Plays vs. Novels
Among my creative goals for 2016 are revising two novels, (in two different stage of completion.) I am also revising a stage play, which hopefully will get at least a local reading before the end of the year.
Revising plays is so much different from revising novels. Both have their tedious qualities, and both have their satisfying aspects.
The easier part about revising novels is the amount of real estate to work with. If a scene isn’t working, I have the freedom more words to shuffle around. I can work the description, change dialogue, give myself more time to get to the point if needed. (Without boring the reader, hopefully.) In short, a novel allows me to meander to some extent. Fixing something that doesn’t work can happen in more than one fashion.
In a play of course, I generally don’t have that option. A play is almost exclusively what people say. I’m very much opposed to pages-long descriptions of sets and characters and actions for a script. As an actor/director such meticulous detail gets in the way. It’s obnoxious. I call it “phantom directing.” If a playwright wants to control the mood and the look to that extent, he ought to move into novel-writing, where in essences the writer controls everything on the page. (Though character’s do tend to dictate their own arc at times.)
The same goes for stage directions. If there are more than two sentences in a script at a time explaining movements and actions of actors, the playwright is too insecure, or hasn’t done their job.
When I write a play, (and i have only ever written three, two one-acts and a full length) I keep description and stage direction to a minimum. About 90% of character, motivations, sequence, tone and all such things are revealed directly through what characters say on stage. When something isn’t working for me in a script, most of the time, working on dialogue is my only recourse. I can change the sequence of scenes, somewhat, and maybe add one or two clarifying stage directions, but I can’t hope around location to location, or in and out of someone’s thoughts with ease, as I can in a novel. I have fewer means of “attack” when I revise a play.
This disadvantage of revising a play is however also its advantage. I don’t have as much to juggle. When writing or revising a novel, one can never really be “off” on the page. Every pause must be described, every sight and sound at least somewhat explained. No moment in the arc of a novel escapes scrutiny when it comes to diction, word choice, sentence length, and so on. That’s a lot of sentences to take care of, each one with a different purpose. That means I have to switch my “ear” to tune into different aspects of a novel at any given point in a rewrite. Am I doing character here, or description, or dialogue?
In a play, I need only worry about how the dialogue sounds. It may take me a few tries to get it right, but it’s the only thing to which I’m dedicating the word craft. If Bob leaves, I put Exit Bob and am done with it. No exploration. No poetry. No symbolism. If I need Bob to get out, I state it, and that’s that.
In a play, the thunder doesn’t have to “roll over the sky like an ancient boulder scraping along and gathering steam over its mother mountain, on it’s way to oblivion.” In a play it’s. “Sound of thunder.”
I love writing good prose, even if I’m not usually fancy with it. But the novelist in me still enjoys the break he gets when I am revising a play.
It’s different for every writer of course. Some may not see these aspects of revising as positives. I also would surmise at this time that over the course of my life, I will have written more novels and stories than plays. Still, while spending time on one, it helps me to remember the distinct advantages one has over the other.
I try not to dwell too much on the distinct difficulties of each; writing is difficult enough as it is.
Do you write plays and/or novels? Which is easier for you?
My Thoughts on Sex.
In my fiction, that is to say.
Or, that is not to say. Sex has never appeared in any of my fiction. Then again, neither has Prague, backgammon or millions of other things. Yet I’ve found a noticeable difference between the reactions to never including sex in my work, and never including the other things.
If you tell someone you have never written a story that takes place in Prague, they aren’t likely to think much of it. Some might say, “So?” Other writers might say, “I guess Prague just isn’t vital to the stories you’ve wanted to tell.”
Say that that has never been any sex in your fiction, and you get, “Wow, really? Do you write kids books? Christian fiction? No? Okay, well…”
The lack of sex, or sex scenes in my fiction is not a purity or religious issue. Sex is not dirty or immoral to me. The sexual urge is almost as universal as the need for food and water and warmth. Embracing it, denying it or describing it is an element in many stories, true and fiction. In fact, so universal is it, that I have read articles over the years, and had conversation with people who say that adult fiction of any kind simply cannot be believable unless somebody, somewhere in the story is dealing in someway with sexual tension. That every plot, on some level, can be boiled down to sex in some fashion.
Think again, Sigmund.
Every writer tells certain stories at any given time. To do so successfully, certain things must be revealed certain things must be hidden, and certain things can be assumed. As they say, if something is not revealing character, advancing the plot or setting a mood, it’s usually extraneous. In the end, the stories I have felt compelled to write are not moved forward by describing sex. The characters I have written reveal themselves in actions that are not sexual in nature. The moods of my works can’t generally be described as erotic. So, why would I write sex scenes into my fiction, if they would so clearly exist only for their own sake? Because sex is important to everybody, everywhere, allegedly? I imagine urinating is as well, and it isn’t described in detail in most novels I’ve read.
“This ‘Flowers of Dionysus’ contains no DE-flowering. Unglebower, you prude.”
Yet you know all the people in a story at some point urinate. (At least outside of odd science fiction tales.) Just as you can assume that certain people have sex at some point. This is true with my own fiction. I don’t write only celibate characters; a lot of people in my fiction can be assumed to have had sex at some point in their lives. I just don’t need to visit them, as an author, while they do so, in order to tell the story I want to tell.
Will the time ever come when I do write a sex scene into my story? Maybe. Never say never. But the angles at which I approach stories don’t usually lend themselves to sex scenes.
I did try to write a sex scene once, though. It was a stand alone scene that I wrote for an erotica author friend of mine to take a look at. They didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t very good. I shared it with one other writer of such things, and they too didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it either. So for no other reason than I am not any good at it, perhaps I will leave sex scenes to the professionals, like my various author-friends.
As for Prague and backgammon, I wonder if there is a novel to be created around a backgammon tournament in Prague…wherein nobody has sex.
Author Followings
In my last post, I mentioned that for the sake of diversity in my reading, I should put forth a greater effort to seek out minority authors and their stories. Read the past to see why this is important, in my opinion.
Yet it brings up a far less important but nonetheless interesting issue about me as a reader; I rarely seek out specific authors, for any reason.
I know. How can an author not research other authors for the philosophy, tone, biography, works and other such things when deciding what to read? Or at least remember the names of authors? (I have to admit in most cases, when i am done reading and return a book, I don’t remember the author’s name.)
Plus, how awkward it must be for me when people ask me, “what authors do you read?” Actually, I don’t get asked that exact question every day or anything, but it does come up from time to time, and when I am honest with myself, I have to say that I don’t have any “regulars” that I follow.
Maybe I should change that. I’ve pursued new fiction to read in roughly the same fashion my whole life. I go by my mood. If I’m in the mood for suspense, I browse suspense, and pick up the book that sounds the most interesting. Same with other moods and genres. I make my decisions based on stories I think I will enjoy.
Only a handful of times have I enjoyed an author’s work, and then made note to try something else by them. Each fiction is such a self-contained universe to me, that I give little though to the creator of that universe when I’m done. Even when I want to look more into an author’s work, I usually wait a while before I so do.
If someone says, “I read Grisham,” that opens a solid door in conversation. “Have you read his latest?” Or, “Me too, my favorite is…” I, however, have in the last ten years or so read books by about 30 different people, and been a repeat customer only a few times. I have to look up who wrote the book I want to mention in such a conversation much of the time.
Maybe I’m just afraid of narrowing my scope. I read slower than most people, after all, and if I commit to reading all/most of an author’s opus once I like one of their books, I could be on that authors for quite some time, depending.
That could be a good thing, though, I suppose. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter much at all. Maybe there is nothing odd or hypocritical about an author not paying much attention to other authors.
Then, as with so much, I may be overthinking all of this.
“Dude thinks I wrote Old Man and the Sea. I didn’t correct him.
Still, this year may be the year to dive back into some author’s I have enjoyed previously. I already have a long epic on my shelf written by the same person who wrote a different epic I enjoyed years ago. (I don’t read epics much.)
Do you have favorite authors that you follow, no matter what their latest is about?
Diversity in Fiction
Appropriate on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day that I offer some thoughts on diversity, in this case in the fiction world.
Let me open by saying that in no way does the level of diversity in fiction these days compare with the importance of Dr. King’s mission and the Civil Rights Movement. There are plenty of issues facing minorities even today that are more urgent than the documented “whiteness” of literature, the publishing industry, Hollywood, and so on.
Still, on this day, in addition to human and civil rights of all minorities, I also ponder visibility and access and influence of same in the arts.
Yet this isn’t an academic exploration of the topic. Searching online for phrases such as “diversity in literature” or “diversity in the publishing industry” will, I have no doubt, take you to multiple reputable sources on the subject, that will demonstrate how despite progress, such arenas in this country are still disproportionately influenced by Caucasians. They can site sources and studies and everything the professor in you loves.
Rather, this post is about a question I’m posing to myself. Do I personally contribute, as an author and a reader, to a lack of diversity in fiction?
Not intentionally, of course, and I would hope you would believe that. But do I do it subconsciously?
Let’s start with my own fiction. Going over all the stories and novels I’ve completed, I’ve estimated that about 85-90% of my characters were written with no race in mind. That is to say in most cases, there is to me nothing in the world that prevents most of my characters from being seen as at least a racial minority, and in many cases a sexuality-minority. Because most of my fiction to date has not dealt specifically with issues pertaining exclusively to folks of a particular minority, I’ve not put in specific efforts to highlight race. I see my characters in my mind when I write, but that doesn’t mean a reader is expected to see them the same way. I see no reason on the surface why Matt from Flowers of Dionysus needs to be white. I certainly designed no such reasons.
The key word here being “designed.” So the question becomes if I have made Matt or any of my characters “white by default.” Do my characters speak, eat, work in ways that would somehow make them highly unlikely to be a minority? (Or at least, not a realistic one?)
In general, though I can understand the question, I still don’t think so. I don’t tend to believe in such things as “he talks like a black guy.” This is a stereotype to me that I absolutely want no parts of. Many environmental factors go into the more well known vernacular of any given person, other than their race. I will perhaps cop to the notion that most of my fiction takes place in the type of situations or settings that breed certain life or speaking styles, but I bristle at the notion that my fiction is “white.”
Fiction directed toward the specific struggles and perceptions of minorities does exist, and must exist. We need more of it, in fact. The lack of a specific demographic in most of my fiction is not my way of dismissing minority issues. Rather my particular fiction usually doesn’t address those issues, and indeed I do not think I’m qualified at this time to explore most such issues in the emotional detail and authenticity they deserve. Should I decide to write such a work in the future, much research would have to come first. (There is a difference between my intellectual understanding and awareness of an issue facing a minority, and my ability to portray it through my fictional characters with any degree of sincerity.)
My hope is that for my “color blind” characterizations, there is nothing overtly ridiculous, nothing that flies in the face of a serious minority issue, or denies it’s existence simply because I am not writing about it. I don’t feel I am guilty of this, but I would accept thoughts on the subject from readers of my fiction.
Speaking of readers, what about my life as a reader? Do I impede diversity by patronizing only Caucasian authors that write Caucasian stories for Caucasian readers?
Once again, I obviously don’t do this on purpose.
A quick overview of my Goodreads list indicates that I do read work by women quite often. (Most of my non-fiction is by women authors for some reason.) Most of the authors do seem to be Caucasian, and that may mean that on a subconscious level, I am somehow “detecting fellow whiteness” when I read about the plot of a book. I won’t dismiss the idea completely. Yet unless there’s a picture of the author on the back of a book I pick up to read, I often have no idea what they look like. I’m one of those odd people that goes all over the place chasing fiction to read. I look for keywords and concepts, tone and nature of plot. Thus far I don’t often go looking for work by a specific author. I actually don’t even read the “about the author” section of most fiction I read.
So if a Muslim woman from Africa wrote a novel that sounded appealing to me, I would pick it up.
But what about a novel about a Muslim woman from Africa?
I’ve read books with women as protagonists, as well as African-Americans, and Muslims. Again, if the plot description intrigues me, I will read, and some plot descriptions about minorities have done so. However, (and I don’t know what it may mean) a quick scan of my book list from the last several years indicates more of the protagonists in the books I read are Caucasian. Again, I suppose this could in fact be a subconscious tuning-in to “fellow whiteness.” I think I’m probably better than that, but I won’t assume my own perfection here.
I don’t think it can be ignored, however, that walking into any standard library of bookstore, one is quickly surrounded by books written by Caucasians, more so than those of minorities. One can sling a dead cat in a book store and usually hit a book by a Caucasian author. It’s an ocean in which it is quite easy to swim, and therefore the sample size to which I’ve been exposed I think would make it easier to by hooked by such books written by such authors. Greater opportunity.
The final question is, could I make the effort to intentionally seek out fiction by/about minority people? The answer is less ambiguous this time; yes.
This is not to say I avoid them now. Still, as I said, if I spend an hour looking at potential reads in a library, I am statistically more likely to happen across “Caucasian” books as part of my sampling than I am any other race. If, however, I state the intention to read more novels by minority authors, I am then certain to at least be exposed to more of them, because I am looking for them. Instead of looking for a good read, I’m looking for a good read written by or about minorities. The book I choose could still suck, but I’d be making an effort to at least not look like I’m homing in on one particular race. (Or sexuality, or class or creed or religion, and so forth.)
The overwhelmingly “white” nature of fantasy fiction makes me think I might start there, as fantasy with a more ethnic component is very slowly starting to emerge. I’ve not been a fan of fantasy that I’ve read in most cases. Perhaps that could change…
But fantasy or not, I will change some of my searching from now on. I will in fact always be “does it sound interesting?” reader first, with all other things second. I’ll probably always read more “color blind” stories like my own (?) more often than not. But on this day, and in the future, I can do better with intent.
So in the end, I will say I am probably not biased on a subconscious level when it comes to fiction, but leave open the possibility that I sometimes am, if a different view were presented. I also find myself mostly not-guilty of seeking out “white things” to read. I find myself somewhat lacking in my intentional search for minority fiction.
What about you? How’s your taste in diversity?
Duotrope
I finally joined. At least I’ll check it out for a few months.
For those who don’t know, Duotrope is a sort of searchable database for writers. With it, one can search for magazines and journals and such that most match, in tone, style and length, the sort of piece one has written. A writer can than submit their piece to that (hopefully) good match.
I’ve only joined this week, even though thousands of authors have used it for years. I’ve played around with the search engine, and so far it seems it will be useful.
It’s five dollars a month, and I admit I had put off joining the site several times over the last few years because of that. After all, I thought, isn’t Duotrope just doing what I myself could do for free? Namely, search the internet for information about places that seem to be looking for the type of work I’ve written.
The answer is, yes. There is no information, as far as I can tell, that Duotrope provides members that one couldn’t with enough time and searching find on one’s own. But for me, I decided that would take a lot of time. Possibly as much as twice the amount of time, as simply using an existing, searchable database. The time I save searching for possible matches on my own can be used to review and read excerpts from the publications I’ve found. (To see if my work really is a good match.) More time also on the actual submitting. And of course, more actual writing time.
I could grill my own steak, after all, and once in a while, I do. But I’m willing more often to pay someone to do it for me, in an establishment suited to the purpose. I feel no guilt in doing so either. They can do it better than I could anyway. Why should a search for magazine be any different? It will certainly cost less than a steak.
The site will probably be even more useful if I lightly study some genre definitions. I confess that on their search engine, there were a few genres and subgenres of fiction I had never heard of before. I have no idea what such genres entail. For all I know, some of my stuff falls into said categories.
Which brings up another issue. Unless it’s obvious, as some of my stories are, I’m not adept at determining what genre one of my pieces falls into. Not to say that they aren’t classifiable, rather that I myself don’t always know how to do so. (Though I also think a few of my stories are genre-bending.) If I find out along the way using the site that many of my stories fall into, say, “angel tear fiction,” I’ll be better able to describe it in other contexts as well. (By the way, as far as I know, “angel tear fiction” is a subgenre I completely invented just now to make a point.)
So hopefully I’ll get some good leads.
Do any of you use Duotrope? Has it helped you?
Ty Unglebower 