Matthew Woodring Stover's Blog, page 4

Grandmaster Stover

So I've always wanted to be a grandmaster, because the title is cool. Especially International Grandmaster, which is even cooler. But working your way up through a trad system takes forever, and I'm not so young any more.

So to hell with it. I'm officially founding my own fighting system:

THE WAY OF THE PORCUPINE

(Chinese: huán dao, because everybody knows

it's not a real martial art unless

it has a Chinese name.)

Colloquially known as fat mattjitsu, it's a self defense system for people too old or out of shape for kung fu. It's primarily a soft art (due to the soft body of its founder); its practice cultivates a spiritual discipline based on the Taoist proverb:

"The fox is swift and clever, and knows many tricks, yet still he is taken by the hounds. The porcupine is slow and dull, and knows only one trick — but it is a very good trick."

In honor of the art's creation, there's a special one-time-only sale: $1000 for a black belt, $5000 to be a certified instructor, and for $10,000 you can be the International Grandmaster of fat mattjitsu for a month.

Stover on Psycho Progress 2.0

Again from our pal snark:

Regarding smoothness, it sounds like you're saying that writing is an iterative process. It also sounds like you're saying "You want a step by step by step instruction manual to writing well for dummies? A set of writing principles? Ha, Sure. Here are the principles of writing well: talent and hard work."

Which is fair enough.

I don't actually know what you mean by "iterative process," unless it's intended to signify something you learn by doing it over and over and over again. If that's what you mean, then . . . well, no.

That works for learning to play a guitar — or a video game, or tennis, or to hit a baseball — but the creation of narrative can't be learned by repetition; no matter how many times you copy Hamlet, it won't teach you to write like Shakespeare. Learning to write is not a process of entraining motor reflex pathways. It's more analogous to learning to play chess.

Yes: playing chess well requires that you play game after game after game, just as writing well requires that you write scene after scene after scene, but you aren't mastering a motor skill, you are heuristically uncovering the essential structure of the activity.

Even the greatest chess masters don't see the game more than three or four moves ahead. Lasker, reputed to be the greatest mind in the history of chess, is said to have been able to see seven moves ahead . . . but I suspect that applied largely to the endgame, where options are restricted. What chess masters have is a vast well of experience — what people call "feel for the game." They don't have to analyze a position in detail, because they have an intuitive sense for the progress of play.

Same with writing, except it's harder. With chess, you know whether or not you're getting better; you have an objective measure in wins and losses (or cumulative points in the leagues and such). As long as you keep winning, you're obviously doing something right. With writing, all you have is your own sense of the quality of your narrative, and the inherently suspect opinions of whoever you can strongarm into reading your shit.

Even commercial considerations don't help; we can all point out hundreds of shitty books and dumbfuck stories that have not only sold, but sold well. Once you're in print, you do get some occasional honest feedback . . . from people who love your work if it flatters their intelligence or accords with their political prejudice, and hate it otherwise, and you have a small group of people whose opinions you really respect . . . but they're no more likely to be right than anybody else. (No offense.)

The only way you know you're making progress is if, when you stop and look at your project, your experience and intuition gives you a feel for how the story needs to go . . .

This is why people who want to be good writers should read lots and lots of good writers. Leave the beach book crap to people who want to write beach books.

In the end, all you have is Rule #1a: "If it works for you, it's right. If it doesn't, it's wrong."

This paragraph ended up a ramble in the response I'm trying to retype, so it's hard to summarise. I guess the point was that the amount of exposition you manage to get into this scene, regarding jedi attachment, the planet, Mace's relationship with the planet, Mace's relationship with Depa, Depa's backstory, the civil war, and so on, can't be an accident. Do you stop and say "Here's the bit where I'm going to need to tell the reader these particular elements?"

I think you're speaking of Mace's journal entry as his shuttle is making the atmospheric insertion into Pelek Baw airspace.

And yes, in that entry, I did have two main expository goals: to delimit the gross characteristics of Haruun Kal as a planet and a war zone, and to establish Mace's connection to it.

Throwing in the fabricated HoloNet entry for the planet is a cheap trick to give the appearance of objective authority. The rest . . .

Well, by Stover's Rule of Exposition, the trick is to work the info into a little story of its own. After all, when you remember something, you are (in effect) narrating the story of that event to yourself. So each thing I wanted to convey about Mace gets attached to its own story . . . and stories are messy things, especially when you're remembering them, that produce all kinds of unexpected interrelations. Read Proust. He knew his shit in every conceivable way, but the on the interaction of consciousness and memory, he is unmatched in the history of literature.

I didn't write that sequence to set up shit. I wrote it because it's what Mace would have written. I have Mace thinking about his childhood, because he's going back to the place he was born. He's thinking about Depa, because he's worried sick about her and has no idea if she can be found, much less what he'll find. And he's thinking about war and atrocities because war is overtaking everything he thought he knew about the galaxy . . . and he bitterly regrets not having committed an atrocity himself, because . . . well, you remember. It's not only what he's thinking about, but what he's thinking about the thinking.

I could have put that into a paragraph just like the one above, and saved about eight pages of very dense prose, but it wouldn't have worked for me.

Rule #1a.

I think I may have put this in one of the SRW posts, but it's important to every element of writing:

Never write shit just to set up other shit. Your shit needs to be powerful and engaging right where it is, otherwise just skip it and move on to something that is powerful and engaging.

Set up is bullshit. Story grows from story. If you're writing something primarily to set up something later, you're thinking too far ahead. Make where you are perfect, and where you're going will take care of itself.

Stover's Rules of Writing: Genre & Psychological Progression

From our good friend snark, some writing-related questions.

I was just reading an old post on sffworld.com in which you discussed how, while HD and BoT both contain magic and tech, HD is SF whereas BoT is fantasy, due to the focus of the story.

I found this a pretty interesting take on the whole thing, and would love to hear a more detailed explanation of how that works in the general case – what makes SF SF and fantasy fantasy?

Okay, first: there are two different versions of genre. Genre in publishing is different from genre in criticism and lit theory. Genre in publishing is broadly a question of trope: spaceships and aliens is SF, knights and dragons is fantasy and so forth. Basically what you expect.

Second: my theory of genre is idiosyncratic. To the best of my knowledge, my principle of metathematic intention has not even been considered, let alone taken seriously, by the LitCrit community.

I was speaking specifically of "hard SF", which is a subgenre with certain broad principles; essentially, to truly qualify as Hard, the central problem is resolved by creative use of the central speculative technology or technologies. That is, Caine's victory in Heroes Die is over an external threat, and achieved by getting tricky with the Studio, the thoughtmitter, and the Winston Transfer, while in Blade of Tyshalle the victory is achieved by Caine's enlightenment about the universe and his place in it.

Could one, as an experiment, write a novel in a medieval magical world whereby the central conflict is an external problem resulting from parallels between their society and our SF, which is solved by creative application of the central rule-based magicks? Would that then be SF, or fantasy? Which parts of the description are really central to the essence of the genre?

Or a near-future story that carefully explains the scientific basis for all fantastical elements, but focuses on the growth of characters through a myth arc? Arguably the original star wars does this, but it's already very soft SF, so it's not a very striking example.

A number of writers have pursued the "magical hard SF" you posit, notably Greg Keyes in his excellent Age of Unreason tetralogy, and yes, under my personal principle of genre, that's SF. But, as I'm sure Greg would say, who really gives a shit? That's not something a writer needs to worry about. The writer needs to worry about creating a compelling story. Critics can argue about the rest.

And if it's got magic in it, the publisher's gonna market it as fantasy, and if it has spaceships and aliens, they'll sell it as SF.

Star Wars is not even remotely real SF. You could remove every single piece of spectech and have no effect on the story at all, beyond confining it to a single world. The Millennium Falcon becomes a tramp freighter, Han's blaster becomes a six-gun, Luke's lightsaber becomes a sword, Alderaan is a city instead of a planet, so on and so forth.

However, take the magic away — that is, the Force — and all you have left over is a pedestrian revenge drama along with some preposterous character development from Luke.

How do you approach planning individual scenes? I think you said somewhere that the way you plan the novel as a whole varies from novel to novel, but for the scenes themselves, do you think through the train of thought for the character in an introspective scene, do you jot down a list of which Reveals you want to take place…? This question may be a little tangential to what I actually want to get at. I note in Shatterpoint you very carefully and yet naturally lead Mace's thoughts through a string of connected and important ideas – how do you get that to work so smoothly? Do you brainstorm out the ideas you want and possible connections in advance? Or do you just write it and it works?

I virtually never plot out Reveals; "Reveal" is just a word I made up because it makes certain concepts easier to talk about. When there's an opportunity for a character to take a quiet moment to chew shit over — especially a brilliant and highly articulate hero who's predisposed to introspection — all I'm really doing is answering a single question: "Well, if I were him, what would I be thinking right now?"

Beyond that, I'm just trying to make sure I get the character in a plausible emotional state and frame of mind to encounter/do whatever comes next. The "smoothly" is optical illusion. Perhaps the single greatest gift of technology to me is the word processor. Sequences that don't work for me are subject to (nigh) infinite revision; if I can't make it work, I chuck it and come up with something I like better.

For me, introspection is the same with actions and reactions — "If I were him, what would I be doing?" If the answer is something different from what the plot requires, then I have two equally valid options: change the character, or change the plot.

The piece I'm working on right now was going to feature the bad guy kidnapping the good guy's ex-wife and daughters as hostages to make the good guy do bad things . . . but I couldn't come up with a plausible reason why the good guy wouldn't just go along to save his little girls. Why he would even risk the appearance of defiance, let alone do something overt? I must have gone through thirty of forty different ways to play it, and none of them worked for me.

So I killed off the ex and the daughters ten years before the story begins, so that his family is now a character point instead of a plot point, and it's working beautifully.

It was my single greatest challenge in writing Revenge of the Sith — I kept coming up against psychological impossibilities — "How can a guy who thought That in the last chapter be thinking This now?" — and I discovered that back-chaining the emotional development (in other words, changing what the character thought in the previous chapter to make this chapter work, and another change two chapters before that to make the previous chapter work, etc. all the way back to the beginning) it transformed the emotional arc of the book into one I found plausible.

I also discovered — in literally every single case — the changes sharpened the previous chapters as well. It was actually kind of spooky.

If you really want to see masterpieces of introspection, you should read Shakespeare. Especially the tragedies, and specifically Hamlet. There's a reason why Hamlet's soliloquies are the most quoted lines from the Elizabethan theater. Especially "O what a rogue and peasant slave" and "How all occasions do inform against me" — what you're reading is his chain of thought as he talks himself through radical alterations of his conception of himself.

You can't beat Ol' Bill.

Stover Goes Live!

Hey. On the orders of my obsessed fan and stalker longtime pal and potential business partner Moe, I have finally actually activated my Twitter account.

So when you get so bored that you give up waiting for me to post on my blog, you can also be bored and give up waiting for my next tweet.

God help me.

I honestly thought I would never write the word tweet outside the context of Looney Tunes.

To quote the one and only REM tune I actually like, it's the end of the world as we know it.

Whiny Troll Replies! (Film at 11!)

Well, okay, no film.

But the whiny troll did indeed reply.

Do Lucas Books, Random House, Ballantine Books and Del Ray Press share your arrogant, profane and condescending snippy fits? I sure hope so because they are all being forwarded this lovely response you sent me. I will also share your entire response with the Star Wars community and as I submit book reviews to as many sites as I can find.

I guess the truth hurts? Read some honest reviews of the book and you will see I am far from alone in my opinion. Your pathetic money grab will end up hurting your career in the long run. I wouldnt use your book to wipe my ass. Pathetic.

Sandor Nagy

Ahem.

This was my reply to the reply:

Maybe before you do, you should look up the definition of "profane," because you clearly don't know what it means.

Here's the news, Giant Brain: I don't have to be polite to squealing piglets who hand-job their neuroses by shitting on my work and throwing it in my face.

"Snippy fits"? Are you kidding me? Why on Earth would I care what you think of my work? I don't care about my positive reviews, dumbshit. Why would I care about the tiresome ranting of some preposterously rude piglet with the social skills of a rabid skunk?

The only reason I replied in the first place was because I thought it was funny. And because I knew that people who read my blog would think it's funny too.

And they did.

Your brain-dead threat to send that to Del Rey is right in character. It's exactly what a whiny little festering pustule of a person with delusions of adequacy would do.

Do you not understand that I already posted your letter and my reply on a public blog?

So go right ahead on, piglet. Take your best shot. Please. Send it to everyone you know. Because the only people who will think you're in the right will be members of your immediate family and whatever kind, tolerant souls pretend to be your friends — and they'll be lying to you.

Plastering your blather all over the Internet will only make you look even more petty and self-righteously silly than you do already.

Have a ball, piglet. I can hardly wait.

Respectfully yours,

Matthew W. Stover

This creep could potentially provide ongoing amusement for years.

The email address, for those who missed it the first time, is

zbud@zbud.com

Just so you know.

One more time, with feeling!

IF YOU'RE GONNA PLAY POKE THE BEAR . . .

One to Share with the Class

Just got this email from one "Sandor Nagy."

I recently purchased and finished reading "Luke Skywalker and the shadows of Mindor". I must say, I have read over 30 Star Wars EU books and have loved every one except for Mindor. What utter rubbish! Lucasfilm should be ashamed of this amateurish work. What a waste of $8.00 of hard earned money. And what a shame that you were allowed to publish such garbage!

My response, in sum:

I shudder to think of the horrific anguish inflicted upon you by my little Star Wars book (one of over 30 you've read! Gosh, you must be smart!).

Your $8.00 was wasted . . . and it was hard earned! I am overcome . . . I tremble with shame . . . would that my tears could be diamonds, that I might cry you a river of money to heal your wounded heart!

Tragically, all my sympathy has been wasted on people who are not pompously self-righteous ignorant rat cunts with Internet access.

Excuse me. I have to go kill myself now.

Best always,

Matthew W. Stover

Oh, and by the way . . .

The email address it came from was:

zbud@zbud.com

Just in case any spambots might like to weigh in on the subject.

EDIT: Sorry for the typo. I meant "rat cunts." Corrected above.

This Just In: LIES, STUPIDITY AND GREED FINALLY SUCCEED IN DESTROYING THE REPUBLIC

Next update:

December 2012

GO VOTE

That.

The Size of the Universe For Dummies

So in the NYTimes today is an Associated Press report that astronomers believe the Hubble Space Telescope has detected the earliest galaxy yet — one from 13.1 billion years ago,  when the universe was only about 600 million years old.

Now stick with me here; I'm a fantasist, which means my knowledge base is primarily human psychology, history, myth and narrative theory. This is an Actual Hard Science thing, but I don't know Actual Hard Scientists. There's a question I've been meaning to ask a Real Astronomer, but I never seem to meet one.

So I want to lay this out for you, because somewhere among you all out there must be somebody who is one, or knows one, or knows somebody who knows one.

This all comes from one of Isaac Asimov's Cool Science For Yokels essays that I read, if memory serves, sometime in the early-to-mid 70s, when I was in what was then called junior high. The essay was on cosmogony, which was a hot topic, as the Big Bang theory was in those days decisively overtaking Continuous Creation and the other various versions of Where All This Stuff Came From (though the essay may have been written years earlier).

Asimov pointed out that we knew the gravitational constant and suchlike parameters to state with authority This Much Mass in This Much Space Becomes a Singularity Enveloped in an Event Horizon, otherwise known as a black hole. Now, in those days, Asimov reported that astrophysicists generally adhered to the Law of Cosmic Modesty, which was  "There shall be no such thing as a naked singularity," which was evidence that he was writing  before Stephen Hawking came along and told everybody, "Umm . . . we don't actually know as much as we think we know."

So okay. This is where it gets a little weird.

Asimov, in his usual Asimovian Let's Blow Your Little Geek Mind way, mentioned that all the hard SF writers speculating about what might exist inside a black hole were missing the point. Everyone knows what's inside a black hole, because we are.

Yes, we are.

He did a back-of-the-napkin calculation that clearly demonstrated (given what was then accepted as the mass of the universe and the size of what was then called "the cosmic egg") the universe must be enclosed within an event horizon. Which might be, he theorized, why the velocity of light is God's Own Speed Limit — "C. It's not just a good idea. It's the Law."– because anything going faster than c would have enough energy to burst out through our black-hole universe's event horizon . . . into nobody knows what.

This was all in the way of explaining how an infinite universe can still have boundaries. Reading at the time, it struck me this implies (as a thought experiment) that if you stood and stared into a Perfect Telescope long enough — about 13.7 billion years, give or take — you might find yourself looking at the back of your own head.

Now, I'm not hip to the current thinking on the curvature of space, except for some passing mention somewhere that Hawking thinks it might be a regular ovoid, like a flattened sphere, so I don't know if any of this has any meaning in the state of the art as it stands now.

But . . .

This was all brought back to me this morning, when I read the AP report I mentioned above. One of the astronomers was quoted pointing out how that galaxy has almost certainly by now merged with other galaxies etc etc (not to mention fundamentally changing its major components from supermassive blue stars to the more standard distribution). And we also know that the universe (or, at least, the ordinary matter part of it) was a lot smaller back then.

So here's my Size of the Universe for Dummies question:

Given what we know of how galaxies age — how various elements are gradually created, changing the spectrum profile, and how galaxies collide and trade stars and all that stuff — how do we know that this 13.1 billion years-ago galaxy (or some of its stars, elements, or whatever) is a new and unique find? How do we know that we haven't seen it or its descendants already?

In other words, what if the universe is smaller than we think?

How do we know that high-red-shift smear (or its descendants) isn't part of a cluster we've observed only 10 billion light years away? And what we assume is a completely different one at 7 billion lightyears, and one at 3 billion, and a relatively nearby one at a few hundred million . . .?

(Numbers are chosen entirely at random, only for purposes of illustration.)

Do we know what the primordial cluster that would eventually become the Milky Way looked like, 13.1 billion years ago?

In other words, how do we know that unimaginably distant ancient galaxy isn't going to grow up to be us?

Enquiring minds want to know.

Welllll . . .

I don't know when the book will come out; it is supposedly on Del Rey's 2011 schedule, but a lot depends on how much rewrite it'll need (it's fucking complicated, and I'm not sure it really makes sense), and what the workloads of my editor and the production department look like.

There will be no spoilers. Faithful Readers know how I feel about spoilers.

I will say, however, that the Acts of Caine have always been  . . . well, I guess you could call them, loosely, revisionist SFF. Heroes Die was, in part, intended to provide an alternate paradigm for the reader's experience of heroic fantasy (and adventure fiction in general), which was radical for 1997, but looks pretty tame compared to what comes after. By shining a little more light on What Fighting Really Is, and What Kind of Demented Borderline Personalities You've Been Cheering For All These Years, I hoped to shift my readers' expectations for the genre, and to affect how they experience other works.

Of course, this was only a thematic motif, not the primary goal for the story; the primary goal was to nail your ass to a chair and keep you tuning pages and at the end, leave you feeling like you kind of lived through some of the shit in the book yourself. And make me rich and famous.

*sigh*

Anyway, by the time Blade of Tyshalle was coming out, some of that paradigm shift was already under way, due largely to the influence of GRRM, and besides, I'd already said what I had to say on the subject . . . so with Blade I though it would be interesting to ask my readers to reimagine and reinterpret what they'd read in Heroes Die in a way that (I hoped) would deepen their experience of both books.

Act of Atonement is about doing exactly that to Caine himself. We'll see whether it works, once it's all put together.

I had originally dreamed of allowing new characters to come forward and carry the story of the Earth/Overworld cycle . . . but I discovered that what most of the people liked wasn't the idea of the world, but the idea of Caine.

In retrospect, it's obvious, of course; but in my days as a young fan, the idea of a charismatic protagonist fighting to save/change/whatever the world and the people he loves was thought to be juvenile, retrograde, and mere pandering to the lowest impulses of the people who kept SF from being a respected literary genre. Robert Heinlein was dismissed as a second-rate fascist peddling third-rate Ubermensch technoporn; Robert E. Howard was regarded as a YA author, and not a very good one; Fritz Leiber was considered a Great Name in the Genre . . . as long as you stay away from his unfortunate Fafhrd & Mouser shit.

I grew up in the era of Great Writers Doing Great Fiction–Harlan Ellison went his whole career without creating a single protagonist more heroic than a dog named Blood and a misfit named Everett C. Marm. JG Ballard. Gene Wolfe. It's a long list. The "Great Writers Doing Great Fiction" is not sarcastic–it's what they really were, and what they were really doing.

Heroic SFF was relegated to "hacks ripping off Tolkien," "hacks ripping off Conan,"  the neurasthenic lassitude of Moorcock's Elric, and the psychotic sadomasochism of John Norman's Gor.

It's probably fair to say that the entire genre was saved by Roger Zelazny, Terry Brooks, David (& Leigh) Eddings, and Bob Salvatore. (Donaldson rides the rail, being that he used the traditional trappings of quest fantasy but hung them on a powerless, morally compromised and arguably delusional leper–kind of a metaphor for the life of a fantasy novelist, huh?).

At any rate, this book (as it stands, and subject to revision) carries the following warning:

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Several parts of this story take place before the events depicted in Act of Atonement Book I, Caine Black Knife. Other parts of this story take place after. Still other parts take place before and after both. Some parts may be imaginary, and some were real only temporarily, as they have subsequently unhappened.

'Nuff said.