On Wood on How Fiction Works

James Wood article: A Life of their own

From Jane Eyre to Jean Brodie, David Copperfield to David Brent, whether solidly realised or lightly sketched, fictional figures can be as vivid to us as real people. But just what, exactly, is a character, asks James Wood

Guardian 26 January 2008

Reviews of :

Frank Kermode’s The New Republic review

Peter Conrad Guardian 17 February 2008

D J Taylor The Independent 3 February 2008

Gideon Lewis-Kraus Los Angeles Times 20 July 2008

Mark Thwaite Ready Steady Book blog 12 March 2008

Wisdom of the West blog

He does it chapter by chapter and there is a lot of it.

Nearly finished?

J G Ballard’s memoir {review by Nicholas Shakespeare. }, Miracle of Life, was serialised on Radio 4 this week.

In one episode, relating a meeting the future Mrs. Ballard, in which on learning he was writing a novel she asked him, “Have you nearly finished? “, he replied “No, (but) I’ve nearly begun.”

::

Nienke Hinton writes in a post in her blog, The Writing Life, several quotes from Finishing your Novel by Timothy Hallinan. The one which resonated most profoundly was:

“Do not reduce your story to outlines and sketches, notes and 3×5 cards. You will make your story finite this way and it will suffer because it cannot grow beyond your outline.”

Too late, unfortunately. I did once explain to another blogger who appeared to be trying to write – complaining in a post she couldn’t get on – that I thought I had discovered a half-way house. On any particular day, if you find you can’t write what you thought you were going to, then write notes (and even notes on the notes, if you feel you have to). With luck the mood flips out of notes into something which feels like writing – – a snatch of dialogue suddenly comes to mind, perhaps, or a description. Change the colour of the font and get it down. Or ordinary to bold, why not.

The problem with this is remembering you’ve done actual writing amongst the notes. If you were very efficient there would be the immediate copying and pasting of the ‘writing’ into a file of their own a the end of the session. But they would probably make no sense at all when re-read a week later without the surround of explanatory notes, which themselves in places might look suspiciously like narratorial voices being practiced in some sort of complex metalepsis.

In my case there is often a dialogue going on in there amongst the ideas. What if this? Could do that. Nah. Would the reader….? Dunno.

Then the other writing displacement activity: reading about writing and maybe even taking notes. Not even reading more good writing itself, which might be more useful: but reading how to write, or even some fancy narratology. If this happens, you will almost certainly feel the need to add to your notes the links which lead to the accumulation of articles on writing you come across. Notes. Notes on notes. Links to other people’s notes. And so on.

This sort of thing can be thoroughly absorbing: you might be excused for forgetting you were meant to be writing at all. One day I came across the word diagesis. By the time I was into the homodiagesis and heterodiagesis, I had completely forgotten what I woke with for my own story. It didn’t seem to matter when so much progress was being made on how to tell stories and their possible structure.

Just now I came across the original place where I picked up the diagetic lingo: Narrators and Narrative Situation from Basics of English Studies, which looks like a desperation measure by some determined lecturer in the face of the general ignorance of his or her undergraduate students. Quite useful though.

This section of a website dealing with The Narrator and Storytelling, has even resorted to “PowerPoint”- style slide presentations of the essential features. For example a slide sequence subtitled: What kind of story telling?

Oh and look here’s another one with all the terms nicely boxed-up: Chapter 7: The Narrator from Narrative theory.

Never ending. You can learn too that diagesis is a term used a lot in film (though it seems not a lot by film-makers but a lot by film students and their teachers). You might have come to the idea that this never going to be a novel. What about a film script?

By the time you are through with:

An Attempt at Universal Subjectivity: The importance of mirrors for self-consciousness, the importance of self-consciousness for cinema, and the importance of it all to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. David Wishard

or

Scene shift, metalepsis, and the metaleptic mode by by Monika Fludernik

the day is gone. Pretty sure in your mind that tomorrow when you start afresh aiming to write your own words, the narrative voice will be sorted. Or will it?