Read a new story, "Cleaning Up After the Champion"

I posted a short story to a new writers' website, Fictionaut. The story is called "Cleaning Up After the Champion," and is about how normal people react when their loved ones turn into superheroes.

It's either the first in a series of stories about superheroes, or the first chapter in a novel. Works either way. No other stories in the series, if there is one, have been completed, though I have started a couple of them.

Read "Cleaning Up After the Champion."

Too much talk

I looked at "The Savage Detectives" again briefly on Sunday, having bought a paperback copy of the novel to accompany my now-damaged hardback copy. As far as I could determine, there are no direct quotes in the entire second section, which takes 80% of the book.

Some of the chapters in the current novel I'm writing, titled "Knock Yourself Out," are written like this, and they're my favorite chapters. You know what the great thing is about forbidding direct quotes? It eliminates the long talky sections that mar my writing. Anytime I have an extended dialogue scene, it tends to get away from me. I can hear the dialogue and individual lines are good, but when there's three or four pages of talking, of clever dialogue, everything gets lost. For example, in the chapter I just finished, a scene at a party devolves into three pages of dialog, with a descriptive paragraph every ten lines or so.

It's a mode of writing that's always easy to do and dull to read. The first novel I ever attempted, which I titled "Us and Them," had pages and pages of this talk. I had seen it done in other books and it didn't seem to grate, so I thought it was permissible to do. But it just doesn't fit with the kind of book I want to write now.

When I wrote "How They Scored," I was able to alternate between direct and indirect quotes. I would have a long passage of narration, with indirect quotes if necessary, and then a paragraph or two of direct quotation, and then go back to indirect quoting -- all in the same scene in which one character was telling a single, long anecdote. It worked pretty well, I thought. I haven't been able to achieve this yet with my current project, though as I say, the chapters where I have no direct quotations at all are fine..

technorati: writing

Flannery never liked digging too deeply

Here's Flannery O'Connor, writing to her correspondent "A" on why the bull had to gore a character in her story "Greenleaf":

What personal problems are worked out in the story must be unconscious. My preoccupations are technical. My preoccupation is how I am going to get the bull's horns into this woman's ribs. Of course why his horns belong in her ribs is something more fundamental but I can say I give [sic] it much thought. Perhaps you are able to see things in these stories that I can't see because if I did see I would be too frightened to write them. I have always insisted that there is a fine grain of stupidity required in the fiction writer.

Previously: Another instance in which O'Connor resisted interpretation of one of her stories.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, fiction, literary criticism

I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

-- Flannery O'Connor,
rejecting a wild interpretation of her story "A Good Man is Hard to Find,"
from a letter dated 28 March 1961,
in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor"

This reminded me of an incident from my college days. I was a film criticism major, and being an undergraduate was much vexed by the grad students who tended to throw their weight around.

Two of them particularly annoyed me, Greg B. and Louis B. The latter once offered an interpretation of a classic film, whose director I later had the opportunity to speak to in person. When I described Louis' interpretation to him, he dismissed it and said there was nothing like that at all the scene. I dutifully reported this back to Louis, who scornfully said: "Well, you can talk about intentionality all you want, but..."

Louis is the main reason I wanted never to become a grad student.

technorati: Flannery O'Connor, literary theory