Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 11

Poetry Thursday: Welcome to Summer

Claude McKay is another poet I’ve never heard of before, who was writing long enough ago that his works are out of copyright. It says here at the link:

The son of peasant farmers [in Jamaica], McKay was infused with pride in his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to write verse in Jamaican dialect.

I think it’s a very good idea to focus on the Romantic poets at some point, if you want to write poetry at all. I actually just stumbled across this because we’re here at the entrance to summer; June is right around the corner, so I googled “summer poetry” or something of the sort. This was one of the poems that popped up, and I think you can see the influence of the Romantics.

Summer Morn in New Hampshire

All yesterday it poured, and all night long
    I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
    Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
    Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
    And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
    The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
    The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
    But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
    And I was blind with hunger for your love.

*****

Here’s another, much fiercer

*****

If We Must Die

If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

*****

Let me try to find one in Jamaican dialect … nothing at Poetry Foundation seems to fit the bill … Okay, these were published in a collection called Songs of Jamaica, available here. Here’s a poem from this collection:

*****

Taken Aback

Let me go, Joe, for I want go home:
   Can’t stan’ wid you,
   For pa might go come;
An’ if him only hab him rum,
I don’t know whatever I’ll do.

I must go now, for it’s gettin’ night
   I am afraid, 
   An’ tis not moonlight:
Give me de last hug, an’ do it tight;
Me pa gwin’ go knock off me head. 

No, Joe, don’t come!–you will keep me late,
   An’ pa might be 
   In him sober state;
Him might get vex’ an’ lock up de gate,
Den what will becomin’ of me?

Go wid you, Joe? — you don’t lub me den!
   I shame’ o’ you–
   Gals caan’ trust you men!
An’ I b’en tekin’ you fe me frien’;
Good-night, Joe, you’ve proven untrue. 

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Thursday: Welcome to Summer appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Pulitzer Prize Winners: Have You Read Any?

So, this recent post included the question: Who are the latest three Pulitzer winners for fiction? And of course I had no idea and not a lot of interest, but some of you looked up the winners and commented, and suddenly I got more interested. This is partly because I LOVED The Killer Angels, which I hadn’t realized won the Pulitzer. I was so surprised to see it mentioned that I wasn’t sure it was the same book until I checked. It is. It’s an amazingly good book about three days in the Civil War. The movie based on this book, Gettysburg, was also excellent.

So I thought, fine, let’s see what else has won the Pulitzer. Here’s a Wikipedia page that lists the winners in chronological order. Besides The Killer Angels, I have read:

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, which I liked a lot and admired. I’ve read a few others by Pearl Buck (Peony and The Townsman), and I have to agree with the Pulitzer judges that she was an amazing writer. Gosh, she wrote a ton of novels! A lot more than I realized. I’ve got Pavilion of Women on my TBR pile. . Death in the Castle is just $1.99 at Amazon right now. So is Letters from Peking.

The Old Man and the Sea, by Hemingway, which was assigned in high school and which I didn’t hate as much as all the other books that were assigned in high school. I didn’t know it had won the Pulitzer! It’s really short, under 30,000 words! It’s a novella, and not even a long novella! I’m surprised the Pulitzer considers works that short, though I’m also realizing now that “Fiction” doesn’t specify novel and for all I know the judges have awarded the Pulitzer to short stories. Oh, yes, I see a collection of short stories by Jean Stafford is on this list.

To Kill a Mockingbird, which was also assigned in high school, and which I did not like and don’t remember well.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which I read voluntarily and … sort of liked. It is almost but not quite unrelentingly grim. Also, it makes no sense. I mean, the setting makes no sense. It’s post-apocalyptic, but … it doesn’t make any sense! Everything living has died except a tiny number of humans making their way through this exceedingly bleak landscape, and what caused this catastrophe and how this many people are still alive and how they’re staying alive given there’s nothing whatsoever left anywhere, all this is totally unclear. I guess drawing a rational setting was not McCarthy’s aim. Also, this is the author who thinks punctuation is passe and doesn’t use anything except, occasionally, periods.

That’s it for me. I’m not going to rush out and read anything else here either, although, I mean, if anybody here pointed emphatically to something on the list, I would at least add a sample to my TBR pile and who knows, maybe I would read it.

Meanwhile! Did you know that the judges withheld an award in 2012? I didn’t know that. The judges cited lack of quality, which is quite an insult to the panel that selects the nominees, I must say — though the Pulitzer has been withheld a total of 12 times, so it’s not super unusual. The link goes to a post written by one of the people who selected the nominees. Here is how a thirty-second google search says it works: There’s a 20-person panel, from which three people are selected to choose three books to nominate. These three nominees are then referred back to the panel, and the remaining 17 (or so, apparently) people then act as judges to select the Pulitzer winner for that year. If some details here are wrong, sorry, you can do your own much more careful google search and find out how it really works.

Anyway, from the linked post:

The nominees were David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, which was not only unfinished at the time of Wallace’s death but left in disarray, and brilliantly pieced together by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; Denis Johnson’s grim but transcendent Train Dreams, set in the American West at the turn of the nineteenth century; and an accomplished first novel, Swamplandia!, about an eccentric Southern family, by the alarmingly young writer Karen Russell.

I’m sure you want to know how old Karen Russel was at the time. She was twenty-nine. I admit that this does seem young to me, but not shockingly young.

Three hundred books were under consideration. There’s no hint of how those three hundred were chosen, but I assume SFF novels are never considered except when critics are pretending it’s not SF, as with Butler’s Kindred, for example. Or The Road, for that matter. Ditto for other quote commercial fiction unquote.

But, back to the nominees that were dismissed by the panel in 2012. Once again from the linked post:

I was, as it happened, the first of us to read “The Pale King,” and well before I’d finished it I found myself calling Maureen and Susan and saying, “The first paragraph of the Wallace book is more powerful than any entire book we’ve read so far.”

Consider its opening line:

Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Here’s a line from Train Dreams:

All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he’d ever witnessed waking—the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utter still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.

And from Swamplandia:

Nights in the swamp were dark and star-lepered—our island was thirty-odd miles from the mainland—and although your naked eye could easily find the ball of Venus and the sapphire hairs of the Pleiades, our mother’s body was just lines, a smudge against the palm trees.

To which my response is, “star-lepered”? Anyway, I do like the first two, though I’ve no intention of rushing out and reading either. The panel of judges never really laid out why they didn’t award the prize to any of these three OR ask for a fourth nominee, which they could have done. Why didn’t they? I hereby declare they were jerks, not for failing to pick a winner, but for failing to request a fourth nominee and then not picking a winner. I can’t offhand imagine any non-jerk motive for that.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Pulitzer Prize Winners: Have You Read Any? appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

All About Description

A series of posts about description on Patricia Wrede’s blog:

Fashions in description

Fast forward to the 1800s, when the printing press and the spread of literacy made books available to a much wider audience, many of whom had never traveled more than a few miles from home. Descriptions of places became longer and far more detailed, in an attempt to paint a mental picture for readers of a place or event which they had never (and might never) have seen:

“One doesn’t test these truths every day, but they form part of the air one breathes…The colour the thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the world; they mingle with the troubled light to which the straight, ungarnished aperture in one’s dull, undistinctive housefront affords a passage, and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset—as you never see any source of radiance you can’t in the least tell—all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy.”—description of London from English Hours, Henry James

And so on, shifting to a discussion about description in modern novels, where one size does not fit all. Then –>

Description in general

This post is about chunks of description versus working little dabs of description into the story. Also about choosing details to include, and how that depends on the character. This post is making me think of various openings from Jennifer Crusie novels, such as Welcome to Temptation:

Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.

Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.

And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.

Look at the details! It’s not just which details, it’s the sheer liveliness of the prose. Plus the tone. “Happily,” “bright hair ruffling in the wind,” “cheerfully,” “cotton clouds bounced across the sky” — and all those details combined with the trivial violence of a minor car accident — we know it was minor because otherwise something more important than sunglasses would have been broken — plus the line about Dempseys and jail. This is just such a fun example of working the description into the story.

Anyway, then the next post about characterization at Wrede’s blog is description through characterization, a great topic.

When a viewpoint character enters a place, they aren’t just seeing it. They’re experiencing it, and they register different parts of the experience as they become more personally relevant. If I walk into my sister’s house when it’s bitterly cold and windy out, the first thing I register is that it’s nice and warm. I’ll notice the smell of the curry next, and only then realize that she’s rearranged the furniture (and if the furniture is where I expect it to be, I won’t notice it at all unless there’s stuff piled in the chair where I usually sit). On a similar day, if I’m really hungry when I get there, I’ll notice the curry-smell first, and the warmth second.

I particularly like this comment:

A tough-guy character who rarely says anything other than “yup” or “nope” isn’t likely to comment—verbally or mentally—that the cerulean-and-cream brocade curtains remind him of the Greek Key china his Aunt Sophia brought with her when she emigrated forty-two years ago. 

Cerulean is such a wonderful word. I need to use that some time.

Wrede adds that doing description as part of characterization is tough because:

This makes it a poor choice for writers who like ornate descriptions such as “the freshness of morning breathed and shimmered in that lofty chamber, chasing the blue and dusky shades of departed night to the corners and recesses,” unless they can actually write a character who talks and thinks like that all the time.

Which I can and do. For me, that’s something I enjoy. Personally, I think the best example of this in anything I’ve written is surely the Death’s Lady series, because diction and allusion are just so different for everyone from Talasayan compared to everyone from America, and I had to stick to Talasayan style for almost all of Shines Now. This wasn’t precisely difficult, but I was aware of it all the way through. This:

He spoke in a calm, level tone, quietly enough that no one farther than a few steps away would hear. “Nolas-e, I thank you for your great mercy, which is far more than I or any of my people deserve. I hope you will continue to hold out your hand to my people even if you judge me harshly for my temerity in asking for yet greater mercy. I mean no insolence when I ask, Nolas-e, that the dead past be left to lie buried in its grave. My name is Kuomat; I have never been called by any other name. I will neither look back through the years nor recall a time when another man might have been called by another name. I will not face Nolas-Kuomon; not in Nerinesir nor in Chaisa nor in Kandun nor in any other place. I will not face her and you will not demand it of me. If you find these strictures acceptable, I will swear to your service and accept whatever judgment you see fit. If otherwise, I will set my face toward Lord Death’s dark country and await his judgment and the judgment of God.”

is nothing that any modern American character could possibly say. And THEN on top of that, Kuomat is also a distinctive character who is very different from, say, Mitereh, even though they’re both authoritative and assured. I’m very fond of Kuomat. That’s one reason we see ALL the vigils in This Hour — because I didn’t want to skip showing Kuomat, and that led to just adding one vignette after another, for everyone I could think of.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post All About Description appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: So there’s the newsletter sorted out for the rest of the year

Okay, so this past week, I decided to write a few more chapters of Sekaran. I’ve got 7 chapters complete at this point, plus very brief notes for another five chapters, but even if I work on something totally different THIS week, that’s enough for the newsletter. I mean, two more chapters of This Hour … or maybe I’ll just drop the rest of the story in the June newsletter, since it seems like it’s time to move on to something else. Then a chapter of Sekaran every month and there you go, that’s the rest of 2025.

Whether I’ll write the rest of it this year or not, I don’t really know. It wouldn’t be hard. I know what I’m doing with it, unless alternate inspiration strikes.

It’s a bit unusual. I’ve said that, right? One of the things that ordinarily ups the wordcount is transitions, and just generally getting from Point A to Point B. Adding new characters is the other thing that increases wordcount. While both of those things are relevant for Sekaran, they’re a lot less relevant than usual because this story isn’t exactly a story in the ordinary sense. It’s a series of vignettes and scenes with very little transitional material in between. Also, there’s not exactly a plot. Instead, every chapter involves a meeting between Sekaran and Aras that occurs at an important moment, and the throughline involves the evolution of their relationship from the time they first meet as boys to the time — this is the plan, I haven’t written this part yet — that Sekaran becomes king. That will carry us into the future, obviously. The rest of the series will catch up to that point eventually, I expect.

So it’s been fun to work on, but I do consider this a minor work, not a real novel. It’ll probably wind up about 200 pages (I know, right? But it’s possible I’m right about that for once). I’ll publish it as a book, I expect, but I’ll also have to handle the description in a way that makes it clear what this is, and isn’t.

Stuff that slowed me down a trifle last week: four extra Cavaliers came to stay with me for variable lengths of time, three of my friend Deb’s dogs (Leo, who is the father, grandfather, great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather of most of my dogs, plus Nick, an incredibly sweet but pushy dog, and Bon Bon, who is also incredibly sweet and much less pushy) and a puppy of mine from a few year’s past, Leda’s Tiny Boy Four. Who is no longer tiny AT ALL, which is why it’s unwise to name the smallest puppy in the litter Tinkerbell or Little Bug or whatever comes to mind in that general realm of names. TB4 (real name Piolo) will be with me nearly a month, while the other three only stayed for a week and have already departed for their Real Home. I’m almost sorry to see them go because one of them became instant buddies with Piolo, who is going to miss him. I’ll post a short clip at my Patreon. Meanwhile —

Leda with Boy One

Still spring here, not summer — amazingly cool weather most days. Here’s my favorite tree that’s flowering right now:

This is a Japanese tree lilac, Syringa reticulata, which is indeed in the same genus as the ordinary shrub lilacs you see everywhere in the spring. Not scented, or not enough to notice; BUT, as you see, a handsome small tree. We had two trees of various kinds die in that planter before I chose to try again with this one, which has been utterly trouble-free. I believe this is probably ‘Ivory Silk,’ a common variety in the nursery trade, and I highly, highly recommend it for a completely trouble-free, non-quirky, adaptable, cooperative small tree. The flowers look whiter than this generally. They’re barely opening here, and the cloudy weather turned the flowers to this creamy color.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: So there’s the newsletter sorted out for the rest of the year appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Important authors

I tripped over this post, which made me laugh while also making an important point: A reminder about what really matters

There are two “quizzes” below. Scroll slowly and read carefully to get the full effect. Note: It’s okay if you don’t know all the answers, just keep going.

1. Who are the 3 wealthiest writers in the world?
2. Who are the last 3 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature?
3. Who are the last 3 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
4. What are 5 of the “Top 10 Best Books” of last year?
5. What’s the latest book on shelves that was signed for a 7-figure deal?

***

Okay, how about it? Anybody answer any of those questions, or are they all blank? I bet you can anticipate the second “quiz,” can’t you? Here it is:

***

1. Who are your 3 favorite authors?
2. What are the last 3 books that made you laugh or cry?
3. What are the last 3 books that inspired you?
4. Which 5 books do you most frequently recommend?
5. What’s the last book that you stayed up until the wee hours of the night reading?

The author of the post — an author named Kristan Hoffman — is pushing back against the envy that can beset authors when they hear about prizes awards and big advances and so forth. Good for her.

Mind you, I don’t think I could name “my three favorite authors” because … how could I choose three? I honestly prefer questions phrased with more wiggle room, such as “Who are three of your favorite authors?” That way I feel free to pick three authors without necessarily deciding they’re really THE three. Then I can let the answer change depending on who I thought of at the moment the question was asked — Patricia McKillip, but the other two will probably vary.

Instead of “The last three books that made you laugh or cry,” I would prefer, “What’s one book that made you get up and go find the kleenix?” Then I can say, “The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson” without feeling like, I mean, am I forgetting something more recent? I can just name something that knocked me out of my chair, even if I read it a long time ago.

I don’t know what the last three books that inspired me would be, but I can say that I’m listening to The Crystal Cave audiobook, and I just hit the conversation between Merlin and Ambrosius, the one right after Merlin realizes Ambrosius is his father, and I thought, I could have written this. I love this. This is exactly how I would have written it. Now I’m thinking maybe this series might have been more influential for me than I ever realized. The description, the pacing, this fantastic, intense conversation, if I met Mary Stewart today, I would say, “Hey, you know what, thanks for writing the Merlin trilogy; I think it might have been a powerful influence on my writing.

The link, by the way, goes to the Chirp audiobook, because that audiobook is still $1.99 as of the time I wrote this post. It might be higher before this post goes live, because I’m going to schedule it for a few days from the time I’m writing this post.

What was the next question? Oh, what are five books that I frequently recommend. Okay, well, it depends on why I’m recommending the book, though! But The Hands of the Emperor is one, especially if someone wants to see great description. So is All Systems Red, for voice and catchiness.

The last question, well, I’m usually pretty committed to turning off the light between nine and ten. The clear awareness that lack of sleep is the single most reliable trigger for headaches means I stick to an extremely consistent schedule. Therefore, I literally don’t remember the last time I stayed up significantly late. It sure doesn’t happen very often.

How about you all? Any of the five questions, pick one and drop a recommendation in the comments.

Also, DOES anybody remember any of the recent winners of the Pulitzer for Fiction? Or whatever. I have no idea about any of those first five questions, and the linked post is right — I also don’t care. That’s as trivial to me as which football team won whatever game last year.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Important authors appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Poetry Thursday: Kipling

I had reason to look up a Kipling poem recently, and I thought you know what, let’s find a few poems that aren’t the ones that just jumped to your mind, as I assume some probably did. How about this one, which I’ve never seen before:

Rejection

1
'We will lay this thing here'
Thus spake the voice of the sea,
Murmuring wearily—
In the rock's ear—
2
Then the green laver rose,
Shook out her folds & cried,
Before the rising tide
'Let me repose—
3
Stir not my rest O sea,
With dead things in these silent deeps,
Surely wave tossed he sleeps
As heavily'—
4
The weedhung chambers then
Made answer—'O thou sea,
The beasts that feed in me
What need they men'—
5
Rock limpets cowering,
Murmured gloom shaded—'There is meat
Enough for all to eat
Bear hence this thing—
6
In thy strong arms O sea,
Out, even to the quicksands' brink,
It shall be that he sink—
There, utterly.'
7
'We will lay this thing here'
Thus spake the voice of the sea,
Ever persistently
In the rock's ear.

***

Wow, there are a lot of poems here! I’m not planning to count them, but I swear it looks like a thousand or so. Only 549, according to Google. Well, I think the linked site includes all of them. I’m throwing darts at this list, meaning I’m just picking by titles that seem appealing.

***

How the Day BrokeThe night was very silent, and the moon was going down, And the winds of dawn were chilling all the sea.The full tide turned in silver o'er the ridge's length of brown, When a little muffled figure left the dim-seen, sleeping town By the white road that leadeth to the sea.The night was very silent, and the tide was falling fast, And the dawn was breaking dimly o'er the sea;The early boats like shadows with their lanterns flitted past, And the little muffled figure by the sand-hills stayed at last, Where the waste land opens on the sea.The night is well-nigh ended, and the moon has gone to rest And the winds of dawn are lashing all the sea.But the weariness is over and the doubt is all confessed, And hope is re-arisen and the wrong is all redressed,But the little muffled figure lays her head upon his breast Who has waited for her coming by the sea.The night is passed and done with, and the day is cold and white As the loosed winds riot o'er the sea,But the woe is passed and done with as a shadow of the night, And the little muffled figure flitteth, singing, out of sight To the fishing-town that faces on the sea.Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Poetry Thursday: Kipling appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Now You’re Talking

From Writer Unboxed: Canine Enhancement of the Writing Life

These past weeks together have reminded me of the benefits of having canine companionship for my writing journey. The list is long but includes:

Dogs are the antidote to the sort of loneliness that can accompany the writing life.Dogs strictly enforce a routine, which is at the core of a productive writing discipline.Part of that routine includes getting their writer outdoors and walking. In nature if possible, where the ideas tend to flow and flourish.Dogs are sympathetic friends. When others can’t be bothered to care about a writerly low or failing, most dogs will sense your mood and seek to lift your spirits.Dogs won’t allow you to become too self-important. Nothing that happens in writing or publishing–good or bad–is more serious than a play session with the newest toy in the house.

All true! Related: The Stages of Lambchop

Happy puppy with new Lambchop

Sad puppy with destroyed Lambchop

Lambchop re-stuffed with fluff plus an empty water bottle, for that fun crunchiness

This is a different Lambchop post-destruction, resurrected as half a Lambchop.

These days, I add three or so Lambchops to the order every time I get petfood from Chewy. Also eighteen extra squeakers.

Would you like to guess how long it takes Joy to extract and chew up all five of the squeakers that come in a Lambchop toy? Now that she knows what she’s doing, less than 24 hours. I try to remember to take the toy away from her after the first frenzy of destruction so she can enjoy destroying it for several days instead of just one day. Once she’s torn it up, I stitch it back together , each time in a slightly different Frankensteinian way depending on just what’s left of the original toy.

We do have other toys around, which Joy also destroys in a disconsolate fashion after I throw away the useless remnants of the latest Lambchop.

I figure she’ll have outgrown destroying Lambchop toys in a few years, so she may as well have her share of fun destruction while she’s young enough to really enjoy it.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Now You’re Talking appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Beyond Accents

A post at Jane Friedman’s blog: Beyond the Accent: Writing Speech Patterns Authentically

This post is mostly about representation without offense, which is not as important to me because I’m mostly focused on secondary world fantasy, so accurate or responsible representation of whatever real-world group isn’t much of an issue. Here’s the part of this blog post that is still relevant even to secondary world fantasy:

Craft tips1. Follow Stephen King’s rule of restraint

Stephen King, master of character-revealing dialogue, advises using the lightest possible touch with dialect. In On Writing, King suggests indicating accent or impediment once or twice, then letting readers carry that voice in their heads. This approach respects readers’ intelligence while avoiding the distraction of constant phonetic spelling.

2. Focus on cadence and word choice

Instead of phonetic spelling, capture speech patterns through syntax, unique vocabulary, and sentence structure. A character might reverse word order, use distinctive phrases, or favor certain expressions without requiring readers to decipher unusual spelling.

***

I think this is good advice, because of course I do. I honestly think posts like this one at Friedman’s blog would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from showing examples from real books rather than just listing tips. What good does it do to say, “capture speech patterns through syntax”? You have to DEMONSTRATE how that works, because obviously you do, or how can anybody get a feel for what this even means?

Even the most basic, artificial examples would be helpful, such as —

“Kindly leave your shoes by the door. My mother prefers no one wear shoes in the house.”

vs

“No shoes in the house! Toss ’em over there!”

This is enough to clarify the use of speech patterns to capture character. But you know what ELSE is missing from the linked post? The word “register.”

Syntax can and should do a lot more than indicate the broad geographic region from which your character is from. “He’s from Georgia” is a start, but people hardly ever seem to mention register, and that tells you a lot more than “from Georgia.”

Is your protagonist a literature professor from Georgia? A state senator from Georgia? A teenager from the nicest Atlanta suburb talking to an adult he wants to impress? Same teenager talking to his friends? A teenager living with meth-dealer parents in Atlanta? A guy who joined the marines five years ago and is home on leave? Obviously each of the above protagonists would have distinctive syntax, not based on region, but based on register — which means the spectrum from super informal to extremely formal.

Also, this character’s internal thoughts ought to be consistent with his speech, and if you’re writing in close third person, that matters, because a whole lot of the narration should also be filtered through the protagonist and that means the whole narration is flavored by that character’s register.

We ought to see more blog posts about register. There are a few. Here’s one: Register: Language Formality in Creative Writing.

In modern English, words of Germanic origin lower register, while French or Latin vocabulary raises the register. Latin-derived words are often slightly higher in register than the French. Many English words have Germanic, French, and Latin synonyms that can be interchanged to affect register. … So bring up is lower-register than mention; put in is lower-register than insert.

From the same post:

A primary way punctuation affects register is the use or avoidance of contractions and abbreviations. Contractions and abbreviations are informal language features, and one of the quickest ways to lower register is to add them. … simpler, shorter sentences equate with lower register … The more a sentence employs subordinate or dependent clauses, the more formal it becomes.

And so forth. It’s a good post — we need more like it!

For secondary world fantasy, and also for far-future SF and for that matter historicals, a somewhat related language issue has to do with allusions, metaphors, and slang, because all of that should shift from modern American usage as well (unless you want your world to seem a lot like modern America). I thought that the TV show Andromeda showcased quite good use of modern American language, including slang in an SF setting, and I thought this was one way the show demonstrated to the viewer that it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, not to be taken all that seriously. Language like that wouldn’t work at all well if the author was trying to get the reader to take the setting and the story more seriously.

I focused on register — and allusion, which is a lot more difficult, at least for me — in the Death’s Lady series, of course. I mean, in all my books; it’s just this is the series where I focused a lot of allusion and similes and everything else having to do with style, in addition to register.

CJC did a great job with slang — and register — in lots of her books, particularly Heavy Time. Isn’t there a site where you can get this book as an ebook? I can’t find it with five minutes of poking at Google, so does anybody recall where that is? Anyway, register is a big deal in her Fortress series, of course, and that is available in ebook form. I don’t actually recommend the fifth book in the series, which is unnecessary and also one of the few CJC books I really disliked.

Let me see. Okay, here’s a post about slang: The Jargon and Slang of the Fantastic

Worldbuilding is more than misty mountains, crumbling castles, dripping neon cityscapes, and talking rats. It’s also about psychology and language, and the language equation includes the everyday corruptions of jargon and slang.

I’m on board with this.

Invented words, if used, must fit the established mood and tone of the work. What we hear in Middle Earth is old and new language, not jargon or slang. At least, not that I can recall. In Tolkien’s world that works best; the language has a high, formal tone, established from the start. Hobbit words evoke comfort and country charm. Elvish words evoke grace and elegance. The words of Man evoke solidity and practicality.

Well, of course, Tolkien was a past master at all this, including, very definitely, register. The Lord of the Rings is practically a master class in Register, use of in secondary-world fantasy.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Beyond Accents appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Update: WHEW FINISHED

Which means, of course, finished until I get comments back. But I sent the full draft of HEDESA to the earliest readers this past Friday, and let me tell you, I was glad to let it go.

I mean, of course: Let it go for now. As soon as I get back comments, I will –>

A) Pick a preorder date for Amazon, allowing a minimum of two weeks’ lead time so I can release it at my Patreon first. Three or four weeks would be better. And,

B) Begin secondary revision. And the preorder date actually depends A LOT on early feedback, because obviously if I realize I’m going to need to do a ton of secondary revision, then the preorder date will have to move back, whereas if secondary revision looks like it will be basically quick and simple, then I can plan to release the book earlier.

This is why I can’t set up the preorder date that far in advance. Unless I’m really, really confident about a book, and then I don’t worry about it. I was extremely confident about Marag, less confident about Rihasi, and again I’m less confident about Hedesa. That is, I’m confident about the entire front half and part of the back half, but, well, we’ll see, that’s all.

AND

Because I’m confident about the front half, I’ve scheduled chapters to go live at my Patreon every Tuesday until the middle of June, meaning June 17th because that’s a Tuesday. At that point, I’ll either release more chapters OR, and I hope this is where I am at that point, I’ll release the book itself. In the meantime, I have very much enjoyed releasing chapters there! It’s fun to think of readers hitting bits I particularly enjoyed writing.

Those early chapters are going to be revised, I’m sure, but I think the changes will be minimal. That’s my prediction. We’ll all find out soon enough!

MEANWHILE

Ironically, I sent off the Hedesa draft on the last day of the spring semester. I’m off this week and next week, and OBVIOUSLY what I ought to do is write … it’s fourteen days … half a book or AT LEAST make major progress on a book. However, what I’m actually going to do is take a break and read two or three of the books I’ve been wanting to read for the past age, and then we’ll see.

Things I need to do soon-ish, not including Hedesa in any way:

A) I have two more chapters of This Hour that I can put into my newsletter, after which I will need something new. What will it be? I don’t want to start putting chapters of Sekaran into the newsletter until I have more of it written. Maybe I should write more of that? Or a couple short stories that stand alone? Not sure.

B) I have a complete fantasy novel sitting on my computer that I wrote back in, I think 2017 or so and haven’t looked at since. I liked the first part, but not the last part, and I don’t really remember why. I should pull it out and read it and revise it and then send it to a couple of you and see what you think. Should I do that next, like over the next couple weeks? Because I could probably do essential revision pretty briskly, so that makes sense?

C) OBVIOUSLY I need to start the sequel for No Foreign Sky. Should I set everything else aside and do that? Even if I don’t mean to finish it right now, if I start it, that would help me go on with it later.

And it’s not that I’m asking for advice here or taking a vote. I’m just not sure what I’ll be doing this week or next week. Also, obviously I’ll get comments back for Hedesa fairly soon and then everything else will wait for that. This kind of suggests not trying to tackle anything too huge, as whatever I’m doing, I’ll probably switch back to revision.

I will hope to send the revised draft to the second round of readers by the end of May, BUT WE’LL SEE. Like the preorder date, I really need to see the first set of comments before I can tell about that.

MEANWHILE: I hope you’re all enjoying spring, unless you’re in Australia, and then I guess it’s probably winter. Here, it’s early summer and the roses are blooming —

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: WHEW FINISHED appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.

Integrating Metaphysical Depth into the Story: Piranesi

When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule to witness the joining of three Tides. This is something that happens only once every eight years.

The Ninth Vestibule is remarkable for the three great Staircases it contains. Its Walls are lined with marble Statues, hundreds upon hundreds of them, Tier upon Tier, rising into the distant heights.

I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left eye. I squeezed Myself into the Woman’s Niche and waited until I heard the Tides roaring in the Lower Halls and felt the Walls vibrating with the force of what was about to happen.

First came the Tide from the Far Eastern Halls. This Tide ascended the Easternmost Staircase without violence. It had no colour to speak of and its Waters were no more than ankle deep. It spread a grey mirror across the Pavement, the surface of which was marbled with streaks of milky Foam.

Next came the Tide from the Western Halls. This Tide thundered up the Westernmost Staircase and hit the Eastern Wall with a great Clap, making all the Statues tremble. Its Foam was the white of old fishbones and its churning depths were pewter. Within seconds its Waters were as high as the Wastes of the First Tier of Statues.

Last came the Tide from the Northern Halls. It hurled itself up the middle Staircase, filling the Vestibule with an explosion of glittering, ice-white Foam. I was drenched and blinded. When I could see again Waters were cascading down the Statues. It was then that I realized I had made a mistake in calculating the volumes of the Second and Third Tides. A towering Peak of Water swept up to where I crouched. A great Hand of Water reached out to pluck me from the Wall. I flung arms around the Legs of the Woman carrying a Beehive and prayed to the House to protect me. The Waters covered me and for a moment I was surrounded by the strange silence that comes when the Sea sweeps over you and drowns its own sounds. I thought that I was going to die; or else that I would be swept away to Unknown Halls, far from the rush and thrum of Familiar Tides. I clung on.

Then just as suddenly as it began, it was over. The Joined Tides swept on into the surrounding Halls. I heard the thunder and crack as the Tides struck the Walls. The Waters in the Ninth Vestibule sank rapidly down until they barely covered the Plinths of the First Tier of Statues.

I realized that I was holding on to something. I opened my hand and found a marble Finger from some Faraway Statue that the Tides had placed there.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

***

I’m working my way toward various spoilers regarding character, plot, tone, and theme, so just be aware, all right?

Now, what is most immediately obvious about the above passage, which is the opening of Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi?

I mean, what is most obvious about the style; there’s a lot that’s obvious about the world, though, as with the sea, you’ve only glimpsed the surface so far and everything important remains hidden.

Stylistically, the obvious feature here is that every word the narrator thinks is especially important is capitalized. This is archaic, obviously, and instantly gives this introductory passage a clear feel not just of foreignness, but archaic formality. We’re not in Kansas and the narrator isn’t a Kansas boy. The capitalization also serves to subtly indicate the attitude of the narrator: he is treating all the elements of the House as important, while reducing his own importance. The narrator never says, I was Drenched or I thought I was going to Die. The House is being elevated relative to the narrator. This is before the narrator says, The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. This is the line that first, indicates that the House is being treated as a numinous divine presence – by numinous, I mean here something to glorify without understanding. The narrator tracks and times the Tides not to master the House through understanding it, but to reveal and revere the divine. He doesn’t have to say so. This is obvious, and this stylistic trick is the first hint of this priest-like attitude.

This story definitely provides a numinous sense of the world. In this story, the world – the House – is in communication with you, but you have to learn to listen. You see the flight of a flock of birds and rather than thinking, Ah, birds, you think, Ah, yes, I understand, I should expect a message from afar. Of course, a message that is obscure. Oh, I see, innocence that is eroded. Of course, all this is perfectly correct, and it’s one of the most elegant uses of prophecies I’ve ever seen in a fantasy novel, by the way.

And if you’ve read this story, then you know whose innocence is eroded, of course, and by whom, and how, and this is possibly the most remarkable achievement of the story – the tremendous, remarkable innocence of the narrator that is not in any way due to the narrator being unreasonably dense. Or … it is, but it isn’t. This is an innocence that has nothing to do with naivety or stupidity; it’s quite an achievement for the author to pull this off, but it’s an innocence that the reader doesn’t want to see destroyed. It’s horrifying – that is, the narrator’s innocence is not horrifying at all; the ongoing betrayal is horrifying. This sets up a problem for the author – how can she provide a just ending without in some sense destroying the narrator? She manages this in three ways:

–She allows the narrator a recovery of memory and a storm of feeling, but by the end the storm has settled and the narrator, though he has recovered his name, has by no means returned to the person he was.

–She makes us like the person the narrator became a lot more than the person he used to be, though his previous identity wasn’t really a bad person. She makes us feel that the previous identity was shallow, that the narrator is in tune with deeper reality in a way that he wasn’t in his previous life.

–She makes the reader feel that in the climactic scene, probably the House intervened to protect the narrator and punish the evildoer, without ever doing anything to make us sure about that. But we feel like it probably happened that way.

Then she does something really, really important:

After reading this book the first time, I felt like this line – The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite – was used repeatedly. This isn’t true. The line is used just twice: once in the beginning, to show the reader the narrator and the narrator’s attitude toward and relationship with the House – and, this is what matters, it’s used the second time right at the end:

***

This afternoon I walked through the city, making for a café where I was to meet Raphael. It was about half-past two on a day that had never really got light.

It began to snow. The low clouds made a gray ceiling for the city; the snow muffled the noise of the cars until it became almost rhythmical; a steady, shushing noise, like the sound of tides beating endlessly on marble walls.

I closed my eyes. I felt calm.

There was a park. I entered it and followed a path through an avenue of tall, ancient trees with wide, dusky, grassy spaces on either side of them. The pale snow sifted down through bare winter branches. The lights of the cars on the distant road sparkled through the trees: red, yellow, white. It was very quiet. Though it was not yet twilight the streetlights shed a faint light.

People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realized I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated too long and he disappeared into the crowd.

A woman passed me with two children. One of the children had a wooden recorder in his hands. I knew them too. They are depicted in the twenty-seventh southern hall: a statue of two children laughing, one of them holding a flute.

I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

***

That’s the last line of the story.

Bookending the story with this statement is absolutely crucial, because by the ending the narrator has recovered his name and stepped back into the world. But, though he is no longer writing with all those capital letters – I’m sure you noticed that — he hasn’t resumed his old identity, or his old attitudes. He’s no longer acting as a priest of the House, which was essentially what he had become, but he also hasn’t rejected the understanding of the world or the attitudes he gained while residing in the House. He’s reclaimed his name, but not his old identity; that’s why he refers to himself by his full name in this unusual way, Matthew Rose Sorenson, instead of just as Matthew. Above all, if Susannah Clarke hadn’t repeated that line – The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite – as the very last line of the story, the reader might be left with one or more of the following impressions:

–Matthew Rose Sorenson was delusional; trapped in delusion; trapped in a weird metaphysical reality; most importantly, he was trapped.

–Matthew Rose Sorenson is sorry he lost a chunk of his life and his previous identity; the thing that happened to him was not only tragic but also lacked deep compensation; he was hurt.

–The understanding Matthew Rose Sorenson gained from living in the House and learning to listen to the world the way he did there, and still does now, was all delusional; he was wrong.

By ending the story the way she does, Clarke prevents all of that. When the narrator sees real people whom the statues echo, that’s obviously a way of saying that his new perception of the world is true in some deep way. But Clarke is also saying that while the narrator was trapped at first, as his perception shifted, that became a misleading way to think about it. He lost his identity, but he gained a different identity. He would not and does not want to return to the person he used to be – nor should he want that, because his perception of the world changed, but the perception he gained is more true and right than his old perception, and this was a just and sufficient compensation for what he lost. I think that is what Clarke wants the reader to take away from the story. I think she is indicating that the metaphysical reality of the world she drew was real, not false; she has created a story where the sense of the divine is real, and where the House – the world – is both immeasurably beautiful and, finally, if you look deeply enough into the world and let it speak to you, kind.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Integrating Metaphysical Depth into the Story: Piranesi appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.