In the last couple of years, since I’ve been teaching screenwriting, I’ve been thinking obsessively about story design. Writing a good film is all about creating an airtight story that has the feeling of inevitability and delivers physiological satisfaction: shuddering, shivering, laughing, cringing, crying—but about someone else’s problems. A good film provides emotional and physical release, what Aristotle called catharsis. There are, as always, exceptions to this rule, but Hollywood seeks to make movies that affect us in these ways.So what about novels? Is a cathartic story, one that delivers a quickening of heartbeat and breath, the essence of a good novel?
It is unlikely that most of us would read a novel devoid of any story at all, as story is one of the primary ways our minds make sense of the world. Narrative helps us explain things, comforting and grounding us even when we’re wrong. There is also a delightful escape in engaging with the problems of other people and leaving our own problems behind. Sometimes all we want is an airtight story that makes us feel something strongly.
But really good novels—the ones we discuss, praise, remember—offer more than that. They display a view of the world from a particular standpoint, an individual brain’s way of thinking that we might not have encountered before. They use the music and poetry of language, an element that interacts with story, but has its own satisfactions independent of story. And the reading of a good novel employs our intellect. We rarely absorb a novel in one or even two sittings (unlike film), and between those sittings we have time to think, to contemplate an author’s intentions and enter a conversation.
So yes, a good story is usually embedded in a good novel, but a really good novel engages us in a ways that ignite all our sensibilities and remind us what it means to be human.
2 Comments
I agree. Creating a world that we can see as "new" in some way, even if it is our own, allows us to see things slightly differently, and in that process often the mundane becomes beautiful.
I think the reason why a really good novel enraptures me is the world it brings me in. Even novels that claim to be set in our own world or universe still act as though they are a vacation to another world, or another time and place; the tour we are given through the characters eyes allow us to transplant ourselves such that even though the actions and reactions, committed by or upon the characters we are introduced to, may be horrific, the world itself it still beautiful in its own way.
Add Comment