Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings

In my last post I talked about a modernization of Pride and Prejudice that disappointed me. I said I didn't enjoy the novel because, though it had all of P&P's beloved characters and basic events, it lacked the story that makes the reading experience of the original so magical.

The modernization also rubbed me the wrong way for a second, even stronger reason: it's one of the preachiest books I've read in years.

When I say the book is "preachy," you might imagine something along the lines of C. S. Lewis and his unmissable religious symbolism, Rudyard Kipling and his not-so-subtle imperialism, or Harriet Beecher Stowe and her in-your-face paternalism. If you do, you're on the right track. This book had the heavy-handed moralizing of Uncle Tom's Cabin in a twenty-first-century flavor. Instead of "Christian charity! Christian charity!" the novel screamed "Social justice! Social justice!" until my ears were ringing.

Every story, in some way or another, is a morality tale. Stories are how people around the world express cultural values: what is heroic, what is villainous, how society should reward the heroes and punish the villains. We write books and make movies for entertainment, but also to build our collective understanding of an ideal universe.

It's perfectly natural for authors to use their stories to show the difference between right and wrong. However, there are stories with good moral lessons, and then there are sermons masquerading as stories.

Sign of Preaching #1: The "Point" Overshadows the Plot

The author of that P&P modernization ruined the story because she was trying to "make a point." Many points, actually.

• Jane's relationship with Mr. Bingley falls apart when Jane gets pregnant through IVF. The author wanted to make the point that it's a woman's individual choice to have children or not, and everyone should respect that.
• Mr. Wickham plays no real role in the story because, instead of finding out he's a money-grubbing cad, Elizabeth finds out he's a racist. The author wanted to make the point that racism is bad.
• Lydia randomly runs off with a trans man because the author wanted to make the point that everyone should be allowed to love whomever they want, and no one has the right to judge.
• Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a famous second-wave feminist with no business being in the book because the author wanted to make the point that strong women should be applauded, not reviled.

The problem with the novel isn't these "points" themselves. The points are all good points.

But instead of working her points into the story structure of P&P, which could be easily done, the author wrote a long egalitarian sermon. She could have saved herself a lot of trouble, and her readers a lot of time, by dispensing with the charade of writing a novel and simply printing big posters that say, "Racism is bad! Sexism is bad! So is slut-shaming and fat-shaming, by the way. Liberty and justice for all!"

Sign of Preaching #2: Characters "Tell" the Morals

Many times in the P&P modernization, Elizabeth Bennet pauses to reflect.

• She reflects that her mother's racism is subtle and insidious, as shown by how she takes the maid for granted and distrusts the real estate agent because he's black.
• She reflects that while she dislikes her younger sisters for being so vulgar, she also admires them for being so open about their feelings and so unashamed to go after what they want.
• She reflects that anorexia is a terrible disease, and that's why she tries her best to avoid talking about diet and exercise with other women.

And so on, and so forth.

Now, the original Elizabeth Bennet spends plenty of time reflecting, but the focus of her reflections is very different. She looks back on her own behavior to figure out her heart and mind, or she evaluates the actions of other people to figure out their characters and motivations. But she never pauses to profess, in a thinly disguised way, her opinions about current social mores.

Fearing that readers wouldn't get The Point from modern Elizabeth's extensive reflections, the author also made sure some of the characters voice her morals plainly. Mr. Darcy explains that Mr. Wickham's vicious prank against a black teacher was racist, in case that wasn't abundantly obvious. He also points out that Lydia's choice of husband is no one's business but her own, in case we readers in 2017 might suffer from doubts on that score.

Like complex emotions and character motivations, morals are higher-order concepts a writer should show, not tell. Modern novels are not ancient Greek plays. We don't need a chorus at the end to sing about how fate can't be changed and hubris leads to ruin.

The Moral of This Post

If you want to make the point that racism is bad, show readers how the racist words and actions of some characters hurt other characters. If you want to make the point that powerful women are admirable, introduce powerful female characters who play heroic roles in the plot.

When you preach morals to an audience, they roll their eyes and make sarcastic snoring noises. If you instead tell an audience a riveting story and let them figure out the morals for themselves, not only will the experience be more enjoyable for everyone, but the lessons will sink in deeper and stay with them longer.

Outlining Rainie Day Mystery #2, in which the murder takes place at the Sea Breeze Jane Austen Society's Annual Regency Ball, has given me the happy excuse to revisit Austen's works. I've been spending my evenings reading the novels on Project Gutenberg and watching the movie adaptations on Amazon...all for the sake of "research," of course.

My opinion of this literary great, and particularly of her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, has vacillated over the years. I adored Austen as a teenager. Then I derided her in my early twenties, when I discovered her imperfections. Now I can enjoy her stories despite their flaws.

As I reflect on the novels and read what other people say about them, I've been thinking about what makes Pride and Prejudice (henceforth "P&P") so much more popular than the others. I've proposed theories on this blog before: P&P has the most likeable heroine, and the story focuses on romance while Austen's other novels are primarily coming of age stories.

But there's something magical about P&P that sucks a reader in more than the others. It's not the brilliance of the characters—the cast of Emma is much more interesting. It's not the wittiness of the writing—the satire in Northanger Abbey is much more amusing. And it's not the pacing or originality of the plot—Elizabeth Bennet is completely reactive, and the plot points of P&P are tame compared to the scandalous secrets, betrayals, and brushes with death in Sense and Sensibility.

No, that special something is not in either the idea or the execution of the novel. The magic of P&P is in its basic story structure.

1. Of all Jane Austen's novels, P&P has the happiest ending.

As I wrote in my March 2016 post, "Thoughts on Conflict and Tension," conflict creates narrative tension because it takes the characters farther away from happiness. This means the potential for happiness has to exist in the first place. "There's no tension when a character sits around moping about the pointlessness of life," I said. "There is tension when a character wants very much to live happily ever after with his college sweetheart, but she disappears without a trace, and he's desperate to find her."

There are two ways to add tension to a story. One is to make the characters' situation worse. Inflict greater and greater misfortunes upon the poor cast until their accumulated misery explodes in the climax and fizzles away in the resolution. This does make for an exciting read—however, overdoing it will inflict misery on the poor readers as well. I've read several dark novels in which every character was a jerk and every scene was a humiliation or a heartbreak for the hero. By the time the hero was facing mortal danger to save the world, I was thinking, "Who cares? This world isn't worth saving."

The other way to add tension is to attack from the other end. Make the promised resolution of the story happier.

Here's a boring movie: An alcoholic former athlete must clean himself up to recover his health.

Here's a better movie: An alcoholic former athlete must clean himself up and lead the high school soccer team to victory to regain the respect of the community.

Here's a poignant movie: An alcoholic former athlete must clean himself up, mend broken friendships, and lead the high school soccer team to victory to regain the affections of his long-suffering wife and their adorable young son.

Each successive hypothetical movie above raises the stakes, not by making the situation more dire, but by making the rewards more desirable. The first movie would make an audience go, "So what?" The third would make them go, "Aww..." The greater the potential happiness, the more tragic the obstacles standing in the way, especially if those obstacles are the characters' own doing.

Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are an ideal couple. Austen shows us how perfect they are for each other through their sparkling conversations, which are disagreements on the surface but hold the promise of harmony in the future. Elizabeth attempts to tease Darcy, and he thwarts her with gallant responses. They get so absorbed in their playful duels of wit that other characters feel the need to cut in and yank them out. And though they claim to dislike each other, Darcy defends Elizabeth against the nasty Miss Bingley, and Elizabeth defends Darcy against her vulgar mother.

Readers can see almost immediately that these two are on the same wavelength. They're equally matched in brains, in humor, and in vanity and stubbornness. Once they conquer their misunderstandings, they'll be the best of friends. We keep turning the pages because we desperately want to see these two likeable characters resolve their problems and live happily ever after.

The incentive to turn the pages isn't as great in any other Austen novel because the happily-ever-afters aren't quite as happy. Every other romantic pairing is subdued or flawed in some way—the heroines are much younger and less mature than the heroes (as in Emma and Northanger Abbey), or the characters just aren't very interesting (as in Mansfield Park and Persuasion), or both (as in Sense and Sensibility). All of these novels have conflict aplenty, some even more than P&P, and yet readers who make it to the marriage proposals at the end will say, "That's nice," not "Yes! Finally!"

2. Every conflict in P&P directly threatens the happy ending.

I didn't realize how tightly plotted P&P really is until last weekend, when I read a modern retelling of this beloved novel that had the same basic characters, and the same basic events, but no story. In the author's eagerness to stuff the story into the 21st century by erasing all traces of sexism, she also erased all the interesting and relevant conflicts.

• The initiation, temporary demise, and restoration of Jane's relationship with Mr. Bingley occur completely independently of Mrs. Bennet's scheming, and nearly independently of Mr. Darcy's meddling.
• The dastardly Wickham is an overgrown frat boy who strings Elizabeth along, but he never touched Darcy's sister Georgianna and never meets Elizabeth's sister Lydia. Elizabeth wises up and ends her relationship with Wickham before she gets involved with Darcy, and Wickham has no part in the story thereafter.
• Lydia elopes with a trans man she's been dating since the beginning of the novel. But though the conservative Mrs. Bennet flies into hysterics, everyone else points out that Lydia really did nothing wrong. So there's no need for Darcy to win Elizabeth's heart by saving her family from social and financial ruin—she merely realizes she's in love with him after spending more time with him at holiday barbecues.
• The powerful Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a famous second-wave feminist who has no relation to Darcy, no objections to to Elizabeth, and really no purpose for being in the story at all.

So this "retelling" ended up being a collection of events that relate to each other only sequentially: scene A comes before scene B, but scene A doesn't cause scene B. Mere bickering and flimsy misunderstandings separate the lovers, and mere happenstance brings them back together.

Every time I read the original P&P or watch the faithful movie adaptations, I cringe when Mr. Darcy explains why he doubted Jane's affections for Bingley, because Mrs. Bingley's manipulative schemes are finally coming back to bite her. I tear up when Elizabeth receives Jane's letter about Lydia's elopement and realizes she'll never see Mr. Darcy again, because she could have prevented the disaster by telling her family about Wickham's history of seducing fifteen-year-old girls. I chortle when Lady Catherine de Bourgh huffs off to tell Mr. Darcy all about the impudence of Miss Bennet, because she's only bringing about the very union she's trying to prevent.

But when I read the modernization, I never once cringed, teared up, or chortled over the plot events. I didn't delight in the ups or despair in the downs of the main couple's relationship. None of the plot points were the consequence of the main couple's previous decisions, and very few of the conflicts affected their ultimate happiness.

Let us return to our alcoholic former athlete, who we'll presume is in the poignant version of the movie. Here's a series of conflicts that he might face in a boring plot.

• The assistant coach of the high school soccer team doesn't respect him and undermines his authority in front of the kids.
• The president of the PTA objects to him and starts a petition to get him fired.
• The rival soccer team plays mean pranks on the kids and lowers their morale.

Are these conflicts? Yes, they are. Will anyone care? No, because these conflicts have no cause/effect relationship and have very little to do with the protagonist's ultimate goal of living happily ever after with his wife and child.

Now here's a series of conflicts that would make for a much more interesting movie.

• The athlete gets off on the wrong foot with the soccer team by arriving late to the first practice with a hangover and no training plan. He treats the kids with contempt. Half of the team doesn't come back, and the remaining players don't respect him.
• One of the kids he insulted is the son of the PTA president, who starts a petition to get him fired.
• After a disastrous PTA meeting, the athlete has a relapse and comes home drunk. His little son wants to play, and the athlete shouts at him. Terrified, the boy begins to cry. The long-suffering wife packs up and leaves with the child.

Now to earn his happily ever after, the athlete will have to sober up, bond with the kids by getting sweet revenge on the rival team, and show his wife he's changed by being responsible and winning the championship game.

These interesting events are not materially different from the boring versions, but (a) they're related causally and (b) at every step, you can feel the pain the protagonist is causing to himself and to others. When you watch him botch the soccer practice, you know he's going to regret it later. When you watch him shout at his little son, you know he's breaking his own heart as well as his wife's. These events aren't just random occurrences that leave you asking, "So what?"

Today I'm going to talk about a subject near and dear to every academic librarian's heart: authority.

Now when librarians talk about "authority," we don't mean the word in the common sense of "the power to enforce laws, exact obedience, command, determine, or judge." We use it in the context of evaluating sources, i.e., "Does the author of this book or article have the authority to write on the topic, or is he a random Joe Schmoe with no claims to expertise?"

What is "authority" in publishing?

The concept of authority is difficult for students to grasp because it's not "real." It seems to be completely arbitrary. College students know they're supposed to use academic journals instead Wikipedia, but why? Who says this stranger with a PhD must be more trustworthy than this other stranger with the screen name scienceguy1985? The information from both strangers is the same anyway!

Authority seems arbitrary...because it is somewhat arbitrary. The truth is, authority isn't actually a question of whether a person is qualified to write about a topic. It's a question of whether other people will believe this person is qualified to write about the topic.

"For example," I tell the classes, "If you say to your friends that you read on Wikipedia that sugary snacks worsen symptoms in kids with ADHD, they might say, 'Oh, that makes sense!' But if you write that in a paper, your readers will tear you apart. Readers, especially ones who disagree with you, are always on the lookout for weaknesses in your sources. They'll scoff, 'Well, that's just some quote from Wikipedia. Anyone could have made it up.' But if you can find that same quote in an article by researchers at Harvard Medical School, they'll say, 'Well, I guess that must be true. People at Harvard know what they're talking about.'"

In reality, the anonymous authors who contributed to the Wikipedia article might know more about ADHD than those researchers at Harvard. People at Harvard have published just as much nonsense over the centuries as people from anywhere else. But what's important, when picking sources for an academic argument, is that your audience will believe Harvard studies are always reliable.

"Authority" is the reason why people in the publishing world talk so much about platform. Having a platform is especially important for nonfiction writers. Even if an amateur historian/psychologist/etc. has the same knowledge as an Ivy League expert, if she can't put "Dr." in front of her name and wax at length on her accomplishments in the field, nobody will buy her books. It's not fair, but it's true.

In fiction, an author's platform is slightly different. Potential readers don't look for PhDs from fancy universities, but they do look for literary awards, celebrity endorsements, and other evidence of "quality." People are much more likely to take a chance on an author with a dozen critically acclaimed books and a "bestselling" label to her name than on a newbie with no apparent credentials.

The essence of authority is trust.

Authority is something we, as a society, give to people because we trust them. We trust researchers from Harvard to write medical articles with solid data and flawless reasoning. We trust people with "Dr." in front of their names to tell us the truth about history/psychology/etc. We trust people in police uniforms to enforce the law fairly.

So we're outraged when scientists publish lies, when police murder innocent citizens, or when high school teachers prey on impressionable young students. If an inner-city gangster lies, kills, or rapes...well, that's horrible, but we don't expect any better. But the scientist, the cop, the teacher? We trusted these people, and they broke our trust and stomped all over the brittle fragments.

Writers, even in fiction, have more authority than many realize. Simply by being authors we have authority. (Who'd-a-thunk?)

When a reader picks up a book, she basically hands her heart over to the author on a silver platter, saying, "Do with it what you will." She trusts the author to do great things with her heart, to make it race and stop and soar in an unforgettable experience.

And that's why, when a novel doesn't deliver that experience, readers are infuriated. They wouldn't get angry about a $15 lunch with a disappointing dessert, but they'll storm and rage about a $15 paperback with a disappointing ending. The author beguiled them into handing over their hearts, and then she just dropped them in the dust and walked away.

Never break a reader's trust.

After I wrote my previous post, "In Defense of Telling," my mother emailed me with a comment on my complaints about "bait and switch" openings. She was recently certified to teach cycling classes, and the award-winning personal trainer who led her certification course said, "Never trick your trainee. Build trust and follow through with your word."

In the past few months, I've read a couple of books that "tricked" me as a reader. The author set up expectations in the beginning, but then she didn't follow through with her word.

One of them was a YA fantasy, the sequel to a bestselling novel I thoroughly enjoyed. When I finished book #1, I thought I'd found a new favorite author to add to my ever-growing list. I was excited to learn it was the first of a trilogy, and I eagerly downloaded the audiobook of #2 from my local public library and listened while sewing.

The book is about a teenage girl who can control minds. If she desires, she can force anyone in the world to love her, to tell her all of their secrets, to do whatever she wants them to. Everyone fears and distrusts her, especially the prince of the kingdom. The heroine's father, who had the same ability, used it to lead the king down the path of ruin. The prince despises him for it and would never, ever trust her, a monster like him.

"Ooh!" I thought while ripping out tangled stitches. "This is gonna be amaaazing!" Just imagine it: the girl struggling with the temptation to use her ability, trying to remain a good and kind person even though victims of her evil father want to kill her and powerful royals want to use her for their own ends. The handsome prince, falling in love with her but resisting it every step of the way, because he can never tell if his feelings are real or if he's being brainwashed by that wicked siren. The conflict! The heartache! Bring it on!

And then...nothing.

The author did absolutely nothing with this amazing setup. That heartbreaking romance? After one minor act of kingdom-saving by the heroine very early on, the prince feels bad for saying mean things and decides to treat her better. They get to know each other during long walks in the moonlight. They become best friends and eventually lovers. End.

And that internal struggle to be a good person? Well, after some nice people in the palace convince the heroine she can use her powers for good, she thinks quietly for a while (and by "a while" I mean many, many chapters) and decides to accept her power and herself. She helps the royal family put down rebellions and soon everyone in the kingdom worships her. End.

The book was very mature, very realistic, and mind-numbingly boring. I listened to all twelve hours of the audiobook on principle, wondering all the while how the same author who wrote that wonderful book #1 could turn out a dud like this.

Writers say conflict drives plot. While that's true in essence, it's not the whole story. Conflict, by itself, doesn't drive anything. It's only a setup, a promise of exhilarating scenes to come. What really drives the plot is how characters react to conflicts: fighting, fretting, trying to fix problems only to create more of them.

So it's not enough to say, "The prince and the heroine hate each other but they're destined for each other. Isn't this exciting?" If the conflict doesn't put the characters in painful situations, doesn't force them into ugly confrontations with each other or themselves, the story will still be a dud.

Setting up a conflict, but then doing nothing with it, is breaking a promise to readers. So is hinting at a romance that never blossoms; or introducing a villain who doesn't do villainous things; or portraying the heroine as a kick-butt warrior on page one, only to have her spend the next 300 pages wallowing in self-doubt and pining for hot guys. Like the personal trainer said, you have to follow through with your word.