Help - Literature

[meed96]

Since this is my first post, allow me to introduce myself.
I am in my second year of high school, read and write very frequently, and enjoy many genres of literature.

But there in lies my problem. I've just barely started my literature class for this year, and although I wouldn't say I don't understand it, I guess I just don't agree with it.

It all started last year, when I did my first high school literature class. This was my first introduction to new exotic terms, such as simile, personification, symbolism, etc. Although I didn't find the class extremely difficult, I did find it rather confusing. Up until that point, I had been, and still am, an avid reader. I have a bookshelf in my room, which is at this point, almost completely full (some 150-175 books crammed into it). I had also been a very good writer, I had taken some online courses, and had gotten, and continue to get, top marks.

But here's where my problem sits. As I started some more difficult literature and writing classes, I would see articles and lessons that teach how to write better, how to plan to write, and strategies and things. I have always written what's come to me, I never needed planning or setup, so these articles seemed like a scripted how-to guide on something you can't write a how-to guide on. I felt like these articles were trying to explain how to write. In my mind, you just write "realistic" things. You think of your story as if it were real, and you write real characters, and real actions. The previous has always been easy for me, so I couldn't understand.

As for the literature side, I would hear things like "understanding literature helps you enjoy it more". To me, this sounded like a how-to guide on how to read a book. I've always enjoyed the books I've read, so this was again, confusing to me. As I study more into literature, and as I'm introduced to these literary devices, I don't see how they make sense. If the author writes a good story, has realistic characters and realistic actions, then it's a good book. I don't need a term like personification to tell me that the story I read was a good one.

I guess I'm having trouble explaining my problem. I see lots of people who like "literature" and I'm just sitting here thinking "I like reading". The terms described make me feel like we're trying to program a computer to grade good writing. Look out for terms X, Y, and Z, and you'll be sure to know it's a good story. In my mind, a good story just includes those things without thinking about it. As I write, I don't look for places to add symbolism or something similar, I just write realistically.

I hear my literature teacher say things like "This author made good use of symbolism and personification in paragraph five." I'm just thinking "If I had written this story, none of these terms would be anywhere on my mind". Do people really sit there and write thinking "Put a pun here, symbolism here, etc"?

Maybe this is just me, and I think differently, but I wanted to reach out and ask a literary community what they think. Does any of what I'm saying make sense?

Any help is appreciated,
Meed.

[meed96]

To add a little bit more:

I feel that if I took a real scene from real life and wrote down what everyone said and marked down all needed detail, I could apply the literature method to my "story", and come out with good marks, according to literature. This is somewhat why I feel like all literature does, is make sure your work is realistic to the story and characters.

I could write a realistic story, and do well without ever needing to think of a single literary device. This seems opposite from what my current understanding of literature is.

-Meed.

[Lykren]

I suspect that the idea behind introducing terminology specific to literature is intended to assist those who don't naturally enjoy literature in categorizing and coping with the required reading. In that sense, then, yes, the practice is rather artificial.

But that doesn't mean that those techniques don't exist in an objective sense. For an author to use a pun in their work, of course, they don't necessarily need to know what a pun is, but it would help for them to have experienced prior examples of puns either in their reading or in conversation.

On the whole I agree with you though. You can study all the theory you want, and maybe such a strictly analytical approach is what suits some people, but it is not really imperative to become a skilled writer. For that, I believe, it is sufficient to have a strong intuition and a love for the written word.

[uiscebeatha]

A good discussion and one well worth thinking about. Some of what constitutes 'literature' or 'literary criticism' is enjoyable in itself. It would be difficult to think of any field of study in science or humanities that does not need its subject-specific terms. These often allow people to learn and expand their vision and world-view of what is good, bad or indifferent. The terms don't make the judgement they enable it. They are vehicles by which people might better inform their discussion and marshal their thoughts and feelings about a text or genre. They facilitate a more organised and specific exchange of personal opinion. Useful in teaching and study, the aspects of 'literary study' allow commerce between people - they enhance the shared experience of reading and develop a shared culture. Sorry this is very rushed and not as detailed a response as I would like to write. But good and enjoyable topic.

[Aylinn]

After reading a lot of good literature, you may acquire a good sense of how to write something. Unfortunately, not everyone reads so much and learns in this way. If all people did, there would have been no bad fiction and other badly written books.

Try to look at it from a different perspective, if you were a critic and tried to explain someone why the book you like/have read is good in your opinion, all those terms would come in handy. Imagine someone asks you why you like, for example, Anna Karenina, but not The Fifty Shades of Grey. What makes one better than the other? What makes Anna Karenina worth reading? What makes The Fifty Shades of Grey unworthy of reading and a waste of time?

[Iain Sparrow]

I hear my literature teacher say things like "This author made good use of symbolism and personification in paragraph five." I'm just thinking "If I had written this story, none of these terms would be anywhere on my mind". Do people really sit there and write thinking "Put a pun here, symbolism here, etc"?

Maybe this is just me, and I think differently, but I wanted to reach out and ask a literary community what they think. Does any of what I'm saying make sense?

Any help is appreciated,
Meed.

I'm an artist; as a kid and young person I had taken many classes in drawing, painting, etc, etc, and through practice and instruction, and innate talent became a good artist. Good enough to earning part of my living being an artist, which ain't easy. Likewise, writing is a craft and as such you must learn that craft, there is no shortcut!
You might be surprised to know that many modern artists, the really famous ones like Picasso and others, were in fact classically trained... they then took art in a different direction.

[Emil Miller]

In answer to your request for help regarding learning to write, even at the risk of sounding patronising, I would say that no amount of studying literature, although it's interesting in itself, will make someone a writer without the prerequisite of experience.
Look at any author of note and you will find that they all lived for a certain period and had actually done things before becoming published writers. Whether it's Dickens, Maugham, Chekov, Hemingway, Hardy, Lawrence or any other noteworthy author, all had gained experience of life sufficiently to be able to comment on and use it in their writing: even Nabokov, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had to earn his keep by giving language lessons when forced into exile.
I have written three novels and published two of them, and while it's true to say that none of them would have been written without years of reading good literature, I never felt it necessary to consider symbolism or any other literary device although there is plenty of irony in each of them and it came naturally without my thinking about it.
So the best advice I can give is....get a few years under your belt, get a job or preferably more than one, make contact with people in the real world and not just the fictional characters in novels or plays. Sitting around reading novels is very instructive but you will need more than that to be a writer.

[MANICHAEAN]

Retire to the nearest ale-house and after a few pints, ask yourself the question, “Why do I want to write?” I read once somewhere, that writing comes out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap. No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book if he were a well adjusted happy man.

I happen to disagree with that view, but do acknowledge what Graham Greene once noted, that a writer has to conform to two conflicting requirements: he must be involved in his novel and detached from himself.

For myself; I’m not subject to any real financial constraints, work in situations and locations that constantly stimulate my imagination, have a genuine interest in observing human behaviour and will very likely be buried with whatever I am reading at the time.

Your main problem will likely be an almost panic-striken search for your own voice.

(P.S. I've just realised what I percieve to be your young years. Just ignore the ale-house recommendation.)

[Marbles]

In answer to your request for help regarding learning to write, even at the risk of sounding patronising, I would say that no amount of studying literature, although it's interesting in itself, will make someone a writer without the prerequisite of experience.
Look at any author of note and you will find that they all lived for a certain period and had actually done things before becoming published writers. Whether it's Dickens, Maugham, Chekov, Hemingway, Hardy, Lawrence or any other noteworthy author, all had gained experience of life sufficiently to be able to comment on and use it in their writing: even Nabokov, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, had to earn his keep by giving language lessons when forced into exile.
I have written three novels and published two of them, and while it's true to say that none of them would have been written without years of reading good literature, I never felt it necessary to consider symbolism or any other literary device although there is plenty of irony in each of them and it came naturally without my thinking about it.
So the best advice I can give is....get a few years under your belt, get a job or preferably more than one, make contact with people in the real world and not just the fictional characters in novels or plays. Sitting around reading novels is very instructive but you will need more than that to be a writer.

I am just wondering how many of real life people, aspiring or new writers especially, are able to stay at home and bury themselves in piles of books without needing or wanting to go out to interact with people, do mundane jobs, manage their pecuniary affairs, carouse and flirt, deceive and be deceived, and suffer life's interminable troubles and travails as they go along. I should think hardly anyone fits the description save a man already in the grave.

The lives of famous writers are no different and no better experienced than the lives of ordinary and 'successful' people, or vice versa, yet one type write and the other may not even know how to spell Shakespeare. So where is the fundamental difference and what is it?

My answer is that a writer's experience lies in the powers of her imagination. No one lacks in life experience to write good literature; the thing they lack is the experience gained through good reading and the hard work it takes to polish your gift of storytelling, which is the only type of 'experience' a writer needs and must consciously earn.

Here's a hypothetical question: Should a refugee of war with her experience of the worst side of humanity, and with her despair, disappointment, pain, misery, disease and death of loved ones, possible rape, tatterdemalion constitution, starvation etc make a better novelist than the one who has only observed the lives of such refugees, artistic merit being equal?

In my humble opinion, life experience, which all of us have in varying ways, is overrated. If Nabokov had really been a paedophile he still could not have written Lolita any better.

[Emil Miller]

I am just wondering how many of real life people, aspiring or new writers especially, are able to stay at home and bury themselves in piles of books without needing or wanting to go out to interact with people, do mundane jobs, manage their pecuniary affairs, carouse and flirt, deceive and be deceived, and suffer life's interminable troubles and travails as they go along. I should think hardly anyone fits the description save a man already in the grave.

The lives of famous writers are no different and no better experienced than the lives of ordinary and 'successful' people, or vice versa, yet one type write and the other may not even know how to spell Shakespeare. So where is the fundamental difference and what is it?

My answer is that a writer's experience lies in the powers of her imagination. No one lacks in life experience to write good literature; the thing they lack is the experience gained through good reading and the hard work it takes to polish your gift of storytelling, which is the only type of 'experience' a writer needs and must consciously earn.

Here's a hypothetical question: Should a refugee of war with her experience of the worst side of humanity, and with her despair, disappointment, pain, misery, disease and death of loved ones, possible rape, tatterdemalion constitution, starvation etc make a better novelist than the one who has only observed the lives of such refugees, artistic merit being equal?

In my humble opinion, life experience, which all of us have in varying ways, is overrated. If Nabokov had really been a paedophile he still could not have written Lolita any better.

I don't disagree that imagination, hard work and a gift of storytelling are also necessary weapons in a writer's armoury as W S Maugham pointed out on more than one occasion. If one reads Maugham's biographer's, however, not only was he an avid reader but he also had an eventful life and many of his experiences are portrayed in his novels.

It is less a question of whether Nabokov would have written a better novel of paedophilia but whether he would have written it at all if his life had simply revolved around studying literature. Lolita is a book as much about America as that of a paedophile and had it not been for the events surrounding his early life in Russia, it is possible that he might never have gone there.

The scenario of one of my own books alternates between Germany and England and has chapters set within the Ministry of Defence. I could have dreamed up a similar story but the fact that for some years my life also alternated between those two countries and I spent some time working at the MoD, allowed me to write it from the standpoint of actual experience, even though the main theme of the novel concerns a man who has committed what he imagines to be the perfect murder and in which I obviously had to use my imagination.

The answer to the hypothetical question is ...yes. Both could write about the tragic events, but the person actually experiencing them would be more convincing in the event of artistic merit being equal.

[Marbles]

I don't disagree that imagination, hard work and a gift of storytelling are also necessary weapons in a writer's armoury as W S Maugham pointed out on more than one occasion. If one reads Maugham's biographer's, however, not only was he an avid reader but he also had an eventful life and many of his experiences are portrayed in his novels.

It is less a question of whether Nabokov would have written a better novel of paedophilia but whether he would have written it at all if his life had simply revolved around studying literature. Lolita is a book as much about America as that of a paedophile and had it not been for the events surrounding his early life in Russia, it is possible that he might never have gone there.

The scenario of one of my own books alternates between Germany and England and has chapters set within the Ministry of Defence. I could have dreamed up a similar story but the fact that for some years my life also alternated between those two countries and I spent some time working at the MoD, allowed me to write it from the standpoint of actual experience, even though the main theme of the novel concerns a man who has committed what he imagines to be the perfect murder and in which I obviously had to use my imagination.

The answer to the hypothetical question is ...yes. Both could write about the tragic events, but the person actually experiencing them would be more convincing in the event of artistic merit being equal.

This is all good. It goes back to the oft-said guiding rule: write what you know about. I think the term we're looking for is 'exposure' rather than 'experience'. I have come to accept that everyone has enough experience in their daily lives to take material from, about human ways and emotions, human good and evil, but it is the manner of your exposure which makes you write what you eventually write and which makes you, you. Thus, Nabokov could have written the same Lolita but in a Russian setting had he never gone to the United States. He could still get into the skin of a lettered paedophile but he couldn't obviously write about the United States in the same knowing way. Likewise, Joseph Conrad most definitely could not have written what Rudyard Kipling came to write about India, and Kipling couldn't set his novels in Congo without sounding like a fool. Different lives, different exposures.

I'd like to look up your books. Is your screen name the same as your pen name? Book titles? You may write here or message me. Thanks!

[Emil Miller]

I'd like to look up your books. Is your screen name the same as your pen name? Book titles? You may write here or message me. Thanks!

You can find them under my screen name on Amazon although the novel I have mentioned above has not been published but was written and printed privately for a friend and some acquaintances. I am considering publishing it but I think it needs some revision. The first book, which had a long gestation period, concerns the UK's political and social development from 1945 until 1979 in the form of a novel. The second has a literary background and is a satire on the gullibility of the mass mentality.

[Marbles]

^ Thank you, Emil.

[Emil Miller]

^ Thank you, Emil.

You're welcome, thanks for taking an interest.