Is Your Novel the MacGuffin of Your Life? (If So: Good!)
Photo credit Evrard d'Espinques/Public Domain.
Javier Marias says there are seven reasons not to write novels, and only one reason to write them:
...fiction is the most bearable of worlds, because it offers diversion and consolation to those who frequent it, as well as something else: in addition to providing us with a fictional present, it also offers us a possible future reality. And although this has nothing to do with personal immortality, it means that, for every novelist, there is the possibility – infinitesimal, but still a possibility– that what he is writing is both shaping and might even become the future he will never see.
We novel writers need to band together and put together some catchy Marias-inspired chants (“You can’t be immortal but your writing is!?”), because there are naysayers about and we need something to say to them.
Case in point, I recently read a Salon article ranting about the current surplus of unnecessary novelists. If we hope someone will read our drivelings, I read, we should switch genres, and churn out novel-writing advice manuals instead. "...far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels," opines Laura Miller, "than out of people who want to read them."
Miller scoffs at the unnecessary hordes of would-be novelists who have sprung up in recent decades as "narcissistic" people who should go back to their job of selflessly reading the work of the "two dozen odd authors" who she, Laura, thinks are actually quite good. "Frankly," she says, "there are already more than enough novels out there -- more than those of us who still read novels could ever get around to poking our noses into, even when it's our job to do so."
Shoot, if only we had listened to Laura before we ever started this self-serving debacle. I hope most of you have been more efficient, but I have been toiling away for ten years on my debut work, and I have completed only a fraction of a novel! My constant companion, Ms. Critical Inner Voice, is all full of: “you are not a novelist. You are a cliche. An embarrassing, incompetent, cliche!”
I hope your inner critical voice is more tactful!
But in case she isn’t, this is where we all need to remembered about the MacGuffin. A MacGuffin, or "McGuffin," is described by screenwriting.io as "a device that drives the plot, but has no real relevance." And indeed modern users of the term generally consider it within the context of film. Alfred Hitchcock is credited with first use of the phrase in this context in a 1939 lecture at Columbia College, where he described it as: "[t]he mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers."
Now we're getting somewhere. "The necklace!" "The papers!" Yes! But it gets better. The eponymous wikipedia article calls the MacGuffin a plot device that goes much further back than twentieth century thriller movies:
The Holy Grail of Arthurian Legend has been cited as an early example of a MacGuffin. The Holy Grail is the desired object that is essential to initiate and advance the plot. The final disposition of the Grail is never revealed, suggesting that the object is not of significance in itself.
Indeed, there is some pretty heavy duty comfort to be found here, perhaps. As it says in Ecclesiastes, "There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour." (KJV Ecc 1:24) Or as they say on shinetext.com: "progress, not perfection."
I myself have literally risked life and limb (or at least, incarceration and poison ivy), in the name of novel writing, and I’m sure you have your own much more exciting writing-about-writing stories to tell!
But what role does the novel itself play in our various tragi-comic life journeys? Can we generalize? It is a MacGuffin?
Like every Grail-seeking Templar ever, we need to scoff at the question and keep moving. A novel-writing-coach I hired along the way pointed out quite bluntly, "you are not a would-be novelist. You are a novelist. Just write it, and then sell it. And then write another one."
It's that easy!
So come on friends, let’s go. Let’s consider it exciting, and not discouraging, that what we have on our hands is a sort of Schroedinger's MacGuffin -- will it be real, or will it just be an inciting incident? The quest itself is a noble one, and we spend our hours writing in the company of people who speak directly to our goals, hopes, and dreams. We are aligned in the firmest possible way with our own values, building the world we want to see, one word at a time.
So let’s go!
