Kicking Around: Dialogue, Women, Colonialism, Goals, Godless Realism

 Better Said than Dead: Quick Tips on Dialogue Tags

It’s useful to remember that we don’t read every word equally. Our brains gloss over some language, just registering the important information rather than lingering on each word. With “said” tags your brain registers who speaks and moves on. “Asked” and “replied” are also fairly neutral. But if characters are shouting or grumbling or screeching, then the brain slows down.

So, yes, I agree that said is typically best. However, since this newsletter is called Counter Craft, I do want to give some contrary advice and agree somewhat with the “too many saids is boring” crowd. Because it’s true that reading tons of said tags can be both dull and unnecessary. In large part that’s because some writers tag too much.

Three novels that delve into sex, consent and power after #MeToo 

FICTION

Exquisite Corpse

Marija Pericic

Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Feast

Emily O’Grady

Allen & Unwin, $32.99

The Crying Room

Gretchen Shirm

Transit Lounge, $32.99

These three second novels, by Australian women who won awards for their debuts, disrupt familiar narratives and demand we question what we “know”. Their narratives are fragmented and deliberately unreliable; mosaics of contrasting perspectives. Two of them invite the reader to take an active part in assembling a whole picture, leaving room for projection and doubt. The third, while cleverly structured in its revelations and studded with surprises, leaves the reader in no doubt about the lessons we’re meant to take from it.

 ‘Trojan horse’ novel tackling colonisation and war wins Miles Franklin

Shankari Chandran has pulled a fast one. Her novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens has the sort of title and cover that suggest readers are in for a gentle read about the funny old residents of an aged-care home.

But readers are in for a surprise. Chandran’s third novel, which has won this year’s $60,000 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia’s most significant prize for fiction, addresses racism, the consequences of colonisation, the distortion of history and the traumas of the Sri Lankan civil war head on – all with the help of those funny old residents.

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The judges said Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens “reminds us that the personal is often political, and that unaddressed trauma of the past haunts us in the present. It treads carefully on contested historical claims, reminding us that horrors forgotten are horrors bound to be repeated, and that the reclamation and retelling of history cannot be undertaken without listening to the story-tellers amongst us”.

 Melissa Donovan's How to Set Writing Goals to Stay Focused and Motivated from Writing Forward:

Every writer has their own reasons for writing. Some want to complete a novel. Others want to get published in a reputable magazine or journal. Some want to make money. Regardless of why one comes to writing, writers often express frustration with their own inability to get the work done. We hear writers lamenting over unfinished projects or how long it’s been since they wrote anything. For a lot of these writers, three things are missing: motivation, focus, and discipline. And one way to cultivate these traits is by setting writing goals and then making a commitment to those goals.

Yep, I make plans, and they get superseded – I was supposed to be working on the pretrial detention journal, and what I am doing is cleaning out notes from 2023.  I can rationalize it as all being for the blog. I just need to clear my way to “Road Tripping” for tomorrow. I will call that a goal….

In Through the Out Door - I should have sent his to KH and Joel C, this is up their alley.

In his Theory of the Novel (1916), Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács famously declared that “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” Lukács wasn’t sure that the “godforsaken” novel would have the last word on the state of the world, mind you, but the expression soon took on a life of its own, becoming a tagline for the secular theory of the novel. In brief, critics of this persuasion see the novel tradition as both evidence of the growing secularization of Western culture and a potent force in that process.

Fiction, the argument goes, shows us a world where God is either a nonplayer or God’s ways are subject to interminable debate among the characters (which, in turn, sows doubt about whether God is at work at all). The scholar Michael Wood, for example, points to the influence of Don Quixote, observing that Cervantes “[leaves] God out of the picture, and [suggests] that the worlds of the novel (the one it lives in and the one it presents) are zones of contingency, places where Providence has no jurisdiction.” The critic James Wood (no relation) has argued that “despite being a kind of magic, [the novel] is actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions.” In the latter Wood’s formulation, fiction reveals the relativity of all views and insinuates the “as if” of literary belief into our view of the world. “There is something about narrative that puts the world in doubt. Narrative corrugates belief, puts bends and twists in it.”

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But how can Dostoevsky give Alyosha what he wants? How can an author plausibly write a divine manifestation into a realist novel without turning it into some other kind of writing? (Lukács, for one, believed there wasn’t yet a proper name for what Dostoevsky was doing.) Dostoevsky’s solution is twofold. First, the miraculous vision is preceded by an ethical about-face that makes it to some degree unnecessary. The episode comes on the heels of the Dostoevskyan version of the felix culpa in which Alyosha, in a state of “rebellion,” “seeks his ruin” in the arms of Grushenka only to watch as his humility ennobles the would-be seducer to become his rescuer. Citing an old proverb about the significance of ordinary kindnesses, Grushenka credits Alyosha with giving her an “onion,” and he credits her with restoring his soul. The devilish Rakitin carps that “the miracles you were looking out for just now have come to pass!” But the scene suggests that the scoffer is right; the real miracle is not a spectacle but a change of heart, and that can happen anywhere—even Grushenka’s drawing room—and without suspending the laws of nature.

The second part of Dostoevsky’s solution is to arrange the scene so that he has plausible deniability. Alyosha is in a spiritual tizzy when he returns to the monastery. As Father Paissy reads the Gospel of John’s narrative of the wedding at Cana over the coffin, Alyosha’s mind is unstable, darting between thoughts. The suggestion, of course, is that the vision merely represents the outpouring of his feverish imagination. And then his waking at the end allows us another out: to dismiss it as nothing but a dream elicited by a familiar text. Step by step, Dostoevsky gives us justifications to write the vision off as Alyosha’s fantasy. Notice too that the narrator describes Zosima directly (“the little, thin old man with tiny wrinkles on his face”) but not “Him.” The narrator, like Alyosha, dares not look directly at God, leaving Zosima to characterize “our Sun.” To see “Him” requires that our imaginations set to work. This is Dostoevsky’s brilliant play on fiction’s fundamental vacillation about gods: He turns responsibility for the divine apparition over to the reader. Can you believe it? Do you see God? More importantly, would you join the feast?

And if you have come this far: How to Use Misdirection in Your Story for Greater Impact from K.M. Weiland -

If that sounds contradictory, try thinking of it as being a little like a magic trick. A good magician knows how to artfully misdirect his audience’s attention in a way that leaves them delighted when a white dove unexpectedly bursts from a handkerchief. Why would an author want to attempt this trickery? Mostly for the same reason the magician does: because, as much as audiences hate to be conned, they love to be surprised.

 sch 8/5