… And all of ‘em are in Homer.
Well, that’s the story, anyway. Sometimes the magic number is eleven. Sometimes the magic number is three. Sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes Virgil gets a look-in, but usually Homer gets the blame for the sum total of basic plotlines in Western Literature. I used to think this assertion was so much eyewash, but having spent a depressing few months reading a great deal of contemporary (and not so contemporary) fiction, I’m starting to agree that there aren’t that many different plots.
Similarly, I’m also starting to think that writers who stray outside those basic plots — unless they’re a genius — are apt to produce bad writing. Since I’m writing at the moment, this is something I’m keen to avoid. My view has always been that to write well, you need to read widely, especially in the areas that inspire your own writing. For the book I’m doing now, I’ve revisited Swift (A Modest Proposal is on the electronic equivalent of speed dial) and have been dining out on science fiction, speculative fiction and steampunk (I highly recommend Perdido Street Station, by the way). That said, I tend to read pretty omnivorously when writing, and this book has also required some time in the company of Adam Smith and David Hume as well as the New Testament, the Gnostic Gospels, Lucretius and Catullus.
Unfortunately, my usual plan to read lots of recent literary fiction has pretty much stalled. This is because every second work of literary fiction I pick up seems to be one of the following:
(a) Bad magic realism
(b) Bad Jane Austen
(c) People working out their childhood shit
(d) People obsessed with the more boring aspects of women’s lives, as though writing about it obsessively will somehow make it less boring.
One of the above is coupled (almost inevitably) with excruciating dialogue and an utter failure to plot convincingly. It is dreadful and very unpleasant to wade through.
I was beginning to worry that a tendency to engage in (e) all of the above was spreading and so spent some time in the genre fiction sections. This is in Blackwell’s, by the way, the bookshop in Oxford with umpteen miles of shelving. I don’t want for reading material that is both (a) plentiful and (b) cheap.
To my delight, I found that crime writers can still — for the most part — create proper tension. Erotic writers can still do sex scenes. War and science fiction get their technology right (although the latter are still sometimes afflicted with excruciating dialogue) and often do interesting things with it. Writers of police procedurals and courtroom dramas can be very good, especially if they have taken the time to get the police procedure/law correct.
Sometimes a literary writer can take a genre (thriller, often) and really do something with it. The best book I’ve read in the last three years is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin: nothing (including the narrator) is quite what it seems, and the ending is overwhelming because so well concealed.
Most of the time, however, there is no attempt to engage with genre fiction and literary authors flounder about with boring stories derived largely from their own experience. Now this ‘only write what you know’ caper is the biggest bloody furphy in literature and I’m going to explode it right now.
Robert Heinlein never travelled to the moon. Harper Lee was never a lawyer. P.D James is not a copper. Lionel Shriver is not a school shooter. Bret Easton Ellis…
You get my point.
Writing well requires thought and insight, not deep knowledge of the inner workings of the Queensland Criminal Code (or whatever it is). If there is a rule, it is this: first tell your story, then worry about all the bells and whistles to make it ‘authentic’. If you strive for authenticity first, you will produce a pale imitation of literature, and your characters will never live.
This seems to be a lesson too many literary writers fail to learn, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of politeness to the groups they seek to represent in fiction. Feeling that they should not speak for those who are unlike themselves, they speak only about people like themselves. And because most writers are white, middle-class and female, the result is slightly less interesting than navel fluff collecting.
After my last run-in with people who take this sort of slipshod argument seriously, I swore off historical fiction. First time around, I went to some trouble to make my characters ‘true’ to their time: nasty, poor, brutish and — in their case, having been recruited into the Waffen-SS — tall. It seems, however, that authors would rather live with a lie when it comes to historical fiction. This produces ridiculous effects like Medieval nuns sounding like nineteenth century liberals (or, if the author is American, like 20th century American liberals). It is utterly nauseating and evidence of the worst sort of contempt for both history and literature.
As you all know, this time I’m doing spec-fic with roots in a historical period about which I know a great deal. Since I refuse to write historical fiction, I’ve been freed to ask some odder questions. Some of these have interesting answers, while some of these have boring (or at least pointless) answers. Often, I don’t know what I’ll get when I ask the question and start working my ideas through, but the exercise is a bunch of fun. And it produces characters that are fully, grubbily alive — which is all you can ask for, really.
And trust me on the seven plots. There ain’t no more.
50 Comments
I used to think this assertion was so much eyewash, but having spent a depressing few months reading a great deal of contemporary (and not so contemporary) fiction, I’m starting to agree that there aren’t that many different plots.
I would have thought the degree in English Literature would have taught you THAT… or had you just forgotten since your brain was rewired by the Law degree?
Alas the ninnies who taught me English literature all had a tendency to inflate the purported originality of much writing, particularly if it represented the experiences of a hitherto ‘oppressed’ group. We may never be able to calculate the damage the whole ‘write yourself’ movement has done to literature.
The classicists, by contrast? ‘Seven plots, and they’re all in Homer’.
I am going to uni to chat to a professor or two, so for now, here’s two quick links.
The Big List of RPG Plots
The TV Tropes Wiki
I quite like Joseph Campbell’s analysis of mythical heroes. Fascinating to see how many tropes are repeated in different cultures and religions.
Jacques: LOL – particularly like the TV tropes.
One of the reasons why Shakespeare has survived until now is because he builds on these kind of tropes – they have a universal appeal.
SL, I think genre writing is great – I vastly prefer it to most “literature” these days. One of the reasons why it’s great is because it has a set pattern, but writers tweak it here and there in interesting ways. It’s about doing different things with a known genre.
There’s a broad and shallow but very very powerful subculture among students of ‘creative writing’, one that I and all the other people I know who’ve ever taught writing just tear our hair out about but can’t shift one iota, that not only do you not need to read in order to be a writer, but that reading actively gets in the way. This is what’s currently producing at least some of the worst stuff in your categories (a) to (e) above. Not only are they convinced they should ‘write what you know’ (a once-useful dictum that they have wilfully misinterpreted beyond recognition), but they are also convinced that you should just ‘be creative’ and that you shouldn’t let other writers ‘influence’ you.
I am talking only about the bad and mediocre students, the ones with no particular talent and no extraordinary intelligence. And I don’t want to get into some derailing side stoush about whether it’s possible to teach creative writing, especially not with anyone who’s never taught or learned it. This comment is intended to engage with Helen’s observations about much contemporary fiction, and to observe that what can be taught is literary technique and literary history, including the history of the various genres and their conventions. If only the people who fork out thousands of bucks to ‘do creative writing’ could be made to understand that those are the main things they need to know.
SL
You are fortunate to be away from The Land That Time Forget. You cannot open a newspaper review section or a literary/current affairs journal/mag, attend a contemporary visual arts exhibition, or see a play without being bashed about the head with musings on aborigines; overwhelmingly, musings by Anglo-Celts.
Aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!.
SL
I argue that one of the worst influences on young writers has been Edward Said’s Orientalism, and all that “writing the Other” shit he inspired.
I don’t doubt for a minute that literary technique etc can be taught — no argument from me there, PC. Sometimes I think that the jobs writing teachers get saddled with would be a little less onerous if schools did their jobs properly, but that is by the by. I wrote THTSTP and had ‘Politics and the English Language’ on speed dial for it — I must have read it at least weekly, much as I’m doing with A Modest Proposal for this book.
The idea that you can write without being well-read is perplexing. If you are going to write, you must read. I am reading for this thing all the time. In fact spent half a day revisiting the NT — in the KJV, of course — just last week.
I do like the TV Tropes Wiki, too. I suspect I may have created one Jerk With A Heart of Gold in this book, or at least a character with potential to head in that direction
At the moment he isn’t a jerk, but is certainly Lovably Dissolute. I’ve been careful to keep his jerkishness out of sight, although his dissolution is starting to annoy The People He Went to College With and Who Think He Should Have Grown Out of it by Now.
I am reading The Little Stranger at the moment. Sarah Waters has created as her narrator a tired, rather dispirited and boring middle-aged male GP, circa 1947 in Warwickshire, and I am completely rivetted. Her sense of period detail – the language, the bleakness and grayness and poverty and the weight of contemporary English class expectations on everyone – none of which she has experienced first-hand – imbue the prose in every sentence. That’s what I call a writer.
(a) Bad magic realism
(b) Bad Jane Austen
(c) People working out their childhood shit
(d) People obsessed with the more boring aspects of women’s lives, as though writing about it obsessively will somehow make it less boring.
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It’s funny cause it’s true.
Talking of ‘c’ I met Augusten Burroughs last year. Don’t know what his books are like. Haven’t read ‘em. Ain’t gonna. What a wanker.
I think magic realism or surrealism takes a real gift and if you don’t have it it’s just naff fantasy. Most of us aren’t Neil Gaiman or Haruki Murakami.
Apart from Murakami the last contemporary fiction to really impress me was Special Topics in Calamity Physics.
Normally I like authors dead.
There might only be 7 plots but you can do a lot with them. Hell most songs only have three chords.
Try Kafka on the Shore which takes the Oedipus somewhere very strange. Somewhere you don’t actually want to come back from.
Sorry Murakami’s my latest obsession.
Adrien, judging from what I’ve read of him, Neil Gaiman ain’t no Neil Gaiman either.
I find the points Adrien finds funny very funny also!
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I just read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (The 2008 Booker winner), which was really funny and a super read. It’s like an Indian version of Dickens.
Of the writers I’ve read, Borges was perhaps the most original. He also had fantastic insight into the process of literature.
My favourite observation of his is that authors ‘create’ their predecessors. We say that so-and-so X follows from Y and Z. But until X comes along, Y is just Y and Z is just Z. X adds to them as much as they add to X.
For a while after Kafka, and while I was depressed, everything I wrote was dark and fiddly and weird. And sometimes overwritten.
Hmm. Just found one that might be on topic too.
I found your comments skepticlawyer spot on. I find myself re-reading books and don’t realize until about half way through; that says a lot about the quality and interest of the story line… Then, of course, some books are so like others I think I might have read them previously but am not quite sure. Of course I remember very well the outstanding books I have read but I hardly ever find really good reads now, most are quite average. However, this thread has put me on to a few titles.
Are we losing good literature due to poor literacy? I think so and nobody seems to have new thoughts or is it that people are starting to lack imagination? I am a Douglas Adams fan so perhaps I am a bit tough in that department.
However, could lack of imagination be due to the writer not reading lots and lots of good books? I think you are on to something there. The art of gaining a readers full attention from page 1 seems to be vanishing as well. Personally if I am not grabbed during the first 10 or 20 pages and my attention is wandering to other thoughts, the book goes where all ordinary books go…. For every 1 good/reasonable read these days I am leaving 2 due to lack of interest. I recently read “The Senator’s Wife”, an interesting read. Different and the ending was surprising. I like that.
As for plots generally, I sometimes toy with developing a kind of generic, large-scale plot engine. It starts with a few characters with a very large, world-scale plot; it then decomposes their goals and such into subplots for lower characters, recursively down to characters like the local chicken farmer, the corner apothecary or grumpy publican.
Essentially to drive an MMORPG. Right now they cost too much to build and manage. The bulk of the cost is in the art and the stories / quests / roleplaying guff. If you can automate it …
So which of the seven plots was Alain Robbe-Grille using? Does anyone know? Did he?
Say what you like but Topology of a Phantom City was a real page turner.
Jorge Louis Borges was a saint.
SL said “slightly less interesting than navel fluff collecting”
Don’t say that to Dr Karl of the ABC who won an IgNobel on this topic a few years back. Belly-Button Lint physics is strangely interesting.
See this and this. BTW: To minimize navel fluff, shave around your belly button.
Navel fluff collecting? Heh, SL, I ought to show you some of the poems I’ve been using for local Melbourne poetry slams… the most recent one talked about the navel lint of television hero MacGyver. The one before that was a Shakespearean sonnet sequence about nose picking.
Re TimT@20
Grab the towel, beer and nuts! The Vogons are here!
No offense to the guy with the blog, but numerous books have been written outlining the key themes in all literature, so anyone throwing together their own little theories have missed the boat, or are poorly read.
The other interesting one is the monomyth, or the hero’s journey, which can be found on Wikipedia, albeit, not an especially erudite presentation of the theory.
The TV Tropes site is pretty good, at least to the extent of the amount of work that seems to have gone into it, but I’m not sure how useful it would be to anyone. I imagine a television writing course would provide the exact same descriptions of common devices, but one hopes they also put some cohesive theory around it all (or maybe not … that would explain a lot of bad television).
Yes Dave, thanks for that interesting ‘information’ there…
I must admit I’ve struggled with magic realism all my life, to the point where I no longer attempt to read it. I spent the best part of a year failing to finish Garcia Marquez, Ben Okri and the like (I got exactly 2/3 of the way through The Famished Road and gave up. It is very unusual for me to get well over half way and then give up). I’ve probably developed such rancid prejudice against it that it would be unwise to make any further attempts. Adiga didn’t grab me in the first twenty pages (yes, I have that rule too) so I gave it away. That said, I loved Midnight’s Children, and that is usually considered magic realism. It is also very Dickensian and baroque, which may have been what attracted me.
Love Douglas Adams. Think the guy should be elevated to the sainted multitude of literature if there is one.
My stock of reading tends to have its origins in my literary studies, where I very systematically took subjects that taught me the ‘canon’, from Beowulf through to high modernism. I only cribbed one book — Ulysses. I made four attempts and was utterly defeated by it. I also picked up quite a few ‘non-canonical’ subjects — the post-colonial writers and so on. As a general rule, the writers in question weren’t as good, but many of them had interesting ideas and one (a woman called Jean Rhys and her novel Wide Sargasso Sea) had the effect of ensuring that I will never read Jane Eyre in the same way ever again.
That said, the best book I’ve ever read about being fixed with a destiny you do not want is Stephen King’s The Dead Zone; the best book about the quotidian horrors of childhood is Stephen King’s It. He is a superb chronicler of his times, and it is only the artificial division between ‘literature’ and ‘genre’ that sees him excluded from what passes for the ‘canon’ these days.
BTW Jacques: some of the dialogue in those pieces of yours is good — the idea of a devil who sounds like P.J O’Rourke appeals to me.
Apologies for the long comment.
Thanks Dave. I try my worst. I was actually thinking of using the term ‘micturation’ in an upcoming piece. I like to think of the Prosthenic Vogon Jeltz (or whatever the hell his name was) as one of my influences.
OT sorry folks
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H can you email me I have some honey for you
Tim@24: “I was actually thinking of using the term ‘micturation’ in an upcoming piece”
Try “smegma” – (and note it’s widely thought, though always denied by writers, that Red Dwarf’s “SMEGHEAD” insult is derived from smegma).Smegma makes nose-pickings seem polite and hygeinic by comparison – but you’ll have to work hard finding all the greek-derived words ending in “-ma”, although dogma comes to mind.
SL@23: said “I only cribbed one book”
“Tess of the D’Urbervilles” and “Sluts and Lusters” by D.H. Lawrence are the only two books I wrote essays on that I didn’t read but relied on class discussions (and Tess for an externally marked exam).
I wonder if anyone has created a list of the least read by students of books on a curriculum? Could that be an indicator of quality?
Err sorry that was badly worded
Most of the people I’ve leant his books to dislike him. He also gets a bad rap for being white and middle-class. And he writes obsessively about himself. But I have to say, the one writer who changed my life was Gerald Murnane. Also Borges-influenced. Writes beyond the literary scourge of the seven plots. And some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read are contained in ‘Landscape with Landscape’ (word of advice: don’t be convinced by the hype – ‘The Plains’ is probably his most ordinary book.).
I think it’s also rather telling that Murnane refers to his days as a student of English literature as bewildering and exasperating, as he wondered what on earth he was supposed to be doing in the course of studying literature and why no one whom he studied under was ever able to clearly explain this to him. Although I had moments of loving what studying English opened my mind to, I also felt similarly discombobulated throughout most of my English studies, especially when it came to the study of contemporary writing, which often seemed to be held up to the canon as something of equal literary value, as though its insights were as timeless, rather than each contemporary work being largely a product of themoment of recent history in which it was written. By the same token, in studying the canon, there never seemed to be a lot of room devoted to an explanation of why certain literary works have come to be considered ‘canonical’. Instead, the study of English literature often seems to retain this veil of mysticism, or obfuscation, or just plain obtuseness around itself, rather than engage in any constructive criticism of why value is accorded to certain works of literature in the way that it is.
Rant over, I think…
Dave, my name for that book is Sods and Losers. I don’t think there’s much to choose between your title and mine apart from a slightly different gender angle.
Got through Tess fine and found it quite affecting, but the only Lawrence I’ve read is Lady Chatterley, which I thought was pretty good. I’m too young to be shocked by his sex scenes, but the class distinction depicted therein and the ‘I’ll not be a kept man’ refrain has stayed with me.
Maybe it’s a British thing, because in the novel I’m writing now, I’ve had no trouble creating a throughly sexually liberal culture that has come up with a number of neat fixes to many of the sex and gender issues that still plague us in the West.
But class distinction? They still has it. In spades.
Normally I like authors dead.
I don’t think you’d get much disagreement from many of those who criticized SL for THTSTP.
No, there are only two plots
The Quest
Stranger in Town
The Old Testament is the Quest. The New is Stranger in Town.
I have never found any story that does not fit one of these.
Remember The Beverley Hillbillies? Stranger in Town.
Dr Who? The Quest.
Sex and the City? The Quest.
Simple, really.
Ken
The Old Testament is just a rewriting of The Odyssey. And the Old Testament is an early version of Stranger in Town, which riffs off,er,er, The Odyssey.
There’s no objective criteria. It’s like the Beatles or John Coltrane. You get it or you don’t. And not getting it doesn’t mean you don’t get anything: Lou Reed hated the Beatles, Tolstoy hated Shakespeare.
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They were jealous
Can I second M-H on the utter brilliance of Sarah Waters? I recently read The Night Watch (set towards the end of the Second World War in London) and it was the most remarkable and enjoyable thing I’ve read in absolutely ages.
I think I’m going to have to make an appointment with Ms Waters. That’s the third recommendation in as many days.
JG@33
JG@33
The Odyssey is just a trashy modern riff on Gilgamesh (short version here). I’d argue Gilgamesh is both stranger AND quest… in spades.
And a rather famous bit of the OT shamelessly pillages the Gilgamesh, and conflates “7 days flood” to 40.
And there’s Virgil who even more shamelessly takes both Homers to produce one book (Boringly pius stranger on a quest). Has any author ever been that brazen? At least Shakespeare usually pillaged Plutarch on a “one book, one play” basis.
So… Iliad – stranger or quest?
(Yeah… joking about the Odyssey being rubbish. Love the Fagles versions of both Homers)
Hey, he gets a hot root with Dido in a cave, whereupon it all gets a bit Fatal Attraction and she turns into a bunny boiler and offs herself with his sword.
Also the scene with the Sibyl who forgot to ask for eternal youth is really, really creepy.
Dave
I think Virgil was quite upfront in his adaptation of both Homers.
Virgil is to Homer what The Koran is the Torah. Both Virgil and The Koran take relatively minor characters from Homer and The Torah – Aeneas and Ishmael – to make extremely successful spin-off series’.
Unfortunately for the readers of both – and particularly the cultist followers of the latter – neither Aeneas nor Ishmael were Karen or Jack from Will and Grace.
Er, should be “WAS Karen or Jack”. Dang Vodka at 3 am!
As for The Iliad, I put that down as the first piece of humanist literature The scene where Priam confronts Achilles to recover Hector’s body, and Achilles agrees, but refusing to accept the ransom Priam had offered, is the first humanist “self in other” moment in literature.
Now, the extent to which the Jews made hay with this Iliad moment in its shtick about ‘the stranger’ we can all ruminate on for homework!
test
Hmmmm…why am I in moderation?
dunno JG, our spam filter’s gone crazy. I’ll try to sort it out.
Hmm, you’re not in the “Sin Bin” or anything – the spam filter seems to have taken a random dislike to your comments for reasons known only to itself. As I say, it’s gone crazy lately and eaten comments from various people.
Phew, I was worried discusssing Homer was against guidelines!
Yeah buggered if I know what’s going on there, JG, the spam filter’s been pretty nuts, throwing everyone in the mod box from time to time.
Yeah, Akismet is quite inscrutable. They say they won’t reveal reasons for spam markings to make it harder for spammers to game the system. My personal belief is because it’s probably as much a pile of dung as WordPress is, being written by the same bunch of galahs.
Am I in “homegrown”?
Has some evil person with our comments on their blogs been turning them retrospectively into spam?
Very interesting, Skeptic Lawyer.
Who was it that asked God why He made so many poets but so few poems? Same applies to writers. I’m sick of people telling me at the pub, “Well, I’m in retail at the moment, but really I’m working on a novel”.