Re: Brilliant Sri Lankan Novelists Go Home
oops . . . good thing my unpublished manuscript--chronicling a woman's search for a lyrical small-town full of wry insight--is sitting in a slushpile in New York! Hate for poor Joe Bob Briggs to have to read a review about it some day
Just read a really fabulous essay by Ursula Le Guin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown", (Language of the Night, Berkley 1985 edition).
Le Guin spends quite a bit of time discussing Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Brown"--reiterating what Jim and others have said, again and again, here. Novels are about people. When a novel tries to be about something besides people--technological gizmos, a GRAND THEME, a moral lesson--that novel fails, on a level, even if it's still somehow readable. Le Guin's mark of success for a novel is whether she can remember the characters' names some time later.
But she said something that intrigued me, and I've wondered about all evening, so I thought I'd ask.
Leguin talks about seeing a character in her mind, and she perceives the novelist's task is to get from where you sit to where the character lives. She said one of her worst short stories was about one of her most clearly perceived characters:
My first effort to catch him was a short story. I should have known he was much too big for a short story. . . . It was a really terrible story, one of the worst I have written in thirty years of malpractice.
She says a writer must develop an "infallible sense" for the proper framework--length--for the idea.
Is this just practice? Lots and lots of practice, combined with superlative intuition? What does it feel like when you have a sense, "this is a short story" versus "this is a mondo, whacking, multi-volume saga"?
Maybe I'm just asking, gosh, folks--d'ya think Robert Jordan had ANY freaking idea what he was getting into :ack
sorry. I should have resisted the Robert Jordan dig . . .
Mac