First-Time Novelists and Radical Creativity?

Jeanette Winterson's first (Oranges are not the only Fruit) was pretty unusual and caused quite a ruckus at the time.

I think some of it is that books like Finnegan's Wake or The Waves are not necessarily first novels. Writers need to find their feet, their voice, slough off stuff that isnt their own (as it were). Have confidence in what they're doing, too, so they can feel free to experiment & be more radical. In the same way that pretty much all abstract painters start with figurative stuff and then work their way out of it.

My 2p.

House of Leaves is pretty radical.

If by "radical creativity" you mean messing with literary technique (voice, structure narrative and style etc), rather than coming up with better and more creative stories with even more intriguing characters:

The novel form is - what? - two centuries old at least. I suspect that most of the useful variations in technique have been discovered. What you're left with is innovation for it's own sake.

However, I'm not convinced that experimenting with literary technique is particularly creative. To me that's as mechanistic as turning up the contrast on the TV and calling yourself a director.

And, think on it: if I tell my story backwards in 2nd person past imperfect, using a random selection of wastepaper baskets as viewpoint characters, some of whom only see the action from a great distance, does that make me "radically creative", or a dickhead?

If we're talking stylistic radicalness, then Jay Mcinerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides are two pretty famous examples. Mcinerney uses the rare second person to perfection, and Eugenides uses a sort of collective narrator that I've never seen before, one that makes that book just tremendous stylistically.

Neither of these books really comes close to the avant-garde. If you're writing in a true avant-garde manner, you're headed for a niche. That goes for a first novel or a fifty-first novel. There aren't many writers, even established ones, who can get away with "radical creativity" and sell many books.

zornhau said:

And, think on it: if I tell my story backwards in 2nd person past imperfect, using a random selection of wastepaper baskets as viewpoint characters, some of whom only see the action from a great distance, does that make me "radically creative", or a dickhead?

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Depends. If you do it in a way that makes sense, tells a good story, and couldn't have been done any other way, you're the former...

I can't stand it, but Naked Lunch did something different in a way that became influential...

And, think on it: if I tell my story backwards in 2nd person past imperfect, using a random selection of wastepaper baskets as viewpoint characters, some of whom only see the action from a great distance, does that make me "radically creative", or a dickhead?

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I want to read this already.

You used to bang the reports against the wall before you tossed them into that unrelenting gag utop my mouth. Paper shreder, you call her. Damn you Mr. President. Damn you for using me to shred what you could not read. Abused me continously while you discarded intelligence reports on Iraq. Night and day I slaved for you....

Zornhau: You said dickhead, don't hear that very often anymore

I think it depends on what you wrote. If it's radicaly diffrent stylistically and still maintains a good story then it's going to be picked up. If you're just messing with form for the sake of messing with it and the story is weak, its probably not going to work out.

John Irving's first was a headtrip of a novel, but I don't know if anyone read it.

Ghengis Kant said:

I want to read this already.

You used to bang the reports against the wall before you tossed them into that unrelenting gag utop my mouth. Paper shreder, you call her. Damn you Mr. President. Damn you for using me to shred what you could not read. Abused me continously while you discarded intelligence reports on Iraq. Night and day I slaved for you....

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I love it.

Just about anything can be done in a novel methinks, as long as it works. Yup, I said methinks.

Insert Name said:

1. Do they simply evolve to write more complex, stylistic, or avant-garde work?
2. Or, do they simply shelve the ambitious work in order to get their foot in door?

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All my avant-garde work I did in my teens; I was abusing my dad's painkillers. I was also in love with a boy who's sole aim in life was to remain apathetic to everything, including my infatuation with him. It was a tough time. I didn't wash my hair. Before that I wrote fantasy and historical, now I write fantasy and... well. They probably wouldn't let me publish my fantasy unless I published something else, so I'm writing a story about some teenagers in a boarding school on Vancouver Island. Disenchanted sophisticates and all that.

I can't say anything about the authors, but I think writers play around and good writers like to break the rules. I also think some authors can't hack a straightforward novel, so they skirt the issue by writing something totally off the wall, makng it above criticism.

I personally prefer straightforward stuff. I find "radical creativity" largely pretentious. Though I have been likened (admittedly by an old man who only read four pages of my work) to Kurt Vonnegut.

I think messing with structure in too drastic a way can seriously damage that part of a story which makes it a story: namely it's ressonance with the reader as a human experience. The structure is always an appurtenance and should be treated like one: of less importance than the story. If the story is not worth telling in straightforward terms, then one might want to consider what makes it worth telling in non-straightforward terms. Sometimes a new structure can give new insight, or bring to light a new point, in which case it's worth the trouble.

Which doesn't answer either question.

Ghengis Kant said:

I want to read this already.

You used to bang the reports against the wall before you tossed them into that unrelenting gag utop my mouth. Paper shreder, you call her. Damn you Mr. President. Damn you for using me to shred what you could not read. Abused me continously while you discarded intelligence reports on Iraq. Night and day I slaved for you....

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Love it. Fabulous!

Ghengis Kant said:

I want to read this already.

You used to bang the reports against the wall before you tossed them into that unrelenting gag utop my mouth. Paper shreder, you call her. Damn you Mr. President. Damn you for using me to shred what you could not read. Abused me continously while you discarded intelligence reports on Iraq. Night and day I slaved for you....

Click to expand...

Fine writing indeed, and yes I'd read it, but:

• That's using a 1st person narrator.
• You didn't do it in Past Imperfect. It should open "You were... ".
• It uses a frame, rather than tells the story backwards. "You were using me to shred documents. Prior to that, you were banging each... Before that"
• I specified a random selection of wastepaper baskets, some distant from the action. Your choice of a single shredder is obviously pandering to low-brows who don't want to have to think about what they read!