Sunday 3/17/24
Stakes are a crucial part of all great fiction. They must be high for the reader. Stakes generate readerly involvement that makes the reader a part of the story, not simply an observer of it.
Stakes can take all forms. They need not be life or death. Stakes that are very high may stem from something that, in the grand scheme of the world, isn't very large in and of itself. Perhaps it means everything to a character in a story, though, which then makes the story about why that is, and that why can be about someone's fundamental humanness, which may also make it about ours, and reveal that humanness--and aspects of ourselves--to us in ways we never considered. May make us aware that things exist that we had no inkling about. Things we need to know of. Things that facilitate our growth. Cause us to consider how we are, how we act, how we look at certain things and people. Stakes are imperative. From stakes we get consequence.
A great story must be an undertaking of great consequence, replete with consequence, that has consequence for the reader. I don't just mean as a reader--I mean as a person. A person who has just read.
You never get any stakes in the fiction that we see right now. What are the stakes of Motorollah in Granta? Some pedestrian, replacement-level writing from a J. Robert Lennon? Diane Williams nothingness that publishing people lie about when we can all see how bad it is?
Stakes are apparent throughout the work. There are no stake-less bits, if you will. Everything contributes to what is on the table, that mass of consequence. A trip to the store to purchase a loaf of bread may have great stakes.
It depends what is on the table for that character or characters, and, by extension, and involvement, what is on that table for us. We are walking alongside that character, if the writer is a great at what they do, and we may even say that we are that character, though the adumbrations of their life looks very different from ours. If it does. That's outside stuff, though. Inside is where it's really at.
Another prose off here, with Granta again, where the fiction is always tedious, put forward for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the work, interchangeable, replaceable, and stake-less. Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima aren't publishing anything in Granta because it's so amazing, something that these pages have proven. You don't have invention. You have people talking things from their boring and fictionalizing them.
Those are the stakes, which is to say, there are none at all. Who cares what classroom you sat in once upon a time in getting some degree? Who cares about your writing workshop? Your cliched hipster life in Brooklyn, if you're Justin Taylor? Whatever it may be.
Let's take a look at something from "The Sensitivity Reader," by Andrew O'Hagan:
Before it occurred, the drama on the Piccadilly Line, I was one of those people employed to clean up the radio archives at the BBC. I’d written a book called Muriel Spark and the Comedy of Fact and was still smarting from the silence surrounding its publication. People talk such garbage about failure. They say it’s the attempt that counts, that failure is a great teacher. All I know is that success improves your life, and when it doesn’t come you’re left with a sense of premeditated injury. I joined a part-time MA in journalism at City University, where some of the students had tattoos, nose rings and pale blue hair. We yearned to report on the inner reaches of ourselves. All data was of course credit data. All reporting was surveillance. In good journalism you get to see what happened, but in the best you also get to see what might have happened instead.
‘You guys want to believe that stories belong to the people they’re about,’ the professor said one cold evening in the lecture hall, ‘but that’s just not true. History is merely a chronology of accidents and journalism a perpetual clean-up operation.’ His accent was strong. Welsh. The hall smelled of damp wool. The students seemed super-alert. Outside the window, the lights of Clerkenwell glowed through the rain.
‘I don’t think so,’ the young woman sitting in front of me said. Professor Madoc behaved as if all opposition was enjoyable. You had the impression he kept his deepest professional experiences to himself, and that he doubted your capacity for reality. I admired him, perhaps more than I should have. I like the idea that minds improve by confronting difficulty, not by meeting reassurance.
Do you care about any of that? What did you care about? The answers, of course, are "no" and "nothing." There's nothing to care about, because there are no stakes. You, the reader, insofar as your time, energy, and interest are considered at all, are supposed to indulge the writer, as if that's what they have coming to them via birthright. Call it the "let them eat cake" approach to fiction.
What you'll see over and over and over again in these examples I put up on here, is the snobbery at play. Think of how entitled you have to be to be a writer who does not give a single thought to whether what they've written has any appeal for a reader. I mean, do you think these people--again, go look at Motorollah, look at J. Robert Lennon in The New Yorker--ever ask themselves if someone might like what they've just written? Do you think they ever try and put themselves in someone else's place as the reader of what they wrote? They never do, do they? Think of how narcissistic that is. How myopic. How pathetic.
These people aren't really writers. They're members of a system, a clan. And that's very different. Real writers think about the reader. And they care about the reader.
Stakes give us something. We have a reason to be there--and to care--when there are stakes. Writing minus stakes, in a place like Granta, a New Yorker, a Paris Review, A Public Space, a Zoetrope, is simply vapid narcissism. There are no stakes with vapid narcissism. There's also classicism in abundance, this expectation--which is more like a total lack of consideration or regard for anyone else--that you--or someone--will care because this entitled person who wrote the story was the person who wrote it, though there's also no thought given to a reader at all.
Reading isn't part of why someone writes something like this. It's not really written to be read. It's meant to keep one in a club, get one in a club, be able to say that one is this thing, to get the teaching post, to get the award sans any actual vetting of the prose, to be handed things that are not earned by the work. Intention matters in great writing. Something that is great is written with intent for the person and people reading it, or who could read it.
Sigrid Rausing is herself a narcissistic bigot, so she would go along with waving this bland, pointless writing through. She is herself bland and pointless; she exists to symbolize a class. To be in a class. Being in a class means, for a Sigrid Rausing, saying "You don't get to be in this class."
It's a joyless, empty life of looking after one's own, and being a pedant of class system gatekeeping. This would be the kind of writing she'd publish, because she's not looking at the writing at all. She's looking at the kind of person who did that writing. You can't mount any defense or case that what you just saw was excellent. The next person who does so will be the first. You're sitting in a class. Fine. What are the stakes? How much you want to bet that was this author's university class back in the day, and he's just flown it into service here and is calling it fiction?
And big shock, we have academia, we have someone who wrote a book that itself sounds so boring and is, comically--but not intentionally comically--a book about Muriel Spark, which is so on the nose for this kind of automation of a writer. A system product of a person. One of the interchangeable drones doing drone writing. Drone typing. Drone formula. Whatever you wish to call it. I can't really call it writing. We get the stock description of the lights glowing outside in the rain, which comes exactly where the recipe these people all seem to use says it should come. Why are you telling us about these lights? What do they have to do with anything? Where are the stakes?
Everything has to contribute to the stakes. But that also presupposes there are stakes. And there are no stakes here. This is just a bad writing with nothing to say, no story to tell, expecting your indulgence, and having that work published because bigots who could care less about the quality of the writing saw that this was the right kind of person.
There's nothing to be threatened by here if you have no ability and know it. We've talked over and over again in this journal about parallelism--how people like Sigrid Rausing want to put forward what is to the side of them, never what is on the level above. Levels above. Publication in Granta isn't about great work. Great work is hated at a Granta. It's about maintenance, the upkeep of a kind of comforting mediocrity. I'm using that term mediocrity loosely. Is this even mediocre? Compared to what? It's just more bad, meaningless, rote, do-nothing, stand-for-nothing, venture-nothing, give-nothing, offer-nothing writing. It's just there. Technically, because that's a page and there are some words on them.
So what we just saw involved a gathering. We'll be consistent--this is also about a gathering, from a story of mine:
Because our daughter Sue plays basketball as well, I have to hear Rich from the stands often. Sometimes, he's next to me and I want to karate chop him in the neck, but in part so I'd win the approval of the other parents, as I’m confident that they'd cheer me and I have never been formally cheered before.
As a kid at my birthday parties I recall the cake being carried in, and instead of people just singing to me, there’d be silence instead, like this ceremony had never been enacted before in the history of people, let alone on that same day of the calendar the year before, and my mother would say to me, "Say something."
What the hell was I going to say there? "Chitlins con carne!"
One year, for whatever reason, I just said, "Merry." Everyone laughed that kind of laughter with the “wouldn’t-want-to-be-you” edge. Kids can laugh that way as well. A girl named Riley who grew up to be a trauma surgeon reached under the table and pinched my thigh, squeezing the smallest amount of skin between her fingers so that it took everything I had not to scream. My birthday is in July, so I always had shorts on and have felt vulnerable as a result in all of the years since when a cake—or, more likely here in middle age, a cupcake—is brought out.
We regularly seemed to sit next to each other, Riley and myself. Every now and again at dinner, my mother would opine that “that Riley” had a crush on me and it was cute, as my father, who was sitting three feet away, pretended not to hear.
Different level. It's always on a different level. It isn't to the left or the right. It's above. That's not comforting mediocrity to a Sigrid Rausing. We all know that's different level stuff. That's the problem in this industry, because it's same-level stuff, and the same type of person, who is cleared to pass. Which is why entries like this one in this journal are so important, because otherwise, it's all allowed to happen and the bigotry and classism and discrimination can be continued indefinitely.
That's not just about a birthday party in the above excerpt, is it? There's a grand sweep of truth here, and we move from the precise historical moment--part of a person's life--to timeless concerns, even if they're just occurring to us now, as they are perhaps to the narrator. You want to catch readers up in the sweep. It's the sweep of stakes. We know more about people when we read this passage. At the level of language, a word choice like "merry" is memorable. What you need there is something that works, that fits, is congruous, but which is also totally surprising. That "merry" sticks in the brain. We retain that after we're done reading.
We also find that things we've thought, that we may not have known we thought, are given greater clarity, "made official" in our minds, as it were. We have that sensation--but from deep down--of "Oh, yeah." It's the commiseration of our human essences. A pooling. And an individualistically-tailored boosting via the pooling.
Again, stakes and consequence.
