One of the perks of being a teacher is end-of-year gifts. It doesn't happen at every school, but it happens at mine, and it gets real. For a small example, I think I have $85 in Barnes & Nobles gift cards waiting to be tapped thanks to my students and their parents.
But as an 8th grade teacher, I also get out-of-this-world goodbye cards from graduates. I got one this year which is absolutely fantastic:
"Dear Mr. Riggs
I still remember the very first class I had with you and how you showed us a power point on your adventurous past. Honestly, at that time, I really didn't know what to think of you. I didn't know if you would be a really cool teacher or a teacher that just cared about teaching. Throughout the last two years though, I've come to a conclusion: You are an amazingly cool teacher and you absolutely love teaching. I can see that you just get so excited when you teach students. I see it in your face. You like look down and then you gradually flex your nostrils so they become bigger, and trust me I will always remember that look.
[The student then goes on to talk about how I helped develop them into a 'mature and romantic writer.']
By the way I think you have really good taste in music.
Thank you,
No Name Sue"
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
The Novel and the Future
What is happening to humanity, and what has the novel got to
do with it?
Anyone over the age of thirty has witnessed a technological
invasion of their homes. The machines, which first sent spies of refrigerators,
radios, televisions, and heaters, followed with legions of Ataris, VCRs, PCs,
microwaves, Nintendos, CD players, and cell phones. Even our bodies have fallen
to the invaders. And who would complain about high blood pressure medication,
insulin, or Viagra? Who would complain about iPads, Playstation, Netflix, or
MP3s?
But still.
This has all been a bit much a bit quickly, and change is
only speeding up. What will the world look like in 30 years? What will it look
like in 90? As we gaze at our blackening skies, back cautiously away from our
coastlines, hide in bolt holes from tornadoes the size of whole towns, and gaze
in horror at middle and lower classes growing thinner, paler, hungrier and more
impoverished by disruptive technologies and an unresponsive political system, we
are right to wonder. We are right to be afraid.
Who knows the path forward? Who has walked this way before?
Has anyone? No. Scientists and engineers can predict the paths of stars and the
workings of nanobots, but none can say what our technology will do to us, or
what we will do with our technology.
And so the task of making sense of what has happened and
what is to come falls to writers, that half-mad clan crouching in solitude and
darkness to bang away at keyboards like obsessive-compulsives washing their
hands until they crack and ooze blood.
And we read what they write because their words order the
world. Their books are maps pointing the way we have come, pinpointing where we
are, and scouting the road of the future. One of the most powerful tools in the writer’s garage is
the novel.
The novel, like God, has been pronounced dead. Its
murderers, we are told, video games, movies, TV, and the internet, run rampant
in the halls of culture. Who can bring them to justice?
But the truth is more nuanced. Yes, sales are down. Since
the creation of moveable type, there may never have been a harder time to be a
writer, or make a living at it, than this historical moment. And while the
novel has had to make room for others on the stage of culture, that does not
mean the novel has been slain, for the novel has a number of unique features
which guarantee not only that it will continue to exist, but that it may be a
vital tool for understanding whatever new world is waiting for its line to come
on stage.
First, stories, and even modernists and theorists will
concede with horror that a novel does tell a story, are powerful. Stories,
beyond being enjoyable, add experiences to the life of a reader. This is not
just metaphorical or wishful thinking. Researchers have demonstrated that
reading does not just stimulate the brain’s language center. It goes beyond to
engage other parts of the brain. A passage about movement will stimulate a
reader’s motor cortex. A paragraph describing the interaction of Jim and Huck will
activate centers of the brain devoted to socialization.
In other words, the brain of a person reading a novel acts
as though the reader is experiencing what
they read.
A reader of Elie Wiesel’s Night does not just hear a story and learn about the Holocaust. It
is deeper than that. Her brain behaves as though she lived through the horrors of Auschwitz. A reader of To Kill a Mockingbird’s brain behaves as
though she was a witness to prejudice and racism.
How do we quantify the benefits to society and civilization bestowed
of the novel by making all of us into survivors and witnesses?
Secondly, a good novel should engage its reader emotionally.
We fly through chapters because we care about characters, and want to know what
will happen to them. We stay up so late that getting up will be a chore because
we care.
Emotion is regulated in the brain by the limbic system.
There are more neural fibers going from the limbic system into the brain’s
rational centers than vice-versa, which is why appeals to emotion are often
more effective than appeals to rationality. The novel makes just these sorts of
appeals to a reader.
Furthermore, memories made when emotionally engaged are more
persistent. It is why a reader can remember all the reversals and horrors that
have befallen the Stark family in A Song
of Ice and Fire but would struggle recall similar material from a textbook
on the War of the Roses.
So the lives we live when we read a novel can be as
memorable, or even more memorable, than the events of our own daily lives.
Third, the engagement generated by a story and the emotional
involvement of the reader allow for the length of the novel. Adults with no
interest in so much as a short essay on the difficulties of adolescence will
ravenously consume The Hunger Games and
Harry Potter. And we are right to
wonder what fruit The Hunger Games will
produce when a generation of 12 year-olds taught to be suspicious of
tyrannical, over-powerful governments reach voting age.
These same 12 year-olds would not be interested in reading Rousseau or
Locke, but they consume lengthy novels on similar topics with avidity. Novels
spread ideas in ways and to people who would not encounter them otherwise, and
these same people will consider these ideas at length because they are in the
form of a story.
Fourth, writers are allowed to experiment in ways which creators
of other media are not. Movies are expensive, and their failure leads the sacking
of their creators. Ditto for video games and television shows. But a writer? If
she chases some bee of a thought back to its hive to discover it was a wasp and
there is no honey, all she has lost is her time. A writer can spend two years
writing a novel, decide it’s all drek, and toss it. Writers can go for
walk, kick an idea around, show it to their spouses, hide it in some obscure
word file, and if they decide the idea is not up to snuff, no one else ever
need know about it. Writers can try out a thousand ideas, and only publicize
the three brilliant ones. Writers have the time and the space for failure.
And failure is
important for creative innovation.
The lessons of Pixar come here to mind. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich said, “Screw-ups are an essential part of making
something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.”
Knowing this, Pixar’s movie-making process involves lots and lots and lots of
drafts and revision, a process strikingly similar to making a good novel. They
are not afraid to take an idea back to the drawing board, schedules and
deadlines be damned. For example, Toy
Story 2 was initially conceived as a direct-to-video release, but when
Disney liked the storyboards, it was made into a feature release. When director
John Lasseter saw the existing storyboards, he decided the entire movie had to
be reworked. With Disney insistent on its release date, the entire movie had to
be re-done in nine months even though most Pixar features take years to
produce.
Consider for a moment the cojones
required of Lasseter in this decision. Disney already liked the movie they saw
in the storyboards! Even though he was dissatisfied, he could have bit his
tongue, and made the movie, avoiding a rush or time crunch which might have
proved ruinous. Instead, Lasseter risked a massive failure with only himself to
blame to create one of the best sequels of all time.
Yes, successful writers do become
subject to the kind of review and cookie-cutter critique as film-makers do. It
has a pernicious effect on the writer as an artist, and is why the sophomore
slump is a literary as well as musical phenomenon. (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets anyone?)
Despite this, experience has shown that because of the cushion for
failure provided by the writing life, novelists can create more innovative and
culturally enduring ideas than other media-makers. To demonstrate the point,
successful novels will generate plays, musicals, television shows, video games,
and movies, yet after all those different, raucous, glowing, humming media
formats have been unleashed upon the novel’s plot and characters, the cliché still
stands that “The book was better.” A look at the top grossing movies of 2012 is
instructive. Of the ten highest grossing films, six of them are based on novels
or comic books, which I would argue are serialized novels with a visual
component. The ideas and stories birthed in novels are so puissant that they
are keeping the American film industry alive.
Consider that for decades, the novelizations of films have
cluttered bookstores and landfills. Pity the poor tree that gave its life to
print the novelization of Rollerball.
These books rarely become bestsellers. They certainly don’t win prizes. Because
everyone understands, universally, that they will suck because they take a 10,000
word story and force it into 100,000 words.
Yet novels can be put into countless different media, and their
story, ideas, and characters will translate. Witness the success of The Lord of the Rings movies, and
soundtracks, and video games, and table-top role-playing games. The novel
possesses a vitality and robustness for translation which other media lack, and
which I lay upon their length, and aforementioned tolerance for early and
private failures.
A novel must be planned or it will never be finished. It must be
cogent and engaging or it will never be read. Unless your name is James Joyce,
in which case your novels will be inflicted upon undergraduates by professors insisting
like a doctor administering a shot, that it is for their own good.
The experience of reading a novel is like living a whole
other life. This makes novels engaging. Memories created while emotionally
engaged are more persistent than other memories, which allows novels to be long
without losing the attention of the reader. Because the art of writing has more
room for failure than more high-stakes media, novelists can produce vigorous,
robust, and innovative ideas. This is demonstrated by their success when
translated into other formats, and the failure of stories generated in other
formats to succeed as novels.
It has been said that all art is perfectly useless, an
assertion which every artist has known to reject on its face but in the darkest
watches of the night has secretly feared to be true. Science, research, and
experience now shows us that not only is the novel useful, I would argue it is necessary. We need to understand
ourselves and our world now more than ever because we have more power over both
than at any other time in history. We need ideas for dealing with the
challenges that lay before us, and for democracy to have a hope in hell, we
must bring an understanding of the world to masses of people. Novels can help
us because novels can change us.
Bibliography
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