The Big Thing With Far More Pages

So have you been wonderful? Remember James’…oops…I mean Rowlings great quote. Big things, little things and all that (The Little Thing that Rubs Up Against the Big Thing) So what makes the novel the big thing. Well pick it up in your hand and you will find out. Yeah it weighs heavier than the short story. Why? It’s got more pages.

Oh for Heaven’s sake, Howl, what do you think we are, imbeciles? You think we couldn’t have figured that out on our own?

Don’t be so touchy. And by the way, Mr. Howl to you.

Sure it’s obvious, but a lot of writers forget this important fact - that good writing is created from very obvious steps. Sometimes there is an illusion that ‘important’ writing is complicated, perhaps even hard to understand. Think Ulysses for instance, Old Mr. Joyce ( a fine Irish countryman by the way) - stream of consciousness and all that, you know one sentence following the other in a sort of random chaotic order linked by tenuous thoughts - the way our mind flicks from one idea to another - or more to the point think one of Howl’s old friends, that infamous beat writer Jack Kerouac and his cult novel On The Road - written in three days on a continuous sheet of paper - hmm!

Howl goes “Hmm”.

James and Jack, can’t you hear them yakking it up in a bar together? Anyway, you can bet your ipod that Mr. Joyce did not churn it out in three days or that there was no logic to his great work. And likewise I don’t believe the myth of Kerouac either. There is a sincere logic at work.
Their books while rich with complexity are not complicated.

Aren’t you getting a little confused her, Mr. Howl?

Not at all. These books have a clear logic and follow some basic guidelines. It is the logic that allows us entry to the story. But we are getting to far ahead of ourselves. I will try and simplify that another day.

The point is that there is no excuse for putting any old sentences together in some incomprehensible way and saying to the confused reader, “well you just don’t get it, that’s not my fault.” It is your fault and nothing short of it.

Back to the novel. Its large number of pages is of great importance. This means we have more room for each of the main elements of fiction: Characters, setting, plot. We can have more characters in a novel than in a short story. We can have a wider range of settings or locations that the story takes place in. We can have more events taking place (plot=sequence of events) since we have more time. The short story is limited. Less time, less events, less characters, less settings. In the novel therefore we gain complesity from having space for sub plots, from secondary characters and more actions/events to occurr to learn more about the character’s reactions.

Whew! A lot to absorb in all of that. I’ll break it down in future posts, make the logic clear and it all should become quite simple to understand.