OK, if that sounds like the petulant outcry of a scolded fiction writer, that’s because it is. I was innocently leafing through last week’s issue of Newsweek when I came across a review of James Wood’s new book How Fiction Works. The first paragraph of the review reads thusly:
James Wood’s new book, “How Fiction Works,” is as knowing as you’d expect from one of the best critics alive—more knowing than that, in fact—but that may not always please writers, since Wood also knows how fiction doesn’t work. I guess I’d always thought, for instance, that maybe it wasn’t too lame to kick off a novel or story with a description of a photograph. Wood not only identifies this device, correctly, as a cliché marking the writer as a greenhorn, but also cooks up a parody just plausible enough to seduce you before stinging: “My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, on the other hand …” What’s wrong with this, besides its triteness? Its laziness. As Wood writes: “It is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilized in a scene that is hard.”
DAMN it. On page 1 of my novel-in-progress, I have the following description of a photograph:
Quentin kept a picture of Marianne on his dresser. In the picture she’s wearing shorts and a tank top and her blond hair is pulled back in a pony tail. She’s somewhere in the Cascades from the look of the rocky terrain beneath her feet. She holds one calloused hand up to shield her eyes, and she smiles. I’ve spent hours, maybe days of my life staring at that photograph, memorizing every detail, every curve of her long oval face, the crow’s feet around her eyes as she squints against the sun, the wave of her uncared-for hair, the few unruly strands that catch the sunlight: just so.
Of course, reading this immediately took all the wind out of my sails. Last night I tapped merrily along, revising chapter 1 and feeling good about the work. Tonight, I doubt all of it.
Of course, I immediately ordered the book.
1 response so far ↓
1 NanMel // Aug 7, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Tom! I know what you mean. After we (my fellow film school classmates) had finished filming our first films, we were given this list of student film cliches to avoid. Every one of us had at least one of these, save for the zoom in/dolly out (which I contend is awesome and not a cliche, but whatever), in our films.
Of course we all then felt that same doubt-filled windless-sail gut-wrenching misunderstood feeling. But that’s why we’re called tortured artists, right?
Leave a Comment