Sarah Larson asks Ira Glass, in "Ira Glass Hears It All/Three decades into 'This American Life,' the host thinks the show is doing some of its best work yet—even if he’s still jealous of 'The Daily'" (The New. Yorker).
For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.It’s funny, because he was probably describing it so we could see through it and understand the manipulation. But, for me, it was a completely actionable agenda. One of the things he says gives pleasure is the proairetic code, which is literally just the idea that when you have any sequence of actions—this leads to this—it creates narrative suspense. And what he points out is that the events can be incredibly banal, you don’t have to have a murder or anything. It can really be somebody getting up, and the house is very quiet, and they walk into the other room and down the stairs, and nothing’s happening, but simply the forward motion creates the question of what will happen next. And you can make people stick with you.And at the time I was trying to think about, like, How can you make a compelling story about everyday life? And so I put that into place in interviews. I would have people just lay out that this happened, and then this happened, knowing that the listener would come along. I still use that. That’s the structure of the show. It was just completely fundamental.
I haven't studied this topic, so the question that occurs to me may be tedious to those who have, but why are so many people terribly boring when they go into this-happened-and-then-this-happened mode? It's how little children relay information. Little children... and adults whose desire to hold the floor exceeds the value of their material. Maybe that's what fiction-writers are. And, of course, most of them are quite tedious. They're not Balzac.
Wikipedia page I read while writing this blog post: "Shaggy dog story." Excerpt: "As a comic device, the shaggy-dog story is related to unintentional long windedness, and the two are sometimes both referred to in the same way."
And I thought about Artemus Ward, (1834-1867, arguably America's first stand-up comedian). I've blogged about him before (back in 2017), where I quoted from one of my favorite books, "Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians," by Justin Martin:
Ostensibly, he was delivering a lecture called The Babes in the Wood... At some level, it certainly reminded audiences of all the oratories and lectures and sermons they’d been forced to endure.... The impression that his performances were rambling and spontaneous was just that, an impression: he was in complete control... He would begin by struggling to describe the claustrophobic feeling of traveling inside a very small stagecoach. “Those of you who have been in the penitentiary . . . ,” he offered. But then his voice trailed off, and his eyes filled with panic.... As Ward tried to extricate himself from this awkwardness, the audience could almost see the wheels turning in his mind.....
Ward’s show clocked in at exactly one hour. Just as it opened on a high note, it closed on one, too. As the hour mark drew nigh, Ward would reach into his pocket and retrieve his watch. He’d stare at it, an expression of alarm spreading across his face. He had been rambling rambling for many minutes, traveling countless conversational tangents, yet he’d failed to address the subject at hand, “The Babes in the Wood.” But what could he say now? What pithy comment about the topic could he offer that might tie things up? There simply wasn’t enough time left. After a few more stumbles and false starts, Ward would apologize, promising to give the subject a full airing during his next lecture....
But how does this connect with semiotics? I'm sorry but this post is already too long, too one-thing-after-another.... A fresh post on top of this will feel best. I need the forward motion and the question of what will be blogged next.
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29 comments:
Ira Glass is just another of the 4,342 reasons why NPR should be totally and completely defunded.
If the Libs want their own damn radio network, pay for it.
The most recent review of "S/Z."
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Just want to say the delivery was fast, the book was exactly as described.
This American Life use to be a great show. It has gone downhill in recent years.
"Why are so many people terribly boring when they go into this-happened-and-then-this-happened mode?"
Parataxis vs. hypotaxis.
Parataxis: Our natural way of communicating (as seen in the way children retell events) is this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened ... [to infinity].
Hypotaxis: how we organize a narrative after some thought: because this happened, this happened, and as a result, this happened, which caused this other thing to happen. Hypotaxis produces chains of cause and effect that communicate WHY something happened.
The problem with hypotaxis is that in very long forms, like the novel, it can seem cold or artificial, and the genius of many of the great novelists is to make a story SEEM paratactic but actually use subtle changes in things like tense, aspect, point of view, phrasing, and strategic interruption enable the reader to piece together those chains of cause and effect and recognize patterns--irony, poetic justice, repetition--which can then also be used to great effect by either sticking to them or breaking them to produce surprise.
The difference between a boring "...and then ... and then" story and a charming anecdote is that there is a payoff, like a punch-line, for the anecdote.
If you are over a certain age you may remember having it drilled into you that you can't start a sentence with "and." There's actually nothing grammatically wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction. But clever and experienced grammar school teachers realized that eliminating "and" at the start of a sentence is a quick-and-dirty method of helping their students write better narratives.
I took a class once on how to teach undergraduates to write good term papers. There's a theory about why people write bad term papers, at least in the first draft. The theory is that left to his own devices, a student will structure the paper as follows: First, I thought this. Then I had this other thought, and the next thought I had was this other thing. And so on, stringing sentences one after the other in the order that they appeared chronologically in the student's mind.
You, then, if you are tutoring them, need to get them to rework the paper on thematic lines rather than on chronological lines.
FWIW, there is nearly always some suspense involved in reading your blog posts. The suspense is, "Okay, she said that or quoted that. Where is she going with this?"
Mr O'Malley in Crocket Johnson's strip Barnaby taught the dog Gorgon to talk ("hey, I can talk!") and he went into long frames of shaggy dog stories, boring both O'Malley and Barnaby.
Gorgon also experimented with giving himself commands. Sit!
The queen died and then the king died, vs the queen died and then the king died of a broken heart.
NPR needs to be defunded on the first day if Trump wins.
If lefties like hearing their fantasies about an all-benevolent government, let them pay for it themselves.
I had a family member (years ago) who had to turn everything into a story, beginning the story at an earlier point in time than anyone needed to know. What awful anxiety made her do that? I tried to be patient and respectful, and actually, I succeeded. These long accounts were never funny. I think she was just venting some endless deep frustration about life itself. I didn't feel any enjoyable suspense, just wondered how much of my life I would be required to sacrifice.
"The problem with hypotaxis is that in very long forms, like the novel, it can seem cold or artificial, and the genius of many of the great novelists is to make a story SEEM paratactic but actually use subtle changes in things like tense, aspect, point of view, phrasing, and strategic interruption enable the reader to piece together those chains of cause and effect and recognize patterns--irony, poetic justice, repetition--which can then also be used to great effect by either sticking to them or breaking them to produce surprise."
Thank you. That's very helpful. I wonder if you think Ira Glass isn't getting it quite right when he says "the idea that when you have any sequence of actions—this leads to this—it creates narrative suspense." And "simply the forward motion creates the question of what will happen next. And you can make people stick with you."
“For me, the most important book was “S/Z,” by Roland Barthes, where he takes apart a short story by Balzac phrase by phrase, paragraph by paragraph. What he’s interested in is, How does this story get its hooks into you? Why do you read to the next paragraph? Why do you care? And that feeling that you get at the end of a really good story, where you just feel, like, Ahh!—what produces that? And he names a bunch of mechanisms that, once you know them, you can create yourself.”
In “The Mezzanine” Nicholson Baker gets a compelling 150 page novel out of a 30 second escalator ride.
TL. DR.
Wow. I followed you all the way down that rabbit hole and you left me there dangling.
"Maybe that's what fiction-writers are. And, of course, most of them are quite tedious. They're not Balzac."
Wordiness has always been a problem for me. Always. I used to work at it. Then somewhere along the line I started to embrace it. It's what I do. That said, tediousness is the number one red flag I look out for when I'm writing fiction. If it's tedious to me, it reached that point far earlier for someone less invested in it. Every sentence counts when writing fiction. (Not so much when commenting on blogs.) And of course, less is more. I fail at that regularly.
The grammatical points are a great refresher. And, as always, your commenters are among the best.
At first I was kind of interested in this book, but that's pretty banal advice. You create long term suspense, in the story arc, and you create minor little questions that are answered two pages down, but not before you raise another one.
Why did that blue car drive by?
Were did this red piece of cloth come from?
Oh, we were being followed by a private detective.
Why is my door slightly ajar?
etc, etc, etc.
BTW, AI can do all of that stuff writing stories. It just can't make it interesting, well, not yet anyway.
Prof. M. Drout:
But clever and experienced grammar school teachers realized that eliminating "and" at the start of a sentence is a quick-and-dirty method of helping their students write better narratives.
Way too much credit to the teachers. More like, it was suggested as a style form (like not ending with a preposition) and it's easier to teach it as a rule than explain it any deeper.
It does nothing to help write a better narrative. Take for instance your sentence I referred to. Starting a sentence with but or and are both discouraged by style.
so where then is Trumptaxis - para, hypo or syn?
Piqued my interest enough to order the book.
This method reading is basically understanding the rhetorical dimensions of literature. Let me recommend Wayne Booth's
books "The Rhetoric of Fiction" and "The Rhetoric of Irony" as the foundational texts of this method. An ancillary field supporting rhetorical analysis of literature is reader response theory, which examines the complex psychology of literary responses. I. A. Richard's "Practical Criticism" is foundational for this subfield.
Perhaps the most famous one is "What did she and Billie Joe McAlsiter throw off the Talahachee Bridge?"
Parataxis : Hypotaxis :: Chronicle : History
"The problem with hypotaxis is that in very long forms, like the novel, it can seem cold or artificial, and the genius of many of the great novelists is to make a story SEEM paratactic "
This is where subplots come in, IMHO. The last novel I finished listening to on audiobook was The Big Sleep, and he had so many sub plots spinning, it was difficult to keep up with them, not to mention the large number of names of characters who were important to understanding the story, At the end though it ended with the question that was asked at the beginning in the greenhouse with General Sternwood, what happened to the his son-in-law, even though the Marlowe character kept saying that he wasn't looking for him, throughout the novel. The stories of the daughters, Carmen and Vivian, unfolded in seemingly separate directions, with several underworld characters showing up and disappearing, until it all got tied up in a nice little bow at the end.
Oddly, Marlowe didn't really change in the story, there was no "character arc" in the traditional sense. I don't think, maybe he did, but I think he was fully formed when the story started, and his character arc could be summarized as "the dude abides."
Ann said: "I wonder if you think Ira Glass isn't getting it quite right when he says "the idea that when you have any sequence of actions—this leads to this—it creates narrative suspense." And "simply the forward motion creates the question of what will happen next. And you can make people stick with you.""
I would say that sequences of actions create expectations rather than suspense. We have a sense that when someone puts one action after another, there is a cause-and-effect relationship, and we are probably usually forecasting, guessing ahead what is going to happen. A talented storyteller can entertain us by fulfilling those expectations ("I KNEW it!") OR by frustrating them those expectations ("I didn't see THAT coming!"). Suspense is one possible result of frustrating expectations. Probably the reader/listener can see that there are connections between the various events but can't see how they all fit together. But you don't need suspense or even any frustrated expectations to be successful: people also enjoy a story where they can see the ending coming a mile away if all the pieces are well done in themselves.
The Shaggy Dog story is almost entirely a play on audience expectations: we are given the impression that a grand synthesis of all the bizarrely disparate pieces of the story is always about to happen, and then there's just another diversion added to it, with the gimmick being how long you can keep the audience listening with no payoff. The "No Soap, Radio" joke is basically a shaggy dog story with a dumb punchline used to stop it rather than a shaggy dog story that goes on infinitely.
One way bad storytellers fail is by trying to tell one of those Agatha Christie-type stories where 30 seemingly irrelevant actions all suddenly pull together to explain everything. Most people can't pull this off, and when they try, you get the hopelessly digressive, rambling stories that make you never want to listen to a story from that person again.
"Most people can't pull this off, and when they try, you get the hopelessly digressive, rambling stories that make you never want to listen to a story from that person again."
This is why I don't see JJ Abrams movies anymore
I decided to reread Michener's books recently after reading through most of them in high school.
Currently 40% through Hawaii. Very long books. Some starting with a long chapter on the geological formation. Yet I was drawn into them then and again now 30+ yrs laterat a point where my attention span is much less.
What makes them so engaging to me? I think it's the deep dive into a place over generations really getting to know it's life. But there must be something more in how he tells the story and builds the characters.
I didn't feel any enjoyable suspense, just wondered how much of my life I would be required to sacrifice.”
Ha! I know exactly this. I feel guilty about it. (A little bit. OK not too much). I’m not really anti-social; I am anti-bad social. And most social is pretty dull.
It’s why I like the Althouse blog. Good social.
I always thought there was something "off" about Glass, then I read about his adopting a pit bull and letting the destructive animal control his life, and I understood.
Omg. Someone took a shot at Trump!
On the news now.
They hit him in the ear
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