On writing: sjuzhet/fabula
Jun. 20th, 2003 11:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321Boring!Orli has eaten my brain.
Somewhere along the line, Malta was shunted to second place and boring!Orli leaped to the fore! He was unstoppable! He invaded my head, and ficlet after ficlet rolled out in logorrhoeic uberty.
(Note: I discovered the word 'uberty' today. It is archaic and arcane, 16th century, and means "fertility, fruitfulness, abundance". As in: Orli's hair blew in the breeze, in all its crampant uberty. Outré, or what?)
Am rather touched by friendly response to this madness. It types itself straight into the LJ 'event' box, bypassing betas and 'go' and the Mayfair hotels. My brain seems to be reading the comments carefully and factoring them into sequels in devious ways. *g*
And can I say it again: Congrats to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
badgermonkey Hooray!
Reading in t'reference library today, I remembered sjuzhet and fabula. These were Viktor Shklovsky's terms for what is also called plot and story (or, confusingly by Mieke Bal, story and fabula), or, by Genette, récit and histoire. I do have a soft spot for the Russian words, though; they sound so wonderfully rich and resonant.
Anyway, I remembered how interesting it is to think about the relationship of sjuzhet to fabula. The fabula is the story or the sequence of events as they happened in chronological order. The sjuzhet is the plot or the way these events are told in a particular narration (flashbacks, gaps of information to create suspense and surprise, and so forth). So the story is the 'what', and the plot is the 'how'.
Earlier narratologists (1920s to 60s) apparently assumed that the story is there in its entirety, and the plot is the telling of that story, that the story is primary material and the plot the reworking of that material. Later theorists, incl. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argued that, no, it is the plot that *reveals* the story. We readers perceive the plot first and construct the story from the bits and pieces we are fed in the plot. We only perceive the story in its entirety in hindsight, when we have finished the novel or tale or when we have finished watching the movie. We are constantly reorganising and rethinking our construction of the fabula/story as we go along and new bits get revealed via the sjuzhet/plot.
It occurred to me that this doesn't only work for *readers*, but also for *writers*. (Narratologists have tended, over the past 25 years, to privilege readers; they are only now rediscovering authors, as I found out today.) Sometimes when I am writing, I am experiencing the putting down of words and plot as a gradual revelation of a story. It's a bit like Michelangelo freeing the statue from the stone. And part of the reason I write (getting back to one of the 5 questionsorlisbunny asked me) is to find out the story, to know what happens next and how it will all end and what it all means. The fabula reveals itself to me as I go along constructing the sjuzhet.
This is what I was missing with k/d epic. I had just *thought* and pondered over that fic too much. I knew the fabula already. Setting it down on paper or on screen often felt like a dutiful ticking off of plot points. No doubt lots of writers do this and it's something you have to go through if you are writing a long fic, e.g. a novel, at least during revision. But it takes the fun and the surprise out of it for me.
Or that's how I feel at the moment at least. Hence completely out-of-the-blue boring!Orli fic: in the mad spirit ofbadgermonkey's Lotswings and in the spirit of discovery through writing words.
Let's see what will be next...
Somewhere along the line, Malta was shunted to second place and boring!Orli leaped to the fore! He was unstoppable! He invaded my head, and ficlet after ficlet rolled out in logorrhoeic uberty.
(Note: I discovered the word 'uberty' today. It is archaic and arcane, 16th century, and means "fertility, fruitfulness, abundance". As in: Orli's hair blew in the breeze, in all its crampant uberty. Outré, or what?)
Am rather touched by friendly response to this madness. It types itself straight into the LJ 'event' box, bypassing betas and 'go' and the Mayfair hotels. My brain seems to be reading the comments carefully and factoring them into sequels in devious ways. *g*
And can I say it again: Congrats to
badgermonkey Hooray! Reading in t'reference library today, I remembered sjuzhet and fabula. These were Viktor Shklovsky's terms for what is also called plot and story (or, confusingly by Mieke Bal, story and fabula), or, by Genette, récit and histoire. I do have a soft spot for the Russian words, though; they sound so wonderfully rich and resonant.
Anyway, I remembered how interesting it is to think about the relationship of sjuzhet to fabula. The fabula is the story or the sequence of events as they happened in chronological order. The sjuzhet is the plot or the way these events are told in a particular narration (flashbacks, gaps of information to create suspense and surprise, and so forth). So the story is the 'what', and the plot is the 'how'.
Earlier narratologists (1920s to 60s) apparently assumed that the story is there in its entirety, and the plot is the telling of that story, that the story is primary material and the plot the reworking of that material. Later theorists, incl. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argued that, no, it is the plot that *reveals* the story. We readers perceive the plot first and construct the story from the bits and pieces we are fed in the plot. We only perceive the story in its entirety in hindsight, when we have finished the novel or tale or when we have finished watching the movie. We are constantly reorganising and rethinking our construction of the fabula/story as we go along and new bits get revealed via the sjuzhet/plot.
It occurred to me that this doesn't only work for *readers*, but also for *writers*. (Narratologists have tended, over the past 25 years, to privilege readers; they are only now rediscovering authors, as I found out today.) Sometimes when I am writing, I am experiencing the putting down of words and plot as a gradual revelation of a story. It's a bit like Michelangelo freeing the statue from the stone. And part of the reason I write (getting back to one of the 5 questions
orlisbunny asked me) is to find out the story, to know what happens next and how it will all end and what it all means. The fabula reveals itself to me as I go along constructing the sjuzhet.This is what I was missing with k/d epic. I had just *thought* and pondered over that fic too much. I knew the fabula already. Setting it down on paper or on screen often felt like a dutiful ticking off of plot points. No doubt lots of writers do this and it's something you have to go through if you are writing a long fic, e.g. a novel, at least during revision. But it takes the fun and the surprise out of it for me.
Or that's how I feel at the moment at least. Hence completely out-of-the-blue boring!Orli fic: in the mad spirit of
badgermonkey's Lotswings and in the spirit of discovery through writing words.Let's see what will be next...