Richard Chiappone on Why I Write Fiction, and How I Read Fiction

This post is a guest blog from author Richard Chiappone, whose most recent book is a collection of short stories, Uncommon Weather, now available for preorder from University of Alaska Press.

Richard Chiappone

“The person, be it gentleman or a lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.” —Jane Austen

 

I agree with Jane Austen that novels (or in my case, more often short stories) can bring great pleasure. But being neither a lady, nor much of a gentleman, and having no fear of being called intolerably stupid (I’ve heard it said!), I can report that—for me as a writer—great books can bring me great pleasure, but also propel me into fits of despair at the thought of ever writing another word myself.

Which brings me to the subject of why I write in the first place. I’m sure Jane would find my soul-searching unmanly, and would judge me an unsuitable suitor for any of the Bennett sisters. But here goes.

I think that after thirty years, I understand now that I write fiction to find out what’s important to me, what I value. I do that by putting fictitious characters in fictitious situations that cause them to act and reveal something about themselves in the process. What that reveals, I’m finding more and more, is that these characters are almost always—like real people—in need of something they don't yet have, or they are trying to hang onto something they fear they might lose.

 

One quote I like a lot is: “A man is what he desires…” which was said by the Theosophist Annie Besant. (Note: Theosophy is not the study of guys named Theodore.) And what do humans desire? They want to be treated decently, they want to be respected, and with luck maybe even loved. The want companionship. They want loyalty from their friends and families. Simply put, they want to be wanted. (I know that sounds like a Peter Frampton song.) And what I’ve learned about myself is that I care for my characters and hope they get what they want, and I’m a little sad when things don't work out for them. I think that’s called empathy.  

 

But I don't write just to prove that again and again by producing scenarios that confirm my own theories. I also write to see how that empathy can be generated by nothing more than words on a page. I’m astounded by the miracle when it occurs. Because, more than anyone, I know intellectually that my people don't exist and never have. What interests me is the challenge of making myself—and hopefully my readers—come to actually care about them, in spite of that.

 

And that’s how I read now. I read looking for clues about how other writers convince their readers (and me) to care about fictitious people. What makes us weep for self-destructive Emma Bovary or exult in the pluckiness of young Jane Eyre or Huck Finn?  And I read books to steal everything I can from them.

 

That results in two things:

 

1) I avoid books that are not character driven, even great authors who are more interested in form or language than in their own characters. I studied experimental writers when I  was a student—Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gass, Robert Coover, and others—and I still admire their spectacular accomplishment. But I’m just not interested in writing those kinds of stories (nor smart enough to do them well). And, of course, I don't read plot-driven books that reveal little or nothing about the inner life of their characters.

 

2) Basically, I just don't read fictions for pleasure anymore. In fact, I don't actually read fiction; I study fictions.

 

I don't read for pleasure anymore because I’m almost always aware of the writer behind the words on the page. If the writing is good and the characters are interesting, I may suspend disbelief and get caught up in the story at times, but only briefly. Then some word or some structural choice or narrative strategy catches my eye, and I’m thinking about how effective it is or isn’t. It’s a curse. I can never be truly entertained by books. I treat them like objects to learn from. For that reason, I can't read badly written books. I believe that you’ll never write books any better than the last book you read. Which is why I avoid books I wouldn’t want to put my name on. It’s like trying to eat food I’d be embarrassed to serve to guests.

 

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that reading great books will make a reader into a great writer. If that were true, every William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Alice Munro scholar would be a Nobel Prize-winning author. But it will make each of us the most empathetic writer we can be. And I guess, in the end, that’s what’s really important to me.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 6: Populist Writers: the Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

To continue the thread of the last two blogs, which talked about populist writers Walt Whitman and Thornton Wilder, I’m going to discuss other groups of American writers who I’m viewing as gathered under the populist umbrella.

A populist writer is not just one who writes about the United States, but a writer who believes that American life is a source of good, knowledge, and redemption. That’s why I’m not including in this particular post excellent writers such as Jane Smiley or Jane Hamilton, for instance. I think their view of American society is more pessimistic than the populists. I’ll talk about their writing in an upcoming blog.

Among other populist writers, we could add the playwright Arthur Miller, who dealt with ordinary Americans in some of his plays. Miller raised the lives of working people to the level of tragedy, a genre of literature that was formerly the domain of kings. I’m thinking in particular of his plays Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge—the latter play I analyzed in a blog earlier this year.

I’d also include as populists some of the writers of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac for On the Road, a book about discovering the hidden beauty of freeway America and the heartland.

I’d include many African American writers as populists, since a number of these authors are also champions of everyday Americans. I’m thinking of fiction writers Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, for example; and poets Langston Hughes, June Jordan, and Sekou Sundiata. Ishmael Reed I'm saving for the blog on satirists—I see his sensibility differently.

The explosion of women’s fiction in the U.S. in the last several decades often has a populist impulse, finding extraordinary truths in the lives of people often considered ordinary. Some examples would be the writing of Ann Beattie, Elizabeth Berg, Sandra Cisneros, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Patchett, Marilynne Robinson, Elizabeth Strout, Amy Tan, and Anne Tyler. Those authors focus on the intimate moments of American life that lead to large epiphanies. 

Ann Patchett

There are some male fiction writers who think along similar lines, such as Raymond Carver, definitely a detective searching for the small moments in American households that resonate deeply.

What’s interesting about the literary populism that has come out of the last several decades is that it’s not always an affirmation of all of American life. It’s sometimes an affirmation of a particular slice of American life, a slice often defined by the author’s race, ethnicity, national origin, class, gender, sexuality, etc. It’s a populism with an edge, a populism that overlaps with the critical approaches to American life that I’m going to discuss in the blogs that follow.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

I just finished listening to the audiobook of William Faulkner’s celebrated novel Absalom, Absalom! The book has had a major influence on world literature, but, ironically, not always in Faulkner’s home country, the U.S.A.

William Faulkner

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner creates a complex plot structure that is one of the novel’s most unusual features. That meandering architecture does have its antecedents—Ford Madox Ford’s groundbreaking work of fiction The Good Soldier springs to mind.

The tales of the various narrators in Absalom, Absalom! are filtered through the voice of Quentin Compson, a Harvard undergraduate from the rural Mississippi town of Jefferson, where most of the book’s action takes place. Quentin tells the story in 1910 to his roommate, Shreve, though the timeframe of the story is mostly mid-19^th century.

But the plot is not a linear progression through history. Instead, the story unfolds in temporal loops that keep circling back to certain key events, revealing with each telling another part of what occurred in a particular episode. As the loops around a certain incident accumulate, the reader is able to assemble a more complete picture of that event. These loops are like the twists of a cord, or the frills at the edge of a doily, moving forward, but never in a straight line.

At one point in the novel, Faulker beautifully describes the worldview that underlies his highly original method of storytelling:

“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-space, to the old ineradicable rhythm …”

In other words, each event in a story resonates with every other event, whether we realize the connections or not, just as the characters in the novel seem to repeat the same actions from generation to generation. Thomas Sutpen, the Southern, self-made partriarch who is the dominant figure in the novel, marries two women without divorcing the first. The son that he never acknowledged from his first marriage similarly attempts bigamy, but … well, I won’t reveal what happens for those who haven’t read the novel. It’s like a cycle of Greek tragedies on a Southern plantation, and then some.

Absalom, Absalom! has been described as “Southern Gothic” but I don’t think there’s a lot of the Gothic in Faulkner’s book. To me, “Gothic” implies the presence of otherworldly beings and phenomena, and the characters of Absalom, Absalom! are very much of this world. What could be more material than Thomas Sutpen’s relentless, Balzacian energy to procreate and to build and rebuild his plantation? I would describe Faulkner’s novel as Southern baroque, since it has the ornateness, grandeur, and sensuality of a baroque basilica.

The style of the novel also has a leisurely, baroque flow. Here’s a passage from the opening paragraphs that gives a flavor of the book’s style, which makes it such a pleasure to hear certain sections of the novel read out loud in a Mississippi drawl:

“Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.”

OK, there are some weird otherworldly beings there. You’ve got to take a long leap of faith to read this book.

The novel’s baroque diction and plot were a tremendous influence on several of the greatest South American magical realist writers, particularly in novels such as GabrielGarcía Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Autumn of the Patriarch. I would add Mario Vargas Llosa’s masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral (which you should read if you haven’t—fantastic book!), and Manuel Puig’s wonderful saga, Heartbreak Tango.

It’s curious to me that so few writers of Faulkner’s own country have emulated either his style or his plot structure. He is one of the few North Americans to win the Nobel Prize for literature, isn’t he? I do think Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz has some of Absalom, Absalom in its winding plot structure and the ornateness of its language.

Maybe part of the problem is that Faulkner is a complicated case when it comes to race and gender, and who wants to touch complexity in this day and age? Faulkner probably thought of himself as an enlightened person when it came to those issues, at least in the context of the time when Absalom, Absalom! was published, which was 1936. And in some ways Faulkner was enlightened. There is a character in the novel who nails himself into his own attic and starves to death rather than be drafted into the Confederate army during the Civil War. The book discusses relationships between the races. Those were certainly taboo subjects for a White Southern writer to depict at that time. Despite those moments in the book, Faulkner could be faulted over and over for his obsessive use of the “n” word and his stereotypical description of African Americans. The women characters in the novel are paper dolls. For those of us still living with the legacy of the history Faulkner describes in Absalom, Absalom!, the book is a grab bag as a role model for other writers.

Or is it that Faulkner’s baroque, Southern sensibility is not in tune with the WYSIWIG culture of Puritan America? Who has time for a sentence that goes on for the better part of a page in a world where stock market trades are logged by the millionth of a second? I experienced this firsthand when I was listening to the audiobook of Absalom, Absalom! on the way to work. I would arrive at the parking lot at my office and I couldn’t shut off the narrative till the actor reading the book came to a stopping point, so I would sit in my car for a couple of minutes while the time ticked away making me later and later for work, and I paused in my ancient Toyota Corolla listening to Faulkner’s sazerac-infused prose, waiting for that beautiful, winding river of a sentence to finally reach its delta.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry