Tom Simon's Blog, page 6
January 10, 2013
A minor milestone
With the republication of ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’, there are now over 200,000 words of content on bondwine.com. I hope you may find some of them interesting, informative, or entertaining.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
Teaching Pegasus to crawl
The fourth essai in a series, following ‘Tyrion 13:4’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.
As I said earlier, the choice of an appropriate prose style for a fantasy tale is a decision fraught with peril. We are tempted to choose a style that will convey the proper sense of wonder and adventure, and the air of old times and alien cultures; or would, if we only had the skill to pull it off. If we lack that skill, our stories will sound rather like an untrained singer trying to do the lead in Rigoletto — ambitious, but inept. And this will get us laughed at.
It is safe to say that none of us enjoy being laughed at. So for perhaps forty years past, there has been a reaction in the opposite direction; and I am afraid that is an even worse error. The sensible reaction would be to learn how to produce the effects that we wanted; the real reaction, for far too many writers, has been simply to give up trying and settle for a bland quotidian style. Their stories are inept without being ambitious. And this is worse, for unless they are very lucky, it gets them ignored and forgotten. They may truly be hearing the horns of Elfland in their heads; but they cannot play that music. What they do play is a tuneless mishmash compounded of slovenly description, spin-doctoring, and rhetorical fog.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
Defining ‘literary fiction’
Geoff Burling says, in a comment on The Passive Voice (same article as the last):
One problem I have with Friedman’s post was that she insisted on an artificial distinction between “literary fiction” — I’m guessing she means fiction that is written well but is not bestseller material — & “genre” fiction (e.g., romance, mystery, action, science fiction): until a few decades ago, any fiction writer published with the hope her/his book would get on the bestseller lists, that everyone would want to read the book. (I bet even Herman Melville wanted Moby Dick to be a best seller, & was disappointed when it sold poorly.) A work is classed as literature long after the author is dead in most cases, anyway.
I reply:
Actually, the ‘literary fiction’ racket has been going for over a century, and it is, indeed, a racket. It is based not on quality of writing (though, to keep its rights to the moniker ‘literary’, it does tend to insist obsessively on fine details of prose technique at the sentence level), but on exclusion.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
Quality vs. quality
Edward M. Grant says, in a comment on The Passive Voice:
Most readers don’t care about ‘quality’ in the English teacher sense. They just want a good story that’s told in a readable manner.
I reply:
Which is to say that they are very picky indeed about actual quality. It’s just that the quality of a story as a story is not the sort of thing that English teachers are well equipped to analyse; so they pick and pick at relatively unimportant details of prose technique.
The trouble with publishing first drafts, for most writers, is that we very seldom get all our best ideas on the first draft. Right now, for instance, I am (shirking) revising the second book in a series that I am bringing out — an important structural revision. I realized a while ago that the pacing wasn’t holding up well in the earlier part of the book; and in the course of figuring out why, I came up with a much better way of getting the plot from point A to point B, in such a way that all the elements of the story would come together at point B with a bang, instead of making little popping noises one by one along the way.
John Cleese talks about how one of his fellow Pythons, though more talented than Cleese as a writer, never wrote scripts as original as Cleese’s. This (said Cleese) is because the colleague would go with the first workable idea he thought of, and knock off at 5:00, whilst Cleese would stay for an extra hour and a quarter, trying different ideas until he came up with something better. A lot of writers do this kind of work in the second draft. They’ve built the skeleton of the story, and have a working route from beginning to end; now they can make structural revisions to come up with the best route.
Readers will never consciously notice that all this work has been done, but they have a very shrewd way of being able to tell when it hasn’t.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 9, 2013
Jack London on the writing process
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
—Jack London
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
‘William Ockham’ on packages vs. contents
All the physical goods I buy from Amazon are packaged in cardboard boxes. Talking about the publishing industry is making the same mistake as assuming Amazon sells cardboard boxes that are customized by what’s inside them.
—‘William Ockham’, in a comment at The Passive Voice
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
Mishaps with ‘ezbuybutton’
Just one problem: As soon as I did this, all the paragraph breaks disappeared from all the posts on the whole site. Every single post displayed as a continuous mush of text. This, needless to say, is not acceptable.
I have sent an SOS to the developers, and deactivated the plugin. Meanwhile, if anybody can suggest an alternative or a workaround, I am all ears and humbly at your service.
Tyrion 13:4
The third part of the series, following ‘Quakers in Spain’ and ‘Gwladys and the Ghraem’lan’. As with those two, an earlier and shorter version appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.
Most readers like formed stories; I have this taste to an unusual degree. I have never lost, or as the sophisticates would call it, ‘outgrown’ the taste for a well-turned plot that I drank in — not with my mother’s milk, for I was raised on cheap commercial substitutes — but at any rate with the oldest stratum of my father’s teaching, with the earliest books (after Dr. Seuss) that he gave me to read. A child is not subtle; a child likes stories to be marked by clear signposts, and would rather have five spoilers than one ambiguity.
Partly this is because a child has not formed a pattern of expectations about stories. Grown people dislike spoilers, I suspect, largely because they have read (or watched) so much fiction that they generally know what to expect: a real surprise, to them, is a rare and precious thing, and if you deprive them of one, you do them a real injury. Every turn in a story is a surprise to a child, and the suspense can become too hard to bear. It was a master-stroke when William Goldman, in the film version of The Princess Bride, had the grandfather interrupt his telling of the tale to reassure his grandson that Buttercup ‘does not get eaten by eels at this time’. To an experienced reader, any peril that threatens to kill off the heroine a third of the way through the book is an obvious bluff. A very young reader has to find out the hard way.
Nowadays, even the average six-year-old has imbibed enough stories, chiefly through the medium of television, to be wise to the obvious tricks; in sad consequence, even a six-year-old may be angry at spoilers. But there are less naked ways to signal the phases of a story, ways that can be made subtle enough (and misleading enough) to please the palate even of a very old and sophisticated reader. One of the best devices for this purpose is the chapter break, with or without a title.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 8, 2013
Testing JournalPress
This is a test of the JournalPress plugin for WordPress. If I have installed it correctly (and it really is compatible with WP 3.5), this post should appear at superversive.livejournal.com. You should be able to leave comments on either site.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
A question . . .
What do you use to do the crossposting? And what version of WP are you using? I’ve found several plugins for WP that are supposed to crosspost to LJ automatically, but none of them are said to be compatible with WP 3.5. I am loath to risk my new site on the experiment.
EDIT: I tried the latest version of ljxp (or what seems to be the latest version), and as soon as I clicked on ‘Add New Post’, it sprayed error messages all over the editor page. I don’t see any place to input settings of any kind, such as, for instance, the name of the LJ I want to crosspost to. So it appears this method is a no-go, at least for now.
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