Faulkner to Fan Fiction

William Faulkner is one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1955. He wrote primarily about the post-Civil War South and that war's effect on its people, places, and culture.

I just completed his masterwork, Absalom, Absalom!—a fantastic narrative of ambition and diabolical characters woven through the tragic antebellum South, the rise and fall of the plantation, and the history that ultimately consumed it. My habit of reading fifty to seventy-five pages each morning before I start my workday took a hit. My  page count, severely reduced by Faulkner's dense sentences and fascinating back-and-forth narrative structure. The story seemed to move forward and backward at the same time, with characters reconstructing events they hadn't witnessed, interpreting what others had told them, and sometimes guessing at what might have happened.

I had read that Faulkner's deliberately labyrinthine style was, in some cases, intended to make the reader experience mirror the confusion and frustration of the narrative and the historical period. Whether or not that was always his conscious intention, it worked on me. I was sometimes confused and sometimes frustrated, but I also felt that those experiences brought me deeper into the world he had created.

At the same time, I was reading my niece's fan fiction, in which she expands upon the story of her favorite DC Comics character, an adopted daughter of a superhero. She is writing her own empowered young woman’s coming-of-age arc, using the direct, action-driven style of comic books while also expanding the larger story around one of DC's familiar icons,  Batman. My niece has a writer's mind and a writer's voice. No awards yet.

It struck me during those mornings that Faulkner and Batman fan fiction have something in common. Now, before anyone misunderstands me, my niece is no Faulkner (I’ll repeat; yet). But that's not the point. Most readers would probably see the enormous differences between them. I began seeing some parallels.

First, both use larger-than-life characters—bold, dynamic, sometimes nearly unbelievable figures standing against dramatic backdrops: Faulkner's antebellum South and my niece's Gotham City. Then there is the setting. In both, the place becomes more than a backdrop. The plantation and Gotham exert pressure on the people who inhabit them. Violence, injustice, corrupt institutions, powerful families, dark and dangerous landscapes, and the weight of the past become part of the story's reality. The setting almost becomes another character. Both create dread. Both place their characters in worlds where the past refuses to remain in the past.

And that got me thinking.

Maybe the fundamentals of storytelling are remarkably democratic.

A Nobel Prize winner and a young writer experimenting with fan fiction may have radically different command of language, experience, technique, and ambition. The execution is worlds apart. But the fundamental tools are surprisingly similar for all writers: character, conflict, setting, point of view, pacing, voice, mystery, anticipation, emotional stakes. The desire to make a reader enter a world and care about what happens there. Isn’t that why we write?

We want readers to inhabit our imagination. The tools may be fundamental and shared. What each writer does with them is where the art begins.

That realization has changed the way I want to read going forward. I want to read more diverse works at the same time—not necessarily because they resemble one another, but because their differences make the underlying mechanics easier to see and the comparisons inspiring for my own writing.

Read Faulkner beside fan fiction. Read literary fiction beside fantasy. Read a mystery beside a comic book. Read a Nobel laureate beside a beginning writer.

Look beneath the genre and the reputation and the style. Look for the fundamentals. Where does the writer put the reader? How do they make us care? How do they create dread? How do they make a place matter? How do they reveal character? How do they withhold information? How do they manipulate time?

As far-flung as our writing genres and styles may seem from those we read, underneath them all are many of the same fundamental tools. The difference is what we build with them. That was my self-taught, accidental lesson from reading Faulkner and Batman fan fiction on the same morning.

Because underneath all the genres, reputations, styles, and differences, there remains the same strange and wonderful act: a human being putting words together and asking another human being to enter a world that exists only because someone imagined it. And that’s an extremely beautiful way to start my morning.