Much has been written about the sin of sentimentality in fiction. But is it really so bad?

What is sentimental writing?

It has to be more than simply writing that inspires emotion, a sensation of tenderness. Writing is supposed to move the reader. Sentimentality, as apposed to sentiment, is something shallow that cheapens or simplifies that emotion in order to tug at the reader’s heartstrings.

If it makes you go “aww” it’s probably an example of sentimentality.

If a story contains these stock themes, it’s likely to involve sentimentality (though these themes do also occur in deeper fiction):

• A child’s tears
• A sick pet
• The forgiving father
• The individual who stands up for right
• The kind and wise grandparent
• A triumph over adversity

Is it elitist to abhor sentimentality?

There was an interesting debate on sentimentality in the New York Times between authors Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison. Heller argued that “Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art.” Jamison responded that “I would argue that one of the deep unspoken fears beneath the sentimentality taboo is really the fear of commonality, the fear of being just like everyone else or telling a story just like everyone else’s.”

Jamison’s point about elitism is interesting. “We all have the same stories to tell,” she writes. And it’s true that the accusation of sentimentality tends to be levelled by intellectuals at writers of pulp fiction.  Perhaps they’re just sneering at emotions they disagree with.

John Irving, writing in the New York Times, points out the hypocrisy of context. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is among the best-loved works in English. Yet its theme of redemption is arguably sentimental, as is the tear-jerking ending where Tiny Tim says “God bless us, every one”. And yet the indulgence we afford tales of kindness at Christmas time doesn’t extend to other seasons. Critical fire greeted Dickens late grafting of a happy ending onto Great Expectations.  And I’d probably agree with the critics.

Some say the sin of sentimentality is that the author manipulates the reader into feeling certain emotions. But I think that’s true of all writing. The events on the page of a story don’t really exist—the writer simulates them to create an effect.

The reader’s collusion with sentimentality

Maybe the most useful definition of sentimentality is Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that it affords “the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it”. This definition emphasises the cheapness of the effect. But, interestingly, it also makes the consumer share responsibility for the sin with the producer.

So perhaps the issue is less to do with the emotion evoked than with what we’re enabled to do afterwards. Tropes and clichés are poor art because they confirm stereotypes rather than challenging them. In the same way, perhaps sentimentality is poor art because it denies us an understanding of how to cope with real loss or engage generously with others. If the writing doesn’t surprise and elucidate in some way, can it be good?

Jamison, in another essay, makes a similar point. She argues that sentimentalism strokes our ego by titillating our capacity to feel while simultaneously denying us genuine emotion.

I guess I’m arguing in favour of the pleasure of complexity and against the pleasure of simple intensity. Sentimentality irons out ambiguity. Whether you enjoy complexity or intensity may be no more than a matter of preferences.

What do you think? Is sentimentality a writing sin? Or is this just an elitist prejudice?

I am writing a magic realist novel. So I thought I’d better clarify for myself what the genre is. How does it differ from fantasy and surrealism, for example? Is it another name for fabulism? Where does science fiction fit?

Magic Realist writing emerged in Latin America. An example is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The genre integrates, into the everyday world, elements whose logic and rules of causality are different. In magic realism, the fantastic has to be plausible, the impossible is reframed as real. Characters do extraordinary things without realising it or knowing why. Its magic is ordinary and very firmly located in reality.

In this sense it is different from fantasy, whose purpose is to create magical alternate worlds. An example is Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Perhaps more importantly, the purpose of the two groups of writers is different. Whereas fantasy authors are generally offering escapism, magic realist authors are often advancing a critique of the real world. In Latin America it has roots in the critique of neo-colonialism.

Marquez, one of the originators of the genre, expressed this in his speech on accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982: “our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

In this, magic realism also differs from surrealism. Both genres explore illogical or non-realist aspects of existence, but surrealism invites us to look inwards to the subconscious machinery of imagination, while magic realism’s focus tends to be on society.

I have written several stories that I describe as fabulism. Some people see fabulism as a branch of magic realism. And that makes sense, if you consider the purpose. Like magic realism, fabulist writing tends to offer social commentary. But the technique is different, Fabulism need not be realist. It draws on tropes of myth and fable, often combining them in unusual ways to create a new, hybrid story.

Finally, all of these genres are different from science fiction, which requires a plausible extrapolation of existing scientific knowledge to explain the extraordinary. A goose that lays golden eggs is fairy tale. A goose, genetically engineered so that it metabolises gold and deposits the metal in its shell, is science fiction.

Do you think genre descriptions matter? Do you have different definitions? Leave a comment and join the debate.

I don’t just write – I write myself at the same time as the stories. Or at least, I explore myself in the act of writing, and discover things I didn’t know.

There are now enough novels under my belt (five) to constitute an oevre (yay). As an avid analyser, I can now explore what this tells me.

1. Each novel is a in a different genre. The first is an amalgam of detective, sci-fi, and psychological thriller. The second, is literary travel– a journey of the mind coupled with a journey to an exotic location. The third, historical fantasy. The fourth, an amalgam of historical and detective. The fifth is again literary, and a romantic political thriller. So, if I don’t follow a genre (almost certainly a marketing mistake) what do my books have in common that marks them as mine?
2. The main male character is almost always flawed and, at least in part, hard to like. They are often unreliable narrators. The only exception to this is the historical fantasy novel.

3. The stories are almost always told in close third or first person by a single narrator. Again, the historical fantasy novel is the exception. In this one I experimented with multiple point-of-view characters.
4. The stories are multi-threaded. There is usually a surface narrative which conforms roughly to a genre format, and then there are other threads. The fifth book, The Tears of Boabdil, does this is spades. There is a fairly simple story of an undercover policeman attempting to penetrate what he believe is a terrorist cell, and falling for the sister of the cell’s leader. Yet there is little of the tension you would expect from a thriller because the narrator gives away in the first chapter most of what subsequently happens. This follows the advice of Boris Fishman

If your story has a secret reveal it from the top.

The drama of the story is in how the protagonist deals with his secret.  But there are also magic realist elements of a parallel story of a wandering minstrel in Moorish Spain. What connects both of these strands, which begin to interweave, is a commentary on truth in which identity becomes the story we tell ourselves and other people.

5. There is a common human preoccupation behind all of these stories. The main character is usually confused or conflicted about what is really important to him. Though there are antagonists in all but the literary travel story, the real barrier to be overcome is internal. Many of the lead characters are of dubious sanity. There is often a helper character who is female and who is usually strong and whole. In some of the stories, the confusion gets the better of the protagonist. In others, he overcomes his barrier.
6. There is a political (with a small “p”) preoccupation behind many of these stories. Part of what the protagonist confronts is social injustice, and the way in which different cultures or sub-cultures get labelled as “other”. The politics is most explicit in the historical fantasy novel, which tracks the attempt of two very different Kings to maintain the integrity of their realms and the allegiance of their peoples.

Now that is all pretty interesting to me (though whether it is to you, only you can say). I hadn’t set out with the intention of writing flawed protagonists. Noble heroes are much easier to like (though arguably much less interesting). Readers identify with heroes, but their sympathy is engaged by flaws. So I guess, a first principle of my writing is

Your protagonist doesn’t have to be likeable, but s/he does have to be interesting

Am I using my characters’ flaws to explore something in myself? Possibly, but if so, I don’t know what it might be. The characters all have different flaws. I don’t think they’re me, though each of them has some aspect of me. I didn’t consciously decide to write conflicted protagonists. It just happened. So, I reassure myself that I just enjoy the depth that a flawed character allows.

The preoccupation with what things mean is definitely me, and the idea that we are all stories is certainly a recurring theme. The first book is even called Identity.

Facts are everything that exists. Stories are the connections between them. Stories tell us what goes with what, what is important and what is unimportant, who to praise and who to blame.

The multi-threading is also a signature. I like stories with layers, especially where the layers “rhyme”.  Just as a piece of music is dull if it only has a simple beat and melody, so with a story.

Complexity rewards the reader’s attention when s/he recognises recurring motifs. Complexity also adds ambiguity, blurring certainty. It makes the reader part of the story’s construction, because there is no single reading, there are as many stories as there are readers. A story only belongs to the author up to the moment of publication. From then on, it belongs to the readers.

Images and metaphors from myth and religion recur frequently in my work, even more so in the short stories. Which is odd really, since I’m not religious. Or maybe I am, and I just don’t know it. I wrote a story, Cara’s Saga, which is a deliberate bricolage (a delicious French world, meaning a construction from a variety of a diverse range of things). And that, of course, is the attraction of bricolage. The story invents a world which is part Inca, part Australian aboriginal, part Canadian northwest seaboard, wrapped up in a homage to Norse sagas. I loved writing it. The Sumerian goddess Ishtar is a character in The Tears of Boabdil.

And there’s a clue there to the pre-occupation underlying it. I’ve been planning to write for most of my working life, but decided not to (at least not write fiction) until I could write whatever I damned well pleased without having to worry about whether it was commercial. I always imagined I’d write science fiction. And yet, I’ve written very little of that genre. I like to explore different worlds, both for the curiosities I encounter there and for the underlying music of the universal human spirit at work. It turns out that the most interesting worlds to me are not those with elves and dragons (I actively dislike elves and dragons), or empires in other galaxies. The most interesting worlds are those inside people’s heads. I’m interested in the ways that people understand things, and how that makes them act.

Stories should take us to places we’ve never been before, and introduce us to characters we’ve never met before. The writer constructs a new world for us. But you don’t have to cross galaxies to do this. Inside every head there is a world which, to the rest of us, is unimaginably different and strange. Since we can never enter these worlds in reality, it’s the job of fiction to take us there and show us our friends, our partners, and our children as they really are.

If we were all aliens beneath the skin, that would be as scary as the pod people in the classic (McCarthy era and anti-communist) sci-fi movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So the work of fiction is not to render people as “other” but as (at least in part) delightfully like us. We have to be able to understand and empathise with the alien universes inside their heads.

I think getting a handle on how those mystifying creatures around me think and feel and construct meaning is my main motivation for writing.

And that’s probably why I’m so drawn to religion and myth. I wasn’t even really aware of this until I was doing a reading at a “Lit Live” event in Frensham and the poet, Jo Young asked me why I used so much religious reference. The impulse is literary, not a religious. These are simply great stories, the best our species has created. And why are they so great? Because they have been the glue which binds communities and peoples together. They express universal longings and fears, and explain, in their distinct and unique ways, cultures to themselves.

Religion and myth are a wonderful toolkit of story pieces.

Like an electronic hobbyist, the writer can take characters and themes and events from them, and plug these into the circuit board of a story. And when narrative current is passed through them, they resonate with deep energy that draws in the freight of hundreds or thousands of years of storytelling.

Personally I don’t make resolutions, but that may not be true of you. It may be important to resolve, for example, to make time to write every day, or to complete what you’ve started, or to edit more, or any number of things.

I do plan, though, what I can realistically achieve this year as a writer. Luckily, most of those decisions are already taken for me in 2018.