[caption id="attachment_1070" align="alignright" width="143" caption="Not so "by the book" by today's standards"]
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Rebecca Berg, who on Monday starts teaching Reading as a Writer: The Lush Novel (featuring William Styron's Sophie's Choice) is very gracious when you bug her on a weekend. I e-mailed her yesterday to ask, Why Styron, why now? Today she sent me this note:
Our emphasis as fiction writers is so often on creating an effect of "immediacy." It's gotten to the point that we almost think of narrative distance as a mistake. Sometimes I think we see the classic "talky" novelists as imperfect pioneers of a technology that has evolved since their time--as in: now we know better. Or maybe we tell ourselves: "Well, Styron was a great writer, but don't try this at home." Or maybe we think: "We're in the age of Twitter--complexity not allowed." Disempowering stuff. So my "Lush Novel" fascination is a little bit in the spirit of defiance: Remember, lots of people love to read those fat novels. And here's the thing about Sophie's Choice: it manages to speak about the unspeakable, the Holocaust. It breaks another rule, too: a lot of that unspeakable history is outside the author's direct personal experience. The novel claims the right to do that. To exercise the imagination in that way. And one reason I think Styron brings this off is the various distancing techniques he uses. You don't see much of the sun by looking at it directly.
Now you see why it's always good to ask Rebecca questions. I welcome her perspective--I fall to my knees to hug it, in fact--as someone who's genetically incapable of writing a story under 7,500 words. Nobody wants a stinking 10,000-word story! (If you doubt this, I have links.) Today's mandate to "say it all quickly" (to mollify or at least coexist with the Twitterati, the short attention spans, the hostilely bored, the polyconnected with multiple outlets and earbuds, etc.) makes me chafe a bit. At my most petulant, I'm reminded of those old schoolteacher sayings meant to combat peer pressure: "If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you, too?" Only now, the cliff is the 140-character Tweet. And people are jumping into it, not off of it. But still. Some of us are just long-winded, right? And maybe we even wish we lived in a world where 140-character Tweets could share the bus with 150-character Tweets. (The poor things, brutally truncated before sense even has a fighting chance to materialize.)
So I vote we join Rebecca's spirit of defiance! Write long-winded stories, complicate all the complications, write compound-complex sentences! Take on a taboo or seven, while you're at it. (But, just a quick note from the Lighthouse Department of Disclaimers: We don't recommend looking directly at the sun.)
--aed
