Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 107

TT: Old Styling in SF

JANE: When I was a junior in high school, my English teacher, Mrs. McCabe, created a very interesting assignment.  She divided the class into group, then randomly assigned novels to each group.  Each group was to prepare a presentation on the novel to give before the class.  Who was to do what element of the novel was also assigned randomly.  I still recall my reaction when I looked at the word printed on my slip of paper.  It was Style.

Let’s Take a Closer Look

“What?” thought I, “is ‘Style’?  How can I ever hope to discuss this, especially in a book like Vanity Fair?”

I usually did very well in English, but I thought I might fail this assignment.

ALAN: What did you do?

JANE: I looked Style up in the dictionary.  Then I forged onward.  And, for those of you who are waiting in trepidation, I did not fail the assignment.  Indeed, I learned a lot.

But I don’t bring this up just to provide a window into a past anxiety.  If we’re going to discuss “Style” in SF/F, I think it would be a good idea if we start by providing ourselves with a working definition, so we end up talking about the same thing.

I’d love to hear what springs to mind for you when someone talks about the “Style” of a novel or writer or even time period.

ALAN: Mainly I think it’s the way that sentences are put together. Hemingway’s short, declarative sentences are instantly identifiable. At the other extreme you have Henry James with his long, rambling sentences that are absolutely stuffed to the gills with subordinate within subordinate clauses. And let’s not forget Damon Runyon with his utterly inspired use of the historical present tense.

After that things start to get a bit more subtle. Raymond Chandler’s very clever and often witty similes (…as false as an usherette’s eyebrows…) are quite distinctive, as is the stream of consciousness technique used by Virginia Woolf and James Joyce that tries to mimic people’s interior thoughts.

In a nutshell, for me, style is defined by the structure of the prose. How did you approach the problem when you set out to analyse Vanity Fair?

JANE: I can’t really remember.  This was, after all, decades ago.  So what I remember most was the apprehension I felt about having to deal in a concrete fashion with a term that people tend to toss around lightly.  “I like that writer’s style” can mean different things to different people.

That’s why I wanted to have some idea of what you meant before we dove into the difficult question of “style” in SF and, particularly, the thorny issue you mentioned last week.  I quote: “Another criticism I’ve heard about the [SF/F] classics is that the writing style can sometimes seem cumbersome and old fashioned.”

So, what sort of things do people mention when they criticize the style?

ALAN: That’s hard to answer – I’ve not seen any specifics, mostly I’ve just seen general grumbling about old-fashioned and clunky.

But one example that I have seen mentioned is Isaac Asimov’s short story “Nightfall.” It’s been voted the best SF story ever in numerous polls, but if you actually go and read it you’ll find that it reads like it was written by a teenager who was still trying to learn how to write properly.  And that’s because it was written by a teenager who was still trying to learn how to write properly. In one of his several autobiographies, Asimov said that he always found it a bit embarrassing that such a badly written story was held in such reverence. It has a great central idea, but the story itself is very poorly written.

JANE: Okay…  I went and re-read “Nightfall” (published 1941), then, for good measure I re-read Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” (published in 1934).  This gave me what may be a valid insight into what could be called the “style” or expectations of fiction at that time.  This is different from personal writerly style, but no less valid.

Both of these stories can be found in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. This collection itself is probably now considered a dinosaur, since it was published in 1970 – a walloping forty-six years ago or, to put it all into perspective, a greater interval than between the publication of the anthology and the oldest story in the volume

With me so far?

ALAN: Indeed I am. What conclusions did you draw from this?

JANE: For one thing, I was struck by the fact that both stories (and, indeed, others in the collection) were essentially about events that had already mostly happened.   In other words, they broke a cardinal tenant of modern writing: “Show Don’t Tell.”

 As such, these stories were incredibly talky, with stereotypical characters whose names – to use “Nightfall” as an example – could have been replaced with “Reporter,” “Psychologist,” “Chief Astronomer,” “Cultist” without losing a beat.  The talky characters talk to each other, then the story ends.

“Nightfall” essentially has two parallel plots, both talky: one talking about past events that lead to the current situation; the other talking about the current situation (the impending “Darkness”) and what might happen.  The story ends with a shift to an omniscient narrative voice that informs us (in the best radio voiceover manner) “The long night had come again.”

As such, I can see why a post-television audience, accustomed to being shown not told, would find this deadly.  However, I think there’s a bigger element influencing the style here than visual versus auditory storytelling.  Want to guess what it is?

ALAN: No idea.

JANE: Wrong! Quite the opposite. Idea is really what the stories are all about!

My long-ago English teacher, Mrs. McCabe, would have broken the elements of a story into plot, setting, characters, and style. But for SF, especially “hard” SF, the concept that the IDEA is the hero is crucial.

“Nightfall” begins with a quotation from Emerson.

“If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?”

Asimov’s story takes Emerson’s idea and provides a very different answer.  Along the way, he designs a complicated solar system that justifies the idea of a relatively sophisticated civilization that has no idea the universe is larger than eight light years, and within which the residents of the planet are accustomed to always having at least some light.

ALAN: Ah! A penny just dropped in my head. Style is more than just sentence structure and word choice. It’s also the way in which the story itself is put together.

JANE: Exactly! When I thought about it, I realized that if retold as a novel, “Nightfall” could be very gripping.  Instead being set on the final day, we’d start a few weeks earlier. The characters would be given dimension.  There would be trauma and tears over who would go into the “Hideout.”  We’d have separated lovers, battles in the streets, as well as the build up to the final disaster… And maybe some of our protagonists (because we’d have some, rather than talking heads) would survive the initial disaster.

Then we could have interminable sequels about how the survivors deal with the “long night.”  Actually, handled correctly (say by S.M. Stirling) as retold, “Nightfall” could be quite gripping.

ALAN: As it happens, Robert Silverberg spotted that before you did and he expanded the story into a novel (also called Nightfall) in 1990. Apart from the lack of sequels, he follows your plot outline quite well.

JANE: I had no idea!  I wish you could hear how loud I’m laughing.

As I see it, one of the difficulties older SF has with reaching a modern audience is that in a genre now dominated not only by novels, but by series, readers don’t just want a Cool Idea and a setting that exists as an excuse to show it off, they want developed characters, intricate plot, and good prose.

ALAN: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The older stories could well seem unsophisticated to modern readers, and that can be quite a turnoff.

JANE:  I’d actually like to look more closely at the prose conventions of the older SF and how they inform the style.  I’ve had some cool thoughts…  But I also want to go write, so can we wait until next time?

D is for Deadline

A few weeks ago, when I was the Featured Speaker at the UNM Writer’s Conference, part of my talk was about how important it is to establish writing habits.  I went out of my way to explain that there isn’t one way to do this.  I then supplied examples from several professional writers (including myself, from back when I was getting started) who manage to produce  a regular flow of novels and short fiction despite holding down full-time jobs.

Deadline? Finishing Line?

Afterwards, one of the people who stopped to chat made an interesting comment: “I really enjoyed your talk, and all the examples you gave.  But isn’t it easier for professional writers to write—even if they have jobs?  After all, they have deadlines to meet.”

I thought this was a really interesting comment because, of course, not all professional writers make their deadlines.  Indeed, a couple of writers have become almost as famous for not making deadlines as for what they produce when they finally deliver the manuscripts in question.

Those writers who do meet their deadlines take into account that life is not predictable and try to set deadlines that allow not only for time to write, but for when the unpredictable happens.  One of my favorite examples was from Ian Tregillis, who not only schedules time to write, but also allows time for life’s ups and downs.  Here’s how Ian put it:

“I also anticipate two non-productive months, so that I have time for revision prior to submission, and also to account for the inevitable month where travel, work deadlines, pets, taxes, and household emergencies conspire to make writing impossible for several weeks.  I’ve found that every single book comes with at least one of those months.”

(Ian Tregillis is the author of the critically acclaimed “Milkweed Triology.”  His current new release is The Rising, book two in his “Alchemy Wars” series from Orbit.  When he’s not writing, Ian holds down a light-weight, full-time job as a physicist at Los Alamos National Labs.)

When I started writing full-time, I also allowed for time for things to go wrong.  I have bittersweet memories of talking with John Douglas at Avon who was my editor both for several of my own books and for the two books I completed for Roger Zelazny: Donnerjack and Lord Demon.  We were trying to work out a schedule for my turning in first Donnerjack, then the book that would become Changer.  I remember saying something along the lines of, “And then it’s going to be around the anniversary of Roger’s death, so I’d better allow time for my breaking down.”  John understood.

In fact, the only time I’ve missed a deadline was when my father died, and even then I was only a few weeks late.

My feeling is that externally imposed deadlines may indeed help some people make time to write.  They might even thrive under pressure, like those people who, in high school and college, leave their term papers to the last minute.  (I always wondered how good those papers turned out and what sort of grades they received, but I never could make myself ask.)

Most people think of deadlines as something imposed from the outside.  This is probably part of the appeal of National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo).  Not only is there a deadline imposed, but also there is the sense of belonging to a community of other people all striving to meet that goal.

However, I think that the best deadlines are those imposed by writers themselves.  November would not be the month I’d pick to try to write a novel.  By the end of the month, both Thanksgiving and the build-up to the Christmas holiday season are already cutting into my free time then.

Some people resist setting up deadlines because they can’t bear the sense of failure when they don’t meet them.  However, would these people write more if they didn’t have any reason to push forward, despite the myriad distractions imposed by daily life?  Only they know, but – based on my experience both as a writer and as an English professor (and thus subject to myriad excuses as to why the paper was late, despite the student having known the deadline from the first week of class), I doubt it.

Maybe we need to change the term.  Maybe “deadline” – with the implication of complete failure and death if the goal is not met – needs to be changed to something more inspiring.  How about finishing line?

I’d love to know what you think about deadlines.  Have they helped you?  Hurt you?  Inspired you?  Distracted you?

FF: Gods, Ghosts, Games

It’s been a heck of a busy week, with reviewing my own work cutting into my ability to read other people’s.

Silver Contemplates Rome

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The River God’s Vengeance by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR 8.  By this point in the series, Decius is definitely a more serious person.  Interesting think how this shift occurred in tiny stages.

Ghost Walker by Margaret Coel.  Audiobook.  Ms. Coel was keynote speaker for the UNM Writer’s Conference, where I gave the post-lunch talk.  Enjoyable.  Will probably read more in the series.

In Progress:

Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture by Adrienne Shaw.  “Gamer” here means video, not RPG.  Interesting, but dense.  Decided to focus more on reading this.  Unhappily, the author’s focus is not as tight as it could be.

Who Am I? Pete Townsend.  Audiobook.  Read by Pete Townsend.  Townsend’s thoughtful, incisive view of his own struggles to realize complex artistic visions is fascinating.  His reading is quite good and means that the text is his own, not “interpreted” by a reader.  This is a huge bonus for autobiography.

Also:

Lots of research stuff, as well as my “read-aloud” of my manuscript of Asphodel.

TT: Classic or Out of Date?

ALAN: There’s been a bit of on-line discussion recently which suggests that people no longer read the SF classics (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, et al). The suggestion is that modern readers no longer find them relevant. Heinlein heroes use slide rules for goodness sake! How old fashioned…

Asimov, Clarke, Budris, Heinlein

You have more direct experience of this than I do because you’ve taught literature classes. How did your students react to the classics of literature?

JANE: Honestly, I’m not sure that the two really compare.  For one, students of literature don’t expect to be familiar with all the details they encounter in “classics.”  I mention this because I don’t think I’d recognize a slide rule if I saw one, much less know how to use it!

For another, what usually has made the piece in question a classic is that it deals with moral, ethical, or social dilemmas that still have resonance for a modern audience.

I think the problem that SF faces is that those stories are set in an ostensible future.  Therefore, someone using a slide rule to fix a spaceship — if I recall the story you’re alluding to, it’s Heinlein’s “Misfit” – seems ridiculous.

ALAN: Yes, that story does have a slide rule in it. But actually I was thinking more of the novel The Rolling Stones (aka Space Family Stone) where their father keeps the twins Castor and Pollux in line by threatening to confiscate their slide rules when they misbehave. It’s one of my favourite Heinlein books.

JANE: I’m not familiar with that one.  I’ll need to give it a try.

 I’ve actually seen a writer pull a great “save,” for a situation where the tech in a setting had become dated.  It was in a Star Trek novel of which, to my shame, I cannot remember either the title or the author.  A sassy young cadet fresh out of the academy is “shadowing” Lieutenant Uhura.  He can’t stop telling her how outdated the communication equipment is, rattling on and on and on….

Then they get into a battle, and (as always happened) the communication board gets blown.  Uhura’s down beneath the counter, splicing wires and all that to get the board working again.  She pauses to look at the young hot shot and says, “If we had the sort of equipment you were talking about, I couldn’t fix it this fast.”

But, although that was a great save, it doesn’t avoid the fact that nothing looks stupid faster than a projected future that relies on past assumptions.

ALAN: I’ve heard other people say that as well, but I just don’t see it. Certainly it’s anachronistic but I can’t see why it should detract from the story.  (The striking clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar never worried me either). If you need to rationalise it, you could claim that Heinlein et al were not writing about the future, rather they were writing about a future which never actually came to pass.

JANE: The Julius Caesar example is not at all the same thing.  It’s an anachronism in the literal sense – something outside of time placed in the wrong setting.

The slide rule, however, can be seen as a failure of imagination.  For a genre that prided itself in speculating about the future as it might be, this is a definite shortcoming.

ALAN: Sorry, but I don’t agree. In both cases, the anachronism is a piece of technology that doesn’t belong in the time period either because it hasn’t been invented yet (the clock) or because it has been superseded (the slide rule). And neither of them bothers me very much when I’m reading the story.

JANE: Ah, but as you noted in your opening statement, it does bother a lot of readers.  Not me, particularly, but obviously some!

ALAN: True.

JANE: Do you remember who it was who commented that in all the fictional depictions of the first landing on the Moon, no one included the event being televised?  Yet the worldwide televising of the Moon landing caused it to have an enormous cultural impact.

ALAN: No, sorry, I don’t. And the googles aren’t doing anything for me today…

JANE: I mention that because that bit about the Moon landing is frequently cited as another example of SF failing to really imagine the future.

ALAN: Someone (I think it was Brian Aldiss) once remarked that SF writers imagine and predict the future on the machine gun principle. If you spray enough bullets around some of them are bound to hit the target by sheer chance. But most of them will miss…

I actually have anecdotal evidence that these classic books can still be read and enjoyed by today’s readers. My godson, who is 13, has read and enjoyed many such novels. He requested Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for Christmas and absolutely loved it. And my friend Dylan, who is also 13, bought, read and enjoyed some Heinlein juveniles when I sold my library off…

And in my own case, as a young boy I was reading and enjoying books by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs – books that were fifty or more years old by then and quite out of date in much the same way that the SF classics are out of date now. Nevertheless I loved the stories that those old books told.

JANE: Oh, I agree that many of the best works are still readable.  However, I’m not sure I’d use them as “gateway” books for a new reader of SF/F.  My Wednesday Wanderings – and especially the Comments – discussed this at some length back in 2014: here and here.

ALAN: I certainly agree that these are no longer “gateway” books. They still have value for the serious SF reader though, if only to familiarise the reader (and possibly the writer) with what has gone before. It can be embarrassing to realise that the thrilling new idea you’ve just come across is actually common coin.

JANE: Yes, that’s it exactly!  Every so often, I come across an old movie or story – something that would have been part of the mental furniture of the publishers and editors to whom I was attempting to sell my stories – and I realize I’d been missing a whole element in the landscape.  The only thing I can compare it to is when the clouds clear and you realize that “the mountain” you’d seen was part of a larger range, not the isolated bump you’d originally thought.

Does that change what I would have written?  No.  But it would have given me a different perspective.

ALAN: Another criticism I’ve heard about the classics is that the writing style can sometimes seem cumbersome and old fashioned. I have a certain sympathy with this point of view. Robinson Crusoe is a classic book by any definition of the term. I’ve read and enjoyed it several times, but I do find it a bit of a struggle. Defoe’s prose can sometimes be opaque. And, from a personal point of view, I find his obsession with Crusoe’s Christian faith quite tedious.

JANE: Oh, sheesh!  Writing style…  That’s a whole other topic and probably not one we want to tackle here.  Or do we?  Maybe next time?

ALAN: Oh yes we do! As always, I have OPINIONS about this, and I’m sure you do as well.

When You Don’t Know

How do you know what questions to ask when you don’t know you don’t know that there’s even a question?

Any Questions?

This past weekend, I was the Featured Speaker at the UNM Writer’s Conference.  I had a wonderful time, and especially enjoyed having the opportunity to answer questions.  But the experience also left me with the above question.

Let me back up and explain…

Although the UNM Writer’s Conference was a “general” event – embracing writers of non-fiction, as well as of fiction in many different genres – there were a fair number of people there who were specifically interested in writing SF.  These people were serious enough about their writing that they had paid the relatively steep admission price.  (To be fair to the conference, this did include a nice box lunch, as well as coffee and snacks, and the possibility to sign up for a pitch session with an agent or an editor.)   Despite this, many of those I spoke with didn’t appear to know much about the SF/F field, nor did they appear to have done their basic pre-conference homework.

I am still feeling a little bad about giving a young man a hard time when he didn’t recognize my name.  Why?  Well, I certainly don’t expect everyone to know who I am.  Far from it!  I’m not a household name, even in the SF/F field.  However, I was the Featured Speaker for the conference.  If I had been paying to attend such an event, I would have researched every listed writer (in this case, there were only about six).  Then, especially for those who were writing in my chosen genre, I would have read at least one of their books.

(As those of you who read my Friday Fragments know already, I sought out a novel by Margaret Coel, the conference’s Guest of Honor, just because I felt I would get more out of contact with her if I understood something about her work.)

If you’re reading this, Nathan, I apologize.  I hope that the questions I did answer for you showed that I took you seriously.  And I hope that your pitch session went brilliantly.

However, this young gentleman was not the only would-be SF/F writer who showed a lack of awareness of the SF/F field.  Of the seven or eight people I spoke with, only two knew about Bubonicon, our highly-regarded local SF convention.  Given how important the SF/F convention is – not only to the field in general, but for authors as a means of learning about the field, having an opportunity to interact with readers, and, maybe, even to network – this really surprised me.

Back in the Dark Ages, when I started writing, I wasn’t a convention goer.  However, I knew that such conventions existed.  I even knew that they involved activities other than “serious” writing discussions.  This was in the Days Before the Internet, so I couldn’t easily research everyone who was expected to attend.  However, I did look up the listed guests, so that if I met any of them, I could speak intelligently.  My research also helped me to choose what panels I wanted to attend.  And, no, I wasn’t the grey-haired old wolf you all know.  I was twenty-six.

That brings me back to my original question: How do you know what questions to ask when you don’t know you don’t know that there’s even a question?

Well, here’s one option available to aspiring writers these days.  If you “follow” or otherwise interact with a writer, editor, or publisher via Social Media, and he or she uses a term you’re not familiar with, look it up!

A writer might say “I’m Guest of Honor at Such and Suchcon this weekend.”  If, instead of letting this odd reference slide by, you looked up Such and Suchcon, you’d then find out that this was an SF/F convention.  If you read the listed activities, you might see terms you don’t know, like “cosplay,” or “steampunk,” or “fan programming.”  By the time you’d looked those up, you’d have come to realize how vast and varied the field you are interested in has become.

Your next step should be to see if there is a similar event in your area.  As an experiment, I just Googled “SF con + NM.”  This gave me not only Bubonicon, but several other related conventions and a Wikipedia listing of SF conventions in general.

Honestly, this is the sort of research you would be doing if you were searching for a job in a specific area, and that’s what writing (and selling ) SF/F is.  Looking for a job.

All right, I’m curious, how would you go about figuring out what questions to ask when you don’t know you don’t know that there’s even a question?

FF: Reading Somethings Old, Lots New

This week only one YA or younger book…  and that one was as carryover from last week. Didn’t have an audiobook for the weekend…  Nearly went into withdrawal!

Persephone Steals the Shelf!

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Maze of Bones, 1st 39 Clues novel by Rick Riordan.  Audiobook.  Part of a vast, multi-author.  I think I’ve seen another of these (“Spirit Animals”) being marketed in a very similar way (multiple authors, on-line support, “where do you belong” etc., sense of being tied to a computer game.)  Can anyone tell me if this is a new trend?

Nobody Loves a Centurion by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR 6.  Decius is with Julius Caesar in Gaul.

The Tribune’s Curse by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR 7.  Decius back in Rome.  Things are so bad he keeps wishing he were back in Gaul.

In Progress:

The River God’s Vengeance by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR 8.  Don’t forget to clean the sewers!

Ghost Walker by Margaret Coel.  Audiobook.  Ms. Coel is keynote speaker for the UNM Writer’s Conference, where I’m giving the post-lunch talk.  Thought I’d try one of her books.

Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture by Adrienne Shaw.  “Gamer” here means video, not RPG.  Interesting, but dense.  Only reading a bit at a time.

Also:

Re-read or read for the first time a bunch of pieces in the 1970 Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology.

TT: Alan Gets Into Someone’s Head

JANE: So, Alan, last time you mentioned that the biggest challenge you’d faced when you started in on writing fiction was getting into character’s heads.

Here’s Edna!

Did your writer’s group exercise based around writing a character sketch give you any insights into making a character come alive?

ALAN: Yes, I think so. I chose a picture of a cleaning lady and wrote three brief character sketches that described her as three very different people. Then I took one of those character sketches and wrote a (very short) story about her with a proper beginning, a middle and an end. I’m quite pleased with the results. All I’ve got to do now is try and work out how I did it…

JANE: Maybe if we step back and look at those three character sketches, you’ll have an insight.  Are you game?

ALAN: Yes, indeed.

JANE: First, though, I have a question for you.  Why did you pick a cleaning lady?

ALAN: As soon as I saw the picture, I remembered an incident from when I was a student. We had a party, and wrote a message on the wall: “We love Mrs Francis our wonderful cleaning lady”. She had to clean it up the next day, of course. But she did it with a huge smile on her face – she really was a lovely lady and I remember her fondly. I thought I could use that anecdote in a character sketch. And I did!

JANE: That’s neat!  I have another thought on that, but I want to hold onto it for later.  So, how about those character sketches?

ALAN: The first two character sketches described Edna, an office cleaner. I used almost exactly the same words to describe a nice Edna and a nasty Edna. It was a useful exercise on how important the choices of words and similes are. For example, the nasty Edna had “formidable curlers that looked as if they could put a permanent wave in the girders of the Eiffel Tower” while the nice Edna had “formidable curlers that only came out on Saturday when they gave her lucky hair for the bingo”.

JANE:  Nice variation on a theme.   Another good thing to remember is that the point of view of whoever is viewing Edna might influence whether they saw her as “nice” or “nasty” based on their own past associations with women who wear curlers.

So, what was the third sketch?

ALAN: The third character sketch was a longer piece that described Edna’s life in a small Yorkshire village in (probably) the 1950s. She was an amalgam of various such ladies that I remembered from that time. There was a little bit of my grandmother in her, and a little bit of a friend’s mother…

JANE: I’m curious.  Why did you name her Edna?  Was that the name of one of those ladies?

ALAN: I have no idea, except that really is her name. If she had a different name, she’d be an imposter. And no, I do not know anyone in real life called Edna…

JANE: Character names can be like that.

So, which one did you choose to write your story about?

ALAN: The nice Edna from the original character sketches. She helps Phyllis from Accounts Receivable with the month end report by applying a little bit of homespun wisdom and a dirty joke. It’s only 500 words, but I think it works quite well.

JANE: Sounds intriguing.  I know that sometimes there are contests for very short stories.  Maybe you can try your piece there.

Earlier, when you mentioned you’d chosen a cleaning lady, I mentioned I had a thought but wanted to hold onto  it.  Now I’ll trot it out…

One of the ways to avoid writing cardboard characters is to think of actual people you know – or as you did with Edna Three, several actual people you know.  A really good exercise is to write a story using real people as characters rather than thinking of them as abstract concepts like “detective,” or “biologist,” or “ship’s captain” or “cleaning lady.”

It’s astonishing how much we know about even casual acquaintances.  Yet, if asked the same questions about a character many writers would just look puzzled.

ALAN: Can you give me an example?

JANE: Sure.  There’s a clerk at my local grocery store I see regularly.  The longest conversation we’ve had is probably less than 120 seconds.  Nonetheless, I know she hates hot weather, doesn’t like bananas, struggles with her diet, is a former smoker, has a small dog she’s very fond of, and watches football.  She is not patient with people who don’t hold up their end, but can be surprisingly kind if someone really needs help.

The green grocer at the same store is divorced, but gets along well with his now adult children.  He’s afraid of flying.  Although very friendly, he prefers to work with stock to being put on a register.  He likes small towns, enough so that he gets up very early to commute in for his job, rather than live closer.  He’s fully bilingual in Spanish and English, switching between languages depending on who he’s chatting with.

And that leaves out physical descriptions entirely.  And names, both of which tend to be the first things many writers – both new and experienced – think about when putting a character together.

ALAN: That’s clever. I’d never thought of approaching it that way. I think I sort of assumed that successful story tellers had characters just walk into their fingertips and then drop straight out on to the page. It was a bit frustrating that it didn’t work like that for me.

JANE: Well, sometimes they do just appear – and start running the show.  However, not every character does.  I want to clarify something.  I’m not saying that all your characters need to be copies of people you actually know.  Far from it!  However, I do think you should have the same sort of “gut feeling” for your characters that you would about a casual acquaintance.

Now, mind you, I’m not saying that all this needs to come out on the page, but sometimes knowing these little things about a character helps give them more dimension.

ALAN: Thank you – that’s given me a lot to think about. Meanwhile, from hints that Lyn has dropped, I think the next few meetings of the group will be concentrating on how to make a place seem real. I’ll let you know how it goes.

JANE: That would be delightful.  Maybe in a few months we can pick up this theme again.  Meantime, I wonder if our readers have anything to add about their experiences with fiction writing or in writing groups.  (We had a little last week, but I’m inviting more!)

Flowering Determination

On Sunday night, we heard our first toad of the year singing in our tiny (120 gallon) backyard pond.  This makes it officially Spring.  Mind you, nighttime temperatures still frequently drop to below freezing.  Forty-degree temperature shifts are not at all uncommon here, where a mile-high elevation means I can find myself wearing a short sleeved tee-shirt in the daytime and a sweater at night.

Amaryllis with a Twist

So I’m fighting a desire to put in a garden because, even though part of me is dancing around saying “Spring is here at last!”,  it’s quite likely that seeds would rot in the ground and plants just sulk and/or get frostbite.  Or broken in half by high winds.  Our catalpa trees made the mistake of starting to leaf out and currently show some bad burn.  They’ll recover, though.

As a sop to our gardening Cerberus, we’ve planted some tomato seeds in our little seed starter.  Are you familiar with Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro?  If you are, imagine me as little Mei checking the garden after she and her sister Satsuki have planted the nuts and seeds the totoro gave them.  I don’t quite hunker down like a crab and stare, but I do check the seed starter several times a day, just in case.  I will not admit to whether or not I do the “totoro dance.”  My dignity needs some preservation.

A much more rewarding plant-watching activity is watching our two amaryllis grow.   Amaryllises surge forth visibly in the course of a day.  On the first day we brought them out, only one bulb showed a tiny green leaf tip.  Today – about two weeks later – they’re already flowering.  Very satisfying indeed.

These amaryllis plants are descended from one given to me for Christmas by a friend many years ago.  Last year, I had to split the bulb, which resulted in the very odd stalk that you can see in the accompanying picture.  I like the determination it illustrates.  Visual depictions of determination are something every writer needs.

Yes…  It’s spring in New Mexico, which is about as different as you can get from the “drip-drip-drop little April showers” you may remember from Disney’s Bambi. Still, it’s nice looking out the window and seeing some green, even if the green is largely what most people would call “weeds,” but we consider valuable stabilizing elements in our very sandy yard.

What else is going on?

This coming Saturday I’m the “Featured Speaker” at the UNM writer’s conference.  My slot comes up right after lunch.  I’m still putting my talk together, but I’ve collected some neat material and looking forward to it.  Perhaps I’ll see a few of you there.

I heard from David Weber, and he likes my story for the forthcoming (but as of yet unscheduled) “Safehold” anthology.  My story is called “Brother Against Brother,” and is set during the colonization of Safehold.

I’ve also finished typing up the “handwritten project” and started reading it aloud to myself.  It came in at around 54,500 words.  No idea whether my read through will end up making it longer or shorter.  What I do know is that I’m feeling increasingly excited about it.

Yes.  It does have a title: Asphodel.

Now I’m going to go emulate my amaryllis and see how I can make my writerly garden grow!

FF: No Fooling!

Finished my library books, got out another, and am back to SPQR.  So, as usual, all over the place.

Kel Pretends to be the Big Bad Cat

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The Storybook of Legends “Ever After High #1” by Shannon Hale. Middle grade and built around fashion dolls, so I didn’t expect much.  However, between descriptions and some of the most annoying slang I’ve encountered ever (hexellent; “fairy” instead of “very” ex.  “You look fairy, fairy lovely today!”) I found much to like, including a much more thoughtful exploration of character motivation than the similar School for Good and Evil by Soman Chainani that I read a few months back.

Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt.  “The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It.”  Learned a bit more history of the RPG field, although the tight focus on D&D was a distorting element.

In Progress:

Maze of Bones, 1st 39 Clues novel by Rick Riordan.  Audiobook.  Part of a vast, multi-author project.  I’m obviously not the target audience but will stick to the end of this one.

Nobody Loves a Centurion by John Maddox Roberts.  SPQR 6.  Decius is with Julius Caesar in Gaul.

Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture by Adrienne Shaw.  “Gamer” here means video, not RPG.  Will at least skim, but I’m not really a video gamer, so many references don’t mean a lot to me.

Also:

Origami books.  Still.  I have mastered the inflatable rabbit and am considering what next.

TT: Reader, Reviewer… Writer?

JANE: So, Alan, recently I was thinking you’ve been retired for a while now.  Soon after you retired, we Tangented about the big event, and your various goals.

As I recall, you were going to move, get a dog, and start writing a novel.  I know the move happened and the dog was acquired, but how’s the writing going?

Antique Bottle of Mystery!

ALAN: Well, I started writing a time-travel novel, but it died. The characters were cardboard thin and they tended to lecture each other instead of having proper conversations. So I started writing a historical novel, which is actually looking a little more promising, but I got stuck three chapters into it.

JANE: That’s interesting.  You’ve been writing a review column for many years, and you faithfully manage to produce an interesting and humorous column every month.  From collaborating with you these last several years, I know you’re good at meeting deadlines.

So, what’s different about writing fiction?

ALAN: The hardest part is getting inside someone else’s head. The humorous incidents in my review column are all about me, and I’m already inside my own head, of course. But when I try and get inside another person’s head I tend to find lots of empty space there. And that translates into blank screens and blank sheets of paper…

JANE: Have you found any ways to work around this?

ALAN: Yes – I’ve joined a writers group. I’m hoping it will teach me something about character development by forcing me to do homework outside my comfort zone. Practice makes perfect!

I’m very lazy and I can always find reasons not to write. But if I have a deadline to meet, I then have a very good reason to write, and so I do. I really seem to need the stimulus of a deadline to force my fingers to the keyboard.

Have you ever belonged to a writer’s group?

JANE: I haven’t.  I did take one writing class in college, which I found valuable in making me actually finish something.  Up to that point, I’d tended to write until I got stuck or distracted, and then quit and go on to something else.   For that, the class was incredibly valuable.

You said you joined a “writers group,” but then you talk about “homework.”  That makes it sound more like a class to me.  I’d like to hear more about these assignments.

ALAN: I suppose it is a class, in a way, though it’s a very informal one. We meet on the second and fourth Friday of the month, and we always have to produce a piece of writing for the meeting. Lyn, the convener, sets us a task to work on between meetings. She calls these exercises our homework for the fortnight.

We’ve only had three meetings so far. For our first task, we had to choose an object from a set of things Lyn had dug out of goodness knows what dusty attic and write something about our chosen thing.  I chose a bottle.

Our second homework was to choose a picture from a set provided by Lyn and write a character sketch to bring the person in the picture alive. And for our third homework, Lyn wants us to write a story using the character we set up last time. That’s what I’m working on now.

I find it hard to imagine a writer’s group that doesn’t work like that, so I’m a bit puzzled as to how you think such a group would organise itself?

JANE: Most writer’s groups I’m acquainted with – second hand, you must understand – don’t have assignments.  Instead, the members bring what they are already working on and have it critiqued by the group.

For this reason, it helps if the members of the group are at least familiar with the conventions of the genre in which the others are writing – even if they are not writing in that genre themselves.

ALAN: By “conventions,” I presume you mean things like faster than light travel in SF stories or locked room mysteries in detective novels?

JANE: Something like that.  I suspect the issues are more subtle than that.

However, one thing your group is doing right – at least based on what I’ve heard – is insisting that all members bring a new piece of writing with them, if not every meeting, then every other meeting.  Many groups have gone belly-up because only one person brings anything new to share.

ALAN: Lyn was quite insistent about this. At our first meeting she told us that she expected us always to do our homework. She even told us that if we couldn’t bring a piece of writing to the next meeting then we shouldn’t bother coming to the meeting. And of course, nobody could stand the shame of that!

JANE: Respecting the need for a production requirement is the main reason I don’t belong to a group.  I don’t want feedback until a piece is completed, because I myself don’t know where a story is going until it gets there, and I don’t care to have anyone try to tell me.

 If I only wrote short stories, I could probably write a short story a month to bring to the group, but if I’m working on a novel, I would be unwilling to contribute anything other than a finished draft.

ALAN: There are ten people in our group, and meetings last for two hours. So again, Lyn insists that our pieces must be no longer than 600 words or so, otherwise we’d never get through them all in the time. She also wants each piece to be as complete as possible (i.e. not part of a longer work). I find that working within those constraints really stretches my writing muscles. I’m sure the discipline is good for me.

JANE: Absolutely!  Writing is a lot harder than even those close to the business realize.  Many years ago, I was chatting with Ace/Roc senior editor Ginjer Buchanan, and she mentioned that it wasn’t until she wrote a novel herself that she realized how hard it was to do.

(The novel was a “Highlander” tie-in, called White Silence, in case you wonder.)

Like you, Ginjer had done a lot of non-fiction writing, and had been highly praised as a fan writer.  And, of course, she’d read and edited hundreds of novels.  Nonetheless, she found writing a novel of her own a tremendous challenge.

ALAN: And she’s quite right. Fiction and non-fiction work quite differently from each other.

But now, using the newly acquired discipline that Lyn has enforced on me, I notice that we’ve reached our word limit. However I think we still have things to say, so let’s carry on with this again next week.