Writing Fiction

Charles Dickens: Six things he gave the modern world

A great piece from BBC News: Charles Dickens: Six things he gave the modern world. Every fiction writer should read this, and then get to work reading and learning from Dickens himself. One of the six things: Modern cinema.

While everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Miss Piggy has taken a role in a film adaptation of Dickens's work, many argue that he was as instrumental in creating the conventions of cinema as he was for inspiring the content itself. 

Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein said that important aspects of cinema were created by the influence of Dickens on pioneering film director DW Griffith. 

He argued that Dickens invented, among other things, the parallel montage - where two stories run alongside each other - and the close-up. 

"The idea that Dickens invented cinema is obviously nonsensical but he was a key and important influence in its development," says Prof Graeme Smith, who wrote Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. "Once film arrived, his work inspired an extraordinary amount of early cinema." 

The BFI says that there were around 100 versions of Dickens's work recreated in film in the silent era alone. And those adaptations continue to this day.

Reading Dickens as a grad student long ago, I kept thinking what a moviemaker he would have made. But then he was also technically brilliant as a storyteller; Bleak House, written in the 1850s, is still in many ways an avant-garde novel. And as the BBC story points out, he was also hysterically funny. 

Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature

I've just learned about an amazing opportunity for writers. Next year is the centenary of the birth of Northrop Frye, and the University of Toronto is celebrating by putting online Northrop Frye on the Bible and Literature: videotaped lectures he gave in 1982-83, and that later became The Great Code and Words With Power.

I am making a fuss about this because Northrop Frye set me on my course as a writer: Reading his major work Anatomy of Criticism as a young grad student, I finally understood how literature works, how a story operates on us. Frye's students used to say that listening to his lectures produced the sensation that the tops of their heads were coming off; that was the sensation I had within a few pages of starting Anatomy, and recurrently in reading his books thereafter.

One of the points Frye made was that Western literature is almost unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know the Bible. Applying this insight to Charles Dickens's Bleak House, I was astounded to see how Dickens had assumed that his audience (even those who had to be read to because they were illiterate) was thoroughly conversant with the Bible.

We are still retelling Biblical stories whether we know it or not, and they're likely to be better stories if we do know it. So spend some time with Frye, both through this series and through his books.

Northrop Frye died in 1991; I cried when I heard the news, and I think of him all the time. Watching him on the 7-minute trailer for this series made me realize how much I've missed him.