The Gamble: What the reader Gets Out Of It
May. 6th, 2014 06:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahunter3Authors and agents and writing coaches have a mantra: "show, don't tell". Instead of saying that John and Theresa had a fight, you describe the glares and the raised voices, you provide the dialog, describe the way the silverware jingles and bounces when the hand smacks down on the table, and so on.
There's an entire category of memoir that ought to have a name—illustrative memoir, demonstrative memoir, exemplary memoir, representative memoir, something like that—in which the author is trying to show a situation to the reading audience as an alternative to telling them about it in a polemic or a manifesto. In other words, their memoir is less "This is the story of me-the-author, ain't I interesting?" and more "This is the story of a ______ person, so that you can see how it is".
And there's a gamble in doing that. The author is gambling that the readers will get out of it what the author intended, that they will perceive the book as being a representative example of whatever situation or phenomenon the author is trying to draw attention to.
Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room. Her tale (recast as the tale of Myra) could have been received and reviewed as a sort of soap-opera days-in-the-lives story of a suburban woman and her circle of similar white women in the 50s and 60s, but it was seen (quite rightly) as a show-don't-tell presentation of women's lives in patriarchy, the Exhibit A to go along with Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan's theory works.
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum: From James to Jan. She gave us her first person account of growing up as a male child increasingly aware of feeling that the real person in that body was a girl, later a woman, and of the conflicts and complexities of that experience, eventually culminating in a successful sex reassignment surgery. Almost no one perceived it as anything other than an inside look at what it is like to be a transsexual male-to-female person, as Morris had intended it should be.
Not all attempts to illustrate a concept by telling a representative tale work out as planned, although the most prominent example isn't a memoir, but fiction instead: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair intended his tale of Jurgis Rudkus, immigrant from Lithuania, to be an illustration of the miserable lives of impoverished immigrants in a class-stratified society. Instead, it was widely received as an expose of what goes on in slaughterhouses as told from the perspective of someone working in them.
In some situations, the novelist (and novel fans) have often expressed a desire to have, for example, gay main characters without the book being ABOUT being gay; or mixed-race family characters without the book being ABOUT a mixed-race family. It's the opposite of trying to write a representative memoir: the desire for the difference to be accepted as normative.
When Rita Mae Brown wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, it was perceived as a coming-of-age story of a lesbian, an inside look at what it is like to grow up lesbian. If it were being published for the first time *now*, might it be perceived instead as the tale of an interesting semi-rural lower-income southern girl who goes on to college and who also oh yeah is lesbian and has to take some shit for that?
In my case, I am very much trying to be "Exhibit A". I am counting on people reading my book and seeing a social phenomenon, without me jumping up ever 3rd paragraph or so to say "Now, you see, that would have gone down differently if I had been a typical boy instead of a girlish / girl-identified male".
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There's an entire category of memoir that ought to have a name—illustrative memoir, demonstrative memoir, exemplary memoir, representative memoir, something like that—in which the author is trying to show a situation to the reading audience as an alternative to telling them about it in a polemic or a manifesto. In other words, their memoir is less "This is the story of me-the-author, ain't I interesting?" and more "This is the story of a ______ person, so that you can see how it is".
And there's a gamble in doing that. The author is gambling that the readers will get out of it what the author intended, that they will perceive the book as being a representative example of whatever situation or phenomenon the author is trying to draw attention to.
Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room. Her tale (recast as the tale of Myra) could have been received and reviewed as a sort of soap-opera days-in-the-lives story of a suburban woman and her circle of similar white women in the 50s and 60s, but it was seen (quite rightly) as a show-don't-tell presentation of women's lives in patriarchy, the Exhibit A to go along with Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan's theory works.
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum: From James to Jan. She gave us her first person account of growing up as a male child increasingly aware of feeling that the real person in that body was a girl, later a woman, and of the conflicts and complexities of that experience, eventually culminating in a successful sex reassignment surgery. Almost no one perceived it as anything other than an inside look at what it is like to be a transsexual male-to-female person, as Morris had intended it should be.
Not all attempts to illustrate a concept by telling a representative tale work out as planned, although the most prominent example isn't a memoir, but fiction instead: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair intended his tale of Jurgis Rudkus, immigrant from Lithuania, to be an illustration of the miserable lives of impoverished immigrants in a class-stratified society. Instead, it was widely received as an expose of what goes on in slaughterhouses as told from the perspective of someone working in them.
In some situations, the novelist (and novel fans) have often expressed a desire to have, for example, gay main characters without the book being ABOUT being gay; or mixed-race family characters without the book being ABOUT a mixed-race family. It's the opposite of trying to write a representative memoir: the desire for the difference to be accepted as normative.
When Rita Mae Brown wrote Rubyfruit Jungle, it was perceived as a coming-of-age story of a lesbian, an inside look at what it is like to grow up lesbian. If it were being published for the first time *now*, might it be perceived instead as the tale of an interesting semi-rural lower-income southern girl who goes on to college and who also oh yeah is lesbian and has to take some shit for that?
In my case, I am very much trying to be "Exhibit A". I am counting on people reading my book and seeing a social phenomenon, without me jumping up ever 3rd paragraph or so to say "Now, you see, that would have gone down differently if I had been a typical boy instead of a girlish / girl-identified male".
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 12:36 pm (UTC)There are several black authors's whose work I read because I like the work, and not because they write just about being black, or make all their important characters black. Same with Asian authors. Tess Geritson's fiction was fun to read, it had nothing to do with the fact that she was Asian.
Readers take from writers what they can. They will never take all the writer intended, or meant, or accomplished (which are sometimes very different). As a writer, one can only do one's best to illustrate and show, and yet, sometimes one does have to tell the reader, rather than to always show. How well we accomplish those two - show and tell - determine how well we do as a writer.
I read Rubyfruit Jungle when it first came out. Loved it. Was hooked on Rita Mae Brown's books for a long time. The resonance of writing about being a lesbian without a lot of veiled or apology was refreshing for me. It helped me understand women better, too - or so I thought.
You have an interesting dilemma.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 02:17 pm (UTC)If that's the case, what is the story? Because that's why most people read -- for the story.
And I think you're wrong about Upton Sinclair. The Jungle was very much intended to be an expose of conditions inside a meat packing plant. If I'm remembering correctly, Sinclair actually spent 6 weeks working inside a meatpacking plant to research it. Any other storyline was incidental.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:04 am (UTC)But I do want them also to "get it".
no subject
Date: 2014-05-06 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 02:07 am (UTC)That's not to say I can keep my hands off it for long. There's always a passage where I think a different sequence of words would be an improvement. I suspect that for all authors there's always that possibility, of going back in and doing stuff with it, right up until you do something that solidifies it in a specific form.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-12 03:33 pm (UTC)K.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-12 03:35 pm (UTC)K.