New discoveries in Poetic Form (aka Non-Narrative)

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Some time ago I wrote that there's endless information available about writing fiction or screenplays if you're working within the realm of genre (narrative), but that it's extremely hard to find anything about writing in non-narrative form (An Investigation into Poetic Film—the World of Objects/Nature/Animals). In fact this quest comprises the first couple of pages of this blog. Well, the situation has changed. I recently picked up the search again and have made a major breakthrough.

Transcendental Style in Film is a book by Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver and other Scorsese films, director of Cat People)—here at last is an excellent breakdown of the trends of what I call the Poetic. He's discussing it in specifically filmic terms, but much of it relates also to written stories.

He goes far deeper than what I call poetic narrative—the artful blending of narrative structure with free, formless meandering—In fact he goes all the way to the farthest fringes of pure Anti-Narrative. But it's actually extremely helpful to get the whole lay of the land, to clearly see both ends of the spectrum, in order to more fully understand that region around the middle where the 2 combine and interact in fascinating ways. That's the region I'm interested in.

I found the entire new introduction, called Rethinking Transcendental Style in PDF form in case anyone cares to read it. This alone is a treasure trove of information on the poetic. It makes mention of several other books on the same subject as well. I've already ordered Deleuze's Cinema 2 (It's come in—wow, heavy duty stuff! This is the kind of philosophy I hate to struggle through, opaque as hell!) Honestly, the PDF of Schrader's introduction is all you need to get a good feel for this stuff.

Schrader's book, and the ones it lists, are concerned mostly with form, but I busted out Andrei Tarkovsky's book Sculpting in Time. Tarkovsky is one of the pioneers of the poetic in film and a precursor of what's come to be known as Slow Cinema, and the book is his own thoughts and meditations on the emotional and transcendent themes that are at the core of his films. It's as if Schrader is showing you the floor plan of a magnificent cathedral, and Tarkovsky is opening his soul and revealing the pure religious experience he had there.

I think there's a great value in exploring cinematic techniques and trends for us as writers—there's a good deal of overlap between the 2 worlds. If you only study books about writing, then you're going to write like everybody else who's studied the same books. So I'm approaching it obliquely, by reading about poetic film. There are ways to translate film techniques and ideas into your writing, you just need to understand the differences.

But now I've also decided to look into structure for literary novels. I know, many of them are structureless, but not all. I was interested in (once again) exploring the territory. I've run across one interesting article so far, and as I thought, there's a good deal of overlap with what I've been learning about poetic film. Here it is: Two Ways to Structure Your Literary Fiction Novel