Claire Ryan's Blog, page 2

The Hugo Awards are Irrelevant

I have written before about the Hugo Awards. Now that the finalists are in for this year, I have some thoughts. Well… I have one thought, really. The Hugos are irrelevant.

Go ahead and ask me about how I feel about being on the same side as the Rabid Puppies, in this respect. It’s icky. (For the record, I got nothing against Larry Correia and the Sad Puppies apart from thinking they’re wrong about a whole bunch of stuff. It’s Vox Day and his crowd who can fuck right off forever, as far as I’m concerned.)

So I’m going to elaborate here on the idea that the Hugos are irrelevant.

The problem, at its core, is that the Hugos are supposed to represent the best of the sci-fi and fantasy genre, from fan works to magazines… and it doesn’t. I knew what I’d see before I looked at the nomination list this year: title after title from mainstream publishers, with nary a self-published work in sight, except for one or two at most who got in because of Puppy-related shenanigans. For all that the Hugos do allow self-published works to be nominated, the reality is that the awards are entrenched with traditional publishing, and it shows. I’m not sure what this says about the genre as a whole, or about the Worldcon membership that votes on the Hugos.

I went to Amazon.com, and I took a look at the current bestsellers for sci-fi and fantasy in Kindle. I found a couple of self-published authors immediately. Let’s not hash out the same tired arguments that the indies are somehow less worthy or less talented, please. Clearly the readers don’t think so. Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking probably have more readers than all the current Hugo Best Novel finalists put together, and they’ve never even been nominated.

Case in point: Andy Weir took the Campbell in 2016 for The Martian, a novel he self-published in 2011. The criteria for the Campbell award for Best New Writer is as follows:

The John W. Campbell Award is given to the best new science fiction or fantasy writer whose first work of science fiction or fantasy was published in a professional publication in the previous two years.

The Martian was picked up and re-released by Crown Publishing in 2014. All the time prior to that, when Weir was selling his book on Amazon and gaining fans, don’t count. The implication is clear that writing a popular, sellable book doesn’t matter unless you’ve got the nod from the publishing industry.

Although there might be other explanations, my take on it is this: the Hugo Awards exist in a sphere of authors, publishers, and readers for whom the majority of self-published works are invisible. On some level, I think the stigma of going it alone still hasn’t worn off. So for the vast crowd of indies out there, publishing their work on Amazon and building their readership, the Hugos are irrelevant, as if they’re awards given out for a completely different industry. They exist but… they are meaningless. They are outside of our concern.

Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I like to take the world as it is. And right now, it looks like it’ll be a long time before a self-published work winning a Hugo is completely normal.

Related Posts:

The Smoking Crater that is the Hugos
Lying Down with Dogs
The Great Erotica Ebook Purge

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On the Naming of Swords

I was reminded of this by a post on Facebook: people name their swords.

I understand the rationale behind it. The act of naming the sword anthropomorphizes it, so that the act of swordplay becomes a kind of partnership. There is a significance in the name of a sword passed down through generations, in that the sword takes on a life of its own.

It’s a curious thing about humanity, this way we have of granting personhood to inanimate objects. I’m not sure what psychological theory is behind it, to be honest, but I find it rather fascinating. I like to explore themes of identity, and there is nothing more fundamental to identity than having a name. Names have power. Giving a name to a thing gives it power. The ancient Vikings appreciated this in that only a weapon with a name could be blessed or enchanted, apparently. We still feel the need to name things like ships.

Why, though? There’s a longstanding tradition of naming ships. But we don’t name our cars, or planes, or trains, for example, even though they’re basically another form of transport. No, they get an identifying number, and thus they are relegated to the status of mere machines. Ships with names, even swords with names, are granted a soul. Call it superstition, I suppose; a holdover from an age where travelers were at the mercy of their ship in dangerous waters, and it must have been a comfort to think of the vessel as an entity in its own right who was just as invested in survival as they were.

But I don’t have a name for my sword.

I suppose I have to buck tradition. My sword is not a partner, nor a friend or comrade. It has no soul. It’s a fine sword, of course, but it is still a forged length of steel, and nothing more. I invest it with no sense of personhood or identity.

My sword in my hand is a part of me. It is an extension of my arm, myself, my soul. I can feel the weight and balance of it as if it’s another limb. A swing and a cut, and it moves around me as surely as if I had reached out my hand and swept the air with my palm. It doesn’t need a name, because it is not separate from me.

This is my sword. There are many like it, but this one is mine, as familiar to me as the sound of my own name. It is an aspect of my identity, where I am a swordfighter, therefore I have a sword. Of course, I give it significance greater than, say, the chair on which I sit, but it will forever remain part of a greater whole.

Identity, and how we perceive it, is a strange and wondrous thing.

Related Posts:

Take Sword, Add Protrusions

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If you watch no other documentaries this year

Guys. GUYS.

I sat down and watched Reclaiming the Blade. I was planning to live-tweet it, but honestly, I was just too engrossed in it. It’s EXCELLENT.

Well… mostly excellent. The voice-over by John Rhys-Davies was completely superfluous. I wanted much more of Bob Anderson talking about movie fighting and fencing. But so much of it is just really, really good! It’s a fantastic introduction to historical European martial arts, and it really shows off that Europe’s martial traditions were just as sophisticated as those from Asia.

I talked once about being a swordfighter. (For the record, I still haven’t gotten my Blue Cord.) When you’ve been training a while, you get a feeling, in the back of your mind, of things starting to click. You hold the sword with a greater sense of perception, an awareness of its weight and movement, and you understand. The Art becomes a rock under your feet, an anchor to centuries of history. It grounds you and empowers you.

It’s hard to explain that to someone. How do you tell a friend who might be interested in learning how to fence with a rapier, for example, that the very act of studying the weapon will change their life?

I think Reclaiming the Blade is so important and wonderful because it gets close to that. It tells someone who doesn’t know anything about HEMA why they should want to get into it. It’s a love letter to the HEMA community and to the Art, and a celebration of swordplay.

The movie stuff was hella cool. Very Lord-of-the-Rings heavy. Very enjoyable.

I just so happy I watched this and I’m going to re-watch it a few times more. I need to get my hands on the box set.

GET IT
Related Posts:

Breaking a Sword
5 Reasons Why Katanas are Stupid
Brienne of Tarth versus The Hound
Longswords and James Bond
Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games

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Reclaiming The Blade

A commenter got me on to this documentary, and I have to say, I am SUPER excited to watch it. Here’s the synopsis from IMDB:

The Medieval and Renaissance blade, a profound and beautiful object handcrafted by master artisans of old. An object of great complexity, yet one with a singular use in mind- it is designed to kill. The truth of the sword has been shrouded in antiquity, and the Renaissance martial arts that brought it to being are long forgotten. The ancient practitioners lent us all they knew through their manuscripts. As gunslingers of the Renaissance they were western heroes with swords, and they lived and died by them. Yet today their history remains cloaked under a shadow of legend.

I’m going to live-tweet it when I watch it. I want to set aside some time and really absorb it, maybe this weekend. If it weren’t for the fact that the Special Edition is like $200 on Amazon, and the single edition is $60, I’d just go buy it, but I’m not made of money.

Still! I’m excited! I loves me some swordy-sword documentaries! And it has actual movie stars and Bob Anderson in it.

Related Posts:

Breaking a Sword
5 Reasons Why Katanas are Stupid
Brienne of Tarth versus The Hound
Longswords and James Bond
Strength Versus Dexterity in Roleplaying Games

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The Value of First Hand Experience

The interesting, and difficult, thing about being a writer is that you must usually write about things that are outside your experience. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that your writing is enriched by your experience.

Being a fantasy writer, this begs the question: how do you get experience of things that are very obviously not real? I don’t think there’s a good answer to that. I certainly wouldn’t rule out anyone writing about a topic that they can’t experience, but that just puts the onus on them to do as much intensive research into the subject as possible. Hence, you get a Google search history that reads like a cross between a medieval serial killer and a cryptozoologist.

Seriously, never ask why I once spent an hour researching the names of specific pieces of armor, and the effective cutting resistance of forged steel.

Still, there’s something to be said for having first hand experience. And this is why I’ve acquired these: a pair of Okinawan sai.

With my hand for scale

They’re eighteen inches long, because my arms are relatively short. The right length for a sai depends on the length of the wielder’s forearm.

One of the main characters in my other fantasy series uses a pair of daggers. Originally, I wrote her using the usual generic daggers, but a lot of things changed when I started training in western martial arts and I learned, first hand, what it feels like to wield a sword and the mechanics of swordplay. I decided that she should wield a pair of sai instead, so that my writing would be informed by an actual, versatile martial technique.

But if she is going to use them effectively, then so do I. If I write about a character’s use of a weapon, especially if they’re significant to that character, I must know how to use them. It’s important to me that the fighting in my fantasy come from a place of realism. I have to know the weight, the feel, the limitations of the weapon.

I see a lot of kata training in my future. Wish me luck.

Related Posts:

Exotic Weapons in Fantasy Adventure
Rules of Feminism 6: Your Experience is not Universal
Rules of Feminism 3: Experience vs Hypotheticals

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The Origins of Fairies

Continuing with my series on the origins of stuff, here’s one that’s actually quite close to my heritage – fairies, or the Fae, or changlings.

Fairies were a kind of catch-all reference for otherworldly spirit beings, typically connected to pre-Christian pagan myths and nature beliefs. The etymology of the word ‘fairy’ comes from ‘faerie’, which drives from the Latin word for enchantment, and so fairies have always had a strong implication of magic.

The Fae Evolution

Before the scientific method became more widespread among the beer-drinking classes, it was usual to attribute inexplicable phenomena to spirits or other magical beings. The presence of flint arrowheads from the Stone Age in Britain and Ireland (so-called ‘elf-shot’ at the time) seems to have contributed to the fairy mythos, and so there are strong overtones of fairies being an older race with mysterious powers, pushed out to the fringes by the expansion of humanity, and connected to nature.

The detail about stone arrowheads being called elf-shot is interesting, because it suggests that that’s the origin of the cold iron part of the trope. Legend has it that cold iron is harmful to fairies, and they will not use it. Perhaps that was the best explanation people had, centuries ago – surely the fairies used stone because they couldn’t use iron!

But where did the idea of wings come from? This is certainly not essential, as there are fairies who don’t have wings (such as leprechauns) but it’s certainly a feature of the classical fairy model. It seems to have come from an embellishment from Canto II of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:

He summons strait his Denizens of Air;

The lucid Squadrons round the Sails repair:

Soft o’er the Shrouds Aerial Whispers breathe,

That seem’d but Zephyrs to the Train beneath.

Some to the Sun their Insect-Wings unfold,

Waft on the Breeze, or sink in Clouds of Gold.

Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight,

Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light.

Pope wrote this in 1714, but the presence of cherubs or cupids was well established before then, so the concept of small, flying humanoids was not unusual. He refers to these here as sylphs; a ‘sylph’ has become another fairy-related word. But why insect wings? Well, I think it’s just a convenient embellishment to the story. Pope imagines the sylphs as guardians of a virgin noblewoman, and I can only think that he found it funny to write about a woman with a cloud of annoying little creatures buzzing around her!

It’s interesting that Pope’s poem describes the modern fairy almost exactly, so it’s worth noting just how influential he was on the visual concept. Read Canto II here if you’re curious.

In Irish Legend

In Ireland, the fairies are considered to be a race in their own right, with their own customs and culture, and they are known to be capricious and flighty in their ways. There are a few different components to the fairy mythos that are very much Celtic and Irish in nature.

(Note: I’m speaking in the present tense because the belief in fairies is still pretty strong in Ireland. There’s innumerable superstitions and folk-tales about them and the places that supposedly ‘belong’ to them.)

The leprechaun is the most well-known trope related to fairies in Ireland, but it’s also a rather horrible one. The image of the little troublemaker, dressed in green and ready to make mischief, seems to have evolved out of negative stereotypes of Irish people themselves. There are other interesting details, such as that of the leprechaun having to grant three wishes if he is caught – a callback to the Irish géas, if nothing else – that are very much un-fairy-like and more Irish-like.

The Tuatha Dé Danann, by the legendary Jim Fitzpatrick

The main body of fairy folklore in Ireland derives from the Tuatha Dé Danann, the ancient inhabitants of Ireland who reputedly had incredible magical gifts. They were considered gods and goddesses (indeed, the name of Ireland derives from them: Ériu = Éireann = Ireland) and there are stories of them littered all over Irish mythology. Over time, they evolved into the Sídhe, the ‘people of the mounds’ – meaning fairy mounds, which were actually the remains of Iron Age ring forts. Funnily enough, they never seemed to gain wings in Ireland.

Modern Interpretations

These days, fairies have metamorphosed into a kind of broad grouping of magical beings of a European flavor that aren’t explicitly related to some kind of religion or pantheon. The typical tiny-humanoid-with-butterfly-wings iconography found its way into children’s media through Victorian fairy-tales, and has been a mainstay there ever since. But the tropes of the Tuatha Dé Danann, of powerful beings holding court and ruling over lesser creatures, have found their way into more adult interpretations of fairy mythos. Various elements of central European folklore around elves and dwarves have also been rolled into the mythos, and there’s a lot of fluidity between them.

I personally credit White Wolf’s Changling RPG series from 1995 as the spark for a lot of modern adult fantasy involving fairies. (That’s another subject close to me – I played Changling in college.) The mythos is still evolving beyond the original tropes and it certainly hasn’t been as overdone as zombies, so it’ll be interesting to see who takes it where next.

Related Posts:

The Origins of Vampires
The Origins of Werewolves

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The Rules of Excellent Exposition: A Guide

After another productive conversation with one of my most esteemed friends, I got to thinking about exposition. Funnily enough, I believe I have quite a bit to say about exposition, mostly in the context of novel-writing.

Brace yourself, because this is going to be a long post. By the time you’re done reading, you should have a better understanding of how to do exposition well. Follow at least the first three rules religiously, and you’ll probably start writing better prose.

No, I am not joking.

Let’s start at the very beginning. Wikipedia has the following definition for narrative exposition, with a bonus definition for “incluing”:

Narrative exposition is the insertion of important background information within a story; for example, information about the setting, characters’ backstories, prior plot events, historical context, etc…

Incluing is a technique of world-building in which the reader is gradually exposed to background information about the world in which a story is set. The idea is to clue the readers in to the world the author is building without them being aware of it.

If you’re a novel writer, exposition is probably your biggest bugbear. It’s the rule of “show, don’t tell” writ large, which states that you can’t write as if you’re telling the reader something; you have to “show” them the scene, as if you’re not delivering words in both instances.

(Most novels are written in first or third person limited viewpoint, so that is what I will deal with here.)

There are too many simplistic explanations of what good exposition is. You’re told to use the five senses to describe the scene. You get bogged down in adjectives. You get totally spun around by what level of detail you should use.

 

The Working Definition

For the purposes of writing fiction, especially novels, here is my working definition, which encompasses both exposition and incluing:

Exposition is the art of conveying important contextual information to the reader, through stylistic choice, word choice, framing, setting, and character action, without interfering with the flow of the story.

See, you can sit down and insert whole paragraphs on a character’s back story, and that would certainly be exposition, but that would also derail the flow of the story itself. (Besides, who cares? We should be interested in what the character is doing right now.) Hence, it’s not really exposition at all. It’s just waffling. It’s what the rule of show-not-tell was invented to avoid.

But show-not-tell is dangerous as well, because showing instead of telling can still lead to useless info dumps – except those info dumps consist of large quantities of irrelevant information related to the current scene, instead of being lecture-like.

Good exposition happens when a reader gains an awareness of the setting, the character’s motivation, and important plot related details, without ever having read anything but the uninterrupted story itself, and without being distracted by irrelevant information.

Here’s how you do it.

Rule 1: In Medias Res

This normally refers to stories that start “in medias res“, which is Latin for “in the middle of things”. For me, this is the rule of immediacy in writing. Your writing should only ever actively refer to what is happening at that exact moment in time in that particular setting.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t refer to past or future events. But if you do refer to them, you need to use something in the immediate scene to bring them into it, such as a character noticing something and being reminded of them.

You may only describe what your viewpoint character experiences, or what they’re thinking or feeling at that moment. You may not meander off into random, unnatural info-dumping that has nothing to do with the immediate situation. If it makes no sense for a character to be relaying a piece of information to the reader at that exact moment, then you may not have them relay it at all, no matter how important it is.

Rule 2: To Show or to Hide

Once you’re at the point of writing with immediacy, then you need to work out what information to convey. Obviously you don’t need to tell the reader everything about the scene, but how do you decide what is important and what isn’t?

First of all: if it doesn’t describe the scene, advance the plot, or provide characterization, then you may not write about it at all. This is a hard rule which you may not break unless you’re absolutely certain that it works in context (and multiple other writers agree with you). It also cuts down what information you need to consider when deciding what to include or exclude.

Secondly, the problem here is that you need to convey plot, characterization, and setting, but only the plot may be explicit, because the plot is the driving force of the story. You may not include something that derails the forward motion of the plot. No random paragraphs of back story or scenery descriptions, for example. (Tolkien is notorious for overly verbose descriptions, so read Lord of the Rings if you want to see an example of this.) All information that you include must be woven around the plot or directly support the plot.

Finally, the first and most important details are those that are essential in order for the reader to understand what’s happening right now. The second, far less important details are those that are essential for the reader to understand what will happen later, but that you can still relate to the first and most important details.

Rule 3: Noteworthiness

If you can write with immediacy, and you know what information you need to include and what will happen with the plot, now you need to understand how the viewpoint character will work with this information.

Novels usually have viewpoint characters, whether in the first person or third person. (Second person is rare and difficult to execute well.) The obsession with show-not-tell seems to result in prose where anything at all can be ‘shown’ as long as the viewpoint character is there to experience it, but this is absolutely not true. The viewpoint character for a scene effectively limits what information can be conveyed because of what I call “noteworthiness”: the concept that a character will not notice or think of details that they would normally consider unimportant.

In somewhat easier terms, this means that a character’s familiarity with details will render those details invisible, and thus we cannot describe them in the scene. What is available to us are those details that are “noteworthy”; that the character would recognize as being out of place or different or new.

A police officer sitting down at their desk would not find the desk itself noteworthy because they interact with it every day. It’s part of the background to them. So you may say that they sat at their desk, but not that they sat at their old walnut desk with the scratches all down one leg. The point is that the character should have a reason to notice that particular detail at this point, in spite of the fact that they have presumably observed the same detail many times prior to this without comment. But a new report left on their desk is noteworthy, and you can describe it and possibly use it to add more detail about the scene.

Another example: one thing I see a lot with new writers is the tendency to make this mistake of noteworthiness when trying to describe their main character’s hair. I know this seems really specific, but it’s true! They’ve been told to show-not-tell, and the result is that they write some detail in an opening scene like “she pushed her blonde locks out of her face” with no other reference to hair at all. This provides a detail – hair colour – but it sounds jarring, because no one really thinks about their hair unless they’re expressly doing something with it at that moment. And so the throwaway line becomes horribly clunky because this is not something the character would find noteworthy at that point in time.

If you look at writing that you feel just isn’t that good, but you’re not sure why, then try to examine it in the context of noteworthiness. A lot of prose that looks otherwise structurally sound comes off as absurd because of this. On some level, when a reader engaging with a story, there is an assumption of noteworthiness, a.k.a. the Chekov’s Gun Principle: that specific details are only brought to the reader’s attention because they are important to the plot, and it’s jarring to the reader when those details turn out to be irrelevant.

Remember: when trying to describe the scene, advance the plot, or provide characterization, you may only use information that the viewpoint character would find noteworthy. And from there, you can bring in non-noteworthy information as a kind of adjunct detail to provide context.

Rule 4: The Methods of Conveyance

Once you understand immediacy, information filtering, and noteworthiness, you’ll be most of the way to writing solid exposition. The next stage is to think about different ways of conveying information.

The plot should be fairly straightforward; you’re saying what happened and in what order, preferably in a not-boring way. You’ll trip up everywhere else, because you also need to tell the reader what the setting is and what kind of person the character is and why they’re doing this and a whole host of other stuff that should be relevant to the things that are happening, but if you were going to actually just tell it straight to the reader, you’d be interrupting the story in order to give a lecture.

So you require alternate means of conveyance that are implicit and woven around the forward momentum of the plot. This, unfortunately, is incredibly nebulous, and depends as much on your own style and taste as it does on mechanical or structural rules.

Characterization can be handled simply by choosing certain actions/thoughts/feelings for your character to express in the moment, while the plot is happening. A character who cowers in fear, for example, is obviously a different person to one who stands defiant, or to one who turns and runs. It can be as simple as the things they notice; a greedy person might notice a few coins on a table first, whereas a hungry person might see the sandwich. How they speak, what they say, and how they react to other characters is also important.

This is why novel writers frequently talk about getting inside their characters’ heads. You don’t necessarily need to know every last detail about a character, but you need to have enough of a handle on who and what they are, as a person, at that moment in time, in order to characterize them effectively. You have to have an immediate answer for how they would react in a given situation.

Setting depends on the viewpoint character. It’s on you to work out a way to convey setting information through that character’s thoughts, experiences, and memories. You should always focus on noteworthy details first, and look for ways to get important but non-noteworthy details attached to them. But here’s the thing: this is certainly less difficult than it seems, because there are so many ways to convey information in writing, especially when you combine characterization and setting, or play off common tropes.

Ever considered that? It’s true. In many genre novels, setting and character are often tied together, and we can use common tropes as a kind of placeholder of information without needing to be explicit about what we mean. Invoke the word “orc” in a fantasy novel, and the reader thinks of a brutish green-skinned humanoid. Talk about vampires and mention a castle, and the reader will start off with a expectation of what a vampire is and what it does, and what the castle looks like, such that we don’t need to shoehorn as much detail in there. This is incredibly useful because it means we can make assumptions about what the reader likely knows, and then only specify what’s different in our setting.

There are other methods as well, once you get into deeper analysis of this kind of thing. The character’s tone and word use can be important; likewise their accent and their mannerisms. What they consider normal about the world is also very valuable.

I wish I had more advice to give about this, but, again, it’s a very hard thing to nail down. I think following the rules of immediacy, information filtering, and noteworthiness will get you far, and then it’s all down to exploring and experimenting with different methods of conveyance.

Example 1

Let’s start with a simple example (that I just pulled out of my ass). It’s sometimes useful to look at a piece of your writing and determine what information is being conveyed to the reader in order to judge how well you’re handling exposition.

“Count Arvoran stood on the highest balcony of his castle, staring down at the village in the valley below and brooding in his displeasure. The wind caught his cape, causing it to curl around his legs, and his shadow flared suddenly in the bright moonlight. He frowned, and adjusted his blood-speckled cuffs irritably.”

Let’s break it down in terms of what information is being conveyed.

“Count Arvoran stood on the highest balcony of his castle…”

This character is a noble, a man, and owns a castle with multiple balconies.

“…staring down at the village in the valley below…”

The castle is up high, probably on a mountain, and there’s a village below it in a valley.

“…and brooding in his displeasure.”

He’s the viewpoint character for this scene, and we’re inside his head. He’s unhappy about something and thinking about it. The fact that he’s staring at the village suggests that it has something to do with it.

“The wind caught his cape, causing it to curl around his legs…”

He’s wearing a cape, implying rich clothing, and it’s windy on this mountain. Having legs also implies he’s humanoid-shaped, which is never a given in fantasy writing at least.

“…and his shadow flared suddenly in the bright moonlight.”

It’s nighttime. By now we’ve just about locked in the setting – on the balcony of a castle, high in the mountains, at night, with clear skies and wind. You can also infer that the moon is behind him if he can see his shadow.

“He frowned, and adjusted his blood-speckled cuffs irritably.”

Now we’ve got the hook. The cuffs further imply rich clothing, and the detail about the blood tells us two things: one, that it’s notable enough to not be background information, and two, he’s not especially bothered by it if all he’s doing is fiddling with his sleeves. The reader should want to know, at this point, why does this guy have blood on his sleeves? What’s he been doing?

So leaving aside the fact that this is kind of indifferent as a piece of prose because I wrote it in like two minutes, let’s look at how it follows the rules above.

It’s immediate. All the information given relates to this moment in time, with no extra backstory.
It’s showing not telling. There isn’t much plot yet, but what information is given describes the scene and provides characterization.
It’s noteworthy. The only information given is from the Count’s perspective, and the details are all those that he would notice or be thinking of at this point in time. So what we get is his effectively his awareness of where he is, what he’s doing, and what he experiences.
It uses an implicit method of conveyance. The Count’s character, and his possible role as a villain, is suggested by his attitude and indifference to the blood.

Example 2

Let’s see how something more well known follows the rules above: Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Personally, I love Alice in Wonderland. It’s so quirky! (Also better written than the example above.) It starts off with excellent exposition.

It’s immediate. We’re getting Alice’s in-the-moment reaction to the situation.
It’s showing not telling. We know where Alice is and who is with her, without being explicitly told as such.
It’s noteworthy. Everything here is clearly what is in the forefront of Alice’s mind. Notice how she doesn’t describe what either of them are wearing, because that’s not in the forefront of her mind right now.
It uses an implicit method of conveyance. We know what kind of person Alice is from a throwaway line of what she’s thinking, i.e. that books are useless without pictures or dialogue.

Example 3

Here’s a more complex sci-fi example: the opening lines of Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie. (Who is, by the way, a goddamn maestro of exposition and her series should be read as a master class in the subject.)

“The body lay naked and facedown, a deathly gray, spatters of blood staining the snow around it. It was minus fifteen degrees Celsius and a storm had passed just hours before. The snow stretched smooth in the wan sunrise, only a few tracks leading into a nearby ice-block building. A tavern. Or what passed for a tavern in this town.”

It’s immediate. This is the viewpoint character describing the scene.
It’s showing not telling. Now, here’s the thing: this might look like telling, but it’s not. All the information presented to us is encapsulated within the scene, with no backstory to speak of. Ancillary Justice starts in medias res, so it had better have the bare minimum of detail required to get us into the setting.
It’s noteworthy. It’s interesting to watch what is included and what is excluded. This character knows the temperature offhand, but doesn’t bother to say much much of anything specific about the town at this point. This is important, not because it’s generally vital to the plot to know the exact temperature, but because it’s notable enough to the viewpoint character themselves that they mention it.
It uses an implicit method of conveyance. It doesn’t seem like it, does it? Reread the paragraph again, and this time listen to the tone. It’s precise, clinical, and, at the end, has a hint of contempt for the surroundings. Observe the use of noteworthiness; this character explicitly mentions the weather conditions immediately after describing a body surrounded by blood stains, which indicates they’re not that bothered by it. That’s characterization, so subtle that you probably didn’t even realize you were absorbing it.

Final Notes

Well, this has turned into a wall of text and then some. Hopefully, if you’re gotten this far, you’ve found this useful.

I recommend reading and analyzing your favorite novels. Don’t expect every one to follow the rules above exactly – literary novels frequently don’t, for example. As with all things to do with art, the best can break rules all over the place and do it well. But understanding why their rule-breaking still works is very useful.

You can have more than one viewpoint character. You cannot have a switch between viewpoint characters in the same scene. I have read some books that attempt this and it has never, not once, worked properly while the viewpoint is first or third person limited. It’s guaranteed to turn your scene into a confused mess. If one character is your viewpoint, stay with them for the whole scene. The scene breaks or chapter breaks can serve as a signal to the reader that the viewpoint is changing. By and large, the worst thing you can do is have the reader guessing or being uncertain about whose viewpoint they’re currently experiencing.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Read up on different viewpoint mechanics, and write scenes from several perspectives. Open up a thesaurus and see what effect different word choices have on a paragraph. There is always a flow and a rhythm to good prose that makes it stand out, and you need to train yourself to recognize it in your own writing.

Your goal is always the same: get the reader from the start to the end, and leave them satisfied with their experience of your work. Don’t get bogged down too much in the details, if you’re finding yourself falling into analysis paralysis. Where possible, just focus on writing the plot, and remind yourself of this: what is the absolute bare minimum the reader needs to know for this scene to make sense? I don’t mean that all their questions should be answered, because that’s not necessary. They only need to understand enough to want to keep reading, so they can get the answers later.

Good luck, my friends, and write on.

Related Posts:

The Art of Criticism
The White Saviour Narrative
Nanowrimo is done
The Importance of Tea
Cover Reveal: The Meldling

The post The Rules of Excellent Exposition: A Guide appeared first on Raynfall.

The Art of Criticism

After a conversation with another esteemed writer friend, I got to thinking about criticism, and how we as authors should parse it when it’s given. It’s a funny thing, really. Most of us are terrified of it because it can strike so deeply, but it’s absolutely required for us to improve our craft.

Are you scared yet?

First of all, what criticism should you take seriously, and what should you discard? Well, all criticism is good, more or less, but there’s levels of value to it. There’s actually a very simple general rule you can use to separate high value feedback from low value, and it’s this.

You must pay attention to criticism that comes from a consensus of at least three writers who operate in the same or close to the same genre as you.

It’s simple, really. Let’s break it down.

A Consensus

You have to look for a consensus of opinion. When multiple people all arrive at the same or similar conclusions about what’s wrong with a piece of writing, then it’s likely that they’re on to something.

Of at Least Three Writers

It should be writers, not readers. Criticism is innately connected to the craft and work of writing, and it should come from those who do the same kind of craft. Their perspective is more likely to be the right one.

In the Same or Close to the Same Genre

This is important because, although good writing is universal, what works in one genre will not work in another. Different audiences have different expectations, and a writer in the same genre will be more likely to flag genre-related issues.

This isn’t to say that you’ll get a pass on bad writing because “the genre requires it”. Never, ever fall into that trap. A genre can have certain conventions, but following a convention should never mean skimping on quality.

What Kind of Criticism?

Here’s a question: how do you tell whether the criticism you’ve received is good or not? Well, I’ve got you covered there too, my friend. Let’s talk about different kinds of criticism using a simple example.

I don’t like this part where Colonel Mustard kills the victim in the library with the candlestick.

This is the most often encountered form of criticism – the bad kind. This is utterly useless to you. All you know from it is that this reader dislikes this part of the story.

I don’t like this part where Colonel Mustard kills the victim in the library with the candlestick. You’ve written him as a frail old man, so it doesn’t make sense that he’d be capable of bludgeoning someone to death.

Now we’re getting somewhere. This kind of criticism gives you something to work with, because now you know why this reader had an issue with the story. The specifics are important, and help you nail down what to do to fix it.

I don’t like this part where Colonel Mustard kills the victim in the library with the candlestick. You’ve written him as a frail old man, so it doesn’t make sense that he’d be capable of bludgeoning someone to death. Why not put a gun case in the library and have him shoot the victim instead?

Boom. Now we’ve got an identification of the issue, and a concrete suggestion as to how to solve it. This is the best kind of criticism, and the kind that you want to hope for every chance you get. If you have someone who gives this kind of criticism, treasure them. You’re also most likely to get this from other authors in your genre, hence why it’s important to seek them out.

Now, this example is very simple, as it’s dealing with a basic factual/logic error. That’s a quick fix. But the principle applies to any level of criticism you can imagine, even the large-scale structural stuff. I went through something like this with my esteemed author friend today, while we talked through the first paragraph of one of her stories and discussed exposition. (And that’s a topic for another day.)

Criticism: learn how to give it and how to take it, and you’ll become a better writer.

Related Posts:

The White Saviour Narrative
Get in Formation
Nanowrimo is done
The Importance of Tea
Cover Reveal: The Meldling

The post The Art of Criticism appeared first on Raynfall.

The White Saviour Narrative

So you’ve got this native people, okay, and they are “more in tune with nature” and therefore have no indoor toilets or shoes, and they have Issues, man. Issues that are usually insurmountable for them (because they don’t have access to modern plumbing, of course) but less so for the Mighty Whitey who makes first contact with them and brings them the knowledge of pooping indoors and wearing boots.

This white person, male or female, absorbs the native culture and uses their amazing white outsider knowledge/strength to save the primitive people from their deadly Issues, usually becoming their leader in the process.

This, my friends, is the White Saviour narrative. Sound familiar?

Pocahontas does not approve of your shenanigans.

This is coming up again because The Continent by Keira Drake is back on my radar, as it was supposed to be released this month. Not for me to read, mind you – these days I’m still only reading stuff recommended to me by my most esteemed friend, Mab Morris – but because of racism. Creeping, insidious racism.

I have to assume that Drake meant well, because I assume no one goes out with the intention of being offensively racist unless they’re an actual Nazi, and Nazis are usually not that subtle. But this is an example of the kind of unconscious racism I keep seeing over, and over, and over and OVER, and you get the idea… So I want to talk about that, and perhaps we can all learn by example.

There is no point asking, “why didn’t she do the research?” Drake set out to write a book around a particular theme. She believed that she executed that theme well. But her execution held a dozen offensive cultural tropes; things she’s likely absorbed without realizing it all her life, and she never thought that perhaps she was writing these brown people a certain way, and these white people a certain way, not because she was being imaginative, but because she was unconsciously repeating certain narratives that feel familiar.

There comes a point where you end up failing because you didn’t even know you needed to start asking questions of yourself.

So we’re likely to see more of this, and the reaction is predictable. “But I didn’t MEAN to! Here are all the reasons why I’m not really being racist!” Ms. Drake delivers, of course. There isn’t much to say about it other than the fact that there is nothing she can say about her book, or her world-building, that will make it any less racist. Her good intentions don’t make it any less racist. That will hurt, of course, but there you have it.

My fellow white authors, I have mentioned before that there are some plots you cannot write. (I know, I know, there’s this idea that we should be able to write whatever we want, but frankly I think we should act like we live on Planet Earth and not the Fairy Marshmallow Kingdom of No-Consequences. Deal with it.) We cannot write these things because of various reasons: we have almost zero chance of doing it well, or it’s propagating offensive and harmful stereotypes, or it abusively appropriates another culture. In this case, it’s the second. The White Saviour narrative is offensive and racist, and contains a vast array of coded bullshit that I (a white author) am not qualified to analyse in depth. At its core, the very idea of a white person burrowing into a native culture, sucking it all up into themselves, and then solving some insurmountable problem with their advanced knowledge fused with native elements is fucking insulting on its face. (If you want to know more, google the metric ton of writing by First Nations people on the subject.)

The point is, you can’t write about it.

I mean… yes, you can, in the way that you can sit down and write a book and publish it, but you shouldn’t, because you are a moral person who wouldn’t dream of propagating harmful tropes, even unconsciously.

So don’t. If you’re thinking of writing something that could turn out to be a White Saviour narrative, stop. Analyse it, change it, make sure it doesn’t go that way. If you’ve written something and you’re afraid it might be a White Saviour narrative, please refer to any number of First Nations people willing to exchange an appropriate sum of money for their input. (Google. Learn it, live it, love it.)

If you’re certain that you’ve written a White Saviour narrative, then forget about it. Close that file, open another, and start writing something new. As Keira Drake finds herself in this unfortunate position, I see she and Harlequin Teen have taken the option of rewriting the problematic parts… but I think it would be better for her to let it go, and have her writing skill be applied to something else.

Related Posts:

An Author’s Life, or Why I will Never Do a Kickstarter
So You Just Want to Write
Racism in Writing
Why You Should Be a Writer
One to watch out for

The post The White Saviour Narrative appeared first on Raynfall.

A Letter to White Authors on the Subject of Racism

There is racism in books. There is a big problem with racism and representation in books, especially books from the traditional publishing houses and – I don’t even fucking know anymore. I’ve seen some stuff on Twitter that’s making me want to SCREAM at other white people. Like, why don’t you get it?! Are you not paying attention? WHY AREN’T YOU PAYING ATTENTION-

But tweets are only 140 characters.

And so, I wrote this. Because I’m tired of seeing the same shit over and over, and somehow people still believe that there isn’t really a problem and it’s all in your imagination. Because I should have spoken up sooner, and I didn’t. Maybe because today is Martin Luther King Day. I don’t know if too many people will read this. I don’t know if this will lose me readers – aren’t we always told that we shouldn’t be political, in case it turns people off? I have the luxury of not caring, in both cases.

So this is for white authors. If I’ve gotten anything wrong, I hope someone corrects me.

Dr. Martin Luther King

Dear Other White Writers,

You need put people who are not white into your stories. (You need to include people who are not heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, and mentally stable in your stories, but I’m just talking about race here right now.)

If you’re going to write about real world situations that involve non-white people, do your research to make sure you’re not propagating damaging racist stereotypes. If you’re going to write about fantasy worlds that involve non-white people, do even more research. Do ALL the research. Writers can spend hours reading Wikipedia to make sure the little details in a story are correct; do not tell me that this is beyond you.

If your research doesn’t involve reading stuff written by non-white people/talking to non-white people, you’re failing. Badly.

Do not ever, EVER, say you can’t write about [insert race here] because you’re not [insert race here]. If you can drum up the imagination to write about dragons, vampires or aliens, you can write about people who don’t share your skin colour. You can do it. Non-white people do it all the time. You’re only tossing out this excuse because you’re afraid that someone is going to give you shit for getting it wrong, and you’re correct. You WILL get it wrong, and you WILL get shit for it. That’s the only way you’ll learn to be a better writer.

You need to include more non-white culture in your books. But flat out lifting whole cultural elements and using them piecemeal, like it’s okay to mix and match any damn thing you please? Elements that are sacred, elements that are difficult or sensitive? Elements that white people have been taking and erasing and (ab)using for decades? It’s on you if you didn’t do your damn research and you get slammed because you didn’t treat that culture with the respect and sensitivity it deserves. J.K. Rowling shoved some ignorant crap about skinwalkers into a Harry Potter story and she was accused of racism (because she did a racist thing). She could have avoided that just by, I don’t know, asking some Native Americans and DOING SOME FUCKING RESEARCH.

You don’t get to toss the culture and history of non-white people into your grab-bag of story ideas, to be pulled out in bits whenever you feel like it. You do the research, you tread carefully, you ask yourself whether this story needs to be told by you, a white person, and you treat it with respect.

Sound difficult? Tough. You still need to put non-white people and non-white culture into your stories. Just DO. THE. RESEARCH. FIRST.

Do not ever bring up stuff like Lord of the Rings when you’re having a conversation about racism in books being published today. Yes, there are many well-regarded works of literature that are racist. No, these books will not be pulled off the shelves or edited because they’re racist. They were written by racists years ago who presumably didn’t know any better. Do NOT complain that your books aren’t getting the same free pass on racism, writer-who-should-bloody-well-know-better-because-it’s-the-year-2017. You still need to put non-white people in your stories without pretending it’s 1917.

‘Reverse racism’ is not a thing in the real world. Do not write it. If you’re thinking of putting non-white people in a story where white people are oppressed by non-white people (you know the kind of story I mean; I’m looking at you, Victoria Foyt), STOP. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Do not write that story. Pick anything else instead. There is a 90% chance that you’ll screw it up and your reputation will burn to the ground and you will deserve every damn minute of the backlash.

Do not, under any fucking circumstances, claim to be ‘oppressed’ because someone pointed out racial problems in your work. If you’re white and live in the US, you have no idea what it means to suffer systematic racial oppression. The worst that will happen to you is that your precious feelings will be hurt. You will, most likely, suffer no economic or social consequences. Claiming to be oppressed just because non-white people think your work has issues makes you a giant asshole.

If you truly don’t understand how a particular narrative can be harmful, because “it’s all fictional!”, then you’re either excessively ignorant or a goddamn idiot. I’ll be generous and just say you’re ignorant, so DO YOUR RESEARCH and educate yourself. The only thing that can truly combat racism is to change the narrative surrounding non-white people, and to do that, you need to put them into your stories and write a better narrative.

Even though it’s not supposed to be personal, you are going to be judged personally for making racist mistakes in your writing. This is going to hurt because it wasn’t intentional and you probably think that racism equals actively hating non-white people and all that that entails, e.g. cross-burning and white hoods. This is not the case. You have a lot of unconscious racist bias swimming around in your brain, if you grew up in the western world, and it’s hard to spot from the inside. It not being intentional doesn’t absolve you of making a racist mistake. You still have to make amends. Suck it up, learn some humility, fix your shit, and be sincere in your apologies.

Your art is political. Your art is not immune to the society and culture in which you were raised. There is no such thing as art created in a vacuum; you can’t separate art from its maker. If you invoke lazy, shitty racist stereotypes, you don’t get to claim that you, personally, don’t really think that and it’s just part of the story you were trying to tell. The very fact that you’re invoking lazy, shitty racist stereotypes without awareness of the damage they cause means that, on some level, you DO really think that. That unconscious bias just isn’t going to go away because you’re convinced that your particular use of lazy, shitty racist stereotypes is okay.

There is a difference between writing a story that is racist and needs to be changed, and writing a story about a character or setting that displays racist attitudes. If you don’t think you can identify that difference, you need to DO YOUR RESEARCH.

There are so many amazing people on Twitter who are not white. Follow them. Listen to them. Appreciate them. DO NOT ARGUE WITH THEM ABOUT WHETHER SOMETHING IS RACIST OR NOT. You, white person, are not the arbiter of whether a thing is racist, in the same way that men are not the arbiters of whether tampons are better than pads. It is for all intents and purposes outside your first hand experience, and you need to defer to the people for whom it IS a first hand experience. If, by some miracle, one agrees to help you examine the non-white people/culture in your stories to make sure you’re not inadvertently being racist, then thank them and pay them for their assistance. If they say “don’t write this story”, then don’t write it. Forget it. You should have a dozen other stories waiting in the wings, so go work on one of them.

Non-white people and non-white culture are not monoliths. They are more diverse than white people. They have a million contradictory opinions. Their culture and traditions vary all over the place in ways you’ve never thought about. This means you will have to do far more research than you think. Get over it and move on.

If you see another white person write something that you know for sure is racist, call them out. You don’t have to shout them down. It can be as simple as pointing out the thing they wrote and saying “hey, did you know this thing is not okay?” plus reasons. It’s on us to police our own. Support any non-white person that calls them out too.

Don’t review racist books without highlighting their issues. Don’t give your money to authors who double-down on or defend their racist writing. Don’t give your money or your time to authors who are literally racist. Don’t do business with companies that decide racism is profitable. Yes, this means (for example) telling Simon and Schuster to fuck off if they offer you a book deal, because they gave $250,000 to that racist prick Milo Yiannopoulos. Yeah, yeah, no company is squeaky clean, but I think you can draw the line at “gave a quarter of a million dollars to an evil, bigoted con artist”.

African American Vernacular English is a legitimate dialect, and it’s amazing to me that I have to explain this to anyone, but here we are. It’s complicated and cultural and you better do your damn research if you plan on including it in your writing. I don’t need Wikipedia to tell me this because, crazily enough, I speak Hiberno-English – another dialect that’s complicated and cultural and that Hollywood keeps getting wrong, and that’s sometimes incomprehensible to non-speakers. Language is tricky stuff, who’da thunk it.

There are eleventy million stories starring white people. We do not need more stories starring white people. We DO need more stories starring people who are not white. If, at any point, you insist that your story needs to have a white protagonist or an all-white cast because of some nebulous bullshit to do with Art, then you are being racist. If you can’t imagine a story where a character’s skin colour is non-white, then your imagination is lacking. Let me make this clear: there is no story that can’t be told with a non-white character, even if you’re writing about a character that is canonically white.

We need more stories starring people who are not white because there are legions of readers and TV watchers and movie-goers out there who want and need them. Because a story told often enough can change the world, and you have an obligation to change it for the better if you can. Because there are so many people out there who desperately need to see themselves, standing at the heart of wonder and adventure and change, and they are being betrayed every fucking day by the narrative industries who can barely accept that there’s a problem at all.

Yes, you will fuck this up, no matter how well-meaning you are. Shut down your ego for five minutes and be thankful when someone tells you that you fucked up. We’re writers, for Odin’s sake, we have to be ready to take criticism without it getting personal. Take it and absorb it and get better at writing because of it. This stuff is important, dammit, and it’s bigger than you. You have to try.

You have to try.

I’m asking you to do the constant, hard self-reflection needed to combat your internal racist bias. I’m asking you to be vigilant and speak up when you’re reading other people’s work or talking on Twitter or whatever. I’m asking you to examine why your characters may be able to break the laws of physics on a whim, but somehow their skin being not-like-yours is unbelievable. I’m asking you to flood your stories with non-white people, with their lives and their history; because white authors have white privilege and we need to wield it in service of those without, even if we screw it up, even if it hurts us.

So, in short:

WRITE ABOUT NON-WHITE PEOPLE.
DO YOUR RESEARCH.
DON’T BE A GIANT ASSHOLE.
LISTEN TO NON-WHITE PEOPLE.
ACCEPT THAT YOU WILL SCREW UP.
BE SINCERE WHEN YOU APOLOGISE.

Signed

Claire Ryan

Related Posts:

Washed Out and Fed Up
On White Feminists and Womanism
Racism in Writing
Even bad publicity is good?
Driving the Space Shuttle, and other fun things

The post A Letter to White Authors on the Subject of Racism appeared first on Raynfall.