Archive for August, 2006

Defining Story

Laura J. Mixon August 5th, 2006

Greetings, all, and thanks to the web hosts and my fellow authors for inviting me to play in this great sandbox. For my first contribution to this forum, here is an essay I recently wrote on the nature of story.

At its simplest, a story can be defined as a character in a setting with a problem. These are story’s subatomic particles, if you will. You’ll find exceptions, as storytelling is a highly subjective and idiosyncratic artform, but stories without a character, a setting, and a problem are about rare as anti-hydrogen.

Good stories both entertain us and have characters whose problems we care about. Great stories linger in our minds long afterward – because they strike a chord that resonates with us. That chord that rings in us when a story moves us — that gut-deep feeling, that “aha!” when we have read or watched something that just feels right somehow — is tied to its theme.

A theme can be expressed by a single sentence — a truism or cliche, even — that summarizes what the story is about. “Love conquers all.” ‘The best laid plans go oft awry.” “You can’t take it with you.” “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” Chris likes to give the example of the Eensy Weensy Spider, a thirty-eight (!) word story whose theme is “Perseverance furthers.” A story whose theme can’t be summarized in a single sentence has no clear theme, and I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s a story that flounders. (Don’t worry if you don’t know your theme when you start out, however; writers often don’t know what it was about till after they’ve finished it…but if you have a completed or mostly completed work, it’s a useful exercise to see if you can work out its theme — or take some of your favorite works, and see if you can boil their themes down to ten words or less.)

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Genre Don’t Want No Respect

Lois Tilton August 4th, 2006

When we last saw our chimerical Literary Personage, she was protesting that her novel, despite its future setting and its sciencefictional subject matter, was not science fiction, not a genre work; that genre is crap. I demonstrated a schema to make it clear what sort of thing genre fiction really is, that genre does not in fact imply a low quality of writing, that it is even entirely possible a given work could be described as both science fiction and as literature, whatever that is.

But the Literary Personage still isn’t having any. She continues to protest that her book is not science fiction, even if her book is science fiction. At last it becomes clear that the L P is not thinking of genre in terms of the book’s content. The reason for her protest is quite simple: she doesn’t want her book on the Science Fiction shelf. Next to All That Crap. Her concern is not with reality, but with perception, with appearances. In short, our author considers genre solely as a marketing category.

Thus, for her it does not matter that many genre works can not, in fact, be considered crap, that good writing and genre subject matter are not incompatible. For her, all that matters is that people think of genre books as crap, so that if her book is labeled science fiction and placed on the science fiction shelf at the bookstore, people – prospective buyers and readers — will conclude it must be crap. If, on the other hand, her work finds its way to the shelf labeled “literature” those same prospective buyers and readers will assume it must be a good book.

Now where did the notion come from that genre is crap? Why does genre fiction have a reputation for crappiness, and is this reputation deserved? We are all acquainted with Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 90% of everything is [crap], so why should genre fiction, in particular, be so stigmatized?

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The Two Elements Common to All Science Fiction Stories

David Louis Edelman August 4th, 2006

Since my post on The Five Elements Common to All Stories, I’ve been thinking about the obvious follow-up: what are the common elements of science fiction stories?

We can argue all day about what constitutes a science fiction story and what doesn’t. (And, heck, if you’re reading this blog, chances are nothing would make you happier.) But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to include both the genres commonly known as science fiction and fantasy, as well as their numerous branches and offshoots. Alternate history, cyberpunk, steampunk, epic fantasy, doorstopper fantasy, et cetera ad nauseum. Basically, if you would find it in the Science Fiction section of your local Barnes & Noble, today I’m calling it science fiction.

So what principles encompass all of these varieties of the genre? Is there any blanket that could possible cover the whole kit-and-caboodle? These characteristics have to be out there, because, as with Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum about pornography, we generally know science fiction when we see it.

Obviously we can include the previous five principles outlined in my earlier post. (And I think we can also probably include Point, which Sherwood Smith brought up in the comments.)

But the baseline elements common to all science fiction stories? I could only think of two.

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Let’s Get Progressive — grammar neep

Katharine Kerr August 3rd, 2006

There are a number of grammar myths current in the genre writing community. A lot of people seem to believe, for example, that commas exists to mark pauses when, actually, they show logical relationships between parts of a sentence. Strunk and White cover commas quite well, but they leave out a common myth about verbs. For example, on another online service one poster stated that “a teacher at Clarion” had told him, “You should eliminate all uses of the verb to be in your writing because they’re all passive.” Um well, no, not really, not at all.Since I love tilting at windmills, I thought I’d take this latter myth on.

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Prism Award

Carol Berg August 2nd, 2006

Just heard that Daughter of Ancients won the 2006 Prism Award for best romantic fantasy.  This was announced in Atlanta at the annual RWA bash.  So this feels very nice.  Especially since it is the fourth book of a four-book series and written as fantasy.
Carol

Magic? Science?

Constance Ash August 1st, 2006

Transforming the Alchemists.

PHILADELPHIA — Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.

The painting chosen to be reproduced as the illo for this article is worth looking at by itself.  There is also a link to the author of the article, who will answer any questions about this subject you might want to ask.

Here is a pull that may be representative of this long article, and that I, at least, quitel liked:

“The British chemist Robert Boyle, a Newton contemporary, also had a foot on each side of the alchemy-modern science divide. He dabbled for years in an alchemical obsession, the search for the philosopher’s stone — the long-sought agent for transmuting lead to gold and unlocking other material and spiritual secrets. The stone was the unified theory of everything in that time.”

Love, C.

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