When I was traveling through the Midwest about a month ago, I randomly took a copy of the Wall Street Journal from the lobby of my hotel on the way out one morning, and on the front page was an article about the growing popularity of digital books. The reporting focused specifically on the rise of self-publishing, explaining (1) how an amateur author had uploaded a manuscript she’d been unable to sell for years and had gone on to sell enough digital copies that Amazon will soon be printing a hardcopy version of the book to be sold through their site, and (2) how an experienced Sci-Fi writer was selling digital copies of his early, out of print novels, which allowed him to easily distribute hard to find work to his fans, as well as make a comfortable living for himself.
Why am I telling you this? Because that Wall Street Journal article was published on June 6th, 2010, while on February 5th, 2010, I also wrote about how the rise of digital books will revolutionize the publishing industry, allowing up and coming writers the opportunity to circumvent the big publishing houses, and providing established writers more control over their work (as well as more money). I’m not telling you this to highlight my superior intellect or prescience; rather, I’m pointing out the five-month discrepancy in lead-time as yet another example of We Have Beards superiority over the dead medium that is traditional print media. In your face, print media!
Of course, this is coming from someone who only last week wrote a review of Aristotle and Flannery O’Connor: talk about timeliness. Then again, it would be difficult for most newspaper writers to publish a story about O’Connor, considering most of them have never read her work. Boom! In your face, print media!
In Poetics, Aristotle offers two valuable observations about the creation of art. First, and most significantly, Aristotle tells us “not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically”. In other words, it is less important for a writer not to be fully informed about the subject he is writing than it is for him to describe his subject in poor style.
Second, Aristotle offers his definition of tragedy. The ideal outcome of a tragic story, he writes, is that the protagonist will experience peripeteia (or a reversal of intention), which leads to anagnorisis (or a recognition), which in turn leaves the protagonist in a state of catastrophe and suffering. Put another way, peripeteia is the revelation that a pursuit which the protagonist believed to be in his best interests is in fact the opposite, and anagnorisis is their sudden awareness of the consequences of this reversal.
Aristotle uses the play Oedipus Rex (which Wikipedia summarizes fully here, although I would point out that they date the first production of the play as 429 BC, nearly a hundred years after Aristotle’s death) as his example. In this story Oedipus, who is made king of Thebes after defeating the Sphinx, is seeking the murderer of the former king, whom an oracle has said must be brought to justice before the pestilence plaguing the kingdom will end. The peripeteia is reached when it is revealed through Oedipus’s investigation that he himself had unknowingly murdered the former king, and the anagnorisis occurs when Oedipus then realizes that he is the murderer of his own father and the queen, was queen alongside the former king and whom Oedipus married when he assumed the throne, is his mother, which, in case you need it spelled out for you, is the catastrophic aspect of this equation. Suffering, in the form of Oedipus’s self-inflicted eye gouging, ensues soon thereafter.
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Recently a friend asked me to make a list of books I would recommend for someone who would like to read some serious literature, and in doing so, I realized that a list like this could serve as a useful primer for anyone who reads what I write in this space. That being said, what follows are not my selections for the best or most important texts from all of recorded history; they are merely a starting point for the uninitiated. My hope is that if one were to actually read everything I recommend they would be left with a broad knowledge of a range of literature and would also be inspired enough by a few novels to pursue more work by a specific author or era. So, with that in mind, please do enjoy.
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So far, I’ve been able to avoid spending an entire post ruminating on the process of writing fiction. It’s true, I suppose, that in a way everything I’ve discussed is somehow related to my views on the creative process, but I have not, until today, explicitly stated how I think one should go about writing a story. See, I read Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge recently, and since then I’ve been thinking about the word “Realistic” as it pertains to fiction.
In writing workshops, a lot of time is spent talking about whether the action that unfolds in a story submitted to the group is or is not realistic. Really, I should say that for good stories, there is often a debate about the realism of the situation depicted. This is not the case for poor stories because bad writing invariably ends up in one of two groups: the stories that slog through a series of dull and uneventful scenes depicting everyday life, which are entirely too realistic; or the stories that are so far removed from reality that a discussion of its authenticity does not even factor into the discussion. The good stories, on the other hand, exist in-between possibility and impossibility; they are fantastic enough that the reader will doubt for a moment that the events being described are possible before ultimately deciding the scene is so compelling that they want to believe it is true.
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Why am I telling you this? Because that Wall Street Journal article was published on June 6th, 2010, while on February 5th, 2010, I also wrote about how the rise of digital books will revolutionize the publishing industry, allowing up and coming writers the opportunity to circumvent the big publishing houses, and providing established writers more control over their work (as well as more money). I’m not telling you this to highlight my superior intellect or prescience; rather, I’m pointing out the five-month discrepancy in lead-time as yet another example of We Have Beards superiority over the dead medium that is traditional print media. In your face, print media!
