Month: September 2012

Tristram Shandy Saves the World

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Playing with alternate histories is — if you’ve already got the sort of mind that likes extrapolations and what-ifs — a great deal of fun, and it’s not surprising that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular (because they do have that sort of mind) have turned alternate-history into a viable subgenre all on its own.  The fun of the game is muted somewhat when it’s played for money, however, because for the story to work the historical turning point has got to be one that a sufficiently large number of readers will recognize — which is why we’ve got “what if the South won the Civil War? novels by the cartload, but not a lot of “what if Mexico had never sold the Gadsden Purchase to the US?” stories, even though the resulting history of the American Southwest, and of Mexico, might have been a great deal different in a number of interesting ways.

I suspect that most writers who dabble in alternate history have got one or two “what-ifs” that they know will never make it commercially.  My personal favorite:

What if Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, instead of being a weird outlier in the early history of the English novel, turned out to occupy the position of genre-prototype that in our history was filled by the works of Richardson and Fielding?

When I’m feeling particularly energetic, I can make a good-enough-for-fiction argument that Sterne’s interest in free-associative internal monologue, if allowed to influence the fiction of the next several generations, would have led to the development of psychology and psychiatry at least a century earlier than actually happened, and in a climate of Victorian optimism rather than turn-of-the-century anxiety.  And when I’m really on a roll, I can argue that the earlier development of psychoanalysis would have done a great deal to alleviate Kaiser Wilhelm’s mental problems, especially his need to overcompensate for his physical inadequacies by building battleships.  And thus, ultimately, Laurence Sterne would have prevented the Great War, and by extension World War II as well.

Of course, there’s no easy way to make a scenario like that into a novel, because for one thing, a depressingly large number of potential readers are going to say, “Tristram who?”, and for another, it’s hard to come up with the conflict necessary for a good story when you’ve got an alternate history that consists of a lot of unpleasant events not happening after all.

Tales from the Before Time

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This is a story from the days before electronic submissions, when all the internet was on dial-up and the web hadn’t yet been invented, and printing was done by dot-matrix printers on fanfold paper, and writers — by which I mean in this case my husband/co-author and I — turned in their novels in the form of four-and-five-inch-deep stacks of hard copy.

So there we were, on a sunny summer day, motoring down to New York from far northern New Hampshire, with the intention of handing over a stack of hard copy to our publisher and (if we were lucky) getting a lunch downtown on the strength of it.  Under ordinary circumstances, we would have used the post office like normal people, but as it happens we were piggybacking the novel delivery onto a family visit in Westchester County.  We were also hauling our complete computer setup — CPU, monitor, printer, and all — with us in the back of our mini-van, because my co-author’s other paying job at the time was as managing sysop for one of the pre-web online communities, and he couldn’t leave the place unwatched.

About fifteen minutes into what was going to be a six hour drive, my co-author said, “The middle of the book doesn’t work.”

I made a noise like Donald Duck being goosed with a cattle prod.  “What do you mean, ‘the middle of the book doesn’t work’?”

“Don’t worry.  I know how to fix it.”

And, in fact, he did.  Because the novel in question was a space opera, “fixing it” ended up requiring the insertion of an entire space battle of epic proportions, plus all of its foreshadowing and repercussions, written in a single thirty-six hour push by the two of us hot-seating it at our computer in the living room of his family’s house.

But that turned out to be the easy part, because then we had to print out the hard copy — something we’d originally planned to do in a leisurely manner the day before we were to take the train from Mount Kisco into Manhattan, and which we now had to accomplish in the narrow window of time between writing “The End” to the revised novel at sometime past midnight and leaving for the train station in the mid-morning of the following day.  And then, at around two in the morning, we discovered that the brand of dot-matrix printer we owned had a Feature:  in order to protect the print head from burning out through overheating, whenever the print head got too hot the printer would simply stop printing until the print head cooled down.

We were in a house without air conditioning, on a sultry night in August, and we had a deadline.

“We do not care about the integrity of the print head,” we said.  “Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead.”

So we took the cover off the printer, set a fan blowing directly onto the print head, and let ‘er rip.

We finished printing out the manuscript with a couple of minutes to spare, and spent the train ride into Manhattan separating the fanfold pages and tearing off the perforated tractor-feed strips so as to turn the printout into a stack of hard copy fit to hand over to an editor.

Which we did, and then we had lunch.  Martinis may have been involved, because we felt that under the circumstances, we deserved them.

I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, other than that if you need to fix the middle of the story, you do what you have to do in order to get it fixed; or possibly, that writers under pressure can come up with workable solutions to all sorts of things.

Also — laptop computers, broadband internet, and electronic manuscript submissions are all awesome developments; and I don’t miss fanfold computer paper at all.

Peeve of the Day

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(Because I’ve got a summer cold and it’s a day for feeling peevish.)

Another pair for the Homonyms to Watch Out For list:  canon and cannon.

Canon, with one n, is the received texts for something, or the authorized meaning of it.  (Or a piece of music written in counterpoint, or a member of the clergy.)

Cannon, with two n‘s, is a piece of artillery.

Not the same thing at all.

Halfway Home

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In the beginning, writing is easy, because you don’t know yet how much you don’t know, and you don’t know yet how much work it’s going to take to get better.

And eventually, you know that you’re not yet as good at it as you can be, but you’ve been at it long enough to know that you’re at least adequate and — more importantly — you know how to work at getting better.

In between those two states, though, is a trackless waste where a lot of dreams go to die.  It’s the stage where you’ve realized how much you still don’t know, but you haven’t got any idea how to go about getting better.  This is the point where despair can take over.

What can an aspiring writing do to avoid getting mired in despair?  Different remedies work for different people, but here are some that have proven effective:

  • Write something with the pressure-for-excellence taken off.  Blog posts; a journal; letters to imaginary friends, or to real ones; fan fiction, even, if that’s where your heart lies.  You don’t have to write the Great Post-Postmodern Novel every time, or even the Next Big Novel in your genre of choice, any more than a concert pianist has to play the Warsaw Concerto every time he or she sits down at the keyboard.
  • Go for some education.  Sign up for a writers’ workshop, or take a course online, or read some books on writing.  These are all good ways to pick up tips on craft and technique, because craft and technique are things that can be taught.
  • Seek out the company of other writers.  You may not pick up any tips on craft or technique from them (then again, you might), but writing is a lonely business and too much time spent alone with it can make it seem like you’ve been hiking through the same stretch of desolate landscape since forever.
  • Read for pleasure — books in your genre, books out of it, whatever takes your fancy — and read for instruction as well.  Watch how your favorite writers handle the tricky bits you’ve been struggling with; notice when even your favorite writers sometimes don’t quite hit the mark.  (Even great writers don’t hit it every time.  Point of view in Moby-Dick wanders all over the place; Mark Twain had trouble writing endings; Dickens was fond of plot advancement through incredible coincidence.  And so on.)
  • And keep on writing.  Nobody ever got through the wasteland by stopping in the middle of it and waiting for something to happen.

Bowknots

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If the endgame of a novel is hard to write, the bit that comes after the endgame is even harder.  This is the part I think of as the “tying up all the loose ends into a bowknot” stage of a project –  and when I reach it, I have to struggle every time against the urge to simply ring down the curtain on the action climax and be done

But I know that I can’t let myself do that, because skimping on the bowknot stage is a quick way to leave the readers unhappy and unsatisfied with the entire rest of the book.  The bowknot is the part where all the plot coupons get gathered up, and What Was Really Going On gets summarized and explained, and everyone gets played out with sweet music and the implication that the world of the story extends beyond the FINIS and the fade to black.  Tying the bowknot is not the fun part of writing the novel, it’s the part that has to be done with sheer bloody craftsmanship, and sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.

The other thing to know about bowknots (and this took me longer that it should have to figure out, which is why the last scene of my first novel got rewritten multiple times) is that the length of an effective bowknot is proportional to the size of the work itself.  A short story can be tied up in a single paragraph, or even a single sentence.  A novel can take a whole chapter, or sometimes more.

How do you know you’ve tied up your bowknot in an adequate fashion?  Your best bet is to find a reliable outside reader and bind him or her with strong oaths to tell you truly whether or not the ending works.  Don’t be surprised if it takes several iterations of the process and more than one outside reader to arrive at an acceptable finished product.

And don’t worry too much.  Getting the ending right is a matter of craft, which means it’s something that can be learned, and that can be improved with practice.

From the Department of Annoying Tropes

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I was a Navy wife for about a decade, and a Navy girlfriend for three years before that. And sometimes I get so very very tired of the “Darling, I love you, but I can’t handle your job” routine that seems to be obligatory whenever you have an action-adventure television character who starts out the series married, or even just going steady. It’s a goddamned insult to all the people who are living that life and by God coping with it, is what it is.  (My issues, let me show you them.)

I know why the powers that be do it, of course.  They want the (male) lead to be conveniently unattached, so that he’ll make a more convenient fantasy object for the viewers, as well as leaving the coast clear for the script writers to throw in a Babe of the Week or a Girlfriend in the Fridge whenever they run out of other ideas.  At the same time — because the powers tend to assume that the typical viewer is both casually misogynistic and casually homophobic — they want to make it crystal clear that the male lead is straighter than a ruler-straight thing.  Enter, therefore (and leave, shortly thereafter), the conveniently dissatisfied wife-or-girlfriend.

Personally, I think that the powers that be underestimate the tolerance of the typical viewer, or at least the typical viewer’s lack of a need for constant reassurance about a leading character’s sexuality.  Then again, I’m not gambling a million bucks or more per episode on my faith in human nature, either — one of the advantages to writing novels instead of series television is that the stakes are low enough to take some risks.

No POV Beyond This Point

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That’s what the sign said, anyway, in the parking lot of the Base Exchange.  What they meant, of course, was Personally Owned Vehicle — which is military-speak for the family car.  All the same, it gave aspiring-writer me a memorable moment of mental bogglement, because the same acronym, in writer-speak, is shorthand for Point Of View, and Point Of View is everywhere.

In the universe of fiction, nothing happens without an observer; without observation, the story would not exist.  Even the so-called “third person objective” has an observer — third person objective is nothing but observation.  It’s the “fly on the wall” viewpoint, the “camera’s eye” viewpoint, which gives the reader action and dialogue and description but nothing interior to the characters or to the narrator.  (This is all elaborate sleight of hand, or sleight of mind — the writer is only pretending not to judge or comment on what’s going on.  In fact, every detail is selected out of the near-infinite number of possible details with an eye to how it’s going to contribute to the impression the writer wants to make on the mind of the reader.  Not surprisingly, third person objective is fiendishly hard to do well, or to carry off at length; most of the famous examples, such as Hemingway’s “The Killers”, are short stories.)

At the other end of the spectrum from third person objective is the omniscient point of view favored by Victorian novelists.  For a long time in the mid to late twentieth century, omniscient POV fell out of favor, the victim of changes in literary fashion.  Not surprisingly, given the lack of contemporary models, most of the writers who attempted to write in omni POV struggled with the process; failed attempts at omni were denigrated as “head-hopping.”  It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to manage access to the interior lives of all a story’s characters, and to move freely between them without jarring or disorienting the reader.

Occupying the middle of the spectrum is tight-third POV, and its variant form, multiple tight-third.  In tight-third, the writer allows him- or herself privileged access to the interior life of only a single character — or, in multiple tight-third, to only a single character in a particular scene.  Tight-third, whether single or multiple, is probably the most common point of view in contemporary fiction, and to the extent that anything in this business is easy, it’s probably the easiest to get right.

Outside of the objective/tight-third/omni spectrum we have the varyingly-weird outliers:  first-person, the “reader, I married him” point of view; second-person, the “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike” point of view; and oddities such as the epistolary story, told through letters and other documents.  They’re all hard to write in their different ways, and a certain proportion of your audience is going to find them off-putting (there are readers out there who will never read a first-person story, for example, or a first-person story where the gender of the narrator doesn’t match the gender of the author, even though the text is plainly labelled “fiction.”)

What point of view should you use for your story?  As so often in the writing business, the answer is, “It depends.”  If your main character is talking to you in a distinctive voice and won’t shut up, first-person may be the answer.  If you’re concerned with how the society of the story both affects and deals with the events of the narrative, and if you feel up to the challenge, then omniscient POV may be what you’re looking for.  When in doubt, though, it’s always a good idea to go first for tight-third.  No reader is going to question that choice, and it’s one with a lot of good models available for emulation.

But if tight-third isn’t working for you, or if your narrative persists in veering toward one of the other models, then try the various alternatives until you find the one that clicks.

Go. Look. Read This.

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Christopher R. Beha’s essay, “The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something”, is chock-full of good crunchy insights and thoughtful advice and things I would have liked to say only he’s saying them first and better.  A snippet:

People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.

Speaking as a person who spends a lot of time wrestling with sentences, both her own and others, I can only say, Yes.  This is how it is.  Yes.