There are lanterns glowing in the dark now, the early dark. Oranges and purples, lighting the bellies of deflated creatures, monsters brought low by the winds of nature, of time. The desiccated balloon carcasses lie in the yards of every home I pass, just defeated beasts, shapeshifters glowing orange and purple in the skins of minced, ruined things. Walking the dog around Halloween is fun. She’s not emaciated. She eats well.
Reading through Gardner’s instruction this week, I couldn’t help but sit and think about plotting, despite that not being the name of the chapter at all! It’s a hard thing to handle, a plot. There’s a book by James Scott Bell, the whole subject of which is plot and structure. That’s the name in fact. It’s a subject Gardner gives a whole chapter, the last chapter. It’s a thing that requires constant attention, and essentially differentiates a story from what is not a story. Bell says, echoing Gardner, “If a reader picks up a book and remains in his own world, there was no point in picking up the book in the first place…Story is how he gets there…not through arguments or facts, but through the illusion that life is taking place on the page.” He actually references the “fictive dream” in the next paragraph.
It’s not something I plan to discuss at the moment; I think I’d like to think about it more. But it stands to reason that the best way – in fact the only way – to create a fictive dream is through story, through plot. If you have no plot, then you have no story. You can have a scene, or a series of scenes, that may be interconnected, that may follow a temporal arc, but at the end of the day have no cognitive resonance. And they don’t make a story. Plot is important, is the gist of it. Hnh.
So in not discussing plot, it seems wise to waste no more table space and move on to what Gardner discusses in his chapter on technique. There are two specific areas I’d like to mention, in not discussing plot. But they are areas that in themselves absolutely inform a story, a dream, as much as any forward motion. Style and point-of-view are those things. (I’m not even gonna touch on sentence construction. Gardner has fun with it, building a Faulknerian machine that spans a page, patching it together with driftwood and butterfly-like distraction, then dropping into a staccato tone that reminds one of the other end of the spectrum. The slow stomp of short sentences. The deference to pacing. The attention to awareness. Momentary but affirmed. In rhythm alone.
I’m flitting around too, but there really is a lot to talk about in these chapters. For instance, his discussion of style is an interesting thing, utterly brief. Of course it is. Style is an amalgamation. Style is not a thing learned. Except it is. Like playing an instrument, the technicals eventually give way to mechanical memory, to ghosts in the machine, to whispers of creativity, of fun. Voice in a writer emerges much as it does from a newborn, spontaneously, and given a shape to play with immediately. Through mimetics it learns structures. And over years the voice emerges as its own thing, completely natural in its naturally mechanical nature. “Ugh”, on that sentence. I’m leaving it.
Style is voice. Voice, style. “Except by their concerns and subject matter, one cannot tell Tolstoy from Dinesen.” Gardner says. I cannot decide whether I agree with that statement or not. He(Gardner)’s talking point-of-view here. He also states earlier in the chapter, in discussing point-of-view when speaking of serial objectivism, photography of the mind, snapshots turned written word turned art, that even those writers so detached from the emotion of a scene, of a character, are necessarily subsumed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the inequality that exists in precision measurement, so that they are invariably… oh, how would you say it? Lying to themselves. (Not quite Faulknerian, but fun.) Goddamnit, why does every literary discussion ever end with physics and philosophy? And alliteration.
Gardner freely admits the contrariness of the style of those sorts of writers (those sorts, you know, the super-realists), and certainly implies that even the most omniscient narrator is still a God with desires, decisions and plans, as he(Gardner, not God)’s discussing objections to their work. Actually, the background argument in the chapter has a certain parallel with the paradox of subjective vs. objective morality, whether which exists, and if so, however it shakes out, how that affects the very deference given to respect for its source, again, whichever it may be (the authorial voice in this context). Even God has a voice, one could say. Very off track. Physics or philosophy man. Every. Damned. Time.
But maybe that’s what it all boils down to. There is no voice. There is only the riffing on mechanics, playing with the strings until they sing, turning yard ornaments into beasties, or a mild autumn evening into a dark ordeal. There is only the subjective to observe it, to decide what constitutes a scene, a voice. Trees as ghouls with no one around and all.
I swear there was a Pope quote somewhere in that chapter…. something about learning to dance or, I dunno. Gen…Y? That’s just a made up generation.