This is a discussion page about NovelWritingScience.
Helmut, are you talking about:
I support the ideas in this page, so I think it’s the second. If that’s the case, fare well, and if you would, please let me know where you intend to develop these ideas, so that I can see what comes out. Again, I support the ideas in this page.
Lion, sorry for being unclear, neither - nor. This is about “my basis” for doing this here, technically and emotionally. I write in wikis for interaction (learning) and got none in time to make this useful for my book (e. g. as an example of PatternTheory application). This is about my expectations and personal timing, my problems. My feeling towards cw has changed during the last weeks, so I’m less inclined to invest time here. These are my emotions, my problem. The puzzle doesn’t fit together to make this page work, so it feels better to remove the stub.
Helmut, I’m also a writer and my initial reaction to the original content of this page (mostly predicated on what I think is a misleading title) was to let Lion go off on this tangent as far as he wanted. I wasn’t planning to comment on this subject given I simply don’t believe that there is a useful science to novel writing so I didn’t feel I had anything constructive to add, but he’s extremely inventive so I’d hardly want to slow him down — who knows what he might come up with?
That said, in reading over the contents from the earlier revisions, it should be pointed out that there is of course an entire body of literature on the “science” (using that word loosely) of writing novels, i.e., the whole category of “How to Plot Your Novel” books and their ilk. I doubt any serious novelist would consult one of them but they do constitute a popular genre of How To books, as do their equivalents in the magazine world. I even bought (on a lark as part of my research into authoring practices) a copy of some horribly simplistic “novel writing” software that asks questions like “Who is the protagonist in your story?”. I’d much rather steer any aspiring writers towards the Writers at Work series from the Paris Review series of interviews (check your local library or bookseller).
Oh, actually, it was HelmutLeitner who wrote this page.
We were discussing the NatureOfScience, and then the example of “novel writing” came up, to talk about something more general than what we consider “Science”, but that none-the-less is something where people study, find things that work, talk about it, and so on.
Hi Lion. Ah, understood. Yes, certainly, as I mentioned there is an entire literature on the subject of authoring, and it was one of the four or five disciplines that was part of my Ph.D. research. I think it can be studied, analyzed, etc. but this is for academics to better understand the process, probably not so much to help out aspiring writers. Then there’s also the aforementioned category of popular literature, the books and magazines that (at least in theory) try to help writers. It’s probably important to keep these two distinct, as their purposes and target audiences are quite separate.
The point is that fields of investigations are structured by scientific methods. The only well established method is the method of the natural sciences, using experiments, theories, reproducable behaviour. It is clear that this method is not very usable for phenomena like individuals, society, communities or works of art like novels, which are not predictable or controllable and not subject to (scientific) experimentation.
This means that NovelWritingScience would be, first and for all, a re-interpretation and re-structuring of existing material. Just as science restructured the knowledge about the sun, moon and tides. The basic phenomenological knowledge was always available, but the structure and interpretation changed through science.
To make an example - remember that I do this as a methodologist and a laymen to novel writing - lets look at the pattern MAIN-PROTAGONIST. You ask “who is it”. PatternTheory leads us to ask, e. g.:
It’s probably interesting to look at decision making. How does an author relate his self and his life to the unfolding of the novel? (because pattern theory suggests that this is the substance of unfolding) …
PatternTheory sets the goal: a NovelWritingScience is about the goal to create novels that make the life of the author and the readers richer, more intense.
PatternTheory would also suggest that creating a novel is not about writing it primarily but about unfolding it.
Murray, exactly because you are in the situation to judge, be critical and guide such a process, your contributions would be vital to the development.
Helmut, I think this conversation could easily take many, many hours and simply because I don’t have that kind of time right now I’ll try to answer in brief, with the proviso that my answer is deficient.
First, I think a “science of novel writing” could only proceed analytically, i.e., by analysing a large sample of novels, possibly narrowing the investigation by honing in on one or several genres. This analysis would likely entail interviews with authors to discern processes, planning, intent, plot structure, character and inter-character design, relation of character to structure, etc. (all from the author’s perspective), then the resulting text itself would be broken down according to plot, story structures, character development, and the like. Then a comparison between author intent and result would be made, possibly with some kind of metrics (based on interviews with readers and critics) could be done. These would be very complex analyses whose goals would be to determine things like how an author accomplishes (or doesn’t) getting across various kinds of ideas, moving the story forward, etc. As I’ve mentioned, there is a large body of literature for lay authors on “how to write a book”, there is a body of interviews with writers (the Paris Review series I mentioned above) then there’s the entire academic fields of creative writing, narratology, etc. focused on all manner of aspects of writing novels. If anything, somewhere in this mess of ideas might be considered the “science of novel writing”.
An analysis of MAIN-PROTAGONIST alone would be far too reductive, and approaching novels as patterns typifies my criticisms of most of the “how to” books — even the most simple of novels far surpasses this simplistic approach to structure, plot, and character development. Yes, PatternTheory could be one tool to approach this issue, but novels by their nature are perversely contrary to simple analysis. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, published in 1605, is a very complicated narrative that is almost postmodern in structure almost four centuries before anyone coined the term. Things like irony, metaphor, echoes and reflections of other novels, histories, myths, etc. all pervade novels. For example, since the time of Cervantes, novelists have been reacted to his work, each successive generation adding yet more layers of subtle structure and meaning into the mix. We are at a post-post-post-post-post modern stage by now in the novel. I realize your example was meant to be illustrative of only one possible pattern, but I think that even in a generalized analysis the complexity of the patterns in even a simple novel surpasses the ability such analysis. This far exceeds what is accomplished in a Cliff Notes summary.
But I’m very skeptical of the efficacy of this, and I’d claim some very good company. Novels are one of our most advanced art forms, arguably more complex than film (just in a different way perhaps). There is no other art form that can explore a complex set of intertwining ideas like a novel can. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera has written extensively about this over the years, and in the first chapter of his new book The Curtain, a collection of essays on the novel reviewed recently in the New York Times, Kundera talks about the consciousness of continuity, the development over time of the conversations occurring between novels within the world of the novel. This kind of analysis (and much more besides) would be required reading before anyone jumped into trying to create any new such science. And certainly, Kundera’s is only one approach to such an analysis. There could be many different ones.
So it’s not necessarily that I think a “science of novel writing” couldn’t or shouldn’t exist, it’s that it would be one of our most complex sciences, encompassing the fields of creative writing, authorship practices, narratology, and the like, but also mythology, history, religion plus a complete history of the novel and how its forms and approaches have changed over the years, how the consciousness of continuity has changed over the years of the novel’s development as a form. Anything less would be far too reductive.
Murray, I’m grateful for your engagement in this dialogue. I’m aware that discussing this or even only outlining a NovelWritingScience is an enormous task. There is also no way finishing it, like there was no way for Galilei or Newton to finish the science of physics.
I agree that it is not desirable to reduce the complexity of the art of novel writing. In outlining a single patterns like MAIN-PROTAGONIST I do not suggest that this is a reduction. There are probably hundreds or thousands of patterns and there can be no intention to make these a closed system. PatternTheory is a methodology which creates a view on order and structures and how to describe and use them. It’s open because its modular: anyone can add a pattern or a consideration to a pattern at any time. PatternTheory is about creating high quality complexity, not about reducing it.
I think that you ask for “analytical science” because this is the state-of-the-art “traditional science” method, the best we have. “What else?”. Alexander suggest a “holistic science” (instead of analytical) and an “organic science” (instead of mechanistical). One could lead an abstract methodological discussion about that, but I think it is more efficient to work with the method and show its results.
I do not think the outline of a NovelWritingScience needs researching the primary sources, the novels, at this stage. There must be heaps of secondary literature and theories available, and you mention some of them. It’s probably faster and more efficient to build on that. The way of PatternTheory is not to trump Kundera and other existing theories by a new model or abstraction, but to add structure and method to available insights. PatternTheory is in a way empty, a system theory, which allows to unify many different insights into a single framework. While the ideal of analytical science is the reduction of reality to very general theories or formulas, the ideal of pattern science is the growths of increasingly rich pattern languages and creative processes.
When you say “Things like irony, metaphor, echoes and reflections of other novels, histories, myths, etc. all pervade novels” this is no doubt a valid observation. But it’s phenomenology, it does not suggest a structure in which this can be analyzed. One could create statistics, how many artful novels vs. bestseller contain these elements and to what degree. Would this help? If I believe you about “Don Quixote”, then its quality comes from being not similar to other novels of its time.
Alexander suggests that the quality of systems comes from the structure, the density and intensity of centers (system elements) they contain. He suggest 15 fundamental properties of living systems, among them STRONG-CENTER, BOUNDARY, ECHOES, SIMILARITY, SIMPLICITY and AMBIGUITY. One could try to map phenomenology to these properties and would get an order system and a language to talk about all this.
We know that an individual system can’t implement all of these properties but typically uses only 5-10 out of 15. An author can’t build a stew out of everything that has proven succesful. Some properties are even contradicting like SIMPLICITY and AMBIGUITY. So while irony or reflections may help a novel in its quality, there is no need for a specific excellent novel to use these specific elements at all. A novel can model reality or it can be rather detached like science fiction or fantasy and live on the SIMILARITY and CONTRAST of reality or the genre.
How does analytical thinking cope with this complexity?
P.S. Actually it seems that there are a number of elements in the existing literature sphere that are not analytical. E. g. there are no objective criteria to decide whether a novel is high quality literature or not. This is based on the consensual feeling of literature experts and literature lovers. If a positive judgement holds for fifty years, a book becomes “classical literature”. There is a standard body of literature for comparison. If a book deviates very much from expectations (like “Lord of the Rings”) the system gets into trouble.
Helmut, I’m familiar with Christopher Alexander's work, I think I probably read both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building in the mid-1980s while doing some urban planning work in Sacramento. I’ve also got some background in systems theory, having read some of the original texts (like Bateson, Bertalanffy, Köestler, Laszlo, Prigogine, etc.) and have been a huge admirer of people like David Bohm, Krishnamurti and Gregory Bateson ever since — I could probably spend the rest of my life reading just those three and be happy and fulfilled. I also spent many years studying Taoism, so in short, I’m not the kind of person who goes in for what might be considered “traditional analysis”, but I’m also not of the mind that pattern languages aren’t created via a process of rather traditional analysis. I think by definition the creation of a pattern – even in the Alexander sense – is still very much a reductive process. The use of it may not be, but in order to create a valid, pragmatic pattern a process of analysis is necessary. Certainly Alexander’s 1970’s books (not having read any post that period) would demonstrate this to be true: he created the original architectural patterns by analysing actual patterns of historical and contemporary human habitation, land and architectural development and usage.
Now, my understanding of systems theory is that we move from a focus on an analysis of things (in the most general sense) to the relations between things. This fundamental shift is something that I’ve found reiterated over and over for the past 20 years or more, even in my personal theories in philosophy, physics and neuropsychology. The universe isn’t composed of concepts, atoms and neurons, it’s the Single Emergent Property created by relations between concepts, atoms, and neurons, i.e., the world is not in the things, it’s the relations between them. Things may not even exist except as interrelations, a merging of physics and Buddhism.
But to return to the subject at hand, in order to create a set of useful patterns for a NovelWritingScience, some form of analytic and/or synthetic process would be undertaken to create a set of patterns. I would still maintain that the patterns themselves are highly reductive, and whereas in the more “solid” sciences and applied sciences (like physics and architecture) patterns are extremely useful, I’m not sure if they hold the same efficacy in the softer world of the social sciences and particularly the creative arts. Whether or not a pattern theory for NovelWritingScience is closed or not, if it has (as you suggest, and I don’t disagree) hundreds or thousands of potential patterns, then there are likely so many patterns and so many interactions between patterns (again, relations not objects) that I have trouble seeing that the approach is reasonable, particularly because what makes a novel unique and valuable is likely not at the level of the higher-level patterns like MAIN-PROTAGONIST but in the subtle and complex interrelations between not only character or plot patterns but in the ideas and inter-structures of ideas that are expressed in the novel. What are War and Peace or At Play in the Fields of the Lord really about? I think any attempt to answer that question is by nature reductive. Not without value, but certainly reductive, as is any process of simplification.
I think that one of the things that we should perhaps focus on instead of simplification is to take an approach that someone like Doug Engelbart might suggest: that with the availability of computers and visualization tools, that rather than attempt to analyse (in the traditional sense of cutting up or simplifying) that we use software tools to augment our previous abilities. In the same way that extremely complex data sets can be visualized in medicine to show previously-indecipherable pathologies, we might use graph visualization tools to chart the complex inter-structures of a novel. This is precisely the approach I’ve taken in the design of my Ceryle software, for exactly that purpose: to permit authors to organize research materials, chart and plan complex narrative structures, and tie their narratives into their research, to go beyond the limits of what could be done previously in a writer’s head or with pencil on paper.
I do agree with your postscript; an interesting observation that of course underlies the whole field of literary criticism, which informs any NovelWritingScience.
But as you might correctly gather, I am enjoying our discussion. 
(three days delayed because the wiki was down)
Murray, I also enjoy our discussion. I think we have found a rhythm of give and take that works. Alexander might name this an example of ALTERNATING-REPETITION (one of the 15 properties of living systems). I also read Alexanders “A Pattern Language” and “The Timeless Way of Building”, but only recently. You might think of this as “PATTERNS 1.0”, a poetic and dogmatic version of his thinking. Before that I read his four volumes of “The Nature of Order” which is a kind of “PATTERNS 2.0” which is more technical, philosophical and methodical. Highly recommended.
I read a little fromt Koestler and some works of Prigogine who is the father of irreversible thermodynamics and one of the big names in Chemistry (I was a theoretical chemist in a former life). From the cybernetical system theory I’ve read a lot from Frederic Vester, but not other basic work. I’m not so inclined to read spiritual authors or physicists and enjoy the aestetics. I do not see the point of Krishnamurti, because I agree with his fundamentals, so he has nothing more to teach.
Of course, PatternTheory also uses logical and analytical elements, but they are in the role of auxiliary sciences. Just like natural sciences use logic as an auxiliary science but wouldn’t define themselves as basically logical.
When you ask “What is War and Peace really about?” I think you are displaying a top-level analytical or reductionist attitude, because the question assumes that you can boil this work down to one ultimate statement. PatternTheory would suggest that there is a complex “field effect of centers” which may enable us to grasp what the book is about.
I think that the “objects vs. relations” issue hardly helps. Both ideas are abstractions and interpretations, so using one or the other keeps us thinking at pretty much the same level.
Patterns are a bit like Objects in OO programming (you are obviously familiar with that), by encapsulating statical and dynamical aspects (like properties and methods). Many programmers had problems with switching from procedural programming to OO programming. This may be similar to switching from mechanistic/causal to organic/pattern science. Although at the bottom of both very little changes, both seem to make a big difference imho.
Helmut, the authors I mentioned form some of the bedrock ideas I grew up with, so I don’t want to give you the impression that they are part of my current reading. I think I read most of Koestler’s works (and much of the other authors mentioned above) in the late 1980s if that’s any indication. I agree with your feelings about Krishnamurti to some degree — I find the transcripts of his conversations with people like David Bohm immensely enjoyable, though more an edification than education. But some songs repeated grow richer still with meaning.
My philosophical reading in the past five years or so has been largely in epistemology, e.g., Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, Wilfrid Sellars, though I’d not claim to yet have a significant grasp of any. I think I have some understanding of Brandom after much effort. I’m at a stage where my internal sense of intellectual consistency is an almost-finished puzzle thrown onto the floor; I’m once again searching for the corners and edges, some basis, some synthesis of the things I’ve learned so far – patterns, if you will – but I don’t know that I have the intellectual stamina to put all the pieces together once again. I’m not sure they even fit together anymore, there doesn’t seem to be any Unified Theory in front of me, except some kind of organic, ineffable matrix of relations, that when looked at dissolve into dust. Only by keeping my vision blurred can I gain any sense of the whole (see also Inferential Role Semantics). This blur may be the complex “field effect of centers” you mention, each “center” a contextualized identity, with “identity” only determined by the field effect, the web of interrelations. (In short, I don’t really believe in objects, but I do believe in relations.)
That said, I understand the notions of auxiliary sciences and that of the encapsulation within a Pattern as you describe it, and I don’t disagree with you on those counts. I am just not a believer (necessarily) that the Pattern has actually provided anything new in the analytic toolbox. I think it is simply a new social practice, an appealing one, yes, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter the underlying process of analysis. As you suggest – if I interpret you correctly – maybe it’s just a new layer.
So when I ask “What is War and Peace really about?”, I’m not trying to reductively boil the issue down to some ultimate answer, I may be posing the question in a traditional way but I’m looking for a non-traditional answer. I think Patterns provide a potentially interesting means of analysis, but I’m not convinced that it’s altogether a new process. How is it organic in any real sense? It still requires those aforementioned auxiliary sciences and a process of analysis and interpretation to develop and then apply the patterns. Is there some process of training the mind that can keep it from the process of interpretation? Are we seeking something beyond interpretation? (I think this is where I wish my understanding of Wilfrid Sellars was better.)
I’m trying to delve into that word about in a deeper way as well. What is anything about? Then to take something so intellectually, philosophically, and narratively complex as War and Peace and try to analyze it, to distill it down to some essential essence, yes, of course that is an absurdity. That was part of my point in choosing something so enormous, one of the biggest books I can think of. By contrast, to take the smallest thing we might talk about, say, a mouse: what is a mouse about? Or something more reasonable, a sentence, a paragraph, a short story? What do we find in common with all these different analyses? Are there patterns that describe ABOUT? I realize this all sounds very confusing, and it is to me as well.
Two major concepts that have remained (or perhaps become moreso) a mystery to me recently are subject identity and context. Identifying the complex, intertwined identities and contexts within even a short story is exceedingly difficult without resorting to reductive methods, and I think using a Pattern Language is (using a standards wonk’s term) orthogonal to the task at hand. To me this isn’t a problem of developing or determining underlying patterns but in determining the web of intertwined relationships without creating those relations as objects. To create a relation one needs both identity and context. I don’t know how we can avoid interpretation here, and I don’t see how Patterns provides a better analytical tool. I’m stumped.
So I don’t mean to be critical of your proposals, I just don’t see that they get beyond the kinds of problems that Robert Brandom outlines in his introduction to Articulating Reasons (p.1-22). I begin reaching instead for my copy of the Chuang Tse…
We are going deeper and deeper, becoming more general and philosophical, which is great. I’m very much interested in all these topics. On the other hand, it should be clear, that a new method like “pattern theory” can’t provide answers or solutions “out of the box”. I’d compare it to natural science and the concept of experiment in maybe the 18th century. One could have said: “in principle, experiments have always been used, its nothing new” or “what is the advantage of knowing how fast a stone is falling, we know that it falls anyway”. I think that we are in a process of development and some ideas are in the air and they may provide important evolutionary steps, only becoming visible in retrospection.
In dealing with my personal intellectual devlopment, reading various authors and philosophers is important, but I try not to get lost in their ways of thinking. Often they are totally immersed in their context and in fighting their contemporary opponents ideas, often accumulating thousands of pages of arguments against positions that are irrelevant to us now. It’s very hard to get at the bottom of what perhaps Hegel (8000 pages?) Kant (3000 pages?) Alexander (4000 pages?) meant. It would be great to boil them down to 10 page summaries of the ideas that are relevant to us now, but nobody seems to be willing to do this. It’s a kind of paradoxon: if you’ve invested years of studying, you will prefer to act as an expert to Kant instead of making his ideas accessable to everyone.
I very much like genuine thinkers from different fields, e. g. the classical C. K. Ogden works about the meaning of meaning, and his language analysis which led me into TheOgdenExperiment. I very much appreciate Karl Poppers work on the open society and the science method, although after 30 years of loving his ideas, I now think he is too strict. I like Willam Isaacs work about dialogue and Gary Klein (SourcesOfPower) about critical decision making. Of course a number of people who researched the human and animal psychology, like Sigmund Freud or Konrad Lorenz. Rupert Riedl about evolutionary epistemology. And Erving Goffman is great in his analysis of human situations and rituals.
What intrigues me are the cultural gaps that seem to exist inevitably. There are a number of French authors, like Rene Descartes or Piaget which are hardly appreciated in the German world. A number of authors you named are totally unknown to me. And I assume it’s pretty much the same, the other way round. A lot of Asian philosophies are hardly know to us, and even if they are, it’s more for their exotic touch than for their content. An example for the English/German gap: in the US “Occam’s razor” is so overused, that its real meaning has almost been lost, while in the German speaking world the translation “Ockham’s Rasiermesser” sounds silly, because “razor” doesn’t really translate, and the concept is practically unknown as a meme (google count - English: 670.000 German: 900). It’s very weird.
A point that becomes more and more important for me is the integration of various parts of knowledge. Up to know I found two keys for this: the first is the pattern theory which allows for “modules of knowledge” that can be improved and combined without creating problems. The second is what I call the “logic of the paradoxical”, the understanding of inevitable contradictions that can’t be logically resolved but must be implemented in dynamic equlibria. I touched this topic on WikiIsParadoxical. One key that I miss, is a neutral language to talk about different views of reality and truth. Worldviews seem to have so different languages, that it is almost impossible to bridge the really abstract issues in dialogue.