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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.
Realism
As a philosophical term, realism raises complex issues, such as What is real? Is everything? Is nothing? Am I? Are you? How can I know? and other late-night ponderings. But since the nineteenth century, realism accumulated specific meanings that are important for a writer to understand. Realism became associated with a type of fiction that argued that art was not only about extraordinary events, amazing places, and spectacular characters, but could be fashioned from everyday life. Realism justified fiction that stressed accurate observation of characters, scenes, events, and problems that are familiar to regular folks.
Realists felt they were doing more serious work than the writers of wild adventure stories and improbable love stories, whom they called Romanticists, because realists tried to show how people actually lived and suffered and dealt with their problems. The story of a kid growing up in Mississippi was as much a subject for great art as the story of a European prince; a salesman was as significant as a tycoon. Realism demonstrated that relatively simple plots could be effective structures for long works. As in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, beauty lay in the ordinary surroundings and rituals of human experience. Realism recognized a responsibility to record the more mundane and less admirable aspects of daily life. Most important, it let you perceive that your own region, your own background, and your own experience were fit subjects for art. That remains one of realism's strongest legacies.
American realists of the nineteenth century were limited in a number of ways. Since many knew only middle-class life, that was all that was real to them. They were prudish, and their treatment of sex tended to be anything but "real." Generally committed to an optimistic view of life, they sometimes could not deal with the tragic implications of their own subjects. You could say they violated their own premises by limiting the notion of what is real. But other realists came along who knew of poverty and prisons, violence and brutality.
Realism no longer means limiting yourself to the small trials and tribulations of middle-class life. For one thing, we know that middle-class life is not filled with small trials and tribulations but, as John Cheever recorded, with alcoholism and suicide, with break-ins and breakdowns. Our whole sense of what is real has been transformed. Don DeLillo's nightmare world of toxic spills is on the nightly news. Our sense of subject matter has changed. Denis Johnson's murderous criminals seem as close to us as the people we pass on the street. The worlds of the schizophrenic, the addict, the political zealot -- the people who have been pushed to the margins of society -- are as real as the world at the center. Our ordinary lives are improbable.
Yet realism remains an important aesthetic principle. The lives you depict are powerful because they seem true, immediate, and real. The events may be bizarre, but they are believable, as in the fiction of Mary McGarry Morris or Alice McDermott, with their weird abductions and suburban riots. The plots might be twisted, but they seem to grow naturally out of the possibilities and dangers of the real world.
If you provide enough convincing information, your readers will accept the reality of your characters no matter how upsetting or outrageous their actins are. If you don't provide the information that gives insight into background and motivation, the characters seem made up, implausible. If readers find them "unbelievable" the problem might lie not in what they do, but in what the writer didn’t' do. In Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" she has the Misfit himself convince us of his horrifying reality.
Even in surreal fictions, which leave traditional realism far behind, realist principles inhere. Gogol and Kafka have their own accuracy and almost obsessive attention to detail. Magical realism, the term used to describe such works, combines the ordinary with the inexplicable. In works by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Borges, Western rationality clashes with magical native cultures. In other writers' fictions it's the intermingling of the natural with the supernatural, the living with the dead. Each world is as real as the other. Before the invention of the term, America had its own magic realist tradition -- starting with Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James, and continuing in writers like Malamud, Pynchon, and even William Faulkner.
See Accuracy, Naturalism, Places and Place Names, Premise, Trust Your Material, "Write What You Know."
Realism
As a philosophical term, realism raises complex issues, such as What is real? Is everything? Is nothing? Am I? Are you? How can I know? and other late-night ponderings. But since the nineteenth century, realism accumulated specific meanings that are important for a writer to understand. Realism became associated with a type of fiction that argued that art was not only about extraordinary events, amazing places, and spectacular characters, but could be fashioned from everyday life. Realism justified fiction that stressed accurate observation of characters, scenes, events, and problems that are familiar to regular folks.
Realists felt they were doing more serious work than the writers of wild adventure stories and improbable love stories, whom they called Romanticists, because realists tried to show how people actually lived and suffered and dealt with their problems. The story of a kid growing up in Mississippi was as much a subject for great art as the story of a European prince; a salesman was as significant as a tycoon. Realism demonstrated that relatively simple plots could be effective structures for long works. As in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting, beauty lay in the ordinary surroundings and rituals of human experience. Realism recognized a responsibility to record the more mundane and less admirable aspects of daily life. Most important, it let you perceive that your own region, your own background, and your own experience were fit subjects for art. That remains one of realism's strongest legacies.
American realists of the nineteenth century were limited in a number of ways. Since many knew only middle-class life, that was all that was real to them. They were prudish, and their treatment of sex tended to be anything but "real." Generally committed to an optimistic view of life, they sometimes could not deal with the tragic implications of their own subjects. You could say they violated their own premises by limiting the notion of what is real. But other realists came along who knew of poverty and prisons, violence and brutality.
Realism no longer means limiting yourself to the small trials and tribulations of middle-class life. For one thing, we know that middle-class life is not filled with small trials and tribulations but, as John Cheever recorded, with alcoholism and suicide, with break-ins and breakdowns. Our whole sense of what is real has been transformed. Don DeLillo's nightmare world of toxic spills is on the nightly news. Our sense of subject matter has changed. Denis Johnson's murderous criminals seem as close to us as the people we pass on the street. The worlds of the schizophrenic, the addict, the political zealot -- the people who have been pushed to the margins of society -- are as real as the world at the center. Our ordinary lives are improbable.
Yet realism remains an important aesthetic principle. The lives you depict are powerful because they seem true, immediate, and real. The events may be bizarre, but they are believable, as in the fiction of Mary McGarry Morris or Alice McDermott, with their weird abductions and suburban riots. The plots might be twisted, but they seem to grow naturally out of the possibilities and dangers of the real world.
If you provide enough convincing information, your readers will accept the reality of your characters no matter how upsetting or outrageous their actins are. If you don't provide the information that gives insight into background and motivation, the characters seem made up, implausible. If readers find them "unbelievable" the problem might lie not in what they do, but in what the writer didn’t' do. In Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" she has the Misfit himself convince us of his horrifying reality.
Even in surreal fictions, which leave traditional realism far behind, realist principles inhere. Gogol and Kafka have their own accuracy and almost obsessive attention to detail. Magical realism, the term used to describe such works, combines the ordinary with the inexplicable. In works by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Borges, Western rationality clashes with magical native cultures. In other writers' fictions it's the intermingling of the natural with the supernatural, the living with the dead. Each world is as real as the other. Before the invention of the term, America had its own magic realist tradition -- starting with Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James, and continuing in writers like Malamud, Pynchon, and even William Faulkner.
See Accuracy, Naturalism, Places and Place Names, Premise, Trust Your Material, "Write What You Know."