What Bugs Me Wednesday: Stream of Consciousness

You know what bugs me? Stream of Consciousness in fiction.

“And since sleep is is not, and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addy Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addy Bundren must be, and then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so, if I am not emptied yet, I am is.”

Call it innovative, call it avant guarde, call it whatever you want. But don’t tell me it gives the reader any clue what it’s like to be inside the character’s head. I’ve been  inside a head before. I’m inside mine every day. And it’s not disorienting or confusing in the least. Do things jump around a lot? Sure. Can an aroma or a song or a visual cue disrupt my thoughts and throw me twenty years into the past? Happens all the time. But there’s almost always some context, some thread I can follow in retrospect, something that ties the thoughts together into a fluid and flowing “stream” of consciousness.

But on the written page? That’s a different story altogether. When I have to wade through a confusing interior monologue in a book- I get the same feeling I get in my worst, mixed-up dreams. It’s a jolting confusion, like riding a rollercoaster in pitch blackness. It’s like those first couple seconds underwater when you turf it on waterskis- the noise of the churning water, the not knowing which way is up, being folded into some painful contortionists pose...

To be clear, I don’t think the concept  is a bad one. It could actually be very interesting if someone could pull it off (I’m told Henry James did it differently than most). But the execution  of it is all too often a festering, steaming pile of crap.

The way I see it you have two choices with Stream of Consciousness writing: you can choose to replicate the speed of thought, in which case unrelated sentence fragments are fired off almost as quickly as synapses fire in our brains (see example above) -or- you can actually replicate the cognitive journey of the character in question, in which case each new thought would flow by some logical connection to the next one, and each will leave the character with the feelings, memories, images and ideas associated with those thoughts- no matter how fast it occurs in real life. In other words you can go fast, or you can go deep. But you can’t do both.

If your goal is to demonstrate the physiological wonder of the human brain, and show how fast it moves between thoughts, then fine, go for option one above. Show us how random you can be. Awesome. But distant memories won’t be sorted from present action or from visualizations of future possibilities. Past and present, the real and the unreal, the hoped for and the feared…  we won’t know which is which. Your reader will just feel like they’re riding Space Mountain for the first time.

But if your goal is to convey what it’s really like to be inside the character’s head, your only real choice is to slow the passage of time and flesh out each impression as it surfaces- recreating the memories, painting the word pictures and describing the feelings they bring with them. Too long and boring? Doesn’t have to be. It’s done all the time for fight scenes. What would be an incomprehensible tangle of limbs, grunts, thoughts and pangs if paced in real-time, is slowed down and elongated so we can see each punch, each reaction and counterpunch, motivations, momentum, etc. But as long as writing is done with words, this choice between speed and depth will have to be made.

The reason for this is that the old adage that “a picture’s worth a thousand words” actually holds true. And unless you’re going to make a stab at getting some of those thousand words down on paper as each thought-picture appears to a character, then you can never give the reader the feel for what it’s like to be in the character’s head, and to see what’s going on. And yeah, to pretend otherwise, kinda bugs me. 

What Bugs Me Wednesday: The War on Style

Elmore Leonard: "My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

Jonathan Franzen: "Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting."

Esther Freud: "Cut out the metaphors and similes."

David Hare: "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it."

Stephen King: "The road to hell is paved with adjectives"

You know what really bugs me? The War on Style.

Look, I get these arguments. I really do. Yesterday’s post was all about simplicity. I get as bothered as the next guy by purple, florid prose (see the Henry James passage in this post for an example. Shudder.) But when was it decided that every great piece of fiction has to read like a USA Today article? I mean, come on, if the whole point of great writing is for the writer to take themselves out of the final product, then why am I reading these authors in the first place? Why not spend my time reading the hundreds of thousands of computer-generated books out there instead? I guess I’m in the camp that says the author should bring more to the table than a compelling plot line.

Let’s look at the world of painting for an example. Can you imagine if visual artists followed an Elmore Leonard-like rule that “if it looks like painting, I repaint it?” Every art museum on earth would be chock-full of realistic, tromp l’oeil paintings that look little different from photographs. That’s cool, I guess… for a while anyway. 

But sometimes you get tired of admiring technical skill. Sometimes you want to see the artist’s imagination at work, you want to see their innermost feelings splayed across the canvas. You want to see things in a way you never could have imagined them yourself. In short, you want to see some style.

Here are some visuals to help you see what I'm talking about. What if I mentioned the names Picasso, Dali, Monet, Matisse and Van Gogh, and the only styles of painting that came to mind were the ones on the left below?

Picasso, before and after:

Dali, before and after:

Monet, before and after:

Matisse, before and after:

Van Gogh, before and after:

I won’t call any of those early, left-side paintings bad or boring. I'd give my proverbial left-nut to be able to paint like that. But isn’t the world a little richer because those same artists moved on from the technical proficiency displayed on the left to blaze the new schools of painting displayed on the right? Isn't it great that they made it okay for others like Chagall or Lichtenstein or Warhol to bypass a realistic, technically proficient phase, and head straight for their own revolution of artistic styles?

Cubism, Surrealism, and Impressionism may not be your cup of tea, but there's no denying they exhibit an entirely different pull on the human spirit than paintings done in a photographic mimicry of real-world images can. Style matters. And the fact that styles differ, matters.

So back to literature. You want to pass out writing advice? Great. The more the merrier. But let's not pretend we're not losing something significant when the drumbeat to eliminate all adverbs, adjectives, metaphors, similes and complex verbs crowds out those who were born to take a slightly (or vastly) different path. Those parts of speech may just be the otherworldly color and heavy brushstrokes that will define a new kind of literature.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: "Blogging"

I had a very late night, and a very early morning, so I’ll make this one short and sweet, albeit a little bit late.

If the word “blog” is a portmanteau for “web log” -and it is, by the way- then shouldn’t it follow the same rules of usage?

For example, if someone says “I wrote a blog about that just yesterday,” uh… no you didn’t. The ‘blog’ would be your full body of work, the recurring record of whatever it is you’re writing about. Just like a ship’s log- with multiple entries over time.

What this person probably means to say is that they wrote a blog entry , a blog post , or that they blogged  a particular subject on their web log. Right? Right?  Come on, I can’t be the only one this bugs…

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Deus ex machina

-"Swing away, Merrill! Deus ex machina's got you covered!"

This may be somewhat related to last week’s complaint, but you know what really bugs me? Deus ex machina.

That’s right, the plot device of last resort (it should be, anyway-) when a character paints themselves into a corner, or finds themselves in a hopeless situation, and some outside force or event swoops in to save their bacon. It’s maddening. You don’t often find it in so-called “high literature,” but it rears its ugly head every now and again. Take Cormack McCarthy’s The Road,  for example.

I loved that book. I loved how McCarthy pulled off ‘post-apocolyptic’ while remaining completely apolitical. That, in itself, is pretty refreshing. But given the bleak existence of his father and son duo in that book, their amazingly good luck in a couple of tight spots laps right up against the borders of Deus ex machina.

Literally starving to death in a scorched landscape where all food sources have been picked clean by raiders, they happen upon an untouched underground cache filled with everything you could imagine. Awfully convenient. Later on, and in similarly dire straits they discover a pristine cistern of crystal clear water under a layer of rain gutter scum. Finally, with his father dead for two days, the boy ventures back out to the road and meets, not another marauding gang or cannibalistic maniac, but one of the last remaining ‘good guys’ who promises to protect him. McCarthy pulls it off because he’s that good, but it still strikes me as a little too convenient when it’s all said and done.

I’ve mentioned Guiraldes’ Don Segundo Sombra  before. In that classic of Argentine literature, the main character works his way up as a gaucho, earning his stripes, not to mention a nice little nest egg that he then blows on an ill-advised cock-fight bet. Gone is his hope for the future, gone is his dream of owning “a string of ponies all of one color” ….  Until he inherits his own ranch out of nowhere, that is. Deus ex machina strikes again. And yeah, it kind of bugs me.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Unbelievable Plot Points

You know what really bugs me? Unbelievable plot points. You know what I’m talking about. Those turning points in a story that, yes, are theoretically or scientifically possible, maybe even witnessed in real life, but are really only credible between the covers of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not,  and not  in any fiction that aims for a veneer of realism. As far as I’m concerned, you cannot give your character a one-in-a-million shot at making it out alive, and expect me to swallow it.

Don’t get me wrong, incredible things happen every day. Things that will blow your mind. But you can’t rely on something that happens once in a thousand tries, to save your character, resolve your story, or put a nice bow around a very messy plot. If you do, I’ll probably throw your book across the room.

Take “surviving a freefall” for example. It crops up now and again as a way to spice up fiction, and it really irks me. Are there documented cases of people surviving a fall from heights of 30,000 feet or more? Yes, there are. But that doesn’t mean you should make it the exit strategy for your character. Now, I understand the concept of terminal velocity as well as the next guy. But even if a falling body reaches a maximum falling speed due to increased drag, you’re still going to hit the ground at 122 miles per hour. Unless your book is about Gumby, I just don’t see things working out for your character.

At the climax of his novel Angels & Demons,  Dan Brown lets Robert Langdon plummet thousands of feet over Rome.  He survives, of course. He remembers from earlier in the novel that “one square yard of drag will slow a falling body 20%,” so he manages to grab some sort of window cover on his way out of the chopper. For those doing the math at home, 122 miles per hour reduced by 20% is still 98 miles per hour- but really, that’s for a face-down, belly-to-earth position. Not sure how Langdon would use his makeshift parachute in that maximum drag position. Brown might not have been sure either, which is why he had Langdon land in the Tiber River. This “churning” river is supposedly so “frothy and air-filled” that it is “three times softer than standing water.”*

Forget the fact that the helicopter would have to travel 2,000 to 2,500 horizontal feet to even get from St. Peter’s to the Tiber River. I’ve been to Rome, and that river is neither churning, nor frothy, nor air-filled. It creeps downstream like a moving lake, so I’m not buying Brown’s extenuating circumstances. It’s also probably not that deep, so in all likelihood Langdon would be looking at a few broken bones when it was all said and done. This free-fall has bugged me ever since I read it. It must have bugged Hollywood, too, because they kept Langdon on the ground in the movie.

Amendment to the complaint:

After mulling this over, I am willing to make a very specific exception to this rule. The unbelievable plot point might be acceptable as the inciting incident or launching pad for a story. In other words, if you’ve just survived a fall from 30,000 feet, then yeah, I want to learn more about you. You deserve to have your story told. And if an interesting and believable story follows your amazing brush with certain death, then I’ll read on.

As I understand it, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses  features a free-fall from 29,000 feet. Two characters fall into the English Channel and wash up on the beach alive. Given the magical realism in the book, and the fall serving as an inciting incident for the story, I’m going to give Rushdie a reluctant pass.

This is also why the Bourne Identity works (survival of several gunshot wounds, floating unconscious yet alive in a stormy sea.) It’s unbelievable, but it’s unbelievable in a way that gives you a reason to read on, rather than being a cheap gimmick to save the story. That would have bugged me.

*These quotes from the novel are taken from this page.

What Bugs Me Wednesday

You know what bugs me? Poorly laid out books. 

Do I really need two inches of whitespace at the bottom of the page?  Or an inch and a half on the outer edges? No. But you know  where I could use a little bit? That's right, where the pages are actually glued to the spine. That might be kind of nice.

Above is a look at my paperback Ethan Frome  - great for marginalia- but piss poor for holding it open with one hand and not  suffering debilitating hand cramps. This awesome book was a lot harder to read than it needed to be, and yeah, it kind of bugged me…

What Bugs Me Wednesday: Fogg's Non-existent Airship

It has occurred to me that I’m missing out on one of the major perks of having a forum for my own personal ramblings: the opportunity to complain about stuff that bugs me.

So here is the first of what will be a sporadic feature- after all, not a lot of stuff really bugs me- that we’ll call “What Bugs Me Wednesday.”

We begin the series with one of literature’s greatest and longest-lasting lies: the mythical airship in Jules Verne’s Around the World In 80 Days.  Just about every film adaptation, comic book version and dumbed-down retelling has invented some sort of hot-air balloon out of whole cloth (pardon the pun). Even the cover art for reprintings of Verne’s classic is guilty from time to time. Sometimes it’s a zeppelin, sometimes it’s a steampunk airship, but whatever form it takes, it has no relation whatsoever to the story as Verne wrote it.

The incomparable Phileas Fogg and his valet Passpartout do indeed set out on a memorable adventure. They have run-ins with the law, with outlaws, with vigilantes and religious sects. There’s a princess in distress, an opium-den trap and an acrobatic circus. Modes of transportation are rented, bought, hijacked and destroyed, but at no point in the journey do the characters take to the air.

Do they take a turn on the back of an elephant? Sure. Do they cross the Great Plains in a fortuitous windsled? They do. But do they ever set foot in the basket of a hot-air balloon? No, no, a thousand times no. And it’s time for this nonsense to stop.

Pictured above are the thumbnails from the first page of Google Image results for “Around the World in 80 Days.” Take a quick look and you can see how widespread this pernicious falsehood has become. An entire generation is being led to believe that Fogg was some sort of Victorian Steve Fossett. And yeah, it kind of bugs me.