Literary vs. Commercial: A Panel Report from AWP 2013

Yesterday, I went to a talk on bridging the gap between “commercial” and “literary” novels. The speakers (Ed Falco, Julianna Baggott, Lisa Haines, and Benjamin Percy) were phenomenal. They were the kinds of writers you want to be friends with so you could sit over beers late at night talking about favorite books. They were all that a panel should be—funny and insightful, approachable but authoritative—and they made a number of comments that I’ve been mulling over ever since. For example, I liked Ed Falco’s point that we should not be judging books by genre but by quality. He rightly argued that there are badly written literary genre books and well-written commercial ones, and that the quality of goodness or badness in the writing itself (rather than genre) should determine how we judge it. He said that the text, once done and sent to the publisher, is not inherently “literary” or “commercial.” It’s the author’s attitude when writing the book that puts it there. If you’re thinking only about your needs as an author and what you feel you must write, you are writing from a literary impulse, but if you are thinking about the audience and how the book might appeal to them, then your impulse is commercial.

Perhaps it is because I agree with him that I found the question and answer portion of the talk to be a bit frustrating. A young writer behind me asked about how the literary/commercial distinction affected the writing of the book—a good meaty process question—and the panelists (I want to attribute this answer mostly to Haines and Baggott, but more might have chimed in) responded that you write what you feel you must write, ignoring the generic question altogether. I am sure this answer feels utterly true to them, and I’m also sure that it is the best answer available, but I have to say, I can’t help but recognize it as an oversimplification. After all, anyone who has written creatively has faced the wealth of artistic choices, each beckoning with its own siren song. We have ridden through the yellow wood and faced, over and over again, the divergent paths. Sometimes, the street signs on those paths might as well be labeled “commercial” and “literary.” They lead us to different ends, but it isn’t always clear which is the better path.

Let’s be honest: our choices determine the book’s audience and the level of respect it earns with The New York Times book review or, as Haines pointed out, a tenure committee. Haines and Baggott both said that their most commercially successful books were left off their academic CVs or listed as supplementary to their other work because they knew those books would hurt rather than help their cause, and failure to make tenure means the loss of a job and the primary means to feed the family.

I’ve been at the cross roads with my second novel now for the past few months, trying to decide exactly how gritty, how “real,” I want this book to be, knowing that making it too gritty may not appeal to young adult readers who are likely to be its primary audience. The creative genies have yet to come to tell me which path I should take, and this fence rail has long become uncomfortable.

Who was it who said “the truth is rarely pure and never simple?” That’s the message I wish the panel had given the young writer in the audience struggling at her own crossroads. And maybe if they hadn’t been on the spot, under pressure to give the quick answer, they would have. Or maybe I am projecting too much. Maybe the choices have always been clearer for them. Haines and Baggott, after all, are talented and prolific—far more so than I am. Maybe they don’t get stuck on these questions as I am and have been. Maybe they don’t wallow in indecision. Maybe that’s the heart of genius.

Since I am not a genius, though, I will simply say this to that fellow writer and struggler who asked her bold question: many of us share your doubt. The answer Baggott and Haines gave is undoubtedly right—we must determine the road by being true to our work. Yet I come back to Falco (silent during this portion of the Q&A) who said that it is during process that we find ourselves following a literary or commercial impulse. Sometimes, those two masters give contradictory orders, and the writer must determine which s/he serves. The choice is rarely pure and never simple.

Voice

I love having caller ID. When an unknown or an 800- number comes up, I rarely answer. I figure, this saves both me and the telemarketers trying to call me quite a lot of grief. Today, though, I'm waiting for the plumber to come fix my toilet, so when the unknown number came up, I took a chance and answered, thinking it might be him.

It wasn't. The call was from somewhere in the subcontinent, from a man who claimed to represent Microsoft. He asked, how I was doing? On this side of the phone line, I gaped, unsure whether to say anything. In fact, even as naturally suspicious as I am, it took me half a minute of silent gaping to realize I needed to hang up. I didn't know if he was from Microsoft. I doubted it. Everything from the series of numbers and letters that had appeared on my phone read out to the pause while it connected us to the distance in the line suggested that maybe I shouldn't trust this situation. All this was almost tipped by one enormous fact: the fact of his voice.

The lilt of it, the pitch of it, the seeming sincerity when he asked how my day was--it all reminded me strongly of a colleague at work of whom I am quite fond. That half-moment when I didn't hang up? It was consumed with the need to remind myself that this wasn't the man I knew, and that it was OK to hang up.

Still, I was strangely shaken. I felt I'd been discourteous to a stranger--this even though I myself have worked as a telemarketer to help support my family over the summers while I was in grad school. I know from experience that a hang up isn't an insult; it's just a reason to move to the next call. But that human voice... that unique timber that no robocaller has ever replicated...

Because I'm working on manuscript revision today, it struck me how crucial this element is in writing. If I can make a voice that personal on the page, it's hard to hang up on. Our love for the sound of our fellow beings is one of the things that pulls us into story, whether we know it or not. It's what we most enjoy when we sit round a campfire and speak of ghosts. It's what makes us crave stories when we're alone and need the comfort of voice.

As writers, we're the ultimate scammers and salesmen, pitching a line we acknowledge up front to be false, and expecting emotional payment regardless. Any number of craft elements help make this possible, but I rarely give voice its due. Today, I'm rethinking this.

Plot, Structure, Through Line

From the 2012 Sewanee Writers' Conference

The other day, I was standing in a line of writers at Sterling's waiting to get a hazelnut latte when I heard two others talking about their workshop. "How did it go?" writer #1 asked. "Great," writer #2 said. "We talked a lot about plot. You know, it's funny, but we don't tend to talk a lot about plot in writing workshops. We talk about structure, but not plot."

Yesterday, I was listing to the Tin House writing podcast as I went for my morning run, and the subject of plot came up again. Steve Almond and Aimee Bender talked over many pitfalls writers face, one of which is giving a character problems (terminal illness, dying parents, etc) out of fear that if we don't, there will be no plot. Bender quoted Ray Bradbury, "plot is no more than the foot prints in the snow left after your characters have run by." (I believe she left out the end of that quotation, which is "on the way to incredible destinations." I suspect that ending is crucial for Bradbury [ahem, dinosuars; ahem, book burning--Bradbury is not exactly plot-light], but I'll leave it aside for now.)

In my own workshop with John Casey and Christine Schutt, one of the workshop participants mentioned a narrative having a "through line." Casey asked if through line meant the same as plot and the writer answered that no, he thought it dealt more with an idea running though the work (what we might also call theme).

With all this in the air, I've been thinking about the collision and collusion of our definitions of plot, structure, and through line, so I thought I'd do a little Internet browsing this morning to see what Dr. Google had to bring to the table.

I have to admit, my own definition of "through line" (admittedly one I invented from the contexts in which I'd heard the word rather than on scholarship) has much more to do with narrative threads and arcs than strictly themes. For me, the through line is closer to one of Aristotle's unities. For him, time and space helped define the story and give it a kind of cohesion. As we've abandoned that unity and opened narrative to longer forms, we've needed to find substitute unities. Yes, a story's themes are among these threads, but I would say characters, too, can be threads running through a story. Dickens, for example, wrote a cast of characters who were related in surprising and often absurd ways. As we've become increasing suspicious of coincidence, recurring images have added another thread. Asked to define a through line, I would have said that, like any good rope, it is a braiding of all these threads and to form the line that ultimately pulls us over the narrative arc (which I'm using here as almost synonymous with plot).

Thus, for me, a through line combines elements of character, imagery, thematics, etc to pull us over this mountain:

But checking in with Wikipedia this morning, I found that my definition, though pretty, is not accurate either. It offers this:

"The through line, sometimes also called the spine, was first suggested by Constantin Stanislavski as a simplified way for actors to think about characterisation [sic]. He believed actors should not only understand what their character was doing, or trying to do, (their objective) in any given unit, but should also strive to understand the through line which linked these objectives together and thus pushed the character forward through the narrative."

Here, the through line resides strictly in character and motivation, but if we lay Bradbury's quotation ("plot is [...] the foot prints in the snow left [by] characters") alongside this, we find ourselves back at the deep and abiding relation of plot to character.

A Google request for a definition of plot added this:

plot/plät/

Noun:

A plan made in secret by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful.

Now, I realize of course that this is not how writers tend to use the word "plot," but I kind of love the idea that something subversive is going on here. Hopefully, our plots are not illegal or harmful outside of the world of the fiction (honestly, I hope my writing aspires to do more good than harm), but it seems to me that, while writers may have a plan for our book, it often feels like something outside of us, something residing in the art itself, will not always allow us to follow that plan. Our characters don't always behave themselves. The subvert and foil our best laid plans. I'll argue that this is a good thing--a sign that we've just started to make the characters complex enough. The through line may be a way to simplify their personality into something comprehensible for a actor or writer, but it should never serve to make their actions any less authentically human, and therefore, surprising.

I'm no closer to parsing these definitions into neatly defined territories than I was was when I began writing this post, but somehow, I find the blur between these elements deeply satisfying and far more useful than easy classification would be.

Omniscient Point of View: A Re-Understanding

Writing Excuses recently did a podcast on omniscient point of view, and while I agree with much of what they said, I noticed that the show repeated a central understanding of omniscience that I've come to see as flawed. Because it's so prevalent, I thought I'd write on it.

When I first learned about point of view (POV) back in middle school and high school, I learned that there were three kinds: first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. (Much later, I would learn about that other skipped person, that poetically favored person, the second, but I won't touch on that for this post.) First and third person limited were fairly clear and familiar, but third omniscient was more difficult to grasp. The way I learned it then and over and over in courses since then was much in line with this definition, found at About: "Third person omniscient is a method of storytelling in which the narrator knows the thoughts and feelings of all of the characters in the story." This definition is usually followed with the disclaimer that writers used to use third person omniscient more commonly, but that it has gone out of fashion. The problem was, I couldn't remember ever seeing it used in the works I read.

I've since continued to read widely in Victorian literature, and I can't think of a case of third person omniscient that adheres to this definition. In fact, the only novel I can think of that does attempt this is Peter Carey's 1999 novel Jack Maggs, and though it's been a while since I read it, my memory is that fairly soon after the opening, it adheres to one limited point of view and then another for sustained periods (becoming more like the floating third mentioned below). It strikes me that novels that truly allow simultaneous insight into all characters' minds are exceedingly rare.

And with good reason. After all, if a reader has insight into all minds at once, we lose some of our ability to engage with the text--that is, we don't get to participate by trying to understand characters' motivations from their actions. We're no longer in the position of the characters, trying to figure out each other from outside information (gestures, dialogue) alone. We're no longer in a human position at all. As the word omniscient suggests, we're put in the position of an all-knowing god, and that's not a position that's familiar or comfortable from which to read. It's also almost impossible for even the finest writer to manage. I've come to understand that third person omniscient, as it's typically defined (simultaneous insight into all characters' thoughts and feelings), is even more rare than second person.

If the traditional definition is not valid, I'd like to propose alternatives that are more common, though still more rare than first person or third person limited. I add a disclaimer that I don't think I'm coining any new terminology here.

Floating third person limited: when the writer deliberately and seamlessly moves us from the thoughts of one character into the thoughts of another.

Virginia Woolf was a master at the floating third person. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, we'll move from the thoughts of our title character to war veteran Septimus Smith as she gazes at him across a flower shop. Woolf's point of view shifts are not haphazard or jarring, but methodical and intentional. We get a sense of how each character is isolated from the others by the way they fail to intersect at the very moments their points of view collide.  In this way, it's distinct from the point of view errors one might find in a new writer's work, in which we accidentally see or know something the point of view character cannot. With Woolf, it's never a slip-up. We move to the new mind and stay there for some time before moving on.

Writing Excuses refers to this as "head hopping," which is usually a pejorative term for poorly executed writing when the writer doesn't seem able or willing to commit to a point of view. I'd like to draw the distinction that floating third person is an extremely difficult POV to pull off, and only true craftsman tend to manage it well. (I suspect that Writing Excuses writers would back me up on this.)


Omniscient pronouncement: when the writer makes a grand pronouncement that seems beyond the scope of most human knowledge.

This omniscience that is correctly attributed to nineteenth century writers, who were not shy about making a sweeping statement in their work. Charles Dickens's "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times" in Tale of Two Cities or Leo Tolstoy's "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" in Anna Karenina both fit into this category. More recently, and one of the more common examples given on Internet websites, Douglas Adams's narrator in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has knowledge of world history going back to the primordial ooze. Usually, this kind of omniscience enters the book only for short moments before we attach ourselves to a POV character through which our understanding will be filtered.

And yes, this point of view does put the author in a god-like roll, but not so much that it allows multiple characters' thoughts at once.


The Establishing Shot: when a book starts, like a film, with an establishing "shot," that is, a description that of a large setting that then zooms in on a particular set of characters which we will follow.

John Steinbeck's story "The Chrysanthemums" is a great example of this, starting "The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot." 

(Writing Excuses mentioned Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Those better read in fantasy than I will have to confirm or disavow this one.)


Shifting third person limited: when the point of view character shifts in clearly defined sections, such as chapters

Charles Dickens's Bleak House shifts between an unknown third person narrator to Esther Summerson in different segments of the novel. George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones and George Eliot's Middlemarch similarly limit each chapter to one third person POV character, but which character that is shifts from chapter to chapter. Murder mystery novelist P. D. James uses this to great effect in most of her novels, as she shifts us into a new mind from chapter to chapter so that readers discover at her novels' ends that they've been in the mind of a murderer and never suspected them. Like the floating point of view, the shifting third person does not allow sloppiness. For the entirety of the chapter, the POV stays strictly limited to the person its writer has established.


While nineteenth century writers were still inventing the novel and, so, didn't have the wealth of craft texts that their work and subsequent writing has generated, by falsely attributing to them a point of view that allows simultaneous insight into all minds, we do them a disservice. I've come to believe they understood narrative tension better than this. While we can find occasional examples in which their point of view does not attach as rigidly to a single character as is now common, I cannot find so many of those examples as to suggest they are any kind of norm. Nineteenth century novelists allowed their readers more involvement in their books than this credits them for. They allowed readers to draw conclusions from the action and dialogue of non-POV characters without insight into their thinking. This restraint offers the pleasure of dramatic irony, in which we readers better read the dialogue of a character than the POV character him/herself.

Novel writing has changed a great deal in the past two hundred years, but perhaps not so much as our current teaching of point of view suggests.