Either/or== Must we choose between proper mechanics and creativity?

I'm asking this because this is a question that comes up a lot: "So someone submits a perfectly clean manuscript, every comma in the right place, but it's boring. And someone submits a manuscript with a lot of grammar mistakes, but it's a great story. Which would you take?"

Hmm. That's a toughie. It's especially tough because in my experience, good creativity and good mechanics are NOT mutually exclusive. Far from it. Language is the way we present our stories, and the presentation is important for getting the story right.

To tell you the truth, I seldom see a "great story with terrible mechanics." (I have seen a few perfect manuscripts with boring stories, a few fairly good stories with terrible mechanics... mostly I've see okay stories with okay mechanics, alas.)

First, I guess I'd like to say-- no editor is looking for a perfect manuscript. Editors assume that there will be a few typos, a few infelicitous phrasings, some small format problems. No editor starts hyperventilating at the prospect of working with a writer who is a little less than perfect on every page. Got to justify existence, don't we? Perfect writers don't need editors!

So never worry that the editor is going to read 200 pages and on page 201 discover that misspelling and decide to reject. That won't happen. But what if there are four misspellings on the first page? What should the editor do then? (When encountering a lot of mechanical problems right away, I started sending back the submission without reading further, and saying, politely I hope, "I know you would like another chance to edit so that this is easier for me to consider." Generally, the writers have all thanked me for the chance, though who knows what they're really thinking. :)

One thing I do have to point out is that there really isn't an either/or here. Creativity might be messy at the creation stage, but I know very well there is no need for a good story to be messy at the submission stage. Most good stories go along with at least adequate mechanics, because the writer cares enough about presentation and narration to work hard at things like sentences and paragraphing. Most good writers don't assume that "story" is just "idea," but understand that ideas are developed in scenes which are made up of causally linked passages which are made up of paragraphs and sentences.

A mechanically inept manuscript is, in my experience, more correlated to inept development of the central idea or plot. I might see, in a mess of a manuscript, a good plot idea, or a glimmer of brilliant characterization. But that's usually all there is-- an idea, a glimmer. The execution and development aren't done well, particularly at the scene level. Why, well, interestingly, I think, there is "story grammar" and "scene syntax." Just as in a sentence or paragraph, stories and scenes have relationships that are shown in the structure or design. If the writer doesn't get that this pair of sentences shows a causal relationship:
He lurched forward, his mouth open.
I got out of the way.
Then probably the same writer isn't going to design a scene developing the cause/effect relationship between bigger events, although those events might be terrific.

Have I ever seen a great story with lousy mechanics? Yes, but mostly with my college students. If they come from a storytelling family or culture, often they get the story grammar talent with mother's milk. They've been surrounded by great stories all their lives. But usually this is oral storytelling, and often their ability to write it down is limited. We see this a whole lot with non-native speakers, especially those who left their home culture before high school, so that they aren't "writingly fluent" in their native language either.
We also see this in native speakers who didn't have adequate educational experiences (or who weren't paying attention... the class clown comes to mind-- usually he's a great storyteller.) The issues are usually spelling and punctuation, not sentences-- that is, it's really the -writing- stuff, the letters and punctuation marks which aren't clear in spoken English that cause the problem. Sometimes word choice is lacking too, especially in non-native speakers-- they just don't yet have the vocabulary. But they do have the ability to describe setting and people, to design scenes for maximum drama, to select the telling detail.

I had two students like this in one semester. They both would have gotten an A if I taught speech. As it was, one got an A, the woman who wrote very affectingly about her grandmother being diagnosed with Alzheimers the same week the writer found out she was pregnant, and how that baby ended up helping the grandmother keep her speech long into the illness. She worked closely with me and a tutor to find the mechanical problems that got in the way of the story presentation.

The other was a young man who wrote (this was a kind of emotionally wrenching semester) about getting to the hospital just a few moments after his mother died, so he couldn't say goodbye. The urgency of the journey across town -- wow. Beautifully structured with great suspense. But he didn't have the time to transform this great story into a great paper, and didn't get as good a grade (though I made sure he knew that he had all the right stuff and just needed to go this additional step, and I hope he did in the future).

So I know it's possible to have great story/bad mechanics-- but I have to point out that these were students in freshman composition, each coming out of an oral tradition that rewarded great story design and impressive vocal performance (which they had-- as I said, they both would have gotten As in a speech class). Transferring that to written language is a separate process.

But if you're submitting a written manuscript to a book publisher, well, it's expected that you are as adept at the tools of the craft. Those students might not know so much about punctuation and other elements of written language, but they did know how to use vocal expression and pauses and body language as they told their story. (They weren't so great at first at transferring that to writing, but they really did have the vocal tools for storytelling.) If you choose to write this story, it's kind of expected that you would use the written-language tools adequately.

Now, as I said, minor errors are not the issue here, and I think writers who get upset when I say I want a mechanically adept manuscript might think I mean no typos. But what I mean is-- well, truth is, most of you would be shocked to see a story with dialogue like this:

He said "Joni Im sorry about your cat's.
She said don't worry about it. There probably hiding in the garage"

That's not actually the sort of "messiness" that goes with creativity and great ideas. But that is what we see a lot. And that sort of leaden presentation means the voice is usually leaden too. Voice isn't just about word choice-- it's developed through sentencing and punctuating too.

So... let's say you are like my students, trained by tradition and upbringing and talent to be a great storyteller but not a great practitioner of the written discourse? You know what I'd suggest you do? I'd suggest you dictate your story into your phone recorder, and hire a good secretary or transcriber to type it. (If anyone knows of a speech-to-text app which does a good job, let me know. My "twalking" -- talk-walking- recordings always end up as gibberish as text.)

Many transcribers have been, uh, quietly editing their clients' prose for years, and know how to turn your dictation into an fairly adequate manuscript. (When I worked at the late lamented Grammar Hotline, most of our callers were secretaries who were interested in getting the grammar right, or in proving to their boss they were right, and they usually were.:) If the problem is getting it from oral language to written language, it's probably easier and cheaper to hire someone to make the transfer yourself.

Now that I think of it, the corollary -- the perfect manuscript and boring story-- happens more often. That's because you can hire someone to turn oral language into written language -- same words, after all, and it will still be YOUR story, not the transcriber's. But if you hire someone to design your scenes, deepen the characterization, create a suspenseful tone, structure the events-- it's not really your story, is it? All those things ARE story. (And that is why people hire ghostwriters, I guess.)

Thinking back on perfectpunctators/lousystorytellers... I have seen that too. I used to write Regency novels, a subgenre that attracted a lot of English teachers and librarians (it's set in the time of Austen, see). And when I'd judge a Regency contest, I'd frequently get an entry that was well-written on the basic word level, but lacking in story grammar. They knew how to write a sentence, but couldn't flesh out a character. They knew how to punctuate dialogue, but not how to make it sound authentic. The story would never be insane (that's much more likely with the messy manuscript, and yeah, I've seen that a lot too), but it would be "by the numbers," often using conventional situations (ballroom scenes, mistaken identity) with nothing fresh added.

In a contest, this would often score sort of on the high end of mediocre, but never win. And really, I don't have a quick solution ("hire someone to type it") here. The problem is more global, more personal-- that is, the writer probably doesn't have a great imagination and/or an innate or learned sense of story grammar, and you just can't hire that. (But I do think these would be great transcribers for the oral storytellers out there! :)

So... which of the two (messy but good story, clean but boring story) would be more likely to be published? Hmm. Well, of course, when we pick up a published book, we're seeing an edited version, not the original submission. So there might be plenty of previously-messy books that have been wrestled into rightness by a pair of editors and a proofreader, and we'll never know unless we get the editor drunk. ("You know that writer of mine who made the NYTimes list last week. Boy, you should have seen the manuscript when it came to me. One long sentence, the whole first chapter. I kid you not. You're buying the next round, right?") Notice that this requires a lot of time and energy from the editors and money commitment from the publisher, so a damn good story is required, not just a good story, to elicit that much effort.

But we certainly all read boring but well-written books. They're well-written enough that we don't take them back to the bookstore and demand our money back, or post nasty reviews on Amazon. We don't feel passionate enough about them for that level of response. Meh... we sort of wonder why this book was chosen out of the many the editor must have read that month. (Probably the original book for that slot didn't come in on time, so they needed a book to fill the gap, a book that didn't require much work to make presentable, and this one landed very cleanly on the desk at just the right moment. See why it's a good idea always to send in a clean manuscript? "Doesn't need much editing" is maybe not the fulsome compliment you were hoping for, but there are times when that's exactly what the publisher wants in a book.)

Well, anyway, we should all strive for great story/great mechanics. Figure out our weakness and what to work on to overcome it, but maintain our strengths too.

I'm remembering a query I got from one of those meticulous types, the one that made me really WANT to buy out of pity-- "I always make deadlines. I always deliver a clean manuscript. I have worked as a proofreader for a decade"-- it was sort of sad. Imagine an epitaph: "She always made her deadlines, including this one."

Alicia
Writing articles

Tell it slant

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Just a reminder to us all that the fiction in fiction is metaphor-- not of the word variety (hope is the thing with feathers) particularly, but still "slant". Fiction is not just the retelling of something that could have happened, but rather a metaphor for truth. There should be a metaphoric "slant" to a story. If you just want to send a message, write a bumper sticker. If you want the reader to experience the process of creating meaning, write a story.

Example: In Hitchcock's Rear Window, the James Stewart character is a photographer. He looks at the world through a camera lens. This is a metaphor for the experience of filmmaking (one of Hitchcock's preoccupations), but also of sexual voyeurism. And as in order to watch his neighbor's sexual encounters, he has to ignore Grace Kelly (in fab de la Renta's dresses!), it's also a metaphor for the fear of commitment. Now of course the "camera lens" isn't just a metaphor-- it's an integral part of the plot (the longer lens lets him see the activities that convince him there's been a murder). But it's the metaphorical aspect that transforms this from just a tale to an actual story.

Think about your own story. What is going to make it more than just a retelling of events? What's the underlying metaphor that connects this to something human or something universal?

I'm thinking about the story I just started. I think that it's not just about the heroine's secrets or the murder, but about choosing to live again after grief. So I should think of a central metaphor that represents that grief. Maybe it's loss-- she loses her purse and loses all her money, and that starts everything going, that loss. I don't know exactly, but I'm going to keep out a watch for some central metaphor which adds that fictional layer.

Alicia

What is your unit?

"It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy." Gary Lutz, THE SENTENCE IS A LONELY PLACE

This is a fascinating "literacy-memoir", about a writer's growth to writing. But of course it's the above that grabbed me. His "unit of writing" is the sentence. That's what intrigues him, that's what he works hardest on.

What's yours? Are you concerned with the micro-aspects, getting the right word, finding the right image for this moment? The sentence-- "vivid extremity of langage"?

Or do you concentrate more on the middle distance, the scene and/or chapter?

Or the macro aspects, the characters, structure, plot? Are you a storyteller more than a wordsmith?

I have to say, I think the unit for me is the paragraph. I wouldn't have every sentence be "vivid", because the paragraph might need quieter sentences. I focus a lot more, I think, on how to start a paragraph than how to start a scene. And how to end the paragraph!! Well, that's a preoccupation for me.

I wouldn't, for example, consider it repetitive to repeat a word on the page, but I would be careful about repeating in a paragraph.

What about you?

A Big Dead Horse

I started writing this as a comment to my last post, in response to some of the very thoughtful and insightful comments some of you made. But I thought it made sense to bump this to the front page.

People are discussing how optimistic or pessimistic they feel in this economic environment. Is the glass half full or half empty? There are some in publishing right now who are happy to have a glass at all, never mind how full it is. (Nota bene to any of my writers who might be reading this: Don't worry. I've studied the crap out of every number I can find, and we're in good shape relative to the market.)

Books are still going to be purchased, though perhaps not in the same quantities. One thing we've got going for us -- and this is really a strong factor -- is that a mass market paperback still costs less than ten bucks. That's cheaper than a DVD, CD, video game, dinner out, movie with your spouse, and so on.

Consumers may have fewer extra ten dollar bills laying around for impulse or entertainment purchases, but a book is still a good entertainment value at that price point. Think about it. How long does it take you to read an eight dollar book? Six hours? Ten? You're looking at an average cost of a buck an hour, give or take a couple dimes. Not bad at all, really. What I think we'll be doing now is focusing on ways to inject extra value into the product by making the stories as big as possible, so that the six to ten hours are really exciting experiences.

So, what is big? It's a tricky concept to define. It's not about word count or the number of point of view characters, though big books sometimes have more of each. It's not about setting, though unusual settings can make a book feel bigger if those settings are interesting and entertaining and are thoroughly utilized in the plot. Any story or narrative element, properly leveraged, can enhance the bigness of a book.

But I think of big mostly as having to do with plot and character. Shopworn plots and stock characters will probably never feel big, no matter how much you exaggerate their emotions on the page. But legitimately big characters do unexpected things, and the other characters around them react accordingly. The plots reflect that willingness in the big characters -- they reach for things that lesser characters around them would never do. And always, those actions are solidly motivated.

Think of Don Corleone killing the horse. You know the old saw, never kill the cat? This is because heroic characters, protagonists, are supposed to protect the weak. And also because people get legitimately upset over things like animal cruelty, even when committed by a villain. Authors receive letters of complaint over that sort of thing. So why did Mario Puzo have his character kill a prize racehorse in a disgusting and gruesome way?

Because it was big. Because it demonstrated Don Corleone's power, and his ruthlessness in pursuit of a goal. Because his love for his godson is so deep and profound that it compelled him to commit this unspeakable act -- and because that love rendered the act understandable, even, in a perverted way, noble.

The act was shocking, properly motivated, evocative of character -- BIG.

Theresa

Audience and innovation

Nancy said:
but the important thing is to know your audience, even if that means you want to create one.>>

I think that is important. Some audiences will allow any unexpectedness as long as they get this one thing (whatever it is) fulfilled-- usually the basic genre expectation (that the murdered will be found out, that the couple will find love, etc). Other audiences are happy when even that expectation is violated, as long as structurally this is whatever they like to read.

I've often thought that genre readers-- because they read more and KNOW the genre expectations-- are going to be less likely to forgive than, say, bestseller-only readers who come into their reading without much experience and expectation. So my sister who reads a lot of mysteries was very unhappy with a big huge bestseller mystery/thriller where the culprit was revealed to be someone who was not a character in the story before that. (I mean, the murderer was a new character, introduced only when he was revealed as the murderer.) Now I suspect that the author wanted to show how random murder can be, how the most careful policing can't account for the crazy murderer, how sometimes things don't make sense. So that would be a valid reason for deciding to violate the norms, right? But presumably genre readers LIKE the genre norms, and maybe need some tradeoff here-- something better about this book that makes up for this, or the result of the violation is so good, it's worth it.

I think that that story actually violated the central norm of mysteries, that murder will out, but also that thought and investigation, not accident, can restore justice. That's a world-view, actually, a belief in the primacy of reason (at least in fiction) that would lead away from an ending that happened more or less by accident. That, of course, makes it all the more provocative when you violate that and say, "Sometimes reason doesn't find the truth!"

That is, I think that we need to respect that genre expectations are usually based in serious thought/feeling approaches, actual principles, not just stodginess. If I read romance because I want to have my belief in love reaffirmed, then I'm probably less likely to be open to a book that SEEMS like a romance but is actually cynical about love. (However, a story that is cynical about love and THEN ends with love being affirmed-- now that will get me every time. :) Also notice that most genre readers might have no problem with a mainstream book that violates genre expectations.

So how do you get around that pre-existing worldview? A couple thoughts:

1) Aim for a genre audience but be judicious about what you're changing. I remember a great workshop by Jennifer Greene and Emily Richards, two romance writers who have always pushed the envelope, where they suggested identifying the major norms of your genre, and realize that if you change too many all at once, you'll probably alienate a lot of readers. For example, if you're going to set this in a dystopia and have the plot concerned with some arcane alien politics, you might decide that it would be too much to make the protagonist unsympathetic besides. If you want to violate the majority of the genre norms, think about whether you really want to write in that genre. No one is making you, after all. :)


2) Aim for a non-genre audience. Genre storytelling structures (the mystery plot, etc.) are remarkably durable-- they are a very good way to tell many stories that are NOT within genre expectations. Think of The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night, and The Name of the Rose. Both of these are self-consciously modeled on the genre stories about Sherlock Holmes, but they are both aimed at a different audience than a genre one. Both were mainstream successes.

3) Take the genre storytelling structure into another genre. There are a couple genre structures that are really portable-- mystery and romance. These show up all the time as plots in other genres. Mysteries, for example, are quite common as external plots in romance, and I keep trying to say that, say, Shards of Honor (nominally sf) is a quite traditional captive/captor romance, or that that first Amelia Peabody mystery was a great romance but only a mediocre mystery. (I am SO annoying!) But since the "destination genre" readers aren't likely to have the same expectations as the "originating genre" readers, you can probably violate expectations without antagonizing readers. For example, in a novel that is marketed as a science fiction novel where, say, the space ship's captain is murdered, an ambivalent ending to the mystery will probably be well accepted.

4) Write such a great story in such a great way that everyone will forgive anything. Just remember that central expectation and keep that in some way (like a mystery novel without a crime might not go over well). Laura Kinsale specializes romances with less sympathetic characters and emotionally problematic conflicts, but her characterization and prose makes up for the dislocating aspects. The Western genre has been revitalized by several authors who have generally kept the sweeping epic setting but have complicated the characters (occasionally even making the "hero" a woman).

Other thoughts? I think thinking of the =structures- rather than genres can really help. That is, take the mystery or thriller or horror structure into that big category called "General Fiction" or even "Literary Fiction," and see if that gives you freedom to innovate. :)
Alicia

Innovating

Murphy's comment is worth highlighting, and I'm going to copy just a bit, but go and read it-- it's the first comment in my just previous post.

Before I ever commit to testing these boundaries though, I’m given to wonder: How accepting is a reader likely to be, when a mainstream fiction writer breaks from traditional form? I mean, personally I feel that any art form - be it (paintings, movies or books) that invites an individual to explore themselves - their meaning and overall place in the creation of their own history, is to be admired – but like Kaufman’s work....how well would it be received? Sure, you will have an audience but, is it the right audience? Who are you actually writing for? More importantly, what is the voice that you want the world to hear? If it’s your voice, as the narrator, is what you have to impart to the reader, more important than the words your characters may have to speak for themselves? ...In the end would the truth of your fiction be better received this way? - It is certainly something to think about.

So let's say that you want to use popular fiction tropes and stories-- you love the thriller plot, or you read a lot of mysteries, or you can't write without a romance-- but you also want to innovate-- you want an unhappy ending, or you want the murderer to be someone you didn't introduce earlier, or....

First, if you are considering innovating with your current story, how? What convention are you spinning away from, and why?

Then do you think there's a way to make this acceptable? To reach readers, you have to get by editors (who can be more wedded to convention than readers are!). So... what works, to innovate without rejection?

Alicia (who actually did get all the grading done, only to find that several of the grades had turned into negatives... gotta love technology)

Synecdoche thoughts part 1

I saw Synecdoche (film by Charlie Kaufman) this weekend, and want to talk about something it brought up in my head. So spoiler alert, only this is not like a murder mystery—it's not likely I'll say anything that will actually spoil the film, as it's not all that comprehensible anyway. :) However, if you don't want to know what little I understood of the movie, stop now.

Okay, so this film with a title no one can pronounce (sin-neck-duck-key) or define (the device of using a part of a thing to represent the whole thing, like "wheels" to represent "a car"). It's about a writer, so hey! Yay! After all those films about cops and strippers, finally! Films about REAL people like us! Anyway, Caden Cotard is a playwright. (The Cotard Syndrome is worth reading about—the delusion that you don't actually exist.) When the film opens, he is directing to great acclaim a performance of Death of a Salesman, and I think that is significant, as it bookends the "play" trope—that is, here it is, fifty years after the play was written, and audiences are still loving it. (Keep that thought, as his own play lasts for fifty years... that is, it takes fifty years to "write", and it never gets performed.)

So then his wife leaves him and he gets a Genius Grant (a fair trade, given his wife is not really all that appealing :), and he decides to use the money to fund a new project, a play that replicates life. And then it gets sort of weird as Caden starts hiring actors to BE him and the others in his life, and that lasts a REEEEEEALLLL long time. But it's sort of interesting, in a tedious way. I mean, the idea is interesting, even if the actual scenes are pretty boring. (The film is worth seeing... just don't feel bad if there are long stretches you have to concentrate to follow).

What does it all mean? Well, I don't pretend to understand film, but at least it sparked a few thoughts for me.

1) Art isn't life. Art can imitate life (and vice versa), but art can't be life, or even replicate life. Caden spends decades trying to make a play that is like life, and guess what? It's boring and interminable. Life is about living. Art is about selection, conflict, focus. Life is diffuse. Art is concise. This is shown with the contrast of Death of a Salesman (two concentrated hours) and Caden's unnamed masterpiece-manque. Death of a Salesman focuses on a few significant moments, and has lived for 50 years. Caden's M-M has no focus, and outlives most of its actors.

2) Audience makes meaning. Death of a Salesman is performed in the first few minutes of the film, to great reviews and audience rapture. And it's been performed thousands of time, but everytime is new. Caden's version has very young actors performing the older parts, and as he comments, the contrast makes the audience think about mortality—that is, the audience is a maker of meaning, a part of the process.

In Caden's own play, there is no audience, just the creator and the performers... and there is no meaning. At one point, one of the actors points out they've been rehearsing for 17 years and never performed, but Caden's narcissism is such that he doesn't need an audience. The meaning for him is just that... well, I think that he's important and his life is important. This is ratified by all these people who are spending their lives replicating his life. But they are not the audience. There is no audience. So there is no meaning.

3) Art is about selection. Generally it's created in retrospect, in reflection (there are some poetry and rap jams, not to mention jazz and comedy improvs, of course, but usually the improvisers have been preparing all their lives). Revision means you can shift events and words for greater effect. Effect—effect on the audience, of course. In fact, the initial creation might be all about the artist, but revision is all about the audience, about making this make sense for the audience. Caden's M-M never gets to the revision stage, the "audience-effect" stage-- it's all created on the fly, and revised only as life requires (like a character dies or an actor quits).

4) Art is also about permanence. In drama and music, which rely so much on the performer, that means repetition. That is, part of the power of Death of a Salesman is that certain elements cannot be changed without it ceasing to be Death of a Salesman. Caden can cast it with young actors; Arthur Miller can present it in China in Chinese. The setting can be, I don't know, a space station in 2090. But something essential must remain, Willy's salesman persona, the line about attention, the theme of family disappointment. Caden's life-art has no permanence, because it has no ending—it's constantly changing as he changes his understanding of what's going on in his life.

Ars longus, vita brevis. Arthur Miller is gone, but Death of a Salesman remains with us. But when Syndecdoche ends, Caden is still alive, wandering in the derelict precincts of his set, deserted by all his actors and presumably his muse too. His life lasted longer than his art, which I guess suggests it wasn't really art at all... just his narcissism?

Well, okay, I'll think of other "art is" items. But now I'm going to just free-associate rather than try to be organize, or I'll never finish this!

The film is intriguing to me because, like the actor who gets drunk to play the drunk, Kaufman is willing to be boring in order to show how life isn't art.

Theatrical Bookends (motif here):

Death of a Salesman and Caden's Masterpiece-manque (MM)—

Hmm. Well, as I've said, Death is very contained, though actually non-linear—that is, there are those flashbacks that break the chronology. MM is tediously linear, moving only forward in time, though there are sudden jumps forward—suddenly the play has been in progress (or at least rehearsal) for 17 years, for example.

The most famous line in Death is "Attention must be paid!" That is, Willy's important, and someone should notice. His wife speaks this.

In Synecdoche (that is, Kaufman's film, not Caden's play), the actor/stalker who has been playing Caden jumps off a roof to his death (replicating more successfully Caden's suicide attempt). At the actor's funeral, Caden suddenly says, "No one is an extra. They're all leads in their own story." Then, when this event is subsumed into the play, instead of Caden, the minister says this as part of a (nutso) funeral eulogy. Not sure why it's changed from Caden. But I notice that in Death, the corresponding line is spoken by Willy's wife, that is, not by the protagonist Willy. Maybe Caden understood that distance was needed for that sort of pronouncement, but since he's so much lesser a playwright than Arthur Miller, he gives the central realization not to a major character, but to a walk-on, never seen before or again. That weakens the importance of the realization by making it extraneous to plot events—that is, the minister just announces this, and since we don't know him, we don't know what has led to this understanding. (With Willy's wife, we know all that has led to this, her love of Willy, her disillusionment, her identification with him, her vicarious humiliation....)

So by assigning it to a walk-on, Caden is diminishing the power of this, and this is deliberate, at least on Kaufman's part. With Caden, I think it's interesting—this wilderness of mirrors. The actor playing him committed suicide. He is both playwright and character. Both he and Kaufman decide to take his own understanding and give it to the minister.

Well, I think with Caden it could be a desire to distance himself from his own guilt—that is, if he hadn't unsuccessfully attempted suicide, the actor wouldn't have been led to replicate that. And Kaufman certainly wants to pose that question. But he could also be doing what I suggested in a recent post—put the Big Realization in the mouth of a non-credible character, and since the minister has a breakdown during the eulogy and starts cussing, he's pretty non-credible. :)

Funeral too—that is, Willy commits suicide, like the actor/stalker. Willy has been thinking of his own funeral for a long time, hoping it will be well-attended. In fact, one of the saddest moments in Death is when Willy predicts that many will pay their respects when he dies—he's looking forward to his funeral because death will provide the validation life hasn't. (And of course, no one comes to his funeral.) The actor's funeral is actually fairly well-attended, but the truth is, he is important to no one (I can't even remember his name :). He is, no matter what Caden says, an extra, a marginalized character whose importance is just in his role, and who is quickly replaced. He isn't the lead in his own life, because he has chosen to be an extra in someone else's play. So Willy actually has more of a life, more of a reality. He is living his own life, however sad, and his funeral is his own.

So, anyway, Death of a Salesman and Caden's MM are bookends of this film and are meant to thematically resonate and echo, and I'm sure the rest of you can find more resonances!

Off to bed—more thoughts later, including how this all connects to fiction-writing.

Alicia

(Part 2 here)