Nikolai Gogol and me on realism and truth vs. style · 11:42pm March 4th
From the author's preface to part 1 (the only part of 3 parts that was ever published) of Dead Souls (English translation by C. J. Hogarth):
How excellent it would be if some reader who is sufficiently rich in experience and the knowledge of life to be acquainted with the sort of characters which I have described herein would... peruse a few pages of the work, and then to recall his own life, and the lives of folk with whom he has come in contact, and everything which he has seen with his own eyes or has heard of from others, and to proceed to annotate, in so far as may tally with his own experience or otherwise, what is set forth in the book... Of style or beauty of expression he would need to take no account, for the value of a book lies in its truth and its actuality rather than in its wording.
Unlike Gogol, I think there is also value in style; but my recollection is that most such comments by famous writers insist that only one or the other is important, either style or content. We are currently living in an age of style over content. We must alternate between these two types of writers to see the value of both.
I'm currently shortening passages for my live fanfic readings in Cleveland this weekend. (I will tell the audience that I've shortened them.) I've noticed that I can trim a fair bit without changing the style or content from authors who emphasize content over style; but the more an author emphasizes style, the less I can cut without harming style or content. It was trivial to cut away half of the Gogol quote above, and I was able to cut a passage from Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality by over 20% without doing much harm. But I could cut little or nothing from passages from Biblical Monsters by Horse Voice, Bouts of Forgetful Artistic Destruction by HoofBitingActionOverload, Hang by AShadowOfCygnus, or RUN by Stereo_Sub.
Episodic stories are an exception. Cauterize by Lady Altair is a Harry Potter fanfic with separate small sections for each of many characters. Each one is carefully written, but you can cut quite a few of them without damaging what remains. You are cutting away good stuff, but what remains is still as good as new, because the different "episodes" have no interconnections.
Stories with a digressive style are another type of exception, in which cutting does damage, but you can cut some parts at less expense than others if you're pressed for time or space. Twilight is Annoyed by Protopony350 has a deliberately "bad" style--extremely simple, formulaic, and repetitive; full of weak modifiers which should usually be cut, but which here show the narrator's uncertainty and indecision; and with subtle time gaps where the narrator neglects to tell you something. This is a brilliant way to convey the run-down, broken, unstuck-in-time mind of Twilight in this story. Some of the disjointed bits can be cut (for a time-limited reading! not from the original story!) because their main purpose for being there is just to be disjointed bits. Though even they can't be trimmed much; that randomness needs to be there. Save the Records by Bandy is styled very carefully, but many sections have elaborations, digging deeper into the matter at hand, which can (I think) be trimmed for a reading. The text has a kind of fractal structure, like a jazz song with riffs, and ornamentations on those riffs, so I can cut some sentences which have less weight than other equally-long sentences, though at the cost of sanding down some of that organic fractal structure.
Perhaps my impression that I can cut from content-oriented authors is just my prejudice to balance content and style. I look at a passage from a realist Russian author and think, "We don't really need so much detail about exactly what the flies on the table were doing," but maybe Gogol would say, "How can anyone know which details are or aren't important? To be honest, you must record everything that you can!" Certainly Proust would. I could have cut more from Yudkowsky passages if I'd streamlined the wordy wording of Prof. Quirrell or Lucius Malfoy--but that would have changed their characters.
But I think it's not entirely prejudice. I suspect that authors who focus only on content aren't used to thinking about all the different ways of saying the same thing.
PS - A warning to my Patreon contributors: I've been forgetting to charge you every 10,000 words. I'm going to start doing that again, probably next week. Thank you!
RUN is a gem of the fandom, I'm glad to see it's getting a spot in the limelight! Also, inquiring minds need to know: is your panel going to be taped/livestreamed/recorded?
An interesting observation, sir. Abridging quotes in scholarship, though often necessary, is tricky enough let alone trying to do it with more artistic writing. It’s so easy to loose contextual meanings and tone that way. Must be a tall order!
I’d say that most famous writers probably have rather distinctive styles of prose, but perhaps the intentionality of it differs? Perhaps what the “detail oriented” writers are in fact saying is that they knowingly concentrate on detail whereas their form is more just a reflection of their own thought patterns rather than an intentional artistic choice. Whereas for some writers the style is more of an artistic choice.
I’m not sure how I’d classify my own work to be honest. Much of my historical fiction is a mixture of heavy archaic usage of words and copious amounts of historical detail. I’ve written stories based on songs as a style choice too. On the other hand my EQG stories are more just written to be cute.
When it comes to details, I feel like ever one a writer includes ought to be significant somehow. Even if the significance is just setting the mood. Too much detail makes it difficult to see what is significant…and also sometimes details are just extraneous. Steve Martin’s “An Object of Beauty”, for example, had an annoying tendency to describe what every woman was wearing for… no particular reason (that isn’t creepy/bad writing). It’s hardly Proust, and I’m somewhat sympathetic because I like describing my characters outfits in loving detail too, but do we really need to know what someone is wearing to go jogging? In an incidental scene? So when it comes to detail I think authors ought to ask first: is this detail necessary for the story? And then perhaps how do you make it clear that this detail is important (depending on the type of the story it could be that every detail is important or one particular one buried amidst several inconsequential ones).
Just my two cents.
I really think, sometimes style IS part of the content.
In some writing, style makes the content work better, AND communicates part of the content, but in subtler ways.
As a rather basic example, style can let people know whether something is intended to be viewed as a joke, or with deep seriousness. In a humorous story, sometimes the style IS some of the humor.
Or, as the author's note to "True Love Is Forever" says...
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I hadn't even thought about that. Searching youtube now, I find that in past years, the con (Cleveland Concoction) only posted videos of "performances" (music, plays, contests). So I doubt it.
BTW, "Save the Records" is undoubtedly going to be the most-challenging story to read. I'm already practicing it. I need bigger lungs.
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I wasn't thinking of "content-oriented" as "detail-oriented", but more as focusing on the propositional content of the text, however abstract that may be. I think attention to detail tends to lead people away from content, as in the Steve Martin case. If Martin describes clothes needlessly, I'd think of that as more stylistic than content-oriented. What I call "content"-oriented writers are more likely to have something they're trying to say, whereas pure stylists might just be writing pretty words.
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I realize while trying to answer comments that I didn't really know what I was writing.
I think I think of "content" as propositional content--something you could represent in logical form and do inference with. The stuff that a natural-language-understanding AI wants to extract from a text in order to understand it and answer questions about it. When the style is, as you say, "part of the context", I think the kind of content it's part of would be difficult to express in propositions. We might be talking about the style that sets the mood, or nudges the reader to have certain attitudes. I think of that as a function of style. Harry Potter & the methods of rationality is a good case for exploring this: the purpose of the story is very very explicitly to communicate a lot of propositional content. And yet it has good style, especially in the individualized styles the different characters use for their own speech which somehow contributes to communicating that propositional content. A person's way of speaking tells you something about her way of thinking, which helps understand what her words probably mean.
"it has good style"
I think this is debatable. Yet, to fully debate it, I would have to read at least a significant amount of that story again...which might be too high a price to pay.
Edited within first five minutes after posting to say: I think HPMOR's style is...good in some ways, bad in some other ways? But after that much reading of it, I find I'm kind of sick of it.
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Godspeed! I'm tickled to know you're including it in your panel. If you wind up recording the panel on your phone or something, please let me know. I would love to get my hands on a copy
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I'm sorry; I won't be able to recite the whole thing. It takes at least 10 minutes, and I only have 35 minutes total for readings, and pony gets less than half of that.
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I suppose it’s telling of my thought processes that I conflate “detail” and “content”. Though that’s probably because I’m generally not trying to advance some kind of message with my plots, as in something like Science Fiction. Thus my content is more about historical details or just fun scene setting for the vibes.
Be it style or content, Martin’s writing of women is... not good. My professor, and it’s worth mentioning here she was a woman, seemed sort of shocked that the book didn’t go over quite so well as she thought it would with the other ladies or myself in that regard. Honestly some of his stuff in that book belonged on r/menwritingwomen, though at least he had more grasp of the relevant anatomy. In fairness, the main character in that novel, Lacey, isn’t supposed to be a good person. She’s supposed to be an entertaining train wreck, especially in her relationships with men, and Martin delivers on that. I think that book made me finally understand why some people really enjoy villainous protagonists. Martin is decidedly at his best taking the piss of art collectors, and the art world, which you’d probably expect. So I think I’ll agree with you that it’s an issue of style, because if Martin was slightly better at writing relationships then that half of the novel would be far better.
I hope the reading went well! Museum work keeps me plenty busy these days but if you’re ever in town again and want a tour...
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Wait wait wait... do you work in the Cleveland Museum of Art??? I LOVE that museum!
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Ha! I wish... that is a great museum though. I’ve paid the muses there and the armor court quite a few visits.
No, I work at a place called Dunham Tavern, which is the oldest building in Cleveland. We’re turning 200 this year, and COVID shut things down for a while, so there’s a lot for me to do! It’s a great job though, I’ve already done two exhibits and I have my own office. I’m also the manager of an awesome group of volunteer docents. Amusingly, it’s on the same bus line though.
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I wish I'd known that a few weeks ago! I see it's only open Wed. & Sun. I'll see if I can schedule one of my Cleveland trips for a Wednesday.