Look Elsewhere

Currently Reading Midnight's Children (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) By Salman Rushdie see related

Poor Devil, by Charles Baxter (A simple, contemporary, broken-hearted love story.)

Weightlifting for Catholics by Mark Jacobs (Stylistically and thematically the best story in the magazine, although it suffers from a tepid ending.)

The House on Kronenstrasse by Shira Nayman (Interesting stuff--and we should never tire of reading about the Holocaust.)

Now, once an audience begins to experience itself as a community with power, it begins to ask certain questions about stories. I'm sure that analogous questions are asked about poems and essays in workshops every day, but I have less experience with those forms. Pardon me, then, if I confine myself to the kinds of questions that are a commonplace of the contemporary fiction workshop.

[NOTE: for some reason, Moody's magical lists are not present in the online version--a terrible mistake by the Atlantic web-squad, I imagine. All the more reason to buy the magazine. Here's a few from my fingertips]

1. Does the story begin effectively?
2. Does the story end effectively?
3. Does the story have a conflict?
4. Are the characters believable?
5. Are the charactes likeable?
6. Is the story dramatic? Does drama help the story move?
7. Is the language in the way?
8. Does the story have a theme?
9. Does the character experience an epiphany?
10. Are you moved?
    

This is just off the top of my head. Many other such questions can be imagined. To the extent that a student comes to expect these questions, or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely product will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of innovation, that ratify the workshop as a system, and that ratify the idea of the university but do little for the development of the form or for our language as a whole.

If I had it to do myself, I might instead ask questions like these:

[Again, edited and inserted by me.]

1. Has the writer attempted to eliminate all adverbs?
2. What's wrong with using a few more semicolons?
3. Does this story contain any sentences that you want to remember to your grave?
4. Would Samuel Beckett like this story? Would Virginia Woolf?
5. Does this story answer the question, "Why bother to write?"
6. Can this story save any lives?
   

I am not suggesting, of course, that traditional workshop questions are entirely without merit (though I personally will have no truck with the idea of likeability, which is the hobgoblin of small minds), nor am I suggesting that even quite innovative stories are without conflict or character (although one does recall John Hawkes's famous remark that "the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme"). What I am suggesting is that a workshop structure that becomes oriented toward what is easy to say about a story will, by its very nature, default on its responsibility when faced with two kinds of work: the very good and the very bad. What gets lost, therefore, is what is at the margins of convention, and that is potentially catastrophic, because a literary form is defined in part by the marginal, by what is impossible, by what is grandiose and revolutionary, whether in the good sense or in the bad.

Currently Listening Brighten The Corners By Pavement see related

This family drama seems too calculated an interpolation, fulfilling too neatly the Hollywood requirement that all movies must involve the "redemption" of at least one central character. The H.G. Wells novel followed a more austere and solitary course, as its anonymous hero mostly hid out and watched from the sidelines while the disaster unfolded. He was there as an observer; it was the fate of the race that was in question. Here we are often distracted from the magnitude of the catastrophe by worrying about what will happen to Ray, his teenage son, and his ten-year-old daughter, as if謡ith inescapable movie logic葉he fate of the rest of humanity took second place to Ray's need to establish a good relationship with his kids and get them safely back to their mother in Boston.