Showing posts with label craft of fiction writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label craft of fiction writing. Show all posts

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Hooking Without Overwhelming

One of my publishers hosts weekly author chats. I recently read the transcript of a chat that warned against "overwhelming" the reader. Specifically, it discussed the hazard of overwhelming the reader in the opening scene of a book or story.

We know the importance of quickly hooking the agent, editor, or reader. We've heard that an agent or editor has to be reeled in with the first page or sometimes the first paragraph (depending on the giver of the advice) to avoid rejection. What pitfalls loom in that first look? By "overwhelming," the editors in the above-mentioned chat referred to inundating the reader with either unnecessary details or too many characters, especially named characters, right off the bat. The reader needs to know the setting (place and time), important details that "move the story along," and maybe a selection of secondary characters. Above all, the protagonist must be introduced in a way to make the reader care about her.

Another caution mentioned was not to plunge into an "action" scene right away. We need a reason to care what happens to the protagonist before seeing him or her in a crisis or life-threatening situation. A violent fight scene doesn't mean much if we don't know the participants or the stakes involved. The same principle applies to starting with a sex scene, unless writing erotica or erotic romance, and even then the scene will appear pointless if it doesn't reveal character and advance the story.

Before the inciting event, the big change in the protagonist's life, occurs, there should be a glimpse of her normal life, even if very brief. Especially if it's a violent or otherwise shocking event. I have slight reservations about this guideline. We could think of successful novels that deviate from it. One that leaps to mind for me is MISERY.

King's novel starts with the protagonist already injured from a car accident, waking to consciousness in the home of his "number one fan."

A big pitfall to avoid: Starting with backstory. The early pages should always move forward. Frontloading backstory is a besetting authorial sin of my own. I've read books by prominent authors that violate this one, too. A brief opening shows the hero in some dire plight. Then they answer the rhetorical question, "How did I get here?" with several chapters of backstory. Techniques like this probably shouldn't be tried until the author has attained a similar level of expertise and popularity.

One of my favorites of my own works, FROM THE DARK PLACES, originally started with the heroine's gazing at a photo of her late husband and immediately falling into a reverie that leads into a whole chapter about their meeting, their marriage, the birth of their daughter, and the husband's untimely death. Fortunately, I received and followed the advice, "Don't do that!" The book as published begins with present-day action and gradually weaves in, when appropriate, the only parts of the backstory the reader needs to know, the crisis birth and the husband's death.

My husband and I violated the "don't plunge straight into action" guideline in the second volume of our "Wild Sorceress" series by starting in the middle of a battle. In this case, I believe the problem is slightly mitigated by the fact that this is a sequel to a book any reader who buys the sequel has probably read. In the first volume, we transgressed a no-no the chat doesn't mention, starting with a dream sequence. In our defense, it's clearly a dream, not a bait-and-switch, and it has an immediate, clear bearing on what the character is now facing in real life. Still, I would probably resist doing it that way today. It also commits another alleged fault that many editors and readers detest, starting with a character waking up and preparing for her day.

One of my favorite bestselling fantasy authors begins a novel published a few years ago with a life-threatening battle that turns out to be a simulation! I'm astonished that the publisher let her get away with that blatant bait-and-switch!

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 05, 2023

Mental Illness in Horror

The Horror Writers Association's monthly newsletter has started running a column about the treatment of mental illness in horror fiction -- how it's been done wrong in the past and how to do it realistically, sensitively, and compassionately. Too often in such stories, neurodivergent people or sufferers from mental and emotional disorders have appeared as stereotypically monstrous figures such as deranged serial killers. Yet it's hard to imagine the genre without Poe's neurotic or perhaps delusional narrators, Renfield in DRACULA, Lovecraft's protagonists driven mad by cosmic terrors, Robert Bloch's PSYCHO, and works such as Theodore Sturgeon's brilliant SOME OF YOUR BLOOD (a short epistolary novel featuring a rather pitiable blood-drinking sociopath, who, with only two exceptions, kills only small animals he hunts in the woods). THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS presents the sociopathic genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, more of a fairy-tale monster with almost magical powers than a realistic criminal, and the serial killer "Buffalo Bill," murdering women to sew a "girl suit" out of their skins. The latter has been criticized for giving the toxic impression that transgender men are inherently unstable and probably dangerous. Lecter explicitly says "Bill" isn't really transgender and has been rejected by more than one sex change clinic (as the procedure was labeled at that time); nevertheless, the impression lingers.

There's little room to doubt that the innumerable fiction and film portrayals of people suffering from psychosis and other mental or emotional disorders as insane killers have negatively affected the public's distorted perception of actual human beings with similar problems. Also, the pulp fiction and horror film trope of the "mad scientist" probably reinforces too many people's distrust of real-life science nowadays, often with potentially disastrous real-world results.

As the panel discussion articles in the HWA newsletter point out, horror writers don't have to stop including mentally ill and neurodivergent characters in their works. Those characters can be drawn as three-dimensional figures with credible virtues and flaws, even if they're sometimes the antagonists in their stories.

I recently read Stephen King's latest novel, HOLLY, which I enjoyed very much. Like King himself, I've been fond of Holly ever since her first appearance in MR. MERCEDES. Through the rest of that trilogy, the spin-off novel THE OUTSIDER, and the novella "If It Bleeds," she has believably evolved as a character. When we first meet her, she's nervous, shy, perpetually anxious, and at least mildly obsessive-compulsive. Even then, her suppressed intelligence shines through. She also seems to be high-functioning autistic, although the texts never explicitly state that diagnosis. As seen in HOLLY, she has grown in confidence, competence, and bonding with people she has come to love, while her core personality remains the same. She still displays the same quirks, including that touch of OC, exacerbated by the need for COVID precautions. She's a well-rounded character whose strengths and weaknesses we can empathize with, yet a true hero when circumstances require. She strikes me as an outstanding example of a non-neurotypical protagonist done well.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, September 28, 2023

In Celebration of Happy Endings

In fiction, is a sad conclusion more "realistic" than a happy one? "The belief seems to be that tragic or unhappy endings are 'real' and therefore 'worthy' while happy endings are an easy cop-out." This essay on the Word Wenches blog strongly objects to that belief:

Word Wenches: Happy Endings

The insistence that happy endings are unrealistic seems based on the undeniable fact that the real world contains lots of horror and suffering. Yes, admits this blogger, but it also contains "a lot of happy stuff," which she wants us to "celebrate. . . not push it under the carpet and call it mindless fluff." People who hold the latter position apparently believe writers and readers of such "fluff" are evading reality, hiding from the grim truths of life. As if the grimness and suffering were somehow MORE "real" than the joyful bits. Is a house in the suburbs with two cars and a jacuzzi any less "real life" than a roach-infested apartment? (During our fifty-plus years of marriage, we've lived in both as well as various environments in between.) Every work of art constructs its effects by selecting elements from the total mass of lived experience. Why shouldn't we preferentially select the good rather than the bad sometimes? Dwelling solely on the bad and labeling it "realism" reminds me of a passage in C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS: The senior demon advises the junior tempter to induce the human "patient" to consider his feelings about the impact of bombs on human flesh as a reflection of "reality" and his feelings about sunshine and happy children as mere wishful thinking.

I suspect a large part of "serious" critics' dismissal of romance arises not just from its predominantly female audience but also from its generic requirement for a "happily ever after" or at least a "happily for now." Yet if it's actually true that half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce (which I've read is a faulty claim based on a misinterpretation of the statistics), then it's also true that half of all marriages last a lifetime.

Not that the Word Wenches blogger is saying no fiction should conclude with a sad outcome. What she objects to are stories (in whatever medium) that "are needlessly miserable at the end." If the disastrous or tragic conclusion grows naturally out of the story, as an inevitable result of the characters and their situation, that can work for her. That's different from a pointlessly sad ending designed for shock value or to flaunt the author's commitment to gritty "realism" -- or "simply because the writer thinks it will make for a better, more dramatic ending." I agree. "Sad" fiction isn't necessarily depressing. The finale of a tragedy by Shakespeare feels uplifting, not depressing. Seemingly meaningless destruction of the characters and their goals, to me, IS depressing. The purpose of art is to impose structure on, or discover it in, the apparent chaos of "real life."

In one of his books on literature, C. S. Lewis approaches the issue of "realism" from the opposite angle, addressing critics and readers who think the down-to-earth content of comedy is more "realistic" than the solemn grandeur of tragedy. He points out that the zany coincidences required to make a good farce work are just as artificial and therefore "unrealistic" as the plot of a well-crafted tragedy. Every genre includes some details of mundane life and excludes others, according to its particular requirements.

So we have no reason to apologize if we love to read and write upbeat fiction.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, August 31, 2023

On Character Growth

There's an essay on the WRITER'S DIGEST website called "The Importance of Character Growth in Fiction," by bestselling author Annie Rains:

Importance of Character Growth

She lists and discusses vital elements in showing the transformation of a character over the course of a story: Goal and motivation; backstory and the character's weakness or fatal flaw, arising from features of the backstory; the plot and how its events force the protagonist to struggle, plus the importance of pacing so that growth doesn't "happen in clumpy phases"; the "ah-ha" moment when the character realizes the necessity of taking a different path; importance of showing through action how the character has changed to be able to do "something that they never would have been able to do at the book’s start."

As vital as all these factors are, and as much as I love character-driven fiction myself, I have slight reservations about Rains's opening thesis: "If your character is stagnant, there is no story. . . . Your character should not come out of your plot as the same person they were before their journey began." Doesn't good fiction exist to which this premise doesn't apply? Classic detective series, for example. What about Sherlock Holmes? Hercule Poirot? Miss Marple? What about action-thriller heroes such as James Bond? Through most of the series, Bond survives harrowing adventures that would kill ordinary men many times over, with no discernible change in his essential character. (In the last few books, he does begin to change.) Even in stand-alone novels, as mentioned in the WRITER'S DIGEST essay to which I linked in my blog post on July 20, static characters (as opposed to the negative term "stagnant") have their place. In A TALE OF TWO CITIES, Charles Darnay doesn't change, whereas Sidney Carton does. In THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, the Russian submarine captain has already made his life-changing decision before the story begins and never veers from his goal. In A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Scrooge transforms, while Bob Cratchit is a static character. So, arguably, is Romeo, who's still the same impulsive, emotion-driven youth at the end of the play as at the beginning, thereby possibly triggering his own tragic end.

I'd maintain that, while Rains is self-evidently correct that a character's circumstances have to change in the course of a narrative, he or she doesn't necessarily have to undergo a transformation, depending on the genre. The character must either attain the plot's stated goal or fail in an interesting, appropriate way. Without a change in his or her situation, whether external, internal, or both, there's no story. But an internal transformation isn't a necessary feature without which "there is no story."

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Posthumous Unfinished Writings and Whether Characters Have a Life of Their Own

Last week I read TERRY PRATCHETT: A LIFE WITH FOOTNOTES, by Rob Wilkins, who worked as the Discworld creator's personal assistant for many years, right up to the end. Two points in this biography distressed me, as a reader, writer, and occasional literary critic. (Well, aside from knowing in advance about the sad conclusion, Pratchett's premature death from a rare form of Alzheimer's disease.) I reacted most strongly to the ceremonious crushing of the hard drive from Pratchett's computer, purposely obliterating his unfinished works. Pratchett ordered that his unpublished writings should stay unpublished and that there would be no posthumous Discworld fiction from other authors. Of course, an author has a right to express that wish and have it obeyed by his heirs. But utterly destroying every trace of those uncompleted stories? Very well, as per the author's instructions, don't publish them. However, I shudder at the thought of the loss to SF and fantasy scholarship. A library could have preserved them in an archival collection for academic study of Pratchett's work.

Some readers of Harper Lee's prequel to (or first draft of) TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD declared it should not have been published, that it only tarnished the reputation of her classic novel. "That isn't the point," I mentally screamed at the time. The point is the value of that prior work to scholars of her writing. Consider the abundance of posthumous publications and unfinished works by C. S. Lewis available to fans and academics. I would hate to have missed all that. And then there's the case of J. R. R. Tolkien, whose son spent decades compiling, editing, and releasing Tolkien's many surviving stories and fragments. What a loss to scholars and readers the withholding of that material would have been.

In one of my second-tier favorites of Stephen King's novels, LISEY'S STORY, I of course sympathize with the fictional bestselling author's widow, who has been constantly pestered since his death by academics demanding access to his manuscripts and other files. I also feel for those fictional scholars, though. While reading the book for the first time, I did wonder what the heck was taking her so long to get around to the obviously necessary task of releasing his papers for study. Granted, most of the people making those demands were portrayed as pushy, presumptuous, and often downright contemptuous of Lisey herself. I trust Pratchett scholars wouldn't act that way, and I mourn that we'll never know the contents of those destroyed files. If publication had been allowed, I would have paid a considerable sum to read even a fragment of a story about Susan Sto Helit as headmistress of her old school (one example mentioned in the biography).

Second and less important was a casual remark of Pratchett's quoted in passing, which nevertheless I felt like protesting. Once a fan asked him what Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city Watch was doing in between two particular novels. Pratchett answered, "Nothing. I made him up." If a fictional character becomes vivid enough for readers to imagine he or she has a life outside the printed pages, isn't that a good thing? Pratchett himself certainly must have understood the fanfic-creating impulse, for he admits to perpetrating fanfiction at least once: As a teenager, he composed a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE rewrite set in the world of LORD OF THE RINGS. (It involved orcs.) Not only fanfic but also professional fiction attests to the irresistible desire to expand on the imagined lives of favorite characters.

I know of at least one novel speculating on what Heathcliff did in his years away from Wuthering Heights and how he made his fortune. A recently published book explores the wartime service of the March girls' father during the early chapters of LITTLE WOMEN. So many classic works leave gaps and unanswered questions. What was the full backstory of Bertha, the mad wife in JANE EYRE, and was she actuallly insane before Rochester locked her in an upstairs suite (not, as commonly said, the attic) with only one companion (THE WIDE SARGASSO SEA)? What happened to Ishmael after his rescue at the end of MOBY-DICK. (Jane Yolen recently published a YA novel spun off from that question.) What's the story of Captain Ahab's wife, fleetingly alluded to in Melville's book? There's a novel about her. In A CHRISTMAS CAROL, how do the events look from Marley's viewpoint? Several works have addressed that question. Why did young Ebenezer Scrooge's father detest him? (Ebenezer's mother couldn't have died in giving birth to him, as one classic film states, because his sister Fan is younger; if Scrooge senior was that bitter about his wife's death, he wouldn't have remarried.) Why is Ebenezer too "poor" to marry Belle right away? His father must have been prosperous, since he enrolled Ebenezer in an apparently respectable boarding school and eventually sent a carriage to bring him home; what happened to the family money? What happened to Fan's husband, the never-mentioned father of Scrooge's nephew? What is Tiny Tim's illness, which has to be something chronic but ultimately fatal and yet curable by nineteenth-century medicine? At the time of Scrooge's death in the future scenes, where is his nephew? It's hard to believe Fred, as portrayed in the present-day scenes, would ever give up on Uncle Ebenezer.

These are the kinds of questions deeply involved fans of stories ask. Speculating on the answers is a vital part of the fun of being a reader.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, August 10, 2023

He, She, It , or They Said

Nowadays a widely accepted piece of advice about writing fiction sternly rebukes any use of dialogue tags other than the simple, almost invisible word "said." No alternative verb choices such as "muttered," "snarled," "cried," "screamed," etc., and definitely no adverbs. Nothing like, "We must flee," Tom said swiftly. Resorting to dialogue tags to convey the tone of a character's speech is a sign of weakness, the fiction mavens insist. A skillful writer can accomplish this goal by other methods. But sometimes you can't, I protest, at least not so concisely. Can't your hero "whisper" or "shout" occasionally?

Anthony Ambrogio's "Grumpy Grammarian" column in the August newsletter of the Horror Writers Association rages against this alleged rule. In this columnist's view, the constant repetition of "said" makes a fiction writer's prose tedious and flat. He particularly dislikes the use of "said" with questions. The verb "asked" belongs there, he insists, and on this point I completely agree. I also advocate a whisper, shout, murmur, or mutter in the appropriate places. Ambrogio disparages the current fashion as "the unfortunate less-is-more, bare-bones approach to dialogue where everything is 'said' and writers don’t ever vary their descriptions of characters’ remarks." He concludes the essay with the exhortation, "You’re a writer. You have imagination. You have language. Use both (he demanded boldly)." To some extent, I agree with him. Sure, a beginning author may wander into a thicket of purple prose by becoming too enamored of flamboyant dialogue tags and unnecessary -ly adverbs. But potential abuse of a technique doesn't justify forbidding its legitimate use.

Of course, variation can be introduced by avoiding dialogue tags altogether and identifying the speaker through his or her actions. However, that device, too, can become tediously repetitious if overused. Sometimes, moreover, we just need to know that the character whispered a line instead of screaming it. I once did some editing on a novel that included a conversation where two women were drinking tea or coffee or whatever. The text repeatedly identified each speaker by having her fiddle with her cup, spoon, etc., often in almost identical words.

One stylistic choice I strongly dislike consists of line after line of quoted speech with no attribution at all, like reading the script of a play but without the characters' names. Supposedly, in well-written dialogue each character has such a distinctive voice that you can immediately recognize which one is speaking. Well, sometimes you can't. It breaks the flow of the story when the reader has to count back up the lines to the last mention of a name to figure out who said what. It's even worse if the author ignores the "one speaker per paragraph" rule, as some do.

In short, writers have access to many methods of distinguishing speakers in fictional dialogue and describing their manner of speech. Each one can be elegantly deployed or clumsily misused. Or, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!"

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Thursday, April 06, 2023

Must Fiction Have Conflict?

I recently read FANTASY: HOW IT WORKS, by Brian Attebery, a distinguished scholar of fantasy and science fiction. In addition to the solid content, he has a highly readable style. While I can't unreservedly recommend this book to every fan, given the price (but still very reasonable for a product of a university press), anybody who enjoys in-depth analysis of fantasy in all its dimensions would probably find it more than worth the cost. Some topics include realism and fantasy, myths and fantasy, gender and fantasy (mostly focusing on male characters), and the politics of fantasy. Of particular interest to me is the chapter titled, "If Not Conflict, Then What?"

Advice to writers almost always maintains that a story can't exist without conflict. Attebery is the first critic I've encountered who casts doubt on that alleged truism. In fact, he flatly states, "This may be good advice for getting published, but it isn't true." Conflict, he points out, is simply a single metaphor, implying combat. Among other metaphors he suggests are dissonance, friction, and dance. He maintains there's only one "essential requirement for narrative," which is "motivated change over time."

This discussion intrigued and reassured me, since the necessity for goal-motivation-conflict in a properly structured story is usually taken for granted. Reflecting on examples of my own work, I realize some of my fiction contains what could be called "conflict" only by stretching the term almost out of recognition. Suppose we subsitute "goal-motivation-obstacles"? Marion Zimmer Bradley, after all, summarized the universal plot as, roughly, "Johnny gets his behind caught in a bear trap and how he gets out." Elsewhere, I've seen the essence of story encapsulated as: The protagonist wants something. What's keeping them from getting it?

For example, my contemporary fantasy, "Bunny Hunt" (to be published as an e-book on April 10), features a protagonist whose long-range goal is to have a baby, a wish gaining new urgency because she and her husband are over thirty. Her problem is that they've been trying for a while with no result. The impediment, her possible infertility, might fall under one of the classic types of "conflict," person versus nature—if we count her own body as part of "nature." But that interpretation seems to strain the definition of "conflict." The short-term goal, to help a rabbit woman through a potentially fatal childbirth (no more details, sorry—spoilers!), involves problems that might possibly be labeled "person versus nature," but again that reading feels like a stretch.

For me, I believe thinking in terms of the more general formula "goal-motivation-obstacles" will make plotting future fiction projects easier.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, September 22, 2022

Current Events: To Write or Not to Write?

The website of WRITER'S DIGEST has an article about whether authors should include references to the COVID-19 pandemic in contemporary fiction:

Should We Write About the Pandemic in Fiction?

The author of the article explores whether it's "too soon" to write about the pandemic or whether readers (and writers) who are worn out after the past three years prefer not to have that weight added to their fictional experiences. "Who would want to read about the pandemic, we wondered, on top of living it? Could we even bear to write about it? Didn’t we all need one long vacation from the subject?" On the other side, she personally felt a need to process the ordeal through stories. "Books make difficulties a shared experience. When we read about something we’ve also lived through, we realize that, thankfully, the story is not just our own." Moreover, in her opinion a present-day novel that didn't mention the pandemic would feel unrealistic; the omission of that element would jarringly stand out.

Most important, for her, failing to mention COVID-19 in a novel with a contemporary setting would violate her duty as an author to write the truth. Leaving it out would falsify present-day reality as we know it.

She makes some good points. On the other hand, one of my publishers decided not to allow references to the pandemic in contemporary fiction, and I believe there are good reasons for their position. First, we hope and trust the pandemic won't last forever. Like the flu pandemic of the early 20th century, it will pass. The disease may (probably will) hang around in some form, but it won't continue to dominate our lives and consciousness. Therefore, including COVID-19 in a story or novel would date the work to a specific period of three or four years. Unless there's a solid plot or character reason to write the piece within that framework, why handicap it that way?

Also, more fundamentally, the pandemic, if mentioned, would overshadow the rest of the story. Any fictional work that includes COVID-19 would have to be in some way ABOUT the pandemic. In that sense, I believe it is "too soon" in the same sense that it's still too soon to mention the September 11 attacks as mere background detail. A novel or story including that event would have to be "about" 9-11, such as Stephen King's novella whose protagonist had escaped dying with his coworkers because he happened not to be at the office that day. I think we can, however, legitimately incorporate such related details as going through an airport security checkpoint, something that's now woven into the fabric of our culture. Likewise, at some point in the future after COVID-19 recedes into the background as an annual nuisance like the flu, if people continue to wear masks in medical settings (for instance) that kind of thing could be casually mentioned in contemporary fiction.

What do you think about referencing contemporary real-life events in fiction set in the present day?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, September 01, 2022

Fiction About Creating Fiction

This week I watched the Fred Astaire musical THE BAND WAGON. The plot (such as it is) revolves around a lighthearted musical play the Fred Astaire character's two best friends have written for him as a comeback vehicle. The famous director who's persuaded to take charge of the production insists they rewrite the story as a contemporary, avant-garde musical adaptation of FAUST. When the opening performance proves to be a spectacular flop, the cast and crew remake the play according to the original script. So this movie is a musical about the making of two musicals.

KISS ME, KATE is another well-known example of a film about producing a play. Many others appear in the list on the TV Tropes page titled "The Musical Musical":

The Musical Musical

Of course, the device of a play within a play goes back to Shakespeare, if not earlier. In A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, the workmen of the city put on a play about Pyramus and Thisbe, meant as a movingly tragic drama but turning into a farce. Hamlet writes a revenge drama for the visiting actors to perform in an attempt to expose his murderous uncle and even lectures them on acting techniques.

Then there are films and TV series such as WANDAVISION and PLEASANTVILLE, in which the protagonist is trapped inside a TV show or movie come to life.

Novels about writing books are not uncommon, also. One obvious example is Stephen King's MISERY, in which the villainess forces the author of her favorite series to compose a sequel restoring the supposedly dead heroine to life.

Such stories can go either way in terms of the relation of the embedded fiction to the main plot. In MISERY, the melodramatic historical novel the author writes during his captivity contrasts sharply with his own desperate plight; the process of creation offers temporary escape. In HAMLET, the content and theme of the play within a play deliberately echo the situation at Elsinore.

Do authors create stories like this mainly because, as labeled on TV Tropes, "Most writers are writers," and we tend to "write what we know"?

Most Writers Are Writers

Or are there deeper reasons why many people enjoy metafictional fiction?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, March 31, 2022

SF Versus Fantasy

At this year's ICFA (which I wrote about last week), one of the free goodies distributed at meals was a copy of the March/April 2020 ASIMOV'S magazine. It happened to include a provocative article by David D. Levine called "Thoughts on a Definition of Science Fiction." The author takes an approach to distinguishing science fiction from fantasy that never occurred to me before.

Of course, this perennial and never-settled question has many proposed answers. And many works cross genre boundaries; SF is a "fuzzy set." Anne McCaffrey's Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley's pre-rediscovery Darkover, although science fiction, have a fantasy "feel." S. M. Stirling's Emberverse series, beginning with DIES THE FIRE, clearly near-future or alternate-history SF, also includes something like magic. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series focuses on the protagonists' learning and using magic—which they prefer to label "wizardry" to avoid the implication that it can do anything, unbounded by rules—yet they visit distant planets and make friends with extraterrestrials. Cases like these are part of why the term "speculative fiction" is so useful.

Levine suggests that the distinction between fantasy and science fiction rests on a fundamental difference between worldviews. Science fiction arises from an Enlightenment worldview and fantasy from a pre-Enlightenment worldview. In SF, "the universe is logical, predictable, and understandable, governed by rules that are impersonal and have no moral dimension." Fantasy, on the other hand, inhabits a universe that "has a moral compass, and is governed by rules that, though they may be understandable, are not necessarily always consistent, logical, or predictable in their application." For example, fantasy contains swords that can be drawn only by the "pure in heart" (a moral dimension). As an extension of this definition, Levine focuses on the central importance of "the means by which characters affect the world," whether by technology or by magic. Using this principle, he maintains that the later Star Wars films, after the original movie, slip further and further into fantasy territory because of the way the Force becomes more powerful and less scientifically plausible (e.g., action at a distance).

While I admire his theory, it doesn't align completely with my own concept of the SF-fantasy divide. I've always seen the distinction as—perhaps too simplistically—primarily a matter of authorial intent as it appears on the surface of the text. If the text claims a scientific rationale for its phenomena, it's science fiction. If not, it's fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs's interplanetary adventures count as science fiction, even if most of the science is obsolete. Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mysteries, set in an alternate-history England in a world where magic plays a commonplace role in society, are fantasy even though the rules of magic are systematic and predictable. What about works such as Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and its sequels and spinoffs, invoking scientific principles, featuring visits to other worlds, and marketed as SF, but containing some elements of apparent magic as well as a religious worldview? Or C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, wherein the superhuman intelligences ruling the other planets are also identified as angels? The Wild Sorceress trilogy, co-written by my husband and me, starts as apparent fantasy, to be revealed as SF at the end of the third book. Well, that's where the flexible terms "science fantasy" and "speculative fiction" come in handy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 17, 2022

Viable Villains

I've just finished reading Dean Koontz's latest fantasy thriller, QUICKSILVER, which I like better than a lot of his recent novels. For many years, almost every book he's written has featured the same kind of villain (or a secret cabal of them)—a sociopath with delusions of grandeur, an evil genius, at least a genius in his own eyes, dismissing the rest of the human species as inferiors who, if not deserving of extermination, exist only to serve the few elite supermen. QUICKSILVER does include one of those annoyingly unrelatable, often flat-out unbelievable characters, but he appears only briefly. The other human antagonists work for a covert federal agency; their motives make sense in context, to carry out their orders and suppress the danger they believe the hero represents. The principal villains, invaders from another universe, have no humanly relatable personalities or goals, but that inhumanity is appropriate to them. They're almost Lovecraftian in their alienness.

Aside from such utterly alien creatures, however, the typical sapient antagonist (as opposed to an animal or a force of nature) should have some relatable traits in the form of motives we can comprehend even if we condemn the methods of pursuing those aims. Even many readers' favorite "pure sociopath," predatory genius Dr. Hannibal Lecter, has desires other than his cannibalistic cravings, goals we can sympathize with. He wants freedom, along with the comforts and luxuries denied him in his windowless, high-security cell, as anybody in that plight would.

Frankenstein's creature wants kindness and companionship; only rejection turns him bitter, vengeful, and violent. Count Dracula wants to leave his worn-out homeland for a new country of boundless opportunity. Dr. Jekyll begins with the noble goal of splitting the evil dimension of humanity from the good and thereby controlling the former. The Phantom of the Opera wants the admiration and devotion of a young woman. In more recent fiction, Michael in THE GODFATHER doesn't start out as a bad guy; indeed, he has deliberately tried to dissociate himself from that part of his background. He devolves into a villain when his determination to protect his family gradually entangles him in his father's criminal empire. According to an often cited principle, every villain is the hero of his or her own story.

To me, more often than not, one-dimensional evil geniuses such as Koontz's recent antagonists feel no more believable than the supervillains in an old cartoon series whose purpose was "to destroy the universe for their own gain." They're sometimes fun to read about, but I can't in the least relate to their motivations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Most Writers Are Writers

This is the name of a page on the TV Tropes site, referring to the countless works of fiction with authors, playwrights, screenwriters, journalists, or poets as protagonists, a not unreasonable consequence of the hoary precept to "write what you know.":

Most Writers Are Writers

Taking this principle to its logical extreme leads to the situation satirized in a quote from SF author Joe Haldeman at the top of that trope page: "Bad books on writing and thoughtless English professors solemnly tell beginners to Write What You Know, which explains why so many mediocre novels are about English professors contemplating adultery."

Strict obedience to that "rule" would, of course, mean no fiction could be created about places or ethnicities other than the author's own, much less science fiction or fantasy. TV Tropes has another page discussing, with examples, the difficulties of writing about nonhuman protagonists such as extraterrestrials or animals. Yet even these characters have to exhibit as least some human-like traits, or readers couldn't identify with them:

Most Writers Are Human

Henry James critiques the advice that an author should write only from his or her own experience in this famous passage from his 1884 essay "The Art of Fiction" about the need for a writer to be someone "on whom nothing is lost":

"I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience. She had got her impression, and she evolved her type. She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French; so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and produced a reality. Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a much greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it--this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience, and experience only,' I should feel that this was a rather tantalising monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!'"

To put it more briefly, it has been said that instead of "Write what you know," the rule should be, "Know what you write." In other words, thoroughly research whatever you aren't already familiar with from personal experience or study.

I admit I've usually adhered to "write what you know" in terms of my characters' occupations. Most of my heroines work as librarians, proofreaders, bookstore clerks, college instructors, or, yes, authors. Since their work usually isn't the central focus of the story, I figure it's just as well to give them jobs I know enough about not to make blatant errors. Where the protagonist's vocation does play a major role in the plot, I default to "writer."

The internet makes research easier than ever before, provided one takes care to distinguish accurate sources from their opposite. And for in-depth exploration, reliable websites can direct the searcher to books, which can often be obtained through interlibrary loan—which can also be arranged online. A public library might even have access to that one necessary book in electronic format, eliminating the need to go out to pick it up. For example, once when I wanted to insert a few sentences about a heroine's psychic vision of a mountain trail in Afghanistan into a story, typing and clicking on a single search phrase gave me all the images I could wish for. We truly live in wondrous times for "knowing what we write."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, January 20, 2022

Presently Tense

Does anybody really like fiction narrated in the present tense? Apparently, to my bafflement, many people actually do, since that device seems to be a currently popular fad. Not only do authors write it, lots of editors accept it. Of the two most recent Ellen Datlow anthologies I read, each contains multiple present-tense selections. The January-February issue of THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, which I just finished reading, includes twelve stories, of which five are told in present tense. To skew the balance further, one of those is the longest piece in the issue. Only one story strikes me as possibly justified in its narrative choice, being framed as a sequence of day-by-day news-as-it-unfolds reports.

Many years ago, I read a horror novella that enthralled me except for one feature: It was written in present tense and second person. "You walk to the top of the barren hill and find the ruins of an ancient stone circle. . . ." kind of thing. (Just an example, not a quote. The bizarre narrative style is the only specific thing I recall.) I've seen second-person-present-tense work very effectively in an occasional short story. At novella length, it was excruciating. An author I follow on Facebook dislikes present-tense fiction so thoroughly that it's an automatic downcheck for her. While I don't go that far, in my opinion present tense has only a limited justifiable use. It works well in the aforementioned rare short stories in second person. And if an author wants to leave open the possibility of a first-person protagonist's death, present tense can discourage the reader from meta-thinking along the lines of, "He can't die, because he's telling what happened in the past." (Only in a short story, though, not inflicted on us for the length of a novel or even a novella.) There are few other circumstances in which present-tense narrative doesn't annoy me. Sometimes it makes sense when used to distinguish current action from flashbacks, as Stephen King does in his recent thriller BILLY SUMMERS. I didn't mind it too much in that book, although I don't think it was necessary.

Why do fiction writers use present tense? I assume the idea is that telling the tale as if it's happening at this moment is supposed to enhance suspense or create a feeling of immediacy. It's probably meant to give the audience a sense of being immersed in the action. In my experience as a reader, that style has the opposite effect. Present-tense narration draws attention to itself and away from the story. It most often generates distance rather than emotional involvement. Conventional past-tense storytelling is "transparent" because it's what we've been conditioned to expect. When reading, we look through it, not at it. My advice, for what it's worth: As a writer, don't mess with what traditionally works unless you have a strong, specific reason for the change.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, December 16, 2021

Classics and Monsters

Following the success of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES (2009), numerous mash-ups of public domain classic novels with horror creatures and tropes were published in the few years immediately following. I've recently reread LITTLE VAMPIRE WOMEN and A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL. Are such adaptations worth reading except as bizarre novelties? Their main appeal, judging from the types of books that have been adapted, seems to be incongruity, with fiction as unlike the horror genre as possible being transmuted by the insertion of supernatural threats into the original stories. Some others, for example, are JANE SLAYRE, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS, LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES, and WUTHERING BITES.

In my opinion, those kinds of books turn out better if they involve a certain amount of actual rewriting. From what I remember of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, it's fun to read once but not transformative enough to comprise much more than Jane Austen's original work with zombies thrown in at suitable intervals. Granted, though, the image of Elizabeth as a trained zombie-slayer has a certain zany charm. LITTLE VAMPIRE WOMEN and A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL, on the other hand, rewrite their prototypes more extensively, although some undigested lumps of Alcott's and Dickens's prose do stand out.

A VAMPIRE CHRISTMAS CAROL raises the question of whether the entertainment value of such crossovers fades a bit when the source text already contains elements of supernatural horror. It strikes me as not too much of a stretch to have Mr. Scrooge stalked by vampires as well as haunted by ghosts. WUTHERING BITES falls into a similar category. Vampiric motifs pervade WUTHERING HEIGHTS, with Heathcliff explicitly compared to a vampire in one line. Turning him into a literal vampire-human crossbreed, cursed by the heritage of his monstrous half, fits fairly well into the original plot. In that case, the "co-author" can't depend solely on the appeal of incongruity; she has to create a believable story with an anti-hero who inspires genuine sympathy as well as horror.

A step removed from those books, which might be considered a peculiar sort of fanfic, we find "secret histories" such as ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER, which I discovered to be better than I'd expected. The criterion for such novels is that the action must remain faithful to the historical person's biography as publicly known, while inserting supernatural elements into the hidden corners of his or her life, so to speak. Queen Elizabeth, H. P. Lovecraft, Lizzie Borden, and many others have received similar fictional treatment. A January 2022 release, THE SILVER BULLETS OF ANNIE OAKLEY, by Mercedes Lackey, will introduce magic into the career of the famed sharpshooter. I don't object to this type of fiction as long as the author does conscientious research into the historical background and treats the protagonist with respect.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, November 04, 2021

Unimaginable?

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column tackles the issue of scenarios that are allegedly impossible to imagine:

The Unimaginable

The specific scenario he discusses here is the end of capitalism. Lots of authors, he points out (including himself) have written about postcapitalist, sometimes post-scarcity societies. What's hard to imagine, he suggests, is the process of transition from the present to those hypothetical futures. Doctorow cites several examples of SF works that portray postcapitalist worlds, few of which go into detail about how those societies came about, Kim Stanley Robinson being one exception. Would the shift happen through violent revolution or gradual evolution?

Anyway, the job of science-fiction and fantasy writers is to imagine things, however wild or seemingly improbable, right? John Lennon's song "Imagine" claims "it's easy if you try" to conceive of such things as a peaceful Earth with "no possessions," no "greed or hunger," and "nothing to kill or die for." Imagining a utopia (not that I'd want to live in his, since I have doubts of the desirability of a world without countries or possessions, not to mention Lennon's anti-religious slant) may be easy, but visualizing how to get there involves a whole different order of difficulty.

Many, if not most, fictional futures, of course, aren't meant as literal predictions but as cautionary "if this goes on. . ." warnings or optimistic thought experiments in constructing societies better than our own. Few people would want to live in Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE. In the former, the rewriting or obliteration of history as a core policy of the despotic regime deliberately leaves the question of how Big Brother rose to power unanswerable. THE HANDMAID'S TALE (novel) offers a few glimpses of the transition but no detailed account of how we might get from here to there, while the TV series expands on these hints in extended flashbacks but still leaves many questions unanswered.

Although Edward Bellamy claimed his 1888 utopian novel LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000-1887 wasn't intended as a literal plan for political action, a movement to implement his ideas sprang up, in the form of "Nationalist Clubs" active in American politics well into the 1890s. In time Bellamy himself did get involved in this movement, which achieved some practical results before dying out. As attractive as some aspects of Bellamy's vision seem to me, I don't expect to see it become reality, although a few elements exist already—for instance, the cashless society. On the whole, though, over twenty years have passed since 2000, and we're not there yet. Bellamy's faith in the capacity of social structures to change human nature within a generation or two (abolishing greed, violence, etc.) seems naive today. I don't expect a world government such as LOOKING BACKWARD and many near-future SF novels take for granted. However, I wouldn't be surprised if a worldwide confederation similar to the EU eventually developed, but probably not in my lifetime.

One thing I especially like about S. M. Stirling's long-running Emberverse series, beginning with DIES THE FIRE, is that it depicts not only the violent collapse of civilization as we know it, along with the immediate post-apocalyptic scenario, but also the transitional phase experienced by the survivors and their rebuilding of a new society. The series follows the changed world over the course of two generations. We witness how the new world develops into neither a dystopic hellscape, an ideal utopia, nor a duplicate of the old order, but something simply different, better than the present in some ways and worse in others.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Hanging from a Cliff

How do you feel about cliffhanger endings in novels? I've just finished reading the second book in a thrilling, very inventive dark fantasy series. (I suspect it will be a trilogy, but that hasn't been announced as far as I know.) While the first novel ended with an intriguing hook for the continuation, this new one concludes with an outright cliffhanger in the final sentence. Now we have to wait a year for the resolution! That sort of thing bugs me a little, because devoted fans will read the next installment regardless, while the author risks annoying readers less deeply invested. On the other hand, in this particular case it's hard to see how the story could have ended without leaving the audience in suspense. I can't go into details, of course, because of spoilers.

A classic example in pulp SF comes from one of Edgar Rice Burroughs' early John Carter adventures, THE GODS OF MARS. On the last page, Princess Dejah Thoris is trapped with a couple of other people in a revolving chamber designed to open only once a year. The villain is preparing to kill her as the hero watches the tableau vanish into the depths of the temple. Fortunately for me, I read that series many decades after its publication, so all I had to do was find the next volume on my grandfather's bookshelves.

I have a vivid memory of my frustration with THE MIRROR OF HER DREAMS, by Stephen R. Donaldson. In fact, after all these years I don't recall much else about it, not even what the cliffhanger ending consisted of. I do remember that by the time the sequel, A MAN RIDES THROUGH, became available, I'd forgotten so much about the first novel that I no longer felt any enthusiasm for returning to the story.

It was a jarring shock when I read BLACKOUT, Connie Willis's time-travel novel about England in World War II, and reached the last page to discover that it just—stopped. I felt like yelling, "Where's the rest of it?" That sharp break wasn't the author's fault, though. She'd written the duology of BLACKOUT and ALL CLEAR as a single work, but it turned out much too long for one volume, so the publisher released it as two books. Happily, they made us wait only a few months for the second half, not a whole year.

Ideally, a series that includes a book with what amounts to an abrupt break in the middle of the story should have its installments released in quick succession over a span of a few months. I realize that's not always feasible with either the author's or the publisher's schedule, though. But I still think the typical traditional publishing gap of a year between books is more apt to discourage than to intrigue a casual reader (as opposed to a devoted fan).

A similar trick that does exasperate me in the extreme is ending a TV season on a cliffhanger, especially if renewal isn't definite, but even if it is. That device strikes me as disrespectful to the established audience and unlikely to attract new viewers. As far as the latter are concerned, how many people will start watching a new season of a long-running series if they're aware they don't have the necessary backstory to understand what's going on? Veteran fans, on the other hand, will tune in to the next season anyway without that kind of irritating manipulation.

As a reader and author, my advice would be that if you're going to end a novel on a cliffhanger, be very careful. One would hope for at least a partial resolution—as the book mentioned at the beginning of this post does in fact offer—so readers won't feel their trust has been abused.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, October 14, 2021

Real People as Characters

I've just finished reading the ten Catherine Le Vendeur novels by Sharan Newman, mysteries set in twelfth-century Europe (mostly in France). Catherine begins as a novice at the Abbey of the Paraclete and a student of Abbess Heloise. At the end of the first book, Catherine leaves the convent, rather than taking final vows, and gets married. Thus she's not only an intelligent young woman but highly educated for a lady of that era. Like any reluctant amateur detective, she frequently stumbles over corpses or gets entangled in events that endanger her family and friends. She applies the logic she learned from her teacher to probe these mysteries. Over the course of her adventures, she crosses paths with many distinguished historical figures in addition to Heloise, Peter Abelard, and their son, Astrolabe. (Yes, that was actually his name.) Significant historical events such as important church councils, with the associated political controversies, provide backdrops to the stories. Judging from Newman's afterwords to the books and her expertise in medieval studies, she clearly took care to place the real people in the series at locations where they're known to have been or could have been in the given year and not to show them doing anything that conflicts with their documented personalities and behavior.

I once read a post on Quora that vehemently objected to including people who actually existed, regardless of which century they lived in, as characters in fiction. That attitude baffled me. I can't think of a valid reason to consider such fiction disrespectful, and a lot of excellent works would never have been written if authors accepted that prohibition as a rule. Several of Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian "Ballad Novels" tell stories based on real events—for instance, THE BALLAD OF TOM DOOLEY, whose afterword explains that the narrative sticks as close to reality as she could manage. Since it's a novel, though, McCrumb was free to speculate about motives and invent incidents and dialogue. Barbara Hambly does the same in THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE, about the later life of Lincoln's widow but with flashbacks to earlier periods. I see no problem with portraying historical persons in fiction if the author does conscientious research, sticks to the recorded facts except when filling in gaps where creative license is appropriate, and doesn't show the subjects behaving in ways incompatible with their known characters.

Writers of alternate history and secret history, of course, have much greater scope for invention. "Secret history" refers to fiction that doesn't change the facts of the past as generally known and accepted but inserts other events, often supernatural, occurring behind the scenes: Vlad the Implaler was a vampire. Lincoln was a vampire slayer. Elizabeth I was a demon hunter. Wizards on both sides shaped the course of World War II. I can enjoy these kinds of novels as long as the depictions of historical figures stick close to their true-life personalities. Otherwise, why bother writing about them at all instead of inventing your own characters?

The closer we get to the present, it seems to me, the more problematic it becomes to use actual people as protagonists. Successful books, however, have been published on plot premises such as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Howard on a road trip to confront eldritch horrors or C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien fighting the forces of evil. Personally, I might have qualms about making fictional protagonists of people with still-living relatives and friends who remember them.

I do draw the line at the use of live, present-day celebrities as fictional characters, except as walk-on "extras" or as part of the cultural background. (E.g., the protagonist attends a concert by a famous singer or watches a presidential debate.) There's a subgenre of fan fiction, "real people" fanfic, that consists of stories about celebrities such as singers and actors. It even includes, incredibly, slash scenarios between living individuals. While I'm adamantly opposed to censorship and therefore don't advocate making this sort of privacy invasion illegal, one would think it would be precluded by good taste and simple courtesy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Handling Editorial Feedback

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column focuses on how to evaluate feedback from editors:

When Should You Compromise?

Her guiding principles are "Understand the story you are trying to tell" and "Be confident in the story you're telling." In the revision process, keep the theme, the emotional core in mind; "figure out what your story is about, and cut out anything that isn’t that – and add only bits that are in support of that story." The way she describes her process, she seldom argues with editors to justify her choices. She accepts the suggestions that take the story in the direction she wants it to go and disregards the rest. If "you don't know what the book is," she cautions, you may find yourself trying to revise in accordance with every criticism you get, even those that contradict each other, and end up in a "tailspin."

She also says she typically has to "write a significant number of words" to figure out what the story is really about. That statement slightly boggles me. Shouldn't that figuring-out happen in the outlining phase? Granted, however, many authors consider outlines constraining and need the exploratory process of actual writing in order to accomplish what "plotters" usually do in prewriting.

I've hardly ever had to grapple with the kind of overarching plot and character edits she discusses. Maybe any of my fiction that had serious problems on that level has been rejected outright, or maybe I've been fortunate enough to work through any such problems at the pre-submission stage with the help of critique partners. Most often, my disagreements with editorial recommendations have concerned details of sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation. When the latter kinds of "corrections" arise, house style usually rules, no matter how I feel about it. I consider the "Oxford comma" indispensable, but one of my former e-publishers didn't allow it except in rare cases. Worse yet, they didn't want commas between independent clauses. I gritted my teeth and allowed stories to go out into the world punctuated "wrong" by my standards. On other stylistic issues, I sometimes agree with the editor and sometimes not. If the disagreement isn't vital to me, I usually let it go to save "fights" for instances where the change makes a real difference.

Most editors, if not all, have personal quirks and fetishes. I had one who insisted "sit down" and "stand up" were redundant and wanted the adverbs omitted. Really? Do most people invite a guest to take a seat with the single word "Sit" as if speaking to a dog? I gave in except when a word indicating motion was definitely needed. Another declared that "to start to do a thing is to do it," so one should never state that a character is starting to do something. Then how does one describe an interrupted action without unnecessary wordiness? The small-press editor who published my first novel told me up front that they didn't permit reversing subject and verb in dialogue tags; if I wrote "said Jenny" instead of "Jenny said," they would automatically change it, no argument allowed. That house rule didn't bother me, although I never found out what he had against the reversal; maybe he thought it sounded too old-fashioned.

That book, a werewolf novel, was the only fiction project on which I've faced big-picture editing such as Hurley discusses. The editor warned me that the manuscript would face a merciless revision critique, which indeed it did. The pages came back to me covered in emphatic handwritten notes. I balked at only a few of his revision suggestions and went along with the vast majority. The two I remember clearly: I refused to write out the heroine's stepfather, because I felt the story needed her little sister, who couldn't exist otherwise. I kept more of the viewpoint scenes from the heroine's long-lost father, the antagonist, than the editor wanted me to delete, and later I wished I'd retained still more. (I re-inserted a little of that material when a later published reissued the book.) The result slashed the original text by almost half. The editor wrote back in obvious shock that he hadn't really expected me to make ALL those changes. Huh? How was I to know that, with (as I felt) my first chance for a professionally published book-length piece of fiction at stake? The acerbic tone of his corrections made no distinctions to indicate which changes were more important than any others.

Although I was generally pleased with the final result, I suspect the situation was, as Hurley puts it, a case where the editor "was reading (or wants to read) an entirely different book." The publisher was a horror specialty small press, and what I was really trying to write, most likely, was urban fantasy, although the term hadn't yet become widely known at that time. The editor remarked that the protagonist was the least scary werewolf he'd ever seen. Well, I didn't mean for her to be scary, except to herself. Her father, a homicidal werewolf, was intended as the source of terror. I saw the protagonist as a sympathetic character struggling with an incredible, harrowing self-transformation. The editor also didn't seem to care much for the romance subplot, which I kept intact, not wanting the heroine to appear to exist in a vacuum and already having trimmed a couple of workplace scenes at his request. In fact, I wanted to write something along the line of Anthony Boucher's classic novelette "The Compleat Werewolf," a contemporary fantasy with suspense and touches of humor, which of course (as I recognize now) didn't fit comfortably into the genre conventions of horror. Anyway, the publisher produced a nice-looking trade paperback with a fabulous cover, and I remain forever grateful for their giving me my first "break"—not to mention getting me my one and only review in LOCUS!

In any case, Kameron Hurley's closing remark deserves to be taken to heart by any author dealing with either critique partners or professional editors: "The clearer you are about the destination you want to arrive at, the easier it is to sift through all the different directions and suggestions you get from people along the way."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, July 22, 2021

No Time Like the Present?

What accounts for the current fad of present-tense narrative in fiction? Most of the time, it makes my teeth grind with annoyance. Even a recent urban fantasy novel by Charles de Lint veers onto that strange byway. The traditional convention of writing fiction in the simple past demands no mental contortions from the reader. Its familiarity makes it "invisible," allowing the story to come through unfiltered from the author's mind to the reader's, or at least producing the illusion of unfiltered immersion in the story. Present tense draws attention to itself and away from the characters and plot, until the reader manages to shift mental gears and adjust to that technical oddity.

Now, the writer might have an artistic motive for purposely directing the audience's attention to the narrative technique itself. Even so, in my opinion, doing this for a longer span than a short story is usually so off-putting as to defeat any such purpose. I can think of a few circumstances when present-tense narrative serves a legitimate function: In the case of an experience told in the first person by a protagonist of horror or suspense, writing it in the present could avoid the near-certainty that the narrator will survive until after the end of the adventure. Unless he's speaking from the afterlife, the reader will assume that if he narrates in the past tense, he lived to tell the tale. Another reason for the use of present tense by a first-person narrator might be that the narrator's mind is somehow clouded or she has some other cause for extreme confusion. Present-time narration could give the impression that she's groping her way through a strange environment. Also, I've read a few novels with lots of flashbacks that distinguish in-story past and present by alternating the verb tenses accordingly. And, of course, if a text is framed as a diary or series of letters, parts of it might legitimately consist of a stream of consciousness in the present. In the case of the rarely used second-person narrative voice, past tense—a blow-by-blow account of what "you did"—might sound peculiar unless (as in an effective horror story I once read) the "you" has amnesia and the story is telling the protagonist about his or own past experiences in an attempt to awaken memories. Present tense therefore has some advantage in a second-person narrative.

Fiction written in the second person, however, foregrounds the narrative technique itself so emphatically that it seems to me suitable only for short stories. At novel length, I'd think it would be intolerable. Many years ago, I read a horror novella I liked very much, except that the whole thing was told in second person, present tense. That choice still puzzles me, unless the author hoped it would draw the reader into the deepest possible intimacy with the protagonist. It seems to me that the writer was taking a serious risk; readers might be repelled by the narrative voice, viewed as an annoying gimmick. I was enthralled enough by the plot that I stuck with it despite the odd style of narration, which combined two distracting techniques in one story.

What do you think of present-tense narrative? Legitimate writing tool, a pointless variation from the norm that hampers suspension of disbelief, or something in between?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Plotting and Discovery

In the June issue of LOCUS, Kameron Hurley writes about how she gets from the beginning of a story to the end:

Endings and Beginnings

I'm always interested in the techniques used by other writers, and Hurley's current procedure isn't quite like any I've come across before. She describes how her method changed from free-writing in a process of discovery all the way through a piece of fiction to a hybrid of freeform and outlining. Early in her career, she "began every story with a scene, an inciting incident, a mood, a situation, and wrote until [she] figured out what happened next." She ended up with "dozens and dozens of beginnings, a few middles, and not a lot of endings." As she points out, it's hard to sell beginnings and middles to publishers.

Now she free-writes the beginning, works on it until the characters and their motivations become clear, and then plots the rest of the book. She needs to write a story opening that establishes all the vital ""problems, relationships, tensions, and setups" before she can move forward. Judging from the rest of the essay, Hurley seems to be very much a character-driven rather than plot-driven writer. She finds that, for her, it's "impossible to write an ending unless the beginning works." She concludes the essay with the principle, "Get the first part right, and you'll find the ending was staring at you all along."

This method runs contrary to the common advice to write the ending first and then work out what needs to happen to get there. Even if a writer doesn't literally compose the final scene first, it's generally assumed that for effective fiction writing the author has to know the culmination all along. On the other hand, Nora Roberts, in answer to a question at a conference session where I heard her speak, claimed she didn't outline her Eve Dallas mysteries (published under the name "J. D. Robb"). She was as surprised by the twists and turns of the murder investigations as Lt. Dallas was. The notion of writing a detective story that way boggled my mind. Imagine the backtracking and revision that must be required to make all the clues fit the solution. Yet clearly this method works for Roberts, who dependably releases two Lt. Dallas "In Death" mysteries every year in addition to the Nora Roberts romances.

I'm one of those dedicated outliners Hurley mentions, who would find her old process, if not exactly "horrifying" as she puts it, distressingly inefficient. As a novice writer, I surged forward through my narratives on waves of inspiration. In my teens, writing short pieces, I found that approach could work well enough, in the sense that I finished stories. (Whether they were any good is a different matter.) Holding a short-story or novelette plot in my head from beginning to end wasn't hard. When I started trying to create novels, though, starting at the beginning and charging forward to the end resulted in often not reaching the end because I'd get bogged down in the middle. I realized I needed to know where the plot was going and the steps along the road. For the same reason, although I used to occasionally write scenes out of order (as Diana Gabaldon, a bestselling "pantser," does), I've long since switched to linear scene-by-scene composition following my outline. With my early novel-writing attempts, if I yielded to the temptation of writing the most "exciting" incidents first, I tended to get bored with the necessary filling-in work. Some "pantsers" find an outline too limiting. I feel just the opposite; the outline liberates me from the fear of getting stuck in the middle and losing interest in the project.

Regardless of one's favorite method of composition, one of Hurley's discoveries has general application: Plot doesn't consist of "what happened to people"; it's "how people respond to and influence the world around them."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt