Katherine Addison's Blog, page 45
January 16, 2016
Taking Another Tilt at the Windmill
Writing "I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!" (published December 7, 2010) started me thinking again about that hoary old chestnut and perennial panel favorite: “What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction?” Since, insofar as I have an allegiance to any academic critical school, it’s to genre theory, I think about this a little bit differently than most people, and this round of thinking has led me to some interesting places.
First off, two caveats:
1.) “Genre” and “marketing category” are not the same thing. The latter is a label slapped on a book for the convenience of booksellers. (And I fully appreciate the need for quick, one-word, uncomplicated labels when all you’re trying to do is figure out how to put books where people will find them in order to buy them.) “Genre” has a complicated history, which I’ll get to in a minute. For now, I just want to point out that marketing categories strive for the absolute (though they don’t necessarily achieve it, even so): either something DOES go in the Romance section or it DOESN’T. Genres are all about relatives.
2.) I am not a prescriptivist. I don’t want to tell any story what it should be doing. Rather, I’m trying to find ways to describe what it is doing. So none of what follows should be construed as pronouncements from on high. It’s just me thinking about the stories I love.
All right. Back to the idea of “genre.” At the root of it all, genres are arbitrary categories which we use because we are hardwired pattern-recognition junkies. And I fully and cheerfully include myself in that. For pretty much as long as there’s been literary criticism, they’ve been used to try to impose value judgments on different kinds of stories and storytelling (think of Aristotle, think of Sir Philip Sidney), and as prose gradually supplanted poetry as the primary mode of storytelling in English (I can’t speak about any other language’s literature, because the only two I know anything about are (a.) pre-novel and (b.) dead), and the novel came to reign supreme over Anglo-American story consumption (I don’t know enough about other Anglophone traditions to discuss them), people started dividing novels into smaller and smaller sub-genres. And started, inevitably, making value judgments about them.
The divide between mimetic literature and fantastic literature is a relatively recent one, and judging by its effects, it went hand in hand with the effort to make prose fiction respectable, something critics and academics could take seriously, not just popular entertainment. And, whether by design or not, this bid for respectability involved disowning the fantastic. (I blame James Joyce, but only because I can’t blame Aristotle.) Fantastic literature became something suitable only for children and the ignorant masses–and notice the simultaneous denigration of children’s literature, and the way in which the two reinforce each other. It’s taken us most of a century to fight our way back from that completely arbitrary and artificial distinction. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. The way you elevate mimetic literature and denigrate fantastic literature is by comparing the 10% to the 90.) If you go and look at Western canonical literature, you’ll be hard pressed to find any of it that isn’t fantastic in one aspect or another until you get to Clarissa; Clarissa, while I wouldn’t call it particularly realistic, is definitely in the para-real rather than the contra-real or sur-real camp. (And that, of course, has a great deal to do with the origins of the novel in confessional literature . . . but that’s another topic entirely.)
My point is that I think most definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or fantasy vs. science fiction) are starting from premises that could themselves stand to be more carefully examined.
I’m going to define “genre” as stories concerned with the same set of narrative conventions and expectations. In other words, I see a genre as a series of questions which a story chooses to engage with. It may answer “yes,” “no,” or “giraffe,” but it is engaging with those questions, rather than another set.
It becomes immediately apparent, by this definition, that fantasy and science fiction are not genres. Horror is a genre, because horror brings a set of narrative expectations, just as mystery and romance do. You can put a romance into a fantasy story or a science fiction story, and nothing about the plot of the romance must or should change. But if you put the romance into a horror story–yes, something has to change. Just as you can take the same set-up–a dead body found under strange circumstances–and make it either a mystery story or a horror story; either one may have elements of the other, but fundamentally, whether you pick mystery or horror makes a difference to your plot and its outcome. They are genres.
Fantasy and science fiction, on the other hand, are like Western and historical. They’re something for which there isn’t a good word. “Setting” is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because it implies that the fantastic/sfnal/Western/historical elements of the story are merely window-dressing, and that is not at all the case. (Okay, here I am a little bit prescriptivist, because what I mean is that it shouldn’t be the case. In good fantasy, the fantastic element should be integral to–and also well integrated in–the plot. Ditto the sfnal in science fiction, the western milieu in Westerns, the historical in historicals.) But they aren’t genres, because there is no narrative expectation you can apply across the board. You can have historical mysteries, fantasy mysteries (Barbara Hambly, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, to name three off the top), science fiction mysteries. I’ve never seen a Western mystery, but there’s no reason you couldn’t write one. You can put horror in any of these settings, likewise. They don’t care what kind of narrative you apply to them.
(The other odd thing, while I’m talking about things for which there aren’t good words in English, is the way in which horror, aside from being transportable from one genre to another, can make back-formations and put down roots. A detective without a mystery is like something out of Pirandello or Beckett, and a romantic lead without a romance is even worse. But Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker is, among other things, a fantasy novel with zombies in it. Zombies are a horror trope, but they don’t make Boneshaker a horror novel, any more than vampires, likewise a horror trope, make Those Who Hunt the Night (Hambly) or New Amsterdam (Bear) a vampire novel. And yet the zombies in Boneshaker are still zombies, and Bear and Hambly’s vampires are most definitely vampires. (N.b., they do not sparkle.) It’s odd and it’s also marvelous that you can cut horror tropes loose from their genre moorings, and they keep working.
(I don’t know what to do with that, and the neat thing about genre theory, and the fact that it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, is that I don’t have to know what to do with that. It’s okay to just sit and watch it work and be filled with delight.)
Under this schematic, fantasy and science fiction differ in world rather than in story, and I think this applies to Westerns and historicals, too. World, like genre, does bring with it questions a story has to answer, but it brings different questions, and they interact with the story in different ways.
… I guess for next month I can start thinking about what I think those questions are.
January 15, 2016
Should Cinderella Kiss the Prince?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about romance1, and from two different directions.
In exhibit A, you have an author who had to rip conventional romance plots out of her two most recent books, The Mirador and Corambis, like yanking Virginia creeper off a tree trunk. In exhibit B, you have a reader who is currently reading a fantasy series by [name of well-known sff author redacted] and is finding the predictability of the romance sub-plots, in all their conventional heteronormative glory … well, predictable. And therefore not very interesting. And at the same time, in both exhibits A and B, you have an author/reader who likes love stories and even likes category romance–at least in the form of Georgette Heyer. And so I’m trying to figure out where the line is between compelling–or at least entertaining–and that not-quite-eyeroll I give the book when the characters yoke up in exactly the pair I expected.
The first thing to do is to separate category romance (including paranormal romance and “urban fantasy”2) out from novels-with-love-stories-in-them, because the point of category romance is, to a certain extent, its predictability. You don’t read a romance because you really want to wonder whether the heroine will find her True Love or not. You read a romance in the comforting certainty that she will, and thus you can watch the twists and turns of the plot, the misunderstandings and separations and rival suitors and all, with a scaled down version of the vicarious thrill of a roller coaster. It’s exciting, but it’s also ultimately safe. And I’m not knocking this–I’ve reread my Heyers so many times I’ve just about worn the print off the page. If you’re reading or writing category romance, that’s what you’re there for and there’s no sense criticizing a duck for not being a ferret. If that’s where you are, then the question is whether it’s a good duck or not, not whether it’s got fur and viviparous offspring.
But the thing about conventional, category romance is that, when it’s imported out of its genre–where it’s part of the form, like it’s part of the form of a sonnet that it has 14 lines–is that it shuts down character development. That’s what happened to me in The Mirador and Corambis. I put my characters in a conventional romance, and they began to behave according to the conventions of the category romance rather than according to their personalities and situations. Now, I fully admit that I did this to myself: I decided arbitrarily that character X and Y should be In Love, so it’s no surprise that X and Y began to behave arbitrarily. But it was astonishingly hard and painful for me to see what I’d done and to see that it was wrong. My writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, just about had to commit long-distance GBH to get me to let go. I’m deeply grateful now, but it’s a little like . . . okay, you’ve gone to a party and gotten completely hammered and you really really really want to take off all your clothes and dance on the table in nothing but a lampshade-hat and maybe shout rude things about the important people at the party (professors or editors or managers–take your pick depending on your profession). You have a friend who won’t let you, and you curse at them and maybe try to hit them and maybe try to stomp off in a huff, only they’ve got your car keys, and then you get distracted by having another drink and end up passed out cold on the stairs. And when you wake up the next morning, you remember wanting to dance on the table and you remember how your friend wouldn’t let you, and you realize you owe them your first-born child and probably a kidney . . . that’s what it’s like.
And I’ve come, in consequence to a realization: love is hard. It’s hard to do in real life, but it’s also hard to write about. And it’s even harder to write about if you don’t fall back on romance conventions. Because we all know how to write romance conventions and we all know how to read them. It’s safe, whereas writing about what love really is–that’s hard and scary, like asking an armadillo to expose its underbelly to a coyote. But here’s the thing. We do all know romance conventions, which means readers are able to predict them. And if we aren’t reading a book where the predictability is part of the win conditions, that predictability is going to undercut the rest of the story. Because real people aren’t predictable–or, rather, they’re predictable according to their own characters, not according to an arbitrary set of externally imposed rules–and if characters who are three-dimensional in every other respect become flat and conventional when faced with love, it points out how flimsy and artificial the conventions of romance are, and it makes a thin place in the structure of the novel, a place where you feel like you can put your hand through and grab the strings. And that thin place, of course, is exactly the thing a novelist doesn’t want.
So I’ve answered my own question: it depends on whether the predictability of the romance is constructed (or construed) as a bug or a feature of a given novel. Because it can be either. It depends on what the novel is trying to do, and on whether that predictable romance is commensurate with the other parts of the narrative.
If you’re writing a romance, yes, Cinderella kisses the prince. If you’re writing a novel about a girl who’s been abused and degraded and exploited by her stepmother and stepsisters for years while her father does nothing to help her, and whose fairy godmother seems to feel that the only thing worth intervening for is a ball . . . well, maybe she should and maybe she shouldn’t. It kind of depends on the prince.
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1In the modern sense of limerence and erotic interest, rather than the early modern sense of a prose narrative that is similar to a novel but really something quite different.
2I’m plagiarizing a footnote from myself:
I put “urban fantasy” in quotes because–as we discovered on a panel about it at Odyssey Con–whatever that genre is, “urban fantasy” is a misnomer. Urban fantasy is fantasy about cities–which the panel also discovered is a flourishing sub-genre including authors like China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett–but “urban fantasy,” while very distinctly a genre, really needs a different name. (Oddly enough, both genres are clearly influenced–if not outright founded–by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull). I write urban fantasy; I do not write “urban fantasy” and couldn’t if I tried.3
3This is not a slam against “urban fantasy.” It is very much Not My Thing, but dude. Neither is hard SF. The fact that, obviously, I want to reappropriate the term “urban fantasy” for something else isn’t because I think the books being called “urban fantasy” somehow don’t “deserve” the label, but because, as a genre theory geek, I am frustrated by the fact that the term is being used to label a genre it doesn’t describe, while a genre that it does describe, and which I think is really cool, doesn’t have a label at all–or much recognition as a genre. From the genre-theory-geek perspective “urban fantasy” is actually really interesting, because what makes it a genre is the mélange of genres it offers–fantasy, romance, mystery, action-adventure, maybe a little horror–but while the urban environment, or at least the postmodern cosmopolitan sensibility, is necessary to the genre, it’s not really what books in this genre are about.
Five Things I Know about World-Building
1. The more fun you have, the more fun your audience will have.
World-building should be fun. That’s what it’s for. You don’t have to approach it like a history textbook with all the dates and the names and the dry tedious facts. You only have to talk about the good bits, and you get to decide what those good bits are. And you can be outrageous. Real history is.
2. Never world-build through infodump.1
(N.b., there is a difference between an “infodump” and “exposition.” Robin McKinley world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Spindle’s End; Diana Wynne Jones world-builds through exposition at the beginning of Howl’s Moving Castle. These are both markedly different from the infodump world-building at the beginning of the book I’m reading right now, James White’s Ambulance Ship.)
Avoid giving your readers information in solid lumps. This causes skimming and skipping, and if there’s something important in there, odds are pretty good no one’s going to catch it because their eyes have glazed over. Also, it feels fake; the dream ceases to be continuous and the reader gets dumped out of the story on his or her ass.
3. You can work it all out in advance or make it up as you go along. The end result will look the same.
How do I know this is true? Because 80% of my world-building, I make up as I go along. I take copious notes so as not to contradict myself or invent the wheel twice, but I invent my worlds on the fly.
Writing is, thank goodness, not a performance art. The finished product does not have to tell you anything about the details of the process. Therefore, the only wrong way to world-build–as with everything else–is the way that doesn’t work.
4. Never tell your audience everything you know.
This goes back to both (1.) and (2.) You aren’t writing a textbook; there isn’t going to be a test. You don’t have to explain everything, and in fact you’re better off if you don’t.
Also, there should be a difference between everything you know and everything your viewpoint character knows. Unless you’re writing in omniscient (in which case you, sir or madam, are as mad as a fish2), you need to filter your information through the character. If she doesn’t know it, she can’t tell the reader about it. If she doesn’t think it’s important, she won’t tell the reader about it. If the version of the facts she’s been given is wrong …
5. You have to let some details be throwaways.
This is what gives the world-building the illusion of depth. Not every folksong can be the coded solution to a mystery, and if you only mention popular culture or history when you are pushing another piece of the plot into place, your audience is going to get wise to your tricks, and your world-building is reduced to two-dimensional stage scenery.
Include details that have nothing to do with your story. Let your characters make allusions to events or ballads or novels that aren’t clues, just things they’ve read or heard or seen. The way real people do.
My favorite example from my own work (to be vulgarly conceited for a moment) is in the first chapter of Mélusine, when one of the protagonists says disparagingly of his teenage ambitions as a knife-fighter, “I thought I was quite something back then, like I was another Charlett Redding and they were going to have my hands plated with gold when I died” (p. 22).
That’s the only time Charlett Redding is ever mentioned, and that’s all we ever know about her. (I know more–although not a lot more–but like I said, never tell your audience everything you know.) Nothing about this throwaway anecdote has any bearing on the story, but it tells you a lot about the character and a lot about the world, and a lot of what it tells you, it tells you precisely because it’s a throwaway detail. It matters because it doesn’t matter.
And now, before I start calling people Grasshopper, I’m going to end this post.
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1For a definition of “infodump,” plus any number of other useful concepts, please consult the Turkey City Lexicon.
2A statement which is not the same as saying you shouldn’t do it.
Deadline on the Horizon
I have a deadline.
My fourth book, Summerdown, is due August 1st. I honestly don’t know if it’s going to be finished in time. So, since it’s the first thing on my mind (also the second, third, fourth, and fifth), I’m going to introduce myself to storytellersunplugged by talking about, hey, deadlines, and the things I am learning as I struggle to meet this one.
It is, of course, the hallmark of a professional writer to meet his or her deadlines. To do so calmly. Cheerfully. With a song on his or her lips!
Well, okay. Maybe not that last bit.
The first thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is to stay calm. They can smell fear. Also, your productivity is better if you aren’t in a state of gibbering panic. Therefore, it’s better not to let yourself get too worked up, no matter how far in the hole you feel like you are. Perspective is important, not least to keep you from behaving like a drama queen in front of friends, family, and random passersby.
(And by “you,” of course, I mean “me.”)
No matter how important your deadline is, the world will keep revolving if you miss it.
Really.
Try for some Zen, if you can.
The second thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is not to compare yourself to other writers. Especially, god help you, to your friends. There will always be someone who writes faster than you do, or whose first drafts are cleaner. Or both. And what you have to accept is that this information is MEANINGLESS. How fast other people are writing their books has no relevance to your book. You are not in competition with them, and using other people to beat yourself up is unfair, both to you and to them.
Sometimes, in order to accept this, you have to tell yourself that those other, faster, better, prettier writers are space aliens. This is okay, as long as it gets you to Stop. Comparing. Yourself. To. Other. Writers. Some of my dearest friends are space aliens to me right now.
Zen is also good here, if you can find it.
The third thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is to listen to the book. Do not let the mob in your brain chanting DEADLINE DEADLINE DEADLINE drown out the things you need to hear. If the book is taking a wrong turn, you need to figure that out at the intersection, not twenty miles down the wrong road. If that means you have to stop while your backbrain figures out how to tell you what’s going on, then stop. It will save time in the long run, and you will hate yourself and the book less.
In other words, it’s the book that is the point of the exercise, and it is the book that, ultimately, you are accountable to. Do not forget that in the clamor.
The fourth thing to remember in dealing with a deadline is that you can do this. Set goals. Make them reasonable. Allot yourself breaks and rewards. Novel-writing is an endurance sport. You can’t do it in a sprint. Do whatever it takes to stay both consistently productive and relatively sane.
Meet your deadline if it’s humanly possible. But if you can’t, it’s your job to come as close as you can. Not to waste your time and your editor’s time with your writer angst and Woe is me! Be professional even in your failure, and make it as minimal a failure as you can. Even after you lose the race, you still keep running.
And, yeah, work on that Zen. It’s gonna come in handy.
In Which I Explain the Inner Workings of my Mind with the Cunning Use of Puppets
GUILDENSTERN: We should be working.
ROSENCRANTZ: On what?
GUILDENSTERN: Well, I don’t know! On, um, hey, what about that story?
ROSENCRANTZ: Which story?
GUILDENSTERN: You know. That story. The one with the stuff.
ROSENCRANTZ: [eye-roll] Oh, that‘s helpful.
GUILDENSTERN: Well, we should definitely be working.
ROSENCRANTZ: And I repeat, on what?
GUILDENSTERN: Look, this is unnatural, is all I’m saying.
ROSENCRANTZ: It’s called a vacation. VA-CA-TION. Which we have earned, you twit. My carpal tunnels are still carping.
GUILDENSTERN: Oh. Right.
GUILDENSTERN: …
GUILDENSTERN: Dammit, we should be working!
[Lather, rinse, repeat]
Unlike poor Rosencrantz (who obviously has an Underwood), I don’t actually have carpal tunnel problems (thanks largely to my workhorse of a Kinesis keyboard); otherwise, this is an accurate rendition of the inside of my head this month. It’s hard to take a vacation from writing for exactly the same reason that many people find it difficult to get any writing done if they aren’t taking a class or have some other form of external structure (e.g. NaNoWriMo). You have to train yourself to be self-starting. But once you’ve done that, you discover to your chagrin that there isn’t really much in the way of an off-switch. You can choose not to write. But you can’t choose to make Guildenstern shut up about it.And now I’m going to go work on that story. The one with the stuff.
Of Scullery Boys and Kings
Once upon a time, there was a scullery boy.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about genre conventions and what they do to stories.
A genre convention is something, a certain type of character or a particular development of plot, that can be depended upon to show up in stories that share a genre. Loner private eyes are a convention of hard-boiled mysteries, for example. Tall dark men with sinister pasts are a convention of gothics. And scullery boys are a convention of a genre that can be called “epic fantasy” or “high fantasy” or–my preferred term precisely because it doesn’t carry a lot of baggage–”secondary world fantasy.”
And we all know what happens to scullery boys in this kind of fantasy: they turn out to be kings.
That’s what a genre convention is: it’s something we all know before we read the story.
Genre conventions aren’t always a bad thing; they’re a common language for readers and writers, and having a common language means that you can have a much more sophisticated and thoughtful discussion, instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time you get in the car. And every convention can be twisted or tweaked or turned on its head, and often the most fun and interesting stories are the ones that do that.
This is the important thing about genre conventions: they are not carved in stone. They are not immutable. They aren’t laws, or even rules. They’re grooves. And of course the problem with a groove is, it all too rapidly deepens into a rut.
Ergo, the scullery boy.
We all know the shape of his story: he will be extracted from his scullery and sent on a variety of adventures; he’ll acquire some loyal companions and some equally faithful enemies, and eventually, to everyone’s shock (except the reader, who saw it coming 300 pages ago), he will turn out to be the Long Lost King of Albion or Gondor or Riva or wherever the heck we happen to be.
That’s the genre convention, and if you think with it–if you let the convention dictate the shape of your story–you’re going to write flat and unappealing fantasy that no one will be able to remember five minutes after they’ve put the book down.
But what happens when you start to think about it?
For example, let’s not say a scullery boy. Let’s say this scullery boy. His name is Tam. He’s fifteen, an orphan, skinny and dark and he’s got a nasty hacking cough just like the one that killed his mother. The other boys who work in the castle beat him up on a regular basis because he’s an easy target, and he has small, subtle, and very elegant ways of getting revenge.
Or how about this scullery boy. His name is Patrick. He’s fifteen, the seventh of twelve children. Two of his siblings died before they were two years old; his eldest sister died in childbirth when he was twelve. His eldest brother stands to inherit his father’s croft and the anxiety is already turning him into an old man; his second brother is apprenticed to a cobbler and is miserably unhappy. His father intended Patrick for the priesthood, but he talked his way out of it, and got himself sent to the castle instead. Patrick loves living in the castle; he loves his job. What he knows is that he never wants to be responsible for anybody else’s life.
Or how about this scullery boy. Her name is Annalisa; she’s fifteen, the daughter of the head chef, and she works in the scullery so her father can keep an eye on her. Her mother died when she was born; all Annalisa knows about her is that she was a foreigner, she never talked about herself, and she left her daughter a golden locket that no one knows how to open. Her father tells her that it will look beautiful with her wedding gown, and Annalisa dreams that when she finds her One True Love, he’ll know how to open the locket.
Put any of these particular scullery boys into the conventional story, and the story falls apart. Tam’s got TB; he can’t go swanning off across the map on a quest. And he’s got a Machiavellian approach to life which many people are going to find inappropriate in the Long Lost King of Wherever. Patrick’s going to do everything in his power to avoid being sent off on a quest in the first place, much less being made king. And Annalisa doesn’t want to be in that story; she wants to be in Cinderella instead.
The genre convention falls apart, but the story you find in the rubble is much more interesting. We DON’T all know how any one of these stories–Tam’s, or Patrick’s, or Annalisa’s–would turn out. We can’t predict the plot developments 300 pages in advance.
Which means both the story and the characters are free to develop however they want to, instead of being ruthlessly trimmed back into the topiary shape of a grail. They’re free to be real.
We’re out of our rut, and that’s hard and scary, but the view is worth the climb.
I Suppose You're All Wondering Why I've Called You Here Today
Last week, I finished the first draft of The Goblin Emperor (::wild cheers::), and in the last five to ten thousand words or so, I gained a new appreciation for why mystery writers so frequently resort to the last chapter In Which The Great Detective Explains It All. And so today I’m going to talk about ending a novel.
Ending a novel is harder than it looks.
For one thing, how do you figure out where the story ends? How do you choose where to stop? For another, unless your novel is exceptionally spare and stripped down, you’re not finding an ending point for one monolithic story, you’re finding a point where you can bring together the ends of several different story-strands, spatially, temporally, and as Captain Jack Sparrow says, ecumenically. And still make it look quote-unquote “natural.” This is where “Rocks fall, everyone dies” becomes a major temptation.
And there’s also the problem–again, unless your narrative is so minimalist Raymond Carver would be proud of you–that you probably have more than three characters with names. You don’t have to explain what happened to all of them, but you also don’t want your readers’ first response to the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus to be, “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?” Hence the Great Detective gets all the characters together to explain whodunnit to them. Or, in Victorian novels (which often evade the problem of having to collect all the characters in one room by being in omniscient) there will be a sudden rash of marriages in the last chapter, to get everybody tided out of the way. Both The Great Detective Explains It All ending and the Mawwiage Is What Bwings Us Togethah Today ending are artificial in the extreme, and frequently–as Elizabeth Bear pointed out when I mentioned it to her–awkward, obtrusive, and unsatisfying, but the thing is, I understand why people do them. Because it gets everybody to hold still for FIVE FUCKING SECONDS so you can END THE GODDAMN BOOK ALREADY. And I don’t care if your eyes WERE closed, Aunt Mabel, this is the picture that’s going to the newspaper.
But understanding the temptation is not the same as thinking it’s a good strategy. It isn’t. The more artificial and obvious the narrative structure is, the more likely your readers are to be distracted from the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus by the creaks and groans of the machinery. All the more so as the Great Detective Ending and the Mawwiage Ending are cliches, and the majority of your readers will recognize them the instant they hear the oom-pah-pah of the calliope, and you will have to work twice as hard to get their attention back.
So, okay, Mole, you say. Cliches are bad. Clunky artifice is bad. What do we do instead?
Well, you try to make your artifice look natural. You can’t, by the way, avoid artifice: that’s all writing a novel is: artifice and sleight of hand. If you aren’t writing a novel predicated on artifice–like John Myers Myers’ Silverlock or Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next books or Tristram Shandy–you want to camouflage it as much as you can, so that the reader will forget to look for the zipper down the monster’s back, or for the wires enabling Peter Pan to fly. Even if you’re writing category romance, in which part of the attraction of the genre is its patent artifice, you still want it to look like your characters reach their Happily Ever After because they love other, not because the plot made them do it.
To be perfectly clear: I don’t think artifice is bad. I don’t think patent artifice is bad, either–otherwise I wouldn’t love revenge tragedies, or the work of Georgette Heyer, as much as I do. But part of the artifice of writing a novel is that you’re trying to make it look not-artificial. Renaissance rhetoricians had a word for this: sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look effortless. And that’s really what I’m talking about. Not how to be natural in your writing, but how to appear natural. Sprezzatura.
You can try for sprezzatura with regard to your ending in several ways:
1. Limit the number of artificial interventions in your story. To tell a story at all, you have to choose an artificial starting point, and a trigger: a murder or a visitor or an earthquake. The more you can set up your starting point and your trigger so that the rest of the story follows naturally from them (remembering, of course, that like I said a couple paragrahs up, “natural” is also artificial in the world of a novel), the less the mechanics of your narrative have to be visible, and the less likely the artificiality of the ending is to call attention to itself.
2. Misdirection and distraction. Brilliant prose style! Wacky characters! Dialogue that your readers will be unable to prevent themselves from quoting to hapless friends! The brighter and more wildly the surface of the novel shines, the less attention readers have to spare for noticing things like plot. Concomitantly, the more likely they are to forgive the artificiality they do notice. I don’t mind when Lord Peter Wimsey Explains It All, because listening to Lord Peter talk is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the reason I showed up for this book in the first place.
3. Try to find an ending point that doesn’t look like you’re going for a merit badge in knot tying. I know many readers are frustrated by the endings of my books because the arc of the characters’ lives can’t be predicted (“What’s going to happen to X?” they ask plaintively–but please notice that that’s a different question than “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?”), but for me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I think you should feel at the end of a book that the characters’ lives are going to continue and, like real people’s lives, be unpredictable. Even if you like more closure than I do, getting it too pat will make the game look rigged.
Of course, the game is rigged. But your job is to make people feel like they won it on their own.
January 14, 2016
The Love of the Underfoot Cat for the Argyle Socks
UNDERFOOT CAT: I'm singin' in the rain, just singin'--
ME: Try again.
U.C.: Um. Your socks were lonely?
ME: My dirty and undoubtedly reeking socks that I just took off my feet after coming back from the barn?
U.C.: Yup! They're awesome!
ME: From the way you're treating them, you'd think I've been walking through the catnip mines.
U.C.: Um. I like horses?
ME: Have you ever seen a horse?
U.C.: . . . Maybe.
[UNDERFOOT CAT rubs his face lovingly against my argyle socks]
ME: You do realize this is not normal, don't you?
U.C.: It's not my fault! I was found up a tree! *
ME: Where all the horses wore argyle socks?
U.C.: It was an awesome tree.
---
*True.
January 13, 2016
Getting out of Your Own Way
“I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.” –Alan Rickman
So I was talking with a friend the other day about writing and art and being, or not being, a pretentious asshole, and she said, “Why don’t you write a Storytellers Unplugged post about that?”</p>
And I said, “Thank you for doing my homework for me.”
Because it is a problem, and I think it’s one we all go through, the pendulum swing from “I’m just playing around, there’s no need to take anything I do seriously” to “I am a Serious Writer and you must Admire my Art.” The key, I think, is the Alan Rickman quote I used as an epigraph, not least because he shifts the discussion from “art” to “work.” Frankly, “Is it art?” is something so subjective that it’s not a useful question for an artist to ask. Everyone’s answer to “What is art?” is different, and even something that seems to be a consensus may be overturned in another five years, or twenty, or a hundred. And it’s something that you can’t control. Whereas, “Is it work?” is a pretty easy question.
But it can be hard to get the balance right between taking your work seriously and not taking yourself too seriously, especially when there are so many factors conspiring to make you feel defensive about taking your work seriously. There’s a lot of pressure on people who do creative things to be self-deprecating about them, whether it’s the “it’s just a hobby” gambit or “I’m not really any good at it” or (if you are a professional) “I’m just a hack.” All of which are ways of abjuring the idea that one takes one’s work seriously.
When I was a teenager, I went militantly the other way. I had a teacher who disparaged genre fiction, and I bristled up like a porcupine and became very much, “This is my Art and I am an Artist, and I will make you see the error of your ways!” It’s the opposite reaction, but it’s just as much a defense as the other. And there for a while, yes, I was really hard to live with. I’m not sure what knocked it out of me, but I think part of it was learning that making art and Being An Artist are not the same thing. You can do one without having anything to do with the other. Making art doesn’t require starving in a garret or being crazy or doing drugs or getting an M.F.A. or any of the other thousand and one things our culture thinks artists have to do. All that making art requires is that you do the work.
You don’t have to be defensive about it, either. You don’t have to tear yourself down, and you don’t have to build yourself up. Neither one makes a difference to the work you’re doing, unless you let yourself become poisoned with your own propaganda. Self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement are about how the world sees you and how you see yourself, and goodness knows it’s something we all struggle with, but it’s also, from another perspective, missing the point. Because the thing at stake isn’t your self (arguably, your self is just sitting around getting in the way), it’s your work. For me, at least, it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m not a very good writer,” but it’s quite another thing to say, “Oh, that’s not a very good story.” Because, dude, if it’s not a good story, why did I send it out? Why did the editor buy and publish it? And in my heart of hearts, while “I’m not a very good writer,” may feel true a whole freaking lot of the time, “That’s not a good story,” is going to feel like a lie. If I’ve gotten to the point of sending it out, I believe it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense to try to say otherwise.
For me, I think that’s the crux of the matter. Not whether I’m taking myself seriously, or not seriously, but whether I’m taking my work seriously. Because the rest of it, a lot of the time? Is just my self getting in the way.
Fundraising and Self-Publishing: Lessons Learned
On January 20, 2011, one of our cats passed away. He was almost sixteen; I’d had him since he was almost two, and I loved him dearly, but that’s not actually what I want to talk about.
You see, I decided to do a fundraiser in his honor, to benefit the Companion Animal Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, as a way of saying thank you for the care they gave him and the kindness they extended to me and my husband. And as part of that fundraiser, almost as an afterthought, I decided to do a chapbook of the four stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth that were not collected in The Bone Key. I figured if the fundraiser did exceptionally well, I’d be able to donate $1000 or $1500.
As of today, the donations have passed $4000. [I ended up donating $3200. --Ed.]And basically three-quarters of that is the one hundred sixty-one people who have bought Unnatural Creatures. As a comparison point, the auction of my last hardback set of the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Mélusine (OOP), The Virtu (OOP), The Mirador, Corambis) had only two bidders and raised only $150.
I think the chapbook sale has worked so well for two reasons:
1. it was something people wanted (I know, duh, but it surprised me how eager people were)
2. the price point was low enough that it felt affordable, even in the current zombie apocalypse
(Well, and #3, people like contributing to what they feel is a good cause.)
So the lesson learned is that it’s better to have a (potentially) unlimited number of a low price-point item than to have one, or very few, of an expensive item.
I’ve also learned a number of things about self-publishing in trying to put the chapbook together through Lulu.
1. Lulu would really prefer it if you’d use (and pay for) their formatting service; the option for the obstinate is to make your own .pdf
2. Making .pdfs is a PAIN IN THE ASS if what you happen to have is, you know, word processing software.
3. MS Word is the tool of Satan. There is no other explanation for the things it does to innocent documents.
4. Although Lulu will let you use any font you like in the interior of the book, it offers only a limited palette of fonts in its Cover Wizard, and some of them are very ugly. Unless you get lucky, as I did, and have someone volunteer to design your cover, Garamond is your best bet. (I went with Garamond anyway, because it’s an attractive and legible font, and it has the slightly old-fashioned air appropriate to Booth.)
5. Yes, you do want to order a proof copy before you commit to your big order. Even a .pdf doesn’t show you what the physical book is going to look like, and there will always be more errors to catch.
6. Full justification is necessary if you want the book to look competent and professional, and if you want the full justification to look competent and professional, you have to hyphenate. Whereupon, MS Word’s auto-hyphenation will sabotage you by mishyphenating an astonishing array of words, thereby making you look like an illiterate n00b.
7. Something I knew already: book production is a lot of work if you’re going to do it right, even when you’re keeping things very simple and taking the path of least resistance wherever possible. (And for this project, I don’t even have to think about distribution and marketing.)
This is why authors want there to be publishers, and why publishers, despite the sometimes egregious flaws in the system, are at bottom a good thing. Because there is an ENORMOUS YAWNING ABYSS OF DIFFERENCE between a complete manuscript of a story and a book, and the more time the author has to spend thinking about the book, the fewer stories s/he can write.
I’m not knocking self-publishing–obviously, since I’m participating in it. What I’m saying is that if you’re going to do a good job, it’s difficult and time-consuming. And although I’m happy to be doing this specific project and do not begrudge in the slightest the time and effort, I’d still rather be writing.
