Katherine Addison's Blog, page 46
January 13, 2016
Finding the Story in the Story
This morning, I threw myself upon the mercy of Twitter, begging for topics to write about this month. And Twitter, in the form of my friend Victoria Janssen, answered; quoth Victoria: figuring out the real story of the story. This is a great topic. This is a topic I would actually love to see other people write about so that I can read their answers. Because I don’t know that mine is the best way to think about it. But as of right now, it’s the way I’ve got.
Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I taught Creative Writing. This meant, among other things, that I spent a lot of time there for a year or two reading books about creative writing. Some of them were helpful, some not so much. Some of them infuriated me. And one of them taught me something I’ve been using ever since.
The book was The Triggering Town, by the poet Richard Hugo (available at Powells). I bought it for five dollars in a used bookstore. It’s a skinny book; it doesn’t take long to read. And in it, Hugo deploys a pair of concepts that I have found incredibly useful: the triggering subject (hence the title of his book) and the real subject. I’m going to go ahead and quote him here, since I’ve found the passage, and if I didn’t quote it, I’d just be paraphrasing it all over the place anyway:
A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.
(Hugo 4)
For the word “poem,” you can substitute “story,” and it works just as well. At least, in my experience. Because you have the thing that you want to write the story about–dragons, for example–and then you have the thing that you discover in the course of writing that is the thing you need to say about dragons. To show you what I mean, here are four different stories about dragons, two written by Elizabeth Bear, and two written by me:
“Draco campestris” (Monette)
“Orm the Beautiful” (Bear)
“After the Dragon” (Monette)
“Snow Dragons” (Bear)
All four of these stories have the same triggering subject: dragons. And all four of them have quite different real subjects, which the reader (like the writer) discovers in the process of experiencing the story.
Triggering subjects are a dime a dozen. Seriously. I have a word processor full of them. The hard part is never coming up with something to write about. The hard part is making the leap from the triggering subject to the real subject.
Some stories, like some poems, never do. They’re all surface and WYSIWYG. Sometimes, reading those, you find the place where the real subject tried to emerge, like a soft, shy, velvet moth from a cocoon, and died because the writer was not attentive, not receptive. Hugo says, just after the passage I quoted, that the writer doesn’t always know the real subject, and that may be true. (I think it’s more accurate to say that the writer may not know all the real subjects; some of them may be pointed out to her by readers. But I do kind of think she should have at least an idea of the deep parts of her work.) But whether the writer can articulate the real subject of not, he has to be open to it. He has to be willing to let it spread its wings, and he has to be willing to listen to its inaudible wing-beats.
I don’t have any good advice for how you convince the real subject to come out. That’s the part over which I personally have the least conscious control. Forcing it doesn’t work for me; I know that much. That way lies didactic literature and propaganda. I’ve found that I have to be willing to listen to the weird ideas my brain throws off around the story; even though they frequently seem unrelated or just plain nuts, they’re often the places where the real story is tearing its way through. And I have to be willing to change the story, to let go of my preconceived ideas about what I’m doing and follow the moth into the darkness. It’s scary, but I always get better stories when I do.
And for me, it helps just to have a vocabulary, to be able to say, “This is my triggering subject.” It lets me clear a bunch of distracting stuff out of the way, and it reminds me that no matter how cool my triggering subject is, there’s still a real subject to generate, and that that’s the thing that will make my story worth reading. That’s the story I’m trying to tell.
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WORKS CITED
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. 1979. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992.
I'm a Member of an Evil Horde, Ask Me How!
So, last month, I issued a plea for topics, and Sora Kess answered with an excellent question regarding Evil Hordes. There was a panel at World Fantasy, which I did not attend, in which apparently the consensus was that all secondary world fantasies have Evil Hordes in them. (If this is a misrepresentation, I apologize.)
Now, I reject pretty emphatically the idea that all secondary world fantasies have–or should have–Evil Hordes. That’s the same as saying all secondary world fantasies have quests. Or Dark Lords. Or magical MacGuffins. Certainly, many secondary world fantasies do have these things–hence Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland–but by the same token, surely the Tough Guide is a suggestion that maybe we could do something else instead? The fact that many secondary world fantasies have quests and Dark Lords and and magical MacGuffins and Evil Hordes, doesn’t mean that any of these things is a requirement. Or even a desideraturm.
In the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis), I was working deliberately to write secondary world fantasy that didn’t have all those things. I didn’t entirely succeed–the Virtu is, yes, a great big magical MacGuffin, and my poor protagonists do spend an awful lot of time tramping back and forth across the continent. But no one sends them or makes prophecies about them, and they’re not saving the world. Malkar Gennadion is evil and powerful (and kind of two dimensional, honestly), but he’s not a Dark Lord. And the wizards of the Bastion, with their military hierarchy and their ideology, still aren’t an Evil Horde.
(The relationship between the Mirador and the Bastion was based on my memories of growing up during the last decade of the Cold War. So the characters may think of the Bastion as an Evil Horde, but they aren’t, any more than the Russians were.)
In A Companion to Wolves, the trolls are, really, the epitome of an Evil Horde: implacable, inhuman, they don’t even have individual identities. But it turns out that to them, the humans (and wolves) are just as incomprehensibly alien and terrifying, and for me (as I do not pretend to speak for my co-author Elizabeth Bear), the end of the book–when Isolfr chooses to spare the troll kitten–is a rejection of Evil Horde-ism and its inevitable companion, genocide.
What Evil Hordes do is reduce human conflict to Us vs. Them. Moreover, since we’re talking about fantasy, “They” don’t have to be human at all, which makes the whole ethical dimension of the conflict ever so much simpler. No one agonizes, for instance, about the ethics of chopping zombies into mincemeat. It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a no-brainer.
Zombies are kind of the quintessence of Evil Horde-ism. They are an inarguable, external threat that can only be dealt with by wholesale extermination. Negotiating with zombies is not an option. Generally, there’s neither room, time, nor need for debate, and we may be comfortably certain that any character who tries to espouse a more liberal position will be the first person eaten: not just mistaken, but totally, irrefutably, cosmologically, capital-W Wrong.
Zombies, of course, do other cultural work, which the Evil Hordes of secondary world fantasy may, or may not, participate in; the crucial point for my argument is that zombies make it very easy to see the dehumanizing impulse at work. George Lucas’ Stormtroopers are another readily accessible example. Their quite literal facelessnsess (and that handy Nazi reference, just in case) makes their deaths unproblematic and meaningless. Like zombies, they’re there to provide an external threat, and they’re there to be killed.
Fundamentally, these two things are the purposes of an Evil Horde: an external threat and an excuse for bloodshed (metaphorical in the case of Stormtroopers, who don’t even bleed). An enemy that it’s uncomplicatedly good (ethically, morally, narratively) to kill. And, by extension, good to exterminate, 100%, to the last zombie, Stormtrooper, or orc.
It should be clear by now that I have ethical and philosophical objections to Evil Hordes and the policy of genocide they lead to. I don’t think Evil Hordes necessarily represent any specific human cultural group (although they certainly can), but considering all the real world examples of genocide the last two centuries have seen, I think any pattern of thought that makes it easier to get to genocide as an answer–even, or perhaps especially, when divorced from reality–needs to be interrogated very carefully and approached with caution. If you’re going to use it, you should use it in full mindfulness of its baggage and its underlying darkness.
I am not, however, calling for an end to zombie stories. (I may be calling for an end to stories that treat nonhuman species like zombies; I’ll have to get back to you on that.) I understand entirely that sometimes we all need things to be just that simple and just that violent, and I think zombies are a fantastic way to deal with that in fiction, whether text, movie, or game. But I also think that that’s a catharsis, not either (a.) a plot or (b.) a useful solution to the ineradicable problem of conflict between humans. Which is to say, once you finish killing the zombies, you still have to settle who among the survivors gets the last spoonful of peanut butter. And that peanut butter is going to be the interesting conflict in your story, besides.*
Pepole who are not like us (whoever “we” are) may be frightening, but the reactionary answer of “Kill them all!” is, frankly, a bad answer. Fantasy, as a genre, needs to start coming up with better ones.
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*For the record, I would like to point out that zombie novels like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker already know this.
Fiction, History, and Tombstone
Last month on the seventh, I was on my way to Tucson to spend a week hanging out and doing touristy things with friends. This month, I want to talk about one of those touristy things, namely the town of Tombstone, Arizona, and the questions that Tombstone made me think about.
Tombstone is famous for the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral–and that right there is an example of the thing that fascinates me about Tombstone, because, in fact, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral did not happen at the O.K. Corral. It happened half a block away, in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House. Now, on one level, this is only a detail: why get worked up over whether it was the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or only the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral? But, from a different perspective, the place a gunfight happened is kind of an important detail about that gunfight. And, in the larger picture, this piece of misinformation, trivial though it may seem, is symptomatic. Nearly every detail about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is subject to this kind of uncertainty, from the exact events of the fight itself, to the motives of the participants, to that simplest and yet most difficult of questions, the question fundamental and beloved of the Western (a genre one of whose taproots is sunk deep in the clusterfuck of October 26, 1881): who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
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The important thing to remember about the Gunfight at (or near) the O.K. Corral is that it breeds misinformation like stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Some of this is due to deliberate lies, like the farrago of nonsense Ike Clanton produced in court; some of it is due to the fact that Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury were hardly dead before they, and the Earps, became symbols and pawns in the vicious political fighting between the Democrats and Republicans of the Arizona Territory; some of it is due to the inevitable erosion which the passing of time causes to the human memory. Wyatt Earp didn’t try to tell anyone his version until he was in his seventies, and other participants or near-participants likewise didn’t commit their stories to paper, or an interviewer’s tape recorder, until so much time had passed that it would be miraculous if there weren’t mistakes, conflations, narrative splices, and all the rest of the changes, subtle and otherwise, that go towards turning a historical event into first a story and then a legend. And even those witnesses who testified before Judge Spicer–and who were doing their best to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth–could give only partial views. And they contradicted each other just as much as they contradicted the versions presented by the participants. The truism about the untrustworthiness of eyewitness testimony is amply proven by the evidence of Tombstone. The entire thing is an object lesson in the action of the unreliable narrator.
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We all know Han Solo shot first, but did Wyatt Earp?
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It’s difficult, if not impossible, to condense the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral into a manageable precis. I can tell you, for instance that Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, along with Doc Holliday, confronted Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House; that when the dust cleared, Frank was dead, Tom and Billy were dying, Virgil and Morgan were wounded, Doc has been creased along the hip, Ike had fled, and Wyatt was unharmed. But that’s not a story. I can tell you that there’s no agreement on who shot first, or on how many of the Clanton/McLaury party were armed, or on whether they tried to surrender. But the story is in the why and the why of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is . . . It’s partial and complicated and I think it’s one reason why so many stories have been told about this gunfight.
Fiction likes actions to have comprehensible, consistent and, insofar as possible, singular motives; furthermore it wants the motives and the actions to belong to the same people. But that’s not how real history and real people work. From a fiction-writer’s perspective, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral doesn’t work. It’s too messy. Ike Clanton, who’d spent the previous twelve to twenty-four hours telling everyone who would listen that he wanted a showdown with the Earps, was clearly unprepared when he actually got one: he was unarmed. The McLaurys and Ike’s brother Billy may not ever have understood why they were fighting. (Nobody else was entirely clear on that either.) The Earps and Holliday were responding to Ike’s threats, but they were also acting on a piece of spectacular miscommunication by John Behan, the Sheriff of Cochise County, who led them to believe he had disarmed the Clantons and the McLaurys when in fact he had not. They weren’t ready for the gunfight, either. And as for Ike’s motivations in stirring up the hornet’s nest, from what we know, they don’t even make sense. About the most useful thing a historian can say about Ike Clanton’s inner workings on October 25-6 is, “Well, he was drunk.”
And so people make motives. Ike did it in his testimony, although he made them all Wyatt’s motives, not his own. Wyatt himself was prone to conspiracy theories, especially as an old man. Witnesses, gossip-mongers, story-tellers, historians, novelists (and on this particular subject, the dividing line between those latter two categories is not nearly as clear as one might like): everyone provides a different framework in which to place the gunfight, some plausible, some ludicrous. Although it’s nonsense on the face of it to think the Earps were involved in robbing stage-coaches, the idea persists, and it persists because it provides that singular, comprehensible motive that fiction wants, and it gives the motive to the men who acted.
Human beings are pattern-making animals. History and fiction are two of the ways in which we seek to pattern our lives, and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral shows the deep permability of the boundary where one leaves off and the other takes over. Because that boundary is where the discourse about the gunfight always has and always will take place.
Everyperson Blues
It’s the day after the Feast of the Epiphany and it’s snowing like a mad bastard. I have 85,000 words of The Goblin Emperor, which is due on February 1st. My word limit is 110,000 words, which means I need to write the equivalent of a novella this month.
Good times.
And, of course, what I’ve mostly been doing in this, the coldest and darkest part of the year, is playing a game called Torchlight. It’s a sort of Diablo meets Angband dungeon crawler with a horror marinade and a generous garnish of steampunk. I love being able to wander around !Moria killing undead dwarves with a pistol. Seriously. Never gets old. And it sends me on quests. I am stupidly, stupidly easy for a game that will send me on quests.
I’ve been thinking about that and story-telling, and the way that my relationship with a story is different from my relationship with a game. Because a novelization of Torchlight is not something I would read. The characters are two-dimensional, the storyline is utterly predictable (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), and the narrative structure is nothing but quests. None of which is a complaint, mind you, because Torchlight is not a novel, and I don’t mind that the characters and the plot don’t get in the way of the game’s real business, which is monster-slaying.
The game’s real business, in other words, is not the story. Because it’s, you know, a game.
But how about the real business of a story? Where I’m going with this is an attack on my least favorite piece of writing advice, the one that says “Readers want to identify with the protagonist. Therefore, your protagonist must be an Everyperson, so that everyone who reads your novel can identify with him/her.” There are a lot of things I disagree with here:
1. If the reader wants it, the writer has to give it to them.
I don’t think that a writer should go out of his or her way to deny readers what they want. But I think it’s a mistake to write with one eye on the gallery all the time. Especially as what actual readers actually want is next door to impossible to predict.
And sometimes, what readers think they want, and say they want, will not be as satisfying to them as something they haven’t thought of. That, after all, is why we want new stories. But you can’t get there if you’re afraid to go beyond the boundaries of “what readers want.”
2. Readers want to identify with the protagonist.
I know that some readers do get great pleasure out of reading in this way, reading as a method of self-insertion into fantasy, but not all readers do. I personally prefer to read about people I don’t identify with–because, honestly, if my own life was that fascinating to me, why would I be reading fiction? I think it’s more accurate and useful to say that readers want to empathize with protagonists. We want to feel for and with the people we read about. But that’s not the same as identifying with them.
Some of the greatest reading pleasure I had as a teenager was in reading about characters who were NOT LIKE me. And not just the characters who were elves or aliens or vampires, either, but the characters who were Australian, or who were living in the Depression, or who were members of large families–or who weren’t well-behaved over-achievers. I loved that they were different. I loved that they gave my imagination more stuff to work with. I most disliked the books with protagonists most like me.
And that’s only me, of course, but I don’t think I’m the only one.
3. Readers only identify–or empathize–with protagonists who are NOT UNLIKE them.
Notice, please, the difference between LIKE and NOT UNLIKE. Because it is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE, and it’s the difference that results in protagonists who have no identifying characteristics, or who only have “quirks.” Readers can and do empathize with a vast panorama of characters–frequently to the bewilderment of writers who thought that X was a walk-on, or a villain. Frequently, that empathy comes not from any way in which the reader is NOT UNLIKE the character, but in a likeness that runs well beneath the surface, in the way the character isn’t afraid to make jokes about serious things, or the way he or she endures adversity. These are the things you cannot predict as a writer, and they’re the things that you can’t get to with a formula. We are most likely (I think) to empathize with characters who feel real to us–it only makes sense, doesn’t it? And Everyperson will never feel real, because s/he isn’t. S/he is an attempt to be all things to all people, and if we don’t like that in our politicians, why should we want it in our protagonists?
4. [and this is implied, rather than directly stated] The real business of your story is not your protagonist.
Because if it’s the real business of your story, you’re not creating it based on what your hypothetical readers are hypothetically going to want. The protagonist, in this model, is merely a vehicle for getting readers to read whatever it is your story is really about, whether that’s the mystery your protagonist is going to solve, or the werewolf your protagonist is going to fall in love with, or the fabulous underground kingdom your protagonist is going to explore.
Now, I don’t for a moment deny that the real business of a story can be a mystery or a werewolf or a fabulous underground kingdom. But I think, and am going to go on thinking, that this is a BOTH/AND situation, not an EITHER/OR. Sacrificing the protagonist will never make the story better. I’m greedy; I want everything–the mystery and the werewolf and the fabulous underground kingdom and a protagonist who’s a real person, who I can empathize with and thus come to love.
Because, for me, all those things are the real business of a story.
Still Seeking Chloe and Olivia
Virginia Woolf, who knew a thing or two about writing female characters, wrote in A Room of One’s Own about the difficulties involved:
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. [...] Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers [...] literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.
(Woolf 86-87)
This trope is echoed by Joanna Russ in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write,” and it continues to be almost embarrassingly apropos. Thus, the first obstacle standing in the way of writing strong female characters is that, even now, seventy-seven years after Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, the great mass of tradition is against it.
The Sexualization of Female Characters
It is still hard for us, as writers and readers, to see women in relation to each other, rather than in relation to men. Think of how few stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between women. And think of how often, in those few stories, the friendship either is or is read as code for a lesbian relationship. Now, as Woolf does, think of how many stories there are in which the primary relationship is a friendship between men.
Although the entire idea of slash fanfiction is to recode those male friendships as romances, slash is not canon. Slash is not read as canon. No one in a sober academic context would make the sort of note which occurs in my second-hand copy of A Room of One’s Own. “Chloe likes Olivia,” writes Woolf (Woolf 86); noted above the text in blue ballpoint is the word “lesbianism.”
That, too, was a large component of how I was taught A Room of One’s Own in my undergraduate Introduction to Gender Studies course, as if the erotic relationship were more transgressive than the platonic. The male homoerotic reading is contested, contentious; the assumption that two women who like each other must be lovers is par for the course.
Women are traditionally put in fiction (as Woolf notes) as the lovers of men; it is much easier for them to be imagined as the lovers of women than as the friends of women – or of men.
One of the things I dislike about When Harry Met Sally, which is in most ways a charming romantic comedy, is that it carefully proves its contention that “Men and women can’t be friends.” One of the things that most disappointed me about the long slow decline of The X-Files is that Chris Carter went back on his promise that Mulder and Scully would never have a romantic relationship.
The romantic reading is the easy reading, and the first question to ask yourself when you’re trying to write a strong female character is: who is she, when she isn’t somebody’s lover?
Male-Centered Narratives
Ursula K. Le Guin, who also knows a thing or two about writing female characters, points out in “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” that some activities – hunting, as opposed to gathering – make more exciting stories than others and lend themselves to certain patterns of narrative:
That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.
(Le Guin 166)
But, as she also says (with a vicious and well-earned sideswipe at 2001: A Space Odyssey), just because those are the stories that get told doesn’t mean those are the only stories worth telling. But other stories – stories that don’t center on a capital-H Hero, stories that aren’t about war or the seizing of power or other traditionally masculine concerns – are harder to tell, and harder to find an audience for.
Studies have been done with children showing that while girls will read stories about girls and/or boys, most boys will only read stories about boys. So if you want your work to appeal to the widest possible range of readers, you’d better write stories that boys (or men) will read.
The unpleasant terms “chick flicks” and “chick lit” reflect and promote the assumption that there is a certain kind of story that only women are interested in, and, on the obverse, that all women are interested in. And the derogatory use of the word “chick” makes it perfectly clear that these are lesser stories, weaker stories: stories that are pandering to the fluffy, over-emotional preoccupations of women. Woolf skewers this prejudice with her customary acumen, some seventy years before it gained a name:
But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial.” And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
(Woolf 76-77)
Thus, a great many things militate against strong women characters in fiction of any kind. We have been trained to see male-centered stories about masculine concerns as being the stories worth reading, and progress against that paradigm has been slow and difficult.
Options for SF Authors
SF is an inherently reactionary genre. Not in all ways, or even most ways, but SF spends most of its time trying to pretend that Modernism never happened. (There are exceptions, like Samuel R. Delany, but the fact that they are exceptions goes a long way toward proving my point.) In terms of narrative conventions and narrative structure, SF is old-fashioned and proud of it. And these old-fashioned models of narrative are ideally suited to telling male-centered stories; as Le Guin puts it:
So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.
(Le Guin 169)
While Modernism allowed realistic fiction writers to write stories in which “nothing happens” (i.e., the action is not what we have been trained to consider meaningful), SF is still heavily plot-oriented. It doesn’t have very much space for stories that aren’t about Saving The World, and has even less space for stories about characters who aren’t Heroes.
Which leaves one with a choice. Either try to make room in SF for women’s stories or make room in SF stories for women. And the easiest way to make room in SF stories for women is to make the women into men. It is also an easy (and cheap) way, in this the beginning of the twenty-first century, to lay claim to being a feminist writer. But it isn’t feminist to write about men with breasts. It’s a reinforcement of the patriarchal idea (most notably expressed by Freud) that all women are simply defective men.
The question, then, is how to resist this facile and meretricious method of writing about “women.” First and most obvious: don’t make a character female just because you think you ought to, or because you want to be able to say you’ve done it. If the character needs to be female, that’s a different matter, but making artificial choices about gender is just as detrimental to a story as making artificial choices about anything else.
Secondly, think about the story you’re telling. Is it a traditionally male-centered narrative? If it isn’t, you have a whole host of new problems about structure and pacing which are outside the scope of this article. If it is – and there’s nothing wrong with telling that sort of story – then you need to think carefully and thoroughly about what it means to a female character to be in that sort of story. What possibilities does it open up for her? Conversely, what limits does it place on her behavior?
Ultimately, the answer to the question of writing strong women characters lies in another realization, something our heteronormative society isn’t very comfortable with: gender isn’t binary. Neither is sex. Not all human beings are unambiguously manly men or womanly women. Most of us aren’t. There are all sorts of points along the continuum where real human beings can end up, and therefore the same is, or ought to be, true of the characters we invent.
Rather than inventing “women” and “men,” let us strive to invent people, people whose gender inflects their behavior just as their race and class do. And when we tell stories about them, let us consider possibilities that the Hero habitually ignores.
Works Cited
Le GuiLeGuin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1989. 165-70.
Russ, Joanna. “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 79-93.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harvest/HBJ-Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.
Doing Tolkien Wrong
I was given The Hobbit for my sixth birthday, The Lord of the Rings for my ninth. I’ve read The Silmarillion. I own the extended edition DVDs of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King–even though I don’t own a DVD player. In other words, I love Tolkien as much as the next really geeky person.
So when I say that Tolkien is an affliction and a curse, you understand that I’m saying it for a reason.
Specifically, Tolkien is an affliction and a curse to fantasy writers. This is a horribly ungrateful thing to say, when it’s largely thanks to Tolkien that fantasy writers can exist as a sub-species today at all. Certainly it’s thanks to Tolkien that so many fantasy novels, especially series of novels, can get published. But, nevertheless, the genre has reached a point where Tolkien causes more problems than he solves.
The reason for this is that, while Tolkien was a genius and a godsend to readers prepared to love secondary-world fantasy, he is a terrible model for writers. And that for a number of reasons, ranging from, on the macro level, his use of the quest plot to, on the micro level, the nature of his prose style. Imitating Tolkien – in and of itself, not a bad idea – has become mired down in slavish adherence to his product, rather than careful attention to his process.
We Can’t All Be Geniuses – Or Even Philologists
J. R. R. Tolkien was a scholar, a philologist (linguist), steeped in the literature on which he modeled The Lord of the Rings. Few (if any) modern fantasy writers can say the same, and this is where the mistake in imitating Tolkien begins.
When Tolkien drew for inspiration on the folklore and mythology of England and Scandinavia and Germany, he was doing so from a position of extreme and encyclopedic familiarity. He makes it look easy, unthinking, because what isn’t visible in the story is the years of academic training and reading and research behind it. When we (meaning modern fantasy writers) do research for world-building, we are attempting to create artificially what Tolkien had naturally.
The same is true of constructed languages (also called conlangs). Famously, Tolkien invented Elves so that he would have someone to speak the languages he created. But again, so little of the work involved is actually visible on the surface of the story that writers following in Tolkien’s footsteps are tempted to imitate the end result without understanding the years of foundational work behind it. This is not to say that conlangs are verboten in fantasy writing, merely that you have to be prepared to put a certain amount of work into it. There are resources online for anyone interested, either to improve one’s writing or simply for the fun of it; a good place to begin is the Language Construction Kit.
Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits, Oh My!
Another major problem – and this one not at all intrinsic to Tolkien’s work – is that much of Tolkien’s world-building has become cliché. Thirty years of D&D means that everyone expects elves in a fantasy world. We all know what they look like, what they act like. The same goes for dwarves, as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books use to shamelessly good advantage. Perhaps because so much of modern fantasy is inspired or influenced by Tolkien, the elements of his world-building have become part of the genre’s common language – leading to the feasibility and hilariously painful accuracy of parodies like Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. And thus, what for him was merely a choice, about how best to tell the story he wanted to tell, has become for us a kind of black hole in our mental living room, something we get sucked into whether we want to or not.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the arena of the plot-arc. Tolkien chose a quest-plot. He did this, I suspect, for a number of reasons. He wrote a great deal about traveling, so the quest came naturally to him. It was also familiar from the tradition of literature he was evoking in his stories of Middle-earth. Grail-quests and quests to slay monsters and quests for all sorts of other reasons – those are the building blocks of Old English and Middle English narratives. And finally, the quest-plot was the shape best suited to the story he wanted to tell.
And now, fifty years later, the quest-plot is impossible to escape. It isn’t merely a convention of the fantasy genre; it’s a stereotype. It’s hard (not impossible, but hard) to imagine a story-shape that doesn’t involve some sort of questing motif. And it has, all too clearly, been done to death. When I started writing fantasy as a teenager, I tried to write quest-plots, not because I had ideas well-suited to them, but because I didn’t have any other model for how a fantasy story ought to be told.
The choices made by Tolkien to tell a particular story have been warped and magnified into conventions of an entire genre – and not to the genre’s benefit. When Tolkien set up his dichotomy of capital-G Good and capital-E Evil, he did so because he was interested in exploring how many ways there were to fall from the side of Good into the darkness of Mordor. Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Wormtongue, Gollum, most crucially and painfully Frodo: each of these characters follows a different path into the same moral abyss, just as Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, Gandalf, Théoden, Sam, and the other characters who choose the side of light each has a different moment of crisis, a different strength that keeps them from falling. Sauron and the Ring are static, symbolic entities whose function in the story is to provide a fixed point of reference, a reminder of where bad choices are going to lead. In other words, Tolkien doesn’t create a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the genre; he creates a Dark Lord because it’s a requirement of the story.
So You Want To Write An Epic
The final way in which fantasy writers do a disservice to themselves in imitating Tolkien is in matters of prose and narrative style. As I mentioned above, many of Tolkien’s stories, and not just the most famous ones, are travel narratives. To him, this style seems to have come naturally, and thus he makes it look simple to write journeys that are compelling reading. But few people have the gift for travel narrative that Tolkien does, and thus the impression one gains from many fantasy novels of the characters wandering haplessly across the author’s carefully constructed map.
Moreover, Tolkien’s prose style (which is not always his strong point) is itself the result of careful choices made in the service of the story. He was writing epic in the old-school definition of the word–not merely a story that goes on for thousands of pages, but a story with a particular kind of thematic structure, a particular kind of character, a particular kind of mood. The Latin word gravitas, meaning both “dignity” and “weight,” suits exactly the prose style of The Lord of the Rings. But few writers nowadays (and few readers) have any interest in that kind of epic, and fewer still have the gift that Tolkien did for cadence and meter in his prose. Attempts to write Tolkienesquely generally founder and fall flat on the writer’s failure to understand either the skill or the purpose behind Tolkien’s exceedingly stately prose.
My point is not that one should not imitate Tolkien. Rather, it is that one should do precisely that: imitate Tolkien. Love the secondary world you create, understand the story you want to tell, choose your prose techniques and world-building tricks accordingly. Imitate the process, not the product. The story you write will most likely have nothing in common with The Lord of the Rings. Except, perhaps, that readers will love it.
Little Red Riding Hood & the Hospital
Today, as part of the ongoing saga of Sarah vs. her uterus, I went to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals for an ultrasound. They’ve been remodeling the hospital, and they’ve done it over in the same style I’ve seen for a lot of airports recently, or a seriously upscale shopping mall. The floors are hardwood or stone, with inlays; there’s a natural stone fountain; they’ve named the corridors things like “Main Street” and “Atrium Way.” Aside from the people in scrubs wandering around, it hardly looks like a hospital at all. It was all very beautiful and gracious, and the fact that it made me uneasy probably says more about my innate perversity than anything else.
On the other hand, and in my defense, like all hospitals, it was bewildering. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of getting lost the whole time. And that constant, almost subliminal, anxiety made the hospital unheimlich–one of Freud’s more useful terms, which generally gets translated as “uncanny,” but which literally means “un-home-like.”
Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my hockey-puck pager to go off, I thought, semi-idly, Visiting grandma in the hospital would be a great way to update Little Red Riding Hood. And then I started thinking about all the ways to map a hospital onto a fairy tale forest, the quintessence of the unheimlich. And then I started thinking about variations on the theme of Little Red Riding Hood.
I love fairy tale retellings, frequently more than I love the original fairy tales themselves, and there are a number of ways in which a fairy tale retelling is a great way to practice storytelling. First, the plots are simple. Mozart wrote a theme and variations on the melody which English-speakers know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the goofy, elaborate things he does with it are achievable partly because the original is so simple. You can’t mess around very much with an original that is itself complicated or intricate before you make it unrecognizable. Second, your audience knows the story. Like Mozart with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or like Jimi Hendrix doing a Bob Dylan cover, no matter how crazy you get with it, your audience will be able to recognize the original melody line. They’ll be able to follow, and enjoy, what you’re doing. Third, by their nature, fairy tales come pre-loaded with symbolism and magical thinking, so they’ll stand up to whatever weight you want to put on them. (This is also another advantage of simplicity.) Moreover, the characters and events of fairy tales are always general, rather than specific. Little Red Riding Hood and her sisters (Snow White, Cinderella, Donkeyskin) are named for external characteristics. They aren’t Amelia or Charlotte or Susannah; they’re identified by a piece of clothing, or the color of their skin, or the fact that they’re always dirty. And their antagonists are The Witch, The Wolf, The King, The (Step)Mother. The simple act of giving these characters identities, of naming Little Red Riding Hood Susannah, already makes the story different, opens the door for you to bring your own meanings to it as you tell it.
And fairy tales, because they’re simple, because they’re familiar, because they’re symbolic and therefore focus on external action, offer almost limitless scope for shifting perspectives and points of view. Snow White looks very different from the Queen’s point of view. Rumpelstiltskin has every reason to be angry. Who can blame the ogre for hiding his heart? And what, really, is the truth of the struggle between Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and the wolf?
With the girl, the grandmother, and the hospital/forest laid out, the big question becomes the wolf. I did some brainstorming this afternoon, and I came up with these nine variations:
1. The most obvious is the wolf as serial killer. An orderly or a doctor who tempts L.R.R.H. off the path and into a convenient supply room. She gets away, gets hopelessly lost in the hospital corridors, finally reaches her grandmother’s room, and–in a classic horror movie move which echoes, of course, the original fairy tale–finds the wolf there waiting for her over her grandmother’s corpse.
2. The wolf is a werewolf, whom L.R.R.H. helps to escape from the Evil Doctors who have been experimenting on him. This one is clearly the urban fantasy/paranormal romance variation.
3. The wolf is L. R. R. H.’s irresponsible selfishness, probably conveniently externalized in a group of friends who want her to do something fun with them instead of visiting her grandmother. She’s tempted off the path, has a great time, and (the kicker), gets to her grandmother’s room just as the old lady flatlines. (This would be the After-School Special variation.)
4.The wolf is a hallucination, and over the course of the story we learn that L. R. R. H. is schizophrenic. She‘s not the one doing the visiting.
5. The wolf is a real wolf. This is the magical realism variation, in which the matter-of-factly unexplained wolf symbolizes L. R. R. H.’s chance to rebel against the societal expectations embodied in her grandmother.
6. The wolf is a doctor who takes L. R. R. H. aside and tells her the truth: her grandmother is dying. This is a story about the transition from childhood/innocence to adulthood and hard choices. The doctor/wolf symbolizes the disease “eating” her grandmother.
7.The wolf is a child patient from oncology. Here, the scary wolf, rather than being a monster, turns out to be a victim. (This, I suspect, is the children’s book variation.)
8. The wolf is a secret the hospital is hiding, as the wolf in the original fairy tale hides in the forest. The nature of the secret would, of course, depend on the kind of story you want to tell (mystery, thriller, science fiction, horror, etc.).
9. The wolf is hunger, rebellion, and rage (borrowing Matthew Arnold’s description of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre). This is the horror version in which L. R. R. H. and the wolf are actually the same character–maybe a werewolf, if you need a label to stick on her, or a Fury.
They’re all recognizably Little Red Riding Hood, but each of them is a different story, doing different work. That’s the best thing about fairy tale retellings: although they’re old stories, deeply familiar, it’s easy to make them young again, to make them do new work.
January 10, 2016
UBC: April Moore, Folsom's 93
Folsom's 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison's Executed Men by April MooreMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Website: folsoms93.com.]
Does what it says on the tin. 93 convicted murderers you have almost certainly never heard of. The mug shots of all 93 are the best reason to pick up this book if you happen to find it.
Some of these 93 men were clearly guilty; some of them were guilty but insane (by 21st century standards); a couple were pretty clearly insane even by early 20th century standards (but were hanged anyway). It's not always easy to tell from Moore's writing whether her account of a given crime is what did happen or what the prosecution alleged happened, so I can't say for certain whether any of these 93 men were actually innocent of the murders for which they were hanged. (The cavalier pre-Miranda treatment of defendants' rights did on several occasions make my skin crawl.)
I am not a fan of the death penalty, and the evidence provided by this book certainly did not change my mind. Several of these murderers are horrifying (Elton M. Stone, David Fountain, Adolph Julius Weber, Earl Budd Kimball, Tellie McQuate, Walter Lewis), but so is Governor Friend Robinson, who, despite being a Quaker, was such a blind believer in capital punishment that he refused on principle to listen to any appeals. For that matter, so is Governor James "Sunny Jim" Rolph, who was opposed to the death penalty, and was generous with reprieves, but who thought that lynching was perfectly okay. And one's understanding of Rolph's opposition to the death penalty changes a little bit when he says things like, "I'm not inclined to let men hang when their crimes involve infidelity of their wife and breaking up of their home." Because if it's your wife's fault you murdered her, then surely you must be more deserving of mercy than other murderers. [/sarcasm]
Also, hanging, where you might die instantly, but you might just as easily hang there, strangling, for as much as fifteen minutes, is surely one of the least merciful forms of execution available.
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January 8, 2016
Another conversation at 5:30 a.m.
ME: That's not a very nice thing to do to a person trying to do balasana.
CATZILLA: Y'know, I really think you're over-thinking this whole stretching thing. It just goes like this [stretches forward] [stretches aft] and then you're done, see?
ME: Screw you, you smug asshole.
CATZILLA: purrs
January 4, 2016
UBC: Robert V. Cox, Deadly Pursuit
Deadly Pursuit by Robert V. CoxMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
Robert Cox won the Pulitzer for his vivid deadline reporting of the kidnapping of Peggy Ann Bradnick and the massive manhunt that followed, but--I'm sorry, and I'm not saying this to be glib--you wouldn't know it from Deadly Pursuit. The writing is pedestrian at best (not vivid); the efforts to build suspense clumsy, obvious, and annoying; Cox writes from the point of view of the victim(s) of each of Hollenbaugh's attacks before the kidnapping, the murdered F.B.I. agent, the murdered F.B.I. agent's wife (for pathos), "Mary Lou Broderick" (Bradnick--one of her younger sisters was actually named Mary Louise, which makes this seem like a pretty damn tactless choice on Cox's part), a news photographer, police officers, sheriff's deputies, and--oh yeah--Robert V. Cox himself. There's something unspeakably creepy to me about the way he writes about himself in the third person--not just that he does it, although he'd really be better off to 'fess up and use first, since his identity is not secret--but the weird flat way Cox's PoV seems not a shred more real than that of Terry Anderson, which Cox is blatantly making up, given that Anderson was killed before the manhunt was even over. (I found myself surprised that he didn't drop into the PoV of one of the dogs--several dogs play critical roles in the story--because that's just the sort of cheap emotionally manipulative stunt that seems right up Cox's alley.) He does not organize his facts well, and the way he wanders from PoV to PoV makes it really quite difficult to keep track of what the hell is going on.
Also, while I'm complaining, hoo boy is it 1966 in this book. All the police officers and F.B.I. agents and volunteer manhunters are men (manly men, men in tights); all the women are victims or providers of food (no, really, that's the most contribution any woman in the book makes toward this massive effort--they contribute less than the German Shepherds. Which are male.). Women can also cry, while men are manly and uncomfortable: "While Margie and Brenda sobbed, both agents remained silent" (156). The male/female active/passive divide is absolute. And this is so completely Cox's understanding of the way the world works that it took me two-thirds of the book to notice it. I don't know if there were really no women actively involved in the manhunt or if Cox just didn't see them.
Six of the book's 200 pages are spent on Peggy Ann Bradnick's side of the story.
He also keeps raising the question of whether Hollenbaugh was really the Mountain Man, the guy who'd been terrorizing that part of Pennsylvania for two years, but every shred of evidence he gives us indicates the answer is yes. I can see why there might be reason to doubt--the Mountain Man raped one of his victims, but Hollenbaugh did not sexually assault Peggy Ann Bradnick, despite holding her captive for eight days, the (vague, confused) eyewitness descriptions of the Mountain Man don't match up with Hollenbaugh--but Hollenbaugh, from Bradnick's testimony, was using devices to alter his appearance, and otherwise, Cox doesn't explain. Is there a plausible theory that Shade Gap and environs were being plagued by two such predators? If there is, I need more details; if there isn't, stop trying to manufacture mystery out of nothing.
According to Cox, Terry Anderson was the sixth FBI agent killed in the line of duty. The blog of New York radio station WFMU says ninth. On the FBI's list, he's number fifteen. I think I know who to believe here.
So far as I (or Wikipedia) know, this is the only book about Hollenbaugh's crimes.
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