Link the first: A newly-released on-line archive of images from the French Revolution, done as a partnership between Stanford University and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. There’s an article about the archive here; the bilingual, searchable archive itself is here.
Link the second: Over at John Scalzi’s blog, there’s an open comment thread going on, with writers sharing the most valuable bits of practical craft advice they’ve received or read.
Anthologies, especially in genre fiction, cycle in and out of fashion. At the time when my coauthor and I started writing professionally, they were at the start of a boom phase – our first sale was to the YA anthology Werewolves, edited by Jane Yolen and Martin Greenberg, and we had other anthology sales afterward. As usually happens, though, there came a time when so many anthologies were being published that reader fatigue set in, and then for another decade or so hardly anybody edited original anthologies any more. Now anthologies are coming back in again, and once again we’re selling an occasional short story (we’re novelists; all our short stories are occasional) to those markets.
Setting aside reprint anthologies, which are a different creature, anthologies come in two basic flavors: general and themed. A general anthology is inclusive in its scope – its guidelines don’t get much more restrictive than, say, “original science fiction under 10,000 words.” A themed anthology can be as specific as the editor desires: “hard science fiction between 500-1000 words about broccoli,” or “fantasy novellas or long short stories on feminist themes with an emphasis on nontraditional magic systems.” Themed anthologies can, paradoxically, be a lot easier to write for and sell to than the more open-ended ones. Either you’re the sort of writer for whom 500 words of hard sf focusing on broccoli come naturally to mind, or you’re not – and if you’re not you already know better than to try.
The other two main flavors of anthology are the open anthologies and the closed, or invitational, anthologies. For an open anthology, the editor basically puts up a sign saying “SF Stories About Broccoli Wanted – Apply Within,” and then reads every manuscript that the mailman or the internet brings to him or her and rejects most of them. This is, not surprisingly, a lot of work, and rejecting that many stories can get depressing, so most anthologies are put together from a list of invited authors, or from market listings in a restricted number of venues.
How to get into such an anthology? Well, the usual way is to write a good enough story . . . but before you can do that, you have to know where to send it, and the trick to that is to be in the sort of places where word about such things gets spread about. This is one of the reasons for the existence of professional writers’ mailing lists and on-line forums, and also one of the reasons why writers go to parties at conventions, or hang out in the bar, or talk to other writers at signing sessions or in the dealer’s room. Because if you’re there, and you hear word of an anthology that’s opening up, then you’re in a position to write to the editor and say words to the effect of, “I understand that you’re going to be editing an anthology of hard sf flash fiction about broccoli, and I was wondering if I could submit a story to it.”
Maybe it won’t work; maybe you’ll get a polite brush-off along the lines of “I’d love to see something from you, but unfortunately all the slots are already filled.” But you’re just as likely to get a “Sure, why not?” – and at that point, you’ve just been invited to apply. And while a sale is never guaranteed, you’ll be part of a much much smaller slushpile than the ever-increasing paper and digital stacks of submitted manuscripts over at Rivetty SF.
The next step: working your way up from “and others” to a name on the cover.
Writers have always tended to have a complicated relationship with the tools they use to write. Some of them praise the fluid ease of writing in a fresh bound notebook with a high-quality fountain pen; others insist that only #2 pencils and a legal pad will do. (Lord Dunsany allegedly wrote his stories with a peacock-feather quill pen, but he was the 18th Baron Dunsany and could get away with such things.)
Other writers love new tech. Mark Twain was an early adopter of the typewriter, for example. For a while in the mid-twentieth century, composing directly on the typewriter, instead of just using it to make a fair copy for submission, nevertheless had a faintly non-literary smell – an aroma of hackwork, as it were — in the noses of sensitive readers and critics.
Then along came dedicated word processors, followed shortly by word processing programs running on personal computers, and the people who had been looking down on typewriters switched to looking down on word processors and waxing nostalgic about their old muscle-powered Remingtons and Underwoods.
And so it goes, and keeps on going. Even among the computerati, there are writers who eagerly embrace each new development (Google Docs! Scrivener!) and others who lovingly maintain a vintage PC for the express purpose of running their copy of WordStar or Leading Edge.
Which is all taking the long way around to saying that I’m composing this blog post using Microsoft Live Writer for the first time, and if anything about it looks strange or funky or unexpected . . . well, you’ll know why.
If you’re a long-form writer with a number of stories set in the same fictional milieu, the odds are that at some point or other you’re going to find yourself writing a prequel. (I don’t think the term counts as a neologism any longer, since at least two respected on-line dictionaries vouch for its existence since at least 1972, or possibly as early as 1958.†) Writing primarily short stories isn’t going to get you out from under this particular Sword of Damocles, either, since at some point you may be inspired — or be offered money, which often comes to the same thing — to expand a short story or series of short stories into a novel, or to write an origin story for one of your characters.
At which point you will find yourself engaged in one of the more masochistic pleasures of the writing life, that of retrofitting a backstory.
The big challenge in writing a prequel lies in the necessity of keeping your plot consistent with what’s been said or implied in the existing material, while at the same time writing a story that’s interesting on its own — the latter being, in my opinion, the more important job of the two. Not surprisingly (this is a blog about writing, after all) I have some thoughts about how to go about it.
Thought one: Writing a prequel is, in some ways, like taking off on a road trip with a certain number of must-hit way-points that you can’t ignore, even if your start point and your final destination are left to your discretion. When my co-author and I wrote The Gathering Flame, our prequel novel in the Mageworlds universe, there were really only a handful of such points: a couple of political agreements, two or three military engagements and a couple of daring space exploits, and the birth dates of a couple of children whose relative ages and birth order had been set in the original trilogy. (And it was the kids who gave me the most trouble, believe it or not. The family setup in the trilogy had been established for effective storytelling in the context of those books; for the prequel, I had to go back in time and figure out not just how but why things had worked out that way, in a fictional milieu where “oops!” was a less-than-believable explanation for such things.)
So when you’re contemplating a prequel, it helps to make a list before you start of what your known past facts and must-hit way-points actually are.
Thought two: Not all of your known past facts and way-points are going to be of equal importance. Some of them, in fact, you may have to jettison or flat-out contradict for the sake of creating an effective story this time around. Yes, if you do that, you will probably get letters from readers pointing out your mistakes. Console yourself, in that case, with the thought that you’ve got readers who are paying close enough attention to what you’re saying that they can catch such things. Or you can point out to them that even in contemporary consensus reality, not everything comes with a completely known and consistent backstory, that “exactly what happened” is something that journalists and historians struggle with every day and don’t always come up with definitive answers, and that the bits and pieces of our lives don’t always match up tidily at the edges.
Or, as one of our own fictional characters said, in the (utterly invented, because we made it — and him — up) epigraph to The Gathering Flame: “What you have to realize, son, is that almost all of the people who were there at the time are dead. And everybody who’s still alive is lying to you about something.”
†That would be the on-line OED citation, which alas I cannot verify without purchasing a subscription.
So you’ve promised somebody (or promised yourself, it’s all good) a story, and now you’re stuck?
Try the Cool Bits Story Generator.
A handful of samples:
In Venice, a woman who does the unexpected encounters sailboats as the story begins. As the narrative unfolds, the protagonist meets a tough-as-nails yet likable woman with antiquarian knowledge, and they wind up in an ivy-covered tower with dark passions.
Sounds like one of those buried-historical-secret novels, after the manner of Dan Brown, or Katherine Neville’s The Eight. Or maybe a thriller having to do with art smuggling.
Your story is a romance between a cynical religious practitioner with a secretly soft heart and a retired superhero. The lovers experience secrecy and the texture of warm stone while in Meiji Japan.
If this one isn’t already a manga, it probably ought to be.
This story begins as a flapper investigates a mystery about a bittersweet romance. Clues include the mythic or archetypal coming alive and love transcending limits. The villain is revealed to be a cat lover, and is motivated out of a need for redemption.
This one is clearly a historical detective story somewhere on the border between paranormal and alternate-historical fantasy, and if somebody were to write it I’d read it in a heartbeat.
I love these things.
Internal monologue, that is.
Some writers like to put a character’s internal monologue into italics (represented in MS format by a single underline):
I don’t like the looks of this, he thought. He reached for his radio. Better call for backup.
Other writers prefer to leave the internal monologue in straight unitalicized (aka “roman“) type:
I don’t like the looks of this, he thought. He reached for his radio. Better call for backup.
Which is preferable? It’s dealer’s choice, really, unless you’ve been stuck with a publisher whose house style calls for one or the other. (Most publishers let the author decide, but once in a while you’ll run across one that doesn’t.)
Leaving the internal monologue in roman type is more common — in my admittedly biased observation — in writing that occupies, or at least aspires to occupy, a place on the literary end of the literary/genre continuum. I’m not sure why it should be so. When I’m feeling snarky, I suspect that it’s because clearly setting off internal monologue from authorial narrative makes things easier for the reader, and making things easier for the reader is one of those things that a literary writer is not supposed to do. Art is meant to be wrestled with, and meaning is only worthwhile if the reader has to work for it, and is only intended for those who can win the wrestling match and do the work. If this narrows the prospective audience, so be it; quality, not quantity, is the desideratum.
And of course, there’s no denying the force of custom. If plain roman type was good enough for Laurence Sterne and James Joyce and William Faulkner when they got their stream-of-consciousness on, then it should be good enough for their latter-day literary descendants.
Writers in the genres, meanwhile, were more concerned with getting their intended meaning across to as many readers as possible, and saw no point in letting a useful tool go unused. To the extent that they thought about literature as art, they thought that it wasn’t meant to be treated like a mystery cult where the revelation of truth is reserved for the initiated few, or like the exclusive property of an educated elite; it was meant for everybody, and it was the writer’s job to make it as accessible as possible.
Which side has the right of it? Neither, really; literature needs both approaches. But it helps, in a “know thyself” kind of way, to figure out where on the spectrum you, as an individual writer, happen to stand.
A timely reminder: applications for Viable Paradise XVIII will open on 1 January 2014.
First, the recipe, which is a variation on your basic Alfredo sauce.
Hot and Spicy Alfredo Sauce
Directions
Cook the butter, the pepper flakes and the garlic in a frying pan over low heat until the butter melts. Wait until the garlic turns transparent. Now add the cream and stir well, add 1 cup of the Parmesan cheese and blend. Remove from heat, add Tabasco, cayenne, salt and pepper and stir well.
Toss it over your pasta and add the remaining Parmesan cheese.
As you can see, this begins as a standard Alfredo sauce, but it has hot red pepper added to it in three different forms. In much the same way, a standard plot may be made more complex and interesting by the addition of exciting ingredients — pirates, maybe, or political shenanigans, or the sudden discovery that one of the parties involved in a relationship is not necessarily what they seem to be. What things should be added will depend on the base story, of course; a realistic narrative of suburban angst and adultery, for example, is unlikely to have a plausible reason for the inclusion of pirates (though if such a trick could be carried off, it would be awesome.)
Then we come to the next stage of the recipe, in which we make the hot and spicy pasta Alfredo into a more substantial entrée:
Hot and Spicy Chicken Alfredo
Take about a pound of chicken tenders, or a boneless chicken breast. (I suppose you could use boneless thighs, if you like dark meat, but I tend to save the thighs for more slow-cooked dishes.) Cut the meat up into 1-inch chunks. Put a bit of oil in the pan you’re going to be using for the sauce, and saute the chicken chunks until they’re white clear through. Remove them from the pan, and proceed with the recipe as above. Add the cooked chicken chunks at the end, just before tossing the sauce with the pasta.
By adding the chicken, you’ve made your pasta dish heartier, and more full of protein. (You’ve also stretched one pound or less of chicken to feed several people, if that’s your primary concern.) In the same way, you can make your spiced-up standard plot more substantial by working in some meaty thematic material — the issues the story is thinking and talking about that aren’t the basic plot or the exciting details. And like the cooked chicken, the thematic material needs to be there and waiting before you start messing around with the basic plot (aka the standard sauce) and the exciting details (aka the spices.)
So the question comes up, from the earnest student in the front row of the lecture hall: “Are there specific things that I, as a writer, can do — in terms of practice exercises and the like – to improve the quality of my work?”
And the answer is, yes, there are a few.
Here’s one for starters: Try writing things that are further out toward the edges of your comfort zone, whether in terms of form and style, or in terms of content.
For example, if you don’t like writing in first person (or in second person present tense, or in third person objective, or whatever), you can make a point of writing a short piece or two that way. Likewise, you can try writing angst-ridden noir if you normally turn out lighter pieces; or comforting fluff if you normally go for the 88%-cacao-dark; or a tightly-plotted caper story if your usual product is loosely-plotted character-driven vignettes.
You may surprise yourself and get something publishable out of the exercise. And even if you don’t, you’ll have exercised some new writing muscles.
It certainly looks like it. The Paris Review has interviewed Ursula K. LeGuin.
The interview is worth reading for a couple of different reasons . . . well, actually, at least three.
One is that the interviewer is not somebody from inside the science fiction/fantasy community, so the interview’s questions and answers aren’t the ones that a lifetime of reading interviews in Locus and similar in-group publications has trained us to expect.
Two is that the interviewer is not someone who knows a great deal about science fiction, to put it kindly, and watching LeGuin maneuver diplomatically around the resulting areas of ignorance is a pleasure to behold.
And three, this is Ursula K. LeGuin we’re talking about. She’s always interesting, no matter who’s interviewing her and for what.
Dr. Doyle's Blog 