Things to avoid in stories · 1:28am Dec 6th, 2013
From "LETTER FROM THE PULITZER FICTION JURY" by Michael Cunningham:
We loved each of the authors for their triumphs over the forces of banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, and all the other forces that defeat almost everyone reckless enough to write fiction at all.
That's a pretty good list of things to look out for in writing. He gave a specific example later on:
A third fell under the wheel (and this one was particularly heartbreaking to all of us) when we reluctantly acknowledged that although it was wonderfully written and fabulously inventive, its central love story, while moving, was insufficiently complicated and a bit sentimental; that it failed to depict the body of darker emotions that are integral to love: moments of rage, disappointment, pettiness, and greed, to name a few. All three of us wished love to be as simple as the author imagined it to be, but we acknowledged that love, as far as we could tell, is not only not simple, but that part of its glory is its ability to survive incidents of rage, disappointment, and etc.
So am I the only one that, after reading little answers like that, thinks it applies to their own work?
I am endlessly amused how one of the literary criteria for quality in fiction is things being true to life.
But then I only consume fiction for escapist purposes. True to life has never benefited my condition.
1576393 The example about a love story being too simple is an example of falseness being a problem.
Oh look, vague concepts to judge things with!
1576393
The more realistic a work of fiction is, often results in me getting bored out of my skull. There was a story, I can't remember it's title, or even much of what actually happened, that my english teacher praised as genius. Nothing happened. At all, it was a book about nothing. It was fiction only by virtue of being about fake people, in fact, it had arguably less conflict that a real person's life. The teacher praised the book for it's realism. Most of the class wondered what the bloody point was.
I don't need constant action for a work to be good, but I do want it to at least be entertaining.
1576424 Then it was defeated by its banality. It's not fair to pick one item from the list and then complain about stories that didn't have that, but had something else from the list.
Huh, I'll have to bookmark that. Thanks for the link, BH.
Um. I don't know, Bad Horse. Normally I'm quite sympathetic to attempts to form at least some semblance of a Grand Unified Theory of Good Storytelling, but the example you cited strikes me as, rather ironically, false and a bit thin. Heh. To be a bit less facile, it strikes me as that rather peculiar species of writing present in things like audiophile reviews. There's a lot of words there--banality, falseness, &c &c--but there's not a lot of feeling that they actually mean something concrete. Rather, there is a strong sense that they are verbal camouflage for a paucity of ideas and wooliness of thought.
But I could just be grumpy as I write this.
1576501
But love stories that involve moments of rage, disappointment, pettiness, and greed just sound warmer.
1576664
With a well-defined wordscape and a taut mid-range, yes.
I actually don't believe in the idea of "The One," the greatest book ever written.
That's not to say that it doesn't exist, it's just that we will be long dead before it happens. And (depending on your worldview,) I'd even go as far to say that no one will ever actually read The One, because the world will end shortly after it is written.
That's also why I think the idea of getting mad at EqD for not featuring a particular story is ridiculous.
Must we attempt to cram all of life into a single book? Doesn't attempting to become an omnidirectional broadcast to all humanity leave one's work an undirected mess? In trying to please everyone, doesn't one please nobody at all?
All I'm getting out of this is a vague allusion to the 'Reality is Unrealistic' attitude (no, I'm not linking to that site; look it up yourself).
1576401
Some cynics can't differentiate between falseness and simplicity, happiness, or a love different from what they believe or know.
The difference between a true story and a good story is that you criticize the good story for not ringing true and you criticize the true story for ringing false.
1576671
"All the highest notes, neither sharp nor flat--"
"The ear can't hear as high as that!"
"Still I ought to please any passing bat..."
1576393
I have to go with DPV on this one. Sometimes I don't want realistic. If I did, I'd put down the book and look out my window. Literature (substitute: games, writing, music) is my escape, where I can finally believe that maybe, just maybe, the world isn't a complete crapsack.
Quoted passage
sounds too much like this.
1576779
1957??
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
1576501>>1576693>>1576713>>1576838
I'm surprised how many of you seem to want to interpret this in the most negative way possible, eager to project onto Cunningham every snobby critic or EQD pre-reader you've encountered.
This is what you had to respond to: Banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, and tidiness can ruin a novel.
For example:
Banality: The story where nothing happens.
Contrivance: Twilight gets lost in the Everfree Forest and immediately happens to stumble upon a ruined old cottage containing a book with exactly the spell she was looking for.
Predictability: Rarity finally breaks down and confesses her love to Fluttershy. It turns out that Fluttershy also loves Rarity!
Thinness: Twilight's friends tell her to go back to Ponyville and they will go on without her. Twilight goes back to Ponyville for about ten seconds, then realizes they are wrong, and returns.
Falseness: Applejack tells Twilight to go on back to Ponyville while the rest of them search for the Tree of Harmony.
Randomness: Pinkie Pie is a pirate! And Fluttershy is a ninja! Then they have sex.
Are you really in favor of banality, predictability, falseness, randomness, etc.? I think you're attacking your own memories of somebody who said something similar when it wasn't justified.
1576973
No?
I just think that the reviewer was chosing between several pulitzer nominated stories and had to pull incredibly nitpicky and irrelevant yet technically justifiable shit outa his ass for the sake of getting the job done.
The story may have been greatly served by it's simplicity, and the falseness was merely an excuse to cut it rather than an actual problem for anyone reading for pleasure.
And you are using rather extreme fanfic examples instead of the minimal differntiation one in the original example.
Most stories are not pulitzer nominees. And would not benefit from trying to be such.
1576973
My issue with that list is how vague and subjective it is. To go back to my previous example, while most of the class, myself included would consider the book banal, our teacher clearly did NOT. And while I call BS that we were graded poorly due to a difference of opinion, it goes to show that what one person would find banal, someone else might enjoy. The same applies to all the other things on the list. That's why I object to telling potential authors to avoid everything on the list. Avoiding some of them is certainly a good idea, depending on what your story is, but people's tastes are to varied for such a guideline to be all encompassing.
1576973
As far as writing advice goes, these examples might just be a little bit useless. Certainly when judging or editing or w/e these can be categories for things that can be critiqued or improved upon, but they all boil down to "Don't be bad." And banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, have certainly all been used in 'great' stories before to good effect and stuff.
1577040 People disagree about what words apply to what story, but we still gotta use words. The list is vague, but its information content per word is pretty high. You can make good use of it if you try to get what you can out of it rather than to figure out how it's wrong.
1576685 I just get annoyed at people who get rejected by EqD who admit they don't write stories that EqD would like. You* knew they were grammar sticklers, you knew they don't like sex or sexuality, you knew they get touchy about certain other subjects. You write stories about sex and weird fetishes with bad grammar. It's not EqD-style stuff. Why are you surprised it was rejected?
* not you, Azusa, but I do have a few specific individuals in mind.
But I suppose I could apply the same sort of logic to the Pulitzer committee: there are very few objective standards one can apply to writing. Is it spelled correctly? Yes? Did you apply all the hyphens and apostrophes in the right places? Yes? Then it's as good as it can objectively be.**
Every other complaint you might have about a story is (fundamentally) subjective: there is no one true law of comma usage, no one true law of dialogue attribution, no one true law of sentence structure. While there's definately a lot of bad ways to write, and a lot fewer good ways to write, there are not many objectively and universally wrong ways to write.
The rest, once the spellcheck is satisfied, is about consensus, really. And that consensus changes.
Here's where I was misunderstood the last time I tried to make this point: it's a curve. The more narrowly you try to define "good," the more people you will alienate. Different concepts will have differential effects, too. Some ideas are broadly accepted, some are more focused. "A story needs to vary in its pacing" (aside from being vague) is pretty good advice overall, and I think I'd be hard pressed to find a person who knows what literary pacing is who would disagree. This is a broadly accepted standard, though most likely not universal. "A good story subverts common tropes" is not so broadly agreed upon. In a recent post, Titanium Dragon made a great defense of classic forms. The Pulitzer Committee disagrees with him. I would call this a 'narrow' standard.
This is all in addition to the problem with writing absolute standards. Saying that "good fiction doesn't use the passive voice very often" is probably not going to upset many people, but saying "good fiction doesn't use the passive voice ever" will piss off a lot of writers. But the first version leaves wide open the question of how much is too much.
And now I can come back to (EqD and) the Pulitzer Committee: the, by the nature of what they are trying to do, set high, and therefore narrow, standards. To win a Pulitzer, a story needs to be more than just technically adequate. It needs to lack: "banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, and all the other forces that defeat almost everyone reckless enough to write fiction at all." (I assume that the rest of the article, or some other article, gives more detail, but I really don't know.) That's what they want.
Can a story be good and still contain these elements? Yes, of course. Can a good story that does contain these elements win a Pulitzer Prize? Probably not.
Which is fine. The Pulitzer Committee has certain things that they look for: and their idea of what's good is just as valid as anyone else's. (Okay, their idea is probably more valid than most) But there is nothing wrong with a person saying "I don't think the Pulitzer Committee is looking for the same things I am in fiction." If a writer I know wins The Pulitzer, I'll send them my most heartfelt congratulations, but if they don't, that in no way indicates they are a bad writer, or that they wrote a bad story.
And here's the rub: the Frost Medal, the Hugo Award, the Newbery Medal et al will each have different, and equally valid, standards by which they judge books. And their ideas are also just as valid.
**I'm sure you can find crackpots who will disagree that spelling is a "hard rule" who are also brilliant writers.
As for OP's original question: Yeah, don't do all that stuff if you can avoid it.
Is it possible that he was writing about something other than love?
1576973
Well, I may be grumpy again, but it seems to me you are doing some projecting of your own, imposing much more concrete ideas on a phraseology that's altogether vague. I mean consider 'tidiness.' What's that supposed to mean? That a story should avoid being tidy? Well, yes, real life isn't, but real life doesn't really end--thought it might stop--and enjoys a great profusion of POVs. When writing a story that must, by necessity, eventually stagger to a conclusion of some sort you have to be tidy in some respect. Or contrivance? Well all stories are contrived. That's their fundamental nature, for heaven's sake. Someone made 'em up! If you wrote a love story with all the darkness the good critic seems to think is necessary and then had the qualms and dips into rage &c of the two principals synchronized so that they are commentaries one upon another, would you call that good writing? It's contrived that the brothers Karamazov each embody a very well-defined world-view quite unlike the one embodied by the other two, but is that bad writing?
What the list really means is that you ought to avoid bad banality, and bad contrivance, and bad tidiness &c. And, really, it ends up meaning "Don't have your story be bad." which is less than useful. Okay, yes, yes, a more charitable reading is wold be "Misusing these notes in a story often makes it bad--take care. It's dangerous to go alone, take this." but that's not really how the quote was phrased--hence my grumpiness. Well, that and I have a powerful headache.
1577660 The words need interpretation. But you're a writer. You can do that. Think of it as a checklist. While writing, take each word on the checklist, decide what it means, and check whether your story falls into that trap, by your own standards.
1577848
Fair enough, but I think I'm bringing altogether too much in the interpretation to be especially thankful to Mr. Cunningham. But, I concede the point. My comments were soaked in grumpiness, and my reading was uncharitable in the extreme.
1576973
That's not all we have to respond to. The list in itself I find unobjectionable. However, the second quote from your original post wheels from that into a bold statement that a story fell short simply because its outlook on love was insufficiently cynical, which is inflammatory at least and most likely problematic.
I'm not going to talk any further about that, though. Instead, I'm going to quote a different paragraph from the same article you linked, which I find equally intriguing, especially in light of the past few days' discussions:
I missed commenting on this yesterday, but I just want to say, looking at the absolutely horribly written opening line of "The Pale King", I can see why any jury which nominated that book would not be asked for additional suggestions for the Pulitzer Prize. I mean, seriously, that sentence is painful to read.
Do you think most readers even know what "blacktop graphs" and "canted rust" mean? Because I sure don't. And that's the least of its problems. Most people don't know what color tobacco-brown is, and then he goes on to list a bajillion plants for no reason, most of which most folk don't know what they are to begin with. The list is enormously long and just terrible to read.
The bit from "Train Dreams" is better, but is not the sort of prose I drool over; it is terrifically overwrought language. Even the Swampland bit feels like it drifts - why does that sentence exist as a single sentence?
As far as the darkness thing goes: There's nothing wrong with lacking darkness. I know that some people think that darkness makes for depth, but it doesn't. This is the sort of pretentious nonsense that lead to comic books sucking in the 1990s. There's nothing wrong with writing a simple story. Is it going to win the Pulitzer Prize? Well, not with people like that judging. Though maybe whatever book they dismissed for that reason is going to be the book that everyone in the future thinks the jury was drunk for not nominating.
I dunno. I do agree that darkness helps - really, that things being complicated helps - but at the same time, I look at things which have been hugely successful, which are well received and well-regarded, and I have to ask whether complexity is actually such a good thing.
In game design, complexity is a -cost-, not a benefit. We make games more complicated because it makes them better, but our goal is to make the game as simple as possible - this is because games are inherently quite complicated, and the simpler it is, the less cruft there is, the better the players are able to focus on the actual play, the actual fun. I suspect it is to some extent the same with a book - complexity is a cost, not a benefit. We use complexity because it helps us to build worlds, to excite our readers' imaginations, to add twists and turns to the stories we tell, to make characters more relatable, to add greater verisimilitude to our works - but at the same time, we all know that calling a rabbit a smeerp has a cost. When we go to a world completely different from our own, it taxes the reader, and in a non-visual medium like a novel, it taxes the reader all the more. A world full of fantastic creatures is a wonder to behold, but at the same time it can easily lead the reader astray, cause them to lose interest or feel less immersed as they struggle with the language we use. A book full of science might be wonderful to read, but it also might be too taxing for the audience to really comprehend. Jurassic Park, for instance, uses some science and a fair bit of fantasy to communicate what it wants to communicate - it does not delve overly into the specifics, it merely does what it needs to to make it seem plausible to the reader. It does not attempt to justify itself fully, just enough for us to suspend our disbelief and accept that this guy has really cloned a park full of dinosaurs.
My Little Pony is fairly simple in some ways, and fairly complicated in others. Characters have depth, but the world itself has only a very marginal amount of it - it is ultimately a story about the characters, not a story about a pony world. The pony world is what is around the characters, but we don't care about that world as much as we do Twilight Sparkle. On the other hand, in a work like a Song of Ice and Fire, it is the world itself which is built up around us as we read - we get a feeling for the world by viewing it through many sets of eyes, and seeing the horrors and wonders that it contains. We care about the characters, sure, but we also care about the world, and the world being built up is a big part of what makes it so interesting - we see many people navigating their way through it, and the story would not be the same without the complex world built around it.
But this can be trouble as well, as in The Wheel of Time, when the books themselves lose their way because the world has become too big. There is too much, and too little that actually matters. The story we're telling is the lead up to Tarmon Gaidon, and that great, final battle - there are many pieces that, viewed in that light, are probably unnecessary to that story. The books drag because they have lost their unity of purpose. Building the world up is vital, but only insofar as that it supports whatever it is we're trying to accomplish.
1576685
Oh, we all know that the greatest book will be a random fanfic that some nobody posts on some random website, it gets five views, and forever goes unrecognized.
More seriously, though, I don't think it is really a realistic expectation to begin with. Books are too long for there to be a "perfect" book - I don't think there will be ONE perfect book. Though I think eventually we may write a number which are incredibly high-tier.
1578722
I disagree with this statement. I think it is possible to identify the elements of magic. I think the hard part is not identification but in many cases replication.
1578982
> I think it is possible to identify the elements of magic.
I could argue that doing so is what removes it from the realm of magic and grounds it in the naturalistic, and then it's not magic any more … but more fascinating is to point out this:
It's not me, but one of the members of the Pulitzer Prize jury, who disagrees with you.
They're giving out one of the top literary awards and admitting that they cannot put into words what makes the winners good.
1579148
Just because someone is on the jury doesn't necessarily mean that they're competent. Indeed, the fact that not a single book got the Pulitzer Prize this year indicates that, no, they're actually not competent at that job.
So who is to say that they're right?
People love to pretend like it is something magical, but it isn't. It is a common affection for artists, and especially for literary critics. After all, if it isn't magic, you don't really need them very much, do you?
I dunno if you've ever read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, but the most interesting thing about the author of that book was, in my opinion, the fact that they embraced the idea that drawing is a skill, not a magical ability that some people have, and that anyone can draw if they're taught how to see - that is to say, see how you translate something you see with your eyes into a two-dimensional drawing on a piece of paper.
1578722 bold statement that a story fell short simply because its outlook on love was insufficiently cynical, which is inflammatory at least and most likely problematic.
1576713>>1577194
He said the love story was "central". A love story that appears in a story doesn't need to have difficulties and darkness. But a love story that is the story usually does. Every romance novel, from Jane Austen to Harlequin romance, has moments of rage, etc. If stories need conflict, then love stories need that love to be continually threatened. Usually this means the lovers have crises where they don't think they love, like, or even tolerate each other at all.
The exceptions are when the conflict is between love and some outside force. Romeo and Juliet (which we've already argued about some) and O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi" are examples of that.
1579197
Agreed. I wasn't trying to make an argument from authority, I was trying to point out that that's an awfully high platform from which to proclaim that you can't name your foundations.
1581212
I did not parse the adjective "central" that way, but I do see what you're saying, and that's a good point.
1581212
Not entirely. Love is a drive, not an emotion. It is a mix of many rmotions, fueled by hormones and instincts; and that is not even getting into the psychological motives behind why a specific individual falls in love. Love of course contains darker and fearful emotions. It's a given.
But the question here is, if something is, must it be dwelled on? I feel that writing about the love between 2 people does not necessarily need to have every roiling emotion and paranoid fear detailed, even if this love is central to a story. Does the story in question contain conflict and plot beyond tge central romance? is the story even primarily a romance? No idea. All I know is that I highly doubt that a Pulitzer considered story, cut 3rd, contains nothing other than an overly simple depiction of a romance. Or that that romance was not well written at all. Only that the one aspect, not being depicted with full realism and nuance (which may or may not have served the story) was the excuse for disqualifying it (with stated regret). Not the best example to use IMO. It's like saying that a fic is fundamentally flawed if it cannot get on EQD, which we know is not true.
1581212
Here's a common synopsis for the story in question (Train Dreams):
Going by this, I do not believe that the love story was anything more than setup for the real story.
Love stories have conflict. If an author subverts that trope too drastically, then it may lead a reader to fall out of immersion with the story. I can see that as being a reason to withhold the prize. It didn't seem to me that the committee thought it immersion-breaking while reading it, but I guess for whatever reason they believed that others would.