The Power of Richard Powers: Act II

Maybe you don’t read literary or experimental novels. Or you think novelists should leave poetry to the poets and lectures to the nonfiction writers. But. If you care  how your sentences sound, or have facts or beliefs to convey, Richard Powers can teach you lots. While you read.

All his novels have heft, but some are more digestible than others. Here’s why:

 One of my pleasures as an artist is to reinvent myself with each new book. If you’re going to immerse yourself in a project for three years, why not stake out a chunk of the world that is completely alien to you and go traveling? — from a Kevin Berger interview with Richard Powers, The Paris Review

What a great way to think about the writing of books, and what variety his readers get. Why not start with The Time of Our Singing? It links music with race relations and physics. At a concert on the Washington Mall by the black diva Marian Anderson, German Jewish physicist David Strom falls in love with Delia Daley, diva in training. In the racist world they inhabit, can music keep them united? Who will their three interracial children become? And, most crucially, what didn’t you know about your own racism? Not to mention physics.

The Echo Maker is also fairly conventional—except for its huge themes and heavenly voice. Here’s the opening:

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus Canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.

This novel explores the brain injury resulting from an automobile accident, a plot which raises questions about “real” or “natural.” Then why cranes? As Margaret Atwood observes in  “The Heart of the Heartland” from New York Review of Books, Native Americans named these birds “echo makers” because of their call. For the protagonist’s brother, who thinks a stranger inhabits every familiar person, only an echo of the past remains. The novel conveys a moving story interspersed with psychology, neurology, and larger-than-life symbols. 

Orfeo has less plot. But if you’ve ever wondered why music affects us as it does, this is where to find out. The novel plumbs the mystery of music, the impact of silence, and the secret of creativity. Typically, Powers can’t restrain his sense of humor:

Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you’ll zag. Creation’s Rule Number Two.
     What’s Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul’s straight man.
     Zag when they think you’ll zig.” 

So many brilliant novels by Richard Powers, so little space. Galatea 2.2 tackles Artificial Intelligence. Can a computer produce an essay indistinguishable from a scholar’s? As that computer becomes increasingly human, how does it feel? And what about the human teaching the computer to be something other than itself?

The Gold Bug Variations is the Powers novel I love best. Not much plot, but enough story and suspense to enliven passages about DNA, philosophy, and the history of science. Who wouldn’t love the synthesis of Bach’s Goldberg Variations with Edgar Allan Poe's “The Gold Bug”?  Here’s a sample. 

The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is a nightmare beyond measure.

Tip: Want to stretch your horizons as a writer? Stretch your horizons as a reader.

Rules and Resolutions: Brake or Break?

Something in us loves formulas and fresh starts, vows and pledges. After all, if you aspire to quality, you want to identify which mountains to disregard or hike, and how to discern when you approach the summit. For many, January 1 promises a chance to do better. More exercise and writing, healthier food, less to be guilty about, more opportunities for pride as opposed to arrogance.

Tip: You can’t decide which rules to break—and when—unless you know the rules in the first place.

For better self-diagnosis, read plenty of fiction and nonfiction about fiction (as opposed to fiction about how fiction is actually written and judged).

~ Understand the rules well enough to evaluate when to break them.

There’s oodles of info on this, on the web and elsewhere. For example, at the “Literary Hub,” Amitava Kumar offers “Ten Rules of Writing,” everything from length of sentence to daily practice.

Stephen King has twenty rules, culminating in “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

It continues. In The Guardian, Margaret Atwood suggests:

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

Determined to maintain fiction as art rather than industry, again in The Guardian, Jonathan Franzen insists that “Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.” 

~ Use your knowledge of the rules to consciously choose when to break them.

In “Brain Pickings,” Neil Gaiman assures that

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

Scott Turow made this point at ThrillerFest (2014): “I think that you must be aware of the existing conventions. … That does not mean that you cannot reinvent them in your own way.”

The better you internalize rules or resolutions, then the more successfully you’ll reinvent them. A preference for “showing” over “telling” is helpful, as is awareness of when readers want a transitional bridge, even though the author writing the scene can follow perfectly. 

~ Sense when you’re being subjective, even self-indulgent. That’s when you want to apply the brakes.

These questions might help you analyze based exclusively on craft:

• Do you merely seek what’s easiest?
• Is your rationale for disregarding this rule or resolution legitimate?
• Is the main motive anxiety that you’ll never devise a preferable solution?

Meticulous attention to rules can breed mediocrity. But complete disregard for rules can breed failure. Like everything else about writing, the goal is candid self-assessment coupled with rigorous follow-through. Resolve to make revision seem not like strenuous tedium, but euphoric fun.

That Tricky First Sentence: Individuality and Integration

Every opening—for each chapter and scene—is crucial. But the first is most crucial of all.  Along with the familiar openings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, haunting openings usually need  no context at all:

They shoot the white girl first. – Toni Morrison, Paradise

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. – Gabriel García Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. – Ha Jin, Waiting

Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. – Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Yet, as Chad Harbach observed in The Art of Fielding,

It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side, so that three became five and five became seven, seven became nine, and whichever sentence he was writing became the slender fulcrum on which the whole precarious edifice depended. That sentence could contain anything, anything, and so it promised the kind of absolute freedom that, to Affenlight’s mind, belonged to the artist and the artist alone. And yet that sentence was also beholden to the book’s very first one, and its last unwritten one, and every sentence in between.

Sentence Revision Exercise 1

Just for fun, model the first line in your book after the structure of an opening sentence you love. Now transform your sentence into something that actually works, perhaps a combination of your original sentence and the one from this exercise. What did you discover? Can you apply it?

Sentence Revision Exercise 2

View your first sentence as the launch pad for everything else. Is it powerful enough? Does it hint at what’s crucial and set up the climax? Revise until it does, to improve not only that essential sentence, but your understanding of your entire novel.

Tip: The opening sentence must stand on its own and foreshadow every sentence to come.