Plots vs so called "literary fiction" and awards

[Ray McCarthy]

Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty

 

[The Big Peat]

Someone give Ray another like for sharing this as I can only like it once.

 

[svalbard]

Someone give Ray another like for sharing this as I can only like it once.

You may have started a trend.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

It has got to the point where if you won a literary award you'd be worried you'd lost the plot

 

[Extollager]

I don't read current fiction, except genre stuff, to speak of. Is it often fairly "plotless"? I scanned the article and it seemed to be mostly about TV programs.

 

[The Big Peat]

It's about both, including books that become TV series - and there's a fair amount I think we can learn from TV tbh. The length and ambition of some of the stories being made on TV is staggering.

One of the things the article raised for me was the matter of plausibility. I've never had a problem with the plot of The Night Manager; there's nothing wrong with Roper trusting Pine for me. But could Le Carre have done a better job of selling that in the book? I think yes, so I understand their complaint. Whenever a plot turns upon a character making a mistake, you're always going to have people going "Why did he do that?" which is slightly bizarre, because real life is littered with mistakes. The Guinness Book of Military Blunders is one of my very favourite things in the world. If you're going to have characters make these big mistakes, you've got to foreshadow the reasons why they happen.

Of course, sometimes real life does throw up things too absurd for believable fiction. I remember being at a panel where an author made the point by saying a plot based upon the sale of a Russian submarine to Colombian drug traffickers had been turned down for being too unbelievable. The thing is, it nearly actually happened. I'm amazed Tom Clancy didn't turn it into a book where 'Murica! is the reason it doesn't happen actually; now there was a man who could pass off the ludicrous as believable and produced plots you could bounce a cannon ball off. Characters like comic book cut-outs mind, but given those plots earned him $300m, I'm not going to cast too many aspersions.

 

[Dave]

Surely, the most popular TV programmes are "Soap Operas" that are clearly not plotted, or are plotted on-the-hoof and therefore unlikely to be internally consistent. In fact, their internal consistency is laughably bad, and yet people still love them, most probably because they mirror real life, in stories that do not have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but just go on forever, infinitude.

I once wondered if money could be made selling "soap opera family trees" but 1) they make no sense 2) someone already does it.

There is also a difference between a planned book series and one where someone is obviously paying down a pension plan.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I don't read current fiction, except genre stuff, to speak of. Is it often fairly "plotless"?

The supposedly more highbrow "literary" end does seem increasingly plotless, I mean Enid Blyton's "Faraway tree" or the "Chalet School" series have more plot.
Books that
A) People actually buy
B) Actually like after reading
Mostly have plots.

I used to worry about a good plot. I worry less now, but do have some sort of over arching plot, I try then to make fun exploits have some relation to that, but if something is effectively an entertaining short story unrelated to plot, I might keep it if it's developing the characters.
Characters, action and dialogue are as important as plot (the story). Some "literary" works seem to just have well executed character sketches, doubly annoying if none of the characters are lovable or fun or interesting, and especially if all are immoral B*****.

 

[Toby Frost]

Books that
A) People actually buy
B) Actually like after reading
Mostly have plots

I agree.

A few years ago, I got talking for a man who used to write scripts for The Archers, the UK’s longest running soap opera. He told me that quite often the writers would put a “seed” into the script – mention of a character’s prior illness, or rumours of an illegitimate child, say – just so that writers later on could pick up on the idea and make something out of it. I suspect that, written down, the sheer number of things that happened to a character would be ridiculous, but nobody thinks about it like that. Besides, there are real lives that are just extraordinary: someone like, say, Nancy Wake or Orde Wingate would seem wildly implausible if they weren’t real.

I’ve got a feeling that to write good literary fiction you’ve got to be exceptional as a writer, partly because you don’t have things like plot to fall back on. But it might possible to fake that or to put in certain elements to make people think your book is literary. The critic B.R. Myers (his book A Reader’s Manifesto is worth a look) told the story of a reader who complained to an author that the book was difficult to read, and was told that that was how proper fiction was. I certainly don’t have much urge to read modern literary fiction in the same way that I don’t have much urge to see modern theatre or read an editorial in the Guardian or the Telegraph: whether I’m justified in saying so, I suspect that it will be people telling me exactly what I would expect them to want to tell me.

For what it’s worth I think Le Carre is not as good as he used to be. Both his plotting and his politics have become simpler after the fall of Communism and particularly post-Iraq, and the last of his books that I read had an agit-prop quality that felt crude. That said, the Carla trilogy and The Secret Pilgrim are excellent.

 

[aThenian]

Surely, the most popular TV programmes are "Soap Operas" that are clearly not plotted, or are plotted on-the-hoof

I think it's a case of the audience knowing what they are getting. If you are watching soap opera, you know it's not going to end, so there's no grand, over-arching story arc, and therefore you're not disappointed. If you're watching Twin Peaks or Lost (or maybe even Game of Thrones) then you tend to expect there is and so you get a bit fed up if you start to feel that it's all being made up on the hoof.

That said, the Carla trilogy and The Secret Pilgrim are excellent.

I've read Tinker Tailor a few times now, and even though I've read it before I still find it a challenge trying to disentangle the plot in my head.

 

[MWagner]

I’ve got a feeling that to write good literary fiction you’ve got to be exceptional as a writer, partly because you don’t have things like plot to fall back on. But it might possible to fake that or to put in certain elements to make people think your book is literary. The critic B.R. Myers (his book A Reader’s Manifesto is worth a look) told the story of a reader who complained to an author that the book was difficult to read, and was told that that was how proper fiction was. I certainly don’t have much urge to read modern literary fiction in the same way that I don’t have much urge to see modern theatre or read an editorial in the Guardian or the Telegraph: whether I’m justified in saying so, I suspect that it will be people telling me exactly what I would expect them to want to tell me.

A Reader's Manifesto is excellent. I was swimming happily in the literary end of the fiction pool when the original Atlantic magazine article came out, and it was a the emperor has no clothes moment. It was fascinating to see the pretences and limitations of literary fiction ripped out and exposed for all to see. It marked a turning point in my preferences as a reader, and eventually as a writer.

What came to frustrate me is the wilful, almost capricious way literary writers eschew plot and narrative momentum. I can get on-board with the notion that over-reliance on plot at the expense of characterization and dramatic truth can make for superficial drama. But why can't we have both? Why do so few literary writers avail themselves of useful tools in the toolbox of fiction? It may not be an organic and natural way to craft drama, but neither is fussing over every word and polishing every metaphor until they shine. If the prose itself can be crafted with deliberate artifice, why can't the story?

 

[Pentagon]

I absolutely love the pace of the Carla Trilogy, it's like he's mastered the art of making you hang on absolutely nothing - and to me it sums up the cold war perfectly. I'd strongly recommend audio booking them, lets you concentrate better on disentangling the plot!

 

[Toby Frost]

I get the same feeling from over-written prose as I do from political writing that is full of jargon or buzz-words: that whatever lies beneath the heap of words is either very thin or hasn’t been thought through that well. I should add that I’m not against prose-poetry – the Gormenghast novels are some of my favourite books – but against the sort of messy imagery or things that Myers attacks for only making sense if skim-read.

To go off on a slight tangent: in what way is The Road by Cormac McCarthy a better story or a better-told story than the computer game The Last of Us? It came first, true. Otherwise, I can’t see anything. Yea, I did plough through McCarthy’s awkward prose for surely even unto the end yet not before, and what I read was essentially a fairly standard post-apocalyptic story with a bit more character and a lot more gross-out horror that would have been considered normal if a genre writer had done it. I can’t remember any of the prose the way I can remember chunks of Raymond Chandler or H Rider Haggard. I just remember the bits where cannibals ate some dudes in a basement and then they ate a baby too.

I don’t want to say that The Road is especially bad or to pick on it as the worst example of prose over content (I didn’t mind it at the time), but I don’t see much to it that I haven’t seen elsewhere, done more clearly and powerfully. I think this is a continual risk with literary fiction, especially where it overlaps into genre territory. I wonder if it stems from a feeling that genre fiction is always lacking in depth: that a novel with “crime” on the spine won’t give proper treatment to the effects of the murder in its haste to find out who did it, or that a science fiction story won’t consider what it is like to be a robot when the issue is finding and retiring them.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I think it's very much that, Toby. Though it's been said many times, this bears repeating: literary types are snobs and the whole thing is a seething nest of in-crowds. That a genre novel - The Book Of The New Sun for instance - could have way more depth than a 'literary' novel doesn't occur to these people...

 

[aThenian]

The Atlantic article made me feel much better about the fact that I've never managed to get into Annie Proulx, and didn't think much of Snow Falling on Cedars. And the general fact that often what's termed "literary" fiction actually seems quite turgid and unmemorable.

I like the "plot as design" idea from the first article. If you look at Pride and Prejudice you can't take out a single scene (yes, think I did once go through and check this) because every scene is essential to the story and it wouldn't make sense otherwise. That's surely masterly plot design.

When I read Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander recently I was a bit disappointed because I felt that this aspect of plot-as-design was missing. Lots of great and exciting scenes, intriguing characters, beautiful prose, but at the end... it just stopped. It felt like a string of naval escapades strung together rather than a story. But maybe I didn't get it.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

When I read Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander recently I was a bit disappointed because I felt that this aspect of plot-as-design was missing. Lots of great and exciting scenes, intriguing characters, beautiful prose, but at the end... it just stopped. It felt like a string of naval escapades strung together rather than a story.

I enjoyed the first, (Novelty?) but finding the next tedious. I may give up.

 

[aThenian]

I enjoyed the first, (Novelty?) but finding the next tedious. I may give up.

I read half the second, and was a bit put off by the switch to country squires and drawing room romance - wanted some naval battles! Let me know if it gets better.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

switch to country squires and drawing room romance

I like that if it's done well, but it's not.