What happened to simply telling a compelling story?

[Writer]

A story that catches the reader's attention from the get-go? That moves them from beginning to middle to end?

New writing seems to focus more on the style or format of delivery than the story itself. I am now reading Kiran Desai's "The Inheritance of Lost," and I'm taken more by her character development than the plot itself. I find this to be a growing trend since the 1990's and I wonder: Is it that traditional plot structure has grown antiquated and uninteresting? Or does this reflect the modern writer's need to stand out from the rest?

What do you think?

[petgoat]

1. I think it reflects extreme self-indulgence on the part of

foundation-supported writers who are more concerned with winning
prizes and getting grants than with being read.

[petgoat]

3. Scott Turow had a story about that.

When he was at the writer's program at Stanford the
prevailing culture was to assume the role of the
avant garde, with the ethic of "the reader be damned."

One summer he had a job delivering mail, and after a
few weeks he'd gotten to know his route well enough that
he could finish a couple of hours before his shift ended.
He wasn't allowed to go back to the station early, so he
started hanging out at the public library, and he decided
to spend the time reading "Finnegan's Wake." He didn't
have a card at that library; he just took the book off the
shelf and replaced it when he left.

He found much to admire in the book, but it was pretty
tough sledding, and after a couple of weeks of this,
noticing that the book was always on the shelf, he noticed
that it had not been checked out in years. He concluded
that "Finnegan's Wake" was a book much more admired than
read.

Finally he finished the writing program and decided he needed
to make a living. He went to law school (and wrote a book
about it) and then he joined the DA's office in Boston, where
he found that their job in prosecuting a case was--surprise!--
to tell a story to the jury. It had to be told in a compelling,
engaging, and convincing way, with nothing left out and nothing
extraneous put in. "Reader be damned" attitudes were not
an option if they wanted to win their case.

[trusty elf]

7. Of course, Mark Twain's quote immediately comes to mind.

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

[petgoat]

8. I'm starting to suspect that a best seller is much the same thing. nt

[Orrex]

2. I guess there are two imperatives at work here, under the heading of "writing"

One group seeks to tell compelling, entertaining stories, while the other group hopes (ideally) to experiment with the format itself. Of course, these are hardly immovable boundaries, and a single work can certainly encompass both styles. I would say that nothing is inherently wrong with either of them, though it can be disheartening for one group when the other gains ascendancy. But even then, it's not as though examples of each are hard to come by; it's just a matter of toughing it out while your own favored style is brutalized by critics.

[petgoat]

4. A Reader's Manifesto

It's in the July/August issue of the Atlantic in 2001. It's another issue
(along with the fact that Gore got more votes in FL in 2000 and that
the Pentagon had $2.3 TTTTTTrillion in expenditures for which it could
not account) that got upstaged by 9/11.

I've got nothing against style, wit, and grace in a story. But substituting
it for the story is like giving me a bowl of nutmeg and paprika instead of
a bowl of noodles and squash seasoned with nutmeg and paprika--not very
nutritious.


A Reader's Manifesto


An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose

by B. R. Myers

.....

Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun read—Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back. In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose—"furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in the dark before the day yet was"—and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.

I realize that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to the literary establishment. For years now editors, critics, and prize jurors, not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the rest of us how lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting times. The absence of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has given rise to an extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with something for every palate. As the novelist and critic David Lodge has remarked, in summing up a lecture about the coexistence of fabulation, minimalism, and other movements, "Everything is in and nothing is out." Coming from insiders to whom a term like "fabulation" actually means something, this hyperbole is excusable, even endearing; it's as if a team of hotel chefs were getting excited about their assortment of cabbages. From a reader's standpoint, however, "variety" is the last word that comes to mind, and more appears to be "out" than ever before. More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction"—at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event, but most "genre" novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review.

[valerief]

5. I see the word Literature and I immediately associate it with what the Corporate News Media passes

off as News. I feel the same way about modern "music." The more it's celebrated, the crappier it is.

I guess modern literary prose is jam-packed with lousy stories, so it's gotta mask it with ridiculous prose.

I'm a lousy reader anyway. I get bored easily and always remind myself I should be writing instead. So what do I know?

[WCGreen]

9. Yea But Philip Roth. Pete Hamill, Richard Russo and Richard Ford

can all tell a compeling story while pushing the boundries on writing...

They experiment with format and language but seem to be able to get it done by surrounding a good story...

Joseph Heller comes to mind as does Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jane Smilley, Ian McEwen, Clair Messud, Anna Quinlan all start with a story....

[alfredo]

6. Writing will always

reflect their times.

[SmokingJacket]

10. Because TV and movies "tell a good story" better.

What fiction is good at -- and what visual media can't do -- is get inside a human mind, develop a character, and view the world through a unique set of eyes and experiences. If all you want is a rollicking good plot, why read? Why not just watch?

[SoCalDem]

11. They are planning for the movie, as they write the book

That would be my guess :)

[RetroLounge]

12. Have you seen Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy?

Great stories...

:hi:

RL

[frogmarch]

13. My reading tastes vary

from week to week - and sometimes from day to day. Regardless of what genre I happen to be in the mood for at any given moment, good character development is important to me.

Even though I'm an atheist, sometimes I'm in the mood to read fiction with a supernatural theme (I pass on splatter punk, though), and stories with a supernatural theme are what I usually write.

One of my favorite novels is Frank Delaney's Ireland. Another is E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. Those are the only two novels I recall having read more than twice.