Month: September 2012

Quick and Easy Deadline Dinners #2

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Another meal that doesn’t require much in the way of effort, or of watching, or of thought, for those days when your supply of all three is directed elsewhere.  This one is really easy, if you have a crockpot, and even easier if you also have a food processor.

1 or 2 pounds of cut-up chicken, depending upon how much chicken you’ve got and how many people you’re going to feed.  Boneless chicken thighs are best for slow cooking.

1 large or 2 medium onions, finely chopped.  This is where the food processor comes in.  If you don’t have a food processor, chopping up the onion will take a couple of minutes longer.

1 jar Roland’s yellow curry paste.

1 can coconut milk (the kind for cooking, not the sweetened kind they sometimes sell to put into mixed drinks.)

Put the cut-up chicken, the chopped onion, and the curry paste into your slow cooker, and cook on high for 2-3 hours or on low for 5-6 hours.

Half an hour before you want to serve dinner, stir in the coconut milk.

Serve over rice, or with naan from the grocery store if your grocery store carries naan, or with whatever starch pleases you.

Let There be Light

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

I’d file this one under “common errors of fantasy”, except that it’s more ubiquitous than that.  Call it a common failure of visualization, maybe.

The thing is, no matter where your scene is set, the light is going to be coming from somewhere . . . and a lot of beginning writers forget that you need to keep track of such things.  If the action is taking place outdoors in broad daylight, or indoors during the modern era, illumination can be more or less assumed.  The reader will need to know if something happens to make the light diminish or go away — power failure, dense cloud cover, a darkness at noon of biblical proportions — but unless there’s something special about the source or quality of the light, it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

Outside of those circumstances, though, things change.  If the characters are operating at night, or underground, or in deep woods, or indoors during any pre-electric era, then you-the-writer are going to have to be aware of how much or how little light there is available for every scene.  A cloudy night, a clear night in the dark of the moon, and a clear night with a full moon are going to have different light levels — enough to make the difference, for instance, between your characters being able to operate unseen (if they can avoid tripping over tree roots and large rocks) and being plainly visible to any alert sentry on the castle wall.

Meanwhile, inside the castle, the wizard perusing his books of lore by the flame of a single candle isn’t going to have all that much light to work with either.  As a writing experiment, try lighting one candle in a dark room and then describing how much you can and can’t see.  If you’ve got access to an oil lamp, try that sometime.  Life without incandescence or fluorescence looks a lot different.  (And it’s no wonder that the reading-light spell is a classic beginning wizard’s trick in so many fantasies, right after the fire-lighting one.)

And if your characters are going exploring someplace where they’ll need to take their light source with them, don’t forget that someone in the group is going to have to be carrying the torch or candle or lantern, and that person won’t have both hands free to do other things.

Knowing Where You Are

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Every now and again, I have a week where all the days feel seriously off-sync.

If I were living in a science fiction novel, I would blame waves of time disjunction passing over the landscape. Alas, I fear that I am, at best, a character in a piece of realistic prose fiction about daily life in a small New England town . . . and not even the steamy, rip-the-lid-off-simmering-scandals subgenre, at that.

Knowing what form and genre you’re currently living in is always vital, of course; what might be an appropriate reaction during time spent in an action/adventure story would be inappropriate in a domestic drama. And I totally agree with whoever it was who said, when asked about truly useful superpowers, “I’d like to be able to hear the musical soundtrack for the movie of my life.” Think about it — with a superpower like that one, you’d never have to ask yourself, “Was the muffled noise I just heard only the cat knocking something off the shelf in the laundry room, or was it an evil housebreaker of dark intent?” All you’d have to do was listen for the sinister notes of the English horn and the rumble of timpani in the percussion section, and you’d know.

While I’m Discoursing on Trivia

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I’d just like to say that I find the use of the European-style initial-dash method of dialogue punctuation by writers of English-language fiction to be pretentious in the extreme. It contributes no extra meaning to the text itself; it’s present solely as a signifier that the work in question is — despite the presence of possible overt genre clues to the contrary — meant to be read as serious literature.

Not that I’ve got any firm opinions on the subject, or anything.

(It also makes me feel like the characters aren’t actually talking loudly enough to be heard — instead, they’re standing somewhere just out of earshot and muttering.)

The Research Thing Again

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Yesterday I brought up the necessity of doing research for fantasy novels.  So the question then arises:  If you’re making up everything including the world and the cultures that people it, where do you go for research and what do you do research on?

Well, if you’re doing high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery or anything set in a pre-industrial world, then you need to do some reading on pre-industrial societies in general.  The easy way out is to take one particular society and base yours on that one, with perhaps a certain amount of cosmetic removal of the obvious serial numbers.  But as Murphy’s Laws of Combat remind us, “The easy way is always mined.”  In this case, the minefield is labeled “cultural appropriation”, and you want to avoid it — even if you don’t care about the ethical issues involved, it’s still bad art.  Better in the long run to do enough reading and research that you’re able to make stuff up without having to steal things in wholesale lots.

(If you’re writing historical fantasy, or alternate-historical fantasy, or steampunk, the sort of stuff you’ll need to research is different, but the need for it doesn’t go away.  At various times I’ve found myself looking up Victorian underwear, Renaissance typographers, and the name of the train line running from Portsmouth to London in 1863 . . . all for the same book.)

If you’re interested in some starting points for fantasy research, you can find a list of suggestions here.

Common Errors of Fantasy, Transportation Division

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Horses are not motorcycles.

If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.

While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story.  Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.

Across the Great Divide

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 4 Comments

I’m talking about the barrier between “literary” and “genre” fiction — and the quotes are deliberate, because I consider the distinction, and the barrier, to be an essentially artificial one.

The way it works, published fiction in the English-speaking world (and maybe elsewhere, for all I know, but it’s not a subject upon which I have the authority to speak) divides itself roughly into three parts.  First, you have literary fiction — the books that are reviewed in the literary supplements of national newspapers, that win the major literary prizes, that garner their authors speaking engagements and writer-in-residence posts at big-name universities.  Most of this is mimetic realism, which is to say it is set in and depicts the world as we have agreed to believe it is; occasionally it detours into things like magical realism or surrealism, but mostly it leaves that sort of thing to writers who — while they may write in English — aren’t themselves English or American.  The literary fiction that makes the news and wins the prizes is usually quite good (one of the most useful things I learned on the way to a Ph.D. in English was how to recognize a well-written example of something I didn’t particularly like); I’m not sure what the literary establishment does with the ninety percent that isn’t.  Maybe it’s taken out behind the library and quietly buried in a shallow grave?

Then you have popular commercial fiction, the stuff that’s never going to win its author any big serious awards, but can sometimes earn huge pots of money.  Most of this is also set in present-day consensus reality, only with the dial turned up to eleven.  These are the books that get reviewed in job lots under the header “summer beach reading” or the like; they’re the ones that turn up on the paperback shelves in airport bookstores.  On the high end, they aspire to crossing over into the literary division, but — like social climbers hoping to get invited to the better parties — this seldom works.  The writers of popular commercial fiction are supposed to be content with their money and know their place.

On the low end, popular commercial fiction starts peeling off into the beginnings of genre — chick lit, technothrillers, suspense, and so forth.  But what most readers and writers consider to be genre lit are the things that have their own publishing houses, or their own lines at major publishers:  mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction.  Westerns used to be a genre, but over the past few decades they’ve retreated back into historical fiction, and from there a few have even moved over into literary.  (Historical fiction has always had an easier time crossing the border than some of the other genres; I’m not sure why.)  Nurse novels are for all intents and purposes extinct.  And so forth.  Genre lit doesn’t make the kind of big money that popular commercial fiction can; and it sure as heck doesn’t get the respect that literary fiction commands.

Why on earth, then, does anybody write genre fiction?  For love, in some cases; for fun, in others.  And because the most exciting place to work, in the landscape of literary creation, is outside the walls of literary respectability, because that’s always been where the excitement starts.

Other People’s Endings

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

When it comes to works in a series — novels, films, television, it doesn’t matter which — I like playing the how-would-I-end-this game.  It’s the fiction-writing equivalent of that improvisational drama exercise where you have to construct a skit around four or five random objects drawn from a grab bag (an argyle sock, a popsicle stick, an outdated guidebook to Tblisi on Five Dollars a Day, and a fishing lure with the hook snipped off…you have ten minutes to brainstorm with your group and then we’ll begin) –the idea is to get from where you are to an acceptable victory condition in five moves or less.

It’s an amusing game; but while I’m playing it I have to keep a firm grasp on the fact that the story I’m ending in my head is, despite any surface resemblances, a different story than the one the author is ending.

Another Thing I Don’t Miss at All

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

True fact: writers used to trade tips for freshening up a typed manuscript that had been out and back a few times without finding a home. An electric iron set on “warm” was sometimes involved.

The first time I added the words “please consider this a disposable manuscript” to a cover letter, I felt a beautiful warm God-I-love-technology glow.

I expect that the first writer to send out a typed story for submission felt the same way, because if typing up a story was a drag, making a fair copy by hand using pen and paper must have been a thousand times worse.

The One-Third Principle

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

On the days when I’m wearing my editor hat, I write revision letters.  On the days when I’m wearing my writer hat, sometimes I have to read them — and having read them, have to do something about them.

On those days, I spend a lot of time dealing with what I think of as the one-third principle of editorial commentary.  The way it works is this:

In any given set of editorial comments, roughly one third of them are going to inspire sentiments along the lines of “Oh, thank God you caught that before I ended up looking like an idiot in public!” or “Yes, that is absolutely true and insightful and every writer should be so fortunate as to have someone like you for an editor!”

Another third of the commentary is going to cause a reaction more along the lines of “Well, maybe . . . I’m not saying that I buy it, but it isn’t worth arguing over, either.  I might as well save my energy and make the changes.”

And the final third of the commentary is going to be the cause of neck-cracking double-takes and exclamations of “Say what?!” and “Over my dead body am I changing that!”  Which is, of course, where the saved energy  gained by not arguing over the middle third ends up getting spent.

When I put my editorial hat back on, I try to remember these things.