Author: drdoyleeditorial

Another Thing Not to Do

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If you’ve got a character speaking a line of dialogue and also performing an action, don’t get into the habit of always putting the action into a participial phrase  tacked on after the dialogue tag:

“This is an important announcement,” she said, taking her place at the podium and opening her notebook.

No.  It needs to be either:

“This is an important announcement.”  She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.

or

She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.  “This is an important announcement.”

Save the participial phrases for occasions when the dialogue and the action are truly simultaneous:

“Listen up, people!” she snapped, slamming the notebook down on the podium.

or when the action’s mostly a bit of stage business, there for characterization or setting-establishment or pacing:

“Listen up, people,” she said, shooing away a moth that was trying to fly into the Coleman lantern.

(Who gets to decide what’s important and what’s stage-dressing?  You do.  It’s your story.  Just remember to keep on listening to what it’s telling you.  And remember, audiences like variation.)

Not Something You Hear Every Day

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Ever since the rise of the novel in the 18th century, mimetic realism has been the unmarked state for fiction in English (of fiction in other languages, I lack the authority to speak.)  Everything else is genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, moribund genres like the western and nearly extinct ones like the nurse novel — and yes, literary fiction.  The fact that literary fiction occupies a position of high prestige doesn’t exempt it from having its own tropes and clichés and habits of thought, and doesn’t exempt it from Sturgeon’s Law.†

But it’s not often you encounter a writer of literary fiction actually admitting to the fact in public, as J. Robert Lennon does in the March 29th issue of Salon.

†Named after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, to whom someone once said, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” To which Sturgeon replied, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Feast and Famine

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I’ve said more than once that there are two basic states in the freelancing life:  the state of too much work and the state of not enough money.  Usually it’s either one or the other, though sometimes, painfully, it can be both at once.

In theory, there should also exist a balancing state of not enough work and too much money, but I don’t think freelancers get to go there.

(Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a backlog of editorial work that I need to get done, so for the next little while my entries here may be somewhat brief.)

Unnecessary Endings

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Thanks to the magic of home video, I finally got a chance to watch Spielberg’s Lincoln — which is not, despite its title and its director, a sprawling epic biopic.  It’s actually, for the most part, a tightly focused docudrama about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, in which Abraham Lincoln employs every political tool in the book, up to and including bald-faced lies and outright bribes, in order to secure the crossover votes in the House of Representatives necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery.  The story ends with Mr. Lincoln leaving a gathering of his political associates in order to join Mrs. Lincoln for a night out at the theater, in a lovely moody shot of the President walking down a darkened White House corridor toward the lighted doorway at the end.

Unfortunately, the movie goes on for several minutes after that.

We get the assassination — well, actually, we get an audience at a different performance in another theatre being told that the President has just been shot.  (I suppose this was meant to be clever film-making, but it felt to me like a bait-and-switch.  Mileage, of course, may vary.) We get Mary Todd Lincoln weeping at the deathbed.  We get “Now he belongs to the ages.”  We get a final Inspiring Voiceover Montage.  And I’m damned if I know why the movie needed any of that stuff, unless it was for the historical enlightenment of the three or four people in Outer Mongolia who don’t already know that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated while watching a play at Ford’s Theater.

The whole thing reminded me of another movie with an equally unnecessary ending — First Knight, the Arthurian film with Richard Gere as Lancelot and Sean Connery as King Arthur.  Except for the assumption that any woman in possession of her right mind could possibly prefer Gere† to Connery, First Knight was a perfectly serviceable film adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart, and would have worked just fine if they’d left it at that.  But the film-maker stuck a Mort D’Arthur sequence onto the end of it, presumably because nobody involved trusted the audience to remember what was going to happen a few years down the fictional road.

One of the good things about being in the business of making novels and short stories instead of films is that we can get away with putting a bit more trust in the intelligence — and the literacy — of our audience.

†Of that vintage, at least. Perversely, as Gere’s gotten older he’s acquired a kind of sleazy shopworn charm that is attractive in its own right. But I digress.

More Neat Stuff

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Regency and Napoleonic-era fans and writers take note:  Google Books now has La Belle Assemblée, Volume 2 (January through June, 1807) available on-line and as a PDF download.

Also neat, though not Napoleonic:  Boston viewed from the air, in 1860.

Snow Out of Season

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It’s April, but with all due respect to T. S. Eliot, no one up here in far northern New Hampshire is breeding any lilacs out of any land, dead or otherwise.

Instead, we’ve got the freeze-thaw cycle still going on, putting frost heaves and potholes into all the roads, and turning the frozen ground into deep, thick mud of the sort that used to sink Tiger tanks on the Eastern Front.   When I was an undergraduate doing a seminar on Robert Frost, I thought that mud-time was something Frost had made up for poetic purposes. Then I moved up here, and found out otherwise. (He wasn’t making up the bent-over birches, either.)

It’s always odd when you encounter in real life something which you’ve previously only encountered via art. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for legions of science fiction fans on the day the space aliens finally arrive.

Chasing the White Whale

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An outside observer, surveying the existing canon of the science fiction genre, might well be forgiven for asking, “What is it about sf writers and Moby-Dick?”  Melville’s classic sea story about Captain Ahab and the white whale has been the springboard for more than one science fiction novel — Samuel R. Delany’s Nova has echoes of it, and Philip Jose Farmer’s The Wind Whales of Ishmael is a direct homage, and just this past year China Miéville’s YA novel Railsea had the protagonist following a one-armed captain in a vengeance-hunt for a giant white burrowing mole-rat, or “mouldywarpe”, named Mocker-Jack.

Giant burrowing mole-rats aside, what are the attractions of Moby-Dick for writers working in the science-fictional mode?

Well, obviously, there’s the whole obsessive-vengeance-quest plot.  Vengeance may be morally dubious as all hell, but there’s no denying that as plot engines go, it’s a winner.  It comes with automatic interesting backstory, since the object of the vengeance-quest must have done something impressively dramatic to set the protagonist on his or her course of action (framed him for treason and stolen his girlfriend, killed his father and usurped the throne, shot up her wedding and killed her fiancé on her wedding day . . . that sort of thing.)  It pretty much insures that the protagonist isn’t going to be spending the book contemplating the landscape and doing nothing, and it has the promise of a violent and exciting payoff at the end.  And finally, if the writer is inclined that way, it has lots of scope for contemplating law and morality and justice and mercy and other chewy thematic issues.

Beyond all that, though, is the fact that the one of the key concerns in Moby-Dick is Captain Ahab’s desire to “strike through the mask” — to find out what, exactly, is the real nature of the white whale.  Is it a brute beast acting according to its nature, or is it an active and malevolent adversary?  Or is it merely the agent of some other, greater intelligence?  This desire to see beyond the surface of things, to find out the true nature of the universe, is also one of the key concerns of science fiction.

And this thematic similarity, I think, is a big part of what attracts science fiction writers to Moby-Dick.

Leftovers

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We roasted a leg of lamb for Easter dinner.  It would have been a half-leg of lamb — which is more in line with the number of people in the house these days — but the grocery store didn’t have any half-legs left by the time we did our shopping, so a whole leg of lamb it was.  We stabbed it with a knife and put in slivers of garlic, then laid rosemary sprigs on top of it and cooked it at 325F for 25 minutes per pound, and served it up with mint sauce and roasted potatoes and asparagus in hollandaise.

The potatoes and the asparagus are gone, along with the hollandaise, but we’ve still got half the lamb in the refrigerator, and now I’m thinking about leftovers.  Lamb sandwiches, probably, and maybe a shepherd’s pie.

It isn’t just cooking that has me thinking about leftovers.  Writing jobs have leftovers, too — the paths the story tried to take that turned out to be dead ends; the bits of other as-yet-unwritten stories that cropped up in the current project by mistake; the occasional perfectly good, yes-it-really-happened scene that nevertheless had to be excised from the finished text because it slowed things down at a point when they needed to be moving fast, or because it threw unwanted emphasis on something that needed to be kept in the background, or because the book had a firm word count requirement and was already threatening to run long.

But the dead-end paths and the outcroppings of other narratives can often be reworked into fully realized stories in their own right.  In fact, their appearance in a story where they don’t fit can often mean that your subconscious muse is telling you something about what your next project ought to be.  As for those snippets that were removed in the service of the greater good — it used to be, there wasn’t much a writer could do with them except put the pages away in a desk drawer with a sigh of regret, but the internet has helped us with that as it has helped us with so many other things.   Those snippets can now be posted on a novel’s web page as extra treats for faithful readers, or turned into Kickstarter rewards, or compiled into a self-published chapbook and put up for sale by the author.

So don’t throw out those leftovers, any more than you’d throw out a perfectly good half-eaten leg of lamb.

Desk Job

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Sometimes I fantasize about having the ideal desk.  It’s nice and solid, in oak or cherry or some other polished hardwood, and it puts my monitor at just the right height, and it’s got three or four proper-sized drawers that I can put things away in . . . something rather like this one, in fact, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world.

Since I don’t have all the money in the world, I’m still using the same particle-board desk my husband/co-author and I bought as one of a pair in a 2-for-1 sale at K-Mart the year we took up this freelance writing gig.  It’s not even a little bit ergonomic — the computer magazines were only just starting to take up that idea — and it’s ugly as a mud fence plastered with tapoles (to use an idiom of my youth), and so far it has proven damn-near indestructible.

Taking a sledgehammer to it would be cheating.

I tell myself that with a new desk, a proper desk, I would experience a sudden efflorescence of creative enthusiasm.  I know better than that, alas.  The quality of the desk has little or nothing to do with the quality of the writing.  I did a lot of very good work during the five-year span where I had my computer and printer set up on a table in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on the front door — that being the time period when the two younger children had learned how to work the latch on the front door but had not yet attained the discretion necessary to not go out and play in traffic.

Nevertheless, a writer can dream.

The Return of the Intellectual Packrat

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By way of apologia for having been Away From Keyboard for a couple of days, have a couple of nifty research sites.

The Memoirs of Pascal Bonenfant.  The site name notwithstanding, this isn’t actually anybody’s memoirs; rather, it’s a collection of research sources and links for 18th-century social history.  There’s a database of thieves’ cant, and a page with recipes from a period pharmacopoeia (I really want to know what the “Powder of Millepedes” — Take Millepedes prepared 12 grains; Saffron 3 grains; Flower of Benjamin, Salt of Amber, each 2 grains; Ginger 1 grain; Oil of Aniseed 1 drop; Bring all to a Powder — was supposed to be prescribed for), a “List of the Flying Coaches, Stage Coaches, Waggons, and Carriers” going in and out of London in 1721, and a plethora of other fascinating things.

And then there’s the Food Timeline page.  If you want to find out the wholesale price of wheat in Philadelphia in July of 1762 (5.5 shillings the bushel), or the cost of a  Thanksgiving turkey in New Jersey in 1931 (39¢ a pound), this is the place to look.

Because if you really want to write about the past and make it real for your readers, you don’t just want the wars and the politics.  You want the food and the drink and the furniture of everyday life as well.