Writing: War and peace, truth and fiction · 2:50am Dec 7th, 2012
WARNING: RISK OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AHEAD
I've reached watcher equilibrium: I now lose watchers from my blog posts as rapidly as I gain them from my stories. Place your bets now on how many this wall-o-text will drive away.
I'm trying to figure out how truthful fiction should be. I'm half-way through War and Peace on audio. In every poll of famous Western writers, War and Peace comes in first place as the best novel of all time. But it's not like other novels! It's much more realistic. All of the characters are such a mix of virtues and failings that it's hard to admire or dislike any of them. There are no protagonists and no antagonists (other than Napoleon, who is both a genius and a fool). There's no plot—there's an over-arching story about the war with Napoleon, but it isn't a plot, because Tolstoy doesn't try to make you care about the war. Instead, every character uses the war to pursue their own petty concerns. At no point do you wonder (or care) what's going to happen next to any of them. Partly this is because they're slave-holding nobility, each obsessing over their own first-world problems while living lives of luxury supported by the endless forced labor of dozens or hundreds of serfs. Mostly it's because their problems are usually trivial ones they stupidly created for themselves.
Stupidity is the prime mover for both good and evil. In every battle scene, men are wounded or killed because someone made a stupid decision, or led men on a useless and dangerous mission in order to win glory. No one gets upset because they also endorse stupid values that excuse it—or when they do get upset, it's because they're overcome by some competing but equally-stupid meme. Morals are spread by hypocrites and fools, and now and then take root in someone who is foolish enough to listen to them, yet smart enough to do real good. If the book has a theme, it appears to be the futility of reason and the beauty of stupidity.
But I'm not convinced the book has themes. It shows what people are like, and why they do what they do. Possibly as a result, it is boring. It's fascinating when you step back and look at the big picture. But, paragraph by paragraph, it's boring. It took me three tries to get through the first two chapters.
Is this a good book? Writers say it is, but they never try to write anything like it themselves.
Do I want to write or read stories that are that truthful? I don't know.
Chapter 7 of Bickham's The 38 most common fiction writing mistakes, "Don't Use Real People in Your Story", has this to say. (I've reworded it to make it shorter, so don't quote this.)
One of my new writing students, a gent we shall call Wally, came by my office with the first pages of a new story. I read the pages and then handed them back.
"Wally, these characters are dull. They are flat and insipid. They are pasteboard. They have no life, no color, no vivacity."
Wally looked shocked. “How can these characters be dull? They’re real people – every one of them! I took them right out of real life!”
“Oh”, I said. “So that’s the problem.”
“What?” he said.
“You can never use real people in your story. ”
“Why?”
“For one reason, real people might sue you. But far more to the point, real people – taken straight over and put on the page of a story – are dull. ”
Good fiction characters are never, ever real people. Your character may begin with a real person, but to make him vivid enough for your readers to believe in him, you have to exaggerate tremendously; you have to provide shortcut identifying characteristics that stick out all over him, you have to make him practically a monster – for readers to see even his dimmest outlines.
If your real person is loyal, you will make your character tremendously, almost unbelievably loyal. If he tends to be a bit impatient in real life, your character will fidget, gnash his teeth, drum his fingers, interrupt others, twitch, and practically blow sky high with his outlandishly exaggerated impatience.
Good fiction characters also tend to be more understandable than real-life people. While they’re more mercurial and colorful, they’re also more goal-motivated. In real life, people often act on impulses that grow out of things in their personalities that even they don’t understand. In real life people often don’t make sense. But in fiction, they do.
It's just one of several ways that fiction surpasses and improves upon life. And that's a good thing, isn't it? After all, if fiction were really just like life, why would we have to have it at all? What need would it meet? Who would care about it?
Maybe Tolstoy is doing this precise thing, so masterfully that it fooled me into finding his characters realistic. But I don't think so. True, Tolstoy's characters are more goal-oriented than real people. None of them stay in the same place and the same routine out of inertia, as most real people do. But I think that Bickham would have some harsh words for Tolstoy. War and Peace may have colorful characters—though many are not—but it is boring because it doesn't pretend that life is made out of heroes and villains, or that even the grandest episodes in history make any sense. It has little emotional impact and no suspense, just like most of life. I think Tolstoy wanted to show the kind of grandness or flavor real life has, not of big things but of little ones, small prides and sacrifices and kindnesses and spites. That's deep. But it's hard to read. It isn't flashy and exaggerated, the way Bickham thinks stories should be. "Who would care about it?" strikes at what's wrong with War and Peace.
Maybe War and Peace is like a plate of broccoli, good for you but not as appealing as a jar of cookies that will make you fat and stupid. Maybe Tolstoy is right, and that's just how broccoli must be.
Maybe fiction can never be more than dessert. Does it make any sense to force yourself to read a giant novel because you think it's good for you, instead of reading a textbook on psychology? I think so. We only really understand and believe things when they come to us in the form of a story.
Or maybe Bickham and Tolstoy are both wrong. Maybe a great chef can make broccoli taste good. Maybe War and Peace is a crippled could-have-been masterpiece, hyper-realistic and loaded with psychological insight, but bloated with boring dinner parties, and full of missed opportunities where Tolstoy described loves and battles but never made it clear why we should care about them. Is there a way to make a book that's both realistic and exciting? You know I think that Fallout: Equestria accomplished this pretty well. But it isn't as realistic as War and Peace. So I still haven't got my answer.
There's lots written on "novelistic realism", but it's way more boring and pretentious than this, and seems to be about the trappings of realism (dirty dishes and characters who fart) instead of realism about how people and the world work.
Can you name any stories that are as realistic, and aren't boring? Maybe stories by Chinua Achebe, Yasunari Kawabata, and Jhumpa Lahiri. I don't know. I'm going to go with Don Quixote for now. The first real novel, and still possibly the best.
Maybe War and Peace is the exception that proves the rule?
The point is that it is boring and the characters dull.
But then I haven't read War and Peace and have never really had a desire to, and it's late, and I haven't had coffee today... and maybe I'm just an idiot who only pretends to understand complex concepts.
It really depends on how you quantify 'good.' It's the sort of book most people probably read because 'it's a classic,' rather than because they actually enjoy it. After you're done, you can put it on your self and smugly declare that you've read War and Peace, and your friends will all gasp and marvel at how intelligent and cultured you are. A smarter but less ambitious man would just buy the book and put it on his shelf, since everyone assumes that if you own a book you must have read it, and save himself the hassle of actually slogging through the morass of Tolstoy.
You've also got to remember that Tolstoy wasn't writing to be a classic; he was writing for his contemporaries, and to a certain extent, all Russian literature from that period was like that. It was concerned with the social politics of mid to late nineteenth century Russia, written in style that was long winded and required exceptional mental stamina to digest, and as such are going to be fairly opaque to a lot of people of the more modern era.
Yes. But before you ask me how, the questions that have to be answered are "Realistic to whom?" and "Exciting to whom?" You? Scholars? The general public? The general public today, or twenty year ago or twenty years from now?
I'm afraid those are all different novels, because "realistic" and "exciting" are relative, and a person isn't likely to agree with himself-from-ten-years-ago on the definitions, let alone anyone else.
I've read Gone with the Wind, that's about as much classic literature (if it is considered as such, I don't really know) as I ever plan to force myself through.
582068 But if that were all there were to it, then there would be books today that are as realistic, and as truthful about people, but not as boring. Can you name any?
582088 So give examples that are realistic and exciting to you.
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There probablly are, but I've never read them. Even if they are more exciting by virtue of their contemporary relatablity, they're still a lot less interesting than my usual fare. For example, I'm a big fan of the Temeraire series, which is what you get when a fanfiction author decides to go pro with the idea: "You know what the Napoleonic wars needed more of? Air forces made of friggen dragons!"
Also, while War and Peace might have been popular with the intelegista crowd of the time (and a quick Wikipedia check seems to imply this) there were probably a lot of people who found contemporary nineteenth century Russia lit to be boring in the extreme. "Why am I reading about all these boring, stupid russian people? I should be reading about white dudes taiming the western territories and shooting Indians and strangling bears with their bear hands!"
You might also have to look at who was reading, writing, and in control of what made it out to the public.
Today anybody can get published. Even a few years ago you had to convince a publisher to print you work. Who bought books back when W&P was published? Probably snobby intellectuals. Definitely not the Russian peasantry.
Huh. I would expect you to gain followers from posts like this one.
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I never said I've read any. Realistic isn't a trait I usually value in literature, so I don't seek it out. But, in thinking about your questions, I thought of a hypothetical novel, written by a hypothetical Victorian gentleman, which did nothing but realistically describe the daily minutia of several people. No plot, realistic dialogue. I'd be interested in that, I'm ridiculously interested in daily minutia of lives that are different from my own. I would be excited to find out how their dinner was cooked, and what they ate. How late they stayed up. If they happened to get into a political discussion and what the daily, poorly argued views of ordinary people were.
I seriously doubt an actual person living at that time would be interested in that, though. So it was never written. Such a realistic novel would be exciting to me, but boring to them.
582275 Thanks! But since only people already following me know about my blog posts, that can't happen.
582280 Interesting. Many historians have complained that nobody recorded the really important things, because they were the things that everybody knew.
582150 When I say "realistic", I'm not necessarily excluding dragons or violations of the laws of physics. I find the Clancyverse, where battle plans and complicated equipment both work reliably, and warriors are all physically-fit, brave men who love their families, less realistic than a lot of fantasy. (He's a gripping writer, though. Clancy is one of the writers who made me start wondering whether there's always a trade-off between realism and excitement.)
The Catcher in the Rye? Except I hate that book.
Frankly, while I think a certain degree of realism is required in any good story, I just am not drawn to heavily realistic stories for the most part.
(And if I am COMPLETELY honest, I personally liked The Hobbit better. 
)
As far as I am concerned, The Lord of the Rings is the best story ever told. Realistic? Yeah, not so much.
OH WAIT! I did really enjoy the Grapes of Wrath. Though now that I think of it, wasn't that a play?
Welp, I guess I'll be finding some time to read it.
I know it is borderline heresy, but I simply don't like Tolstoy. I see what he's trying to do, sure enough, but I don't like it. I contend that you can't really read his work as it should have been read because you lack context. You aren't a Russian aristocrat overcome with Oblomov-esque ennui and so, in a way, Tolstoy's characters are as alien to you as, say, elves or aliens or what-have-you.
But if you want to talk about great Russian literature that's more palatable, I don't think you can go far wrong with Dostoyevsky. Brothers Karamazov is my personal choice for Best Novel Ever Written[1], and it is certainly populated by a fascinating cast of characters that's heavy on the realism. An example that's even more in tune with what you asked for is Записки из Мёртвого дома, commonly translated as "The House of the Dead". It's even more brutally realistic than the Brothers Karamazov and has much less plot and much less philosophical discourse than the more famous work. To my mind, Dostoyevsky is cookies[2] that are good for you.
[1] Also, possibly best case of unreliable narrator ever. The moment you realize that a) the narrator is an actual person in Skotoprigon'evsk b) He keeps making small asides about himself but c) No other character ever mentions him in any way form or capacity is almost horror-story worthy. It's like being led gently by the hand through darkness and then realizing that the hand you were grasping for comfort is, in fact, severed. And you have been talking to your guide all the while, too. So who was answering back?
[2] A bit tough and chewy perhaps, but tasty nonetheless.
yes, yes, YES!
I agree with everything you said, with the addition that when I finished War and Peace, I was severely tempted to throw it at a wall!
I simply HATE that book with a burning passion, and seeing somebody else point out its flaws makes me happy
>Place your bets now on how many this wall-o-text will drive away
The only reason I have for unwatching Le Users is them blocking me
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That's where you're wrong! I just got linked to this from Thweet Geniuth and found it sufficiently insightful.
As an aside, I think a more contemporary example of this problem might be the The Wheel of Time series which starts out as a story and end up as a mess of nearly a thousand characters interacting.
When I was the nerd I was in late middle school or early highschool, I got about 100 pages in before I gave up. When asked why, I replied "because he spends 50 pages talking about a bloody dinner party!