Tag: writing

It’s the Real Thing

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Straight out of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, it’s the world’s largest gingerbread house.

What does this have to do with writing?

Well, for one thing, it’s proof that the real world has a lot of strange stuff in it all by itself, without writers necessarily having to make strange stuff up.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with making up strange stuff for the fun of it, if that’s what you like to do.)

And for another thing, it’s a salutary reminder, for those of us who write science fiction and fantasy, that we work in genres where things that in the world of consensus reality are only imaginary concepts, can and do achieve solid three-dimensional existence.  Our gingerbread house isn’t just a daydream or a metaphor any longer — it’s right there in front of us, and the door is open.

Does This Mean We’re Respectable?

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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.

The Season Approacheth

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With National Novel Writing Month receding into the past, and the midwinter giftgiving season drawing ever closer, it’s time again for a display of crass commercialism on my part.

If you’ve got your NaNoWriMo manuscript in hand, and would like help in taking that finished product to the next level, I’m here to help.  My base rates are $1500 for a novel, or $100 for a first chapter sample (or for a short story, if that’s what you’ve got.)  More details can be found here.

Also, if you’re looking for a present to give to the writer in your life, you can give them a virtual gift certificate for a line-edit and critique — you can purchase my services in advance at the usual rate, and they can schedule the job whenever they’re ready.  If you like, I can even send you a PDF of a nice-looking gift certificate that you can print out and put into an envelope, or in a great big enormous box with a lot of packing peanuts, if that’s how you roll.

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s peeve, gentlebeings and fellow wordsmiths, is that pair of weasel words, “somehow” and “something.”

We’ve all used them, at least in our first drafts.  Our hero is engaged in breakneck pursuit of the villain, and his energy is flagging while the villain has wings on his heels (possibly literally, if we’re writing fantasy) . . . but somehow, our hero finds within himself a last reserve of speed and collars the miscreant.  Or possibly our hero is fast overtaking the bad guy, but somehow the bad guy pulls ahead by just enough to swing aboard a passing garbage truck and make his escape.

Later in the same epic, our hero is about to enter his home through the front door after a hard day’s work . . . but something prompts him to go around back and enter through the kitchen door instead, thus allowing him to get the drop on the waiting villain.

This is lazy writing.  It implies causation (thus taking the curse of random coincidence off the turn of events), but it does so without bothering to be specific about anything.  The alert reader — and it never pays to assume your reader is anything but alert — will notice that an actual cause or agent is missing, and will lose a certain amount of faith in the writer because of the omission.

Most of the time, you can jettison the “somehow” and no one will miss it.  The hero puts on a burst of speed and catches the bad guy, or the bad guy pulls ahead and makes his getaway — state it with confidence and your reader will believe you.

As for that stealthy entrance through the kitchen door . . . ditching the “something” isn’t enough to help you there.  For that one, you also need to come up with a reason.  If your hero goes round to the back based on the promptings of his intuition, you had better have established already that he’s an intuitive sort and that his intuition works in his favor more often than not.  Otherwise, you’d better have him noticing that the doormat is no longer lined up squarely with the edges of the front step, or that his cat is not dozing on her favored late-afternoon spot on the living-room window-sill, or that the burnt-out match stub he normally shuts between the door and the doorjamb when he leaves in the morning isn’t there any more (depending upon whether your hero is obsessively tidy, or a cat person, or professionally paranoid.)

The two general rules that apply here:  one, don’t dither; and two, specificity is your friend.

Family Feasts and Rituals

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We’re gearing up for Thanksgiving dinner already — tonight is pie production, because Thanksgiving dinner is nothing if not a pie delivery system.  This year we’re only doing three pies (cherry, apple, and pumpkin) because there are only going to be four of us at the table.  Come Christmas, when all three of the unmarried offspring will be temporarily in residence, we will be doing at least four pies (the current loadout, plus blueberry, and quite possibly some kind of chocolate cream pie as an extra.)

One of the things that a lot of science fiction and secondary-world fantasy often lacks, in my opinion, is this kind of tradition-laden family gathering.  Partly it’s because the protagonists of science-fictional and fantastic stories are so often loners, either by circumstance or by choice — they’re orphans, or they’re wanderers of one sort or another, or they’re estranged from whatever relatives they’ve got.  (Which is a pity, I think; nothing complicates life, or a plot, like family.)  But partly, I suspect, it’s because making up plausible and consistent holidays and family rituals that are convincingly alien but nevertheless feel like the real thing . . . is hard work.

(This is also where I like to give a nod to one of my favorite fictional Thanksgivings, the season four episode “Pangs” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It has everything, from the manic freakouts over getting the traditional recipes exactly right, to a look at some of the more problematic historical and cultural issues surrounding the holiday, culminating in a shared meal where everybody — even the captive vampire tied to a chair — is entitled to a seat at the table.)

A Couple of Notes on Dialogue

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Note the first:

When you change speakers, you start a new paragraph.  Seriously, they should have taught you this one in grade school, or high school at least.  I’m starting to suspect that it gets neglected because nobody expects most students to ever need to write dialogue.  O tempora, O mores, what is the world coming to, and all that jazz.

Note the second:

When you’re writing a scene with a lot of dialogue, and feel the need to throw in small bits of action and stage business to break up the steady back-and-forth, or to show one speaker’s reaction to something the other person has said, the action bit goes with the dialogue belonging to the speaker who’s doing it.  To illustrate:

Not like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.  Jane looked at him with disbelief.

“Sure, you do.”

But like this:

“I don’t know what you mean,” Joe said.

Jane looked at him with disbelief.  “Sure, you do.”

Don’t make your readers have to go through a scene’s dialogue twice in order to be sure of who is doing and saying what. Accidentally confusing your readers is bad.

Confusing your readers on purpose is a different kettle of fish.  I personally don’t know why anyone would want to do it, but some writers do, and those writers have audiences, so if that’s your style, then go for it.  But if you’re going down that path, not confusing anyone by accident becomes more important, rather than less.

Shakespeare was a Glovemaker’s Son

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This post here says it all, really.

You don’t need an M.F.A. to write.  You don’t need a B.A. in English to write.  In fact, you don’t need any sort of specialized education whatsoever to write.  (Jane Austen was tutored at home by her father and brothers; Charlotte Bronte had maybe half a dozen years of formal schooling, at least a couple of them at a boarding school so hellish she turned it into that ghastly boarding school in Jane Eyre.) You don’t even need to be a native speaker of the language you decide you’re going to write in.  (Joseph Conrad’s first language was Polish; Vladimir Nabokov wrote his first novels in Russian.)

You just need to write.

So go do it.

The Better Part of Valor

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As a matter of principle, I believe that a writer should be free to pick his or her subject matter from the entire range of human experience — even when the premise in question is such that, if it were an objective in one of the tabletop Squad Leader games I used to play, it would be one that a smart player wouldn’t even think of attempting without at least six to one odds in favor, not to mention a +8 leader counter and a couple of Sherman tanks. And possibly off-board artillery and some close air support.

As a matter of practicality, on the other hand . . . at some point in the process, there needs to be somebody who’s clear-eyed enough to look at the project and say, “Sweetie, it would take the second coming of Truman Capote to pull this one off, with William Faulkner riding shotgun and Quentin Tarantino bringing up the rear with a video camera — and frankly, my dear, you’re nowhere in that league.”

And everybody concerned is going to be happier if the verdict is delivered before the project goes to press, rather than after.

Thunder and Lightning

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It was a dark and stormy night. . . .

You know, the first time that was used as a novel opener, it wasn’t a cliche.  It was all the imitators that came afterwards that made it tired and hokey.

And “dark night” wasn’t redundant, either, in an era when urban skyglow hadn’t yet blinded large numbers of people to the differences possible in a night-time sky.  A clear night with a full moon is a whole lot brighter than a cloudy night with a waning moon or no moon at all.  (There’s a reason why night-time assemblies of all sorts — dances, lodge meetings, and the like — used to be held on full-moon nights.  That way, people would be able to see the road on their way home.)

And right now, outside, it is indeed a dark and stormy night.  The crescent moon is completely obscured by clouds, and we’ve had thunderstorms rumbling through all evening.  The local volunteer fire departments have been called out at least twice for lightning strikes and downed trees smouldering on the power lines, and while we haven’t ourselves gotten any hail, other parts of the state haven’t been so lucky.

You could begin a novel with a night like this, if it hadn’t already been done.

When Life Gives You Zucchini

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You make zucchini bread.

We all know how it is with zucchini.  Somebody in the neighborhood has a garden, and they have a zucchini plant.  Maybe even they have two (if they’ve never grown zucchini before.)  And the zucchini does as zucchini plants do, and sometime around the end of summer everybody in the neighborhood is receiving gifts of abundant zucchini, because the alternative is seeing their neighbor’s kitchen fill up with zucchini and possibly even explode.

And there’s only so much zucchini you can steam or saute or stir-fry before you start to bring out the recipe books.  And you think about Zucchini Lasagna, but not for very long, because the voice in your head that says “lasagna” also says, “That isn’t lasagna, that’s a vegetable casserole,” and your stomach says, “If you’re making lasagna, I want the real thing or nothing.”  And you think about zucchini pickles, but not for very long, because you don’t want to get involved in the whole pickling and canning thing.

And besides, zucchini bread isn’t imitation anything else, it’s real zucchini bread; and it doesn’t require specialized equipment and messing around with vats of boiling water and worrying about lids and seals; and you already know that everybody in the house will eat it.  And if they don’t, that’s okay, too, because you happen to like zucchini bread just fine.

Sometimes story ideas are like that.  You’ll get a story idea that comes out of nowhere like a gift of random zucchini, and it’s not your usual sort of story . . . maybe it’s a little over-the-top for your normal style, maybe it’s not your usual subject matter, maybe it has a bit too much of the guilty pleasure about it for your artistic peace of mind.

When something like that happens, you can try to make zucchini lasagna out of your story idea — slice it up and sauce it up and generally try to turn it into something more like your usual thing — but unless you really truly like zucchini lasagna, your readers are going to see what you did and know that your heart wasn’t in it.  Or you can go the pickling-and-canning route, taking that story idea and using all your hard-won tools and techniques to make it into something you can point to and call art.  And the critics may praise what you’ve done to elevate zucchini into something better and longer-lasting, but the voice in your head that doesn’t shut up is going to say, “And why does zucchini need elevation, anyhow?”

So you might as well make zucchini bread.  Don’t try to make that story idea into an imitation of something else, and don’t try to make it into something fancy and difficult just to please the critics.  Make it into good honest zucchini bread, and serve it to the people who will like it that way.

And don’t worry.  Eventually the frost comes, and the zucchini flood will dry up until next summer.