screenwriter (or storyteller generally). Apparently Aristotle was the first to apply an inquiring mind to the question of how stories work--what are their parts, how do they fit together, and how does the whole thing function? I've read very little Aristotle over the years, but as I have become exposed to his ideas I have increasingly come to see him as a bold, original thinker whose ideas are still striking and fresh today. What a treat to have a whole (little) book by him devoted to the art of literature.

Aristotle was known in the ancient world as an excellent prose stylist; his writing was considered exemplary. Unfortunately, none of his published work has survived (or has been found). All the surviving works of Aristotle are of the nature of notes, possibly lecture notes. They are intended for students, perhaps only senior students, not for a general audience. As a result, the writing tends to be cryptic and difficult for the new reader.

So Malcolm Heath starts off this translation with a lengthy introduction, in which he recapitulates the essence of Aristotle's argument, fleshing it out with examples and warding off potential miscontructions. Wanting to get right to the text, I was going to skip the introduction and read it afterwards, but I found that it is too good to miss, so I am reading it first after all.

Already, after just a few pages, I've encountered many striking and provocative ideas. How about this direct quote from Aristotle's Metaphysics, with which Heath launches the main part of the introduction:

All human beings by nature desire knowledge.

We all need knowledge and use it, but Aristotle means more than this: that we seek knowledge for its own sake, and find the acquisition of it pleasurable in its own right. Animals might need and use knowledge, in the sense of learning what to do in a particular situation, but humans enjoy it. I know this is true for me.

As I understand it, Aristotle goes on to show how the arts arise from this human desire for and enjoyment of knowledge. All the arts, including the art of poetry, operate by imitating objects of experience. The experience of aesthetic enjoyment happens when we recognize the imitated object in its imitated or represented form--for noticing similarities between things is exactly knowledge consists of, at bottom. He's saying that the enjoyment of a work of art is essentially an experience of learning. Fantastic!

At least, that's my effort to summarize the first page. I'll be reading every page, you may be sure.