Convention
Oct. 14th, 2004 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
odd_buttonsThe following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Convention
A literary convention is a feature that readers accept even though it violates what is considered real or probable. In Shakespeare's plays we accept that the characters speak in blank verse. In opera people sing while they are dying. There are all sorts of conventions in fiction, too. In first-person novels, characters like Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield artfully tell the story of their lives and talk to their readers for hundreds of pages.
Conventions liberate fiction. They allow you to tell the ending of a story before the beginning, what occurs before the story begins, or what happens after the story ends. You can move characters in time and space without describing what your characters did in between or how they got there. You can address your readers; you can address yourself.
You establish your own conventions just as you establish your own characters. If you begin by having your characters talking in an obscure sesquipedalian prose, or by interspersing interludes of raunchy vaudeville jokes and catastrophe statistics, readers will accept those strategies. The freedoms you seize license your fiction for its future liberties.
See Avant-garde, Formula, Metafiction, Premise.
Convention
A literary convention is a feature that readers accept even though it violates what is considered real or probable. In Shakespeare's plays we accept that the characters speak in blank verse. In opera people sing while they are dying. There are all sorts of conventions in fiction, too. In first-person novels, characters like Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield artfully tell the story of their lives and talk to their readers for hundreds of pages.
Conventions liberate fiction. They allow you to tell the ending of a story before the beginning, what occurs before the story begins, or what happens after the story ends. You can move characters in time and space without describing what your characters did in between or how they got there. You can address your readers; you can address yourself.
You establish your own conventions just as you establish your own characters. If you begin by having your characters talking in an obscure sesquipedalian prose, or by interspersing interludes of raunchy vaudeville jokes and catastrophe statistics, readers will accept those strategies. The freedoms you seize license your fiction for its future liberties.
See Avant-garde, Formula, Metafiction, Premise.