1Q84 and story "stuff"...

[khiemtran]

A while ago, I saw Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (Parts 1 & 2) on sale at Books Kinokuniya and was sorely tempted. The only reason I didn't buy it was that I was a bit put off by the size of the volume and the relative lack of space in our house. Was there an e-book version, I wondered...


It turned out there was, and further more, I could get a free sample from iBooks before deciding to purchase, so I downloaded it, promptly got hooked, and ended up making my second ever e-book purchase (my first was Teach Yourself German, just before my trip to Vienna).

Reading 1Q84 on the iphone is quite a different experience from reading a paper novel. For one thing, it's always with you. Which means I can catch up with a paragraph or two whenever I'm waiting for a coffee or a meeting to start. On the other hand, since I'm reading in small nibbles, it can all feel very stop-start. What I am finding is that Murakami's writing is actually well suited to being read like this. Because there are so many little hooks and mysteries, having extra time to think between paragraphs is actually a good thing. More than once I've had those wonderful Murakami moments - when you suddenly realise how things are connected - while doing something completely different.

Murakami is also especially good at conversations between strangers, to the extent that as soon as he sets one up, my anticipation starts rising, and just about every book of his I've read is full of them.

There's an interesting lesson here. If you were good at action scenes, you could tell the entire "story" of WWII from the POV of a Polish soldier dodging tanks and bullets all the way from Krakow to Okinawa. Or if you were good at armchair conversations, you could tell just as profound a story just from a series of visits by a child to a nursing home. The difference is the story "stuff". Not the "what happens" but "what the story is made of".

And I think, after many years, I'm finally starting to understand what my own story "stuff" is. The palette of scenes I'll use to tell a story and the sorts of things I'll consider important. Now that I know what it is, it's giving me a better understanding of how I need to look at a story in order to tell it properly.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

What you say about how we read influencing our perception of the novel and the way we're experiencing it makes so much sense to me, and really resonates with me. It's funny, because these days (meaning, these past ten years, really), my time for reading has been like this: really chopped up--tiny pieces in the corners of the day. And so yeah: the novels that work out for me are the ones that can tolerate this way of being read. That's fine, except that I feel kind of sorry for the novels that build slowly, with the accretion of details, which you to be immersed more long term and more completely--because I think I'd enjoy that sort of a novel too, and I think it's worthwhile, but that's not the sort of novel I'm able to read (or at least, it doesn't fit with the pattern of how I'm able to read) these days.

It's also *very* interesting what you say about how that reading method might alter how you yourself write, or what you write about. The novel 'm working on now is one I'm expanding from something I wrote on LJ three years ago. The way I wrote it then was really suited to the way people read on LJ--that is, they drop by and dip in for a few moments. But as a "proper" novel, it's turned into something else. But what you say makes me wonder if even "proper" novels might benefit from being written the way the story was written, in little bite-sized pieces. Very interesting.

You say you're starting to understand what your own story "stuff" is. Can I ask what?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

You say you're starting to understand what your own story "stuff" is. Can I ask what?

I guess it's a sort of formula for the things I find cool in a story. As an example, I am currently re-writing a story that I've already had one go at. I had an opening and an ending, and an idea of some of the secrets and surprises, but I didn't really know what the middle was. And that, after all, was what made up the bulk of the novel.

I could have gone lots of different ways with the middle. My first instinct would have been a sort of "history glimpsed from the corner of the room" with my protag swept along by world events, getting one or two chances to contribute along the way, and then getting his chance for a pivotal role in the final battle. For various reasons, this didn't work. Next, I tried looking at an all-action roller coaster plot with my character tumbling from one escape to another, all the way to the eventual triumph. This probably would have worked, but it still felt empty to me.

Finally, after a lot of work and contemplation, I started to get a feel for a new sort of pattern: a story told from interlocking viewpoints and with characters whose secrets are only revealed drip by drip. And the real "stuff" of the novel is actually the relationship between two of the characters, with the great geopolitical events now only a backdrop. There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but at least now I have a feel for the sort of scenes that will come up and the rules for what sort of things are allowed and what belongs in another story.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I like your description of the evolution! What you've ended up with sounds very appealing.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I hope it will be worth it in the end. Unfortunately, I'm only progressing glacially slowly, mainly due to other commitments.