Tag: books

The Fire in Fantasy Rant

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In honor of the first day of December, a few words on a subject near to my heart (or to my chilly feet and fingers, anyhow):

One of the persistent errors of cheap genre fantasy (along with horses that are really motorcycles and ships that have late 19th-century rigging and construction in an early-medieval environment) is a complete unawareness of how complicated a process heating with wood actually is.  The way fantasy characters build and light fires in the mere blink of a subordinate clause, you’d think they were using gas logs or an electric space heater.  What’s worse, once the fire is going nobody pays it a bit of attention thereafter.

Well, the first twelve years we lived in our current house, we heated it by means of a wood-burning furnace lurking like Moloch down in the basement, and I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work that way.  Even with the aid of matches and butane-powered firestarters and similar modern innovations, building a fire is still a fiddly process, involving a lot of messing around with tinder and kindling and carefully putting two or three bigger sticks on top of the resulting tiny blaze — which just went out, so you have to start over with the tinder and kindling and then the two or three bigger sticks again — and then you have to keep the smaller sticks going until the bigger ones catch fire, and then you can start putting on some serious logs and if you’re careful and put the structure together right the first time the logs won’t crush the whole thing and snuff it out — and God help you if you’ve got wet or green wood, because then the whole process is going to take twice as long and put out only half as much heat.

And once the fire’s actually going you have to keep feeding it more logs at regular intervals, and — especially in an open fireplace — keep rearranging the logs so that they’ll burn better, not to mention periodically clearing out the ashes. (Which in a pre-modern society would be saved for soapmaking and other uses, but which these days are a pure nuisance to get rid of.)

A wizard with a reliable fire-starting spell could probably eat for free at any kitchen table in the kingdom.  Especially if he had a reliable flea-and-bedbug-eradicator in his other pocket.

Causes of Reader Disgruntlement: an Intermittent Series

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(“Intermittent” meaning, “I’ll deal with them as I think of them.”)

We will assume, for the moment, that you don’t want your readers disgruntled; that you want to keep them pleased with your work so that they will, you hope, keep wanting more of it.  I will grant that there are writers whose goal, at least for a particular piece of writing, is something other than pleasing the reader — the desired effect may be a justifiable anger at the system, or a fuller understanding of the futility of it, or something else along that line — but for the purposes of this blog I’m assuming a less rarefied, but more common, goal.

One of the primary causes of reader disgruntlement is simply this:  The reader feels that the author has not fulfilled the implied promises he or she made at the start of the story.

For an example, let us consider a popular novel in the romance genre.  I’m using romance as an example not because I have anything against romance novels — far from it; I read them even though I don’t have the knack of writing them — but because a typical romance novel is as formal in its structure as a sonnet.  There will be A Heroine; there will be A Hero; the primary action of the novel will involve their relationship, its Trials and Misunderstandings and Ultimate Consummation (with all-out steamy sex or with a single significant kiss, depending upon the overall hotness level of the text); and there will be a Happily Ever After.  A story that lacks one of these things may be a failed romance novel, or it may be something that only looks on the surface like a romance novel — but readers who picked it up and read it in the understanding that what they were getting actually was a romance novel are not going to be pleased.

They will, in fact, be severely disgruntled.

It’s possible, of course, that the author of the story intended to subvert the romance paradigm in exactly that manner — but the intended audience in that case is not the community of romance readers, but the community of readers who derive pleasure from subverted or inverted or otherwise tinkered-with paradigms.  (Who can get just as disgruntled if they’re promised a subversive experience and don’t actually get one.)  Someone who’s been promised a steak doesn’t want artfully manipulated tofu, any more than a committed vegetarian wants to be slipped a piece of meat unawares.

About the only way a writer can get away with not delivering what was, by implication, promised is by giving the reader something even better — and not just any something even better, but the kind of something better than a reader who had his or her mouth set for the original dish is also going to like.

(Nobody ever said this job was going to be easy.)

 

Another Item from the Department of Nifty Stuff

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More research gold — the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put a bunch of its publications up on the ‘net for on-line reading, PDF download, or print-on-demand.

All sorts of books are available: titles like The Armored Horse in Europe, 1480–1620 or Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color or History of Russian Costume from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Century, to name just a few.

Man, I love the internet.  Time was, you’d have to go hit a major research library (if not travel all the way to New York) to get some of this stuff.

Uphill.  In the snow.  Both ways.

Why Movie Novelizations Tend to Suck

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Not all of them do, of course; nevertheless, when it comes to novelizations, suckitude is the way to bet.  Most of the time, though, it isn’t really (or at least, not entirely) the writer’s fault.

Reason number one:  The writer probably didn’t have that much time to work in.  The publisher wants the book to come out at the same time as the movie, and the studio doesn’t make the book deal until fairly late in the game (because in the grand Hollywood scheme of things, the novel tie-in is roughly as important as the Halloween costume and lunchbox rights.  Or maybe less.)  This leaves the writer facing the directive, “We don’t want it good.  We want it Tuesday.”

Reason number two:  The writer probably didn’t get a copy of the actual movie to watch before writing the novelization.  The studio doesn’t give those out to just anybody, and novelists aren’t even anybody.  The writer would have gotten a copy of the screenplay for the movie; if the writer was lucky, it would even have been the version of the screenplay that actually got filmed, and not some earlier — and superseded — version.

Reason number three:  The novelizer has to please not only his or her editor at the publishing house, but also the person at the movie studio who’s in charge of maintaining consistency and creative control.  This effectively prevents the writer from doing anything innovative or unusual with the material.

Reason number four:  A screenplay is a bare bone to make a good soup with.  It’ll run, typically, about 120 pages, of which a lot is white space.  A knock-down brawl or an epic swashbuckling chandelier-swinging duel may be set down on the page as just “They fight” — presumably on the grounds that the second unit director is going to be handling that sequence and will have his own ideas.  (The novelizers will count themselves lucky if the chandelier bit gets a mention, because viewers of the movie are going to remember it, and will complain if it doesn’t turn up in the novel.)  In any case, the fictional form that matches most closely a film in length isn’t the novel, it’s the short story or novella; but you don’t see novella-length tie-ins crowding the bookstores.  If an author has been charged with making an 80K or even 120K novel out of a standard-weight screenplay, and if he or she isn’t going to be allowed to make up additional story material to fill things out, then the only alternative left is going to be shameless padding.

So the next time you’re reading a novelization that isn’t one of the rare handful of actually pretty good ones, pause a moment and spare a kindly thought for the writer who strove to give the publisher and the movie studio the very best novel that they could get by Tuesday.

A Literary Blast from the Past

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To be specific, it’s the original contract between Harper&Brothers — one of the ancestor firms of current publisher HarperCollins — and Herman Melville for Moby-Dick.

Publishing contracts haven’t changed all that much since then; they’ve just gotten longer and more complex.  Melville, wisely, had representation, in the person of his-brother-the-lawyer.  (Literary agents in the modern sense — if Wikipedia is to be believed — didn’t become common until the 1880’s, and Moby-Dick was published in 1851.)

Short Takes

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Everybody knows that in the history of English prose fiction, there are important authors you shouldn’t miss.  Unfortunately, some of those important authors wrote mostly “damned, thick, square books” (as the Duke of Gloucester was supposed to have said of Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), and actually setting out to read one of those doorstops can be an intimidating exercise.

Fear not — most authors of important doorstops have written shorter stuff which is also valid for getting your Have Read Important Author ticket punched.  The shorter stuff will also give you an idea as to whether or not you might actually enjoy reading some of the author’s longer works (or, conversely, whether the mere thought of reading another paragraph by a certain author is enough to make you break out in hives.)  Herewith, a tasting flight, as it were, of shorter works by a quartet of important authors:

Herman Melville, Typee.  Moby-Dick is, of course, the Big Important Melville novel, just as Billy Budd is the Important Later Work, but Typee is the book that made him famous.  It’s loosely based on Melville’s own experiences when he jumped ship off the whaler Acushnet in the Marquesas Islands, and is best described, in my opinion, as what a reader of science fiction would describe as a “first contact novel” — two cultures coming into contact at a historically significant moment.  It made Melville briefly famous as “the man who lived with cannibals”; his fans, predictably, were disappointed when his next book wasn’t about cannibals at all.

(No, I’m not going to recommend “Bartleby the Scrivener“.  But it’s even shorter than Typee, if that’s your main criterion.)

James Joyce, Dubliners.  A collection of short stories, this time, by the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.  They’re written in a considerably more straightforward manner than any of the later works, but should suffice to give you an idea of Joyce’s favorite topics and themes.  If you don’t want to read the whole collection, go for “Araby” and “The Dead”; if you want more Joyce after you’re finished, move on to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle.  Henry James specialized in the painstaking depiction of subtle emotions and complex relationships; his prose style is somewhere between exquisite and maddening depending upon your tolerance level.  (H. G. Wells memorably described it as “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea that has got into the corner of its den.”)  But the last paragraph of this novella hits like a hammer in spite of it all.  If you decide that you like James — and many writers do — go on to The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors.

William Faulkner, The Bear.  Faulkner’s longer works are notorious for their dense prose and their complex story lines, but The Bear is about as straightforward a Faulkner story as you’re going to get.  It’s also a story in which exciting stuff actually happens, since it deals with the hunt for the giant bear Old Ben — so you’ve got guns and knives and bear hounds and good old boys running around in the woods and killing things.  If you like The Bear, there’s a lot more Faulkner out there waiting for you (but I’d advise working your way up to novels like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom.  Some books are like marathons . . . you’ve got to get into training for them, first.)

Cranky Thought for the Day

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Most science fiction and fantasy authors aren’t interested in writing what used to be called (and may still be called, for all I know) “teen problem novels.” It’s okay, apparently, to have a young adult protagonist who is in some way different, provided that the difference is what the book is about. There has to be angst, and discrimination, and Dealing With Issues† — the non-default protagonist is not allowed to have a story that isn’t all about his or her non-default qualities.

Or, to put it a bit more snarkily, the non-default character is not allowed to enjoy his or her life, or go on adventures, or have fun. If science fiction and fantasy are part of the literature of escape, then readers who are in one way or another not default-normal are constantly being told by the gatekeepers of young adult fiction that freedom is for other people, not for them.

Which is — just in case anybody was in any doubt as to my opinion on the matter — bad.

†Like Dancing With Wolves, only not as much fun.

It Varies

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The quality of the layout and typography in commercially published e-books, that is.  (So does the quality of non-commercially-published e-books, but those are beyond the scope of this post.)

To a large extent, the quality of an e-book depends upon whether the publisher is working from an electronic version of the manuscript as originally submitted (a lot of publishers these days ask for either electronic-only MSS or a combination of electronic and hardcopy), or whether they’re working from a scanned hardcopy version of the published book.

It used to be mostly pirates who worked from scanned hardcopy. These days, though, a number of legitimate publishers are working on bringing their backlist titles out as e-books, and a number of authors are doing the same thing with their own works for which the rights have reverted. In both cases, if the original book was produced during the typewriter era, or in the early days of word processing, scanning a sacrificed hardcopy may be the only way — short of re-keying the whole thing — to get an electronic text.

A lot also depends on whether or not the publisher bothers to have somebody proofread the e-book before it’s released. Dead-tree books are copyedited, and have the copyedited MS gone over by the author before being set into type, and then the typeset MS is gone over again by both the publishing house and the author before being sent to the printer. Even so, errors will creep in. Sometimes it’s just because no matter how many sets of eyes look at a thing, something’s going to get missed; other times, very bad stuff can happen at the printer’s end and not get noticed until angry book buyers start sending back their copies. Turning hardcopy into e-text, if the publisher is converting something that never had an electronic MS, often involves taking apart a physical copy of the book and scanning it page by page, which not only preserves any existing errors but opens the way for even more.

Some publishing houses clearly take care with the process of turning hardcopy into an e-book; others just as clearly don’t do much more than pour the however-generated e-text into a standard template and don’t bother much with it after that.

Your best bet is probably to write to the publisher about any errors you find. It’s not likely to get you a better version of that particular book, but it might encourage them to take more care with the process in the future.

Some Things Just Don’t Translate

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Written and visual storytelling are two different things, and something that works just fine in one medium may not work at all in the other.  Imagine trying to do the classic music-plus-montage transition sequence beloved of film-makers everywhere with nothing but words on paper, for example.  Writers being the creatures they are, some of them have probably tried it, and it’s possible one or two of them may have succeeded — but it’s bucking the odds.

Over on the written-to-visual adaptation end, you get all sorts of problems with adapting interior action — stuff that’s going on mostly inside the protagonist’s head — into an effective visual form.  The key word there being “visual”; voice-over narration is not usually a good answer.  In my opinion, any director who’s thinking about using voice-over narration should stop and think about it some more before going on with the project. The whole point of a movie is that it tells the story through visuals and action; throw in explicit first-person narration and you might as well have a radio play with illustrations. And that goes double for noir-detective-style first person.  Stuff that reads on the page as moody and atmospheric and full of character-building through voice and tone tends to come off as purple and pretentious when spoken aloud. Especially when spoken aloud with pictures.

Sometimes, granted, Hollywood does make changes in written source material just because it can; but a lot of the time, the changes are made because something interior and/or verbal had to be translated into external action in a visual medium.

 

Another Thing Not to Do

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As a general rule, avoid writing dialect.  If you don’t have a dead-on ear for that sort of thing, it’s not going to work — and the failure state of attempted dialect is truly dire.  Not only do you risk coming off as unintentionally funny (and “funny” is just one of the many many things in writing that you only want to be on purpose), you’re putting yourself in position to get called out for imposing a privileged outside-observer point of view upon the native speakers of whatever dialect you’re trying to write.

Furthermore, styles in writing change, and dialect has been out of fashion for some time now.  But it wasn’t always so.  English literature of the nineteenth century, in particular, was crammed full of painstaking representations of different dialects:  national dialects, regional dialects, class dialects, all carefully done in what passed (in those pre-International Phonetic Alphabet days) for phonetic spelling.  Sir Walter Scott did it — the characters in The Heart of Midlothian speak Scots broad enough to carpet a floor with — and Mark Twain did it and even Alfred, Lord Tennyson did it (check out his Northern Farmer: Old Style and Northern Farmer: New Style for a couple of wince-worthy examples.)  One reason for the popularity of written-out dialect pronunciation may have been the common practice at the time of reading books out loud in the family circle; if the reader wanted to “do the voices”, the written-out dialect would give him or her some guidelines.

Sometimes, the way the writer transcribed a character’s dialect said as much about the writer’s own dialect and that of his or her intended audience as it did about that of the characters.  Check out the coastal New England dialect as depicted by an educated Englishman for an English audience in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous, for example.

(The Heart of Midlothian and Captains Courageous are both good books in spite of the dialect writing.  I don’t really recommend the Tennyson, though, except as a curiosity.)