Author: drdoyleeditorial

Random Thoughts on Point of View

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Point of view is a tricky thing to get right, and it takes a lot of practice.  As a general rule, you should be inside only one character’s head per scene, and you should make it crystal clear to the reader which character that is.  While you’re inside that character’s head, only what he or she can directly observe should get reported to the reader (therefore, no seeing what’s around corners that your character can’t poke his or her head around.)  Also, any commentary on the action should be filtered through the viewpoint character’s perceptions and attitude.

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First person, and single-viewpoint tight third person, are good points of view to use when part of the impact of your story depends upon keeping some plot elements secret from both your POV character and the reader until the time is ripe for them to be revealed.  Try to avoid writing yourself into plot situations where your first person narrator knows something that the reader doesn’t; it’s a tour de force if you can pull it off, but the failure mode isn’t pretty, and even a successful attempt is going to leave a certain number of resentful readers in its  wake.

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True omniscient point of view is fiendishly difficult to do well, and it’s a good idea to master multiple-viewpoint third-person first.  The longer the novel, and the more ground it covers, the more point of view characters you may need — but when in doubt, err on the side of parsimony.

The Do-It-Yourself Method

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Yesterday I wrote briefly about the just-you-and-the-Norton-Anthology method of bringing yourself up to speed on the English or American literary canon.

There is not, alas, a Norton Anthology of Science Fiction that can serve a similar purpose. There’s The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but it’s much more limited in scope, containing only American and Canadian short fiction from 1960 to 1990 (the anthology came out in 1993.)

John Klima, in his Tor.com essay The Ten Most Influential Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthologies/Anthology Series, provides a list of books which, taken all together, can give you a sense of what was considered important or groundbreaking in the field at different times.  The downside is that you’ll need to buy or borrow a stack of books instead of just one.  (I know, I know . . . the thought makes you weep hot tears.)

But if what you’re looking for is a single Big Fat Volume that you can read from cover to cover in lieu of a full-dress classroom experience, then you might want to give this anthology a look:  Sense of Wonder, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman.  It covers science fiction from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the present, and includes essays as well as fiction.  (Full disclosure:  I have an essay in this anthology, and my husband/coauthor and I have a short story in it as well.)

Wheel Comma Avoiding the Reinvention of

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If you’re going to work in a genre, you need to know the history of the genre — what’s already been done, what the average reader’s expectations are, what the assumed knowledge base of your readership is.

This is one of the few places in the writing game where English majors actually do have an edge — they’ll have been force-marched through a lot of this already, and for mainstream writing, either literary or popular, that’ll just about do it.  If you aren’t an English major and don’t want to be one, you can do it yourself with the aid of a halfway good public library, or with the internet and a copy of an English Lit or American Lit survey syllabus.  (Or you could just buy a used edition of the Norton Anthology of English (or American) Literature, read it cover to cover over the course of a year or so, and form your own opinions.)

If you’re working in one of the genres, such as science fiction, there aren’t going to be as many handy guideposts.

But don’t worry.  I’m here to help you.

Ten Books to Help Get You up to Speed with Science Fiction

(Some of these books are every bit as absorbing today as they were when they were written; others are, as they say, “of historical interest.”  Which ones are which — your call.  Mileage may vary; contents may have settled during shipping; and not all souvenir plates increase in value.)

1. Mary Shelley — Frankenstein (1818).  Don’t be fooled into thinking this one is horror.  It deals with what would eventually become some of the big science-fictional themes — the creation of artificial life, the relationship between an artificial creation and its maker, and the permeable boundary between research and obsession.  Also, it extrapolates its fictional science from then-contemporary interests, such as Arctic exploration and electrical experimentation.

2. H. G. Wells — The War of the Worlds (1898).  A groundbreaking early entry in the invasion-from-outer-space subgenre.  It spawned the classic 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast and two direct film adaptations, one by George Pal in 1953 and one by Stephen Spielberg in 2007, and is the ancestor of a host of other works.

3. E. E. “Doc” Smith — Gray Lensman.  (Magazine serial publication, 1939; collected in book form, 1951) The great-grandaddy of all space opera.  The book is very much “of its time” as far as social attitudes go, and its prose quality is at best serviceable.  (At worst, it’s deep purple.)  On the other hand, its slam-bang action and resolute lack of psychological complexity can provide one’s inner twelve-year-old with a great deal of fun, and a more critical reader can always play a rousing game of spot-the-familiar-trope.

4. Robert Heinlein — Starship Troopers (1959.) The novel, not the movie, which has almost nothing in common with the book except the title and a few characters with the same names.  Just about every military sf novel since this one has either been influenced by it, or is in dialogue (sometimes, in vigorous argument) with it.  The Forever War, Ender’s Game, Old Man’s War, not to mention all the Star Trek tv shows, movies, and tie-in novels — all of them are in the lineage.  While you’re at it, read another two or three books by Heinlein — I’d pick The Puppet Masters and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress myself — because his work established so much of what you could think of as the consensus science-fictional future.  Avoid his more vocal fans; and remind yourself from time to time that these books were written by a guy who was born in 1907.

5.  Isaac Asimov — with Heinlein, one of the central figures of mid-century hard sf.  His Foundation trilogy (1951-1953)and the stories collected as I, Robot (1950) are probably the most influential of his works.  (The “three laws of robotics” form part of the intellectual furniture of modern computer science.)  You should also read his short story, “Nightfall” (1941).

6. Samuel R. Delany — When science fiction’s New Wave hit the US in the 1960’s, the young Delany was one of its rock stars.  Try Babel-17 (1966) or The Einstein Intersection (1967); if you like those, work your way up to Dhalgren (1975) and the later works.  (I bounced hard off of Dhalgren, but many people love it.)

7. Ursula K. LeGuin — The Left Hand of Darkness  (1969.) Because it marks the point where science fiction and Second Wave feminism collided and made readers’ heads explode.  Her other big novel from that time period, The Dispossessed, has in my opinion worn somewhat better over the intervening decades, but The Left Hand of Darkness has probably been the more influential of the two.  If you like LeGuin’s work, you might go on to read Joanna Russ and Sherri S. Tepper.

8. James Tiptree, Jr — Her Smoke Rose up Forever (1990.) A posthumous omnibus collection of short stories by an influential writer, famous for, among other things, actually being Alice Sheldon.  (She wasn’t the first or the only woman in sf field to hide or at least partially obscure her gender — C. L. Moore, Andre Norton, and C. J Cherryh all spring to mind — but she remains noteworthy for the thoroughness of her cover and the later embarrassment of certain critics who had previously declared her writing “ineluctably masculine.”) The James Tiptree, Jr. , Literary Award is named in her honor.  Notable short stories (included in the collection): “Houston, Houston, Do You Read” (1976), “The Screwfly Solution” (1977)

9.  C. J. Cherryh — Pride of Chanur (1981)  You can’t have sf without aliens, and C. J. Cherryh gives some of the best aliens in the business.  Pride of Chanur is shorter than a lot of her work, and more accessible; the novel’s felinoid aliens (yes, the title is a pun) are different enough to be believably not-human, but not so far away from oxygen-breathing mammalian norms as to be completely inscrutable.

10.  William Gibson — Neuromancer (1984) Science fiction meets the computer age, and the cyberpunk genre is born.  If you like the flavor, read Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson and work your way outward from there; also watch Bladerunner on DVD.

Getting There

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Fantastic and historical fiction is full of journeys, quests, hot pursuits, and other assorted road trips — sometimes with magical assistance, and sometimes not.

It’s with the “not” that things can get difficult, because a lot of modern-day writers don’t have anything like a working knowledge of any kind of travel that doesn’t involve an internal combustion engine and a four-lane divided highway.  Doing research can be tricky, too, because while modern-day horse people (and trail hikers and dogsled racers and people who raise and train yokes of oxen for fun) are almost always delighted to share their specialized knowledge, a lot of the time it can be like asking a NASCAR driver or a rally enthusiast, “How many days would it take me to drive from Podunk to Ashtabula?”

You’ll get an answer, all right, but it may well be so full of qualifying details that you can’t sort out the single thing you really need to know, or so far out there on the extreme performance end that an ordinary mortal wouldn’t have a chance of coming near it.  These people are all highly-qualified experts driving perfectly-maintained, high-end machines, and all you really want to know is roughly how long it would take an ordinary Joe or Jane driving a plain vanilla sedan with an automatic transmission and 50,000 miles on the odometer.

(I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that once horses stopped being a means of transportation and became a hobby, the equine equivalent of the midrange family car with automatic transmission and cruise control started fading out of the picture.)

Nevertheless, you have to try.  Criticism of fantasy, both from within and from without the genre, has already said a lot of true and cutting things about fantasy horses that are functionally indistinguishable from motorcycles; you don’t want to provide the critics with yet more ammunition.

For some help on that, you could do worse than to read this LiveJournal post, here — also the comments, which contain much additional useful information.

Another Way to Make an Author Happy

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If you know an author, and are at the same convention with them, or share the same local bookstore or library or coffee shop, and you see that they’re scheduled to give a reading:

Go to their reading.

Unless they’re serious rock stars like Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin or J. K. Rowling, most writers live in fear of the dreaded 10 AM Sunday morning reading slot . . . the one where the audience consists of four rows of empty chairs and one drowsy con-goer who fell asleep in the room after the last party of the night before and is now too embarrassed to leave.

What do you get in return for taking the time to attend a reading?  Well, stars in your crown in heaven, of course, and the chance to hear early drafts of forthcoming books and works-in-progress, and the sincere and profound gratitude of the writer in question.

Especially at 10 AM on a Sunday morning.

 

Link of the Day

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(In lieu of a more substantive post, because I’ve got a Viable Paradise chat conference tonight.)

The New York Times has a series of blog posts on the process of writing, by various authors.  The current one, “Writing and Fear”, by Sarah Jio, is one that ties in with my own stated maxim that writers shouldn’t flinch away from the strong stuff, even if it scares them.

There are a lot more posts in the archive.  I’ve only had the chance to read a few of them, but they all look interesting.

I have a theory:  writers like to read other writers talking about writing, because this can be a lonely job, and it’s always heartening to know that somebody else out there has hit that Slough of Despond in the middle of the book, or had their hard drive die without warning at the eleventh hour, taking a novel’s worth of hard work with it in its death throes, or struggled to retain their dignity in the face of an utterly wrongheaded review.

Five More Days

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Until applications close for this year’s Viable Paradise.  The ferry to the island pulls away from the dock at midnight on June 15 — if you’re thinking of applying and don’t have your application in by then, you’ll have to wait until next year.

(You can submit your application by e-mail in .RTF format, with hardcopy to follow, so you can’t get away with telling yourself that there isn’t time for the envelope to get there.)

Batteries Sort of Included

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Not too long ago, three out of the four Uninterruptible Power Supplies in our office setup expired from old age.  A bit of internet research informed us that replacement batteries for all three, plus shipping, would cost about the same as buying one new UPS, so — not being intimidated by the idea of opening up the dead power supplies and performing a bit of open-case surgery — we decided to go the replacement-battery route.

What was never in question was the idea that an Uninterruptible Power Supply belonged in the “replace when broken” category.  We’ve been big believers in having a UPS for our computer since the early days, when a UPS was essentially a motorcycle battery in a metal case with a plug on one side for wall current in and a plug on the other side for battery power out.

Our conversion experience, as it were, came during our time in the Republic of Panamá, where the power downtown had a tendency to fail at inopportune moments.  One weekend afternoon, my husband and eventual co-author was playing Jumpman Junior on our Atari 800, and after a session of extended play had succeeded in racking up an all-time high score.  Flushed with triumph, he went on to the screen where he could save his high score and his initials for posterity . . . and the power went out.

We ordered our first Uninterruptible Power Supply that same day.

A Bit of This, a Bit of That

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Writers and other freelance artists have more than a little in common with small farmers, and not just that people in both occupations have insanely complicated income tax forms and a tendency to get depressed when thinking about health insurance.

They also have to hold all sorts of odd jobs in order to continue working at their chosen vocation. A sculptor I once met, for example, said that most of the ceramic artists he knew kept themselves in rent and food money by making coffee mugs.  And I still treasure a sign I once saw outside a farmhouse on Route 3:

FRESH EGGS
TAROT READINGS
AROMATHERAPY
CHAIN SAWS SHARPENED

My own list of oddball writer jobs is atypically prosaic, mostly versions of “taught freshman English someplace,” though I did spend one semester in graduate school as an elderly faculty widow’s live-in companion, which was not the sinecure you might think, and a later summer answering correspondence for the National Solar Heating and Cooling Foundation.  I spent a lot of time putting together letters out of prefab paragraphs that all said, more or less, “Yes, you can retrofit your house for solar energy.  It will be very expensive.”†  I’m pleased, these days, to note that science has marched on, and solar panels have dropped enough in price that they’re even showing up in a low-income area like far northern New England.

†My favorite, though, was the guy who wrote to ask if he could use passive solar energy to run his earthworm farm. I had to take that one upstairs to the engineers, who were equally delighted to see it — apparently earthworm farming was an ideal application for passive solar.