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What the hell is minimalism?
Editor's Note: This is a sample thread from the recent Craig Clevenger intensive. It's on the theoretical side, and doesn't showcase any private submissions of students' creative writing or other sensitive materials. Rather, it's a good small sampler of the level of talk that goes on in our advanced writing classes. Enjoy. Mark Vanderpool
There seem to be multiple definitions floating around!
When I think minimalism, I think first of Ezra Pound, who says: "Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something." (He's talking about writing poetry but I still feel it's pertinent)
Chuck Palahniuk talk's about how what Tom Spanbauer teaches is 'minimalism', and even suggested at one point that they'd be writing a book about it together. In Chuck's case, I imagine minimalism is characterized by cramming as much power into your words as possible while using the minimum amount of words; similar sort of thing.
In the senses above, I think of minimalism as a set of techniques that improve efficiency of one's writing. Cain and Camus come to mind. Efficient, powerful, evocative storytelling.
But then I read Story, and Robert McKee's notion of minimalism has to do with ignoring some amount of classical storytelling conventions. McKee characterizes minimalism as having open endings, internal conflict, multi-protagonists, or a passive protagonist.
Craig, you're on the record saying minimalism is a label you despise. Which notion of minimalism are you talking about, and why do you despise it?
And guys, how are my definitions of minimalism? Does anyone have a clearer definition of Spanbauer's brand of minimalism? Does anyone have a notion of minimalism I didn't cover?
Seems like something worth sorting out.
Ezra Pound said don't use superfluous words?!? It always seemed that there didn't exist a word, in a any language (or a made-up language) that Ezra wouldn't use in something.
No wonder he was in an asylum!
Just being light here....pay me no mind. ;)
I think the label "Minimalism" is maybe worthy of disgust, because it's misleading and unclear. On the other hand, the technique or family of techniques that comprise the practice of minimalism in literature is worthy of study.
Amy Hempel despises the term, too. I think I read somewhere she'd rather call what she does "Miniaturism."
That's probably better, because the way I think of Minimalism, it has less to do with your word count and more to do with things like your distance from the subject of your story, the scope of your plot (smaller than epic), the number of close-up shots you employ (lots of them) as opposed to a wide-angle lens, the number of characters you employ (fewer), and the duration of your story (actually more words and more pages devoted to a shorter span of "real time" in your characters' lives.)
When people think of minimalism as just economy, brevity, or poetic compression, there's a chance they'll miss the mark with it entirely. For example, it's much more economical and terse to say: "John was angry" than it is to shun the state of being verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been) and show us that anger and the reason for it so effectively that we feel it ourselves.
If you avoid the state of being verbs and the "thought verbs" (wonder, think, thought, believe) as Chuck recommends, and stick mostly to verbs that paint an action picture for the reader, you'll actually end up spending more words to convey subtle things like beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in your characters.
I think of "Minimalism" as having a lineage through Hemingway, with his dramatic third person point of view (in contrast with the more florid style of Fitzgerald and all the internal monologue, stream of consciousness, Joycean stuff from that age.) It passes from Hemingway to writers like Raymond Carver, who carve out short stories with serious panache arising mostly from a rich subtext and a reluctance to directly tell you anything about a character's internal states. You must infer from action and subtext.
Gordon Lish had a major role in editing Raymond Carver. Lish also personally taught a number of writers with names you might recognize. Names such as: Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Barry Hannah, and Tom Spanbauer.
Spanbauer took what he learned from Lish at Columbia and made his exodus from New York, relocating to the Pacific Norhwest. It's there, in the Portland area, where he began to teach a younger crop of writers with familiar names. Monica Drake and Chuck Palahniuk among the earliest.
If you think of the classical plot and the epic hero story (as opposed to various styles of "mini-plot" and all the anti-heroes of modern fiction) ... if you think of most fantasy fiction, for example--sometimes a florid style, sometimes a quick "tell" of a character's internal state in order to keep cataloging other things and keep the massive plot moving forward, often dozens of characters and generations of time transpiring in a single novel (think Tolkein)--you have, in one sense, the pure opposite of minimalism.
An epic tale is a flight over the tall pines and a minimalist story is a bonsai tree. It takes a lot of time and care to do service to either one.
Hempel's miniaturism makes sense in that it's someone who creates smaller slices of art. They write short stories but can't pull it together to tackle a novel. They write great songs but never the concept album. I never thought of it as any specific writing technique, only relating it to the finished product (compared to minimalism which is in the words themselves). But I guess it could be. Taking a smaller view of something. Using the 85mm lens instead of the 24mm. Thanks for the history, Mark.
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If you avoid the state of being verbs and the "thought verbs" (wonder, think, thought, believe) as Chuck recommends, and stick mostly to verbs that paint an action picture for the reader, you'll actually end up spending more words to convey subtle things like beliefs, thoughts, and feelings in your characters.
Excellent point, Mark, and it cuts to the heart of my objections to the label minimalism. I despise the label applied to me, Casey, for a couple of reasons. First, it's a snap judgement. Someone sees a goodly chunk of the Handbook written in terse sentences and applies the minimalist label, ignoring the other longer, more florid sentences. Even if you can argue the Handbook is a minimalist novel, with Dermaphoria, you can't apply that label to me as a writer. However...
The whole notion of minimalist is misguided in my opinion because what Ezra Pound said should apply to all writing, period. No writing should have any excess words, but what constitutes excess in one piece of writing does not apply in another. Hemmingway and Cain had no excess words, but neither did Dostoevsky or Kafka. However, their respective influences, personal histories, cultures, styles and goals of their particular stories all added up to different criteria for which words were excessive and which were essential. To look at prose full of terse sentences and short fragments and label it minimalist is simply short sighted, in my opinion.
-Craig
"I need beauty like I need to breathe."
-Jack Henry Abbott
Thanks Mark, that's the clarity I was looking for regarding Minimalism's definition, and I didn't know a damn thing about Gordon Lish. Maybe I should.
I didn't mean to imply cutting corners with tells and thought verbs was a worthwhile economics tactic; the trick is, when you're describing something vividly, conveying it well seems like it should require a lot of words. It's tricky showing something graphic happen without using a bunch of superflous words. When I think minimalism, I think of Craig's slot machine memory technique of utilizing the reader's imagination with contrasting images. An added bonus I've noticed in using the active voice, desribing with nouns and verbs tends to take a lot of the clutter out of a sentence. When I go back over my work and improve my initial descriptions, I find the sentences get shorter and clearer on top of the images being more vivid. That's what I'm talking about when I say 'efficient'.
I'm really having difficulty understanding the connection between McKee's notion of Minimalism and everyone else's; they seem like two very different things. It seems to me like Minimalism as you've described it would be extremely useful to someone writing a totally 'Archplot' story.
In a station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
(/my favorite Ezra Pound Poem)
Ezra Pound also said this:
"Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol..."
Which, to me, is the beginning of the principle that told me never to use thought verbs in the first place.
But novelists/storytellers can play with abstractions to beautiful effect, sometimes, where poets fall on their faces. I've never seen anyone do it (pump life into abstractions 'til they're living, breathing things) quite like Steve Erickson. The effect is amazing if you can pull it off...
"Thanks Mark, that's the clarity I was looking for regarding Minimalism's definition, and I didn't know a damn thing about Gordon Lish. Maybe I should. "
Well then, here's a good link. Lashed by Lish
"I didn't mean to imply cutting corners with tells and thought verbs was a worthwhile economics tactic..."
Oh, of course not. And your own writing is clear evidence that you know better. I'm sketching out why the term "minimalism" is problematic, in general. For me, that begins with the simplistic and easily misinterpreted dictum: "Say more with less."
"I'm really having difficulty understanding the connection between McKee's notion of Minimalism and everyone else's; they seem like two very different things. It seems to me like Minimalism as you've described it would be extremely useful to someone writing a totally 'Archplot' story."
For McKee, "Minimalism" seems to mean dispensing with some of the formal characteristics of classical story structure, in favor of "economy and simplicity," while still delivering a good story. Notice that the way he defines it is entirely in relation to plot, and in no way relates to the line level choices we've also brought into the conversation. He's speaking the language of film, where the writing is a sort of blueprint instead of the thing itself.
One could certainly rely upon a dramatic, external point of view, and show action with concise subject-verb constructions, active voice, active protagonist, external conflicts, subtextual hinting at the internal conflicts, all of these things to the letter, and still be working with all the plot co-ordinates of the classical story structure. Off hand, I'd say Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea is probably a good example of that, but it's been years since I've read it.
On the other hand, look at Fight Club. Is the conflict external or internal? It's painted in the brushstrokes of male machismo, with lots of action... and then we find out the narrator has been fighting with himself. Either he IS Tyler Durden, or Tyler Durden isn't even real. By the point in the story where we realize this, we're so hooked in we probably don't even ask how Durden (the Narrator?) could have become a charismatic cult figure with an underground army of space monkeys if, in fact, he's a lunatic who's been punching himself in the face for other people's amusement. That sort of behavior doesn't usually get you much of a following. They just cart you off and lock you in a padded room. But we're too hooked into the story for that inconsistency to matter. So it's a mini-plot story with absurdist tendencies (veering toward anti-plot) and it has something of an open ending. It's minimalism in terms of both line level writing technique, and in terms of plot.
The key, perhaps, is to split these things apart and realize that McKee is talking almost exclusively in terms of plot. While both sets of distinctions are useful, they don't necessarily wrap up together into a single, neat package.
Ok, so in my introduction to the class I said I wanted to hone my skills in a "minimalist" fashion, but what I meant was that I really enjoy the works of Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, and Amy Hempel, and one day I hope to learn the tools they utilize in telling great stories. Sorry, my ego just needed me to clarify before people thought I advocated the stereotype connected to the title "Minimalism."
Perhaps people like us cannot love. Ordinary people can - that is there secret. ~Herman Hesse
Gus, no sweat man... I sounded more belligerent than I meant to. Well, no, I meant to sound belligerent, but didn't mean to attack anyone. Which really makes no sense...
Funny, I've never read Gordon Lish; I remember when Raymond Carver broke out big in the eighties. i tried reading him and just didn't get it. I've never like him, no matter what I read. Then a friend told me about the Lish/Carver controversy. I read about the whole affair in The New Yorker, as well as all of the ancillary docs on their web site... these included the correspondance between the two, before and after edits from Lish on one of Carver's short stories, and a reprint of one of Carver's stories as he wrote it (versus how it appeared in the original anthology, with Lish's edits). I gotta say, it changed my opinion of Carver and, frankly, Lish was a butcher.
"Never use an adverbial participle." Really, Gordon? Why? There are lots of hard and fast rules in writing, none of which are above being broken.* Never is a dangerous word so, give me a reason.
-Craig
*Here's a fun experiment I did every now and then (when the insult of MSWord still infected my hard drive and I was forced to output to Bill Gates's .suck file format) that you can try for yourself: Transcribe a graph or two from Joyce, Hemingway, Kafka, whomever. Then run Word's useless Grammar Checker function and see how the greats stand up. Heck, anybody wants to try it with a paragraph from Lish's work, I'd be curious.
"I need beauty like I need to breathe."
-Jack Henry Abbott
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