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Emily's avatar

So first of all, thank you for “gummy” as a description for books. I think of a lot of fiction — much of it the variety of thing you’re writing about, I think, the ones where the interior and the exterior are oil and water — as “damp.” I’ve never heard anyone else use a similar simile to describe it but “gummy” resonates.

The division of plot and character is such a disservice to young writers or at least it did a great disservice to me. I think a lot of this is because writers tend to be drawn to their own ideas either because the concept is of great interest to them (plot) or the psychology and actions of a person are of great interest (character). And writers, especially starting out, tend to be lopsided, tending to be drawn to one or the other. For me, character psychology was the spark that lit the wick of my stories. And I saw other “beginning” writers (and some professionals) who wrote those books you’re talking about, where the characters are dragged nonsensically through a series of events, and I knew I didn’t want to write like that, and so I got this idea that the tools those writers relied upon — stuff like notes and outlines — were bad tools, because they were creating bad fiction. But of course the tools are not the main problem — that would be like saying like a hammer is responsible for shoddy construction. (I mean, I guess it’s possible, but the hammer would have to be utterly fucked, like shattered maybe?, for that to be true. It’s hard to imagine.) Once I began using actual planning and structure (it took an embarrassingly long time), I discovered that that was how I could put together all the stuff that was fun — the character stuff — with the events. And create resonance not by forcing it through in a series of bullet points, but by looking for the ways the interior and exterior create counterpoints and rhymes. And then feeding the things that are good and resonant and growing them up.

Thank you for making me think about all this. I always look forward to seeing Sweater Weather in my inbox.

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Tara S's avatar

A book that I think articulates well how a novel of situation becomes a novel of character and the tension between the two is “Gaudy Night” by Dorothy Sayers. Which is a mystery novel that’s also a romance that’s also a novel of both situation and character.

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