Alicia Costello

4 December 2009

Essay #1: When Lies Become Beautiful

            As I progress with my Bachelor’s degree in Literature, I read many books: some I love, some I hate, and all at superhuman speed to finish before the next essay is due.  Not often in one’s reading career does one get to practice for one’s writing career.  So often while reading The Great Fiction of the English Language can become daunting, and certainly the mainstream university curriculum has narrowed the books read to a select few of a certain quality and genre.  Instead of reading for the story experience or the interesting characters, Literature professors most often encourage students to read for high-quality writing, symbolic depth, and complexity of story.   In their most important job to teach what is “good” and what is “bad”, room for teaching “what is fun” has been ruthlessly marginalized and budgeted like everything else in university life.  I enjoyed exploring different types of fiction—narrative poetry, love poetry, historic poetry, fantasy stories, myth stories, historical fiction stories, and the everyday fiction that so enriches and brings human experiences into community.  I always knew the other stuff was there, but rarely got a chance to explore and appreciate different sub-genres of fiction with those who loved it too.  I’ve learned fine aspects of fiction sub-genres and pacing.

            One thing I learned about fiction as a whole is pacing.  By reading stories with pacing that was too slow, and some other stories where the pacing was too quick, and one or two stories where the pacing proved just right, like Goldilocks, I taste-tested until I came upon a comfortable middle.  The students in the class also seemed to respond to great pacing positively.  The better the pacing, the more positive comments came from the students, although they just refer to the story as “really good” without specifically labeling pacing as the culprit of their surprise.

            This began my thinking about pacing as a whole, noticing it in everything I read.  Many writers and literary agents and editors I’ve met agree pacing is the most important aspect to a novel, and pacing for today’s reader is the key to getting published, but the question remains: “Well, what is good pacing?”  To answer this question, one may only hand a few books over and say, “Well, read this one and this one. They’re good.”    Just like porridge, pacing is largely an aspect to writing that is, for the most part, unquantifiable.   Some editors and agents have little sayings; Terry Glaspey, an editor for Harvest House Publishers, told me a good rule of thumb was to “have something happen every six pages”.  While this specific advice wasn’t applicable in our short-story and poetry limited class, it gave me a good idea of how quickly today’s readers become bored and how hard writers must work to keep up with them.  Minot comments on pacing throughout his ranting, but doesn’t realize it—especially when discussing what is “good fiction and bad fiction” from chapter 12.  When he says, “There is nothing so dull as a step-by-step account of what has happened to you over the course of an average day,” he actually refers to pacing.  Any great writer can and will make every day events wonderful, the real trick is editing these events to a good pace.  The pacing of older novels was longer, and often included many more of the day’s activities that today’s novels include, an example being Jane Austen, who often included long, rambling conversations or lengthy garden walks.  Whenever I try to describe BBC film adaptations of Jane Austen novels, I say, “True to the book in every way—including pacing.  Drink some coffee beforehand.”

            I’ve also learned, or remembered, about fiction as a collection of sub-genres. By reading the couple of myth stories we had presented, a couple of historical fiction, that hilarious waiter story, and many others, I remembered some of these sub-genres even existed.  I usually dash past Popular Historical Fiction to the Classic Literature section, and I usually dodge the casual readers in the Popular Fiction section to peek into History where they house The Iliad and Poetics (not to be confused with Historical Fiction, which is written now and often features bonnets, love, and dudes with axes). By reading these forgotten literature sub-genres, I’ve discovered a new love for myth stories, got reacquainted with historical fiction, which once fueled my love of literature but got dumped because a lot of it is formulaic, and graciously experienced popular fiction, which I am usually way too busy to enjoy.

            The wonderful thing about each type of sub-genre is the stories at the thematic root, are the same, but come to the reader in different aspects.  The historical fiction Jennifer presented had the same strong female as Naomi’s fox story.  They both discuss a slightly different aspect of the human condition wrapped in vastly different packaging.  This wonderful dynamic occurs because while our lives are wrapped in different packaging, many humans experience the same ordeals and deal with the same type of people. While talking about all types of fiction, Minot says in Chapter Thirteen “similarities to persons and places are frequent, intentional, and occasionally brazen.”  The fact that fiction may take these same instances and put them in such wonderfully different and entertaining stories is one thing I adore about comparing different types of sub-genre.

            In this class, I’ve learned about various aspects of the fiction genre, including finding the “just right” pacing and rediscovering different sub-genres.  With my newfound knowledge, I plan to judge books with tools I never learned in those “other” literature classes.