Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Novels
Musings on types of novel-creation. It would appear, from my limited readings, that the novels are inspired by two means: conclusion-inspired or theme-inspired. Of course, there will be exceptions to these which may very well be the majority. Nonetheless, such a simplistic categorization may elucidate or enrich reading.
Conclusion-inspired writing begins with a conclusion; thereafter the author enriches the process to the conclusion. Example:
Step 1: My family bought a dog. My dog died.
Step 2: My family bought a dog, a german shepherd. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 3: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 4: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. (Insert more details) My dog, died four years ago.
Step n: "Novel completed".
Theme-inspired writing may originate from an author's desire to create a fictitious world or describe an imagined variation of a current situation. The author might then weave incidental stories, which describe the world or phenomena created by the author. Example:
Step 1: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks.
Step 2: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks. Jane finds herself subject to such personal conflict daily. She leads a typical life: complete with an awkwardly-functional family, image-conscious cadre of friends, hypersensitive allergies to basic food types and an incurable addiction to expose her thoughts to the multi-web. The multi-web is a reinvention of the world wide web after the "year of criticality", as termed by workers in networking theory. The web, as we know it, inevitably embedded human interactions into its transmission protocol. A user of the multi-web is no longer a user, but a key component of its functionalities, in a statistically averaged sense. ...
Step n: (story continues to a satisfying ending about Jane's story, with an extremely detailed description of the world I intended)
My point:
I lament the rarity of books with strong evidence of both inspirations.
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1 comment:
I think - or at least I hope - there's also character-inspired stories. Ones that start with a very fully realized character under certain pressures that must lead to a conflict of unknown type or outcome. The end result is not defined by a conclusion or a theme, but by how the character must necessarily navigate the story.
You sometimes hear authors complain of characters getting away from them and taking the story in an unexpected direction. Maybe they're just fooling themselves and don't want to admit that they hoped for the sappy, upbeat ending, for instance, but I enjoy a good character so much that I like to think that it can be the driving force of the story, too.
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