This World Like a Knife

Last Post

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 21:38:00 +0000

All good things must come to an end, or be renewed. Time and technology have rendered this blog site rather obsolete, so from now on I'll be posting news and updates on my blog at dereknikitas.com.

Please stop by there soon.

Oh, and my new novel, EXTRA LIFE, will be released on October 13th, 2015!

What Went Wrong with Last Night's Game of Thrones?

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 18 May 2015 14:38:00 +0000

Spoilers, obviously.

There’s been a bit of an internet uproar about last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken,” especially in regards to the last few minutes after Sansa Stark and Ramsay Bolton’s wedding (though there are also problems with the hasty treatment of the Dorne storyline and the inexplicable re-emergence of Jaime’s fighting prowess).

Some viewers lament how the showrunners have deviated from George R. R. Martin’s original novels, but now that the show has outpaced the books in several story lines, deviations are to be expected. It’s a matter of the quality of the deviations, and whether they adhere to the spirit of the books, and, by extension, previous seasons of the television show.

Other viewers lament the sexual brutality of the scene, and this concern is far more important, far more worthy of discussion. Certainly there are serious issues about agency and the treatment of women, of using rape as a plot point.

I’m going to discuss storytelling technique, but I’ll admit that what I have to say is trivial compared to these concerns. Hopefully, though, I’ll get around to saying something useful about the ethics of this episode’s storytelling, which are inextricably linked to the technique.

Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire universe is loaded with brutality and ugly turns of fate. His storytelling tests the limits of how often our hopes about his characters can be dashed before we lose all faith. Certainly, Martin has to keep a careful balance between shocking us with setbacks for heroes and maintaining a sense of hope. If we lose the latter, we’ll get the sense that there is no moral core to this universe, and the structural integrity of his fantasy world would crumble.

If the fictional world is meaningless and arbitrary, we disconnect.

Martin’s high-fantasy world is innovative because the moral rules are not simple dark/light, good/evil. His work is a brilliant exploration of moral paradoxes, of pulling the reader in several directions at once, of defamilarizing our judgment. His shocking plot points may be brutal, but they’re also deliciously ironic and paradoxical on a moral level. We hate what they do, but we love way they say.

His plot points—such as the loss of Jamie’s hand, which I discuss in a previous post—are full of resonating layers of meaning. Even when the death of the Red Viper dashes our hope, we can see that it is a morally meaningful plot point. On the simplest level, we understand that the Red Viper can’t win a decisive victory against the Mountain because Tyrion has already previously won a trial-by-combat in the Eyrie using Bronn as his champion.

He can’t do it again, if for no other reason than because the fatalism in Martin’s world won’t allow for the same moral note to be struck twice in exactly the same way. In a morally arbitrary world like our own real world, the same damn thing can happen over and over. It’s exactly that kind of arbitrariness that we resist in fiction.

So now we come to Ramsay’s rape of Sansa, with Theon in attendance. This moment was never written by Martin. Like many other Game of Thrones moments, it’s brutal, but unlike many other Game of Thrones moments, the brutality is morally meaningless. Unlike, say, the Red Wedding, when we feel a simultaneous dismay and paradoxical knowingness about Robb Starks’s hubris, we feel only dismay for Sansa and her treatment by Ramsay.

I’ve been interested in Sansa’s character arc from the start, as she’s evolved from a bright-eyed and rather snotty dreamer to a victim to a shrewd mistress of her own fate. Or, at least, she’s been headed toward that latter category. It’s been deliciously ironic that her progress as a character has been largely based on the tutelage of Littlefinger, a villain her mother deeply distrusted. Furthermore, it’s been wonderful to see (or at least suspect) that Littlefinger’s perfect political calculations may be endangered by his emotional attachment to a helpless young lady. He would be her deliverance, and she would be his undoing. There’s a wonderful elegance in that.

Sansa begins as a naïve young lady betrothed to a handsome prince. She consents, but has no understanding or agency in her consent. The irony is that the prince is a brutal monster. Once she realizes this fact, it’s too late, and we fear that she will be victimized by him. Indeed, he tries to sexually victimize her, but at least she’s spared a wedding night with him (and, furthermore, she’s allowed to have an unwilling hand in Joffrey’s death, and she’s blamed for it, too).

Her next forced betrothal, this time to Tyrion, is the perfect ironic contrast to the first. Tyrion is a “monster” on the outside, but because he is a (complicatedly) moral creature at heart, she never has to suffer nonconsensual sex with him. Her marriage to Tyrion is also the beginning of her path to political shrewdness. She’s the only Stark left inside the political arena, the only one still playing the “Game of Thrones.”

What, then, is Sansa’s marriage to Ramsay? In terms of moral resonance, the story was headed in the right direction, even as it deviated from Martin’s books. This time, Sansa is willingly undertaking this marriage, or at least she thinks she is, and the fact that she doesn’t realize she’s being manipulated by Littlefinger is a part of her character flaw. She’s only had to deal with outwardly monstrous villains.

This time, Sansa is shrewd and in control, and she’s out for vengeance with her black-dyed hair.

But then it all gets literally washed away. Sansa’s agency is stolen from her, and she is raped. This plot point grossly and clumsily reiterates her betrothal to Joffrey. Ramsey is the same kind of monster, and Sansa is the same kind of victim, and the only difference this time is that Sansa’s being put through the exact sexual torture Joffrey put her through. It is merely intensified, not changed.

Furthermore, in the beginning of the story, Sansa’s virginity was a political playing piece that other characters used. She has no choice in whether Joffrey or Tyrion took her virginity, but the fact that they did not meant something. It meant that she could develop as a character long enough that her virginity became something she had control over. It could be her choice to keep it or use for whatever emotional or political reasons she saw fit.

(I’m not suggesting it’s morally right that a girl’s virginity be a political concern; I’m merely acknowledging that it very much is in Martin’s quasi-medieval world, and in our world).

But her wedding night with Ramsay ruins all that. The redundancy of Ramsey/Joffrey, and the cynical reversal of the deliverance Sansa earned from Joffrey, effectively cancels out all of Sansa’s character progress and retracts any agency she’s earned through the seasons. It’s dismay for the sake of dismay, without any ironic resonance. We can feel nothing about it except pity.

It didn’t have to be that way. What if, for example, Sansa consensually lost her virginity to Littlefinger? The story seemed to be headed in that direction. It would be a wonderfully paradoxical plot point because Sansa would have agency and choice; she’d be deliberately abandoning the “honor” and attendant naiveté of her position as a noblewoman. She’d be spitting in the face of the false pageantry of it all.

At the same time, she’d be unwittingly giving in to the Baelish charms that her mother pointedly resisted much of her life. It would be a beautifully ironic win/lose. It would be awful and it would be subtly brutal, because we know that Sansa wouldn’t really be consenting to anything, (she’s too young, and still too innocent about monsters who seem to be charming) but it would be meaningful as a point of character progress for Sansa.

But Ramsey Bolton? He should’ve been a piece of cake for her. The Ramsey/Sansa plot point might’ve worked if Sansa had maintained her agency and carefully manipulated him without becoming a victim. Or it might have worked if Ramsey himself had surprised us in some believable way (actually trying to be respectful, now that he’s a lord, for example). I have a feeling the showrunners have Sansa’s vengeance in mind for the long game, but they blew the progress of that storyline in one terribly ill-conceived and morally bankrupt moment.

Not to mention, when Sansa’s vengeance does comes, it’ll now be too morally simplistic and inevitable.

Worst of all, they made Theon the focus of the scene, as if this were Theon’s moment to save the damsel. Nothing in the moral landscape of the story would suggest that Theon would be of any use, or any resonant meaning in this moment. The storytelling is guilty of both moral redundancy and moral bankruptcy. All we learn by focusing on Theon is that he’s still in Ramsay’s thrall. We’ve already been made to understand that several times over, and nothing changes as we pointlessly watch him watch.

Yes, it’s true that we haven’t yet seen the fall-out of this specific plot point. Undoubtedly, there will be consequences for Ramsay and Theon, but I’m skeptical that any subsequent turns will justify the backtracking and morally empty brutality of this scene.

Flaubert's Micro-Astonishments

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:58:00 +0000

My last post on Game of Thrones and all my recent, unwritten musings on the masterful concluding chapters of Breaking Bad have got me thinking again about Madame Bovary, which is a pretty weird thing to say, I know.

But I’ve been teaching Bovary again and I’m struck by how the novel continues to compel my vested interested despite its surface near-plotlessness. Is it just that a novel like Bovary and a novel like Game of Thrones fire entirely different synapses in the brain, and no reconciliation between their pleasures can be found?

I don’t know.

One thing is certain. Flaubert is not a good storyteller.

In Flaubert’s letters from during the writing of Bovary, he admits his disinterest in plot—in fact, he deliberately sets out to write a book “about nothing,” focusing on something other than dynamic plot events. Certainly, Bovary is not plotless. It’s a familiar adultery-and-repercussions narrative. But Flaubert seems to suggest that explosive plot events would have a detrimental effect on his aim to explore the recesses of his characters’ psyches.

If we push the metaphor a bit further, an explosive plot event is kind of like a gun going off. It’s exciting, it makes your heart leap, but the fraught anticipation of it is distracting, and it leaves you deaf to any subtler sounds for several minutes thereafter.

I don’t believe that’s always the case, but for Flaubert and Bovary, it may be true.

So, quite intentionally, Flaubert was not a good storyteller. Not if we mean those classic Aristotelian virtues of compelling events, action-orientated characters, surprise reversals and revelations, suspense, momentum. These are the elements we typically note as "good storytelling," and what we find in abundance with an author like George R.R. Martin. These are the age-old elements of epic and romance, the very “cheap thrills” that Flaubert was satirizing in Bovary through Emma’s delusions.

If we look at the history of the development of “the novel,” it’s clear that all the developments and innovations since its inception have been movements away from those elements we tend to cite as “good storytelling.” In a way, good storytelling was already established before 1700, so every innovation since has been in service of something else.

Mostly, the something else was efforts to make the fictional world seem more life-like, and in many cases, those efforts were antithetical to "good storytelling." Just for example, surprise reversals (he’s really a ghost! it’s his wife’s head in the box!) are fun storytelling, but they are contrivances, or at least a rarity, because they don't happen often in reality. It is "less realistic" to depict them in fiction.

But good storytelling is obviously only one factor in what can make a narrative interesting. Flaubert was deliberately uninterested in storytelling, choosing rather to explore microscopically the foibles of humanity, Emma’s psychological states, the distance between two or more people's psychological experience of the same event, details so precise and so evocative that we are shocked by their appearance, etc.

For example, Emma Bovary has an affair with a young man named Leon, and falls into what she thinks is “love” with him. Flaubert writes, "She was in love with Leon, and she wanted to be alone as to delight more comfortably in his image. The sight of him in person disturbed the sensual pleasure of this meditation" (the italics are mine, and the translation is Lydia Davis’).

This is clearly an example of interiority, an insight into Emma’s mind. It’s not a surprise plot point, right?

Well…. there are macro-level plot surprises. We expect Luke Skywalker to vanquish Darth Vader and avenge his father but (twist), Vader reveals he is Luke's father and cuts off his hand! We expect Jaime to weasel his way out of a situation like every time before but (twist), a very Luke-like change of fortune happens to him, too! These are the explosive gunshots of narrative.

But I’d suggest there are also these exquisite micro-level surprises, sudden insights. We understand that Emma loves Leon in her own way and, as a consequence, would want to spend time with him, but (twist) she’d rather spend time alone with her thoughts about him.

I think the macro and micro twists have fundamentally the same effect. Both are surprising because they give us insight into characters’ values. Jaime’s fate wouldn’t shock us if we didn’t see the multifaceted irony in his loss and the circumstances surrounding it. Luke’s fate wouldn’t shock us if we didn’t realize how drastically and ironically it renegotiates his personal journey. And this insight into Emma wouldn’t hit us if it didn’t drive an ironic wedge between the appearance and reality of her character, if it didn’t poke a hole in what we understand “love” to mean for Emma.

In both cases you’re experiencing what Aristotle called astonishment, which I would define as the reader’s reaction to the surprise appearance of irony.

Another brief example arrives in Emma’s first dalliance with her other lover, Rodolphe. They have just made love or are still making love—it’s deliberately unclear—and we’re immersed in Emma’s orgasmic flush of words and images (Davis translation again):

“…her blood flowing through her flesh like a river of milk. Then, from far away beyond the woods, on the other hills, she heard a vague, prolonged cry, a voice that lingered, and she listened to it in silence as it lost itself like a kind of music in the last vibrations in her tingling nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.”

The first “plot twist” here is again about ironic insight. This is the most alive and present Emma has been in the book so far, and yet she’s divorcing herself from her own orgasmic scream, attributing it to some animal “far away beyond the woods.” The second plot twist is the sudden juxtaposition between Emma’s lyrical, ecstatic impression of this event and Rodolphe’s complete dismissal of it.

The jump cut is amazing: she’s still lost in reveries while he’s back to taking care of a mundane task. The ironic gulf opens up, and we see the sharp contrast between their characters. We’re astonished by this surprise appearance of irony (dramatic irony in this case—we’ve been shown truths about Emma and her relationship with Rodolphe that she does not yet realize).

Admittedly, big plot points hit harder than these precise character insights, but in many cases big ironic plot points hit like blunt instruments, dull and numbing. This is not always the case, as with most big plot points in Breaking Bad, which have the virtue of being sharp and explosive. Or the Game of Thrones plot point I wrote about in my last post, which is big, but has a dozen exquisite micro-astonishing ironies swirling around it.

“Micro-astonishments” have the virtue of affecting the reader in smaller ways—often sharper, more precise. They also strike more deeply, I think, because we recognize our own personal foibles of character. They open up hidden truths in ourselves that we generally do not wish to confront (let’s face it, most ironic recognitions in fiction are not happy ones). They sting and they resonate.

The other virtue of micro-astonishing twists of the type we find in Madame Bovary is that there are hundreds of them, several per page, not just the ones at major plot junctures. You get way more astonishments for your time with a book like Bovary, and none of them are cheap.

But, yes, for micro-astonishment to work, you have to read more slowly, more carefully. If we read too bluntly for "stuff happening" on a surface or situational level, we'll skip over all Flaubert's sharp psychological insights, his dozens and dozens of sinister juxtapositions, his evocative details that feel both frozen in time and fully alive at once, or, as James Wood puts it in How Fiction Works, “each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness.”

It's easier to skip over the small, precise insights precisely because they're subtle, because we've been conditioned to read in search of the big plot points, propelling ourselves from one to the next, never paying attention to the fact that we're being offered one gem after another, if we allow ourselves the focused vision to see them.

But if we slow down with a novel like Madame Bovary, we get the same kind of pleasure of astonishment in kind as we do from the big “page-turners.” The pleasure is only different in degree and number. More subtle, more exacting, and far more numerous.

On the Genius of George R.R. Martin

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:31:00 +0000

Some thoughts about plot, via the storytelling genius of George R.R. Martin. Spoilers regarding last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, “Walk of Punishment” and obviously A Storm of Swords, so be warned. I will not, however, blow any plot points not already aired.

Plot, the building block of narration—not in opposition to character, but in concert with character. If you don’t have your characters acting, no story. Actions and never more important as when they instigate plot “turns,” moments in a narrative when a character’s fortune is changed, or when a game-changing piece of knowledge is revealed, or both.

A good turn affects a reader just as much as a character. It’s the basic building blocks of effective narration, more than anything else. This isn’t a new idea (Aristotle), but we sometimes forget. Luckily, George R.R. Martin does not forget.

Some turns are more effective than others, and the best kind are the ironic ones. “Ironic” is a jumpy word, I know, but what I mean here is this: a) a turn that the reader didn’t anticipate but realizes he should’ve, and b) a turn that complicates how we thought we’d feel. A is basically embedded in B, so it’s B that’s the real kicker.

So Jaime Lannister got his hand cut off last week. I read this scene two years ago when I first blazed through A Storm of Swords. Now, encountering it again on HBO, I’m thinking about why I’m so awestruck. Here’s why.

1. Suffering. We’re moved by Jaime's sudden misfortune. Aristotle listed a character’s suffering as one of the key ways that audiences are moved. But empathy for suffering is a shallow (in fiction), too easily elicited, too easily forgotten. Much deeper is our moral sensibility—our sense of judgment. In this case, Jaime has been a pretty crap dude, so we might’ve welcomed his suffering. What’s interesting is that we don’t. Curious.

2. It’s the worst thing that could happen to his core character. Worse than death, probably. Jaime Lannister is his bravado, his tarnished heroism, which is physically embodied in his swordsmanship (it is with that hand that he killed the mad king). He’s a master of talk and sword. So the irony here is the great question mark of what’s to come. We could see Jaime dying, and we could see him living to fight another day. But Jaime living, never to be able to fight again? We don’t know what to think.

3. It’s a failure of his core character. Jaime’s rhetoric has gotten him out of a lot of scrapes. He’s even, arguably, talked his way out of POW camp. But this time, despite his best efforts, his rhetoric could not get him off the hook.

4. Locke is the instrument of Jaime’s amputation. He’s no major player. He’s just a two-bit mercenary whose allegiances are quite questionable. Our sense of justice dictates that Jaime should be punished by a big deal character that he has grievously wronged. Now, even if Bran Stark could somehow exact his revenge for the defenestration, it would be anticlimactic. Jaime’s core character is lost. He’s already defeated.

5. Speaking of two-bit Locke, let’s not forget that Jaime is only in this predicament because his rhetoric was ignored. Brianne sealed their fate, failing to kill the traveler who eventually ratted them out. Jaime warned her. But what makes the truth so gut wrenching is that Jaime was in the moral wrong, and Brianne in the moral right. Yet, logically, she was wrong, and he was the one to pay the price. One might say, unfairly.

6. Brienne. The most immediately wrenching irony is that Jaime has just revealed himself to be a chivalrous man. He manages to use rhetoric to prevent Brienne from getting raped. It’s a double-blow, then, when he is severely punished, mere moments after saving her. There’s a poetic injustice to it, too, since one thing that defines Brienne is her “maidenhood” (she is the Maid of Tarth after all). He saved what defines her, only to lose what defines him.

7. Jaime’s rhetoric should’ve worked. It’s the same rhetoric he used a moment before. In a way, it’s his tactical error that dooms him. He “wastes” his pleading on Brienne, sealing his own fate. It’s a mirror of the tactical error she made with the traveler—causing punishment to oneself by doing the right thing.

8. On the other hand, Jaime reverses his rhetoric, promising Locke punishment if any harm should come to him (Jaime). With Brienne, he promised reward (a bounty from Tarth), and that’s what convinced Locke. Another tactical error.

9. It looked like Jaime was going to get away with it. Martin (and the show writers) surprises us by seeming to remove the threat that Jaime is going to be killed on that chopping block. Locke has the knife up to his face for quite a while, and then Jaime seems to convince him. Either Jaime will be killed, or he’ll be left alone, we think. Locke even begins to walk away, only to turn and chop the hand off in one swoop.

10. There’s a bigger reason that surprise works. It resonates, it calls back. This is the particular genius of Martin, the way he “rhymes” action from chapter to chapter, even book to book. The world of Game of Thrones is not just an imaginary universe; it’s a universe governed by a god (or gods) with an exacting and poetic sense of irony. Just before Ned Stark lost his head in the first season, to the Lannisters, it looked like he was going to be spared, but Joffrey’s mercilessness got in the way. Ned’s death was itself deeply resonant, stretching back to an early scene when Ned shows his son Bran the meaning of justice, executing a deserter with his own hands—brutal but a clear moral code. Later, Jaime attempts to kill Bran, Ned’s son (again, in this scene, it appears that Jaime is not going to hurt Bran, and then he does). Then, in a climactic moment that mirrors both of those major events, Joffrey, Jaime’s son, kills Ned, corrupting the same method that made Ned such a morally upstanding leader. In that case, Ned was forced to relinquish his moral code and call himself a traitor, though it did him no good. Jamie’s amputation brings to bear all those moments, a veritable hall of mirrors.

11. And more. Let’s not forget that Catelyn Stark, Bran’s mother and Ned’s wife, is the reason Jaime gained his “freedom” in the first place. When it seemed as if every moment in captivity he might have been killed, he’s ironically in much greater danger when he’s on the road, “free.” It was Catelyn’s capacity for mercy and diplomacy— exactly what Joffrey lacks—that has put Jaime in this situation.

12. Another resonant mirror scene is a key moment in the previous season when Jamie concocts an escape attempt by coaxing his cousin, then killing said cousin as a means of getting a jailor to come into the pen (not in the book, I don’t think). That scene plays out very much like the scene with Locke, except the roles are reversed.

13. There is ever more resonance, some I’m missing, probably. Note the losses of body parts and what they say about characters. Ned lost his head of course, and he was the hand of the king (another mirror reversal). It was with his hand that Jaime pushed Bran out the window. Bran lost the use of his legs, but has arguably gained so much more in the bargain (the dawning of his warg ability). Davos Seaworth lost his fingers to a noble man (Stannis), and that loss gave Davos—ironically, again—his moral superiority over Stannis. On and on and on…

A single event that resonates irony in at least thirteen different ways, an absolute master-stroke of storytelling. You may think Game of Thrones and other such stories are mere pulp, but I admire such structural genius in the same way I admire a beautifully arranged sonnet. It takes absolute precision. I won’t say that every effect on this list was purposeful (Martin insists he doesn’t plan ahead), but the result is the point, not the intention. If I could craft a moment as deeply loaded as this one, I’d consider my writing career a success.

And, perhaps most astoundingly, Jaime’s lost hand isn’t even the most reverberating moment you’ll experience in this story…

UPDATE: after watching this week's episode, I see the writers are asking me to notice three other similar resonant connections:

Tyrion Lannister as the mirror of his brother. Tyrion is no warrior, yet he fought bravely defending King's Landing and nearly lost his head for it. He did not lose any body parts (in the book, he loses his nose), so he is still essentially himself--same wit and conniving. Still, like Jaime, Tyrion wants to exact revenge on those who betrayed him (Brienne makes this connection to Jaime clear in her fireside chat with him, when she tells him he must live to take revenge).

By extension, Varys' story about his castration echoes the Jaime and Tyrion theme already established. The castration may have changed who Varys thought he was, but it made him into the character he is today.

Finally, in another mirror reversal (and connection to Tyrion/Varys/Jaime), the Unsullied army rises up, all of them castrated in order to make them fierce warriors. If we see Jaime's loss of hand as a kind of castration (and the narrative is clearly asking us to), then the unsullied represent the mirror opposite of Jaime. Yet, like him, they are "prisoners," just as he was, only to be freed by a moral female leader (Danerys/Catelyn).

Oh, and it turns out that Jaime's ploy to save Brienne from rape was a lie (no sapphires in Tarth). In that sense, he used his immoral propensity to lie to do good by the woman who was holding him captive, another ironic turn.

That makes sixteen separate ironic turns in one event.

E-books

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Kindle and Nook editions of Pyres and The Long Division are now FINALLY available. You know where to find them!

False Dichotomies: Plot vs. Lyricism (Part Three)

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:42:00 +0000

A recent reader post reminded me I never finished this series, and ought to, since I’ve only incompletely explained what I mean. You can look at the first two installments here (Part One) and here (Part Two), but the gist is this:

I’m trying (for kicks) to bridge the gap between readers who say they “read for the story” and readers who say they read for “the language.” On the one hand, I want to suggest that those “story” readers ought to read for more than just characters and events. On the other hand, I want to suggest that those “language” readers don’t really mean what they’re saying: we don’t actually read for the words on the page, per say, no matter how beautiful or lyrical they are (and despite the fact that evocative, lyrical language, if done right, makes the reading experience more fulfilling).

We’re all reading more or less for the same thing: the sensual experience that elicits an emotional response. We read to feel—strongly, subtly, deeply. Some of that comes from plot and character, but that’s what’s on the surface. A lot more of it comes from a mixed bag of tricks that some folk—erroneously, I think, call language. Evocation might be a better word. Voice is good, but limited. Sensuality—maybe, but that sounds a little dirty.

Language is a means to an end that is not, itself, language.

This issue is at the crux of John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous dream.” More recently, Robert Olen Butler argued a hard-line version in his series of lectures, From Where You Dream. Paraphrasing Butler: creative writing is the only artistic medium that posits a middle-man between the art and the audience. A movie does not make you imagine something else. You watch a movie and you imagine the movie—you imagine that it’s “real.” A sculpture is a sculpture, and a painting is a painting. They are about themselves. The Thinker doesn’t make you think about how people think; it makes you think about that particular rendition of a man thinking.

Fiction, however, is not itself. At its most concrete, it’s ink on a page. At one level of abstraction, it’s letters in an alphabet, strung together. Next, its words in a language. Then it’s the sound those words make—but the sound happens in your mind, not on the page. Then it’s syntax, etc. Finally, at the furthest level of abstraction, fiction becomes what it really intends to be: an evocation of sensual experience inside the reader’s mind. But the book—the language—is merely a middleman, the one who provides the tools the reader will use to complete the artwork.

This is Butler’s argument. A fiction isn’t a fiction until it happens in somebody’s imagination. Which is why, Butler argues, fiction should be as sensually evocative as possible—why it should show instead of tell, why the writer should remember what he’s really doing is painting a picture or making a movie, not impressing the reader with his pretty language (except insofar as said language is serving the reader’s sensory/imaginative process).

Butler’s position is not watertight. For one thing, I’m not sure he’s right that creative writing is the only art with a middleman. Music makes us think about itself, but inevitably it puts images in our mind. Admittedly, these images are much more arbitrary than the ones a piece of fiction would evoke. Then there’s sheet music. For those who can read it, sheet music functions like fiction: it evokes sound in the reader’s imagination. When Beethoven wrote his 9^th Symphony, he didn’t set down any actual sounds, no more than a writer makes his fiction actually happen in the world. He transcribed musical notes that the right mind, or instruments, could turn into music. My argument here is bolstered by the fact that poor Beethoven never even heard his own 9^th Symphony.

Butler’s also not quite right because he rather militantly privileges language that evokes sensory experience over all other kinds of language, when we know that sometimes a great writer can blow our minds with an abstract idea, an intellectual argument, a pithy observation about life. Take the very beginning of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory, for instance:

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for...”

Years ago, when I first read this, it struck me as one of the most profound, yet blissfully simple arguments I’ve ever heard against the fear of death. Death, for you, will be exactly the same as things were before you were born, and since you aren’t scared of what existence was like before you were born, why be scared of death? Of course it’s not that simple, especially if what you fear is the death of people you love, but Nabokov provides a momentary balm, and that’s about all we can ask for.

The point is: this is a pleasing idea, not a sensory experience. It’s an abstraction from which we’re meant to extrapolate. It doesn’t ask us to imagine anything in particular, except of course the ominous picture of the cradle rocking on the edge of a very high cliff.

And, yes, the way Nabokov says this is a large part of its effect. That’s why great poetry and fiction is un-paraphrasable, why every “modernized” version of a Shakespeare play can’t begin to capture the nuances, particularities and multiple meanings of the original. My explanation of Nabokov pales in comparison to his original, in part because I made explicit what he was only suggesting, and took away the reader’s thrill of analysis, realization and understanding (one of the main reasons we read: to feel smart that we “get” what we’re reading).

My explanation also pales because it was written in utilitarian prose, without any attempt to match sound to sense. Not so with Nabokov. Note, for instance, Nabokov’s: “common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The sentence itself evokes three distinct stages: “Common sense tells us that our existence,” has an abundance of unstressed syllables and soft s sounds, so it “flows” (as my students love to say). “Two eternities of darkness” does quite the same: lots of s sounds, lots of flow. Parts one and three of the sentences match in their elongated, loose way. However, part two is a brief interruption full of hard sound and a rough, stress-filled cadence: “brief crack of light between.” You see, then, that Nabokov has made us feel the stages of human existence in the structure and sounds of his sentences. The easy/lucky/free openness of pre-birth and death, and the strange brevity of that thing in the middle that we call “life.”

Hey, blame Nabokov, not me!

It might seem that I’m arguing against my own conviction that no sane person reads for language alone, but I’m not. The sound is servant to the sense here, as in almost all cases. Nobody likes “common sense tells us that our existence” because it has lots of s’s and few stresses. We like it because its s’s and unstressed syllables evoke a sonic metaphor of what the sentence means. It’s not the language: it’s what the language is working for.

Why split hairs? Because when you say, "I read for language," you sound like you're privileging sound and rhythm over actual meaning, and you make us wonder why you don't just listen to music instead. Surely music is much more vividly aural than prose. But, in fact, you don't mean you read words for their aural qualities alone. Instead, you mean what everybody else means when they talk about why they love fiction: you read for the emotional experience it provides you.

In that way, you mean precisely the same thing as the guy who says “I read for story.” He doesn’t really mean he reads to see shit happen. He means he reads to see shit happen to people he’s interested in and whose feelings he feels vicariously. Same thing!

But “I read for language” sounds so damn precious, folks. If that “philistine reader” were made to see what we really mean when we say “language,” to realize how much the subtler qualities of voice and rhythm could enhance the emotional experience of reading, well, then, we might eventually broaden some palates a little.

Here: saying that you read for the language is like saying you watch movies for the soundtrack. Certainly soundtracks are essential, as is the right tone, rhythm, and diction in your fiction. Soundtracks compliment or even generate atmosphere, but they exist to serve the story, not the other way around.

I recently told a student who was struggling with the concept of voice to think of voice as the written equivalent of a movie soundtrack. You use rhythm, beat, tone and sound to evoke mood and atmosphere—to compliment the story. He seemed to understand much better.

Even the most language-y writing I can think of employs language in the service of story. Dr. Seuss’s rhythms and sounds evoke the playful, spry, child-like, off-kilter atmosphere of his fictional worlds. Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” is fun to read just to hear yourself read it—but more importantly, its pompous, nonsensical nature is there to satirize the kind of figure Humpty Dumpty represents as he recites and then explicates it: the pretentious English teacher who claims to know what it all means.

Ahem.

I must turn again to the king, Nabokov, for the most pertinent example of language-for-some–other-sake-besides-itself that I’ve ever read. The first paragraph of Lolita: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

This passage is all about language, riffing off of Lolita’s name with loads of assonance and consonance. So much that even the regular reader (as opposed to the lit student) would see that there sure are a heck of a lot of l’s and i’s in here. And look at how Humbert Humbert, the speaker of this passage, uses the matching sounds to make a diametric opposite seem all of a piece: “lift of my life, fire of my loins.” The first half is spiritual and the second half is bawdy, but language makes it all sound like one big love-fest. Then, he inverts the spirit and the bawdy in the next sentence, carrying over the “s” sound from “loins.” Snake-like hissing (and that’s an important aspect of H.H.!).

Then, famously, H.H. pulls apart the word Lolita and describes, in sensuous, rhythmic detail, exactly how his tongue moves inside his mouth when he says it. And that, too, is a little naughty, frankly. You can’t fetishize language any more than H.H. is doing it here. This guy’s all about the language.

But that’s the point. Nabokov makes H.H. pull apart Lolita’s name like this because it’s weird to do so. On one level we go along for the ride: try not to test how your tongue moves when you say Lo-lee-ta. We’re drawn into this guy’s obsessions. But they are obsessions, ugly ones, falsely spiritual, honestly sinful. Soon we will learn Lolita is twelve and fascinating old H.H. is not at all a good man. Are we surprised? No: because that first paragraph is a case study of pathology all by itself.

So here again, the pleasures of sound are there to be had, but Nabokov is playing with us, setting us up for a stark realization regarding this speaker, whose words and worldview we’re hanging onto with vested interest. For all its qualities, the most important aspect of this paragraph is that it sets up H.H.’s sick but fascinating character, and our relationship to him. The language serves the story and our sense of it.

It’s no wonder that in just a few more lines H.H. will announce to his confessors in an ironically plain-spoken sentence: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” Cheeky Humbert!

French Pyres

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:31:00 +0000

In two weeks, Brasiers hits France. That's Brasiers with one s, folks, not two and an extra e. We'll see how it goes over with the my ancient kinfolk, the land of Truffaut and Flaubert, the people who named noir...

How to Destroy Angels

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:48:00 +0000

If you're read my fiction, you might know I have an affinity for the band Nine Inch Nails. Have since, oh, 1992, when the EP Broken was released, and all my teen angst suddenly came blasting back at me through my earphones (never mind that the brainchild behind NIN--Trent Reznor--was 26 when he recorded that album).

Trent and I are both older now, but his deeply nihilistic worldview has always been a current conductor for the darker aspects of my creativity. You might say I learned how to do noir from Trent Reznor.

My last novel, The Long Division, in particular, references NIN lyrics on various occasions, though not for more than a word or two, owing to the fact that I can't afford copyright clearance. While I was writing Division, the NIN song "Right Where it Belongs," off the album With Teeth became the unofficial "theme song" for my character Wynn Johnston, an disturbed young man whose sense of reality is gradually cracking.

"Right Where it Belongs" is a haunting song with "Alice Through the Looking Glass" metaphysical themes regarding the "reality" of our earthy existence. It's Lewis Carroll, it's Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" or The Matrix in song form--except that the other side of Trent's looking glass isn't Wonderland or "the ideal truth," or even Neo and Orpheus and Trinity battling giant octopus robots.

It's absolute oblivion, total un-being. For me, the song derives its power from its truth value. It doesn't need to concoct a fantasy realm to scare us. It just tells us exactly what's coming, what's already there. Cheerful, huh? No--but there's a kind of melancholy satisfaction, an inner peace, that comes from pondering the unhappy truth--and this song captures it better than few I know.

As of last year, Nine Inch Nails has gone on a rather long hiatus, which is actually nothing new for Reznor, who's been known to let almost a decade pass between albums. But, actually, Reznor's output has been pretty steady in the last few years: Year Zero, Ghosts, The Slip. And even now he doesn't seem to be resting on his laurels.

Recently Rznor got married to a musician named Mariqueen Maandig, formerly of the band West India Girl. Yes, one tends to want one's mope rock heroes to avoid normal, happy things like getting married, a la Morrissey's famous musical vow: "I will live my life as I will undoubtedly die: alone." But you can't begrudge a guy a little happiness every now and then.

Especially when his marriage results in a new band and a new way to channel his creative energies. That band is How to Destroy Angels. Mariqueen sings, at least on the tracks I've heard so far. I'm a little ambivalent.

Mariqueen is a breathy, quiet singer like Charlotte Gainsbourg or that lady from Portishead. She doesn't belt it out with raw emotional energy like her husband, one of the most viscerally exciting singers of my generation, but this is more subdued music, slightly more conventional than what Trent's been doing. But it grows on me quickly.

And one certainly can't begrudge their first video. In instantly captures that noir sensibility that I've always found so captivating about Reznor. Mariqueen and Trent, both of them victims of some violent murder. It's a bit disconcerting to see the soul hero of your adolescence immolating in a pool of his own blood, but, hell, we're talking about the guy who recorded his classic album The Downward Spiral in the Tate-Polanski house. He's like that.

Atlantis Article

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:09:00 +0000

Here's a brand new article/interview with Atlantis, a journal out of UNC-Wilmington, my MFA alma mater. Thanks to Madison Kiger for the great interview questions.

The opening para:

"'Once upon a time is hell.' The first line of the thriller Pyres sets the tone for 308 pages of death, deceit, and a closet full of skeletons that a fifteen-year-old girl must unearth in order to solve her father’s murder. Author Derek Nikitas’s first book has made an irreversible mark on the crime fiction genre. Recently having released his second book, The Long Division, Nikitas is making himself hard to ignore."

That's right. As Morrissey once sang, "the more you ignore me, the closer I get."

The Impulse

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:36:00 +0000

Usually I visit two writers' conferences a year. Bouchercon, a conference for mystery and crime writers and fans. And AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, where folks associated with college-level writing programs, mostly MFA program, gather to trade teaching ideas, pleas for literary magazines subscriptions, jealousy and misery.

I enjoy Bouchercon shitloads more. At Bouchercon, my love for fiction is constantly reinvigorated by the enthusiasm of my peers, novice and seasoned. There's community, where writers seek each other out to share news, encourage each other, and discuss the writing world. Each time I've been to Bouchercon, my instinctive introversion was thrown out the window as new writers asked for my advice, editors introduced themselves to me, and sages of the genre, like Dennis Lehane in Baltimore two years ago, passed some wisdom onto me. Walk through the halls at the Boucheron hotel and you're likely to hear laughter and larger-than-life voices. Lots of Type A personalities.

At AWP, there's a kind of hush. Some people look like they're about ready to cry. There's a huge "book sale" wherein literary magazines you've never heard of try to get to subscribe to issues featuring writers you've never heard of. Most of these mags will not be in business next year. At AWP, I get to catch up with a couple of old friends, but otherwise I'm a wallflower, silently attending mundane panels. The literary stars are basically untouchable, or they form little cliques. Sure, there's the "bar scene" and a few off-site parties, but only at night. Walk through the halls at AWP and you get ignored, or at least glared at suspiciously.

If it sounds like I'm leading up to yet another in the endless series of "genre versus literary" blogs, well, I am. There's been enough virtual blood and ink spilled regarding the supposed difference between genre and literary fiction. John Banville got in some trouble last year for suggesting at a mystery conference that his crime-genre alter ego, Benjamin Black, wrote books more quickly and easily than his Booker-Prize-winning literary self. You can really irk some people talking like that.

So I probably shouldn't, but I will. We can split hairs all day about whether "literary" is itself a genre or not (of course it is; at least, it's a collection of many genres). We can debate about the aesthetic merits of literary versus genre fiction, the degree to which one or the other is rife with clichés or utilitarian writing or overblown writing or obfuscation, the entertainment value of either. We can ponder whether there is a "we" at all, or just me, writing this blog to myself.
All that's been done before.

But what I want to talk about is the literary impulse versus the genre impulse. This is observation, necessarily generalized, and it comes mostly from my experiences at these conferences and talking with friends who self-identify as either literary or genre writers.

All writers want to reach readers. All writers want to sell books and please their readership. All writers want to impress their readers. Almost all writers want to feel like they're part of a community. The notions that literary writers want to deliberately alienate readers and stay poor or unpublished just to be "different," or that genre writers want to hoard money by passing off paint-by-numbers exercises as quickly and efficiently as possible--these are all generally false suppositions generated by people who don't understand writerly impulses. We all have egos and want to be admired for our stories--or rather, we want our stories to be admired.

But I've noticed differences between how certain kinds of writers want to please or impress their readers.

There's an authorial impulse that wants nothing more than to hear from a reader: "Your novel kept me up all night. I couldn't stop turning the pages, and I couldn't turn them quickly enough. Those twists and revelations--man, I was floored. Not only that, I learned so much information about X. You're such an amazing storyteller!" Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the writer who wants to hear this kind of feedback has a genre impulse: the need to please a reader by telling as exciting a story as possible.

But there's another authorial impulse that wants most of all to hear this from a reader: "Your novel changed my life. I thought I had the world figured out, and then you just opened up this whole new way of thinking for me. Your vision is beautiful, I contemplated every sentence, and I don't think I'll ever be able to get your characters or your worldview out of my consciousness." The need to hear this feedback I'm going to call, as you might have guessed, the literary impulse.

I'm not suggesting that one is better than the other, though many do make just such a suggestion. To stereotype, some writers with a literary impulse don't understand the genre impulse. They think it's cheap, filled with gimmicks, and disposable. The sheer goal of getting people to flip pages quickly sounds to them like the worst kind of commodity fetishism. Plot is a crutch, outmoded since the Modernist era, fodder for ridicule since the Postmoderns came on the scene. The genre impulse is, to some, less about personal vision than jumping a bandwagon and stealing all its baggage.

But many genre writers don't understand the literary impulse. They think it's vain and elitist to presume that you can explode a reader's worldview. They think it's ego-maniacal and solipsistic to bore readers with endless passages of intellectual or emotional pontification. It's naval-gazing on mundane subjects. It's self-destructive self-marginalization and a complete ignorance of the publishing marketplace.

Of course these are generalizations, or at least extremes along a continuum. Most real writers fit somewhere in the middle. I know I do--and it's exactly that DMZ between these two poles that feeds my anxieties and makes me wonder who my audience is supposed to be--if anyone. Because, let's face it: the literary impulse and the genre impulse tend to attract two very different kinds of audiences, too.

You're wondering what all this has to do with conferences. Conferences show me what happens when you bring together two different masses of people, each tending to gravitate to one or the other impulse pole. And what I discover, whether demonstrably true or not, is that the genre impulse seems generally extroverted, social, and objective. It's also inclusive, less competitive, because all writers with a genre impulse draw from the same inexhaustible pool of tropes and feed an arguably ever-hungry audience.

The literary impulse is generally introverted, competitive and subjective because writers with a genre impulse feel that they're drawing each from their own little drying wells of personal inspiration and feeding a small and finicky audience. This, you might argue, is why literary writers tend to write fewer books more slowly, and why their books are often more autobiographical and "realistic." Their impulse is to voice their subjective experience instead of the collective, iconic, idealized experience of humanity.

I'm really going to go out on a limb and suggest that many more of my genre friends were outgoing and popular in high school, just as they are now mostly great conversationalists and self-promoters. They had the pulse of the people--knew what others wanted to hear, and gave it to them. On the other hand, I know most of my literary friends were awkward loners in high school, too indrawn and contemplative, too pent up with an eagerness to prove themselves to others. They felt cut off from the concerns of the mainstream, yet secretly eager to connect with someone who felt the same strange impulses they did.

Perhaps these are the personalities that these genre and literary impulses breed from? The genre extrovert gathers everyone he can into his fold, eager to entertain and please. The literary introvert seeks out a smaller cadre of confidants, a safety zone where he can discuss how different he feels, how unique. Both of them want to be read, but, it seems to me, for very different reasons. In this sense, I think this old genre versus literary thing isn't a decision at all. It's largely a manifestation of personality.

This is probably no big news to anyone reading, but it strikes the heart of my own anxieties. When I go to Bouchercon, I often feel like a literary grump dressed in communist gray who has stowed himself aboard a Carnival cruise full of champagne and bathing suits. I know my impulses tend toward the literary, just as I know they were probably borne from that awkward, introverted teenager who needed to please people by impressing them with the depth and strangeness of his artistic expression. But the types of stories I create are genre because that's what I loved to read when I was younger, and that's what compels me to write. In my work, I'm constantly stuck right in the middle, the consummate moderate, wanting all at once to propel my story forward and yet linger on the metaphysical experience of my characters in their moments of crisis, rendered in evocative and carefully crafted prose.

This is obviously where my theory falls apart. There are probably very few writers at each extreme. Sure, Lee Child is an out-and-out genre writer, interested in little more than crafting a story that shoots the reader through the book and having another book at the readeywhen the reader is done. Whereas, say, David Foster Wallace, quite obviously a tortured loner to the end, was desperate in almost all his writing to make his vision understood. But when you throw enough of these guys and gals together, they tend to cluster near either extreme.

Here's another knot in my argument: most of the loners I knew in high schools were not readers of literary fiction (hardly anyone is, until she gets to college; and even then one gets "initiated" into a love for literary fiction, a kind of "secret society" of people who believe they feel more deeply and weirdly than the general populace). No, the loners in high school read sci-fi or fantasy, if they read anything at all. I've never been to a sci-fi or fantasy conference, so I don't know about the kinds of people who frequent them. Perhaps, then, when I say genre, I mean only mystery and romance, maybe horror.

Now I'm nitpicking, and my ideas are falling apart in my hands. I know quite a few outgoing literary writers. I know a couple deeply introverted genre writers, including the one in the mirror. My argument is little more than a whim, baseless and ephemeral. But still, when I go to those conferences, the line feels like a solid brick wall.

I'm teetering right on that wall, never sure which way to let myself fall, never quite wanting to decide. I want to please lots of people with engaging and surprising stories pulled right out of the Collective Unconscious. I want to surprise a few with my quirky personal vision and deeply-sought insights. I want it all. What a cad. What a snob. What a... writer?

The Tortise Reads

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sun, 02 May 2010 14:05:00 +0000

I know some speed readers. My pal and fellow writer J.T. Ellison says she “can get 10-15 pages into a book in two minutes.” Critic extraordinaire Sarah Weinman is a staggeringly speedy reader. She claims to be able to take in information a paragraph or even a page at a time, sort of like looking at a picture. It has something to do with excellent peripheral vision, to hear her tell it.

Which explains why I can’t read more than a page a minute, tops. Shitty eyesight. Yeah, I’m envious of those who can read faster. Sure as hell could get a lot more reading done, and they may in fact have some kind of wiring in their brains that I don't have.

I don't presume to be able to understand the speed reading process and how it works, and I certainly don't doubt the insights my speed-reading friends gain from their reading. But I have to wonder two things. First, it’s got to be more than just the ability to see better, or wider, or more comprehensively in one swoop. There’s more to real reading than just seeing the words clearly. Second, I must wonder if speed readers end up missing something in the rush--if only because I know I would miss lots of stuff if I read any faster than I do. The point of all this could be only that I'm just kind of slow.

Truth told, I read different material at different rates. Straightforward informational nonfiction goes fastest, since all you’re getting is that: information. Of course, the more difficult the information, the more it needs analysis and interpretation and configuration from the reader, the slower I get. Can anyone read the great philosophers at a steady clip and get anything out of it?

Fiction written in a utilitarian, storyteller’s voice, like Dean Koontz or Stephen King, I can read that pretty fast. I raced through the last three books in King’s massive Dark Tower series, each one in a couple days. The prose is the opposite of dense: breezy, detail-lite passages that race the reader through activity and dialogue. There's often a lot of telling, where the imaginative work is done for you. I'm not knocking this stuff; it's a lot of fun to read and a great diversion.

But what about the more “writerly” fiction? Or fiction written in a time when the reading public preferred denser or more baroque prose, or spoke in an earlier form of English difficult for contemporary readers to translate? What happens to reading speed when meaning gets complicated by compound-complex sentencing, or inversions in syntax, or unfamiliar diction, or complexity, obscurity, or downright evasion or elusiveness?

Here’s the first sentence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?”

At the risk of exposing my own stupidity, I’m going to admit this is a tough sentence for me. Slow-going. I have to read this sentence a phrase at a time, a couple times, just to see its whole meaning play out. Like: to realize that the person who “has not dwelt” and “has not smiled” is the “Who” at the beginning of the sentence. Like: realizing this is a rhetorical sentence: “What thoughtful person hasn’t thought about Saint Theresa?” (me, for one). Like: getting that the little girl is Saint Theresa herself. Like: getting that the “mysterious mixture” is “the history of man.” This is all slow-going grammatical analysis I have to undertake before I can even see what the sentence is asking of me, and appreciate the question.

It ain’t good enough to dismiss this prose as inconsequential old fashioned-ness, because we're talking about George Eliot, and she’s bigger than any of us. Her place in literary history is solid, and we’re not going to break it. It’s our job to step up to her, to Shakespeare, to Melville, to all of them. Yes, we can say that they're not our cup of tea or ignore them completely, but the more of us who dismiss the past masters, the more of our literary culture and history we kill off and bury forever.

Occasionally, we can dismiss contemporary writers who seem to be just difficult for the sake of difficulty. But we can’t rush to assume that a writer’s difficulty exists only for its own sake. Often, difficulty is a product of culture and time, or, perhaps most importantly, difficulty is a product of the complexity and depth of an author's expression. So we can’t just say: well, I don’t read books by authors who don’t write clearly or breezily. That’s just blanket stupidity.

Philosophy and poetry are even tougher. Try to speed-read Nietzsche or Walter Benjamin or W.B. Yeats. Unless you’re a genius, Speed Reader, you’re lost. Constantly, I have to convince my students to slow down when reading poetry. So often, you’ve got to unravel syntax and consider alternate meanings of words, and that’s even before you can comprehend the full meaning of a line or a stanza. Before you can get a full picture of the image evoked or a full understanding of the idea expressed, you've got to figure out what the sentence actually says.

Maybe those who claim to be speed readers aren’t talking about reading poetry and high philosophy. Few people these days notice when you omit those categories.

But, still. Fulfilling reading is about much, much more than the mere speed at which you process the English language in print. Most of us can read faster than we can comprehend what we’re reading. That’s obvious. But what’s not obvious is that reading is more than just comprehension, too. Just because we understand a sentence or paragraph of fiction, doesn’t mean we truly experience it.

Most of what I mean has to do with gaps—a Reader Response Theory word. Don’t worry—this isn’t technical. It’s just the idea that with fiction, the words on the page are only part of the equation. The words on the page are only a blueprint for the reader’s full experience, most of which the conscientious reader provides him or herself during the reading process.

Take for instance, a brief but arresting image I read recently in Dennis Tafoya’s debut crime novel Dope Thief. Paraphrased: the main character is scoping out a farm house, notices swing set chains, seats missing, pinging against the swing set frame. It’s one sentence, fairly nondescript, but it suggests a lot of gaps that need filling by me.

First, the image gaps. Good writers give “telling details,” details that suggest much more about the image that needs be said. The reader will fill in the rest. When I see the above image, I fill in, at least: the intensity of the breeze that’s swinging those chains, the frequency of the pinging, the rustiness of the swing set, the height of the neglected grasses surrounding the set. And much more that I'm only half-conscious of. I need time--seconds, at least--to do that imaginative work.

Next, the emotion gaps. I have to take a nanosecond, at least, to feel the forlorn mood of the image. I have to ponder why the narrator notices this image and what it means that he does. This is a guy who lost his childhood early, so the image has thematic resonance. The missing swings on the dangling chains are metaphors, but you have to think about what they're metaphors for.

Do I really go through all this work when I read a narrative sentence? Yes. In order to create the movie in my mind, not to mention the emotional depth in my understanding, I have to. It takes only mere seconds to do so, but that’s mere seconds per sentence, which adds up to two or three minutes a page, minimum. Get a denser, more difficult writer like Nabokov or Cormac McCarthy in his earlier books, you're looking at five minutes a page.

So when I hear about speed readers I wonder if I’m not just a damn slow thinker, or if so-called speed readers are really actually denying themselves the full intensity and depth of a reading experience. If you read so fast you don’t fill those gaps, the book stays a hazy blueprint, just a shallow simulation of a full experience. And what fun is that?

Interview with Art Taylor

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:22:00 +0000

Here's an interview with Art Taylor just posted today at "Art and Literature." Taylor is a great fiction writer in his own right, but also a critic and professor of English and George Mason University. I was delighted to the a subject of one of his interviews, as I've read several of his previous interviews with interest, especially the one with James Ellroy.

Here's a quick preview of one q and a, the controversial question of "genre" fiction in the academy. I had to restrain myself, as I had much more to say on the subject:

TAYLOR: You earned an MFA from UNC-Wilmington and are pursuing a PhD at Georgia State. My impression has been that many (perhaps most) such grad school programs see a significant divide between so-called literary fiction on the one hand and genre fiction on the other and may tend to stigmatize or even dismiss the latter — and when you yourself go from crime fiction to zombies, you may really be riling the ranks. What was your experience as a “genre writer” in MFA workshops and in your current program? How have those experiences deterred or enhanced your work? And I have to ask, given how much effort you’re devoting to your fiction, how are you finding time to pursue a PhD (and why are you pursuing one at all)?

NIKITAS: I agree that formulaic writing is often disappointing because it engages the reader only on one, too-comfortably-familiar level. But “literary fiction” is a genre, or a catchall for a group of genres like magical realism, domestic realism, southern gothic, minimalism, etc. It has tropes, just tropes that are different from the mystery, or sci-fi, or whatever. Equally as much “literary fiction” is formulaic, like the formula for the “Chekhovian story” (aka, the “MFA” story).

A resourceful writer will use whatever tools he’s got available to enhance a reader’s interest in his fiction, whether those tools are poetic lyricism, an unreliable narrator, or rotting zombies. Many student writers will want to entertain via genre tropes, not because they want to be more marketable or write more “easily,” but because they’re genuinely drawn to these types of stories. (I’m inclined to believe the anecdotal evidence that this is partly a class issue — related to what forms of entertainment we were exposed to in our formative years — a possibility that makes me all the more sensitive to it.)

A conscientious teacher of writing should recognize and champion all of the above. We can’t all be Chekhovians, though some of us want to be Chekhovians, and should be encouraged to follow in his footsteps as we explode the formulas that have been extrapolated from his work.

I want to tell the haters to look around. The Modernist divide is largely gone. We’ve cross-fertilized. Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Justin Cronin, Junot Diaz. How many current, big-name award winners do we need to name before we concede that the genre tropes of ghost stories, adventure stories, crime stories, vampire stories, fairy tales, gothics, superhero stories, dystopias, and fantasies are flourishing in literary fiction?

I was lucky to work with faculty at UNC Wilmington who encouraged my writing experiments no matter where those experiments took me. Wilmington is where I took classes that introduced me to classic hardboiled crime and the great genre films of the ’60s and ’70s. Wilmington’s where I learned to write novels that consider their audiences and seek to entertain. It’s where I learned that good plotting is the hardest element of the craft and is not a cop out. It’s also where I learned that subtlety and originality of expression and characterization can push good work to the next level of quality.

I know my “genre tendencies” quietly disqualify me from certain opportunities, but they’ve also opened some doors, not the least of which is a modest but actual readership. I’m invigorated knowing that my writing is faithful to my own readerly interests. I’m also deeply satisfied to know that, as a teacher, I add a new flavor to the mix. My students hear a variety of advice from my colleagues and me, some of it contradictory, oh my! Our students must think deeply without passive acceptance. They must experiment and evolve and follow the advice that serves them best for the project at hand. Isn’t that how it should be?

My Zombie Story--Free

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 18:49:00 +0000

So here's a sexy e-card to publicize St. Martin's forthcoming zombie short story anthology, with pieces from many famous authors, and me. But you don't have to wait another month to read my story! Oh, no! If you follow this link, you can get access to a couple stories from the antho for free, including mine. It's called "My Dolly."

I'm excited to be a small part of this swarm of undead and unleashed, the legions plagued with the "flesh the grave cave ate," as Sylvia Plath wrote. I can get even more highbrow and dig out some of my favorite zombie poems from Tom Hardy. Just watch me!

The New Dead is already getting some enthusiastic press, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

The New Dead Edited by Christopher Golden. St. Martin’s Griffin, $14.99 paper (400p) ISBN 978-0-312-55971-7

The 19 provocative, haunting, and genuinely unsettling original stories in this zombie anthology move the genre beyond its usual apocalyptic wastelands. David Liss’s novelette “What Maisie Knew” is a stunning and gruesome meditation on the banality of capitalism and evil. Mike Carey’s “Second Wind” is a haunting tale of an undead stockbroker who comes to question whether he ever truly lived. Lovers of more traditional zombie fare will also not be disappointed. Joe Hill’s ingenious “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” tells a classic slasher film story through Twitter posts, while Jonathan Maberry’s heartbreaking “Family Business” describes a ruined America populated by kindly monks and zombie hunters. This powerful anthology shines a bright and unflinching light on the fears of death, decay, and loss that underpin America’s longstanding obsession with the undead. (Feb.)

The Washington Post Review

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:30:00 +0000

For Christmas this year, I get what is quite possibly the most complimentary, most insightful review of my work ever committed to print, in the Washington Post today. Thank you, Daniel Mallory.

It begins:

"Here is a book to scorch the heart and freeze the blood. Here is a story that leaves the reader gasping in shock and sadness, dry-mouthed and damp-eyed, dragging in air as the final chapters detonate. Here, in abundance, is live-wire language pumping beauty, desire and violence like electric currents; here are characters so exquisitely textured, the pages nearly shudder with their breath."

The rest is here.

The Reviews Are In...

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:07:00 +0000

...with more to come...

The New York Times Book Review:

With The Long Division, Derek Nikitas bumps up the style requirements for writing crime fiction another notch. When Jodie Larkin steals $5,000 from a home she cleans for an Atlanta housekeeping service and takes off in a stolen car to reconcile with the son she abandoned 15 years earlier, she sets in motion a chain of events that will eventually unite a group of strangers in grief. That takes some dazzling plot maneuvers, but Nikitas interlocks his fragmented story pieces in a way that makes everything seem inevitable - even the murders.

***

The Onion (A.V. Club)

Though ostensibly a crime novel—complete with shootouts, plot twists, and recriminations—Derek Nikitas’ The Long Division is more a work of literary fiction than a genre exercise. Nikitas shows an interest in language and form that outpaces most other authors who write about murder, and it manifests in passages that express the characters’ internal lives in terms of what they see around them. The Long Division is never hard to follow—and it’s peppered with memorable descriptions...

... The Long Division is much better—superior, even—when Nikitas is getting inside each character’s paranoia, exploring how varying degrees of guilt lead them to believe that everyone can see how pathetic they are. That core of emotional understanding is what makes Nikitas a special kind of crime writer.

***

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

[The Long Division] is no James Patterson/Faye Kellerman/Dan Brown whodunit. This is a novel concerned with bigger questions of identity, forgiveness, sin and fate.... Not one of the central characters in "Division" is a bad person, and so we keep hoping they will find a way out.But Nikitas tightens the noose, then tightens some more....

[Readers] may also find that the book reminds them a little of a David Lynch movie, or Darren Aronofsky's "Pi"....

[Readers] will certainly find themselves thinking of Lewis Carroll's " Alice in Wonderland." In the book's final moments....Nikitas conjures another writer, the great William Shakespeare, who never let his tragic heroes escape their mistakes, even when their intentions were good.

***

The Charlotte Observer:

The first chapter of "The Long Division" had me e-mailing to ask the publisher for a copy of Derek Nikitas' first novel, "Pyres," which I'm about halfway through now. Both are wonderfully character-driven stories of lives gone off the rails, with special attention to teens trying to make sense of the strange world their parents have twisted like a balloon animal before handing over to them.

***

South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

In his second novel, Derek Nikitas proves that he doesn't write conventional crime fiction; nor does he write conventionally. [The Long Division] has a frenetic pacing that never lets up. Sentences break off in the middle, sometimes even in the middle of a word. Chapters skid from one character to the other. Far from being precious, this gimmick works in a cinematic way, as if The Long Division is the literary complement to Quentin Tarantino in his Reservoir Dogs/Pulp Fiction days, but with far less violence....

The author makes us care about each of these sad, lonely people who seem unable to help themselves. As Nikitas pulls these characters together, surprises pop up on the route to a finale that is heartbreaking.

***

Wilmington Star News:

Clyde Edgerton likes to quote the adage that Evil is boring; it’s Sin that’s really interesting. What makes otherwise good, well-meaning people take a detour, turn left instead of right and veer off on a path that leads to destruction? That might be the theme of “The Long Division....”

Few of the protagonists in this equation are truly evil, but, when they come together, the result is a wreck of bloody and epic proportions....

Don’t pick up this book, though, expecting another James Patterson or even a Jim Thompson. Nikitas writes in a modified stream-of-consciousness, and his characters – especially the brilliant but troubled Wynn – tend to telegraph their thoughts in a language that’s more poetry slam than standard English....

In other words, “The Long Division” is not a beach read. It’s more like introductory calculus. Those readers willing to put forth a little effort, though, will be rewarded for their pains.

***

Publishers Weekly *starred review*:

"Beautifully realized characterizations power complex story lines that meet and connect this disparate group with the inevitability of Greek tragedy."

***

Library Journal *starred review*:

Nikitas is a master craftsman of both plot and prose, merging gritty, evocative description with sharply drawn characters in a staccato style"

***

Kirkus Reviews:

"An elegantly written second novel"

Me, Reading, in Buffalo, Talking Leaves Books

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:17:00 +0000

False Dichotomies: Plot vs. Lyricism (part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:07:00 +0000

So what do we really mean when we say we love lyrical novels for the language? We mean we love what the language evokes through denotation. Above all, we love vivid sensory detail because we can evoke in our mind's eye a moving picture of what the words represent. When we imaginatively move the stimulus away from language, away from arbitrary sound and printed letters on a page, when we move toward the thoroughly concrete sensory evocation--this is when we move toward a true experience worthy of the effort of reading fiction.

Take this bit from Jeffrey Eugenidies' The Virgin Suicides: "He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled with crumpled panties, of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of the girls, of a crucifix draped with a brassiere, of gauzy chambers of canopied beds, and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the same cramped space."

Certainly there are aural pleasure to be taken from this passage, pure sound delights: the suggestive verbs "filled," "stuffed," "hugged," "draped." The onomatopoetic cramped sound of "cramped." The breathless nature of the syntax--exactly how we'd expect the story teller to be telling the story of his illicit foray into the Lisbon girls' bedroom. The weird consonance between "crucifix" and "brassiere."

But all of these are secondary delights, something that registers with the reader on a fleeting, half-conscious level. Nobody except an analyst stops and notes consonance. And nobody sane takes delight in the mere presence of consonance, as if the repetition of consonant sounds moves him emotionally in some way. All these effects are of note because they relate to the context--to the story and what we're to draw from it. And that's not for the sake of "the language." That's for the sake of the story.

The primary pleasure of this passage is the sensory detail it provokes, the textures and the nostalgia regarding unfulfilled teenage hormonal fantasies. "...[T]he gauzy chamber of canopied beds" sounds good, but much more importantly it looks good in the mind's eye. We can see the numerous beds, all chambered off in different compartments by the canopies, but see-through, suffused with light from a window and gently floating, all evoking senses of intimacy and secrecy, yet ironically in a shared space. We enjoy what we see on a much deeper level than what we read.

And part of the reason we enjoy it so deeply is because we, the readers, are each participating in the creation of the sensory experience. The expert author has given us cues we'll use to develop the image, but ultimately the image belongs to us. It is an act of pure imagination so separated from language that it feels like liberation from some kind of tyranny, some semiotic anchor. If the words themselves give us any aural pleasure at all, it is usually an effect that serves to accompany the imagery we're developing in our minds.

We might hear the sounds that the various fabrics make when they're touched or when they flutter, and we might even hear them in the sounds of the words themselves ("effluvia," "gauzy chambers"). But sound has everything to do with enhancing the imagined sensory experience, and little to do with some kind of love for the words themselves, detached from context. (to be continued)

False Dichotomies: Plot vs. Lyricism (part one)

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Some readers like relatively plot-light, lyrical novels. They are often forced to defend their taste against the backlash: boring, self-indulgent, too distracting from the "story." A common defense: "I read it for the language."

How I wish apologists of lyrical fiction would stop saying "I read it for the language." It ain't helping the cause. Why? Because people don't really know what "for language" means. Especially those who say it. Which makes the idea too easy to dismiss as elitist or pedantic.

Come on: nobody reads novels for the language. That's like saying you eat at fancy restaurants for the calories or look at paintings for the paint. Written language is just utterances, denoted by letters, formed into words printed on a page. Yes, there's a certain musicality in well-formed utterances, but that musicality isn't the bottom-line reason we read novels, no more than the pleasantly musty smell of library books is the reason. Who would read novel after novel by the same author only because he likes the way the author makes noises?

Language poets write a kind of verbal poem that lacks any semantic meaning. Language poetry is largely performative and mercifully short in duration, and almost nobody gives a damn about it, except perhaps truly pretentious people. If you're truly in that camp, then congratulations for existing in a higher state of consciousness and aesthetic sensitivity than the rest of us philistines.

But I'll assume most of us, including those who claim to love language, aren't that detached. Even the briefest, most lyrically rich poem we read for more than mere language. And a whole novel? Come on.

So what do we really mean when we say we love lyrical novels for the language? (to be continued)

Soundtrack

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:23:00 +0000

Pyres Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:19:00 +0000

Here's the full 58-minute audio of an interview regarding Pyres, conducted on Georgia State University radio last year. It comes courtesy of Nija Dalal, my illustrious interviewer, now of Rock the Province in Sydney, Down Under.

Flames of Mourning

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:18:00 +0000

That's the Japanese title for Pyres, released in Japan last week. I don't have a copy of it yet, but I look forward to holding it and not being able to read a single solitary bit. The genre, according to the Japanese publisher, Hayakawa, is "state of mind," which I suppose is something like "noir."

Pyres: The Movie?

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Must admit I've been sitting on this news a while, processing whether or not it could be true, waiting for it to mature. But now that the first big step has been taken, hiring a brilliant screenwriter, I must spread the news. So here goes:

Producer Andrew Fierberg at Vox3 Films has optioned film rights to Derek Nikitas' Edgar Award nominated PYRES, the story of a rebellious teenage girl who is forced to come of age in the midst of the criminal conspiracies surrounding her father's murder and the dogged detective atoning for her own family's collapse while investigating the case.

Fierberg is 1/3 of Vox3, a highly successful NY-based independent production company known for actually making the movies for which they acquire the rights, so you can imagine my delight. What's more, their movies are quirky, honest, and alive in ways you don't normally see in movies from the big H (not that I have anything against the big H, mind you; there's a time to every purpose under heaven).

Their most recent release is Rage with Judi Dench, Jude Law (in drag), Eddie Izzard, and Steve Buscemi. They've also made Keane, a truly frightning and moving and intimate psychological character study; Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus with Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., among quite a few others. Secretary and Fur are of course Steven Shainberg's two stylish and creepy films, the former of which I've taught in a film class before.

Oh, and they made Broken English, directed by Zoe Casavettes, the daughter of one of my heroes, the late, great independet film giant, John Casavettes. I enjoyed Broken English in particular because it shows how much more Ms. Casavettes is following in her father's footsteps than her brother Nick, who made The Notebook.

But the biggest news yet about all this is that Vox3 has hired James Ponsoldt to write the adapted screenplay. Ponsoldt's first feature film, Off The Black (starring Nick Nolte), was a Sundance official entry. If you've not seen it, run out and rent it pronto. It's a moving, starkly beautiful character study full of authenticating detail both comic and tragic, and it has such a keen eye for the kind of life my characters lead. I'm thrilled to have James making my story his own, and can't wait to read the results.

The Long Division... This November

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:59:00 +0000

Me, on Austrailian Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:07:00 +0000

Well, sorta. About a year ago, when I was still at Georgia State University, a radio broadcaster named Nija Dalal interviewed me for the college radio station, just after I was nominated for the Edgar. The interview aired, but has never been available online...

until now! (follow the link, then press the green "play" button).

Nija moved to Austrailia after graduating, hooked up with Radio 2SER FM in Sydney, and recut our interview for part of a literature-oriented radio show called Final Draft. Since nobody in Austrailia would care in the least about my book (really, let's be honest), Nija rightly cut out all those parts and concentrated on what I said about the history of mystery, the thriller, and the spaces between. This is all off-the-cuff stuff, no notes or prep, so please excuse inaccuracies and oversimplifications.

And thank you, Nija!

New Pyres Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Derek Nikitas) — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:36:00 +0000

Glad to report that last month's publication of the trade paperback of Pyres has eared the book some renewed attention, including some fresh reviews from newspaper and online sources. Here's a sampling:

Nikitas does a nice job of weaving in a surprising amount of Norse mythology into an otherwise very modern thriller. . . [T]he novel's final chapter, titled Ragnarok (twilight of the gods in Norse mythology), vies with any epic opera for explicit and apocalyptic violence.

Nikitas keeps the tension high in Pyres while creating a compelling cast of characters. Detective Hurd could be a springboard heroine for a noir series set in the woodsy idyll of upstate New York.

--Kathy Kerr, The Edmonton Journal (full review here)

Derek Nikitas' Pyres garnered good notices, but not widespread acclaim, when it was published last year. But now that the book, nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel, is out in paperback, it has a chance to reach the audience it richly deserves.

--Ruth Myles, Calgary Herald (full review here)

An Edgar Award nominee for best first novel, Pyres is a harsh, bleeding nightmare full of Scandinavian angst and American mayhem, a fairy tale with all "the brutal bits."

In a genre ploughed deep, it breaks new ground. Don't miss it.

--John Sullivan, Winnipeg Free Press (full review here)

It's hard to believe this tour de force is a first novel. However, the author is an acclaimed short-story writer and clearly has honed his fiction chops. Another surprise, given the male author, is that the main characters are women and a major theme running through the book is mothers and daughters trying to make peace. To Nikitas' credit, the characters and relationships are all quite convincing. Nikitas is also close enough to his youth that he gets his younger characters right. I admit that when Luc started seeing Nordic gnomes (tomten) that led her on the right path, I paused. This was verging on fantasy, something I usually avoid. But everything about the story was so well done and so compelling that I was willing to suspend disbelief and keep on reading. I was glad I did. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

--Verna Suit at I Love a Mystery (full review here, complete with doofy candid of the author)

And here's a nice bit about my story "Runaway," in the Killer Year anthology (St. Martin's Minotaur, edited by Lee Child):

The best story in this collection is the superbly chilling "Runaway" by Derek Nikitas. Two fifteen year-olds have made a building site their playground and a concrete underground bunker their den - and then they discover that a runaway black girl is hiding inside. The captivating Rhonda Peach is a revelation to the boys. But things increasingly get beyond their control. Nikitas's writing is evocative and sensual and rooted in teenage angst.

--Eileen Shaw, The Bookbag (full review here)

But perhaps my favorite review of Pyres yet comes from the "Nerd of Noir" (aka Peter Dragovich) Here's a snippet, but please do read the whole profane thing:

But what really makes this fucker hum is the action. This is some of the most intense violence you will read anywhere, depicted on a level that is arguably McCarthyian - no shit. ..Some shocking stuff happens in this motherfucker and when it isn't completely disgusting, it is absolutely riveting.

I can't wait for Nikitas to pump out another book. This dude has the chops to intrigue both the beret-wearing totebag-carriers and the folks like you and me who want our pulp to go all the way. He's fighting the best fight and I support the shit out of him for that.

Finally, and by contrast, here's a message board over at Women's Day, where a nice group of folks are currently reading and discussing Pyres.