Sarah Monette's Blog, page 15
January 15, 2016
In Which I Explain the Inner Workings of my Mind with the Cunning Use of Puppets
GUILDENSTERN: We should be working.
ROSENCRANTZ: On what?
GUILDENSTERN: Well, I don’t know! On, um, hey, what about that story?
ROSENCRANTZ: Which story?
GUILDENSTERN: You know. That story. The one with the stuff.
ROSENCRANTZ: [eye-roll] Oh, that‘s helpful.
GUILDENSTERN: Well, we should definitely be working.
ROSENCRANTZ: And I repeat, on what?
GUILDENSTERN: Look, this is unnatural, is all I’m saying.
ROSENCRANTZ: It’s called a vacation. VA-CA-TION. Which we have earned, you twit. My carpal tunnels are still carping.
GUILDENSTERN: Oh. Right.
GUILDENSTERN: …
GUILDENSTERN: Dammit, we should be working!
[Lather, rinse, repeat]
Unlike poor Rosencrantz (who obviously has an Underwood), I don’t actually have carpal tunnel problems (thanks largely to my workhorse of a Kinesis keyboard); otherwise, this is an accurate rendition of the inside of my head this month. It’s hard to take a vacation from writing for exactly the same reason that many people find it difficult to get any writing done if they aren’t taking a class or have some other form of external structure (e.g. NaNoWriMo). You have to train yourself to be self-starting. But once you’ve done that, you discover to your chagrin that there isn’t really much in the way of an off-switch. You can choose not to write. But you can’t choose to make Guildenstern shut up about it.And now I’m going to go work on that story. The one with the stuff.
Of Scullery Boys and Kings
Once upon a time, there was a scullery boy.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about genre conventions and what they do to stories.
A genre convention is something, a certain type of character or a particular development of plot, that can be depended upon to show up in stories that share a genre. Loner private eyes are a convention of hard-boiled mysteries, for example. Tall dark men with sinister pasts are a convention of gothics. And scullery boys are a convention of a genre that can be called “epic fantasy” or “high fantasy” or–my preferred term precisely because it doesn’t carry a lot of baggage–”secondary world fantasy.”
And we all know what happens to scullery boys in this kind of fantasy: they turn out to be kings.
That’s what a genre convention is: it’s something we all know before we read the story.
Genre conventions aren’t always a bad thing; they’re a common language for readers and writers, and having a common language means that you can have a much more sophisticated and thoughtful discussion, instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time you get in the car. And every convention can be twisted or tweaked or turned on its head, and often the most fun and interesting stories are the ones that do that.
This is the important thing about genre conventions: they are not carved in stone. They are not immutable. They aren’t laws, or even rules. They’re grooves. And of course the problem with a groove is, it all too rapidly deepens into a rut.
Ergo, the scullery boy.
We all know the shape of his story: he will be extracted from his scullery and sent on a variety of adventures; he’ll acquire some loyal companions and some equally faithful enemies, and eventually, to everyone’s shock (except the reader, who saw it coming 300 pages ago), he will turn out to be the Long Lost King of Albion or Gondor or Riva or wherever the heck we happen to be.
That’s the genre convention, and if you think with it–if you let the convention dictate the shape of your story–you’re going to write flat and unappealing fantasy that no one will be able to remember five minutes after they’ve put the book down.
But what happens when you start to think about it?
For example, let’s not say a scullery boy. Let’s say this scullery boy. His name is Tam. He’s fifteen, an orphan, skinny and dark and he’s got a nasty hacking cough just like the one that killed his mother. The other boys who work in the castle beat him up on a regular basis because he’s an easy target, and he has small, subtle, and very elegant ways of getting revenge.
Or how about this scullery boy. His name is Patrick. He’s fifteen, the seventh of twelve children. Two of his siblings died before they were two years old; his eldest sister died in childbirth when he was twelve. His eldest brother stands to inherit his father’s croft and the anxiety is already turning him into an old man; his second brother is apprenticed to a cobbler and is miserably unhappy. His father intended Patrick for the priesthood, but he talked his way out of it, and got himself sent to the castle instead. Patrick loves living in the castle; he loves his job. What he knows is that he never wants to be responsible for anybody else’s life.
Or how about this scullery boy. Her name is Annalisa; she’s fifteen, the daughter of the head chef, and she works in the scullery so her father can keep an eye on her. Her mother died when she was born; all Annalisa knows about her is that she was a foreigner, she never talked about herself, and she left her daughter a golden locket that no one knows how to open. Her father tells her that it will look beautiful with her wedding gown, and Annalisa dreams that when she finds her One True Love, he’ll know how to open the locket.
Put any of these particular scullery boys into the conventional story, and the story falls apart. Tam’s got TB; he can’t go swanning off across the map on a quest. And he’s got a Machiavellian approach to life which many people are going to find inappropriate in the Long Lost King of Wherever. Patrick’s going to do everything in his power to avoid being sent off on a quest in the first place, much less being made king. And Annalisa doesn’t want to be in that story; she wants to be in Cinderella instead.
The genre convention falls apart, but the story you find in the rubble is much more interesting. We DON’T all know how any one of these stories–Tam’s, or Patrick’s, or Annalisa’s–would turn out. We can’t predict the plot developments 300 pages in advance.
Which means both the story and the characters are free to develop however they want to, instead of being ruthlessly trimmed back into the topiary shape of a grail. They’re free to be real.
We’re out of our rut, and that’s hard and scary, but the view is worth the climb.
I Suppose You're All Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today
Last week, I finished the first draft of The Goblin Emperor (::wild cheers::), and in the last five to ten thousand words or so, I gained a new appreciation for why mystery writers so frequently resort to the last chapter In Which The Great Detective Explains It All. And so today I’m going to talk about ending a novel.
Ending a novel is harder than it looks.
For one thing, how do you figure out where the story ends? How do you choose where to stop? For another, unless your novel is exceptionally spare and stripped down, you’re not finding an ending point for one monolithic story, you’re finding a point where you can bring together the ends of several different story-strands, spatially, temporally, and as Captain Jack Sparrow says, ecumenically. And still make it look quote-unquote “natural.” This is where “Rocks fall, everyone dies” becomes a major temptation.
And there’s also the problem–again, unless your narrative is so minimalist Raymond Carver would be proud of you–that you probably have more than three characters with names. You don’t have to explain what happened to all of them, but you also don’t want your readers’ first response to the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus to be, “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?” Hence the Great Detective gets all the characters together to explain whodunnit to them. Or, in Victorian novels (which often evade the problem of having to collect all the characters in one room by being in omniscient) there will be a sudden rash of marriages in the last chapter, to get everybody tided out of the way. Both The Great Detective Explains It All ending and the Mawwiage Is What Bwings Us Togethah Today ending are artificial in the extreme, and frequently–as Elizabeth Bear pointed out when I mentioned it to her–awkward, obtrusive, and unsatisfying, but the thing is, I understand why people do them. Because it gets everybody to hold still for FIVE FUCKING SECONDS so you can END THE GODDAMN BOOK ALREADY. And I don’t care if your eyes WERE closed, Aunt Mabel, this is the picture that’s going to the newspaper.
But understanding the temptation is not the same as thinking it’s a good strategy. It isn’t. The more artificial and obvious the narrative structure is, the more likely your readers are to be distracted from the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus by the creaks and groans of the machinery. All the more so as the Great Detective Ending and the Mawwiage Ending are cliches, and the majority of your readers will recognize them the instant they hear the oom-pah-pah of the calliope, and you will have to work twice as hard to get their attention back.
So, okay, Mole, you say. Cliches are bad. Clunky artifice is bad. What do we do instead?
Well, you try to make your artifice look natural. You can’t, by the way, avoid artifice: that’s all writing a novel is: artifice and sleight of hand. If you aren’t writing a novel predicated on artifice–like John Myers Myers’ Silverlock or Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next books or Tristram Shandy–you want to camouflage it as much as you can, so that the reader will forget to look for the zipper down the monster’s back, or for the wires enabling Peter Pan to fly. Even if you’re writing category romance, in which part of the attraction of the genre is its patent artifice, you still want it to look like your characters reach their Happily Ever After because they love other, not because the plot made them do it.
To be perfectly clear: I don’t think artifice is bad. I don’t think patent artifice is bad, either–otherwise I wouldn’t love revenge tragedies, or the work of Georgette Heyer, as much as I do. But part of the artifice of writing a novel is that you’re trying to make it look not-artificial. Renaissance rhetoricians had a word for this: sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look effortless. And that’s really what I’m talking about. Not how to be natural in your writing, but how to appear natural. Sprezzatura.
You can try for sprezzatura with regard to your ending in several ways:
1. Limit the number of artificial interventions in your story. To tell a story at all, you have to choose an artificial starting point, and a trigger: a murder or a visitor or an earthquake. The more you can set up your starting point and your trigger so that the rest of the story follows naturally from them (remembering, of course, that like I said a couple paragrahs up, “natural” is also artificial in the world of a novel), the less the mechanics of your narrative have to be visible, and the less likely the artificiality of the ending is to call attention to itself.
2. Misdirection and distraction. Brilliant prose style! Wacky characters! Dialogue that your readers will be unable to prevent themselves from quoting to hapless friends! The brighter and more wildly the surface of the novel shines, the less attention readers have to spare for noticing things like plot. Concomitantly, the more likely they are to forgive the artificiality they do notice. I don’t mind when Lord Peter Wimsey Explains It All, because listening to Lord Peter talk is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the reason I showed up for this book in the first place.
3. Try to find an ending point that doesn’t look like you’re going for a merit badge in knot tying. I know many readers are frustrated by the endings of my books because the arc of the characters’ lives can’t be predicted (“What’s going to happen to X?” they ask plaintively–but please notice that that’s a different question than “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?”), but for me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I think you should feel at the end of a book that the characters’ lives are going to continue and, like real people’s lives, be unpredictable. Even if you like more closure than I do, getting it too pat will make the game look rigged.
Of course, the game is rigged. But your job is to make people feel like they won it on their own.
January 14, 2016
The Love of the Underfoot Cat for the Argyle Socks
UNDERFOOT CAT: I'm singin' in the rain, just singin'--
ME: Try again.
U.C.: Um. Your socks were lonely?
ME: My dirty and undoubtedly reeking socks that I just took off my feet after coming back from the barn?
U.C.: Yup! They're awesome!
ME: From the way you're treating them, you'd think I've been walking through the catnip mines.
U.C.: Um. I like horses?
ME: Have you ever seen a horse?
U.C.: . . . Maybe.
[UNDERFOOT CAT rubs his face lovingly against my argyle socks]
ME: You do realize this is not normal, don't you?
U.C.: It's not my fault! I was found up a tree! *
ME: Where all the horses wore argyle socks?
U.C.: It was an awesome tree.
---
*True.
January 13, 2016
Getting out of Your Own Way
“I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.” –Alan Rickman
So I was talking with a friend the other day about writing and art and being, or not being, a pretentious asshole, and she said, “Why don’t you write a Storytellers Unplugged post about that?”</p>
And I said, “Thank you for doing my homework for me.”
Because it is a problem, and I think it’s one we all go through, the pendulum swing from “I’m just playing around, there’s no need to take anything I do seriously” to “I am a Serious Writer and you must Admire my Art.” The key, I think, is the Alan Rickman quote I used as an epigraph, not least because he shifts the discussion from “art” to “work.” Frankly, “Is it art?” is something so subjective that it’s not a useful question for an artist to ask. Everyone’s answer to “What is art?” is different, and even something that seems to be a consensus may be overturned in another five years, or twenty, or a hundred. And it’s something that you can’t control. Whereas, “Is it work?” is a pretty easy question.
But it can be hard to get the balance right between taking your work seriously and not taking yourself too seriously, especially when there are so many factors conspiring to make you feel defensive about taking your work seriously. There’s a lot of pressure on people who do creative things to be self-deprecating about them, whether it’s the “it’s just a hobby” gambit or “I’m not really any good at it” or (if you are a professional) “I’m just a hack.” All of which are ways of abjuring the idea that one takes one’s work seriously.
When I was a teenager, I went militantly the other way. I had a teacher who disparaged genre fiction, and I bristled up like a porcupine and became very much, “This is my Art and I am an Artist, and I will make you see the error of your ways!” It’s the opposite reaction, but it’s just as much a defense as the other. And there for a while, yes, I was really hard to live with. I’m not sure what knocked it out of me, but I think part of it was learning that making art and Being An Artist are not the same thing. You can do one without having anything to do with the other. Making art doesn’t require starving in a garret or being crazy or doing drugs or getting an M.F.A. or any of the other thousand and one things our culture thinks artists have to do. All that making art requires is that you do the work.
You don’t have to be defensive about it, either. You don’t have to tear yourself down, and you don’t have to build yourself up. Neither one makes a difference to the work you’re doing, unless you let yourself become poisoned with your own propaganda. Self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement are about how the world sees you and how you see yourself, and goodness knows it’s something we all struggle with, but it’s also, from another perspective, missing the point. Because the thing at stake isn’t your self (arguably, your self is just sitting around getting in the way), it’s your work. For me, at least, it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m not a very good writer,” but it’s quite another thing to say, “Oh, that’s not a very good story.” Because, dude, if it’s not a good story, why did I send it out? Why did the editor buy and publish it? And in my heart of hearts, while “I’m not a very good writer,” may feel true a whole freaking lot of the time, “That’s not a good story,” is going to feel like a lie. If I’ve gotten to the point of sending it out, I believe it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense to try to say otherwise.
For me, I think that’s the crux of the matter. Not whether I’m taking myself seriously, or not seriously, but whether I’m taking my work seriously. Because the rest of it, a lot of the time? Is just my self getting in the way.
Fundraising and Self-Publishing: Lessons Learned
On January 20, 2011, one of our cats passed away. He was almost sixteen; I’d had him since he was almost two, and I loved him dearly, but that’s not actually what I want to talk about.
You see, I decided to do a fundraiser in his honor, to benefit the Companion Animal Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, as a way of saying thank you for the care they gave him and the kindness they extended to me and my husband. And as part of that fundraiser, almost as an afterthought, I decided to do a chapbook of the four stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth that were not collected in The Bone Key. I figured if the fundraiser did exceptionally well, I’d be able to donate $1000 or $1500.
As of today, the donations have passed $4000. [I ended up donating $3200. --Ed.]And basically three-quarters of that is the one hundred sixty-one people who have bought Unnatural Creatures. As a comparison point, the auction of my last hardback set of the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Mélusine (OOP), The Virtu (OOP), The Mirador, Corambis) had only two bidders and raised only $150.
I think the chapbook sale has worked so well for two reasons:
1. it was something people wanted (I know, duh, but it surprised me how eager people were)
2. the price point was low enough that it felt affordable, even in the current zombie apocalypse
(Well, and #3, people like contributing to what they feel is a good cause.)
So the lesson learned is that it’s better to have a (potentially) unlimited number of a low price-point item than to have one, or very few, of an expensive item.
I’ve also learned a number of things about self-publishing in trying to put the chapbook together through Lulu.
1. Lulu would really prefer it if you’d use (and pay for) their formatting service; the option for the obstinate is to make your own .pdf
2. Making .pdfs is a PAIN IN THE ASS if what you happen to have is, you know, word processing software.
3. MS Word is the tool of Satan. There is no other explanation for the things it does to innocent documents.
4. Although Lulu will let you use any font you like in the interior of the book, it offers only a limited palette of fonts in its Cover Wizard, and some of them are very ugly. Unless you get lucky, as I did, and have someone volunteer to design your cover, Garamond is your best bet. (I went with Garamond anyway, because it’s an attractive and legible font, and it has the slightly old-fashioned air appropriate to Booth.)
5. Yes, you do want to order a proof copy before you commit to your big order. Even a .pdf doesn’t show you what the physical book is going to look like, and there will always be more errors to catch.
6. Full justification is necessary if you want the book to look competent and professional, and if you want the full justification to look competent and professional, you have to hyphenate. Whereupon, MS Word’s auto-hyphenation will sabotage you by mishyphenating an astonishing array of words, thereby making you look like an illiterate n00b.
7. Something I knew already: book production is a lot of work if you’re going to do it right, even when you’re keeping things very simple and taking the path of least resistance wherever possible. (And for this project, I don’t even have to think about distribution and marketing.)
This is why authors want there to be publishers, and why publishers, despite the sometimes egregious flaws in the system, are at bottom a good thing. Because there is an ENORMOUS YAWNING ABYSS OF DIFFERENCE between a complete manuscript of a story and a book, and the more time the author has to spend thinking about the book, the fewer stories s/he can write.
I’m not knocking self-publishing–obviously, since I’m participating in it. What I’m saying is that if you’re going to do a good job, it’s difficult and time-consuming. And although I’m happy to be doing this specific project and do not begrudge in the slightest the time and effort, I’d still rather be writing.
Finding the Story in the Story
This morning, I threw myself upon the mercy of Twitter, begging for topics to write about this month. And Twitter, in the form of my friend Victoria Janssen, answered; quoth Victoria: figuring out the real story of the story. This is a great topic. This is a topic I would actually love to see other people write about so that I can read their answers. Because I don’t know that mine is the best way to think about it. But as of right now, it’s the way I’ve got.
Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I taught Creative Writing. This meant, among other things, that I spent a lot of time there for a year or two reading books about creative writing. Some of them were helpful, some not so much. Some of them infuriated me. And one of them taught me something I’ve been using ever since.
The book was The Triggering Town, by the poet Richard Hugo (available at Powells). I bought it for five dollars in a used bookstore. It’s a skinny book; it doesn’t take long to read. And in it, Hugo deploys a pair of concepts that I have found incredibly useful: the triggering subject (hence the title of his book) and the real subject. I’m going to go ahead and quote him here, since I’ve found the passage, and if I didn’t quote it, I’d just be paraphrasing it all over the place anyway:
A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.
(Hugo 4)
For the word “poem,” you can substitute “story,” and it works just as well. At least, in my experience. Because you have the thing that you want to write the story about–dragons, for example–and then you have the thing that you discover in the course of writing that is the thing you need to say about dragons. To show you what I mean, here are four different stories about dragons, two written by Elizabeth Bear, and two written by me:
“Draco campestris” (Monette)
“Orm the Beautiful” (Bear)
“After the Dragon” (Monette)
“Snow Dragons” (Bear)
All four of these stories have the same triggering subject: dragons. And all four of them have quite different real subjects, which the reader (like the writer) discovers in the process of experiencing the story.
Triggering subjects are a dime a dozen. Seriously. I have a word processor full of them. The hard part is never coming up with something to write about. The hard part is making the leap from the triggering subject to the real subject.
Some stories, like some poems, never do. They’re all surface and WYSIWYG. Sometimes, reading those, you find the place where the real subject tried to emerge, like a soft, shy, velvet moth from a cocoon, and died because the writer was not attentive, not receptive. Hugo says, just after the passage I quoted, that the writer doesn’t always know the real subject, and that may be true. (I think it’s more accurate to say that the writer may not know all the real subjects; some of them may be pointed out to her by readers. But I do kind of think she should have at least an idea of the deep parts of her work.) But whether the writer can articulate the real subject of not, he has to be open to it. He has to be willing to let it spread its wings, and he has to be willing to listen to its inaudible wing-beats.
I don’t have any good advice for how you convince the real subject to come out. That’s the part over which I personally have the least conscious control. Forcing it doesn’t work for me; I know that much. That way lies didactic literature and propaganda. I’ve found that I have to be willing to listen to the weird ideas my brain throws off around the story; even though they frequently seem unrelated or just plain nuts, they’re often the places where the real story is tearing its way through. And I have to be willing to change the story, to let go of my preconceived ideas about what I’m doing and follow the moth into the darkness. It’s scary, but I always get better stories when I do.
And for me, it helps just to have a vocabulary, to be able to say, “This is my triggering subject.” It lets me clear a bunch of distracting stuff out of the way, and it reminds me that no matter how cool my triggering subject is, there’s still a real subject to generate, and that that’s the thing that will make my story worth reading. That’s the story I’m trying to tell.
—
WORKS CITED
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. 1979. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992.
I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!
So, last month, I issued a plea for topics, and Sora Kess answered with an excellent question regarding Evil Hordes. There was a panel at World Fantasy, which I did not attend, in which apparently the consensus was that all secondary world fantasies have Evil Hordes in them. (If this is a misrepresentation, I apologize.)
Now, I reject pretty emphatically the idea that all secondary world fantasies have–or should have–Evil Hordes. That’s the same as saying all secondary world fantasies have quests. Or Dark Lords. Or magical MacGuffins. Certainly, many secondary world fantasies do have these things–hence Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland–but by the same token, surely the Tough Guide is a suggestion that maybe we could do something else instead? The fact that many secondary world fantasies have quests and Dark Lords and and magical MacGuffins and Evil Hordes, doesn’t mean that any of these things is a requirement. Or even a desideraturm.
In the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis), I was working deliberately to write secondary world fantasy that didn’t have all those things. I didn’t entirely succeed–the Virtu is, yes, a great big magical MacGuffin, and my poor protagonists do spend an awful lot of time tramping back and forth across the continent. But no one sends them or makes prophecies about them, and they’re not saving the world. Malkar Gennadion is evil and powerful (and kind of two dimensional, honestly), but he’s not a Dark Lord. And the wizards of the Bastion, with their military hierarchy and their ideology, still aren’t an Evil Horde.
(The relationship between the Mirador and the Bastion was based on my memories of growing up during the last decade of the Cold War. So the characters may think of the Bastion as an Evil Horde, but they aren’t, any more than the Russians were.)
In A Companion to Wolves, the trolls are, really, the epitome of an Evil Horde: implacable, inhuman, they don’t even have individual identities. But it turns out that to them, the humans (and wolves) are just as incomprehensibly alien and terrifying, and for me (as I do not pretend to speak for my co-author Elizabeth Bear), the end of the book–when Isolfr chooses to spare the troll kitten–is a rejection of Evil Horde-ism and its inevitable companion, genocide.
What Evil Hordes do is reduce human conflict to Us vs. Them. Moreover, since we’re talking about fantasy, “They” don’t have to be human at all, which makes the whole ethical dimension of the conflict ever so much simpler. No one agonizes, for instance, about the ethics of chopping zombies into mincemeat. It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a no-brainer.
Zombies are kind of the quintessence of Evil Horde-ism. They are an inarguable, external threat that can only be dealt with by wholesale extermination. Negotiating with zombies is not an option. Generally, there’s neither room, time, nor need for debate, and we may be comfortably certain that any character who tries to espouse a more liberal position will be the first person eaten: not just mistaken, but totally, irrefutably, cosmologically, capital-W Wrong.
Zombies, of course, do other cultural work, which the Evil Hordes of secondary world fantasy may, or may not, participate in; the crucial point for my argument is that zombies make it very easy to see the dehumanizing impulse at work. George Lucas’ Stormtroopers are another readily accessible example. Their quite literal facelessnsess (and that handy Nazi reference, just in case) makes their deaths unproblematic and meaningless. Like zombies, they’re there to provide an external threat, and they’re there to be killed.
Fundamentally, these two things are the purposes of an Evil Horde: an external threat and an excuse for bloodshed (metaphorical in the case of Stormtroopers, who don’t even bleed). An enemy that it’s uncomplicatedly good (ethically, morally, narratively) to kill. And, by extension, good to exterminate, 100%, to the last zombie, Stormtrooper, or orc.
It should be clear by now that I have ethical and philosophical objections to Evil Hordes and the policy of genocide they lead to. I don’t think Evil Hordes necessarily represent any specific human cultural group (although they certainly can), but considering all the real world examples of genocide the last two centuries have seen, I think any pattern of thought that makes it easier to get to genocide as an answer–even, or perhaps especially, when divorced from reality–needs to be interrogated very carefully and approached with caution. If you’re going to use it, you should use it in full mindfulness of its baggage and its underlying darkness.
I am not, however, calling for an end to zombie stories. (I may be calling for an end to stories that treat nonhuman species like zombies; I’ll have to get back to you on that.) I understand entirely that sometimes we all need things to be just that simple and just that violent, and I think zombies are a fantastic way to deal with that in fiction, whether text, movie, or game. But I also think that that’s a catharsis, not either (a.) a plot or (b.) a useful solution to the ineradicable problem of conflict between humans. Which is to say, once you finish killing the zombies, you still have to settle who among the survivors gets the last spoonful of peanut butter. And that peanut butter is going to be the interesting conflict in your story, besides.*
Pepole who are not like us (whoever “we” are) may be frightening, but the reactionary answer of “Kill them all!” is, frankly, a bad answer. Fantasy, as a genre, needs to start coming up with better ones.
—
*For the record, I would like to point out that zombie novels like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker already know this.
Fiction, History, and Tombstone
Last month on the seventh, I was on my way to Tucson to spend a week hanging out and doing touristy things with friends. This month, I want to talk about one of those touristy things, namely the town of Tombstone, Arizona, and the questions that Tombstone made me think about.
Tombstone is famous for the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral–and that right there is an example of the thing that fascinates me about Tombstone, because, in fact, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral did not happen at the O.K. Corral. It happened half a block away, in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House. Now, on one level, this is only a detail: why get worked up over whether it was the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or only the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral? But, from a different perspective, the place a gunfight happened is kind of an important detail about that gunfight. And, in the larger picture, this piece of misinformation, trivial though it may seem, is symptomatic. Nearly every detail about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is subject to this kind of uncertainty, from the exact events of the fight itself, to the motives of the participants, to that simplest and yet most difficult of questions, the question fundamental and beloved of the Western (a genre one of whose taproots is sunk deep in the clusterfuck of October 26, 1881): who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
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The important thing to remember about the Gunfight at (or near) the O.K. Corral is that it breeds misinformation like stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Some of this is due to deliberate lies, like the farrago of nonsense Ike Clanton produced in court; some of it is due to the fact that Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury were hardly dead before they, and the Earps, became symbols and pawns in the vicious political fighting between the Democrats and Republicans of the Arizona Territory; some of it is due to the inevitable erosion which the passing of time causes to the human memory. Wyatt Earp didn’t try to tell anyone his version until he was in his seventies, and other participants or near-participants likewise didn’t commit their stories to paper, or an interviewer’s tape recorder, until so much time had passed that it would be miraculous if there weren’t mistakes, conflations, narrative splices, and all the rest of the changes, subtle and otherwise, that go towards turning a historical event into first a story and then a legend. And even those witnesses who testified before Judge Spicer–and who were doing their best to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth–could give only partial views. And they contradicted each other just as much as they contradicted the versions presented by the participants. The truism about the untrustworthiness of eyewitness testimony is amply proven by the evidence of Tombstone. The entire thing is an object lesson in the action of the unreliable narrator.
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We all know Han Solo shot first, but did Wyatt Earp?
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It’s difficult, if not impossible, to condense the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral into a manageable precis. I can tell you, for instance that Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, along with Doc Holliday, confronted Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House; that when the dust cleared, Frank was dead, Tom and Billy were dying, Virgil and Morgan were wounded, Doc has been creased along the hip, Ike had fled, and Wyatt was unharmed. But that’s not a story. I can tell you that there’s no agreement on who shot first, or on how many of the Clanton/McLaury party were armed, or on whether they tried to surrender. But the story is in the why and the why of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is . . . It’s partial and complicated and I think it’s one reason why so many stories have been told about this gunfight.
Fiction likes actions to have comprehensible, consistent and, insofar as possible, singular motives; furthermore it wants the motives and the actions to belong to the same people. But that’s not how real history and real people work. From a fiction-writer’s perspective, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral doesn’t work. It’s too messy. Ike Clanton, who’d spent the previous twelve to twenty-four hours telling everyone who would listen that he wanted a showdown with the Earps, was clearly unprepared when he actually got one: he was unarmed. The McLaurys and Ike’s brother Billy may not ever have understood why they were fighting. (Nobody else was entirely clear on that either.) The Earps and Holliday were responding to Ike’s threats, but they were also acting on a piece of spectacular miscommunication by John Behan, the Sheriff of Cochise County, who led them to believe he had disarmed the Clantons and the McLaurys when in fact he had not. They weren’t ready for the gunfight, either. And as for Ike’s motivations in stirring up the hornet’s nest, from what we know, they don’t even make sense. About the most useful thing a historian can say about Ike Clanton’s inner workings on October 25-6 is, “Well, he was drunk.”
And so people make motives. Ike did it in his testimony, although he made them all Wyatt’s motives, not his own. Wyatt himself was prone to conspiracy theories, especially as an old man. Witnesses, gossip-mongers, story-tellers, historians, novelists (and on this particular subject, the dividing line between those latter two categories is not nearly as clear as one might like): everyone provides a different framework in which to place the gunfight, some plausible, some ludicrous. Although it’s nonsense on the face of it to think the Earps were involved in robbing stage-coaches, the idea persists, and it persists because it provides that singular, comprehensible motive that fiction wants, and it gives the motive to the men who acted.
Human beings are pattern-making animals. History and fiction are two of the ways in which we seek to pattern our lives, and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral shows the deep permability of the boundary where one leaves off and the other takes over. Because that boundary is where the discourse about the gunfight always has and always will take place.
Everyperson Blues
It’s the day after the Feast of the Epiphany and it’s snowing like a mad bastard. I have 85,000 words of The Goblin Emperor, which is due on February 1st. My word limit is 110,000 words, which means I need to write the equivalent of a novella this month.
Good times.
And, of course, what I’ve mostly been doing in this, the coldest and darkest part of the year, is playing a game called Torchlight. It’s a sort of Diablo meets Angband dungeon crawler with a horror marinade and a generous garnish of steampunk. I love being able to wander around !Moria killing undead dwarves with a pistol. Seriously. Never gets old. And it sends me on quests. I am stupidly, stupidly easy for a game that will send me on quests.
I’ve been thinking about that and story-telling, and the way that my relationship with a story is different from my relationship with a game. Because a novelization of Torchlight is not something I would read. The characters are two-dimensional, the storyline is utterly predictable (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), and the narrative structure is nothing but quests. None of which is a complaint, mind you, because Torchlight is not a novel, and I don’t mind that the characters and the plot don’t get in the way of the game’s real business, which is monster-slaying.
The game’s real business, in other words, is not the story. Because it’s, you know, a game.
But how about the real business of a story? Where I’m going with this is an attack on my least favorite piece of writing advice, the one that says “Readers want to identify with the protagonist. Therefore, your protagonist must be an Everyperson, so that everyone who reads your novel can identify with him/her.” There are a lot of things I disagree with here:
1. If the reader wants it, the writer has to give it to them.
I don’t think that a writer should go out of his or her way to deny readers what they want. But I think it’s a mistake to write with one eye on the gallery all the time. Especially as what actual readers actually want is next door to impossible to predict.
And sometimes, what readers think they want, and say they want, will not be as satisfying to them as something they haven’t thought of. That, after all, is why we want new stories. But you can’t get there if you’re afraid to go beyond the boundaries of “what readers want.”
2. Readers want to identify with the protagonist.
I know that some readers do get great pleasure out of reading in this way, reading as a method of self-insertion into fantasy, but not all readers do. I personally prefer to read about people I don’t identify with–because, honestly, if my own life was that fascinating to me, why would I be reading fiction? I think it’s more accurate and useful to say that readers want to empathize with protagonists. We want to feel for and with the people we read about. But that’s not the same as identifying with them.
Some of the greatest reading pleasure I had as a teenager was in reading about characters who were NOT LIKE me. And not just the characters who were elves or aliens or vampires, either, but the characters who were Australian, or who were living in the Depression, or who were members of large families–or who weren’t well-behaved over-achievers. I loved that they were different. I loved that they gave my imagination more stuff to work with. I most disliked the books with protagonists most like me.
And that’s only me, of course, but I don’t think I’m the only one.
3. Readers only identify–or empathize–with protagonists who are NOT UNLIKE them.
Notice, please, the difference between LIKE and NOT UNLIKE. Because it is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE, and it’s the difference that results in protagonists who have no identifying characteristics, or who only have “quirks.” Readers can and do empathize with a vast panorama of characters–frequently to the bewilderment of writers who thought that X was a walk-on, or a villain. Frequently, that empathy comes not from any way in which the reader is NOT UNLIKE the character, but in a likeness that runs well beneath the surface, in the way the character isn’t afraid to make jokes about serious things, or the way he or she endures adversity. These are the things you cannot predict as a writer, and they’re the things that you can’t get to with a formula. We are most likely (I think) to empathize with characters who feel real to us–it only makes sense, doesn’t it? And Everyperson will never feel real, because s/he isn’t. S/he is an attempt to be all things to all people, and if we don’t like that in our politicians, why should we want it in our protagonists?
4. [and this is implied, rather than directly stated] The real business of your story is not your protagonist.
Because if it’s the real business of your story, you’re not creating it based on what your hypothetical readers are hypothetically going to want. The protagonist, in this model, is merely a vehicle for getting readers to read whatever it is your story is really about, whether that’s the mystery your protagonist is going to solve, or the werewolf your protagonist is going to fall in love with, or the fabulous underground kingdom your protagonist is going to explore.
Now, I don’t for a moment deny that the real business of a story can be a mystery or a werewolf or a fabulous underground kingdom. But I think, and am going to go on thinking, that this is a BOTH/AND situation, not an EITHER/OR. Sacrificing the protagonist will never make the story better. I’m greedy; I want everything–the mystery and the werewolf and the fabulous underground kingdom and a protagonist who’s a real person, who I can empathize with and thus come to love.
Because, for me, all those things are the real business of a story.
