Story and Storytelling

What Does the Author Owe the Reader? Questions about The Buried Giant

Just read The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I have a lot of questions. What in the world was the author trying to say? Should I be worried because I don’t know? Or should he?

The story is about Axl and Beatrice, Britons (Celts) in post-Arthurian England. They are elderly, and their memories are fading, but so are the memories of all those around them. They decide to leave their village, where they are being persecuted because they are old, and travel to visit their son. On their journey they meet a knight (Sir Gawain, nephew of King Arthur, who has grown old), a Saxon warrior, and a young boy with special unnamed powers. They wander around, talk a lot, share some mild adventures,

As with others of Ishiguro’s novels,(like The Remains of the Day), much is suggested, little is directly stated.

The giant is mentioned in the beginning as a physical entity, a ordinary giant; by the end, the giant has become something else. The warrior, Wistan, says, “The giant, once well buried now stirs.” And I understand that the giant is now war and conquest.

I had the feeling that Ishiguro was trying to say something, trying to get me as a reader to understand something. But I found myself more frustrated at the lack of directness than intrigued.

To give you – and me – something to think about, Ishiguro said:

“Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

(The genre question is another discussion. If you want to go more deeply into it, read this Guardian article in which Ursula Le Guin takes Ishiguro to task.)

My question is about more than genre; it’s about the relationship between a writer and his readers, and the unstated communication that goes on behind the words.

Is Ishiguro too subtle? If he’s trying to “say” something, get the reader to think a certain way about the effect of the book, is there a point at which subtlety, allegory, is overdone?

Does his subtlety diminish his skill as a writer?

If an author is trying to “do” or “say” something, and readers don’t get it, does that mean the book is a failure? If this wasn’t from Ishiguro, would readers enjoy it, and “get it”?

I shouldn’t have to know what he’s trying to say. I should be able to enjoy the book for the story itself and find the story satisfying. And I should be able to discern what the author is trying to say.

2674672556_dafd9348d4_q — Pilgrim’s Progress flickr Creative commons by PMM

Neil Gaiman, in his New York Times review of The Buried Giant, confesses his “inability to fall in love with it.” He says, “I suspect my inability to fall in love with it, much as I wanted to, came from my conviction that there was an allegory waiting like an ogre in the mist….” (you’ll have to read the rest of the quote online to see what Gaiman thought the allegory was.)

It may be too simple to state that the book is allegory (extended metaphor); certainly, it has the quality of allegory, like Pilgrim’s Progress. The boatman in the book, for example, immediately brought to mind Charon, the boatman who ferried the dead to the underworld.

Gaiman continues, “it guards its secrets and its world close.” Too close, maybe?

Charlie Jane Anders, reviewing the book on io9, called it a “weird mess,” and said,

Ishiguro’s story is dark and very strange, and leaves you with questions and riddles rather than explanations. The end of the book is one that’s going to haunt and perplex me for a while — which, in the end, is the ultimate proof that this is a book worth reading.

Really? Haunt, yes, but must we be perplexed? Is it good storytelling to perplex readers? Or is it just that Ishiguro missed the mark in his intention?

If you really want to know, Ishiguro explains what he was trying to do, the “universal statement” he was trying to make, in the Guardian article. I certainly didn’t get that out of the book. You can take what you want from what he says, you can decide it says something different to you (like Neil Gaiman), or you can keep re-reading until you figure it out for yourself.

Do I have to read what the author intended in order to understand the book? Shouldn’t I be able to understand it on its own? In one reading?

My head hurts from all these questions. I liked the book, the story was intriguing and the relationship between Axl and Beatrice was touching. But I felt unsatisfied, frustrated by my lack of understanding about what the author was trying to say.

I don’t like working this hard to get meaning from a book. Lazy, I know. Give me a good murder mystery in which the detective sits everyone down at the end and explains who killed who and why and how and where. Miss Plum in the library with a candlestick.

See my Goodreads review of The Buried Giant

Stories – The Fabric of our Lives – And our Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Fright — By DaigoOliva CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Stories are everywhere around us, and they weave together to make up a huge part of our lives.

I watched a TED presentation by Karen Thompson Walker about fear in which Walker, the author of a novel about the whaleship Essex discussed why we have fears. Primarily, it’s because we have a story in our heads about the subject (spiders, let’s say) that causes us to act in a specific way. She calls fears “unintentional storytelling.”

Let’s say you are afraid of spiders, because you have heard stories about people being killed by spiders or people have warned you about them. You have created an unintentional story about spiders that keeps you fearful. The stories, you’ll notice, build up like a game of “telephone,” and the stories keep getting more fantastic and lurid.

In the case of the Essex, by the way, the sailors had heard stories about cannibals in the islands nearest them, and they didn’t go that way. The cannibals weren’t actually that bad, and that would have been the best way to sail. They chose the least scary way, the way their stories told them was least scary, which was the worst way. All died.

Where do we get our stories? The vast majority come to us when we are young, from our parents and others. The story of our religion is a good example. This story forms what we believe about life and death. The story of our family is told over and over, at the breakfast table, at holidays, at funerals and weddings. “Remember the time when…?”

Our stories about ourselves are powerful. In the Wise Heart, psychologist Jack Kornfield says, “Who would you be without your story?” I stopped and thought when I read this, and had a bid “Ah ha!” moment.

Who we are is the stories we tell ourselves. If I say, “I’m a writer,” I am what I think I am, what my story tells me I am. If the story you tell yourself is, “I can’t write,” you aren’t a writer. Take away the stories we have told ourselves, and others, and what do we have?

A recent article in The Atlantic discusses the human need for stories.

Stories can be a way for humans to feel that we have control over the world. They allow people to see patterns where there is chaos, meaning where there is randomness. Humans are inclined to see narratives where there are none because it can afford meaning to our lives—a form of existential problem-solving.

In one example in the article, research subjects saw several triangles and a circle moving around and when asked what they saw, all but one subject had created a story out of the movement of these inanimate objects. We do this with animals too – my husband insists that the dog licks his face because she loves him. Ha!

Stories may one of the most important links our brains make. We are “wired for story,” and our brains are built to make sense of what we see, creating context so we can figure it out. Our survival depends on it. If our ancient ancestors didn’t have stories about sabre-toothed tigers, for example, they wouldn’t know to run when they saw one, or how to kill it, and they would not have survived.

Thinking about the stories we tell as writers can help us be better writers. Are you telling a riveting, funny, sad, important story?

A couple of books to help you think about storytelling and how it relates to your writing:

There is Only One Story

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Campfire Tales — On Flickr by Clevergrrl

Everywhere I turn, I run into the concepts of story and storytelling, and I’m fascinated by the truth that these concepts are central to the human experience. I find evidence of story and storytelling everywhere. Most recently, I encountered a quote I want to share with you.

It’s from the first season of True Detective, an HBO series. In this first series, the major characters are two cops, played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. At the end of one episode, the two have a dialogue about the meaning of life, and McConaughey’s character, Rust Cohle, gives a speech that includes this:

Rust: “Yeah, I think you remember how I never watched the TV until I was 17, so there wasn’t much to do up there [Alaska] but walk around, explore, and…”

Marty: “And look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”

Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that [hospital] room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”

Marty: “What’s that?”

Rust: “Light versus dark.”

Is it really true that there’s just one story? I decided to put this statement to the test. Stories about fighting the bad guys (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings) are certainly light versus dark. But what about a romance novel? A YA vampire novel? A comedy?

The “dark” can be inner as well as outside. There is the “dark” of loneliness, of fear of death, or fear of what might be called a “death in life,” that might be manifest in many ways.

Take a movie like Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman dresses like a woman to get a job on a sit-com, and he falls in love with his co-star (played by Jessica Lange). Where is the dark? I believe Tootsie has a lot to say about who we are as humans, not just men or women, and our inner longing and loneliness (the dark). In the most poignant scene, the two are in her bedroom with little pink buds in the wallpaper, and the longing in Tootsie is palpable.

A concept that has meaning for this discussion is what’s called the “dark night of the soul,” the title of a 16th-century poem by a Christian mystic named St. John of the Cross. The term is used by Roman Catholics to denote a spiritual crisis, but in its broader sense it can describe what spiritual author Eckart Tolle says is “collapse of a perceived meaning in life.”

The darkness is all around us, and in us too. Storytelling around the campfire is a perfect example of how we try to keep the dark away.

Darkest Winter

As I write this, we are at the darkest point of the year – the winter solstice, when days are shortest and nights longest. I’ve always felt this is a special time, because it combines the reality of darkness with the hope of light, as the succeeding days grow longer.

Gary Zukav, a spiritual teacher, says,

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

Christmas as the Light

The light vs. dark story is played out in many religions, but I wanted to mention Christianity as a premier example. We celebrate Christmas at midwinter, that darkest time of the year. We sing carols like Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, which includes “light and life to all he brings.” I remember as a child going to a Christmas Eve service in which we sang “Joy to the World” while holding lighted candles. The church was filled with light.

The final lines of True Detective return again to the discussion of light vs. dark. Marty has said, looking at the sky, “it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
Then Rust says:

Rust: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”

Marty: “How’s that?”

Rust: “Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.”

May your stories bring light to the darkness.

Using the Iceberg Principle to Improve Your Fiction Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

I came across the Iceberg Principle a while back, and found many references to it in connection with Ernest Hemingway. But there isn’t much about how to specifically apply it to your writing. So here goes:

First: the Iceberg Principle, as explained by Hemingway

If you’re read Hemingway, you know he writes in a very concise, even terse, style. See this NYTimes article (or below in this article) for a sample, and note the dialogue – short, almost brusque sentences, and an occasional short paragraph of narrative, with very little description.

As I understand what Hemingway said about the Iceberg Principle, you have to know what you are writing about, but you don’t need to write every word of what you know. “If the writer does his job,” Hemingway says, “the reader almost innately gets a sense of the underlying story, even without all the details.”
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Here’s a scene from The Sun Also Rises, from the NY Times article I mentioned above:

“It’s cold.”

“Want to walk back?”

“Through the park.”

We climbed down. It was clouding over again. In the park it was dark under the trees.

“Do you still love me, Jake?”

“Yes,” I said

“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.

“How?”

“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”

“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”

“You ought to stop it.”

“How can I stop it? I can’t stop things. Feel that?”

Her hand was trembling.

“I’m like that all through.”

“You oughtn’t to do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner now, anyway. Don’t you see the difference?”

“No.”

“I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.”

From this short scene, you can get a sense of:

the setting
how the characters feel about each other
their moods
the mood of the scene
the conflict between the two characters
a sense of foreboding
and an anticipation of what will happen next.

All in 156 words!

Hemingway had to know a lot about what was going on, he had to know the characters inside/out, and he had to have a strong sense of the setting and background. And, most important, he needed to know what was going to happen next in the story.

BUT, he didn’t need to tell you everything. He could show you in a subtle way, the tip of the fictional iceberg.

If you want another example of Hemingway’s style, to see the iceberg principle played out, read his short story Hills Like White Elephants.

Then, the Iceberg Principle Applied

This principle works in all kinds of writing and business situations. For example, Chip Scanlon, writing for the Poynter Institute, discusses how reporters must interview many sources and do lots of research, before writing that article, which might contain only a small part of what the writer knows.

When I was writing business reports, I also gathered a great deal of information and had to distill it down to its essence, but I also had to be able to answer esoteric questions. Without a broad understanding of the issue, I wouldn’t have much credibility.

Finally, the Iceberg Principle Applied to Your Writing

How well you prepare to write your novel can make it sellable – or not. Using the Iceberg Principle when you are preparing to write and then writing, can make a difference. Some ways you can use the Iceberg Principle:

Build complex characters with lots of back story, not just the protagonist and antagonist.
Take time to create your setting completely, whether it’s a fictional world or a piece of the real world. Draw diagrams, maps, blueprints, whatever it takes to give you a sense of the setting. Write detailed descriptions of key places in the story.
If you want to create a fictional world, ask yourself all the questions that need to be answered about that world. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers have an article with a detailed list of questions you can work through to build your world.
Writing historical fiction? Be sure you know the details about the world in which your characters lived. Yes, this takes lots of time, but it will pay huge dividends in improving your writing.
Think about what is happening in the outside world while your story is going on. What events – local to global – might affect the characters and the story?
Create a specific timeline for your story – what happens when and what events happen in what order?

Following the iceberg principle in your fiction writing helps enrich your writing. It makes you an “expert” in the story you are writing, and helps your readers feel more involved with your story.

While your readers may not acknowledge your efforts in spending the time to gather the whole iceberg, they will be able to more quickly become immersed in your story and your characters.

As Hemingway said,

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.