I used to be the sort of person who would say, “This is a book everyone should read,” but I am no longer that person. I don’t know when I changed, or what did it exactly, because I didn’t even fully realize I had changed until recently. I was reading the introduction to Nick Hornby’s “Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt,” a collection of the essays he writes for a magazine called The Believer about what he reads each month. He writes about the decline of reading as a part of the culture, but doesn’t blame TV or movies or computers. Instead he blames readers and English teachers and the sort of people who would say, “This is a book everyone should read.”
Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.
No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.
In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.
At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.
There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).
So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.
So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.
So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.
It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.
The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.
Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).
There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.
One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.
So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Made-up places
Another thing I wrote a few months ago, also inspired by Daniel Handler, but not about him.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
My Daniel Handler problem
As promised, here's something I wrote several months back. As always, I feel no shame in spoiling the end of all the books discussed.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
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