For Brains
In preparation for my annual move, I was recently going through some old magazines, cutting out any articles I might want to clutter up my next apartment with, when I came across a copy of the Writers' Chronicle from February of this year containing an essay by Frederick Reiken discussing the merging and separating of Author, Narrator, and Character in modern novels. It's a good article, especially for those of us attempting 1st or close 3rd narratives, and more specifically for anyone trying for a semi-autobiographical book (I am not, myself, so those of you who endured the beginning of my "novel" in Vanderbes's wrkshp can breathe a sigh of relief) and I wanted to bring it to the attention of anyone who might still have a stack of those Chronicles picked up from the Dey House table (you know they get the NY Times everyday now?) It is not available anywhere online, but our brothers and sisters at Earth Goat held a discussion of this very article a while back. Grendel provides a fine synopsis of the major points and then the other kids get in on the action, eventually getting pretty heated debating the pros and cons of a Canin education. Check it: http://earthgoat.blogspot.com/2005/02/author-narrator-character-merge.htmlIncidentally, Reiken's a pretty good novelist. His first book, The Odd Sea, is a super quick read, a nice little bildungsroman (sp?), and the second, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, is a bit more-of-the-same, but with more psychological depth and, as far as I remember, some teenage sex. Which is good.
Another thing: NPR's The Connection (9 am on 90.9 fm here in IC) is doing a series this week, "Books that Changed My Life" or something like that. Tomorrow Jason Shinder and Mark Doty discuss "Howl," then Richard Ford On Walker Percy's The Moviegoer on Thursday, and Big Russ Banks talks up On the Road Friday. Might be worth a listen.
posted by Ian @ Tuesday, August 02, 2005
3 Comments:
Ditto what Ian said. I first became familiar with it because one of my students read it and quoted it aloud for the rest of the semester in every class.
It's funny and makes perfect sense that a student (I assume an undergrad) would latch on to that particular article. Reiken sets up more than one equations or diagrams to explain his ideas of Author-Narrator-Character. I had hit a wall in teaching and finally used the blackboard (it's really hard to write on those) to set up a diagram explaining the relationship between "active" plot and "emotional" plot. All my students perked up and jotted this down. It wasn't a particularly insightful little doodle, but they jumped all over it. I remember thinking at the time "You kids just want a recipe. A road map, if you will." (My thoughts often have small appendages, "if you will," "as it were.") Then, of course, a semester later I found myself frantically scribbling Frank's big Reader-Author responsibility arc thing. I know that there is no formula one can follow to write a story, I know that this is an impossibility, but at the same time if someone wants to try to set one up I'll fucking listen.
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