Author: drdoyleeditorial

Saving the Endangered Wansdyke

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This showed up today on ANSAX-L, the Anglo-Saxon language and literature mailing list, where I’m a long-time lurker. (I’m a long way from the groves of Academe, but I still like to keep up with the hot gossip in the field.)

It has all the earmarks of something that is chock full of local politics and confusing issues (there is nothing more opaque, sometimes, than somebody else’s politics — as I discovered once when I tried to explain local option liquor laws, wet and dry counties, and the Baptist/bootlegger alliance to a European correspondent), but I present it here for what it’s worth.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s pet peeve, O my readers (you patient and long-suffering lot), is presentism in historical fiction.

What, I ask you, is the point of writing stories set in the past if everybody in them — or at least every character intended to be liked or admired by the reader — thinks and at least desires to act like an enlightened specimen of twenty-first century humanity? And yet there is a market for such stories, possibly because not every reader-for-pleasure wants to spend his or her time working at the admittedly difficult job of empathizing with characters who might possibly hold opinions or indulge in practices of which twenty-first century persons do not approve. For it is an almost inescapable fact that even the most enlightened and progressive person of a past era will hold at least one or two opinions which are at best incomprehensible and at worst repugnant to the modern mind.  (They smoke like chimneys.  They spank their children.  They truly believe not just in the rightness but in the vigorous exportation of Western civilization and Protestant Christianity.  And so on.)  The past isn’t just another country; sometimes it’s practically another planet.  And space aliens live there.

In the immortal words of the old New Yorker cartoon, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.  But then, I’m a science fiction and fantasy sort of person, with the science fiction and fantasy cast of mind, which means that I’m the sort of reader who can derive pleasure from trying to think like a space alien for an hour or two.  That cast of mind makes the awareness that these people are not like us into a feature, rather than a bug, of true historical fiction.  The “not like us” factor is also what, in my opinion, distinguishes historical fiction from historical romances,† which choose to emphasize the points of commonality — the “these people are a lot like us after all” bits — rather than the points of difference.

†And I’ll save time right now by agreeing that it isn’t either the quality of the research or the quality of the writing that distinguishes historical fiction from historical romance — it’s the angle of approach. And I enjoy a historical romance as much as the next person, when I’m in the right mood.

Utterly Shameless Self-Promotion

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My co-author James D. Macdonald and I have a short story out on-line today, in both text and podcast form:  “The Clockwork Trollop,” over at this month’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

More from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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Because writers, as I’ve observed before, are intellectual packrats who gather up odd bits of information just in case they may need one of them someday:  The scholarly hairdresser who figured out how to do the Vestal Virgins’ seven-braid hairdo also takes on 18th-19th century papillote curls — the “curling-papers” we read about in period fiction.

When I googled on “papillote curls” to retrieve the link, I also found links to blogs where other recreationists have gone on to try the process themselves, which is how I learned that the process works best on hair that hasn’t been washed for a day or so — “every day” hair-washing being a mostly 20th-century innovation.  And in the “everything is connected to everything else” department, I liked the hairdresser’s comment that this particular style and curling method didn’t become popular until technology had advanced enough for paper to become relatively cheap.

Good Tech, Better Tech, Really Good Tech

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I’m as fond of toys as the next she-geek, but Really Good Tech — as in, the stuff that gets replaced at once, no question, if and when it ever dies — is something else again. In my book, to qualify for that title, the piece of technology involved has to:

1. be better than I am
2. at something I really hate doing
3. that nevertheless is usually my job to get done anyway.

This rules out my e-book reader, much as I adore it, because it just facilitates something that I’d enjoy doing regardless of the tech involved. The same goes for my crockpot, no matter how much I rely on it, because I could always fall back on the dutch oven if I had to. In fact, there are only four items, at the moment, that make my Really Good Tech list:

  • The computer/word processor/printer combination. Not for writing, but for turning what I write into a submittable electronic or paper MS. I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember the bad old days, when it would take me half an hour and an unconscionable amount of White-Out to produce a single page of submission-quality typescript. There’s a reason I didn’t start getting published until we got our first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory.
  • The GPS for our auto. Because it used to be me riding shotgun with my lap full of maps and triptiks, frantically doing arithmetic (at which I suck) in order to answer urgent questions like “How many minutes until our next exit?” and “What’s our current projected arrival time?”
  • The dishwasher. Because it maintains the fragile barrier between us and total (as opposed to merely partial) household disarray, and without it I would fall behind in the dishwashing and never catch up again.
  • The rice cooker. Because while it only does one thing, it does that one thing right every single time, whereas rice cookery by any other method, for me, is a project with only about a 50% chance of success.

I’ve been giving considerable thought to adding the electric wok to the shortlist, but I’m still on the fence about that one.  I could fake stir-frying in a different pan, or I could adjust my meal plans to make up for the loss if I had to, and besides, I kind of enjoy cooking and I’m not all that bad at it . . . on the other hand, I really like having a proper wok.

The observant reader will have noticed that only one of the items on the Really Good Tech list has anything to do with writing, and the one that does, has more to do with the mechanical end of the job than the creative end.  All you really need for the creative end are the contents of your own head and some means — pencil and paper, typewriter, dictaphone, computer, whatever you’ve got handy — of getting them fixed in permanent form.

For the mechanical end, there’s no magic in either retro or cutting-edge technology.  Use whatever tech you like and can afford and are comfortable with, so long as it can get your material to the marketplace in a form that the marketplace can handle.

The More Things Change

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I’ve said for a long time that the generic publishing-industry headline is “Big Changes Ahead for Publishers; Writers to be Adversely Affected.” Most working writers — like self-employed freelancers in other fields — have by necessity got their strategies fine-tuned to meet the current conditions.  Any change in those conditions is going to make their strategies unstable or unworkable, and they’re going to have to devote time and thought to changing them, instead of spending that time and thought on writing.

Understandably, this does not make writers happy.  It’s hard to concentrate on long-term strategy when you’re dealing with the fact that a previously-reliable part of your income stream has suddenly dried up or gone wonky. The body and brain have this inconvenient habit of insisting on “Food — now!” without caring whether or not there’s money in the bank to pay for it.

It’s All in Your Head

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Or too much of it is, anyway.  When it comes to stating — or not stating — the obvious, it’s possible to be too subtle for your own good.

I’m talking here about the kind of excessive subtlety that leads to what are sometimes called “head stories” — which is to say, the particular kind of flawed story you get when there are elements of it that are so obvious to the writer that they aren’t mentioned in the text.  They never make it out of the writer’s head; hence the name.

But readers can only read texts, not minds.  If you don’t put that material down on the page — or don’t at least put down enough of it that they can reasonably infer the rest — then they won’t ever know that it’s there.

If you’ve got something crucial to your story that you want the reader to work out by inference from the clues supplied, then you need to, first, make certain that you have in fact supplied enough clues for the reader to draw the desired inference; and second, make certain that you give the reader confirmation at some point that he or she has interpreted the matter correctly.  (This confirmation is one of the strings that can be usefully tied up in the story’s denouement.)

How many hints or clues are enough?  As always with writing, it depends — but three is a nice round number.  Western-influenced people tend to regard three as significant and memorable; we show it in sayings like “Third time’s the charm” or “Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action.”  If something is called to our attention three times, we’re going to assume that the writer had a reason for waving it in our faces like that.  Also — when supplying the clues, remember that you have privileged knowledge that the reader does not; therefore, what is screamingly obvious to you may not be so to anybody else.

As a general rule, the answer to the question, “Am I being too obvious here?” is usually, “No.”  If you are being too obvious, your first reader or your editor will probably tell you.

Thought for the Day

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There’s a reason why writers are almost as superstitious as sailors and baseball players — they’re all in businesses where you can do the best you can, and have your best actually be pretty damned good, and still get sabotaged by random events beyond your control.

In It for the Long Haul

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It’s one thing to write a polished, even gripping, opening chapter (since opening chapters are the ones most frequently workshopped and otherwise shown around, they’re usually the ones that get the most feedback.)  It’s another thing to maintain that level for an entire novel.

Unfortunately, structure and pacing are important to editors when they get around to judging the whole book.  Editors want to see whether a writer can sustain interest through the long middle parts without letting the pace of the story flag,  and whether he or she can avoid getting distracted by unnecessary details and by subplots that go nowhere,  and whether he or she can resist the temptation to skip important plot and character stuff and rush the story in haste to get to the end.  They also want to see if the writer can in fact end a book effectively — not winding things up too fast, not dragging the end out too long, not failing to supply a sufficiently impressive fireworks show for the grand finale.

In truth, however, messing up the middle of the book is far more likely to be fatal than not being absolutely perfect at the end.  By the time the readers have reached the final chapters, they’ve invested enough time and thought in the story that a lot of technical problems with the ending will be forgiven, just so long as the readers don’t feel cheated of something they’ve come to feel is owed to them by the story.  Any number of really good writers have wobbled on the dismount, as it were — Tolkien ended the Lord of the Rings trilogy at least three times before finally letting his readers stagger off into the appendices, for example, but most of his readers don’t feel cheated by the excess.

But this is why editors want to see the traditional “three chapters and an outline” even for query letters, and why the first thing they’re going to say, when you eventually get a nibble, is, “Send me the whole book.”

The Nature of the Beast

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Most writers (and by that, like most writers, I mean “most writers who are like me, but not the other ones”) don’t spend a lot of time before or during the writing of a particular piece in fretting about whether it’s straight science fiction/fantasy or magical realism.  We write the story, and worry about determining its genre afterward — or we let the editor and the publisher and the readers worry about it, which is easier, and lets us get on to the next project.

There are a lot of theories about the difference between straight science fiction/fantasy  and magical realism.  For my money, the big difference between the two is that in straight sf/fantasy the non-realistic elements are meant to be regarded as actually there and actually happening (the elves are real and physically present elves; the spaceship is a real spaceship and not — or at any rate, not just –a metaphor for escape; the zombies really are a shambling undead menace and they really do want to eat your brains); but in magical realism, the non-realistic elements serve mainly as extended metaphors.

That’s an incomplete definition, of course.  In my more cynical moments, I suspect that in the end the determination of the story’s genre will be done by whatever market you sell it to.  If it goes to one of the mainstream markets — places like The New Yorker or The Atlantic† (hey, why not think big?) or one of the literary magazines — it’ll probably be classified as magical realism, or possibly as “slipstream” if they’re trying to be genre-friendly.  If it goes to one of the sf/fantasy magazines, then it will be known as sf/fantasy for the rest of its natural life.

My own inclination, with an edge-case story like that, would be to try for the mainstream commercial magazines first, on the grounds that while they’re a long shot, they pay really well and publication there brings instant recognition.  After that, unless I had a strong reason not to want my story identified as sf/fantasy, I’d probably bypass the literary magazines and go straight to the sf/fantasy mags, because by and large the literary magazines pay more in prestige than they do in cash.

†It used to be The Atlantic Monthly, but they changed the name after they stopped putting out twelve issues a year.