Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 138
July 31, 2011
What Rowling Got Right: Worldbuilding as Plot
I got to see the last Harry Potter film last weekend and loved it to bits – it reminded me why I liked the books so much originally, and even redeemed some of the bits I didn't like about the final book. They conveyed far more sweetness & believability to the Remus/Tonks relationship by cutting out most of what was in the book & sticking with a couple of symbolic shots, and the epilogue actually worked as a visual scene far better than in prose.
But really I did that thing I always do when I go to the cinema – I sat there, let the images wash over me, and thought about writing. The big screen always does that to me – we spend a fortune on tickets and then I spend half the time plotting & replotting my own stories. My brain is particularly directed towards technique at the moment because of the stage I'm at drafting Fury, and HP7.2 really helped me by reminding me of the one writing technique that Rowling does better than almost any other writer: worldbuilding as plot.
People talk a lot about how crap the HP books are, as if it's a given that they're badly written. I'm as guilty of this as everyone else – I get cranky at the occasional rough seam, poking and prodding at it, instead of appreciating how good the overall pattern is. So here's a positive post about JK's writing skills!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – and I'm thinking especially of the book here rather than the films, though a lot of this applies to both) – is packed with magical items, people and settings. It's a chaotic mass. But there's very little in it that wasn't seeded one way or another in previous books. The cleverness of the Harry Potter books is how the worldbuilding is added, one brick at a time, usually wrapped around a piece of plot to keep it in place. So it's there when, much later, it's needed again.
It helps of course that a major plot strand of each book is 'Harry learns magic' and that the whole thing revolves around a magical school. It helps a lot. It also helps that Harry is an outsider who learns about the magical world in tiny, bite-sized pieces. But neither of these things are accidents. These are both traditional methods for expressing a fantasy world.
The genius of Rowling is in the telling detail. The Snitch Harry catches in his mouth (to show how jammy his luck is, and make us not hate him for being too effortless in how he has picked up Quidditch), the invisible cloak that enables him to get into his various scrapes with his friends over the years, Polyjuice, the unreliability of prophecy, the Pensieve, the Patronus, the ghosts of each House, the goblins and the bank vaults, the rules of duelling … all of these things, which are vital to the final part of the story, were tethered to the world of Harry Potter through their own plot strands, many books ago.
Worldbuilding should never be a shopping list of pretty props, particularly when we're talking about magic systems. They should also never be revealed to the reader or any character in the book through a lecture – or at least, not only through a theory lesson. If you put a gun on the side table, you have to use it, right? So the best way to explain the magic system or any other important worldbuilding details of your world is to intricately weave them into the plot.
It's all about me, of course, and Nancy Napoleon. I'm over 50,000 words into a manuscript and I don't yet have the magic system nailed down. It's a problem, because this is something I not only need to establish back in the first few chapters, but I need to put it in there as if it could never have been anywhere else. I need to make magic matter that early, even though she's busy with her drama and grief and guilt and job and all that other stuff. I need to figure it out, damn it. Because apparently I managed to skate over all the details in Siren Beat. I know there are curses, but I can't have just curses, because Holly Black already did that. I am feeling my way through a sympathetic magic system, using words and objects, but it's not there yet. I can see places in my story where explaining and displaying how magic works will be perfect, but I don't yet know what that magic is!
My magical creatures and my romanceish and my backstory and my teenage helper characters and my smutty bits are all tied into the plot and theme of the novel. How did I forget the magic?
Obviously I need to ask 'what would Rowling do' a bit more often in my writing process. As long as I'm not writing sex scenes at the time…
Writerly Day
I've come to the end of my Clarion write-a-thon challenge, and I'm very happy with my results. I didn't make my revised goal of 40,000 words for the 6 weeks – but I got 37000 which is more than respectable, and 7000 more than my original goal. The entire book is up to 57K now, so hooray, more than halfway! I raised a little money for Clarion, but the really exciting thing for me was getting my writing momentum back after a bit of a slump at the beginning of the year.
It's quite fitting that I got to spend the day doing writerly things – including going to a local book launch & hanging out afterwards with writing friends Tania Walker, Sarah Brabazon & Elizabeth Carroll. It was exactly what I wanted from going to a random book event like that – one of my current aims is to devote more time and energy to being part of the local writing community, rather than putting all my eggs in the online basket, and this afternoon was a great reminder of the payoff that comes from spending time with writer friends in person.
Ridiculously excited about Nanowrimo this year. Even though it's a whole book away, it's zooming towards us at a rate of knots.
July 28, 2011
Friday Linkway (with bonus Muppets)
My plan was for today's Friday links to be all about the SF gateway, but in breaking news, the World Fantasy nominations were released, and I'm SO EXCITED that Alisa Krasnostein has her first nomination! It's for Best Non-Professional Achievement (some day she will be able to start paying herself and it will be Best Professional!) and I love that it is for Twelfth Planet Press rather than all the volunteer work she does in the community for projects like ASif & Swancon – much though I appreciate her work in that area, TPP is her future and for it to be the reason she has her first WF nomination is fabulous.
Congrats to all the nominees – I'm particularly delighted by the diverse and exciting novel shortlist, but also crowing over Rachel Swirsky's novella "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen's Window," Jonathan Strahan's anthology "Swords and Dark Magic," and Angela Slatter's exceptional collection, Sourdough and Other Stories. Also, extra congrats to Charles A Tan & Lavie Tidhar for their nods in the same category as Alisa, for Bibliophile Stalker and the World SF blog respectively.
But now, links!
I haven't spotted quite as much analysis as I had expected about the significance of the SF Gateway, but here are some key posts from the last week or so:
The Announcement
Nicola Griffith on being one of the Gateway authors.
Cheryl Morgan on The Gateway Opens
io9 presents a vid of authors talking about their favourite out-of-print SF classics
Over at the Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan & Gary interview John Clute about the SF Encyclopedia, and how it ties into the SF Gateway project.
And now some more random linkage:
Chris Alpha of The Ood Cast has been writing a season by season recap of Doctor Who, in haiku. Oh yes, he has.
Apologies for the LJ links at this time of great LJ unreliability, but these ones are worth it. Michelle Sagara talks about how to be a good panellist at a convention, and what not to do.
Catherynne Valente is delighted by the sheer writerfantasy of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
Cheryl Morgan is republishing Linda Nagata's SF novels as e-books.
Diana Peterfreund blogs about .
Mary Robinette Kowal continues her interesting blog series on the writerly/practical use of Google Plus: in this case, how to teach a class using Google Hangouts.
July 27, 2011
My Daughter's Doctors
As we while away the long wait for the second half of the next Matt Smith season, Raeli and I have been catching up on previous Doctors.
I find this rather surreal, because I remember watching Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant with her already, experiencing the show through her eyes… but she was three and four years old, and she doesn't remember thim now that she is a big girl of six. For a little while there, Matt Smith was the only Doctor in her living memory, HER Doctor.
Something I have learned about my daughter over the last few weeks is that she is a) fickle and b) a true Doctor Who fan.
We've been making our way through seasons 3 and 4 (Martha and Donna) plus a few classic stories along the way, and she triumphantly announced a week ago that Matt Smith was no longer her favourite – it was now David Tennant! She had been holding out for Rose as her favourite companion, despite not remembering any of her appearances, so I let her watch season 1… and it's been really fascinating seeing her watch one of my favourite seasons of Doctor Who, as if for the first time.
The big difference between 3 year old Raeli and 6 year old Raeli is that the smaller version of her was pretty fearless about anything she saw on TV. In the last several years, she has developed huge panicky fears about all sorts of things – she's terrified of dogs and cats, gets freaked out by all manner of sounds, and in the last 18 months in particular developed a deep horror of Sontarans, Daleks and other Doctor Who monsters.
But she's a determined little thing, and while we've had years of her completely collapsing into panic attacks, she's now starting to take control of her fears and her boundaries. She declared a few months ago that she was no longer afraid of dogs, which was a huge deal (much like her claim not to like pink, it was a total lie, but one we don't call her on, because it's one we thoroughly approve of) and a sign that while she is still severely hampered by overwhelming fear and panic, she is actually starting to imagine a future when this won't be the case. And lo, the Stubbornest of Daughters Made Progress.
Her progress in managing real life fears has gone hand in hand with her science fiction viewing. She started out desperately afraid of the Silurians, but her love of the Ood Cast's songs tempted her back to watch The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood until she adored them so much she wants to dress up as a Silurian for her birthday. She rationalised her Dalek fear to being okay with stories with just ONE Dalek at a time (ie the Big Bang, and The Five Doctors), as long as there weren't more than three at a time. She drew the line at Victory of the Daleks, which she only "watched" from behind the couch, peering through a doorway from the other room, and at several points completely hiding her face in her hands.
The change which really surprised me was the Sontarans. Raeli's fear of Sontarans, based entirely on a few images in a magazine and on a DVD case, was epic in the extreme. The very sight of one would send her into screaming fits. She was once so utterly traumatised by an unexpected Sontaran in an episode of Sarah Jane that she refused to watch the show ever again. But then along came our lovely sympathetic Sontaran nurse in A Good Man Goes to War, and she was over it.
If only her fear of dogs could be cured by a sympathetic TV character!
Today, she officially dumped David Tennant for Christopher Eccleston as her favourite Doctor. She then told me with glee that Matt Smith had been bumped down to fourth, because she quite likes Jon Pertwee too. Oh, and… as of tonight, she is no longer afraid of Daleks. The realisation hit her sometime between Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways, but I credit Rob Shearman's Dalek for the shift in perspective – for the first time, she empathised with a Dalek, and now she's immune!
One of Raeli's favourite games last thing at night is for us to ask each other Doctor Who related questions – favourite or least favourite Doctors, companions, episodes, etc. Tonight, she informed me that her favourite episode of the Christopher Eccleston season was The Doctor Dances (she likes 'everybody lives') but her least favourite is The Empty Child ("because of Jack and Rose dancing and being romancey, Mummy, you know I'm not a romancey child, I'm an ACTIONY child").
Then, just before she went to sleep, she remembered that she wasn't afraid of Daleks any more, so now she can watch the Matt Smith Dalek story all the way through! The look of excitement on her face was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
This is totally what daughters are for.
Also, Doctors.
July 24, 2011
Clarion Write-a-thon Update, Week 5
33278 / 40000
5 weeks down, one to go! I'm well in advance of my goal for this six weekly period, averaging 6-7000 words a week, from writing 5 days a week. More importantly, I've got the momentum I need to finish my book, and it's been going really well! I've found a weekly (and daily) routine that works for me, the right balance of getting words one, and giving myself thinking time between writing bouts, to sort out the plot and structure of the novel.
I've moved the goalposts a little, in the hopes of giving myself an extra kick this week. I might not quite make 40,000 in the six weeks, but I really want to try.
I'm also inspired enough that I am planning my Nano novel already! If I can do 1000 words a day this comfortably, surely I can do the 1700 necessary to produce a writing total of 50K in a month… right? Right?
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If you would like to encourage me over the next six weeks as I retrain myself as a writer and write 30K of my new novel, you can sponsor me at the Clarion Write-a-Thon. No amount too small, all funds raised go towards supporting the Clarion writer's workshop. I also accept encouraging comments, attagirls and anecdotes about your own times of writerfail and writerwin. It's the last week! Eeee.
July 22, 2011
Galactic Suburbia Episode 37 Show Notes
New episode up! Grab it from iTunes, by direct download or stream it on the site.
In which we discuss the SF Gateway and some great additions to the Women in SF conversation, Alex eats all the Bujold in one bite, and Alisa's puppy does his very best to oppress us.
News
The Locus Awards
Prometheus Award winners
Sturgeon and Campbell Awards
Shirley Jackson Awards
Recent announcement – Gollancz announces the SF Gateway, huge project to digitise & make available thousands of SF classics as ebooks.
Linda Nagata on 'What's in a Name' and her career trajectory as a female writer of hard SF
Chris Moriarty on labels in the women & SF conversation
Women and the chilly climate at Scientific American
Liz Williams at the Guardian on the way science fiction reflects human belief
Alastair Reynolds to write Doctor Who novel: Tansy and Alex's obsessions in one package!
What Culture Have we Consumed?
Alisa: Maureen Johnson on www.whyy.org/podcast; Twin Peaks; Mercy (not genre but interesting feminism);
Alex: sooo much Bujold (3rd, 4th and 5th omnibi, and Memory); lots of books, because of holidays! But particularly Heartless, Gail Carriger; Blackout, Connie Willis; Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin… also Harry Potter 7 and Transformers 3.
Tansy: The Demon's Surrender, The Holy Terror & Robophobia (Big Finish), Subterranean's YA Issue
Pet Subject: Feedback from our Joanna Russ episode
Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don't forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!
July 21, 2011
Friday Links Were Sorted Ravenclaw
Not sure I've linked to Kathleen Jennings' The Dalek Game before, but I love her illustrative blog and this series which mashes up pencilled Daleks with famous book/movie titles are just adorable.
Linda Nagata gives an unvarnished account of her career trajectory as a female hard SF writer.
A discussion at the Mary Sue of genderbending in geek culture & cosplay – the impression I've got is that men dressing as women is a lot more acceptable in the cosplay community than this article suggests, though. I was delighted to hear there was a male Sarah Jane at the last Gallifrey, dressed in the Andy Pandy overalls!
Grant Watson reviews Summer Wars, a new anime movie which we watched recently with friends and I agree with Grant about how exceptional it is. A screwball family comedy and science fiction thriller combined! I love stories of big crazy families, and this handles that so well (though I was delighted today to find the wikipedia page that tells me who they all are and how they're related to each other). I was amazed how much story and character was packed into the running length of a normal movie – and the combination of science fiction, contemporary issues (information hijacking, vulnerability of overstretched resources in the face of terrorist action) and deeply-felt emotions was fabulous. I particularly love the introverted hacker teen character Kazuma, and the sword-wielding matriarch grandmother, whose backstory is conveyed through mastery of the telling detail.
Chris Moriarty on the Women in SF conversation, and the danger of labels.
Thoraiya passed on a link to this fascinating article about the "chilly climate" for women in professional areas (such as the sciences) dominated by men, and one amazing woman who defined that term decades ago, as part of her work in the creation of policies to prevent gender discrimination. Most important quote: "This is changeable behaviour."
Marie Brennan talks about prodding your own defaults when it comes to including religious culture in your fiction.
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books reports a new book trend in Spain – landscape paperbacks!
July 20, 2011
You Can't Go Wrong…
…when a fantasy writer as talented, hardworking and inventive as Glenda Larke thinks your books are worth recommending!
Check out the current SF MindMeld for a variety of recommendations of writers outside the UK & US who are worth checking out – from many corners of the globe!
July 19, 2011
On My iPod: UNIT & Robophobia
UNIT 1.1 Time Heals [Big Finish Productions]
UNIT 1.2 Snake Head [Big Finish Productions]
UNIT 1.3 The Longest Night [Big Finish Productions]
UNIT 1.4 The Wasting [Big Finish Productions]
A while back, when Nicholas Courtney died, I recommended UNIT: The Coup, a freebie Big Finish audioplay which showed a 21st Century version of UNIT, dealing with one of those loose threads the Doctor left behind him, the pesky Silurians and their need to make an actual peace with humanity.
As well as showcasing Sir Alastair himself, the play introduced Colonel Emily Chaudhry (Siri O'Neal), a media liason working with UNIT. It serves as an introduction to the whole UNIT miniseries (2004), revolving around Chaudhry as she deals with a missing CEO, his replacement Col. Robert Dalton (who is, pleasingly, a skeptic of the Scully variety), the soulless media as personified by reporter Francis Currie, and some serious threats to humanity. The first two are mostly standalone adventures, and very enjoyable largely for the chemistry between the two leads, and the weirdness of their investigations. The style of the dramas anticipate some of the themes and ideas that came up in Torchwood, and I got more of a sense of UNIT as a real, modern organisation with ties back to the Pertwee Years than I ever got from the sparce UNIT appearances in New Who.
The third and fourth stories, The Longest Night and The Wasting, are impressively bleak political dramas, with far more in common with Torchwood: Children of Earth than anything else in the Whoniverse. It's brilliant stuff. Of special note is the appearance of David Tennant in The Wasting as the long-missing-in-action CEO of UNIT, along with his Scottish accent. It's a feisty performance, packed with personality, and his scenes with Chaudry are electric. Siri O'Neal's performance is also brilliant in this final appearance (sadly there was only one series of UNIT, sniff) and every time Tennant looks likely to steal the scene, she kicks him in the kneecap and takes it right back. There's an amazing hero moment for her which made me very emotional. It also doesn't hurt that Nicholas Courtney, who made a fairly tame appearance in Episode 1, returns in this final ep with some serious firepower and good old boy action.
These episodes are all available from Big Finish right now at the outrageously cheap price of $5 Australian per download & $8-9 each for the CD including shipping. Definitely worth checking out!
Robophobia [Big Finish Productions]
Meanwhile back in 2011, I just finished listening to July's monthly Doctor Who release, and it's an absolute blinder. Starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor and Nicola Walker (Ruth from Spooks!) as MedTech Liv Chenka, this is a sequel to Robots of Death (1977) which is one of my favourite Doctor Who stories of all time.
I was delighted to discover that this play works very well on both of the necessary levels: that of modern storytelling with all the focus on character we expect in a 21st century audioplay, and also in feeling like it belongs to the same world of the original story. Obviously writer Nicholas Briggs deserves a lot of the credit for this, providing a very clever script which, like the original, plays with the preconceptions of the audience and presents something that looks like a whodunnit in space, but is actually a more complex thriller that is using the tropes of the whodunnit to mess with everyone's heads.
I also think the excellence of this story shows how good a writer and worldbuilder Chris Boucher was – he not only wrote the original script to Robots of Death, but a good chunk of early Blake's 7, which explains the similar sensibilities between the two – and it's pretty impressive to have two stories told nearly thirty five years apart which feel not only like they belong to the same world, but the same time period. Robots of Death always gave the impression that there were several novels worth of material, hovering just out of sight…
The performances are really good in this one. Toby Hadoke is very good as a head of security coming apart at the seams under pressure, Nicola Walker is rightly the emotional centre of every scene as Liv, and Sylvester McCoy gets to play his manipulative, all-knowing Doctor to the hilt – it is utterly credible that as soon as he was between companions, he would flit about the universe, checking in on what happened after previous adventures, finding out the ramifications, and tying up loose ends.
Then of course, there are the robots. I always thought it was the beautiful design of the robots which made the original Sandminer story so vivid, but this audio made it very clear how much both stories old and new relied on the sibilant, gentle performances of the actors who voiced the robots themselves. Their calm, unflappable tones come across very effectively, and I love how easily they can sound creepy and threatening without in fact changing their performance at all. Lovely stuff! I highly recommend this one to Classic Who fans who don't know where to get started with Big Finish – 1977 connection aside, the play is completely self-contained.
July 14, 2011
Bijou Friday Links.
This one is small but elegant – which is unsurprising as it's my second links post this week!
N.K. Jemisin wrote a very cool post about women's roles in fantasy and the problematic nature of judging the strength and value of female characters by masculine standards – the conversation in the comments is interesting, as so many people jump in to talk about domestic skills and values in fantasy, and why giving a woman a sword isn't the only way to make her a "strong" character.
Also, I'm on the fence about Google+ and expect to continue so until too many friends of mine are in there for me to ignore it any longer (was I not right about Google Buzz? Thankyew and goodnight) but this post by Mary Robinette Kowal about constructing writing dates & writer gatherings in Google+ makes me think I'm going to have to get my arse in there before this year's Nanowrimo.
Meanwhile, over at Twelfth Planet Press, Alisa has revealed the gorgeous cover of the new Twelve Planets collection by Lucy Sussex, and info to tantalise you about this book from one of Australia's veteran science fiction & fantasy writers. Alisa also revealed the titles this week of the next season of TPs, by Deborah Biancotti, Narrelle Harris and Kaaron Warren… and what titles they are!
But you know, when it comes down to it, the most awesome thing about this week was Noni Hazlehurst reading modern classic picture book, Go The Fuck to Sleep. Text Publishing hit on a genius method of publicising the fact that they are the Australian publishers of this instant classic for exhausted parents everywhere. Noni is a goddess as well as a national icon, and her performance of the book, including traditional Play School commentary & asides to the viewer, and a deeply authentic 'going downhill rapidly' emotional journey, is note-perfect.
The glee on Twitter as Noni's reading was announced (you can keep your Samuel L Jackson, Americans!), the outrage as YouTube canned the video for offensive conduct (you know where you can go, YouTube…) and the joy as the video was re-released on other platforms… honestly, this is the most patriotic joy I think most Aussies have felt in years.
Go the Fuck to Sleep – read by Noni Hazlehurst from sswam on Vimeo.
