31 July, 2013
By William H. Coles
Peter Ho Davies is a contemporary British writer of Welsh and Chinese descent. He was born and raised in Coventry, England, and moved to the United States in 1992. He was a physicist before studying English at Cambridge University. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught at the University of Oregon, Emory University, and the University of Michigan (as director of MFA program), where he now teaches creative writing.
William H. Coles
Let’s start with a general question. What is story to you? What about it do you convey to your students, but also what does it mean for humanity and culture?
Peter Ho Davies
It’s funny and coincidental that we were talking this morning in class about E. M. Forster’s distinction between story and plot. Story in his view is a sequence of events — the king died, the queen died — whereas plot imposes causality and motivation — the king died and then the queen died of grief. I guess that’s the way I tend to think about the function of fiction in our community, in our civilization, in our humanity. It performs in Foresterian terms the role of plot. By thinking about causality and the motivations that underlie events, we better understand the lives we have lived or that others have lived around us. So one could regard plot — causality, motivation — as the place where we find meaning in event, why one thing happened after another, how one thing relates to another. I think for writers and for readers, and even listeners in oral storytelling, what we’re searching for in life is what it means. There are lots of ways to think about that. From larger scale to smaller scale, some obviously religious, some philosophical, but also more simply on a level of character motivation and emotion. That’s what drives me. I think about my life, the lives of people around me, the contemporary world and the historical world that predate me — I think, what did it mean, why did it happen that way, what caused these things to take place? That’s what drives me in my fiction.
William H. Coles
So a story enlightens in some way, expresses a meaning about how to live based on how fictional characters and real “characters” live?
Peter Ho Davies
I think so, but I’m not necessarily saying this is the way to do it, this is the way to live, or this is the meaning of life. I think stories are offered as thought experiments. This is not the way to live but a way to live. We, as writers and readers, get to explore those decisions. What does it mean if I were that person? What if I walked in that person’s shoes? That doesn’t mean that was a definitive version. It’s an exploration. I’d like my stories to contain meaning . . . it just doesn’t have to be the definitive meaning. The effort here is to find in randomness some sense of meaning and shape, some sense of direction.
William H. Coles
There is movement and there is change, in both the characters and the readers?
Peter Ho Davies
I think that’s right, although there can be a separation in that regard. We can talk about stories in which we want to see a character change, but it’s also incredibly powerful to see a character fail to change.
William H. Coles
So the potential for change has to be there, potential that may provide meaning.
Peter Ho Davies
Precisely.
William H. Coles
Are most successful stories, particularly in prose, flirting with metaphysical questions that we don’t know the answers to? Why are we here? Is there a God? What is beauty? What is justice?
Peter Ho Davies
I’m reminded of the lecture yesterday where mystery was talked about . . . as Flannery O’Connor talks about it in various ways. And that might begin to bump up against the metaphysical in the ways you’re talking about. I’m interested in stories that are successful to me, stories that I would aspire to write, stories I’m intrigued by. There is at the heart of them some human mystery, also some characterological mystery. We have been talking in workshop about informational mystery, which is often contrived by the author by holding back (from the reader) information that the characters already know to make the reader read on, looking for the crumbs and the clues, even if that feels manipulative to the reader. But I’m interested in mysteries that, in part, can’t be solved.
It’s hard to talk about this without speaking of my work — out of laziness or not being well read, I always revert to my own work in these contexts, but it’s the work that I know best. I think of a story of mine called “The Ugliest House in the World,” in which a child has died and one of the protagonists feels guilty. The struggle in that story is that the character is not legally guilty — an accident has occurred — but because it has occurred on his property, he feels emotionally guilty. And other people have ascribed guilt to him. It feels as if there is a tension to this character being guilty and not guilty. Of course I’m no lawyer, but I feel the character is not guilty. And my sympathy for him is actuated by the fact that he feels guilty. And so what intrigues me about that character is that he is simultaneously guilty and not guilty. And that’s a mystery. How do we address something where two mutually exclusive opposites are enshrined in the same human being? It remains fascinating to me, an impenetrable mystery. Human beings are capable of embodying opposite ideas simultaneously. That reminds me of my background as a physicist many years ago when I was particularly captivated by wave particle duality, where two mutually exclusive concepts can be used to describe the same phenomenon of light or matter.
William H. Coles
How do you work on delivering emotion such as guilt on the page, in the story, without demeaning the intensity of the emotion or the character? How especially do you deliver it through action?
Peter Ho Davies
We’re inclined to deny guilt, but the denial itself often points toward guilt. I’m intrigued by what I feel is a misdirection in character. The denial of it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Denial is the signal that the guilt is felt.
William H. Coles
One stimulation that came from your discussions was the overall concept of narration. I find it difficult to conceive a sophisticated understanding of narration of prose stories because it’s so different than developing a story in film, or orally. As writers, we have so many more things we can do with narration as opposed to other forms of storytelling, but with that come many techniques we can abuse. You mentioned the differences between classical narration and contemporary narration for the modern academic writer. In the old narrative techniques, a writer worked in a structured environment — beginning, middle, and end, conflict and resolution. There were emotional displays through action. There you have the opportunity to use a narrator. The term “omniscient” always bothers me a little because it means all-knowing, godlike, and in fiction writing “all-knowing” omniscient seems best applied to multiple points of view with omniscience only in the worldviews of the characters the writer has created and chooses for the delivery of story.
Peter Ho Davies
Right. An omniscient narrator who has the ability not just to be all-knowing but to enter the consciousness of many characters.
William H. Coles
That’s pretty well defined. But in contemporary times, the author becomes the narrator and actually dictates what goes into the story. In classical times the narrator could be objective.
Peter Ho Davies
Actually, I would argue the reverse of that in some ways. In the classical sense, we associate Charles Dickens’s narrators, Jane Austen’s narrators, with Dickens and Austen. They are all-knowing, all-seeing, as by definition the author of a work is. But they are also out to offer us judgment. Or, more gently, guidance as to how we see and interpret their characters.
William H. Coles
Okay.
Peter Ho Davies
But it also is explicit how to feel about these people. They’ll show it, but they’ll often tell it. To me that’s a mode of narration, the classic mode, which is enjoyable to sink into as a reader, and which also speaks to a time and a period when narrators were godlike, authors were godlike. I certainly don’t feel godlike, and I think a lot of contemporary writers likewise don’t feel godlike. I don’t think we draw unto ourselves the right to be omniscient, but also we are hesitant in our judgment. That’s a reflection perhaps of the way cultural movements, scientific discoveries, and the entire history of our entire civilization over the last couple of hundred years has chipped away at traditional visions of faith and our position in the universe and our relationship to God. Now we see omniscience in the context of a modernist like Virginia Woolf — a roving omniscience capable of dipping in and out of various characters. But Woolf does not step back in between those moments as often as in previous incarnations and offer an explicit authorial judgment of those characters.
William H. Coles
Which Leo Tolstoy was very happy to do. But Woolf also describes the authorial narration, especially in the nineteenth century, as almost incandescent. The authorial presence as incandescent. Meaning, the author is not directly present in the story description but everything that is said, every action taken, every judgment made, stamps the author as the creator. I think that’s especially true of Austen, too. Austen isn’t in the drawing rooms, but she’s always there. Also true of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Peter Ho Davies
I don’t know that quote of Woolf’s, but it is lovely phrasing. It’s been a while since I read her, but I agree that her authorial presence illuminates the characters.
William H. Coles
Hers is an intellectually generated presence, don’t you think? She was smart. That helps. But it does put her directly in the book. She’s objective, not necessarily needing to make the story her personal story.
Peter Ho Davies
Objectivity is interesting and may reflect a weakening of faith in some ways, but also the ascendancy of scientific method. Again this all leads to the sense of the nineteenth-century author as a chatty narrator presence receding in a lot of contemporary work. We stand in the wings, rather than as an impresario at center stage.
William H. Coles
Memoir has become so dominant in contemporary writing and seems to have almost drowned out classic fiction. But with time, memoir has slipped into the narrative techniques of fiction. Many writers seem to approach story as a confessional, or cathartic, a tool for revealing events or emotions they’ve had in their life. And without hesitancy to alter facts in memoir, or use life for description in fiction. Isn’t this degrading the quality of both memoir and fiction? As a teacher directing writers to write with meaning and the possibility of contributing to the literature of our generation, do you see an erosion of quality with this trend, and are you concerned?
Peter Ho Davies
I don’t see that a lot in my own teaching experience because my students are supposedly all working on fiction, and I engage with the work as fiction. As I said in class, my supposition is that any fiction has to be built from autobiographical experiences in some way, but we will approach it as fiction. If I were teaching memoir classes, I might deal more directly with these questions. There are dangers in that movement, but I don’t want to decry it entirely. There has been a small shift, but not massive, in marketing strategy. What we call memoirs today, particularly those written with fictional techniques, in an earlier generation we would have described as autobiographical novels. Something I do, and that most fiction writers do in some form or other. The question is, how far is that fiction disguised, how far it is projected away from the self. The danger in memoir ultimately is that it accentuates the authority of “this really happened,” which can sometimes be a blunt force and supersede the authority of persuasion, plausibility, which I think of as fiction’s traits. The elevation of memoir can sometimes make fictional persuasion pallid by comparison. Outrageous things can happen, and if I tell you it was outrageous and it really happened, you are obliged to believe it. If an outrageous thing happens in my fiction, I have to work a little harder to make you believe it. Things are less believable in fiction than they are sometimes in a piece that purports to be nonfiction.
William H. Coles
That goes to the very first thing you asked in class. You asked people to describe why they write. This would seem to say that for quality stories, the focus should be on reader response. There are dramatists who say success in plays is not so much the emotional and intellectual transference on the stage, but what happens to the audience. Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead mentions a number of authorial motivations for writing, including a few focused on entertaining and enlightening another human being.*
Peter Ho Davies
In that list of reasons Atwood compiled for why writers write, there are, very loosely, a couple of categories. I would describe them as high and low motives. Some of the lower ones are very human, very individual, but I think we might recognize them or own them. I write for revenge, I write for money, I write so my children can have shoes, that sort of thing. But set against that are goals like to justify the words of God to humanity, to tell stories that will be forgotten if they are not told, to right wrongs. These are motives that are directed toward the reader. And I guess what I like about that list is that you don’t have to pick one of the reasons. We are all of us made up of many of these reasons. And again, speaking of characters and contradictory ideas, I think we write for ourselves and we write for others. I don’t think it’s a choice; I think it’s those two things simultaneously. It’s about an act of communication. The communication is self-communicating to you. You can never quite separate those two figures.
William H. Coles
If you want to be a writer, and you enjoy writing, whatever your motivation is, go ahead and do it. But if you look at writing as your desire to see the quality of fiction reach a certain threshold, how do you create great fiction to engage a larger number of people, to attract agents and publishers who are looking for quality, even in a market that may not see big-money potential? It seems to me that if an author is going to write fiction that reaches a certain quality, it can attract those now averse to fiction, so it is important for that writer to identify in themselves reasons to write that are not monetary. Otherwise monetary goals will dominate and dictate their writing so they never reach standards of creative excellence. Admittedly as defined by me.
Peter Ho Davies
Interesting. One of the reasons we write is to know ourselves. We can’t communicate ourselves, and our visions, and our sense of character, until we know ourselves. The kind of recursive writing in revision is an effort at that understanding. We write it, so we think we know what we mean by it. But one of the things we discover in revision is what we really mean by it. We deepen the meaning in the process — change the meaning in various ways.
William H. Coles
I’d like to think about the fictional dream. Should stories, and should authors, try to engage the reader — because it seems like the fictional dream is a thermometer on whether you’ve engaged a reader — and should stories entertain?
Peter Ho Davies
Oh, sure.
William H. Coles
I’ve had a number of academic teachers say that if your purpose as a writer is to entertain a reader, you lose the ability to create literature as an art form. Some authors write to please themselves, ignoring a reader.
Peter Ho Davies
That’s interesting. A dichotomy is being suggested that you cannot do it all — that you can entertain or do something serious and artful. I would say it’s quite clear that examples of great literature that we have from the past are with us today because we are entertained. They not only entertain, they entertain in rich ways. There are academics who read whatever they might read, however esoteric it might be, because in some sense it entertains them. If we think about this in the large sense of entertainment, intellectual stimulation is entertainment. Michael Chabon, in his essay “Trickster in a Suit of Light,” pointed out that we suspiciously view entertainment as a sort of gaudy pleasure. But there are many ways in which deep reading, scholarly reading, is also about a satisfying engagement with another. We all in some way aspire to entertain. We just don’t only aspire to entertain.
William H. Coles
Struggling fiction writers may go to a highly poetic style of writing: metaphors, flowery adjectives and adverbs, alliteration and onomatopoeia. How does that affect the development of story as structure? To me it takes away, especially for the beginning writer of fiction, the ability to instill conflict, drama, theme, and meaning in story. Excessive poetics seem to hinder development of effective emotional arcs, theme-useful plots, depth of characterization that drives plot events (rather than just responding to plot events). This seems to be happening to a significant degree in contemporary fiction, where a story is overwhelmed by an abundance of attention to language complexity that results in obscurity and inaccuracy for story development.
Peter Ho Davies
It’s hard to generalize, and I hesitate to in some ways. Some of these things are affected by taste. Probably many of us, if not all of us, come to writing with a fascination for language. We are drawn by language. And as young writers especially, we may enjoy the fun house of language, enjoy language to excess. That’s part of the joy, part of the play. But it probably indulges us more than it does our readers. Sometimes it can get in the way of narrative. It’s also sometimes true that younger writers (although older writers are also prone to this) think they need to sound “like a writer.” Out of our own anxiety, we think: What does a writer sound like? I’ll just sound like that. And sometimes that does result in florid language, excessive language.
William H. Coles
The default for storytelling is narrative description about feelings, about events, about characters. It’s what we go to without much thought. Can you teach a creator of imaginative fiction about story development in-scene, in-the-moment development, internalization, effective dialogue, accurate metaphor, and characterization? Are those teachable, or inherent?
Peter Ho Davies
Some people have a greater or lesser aptitude for them. But I think we can help everybody toward them. Sometimes it’s about listening to your story, listening to the language. Certain word choices that might have been subconscious might provoke the questions: Why did you choose that word? Why did that character use that word? Does that provoke a way of thinking about the character that hasn’t previously been considered? Does that provoke a potential query for plot that hasn’t previously been explored? So, I do think these things are not always separable. The language is how we tell the story. Our analytic mindset, the way we apprehend the world, the way we teach creative writing — we like to chop it up. And I’d like to think that fiction puts it back together. These are not either-or; they are both. We have to tear them apart to do the analysis to begin with. Then we have to engage with the issue of synthesis and put them back together again.
William H. Coles
Thanks. That helps a lot. We’ve been talking about how beginning writers set ourselves up. How do we think about writing, how do we think about story, and what do we need to study? Copying a successful writer is great to a certain extent, but it’s not so useful if you want to develop as an individual, your own style. You’ve allowed us to see alternatives in ways of thinking that can help us develop self as a writer while creating effective, entertaining stories. It’s been a valuable discussion. Thank you for participating.
Peter Ho Davies
I’m very happy to do it.
*A few examples of why writers write, from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead:
Revenge
Fear and fascination with mortality
Enduring fame
Leaving a name
Fear of obscurity
Tell a story
For knowledge
Chance to battle an evil monster
To remember the loved and the lost
To bring back the dead to the living
To learn from our ancestors