The title "Legally Blonde" is a terrible pun, by which I don't mean there could be a good pun on blindness.
Q: What's wrong with the following sentence?
"That issue is that nothing happens in it."
A: Not a thing. It doesn't cry out for an obscenity between "nothing" and "happens". If you insert one, you don't even add anything; you punch a hole in the sentence. Expletives may be called strong language, but they're actually language-weakeners. Where there's an expletive, nothing happens.
I recall reading that David Foster Wallace faced a lot of early-career criticism from Writers Workshop types who told him condescending things like "that's not a story, David" and "a story has a beginning, a middle and an end."
While I am not a fiction writer, I imagine a lot who are took a similar lesson from those anecdotes as I did, namely that the "squares" can't recognize real genius that transcends boundaries etc.
The problem I suppose is that most writers aren't David Foster Wallace. As you say, for most people they have to master the rules before trying to break them. Plus it sounds like following the rules is the subversive thing to do now anyway, so win-win!
I don't find this piece to be particularly compelling but part of my complaint may have to do with the title.
Heather is not explicitly arguing that modern life is ruining storytelling but rather that it is ruining new and emerging authors' *early attempts* at writing literary fiction thanks to the way discourse is mediated by the internet. It is not clear to me, and there are certainly no examples provided by Heather, that these failings to incorporate plot continue throughout these authors' careers. I should also note that the democratization of writing as an art form *as a result of the internet* is bound to produce early works that fall prey to the issues she mentions.
It is also not clear to me that this phenomenon is anything more than a difficulty every new writer faces---of balancing situation, prose, style, etc. with story---but in the context of the internet. Furthermore, none of the examples she provides, of literary fiction authors who do incorporate plot, are newbies! The authors she cites are all well-established and would certainly not fall prey to the same misgivings as new writers.
Now if the intent was to provide an implicit argument about plotlessness in modern literary fiction then it's a different story entirely...
The art of storytelling is getting lost, I agree. I personally hated Poor Things, but your piece reminded me of its one redeeming fearure: stuff happened. That this fact alone makes a film worthy of praise is a sad indictment of modern film-making.
To go back to movie story telling, since that 's where your piece started, I think a major failing of a lot of modern movies in their inability to move things along is their length. Although I have no objections to long films, many great movies could get everything into 90 minutes (I don't think Woody Allen ever made a film longer than this though, admittedly, the quality of his work declined after the 80s.
PS My strong opinion on the Alien franchise is that the first one was terrific and the rest are shite.
And all this time, I thought it was me, the reader. I just finished reading an anthology of short stories in which about a third of the stories made me feel duller for having read them.
I could not agree more. Splendid analysis of the problem. Continue doing your bit to fix it.
(And to the rest of you: seek out and read Heather Parry. Heather makes things happen.)
Julian!! What a kind comment. Of course I learned it all from you!
Two unrelated thoughts:
The title "Legally Blonde" is a terrible pun, by which I don't mean there could be a good pun on blindness.
Q: What's wrong with the following sentence?
"That issue is that nothing happens in it."
A: Not a thing. It doesn't cry out for an obscenity between "nothing" and "happens". If you insert one, you don't even add anything; you punch a hole in the sentence. Expletives may be called strong language, but they're actually language-weakeners. Where there's an expletive, nothing happens.
I recall reading that David Foster Wallace faced a lot of early-career criticism from Writers Workshop types who told him condescending things like "that's not a story, David" and "a story has a beginning, a middle and an end."
While I am not a fiction writer, I imagine a lot who are took a similar lesson from those anecdotes as I did, namely that the "squares" can't recognize real genius that transcends boundaries etc.
The problem I suppose is that most writers aren't David Foster Wallace. As you say, for most people they have to master the rules before trying to break them. Plus it sounds like following the rules is the subversive thing to do now anyway, so win-win!
I don't find this piece to be particularly compelling but part of my complaint may have to do with the title.
Heather is not explicitly arguing that modern life is ruining storytelling but rather that it is ruining new and emerging authors' *early attempts* at writing literary fiction thanks to the way discourse is mediated by the internet. It is not clear to me, and there are certainly no examples provided by Heather, that these failings to incorporate plot continue throughout these authors' careers. I should also note that the democratization of writing as an art form *as a result of the internet* is bound to produce early works that fall prey to the issues she mentions.
It is also not clear to me that this phenomenon is anything more than a difficulty every new writer faces---of balancing situation, prose, style, etc. with story---but in the context of the internet. Furthermore, none of the examples she provides, of literary fiction authors who do incorporate plot, are newbies! The authors she cites are all well-established and would certainly not fall prey to the same misgivings as new writers.
Now if the intent was to provide an implicit argument about plotlessness in modern literary fiction then it's a different story entirely...
The art of storytelling is getting lost, I agree. I personally hated Poor Things, but your piece reminded me of its one redeeming fearure: stuff happened. That this fact alone makes a film worthy of praise is a sad indictment of modern film-making.
To go back to movie story telling, since that 's where your piece started, I think a major failing of a lot of modern movies in their inability to move things along is their length. Although I have no objections to long films, many great movies could get everything into 90 minutes (I don't think Woody Allen ever made a film longer than this though, admittedly, the quality of his work declined after the 80s.
PS My strong opinion on the Alien franchise is that the first one was terrific and the rest are shite.
And all this time, I thought it was me, the reader. I just finished reading an anthology of short stories in which about a third of the stories made me feel duller for having read them.