The world moves faster these days. From political snippets to the latest teen idol (who is he this week?) To rolling music video scenes, things come, things go, other things take their place, and then they go too.

But literature, good literature, is meant to be savored. Persists. Keys. Whispers Long after written words disappear from sight, they play music in our minds. Herein lies the dilemma. How can 21st century literature be adapted to a world that moves faster, to an audience that wants and expects a crushing avalanche of continuous temptation?

One answer: literary cubism.

The 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary offers a definition of Cubism that describes an abstractly structured art style that simultaneously displays multiple aspects of the same object in fragmented form.

OK.

Hmm …

The “same object” in that definition of work is my story. The “many aspects” and fragmented forms that I show include poems, emails, personal notes, and legal documents, to name a few. And yes, there is room and need for blocks of traditional prose in literary cubism.

Cubist writing is liberating. It adds to a writer’s toolbox to tell their story. We’ve always had descriptions and dialogue to set scenes, create moods, and create consistent and compelling characters. It feels good to now have the text of an email to do any or all of those things. We can also access poems, personal notes, shopping lists and any other written medium. All of these can be used to great effect to show a lifestyle, to define a character’s motives and psyche, or to paint the tensions and emotional contours of a relationship.

Like I said before, liberating.

Enough of the theories of liberated lingual expression; How is literary cubism applied? Very well. Simply put, “Resolution 786” tells the story of a philosophically and emotionally wounded American engineer who finds himself in combat operations in the Iraq War while simultaneously trying the Lord for crimes against humanity in court. Literary Cubism made it possible to create the tapestry of a unified experience through these wildly disparate settings, an experience of spiritual self-realization in the context of a physical realization of human mortality. Cubism gave me license to develop this multi-pronged story and to construct my central themes using a variety of literary mediums presented from the perspectives of many different characters. In fact, a cartoon consists mainly of a set of emails written by the mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, and girlfriends of soldiers fighting in Iraq. In writing that part of the novel, I was struck by the frankness with which an author can develop characters and define relationships through email messages.

But despite the license that literary cubism grants, there are still a few “No Driving” lanes on this literary highway. Don’t use incorrect grammar, spelling, or punctuation (unless Cummings is “drawing” a poem on the page). Don’t use flat, uninteresting prose. And, whatever you do, don’t let your focus stray from telling a good story. The greatest literary art is useless if it doesn’t tell a good story.

Yes, with literary cubism, you run the risk of your story turning into unintegrated plot and story fragments, but you run the same risk in traditional prose. Image rewriting, reviewing, and re-creation enhance your multi-media integration. And as one of the characters in Resolution 786 explains while defending himself against criticism of realism in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“I don’t think The Metamorphosis really happened. Samsa did not turn into an insect. If he had turned into an insect, he would have stopped considering his own conscience. No, Samsa became a human being who was trapped inside an insect “. , which is fundamentally different from becoming an insect. And as for being realistic, if a work of artistic expression does not have a traditional structure, that does not mean that, as a whole, it does not yet have some valuable or instructive form or substance. “

So go ahead, wake up an insect. Go ahead, judge the Lord. And feel free to use a cubist structure throughout.

I find literary cubism to be a sharp, fresh, and consistently interesting method of constructing novels. Considering how fast our world moves today, how bright and varied our entertainment media and tastes are, I am surprised that more writers are not using cubism. It is an ideal structure for storytelling in the 21st century.