Writing Stuff: Learning from Moby-Dick

 This may be proof of my long-standing mental health issues : I read Moby-Dick twice in a span of 40 years, and I enjoyed it both times.

No surprise I am seconding Lincoln Michel's Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick: Why not put some whale facts chapters in your WIP?.

His thesis:

The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable parts of the book. (Which, if you haven’t read, is far funnier, weirder, and gripping than you likely imagine.) Of course, the “whale facts” chapters aren’t just about facts about whales. Moby-Dick includes weird and philosophical digressions about many subjects, such as the meaning of the color white, as well as chapters in the form of plays. Melville is always mixing it up. Moby-Dick might have a narrow central subject, but it is expansive in scope and Melville always seems hungry to try something new, shift moods, or follow thoughts where they take him.

And why shouldn’t we mix it up? Why shouldn’t writers follow their obsessions and interests and strange ideas? The result is almost always going to be more memorable than an unthinking devotion to plot beats and character arcs.

I also must say that I agree with this paragraph, even though I am trying to use some film techniques in “Love Stinks”:

The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue. 

I think we have to go back to Henry James before we find a writer who is not influenced by film. (Yes, I am looking at you Hemingway.)

Now, I first ran across these ideas in Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel (a book which I highly recommend):

A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.

Since I knew nothing about writing a novel (and still do not), these ideas got my attention. See, I was in a sort of a go-for-broke mentality, a feeling that what I had been taught decades ago were not enough for the stories I wanted to tell. How Hemingway and Hammett and Faulkner wrote were beyond me because I was not them, and they were not living in my world. 

Mr. Michel has other examples to read. Do click over to his article, it will reward you.

(For those who do not want to plunge into Moby-Dick: Katie Alafdal's An Open Letter to My Five Unread Copies of Moby Dick.)

sch 11/7