Intentional or Not? Why It's Important to Recognize What You Write · 12:26am Jun 6th, 2016
Kurt Vonnegut famously proposed that a sufficiently talented writer or storyteller could break any of his twelve rules of writing except the most important: the rule that an author may never waste the time of their reader. For the most part, I believe this is true. Much like how fans of golden-age mystery novels can probably point to one or two of their favorites that break key rules in Knox's Decalogue or how people who worship Stephen King's On Writing can probably think of authors who disobey his guidelines on creating "good prose" and still create quality products, there are very few rules of good writing that can't be broken by sufficiently talented authors with a strong vision.
So why is it that some authors can get away with breaking away from conventions of what creates "good" writing, and some cannot? There is no hard and fast rule for this, and in some cases authors succeed in spite of their flaws. For the rest though, what makes the difference between a story that breaks with convention and succeeds and a story that breaks and fails?
The answer, I believe, begins with intention. The fundamental skill that every writer must master before they type a single sentence of a single short story is writing with intention. You must know what effect you wish to convey to the reader. Then, you must understand how to create it. Only then can you begin to play with 'rules'. For some authors, writing with intention comes naturally, or emerges as they practice. Some authors have to learn it through study. The fundamental remains, however: the root of every almost every typical writing sin begins with failing to understand what it is you are writing, and creating something not wholly intended. The greater part of most writing sins are committed in ignorance, willful or otherwise.
The oft-maligned Twilight novels came under fire almost immediately after achieving widespread popularity, and now that the fires of hate burning against them have somewhat abated with time and apathy, I feel this is a good time to bring them back into the spotlight to serve as examples of where failing to understand what is being written destroyed the emotional core of a story. Twilight is an attempt to write a love story between a young woman and a centuries old deliciously attractive older man who has a deep desire for her. In the author's own words, Edward Cullen is intended to be "perfect". What do we find when reading these novels?
As everyone no doubt knows by now, Edward Cullen is somewhat less than a perfect individual. He emotionally manipulates and belittles Bella Swan at times. His personality is muted and seems void of interests and hobbies in his life that aren't Bella. He is unable to make a joke, unable to smile, and seems more like a cold, biological robot than a human. He stalks Bella without her knowledge or consent, and watches her sleep in order to relieve his boredom and sate his obsession despite knowing that at any moment his self-control could fail with catastrophic results. If at any point in this description you found yourself feeling repulsed by this poor shmuck, I do not blame you. He is fairly repulsive.
Twilight breaks apart because Edward Cullen is presented as a perfect romantic partner, then, and fails as such. Anything beyond a surface level reading shows a darker and less attractive person beneath.
And yet.
Note how none of the qualities I just ascribed to Edward Cullen are necessarily bad ones for a character. There is something compelling in the idea of a vampire who never cracks a smile - perhaps he's doing it to maintain an intimidating presence, or perhaps it is because if he lets his control slip even by a little bit he might hurt people - Superman's "World of Cardboard" speech from the Justice League animated series comes to mind. Perhaps he knows it's wrong to stalk Bella and watch her sleep, but his emotional control has been slipping because of his attraction to her and now his behavior is being somewhat controlled by his baser, more predatory instincts. Or perhaps centuries of living as a vampire have somewhat dulled his moral sense, and he no longer feels that watching humans sleep is an invasion of privacy since what they don't know can't hurt them. Perhaps his controlling behavior makes him dangerous, and Bella is constantly on edge around him, quietly looking for ways to escape him or even destroy him should it become necessary.
In short, the problem with Edward Cullen is that Bella's reactions to him are meant to sell him as an attractive catch. The audience's reaction to him is to see him as a flawed hero at best, and more likely as a creepy, dangerous threat. If Stephanie Meyers had gone that extra mile and simply capitalized on what the traits she assigned to the character said about him, perhaps recasting him as a villain, or forcing him to confront and overcome his failings over the course of her four books, Twilight would be more fondly remembered than it is now. Of course, it would also be a fundamentally different story. The genre, the tone, and the world and implications would all have to shift to accommodate the new authorial intent. But with an intent grasped and followed through, this story could have been saved.
Imagine individual character traits, world details, scenes, and plot threads as if they were ingredients being presented to a prospective chef, and they are asked to cook something simple with them- a pea soup. A new chef is likely to make rookie mistakes. Maybe they over or under-salt their dish, or add taragon instead of thyme, or don't understand what they're doing at all and just plain add ingredients that have no place in a pea soup. A good chef would take the ingredients set in front of them and prepare a simple, satisfying traditional pea soup. A brilliant chef might even be able to take the dish and through skillful use of other ingredients and understanding of the fundamentals of pea soup, serve it in a non-traditional manner and still get a tasty dish out of it - say, replacing onions with apples and salt with sugar to create a sweetened desert. The available ingredients at no point changed. What changed was how each of the people preparing the dish understood their available ingredients, and applied that knowledge. The ability to flout the rules of writing takes place in that passage from a chef who doesn't understand how to cook a pea soup to a chef who knows the dish so well they're able to effortlessly transform it into something new.
The heart of writing, of reading, and of talking about writing rests here: Understanding the core elements of a story, and how they are applied.
At some point in the future, I want to talk about a very common misunderstanding of intent in the brony community, and how it has more or less destroyed an entire sub-genre of stories. For now, I will leave all and sundry with this: the first step towards good writing is not just establishing good habits or learning what makes effective prose. It is understanding what you are writing about. Only then can you best apply what tools you need to accomplish that goal.
After all, it's difficult to cook a pea soup if you start off by boiling a salad.
I am very interested in the continuation to this post
4003321
Seconded.
If I had to guess what destroyed genre it's going to be about, my first thought would be the desert of HiE (which does admittedly have its oases), or perhaps the radioactive crater-within-the-desert that is LOHAV/Displaced. But there are other genres this could apply to, certainly.
Fascinating and thought-provoking. I await your further thoughts on this topic with bated breath.
You understand writing.
Therefore, you are worth following.
4007423
"A human goes to Equestria" is a premise, not a plot. I think that's the central problem with HIE in general.
I agree with the intent of this post, but--
The sad reality is that this is almost certainly false. Twilight was a huge success, and is more fondly remembered than any book written in recent memory other than the Harry Potter books. That's just fact. Explaining that fact is difficult, but a theory of literature has to explain that fact.
4010034
More fondly remembered by people who understand and appreciate good writing, I think. Da Vinci Code was hugely popular, and is probably fondly remembered by a lot of people, but if you know books and writing, you're never going to say it's better than Foucault's Pendulum.
4010034
It's not that difficult a fact to explain. Twilight works on a surface level but fails when you start to examine how terrible of a person Edward Cullen can be. If you read it quickly and breezily without spending a lot of time thinking about implications, you can miss most of its really egregious flaws entirely. And Twilight is a breezy, quick read.
...Though personally, I'd argue at this point that "in recent memory" it's arguably been supplanted and replaced by The Hunger Games.
4010376
I've never read Foucault's Pendulum, so I couldn't say. But yes, that was the gist of it. Twilight was never a critic's darling, and while there is a large audience that loved it there was an also an extremely large and vocal audience who hated it.
4010511
You should read it! It's a very good deconstruction and send-up of occult conspiracies, while also being a really good occult conspiracy novel. And it's hugely erudite (par the course for Umberto Eco), yet quite accessible.
4010376
The problem is that "if you know books and writing" always seems to mean "if you share my opinions". The people who liked Twilight and Da Vinci Code would, by and large, say they were better than Foucault's Pendulum. I don't think we can explain this simply as them being stupid and reading too fast. People who "know books and writing" inevitably are attracted to puzzle-novels, collections of literary allusions, fetishistic explorations of minor stylistic issues and literary theory, and other books that are objectively quite bad as stories (Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, As I Lay Dying), in the way that wine snobs are attracted to bitter reds that most people would spit out. They've grown jaded and are looking for something, anything, new to excite them, and this often leads to meta-fiction, which is often bad fiction.
Furthermore, "naive" genre readers read far more fiction than the most cultured of Manhattan editors. Some people have read a romance or SF novel every 3 days for the past 40 years. They know that fiction very well. They are looking for something useful to them, just as a professor taking notes on "Finnegan's Wake" is looking for something useful to her. I don't see how one can call Finnegan's Wake more valid than a Harlequin romance. If I had to choose, I'd say the romance novel is an objectively better story.
4010826
Hey, I resent the implication that I've ever even looked at Finnegan's Wake! Or that literary snobbery is the only reason to become attracted to meta-fiction. While it's an acquired taste, virtually every genre has a barrier to entry.
I think the success of The Da Vinci Code is also slightly different than the success of Twilight. For one thing, I wouldn't say it has a good 'plot'. It's been a few years now, but the plot of The Da Vinci Code is largely, as I recall, a globe trotting adventure where a massive conspiracy threatens our heroes in ways both vague and non-specific, and where the most memorable portions are an old Englishman imparting strange, arcane knowledge about the world. The Da Vinci Code thrived mostly on controversy, being a remarkably easy book to devour quickly for its size, and the fact that most of the people who are reading it know absolutely nothing about what Dan Brown is even talking about. I admit the effect was somewhat spoiled for me because I first read it trying to understand what the hullabaloo was about, and my first thought was "does nobody in this world understand the Hypostatic Union? Nobody cares if Jesus had kids".
Twilight's plot is at least serviceable, though outside my tastes for the same reason you catch me making more recommendations for something like Joker's Game than whatever this season's "cute show about nothing much with an EDGE" is when I talk to friends about anime. Supernatural romance is an excellent and noble genre to pursue, tragically marred in Twilight's case because the romance is stilted as hell. Its only saving grace, and this cannot be ignored when evaluating Twilight, is how perfectly saccharine it is. While Edward watches Bella sleep, if you make excuses for him- and the fans of the novel will, treating him as a living person rather than a construct created by Stephanie Meyers - then he's very "respectful". He is handsome, uninterested in anything except what Bella/the reader is interested in (aside, of course, from deliciously handsome and gorgeous activities such as 'playing the piano'), and his family is delightfully eccentric and accepting. And more interesting. He is, in short, a fantastic character that the reader can hold up as a standard for future relationships, or get a vicarious thrill from.
I draw the line at any form of criticism suggesting that getting this vicarious thrill is damning. I find Twilight frustrating primarily because I think it could be much better at giving a vicarious thrill than it already is. In my food analogy, Twilight is perhaps best described as a fast-food burger. Cheap, economical, and popular, and with a firm place in gastronomy that anything I say or do is unlikely to upset. But it's also not what I'd hold up as a culinary standard, nor do I think people should feel like they need to 'settle' for Twilight tasting the way it does.
Very, very much agreed though that stupidity or ignorance aren't the only explanations. Personally, though, I say it owes at least some of its success to being deemed a "safe" book in households where kid's literature is heavily screened.
4011112 I have other theories about Twilight. For example:
- It's efficient wish-fulfillment. It doesn't waste time developing the viewpoint character, crafting beautiful sentences, describing the landscape, zeroing in on a precise, somewhat rare and rarified emotion the author wishes to communicate, symbolism, developing a theme, or other things that some readers just don't care about. It is quite competent at moving a narrative along.
- Re:
That might be what a lot of people really want, deep-down, in a romantic partner. I mean, a lot of people found 50 Shades romantic. I've heard from several sources that convicted serial killers always get fan mail from women.
4011411
I have explicit fantasies involving lack of consent and masochistic tendencies. I still don't want to date a guy who stalks me. There's a difference between "fantasy" and "what women are looking for in a romantic partner" or "really want, deep down". And even describing Fifty Shades as "romantic" is annoying because Fifty Shades is honestly just a weak kink piece that got good word of mouth. You can find comparable fiction, albeit some less polished, for free on the internet or in the pages of compilations or cheap novels slung in the bins in grocery stores or airports. Fifty Shades profited from being a cleaned-up piece that already had a wide audience, but I think there's a mistake in assuming it was somehow unique in its appeal. People like kink. A socially acceptable (and popular) kink piece was bound to be successful. There is a difference between that and being a good kink piece, and plenty of people resent Fifty Shades for misrepresenting what it is to actually live the kind of relationship it describes.
And while you're probably right about the efficiency of Twilight, I also think that efficiency is in no way intrinsic to how painfully messed up that story is. Focusing primarily on the first book, I think what struck me about it was how easy the story was to read - one of the fastest I've ever had - and how it was just sort of satisfying but not really. Building "Theme" and "Character" are lofty abstractions. The easiest way to fix Twilight would be to smooth out the creep factor, or at least address it. And while creep factor can be a fantasy, it's dangerous to present it in a context where that fantasy might be perceived as stable, normal behavior.
Like... there's a big difference between fantasizing about having a dominant partner and coming home to find out that someone you've only just started dating (if that) has been standing outside your room. Watching you. All night.
4010826
4011112
One thing to keep in mind with regards to Twilight is that while critics didn't make a dent in the popularity at the time, I think there's a good chance they destroyed any chance it might have had at longevity. While I already hear parents my age talking about sharing Harry Potter with their kids, and I suspect The Hunger Games will be joining The Giver and Ender's Game on middle school summer reading lists for a long time, I don't see Twilight being "passed down" in the same way. There are enough novels in the same genre, of varying quality, that I doubt it will be able to overcome its reputation as time goes on.
(And this "passing down" is no small thing. Nobody ever mentioned Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, or later Gone With the Wind in school or among my peers, but I think they've been recommended mother-to-daughter for generations to the point where they're parts of their respective genre canons.)
50 Shades will probably have some staying power as "a book you can take out of the library with sex in it," though I'm not sure how the internet is affecting that particular niche.
4012585
Charity Bookstore Begs People To Stop Donating Copies Of Fifty Shades of Grey
I'm not sure if that speaks to its popularity or to its staying power.
I do like the book fort, however.
Disclaimer: Did not read it, but interested in it as a cultural phenomenon.
Furthermore and in conclusion:
img05.deviantart.net/9287/i/2010/041/d/e/down_for_the_count_by_poopbear.jpg
4351303 You're trying to kill me with laughter, aren't you?
4011112
If The Battle of Britain's history had been as bad as The Da Vinci Code's theology, we would have seen Winston Churchill swim the English Channel to personally beat Hermann Goering over the head with a Spitfire.
But the thing is, I'd pay to see that movie.
4351305
What? No, no, not at all.
Now I am:
4011448
- does internet reading counts as stalking? Because ..um, I'm stalking you right now, sort of?
Also, 'thought of the moment': it seems whole song "Now I'm A Woman" started to sound quite differently for me, knowing your story so far... I mean, Last Unicorn was female ...unicorn. And turned into female ..human. Big thing anyway, for sure. Not so sure if it was thought back in time (at book time and animation film time) whole process can be seen as metaphor for real-world process, or was it even considered how additional gender change may affect Unicorn. Probably with enough digging I'll find some paper about this, too ...