Exploring where life and story meet!

Friday, August 1, 2014

On bad writers and good stories

"But it's not in the power of my gift.  You know what my forte is--the fanciful, the fairylike, the pretty…"  Anne on her writing style in Anne's House of Dreams.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis's excellent preface to his book George MacDonald: MacDonald is not a great writer, not even in the first or second tier of great writers, at least on a literary level, he is not what one would call an artist, but there is something there that defies words, he evokes something magical that simply uses words as a vehicle for its expression.  It is not how he says something but rather the sensations he inspires in his reader; he is not so much a writer as a mythologist.

I appreciate Lewis's incite into the writing of this fanciful man, I never quite understood what captivated me about MacDonald, his writing is sometimes poignant and painfully sweet, and at other times vague and rambling.  The myth behind the words is what I fell in love with rather than the words themselves.  I can be content now in knowing that an excellent writer and very learned man sometimes finds MacDonald's writing occasionally awkward; I love the man's stories but sometimes found the writing itself a little…cumbersome.

I begin to see a very clear pattern in my favorite authors: it is not so much the quality of the writing (though many of them are very gifted writers) so much as the 'soundtrack' behind the words.  Those inexplicable feelings stirred up as you read that do not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the words, grammar, or sentence structure.  The story behind the story as it were.  How good of a story do they tell, rather than how perfect of a grammarian are they, is the question I ask.  I've tried reading some of the modern 'classics' and if they are examples of 'good' literature, I will have to stick to my poor, uncultured selections.  I may be a literary ignoramus, but I am a happy idiot.  Those books may be 'literary' or some such undefinable academic jargon, but they have no soul.  I can't read a book that has no heart, that is illogical, or that is grim, depressing, and with never a hint of hope shining through; I cannot read something that has no echo of real life in its pages.  Even the most fantastic fictional world must conform somewhat to reality or there is no point in reading it.  Neither is something that is all happiness and roses satisfactory for the same reason.

I remember watching a movie a few years ago that the critics were raving about, they did bring the strange world to splendid life and I think the musical score was good, but the movie would have been far better if the characters weren't allowed to speak; their insipid dialogue and the predictable plot seemed an intrusion into this otherwise magical world they had created.  It was rather a shame.  The plot was one of those ancient culture threatened by intrusion from 'civilized' outsiders, one of whom is adopted into said endangered culture and falls in love with his new society, thus standing in opposition to his former allies as they make one final, glorious last stand.  Think Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai.  It is an old story and endures for good reason, it echoes somewhere deep inside and stirs that archaic thing we call a soul.  Just in this case, the tale was told so awkwardly that it detracted from the overall story, but the nonverbal parts of the movie were good enough to tell the tale without dialogue.  Job said it right in this instance, 'it is wisdom for you to remain silent.'  The artistry was there, but the story fell flat on its face because they were trying to sell an agenda rather than tell a story.

I suppose that is why I like movies like the original Star Wars, if you look at it from an artistic standpoint, it is rather ridiculous and the dialogue is certainly not what one would call witty, but it drags you in and stirs the deeps of your soul even so.  It is just good storytelling.  That's what I like about George MacDonald and my other favorite authors.  It is something that I fear is dying in this modern age, I have such a hard time finding a living author whose works I like or even a movie I really enjoy.  Most are just missing something, and I think it was something innate in MacDonald's writing: soul.  I can tolerate a certain amount of 'clunkiness' if the author (or producer) is adept in the art of story, but even the best writing (or effects) in the world cannot make up for a lack of heart and a bad story.

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