I found the tennis scene in Lolita to have no real relevance to the plot. It was used only to describe Lolita in motion. Which would come back to haunt Humbert later but really it wasn't needed. Yet on the other end of the spectrum - why clip it? It does show another facet to their relationship and it's one of the more beautifully written passages. I'm with Lemex on this one - the How to write guides are good for starting out but after a while you do need to break free of them and decide what works for you. Especially if you want to go beyond genre fiction.
If you write from the heart and have solid characters, you are always writing about the human experience. When someone reads it, they are either going to empathize with those experiences or learn something about how the writer sees it. That puts the reader in a position where he has to think about how another person sees the world, even if he didn't like the book. That's how I see it anyway.
To me, without an allegory a book/story is useless and meaningless. Every single movie I watched, every book I read and every videogame I've played (that has a story) have had allegories. That's just my $0.02
Sometimes a book written for entertainment ends up having a deeper meaning personally, I find those more enjoyable than a book written with a moral in mind that ends up preachy.
I'm always confused by this question. Can a novel just be for the sake of entertainment? With no thought-provoking plot/theme/etc.? It's purely for sheer, unbridled fun? Oh yes, sure. Absolutely. Can a novel just be for the sake of entertainment with the thought-provoking plot/theme/etc.? It's fun, but it also leaves the readers to think a little bit about what they've read? Yes, it can be that as well. I guess it's a bit of both. So long as the plot is decent enough and the characters are interesting, I don't think it matters if they're questing for the last soda can in the city or exploring the deeper nuances of the human condition; they both can be entertaining.
Case in point: Asterix and Obelix. Well worth a read if you know of them and read them as comics as a kid
Hi, Can a novel be just for fun? I damned well hope so! Probably the vast majority of novels out there are primarily written to be enjoyed. They may have a little social commentary in them, but that's not really the point of them. My thought is that if you write a novel which isn't primarily meant to be enjoyed by the readers, then you've likely lost a lost of readers and failed as an author. Granted there may be a few people out their who believe that the purpose of their literary gems should be to impress upon the world the results of their deep philosophical insights about the human condition - but for the most part in my view, they're pretentious arses! I mean think of it like a movie. How many people would prefer to go to one man's introspective analysis of class structure rather than say Mission Impossibly whatever number we're up to? Damned few. And personally I'd much rather read Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat than Proust. Cheers, Greg.
You don't have to. You can, but you absolutely don't have to. And in fact I think that making a deliberate point of these is often a bad idea. As one example, I recall reading that Harper Lee clearly said that she didn't have a message in mind when she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. To "leave all of those out", I suspect that an author would have to deliberately and laboriously go through the novel and scrub out every last bit of deeper meaning. Because everyone, including every author, has a belief system that influences all of their thoughts and creations. Why not? But it is still going to have a deeper meaning, unless someone went through and scrubbed that meaning out.
Here's a thought. It's up to the reader (don't know about video games) to discover the allegory, the theme, the overall meaning, in anything they read. It's not up to an author to put it there on purpose. I know we spend lots of time at school trying to discover what the author 'meant,' in every piece of literature we studied. But the funny thing is, we'll never know what they actually 'meant'—unless they've provided supplementary writing in the form of introduction, preface or letters to friends, etc. It's what you take out of a piece that determines theme, etc. Not necessarily what the author intended to put in. I'd say don't worry about how significant your book will be. Just write what you enjoy reading, and aim to polish it to publishable standard. You might have to come up with a 'theme' for the book in a query letter, but that theme is something you're likely to have discovered AFTER you wrote the book, not while you were writing it. Just like any other reader. Writers who love to hammer home a theme or bang a drum for some cause are often dull or superficial when it comes to their actual story. Don't believe me? Try reading The Ragged -Trousered Philanthropist. A worthy cause if there ever was one, but my god, that book is well nigh unreadable. There was blood coming out of my eyeballs by the time I finished it.
Somehow the South Park episode about banned books seems relevant. Personally I read for entertainment. Most of what I read do end up having some message somewhere in them and deeper meanings. Some commentary on life or society. But I didn't set out looking for it. I just thought the plot sounded interesting.
@jannert Exactly. Creative writing is just words on a page; its "meaning" is whatever thoughts exist in the reader's mind as a result of reading it. Reading and writing both are so much more enjoyable with that mindset.
Well as long as it wasn't coming out your wherever you should be fine. Hey thanks for the anti-recommendation
I agree with @jannert and @psychotick . I enjoy books purely for entertainment purposes. If they can stick a message on me in the process, fine, but I find that books that repeatedly punch you in the face with "UNDERSTAND THIS! UNDERSTAND THIS!! THIS IS WHAT I'M TELLING YOU!!!" to be extremely pretentious and dull. I'll listen to a lecture on philosophy if I wanted to be lectured to. The best authors, in my opinion, are the ones who can weave a thrilling story, and if they have a message, they do it that doesn't sound pretentious and in-your-face about it.
I wrote mine with the sole intention of making my reader laugh. Hopefully one day he'll let me know if I succeeded.
Interesting discussion--hope y'all don't mind my barging in. I would come down on the side of thinking scenes are best if they advance the plot, help us understand the characters, etc. as I don't like reading a scene and thinking later "what the hell was that about--did I just waste my time reading about something that is a throwaway in this story?" But back to the point of being entertained by a novel or short story simply because it is entertaining and w/o a moral? On one hand I would say absolutely, nothing wrong with that, a good story is a good story, fun to tell and fun to listen to or read. On the other hand I think a case could be made that every good story has (at least) one moral to the story. I used to play a game with my kids when they were quite young where I would make up the most outrageous stories, then at the end I would ask them what the lesson was in the story. They always came up with some relevant point, often unintended by me, the storyteller. So might be hard to tell a story w/o meaning even if you tried to make it entirely "meaningless."
I think a lot of people mistake what 'meaning' is in literature. People seem to be haunted by questions in school typified by 'What is the significance of a blue sky - Teacher thinks 'Oh, it symbolises the character's depression, maybe even a repressed Oedipal complex as a result from the last scene where he was reminded of childbearing because he saw someone drinking milk from a cup - thus on hiss walk back the sky being blue and sunny is both exposing and hiding his violently temperamental inner conflict, exposing the core of his character' - what the author meant 'It was a nice, sunny day'. And that would be fine, if that's what 'meaning' is in literature, but it really isn't. I actually think questions like that, and 'What does this line make you feel' are very very bad questions to put to students. Think about Gatsby - and the green light from Daisy's house across West Egg is clearly important because Gatsby is longingly looking at it at the end of a really swinging party. He isn't having a scotch and listening to classical music or reading a book, or whatever else he might do for fun in a huge mansion - he spends his wind-down time looking at a house in the distance. And also, green is just an odd colour for a light, wouldn't you say? Especially to use for ... whatever it is that light is actually used for. Then you can build on it, green the colour being related to the idiomatic 'Green Eyed Monster' of jealousy, and then it becomes more subjective, but that's almost beside the point. Symbols are important in Gatsby because they stand out. What does it mean for the character og Jay Gatsby? What does he want? Why did he fail? That's the 'meaning' of Gatsby. 'Meaning' in a literary work isn't something you just work out, like the solution to a puzzle and then leave the book alone feeling all smug and satisfied you've worked it out, 'meaning' in a literary work enriches your appreciation of the text, and of other texts. It makes you see things in new ways, makes you feel emotions more strongly, makes you change as a person. How much more can you love Scotland thanks to Robbie Burns' poetry? You are right, if you are too slap-dash, and too obvious the work becomes just boring and preachy. The best writing weaves all these threads together so they are enjoyable to actually read on the page - and to neglect it is just as damaging as having it done badly.
And the teacher is so damned convinced the blue sky means the repression of violent anger, or a symbolism of the character's depression that he/she refuses to listen to any other alternatives, including, "Uh...I think the author was just saying it was a pretty day for a stroll." You're spot on with Gatsby, though. The author, I feel, deliberately sprinkled them in because he wanted you to get a feeling for what Gatsby was as a character, how his mind was working. It was clear the author had something planned with the likes of the 'green light' the yellow car, etc.
That's exactly right. If there isn't a symbol for the character - what does it mean for the reader? Often it's very little. The little paperweight in Nineteen Eighty-Four is important as a symbol of the lost past for the reader because that's exactly how Winston Smith understands it too. Sometimes symbols and deeper things are independent of the characters - certainly. The boy in 'Birches' the poem by Robert Frost doesn't think of swinging the birch tree branches as anything other than a lot of fun - but in the poem they become a way to probe the idea of God. And sometimes symbols are recognized but not understood like Miranda at the end of Purgatorio. There is actually good money for you if you can work out who Miranda is and why she's there, because scholars have been trying to work it out for hundreds of years. How we come to understand what is important and what isn't in a text is another story - often it can just take a bit of experience.
I hope you didn't think I don't value meaning in literature, because I do. However, I think it's what you, the reader, brings to it that matters. It's what you think about while you read and afterwards that makes a theme appear, then stick. I'm not all that wigged on hunting around for author-planted symbols ...because often times that hunting feels forced, as does the planting. I mean, Daisy's green light? Would the book have been lessened to any great degree if the light had been yellow? If these kinds of details bring thoughts into your head, that's great. But I think a well-conceived and well-written story doesn't really need these kinds of gimmicks—if it was a gimmick. Green light. Omigod, he's jealous. I think we'd have taken the same amount of insight from The Great Gatsby no matter what colour that light had been. It was the fact Jay was staring at it, and that it was Daisy's light, that mattered. Heavy-handed symbolism can feel cheesy, because it's so palpably there to signpost theme. Looky looky, amn't I clever. I prefer symbolism laid on with a very light hand indeed. And I used to be an English teacher! Egad....
In days gone by, it was part of the editor's job to spot possible themes/messages in a novel (leaving the author to simply write without intent) and guide the author toward bringing those themes/messages into focus without going overboard. Personally, I try not to write to a theme if I can. I enjoy the process far more. I leave it to my wife to pick them out and then we talk them over to see if I should take them anywhere or just eradicate them.
