Really Good Books, considered as fractal

[owlectomy]

I first noticed this sometime in high school when my sister and I were geeking out over Escaflowne: there were places where individual scenes, individual moments, refracted into all the Big Themes of the series. There was something fractal-like about it. A fractal is a geometric shape where you see the same pattern, the same complexity, no matter how closely you zoom in, and Escaflowne seemed like that to me.

I had some predictions for the Printz award this year, based partly on gut feeling and partly on sheer enjoyment, but perhaps mostly on this kind of fractal thing. Terry Pratchett, and M.T. Anderson, and Margo Lanagan, wrote books in which almost every single sentence somehow contributed to the thematic heft of the whole. (I'll consider Frankie Landau-Banks in more detail after I reread the book; I was having an awful day when I read it, and not really capable of analysis.)

When I first began writing I was very suspicious of Style, for many reasons. For one thing, I thought I couldn't do Style. For another, I didn't really like most of the stories I read that seemed to be all about Style, whether that was spare like Hemingway or at the opposite end like Faulkner. Mostly it seemed like Style was just a decoration, something separate from the Story. And I read Samuel Delany's book on writing, and he argued just the opposite -- he argued for the style being absolutely organic to the story -- and I didn't know whether I'd read something brilliant or something I disagreed with intensely. Because I was still very suspicious of Style.

But in some ways, I think, when you have that level of fractal complexity, it lets you take on the huge issues without being overly preachy. Because the thematic arguments in a book like Octavian Nothing are woven in at such a deep level, there's enough room for complexities and contradictions and exploring little facets of the theme -- and you can get a very powerful theme across without doing the obvious dialectic that Robert McKee talks about in Story where you have one thematic idea ("crime pays because the criminal is ruthless") competing with another thematic idea ("crime doesn't pay because the detective is clever") and in the end one of them wins. This works fine a lot of the time -- but I think when you rely on the Big Story Events to carry all your thematic weight, it's sort of like using mallets to get your message across. A book like Octavian Nothing would collapse utterly if you used mallets. You have to use a lot of tiny little jewelers' tools -- and a writer like Margo Lanagan or M.T. Anderson can accomplish that.

I need to figure out that trick.

Comments

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Definitely, I think that believing in what you're writing right down to your core is a huge part of it. And often when you read a book that's a total mess thematically, it's because it seems like there are all these unresolved issues that keep bubbling up to the surface no matter what the writer says he or she believes. But it's also a matter of studying craftsmanship with real intensity -- you look at other people's novels and other people's movies and you see the possibilities open up for yourself as to what you can do with a single perfect sentence or a single perfect angle. And no, you don't spend half an hour thinking about every sentence, but you do think about the work your sentences are doing. I write a lot slower than I used to, but I think I'm a lot less willing to settle for a scene that doesn't ring true emotionally, or a sentence where the voice is wrong.

BTW, while you're tracking down books, see if you can track down "The Knife of Never Letting Go." I am not at all certain if you would like it but I think you might have a strong reaction to it.

[meaghanchan.livejournal.com]

I find the subject of movies interesting, because they are so much a collaborative effort. One (or two, or three) people may write the script, but from there each little portion of the fractal whole is taken care of by someone else. The actors, the camera people, costume designers, art directors, etc, can each take what they can from the script, and add to it in their own ways.

An example might be the costumes from "Mean Girls"(just because I just rewatched it)-- As Cady becomes more accepted by the popular clique, becomes more 'fake' (pretending to be bad at math, becoming less genuine in her relations with the people around her) her clothing goes from organic fabrics (cotton, denim) all the way to the very shiny black and pink plastic-y dress she wears at the party at her house.

Now, anyone can say whatever they want about Mean Girls not exactly being a pinnacle of cinematic acheivement, but it's one of those cases where everyone can just say 'how can I do my part to add to what the movie's about', even if they're just the costume designer and not the screenwriter or director.

If you're a novelist, you don't have the luxury of a team with each of their brains working on making your vision a reality. You're responsible for being the art director, the costume designer, the camera person... Knowing the details to choose to describe that reflect the themes as a whole.

[meaghanchan.livejournal.com]

I just read the passage below yesterday, and had a thought along the same lines: individual words and sentences contributing to the whole in a greater way than words that meant the exact same thing wouldn't have, because of word choice and specificity.

From Octavian Nothing:

I protested, "A man is known by his deeds."
"Oh, that's sure," said Bono. "Just like a house is known by its deeds. The deeds say who owns it, who sold it, and who'll be buying a new one when it gets knocked down".

So much in those few sentences- Most obviously, the dual meaning of 'deeds'. That's one of my favorite things in poetry... Like in Keats' "Ode on Melancholy", "Feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes"... Peerless meaning without equal, but also meaning unseeing.

On the whole, I'm not sure there are many novels that play with word choice to the same extent that poetry can. But I love when they do.

I love the image of fractals... The story being this large mass, with shape that is defined by its edges. And the edges look smaller and more detailed the closer you look. At first it looks like it's defined by ideas and themes, but when you get close enough, it's just individual words and letters creating the appearance of theme. And the large mass of story would look different if any of the words were different, if only slightly.

Cool post.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. And that dual meaning gets right to the heart of what Anderson is trying to say -- Octavian is being raised under the same naive presumptuous Enlightenment that's driving the revolution, that says "a man is known by his deeds" and "all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights" -- he's representing the stories that we tell ourselves about the American revolution -- while Pro Bono uses that same word to twist the argument on its head to drive at Anderson's theme that fighting for 'freedom' means nothing if you're going to categorically deny certain people their freedom at the same time.