Carol Berg September 18th, 2008
Nope, no essay this week. I wrote one already for agent Lucienne Diver’s Epic Fantasy Week blog. Other guest bloggers are fantasy writers Lynn Flewelling, David Coe, Diana Pharaoh Francis, and Sara Hoyt. Join us for talk about characterization in fantasy, writer promotion, series arcs, worldbuilding, and writing fantasy in a scientific world.
Carol
Lois Tilton August 6th, 2008
When I recently reviewed the Summer issue of Helix SF (http://www.helixsf.com/) for the August issue of IROSF (http://www.irosf.com/), I made no mention of the controversy then [and now still] festering over Senior Editor William Sanders’ use of the term “sheet-heads” to describe jihahis/Musims/Arabs –- the target of the reference is not quite clear, although Sanders has insisted it refers only to terrorists. He has also argued that his use of this term can not be considered racist, since neither Muslims nor Arabs are strictly speaking a race; nonetheless I think it is clearly species of bigotry, as the argument is a species of sophistry.
In fact, I had for some time been aware of his use of this term, well before the present controversy. But I do not consider it my job as a reviewer to discuss or condemn the political statements of a magazine’s editor –- bigoted or not. My job is to review the magazine’s fiction and not its politics.
It is not possible, though, to pretend that politics does not exist in fiction. Fiction has always been a vehicle for political statements. But a reviewer, I believe, should critique the stories, not the politics. Analog, to take one example, often appears to be taking a right-libertarian stand in both its editorial content and its fiction. This is not a position with which I am particularly sympathetic, but I consider my job as a reviewer to consider whether a libertarian story is a good story, not whether its ideology suits me. Grounds for condemning it might be cardboard characterization, clumsy plotting, awkward dialogue, or heavy-handed polemic, but not the ideology itself. If I find a well-written libertarian story, I will recommend it as readily as any other.
Unfortunately, it often seems to be the case that there is an inverse relationship between political zeal and quality of fiction. One way this manifests is in characterization: the ideological opponent is cast as the Bad Guy. When I was a kid, watching crummy westerns on the black-and-white TV, it was always easy to tell the Bad Guys; they were the ones wearing the black hats. They were there in the story to be shot down by the Good Guy. They are villainous because they are villains, bad because they are Bad Guys. Like the Nazi.
Carol Berg July 14th, 2008
Matthew Milson wrote:
another obstacle that I found to be limiting with the first person perspective was the inability to give the reader information outside of the main character’s knowledge. I grew concerned that I would not be able to adequately hold the reader’s interest or create a sense of worry for the main character by breaking away from their storyline for short periods of time.
Certainly there are limitations to strict first person POV that one has to deal with. You mentioned a number of concerns here, some of which are related and some not.
1. giving the reader information outside the POV character’s knowledge
2. holding the reader’s interest
3. breaking away from that (POV) character’s story
4. creating a sense of worry in the reader
First off, #2 should not be dependent on #1 or #3. If you create an interesting character, and a strong vivid supporting cast, complex relationships, and interesting events surrounding that character, ie. a good story, you can hold the reader’s interest. Your POV character - no matter first or third - should be someone we want to spend time with. Someone with a complex personality, not perfect, with interests, attitudes, likes, dislikes, beliefs, superstitions, whatever makes a person human (or not, as the case may be.) Someone who learns and is capable of change. Sometimes the first person narrator is not the true protagonist, but only the person who is telling the story of the true hero or heroine. (I tried that with Transformation, and it ended up the narrator WAS the heart of the story, but those things can happen…) First person is certainly not appropriate for every story.
Constance Ash June 24th, 2008
Cross-posted with my LJ. Mongol, the first installment of a Russian trilogy featuring Genghis Khan is currently playing in a single theater here in Manhattan. Go here and here to see trailers, stills and more information. The film is supposed to have a larger release here in the U.S. It had terrific popular and critical reception in Europe.
The best parts:
–The locations, the vistas, the action, the people — none of them are digital. This is all location and real people riding real horses. It does look different, and so much better, I do say.
–The landscape, as one expects, has the leading role in Mongol. You will not be disappointed. Vistas of snow, of arid slopes, green rolling spring grass, doesn’t seem foreign to someone who grew up on the Great Plains, though, no we didn’t have mountains where I grew up. But I did visit the Black Hills, which are really mountains, often on family summer vacations, and the Badlands, in both South Dakota and North Dakota. The Missouri-Platt system meanders through parts of both these states on their way to the Mississippi, so I saw those too on summer vacations. These are true vistas and landscapes, from my own life, and the lives of these characters in
David Louis Edelman May 30th, 2008
You’ve read the reviews, you’ve heard the slams, you’ve witnessed the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. You’ve heard that such-and-such author has “flat,” “paper-thin,” or “two-dimensional” characters that are “weak,” “anemic,” and “stereotyped.” And now you, as an aspiring writer, want to know:
How can I avoid that? How can I create fully-fledged, rich, three-dimensional, fat, happy characters with plenty of iron in their blood?
It’s not as easy as it sounds. Problem is, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much time and effort you spend, what you’re really doing when you create fictional characters is pure illusion. It’s mimicry. Writers in college who have just discovered Plato get hooked on the idea that characters already exist out there in some nebulous Elysian Fields of the mind, and all you have to do is channel them. But that’s simply not true, and it’s not a particularly helpful metaphor.
I think it’s more useful to think of the art of characterization as something akin to the art of additive sculpture. When you build a character, you’re not describing an existing personality so much as building one from the ground up. (Additive sculpture, my Art History major wife informs me, is the type where you pile up stuff to build your object, whereas subtractive sculpture is where you start with an existing hunk of something and chisel away the stuff you don’t need.) Just like with sculpture, when building characters you’ll often throw in materials that you’ve got lying around the shop. And just like with sculpture, your characters don’t have anything that you don’t explicitly put there yourself.
So okay, you’re asking yourself, if building characters is like creating sculpture, what ingredients do I need to add to the mix? Glad you asked. Here’s my list of things that good, full characters need. (And keep in mind that these are the ingredients for major characters in your story; minor characters don’t necessarily need such attention.)
Kevin Andrew Murphy December 10th, 2007
I just went to see The Golden Compass, along with a couple other friends, who all decided to see it despite being advised by one friend that the movie made no sense and by another that he didn’t want to see it because he hadn’t liked the book.
I have the book, but on the “I’ll read it when I get around to it” shelf. But it was a nice outing with friends and I wanted to see airships and Nicole Kidman in a series of improbably lovely costumes. And going in with such low expectations, I was not disappointed, except by everything else.
First off, well, my biggest criticism is what I said after the movie was over: “I suppose it will all make more sense after we read the book and watch the expanded version on DVD.” This was after watching a nearly two and a half hour movie, mind you. I’m not certain whether to blame the screenwriter, the film editor or both, but there seemed to be a concentrated effort to shoehorn in every significant scene in the book, regardless of the exposition or transition or set-up for character motivation.
As it stands, the movie has the worst case of “beloved child” syndrome I’ve ever seen. The protagonist, Lyra (and I’m probably wrong on the spelling), wanders around and simply bumps into people who decide to fight and die for her “Just because.” I can understand it with the head witch, since she’s at least got a prophecy to go on, but she’s still canny enough to check out whether the kid can read the Golden Compass. But Sky Captain Wild Bill? I’m blanking on the name of character, but if you took an old American character actor, had him play Wild Bill as conceived of by someone who’d only seen British Wild West shows, gave him a jackrabbit familiar (voiced by Cathy Bates) and then made him an airship captain…well, that’s who we’ve got, who not only immediately takes a liking to this random kid, but offers to take her along in his airship, and also tips her off to the location of an alcoholic talking bear, who is less entertaining than he sounds. The bear decides to follow the kid because she finds his armor, but the only reason they aren’t immediately blown away by the Cossack police is because the sea gypsies keep randomly appearing whenever the cavalry is needed. Even in the middle of the frozen glacial wastes.
Then there’s the Magisterium. I understand it’s supposed to be the unholy spawn of the Catholic church and Big Brother, but if you’re going to spirit away kids to do insane arcane medical experiments on them, there must be a more convenient place than an ice sheet in the middle of the Norway analogue. But more than that, why steal children when you can just buy them? Or get parents to give them to you for free? There must be a few parents who’ve already drunk enough of the Kool-aid that they’d hand over their children no questions asked, rather than steal the child of the well connected sea gypsy matron? Or the kitchen boy from the university where there are loads of nosy people just looking for a mystery to crack?
Of course, the number of brain dead people is pretty amazing. There’s horror movie stupid. Then there’s opera stupid. Then there’s this. One really wonders what the scholars are thinking to let their child of prophecy go running around rooftops with the cast of Oliver at the beginning of the movie. One also sort of wonders whether a world with all sorts of arcane science wouldn’t be able to figure out who poisoned a wine decanter if just by taking fingerprints. And the uspurping Bear King? Does he know that “gullible” is not in the dictionary?
Then there’s the trouble of giving your protagonist an amazingly useful power and forgetting to use it. Lyra gets a Golden Compass, which once she figures it out is basically a deluxe Magic 8 Ball that can answer any question, no problem. So when later in the movie, the wicked Mrs. Coulter says “Lyra, I’m your mother!” wouldn’t it be prudent or least sensible to twiddle with your Golden Compass and ask “Is that psycho really my mommy?” Of course this scene may have been left on the cutting room floor, so it’s not possibly quite at the level of the recent Heroes finale where Peter forgets he can walk through walls if he wants to and instead dramatically uses his telekinesis to rip the door off a bank vault, getting a nosebleed in the process. But still….
I should probably not get into the other troubles but the line “Tell the children to get their warmest coats!” is going to stick with me for a while. You get a bunch of kids who were spirited away to an icy wasteland via airship and you expect them to walk to safety? Of course an electrocuted traumatized child was able to walk all the way to the next valley and hole up in an unheated trapper’s cabin without freezing to death, so I suppose anything is possible, but….
Yargh.
Lois Tilton August 7th, 2007
An occupational hazard of reviewing fiction is the necessity of engaging works one would not otherwise be likely to read. Thus I find myself from time to time encountering that peculiar fringe subspecies of the genre, libertarian science fiction.
The practitioners of libertarian SF tend to be ideologically motivated, and their fiction, more often than not, serves primarily as a medium for their Message. Of course, no political position confers immunity from the general tendency for an overload of ideology to make for bad story. But libertarian SF seems to be afflicted with a peculiarly wrong-headed Message, that we must go into space to live free!
Kevin Andrew Murphy January 27th, 2007
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about descriptions — what works, what doesn’t, and what resonates down to a deeper level of truth. It’s an author’s job to notice things, and to use what they notice in service of their story, details as keys to unlock the reader’s imagination and memory and let them experience the world.
The smallest things are often the most important, touchstones to memory. When I was thirteen, my grandmother taught me how to make a pie crust. Everything was fairly basic and straightforward, if tricky, until there came the moment to finish the pie. My grandmother took a knife and drew three wavy lines down the crust, almost joining at the bottom, then used the knife to cut vents on each side of them, angled to make them look like three feathers or waving shafts of wheat. She explained that this was the pattern her mother had taught her, and her grandmother before, and all the ladies in the neighborhood had used this back in the day. It looked old and beautiful, something that wouldn’t look out of place in a pioneer woman’s hands, or a colonial kitchen, or an old Dutch master’s still life or even before. Cutting that pattern a couple days ago, I couldn’t help but remember my grandmother.
Kate Elliott January 23rd, 2007
Warning:Â Spoilers for ROME, the recent HBO miniseries
One of the ways I rate my enjoyment of books and filmic-visual fiction is in how the roles of women are approached by the writers and/or directors. Certain conventions are sure to minimize my enjoyment of a narrative, and chief among them is the narrowing of women’s roles to those related to reproduction and/or Relationship to the Male. In such cases, women are portrayed either as wombs (mother, surrogate mother, or wife) or vaginas (of sexual interest to male characters without having any other real narrative function); that is, a female character has no existence beyond her relationship to men via sex and/or reproduction.
Continue Reading »
Madeleine Robins October 3rd, 2006
Over in LiveJournal-land, Anna Genoese (my current editor at Tor) is answering random questions. I adore Anna, but I think she missed the boat here; the question, regarding historical fiction, was:
And how accurate do the facts have to be in such works (I’m not talking dates — more like making up motives for people’s actions.
and her answer was:
People are people are people. If their motivations don’t make sense, no one is going to want to read your book. If the characters are stupid, silly, one-dimensional, and boring, and they seem to do things for no reason at all other than to move the story forward, you will get a form rejection really quickly because it means your book is bad, whatever the genre.
I generally think it’s a mistake to over-research, or at least to leave too much of your research on the page. Whether it’s SF, fantasy, or straight historical, wading through pages of the author’s attempts to demonstrate how much more she knows about the setting than her readers will ever know is a distinct turn off (unless it’s John Fowles, who could sit there and lecture me for hours, and I would lap it up happily–but Fowles manages that with tone and voice, not endless exposition). On the other hand…
I am equally irritated by a story in which the motivations of the characters are out of tune with the setting. You cannot write (for example) a novel set in 16th century Italy in which the behavior of the characters is not influenced, in one way or another, by the presence of the Catholic Church, by the lack of reliable birth control, by the laws regarding women and property. That’s not to say you can’t write a novel in which a character goes against the grain of her society, but you have to build in convincing reasons for her to do so–and you have to remember that (when your heroine becomes Pope and decides to establish ecumentical ties to Islam and Judaism in 1450) that not everyone around her is going to be thrilled. In many historical periods and places, women were rarely given political or temporal power; women who had casual sex would face consequences, anywhere from shunning to stoning (not to mention pregnancy); romantic love was a literary construct, and marriage was often a matter of economic expedience. To elide over these facts and consequences is not only cheating, it’s boring.
So, it’s not that I disagree with what Anna said; I just don’t think she was complete enough. Some would-be writer is going to read her comment as “Hey, as long as the motivations make sense, you don’t need to do any research.” Motivations are motivations, and people are people. But if you don’t inform those motivations with the mores and laws of the setting, you’re cheating the reader and you’re cheating your story.