a fool's musings

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Fool, said my muse to me,
look in thy heart and write...

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2002-04-30 - 11:34 p.m.

do you believe what I'm saying?

Observations on BtVS and Smallville are in the LJ.

***

Hee!

Wendi my fellow Homicide whore and apparent Kellergirl gave me a nice shout out this morning.

Go read her fic, Eros and Agape. It's great fun.

And Seema says the nicest things about me!

Geez, I'm feeling the love and doing the Dance of Seema Rocks.

***

I wanted to talk about something Jenn wrote in response to my entry earlier today about knowing the backstory etc.

(by the way, I love this whole weird meta-inter-diary-conversation thing we get going. It geeks me, seriously. So cool. So. Cool. And I heart Jenn. Give her much love.)

Jenn said:
Which brings me to the natural conclusion of such thoughts, the unreliable narrator.

This is a story I REALLY want to write. I've read a few--mostly told from the point of view of someone obviously insane, or an obviously unreliable narrator, but--it's like my grail. Tell a story that's a complete lie and from that let the reader figure out the truth, and with a narrator that isn't obviously lying yet is. The absolute ultimate in telling a story and making a show out of it instead--it's just a mindbending concept.

I think that the unreliable narrator is a great conceit, and have used it on a few occasions myself, but to do a whole story without any objective narrator at all...

Poe did it with "Cask of Amontillado", but I can't remember another where it was so successful.

Okay, Holden Caulfield's not exactly an upstanding and truthful narrator, nor is what's- his-name? Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five.

But even Faulkner chose to include the Dilsey section of The Sound and the Fury to clear up some of the confusion abounding from the first three (highly unreliable) narrators.

So it is something of a grail, a quest that very few will ever master.

I doubt I could do it.

Jenn might pull it off. I wouldn't put it past her. *g*

I had a hard enough time with Untouchable Face, which was my first conscious stab at an unreliable narrator, though I have to say that *any* first person narrative is going to be suspect. Because if you do it right, then the POV character's thoughts and prejudices etc. should naturally inform the narrative, and the readers' opinion.

With Untouchable Face, I wasn't completely successful, because some people took Rogue's version of events at face value, and really, you can't do that in this story.

Logan's only slightly less biased, and since they're the principal narrators, in alternating first person, you never do get a clear view of Jean until the very end. At least, there were numerous readers who didn't, according to the feedback I got.

The one true success I had in this was with The Very Sickness of My Heart, in which Rogue is a lovely and yet completely unreliable narrator as she's quite mad, poor dear. I felt the need to include the third person omniscient narrator simply to offset her story. I don't think being inside her head for 6K words would have been... healthy.

I really did enjoy writing those parts of the story, though, especially the diary entries. I had a lot of fun layering references in to mythology and literature, and just getting my Faulknerian groove on.

Speaking of whom, he gets nary a mention in this article: The Struggle for the Soul of the Sentence by Sven Birkerts, which is a discussion of the utilitarian "honest" prose of a writer like Hemingway versus the more baroque and consciously "artsy" (and therefore possibly less trustworthy) writing of a Pynchon or a Cormac McCarthy [who isn't fit to carry Faulkner's pen, in my opinion, but whatever. Critics love him].

Very interesting, and always nice to see echoes of stuff we're discussing in blogland out in the "real world."

See, we're not making this stuff up! *g*

Anyhow, the guy, Birkerts, brings up the point that Hemingway was no less consciously artsy - and probably spent just as much, if not more time paring his sentences back to fit his own minimalist style.

Me, I write like a minimalist with maximalist aspirations.

I don't like a lot of description of things or places or people. I like to leave dialogue untagged as much as possible. I do love long, twisty sentences, though, with lots of words that can have varied meanings.

I want to give the reader just enough so that she can draw her own conclusions, you know? I mean, if I do it right, she'll draw the conclusions I'm aiming for, and all is successful.

If not, well, at least I hope I've given them a good story.

And that's pretty much all a writer can ask for at the end of the day, right? to tell a good story in the best possible way?

Huh.

Comments are, as always, welcome.

~victoria
[current mood: philosophical]
[current music: The Sounds of Silence - Simon & Garfunkel]

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~*~

2002-04-30 - 11:34 a.m.

gimme the backstory, baby

Lots of thoughts, little time...

Kit Mason has an interesting entry [actually, all of Kit's entries are interesting, and if you're not reading her blog, you should be] about how a writer needs to know it all.

And no, she's not talking about know-it-alls like me. *snerk*

What she means is, when you write a story, you should know all the background, all the characters and their motivations and probably what they ate for breakfast that morning -- you should be able to answer random questions about them without having to think too hard.

I don't always do this, I admit.

But quite frequently, I do.

Because my betas make me.

It's one of the things I love about them.

"But *why* is Rogue doing this?" "Why is Logan such an idiot?" "What does Scott think of all this?" "Where's Hank and why isn't he saying something?"

So I have to think about a lot of things that don't necessarily make it into the story. A lot of it is backstory.

(As an aside, Pete is the KING of backstory. He has *everything* worked out before he writes. I find that amazing. I mean, I adore backstory - one reason I spent so much of my childhood and teen years not-finishing fantasy novels was because I was so much more interested in sketching out timelines and geneaologies and grammars of made up languages than I ever was in telling the damn story, which was usually derivative of either Star Wars or LotR or both. *G* So yeah, I adore backstory, but if I work it all out ahead of time, I feel like there's no reason to tell the story.)

I can tell you about all of Rogue's failed romances in NotDL, for example. I know each and every one of them that leads up to her giving Munch's speech.

I can tell you that the throwaway reference to Betsy at the beginning was in fact part of Scott and Jean's problems, that Betsy was new to the mansion and flirting heavily with Scott, who was flirting back, leading to Jean wondering *what* was up with him. And that Betsy was also flirting with Logan, who also flirted back, but wasn't interested either. I can tell you what was occupying Scott's time so much that he forgot he was a husband as well as a leader and a teacher.

I could tell you all about Remy and Ororo's failed romance in Harbor in the Tempest, and *why* Remy threw in with the government. I can tell you exactly what happened to Bobby's knee, how Scott and Xavier died, Jean's descent into alcoholism, and the little details of Ororo and Logan's friendship, including the sex. I can tell you how Sabretooth died and how Mystique was discovered.

Admittedly for some of the shorter stories, I didn't work out those details, and for some of the longers stories, it's obvious that I didn't, and the story suffers for it.

I know I always pick on it, but Crossing Canada is the one non-PWP that really irks me.

I changed horses in mid-stream, to mix metaphors. Logan was fucking his way across country, with redheaded women.

Why?

Well, because originally, he lit out because of Jean and his feelings for her.

Only halfway through did I realize it wasn't because of Jean [which is what Rogue thought, and I was writing from Rogue's POV], but because he thought Rogue was getting married [and, for a better take on that sitch, read Die's heartbreaking "Return to Sender", as well as Donna's more hopeful follow-up, "Will You Accept the Charges?", both available at the WRFA, and listed on the recs page at Unfit]. And I should have taken that line out, but since it was integral to the story that Rogue keep meeting hs exes, I left it in. I should have changed them all to doe-eyed brunettes and had her not notice the resemblance, but Margie could have. Hmm.... maybe I'll fix that....

Anyhow, Kit's point is that the writer is god in her fic, and she should damn well be omniscient, especially in a heavily-plotted story.

I forget this all too often, letting the story take control. And that's fine, as long as when I go back and revise and edit, I *can* answer those questions.

Which is kind of the opposite approach to what Kit says in what you should know when you sit down to write, but I find that I can't write if I've got everything all planned out. The story bores me then.

That's one reason I don't outline too often, and one reason I'm hoping getting the orgyfic worked out means it'll start boring me and I can forget about it and concentrate on psychokiller fic.

~*~*~

I want to marry Jay Tolson: Wittgenstein's Curse.

All my misgivings about academia, or, rather, about the jargon associated with literary criticism, are so clearly outlined in this article that I can do nothing more than point you to it and say, "This is what I think. Tolson articulates it exactly."

So that is what I am doing. *g*

More later.

~victoria
[current mood: vindicated]
[current music: Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones]

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~*~

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The painting is "Boreas" by John William Waterhouse. Again, not a muse, but I like her. She suits the color scheme.

The quote is from Sir Philip Sidney.

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