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Again with the posting--ovulating, I swear. But I find myself again with something to babble about.
I was reading a conversation today and something in it struck me. It wasn't the point of the conversation at all, but it just seemed to come up and be there under the surface. "It" was a casual reference to those "old fashioned" kind of books, the kind that people perhaps call literature (literature here being a suspect word that means boring and forced on you by snobs), are really inferior to the kind of writing JK Rowling does. It wasn't so much saying that outright, but more a pre-emptive defense of Rowling against people who didn't class her with the greats, particularly as a stylist. Her writing was simply clear, and that was a good thing—and it all made her better for children (even all those adverbs, which aren't lazy but helpful to children who couldn't understand things just from dialogue).
And that made me think two things--one that I thought that certain things in Rowling's style were being described as conscious choices about style when I wasn't sure they were, and two, that she was being described as being better when what the person really meant was just "contemporary."
And that made me think about writing styles a lot more...
The kind of books that were being criticized in favor of Rowling's sparser style were described as having too much description, where as Rowling let you imagine your own world. Now, I like having some room to breathe in a book too, but I think JKR goes beyond that, and this reminded me of something that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sydpad said recently that I really agreed with about Rowling's style. It's too long to quote in full, but the whole thing can be read here. But here are some excerpts:
The point I'm taking right now from that is the connection to screenwriting. (And I should note here thatsydpad is not saying screenwriting is inferior at all.) When I was in grad school studying writing I swear one was more likely to hear that writing a screenplay like a play or a book was a bad thing than vice versa. In fact, one might actually hear that making your fiction writing like a screenplay was not so bad. In fact, I remember a teacher explaining ways he felt people tried to do that and did it badly. It wasn’t that he really wanted everyone to write fiction like screenplays (but he saw nothing wrong in aspiring to a movie-like experience), but because he recognized movies as a huge influence. For instance, he talked about writing stories in the present tense--the way screenplays are written--because one mistakenly thought this made the writing more immediate. (In fact it puts a barrier up between the words and the action. Instead of "He walked in," which the reader experiences in the moment s/he reads it, you get "He walks in," which is a direction to you, the reader, to make the character walk in. In a screenplay, of course, this is exactly what you are doing--telling the actors and directors what to do when they actually create the story in its final form. In the screenplay he’s not walking in, but he will in the movie.)
It's not that JKR is bad for writing in a way that's reminiscent of screenplays--I think that's very much part of our time. So much so that I don't think she's consciously saying, "I'm putting in adverbs to help children who can't understand through just dialogue" since that's frankly insulting to children and also suggests that the only way one can help a reader is to use crutches like adverbs that tell instead of show. To me it really does read more like she's just, like many of us naturally do now a days, seeing a movie in her head and quickly describing how the actors are saying their lines while keeping her eye on the story.
And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
But really it's more interesting to think about the different situation older writers found themselves in. Movies create a sort of in-between space for stories that never existed before. They make a "real" version of the events described that you can just watch-- what they obviously don't do is create a story through only *words* like authors used to have to do. I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
It's almost impossible to really imagine pre-movie storytelling, but obviously it existed. Using more words, or descriptive words, or big words, is not really so much more difficult than not. It's just different--and more word-based, which is probably why it's, you know, got more words. If you’re aspiring to a movie, otoh, you’re going to try to disguise everything not movie-like, and that includes language that draws attention to itself or passages that aren’t giving you the information a movie does. I have no idea what the reaction would be if we could reverse the process and, say, go back in time to read Rowling to Dickens fans. Would they feel the loss of the language? Like the artist lacked a certain level of competency at the craft—the way we today notice bad special effects in movies? Would the author's allowing us to make up our own images just feel like the author creating sketchy characters? After all, in that time period they might not have the same pool of stereotypes to draw on, and might not have as many different types of people to draw on as modern people do thanks to movies and TV, to use to fill in the blanks.
I'm not, in case it seems I am, making a case for older styles of writing necessarily being better. I do appreciate that I was exposed to this style from a pretty young age so it never seemed foreign to me--but I also like sparse styles of writing. I'm glad I can enjoy something like Les Misérables and not just be completely put off by interludes about Waterloo or the life story of monsignor Myriel who will have nothing to do with the story after dominating it for the first 90 pages. I definitely appreciate the different style of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose word-painting I think Sydney shows really does blow Rowling's adverbs out of the water. But some writers of sparse prose are better than writers of more florid prose.
I also think that far from a sparse style being the pinnacle of a natural evolution, that it's still just as common for people who like reading for the sake of reading to be drawn to other types of writers as well. I remember when I worked at the children's bookstore there was one little girl who started out only wanting to read Babysitter's Club, because she was into that. It was one of the closest things we had in the store to TV series--mass market, familiar, simply written etc. Then one day she came in wanting a "real book," a phrase she seemed to have come up with herself for books that weren't based on a formula with the characters never changing etc. So we started her on books with similar themes--school problems, etc., like Judy Blume. She read a lot of those, but one day came in and hesitatingly asked for someone who was "a better writer" than Judy Blume. Blume's plain, kid-like language was one of her selling points, and she was now specifically asking for something else. Which she got in Natalie Babbitt:
I was reading a conversation today and something in it struck me. It wasn't the point of the conversation at all, but it just seemed to come up and be there under the surface. "It" was a casual reference to those "old fashioned" kind of books, the kind that people perhaps call literature (literature here being a suspect word that means boring and forced on you by snobs), are really inferior to the kind of writing JK Rowling does. It wasn't so much saying that outright, but more a pre-emptive defense of Rowling against people who didn't class her with the greats, particularly as a stylist. Her writing was simply clear, and that was a good thing—and it all made her better for children (even all those adverbs, which aren't lazy but helpful to children who couldn't understand things just from dialogue).
And that made me think two things--one that I thought that certain things in Rowling's style were being described as conscious choices about style when I wasn't sure they were, and two, that she was being described as being better when what the person really meant was just "contemporary."
And that made me think about writing styles a lot more...
The kind of books that were being criticized in favor of Rowling's sparser style were described as having too much description, where as Rowling let you imagine your own world. Now, I like having some room to breathe in a book too, but I think JKR goes beyond that, and this reminded me of something that
sydpad said recently that I really agreed with about Rowling's style. It's too long to quote in full, but the whole thing can be read here. But here are some excerpts:Any writer will use a descriptor like 'stubbornly' once in a while, but Rowling does lean on it more than usual I think. I only had to open HBP to a random page to find the example above, but I really had to pore over Dickens and Austen to find any descriptors used for dialogue at all. That's why I think she's so suited to screenwriting-- it's like she just wishes she had actors there to sell the idea rather than having to find a way to write it down.
[snip]
Now, I defy you to actually say one word in a 'pleading' tone in way that's THAT clear, without being comical. You can't do it. She's created this brilliant situation which is her chief genius, but it would play out much better on screen, where you could use the cuts and some first-class actors in close-up to get the pleading across. The word pleading here is the whole scenario; it's not actually a description of Dumbledore's tone.
[snip]
It's like the robes-- OMG, the robes! that are there, and then they're not, and then they're this style or that style... the thing is, she's basically handing it over to the 'costume department'. She's barely bothering, generally, to really see the whole shot in her head and paint a picture. Story is be-all and end-all--
The point I'm taking right now from that is the connection to screenwriting. (And I should note here that
sydpad is not saying screenwriting is inferior at all.) When I was in grad school studying writing I swear one was more likely to hear that writing a screenplay like a play or a book was a bad thing than vice versa. In fact, one might actually hear that making your fiction writing like a screenplay was not so bad. In fact, I remember a teacher explaining ways he felt people tried to do that and did it badly. It wasn’t that he really wanted everyone to write fiction like screenplays (but he saw nothing wrong in aspiring to a movie-like experience), but because he recognized movies as a huge influence. For instance, he talked about writing stories in the present tense--the way screenplays are written--because one mistakenly thought this made the writing more immediate. (In fact it puts a barrier up between the words and the action. Instead of "He walked in," which the reader experiences in the moment s/he reads it, you get "He walks in," which is a direction to you, the reader, to make the character walk in. In a screenplay, of course, this is exactly what you are doing--telling the actors and directors what to do when they actually create the story in its final form. In the screenplay he’s not walking in, but he will in the movie.)It's not that JKR is bad for writing in a way that's reminiscent of screenplays--I think that's very much part of our time. So much so that I don't think she's consciously saying, "I'm putting in adverbs to help children who can't understand through just dialogue" since that's frankly insulting to children and also suggests that the only way one can help a reader is to use crutches like adverbs that tell instead of show. To me it really does read more like she's just, like many of us naturally do now a days, seeing a movie in her head and quickly describing how the actors are saying their lines while keeping her eye on the story.
And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
But really it's more interesting to think about the different situation older writers found themselves in. Movies create a sort of in-between space for stories that never existed before. They make a "real" version of the events described that you can just watch-- what they obviously don't do is create a story through only *words* like authors used to have to do. I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
It's almost impossible to really imagine pre-movie storytelling, but obviously it existed. Using more words, or descriptive words, or big words, is not really so much more difficult than not. It's just different--and more word-based, which is probably why it's, you know, got more words. If you’re aspiring to a movie, otoh, you’re going to try to disguise everything not movie-like, and that includes language that draws attention to itself or passages that aren’t giving you the information a movie does. I have no idea what the reaction would be if we could reverse the process and, say, go back in time to read Rowling to Dickens fans. Would they feel the loss of the language? Like the artist lacked a certain level of competency at the craft—the way we today notice bad special effects in movies? Would the author's allowing us to make up our own images just feel like the author creating sketchy characters? After all, in that time period they might not have the same pool of stereotypes to draw on, and might not have as many different types of people to draw on as modern people do thanks to movies and TV, to use to fill in the blanks.
I'm not, in case it seems I am, making a case for older styles of writing necessarily being better. I do appreciate that I was exposed to this style from a pretty young age so it never seemed foreign to me--but I also like sparse styles of writing. I'm glad I can enjoy something like Les Misérables and not just be completely put off by interludes about Waterloo or the life story of monsignor Myriel who will have nothing to do with the story after dominating it for the first 90 pages. I definitely appreciate the different style of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose word-painting I think Sydney shows really does blow Rowling's adverbs out of the water. But some writers of sparse prose are better than writers of more florid prose.
I also think that far from a sparse style being the pinnacle of a natural evolution, that it's still just as common for people who like reading for the sake of reading to be drawn to other types of writers as well. I remember when I worked at the children's bookstore there was one little girl who started out only wanting to read Babysitter's Club, because she was into that. It was one of the closest things we had in the store to TV series--mass market, familiar, simply written etc. Then one day she came in wanting a "real book," a phrase she seemed to have come up with herself for books that weren't based on a formula with the characters never changing etc. So we started her on books with similar themes--school problems, etc., like Judy Blume. She read a lot of those, but one day came in and hesitatingly asked for someone who was "a better writer" than Judy Blume. Blume's plain, kid-like language was one of her selling points, and she was now specifically asking for something else. Which she got in Natalie Babbitt:
"Listen, all you people lying lazy on the beach, is this what you imagine is the meaning of the sea?"
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Greetings and...yes.
And so, suddenly, I find myself commenting. Strange how that works out.
I've read your posts on Draco/Snape/Sytherins and their glory/humiliation/imminent downfall/impending redemption and I've always been inspired, but for some reason, this was the post I felt driven to talk about. Because I'm weird like that.
And, because, like I said, you're a genius. For so long I've read Rowling and pondered over the idea that there seems to be some intangible aim, some unreachable goal, behind the work, and I think it might be an issue that is commonplace for fictional/fantasy writers. She is in an author's version of the classic Catch 22 scenario: writing about fictional wizards in a fictional world full of fictional beasts and fictional situations, but at the same time making them everymen and women. Keep it too real and you lose the fantastical element, making all the wand-waving and incantation-saying silly; keep it beyond the reach of normalcy, and kids wont get as attached to the characters. Harry himself is inside everyone and no one at all, simultaneously the speccy kid at school with two friends to his name and the awesome force of nature who can destroy oppressive regimes and defy invasive governments (and, now, make the ladies swoon in the hallways). It's the bridge that almost every author has to cross to reach their readers: either I am making you care about these people and their lives because you relate and connect (Harry feels awkward with Cho, Harry feels stupid in Potions), or the story is so wildly different from your experience that you are fascinated regardless of the unquestionable distance between the character's lives and your own (I know I've never faced a Basilisk wtf this is so weird I cannot put it down).
Movies make that gap a lot easier. I don't have to suspend reality quite as much when the image of Harry waving a wand and something exploding is right in front of me- we have cut out the middle man that is my personal interpretation of events. Conversely, I can identify directly with the wee eleven year old Harry on screen because I can see for myself that he is an underfed orphan that elicits my pity/ needs a hug. Maybe I needed a hug once too, and so I care about him.
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Re: Greetings and...yes....continued
With movies, you can do both. We (will) see the expansive awesome that is the joke shop, and we (will) hear that Ginny is beside herself when Ron calls her out as a harlot. For authors, the challenge of showing rather than telling is difficult- having Harry magically intuit that someone is upset, or that danger is approaching, isnt as dramatic or as interesting to readers as it would be to make them do the work. We know that the Department of Mysteries scenes in OoTP/ Dumbledore Tower Scenario in HBP are going to go badly long before they really do- JKR writes a suspenseful, if somewhat drawn out, moment that captures readers. Movies can do this with lighting and some voilin music. A picture is worth a thousand words, I am sure that the dramatic climax of OoTP, which lasted dozens of pages, could be cut into five minutes of film. Would it do the pages justice? Maybe not.
Perhaps because imagination is harder to come by, and more difficult to enrich and inspire these days (such a depressing thought), but giving people a solid, physical presence to connect with is an effective means of communicating your story. Kids with creative tendencies can picture Harry vividly enough from the books alone to satisfy them- I have a nine year old cousin who flat out refuses to see the films because he likes the images he has in his head and knows that the movies would only conflict with his imaginary world he has based off the books (I think the removal of Draco-as-tabloid-informant in the GoF movie would make his head explode). Fair enough. And JKR allows for that- by sparing us the lengthy details, she leaves more room for kids like him to elaborate by themselves (he also suspects that Ginny will get Harry another Quidditch book for his birthday, because there has to be more than one and he has read 'Quidditch Through the Ages' too many times. That probably won't be included in Book 7, but probably won't be ruled out, either.)
On the other hand, some people don't read the books until they've seen the movies, and then forever have Rupert/Dan/Emma as their mind's Trio. And because JKR never directly contradicts that (aside from that green eyes/blue eyes trick of Harry's...dont even get me started), it works for them. JKR may have them doing more elaborate things and involved in more complicated plots, but the basic template stays the same.
I like to think that JKR isnt thinking of the movies when she writes the books- clearly she wasnt at first, but even she is human, and even she must have an inkling of the theatrical "wow" that could be the final Tower scenes of HBP. (I say could be because...well, handled poorly they could also be a complete farce). Maybe she just wants to leave imagination wiggle room- which seems almost redundant when talking about a school full of wizards, but you know what I mean- so that kids like my cousin can extrapolate things like 'Ron makes a mean egg sandwich' from the text.
Um, I feel like this is very long and probably not very full of sense-making. I think you're very smart and wise, and full of insightful ideas and comments. And, yes.
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Re: Greetings and...yes....continued
Speaking of genius...I hadn't thought of it that way but that is a great point about the balance of everyman and hero. It is great the way JKR does it--and it may be instinctive almost at times. Part of it is maybe the use of the tight pov where we feel how Harry feels, and Harry rarely feels special--but at the same time it's not totally fake because I think we see Harry sometimes taking things for granted. So it's not like he's really walking around being overly humble like a saint. He gets impatient, he snape.
if you say 'Ginny shouted, beside herself', that conveys just as much as if you say 'Ginny had gone red in the face, was swaying agitatedly and so on and so forth.') JKR does not shy away from exploring more detailed descriptions, in fact, she gives almost painstakingly exact accounts of what are arguably less important elements of the story (the Twins' joke shop etc); however, when she thinks such attentions might distract from a central conflict or pivotal scene, she abandons them in favor of brevity- using fewer words to show the same thing, then moving along.
Right--the story and the pace is all-important at all times. There are times where she will really focus on details in the setting, for instance. The first time we see the MoM is like that, I think. It sweeps you along--and obviously that's working!
And there is something fun about being able to extrapolate things like "Ron makes a mean egg sandwich" from a text. I think fandoms really rely on that kind of wiggle room.
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When people talk about writing styles, the first thing I think of is a book I read, and will not read again, but which had so many layers in almost every sentence that it really was "textured". It was called The Spectacle on the Tower, and it won some prize or other. What it doesn't say is nearly as clear as what it does say. But most of these bare-bones books and stories don't even approach this sort of texturing, so why go on and on about the difference? Poorly done non-descriptions are as annoying as poorly done descriptions.
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Absolutely. I guess if you're used to one you might notice the flaws in the other more obviously, but it's a shame that descriptive writing sometimes gets used as a synonym for boring as if it always stops the story dead. With some writers it's all intertwined. There's a special feeling you get from writers who can paint you into a world so well. It perhaps does usually come with a different pace--but that pace isn't always slow in retrospect. I find myself thinking of We Have Always Lived In The Castle, which I think of as very descriptive--and it's just delicious!
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So, I notice words when they change. Maybe it's that the pace changes suddenly and for no apparent reason, like with big blocks of description that are only there to show how well the author describes things, or a weird turn of phrase that catches my mind like a frayed rug might trip my foot. One really bad thing about descriptions is when an author tries to show an extremely specific setting without sounding like a guidebook. I get an idea in my head, based on things I've seen or imagined, houses I've lived in, and so on, and suddenly, where my mind is turning left, the writer tells me I'm turning right. I have to stop and go back and re-think this.
But sometimes, I just love a description. That one sydpad quoted, with the guy wringing his hand on his mouth, was just so great! I can completely see him just from that.
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I used to be pretty convinced that I didn't like writing that spent a lot of time on description, because in a lot of cases (at least of books I'd read at that point), very descriptive writing becomes overdescriptive and is downright atrocious. I've realised I was wrong on this point recently. What really did it for me, I think, was reading East of Eden, which iirc has a whole chapter near the beginning just describing the valley. Now, I'm not sure where this book fits on the scale of time spent on description, but I do know that that's the sort of thing that I would have expected to put me off, and instead I couldn't put the book down.*
So. I've been rethinking this, obviously, and what I'm thinking is that it's not so much about the amount of description as it is about the precision of the description. By this, I mean using the right words and the right amount of words to show whatever it is you're trying to show, in the way you're trying to show it. I'm not sure how you would measure this, exactly, since it seems very much an instinctive thing, and very individual to the particular author's voice. Its easier to tell when it isn't done well, because both overblown description and overly sparse description can throw you out of the story and prevent you from feeling it properly. I think it takes a certain amount of control to stick consistantly to the same voice in your writing, and it's when you lose that that you start slipping up on this.
These thoughts are still pretty preliminary, but your post got me trying to put them into words, and here it is.
*This is off-topic, but I thought I'd mention that I actually discovered this book through your essay about Sirius and Regulus and East of Eden, and I'm very glad I did. So thank you for that, even if I was just a lurker when I read it. Also, I hope you don't mind that I'm friending you.
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And I think you're totally right about the economy of words--that's the thing. I'll bet if you look at the best descriptive passages they are good not just because they are pretty or describe things well, but are conveying something else throught the description. When you say you can "see" what the Shire looks like in Tolkien, for instance, I suspect that's because he imbues it with the right kind of feeling, not just because he describes what it looks like.
Heh--it's a little like porn in fanfic, probably. People want the feeling as part of the description, not just body parts.
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Ut pictura poesis, sort of
Are movies really so dominant in our culture that novels mimic them? “Think like a movie maker” would be terrible advice to give to a writer of novels, though it might be a fun thing for a writer to do once in a while. A novel is an exploration through words alone, and any meanings, allusions and any images a novel evokes are evoked by words. Movies evoke meaning etc through movement and light, essentially. A screenplay is no more a movie than it is a novel. I wonder do we actually see books as movies in our heads? I don’t think I do. I don’t usually have a completely clear picture of what the characters and settings in a book look like, I don’t have a sort of photographic image. Instead I have a feeling about it, an impression of connections between the characters and between them and the place they’re in. Rather than a movie I think I might see something more like a cubist painting, or a collage. Perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough! But aren’t we actually more likely to relate a novel we’re reading to our own lives, which are not purely visual and not something two-dimensional that we sit and watch but are multi-dimensional and going on around us and inside us? I often accuse myself of reading only to find out what happens in the end, but detective novels - which it could be argued are mostly about the end – I find unsatisfying precisely for the shorthand world view they tend to present. Dickens one reads for the jaw-dropping incredible, insane world he describes even more than for the plot. And I’ve just remembered the aweome spontaneous combustion bit in ‘Bleak House’ which is largely about smell and a heaviness in the air which is not the easiest thing for film to evoke.
Some of the scenes JKR writes are very visual – it seems she really wants you to picture them to understand what she’s getting at, except that the meaning of the visual imagery in them isn’t necessarily clear. Hermione surrounded by birds and Draco and Harry in the water and blood in the bathroom are cases in point. I’m not sure if its because she’s seeing a movie in her head or if it’s something to do with alchemy. Some of the time when she doesn't describe as much as might be required it seems to be precisely in order to promote uncertainty, and to get us to think about it. Unless it really is just lazy writing ...
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Re: Ut pictura poesis, sort of
I feel like one doesn't even have to consciously think about making something like a movie these days because most people have been so constantly exposed to movies or TV it seeps into the language of your thoughts somehow. So it's not like Rowling is lazy in being more cinematic if she is and Dickens worked harder. She just has a different experience of life to turn on.
But that's not to say they don't have things in common. As I was saying above, I think the thing about description is that it has to do more than just stop the story dead to describe the room. Rowling does sometimes have passages of description--it's just not dead description because it's usually lively and connected to character or putting across a feeling. I mentioned the intro to the MoM in OotP for instance--when I conjure up that scene in my mind I almost here background music as well. Movies have, I think, come part of the language. And of course, Dickens had his own passages that were cinematic (obviously without consciously being so) too.
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Re: Ut pictura poesis, sort of
I think you're right here. Oddly enough, for myself, almost more important thatn the visuals in a novel is a sort of auditory sense. I can hear the characters' individual voices in my head, much more clearly than I can pin down a visual image of them. I don't know if others are the same way about this.
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Adverbs aside, I do think that JKR has a pretty strong (and charming!) narrative voice, which is a large part of why the movies have never appealed as much to me as the books, and that would all be lost if she turned to screenplay. :)
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I guess I mean, why did they have 'blanks', but we're okay with those blanks because we have images from movies to draw upon? Why do we draw upon the movies to fill the holes instead of something else?
When I was talking about blanks I was thinking more of just certain shorthands that we have now from mass popular culture that people might not have had as much then (though of course they had things that *they* would recognize with a hint that we wouldn't because every culture has those things). And one thing that did occur to me was that perhaps people can be more expected to have been exposed to a greater range of people through mass media than they might have been then. For instance, if Dickens had the character of Cho Chang in his book would he have described her as looking Asian more than Rowling does?
Adverbs aside, I do think that JKR has a pretty strong (and charming!) narrative voice, which is a large part of why the movies have never appealed as much to me as the books, and that would all be lost if she turned to screenplay. :)
I never think of her narrative voice much, now that I think about it. But I do much prefer the books to the movies. The narrative voice might be part of that. Even though I might never think about it in terms of being poetic or whatever she uses the narrative voice very well. It's fully in control of you as a reader throughout the book--in that way I do think about it.
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And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
Hee, thank you. This idea of constant cultural improvement seems very weird to me but you see people assuming it all the time. And it doesn't work any better than the equally dubious idea that modern stuff is some horrible corruption or degeneration from previous art forms. Artistic styles change over time, that's all, and each aesthetic can be appreciated on its own terms.
I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
*nods* Yes, for many many reasons. The one that strikes me the most when I think about Tolkien is this: any movie adaptation has this problem of *time* - even if a written scene contains a metric ton of description we can read it much, much faster than it will play out on the screen.
It is so dazzlingly cool that written narrative can suspend our sense of time like that, but time as we experience it in reading is a total illusion, whereas filmmakers have to deal with actual TIME as it passes for people who are sitting in front of a movie screen. You can't include everything from a book in a movie, and you also don't have the option of just cutting from the book and putting in little bits and pieces that happen to fit into the running time, because then the resulting film would have no shape at all. So you have to compress episodes and change their order and even add scenes that contain characterization bits that might be the net result of six or seven scenes from the original book. This is just inevitable, I think; what will make the result seem like a faithful adaptation or not will depend I think on whether not on how closely the movie conforms to the written narrative but on how good the filmakers are at constructing a coherent narrative of their own.
As for Rowling's descriptive style -- yeah, it does seem to me to be a bit compressed. I notice two kinds of details in her stories -- details that are there for comic effect, and details that are there because she's reached a point in the narrative when she's talking about something that is experienced by the POV character as really different from anything he's ever seen or done. The longest passage of pure description that I've noticed in OotP happens when they're flying on the Thestrals, which is, lets face it, a really odd thing to do. It's a place where I can imagine a kid reading the story asking, what did that look like? But the description also serves the purpose there of increasing the suspense as Harry & co travel to rescue (so Harry hopes) Sirius, so even there the description is really in the service of what's going on in the character's head.
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Where I think she gets sketchier is just when she's concentrating on plot, which is often. Like, where she's setting people up to get to where she wants them I think her eye's maybe just a bit more ahead, on getting to the goal.
I remember one classic LOTR thing was the battle in Moria. Somebody kept saying they should have just done it like in the book and what the book does is say "The melee was fierce." And then it gives you the body counts. And somehow that was able to be translated directly to the screen. There just wasn't the sense that movies are literally starting from scratch.
(Now I'm also remembering my defense of Gandalf's fall: It matches the rythmn of the text. Doing what the text literally says would look SILLY: Fly you foooooooooooooooooools
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I had at one time a link to a similar analysis of The Da Vinci Code, analysing bits of it that made no sense from a literary standpoint but excellent sense as stage directions or descriptions of different 'shots'. I object to this personally, not because I think movies are 'less' than books, but because they're different art forms and suited to different things. Writing a book movie-style is like playing music on empty tuna-cans or knitting a dress out of magnetic tape. Yeah, you can do it, and you can get cool results and you can learn things from the experiment, but if that's the only technique you have in your repetoire you're going to be pretty limited.
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I almost put in a bit about theater that way, actually. I'm finding more and more that I much prefer plays that just embrace their theatricality and use it. All those big splashy musicals, usually made of movies, are so often seeming to just want to be a movie. Like Sunset Boulevard started with this amazing looking recreation of the opening scene in the movie, but really the cool thing about it was just that they recreated the movie. It's like watching the Flintstones movie just to say, "Oh look, they made the bird phonograph in live action."
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The biggest image in my head right now is of people, one hundred years from now, discussing the same topic, and people pointing out that books were only used back in the days because people didn't have the technology to Sim-like fiction, and of course it is better to use computer rendering to simulate the image in their heads than letting people imagine it for themselves.
And I'm interested in the example you give about the LotR movies, because that can be part of why I was so disappointed in them (but not everything, not by a long shot). I remember going into the first movie all hyped up, and when I came out everyone around me was saying how thrilling it was and I was definitely not feeling the same thing. I'd enjoyed it, but... Only some time later did I realise that the trouble was that I saw what I could only describe as an action movie, while the books were something else with some action. So, you could say that the movie on the screen not matching the movie in my head did make me somewhat not enjoy the movie I actually saw.
Also, (and I'm all over the place) it's interesting to note that Christopher Lee (I think) said that one of the great things of doing the movies was that there was going to be a new generation that would grow up thinking that he was Saruman, or something of the kind. Eh... Not that it's any way relevant to the topic.
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My uncle never saw the LOTR movies because he never wanted anything but what he had in his head. I knew some other people who did that too (some still posting about them on TORC regardless). I was lucky with them that I had fairly low expectations (thank you, Ralph Bakshi!) and have been able to like them as separate entities. But it can be difficult to make the jump.
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A random thought on thick description
One thing that struck me about your observations is a general shift in stylistic conventions, one which I'm not certain is really related to film. And that's the shift away from the omniscient narrator. I haven't read much Dickens, but I've read a lot of Dostoyevsky and Wilkie Collins who I think will work as well for these purposes, since they both feature the same Victorian style of description you're talking about. The kind of descriptive tangents they make are enabled by the fact that the narrative voice is not limited in time, space, knowledge or to the point of view of a single character. When American lit (both popular and literary) moved to favoring third-person (and to a much lesser degree first-person)-limited, the scope of descriptions changed. They became limited to the knowledge, experience and voice of the pov character. In third-person pov, the author can only describe what the character knows, what the character perceives, and what the character would attend to. Take three different 3rd-p-limited pov characters into the same Mcdonald's at the same moment and they will in all likelihood describe entirely different scenes-- one might fixate entirely on the shrill noise created by a birthday party of small children, another might dwell on the generic vacuity of the corporate decor, another might cheerfully attend to the brightness of the lighting and the cleanness of the floor, while a fourth may focus entirely on the breasts of the cashier.
Which is not to say that limited pov equals spare description. I'm thinking of a couple popular novels I've read recently-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and well, a whole bunch of mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman. while keeping to 3rd p limited, both authors paint detailed and vibrant sensory pictures. (Stephenson's image of a leather executive chair swallowing the buttocks of the pov character like a soft, buttery calfskin catcher's mitt may stay with me for the rest of my natural.) Kellerman, on the other hand, takes some flack from readers sometimes for the thickness of his descriptions. In particular, people often complain the detail to which his pov character observes peoples appearances (down to the shade of eyeliner). I think these complaints are pretty minor-- but they also illustrate the descriptive dilemma of 3rd person limited, because to the degree to which Kellerman's decriptions jar, they jar in part because a straight male psychologist is noting minute details of women's jewelry, make-up, and clothing that seem inconsistent with (stereotyped, at least) expectations of what a straight male professional would know about and pay attention to.
On the other hand, it's interesting to note that critics have praised Kellerman's richly described style as "cinematic." ;-)
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Re: A random thought on thick description
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Re: A random thought on thick description
But yes, the omniscient narrator--perhaps part of a greater trend towards invisible style? That's probably too reductive again. Maybe people just started moving away from it. Where I work I almost always have to write in first person limited so I'm hyper aware of being limited to pov but also trying to get in description while still sounding conversational.
I feel like I can't add anything to your comment--I loved reading it. I'll probably be thinking about it tomorrow too. And also that catcher's mitt. Awesome!
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I think that how that relates into JKR's work is that I do see her work at first being very formulaic, especially with the first two books; I got the impression that she either didn't really know what she was doing with the series at first, or she was writing to meet specific guidelines. The later books don't really seem to have this problem in that they flow far more organically and there are far more loose ends and subplots for a reader to pick at, but it's definitely arguable that the writing quality and style of the earlier books were just as... wooden? I've been re-reading the series, and my boyfriend has only just started reading them, and it's easier to see this when you have an outsider's opinion. (It took him four months to get through "PS" and "CoS", but about a week to get through "PoA", if it gives any indication.)
What I think I enjoy about her writing style is something that
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But I do think that JKR has a lot of things that are *good* about the way she writes--it's kind of amazing how they can be re-read and still be enjoyed. She's got that Jane Austen things where things slot into each other so it's more fun to read later and things zip along. I think she was probably great for YA in general because yeah, for a while it was like children's trade lit was getting so pretentious and heavy--imagine somebody actually giving you an actual entertaining story!
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I would have been about fifteen when I read the Sid Fields books: my uncle (who's been the primary encouragement to me actually consider writing seriously) handed them to me on the impression that they would be of use in structuring stories, and at the time I wasn't really discerning enough to tell if it would help me or not, given that I had little confidence in my own work and hadn't really done much of it. I don't really enjoy writing screenplays because I like having fun with the description and dialogue, and I found myself enjoying the writing progress of prose much more.
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One way of opening up the issue is to ask: what kind of more basic experience, what kind of elementary connection between people, is a text standing in for or pointing toward? And the traditional answer has been that it points toward an oral performance, that it stands in for speech. It imitates the techniques and strategies of a living human storyteller, reciting his tale in a Mycenaean court or a shadowy London club or tugging your sleeve on a streetcorner and trying to hold your attention.
And so the virtues of this kind of writing are the virtues of this kind of talking: the sound of the words and the rhythm of the sentences, the pattern of teasing and disclosure, the frank appeal to the listener’s sensibilties. And not least, the glimpses of the narrator’s own personality, the vivid and almost-caressing presence of another person crowding your space just a little bit and maybe spinning you for his own purposes. In
But – admittedly to oversimplify -- nowadays we don’t primarily experience stories as something another person tells us, we experience them as the consumption of an impersonal visual product. And this, as you point out in detail, has fundamental consequences for writing – because to a greater or lesser extent (depending on the writer's particular idea of artistry) writing is no longer an imitation of speech, or of direct and charged-up human connection, but rather an imitation of a passive visual experience, a score or shorthand for describing a movie. And perhaps even more: for describing not the movie itself but the ideal, obedient spectator’s uncritical and immediate reaction to it.
This is where JKR’s notorious adverbs come in. As you say, they simulate the immediacy of impressions that, in a movie, aren’t verbal in the first place: the “pleading” tone, the anger in someone’s face. It would be untrue to the underlying visual experience, a sort of distraction or clutter, to waste too much time evoking these things with words – instead you assert them as swiftly and efficiently as possible, and the reader accepts them and fills out the details automatically, like you’d accept the dynamics and accents marked in a written musical score.
Is this a bad thing, a debasement of writing? I think it's possible to use visual culture elements in a very sophisticated way in writing -- Isherwood and Cortazar do interesting things with their "cameras," just off the top of my head. But I think borrowing from visual media also presents a very strong temptation for dumbing down the potential power of written texts. There's something coercive about video as a medium, the way it firmly directs your attention from moment to moment, anticipates and manages your reactions, even tells you what sort of mental associations you should make as it transitions from one cut to the next. It tends to overwhelm you and reduce you to passivity and have its way with you, in a way that short-circuits full imaginative engagement. I love movies that don't do that -- I think I went off about David Lynch once on your journal, and I love being disoriented by films that are geuninely weird and mysterious -- but most of them don't take that strategy, they opt for a simpler and more authoritarian handling of their spectators, a lowest common denominator of audience response. And thinking about extending that tendency to literature makes me want to go read Henry James and smoke cigarettes in front of children. :)
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LOL! You're right! And there's that omnicient narrator that jumps out and talks to us as well. Now I think it might seem to draw attention to the "illusion" too much, like the narrator knows you're reading a book. But really it's recreating talking, you're right!
I think I went off about David Lynch once on your journal,
Heh--he was exactly who I was thinking of for someone who seems more sophisticated in the way they use images. But still, of course you can't blame one medium for another's perceived shortcomings, as you said. I was reading a book a while back--maybe it was "The Great War and Modern Memory" where I think they talked about how WWI is such a literary war--that's how people made sense of it. The soldiers themselves talked about it in literary terms and wrote poetry etc. WW2 wasn't that much later but it was understood far more through the movies. Even today you tend to think about the War poets and WW2 movies.
But you can't unstir the porridge--there's certain ways of picturing things or understanding things that are just common to the movies and we're going to use them to talk to each other. Same with computers now, really. And those come into our speech too...
I think people can do interesting things with that sort of thing in writing, but I tend to not be too fond of a lot of things that are really playing with that kind of thing.
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I maintain (see above!) that JKR's adverbs have nothing to do with film but come from Enid Blyton. I don't have any Malory Towers books but do have 'Five Go to Smugglers Top', first published 1945. Here's a few random examples:
p. 29
'Well,' said the driver, doubtfully, 'I don't know if you're supposed to take that dog in, Miss...
'Well, he'll have to send me back too,' said George, defiantly.
p. 85
George took her hand away from the door at once. She turned to look at Timmy. He was standing stiffly, the hackles on his neck rising up, and he was staring fixedly at the door. George put her hand to her lips warningly, and whispered...
p.163
Uncle Quentin was listening quietly to all this. He looked at Mr. Barling and spoke sternly...
'Yes - I bet Block's been spying and reading letters!' cried Sooty, indignantly.
E.B. may have got the idea from thinking about films, I guess...
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I think I remember hearing them more associated with Tom Swift where sometimes people called them "Swifties" because of all the ridiculous adverbs that came up. (It wasn't a compliment.)
But I don't think BD is claiming that adverbs were invented by movies. He's speaking generally about the experience of watching movies and telling a story and the different influences and just using the use of adverbs as being similar in the way he described.
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But I think one of the most interesting things about most literary writing is that it can be read aloud, and that the pleasures you take from it line by line are very closely related to the pleasure you would experience in listening to it. The sound and rhythm of the words, the structure of the rhetoric, are all important even when you’re reading in the “normal” mode – that is, silently and alone. Of course writing can depart from an oral standard, that’s one of its vulnerabilities compared strictly with speech. But when it does this too much, we often accuse a writer of having a lazy or barbaric style, of sounding like a tech manual rather than literature. My concern is that visual culture increases the temptation for writers to slack off in this way.
JKR had an interesting interview comment about how she learned something about writing from the audio adaption of one of her books. (Yay, audio!) I guess she had written “’you doddering idiot,’ he hissed,” and it had never occurred to her that you had to have an “s” in order to hiss. So I think it’s at least plausible to suggest that JKR doesn’t always automatically listen to the sound of her own words, and this may be one thing to look at when there are irritations in her style.
I haven’t read any Enid Blyton but it was interesting to see your examples of her own use of adverbs gone mad. But I’m not totally convinced when you posit a direct influence on JKR. Are you suggesting that the adverbs are a stylistic trick with some literary merit, or possibly even a traditional marker of children’s literature that JKR was paying homage to? I guess it’s possible, but it strikes me more simply as bad writing of a fairly common sort, specifically the writing of someone with a heavyhanded tendency to editorialize, to guide her readers’ interpretation in almost a nagging way. Perhaps she’s trying to add a kind of fail-safe redundancy to make her work more reliably intelligible for children. JKR might do it for the same reason, or she might do it for a different reason. The eternal recurrence of basic vices may be spontaneous enough, without requiring those vices to be traced as a “literary impact” direct from one writer to the next.
In any case, I should probably have been clearer that I wasn’t trying to come up with some Unified Theory of what Writing Really Is and Should Be. :) Obviously video has been around a long time and I mentioned Isherwood and Cortazar as writers who reacted to it in particularly sophisticated ways. I think the underlying issue in Magpie's post was to think about risk factors, pitfalls, types of badness: why so much popular writing seems overly linear and unliterary, and why the broader reading public seems averse to rhetoric or self-consciousness in prose. And I do think popular visual culture is a major culprit here. It’s a particular issue in popular or mass-market novels -- ever since Jurassic Park Michael Crichton has blocking his scenes in really intrusive and annoying ways. But the interesting thing is when it affects writers like JKR with more sophisticated ambitions (or at least, who have more sophisticated claims made on their behalf). I’m just suggesting video culture is a particularly prolific source of dangers for inattentive writers, if they stop thinking about how words sound and how verbal descriptions work and instead cut straight to cinematic images and impressions.
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I understand what's being said about film and agree that it would be 'inattentive writers' who responded to film in the way being discussed - inattentive to film as much as to writing because film scenes are painstaking creations and dependent on nuance and detail. I'm sure there are writers happy to leave the task of description to their readers' vague recollections of some similar sort of scene they've seen on telly. Afer all a whole book could be written in just one word: whatever ;)
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But anyway. I was wondering, if it's not too much trouble or anything, if I could have links to those two entries? Er, if you even have any idea what I'm talking about. Other ppl have mentioned them, which is why I'm curious to read them as well.
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I do know what you're talking about, definitely! Those are both communities where we basically go through the books and respond to them as we go. The Snarkery was closed by the moderator, but at some point I do plan to repost the chapter summaries I put up there on the other comm. That would be OotP and GoF.
On
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Oooh, I've just been to deathtocapslock... SO MUCH LOVE. You people (you and your people?) ROCKKKK. XD
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