Tag: books

Thought for the Day

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The shape of a good story in usually implied in all of its parts, including the beginning.

It’s always a good sign when the reader is able to guess at that ultimate shape from reading the first two or three chapters, rather like a paleontologist inferring the shape of a T-Rex from a couple of bones.  Conversely, if the animal as ultimately reconstructed turns out to be wildly different from the one suggested by that first handful of bones, an acute observer may well conclude that something went wrong — either in the final assembly, or in the selection of parts.

Most readers are more acute observers than you might think.  And writing a story whose front end promises something that the rest of the story doesn’t deliver is a prime route to reader disgruntlement.

Mr. Melville Submits a Proposal

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Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth:  Writing a proposal sucks.  You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.

Take heart.  And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:

“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”

This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book.  Consider what it does:   It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.

Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†

Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to.  And if he could, so can we.

†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.

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.”

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.

Peeve of the Day

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Another thing a lot of writers get wrong:  cold.

Film and television writers are particularly bad in this regard, possibly because so many of them live in southern California, where cold is something that you make a day trip to visit and then drive home again.  But they aren’t the only ones.

Cold — true cold — isn’t charming and picturesque.  It’s dangerous and debilitating; it drains your energy and makes you stupid and has no compunction about killing you dead.

A few writers have gotten it right, notably Jack London in “To Build a Fire.” (The fantasy novelist Sean Stewart also got it right, in an elegant homage to London’s work that appears in his novel The Night Watch.)

What He Said.

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I was going to write a post about this:  ‘Libraries Have Had Their Day,’ Says ‘Horrible Histories’ Author.

But then I went on the road for a week, and when I came back the estimable John Scalzi was already on the case:  A Personal History of Libraries.

I can’t help but think that there are two kinds of people who believe that shutting down public libraries is a good idea:  the ones who, not being bookish people themselves, have no idea how important libraries are to people, bookish or otherwise, on limited budgets; and the ones who know exactly how important library access is to such people, and have their own selfish reasons for wanting to deny it to them.

(We need a better class of robber baron for this new Gilded Age of ours.  At least Andrew Carnegie built libraries, instead of trying to tear them down.)

Done

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The novel, that is.  At 4:45 on Friday morning.

Now it’s Saturday, and I’m at Boskone, enjoying the rewards of virtue, which include sleeping last night for eleven hours straight.

I won’t be sending in the novel until around Wednesday, because I have to clean up the formatting first.  By the time I finished it in the wee hours of Friday morning, an entire chapter could have been replaced by the Declaration of Independence and typeset in WingDings, and I wouldn’t have been able to spot it.

If Wishes Were Horses

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Two things I wish that writers wouldn’t do:

Tell readers what, and how, they should think about their books.  Believe me, I understand the impulse.  One of the hardest things to accept, if you’re a writer, is that once your story is out there loose in the world, you have absolutely no control over how other people incorporate it into their own heads. The readers who excoriate you for crimes you had no idea you were committing are bad enough; the ones who really like your books for reasons you find repulsive are even worse; and sometimes the urge to tell everybody that They’re Doing It Wrong becomes well-nigh insurmountable.

Go back and rewrite their earlier works to make them better.   I can understand this impulse, as well.  We all like to think that we’ve improved in our art since we started working at it, and our novice-writer gaucheries can make us wince.  But rewriting one’s early stuff to bring it up to standard doesn’t usually improve it enough to make it worth the loss of the energy and reckless endeavor that often characterize newbie work.  (I know there are things that I tried to do, and at least came close to carrying off, in my early stuff that I wouldn’t attempt to do now because I know how low the odds are for success.)

As for writers who go back and revise their earlier work to bring it more into line with their later political or philosophical convictions . . . they depress me.  Sure, you don’t think that way now, I want to say to them; but an earlier version of you once did.  Trying to bring those thoughts and words around to the current standard always strikes me as like trying to kill that earlier you.

Peeve of the Day

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I don’t like novels or short stories where the author deliberately withholds stuff from the reader.

I’m not talking about mysteries, where part of the fun is in the puzzle and in the timing of the revelations; also, part of the thematic point of most mystery novels — even more than questions of innocence and guilt and justice — is the revelation of truth.  I’m talking about stories where there is something significant about one of the characters, or about some aspect of the general milieu of the story, or about the resolution, that the author clearly knows but doesn’t choose to tell, instead toying with the reveal like a fan dancer in the burlesque.

Stories where the gender of the main character or first person narrator is kept hidden — especially if it’s revealed, gotcha!-fashion, at the end — are a particular irritant as far as I’m concerned.  This, I will admit, is mostly a matter of personal taste, since I have known discriminating readers for whom such stories were like catnip to a Siamese.  And it’s not even an absolute thing with me; I’m quite fond of the mystery novels of the late Sarah Caudwell, who never did reveal the gender of their first-person narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar.  (I always pictured Professor Tamar as looking rather like an anthropomorphic sheep as drawn by Sir John Tenniel for a missing scene from Alice in Wonderland . . . in the absence of data, the human mind does strange things.)  But Caudwell is a case of good writing plus good story trumping almost everything else; but a story that isn’t top-notch in both those areas is going to lose me before it goes very far.

Almost as irritating, where I’m concerned, are stories where the resolution is left open, in “The Lady or the Tiger” fashion, especially when the story seems to be offering the reader a deliberate ambiguity in order to establish some sort of literary street cred.  Again, some people find endings like that to be right down their alley; I’m just not one of them.  Instead, such endings make me cranky and resentful, because I always suspect in my heart that the author knows the true ending and is deliberately holding out on me — I think it’s because, as a writer, I can’t imagine not knowing the true ending of something I’ve written.

The moral of the story, if there is one:  Don’t ever be accidentally ambiguous.  If you’re going to do it, do it on purpose, in the full awareness that you’re probably going to lose some of your audience that way, and in the firm belief that whatever you’re trying to do or say with your story is worth the risk.