As is often the case with some of my reviews – Outline, by Rachel Cusk comes to mind – this review of Confessions of a Mask, by Yukio Mishima, is not just a review. It’s also an opportunity for me to explain something about how literature is supposed to operate.
And here’s the (meta-)lesson: There’s no “supposed to” in literature.
Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask – in a meta-textual twist, having this very element as the core of its plot – demonstrates how awfully things can fall apart once you begin following rules and supposed-tos.
Mishima’s novel is probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever thought to review. Not only does it defy categorization, but reading it I wonder whether we could even call it “a novel”. In that regard, it’s very similar to Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino.
Confessions of a Mask is a fine example of our struggle to balance between being part of society and understanding it can’t offer us what we crave. If this duality sounds familiar, take a look at my post on the meaning of Jinjer’s “Pisces” – talking about a multi-layered metaphor, huh?(more…)
I’ve been reading a lot of Yukio Mishima’s fiction lately. In awe of the richness of his vocabulary, I decided to code a little program that analyzes a novel and tells us how diverse the author’s word choices are. Enter Vocabulary Richness Ratio, my newest JavaScript experiment!
a work-in-progress – in other words, take the results with a grain of salt.
I’ve combined my expertise in literature and creative writing together with my interest in coding, and this little program was the result. Again, I must emphasize that it’s only a work-in-progress. It can give you a hint of how rich the vocabulary of your book is, but it’s not exact science.
Vocabulary Richness Ratio is a JavaScript program that finds unique words in a text and, together with other factors, estimates how diverse the book’s vocabulary is(more…)
By “concept”, we usually refer to an abstract theme, topic, or group of ideas. And so, in this context, concept fiction refers to writing that is not plot-based but rather themed-based.
In some way, this might make you think that concept fiction is a matter of genre, but this is not entirely accurate. True, most e.g. crime fiction is plot-based (whereas literary fiction isn’t), but there is an important difference.
Whereas the idea of genre fiction (or of literary fiction) informs the aesthetics and form of the narrative – that is, what it looks like – concept fiction refers to the process itself: how to write the narrative.
Of course, having a different methodology of writing directly affects the outcome – and so, to some extent, the aesthetics. This means that:
although concept fiction is applicable to any genre (or literary fiction, or experimental fiction), it does somewhat blur the established borders between genres and can destabilize its own position in the literary category.
Especially if you’re a genre writer, the first element above might sound like something bad. It isn’t, but it also depends on your priorities. We’ll get back to this later in the post. For now, a simpler way of putting it would be this: “Concept fiction helps your work stand out from the vast crowd of mediocre works”.
Much better, isn’t it?
In this post we’ll take a closer look at all these elements, and see how writing concept fiction can help you produce intelligent narratives that are cohesive, symbolically rich, and intriguingly original.
Concept fiction means to begin with the theme before you begin with the plot and even the characters(more…)
