Gertrude Stein, who didn’t like Ezra Pound, famously called him “a village explainer.” I guess she felt he was a bore who had a lot to say about things that shouldn’t need any explaining.
I use the term occasionally to call out examples of a kind of village-explainerish narrative that, for example, tells you the widow was grief-stricken–after you’ve already seen the widow in her grief.
When we write fiction, a good 85% to 90% of what we do is create images, gestures, and actions, to illuminate events so completely that they need no explaining. Do this right and there’s no need to summarize, explain, or interpret..
Too many of us explain far too much. We just can’t seem to help it. I do it, too–see the novel I’m posting as I go: not bad first draft, but far too much summary for my taste.
The late coach Jim Valvano said of basketball, “Easy to understand, hard to do.” That holds true here, too: we know good fiction writing when we see it; in this sense, it’s “easy to understand”–so easy it has spawned the cliche: “Show don’t tell.”
But just try it. Hard to do.
Why should this be? Why are we are so compelled to tell, tell, tell? Are we all, at heart, village explainers?
My personal theory is that written language was never meant to be an artistic medium. From the get go, writing in the schools has been about teaching kids how to write narrative reports, business letters, scientific papers, critical analyses–the kinds of communication skills that produce a literate workforce. Virtues like nuance, attitude, subjectivity have never been stressed.
We were taught that proper writing starts with the general and moves to the specific. We lead with our thesis (the general) and support it with proof points (the specific). Fiction, by contrast, works almost exactly the other way around: it’s all proof points (the specific) leading toward generalities out of which eventually, an implied theme (thesis) emerges.
Easy to understand but hard to do.
What exactly am I saying then? That to write good fiction, we have to unlearn everything we learned in school?
Yes indeed, that’s exactly what I’m saying. At least it’s a start–but I hear the bell, so it’ll have to wait.
In fact, there’s a lot more to say on the subject, and for that reason I’m going to break this post into two.
Click for The Village Explainer – Part 2…and Part 3
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