The Iceberg Theory

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It’s fairly common knowledge that most of an iceberg – seven-eighths is the usual number – is underwater, out of sight to all but the denizens of the deep.  What’s less common knowledge is that most of a piece of fiction is likewise out of sight to everyone but the author.

Case in point:  a short story Jim Macdonald and I finished not too long ago.  Before I could do my part of the work on it, I ended up researching everything from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to early-twentieth century spiritualists in Denver, Colorado and using the results to construct an entire past history for a particular character.

And then I didn’t put any of it into the actual story, because none of it was stuff that the readers needed to know.  It was stuff I needed to know, which is a different thing.

This is also one of the ways that a short story can differ from a novel.  If we’d been writing a novel using the same general theme and ideas, all of that character history might have become a major plot thread.  This is because a novel can do more than one thing at a time (which is why writing a novel sometimes feels like trying to juggle jellyfish) but a short story only has the room and the time to do one thing, and whatever isn’t directly relevant to that one thing needs to be uprooted without mercy.  If you can’t uproot it without destroying the entire structure in the process, you probably don’t have a short story at all.

(If it isn’t a short story, but you’re certain in your heart and in your bones that it isn’t a novel, then you’ve probably got a novella on your hands, and an entirely different set of writing problems.  But that’s a post for another time.)

A Writer’s Mind is a Strange, Strange Place

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Last night I dreamed I was at a science fiction convention, and was trying (as one does) to juggle prepping for my final panel of the con, packing up and checking out before the hotel deadline, and finding my co-author to make certain that he had all of his packing done so that I didn’t have to do it for him in a tearing hurry and risk losing something crucial.

Which would have made for a simple, if boring, dream, except for the point where I suddenly discovered that I had left all my clothes someplace else — as is usually the case with such dreams, my mind didn’t supply a further explanation, just bam! naked — and had to make my way back to my hotel room on the eleventh floor, and presumably to some new clothes, with nothing to preserve my modesty but a large crockpot which I was carrying in front of me like a shield.

No, my mind didn’t supply an explanation for the crockpot, either.

And did I mention the elevator was being wonky? It kept dropping me off at every floor but #11, no matter what button I pushed, including the floor which was full of actors and musicians rehearsing a musical based on the life of Theodore Roosevelt.

And while it may or may not say something about my subconscious, it definitely says something about my sense of priorities that during the whole dream, my main worry wasn’t the lack of clothes or the looming check-out time, but whether or not I had prepped adequately for that final panel.

You Should Probably Go Read This

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Especially if you’re active, or intend or hope to be active, in the greater science fiction/fantasy writing community:  sf writer Laura J. Mixon (aka Morgan J. Locke) provides an exhaustive investigation and analysis of the work – if that’s the appropriate word – of a “new, young” writer who turns out to be a well-known internet troll with a long-term record of personal attacks and community destruction.

(No, I’m not giving that person’s name(s) here; I have no desire to give them any more Googlejuice, or to set myself up as a target for somebody to punch full of holes.  But the blog post at the link will provide.)

As far as writing advice and philosophy go, two associated points that are more directly in line with the concerns of this blog:

First, this person’s personality and their pattern of bad behavior do not stop them from being a good writer.  Even a cursory look at the history of world literature should suffice to demonstrate that the gift of being a good writer and the gift of being a good person come in two separate baskets, and it doesn’t always happen that an individual gets handed both.

Second, it behooves all of us to be careful and charitable about what we say to and about our readers and our colleagues, because the field is close-knit (not to say incestuous), and the same faces will keep turning up around us in different contexts as the years go by.  And these days, the internet is forever; somebody will always have saved the emails/kept the screencaps, and the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient, eventually will out.

‘Tis the Season

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NaNoWriMo season, that is.

And if it’s NaNoWriMo today, then it’ll be the winter solstice and all its associated holidays tomorrow, at least in the northern hemisphere.

As I’ve done before, I’m offering a seasonal gift for the writer in your life:  Purchase a gift certificate for a round of my editorial services for them any time between now and the 24th of December, and they can redeem that certificate later at the time of their choice.  I’ll even throw in a snazzy PDF gift certificate form that you can print out and put into an envelope with a bright red bow on it, if such should be your desire.

Sounding Brass and Clanking Symbols

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To a lot of readers, literary symbolism is that thing in high school English class that the teacher went on and on about instead of talking about the story.  Then some of them turn into writers, and come to the understanding that literary symbolism isn’t some sort of academic game of  “Gotcha!” – it’s just another tool in the toolbox, a way of deepening and enriching the theme of the story without having to take the reader’s attention away from the plot and the setting and the characters.

Sometimes the gun over the mantelpiece literally goes off in the third act.  And sometimes the gun over the mantelpiece is there to keep the reader aware of something else in the story that goes off in the third act instead.  That second gun is a symbol.

There are two sorts of symbols.  One sort consists of symbols drawn from several thousand years of human culture – mostly Western culture, for reasons having to do with imperialism, colonialism, the established literary and artistic canon as set forth in freshman-year survey classes, and the fact that if you’re reading this blog, then English is at least one of your secondary languages.  The other sort are drawn from the writer’s own mind and are hand-made on purpose for a particular project:  the billboard with the picture of the eyeglasses in The Great Gatsby, the scent of honeysuckle in The Sound and the Fury.

The primary risk involved in deploying the first sort of symbol is that of misunderstanding.  The audience for our work grows more global every day, and there is no guarantee that the reader’s load of cultural baggage is the same as the one the writer brought to the story.  There’s no telling what references are going to leave a non-native-English-speaker in a position similar to that of a college freshman somewhere in Iowa struggling with Crime and Punishment in translation, and having to rely on the introduction and the footnotes to make sense of the social implications of all those first names, last names, patronymics, and multiple layers of nicknames, and who calls who what when.

A secondary risk associated with the use of established cultural symbols is that they can change meaning over time, or across distance, and the world is not always kind enough to post warnings when you’re going over one of those borders.  A fairly dramatic case in point, of course, is the swastika, which prior to the 1930s was known in a number of world traditions as a good-luck symbol – Kipling employed it in his bookplates and on the bindings of his books until 1935, as an homage to his roots in British India, for example; it also appears in prehistoric petroglyphs (drawings and symbols on rock) in the North American Southwest.  By the end of the second World War, however, the former good-luck symbol had acquired such a burden of negative association that it has been effectively desecrated for good in the minds of Western audiences.  A writer coming from one of the world traditions where the swastika has retained a good portion of its former meaning is going to have a hard time making a case for its use, no matter how benign their intent may be.

For the second sort of symbol – the handmade-for-the-occasion kind – the primary risk is that of obscurity.  Even a reader from the same time and place as the writer is not going to have access to the inside of the writer’s head, or to the writer’s private stock of significant images.  The writer has to work the meaning of the symbol into the very story whose meaning the symbol is intended to explicate or reinforce, which is a task not much different from crossing a deep ravine by means of a bridge which you’re building beneath you as you go across.  The fact that writers do it all the time, and that readers get the intended meaning more often than not (even if they don’t have the critical vocabulary to explicate it later), is in fact a tribute to the collective intelligence of all of us, writers and readers alike.

I don’t have any words of wisdom about secret techniques for making this part of the writing job any easier . . . just an acknowledgement that it really is hard work, and full of pitfalls and unexploded land mines, but that it’s one of the things that, if you carry it off, will give your story that sense of extra layers beneath the surface which can lift it above the other submissions in an editor’s stack.

Where I’m Going to be This Weekend

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I’m going to be at the La Belle Winery in Amherst, New Hampshire, participating in a short fiction slam with other former students and instructors of the Odyssey Writer’s Workshop. (Jim Macdonald and I were guest instructors there, once upon a time.)

I’ve never participated in a slam before (group readings at conventions and the like, yes, but that was within the tribe, as it were) and certainly never one at a winery.

This should be fun.  If you’re in or around Amherst NH this weekend with $25 burning a hole in your pocket ($15 if you’re a student; $10 if you’re a teenager), you might think of stopping by.

Today’s Cranky Observation

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If ever I needed to present any evidence that this blog post by Matthew Yglesias was mindboggling in its sheer wrong-headedness, this quote alone would do the trick:

Transforming a writer’s words into a readable e-book product can be done with a combination of software and a minimal amount of training.

It appears that even noted bloggers on politics and economics aren’t exceptions to the widespread belief that novels aren’t so much made objects as they are the naturally-occurring fruit of the fiction tree.

There are a whole lot of things that have to happen to an author’s manuscript before the printer, or the e-book producer, ever gets hold of it, and surprise, all of these things involve the services of people who expect to get paid for their labor.  Yes, the author could do these things him-or-herself,  or could hire other people to do them for him/her – but authors generally have other things to do with their money (such as eating, or paying the internet bill), and other things to do with their time (such as writing more books.)

Maybe some things could be better for authors than, in the current scheme of things, they are . . . but improving the lot of authors by bringing down traditional publishing is a bit like improving the lot of coal miners by closing down all the mines.

Farewell to the Island

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vpxiGayHead Light

 

 

 

The Viable Paradise workshop is over for another year.  We had writing and music and pancakes and jellyfish and a sky full of stars.  (Also, if you were me, lobster tacos at the Lookout restaurant, and I just have to say, that was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted done to a lobster.)

The photo, by the way, is of the Gay Head Lighthouse on the Cliffs of Aquinnah — one of the five lighthouses on the island.  (The others are East Chop, West Chop, Edgartown, and Cape Pogue.) It’s called “Gay Head” because the headland there is a multi-hued clay cliff.  Obligatory literature reference:  The harpooneer Tashtego, in Moby-Dick, was a Native American from Gay Head.

If you wanted to apply to VP this year and couldn’t make it, next year’s applications open on 1 January 2015.

Busy busy busy

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If posting is kind of sparse for a week or so, it’ll  because Jim Macdonald and I are down on Martha’s Vineyard, where we’ll be teaching at the Viable Paradise sf/fantasy writer’s workshop.

As usual, we expect to learn as much as we teach.  There’s something about hanging out with a bunch of fellow writers and talking about technique and craft and what Edward Gorey so aptly referred to as “the unspeakable horror of the literary life” that works that way.

Of Course It’s a Good Post; After All, I Agree with It

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Jonathan Owen, over at Arrant Pedantry, on twelve common mistakes made by people who write about grammatical mistakes.

Fair warning, for those who want it:  Like most scholars of linguistics, he’s a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist.  (As the header of this post suggests, so am I.)  If descriptive grammar is the sort of thing that makes your milk of human kindness go all sour and curdled, you probably don’t want to go there.