What Makes Fiction Literary: Scenes Versus Postcards
By Donald Maass | June 1, 2016 |
Flickr Creative Commons: funnyshian
The question comes up during Q&A at almost every writers’ conference: What makes fiction literary? I’ve frequently been on that panel. I’ve listened as smart and experienced editors and agents try to pin it down. Literary? It’s…well, it’s…
Mostly the stabs at an answer boil down to, literary fiction is beautifully written. But wait, so is some commercial fiction. Or, maybe literary fiction is the stuff that is highly regarded but achieves low sales? Um, you could say that about much commercial fiction too. Well, perhaps it’s subject matter, you know, being grounded in the real world? Then how do you explain Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? Or it’s something about characters…arc…voice…themes? Sure, but commercial fiction has plenty of those as well.
For every factor that could identify fiction as literary, we can find examples of the same factors at work in fiction that’s considered commercial. And vice versa. The swift pace, active characters, high stakes and urgency that are associated with commercial fiction can be spotted in literary fiction.
So what’s the answer? Is it a matter of subjective judgment? Is literary a label allocated by the publishing gods to certain imprints at certain houses? To debunk that idea, try this thought experiment: If your novel is published by Nan Talese’s imprint it’s called literary, but if the exact same novel comes out under a different imprint at Penguin Random House, say Dell, then it’s commercial? That doesn’t make any sense, does it.
Clearly, what causes us to feel that a given novel is literary is something about the way it reads, which in turn starts with the way it’s written. Beautifully written is often accurate of literary fiction but it’s also broad and vague. Ask me, it’s time to stop guessing and hone our understanding. Literary comes from something and if we grasp that something we can use it when it suits our purposes.
One thing we’re talking about is the difference between scenes and what I call postcards. What are the building blocks of a novel? The term “scenes” is most often used, but that is imprecise. Scenes, summary and postcards are three different ways to shape the discrete blocks of narration that build a novel. These blocks are arranged either in strict chronological order, or in some other pattern, which taken together tell a story.
However, there are differences, such as:
- A scene enacts a change in story circumstances; a postcard illuminates something that we haven’t yet fathomed or perceived.
- A scene leads to further action; a postcard leads to deeper understanding.
- A scene is about what happens; a postcard is about what we discover.
- A scene is an event that has implications; a postcard is a moment with meaning.
- Scenes change characters; in postcards, the change is in readers.
We’re not only talking about the author’s intention. It’s not just wanting to entertain versus wanting to illuminate. It’s not only in pushing characters to a new place versus pushing readers to new ways of seeing. The difference is hard-baked into a discrete block of text. What will this text-unit in the novel accomplish? How will it be constructed and what will be its effect?
The difference between scenes and postcards can be seen in two recent novels that on the surface are very similar, Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. Both novels are set in France during World War II. Both have paired protagonists. Both are well written. Both are well reviewed. Both were published by well-regarded imprints (St. Martin’s and Scribner, respectively). Both have trendy dark-turquoise jackets with discrete embossing and foil. Both are enormous best sellers.
However, they are not the same.
In The Nightingale, Kristin Hannah more often works with scenes. The Nightingale is about two sisters, one of whom joins the Resistance, the other of whom remains at home. The Resistance sister is Isabelle Rossingnol. After a childhood bouncing between schools and convents, she goes to Paris to live with her reluctant father, a bookseller, just prior to the German invasion. She is evacuated by family friends who are far more practical than she. They bring food. She brings books. On the road she separates from them and meets a young man, Gaëtan Dubois, camping in the forest. Gaëtan has been released from prison so that he may fight the Germans. In this scene, he persuades Isabelle to join him:
“You were in prison?”
“Does that scare you?”
“No. It’s just…unexpected.”
“You should be scared,” he said, pushing the stringy hair out of his eyes. “Anyway, you are safe enough with me. I have other things on my mind. I am going to check on my maman and sister and then find a regiment to join. I’ll kill as many of those bastards as I can.”
“You’re lucky,” she said with a sigh. Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?
“Come with me.”
Isabelle knew better than to believe him. “You only ask because I’m pretty and you think I’ll end up in your bed if I stay,” she said.
He stared across the fire at her. It cracked and hissed as fat dripped onto the flames. He took a long drink of wine and handed the bottle back to her. Near the flames, their hands touched, the barest brushing of skin on skin. “I could have you in my bed right now if that’s what I wanted.”
“Not willingly,” she said, swallowing hard, unable to look away.
“Willingly,” he said in a way that made her skin prickle and made breathing difficult. “But that’s not what I meant. Or what I said. I asked you to come with me to fight.”
…
“I could do something that matters,” she said quietly.
“Of course you could. I could teach you to use a gun and a knife.”
“I need to go to Carriveau and make sure my sister is well. Her husband is at the front.”
He gazed across the fire, his expression intent. “We will see your sister in Carriveau and my mother in Poitiers, and then we will be off to join the war.”
He made it sound like such an adventure, no different from running off to join the circus, as if they would see men who swallowed swords and fat women with beards along the way.
It’s what she had been looking for all of her life. “A plan, then,” she said, unable to hide her smile.
You can see that in this scene Isabelle’s path is changing. She’s at a crossroads in her life and things hereafter will be different, and so it proves. The intention in this scene is to begin a relationship, turn Isabelle from a girl to a woman, from refugee to Resistance fighter. The mechanism is the passionate released prisoner, Gaëtan, the agent of change. There’s sexual tension between them and the change underway is demonstrated largely in dialogue.
In All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr also puts his blind young heroine, Marie-Laure LeBlanc through changes. The story concerns Marie-Laure and a young German soldier, Werner Pfennig, whose lives intersect following the Allied carpet bombing of the French coastal island city of Saint-Malo. Marie-Laure’s part of the novel involves a number of flashbacks to her earlier life in Paris, becoming blind, and later hiding in her uncle Etienne’s house in German-occupied Saint-Malo, where in the attic her father builds her a miniature of the town. Being young, she wishes to go out, which is not possible, a reality reflected this postcard:
In Saint-Malo, people are fined for locking their doors, for keeping doves, for hoarding meat. Truffles disappear. Sparkling wine disappears. No eye contact. No chatter in doorways. No sunbathing, no singing, no lovers strolling the ramparts in the evenings—such rules are not written down, but they may as well be. Icy winds whirl in from the Atlantic and Etienne barricades himself inside his brother’s old room and Marie-Laure endures the slow rain of hours by running her fingers over his seashells down in his study, ordering them by size, by species, by morphology, checking and rechecking their order, trying to make sure she has not mis-sorted a single one.
Surely she could go out for half an hour? On the arm of her father? And yet each time her father refuses, a voice echoes up from a chamber of her memory: They’ll probably take the blind girls before they take the gimps.
Make them do things.
Outside the city walls, a few military boats cruise to and fro, and the flax is bundled and shipped and woven into rope or cables or parachute cord, and airborne gulls drop oysters or mussels or clams, and the sudden clatter on the roof makes Marie-Laure bolt upright in bed. The mayor announces a new tax, and some of Madame Manec’s friends mutter that he has sold them out, that they need un home à poigne, but others ask what the mayor is supposed to do. It becomes known as the time of the ostriches.
“Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?”
“Maybe everyone does,” she murmurs.
The intention in this postcard passage is not to change the course of Marie-Laure’s life, but to sink her deeper into her confined existence. The desperation of her situation is captured in the vivid details of life in an occupied place; details which—did you notice?—are heavy with metaphorical reference to seeing and blindness, order and its breakdown, acquiescence and denial. The time of the ostriches.
Blind Marie-Laure opens our eyes to the reality of hiding. We are invited to feel as trapped as she. The point is not to push blind Marie-Laure into action but to push us into seeing and feeling her entrapment. The change here is internal, but not internal to Marie-Laure. She doesn’t change. We do, in terms of our perception.
Scenes hustle us from point A to point B. Postcards sink us into point A. A scene takes us in a new direction; a postcard shows us a static picture and says wish you were here. Neither intention is wrong. Both achieve a narrative effect, seeming to move us along, somehow, except that the direction of scenes is forward while the direction of postcards is deeper.
So let’s turn this concept into tool that you can use to achieve a literary effect, or commercial drive, whenever you want to.
- Think not about your manuscript, but about the chronology of your main character’s experience. Picture a calendar covering all the days of the story’s duration. Stop on any one of those days. Ask, what would be good to show here: 1) Events moving forward, or 2) a snapshot of my protagonist’s state of mind, heart, being or world? Is there something the reader needs to see happen, or is there something the reader needs to apprehend, deeply question, or see anew?
- If it would be good to move events forward at this point, identify what is going to change. In the scene that enacts this change, work backwards to make the change unlikely, even impossible, at the beginning of the scene.
- If it would be good to dive deep and make your readers apprehend something, or feel the condition of your main character, or question things, then take time (page time, that is) to first conceal, and then reveal, what you wish your readers to experience. If you need a framework, start with a provocative statement or question; finish with a punchline.
- In the first instance (scene), add action that more emphatically moves your protagonist forward, backwards, or sideways. In the second instance (postcard), add visual details of the environment around your main character; paint it for us.
- In the first instance (scene), spring a surprise on your protagonist. In the second instance (postcard), spring a surprise on your reader.
If you’ve ever wondered how commercial fiction comes to feel literary, and thereby gain extra respect, now you know: it sometimes acts to illuminate as much as to advance a plot.
If you’ve ever wondered how literary fiction achieves a sense of narrative drive without tons of plot events happening, now you can see: the sense of change we feel really is a series of moments in which we recognize things as true.
What are you working on today, a scene or a postcard? Which mode comes more naturally to you? How can you use the other in your WIP?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
Don, I love your postcard metaphor, and its application here. It’s flexible, too. A novel could have too many postcards, or not enough. You could say to a lover of sentences, “Stop with the postcards already. They’re piling up! I’ve lost track of the trip.” Or to a plot maven, “Hey, stop a second and drop us a card.”
Isn’t it also the case that someone we normally put in the commercial (or genre) camp might be just as “deep” by what they leave out? IOW, the actions of the characters which “move the plot along” are such that they seep into us and created a “picture” of human nature or life that lingers long after the plot ends? I’m thinking of the difference, say, between The Great Gatsby and The Maltese Falcon. For some reason, I find the latter the deeper and better novel. And Hammett didn’t use a single postcard!
Quite so, Jim.
Character’s actions can illuminate us, as well as make things happen. What I’m after here is to pinpoint exactly what it is that causes us to pin on the medal “literary” when we read.
I also think it’s important for commercially minded writers to understand what creates the sense of depth that readers feel in “slow” moving stories. Likewise, literary minded readers should know that depth is not just a factor of deft prose.
Depth is a reveal, and with an understanding of the operation of postcards one can always use it and get the desired effect.
So glad you took the time today, pal. Appreciated.
Interesting distinction! I’ve worked hard on my scenes, for sure, since we’re so often told how important they are, but as a reader and as a writer I love the sections you call postcards. Pacing is always an issue; calling them postcards reminds me to keep them short and not slow the story too much.
Thanks for clarifying their different purposes and for your (always) thought-provoking exercises.
I especially appreciate your suggestion to “Think . . . about the chronology of your main character’s experience.” I do have a calendar that I made up but now will look at the individual days as you suggest.
Barbara-
For me the ideal is a mix of scenes, summary and postcards, which is to say events moving forward, quickly or slowly, with pauses to be surprised by where we are on the journey.
There’s a useful metaphor in the changing tempo and keys in song construction, but that’s another post.
Enjoy the calendar exercise, it’s fun.
Totally agree about the ideal being a mix of all three. And boy do I love this analogy! Scenes, postcards, and summary. Definitely stealing that — for my own reference, and for talking about writing with others. Thanks, Don!
I look forward to a post about tempo and keys in writing music and how it can apply to writing fiction. I have always been a firm believer that we each have a certain rhythm we apply to our writing. That can change depending on what we are writing, but always there is a rhythm.
There’s a useful metaphor in the changing tempo and keys in song construction, but that’s another post. And that’s a post I would dearly love to read. I have long been fascinated by the rhythm of words; even stories have their own rhythms. So please, where may I find your words of wisdom on tempo and keys in song construction as relates to the novel? Thanks.
That’s an excellent point, Barbara, on postcards as shorthand reminder not to languish. Illuminating moments of a tale can be both brief and powerful and need not slow the flow of a story.
You’ve got it, John. Reveal. Illuminate. In that there is a feeling (in our minds) of movement.
Don, as I was reading your descriptions of scenes vs postcards I started thinking ‘heartbeat’. The stories that stay with me do so because of the rhythm and pace with which they’ve pulled me in, lifted me up, whirled me around and sent me sideways – and then brought things to a satisfying end. It sounds like the orchestration of a symphony (I think someone slipped a bunch of metaphors in my coffee this morning!) Writing often feels like an orchestration or a choreography. So, question. Am I right in thinking that postcards can get delivered via characters’ internal dialogue? Someone faces a dilemma or a choice, asks a question, struggles internally with the options? Thanks for so much to think on this morning!
Susan,
As I said just above, I think it’s useful to think of a postcard as a moment in which a reader is caused to have a realization.
The orchestration, ask me, is the arrangement of scenes, summary and postcards. Orchestrate well and our minds dance.
Don,
Thanks so much for this explanation. I’ve been stuck for two days without writing on a novel I’ve been working on steadily every day since I started. I know more or less what plot points I need to reach next, but I felt as if the segues were missing. Now I know what’s next. I need to take it deeper in order to move forward.
Don,
Excellent analysis. Your “scene and postcard” reminds me of the “scene and sequel” concept of two great old writing teachers, Dwight Swain and Jack Bickham. They describe the “scene” as what happens and the “sequel” as what it means.
Writing terminology can be so mushy, even among experts. It’s like trying to deconstruct oatmeal. I always admire teachers like yourself who can separate the oats from the water.
Debbie-
I prefer to get away from the (to me) outdated idea of a “sequel” scene, which too often is used to justify inactive churning of what we’ve already thought and felt.
I’d rather define a new, more psychologically active and effective story unit. Hence, postcards. They’re not just a rehash. They’re a discovery, something new.
Don, I never thought sequels were supposed to be a rehash but much like how you define postcards. A chance to breathe and bring meaning to what’s happened as well as planning the next move. I suppose I’m very much a scenic writer with a few postcards thrown in for good measure. Jim’s mirror moment is definitely a postcard.
Thanks, Don. This is the most illuminating explanation I’ve been given on the subject. I would even call it literary ;).
Seriously, though, you provide a good vocabulary for discussing books of both stripes, one I’m certain to use going forward.
Thanks as always for sharing your sage insight.
Thanks, John.
Wow! Thanks. I finally understand the difference! Thank you so much, now I need to learn how to write “postcards.”
Awesome.
Very thoughtful analysis. And helpful exercises. Not totally sure I agree but I have to think about these ideas before I can argue them. Thanks, Don.
Barbara,
I can think of no one I’d enjoy debating with more. It would be illuminating, guaranteed!
Fire away…if that’s the right action term for gurus like you.
Hey Don – your post really provides great clarity for me. In considering several of my recent genre reads, I can recall those that leaned to postcards and those that forewent them for all scenes. And I can clearly see how those that effectively blend the two are the most powerful.
I love postcards. In fact, I just got back from a two week tour of ten cities I’ve never visited. And although I took a couple hundred photos, I still bought about a dozen postcards. But, as with anything, I prefer certain types. Looking at the ones I selected now, I can see that I’m drawn to those that tell a story. So many in the rack are simple landscapes flooded in sunshine, not a cloud in the brilliant blue skies. I’m never drawn to those. I like the clouds, the shadows, the twilight. I’m also drawn to historical postcards. They draw me in with the question: What was this place like back then? Why did someone think this image held appeal? I don’t want to know what a place is like when it’s at its best, on the fairest day. I want to glean its mysteries, to feel its moods, to sense its backstory.
Looking at the postcards I chose really helps me understand what you mean when you say: “…the sense of change we feel really is a series of moments in which we recognize things as true.”
Thanks for the illumination, as well as the shadowy nuances, Don!
Welcome, Vaughn. There’s too little clarity in this business of discussion of fiction and how it’s done.
I’m all for helpful analogies and metaphors for the process, but sometimes it’s also good to hammer down what we mean and exactly how to do it.
A tour of ten cities you’ve never been too? Once again, envying your life!
I love this distinction. Too often, the adage “show, don’t tell” is interpreted as creating a scene. But a postcard written with description in motion and evocative of the senses can work as well, or even better. Thank you. I see more clearly now.
Just remember that a postcard is not just descriptive details but a surprising discovery. You will, I’m sure.
I just finished reading ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE and I wanted to stay with the characters and go even deeper into their thoughts and experience. A great book is like that for me and your words today, so helpful. Actually I think the distinction you made is brilliant. And you parse that distinction clearly–which is making me eager to go into my WIP and see where I might have created some postcards–I know I have scenes. As always my writing grows from your excellent tutorials. Beth
Great, Beth. It kinda helps to have an understanding of what we’re shooting for, and how it works, I think, so you can have the right effect when you want to.
A really nice post.
On a larger scale than the individual scene, here’s my personal rule of thumb.
The simplest comparison between literary fiction and popular/genre fiction is that literary fiction is about the telling of the story, popular fiction is about the story itself.
In literary fiction, the author is always evident through the flashy style and the use of complex structure. Plot isn’t important. A common technique found in literary fiction is the frame story where someone in the present is looking into the past, or the end of the novel is revealed at the beginning. In other words, time in most stories isn’t linear, and the reader doesn’t read primarily to know what happens next and how it turns out in the end. This technique emphasizes character over plot.
In genre fiction, the writer should be invisible, and the reader should be part of the story and not really aware of the writer and the way he’s putting the story together. Anything that breaks this “dream state” is a failure on the writer’s part.
In literary fiction, the opposite is true. The language draws attention to itself, and the reader pauses to think, “My, what an excellent use of metaphor and language! I think I’ll reread that again.” This is what the literary writer aims for.
Marilynn-
Interesting points, though I do see commercial-feeling fiction that is character driven (women’s fiction, say) and commercial-feeling fiction which does not hew to linear time.
I also do not find that the author is invisible in all commercial fiction, nor that we’re intended to be aware of the author in all literary fiction.
If that distinction was always true then by implication every novel with a self-aware, intrusive first person narrator would be literary, since we’re always aware of the person telling the story, and how the narrator, and author, is bending the tale.
Someone on Twitter suggested I remember that part of being literary is the book jacket. Ha! If only that was all it was!
Not that anything you’re pointing out makes for bad writing, I just think those things are not exclusive to literary-feeling fiction, or by themselves make it so.
As I said, this was a rule of thumb, not a be-all and end-all of defining the difference between genre and literary fiction.
The problem with such a specialized definition as you and others have given is that so many writers who aren’t remotely literary will now declare themselves literary writers and market themselves that way.
They would be better served to actually read lots of books that are legitimately literary to get a better sense of what they write.
Writers should read widely in what they write as well as other genres, including literary. It makes them better writers.
“Writers should read widely in what they write as well as other genres, including literary. It makes them better writers.”
Well, who can argue with that?
What a brilliant distinction you draw, Don, between literary and commercial fiction. Both Kristin Hannah and Anthony Doerr have beautifully written novels. Many of us have been stuck with the stigmas that commercial novels skimp on writing finesse and that literary ones must be plodding and tedious. Not so.
My only question now is about upmarket fiction? Does that category straddle literary and commercial, blending the best of both?
Thanks, as always, Don. Can’t wait to apply all of this to my WIP!
Nancy-
“Upmarket” is one of those vague, imprecise industry terms that clouds what should be clear. It’s used to suggest that a novel, especially one plot-driven, has qualities that elevate it above pure entertainment.
Or something like that. I wouldn’t stress about it. It’s an adjective that some people might apply to your work to express a vague feeling they get that’s generated by techniques you use consciously for deliberate effect, I hope.
I remember the shock the first time I saw one of my novels described as literary. You could have knocked me over. I’m still not convinced, but the label has me striving to become a worthy author. When I think “literary”, I think a story that not only stays with you, but changes your concepts or attitudes about life. I would love if my work could do that.
Commercial fiction changes hearts, minds and even history too. Think of the spy fiction that captured the paranoia of the Cold War, or the way that Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick or horror fiction have played with our minds and perceptions of reality.
Think of Jaws, Shogun, The Pillars of the Earth. To name a few. We see our world in new ways through all kinds of stories.
To me, “literary” is a specific quality that comes from specific writing techniques, not just a lasting effect that a work of fiction may have.
That first example was so – flat.
I’ve always said I write mainstream contemporary fiction with a ‘literary quality,’ because naming what I write ‘literary’ (except for Amazon categories – which don’t have ‘mainstream’ as an option) seemed pretentious. No MFA, you see, no formal training beyond reading for a lifetime.
But based on your two examples, my fiction is definitely literary. That first example needs a lot of work before I’d consider it ready.
Without the psychological component, fiction doesn’t work for me. But ‘literary’ has gotten a bad name as equivalent to ‘slow,’ and as excessively concerned with flowery language and literary allusions to the point of stopping the flow of a story.
Story is primary. But there’s no reason for stopping there. It just takes a LOT more time and work. I like doing that work.
I agree with you that “literary” has come to be associated with, as you say, “flowery language and literary allusions to the point of stopping the flow of a story.” That’s not have makes us feel “literary” when we read certain fiction.
A psychological component as you put it, to me, is necessary for any story to grip, not just a literary one. It’s the primary purpose of inner journey, transformative arc, change, character growth or whatever term you prefer.
Thanks, Don, for these tools and exercises.
Labeling this technique as ‘postcard’ is new to me and I’ll chew on it. But the section from All the Light We Cannot See seems more like a letter (meaning long) from the author . . . except for ‘his’ occasional mentions of characters’ names. As such it pulls back from intimacy and I wonder if this omniscient POV best serves the book.
Granted the imagery is crisp and the weaving of blindness and sight is well-done, but to this reader its length, voice and analysis put the story at arm’s length. It strikes me as heavy, the feeling I had reading the novel, (which wasn’t helped by his reliance on stereotyped characters. It felt very Disney to me.)
I’m working on imparting this rhythm and function through dashes of inner monologue in close third, in scene, and longer descriptions coming through the characters’ eyes and insights, into what I hope yields a crisper shape of literary fiction. My goal is to combine narrative drive with depth and surprise through the characters’ insights and/or in spite of their blindness at not recognizing what is around them. But maybe I’m not writing literary fiction after all.
Questions: Should one acquaint postcard with omniscient POV? Is length such as Doerr’s what contributes to the ‘literary’ feel? It certainly slows things down. But does literary fiction equal slow?
Your post days here are alway highlights.
Thanks, Tom. You make interesting points that All the Light “pulls back from intimacy” and “put(s) the story at arm’s length”. Others find a literary feel kind of dry, too.
And yet many people are swept up by Doerr’s writing and feel transported by it. His evocative details do that. They fire the imagination, cause readers to chew, and those things in turn open their hearts. Readers feel a lot even though he’s not conveying a lot of feeling in his words.
I get into that quite a bit in a new book I have coming out at the end of the year, The Emotional Craft of Fiction. In case you’re interested…
Thanks, Don,
We are all looking forward to your new book, which your posts over the last two years have been heralding.
I generally gobble literary fiction if in the hands of a skilled author because it offers opportunities that some treatments of genre exclude. . . more rumination by characters and sometimes long departures from the scene at hand. But in Doerr’s ATLYCS, the rumination is the author’s. I would have preferred to see these things through the character’s lens.
Do you have a comment on literary fiction HAVING to be slow?
> Do you have a comment on literary fiction HAVING to be slow?
No. It doesn’t. However, I think the term “slow” is also often misleading. I prefer to think whether what is on the page has high tension infused, or not.
I mean, high action (as in violent action), like sex, can be some of the most skimmable stuff on the page. That’s not because it’s “slow” but because it’s low in micro-tension.
Ah, micro-tension. The essential difference. Why Cormac McCarthy can wander down what seems to be a rabbit hole and the reader can’t pull away for a second .
Thanks for this.
Thanks, Don, for these tools and exercises.
Labeling this technique as ‘postcard’ is new to me and I’ll chew on it. But the section from All the Light We Cannot See seems more like a letter (meaning long) from the author . . . except for ‘his’ occasional mentions of characters’ names. As such it pulls back from intimacy and I wonder if this omniscient POV best serves the book.
Granted the imagery is crisp and the weaving of blindness and sight is well-done, but to this reader its length, voice and analysis put the story at arm’s length. It strikes me as heavy, the feeling I had reading the novel, (which wasn’t helped by his reliance on stereotyped characters. It felt very Disney to me.)
I’m working on imparting this rhythm and function through dashes of inner monologue in close third, in scene, and longer descriptions coming through the characters’ eyes and insights, into what I hope yields a crisper shape of literary fiction. My goal is to imbue narrative drive with depth and surprise through the characters’ insights and/or in spite of their blindness at not recognizing what is around them. But maybe I’m not writing literary fiction after all.
Questions: Should one acquaint postcard with omniscient POV? Is length such as Doerr’s what contributes to the ‘literary’ feel? It certainly slows things down. But does literary fiction equal slow?
Your post days here are always highlights.
Ditto. All bears repeating!
Didn’t see the double until now. LOL.
Wow. Thank you for this! It’s funny . . . ALL THE LIGHT is one of my all time favorites. THE NIGHTINGALE? I stopped mid-way.
I guess this means that I read to be changed.
Right now I am reading STATION ELEVEN and am loving it, partly for the author’s creativity, partly because of what it does to me. A few months back I read THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, also dystopian fiction, and while I thought it was a great page-turner, and while I was horrified and disturbed, I can’t say I was changed by it. I had been trying to figure out why. Your post helps me to understand.
Wish you were here. In my writing office. Writing my book.
Thank you muchly, sir!
STATION ELEVEN definitely uses more literary methods, whereas GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, while wonderfully written, for the most part moves a story forward.
Both have revelations, but in the former the revelations are more about living in dystoipia; in the later, the revelations are about why there’s a dystopia in the first place. Reveals of feeling versus reveals of plot.
That’s a great pairing of examples. May I borrow that?
Yes! Borrow away. You’re so kind to ask.
Thank you, Don. Your post is illuminating and timely for me.
Back to work, Bron! (Sound of whip cracking.) Don’t you have a self-imposed deadline this month??? LOL. (Seriously, thanks for commenting.)
Thanks to my many travels with you leading the way I know how to write post cards! Thank you. I’m spending the rest of the day writing a few. Now, if I can just find those darn stamps.
Thanks for dropping by, Gretchen!
Don:
Another useful and inspiring post. (No wonder they pay you the big bucks!)
One of my most memorable postcards comes from the old TV drama, Homicide: Life on the Street. One of the detectives stops at his old house to pick up his kids for the weekend. His ex-wife greets him on the porch. She tells him the kids are with her mother; she thought they might have dinner alone tonight. He grouses that she’s wasted his time and drives off to collect the kids at her mother’s house. The camera follows the ex-wife into the living room. We see a beautifully set table, complete with the good china, lighted candles, and a homemade lattice-crusted pie (strawberry-rhubarb, I would say). Wordlessly, the ex-wife blows out the candles, picks at the pie with a fork, then puts it on the floor, where a dog starts lapping it up. The scene fades to black to the sound of the dog eating the pie.
Twenty years later, I can still feel this woman’s crushed hopes.
I get big bucks? Hmph. Only the IRS thinks so.
LOL, okay seriously, I love that scene you describe. Does it move a plot forward? No. Does it reveal a character’s state, in this case feeling crushed? Yes.
Postcard. Thanks. I can see that scene perfectly.
Thank you Don,
As a fledgling writer I am pleased you defined the differences between literary and commercial fiction for me [you did write this just for me didn’t you?] It is a subject that I have been discussing with friends in recent times.
I would also like to thank Christine for sharing her ‘postcard’, it so simply and clearly demonstrated how quickly [*read no waffle] a writer can take the reader into the heart or mind of a character.
Many thanks, I am inspired.
So many such moments on Homicide! What great writers.
Yes, that moved me. Divorce is so powerful.
Thanks for the distinctions, Don. The provocative question remains: what is literary? But when I think about my favorite books–LOTR, The Maltese Falcon, Justine, I can easily seem them in postcards. And I carry those postcards around with me. Right now I’m teaching in Orvieto, Italy, a town that’s on a hilltop. And every time I take a walk around the edge of town and see the fields in the surrounding areas, I think of Bilbo setting out for his big adventure. I imagine the fields of Umbria as part of the Shire. When I think of Justine, I immediately see Alexandria, not as it is today, but as Durrell painted it.
I would add to this notion of postcards the idea that something literary is lasting whereas something in popular fiction is not necessarily. I’ve read a lot of Grisham–but his novel that most creates postcards for me–and that is the most memorable– is The Broker–because of the wonderful (and accurate) way he paints Italy. So will the future look back on that book as literary? I hope so. It should.
But I would also offer a more current example. William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace was a standalone mystery…but it also painted a whole town. I can see the whole thing–the church, the house, the train tracks. Some of the lines were so beautiful that I underlined them, thinking, wow, wish I had written that. Does that make his story literary? It does for me.
Wait, wait, wait…you are teaching in the hilltop town of Orvieto, Italy? How did you get that gig? Can I get it after you, except without speaking Italian?
Okay, focus. I completely agree about Krueger’s Ordinary Grace. That book does it all: great plot, great depth, amazing cast of characters, rich world…enthralling.
Grisham is under appreciated. My favorite is his autobiographical novel, A Painted House, the one with no lawyers. It’s a Steinbeck kind of story that reveals the cotton fields world of Arkansas through a kid’s eyes. It’s a postcard from the early 1950’s.
If you like those, also try Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon. We could go on.
Heh heh heh. It’s a study abroad program under the auspices of the University of Arizona, where I work during the “regular” year. Currently my students are under-appreciating E.M. Forster’s Italian novels and Phil Doran (The Reluctant Tuscan.) Too many distractions–the cafes, the bars, the sightseeing, and, oh, yes, the Italian men. But they are writing their own postcards, trying to capture their impressions. It’s always interesting to see Italy under a first-timer’s eyes.
Wish you had been my lit prof. Heck, I wish I was young again. In Italy.
I loved both Ordinary Grace and The Painted House. Both were rich in beautiful prose that made me want to stop and reread passages just for the beauty of the language. I will re-read Ordinary Grace and note the postcards and the scenes. I learn best by looking at a story by someone else, then I can start seeing it in my own work.
You are always soooo insightful. Your posts always fill me with awe
Awe? Aw. Thanks.
Very interesting. I have most of your books. They’re the only books on writing that make me impatient to get back to work on whatever writing I’m doing at the time. As does this piece. Thanks!
Go to it!
Don, thanks for this essay.
In terms of mechanism, approach, technique, I’m right with you here. I think the dynamics of scene and postcard show us an almost lateral and longitudinal exploration of a story — drill-down vs. cover-ground: perfect.
I’ve just finished Michel Faber’s “The Book of Strange New Things” (Jamie Byng at Canongate sent it to me and it took me way too long to get to it.) and I think Faber probably postcards more frequently than he might, but if anything the energy he then gathers every time he moves forward with scene work is even more welcome, the contrast helps him pace us. (He reminds me in “Strange New Things,” in fact, of Nevil Shute, for whom we share a lot of respect, I know — the world is always just out of sight and not necessarily doing real well.)
Then when I think back on Michael Cunningham’s “By Nightfall,” which I think is his best and most overlooked piece, I realize that he works almost entirely in postcards, each revelatory of an ambiguous corner of personality and potential. Even his scenes play like one of those postcards I remember from my childhood that had some kind of plastic surface making it show you two views of something if you tilted it back and forth, remember those weird things?
But if we move beyond your excellent meditation here on these dynamics, can we not also look for something about author intention in “what is literary?”
I don’t mean bel canto writing as the intent (although I won’t kick beautiful writing out of bed, of course). I mean something about — here comes what may be too heavy a word but I’m going to opt for it — need.
It’s not a mission. But it’s the bee up an author’s bonnet. It’s some insistent pressure to say something, to point something out to us, about ourselves, our lives, something we overlooked in our past, something we should think about in our future…maybe I’m talking about purpose. But it’s more than purposeful work: literary fiction is needy.
I’m probably less worried than you about distinguishing between literary and commercial work, but only because I didn’t write “21st Century Fiction,” which you know I admire. For my money, both literary and commercial have this need. It’s a need to tell us something, to get something across to us. And even the most laid-back of our beat-cool writers (who might try to deny this) have that need.
I’m just at the end of Patrick Modiano’s “Paris Nocturne,” and it’s such a compounded creature of need that you find yourself aching for all the confusion and searching going on there. In so many of the cases — all of the cases — of literary appeal I can think of, there’s something evident about the author’s need in place. And this is what takes it past entertainment which doesn’t have a lot of need to it. Literary is for me far more entertaining than genre work, but I’ve come to think that people who say such things are the same ones who understand Chekhov as comedy, and that’s not everybody.
We may know nothing of what the author’s need is or why it’s there or whether the book in question has in some way answered that need. But it’s there and it tints the postcards and it scours its own scenes for something that’s needed. And it’s a component, I think — I’m new to this insight, mind you — it’s a component of what makes literary literary.
Think of Shute’s “Around the Bend” or Patrick Suskind’s “Perfume” (which only Tykwer could have made into such a film). A guy writing at his level of success and ease like Shute wouldn’t jump into “Around the Bend” if he didn’t need to.
I like authors who come to us in some kind of distress, however well they wear it. They’re the ones who tug at us for attention, the ones who aren’t satisfied with genre entertainments because they’re too facile. And I think that what makes literary so different each time is that it’s an evocation of a different need, a different personality’s pressure which may ring a bell for a given reader and not for another.
I’m thinking of Andrew Miller’s “Ingenious Pain” and “Pure” and Henry Miller’s “The Colossus of Maroussi.” Need is what makes le Carré’s “A Delicate Truth” more than espionage and what makes Joan Didion’s “The Last Thing He Wanted” more than political.
Thanks for getting me to think of this, always a pleasure, Don.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter-
First, thanks for using “postcard” as a verb. “To postcard.” That tells me my idea is gaining traction.
About need…oh yes, I agree, though where I feel that in not in the author’s intention (who can know that?) but in the yearning of characters.
At the risk of being promote-y (a new adjective), I get into that in a big way in my upcoming book The Emotional Craft of Fiction, which in part discusses what is driving a character, and pulling us along, when there is no apparent motivation.
And what a reading list you have! I will definitely catch up with By Nightfall and The Colossus of Maroussi. Over Campari. Hope you’re well, Porter. Always a pleasure.
Porter, thanks for chiming in on the ‘what makes literary literary.’
Yes, the need. The author’s need to say something. How it infuses the text and emerges from it depends on the author’s palette and intent, but in the best of the class, a red face or elevated blood-pressure seem to be involved.
Don replied above calling micro-tension the binding factor that makes literary work, and this appears on the level of character and reveal, of action and thought. The drive of need–in my opinion a deeper, more passionate source of story-telling–comes through in the language, the set-up and the themes.
The first many pages of LeCarre’s The Night Manager present nothing more than a horny hotel manager, a smart and groveling servant. But so much lingers and wafts in the easy, nothing-happening narrative, because of how much Jonathan Pine (close-third POV) notices and files. The question begs: Who is this guy?
And thanks for adding to my reading list.
You’ve nailed it, Don. But seeing some of the comments here prompts me to add a reminder that a certain kind of “postcard” can actually detract from a novel. I see a lot of manuscripts from aspiring authors that way overdo scenic descriptions, or routinely give detailed depictions of what every new character is wearing.
Because they get told in writing classes that good prose is strong in sensory images, budding authors sometimes conclude that the more of these they throw into their story, the better — whether or not their descriptions move the story forward, reveal character, or provide particular insight. Most new writers I work with seem to make this mistake.
Jessi-
You are so right. Strong sensory images by themselves are only a flashy distraction. A postcard is a reveal. Our mini-awakening gives us a sense of moving, which we are–deeper.
I would like to learn if anyone agrees with me. I believe a literary work of fiction does not truly tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a great deal of embellishment of characters and scenes, but the novels seem to not be going anywhere. They are rather stagnant to my way of thinking. Beautiful prose can be written within the action that I miss in a soul searching kind of novel. Perhaps I am incorrect in my belief. I care enough about my craft to have an answer. Thanks for listening.
I don’t quite agree. Plenty of literary fiction has beginning, middle, end. I’m searching for the qualities (for us, techniques) that truly make fiction feel literary, and this post is, I hope, a partial answer.
Well Don, I really like the postcard-scene comparison. Makes sense. But your choices of literary writing are full of terrible author intrusion. Is that what literary is — we keep listening to a writer writing?
Oh, Getze is cranky today. Need more coffee.
Getze, no need to apologize. You are speaking with a coffee addict.
As to your point, see my reply to Marilynn Byerly above, which I think covers it, for me anyway.
Lessons, like this one, with examples are the most helpful for me. I don’t merely read the words, I inhabit them. Thank you, Don, for sharing your insights. Another great post!
~Peggy
Welcome, Peggy.
Very interesting analysis. I would venture that many of the books I enjoy the most contain some of both scenes and postcards. I’ve always thought literary fiction tended to be more character driven and genre–or commercial–fiction, more plot driven. I suppose the best books are a mixture. I tend to judge books like the Sol Stein did, I want to fall in love–with a character, a place, an idea. I want to be so drawn in and care so much for whatever I love, that I can’t stop reading until I know how it all works out.
Yes, I used to think that way too. Literary = character driven. Genre = plot driven.
I now find that too simplistic and out of keeping with what’s really being written and published. Crime and thriller fiction can have highly novelistic qualities, like strong character arcs and themes, and still tell a whopping story. (Think Mystic River.)
Literary fiction, on the other hand, can read (and sell) quite commercially, with driving plot *and* all the great writing you could want. (Think Like Water for Elephants.)
In fact, I’d say that commercial and literary are converging, which was the forecast, idea and exploration of my book Writing 21st Century Fiction.
It’s a new century and, ask me, we’ve got to understand fiction, why it appeals and how it’s written, with keener insight and nuanced understanding. That’s my mission.
Good stuff, Don. Wondering about your take on summary (the second of your list of three)…
The ideas here really relate to story motion: external character motion vs. internal reader realization (which is forward story motion, as well). So…
Q: If you consider a scene external character motion and a postcard internal reader motion through realization, would you consider summary stand-still?
Depending on the overall POV structure, a POV character’s internal summary/internal dialogue can create the reader’s internal change…so summary is then part of the postcard…
Yes?
EB-
Well, summary is a subject for another post, but briefly, a scene expends time, whereas summary collapses it. In the former, we delve into a period of time, experiencing it in greater depth than we might in real clock time. In the latter we speed through a period of time, experiencing it no less effectively but by hitting only the important developments and emotional highlights.
As I say, another post!
Please stop trusting auto-correct about the use of discrete, when you mean discreet. They do not mean the same thing at all. Otherwise, I enjoyed this post very much. Thank you.
PS, I’d rather you correct the errors than post this comment. :)
Ha! Thanks.
This is excellent. My writing has always hovered on the border between commercial and literary; now I have a clearer idea of what it would take to tip it in one direction or the other. Thank you.
Loved this article!
“We’re not only talking about the author’s intention. It’s not just wanting to entertain versus wanting to illuminate. It’s not only in pushing characters to a new place versus pushing readers to new ways of seeing. The difference is hard-baked into a discrete block of text. What will this text-unit in the novel accomplish? How will it be constructed and what will be its effect?”
I can’t say I agree with this representation, since it makes it seem as if a story is a series of discrete pieces laid out in some kind of order. Why can’t the same ‘hard-baked block of text’ do both?
It makes me see an author some where, playing with blocks (or index cards) and saying, “Let’s put the hero’s moment(s) of introspective genius over here (,here, and here)…” If the hero isn’t having moments of introspective genius all through the book it’s going to feel weird when he finally has one at the end, and if the hero’s moments of introspective genius come in discrete chunks it still feels like stepping on a rock when I trip over one. You break them up into such large bits. Why can’t the character introspect,ruminate, and perceive, while he’s chasing a werewolf through a space station and falling in love while solving the mystery?
“Why can’t the same ‘hard-baked block of text’ do both?”
Indeed, why not? Ask me, that’s the ideal. Go for it.
I did, and I do. I write from the perspective of whatever character has the focus, so introspection and perception are a given, even if he’s being chased by werewolves through haunted lunar colonies. I’m nowhere near an expert on ‘literary’ versus ‘genre’, but I think my technique weaves some literary elements into what are mostly genre stories.
Finally a worthy answer to this question. You have made sense to me and I know my novel writing will improve as a result. I can apply what you are saying – a rare piece of insight indeed. I have bought you a cup of coffee via Paypal – such a nice idea, not too much to put off a struggling writer from paying and giving me the opportunity to show in a tangible way my valuing of your article. Thanks so much. I have tweeted this article.
And I have consumed that cup of coffee! Thanks!
I meant to comment on this article when it first came out, but other pressing engagements got in the way. Now I’ve read it again, and I think I appreciate it even more.
I’d long suspected that the distinction between literary and commercial fiction was rooted in pretension. I know I’ve often seen it coupled with a disdain for commercial fiction that I just can’t stomach.
But your distinction between scenes and postcards is a wonderful, insightful, and reality-based distinction.
Thank you.
Excellent. Just what I needed to read this morning as I take a break from writing.
A structural unit for literary fiction is an interesting thought. Do you think a “postcard” is anything like an “epiphany”? Or does a “postcard” have to be something the characters themselves are unaware of? For example, in Olivia Manning’s FORTUNES OF WAR, Guy finally learns Harriet isn’t dead and the reader realizes how much it mattered to him. It’s an emotional turning point for both characters, but it’s also an epiphany for the reader, isn’t it? That it’s possibly for a person to grieve so invisibly for so long. Or would you say the “literary quality” comes from something else? I also wonder what to “do” with writers like P.G. Wodehouse. Do Jeeves and Wooster have any “postcards”? Or are those books commercial fiction in spite of the effervescent style? Is Nevil Shute’s A TOWN LIKE ALICE considered literary or commercial? I’ve always liked reading books on the edge of literary and commercial and hope to write some in that sweet spot. For me, literary has something to do with the “alignment” of character, theme, atmosphere, setting, language, story and plot. I think that’s what makes a literary novel resonate. But maybe postcards are another way to get that alignment across. Have to think about this more.
Hello, Donald, I’ve been thinking about your June 1 post and just read it again. Love the idea of “postcard.” I’ve had arguments with folks about genre vs. literary many times. Some folks think there is no difference any longer. I keep maintaining there is still a difference. Yes, more literary writers are writing genre topics, but their work is usually more compelling and memorable. My opinion.
And you’ve said it best!