They choose me!

Fair point. We have to write what we feel passionate about. But the distinction snowbell and I are making is between genuinely serious attempts to tackle important gritty issues, and otherwise so-so writing that's out to press buttons.

Jackie Kay says it's unhappiness that picks up the pencil, which may be true.

[Bloody hell! - thick black clouds, thunder, lightning, hailstones the size of peas hitting the windows, gusts of wind blowing the bins over and setting off car alarms... Anyone else in S E London and getting this?]

Snowbell, I think you've put your finger on the thing that's making me feel uneasy - that death is too easy a way of making things seem Significant. And yes, maybe writers do 'use' it in that sense. Perhaps now we're not convinced by out-and-out villains, we need to feel more ambiguous about our characters, by balancing their villainy with a quick-trick-not-their-fault reason for it.

Maybe endless deaths aren't so much a cheap profundity as a beginner's profundity: more sophisticated writers can find and breath reality into the significance of far more different things and events.

Emma

Literary fiction does tend to deal with sad themes

I think this links up with our other discussion on women writer's thread. Perhaps people choose these themes to be "taken seriously". Otherwise you get dressed up in a pink cover!!

Time for one of those winking faces again. Bear with me.

I posted a version of my original question on the Glamorgan MPhil mailing list, and one of the tutors (ex-tutor, in his case, as it happens) Matthew Francis, came back with this:

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Personally I blame Joyce. The Joycean epiphany story has the genre in a stranglehold, in this country particularly. Epiphany, as I understand it, is supposed to be a moment of revelation, of any kind, but as Joyce actually practised it, in Dubliners (a book I love, by the way), the classic epiphany is negative, and distils into two easy-to-follow formulae:

1) A person dreams of love, but fails at it ('Araby', 'Eveline', 'The Dead' ). The revelation here is love is not easy, you can't always get what you want etc.

2) A person seems to have reached an accommodation with life, but (re)discovers death ('Clay' ).

The attraction of these formulae is that they're based round the eternal verities (love, death), so the discovery can be profound (if you're Joyce) or pseudo-profound (if you're most of us), that they're negative so avoiding any impression of facile optimism, and that they don't require much plotting - in fact you can find most of the plots in your own life. The fact that I'm heartily tired of this kind of story doesn't mean I don't think it's capable of producing great literature: the Shakespearean sonnet is a formula, too, and so is the Jane Austen romantic-comic novel. It's just that every now and then we need to look again at our formulae and see if we can find an alternative to them.
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And I've just answered him thus:

And while I'm grumbling, why is optimism automatically facile to so many people? Why is gloom cooler than cheerfulness? Cynicism cleverer than taking things at face value? Tragedy greater than Comedy (as someone's said, see most literary prize lists?) I know plenty of pessimists whose pessimism is equally facile.

Facile pessimism. I'm adding that one to my vocabulary.

Emma

Cheers from sidelines.

Facile pessimism.

love that!

Maybe endless deaths aren't so much a cheap profundity as a beginner's profundity: more sophisticated writers can find and breath reality into the significance of far more different things and events.

Yes. I agree. My next novel will have one death. Max. (My first has two - one before the novel began, but very much what the story is About.)

I love the phrase 'facile pessimism'. Ha!

I'm now trying to think of some great comedies, aside from Jane Austen, cos I think we talked about her in the other thread.

Erm . . . . . .

What's everyone writing now? I might see if I can go and write a comic short story.

I can't wait to read your book Sappholit deaths or no deaths. As it is a thriller I think its fair enough you have a few and shouldn't worry about it too much. (As long as you managed to crowbar in the rape and child abuse too. And some abusive nuns. And extreme poverty. And cold sterile communication where human beings can't connect due to the alienation of modern life - embodied by the internet - And parents who can't say "I love you" to each other but are eaten away by bitterness for the kind of people they could have been...)

No, no. There's none of that!!

Actually, the only reason I killed my main character off was simply that it seemed the only possible ending. It wasn't for profundity or anything else. I spent a long time whizzing backward and forwards in my head over three possible endings for her, and dying truly was the most appropriate one. It follows immediately after A Damn Good Shag.

Snowbell, that did make me laugh, thank you. And the sun's come out. No more hail!

I think I'm projecting, actually. The section of the new novel that I'm writing is the MC, three of whose five sons (one adult, two children) have just died violently and treacherously, as well as two of her brothers, her father, and her first husband. I've just decided her youngest daughter had Down's Syndrome, too.

My excuse is that she's a real person, but I'm still feeling survivor guilt.

As the late great Katharine Whitehorn said, 'There's been a boom in books about perfectly awful adventure [read Misery Memoirs]... Where was I - ah - page 57. Not too much tonic, please, and could you pass me another cushion?'

Emma

Le Petit Mort. Or is it Morte?

Oh I'm just showing off now. And I can't even do that properly. Can't wait to read it anyway.

The section of the new novel that I'm writing is the MC, three of whose five sons (one adult, two children) have just died violently and treacherously, as well as two of her brothers, her father, and her first husband. I've just decided her youngest daughter had Down's Syndrome, too.

I love books like that.

Writing them's a bugger though : two sons, a father, a father-in-law, a brother and a brother-in-law are all called Richard.

Do you think the historical-correctness brigade would notice if I re-christened a couple of them? Darren and Kevin, maybe?

Emma

You could say their parents were ahead of their time.

I've been reading The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft to see how close to the edge I can go with making my main female character a liberated woman. Quite far, is the answer. I might even give her the odd orgasm or two.

Sorry. I've wondered off topic.

Short stories about death, anyone?



<Added>

'wandered'. Agh!

Some of my short stories have got death in them, BUT, they were written when I was working in the funeral profession, and was dealing with death several times a day, every day - so it's not surprising really that it figured in my writing.

The only reason I can think of as to why people use death in their stories, is to provoke the emotions of the reader. It's easier to make someone sad, than to make someone laugh I suppose.

Katerina