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Rebel Yell: A Short Guide To Fiction Writing
1. Breakout: The Challenges of Writing for the New Millenium
Carefully follow what most handbooks on writing fiction tell you, and chances are you'll end up producing a nice, tight, well-crafted story that could have been produced just as easily in 1830.
You'll end up producing a story where language is transparent and fictive focus falls on your protagonist's psychology. Your character will be rounded, resonant, believable, and usually middle or lower-middle class. Your setting will probably be urban or suburban and rendered with the precision of a photograph. The form of your story will be so predictable as to be virtually invisible: it will have a beginning, a muddle, and an ending through which your rounded resonant character will travel in a fairly limited amount of strictly structured chronological time in order to learn something about himself, herself, or his or her relationship to society or nature.
In a narratological nutshell, you'll end up producing a piece of realism, and realism is a genre of averages.
It's all about middle-of-the-road people living on Main Street in Middletown, Middle America.
It prefers the everyday in terms of style, shape, and content.
There's nothing fancy about it, nothing flashy.
And that's just the way realist writers like it. They strive to invent stories about ordinary folks living through the unexceptional moments that comprise diurnally dull and usually distantly unhappy life in breadbasket America: childhood, adolescence, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity, paying the rent, buying the groceries, watching the TV, dropping by the 7-11, getting sick, and eventually dying, usually of cancer.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, in his explosive collection of essays on experimental writing, For a New Novel (1963), calls this the Balzacian mode of fiction because in a very real sense its impulse stems from the early nineteenth-century novels of Honoré de Balzac, but it could just as well be called the Defoean mode of fiction—after Daniel Defoe, the first novelistic realist, and his 1719 puritanically detailed pseudo-reportage of Robinson Crusoe's daily accomplishments on an island in the middle of nowhere. Illuminatingly, Crusoe's first impulse after finding himself shipwrecked is to recreate as closely as possible a bourgeois European enclave . . . another Main Street.
A mode that appeared in the eighteenth century with the rise of the new middle class in England and on the Continent, rooted in the less-than-factual journalism, diaries, letters, and journals of the time, realism is the stuff of Richardson and Fielding, Dickens and Dreiser, William Dean Howells and Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway and Ann Beattie, John Updike and The Bridges of Madison County.
I mention that last tremendously bad bestseller among all those pretty darn good realist writers because, as Samuel R. Delany once commented in an interview, those sorts of narratives aren't written for sharp perspicacious readers in, say, New York, where all the major publishing houses and most of the major slick magazines in America reside, but for a certain imagined housewife living in a small-yet-comfortable house somewhere in Nebraska.
If there's nothing in your narrative that she can relate to, nothing and no one she wants to know something about, then as far as that mainstream market goes, well, you're plain out of luck.
"The housewife in Nebraska has, of course, a male counterpart," Delany continues. "In commercial terms, he's only about a third as important as she is. The basic model for the novel reader has traditionally been female since the time of Richardson. But his good opinion is considered far more prestigious. He's a high school English teacher in Montana who hikes for a hobby on weekends and has some military service behind him. He despises the housewife—though reputedly she wants to have an affair with him. . . . Between them, that Nebraska housewife and that Montana English teacher tyrannized mid-century American fiction."
One reason that virtual couple likes realist novels so much, Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson figures, is that that kind of book "persuades us in a concrete fashion that human actions, human life is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single formed, meaningful substance. . . . Our satisfaction with the completeness of plot is therefore a kind of satisfaction with society as well."
Every narrative strategy thereby suggests a metaphysical one.
Writing is nothing if not a series of choices, and to write one way rather than another is to imply a mode of thinking that privileges one perspective on the world over another.
The problem with the realist strategy—besides the obvious gaff that more and more of us these days are neither Nebraskan housewives nor Montanan teachers, figuratively speaking—is that many of us don't share its deep-structure assumptions at the turn of the millennium. Given the high-tech, increasingly global, hugely unstable, multi-cultural, multi-gendered, multi-genred pluriverse our fluid selves inhabit, the idea that life is somehow a complete, interlocking whole strikes a good number of us as out-of-step with our Age of Uncertainty, even a little quaint, perhaps naive . . . if not downright amusing.
We no longer intuit that existence is necessarily meaningful, if we ever did, and we're certainly not satisfied with society.
So why should we write as if we did and were?
Why should we pad along the cramped homogeneous corridors of suburbia, or the cramped homogeneous corridors of domestic fiction that reflects it?
Shouldn't our task as authors rather be (or perhaps also be) to explore ways to create that accurately reflect our sense of lived contemporary experience?
Shouldn't we be writing for the new millennium?
If the answer is yes, enter the alternative.
For the purposes of this guide, let's define the term as loosely and inclusively as possible: everything that is neither mainstream realism, nor the pure cookie-cutter pulp of something like romance, is alternative—both commercially and aesthetically, as seen from the dominant culture's point of view.
Many of the points we'll make through the course of our discussion, which intends to touch on everything from the current publishing climate in America, to the process of writing and undermining traditional components of narrative, to finding a publisher and even helping promote one’s own book after publication, can be applied to poetry and as well. In fact, one of the premises of this discussion, as with so many postmodern others over the last twenty years or so, is that the boundaries separating these once disparate genres—all genres, actually—have begun to dissolve.
This text doesn't intend to be a manifesto, a public declaration of aesthetic principles, policies, and rules, the ironic and punnish title for my introduction notwithstanding. I'm aware that a guidebook about the alternative smacks of oxymoron. After all, if you can codify and systematize the alternative, then how alternative can it be, right?
But that's not what this text is trying to do.
ManiQuesto is more like it.
That is, this book intends to be an invitation to think about where we are in space and time, and to ask how each of us might most effectively capture that place and point in our prose. It doesn't intend to be a how-to text in the same way, for instance, that Janet Burroway's very helpful Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (1992) intends to be a how-to text. While her book and most of those like it are designed to nudge young authors toward writing mainstream realist narratives, this is designed to encourage young authors to investigate which mode of writing best nails down what they have to express.
It's an invitation to think about fictive possibilities rather than limitations, an opening up of perceptions and perspectives rather than a closing down of compositional options.
And it has one bottom-line thesis: taking chances with writing fiction is more engaging and more enjoyable than not taking chances.
It therefore assumes that every piece of writing should be a kind of experiment in narration, and that, as we all know, some experiments succeed while others don't. The excitement and fulfillment of the experiment exists in the process, not necessarily the product.
It also takes for granted that a collaborative paradigm for writing is usually more fruitful than an isolationist one. Romantic myths aside, writing isn't about soltaire and ego. It's about synergy and cooperation.
Every writer, my assumption goes, should make a good-spirited attempt to talk with and help out other writers in any way she or he can, from joining forces in the actual act of creation and post-creation critique, to offering support communities along the literary interstate, to assisting in getting out the word about other writers' manuscripts and published work.
Alternative writing's a big party, and everyone's invited.
Now Read This
Alternative Reading Lists: Mark Amerika and I put together a long list of alternative fiction recommendations at the end of the collection of essays we edited, In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop (San Diego State University Press, 1995), which you can find for free on-line at:
• www.altx.com/memoriam/pomo.html#RTFToC10
I also keep a regularly updated short-list of fresh new alternative fiction at:
• www.uidaho.edu/~lolsen/readings.html
Barth, John. "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967) & "The Literature of Replenishment" (1979). Two cornerstone essays on the innovative by one of the most influential edge-writers of the second half of the twentieth century. The first focuses on the death of old forms of fiction, the second on fiction's postmodern reinvigoration.
Bookstore: If you don't live in a city with a good bookstore, fear not. You can shop digitally for alternative fare at the biggest bookstore in the world at:
• amazon.com
Federman, Raymond. "Surfiction: A Postmodern Position" (1973). "The only kind of fiction that still means something today," this key essay asserts, "is the kind of fiction that tries to explore the possibilities of fiction beyond its own limitations; the kind of fiction that challenges the tradition that governs it."
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel (1963). It's really hard to write mainstream realism again after reading these essays that demand a special fiction for the present.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel (1957). A superb study of the development of the realist novel and an assessment of its assumptions.
Stretching & Flexing
Bring in to your writing group a short passage from your favorite fiction of all time, and one from your least favorite, and be prepared to explain why each affects you the way it does, paying close attention to style, voice, ear, form, character, and imaginative flair. What would you like to steal from the first? What can you learn by negative example from the second? What does each tell you about your preferences?
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