Comments on: The narrative of illness https://andrewchapman.info/the-narrative-of-illness/ Editor, writer, book designer, publishing consultant, walker Mon, 18 Sep 2023 10:47:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.3 By: Rickbot https://andrewchapman.info/the-narrative-of-illness/comment-page-1/#comment-1129 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:05:15 +0000 http://hatmandu.net/?p=1237#comment-1129 Oh absolutely, I love story arcs. I tried reading ‘Ivanhoe’ recently and quickly gave up, as after fifteen pages Sir Walter was still obsessively discussing the detail of a minor character’s clothing. Two paragraphs on the belt alone. Good grief.

]]> By: Matt Matt Kallisti Matt https://andrewchapman.info/the-narrative-of-illness/comment-page-1/#comment-1128 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:45:39 +0000 http://hatmandu.net/?p=1237#comment-1128 qv Heller’s “Something Happened” – 550 pages of nothing whatsoever happening except a middle-aged man’s angst, until an actual life-shattering event occurs in the last couple of pages. I love it dearly.

Arthouse films are much more willing to mill around pointing the camera at pretty things than literature, probably because they exist in a visual medium: given it takes a thousand words to tell a picture, it’s harder to write about nothing than to look at it.

]]> By: hatmandu https://andrewchapman.info/the-narrative-of-illness/comment-page-1/#comment-1127 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:27:08 +0000 http://hatmandu.net/?p=1237#comment-1127 Absolutely – I don’t think an arc is a necessity. I loved A Rebours by J-K Huysmans, where bugger all happens – he basically describes the character’s soft furnishings and inner maunderings for a few hundred pages. A lot of Hollywood is boilerplate nonsense. Though I do suspect stories with an arc have a comforting value of their own. That’s what I tell myself when I enjoy Dan Brown, anyway.

]]> By: Rickbot https://andrewchapman.info/the-narrative-of-illness/comment-page-1/#comment-1126 Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:25:38 +0000 http://hatmandu.net/?p=1237#comment-1126 Must a story always have an arc? Does there need to be a purpose and a conclusion? I don’t think so. An eighth, twenty-first or thirty-sixth story might be ‘monotony’, where the author showcases their writing style by detailing events of no consequence. There is still a character who still has actions, but his actions go nowhere and mean nothing.

This is possibly more common in student films than in literature, but Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York is a good example in print: 13 chapters describing the tediously ordinary existence of New Yorkers, moving on the basis of mundane motivations and all of it beautifully written.

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