Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Page 4 of 10

Week 7: Chapters vs. Stories, Part III, Section B

October 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This is the second of two posts (first one here) from my linked stories class. Now, we’re going to talk about Cambria, PowerPoint, and our second class activity.

So let’s backtrack for a moment to early in the class period. We discussed formatting—for our upcoming projects and for fiction in general. Prof. Day advised us not to use Cambria, which is the default font for Microsoft Word. (I’d take it one step further and say don’t use Word, but that’s another matter.) Many of Word’s settings are better changed because, as she put it, “You’re the boss of Word!”

I don’t know about Jennifer Egan’s relationship with Word, but I can tell you right now that she is the boss of PowerPoint.

Our Activities, Part II: Translating PowerPoint to Normal Story

As I mentioned last time, Chapter 12 of Goon Squad, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” is told entirely in PowerPoint slides. The fictional slidemaker, 12-year-old Alison, reveals a portion of her family life, including her brother’s obsession with the pauses in songs.

It’s hard to discuss how this piece works without having read it, so if you didn’t click the link earlier, go now. It’s a quick—and unique—read. Of it, Egan says,

Goon Squad is a book about time, composed of 13 discrete stories separated by gaps. And PowerPoint (or any slideshow, it doesn’t have to be Microsoft) is a genre composed of discrete moments separated by gaps. As a genre, it echoes the structure I was already working with in Goon Squad, and its corporate coldness allowed me to be overtly sentimental in ways I probably wouldn’t have allowed myself to in conventional fiction.

Our task, having read this chapter, was to take a ten-slide portion of it and translate it into “conventional fiction.” Some slides make it pretty easy by being single linear exchanges:

All slides © Jennifer Egan

Some make it more difficult by being nonlinear in form and all over the place in time:

Some just can’t be captured the same way in “normal story”:

And some are simple statements of fact:

Although we grappled with the nonlinear ones, these last, factual ones seemed to give us the most difficulty—we didn’t feel free, as Prof. Day put it, to “transform the data into good fiction” and so tried to do a too-literal translation. (As any foreign language study will show you, a literal translation of anything complex is rarely successful.) It’s a common problem even when we’re not translating from PowerPoint, though. How do we convey information without just resigning to the dreaded “info dump”? What do we do with that green-circle slide, other than turn it into a list of dramatis personae?

For starters, recognize that we can work it in over time. Take the fifth slide:

My translation went like this:

We’re walking to the car, skipping in the desert night. My arm is around my brother’s neck, and when kids say, “Good game, Linc,” I answer for him.

It’s cool air, but you feel heat coming up from the earth like from behind a person’s skin. I think I feel it through my shoes, but do I? When I crouch to touch the parking lot, it glitters like coal in the streetlight. I was right: the ground is warm.

“Alison, cars!” Mom yells, overreacting as usual (Annoying Habit #81).

I stand up, slowly, rolling my eyes. “I know, Mom.”

So, for instance, I might have referred to the junior high baseball league to approximate Lincoln’s age, and called him Alison’s older brother. I might have remarked on the father’s absence from the game to show that he’s also an important character, even if he isn’t in this scene.

It’s a good exercise, considering how you might translate these things. If you’re following along but haven’t been keeping up on the activities, try this one. Give yourself the same ten-page assignment and see what you come up with. (Leave it for me in the comments, even—I’m curious.)

What’s next?

For us, we’ll be kicking off workshops soon, looking at material for our final projects. For you, you can kick off a workshop as well. Find a writing group near you, or start one, or seek out an online community. Share what you’ve learned by following our class, and exchange stories. In other words, make links.

I am linking. Are you?

Week 7: Chapters vs. Stories, Part III, Section A

October 6, 2013 / / 1 Comment

This week marks the more-or-less midpoint of my linked stories course with Cathy Day, and the last of our reading-focused classes. (Up next: workshops.) We started the semester with the least linked stories, Short Cuts, and worked our way toward more and more tightly linked pieces, finally reaching today’s book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, whose second-edition cover identifies it as a novel.

To my regular readers: This will be a stylistic departure. I’m preparing this post as the first of two to be shared on our class blog, where you can follow along with us.

To my new readers: Hi. My name is Alice, and I’m here to talk to you about …

What We Read: A Visit from the Goon Squad

A Visit from the Goon Squad is the result of Jennifer Egan‘s challenge to herself to write a book with chapters “as different from each other as possible, yet still adding up to one story.” (source) After an interview with Egan, Emma Brockes observes,

The idea for Goon Squad came to her after her reading group got stuck into Proust. It took them about seven years to plough through In Search of Lost Time, during which she became obsessed with how to represent entire lifespans, non-sequentially and in the way people actually experience them, that is as a constant negotiation between reflection and anticipation.

The twelfth chapter of Goon Squad is written as 12-year-old Alison’s autobiographical slideshow, complete with sound effects (if read online, as was Egan’s initial expectation). Another story is told in second-person. Still another is a news article. Different narrators, different protagonists from one chapter to the next, different time periods over forty-some years—and now identified as a novel?

Our Activity: Reorganizing Goon Squad

Because of the delightfully mixed-up nature of this book, an obvious exercise is to experiment with different ways of ordering the chapters. What would happen, for instance, if we extracted all the chapters that prominently feature Bennie? Or Rob’s death? What if we put them in chronological order as best we can?

Pictured: Kate Gutheil and Ashley Mack-Jackson with chapters sorted into character-based arrangements

(A past, particularly ambitious reader had done something like this already. Tyler Petty went through the book and outlined the timelines for twelve different characters.)

As we reflected on this task—the difficulties in mapping out an exact timeline, the costs of every rearrangement—someone declared that Egan had already put it in the best order. Prof. Day said, “I know.”

Takeaways

The order of chapters/sections/stories in a book goes a long way in determining how it’s read. Chronological Goon Squad, for instance, doesn’t have the same emotional effect, because information gets doled out differently. Good Squad organized by major character loses the interwoven, interdependent feel.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a more conventional structure is always bad. It just means that organization should never be taken for granted, that we shouldn’t default to one form because that’s how it’s usually done (or for the sole purpose of being different) without thinking about how it will serve the book we’re writing. We need to take time for these questions, to make these decisions deliberately, open to the possibility that the first way we try it might not be the best. (We also have to recognize that there are Tyler Pettys out there, so if we’re going to play with chronology, we better make sure we double check our math.)

What I Learned

I’ve experimented some with chronological deviation in novels and written chronologically-ambiguous short stories, mosaics of scenes whose temporal relations aren’t explicit but are clearly not chronological. But I haven’t written—or contemplated in-depth—something with the scope of Egan’s book. The questions and considerations presented by a project like Goon Squad are fascinating (if somewhat daunting). The most important thing, though, was that reminder that no decision should be taken for granted in writing, and that there are questions worth asking that I might not think of at first.

What’s next?

In a few days, I’ll share the second half of our class activities, which focused specifically on that twelfth chapter.

Something in that I don’t like.

October 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

When I was young, I played a computer game called Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. I don’t remember much about it, except that the goal was to successfully navigate bands of Zoombinis from one side of a map to another, solving logic puzzles to avoid perils along the way.

One of those puzzles requires you to suss out the pizza preferences of a couple troll-like creatures. You offer them different toppings in combinations until they’re pleased. Until they’re satisfied, they’ll respond to your offers with either, “More toppings!” or, “Something on that I don’t like,” flinging the pizza away in rejection.

Screw up too many times, and your little Zoombini server gets booted out of your party.

In related news, I recently read Sideways, by Rex Pickett.

I recently read Sideways and, on several occasions I found myself with an urge to fling the book away and declare, “Something in that I don’t like!” That something, I realized quickly, was the characters.

I’ve read plenty of books with central characters I disliked, though, and I wasn’t always struck by the urge to fling them away … which makes me wonder what, exactly, that difference is.

There are all sorts of reasons I dislike people, some of them more legitimate than others, so perhaps that’s part of it—different characters are unlikable for different reasons. I enjoy a charming sociopath, for instance even if the sociopathy outweighs the charm and I don’t actually like the character. Perhaps the most striking example from my recent reads is Horns, by Joe Hill. There are a few characters whose heads we get to inhabit, and none of them are particularly likable—one of them, in fact, becomes something akin to the devil. Yet I enjoyed the book, to the point that I’ve recommended it to several friends.

Those Sideways characters, though. They have inspired me to warn several friends away from it (or else assure people who meant to read it before watching the film adaptation that really, they didn’t miss anything).

The New York Times recently published a pair of short essays by Moshin Hamid and Zoë Heller on the matter of unlikable characters. Hamid observed:

I’ll confess—I read fiction to fall in love. That’s what’s kept me hooked all these years. Often, that love was for a character: in a presexual-crush way for Fern in “Charlotte’s Web”; in a best-buddies way for the heroes of “Astérix & Obélix”; in a sighing, “I wish there were more of her in this book” way for Jessica in “Dune” or Arwen in “The Lord of the Rings.”

Then, though, he goes on to note that, “In fiction, as in my nonreading life, someone didn’t necessarily have to be likable to be lovable.”

It’s an important distinction, likable vs. lovable, and one that—in different ways—we’re all familiar with. It’s like that line that gets floated around in different fonts, superimposed over different images: At some point you have to realize that some people can stay in your heart but not in your life (or some variation thereof). We’ve all been there, loving something that was not, by objective measures, good—a person, a behavior, a life state, whatever. But goodness—likability—isn’t the primary criterion we use sometimes.

Few would argue in defense of Dr. Lecter’s dietary preferences. And yet we love him. Or, at least, I do.

So what’s a writer to do with this? Likable might not be good enough to be lovable, and unlikable still needs to leave room for lovable.

The short answer is, I’m not sure. Writing always has an element of trial and error, the same as in real life. I can list off characteristics of people I love (in a broad sense) and although that’s a start, it doesn’t mean I’ll love everyone who meets those criteria—or that I won’t love anyone who doesn’t. I have to actually interact with those people. Still, here are some points I would put out:

  • a lovable character has agency (we can pity a victim, but pity isn’t love)
  • a lovable character wants something (otherwise it’s just a lazy afternoon with an echoing, “I dunno, what do you want to do?”)
  • a lovable character makes decisions (we, as readers, are along for the story’s ride; we need more from a character)
  • a lovable character faces a genuine but potentially surmountable obstacle (if it’s all smooth sailing, or if there’s no reason to hope, we have nothing to wonder about, and wonder is a key component of love)

That’s an imperfect list, of course. (You’ll notice that much of it has as much to do with story as with character. Separating the two seems, in ways, a pointless exercise, because one without the other loses either its context or its importance. But that’s another matter entirely.) If you have any to add, leave me a comment.

What Big Teeth You Have

September 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned before the fiction workshop I’m taking this semester, specializing in linked stories. (If you want to follow along with the course, check out our class blog.) The basic idea of linked stories is that they’re too connected to be wholly separate stories and still have the same impact (that is, they function as stories alone but become more powerful in combination) but too distinct to be a novel(/novella). If this sounds like a slippery definition, that’s because it is. There’s a whole messy space between collections of unrelated stories and novels that’s inhabited by linked stories, story cycles, novels in stories, composite novels, etc.

I took something of a hiatus from writing anything complete from 2003–2005 (during which time I considered, among other things, becoming a high school band director) and picked it back up on a whim when a friend of mine instructed me to do NaNoWriMo. (I do mean instructed. There was no, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing. Want to do it with me?” There was only, “Do NaNoWriMo.”) It was a messy month—I came up with my concept at the last minute, realized when my planned plot concluded that I only had half of the 50,000 words, and only finished because Thanksgiving Break afforded me the opportunity to lock myself in the bathroom, away from distractions, and pound out 7,000 a day. But I finished a project that I lovingly called the SVN, because titles have never been my strong suit.

The SVN involved five different viewpoint characters, and although that messy first draft didn’t make the best use of them, by the time I’d been through several revisions (for three years, although I had other side projects, it was my focus) each of those characters had an arc, all of which converged in the penultimate scene.

In other words, the SVN could, in a way, be considered a collection of linked stories, interwoven with one another.

I wrote another NaNoWriMo novel in 2008 (my next serious project) that had two viewpoint characters who spent the majority of the plot not knowing of each other, much less their connection. Again, their arcs joined up as the story neared its end; again, I could rephrase that as, their stories joined up as the piece neared its end.

My current project is a single viewpoint chronological narrative—free of murkiness—but it occurred to me that it’s the exception. Of the novels/sort-of-novels I’ve written, almost three-quarters have been, to some extent, separate but linked stories.

That said, they’ve all be much closer to the novel end of the spectrum. There are separate character arcs, but they’re all structured around the central conflict, whatever that is, and even when the characters don’t yet know each other, it’s clear to the reader that they’re all directly tied to that conflict, so they’re only ever as distant as a friend of a friend(/enemy of an enemy, etc.). I consider those pieces to be novels … but I suppose it’s rarely quite so simple.

I’ve adamantly defended my novelist identity; the idea that I might be dipping so much as a toe into that murky in-between water seemed, until about 3:15 this afternoon, impossible. It’s disconcerting. Because Continue reading

On College Writing (by way of preschoolers)

August 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

This is cross-posted (with slight variation) on my brand new temporary side blog, I have an office. I’m keeping it as a place to process my learning-to-be-a-teacher thoughts, and I might draw from it now and then if I have a thought that comes together well.

A few days ago, I started How Learning Works, and it brings up a lot of principles from my undergrad psychology studies. The third chapter in particular makes me think of a psychology class I had my last semester of undergrad, which was actually called Learning. It was behavioral psychology learning, not education learning, but a huge chunk of behavioral psychology is operant conditioning—all about shaping behavior with consequences. And this is where motivation comes in.

Take the different forms of value, for instance. Intrinsic value, my psych professor asserted, rarely comes out of nowhere—there’s almost always something that precedes it. Example: most pianists who play because of the intrinsic value they find in it didn’t just decide, out of the blue, that this pursuit was valuable. The closest jump would be that boredom/curiosity/etc. gave value to exploring the environment, and the piano that happened to be there had instrumental value (get it?) as a way to alleviate boredom/satiate curiosity. Only then can the piano take on its own value. But that often isn’t the case. A lot of pianists had piano lessons as a kid, something selected—and incentivized—by the parent.

Nothing is intrinsically intrinsically valuable, short of basic life needs. Intrinsic value develops with time—sometimes quickly, sometimes not.

Here, though, is the twist: we have to be careful how we reward things. There are risks involved. Lepper, Green, and Nisbett did a study in 1973 with preschool kids—not exactly a college writing class, I know, but bear with me.

So one day, you sit down three groups of kids with markers and tell them to draw. You tell the first group they’ll get a reward at the end for drawing; you surprise the second group with a reward; and the third group gets no reward. Three days later, you reconvene the groups and set them in a playroom with, among other things, markers and paper. Do you see a change in the rate of drawing?

Yes. But it’s complicated.

What typically gets reported when the study is cited is that the group that got no reward had higher rates of drawing than the group that was told they’d get a reward. This means, people will say, that extrinsic reward actually undermines motivation. (It’s the whole, I love writing, so if I got paid to do it, it would be ruined! sort of thinking.)

Except you had three groups, remember? And the group of kids that got a surprise reward drew just as much as the group that got no reward. So this means that extrinsic reward has no effect, then? No, not that either.

With a little probing into these kids’ histories, you can break them down into “low-base-rate” and “high-base-rate” drawers—i.e., kids who, left to their own devices, didn’t draw much, and kids who did. The group with no reward saw no change to either group. The group with the surprise reward saw a higher rate in the low-base-rate kids, as did the group with the expected reward. But that group saw a drop in high-base-rate kids.

Why might that possibly be?

Here’s an analogy. I could say, “Want to help me with Project A?” Or I could say, “Want to help me with Project B? I’ll give you five bucks.” While the five dollars is a nice offer, it also might—reasonably—lead you to suspect that there’s something unpleasant about Project B. You go in with the assumption that this is a trade—that you’re taking a loss (your effort) in exchange for a gain (five dollars), as am I (reversed). By offering you the money ahead of time, I’ve framed it as a chore, and since I’m having to add extrinsic value to the equation, Project B must not have intrinsic value.

And that’s the tricky thing with incentives. (Well, one of them.) A lot of people don’t come into a writing class finding writing intrinsically valuable. But lumping on simple extrinsic value isn’t necessarily the best way to resolve that.

I met with my mentor Friday, along with her other mentee. He asked about creating student interest in the class, and it’s a good question—particularly with a class like this. It’s not just that they need a 300-level lit class and they picked the one that looked best; it’s that they need this specific composition class—there’s no element of choice involved, except “Now or later?”

The first thing, our mentor said, is to get them arguing with one another.

Which, when she said it, made perfect sense. These students might not find intrinsic value in writing, but who doesn’t find intrinsic value in being right—in being recognized as being right? Start off there, and writing becomes instrumentally valuable, but not in a way tied to an unrelated reward—in a way that’s organically connected to a reward. Writing isn’t a chore you complete to get a grade; it’s a tool for demonstrating how deliciously right you are.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Alice Thomsen

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑