Good Stories
13 January 2010
Sometimes you show someone a story — this happens in workshops, or submitting to publishers, or just in life — and they say, “The characters in this story are flat,” or, “This story seems to have been written by someone whose native language is not English,” and then they seem to consider that the end of the discussion.
Here’s why this is weird. The first thing to ask about a story is whether you like it. The first thing is not to go down some list of characteristics a putatively good story is supposed to have and look for ways in which the story in front of you does or doesn’t measure up. Sometimes good stories are built around flat characters. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are flat characters, but many people love to read stories about them. I read them often myself. Sometimes good stories are written in bizarre broken English. Amos Tutuola comes to mind; The Palm-Wine Drinkard is great, partly because of its bizarre broken English. You read it and you know it’s great. Then, if you like, you ask why. That’s the correct order.
It’s not that any story of mine has received this treatment recently (although they certainly have, often); I’m not thinking of any particular incident. But I was reading some mainstream literary magazines, I won’t say which ones, and marvelling at how carefully crafted and how boring the stories were. Carefully crafted, boring stories come from paying attention to the characteristics a good story ought to have and then writing towards those characteristics instead of taking care that your story is, first and foremost, actually good.
I am sorry this is so vague. It’s just something that came to mind, a strange misconception that I often think about.
Henry James said that what makes a story good is its quality of “life.” He had a whole critical apparatus based on this notion of “life.” What the hell did he mean? I’m sure I don’t know any better than anyone else. But if Henry James wasn’t willing to get any more specific than “life,” I’m not sure the rest of us should either.
Comments (2)
Like teaching for the test, not the content of the course. Truly an annoying phenomenon. I’ve come to this opinion only after I’ve been out of school for a while. Unfortunately, at the time, I really wanted the grades even more than the knowledge.
It’s as though in our love for naming and cataloging parts of things, we forget that there may be other parts (perhaps the most important parts) that are less easy to describe, and that therefore get left out. Knowledge that’s hard to test, for example, or this quality of “life.”