Grant Faulkner

Emily Dickinson: Truth at a Slant

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“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” This was Emily Dickinson’s credo.

Walker Evans applied a similar aesthetic approach to photography—a preference to take photos when the sun’s light was slanting, toward evening or in the early morning.

The approach begs the question of whether life should be represented in full illumination. What does it mean to represent something or someone in full light?

Perhaps truth—not to mention mystery and wonder—can only be found in the “slants,” the corners, the shadows.

I’m not sure if an artist needs to know much more than this, but of course these simple words require such keen interpretation and creative judgment.

What is truth at a slant, after all? It goes beyond sunrise and sunset.

Romantic Comedy: The Curse of a Popular Genre

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Why is it so difficult to create a decent romantic comedy?

The key word here is decent, not great. The genre by its very definition doesn’t demand any attempts at greatness–audiences want palatable fare, a few yuks, some suspense, and a little enlightenment about the thorny world of love. The genre isn’t designed to change anyone’s life, or even their relationship. A happy ending is guaranteed after all.

And yet Hollywood, despite its preoccupation with the genre and its prospects of ticket sales, continues to not even hit the mark of decent, falling usually to mediocrity or worse. Did anyone see License to Wed for God’s sake?

A.O. Scott recently dissected romantic comedies in the New York Times, noting their predictable formula: “A single woman, courted by two eligible men, will be drawn toward the man who is superficially right but ontologically wrong for her before choosing, in the final 20 minutes, the man with the opposite qualities. Or, more rarely, a single man will face the analogous predicament. Or an incurable skirt chaser will be cured, usually by a lady who at first had seemed to be repelled by his irresistible manly charms. Or a couple on the verge of splitting — or already split — will discover that they were meant to be together after all.”

Predictability, however, shouldn’t be such a problem. It’s all in the execution. As with any work of art, the vision of the thing matters more than its form. There’s no reason that romantic comedies have to be “movies whose notion of love is insipid, shallow and frequently ludicrous,” as A.O. Scott puts it.

Without going into details about romantic comedies my overall impression of the last decades fare is summed up by a kind of bland slapstick where no one gets hurt, no one really falls in love, and no one really laughs. It’s like going to a dinner party where everyone is trying to be polite, and no one dares a joke at another’s expense.

One of the answers that A.O. Scott posits for the romantic comedy’s demise is an aversion to love’s invigorating fisticuffs. The old romantic comedies (e.g., Grant and Hepburn) were notable for the “emotional combat of two strong-willed, independent individuals ending in mutual conquest. Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment. It required movie stars whose physical appeal was matched by verbal dexterity and a vital sense of idiosyncrasy.”

A friend noted that so often in romantic comedies, the female character is portrayed as a cold, disciplined woman in a power position–out of touch with her emotions, a bit crazy without knowing it (hence comedic), and scarcely maternal or nurturing. Then the man enters the picture, and essentially brings her down to love–think Cameron Diaz in The Holiday. This isn’t the battle of the sexes that A.O. Scott is talking about.

Scott mentions When Harry Met Sally, so I rented it again. I remembered it as a pretty good movie–I know I enjoyed it at the time–and while it hasn’t aged well (just check out that contrived fake orgasm scene that was so dangereux in the late ’80s that it put Meg Ryan on the map), it was a battle of life philosophies as much as it was a battle of the sexes.

The characters operate within entirely different experiences and perspectives on love–the movie follows this evolution as much as it does the growth of their relationship. At first, they can’t stand each other (great beginning!), then they become awkward friends, suprisingly good friends–wait a minute, they’re so damn close, it looks like they’re going to become lovers–except, no, Billy Chrystal is still whacked, still stuck in his stupid college boy ideas, and he’s going to make them both miserable forever.

They get together, but you know they’re still going to fight a lot (joyfully so, or at least sometimes), so the happy ending resonates. Emotional combat present and accounted for.

I just saw The Jane Austen Book Club–not a great movie by any means, and a story that relies on contrivance–but at least it contained a few good smidgeons of emotional combat, at least the characters were portrayed with authentic, revealing quirks and vulnerabilities. With romance getting more complex (global, ages, online, etc.), you’d think that romantic comedies would follow suit instead of of presenting the same old Sam and Sallies.

The problem, however, is what kind of emotional combat can Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson possibly find themselves in? To wear a shirt or not to wear a shirt?

The Art of the Romantic Comedy, by Bill Johnson, provides a good Hollywood primer for writing a romantic comedy, but it’s likely to lead a writer toward the idiotic gimmickery that’s behind most movies in the genre, not to a script that dares a risk or two.

If I were going to try to write an original romantic comedy, I’d check out the blog Alligators in a Helicopter, written by Scott the Script Reader. Alligators offers much better tips and a great summation of what’s wrong with the current putrid lot.

Finally, here’s a funny recut of The Shining on YouTube that might best sum up the state of the romantic comedy.

Steal This Plot

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There are so many basic plots—ready to simply snatch as I’ve recently learned—but I’ll be damned if I can write a good one.

I’m not sure why I try. It’s a pity we’re not living in a more nouvelle roman era—since I specialize in what might be called the meandering existential novel, sans epiphany, sans much of anything but a lot of moping about—but we’re living in the age of increasingly short attention spans, data smog, and well, the overwhelming popularity of new narratives, such as video games, that are much more viscerally arresting. Let’s be honest.

I should ask, “Who needs plot, not to mention text?” and be done with it. But I like plot. And I like text.

Despite the slipping and sloping and pausing, the attempted dipsy-do’s and dipsy-don’ts, the outright boring and embarrassing maudlin pitches of my writerly sensibilities, I relish a good plot. I envy writers who can write good plots like I envied guys who could get dates in high school (is there a connection between the two?).

I also hate writers who can write good plots, just as…yes, of course.

So, after all of these years of reading relatively serious fare (Roland Barthes anyone?) I picked up Steal This Plot, by June and William Noble, in a dog-eared, nearly bankrupt used book store, and it turned out to be one of the better “how-to-write” books I’ve read.

The caveat is that very few in the literary how-to genre have done me much good. Steal This Plot at the very least offers some archetypal plot structures to consider when writing any story. You don’t have to steal the plot so much as you can think about the tendencies of your own storyline and consider the trajectory of other stories. If you’re an undisciplined writer, and one who prefers to write without an outline, then Steal This Plot will surely help bring discipline to your storyline, and perhaps tame any wild tangents.

With its distinctions between plot spicers and plot motivators, it offers even experimental writers something to think about when constructing a narrative. I have to say that I think this book if more helpful than Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer.

Here are the plot motivators:

  • vengeance
  • catastrophe
  • love and hate
  • the chase
  • grief and loss
  • rebellion
  • betrayal
  • persecution
  • self-sacrifice
  • survival
  • rivalry
  • quest
  • ambition.

Here are the plot spicers (sub-plots of a sort):

  • mistaken identity
  • criminal actions
  • deception, honor
  • increase or decrease in material well-being
  • authority
  • making amends
  • conspiracy
  • rescue
  • unnatural affection
  • suspicion
  • suicide
  • searching.

Good plots can be told repeatedly in endless variations, I hear.

Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose

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“Can creative writing be taught?” That’s the question Francine Prose starts with in her recent book, Reading Like a Writer.

The question, which is so often a taunt–a menace to the hundreds (thousands?) of creative writing programs across the nation–often looms in my mind. I suspect the answer is no. Talent can at best be refined and nurtured, but the true creative numen, that which startles, is revered or reviled, is ineffable, such a force unto itself that it can’t be explained or constructed by a classroom curriculum or any sort of regimen.

Still, some of us, the stubborn or the dumb, persist, hoping that we can teach ourselves something.

Prose’s recommendation is that we read more carefully, diagramming stories as we take pleasure in reading them, for only those who notice the techniques of the masters can possibly carry them off.

Reading Like a Writer is a solid book, if not particularly enlightening. I read it to attune my awareness more keenly to the finer narrative details, to shake myself up a bit, and the book delivered on that level. One would think that I’d pause more with age, carefully consider each book I read, but I find that as my hours for free reading get squeezed by what can only be called adulthood, I read with greater haste and sloppiness, deceiving myself that I can keep up the volume of reading I used to take for granted.

So now I remind myself to slow down, pay attention to the details. Here are a couple snippets I enjoyed from Prose’s book, and will try to teach myself:

On paragraphs:
“The breaking up into paragraphs and the punctuation have to be done properly but only for the effect on the reader. A set of dead rules is no good. A new paragraph is a wonderful thing. It lets you quietly change the rhythm, and it can be like a flash of lightning that shows the same landscape from a different aspect.” –Isaac Babel

Prose comments that paragraphs can be understood “as a sort of literary respiration, with each paragraph as an extended–in some cases, very extended–breath. Inhale at the beginning of the paragraph, exhale at the end. Inhale again at the start of the next.”

On dialogue:
“When we humans speak, we are not merely communicating information but attempting to make an impression and achieve a goal. And sometimes we are hoping to prevent the listener from noticing what we are not saying, which is often not merely distracting but, we fear, as audible as what we are saying. As a result, dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.”

Like good actors, who don’t just act their part, but react to the actors and scene around them, Prose says, “a good writer understands that characters not only speak differently depending on whom they are speaking to, but also listen differently depending on who is speaking.”

For more, read the New York Times fine review of the book.

Milan Kundera — The Art of the Novel

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After just writing about Walter Kirn’s fumblings and rumblings on how the novel can handle the “new” nature of our lives in our global, tech-connected village, it was refreshing to read Milan Kundera’s essay “What Is a Novelist” in the October 9 New Yorker (no link to the article is available, unfortunately).

Kundera provides a stern and unflinching definition of a great novelist, much akin to his thoughts in his book The Art of the Novel, published in 1986. Instead of beginning with the challenge of how to represent the external world, as Kirn does, Kundera focuses solely on the personal characteristics a successful novelist must possess.

Quoting Hegel, Kundera posits that novelists are born as lyric poets, giving voice “to his inner world so as to stir in his audience the feelings, the states, of mind he experiences”–even if the subject is supposedly the objective world.

But Kundera, who admires the novel as a form because of its ability to represent polyphony (hint, hint Walter Kirn), details how a great writer much move beyond this lyrically self-abosorbed state. Flaubert is the great example when he dropped his “romantic flights” at the urgings of his friends and wrote Madame Bovary.

A critic mentions that Flaubert wrote Bovary “without pleasure,” but it was this workmanlike discipline that allowed him to go beyond himself and write with a perspectivist sensibility. Kundera describes the territory of the novel as “the prose of life,” which is perhaps misleading since it implies the mundane as opposed to the romantic. “The prose of life” in this case, though, means all that makes us human, flights of fancy and Madame Bovary’s daily drudgery (imagine what a novel it would be if she had email!)

Kundera presents moments like Flaubert’s as “conversion stories,” much in the religious sense. It’s an apt metaphor since it’s not easy to literally move out of your skin and see yourself as others might see you–not as a hero, but perhaps as an asshole or a boor or just an ordinary person (hence comedy and tragedy).

“The anti-lyric conversion is a fundamental experience in the curriculum vitae of the novelist: separated from himself, he suddenly sees that self from a distance, astonished to find that he is not the person he thought he was. After that experience, he will know that nobody is the person he thinks he is, that his misapprehension is universal, elementary, and taht it casts on people . . . the soft gleam of the comical.”

It’s an artistic position so distant than Kirn’s grappling with “the age of networked everything.” Kirn writes, “I’m thrown by this new world, both as a novelist and as a person. These two confusions are one confusion. They come down to the fact that I still think (and can’t help but read and write) in linear terms, but I find myself living in infinity loops. Too much happens each day, it happens all at once, and yet, in some ways, nothing happens at all. A day that’s spent processing electronic signals like a sort of lonely arctic radar station (my day, your day, a lot of ours) is hard to dramatize.”

The obvious advice for Kirn is to log off of his computer from time to time (there is still life beyond e-mail, Walter). But more important, Walter should reassess his stance as novelist. He might find that if he gets outside of the “lonely arctic radar station” of himself, he’ll discover all of the perspectives and techniques necessary to capture the “networked everything.”

More on Kundera: