Author: drdoyleeditorial

While I’m Discoursing on Trivia

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I’d just like to say that I find the use of the European-style initial-dash method of dialogue punctuation by writers of English-language fiction to be pretentious in the extreme. It contributes no extra meaning to the text itself; it’s present solely as a signifier that the work in question is — despite the presence of possible overt genre clues to the contrary — meant to be read as serious literature.

Not that I’ve got any firm opinions on the subject, or anything.

(It also makes me feel like the characters aren’t actually talking loudly enough to be heard — instead, they’re standing somewhere just out of earshot and muttering.)

The Research Thing Again

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Yesterday I brought up the necessity of doing research for fantasy novels.  So the question then arises:  If you’re making up everything including the world and the cultures that people it, where do you go for research and what do you do research on?

Well, if you’re doing high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery or anything set in a pre-industrial world, then you need to do some reading on pre-industrial societies in general.  The easy way out is to take one particular society and base yours on that one, with perhaps a certain amount of cosmetic removal of the obvious serial numbers.  But as Murphy’s Laws of Combat remind us, “The easy way is always mined.”  In this case, the minefield is labeled “cultural appropriation”, and you want to avoid it — even if you don’t care about the ethical issues involved, it’s still bad art.  Better in the long run to do enough reading and research that you’re able to make stuff up without having to steal things in wholesale lots.

(If you’re writing historical fantasy, or alternate-historical fantasy, or steampunk, the sort of stuff you’ll need to research is different, but the need for it doesn’t go away.  At various times I’ve found myself looking up Victorian underwear, Renaissance typographers, and the name of the train line running from Portsmouth to London in 1863 . . . all for the same book.)

If you’re interested in some starting points for fantasy research, you can find a list of suggestions here.

Common Errors of Fantasy, Transportation Division

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Horses are not motorcycles.

If your protagonist’s interactions with his/her gallant steed could equally well (with a change of costume) be interactions with his/her Harley-Davidson, then you have a problem.

If you don’t feel comfortable writing the horse stuff, but are dealing with a fictional milieu where horsepower is what you’ve got, then either do the research (as I’ve said here before, horse people are, taken as a group, glad to be helpful in this regard) or keep your characters indoors and on foot as much as possible.

While you’re at it, take a moment to consider whether or not the horses-as-motorcycles issue might be symptomatic of a larger problem with your story.  Pre-industrial societies are different from modern ones, even if they’re entirely imaginary, and it takes doing the research (again) to get them right.

Across the Great Divide

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 4 Comments

I’m talking about the barrier between “literary” and “genre” fiction — and the quotes are deliberate, because I consider the distinction, and the barrier, to be an essentially artificial one.

The way it works, published fiction in the English-speaking world (and maybe elsewhere, for all I know, but it’s not a subject upon which I have the authority to speak) divides itself roughly into three parts.  First, you have literary fiction — the books that are reviewed in the literary supplements of national newspapers, that win the major literary prizes, that garner their authors speaking engagements and writer-in-residence posts at big-name universities.  Most of this is mimetic realism, which is to say it is set in and depicts the world as we have agreed to believe it is; occasionally it detours into things like magical realism or surrealism, but mostly it leaves that sort of thing to writers who — while they may write in English — aren’t themselves English or American.  The literary fiction that makes the news and wins the prizes is usually quite good (one of the most useful things I learned on the way to a Ph.D. in English was how to recognize a well-written example of something I didn’t particularly like); I’m not sure what the literary establishment does with the ninety percent that isn’t.  Maybe it’s taken out behind the library and quietly buried in a shallow grave?

Then you have popular commercial fiction, the stuff that’s never going to win its author any big serious awards, but can sometimes earn huge pots of money.  Most of this is also set in present-day consensus reality, only with the dial turned up to eleven.  These are the books that get reviewed in job lots under the header “summer beach reading” or the like; they’re the ones that turn up on the paperback shelves in airport bookstores.  On the high end, they aspire to crossing over into the literary division, but — like social climbers hoping to get invited to the better parties — this seldom works.  The writers of popular commercial fiction are supposed to be content with their money and know their place.

On the low end, popular commercial fiction starts peeling off into the beginnings of genre — chick lit, technothrillers, suspense, and so forth.  But what most readers and writers consider to be genre lit are the things that have their own publishing houses, or their own lines at major publishers:  mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction.  Westerns used to be a genre, but over the past few decades they’ve retreated back into historical fiction, and from there a few have even moved over into literary.  (Historical fiction has always had an easier time crossing the border than some of the other genres; I’m not sure why.)  Nurse novels are for all intents and purposes extinct.  And so forth.  Genre lit doesn’t make the kind of big money that popular commercial fiction can; and it sure as heck doesn’t get the respect that literary fiction commands.

Why on earth, then, does anybody write genre fiction?  For love, in some cases; for fun, in others.  And because the most exciting place to work, in the landscape of literary creation, is outside the walls of literary respectability, because that’s always been where the excitement starts.

Other People’s Endings

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When it comes to works in a series — novels, films, television, it doesn’t matter which — I like playing the how-would-I-end-this game.  It’s the fiction-writing equivalent of that improvisational drama exercise where you have to construct a skit around four or five random objects drawn from a grab bag (an argyle sock, a popsicle stick, an outdated guidebook to Tblisi on Five Dollars a Day, and a fishing lure with the hook snipped off…you have ten minutes to brainstorm with your group and then we’ll begin) –the idea is to get from where you are to an acceptable victory condition in five moves or less.

It’s an amusing game; but while I’m playing it I have to keep a firm grasp on the fact that the story I’m ending in my head is, despite any surface resemblances, a different story than the one the author is ending.

Another Thing I Don’t Miss at All

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True fact: writers used to trade tips for freshening up a typed manuscript that had been out and back a few times without finding a home. An electric iron set on “warm” was sometimes involved.

The first time I added the words “please consider this a disposable manuscript” to a cover letter, I felt a beautiful warm God-I-love-technology glow.

I expect that the first writer to send out a typed story for submission felt the same way, because if typing up a story was a drag, making a fair copy by hand using pen and paper must have been a thousand times worse.

The One-Third Principle

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On the days when I’m wearing my editor hat, I write revision letters.  On the days when I’m wearing my writer hat, sometimes I have to read them — and having read them, have to do something about them.

On those days, I spend a lot of time dealing with what I think of as the one-third principle of editorial commentary.  The way it works is this:

In any given set of editorial comments, roughly one third of them are going to inspire sentiments along the lines of “Oh, thank God you caught that before I ended up looking like an idiot in public!” or “Yes, that is absolutely true and insightful and every writer should be so fortunate as to have someone like you for an editor!”

Another third of the commentary is going to cause a reaction more along the lines of “Well, maybe . . . I’m not saying that I buy it, but it isn’t worth arguing over, either.  I might as well save my energy and make the changes.”

And the final third of the commentary is going to be the cause of neck-cracking double-takes and exclamations of “Say what?!” and “Over my dead body am I changing that!”  Which is, of course, where the saved energy  gained by not arguing over the middle third ends up getting spent.

When I put my editorial hat back on, I try to remember these things.

Tristram Shandy Saves the World

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 3 Comments

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.