The hot and muggy Fourth, at any rate. Our town has had its parade, and shot off its fireworks, and at midnight they will ring the bell in the Congregational Church (it being the oldest one in town) to proclaim liberty throughout the land.
Happy Independence Day to all my US readers — and for those of you from other parts, please take and hold these good wishes in reserve for your own national holidays, whenever they may be.
Today’s entry in the “everything is grist for the writer’s mill” department: a decidedly NSFW illustrated article on a 1680 sex manual that even shocked Samuel Pepys. (But he read it anyway, the horndog.)
For the prurient or dedicated researcher — not that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive — the article includes a link to the full version of the text as digitized on Google Books. Because you never can tell what you might need to know someday.
Another dead-simple recipe for nights when your brain isn’t up to anything more elaborate. This one has the advantage of being mostly made from pantry ingredients — you’ll need fresh milk, but chicken breasts are a freezer staple around our house, at least.
Chicken Breasts on Rice
Ingredients
Directions
There you go. Five ingredients, and nothing to worry about once you’ve got it going except remembering to take off the aluminum foil at the one-hour mark.
Readers like to see your characters in motion. Even a story focused on an interior dilemma can be made more gripping if the problem has some physical action to mirror it or contrast with it. As for stories focused on exterior problems, they’re like sharks — they can either keep moving or die.
Some writers have the storyteller’s version of kinesthetic awareness. They’re able to keep the complicated three-dimensional moving geometry of a multiple-character action scene running in their heads without having to work at it. When they need to describe what Character A is doing and exactly how that character occupies space and moves through the room in relationship to Characters B, C, and D, the only thing they need to do is check their mental diagram and it’s all there.
The rest of us have to work at it.
Diagrams on graph paper are one way to do it, and so is moving counters or figurines around on a tabletop.
Example: For a scene involving an infant, a nanny, a bodyguard, and a wicked kidnapper sneaking in through the balcony, break out a chess set. Pick out one of the queens to represent the nanny, one of the knights to represent the bodyguard, a rook for the wicked kidnapper, and a pawn for the baby in its crib. Designate one side of the chessboard as the balcony. Designate a square on the appropriate side of the chessboard in relation to the balcony as the door. Put the pawn in the right position for the baby’s crib. Then put your knight/bodyguard, your queen/nanny and your wicked kidnapping rook in their appropriate places — off the board next to the designated door square, on a square next to the baby pawn, off the board next to the balcony. Then start moving the pieces to block out the action, and watch how things happen.
(Amusingly enough, writers of romance and erotica can have similar problems, although with a different sort of action. They have to keep careful track of whose arms and legs are going where, and make certain that nobody ends up in a physically impossible position, or one that’s going to give them muscle cramps if they stay that way for very long. I’ve heard of poseable artist’s dummies being used to work things out, and have also heard of writers who’ve enlisted the aid of a sympathetic partner for the more athletic bits.)
These are things that can disrupt your day, ranked in order of ascending troublesomeness.
A Pop-Up Target is something unexpected that requires immediate action, but which you have the resources and ability to deal with promptly. A suddenly necessary payment at a time when the bank account is flush, for example, or an unanticipated piece of time-critical paperwork. The target jumps up, you deal with it, and you move on, slightly more adrenaline-charged than you were before.
Adventures in the Writing Life Version: The FedEx delivery man shows up on your doorstep Thursday afternoon with a package containing a stack of unpleasantly familiar paper and a cover letter: Dear Author–here’s the copyedited MS for your next novel. Please go over the copyedits and get them back to us by this coming Monday.
What you do: Cancel your social engagements for the next 48 hours. After a few seconds’ more thought, cancel the rest of your life for the next 48 hours. Check your local FedEx pickup to see what’s the absolute latest you can hand over the MS and still expect it to show up in New York on Monday. Check your bank account to see if you can afford that much money. (If both your budget and the publisher’s schedule really are that tight, phone your editor. Ask if you can FedEx the MS back to them on their dime, because otherwise it’s coming back to them by Priority Mail.) Buckle down and get to work on going over the copyedits, and be grateful that you aren’t having to deal with a Copyedit From Hell.
An Unexploded Land Mine is something that you thought that you’d already dealt with, or that you were supposed to deal with and forgot, or that somebody else completely neglected to inform you about back when it should have been dealt with. Some land mines are relatively mild; others can blow you sky-high. What they have in common is that “I should have known about this one, dammit!” quality that adds a touch of frustration and outrage to the whole deal.
Adventures in the Writing Life version: “What do you mean, I didn’t send you back the signed contracts!” Or, “No, you didn’t tell me you wanted a map for the front of the book and a glossary in the back!” Or, “I thought you were going to handle asking for blurbs, and now you’re telling me that I have to do it?”
What you do: Send back the signed contracts with a profuse apology for your absent-mindedness, and promise never to be so flaky again. Grit your teeth and draw the damned map and make up the damned glossary. Take a deep breath and make a list of writers you know who might be willing to come up with a back-cover blurb for you, then start writing letters.
And then there’s the Snake in a Can. Like the trick jar labeled “peanuts” with the spring-loaded snake inside, these show up completely unexpectedly and leap right out into your face. Also, sometimes the snake is real. A heavy-duty snake has the ability to disrupt your whole life for days, if not weeks, if you can’t manage to stuff it back into the can.
Adventures in the Writing Life Version: Your publisher goes bankrupt without warning. Your agent, with whom you have a warm personal relationship and who has been a prime force in building your career, gets hit by a truck while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan. The company for which you’ve happily written three potboiler tie-in novels and with whom you’re under contract for a fourth suddenly lets go all their in-house publishing staff (including the editor of your novel in progress, with whom you’ve had an excellent relationship) and replaces them with people you’ve never even heard of.
What you do: Don’t keep all your writing eggs in one basket. Maintain good relationships with everyone in your field, to the extent that it’s possible, so that if you’re suddenly swimming for your life in a rising flood you have people who might throw you a lifeline from the shore. Resign yourself to the fact that sometimes bad stuff is going to happen that isn’t your fault, and that you can’t do anything about, and that is going to mess up your life more than it messes up the lives of the people actually responsible — but don’t let yourself dwell on it for too long, because dwelling on it only uses up time and energy that you could be spending on writing something better for people who will respect you more.
“Writing forsoothly” is the term we like to use around the house for all the different varieties of bad pseudo-archaic diction that infest modern fantasy — historical and created-world fantasy in particular. J. R. R. Tolkien is undoubtedly to blame for a lot of it, because his characters do like their elevated language; what unobservant readers miss is the way that Tolkien modulates his characters’ dialogue, moving effortlessly from plain vernacular to almost-archaic high formal speech and back again, depending upon the situation and the company. Strider the Ranger has a much commoner way of talking than Aragorn the Heir to the Throne of Gondor, but at the same time they’re both recognizably the same guy.
It’s probably unwise to play with writing in extreme forsoothly unless you can at least approach Tolkien’s level of skill and language-awareness. It’s a lot harder to do than it looks, and the failure mode is dire. But if you’re determined to give it a try — and nobody ever makes any progress in this game unless they regularly try things that they aren’t certain will work — there are a few things it will help to do first.
One: Ask yourself, “Is this really the direction my writing talent lies in?” and answer it honestly. If your interior Magic 8-Ball refuses to yield up anything more specific than “reply hazy; ask again later,” find a kind but honest friend and ask them. Kind, because you don’t want your self-image pulled down and stomped upon with hobnailed boots; and honest, because you’re not asking them for sympathy, you’re asking them for the truth.
Two: Prepare yourself. Read genuine period or formal writing until it dribbles out of your ears. If you start talking in Shakespearean or Regency English at the breakfast table, you’re probably ready. And a good thing, too, because at that point your friends and family are either bored stiff with your project, or convinced that you’re going nuts.
Three: Stop researching and write. Don’t worry about getting all the nuances down perfectly; you can always polish the heck out of the language in your second — or third or fourth or fifth — draft.
Four: Go find that kind but honest friend again. This time, ask them if the archaic or formal language in fact worked; and ask them, also, whether they think you got it right but took it too far. As with so many other things in writing, a light hand is best.
(For an interesting example of archaic diction done well in an unexpected venue, check out the historical romance For My Lady’s Heart, by Laura Kinsale, now available again in e-book format after a long while out of print.)
And because I hate to miss two days in a row when I’m not on a road trip, and always feel guilty when I do:
Presented for your amusement: The Most Interesting Writer in the World.
We’re in the midst of a spell of heat and humidity that makes doing anything, even writing, seem dreary and unattractive.
Also, there are mosquitoes.
Midsummer in general has never been my favorite time for writing, despite the fact that more than once I’ve found myself head down and running for deadline daylight in the midst of the hot and sticky season. The dead of winter — that stretch from mid-January to mid-February when this part of the word gets hit with temperatures in the subzero-Fahrenheit range — isn’t much better. It’s hard to concentrate when your mind keeps drifting off-topic to the question of the winter electric bill.
The best seasons for writing, as far as I’m concerned, are spring, fall, late summer, and early winter. The temperatures are moderate (for local values of moderate); the weather is mostly well-behaved; and the local insect life is at worst only moderately annoying.
Summer, though . . . ugh. But I suppose it could be worse. I could always be trying to write through summer in Texas. Or any season in the tropics.
There’s a reason I wound up living — and writing — in far northern New Hampshire.
I’ve written before about the issue of buried or implied technology in language.
But there’s another technology-related question that writers–especially writers of created-world fantasy– need to be aware of: What is the general tech level of your story?
A lot of created-world fantasy takes place in a pre-industrial setting. (Steampunk is perhaps the most obvious exception, but only if you consider steampunk to be a species of fantasy rather than a species of science fiction — a question upon which opinion is divided.) “Pre-industrial”, though, covers a lot of ground. Do you mean pre-gunpowder? Pre-clockwork? Pre-mass production and interchangeable parts? Does your society have steam engines or water wheels? Spinning wheels or drop spindles? Is your hero’s sword steel or bronze? Is his armor plate or chain or boiled leather? Does he pay the swordsmith in barter or with coin? Does his banker know about letters of credit and double-entry book-keeping? Has banking even been invented yet?
You need to think about all of these things if you’re not going to have your story taking place in an ersatz-medieval RennFaire fantasyland — and you need to make certain that your tech levels match across the board.
(Yes. This means that you have to do research if you’re going to write fantasy. Books like The Timelines of History and television programs like the old BBC Connections series are a good place to start.)
Among the many arguments swirling around the internet this week (I swear it must be something in the air, like pollen) is the brouhaha stirred up by Annasue McCleave Wilson’s interview in PW with novelist Claire Messud.
In the course of interviewing Messud about her latest book, The Woman Upstairs, Wilson observed that:
I wouldn’t want to be friends with [the protagonist], would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.
To which Messud responded:
For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.†
Whereupon the literary blogoverse was plunged, as they say, into war. Panels of literary experts were assembled to discuss the relative literary merit of likeable and unlikeable characters; the interview question itself was more than once called out as sexist; and other authors and readers then took to the net in defense of likeable characters, and in opposition to the idea that reading for the company of such characters, like reading for the story, is a lower form of literary engagement. (A few mostly-woman-shaped people also pointed out that women writers of both popular and literary fiction would do a far better job of combating sexism in literature and publishing if they had each others’ backs, rather than looking for opportunities to stick knives in them.)
What do I think? Well:
I don’t subscribe to the castor oil theory of artistic merit. (“Yes, it tastes bad; but you should take it anyway, because it’s good for you.”) I think that if you’re going to expect your readers to spend several hours in the company of a character, you damned well ought to give the reader something in return — maybe a likeable protagonist, maybe an interestingly unlikeable one; maybe an intricately convoluted plot; maybe exquisite prose and imagery; but by God, you’ve got to give them something.
†Actually, I’ve always thought that Hamlet would have been fun to hang out with, in his Wittenberg days. And I kind of liked Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49.
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