Not long ago I listed some pieces of fiction that I have coming out. Two of those pieces have now been mentioned in online reviews, here and here. The two reviews are not entirely unfavourable, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to be churlish about them.
I suppose there can be something a little pathetic about making reply to reviews of your work that you don't happen to like. I do agree with Dazai Osamu that there's really no point in trying to explain one's work to someone who doesn't like it. You can't say, "Well, you should like it." It just doesn't work like that. The two reviewers also seem to be in agreement about the quality of my prose, so I suppose you could say they are being even-handed. However, if I feel justified responding, it's probably for two reasons. The first of these is that I could write better reviews in a coma. And I shall (well, perhaps not while I'm in a coma, but I shall write better reviews). I think that a review should be a good read in itself if we are to take the opinions expressed even vaguely seriously.
The second reason is that both reviews seem to be in agreement that my weakness is a lack of plot. Apart from anything else, in the case of 'The Fairy Killer', I don't actually agree, but, being personally close to that work, I'm not going to argue the point. More importantly, this is something that I've encountered before and wanted to address because it's really beginning to get on my tits. This criticism is the equivalent of saying that Mervyn Peake is not realistic enough, or that Leonard Cohen is okay, but he just doesn't know how to play a kick-ass guitar. If I were trying and failing to write a conventional plot then it might be a valid criticism, but – here's the point – I'M NOT. To quote Lou Reed, if 'plot' is that important to you, then you're still doing things that I gave up years ago. LIFE HAS NO PLOT, or not one that would be recognised as such by a Hollywood scriptwriter. I don't actually think that I have jettisoned plot, any more than an impressionistic painter has jettisoned representation of form, but I'm doing something different with it that probably isn't recognised as plot. Fine, let's not call it plot. In that case, what you call plot bores me. I am not even attempting to play by your rules. If I am failing according to the rules I have set myself that's a different matter, and perhaps I am. But please don't lazily talk about lack of plot without even questioning – as I have – what plot actually is.
So, just in case anyone who has read my work and found it plotless is reading this too, if you even give a damn (enough of a damn to write a review, for instance), I would suggest you first widen your horizons by reading Nagai Kafu's A Strange Tale from East of the River, the works of Bruno Schulz, Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human, La-Bas by J-K Huysmans, anything by Denton Welch… I could go on. If you read these and find them disappointingly plotless, maybe it will start to dawn on you that some people like it this way, even if you don't, and that losing the plot is not necessarily failure.
Standback writes:
I haven’t read your work, but I’ve certainly read many other pieces that can be described as lacking a plot, or free from one, depending on one’s literary preferences. I’m personally on the pro-plot side of the divide, but as you say, I appreciate that many other readers enjoy precisely the unconstrained, perhaps more poetical nature of plotless writing. So I agree with you entirely that it is a mistake to discount stories solely on the basis of lack of plot; wonderful fiction can and has been written this way, and it certainly deserves to be recognized.There’s a ‘but’ here. (You see, random commenters get to be churlish too :P)In my opinion and experience, a story without a plot starts with a serious strike against it. This isn’t a matter of preference; it’s the simple observation that plot is an amazingly powerful tool for encouraging suspense, excitement, *interest* in the story itself. You *could* build a house entirely out of flower blossoms, and it may well be beautiful, but you’ve got to admit it’s a hell of a lot harder than just using some bricks. If you forego plot, or marginalize it, you’re going to have to squeeze some other element into a self-contained *experience* that the reader can enjoy and appreciate. Not that your post says otherwise, but it should be fairly clear that while a plot doesn’t make a story “good” or the lack thereof “bad,” neither is it true that a plotless story is “better” than one that has more plot. A story can be considered and reviewed by the experience, emotions and ideas that it provokes – not on the presence or absence of the one particular merit of “plot” or “plotless.”Which brings me to my next point. The following is, of course, wholly subjective opinion, but hey, the preceding is too, so no worries. My next point being: while good plotless is just as good as good plot-ful, there is a somewhat justified sense that *bad* plotless is often worse than bad plot-ful. Because a plot-ful flop tends to elict a sense of “huh, well that kind of sucked,” whereas a plot-less flop will generally get a response more along the lines of “huh?” and “WTF?”. The plotless story, *when unsuccessful*, is opaque and frustrating – and that’s something that will earn plotless a lot of scorn. To this, add that it’s easy to erronously consider plotless easier – i.e., lazier – than plot-ful, because, hey! you don’t need to come up with a whole PLOT, right? Again, this is an unpardonable misconception if it comes from a reviewer reading a plotless piece. But on the other hand, it’s also an unpardonable misconception if it comes from the guy actually writing the story. If I, as a reader, cannot figure out what’s meant by a plotless story, either my understanding is very poor, or the communication of the meaning is very poor, or there is really no meaning to look for. If you’ll allow me the slight conceit of being capable of a reasonable amount of understanding on a fair portion of plotless stories, that leaves an awful lot of stories I’ve read which need to be accounted for by one of the other two explanations.Again, let me say I’ve not read anything of yours personally; I’m responding in a general manner to the general opinion you expressed in your post. I’m not sure to what extent we actually disagree, but I did want to speak up a bit in defense of “traditional,” plot-ful stories, and justify some (but only some!) of the criticism and dislike plotless often suffers.Cheers!–Ziv
Hello. Thanks for commenting. Just about to go to bed, but will answer at reasonable length later.
To attempt an answer to your comments, which sound fair enough to me, even if I don’t necessarily share your views, I think that I wouldn’t be on either side of the plot/no-plot divide if some people had not created a divide in the first place by complaining pointlessly about this or that story that it doesn’t have a plot. What they are generally complaining about (in most cases of which I’m aware) is that the plot doesn’t fit into whatever narrow formula they happen to favour. I think you’d find it difficult (not impossible, but difficult nonetheless) to find a reader more omnivorous than myself. It’s really only since getting involved with publishing to some extent, and having the world of reading and writing no longer such a private thing, that I discover how disgustingly beholden so many people are to one particular type of story, beyond which they will not dare to venture. As a reader, I used to love the genres – horror, fantasy, anything really. Since discoverng the tribalism of those genres, unfortunately I have come to despise them. Horror readers who refuse to read science fiction, science fiction readers who scoff at fantasy. Etc. The great shame is that, as a writer, as anyone trying to do something creative, you often need the support of these tribes, for which they demand a kind of narrow and exclusive loyalty. Well, I’m not loyal to any of them. Similarly, I’m not loyal to narrow ideas about what a plot should be.I know very well what they mean by plot – the hero has a goal, and there are obstacles between hero and goal creating the tension of ‘plot’. The ideal of this type of plot is to have an arc of suspense that peaks not in the middle, but towards the end, and for the major arc to be composed entirely of minor arcs. Such a format might be likened in some ways to the artistic discipline of drawing from life, in that it’s helpful to master such a skill before going on to do other things. I’m certainly still learning as a writer, but I have been doing so for many years now. I have actually consciously put myself through the training of writing what people think of as stories instead of the very impressionistic work to which I was for a long time inclined. I did this because I recognised the value of discipline. In fact, I have come to favour a fairly disciplined style of writing (although, I also realised that the result is probably not what many would associate with the word ‘discipline’, since it’s not this staccato gallop towards the story’s finishing line that is so popular). My general method of writing, to which there are, these days, few exceptions, is to plot the whole thing out carefully in advance. After making sufficient notes, I will actually number and write out the main plot points. Both the stories written above were written in this manner. It doesn’t surprise me that ‘A Cup of Tea’ was seen as plotless, because it doesn’t have any knife fights, or car chases or people being kidnapped or anything, but I plotted it with the strictness that I would use for writing an essay. Let’s say A+B+C=D is the form of an essay. If any one of the logical points A, B and C are missing, you can’t reach your conclusion D. I always make sure that I’m not writing A+C=D, but have the full complement of points marshalled before me. The reader is certainly not obliged to like what I produce, but I just get annoyed – as a reader and a writer – when that dislike seems to be based on particularly lazy prejudices, or unexamined prejudices.Anyway, I don’t object to stories having a plot. I even like ‘page-turning’ stories. What I object to is when conflict-and-resolution-arc is seen as the only viable way of writing a story. I am, in fact, an advocate of great variety. As a writer I have my limitations and my tendencies (which may be seen positively or negatively) just as I do as a person. I suppose my tendency is to write stories not with the aim of making a page-turner (though I have done that), but for people to dream over. It seems to me that, with the advent of cinema, which has, after all, been around for some time now, that a lot of the pressure should be off literature now to provide ‘action’ stories. Cinema should have freed us to make a greater exploration in fiction of all the things that cinema can’t do. It seems a bit… strange to me to insist that written stories conform to models of cinematic pacing and suspense. Hmmm. Well, I hope that makes some of what I was attempting to say a little clearer.Anyway, thanks for dropping by. Comments are generally welcome. And now for breakfast…
Peter A Leonard writes:
Fred Allen claimed: “ If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now.” Sadly critics abound – their proliferation aided and abetted by the internet. Good critics, unfortunately, are as rare as the doppelsauger of northern Germany. Professional literary critics are, more often than not, frustrated writers – those individuals who, lacking in ability or creativity or originality themselves, turn instead to the criticism of the work of others. Often, their inability to truly comprehend the aims and meaning behind a particular author’s work/s leads them to write a flawed review or, as often proves to be the case, an absurd review. This is increasingly so with reviews offered up by genre “fans” who more often than not lack the depth of vision to see beyond the mundane and the obvious. God help the writer who displays the least originality. To be successful they must shovel up the same old pooh as those BIG names in whatever genre the “fan” is active in (they’re probably his or her heroes, anyway). One can only turn to Hunter S Thompson who said: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”RegardsPeter
Hello. Thanks. I will answer this, but not just yet.
Hello Peter.There’s actually a great deal I could write on this subject in response to your comments, much of it informed by a book I’m currently reading about the aesthetics of traditional Chinese painting, with which I am greatly in sympathy. However, unfortunately my time is very limited at present, for a number of reasons, so I shall simply reproduce here a recent exchange I had with a friend on the telephone and hope that it has some bearing on the subject, and that she doesn’t mind:Her: So what kind of story is it you’re writing at the moment, what genre?Me: Well, you know, that’s difficult. It’s supernatural, I suppose, but it’s not like Stephen King or anything.Her: I see.Me: I suppose it’s a bit highbrow or something.Her: Highbrow?Me: Yes, I don’t know. Something like that. I seem to getting more and more highbrow in what I write. Or literary or something.Her: Yes, I know what you mean.Me: Yes, you know, poncey.Her: Ah yes, poncey! That’s the word!Me: Yes. That’s it.Her: Well that’s good, though, anyway.Me: Why?Her: Because, well, it would be bad if you were going the opposite way. This way you’re being yourself.Me: And going against the current of the times, maybe.Her: Well, yes, maybe.Me: You know, it always surprises me how few people there are who like poncey things.Her: Yes, that surprises me, too. Constantly. It’s always disappointing to discover how un-poncey people’s tastes are. Anyway, that was the general gist of the conversation, though it’s not verbatim. It does surprise me that my tastes are not those of a man with his finger on the pulse of the nation or some rubbish like that. I mean, people are weirded out so easily it makes me sigh. Still, the reason I don’t have my pulse on the zeitgeisty vein of the people is because I’m way ahead of my time… I tell myself.