Creative Digest #6: What are 'rocks'? – and three recent takes on the historical novel
The first edition of our departmental Substack for 2024 looks at a familiar maxim about plot structure, and three recent but very different historical novels.
Welcome to the sixth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope your enjoy it.
Upcoming events:
Thurs 1 Feb: Freya Waley-Cohen and Manchester Collective: Spell Book, at the Barbican, London, adapted from poems from WITCH by Rebecca Támas. Details here
Weds 7 Feb: City is running an on-campus postgraduate Open Evening, with Deepa Anappara representing Creative Writing. Do come along and hear about our exciting degree programmes. Details here
Weds 15 Feb: MAO Late: Rebecca Támas reads and is in discussion at Modern Art Oxford as part of an event treating environmental visual artist Monica Sjöö. Details here
What are ‘rocks’?
By Jonathan Gibbs
There’s a famous maxim about narrative structure that goes: Act One – get your character up a tree; Act Two – throw rocks at them; Act Three – get them down again. (And no, it wasn’t Vladimir Nabokov who said it, whatever you read on the internet.)
As writing advice goes, it’s a useful piece of shorthand, but even in these basic terms there’s plenty to be explored. What does ‘being up a tree’ mean, for instance? And what are ‘rocks’? Show me an analogy, and I’ll immediately want to take it apart, to see what’s going on inside and behind it.
Well, ‘being up a tree’ means being somewhere you are not ‘at home’. It’s being somewhere you are simultaneously exposed to danger (people can see you, to throw rocks at you) and constrained (you can’t easily dodge the rocks). And thought it’s a metaphor it’s also a perfectly good plot device in literal terms: in Euripides’ The Bacchae, King Pentheus is tricked by the god Dionysus into hiding in a tree to spy on his followers, the Bacchants, as they enact their crazed and drunken ecstatic rites, only for the trickster god to give him away: the Bacchants hurl stones at their king, then tear him to pieces. (Surely this is the origin of the maxim.) Or there’s Winnie-the-Pooh, who gets in trouble climbing a tree to raid a beehive. Or Will, in the prologue to A Game of Thrones, climbing a tree to hide from the Others.
That’s the tree. What then are the ‘rocks’? The rocks, fairly obviously, are the challenges that threaten your character. They are intended to hurt, kill or dislodge them. And, unless, like Euripides, you’re writing a tragedy, they should fail to do so. The rocks are ‘thrown’ by your other characters, or by the mechanics of the plot itself, and they should start small and get bigger, so that the sense of jeopardy increases as you build towards your dramatic climax.
The more interesting question, however, is where you get your rocks. Well, the easiest thing for a rock-thrower is to use rocks that are lying around, that are already present in the environment. What this means for the author – and this is something I teach students as a way of thinking about plot development – is that the challenges and obstacles you direct at your protagonist can often be ones that are already present in your story. How are they present? Because you unconsciously scattered them in your first draft, or in the early scenes of the draft as you write it.
So, look at what you’ve already written, and look for sub- or secondary themes you’ve put there, that are ready for development. Early drafts are often full of underutilised thematic material that writers insert, almost without thinking, just to bulk up and populate their scenes and characterisations. This will do, you think, as you add bits and pieces to the background of scenes, before rushing on to the next, more interesting part of the story. Not of all what you put there will be useful, of course, when you go back to it, and what isn’t useful might be ripe for cutting, but do go back and look for the rocks you’ve already placed. Pick them up and weigh them in your hand. Are they chuckable? How much damage would they be likely to do? This is how your develop your plot.
The last part of the maxim is ‘Get them down again’, but really it’s not you that gets your character down. They’ve got to get themselves down. The author sending in a helicopter to winch their character to safety is what Euripides would have called a deus ex machina, where the protagonist’s problems are solved by miraculous external agency – common enough in classical drama, but frowned on in contemporary narrative theory, as the reader is likely to feel cheated. So you’ve got to let them get themselves down, perhaps under fire from a barrage of rocks – and here I want to say: using the rocks to get themselves down, but I’m not sure the analogy will stretch that far. Certainly they can chuck some of the rocks back. But the problem of the narrative is resolved once your protagonist has their feet back on the safety of solid ground. And can contemplate the lessons they’ve learned from their Adventures Up a Tree.
Historical fiction: the uses of ‘ecstatic nastiness’
By Rebecca Támas
The American-Iranian author Ottessa Moshfegh’s most celebrated novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, painfully skewered the drudgery of contemporary capitalism. That novel of modern malaise is, on the surface, a world away from her more recent Lapvona, and its medieval story of exploited serfs and malicious aristocrats. Yet Lapvona, for all its distance from contemporary America, is just as much a dive into human depravity and avarice.
Lapvona, which begins with a representatively surreal epigraph from pop singer Demi Lovato – ‘I feel stupid when I pray,’ is seemingly a ‘historical novel’, but it’s definitely not one that readers of Hilary Mantel would recognise. The story takes place in an unnamed part of Europe that’s an amalgamation of history, myth and folklore, where a tyrannical lord rules over impoverished, pious villagers, and magic lies in the hands of old and cunning crones.
Moshfegh’s central character is teenager Marek, the motherless, hunchbacked child of a local shepherd, who has a passion for suffering that he thinks will purify him – ‘If my father kills me, Marek thought, I am sure to go to heaven.’ Marek has known nothing beyond his simple, grim village life with his father. But, due to an act of unexpected violence, his life changes – swapping his home in the village for one in the comfortable castle of the lord Villiam. Marek goes there at a time of extreme drought and famine, an environmental disaster that, we slowly realise, is being made worse by the greed of the lord himself.
Though Marek’s move from poverty to privilege is central to the novel, Moshfegh has no simplistic points to make about the innocent goodness of the villagers and the monstrous oppression of their masters. In Moshfegh’s world, everyone is tainted with venality and malice. Marek’s struggling peasant father Jude is a liar and an abuser; and his new aristocratic guardian Villiam is just as bad – obsessed with high living and vulgar entertainments, with no interest at all in the wellbeing of the villagers he’s meant to protect. Marek himself proves to be cringeworthily spoilt and selfish, the seeming purity of his self-flagellation simply a mask for his creepy sadism. Even the village priest is corrupt and foolish. Indeed, no one in Lapvona has intentions that can be trusted – rarely have I read a story that so confidently makes almost every character thoroughly unlikable. But unlikability is no bad thing in a novel exploring the most disturbing elements of human nature. Moshfegh isn’t here to make you feel good about the world – she’s here to show you the seamy underside of the structures that purport to hold society together – family, romantic relationships, gender binaries, the hierarchies of power, class and religion.
There’s an almost ecstatic nastiness here that, though unsettling, is also bracing and refreshing in its moral complexity and dark humour. Moshfegh’s unusual genius is her ability to rip away the veil of ‘normal’ life, revealing the horrors beneath, in writing so compelling and bleakly funny that we can’t bear to look away.
Historical fiction: two ways into ‘being there’
By Joe Thomas
Over Christmas, I read two quite different historical novels, The Fraud by Zadie Smith and The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore. Both novels are excellent examples of what you might call contemporary historical fiction, in that they are very modern in sensibility and yet wholly rooted in their periods and places, very much imagined historical works in a traditional sense. And they achieve these qualities in different ways. Reading them, I was struck by how historical fiction can offer clear ways into a subject – and that decisions on style, tone and worldbuilding can offer models that we can apply to any fiction.
Firstly, I should say that The Glutton might be my favourite novel of 2023. I enjoyed A. K. Blakemore’s first book, but I, ahem, devoured The Glutton in greedy, crammed, messy handfuls. It is the style, the sentence writing, the sensual, tactile descriptions, the imagining of France in the 1790s as a place of appetites and gore, that found itself in the middle of an incredible change that manifested itself – for swathes of peasants and other Third Estate crucially outside of Paris – as a place of danger. The novel drips and throbs, seethes, feels alive and visceral like maggots, squirming. It seems to me that Blakemore has achieved the goal of the historical novelist – to recreate or reimagine another time and place – by thinking about what that place smells like, tastes like, feels like. And through her main character, the glutton himself, The Great Tarare, a figure so grotesque and of such sadness that, as he is exploited and manipulated again and again by vividly drawn unscrupulous travellers, and then politicians and military figures, we feel horrified and appalled but also a sort of bewildered delight, such are the rollicking stories that make up the novel.
Zadie Smith comes at the past a different way. The Fraud is hugely clever and enjoyable, and Smith takes us into nineteenth century England through its preoccupations and its patterns of speech and thought. The first half of the novel – roughly – is set in the household of a writer, a man whose powers are well on the wane and who is guilelessly trying to recover something of his prestige in his latest novel. The narrator in this section – and again, later – is Eliza Touchet, who acts as the conduit both for the sensibility of the novel, and for its plot. Eliza is the moral and questing conscience of the novel; Smith sets up these sections as parlour room conversations and trips to London – to put it somewhat reductively. (The imperious middle section set in Jamaica is a gear shift, I think, that I’m less certain about, in terms of how she approached it – it is a magnificent extended bit of writing, I’m certain of that.)
So, what can learn from historical fiction? I think it’s about seeing the working, seeing what the writer focuses on in terms of approach, thinking about that in terms of how it defines fundamental technical questions. Maybe in these two cases the simplest answer is that both novelists play to their strengths. They likely don’t feel that way about their own writing, are likely as conflicted and anxious about it as the rest of us. I’ll leave you with another recommendation: Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, winner of the Sir Walter Scott prize for historical fiction, the most prestigious of its kind. She visited us here at City and talked about the tribulations of getting the novel right, of writing a modern historical novel, and how focusing on the perceived traditional qualities of the form led to her subversion of it.
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Jonathan Gibbs is Programme Director for the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, and is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal.
Rebecca Tamás is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is the author of Strangers and Witch, and co-editor of Spells: 21st-Century Occult Poetry.
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Pyscho, Bent and other novels.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’s next novel, Red Menace, will be published in February 2024 by Quercus. It follows White Riot as the second in a trilogy of novels set in East London, and will be followed by True Blue.
Deepa Anappara's second novel, titled The Last of Earth and set in mid-nineteenth century Tibet, will be published by Oneworld in the UK in March 2025, and by Random House in the US. More details can be found here.
Deepa is also co-organising a conference on decolonisation in Creative Writing teaching and publishing with Farhana Shaikh, an editor and lecturer in publishing at De Montfort University. Please see here for a call for abstracts.