You’d think that having a typhoon pen me up in my room all day would at least get me started on that book, but nope, I have no idea how to actually write fiction.
“But Andrew, you majored in comparative literature!” people sometimes say when I tell them of my difficulties with creative writing. Yeah, that was kind of the problem. I’ve become used to (and damn good at, if I may say) a certain observational style of written inquiry that is suited for situational and textual analysis, but now I’m very uncomfortable with affecting pretense – kind of crucial for fiction. To try to get some ideas I’ve attempted to immerse myself with guides and examples. I brought with me from America three “how to” books on dialogue, characterization and plot and on public buses sometimes I’ll take them out of my bag and browse through them (much to my own amusement when Chinese people do a double-take of what I’m reading). But their advice and recommendations are largely on how to write a kind of novel that ends up being read either on the beach or on the toilet, and while I know that I’ve been conditioned to reading more literary-type pieces that are possibly more rarefied than is practical, I still have enough comparative lit elitism to want to write something a bit…grander. So today I dug up an essay written by Zadie Smith, one of my favorite authors who herself may be able to explain some secrets of her fictional craft in the critical terminology that I learned how to understand.
She quickly introduces two “antipodal” novels whose opposition to each other in style and substance represents, in her words,
a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.
In other words, everyone’s advice to me about how best to write is probably just an attempt to validate their own way of writing after all, and I should just do my own thang. Actually, this is likely not what she intended I take away from her essay, but to be honest I kind of stopped reading it after I remembered that I had downloaded the film Old Boy last week.
What the heck, I figured. If I couldn’t write anything of my own today, and if I couldn’t even pay enough attention to read about writing on my own today, then I’ll watch a really good movie and call my day of artfulness good. Maybe I could sap and leech some creativity from watching the high achievements of others.
Old Boy is a violent revenge story directed by the famous Korean director Park Chan-wook, and is widely regarded as one of the best films of Asian cinema on par with anything from the West. While I was watching I glimpsed a whole lot of scissors in the mise-en-scen, obviously to foreshadow the ending where the main character cuts out his own tongue (sorry for the spoiler.) It made me think about how that same kind of foreshadowing would work in writing: all the film medium has to do is quietly and plainly show those symbols, because objects will always naturally be present in any visual scene. But I feel like if I were to try to insert those same things into writing, it would be heavy-handed and contrived, as the authorial effort to insert an object into a text always stands out more than just simply seeing it as part of the scenery would in a movie.
During some of the movie’s most visceral scenes – the corridor fight and two shocking incidents of torture by tooth pulling that he somehow is able to portray artfully (although after the advent of the torture-porn genre, the bar for that has been set pretty disgustingly low) – Park chose to play the Summer portion of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concerto on the film’s soundtrack. Park seems to be extremely good at using juxtaposition and contrast like this, since despite all the disturbing scenes in Old Boy the film still deserves its fame because of its emotional poignancy. I remember watching one of Park’s other films called I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay and noting the same effect with its balance of an innocently happy child mentality in an asylum setting of schizophrenic insanity. I feel like a lot of this oppositional effect is created by the music in each film, which I may be overly sensitive to because of my own musical training – but I have no idea how to get or duplicate that on paper.
Ach, I wanted to try to get something creative out of this, but I just ended up analyzing somebody else’s work again.
To wrap up this thematically failed post with my favorite paragraph of the day, from the Wikipedia entry on Old Boy’s production:
“The octopus being eaten alive was not computer-generated; four were used during the making of this scene. Actor Choi Min-sik, a Buddhist, said a prayer for each one. It should also be noted that the eating of live octopuses (called sannakji (산낙지) in Korean) as a delicacy is not unheard of in East Asia, although it is usually cut, not eaten whole. When asked if he felt sorry for the actor Choi Min-sik, director Park Chan-wook stated he felt more sorry for the octopus.”
Edit: Actually, I guess I really did get the central premise of Zadie Smith’s essay after all!
Second Edit: Which do you think would make a better band name – “Dry in Rainfall” or “Koppu!”?
For I while I read a lot of “how to” books on writing but they all essentially said “JUST GO WRITE STUFF,” even if you write multiple drafts of crap. Being able to storytell through writing can only be developed with so much study, you have to have something naturally to begin with- which YOU do.
I’ve given up on those books and just write a little each day, even if it may not make sense right now or actually come to anything. I’ve been writing consistently since 6th grade so I’ve gotten in the routine of having a notebook in each bag and at both ends of my room- though it can be confusing having ideas scattered like that.
Don’t worry over it. Just do, and read A LOT of other people’s works. Try doing a pastiche, that may help you figure out how you like to write and how you don’t. Sometimes what I have to do is just write out what I want to say, no plot. Or write about a character when they’re doing the laundry- outside of your desired storyline.
I’m working on a short story now, I’m on the fourth permutation of it, gah. And changing it was simply based upon the though: “This is getting too complicated. What if it was just two people at the bus stop?” And so now an complex science fiction story is essentially about two people at a bus stop. Yay!
I used to try to outline stories in their entirety and come up with titles- but as soon as I did that I gave up on the story because it felt done. At least it was done in my head, so the motivation was gone.
In conclusion, chin up dearie! Keep it simple, just DO. Whenever the mood strikes. I tend to write just before I go to sleep, that’s when I get my best ideas (it also means I’m often up ridiculously late because my brain won’t STOP giving me ideas- but it’s worth it).
The Cyborg movie scared me.
http://stevemartin.com/world_of_steve/print/writing_is_easy.php
@ Emmo: You are pretty amazing kid, you’ve got all sorts of talents up your sleeve! And the kindness to share them with me, haha – thank you for the advice and the encouragement. I’ll see if I can be as diligent a writer as you…or as humorous as Steve Martin, haha.
@ Julia: It scared you? It’s so zany though.