The Four Dyads of Building Fictional Worlds: Part I
On how we talk about the virtues and qualities of writing fiction
Dear Friends,
Last week a Wired profile on Brandon Sanderson made the rounds in some online literary circles. In my most generous reading, the journalist tried to position himself (and his own taste) as an outsider to the world that Sanderson and his fans inhabit and wanted to try to pivot toward some transformational position by the end. I’d say the writer did not succeed in this attempt. The article itself comes across as a half-baked hit job that never fully transcends mean-spiritedness and ultimately undercuts its own ethos by never truly engaging Sanderson or his work on its own playing field (not to mention a hackneyed depiction of geek culture). The finishing blow was when Sanderson himself made a follow-up Reddit post that was magnanimous in that way that truly kills with its kindness.
I’m not here necessarily to engage with that discourse—not really—although it is relevant to what I’m here to write about today and provides me an example to spin off of.
There have been many debates about narratology and what goes into creating fictional worlds. Many of these debates focus on a more traditional type of storytelling versus experimental modes of fiction-making—or—endless [unhelpful] altercations about literary fiction versus genre fiction. What I’d like to offer up today is a re-framing of those interconnected relationships with an additional emphasis on both the writer’s style and the rhetorical purposes of the fictional work itself (i.e. in connection to audience). This is all to say I have my own theory to offer up for you all.
When one creates a storyworld, I’d argue there are four main dyads that go into it:
The tradition–innovation dyad
The prosaic–poetic dyad
The play–work dyad
The natural–supernatural dyad
To make this as short as possible (we’ll be getting into specifics soon): tradition–innovation mostly consists of your meat-and-potatoes narrative elements like character, plot, structure, setting, and so forth. When you remove one of these narrative elements that the reader usually expects, you lend yourself closer to innovation or experimentation.
As for prosaic–poetic, this gets closer to what we often talk about as style, voice, the lyric, and how the writer expresses themselves through the poetic quality of the sentence. Often this is spoken about in extremes of prose that is either “invisible” (the language does not call attention to itself for the reader) or “lyrical” (language that relies on poetic or literary devices and often does call attention to itself).
When we talk about play–work, it’s slightly less about structure and more about the rhetorical purpose of the work of fiction in relationship to the audience (and to some extent—the publisher). On the mass media end, we have writing that exists for entertainment, pleasure, familiar tropes, representations of norms and the status quo. On the other side of the spectrum, we have the theoretical, philosophical, and that which challenges both the status quo and the reader (by making them work for what they read).
The natural–supernatural is probably a familiar conversation to many, as it includes the laws of science and the natural world versus what lies outside of human understanding—or what humans speculate about. There is much more than has been and can be said about this, but I’ll leave this one alone for now.
As far as a Myers–Briggs-esque analysis of Sanderson, I’d wager most of his work falls more on the side of traditional/prosaic/playful/supernatural. These are traditional fantasies with imagined settings full of a unique take on magic, containing characters who embody familiar genre fiction tropes (for genre fiction readers), and stories written with invisible prose that are ultimately meant to entertain.
When Kehe wrote in that Wired article that Sanderson was a “bad” writer, what he could have said was that his own taste prefers prose that is more lyrical, dialogue that is more refined and ornate, fiction that intellectually challenges the reader to a greater degree, and stories that pay attention to the sonic quality of the sentence. These are all elements I prefer too, but just because someone makes different choices from me as a writer doesn’t mean they’re a “bad writer.” Sanderson is writing for himself (and his fans), just like many of us are. What I’m trying to offer up is here are rhizomatic ways to talk about fiction without necessarily putting one’s own taste in a hierarchical position.
Each dyad contains multiple questions and considerations that the writer most choose from based on a combination of personal interests, ideas, taste, voice, audience expectations, purpose of the text, genre expectations, publishing expectations, and all those intangible qualities to creative writing that lurk beneath the surface of the writer’s mind.
There are hard science fiction stories that take place on Earth ten years in the future that closely follow the logic of peer-reviewed rigor regarding engineering. There are also fantastical sci-fi stories that completely abandon the laws of thermodynamics. The same writer might write both of the aforementioned stories simply based on their own needs at the time. It’s not necessarily about a writer leaning holistically on one “side” of the dyad or the other. These are complex choices (and subconscious impulses) that go into every single story, novel, or work of fiction that we as writers create.
For a very self-centered or navel-gazing reason, I’ve been thinking about all these elements of worldbuilding to try to find a better perspective of the intersections where my work exists. Much of my work contains both literary and genre fiction elements, but I’ve rarely felt at home with either looming descriptor being placed on my work. What working on these dyads has helped me come to terms with is that the structure and content of my writing often takes a backseat to the version of me who is a stylist and foregrounds the music and imagistic quality of the language. I’ll say more on this later, but for your consideration these next four sections (well, only two today) are presented as perhaps a means to help you have a conversation with and take an inventory of your writerself and your body of fiction.
One accessibility caveat I have to make is that Substack doesn’t seem to really have the functionality built-in to create tables, so I’m using screenshots of a Google Sheet for each section below. If you’d like to view the dyad sheets, I’m including a link here.
For a little set-up, most of what I’m going to talk about here is regarding writers in the West (more specifically, the United States) using traditions of the West and writing in the English language. I’m defining traditional fiction here as prose-based narratives of the imagination created using words that make sentences and sentences that make paragraphs. If this all seems self-evident, bear with me.
Sometimes removing one traditional narrative element can have such a shocking effect that the entire text is thrown closer to innovation—or what is sometimes called experimental writing (a term that has been analyzed and dissected to death, but we’ll just run with it for now without over-thinking things).
One example: Kate Durbin has a chapbook called Kept Women (it also appears as a section in her book, E! Entertainment) that constructs intricate descriptions of the rooms in the Playboy mansion based on the television show The Girls Next Door. What she does though is removes Hugh Hefner himself as well as the familiar bunnies, and ultimately this becomes a jarring removal (or passage) of the understood notion of character. If humans are removed, do the rooms now become more character than setting? Are they both? Neither?
Another example: Renata Adler’s Speedboat is whirling, fragmentary, disorienting, meandering, impressionistic—and ultimately plotless. It’s a series of vignettes that build up the effect of a whole—and a wonderful portrait of New York City in the 1970s, but it isn’t necessarily driven by a sequence of events. It has characters and voice and setting, but not necessarily conflict. It’s still a book I think about all the time though.
I’m not even trying to get into comics, which is an entire solar system of possibilities on its own by way of introducing visual elements, but I do want to offer up one prospect I’ve always found interesting. Traditionally comics are confined to the boundaries of a piece of paper (“the page”) just like fiction has been for hundreds of years, but Scott McCloud introduced the idea that the digital realms provide an infinite canvas. That’s innovation. A web comic could scroll in any direction infinitely.
Catherynne M. Valente has a fabulous series of blog posts called “Operating Narrative Machinery” which I find to be a must-read, but I especially love when she talks about the ratio of tradition-to-experiment when interfacing with the reader (I’ll talk about this more too in my next newsletter). When Valente speaks of Mark Z. Danielewski’s most notorious debut she says:
Look at House of Leaves, which has a structure like good grief, Charlie Pomo, but the sentence-level prose style is pretty workaday in 2/3 of the book, with only the occasional Truant/grad school thesis sections and the poetry, which is not part of the main body of narrative, going off the farm. The plot is a pretty standard haunted house story, with a literary fetch quest stapled onto it.
Despite Danielewski doing something unfamiliar to a wider public (making a book that becomes typographically/visually more experimental as the narrative goes on—which matches the themes of being haunted), he also maintains a pretty familiar subgenre of Gothic literature, so the reader has something to grab onto. These are the choices we must make when we consider how our storyworlds might meet our readers.
Speaking of haunted houses…. In the movie Poltergeist, Tangina says, “This house has many hearts.” The houses of my fiction have many hearts too, most of which come from the realms of poetry. This is dyadic section is probably where I will show my biased hand the most. I read hundreds of books of poetry before I ever ventured into story writing. I carry that music in me. It’s also what brings me the most joy.
It’s also probably why I exhibited some immediate empathy for Sanderson—because I’ve been criticized for being hyper-lyrical in the same way that his own style has been criticized for being hyper-prosaic or simplistic. Neither are inherently good or bad. They are a mixture of our tastes and impulses.
Your style or voice grows out of what you read. It’s important to know the genre conventions of what tradition you’re writing in (or against), of course. There are plenty of genres and readerships that prefer sentences that are “transparent,” “invisible,” or “plain.” Certain choices pulled from the poetic side of the dyad might alienate your readers. Hell, you personally may hate books that venture too far away from invisible prose.
But if I’m to stir any controversy today, it will be with this: my very partisan opinion is that many writers haven’t done their proper homework to read poetry (or fiction that is lyrically challenging), so they haven’t developed an ear for it yet. Maybe I’m unnecessarily defensive because I heard so much antagonism toward purple prose over the years and a resistance to the musical quality of the sentence before I ever ventured into fiction. I often wonder if the bias against lyrical writing mirrors the overall reader neglect that poetry experiences in the United States.
By the way, the concept of purple prose, so to speak, is over 2000 years old. Horace, when writing his Ars Poetica, was referring to patches of speech that were so unnecessarily ornate that they called attention to themselves beyond the needs over the overall rhetoric—often associated with an overabundance of pathos that manipulates the listener’s emotions.
While Horace was most likely speaking about the appropriateness of occasion, the contemporary meaning of purple prose usually evokes writers who use so-called flowery language in similarly inappropriate ways. Here’s where I’ll give you my variant definition though: it’s when writers who don’t read poetry try to take on the language of poetry and don’t execute it well.
Style can support theme too (and might also blur with some of the lines of the tradition–innovation dyad). There’s no better example than the way Toni Morrison, in her debut, The Bluest Eye, disrupts the mythic idylls of white suburbia (represented by the Dick and Jane books) by bringing in the language of those early childhood texts and warping their orthographies into something unsettling and sinister.
I love writing that is over-stylized and overwrought—or baroque and decadent—but you can’t half-ass it. You have to go all in. You have to understand the rhythm and music of the sentence. You have to have some intuition to know when to repeat, to emphasize. Or use sentence variety. The quarter-pauses, the half pauses. The full stops.
You also have to know why you’re doing it (in Morrison’s case: to highlight a historically, insidiously violent racist culture in the United States).
I also adore literary minimalism, which contains a different type of poetry (the kind measured in technical precision—like what Louise Glück writes). There’s an entire lineage of writers who defined themselves by what Raymond Carver called “[an inclination] toward brevity and intensity.” We should not mistake those who purposefully measure out the minimal with those who write invisibly because they haven’t developed another way to be on the page. For an essential read on the sonic quality of the sentence, check out “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Garielle Lutz.
This isn’t all about sound though. Poetry’s relationship to writing is also about knowing how to utilize poetic/literary devices effectively: the image, the metaphor, sensory details, allusion, allegory, chiasmus….
I should clarify, that even with my own biases, I don’t necessarily believe that the poetic side of the dyad is better, but I do believe that many writers default to the prosaic side of the dyad because they haven’t spent enough time in poetry’s salt mines to fully take advantage of the tools that poetry provides us. The more you do develop your style and voice, the more you’re able to express yourself and the affect of your storyworld in complex ways.
Also, just because I often go all-in as a stylist, doesn’t mean everyone does or should at every moment. Perhaps you prefer natural narrative prose and incredibly unnatural, witty dialogue when characters speak. Perhaps you lean into alliteration at a pivotal moment for emotional effect, such as Aimee Bender does at the end of her story, “The Rememberer,” in which a lover experiences reverse evolution until he’s nothing more than a single-cell organism (notice the b sounds that follow):
This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don’t ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you’re there. Because I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and blind, brainless, benign, heading clear and small, like an eye-floater into nothingness.
A little emphasis can go a long way. That’s voice. That’s music. That’s style.
In the second and final installment on some of my ideas about fiction-writing, I’ll talk more about the play–work dyad and the natural–supernatural dyad. Trying to chart and probe the worlds we build—the structural elements, the craft-based ones, the rhetorical, and so on—can hopefully let us examine our fictions from different angles, and perhaps also find ways to locate non-hierarchical, relationship-based values in different types of fiction we both read and write.
Until next time,
JD
PS: A quick edit. If you’d like to read the second half, you can find it here.