Category: Writing

A Handy Trick

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Naming characters is always a hassle – I can’t get mine to settle properly in my head until they’ve been correctly bemonickered – and most writers have their favorite resources for the job.  Baby name books and web sites are always good, especially for tales set in contemporary consensus reality, and if your interest is more historical, sites like the Social Security Administration’s Popular Baby Names page will let you search for popular American names by decade going back as far as the 1880s.  I’m sure that other countries have similar resources; the SSA page just happens to be the one I know about firsthand.

If you’re writing science fiction or fantasy, though, you’ve got problems.  Good science-fictional names, if you’re going to put some thought into them, are part of the worldbuilding:  You have to make some complex calculations about the probable ethnic makeup of your future society, for example, and about possible changes in naming styles (the all-whitebread science-fictional future is, if not yet completely dead, definitely moribund, and a good thing, too; and while it’s not likely that we’re ever going to see a resurgence of multi-word Puritan-style virtue names of the Praise-God Barebones variety, there’s always the off-chance that some future society may produce dimpled tots named Respect-for-the-Rights-of-Others Herrera or Earth-is-not-the-Only-Planet Jones.)

But if you’re writing fantasy, at least of the pseudo-western-medieval variety, there’s at least one good cheap trick out there:   Grab a copy of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and steal from there.  Go right past all the too-familiar major characters, and head for the ranks of (sometimes literal) spear-carriers, of which there are a good plenty.  This will give you lots of names which look vaguely western-medieval without belonging to any specific name-hoard, and which can usually be sounded out and pronounced by the average reader.

Today’s Peeve…

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…is a spelling peeve:  the confusing duo of capital and capitol.

Capitol is the building: The state capitol is an imposing granite structure with a golden dome.

Capital is the city that’s the seat of government for a country or state or similar region.  The paperwork needs to be sent to the state capital.

Capital is also the spelling for just about every use of the word that doesn’t refer to the big building with the fancy dome.  Usually, these words have something to do with being at the top or the head of something:  capital ships are the most important ones in the fleet; capital funds and assets are the ones you start with; capital crimes are the ones that you could lose your head over; and so forth.

As for the fact that the state capitol is usually in the state capital . . . these things are sent to test us, and to remind us that while the spellchecker may be our good friend, it’s not necessarily our most reliable friend.

In Praise of the Naïve Reader

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Critics often speak, somewhat condescendingly, of the “naïve reader” – one who doesn’t have the benefit of an awareness of literary history, or of training in criticism and literary theory, or of an extensive knowledge of literature as an art form.  (In other words, a reader who isn’t a critic or a scholar, but a common-or-garden reader for pleasure.  Joe Six-Pack, or his sister Jane, spending their beer or appletini money on a book instead.)

I’ll admit, there’s a pleasure to be had in writing for an audience who knows all the inside baseball of the thing.  I’ve done it myself, at least once.  The short story “A Death in the Working” (originally published in Murder by Magic, now available in Two from the Mageworlds) plays with three different sets of inside knowledge:  the established canon of the space opera series I co-wrote with my husband James D. Macdonald, the traditions of the Golden Age country-house mystery story, and (the part I had the most fun with) the tone and format of various scholarly editions of literary works, especially those in the Methuen Old English Library, where the footnotes would often take up more room on the page than the actual text.

Nevertheless, the most gratifying comment I ever got on the story wasn’t an appreciation of all that insider geekery; it came from a reader who said that they’d like to read more stories about my fictional detective and his cases.  (I sometimes toy with the idea of taking that reader up on their request; but science-fiction/fantasy mystery novels are enough of a niche market that I don’t know if the gain would repay the effort.)

When I think of naïve readers, I also think of the fellow grad student in Old English who admitted to translating the final section of Beowulf with tears in her eyes, because in all her survey courses and the like they’d only read the first part of the poem, and so she didn’t know that – to put it in ROT-13 just in case anybody reading this is in a similar position — Orbjhys trgf xvyyrq ol gur qentba va gur raq. Or I think of a friend’s account of watching a performance of King Lear a few seats away from an older couple who had clearly never encountered the play at all before, who reacted to the blinding of Gloucester with profound shock and dismay.  Or I think about my great-uncle Jake, a huntin’, fishin’ good old boy from Arkansas – albeit one with a college education – who once said to his medievalist great-niece, “That Beowulf . . . he was a mighty hunter.”

Art is about getting people where they live, and a naïve reader will provide you with a response that’s unmediated by other people’s expectations of how they should react and feel.  It’s all very well to be the critics’ darling, but treasure your naïve readers as well . . . they will tell you a different kind of truth.

One More Day

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Tomorrow – 15 June 2014 – is the last day to apply for this year’s Viable Paradise Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop.

So if you’ve been wavering back and forth all spring and part of the summer on whether or not to apply, it’s time to pull up your socks, format your manuscript, and get in that application before the deadline.

The jellyfish are calling . . . ask not for whom the lighthouse blinks; it blinks for thee.

Every Writer’s Nightmare

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The recent news out of Wisconsin is the sort of thing that keeps writers awake at night . . . the unhappy knowledge that once we’ve turned our fiction loose into the wild, we have absolutely no control over what other people may do with it.

Oh, we’ve got a certain limited amount of control over – or at least a fighting chance at controlling – other people’s attempts to make money from it, but the money isn’t where we get the real nightmare stuff.  The nightmares come from the thought that there’s no way a writer can stop it if somebody out there decides to like their work for all the wrong reasons – like Charles Manson liked the Beatles, or like those two girls in Wisconsin liked the manufactured urban legend of the Slender Man.

Nor does it help us to resolve to be good citizens and not write the sort of stuff that might cause other people to do bad things, because there’s never any way to tell what story might or might not interact with the contents of somebody else’s head in a toxic fashion.  Our cautionary dystopia may end up mirroring somebody else’s secret ideal; our careful exploration of the depths of the human psyche may end up validating somebody else’s long-suppressed and destructive rage.

And those are the cases that we know might get risky.  When somebody gravely and dangerously misreads something that we intended to be a bit of entertaining fluff or an adventurous romp, it makes us wonder why on earth we picked this of all ways to pursue art and earn a living, instead of going out on a lobster boat or washing dishes in Joe’s Open-All-Night Diner.

I don’t know of a solution to this problem.  All I can think of to say is, write what you want and write what you must – but be aware that you can’t always control the consequences.

A Friendly Reminder

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Applications for this year’s Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop close on June 15th.

VP is a one-week residential workshop, held annually in the autumn on Martha’s Vineyard – eight instructors and twenty-four students, all in it together for the whole week.  (Why one week?  Because not everybody who wants and needs the workshop experience is at a point in their lives where they can spare six weeks or a month away from whatever it is that they normally do with their time.  But just about anybody can manage to hack free a week if they absolutely have to.)

We’re also the workshop that features lighthouses and (the weather permitting) luminescent jellyfish.

Imposter Syndrome, in Full Cry

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To be a writer is to have imposter syndrome.

It’s not surprising, really.  Our vocation, and often our livelihood, depends upon convincing people whom we will most likely never meet to put credence in things which we have cobbled together out of our experiences and the experiences of others (if we have not, in the case of us genre romancers, made them up out of whole cloth – having first also made up the cloth as well.)  Small wonder, then, that we tend to lie awake in the grey hours before dawn, fretting that this time will be the time when our knack fails us, and the readers will see us for the shameless fakers that we are.

(The Anglo-Saxons had a word for that sort of grim insomnia: uht-ceare, meaning “the care or worry that comes in the period just before dawn,” or as a modern-day shrink might put it, “pre-dawn anxiety.”  Smart people, those Anglo-Saxons.)

This is why literary writers worry that they are writing for a narrow and diminishing audience, and their works will never find the wider recognition that serious writers got in times past; and why writers of popular and genre fiction worry that nobody is ever going to see anything in their work except the surface of it, and all their thematic and, yes, artistic concerns will go forever unnoticed and unappreciated; and all writers, everywhere, worry about money.

(This post brought to you by the short story rejection that arrived in yesterday’s e-mail, and by the concomitant necessity to nerve myself up for picking another potential market and sending it out again.)

Weather, Incoming

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Or perhaps not.

Today’s promised thunderstorms failed to materialize, leaving us with only high humidity, a falling barometer, and that waiting-for-the-shoe-to-drop feeling.

The resulting general disgruntlement reminded me of one of the classic errors of fiction writing, one almost guaranteed to induce a similar disgruntlement in the reader:  the failure to deliver on a promised thunderstorm.

This is how it goes (or doesn’t go.)  You have the reader, trustingly reading along.  You have your foreshadowings of trouble to come, draped all over the plot in a shadowy manner.  You have Chekov’s Gun, displayed in a place of honor above the mantelpiece.  You have your dramatic tension, wound up tight.  And then—

Nothing happens.  The foreshadowed conflicts fail to materialize – or worse, they are sidestepped or handwaved away.  Chekov’s Gun remains untouched by human (or inhuman) hands, and its presence in the story turns out to be merely ornamental after all.  And all that carefully-built dramatic tension fizzles out like a damp firecracker.

At that point, you’re left with a severely disgruntled reader, one who was promised thunderstorms and didn’t get them.

Peeve of the Day

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“Waive” and “wave”, people.

To waive something is to refrain from using or insisting on it.  A speaker can choose to waive his or her customary fee for a good cause; a school may choose to waive a particular entrance requirement for an otherwise promising applicant.

To wave something, on the other hand, is to float, shake, or move it back and forth.  The homecoming queen on the parade float will wave her hand at the crowd; the kids at the Fourth of July picnic will wave sparklers in the air.  (Or at least, they used to wave them.  For all I know, juvenile sparkler-waving is verboten these days in the name of safety.)

Not the same word.  And the spell-checker won’t help you – you’ll have to check for this one with your own two eyes.

Then I’ll Write it Myself, Said the Little Red Hen

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There are all sorts of different reasons for writing, some of them more refined and elevated than others.  Sometimes the impetus comes in the form of a book laid aside (perhaps vigorously) in disgust, as the writer says, “Dammit, I  could write a better book than than one!” and then goes and does just that.

At other times, the book begins with a hunger for something – a plot twist, a story element, a certain flavor to the prose, a particular slantwise way of looking at the subject matter – that none of the books in the reader’s chosen genre has been able to provide.  Lots of readers experience this hunger; a few of them go on to address it by telling their own stories to satisfy the desire.  “I wrote the book I wanted to read that nobody else was writing” is a sentiment often found in authorial memoirs and interviews.

Which reminds me of the time when I decided I wanted a pork pie like the one that sometimes showed up as a lunchtime special down at Howard’s Restaurant.  This was a pork pie of the French Canadian, not the English, variety, because the small New Hampshire town I live in is about fifteen minutes south of Quebec and the local foodways reflect this sometimes.  Because this is the twenty-first century, I turned to the internet for help – and discovered (to nobody’s surprise, I’m sure) not just one, but dozens of recipes, all slightly different.  I ended up conflating several different recipes, and tweaking the result – much as a writer tweaks story elements and plot lines – until I got the dish and the flavor I wanted.

French-Canadian Pork Pie

Ingredients:

  • Pie crust sufficient for a two-crust pie (I used pre-made, but if you’ve got a light hand for pastry and the patience to go with it, you could make your own.  Sources I’ve read say that for the ultra-traditional, a lard-based pastry is the way to go; I’ve never bothered.)
  • 2 large yellow onions, chopped fine (I ran mine through the food processor)
  • 1.5 pounds ground pork
  • 3 medium-to-large white potatoes, cooked (you could boil them; I steamed them) and coarsely mashed
  • 1 cup beef stock (I used stock base from a jar and made it up double strength)
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1/2 teaspoon allspice
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 1/4 teaspoon thyme
  • dash of nutmeg
  • dash of cinnamon
  • two or three grindings of black pepper (the stock was sufficiently salty that I didn’t bother with adding more salt.)

Directions

Cook the ground pork and the chopped onions together in a frying pan until the pork isn’t pink any longer.  Drain off the fat.

Add the pork and onion mixture to the mashed cooked potatoes and mix them up.

Then add the beef stock, the beaten egg, and the spices, and mix them up some more.

Have your pie pan ready with the bottom crust in place.  Put in the filling.  If you’ve got a pie bird, this is a good time to get it into place.  Put on the top crust, and crimp it down.  Cut slits in the top to facilitate the escape of steam.  (At this point, I suppose one could do one or another of the various things one does with egg or milk to put a glaze onto the crust; again, I didn’t bother.)

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 350 and bake 45 minutes more.  (It’s probably a good idea to put a foil-lined baking sheet on the rack below, in case of spillover.)

When it’s done, remove from the oven, let cool for 10-15 minutes, then serve.

Given that Howard’s Restaurant is now closed, and also is in danger of collapsing into the river, it’s a good thing I worked out the recipe for myself.