Pictures don't help
Feb. 4th, 2015 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselMay 2014
Wonderbook - Jeff Vandermeer - Abrams, 2013
* * *
I have quite a few how-to-write books in my collection, of which my favourite by some distance is Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft for its advice on focus and pacing rather than the nuts and bolts of plot, character and style. This one is more traditional in its concerns, but I was enthused by its uniquely visual approach, with the text supplemented by a rich supply of strange diagrams and images. Having a strongly visual imagination, I am a great fan of pictures and maps to explain things, so this was a book that I was excited to read. Sadly, they turned out to be more a hindrance than a help.
Its overall approach is much like other how-to-write books. It starts with a chapter on inspiration, followed by an analysis of story elements (point of view, description, style etc), beginnings and endings, narrative design, characterisation, worldbuilding and revision. The book ends with a set of whimsical exercises such as telling a story based on three bizarre photos.
And "bizarre" and "whimsical" sum up the problems that I had. The advice is technical and sensible, but the illustrations use strange and not entirely apposite imagery, with cutesy aliens illustrating types of dialogue and a bird-headed creature called Mister Odd employed to demonstrate varieties of story openings. In the text, Vandermeer repeatedly uses a talking penguin as an exemplar. Then there are the laboured metaphors - the section on the middles of stories is illustrated with a Tolkien-style fantasy map with such features as "the loops of indecision", "the mountain of anti-climax" and "the estuary of multiple endings". This is an utterly pointless diagram. It humorously describes the travails of a writer trying to plot or write the middle of a story, but does nothing to help them do it.
I think the fundamental difficulty for me is that Vandermeer and I are polar opposites when it comes to creative approach. Based on the surreal art-wankery that characterises the "inspirational" pictures he has chosen, he appears to work by coming up with lots of whimsical notions which he then attempts to corral into a coherent narrative using the techniques that he describes. My attempts at fiction (which, admittedly, have recently been few and far between) have always started from an idea or an observation about the real world that I wanted to explore. The images and characters come later and always in the service of the original idea. For me, an issue of New Scientist or a Metafilter post are most likely to stimulate the creative juices. Trying to decide the character motivation of a talking penguin does not.
The ordering of the chapters illustrates a second problem. Why put the chapter on world-building last, as if it were an afterthought? For an SF or fantasy writer, the creation of a convincing world out of which the characters can naturally emerge is surely the most important thing. Vandermeer's ordering reflects a modern tendency in SF to focus narrowly on characters and to data dump the world through their viewpoints. I'm not convinced that this is sensible, as it leaves the reader confused and frustrated for much of the book, especially when illogicalities in the setup are not addressed. Jane Austen's novels start with an often quite tedious chapter summarising the economic and social history necessary to understand the character motivations, which means that she doesn't have to stop to clue the reader in once the story gets going. I’d like to see more future society novels start the same way.
The best parts of the book were where Vandermeer stops been whimsical and starts being analytical. He discusses the opening to his novel Finch, analysing various alternates that he tried and explaining why each was inferior to the one he eventually used in terms of introducing the world and the characters to the reader. There were also some good mini-essays from other writers, including one from Ursula Le Guin where she makes the point that looking for a message in a work of fiction is a destructively incomplete way of appreciating it (a fair point - if you can reduce everything that a text has to say to a bullet point, you might as well write the bullet point and not the text). But this illustrates why world-building is so important. The world created in the reader's head is the reason why reading fiction is worthwhile, why it can't be reduced to a bullet point, in the same way that Barber's Adagio for Strings cannot reasonably be reduced to "I'm sad". It would have been nice to have had more about how to do this and fewer of the cutesy diagrams.
Wonderbook - Jeff Vandermeer - Abrams, 2013
* * *
I have quite a few how-to-write books in my collection, of which my favourite by some distance is Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft for its advice on focus and pacing rather than the nuts and bolts of plot, character and style. This one is more traditional in its concerns, but I was enthused by its uniquely visual approach, with the text supplemented by a rich supply of strange diagrams and images. Having a strongly visual imagination, I am a great fan of pictures and maps to explain things, so this was a book that I was excited to read. Sadly, they turned out to be more a hindrance than a help.
Its overall approach is much like other how-to-write books. It starts with a chapter on inspiration, followed by an analysis of story elements (point of view, description, style etc), beginnings and endings, narrative design, characterisation, worldbuilding and revision. The book ends with a set of whimsical exercises such as telling a story based on three bizarre photos.
And "bizarre" and "whimsical" sum up the problems that I had. The advice is technical and sensible, but the illustrations use strange and not entirely apposite imagery, with cutesy aliens illustrating types of dialogue and a bird-headed creature called Mister Odd employed to demonstrate varieties of story openings. In the text, Vandermeer repeatedly uses a talking penguin as an exemplar. Then there are the laboured metaphors - the section on the middles of stories is illustrated with a Tolkien-style fantasy map with such features as "the loops of indecision", "the mountain of anti-climax" and "the estuary of multiple endings". This is an utterly pointless diagram. It humorously describes the travails of a writer trying to plot or write the middle of a story, but does nothing to help them do it.
I think the fundamental difficulty for me is that Vandermeer and I are polar opposites when it comes to creative approach. Based on the surreal art-wankery that characterises the "inspirational" pictures he has chosen, he appears to work by coming up with lots of whimsical notions which he then attempts to corral into a coherent narrative using the techniques that he describes. My attempts at fiction (which, admittedly, have recently been few and far between) have always started from an idea or an observation about the real world that I wanted to explore. The images and characters come later and always in the service of the original idea. For me, an issue of New Scientist or a Metafilter post are most likely to stimulate the creative juices. Trying to decide the character motivation of a talking penguin does not.
The ordering of the chapters illustrates a second problem. Why put the chapter on world-building last, as if it were an afterthought? For an SF or fantasy writer, the creation of a convincing world out of which the characters can naturally emerge is surely the most important thing. Vandermeer's ordering reflects a modern tendency in SF to focus narrowly on characters and to data dump the world through their viewpoints. I'm not convinced that this is sensible, as it leaves the reader confused and frustrated for much of the book, especially when illogicalities in the setup are not addressed. Jane Austen's novels start with an often quite tedious chapter summarising the economic and social history necessary to understand the character motivations, which means that she doesn't have to stop to clue the reader in once the story gets going. I’d like to see more future society novels start the same way.
The best parts of the book were where Vandermeer stops been whimsical and starts being analytical. He discusses the opening to his novel Finch, analysing various alternates that he tried and explaining why each was inferior to the one he eventually used in terms of introducing the world and the characters to the reader. There were also some good mini-essays from other writers, including one from Ursula Le Guin where she makes the point that looking for a message in a work of fiction is a destructively incomplete way of appreciating it (a fair point - if you can reduce everything that a text has to say to a bullet point, you might as well write the bullet point and not the text). But this illustrates why world-building is so important. The world created in the reader's head is the reason why reading fiction is worthwhile, why it can't be reduced to a bullet point, in the same way that Barber's Adagio for Strings cannot reasonably be reduced to "I'm sad". It would have been nice to have had more about how to do this and fewer of the cutesy diagrams.