I particularly liked the bit in the Christmas episode where the cast go for a walk in a ‘winter wonderland’ and as they stand looking over a lake, a snow machine starts up and sprays them with movie-snow, as if they have their own personal snow cloud amidst the bright lights, clear sky and cool air of a Los Angeles night. And the stars themselves seem something like this, almost like charicatures of themselves, all trying to fill a role either of protagonist or supporting character, friend, girlfriend or boyfriend. They’re not actors, and yet they are, all working to an unconcious script dictated by the place and time in which they have grown up, by what they see on TV and read in magazines, and what they think other people want to hear. It’s like a lot of the time, I feel, especially when they’re emotional, such as while in love or during a breakup or consoling someone who is upset, people say these certain clichéd phrases, as if they feel they’re expected to. Like in one episode of The Hills I think Lauren says “love is not a maybe thing” which sounds like a rehearsed line, but presumably isn’t. People in real life say these things too, narrating their own lives and feelings as if in fictional terms.

The way people talk is influenced by the fictions they consume, and vice versa. There’s a humorous example of this in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski where the main character keeps repeating things he’s heard other characters say before, just slipping them into conversation every now and then. A better example though is a quote I once read about Ernest Hemingway, I can’t remember who by, that was something along the lines of: it is said that Hemingway had a good ear for speech, and yet no one spoke like Hemingway’s characters and until after they had read Hemingway.

In my fiction, often, and especially with speech, I try to aim for absolute realism as much as possible. But speech is difficult. Good dialogue and believable speech don’t always intersect. When speaking people pause in awkward places, searching for the right word, or they make mistakes and start again, or they pepper their speech with hesitancies such as ‘um’. Depending on the kind of piece I’m writing, I often include these, even, to an extent, if they could be detrimental to the literary quality of the piece. Perhaps I’m going off at a tangent here, but I occasionally feel, for some works, the presentation of what is real can be more important than what makes a good book (not that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive). For example, I was thinking yesterday how the extended piece I’m working on at the moment, doesn’t really have a climax or, if it does, it’s about two thirds of the way through, and at the end it starts to kind of dwindle out, like a burned-down candle. Then I realised that I was fine with this, that that’s more realistic: Life rarely has climaxes, and I don’t think a lot of Modernist novels do either (Mrs. Dalloway has a character kill himself fairly near the end, but this seems a sort of minor occurence that little effects the title character except in a passing thought). In my piece, the lack of a climactic ending, which is actually different from what I originally planned, mirrors the feelings of my protagonists, who wanted something more dramatic.

Anyway, I’ll talk about all that, and how I’m blatantly obsessed with aspiring towards the ideals and proficiency of James Joyce, in another post. Right now, I shall just add that I think Raymond Carver also is good at realistic speech, and you can see my attempts to emulate his style in stories like I Couldn’t Really Say and Dragonflies, but his speech is a certain type of speech, specifically 1980s American, which is quite different to modern English speech, primarily because of the differences in attitudes between the two nations; most broadly: Americans tend to be frank and direct, while the English are more reserved and indirect.

So it’s interesting that in The Hills there’s this interplay between real dialogue and these kind of stock phrases that sound scripted, which I suppose is the real reason I like The Hills. Yes, it seems strange, certainly impressive, that the film crew managed such intimate access to every part of the stars’ lives, and that the stars should all be so comfortable saying things in front of them, not seeming to play up overtly to the camera any more than they would to anyone else. And though this might call into question the validity of the show’s ‘reality’, other comparable shows, such as Channel 4′s Big Brother, on the few instances I’ve been unfortunate enough to have been exposed to, seem to contain similar types of speech, though more shamefully British and less naturalistic since the people are forced together.

Certainly, that’s one of the things The Hills does well: it does feel very natural, and this returns to my first point about the show providing a voyeuristic look into American life, or at least a very specific type of American life; that of the young priveleged elite. For a lot of people, to live somewhere where the sun shines constantly and the beach is just down the road, to be rich enough to always be comfortable and never have to worry about money, is an ideal existence, and yet still, Lauren and her friends constantly find problems to rock the boat of their idyllic lives, whether stemming from their jobs, their schoolwork or their relationships, all of which are petty compared to the stresses and strife the vast majority of the world’s people face. It’s a reminder that drama and conflict are a part of human existence, one of the few constants through all the stories we’ve told through the years. Even in a perfect utopia people would find something to complain or fight about.

So, in conclusion, or, as they say on the internet, tl;dr: The Hills, despite the questionable merit of watching spoiled California girls obsessed with shopping, fashion and boys, who inflect the end of every sentence, is an interesting programme if only for it’s unusual blurring of reality and fiction and the way it develops concise characters from real people.

“Classics are the books nobody wants to read, but everybody wants to have read.”

the second, rather more blunt one, is:

“Big book: big bore.”

I love novels: I’m reading three at the moment (although perhaps the fact that I start new novels halfway through ones I’m already reading suggests that I find something lacking in the ones I have begun reading, or that I feel impatient for the end of the novel, for the experience of reading to have ceased and the experience of having read to have begun), but there’s definitely something very attractive about the short story.

For Raymond Carver, and I suspect too for Ernest Hemingway, and presumably many other of the short story writers who made their living not soley through their fiction, the attraction was that the short story “could be written and read in one sitting.” This was important to Carver through necessity, because he only had so much time for writing, but doesn’t that resonate strongly with our current proliferation and importance on instant entertainment? When there’s so many quickfire bursts of audio-visual experience at our fingertips, who is inclined to commit the twenty or so hours it takes to read a novel to sitting there, taking in printed words?

I know a lot of people, even on my writing course, who say they should read more, and, even in the university environment I’m in, I suspect there are a lot of people who don’t read it at all. Certainly I myself begrudge the time it takes to read a novel, not because there are necessarily better things I could be doing with my time, just because it takes so long. I have about twenty books lined up on my shelf that I’m looking forward to reading, and a lot of these are big six-hundred-pages-plus books, like Middlemarch, Finnegans Wake and Don Quixote. I just don’t know where I’m going to find the time for all those. Added to which, I feel that I’m quite a slow reader. I don’t know why, but if I read fast I feel like I miss to much. Sometimes I feel like I can write at the same speed I read, if I have my ideas planned out beforehand.

The other problem I have with novels, which the short story seems to escape, is the problem of comfort. It’s so difficult to get comfortable when reading for the extended periods a novel requires because it’s so awkward and unnatural to hold a page and tilt your head at an angle you can see the words. I can sit like that for maybe ten minutes before my neck starts to ache or my leg goes to sleep or whatever. Italo Calvino discusses this problem in the opening pages of his novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.

With the short story I also find there’s a certain exhiliration to the narrative that is different in quality to that felt when reading a novel, like the difference between looking at a Polaroid picture and at a grand painting, just because the narrative has to be so fast and tight to get all of the story across. It’s nice to be able to sit down and absorb a complete narrative experience “in a single sitting”, rather than piecing together meaning across a series of readings to come to a complete understanding of the characters or the plot.

Of course, both Hemingway and Carver are exceptional writers, and their minimalist style is well suited to the short story; I couldn’t imagine Carver writing a novel, and I have not yet read any of Hemingway’s novels. What I find particularly interesting about Carver is the contrast between him and Virginia Woolf (whose Mrs. Dalloway I am also reading). Their styles couldn’t be more different: one uses the fewest words possible to convey meaning, while the other uses thes most adjectives and subordinate clauses to convey a totalness of experience, but they pretty much write about the same things, just at different points. What I mean is, Carver in his stories often examines the single, often minute, event that changes the life of his protagonists. For example in Neighbors there is the husband and wife finding out that they both separately liked to go over to the neighbours’ house and imagine what it was like to be the neighbours, and this will have obvious, though ambiguous, repercussions for their relationship. Virginia Woolf too focuses on relationships, but she examines them at great length after such an event, looking at all the repercussions and how they have affected the characters.

I realise this entry is getting a little ecclectic because I didn’t really plan it out: I was just hit with this sudden appreciation of short stories. What I think my ultimate point is, is that, though I have always assumed novels to be, if you will, the ultimate written form; complete wholistic entities, that every writer should aspire to, I’m beginning to realise, after five years of writing them, that the short story can be a poignant and fulfilling narrative medium as well.

“Sorry,” he mouths silently to the driver of the hearse as he narrowly avoids an oncoming lorry.

“When you say ‘I love you’ and I say ‘I love you’,” the boy replied.

“I love you,” the girl said.

The boy looked at her and he felt sad.