Form and Fiction
by the Editor
Putting up this month's issue of EAP, which is Mostly Fiction, I made a discovery about the Internet and serious fiction writing–the former is not the medium for the latter. Oh, you can do what we do at EAP, and put up chapters, or little bits and pieces of fiction, and hope a reader will be willing enough to read it online, or patient enough to print it out and read it in their own chair, by their own fire. Or you can put up whole chunks of it, perfectly formatted and frozen in PDF form, and let readers download at their leisure. What you can't do, at least not easily, is just put serious fiction pieces up on something like EAP, which is formed by a content management system that for some devilish reason insists on unformatting every piece that comes into its hands. Arbitrarily. In a way to make an editor, who may be very sensitive to the needs of a writer to see their piece come out JUST THE WAY THEY MEANT IT, pull out her hair in large, aggravated clumps.
Because there's a big difference between fiction and just straight out fact writing. A piece where the information is straightforward, and straightforwardly presented, doesn't really need to worry too much about its form: keep it simple, and keep the content clear, and the message will get to the reader, no matter whether it's in a magazine, on line, in a book, or even written on the side of a bus. Fiction is something else again. The form of fiction is intimately related to the content, and when you miss an italic, say, or a particular indentation of a paragraph, you've actually missed part of the meaning. A piece of fiction is as personal as a fingerprint whorl, and it, perhaps, needs to be taken in by the reader in a more personal way than over a shining screen.
Which means books, of course. Books being the single most personal way to convey information. It's just you and the form, there…just you and the content. Putting up this month's issue made me more than ever aware that EAP's mission to put content from the online magazine into books is the right one. And someday there will be books of the longer, completed versions of the fiction that's appeared here online–and books, we hope, that are an elegant and worthy form for the content.
Well, we're still working on that. (The Todblog is following the whole thing, if you're interested in the process.) In the meantime, though, the fiction that shows up here this month is really worth struggling to get to through the medium–you can watch it being shaped, as it were, in a Virtual Workshop. Particularly worth your patience is Jack Carneal's TICK'S STORY: PART ONE. It's the first part of a chapter from his book SMALL AND LESSER FATES, and picks up the ball that Faulkner dropped not such a long time ago. In Part Two, next month, in fact, the author of ABSALOM! ABSALOM! makes an appearance, and is actually beaten at his own storytelling game. Anyone who loves Faulkner will probably laugh out loud at the end. I did.
And of course, EAP's secret favorite, GREENBEARD. This month, in Chapter Six , now that we've learned, in Chapter Five, how the Captain's beard is made up of writhing alien creatures who helped him escape from another planet where he was serving as a live lawn jockey to the owner of a flying saucer that appeared some chapters back–well, you'd think there was nowhere to go but down. But no. Hunt N. Peck just keeps on spinning, always staying just this side of being slightly out of control–a very pleasant place for a book to balance, in EAP's opinion. (And we hope that he is planning on leaving his brain to science so we can get a look at the workshop in there. Although not before he finishes the book.)
Moving away from fiction, but not very far, admirers of Harvey Lillywhite's 'small' essays won't want to miss his deceptively meandering analysis of fiction and poetry, BOTTLECAPS IN THE WEEDS.
And Brian Griffith is hard at work on CORRECTING JESUS: 2000 YEARS OF REVISING THE GOSPEL, an analysis of how the story of Christianity has been used for purposes not necessarily those of the original teachings. So we've pulled out a small part of what Brian's playing with now: CORRECTING EQUALITY. Really worth a look.
Welcome back.