Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 34

Poetry Thursday: Sara Teasdale

I don’t recall every encountering any poems at all by Sara Teasdale. She was born in St Louis, says Wikipedia, which makes her a close neighbor removed in time. Died in 1933, the year before my mother was born. How long ago that seems, but it really wasn’t. I probably wouldn’t pick up a Historical set in the 1930s — not long enough ago for my tastes.

Her poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” from her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow inspired and is featured in a famous short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury. Not a cheerful story. You can click through and read that poem if you like, but here are a few others — also not necessarily cheerful, though the last is a love poem.

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Let It Be Forgotten

Sara Teasdale

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
   Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten for ever and ever,
   Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
  
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
   Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
   In a long forgotten snow.

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Leaves

One by one, like leaves from a tree
All my faiths have forsaken me;
But the stars above my head
Burn in white and delicate red,
And beneath my feet the earth
Brings the sturdy grass to birth.

I who was content to be
But a silken-singing tree,
But a rustle of delight
In the wistful heart of night—
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.

Blinded by a leafy crown
I looked neither up nor down—
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky;
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.

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SwansNight is over the park, and a few brave stars
Look on the lights that link it with chains of gold,
The lake bears up their reflection in broken bars
That seem to heavy for tremulous water to hold.

We watch the swans that sleep in a shadowy place,
And now and again one wakes and uplifts its head;
How still you are—your gaze is on my face—
We watch the swans and never a word is said.

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Image from Unsplash

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Is mediocre good enough?

A post by James Scott Bell at Kill Zone Blog: Should You Go Ahead and Write Mediocre Books?

I’m going to provide a spoiler and say up front that Bell says no.

Here’s how his post starts:

What jumped out at me was a question about whether Big 5 publishers are using AI not only to create new “brand names” but also to extend established ones. West thinks the latter may already be happening … And this is not to mention the thousands (tens of thousands?) of indies using AI to publish dozens of novels and novellas in the time it usually takes an old-school author to write one book.

I have serious doubts about this, actually. Please point to actual examples of that. Any examples will do. I mean this West who made that assertion should have pointed to examples, but if any of you actually know about complete novels being generated, published, and presented as real novels by real people, I would like to know about that.

Bell is making his way toward a pointer to this other post by Joe Konrath: On Writing Shit:

I spend a full 1/3 of my time as a writer trying to make a grade B book into a grade A book. I think I’m wasting my time. Why write longer? Why write better? What’s the benefit? Readers will forgive me if I phone-in a book. Or four. Especially with a series. As long as my first 12 are solid, I could probably make the next 6 mediocre, or even shitty, and most of my fanbase will stick with me. …

I think I need to get out of my own way, stop letting perfect be the enemy of good, and see what happens. … I like to think that I’ve written some good, even great, books. My numbers bear this out. Longtime fans will stick with me if I write something so-so.

Given Fifty Shades, I don’t quite think I’d want to argue that numbers alone are an indication that a book is great, or even good. Numbers indicate something else, that the book is catchy. That’s it. That’s what popularity tells you about a book. Nothing else.

But here’s Bell’s response to Konrath’s post:

Yes, sure, if you want to put out product, lots of it, and fast, without laboring over it, you can. Especially with AI. You can even make money that way. … but something in me makes me need to hand make my cookies, one by one, with some effort to make them as tasty as I can. I still think there are readers who appreciate that. I don’t know the financial ramifications of writing with care versus pumping out mediocrities. It’s impossible to design an A/B test without a time machine. But that’s my recipe and I’m sticking to it.

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What do you think? Leaving aside the question of whether you can generate dozens of mediocre but readable books in a month with AI, which again, I have serious doubts about that. But leaving that aside: Can bestselling authors get away with writing crappy books — or generating crappy books — while continuing to maintain their bestseller status?

It’s plain that sometimes they can.

A lot of established, bestselling authors were never that great at writing in the first place, yet they not only hit it big, they continue to hit it big. Their readers are okay with books that are in some respects pretty crappy. The books may, of course, be good in other ways. I’m thinking of obvious examples like The Da Vinci Code. The review I just linked is funny and you should read it, but I actually chose this review because it illustrates how terrible writing can still be appealing to a lot of readers. The reviewer is very much aware that the writing is terrible, but enjoyed the book anyway and explains how the book succeeded for him.

I’m also thinking of the one and only James Patterson novel I read — Maximum Ride. I read it because I was curious to see what Patterson was doing right. I found out. The story was quick, facile, and reasonably fun. The writing wasn’t as epically awful as Dan Brown’s writing; in fact, the writing itself was pretty okay at the sentence level. The story suffered from huge plot holes and serious deus ex problems. Plainly Patterson’s readers are fine with those weaknesses.

Not all readers are okay with epically terrible writing or gaping plot holes. I’m generally not okay with either. I never picked up another Patterson novel. But there are exceptions. I did like the Harry Potter series, except for the last book, and the worldbuilding in that series doesn’t hold together at all. What I’m basically saying is that if the author is good enough at some things, they can do a crappy job at other things and produce a catchy book. As long as they keep doing a good job at the things they’re good at, their readers will continue to find their books catchy, and so they should. Whatever was appealing about the books continues to be appealing.

But how about if the author starts dialing it in, as Konrath suggests would be practical? Konrath is arguing, in the linked post, that it makes financial sense to just stop bothering to do a good job, that an author who used to write good books won’t lose readers if they turn out four crappy books in a row, that this is a good strategy for authors who could write better books because fast is better than good. You can click through and read his whole post, but I’m telling you, that is literally what he’s saying.

I … am having a hard time with that.

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I think it’s clearly true that some established, bestselling authors show an obvious and striking decline in the quality of their books. Not to throw stones, but fine, I’m going to mention an example. Anybody else a fan of the early Anita Blake novels? I loved them. Then the series turned into erotica — that’s a kind term — and torture porn — that’s the exact term. By ten or fifteen books into the series, each so-called novel included a short story’s worth of plot very thinly wrapped around sex and torture scenes to create a pretense of a novel. I see the series is up to thirty books. I read about ten. That was more than I should have, but enough to establish with certainty that this huge decline in quality had taken place. But, looking at the series page, I see that the series shows only a mild decline in average star rating, with a lot of the early ones hitting 4.7, then a slow decline with drops as low as 4.0, but the thirtieth book is at 4.6. What I think happened is that Hamilton lost plenty of readers, but she also picked up different readers.

The 47 Xanth novels are another example. I read a lot of them when I was in high school. I liked a lot of the early ones, thought they clearly deteriorated, and quit. I had no idea the author was still writing them, but the most recent came out in 2023. Looking at the series page on Amazon, wow, I’ve never seen such a huge dichotomy between Amazon and Goodreads ratings. Massively more ratings on Goodreads, but average star ratings nearly a full star lower on Goodreads. I’m sure that happens, I just haven’t ever noticed it before. Also, I’m seeing a huge decline in the number of ratings on Goodreads, with the first book having more than 45,000 ratings and then a gradually steepening decline with a big drop after the 20th book and another around the 30th book. The most recent book has 97 ratings on Goodreads — 0.2% of the number for the initial book. That’s not 2.0%. That’s 0.2%

That’s not just a question of how long each book has been out. Among other things, Goodreads didn’t exist when the first book came out — the internet didn’t exist when that book hit the shelves, and wouldn’t for years and years. But it doesn’t even matter. No amount of passing time will push the book with 97 ratings up to nearly 50,000 ratings. It’s not going to happen. That’s literally a popularity drop of three orders of magnitude. This looks to me like a series where the author started writing crappy books and lost a LOT of readers without picking up different readers. The Xanth novels must still be making money, since they’re still coming out, but it looks to me like this is a series that refutes Konrath’s argument that readers, once in the habit of buying books by an author, will keep buying them regardless of a decline in quality.

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When I love an author’s books, I buy them all. As long as the quality stays high, I don’t get tired of a series, ever. That’s how I’m wired as a reader.

Here’s something interesting that I noticed about myself as a result of writing this post: The more I love a series, the less tolerant I am of a severe drop in quality. I have a much, much harder time dealing with a drop from excellent to bad than a drop from good to bad.

I think Konrath is basically right in how far I will follow an author who used to write good books and is now writing crappy books: I’ll read about four crappy books.

Then I will get rid of those four, maybe get rid of some or all of the earlier books in the series, and never touch another book by the author again, ever. Anita Blake was one example. Xanth is another. Stephen King is another. It would seem weird to me if many readers kept spending money on crappy books no matter how many crappy books the author churned out. I don’t know how many readers are about as forgiving as I am — or about as unforgiving as I am. I wonder how Konrath would feel about this clever notion of writing crappy books fast if he knew that, when he hit his fourth crappy book, a significant proportion of readers would throw his books away and never again touch anything he wrote.

Regardless, I’m a lot less forgiving when I love a series. When I read Teckla, I hated it, and worse, I thought it objectively showed a huge drop in quality compared to the first two books in the series, and worst of all, everything bad about it directly contradicted character and worldbuilding elements from the earlier books. Despite this, I bought the next book in the series and gradually started more or less trusting Brust again, but ONE more book on a par with Teckla and I would have stopped reading the series. I’m slower to read the new books as well — even now. I haven’t read the most recent two. Though I will, eventually. Probably.

I really loved the Mercy Thompson series and associated series. Patricia Briggs is the author who got me to decide to write my own UF series, so I mean I really enjoyed it a lot. But one book I disliked was enough to make me quit reading the series. One.

My favorite SFF series ever is Cherryh’s Foreigner series, but, with the 20th book, I was appalled at a huge continuity problem plus a second less-huge continuity problem. I haven’t recovered. I’ve found myself unable to read the most recent book in the series because of this problem with the 20th book.

I think what happens is that I’m afraid awful later books will reach back toward the earlier books and spoil them in retrospect. I think this readiness to walk away from a series after one or at most two strikingly inferior books is defensive. I think I’m guarding the earlier books. I don’t want to let the author spoil them. Readers who don’t re-read books might not have that issue. I love re-reading books and re-read all the time.

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I do, by the way, expect to eventually dislike a book by every author whose work I love. I’m not sure there are any exceptions to the rule that if an author writes 10 or more books, I’ll dislike one. And that’s okay! I don’t mind! It’s not reasonable to expect to love every single novel by a prolific author! If an author changes how they’re handling a series or a character for reasons of their own evolving tastes, fine, whatever, I may not follow them through that change, but that’s perfectly legitimate and other readers may well pick up that author’s books and more power to them.

But disliking a book, or disliking the direction an author has a series, isn’t the same as feeling that the author is deliberately dropping standards in a series because they can’t be bothered to do a good job. That’s a really repellant idea. Even bold italics isn’t enough to express how repellant that idea is.

You know what I think the difference is between Konrath’s attitude and mine? The heart of the difference?

Konrath is treating books as products that are more or less commercially viable, but worthless in and of themselves. Literally as objects that have no intrinsic worth to him as the author. He might as well be digging a ditch for someone. A ditch has no intrinsic value. It’s a ditch. You dig it to get paid. You don’t care if it’s a good ditch. It does not need to be a beautiful ditch. If it’s deep enough to hold a pipe or direct water runoff, it’s fine. It’s a ditch.

That’s not how I think of books at all. I bet you can tell.

I want and expect readers to continue reading my books after I’m dead. They are literally a legacy I’m handing to the future. Or I sure hope they are. I definitely want them to be. I’m making a note right now to look at KDP’s page that tells you what clause to put in your will so your heirs can take over your books. I’m literally scribbling “check KDP about will” on a piece of paper so I won’t forget to do that in the near future. That is what Konrath’s post makes me think of: that if he wants to write crappy books and forget about them immediately, whatever, but we are not doing the same thing at all.

tl;dr: No, mediocre is not remotely good enough.

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Unearthing Character

A post at Writer Unboxed: Unearthing Character

Of all the skills writers need most, creating authentic characters is probably the hardest to achieve.  Each character is unique, and the techniques that writers use to bring them to life are so complex and layered that it’s nearly impossible to talk about them in general terms.  I suspect that the writers who are best at it aren’t even aware of how they do it.  That’s why they often talk about finding a character rather than creating one.

Not being able to break characterization down to teachable principles is a source of real frustration for those of us who teach writing and those of you trying to learn it.  But there may be a way to spot and study clear examples of genuine, deep, authentic character and see – or feel — what they have in common.

I find this post immediately interesting because I do think this — creating characters that readers will love — is not very teachable. But it seems to me that a lot of posts hither and yon treat it as though it IS teachable. I mean all the posts like this:

Writing How-to: Create Characters Your Readers Love and Hate

How to Build Characters Your Readers Will Love

Creating Young Adult Fiction Characters Readers Will Love

And on and on, ten thousand similar posts, all of which operate on the idea that you can boil down “creating authentic characters” to a bulleted list of tips and anybody can read the list and off they go, creating great characters that feel like real people to readers. And obviously that’s not actually possible, and it’s nice to see a post that says the techniques that writers use to bring them to life are so complex and layered that it’s nearly impossible to talk about them in general terms.

This may, of course, just reflect my perception natural as an intuitive writer. Maybe all kinds of much more analytical writers are saying, No, it’s honestly more like a bulleted list, we just do characters like paint-by-numbers. That’s just hard for me to imagine. For me, it seems much more reasonable to say But there may be a way to spot and study clear examples of genuine, deep, authentic character and see – or feel — what they have in common. Because to me it seems very reasonable to say Think about how these characters feel, create your own characters by feel.

So what does this linked post from Writer Unboxed actually say about this topic? Where does this author go to find characters that feel real, so that these characters can be used as examples?

You can break out of your own head by reading books from earlier eras.  Everybody’s thinking is shaped by unconscious cultural stuff that gets steeped into our heads from childhood.  And that cultural baggage is where a lot of flat, lazy characterization comes from. … When I read older books, every once in a while I hit a passage that strikes me with how modern it sounds.  These passages can be anything from an offhand observation or a line of dialogue.  But these moments represent true, authentic character – individuals with views on life that aren’t simply a rehash of whatever’s current in the culture at the moment. … if you read older books, be alert for the passages that strike you as strangely modern, that you immediately connect with.  When a character fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred years ago says something you can see yourself saying, you’re in the presence of genuine, authentic character.   Steep yourself in those moments, learn how they feel, and you may find it easier to create them yourself.

That’s an interesting observation. I mean, the idea of breaking out of your preconceptions by reading older books, that’s fine, and by the way well-written Historicals can do the same thing, and obviously fantasy with non-contemporary settings and a lot of SF and so forth. Anything whatsoever that involves a well-drawn setting that is not like the modern American setting, where characters have attitudes and expectations that a carbon copy of modern American attitudes and expectations. (Or modern wherever, fill in with any other contemporary society.)

I think what this post is observing is that human nature doesn’t change …

“I am heartily ashamed of myself, Lizzy. But don’t despair, it’ll pass; and no doubt more quickly than it should.” 

“Adulthood isn’t an award they’ll give you for being a good child. You can waste years trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose.”

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”

“It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.”

Gold star if you know where each of the above quotes came from.

Anyway: Human nature doesn’t change, and people are variable but not infinitely variable, and creating characters who feel true depends at least on part on creating characters who are true — in the sense of being consonant with what people are actually like. But, because the protagonist is the protagonist, probably a little exaggerated, maybe a lot exaggerated — wittier, kinder, braver than most people ever can be. But still true to what people are really like, or really ought to be like. I think that’s what the linked post is talking about — literature as a guide to what people are like and how to create characters who are like that.

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Update: Endless Revision

Primary revision of Silver Circle II and III is going fine. It’s not like it isn’t going fine. It’s just … you know, it’s one of those natural human things, where when you’re writing the initial draft, you can’t WAIT to get through it and start revision, but the second you start revision, you just want to go on to the NEXT book and go back to writing a draft. (As with everything else, I enjoy revision more when it’s a Tuyo-world novel, but even there it can get tedious.)

Anyway: that’s where I am. I feel just like Sisyphus.

Image from Pixabay

Meanwhile!

I’m still going through the Griffin Mage trilogy and correcting the formatting. Commenter Mona made a suggestion that turned out to be helpful for finding and removing all numerals in any order — in Word, the code that means “any numeral” turns out to be ^#, perhaps predictably, and if you Find that and replace with nothing, boom, all numbers disappear. Doesn’t matter if they’re single-digit or multi-digit numbers. That takes out all numerals, poof. This plus just a few other tactical uses of Find and Replace cleared out 90% of the formatting weirdness. The only thing left is fixing places, primarily in dialogue, where there is an unnecessary paragraph break. I’m skimming through the trilogy lightly to fix that and then I’ll reread it properly, from the top, on my laptop.

I’m fine with rereading because I’m also tweaking paragraphing and removing a good number of colons, dashes and ellipses and very occasionally moving a line or changing a word or whatever. I meant to basically not touch anything, but that resolution fell by the wayside and here I am, taking out lots of colons, dashes and ellipses. I haven’t touched any semicolons, though. Commenter Mike S offered to create a usable file for me from the ebook (thanks, Mike!), and if and (hopefully) when something else reverts and this comes up again, I may be asking for help with doing that. Especially because I know for certain I don’t have proofed copies of all the early books. But it’s been such a long time since I’ve looked at this trilogy that I’m actually enjoying this.

Meanwhile!

I’m reading some posts from Publisher Rocket and thinking about redoing the keywords for all my books, particularly the Black Dog series, but basically everything. I’ll be revising the book descriptions for the Black Dog series and doing this and that and I suppose I will mention now that I am putting new covers on all the books in this series. This project has been underway since last year. I’ll replace all the covers for the earlier books at the same time that I put Silver Circle I, II, III up for preorder. I expect I’ll do a specific post about the new covers and new book description and everything soon. But ALSO, I’m thinking about this keyword stuff. I will need to bring my laptop to the office on some weekend and spend a few hours looking at keywords on Publisher Rocket. WHEN I HAVE TIME, I will do that.

So much to do!

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Powerful Novels: The Ocean and the Stars by Mark Helprin

Other posts on this topic:

Power in novels

Powerful novels: Night Watch

Powerful novels: From All False Doctrine

Powerful Novels: The Crane Husband

All right, so I just finished reading The Ocean and the Stars yesterday.

I read the first 30% of it very slowly, then the rest of it, whoosh! I see why the editorial blurb at Amazon says this book is fast paced. I was right to doubt this, because it is not either fast paced – not the long, long, long buildup, which you honestly ought not ignore.

Then the Athena sinks the Sahand (Spoiler! But it would be a much shorter book if the Athena failed in her first real battle and went down with all hands, so, I mean.) and after that the pace picks up, with one terrifying situation after another. Then there’s a long falling-action period and a happy ending. (which may be a spoiler, but hopefully a welcome one.)

I’ll be thinking about this book for a while. The Ocean and the Stars is very (very) different from A Winter’s Tale. Both are literary, I suppose, but the latter occupies the intersection between literary, historical, and fantasy, while the former occupies the intersection between literary, war stories, and something which I suppose I’ll call uplifting fiction, since there’s no recognized term for it, but “UpLit” is one term that is occasionally used.

Also, this is a side note, but you know what I thought, quite early on? That you could easily lift practically the entire plot of The Ocean and the Stars and transmute the story into Military SF. Then, later, I realized you could actually cut the plot to pieces and transmute The Ocean and the Stars into at least two different Military SF novels, maybe three. This would be fun to do! It’s just like reading a David Weber story except much better written at the sentence and paragraph level.

Anyway: let’s have some quotes! Because when I say much better written at the sentence and paragraph level, I should probably support that. Here are a handful of passages that I highlighted:

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The sea was speaking to him in silence. Its message was: as your spirit rises to fill the place of appetites and illusions, take stock and be comforted, for all time is lost in the oceans and the stars. You’ve left behind the things of life on land that shield you from a truth the sea will not let you forget – that you are first and last a spirit, that you are alone, and that this can be borne.

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They took refuge in the Garden District, lost in it and as separated from the continent and all its cares as if they were at sea. The vegetation that surrounded them had a life of its own: it moved in the wind, it folded and unfolded, furling at night and unfurling in the sun. Perpetually fragrant, it engaged in a duet with raindrops and strong breezes.

***

It was strange, but she felt that both he and she would have been essentially the same had they lived in any era of history, never quite fitting in if only because they were quietly adamantine in regard to what they believed was beautiful, right, and true, and their conviction was thoroughly independent of the pressures, fashions, and disappointments of their life and times.

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Words were soon to leave him, and this he regretted. The last of them he heard as if spoken by wind and water, and saw as if written in the air: In heartbreak and in memory I am fixed upon the ocean, always the ocean, to which everything flows as it returns in rivers and rainfall and through quiet coastal marshes where waves dance in the reeds.

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… he watched the plane race down the runway, increasing its speed until it gave itself to the air, rose up, and began a steady climb against a sky so deep and blue it pulsed against the eyes. The course of its travel and the line of its rise conformed like music to those underlying ratios of the heart that, though unseen, determine everything. And though unseen they leave their evidence in the fragile, quickly vanishing traces of friction when the world’s heartbreak is met with love and courage.

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I highlighted the above passages. Then I checked popular highlights. There are ten or so passages that are listed, of which I also highlighted two. The most highlighted passage has a hundred sixty-five highlights. Fewer than one out of a hundred readers highlight anything, as far as I can tell, so that’s a lot.  The passage in question conforms to the general tendency for the most-highlighted passages in a novel to be advice, often very direct advice. Here it is:

If you cease to think well of yourself because you shine in the eyes of others, but, rather, do whatever it is you do out of interest and delight and discipline, such a great burden will be floated from your shoulders as you cannot imagine, and the world will appear as wonderful as it is to a child.

Generally speaking, readers do seem to pick good advice to highlight.

***

This novel is powerful, with part of the power coming from the skilled prose, part from the iconic nature of the protagonist, and part from the theme of selflessness, courage, and intelligent resolve leading to ultimate and timeless victory regardless of transient defeat. I hope I put that adequately. I also want to reiterate that the story is not a tragedy because I don’t want that sentence to lead anyone to think maybe it is. It isn’t. But if it were, though I wouldn’t have liked it nearly as well personally, this theme would have remained unmarred by the tragic ending.

The whole story is also wrapped around the theme of the centrality of love in bringing out the best in people who are already admirable, and besides that the reader is continually shown that admirable people draw those around them to become better people. At some point, someone here — sorry, I don’t remember who — said it would be nice to point out novels where the protagonist causes other characters to become better people. I don’t think I ever wrote that post, partly because it’s hard to think of examples. Well, this novel is an example.

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This book would make a superb choice for a class on “the novel,” by which I don’t mean a class focused on reading classic novels or popular novels, but a class that focuses on how novels are put together – on thinking about what a novel is, what makes a novel good or great or powerful or successful. I don’t mean commercially successful. I mean in terms of succeeding at the job of being a novel, of doing what it is trying to do. There are lots of reasons The Ocean and the Stars would be a great choice for that.

First, this novel has a tremendous amount of telling in it, I mean a huge amount, especially at the beginning. This is telling as it should be done – beautiful and effective – and of course I don’t mean “as it should be done in all novels by all authors.” I mean that if you’re going to have a huge amount of telling, this is an illustration of how to make that work. It’s a great counterexample for any advice that telling is inferior or something to avoid or whatever. There are lots of great counterexamples, obviously. This is one that is particularly beautifully written.

Second, there’s both a prologue and an epilogue, and that’s always an interesting choice in terms of construction of the story. But beyond that, there is, as I say, a really long lead-in and then long falling action, so it’s like nearly half the story is part of the prologue or epilogue, and that’s interesting too.

Third, there’s an interesting moment that made me blink, where Helprin is going to do the David Weber thing (I could also call that the Tom Clancy thing) and tell you ALL ABOUT the Athena’s design and hardware and everything, but there is a link inviting the less interested reader to skip that part. I’ve never seen that in a literary novel. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it before at all, ever. I suppose it’s not there in the paper editions. How much does the reader skip by tapping the link? Two percent. I checked just out of sheer curiosity. Is that a good idea or does it jar the reader out of the story? I think if you had a link like that in a faster-paced story, it would be a terrible idea. But then, if you’re writing a faster-paced story, you wouldn’t pause to explain the hardware in detail. Or at least, you shouldn’t. Anyway, it would be something interesting to discuss.

Fourth, that whole thing about is a novel character-driven or plot-driven or both, this novel would be great to encourage readers to think about that. Are the characters well-rounded and complex? No. Are the characters effectively drawn and compelling? Yes. What makes that work? Well, this is one of those novels where the protagonist is (a) an original protagonist, and (b) iconic. Steven Rensselaer is absolutely iconic from the moment we meet him. He doesn’t change a jot, except for falling in love (during the long lead-in). Which is not about him changing. It’s about him stepping up more surely as the person he already is. All the characters are basically shown like this: from Katy right on through to a seaman whose name we barely remember, all the characters are very firmly themselves. This is really interesting! And neat! And worth noticing and discussing, in terms of does it work? (Yes.) And, is it different from the way most authors handle characterization? (Absolutely yes.) And, how does this suit advice about how to handle characterization and questions about what it means to be character-driven, since the plot is totally determined by who Rensselaer is as a person, but Rensselaer is drawn in adamantine lines that never shift a millimeter.

So, then, is the story plot-driven?  No. That’s why about 45% of the book is slow and leisurely. The fast-paced part is very fast! But the long, slow lead-in and the long falling action should indicate to anybody that this is really not a plot-driven story – or at least, that if it is, that’s because there are two plots that matter: the fast adventure plot in the middle and the much slower framing plot wrapped around the adventure story.

I would actually say that this novel is idea-driven, or philosophy-driven. That it is in fact message fiction, with the message beautifully wrapped within a compelling story. That the story is trying to do two things: first, hook the reader into a journey with beautiful writing plus this iconic protagonist; and second, pull the reader through the journey with this exciting war story and then have the reader come out the other side feeling differently about what matters in life and why.

Long before, he had made peace with the fluid and timeless sea, where comfort is unneeded and unknown. Long before, he had understood that even in a ship full of men, at sea one is alone; that only a heart that has been broken can be full; and that even in every kind of unforgiving desert there is nonetheless infinite love always speaking, always apparent, always appealing. So he kept on running and would not give up.

Helprin put a lot of what he believes into this novel, and he did it with tremendous conviction and beautiful writing, in a novel that is also just put together in a really interesting way. I don’t suppose that most readers think all that much about the structure, the pacing, the double plot, any of that — though I do expect some readers are like: Way too slow, DNF, or whatever, because you don’t have to think about any of that to perceive it. But I do think writers who are used to thinking about structure, maybe writers who also beta read for other authors, would probably notice that this novel is just interesting.

I suspect that Helprin thought he could get away with writing a book like this also implies conviction. Structurally, this novel is unusual for commercial fiction. Thematically, it’s unusual for literary. Yet here Helprin is, writing this novel without the slightest regard for, basically, any modern conventions and certainly no regard for any of the common advice about writing. Very much worth a look, and if you find it slow going, I promise you that when the adventure plot picks up, the book becomes unputdownable.

Also, the day after I finished this book, I bought this one:

And, by the way, the first review, by R. Pryor, demonstrates how to write a great review. I read that review and immediately bought this book.

… That’s what the book’s about on the surface. But in every paragraph, every line, and every word, what it’s REALLY about is the necessity to live life by a code, by a set of values that, if you believe you have a soul, you can’t ever surrender or compromise. It’s about living life as if the good were always eventually, someday, rewarded, evil always punished, and we all lived forever, despite the fact that none of those propositions is true. We all know the good and the beautiful are sometimes defeated utterly, and we all die, and this book is kind of an extended answer to those bleak truths. It’s also, in itself, as beautiful as a hand-painted porcelain vase. Harry, the protagonist, is about as quietly tough as it’s possible for a man to be, but he also has an eye for beauty that really only Mark Helprin could have, and an open, lively intelligence and curiosity about the world that make him relatable to the ordinary reader.

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Unexpected good news!

Okay, so, this isn’t the BEST POSSIBLE NEWS because that would be “Hey, PRH is reverting all your books.”

But this is still good news: yesterday, Hachette reverted the rights to the Griffin Mage trilogy. So, yay! This is really good news!

I asked my agent to pursue rights reversion in January of this year. It is now mid-August, so I guess the wheels grind slowly. I’d rather have rights back for Islands and House of Shadows, since I have actually published sequels for those and it would be nice to control the first books. Especially for Islands. But the Griffin Mage trilogy is a trilogy, which will certainly give me something to work with, and I’m definitely happy to get it back, while hoping that someday I will get rights back for everything else.

What happens now?

The ebooks for the Griffin Mage trilogy appear to have been pulled as of this morning. Paper editions will remain available until Hachette runs out of stock. They’ve still got their incredibly annoying situation with the audiobooks, where Audible has the first and third book, but the second is sporadically available only as a used CD from third-party venders. I presume they somehow lost the digital file for the audio version of the second book and just didn’t want to bother re-creating that file, because that’s been the situation for years.

I’ve contacted a cover artist I’ve worked with before and requested illustrated covers because I have never, ever liked any of the covers for this trilogy. I want griffins, damn it, and I want them to look like griffins, not like the head of an eagle or a disembodied wing. And I don’t want them to look stupid. I want them to look great.

As soon as the covers are ready, I’ll publish new ebook editions.

Will you drop them on you Patreon first?

Yes, for three reasons.

First, it’s a nice thing to do, and I’ll go over there and add a post about this later so patrons who check in see that this is in progress.

Second, I’ll be putting these books in KU, which means they will go exclusive, and I’m sorry, but a large percentage of my royalties come from KU and that percentage will surely be higher for a trilogy that has been out for something on the order of 14 years. I suppose I’ll put the new ebooks up for preorder and see what happens, but probably not a lot of sales out of the box. KU will probably do better.

So, if anybody doesn’t have these books and would like them, but not from Amazon, this is the time to join my Patreon.

Third, Patreon will be my failsafe for formatting.

What’s wrong with the formatting?

So, the individual books came out so long ago that page proofs meant paper. The publisher sent you the page proofs in the mail and you went over them and sent them back. This was the final version of the book, after copyediting and proofreading and probably minor editorial changes. This final version is therefore not something I have as a digital file.

But! It turns out that when Hachette did the omnibus — which was proofed again — they sent page proofs as a pdf, and lo, I still had that file.

So last night I took that pdf file and turned it into a Word file using Calibre, and thank you, Calibre, for existing. And now I have a nice file of all three books that have been through the copy editing and proofreading process. But Calibre, excellent though it may be, is not magic, and so turning the pdf into a Word file introduced some formatting problems.

Some of that was extremely easy to fix. For example, for some reason, “fire” wound up looking like “fi er.” There were a few other words like that. “Flight” turned into “Fl ight.” The problems involved words with “F,” and yes, that is mysterious. But the problems were consistent and not many different words got hit, so Find and Replace fixed that.

More annoying, every page break has three lines of unique formatting text that I need to remove by hand. Plus there are paragraph breaks in the middle of dialogue sometimes. This isn’t hard to fix, but I figure the odds are high that I’ll miss a few instances of formatting weirdness. If anybody who has never read this trilogy before picks it up and reads it via my Patreon, then they’re likely to trip over those formatting mistakes and they can tell me, I’ll produce a clean epub version for Patreon, and then the version that goes onto Amazon will be clean of errors as well.

How long do you think all this will take?

A lot less time than it takes to do three covers plus a boxed set or omnibus. That’s sure to take at least a couple of months, I expect.

Do you plan to do audiobooks?

It really annoys me that the second book is basically not available, so yes. Probably next year. I’m spending A LOT on covers and audiobooks this year, so I think I’ll push that off just a bit.

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Poetry Thursday: Ono no Komachi

Ono No Komachi was, it says here, “one of the six best waka poets during the early Heian period.” This linked Wikipedia page makes for interesting reading. But let’s take a look at one of her poems. This is different translations of just one poem.

***

The colour of this flower
Has already faded away,
While in idle thoughts
My life goes by,
As I watch the long rains fall.

Translation found here

***

***

Alas! The beauty
of the flowers has faded
and come to nothing,
while I have watched the rain,
lost in melancholy thought.

Translated by Helen Craig McCullough

***

***

The flowers withered
Their colour faded away,
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in brooding,
And the long rains were falling.

Translated by Donald Keene

***

***

While watching
the long rains falling on this world
my heart, too, fades
with the unseen color
of the spring flowers.

Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Arantani

***

***

It’s really interesting to see different translations of the same poem! How different they are — each one creates a different feeling and image. There are more translations if you click through the various links.

“Idle” and “melancholy” and “brooding” are not the same word. Throwing in “meaninglessly” completely changes the feel of the poem. Adding anything about “my heart” changes the poem again, not to mention that those translators chose to reverse the order of images.

Since I don’t speak Japanese — and the original language is at the link if you do and want to see how you’d translate this poem — but since I don’t, I can pick whatever version I prefer.

I love the translation by Helen Craig McCullough. I thoroughly dislike the translation by Donald Keene, and suspect he had no sympathy for the emotion expressed in the poem.

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This is Water

Here’s a link to the “This is Water” commencement address by David Foster Wallace, which a commenter mentioned somewhat recently.

[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” …

 The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. …

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

Thanks for pointing to Wallace, Mary Catelli — and to this commencement address in particular, Kim!

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Plot-driven vs Character-driven

A post at Patricia Wrede’s blog: The Driver’s Seat

Since before the Internet began, it seems, there’s been an ongoing argument about “plot-driven” stories vs. “character-driven” stories. By this time, there are a metric ton of how-to-write articles arguing that one is “better” than the other. And all those scare quotes are there because everybody in this discussion seems to have very clear ideas about what each of those terms mean, but if one looks a bit closer, the definitions often don’t agree with each other. This makes the whole discussion highly suspect to begin with. Even the growing chorus of people pointing out that plot vs. character is a false dichotomy leaves out key factors (which I’ll get to in a minute, but first let me rant a bit).

This is an interesting post and you should click through and read the whole thing, but it ends thus:

For my money, the most effective and memorable stories tend to be the ones that deal in both plot and characters, rather than focusing in tightly on one or the other. External events feel more significant if they have changed the characters as well as the country; internal development feels more real when it’s a response to changes or challenges in the character’s world.

Emphasis in the original. Which seems as though it should be obvious. This reminds me very strongly about the nature vs nurture “controversy,” which is best resolved by asking:

“Well, but is it the oxygen or the hydrogen that makes water wet?”

And if that doesn’t bring the debate to a halt, I don’t know what will. I don’t remember where I got that water line, by the way, but I didn’t come up with it. Perfect line, though.

And yet!

This thing about plot-driven vs character-driven isn’t the same, because some books really do focus very much more on the plot and others do focus very much more on the character. The fact that most novels do both obscures the fact that they don’t have to and that stories can be really excellent at both extremes.

A great example of the extreme for plot-driven with zero character development is The Martian. Tremendously fun book, no character development.

A great example of the extreme for character driven is In This House of Brede, where the most important event that happened took place in the backstory and the events of the novel are … not nonexistent, but not important. Practically any events could have worked, because the interior journey of the protagonist doesn’t really depend on those specific events. Or so I would argue.

Regardless, I think that’s where to start in any discussion about character-driven vs plot-driven novels: That one is not better than the other and that most novels do both, not in a wambly sort of way, but in a very definite way, where both the plot and the internal journey of the characters are crucial.

Also, there is a tendency — or I think there is, and I have certainly seen other assertions that there is this tendency — for fans of the genre of literary fiction to declare that literary = character driven, while “genre” or “commercial” fiction = plot driven, and to the extent that this attitude exists, it’s so, so, so ridiculous that it’s hard to answer. It’s as though someone had read ONLY literary fiction plus some Sherlock Holmes stories and The Martian and then thought all commercial or genre fiction, everything but literary, was basically like that — with iconic characters that don’t change or with, um, non-iconic? original iconic? characters that don’t change. You have to ignore, like, 99.9% of all SFF to think that. It’s HARD to think of SFF books like The Martian, with so little character development over the course of the story.

But!

There is ALSO — I think — a tendency for people to declare that the dichotomy between plot-driven and character-driven is illusory and all fiction does both. Which is not the case, and that’s why it’s useful to remember that fiction with iconic characters is very popular and also, look, right there, The Martian is sitting right there, a beautiful counter example.

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At long, long, long last

Finally, I’m winding up Silver Circle. If I’m not quite, totally, completely ready to type The End at the time you read this, I will be doing so tomorrow or maybe Wednesday, but certainly before the end of the week.

Therefore, I will be revising for the rest of the month, with substantially more revision of the last third than the earlier parts of the book. I wrote a lot of the last third with almost no re-reading or revision, so it’s a lot less polished and who knows, I might even change my mind about relatively big elements.

However, I actually started revising last week, before quite finishing the draft. That’s because I can do revision when my brain is more or less nonfunctional; ie, in the middle of the afternoon. Especially super-tedious small-scale editing such as looking up what this or that word is in Spanish or Latin or something, but also super-tedious small-scale editing like looking up the name of a town I mentioned in Book 1 or looking to see what highways lead from some state to some other state and how long it takes to drive from here to there.

I also started revising last week because I want to be able to send Part I out to the very earliest of early readers (Hi, Craig!) today or tomorrow or at least very soon. That means clearing out all the bold-faced notes and doing basic continuity revision for the first 75,000 words …

… because that makes a kind of neat place to break the story, assuming I’m going to break it into three pieces, not two …

… which I am. That is, at this point, settled. Because of the way the story breaks, semi-naturally, at a fairly early point, I’m planning at the moment to break it into

Part 1: Scattered Sparks, 75,000 words;

Part 2: Rising Winds, 150,000 words;

Part III: Shattered Skies, 150,000 words.

The word counts are estimates because, obviously, that will change during revision, but they will probably wind up pretty close to that unless I really change my mind about where to break off Part I.

I hope to be through the basic, primary revision of the whole thing sometime toward the beginning of September, but it could be more like the middle of September. I’d like to hand off Parts I and II to early readers before I’m finished with revision in order to reduce the overwhelming “here, have a book that’s well over 300,000 words.” Besides that, they can tell me what they think of the breaks. It’s kind of a great break at the end of Part 1, I have to say. Very dramatic plus a natural stopping point. That’s why I want to break it there.

Meanwhile!

The audiobook of The Year’s Midnight is now available. I’m making it available everywhere via Findaway Voices so that I can run sales on it, which I will do later, when the other audiobooks for this series are available. But The Year’s Midnight should be available right now at all audio platforms, or if it isn’t, it should be very, very soon.

The audiobook of Rihasi is still in production. I should be listening to Chapter 18 VERY SOON and of course that’s exciting. That is, you may not quite know which chapter is which because why should you, but Chapter 18 in that exciting chapter when Rihasi and Kior don’t get captured by their pursuers.

AND

Yes, as I thought it should, Rihasi earned an All-Star Bonus in July; I just got the notification this past week. I’m certain the many great reviews were crucial, so thank you VERY MUCH for leaving a review!

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