One thing I've been wondering about in my own writing and also as I read /Servant's Quarters/ is the idea of how a character's voice can or should change over the course of a novel, especially in one like this, where the character ages and experiences so much. How does an author allow a character's voice to evolve as a result of the character's life experiences and yet still remain consistent? In /Servant's Quarters/ I felt like I made allowances for the fact that Cressida withholds a lot of information because (initially) I attributed the lack of access to the fact that we had a child narrator with a lack of understanding of the world. However, by Part 3, I felt like Cressida was still withholding a lot of information and still processing her world in much the same way as she did at the beginning as a much younger child, whereas I started to expect, to want, a more rich understanding of, a more full reflection about her situation. I got some of that when she realized that Mr. Harding was right, that she couldn't go back to her childhood home and have it be the same, but I really wanted a similar kind of reflection about her relationships with men in general and Mr. Harding in particular.
I also noticed in the essay/interviews we read that Freed and the interviewers talked a lot about voice, and while they all tried to make a distinction between the character's voice and Freed's voice, Freed also seemed to resist this distinction. For instance, Johnson asks Freed, "How did you develop your ability to create such clear voices?" And Freed's response is more about developing her own voice as a writer, saying, "It took a lot of false writing to come upon a voice in which I could tell the truth as I saw it and felt it" (3, AWP interview). Later she also says, in response to a question about how she keeps herself as the author invisible, "I don't. I'm in every picture. But I'm in disguise" (5, AWP), but then she also says that she starts a story or novel with a voice, a character in a situation (6, AWP). I guess all of this is the push/pull between the author, narrator, and character that Wachtel writes about: "...the writer...is never fully concealed.... Voice contains those elements of style--more than subject, character, and plot--that often cause us to feel a sense of recognition when reading different works by the same author" (56). Is there a question here? I don't know. I guess I just really wonder about all this because there are times when I'm writing when I as the author feel very constrained by the voice I have given my narrator, my character, and so I think of the voice of the novel belonging to the character more than it belongs to me. Is that just my inability, my particular blindness, my resistance to recognizing my own voice? Or is this the difference between writing that is character-driven and writing that isn't? It just seems so hard to separate character's voice from author's voice from narrative voice.
I also was intrigued by Cressida’s voice throughout the book, and how it didn’t seem to change much despite the relatively large jumps in time. I’m not necessarily sure that it should be changing with these time jumps (this seems to fit in with Freed’s description of inhabiting the character while writing), but I’m not sure how old Cressida is supposed to be in the third section, for instance, because I’m not given a specific reference, and her voice sounds so similar to the previous section. She is of course older, but I keep thinking of her as 15, which ups the squick factor a bit. I suppose my question is, how do we deal with changing or not changing the voice of the character as time passes? Especially in situations like this, where the POV character goes from child to adult, it would seem tempting to change the voice as the character matured, but here it felt almost as if Cressida narrated the story with her “adult” voice from the beginning.
I had similar issues with Cressida's voice throughout the novel, and was also struck with Freed's use of scene. I felt many of the scenes and chapters in this novel were very short, and often felt cut off abruptly. Characters were left in mid-conversation, or events happened and didn't have much time to resonate with the characters (for example, Cressida's mother's marriage or the outcome of Cressida's painting fiasco). In Johnson's interview, Freed talks about drama and timing, and how timing "is in the ear." I'm wondering if Freed's pacing or sense of timing felt theatrical? If maybe the shortness of scenes has something to do with Freed's sense of dramatic timing, and if that timing felt or heard in the ear is universal, or singular to the author? How do we know when our timing feels right, or rushed, or too slow?
"This is the writer's job: to write what there is. Making a point about anything will shoot the fiction through the knees."
Really? Freed is certainly not the first writer I've heard make such a statement, and there's truth to it, I suppose, but it's also one of those statements that could go either way. Maybe she means setting out to make a point, and letting character, voice, etc. come second, will shoot the fiction in the knees. Maybe all the good novels that make a point about something just so happen to make a point about something. Really, though? I have trouble believing that Gaddis didn't have a point to make about money when he set out to write J R. Or about art and authenticity when he set out to write The Recognitions. Plenty of great novels make a point. Did these points come about accidentally? If so, damn. I can't wait till my novel just magically happens to click, thematically and sociocritically. What does Freed mean, then?
(Also, do people believe that bit about printing out an entire novel when one preposition's wrong? I didn't. Maybe I'm being too literal here.)
Always interesting to learn about an author's process when it comes to fiction. In her chapter on false starts and creative failure, Freed says "...fiction does not come out of ideas. The sources of fiction are myriad and complex -- a character, a character in a situation, a phrase, a scene, a setting, a smell -- anything at all but an idea attached to an intention." But way better than this is her declaration that "all fiction is revenge, all fiction is betrayal." Really? I might switch teams! I wonder if the fiction writers among us agree with Freed here.
I think Paul's question is sort of related to my question, which was inspired by this sort of statement:
Johnson: This brings us to the issue of authorial invisibility. In writing material that takes place in your home town, in a family similar to your own, how do you, the author, keep yourself out of the picture? Freed: I don't. I'm in every picture. But I'm in disguise.
I found this frustratingly glib, and maybe it's just because I worry a lot more about authorial presence and intentionality in fiction than Freed does, but I feel like it's something that can't just be waved away. I haven't read any of her other novels, so I can't say how much Freed herself tends to engage characters that seem directly autobiographical, but some of our other readings this semester (/If You Follow Me/, or, I'd argue, the Jonathan Lethem story from way back near the beginning of the semester) feature protagonists who are so clearly based on the author's personality and/or life that the two are almost distractingly inextricable. It's a delicate balance between creating a character whose individuality and complexity is a virtue of their being so based in reality and just creating another boring Mary Sue type character. I really want to know what Freed means by being 'in disguise,' and why it's so important to be 'in every picture' as such.
Since, of course, none of you are Lynn Freed and you might not have an answer for that question, here's a more general question: how much do you all really consciously engage yourselves as authors, as decision-makers, when you're writing, whether it's developing a character, crafting a voice, trying to evoke a theme, etc.? I hear people say things like 'the character wants to go such and such place' or 'the poem wants to say so and so,' and I feel like abdicating responsibility for the work so completely is a disservice to ourselves as writers and to the power of good writing. I don't believe, to use Paul's question as an example, that a work just magically happens upon its theme, that you write a whole novel with a distinct universe and cast of characters and, when it's done, go 'oh, wow, I accidentally wrote a complex sociopolitical commentary on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa! Who knew!' At the same time, though, if you sit down to write thinking, 'I'm going to write an amazingly complex sociopolitical commentary on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa,' you're probably doing it wrong. At what point, then, do you turn off your writing machine/mystical literary medium mentality/alien signal receptor and turn on the critical part of your brain?
The following comment from Freed's interview with Johnson caught my eye:
"One needs to put one's self at a distance. To be perpetually the foreigner. This, it seems to me, is the life of the writer."
I really like these sentiments and can relate to them. I have always found it easier to write about people and places when I'm distanced from them, because memory is imperfect. Memory lends weight to the fantastic and inevitably inserts the writer's imagination into the reality of the fiction. But the kind of writing that I'm interested in producing, and the kind of fiction that really gets me off, is fabulous and hyperbolic, continents away from Freed's style, and I wonder if there's an element of falsehood when writing about something so far away from your daily life. Freed also says, "This is the writer's job: write what there is." But what we remember is really a lie, isn't it? To write what there is, accurately, don't you have to be there, immersed in it? After James Baldwin went expatriate and continued writing about Harlem, he got criticized for painting the place too cartoonily. Isn't there an inherent danger in trying to realistically portray something from a distance?
The other thing I was wondering about is the notion of home that comes up again and again in the interviews and essay, which are mostly in reference to earlier novels, but seem like a pervasive theme of hers and is certainly strong in the Servant's Quarters. Although, before reading that stuff, this isn't the theme that jumped out at me. Blame and luck seemed much more prominent areas of exploration, and I wonder if anyone else had any thoughts about this? I was hoping Freed would talk about this, and maybe this is more a question for her on Wednesday.
Now, let me preface this one by saying I enjoyed this novel, was totally rapt in the fiction, but there are a few story elements that really bothered me. Like Joseph, the passage of time was totally unclear to me. I also thought Cressida was 15 from part 2 to the end, and felt a little sick to my stomach watching her fall into bed with Harding and Campbell. Toward the end, we start hearing about her applying to universities and I think I remember reading that she's 19 at the very end, maybe in the Coda, but I think this is a case of too little too late. Is there any indication of her age when she has sex with these guys? Maybe I missed something. And, as a side comment, did it bother anyone else how blatant the whole looking for a father figure in a lover thing plays out with Harding? This little Freudian package was a little too tidy for my taste, a little too simple. Thoughts?
Oh, I left something out. So the point Freed is making with her essay, or at least my interpretation of it, can be summarized by the following:
"The more obsessed I became with chasing down a plan, with wrestling the novel into the confines of an abstraction, the more the real fiction eluded me...a writer with a fixed idea is like a goose laying a stone."
Okay, first of all, what is "real fiction"? And if we can define that, what would "fake fiction" be? And secondly, we all talked about individual processes and I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I like outlines. And to me, this sounds like she thinks this is the wrong approach. Isn't that a little unfair? Different strokes for different folks, I say, and another thing: a problem that I had with "If You Follow Me" was that it was too dawdling. Freed writes, "The way I write best is in scenes, scenes built upon scenes." Fine, but you can pack a billion scenes on top of each other that "tie together," but if they don't amount to something greater than the sum of the scenes, if there isn't a driving through line, then the novel is just a highway to yawnsville. I want a highway to a climax, that everything builds up to, (well maybe not everything, subplots are cool,) but I want a novel to have one big story. Not just an amalgamation of good scenes. What do you guys think?
As has already been mentioned, I'll be interested to discuss Cressida's voice in the novel, how she functions as narrator, someone telling her own story--I'm especially curious to know what you all thought about how she paces her story. We have a novel, obviously, but it's a short novel, and the story is narrated with an economy I tend to see in 'epic' short stories-- 'Brokeback Mountain,' any number of Alice Munro stories. What does the novel gain by speeding through a life, the way Cressida does, and foregoing a lot of what the reader might expect to see on the page (such as beginning part 2 with mentioning Ma's marriage to Mr. Ledson, after their big argument at the end of part 1--what about the time between?). And again, since this is a short, fast novel--one could read this in a few hours--how does form influence the story? Brevity seems like a conscious narrative strategy, so I'm hoping we can discuss how this relates to the various craft techniques at work here...
I really enjoyed how Freed paces the novel. To me, it felt almost realistic? When we tell stories to friends we try to tell the most important parts of our stories and always do our best to give the juiciest pieces without dragging on. Her theatre background does resonate with this piece. It does feel theatrical only to keep our interest in reading until the very end.
As far as voice was concerned, i had a hard time noticing as she aged, since there were no vocal markers that i picked up on. I wonder if the novel would have lost anything, though, by moving to third person.
I was interested in her article about writing a story when you seemed pressured to do so. Once again though, i feel it is hard to just take her advice when approaching my own writing, because what motivates someone to write is so personal. for example, there may be those who work best under pressure, and i wondered while i was reading the article if thats what the people pressuring her for another book in a year might have been relying on. I relate more to Freed in that i need to take my time with a piece otherwise i feel overwhelmed, but i was wondering if there was anyone that felt they produced better work when under a strict schedule?
Oh geez, I wonder what the book would have been like if told from the perspective of one of the many servants? I kept wondering about all those servants- I mean the book is called The Servants' Quarters. It's obviously a choice- keeping the focus straight ahead, directly in front of Cressida but still- are all those servants mere invisible machines?
At times Mr. Harding reminded me of Michael Jackson. If he only would have forced everyone else to where a veil. (sorry no question with this subject matter)
In the Mary interview with TC- Freed states that "All art is amoral." This made my blood pressure rise in excitement. I wonder how people feel about this idea. Maybe I just like the word amoral.
My questions really had to do with setting. I kept wondering where exactly are we in this novel? I had a vague idea that we were in South Africa post WWII but I couldn't ever pinpoint place exactly and get a clear idea of the current social or cultural interactions of the place. Or if it was important to this story. I was wondering what Freed's intent was to keep all of that vague.
One thing I've been wondering about in my own writing and also as I read /Servant's Quarters/ is the idea of how a character's voice can or should change over the course of a novel, especially in one like this, where the character ages and experiences so much. How does an author allow a character's voice to evolve as a result of the character's life experiences and yet still remain consistent? In /Servant's Quarters/ I felt like I made allowances for the fact that Cressida withholds a lot of information because (initially) I attributed the lack of access to the fact that we had a child narrator with a lack of understanding of the world. However, by Part 3, I felt like Cressida was still withholding a lot of information and still processing her world in much the same way as she did at the beginning as a much younger child, whereas I started to expect, to want, a more rich understanding of, a more full reflection about her situation. I got some of that when she realized that Mr. Harding was right, that she couldn't go back to her childhood home and have it be the same, but I really wanted a similar kind of reflection about her relationships with men in general and Mr. Harding in particular.
ReplyDeleteI also noticed in the essay/interviews we read that Freed and the interviewers talked a lot about voice, and while they all tried to make a distinction between the character's voice and Freed's voice, Freed also seemed to resist this distinction. For instance, Johnson asks Freed, "How did you develop your ability to create such clear voices?" And Freed's response is more about developing her own voice as a writer, saying, "It took a lot of false writing to come upon a voice in which I could tell the truth as I saw it and felt it" (3, AWP interview). Later she also says, in response to a question about how she keeps herself as the author invisible, "I don't. I'm in every picture. But I'm in disguise" (5, AWP), but then she also says that she starts a story or novel with a voice, a character in a situation (6, AWP). I guess all of this is the push/pull between the author, narrator, and character that Wachtel writes about: "...the writer...is never fully concealed.... Voice contains those elements of style--more than subject, character, and plot--that often cause us to feel a sense of recognition when reading different works by the same author" (56). Is there a question here? I don't know. I guess I just really wonder about all this because there are times when I'm writing when I as the author feel very constrained by the voice I have given my narrator, my character, and so I think of the voice of the novel belonging to the character more than it belongs to me. Is that just my inability, my particular blindness, my resistance to recognizing my own voice? Or is this the difference between writing that is character-driven and writing that isn't? It just seems so hard to separate character's voice from author's voice from narrative voice.
I also was intrigued by Cressida’s voice throughout the book, and how it didn’t seem to change much despite the relatively large jumps in time. I’m not necessarily sure that it should be changing with these time jumps (this seems to fit in with Freed’s description of inhabiting the character while writing), but I’m not sure how old Cressida is supposed to be in the third section, for instance, because I’m not given a specific reference, and her voice sounds so similar to the previous section. She is of course older, but I keep thinking of her as 15, which ups the squick factor a bit. I suppose my question is, how do we deal with changing or not changing the voice of the character as time passes? Especially in situations like this, where the POV character goes from child to adult, it would seem tempting to change the voice as the character matured, but here it felt almost as if Cressida narrated the story with her “adult” voice from the beginning.
ReplyDeleteI had similar issues with Cressida's voice throughout the novel, and was also struck with Freed's use of scene. I felt many of the scenes and chapters in this novel were very short, and often felt cut off abruptly. Characters were left in mid-conversation, or events happened and didn't have much time to resonate with the characters (for example, Cressida's mother's marriage or the outcome of Cressida's painting fiasco). In Johnson's interview, Freed talks about drama and timing, and how timing "is in the ear." I'm wondering if Freed's pacing or sense of timing felt theatrical? If maybe the shortness of scenes has something to do with Freed's sense of dramatic timing, and if that timing felt or heard in the ear is universal, or singular to the author? How do we know when our timing feels right, or rushed, or too slow?
ReplyDelete"This is the writer's job: to write what there is. Making a point about anything will shoot the fiction through the knees."
ReplyDeleteReally? Freed is certainly not the first writer I've heard make such a statement, and there's truth to it, I suppose, but it's also one of those statements that could go either way. Maybe she means setting out to make a point, and letting character, voice, etc. come second, will shoot the fiction in the knees. Maybe all the good novels that make a point about something just so happen to make a point about something. Really, though? I have trouble believing that Gaddis didn't have a point to make about money when he set out to write J R. Or about art and authenticity when he set out to write The Recognitions. Plenty of great novels make a point. Did these points come about accidentally? If so, damn. I can't wait till my novel just magically happens to click, thematically and sociocritically. What does Freed mean, then?
(Also, do people believe that bit about printing out an entire novel when one preposition's wrong? I didn't. Maybe I'm being too literal here.)
Always interesting to learn about an author's process when it comes to fiction. In her chapter on false starts and creative failure, Freed says "...fiction does not come out of ideas. The sources of fiction are myriad and complex -- a character, a character in a situation, a phrase, a scene, a setting, a smell -- anything at all but an idea attached to an intention." But way better than this is her declaration that "all fiction is revenge, all fiction is betrayal." Really? I might switch teams! I wonder if the fiction writers among us agree with Freed here.
ReplyDeleteI think Paul's question is sort of related to my question, which was inspired by this sort of statement:
ReplyDeleteJohnson: This brings us to the issue of authorial invisibility. In writing material that takes place in your
home town, in a family similar to your own, how do you, the author, keep yourself out of the picture?
Freed: I don't. I'm in every picture. But I'm in disguise.
I found this frustratingly glib, and maybe it's just because I worry a lot more about authorial presence and intentionality in fiction than Freed does, but I feel like it's something that can't just be waved away. I haven't read any of her other novels, so I can't say how much Freed herself tends to engage characters that seem directly autobiographical, but some of our other readings this semester (/If You Follow Me/, or, I'd argue, the Jonathan Lethem story from way back near the beginning of the semester) feature protagonists who are so clearly based on the author's personality and/or life that the two are almost distractingly inextricable. It's a delicate balance between creating a character whose individuality and complexity is a virtue of their being so based in reality and just creating another boring Mary Sue type character. I really want to know what Freed means by being 'in disguise,' and why it's so important to be 'in every picture' as such.
Since, of course, none of you are Lynn Freed and you might not have an answer for that question, here's a more general question: how much do you all really consciously engage yourselves as authors, as decision-makers, when you're writing, whether it's developing a character, crafting a voice, trying to evoke a theme, etc.? I hear people say things like 'the character wants to go such and such place' or 'the poem wants to say so and so,' and I feel like abdicating responsibility for the work so completely is a disservice to ourselves as writers and to the power of good writing. I don't believe, to use Paul's question as an example, that a work just magically happens upon its theme, that you write a whole novel with a distinct universe and cast of characters and, when it's done, go 'oh, wow, I accidentally wrote a complex sociopolitical commentary on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa! Who knew!' At the same time, though, if you sit down to write thinking, 'I'm going to write an amazingly complex sociopolitical commentary on race relations in post-apartheid South Africa,' you're probably doing it wrong. At what point, then, do you turn off your writing machine/mystical literary medium mentality/alien signal receptor and turn on the critical part of your brain?
The following comment from Freed's interview with Johnson caught my eye:
ReplyDelete"One needs to put one's self at a distance. To be perpetually the foreigner. This, it seems to me, is the life of the writer."
I really like these sentiments and can relate to them. I have always found it easier to write about people and places when I'm distanced from them, because memory is imperfect. Memory lends weight to the fantastic and inevitably inserts the writer's imagination into the reality of the fiction. But the kind of writing that I'm interested in producing, and the kind of fiction that really gets me off, is fabulous and hyperbolic, continents away from Freed's style, and I wonder if there's an element of falsehood when writing about something so far away from your daily life. Freed also says, "This is the writer's job: write what there is." But what we remember is really a lie, isn't it? To write what there is, accurately, don't you have to be there, immersed in it? After James Baldwin went expatriate and continued writing about Harlem, he got criticized for painting the place too cartoonily. Isn't there an inherent danger in trying to realistically portray something from a distance?
The other thing I was wondering about is the notion of home that comes up again and again in the interviews and essay, which are mostly in reference to earlier novels, but seem like a pervasive theme of hers and is certainly strong in the Servant's Quarters. Although, before reading that stuff, this isn't the theme that jumped out at me. Blame and luck seemed much more prominent areas of exploration, and I wonder if anyone else had any thoughts about this? I was hoping Freed would talk about this, and maybe this is more a question for her on Wednesday.
Now, let me preface this one by saying I enjoyed this novel, was totally rapt in the fiction, but there are a few story elements that really bothered me. Like Joseph, the passage of time was totally unclear to me. I also thought Cressida was 15 from part 2 to the end, and felt a little sick to my stomach watching her fall into bed with Harding and Campbell. Toward the end, we start hearing about her applying to universities and I think I remember reading that she's 19 at the very end, maybe in the Coda, but I think this is a case of too little too late. Is there any indication of her age when she has sex with these guys? Maybe I missed something. And, as a side comment, did it bother anyone else how blatant the whole looking for a father figure in a lover thing plays out with Harding? This little Freudian package was a little too tidy for my taste, a little too simple. Thoughts?
Oh, I left something out. So the point Freed is making with her essay, or at least my interpretation of it, can be summarized by the following:
ReplyDelete"The more obsessed I became with chasing down a plan, with wrestling the novel into the confines of an abstraction, the more the real fiction eluded me...a writer with a fixed idea is like a goose laying a stone."
Okay, first of all, what is "real fiction"? And if we can define that, what would "fake fiction" be? And secondly, we all talked about individual processes and I've said it before, but I'll say it again: I like outlines. And to me, this sounds like she thinks this is the wrong approach. Isn't that a little unfair? Different strokes for different folks, I say, and another thing: a problem that I had with "If You Follow Me" was that it was too dawdling. Freed writes, "The way I write best is in scenes, scenes built upon scenes." Fine, but you can pack a billion scenes on top of each other that "tie together," but if they don't amount to something greater than the sum of the scenes, if there isn't a driving through line, then the novel is just a highway to yawnsville. I want a highway to a climax, that everything builds up to, (well maybe not everything, subplots are cool,) but I want a novel to have one big story. Not just an amalgamation of good scenes. What do you guys think?
As has already been mentioned, I'll be interested to discuss Cressida's voice in the novel, how she functions as narrator, someone telling her own story--I'm especially curious to know what you all thought about how she paces her story. We have a novel, obviously, but it's a short novel, and the story is narrated with an economy I tend to see in 'epic' short stories-- 'Brokeback Mountain,' any number of Alice Munro stories. What does the novel gain by speeding through a life, the way Cressida does, and foregoing a lot of what the reader might expect to see on the page (such as beginning part 2 with mentioning Ma's marriage to Mr. Ledson, after their big argument at the end of part 1--what about the time between?). And again, since this is a short, fast novel--one could read this in a few hours--how does form influence the story? Brevity seems like a conscious narrative strategy, so I'm hoping we can discuss how this relates to the various craft techniques at work here...
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed how Freed paces the novel. To me, it felt almost realistic? When we tell stories to friends we try to tell the most important parts of our stories and always do our best to give the juiciest pieces without dragging on. Her theatre background does resonate with this piece. It does feel theatrical only to keep our interest in reading until the very end.
ReplyDeleteAs far as voice was concerned, i had a hard time noticing as she aged, since there were no vocal markers that i picked up on. I wonder if the novel would have lost anything, though, by moving to third person.
ReplyDeleteI was interested in her article about writing a story when you seemed pressured to do so. Once again though, i feel it is hard to just take her advice when approaching my own writing, because what motivates someone to write is so personal. for example, there may be those who work best under pressure, and i wondered while i was reading the article if thats what the people pressuring her for another book in a year might have been relying on. I relate more to Freed in that i need to take my time with a piece otherwise i feel overwhelmed, but i was wondering if there was anyone that felt they produced better work when under a strict schedule?
Oh geez, I wonder what the book would have been like if told from the perspective of one of the many servants? I kept wondering about all those servants- I mean the book is called The Servants' Quarters. It's obviously a choice- keeping the focus straight ahead, directly in front of Cressida but still- are all those servants mere invisible machines?
ReplyDeleteAt times Mr. Harding reminded me of Michael Jackson. If he only would have forced everyone else to where a veil. (sorry no question with this subject matter)
In the Mary interview with TC- Freed states that "All art is amoral." This made my blood pressure rise in excitement. I wonder how people feel about this idea. Maybe I just like the word amoral.
My questions really had to do with setting. I kept wondering where exactly are we in this novel? I had a vague idea that we were in South Africa post WWII but I couldn't ever pinpoint place exactly and get a clear idea of the current social or cultural interactions of the place. Or if it was important to this story. I was wondering what Freed's intent was to keep all of that vague.
ReplyDelete