Getting an M.F.A. is a terrible financial decision for almost everyone. (I'd say that so is getting almost any advanced degree in the humanities, but let's start with the M.F.A.)
Article from Atlantic from last year that makes this argument
Article from Village Voice cited in above article, in which the M.F.A. is compared to a Ponzi scheme
Ultimately, young writers with stars in their eyes will probably say that it is worth all the money to become a better writer. You can't put a price on art, you Philistine.
I'll address that idea more fully in a later post, maybe in the final one I'm going to do in a few weeks. My short response is that I don't think anything happens in an M.F.A. program you couldn't replicate for yourself in a much more focused, individualized manner for far, far less money. And money should matter to you if you want to be a writer, unless you come from money or have married well. You're probably not going to make a ton of it. If you throw a lot of debt on top of that, it's going to be something that will cause you stress for a long, long time to come. In other words, it will be something that will sap the energy you might otherwise have put into writing.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Dead dogs
We started watching Wilfred on Netflix last year, but, as happens in every house, we couldn't agree on it. I wanted to continue the binge, but I got overruled. I finally got back to finishing it in the last week or so. Damn. If I ever have to (((SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!)))) cry on command, I'll think about putting down one of the dogs we've had to put down. I strained in my memory, and I think I can just remember one poem from those I had published a long time ago. It's the only poem of the hundreds of bad ones I wrote that I can mostly remember:
To an Old Dog
It's not that we meant to treat
you with any unkindness, tethering
your life to an arm's breadth and a
half of our own. But now that all your bones
ache and with your total blindness,
what could it hurt to leave you, un-
collared, to hobble and urinate on the grass?
Do not remember when we held you back
your puppy neck barely straining the line
and think that only now we've let you go
when you are too old for walks or chasing sticks.
Do not remember, best friend
of man and of so many days, these ironies,
nor think us up to our old tricks.
I can't remember who published it. There are thousands of online poetry journals, and I assume many fold before long. This one is gone, because I haven't been able to find it for years. Oh, that dog, though. I remember the dog this was about.
To an Old Dog
It's not that we meant to treat
you with any unkindness, tethering
your life to an arm's breadth and a
half of our own. But now that all your bones
ache and with your total blindness,
what could it hurt to leave you, un-
collared, to hobble and urinate on the grass?
Do not remember when we held you back
your puppy neck barely straining the line
and think that only now we've let you go
when you are too old for walks or chasing sticks.
Do not remember, best friend
of man and of so many days, these ironies,
nor think us up to our old tricks.
I can't remember who published it. There are thousands of online poetry journals, and I assume many fold before long. This one is gone, because I haven't been able to find it for years. Oh, that dog, though. I remember the dog this was about.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Professional and amateur writers
My adviser in graduate school complained on several occasions that the dean of our college used to send random people to her to get advice about how to write a novel. One time, it was a surgeon sent to her, and my adviser was especially irritated by it. She ranted one day about how she couldn't understand why someone thought they could just pick up writing out of the blue. She didn't go to a doctor to ask advice about how to perform surgery. Didn't people understand that fiction writing was a specific skill, one that takes practice and discipline to get good at?
I understand her frustration. I've been working at it for years, and I still read things I've written and cringe. How does some uppity lay person think he can just march in and turn a novel into gold? That's actually the mark of someone who's never tried. Everyone thinks they've got a great story, and that if they just wrote a book--usually about their rather ordinary lives--it would be a best seller.
At the same time, I think there's a lot to be said for fiction--or any kind of writing, really--written by someone who isn't mainly a writer, or who could at least be thought of as a "slash" writer, e.g. a "surgeon/novelist." There's just an entirely different sense of things when a person is writing out of a love for the subject and trying to find the skill to match that love as opposed to a person who loves the art and is seeking for a subject to incarnate that love with.
As an example, I'd put forth Carl Sagan and Andrea Barrett. Both have written fiction about science. Barrett is known and revered in literary circles (are there enough people in literature anymore to form a whole circle? Literary crescents?) for writing long short stories where she writes fictionalized versions of real scientists at crucial moments in the development of scientific ideas. Sagan wrote a lot of non-fiction, but his best known fiction was Contact, about a radio astronomer named Ellie who finds the first message to humanity coming from a technologically advanced race of aliens.
Barrett is not a complete lay person--she was once enrolled in a graduate zoology program. But her work is more fictional writing that happens to be about scientists than it is fictional writing about science. As Juliet Lapados put it in New Republic:
But I also just didn't find anything in her work to be surprising in any way. In Sagan, I learned a lot of actual science while reading the book. Sagan loves science, and he can't stop teaching it even in the middle of a story. Sagan's themes are about how humanity's scientific and technical advances may ultimately change our perceptions of everything, including God, love, family, and our dreams and longing. Barrett's themes are about how great movements overtake the individual and about the self-delusion we practice and god I'm so bored just writing this I can't even finish this sentence about what her damn stories are about.
Literary people who make book lists, read a lot of fiction, and who think about the world in largely literary terms will get new subject matter in Barrett, but at the heart of it is a conception of the world that isn't really vastly different from what you'd get in any modern journal's short story about a Pakistani immigrant driving a cab in London or about an enlisted Marine in Iraq or about a morbidly obese woman looking to end her life.
Sagan, however, changed how I saw everything. He changed me. I wish I had read him a year earlier than I did. I read Sagan a few months before I got out of the Marines and before I started college. Because of him, I taught myself Algebra right before I enrolled and picked Chemistry as a major. But I really didn't know enough math to go right into Calculus, which meant it would take me longer to finish school than I wanted. So I took the easy road and switched to English. I often think that if I had read him earlier, I'd have had time to learn more math before college and stayed in the natural sciences. God, I loved those Biology and Chemistry classes I took. I still have a dream, when I can overcome my own self-pity long enough to conceive of a future in which I might yet accomplish something, in which I do the math, go back to school, and get to do real science.
But I digress. The point is that Sagan changed me deeply, altered my dreams. Barrett is someone you could read and go right back to being who you are. Barret is a "better" writer: her prose is sharper, more imaginative. But Sagan has more impact. I am reminded of something C.S. Lewis once wrote, something like "every artist, but for grace, moves from love of the thing he is telling about to love of the telling." This is why I think it's important to have surgeons trying to hack their way through novels. The country is full of people with M.F.A.s or similar. (I actually have an M.A. that just had a large writing requirement. "English with a concentration in creative writing" was the wording, I think. We also called it "English light.") There are thousands of journals full of writing from these people. Nobody is reading it except other writers, because it only speaks to writers.
I don't want to pretend that it doesn't matter how you write as long as you have a good story to tell. All those people who think their lives would make a great story think it sounds great in their heads until they start to write it. You've got to write at least reasonably well. But I don't think there's anything wrong with people who are in love with something in the world struggling to find the technique to express that love. I now conclude with a piece of impromptu flash fiction to embody this idea:
I understand her frustration. I've been working at it for years, and I still read things I've written and cringe. How does some uppity lay person think he can just march in and turn a novel into gold? That's actually the mark of someone who's never tried. Everyone thinks they've got a great story, and that if they just wrote a book--usually about their rather ordinary lives--it would be a best seller.
At the same time, I think there's a lot to be said for fiction--or any kind of writing, really--written by someone who isn't mainly a writer, or who could at least be thought of as a "slash" writer, e.g. a "surgeon/novelist." There's just an entirely different sense of things when a person is writing out of a love for the subject and trying to find the skill to match that love as opposed to a person who loves the art and is seeking for a subject to incarnate that love with.
As an example, I'd put forth Carl Sagan and Andrea Barrett. Both have written fiction about science. Barrett is known and revered in literary circles (are there enough people in literature anymore to form a whole circle? Literary crescents?) for writing long short stories where she writes fictionalized versions of real scientists at crucial moments in the development of scientific ideas. Sagan wrote a lot of non-fiction, but his best known fiction was Contact, about a radio astronomer named Ellie who finds the first message to humanity coming from a technologically advanced race of aliens.
Barrett is not a complete lay person--she was once enrolled in a graduate zoology program. But her work is more fictional writing that happens to be about scientists than it is fictional writing about science. As Juliet Lapados put it in New Republic:
Those who take to Barrett often stress that while she writes about science, she’s not really a science-writer because her stories are so emotion-driven. In a review of Servants of the Map for The Chicago Tribune, Dan Cryer argued that “to call Barrett our poet laureate of science is perfectly apropros, as long as we recognize that her specialty is the heart.”Fine. I have no problem with writing like that, except that I'm completely not interested in her stories. (Well, I've only read two: "The Particles" and "The English Pupil.") If you love Barrett, and some people clearly do, I'm not going to argue that you're wrong. Part of my disdain is petty: I am always struggling to make my short stories shorter because of the low word-count limits of literary journals, but she, because she is established, gets to make hers into novellas and still get them into BASS anthologies. So fuck her.
But I also just didn't find anything in her work to be surprising in any way. In Sagan, I learned a lot of actual science while reading the book. Sagan loves science, and he can't stop teaching it even in the middle of a story. Sagan's themes are about how humanity's scientific and technical advances may ultimately change our perceptions of everything, including God, love, family, and our dreams and longing. Barrett's themes are about how great movements overtake the individual and about the self-delusion we practice and god I'm so bored just writing this I can't even finish this sentence about what her damn stories are about.
Literary people who make book lists, read a lot of fiction, and who think about the world in largely literary terms will get new subject matter in Barrett, but at the heart of it is a conception of the world that isn't really vastly different from what you'd get in any modern journal's short story about a Pakistani immigrant driving a cab in London or about an enlisted Marine in Iraq or about a morbidly obese woman looking to end her life.
Sagan, however, changed how I saw everything. He changed me. I wish I had read him a year earlier than I did. I read Sagan a few months before I got out of the Marines and before I started college. Because of him, I taught myself Algebra right before I enrolled and picked Chemistry as a major. But I really didn't know enough math to go right into Calculus, which meant it would take me longer to finish school than I wanted. So I took the easy road and switched to English. I often think that if I had read him earlier, I'd have had time to learn more math before college and stayed in the natural sciences. God, I loved those Biology and Chemistry classes I took. I still have a dream, when I can overcome my own self-pity long enough to conceive of a future in which I might yet accomplish something, in which I do the math, go back to school, and get to do real science.
But I digress. The point is that Sagan changed me deeply, altered my dreams. Barrett is someone you could read and go right back to being who you are. Barret is a "better" writer: her prose is sharper, more imaginative. But Sagan has more impact. I am reminded of something C.S. Lewis once wrote, something like "every artist, but for grace, moves from love of the thing he is telling about to love of the telling." This is why I think it's important to have surgeons trying to hack their way through novels. The country is full of people with M.F.A.s or similar. (I actually have an M.A. that just had a large writing requirement. "English with a concentration in creative writing" was the wording, I think. We also called it "English light.") There are thousands of journals full of writing from these people. Nobody is reading it except other writers, because it only speaks to writers.
I don't want to pretend that it doesn't matter how you write as long as you have a good story to tell. All those people who think their lives would make a great story think it sounds great in their heads until they start to write it. You've got to write at least reasonably well. But I don't think there's anything wrong with people who are in love with something in the world struggling to find the technique to express that love. I now conclude with a piece of impromptu flash fiction to embody this idea:
One guy wants to show his girl he loves her. He takes singing lessons for two months, learns her favorite song, and sings it to her as a surprise at karaoke night. He doesn't totally butcher it. They get married and live happily ever after. Another guy, a professional singer, writes a love song and puts his wife's name in it. It has an eleven minute long archipeggial run of notes where he shows off his virtuosity. It wins a Grammy. The couple get divorced two years later, and he writes another song about how that girl was a bitch and the new one is better. It also wins a Grammy.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
comment from a lurker
A guy who reads this blog for some reason sent me a note after my last post. I had just promised to dump my mediocre literary output and then call it quits. His recommendation was similar to what my literary adviser, Blake Kimzey, told me earlier. Here's what the lurker said:
Good point. I probably am quibbling too much over the "why I write" question. I don't question the habit of writing for most people. But here, as succinctly as I can put it, are a few reasons why I might question it for me:
1) I'm not sure literature is harmless. Literature is great at some stuff that's critical for society, like imaginatively assuming identities of the "other," forcing readers to re-think the familiar by upsetting linguistic or narrative expectations, and by resolving complex facts of reality into a comprehensible narrative framework for understanding the world through metaphor, analogy, allegory, parable, and similar tropes. But, as every book on writing fiction tells you, literature isn't the real world. Reading too much of it, though, tends to muddle your thinking by making you treat the real world as though it were a story. At least it did me. I've made some terrible decisions in life based on the heuristic that it's what a character in a book would have done.
2) Literature is a dangerous temptation to me the way religion is. My commenter, in suggesting that I have nothing to lose by writing and possibly something to gain, presented me with a kind of literary Pascal's wager. In religion, I object to this argument by noting that just because I stand (in the U.S.) nothing to lose and possibly much to gain by believing in God doesn't mean I can make myself believe in something I think is extremely unlikely.
Literature took over a place in my life when I left religion. Its role was to help make the disordered universe seem to have enough order that I could live in it. But I end up conflating literature and life too much, thinking that there is a point to life like there is to literature, or that there is an intelligence behind the plot of my life and that one day everything will make sense. Or worse, that there is some great purpose to my life that I'm supposed to discover. Thinking like this is likely to make my life worse, rather than better, because I end up making decisions as though there were some magic key for me to discover that will unlock my life.
3) This applies to other types of writing as well as fiction. I can't believe anyone listens to anything I say. I have no idea what I'm doing in life, I can't figure anything out, and all I've accomplished with all my attempts to become an intellectual is the realization that I know nothing. I should really shut up and never write anything.
And yet, life often presents me with situations like what used to happen all the time in college classrooms. The professor would ask something and nobody would say anything. Eventually, I couldn't take the silence, and I'd raise my hand and answer. Then, I'd do it again. I'd try to give someone else a chance, but then that person would say something so stupid I couldn't take it, and I'd have to rush it to get the sound of that person's voice out of my head. But then, at the end of the class, I'd worry that I was an asshole for talking the whole time, even though nobody else seemed to either want to or to be any good at it.
That's what writing is like for me. I think I've figured a few things out, and nobody else is saying them. So I say them. Then, because I'm the only one saying them, I feel like I must be either a moron or an asshole or both. I can't share your confidence that if nobody likes it, it's them. I think that sometimes, and then I also think that it's me. I vacillate between thinking I'm an idiot and "they're" all idiots.
You're right that I feel "compelled" to write, like I'm supposed to do it. But isn't this more religious thinking? That because I think I have some unique wisdom, it's my duty to share it?
I don't know. I'll probably end up still writing, even after I try to quit. My best bet is to substitute something else for it. My family has been that substitute for a while, but I do kind of feel like I will always need something to keep my brain occupied, so I don't have to deal with all this school-room silence from the universe. I'm thinking either a whole new round of volunteer work or going back to school for a second bachelor's degree, this time in something more useful than English.
Get over your ambivalence about writing and just submit to what you are obviously compelled to do. You like to write, and you feel a need to write. So write and make no apologies for it. Who do you want as your audience anyway? Why would it make any difference?
I write first and foremost for myself. Those who wish to come along are welcome. Those who don't are just too stupid to worry about. Yes: dumb, undiscerning, lacking in taste.
Regarding the piece in the commentary, if you want to draw out that thread, about how people not caring about art is art's problem, and apply it to writing, that makes sense to me. Avoid the cliched stories that you lament, and keep doing your criticism. Keep doing your writing, whatever that is. You obviously just do it because that's you.If I could restate this argument to make sure I get the gist, as if this were couples' therapy, I'd do it thus: There are a lot of activities I engage in whose value to the world I don't question, but I still do them. Chess, sex, stupid games on my phone, beer, super hero movies, Korean food. I do them because they don't hurt anyone and I enjoy them, and so it seems like there's no harm indulging. So why look the gift horse of writing in the mouth?
Good point. I probably am quibbling too much over the "why I write" question. I don't question the habit of writing for most people. But here, as succinctly as I can put it, are a few reasons why I might question it for me:
1) I'm not sure literature is harmless. Literature is great at some stuff that's critical for society, like imaginatively assuming identities of the "other," forcing readers to re-think the familiar by upsetting linguistic or narrative expectations, and by resolving complex facts of reality into a comprehensible narrative framework for understanding the world through metaphor, analogy, allegory, parable, and similar tropes. But, as every book on writing fiction tells you, literature isn't the real world. Reading too much of it, though, tends to muddle your thinking by making you treat the real world as though it were a story. At least it did me. I've made some terrible decisions in life based on the heuristic that it's what a character in a book would have done.
2) Literature is a dangerous temptation to me the way religion is. My commenter, in suggesting that I have nothing to lose by writing and possibly something to gain, presented me with a kind of literary Pascal's wager. In religion, I object to this argument by noting that just because I stand (in the U.S.) nothing to lose and possibly much to gain by believing in God doesn't mean I can make myself believe in something I think is extremely unlikely.
Literature took over a place in my life when I left religion. Its role was to help make the disordered universe seem to have enough order that I could live in it. But I end up conflating literature and life too much, thinking that there is a point to life like there is to literature, or that there is an intelligence behind the plot of my life and that one day everything will make sense. Or worse, that there is some great purpose to my life that I'm supposed to discover. Thinking like this is likely to make my life worse, rather than better, because I end up making decisions as though there were some magic key for me to discover that will unlock my life.
3) This applies to other types of writing as well as fiction. I can't believe anyone listens to anything I say. I have no idea what I'm doing in life, I can't figure anything out, and all I've accomplished with all my attempts to become an intellectual is the realization that I know nothing. I should really shut up and never write anything.
And yet, life often presents me with situations like what used to happen all the time in college classrooms. The professor would ask something and nobody would say anything. Eventually, I couldn't take the silence, and I'd raise my hand and answer. Then, I'd do it again. I'd try to give someone else a chance, but then that person would say something so stupid I couldn't take it, and I'd have to rush it to get the sound of that person's voice out of my head. But then, at the end of the class, I'd worry that I was an asshole for talking the whole time, even though nobody else seemed to either want to or to be any good at it.
That's what writing is like for me. I think I've figured a few things out, and nobody else is saying them. So I say them. Then, because I'm the only one saying them, I feel like I must be either a moron or an asshole or both. I can't share your confidence that if nobody likes it, it's them. I think that sometimes, and then I also think that it's me. I vacillate between thinking I'm an idiot and "they're" all idiots.
You're right that I feel "compelled" to write, like I'm supposed to do it. But isn't this more religious thinking? That because I think I have some unique wisdom, it's my duty to share it?
I don't know. I'll probably end up still writing, even after I try to quit. My best bet is to substitute something else for it. My family has been that substitute for a while, but I do kind of feel like I will always need something to keep my brain occupied, so I don't have to deal with all this school-room silence from the universe. I'm thinking either a whole new round of volunteer work or going back to school for a second bachelor's degree, this time in something more useful than English.
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
nearly done
(tl;dr: I am about to move from posting shitty blog entries about writing stories to posting the actual shitty stories I wrote during my year-long writing binge. Also, in case you didn't know, Americans don't read much literature anymore.)
The other day, a friend sent me an article about how art became irrelevant. It's mostly ground I've heard covered before: post-WWI and WWII, artists moved from critiquing the unprecedented human suffering wrought by Western society to utter rejection of the values of that society, which ended up making those artists irrelevant. It's a fairly conservative view of art, and I realized, after noodling around the site that published it, that it's a fairly conservative venue. But it doesn't matter; what I'm talking about here is related more to a side-trip the article took than the main argument, and the facts in that digression are solid, even if the main argument may have weaknesses. In this passage, Lewis recalled how art forms wither and die as culture and technology shift:
I've called myself a failed writer, but if I take October 2013 as the moment I started in earnest, and not grad school more than a decade earlier, I haven't done that badly. I had one short story published and got good feedback on five others. One almost-good-enough was from a journal that has sent writers on to Pushcart awards and Best American Short Stories awards before. So it wasn't a bad rookie year. Combine that with a few poetry publications back in the early aughts, and I can probably assume that I don't totally suck at writing.
It's possible that if I kept at it, I might have been a "successful" writer. But what does that mean, nowadays? I don't think we're in danger of books disappearing, but they are losing steam. Shelley once called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," but when was the last time you can think of a piece of literature having a major place in public discourse? Politicians may quote (or misquote) a bit from literature here and there, but I don't get the sense that people read books, particularly fiction, to become different people much nowadays.
And by "people," I mean me
I recently started reading the 2014 Best American Short Stories anthology. In the preface, Heidi Pitlor notes that " from my vantage point...it seems that more people in this country want to write than read. Many people who read this book are in fact writers in training, reading in order to learn how to write better." (She's right; that's a major reason why I bought it.) She followed her train of thought: "What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become--or are we already--a nation of performers with no audience?"
She admits that even she herself and her lit friends have developed a tendency to discuss television more than books when gathered together. She laments a lack of a literary community where thoughts about books are exchanged. She exhorted herself and the patrons of BASS to read more, Facebook less.
Me, I read eight of the twenty stories in the anthology and got bored. Only one, "The Breeze," by Joshua Ferris, struck me as great. The rest were merely well-built stories that impacted on the surface of my psyche.
Literature's influence on me has been profound, but I'm finding it moves me less and less. I have a graduate degree in literature, but even I find watching Mad Men somehow more satisfying than reading The Road was, and not just on a superficial level. My summer reading was all non-fiction. My son and his friends, who have grown up with video everything, will read far less than I do. Reading of fiction will not disappear, but it will mean less in the future than it has.
There are only a handful of writers who truly make a living from what they write. Most have to moonlight--teaching writing, if they are lucky. That's not to say if you don't "make it" that you're a bad writer. It's just that we've created a high supply of writers (a holdover from a past in which writing was a highly respected thing to do) and a low demand from readers. I'm not going to say this is good or bad for society. Although I have a feeling that a society that reads less is somehow linked to Donald Trump being taken seriously as a candidate for president, maybe watching shows and posting on social media about them fills a cultural need even better than old reading circles or salons used to do. Right or wrong, a post-literary shift is happening. Literature is becoming less and less a requirement for those who want to be taken seriously by society. If you wish to address that society in some way, a story in words might not be the best way to do it.
During grad school, I switched from poetry to fiction because I thought nobody read poetry anymore except maybe other poets. I now feel that fiction is crumbling into a few highly segregated neighborhoods of juvenile fiction, "best sellers," and literary fiction, which more and more is coming to mean "writing written for other writers." I've been reading that kind of writing long enough to know I don't like it, and that's not the audience I want to talk to, either.
So my fiction revival is definitely over. I don’t know if I’m done with writing forever. Fiction kind of took over a place in my life that religion used to occupy when I decided I just couldn’t believe in it anymore. I’ve found fiction harder to leave for good than religion. Even religion had some useful things about it that I've kept with me. Fiction has a lot more.
But since writing fiction is over for me for now, so is this blog—nearly. I think I still have a few saved rounds to fire off about "craft." But much more than that, I’m going to post a few of the stories I wrote during that year. Nobody will read them, but I might as well do something with them. Once I’ve posted a few (if I can bear to post any—looking at them after eight months off, the first two didn’t seem very good to me), I’ll do one final post about why I don’t recommend grad school in writing, so that will remain the top post in case someone is wondering about that one day and stumbles across me via Google. Those considering grad school can then at least read a few stories to decide if grad school just didn't work for me because nothing could have.
Stories to start in a few days. Because I know you're all dying of anticipation.
The other day, a friend sent me an article about how art became irrelevant. It's mostly ground I've heard covered before: post-WWI and WWII, artists moved from critiquing the unprecedented human suffering wrought by Western society to utter rejection of the values of that society, which ended up making those artists irrelevant. It's a fairly conservative view of art, and I realized, after noodling around the site that published it, that it's a fairly conservative venue. But it doesn't matter; what I'm talking about here is related more to a side-trip the article took than the main argument, and the facts in that digression are solid, even if the main argument may have weaknesses. In this passage, Lewis recalled how art forms wither and die as culture and technology shift:
...the novel, like any genre of art, is the product of a particular cultural moment. Each genre reflects certain systems of belief and social structures, and it will flourish with them or shrivel accordingly. At the end of the Middle Ages, passion plays and manuscript illumination withered away; shortly thereafter, the Renaissance court conjured up opera and ballet.
A new technology can change the cultural moment with shocking speed. America’s culture of vaudeville, vibrant for a half century, sank into oblivion after the introduction of sound in film in 1927. Fred Allen, one vaudeville performer who found a lifeboat in radio, observed with chagrin how theater chains promptly began to bill motion pictures above their vaudeville programs. The big bands of the Swing Era and their culture of nightclubs and ballrooms could not survive television. Now it is literary culture that is on the chopping block. According to Publishers Weekly, the greatest sales of nonfiction books was achieved in 2007—the same year (the magazine might have noted) that Apple introduced the iPhone. Since then, book sales have been declining steadily, up to 10 percent a year.
I've called myself a failed writer, but if I take October 2013 as the moment I started in earnest, and not grad school more than a decade earlier, I haven't done that badly. I had one short story published and got good feedback on five others. One almost-good-enough was from a journal that has sent writers on to Pushcart awards and Best American Short Stories awards before. So it wasn't a bad rookie year. Combine that with a few poetry publications back in the early aughts, and I can probably assume that I don't totally suck at writing.
It's possible that if I kept at it, I might have been a "successful" writer. But what does that mean, nowadays? I don't think we're in danger of books disappearing, but they are losing steam. Shelley once called poets the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," but when was the last time you can think of a piece of literature having a major place in public discourse? Politicians may quote (or misquote) a bit from literature here and there, but I don't get the sense that people read books, particularly fiction, to become different people much nowadays.
And by "people," I mean me
I recently started reading the 2014 Best American Short Stories anthology. In the preface, Heidi Pitlor notes that " from my vantage point...it seems that more people in this country want to write than read. Many people who read this book are in fact writers in training, reading in order to learn how to write better." (She's right; that's a major reason why I bought it.) She followed her train of thought: "What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become--or are we already--a nation of performers with no audience?"
She admits that even she herself and her lit friends have developed a tendency to discuss television more than books when gathered together. She laments a lack of a literary community where thoughts about books are exchanged. She exhorted herself and the patrons of BASS to read more, Facebook less.
Me, I read eight of the twenty stories in the anthology and got bored. Only one, "The Breeze," by Joshua Ferris, struck me as great. The rest were merely well-built stories that impacted on the surface of my psyche.
Literature's influence on me has been profound, but I'm finding it moves me less and less. I have a graduate degree in literature, but even I find watching Mad Men somehow more satisfying than reading The Road was, and not just on a superficial level. My summer reading was all non-fiction. My son and his friends, who have grown up with video everything, will read far less than I do. Reading of fiction will not disappear, but it will mean less in the future than it has.
There are only a handful of writers who truly make a living from what they write. Most have to moonlight--teaching writing, if they are lucky. That's not to say if you don't "make it" that you're a bad writer. It's just that we've created a high supply of writers (a holdover from a past in which writing was a highly respected thing to do) and a low demand from readers. I'm not going to say this is good or bad for society. Although I have a feeling that a society that reads less is somehow linked to Donald Trump being taken seriously as a candidate for president, maybe watching shows and posting on social media about them fills a cultural need even better than old reading circles or salons used to do. Right or wrong, a post-literary shift is happening. Literature is becoming less and less a requirement for those who want to be taken seriously by society. If you wish to address that society in some way, a story in words might not be the best way to do it.
During grad school, I switched from poetry to fiction because I thought nobody read poetry anymore except maybe other poets. I now feel that fiction is crumbling into a few highly segregated neighborhoods of juvenile fiction, "best sellers," and literary fiction, which more and more is coming to mean "writing written for other writers." I've been reading that kind of writing long enough to know I don't like it, and that's not the audience I want to talk to, either.
So my fiction revival is definitely over. I don’t know if I’m done with writing forever. Fiction kind of took over a place in my life that religion used to occupy when I decided I just couldn’t believe in it anymore. I’ve found fiction harder to leave for good than religion. Even religion had some useful things about it that I've kept with me. Fiction has a lot more.
But since writing fiction is over for me for now, so is this blog—nearly. I think I still have a few saved rounds to fire off about "craft." But much more than that, I’m going to post a few of the stories I wrote during that year. Nobody will read them, but I might as well do something with them. Once I’ve posted a few (if I can bear to post any—looking at them after eight months off, the first two didn’t seem very good to me), I’ll do one final post about why I don’t recommend grad school in writing, so that will remain the top post in case someone is wondering about that one day and stumbles across me via Google. Those considering grad school can then at least read a few stories to decide if grad school just didn't work for me because nothing could have.
Stories to start in a few days. Because I know you're all dying of anticipation.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
how to be lazy as a writer (and still write a decent story)
Before I get into all the things "wrong" with the short story "Long Tom Lookout" by Nicole Cullen, which was included in the 2014 Best American Short Stories collection and is therefore, presumably, a exemplar of the best of the species, the tl;dr is actually this: This is a pretty good story, in spite of how its mechanics fall back on what I will argue are modern literary fiction conventions. I want to make two points by this:
1) Literary fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction. There are expectations and a kind of standard for the field. Some writers break out from this, but you can follow the pattern--sometimes without any innovation at all--and make readers believe you have succeeded in the genre.
2) There's nothing wrong with this. All genres are capable of providing life-changing imaginative connections even when being genre-conventional. Plot, theme, and characterization can make up for the lack of innovation in style and language for a writer.
What are these conventions that I see in Cullen?
1) Listing, often in triples, the things that a character notices as a way to establish scene
2) Highly specific nouns that most people would not really know the names of as a way to establish scene.
"Sin" #1:
When I'm reading a story, particularly a story in third-person limited, I am often distracted when there is a tone of narration going on that seems at odds with the character's POV the narration is providing. A third-person limited POV should give us only what a character can see, touch, taste, think, feel, etc. It is okay for the narrator to interpret for the audience, even to do so with thoughts that the character herself could not verbalize, e.g. "Monica was, in short, getting to that point in her relationship when she would start to invent reasons why the relationship would not work out." This is fine, and doesn't interrupt my enjoyment of the story. But when the author (not just the narrator) seemingly takes over the sensory apparatus of a character and uses the character's eyes, nose, and ears to sense what the author wants to sense, I want to call foul. Examples from "Long Tom Lookout":
I could go on (and on and on), but since all of these examples are within the first 750 words of the story, I think that will suffice. Oh, fuck it, let's do one more:
-Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please—dirt-caked knuckles and a gray braid. Glasses hang from a gold chain around her neck.
I included that last one because it looked for a moment like there would only be two things the narrator picked from Lauren's POV to show the reader, but then...BLAMMO!! The third was just waiting in another sentence. These examples are all before Lauren and her son get out of the car to meet her mother, which is when the action really starts.
Why do I have such a critique hard-on for picking out these tripled scene-setters? (To be fair, the second one in the list is more of a catalog of things that have happened than things in the scenery.) Well, I don't really think this is such a great sin, to be honest. Writers are told to present "details that matter," and I suppose most of these details reasonably set tone and Lauren's interior landscape.
I guess one problem I always have in a 3d person limited PoV is the leakage between what is the PoV character's observation and what is the author interpreting those observations for the reader. This very much kills the magic of the story for me on many occasions. I realize that the narrator's voice isn't the same as the character's voice, unless we're in first person. But when the narrator continues to pick up on things in the main character's field of view in triplets, it starts to take over the attention of the reader in a way I don't think is intended. The narrator can pick and chose from what the character has available to inform the story, but the narrator can't move too far away from the voice of the character without being a character him/herself. When Cullen writes "Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please," that's Lauren's thoughts that the narrator is giving us access to. Presumably, then, all of these sensory details are things that Lauren perceives. And if she perceives everything in groups of three, we have to wonder if this character has some kind of OCD.
Three is a satisfying number. If the character sees three things, we feel like this is a more authentic description somehow. But falling back on it so much that even I noticed it is going to the well a lot.
"Sin" #2
I don't know who started the tendency to go crazy with Google and look up the exact words for things (or find things you didn't know about and put them in your story), but I see this everywhere. I don't believe Lauren would know pyrite from granite. Or what balsamwood, cheatgrass, and Canada thistle are by sight. But all these things appear in the description. To me, this is a break in the direction of third person omniscient, to a narrator who is able to break the surly bonds of the character and be a lot smarter than the character is. I honestly believe that lit fic has developed an unspoken rule that it is permissible if not outright expected that a narrator will break from the constraints of the character whenever scene is being described. Why? Well, I think it's kind of a bourgeois sentimentality. We want beautiful descriptions of scene, because when we go to our book clubs and don't really understand what the book is about, we can always pick out a few passages of description and talk about how beautiful we think they are. I mean, it's fine. I've done it. I looked up the kinds of grass that would grow in the lowlands of Illinois down by the Illinois river and put that in my story. But I really could go for an easing up of this tendency.
NONETHELESS..
This is a really compelling story. Lauren is feeling all the powerful emotions of new parenthood, all that sudden being needed. She is trying to connect, but failing. Her attempts to nurture end up vomited back up like the Huckleberry milkshake she gives "the boy." She is telling herself that her reasons are altruistic, and that she is being much put upon, but the reactions of others seem to call this into question. It's clear that we at least have a mix of altruism and a desire to somehow reconnect with Keller through Jonah. She's a lookout who can't look out for herself, certainly not for Jonah, which makes her doubly isolated. This is good stuff that scratches at the meaning of parent-child bonding, how it complicates the play between romantic love and our fear of being alone. None of this is weakened because Cullen employed some modern lit-fic stock techniques. She makes up for her mechanical plainness with a good plot and a good character working toward a complicated and meaningful theme.
I get tired of always hearing about how much people value original language or language that makes you stand up and take notice. That's not really what people want. If that were true, then 70% of stories in literary journals wouldn't sound an awful lot like one another. So what I'd like is for us to just drop the charade that great technique is what we want because we're such smart, literary readers. I'd like "literary" fiction to open up to stories that don't sound so "literary," that is, that follow conventions other than the ones that lit fic uses. Because at heart, lit fic isn't really better writing or more linguistically virtuosic most of the time. It's just people doing what they've read other people do in order to tell a story that nobody else has told yet. That's what this story did.
1) Literary fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction. There are expectations and a kind of standard for the field. Some writers break out from this, but you can follow the pattern--sometimes without any innovation at all--and make readers believe you have succeeded in the genre.
2) There's nothing wrong with this. All genres are capable of providing life-changing imaginative connections even when being genre-conventional. Plot, theme, and characterization can make up for the lack of innovation in style and language for a writer.
What are these conventions that I see in Cullen?
1) Listing, often in triples, the things that a character notices as a way to establish scene
2) Highly specific nouns that most people would not really know the names of as a way to establish scene.
"Sin" #1:
When I'm reading a story, particularly a story in third-person limited, I am often distracted when there is a tone of narration going on that seems at odds with the character's POV the narration is providing. A third-person limited POV should give us only what a character can see, touch, taste, think, feel, etc. It is okay for the narrator to interpret for the audience, even to do so with thoughts that the character herself could not verbalize, e.g. "Monica was, in short, getting to that point in her relationship when she would start to invent reasons why the relationship would not work out." This is fine, and doesn't interrupt my enjoyment of the story. But when the author (not just the narrator) seemingly takes over the sensory apparatus of a character and uses the character's eyes, nose, and ears to sense what the author wants to sense, I want to call foul. Examples from "Long Tom Lookout":
- The headlights flood an irrigation canal black with water, a jack fence, and the beginnings of a field.
-The last few days on the road have been an experiment in cause and effect—the boy’s inability to communicate, his self-destructive behavior, his obsession with maps.
-...she thinks back to the rare find of a buried railroad tie, the smell of wet sagebrush, her father bending to touch the pink of a bitterroot flower.
-Nine years have passed and now she’s back with sixty-four dollars in cash, a truck in her husband’s name, and a boy that isn’t hers
-She passes a Wonder Bread truck then a flatbed hauling hay bales and two barking dogs. On the hillside above town, houses begin to wake.
-...the property has gone steadily downhill: warped cedar shingles, rusted wrought-iron fence, flowerbeds usurped by star thistle.
-Her mother stands in the side yard, dressed in a mud-hemmed housecoat and muck boots, throwing feed to the chickens.
I could go on (and on and on), but since all of these examples are within the first 750 words of the story, I think that will suffice. Oh, fuck it, let's do one more:
-Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please—dirt-caked knuckles and a gray braid. Glasses hang from a gold chain around her neck.
I included that last one because it looked for a moment like there would only be two things the narrator picked from Lauren's POV to show the reader, but then...BLAMMO!! The third was just waiting in another sentence. These examples are all before Lauren and her son get out of the car to meet her mother, which is when the action really starts.
Why do I have such a critique hard-on for picking out these tripled scene-setters? (To be fair, the second one in the list is more of a catalog of things that have happened than things in the scenery.) Well, I don't really think this is such a great sin, to be honest. Writers are told to present "details that matter," and I suppose most of these details reasonably set tone and Lauren's interior landscape.
I guess one problem I always have in a 3d person limited PoV is the leakage between what is the PoV character's observation and what is the author interpreting those observations for the reader. This very much kills the magic of the story for me on many occasions. I realize that the narrator's voice isn't the same as the character's voice, unless we're in first person. But when the narrator continues to pick up on things in the main character's field of view in triplets, it starts to take over the attention of the reader in a way I don't think is intended. The narrator can pick and chose from what the character has available to inform the story, but the narrator can't move too far away from the voice of the character without being a character him/herself. When Cullen writes "Through the grain of the screen Lauren sees a woman impossible to please," that's Lauren's thoughts that the narrator is giving us access to. Presumably, then, all of these sensory details are things that Lauren perceives. And if she perceives everything in groups of three, we have to wonder if this character has some kind of OCD.
Three is a satisfying number. If the character sees three things, we feel like this is a more authentic description somehow. But falling back on it so much that even I noticed it is going to the well a lot.
"Sin" #2
I don't know who started the tendency to go crazy with Google and look up the exact words for things (or find things you didn't know about and put them in your story), but I see this everywhere. I don't believe Lauren would know pyrite from granite. Or what balsamwood, cheatgrass, and Canada thistle are by sight. But all these things appear in the description. To me, this is a break in the direction of third person omniscient, to a narrator who is able to break the surly bonds of the character and be a lot smarter than the character is. I honestly believe that lit fic has developed an unspoken rule that it is permissible if not outright expected that a narrator will break from the constraints of the character whenever scene is being described. Why? Well, I think it's kind of a bourgeois sentimentality. We want beautiful descriptions of scene, because when we go to our book clubs and don't really understand what the book is about, we can always pick out a few passages of description and talk about how beautiful we think they are. I mean, it's fine. I've done it. I looked up the kinds of grass that would grow in the lowlands of Illinois down by the Illinois river and put that in my story. But I really could go for an easing up of this tendency.
NONETHELESS..
This is a really compelling story. Lauren is feeling all the powerful emotions of new parenthood, all that sudden being needed. She is trying to connect, but failing. Her attempts to nurture end up vomited back up like the Huckleberry milkshake she gives "the boy." She is telling herself that her reasons are altruistic, and that she is being much put upon, but the reactions of others seem to call this into question. It's clear that we at least have a mix of altruism and a desire to somehow reconnect with Keller through Jonah. She's a lookout who can't look out for herself, certainly not for Jonah, which makes her doubly isolated. This is good stuff that scratches at the meaning of parent-child bonding, how it complicates the play between romantic love and our fear of being alone. None of this is weakened because Cullen employed some modern lit-fic stock techniques. She makes up for her mechanical plainness with a good plot and a good character working toward a complicated and meaningful theme.
I get tired of always hearing about how much people value original language or language that makes you stand up and take notice. That's not really what people want. If that were true, then 70% of stories in literary journals wouldn't sound an awful lot like one another. So what I'd like is for us to just drop the charade that great technique is what we want because we're such smart, literary readers. I'd like "literary" fiction to open up to stories that don't sound so "literary," that is, that follow conventions other than the ones that lit fic uses. Because at heart, lit fic isn't really better writing or more linguistically virtuosic most of the time. It's just people doing what they've read other people do in order to tell a story that nobody else has told yet. That's what this story did.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Top Ten Suckiest Parts of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy
While my writing hobby is still stalled (I've actually tried out two 'non-literary' stories while on my break since last December, but mostly I'm not writing), I'll use this blog, since I have it, to scratch another itch that I've had for a while. It's nice to use this time when I'm not being ignored or critiqued to critique the hell out of somebody else's work.
Unlike Walking Dead, which was my last list/diatribe, I actually had an emotional attachment to Tolkien before the movies came out. My dad read them to me when I was young, and then I read them again in high school. I thought about them often when I was in the Marine Corps, hating life, and they were sort of an inspiration to keep slogging along.
I'm not a purist. I understand movies are movies and books are books. None of my criticisms boil down to "this was different in the book." I was fine with not having Tom Bombadil. It was okay to have Saruman be killed by Wormtongue on top of Orthanc, rather than during the (elided) Scouring of Shire. Arwen saves Frodo and not a mystery elf who might have actually died in another part of the Tolkien legendarium? No problem. My hates are more of the "the movies changed something and made the story worse in so doing" flavor. Here we go:
The list
10) The drinking scene. While I understood the need for humor and was willing to tolerate Gimli's transformation into D and D dwarf to get it done, this scene wasn't really funny and took up a lot of time. The beginning of RoTK is really slow. It takes us a half an hour just to get to "Sauron is going to attack Minas Tirith." We could have just had Gandalf figure it out while talking to Saruman and saved time for other, better material.
9) "Fake death #1"--Sam Gamgee. Nearly every character has a fake death at some point in the Jackson trilogy. Aragorn has like three. By the end, it was easy to see that Gollum wasn't really dead when he seemed to fall down the crevice. These add minutes the films desperately needed to do other things, but they also take away the emotional impact of the two, real "fake deaths": those of Gandalf and Frodo. I guess it was okay to have the audience wondering along with the three walkers whether Pip and Merry had made it. But Sam didn't need to have his own fake death at the end of FoTR. It served nothing plot-wise, and telegraphed other, more important fake deaths.
8) Sam has too many Rudy speeches. Sam isn't terrible in the movies, but when he's bad it's by being too much of what he is. The Sam of the books is quiet and has a hard time finding his words. When he does speak, it carries more weight. He does his talking by his actions. In movies two and three, hardly a Frodo/Sam scene goes by without him talking up believing in the good in the world and holding on to hope.
7) Insertion of too many "this is the theme of the movie, guys" lines. "You're part of this world!" In movie one, Gandalf's words come during a tense lull in the action soon before he falls. They carry weight. You've got to play that with a light hand, though. Too much is just wearisome. TTT is dripping with these lines, and RoTK isn't free of it, either. Pick the best ones and drop the rest, Peter. And for God's sake, don't write your own.
6) Creating a conflict in TTT between Aragorn, who wants Theoden to ride out aggressively against a much larger army, and Theoden, who seemingly is healed from one blindness to go right into another. This conflict makes no sense. Strategically, Theoden was right, and there wasn't much to argue about. They were badly outnumbered. Get the high ground and dig in. Aragorn never argued this in the books, because he isn't stupid. This speaks to a real annoying feature of the movies: EVERYONE has to have a narrative arc, no matter how convoluted a route it takes to get them there. Theoden can't just fight the Uruk-hai. He has to be tentative about it before he is inspired to be brave, to be a LEADER about it. That's dumb.One of the cool things about Tolkien is that some of his characters are somewhat static. That sounds terrible, but it's what makes them different from every story you read today. They're static in a good way--they persist in their beliefs. They defy the usual narrative arc. Rather than becoming something new every time, they sometimes become the fullness what they were meant to be all along.
5) Fake death #2, Aragorn falls over the cliff. (Also, he almost gets killed by a troll in RoTK, almost drowns in runoff water in TTT, etc., but this was the worst.) This took a VERY long time. The only plot point advanced by this long side trip is that Aragorn thinks about his past with Arwen. He could easily have done this while riding along on the way to Helm's Deep. The opportunity cost of having this (and the wolves scene that goes with it) in the movie was the lost chance to have one really great scene from the book, the one in which Aragorn stands on the parapet before dawn and speaks to the Uruk-hai. It could have been a great scene in film, and it would have advanced Aragorn's true narrative arc--"Do I have enough greatness in me to accomplish what I desire to?" Instead, the audience got the hint even more that only Boromir is going to die for real.
4) The suckening of Faramir. Sam compares Faramir to Gandalf in the books. He is wise. He is never tempted to take the ring. He says if he found it on the road, he wouldn't pick it up. The movies need to give him an arc, though. "I want to get this to make my father love me, but I must resist. I will eventually learn to resist." That's so...modern. It's familiar. We already know this story. We love LoTR because it's different from every other story we read today. Don't make it more like them.
3) Frodo pushes Gollum into the pit of fire. One friend of mine said this is "like Jesus Christ coming down off the cross to kill all the Roman soldiers." Gollum falls in through his own uncontrollable lust, and possibly through the grace of Eru. That's how the ring works. It seals its own doom.
2) Not having Eomer at Helm's Deep. In the books, he forms a friendship with Gimli, with whom he at first had severe animosity. There is a funny bit about Gimli going off on a raid at one point so he doesn't fall asleep. In the movies, in order to make "Eomer forgives his uncle" a story, they keep him out of his great role.
1 1/2: Also, related to the Helm's Deep scene, something I just thought of: There are about five cutaway shots of women and children looking scared from their refuge within the caves. Did we really need this many shots of random fear to be reminded of the stakes of the battle? Do we feel more invested in the outcome because some redshirt townies will be massacred if the Uruk-hai win?
1) Gandalf gets fucking pwnd by the fucking Witch Fucking King of Fucking Angmar. Fuck you, Peter Jackson. We wasted ten minutes on drinking contests and Gandalf holding a chamber pot, but we don't have time for the MOST MADE-FOR-CINEMA MOMENT from the books? Actually, the theater version didn't have Gandalf losing his stand-off. It's almost like the books: Gandalf says a few words, Witch King says a few words, then horns, horns, and the Witch King leaves. The feeling in the book is that it might have been a stand-off, but I wouldn't have bet against Gandalf. Here it is:
(Really cool scene in which the battering ram breaks through. Then...)
So, yeah. Fuck yeah. That's the scene they had to nail. Instead, we get (in the extended version), Gandalf getting his staff broken and cringing, only to be saved by the horns. Jackson knew better than to put this in theaters. He'd have been lynched. In the first place, it makes no sense. The Witch King has the only effective leader in the city lying in front of him, and can't take three seconds to finish him off before he goes to see about those horns?
But there's a bigger offense here. Gandalf, when he comes back from his battle with the Balrog, is something set apart. I have a sense that he fears nothing in Middle Earth except Sauron himself. Aragorn seems to second this. When he meets the risen Gandalf in the book he says "...you are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, MIGHTIER THAN THEY (caps mine): the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads."
I always read those last lines when most men my age take Viagra, and it works much better. I think I just impregnated the cat. And I don't even have a cat.
Jackson felt, I'm sure, that he had to build up the indomitable nature of the Witch King prior to his death at the hands of Eowyn. But he really didn't need to do it at Gandalf's expense. He could have simply had the Witch King sweeping the fields of horsemen, much like Sauron did in the opening scene of the trilogy. This was utterly a false step, and it's not faithful to Gandalf's own narrative arc. What did his resurrection mean if he is so powerless? He is the greatest of a great order. He is the carrier of Narya, the ring of fire. He is the one, the white rider. This is all great film ready-made. But Jackson missed the layup.
Unlike Walking Dead, which was my last list/diatribe, I actually had an emotional attachment to Tolkien before the movies came out. My dad read them to me when I was young, and then I read them again in high school. I thought about them often when I was in the Marine Corps, hating life, and they were sort of an inspiration to keep slogging along.
I'm not a purist. I understand movies are movies and books are books. None of my criticisms boil down to "this was different in the book." I was fine with not having Tom Bombadil. It was okay to have Saruman be killed by Wormtongue on top of Orthanc, rather than during the (elided) Scouring of Shire. Arwen saves Frodo and not a mystery elf who might have actually died in another part of the Tolkien legendarium? No problem. My hates are more of the "the movies changed something and made the story worse in so doing" flavor. Here we go:
The list
10) The drinking scene. While I understood the need for humor and was willing to tolerate Gimli's transformation into D and D dwarf to get it done, this scene wasn't really funny and took up a lot of time. The beginning of RoTK is really slow. It takes us a half an hour just to get to "Sauron is going to attack Minas Tirith." We could have just had Gandalf figure it out while talking to Saruman and saved time for other, better material.
9) "Fake death #1"--Sam Gamgee. Nearly every character has a fake death at some point in the Jackson trilogy. Aragorn has like three. By the end, it was easy to see that Gollum wasn't really dead when he seemed to fall down the crevice. These add minutes the films desperately needed to do other things, but they also take away the emotional impact of the two, real "fake deaths": those of Gandalf and Frodo. I guess it was okay to have the audience wondering along with the three walkers whether Pip and Merry had made it. But Sam didn't need to have his own fake death at the end of FoTR. It served nothing plot-wise, and telegraphed other, more important fake deaths.
8) Sam has too many Rudy speeches. Sam isn't terrible in the movies, but when he's bad it's by being too much of what he is. The Sam of the books is quiet and has a hard time finding his words. When he does speak, it carries more weight. He does his talking by his actions. In movies two and three, hardly a Frodo/Sam scene goes by without him talking up believing in the good in the world and holding on to hope.
7) Insertion of too many "this is the theme of the movie, guys" lines. "You're part of this world!" In movie one, Gandalf's words come during a tense lull in the action soon before he falls. They carry weight. You've got to play that with a light hand, though. Too much is just wearisome. TTT is dripping with these lines, and RoTK isn't free of it, either. Pick the best ones and drop the rest, Peter. And for God's sake, don't write your own.
6) Creating a conflict in TTT between Aragorn, who wants Theoden to ride out aggressively against a much larger army, and Theoden, who seemingly is healed from one blindness to go right into another. This conflict makes no sense. Strategically, Theoden was right, and there wasn't much to argue about. They were badly outnumbered. Get the high ground and dig in. Aragorn never argued this in the books, because he isn't stupid. This speaks to a real annoying feature of the movies: EVERYONE has to have a narrative arc, no matter how convoluted a route it takes to get them there. Theoden can't just fight the Uruk-hai. He has to be tentative about it before he is inspired to be brave, to be a LEADER about it. That's dumb.One of the cool things about Tolkien is that some of his characters are somewhat static. That sounds terrible, but it's what makes them different from every story you read today. They're static in a good way--they persist in their beliefs. They defy the usual narrative arc. Rather than becoming something new every time, they sometimes become the fullness what they were meant to be all along.
5) Fake death #2, Aragorn falls over the cliff. (Also, he almost gets killed by a troll in RoTK, almost drowns in runoff water in TTT, etc., but this was the worst.) This took a VERY long time. The only plot point advanced by this long side trip is that Aragorn thinks about his past with Arwen. He could easily have done this while riding along on the way to Helm's Deep. The opportunity cost of having this (and the wolves scene that goes with it) in the movie was the lost chance to have one really great scene from the book, the one in which Aragorn stands on the parapet before dawn and speaks to the Uruk-hai. It could have been a great scene in film, and it would have advanced Aragorn's true narrative arc--"Do I have enough greatness in me to accomplish what I desire to?" Instead, the audience got the hint even more that only Boromir is going to die for real.
4) The suckening of Faramir. Sam compares Faramir to Gandalf in the books. He is wise. He is never tempted to take the ring. He says if he found it on the road, he wouldn't pick it up. The movies need to give him an arc, though. "I want to get this to make my father love me, but I must resist. I will eventually learn to resist." That's so...modern. It's familiar. We already know this story. We love LoTR because it's different from every other story we read today. Don't make it more like them.
3) Frodo pushes Gollum into the pit of fire. One friend of mine said this is "like Jesus Christ coming down off the cross to kill all the Roman soldiers." Gollum falls in through his own uncontrollable lust, and possibly through the grace of Eru. That's how the ring works. It seals its own doom.
2) Not having Eomer at Helm's Deep. In the books, he forms a friendship with Gimli, with whom he at first had severe animosity. There is a funny bit about Gimli going off on a raid at one point so he doesn't fall asleep. In the movies, in order to make "Eomer forgives his uncle" a story, they keep him out of his great role.
1 1/2: Also, related to the Helm's Deep scene, something I just thought of: There are about five cutaway shots of women and children looking scared from their refuge within the caves. Did we really need this many shots of random fear to be reminded of the stakes of the battle? Do we feel more invested in the outcome because some redshirt townies will be massacred if the Uruk-hai win?
1) Gandalf gets fucking pwnd by the fucking Witch Fucking King of Fucking Angmar. Fuck you, Peter Jackson. We wasted ten minutes on drinking contests and Gandalf holding a chamber pot, but we don't have time for the MOST MADE-FOR-CINEMA MOMENT from the books? Actually, the theater version didn't have Gandalf losing his stand-off. It's almost like the books: Gandalf says a few words, Witch King says a few words, then horns, horns, and the Witch King leaves. The feeling in the book is that it might have been a stand-off, but I wouldn't have bet against Gandalf. Here it is:
(Really cool scene in which the battering ram breaks through. Then...)
In rode the Lord of the Nazgul. A great black shape against the fires beyond he loomed up, grown to a vast menace of despair. In rode the Lord of the Nazgul, under the archway that no enemy ever yet had passed, and all fled before his face.
ALL SAVE ONE. (caps mine, because I just got an erection while typing that) There waiting, silent and still in the space before the Gate, sat Gandalf upon Shadowfax: Shadowfax who alone among the free horses of the earth endured the terror, unmoving, steadfast as a graven image in Rath Dinen.
"You cannot enter here," said Gandalf, and the huge shadow halted. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master. Go!"
The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. The red fires shone between it and the mantled shoulders vast and dark. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
"Old fool!" he said. "Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!" And with that he lifted high his sword and flame ran down the blade.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.
And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.
So, yeah. Fuck yeah. That's the scene they had to nail. Instead, we get (in the extended version), Gandalf getting his staff broken and cringing, only to be saved by the horns. Jackson knew better than to put this in theaters. He'd have been lynched. In the first place, it makes no sense. The Witch King has the only effective leader in the city lying in front of him, and can't take three seconds to finish him off before he goes to see about those horns?
But there's a bigger offense here. Gandalf, when he comes back from his battle with the Balrog, is something set apart. I have a sense that he fears nothing in Middle Earth except Sauron himself. Aragorn seems to second this. When he meets the risen Gandalf in the book he says "...you are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, MIGHTIER THAN THEY (caps mine): the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads."
I always read those last lines when most men my age take Viagra, and it works much better. I think I just impregnated the cat. And I don't even have a cat.
Jackson felt, I'm sure, that he had to build up the indomitable nature of the Witch King prior to his death at the hands of Eowyn. But he really didn't need to do it at Gandalf's expense. He could have simply had the Witch King sweeping the fields of horsemen, much like Sauron did in the opening scene of the trilogy. This was utterly a false step, and it's not faithful to Gandalf's own narrative arc. What did his resurrection mean if he is so powerless? He is the greatest of a great order. He is the carrier of Narya, the ring of fire. He is the one, the white rider. This is all great film ready-made. But Jackson missed the layup.
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