How Do You Say “Spoiler Alert” in French?

Quite a bit of attention has been given to the counterintuitive findings of this study by Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego’s psychology department. The gist is that when readers were told in the ending of a story before they read it, i.e., the ending was spoiled, readers enjoyed the story more. I was reminded of a Faulkner seminar I once took; we read Absalom, Absalom, and the teacher pointed out that the first pages of the book provide an outline of the entire story that follows. It’s as if Faulkner were saying, here, I’m going to give away the surprises of the plot here at the beginning, so that you can forget that crap and we can focus on the important stuff. And, indeed, one of the authors of the spoiler study is quoted saying, “Plots are just excuses for great writing. What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing.” Faulkner would approve.

But, but…

But the researchers are careful to note that they do not have a new recipe for writers to follow. After all, spoilers helped only when presented in advance, outside of the piece. When the researchers inserted a spoiler directly into a story, it didn’t go over quite as well.

Isn’t that odd? I’m curious how exactly the spoilers were inserted into the stories. Did the readers sense that the altered stories were betraying themselves? I dug out one of the stories the researchers used, “The Bet,” by Chekhov (not one of his best, by the way), and it wasn’t clear to me how a spoiler could be inserted into the text without disrupting the rhythm of the piece. Maybe a skilled writer could give away the ending in a story in a way that gets the benefit without losing the reader. But, taking the study’s result at face value, apparently the lesson for writers is that they should never try insert spoilers into their stories; instead they should send spoiler e-mails to their readers before the readers have had a chance to read.

In America, to say that you could see the ending coming from a hundred pages away is a pretty terrible insult to a book. (This notion has been codified in Flannery O’Connor’s often repeated construction, that a story’s ending should seem “surprising yet inevitable.”) But this is not necessarily a universal principle. I’m not as widely read in internation literature as I would like to be, but a friend who does literary translations from French once told me that the notion that endings must be surprising seems to be an idiosyncrasy of contemporary English literature. The rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care so much if you can see the ending as it approaches. C’est la vie. Oui? And now the science seems to say maybe they’re onto something.

(Cross-posted.)

Hint Fiction Film

A handful of stories from the Hint Fiction anthology, including my own “Knock Knock Joke,” have been selected as the basis for a film contest associated with the 2012 Vail Film Festival. The challenge is to convert 25 words into a one minute film — check it out here.

(The book cover image above was created by Oscar E. Armstrong IV.)

Short Stories, New and Reviewed

Two quick notes:

• I have a new short story, titled “Location,” out in the new issue of The Normal School. It’s a terrific literary magazine. Subscribe. You won’t regret it.
• Matt Bell has posted a (long!) review of my recent story, “The Beauty Engine,” and it’s a great review. Check it out here at his blog.

Quantifying Hamlet

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.

Quantitative analysis is, to my mind, an intriguing and under-utilized lens for examining literature. It’s not hard to see why; most literature grad students would probably rather claw their eyeballs out than try to solve a partial-differential equation. Luckily, here comes Franco Moretti to bring the data. And it turns out, the math is easy!

IDEAS: Did you use any software or algorithms to produce the diagrams that appear in your “Hamlet” article?

MORETTI: I re-read the whole play and simply marked down who was talking to whom, scene after scene. Slowly, the network took shape. Now of course that can and should be done by a computer…but I wanted to have a sense — almost a direct sense — of the network slowly taking shape.

IDEAS: What did you learn about “Hamlet” as you watched this network take shape?

MORETTI: One thing is the discovery of how central Horatio is to the play. And that is interesting in itself, because Horatio is usually not one of the characters on whom people focus. He’s a very bland character, and he usually speaks very blandly….Usually we think of central characters as important in every possible way, but this is not the case here.

IDEAS: Meaning what?

MORETTI: We have to re-think our idea of character altogether. It disproves our thinking about characters in binary terms: i.e., they’re either a protagonist or a minor character. They’re either round or flat. Now there seem to be more positions along this continuum.

I think, actually, we know this intuitively — that some stories have characters who are not “major” characters, and yet they act as a fulcrum or funnel for the action of the story. Nick Caraway in The Great Gatsby might be an extreme example. Still, this word nerd thinks it’s pretty cool that someone has demonstrated the idea with data.

(Cross-posted.)

Interview, New Story, and More

The good people at Midwestern Gothic have posted a short interview with me. The occasion for this interview is my new short story “Beauty Engine,” which appears in Midwestern Gothic #1. You can buy it here, along with the rest of MG #1, in e-book or paper.

• The Hint Fiction anthology continues to get attention, including these cool student designed book covers for stories from the anthology. There’s one in there for my story, “Knock Knock Joke.”

Here's a random monkey picture, because monkeys are funny.

• Back in December, I did an introduction for an reading/interview featuring the matchless Cortright McMeel and his excellent first novel, Short. The whole event is available as a podcast. Check it out.
• My novel The Reconstructionist was published in the UK last year, but meanwhile I’ve been working with the US editor at Harper Perennial on a series of extensive revisions. I’m happy to say we’ve wrapped those up now, and the book is headed toward copyediting, cover design, and publication. It will be in Harper Perennial’s winter catalog, which means publication sometime in the Jan-Apr timeframe of 2012. Compared with the UK version, the US edition will be heavily revised and expanded, about 100 pages longer altogether. I’m very excited about the changes, and looking forward to getting it out into readers’ hands.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day 2011

“The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

– Philip Roth

Is the Denver Post Book Section Vanishing?

Recently, The Denver Post published the following note:

Starting today, we are changing the way we present our print coverage of books and reading in The Denver Post. Rather than separating our reviews, interviews and columns into a single section, we are integrating the coverage into the rest of our A&E pages, in the same way we present such topics as theater, music and film.

You will see books stories on the cover of the Arts & Entertainment section … and we’ll still reserve a few tightly organized pages inside … so you can check out new releases and see what’s selling best. We’ll also give a midweek report on new books each Wednesday in the back of the newspaper’s Food section.

It’s not actually clear from this whether the Post is cutting down on book coverage. Maybe they’re only planning to take the same amount of page space that they gave to books in the past and redistribute it around the paper. I hope so. But it’s entirely possible that “integrating the coverage” is simply what you get when you don’t have enough material to fill a section anymore. And if you saw the meager two pages given to books in last Sunday’s edition, it’s hard not to feel dispirited.

I once had the opportunity to chat with a newspaper publisher, and something he said that stayed with me was this: out of all the bits he had to cut from his paper over the years (sections, columnists, etc.), the only time it had inspired angry letters was when he cut a comic strip.

There are two things to notice about this. One is that people really like their comic strips. The other is that publishers actually do pay attention to the mail that they get.

Book lovers, if you’ve ever read a review in the Denver Post, please — take two minutes to send a note to tell the Post that book coverage is important to you, and that book coverage influences your decision to read the paper. Send your note to Ray Mark Rinaldi, Arts & Entertainment Editor, rrinaldi@denverpost.com.

Below is the note that I sent. Feel free to steal as much of it as you like.

Dear Mr. Rinaldi,

I saw your note, published Dec. 12, about the book section, and I wanted to communicate my concern. The concept of redistributing book coverage throughout the paper seems like it has its pluses and minuses (overall, I think I preferred the standalone book section), but I’m more worried that this change in format might be only a consequence of, or excuse for, reducing book coverage in the Post.

Denver has developed a thriving literary scene in recent years, and a good part of it has been driven by the decision of the Denver Post to continue to publish a book section after many other daily papers have cut theirs. For this reader, high quality book coverage in the Post has set it apart from most of the other local and national media available to me. It’s a big part of the reason I read the paper, and I fear that if the book coverage dwindles I will have one less reason to read.

Thanks for your time and attention, sincerely,

Nick Arvin

(Cross-posted.)

The Future of the Novel, or Whatever It Will Be Called

I.

Looking back, I can see now that there were a couple of rather pleasant years after the Kindle first came out, when I could deceive myself into thinking that things wouldn’t change much, fundamentally, for books. Books would lose the paper and go electronic; publishers would get squeezed; bookstores would (sadly) get squeezed; but the basic nature of the book itself, a thing of lots and lots of words strung together and meant to be read in sequence, would not change. The Kindle allows you to read lots and lots words in sequence, and it does a pretty good job of that, and it doesn’t do much else. So, consideration of the future of books boiled down to issues of distribution and pricing (for more on that, this post by Joe Konrath is quite interesting).

Steve Jobs, what have you wrought?

But now we have the iPad. The iPad is good for reading lots and lots of words in sequence, but it’s also good for a lot of other things, and it allows you to jumble all those things together to create something…new. That new thing, what will it be? That’s a question that writers will soon have to start grappling with, but I haven’t seen much grappling out there so far. The best piece I’ve seen on the subject is this article by Tom Chatfield.

One of the items mentioned in Chatfield’s article is an iPad version of Alice in Wonderland, in which the illustrations move as you turn your iPad, you can throw tarts at the Queen, you can hear the dormouse snoring, and so forth and so on. There aren’t a lot of books like this, yet, but surely there will be more soon, and original works will be coming. Will a multimedia extravaganza like that actually add anything to the experience of the book? That remains to be seen. But a lot of great novels have included snippets of other forms — letters, diaries, newspaper articles, poetry, plays. I love the photographs in WGSebald’s novels. Now there is the opportunity to involve other forms as well — music, videos, animations, games. How best to work those in, I’m not sure. But I bet someone will figure it out.

Alice for the iPad by Atomic Antelope

When an art form is disrupted by new technologies, the results can be extraordinary new art. Think of painting after the invention of photography. Think of music after the introduction of electronics. Now, the novel… For the novel, things might soon get awfully interesting.

II.

Another possible direction for the future of the novel is only gestured at by Chatfield’s article, but it’s possibly even more significant. Chatfield finishes his article with some musings from Don DeLillo, and DeLillo says this: “Novels will become user-generated. An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character. The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications. This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people speak, write and read.”

What’s he talking about? My first thought about a novel with the reader as the main character was, well, that’s a video game, or some kind of rarefied Choose Your Own Adventure. But, on reflection, I think DeLillo is saying the opportunities are much larger. Because there is now so much information about a reader in the electronic ether, it ought to be possible for a well-designed algorithm to go out there, gather the data on a reader, and then create a character that is in fact very much like that reader. It could easily figure out where you live, where you went to school, what you like to eat, and what is the name of your dog. But, more than that, if it had access to your e-mails and your Facebook and Twitter postings, it could probably develop a pretty good sense of how you communicate, what gets you angry and what makes you happy, whether you are an introvert or an extrovert — your character. And then that character could be slipped into a storyline.

And why stop there? If the novel has access to your various online accounts, it could not only glean data from them, but also insert things into them. So that, even though you’ve closed the book’s pages midway through, you might be cc’d on an e-mail between two of the book’s characters with some information that adds to the book’s storyline. Characters in the book might begin to appear in your Facebook and Twitter feeds, they might send you YouTube videos or direct you to a new blog post.

You might download a novel one day, and discover that there’s no “book” at all. It exists only in the online world, as a sequence of Facebook postings and Tweets and blogs and YouTubes and e-mails and text messages. Maybe you only observe the story that emerges, from the periphery. Or maybe you’re at the center of it, interacting with the characters — so that it’s like life, except that it’s only online and none of it’s real (“real”). What would that be? Would it be a novel? Or something completely different?

(Cross-posted.)

More Hint Fiction

The hint fiction anthology has been receiving more attention, including an appearance on NPR, and a review in The Denver Post. You can find my contribution to the anthology in the Post’s review, and if you listen all the way to the end of the the NPR audio, you can hear my story read by Scott Simon himself.

The Faces

“It occurred to us that there is one feature of the Manhattan landscape that we have never analytically described: the faces. So we went out and examined them. The first thing that struck us was how many, many there are. They occur, with rare exceptions, in a narrow belt of space between four and six feet above the pavement. A few glimmer darklingly from windows at an elevation higher than this, and once in a great while, usually late at night, a face may be seen on the pavement itself, but by and large the faces, with surprising conformity, restrict their ebb and flow, advance and withdrawal, as well as their more intricate cross- and counter-movements, to the narrow lateral area described above. Here they hover, like a dense pink cumulus, in a dogged flux as remarkable for its variety as for its nagging persistence.”

 

John Updike, The New Yorker, Talk of the Town, Nov. 17, 1962