Weird Tales: Mark Budman on The Shape of Innovation
Writer: Mark Budman
Weird Tales Story: The Matching Pair (Issue #TBD 2008)
Writer Bio: Mark Budman’s works have appeared in such magazines as Swink, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, Turnrow, Connecticut Review, WW Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. He is the publisher of a flash fiction magazine Vestal Review, the interview editor for Web Del Sol, and a book reviewer for The Bloomsbury Review and the American Book Review. His novel My Life at First Try is coming out from Counterpoint in October 2008, and the anthology he has co-edited came out in November 2007 from Ooligan Press.
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Can you call it “innovation” when the form obscures the function? Is it a writer’s goal to delve into the visual, to let the form shape the content, as a bottle does for a liquid?
Too many “modern” stories are presented in a hard-to-read way. Consider this example:
01000100 01101111 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01101011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01101111 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 01111000 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101111 01110010 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101001 01110100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01110010 01111001 00111111
01010111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01100101 01101110 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101100 01100001 01110010 01101001 01110100 01111001 00111111
Well, some people may argue that this is not a story. I agree. It’s not. It’s a binary representation of this statement:
Do you think that a story has to be complex in order to be literary? What in the world has happened to clarity?
I am referring to stories that have such complex structure that it’s hard to read them. For example: no punctuation, no capitalization and no paragraph breaks. They truly become ciphers, the English equivalent of a binary code, like in my example above.
Should clarity or innovation be the aim of fiction? The best answer is: both, in symbiotic relationship, when one benefits the other.
January 6, 2008 at 10:32 am
[...] Mark Kleiman wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWriter Bio: Mark Budman’s works have appeared in such magazines as Swink, Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Iowa Review, McSweeney’s, Turnrow, Connecticut Review, WW Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward, … [...]
January 6, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I am referring to stories that have such complex structure that it’s hard to read them. For example: no punctuation, no capitalization and no paragraph breaks.
Sounds like the Torah in Hebrew. That story’s survived pretty well over the years and a lot of people have found ways to connect with it.
January 6, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I’m surprised that stripping some punctuation from a work is regarded as increasing the complexity, the reason a writer such as Cormac McCarthy does this is to make the reader engage more with the words than with the symbols around them. He’s a careful writer so this never causes confusion. If you want an example of a writer whose elaborate punctuation gets in the way of the words then look at a page by Henry James.
But isn’t this all a question of context and familiarity? In the past I’ve found it more difficult to engage with one of those bestsellers filled with page after page of bad “he said, she said” dialogue and no effective characterisation or description.
January 6, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Good point, John! Also yours, Rose. I find it fascinating that the Torah has no punctuation and no vowels.
JV
January 6, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Actually, the lack of vowels in the Torah is not unusual. Most writing in Hebrew doesn’t have the vowels, as Hebrew-speaking people know what the word is supposed to be from the context (take a look at any Hebrew-language newspaper).
The lack of punctuation and paragraph breaks makes the Torah infinitely more interesting to me. And I tell my students (I teach the Bar/Bat Mitzvah class at my synagogue) that I believe this is to allow each and every one of us to take from the Torah what we bring to it. This explains why we have so many different interpretations of it (and each translation is its own interpretation, too). And that each time I read it, I see something different, because each time I read it I am in a different place in my life. I consider the Torah a “living” document precisely for this reason.
Some look at the Torah as fiction (how many colleges have a Bible As Literature class?) and that’s fine. There is quite a lot of weird stuff going on and it is quite the family chronicle. But the ultimate purpose of fiction (my opinion, of course) is to communicate something to someone. It doesn’t necessarily HAVE to communicate the exact message the writer has intended although most writers appreciate that. You would be surprised how often a reader sees something different in a work of fiction and surprises the writer when they inform them.