Month: July 2012

Attitude Adjustment

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The British novelist L. P. Hartley famously observed, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

This is a true thing, and the source of great and recurring headaches for writers of historical fiction, alternate history, historical fantasy, and historical romance (as well as any other fiction, genre or not, that deals with time past rather than time present or time future.)  Readers today are, or at least like to think that they are, enlightened and forward-thinking ; and when they read for pleasure, they want the characters they identify with to share their values.

At which point they run headfirst into the unfortunate fact that even historical figures who were howlingly progressive by the standards of their day are likely to exhibit turns of thought and vocabulary which can leave their modern ideological descendants gobsmacked.

I don’t mind it when a historical romance elides or passes over stuff like that; conversely, it irritates me no end when a writer feels obliged to make his/her characters progressive before their time, as it were. Granted, in almost every age you can find people whose attitudes and beliefs were more in line with those of our era than with their own . . . but their contemporaries usually regarded them as whackaloons. And again, granted, sometimes that attitudinal disjunction is the whole point of the story, but if it isn’t, it can be an almighty distraction from whatever the point of the story actually is.

This is, alas, one of those writing problems with no easy solution.  Which way you go is your own choice, based — ideally — on the nature of the story you want to tell and the expectations of the audience you want to tell it to and your own ideas about the relationship between truth and fiction.  But it’s a sad fact that no matter which path you choose to travel, at least some of your potential readers are going to think that you picked the wrong one, and are not going to be shy about saying so.

Hey — nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.

Weather for Working

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The writing life has its ups and downs, but on days like today it at least has the advantage of taking place largely indoors.  Because if I had to do my work outside on a day like today, I do not think I would get any work done at all.

Spring is a good time to write.  So is autumn.  Winter is great, so long as you can afford to keep the heat on.   But summer is not a good time for any sort of strenuous endeavor, even of the intellectual kind.

Summer heat waves don’t summon up the good times in fiction, either.  They bring us Southern gothic novels featuring humidity and honeysuckle and family secrets (a dead mule may also be involved at some point); and if the supply of Southern gothic fails, the dog days also have a stock of noir-tinged detective novels full of adultery, blackmail, and conspiracy to commit murder.

Only in children’s and young adult fiction, really, is summertime a pleasant source of adventure and romance.

A Weekend on the Road

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Or, why I haven’t posted anything for a couple of days.

I’ve been at Readercon, a science-fiction convention in Burlington, Massachusetts, restoring my soul and enjoying the air conditioning.

Regular posting should resume on Monday.

Music to Write By

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Some writers need absolute silence in which to write.  This post is not about them.

Other writers like to have some background sound.  Usually, these days, that means music.

Writers who love their background music have a variety of different tastes and requirements.  Some writers prefer orchestral music, finding the intrusion of human voices distracting, while other writers can’t do without their vocalists.    Different time periods appeal to different writers as well.  One writer will have a preference for Baroque concertos, another for heavy metal, a third for show tunes.

I like writing to vocal music with a steady beat —  not surprisingly, there’s a lot of classic rock in my playlists.

What about you?

Wrong Word of the Day

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Today’s wrong word is “smirk.”

Writers — especially beginning writers — use it far too much, and in the wrong places.  They use it in places where a wry smile, or even a plain ordinary smile, would be more appropriate.  They put it on the faces of characters who are meant to be sympathetic and likeable.  And they make me want to yell, “Stop!”

As Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to the dictionary, to smirk is to smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner., and a smirk is an affected, often offensively self-satisfied smile.

Neither of these are things that you should want associated with that nice character you hope that your readers will like and identify with.  That is all.

(All right.  I admit it.  It’s summer and I’m cranky.  But I’ve been carrying that peeve around with me for years.)

Canon Fodder

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Literary canon formation is a zero-sum game.  I can think of several reasons for this, including the tendency of the literary establishment to turn absolutely everything into an exercise in hierarchical ranking — there are people out there in the world who can’t even look at a sack of potatoes without wanting to sort them in order from The Very Best Most Nearly Platonic Potato down to The Potato Which Barely Made It into the Sack in the First Place.

And then you have the Two-Semester Literature Survey Course — taught, usually, from the Fat Two-Volume Anthology. Combine compulsive ranking of everything with a limited amount of anthology shelf space, and literary scholarship starts to look like an episode of Survivor: Bibliography.  Tenured professors and rising scholars engage in war to the knife to decide whose chosen texts are more important, more artistic, more nourishing to the mind and spirit . . . and recognizing something as “good” isn’t going to be enough.  It can’t just be good.  It needs to be better.  It has to be best.

If this is beginning to sound a bit like those other arguments . . . the ones over whether the Enterprise-D could take out the Death Star, or about who’s the bigger hero, Batman or Superman . . . well, let’s just say that the people involved in all of these arguments take them very very seriously.  The problem with the literary-canon-formation argument is that it slops over onto the heads of everybody else in the reading world, and tends to alienate a whole lot of people once they notice that it’s often their preferred reading material that’s getting dissed.  Their reading material doesn’t get a ticket onto the canon island at all, and when they ask why, the answer that comes back sounds to them an awful lot like “because all that fun prole stuff you people like isn’t high-level enough to be art.”

I don’t want to blame the literary canoneers too much, though.  It’s amazingly difficult to talk about the whole idea of voluntary avocational reading without the use of language which, deliberately or not, imposes rank and hierarchy upon it. We speak of “higher levels” of difficulty, and “greater” challenges; and — in our still-puritanical society — even words like “pleasure” and “relaxation” have a faint negative cast to them, especially when set beside words like “instruction” or “insight” or “self-improvement.”

I’m willing to accept that somebody else may find enjoyable something that I do not. After all, most of the people who tried to convince me, during my school days, that organized team sports were fun, certainly appeared themselves to enjoy them. But I’m no more fond than the next person of being told, or even feeling like I’m being told, that my enjoyment of those things that I do like is in some fashion inferior to the enjoyment experienced by other people who like something else.

My theory (I believe I’ve articulated it at the Viable Paradise workshop once or twice) is that what most of us are looking for in our reading is the perfect birthday present effect — the perfect birthday present being the one where you’re completely surprised by exactly what you’ve always wanted.

And nobody likes being told that their perfect birthday present is actually a cheap piece of Walmart trash.

A Lonely Business

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Writing, that is.

It’s a job that you mostly do sitting at your desk, listening to the voices inside your own head. It’s not surprising that some writers end their careers as eccentric hermits; what’s surprising, actually, is that more of them don’t.

It isn’t required to be an introvert in this job, but sometimes it helps. At the same time, if you’re going to make a living (or at least a part of your living) as a writer, you’re going to have to get out in the world. If you don’t, you’re going to lose touch with all the stuff you’re writing about.

So make the effort. Schedule time for things like community involvement — things like scouting, or the volunteer fire department, or the folks who clean up sea birds after oil slicks. Whatever works for you, so long as there are other people involved in it. From an artistic-development standpoint, it helps if it’s the sort of group that attracts a cross-section of different types, so that the repertory company of actors living in your brain can have as wide a range as possible.

Don’t isolate yourself from other writers, either. Some days, it can be vitally important to your sanity that you’re able to have a conversation with somebody else who understands why it is you do what you do with all those words on the computer screen, and who understands why it matters.

Which is why I’m moving mountains, right this minute, in order to be at Readercon this weekend, down in Burlington, Massachusetts.

Thought for the Day: Less is More

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When writing fantasy, it’s often more effective to be parsimonious with your use of magic, rather than the reverse.

The Fellowship of the Ring, after all, came away from Lothlorien with the equivalent of some cammie cloaks, a hank of nylon parachute cord, and a flashlight.

The E-Pub Revolution as Gold Rush

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The current revolution in electronic publishing is like the California Gold Rush† in a lot of ways.

  • It’s real.

    Underneath all the hype and ballyhoo and frenzied hysteria of 1849 lay a bedrock of sober fact: There really was gold in the California hills.

      Today, a similar feverish atmosphere surrounds electronic publishing, and in particular electronic self-publishing. Publishers are scrambling to secure electronic rights; authors are scrambling to retain them; and web pundits and tech mavens are urging publishers and authors alike to get with the program now, right now, before it’s too late. A person of cynical bent might be forgiven for suspecting that the e-publishing revolution is in fact nothing more than a balloon full of hot air, rising high only to go *pop!*, but that person would be wrong. Electronic publishing really is a big new thing. Maybe even the big new thing.

  • Some people will make a great deal of money at it.

    In every gold rush, a few prospectors strike it rich. The creek that runs through their claim turns out to have more gold dust in it than sand, and the caves to either side of it are littered with gold nuggets the size of tennis balls. They go up into the hills bearded and starving and wearing jeans and flannel, and come down again wealthy enough to buy a mansion and a yacht and a couple of United States senators. In the e-publishing gold rush, a few electronically self-published writers will sell a lot of books and make a great deal of money and — if they want it — get picked up by established publishing houses.

  • Other people will make moderate amounts of money.

    Most of the prospectors who headed out to California in 1849, or up to the Klondike in 1896, didn’t strike it rich. Some of them, though, did succeed in panning enough gold to go back home and marry their sweethearts, or set themselves up in business, or do whatever else they thought was a good thing to spend their money on. In like fashion, a fair number of electronically self-published writers will make enough money over time to take a vacation, or repair the roof, or keep the pantry stocked for another month.

  • But a whole lot of people aren’t going to make any money at all.

    A few of them won’t care, because they only went West, or into e-publishing, for the adventure of it in the first place. The exciting times and narrow escapes they had, and the colorful stories they have to tell, are all the reward they ever really wanted. But bunches and bunches of people are going to head back to civilization even more broke than they were when they started out, and without ever getting close to realizing the dream they left home with. Assuming, of course, that they ever make it home at all.

  • Because some of those people will have very bad things happen to them.

    They might drown in the spring floods, or get dry-gulched by bandits, or succumb to malnutrition because they spent all their money on mining equipment and none of it on food. They will fall prey to swindlers who salt the claims, and to bad advice that leaves them stuck in Donner Pass with winter closing in.

    If they are in e-publishing, they will start publishing houses with no capital and no business plan. Or they will entrust their manuscripts to scam agents, or submit them to publishers who are all façade and no action. They will hear all manner of bad advice, and take it all.‡

  • But some people will make money without ever staking a claim.

    They’re the ones who make it their business to sell mining equipment and blue jeans and flannel shirts and canned food and camp supplies to the miners. And the people who end up making steady reliable money off the e-publishing revolution are going to be the same sort of people: freelance cover designers and web-page maintainers and editors and copyeditors and e-text preparers.

    The astute reader will note that a number of these goods and services are ones that established publishing houses handle — and pay for — as their share of the work required to turn a manuscript into a book.§

†Or the Klondike Gold Rush, or the Australian gold rushes of the mid to late 19th Century — insert local historic gold rush of your choice; there’s been a bunch of them.

‡They should read Writer Beware, and Preditors and Editors, and AbsoluteWrite. Then they will at least have a good set of maps and directions to work from.

§The astute reader will also note — per my sidebar link — that I’m doing my bit in the sale of picks and shovels. If you’ve got a NaNoWriMo book or other project that you’re interested in whipping into better shape, we can do business.

(In the spirit of full disclosure:  This post originally appeared in my personal LiveJournal; I’m reprinting it here in the interest of reaching a wider, or at least more public, audience.)

Sentence Structure Peeve of the Day

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(Because I’m the sort of person who gets peevish over sentence structure.)

It’s a common fault in the work of beginning writers, or in the early drafts of texts by experienced writers (but what makes the writers experienced is that they know how to spot their faults and remove them in the second draft):  They will write sentences where the important idea, or one of the important ideas, is relegated to a subordinate clause — or, worse, a modifying phrase — like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided, his desire to act on his own still surging through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

That’s a bad sentence for a lot of reasons (and deliberately writing a bad sentence is work, let me tell you), but structurally it’s a bad sentence because there’s an important idea buried in it that should be given space to stand on its own.  Important ideas deserve their own independent clauses.  Like this:

Fred’s brief attempt at independence subsided.  His desire to act on his own still surged through him, but in the end he had no choice except to obey.

It’s still a bad sentence (or set of sentences.)  But at least it’s not a structurally bad sentence.