The parts that are only glimpsed*
Sep. 6th, 2008 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarentineFurther on a conversation between ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mnfaure and myself:
Quite ironically, while eating dinner I was reading a collection of Roger Zelazny's short stories entitled Unicorn Variations and stumbled upon an essay he'd written about writing reflexes developed over a long career. The essay was prompted by his reading of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, within which Hemingway observed that he deliberately omitted portions of what he knew of a story, on the theory that omitting what he knew was there would make the story stronger and "make people feel something more than they understood."
Zelazny's subsequent examination of his own writing habits led him to conclude, in part, that he himself tended to the opposite habit - e.g., he often included "gratuitous characterization" of the secondary characters as a means of enriching the story and achieving the same sort of effect Hemingway claimed--making readers feel more than they actually understood by grounding the story in a larger reality.
I've been thinking about all of this recently (following up on a seed perhaps planted long ago by my first reading of this particular essay? Hard to tell) in the light of my current bugaboo. In Break, I am attempting consciously to assemble a more human-scale plot with a backdrop of the World At Risk, where the larger events stay in the background. At the moment, I think it's working, but we'll have to wait for The End to be certain. One of the things I realized about this sort of plot is that the larger reality must be there, present if not front-and-center. Characters are still driven by larger events, even if what I'm showing is how their lives are changed by several-levels-removed reactions to those events.
This relates back to Zelazny's notation of "gratuitous characterization." I like to think that my habit of endowing secondary characters with real lives and cares and concerns is part of the strength of my stories, not at all a throwaway gesture. Those characters certainly help ground the reader in the story's reality and add layers that eventually support the bigger backdrop of the stories without me having to engage with it directly. A feature, if you will, not a bug. *g*
Does this habit "make people feel something more than they understood?" I hope I get the chance to find out!
***
*The title of the essay is The parts that are only glimpsed: Three reflexes, should you find yourself wanting to look it up. I have arrows and brackets all over my copy. *g*
mnfaure and myself: Quite ironically, while eating dinner I was reading a collection of Roger Zelazny's short stories entitled Unicorn Variations and stumbled upon an essay he'd written about writing reflexes developed over a long career. The essay was prompted by his reading of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, within which Hemingway observed that he deliberately omitted portions of what he knew of a story, on the theory that omitting what he knew was there would make the story stronger and "make people feel something more than they understood."
Zelazny's subsequent examination of his own writing habits led him to conclude, in part, that he himself tended to the opposite habit - e.g., he often included "gratuitous characterization" of the secondary characters as a means of enriching the story and achieving the same sort of effect Hemingway claimed--making readers feel more than they actually understood by grounding the story in a larger reality.
I've been thinking about all of this recently (following up on a seed perhaps planted long ago by my first reading of this particular essay? Hard to tell) in the light of my current bugaboo. In Break, I am attempting consciously to assemble a more human-scale plot with a backdrop of the World At Risk, where the larger events stay in the background. At the moment, I think it's working, but we'll have to wait for The End to be certain. One of the things I realized about this sort of plot is that the larger reality must be there, present if not front-and-center. Characters are still driven by larger events, even if what I'm showing is how their lives are changed by several-levels-removed reactions to those events.
This relates back to Zelazny's notation of "gratuitous characterization." I like to think that my habit of endowing secondary characters with real lives and cares and concerns is part of the strength of my stories, not at all a throwaway gesture. Those characters certainly help ground the reader in the story's reality and add layers that eventually support the bigger backdrop of the stories without me having to engage with it directly. A feature, if you will, not a bug. *g*
Does this habit "make people feel something more than they understood?" I hope I get the chance to find out!
***
*The title of the essay is The parts that are only glimpsed: Three reflexes, should you find yourself wanting to look it up. I have arrows and brackets all over my copy. *g*
