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Apr. 25th, 2009 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ezekielsdaughterI’m reading Delany’s “About Writing”. It’s dense and I am reading it only occasionally, so excuse me if the book comes up now and then. I am also trying to get through Josephus’ “The Jewish War” again.
Delany writes “Fiction is an intellectually imaginative act committed on the materials of memory that tries for the form of history. That’s why a political climate pushing the individual to see her or him self as autonomous and self-sufficient is, by definition, a climate unsupportive of rich and satisfying fiction.”
So, in testing that in my thoughts I am thinking how much Southern fiction is lauded. Same for Jewish fiction. Both are fictions of community; they are each joyfully/painfully aware of the community that engenders them. I was considering western (cowboy) fiction something that tests his rule. Isn’t that “outsider” fiction? But most of that—and I’ve only read a little of it—is from the point of view of the community that has to deal with the outsider. It isn’t from the outsider’s POV. Now what tests the rule for me is SF. It is often written from the outsider’s point of view. But I think that Delany sees SF’s focus as being the plot, not the character. And he’s talking about character driven fiction. Maybe.
“If one or more…of the characters in a story are unaware of the sociological levels that contour where they are and the choices they have open to them in the world, it doesn’t particularly matter. But, as the writer is less and less aware of these sociological levels in the course of structuring her or his tale…the tale seems thinner and thinner, regardless of its subjective density.”
Whereon, he discusses the sex and sin in the suburbs novels of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I would probably add the sex and sin in the city novels of the current era. What makes them so thin to me is that the characters never notice or pay heed to their privilege. I cheered when I heard Joe Queenan on NPR last week discuss why he wrote a memoir of his childhood now. “Over the course of time, I got tired of listening to middle class problems. Problems are food; problems are shelter; problems are a guy down the street has a gun. Problems aren’t my dad doesn’t appreciate me. Problems aren’t I didn’t get into Middlebury. Those aren’t problems. I wanted to talk about what poverty is really about. …Don’t you ever take your good fortune for granted.”
Delany writes: “..the basic way to produce a richly interesting fictive situation is to take a person from one social stratum and carefully observe him or her having to learn to deal with folks from another, either up or down the social ladder…One way of the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money.”
A learning moment. I’ve been trying on the second draft to show my character’s difficulty in fitting in with her new ‘family’. She should have the cultural history to do it: she’s Black and from a time when we expected to work for the whole. But she’s also middle-class. She’s never actually had to give up anything. How to show that growth in her? A growth that is also a contraction, a tzimtzum. I think that the plot elements are there, but the physical evidences aren’t there yet. I am still telling and not showing.
Delany writes “Fiction is an intellectually imaginative act committed on the materials of memory that tries for the form of history. That’s why a political climate pushing the individual to see her or him self as autonomous and self-sufficient is, by definition, a climate unsupportive of rich and satisfying fiction.”
So, in testing that in my thoughts I am thinking how much Southern fiction is lauded. Same for Jewish fiction. Both are fictions of community; they are each joyfully/painfully aware of the community that engenders them. I was considering western (cowboy) fiction something that tests his rule. Isn’t that “outsider” fiction? But most of that—and I’ve only read a little of it—is from the point of view of the community that has to deal with the outsider. It isn’t from the outsider’s POV. Now what tests the rule for me is SF. It is often written from the outsider’s point of view. But I think that Delany sees SF’s focus as being the plot, not the character. And he’s talking about character driven fiction. Maybe.
“If one or more…of the characters in a story are unaware of the sociological levels that contour where they are and the choices they have open to them in the world, it doesn’t particularly matter. But, as the writer is less and less aware of these sociological levels in the course of structuring her or his tale…the tale seems thinner and thinner, regardless of its subjective density.”
Whereon, he discusses the sex and sin in the suburbs novels of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I would probably add the sex and sin in the city novels of the current era. What makes them so thin to me is that the characters never notice or pay heed to their privilege. I cheered when I heard Joe Queenan on NPR last week discuss why he wrote a memoir of his childhood now. “Over the course of time, I got tired of listening to middle class problems. Problems are food; problems are shelter; problems are a guy down the street has a gun. Problems aren’t my dad doesn’t appreciate me. Problems aren’t I didn’t get into Middlebury. Those aren’t problems. I wanted to talk about what poverty is really about. …Don’t you ever take your good fortune for granted.”
Delany writes: “..the basic way to produce a richly interesting fictive situation is to take a person from one social stratum and carefully observe him or her having to learn to deal with folks from another, either up or down the social ladder…One way of the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money.”
A learning moment. I’ve been trying on the second draft to show my character’s difficulty in fitting in with her new ‘family’. She should have the cultural history to do it: she’s Black and from a time when we expected to work for the whole. But she’s also middle-class. She’s never actually had to give up anything. How to show that growth in her? A growth that is also a contraction, a tzimtzum. I think that the plot elements are there, but the physical evidences aren’t there yet. I am still telling and not showing.
