Katherine Addison's Blog, page 43
March 13, 2016
T-minus . . .
[Storytellers Unplugged, February 9, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
The Art of the Short Story
[Storytellers Unplugged, January 7, 2009; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “ Draco campestris ,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
There is a myth, in-genre, that an aspiring professional writer’s career should ascend in stages: first short stories, then novels. There are reasons for this myth: it is, in fact, comparatively easier to get one’s first short story published than one’s first novel, and the process of submission-rejection or submission-acceptance-publication is much faster for short stories, meaning that you can that much more quickly start your publication career and word-of-mouth reputation–and that, in turn, can make it easier to get an agent’s or editor’s attention. Note that I’m not claiming it’s the One True Way: many writers sell their first novel without selling--or writing--any short stories at all. But as professional advice goes, it’s pretty good.
As writing advice, on the other hand, not so much.
Short stories are not small novels, and novels are not big short stories. Beyond a certain amount of basic craft, you can’t learn to write a novel by writing short stories. It’s like trying to learn about rhinoceroses by studying tapirs. At a certain point, the ineluctable differences between the two animals become greater than their similarities.
(I encountered this same difficulty as a doctoral student; the common thinking was that you prepared to write your dissertation by writing seminar papers. But seminar papers are generally 20 to 40 pages long; a dissertation is book-length. You can’t learn how to do one by doing the other.)
I find novels, relatively speaking, simple. (”Simple,” as a friend of mine points out, not being synonymous with “easy.”) Short stories baffle me, and the fact that I occasionally write good ones baffles me even more. I don’t know why it works when it works, and I don’t know why it doesn’t work when it doesn’t. (Not, mind you, why the story does or doesn’t work–that I can generally see--but why the thing I do to write the story does or doesn’t work.) This has recently hit home for me again, and consequently, I’ve been trying to articulate the things I do know about why my short-story-writing works on those occasions when it does.
1. The difference between a short story and a novel is qualitative, not just quantitative. It isn’t just the word count that makes something one or the other. They feel different. (At least in my head--and that’s all any of this is: the view from inside my skull.)
2. Short stories are to novels as poems are to short stories. Poems are densely compressed language; novels are expansive, relaxed, even sprawling language. Short stories, for me, are the point in between.
3. A short story is a planetary system in which the satellites, if any, have a very tight orbit. All the bits have to belong to each other, so closely as to be nearly incestuous. Whereas a novel can have moons and rings and comets and maybe even a sister planet.
4. My writing of short stories tends to be more successful if there is a central action or a central image that the rest of the story exists to present. So, in “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day,” it’s the juxtaposition of the teddy bear and the Vietnam Memorial; in “ Draco campestris ,” it’s the strange stilted conversation between the taxonomist and the lady beneath the looming skeletons.
(Horror stories work a little differently for me--I think because horror stories come equipped with that central image already installed. The characteristic gesture of the horror story is the revelation, and that’s the thing that the story works towards and for. So they’re easier for me to write and also more likely to feel like small novels (see, for example, “The Watcher in the Corners” and “Wait for Me.”)
5. Short stories should feel bigger on the inside. The best way I know to describe what a good poem does is that it feels like it takes the top of my skull off. It’s an effect of the compression and the way the compression twists language. It takes a brutally short form to make that happen–drabbles can do it, too, like Neil Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was,” and notice how, the shorter the short story gets, the harder it is to distinguish from a poem--so an ordinary short story (1,000-7,500 words) won’t actually take the top of my skull off, but there should still be a sense that you’ve twisted through an underground passage, crawling on your belly even, and have come out into a cavern of crystal and falling water so beautiful that you can’t quite breathe. I am getting perilously close to the Romantic notion of the Sublime, and that is even kind of what I mean, except that it’s purely a linguistic effect. And please notice that this effect has nothing to do with the content of the story; it’s all about the way the words come together and weave around each other, and flip open into something you didn’t expect.
That’s the art of the short story, and it’s harder than it looks.
The Purpose of Imaginary Places
[Storytellers Unplugged, April 7, 2009; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
Today is the official launch date of my fourth novel, Corambis, about which you, O Gentle Reader, have probably heard more than you would necessarily wish. In celebration, over on my blog, I’m doing a Q&A, and the first question up is such a good one that I’m stealing it for SU for April.
Q: You’ve mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don’t think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn’t it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.
A: So, yeah. What is a secondary world for?
This is an enormous and complicated question, and I’m going to break it down into (hopefully manageable) chunks.
1. What A Secondary World Does For An Author
This part is actually fairly obvious: if you invent your own world, you don’t have to play by real-world rules. To use the generic fantasy example, you can have a monarchy without having to research Tudor England or Bourbon France. You don’t have to know about the Habsburgs or the Julio-Claudians. (And these are all examples from Europe--never mind Russia, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.) And you can mix and match bits of cultures to get what you want. You aren’t tied down to historical reality. It’s enormously freeing.
(And, yes, many authors use it as an excuse to be lazy.)
But there’s more to it than that. Because what a secondary world really does, what you have this freedom for, is it lets you use your imagination. It lets you make things up. And really, you shouldn’t be a writer of any kind if you don’t like using your imagination. You especially shouldn’t be a fantasy writer. When I was a teenager and writing was something I did for my own private enjoyment, what I did most was draw maps and make up genealogies, the more elaborate the better. It was the invention that I enjoyed most. (You can also exercise your invention in this way in stories set in the real world, and I don’t mean to imply you can’t, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a completely blank slate.)
So, for the author, a secondary world lets you maximize the fun stuff: making your own rules, writing your own history. Playing god.
2. What A Secondary World Does For A Reader
Well, first off, obviously a large number of people simply enjoy stories that aren’t set in the real world. Not all people, and I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority. But it is a lot. And even though I’m one of those people myself, I don’t know exactly where the attraction is. But since the point of writing stories is for other people to enjoy them, this is an important part of the purpose of secondary worlds. It also follows from the enjoyment the author takes in invention. If the author is enjoying what he/she does, that enjoyment is likely to communicate itself to the reader. Win-win.
Ideally, also, a secondary world should allow and encourage a reader to think outside the box, to see that, because we can imagine a society different from our own, our society itself is not immutable--not reified, to use the fancy theoretical term. Reification--thing-ification, from the Latin res, meaning "thing"--is the process whereby a human construct becomes perceived as a thing, as something impervious to human endeavor, as something that can be neither changed nor destroyed. So–to give two examples off the top of my head--Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness deconstructs the reification of gender roles. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint deconstructs the reification of heteronormativity (the norm in the world of Swordspoint is bisexuality).
(The social thought experiment has long been considered the territory of science fiction, as with most “serious” endeavors in the amalgamated genre of fantasy/science fiction/horror, but I don’t think the necessary given for it is “science/technology.” I think the necessary given is “a world different from our own”–and fantasy can provide that just as readily as sf. The social commentary may be buried a little deeper because–not being a “serious” genre–secondary world fantasy doesn’t have the leeway to leave out the stuff for the groundlings. Or it may not be there at all–just as it may not be there in science fiction, either. *ahem* I am digressing like a digressive thing.)
3. How A Secondary World Does What It Does
This is where we get into the do’s and don’ts which I may from time to time have promulgated.
The dream, says John Gardner, should be vivid and continuous. He was talking about fiction writing in general, but it applies in spades to secondary worlds. Take your secondary world seriously. Treat it with respect. Remember that for your characters, it is the real world. (I.e., if you aren’t Terry Pratchett and haven’t deliberately set up your secondary world so that it spawns warped reflections of the real world, resist the impulse to be cute. Also, n.b., when Pratchett does it, he isn’t being cute. He’s being consistent to his secondary world as he has established it.)
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, think things through. Every decision you make about your world has consequences. Some of them will be obvious; some will not. And it’s the pursuit of the unobvious consequences that will make your world feel rich and deep. Also, consequences that make things more difficult for your characters. Scott Lynch has a brilliant example of this in Red Sails Under Red Skies; it would be a spoiler to discuss it, so I won’t, but it made me believe in the world because, like our world, it doesn’t always work in the viewpoint character’s favor.
And while there should always be a reason that the story is set in a secondary world--something that you can’t get by setting it in the real world--the secondary world should also be a reason in and of itself. It should provide richness to the story, beyond simply being a pretty backdrop. It should be an integral part of the reader’s enjoyment.
I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this topic, but I also feel like that’s enough pontificating from me for one post. So on the understanding that I don’t think what I’ve said here is either conclusive or definitive, here endeth the lesson.
Today is the official launch date of my fourth novel, Corambis, about which you, O Gentle Reader, have probably heard more than you would necessarily wish. In celebration, over on my blog, I’m doing a Q&A, and the first question up is such a good one that I’m stealing it for SU for April.
Q: You’ve mentioned what you think a secondary world story should and shouldn’t do a few times, but I don’t think you’ve ever specifically elaborated on the subject, so, to be blunt: What do you think a secondary world story should do for the reader? What shouldn’t it do? Do you think you’ve accomplished this in your writing so far? etc.
A: So, yeah. What is a secondary world for?
This is an enormous and complicated question, and I’m going to break it down into (hopefully manageable) chunks.
1. What A Secondary World Does For An Author
This part is actually fairly obvious: if you invent your own world, you don’t have to play by real-world rules. To use the generic fantasy example, you can have a monarchy without having to research Tudor England or Bourbon France. You don’t have to know about the Habsburgs or the Julio-Claudians. (And these are all examples from Europe--never mind Russia, China, Japan, Thailand, etc. etc. etc.) And you can mix and match bits of cultures to get what you want. You aren’t tied down to historical reality. It’s enormously freeing.
(And, yes, many authors use it as an excuse to be lazy.)
But there’s more to it than that. Because what a secondary world really does, what you have this freedom for, is it lets you use your imagination. It lets you make things up. And really, you shouldn’t be a writer of any kind if you don’t like using your imagination. You especially shouldn’t be a fantasy writer. When I was a teenager and writing was something I did for my own private enjoyment, what I did most was draw maps and make up genealogies, the more elaborate the better. It was the invention that I enjoyed most. (You can also exercise your invention in this way in stories set in the real world, and I don’t mean to imply you can’t, but there’s nothing quite like the rush of a completely blank slate.)
So, for the author, a secondary world lets you maximize the fun stuff: making your own rules, writing your own history. Playing god.
2. What A Secondary World Does For A Reader
Well, first off, obviously a large number of people simply enjoy stories that aren’t set in the real world. Not all people, and I don’t know whether it’s a majority or a minority. But it is a lot. And even though I’m one of those people myself, I don’t know exactly where the attraction is. But since the point of writing stories is for other people to enjoy them, this is an important part of the purpose of secondary worlds. It also follows from the enjoyment the author takes in invention. If the author is enjoying what he/she does, that enjoyment is likely to communicate itself to the reader. Win-win.
Ideally, also, a secondary world should allow and encourage a reader to think outside the box, to see that, because we can imagine a society different from our own, our society itself is not immutable--not reified, to use the fancy theoretical term. Reification--thing-ification, from the Latin res, meaning "thing"--is the process whereby a human construct becomes perceived as a thing, as something impervious to human endeavor, as something that can be neither changed nor destroyed. So–to give two examples off the top of my head--Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness deconstructs the reification of gender roles. Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint deconstructs the reification of heteronormativity (the norm in the world of Swordspoint is bisexuality).
(The social thought experiment has long been considered the territory of science fiction, as with most “serious” endeavors in the amalgamated genre of fantasy/science fiction/horror, but I don’t think the necessary given for it is “science/technology.” I think the necessary given is “a world different from our own”–and fantasy can provide that just as readily as sf. The social commentary may be buried a little deeper because–not being a “serious” genre–secondary world fantasy doesn’t have the leeway to leave out the stuff for the groundlings. Or it may not be there at all–just as it may not be there in science fiction, either. *ahem* I am digressing like a digressive thing.)
3. How A Secondary World Does What It Does
This is where we get into the do’s and don’ts which I may from time to time have promulgated.
The dream, says John Gardner, should be vivid and continuous. He was talking about fiction writing in general, but it applies in spades to secondary worlds. Take your secondary world seriously. Treat it with respect. Remember that for your characters, it is the real world. (I.e., if you aren’t Terry Pratchett and haven’t deliberately set up your secondary world so that it spawns warped reflections of the real world, resist the impulse to be cute. Also, n.b., when Pratchett does it, he isn’t being cute. He’s being consistent to his secondary world as he has established it.)
Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, think things through. Every decision you make about your world has consequences. Some of them will be obvious; some will not. And it’s the pursuit of the unobvious consequences that will make your world feel rich and deep. Also, consequences that make things more difficult for your characters. Scott Lynch has a brilliant example of this in Red Sails Under Red Skies; it would be a spoiler to discuss it, so I won’t, but it made me believe in the world because, like our world, it doesn’t always work in the viewpoint character’s favor.
And while there should always be a reason that the story is set in a secondary world--something that you can’t get by setting it in the real world--the secondary world should also be a reason in and of itself. It should provide richness to the story, beyond simply being a pretty backdrop. It should be an integral part of the reader’s enjoyment.
I feel like I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this topic, but I also feel like that’s enough pontificating from me for one post. So on the understanding that I don’t think what I’ve said here is either conclusive or definitive, here endeth the lesson.
The Right Word
[Storytellers Unplugged, December 7, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
(In penance for having forgotten to post on my assigned day two months in a row, I’m taking Elizabeth Bear’s day so she can have a vacation.)
(Also, I feel like I need to issue a disclaimer. I’m very woolly-headed today, in a fatigued and megrim-ridden fashion. So I’m gonna do my best here, but if I’m more than usually incoherent, I apologize.)
A question from a reader of my blog:
I don’t know if this is concrete enough for a whole post or if you may have already done something similar, but–one of the things that I simultaneously admire greatly and envy the crap out of is your facility with evoking atmosphere. Do you have a specific spot in the drafting process when you do that–like a late draft thing–or is the tone/mood/atmosphere of the place your characters are (mentally and physically) something that is present for you from the time you start drafting? Is it word choice, or rhythm, or all of the above.
I don’t know if that question even makes sense. But the mood and atmosphere of your settings and situations always seems so tangible and right for the story at that point–you evoke dread, or oppression, or chaos, longing, sadness, etc., so well and it’s something I struggle with.
I’ve been thinking about this question, and thinking about this question, in my current glum and woolly-headed fashion, and I think the answer has to be word choice. I think this because atmosphere is not something I set out consciously to evoke (in fact, if you’d asked me, I would have said I did it badly). It certainly isn’t something I go back and put in. And that means it’s something I do as I’m writing, as an integral part of the writing process. And that means that it’s down, very simply, to the words.
I’m reading right now a book called Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren. It’s a very interesting book, and by and large it’s a good book, but Warren has a glitch, a tic that I wish to goodness somebody had edited out for him: he has a tendency to use the almost right word.
(I saw this a lot when I was teaching college English, where it was symptomatic of students trying to make their writing look sophisticated. The thesaurus is a false friend.)
The clearest example is in his discussion of Dracula, where he says, “He [Dracula] prevails first upon Lucy Westenra” (Warren 329). Now, prevails is not entirely the wrong word. Warren’s meaning is discernible, and you may have to stare at the sentence for a moment or two before you can figure out why it doesn’t sound quite right. But prevails is also not the right word. You prevail upon someone when you get them to do something for you--a favor, especially of the more tedious kind. The connotations of the word, of imposing your will on another person, are not unlike vampirism. But there’s still a palpable gap between Mina prevails upon Lucy to lend her her favorite hat, and Dracula “prevails” upon Lucy to become a vampire. The almost right word is still wrong.
(And I shall now prevail upon Mark Twain to support my contention: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)
So I obsess over word choice. I fiddle and fuss. I tend (as my writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, can attest) to overload my sentences with adjectives in draft, trying to find exactly the right one. I get very stubborn with copy-editors about not changing my obscure word for a more familiar one. I read my drafts aloud when I can, listening for rhythm, for inadvertent rhymes, for repetition. The words are the vehicle for the story, but for me, they’re also an end in themselves. I mostly don’t write poetry, because I can’t easily get the metaphors packed densely enough to warrant it, but I approach prose with something of the same spirit, with the belief that no word should be allowed to coast or waffle or be almost good enough, that if you use a word, it should be because it’s the right word.
Like building a wall without mortar. It’s all in choosing and placing the stones.
(I’m not sure that really answers the question. But it’s the only thing I can point to and explain. I don’t know how I evoke atmosphere. I do know how I use words.)
(In penance for having forgotten to post on my assigned day two months in a row, I’m taking Elizabeth Bear’s day so she can have a vacation.)
(Also, I feel like I need to issue a disclaimer. I’m very woolly-headed today, in a fatigued and megrim-ridden fashion. So I’m gonna do my best here, but if I’m more than usually incoherent, I apologize.)
A question from a reader of my blog:
I don’t know if this is concrete enough for a whole post or if you may have already done something similar, but–one of the things that I simultaneously admire greatly and envy the crap out of is your facility with evoking atmosphere. Do you have a specific spot in the drafting process when you do that–like a late draft thing–or is the tone/mood/atmosphere of the place your characters are (mentally and physically) something that is present for you from the time you start drafting? Is it word choice, or rhythm, or all of the above.
I don’t know if that question even makes sense. But the mood and atmosphere of your settings and situations always seems so tangible and right for the story at that point–you evoke dread, or oppression, or chaos, longing, sadness, etc., so well and it’s something I struggle with.
I’ve been thinking about this question, and thinking about this question, in my current glum and woolly-headed fashion, and I think the answer has to be word choice. I think this because atmosphere is not something I set out consciously to evoke (in fact, if you’d asked me, I would have said I did it badly). It certainly isn’t something I go back and put in. And that means it’s something I do as I’m writing, as an integral part of the writing process. And that means that it’s down, very simply, to the words.
I’m reading right now a book called Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren. It’s a very interesting book, and by and large it’s a good book, but Warren has a glitch, a tic that I wish to goodness somebody had edited out for him: he has a tendency to use the almost right word.
(I saw this a lot when I was teaching college English, where it was symptomatic of students trying to make their writing look sophisticated. The thesaurus is a false friend.)
The clearest example is in his discussion of Dracula, where he says, “He [Dracula] prevails first upon Lucy Westenra” (Warren 329). Now, prevails is not entirely the wrong word. Warren’s meaning is discernible, and you may have to stare at the sentence for a moment or two before you can figure out why it doesn’t sound quite right. But prevails is also not the right word. You prevail upon someone when you get them to do something for you--a favor, especially of the more tedious kind. The connotations of the word, of imposing your will on another person, are not unlike vampirism. But there’s still a palpable gap between Mina prevails upon Lucy to lend her her favorite hat, and Dracula “prevails” upon Lucy to become a vampire. The almost right word is still wrong.
(And I shall now prevail upon Mark Twain to support my contention: “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)
So I obsess over word choice. I fiddle and fuss. I tend (as my writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, can attest) to overload my sentences with adjectives in draft, trying to find exactly the right one. I get very stubborn with copy-editors about not changing my obscure word for a more familiar one. I read my drafts aloud when I can, listening for rhythm, for inadvertent rhymes, for repetition. The words are the vehicle for the story, but for me, they’re also an end in themselves. I mostly don’t write poetry, because I can’t easily get the metaphors packed densely enough to warrant it, but I approach prose with something of the same spirit, with the belief that no word should be allowed to coast or waffle or be almost good enough, that if you use a word, it should be because it’s the right word.
Like building a wall without mortar. It’s all in choosing and placing the stones.
(I’m not sure that really answers the question. But it’s the only thing I can point to and explain. I don’t know how I evoke atmosphere. I do know how I use words.)
Things I Know about Writing on August 29, 2008
[Storytellers Unplugged, August 29, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine via an awesome reader]
I missed July because I was so far down in novel revisions that I simply forgot about it--I didn’t even notice it was July 29th until August 2nd, if you see what I mean.
Nine days ago, I turned in Corambis. My brain promptly shut down. (This phenomenon is not uncommon among novelists. Elizabeth Bear calls it “post-novel ennui.”) I’m still waiting for it to boot up again.
So.
What do I know about writing?
I know that it’s hard.
I know that if it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
I know that learn by doing is the only game in town.
I know that the only way out is through. And there aren’t any shortcuts. Anything you think is a shortcut is just going to get you in worse trouble.
I know that most of the cliches of writing advice--write what you know, omit needless words--work better as koans, as meditations, than they do as advice.
I know that fiction is all lies.
I know that you have to tell your lies as if they were truth. Lots of circumstantial evidence and telling details. And conviction.
I know that in the end, it turns out that those lies are all there to point the way toward the truth. Or a truth. Or some truth. If we could just tell the truth straight out, it would save a lot of time. But on the other hand, telling lies is fun.
I know that even now, when there isn’t so much as a drop of creativity left in me, I’d rather be writing than not.
I know that my creativity will come back--it’s like stalactite formation: slow but inexorable--and that pretty soon the whole gaudy gruesome carousel will start up again.
I know that writing never stops challenging me. And if it ever does, I’ll know I’m doing something wrong.
And I know, even when I hate it as sometimes I do, that writing is the best damn job in the world.
I missed July because I was so far down in novel revisions that I simply forgot about it--I didn’t even notice it was July 29th until August 2nd, if you see what I mean.
Nine days ago, I turned in Corambis. My brain promptly shut down. (This phenomenon is not uncommon among novelists. Elizabeth Bear calls it “post-novel ennui.”) I’m still waiting for it to boot up again.
So.
What do I know about writing?
I know that it’s hard.
I know that if it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun.
I know that learn by doing is the only game in town.
I know that the only way out is through. And there aren’t any shortcuts. Anything you think is a shortcut is just going to get you in worse trouble.
I know that most of the cliches of writing advice--write what you know, omit needless words--work better as koans, as meditations, than they do as advice.
I know that fiction is all lies.
I know that you have to tell your lies as if they were truth. Lots of circumstantial evidence and telling details. And conviction.
I know that in the end, it turns out that those lies are all there to point the way toward the truth. Or a truth. Or some truth. If we could just tell the truth straight out, it would save a lot of time. But on the other hand, telling lies is fun.
I know that even now, when there isn’t so much as a drop of creativity left in me, I’d rather be writing than not.
I know that my creativity will come back--it’s like stalactite formation: slow but inexorable--and that pretty soon the whole gaudy gruesome carousel will start up again.
I know that writing never stops challenging me. And if it ever does, I’ll know I’m doing something wrong.
And I know, even when I hate it as sometimes I do, that writing is the best damn job in the world.
twofer
When Last We Left Our Heroes
[Storytellers Unplugged, July 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
The thing about writing a post every month (or every couple months--mea culpa) is that you-the-reader tend to get hit with whatever I’ve been thinking about more or less in the background of my day to day life. This time, it’s series novels.
There are two different kinds of series in genre fiction. One, on the Tolkien model, is a single story split up over multiple volumes.* George R. R. Martin is doing fabulously well with that kind of series right now. (Please note: Martin’s success is the exception, not the rule.) The other, which I think of as the mystery model, is a set of stories, all with the same protagonist(s), but with little or no continuity from novel to novel. Ngaio Marsh wrote that kind of series. So did Emma Lathen and Ellery Queen and Edmund Crispin and a whole host of other Golden Age detective story writers. At the far end of that spectrum is someone like John Dickson Carr, whose continuing character, Gideon Fell, is actually almost always a secondary character. Carr wrote standalone mysteries which happened to feature the same detective.
The advantage to the mystery model, from the publishing point of view, is that it caters to the vast yearning for same-but-different that drives a lot of people’s reading habits. You can pick up any book in the series--first, fourth, fourteenth, thirty-seventh--and have roughly the same reading experience. It doesn’t matter if two, five, and nineteen are out of print, because only the completists will care--or even be able to tell. Each book benefits from the sales record and reputation of the other books, but no book is dependent on the other books. This is very much not the case with the Tolkien model, where if you can’t find volume three, reading volume four is an exercise in frustration. And if you’ve read volume four, your incentive to find volume three is sharply diminished, because you already know what’s going to happen. In the mystery model, what happens in volume three has little or no bearing on volume four, and vice versa, so reading one has no impact on your desire for the other--except for feeding the same-but-different demon.
I completely understand why people like the mystery model. I like it myself when I find an author who’s good enough at it. And I equally completely understand why publishing likes the mystery model. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a sure thing in an industry ruled by caprice and intangibles.
My problem is, a mystery model series is the last thing on earth I want to write. They’re popcorn reading, and their indeterminate nature--you have to have enough closure that the story stands on its own but either (a.) leave enough minor threads loose that the next book can tie on or (b.) have frictionless characters who don’t change from book to book--means that even very excellent mystery model series aren’t much more than popcorn reading. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Emma Lathen and John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh and their ilk, and I respect their craft. But they’re not what I want to write. You have to live with a book you’re writing for a lot longer than a book you’re reading, even if you write fast (which I don’t), and, while I enjoy visiting, I couldn’t live in such a self-limiting form.
I’m ambitious. I aspire to art. I want to write great novels, not just excellently crafted entertainment. This may be a case of “aim for the stars, get to the roof” but it’s still better than aiming for the roof and only getting halfway up the stairs. The four books of the Doctrine of Labyrinths are all deeply dependent on each other, and I have always thought of that as a feature, rather than a bug. (It was in fact my puzzlement over reviews describing it as a bug that led me to understand, finally, that my definition of a series was only one of two possible definitions, and not the preferred definition at that.)
I’m going to be writing standalone novels for a while, I think. Aside from the publishing drawbacks, writing a Tolkien model series is exhausting. But when and if I do write another series, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into.
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*This is very literally the Tolkien model, since--As You Know Bob--Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single novel. Most post-Tolkien series have at least some closure at the end of each individual volume: each installment is more or less a novel on its own.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
[Storytellers Unplugged, August 07, 2009; retrieved via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
Apparently, this month I have nothing to say.
Except for a follow-up to last month’s post, in two parts:
1. I have no idea what I mean by “art.”
2. Despite all my bitching about open series (series in which every book is an entry point and every book can be read separately from the others), closed series (a la The Lord of the Rings) have no inherent virtue or “artistic” value, just as standalone novels don’t. I still think that the form of open series makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do certain things (which, last month, I described as “art”), but those things are not the only way to define art. The perfect counter-example is P. G. Wodehouse, whom I do not have the brass-faced effrontery to deny is an artist.
I hope that next month I will have real content to give you.
Where Do We Go from Here?
[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, February 7, 2009; dug out of the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
I’m in kind of a lull right now. The page-proofs of Corambis have gone back to New York, so I’m officially done, not only with that book, but with the four-volume series (Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and now Corambis) that I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since approximately 1993. That’s a big project and a big chunk of my life (even if I didn’t know when I started that it was going to be four books and fifteen years long), and so I suppose it’s really not surprising that I find myself metaphorically standing here, squinting at the signposts, frowning at the map, wondering where I go next.
I don’t know that I’m done forever with Felix and Mildmay and the world of Meduse, but I know that I’m definitely done for now. I need a new direction. I need new worlds to conquer. And at the same time, my mule team say they needs a goddamn break. They need a vacation, for crying out loud.
The mule team, of course, is the subconscious and the right brain and the place where the creativity wells up, the thing we don’t have any good words for. That part of my brain is tired. It’s not drained–I’m still getting new ideas–but, honestly, the idea isn’t the hard part. Turning the idea into a story, and making that story complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s the hard part. And the mule team don’t want to do it. They want to lie around in the shade and drink iced tea.
And for now, I’m willing to let them. We could all use a breather.
Maybe by the time they’re ready to pull again, I’ll have figured out which way is up on the map
I’m in kind of a lull right now. The page-proofs of Corambis have gone back to New York, so I’m officially done, not only with that book, but with the four-volume series (Mélusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, and now Corambis) that I’ve been working on, in one way or another, since approximately 1993. That’s a big project and a big chunk of my life (even if I didn’t know when I started that it was going to be four books and fifteen years long), and so I suppose it’s really not surprising that I find myself metaphorically standing here, squinting at the signposts, frowning at the map, wondering where I go next.
I don’t know that I’m done forever with Felix and Mildmay and the world of Meduse, but I know that I’m definitely done for now. I need a new direction. I need new worlds to conquer. And at the same time, my mule team say they needs a goddamn break. They need a vacation, for crying out loud.
The mule team, of course, is the subconscious and the right brain and the place where the creativity wells up, the thing we don’t have any good words for. That part of my brain is tired. It’s not drained–I’m still getting new ideas–but, honestly, the idea isn’t the hard part. Turning the idea into a story, and making that story complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s the hard part. And the mule team don’t want to do it. They want to lie around in the shade and drink iced tea.
And for now, I’m willing to let them. We could all use a breather.
Maybe by the time they’re ready to pull again, I’ll have figured out which way is up on the map
March 11, 2016
UBC: Mauriello & Darby, The Dollhouse Murders
The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes by Thomas MaurielloMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not to be confused with The Dollhouse Murders.
I found this book frustrating, although others might not. Because they (and I have no idea who, between Mauriello, his co-author, and his publisher, came up with the idea) decided to discuss the six scenarios in the book in the format of stories, they don't provide the kind of analytical detail (either forensic or anthropo-/sociological) that I want. Because these aren't stories, but disguised classroom exercises, their didactic purpose precludes any of the kind of character and/or plot development that make stories satisfying. I also find the conceit of "the Detective" and his shifting cast of forensic technicians, medical examiners, uniformed police officers, and (infinitely annoying) "the partner" obtrusive and just a little bit cutesy.
With that said, the idea behind this book is awesome. In his classroom, Mauriello uses six dollhouse dioramas, each of a different crime scene, to get his students to understand the way the different branches of forensic science intertwine and cooperate in processing a crime scene. Each scenario demonstrates what a lead detective does, and for anyone interested in true crime and/or mysteries, I admit that the story format does give a sense of how the forensic and detectional (which is so not a word, I apologize) work flows from the time a crime is discovered. Despite the title, not all of these little scenarios are murder, and each takes place in a different setting with different challenges, so--as one would expect from a didactic exercise--you get a broad spectrum of what forensic police work can be asked to do.
Flawed, but interesting.
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February 27, 2016
UBC: Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints
The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity by Peter R.L. BrownMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
127 pages about Christianity in late antiquity (c.a. AD 300-600) and the increasing devotion to (specifically) martyred saints and their physical remains. Brown talks about shrines and pilgrimages and burials and exorcisms and relics, and it is all fascinating. 4 of 5 stars only because I've read The Body & Society: Men, Women & Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity--long long ago in an undergraduate history class--and that book sets the particular bar for Professor Brown kind of high. This is a lovely book, full of affection for the rather difficult men (Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Tours, Paulinus of Nola) who are our guides to the growing adoration of the saints in the transition from the Rome-centric culture of the Empire to a much more dispersed relationship of interdependent loci of Christian worship/life of the mind.
Brown is absolutely explicit and open about the fact that this book leaves out enormous chunks of Roman/early-medieval culture: he's talking about the upper class male intellectuals who created and transmitted the theological core of hagiophilia ("love of the saints"--I don't know if that was previously a word, but I need it to be right now). He discusses "women" and "the poor" (and we can talk about the infinite drop-down list of problems with the way he conceptualizes the two as monolithic and discrete categories some other time) only anecdotally--so if what you really want is social history, this is not the book for you. I found it both a pleasure to read and a useful introduction to the intellectual end of a fascinating phenomenon.
There's also a thing in here that, if I were still teaching undergraduate English, I would totally use for an upper-level course on pilgrimages and quests:
By localizing the holy in this manner [martyrs' shrines], late-antique Christianity could feed on the facts of distance and on the joys of proximity. This distance might be physical distance. For this, pilgrimage was the remedy. As Alphonse Dupront has put it, so succinctly, pilgrimage was "une thérapie par l'espace." The pilgrim committed himself or herself to the "therapy of distance" by recognizing that what he or she wished for was not to be had in the immediate environment. Distance could symbolize needs unsatisfied, so that, as Dupront continues, "le pèlerinage demeure essentiallement depart": pilgrimage remains essentially the fact of leaving. But distance is there to be overcome; the experience of pilgrimage activates a yearning for intimate closeness. For the pilgrims who arrived after the obvious "therapy of distance" involved in long travel found themselves subjected to the same therapy by the nature of the shrine itself. [...] For the art of the shrine in late antiquity is an art of closed surfaces. Behind these surfaces, the holy lay, either totally hidden or glimpsed through narrow apertures. The opacity of the surfaces heightened an awareness of the ultimate unattainability in this life of the person [i.e., the saint] they had traveled over such wide spaces to touch. (Brown 86-87)
There is so much in this passage if, as I am, you are predisposed to map the structure of the pilgrimage onto other texts. I'd really like discussions of how MacGuffins and P.R.O.s (Priceless Ritual Objects: Edward Gorey's term) do and don't map onto saints' relics; the way The Lord of the Rings is an anti-pilgrimage: Frodo has to get to Mount Doom (pilgrimage), but it's to rid himself of the unholy (I feel perfectly okay using that adjective for the Ring in this context) rather than to approach the holy; the difference between a quest and a pilgrimage and how those differences affect the structure of a work (Odysseus is on a pilgrimage to reach his home; Aeneas is on a quest to find somewhere to call home); why fantasy, as a genre, is so invested in the therapy of distance; the effect of the quest-structure used, for instance by the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, wherein the quester goes through perils and trials only to discover that what she's looking for was at home/on her feet the whole time; the definition of "home," for that matter, and what its value is as a place of pilgrimage and/or quest object. And the potential reading list: The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, Growing Up Weightless (because we need to start teaching John M. Ford), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Supernatural, To the Lighthouse if I want to get
If you are interested in this odd little corner of history, this book is absolutely worth finding.
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*I really like Virginia Woolf (although more for her nonfiction than her fiction), but I have run out of patience with the artificial divide between "literary" and "popular" fiction that the soi-disant literati of the early twentieth century created in Anglophone literature. And I'm afraid she'd be a pain in the ass to teach. Ditto, come to think of it, for Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast would be awesome conceptually, but oh my god a nightmare about a plague in the classroom. Also, try though I do to overcome it, I really dislike him.
**If anyone wants to try and actually teach this course, you have 100% permission to steal my idea.
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February 21, 2016
UBC: L. Perry Curtis, Jr., Jack the Ripper & the London Press
Jack the Ripper and the London Press by L. Perry Curtis Jr.My rating: 3 of 5 stars
It feels weird to be saying a book's problem is its commitment issues, but that's the best way I can sum up Jack the Ripper and the London Press. The book provides a useful overview of the press coverage of the Whitechapel murders: which papers took what stance (and had which political leanings) and how detailed they got in their description of the "abdominal mutilations." But it neither (a.) has a strong theoretical basis to talk about why (in fact, Curtis frequently seems hostile to theory, about which more below) nor (b.) really digs into its subject the way "Ripperologists" do (I put that word in quotes because it's easier and shorter than saying "popular and amateur historians writing about the Whitechapel murders" but it's also derogatory in a way I don't endorse or condone.) So even though Curtis has clearly done a metric ass-ton of research, the book feels superficial. It could be giving a lot more bang for its buck.
Part of Curtis' problem with theory is that the theorists he engages with most consistently are feminist historians. This sounds, I know, like a strength, but it is amply evident that Curtis has little to no sympathy with those feminists' theoretical project. This is not to call him misogynist, exactly, but to provide an example: in discussing Judith Walkowitz' mistaken assertion that there were riots in the East End, he says, "No doubt such sensational assertions enliven academic monographs of the cultural studies genre" (259), which is just . . . me-OW. He consistently presents the most embarrassingly ridiculous extremes (e.g., Jane Caupti's assertion that the hydrogen bomb is "'the precise macrocosmic parallel to the crimes of Jack the Ripper'" (Caputi quoted in Curtis, 258)) or (as with Walkowitz) the most egregious mistakes, and the language he uses is always faintly impatient, just palpably derogatory. He contrasts them with (male) historians whose views are more "restrained" and "empirical"--although he notes further down the page that his "restrained" and "empirical" (male) historian is following Foucault, which makes me wonder (aloud, to my husband) if he's on crack. (My husband's answer: "Yes.") Curtis treats the feminist theorists in the way academic historians generally treat "Ripperologists."
I will totally grant that the feminist theorists he quotes are not doing a very good job of engaging with the Whitechapel murders, but it would be so much better if he said that and then (again) talked about why, instead of using them throughout the book as straw-men (straw-persons?). Because I think there is a problem in the collision of feminist cultural history and Jack the Ripper, and I don't think it's that the feminist theorists are being silly, even though that's how Curtis makes them look.
And on the other hand, he doesn't engage with his primary sources in the way I wish he would. His most interesting chapter is on letters to the editor, and even there, he gives a statistical overview and quotes highlights, but he doesn't provide any serious analysis--partly because he doesn't have any kind of a theoretical argument underpinning his presentation of his data. He doesn't even have the kind of historical argument that Andrew Cook presents so badly in Jack the Ripper.
It's hard to come to grips with Jack the Ripper on any academic front--because the Whitechapel murders have been so sensationalized? because the amateur historians have made it embarrassing for academic historians to engage with the subject? because we don't know who did it, so we can't measure our theories against his reality? because we don't have a successful model for intellectual engagement with (a.) serial murder, (b.) sexual murder, (c.) serial sexual murder? I know I always break out Patricia Cline Cohen at this point in the discussion--and it's not fair to Curtis, whose book was published in 2001--but she is truly the best example I have found thus far of using feminist analytical techniques on "true crime" subject matter.
Curtis's subject material is interesting in and of itself, and he presents it clearly, but he doesn't provide anything that would make this book more than an assemblage of data. Which is a pity.
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