Zonked Out

On the Proper Care and Feeding of Cliches

2009-06-30T14:15:00.003-05:00

Avoid cliches.

This advice is so commonly found in writing self-help manuals and agent blogs as to be rightfully regarded as an advice cliche.

Lists abound which purport to give guidance to the unwary writer of fantasy (or SF) as to which characters or plot lines one should eschew if one wishes to become a writer of good taste and discernment.

Examples of such lists may be found here or here or here .

The aspiring writer of fantasy should be thankful for such thoughtful sage counsel: after all, who wants to be called a Tolkien or Jordan clone?

But I have a question.

Such lists look suspiciously like a compendium of standard fantasy conventions, those kinds of characters and plot lines which define the genre. So...if we entirely avoid those sorts of characters and plot lines, will what we write actually be regarded as fantasy?

Fantasy readers have come to expect that a fantasy novel will provide them with fantasy characters, and unless one is as gifted and original as Tolkien, how does one produce a fantasy novel? (Actually Tolkien's originality consisted of recasting ancient British myth into fantasy: but I digress...).

Just what we Writers needed, another source of angst.

Now I understand that for Pubbers, whose daily immersion in the POS (Pile of Slush, which reputedly contains unwashed pap in such quantity and lack of quality as to produce crossing of the eyes, drooling, and in rare cases, loose bowels), may be very tired of seeing the same sort of thing repeatedly. I have a feeling that some of the advice from agents regarding the overuse of fantasy cliches is a subconconcious plea to aspiring writers to give them something different. Even a daily diet of filet mignon would become tiresome after a while.

And another question: if we shouldn't write in fantasy cliches, how is it that so many Barnes & Noble shelves are filled with cliched fantasy novels, hmmmm?

Yet more angst.

I have come to several Conclusions regarding this troubling paradox. And as usual, I find myself a little at odds with the standard advice. I believe cliches are not only necessary in fantasy, but the writer who discards them does so at his own peril - but of course there are caveats.

Conclusion 1) Old themes satisfy
I have mentioned before that good writing touches something deep within the human psyche, and that good stories succeed, in part I believe, because they pluck certain common strings in all hearts. Even Shakespeare and Homer and Tolkien made use of ancient material.

Conclusion 2) Human experience is cliched
People have similar fears, desires, and problems. Novels reflect this.

Conclusion 3) Cliches can provide problems or solutions
The 'ignorant farm boy' protag is a delightful fund of ignorance, providing natural opportunities for all sorts of self-inflicted drama, while the Hero's Journey is a natural, even expected, story arc.

Conclusion 4) A different 'feel' is needed
While cliches may well be necessary to define the genre, it does not follow that each and every writer should treat them in the same way. Both Harry and Ged attended a wizard's college, but the texture, the warp and woof of each of their universes are widely dissimilar.

Conclusion 5) There are new Readers born every day
Cliches aren't cliches for new Readers: they can be as fresh to them as the day the stories were first written. I recently introduced a friend of mine to Stephen Lawhead, specifically his Hood trilogy. Now what is more cliched than the Robin Hood story? Yet Lawhead's treatment of it is not only fresh, but surprising.

Conclusion 6) Fads are cyclical
Who knew that vampires and werewolves be popular again?

I intend to fill my writing with cliches, but to twist, pervert, and resurrect them.

And while I wouldn't want to be called a Tolkien clone, if someone said that I reminded them of him, I would be as pleased, as well, punch.

Spiked punch.

Reaction anxiety

2009-05-26T16:00:00.000-05:00

Time for my annual blog...

Writing, any writing, invites comment and judgment, and, although driven by the whip of the Demon Muse to vomit the innermost workings of our benighted souls upon a virgin page, we Writers must then, in fear, face the Reader.

It's not just that we fear that we may reveal too much of ourselves; nor is it just that we fear criticism or ridicule; nor yet that we only fear the Reader may think less of us for having read our work.

All of the above, of course, we fear.

There is another, subtler fear lurking in our fevered brains, Narcissistic and unavoidable, shameful and insistent.

I discovered this abomination very early on, when I surprised myself by the feelings unleashed by Madame Editor's reaction to my work. It came into sharper focus when I was able to observe my beta readers while they were reading my first (as yet unpublished) novel, to my everlasting reproach and secret delight.

I have briefly mentioned this disease before, but it recently reared its Loch Ness serpentine head and neck out of the peat-stained murk of my mind while my latest beta reader dove into my writing. The good news is that she emerged sound of mind: the bad news is that I did not.

Of course, all Writers suffer various and sundry phobias (the latter, as Tolkien said, being the ones that came in the front gate, went out the side, and came back in again), and I shall simply have to learn to live with it.

This fear is the sneaking suspicion that we will not be able to make our Readers feel what we want them to feel, to gasp, cry, laugh, or get angry when we want them to: in short, that our writing will have the desired Effect.

For this is why we Write - well, apart from the inability to resist the Demon Muse's tempting lacerations, and the possibility of a movie option - we Write to elicit a response. Don't we?

How do we overcome this?

Why would we want to...

I say glory in it, bask in its degenerate musk, and roll the sweet syrup of it around your tongue.

And then dive down to the deepest Marianas Trench of your mind, crawl on your belly through the clinging mud of its darkest caverns, take a safari to its least explored jungle, and dredge, drag, and capture enough of your greatest fears and loves to cover the next empty page.

Alas, since I am as yet unpublished (as I think I mentioned), this is the among the best I have to look forward to.

For now.

What fun Writing is!

Addiction...

2008-07-04T17:47:00.000-05:00

I have an Addiction.

I used to quench my appetite mostly at home: but for a long time now, I have been able to satisfy my cravings in full public view, unnoticed by those around me.

I fulfill my desires in restaurants: while watching TV; while surfing the Net; driving my car; at work; at home; in airports; in fact, anywhere at all.

I became Addicted very early in life. Growing up in the 70's was an interesting experience, a time when experimentation with any and all forms of physical, chemical, or mental stimulation was not only accepted, but encouraged. I managed (with the gracious help of the Almighty) to avoid the usual pitfalls - I've never been drunk, or high, in my life - but I got hooked before I knew what 'hooked' was, and by then it was far too late.

Of course, there have been consequences. My Addiction has caused me trouble with my parents, in school, at work, and at home, usually because I should have been doing something else at the time that I was indulging my Habit.

But I refuse to give it up.

I like the way my Habit alters my perceptions. I can lose myself for hours, forgetting all the stuff out there waiting for me, piled up like six weeks' laundry, pungently aromatic with Eau de MustbeDone. I need that escape from this reality to another, to have my mind exploded, rearranged, reconstructed: if deprived, the thirst comes on me like the blood lust on Lestat, and I must feed.

That's not the worst of it, though. Sometimes my Addiction produces nothing so much as a delicious ennui, an aversion to re-entry to real life, a reluctance to stop that ignores sleep, food, and personal hygiene.

Alas, sometimes it produces no feelings or intellectual stimulation at all, but just is, like Decartes' thoughts. Somerset Maugham, who shared my Addiction, said that this last was 'as reprehensible as doping'. Those of you who share my predeliction for Maugham will now know what affliction I bear, on what I am hopelessly hooked.

I am Addicted to Reading. *sighs*

I read any and everything. I read great books, good books, bad books. I read airline magazines. I read restaurant menus, ingredient lists on boxes, signs by the roadside. I can't help myself: the moment my wandering eye collides with a word, it absorbs, digests, and immediately transports itself to the next word, paragraph, page in line. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In this way I have been transported to worlds as diverse as Calvin and Lovecraft, Daily Kos and Frontpagemag, Lewis and Adams.

I have also delved into menu-worlds as disparate as Bennigan's and Mosaic in The Cove, Paradise Island. It was fascinating how they differed - and in what they did not.

I would be very surprised indeed if, in the world of Writers, I didn't have lots of company. After all, it's the love of the written word (truth be told, mostly our own!) that drove us to vomit forth upon an unsuspecting world the outpourings of our souls. Maybe there are those of you out there who haven't recognized your own Addiction yet: you just read everything 'out of habit' or unconsciously.

Admit it: you cannot help yourself, but must read, or shrivel, wither, and freeze.

Of course, I am also Addicted to Writing, but that's a subject for another time.

Stuck and Whipped

2008-02-06T09:52:00.000-05:00

When I first began to Write (note the pretentious capitalization), all the Authorities (by which I mean Pubbers Who Write Advice Books for Writers) recommended The Elements of Style by Strunk & White.

And in my blissful state of glorious Noobosity, I sallied forth with the milk mustache of the invincibly ignorant, white as a virgin page, framing my pursed lips, down to the Barnes & Noble store near the Broward Mall in Ft Liquordale, Fla. I spent several hours, and several hundred dollars, returning triumphant, having killed or captured every relevant tome on Writing in the place, including The Elements.

My first surprise was how tiny it is.

My second, much more disheartening, was that it was largely a little grammar book with moralizing tidbits. To someone raised on The Royal Readers, I found myself familiar with the style, but disappointed with the advice: one of the first clues that The Authorities were having me on.

Another was its very age. First Pubbed in 1918 or 1919, depending on who you read, and revised several times, it has survived both of its authors, a respectable feat, and has become the King James Bible of the Fundamentalist Pubbers, also known as Prescriptivists. Never mind the fact that most Fundamentalist Pubbers, or Pubbers in general, are political Liberals: War has been waged between the FundyPrescrips on the one hand and the linguistically Liberal Descriptivists, or LibbyDescrips on the other. For those who dislike technical jargon, the Rulers vs. the Users.

Many Writers have lived, toiled, and died in woeful ignorance that the Pub Tribe is divided by this great gulf fixed between those that believe language has certain prescribed forms and rules of expression (The Rulers/Prescriptivists) and those who argue vehemently that language can only derive true worth and validity from actual use (Users/Descriptivists).

The opening blow was struck when William Strunk Jr., an English professor at Cornell, produced a delightfully austere little manual for use in his classes. An adoring young student named Elwynn Brooks White updated it at the urgings of a Publisher, and added a fawning intro to Strunk, along with a closing appendix on Style in which he displayed his own, while warning writers against the dangers of verbal prodigality.

Prescriptive Pubbers loved it.

And used it, along with the Chicago Manual of Style, to mold, shape, chill, and otherwise constrain young writers whose outpouring of souls might otherwise, God defend us, kasplode upon the page. These two Books became the Sacred Scriptures of the Rulers, who took over Pubberdom almost by default. One may imagine the conversations...

Ruler:
"But of course one must adhere to the rules of proper grammar and usage, otherwise language is destroyed."

User:
"Who sez? Good writing soars, leaps, flies. And who made you Ruler?"

Ruler:
"We have a Book. Indeed, we have Books, for reference, while editing."

User:
"A Book?"

Ruler:
"Yes. Do you have a Book?"

User:
"Well, um, no..."

Ruler:
"How do you edit Writers? There must be Standards upon which to base any notion of good and bad writing, or thousands of editors, copyeditors, and Publishing Houses will have nothing upon which to base their decisions."

User:
"But Standards change."

Ruler:
"In which unlikely case we will publish an updated version of the Books. "

And so the Rulers/Prescriptivists won, because the Users/Descriptivists could not decide on a reference Book.

Now Strunk & White may be helpful to students composing formal or technical essays in a college setting: such writing is by definition the literary equivalent of Ambien.

But for fiction? Let's look at a few of the admonitions S&W put forward.

Place yourself in the background.
And if I WANT my opinion heard? Written in flaming letters across the sky? Or even just want to be invited to panels at Writing Conferences?

Do not affect a breezy manner.
Two words: Ray Bradbury. A fresh summer breeze blew my hair back and made my eyes water the first time I opened one of his books, a smell of fresh-mown grass and hot concrete and lemonade. Unless of course you prefer stale prose...

Do not inject opinion.
Well, I have to go and get my Henlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and throw them all in the round file. Oh, yes, and my copy of Strunk & White.

Use figures of speech sparingly.
To tell a Writer not to use metaphors is like asking him not to breathe or pass wind: advice that is neither helpful nor possible.

Avoid foreign languages.
Yes, let's proclaim a jihad against foreign languages. After all, no one groks them anyway. All characters must speak proper English. As we say in the Islands, yinna head mussy slack.

Prefer the standard to the offbeat.
Orly? No surprises, no passion, no voice, no fresh expressions, no drowning the writer in something never seen or smelled or heard before? *dies*

Now don't get me wrong: the grammatical advice in Strunk & White is useful for those whose grade-school English teachers were useless check-cashing dolts who didn't know the difference between an adverb or an adjective, or for those who slept through the classes. And they are sarcastic, which saves them from being total preppies.

So what did I learn from Strunk & White?

I have discovered that if you are presenting a MS to a Pubber, your grammar had better be standard form, UNLESS you know when and how to break the Rules, and suck the reader into the world you have created, even if they are a Fundy/Prescrip.

Don't even get me started on the Chilling Mound of Shinola.

P.S.
I wonder if Elwynn would ever have RP'd in Goldshire....?

Boo!

2007-12-05T15:35:00.000-05:00

Fear.

A great thing for a writer to have. It's interesting to me (yes, I know my own perversity) that the one thing that prevents most people from becoming writers may be an indispensable part of the Writing Process for those who decorate empty pages with the outpouring of their souls.

Now while it's true that many writers have conquered their fears, for some authors the empty page is the battleground upon which they slay their inner demons, dragons, ogres or wargs (this list is descriptive, not exhaustive: I would hate to be accused of partiality towards any class, or group, or Race, of monsters).

Whether this is because in doing so they hope that the confrontation may help them grok themselves, or grok the fear, or prevent what they are afraid of from coming to pass (a case of fiction preventing fruition...), or simply to defang the serpent, or whether they actually enjoy being afraid, is irrelevant to me. I leave that to another group that is a Half Bubble Off Plumb, the Psychologists. On second thought make that a Full Bubble.

Writers have learned, God defend us, to feed on Fear: the amount of adrenalin is the same whether the person is inhibited or galvanized by it. Every danger presents an opportunity, and blessed is the Writer who can write with the smell of Fear all over the page, bleeding unchecked out of every wounded noun and verb. If the writing keeps you up at night, it will have the same effect on the reader.

In this way we are similar to other adrenalin junkies, the half-pipe skaters and riders, deep-sea divers, parachutists, and inner-city subway commuters. The exhilaration that comes through fear is the fuel for our endeavor - and the attention and interest of the reader. Which do you think is harder: to juggle five balls or three flaming clubs? On a scale of one to ten, juggling three clubs (lit or otherwise) is maybe a four: juggling five balls is an eleven, perhaps a twelve. Try it and see. Now ask yourself, which would you rather watch? Evel Knievel knew that people watched in fascination knowing he might crash, even die. When he did in fact, recently pass away, he died in bed, and caused only a ripple in the news ocean.

Readers know instinctively when a Writer is racing the crumbling cliff's edge. It creates a shared experience of the Fear between Writer and reader, a telepathic empathy, a bond between two intimate strangers.

How and why does this work?

I believe (you are about to be inflicted with an Opinion) this is because of the sheer wonderful intense concentration that fear induces.

Norm Evans, Right Tackle for the 1972 undefeated Miami Dolphins, when asked about how well the offensive line blocked for Fullback Larry Csonka, confessed that he did so out of sheer terror:
"Larry heads for where the hole is supposed to be. If I'm in the hole, he'll hit me in the back and move both me and the defensive player out of the hole, or he'll run over both of us. I've been hit by Larry in the back, and I never want to have it happen again."

Many athletes and actors understand this, and talk about the jitters that affect them - until they start the game, or play, or scene. The conversion of Fear into concentration is a deadly weapon in the hands of a good Writer. Remembered details stand out crisply in the mind's eye, skin, ears and nasal passages, and pour themselves unaided onto the empty page.

Tom Morrisey told me of an accident he had while rock climbing (another HBOP hobby... Tom also does underwater spelunking, good for TWO Bubbles Off Plumb). He reached for a handhold, slipped, fell over backwards, head down, for about twenty feet, where his rope caught him. As he fell, everything slowed down, and he clearly saw, in the distance, a withered tree with a tombstone standing next to it. Tom even had time to reflect on how ironic a picture this was to a falling climber. Secured by his fellow climber, it took both of them ten minutes to find the tree again.

I wrote in an earlier post of the usefulness of observation to the Writer, and of re-training our dulled senses to record sights, sounds, smells, and tastes, and Fear helps us to concentrate, sharpens the intimate details that can transform a dull piece into a magical telepathic conduit of the Writer's passions, fears, loves, and hates.

So go off and sky dive, or swim with sharks, tell jokes on stage, or more frightening still, delve into the dusky innermost recesses of your own secret Fears, and translate it to the page.

Your Readers will sit up and take notice.

So you don't like Fantasy?

2007-09-29T16:45:00.000-05:00

Okay.

Some people just don't.

In my experience, most people who don't care for Fantasy (poor benighted souls, like Miss Snark), generally lump the genre into one of two categories.

Either they say 'But it isn't real', by which they usually mean it does not conform to their worldview, or they say 'But it's just escapist', by which they mean it tries to avoid their worldview.

Liberals may attack Fantasy because they find it too 'traditional', while books like Harry Potter come under fire from Conservatives because it contains 'witchcraft'. Both groups fear that Fantasy may influence the reader's imagination adversely - a tacit admission of the power of Fantasy, by the way.

So how can we tell if Fantasy is 'good' or 'bad' (apart from the writing style)? Fantasy, after all, is produced by the writer's imagination, and imagination is a good thing, as I said here.

The 'Realist' style of writers like Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, or Emile Zola is firmly rooted in the naturalistic, materialistic worldview that arose around the turn of the last century: the world of Darwin and Marx (Karl, not Groucho), limited to descriptions and treatments of that which may be seen with physical eyes. But if we deal only with that which is real according to this definition, we perforce leave out much which is unseen, but which many people find gives Meaning to Life - like love, or God, or absolute truth, or a clear conscience. The above-mentioned writers produced works, incidentally (or consequently...), that were full of what most people would call the 'seamy' side of life, consciously amoral and devoid of 'sentimentality'. Their writing reflected their worldview. One can, of course, write 'realistically' without accepting this worldview. Read Dostoevsky.

But was it real?

Or was it a self-conscious attempt on their part to portray what they thought was reality? Those who make assumptions about what is 'real' will always be accused of Begging the Question, or at least get asked The Impertinent Question, i.e. 'Sez Who?'

Secondly, every work of fiction is by definition a work of imagination. The Writer projects not what is or has been, but what he or she thinks would, should, or could be, or woulda/shoulda/coulda been.

So my answer to those who say Fantasy is 'not real' is two-fold: Who Sez your 'realism' is really real? And, even your 'realism' is partly fantasy.

There are two ways also to answer the charge that Fantasy is 'escapist'.

The first is to say, with Bradbury, that Fantasy is not an escape from Reality, but a kind of back-door to it, Perseus looking into the golden shield to slay the Medusa. Those who write 'traditional' Fantasy know that one of the best ways to explore the invisible world, the moral and spiritual universe, is through the judicious use of symbolism. I talked about this briefly here.
Fantasy is not reality, it is a 'profitable invention', to quote Sydney, because it deals with Ideas, with Truth, and Good vs. Evil.

Or we can ask, with Tolkien, The Apathetic Question, i.e, 'So What?'

Who would, Tolkien asks, take issue with a prisoner who tries to escape, or failing to succeed at that, find something else to discuss or meditate on than bars and turnkeys? Yes, one may use Fantasy as an escape from responsibility, and this would count as bad Fantasy, but good Fantasy quickens the imagination, and creates longing for heroes, courage and beauty.

In a Zeitgeist that is naturalistic, materialistic, and amoral, Peter Jackson's vision of Tolkien's Lord of The Rings has re-kindled a generation's longing for something more than the dreary depressing doldrums offered by Charlie and Karl.

So how do I tell good Fantasy from bad?

By the effect it has on the reader.

Does it make vice attractive, scoff at heroes, encourage a vapid existentialism, and teach the reader to ignore the transcendent? Then it's Bad Fantasy, no matter how well written. Sorry, Robert.

Does it inculcate a revulsion against evil, root for protagonists that are virtuous (or become so), foster a delight in beauty, and fertilize the imagination with pregnant symbols of transcendent truth? Then it's Good Fantasy, no matter how badly written. Take heart, Terry.

To those who still don't like Fantasy, I wish you the best. I'll just pick up my pearls and go home.

And now for Something Completely Different...

2007-06-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Mea Culpa.

Reading over my last several posts, I have come to the conclusion that I may be in mortal danger of Taking Myself Much Too Seriously.

I cannot afford for this to happen, since I would then start writing Literary novels, the thought of which brings on a desperate need for a good dose of Pepto-Bismol.

So today I want to write about some things I really like about Writing. I realize that in doing so I may be revealing more information about myself than I really want to, or indeed more than you, gentle reader, may really want to know, but there we are.

I'm not going to write about great Themes, or having Something To Say, or the Need to Be Relevant (all of which would make great names for rock bands, an idea I stole from Dave Barry). I won't even write about the fact that Fantasy is not an escape from Reality, but a back door to it.

I like - strike that, I love those times when the scene in my head writes itself on my pc screen without conscious intervention on my part, when the screen itself disappears, so that all I see is the scene I'm writing. At such times I almost feel like a conduit, rather than a translator, and the words overflow the banks, burst through the dam, and its all I can do to manage to direct the flow, and I stop only when the stream runs dry. I call this 'being in the Zone', and I have tried, to no avail, to recreate at will those conditions which precipitate the Zone, and other writers that I've talked to confess something similar. This has all the earmarks of addictive behavior, I know. Ask me if I care.

I especially like creating characters that readers fall in love with. Characters that readers discuss with you as if they were real people. I also like, perverse imp that I am, to propose writing death, dismemberment, or humiliating scenes for these characters, just to see the reaction. Some of these suggestions have actually found their way into a WIP, and some may still do so.

I love watching people read my work: will they gasp at just the right moment, or laugh, or cry; will their eyes go all round like blackboard zeros; will I have to call their name twice before they hear me; will they shudder at that scene? If you're not going to write so as to elicit an emotional response, why write at all?

I love to write cliffhanging ends to chapters. Or books. Well, I might as well be honest, I love to write chapter endings that dangle readers over The Black Abyss of Doom. My beta readers usually only get to read a chapter at a time, and their reactions to NOT being able to turn the page and go on have sometimes been priceless. AW told me once, after trying (vainly) to scroll down after a chapter ending: "You did NOT end it THERE! You SO SUCK!" Which of course I took as a compliment of the highest order, and thanked her profusely.

I love being told my novel should be made into a movie. If only the readers that told me this had the ear of Peter Jackson....*sighs*. Current suggestions for actors among my readers: Johnny Depp as Jonas (... most of my betas are female...), Kate Beckinsale as Diane, Daniel Craig as Alex, Drew Barrymore as Liz, and Anthony Hopkins as The Elder. Such a movie would, of course, never be made: too many stars. But it's a great Dream...

And I love drowning my readers in the Dream that is the Story, when they tell me they can see the scene, smell the Nightmares, hear the waves lapping zhoop-zhoop on the powdered sand. I love finding that one vivid concrete detail that puts the reader there, so that they are in the Story, not just reading words on a page.

Great.

In reading this, I find I may have escaped being Too Serious only to become Too Full of Myself.

What can I say?

I am a writer.

Introspection, Part 2

2007-06-09T11:26:00.000-05:00

Um...

You may not want to read this.

That's because I want to post about Introspection now not as a tool, a skill in the craft of Writing, but as a necessary part of the Writer's character. Why, not how.

I said in my last post that we all need to know, as writers, what we are capable of. Some of us are quite capable of finishing a sentence with a preposition, or starting a sentence with a conjunction, or writing sentence fragments. But others aren't. Pubbers, in particular, when they sit down to write something (for a lark, or just slumming), fight with the Watcher at The Gate about everything.

We are capable, for instance, of deluding ourselves into thinking we are the next J.K. Rowling or Dan Brown, except better. Nevermind that the chances of a virgin writer being published nowadays is about the same as being struck by lightning while being eaten by a great White Shark right after winning the Lottery...

This same lust (why not call it what it is?) drives us to think better of the written record of the outpourings of our souls than we ought, and to resent Pubbers, or other writers, attempting to change it. We are like Pilate, who famously said, 'What I have written, I have written,' when the Sanhedrin tried to edit him. Come to think of it, he was right, too.

On the other hand, we (perversely) think nothing of suggesting any number of perfectly obvious changes that should be made to writing shared with us by our fellow writers.

But the green-eyed demon really begins to claw its way out of our chest when we see, or hear of, writers we know getting published, receiving an Award, or Lord defend us, seducing an Agent: we are more than capable of congratulating them to their face while fantasizing about casting them as the villain in our next novel. And we're convincing; after all, we make up stuff all the time, that's what we do...

Sometimes we begin to write in order to become famous, or garner applause, or Awards, or to get Pubbed. We begin to stray from writing what we want to write into writing what we think readers want to read, or worse, what Agents and Editors want to read.

Which leads us back to the how again.

All of these feelings and thoughts are usable. You can place them into the mind and heart of your antagonist, as I mentioned last post. Or you can place them into the mind and heart of your protagonist.

The protag must have a 'Fatal Flaw' after all. Why not give him a couple - of yours? Or a couple from people you know well? This is 'writing what you know' I suppose: If you can describe your own conflicted feelings about something, take those feelings, nurture them well in the compost of your own mind, grow, prune, and water them. And then make your protag conflicted about something, anything, make him want it but feel guilty about that desire, make him hate it (her?) but desire it with all his being. Make him want to do the right thing but fear the consequences more than Death itself.

The antagonist need not provide all, just the primary, conflict: and conflict is the throbbing heart and weeping soul of a thumping good Story.

Of course this is the literary equivalent of streaking. Would you take off all your clothes and run through a public place, say a Mall at lunchtime on the day after Thanksgiving? If you do the kind of introspection I'm writing about, and then use it in a Story, that's what you're doing, except it's your emotions and thoughts on display, not your Adam or Eve costume.

This why some people never become writers. It's also, incidentally, why some people become Pubbers: so they can indulge in literary emotional voyeurism.

So all Writers are emotional exhibitionists to a greater or lesser extent.

How deep are you willing to dive into yourself? What are you willing to dredge up into the blistering heat of public scrutiny? What will your loved ones say? Can you really write about that??? Would it be worse if you did, if you dug up the most painful, pitiful thing about yourself, sweated blood and wrote it into your character - and no one gave a crap?

Remember, I did say you might not want to read this.

Introspection, Part 1

2007-05-22T09:59:00.000-05:00

Those supposed to be In The Know say that all the characters a writer creates retain some facet of the writer's character.

I don't know if I agree with this altogether, since most of my characters are amalgams of people I know, or have known. I explain my process of character-building here for those interested.

But for my primary antagonist (Agakari; think Hannibal Lector on steroids and less inhibited), I said that I dug him up from the deepest, darkest parts of my own psyche. This shocked Madame Editor considerably when I told her, since she only knows me now in this angelic manifestation.

But the High Inquisitor is not me. He is, however, someone I might have become (supernatural powers excepted, of course...) had I taken a different path in life. This is true also of my protagonist. Jonas is not me, but I could have become very like him had circumstances been different.

When writing a character, however, the writer must somehow enter into that character's 'mind', must think, must feel, must react, like that character. At least this is how it is for me; if other writers have an alternative process, they can explain it to you in their own blogs. Perhaps this is what Those In The Know mean by some part of the writer being found in the character.

It did, however, present me with a problem. I didn't want to enter the mind of Agakari. I didn't want to mix the bloodlines of men and beasts with magic darker than the Styx, nor Transform men into soulless Gargoyles, nor produce progeny from my nearest living female relative (Warning: the previous sentence contains spoilers for those who may read my novel...).

And so I intended to write my antagonist in a similar way to that employed by Tolkien with Sauron; as a presence that permeates the book, whom one never meets, but is always aware of. As time went on, I realized this could not work, since Jonas had to meet Agakari several times in the book, as did one or two other characters. I had to write from within the antagonist's mind therefore.

So at last we come to the point of this post. I have mentioned Observation, Imagination, and downright Theft as part of a writer's necessary skills, but to this point I have not made much of Introspection.

A writer needs to know what he or she is capable of.

I have very little time with those who believe humanity to be essentially good: all the empirical evidence seems to me against them, apart from the Scriptures I believe in. But we don't, of course, like to think of ourselves as inherently evil, as containing within our own psyche the seeds of our own destruction. It isn't pleasant, it lowers our precious self-esteem, which, of course, is unthinkable in the modern Zeitgeist.

Perhaps it will help to ask you, gentle reader, to remember the last time you wished a fellow human being harm. The Democrats among you need only think of the sitting President, and Republicans of the previous. There, see how easy it is?

Now for the hard part.

Look deep into your heart, and be honest with yourself (be careful; your own heart will deceive you into thinking you are really quite a nice person), and find out what you would really do to someone you truly dislike, if you could get away with it.

Did you scare yourself? If you didn't, you weren't honest enough.

Now take what you found, and give it to your antagonist, and you will have a bloody good villain.

Pun intended.

To Write, or Not to Write...

2007-05-08T16:25:00.000-05:00

That is the question.

I see that it has been some time since I last posted. There are many reasons for this, including the selling of drugs (my profession), writing my second novel (my passion), and Global Warming (a pretension: but, since it is responsible for everything else...).

There are times when every Writer wonders whether to continue writing; when rejection by Pubbers, writer's block, apathy of loved ones, and derision of critics all, or singly, conspire against us.

Some Writers defeat these enemies of setting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard by dreams of becoming the next Stephen King (Horrors) J.K. Rowling (Hogwarts) or Dan Brown (Hogwash). Others seek Literary Fame in the Genre that Takes Itself Much Too Seriously to Be Enjoyed. I don't have examples of those types of authors, since I don't read them. This will no doubt make them feel better about the value of the outpourings of their souls, since to them I am a Philistine. I write Fantasy.

I wrote my first novel just to see if I could do it. I had help in the form of a friend, let's call her Madam Editor (she has a Master's in English, so perhaps I should call her Mistress Editor. Or maybe even Editrix...) , to whom I submitted the first half of the first chapter. "Pretend this is a creative writing essay," I said, "and put blue pen marks all over it. Please." She asked where the rest of the chapter was. "Um," I said, "it's not done yet." So she told me to finish the chapter and send it.

I wrote the whole novel that way, waiting for Madame Editor's comments, editing, and then on to the next chapter. After I finished, she did a once-over of the entire MS for me. Yes I do know how incredibly fortunate I am. Because I was getting immediate feedback, I learned to do things instinctively that many writers only learn later: writing with your 'ideal reader' in mind (Madam), self-editing, and how to tease your readers with cliff-hanging chapter endings. The Madam called me after one particularly steep ending. "Is Diane dead, or not?" she asked. "I'm not telling you," I replied. "Ok, then," she said, "You have 48 hours to get the next chapter to me."

So I learned about deadlines under threat of grievous bodily harm, as well.

But mostly I learned that writing is something I must do. It's part of how I now define myself. More than that, it is a compulsion, a need, an addiction. The sequel isn't proceeding as quickly as the first, because the exigencies of Real Life have intervened: I have interrupted the thing not because of Writer's Block, but by choice.

And it's been bloody miserable. My mind refuses to accept that my fingers haven't been typing at the usual rate, or frequency, and it rushes off, carried headlong by the Muse, into all sorts of Dreams of scenes that simply beg to be written down. They pile on top of one another, and side by side, till my head has swollen so large it's difficult to get in and out of doors.

I have had, therefore, to resume my former schedule of writing. It was either that or suffer a violent psychic hemorrhage.

Oh, and I had a conversation with Madame Editor today. She hasn't seen any of the sequel yet, since I refused to put her through the ordeal, and she declined to read it without being able to turn the page after a precipitous chapter ending.

"Did you know that McAllister -" I began. "No," she said. "No, no, no." So I tried again. "He doesn't want to be tempted -" I said. "I'm not listening." she said, which I respected, at least until the next time I tease her with a detail or two about the book.

The Writers among you will know how that conversation made me feel. The rest of you can eat you heart out.

'Teef from Teef make God Smile'

2007-04-05T17:23:00.000-05:00

Really.

The title to this installment is a Bahamian proverb referring to the Almighty's derision when theft is perpetrated upon a thief ('teef'). "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, He shall have them in derision" (Psalm 2 v.4, KJV).

The philologists among you may note that we thus make the word 'Teef' do double duty both as verb and noun; a common practice here in The Islands, where speech tends towards ellipsis in most aspects. In fact, all you really need is the present tense; but that's another post, and I digress.

All writers are thieves by nature. We are liars too, but I leave that to yet another post, advance work for which can be found here. We steal scenes from overheard conversations, we gather characters from acquaintances, from dreams we purloin eldritch horrors, and we lift ideas from chance questions.

Or from other writers.

Now in other Arts, this propensity to borrow without asking is not only tolerated, but encouraged. I play the Blues, a musical form that thrives on stolen chops and covers of the Classical Masters (Robert Johnson, Albert King, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, etc., etc., There was a time in Eric Clapton's life when he wouldn't waste his time with you if you didn't know - and appreciate - Robert Johnson). It is expected that you should be able to play the old standards. The same is true of concert pianists and violinists and cellists, or of opera singers: performance of DWG material is mandatory. Of course the required cover list changes for, say, American Idolaters, but the principle remains the same.

Mind you, while stealing is encouraged, the unwritten rule is: if you steal a lick or riff, you must 'make it yours', i.e. alter it slightly. This gives sufficient homage to the artist from whom you ripped it, while giving listeners the impression that you have a modicum of talent in your own right.

It is a little different for writers, in that we cannot reproduce a given work by a Classy Writer (like Isaac Asimov, or J.R.R. Tolkien). That is plagiarism, which means writers haven't worked out a royalty system that everyone can live with, unlike songwriters, who, quite reasonably, don't mind you reciting or covering their work, once they can get paid for your performance. (On the other hand, if readers ever become able to download novels over Kazaa or Limewire, writers will starve, since, unlike famous musicians, most writers don't make more money than a given Wal-Mart location).

How then, do writers appropriate foodstuffs suitable for Muse provender? I've already posted about the use of observation and imagination, neither of which involves outright theft. They're just creative journalism, where the writer simply reports what he has 'seen'...nothing terrible ever happens to a writer, only wonderful anecdotes. Everything that happens to us is grist for the mill.

But when we choose to add grist that suits our taste, writers imbibe other writers' works, we absorb, masticate, ruminate, digest, ferment, store and then regurgitate. While many of us schedule time to write, how many of us schedule time to read? Different types of reading strengthen different authorial muscles or abilities.

Reading poetry (which should be done every day, according to Bradbury) stimulates the senses and energizes the simile photons so that we can explode metaphorical clusterbomblets on the page in fragrant thunder.

Short stories, comic books, and cartoons develop crystallization of characters and distillation of plot.

Novels build structural stability, elegance, and style, multiply texture, widen and deepen scope, and teach us the intelligent organization and recombination of the primal elements that meet the rapacious hunger of the human heart for Story.

Articles, blogs, and essays, both for the serendipitous resonance of seemingly useless trivia (the judicious use of which may be used to manipulate the reader into suspending disbelief) and for that one improbable, irresistible sensory detail that places the reader there.

So we all steal from each other. I stole the main ideas for this post from Ray Bradbury, John Gardner, and Tom Morrisey.

What will you steal today?

Some Where, Some Time, Pt 2

2007-03-11T20:41:00.008-05:00

Where were we?

Oh, yes. I was afflicting you with my Opinion regarding Place, or Setting, in writing.

The spell that Place casts upon the reader is different from that cast by a character; more subtle, the Place exerts its powers on the characters as well as the reader, so that character and reader share the same world. What makes the characters afraid makes the reader afraid, or joyful, or tense, or relaxed.

Setting is marvellous in creating tension, mood, atmosphere. Read the first page or two of Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror, or the opening paragraph of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, and you will see what I mean. Yes, I know, those are dark examples. It helps to read them at night. Really.

Place can also help to define or delineate or explain a character. Narnia cries out for an Aslan, and the description of Hobbiton tells us much about Samwise Gamgee. And we intuitively understand why both the characters in the tales feel they are places that must be saved; just as we know Barad Dur must be destroyed, along with Giedi Prime.

For Places may be Good, or Evil.

One of the reasons I write speculative fiction is that it is a genre that has perhaps suffered less at the hands of a PostModernist ethos that eviscerates fictional Heroes than some other genres. It is quite acceptable to find Heroes in Fantasy, though in deference to the Zeitgeist they may have more flaws than in the old days. You know, before nylon.

The reason Reepicheep wants to go Further In and Higher Up is that the Place really is worth it; it answers the (often inarticulate) yearning in our breasts for something nobler, richer, purer. The reason Barad Dur must be destroyed is because everything that instinctively feel is Evil thrives there, nourished by a fallen Maia, Gorthaur the Cruel, who perverts all that is good. As he learned from his master Morgoth, so he influenced his pupil Saruman; the Orcs that were made by Morgoth in mockery of the Elves were bred into the Uruk-hai...

The Place, therefore, requires much thought, at least as much thought as the main characters. And they may change over the course of the book, or across a series. Dune comes to mind, since we mentioned Giedi Prime earlier.

Someone once asked Mallory why he climbed Everest. "Because it's there," he said.

That's why we build worlds. To go there, even if 'there' is a place no one has ever been before. Gene Roddenberry understood; where did the Enterprise go?

To create a Place so real, a Setting so captivating, that the reader's primal yearnings and fears are touched, that they want to go and live there, or run away from it as quickly as possible; a Place they almost really feel and touch and taste and smell -

Now that would be Writing.

Some Where, Some Time, Pt 1

2007-02-13T23:32:00.000-05:00

Imagination.

A useful thing to have as a Writer, and especially a Writer of speculative fiction.

In I See, Therefore I Write I talked about the utility of observation for the Writer in general; but in Fantasy, and its red-headed stepchild, Science Fiction, scenes occur in places that exist only in the Writer's mind. Now I know that the ability to see places which do not exist in the real world, to smell fragrances which occur only in thought, or to hear sounds of no measurable frequency, is to the world at large, and to Pubbers in particular, yet more proof that Writers are HBOP.

Writers of Mystery, Romance, Chick Lit, Thrillers, etc., place their stories oftentimes in either recognizable or known exotic locales for specific reasons; setting produces its own magnetic or repulsive action on the characters, gives its own pleasures, dangers, and opportunities, and has its own particular colors and flavors.

All this is true for the Writer of Fantasy - except that the Place wherein the story is cocooned is not remembered from real life experience and observation, but from dreams, visions, or a good case of fish poisoning (Never eat any Barracuda over four feet long, or one not caught in the open sea). No, Place in Fantasy has its untimely birth in the fevered brain of the Writer.

And Fantasy writers take this very seriously indeed, as witness the many articles, workshops, and books sections on the Art of World-Building in the genre community. Aside from the thorny theological questions raised in the sheer impudence of building a world from scratch, there are many practical and thematic issues involved, such as race, religion, technology, gender (or lack thereof), and language of the inhabitants; flora, fauna, geology, climate, and geography of the Place; and Special Rules, if there any, in reference to any and all magic, powers, weapons, or the like. The mind reels.

But, as in all good Writing, the setting, world-building, or Place may be as important as the characters, and receive as much attention. For the setting not only draws the reader in, mesmerizes them, and drowns them in the fictional dream, buts casts the same spell upon the characters. Indeed, setting may be regarded in some stories as a character.

Different Places and settings cast different spells upon the readers and characters. Some are Holy; as Joseph Campbell once said, 'Sacred place is the place where eternity shines through.' Some are in some sense familiar; woods, deserts, seas. Some are Evil; Gorgoroth, the castle of Jadis, Exham Priory. Some are Home; Hobbiton, the Beavers' Dam, The Burrow. Then there are the special Places, the Places to which journeys are made, and from which we return; but I am getting ahead of myself.

Even Places that seem ordinary and commonplace may produce the most magical effects...

All Places do not affect readers in the same way, either. I talked about spending a night in the Bush two posts ago. Would you like to do that? Could you remain still while crabs crawled across your knees as you sat cross-legged for hours? Or fish all day out of sight of land in swells eight feet deep, in water so blue it makes sapphires envious?

Just as characters in fiction may be ordinary, but archetypical, so setting may be mundane, yet primal.

Once we leave our front door, as Bilbo once remarked, the Road beyond may take us anywhere, anywhere at all, on dangerous journeys fraught with the the most horrific hardships, or delightful voyages filled with tears of happiness. Or both.

Because Fantasy Writing must take us Some Where, and into Some Time. It matters not Where, or When, so long as the story is served by the Where and When. It must take us from our comfortable chair or bed to a mysterious mythical magical Place, where we meet strange and wonderful people and animals (or people who are animals, whatever), and from which we return reluctantly. We go Some Where Else, and then we come back.

Further In, and Higher Up, we follow Reepicheep's lead...

More later.

The Synoptic Gospel

2007-01-23T21:43:00.000-05:00

Ok.

In my ongoing quest to disentangle the Gordian Knot that is the Pubber mind, I have tried to unravel the mystery of the Dreaded Synopsis, that ubiquitous demand of Agent and Editor that throws the Writer mind into helpless confusion. You may judge whether or not I have succeeded.

It is well known that penning this particular blasphemy is about as high on the average Writer's list of favorite things to do as root canal surgery. Or maybe colon resection.

Strong Writers have been reduced to whimpering wusses, trembling in every limb, at the thought of reducing the 400-page out-pouring of their souls to a mere 16-20 pages. To condense the majesty of their opus to its boiled dregs, to distill and remove so many sublime pages, wrought by blood and sweat, to a diluted precis, is a thought so painful many Writers cannot bring themselves to do it.

Worse still is the Short Synopsis, that one-or-two-page double-spaced evisceration of one's work. The ultimate horror, however, and Writers reading this may want to take a deep swig of some potent adult beverage before going on, is the obscenity known as the Logline, the reduction of the work to a measly one or two sentences.

Forgive me, gentle reader: but I must, as Mr. Knightly said, tell you the truth while I can.

After I wrote my first novel, and began my attempts to seduce an Agent, I discovered that almost all of them requested a Synopsis of one form or another, and so I broached the subject with some of my online Writer friends.

Some of them still won't talk to me.

So I tried to understand from the admissions of Pubbers themselves what they wanted when they asked for a Synopsis. My discovery left me more than ever convinced of the devious nature of Pubbers in general, and Agents and Editors in particular.

For a Synopsis requires a Writer to do that which we have been told by Pubbers never to do; to Tell rather than Show. This is why Writers, perhaps even unconsciously, so despise the Synopsis. It goes against everything we have trained ourselves to do, every instinct we have honed. Why, I asked my Self, would a Pubber ask a Writer to do something that they must know grates upon the Writer's psyche like a scalpel drawn across a glass window? And my Self answered me (follow me now), because they are naturally devious beings, six-faced and three-hearted.

But surely even a Pubber would not inflict such pain upon a Writer simply for the amusement. Would they? I began to look closer, and I believe I have discovered their secret.

In Your First Novel, a collusion between a published Author (Laura Whitcomb) and her Agent, (Ann Rittenberg), The Pubber makes this confession:

"There just doesn't seem to be any way of getting around the necessity of the synopsis. But I have to admit that I almost never read them, and neither do many of the fiction editors at the big mainstream publishing houses."

What the Billy Goat Gruff???

Now she goes on to give some reasons that give plausible denial to Pubbers: they want to see if the book is salable, or conforms to the guidelines of a particular genre, or whether they are too similar to previously pubbed works. She has, however, let the cat out of the proverbial bag, and since I despise all felines of the domestic persuasion, I determined to find out more. I found it, I believe, in Elizabeth Lyon's excellent The Sell Your Novel Tool Kit. One sentence on page 80 leaped out and Mennen Skin Bracer slapped me on the face.

"One literary agent I know said that she uses what writers send her as a barometer to measure how well they can follow instructions, and therefore to how well she can rely upon them if she takes them on as clients."

So their plan is laid bare in all its cunning simplicity: the Synopsis is not a tool to determine a Writer's ability, but to determine a Writer's compliability.

I have begun to practice writing STET in a broad Gothic script.

I See, Therefore I Write

2006-12-13T16:20:00.000-05:00

Funny.

During my formative years (for the inquisitive, midway through the Cretacous) it seems that I developed a skill that is proving useful since I became, o Frabjous Joy, a Writer. I had no idea then that I was nuturing a Writing Skill; it seemed too much like fun to be preparation for anything, much as reading Henry Hay was. You remember Henry, I wrote about him in Sleight of Verb.

It was a Skill that required patience, fitness, and the ability to remain perfectly still and calm while insects crawled over one's bare skin and inside one's clothing. Any resemblance here to a writing critique group is, of course, purely coincidental.

I'm talking about Observation.

I spent an inordinate amount of youth wandering around in The Bush. The Bush covers major portions of my Island home (though indeed rather less major now...), and is home to a variety of animals, birds, snakes, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, hog lice, regular lice, Poisonwood trees, Haulback trees (a species thornier than James Frey's problems), and the occasional Haitian footpath.

I have watched, and trapped, just about everything here. I once sat, at night, in The Bush, long enough and still enough, to watch a raccoon make a meal of crabs that were feeding on discarded watermelons. Neither the crabs, some of which crawled over me, nor the raccoon, realized I was there. I know how long it takes for an Black Widow spider to spin a web tunnel, and the pattern of her weaving. I know that some lizards have transparent heart muscles. Don't ask. I can look at a track and tell you how old it probably is, what made it, and usually its gender.

What has this got to do with Writing?

I realized, soon after I started Writing seriously, that I was paying much more attention to everything; the color of someone's eyes, the smell of wet grass after rain, the sound of a creaking door. And I started to ask myself how would I describe that?

For descriptive writing, though it seems to have fallen upon hard times, is based upon, in the first instance, vivid, crytallized details first seen through the Writer's eye, and then translated to the page. In this way the reader is sensually bombarded in such a way as to produce an emotional response before, or apart from, that produced by the terrible problems with which the author afflicts his characters, otherwise known as The Plot. It is even distinct from any emotional investment which the reader may be manipulated into bestowing upon the characters themselves, otherwise known as Bloody Good Writing.

In fact, Setting may itself be considered a kind of character: one which mimics or counterbalances a scene; or a character's feelings; or even the character themselves, and should be described appropriately. The Vale of Gorgoroth, the planet of Caladan, Hogwarts, Pemberley, Perelandra's Sea.

And the description must not slow down The Story, must contain specific sensory details, and contain very few labelling adjectives; the adjectives must call the object what it is in itself, that bring out the definite qualities and quantities of the object.

Well.

So much for the usefulness of Observation to the Writer. We have to first See what we write about.

But in the words of Anne Sexton, "Sometimes the soul takes pictures of things it has wished for but never seen..."

Now that requires quite another Skill.

Imagination.

Another blog for another time.

Haik'd-up Villanelle

2006-12-04T15:03:00.000-05:00

Don't ask.

Suggested by a poem by wyzguy over at AW.

A marriage of Haiku and villanelle.

why then, must I write
dredging up, disgorging pain
through the lonely night

when the muse takes flight
and the search for words is vain
why then, must I write

If the muse I fight
and the writing naught but pain
through the lonely night

when the muse gives light
and the words descend like rain
why then, must I write

If the muse grants sight
then not writing would be pain
through the lonely night

whether words descend like rain
or writing be fraught with pain
why then, must I write
through the lonely night

Thanks for the Meme-ories...

2006-11-21T15:10:00.000-05:00

Okay.

Kelly tagged me. I now have to share five little-known Facts about myself, and then tag five other unfortunate Bloggers.

I will pay her back. It will be a slow and painful punishment, since she knows how shy and retiring I am, and how much I value my anonymity. Come to think of it, Dawno began the whole thing...

Well, here we go.

1. I have broken several bones. The sports-engendered ones are all on the right side of my body: my ankle (high school basketball game) wrist (Karate, green belt test, kumite) ribs and clavicle (American Football, played without pads - we couldn't afford them). I have also broken my left little toe stumbling around at night (twice). It's almost rectangular now. This actually constitutes at least five facts, and maybe I should stop here.

2. I have sold drugs to Sean Connery, Moses Malone, Frank Mills, Arthur Hailey, and Rex Harris, among others. Yes, they were all legitimate prescriptions. No, I won't tell you what they were for, Nosey Parker.

3. I have never seen snow. Well, in movies and pictures, but I have never caught it in the act, so to speak. The coldest it has been down here in my lifetime was the mid-40's F back in 1977. The northern islands had a few small snow flurries, which of course melted as soon as they hit the ground. The Government offices closed, as did all the schools; folks said it was the Judgment of God. As I write this, we're having our first real cold snap of the year. It's in the high 60's outside. Thankfully I work inside.

4. I once went two rounds with then Jr. Middleweight Boxing Champion of the world, Elisha Obed, who taught me how to jab properly, with your whole body weight behind it, and not just a flick of the arm. I was an amateur Welterweight at the time, and Obed's jab hurt me more than the straight rights of the guys I regularly sparred with. I had a cheap mouthguard, and his jab opened a horizontal cut inside my lower lip, about an inch across and a quarter inch wide.

I went home and swished some pure alcohol around in my mouth. After my lip finished exploding, I put a steroidal oral paste on the thing, and it healed in maybe a week, though I still have the scar.

5. CT came clean about the West Wing, so I'll fess up; I loved the too-short-lived Dead Like Me series. It was different. Quirky, with outrageous dialogue and story lines, and funny as Hades. What's not to like about a girl who gets killed by a toilet from the decaying MIR space station, and then becomes a Grim Reaper at 18? And the last scene from the final episode just begs for a resolution...

So.

Who do I inflict with the Meme next?

robeiae
Madi
Mac
GreeceTrap
Ray

Why Write, when you can Worry?

2006-10-10T14:59:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned several times in this blog my sincere belief that Writers are all at least a half bubble off plumb (HBOP, for the uninitiated).

Perhaps nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the rituals, procedures, sacrifices and offerings necessary to placate the Muse before we can begin to write. These are the sorts of things that cause relatives and friends to shake their collective heads and make revolving motions with their index fingers near their collective temples.

Sometimes the Muse requires us to don (or doff...) particular articles of clothing. James Joyce wrote in a milkman's uniform, apparently because he thought the light reflected onto the page was brighter thereby. Charles Ludlum, the founder of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, sometimes wore a wig and an evening gown to write, apparently because he made light of everything. Others dress as if they were going to work in an office, and a few inscribe totally sans habilement.

Some write in the early morning; some, like myself, are night owls (I wrote most of my first novel between 11pm and 3am, when my pc didn't have children or spouse attached to it), and the rest write whenever they can steal a moment or two from Real Life.

Seclusion and quiet is the only setting that will mollify sensitive Muses, as opposed to the more demanding variety that require their writers (e.g. J.K. Rowling) to work in the white noise of a busy cafe.

One of the most important considerations, however, concerns the writer's implements. What one writes with can be a major Muse-seducing tool, as are revision procedures. Hemingway's pencil-sharpening ritual is well-known. Jacqueline Susann typed only on pink paper, in all caps, on a pink IBM Selectric, and revised with an eyebrow pencil; Capote wrote everything out longhand, revised likewise, and required a particular kind of yellow paper for the third draft.

The rituals, procedures, or sacrifices each writer adopts become collectively known as The Process, and tampering with it can lead to Writer's Block (paralysis of the literary glands), Irritable Vowel Syndrome (usually noticed first by friends, relatives, or Pubbers), or worse yet, the production of a stream of unvarnished sentimental unprintable drivel, unfit for human consumption. Whatever this Process is, it is absolutely necessary, be it complex or simple, and if mitigating circumstances interrupt (phones ringing, a nap, or an exceptionally sunny day), writing may even become impossible, unthinkable, or, horror of horrors, too much like Work.

Betsy Lerner, in her excellent The Forest for the Trees, says that writers write for either of two reasons; out of compulsion, or out of a desire to be loved. While this is true as far as it goes (and yes, she does also mention money), neither of these seem to explain the need for Process.

The need for Process, I believe, stems from Worry.

Because no one thinks that writers have a Real Job. At least, it's not the same as working in Real Life, say, as a doctor, lawyer, or industrial thief. People with Real Jobs, like Pubbers, claim to envy writers because writers supposedly don't have to get of their pj's to work or even get out of bed for that matter. Never mind that writers don't make as much as most of the people they know. And isn't it true that a writer has to suffer to be good? When a writer is successful (i.e. makes more money than small countries) the public looks askance, as if they have caught the writer with his hand in the Welfare Fund. Conversely, a writer who fails to be published, or cannot make a living at it, is looked on as a failure cum laude.

And so we Worry. We Worry because our nearest and dearest don't understand our 'hobby'. We Worry that we are complete and utter frauds and that our readers will see through us. Even often-published authors have this Worry. We Worry about getting reviews, we Worry about not getting reviews; we obsess about writers that receive obscene advances and garner Award after Award while we can't get an Agent to look at the outpouring of our souls.

The Process is necessary because it provides structure and rhythm to Worried writers. It announces to the Muse that it is Writing Time, and stimulates the literary gland to flow. Many times the Process is a closely guarded secret, because writers Worry that if readers or Pubbers of family knew what was necessary to get us going, their tongues would cluck sadly in time with their shaking heads and revolving digits.

And we also know the melancholy truth: if we never become famous or rich, our Process will be regarded as merely the expression of a neurosis common to writers; but Dan Brown's Process, if discovered, will be the subject of many creative writing lectures, discussions between budding MFA's, maybe even a dissertation or two.

It won't make any difference, though.

They'll still have to placate their own Muses.

Cindy and the Hung and Pransome Yince

2006-09-02T07:44:00.000-05:00

Ok, summer vacation is over.

Cinderella.

The word conjures up visions of pumpkin coaches, rodent footmen, and Aarne-Thompson's type 510A, the persecuted heroine.

The story boasts an impressive antiquity, the first variants appearing in China in the Tang Dynasty, and has been retold numerous times. Modern variants range from Disney's classic 1950 animated feature to Archie Campbell's marvellously dyslexic Rindercella (who lived with her sticked wetmother and two sad blisters: she went to the bancy fall, where she met the hung and pransome yince, and lell in fove. At the moke of stridnight, she stan down the rairs and slopped her dripper. So sad; it was a drass glipper...). The glass slipper was apparently a French addition (Charles Perrault, 1697). The French have always been so verre haute couture...

The heroine has been criticized by modern feminists as too submissive and helpless, satisfied to aquiesce to her miserable lot. Only because she has the phenomenal luck to have a Gairy Fodmother, um, Fairy Godmother, and the unlikely double blessing of unearthly beauty, does she manage to end up with the Prince, whom it is assumed she will accept.

But any story that has lasted so long must have some intrinsic appeal, something that moves the heart and satisfies the intellect, and must therefore be altered. So in modern versions, both Cindy and the Prince have been made to undergo character makeovers to suit someone's sensibilities, either the author's, or the author's perception of the public's.

Now I like the story in most variants. Some I like more than others, and I think I have found out why. Yes, you are about to be inflicted with an Opinion.

Let's take a look at three modern takes on the tale:

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!!!!

Ever After
Drew Barrymore as Cindy, Dougray Scott as Charming.

A Cinderella Story
Hilary Duff as Rella, Chad Michael Murray as Hung and Pransome.

The Prince and Me
Julia Styles is Cinders, Luke Mably is Prince of Denmark.

Each of these have a Cinderella who has something other than beauty to commend her to modern sensibilities: Barrymore's c. 1500's Cindy is remarkably well-read, quick-witted, handles both dirk and rapier with aplomb (Though we sadly do not get to see her swordfight with her captor, M. Le Peu, alas), and deserves the Prince, according to Leonardo Da Vinci, that bastard son of a peasant. Meritocracy trumps Autocracy. Whether Leo would have actually voiced such opinions is of course irrelevant to our concerns in such a lighthearted piece, but putting opinions into Da Vinci's mouth which he cannnot be said to have espoused seems to be quite the popular thing nowadays. She also rescues the Prince from gypsies, and herself from captivity. Scott's Prince only overcomes his prejudices after Leo chastises him, but does end up Charming.

In Duff's modern-day portrayal, Cinderella is actually rich but doesn't know it, because her Mugly Other has hidden her father's Will, and Murray's football hero Prince harbors hidden yearnings to be a writer, something I'm sure many football players secretly aspire to. This 'You've Got Mail' version also has Cindy and the Prince text-messaging each other without either knowing the other's real identity, and at the Bancy Fall she drops her cell phone instead of a glass slipper, which are no doubt difficult to find at Payless. Murray's Prince also has to be told off because he refuses at first to acknowledge Cindy when she is revealed; this time by the heroine herself, Leonardo not being available, having assumed room temperature soon after helping his fellow peasant Barrymore in the 1500's.

Also set in today's Cinderella-jaded times, Ms. Styles' rendition presents us with a tightly-focused med school Cinders,with a cute mom and two passable brothers, and who needs no rescue at all, except perhaps from the drudgery of all-work-and-no-play. Turning the tables, this version has the Prince disguise himself as an exchange student, with no nobler ambition than to ask co-eds to flash him, and sow his royal oats; somewhat of a let-down from Dougray Scott, who wanted to start a University. Forced into the obligatory revelation scene by Danish papparazzi, the couple have the obligatory (and transient) argument and break-up scene. The Prince returns to Denmark after the semester is finished, whereupon Cinders' heart smites her up side her head, and she flies there to see him again. The proposal scene is classy, and original. Cinders accepts (of course) but changes her mind later, because her head recovers from the wound given by her heart in time. She returns to med school to finish her dream of working with Doctors Without Borders, a noble ambition, far superior to getting co-eds to flash their boobs. At least Denmark (now King, did we mention?) returns at her commencement, and vows to wait for her.

The three are listed in the order I prefer.

This has nothing to do with the relative acting skills of the Misses Cindys, or even the Hung and Pransome Yinces.

Nor does it have anything to do with the 'feminist' re-telling; all of them have heroines (and Princes) that have been re-written from a more 'feminist' standpoint.

It has to do with whether or not the story delivers what it seems to promise. If you set me up to expect a 'fairy-tale' ending, then you ought to give it me; if you don't, I'll be disappointed, sometimes without even knowing why. If you want to make me cry, give me a tragedy. If you want to make me laugh, give me a comedy. If you want me to die, give me poison; but don't give me every expectation of one and give me another.

Now it may be that the last story in my trio is an attempt by the author/producer/director/whoever to make a statement about the Cinderella story in general, a sort of deconstructive, or revisionist play. If so, then I think it fails for the reason most deconstuctive and revisionist stories fail; the only satisfaction is political, and will satisfy only those, and perhaps not even those, who share the storytellers' political views.

Classic stories, those that have stood the test of time, have survived, I believe, because they touch something in all of us.

And of course I don't mean one cannot tell a story without a political point; the original Cinderella was political; Princes didn't marry commoners in those days. The original story made a point about meritocracy versus autocracy.

I think the last of our stories would have been much more satisfying had, since they decided to turn the tables, turned them all. It didn't go far enough either way. They could have done a nice update on the old story and left it there, or they could have gone whole hog with the Prince's transformation, and have him take up Cindy's Noble Cause. Either would have more satisfying, at least to me.

On Characters

2006-07-31T19:15:00.000-05:00

Strange.

In the middle of a conversation with one of my beta readers about a week ago, I suddenly realized we were talking about my characters as if they were real people.

"What do you think Diane will do when she finds out about Lilleth?" I asked, knowing full well what Diane would do, having dreamed up her reaction some time ago.

"Oh, Diane will slap her silly," Beta said. "Wait; no, Diane isn't like that. She might want to, but she won't, she has too much self-control."

"You think so?" I asked. Beta will be in for a surprise, apparently, as will Lilleth.

And then I asked Beta if she thought it was strange that we were discussing inanimate characters in a novel as if they were real.

"Yeah, it is, sort of," she said, confirming my statement in my last blog that all writers are HBOP, and a goodly portion of readers likewise.

When readers like or hate my characters, I take this as a very high compliment indeed: it means they have formed some kind of relationship with the character, even though that character is a figment of my imagination.

Well, partly.

I construct my characters from people I have known in real life. I never bring them into a story whole, though, because along with a sincere desire to avoid litigation, I want them to fit certain profiles. I will take something from this person, and something from another, maybe a third or fourth, put it all in the oven and see what rises.

Of course this applies only to my protag and the supporting characters, not the villains, which I dredge up from the inner recesses of my own dark and brooding psyche. Next I'll give you a hot stock tip...

Since I write fantasy, I must acknowledge and pay homage to certain cliches, since that is what defines genre to an extent, otherwise I might as well write in the Genre that Takes Itself Much too Seriously to be Enjoyed. Fantasy readers have come to to expect such, so long as it's not overdone, or too obviously imitative.

Take for instance the Raven-Haired Warrior Queen/Huntress. My character Diane is cast squarely within that mold - but she is also Miss Manners, with unexpected vulnerabilities. I like using cliches; the reader, quite reasonably, expects things from such characters, most of which I give them - until I lower the boom, on the character and the reader...

This is part and parcel to me of the sort of thing I talked about in Sleight of Verb: verbal misdirection and manipulation of interest. My writing plan consists of creating characters that are as real as I can make them, in settings likewise, using real people as templates or cooking ingredients (take your pick), inviting or deceiving the reader (again, choose) into a relationship with the characters, and then manipulating the reader's interest and emotions (...) by having terrible things happen to the characters.

Dang, that sounds callous.

So far, it seems to be working, though...

To Sleep, Perchance to....

2006-07-20T22:21:00.000-05:00

Dream.

I mentioned in my Virgin Blog my perverse desire to drown all my readers in the fictional dreams that I call my writing.

But what are dreams, anyway, and why should a writer care? I suppose I could get technical here, and trot out Merriam-Webster's definition, or even Solomon's (it's verse 3...), but I prefer my own, at least when it comes to writing. I suppose that makes me conceited; but whoever heard of a writer without an ego? Writers are so bloody needy: if you're a writer you know already what I mean. Have you ever watched someone read something you've written, just to see if they gasp, or laugh, or become horrified just at the right moment? It's a disease we all have. But I digress...

I believe Dreams are imagined memories.

This may be why some writers go mad, and why normal people think writers are all at least a half bubble off plumb, and why the normal people are, of course, right.

First of all, the dream has birth in the fertile (or well-fertilized) brain of the writer, who transfers it frantically to paper, or a hard drive, before the dream dies. Something is always lost in the transfer, translation, and recording, another source of authorial angst and neurosis. A reader happens along, reads it, as readers tend to do, and falls in. Now they are caught; they see what the writer saw, hear what the writer heard, smell what the writer smelled. Steven King calls this mental telepathy, thought transferance by use of the written word. The writer dreams the story before writing it, or sometimes while writing it. I can only speak for myself, but when I write most often all I see is the scene before me, not the keyboard.

Now memory is a funny thing, as Henry Hay taught us, and can be manipulated, directed, controlled to a degree. One of the strangest things about it is that false memories and real memories play back in our mind's eye in precisely the same way. This is why I always look upon so-called 'repressed memories' recalled under hypnosis as suspect; is it live, or is it Memorex?

Try it yourself. Close your eyes and think of a real memory, something meaningful, like graduation, or marriage, or your first cup of Starbucks. Now open your eyes and read the next set of instructions; do the same with a scene from one of your favorite books. Be careful. If you're an avid reader blessed with a good imagination, the second exercise may well be the most vivid. Which is why readers are also at least a half bubble off plumb.

John Gardner talks of crafting the fictional dream, a wonderful phrase that I have stolen without remorse, and he maintains that several things are necessary. One is the use of vivid physical details that 'engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things - sights, sounds, smells - as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge.' Another is continuity. Distractions from the dream are deadly to the story. There are many ways to do this, apparently, far too long to list here, and besides, it would rob you of the untrammelled joy of reading his classic book The Art of Fiction.

But there's something more.

I believe good writing not only creates a cohesive and vivid fictional dream for the reader, but that it also touches something deep within, yearnings inexpressible, groanings that cannot be uttered. This is ( I think) what C.S. Lewis meant when he said that good stories bring to us '...a scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tone we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.' It is at once completely familiar and yet totally other, and when we read it we recognize that we had known it all along, though we do not altogether know what it is.

Stories that have that scent, a whiff, perhaps, of elanor, the golden singing of the Sindarin, the speech of Numenor.

I want to write like that, to have readers see only the dream that I have crafted, to smell, taste, touch, hear the dream...but more, I want to touch that deep, unfathomable as-yet unimagined place...

I have to be at least a full bubble off.

Write what you Know?

2006-07-05T15:41:00.000-05:00

Really?

The title for today's missive is trotted out as the collective wisdom of Those that Know Things in the writing world. I've seen the phrase repeatedly in writing primers, forums, and blogs. Ok, I said to myself, and sat down to write.

The problem is, I write fantasy. So how do I write what I know when I have to invent a world, and possibly creatures, hitherto unknown, and factually non-existent?

My first reaction was that this was a false trail, a red herring, laid down by devious Pubbers to shrink the slush pile by screening out ignorant writers: I haven't altogether given up the idea, since some Pubbers repeatedly refer to the high percentage of queries that are "crap". One high-profile Pubber has even revealed the use of interesting (but foul-sounding) device, a Crap-o-Meter. One wonders what units of measurement it uses. However, lacking proof, this must remain only a working hypothesis, like European assumptions that George W. Bush is an idjit.

Secondly, I wondered if readers really do want to hear what I know about certain of my relatives. Do they really want to know that Auntie has been styling her hair in the same fashion since the Roosevelt Administration, or that Brother eats peas 'n rice with corn syrup? (Actually, not all that bad...) And if readers do, do I really want to run the risk of Auntie's retaliatory wrath? Will my Internal Editor let me? And how in the chicken gumbo do I make it interesting?

Thirdly, though I realize that the internet has opened up resources to the writer never before seen ( and some better not seen), from blogs in Chaucerian Englyshe, to catalogues of useful ancient stuff, to Pubber Facts and Figures, these help mainly in researching details. A non-fiction or freelance writer, if they run out of Things they Know, can always, you know, learn about something Else; a fantasy writer still has to make stuff up.

So I decided that while this hoary piece of writing wisdom may work for other writers, it did about zippitydooda for me.

So I asked myself, "Self, what kind of book do you want to read?" and I myself answered my Self (follow me now), "I want to read a different kind of fantasy." So I myself sat down and wrote the kind of book that I My Self wanted to read. Others have read it, and so far most of them like it (Pubbers excluded, thus far), so I think I'm on to something. What it is I don't altogether know, but it must have to do with writing stuff I like.

Which brings up the subject of Genre.

For me, choosing to write in my favorite Genre, i.e. what I like, is more liberating than writing What I Know, because I am writing about things I love, or hate, or would love to have, or hate to lose. And as a Fantasy writer, I don't think I am any different from other writers in other Genres; my world has to be just as coherent, my characters just as believable, my details just as precise as those who write Mysteries, or Romances, or Thrillers. Maybe more so, since I may be asking my readers to suspend disbelief in a totally non-factual world.

I left out Literary Fiction, since nobody seems to be able to give a definition for it. ( I made up my own: Books that Take Themselves Much too Seriously to Be Enjoyed). I also left out Mainstream Fiction because that brings up unfortunate mental images of test strips that have to be held mid-stream...

There is something, though, that writers in every Genre have to do, I believe; get the reader to dive into the page and surround himself with the Writer's crafted Dream. I believe that the authentication, or 'proof', or persuasion, that the writer uses toward this end is the use of specific, concrete, vivid details, both in description and characters.

But that's a blog of a different color.

Probably Purple.

Them Ol' Rejection Blues

2006-06-23T07:59:00.000-05:00

Another dull and dreary mornin'
e-mail inbox still empty... (Repeat)
No replies, Lord, no replies
Rejection Blues is killin' me.

This writin' business makes you crazy
bloody Muse won't leave me be (Repeat)
lookin' Agents up online
blind from readin' my pc.

Now there is this one thing
almost makes me take to drink
my writing friends' acceptance posts
cause me to wring my hands and think
Oh baby...I won't ever be the same
you broke my heart when you called Agent So-and-So's name.

So many ways to say 'no thank you'
They didn't 'fall in love' with me (Repeat)
and then an 'out-of-office' note
wait till Monday, then we'll see.

I send out query after query
some don't bother to reply (Repeat)
and when they do it's a rejection
so I fold my arms and cry.

I have these ol' Rejection Blues
feel like a squeezed-out lemon rind (Repeat)
e-mail has another message
think I'm 'bout to lose my mind.

(12-bar quick-change blues, with profuse apologies to Robert Johnson.)

Sleight of Verb

2006-06-14T23:53:00.000-05:00

Magic.

Specifically The Amateur Magician's Handbook, by Henry Hay, Harper & Row, 4th Ed., 1982 ( now, sadly, out of print).

It sat, trembling expectantly, on the bookstore shelf, its red-and-black dust jacket crying "Pick me, pick me!"

So I did. My library now contains many volumes on the ancient and noble Art of Fooling People Badly with the Cunning Use of Tricks (i.e. magic, sleight of hand, legerdemain...), but Hay's marvellous 400 page tome is still my favorite, and in many ways, the best. Of course memory embellishes and romanticizes first loves, on which more later.

His first chapter is called The Magic State of Mind, a perfectly felicitous phrase, and it contains some of the best advice concerning the performance of magic I have ever read. It also, strangely enough, contains some of the best advice on writing I have ever read, though I didn't know it at the time, and neither, probably, did Hay.

What he says is this:

"And how do we go about tempting our audience?"

-Already we know he's on to something, don't we...

"The central secret of conjuring (and of art and literature and politics and economics) is a manipulation of interest. (Not just of attention, as we shall see in a moment).
"What, in turn, is interest? Interest is a sense of being involved in some process, actual or potential."

-Italics here, and in all these quotes, are his. Well, he sure had my full and undivided. Now that I look back on it, Hay should perhaps have considered moonlighting as a political campaign manager, or Fed Chairman. He obviously understands the basics.

-Potential process? Well, will the protagonist find the sword/ring/amulet? Whodunnit? First, readers have to care about what happens to your characters, which is another way of saying 'plot'. Twice during the writing of my first novel (as yet unpublished, as I think I told you before) I tried to kill off, in true Shogun style, my main female character. Two of my beta readers, both female, threatened me instantly with grievous bodily harm. Apart from the blinding flash of revelatory insight, and perspective, into life in general provided by this near-death experience, I realized I had created at least one character with whom those readers had bonded emotionally, and it felt...pretty darn good. I had Fooled them into suspending disbelief in the actual unreality of the character. That's a magical effect.

Hay goes on to say:

"Processes too big, too small, too fast, too confused, or too slow for you to take in can't give any sense of involvement; they aren't interesting. That much is obvious."

-He obviously must have worked as a Literary Agent. What better description of the average slush pile could one want? In one incredibly concise statement he has addressed scope, pace, clarity, and detail. And it's obvious that the above statement isn't obvious to every writer, otherwise the slush pile would be smaller, or the request-for-partials stack bigger.

He next addresses something that isn't quite so obvious:

"Interest is not the same as attention. Attention is a simple response to a stimulus - either to a loud bang or (much more powerful) to a feeling of interest.
"Interest is selective, an expediture of energy by the interested party. You, the performer, can never command it, only invite it."

-In other words, you can lead a horse to water, but if you want him to drink you have to rub his gums with salt. Any poor sod who has been forcibly fed Shakespeare or Jane Austen by-the-numbers and by a check-collecting excuse for a teacher knows that enforced attention is the mother of after-school detention. It's like racing an engine without putting it into gear. For magic this means, among other things, that an effect must have a logical unity or theme, which is why you don't often see mentalists producing or vanishing cards; one effect undermines the other...

If you gain the spectator's (reader's) attention, how do you lose it? Again Hay comes to our aid:

"...this means a trick must hang together; that it must not be scrambled by irrelevant objects, motions, or even surprises."

-Repeat after me: if it doesn't advance the story, cut it out.

"Memory is an internally edited record of interest (not of attention, much less of 'events')."

-If we have led the suckers - excuse me, the audience - through a realistic enough process, and then by devious and sneakful means and misdirection produce the effect, impossibilities erupt, followed by the inevitable "How did you do that??" To which I usually answer, "Very well, thank you." Perceiving, they think, a certain process, people tend to follow it through to their own logical conclusion. Successful misdirection helps them to wrongly perceive the process because the mind cannot help but make associations based on past experience. Perception becomes reality, which Hay also tackles.

"Perception, too, originates with the perceiver, not with the object."

-Although what the perceiver sees is guided, manipulated, and controlled to a degree by the performer (writer). Wonderfully diabolical, isn't it? The performer controls what the audience shall pay attention to, and what it shall not pay attention to, and the way in which each individual can, or cannot, record a personal memory CD.

"In other words, the magic show takes place ultimately in the spectator's head."

-When I read a really good book, I don't see the words on the page; I see Frodo and Gollum through waves of heat, scrabbling in the dust on the edge of Orodruin's pit. I see Paul Atreides, frozen in fear, droplets of sweat trickling down his face while the hunter-seeker hovers above his bed. Don't you?

And:

"You let the audience perform their own magic, with coaching from you."

-The story is everything. It's very difficult for me to sound clever and the story to be great at the same time.

What I learned about writing from Henry Hay, who had no idea he was teaching it to me:

-A writer may command attention, but must invite interest.
-Reader's interest may be manipulated to follow a process.
-The process (plot, story) must all hang together.
-The reader's perception may be controlled and restricted to a degree.
-A writer must gain the reader's attention, invite his interest, direct his perceptions, and win his involvement.

One last word from my old friend:

"Suppose you vanish four or five small oranges, and then catch them from empty air - a modest little trick that you can do before you are half-way through the section on hand magic. If you are any showman at all, ten to one that people will quite honestly remember that you caught half a bushel of grapefruit, and piled them up on the stage."

The literary equivalent of that memory is what writers salivate after.

Tribal Warfare.

2006-06-09T08:22:00.000-05:00

Ok.

When I decided to begin writing, besides the obligatory books on the Art and Craft of writing,I read everything I could about the business end; publishing. The deeper I delved, the more I felt like a missionary about to embark upon the conversion of a different culture. Or like a teenager attempting his first seduction, take your pick.

This is because I discovered that those in the publishing industry belong to a different Tribe, or Species, than Writers. That men and women belong to differing species has been well documented by the noted social anthropologist Dr. John Gray: but I found the same to be true of writers and those of the editing/publishing/agenting ethnicity, hereinafter referred to as The Pub People (after Keyes).

Pub People are readily discernible from Writers by the following general characteristics:

Pubbers are Schedule-driven, helpless without a day-planner: Writers may schedule writing. Or not.

Pubbers have recognizable corporate/professional habilements: Writers ask "Dress up? For what?"

Pubbers are political animals and networkers: A Writer is a loner, and works best alone.

A Pubber belongs to several cliques based on aesthetic and political preferences: Writers may belong to a critique group...

Pubbers never take naps: Writers nap frequently, even mid-typing.

Pubbers generally have a regular salary, and health benefits: Writers on salary? With health benefits? ROFL.

Pubbers can lose their job: Writers are self-employed (or unemployed, which amounts to the same thing).

Further, Pub People have their own secret rituals and language (blurbs, slush piles, not-for-me-isms), engage in small mutual support groups (lunch meetings, production meetings, agent meetings) and even have their own Holy Days (semi-annual sales conferences).

An insular, commercial people, Pubbers will seldom even consider reading the out-pouring of a Writer's soul unless the writer has a platform, (which means will the bloody thing sell) or the writer is a brand name (which means the bloody thing will sell), or they believe the book has legs (which means I hope the bloody thing sells). They obsess over books earning out, or selling through, or slipping.

They have difficulty reading anything not in a particular format, and will ask writers (beg them, really) to submit the out-pourings of their souls in this form and this form only, or they will refuse to read it. They will however, place minor variations on this format in each and every place that publishes their submission requirements; this is nothing less than the hoary Canary Trap, that old stand-by of the CIA, NSA, Mossad, and MI5. In this manner they can determine where most of the writers submitting to them do their research, so they know where to publish their submission requirements next time.

Writers, of course, have our own idiosyncracies and foibles. These characteristics include the (quite reasonable, to our mind) assumption that Pubbers, who read for a living, ought to be able to read in more than just one or two fonts. We (quite rightly) look upon the requests of the Pubbers to 'be professional' in our submissions as a thinly-disguised plea to give them something they are able to read.

Writers also regard the forecasting ability of The Pub People with regards to sales as suspect. How else can anyone explain the reason Nicholas Sparks, J.K. Rowling, Canfield & Hanson, and Stephen King, et al., took so long to be recognized as the commercial goldmines that they are? We suspect also that Pub People are at least as paranoid as Writers, perhaps more so, and are creative minds trapped in business suits, who portray their subjective, irrational, emotional decisions as rooted in sound financial ground. We believe this because there are no soundly established empirical criteria for the outlay of large monetary sums based solely on the perusal of several MSS sheets.

So as a first-time novelist, my job is to attempt to cross the cultural divide - I must learn to speak, and write, Pub. This is the Golden Rule of getting published; They that Haveth the Gold Maketh The Rules. To make things even more frustrating, Pubbers and Writers profess to speak the same language, but many times fail utterly to communicate. Maybe it's a dialect thing. It doesn't help, either, that Pub People have redefined words that were perfectly well understood before (crash, house, spine, skip, jacket, etc.), or that their sensibilities, preferences, and tastes are so different from people who do not happen to live in Valhalla (New York City).

Worse, the Pubbers and Writers desparately need each other; they recall the classic negotiating concept of the handshake where neither party can afford to let go, or both will go bankrupt, starve, or worst of all, never be regarded by one's peers as Having Arrived.

What we need is a formally agreed -upon Pubber/Writer Dictionary.

Unfortunately what will probably happen is that to be published, a Writer will have to beg, plead, or otherwise cajole, a Pubber into printing it (a process known as querying, designed to humble Writers so that they Know Their Place). The Pubber will immediately suspect it has no platform, spindly legs, and believe the bloody thing won't sell. After all, where's the market for it?

Virgin Blog

2006-06-02T12:01:00.000-05:00

So.

I finally gave in and started a Blog.

Here is where I'm supposed to craft a little bio for any misguided soul that may wander in, lost in the labyrinthine corridors of the Net...

Alas, I'm much too shy and retiring.

All you'll get is this: I live in the tropical paradise known as the Bahamas, and I sell Drugs for a living, for which profession the Government granted me a licence. I write, but am as yet unpublished, though I am a member of the Greatest Writing Site On The Planet. (The site is still under reconstruction as I write. You can find out why here.) I play the guitar, but am as yet not Eric Clapton, though I have three guitars: Gertrude, Suzy, and Sally.

The rest is classified information, given out on a need-to-know basis. This need is not necessarily yours.

Since I intend to Blog mostly about my writing (though I may inflict you with an Opinion now and then) I'll also say that I write sci-fi/fantasy, and am hot on the trail of a good literary agent whom I can seduce into representing me. Not this one. Good agent, but she doesn't rep sci-fi/fantasy, probably due to some unfortunate congenital mishap, poor thing.

I write speculative fiction, because, as Bradbury says, such books are About Something; they contain Ideas, and are surprisingly relevant. They are not an escape from reality, but are instead a kind of secret door into it, and a fascinating way of describing it. Fantasy writers have always understood Plato's Cave intuitively - our writing is merely an expression of an Idea, a hand-shadow puppet show for our readers, or in the case of science fiction, an inventive and imaginative Idea about how to solve a problem. There are submarines now, Jules, and you saw them first.

Enough philosophical claptrap. I really write because it is so much bloody fun. I write because I will explode if I don't. Indeed I held it in for most of my life, and my formal training is in the physical sciences (with a little Theology thrown in), but in my youth, lo, those many centuries ago, I found Conan languishing on a bookstore shelf. I carried him home and devoured him. Then I found Bradbury, o joy and wonder, and Poe, and Lovecraft, and Maugham, and Tolkien.

And I became a fantasy cannibal. I swallowed books, I inhaled them whole into my maw, and digested them over years. I have read The Lord of the Rings at least once a year since first finding it, and could probably recite whole sections.

Of course this is an addiction, and I freely admit it. But the simply glorious thing is that now I have the chance to write something...addicting... and pass the torch, or infect someone else with the love of reading. If I could write a story all green and growing like Bradbury, with the insight of Maugham, the scope of Tolkien, and the sheer blinding narrative pace of Howard, then I might call myself a Writer.

And if I write well enough, I can drown you in my Dream, take you down and hold you under until you inhale and imbibe it, so that when you come up for air the real world for a moment is the dream, and the world you left the reality -

Well, I can dream, can't I?