Sarah Monette's Blog, page 12
March 14, 2016
How to Hack the Wetware
[Storytellers Unplugged, March 29, 2008; awesome reader=awesome]
The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.
When you start writing, everything is easy--it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.
This is--yes, Virginia--deeply unfair.
Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday--but never writing to-day.”
The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.
What makes it harder is that--even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects--outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like--for instance--having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program--as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that--you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.
You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.
Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.
I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.
It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.
Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.
Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.” And we would complete that task. In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.” (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.) “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.” And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task. (Overachiever, remember? In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.) This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done. Nothing left. Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words. Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.
Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it. The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory. (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.) But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy. It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel. It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.
I don’t know what my next novel is going to be. But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.
The more I do it, the more I become convinced the writing, as an activity, is about learning to hack the wetware.
When you start writing, everything is easy--it’s the effect of what Richard Sennett calls “innocent confidence.” (I know, I know, I keep linking to that article, but I can’t help the fact that it really hit a chord, or possibly a nerve.) So the more you do it, and the more you learn about what you’re doing, the harder it gets and the more dissatisfied you become with your own abilities.
This is--yes, Virginia--deeply unfair.
Now, if you have chosen to make writing not merely a hobby, but an (a)vocation, your problems grow even greater, because part of what that means is that you have to write consistently. And writing consistently is extremely damn hard. Your brain will come up with 1001 reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t or don’t need to write today, and it can become a little like living with the White Queen: “writing to-morrow and writing yesterday--but never writing to-day.”
The hardest thing, I think, about writing is learning to make yourself sit down and do it. Everything else follows from that.
What makes it harder is that--even if you are a professional writer and in theory have other people who are going to give you money for completed projects--outside accountability is very limited. Deadlines can be years away; there’s certainly nothing like--for instance--having to turn your homework in once a week. So when it gets down to the brute drudgery part of the program--as it inevitably will, because anything you do consistently is going to have days like that--you have to find ways to make yourself do the damn work.
You have to hack the wetware, i.e., your own brain, and make it do something which (it will assure you earnestly) it was never designed to do.
Some writers work for a set number of hours a day. Others assign themselves quotas, a certain minimum number of words they have to produce. Both of these hacks are designed to provide structure to a largely structureless enterprise, and they can work very well.
I’ve learned a lot while writing Corambis, but possibly the most important thing I’ve learned is that writing to a quota does not work for me. It isn’t that I can’t produce the words. I can. But, because I am an overachiever and got conditioned in certain ways by being an overachiever, I get hung up on the wrong part of the process. To wit: I get the right number of words, but the words themselves are wrong.
It’s a good hack, but it’s not my hack.
Everybody’s wetware is different; cross-platform compatibility is a joke. You have to find the hack that works for you, whatever it is. Even if it’s writing with your head in a bucket.
Now, the hack that worked for me this past month (and which I hope very much will continue to work, because I really kind of enjoyed it) was breaking the project down into a series of tasks. (That’s the other way to look at writing to a schedule and writing to a quota, by the way: writing a novel is such an enormous, complicated undertaking that you can’t hold it all in your head at once. If you don’t find a way to cut it into bite-sized pieces, you’re going to choke.) And I would say to myself, “Okay, Self, today’s task is to get the scullery boy in position to eavesdrop on the Evil Vizier.” And we would complete that task. In general, it took less time than I was expecting, and I could then say, “Okay, Self, we’ve completed our task.” (Imagine my brain wagging its tail like a Golden Retriever puppy.) “Now, we could stop for today, or we could go on to the next task, which would be one less thing we have to do tomorrow.” And in general, because I was happy with having completed the first task and thus enjoying myself, I’d go on to the next task. (Overachiever, remember? In some ways, my wetware is pathetically easy to hack.) This is in distinct contrast to my experience with trying to write to quota, which was that I would get the set number of words, with as much agony as extracting my own teeth with rusty pliers and no Novocaine, and then I would be done. Nothing left. Certainly not the kind of vigor and enthusiasm which would lead to getting twice that number of words, or five times that number of words. Whereas I could set out to complete one task on a particular day and end up completing five.
Partly, I suspect, this hack worked so well because I was under a tight deadline and I knew it. The option to quit for the day after finishing the first task was pretty much illusory. (And I won’t pretend I wasn’t checking my word count obsessively, because I was.) But at the same time, working to an invisible To Do list did make me happy. It made me feel like I was accomplishing things, and that I was writing, not merely words, but parts of a novel. It was the best kind of hack, the kind that makes the system not merely do what you want, but actually work better.
I don’t know what my next novel is going to be. But I hope, with fingers crossed, that I know how I’m going to write it.
History Belongs to the Adults
[Storytellers Unplugged, January 29, 2008; originally titled, "If this ferments long enough, it may become a story"; awesome reader=awesome]
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
I’ve been reading in some odd corners of American history lately, specifically Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party by George R. Stewart (originally published in 1936) and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (originally published in 1974).
Now, the disaster that befell the Donner Party in 1846-7 and the witch hunts of Salem Village in 1692 don’t, on the surface, have a great deal to do with each other, aside from being dark and morbid moments in American history. Except for one very odd thing, which these two books are, in their quite different ways, failing to engage with.
Many of the principal actors are children.
The Salem witch hunts begin, of course, with a group of teenage girls, and of the eighty-seven people trapped in the Sierra Nevada by the snows of 1846, forty-two of them were under eighteen. I started to talk about this in a mini-post I did for Jeff VanderMeer, about who gets to be a “hero” and why. History is written by the victors; as feminist scholars have been saying for years, it is also written by those who can write. And perhaps even more crucially, those who have the resources of money and leisure time to be able to study. Novelists merely need time to write. (And oh the irony of that “merely.” I laugh.) Historians need time to research--which also possibly involves travel, itself expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, to write novels, to write stories, does not require more than average education. (Or what we, in 2008, have the luxury of considering “average education.”) But to write history that will be read and respected and will shape the narratives of historians to come, a person needs training, and a lot of it. These days, that training is widely available to lower class people, to people of color, to women. But there’s still one group to whom it is, always and inevitably, denied: children.
Any child can grow up to be a historian. But, as writers like James Barrie and C. S. Lewis have pointed out with varying degrees of dismay, in order to grow up, one must cease to be a child. And childhood experience is only dubiously recoverable to the adult mind. Even with the best and sincerest good will, we can only remember what it was like.
And these historians, Stewart and Boyer and Nissenbaum, are for various reasons, not interested in the experience of children. Stewart is interested (as I wrote for Jeff) in the heroism of action; he barely sees the children at all. Boyer and Nissenbaum are interested in the social and economic webs and fractures that caused the witch hunts to target certain individuals rather than others and that, arguably, caused those witch hunts to grow like a wild fire. They are deeply interested in the social lives of their subjects, both men and women, but by the very nature of how they understand “social lives,” the children, despite being the instigators and the focus of the trials, are just not relevant. They talk at length, for instance, about the disappointments, betrayals, and resentments that would cause Thomas Putnam Jr. and his wife Ann to victimize women of a particular age and economic position, but insofar as they discuss the motivations of Thomas and Ann’s daughter (also Ann), they assume that her reasons must be copies of her parents’ reasons.
And I think that is a false assumption.
We can’t recover Ann Putnam’s reasons, any more than we can know how the children of the Donner Party represented their experiences to themselves (although I find it eerie and profoundly disturbing how easy it is to map their experience onto fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel”). But we owe it to them, and to ourselves, to recognize that that absence is itself a presence in the stories we tell ourselves, the explanations we create.
We are all missing a piece of the puzzle.
Narrative Efficiency
[Storytellers Unplugged, March 7, 2009; awesome reader=awesome]
We just got back from seeing Watchmen. I can tell you neither the first time I read the graphic novel, nor how many times I’ve read the graphic novel, so you may understand that it is something of a coup for the movie that I was by and large pleased and impressed. There are one or two matters where I was disappointed, but this is largely an inevitable effect of the translation from one medium to another. And there’s one matter where I think the movie improves on the graphic novel--which, as the title of this post suggests, is its narrative efficiency.
The graphic novel Watchmen is narratively a sprawling object; there are several different foci of attention (I hesitate to call them plot threads, because they aren’t plots), and one of the beauties of the graphic novel is the way these different foci are played off each other, the way Moore and Gibbons use each to comment on the others. It is not, to use a thematic image that both graphic novel and movie utilize, a watch. All of its intricacy and delicacy come on the thematic level. The movie, on the other hand, is a watch; the pared-down plot is actually far better constructed than Moore and Gibbons, and it achieves something which the graphic novel does not, in that the playing out of the external plot is also a playing out of the story’s central themes.
(As you can tell, I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything, since although the graphic novel is twenty-three years old, the movie is new, and I can imagine that many people may go see the movie who have never read the graphic novel. If you’re one of them, I do sincerely recommend the novel. For all the movie’s loving recreation of the graphic novel’s visuals, the book is not the same as the movie and it is a tour de force of its form.)
This is a very neat trick. It makes the movie feel cohesive; it makes the movie feel organic, as if this is the way the story always has been, the way the story has to be. Because it all fits together. Theme and imagery are reflected in the plot; the plot tells you something important about the theme. It’s coherent. It’s efficient.
Now, it may fairly be said that my novels are not efficient. They are large and sprawling (not unlike my assessment of the graphic novel of Watchmen). I don’t know if I have it in me to write a narratively efficient novel, one that works like a beautiful watch. But I can certainly admire it when I see it done, and I think that the fundamental thing that makes narrative efficiency possible is this idea that the plot itself is an expression of the theme, and that the theme, conversely, has something to say about the plot.
I’ve never felt very comfortable with plot--certainly never felt that it is one of my strengths. External action is rarely where my interest lies. Recently, in fact, I’ve been having difficulty writing short stories because the ideas come to me as themes and don’t bring any plot along with them, and because I’m not much good at plot, I’ve been unable to do anything with them. So this new way of looking at the relationship between theme and plot is exciting for me. In the dead end I feel like I’m stuck in, it gives me hope of a door.
We just got back from seeing Watchmen. I can tell you neither the first time I read the graphic novel, nor how many times I’ve read the graphic novel, so you may understand that it is something of a coup for the movie that I was by and large pleased and impressed. There are one or two matters where I was disappointed, but this is largely an inevitable effect of the translation from one medium to another. And there’s one matter where I think the movie improves on the graphic novel--which, as the title of this post suggests, is its narrative efficiency.
The graphic novel Watchmen is narratively a sprawling object; there are several different foci of attention (I hesitate to call them plot threads, because they aren’t plots), and one of the beauties of the graphic novel is the way these different foci are played off each other, the way Moore and Gibbons use each to comment on the others. It is not, to use a thematic image that both graphic novel and movie utilize, a watch. All of its intricacy and delicacy come on the thematic level. The movie, on the other hand, is a watch; the pared-down plot is actually far better constructed than Moore and Gibbons, and it achieves something which the graphic novel does not, in that the playing out of the external plot is also a playing out of the story’s central themes.
(As you can tell, I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything, since although the graphic novel is twenty-three years old, the movie is new, and I can imagine that many people may go see the movie who have never read the graphic novel. If you’re one of them, I do sincerely recommend the novel. For all the movie’s loving recreation of the graphic novel’s visuals, the book is not the same as the movie and it is a tour de force of its form.)
This is a very neat trick. It makes the movie feel cohesive; it makes the movie feel organic, as if this is the way the story always has been, the way the story has to be. Because it all fits together. Theme and imagery are reflected in the plot; the plot tells you something important about the theme. It’s coherent. It’s efficient.
Now, it may fairly be said that my novels are not efficient. They are large and sprawling (not unlike my assessment of the graphic novel of Watchmen). I don’t know if I have it in me to write a narratively efficient novel, one that works like a beautiful watch. But I can certainly admire it when I see it done, and I think that the fundamental thing that makes narrative efficiency possible is this idea that the plot itself is an expression of the theme, and that the theme, conversely, has something to say about the plot.
I’ve never felt very comfortable with plot--certainly never felt that it is one of my strengths. External action is rarely where my interest lies. Recently, in fact, I’ve been having difficulty writing short stories because the ideas come to me as themes and don’t bring any plot along with them, and because I’m not much good at plot, I’ve been unable to do anything with them. So this new way of looking at the relationship between theme and plot is exciting for me. In the dead end I feel like I’m stuck in, it gives me hope of a door.
On the Vile Habit of Thinking Too Much
[Storytellers Unplugged, June 29, 2008; awesome reader=awesome]
[N.b., sadly, Childe Cthulhu is no more. Never did figure its sex out for sure. -Ed. 03/14/16]
Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about on May 29.
This month, I find that I’m envying my fish.
I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus--which isn’t nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on algae. I don’t know whether mine is male or female [Holy crap, they come in veiltail? -Ed. 03/14/16], as it is still juvenile; we’re still waiting to see if its going to sprout that Lovecraftian crop of tentacles. Its name, insofar as it has one, is Childe Cthulhu, which in the twenty-first century I think qualifies as unisex. But in any event, I have a (currently) two-inch fish. It lives in a five-gallon tank on my desk and spends its life assiduously cleaning its environment--which in fact it is doing even as I type this. As multicelluluar organisms go, it’s a pretty simple one, and I feel certain that unlike the centipede of the notorious dilemma--and unlike me--it never overthinks.
I intellectualize everything. And while mostly this works in my favor, there are some critical issues on which it constitutes FAIL. One of them, with which I have been wrestling for most of a year, is the process of writing short stories.
I only figured out how to write short stories in 2000, and I had a good run (thirty-two short stories sold, my bibliography tells me) with, you know, no more traumas than any other part of my writing career. And then I started working on a short story called “The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool,” and the whole thing collapsed, as Eddie Izzard says, like a flan in a cupboard.
It took me three tries to finish it, and when I did, it was lifeless. I whined talked about it with my husband and with my writing partner, and finally figured out what was wrong, but when I went to try to rewrite it, like the centipede, I discovered that I had forgotten how to walk.
Theories of expertise talk about moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. But my problem is that I seem to have gotten two of the steps reversed. I’ve moved from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Because the stories that I wrote prior to this crash and burn were not incompetent stories: the slew of reprints in various Best Of anthologies reassures me of that. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t consciously working on my craft when I wrote them; “ Draco campestris ,” to name just one, is all about the conscious craft. But there was something I was doing that I wasn’t thinking about that was simply, painlessly working, and when it stopped working, I couldn’t find a way consciously to fix it.
Which means, of course, that I can’t stop thinking about it. Obsessing, even. And I know intellectually what’s wrong. Something has shifted so that my brain is presenting me with story ideas theme-first. And what I fail at, again and again, is translating that thematic idea into a viable story. If I get the story first, the theme takes care of itself, but this is breach-presentation, and thus far I have not found a mental equivalent of a Caesarean section.
(Interestingly, I have managed to write a few short stories since the crash, and what they have in common is that their structure came predetermined. Ghost stories have a pattern.)
This is frustrating. I like short stories. I like writing them. I like the sharpness and crispness of them; I like the way I can hold them in the cup of my palm. I like the fact that I can finish a short story in less than a week . . . when I can finish one at all. And it’s frustrating because my brain, lacking traction, continues to spin its wheels, thinking about something that I’ve already thought into a limp and wrung-out rag. And yes, I’ve tried writing without thinking about it, which (a.) I can’t do and (b.) you don’t want to see the results.
I can’t solve it by thinking, and I can’t solve it by not-thinking, and while I wait for some third solution to present itself, I sit and envy the small, simple life of my fish.
[N.b., sadly, Childe Cthulhu is no more. Never did figure its sex out for sure. -Ed. 03/14/16]
Last month, alert readers will have noticed that my post was conspicuous by its absence. My excuse is a good one: an utterly ghastly bout of stomach flu. Trust me, you don’t want to know what I was thinking about on May 29.
This month, I find that I’m envying my fish.
I have an albino bristlenose plecostomus--which isn’t nearly as alarming as you think, since the maximum size these critters reach is four inches and they are vegetarian, subsisting mainly on algae. I don’t know whether mine is male or female [Holy crap, they come in veiltail? -Ed. 03/14/16], as it is still juvenile; we’re still waiting to see if its going to sprout that Lovecraftian crop of tentacles. Its name, insofar as it has one, is Childe Cthulhu, which in the twenty-first century I think qualifies as unisex. But in any event, I have a (currently) two-inch fish. It lives in a five-gallon tank on my desk and spends its life assiduously cleaning its environment--which in fact it is doing even as I type this. As multicelluluar organisms go, it’s a pretty simple one, and I feel certain that unlike the centipede of the notorious dilemma--and unlike me--it never overthinks.
I intellectualize everything. And while mostly this works in my favor, there are some critical issues on which it constitutes FAIL. One of them, with which I have been wrestling for most of a year, is the process of writing short stories.
I only figured out how to write short stories in 2000, and I had a good run (thirty-two short stories sold, my bibliography tells me) with, you know, no more traumas than any other part of my writing career. And then I started working on a short story called “The Hostage Crisis on the Derelict Mistral Freighter D35-692N-C, Queen of Liverpool,” and the whole thing collapsed, as Eddie Izzard says, like a flan in a cupboard.
It took me three tries to finish it, and when I did, it was lifeless. I whined talked about it with my husband and with my writing partner, and finally figured out what was wrong, but when I went to try to rewrite it, like the centipede, I discovered that I had forgotten how to walk.
Theories of expertise talk about moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence. But my problem is that I seem to have gotten two of the steps reversed. I’ve moved from unconscious competence to conscious incompetence. Because the stories that I wrote prior to this crash and burn were not incompetent stories: the slew of reprints in various Best Of anthologies reassures me of that. And it wasn’t that I wasn’t consciously working on my craft when I wrote them; “ Draco campestris ,” to name just one, is all about the conscious craft. But there was something I was doing that I wasn’t thinking about that was simply, painlessly working, and when it stopped working, I couldn’t find a way consciously to fix it.
Which means, of course, that I can’t stop thinking about it. Obsessing, even. And I know intellectually what’s wrong. Something has shifted so that my brain is presenting me with story ideas theme-first. And what I fail at, again and again, is translating that thematic idea into a viable story. If I get the story first, the theme takes care of itself, but this is breach-presentation, and thus far I have not found a mental equivalent of a Caesarean section.
(Interestingly, I have managed to write a few short stories since the crash, and what they have in common is that their structure came predetermined. Ghost stories have a pattern.)
This is frustrating. I like short stories. I like writing them. I like the sharpness and crispness of them; I like the way I can hold them in the cup of my palm. I like the fact that I can finish a short story in less than a week . . . when I can finish one at all. And it’s frustrating because my brain, lacking traction, continues to spin its wheels, thinking about something that I’ve already thought into a limp and wrung-out rag. And yes, I’ve tried writing without thinking about it, which (a.) I can’t do and (b.) you don’t want to see the results.
I can’t solve it by thinking, and I can’t solve it by not-thinking, and while I wait for some third solution to present itself, I sit and envy the small, simple life of my fish.
March 13, 2016
Choose Your Own Adventure
[Storytellers Unplugged, September 29, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)
Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for--loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?
The problem--I should make clear--is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.
The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.
So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write--or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voilà, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.
Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent--since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider--but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.
Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands [published as The Goblin Emperor--Ed. 03/13/2016] and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.
Now I just have to figure out the plot.
(Thanks to Leah Bobet for suggesting this topic.)
Corambis (which, yes, I have turned in and even been paid for--loud cheers) is the fourth and final book of a series I’ve been working on, one way or another, since 1993. Now that it’s done, and my brain has grown back a little, I am faced with the quandary of: What do I do next?
The problem--I should make clear--is not that I don’t have ideas. I have at least thirteen ideas for novels floating around in my head, ranging from a modern reworking of Webster’s White Devil to a novel about the first integrated human-elvish baseball team. But, unlike Isaac Asimov, I can’t write more than one novel at a time. So I have to choose.
The first stage of the winnowing process is easy. Several of these ideas are things that aren’t ready to be written yet. They need more time to ferment in the compost heap. I have one novel that would take place in the same world as the series I just finished, and I’m not writing that right now because I need a vacation.
So then it’s down to the things that are ready to write--or, even better, already partially written. Ideally at this point, that would be one thing and there, voilà, the decision is made. I have three, and how to choose between them is in fact a dilemma. First strategy: is there one that I know everything I need to know, it’s just a matter of doing the work? Sadly, no. Of the three, one is stalled out three-quarters of the way through because I’d been cataclysmically wrong about where the plot was going; a second has a complete draft (as in, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end), but it needs a ground up rewrite–and that’s stalled out at the beginning of Chapter Two because my protagonists need to discover a Thing, and I don’t know what the Thing is. And the third, for which I have a complete outline of the plot, is and has been refusing to give me either which decade of the twentieth century it should be set in or which voice it should be told in. These are not insurmountable problems, any of them, but certainly no one of them is any easier to solve than the other two.
Now I tried to fob the decision off on my agent--since that could be a factor in the decision; I am a professional novelist, and if one of these ideas seems more marketable than the others, that’s at least something to consider--but he replied with the, “I love them all equally in different ways” defense, and I was right back to square one. So I consulted the oracles put up a poll on my LiveJournal.
Now, the interesting thing about this as a decision making tool is the fact when I get an answer, there is a very distinct reaction in my head: either, “Yes, that’s right,” or “No, that’s wrong.” So it doesn’t matter what the poll says; what matters is that it says something. In this instance, the poll says The Emperor of the Elflands [published as The Goblin Emperor--Ed. 03/13/2016] and the inscrutable workings of my brain say, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
This is an arbitrary decision, and that’s okay. If it turns out to be wrong, I can change my mind. But in the meantime, the important thing is that it is a decision, and I don’t have to stand here, miserably stalled out between my three bales of hay, until I starve to death.
Now I just have to figure out the plot.
T-minus . . .
[Storytellers Unplugged, February 9, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
The Art of the Short Story
[Storytellers Unplugged, January 7, 2009; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “ Draco campestris ,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “ Draco campestris ,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
The Purpose of Imaginary Places
[Storytellers Unplugged, April 7, 2009; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
Today is the official launch date of my fourth novel, Corambis, about which you, O Gentle Reader, have probably heard more than you would necessarily wish. In celebration, over on my blog, I’m doing a Q&A, and the first question up is such a good one that I’m stealing it for SU for April.
Q: You’ve mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don’t think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn’t it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.
A: So, yeah. What is a secondary world for?
This is an enormous and complicated question, and I’m going to break it down into (hopefully manageable) chunks.
1. What A Secondary World Does For An Author
This part is actually fairly obvious: if you invent your own world, you don’t have to play by real-world rules. To use the generic fantasy example, you can have a monarchy without having to research Tudor England or Bourbon France. You don’t have to know about the Habsburgs or the Julio-Claudians. (And these are all examples from Europe--never mind Russia, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.) And you can mix and match bits of cultures to get what you want. You aren’t tied down to historical reality. It’s enormously freeing.
(And, yes, many authors use it as an excuse to be lazy.)
But there’s more to it than that. Because what a secondary world really does, what you have this freedom for, is it lets you use your imagination. It lets you make things up. And really, you shouldn’t be a writer of any kind if you don’t like using your imagination. You especially shouldn’t be a fantasy writer. When I was a teenager and writing was something I did for my own private enjoyment, what I did most was draw maps and make up genealogies, the more elaborate the better. It was the invention that I enjoyed most. (You can also exercise your invention in this way in stories set in the real world, and I don’t mean to imply you can’t, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a completely blank slate.)
So, for the author, a secondary world lets you maximize the fun stuff: making your own rules, writing your own history. Playing god.
2. What A Secondary World Does For A Reader
Well, first off, obviously a large number of people simply enjoy stories that aren’t set in the real world. Not all people, and I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority. But it is a lot. And even though I’m one of those people myself, I don’t know exactly where the attraction is. But since the point of writing stories is for other people to enjoy them, this is an important part of the purpose of secondary worlds. It also follows from the enjoyment the author takes in invention. If the author is enjoying what he/she does, that enjoyment is likely to communicate itself to the reader. Win-win.
Ideally, also, a secondary world should allow and encourage a reader to think outside the box, to see that, because we can imagine a society different from our own, our society itself is not immutable--not reified, to use the fancy theoretical term. Reification--thing-ification, from the Latin res, meaning "thing"--is the process whereby a human construct becomes perceived as a thing, as something impervious to human endeavor, as something that can be neither changed nor destroyed. So–to give two examples off the top of my head--Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness deconstructs the reification of gender roles. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint deconstructs the reification of heteronormativity (the norm in the world of Swordspoint is bisexuality).
(The social thought experiment has long been considered the territory of science fiction, as with most “serious” endeavors in the amalgamated genre of fantasy/science fiction/horror, but I don’t think the necessary given for it is “science/technology.” I think the necessary given is “a world different from our own”–and fantasy can provide that just as readily as sf. The social commentary may be buried a little deeper because–not being a “serious” genre–secondary world fantasy doesn’t have the leeway to leave out the stuff for the groundlings. Or it may not be there at all–just as it may not be there in science fiction, either. *ahem* I am digressing like a digressive thing.)
3. How A Secondary World Does What It Does
This is where we get into the do’s and don’ts which I may from time to time have promulgated.
The dream, says John Gardner, should be vivid and continuous. He was talking about fiction writing in general, but it applies in spades to secondary worlds. Take your secondary world seriously. Treat it with respect. Remember that for your characters, it is the real world. (I.e., if you aren’t Terry Pratchett and haven’t deliberately set up your secondary world so that it spawns warped reflections of the real world, resist the impulse to be cute. Also, n.b., when Pratchett does it, he isn’t being cute. He’s being consistent to his secondary world as he has established it.)
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, think things through. Every decision you make about your world has consequences. Some of them will be obvious; some will not. And it’s the pursuit of the unobvious consequences that will make your world feel rich and deep. Also, consequences that make things more difficult for your characters. Scott Lynch has a brilliant example of this in Red Sails Under Red Skies; it would be a spoiler to discuss it, so I won’t, but it made me believe in the world because, like our world, it doesn’t always work in the viewpoint character’s favor.
And while there should always be a reason that the story is set in a secondary world--something that you can’t get by setting it in the real world--the secondary world should also be a reason in and of itself. It should provide richness to the story, beyond simply being a pretty backdrop. It should be an integral part of the reader’s enjoyment.
I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this topic, but I also feel like that’s enough pontificating from me for one post. So on the understanding that I don’t think what I’ve said here is either conclusive or definitive, here endeth the lesson.
Today is the official launch date of my fourth novel, Corambis, about which you, O Gentle Reader, have probably heard more than you would necessarily wish. In celebration, over on my blog, I’m doing a Q&A, and the first question up is such a good one that I’m stealing it for SU for April.
Q: You’ve mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don’t think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn’t it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.
A: So, yeah. What is a secondary world for?
This is an enormous and complicated question, and I’m going to break it down into (hopefully manageable) chunks.
1. What A Secondary World Does For An Author
This part is actually fairly obvious: if you invent your own world, you don’t have to play by real-world rules. To use the generic fantasy example, you can have a monarchy without having to research Tudor England or Bourbon France. You don’t have to know about the Habsburgs or the Julio-Claudians. (And these are all examples from Europe--never mind Russia, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.) And you can mix and match bits of cultures to get what you want. You aren’t tied down to historical reality. It’s enormously freeing.
(And, yes, many authors use it as an excuse to be lazy.)
But there’s more to it than that. Because what a secondary world really does, what you have this freedom for, is it lets you use your imagination. It lets you make things up. And really, you shouldn’t be a writer of any kind if you don’t like using your imagination. You especially shouldn’t be a fantasy writer. When I was a teenager and writing was something I did for my own private enjoyment, what I did most was draw maps and make up genealogies, the more elaborate the better. It was the invention that I enjoyed most. (You can also exercise your invention in this way in stories set in the real world, and I don’t mean to imply you can’t, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a completely blank slate.)
So, for the author, a secondary world lets you maximize the fun stuff: making your own rules, writing your own history. Playing god.
2. What A Secondary World Does For A Reader
Well, first off, obviously a large number of people simply enjoy stories that aren’t set in the real world. Not all people, and I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority. But it is a lot. And even though I’m one of those people myself, I don’t know exactly where the attraction is. But since the point of writing stories is for other people to enjoy them, this is an important part of the purpose of secondary worlds. It also follows from the enjoyment the author takes in invention. If the author is enjoying what he/she does, that enjoyment is likely to communicate itself to the reader. Win-win.
Ideally, also, a secondary world should allow and encourage a reader to think outside the box, to see that, because we can imagine a society different from our own, our society itself is not immutable--not reified, to use the fancy theoretical term. Reification--thing-ification, from the Latin res, meaning "thing"--is the process whereby a human construct becomes perceived as a thing, as something impervious to human endeavor, as something that can be neither changed nor destroyed. So–to give two examples off the top of my head--Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness deconstructs the reification of gender roles. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint deconstructs the reification of heteronormativity (the norm in the world of Swordspoint is bisexuality).
(The social thought experiment has long been considered the territory of science fiction, as with most “serious” endeavors in the amalgamated genre of fantasy/science fiction/horror, but I don’t think the necessary given for it is “science/technology.” I think the necessary given is “a world different from our own”–and fantasy can provide that just as readily as sf. The social commentary may be buried a little deeper because–not being a “serious” genre–secondary world fantasy doesn’t have the leeway to leave out the stuff for the groundlings. Or it may not be there at all–just as it may not be there in science fiction, either. *ahem* I am digressing like a digressive thing.)
3. How A Secondary World Does What It Does
This is where we get into the do’s and don’ts which I may from time to time have promulgated.
The dream, says John Gardner, should be vivid and continuous. He was talking about fiction writing in general, but it applies in spades to secondary worlds. Take your secondary world seriously. Treat it with respect. Remember that for your characters, it is the real world. (I.e., if you aren’t Terry Pratchett and haven’t deliberately set up your secondary world so that it spawns warped reflections of the real world, resist the impulse to be cute. Also, n.b., when Pratchett does it, he isn’t being cute. He’s being consistent to his secondary world as he has established it.)
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, think things through. Every decision you make about your world has consequences. Some of them will be obvious; some will not. And it’s the pursuit of the unobvious consequences that will make your world feel rich and deep. Also, consequences that make things more difficult for your characters. Scott Lynch has a brilliant example of this in Red Sails Under Red Skies; it would be a spoiler to discuss it, so I won’t, but it made me believe in the world because, like our world, it doesn’t always work in the viewpoint character’s favor.
And while there should always be a reason that the story is set in a secondary world--something that you can’t get by setting it in the real world--the secondary world should also be a reason in and of itself. It should provide richness to the story, beyond simply being a pretty backdrop. It should be an integral part of the reader’s enjoyment.
I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this topic, but I also feel like that’s enough pontificating from me for one post. So on the understanding that I don’t think what I’ve said here is either conclusive or definitive, here endeth the lesson.
The Right Word
[Storytellers Unplugged, December 7, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
(In penance for having forgotten to post on my assigned day two months in a row, I’m taking Elizabeth Bear’s day so she can have a vacation.)
(Also, I feel like I need to issue a disclaimer. I’m very woolly-headed today, in a fatigued and megrim-ridden fashion. So I’m gonna do my best here, but if I’m more than usually incoherent, I apologize.)
A question from a reader of my blog:
I don’t know if this is concrete enough for a whole post or if you may have already done something similar, but–one of the things that I simultaneously admire greatly and envy the crap out of is your facility with evoking atmosphere. Do you have a specific spot in the drafting process when you do that–like a late draft thing–or is the tone/mood/atmosphere of the place your characters are (mentally and physically) something that is present for you from the time you start drafting? Is it word choice, or rhythm, or all of the above.
I don’t know if that question even makes sense. But the mood and atmosphere of your settings and situations always seems so tangible and right for the story at that point–you evoke dread, or oppression, or chaos, longing, sadness, etc., so well and it’s something I struggle with.
I’ve been thinking about this question, and thinking about this question, in my current glum and woolly-headed fashion, and I think the answer has to be word choice. I think this because atmosphere is not something I set out consciously to evoke (in fact, if you’d asked me, I would have said I did it badly). It certainly isn’t something I go back and put in. And that means it’s something I do as I’m writing, as an integral part of the writing process. And that means that it’s down, very simply, to the words.
I’m reading right now a book called Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren. It’s a very interesting book, and by and large it’s a good book, but Warren has a glitch, a tic that I wish to goodness somebody had edited out for him: he has a tendency to use the almost right word.
(I saw this a lot when I was teaching college English, where it was symptomatic of students trying to make their writing look sophisticated. The thesaurus is a false friend.)
The clearest example is in his discussion of Dracula, where he says, “He [Dracula] prevails first upon Lucy Westenra” (Warren 329). Now, prevails is not entirely the wrong word. Warren’s meaning is discernible, and you may have to stare at the sentence for a moment or two before you can figure out why it doesn’t sound quite right. But prevails is also not the right word. You prevail upon someone when you get them to do something for you--a favor, especially of the more tedious kind. The connotations of the word, of imposing your will on another person, are not unlike vampirism. But there’s still a palpable gap between Mina prevails upon Lucy to lend her her favorite hat, and Dracula “prevails” upon Lucy to become a vampire. The almost right word is still wrong.
(And I shall now prevail upon Mark Twain to support my contention: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)
So I obsess over word choice. I fiddle and fuss. I tend (as my writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, can attest) to overload my sentences with adjectives in draft, trying to find exactly the right one. I get very stubborn with copy-editors about not changing my obscure word for a more familiar one. I read my drafts aloud when I can, listening for rhythm, for inadvertent rhymes, for repetition. The words are the vehicle for the story, but for me, they’re also an end in themselves. I mostly don’t write poetry, because I can’t easily get the metaphors packed densely enough to warrant it, but I approach prose with something of the same spirit, with the belief that no word should be allowed to coast or waffle or be almost good enough, that if you use a word, it should be because it’s the right word.
Like building a wall without mortar. It’s all in choosing and placing the stones.
(I’m not sure that really answers the question. But it’s the only thing I can point to and explain. I don’t know how I evoke atmosphere. I do know how I use words.)
(In penance for having forgotten to post on my assigned day two months in a row, I’m taking Elizabeth Bear’s day so she can have a vacation.)
(Also, I feel like I need to issue a disclaimer. I’m very woolly-headed today, in a fatigued and megrim-ridden fashion. So I’m gonna do my best here, but if I’m more than usually incoherent, I apologize.)
A question from a reader of my blog:
I don’t know if this is concrete enough for a whole post or if you may have already done something similar, but–one of the things that I simultaneously admire greatly and envy the crap out of is your facility with evoking atmosphere. Do you have a specific spot in the drafting process when you do that–like a late draft thing–or is the tone/mood/atmosphere of the place your characters are (mentally and physically) something that is present for you from the time you start drafting? Is it word choice, or rhythm, or all of the above.
I don’t know if that question even makes sense. But the mood and atmosphere of your settings and situations always seems so tangible and right for the story at that point–you evoke dread, or oppression, or chaos, longing, sadness, etc., so well and it’s something I struggle with.
I’ve been thinking about this question, and thinking about this question, in my current glum and woolly-headed fashion, and I think the answer has to be word choice. I think this because atmosphere is not something I set out consciously to evoke (in fact, if you’d asked me, I would have said I did it badly). It certainly isn’t something I go back and put in. And that means it’s something I do as I’m writing, as an integral part of the writing process. And that means that it’s down, very simply, to the words.
I’m reading right now a book called Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren. It’s a very interesting book, and by and large it’s a good book, but Warren has a glitch, a tic that I wish to goodness somebody had edited out for him: he has a tendency to use the almost right word.
(I saw this a lot when I was teaching college English, where it was symptomatic of students trying to make their writing look sophisticated. The thesaurus is a false friend.)
The clearest example is in his discussion of Dracula, where he says, “He [Dracula] prevails first upon Lucy Westenra” (Warren 329). Now, prevails is not entirely the wrong word. Warren’s meaning is discernible, and you may have to stare at the sentence for a moment or two before you can figure out why it doesn’t sound quite right. But prevails is also not the right word. You prevail upon someone when you get them to do something for you--a favor, especially of the more tedious kind. The connotations of the word, of imposing your will on another person, are not unlike vampirism. But there’s still a palpable gap between Mina prevails upon Lucy to lend her her favorite hat, and Dracula “prevails” upon Lucy to become a vampire. The almost right word is still wrong.
(And I shall now prevail upon Mark Twain to support my contention: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)
So I obsess over word choice. I fiddle and fuss. I tend (as my writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, can attest) to overload my sentences with adjectives in draft, trying to find exactly the right one. I get very stubborn with copy-editors about not changing my obscure word for a more familiar one. I read my drafts aloud when I can, listening for rhythm, for inadvertent rhymes, for repetition. The words are the vehicle for the story, but for me, they’re also an end in themselves. I mostly don’t write poetry, because I can’t easily get the metaphors packed densely enough to warrant it, but I approach prose with something of the same spirit, with the belief that no word should be allowed to coast or waffle or be almost good enough, that if you use a word, it should be because it’s the right word.
Like building a wall without mortar. It’s all in choosing and placing the stones.
(I’m not sure that really answers the question. But it’s the only thing I can point to and explain. I don’t know how I evoke atmosphere. I do know how I use words.)
