Experimental Fiction
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This chapter will enable readers of experimental fiction to understand genre-defying work which is ground breaking in form and it will give writers the opportunity to experiment with these two practices.
Which writers are building their fictions from scraps?
In the twenty-first century there are a number of writers who are experimenting by building their fictions from scraps of different discourses, for example, Mark Z. Danielewski, in his experimental work, House of Leaves (2000). In this fiction Danielewski experiments with layout and form, and in so doing, he pushes back the boundaries of what fiction can be. This kind of fiction has been referred to as ergodic literature, a term derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning work, and hodos, meaning path. House of Leaves is a labyrinth of a book, crammed with minutiae: copious footnotes, many of which contain further footnotes, some referencing books that do not exist. There are also appendix, poems, letters, scripts and multiple narrators who interact with each other throughout the narrative.
The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen (2009) is another fiction which breaks the boundaries of traditional narrative form by using other media which challenges the physicality of the book. The text includes drawings purported to be done by Spivet which have actually been created by Larsen and passed to his friend, the artist, Ben Gibson, who re-drafted and completed them. The plot line is illustrated with images which further the narrative by providing charts, lists, sketches and maps, which illustrate the 12-year-old Spivet’s interest with cartography.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Build Fiction from Scraps in a Non-linear Form
Using multiple discourses, choose from any of the following: recipes, graffiti, literary theory, emails, poetry, text messages, lists, lyrics, autobiography. Experiment with a fiction which has the title: The Weird World of Walter Woolf
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Rob Ryan is a Spanish writer and visual artist who specializes in paper cutting, screen printing, drawing and painting. In his works This Is For You (2007) and A Sky Full of Kindness (2011), all the illustrations are paper cut-outs, even the prose-poetry text, which is integrated into the pictures, is cut out from a single sheet of paper. The cut-outs are photographed on white paper so that shadows on the text are part of the design.
In her fiction, Like Bees to Honey, Caroline Smailes experiments with scraps of text and fonts and layout. There is a lyrical, philosophical, spiritual tone to Nina’s narrative. In this work, the unstable heroine returns to her homeland Malta with her son, Christopher, leaving her husband, Matt, and other child, Molly, in England. Malta is a meeting place for restless souls who have not yet completed their transition to paradise. There are sections within the work devoted to individual souls; the paper of these is edged in black – like memorial cards.
Black Boxes is another fiction by Smailes which breaks with traditional realism. Ana Lewis has two children: Pip, who writes a diary, and Davie. Ana has taken an overdose. Black Boxes follows her final hours as the pills kick in and the reader becomes aware of the sequence of events that brought about this moment. The narrative is told within the context of two black boxes, one Ana’s, one Pip’s. As Ana demands silence, Pip and Davie communicate through finger sign language and the text is integrated with this communication in graphics.
Audrey Niffenegger, author of the Time Traveller’s Wife, also created a fiction, Incestuous Sisters. She calls the books she makes ‘visual novels’ as she ‘loves them as objects’ also to ‘acknowledge a debt to Lynd Ward’, whose ‘woodcut novel God’s Man was the first book of this kind I ever saw, and to differentiate my books from graphic novels’ (Afterword Incestuous Sisters). The images and text tell the story. The images are aquatints. Aquatint is an antique process. The images are ‘made by covering a zinc plate with an acid-resistant ground, drawing through the ground with a needle, and immersing the plate in a nitric acid bath, which results in a plate that has the lines of the drawing etched into it. To create tone, fine rosin dust is melted onto the plate. I block out areas that should not be bitten by the acid, and the plate is placed in the acid bath in successive stages. I am working in reverse, blind; I don’t know what’s actually on the plate until I print it. The colour is watercolour, painted onto each print’.
Incestuous Sisters took fourteen years to complete. Niffenegger was working on The Time Traveller’s Wife at the same time. She says that when she is explaining the fiction to a reader who hasn’t yet seen the book that they must ‘image a silent film made from Japanese prints, a melodrama of sibling rivalry, a silent opera hat features women with very long hair and a flying green boy. I never try to explain what it means; you can find that out for yourself’ (Afterword Incestuous Sisters).
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Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Fiction That Uses More than Words
Using the title ‘A Story of Scraps’ create a fiction which incorporates sketches, footnotes, maps, and images and experiments with typography to challenge the boundaries of traditional narrative form and the physicality of the book.
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How are other writers challenging traditional realist fiction?
Senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan, Manchester campus, Nicholas Royle, who runs Nightjar Press, reviews fiction for the Independent and is the author of the novels The Director’s Cut, Antwerp and short-story collection Mortality. He has experimented with metafiction, taking it to its extreme in his novel First Novel. There are stories within stories within stories, as it says in the novel, ‘Everything is either or, and inside each either or is another either or, like Russian dolls’ (p. 265). Indeed, the novel has a complex form. The author of one of the narratives is a Creative Writing tutor and other narratives are written by the tutor’s students; it transpires that the students become the protagonists of their own narratives, which begs the questions: are the writers writing memoir or fiction? The novel also provokes the reader to ask: What is fact and what is fiction? Real events and real people – for example, the case of Dr Harold Shipman – are weaved into the narrative; likewise, a number of real writers, for example, Siri Hustvedt, appear in the novel.
Professor of English at the University of Sussex Nicholas Royle, too, writes an engaging Afterword: Reality Fiction, in his experimental work Quilt. In this Afterword, Royle reflects on the process of writing and asks: ‘Is the author of the afterword simply the same as the author of the novel?’ (p. 152). He goes on to say that ‘The novel is a space of play’ (p. 152). And yet the novel ‘ … faces challenges and pressures unimaginable in earlier times’ (p. 153). He ponders on how a novel should ‘deal with the reality of telephones and other, newer modes of telecommunication?’ (p. 156). And he inscribes the beginning of his fiction into the Afterword: ‘You recall the beginning: ‘In the middle of the night the phone rings, over and over, but I don’t hear it’. He writes, ‘The reader hears about what the narrator doesn’t hear. It is the novel calling. The novel is a kind of weird telephone exchange’. Further complexity is added when Royle informs the reader that ‘Reality literature would be writing that acknowledges this weirdness and goes somewhere that was not foreseeable, either for the author or the reader’.
It is explicit that Royle is exploring the notion of reality, saying that ‘ … reality literature is the first literary genre to be explicitly derived from TV’ (p. 157), although he tells the reader that it needs to be acknowledged that ‘Reality TV is of course a fiction’ (p. 158) and that reality literature ‘ … seeks to question and complicate, to dislocate and interfere’ (p. 158), as Quilt does. Royle invites the reader to question, ‘Is it a literary reality or a literature of reality?’ and he tells the reader that ‘To read a novel is to enter a world of magical thinking’ (p. 158). Royle has certainly created ‘a magical world of thinking’ in his novel Quilt, which is also a ‘space of quilted thinking’ (p. 159), that is, a complex space of play and inventiveness where there are ‘ … layers and pockets of voices, feelings, thoug
hts’ (p. 159).
Quilt is a highly original and experimental work which asks the reader to consider: What is a reader? What is a writer? By reading Quilt, the reader becomes an active producer of meaning of the text and the writer is invited to consider new ways of writing fictions.
In addition to writers who are taking metafiction to thought-provoking extremes, there are also a number of writers who embrace cross-formal experimentation in their pursuit of experimentation. In his work, Someone Called Derrida, John Schad blurs genres and discourses and brings together literary theory and creative writing. Someone Called Derrida is a non-linear work which splices true stories inherited from Schad’s own father, a minister of religion, and the true stories from father of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida. Schad says, in a note at the beginning of the book: ‘This book is an experiment in which I am often attempting a style that is, in many ways, novelistic; however, I am also attempting that equally difficult thing-to tell the truth’.
Artful by Ali Smith is a book that defies categorization; it is fiction and non-fiction, literary criticism and essay, a kind of Room of One’s Own for twenty-first-century writers and readers of experimental fiction. A text built from scraps, it explores what writing can do and what writing can mean. Artful is a book of ideas narrated by a character who is literally haunted by her former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about literature and art. Indeed, the sections of the book, On time, On form, On edge and On offer and on reflection, are adapted from four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University. At the back of the book, there are a number of drawings and photographs that have informed the text, likewise a list of text permissions from works that have been weaved into Artful.
Lila Azam Zanganeh’s work, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, might be described as a playful, semi-fictionalized sequence of elaborations – or variations – on the experience of being a passionate Nabokov reader. There is no linear narrative. Instead, Zanganeh invents an interview with Nabokov and portrays a series of encounters with moments from his biography; the result is a fiction which is both serious and playful, one that experiments with genres, discourses and boundaries and contains elements of memoir, biography and criticism.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Play Within Fiction and to Splice Real Stories about Real People and to Experiment with Metafiction
Choose a real character from history, for example, William Shakespeare; splice true stories from Shakespeare’s life with fictions from your own life as a writer, create a short story that experiments with fact and fiction, a text that is both playful and serious, one that questions the role of the reader and the writer.
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Electronic/Hyper/Interactive Fiction
There are a number of writers who are currently trying to find new ways of telling stories, ways that will stretch the form to its limits. The printed book is no longer the defining literary format; this is having an impact on writers and readers, which is leading to new approaches to reading and writing fiction. To offer the reader an insight into this shift, this chapter explores these changes and also the developments taking place in the publishing industry. In addition, these are here suggesting as to how the contemporary writer can experiment with these practices.
How is the publishing industry changing?
Without doubt, print is dying and digital is surging. Consequently, this acceleration of technology is impacting upon the writer and reader, influencing the ways in which fiction can be constructed and read. Indeed, the rise of digital technology and ebooks and the decline of traditional print media and of high-street retailers, as more and more readers purchase books online, are challenging the structure of creating, buying and selling books; therefore, a very competitive market is now being established.
With a series of classic titles, for example, The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan, to be released in an interactive format, the publishing companies Harper Collins and Faber are now encouraging contemporary writers to get together with software developers to produce experimental works.
In addition, opportunities for self-promoting and self-publishing are increasing; for example, How to Publish Your Own ebook is just one of a number of books that can be bought to encourage and support this process.
Some writers, readers and certainly publishers, whose businesses are seriously threatened by this paradigm shift, view this as cause for concern. The writer Jonathan Franzen, for example, believes readers are becoming shallow, less able to concentrate on the deeper meaning of books. In the age of shortening attention spans, the kernel of books can be expressed in much shorter forms. And yet, with the vast potential of the Web – quick hits, social network sites, twitter, blogs and online forums – readers have swifter access to fiction and new mediums and genres are emerging as writers are free to experiment in a very different space than that of the page.
Writers are developing their creativity in ways they choose and not necessarily to fall in line with publishing trends dictated to by the big publishing houses. Writers are making their own trends, and in so doing, they are discovering new ways of self-expression, new techniques, new strategies, new ways of communicating their new ideas and ultimately are having more control over their work.
What are the advantages of ebooks?
As ebooks can be downloaded and are cheaper to produce, they accounted for 10 per cent of sales in 2011 and 30 per cent of sales in 2012; this is a massive transition, similar to what took place in the music industry 10 years ago.
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James, an erotic fiction, has risen to the top of ebooks sales in the United States. This book was originally launched online by the virtual publisher Writer’s Coffee Shop; it was the first book to sell more than a million copies on Kindle. This illustrates that anyone can write on the internet, promote their work, build up a following and be downloaded on to Kobos and Kindles. When Fifty Shades of Grey went into print, it sold more than any previous novel. In June 2012, in Britain, 200,000 copies a week were sold and 15 million copies had been sold in the United States and Canada; it is set to overtake Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter books as the bestselling paperback book ever, with follow-ups: Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. The film rights have been sold for 3.2 million and a licensing agent appointed to handle all the spin-offs, for example, jewellery, perfume and lipstick. Likewise, teenager Beth Reekles originally posted her novel Kissing Booth on the site Wattpad, an online community themed around writing and story-telling; consequently, it was published as an ebook by Random House in December 2012 and in paperback in 2013. It appears that the power of the internet cannot be underestimated; cyberscouts now frequently scour the Web for undiscovered talent.
However, the writer Julian Barnes thinks that the ebook will never supplant the physical book as every book feels and looks different, whereas every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same. However, he suggests that the ereader will one day be able to click a smell function to make, for example, a Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper and nicotine, like old books discovered in second-hand shops. Victoria Barnsley, head of Harper Collins, has made the point that in the twenty-first century publishers can’t see themselves as simply book publishers, and instead, they need to view themselves as multimedia content producers.
Is Twitter the future of fiction?
Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize, 2001, used innovative methods to tell a story, with chapters being written like PowerPoint slides and celebrity interviews. She experimented in 2012 with her work Black Box, a fiction about a futuristic female spy and her mission as recorded in her log. Originally Egan wrote the story by hand in a notebook with eight black-outlined rectangle spaces on each page. However, she revealed this fiction one tweet at a time at @NYerFiction between 8.00 p.m. and 9.00 p.m. from 24 May 2012 for ten days, attracted by the intimacy and interconnectednss of reaching readers through their phones.
In October 2012, The Guardian challenged some well-known writers to come up with a story of up to 140 characters; Ian Rankin and S. J. Watson were two writers who rose to the challenge.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Write Twitter Fiction
Experiment with fiction. Then experiment with writing a complete story of your own, of up to 140 characters.
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Caroline Smailes’s 99 Reasons Why published by the Friday Project, according to its website ‘the experimental imprint of Harper Collins’, has nine possible outcomes to Kate’s story which the reader can navigate through an ereading device; each outcome is different and exposes a little more of Kate’s world. An additional ending is given online and the eleventh ending will be auctioned for charity. In a radical departure from literary tradition, 99 Reasons Why has a choice of 11 possible endings (log on to http://www.carolinesmailes.co.uk). This digital fiction gives the reader greater autonomy over the text and encourages them to be engaged, interactive readers, leading some critics to voice concerns that more and more authority is now lying with the reader as opposed to the writer, taking Barthes’ polemic, ‘death of the author, birth of the reader’, to its ultimate conclusion.