Fiction writers with no taste or inclination
for the formal constraints of rule of thumb
could do worse than spend an afternoon watching
Chuck Jones's work.
It isn't enough to watch one Road Runner
cartoon or maybe for you it is.
But if you're interested in this,
you need to immerse yourself in them.
There are over 40 Road Runner cartoons,
to see all the conventions, all the restrictions,
to understand the few options of the Road Runner world.
And then to see how again and again they surprise.
The Road Runner saga, Hugh Kenner
wrote, all four plus hours of it,
relies on just one theme seemingly inexhaustible.
That Wile E. Coyote's persistence and pursuit,
and pursuit of what was once a potential snack
and has long since mutated into an ideal conquest,
the viewer of a new installment has
seen it all before and yet seeing none of it before.
That's actually literally true because Chuck Jones
is unlike many animators, made it a point of pride
never to reuse footage or drawings.
Even footage of virtually identical
chases of the Coyote's fall, or the Coyote's fall.
Jones points out that a character runs differently
when he's being chased than he does
when he's chasing something.
If you ever watch Scooby Doo--
I'm really working with lowbrow side here
but if you ever watch Scooby Doo,
you'll notice they do not bother to make that distinction.
It's just about the cheapest animation there is.
But if you watch Chuck Jones's Road Runner cartoons and most
of the Chuck Jones, you'll notice
that the characters oddly enough are based on life.
And you can look at his notebooks too.
Animation needs to be able to express character
without words.
And since animation is movement, characters
express through the way a character moves.
His notebooks contain countless sketches of hips
and leg bones, feet and shoulders, comparisons
of how say real coyotes look outside, heads
hung down with the way Wile E. Coyote slouches.
All mammals share similarities of construction
so the key is to distinctive movement
or the subtle differences.
If an animator cartoons pays this much attention
to physiology, it stands to reason
that writers of realistic fiction
should be students of syntax and for instance,
in many different ways, a populated room can be silent.
In the days when cartoons were a standard part of the package
film studio sent to theaters, each
was required to be 6 minutes long.
That was the primary constraint.
That works out to 4,320 frames.
Movement, pacing, and rhythm are all
discussed in terms of frames or were
then when it was done actually by drawing.
Wile E. Coyote's inevitable fall off a cliff
requires 18 frames from the fall into the distance
and disappear 14 frames later to hit.
It seemed to me, Chuck Jones said,
that 13 frames didn't work in terms of humor
and neither did 15, 14 frames got a laugh.
The punchline then or total effect
is calculated to within 1/12 of a second in a Road Runner
cartoon.
In his biography, Chuck Amuck, which I recommend,
Jones identifies some of the constraints he gave himself
for the Road Runner cartoons.
One, the Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going beep
beep.
Two, no outside force can harm the coyote, only
his own ineptitude, or the failure of Acme products.
Three, the coyote could stop any time if he were not a fanatic.
Repeat, a fanatic is one who redoubles his effort
when he has forgotten his aim, George Santayana.
Four, no dialogue ever except beep, beep.
Five, the Road Runner must stay on the road,
otherwise he would not be called Road Runner.
Six, and this is the strangest one for my money, six,
all action must be confined to the natural environment
of the two characters, the American Southwest.
The natural environment of Road Runner.
You've seen road runner, right?
I mean, you've maybe almost run them over, right?
Not much resemblance to the river.
Seven, all materials, tools, weapons
or mechanical conveniences must be obtained
from the Acme Corporation.
Eight, whenever possible make gravity the Coyote's greatest
enemy.
And 9, the coyote is always more humiliated
than harmed by his failures while he gets
whacked pretty hard.
Those cartoons' constraints were dictated
not by sales departments, not by marketing surveys or audience
polls, they were self-imposed by the artist.
Chuck Jones always said that he and the guys he worked with
didn't made cartoons for kids, they made them for themselves.
They said, we make what amuses us.
For all their looneyness, Road Runner cartoons
are not far removed from the experimental formalism
of the old comic.
Chuck Jones however, was still telling stories,
some post realistic fiction abandons character
in the narrative concentrating instead on ideas, form,
or language alone.
Writers of such work might be more geometers than map-makers,
interested primarily in calculating new projections.
Now we get to this.
This is about the distortion formula we call realism.
Some writers and readers delight in the stories
of novels that bring formal properties to the foreground.
While others, most of us maybe, prefer something
we think of as more natural or something less intellectual.
But realism is perfectly unnatural
and as writers we have to understand how it's created.
We may want the world of our stories
to be rich and complex even unpredictable apparently,
filled with surprise, but surprise
depends on expectation.
If we have no expectations, there's no surprise.
That's why it's hard to tell jokes to dogs.
While we may want to evoke unpredictability
and complexity, we ultimately want our work
to be shapely, in the study of shapes
as the study of geometry.
Given that our capacity for abstraction
is greater than you may realize, it
isn't necessary for a map user to know the first thing
about projection formulas.
A map maker however is obliged to understand
exactly what he's doing.
In the art of the novel, Kundera decries
that historical movement toward verisimilitude
away from what he says is a more important urge that came along
before realism which was the urge toward astonishment
and enchantment, what came from fairy tales and fables and all
those early stories.
He says realism actually smothers
that kind of enchantment.
Mark Twain in his famous essay about James Fenimore Cooper's
literary offenses where he rails against romanticism,
his call for accuracy in detail and an observation
of the natural world can lead, Kundera
might say, to submission to the oppression of actuality.
But that doesn't mean we need to reject realism,
only that to practice it we need to keep in mind the distinction
between realism and reality.
To confuse the two is to mistake the difference
between art and life.
The geometry of realism dates back
to the dawn of perspective, which
is a distortion formula designed to fool the eye.
Probably all of you did in art class
at some point, the old lesson of drawing
a road that met in the distance at a point, right?
Or maybe you even did the next lesson,
which is draw a building, the angles of which
aim toward that same point, single point perspective.
And so the back of the building would be shorter
than the front of the building.
The building would get more narrow
as it aimed toward the vanishing point.
Did you do that?
Some people are looking as if they know what it is.
Yeah.
OK.
So basic lesson in perspective, right?
Which is training, including the unfolding the eye.
But of course, we know that no where
we've been on meets at a point in the distance, right?
The distance side of a building isn't shorter
than the side nearer to us, right?
So what we're trying to create for the eye isn't what exists.
In fact, it's a deception.
We're trying to mirror how we perceive the world.
Thanks to the artists of the Italian Renaissance
primarily, perspective was developed
as a tool and a method.
To understand the goal was enough.
Artists actually had to train themselves
in this way of seeing so they could portray on canvas
what they knew to be true.
And if you ever tried to draw almost anything in perspective,
you realize that what you know about the object often
makes it difficult for you to draw in perspective.
You have to forget that and stare more and more carefully
at what you're seeing in order to see
how curves work in space, how foreshortening works other.
That's why some of us say we can't draw.
I mean, we can't do that thing.
Brunelleschi, who was a goldsmith
turned architect is credited with being
the first to portray three dimensional objects on two
dimensional surfaces.
The mathematical perspective, a calculated illusion
dominated the visual arts to the point
that other methods of representation
seemed and still seem unnatural.
Alberta's veil, what you're seeing
demonstrated there in this object world of print,
and you can see straight on there.
Alberta's veil is essentially a grid
that you would look through and then use.
You could actually place strings on different parts of the grid
and then attach him to the paper that you were working on
and use that to draw lines from what you were looking
at through the grid onto a piece of paper
so that the grid itself became a kind of mirror or glass,
a plane of transformation in order
to put what you saw under the flat page.
And it still serves.
A variations on this serve is a kind of training device.
A realistic painting is a kind of map
drawn on an imaginary window based
on the geometric projection.
So what's the equivalent of this in fiction writing?
What are the tools by which we create realistic fiction?
If we hold up Alberta's veil and try to write a story
instead of make a painting, how do we
transcribe what we see and hear and touch and smell and think?
Clearly this is more complicated than just
wrapping a sheet of paper around the globe
or trying to put something onto a flat sheet
because when we're doing that, when we're drawing,
we're only trying to fool one sense, right?
We're only trying to fool our eye.
A realistic writing evokes the world in all its dimensions,
physical space, time, sound, smell,
through the abstract code of those inky
squiggles the letters and words we put in the page.
Far from being natural or straightforward,
realistic work may be the most deceptive
as it goes to great lengths and heights
in which to conceal its geometric underpinning.
For instance, dialogue and fiction is not true to life,
you all know this, right?
Dialogue in realistic fiction edits
out all the ums and errors and mispronunciations
and false starts of sentences in our regular speech, right?
It's tidied up in the same way that we tend to edit that out.
If we're trying to listen to somebody
and we're trying to gain content, we edit that out.
If you're in a boring class and you're
getting exasperated with the teacher, in fact,
you count those things, right?
How many times did you pull in his ear?
How many times did he say, and now?
You know whatever it is.
My son plays these games in his high school classes
all the time.
But in fiction, we tend to edit those things out.
And also we have all the conventions of putting dialogue
on the page.
We have indentation, we have quotation marks,
we have attribution, right?
We said, he said, he asked, she said,
which are meant to be invisible and we're
trained we're taught not to say things like, he exhorted,
she maintained, he amplified, things
that draw their attention to the attributive.
And we can depart from those conventions but once we do,
either people say nasty things about us at workshop
or they'll say, why are you taking me out of the story?
Why are you taking me out of the dream of the story
and drawing my attention to that?
Dialogue and fiction is also purposeful in a way actual
speech usually isn't.
Among other things, it reveals character,
it expresses conflict, and it conveys necessary information.
Another example, the descriptions of characters.
We describe characters, some people
know what they look like, they have
an idea of how to picture them.
We provide that information to the reader
in realistic fiction.
When the description of a character
is important, when we need to remind the reader or something,
we have to decide how often to return to it
and how to emphasize it.
If you read Treasure Island for instance,
and Stevenson's trying to remind us
of what Long John Silver looks like,
he's got that peg leg you might recall, and he's got the patch.
He's a fearsome creature.
He has to come back to those details,
often enough to remind us not so often that we're
conscious of being reminded again and again.
Much of what we learned is fundamental to good fiction
writing from descriptions of character
and avoiding stereotype and conveying mood through detail
and not calling attention to the way
we describe how people talk.
It's fundamental to the distortion formula of realism.
Can we write that formula out in so many words?
Well, people do it all the time.
Every handbook about good fiction
that's talking about realistic fiction
is, in essence, an attempt to spell out the formula used
for realistic writing.
Mark Twain's essay on Fenimore Cooper
is ultimately less about Fenimore Cooper or even about
romanticism than it is about the assertion of a new aesthetic.
Mark Twain was in his own way defining the rules for his work
and encouraging others to join them.
All right.
Now relatively few people, particularly realist,
are likely to create a series of charts and graphs
or models or constraints for their work.
They're not likely to work the way writers of the Oulipo work.
But many writers do work in a way like that,
charting and graphing the way they compose even if they
don't actually make drawings.
So for instance, the most obvious example, perhaps
is a sonic writer, somebody who's
writing a number of sonnets.
At some point, the sonnet form is in your head,
you know how it works, you know the rhythms of the sonnet,
you know where the turn in the argument occurs in a sonnet,
you have the rhyme scheme of the sonnet in your head,
and you begin to think in that pattern,
and you begin to apply it.
Sometimes the poet choose a particular form made up
of smaller parts of the form.
For the Divine Comedy, Dante chose
to project the world of the poem via form of his own three
sections of 33 cantos, plus 1 introductory canto
to make it even hundred.
He wrote the poem in three lines stanzas and rhema
using an 11-syllable line with the accent on the 10th,
a form he created for himself for that work.
Novelists probably have to think about this more than short
story writers because it's hard to keep a novel in your head.
So at the very least, you have to start
to think about structure and form and pattern.
You have to start to think about chapters and organization.
You have to start to divide the work up
in some way for yourself.
We might resist imposing a strange constraints
on the work, such as every chapter has to be 32 pages,
or every chapter has to take place in an hour.
But some writers, for instance, Jane Smiley, Robert Boswell,
give themselves that assignment when they're stuck.
I say, all right.
This has to be a one scene chapter.
Or all right, this needs to have an extensive passages
of exposition.
They assign themselves those things
in part to work against their tendencies.
And that's one of the reasons to go through your writing
if you're a realistic writer in particular, to spot tendencies,
things that you might not have consciously put
in the work but things you recognize in the work.
If you realize for instance, that all your scenes tend
to be about two pages long, which might just
happen unconsciously, if you realize
that your sentences tend to be perfectly balanced,
if you realize when you write list,
you tend to put three items in a list
because somehow in your head that's
what makes an even rhythm or that's
how you're able to work a certain kind of surprise.
You can go back and analyze your work
and spot those unconscious tendencies
and then decide what to do about them.
You may love them and you may wish
you were unconscious of them, or you
may realize that by habit you're doing some things that
are constraining the work, even without intentionally putting
constraints on the work.
Milan Kundera says that he found out
that he writes most of his novels
in seven parts only when he read a critic's
essay about his work.
And he was talking about the mathematical underpinning
of his work.
And Kundera read it and he never thought about that
and he's always absolutely right.
And then he had to decide, well, so do I stop?
And then he said, no, it's inbuilt, it's hardwired.
He thinks that way, he works that way,
but being aware of it, he started
to think about how he could make use of it differently.
And so it doesn't mean you need to run from those things
that you find in your own work.
Some of you probably know Edgar Allan Poe's essay
on the philosophy of composition about The Raven.
Where he says that he thought through every single thing
he did in that poem.
Most people seem to feel that he probably came back to the poem
and read that after the fact but who knows.
Poe loved games and puzzles.
Poe, as you may now put an ad in a Philadelphia newspaper
for six months offering for people to send him
cryptograms to decode because he fancied
himself quite a master of this.
He also liked Houdini, went around debunking magic acts
and things like that.
So he thought about things very differently.
But he said that in The Raven, he wanted beauty,
and sadness, melancholy, he wanted a pivot upon which
the whole structure would turn.
He wanted a single word, sonorous, and susceptible
to a protracted emphasis, and then
he thought that R is the most progressive consonant, that O
is the most sonorous vowel, and of course
the only word that would work would be, nevermore.
And he goes through the whole poem like that,
talking about how he constructed it.
Believe it or nay, even if you look back at it afterwards,
it describes the poem accurately.
And so it's one description of a writer's understanding
of the analytical underpinnings of his own work.
Nabokov talks about coming up with the name
for the main character of his most famous novel.
For my nymphet, I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt
to it.
One of the most limpid and luminous letters,
is L. The suffix ita has a lot of Latin tenderness and this I
required too, hence Lolita.
However, it should not be pronounced
as most Americans pronounce it, Lolita,
with a heavy clammy L and a long O, no.
The first syllable should be as in lollipop,
the liquid and delicate, the li not too sharp.
Spaniards and Italians pronounce it of course
with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress.
Another consideration was the welcome murmur
of its source name, the fountain name, those roses and tears
in Dolores.
If you study a book, you know he loved anagrams, roses and tears
in Dolores.
Also of course he learned English actually
before he learned Russian even though he grew up in Russia.
And he was very self-conscious of his use of English and--
who are those letters with?
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, Edmund Wilson.
The collection of their letters that you can read
debate a tremendous length points of grammar and syntax.
Nabokov was very self-conscious about his use of language.
And so we can believe that he deliberated for some time
over the name of that girl and how it
had to function in the novel.
And that's a kind of mapping of a world and--
of a word rather and its possible effects in his novel.
And of course Nabokov was unusually analytical
about his work
OK.
I'll show you one different kind of example
of this sort of thing.
We'll see what comes up.
No, not exactly that.
OK.
So this is a little bit about form or about space.
Here we have a dot, not particularly interesting.
Two dots or-- right, maybe just two dots.
OK.
Fine.
What do we have here?
Yeah, right?
We don't of course, we have three dots, right?
But everyone sees a triangle, right?
So now a triangle's there.
What's interesting to me about this
is one dot doesn't really do anything for us, two dots,
I mean.
Maybe you're interested, maybe you're not.
I mean, you're not thrilled but maybe you're interested,
maybe you're not.
Three dots, you see the triangle, right?
The triangle's there.
You can hardly help it.
There's a tension though because there's
that space between the dots.
Once the triangle is there, it's uninteresting again.
I mean, it's OK if you love triangles.
OK.
It's fine.
But there's no tension to that figure,
it's relatively dull in this sense.
As soon as you start to erase parts of it,
tension is introduced again.
You look at that and if I'd shown you that first,
I would argue you'd probably still all see a triangle,
even though there's no triangle there.
When you erase a little bit more or much more,
well, who knows if you would have seen a triangle.
Somebody would have seen it, somebody
would have seen Napoleon.
But you could see almost anything
with a couple of lines segments here.
I mean, at this point, maybe there's
a triangle on the page, maybe with something else entirely.
Now if you think about this in terms of form and fiction
or even in poetry, right?
The questions that come to mind for me are these.
What does it take to suggest the shape to the reader
or to the viewer?
When is the shape vague or undetermined like this?
Does that say triangle to every reader?
Probably not.
When is it usefully ambiguous?
So when could it be a triangle and when is there room
to do something else to it?
And when does it become explicit or essentially explicit
so there's no tension left?
I was talking to a student at New Mexico
State who was turning in his thesis, a novel, next week.
And he's writing he says an experimental meta fictional
satiric science fiction novel.
He was writing.
And he said the problem is that when
you give it to the workshop--
they have a big master's workshop there where
you read the whole novel.
They said people thought he had written it for himself,
they didn't get it.
The problem was they couldn't see the shapes
that he saw in it, right?
It was still interior.
And so these are the questions we come up
with again and again.
When have we conveyed enough to the reader
and when we have fallen short?
The first word of a short story, once.
Well, that's an interesting of course
because we're so prepared for once upon a time.
But once doesn't imply a shape of a story, right?
It may just start as.
Even the first sentence doesn't imply
a complete shape for a story.
But as it goes on, no matter how linear or fragmented or collage
like the story might be, the reader
works to find the story shape because we want to fine shape.
We want to understand why.
You watch a movie and you see a close up on a character,
you say, aha, important character.
We say, I think that's an important character.
And then things move on.
Has anybody here seen the movie, Memento?
Five, six years old, little odd?
Yeah.
It's an unusual movie and it teaches us
how to read it as we see it.
And we're learning how to understand it
over those first 10 minutes as we
start to see how we're supposed to understand
it's moving through time.