(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
I love gnarly shapes and processes---gnarly in the sense of being not too orderly and not too random, right on the living border. Moving water is amazing stuff, and cranking your camera's shutter speed up high lets you freeze it. And your foot, every now and then you look at it and---how strange. Really, we're as oddly shaped as any fabulous jungle plant or deep ocean crustacean.
A few years ago, I gave a talk called "Seek the Gnarl" where I talked about how gnarliness relates to the way a writer creates the plot for a novel.
I used to maintain that it was better not to plot my novels in advance. I'd defend the practice of not having a precise outline by speaking in terms of the gnarl. A characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can't look at what's going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It's necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly processes are unpredictable; they don't allow for short-cuts. In other words, the last chapter of a novel with a gnarly plot is, even in principle, unpredictable from the contents of the first chapter. You have to write the whole novel in order to discover what happens in the last chapter.
This said, I've learned to at least try to write an outline to try and lessen the pain of writing. But even with an outline, I can't be quite sure about the twists and turns my story will take. How precise, after all, is an outline? If, as William Burroughs used to say, a novel is but a map of a territory, an outline is but a map of a map. In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map.
I took this photo on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley the other day. I like the contrast between the digital numbers labeling the billboard, and the gnarly tatters of the peeling paper. The numbers are the outline, the (actually quite elegant) shapes of the paper are the novel.
I'm not saying a novel should be a random mess. I'm saying that it's nice if the story has the organic and unpredictable feel of some living thing that's grown or of some natural shape that's arisen over time. The characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wakes, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle, like the plates of a skull.
Online version of Rudy's talk, "Seek the Gnarl".
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I think there's something to be said for allowing oneself room as a writer to discover what happens next. You the writer should be just as excited as the imagined reader. This doesn't preclude outlining, but it does require the ability to let go of the outline every once in a while and focus instead on priorities: what is this section doing? what is its goal? can that goal be accomplished in another way, with other characters in a different setting saying new things?
This to me is the difference between fiction writing and non: although an essay can be quite a bit longer than a short story, it actually has less room for pleasurable deviations, the bends and dips in the narrative road that expose new landscapes. Academic or journalistic writing requires rigour, because the onus is on the writer to make a point or relay information in the most convenient, understandable way for the reader. With fiction, that onus is on the reader. As the interpreter, she can pick and choose from among the fictional elements to make her own meaning, so long as the writer has provided them in an aesthetically-pleasing way.
I'm basically a beginner, but that's the mindset I work from.
fractnarly?
I'm not sure that I'd characterise the aesthetic appearance of the numerals in the photograph as "digital". Well, of course, they are digits in a literal sense, as indeed are lower-case serif page numbers in a 19th-century book. Though to me, they are conspicuously in Helvetica, and thus an artefact of the late analogue age, the second half of the 20th century. (In fact, when third-quarter-of-20th-century retro comes in, it may end up being called "Helvetipunk".)
Cat Valente's "The Orphan's Tales" is extremely gnarly - it's made up of recursive narratives that invert classic fairy tale tropes.
Plus it's got illustrations by Mike Kaluta, a sound-track.
This is akin to the debate between top-down design and bottom-up growth that permeates many fields - biology, AI, advertising, management...almost any "science" you can think of.
Though I've never called it "gnarl", I've always loved how age is very difficult to mimic (though Disney theme parks do a good job mimicking spiderwebs and dusty rooms), and how age "fills in the gaps" in a way simplicity and purposefully designed form does not.
I've taken a slightly different route in my musings though - I try to see how the right balance of design versus growth is necessary for a thing - for example, how much tending do you have to do to a sapling before you can just sit back and let the tree grow? How much can a company spend on advertising before it is seen as too much?
Anyway, I totally get where you're coming from. I look forward to your blogs.
Many good poets use the expression, "The poem as process." The poem is made from the process of writing it. The wind-up takes you into the delivery and the game is on!
(Then all you've got to do is throw away the first few lines, putting you in media res and as close to the ending as possible.)
One of my favorite days of reading was reading Software by Rudy and Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut in one afternoon, talk about a mind melt. I look forward to Rudy guest blogging. He is a treasure.
I'm with takuan.
You say gnarly, I say fractal.
let's call the whole thing off? ;)
I'd be careful of describing it purely as a fractal though, because that means something pretty specific, and most of the ideas thus far talked about aren't really fractal, per se..
You need characteristics like iterative repetitiveness and self-similarity across scale, both of which may be part of any of the ideas so far mentioned, but are not necessarily intrinsic to them.
Better in the portmanteau Tak suggested, fractnarly :)
gnarctal?
Gnarctal sounds like an aggresive narcoleptic portal. Quite a small market share of internet traffic, I'd imagine.. and do we still even have portals?
"You need characteristics like iterative repetitiveness and self-similarity across scale, both of which may be part of any of the ideas so far mentioned, but are not necessarily intrinsic to them."
I was referring to the things, and not to the ideas about the things.
But, by definition, thoughts are generated within a fractal neural network... so... lets call the whole thing off. ;)
is Proust gnarly?
MDH
Touché, and called! :D
And Proust? I dunno..
But this pratˆHˆHˆHˆH guy seems to know all about it..
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7927404973942853428
(ff til 00.30 if you have to)
'sup fuckers?
In the word fractnarly, is the ct silent or just the t?
neither, but the "3" is aspirated.
gnarly?
oh "gnarly"!: la:
http://iconicionic.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/the_great_wave_off_kanagawa.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1FaflUn4Co
Indeed. Gnarly is one of my favorite things to play around with:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37535656@N07/3455822590/sizes/l/
"I'm not saying a novel should be a random mess."
But I've read Postsingular.
Virginia Wolfe was gnarly.
James Mother Gnarling JOYCE was the gnarly root of literary gnarlyness. He'd gnarl you so twisty your great great grandparents would have arthritis.
See chapter 1 of Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town, "Writing off the Subject:"
"One mark of the beginner is his impulse to push language around to make it accommodate what he has already conceived to be the truth, or, in some cases, what he has already conceived to be the form....knowing can be a limiting thing...Guessing leaves you more options..."
I suppose some novels are coral reef, and some bonsai.
A relief to read this today, having just been told off for having no more than the arc of the story 'planned' (= in my head). I knew some professionals hold the opposite opinion, but being told directly - personally - that i should start with a chapter-by-chapter map is unnerving when at a wobbly-nervous stage of the writing! So, thanx. ;0)
Btw i came here from a retweet via @motsjustes.