Here is our thread for Session 1 questions. I’ll try and get to them as we go forward. You can also use this as a way to meet other writers and create writers groups if you like.
Hi Alexander, thank you for a fantastic discussion. I was wondering if you could speak more about the literal question posed: what is a novel for? I'm so curious about how to answer this. What is the experience of a 'successful' novel for a reader? By successful I mean, why do some novels move us and change us? What form does the energy of a novel take? What kind of experience does it allow for? As opposed to, say, the form of energy and offered experience of an essay or short story. I'm particularly interested in how the reading of a novel works, and how we, as writers, can be generous with our readers if we understand how novels transform, rearrange, uplift through that reading experience.
It’s meant as a kind of endless question or a bottomless one. We’re not supposed to arrive at a final answer. It’s a rhetorical question meant to generate many responses or one, depending on the person. I recently asked on Facebook what people’s first experience of novels was, and I loved the many responses that also were so alike, in that people reported they’d fallen in love. So play with it, it is meant to be a prism.
Yes, definitely not a question with a definitive answer. I'm just so curious about how we might talk about it. Why do we keep writing novels? Why do people keep reading them? What are they for, in humanity? I love how it opens my idea of what I'm doing, both when I'm reading and when I'm writing. We don't just write because we're compelled to, or because there's a story we want to tell, and we don't just read for pleasure (or because there's something we've been required to read or encouraged to read) there's something deeper and more universally human beneath it, I think, and this questions opens me up to thinking about this.
Dear Katie: I am on Alex's mailing list (and we met when I was teaching a workshop at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when Alex was a student there--he credits me with alerting him to write well about sex...:)) and am intrigued by your questions. Having written many novels and many other books and working as a critic, editor, and writing coach, I'd say definitively that a novel is not a can opener or a cork screw. It does not have one function. Your successful novel could be a disaster for me and vice versa. A successful novel published in 1870 might not be "successful" in 1970 or in 2017. "Success" is highly subjective and changes over time -- whether it's the time in which it was written or read or over the reader's time. A book that knocked me out when I was 20 may not have the same effort at 40 or 60.
I would urge you to think less about theory ("form of energy" "how reading of a novel works") and study the novels you love and think about how they work, why they move YOU, and what you can pick up, borrow or steal from those efforts that make sense for YOU. How can writers be generous with readers? BE generous. Write well, dig deep, tell a story, revise it till it works, and consider responses with an open mind and heart. There isn't one way to -- or even 100 ways or 1000 ways -- to do this. The form is always being reinvented. But that doesn't mean you have to personally reinvent it. Tell a story that matters to you and tell it well. And keep writing. ~Elizabeth Benedict
Chiming in here to say that I discovered Elizabeth's book, "The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers" some years ago and I highly recommend it. Like Alex, I credit her with helping me to write better sex scenes.
Hey, thank you very much for this lovely comment. Anything I can do to advance writing about sex (and other matters), I'm happy to do. And I'm thrilled that Alex is doing this project with this wonderful series of posts! THank you for letting me contribute, Alex!
Something the title of this class has me thinking about is, What can a novel do that an essay/memoir can't (or would anyway do differently). Why do we choose to read a novel? Why do we choose to write one? I just watched the recording and I'm fascinated by the texts AC points us to where one is a novel and one is an essay, mulling over shared materials. So, what does the novel achieve or aim to?
And I hear the question "What Is a Novel For?" in conversation with the question posed in Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"--"what's the use of stories that aren't even true."
Hi! Can you say more on creating a memory map for a fictional character? any guidance on creating "memories" for someone who isn't real -- is the idea to use your own memories for them? Thank you!
One resource you can use is what’s called ekphrastic writing—writing off of images—and an especially good resource are the photos found in thrift stores and vintage shops, libraries, museums. When I wrote the Queen of the Night I found a whole series of photos from the late 19th century that had the mood I was after and even a character, in the case of the Comtesse di Castiglione. Use Guy Davenport’s logic of The Still Life, where he looks to the objects on a table in a painting or photo for the life lived around the objects. Roses in a vase and printing shears on a table with gloves and a hat tell us someone has just come in from cutting roses. But what else can you imagine? What comes before the cutting and after?
So find images that are magnetic to you and then ask these kinds of questions and see what you imagine. I’ll think more about it but start there.
Hi Alex, thank you so much for the class and apologies for getting to all this material so late! If I'm not too late to ask, I was wondering if you had any advice to offer on how to begin a practice in novel writing.
As someone who generally prefers writing short stories and understands the rhythms and compressions of the short story form, I'm terrified at the prospect of novel writing (which is to say, perhaps, I'm just scared of the unknown and the loss of control). But I'm attracted to it at the same time, and even more so after your class/the literature you referenced.
Novels are for their writers, first: this is the thing that someone has to make, as opposed to making a short story or a prose poem or a sailboat. (I'd love to write things that take less than 3-10 years to make, but it seems I have to make novels.) If you stay sane long enough to finish a novel, then it's for its readers. Most of us will have few readers, those who make it past the gates will have more. Either way, the possibilities for readers are plentiful: entertainment, education, protest, championing (people, causes, ideas), skewering, grieving, romancing, forgetting, and a hundred others, at least. To me the best novels have a core of unresolved mystery, opening a door into a dark room whose contents can only be speculated. Novel is a form is a basket: anything can fill the basket.
Hi Alex, Thank you for a rich and interesting first session. Do you find it essential to identify what you're making (novel, novella, connected stories, etc.) while you're writing? Sometimes, it feels like analyzing what we're doing pulls us out of the creative work. On the other hand, understanding the different forms and identifying with one or the other may help a writer find direction....
Thanks Erica. I do find it helps. But I try to write first and if I get to 60 pages it becomes time to think about what the work might be. Considering form for my own drafts isn’t analysis to me. It’s a listening process.
hi there! Was wondering if you had more instructive advice on how to use memory mapping as a tool for a starting off point of a new work, especially with regards to a work of fiction? Thanks so much.
Absolutely. Ask yourself what is most compelling of what you found—to you. Is there a pattern that emerges? A place or a time or an age? What made it compelling then and what makes it compelling now? And then ask yourself if those compelling memories, what happened before and what happened after? And how can you change the elements, if you want to fictionalize it, and transform it?
Jan 19, 2023·edited Jan 19, 2023Liked by Alexander Chee
Hi! I’ve been writing a novel directly from my life, à la Elif Batuman. It feels shameful, because it feels uncreative (she addresses this in the sequel) and because other people might feel exposed. However, I am more interested in interpreting what already happened to me than in making up new scenarios. Is there any place, in your opinion, for life writing in fiction? Thank you!
You are not obliged to tell readers whether or not the material is from life or the imagination. But you may find yourself not knowing the lived material as well as the imagined material. Why write this as a novel though?
Hi Alex, I don't have any questions yet but I just wanted to say thank you for being so generous with your knowledge and time. For someone like me who did an undergraduate degree in literature but in the 20+ years since has kind of cobbled together my own learning path as far as writing goes, it's wonderful to have an opportunity to hear you 'lecture.' :) Kaz
Hello Alexander and cohort – Last week I read the three volume version of An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame, which I found to be quite wonderful. I have not read many autobiographies that I remember (and if I don't remember them did I read them?) but I noticed something about the style that seems worth an inquiry.
It seemed to me, while I was reading, that she allowed the reader to see through her eyes, and her mind, her inner world, at her age under discussion in the book. IOW, it seemed less like a description of what she experienced in her historical context, and more like a record of what she was feeling and what it meant to her. She also seems to be able to conjure what she saw at the time, but tells it in context of the whole, not as she goes along in the chronology.
I suppose my first question is: Is my interpretation of her approach reasonable? And then: Is this common and I simply haven't see it previously? Or is this The Way It's Best Done? Are there other literary examples where this style / approach is easily observed? To be clear, "this style / approach" in my mind is "less literal and more literary," more psychological. I'm open to clarification on my interpretation, certainly!
Hi Michael, thank you--and while I don't think she's unique it is not your ordinary autobiography, that is for sure. I'm so glad you enjoyed it and I think your description of how it works is excellent. I would say that fiction writers are typically more confident at writing scenes and dramatizing their past in different ways, instead of the ordinary summaries. She was an incredible, once in a century writer. But we can ask people to contribute to a list of autobiographies like this.
I also watched the movie Saturday night, and while of course it is bad to have expectations in anything, much less the movie adaptation of a book, it was not what I was expecting. What I wanted (and still want!), is a movie where the entire audio track is appropriate background music, plus narrated voiceover passages from the book, with staged scenes reenacting what the narrator is saying, e.g. zero or minimal dialogue.
I suppose today, in order to get funding, we'd add something like, "...and, we have trained an AI on recordings of her voice, so the entire narration will be synthesized as if she herself were speaking it!" Just kidding, I dislike the AI trends for numerous reasons. But I would like to see this version of the movie, taking nothing away from Jane Campion's excellent work in the traditional format.
Hi! I loved your discussion of Jesus' Son in terms of the power of what's left out, the blank spaces between the stories being so essential to the energy and excitement of the book. You presented it alongside the stereoscopic perspectives/dramatic irony discussion as both are devices for giving the reader space to do some of that satisfying interpretive work that makes fiction so exciting. There's such an impulse in the writing process (at least for me) to move linearly, connect the dots, be detailed and comprehensive, but (to my tastes) this can really kill the writing. There's a balance between clarity and leaving room for the reader's imagination to have it's own engagement with telling the story. I'm not a huge mystery buff, but at some level, dosen't fiction need to have some mystery to keep the energy up, give the reader something to wrestle with that gets them on that process of discovery? This also gets me thinking about the idea you brought up that in a stereoscopic novel the characters don't need to change, because the ultimate pay-off is not on the page, but in the reader's comprehension/assembly of all the perspectives into a new (changed?) whole. After producing much bad writing through dilligent 'make myself sit down and write', that usually produced linear, boring, souless pages, I let myself be more exploratory, along the lines of your memory map exercises, and have begun to see the sort of flashes of different moments, perspectives ideas, that with some assembly I can imagine as becoming a sort of narrative. The question is, how much of those gaps to fill in? Jesus' Son is an infinitely rereadable book, because there is always more to discover precisely because of how much is left out, with each reread a reader is likely to fill in those gaps in slightly different ways. But how do you write with a focus on what you're not writing....
(Also, bummed I can't make the live version, as I teach Wednesday nights, but glad to have the asynchronous option)
Hi Ashley, I am very glad to hear all of this is hitting home for you. In the links that Kate sent around after Session 1 you can find my essay about Denis Johnson's writing Jesus' Son, and how he approached: writing down, at last, stories he had always told. They were stories he'd been telling to friends for years, and he finally wrote them down one year when he was sick and broke and needed money. I'll link it here also. https://www.playboy.com/read/writing-for-survival
As for whether mystery is needed, I think what you are talking about is perhaps the energy created by dramatic irony, where the reader feels they know a little less than the writer and a little more than the character about what might happen next. That is created by staging the unsaid inside the story and the larger manuscript. You do this through context, through the set decoration that a story can be as the narrator passes along, describing the narrated. What you're calling a 'focus on what you're not writing'--a formulation that does sound impossible that way--is created by the boundaries to the individual stories, which don't each point to the others in direct ways. But this is all heading toward the subjects of the next talk and I don't want to be accused of repeating myself. And more homework is coming by email Monday to prepare for Session 2.
So, follow up question, or more just me processing... What other strategies can you use to get that exciting dramatic irony, without the rigid boundaries of distinct stories? Lining up concepts/characters/spaces that point to each other (ala tarot cards)? If Jesus' Son is Denis Johnson putting on paper his own personally constructed tarot card reading (memory map?), does that suggest that writers should be wary of being too intentional in the structuring of their work? Or only in the early stages of writing?
Are the inconsistencies of memory the only/best means of working in an open exploratory space where readers can build meaning? There's a whole literature on drug addiction that uses that device to build in disorienting spaces. Already Dead is kind a of an interesting novel to compare with Jesus' Son. Long. Length, time spent inside the characters/narrative is one of the distinctive characteristics of the novel. The experience of living with a character for an extended period of time, as opposed to more of a sort of snapshots experience. But if the autofictional or stereoscopic interconnected stories form is the endpoint of a trajectory that moves from Proust's exhaustive exploration of memory to the more concise and fragmented form, in which the reader is granted more autonomy in the process of meaning making (maybe?), then is the more rooted, linear, single perspective novel no longer relevant (not saying dead…)? I hope not, as it is still my favorite form, but does it (the form) have an answer to the structural innovations of the linked stories form?
(Not sure how much concrete there is to respond to in any of that, but looking forward to the next lecture and thanks for listening.)
The thing is, you can create dramatic irony so many ways. It's as simple as putting something in the reader's eye that the character didn't notice at the time. Any of what we call an unreliable narrator is about providing dramatic irony. Or, it should be. All novelistic styles stay relevant as long as someone needs them to do something or say something. I would just add a lot of these questions are about your fears, and try instead to stay close to your excitement.
Thank you so much for bringing up the bildungsroman/kunstlerroman in class because I had a few questions about this form. When I think of these kinds of books, old classics like Stendhal’s The Red and The Black or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women. They usually have a linear chronology and are usually told in the first person. How flexible are these rules? I just about died having to read all the description and backstory in The Red and The Black. Can a Bildungsroman dip into memory to compress the story or does it have to be linear? Can the timeline be compressed to one year of learning? Does it have to be told in the first person? And finally does a Bildungsroman have to come to agreement with society’s values at the end? Or can the protagonist be in disagreement with society’s values but still have received an education? I think I’m writing a Bildungsroman and switched from the POV from 3rd to 1st which I think is working better in terms of closeness to the characters thoughts but sometimes I prefer third person for the ease of moving into description that doesn’t seem out of character. Does that make any sense? I found the example We The Animals interesting because the book is unfolds linearly but the film uses memory (drowning scene) effectively to portray trauma. Also admired the way Torres changed the POV to show the individuation of the protagonist. Anyway, I found your class extremely helpful and inspiring. And thank you in advance if you have the time to respond to these questions.
It's very important that as writers we don't turn the descriptions of forms into orthodoxies. The critic who coined the term bildungsroman for example was most likely trying to approximate across several novels a vision for the way a writer commented on the culture. No, there's no handbook for it exactly, and so it can be in first person or third, it can have memory and nonlinear structures, and so on. You aren't required to write The Red and The Black, you could as easily write Orlando, which I think we can call a Kunstleroman, as well as a kind of uncanny fictional biography. The question about the ending makes me think of something Jeff Vandermeer says, about how when he ends a story he thinks about whether it supports or defies the status quo, and what that means for the whole story. Which is to say keep in mind that an ending that supports society isn't free of critique about that society, and doesn't create a novel that supports it either. It just describes the society.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful reply, Alex. This gives me some confidence to experiment with something I’ve been mulling over. Also, I have my thesis committee meeting in a few months and the answer you provided will help me explain what I’m trying to do with WIP. Much appreciated!!!
Jan 23, 2023·edited Jan 24, 2023Liked by Alexander Chee
Hi Alex,
Loved the first session and I can't wait for the second one.
A lot of the discussion was focused around finding threads or concrete blocks of memories to get going. I loved that.
How do you tackle finding the right form for those memories? As a story starts to take shape, how do you experiment with developing the narrative and finding the right form to convey it?
Alex, as always, you presented a wondrous, roving mass of material I'll likely spend a lifetime cycling and recycling. I wondered if you could dig a little deeper on the concept/form/qualities of stereoscopic fiction. This piqued my interest and may've presented an answer to assisting me with my current novel-in-progress. Anything you can say on stereoscopic fiction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Well, some novels for you to check out: The Doctor’s House, by Anne Beattie; Brother Alive by Zain Khalid; Dracula, by Bram Stoker; Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones; and my debut novel, as I said; also Olive Kittredge, which is an interconnected short story collection. There’s often but not always someone who doesn’t speak but is spoken of by others. Tayari Jones has said “When there’s two sides to the story and both sides are right, that’s a novel.” And that’s sort of the idea. You tell the story in such a way that the reader is very sure where they are and then the next narrator arrives and throws that into question. I’ll say more in the next session on how the structure works.
Hello. You mentioned Edmund White’s The Married Man as one of three novels in which the author renegotiated material. What were the other two? Thank you.
Hi Crystal, I believe A Married Man and Farewell Symphony revisit the same relationship from very different angles. Kathryn Harrison wrote first a novel, in 1997, entitled The Rapture, about her relationship with her father, and then in 2011 published a memoir, The Kiss. And Janet Frame dealt with her institutionalization in three different books--her novels Owls Do Cry and Faces In The Water, and her autobiography.
You spoke about interconnected stories last night, and I loved the example of Fiona and Jane; how the form allowed the reader to see the story from the perspectives of both characters, and over time. What do you think the opportunities of the connected stories form would be for a story told primarily through the POV of a single character? Perhaps a chance to play with time and the fallibility of memory, with separate stories covering some of the same action, with different outcomes or takes on it? Does anything else come to mind? I've had some trouble getting a novel to coalesce and a mentor suggested trying it as connected stories. I'm more intrigued by this possibility after your talk, but also hesitant/scared to start tearing up chapters and the attempts I've made to shape the novel's arc. I wonder if this kind of form switch would be something you could outline or storyboard, or if it would take actually doing it (all) to see if it works. Would love your thoughts on any of this!
Well, the interconnected story collection doesn’t have an arc or at least it doesn’t need one. That’s the thing of it: it can be a constellation around a person, like Olive Kittredge; or flashes from a life, like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son. You may be trying to make an arc where another form is needed.
Hello Druid :-), I just finished reading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and it made me want to write an essay collection in response :-) It's tremendous! Your writing assignment (first novel you loved) inspired me to write about an obscure historical novel about a relationship between a teenage boy and a man in his 20's both of whom meet as trapeze artists. It's by a famous sci-fi author (Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of Mists of Avalon). I just found out that after her death, she was accused of being a child molester by her children. I'm drafting an essay reckoning with her influence and how I'm mourning my loss of innocence.
1. Do you have any suggestions for where to publish this?
2. Did you use the Fool's Journey to map out your essay collection? If so, at what point did you do this?
3. Since sexual abuse is a triggering term, and I have not written about this topic before, any tips for how to pitch a piece about this? For example, is it better to use S.A. as an acronym, or have a trigger warning?
4. My associative mind links the word 'monster' (as MZB was called in a recent YouTube video about the allegations) to my own experience of leaving a voicemail for my first boyfriend, after I broke up with him, where I said, "Sorry I've Become This Monster. I Love You A Lot." He then turned the voicemail into a song. I'm considering writing about the uncomfortable ways in which MZB's influence contributed to my lacking the skills to navigate ending this relationship. This topic feels edgy and potentially makes me squirm because my first book was for an Indian audience, and I was told NOT to write in the "confessional American style" by my editor. How did you overcome any cultural hangups against being confessional that you might have faced? Any general thoughts on the topic of strategic disclosure of vulnerability? Thanks :-)
I just feel like a lot of essays appeared about this when the news about Bradley came out, and an editor might be reluctant to go back unless you had something new or there was a new peg. I know the news is new to you, I'm just offering a warning. I have no thoughts about "the topic of strategic disclosure of vulnerability" except that it sounds like manipulation and I recoil from it.
I can say no, I didn't use the Fool's Journey to structure the essay collection--I chose a simple chronological order, as much as possible, with some interludes that were non-chronological or really 'outside of time', but I saw something I'll address in the next class as regards the idea of the memoir in essays.
As for your essay idea, it sounds like if you write it could be the sort of essay you could publish anywhere--it's maybe more of a Lithub/Paris Review Daily/Atlantic Books section essay. The point of the exercise though was for you to find your way to material like the material you loved as a kid, and unless you really really want to write this essay I would refer you back to how there was something that delighted you in the novel when you were younger that matters to this exercise more. A follow-up set of prompts goes out next week to prepare for Part 2.
As for cultural hangups, I am a confessional American, though the son of an immigrant who would never admit to bias, and I had to contend with how I felt like I was betraying the way he raised me to speak of it.
I have to stop here, I'm actively dissociating at this point.
Thank you so much for your generous response! I feel bad that my questions made you dissociate. I really appreciated the story you told in an essay about how a pedophile in prison read Edinburgh and felt repentance in a way he had not. It takes so much courage to do what you've been doing. Looking forward to what you're going to say about memoirs in the next class. And thanks also for the pointer to go back to what delighted me--maybe easier to go back to earlier childhood novels like The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton :-)
I think trying to figure out what strategic deployed disclosure meant sent me. But it was a lot of questions heading strongly in different directions, and on difficult and as you noted triggering subjects, and I am a survivor. If you’d like, please just send an email if I missed one, and I’ll tell students to do that next time if they have more than three questions.
Sure. Whenever you’re going to pitch something you have to do a search to see what the previous takes were so you don’t waste your time sending ideas the editors have already seen.
Hi Alexander, thank you for a fantastic discussion. I was wondering if you could speak more about the literal question posed: what is a novel for? I'm so curious about how to answer this. What is the experience of a 'successful' novel for a reader? By successful I mean, why do some novels move us and change us? What form does the energy of a novel take? What kind of experience does it allow for? As opposed to, say, the form of energy and offered experience of an essay or short story. I'm particularly interested in how the reading of a novel works, and how we, as writers, can be generous with our readers if we understand how novels transform, rearrange, uplift through that reading experience.
It’s meant as a kind of endless question or a bottomless one. We’re not supposed to arrive at a final answer. It’s a rhetorical question meant to generate many responses or one, depending on the person. I recently asked on Facebook what people’s first experience of novels was, and I loved the many responses that also were so alike, in that people reported they’d fallen in love. So play with it, it is meant to be a prism.
Yes, definitely not a question with a definitive answer. I'm just so curious about how we might talk about it. Why do we keep writing novels? Why do people keep reading them? What are they for, in humanity? I love how it opens my idea of what I'm doing, both when I'm reading and when I'm writing. We don't just write because we're compelled to, or because there's a story we want to tell, and we don't just read for pleasure (or because there's something we've been required to read or encouraged to read) there's something deeper and more universally human beneath it, I think, and this questions opens me up to thinking about this.
Dear Katie: I am on Alex's mailing list (and we met when I was teaching a workshop at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when Alex was a student there--he credits me with alerting him to write well about sex...:)) and am intrigued by your questions. Having written many novels and many other books and working as a critic, editor, and writing coach, I'd say definitively that a novel is not a can opener or a cork screw. It does not have one function. Your successful novel could be a disaster for me and vice versa. A successful novel published in 1870 might not be "successful" in 1970 or in 2017. "Success" is highly subjective and changes over time -- whether it's the time in which it was written or read or over the reader's time. A book that knocked me out when I was 20 may not have the same effort at 40 or 60.
I would urge you to think less about theory ("form of energy" "how reading of a novel works") and study the novels you love and think about how they work, why they move YOU, and what you can pick up, borrow or steal from those efforts that make sense for YOU. How can writers be generous with readers? BE generous. Write well, dig deep, tell a story, revise it till it works, and consider responses with an open mind and heart. There isn't one way to -- or even 100 ways or 1000 ways -- to do this. The form is always being reinvented. But that doesn't mean you have to personally reinvent it. Tell a story that matters to you and tell it well. And keep writing. ~Elizabeth Benedict
Chiming in here to say that I discovered Elizabeth's book, "The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers" some years ago and I highly recommend it. Like Alex, I credit her with helping me to write better sex scenes.
Such a great book-- you've helped me a lot.
THank you so much! Very glad to hear this! ~ Liz
Hey, thank you very much for this lovely comment. Anything I can do to advance writing about sex (and other matters), I'm happy to do. And I'm thrilled that Alex is doing this project with this wonderful series of posts! THank you for letting me contribute, Alex!
Something the title of this class has me thinking about is, What can a novel do that an essay/memoir can't (or would anyway do differently). Why do we choose to read a novel? Why do we choose to write one? I just watched the recording and I'm fascinated by the texts AC points us to where one is a novel and one is an essay, mulling over shared materials. So, what does the novel achieve or aim to?
And I hear the question "What Is a Novel For?" in conversation with the question posed in Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"--"what's the use of stories that aren't even true."
Hi! Can you say more on creating a memory map for a fictional character? any guidance on creating "memories" for someone who isn't real -- is the idea to use your own memories for them? Thank you!
One resource you can use is what’s called ekphrastic writing—writing off of images—and an especially good resource are the photos found in thrift stores and vintage shops, libraries, museums. When I wrote the Queen of the Night I found a whole series of photos from the late 19th century that had the mood I was after and even a character, in the case of the Comtesse di Castiglione. Use Guy Davenport’s logic of The Still Life, where he looks to the objects on a table in a painting or photo for the life lived around the objects. Roses in a vase and printing shears on a table with gloves and a hat tell us someone has just come in from cutting roses. But what else can you imagine? What comes before the cutting and after?
So find images that are magnetic to you and then ask these kinds of questions and see what you imagine. I’ll think more about it but start there.
Hi Alex, thank you so much for the class and apologies for getting to all this material so late! If I'm not too late to ask, I was wondering if you had any advice to offer on how to begin a practice in novel writing.
As someone who generally prefers writing short stories and understands the rhythms and compressions of the short story form, I'm terrified at the prospect of novel writing (which is to say, perhaps, I'm just scared of the unknown and the loss of control). But I'm attracted to it at the same time, and even more so after your class/the literature you referenced.
Keep a notebook just for ideas about novels. Read them one at a time so you don’t fragment your intuitive sense of their structure. Diagram them.
There’s no one thing, it’s incremental, trying a number of things until something clicks into place.
Novels are for their writers, first: this is the thing that someone has to make, as opposed to making a short story or a prose poem or a sailboat. (I'd love to write things that take less than 3-10 years to make, but it seems I have to make novels.) If you stay sane long enough to finish a novel, then it's for its readers. Most of us will have few readers, those who make it past the gates will have more. Either way, the possibilities for readers are plentiful: entertainment, education, protest, championing (people, causes, ideas), skewering, grieving, romancing, forgetting, and a hundred others, at least. To me the best novels have a core of unresolved mystery, opening a door into a dark room whose contents can only be speculated. Novel is a form is a basket: anything can fill the basket.
Hi Alex, Thank you for a rich and interesting first session. Do you find it essential to identify what you're making (novel, novella, connected stories, etc.) while you're writing? Sometimes, it feels like analyzing what we're doing pulls us out of the creative work. On the other hand, understanding the different forms and identifying with one or the other may help a writer find direction....
Thanks Erica. I do find it helps. But I try to write first and if I get to 60 pages it becomes time to think about what the work might be. Considering form for my own drafts isn’t analysis to me. It’s a listening process.
Thank you for pointing out the difference between analyzing and listening, and the 60-page signpost is a really helpful tip. Thank you Alex.
hi there! Was wondering if you had more instructive advice on how to use memory mapping as a tool for a starting off point of a new work, especially with regards to a work of fiction? Thanks so much.
Absolutely. Ask yourself what is most compelling of what you found—to you. Is there a pattern that emerges? A place or a time or an age? What made it compelling then and what makes it compelling now? And then ask yourself if those compelling memories, what happened before and what happened after? And how can you change the elements, if you want to fictionalize it, and transform it?
Hi! I’ve been writing a novel directly from my life, à la Elif Batuman. It feels shameful, because it feels uncreative (she addresses this in the sequel) and because other people might feel exposed. However, I am more interested in interpreting what already happened to me than in making up new scenarios. Is there any place, in your opinion, for life writing in fiction? Thank you!
You are not obliged to tell readers whether or not the material is from life or the imagination. But you may find yourself not knowing the lived material as well as the imagined material. Why write this as a novel though?
Thanks so much! This is helpful
Hi Alex, I don't have any questions yet but I just wanted to say thank you for being so generous with your knowledge and time. For someone like me who did an undergraduate degree in literature but in the 20+ years since has kind of cobbled together my own learning path as far as writing goes, it's wonderful to have an opportunity to hear you 'lecture.' :) Kaz
Thanks Kaz! I'm so glad.
Hello Alexander and cohort – Last week I read the three volume version of An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame, which I found to be quite wonderful. I have not read many autobiographies that I remember (and if I don't remember them did I read them?) but I noticed something about the style that seems worth an inquiry.
It seemed to me, while I was reading, that she allowed the reader to see through her eyes, and her mind, her inner world, at her age under discussion in the book. IOW, it seemed less like a description of what she experienced in her historical context, and more like a record of what she was feeling and what it meant to her. She also seems to be able to conjure what she saw at the time, but tells it in context of the whole, not as she goes along in the chronology.
I suppose my first question is: Is my interpretation of her approach reasonable? And then: Is this common and I simply haven't see it previously? Or is this The Way It's Best Done? Are there other literary examples where this style / approach is easily observed? To be clear, "this style / approach" in my mind is "less literal and more literary," more psychological. I'm open to clarification on my interpretation, certainly!
Hi Michael, thank you--and while I don't think she's unique it is not your ordinary autobiography, that is for sure. I'm so glad you enjoyed it and I think your description of how it works is excellent. I would say that fiction writers are typically more confident at writing scenes and dramatizing their past in different ways, instead of the ordinary summaries. She was an incredible, once in a century writer. But we can ask people to contribute to a list of autobiographies like this.
I also watched the movie Saturday night, and while of course it is bad to have expectations in anything, much less the movie adaptation of a book, it was not what I was expecting. What I wanted (and still want!), is a movie where the entire audio track is appropriate background music, plus narrated voiceover passages from the book, with staged scenes reenacting what the narrator is saying, e.g. zero or minimal dialogue.
I suppose today, in order to get funding, we'd add something like, "...and, we have trained an AI on recordings of her voice, so the entire narration will be synthesized as if she herself were speaking it!" Just kidding, I dislike the AI trends for numerous reasons. But I would like to see this version of the movie, taking nothing away from Jane Campion's excellent work in the traditional format.
Hi! I loved your discussion of Jesus' Son in terms of the power of what's left out, the blank spaces between the stories being so essential to the energy and excitement of the book. You presented it alongside the stereoscopic perspectives/dramatic irony discussion as both are devices for giving the reader space to do some of that satisfying interpretive work that makes fiction so exciting. There's such an impulse in the writing process (at least for me) to move linearly, connect the dots, be detailed and comprehensive, but (to my tastes) this can really kill the writing. There's a balance between clarity and leaving room for the reader's imagination to have it's own engagement with telling the story. I'm not a huge mystery buff, but at some level, dosen't fiction need to have some mystery to keep the energy up, give the reader something to wrestle with that gets them on that process of discovery? This also gets me thinking about the idea you brought up that in a stereoscopic novel the characters don't need to change, because the ultimate pay-off is not on the page, but in the reader's comprehension/assembly of all the perspectives into a new (changed?) whole. After producing much bad writing through dilligent 'make myself sit down and write', that usually produced linear, boring, souless pages, I let myself be more exploratory, along the lines of your memory map exercises, and have begun to see the sort of flashes of different moments, perspectives ideas, that with some assembly I can imagine as becoming a sort of narrative. The question is, how much of those gaps to fill in? Jesus' Son is an infinitely rereadable book, because there is always more to discover precisely because of how much is left out, with each reread a reader is likely to fill in those gaps in slightly different ways. But how do you write with a focus on what you're not writing....
(Also, bummed I can't make the live version, as I teach Wednesday nights, but glad to have the asynchronous option)
Hi Ashley, I am very glad to hear all of this is hitting home for you. In the links that Kate sent around after Session 1 you can find my essay about Denis Johnson's writing Jesus' Son, and how he approached: writing down, at last, stories he had always told. They were stories he'd been telling to friends for years, and he finally wrote them down one year when he was sick and broke and needed money. I'll link it here also. https://www.playboy.com/read/writing-for-survival
As for whether mystery is needed, I think what you are talking about is perhaps the energy created by dramatic irony, where the reader feels they know a little less than the writer and a little more than the character about what might happen next. That is created by staging the unsaid inside the story and the larger manuscript. You do this through context, through the set decoration that a story can be as the narrator passes along, describing the narrated. What you're calling a 'focus on what you're not writing'--a formulation that does sound impossible that way--is created by the boundaries to the individual stories, which don't each point to the others in direct ways. But this is all heading toward the subjects of the next talk and I don't want to be accused of repeating myself. And more homework is coming by email Monday to prepare for Session 2.
So, follow up question, or more just me processing... What other strategies can you use to get that exciting dramatic irony, without the rigid boundaries of distinct stories? Lining up concepts/characters/spaces that point to each other (ala tarot cards)? If Jesus' Son is Denis Johnson putting on paper his own personally constructed tarot card reading (memory map?), does that suggest that writers should be wary of being too intentional in the structuring of their work? Or only in the early stages of writing?
Are the inconsistencies of memory the only/best means of working in an open exploratory space where readers can build meaning? There's a whole literature on drug addiction that uses that device to build in disorienting spaces. Already Dead is kind a of an interesting novel to compare with Jesus' Son. Long. Length, time spent inside the characters/narrative is one of the distinctive characteristics of the novel. The experience of living with a character for an extended period of time, as opposed to more of a sort of snapshots experience. But if the autofictional or stereoscopic interconnected stories form is the endpoint of a trajectory that moves from Proust's exhaustive exploration of memory to the more concise and fragmented form, in which the reader is granted more autonomy in the process of meaning making (maybe?), then is the more rooted, linear, single perspective novel no longer relevant (not saying dead…)? I hope not, as it is still my favorite form, but does it (the form) have an answer to the structural innovations of the linked stories form?
(Not sure how much concrete there is to respond to in any of that, but looking forward to the next lecture and thanks for listening.)
The thing is, you can create dramatic irony so many ways. It's as simple as putting something in the reader's eye that the character didn't notice at the time. Any of what we call an unreliable narrator is about providing dramatic irony. Or, it should be. All novelistic styles stay relevant as long as someone needs them to do something or say something. I would just add a lot of these questions are about your fears, and try instead to stay close to your excitement.
Hi Alex,
Thank you so much for bringing up the bildungsroman/kunstlerroman in class because I had a few questions about this form. When I think of these kinds of books, old classics like Stendhal’s The Red and The Black or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Alice Munro’s The Lives of Girls and Women. They usually have a linear chronology and are usually told in the first person. How flexible are these rules? I just about died having to read all the description and backstory in The Red and The Black. Can a Bildungsroman dip into memory to compress the story or does it have to be linear? Can the timeline be compressed to one year of learning? Does it have to be told in the first person? And finally does a Bildungsroman have to come to agreement with society’s values at the end? Or can the protagonist be in disagreement with society’s values but still have received an education? I think I’m writing a Bildungsroman and switched from the POV from 3rd to 1st which I think is working better in terms of closeness to the characters thoughts but sometimes I prefer third person for the ease of moving into description that doesn’t seem out of character. Does that make any sense? I found the example We The Animals interesting because the book is unfolds linearly but the film uses memory (drowning scene) effectively to portray trauma. Also admired the way Torres changed the POV to show the individuation of the protagonist. Anyway, I found your class extremely helpful and inspiring. And thank you in advance if you have the time to respond to these questions.
Take care,
Erin
Hi Erin,
It's very important that as writers we don't turn the descriptions of forms into orthodoxies. The critic who coined the term bildungsroman for example was most likely trying to approximate across several novels a vision for the way a writer commented on the culture. No, there's no handbook for it exactly, and so it can be in first person or third, it can have memory and nonlinear structures, and so on. You aren't required to write The Red and The Black, you could as easily write Orlando, which I think we can call a Kunstleroman, as well as a kind of uncanny fictional biography. The question about the ending makes me think of something Jeff Vandermeer says, about how when he ends a story he thinks about whether it supports or defies the status quo, and what that means for the whole story. Which is to say keep in mind that an ending that supports society isn't free of critique about that society, and doesn't create a novel that supports it either. It just describes the society.
Thank you so much for this thoughtful reply, Alex. This gives me some confidence to experiment with something I’ve been mulling over. Also, I have my thesis committee meeting in a few months and the answer you provided will help me explain what I’m trying to do with WIP. Much appreciated!!!
Hi Alex,
Loved the first session and I can't wait for the second one.
A lot of the discussion was focused around finding threads or concrete blocks of memories to get going. I loved that.
How do you tackle finding the right form for those memories? As a story starts to take shape, how do you experiment with developing the narrative and finding the right form to convey it?
The next prompts, which go out shortly, address this, in fact. More from me that way very soon.
Alex, as always, you presented a wondrous, roving mass of material I'll likely spend a lifetime cycling and recycling. I wondered if you could dig a little deeper on the concept/form/qualities of stereoscopic fiction. This piqued my interest and may've presented an answer to assisting me with my current novel-in-progress. Anything you can say on stereoscopic fiction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Well, some novels for you to check out: The Doctor’s House, by Anne Beattie; Brother Alive by Zain Khalid; Dracula, by Bram Stoker; Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones; and my debut novel, as I said; also Olive Kittredge, which is an interconnected short story collection. There’s often but not always someone who doesn’t speak but is spoken of by others. Tayari Jones has said “When there’s two sides to the story and both sides are right, that’s a novel.” And that’s sort of the idea. You tell the story in such a way that the reader is very sure where they are and then the next narrator arrives and throws that into question. I’ll say more in the next session on how the structure works.
And: thank you for the lovely compliment. And for studying with me again.
Hello. You mentioned Edmund White’s The Married Man as one of three novels in which the author renegotiated material. What were the other two? Thank you.
Hi Crystal, I believe A Married Man and Farewell Symphony revisit the same relationship from very different angles. Kathryn Harrison wrote first a novel, in 1997, entitled The Rapture, about her relationship with her father, and then in 2011 published a memoir, The Kiss. And Janet Frame dealt with her institutionalization in three different books--her novels Owls Do Cry and Faces In The Water, and her autobiography.
Hi Alex,
You spoke about interconnected stories last night, and I loved the example of Fiona and Jane; how the form allowed the reader to see the story from the perspectives of both characters, and over time. What do you think the opportunities of the connected stories form would be for a story told primarily through the POV of a single character? Perhaps a chance to play with time and the fallibility of memory, with separate stories covering some of the same action, with different outcomes or takes on it? Does anything else come to mind? I've had some trouble getting a novel to coalesce and a mentor suggested trying it as connected stories. I'm more intrigued by this possibility after your talk, but also hesitant/scared to start tearing up chapters and the attempts I've made to shape the novel's arc. I wonder if this kind of form switch would be something you could outline or storyboard, or if it would take actually doing it (all) to see if it works. Would love your thoughts on any of this!
Well, the interconnected story collection doesn’t have an arc or at least it doesn’t need one. That’s the thing of it: it can be a constellation around a person, like Olive Kittredge; or flashes from a life, like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son. You may be trying to make an arc where another form is needed.
Hello Druid :-), I just finished reading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel and it made me want to write an essay collection in response :-) It's tremendous! Your writing assignment (first novel you loved) inspired me to write about an obscure historical novel about a relationship between a teenage boy and a man in his 20's both of whom meet as trapeze artists. It's by a famous sci-fi author (Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of Mists of Avalon). I just found out that after her death, she was accused of being a child molester by her children. I'm drafting an essay reckoning with her influence and how I'm mourning my loss of innocence.
1. Do you have any suggestions for where to publish this?
2. Did you use the Fool's Journey to map out your essay collection? If so, at what point did you do this?
3. Since sexual abuse is a triggering term, and I have not written about this topic before, any tips for how to pitch a piece about this? For example, is it better to use S.A. as an acronym, or have a trigger warning?
4. My associative mind links the word 'monster' (as MZB was called in a recent YouTube video about the allegations) to my own experience of leaving a voicemail for my first boyfriend, after I broke up with him, where I said, "Sorry I've Become This Monster. I Love You A Lot." He then turned the voicemail into a song. I'm considering writing about the uncomfortable ways in which MZB's influence contributed to my lacking the skills to navigate ending this relationship. This topic feels edgy and potentially makes me squirm because my first book was for an Indian audience, and I was told NOT to write in the "confessional American style" by my editor. How did you overcome any cultural hangups against being confessional that you might have faced? Any general thoughts on the topic of strategic disclosure of vulnerability? Thanks :-)
Hi bidisha,
Have you already read essays like this one? https://electricliterature.com/the-book-that-made-me-a-feminist-was-written-by-an-abuser/
I just feel like a lot of essays appeared about this when the news about Bradley came out, and an editor might be reluctant to go back unless you had something new or there was a new peg. I know the news is new to you, I'm just offering a warning. I have no thoughts about "the topic of strategic disclosure of vulnerability" except that it sounds like manipulation and I recoil from it.
I can say no, I didn't use the Fool's Journey to structure the essay collection--I chose a simple chronological order, as much as possible, with some interludes that were non-chronological or really 'outside of time', but I saw something I'll address in the next class as regards the idea of the memoir in essays.
As for your essay idea, it sounds like if you write it could be the sort of essay you could publish anywhere--it's maybe more of a Lithub/Paris Review Daily/Atlantic Books section essay. The point of the exercise though was for you to find your way to material like the material you loved as a kid, and unless you really really want to write this essay I would refer you back to how there was something that delighted you in the novel when you were younger that matters to this exercise more. A follow-up set of prompts goes out next week to prepare for Part 2.
As for cultural hangups, I am a confessional American, though the son of an immigrant who would never admit to bias, and I had to contend with how I felt like I was betraying the way he raised me to speak of it.
I have to stop here, I'm actively dissociating at this point.
Hi Alex,
Thank you so much for your generous response! I feel bad that my questions made you dissociate. I really appreciated the story you told in an essay about how a pedophile in prison read Edinburgh and felt repentance in a way he had not. It takes so much courage to do what you've been doing. Looking forward to what you're going to say about memoirs in the next class. And thanks also for the pointer to go back to what delighted me--maybe easier to go back to earlier childhood novels like The Naughtiest Girl in the School by Enid Blyton :-)
I think trying to figure out what strategic deployed disclosure meant sent me. But it was a lot of questions heading strongly in different directions, and on difficult and as you noted triggering subjects, and I am a survivor. If you’d like, please just send an email if I missed one, and I’ll tell students to do that next time if they have more than three questions.
p.s.: hadn't read the Electric Lit essay or others like it. Thanks for the link!
Sure. Whenever you’re going to pitch something you have to do a search to see what the previous takes were so you don’t waste your time sending ideas the editors have already seen.