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metafandom link whence the discussion started, but a week or two ago (I am always behind) people were talking about scene length and chapter length. [EDIT: Found it! here] This is always interesting stuff [to me, anyway] because writing on the Internet is such a very different animal from writing on paper. Open your favourite contemporary novel sometime and count the following:
words in a line
lines on a page
pages in a chapter
Average and multiply. You'll be shocked, I think, if you grew up writing online. Way back in the late nineties I remember articles on Zeldman/ALA talking about how reading on the computer strains your eyes or something and so you have to be concise and have lovely clear typography. Eight years later this sounds a bit like medieval science, but the fact is that people just write less to a piece that has its genesis in the online world. Wee babbies who've read more fic than I have Dickens will bug their eyes out after they do the word count exercise, and wonder, "What on earth are they WRITING, to fill that many words? What am I not seeing?"
Because the weird part is that a fic of 2,000 words really does feel long and luxurious. And a short story of the same length will be a bit more like a Tofutti Cutie--very nice, but not particularly satisfying. On paper you rather want the entire banana split.
Writers have known for a long time that what feels interminable to us is just a paragraph that the reader probably skims in a second. Writing speeches is hell for the same reason. While James Joyce apocryphally struggled with seven words, the reader is trolling along at a good clip in search of the lede, the hott sexings, the prettiest simile.
So the answer is this: fandom is made up of writers, who toiled over their drabbles for a WHOLE MATH PERIOD, and these writers are also readers who devoured the source material for the hott sexings.
I'm not inclined to say that this is all awesome and indicative of an exciting new form, perfect and jewel-like as some ancient Zen thing where you use a single raisin to [FILL THIS BIT IN LATER -ed.] We are Westerners and when we see a fic that is 87 words long we treat it as disposable. If we want to write something good, we need to put the time in and say more than we think we're saying.
------------
In a less didactic vein, one of my favourite things in fiction is the extended narrative-in-dialogue. (This probably has some name of its own, but I'm a philosophy/Classics major now so I don't know it.) Yes, it's unrealistic--no one ever gets through a long story in real life without interruptions, forgetting the important parts, going off on tangents, or leaving out the unimportant but delightful details. The Victorians abused this device terribly. I don't care.
My top dialogue narratives:
- Reuven's father talking about the Baal Shem Tov in The Chosen. I don't know why this one springs first to mind, but it does. Chaim Potok is just that good. Reuven's gentle, professorial father drinking glasses of tea and talking about the Hasidim, about a terrible genius, about religious fervour, and asking his son repeatedly if he's boring him--you could read just that section and you would have the entire novel in miniature.
- Frankenstein's monster describing his life. I'm not one of those people who sympathises much with the monster--I felt for Dr Frankenstein himself, the tortured creator, who learned ethics too late. But the improbable Victorian zaniness of the articulate monster and the little melodrama of the blind old man and his daughter is fabulous.
- Mr Enfield's story of encountering Mr Hyde, at the very beginning of Stevenson's novel. I had to get the book to look up the name of the storyteller, but the tale itself is what I always think of when I think about what made Victorian novels good, when they were good. That door under its "blind forehead of discoloured wall" and Hyde's trampling of the little girl, which immediately and brutally remove all the romance and glamour from the idea of an evil man. Movie adaptations have never understood that, of course. Did any of them even show that scene? I can't remember right now, which probably means they didn't. It would be hard to forget a scene where a grown man tramples a little girl. "It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see."
[I think I mention those two novels in almost every book list I make. I should write a gooey entry sometime about why those creaky old monster novels are so much better than The Mill on the Floss or Gravity's Rainbow or any of that shit.]
{{Also, for the record, they're very short novels--The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is really just a novella. So I'm not saying that fans need to churn out tomes of hundreds of pages, necessarily.}}
Anyway, yes, I did just write one of these into Heart's Landscape, an 1,100 word story in a 2,500 word scene. So word counts and stylised dialogue are on my mind.
_________________________
Oh man, read this stuff. This will open your eyes, if you've never thought very much about how Writers Write When They Are Not Writers Who Write Just For the Sake of Writing But Also For Money. The kind of people who call it "content", I mean.
metafandom link whence the discussion started, but a week or two ago (I am always behind) people were talking about scene length and chapter length. [EDIT: Found it! here] This is always interesting stuff [to me, anyway] because writing on the Internet is such a very different animal from writing on paper. Open your favourite contemporary novel sometime and count the following:words in a line
lines on a page
pages in a chapter
Average and multiply. You'll be shocked, I think, if you grew up writing online. Way back in the late nineties I remember articles on Zeldman/ALA talking about how reading on the computer strains your eyes or something and so you have to be concise and have lovely clear typography. Eight years later this sounds a bit like medieval science, but the fact is that people just write less to a piece that has its genesis in the online world. Wee babbies who've read more fic than I have Dickens will bug their eyes out after they do the word count exercise, and wonder, "What on earth are they WRITING, to fill that many words? What am I not seeing?"
Because the weird part is that a fic of 2,000 words really does feel long and luxurious. And a short story of the same length will be a bit more like a Tofutti Cutie--very nice, but not particularly satisfying. On paper you rather want the entire banana split.
Writers have known for a long time that what feels interminable to us is just a paragraph that the reader probably skims in a second. Writing speeches is hell for the same reason. While James Joyce apocryphally struggled with seven words, the reader is trolling along at a good clip in search of the lede, the hott sexings, the prettiest simile.
So the answer is this: fandom is made up of writers, who toiled over their drabbles for a WHOLE MATH PERIOD, and these writers are also readers who devoured the source material for the hott sexings.
I'm not inclined to say that this is all awesome and indicative of an exciting new form, perfect and jewel-like as some ancient Zen thing where you use a single raisin to [FILL THIS BIT IN LATER -ed.] We are Westerners and when we see a fic that is 87 words long we treat it as disposable. If we want to write something good, we need to put the time in and say more than we think we're saying.
------------
In a less didactic vein, one of my favourite things in fiction is the extended narrative-in-dialogue. (This probably has some name of its own, but I'm a philosophy/Classics major now so I don't know it.) Yes, it's unrealistic--no one ever gets through a long story in real life without interruptions, forgetting the important parts, going off on tangents, or leaving out the unimportant but delightful details. The Victorians abused this device terribly. I don't care.
My top dialogue narratives:
- Reuven's father talking about the Baal Shem Tov in The Chosen. I don't know why this one springs first to mind, but it does. Chaim Potok is just that good. Reuven's gentle, professorial father drinking glasses of tea and talking about the Hasidim, about a terrible genius, about religious fervour, and asking his son repeatedly if he's boring him--you could read just that section and you would have the entire novel in miniature.
- Frankenstein's monster describing his life. I'm not one of those people who sympathises much with the monster--I felt for Dr Frankenstein himself, the tortured creator, who learned ethics too late. But the improbable Victorian zaniness of the articulate monster and the little melodrama of the blind old man and his daughter is fabulous.
- Mr Enfield's story of encountering Mr Hyde, at the very beginning of Stevenson's novel. I had to get the book to look up the name of the storyteller, but the tale itself is what I always think of when I think about what made Victorian novels good, when they were good. That door under its "blind forehead of discoloured wall" and Hyde's trampling of the little girl, which immediately and brutally remove all the romance and glamour from the idea of an evil man. Movie adaptations have never understood that, of course. Did any of them even show that scene? I can't remember right now, which probably means they didn't. It would be hard to forget a scene where a grown man tramples a little girl. "It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see."
[I think I mention those two novels in almost every book list I make. I should write a gooey entry sometime about why those creaky old monster novels are so much better than The Mill on the Floss or Gravity's Rainbow or any of that shit.]
{{Also, for the record, they're very short novels--The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is really just a novella. So I'm not saying that fans need to churn out tomes of hundreds of pages, necessarily.}}
Anyway, yes, I did just write one of these into Heart's Landscape, an 1,100 word story in a 2,500 word scene. So word counts and stylised dialogue are on my mind.
_________________________
Oh man, read this stuff. This will open your eyes, if you've never thought very much about how Writers Write When They Are Not Writers Who Write Just For the Sake of Writing But Also For Money. The kind of people who call it "content", I mean.
