It's been one of those weeks when various bits of ideas from various places have coalesced. First, I've been revising my PhD commentary, and found myself trying to pin down how and why I feel that the first half of Atonement, while beautifully written and intelligent and all the other things you expect of McEwan, just, for me, edges into a cliché which I've called long-hot-summer-before-the-war. You all know the kind of cliché I mean, but maybe I'm not being fair to the book: is long-hot-summer-before-the-war so well-established that McEwan's playing with the convention, rather than falling into it? In which case, could we actually call it a literary trope, and talk about how he handles it, rather than whether he should have handled it at all?
And then you might remember that when I was talking about procrastination (and again in The Other Novel) I quoted the idea that 'symptoms are universal, causes are particular'. And that thought came up again when a piece on Vulpes Libris, Five Things I hate About Chicklit, bred a spin-off thread on WriteWords. Since the genres which writers and the book trade think in are a slippery mixture of plot-style, tone, subject and setting, there's plenty of scope for fighting (and on some forums it really does become pitched battles) about what's essential to the genre and what's (un)creative laziness, what's a tedious stereotype and what's the reason you read the book. What's a cliché and what's a trope, in other words. And because some of the things which define the appeal of the book to its potential readers - some aspects of a genre - are to do with the subject, the subject itself can become a defining feature. As Terry Pratchett says (roughly), you can write about anything in the world, but put in one lousy dragon and they'll shelve you in fantasy forever. Never mind how much trouble you go to to make your dragons believable, for some a square-jawed space ship or a pink taste for shoe-shopping or a menopausal flakiness is a cliché by definition, enough to condemn all books which have the occasional booster rocket or strappy sandal or hot flush. But one WriteWorder, a bookseller and children's author, said this:
Just a little comment about stereotypes and writing believable ones: people may fall into categories, but they do so for different reasons. So, a mother may be a nag, for many different reasons: she's terrified of growing old and needs to pretend her child is still a baby, or she has nothing else in her life to concentrate on, or she's someone who is reassured by being in control and hates losing control, or her child once had a terrible accident because she was neglectful and now she feels guilty, or the father pays the child no attention and she wants to compensate, or... If you get to the root of why characters behave as they do, and show that to the reader, then you can have a nagging mum and she won't be a stereotype but a real person.
I think this is beautifully true, and beautifully put, and it's one of the reasons that easy reading takes hard writing: it is, arguably, even harder - and certainly as hard - to find some truth and individuality within the expectations of a genre, than it is to come up with something completely new and off the wall at the outer reaches of 'literary' where most bets are off (though no matter how self-consciously literary a writer, these Theoretical days no writer can convince themselves - let alone others - that they're not engaging with other writing by other writers). So I was delighted to read this, in Tom Jones, which I've just started and am enjoying hugely, though I'm going to have to be careful about reading it on public transport since I was reduced to giggles in the first page. On the second, Fielding compares his novel to a meal, the meat being human nature:
An objection may perhaps be apprehended from the more delicate, that this dish is too common and vulger; for what else is the subject of all the romances, novels, plays and poems, with which the stalls abound? Many exquisite viands might be rejected by the epicure, if it was a sufficient cause for his contemning of them as common and vulgar, that something was to be found in the paltry alleys under the same name...The same animal which hath the honour to have some part of his flesh eaten at the table of a duke, may perhaps be degraded... in the vilest stall in town... Where, then, lies the difference... but in the seasoning, the dressing, the garnishing, and the setting forth? In like manner, the excellence of the mental entertainment consists less in the subject than in the author's skill in well dressing it up.
What this means, of course, is that you can't make outright rules that a given type of character is a stereotype, because who says that a really good writer can't write a dissolute aristocrat or a tart with a heart so well that they're completely believable? If they're fully imagined, roots and all, the convincingness of their origins will make them seem original. Indeed, you could argue that to a sophisticated reader, they're more believable precisely because they gradually stand out more and more - become more three-dimensional - from the flat stereotype of their kind. It's the way that you do it...
