Thinky thought for today
Dec. 23rd, 2008 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clarentineI nabbed this off ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
novel_in_90's daily post:
**From Where You Dream by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler:
. . .of the three fundamentals of fiction, there are two that aspiring writers never miss: first, that fiction is about human beings; second, that it's about human emotion. . . .
But the third element, which is missing from virtually every student manuscript I've seen, has to do with the phenomenon of desire.
. . . as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.
We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. . . . And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.
Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.
The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other.
Desire is the driving force behind plot.
***
(italics, as far as I know, are mine alone)
That's a very interesting statement about the continuum that holds genre and literary fiction - I really do think it's a continuum, rather than two separate places with a dividing line between. Slide to one side and you're more heavily in the genre realm. Slide to the other, and you're dabbling in with the gliterati. Most books I enjoy have elements of both, or (to stick with my metaphor) are somewhere in the middle of that continuum.
I also think it's an elegant way to think about plot, that it's the physical representation of the dynamics of desire. A lot of truth in that statement.
Hmm.
novel_in_90's daily post:**From Where You Dream by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler:
. . .of the three fundamentals of fiction, there are two that aspiring writers never miss: first, that fiction is about human beings; second, that it's about human emotion. . . .
But the third element, which is missing from virtually every student manuscript I've seen, has to do with the phenomenon of desire.
. . . as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.
We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. . . . And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.
Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.
The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other.
Desire is the driving force behind plot.
***
(italics, as far as I know, are mine alone)
That's a very interesting statement about the continuum that holds genre and literary fiction - I really do think it's a continuum, rather than two separate places with a dividing line between. Slide to one side and you're more heavily in the genre realm. Slide to the other, and you're dabbling in with the gliterati. Most books I enjoy have elements of both, or (to stick with my metaphor) are somewhere in the middle of that continuum.
I also think it's an elegant way to think about plot, that it's the physical representation of the dynamics of desire. A lot of truth in that statement.
Hmm.
