G.K. Chesterton: I Drawed A Horsey

“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”

~G.K. Chesterton

I’ve been pondering this quote (source) for a few days now, trying to figure out what exactly Chesterton meant. That’s meant, of course, poking around on the internet to find other idiot interpretations (as compared to my own, to be presented shortly). Most of what I’m seeing chides Chesterton for being orthodox, for misunderstanding the free aspects of creativity, because you can’t, like, limit creativity, man.

I don’t think Chesterton meant what people think he meant.

And I don’t necessarily want to imprint my own thinking on Chesterton’s, lest I end up looking foolish like this.

But I can share a few anecdotes, mostly connected to things I’ve read that could have used some limits.

First, “Little, Big” by John Crowley.

Before I read the book – or at least tried to read it – I was led to believe it was an “epic” of “modern fantasy.” But, as I wrote in my review back in 2014, “I’m 138 pages in, and I’m still waiting for the plot to arrive.”

Crowley needed limitations, and he needed them badly. Maybe there was a tale to be told here, but it got lost in all of the freedom that Crowley expressed. It’s a giraffe that doesn’t look like a giraffe.

Here’s another: Gormenghast. More specifically, “Titus Groan,” by Mervyn Peake.

I liked it better, in 2016, than I did “Little, Big” in 2014, but still: “It's very Dickensian with interesting and extremely dull characters. And there are enough twists in the story to keep things going for the more adventurous reader. But this isn't a great quest, if that's what you like in fantasy. It's as if Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote a great quest novel about all the stuff that happens before the quest starts.”

Again, a giraffe that doesn’t look like a giraffe.

This is important to me because in Doleful Creatures, the book I’m perennially writing, I see the same pitfalls. I haven’t limited myself in any way. I’m creating a giraffe with a short neck, where a long-necked giraffe should be.

Or in other words, I drawed a horsey.

But you know, talking about limitations is so . . . limiting:

I'm not advocating a strict set of limits for everyone and everything. That's foolish. But I think working within constraints and limitations leads to a more focused product, if I can use such a harsh word in the world of "art."

Maybe it’s the Writing Courses that Need Revision . . .

I used to be an advocate of students writing a lot. And I mean a lot. A paper a week, at least a thousand words per paper.

But three years of teaching basic writing at Brigham Young University-Idaho – and this article from Slate.com on a bit of software that reads student essays and offers them suggestions for improvement – are convincing me I’ve got it all upside down, at least in one respect.

Students should write a lot. But a lot of that writing should be revision.

Here’s what popped out at me from the Slate article:

[R]evision only seems like a modest goal if you ignore how rare it is in student writing, where the typical pattern is: Procrastinate, panic, write all night, turn it in, and forget it. A week or two later, when teachers finally pass back the work, any feedback they offer is more or less ignored.

“I mean, once you get a graded essay back, where do you put it? You don’t keep it!” said Dean Ramser, who teaches first-year composition at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

All that careful reading and feedback offered by teachers? Mostly tossed out the window. I can confirm this anecdotally because I’ve always been stymied by students who make the same mistakes over and over, or who fail to connect the dots from one assignment to the next (we take our students through a series of assignments meant to make their writing more lively, and then throw a research paper at them with causes them to display imprinting from the more primitive, high-school-oriented part of their brains where they first learned the Formula for Research Writing ®, meaning boring, boring, boring.

I would love to teach a semester course on revision, where students start with one paper or topic – even something they’ve already written – and keep on re-working it and revising it throughout the semester. And I wouldn’t necessarily bill it as an advanced writing class – I’d aim it at beginners, or at least intermediates (though it would be valuable for beginners). Because the more advanced writers already know the value of revision and feedback, and the fact that you have to go through more than several iterations before good writing becomes great writing.

The challenge in such a course would be to fight the boredom. Students might not like the idea of revising the same old paper over and over. So maybe the course involves three papers, but with multiple submissions of each paper so drafts and revisions and final drafts are all graded and such. That might be worth something.

Pairing students up for one-on-one beta reads might also be useful – through peer review tends, for the most part, to be superficial. Having a computer do some of the peer review, as outlined by Slate, might bring in enough of an interest factor to help improve peer review’s overall usefulness.

Writing Blips I

Introducing a new feature on my blog (one of many new features that’ll likely be around for a little while in one form or another until I forget about it): Writing Blips. These are posts wherein I look at a handful of articles about writing, my own thoughts on writing, and just about anything to do with writing.

First:

Stephen King Is Right. A few posts ago I reviewed Stephen King’s “On Writing,” form which I gleaned this gem: “In many cases, when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his own priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

Wouldn’t you know the next book I start reading, John Crowley’s “Little, Big” is a prime example of this boring enchantedness. Yes, this book won fabulous awards. Yes, Harold Bloom loves this book. But you know what? It’s boring. I’m 37 pages in and NOTHING has happened, except that Smoky Bramble has walked to Edgewood, been told to wear a prophylactic by a character who mentioned she had to go to the bathroom, and then been introduced to the twee house where everything – everything – id described with dripping detail. It’s dull as something very dull.

Thanks to King, I know the name of this disease now. Knowing the name and recognizing it in a book makes me want to expunge the boredom from my own books. Red pens are coming out, Doleful Creatures.

Second:

Only figurative red pens, though, DC, since I’ll be editing you (again) in Microsoft Word.

That probably makes many of my writer friends’ skin crawl. So many of them use other software for their writing. Mostly Scrivener.

And that’s fine. I just don’t see the point. I will confess to being a free writer, one who just wants to sit down and see where the story takes me. I’m not terribly organized – probably to my detriment – but I don’t see organization as a way to become a better writer. And maybe it’s a faster way. But it’s not my way. (See above; I have to learn through hard knocks by reading writing tips written by a horror author.)

Besides – Microsoft Word is essentially free. Scrivener costs $40.

I have done some organization with my current novel, Doleful Creatures. Did it with Excel, and I think it’ll help. Maybe. But I have to agree with Kay Waldman, writing for Slate: There are a lot of creativity/productivity apps and such out there – but at the end of the day, don’t you get just as far with a boring ol’ word processor?

Says Waldman:

The fiction-writing app is a curious creature, because it can only sell creativity by downgrading it. It operates outside of the traditional, mystery-swathed model of inspiration, in which brilliance floods down on us from heaven, and instead reduces invention to a series of steps. In lassoing and regimenting the muse, fiction apps evaporate some of writing’s pain, but also some of its glory. Or maybe they just help us procrastinate!

I don’t need help in that procrastination department.

She adds further:

One worry with apps like these is that they will produce uninspired cookie-cutter novels. Should writing be easy? Composing by numbers, or by consulting a dropdown menu, seems destined to result in a clanky product, not a living thing.

In my experience, the only thing I’ve seen that has improved my writing and creativity is lots of time and lots of writing. The tools haven’t mattered. Well, they have a little. Using a computer and word processor have made editing and storing things easier. Time is the bigger thing: I may never have written a novel out longhand, but probably would be doing so now if I didn’t have the tool, simply because enough time and writing have passed that I see the possibilities of actually finishing a novel, let alone starting one.

But then there are things like this that make me nervous:

Eric Foster White, a music producer who helped artists like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys reach superstardom, believes the future of storytelling lies at the nexus between technology and content. His Denver-based startup, ShowMobile, operates both a platform and content studio, producing and aggregating YouTube videos, Vines, tweets, Instagram posts and other media. But it’s far more than a social stream: ShowMobile’s primary purpose is to tell continuous, always-on stories across platforms young people actually use.

Why nervous? Because I’m a digital fossil. Yes, I plan on publishing Doleful Creatures as an ebook. But that’s about it. I may eventually come up with a book video trailer, but that might be the end of my foray into the digital crossover world.

I see stuff like this (and Daniel Handler’s web series promoting his books) and I get that ol’ corprolite feeling.

Then I start to breathe again. Is this really where books are going? The kind of books I’m writing?

I have to answer: I don’t know. I hope not. But I don’t know.