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anotheranarchistdyke 's review for:
Loved this. Erudite and informative I have nothing to say except this list of things I learned and found invaluable:
* A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we're saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.
* Einstein once said: "No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception." ** Apparently this is a misquote of what Einstein actually said, which was "Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." But years ago a student relayed this to me in the form above and, no offense to Einstein, I thought my student's version was brilliant and have been using it ever since.** The story has just written itself out of the plane of its original concep-tion, by removing Hanov as a possible antidote for Marya's loneliness. What now? We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.
* The movie provider and all around mensch Stuart Cornfield once told me that in a good screen play, every structural unit needs to do two things: 1) be entertaining in its own right, and 2 advance the story in a non-trivial way. We will henceforth refer to this as "the Cornfeld Principle." In a mediocre story, nothing much will happen inside the teahouse. The teahouse is there to allow the writer to supply local color, to tell us what such a place is like. Or something might happen in there, but it won't mean much. Some plates will fall and get broken, a ray of sunlight will come randomly through the window to no purpose, just because rays of sunlight do that in the real world, a dog will run in and run out, because the writer recently saw a real dog do that in a real teahouse. All of this may be "entertaining in its own right" (lively, funny, described in vivid language, etc.) but is not "advancing the story in a non-trivial way." When a story is "advanced in a non-trivial way," we get the local color and something else. The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another. The story becomes a more particular version of itself: it refines the question it’s been asking all along.
* But the true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way. Chekhov once said, "Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly." "Formulate them correctly" might be taken to mean: "make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”
* Flannery O’Conor said ‘the writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’
* A story is an organic whole, and when we say a story is good, we're saying that it responds alertly to itself. This holds true in both directions; a brief description of a road tells us how to read the present moment but also all the past moments in the story and all those still to come.
* Einstein once said: "No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception." ** Apparently this is a misquote of what Einstein actually said, which was "Let the people know that a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels." But years ago a student relayed this to me in the form above and, no offense to Einstein, I thought my student's version was brilliant and have been using it ever since.** The story has just written itself out of the plane of its original concep-tion, by removing Hanov as a possible antidote for Marya's loneliness. What now? We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in the later pages, is to use that energy. Marya was created unhappy and lonely and has become more specifically unhappy and lonely with every passing page. That is the energy the story has made, and must use.
* The movie provider and all around mensch Stuart Cornfield once told me that in a good screen play, every structural unit needs to do two things: 1) be entertaining in its own right, and 2 advance the story in a non-trivial way. We will henceforth refer to this as "the Cornfeld Principle." In a mediocre story, nothing much will happen inside the teahouse. The teahouse is there to allow the writer to supply local color, to tell us what such a place is like. Or something might happen in there, but it won't mean much. Some plates will fall and get broken, a ray of sunlight will come randomly through the window to no purpose, just because rays of sunlight do that in the real world, a dog will run in and run out, because the writer recently saw a real dog do that in a real teahouse. All of this may be "entertaining in its own right" (lively, funny, described in vivid language, etc.) but is not "advancing the story in a non-trivial way." When a story is "advanced in a non-trivial way," we get the local color and something else. The characters go into the scene in one state and leave in another. The story becomes a more particular version of itself: it refines the question it’s been asking all along.
* But the true beauty of a story is not in its apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way. Chekhov once said, "Art doesn't have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly." "Formulate them correctly" might be taken to mean: "make us feel the problem fully, without denying any part of it.”
* Flannery O’Conor said ‘the writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.’