Tag: Fiction

Is this a story?

“Teacher Man“, by Frank McCourt, page 224.

The class is commenting a poem (“My Papa’s Waltz“, by Theodore Roethke). A student called Ann speaks.

Teacher Man by Frank McCourt
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt

That’s one thing, Mr. McCourt, but we have to be careful. If you say something negative about anything, English teachers take it personally and get mad. My sister got in trouble with an English professor at Cornell over the way she interpreted one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He said she was off the mark entirely, and she said a sonnet can be read a hundred different ways, otherwise why would you see a thousand Shakespeare criticism books on the library shelves, and he got pissed off and told her to see him in his office. This time he was nice to her and she backed off and said maybe he was right and went out to dinner with him in Ithaca and I got pissed off at her for giving in like that. Now we only say hello to each other.

Why don’t you write about that, Ann? It’s an unusual story, you and your sister not talking because of a Shakespeare sonnet.

I could, but I would have to get into the whole sonnet thing, what he said, what she said, and, since I hate getting into deeper meanings, and she’s not talking to me anyway, I don’t have the whole story.

David?

Make it up. There are three characters here, Ann and her sister and the professor, and there’s the sonnet that’s causing all the trouble. You could have a hell of a time with that sonnet. You could change the names, get away from the sonnet, say it’s a big fight about “My Papa’s Waltz“, and next thing is you have a story they want to turn into a movie.

Jonathan?

No offense to Ann but I can’t think of anything more boring than a story about a college student arguing with a professor over a sonnet. I mean, Jesus, excuse the language, this world is falling to pieces, people starving, et cetera, and these people have nothing else to do but argue over a poem. I’d never buy that story and I wouldn’t go to the movie if they let me take my whole family for free.

Who’s right?

There’s a story here

Angela's Ashes

'Tis

Teacher Man

Frank McCourt's trilogy

Frank McCourt ended his career as a teacher of creative writing without having written a single book. They would only come afterwards. Reading Teacher Man, one would think that it was through his pupils that he learned that the best stories are often hidden behind everyday events.

His students tended to understimate their own experiences as writing material. Who cares about my life, they would think. In this monographic week devoted to McCourt we will review some of the scenes these young boys and girls shared in his class, and we’ll dig for those stories that McCourt brings to us even though their own protagonists could not see them.

But today we’ll talk about McCourt himself and where he found his stories. I might spoil some details, but the books are portraits and not plot-oriented, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Last Friday I already summarized what each novel is about – they’re all strictly autobiographical. But there’s a nice detail that weaves them together.

The first novel ends when, after many tribulations, teenage Frank finally manages to find a passage out of Ireland.

I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of American twinkling. He says, My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn’t this a great country altogether?
Thus ends the chapter and apparently the book. However, when you turn the page, you find a final chapter, number XIX, whose full text I copy here:
‘Tis.

With this last sentence, McCourt (the author and the character) makes an assertion which is a wish: that it be, that America will be the promised land he’s longed for. Those two words encompass a whole story, from the hoping to the checking and we don’t know if to realization or disappointment. That’s why these two words are the title of the sequel, which tells this story.

Last week I finished the third volume, Teacher Man, whose ending follows a similar pattern. After teaching his final class before retiring, as he walks away along the corridor, a voice calls:

Hey, Mr. McCourt, you should write a book.

After passing the page, the final chapter reads:

I’ll try.

Isn’t that sentence a wohle story? That could have been the title of a fourth volume telling the event after his retiring, the process of writing Angela’s Ashes and getting it published, the massive reception, the success, the incredulity of the author himself, encoumbered from high school teacher to media star. Isn’t that quite a story? Frank McCourt knew how to find it, and surely only his demise kept him from telling it.

Death will be a recurring theme this week. For now, start ordering these books and asking yourself if your life couldn’t be good enough for several novels as well.

Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt
Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt wrote three novels before dying last year at the age of 78.

The first one, Angela’s Ashes, narrates his miserable Irish childhood in the slums of Limmerick, the opression of his Catholic upbringing and his fight to achieve the dream of sailing to America. It won the Pulitzer Prize and it makes a thoroughly enjoyable reading (not long ago I related how I got hold of my copy).

The second one, ‘Tis, picks up at his arrival upon the new continent and tells of his search for employment, for flats, for a place in the world, for love, for a respectable career. It tries to repeat the formula but it lacks the spark and falls in nowhere land.

The third one, Teacher Man, digs in his experiences as a secondary scholl teacher of English and, for the last few years, creative writing. Both the novel and the character lack a purpose, but both seem to find it towards the last third of the book, which contains the most intense passages of the last two books and is the reason we bring it here. Both McCourt’s work and his advice are perfect matches of Brenda Ueland’s philosophy in If You Want To Write, and perfect contrast with megalomaniac storylines as we discussed them only last week.

We’re going to devote the whole of next week, Monday to Friday, to comment upon several fragments of his work and discuss, through them, the use of real experience and autobiographical elements in fiction.

Another kind of “in media res”

Today we get a suggestion from our friend Llabrac.

I was listening to an interview with the Spanish author Jerónimo Tristante on La Rosa de los Vientos (the program from August 2nd). He believes we have been educated audiovisually, so when they tell him that his novels are very cinematic, he takes that as a compliment.

He explained that he often starts his novels, like so many American movies do, with a “seed story” that serves as an introduction to the main character. It’s a similar concept to starting in the middle of the action, but with events that are not necessarily related to the plot of the novel itself. I found it interesting and probably easier than beginnings in media res.  You put a hook on the reader, introduce the characters and, after the resolution of the episode, are free to start with the novel itself.

While this is nothing new, I think it is a very good suggestion to keep in mind. Have you written anything with that structure?

Multiple viewpoint characters

Yesterday’s question by KHaL, with his two narrators, brought to mind a novel I tried to read 12 years ago, “Atlas de Geografía Humana” by Almudena Grandes (who, coincidentally, is presenting a new novel these days). I had enjoyed her previous work, “Malena es un nombre de tango“, enough to give her another go.

“Atlas…” tells the story of four women. If I remember well (I don’t have the book at hand), each chapter has a first person narrator, though it swtitches through all four of them. If I don’t remember well, then it might be a third-person omniscient limited narrator. So let’s talk  about “viewpoint character”, which fits both situations. One way or the other, we have something to learn here, from somebody else’s mistakes.

The problem was that characters did not identify themselves at the beginning of each chapter, so you had no idea who was speaking now. The idea was, I presume, that one doesn’t call oneself by name when one thinks. The reader should be able to identify the narrator by context. Well, call me stupid, but I was unable. All four women were interchangeable to me, because I never had the time to learn each other’s traits before I was mixing them all up. I never finished the book.

George R. R. Martin has created an absurdly large cast for his “A Song of Ice and Fire“, but at least each chapter is headed by the name of the viewpoint character, so at least you know who it’s referring to, which is about the lowest level of comprehension you need. If you have forgotten who it is due to the excess of names or because he hasn’t turned up for five hundred pages, well that’s an entirely different matter.

So you see where I’m heading to, right?

A writer spends many months, normally years, developing characters and plots for their novel, until they become more familiar than their family. Readers, however, will rarely dive so deep, and might even let days or weeks pass between reading one chapter and the week, or even worse, between paragraphs. It’s not like we have to spell everything out for them: readers like to be treated like intelligent creatures. But sometimes a minimum amount of redundancy can be healthy: we don’t like to be treated like we have nothing else to do with our lives apart from learning your characters’ family trees. As usual, balance is the key, and the key to balance is craft and intuition.

Unbearable narrators

Grumpy & Grouchy
Grumpy & Grouchy

KHaL sends this question in:

I’m writing a story centered around two antagonical characters. All the narration is in first person from the perspective of each of them, and a doubt arises: one of the characters is quite pedantic, should this be reflected in the segments narrated from his point of view? In other words, even if the narration is first person, can -or should- his expression depart from his personality so that -for example in this case- the narration is not unpleasant due to the way he is? Would that be coherent even if character and narrator are the same one?

What you suggest cannot be done*. A character:

  • cannot be two characters
  • cannot have two ways of expressing himself
  • cannot soften his discourse just so that the reader likes him

Having said that, a character:

  • may want to appear tougher than he really is
  • may be disliked by other narrators, who would portray him as worse than he really is
  • may have a split personality
  • may evolve from unsufferablee to loveble through his experiences within the story
  • may try to be nice to the person to whom he is telling his story, in order to get their favour (explicit reader)
  • does not need to be likeable (see Lolita)

In other words: *What you suggest cannot be done… without a justification within the story.

Great expectations

I’ve mentioned Scriptshadow in the past, so I won’t introduce Carson Reeves again. Last Monday he reviewed the script for Vanishing On 7th Street, a horror film whose trailer is already available:

As you can see, everybody disappears form the face of the earth, with the rare exception of our protagonists. There’s also something strange going on with darkness, as they can only trust the lights they carry themselves. Pure claustrophoby, and a powerful premise.

Carson starts off his review by wondering, too powerful?

The Vanishing on 7th Street is a script that starts off strong but, like a lot of these scripts, gets swallowed up in its own ambition. The ultra high-concept premise lures us in like fresh garbage to a family of raccoons. The question is, is the premise *too* high concept? Wha? Huh? Buh? ‘How can that even be possible’ you ask?? A premise is too high concept when no matter what you do with the story, it will never be as interesting as the concept itself. In other words, you bite off more than you can chew. And unfortunately, I think that’s the case with Vanishing.

The idea deserves some thought. Only last night was I talking precisely about this, as I’ve recently finished 1984 and my partner is reading Brave New World. Such classics both suffer from the same unarguable flaw: once the initial premise is exhausted, the plot grows thinner by the page.

We’ve seeen the same problem on TV, a few years ago on The 4400 (forty four hundred missing people reappear simultaneously together without aging a day or memories of the missing time) and more recently on the big flop of the season, Flashforward (every person on the planet faints simultaneously and dreams a scene of their own future exactly six months later).

Of course the concepts are powerful enough to engage the reader’s imagination (or the viewer’s, who’ll pay their cinema ticket or sit in front of the TV every week, willing to witness the grand show) – but is it not a pity that, by starting with the climax, we all end up disappointed?

If the concept that sends your story into motion is the best thing about your script, then you only have one-fourth of a script. What if aliens invaded our planet tomorrow? Okay, great concept. But then what? How do you keep that interesting for the 100 minutes after they invade? If you want to see how bad someone can screw this up, go rent Independence Day. Just make sure to also rent a gun, as you’ll want to shoot yourself by the midpoint. I think the key to these high concept ideas is making sure you have a story ready on the personal level after you hit your audience with the hook.

Indeed the big question is, how do I avoid that problem? With interesting characters? Through solid plotting? But of course! Shouldn’t those elements be present in every story? Yes, but we raised the bar too high for ourselves, how can I come up with an ending that’s worthy of my beginning? Well, you need to find elements that are just as powerful. Lost may have disappointed many of us towards the end, but during six seasons it managed to reinvent itself with complex characters, unexpected twists and narrative schemes of all colours and shapes. Blindness turned itself inside out by undoing a world tragedy and revealing a personal one. Masterful!

So here’s an exercise just as powerful: how would you save Vanishing on 7th Street from falling into this trap? How would you improve a book the size and importance of 1984? How would you get, out of these premises above, more than the authors who created them? Or, to present another forthcoming blockbuster, what would you do with the premise of Skyline?