Sarah Monette's Blog, page 14
January 24, 2016
UBC: Hampton Sides, Hellhound on his Trail
Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History by Hampton SidesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The thing I particularly admire about this book (beside the fact that it is both well-written and well-researched, proving that the two things can coexist in the same work), is the way that Sides follows so many different paths, both as they twist together toward the assassination and as they unravel in a dozen different directions after. The underlying backbone of the book is James Earl Ray's trajectory, but Sides also follows Martin Luther King, Jr.--both as a man and (horribly but necessarily) as a corpse--the inner circle of the SCLC's leadership and the dreadful collapse of the Poor People's Campaign (fifty years later and we still need Dr. King back--there has been no one like him, either before or since); Coretta Scott King; the garbagemen's strike in Memphis; the FBI, including their patient backtracking of every damn piece of Ray's matériel . . . Sides' prose is beautifully lucid and he approaches each of his subjects with the same patience, attention, and empathy. (Empathy. Not the same as sympathy. He has no sympathy for Ray at all, but he does his best to have empathy for him, even as that project becomes more and more self-evidently hopeless.)
Sides objects, in the afterword to the paperback edition, to his book being called a thriller--"it implies," he says, "that I've turned a national tragedy into an entertainment of sorts." The book is entertaining to read--in the sense that it keeps you engaged and actively interested--but it is not an "entertainment." What makes it compelling is the way Sides lays all the pieces of the assassination out, like the gears of a clock on a piece of black velvet, and patiently, one by one, explains how they worked. It's painfully compelling, both as historiography and as a lament for everything that Ray destroyed.
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January 18, 2016
(Thinking about) Thinking about Writing
[ Storytellers Unplugged is still active, btw. I just stopped being able to write even just one post a month for them sometime back in 2011.
[Here endeth the editor's aside. --Ed.]
This month, let's not talk about my book (although it does, btw, look like I'm going to meet my deadline after all). Instead, let's go all meta and think about the ways we think about writing.
Homo sapiens sapiens is a peculiar species in more ways than one, but one of our most endearing quirks is our ability to think about our own thought processes. We can do something; we can think about doing something; and we can think about thinking about doing something. It's fantastic!
And since 90%-99% of the writing process takes place in the mind anyway, it's inevitably something that is both frustrating and intensely rewarding to think about.
One of the first things I learned when I began reading books about creative writing (and even more so when I began hanging out with other writers) is that no two people understand their creativity in the same way. (This goes for other endeavors, too, not just writing; I'm sticking with what I know, but I'm not meaning to imply that writers have a corner on this particular market.) And the second thing I learned was that not all ways of thinking about creativity work for all people.
One person's muse, in other words, is another person's poison.
This inconvenient fact does not mean that anyone is "doing it wrong." The only way to tell if you're "doing it wrong" is if you're not writing. It doesn't matter whose advice you follow or don't follow, no matter how insistently a given guru may tell you that their way is the only way that will bring success. What matters is whether your creative process is actually, you know, processing. The rest is just bells and whistles.
It can be tremendously helpful, however, to get a feel for which ways of thinking about writing work for you, and which don't. Natalie Goldberg, for instance, does not work for me. I tried--my creative writing teacher in high school was a true acolyte of Natalie Goldberg and worshipped whole-heartedly at her altar--and I tried, and finally I admitted, This isn't me. This isn't how I understand what I do.
The world was conspicuous by its failure to end.
So I thought--over the course of a decade or so, and obviously, I'm still thinking--about how I think about writing. And I've learned a lot, both about myself and my writing process. And about how I think about writing.
And the insight has been valuable because there are points in the writing process where you need to be able to pull back to the meta level, to be able to look at what you're doing, not from inside the maze, where it's stifling and humid and there are mosquitos the size of sparrows, but from the observation tower in the middle, where you can see how the paths wind and twist, and where the dead-ends are, and how to get to the center from where you are.
As for example, writer's block.
Writer's block probably deserves an essay all its own, but my point here is that my success rate in dealing with it went up dramatically when I stopped looking at it from inside the maze, as a boulder sunk immovably in the middle of my way, and looked at it instead from outside the maze, where it resolves quite differently.
For me (and remember, everyone's creativity works differently, so this may or may not work for you), the key to undoing writer's block was shifting my focus from the immediate (What happens next? Where are they going? What do they want?) to the meta (Why am I stuck?). Because if I give myself enough time to work out the answer to Why am I stuck? it shows me how to get unstuck, and the answer may or may not have anything to do with the scene I'm currently stuck in. The reasons for my stuckness may be a wrong turn I took five scenes back.
So that's the first thing I know about how I think about writing. I need the meta level.
The second thing I know is something you will have observed in the preceding paragraphs: I think in metaphors. Lots of writers do. And the important thing here is that you have to choose your own metaphors. You have to go with what works, not with what pleases you. Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird, talks about listening to your broccoli as a metaphor for paying attention to your subconscious. I love this metaphor, but it does not work for me. Possibly because I don't like broccoli. But more because my metaphors tend to be metaphors of struggle--like trying to find my way through a maze. Or getting lost in Arthur Conan Doyle's Great Grimpen Mire. I think of the process Lamott describes as "listening to your broccoli" more as a siege. The parts of my mind that are not "I," that don't have direct access to language and don't have the benefits of all this self-reflection, have to beat down the walls to get "me" to listen to them. Sometimes, of course, the besieged is helping the besiegers, trying to pry the boards out of the windows and so on, but still. All my metaphors are metaphors of struggle; many of them are metaphors of violence.
And trying to deny that--trying to scrub my thought processes and tie bows on them so they're fit to meet the neighbors--results in nothing. The literal kind of nothing, in which no work gets done and my processes stagnate and I become a misery to my husband and cats.
That's the most important thing in all this thinking about thinking. You have to be honest with yourself.
Because if you don't, who will?
January 16, 2016
Revisions Which a Minute Will Reverse
I’m up to my neck in revisions for Corambis, my fourth book. In fact, I may be in over my head.
2007 was the year I learned I can’t write a book in a year. Actually, that’s not quite true. I can write a book in a year. What I can’t do is write a good book. The first draft of Corambis was certainly a book. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end; it had characters and plot.
It had clichés.
I talked last month about genre conventions, and that post was a direct result of the thinking I’ve been doing about revising Corambis. Because apparently how my process works is that I write the draft with all the genre conventions in it, and then I write the draft where I take them all out again.
I would like, someday, to be able to skip straight to Step 2, but that hasn’t happened yet.
In my particular case, the genre conventions were there for what is actually, in fairness, a very good reason. They were providing plot structure. One reason to write about a scullery boy who turns out to be king is that that convention comes with a built in plot. You don’t have to worry about how to structure your story; the genre conventions do it for you.
This is very seductive, especially when you have a deadline. Especially when plot and structure are not your strong point and you know it.
But it comes back to bite you on the ass in the end, when you look at the book you’ve written and think, my god, this is cheap and trite and flimsy, and worst of all, it isn’t true.
The purpose of fiction is to tell the truth by lying. And genre conventions are part of the structure of lies, not part of the structure of truth. You need both structures, mind you; you can’t get to the truth unless your lies are strong and brave and beautiful. But genre conventions are lies within lies, lies about lies . . . lies about the way we tell lies in order to tell the truth.
“Beauty without cruelty, ever so much worse than untrue,” Kris Delmhorst says in one of her songs, and that’s my problem with genre conventions. They’re too easy. They say you can have beauty without cruelty; they say you can tell lies without worrying about the truth. And if I believe anything about storytelling, it’s that you have to care about the truth behind your lies.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some scullery boys to chase out of my plot.
The Wonderfulness of . . .
While my ankle mends and I struggle with Restless Legs Syndrome (which, by the way, I do not recommend ), I’ve been watching I Spy on Hulu. I Spy, which ran from 1965 to 1968 and starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, is awesome, but its awesomeness is not actually what I want to talk about for this post.
There’s a curious phenomenon, you see, of mid-sixties spy shows. Because on the one hand you have I Spy, and on the other, you have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968, starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum). (I’m not going to talk about Get Smart (1965-1970), because I haven’t seen any episodes since I was a small child, but it would be an interesting way to complete a trifecta.) Both shows, aside from their mid-60s runs and their stars named Robert, were conceived of as James Bond spoofs. Both feature an American agent (Culp, Vaughn) teamed with someone who is in some way an outsider to mainstream (i.e., white, middle-class) American culture: a Russian, an African-American–and I Spy does not hesitate to point out the prejudice Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby) fights against. Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Kelly Robinson (Culp) are very similar characters–a little feckless, very charming, easily ensnared by a pretty female face–just as there are a lot of similarities between Kuryakin (McCallum) and Scott: both are scholarly (Scotty was a Rhodes scholar, and Illya has a Ph.D. in Quantum Mechanics), both serve as straight men for their partners’ whimsical approach to life (although each gives as good as he gets in back-and-forth banter). And in both shows, the partnership between the two men is portrayed as the most important relationship in their lives, the single most important thing keeping them sane and able to function, the thing they will not and cannot betray. (Both shows have brainwashing episodes in which one partner is turned against the other. In both cases, the crux of the episode is the moment at which the brainwashing fails. Illya can’t kill Napoleon, just as Kelly fires at Scotty point-blank and misses.)
With all these similarities, you’d expect the shows to be very much alike, and yet they aren’t. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a very clair show (using “clair” here as the opposite of “noir”); it’s not a spoof in the sense that Get Smart (1965-1970) is, but it’s always very meta, very self-aware, and–especially after the first season, which dabbled in the shallow end of noir–very careful to keep itself divorced from the real world. U.N.C.L.E.’s main opponent is THRUSH, not any real world country (like, say, the USSR). Napoleon and Illya have no personal lives that we ever see; there are only the vaguest references to their families and backgrounds; they don’t take vacations. You can almost imagine Waverly putting them away in their boxes in between affairs. The stories The Man from U.N.C.L.E. wants to tell are about espionage in the abstract, about the tension between the ordinary world and the spies creeping about behind the wainscotting.
I Spy, on the other hand, is about espionage as the ordinary world. It was the first TV show to be shot on location (unlike The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which all airports really do look the same), and the episodes make use of the settings of Hong Kong, Mexico City, Madrid. Kelly and Scotty live in hotel rooms, and the show remembers that they live in hotel rooms. They talk about vacations (well, they bitch and moan about the vacations they don’t get), they have to explain their expenses to government officials, they walk a constant tightrope between maintaining their cover (as a tennis bum and his trainer) and getting the job done. We don’t know much about Kelly’s family, but both Kelly and Scotty write to Scotty’s mom in Philadelphia (it’s Kelly’s best threat: “I’m going to write to your mother!”); the show is built on the detritus and impedimenta of their daily lives as spies. And they don’t fight THRUSH, either. They’re up against Chinese agents and Russian agents–and the occasional freelance madman. (I find it interesting that the Russian agents are frequently human and sympathetic, while the Chinese agents are, um, not.) Scotty can’t save the heroin addict because she doesn’t want to be saved. Being tortured has psychological consequences; one episode deals with what is, in essence, Kelly’s nervous breakdown, although all the characters are very, very careful never to say so out loud. If The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is what you get when you refuse to take James Bond seriously, I Spy is what happens when you think James Bond through. Kelly and Scotty are tired and cynical; they believe in the ideals they’re fighting for (the most dated moments are the knee-jerk rhetoric about the Evils of Communism), but they’re frequently dubious about the means they have to employ, and always aware that they’re nothing more than replaceable parts as far as the higher-ups at the Pentagon are concerned. Nothing could be more different than the personal relationship Napoleon and Illya have with their boss, Mr. Waverly.
My point here, aside from the wonderfulness of I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is that these two shows, despite their extensive similarities, are very different creatures. They have different thematic concerns; they go in different directions. And they provide a lovely example of the relative unimportance of originality. Because with the same basic premise and many of the same elements, they tell entirely different stories.
It’s a truism among doctoral candidates that as soon as you get your thesis topic approved, a well-known scholar in your field will publish a book on the same subject. (And it’s a truism because it happens. It happened to me with Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and Purgatory.) The important thing about this truism, though, is that after the moment of white-out panic in which your entire academic career passes before your eyes, it doesn’t matter. The originality of your research doesn’t depend on your topic, it depends on what you have to say about your topic. And the same is true with storytelling. It’s not the idea of a James Bond spoof that’s original; it’s the difference between Napoleon Solo and Kelly Robinson, between Illya Kuryakin and Alexander Scott. It’s not WHAT you do that matters. It’s how you do it.
What Not to Do with Writer's Block
So I said, back in July, that writer’s block probably deserved a post of its own. And since I’m having no luck coming up with a better topic for September (self-reflexively, I am experiencing a kind of writer’s block), let’s just run with it and see where we get.
The first thing not to do with writer’s block is reify it.
“Reify” is a fancy litcrit word, from the Latin res, and what it means is taking something–a social custom or an institutional practice or a way of thinking–and letting it turn into the black monolith from 2001. It becomes something you can’t change–can’t even think about changing–because you’re forgetting that it has origins and purposes and all those other things that human artifacts, whether material or mental, have. Writer’s block isn’t an unfathomable object. It’s kind of mysterious, because it’s a conflict between the conscious mind and what I tend to call the underconscious, but giving into the mystification angle, letting it become a reified thing, merely makes it harder to deal with. Eventually, it leads to pulling an Ernest Hemingway and blowing your head off.
Bad idea.
The second thing not to do with writer’s block is to use it as an excuse.
There is a perfectly legitimate point in the process of moving from unblocked to blocked to unblocked again where trying to write is only going to make things worse, and you do have to recognize and respect that, but it’s all too easy to start saying I have writer’s block, when the real problem is that you’re struggling with a craft issue, or you’ve made some horrible mistake that you don’t know how to fix, or you’re bored with the story you’ve been working on, or, hell, you just feel lazy today and don’t want to work. Or all of the above. “Writer’s block” sounds a lot better than any of those things, and there’s always the possibility that it can be milked for drama and sympathy.
… Another bad idea.
Writing is hard work, and I don’t think there’s a writer on the face of the planet–or beneath the face of the planet, if there are Morlocks down there writing poems and stories and recipes for baked Eloi–who doesn’t have days when she just wants to QUIT already and go dig ditches for a living or something. At least, if there is a writer out there who never has that sort of day, I’m not sure I want to meet him. But any human endeavor is like that, unromantic and sweaty and hard damn work, and if you don’t want to do the work, it’s better to just admit you don’t want to do the work, whether that’s for a day or a week or whether really you ARE quitting and where’s the nearest ditch-digger school? Prettying it up by calling it writer’s block doesn’t do anyone any favors in the long run.
And the third thing not to do with writer’s block is to give into it.
No, Virginia, it isn’t going to go away on its own.
One of the hardest steps in going from a dilettante writer to a serious writer, and then to a professional writer is learning to generate inspiration. The lightning bolt from the blue is all very well, but it isn’t reliable, and if you want to make a career out of writing, you cannot sit around waiting for the lightning to find you. You have to get behind the mule in the morning, as the Tom Waits song says, and you have to do it whether you’re inspired or not. When you’re blocked, that means you have to go look at what’s blocking you, see if you can crawl under it, or climb over it, or squeeze around it on the left, or hack a chunk out of it on the right. And if it throws you off, you have to jump right back in. You have to make the block explain itself to you, and then you have to take it apart and keep walking.
Writer’s block can stop you from writing, but you cannot let it stop you from working. And that’s the most important thing not to do with writer’s block.
Verisimilitude; Plus, a Sestina
Last Sunday afternoon, I broke my ankle. (Posts with details here and here.) Obviously, I’ve spent most of my time since then stoned on first Percocet and then Oxycodone, so it’s good that the accident itself has given me a topic for a post–namely verisimilitude versus what my partner-in-crime, Elizabeth Bear, calls second order cliches. (I would never use another person’s broken ankle as fuel for my creativity, but using my own broken ankle is not merely thrifty, it gives me something to think about, which has been essential at more than one point recently.)
The accident occurred as I was walking across a slight grassy slope with a couple of other people, toward a barn in which people and horses were warming up for a Training level dressage test. (Yes, the irony is mighty. I was at a horse show and my broken bone has nothing whatsoever to do with horses.) I slipped.
I can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. I think that my right foot must have skidded out from under me from right to left (also downhill), but honestly, I can’t say for sure. I don’t remember that part. I do remember hearing my ankle break and knowing immediately and absolutely what it was. It was a wet, tight snap. It did not sound like a gunshot or a snapping branch or any of the other second order cliches that people use in stories. It sounded like a bone breaking.
The people with me were convinced I must have hit my head. That’s what my ankle breaking sounded like to them, like my head hitting a rock.
One of the people watching the warm-up was a person who had training for dealing with this sort of situation (and believe me, I am grateful to him beyond the telling of it). He said he heard my ankle break from the barn, a good twenty or thirty feet away. He knew immediately what it was, too.
Second order cliches are pernicious; they’re ruts in our use of English. (I have a terrible time with them, as Bear can testify.) In this specific case, they’re also misdirection: they obscure the truth not merely with the sort of soft cloud of familiarity they draw between reader (and writer) and story, but also by comparisons that change the nature of the event they describe. I’ve been thinking about this all week, while stoned on painkillers, and it has turned itself into a sestina. Apparently, Percocet makes blank verse easy. Certainly, it does make one’s thoughts turn back on themselves in ways that make sestinas inevitable.
Percocet Sestina
Untrue, the story: when you break a bone,
The sound is like a twig or rifle shot.
But it isn’t. It’s a stingy sound
And mean. Unmistakable, inside
At least. I knew the bone was broken truth
Before I hit the ground. Before the pain.
It’s good, that story. It says that when the pain
Comes down, it will not be your real bone,
But a twig, a bullet, anything but the truth
That you yourself are not the bullet shot
But, quivering, the doe rabbit, torn inside
And rent, every breath a sobbing sound.
Not a story, not a twig (the sound
Clean and dry, free of strength or pain).
You are not a twig, not dead inside.
You are meat and blood and broken bone,
And if you could escape, like a shot,
You’d run to story, leave behind the truth.
Stories–twigs and rifles–hurt less than truth:
The suddenness, the slip, the fall, the sound,
Not crisp like twigs, not distant like a shot,
But wet and all too close and thick with pain.
It is no safe-soft story, but your bone;
It breaks within your private story, inside
The border lines policed and watched, inside
The place where stories spin and toil, where truth
Is made. In this place, it’s not just bone
That breaks. The sound–the snap–is more than sound;
It tells your helpless imperfection, the pain
To come. It would be easier to be shot,
To end the story by firing squad: the shot
Like punctuation, nothing left inside–
No embarrassment, no circling pain–
But that’s a story, not the needed truth.
We know truth by the sound it makes, the sound,
Wet and sharp and cruel, of breaking bone.
ENVOY
The breaking bone, the petty sound of truth,
No shot, no story–not inside. But pain.
Taking Another Tilt at the Windmill
Writing "I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!" (published December 7, 2010) started me thinking again about that hoary old chestnut and perennial panel favorite: “What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction?” Since, insofar as I have an allegiance to any academic critical school, it’s to genre theory, I think about this a little bit differently than most people, and this round of thinking has led me to some interesting places.
First off, two caveats:
1.) “Genre” and “marketing category” are not the same thing. The latter is a label slapped on a book for the convenience of booksellers. (And I fully appreciate the need for quick, one-word, uncomplicated labels when all you’re trying to do is figure out how to put books where people will find them in order to buy them.) “Genre” has a complicated history, which I’ll get to in a minute. For now, I just want to point out that marketing categories strive for the absolute (though they don’t necessarily achieve it, even so): either something DOES go in the Romance section or it DOESN’T. Genres are all about relatives.
2.) I am not a prescriptivist. I don’t want to tell any story what it should be doing. Rather, I’m trying to find ways to describe what it is doing. So none of what follows should be construed as pronouncements from on high. It’s just me thinking about the stories I love.
All right. Back to the idea of “genre.” At the root of it all, genres are arbitrary categories which we use because we are hardwired pattern-recognition junkies. And I fully and cheerfully include myself in that. For pretty much as long as there’s been literary criticism, they’ve been used to try to impose value judgments on different kinds of stories and storytelling (think of Aristotle, think of Sir Philip Sidney), and as prose gradually supplanted poetry as the primary mode of storytelling in English (I can’t speak about any other language’s literature, because the only two I know anything about are (a.) pre-novel and (b.) dead), and the novel came to reign supreme over Anglo-American story consumption (I don’t know enough about other Anglophone traditions to discuss them), people started dividing novels into smaller and smaller sub-genres. And started, inevitably, making value judgments about them.
The divide between mimetic literature and fantastic literature is a relatively recent one, and judging by its effects, it went hand in hand with the effort to make prose fiction respectable, something critics and academics could take seriously, not just popular entertainment. And, whether by design or not, this bid for respectability involved disowning the fantastic. (I blame James Joyce, but only because I can’t blame Aristotle.) Fantastic literature became something suitable only for children and the ignorant masses–and notice the simultaneous denigration of children’s literature, and the way in which the two reinforce each other. It’s taken us most of a century to fight our way back from that completely arbitrary and artificial distinction. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. The way you elevate mimetic literature and denigrate fantastic literature is by comparing the 10% to the 90.) If you go and look at Western canonical literature, you’ll be hard pressed to find any of it that isn’t fantastic in one aspect or another until you get to Clarissa; Clarissa, while I wouldn’t call it particularly realistic, is definitely in the para-real rather than the contra-real or sur-real camp. (And that, of course, has a great deal to do with the origins of the novel in confessional literature . . . but that’s another topic entirely.)
My point is that I think most definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or fantasy vs. science fiction) are starting from premises that could themselves stand to be more carefully examined.
I’m going to define “genre” as stories concerned with the same set of narrative conventions and expectations. In other words, I see a genre as a series of questions which a story chooses to engage with. It may answer “yes,” “no,” or “giraffe,” but it is engaging with those questions, rather than another set.
It becomes immediately apparent, by this definition, that fantasy and science fiction are not genres. Horror is a genre, because horror brings a set of narrative expectations, just as mystery and romance do. You can put a romance into a fantasy story or a science fiction story, and nothing about the plot of the romance must or should change. But if you put the romance into a horror story–yes, something has to change. Just as you can take the same set-up–a dead body found under strange circumstances–and make it either a mystery story or a horror story; either one may have elements of the other, but fundamentally, whether you pick mystery or horror makes a difference to your plot and its outcome. They are genres.
Fantasy and science fiction, on the other hand, are like Western and historical. They’re something for which there isn’t a good word. “Setting” is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because it implies that the fantastic/sfnal/Western/historical elements of the story are merely window-dressing, and that is not at all the case. (Okay, here I am a little bit prescriptivist, because what I mean is that it shouldn’t be the case. In good fantasy, the fantastic element should be integral to–and also well integrated in–the plot. Ditto the sfnal in science fiction, the western milieu in Westerns, the historical in historicals.) But they aren’t genres, because there is no narrative expectation you can apply across the board. You can have historical mysteries, fantasy mysteries (Barbara Hambly, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, to name three off the top), science fiction mysteries. I’ve never seen a Western mystery, but there’s no reason you couldn’t write one. You can put horror in any of these settings, likewise. They don’t care what kind of narrative you apply to them.
(The other odd thing, while I’m talking about things for which there aren’t good words in English, is the way in which horror, aside from being transportable from one genre to another, can make back-formations and put down roots. A detective without a mystery is like something out of Pirandello or Beckett, and a romantic lead without a romance is even worse. But Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker is, among other things, a fantasy novel with zombies in it. Zombies are a horror trope, but they don’t make Boneshaker a horror novel, any more than vampires, likewise a horror trope, make Those Who Hunt the Night (Hambly) or New Amsterdam (Bear) a vampire novel. And yet the zombies in Boneshaker are still zombies, and Bear and Hambly’s vampires are most definitely vampires. (N.b., they do not sparkle.) It’s odd and it’s also marvelous that you can cut horror tropes loose from their genre moorings, and they keep working.
(I don’t know what to do with that, and the neat thing about genre theory, and the fact that it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, is that I don’t have to know what to do with that. It’s okay to just sit and watch it work and be filled with delight.)
Under this schematic, fantasy and science fiction differ in world rather than in story, and I think this applies to Westerns and historicals, too. World, like genre, does bring with it questions a story has to answer, but it brings different questions, and they interact with the story in different ways.
… I guess for next month I can start thinking about what I think those questions are.
January 15, 2016
Should Cinderella Kiss the Prince?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about romance1, and from two different directions.
In exhibit A, you have an author who had to rip conventional romance plots out of her two most recent books, The Mirador and Corambis, like yanking Virginia creeper off a tree trunk. In exhibit B, you have a reader who is currently reading a fantasy series by [name of well-known sff author redacted] and is finding the predictability of the romance sub-plots, in all their conventional heteronormative glory … well, predictable. And therefore not very interesting. And at the same time, in both exhibits A and B, you have an author/reader who likes love stories and even likes category romance–at least in the form of Georgette Heyer. And so I’m trying to figure out where the line is between compelling–or at least entertaining–and that not-quite-eyeroll I give the book when the characters yoke up in exactly the pair I expected.
The first thing to do is to separate category romance (including paranormal romance and “urban fantasy”2) out from novels-with-love-stories-in-them, because the point of category romance is, to a certain extent, its predictability. You don’t read a romance because you really want to wonder whether the heroine will find her True Love or not. You read a romance in the comforting certainty that she will, and thus you can watch the twists and turns of the plot, the misunderstandings and separations and rival suitors and all, with a scaled down version of the vicarious thrill of a roller coaster. It’s exciting, but it’s also ultimately safe. And I’m not knocking this–I’ve reread my Heyers so many times I’ve just about worn the print off the page. If you’re reading or writing category romance, that’s what you’re there for and there’s no sense criticizing a duck for not being a ferret. If that’s where you are, then the question is whether it’s a good duck or not, not whether it’s got fur and viviparous offspring.
But the thing about conventional, category romance is that, when it’s imported out of its genre–where it’s part of the form, like it’s part of the form of a sonnet that it has 14 lines–is that it shuts down character development. That’s what happened to me in The Mirador and Corambis. I put my characters in a conventional romance, and they began to behave according to the conventions of the category romance rather than according to their personalities and situations. Now, I fully admit that I did this to myself: I decided arbitrarily that character X and Y should be In Love, so it’s no surprise that X and Y began to behave arbitrarily. But it was astonishingly hard and painful for me to see what I’d done and to see that it was wrong. My writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, just about had to commit long-distance GBH to get me to let go. I’m deeply grateful now, but it’s a little like . . . okay, you’ve gone to a party and gotten completely hammered and you really really really want to take off all your clothes and dance on the table in nothing but a lampshade-hat and maybe shout rude things about the important people at the party (professors or editors or managers–take your pick depending on your profession). You have a friend who won’t let you, and you curse at them and maybe try to hit them and maybe try to stomp off in a huff, only they’ve got your car keys, and then you get distracted by having another drink and end up passed out cold on the stairs. And when you wake up the next morning, you remember wanting to dance on the table and you remember how your friend wouldn’t let you, and you realize you owe them your first-born child and probably a kidney . . . that’s what it’s like.
And I’ve come, in consequence to a realization: love is hard. It’s hard to do in real life, but it’s also hard to write about. And it’s even harder to write about if you don’t fall back on romance conventions. Because we all know how to write romance conventions and we all know how to read them. It’s safe, whereas writing about what love really is–that’s hard and scary, like asking an armadillo to expose its underbelly to a coyote. But here’s the thing. We do all know romance conventions, which means readers are able to predict them. And if we aren’t reading a book where the predictability is part of the win conditions, that predictability is going to undercut the rest of the story. Because real people aren’t predictable–or, rather, they’re predictable according to their own characters, not according to an arbitrary set of externally imposed rules–and if characters who are three-dimensional in every other respect become flat and conventional when faced with love, it points out how flimsy and artificial the conventions of romance are, and it makes a thin place in the structure of the novel, a place where you feel like you can put your hand through and grab the strings. And that thin place, of course, is exactly the thing a novelist doesn’t want.
So I’ve answered my own question: it depends on whether the predictability of the romance is constructed (or construed) as a bug or a feature of a given novel. Because it can be either. It depends on what the novel is trying to do, and on whether that predictable romance is commensurate with the other parts of the narrative.
If you’re writing a romance, yes, Cinderella kisses the prince. If you’re writing a novel about a girl who’s been abused and degraded and exploited by her stepmother and stepsisters for years while her father does nothing to help her, and whose fairy godmother seems to feel that the only thing worth intervening for is a ball . . . well, maybe she should and maybe she shouldn’t. It kind of depends on the prince.
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1In the modern sense of limerence and erotic interest, rather than the early modern sense of a prose narrative that is similar to a novel but really something quite different.
2I’m plagiarizing a footnote from myself:
I put “urban fantasy” in quotes because–as we discovered on a panel about it at Odyssey Con–whatever that genre is, “urban fantasy” is a misnomer. Urban fantasy is fantasy about cities–which the panel also discovered is a flourishing sub-genre including authors like China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett–but “urban fantasy,” while very distinctly a genre, really needs a different name. (Oddly enough, both genres are clearly influenced–if not outright founded–by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull). I write urban fantasy; I do not write “urban fantasy” and couldn’t if I tried.3
3This is not a slam against “urban fantasy.” It is very much Not My Thing, but dude. Neither is hard SF. The fact that, obviously, I want to reappropriate the term “urban fantasy” for something else isn’t because I think the books being called “urban fantasy” somehow don’t “deserve” the label, but because, as a genre theory geek, I am frustrated by the fact that the term is being used to label a genre it doesn’t describe, while a genre that it does describe, and which I think is really cool, doesn’t have a label at all–or much recognition as a genre. From the genre-theory-geek perspective “urban fantasy” is actually really interesting, because what makes it a genre is the mélange of genres it offers–fantasy, romance, mystery, action-adventure, maybe a little horror–but while the urban environment, or at least the postmodern cosmopolitan sensibility, is necessary to the genre, it’s not really what books in this genre are about.
Five Things I Know about World-Building
1. The more fun you have, the more fun your audience will have.
World-building should be fun. That’s what it’s for. You don’t have to approach it like a history textbook with all the dates and the names and the dry tedious facts. You only have to talk about the good bits, and you get to decide what those good bits are. And you can be outrageous. Real history is.
2. Never world-build through infodump.1
(N.b., there is a difference between an “infodump” and “exposition.” Robin McKinley world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Spindle’s End; Diana Wynne Jones world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle. These are both markedly different from the infodump world-building at the beginning of the book I’m reading right now, James White’s Ambulance Ship.)
Avoid giving your readers information in solid lumps. This causes skimming and skipping, and if there’s something important in there, odds are pretty good no one’s going to catch it because their eyes have glazed over. Also, it feels fake; the dream ceases to be continuous and the reader gets dumped out of the story on his or her ass.
3. You can work it all out in advance or make it up as you go along. The end result will look the same.
How do I know this is true? Because 80% of my world-building, I make up as I go along. I take copious notes so as not to contradict myself or invent the wheel twice, but I invent my worlds on the fly.
Writing is, thank goodness, not a performance art. The finished product does not have to tell you anything about the details of the process. Therefore, the only wrong way to world-build–as with everything else–is the way that doesn’t work.
4. Never tell your audience everything you know.
This goes back to both (1.) and (2.) You aren’t writing a textbook; there isn’t going to be a test. You don’t have to explain everything, and in fact you’re better off if you don’t.
Also, there should be a difference between everything you know and everything your viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing in omniscient (in which case you, sir or madam, are as mad as a fish2), you need to filter your information through the character. If she doesn’t know it, she can’t tell the reader about it. If she doesn’t think it’s important, she won’t tell the reader about it. If the version of the facts she’s been given is wrong …
5. You have to let some details be throwaways.
This is what gives the world-building the illusion of depth. Not every folksong can be the coded solution to a mystery, and if you only mention popular culture or history when you are pushing another piece of the plot into place, your audience is going to get wise to your tricks, and your world-building is reduced to two-dimensional stage scenery.
Include details that have nothing to do with your story. Let your characters make allusions to events or ballads or novels that aren’t clues, just things they’ve read or heard or seen. The way real people do.
My favorite example from my own work (to be vulgarly conceited for a moment) is in the first chapter of Mélusine, when one of the protagonists says disparagingly of his teenage ambitions as a knife-fighter, “I thought I was quite something back then, like I was another Charlett Redding and they were going to have my hands plated with gold when I died” (p. 22).
That’s the only time Charlett Redding is ever mentioned, and that’s all we ever know about her. (I know more–although not a lot more–but like I said, never tell your audience everything you know.) Nothing about this throwaway anecdote has any bearing on the story, but it tells you a lot about the character and a lot about the world, and a lot of what it tells you, it tells you precisely because it’s a throwaway detail. It matters because it doesn’t matter.
And now, before I start calling people Grasshopper, I’m going to end this post.
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1For a definition of “infodump,” plus any number of other useful concepts, please consult the Turkey City Lexicon.
2A statement which is not the same as saying you shouldn’t do it.
Deadline on the Horizon
I have a deadline.
My fourth book, Summerdown, is due August 1st. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be finished in time. So, since it’s the first thing on my mind (also the second, third, fourth, and fifth), I’m going to introduce myself to storytellersunplugged by talking about, hey, deadlines, and the things I am learning as I struggle to meet this one.
It is, of course, the hallmark of a professional writer to meet his or her deadlines. To do so calmly. Cheerfully. With a song on his or her lips!
Well, okay. Maybe not that last bit.
The first thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is to stay calm. They can smell fear. Also, your productivity is better if you aren’t in a state of gibbering panic. Therefore, it’s better not to let yourself get too worked up, no matter how far in the hole you feel like you are. Perspective is important, not least to keep you from behaving like a drama queen in front of friends, family, and random passersby.
(And by “you,” of course, I mean “me.”)
No matter how important your deadline is, the world will keep revolving if you miss it.
Really.
Try for some Zen, if you can.
The second thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is not to compare yourself to other writers. Especially, god help you, to your friends. There will always be someone who writes faster than you do, or whose first drafts are cleaner. Or both. And what you have to accept is that this information is MEANINGLESS. How fast other people are writing their books has no relevance to your book. You are not in competition with them, and using other people to beat yourself up is unfair, both to you and to them.
Sometimes, in order to accept this, you have to tell yourself that those other, faster, better, prettier writers are space aliens. This is okay, as long as it gets you to Stop. Comparing. Yourself. To. Other. Writers. Some of my dearest friends are space aliens to me right now.
Zen is also good here, if you can find it.
The third thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is to listen to the book. Do not let the mob in your brain chanting DEADLINE DEADLINE DEADLINE drown out the things you need to hear. If the book is taking a wrong turn, you need to figure that out at the intersection, not twenty miles down the wrong road. If that means you have to stop while your backbrain figures out how to tell you what’s going on, then stop. It will save time in the long run, and you will hate yourself and the book less.
In other words, it’s the book that is the point of the exercise, and it is the book that, ultimately, you are accountable to. Do not forget that in the clamor.
The fourth thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is that you can do this. Set goals. Make them reasonable. Allot yourself breaks and rewards. Novel-writing is an endurance sport. You can’t do it in a sprint. Do whatever it takes to stay both consistently productive and relatively sane.
Meet your deadline if it’s humanly possible. But if you can’t, it’s your job to come as close as you can. Not to waste your time and your editor’s time with your writer angst and Woe is me! Be professional even in your failure, and make it as minimal a failure as you can. Even after you lose the race, you still keep running.
And, yeah, work on that Zen. It’s gonna come in handy.
