Meta: On Structure and Stories
Feb. 26th, 2006 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiI want to talk about structure.
By "structure," I mean the methods by which story elements are placed in relation to each other.
The most obvious type of structure is narrative structure, or plot. (Bear with me, flist. I know you know this stuff, but I want it all down for completeness' sake.) "The king died and the queen died of grief" places two story elements--in this case, actions or events--in causal relationship.
In my mind, no matter what Forster might say (this example being taken from his 1927 work Aspects of the Novel as an example of a story), "The king died and the queen died of grief" is not a story. Not because its length--it is more than possible to tell a complete story in a sentence, as I plan to show--but, still, because its structure. The "of grief" tacked on the end of the sentence does place the two events in a type of relationship, a causal relationship, but it is not the type of relationship that makes for a story. Instead, it is a chronicle, a sort of history.
A story represents a more complex type of narrative structure. At its most basic, this structure represents three elements--conflict, a crisis, and a resolution. (A quick Google search informs me that structuralist semioticians have actually detected 33 different elements. Ah, theorists, how I love you and want to become one of you.) If you want to dumb it down even further you can say that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Note that "The king died and the queen died of grief" does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At most, it has a beginning and an end, or a beginning and a middle.
"The king died, the queen grieved, and then the queen died" does have a beginning, a middle, and an end--and lo! And behold! There is a story!
"Now, wait a minute," I hear you saying. "That says the same exact thing! You just changed the wording!" And that's exactly my point. We're talking about structure, remember? The content, what is happening, is the same, but the way that content is communicated to the reader, the form, is changed. And it is the form that makes the text a story, with a conflict (the king's death), a crisis (the queen's grief), and a resolution (the queen's death).
Okay, not exactly groundbreaking stuff, and it gets much more complicated than that (most stories are longer than a sentence, obviously), but that's the fundamental basics of storytelling.
When we turn to fiction, it's usually because we want to be told a story. As Forster put it, with as much regret as anything else, "Yes -- O dear yes -- the novel tells a story." (Does anyone have the longer quote? I couldn't find it on google and all my writing books are at home.) And without a doubt, whether in the form of a short story or a novel, the story is the most commonly encountered narrative form in contemporary mainstream literature.
The thing is, it's not always necessary to tell a story when writing short fiction. Here's a short fictional work which does not tell a story:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
karabair?)
Here we have a situation which is, presumably, fictional. It has dynamic, interesting characters who interact in intriguing ways. And it's not a story, because it's not structured as a story. But no one would argue that it's not a work of art, since it's not trying to be a story--it's trying to be a sonnet. It's about something else, something different, and it's damned good at what it is. (Shakespeare is always a safe example.)
Much of the fanfic I see on LJ does not consist of stories, although I do have to say that the better writers with whom I am familiar are more likely to utilize story form at least a large portion of the time. This is not a criticism; I'm not saying that these people should be writing stories. Indeed, the way that fandom utilizes non-story forms in the production of its art is one of the things that I love about it. I love the word "fic" and how freeing it is in the absence of the demand that one must write a story.
Even more common is fic which technically has a plot--X and Y are attracted to each other, X propositions Y, X and Y have sex--but where to focus too much on the narrative structure would be to ignore the truly interesting ways the fic is functioning, because the story isn't really the point.
But none of this is a reason to ignore structure--indeed, it's a reason to talk about it all that much more, and so it's amazing to me that in the midst of all the meta we discuss structure so little. Because while it isn't necessary to structure your fic as a story, it is necessary to have some type of structure in place. A fic without structure, which isn't sure if it is a scene or a vignette or a character piece or a PWP or a story is going to be bad, and indeed next to bad prose, I'd say that flawed structure is the biggest problem I see in bad fanfiction.
But for some reason, despite structural concerns being so crucial, somehow we consistently overlook them. To borrow a somewhat Orwellian (not in the dystopian sense) image, we see things like prose and structure as a sort of windowpane to the content. If the prose dirties the window and we can't see through to look at our heroes, we get frustrated, but we don't seem to mind so much if there's one or two cracks in the window. But this ignores the fact that in the hand of a truly gifted writer, the medium is the message, and prose, structure, and content all work together. The window is itself the work of art. As evidence I'll offer everything thatwisdomeagle has ever written.
There are undoubtedly a huge number of factors at work conspiring to create this fertile field for non-story fiction, and one of my purposes in writing this behemoth is to throw it out to my flist and to any other potential readers what these factors might be. But I've recently read (And wrote a paper on) the short stories of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, and this got me thinking, because there are a lot of similarities between the way that Babel structures his stories as fanfic writers do, without a clear, conventionally delineated conflict, crisis, and resolution.
First of all, fanfiction works are deeply intertextual. This is built into the definition: every work of fanfiction references a source text or texts (however defined). Even if a fic can stand alone and be enjoyed by those who are unfamiliar with the source text, it only communicates its deepest nexus of meanings when read in relation with its souce. We're writing about someone else's characters, often in someone else's settings using someone else's scenarios, and in so doing we produce a sort of comment on the source text. In addition to this, a fanfic writer can often make assumptions about his or her audience that a mainstream writer wouldn't be able to, and thus make the story intertextual with their experiences. We insert in-jokes, references, and allusions. Our works exist in a sort of nebulous relation to other fanfiction works. Lastly, many non-narrative works are the product of ficathons, which have an even deeper notion of intertextuality and non-narrative structure--in the form of requests--than even "normal" fanfiction.
(I know thatcathexys has also written about and expressed interest in the way that this intertextuality changes the forms and objectives of fanfiction as contrasted with mainstream literature.)
This intertextuality provides some powerful tools to the fanfiction writer. There is not so much need to have a full conflict, crisis, and resolution front-and-center in the fic because the work alreay exists in relation to a text with a full narrative arc. In a sense, the entire source text is already built into the structure of the fic, and the fanfic writer is then free to graft on whatever elements he or she desires. A mere description of a rock can take on so many meanings in a fanfic that the fic will be deeply emotionally and thematically satisfying, while if a mainstream writer tried to do the same we'd all be wondering why we should care about the rock--unless it is a rock already engrained into our cultural consciousness, such as Stonehenge.
Babel's stories function in much the same way. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Babel's stories are intertextual with each other, written in cycles. Something which seems random and inexplicable might take on new meaning when read with another story in the same cycle, even though structurally each story is self-contained. Babel's stories also operate intertextually in relation to Russian history, becoming a certain type of historical fanfic, so to speak. It contains references to real people, places, and events.
Secondly, many fanfiction works operate lyrically rather than narratively. This is sort of a cop-out, because by "lyrically" I mean "not utilizing a narrative structure" so basically what we have is a tautology. But I don't know a better way to describe what I mean. I guess it comes down to that good fanfiction, like Babel's stories or Shakespeare's sonnets, always has some type of structure in place, even if it isn't plot.
(Perhaps this audience would be more familiar with LeGuin's The Ones who Walk away from Omelas, which also is an example of what I mean by functioning lyrically rather than narratively, than Babel's work.)
Okay, because there is never too much navel-gazing, I want to discuss some of the ways in which a fic can utilize a non-narrative (i.e. "lyric") structure and still function in a way which seems unified and whole (or else deliberately and satisfyingly fractured, which is its own type of wholeness). When I sit down to write a fic, I ask myself--sometimes unconsciously, but more and more these days I do it consciously--whether the fic is going to be a story, and if not what type of structure I'm going to use. Note that these structures are simply the ones I use, and that even the names I am going to assign them are more or less arbitrary: for example, I'm sure there's more than one good way to structure a, say, character piece.
In my experience, while a fic doesn't need that conflict/crisis/resolution structure in order to work, it does need to put the reader through some type of journey, the way that Babel, Shakespeare, and LeGuin all do. One way to do this is to make the reader to do a large part of the work. Provide a reader with three scenes and leave it up to them to draw the parallels. Once they do, they'll have a complete-feeling reading experience because the three portions of the story will no longer seem static in relation to each other, even though narratively they are all each self-contained. I use this technique in my fic Triangle, for instance.
Another technique is to position the reader's journey inside the thoughts of a character. This is perilous; I rememberwisdomeagle reporting a comment by one of her flisters that one should always avoid fic with the summary "X thinks about Y," and I can see the reasoning. But one can pull this sort of fic off, as long as there are things happening in addition to the character thinking, "objective correllatives" which reflect what is going on in the character's head back at him or her without being too obvious about it. I use this technique in my Shepherd Book ficlets, because his character lends himself to introspective angst; the best of these, in my opinion, is Conversion.
There are different techniques that work for different types of structures, and these techniques can be learned. I'm still picking up new techniques, and I'm curious what techniques other people use to structure their fics, because I want to be able to expand my own skills.
In general, no matter what structure one chooses, though, one has to think about theme more than if one were writing a story. In a story one can take care of the plot and the theme will take care of itself, but in a fic without a conventional plot the theme will ultimately be the major unifying element. One needs to stop and think what type of overall message the fic as a whole communicates, because otherwise there might not be one and the fic as a whole will just be a mess.
I wish there were more critical discussion of structure in fandom. I know that some of my fanfic are deeply structurally flawed, but no one seems to really care--they're much more interested in the content. But what does it take to make a story about a first kiss--which is 500 words and consists pretty much just of that kiss--work as a fic? How is the structure of a WIP different? After all, aliz_marcs epic is not the same beast as a wisdomeagle ficlet. They are each masters of their respective forms, the best at what they do, but take that structure away from them and watch them flounder. I have to admit that this is particularly amusing--is this perverse of me--in watching liz_marcs try to produce a fic under, say, 20,000 words. (She's done it before and done it well, but she's still fun to watch whenever she attempts it.) But my point is--well, I'm not sure what my point is, in the end, because this meta has no structure.
ETA: (Mainly for my record keeping) On Weak Endings
By "structure," I mean the methods by which story elements are placed in relation to each other.
The most obvious type of structure is narrative structure, or plot. (Bear with me, flist. I know you know this stuff, but I want it all down for completeness' sake.) "The king died and the queen died of grief" places two story elements--in this case, actions or events--in causal relationship.
In my mind, no matter what Forster might say (this example being taken from his 1927 work Aspects of the Novel as an example of a story), "The king died and the queen died of grief" is not a story. Not because its length--it is more than possible to tell a complete story in a sentence, as I plan to show--but, still, because its structure. The "of grief" tacked on the end of the sentence does place the two events in a type of relationship, a causal relationship, but it is not the type of relationship that makes for a story. Instead, it is a chronicle, a sort of history.
A story represents a more complex type of narrative structure. At its most basic, this structure represents three elements--conflict, a crisis, and a resolution. (A quick Google search informs me that structuralist semioticians have actually detected 33 different elements. Ah, theorists, how I love you and want to become one of you.) If you want to dumb it down even further you can say that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Note that "The king died and the queen died of grief" does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At most, it has a beginning and an end, or a beginning and a middle.
"The king died, the queen grieved, and then the queen died" does have a beginning, a middle, and an end--and lo! And behold! There is a story!
"Now, wait a minute," I hear you saying. "That says the same exact thing! You just changed the wording!" And that's exactly my point. We're talking about structure, remember? The content, what is happening, is the same, but the way that content is communicated to the reader, the form, is changed. And it is the form that makes the text a story, with a conflict (the king's death), a crisis (the queen's grief), and a resolution (the queen's death).
Okay, not exactly groundbreaking stuff, and it gets much more complicated than that (most stories are longer than a sentence, obviously), but that's the fundamental basics of storytelling.
When we turn to fiction, it's usually because we want to be told a story. As Forster put it, with as much regret as anything else, "Yes -- O dear yes -- the novel tells a story." (Does anyone have the longer quote? I couldn't find it on google and all my writing books are at home.) And without a doubt, whether in the form of a short story or a novel, the story is the most commonly encountered narrative form in contemporary mainstream literature.
The thing is, it's not always necessary to tell a story when writing short fiction. Here's a short fictional work which does not tell a story:
O THOU, my lovely boy, who in thy power(Erm, that sonnet only has 12 lines. Interesting. Anybody know what's up with that?
Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st
Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st;
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, 5
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure: 10
Her audit, though delay’d, answer’d must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
karabair?)Here we have a situation which is, presumably, fictional. It has dynamic, interesting characters who interact in intriguing ways. And it's not a story, because it's not structured as a story. But no one would argue that it's not a work of art, since it's not trying to be a story--it's trying to be a sonnet. It's about something else, something different, and it's damned good at what it is. (Shakespeare is always a safe example.)
Much of the fanfic I see on LJ does not consist of stories, although I do have to say that the better writers with whom I am familiar are more likely to utilize story form at least a large portion of the time. This is not a criticism; I'm not saying that these people should be writing stories. Indeed, the way that fandom utilizes non-story forms in the production of its art is one of the things that I love about it. I love the word "fic" and how freeing it is in the absence of the demand that one must write a story.
Even more common is fic which technically has a plot--X and Y are attracted to each other, X propositions Y, X and Y have sex--but where to focus too much on the narrative structure would be to ignore the truly interesting ways the fic is functioning, because the story isn't really the point.
But none of this is a reason to ignore structure--indeed, it's a reason to talk about it all that much more, and so it's amazing to me that in the midst of all the meta we discuss structure so little. Because while it isn't necessary to structure your fic as a story, it is necessary to have some type of structure in place. A fic without structure, which isn't sure if it is a scene or a vignette or a character piece or a PWP or a story is going to be bad, and indeed next to bad prose, I'd say that flawed structure is the biggest problem I see in bad fanfiction.
But for some reason, despite structural concerns being so crucial, somehow we consistently overlook them. To borrow a somewhat Orwellian (not in the dystopian sense) image, we see things like prose and structure as a sort of windowpane to the content. If the prose dirties the window and we can't see through to look at our heroes, we get frustrated, but we don't seem to mind so much if there's one or two cracks in the window. But this ignores the fact that in the hand of a truly gifted writer, the medium is the message, and prose, structure, and content all work together. The window is itself the work of art. As evidence I'll offer everything that
wisdomeagle has ever written.There are undoubtedly a huge number of factors at work conspiring to create this fertile field for non-story fiction, and one of my purposes in writing this behemoth is to throw it out to my flist and to any other potential readers what these factors might be. But I've recently read (And wrote a paper on) the short stories of the Russian writer Isaac Babel, and this got me thinking, because there are a lot of similarities between the way that Babel structures his stories as fanfic writers do, without a clear, conventionally delineated conflict, crisis, and resolution.
First of all, fanfiction works are deeply intertextual. This is built into the definition: every work of fanfiction references a source text or texts (however defined). Even if a fic can stand alone and be enjoyed by those who are unfamiliar with the source text, it only communicates its deepest nexus of meanings when read in relation with its souce. We're writing about someone else's characters, often in someone else's settings using someone else's scenarios, and in so doing we produce a sort of comment on the source text. In addition to this, a fanfic writer can often make assumptions about his or her audience that a mainstream writer wouldn't be able to, and thus make the story intertextual with their experiences. We insert in-jokes, references, and allusions. Our works exist in a sort of nebulous relation to other fanfiction works. Lastly, many non-narrative works are the product of ficathons, which have an even deeper notion of intertextuality and non-narrative structure--in the form of requests--than even "normal" fanfiction.
(I know that
cathexys has also written about and expressed interest in the way that this intertextuality changes the forms and objectives of fanfiction as contrasted with mainstream literature.)This intertextuality provides some powerful tools to the fanfiction writer. There is not so much need to have a full conflict, crisis, and resolution front-and-center in the fic because the work alreay exists in relation to a text with a full narrative arc. In a sense, the entire source text is already built into the structure of the fic, and the fanfic writer is then free to graft on whatever elements he or she desires. A mere description of a rock can take on so many meanings in a fanfic that the fic will be deeply emotionally and thematically satisfying, while if a mainstream writer tried to do the same we'd all be wondering why we should care about the rock--unless it is a rock already engrained into our cultural consciousness, such as Stonehenge.
Babel's stories function in much the same way. Like Shakespeare's sonnets, Babel's stories are intertextual with each other, written in cycles. Something which seems random and inexplicable might take on new meaning when read with another story in the same cycle, even though structurally each story is self-contained. Babel's stories also operate intertextually in relation to Russian history, becoming a certain type of historical fanfic, so to speak. It contains references to real people, places, and events.
Secondly, many fanfiction works operate lyrically rather than narratively. This is sort of a cop-out, because by "lyrically" I mean "not utilizing a narrative structure" so basically what we have is a tautology. But I don't know a better way to describe what I mean. I guess it comes down to that good fanfiction, like Babel's stories or Shakespeare's sonnets, always has some type of structure in place, even if it isn't plot.
(Perhaps this audience would be more familiar with LeGuin's The Ones who Walk away from Omelas, which also is an example of what I mean by functioning lyrically rather than narratively, than Babel's work.)
Okay, because there is never too much navel-gazing, I want to discuss some of the ways in which a fic can utilize a non-narrative (i.e. "lyric") structure and still function in a way which seems unified and whole (or else deliberately and satisfyingly fractured, which is its own type of wholeness). When I sit down to write a fic, I ask myself--sometimes unconsciously, but more and more these days I do it consciously--whether the fic is going to be a story, and if not what type of structure I'm going to use. Note that these structures are simply the ones I use, and that even the names I am going to assign them are more or less arbitrary: for example, I'm sure there's more than one good way to structure a, say, character piece.
In my experience, while a fic doesn't need that conflict/crisis/resolution structure in order to work, it does need to put the reader through some type of journey, the way that Babel, Shakespeare, and LeGuin all do. One way to do this is to make the reader to do a large part of the work. Provide a reader with three scenes and leave it up to them to draw the parallels. Once they do, they'll have a complete-feeling reading experience because the three portions of the story will no longer seem static in relation to each other, even though narratively they are all each self-contained. I use this technique in my fic Triangle, for instance.
Another technique is to position the reader's journey inside the thoughts of a character. This is perilous; I remember
wisdomeagle reporting a comment by one of her flisters that one should always avoid fic with the summary "X thinks about Y," and I can see the reasoning. But one can pull this sort of fic off, as long as there are things happening in addition to the character thinking, "objective correllatives" which reflect what is going on in the character's head back at him or her without being too obvious about it. I use this technique in my Shepherd Book ficlets, because his character lends himself to introspective angst; the best of these, in my opinion, is Conversion.There are different techniques that work for different types of structures, and these techniques can be learned. I'm still picking up new techniques, and I'm curious what techniques other people use to structure their fics, because I want to be able to expand my own skills.
In general, no matter what structure one chooses, though, one has to think about theme more than if one were writing a story. In a story one can take care of the plot and the theme will take care of itself, but in a fic without a conventional plot the theme will ultimately be the major unifying element. One needs to stop and think what type of overall message the fic as a whole communicates, because otherwise there might not be one and the fic as a whole will just be a mess.
I wish there were more critical discussion of structure in fandom. I know that some of my fanfic are deeply structurally flawed, but no one seems to really care--they're much more interested in the content. But what does it take to make a story about a first kiss--which is 500 words and consists pretty much just of that kiss--work as a fic? How is the structure of a WIP different? After all, a
liz_marcs epic is not the same beast as a wisdomeagle ficlet. They are each masters of their respective forms, the best at what they do, but take that structure away from them and watch them flounder. I have to admit that this is particularly amusing--is this perverse of me--in watching liz_marcs try to produce a fic under, say, 20,000 words. (She's done it before and done it well, but she's still fun to watch whenever she attempts it.) But my point is--well, I'm not sure what my point is, in the end, because this meta has no structure.ETA: (Mainly for my record keeping) On Weak Endings
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-26 09:31 pm (UTC)Yes! If you said that, you'd be every bit as dumb as Aristotle. *g* I'm kidding, but a serious point? Simple =/= dumb. often just the opposite.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say most fanfics are"not stories". They DON'T have beginning middle and end? What do they have instead? Are you making a distinction between "short story" (a work of prose fiction between, say, 200 and 10,000 words) and some other definition of "story"? Because I can think of plenty of works of prose fiction that don't follow the conflict/crisis/resolution structure (they 'function lyrically,' as you nicely put it), but they're still "short stories" by genre definition.
I already have a feeling we're going to run into a prescriptive/descriptive dichotomy here.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 09:38 pm (UTC)I'm not much of a theorist and I don't have the words or the clarity of understanding, to articulate this precisely (which is why I found this a fascinating post - now I want to go hunt down the theorists!), but I sometimes conceptualize it crudely as whether the piece of fiction is the sort that would/could be "told around a campfire" (I always have an image in my head of an ancient, wise Native American woman when I imagine that! *g*), and I think about the use of the term "good storyteller" as compared/contrasted with "good writer" - not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, but quite distinct, in my mind, at least.
[Sorry for barging in - here via
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 10:14 pm (UTC)I think this is a good distinction -- but it's also kind of like deciding you're going to refer to groundhogs exclusively as "woodchucks," because they clearly aren't pigs. It's an indisputable point but "groundhog"/"short story" has an accepted definition that isn't going away b/c another one might be more accurate. Make sense?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 09:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 02:51 am (UTC)I like fic of all shapes and styles, but I've been reading it online since before the big Xena explosion, and have lately noticed that the present tense seems to be increasingly prevalent in just about every fandom. My own first fics were written in past tense (what I think of as more "traditional"), and despite (or perhaps because of) reading countless present tense stuff that I consider excellent works, it feels like a cheat when I use it, like a way to make writing "easier". It's been working for this recent Buffy stuff -- well enough for me, and a few other nutjobs -- but the thought of using it for an entire season of 22 stories rather leaves me cold. On the other hand, I now find past tense more difficult (because I've been cheating so long?). Hoping for some more murky light shed on this subject.
(I'm also looking forward to FtVS because it should stand on its own better, even though as you say, fic is pretty much always richer and deeper when you know the history of the characters.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 09:56 pm (UTC)As you say, there's just so much to mull over when thinking about how and why we write our fics the way we do!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 02:54 am (UTC)I wish there were, too; I think you've initiated some fruitful lines of discussion here.
I'm not sure, however, how helpful the distinction you draw between 'stories' and 'fic' is - you do a great job of explaining that distinction, but I think it might prejudice some readers against following you.
A story represents a more complex type of narrative structure. At its most basic, this structure represents three elements--conflict, a crisis, and a resolution.
These elements are so broad that one could, I believe, see them in any piece of fic, whether it's a (good) drabble, a vignette, or the sort of multi-chaptered, heavily plotted kind of thing. Narrative structure is something that facilitates motion, then any
one has to think about theme more than if one were writing a story...in a fic without a conventional plot the theme will ultimately be the major unifying element. One needs to stop and think what type of overall message the fic as a whole communicates
I'm really not comfortable with placing theme in the author's hands, with, that is, making it a part of the writing process. I'm in the minority regarding this, I suspect, since I've seen several authors on LJ talk about putting theme in their works.
But I've always thought of theme as a posterior thing - that is, it's something a reader teases out from the text, rather than something placed there by the author. Or, as Delany says in Jewel-Hinged Jaw: I've long found that helpful - to paraphrase, plot is an effect produced in the reader. Same (for me) with theme.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 02:55 am (UTC)Um. I didn't finish that sentence, and now I don't know what I was going to say. Damn.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 03:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 10:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 10:19 pm (UTC)Yeah, this occurred to me. I think the distinctions I'm making are natural ones--that someone, armed with my definitions, would place stories for the most part in the same categories with me--but when I think about what actually constitutes the categories the distinctions get blurry. This is precisely where my thoughts flit in and out of clarity, and I'm sorry you didn't get to finish your sentence there because I am sure it would have brilliant.
I'm really not comfortable with placing theme in the author's hands, with, that is, making it a part of the writing process.
Well, to continue your metaphor, I'm not sure how one can control what is or isn't placed in an author's hands. I might agree that it's usually not a good idea for a writer to dwell too much on what s/he wants her story to mean, but even then I'm such a fan of didactic fictions (Bernard Shaw, Ayn Rand, George Orwell) that I'm not even sure I'd go that far. I know that especially in shorter pieces I find it useful to think about how a piece means and try to facillitate the communication of that meaning, whereas in longer pieces the mechanisms of meaning are so complex that there is little I can do. Also that, as I say above, that a lot of times the shorter pieces need that attention to theme in order to unify them.
I guess my ultimate position is that while of course the final decisions about what the theme of a story is and whether it was effectively conveyed belong to the reader as critic, there are writers for whom I want them to have every possible tool in their proverbial toolbox I can possibly give them, and others for whom I'd recoommend the narrative equivalent of a plastic screwdriver so that they can't do too much damage.
But I've always thought of theme as a posterior thing - that is, it's something a reader teases out from the text, rather than something placed there by the author.
To my mind, this is an inalienable critical truth. But that the meaning of a piece is what the reader finds in it does not mean that those elements couldn't have been put there for the reader to find. From a critical perspective, it doesn't really matter if a piece was crafted with meticulous care or simply exploded virgin from the author's mind, but from a craft-of-writing perspectively that doesn't keep the author from trying to do specific things to make the story good.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-27 09:43 am (UTC)I guess this means that I don't think a story has to have the structure "conflict-crisis-resolution" (well, since I don't see story as a structural element, it would be kind of nonsensical if I did). It just means that the content of whatever literary form you choose is about change, about a thing or things happening.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 10:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-28 02:05 am (UTC)A lot of the fics I've read (and liked) function, as you say, lyrically, and are not exactly 'stories' in the strictest sense. In a way, it could be that a lot of the events described in fic seem to be 'mentally' inserted into the canon by the writer at the time of writing: it's the canon that continues to provide the structure, rather than having structure being deliberately constructed in the process of writing itself.
I've seen a number of fics that focus on relationships that seem to be like this--they simply pick up clues from what canon has, and build on from there to a happy couplehood, and much as I enjoy them, there isn't so much narrative tension, only a series of "will he, won't he" decisions, leading to an outcome that is meant to be re-inserted into canon.
Stories with a structure tend to stand on their own, I feel, and I suspect this is why I sometimes feel that some fanfiction is rather insular; you can't read it unless you keep referring to canon. It's interesting--sometimes to me, that's one of the pleasures of fanfiction: seeing all the romantic interludes that could have happened in canon (again for romance fics). Even if the fic is not strictly a story, but I enjoy the characterization used and the mood evoked.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-01 05:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-14 04:11 am (UTC)