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vcmwMy understanding of "masterclass" is, or at least completely was before this online conversation, a flat one. I haven't participated in writing class environments post college, or writing crit groups at a level where any particular terminology was used, let alone used enough to carry social weights.
So when I personally have thought of a book that I was reading as a "masterclass" on how to do something, my understanding was that I was describing a book that:
a) was recognized by a wide range of people as doing a particular thing very well,
b) appeared to my eye as a reader to be constructed in a style that allowed relatively easy textual analysis of that particular thing, and
c) could be placed in a reasonably accessible context that allowed for relative evaluation of that thing.
That relative evaluation might be via some combination of
i) analysis of comparable works by the same author, or
ii) analysis of the work in question and other works that appeared to be strongly parallel to certain elements in the work in question, to varying degress of success [potentially by different authors / in different genres], or
iii) analysis of elements specifically identifiable as contributing to the construction of the work.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that "masterclass" was used in a context that was equivalent to "what to aim for" or "it's the best," because those definitions don't have the same sort of educational element to my eye.
So, specifically on American Gods.
The context in which I was suggesting American Gods as a masterclass text involved a specific Venn Diagram overlap.
Circle 1: Narrative "complexity" with a genre inflection.
Circle 2: Mass commercial appeal (assumed evidence: strong sales, bookstore placement, etc.)
Circle 3: Accessible to a new audience unfamiliar with genre conventions (assumed evidence: read by many readers who are apt to say "I don't usually read X but this worked for me" or something similar)
Circle 4: Meets the Lois McMaster Bujold definition of genre (because that one is common at 4th St.) in re, works in conversation with each other.
Circle 5: Meets the "tropes and narrative conventions" definition of genre for fantasy
Circle 6: Critically well-received within the fantasy genre as defined under Circle 4, above.
The reason I'm fairly emphatic on this choice is that I can't personally think of another current author other than Neil Gaiman who hits the overlap of all 6 circles above, and because I think that, of his more commercially successful works, American Gods is the most accessible for the kind of textual analysis I think is useful here.
The above constitutes the baseline assumptions that I was making before the conversation - the axioms I'm bringing in with me.
The next section here is going to be in direct conversation with some of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alecaustin 's points in his masterclass post.
Under his point "3) Aim for the stars. Even if you miss, you can still hit London", there's the line "If you treat American Gods or A Game of Kings or A Civil Campaign or any other book like it's the pinnacle of authorial achievement, that is conceding too much. Constraining either the vector or the magnitude of your ambition is to hobble yourself before the race begins. Don't seek to approximate your idols - seek to *surpass them*."
My note here is going to shade into a response to 2b, but I think there's a definite difference between "pinnacle of authorial achievement" and "best example of successful use of X." Successfully using X, for any of value of X, doesn't mean, to me, anything beyond that this is the best example of an X that I've got lying around. Nothing about "this is the best X I've got for analysis" prevents aiming to use X in creating something more personally awesome. I think it can get complicated because there's an overlap of the affective part of art and the intellectual response to craft in the way we usually characterise "best." The best X from a craft standpoint doesn't necessarily correspond to any affection from me from an art standpoint. Salvador Dali has lovely textures, but I dislike most of his paintings. One response is intellectual response to craft, the other is affective response to art.
There are definitely books, and authors, whose art affects me in such a way that I can feel emotionally hobbled when I try to think about them intellectually in terms of craft.
Which brings me to "2b) It's easier to learn from works with visible flaws than from the sheen of perfection." Ok, what this sounds like to me is the very valid point that if your emotional response, or visceral response, or any other kind of response to a work is so strong that you can't see the work analytically, then that work isn't a very good text for you to use in analysis. Which is why I will never be sitting down to do a textual analysis of Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and why you won't usually hear me bringing it up in analytical conversation. I love it, it works for me, and I have no desire to see the sausage.
On the other hand, I think that style can play into how easy it is to learn from a work, quite separate from flaws or perfection. A really good paper collage can be open as a source of learning about image overlap and spatial interplay in a way that even a medium-good, more flawed digital collage might not. There's something about being able to see the interplay of those physically cut edges, even if obscured by gouache, etc., that opens up the mental space (at least for me) in a way that a digital collage that's used Photoshop or other editing tools to play with those edges makes harder.
Narratively, a text that has used a collage-style technique (where the edges of the incorporated styles or elements are left visible through verbal cues, quotations, or stylistic markers) makes for easier analysis for me than one that has used a more watercolor-style technique, by which I mean blended in translucent layers (I know that not all watercolor does this, but it's my image of watercolor). I've read Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock a ton of times, and that essay I read afterswan_tower linked it in her post on Fire and Hemlock was full of bits that DWJ incorporated quite deliberately and that came as total news to me - they weren't incorporated in a way that made them easy to pull out. The Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer stuff is right up on top. The bits that were Psyche - not so much for me at any rate.
In response to "2a) Imitation is effective but problematic." - it seems to me that imitation is a necessary phase for a lot of people, myself included, in absorbing and practicing a new technique. But it's an exercise in craft, and not necessarily a production of successful art. I know that some writers have recommended physically retyping a text word by word to force yourself to pay attention to the words in a way it's hard to do as a reader. Artists copy paintings by masters to practice their technique. People doing layout do the same thing with existing layout pages in books.
But there's a difference, too, between copying a text/image, and copying an example of a technique. Artists practice shading, perspective etc. in just straight up abstracted ways as well as copying images that are good examples of those techniques. I don't know, it seems that this one is an area where not having gotten engaged in writing at that level of craft makes it hard for me to see how the parallels play out, but I imagine that it's hard to get a friend/crit partner to evalue your technical exercises as a writer - "here's me trying to do a Dean Koontz scene transition, did I nail it?" seems like a hard thing to get critical feedback on.
As well, the style is one with visible tags for the elements (collage vs. watercolor), which aids textual analysis.
Here's the pile I'd assemble, for a start at analyzing American Gods:
a) Eight Days of Luke, which does specifically semi-disguised Norse gods in modern day, but is for children and has different narrative.
b) Norse mythology and Egyptian mythology, with others optional but nice. For the purpose of this work I suspect that Bullfinch's level mythology does fine, though I'm sure Gaiman read the Eddas etc. directly, I don't think that you need to be able to catch every parallel to play take-the-book apart.
c) Another Gaiman work that does something similar. If you're already a comics reader, the ideal here is probably the Brief Lives Sandman arc, because it has the advantage of being a road trip narrative and having various gods, so it's a nice chance to see an author doing very similar things differently, which can highlight elements of style and construction. If you're not already a comics reader, maybe Anansi Boys, but then it's harder because the mythology is used differently and it's a different narrative construct, but you can still look at similar seams between mythology and narrative. Works like The Graveyard Book are in deep conversation with explicitly stated other works, but I see them as assembled by very different techniques and think they'd be harder to pull apart.
And a work like Sandman is much harder to use as central analysis in this way, because even though similar things are being done with narrative in some arcs, some of the reference material is much harder to find. Comics are ephemeral. And is it really worth the time to track down the run of Amythest, Princess of Gemworld, to better appreciate some 1-panel reference? Whereas Norse and Egyptian mythology is widely available free online. Also, Sandman has multiple volumes doing multiple different things with various types of mythology, story layout, etc. American Gods is more one piece.
d) Access to some materials such as essays, introductions, online writing etc. about how the author sees their work can be nice - which Gaiman is particularly convenient for as he has a huge online presence and even plenty of secondary work if that's the way your tastes run.
For my tastes d) is a totally optional type of category. I know there are readers for whom it is an important category in analysis. I don't know enough about how writers look at texts to judge the utility of d) for them. I suppose it varies as much by writer as by reader.
I think you could go beyond that in setting up context, but I think that would be a sufficient start.
So a-d are the particular background of context I bring as a reader to American Gods.
I have the added context of having worked in public libraries for 3 years and as a bookseller for 2 (non overlapping) during which time I heard from a lot of audiences about what they liked about Neil Gaiman and what they did or didn't like (with our without mediating recommendation) when looking for something similar to read.
It's in that set of contexts that I'm recommending the book as a masterclass text.
I haven't done the line by line read on American Gods that I think I'd need to do to really look analytically at it using the context and criteria above, but all of this would not be to imitate the particular story or voice, but to look piece by piece at how he assembles the different elements of the story. How much screen time? How does a section read if you enter it knowing who the disguised-god is, or knowing the traditional arc. Can you figure out how it would read if you didn't know that going in the first time, but then did the second? That kind of thing.
Edited because I realized too late that this SO needed a cut tag.
So when I personally have thought of a book that I was reading as a "masterclass" on how to do something, my understanding was that I was describing a book that:
a) was recognized by a wide range of people as doing a particular thing very well,
b) appeared to my eye as a reader to be constructed in a style that allowed relatively easy textual analysis of that particular thing, and
c) could be placed in a reasonably accessible context that allowed for relative evaluation of that thing.
That relative evaluation might be via some combination of
i) analysis of comparable works by the same author, or
ii) analysis of the work in question and other works that appeared to be strongly parallel to certain elements in the work in question, to varying degress of success [potentially by different authors / in different genres], or
iii) analysis of elements specifically identifiable as contributing to the construction of the work.
It wouldn't have occurred to me that "masterclass" was used in a context that was equivalent to "what to aim for" or "it's the best," because those definitions don't have the same sort of educational element to my eye.
So, specifically on American Gods.
The context in which I was suggesting American Gods as a masterclass text involved a specific Venn Diagram overlap.
Circle 1: Narrative "complexity" with a genre inflection.
Circle 2: Mass commercial appeal (assumed evidence: strong sales, bookstore placement, etc.)
Circle 3: Accessible to a new audience unfamiliar with genre conventions (assumed evidence: read by many readers who are apt to say "I don't usually read X but this worked for me" or something similar)
Circle 4: Meets the Lois McMaster Bujold definition of genre (because that one is common at 4th St.) in re, works in conversation with each other.
Circle 5: Meets the "tropes and narrative conventions" definition of genre for fantasy
Circle 6: Critically well-received within the fantasy genre as defined under Circle 4, above.
The reason I'm fairly emphatic on this choice is that I can't personally think of another current author other than Neil Gaiman who hits the overlap of all 6 circles above, and because I think that, of his more commercially successful works, American Gods is the most accessible for the kind of textual analysis I think is useful here.
The above constitutes the baseline assumptions that I was making before the conversation - the axioms I'm bringing in with me.
The next section here is going to be in direct conversation with some of
alecaustin 's points in his masterclass post.Under his point "3) Aim for the stars. Even if you miss, you can still hit London", there's the line "If you treat American Gods or A Game of Kings or A Civil Campaign or any other book like it's the pinnacle of authorial achievement, that is conceding too much. Constraining either the vector or the magnitude of your ambition is to hobble yourself before the race begins. Don't seek to approximate your idols - seek to *surpass them*."
My note here is going to shade into a response to 2b, but I think there's a definite difference between "pinnacle of authorial achievement" and "best example of successful use of X." Successfully using X, for any of value of X, doesn't mean, to me, anything beyond that this is the best example of an X that I've got lying around. Nothing about "this is the best X I've got for analysis" prevents aiming to use X in creating something more personally awesome. I think it can get complicated because there's an overlap of the affective part of art and the intellectual response to craft in the way we usually characterise "best." The best X from a craft standpoint doesn't necessarily correspond to any affection from me from an art standpoint. Salvador Dali has lovely textures, but I dislike most of his paintings. One response is intellectual response to craft, the other is affective response to art.
There are definitely books, and authors, whose art affects me in such a way that I can feel emotionally hobbled when I try to think about them intellectually in terms of craft.
Which brings me to "2b) It's easier to learn from works with visible flaws than from the sheen of perfection." Ok, what this sounds like to me is the very valid point that if your emotional response, or visceral response, or any other kind of response to a work is so strong that you can't see the work analytically, then that work isn't a very good text for you to use in analysis. Which is why I will never be sitting down to do a textual analysis of Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and why you won't usually hear me bringing it up in analytical conversation. I love it, it works for me, and I have no desire to see the sausage.
On the other hand, I think that style can play into how easy it is to learn from a work, quite separate from flaws or perfection. A really good paper collage can be open as a source of learning about image overlap and spatial interplay in a way that even a medium-good, more flawed digital collage might not. There's something about being able to see the interplay of those physically cut edges, even if obscured by gouache, etc., that opens up the mental space (at least for me) in a way that a digital collage that's used Photoshop or other editing tools to play with those edges makes harder.
Narratively, a text that has used a collage-style technique (where the edges of the incorporated styles or elements are left visible through verbal cues, quotations, or stylistic markers) makes for easier analysis for me than one that has used a more watercolor-style technique, by which I mean blended in translucent layers (I know that not all watercolor does this, but it's my image of watercolor). I've read Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock a ton of times, and that essay I read after
swan_tower linked it in her post on Fire and Hemlock was full of bits that DWJ incorporated quite deliberately and that came as total news to me - they weren't incorporated in a way that made them easy to pull out. The Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer stuff is right up on top. The bits that were Psyche - not so much for me at any rate.In response to "2a) Imitation is effective but problematic." - it seems to me that imitation is a necessary phase for a lot of people, myself included, in absorbing and practicing a new technique. But it's an exercise in craft, and not necessarily a production of successful art. I know that some writers have recommended physically retyping a text word by word to force yourself to pay attention to the words in a way it's hard to do as a reader. Artists copy paintings by masters to practice their technique. People doing layout do the same thing with existing layout pages in books.
But there's a difference, too, between copying a text/image, and copying an example of a technique. Artists practice shading, perspective etc. in just straight up abstracted ways as well as copying images that are good examples of those techniques. I don't know, it seems that this one is an area where not having gotten engaged in writing at that level of craft makes it hard for me to see how the parallels play out, but I imagine that it's hard to get a friend/crit partner to evalue your technical exercises as a writer - "here's me trying to do a Dean Koontz scene transition, did I nail it?" seems like a hard thing to get critical feedback on.
In response to "2) An attitude of reverence blinds the student," I'm going to cycle back to American Gods specifically and say that it's a work I don't like all that much. On the other hand, again pointing to intellectual response to craft vs. affective response to art, an attitude of reverence for the craft involved in something doesn't necessarily blind you, it can increase your focus. My friend J.L. is an accomplished dancer. When we go to dance recitals together, he's seeing something different than I am - and he's MORE impressed by some things because he can evaluate their technical difficulty and the successful way they were carried off in a way I can't. Conversely, there are things in the dance that move me emotionally where he's unimpressed or dismissive - because the technique was flawed, or chose an easy way when a hard way was available - and I'm just seeing something that affected me emotionally. I tend to feel as a reader that reverence for either the art or craft in a piece makes it harder to appreciate the other quality - when I'm focused on affect it's hard to see craft, and when I'm focused on craft it's hard to feel affect.
Which leads me back to "1) An isolated data point tells us nothing; context is necessary."
As well, the style is one with visible tags for the elements (collage vs. watercolor), which aids textual analysis.
Here's the pile I'd assemble, for a start at analyzing American Gods:
a) Eight Days of Luke, which does specifically semi-disguised Norse gods in modern day, but is for children and has different narrative.
b) Norse mythology and Egyptian mythology, with others optional but nice. For the purpose of this work I suspect that Bullfinch's level mythology does fine, though I'm sure Gaiman read the Eddas etc. directly, I don't think that you need to be able to catch every parallel to play take-the-book apart.
c) Another Gaiman work that does something similar. If you're already a comics reader, the ideal here is probably the Brief Lives Sandman arc, because it has the advantage of being a road trip narrative and having various gods, so it's a nice chance to see an author doing very similar things differently, which can highlight elements of style and construction. If you're not already a comics reader, maybe Anansi Boys, but then it's harder because the mythology is used differently and it's a different narrative construct, but you can still look at similar seams between mythology and narrative. Works like The Graveyard Book are in deep conversation with explicitly stated other works, but I see them as assembled by very different techniques and think they'd be harder to pull apart.
And a work like Sandman is much harder to use as central analysis in this way, because even though similar things are being done with narrative in some arcs, some of the reference material is much harder to find. Comics are ephemeral. And is it really worth the time to track down the run of Amythest, Princess of Gemworld, to better appreciate some 1-panel reference? Whereas Norse and Egyptian mythology is widely available free online. Also, Sandman has multiple volumes doing multiple different things with various types of mythology, story layout, etc. American Gods is more one piece.
d) Access to some materials such as essays, introductions, online writing etc. about how the author sees their work can be nice - which Gaiman is particularly convenient for as he has a huge online presence and even plenty of secondary work if that's the way your tastes run.
For my tastes d) is a totally optional type of category. I know there are readers for whom it is an important category in analysis. I don't know enough about how writers look at texts to judge the utility of d) for them. I suppose it varies as much by writer as by reader.
I think you could go beyond that in setting up context, but I think that would be a sufficient start.
So a-d are the particular background of context I bring as a reader to American Gods.
I have the added context of having worked in public libraries for 3 years and as a bookseller for 2 (non overlapping) during which time I heard from a lot of audiences about what they liked about Neil Gaiman and what they did or didn't like (with our without mediating recommendation) when looking for something similar to read.
It's in that set of contexts that I'm recommending the book as a masterclass text.
I haven't done the line by line read on American Gods that I think I'd need to do to really look analytically at it using the context and criteria above, but all of this would not be to imitate the particular story or voice, but to look piece by piece at how he assembles the different elements of the story. How much screen time? How does a section read if you enter it knowing who the disguised-god is, or knowing the traditional arc. Can you figure out how it would read if you didn't know that going in the first time, but then did the second? That kind of thing.
Edited because I realized too late that this SO needed a cut tag.
