What Fiction Writers Can Learn from Others: Part One
     Victoria Grossack

One of the best New Year’s Resolutions I ever made – perhaps the only which I actually kept! – occurred when I realized that I kept reading the same authors over and over. So I resolved, that year so long ago, that I would try a bunch of new-to-me authors. I decided to try one for each letter of the alphabet.

I finished my alphabet of authors well before the year was out. (The letter “X” was a challenge; I finally selected The Autobiography of Malcolm X, even though it was actually ghosted by Alex Huxley.) The experience was fabulous. Some of the authors are still among my favorites; others I have not picked up since. But I certainly expanded my literary horizons.

Literary horizons should not be limited to books. Stories abound in other art forms: movies and plays and the like. There are many other types of writing, too. In this column we’ll start thinking about other forms of storytelling and writing and start honing our ability to appreciate them. We’ll also be critical, however, and ask: what functions in other media and why? What can we borrow and apply to our own writing?

Epic Poetry & Religious Writings

There are the great old stories, such as the epic of Gilgamesh, those found in the Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid. You may want to expand your literary experience to include the Koran, and the perspective of the Buddhists and the Hindu Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

These ancient masterpieces have had a tremendous impact on subsequent storytelling; sometimes we can directly follow the trail. For example, Virgil – borrowing heavily from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – composed the Aeneid in order to give Rome its own epic. We can see the combined influence of Virgil and the Bible on Dante. Leo Tolstoy, despite writing in prose, maintained that War & Peace was not a novel, but an epic. I suppose “epic” could be defined as being long in words and grand in scope. War & Peace in turn influenced Herman Wouk and his books about World War II. One could argue that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Rowling’s Harry Potter books are also epical in nature. Each series is certainly long enough and both deal with issues such as life and death, good versus evil, love and grief.

Why is it worth familiarizing yourself with these works? One reason is because they’ve had so much influence on our culture; they make up a large part of our background. Another reason is to see which struggles and passions are eternal to the human condition and which are really more a part of our current times. I think it’s useful to understand even what seems most alien to us now – such as starting a ten-year war over a trivial case of adultery – for these perspectives may help you develop different points of view in your story. And, if you are writing historical fiction, studying these works is essential!

However, these ancient writings can be hard to read. This may be partly because the context, background and names are not familiar. A second reason may be because you have difficulties with the format – for example, long works written in verse may be less accessible for you than prose. And sometimes – oh heresy! – the actual construction of the story may not be satisfying because they are not politically correct, or because you’re more interested in one aspect of the story while the author is concentrating on another.

Here are a few suggestions: instead of just picking up The Iliad, and expecting it to both make sense and to be entertaining, start by taking a course or by renting or buying or borrowing a lecture on the subject. Another way - easy! - is to watch movies based on the epic. I know this may sound like cheating but movies, as they are made for today’s audience, have already been filtered to be more accessible. After this preparation you can move on to the actual epics.

Theatre

Plays – both drama and comedy – have also been around for millennia. When you consider the technology of BCE, it makes sense that plays were an early form of storytelling. People either chiseled their stories on stone (permanent but not transportable), wrote on clay tablets (still very heavy) or wrote on papyrus (significantly easier to carry around but very expensive). Besides, most people could not read. So a few copies of a play would be made, and then the play would be performed and all could watch it and share the story.

Some of the oldest plays we have are those written by the Greeks – and we have, really, only a handful of the hundreds that were written for various competitions. The original plays were limited in their casting, with a chorus and only two or three other characters. So – I will register a complaint – these plays often tell instead of show. When the chorus drones poetically on, describing action which should be exciting but isn’t, the words blur in my brain. But the plays come alive for me, a reader of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when there are quick exchanges between characters.

Theatre blossomed with Shakespeare, and is still in good shape. And it has advantages in that you can show as well as tell. It has the potential for great dialogue and crazy situations.

Theatre as a medium of storytelling also has potential disadvantages. First, sometimes playwrights – again, oh, heresy! – use too much dialogue. Second, changing from scene to scene is more challenging, as is staging some of the action. These facts constrain either the storytelling or the delivery of the story. Third, it’s possible to “miss” something – either a plot point or a pun. Unlike a novel, a spectator can’t go back and review the previous paragraph.

The best way to appreciate theatre is to go and watch it. Another suggestion: get together with friends and read a play together aloud, with assigned parts. Or, if you are like me, a shy exhibitionist - perhaps this describes the nature of many writers - you can read all the parts aloud yourself. This was my technique back in high school. Once a year we would “do” Shakespeare in my English class. I would choose a day when no one was home, make sure that no one was passing by the windows, and then treat myself to ranting and raving through all the parts.

Seriously, though, reading aloud is good practice. And I recommend that, if possible, you read a play aloud before you see it. I know this can spoil the plot, but this sequence will help you appreciate the difference between the mere words in the text and how the direction, staging and acting add dimensions and layers to the storytelling experience.

Movies

Movies are similar to theatre in that they are based on scripts. However, by having a camera which can be moved around – which is, basically, moving the audience – a movie has much more flexibility. The camera can take us, the audience, from the farm to the spaceship in the blink of an eye, and then back down again. The camera can also shoot from different angles, coming in for close ups and then going back to capture panoramas. Movies can also create scenes which require special effects or many takes for the actors to get it right.

In all of the above, movies are more similar to books than to theatre. In books we have similar capabilities, because we can skip around from scene to scene. Some books these days are almost “movie-ready,” with very short scenes. And as people have become accustomed to the swift shifts of scenes, shorter scenes have become more palatable to contemporary readers.

Nevertheless I think this can go too far. Movies have sensory advantages over books, with visuals to show the scene, and even music to quickly summon emotions in the audience. Frequent scene shifts in books are possible but are more difficult to do well. A reader needs more time to enter a scene; for example, the visual details need to be presented via some form of description and description often slows down a story. All the characters need to be introduced using words, also slowing down the story.

Are there any ways in which books still have the advantage in terms of storytelling? I think so. Books are less expensive to make. And I think some things are still better left to the imagination. For example, while reading Stephen King’s vampire book, Salem’s Lot, I was so terrified that I had to leave a light on at night. The film version was not nearly as frightening as my own fantasy.

Movies also need to fit within a certain amount of time, whereas books are more flexible. (Consider how much of the plot of the books has been chopped out to make the Harry Potter movies.) There are ways around this, of course, such as longer movies and even series of movies – but each additional minute of film is expensive. Longer movies may prove difficult for movie theaters and television stations to schedule. Movies that are in series require a more significant investment in time as well as money.

Books allow us to enter a character’s thoughts – similar to the close up, but even better, because we can go inside. In movies, listening to a character’s thoughts is possible by having a voice-over while we see the character performing on the screen, but it can’t be done with the same ease as in a novel.

Movies obviously can do much more cinematically than those working on a stage (although some theatres manage some incredibly elaborate productions). Yet in my opinion, the lack of live people in a movie detracts from the energy that I get when I attend a staged production.

Movies are also important because they are often seen by many people. They’re worth seeing in a cinema, every now and then, because their impact is greater when the screen can overwhelm your senses. I think the experience is also more intense when you share it with an audience. Watch the movie; read the reviews; discuss it with your date and your friends. Notice how they do things, and ask yourself what techniques in the storytelling you can use to make your own fiction better.

Intermission

I am apparently composing my own epic; there are still many other forms to discuss but the length of the column is already far over the limit! So we’ll take a break and continue exploring other storytelling media next month.

Questions? Comments? You want to use this article or simply to share your own impressions? Feel free to write to me at grossackva at yahoo dot com.

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About the Writer:

Victoria Grossack is, with Alice Underwood, the internationally published author of Iokaste: The Novel of the Mother-Wife of Oedipus, and other books coming out in the series called the Tapestry of Bronze (Tapestry of Bronze.com).  You can also read more of her articles on writing by ordering the e-book, Levels of Structure in Fiction from  www.booklocker.com.  

Odes to Olympians poetry contest, featuring Hera/Juno, at Ode Form Contest.

Victoria was a moderator of a critique group for Coffeehouse for Writers and teaches the From Leaves to Forests and Writing Historical Fiction workshops for Coffeehouse for Writers.