Nor the Summers as Golden by Gene Wolfe

An excerpt from Gene Wolfe’s mediation on how to write a multi-volume novel. The original is here: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2007-wolfe

Since just last night I encountered a grave difficulty with my own multivolume work THE UNWITHERING WORLD with the setting, I thought it was providential that I should come across this. The words below are Wolfe’s (or Homer’s or Kipling’s) but not mine, and he is the finest novelist alive today, in or out of genre.

Nor the Summers as Golden: Writing Multivolume Works

by Gene Wolfe

How do you write stories too big for one book?

That is the question I am supposed to answer here, and I ought to confess at once that I may know no more about it than you do. Indeed, I may well know less. My only credential is that I have completed two such works – The Book of the New Sun (four volumes and a coda), and The Book of the Long Sun (four volumes). I, myself, would not read an article on novel-writing by someone who had written two.

Fundamentally, you create these large works by writing something that is more like life itself than the other forms are. Or so it seems to me. In short stories we typically separate a few hours – a single day at most – from the years of the characters. (In 1972, Gardner Dozois edited an anthology called A Day in the Life; that is it, exactly.) A carriage will flee, through ever-deepening snow, a French town occupied by the Prussians; in it ride a great nobleman and his lady, some rich merchants and their wives, a red-bearded beer-swilling radical – and the plump and patriotic little whore the townspeople call Boule de Suif. The driver cracks his whip; a full half dozen horses lunge against their harness; our carriage flounders and skids, and we’re off!

The story, as the reader realises at once, begins with the cracking of the whip and will end when the passengers reach Le Havre.

No doubt one out of the half dozen members who read this will want to be told what a novel is as well, with Huckleberry Finn or For Whom the Bell Tolls as examples. I apologise and beg to be excused. The vast majority of our members, including the other five, read nothing else, and most write nothing else. They do not need to be told what a novel is; they need to be told what the other things are; and that, after all, is what I’m supposed to do here.

One of the other things, to pedants if to nobody else, is the series; but a series is nothing more than a succession of novels that are all too often progressively weaker. You write a novel, and because it sold, another about the same person or persons, until at last your editor warns you Not To Do That Any More. (I cannot present myself as a model of virtue in this regard, much as I’d like to; I’ve done it, and I’ll probably do it again if I get the chance.)

A trilogy, tetralogy, hexology or whatever is very like a series, superficially – so much so that it is often mistaken for one by reviewers; but there are deep-seated differences. And a series, which is much easier to write, is actually much harder to write well.

A multivolume work sets out to tell a multitude of stories under the umbrella of a single overshadowing story. You will be tempted to quibble here, if only with yourself. Telling ‘the story of Main Character’s life’ doesn’t count. Everyone is born at the beginning and dies at the end, although it would be both possible and legitimate to write the story of how Main Character came to die; The Lord of the Rings, which is a genuine trilogy, comes very close as it tells how Frodo rid himself of the one Ring.

By now you have come to see – I hope – why a series is at once easier, and more difficult to write well. It is easier because the author need not worry throughout several books about the overshadowing story that should be lurking in the background of all the subsidiary stories. Contrariwise (as Tweedledee says somewhere in the two-book Alice series), a series is harder to write well because its individual books lack the unity and sense of purpose that an overshadowing story would confer.

From what I have said, it should be obvious that one of the first things the author of a multivolume work ought to do is decide upon the over-shadowing story and tell the reader what it is to be. Thus Homer sets out to tell – and does tell – the tale of the rage of Achilles, with a multitude of subsidiary stories about funeral games, the fighting before the walls of Troy, and so on and so forth. Have you forgotten the opening?

Here it is:

Achilles’s wrath, to Greece the direful spring
of woes unnumber’d heavenly goddess sing!
That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore;
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

Notice how much Homer has packed into those few opening lines. What is the overshadowing story? Achilles’ wrath, mentioned in the first line. Who is Main Character? Achilles, of course, who is mentioned twice in this brief beginning. Can we expect divine meddling in the story? Yes, indeed! ‘Heavenly goddess sing’, and ‘the will of Jove’. Those unburied bodies promise war, and ‘the naked shore’ hints of the sea. If, after reading all that, you do not understand that Homer was of our trade, you do not understand our trade. Here are a few lines from someone who understood it perfectly:

When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ‘eard men sing by land and sea;
An’ what he thought ‘e might require,
‘E went an’ took – the same as me!

Yours is a higher and holier calling, perhaps; all honour to you. But I am of Homer’s trade, and Kipling’s, admittedly on a rather more modest plan; and the moment Homer opens his Iliad, I recognise a member of our lodge. If you have not read him, you ought to, remembering always that he knew exactly what he was doing. (Yes, almost three thousand years ago.) He knew it, because he had recited those verses scores of times to live audiences. If he bored or otherwise displeased his hearers, there would be no soup and no bread for the blind minstrel who wandered from great house to great house. The Iliad is, of course, a multivolume work; if you don’t believe me, examine its structure. If you still don’t, compare its length to those of other poems, including Greek poems.

Now we have reached the hard part, for all the familiar chores of the novelist are the same. You must chose a time and a setting, create engaging characters, provide dialogue that will be succinct and interesting, and the rest of it. You know the drill. You must conclude each of your books in a way that will provide a sense of finality, obviously without prematurely ending the overshadowing story, which will furnish an ending for the last. Thus in The Book of the Long Sun, the first volume ends with Silk’s recognising his need to confront his own nature, the second with the death of Doctor Crane and Silk recognised by officers of the Civil Guard as the legitimate head of the city government, the third with Silk installed and functioning as head of the government, and the fourth with his salvaging the people originally committed to his care from the ruin of their city and their world – this last being the overshadowing story told in the four books. But all that is easy enough. Your own psychology presents the chief difficulty, and frequently requires a good deal of doublethink. You must keep in mind that the overshadowing story is to be told in half a million words or so – while forgetting that years of steady effort will be required to write them. There is a temptation, often severe, to wind the various plots up too quickly. There is another, often insidious, to pad. Half a million is a very large number indeed.

But not as large as you might think.

[…]

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character’s life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden.

Read the whole thing here: http://www.gwern.net/docs/2007-wolfe

—————————————————–

Here is the full text of the Kipling poem quoted:

When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
  He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
  'E went an' took -- the same as me!

The market-girls an' fishermen,
  The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
  But kep' it quiet -- same as you!

They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
  They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
  An' 'e winked back -- the same as us!

About John C Wright

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

March 22, 2012 @ 4:37 pm

Fancies