![[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.
Grotesque
The term is used in literary criticism to refer to incongruous, bizarre, and abnormal characters and events. As far back as we can remember, literature has always been people with the abnormal, with giants, monsters, and unworldly creatures. Dickens's grotesque characters are often physically repulsive. Sherwood Anderson focused specifically on psychological distortion. Flannery O'Connor stressed spiritual deformation.
It's best not to set out consciously to be grotesque. Create your characters truly, fully, and fearlessly, and let the critics worry about what category of grotesquerie, if any, they might inhabit. If you set out to create grotesque effects, your fiction is likely to come across as artificial and self-conscious. If the world you "know" is, in reality, grotesque, then your fiction will be naturally unnatural -- its strangeness not unbelievable but as convincing as a cross-town bus.
See Blue Moon, Character, Realism.
Grotesque
The term is used in literary criticism to refer to incongruous, bizarre, and abnormal characters and events. As far back as we can remember, literature has always been people with the abnormal, with giants, monsters, and unworldly creatures. Dickens's grotesque characters are often physically repulsive. Sherwood Anderson focused specifically on psychological distortion. Flannery O'Connor stressed spiritual deformation.
It's best not to set out consciously to be grotesque. Create your characters truly, fully, and fearlessly, and let the critics worry about what category of grotesquerie, if any, they might inhabit. If you set out to create grotesque effects, your fiction is likely to come across as artificial and self-conscious. If the world you "know" is, in reality, grotesque, then your fiction will be naturally unnatural -- its strangeness not unbelievable but as convincing as a cross-town bus.
See Blue Moon, Character, Realism.