Storytellersunplugged

When I grow up, I’m going to be a child prodigy. That way I won’t have so much history to look back on. Can’t believe this is column #5 on the same subject. But at last we are into the chase scene, the circus maximus, the ninth inning, 4^th quarter, third period. For those of you who have been in the lineup since April when this series on language and style began, please bear with one last summary for those who have not. Despite all my jazzing around with prenatal language, Marmaduke, and the Great Divides between people, it really isn’t complicated. It boils down to this:

Frustrated author (moi) wants to get a handle on writing that avoids the usual genre labels. Maybe something that gets to the nitty-gritty of every author’s individuality. This is because genre labels tend to lump writers into a few plot elements that shape reader expectations toward caricatures (romance as mush and gush, horror as blood and gore, literary as arty farty, etc). Sooo…for my own edification and grasp of who I am and who other writers are I began to think about language and style. What I came up with is not two God-given tablets of stone, but it is concrete (groan) in an area of writing that the marketplace, editors, publishers and even writers seem to find difficult to summarize.

Author’s style.

What the hell is it? What do you say after you say it’s everyone doing their own thing with words? Do you simply list the possibilities, the endlessly differing elements, the emphasis on one thing over another – more of this, less of that? For me it comes down to the impact of the language itself on the reader. I mean, take the word “style,” for instance. It’s a fussy word. Why? What makes it difficult? And the answer is that you can’t taste it, touch it, can’t find a referent for it that evokes a picture, a sound or a smell. It’s abstract. An idea rather than a specific thing or event. Ah. Things and events. Another kind of impact. Lemons, purple elephants, wars, sex in the surf of a thundering ocean – the nouns and verbs of physical reality. Unlike ideas, things and events are not so fussy. They are real things and happenings that you can associate with your senses.

Okay. So we’ve got physical and intellectual, what’s left over? What other kind of impact is there? Ideas, things and events…emotions. We feel. And communication is sometimes used purely to express or manipulate emotions. So there was my scaffolding: emotions; things and events; ideas.

Arbitrary, yeah. Quibble-proof, no. But if you really want to organize language, pretty much everyone can fit their range of communication under ideas, feelings, and things and events.

From there I started to plug the three languages into how I looked at everything, especially writing. Especially genres. It became useful for understanding a lot of things. And then it became useful for measuring what I was writing and to whom I was writing. That’s where we are with this column today. So the bottom line for this whole series, which dates back to a one-hour speech I was giving in the 80s, is that it is a way of dividing language so that it corresponds to different parts of ourselves and, by extension, with what we choose to read and how it is written.

Four of my previous columns break this down in some detail just for fun and for understanding people. Here are the links (each of the last three addresses one of the three languages):

Spiders and Spuds 04-16-06
Horned Owls & Other Horny Beasts 05-16-06
Name the Baby 06-16-06
Marmaduke Goes to College or Wet, Naked & Screaming 07-16-06

Writers tend to favor one or another of these languages, I believe. They do this by human nature as I’ve described it in those prior columns, and in so doing label themselves, because the different genres line up to one degree or another with those languages. Categories in fiction really represent biases that favor one or another language. Let’s take them in their most exaggerated forms to make the point:

The language of emotions: In its purest use, this tends to be represented by what is loosely called “the romance market.” Include chick lit, some types of YA, adolescent identification, cutesy title books, even porn veiled (perversely) in romantic auras, that share the following characteristics:

1) Each action and event is followed by emotional introspection, an emotional search for emotional content.

2) Feelings and the excitement of discovering those feelings is what the genre is all about.

3) Language of things is skeletal.

4) Language of ideas is relatively unimportant.

You could, however, make a strong case for “love” as idea, because virtually every classic that endures is a story about love – love of self, love of country, boy loves dog, gender love, etc. The difference here lies between emphasis and total use of the three languages. Are we talking about sweeping epic romances like THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and GONE WITH THE WIND or is it LUCILLE AND THE FLAMING BARBARIAN? (I actually had a woman come up to me after a speech and inform me that her name was Lucille – or whatever name I had used that night – and I could tell I was not her flaming barbarian.)

Before I get some blistering hate mail from romance writers, let me add that one reason romance gets the “trite” rap is because it is the most basic language. Whatever our deeper sensibilities as an audience, we usually find a common denominator for things that turns out to be an emotion. This, the most popular category in the world, has endless levels of skill within its ranks. Was a time when it was often written by women who went to the supermarket, picked up a First Circle of Love that sat next to the broccoli and had the same shelf life, and said, “I can write better than this.” And they did. I remember reading the three amateur winners of a contest that was co-sponsored by a top women’s mag and one of the leading romance writers in the world (who had gotten in on the ground floor years before), and it was glaringly obvious that the newbies were “heart and soul” better writers than the icon. The cloyingly saccharine pro, who pandered to every frailty of femininity, was downright gratuitous; the amateurs could actually write fleshed out…er, fully developed stories. Thus, the genre has evolved into a highly competitive market, and like any market, there is good, there is bad, and there is everything in between.

The language of things and events: is represented by pretty much everything else in the popular genre categories. I won’t try to list all the sub-categories and niches for fear of missing one, but mystery, western, thriller, horror, adventure, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, detective, hard-boiled, political, legal, graphic porno all TEND to rely heavily on things and events. Action. Adrenaline. Hardware. Palpable things and events left to make their own statements. Of course, the things and events are calculated to produce select emotions (fear and excitement mostly), but the emphasis is on the showing of how the emotion comes about rather than the exploration of feelings for their own sake.

I think what I am observing here is obvious, but if you want to find exceptions in any genre, you can. Emphasis is the key word. The degree of emphasis is what makes a genre whatever it is– a bias, in effect. All genres are biases that misproportion something when compared to real life. Fiction in general, and genres in particular, edit life. Andy Warhol’s 40-hour flick of a man sleeping – that’s unedited life. So the editing, the emphasis, the bias – call it what you will – shape the category, create the pace, and focus the writer and the reader. You can define this (somewhat inadequately) by content, of course. Which is pretty much what happens in the marketplace. But that’s like saying a certain painter paints cats or sunsets or chilluns with enormous eyes. In writing, the infinite variations on the way the languages I’ve distinguished are proportioned reflect the stylistic differences among writers.

The fact that so many adrenaline genres lean heavily on the language of things and events is further evidenced by the amount of crossover between thing-and-event categories. I have often had the same story or even a novel reprinted across several categories. My novel THE MARTYRING, for example, is a metaphor for my career. Written as thriller, published as mystery, shelved as science fiction (Barnes & Noble), reviewed as Gothic horror, and a finalist for Best Novel at World Fantasy Con, they are all genres that pump adrenaline with elements of physical danger. Give me a medal for schizophrenia.

The language of ideas: This one is an orphan. Other than maybe fifty pages on whaling concepts in MOBY DICK, you don’t see sustained unadulterated ideas in fiction. Here again it comes down to degree and emphasis. Ideas, like emotions, tend to underlie all stories; but as a pure art form, ideas writing is mostly non-fiction. Ideas do, however, tend to move center stage in “serious lit” (whatever that is). Mainstream. Contemporary. Literary. Usually they show up as diatribes about politics or soliloquies on existentialism or something you were supposed to write a theme about in tenth grade but you found neatly summed up in the Cliff Notes for Shakespeare.

What, you ask, no intellectual porn? I wouldn’t presume… Should be noted, though, that enterprising publishers have scaled passion all the way from “squeaky cleans” through “bodice rippers” into something called “leather and lace” (which is sort of porno with saddles), so why shouldn’t there be a genre of exquisitely cerebral sex, a la the commissioned work of Anais Nin? Or maybe the bathroom wall at Wellesley trucked into B&N.

What about mainstream then? Here’s a cynical definition: Anything that doesn’t fit into genre is mainstream. The reason may be because it is easier to define a target audience with genre. That’s publisher (and editor) safety. I think most genre editors want to expand the parameters and welcome broadly developed material, but if you put a tumbleweed in a mainstream tale, it’s going to be marketed as a western. In case of tie, genre wins.

Mainstream does, however, mark a distinct change in style. It tends to balance all three languages. This corresponds to real life. Well…not mine, but hey, I’m generally off-planet. Mainstream uses emotions for reader identification, things and events for action and hardware, and ideas for perspective and transcendent meaning. And here’s a cardinal tenet of my personal tastes:

Good genre fiction should at least include, if not balance, emotions, things and events, and ideas.

Probably most writers will agree with that in principal, most readers even, but in practice there are mucho masses of both who don’t. We can argue tastes and whims till the last cowboy rides into the sunset awakening the first vampire, who will return the favor at dawn, but you can’t tell someone they like what they don’t like or don’t like what they do. Each of us is a fact in the marketplace. That said, it’s good to know the range of possibilities and to recognize that we grow and change, for better or for worse. This writing business isn’t moral turpitude. It’s putting funny marks on paper to evoke all kinds of responses.

Here are some corollaries to all this – truisms, at least for me:

1) Writers who write only emotions tend to be shallow – often creating heavyweight treatments of lightweight subjects.

2) Writers who write only things and events tend to have unconvincing characters.

3) Writers who write only ideas tend to be cold and complicated.

So, would you like an example of a really, really, really great piece of lit that crosses the border of all three languages (depending on how it’s told)? Here ‘tis:

THE THREE LITTLE PIGS.

Yup. One of my favs. You’re not surprised, right? Consider, though, that it could entertain preschoolers across the hall from a graduate seminar remarking on its timeless social ideology.

1) Told from an emotional viewpoint, it’s a Chicken-Little story (sorry for the miscegenation). It is a downright drumbeat of panic and terror.

2) Told from a thing-and-event viewpoint, it’s about pork and architecture.

3) Told from an idea perspective, it’s a cautionary tale of survival and the work ethic.

(I’m sure there’s a porn version somewhere.)

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

May I invite you to visit my NEW web site, just up (courtesy of California surfer/guitar webmaster Ed Picard): www.thomassullivanauthor.com