A Timely Lesson in Skimming
Let’s get ready to ramble!!
I read a whole bunch of books on holiday. But what the hell
do I mean when I say I “read” a book? Do I mean page 1, 2, 3, through to last
page? Looking through this year’s selection, I’d say that’s true of a third of
the things I read, if that. A much higher chance if the thing was short, with a
next-to-none category for anything above 400 pages.
Books above 400 pages exist. Lots of them. I’m not sure that
they should. In Oslo I was wandering around a “friki” shop (for frikis) called
Outland, which has this massive sci-fi/ fantasy selection of books in English,
and I kept picking up the biggest books I could find, in awe that any one
person could maintain a single narrative over so many pages. But whether or not
a lengthy book exists and hence implicitly claims that the writer has the
ability to captivate you for the full length, I’m not sure that more than 5
people who ever existed really can.
I first started writing at 22, having always thought of
myself as a big reader. But when I added it up on Goodreads, I’d read 85 books
my entire life up to that point (Leo Silverblatt lawl.) So I sped up. I
justified the act of writing after the fact, and I did what 22 year-olds do: I
collected knowledge for the sole purpose of letting people know what I knew.
Information joy was simply a plus, not the pursuit. In order to do this
successfully, I had to push myself to read every word of Ulysses, of Gravity’s
Rainbow, of The Recognitions, of Infinite Jest, of The Divine Comedy, of
Finnegans fucking Wake.
Impressive? Stupid.
What self-respecting adult- nay: writer!- abuses their spare
time that much simply to earn the adoration of others?
What are you supposed to do? Not that.
What’s true of all the above books is I enjoyed parts. Huge
chunks. More than half, but definitely not all. As a reader, insisting on
reading each word meant I had less fun. Deconstruction is important, but
visceral response is the thing that time and again bestellers say they tried to
evoke (Donna Tartt, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and like, other ones), in which
case they should unashamedly allow prose to fly and leave its structural
intricacies alone- only feel. (This seems like the topic of Patton Oswalt’s new
book: http://www.avclub.com/review/patton-oswalts-memoir-details-risks-and-rewards-fi-213268
)
As a writer, I wasn’t trying to tell a story; I was trying
to prove a point, the point being that I am qualified to tell a story. Where
has any creative writing class ever advocated that? “Remember to unsubtly
remind the reader that you have shit to say. Take those chips off your shoulder
and launch them at the keyboard. Now press ‘print.’” Bullshit. As I’ve said
before: the only way you can convince someone you are capable of writing a good
story is by writing a good story. No one can tell you 100% how to do that. That
being the case, nothing is a guarantee. If nothing is a guarantee, you cannot
claim to be a good writer simply through self-inflicted endurances. Nothing can
de facto make you a writer. You will be known as a good writer if you write
something good. Hey: reading a lot is a good idea. Writing a lot is a good idea.
But no matter you who are, nothing can protect your material from skepticism.
I thought, ‘If I really read all the words in these books, I
will have endured tougher tasks than many other writers, thus I will lead the
pack.’ But I now know the following is true: no fun for the writer, no fun for
the reader. Because it seemed that what I wanted to emulate in my writing was simply
the difficulty in difficult texts. Rather than respecting the complexity a
given story required, I would purposefully make my work difficult such that if
a reader didn’t enjoy the story, they could at least appreciate that I was a
good writer (is that a possible combination of reactions?) I thought I could
get away with it without spilling, without being passionate, without giving
away part of myself. And what I failed to see was that these properties made
Joyce/Pynchon/Foster Wallace et al great. If anything, their penchant to
overcomplexify hindered the greatness of their texts. But I invented multifold
reasons why I was exempt from doing that scary thing: writing good fiction.
It felt like unless I did some penance, unless my head hurt
or I sacrificed something- something fun- I could not call myself a writer. None
of these things are a pre-requisite for writers, although many are common. “Ding
ding ding!” You should hear. “So is most shit I should avoid!”
Times have changed. On holiday, I read:
-
The Diamond Age: this is great fun! What a cool
world. What awesome dialogue. Hang on: a lot of this has nothing to do with the
story. Skipping the parallel fairytale story, lost interest in second half,
read the last chapter. I’d say I read 55% of its content.
-
Wool: baggy. So many words say nothing. The
protagonist’s characterisation was that she was female + the ol’ tic-tac-death
of one or more parents (I think? I don’t even remember): with that, I was dared
not to give a shit. Challenge accepted! Made it halfway through, then read only
the dialogue, skipped 150 or so pages and just read the last chapter. Maybe 55%
of its content.
-
The Time Machine: became obviously standard good
versus evil. Don’t even have to read the end because the story is told by the
time traveler at a dinner party, so I know he got home safe. There was a cool
bit about giant crabs and human fate at the end. Other characters whatever. 60%
-
Dracula: Read the first narrator’s bit until all
the letters-to-beloved came in. Turned out Dracula was a vampire. Where’s Van
Helsing? Skim skim skim. It says Van Helsing! Something about some other
patient. Here we have exposition that explains conversion to a vampire. Even if
this is the origin of the trope, we still all know what happens. Skim, skim,
skim. Van Helsing’s the one who kills Dracula, so let’s get to where he goes to
the castle. Skim, skim. They got him. 35%
-
The City and The Stars. Very cool first 100
pages. Lots of telling me emotions a la Wool. 45% If your whole story is one
guy discovering stuff about the world he lives in, there should be not a single
inclusion of a fact that is not discovered by him. The 3rd person
narrator knows more than the protagonist does? It completely invalidates that mode
of storytelling, as the narrator could surely tell us everything about the
world without the need for one guy to discover it. What I mean is: Greg read on
the laptop some secret email that suggested the cult had meetings for over a
million years. Could it be true, he wondered? Fuck it: sure it was. Greg doesn’t
have evidence for that, but I do because I’m writing the story: it was totally
true.
Of course no such cheap exposition was that on-the-nose, but by extrapolating
the technique of revealing information about the story’s universe whenever it
is seen as convenient by the writer, we see why we just can’t do that, as much
as we might want to. Although frankly, we shouldn’t even want to, because it
undoes all the good mysterious journey crafting work we do. If Greg hasn’t
discovered enough evidence of the millions-of-years-old cult, the narrator
needs to keep his mouth shut.
Why should I care about every sentence in a book when the
writer has not applied his care and skill sentence-by-sentence? Why should
sub-par material be imposed upon us, and why should we have to feel lazy for
not reading it when it is the laziness of the prose, the poor set up, the
pointlessly dry endurance test, that prevents us from doing so?
I also discovered that I don’t care about endings. Once you
reach that set of YES/NO conclusions at the end, the results seem totally
arbitrary in all but a handful of cases, such as in Whiplash or The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle- simply because when you’ve seen a character overcome such
hardship in order to succeed, they just have to! I find it incredibly rare that
an author has crafted a story where the ending really matters. HARRY POTTER
SPOILERS (really?): does it really matter that Snape dies or that Harry
succeeds? Wasn’t the journey that much more fun? No matter where the narrative
stops, the only true ending to most stories is that everyone dies- or in the
Twilight saga’s case, that you wish everyone did.
This is a Carrie Bradshaw line, is it not? “I couldn’t help
but wonder: what happens after ‘Happily ever after’?” According to the White
Dwarf Research Corporation: “About 5 billion years from now, the hydrogen fuel
in the center of the Sun will begin to run out and the helium that has
collected there will begin to gravitationally contract, increasing the rate of
hydrogen burning in a shell surrounding the core. Our star will slowly bloat
into a red giant – eventually engulfing the inner planets, including the
Earth.” Some time in those 5 billion years, he may well buy you that diamond-
but it seems so much less important in perspective, doesn’t it? :D
One of my favourite novels is Natsuo Kirino’s Out. I couldn’t
wait to read the whole thing. I stayed up to read the ending, and that night, I
dreamt I was the main character, and I also dreamt up some completely different
ending to the story. I had just as much creative ability as a 19 year-old to
end the story as Kirino did. By the end, all that’s left to imagine is the dregs
of story threads: tie them every which way- who cares? What I mean is, every
obstacle has been overcome, and now we’re at the final showdown. If you’re
Chekhov, you just stop there! If you’re Dickens, you do the showdown then you ramble
on for about 50 more pages while your main character says bye to everyone. I
once helped one of my friends to the airport and she was like ‘BYE LAMP POST!
BYE TREES! BYE LITTLE DOGGY!’ On and on and on. Whoever thinks that’s cool has
less than half their anticipated charming quotient. Anyways, when I woke up, I
couldn’t remember which ending to Out I’d read and which I’d invented. And I
didn’t care! A few years later I read it again in Spanish for practice, and it’s
still enjoyable second time around, but seriously: I don’t know how that book
ends, and I could not give less of a shit! 5*!!
Short stories make me anxious if they are the
totally-pared-down variety that ensure the importance of every word they
contain. Can you tell? These posts are a total mess! :D On holiday was the
same: it wasn’t until the very evening I left Greece that I let the week’s
cumulative joy find me: the whole time the jury was out over whether or not I
would have a nice time and not spend too much money. Every event and location
held the ability to reverse the rest of the duration’s success. Only when it
was over could I enjoy it in retrospect. Don’t compressed stories make you feel
that way? The lesson here is not to take Camus to the beach. Similarly, I can
only enjoy short stories in retrospect, once I’m sure I paid attention to the
full thing and the hit was delivered.
Thing is, none of the above sounds like an acceptable way to
enjoy a holiday, a novel, a short story. But I submit to the great weirdness. It’s
all gone on long enough for me to conclude that this is how I enjoy things;
this is my method. Find your way of reading and writing: enjoy it without question.
You’ll write something worth reading when you write something you would want to
read, no matter what it contains or doesn’t. The more you take issue with other
novels, the more you will diverge your writing style away from those styles.
The more you find material you don’t want to read, the more you’ll exclude that
kind of material. If I don’t care about a book’s ending, or even remember it,
maybe I’ll write a book with no ending at all. How could I write an ending
authentically if I don’t care about it? And if the neatness of fully compressed
short stories makes me nervous, I’ll write the kind of short story I’d like to
read, whatever that is.
Before I would have considered the above advice deplorable.
But there is no pre-requisite how-to:
-
Learn an artist’s craft. Iron-clad artistic
process? Should you read, write, work hard all the time or be idle for long
stretches? Chances are, your innate artistic rhythm is so specific, so different
from anyone else’s that by the time you’ve honed it you have next to no advice
for me or others! How great that would be: you get to act like you’re being
helpful, but the competition doesn’t even notice that you’re not at all being
helpful. You’re just wasting everyone’s time. If you’re into that- I know it’s
very popular these days ;)
-
Behave as an artist. Enjoy or don’t enjoy your work,
discuss Dostoyevsky or Pokemon, touch yourself constantly or never- fuck knows.
If you ask me, doing something as esoteric and apparently- by which I mean
appears-to-be- next-to-pointless as writing fiction doesn’t sound like the kind
of thing you should do while complaining about how tough it is. Well why don’t
you learn a fucking trade, then? I’ll show you impactful: repair a boiler. Did
the boiler work before? No? Does it now? Yes. Bra-fucking-vo, you’ve made a
difference. If that was really your prime concern, trust me: writing fiction is
the last thing you’d be spending your time on. If you want to spend your time
doing something you hate that you’re never sure is making a difference or not,
go launch potatoes into a black hole or something. Fiction is to be enjoyed
(and my kind of enjoyment requires ample skimmage.) In my honest opinion- but
far be it from me to take away a good excuse to whine.
-
Appreciate and study the work of other artists.
Pore over every word, or don’t even read any? Will Self doesn’t read fiction-
or so he claims. Fellini said that he made films so passionately that he simply
couldn’t watch the films of others- or so he claimed. You see? No one’s even
saying you have to be honest about it.
My own choices leave me in a paradox: if a novelist does not
respect brevity, I will skim. If a short story writer is too adherent to
compression, I’ll get frustrated. Just rest assured that whatever I’m reading,
I’m not completely happy with it. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just that nothing is
perfect and so we should expect the natural progression of our fun to be
patchy.
I’ve read a number of indie things now, and there’s one form
of nervousness I’ve encountered consistently: the author will claim to enjoy
Kafka, to understand Infinite Jest or The Recognitions, may even reference
these and the most obscure texts you’ve never heard of (call it “pulling a
younger Leo”- pleeeeeenty of people have done.) But their prose is pure Stephen
King. Try as they might to obscurify, they were snagged, ensnared, enchanted by
one guy and one guy only. (The dirty sellouts! Jk. Each2DareOwn.) He’s surely
flattered, but I’m not sure I know of any fan of his or otherwise who would
claim there were not enough Stephen King books in the world. As a writer, not
being completely enraptured by the prose of one single guy or gal is a total
gift. I think the best case scenario for any of us is that we become the brief
obsessive phase of a handful of folk, before they find someone else- but by
that point, hopefully someone else has found you: you stay afloat overall, but
not in a single consciousness.
Literary omnivorism sends you down the path of mongrelism. You
take the cerebral nature of David Foster Wallace and you leave behind his
masturbatory word counts; you use the knowingly crass and childish joy of a
John Waters film without spreading your satire as thinly; you attempt the kind
of honest surrealism that comes from the absolute submission to intuition’s
guide by writing down whatever image or event it tells you to, in the spirit
that produced the films of Jodorowsky, that explains Bergman’s enigmatic
reasons for writing his films (that are not far off “I had a bit of a cold and
my cat was missing: this became The Seventh Seal”), or Murakami’s quest to sit
at the bottom of a well (huh?) but maybe you don’t quite hit the mark because
you’re not comfortable with the meaning of your story being so obscure- because
you’re 26 and have taken exactly 0 mg of peyote.
The most important thing is that you embrace your
dissatisfaction. You pick and choose the best parts of your favourites, minus
what you wouldn’t have done. Complain! Skip! Throw books out your window, tear
down the towering talents of your idols with a lazy shake of the hand, and please:
leave the unwavering doe-eyed adulation to your fans.
��Ye�’
