Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 28

Great Sentences

This is a link to an article in The Guardian that made me crazy. "What are the great sentences in genre fiction?" I guess I had missed the concept of great sentences. They are the ones that really stand out, like the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice or the ending of The Great Gatsby. I said on facebook:

Most of the sentences listed in the article and its comments draw attention to themselves. They are finely wrought, often elaborate, often clever. Which is okay, but a lot of very good writing does not have flashing neon arrows that tell us, "Art! Art! Art."

Sentences belong in the texture of a story, and many sentences in a story are not going to be -- should not be -- examples of tour de force writing. I'm sure it's possible to write entire works of fiction with tour de force sentences. Most likely it has been done. But Jane Austen didn't do it. Yes, she has written some amazing, witty sentences -- the opening to P&P is the most famous. But a lot of her beautiful, clear, precise writing simply describes her characters and their actions. You say, "What beautiful writing." But you don't remember the individual sentences, except the opening to P&P.

The comments to the article gave some good examples of tour de force sentences in SF. But I don't think this kind of writing is necessary for good fiction. I was trying to think of great, memorable sentences in the Icelandic family sagas. Everything I came up with was a line of dialogue, which does not display the skill of the writer, but the personality of the character. When Bergthora says she will go into the house with Njall and die with him, when the family's enemies burn the house to kill Njall and Bergthora's sons, she says, "I was given to Njall young, and I said that our fates would be the same." That does not draw your attention to the writing, but to Bergthora, her toughness and loyalty. You can't pull a line like that out of context and marvel at its beauty. It only works if you know the story.

Or when Grettir and his brother Illugi are making their last stand on the island of Drangey and Grettir says, "Bare is the back with no brother behind it." Sounds lofty and heroic, doesn't it? Well, by this time we know that Grettir has a nasty mouth on him and likes to quote Viking proverbs sarcastically. What he is saying is, "You asshole, someone just got behind me. You get back there and defend me." Which Illugi does and does well. I love that line, because it shows us Grettir's character so well. At this point, he is dying of gangrene and can't even stand up to fight, but has to fight on his knees. He knows he's going to be killed in a few minutes, and he still manages to be sarcastic; and Illugi still manages to be loyal to his difficult, even impossible brother.

The people commenting on the article are right: there are a lot of tour de force sentences in P.G. Wodehouse. The family fight with "aunt calling to aunt like mastodons across a primeval swamp." He was a terrific stylist. I have read him for years looking for serious content and not found any, which may reduce his chances of being called a great writer. But what a stylist!

Bibliography

I don't have a complete bibliography online. There is a bibliography in the Mammoths of the Great Plains chapbook, and it's complete up to the date of publication, which is 2010. Since then a collection, Big Mama Stories, has come out from Aqueduct Press; and I've had five new stories published: "The Woman Who Fooled Death Five Times," "Holmes Sherlock," "Kormak the Lucky," "The Scrivener" and "The Hatmaker of God." "Woman" and "Kormak" were in F&SF. "Holmes Sherlock" and "The Scrivener" were in online magazines: Eclipse Online and Subterranean. "Hatmaker" just came out in Tales of the Unanticipated, a Twin Cities semipro zine. TotU has a website, but it doesn't seem to give ordering information. It does give contact information, so it should be possible to ask them how to order.

Conventions

I don't do a lot of conventions. This is partly due to lack of money and partly due to dislike of flying, especially since the TSA came into existence. I find the searching humiliating, and I think it is unnecessary. (See Bruce Schneier on security theater.)

However, I go to Wiscon every year and will be there again this May. The Science Fiction Research Association is meeting at the same time at the next hotel over from Wiscon, and I am a guest at SFRA. So I will be going back and forth between the two cons.

I'm also attending Minicon, a local Twin Cities convention, in April and Diversacon, another local con, in August. I will probably be at CONvergence, a very large local con, over the 4th of July.

So that is my schedule this year.

Weather Report

It's snowing at the moment. I pulled together the paperwork for my taxes yesterday, as planned, and am spending today inputting all the data to spreadsheets. When this is done, I plan to lie on the couch and read.

The snow keeps changing. Earlier it was big flakes falling at a slant. Now it's small flakes falling straight down. Some accumulation, but the streets are mostly clear, though wet. A late winter snowfall, which is not going to last...

Less Mulling

Looking back over this blog, I notice the posts I enjoy most are about what's happening in the present: such as a big storm with photos of snow. I think I need to do less mulling and more reporting on current events.

And I need to strive for John Scalzi's cheerful, chipper tone.

Today I need to pull together the paperwork for my taxes. How is that for cheerful? I use a tax preparation service. But I like to come in with everything neatly ordered and on a spreadsheet.

The people who run it are art fans and run a gallery in the front of their offices. The art is good. I have bought a couple of pieces. It's the one problem in using them: the risk of buying art. But it's affordable.

If I can manage to pull together the various bits of information in a reasonable amount of time, I will go out to a coffee shop and either read or write. Patrick and I share an apartment that isn't small, but is of modest size. We both love the living room, and spend most of our time there, and we both like time alone. So we both go out to be alone and give the other person time alone. For him it's walks through the skyway system. For me, it's time in coffee shops.

Following One's Passion

This is from a post by Kevin Drum about advice given by Richard Branson (of Virgin Mobile and Virgin Airlines) on "doing what you love:"

I know I'm being cranky, but I am sick to death of rich people telling us to "follow our passion" or something similar… For most of us, this is a recipe for going broke. That's because, sadly, the world tends to assign a low market value to most of our passions.

Here's some better advice: try to avoid stuff that you hate. I admit that this is less uplifting, but it's generally more achievable and produces reasonable results. You might not ever get your dream job, or your dream house, or your dream partner, because that's just the way the lottery of life works. But with a little bit of effort, you might be able to avoid a soul-crushing job, a two-hour commute, and an empty relationship. Maybe. It's worth a try, anyway.

But honestly, most of us are better off saving our passions for our hobbies. This won't get me invited to give any commencement speeches, but it's still pretty solid advice.

And my comments on Kevin Drum:

I sort of agree with Drum. One has to negotiate with life. You don't always get what you really want -- and what you really want might not be best for other people. Remember the Bester story, "Oddy and the Id?" And there's a LeGuin story -- in Orsinian Tales -- about a musician who is offered the chance to be a famous composer. But the impresario who offers this says he must leave his home city and his family and devote his life to his career. He choses not to. That story always chilled me. The idea of giving up one's art!

I have very mixed feelings about negotiating with life. Shouldn't one demand more? Shouldn't one take more risks? On the other hand, starving in the streets is not fun.

I admire people who go for broke. For the most, though, we learn about the people who succeeded. They may have had miserable personal lives, but they wrote the great book, painted the great paintings, changed the world in some crucial (and good) way. We benefited from the risks they took. For some people, I think it was absolutely the right decision. Van Gogh died in an insane asylum, having sold one painting in his life. But look at what he left us! Could he have had a better life, if he'd been more willing to negotiate? I suspect not. I can't imagine one. I'm not sure he's a good role model, however.

Well, I could go in a circle about this one. Follow your dream, but have some idea where your next meal is coming from. And you might consider other people, now and then. Don't let your kids starve, if you can do anything about it.

Bibliography

I updated on my bibliography yesterday. Not too bad, though I could have written more. This was not true when I started. I had to learn how to write without waiting for the muse, one reason why I wrote novels, which require less inspiration than short stories. You can just trudge on, until another neat idea hits. And it was hard for me to write when working day jobs. But I have no excuse for not writing more in the part five years.

I've been saying that I have published 30+ works of short fiction. It's 40+, almost 50 when a few more forecoming stories actually forthcome. And six novels, if I include Tomb of the Fathers, which is almost Nebula novel length. This is published work, not the stories piled up on my work desk.

A lot of stories are in groups: hwarhath stories, Lydia Duluth and Goxhat stories, Big Mama stories, Icelandic stories; and a new group seems to be emerging: fairy and folk tales about writing and art. I have four of these so far. The best one is "The Grammarian's Five Daughters," but the others are perfectly okay; and I love writing them. Naomi Kritzer wants me to write a fairy tale about readers, and I think there should be one about librarians. One of my facebook colleagues has suggested a story about booksellers.

MFA vs. NYC

There is a new book out: MFA vs. NYC: The Two Culutres of American Fiction. It sounded morbidly fascinating to me, so I got it. What followed is some facebook posts and then a bit more discussion.

The two cultures are Creative Writing workshops and the "literary" community in New York City, people who all live in one neighborhood in Brooklyn, hang out with one another and aspire to six figure advances. There is a lot more to American fiction: all the genres, for example. And there is a lot more to the US than one neighborhood in Brooklyn. Writers live everywhere.

I got MFA vs NYC on my nook and have read 100 pages. It is clear that I am not a writer. I've had none of these experiences. On the other hand, I have worked in a printing plant in Detroit and an art museum in Minneapolis and three different warehouses... I have not been a short order cook, which is fine. I never wanted to work in food service. And the merchant marine was out, because I get seasick. But it would have been nice to be a forest fire lookout...

The printing plant was not like Kinko's. The presses were two stories tall with two stories of shock absorbers below them. They couldn't move the presses, so they turned the plant into a kind of fortress surrounded by tall fences, with security guards at every entrance. I had an office job and got to wear a pretty dress. The guys on the plant floor were covered with ink and got union wages.

*

I am most of the way through MFA vs. NYC. Interesting book. If you are a writer, your response to the book will be autobiographical. I am up to Fredric Jameson and the workshop rules for writing: Write what you know. Find your own voice. Show, don't tell.

No, no and no.

It's good to know where show, don't tell comes from. (Not from Jameson, from the workshop culture. Jameson does not seem to like show, don't tell much.) I hate it. It is so obviously untrue. And I remember when -- almost 50 years ago -- one of my professors mentioned that many of her former students were writing back to her and saying, "I think I have finally found my own voice." Find your own voice? I thought. What is this crap? As for write what you know, why? Did Homer fight in the Trojan War? Must have been difficult, given that he was blind. How about the author of Beowulf? Met a lot of dragons, did he?

How about tell a story and use whatever techniques are needed to tell the story? The story is primary, not the author. (Lyric poetry may require a personal voice -- or maybe not. Is the voice of "My Last Duchess" Browning's voice? How about "Andrea del Sarto?")

I've written before about how disturbing I find workshops. It's a personal, irrational response. The literary community in Brooklyn does not sounds attractive either. I think it's important to have experiences, know places, be outside the literary world, which sounds hermetic to me, also far too expensive. Rents in New York are insane. You can't mine your own childhood and family and neighborhood forever.

I have suspected for a long time that the Cold War and the McCarthy Era injured American culture big time. It turns out that the Iowa Writing Workshop's second director was a major cold warrior, who saw creative writing as a way to fight communism. He got a lot of grants from conservative Midwestern businessmen and even one grant from the CIA. The essay about him is interesting. Though it doesn't manage to convince me that CIA was behind the Iowa Workshop and does not make clear how the director's politics influenced teaching at the Workshop. But it's something to think about. Did the Cold War change American fiction? Do the two cultures of this book, which seem way too closed-in to me, come out of the McCarthy Era?

This does not mean that workshops are invariably bad. I think they would have been for me. But Joe Haldeman went to Iowa, apparently liked the experience, and turned into a really fine writer of science fiction. His writing has a crispness that I suspect comes from the Workshop. But to this he adds broad vision and big ideas.

More About Money

This is further reflections on money from facebook:

I read economics blogs on a regular basis. I know what is happening in the US and the UK and Europe. But I am still amazed that ordinary people can't find enough money for food and are going hungry. My mind is stuck somewhere in the past -- the roaring wartime economy of the 1960s, maybe, when you could always find a job, and minimum wage was enough to live on. When Patrick and I moved to Minneapolis in 1974, our rent for single bedroom apartment was less than $200 a month. I was making $600 a month, and Patrick must have been making the same. So our rent was 17% of our gross income. We could buy two bags of groceries for $20, and that was enough to get us through a week. (We must have eaten out a lot, though I don't remember this.)

Minimum wage was $2.00. Take home would be around $300 a month. Assume two people at minimum wage, and we made more, the net income would be $600. Rent = $200. Food = $86. Health insurance was covered by the job. Utilities were a few bucks. Let's say $20. That left $294 -- about half of net income -- for clothing, transportation and eating out. The big issue for us was transportation. Car repair expenses terrified us.

The average cost of a one bedroom apartment in Minneapolis is $954 now. Federal minimum wage is 7.25 an hour. (Minnesota's minimum wage -- God help us -- is $6.15.) Assuming a 40 hour work week, which is a lot to assume, and no taxes except for FICA, take home will be $1151 at the federal rate. That leaves $197 a month for food, clothing, health care and transportation. And your rent is 76% of your gross income.

I figure I have been sliding through life, due to luck and beginning my work career in the Golden Years of Capitalism. I ended my work career after the crash 2008, so have not had to deal with the Great Recession, as Paul Krugman calls it. I think it's more like a depression, maybe like the Long Depression of the late 19th century.

The thing that's important to realize about my work career is -- I mostly worked clerical jobs, along with a few light warehousing jobs, and then "professional" jobs for nonprofits, which don't exactly pay professional wages. My work experience -- and my income -- was typical of many Americans. It is not typical any longer.

Note: Back when Patrick was working with homeless people, he used to say it always possible to find food. There were food shelves and free meals and dumpsters. The real problem was finding housing. Now, after the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession and cuts to the federal food stamp program, food shelves in New York says they can't keep up. They have to turn people away without food. (This is per the New York Times.) I assume the same is true in the Twin Cities.

Writing and Money 2

Nora Jemisin commented on the same essay as I did. Her comment reminds me that my experience, coming of age in 1960s and 70s, is very different from the experience of younger writers. I came out of graduate school with no student debt. The economy was in the middle of a wartime boom. Unions were still strong enough to push up wages for almost everyone. It was possible to live on minimum wage. I was able to scrap by because times were not so bad. The way I managed as a writer -- by working full time, then taking time off to write, or by working part time -- is much harder to pull off now.

This is the second time recently I have been reminded that my ideas are stuck in the past. I read an essay about a woman who had taken her kids to Ikea to eat, but couldn't afford to eat herself. (Ikea apparently offers free meals for kids.) She ended weeping from hunger and frustration. The essay is about getting worn down by poverty. The woman's story was ordinary. Her husband lost his good job and was now working two jobs, which did not -- together -- add up to a living wage. They went through their savings and were struggling to survive, though they had always been careful with money and had no debt when the husband lost his job.

Patrick read it and was not surprised. He worked with homeless people for many years. I kept thinking, "Surely there is some way out." But I am thinking in terms of my own experience in the 1960s and 70s.

This is another reason, by the way, why the young author should have banked her money and kept her day job. This economy is simply too hard.