This epic post is like a cabinet stuffed with perceptive observations. I’ve archived it for future research, but I want to make a few points:
Your defense of fanfiction was initially a headscratcher for me, since I’m a shameless snob.
But-- I’m also a connoisseur of the serious defense attorney essay about something I’ve never taken seriously. Your argument connects with me in spite of my prejudice, because I think you’re largely correct about what good storytelling needs to do to make people care about it.
I also agree with the idea that most mainstream “literature” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In fact, I think a fair amount of it is only slightly better technically than amateurish fan fiction, and the presumption is that it’s WAY better. And much of the great storytelling of the past flows along for the reasons you cite, and the importance of plot is a kind of illusion.
Hitchcock talked about this a lot; he wanted to reach people emotionally, and the clever plots were mostly contrived to get you to those emotional effects.
I will say this, though-- maybe this is just a semantic difference, but I don’t think this focus on emotional connection is separate from a focus on craft. In my view, it’s absolutely part of the discussion of craft. Maybe the most essential part. Anyone who discusses craft and leaves this out doesn’t understand the craft.
Side note: I am a huge Burroughs fan, but I understand how Naked Lunch et al doesn’t fit your thesis or mine. I love his work for the style and color and tone, but like a lot of artists I love, he connects some dots beautifully and skips past other important ones. I’d love to read a book that borrows some of his style, but uses it to get to the emotional connections with characters. Maybe I’ll write something like that one day; not sure, it might be over my head.
In short: more of the Rachel magic, where i move quickly from “I don’t know what the fuck Rachel is talking about” to realizing “man, the point is that Rachel does know, and I’m starting to get it.”
Sorry for the apparent ass-kissing, but I’m moving you to my “indispensable” list.
Ah, man, wow. Thank you so much. It is an honour to receive this comment from you.
I, too, am a bit of a snob! So for years I was ashamed of my interest in fanfiction. It was only by reading very widely in both fanfic and published work, and by doggedly validating my own taste, that I came to the conclusion that some fanfic is very good actually, and lots of published work is really bad. There's really nothing to be ashamed of about fanfic as a whole any more than one should be ashamed of literary fiction, which has its own laziness and formulaic nonsense and tropes. I so appreciate your willingness to hear me out in this essay and I'm delighted to have you somewhat convinced!
I take your point on this being in fact a part of craft -- I haven't thought too much about those distinctions before now.
Naked Lunch just doesn't hit for me. I didn't get the sense that Burroughs himself was titillated and seduced by his own amoral/immoral musings. I had the sense that he wanted to write what he thought would be shocking -- I find that insufficiently visceral. I want to know what's inside someone that shocks even the person themselves. (It's a bit voyeuristic to want to witness it but oh well!)
Thank you so much again for this really wonderful comment, I truly appreciate it.
The observation about Burroughs is pretty reasonable and also interesting, and no harsher than things he said about Hemingway. I softly protest that there’s much more to his work than the things that make Naked Lunch notorious-- his early book Junky is underrated and nothing like NL, and some later works like Cities of the Red Night have poetic elements that I value more than the rivers of transgressive sewage. But still-- you make a good point.
There’s always too much to read! I like that “it hasn’t crossed my path” idea, I can relate to that. You start finding people to talk about books with, and it quickly spirals out of control.
On the importance of bivalent relationships, it is notable that fanfic's greatest innovation is the 'slash' - i.e. what would it be like if x + y had a relationship with one another.
All Mantel's Reith Lectures are excellent, but especially 'Silence Grips the Town', on the personal costs of enmeshing yourself that deeply with someone you can never meet. Plenty of lovelorn fans might appreciate the torments she describes.
One reason the Wolf Hall trilogy beats A Place Of Greater Safety is that the events of the French Revolution are a bit too seductive and compelling, she keeps wanting to relate those, as well as show Camille, Danton and Robespierre trading barbs at dinner.
> “The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable.”
This is magnificent, thank you. Right to the end - never even thought about why Orwell can't write fiction (and why Animal Farm and 1984 succeed despite that), but you're obviously right.
yesss thank you, I feel so satisfied when I can get someone to agree with me on Orwell (because my opinion seems to be unpopular but I am sure I am right)
I love the idea that the past is a canon that can be engaged with like the fictional one. It makes sense at a deep level: story and history are intertwined and their common root can be traced back to a time when very little distinction existed between them. This also helps me appreciate historical fiction in a way I couldn’t before.
I had thought: if historical fiction is not inserting hallucinations into the historical record, what is it doing but simply recapitulating the history books? But there’s a third thing, which is exploring the unknowns of what it was like to actually be there, enmeshed in the context where those decisions were made.
At the same time I found myself saddened by the suggestion that fiction shouldn’t, or needn’t, try to make logical sense. I see a palette of fictional styles in the decision of where to place one’s focus. On one end, some stories are highly focused on the logical implications of the core premise. On the other, some lack even a common connective fabric of events—what I have in mind is e.g. something like Waiting for Godot where it is immediately obvious that the physical/temporal context of the characters is excluded with prejudice: it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter.
I can’t get on board with the idea that fiction has to pass over intellectual/analytic engagement with its content in favour of emotional/holistic/relational engagement, lest it be unworthy, something worse than bad. But I do have a razor like that of my own. Which is that fiction fails when it fails to explore unknowns. Intellect-heavy stories fail when they fail to convey the experience of being uncertain about something. Emotion-heavy stories fail when they fail to convey the ambiguity of emotion: for example, in particular, the experience of not knowing what you will do, doing it, and then grappling with why you did it. That to me is the beating heart of fiction. And it is also true that emotionally-driven stories succeed at this much more often than intellectually-driven ones.
I guess I could formulate this into a hypothetical criticism of HPMOR (hypothetical because I haven’t read it): it is so confident in what it wants to express that, as fiction, it is tongue-tied.
"it is so confident in what it wants to express that, as fiction, it is tongue-tied." ohhhh i love this. I have always found that if i talk about something too much I can't write about it because I become too certain of what I want to say, so writing it down is boring, so I can't.
“an excessive cultural preoccupation with the logical structure of the plot marks out our time as an era which is fundamentally hostile to fiction and to art more broadly. It is not important for events in a movie or a novel to make logical sense”
I so agree that the obsession with craft seems to have little place for a discussion of quality.
Thank you for the comment, Henry! I do feel like I've been going mad seeing online discussions of writing/craft that are bogged down in minutae, with no moment set aside to asking "but is it good?". so much ACTUALLY boils down to "is it good?"!
I had this on my Shakespeare essay--people telling me he’s no good at craft but has some other mystical quality that makes his work survive. I sometimes wonder is craft is the phlogiston of literature
I loved this post so much! You managed to eloquently explain how characters can be taken from say a spaceship exploring new worlds to a high school and the characters still be recognisable, and also why people might want to do this.
And you're right, the worst type of published fiction and fan fiction is when the author refuses to put anything on the line emotionally, and even worse, mocks people who write fiction vulnerably (and correctly) and HPMOR is bad and has always been bad.
This epic post is like a cabinet stuffed with perceptive observations. I’ve archived it for future research, but I want to make a few points:
Your defense of fanfiction was initially a headscratcher for me, since I’m a shameless snob.
But-- I’m also a connoisseur of the serious defense attorney essay about something I’ve never taken seriously. Your argument connects with me in spite of my prejudice, because I think you’re largely correct about what good storytelling needs to do to make people care about it.
I also agree with the idea that most mainstream “literature” isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In fact, I think a fair amount of it is only slightly better technically than amateurish fan fiction, and the presumption is that it’s WAY better. And much of the great storytelling of the past flows along for the reasons you cite, and the importance of plot is a kind of illusion.
Hitchcock talked about this a lot; he wanted to reach people emotionally, and the clever plots were mostly contrived to get you to those emotional effects.
I will say this, though-- maybe this is just a semantic difference, but I don’t think this focus on emotional connection is separate from a focus on craft. In my view, it’s absolutely part of the discussion of craft. Maybe the most essential part. Anyone who discusses craft and leaves this out doesn’t understand the craft.
Side note: I am a huge Burroughs fan, but I understand how Naked Lunch et al doesn’t fit your thesis or mine. I love his work for the style and color and tone, but like a lot of artists I love, he connects some dots beautifully and skips past other important ones. I’d love to read a book that borrows some of his style, but uses it to get to the emotional connections with characters. Maybe I’ll write something like that one day; not sure, it might be over my head.
In short: more of the Rachel magic, where i move quickly from “I don’t know what the fuck Rachel is talking about” to realizing “man, the point is that Rachel does know, and I’m starting to get it.”
Sorry for the apparent ass-kissing, but I’m moving you to my “indispensable” list.
Ah, man, wow. Thank you so much. It is an honour to receive this comment from you.
I, too, am a bit of a snob! So for years I was ashamed of my interest in fanfiction. It was only by reading very widely in both fanfic and published work, and by doggedly validating my own taste, that I came to the conclusion that some fanfic is very good actually, and lots of published work is really bad. There's really nothing to be ashamed of about fanfic as a whole any more than one should be ashamed of literary fiction, which has its own laziness and formulaic nonsense and tropes. I so appreciate your willingness to hear me out in this essay and I'm delighted to have you somewhat convinced!
I take your point on this being in fact a part of craft -- I haven't thought too much about those distinctions before now.
Naked Lunch just doesn't hit for me. I didn't get the sense that Burroughs himself was titillated and seduced by his own amoral/immoral musings. I had the sense that he wanted to write what he thought would be shocking -- I find that insufficiently visceral. I want to know what's inside someone that shocks even the person themselves. (It's a bit voyeuristic to want to witness it but oh well!)
Thank you so much again for this really wonderful comment, I truly appreciate it.
The observation about Burroughs is pretty reasonable and also interesting, and no harsher than things he said about Hemingway. I softly protest that there’s much more to his work than the things that make Naked Lunch notorious-- his early book Junky is underrated and nothing like NL, and some later works like Cities of the Red Night have poetic elements that I value more than the rivers of transgressive sewage. But still-- you make a good point.
I would still read Junkie! I'm open to it. It hasn't yet crossed my path though.
There’s always too much to read! I like that “it hasn’t crossed my path” idea, I can relate to that. You start finding people to talk about books with, and it quickly spirals out of control.
On the importance of bivalent relationships, it is notable that fanfic's greatest innovation is the 'slash' - i.e. what would it be like if x + y had a relationship with one another.
All Mantel's Reith Lectures are excellent, but especially 'Silence Grips the Town', on the personal costs of enmeshing yourself that deeply with someone you can never meet. Plenty of lovelorn fans might appreciate the torments she describes.
One reason the Wolf Hall trilogy beats A Place Of Greater Safety is that the events of the French Revolution are a bit too seductive and compelling, she keeps wanting to relate those, as well as show Camille, Danton and Robespierre trading barbs at dinner.
This is SUCH a good point -- the slash *is* the greatest innovation and speaks to that exploration of the bivalent connections!
I need to check out "Silence Grips the Town", I haven't listened to that one!
Thanks for the lovely comment.
> “The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable.”
💛💛💛
Somehow when you quote those words back to me on their own like that they feel even more true than when I wrote them. Entangled indeed. Thanks :)
This is magnificent, thank you. Right to the end - never even thought about why Orwell can't write fiction (and why Animal Farm and 1984 succeed despite that), but you're obviously right.
yesss thank you, I feel so satisfied when I can get someone to agree with me on Orwell (because my opinion seems to be unpopular but I am sure I am right)
I love the idea that the past is a canon that can be engaged with like the fictional one. It makes sense at a deep level: story and history are intertwined and their common root can be traced back to a time when very little distinction existed between them. This also helps me appreciate historical fiction in a way I couldn’t before.
I had thought: if historical fiction is not inserting hallucinations into the historical record, what is it doing but simply recapitulating the history books? But there’s a third thing, which is exploring the unknowns of what it was like to actually be there, enmeshed in the context where those decisions were made.
At the same time I found myself saddened by the suggestion that fiction shouldn’t, or needn’t, try to make logical sense. I see a palette of fictional styles in the decision of where to place one’s focus. On one end, some stories are highly focused on the logical implications of the core premise. On the other, some lack even a common connective fabric of events—what I have in mind is e.g. something like Waiting for Godot where it is immediately obvious that the physical/temporal context of the characters is excluded with prejudice: it doesn’t matter, it can’t matter.
I can’t get on board with the idea that fiction has to pass over intellectual/analytic engagement with its content in favour of emotional/holistic/relational engagement, lest it be unworthy, something worse than bad. But I do have a razor like that of my own. Which is that fiction fails when it fails to explore unknowns. Intellect-heavy stories fail when they fail to convey the experience of being uncertain about something. Emotion-heavy stories fail when they fail to convey the ambiguity of emotion: for example, in particular, the experience of not knowing what you will do, doing it, and then grappling with why you did it. That to me is the beating heart of fiction. And it is also true that emotionally-driven stories succeed at this much more often than intellectually-driven ones.
I guess I could formulate this into a hypothetical criticism of HPMOR (hypothetical because I haven’t read it): it is so confident in what it wants to express that, as fiction, it is tongue-tied.
"it is so confident in what it wants to express that, as fiction, it is tongue-tied." ohhhh i love this. I have always found that if i talk about something too much I can't write about it because I become too certain of what I want to say, so writing it down is boring, so I can't.
thanks for the comment and the thoughts!
Damn, Rachael. When you combine your hellbent style with your penetrating insight, we just need to step aside and watch the bonfire.
ugh this means the world and is too kind!!! thank you!
Also, agreed about Orwell. I like his fiction but the essays are the main course for me now that I’m a grownup.
“an excessive cultural preoccupation with the logical structure of the plot marks out our time as an era which is fundamentally hostile to fiction and to art more broadly. It is not important for events in a movie or a novel to make logical sense”
I so agree that the obsession with craft seems to have little place for a discussion of quality.
Thank you for the comment, Henry! I do feel like I've been going mad seeing online discussions of writing/craft that are bogged down in minutae, with no moment set aside to asking "but is it good?". so much ACTUALLY boils down to "is it good?"!
I had this on my Shakespeare essay--people telling me he’s no good at craft but has some other mystical quality that makes his work survive. I sometimes wonder is craft is the phlogiston of literature
I loved this post so much! You managed to eloquently explain how characters can be taken from say a spaceship exploring new worlds to a high school and the characters still be recognisable, and also why people might want to do this.
And you're right, the worst type of published fiction and fan fiction is when the author refuses to put anything on the line emotionally, and even worse, mocks people who write fiction vulnerably (and correctly) and HPMOR is bad and has always been bad.
Aw Connie thank you so much for this lovely comment. I'm so glad I was able to capture some part of the essence of why fanfic works!
Also you know I try not to judge people based on the art they like but I do make exceptions and HPMOR is one of them.