Story and Message Update

I just wanted to post a quick update to this post with this link to an interesting post on genre writers and the lack of respect they get. I'm particularly struck by the idea that once a work of science fiction becomes "literature," it is no longer considered science fiction...

Story and message

A long time has passed since this post in response to some of my statements about my bookshelves. And since then, my opinion has changed.

When I wrote the original post, I still thought of myself primarily as a critic - someone who studies books. And the study of books, at least the academic study, is based on secondary characteristics. We ignore the story in order to study what it means and what's going on behind it. So philosophy seems more important than fantasy: fantasy books are based on story, and if there's a message or theme, it's secondary.

And now I will say: this is as it should be in fiction. The story should be most important, and anything else that we see in the book comes through the story.

So what's changed? In the past three months I've started writing stories of my own. I've stopped thinking of myself as a critic and started thinking of myself as a writer. I've tried to learn what makes a good story. And good stories are not driven by theme. Good stories are driven by real, confusing, inconsistent characters, who don't always make the right choices and don't always understand the choices they make. It's not a writer's job to make their characters' choices clear so that they express the 'right' philosophy. Characters take on a life of their own, and express a philosophy as they learn it through their experiences - sort of like we all do, every day.

So: mea culpa, and long live the story!

Forgetting Who

Yesterday I was reading a short story – a work in progress by a friend. The passages that impressed me most absolutely blew me out of the water. They were so good that I forgot all about the author; I forgot my friend had written them.

This observation raises two related points about the editing process that I'd like to think about further: The first is that I read a work in progress much differently from how I read a finished or published work – and it's not the material itself, but my readerly attitude. Reading as an editor means that I can hope to influence the work, to shape it somewhat to my own desires. And so I read quite aggressively; and I keep on reworking the thing in my mind as I go. I try to get ahead of the story. I think especially hard about what every line implies, and I catch myself rereading half a sentence that appears not to make sense when if I would just read the sentence's second half, I'd see how clear it really is. How rude of me!

The second thing I'd like to think about is whether losing track of the author really is a measure of quality in the writing of fiction. Is it analogous to the quality of a performance by a famous actor during which the audience forgets who the actor really is? Yes! – say I. But also no. An author's distinctive voice can be an asset. A storyteller needn't disappear in order to tell a story well. A narratorial voice doesn't convey the guts of a story or novel in anything like the way an actor conveys the world in which she plays. It's also problematic to suggest to my writing friends that their work would be better if they didn't appear to be narrating as themselves. I can't think of a good reason this should be the case.

Ultimately (I've hardly begun this sentence, and I already know I'm getting into trouble) a reader wants to forget herself, not the author; her own reality rather than the fact of the story's being written. ("Oh, that sounds pretty good," I say.) And yet the books that have influenced me the most are those that speak to me just as I appear to myself and make me see my own world as though it is deeply tied to the one I'm reading about; a contradiction abides.

The Tour de Bookcases

I got married two months ago, and moved into my first home with my husband two weeks later. When we moved, we decided – in our first big step as a married couple! – to combine our books. This act of combination is one of the most visible signs of our married state. Whenever I walk past a bookshelf, I see my books mixed in with his – divided by topic and subject, rather than putative ownership. Of course, the previous sentence shows the unfamiliarity of this state to me: I still refer to “my books” and “his books” rather than simply “ours.” We have kept all the duplicate copies of books that we own – how could we get rid of a copy that one of us feels an attachment to? The books that we brought into this marriage hold memories. The cheap paperback copies of “The Lord of the Rings” are the ones in which I first discovered the magic of Tolkien’s stories. The textbooks each mark an important moment in our college experiences. My books hold memories from my life that my husband cannot share, so they must be in some sense “mine” not “ours.”

But the books are nonetheless combined on the shelves. A brief tour of the books in our (small, one-bedroom) apartment:

Shelves in the living room hold hymnals and books of religion and philosophy. They contain amusing juxtapositions of content: the Qur’an sits by the Marx–Engels Reader; the Bhagavad-Gita two shelves above the Hebrew dictionary.

Elsewhere: books of music theory and history, from my husband’s college coursework, tucked onto a bottom shelf next to the stereo, and a small shelf of cookbooks tucked next to the kitchen. In the hallway, the “work” books (mathematics and literary theory); in the bedroom, the novels (mostly fantasy).

Our books describe us: they expose our studies, our interests, our values. They also expose the values we think we should project: there is a reason the religion and philosophy books are in the living room and the fantasy novels in the bedroom. While I am a great believer in the importance of fantasy and fairy-tales, putting those books in the living room would make me feel a need to explain them to all of our guests: “Yes, these are children’s books. They are ‘easy’ to read; they don’t have the weight of tradition. Yes, they are escapist. But is that so wrong?” I love the novels I read, but I am still somewhat embarrassed by them. I don’t read them to discover fundamental truths about the world, but simply for entertainment. The religion and philosophy books, on the other hand, are in the living room to convey, “We are Christians. We are proud of our faith, and want you to know about it. But we are also thinkers. We read and study and learn. Our faith is intellectual, as well as evangelical.”

The combining of our books mirrors the combining of our lives. Our shared values allow us to combine our books, to decide what image we want to project from our library. I don’t want to sound like a sappy newlywed (although I am one), but one of the joys of marriage is illustrated by the enlightenment that comes from juxtaposing books that come from different homes on a single shelf. These books have more to say together than apart.