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Thanks very much for kick-starting a fun debate, Mr. Maass. I see your points more clearly now, agree w/ a few, disagree w/ others. That’s the beauty of blog talk, eh? I’m sure we’ll see each other around.

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JesusAngelGarcia, when you say that hyperbolic means to you exaggeration in a way that’s not believable, you make a useful point. When exaggeration works, *why* does it work? Because it has a basis in truth–it just exaggerates that for effect.

So, I think we may be agreeing. I recommend hyperbole to fiction writers in part because so many manuscripts are drab, flat, humdrum, unstimulating, safe. They’re like static on the radio; not annoying, exactly, but not getting any meaning through. Both their language and story events need more oomph.

I think we also agree on originality. Who doesn’t want that in a novel? Now, you point to Marquez and Calvino as authors who find the magical, fantastic, absurb and ironic in life itself. (“BIG LIFE”–love that.) True enough.

Consider this, though: There are plenty of novels that observe life closely yet tell us nothing insightful and furthermore speak in a barely audible murmur. On the other hand, there are genre novels that roar, move us deeply and change our thinking.

How do genre novels do that when they are following a formula? Because the author brings to the story what is original, personal and passionate even if the story pattern is familiar.

In my post on “bigness” I pointed out some factors that big-feeling novels often have in common. Obviously, if one takes that as a template and merely fills in the blanks, that by itself won’t produce a great novel–or much of a novel at all.

Whether a novel is walking down a well worn city sidewalk or blazing a trail across the Gobi Desert, what makes us pay attention is what the author has to say that catches us with the force of the new.

A little hyperbole might not hurt in that regard, either.

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That includes Paul Bunyan, yes, but it also includes… lets say, Jack Ryan. Why? Because ‘everyman CIA analysts’ do not ever see that much action in real life and, if they do, they probably don’t end up being singularly victorious in the end every time (or most times).

But in any case, it seems like a few people are being hung up on semantics while missing the point. Real life often has a lot of down time in it, or times when very little happens. Dramatic events rarely stack up the way they do in exciting novels and different people’s lives almost never reach resolution on their inner or external conflict simultaneously.

I think what Don is suggesting here is using hyperbole to increase the number and improve the timing of dramatic events to slightly unrealistic levels in order to give the reader the sensation of being involved in something ‘larger than life.’

Or perhaps I’m also missing the point…

(I suppose Paul Bunyan is also ‘larger than life,’ but not all hyperbole has to extend into absurdity to be effective.)

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I guess I see hyperbolic as over-the-top in a way that’s not believable or merely entertaining or childish, like tall tales (Paul Bunyan and his big-ass ox pal) or silly horror stories (Friday the 13th… where the demonic killer never dies even though he’s mortal).

Satire, most good humor, I’d say, pushes beyond… goes over the top, but for me it’s gotta be credible to be funny. You know, it’s funny b/c it’s soooo true AND soooo wrong or whatever.

That’s Tom Wolfe and Perotta’s Election, no? I wouldn’t call that hyperbolic. I know a lot of teachers and Election resonated for them in a huge way — not b/c it was hyperbolic (exaggerated to the point of being unbelievable) but b/c it was too true: it COULD happen to anybody… misguided choices, unforeseen blowback, cunning adversaries, no exit on the downward spiral, etc.

Dan Brown hyperbolic? Um, I think he’s just a hack. He steals his source material, his prose is weak, his endings are a joke. I’ve got nothing more to say on him (though I do appreciate his work ethic: doing push-ups during breaks while writing).

Haven’t read the other writers in your thriller paragraph, but it seems to me you’re arguing that there are only two ways to write — in an exaggerated form (NOT “real life,” according to you) or in an “everyman” style (“real life”) — and that seems to me like a very limited dichotomous (false, according to me) view of what a novel can do and how the world really works, aka the nature of “reality,” both in the living, breathing world we inhabit day to day and in the imaginative world of a novel, which needs to feel like it’s living and breathing to be “great,” in my opinion. So yeah. That thar’s what I would call a faulty premise.

Re: YaYa & Watery Elephants… um… same point as above. Maybe you don’t see the world in “fantastic” ways, but I do. That’s how I live, and all I have to do is open my eyes. I see the so-called magical, the fantastical, the absurd, the ironic, the over-the-top nearly every day in so many ways. It’s not hyperbolic. It’s BIG LIFE. Much better examples: Winterson, Marquez, Calvino, Gogol… to me, these writers resonate because they’re real AND “big” — which brings me back to the more important point from my original post:

You can’t write great novels from templates. You can merely write formulaic stories. And formulaic stories ain’t great by any stretch. Isn’t greatness, at a minimum, defined by originality? Oh wait… I remember another blog piece you wrote a month or so ago where you argued that originality was not important or overrated or not necessary or something like that. Respectfully, sir, I disagree.

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