Rudolph Kohn's Blog, page 6

An Exercise or Method for Deeper Writing

Do you ever feel like your writing is a bit shallow in places? Whether you feel it's deficient in character, plot, worldbuilding, theme, or even for non-fiction where you feel the argument is lacking, today I'm going to talk a little bit about a technique I use sometimes to help deepen my writing.

You'll probably feel like it's pretty obvious once I say it, so here goes: Ask questions.

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Fun with All Men Are Brothers!

The Water Margin Story, a famous Chinese novel that goes by several different names here in the West, is so freakin' crazy.

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Writing Tip: Avoiding Late-Draft Tunnel Vision

Redrafting is obviously a big deal. You can add and polish enough in the later stages that you can turn a relatively weak story into something really great.

This video is from a few months ago when I was in the later stages of editing my novel, Pursuit of the Heliotrope. I found a couple of significant mistakes and managed to improve the flow of those chapters quite a bit.

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The Lens Just Keeps Getting Crazier! Review of Galactic Patrol!

I've talked a bit about the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith already, and this time I've got a review of the first chronologically written Lensman book, Galactic Patrol. This book was serialized in Astounding Magazine in 1937 and 1938, then expanded and published as a stand-alone book soon after.Read more »

Reading: More Money than Brains

Just me reading one of my short stories. This one is More Money than Brains, a story about Aric, Bill, and Lew on a little job with a real jerk of an employer. I tried to be funny but ended up being mostly sarcastic. Still, I think the story has a few good moments.

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Tutorial: Making a Paperback on Amazon!

This might be helpful to other writers! I do a video tutorial, producing a paperback version of my first novella!

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Fantastic "Food for Thought" Sci-Fi: Roadside Picnic

Been meaning to read this one for a while, but I finally got around to Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I've heard a lot of good things about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and this book is the basis for those, so I thought I'd give it a read.

My most basic top-level observation was the book's very dark, almost nihilistic tone... Roadside Picnic deals with a small number of characters, and those characters are very fragile... their numbers reduce significantly over the course of the story.

It's heralded as a great classic of Soviet science fiction, and I daresay it is packed with interesting ideas, from the merely mechanical ("empties" and "traps") to the philosophical ("the unlucky barber"). These ideas are presented in a range from obvious to subtle in the book, leaving potential rewards for repeated readings.

One great element of the story was its ambiguous ending. These can feel hollow or trite if done poorly, but I enjoyed it in this book.

Another thing that got me about this book was the tragic arc of the situation. The "zone" gets worse and worse, and so does the government's reaction to it. Eventually, people are forbidden from leaving, and those left behind suffer--the "zone" messes with them and especially their children. The area becomes more and more impoverished as people distance themselves from the "zone" and its inhabitants.

I also found it interesting how making the trade in "zone" artifacts illegal ensured that only the most unreliable people would offer payment for them. A lesson in bad economic incentives.

On the micro level, I found the descriptions of "zone" exploration vivid, creative, and tense. The characters were interesting and often surprisingly sympathetic. Even though mankind learned some useful things from the "zone," it was clear that, most of the time, what you got out of it was far less than you put in.

The Strange Freedom of Old Sci-Fi!

Reading older sci-fi has made me think a lot about how, as time goes on and scientific discoveries are made, the universe of "plausible" science fiction narrows. A century ago, there were so many things that we didn't understand, or where our only understanding came from mathematical models untested in the real world.

Einstein wrote his famous paper on special relativity in 1905, but it took decades for that theory to be backed up by significant experimental data. Hell, there was a man named Herbert Dingle who was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 through 1953--not a crank or kook! In the late 1950s he managed to "un-convince" himself of special relativity and he spent the rest of his life trying to explain what he discovered (or thought he had discovered) was wrong with it.

It's worth noting that, just because a mathematical model is created to solve a particular problem (in this case, the apparent constancy of the speed of light), that doesn't mean that no other models exist that could also explain the same phenomenon and have different forms. Models with very little data to back them up should be met with some skepticism!

But think about all the discoveries that got data to support them over time (special relativity included)... each time that happened, some gap that science fiction authors could play with and still be "plausible" got closed up.

It's easy to forget that 50, 80, 100 years ago, authors were dealing with very different explanations about how the universe worked. One of the things that happens when you're writing in those olden days is that you could write a "hard" science fiction story hypothesizing a stable nucleus at high atomic number, or faster-than-light travel, or other things.

The video above contained some of my musings on the topic of how "not knowing" can sometimes open up paths for authors to write plausible works that we instinctively reject as impossible today. That means that works that could be seen as "hard" sci-fi 100 years ago might be classed as the softest of soft sci-fi today. Something to think about!

A Fun Little Lovecraftian Diversion

One day, I was looking through my old Lovecraft collection, looking for a short story that might be fun to read on YouTube, when I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole.

See, I was trying to figure out which of his stories were the oldest, and what I stumbled onto was something uncharacteristically... cute? For a Lovecraft.

It turns out that Lovecraft's earliest extant writing is a little piece of fiction that he wrote when he was five or six years old.

You can find the images here, in young Lovecraft's own handwriting: https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:425207/

So, I thought it would be fun to read this little piece of history aloud, and talk a little about it, too. Unlike the works that made him famous, this one is playful and funny.

Finally Making my First Novella Presentable!

Honestly, I resisted doing this for a long time, but I figured that, as I was finishing up the first full-length novel in the series, that it made sense to finally get a real cover for my first novella, The Hyacinth Rescue.

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