I always worry when looking for models that I will end up leaning on verisimilitude in place of imagination. Authenticity of representation, whatever that means, is something some people seek, in the historical novel or whatever, but it's not what I'm interested in. But there's an opposite danger, the one-dimensional generic or, as my occasional tendency has been, the stand-in cliche. I care about experience, too, like a good modernist, so I do need to have my phenomenological gestalts, based in sensory detail, even if I'm not poring over Ames-Webster floorplans to lay out the Worthington-Shays.
My life, i.e., my direct experience, has been weird, weirder than most people's even, but it doesn't contain everything I'd like to write about. So how to solve this problem? Most things we know through media, anyways, and future generations will only know our lives through media. So I'm not averse in principle to supplementing experience with media. To put it coarsely. Coarsely, because experiencing media is experience, though of coursely a different kind of experience. What makes media suspect is the way it's always permeated with other people's ideas (as Errol Morris has been harping on lately, a photograph is always posed) and how do I avoid just taking dictation from those other people's ideas?
My solutions are: 1) to pile up as many conflicting representations as possible, overdetermine them, to force myself to make judgments about them. It also reminds me of the contexts in which, e.g., mansions occur. 2) Trying to remember always not to pre-determine things that don't matter, and that some things don't matter. I don't need to pin down the floor plan or the color of the wallpaper, necessarily. 3) I try to let the language lead, and then refer to the media to contextualize (if not justify) those choices. This also militates against "plausibility," which most of the time just means fealty to cliched received wisdom. Refusing rubrics of the form "X's would never Y" in favor of investigating what's at stake when X's do Yish things gets at the heart of things, even if it's literally true that no X has ever Y'ed. 4) Remembering that my world is not the world. I prefer it that way, honestly, but sometimes I make it quite literal, as when my notional Boston and notional Downriver have different names and completely different geographies. I need that to have permission to make things up, sometimes.
I'd love to hear any other strategies you might have collected. I'm really kind of catch-as-catch-can with these.
No, you're totally right about trying to avoid making another copy of a copy. My problem, though, is not with remembering; if I'm remembering a sensation or sight, that's enough. It's when fiction places me in the position of describing something I haven't actually seen or felt; then I need to do my best to either summon a suitable substitute from memory or see what Google Image brings. I guess that, without realizing it, I too compile a lot of different images before embarking on my own description, mainly because it's not the same thing as seeing it yourself.) And sometimes I deviate. But it's hard. Because what's so satisfying is finding just the right metaphor (etc.) for your experience.
Aside from plotting, this is the single greatest difficulty that fiction writing gives me.
I guess that, lately, I notice myself trying very hard to summon some experience similar to the one I've placed my characters in. (Cos it really does come back to that. The high school I'm writing about now, despite its being in the Valley, is really always the horrible high school I knew for four years in rural northern Wisconsin.) That's about my only other trick, yeah.
It's always us, in the end, isn't it? And yet, we do invent things, I'm sure of it.
Well, what about this: using research to jostle out forgotten or misplaced experiences, not just in their phenomenological particulars, but also impressions, emotional qualities, and then assembling those tidbits into a gestalt that is neither the remembered things nor the media representations? Like a collage, or redecorating a room with trinkets in storage.
I hate the feeling I get sometimes that I'm strip-mining my experience, because what happens when the ore runs out? I threw Ireland into the Unicode story because I've been to Ireland. I get to do that--once. It feels hasty and starts to feel as if I'm retelling all my hoary party anecdotes. But I write about what matters to me, and that's going to start with my experience, right?
I think I end up leaning on cinema a lot. It's a trove of images and emotions and the correlations between the two. It might be embarrassing to uncover precisely to what extent that's true for me.
It is hard. (PS, eff plot. When people say "plotting" I always hear "plodding.") I guess in the end, some writers don't apologize for hewing close to experience and some writers like to swerve away, even as they end up looping back to it, but all that matters is that the story works within itself and nothing seems overtly like a proxy for something else.
Yes, I'm always most surprised when I invent a thing. It somehow feels so arbitrary. I suppose this is because it's not a thing I've dredge up from my own experience and culled, pruned, polished, and arranged. That's why, yes, it feels more like Athena springing fully formed from some Olympian's head.
using research to jostle out forgotten or misplaced experiences, not just in their phenomenological particulars, but also impressions, emotional qualities, and then assembling those tidbits into a gestalt that is neither the remembered things nor the media representations?
Definitely. That's second best to experience, I think.
I don't think the ore ever runs out. Or, if it does, you'll move on to a different kind of writing. I think you accumulate more ore, and you change how you cull and sculpt and polish it.
Yes, eff plot as plot alone. And I say this as someone who is plodding when it comes to plot. And yet narrative forms fascinate me. And of course plot makes sense when it's pressed from some underlying preoccupation. Which is essentially what you're saying.
And speaking of copies of copies: Ack. Out of curiosity, I've been skimming through exempla of YA novels. The wretchedest thing about them, aside from their always choosing exposition over impressions to be interpreted, and their characters' absence of recognizable interiority, is how depressingly generic their descriptions of everything are. Like, pulled from the same central casting agency and props and sets warehouse as every episode, ever, of Saved By the Bell. Experience is flattened and algebraized.
I guess I'm trying to be Virginia Woolf writing a YA novel. Which, yeah. Is not going to go over well.
My life, i.e., my direct experience, has been weird, weirder than most people's even, but it doesn't contain everything I'd like to write about. So how to solve this problem? Most things we know through media, anyways, and future generations will only know our lives through media. So I'm not averse in principle to supplementing experience with media. To put it coarsely. Coarsely, because experiencing media is experience, though of coursely a different kind of experience. What makes media suspect is the way it's always permeated with other people's ideas (as Errol Morris has been harping on lately, a photograph is always posed) and how do I avoid just taking dictation from those other people's ideas?
My solutions are: 1) to pile up as many conflicting representations as possible, overdetermine them, to force myself to make judgments about them. It also reminds me of the contexts in which, e.g., mansions occur. 2) Trying to remember always not to pre-determine things that don't matter, and that some things don't matter. I don't need to pin down the floor plan or the color of the wallpaper, necessarily. 3) I try to let the language lead, and then refer to the media to contextualize (if not justify) those choices. This also militates against "plausibility," which most of the time just means fealty to cliched received wisdom. Refusing rubrics of the form "X's would never Y" in favor of investigating what's at stake when X's do Yish things gets at the heart of things, even if it's literally true that no X has ever Y'ed. 4) Remembering that my world is not the world. I prefer it that way, honestly, but sometimes I make it quite literal, as when my notional Boston and notional Downriver have different names and completely different geographies. I need that to have permission to make things up, sometimes.
I'd love to hear any other strategies you might have collected. I'm really kind of catch-as-catch-can with these.
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Aside from plotting, this is the single greatest difficulty that fiction writing gives me.
I guess that, lately, I notice myself trying very hard to summon some experience similar to the one I've placed my characters in. (Cos it really does come back to that. The high school I'm writing about now, despite its being in the Valley, is really always the horrible high school I knew for four years in rural northern Wisconsin.) That's about my only other trick, yeah.
Reply
Well, what about this: using research to jostle out forgotten or misplaced experiences, not just in their phenomenological particulars, but also impressions, emotional qualities, and then assembling those tidbits into a gestalt that is neither the remembered things nor the media representations? Like a collage, or redecorating a room with trinkets in storage.
I hate the feeling I get sometimes that I'm strip-mining my experience, because what happens when the ore runs out? I threw Ireland into the Unicode story because I've been to Ireland. I get to do that--once. It feels hasty and starts to feel as if I'm retelling all my hoary party anecdotes. But I write about what matters to me, and that's going to start with my experience, right?
I think I end up leaning on cinema a lot. It's a trove of images and emotions and the correlations between the two. It might be embarrassing to uncover precisely to what extent that's true for me.
It is hard. (PS, eff plot. When people say "plotting" I always hear "plodding.") I guess in the end, some writers don't apologize for hewing close to experience and some writers like to swerve away, even as they end up looping back to it, but all that matters is that the story works within itself and nothing seems overtly like a proxy for something else.
Reply
using research to jostle out forgotten or misplaced experiences, not just in their phenomenological particulars, but also impressions, emotional qualities, and then assembling those tidbits into a gestalt that is neither the remembered things nor the media representations?
Definitely. That's second best to experience, I think.
I don't think the ore ever runs out. Or, if it does, you'll move on to a different kind of writing. I think you accumulate more ore, and you change how you cull and sculpt and polish it.
Yes, eff plot as plot alone. And I say this as someone who is plodding when it comes to plot. And yet narrative forms fascinate me. And of course plot makes sense when it's pressed from some underlying preoccupation. Which is essentially what you're saying.
And speaking of copies of copies: Ack. Out of curiosity, I've been skimming through exempla of YA novels. The wretchedest thing about them, aside from their always choosing exposition over impressions to be interpreted, and their characters' absence of recognizable interiority, is how depressingly generic their descriptions of everything are. Like, pulled from the same central casting agency and props and sets warehouse as every episode, ever, of Saved By the Bell. Experience is flattened and algebraized.
I guess I'm trying to be Virginia Woolf writing a YA novel. Which, yeah. Is not going to go over well.
Reply
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