Gav Thorpe has posted some thoughts on the use of different forms of narrative over on his (we)blog, Mechanical Hamster. As part of the ongoing debate, the question has arisen as to why storytelling styles change over time…

In large part, I think, it’s simply changing fashions. Tastes change over time and commercial publishing compounds that as publishers focus on what is currently popular. Writers aiming for publication follow suit and implement those styles in their own writing. Fashions continue to change, of course, and will change again. How quickly and how likely that change is to come about is of course down to how broadly followed the fashion is, which is one of the principal reasons I argue for the use of a greater variety of storytelling techniques.

In the particular case of the omniscient narrator, I suspect one reason for its decline in popularity is the separation of fact and fiction. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’ share a clearly observable common root and once upon a time the two words meant the same thing. Look at any work of literature from the middle ages or earlier and it’s clear to see that it contains elements of both what we would now call fact and fiction; history and story. Indeed, this was the case as recently as the 17th century; it was only the application of Enlightenment era thought to the arts and humanities that produced the idea of history as a discipline where factuality was paramount, and separate from fiction.

With that distinction made, the narrative forms used for fictional and factual writing diverged – journalistic forms of writing, for instance, developed around this time, with the subsequent emergence of the first daily newspapers. The omniscient narrator mode – with its seemingly boundless knowledge and a voice clearly external to the story – has many similarities to those styles used in factual writing, and may for that reason have become unpopular amongst writers (and readers) of fiction.

For the most part, the choice of the limited mode for narration of modern novels is a wise one. That’s not to say, though, that it suits all subjects or all kinds of stories, and to return to the original subject of this discussion, the historic, mythic and epic are stories to which, it seems to me, the third-person limited narrator is particularly ill-suited, and I really think its for the simple reason of the nature of those stories and the characters they contain.All reading, and therefore all writing, is ultimately an experience shared by the reader and the characters in the story; a connection between the two, you might say. Most beloved of the modern novel in achieving this is a sense of empathy, and it’s for that reason that the third-person limited perspective is so favoured. Empathy, though, is in itself a sign of modernity…

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An amusing observation on what it would be like if there was no punctuation…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ0mb8ihFks&hl=en]

Matt

As noted in my previous post, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague, Gav Thorpe, has recently started his own blog. He’s even put gone to the effort of writing an interesting post. The post in question is this one, and what particularly interested me was his discussion of the difficulties of writing a novel about what might loosely be termed ‘fabled’ characters.

In Gav’s case, this means Malekith, the Witch King of the Dark Elves in the mythology of the Warhammer World. Malekith is an invention of not more than about twenty years vintage, but given that the character is portrayed as an ancient figure from the pseudo-mythology of a tabletop wargame, I think it’s fair to say that many of the difficulties that apply to writing a novel about Malekith also apply to novels about Alexander the Great, King Arthur or Robin Hood.

There are a great many such novels; novels which attempt to chronicle the life of some great figure from history, or depict some great episode of our past, or further embellish some ancient legend or other. There are lots of these books, more are being released all the time. They seem to be quite popular. I’ll start off by saying that they’re almost universally cack.

I think this, principally, because they are cack. No, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. My main objection to them is that for the most part they singularly fail to capture the ethos of their subject, or to tell the story in the manner such tales deserve. They take individuals like Achilles and Alexander the Great, whose names echo down the centuries, and churn out either the kind of melodrama that makes them look like characters in a particularly bad run of Eastenders, or the kind of bloated, completely witless action shite that makes them look like Steven Seagal characters. So many of these books just lack any of the pathos or profundity such stories and such characters simply demand.

This acute failure to produce worthwhile tellings of our oldest stories is, I think, peculiar to novels. I could have put it down to the fact that any fictionalised telling of history is doomed to failure, but I don’t think that’s true. In the modern age, cinema has succeeded admirably many times. Why do novels fail so badly so often to achieve the same? I don’t think it’s that the medium of the novel is inferior or inadequate, I think it’s more a case of how it’s used.

(My) Point of View…

In almost all modern novels (no matter how long ago the events depicted may have occurred) you have the viewpoint character. An equivalent does not exist in cinema. In cinema, we are seeing the film through nobody’s eyes but our own, and we know full well we are looking upon it as if through a window – we are seeing a scene of which we are not a part. This is different to the novel where, to at least some extent, the viewpoint character is the reader. Even if it’s not quite as literal as that, we are in fact relying exclusively on the viewpoint character to inform us and describe for us all that is proceeding in the story. That creates a very unique relationship between the reader and the viewpoint character, and it’s this which makes the use of established characters or historical figures in novels so problematic…

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I haven’t updated this blog in ages. And after promising to do so as well! Tut tut. How awful. Really, I will try harder.

In the meantime, my friend and one-time (strictly speaking, two-time) colleague Gav Thorpe has started a blog. That’s not what he calls it, but I’ll let his first post explain that. Visit Mechanical Hamster to read this and other posts - one of which I will be responding to very shortly on this very blog. Honest.

Matt

This month’s issue of Death Ray (issue 10) features my interview with Stephen Donaldson, as you may have noticed from the post below.

As is inevitably the case with these things, a few answers had to be trimmed a little and a few others had to be missed out altogether to fit the space available in the magazine, so there’s a few outtakes and a few extended highlights which I will be posting on this blog over the coming days. For now, however, you can read the full interview in Death Ray magazine, and below is a small excerpt from one of the questions we were forced to cut for reasons of space.

In the interview, Stephen talks about his decision not to write The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant - a story he conceived at the same time as The Second Chronicles - immediately after completing the two earlier trilogies, because of his feeling that he needed first to improve as a writer. I asked Stephen if the stories he wrote in the meantime were specifically chosen to help him develop his abilities in certain ways, and here’s what he had to say:

“This question comes up most often in the form of: ‘Do you know what you’re going to write next? What are you gonna do after you’ve finished The Last Chronicles. The truth is I’ve no earthly idea, but I never had had an idea. I don’t try to answer that question until I’ve finished the story that’s right in front of me. Once it’s done then I say ‘oh, ok, now what will I write next?’. And the same has been true for the past twenty years. I haven’t searched for ideas that would help me prepare for Covenant, I’ve just searched for ideas that felt like they were so exciting it felt absolute necessary to write them.”

Read the interview in issue 10 of Death Ray (on sale now) and check back here for more outtakes soon.

For any of you who aren’t already aware of it, Hub Magazine is a free, weekly e-zine providing short fiction, reviews and occasional features. The latest issue of Hub features a short story by my good friend Guy Haley, and is highly recommended all round (Guy’s work has previously appeared in issue 35). You can find the current issue of Hub, and subscribe for free, on their website.

I’ve always been of the opinion that short stories the best kind of fiction of all, especially for imaginative genres like science fiction or fantasy. Sadly, the market for short fiction has been in decline for many years and very few dedicated magazines are able to survive. Hub, as a free magazine, published electronically, but which still pays its writers, is an interesting idea and a smart attempt to keep short story publishing viable. If you like short stories, you really should check out Hub.

Just a quick note to let you all know that issue 10 of Death Ray is out now (in the UK at least). This issue features my interview with Stephen Donaldson (as well as all the usual wide-ranging content we’ve come to expect from Death Ray).

The interview should be of interest not only to readers of Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Gap saga and other books, but also all those with an interest in fiction and writing in general. Stephen talks in quite some detail about literature and provides some some thought provoking answers. I’ll probably be posting a couple of blogs about this in the near future - it’s impossible to interview somebody like Donaldson without forming your own thoughts on the themes discussed, so I’ll share those here in due course.

In the meantime, pick up a copy of Death Ray to read the interview - available from newsagents as they say.

Apologies for not updating this blog in so very long - I think everybody who attempts to maintain a blog ends up saying this at some time or other!

I’ve made a number of additions to the Reviews section. Online now are reviews of The Spirit Stone by Katharine Kerr, A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park and The Edge Chronicles: The Lost Bark Scrolls by Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell. I’ve also uploaded a DVD review for the first time - the complete series of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased).

Finally, I’ve resolved to use this as proper blog, and not merely a repository for old reviews, so in future I should be posting more regularly. Check back often - there’ll be at least two posts over the next couple of days, I promise.

Regards,

Matt

I’ve just posted a new article - Tolkien: A Novel Approach, which originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine. You’ll find it in the articles section of the website.

Regards,

Matt

As you probably know, I write quite regularly for Death Ray magazine. SF Diplomat has posted a review of issue eight (the current issue) over on his blog – he’s previously reviewed issues one and two as well.As you’ll see from the reviews, SF Diplomat’s opinion of the magazine has diminished somewhat. I actually think SF Diplomat is rather unfair in surmising the magazine’s decline based entirely on a single issue, but that’s not really the subject of this blog. What interested me in particular was SF Diplomat’s criticism of the amount of coverage the magazine gives to television, and the nature of that coverage, too – ‘the usual toothless fluff’ as SF Diplomat calls it. I don’t entirely disagree with this statement, as it happens, but I don’t think it’s Death Ray’s fault, I think it’s something in the nature of television.

There’s a tendency for TV series to get an easier ride than either books or films, and thus to appear to be more favoured and subject to less critical scrutiny. With television, if you get a bad episode here and there, people write it off – there’s another episode along in a week or so, and short of a really protracted bad run, nobody really notices. Films and books are single, largely self-contained works and hence any weakness throughout reflect on the whole thing. Overlooking individual flaws in a TV series is easy; to do so with books or film is much harder, with such flaws being seen as much more of a blemish.

There’s also the difference in viewing habits. In many cases, people watch TV when they’re doing nothing else. It’s time they know they would otherwise have wasted, they’re just slobbing around in their living room and so they don’t care as passionately about the quality of what they watch. The effort required to read a book is vastly more – it takes enthusiasm, and that can transform into harsh criticism of a disappointing read. The same applies to films, to an extent. The length of most films and the cost involved in seeing them at the cinema means that watching a film represents a significant outlay in both time and money, an expenditure again sufficient to arouse strong feelings and passionate opinions. Television rarely arouses anything like this strength of feeling.

For most people, books and films are also much more occasional experiences than TV – many people will watch television numerous times in a week, following a great many regular series, but the number of books they read or films they see will be much smaller – perhaps just a few in a month or even a year.

Some might assume that these more numerous television offerings would actually result in audiences being even more selective, but in truth it seems to simply create a sort of aggregating effect – unless a TV show is the very worst of the worst (or the very best of the best), it will probably meet that rather meek standard of approval best described as ‘okay’, ‘not bad’, ‘pretty good’ or something equally harmless.

With a medium that arouses such moderate opinions, it’s perhaps inevitable that the good is lauded more than the poor is condemned, and when reviewers follow this course it gives the impression that television is being fawned over – but it just isn’t the case. If television escapes the kind of zealous and minute scrutiny that books and films are commonly subjected to, it isn’t because Death Ray, or any other magazine for that matter, has shown it preferential treatment – it’s because television just really isn’t worth it.