Among yesterday’s many tasks, I had to return a book to the library, where I scored a winner — Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night on cd. Since finishing Donaghue’s late 18th C historical novel, Life Mask I had failed to find any audio book that worked for my work-outs. When I find one, I settle in for several hours for often several weeks — Life Mask was 19 discs that played for about 70 minutes each. It’s hard to transition out of the world that one’s workout has signaled entry into after so long. Finding the right workout book is not easy.

 In any case, I followed Donaghue’s Life Mask on cd, with a print book, Joe Abercrombie’s 15th-century Italian flavored fantasy, Best Served Cold. Along with Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (also experienced via cd) and Treason’s Shore by Sherwood Smith, these were the novels that held my interest this summer.

Best Served Cold is signally composed with more originality and sharply limned characters than many Fantasies. This isn’t easy to do, since thousands of Fantasy works have been published, and published in ever more numbers every month since LOTR created this new publishing genre — and demographic audience.

 What I liked most about Best Served Cold is the picture it provides of the terrible harm private mercenary armies are to everyone. They are fighting a war for their own profit. They collude with each other to drive up prices, throw battles and wars, betray each other and their employers, create wars where there are none. You have to think about Blackwater and, at last accounting, nearly 200 other private militias that are getting U.S. military contracts. If you ever thought  privatizing a national military is a good idea, you should read this novel of Abercrombie’s, particularly p. 239. But surely there’s no one in these current real world militias who is a classic likeable rogue like the former merc General, Nicomo Cosca, in Best Served Cold.

 Like Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Mercy (2008), and Sherwood Smith’s conclusion to her Inda series, Treason’s Shore (2009), Best Served Cold is a Fantasy novel that feels infused with current political events and catastrophes.  But readers who read to escape the real world, never fear!  Though this deep connection to contemporary events and conditions is successfully accomplished, none of these works will lose anything in depth or effectiveness as all these events disappear from our national attention deficit disordered mind.

 This may be the first Fantasy novel that has a character of agency who is an autistic, just on the edge of functioning. Friendly has no bonds with other humans, or booty, or power. He’s not likely to commit betrayal. He counts things, anything. His dice are his comfort objects. He is happy and content in prison, where the rigid routine allows him to feel safe. He’s a splendid addition to any group of thugs or soldiers because he loves the dice, and he never miscounts. He’s a methodical killer in a fight or battle, counting, counting, counting. He’s a sudden savage killer when the numbers are wrong or someone has broken his comfort routines. Friendly provokes the reader into thinking about what the chances were back in such times and conditions of autistic persons surviving at all.

Morveer is the chemist/alchemist/master of poisons-for-hire. Morveer reminds one of certain portraits of Merlin, including TNH’s description of the “unreliable magician” in her current “Re-reading Sandman” here, and which others like Kit Kerr have also discussed at different times – Kit has also employed this specifically in her Deverry works. Most of all it is Morveer’s relationship with his apprentice that recall a twisted Merlin, a penetrating reading of that odd end of Merlin’s life with the entry of Viviene, she who wished to learn all his magic and secrets. The Merlin parallel feels most strong around p. 195. However, you will be surprised how this narrative strand plays out.

 The two ‘primary’ characters are the peasant turned mercenary general, the ruthless and brilliant strategist-swordswoman, Monza Murcatto, and Caul Shivers, a Viking sort, who has foolishly followed advice proferred at home and come south to become a better man, rather than a killer and seeker after ephemeral booty. It’s seldom I see actors in the role of fictional characters, but I couldn’t get rid of the image of Shivers as Sex and the City’s Aiden:  hunky, competent, unsizzling personality, dull of expression, and twice jilted by Carrie Bradshaw. There are many more characters than these, but these are the most successful, with the most page time. All of them betray each other and re-align frequently.

 The structure of the novel includes a variety of time periods, a variety of charcters and multi-threaded narrative lines.  These are written with an admirable deftness.  Nor does the prose plod.  The opening section is some brilliant satiric repartee by deeply knowing, profoundly cynical characters who know each other better than they want to, and have loyalty to nothing or anyone. At first you can’t believe what you are reading — you think this author is maybe an untalented sap and you’re going to close the book. But that’s not what is going on. It’s a brilliant bit.  And something that’s included in this bit, is there, at the very end of the novel.

 What was problematical for this reader concerning the novel was the name Abercrombie gave the featured region of his world-building — Styria. My eyes and brain insisted on seeing Syria every damned time, which threw me out of where we are. Nor did it feel like a name that would be found on the 15th Century latinum peninsula, of which this tale of warring city states is so reminiscent — as well as of Mario Puzo’s The Family (2001), featuring the Borgias, with historical characters including Niccolò Machiavelli.

This novel was just about perfect for this reader — see, in ‘my interests’: betrayal. It feels  significantly superior to Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy. This may be because the world is so emphatically modeled upon a historical time and place, and historical characters. There was more than one very strong female warrior in that period of the warring papal and city states.

 Hopefully, Best Served Cold is the stand-alone work it appears to be.

Really: no it’s not.

First of all: it reads like a newbie mistake (see above). Second of all, the more detailed and lavish the supporting materials are, the more likely the story itself has been shorted, because the writer has gotten so wound up in providing the schematics for the world (and showing you that they’re all, all there!) that she has forgotten things like logic, character, and wordcraft.

This does not mean that the writer should not do her homework, keep charts and research files and maps and whatever else makes it possible for her to construct a world.  But, as I think I’ve said before, 9/10ths of the worldbuilding iceberg should be underwater, unless you want your manuscript to sink like the Titanic.  Even when the work is finished, think carefully about imposing too many maps, etc. on your reader. 

Of course there’s a reason I’m thinking about this.  I just finished reading a quite satisfying fantasy novel, second in a series set in a big, sprawling elsewhere.  The worldbuilding is generally quite satisfactory.  Two problems:

• In the first book in the series the author included a pronunciation guide so that readers would understand how to say the names of characters and places.  The problem with this is that once I read the arcane rules of this language it meant that every time I met a new character I not only had to remember what she looked like, but that her name was pronounced so that the first H was aspirated but the second H was not*, and that U was always pronounced long, as in you, but A was always short as in aaaa. This means, for me as a reader, that I’m doing the equivalent of walking through a new country with a guidebook in my hand, rather than getting involved in the story. In the second book there is no pronunciation guide, but (sadly) I still remember it, and kept trying to sound out the names in the new book by the same rules, rather than just getting into the story.
• Both books have maps. The first book takes place entirely on one continent, and it’s pretty easy to follow the peregrinations of Our Heroine and her dauntless companion once they leave her hometown and set out to save her people from invaders.  But in the second book–because there were maps (not only of the continent but of the world itself) I kept referring back to them. In the second book Our Hero and his dauntless band sail off to save some captives and wind up saving the world and…it’s a good story, full of cool worldbuilding and action and angst and stuff.  Only, I kept trying to figure out where they were on the maps, and got hugely frustrated because I couldn’t: the larger map that compassed his travels did not include the names of the places they visited, so I still have no idea where they started from and only a rudimentary one of where they ended up. But every time the author gave me a new place name I leafed back to the front of the book and tried to find it. Once again, having that supporting material available was a distraction, not an aid.

Not everyone reads as I read, I know.  Many people would skip right over this stuff, or wouldn’t be bothered the way I was.  But some people will be, and for us, it’s a drag.  So think carefully about including your supporting materials with your work, either in ms. form or in the final book.  If someone proposes it, ask yourself (and the proposer) what you want the map to accomplish.  If you’ve built your world solidly enough, readers might not need a map.  And if there are specific reasons (you want a visual reminder of how close the enemy city is to Our Heroine’s wee tiny cot in the woods, or to give some visual cue as to why the journey from Hither to Yon takes six years by carrier yak), make sure that the map is set up to be useful. Because human nature is such that some people are going to try to use it, and hold it against you if they cannot.

*The real pronunciation rules have been changed to protect the innocent.

While there, I invented a parlor game of interest to writers and fans in general.  It was inspired by this inspired blog post about matchups between heroes and villains to decide the eternal battle of good versus evil.  However, as the game evolved, it seemed a better name was needed than simply Good versus Evil or Heroes versus Villains.  Instead, taking the name from the most warped match-up that presented itself, let me present Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu.

The rules are fairly simple: You need two players, along with any number of judges and kibitzers to decide the fate of the battle for those cases where the contestants can’t agree.  Each player thinks up a hero or villain from the pages of history or literature, then on the count of three, says the name.  It is then decided which of them would win in a battle to the death, with all their powers and resources brought to bear on the problem.  Players alternate heroes and villains each round, and it’s of interest to writers because it gets you to think about characters strengths and weaknesses and the way things will logically happen in a plot.

I played mostly with John De Cles at the dead dog party at the end of the convention.  With the case of Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu, the logic went as follows: While on the face of it, Cthulhu is an ancient evil elder god who will rise from the waves when the stars are right, if you go with the book version, there’s no contest–Mary Poppins rearranges the stars in the course of babysitting and can also summon Greco-Roman gods as a way to amuse kids on a shopping trip.  She’d banish Cthulhu without even breaking a sweat and do it in time for tea.  And even if she were limited to the powers of the Disney musical version, Cthulhu would find himself in a magical chalk painting with nothing to eat but pearly kings and penguins, and by the time he’d finished that, Mary Poppins, having the power of Julie Andrew’s perfect diction, would be able to banish him by speaking the appropriate eldritch words from the Necronomicon.  For example, “Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious,” which is of course “something quite atrocious” which fits Cthulhu to a T.  However, Cthulhu would at least get to eat Burt the chimney sweep.

In a similar match-up, Willy Wonka was able to deal with the monster from Cloverfield, since he’d previously faced snozwangers, hornswogglers, and those horrible wicked wangdoodles, not to mention vermicious knids which are certainly more than Lovecraftian enough too.  So he’d know what the Cloverfield monster was and how to deal with it, and barring that, would find a use for unsafe Wonka gum and turn it into a blueberry the size of the giant peach.

Evil however was able to take points in unexpected places.  For example, Superman, champion of good and utterly broken superhero, was taken out by the Child Snatcher from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, who doesn’t have much in the way of power beyond a facility for disguise, a little sweet-talking, and the ability to design a good trap.  Then again, this is what everyone uses to get the better of Superman, so the Child Snatcher is well prepared.  Add a Kryptonite lollipop and Supes was toast.  Eliza from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also taken out by Lucrecia Borgia, who had never followed her out onto the ice, but instead just poisoned her beforehand.

There were also some embarrassing deaths.  Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist commited suicide after being confronted by Casper the Friendly Ghost (who would not have tried to kill anyone despite the rules of the game, but whose constant attempts at friendship mixed with Bill’s unsuccessful attempts to kill him led to Bill taking his own life).  Lobo the bounty hunter from DC comic simply shot Pongo from 101 Dalmations.  Sauron was utterly unable to tempt Sidartha, who simply threw the One Ring into Mt. Doom without stressing out about it.  And while we were not certain of exactly what went down beforehand, Hans Brinker ended up skating to safety while Snidely Whiplash fell through the ice.

And then there were the odd ones.  Valentine Michael Smith eventually realized Mrs. Lovett was a bad person and “sent her away” but then proceeded to eat the meat pies anyway.  And while Shirley Temple was successfully assimilated by the Borg Collective, adding her uniqueness to their own led to the Borg Ship “Lollipop” and probably the strangest Borg Queen ever, absolutely ruining their street cred as villains and handing the round to Shirley.

Fort Freak

Aside from the good feeling of having a proposal accepted, there’s also the writer’s anxiety about writing about something you don’t know and fear of getting it wrong.  Mary Anne Mohanraj (also among the writers, and new to Wild Cards) was writing about the same thing, relative to Fort Freak being a police story, something she knows little about beyond what she’s seen on television.  My knowledge of police dealings has a slight benefit in that one of my best friends had studied to be a cop (until health issues made him change to lawyer) and his brother is a cop, and I have other friends who work in law enforcement, so I have people to run legalities by so I won’t run too far afoul of Sjöberg’s Law of Cinematic Inaccuracy.   (“Movies get everything wrong. Hacking-based movies are laughable to hackers, military-based movies are laughable to members of the armed forces, and Indiana Jones movies are laughable to archaeologists.”)  Or, as it’s recently been termed on tvtropes.org, having a story “Dan Browned,” a subset of the trope “Did Not Do the Research.”

Of course, there are sins and sins.  Television budgetary concerns can excuse Television Geography and even “The Mountains of Illinois”, but novels and short stories?  Not so much.  I’ve read short stories set in San Francisco where people had a picnic in Candlestick Park (not realizing that it’s a baseball/football stadium) or walked from Alameda to downtown SF (somehow forgetting that not only is this quite a distance, but the bay is in the way).  And these were published too.

So, I’ll confess my failing: I’ve never visited New York.  Neither state nor city.  But I’ve written stuff set there.  Most recently for my story in Busted Flush (the scene cut for pacing and plotting, not inaccuracy), but before as well.  And now I’m about to do it again.

On the plus side, I’ve at least touched Connecticut brownstone (the Flood Mansion in San Francisco is built of the stuff, imported at ruinous expense back in the day) and being familiar with the architecture of San Francisco and other cities helps, in that what was built in one city was then reproduced in other cities of the era, often by the same architects.   (Driving around Mexico City a few years ago, I was getting deja vu, thinking at times I was in parts of San Francisco or New Orleans or even downtown San Jose.)  And with Wild Cards being an alternate timeline which diverges in 1946, there are structures which were knocked down in our Manhattan which can still exist in the world of Wild Cards.  Not tipping my hand too much, but I’m currently researching  one of those, both because it’s neat in terms of alternate history to preserve something rather than destroying everything, and because if I’m pulling from museum archives and photographs, I don’t have to worry that much about someone who actually lives somewhere looking up from the book and rolling their eyes about how I’ve got it wrong.

I’ll also be running the story by some native New Yorkers, so I can get the errors caught before publication.  But right now, it’s research time.

In her well-famed essay, to which I refer you for reference, the great loremistress lists the following thirty-one words as being the components of eighty percent of all craft names:

• Wolf     Raven Silver     Moon     Star
• Water     Snow  Sea     Tree     Wind
• Cloud     Witch     Thorn     Leaf      White
• Black     Green     Fire     Rowan Swan
• Night     Red     Mist     Hawk     Feather
• Eagle     Song     Sky     Storm     Sun
• Wood

Aside from modern witches, Wiccans and neo-pagans, this list also holds true with the majority of witches and wizards in fantasy fiction, especially popular roleplaying games, and is thus of use and interest to the writers and readers thereof.  But with all due deference to the esteemed lexicographer, her rule breaks down in one crucial area: evil overlords and wicked enchantresses.

With the exception of the always serviceable “Black” and “Night,” few evil overlords or wicked enchantresses use more than one word from the above list in their craft names, seldom two, and never three.  The same holds true for the titles of books chronicling their black deeds.  However, this is not to say that the practitioners of the black arts are any more original than their white and off-white colleagues.  They simply draw from a second, but even more limited, word list.

After perusing my vast library of blasphemous texts and eldritch tomes (mostly the aforementioned fantasy novels and gaming supplements), I, Lord Ooky Hellwrought, have found the same sixteen soul-searing words repeated again and again.  Herewith, my addenda:

• Bane     Blood     Bone    Curse    Dark
• Death    Dire    Doom    Dread     Fell
• Foul    Grim    Hell    Hex    Nether
• Shadow

These words may be combined with those from Lady Pixie Moondrip’s original list in the same manner, or, for added effect, may be added to professional titles.  Dread pirates and blood ninjas can charge more than mere ninjas and pirates.  And while no one is much impressed by a merchant or thief, the same cannot be said of death merchants and shadow thieves.  (Lord Ooky Hellwrought notes that a few professions, such as hairdressers and proctologists, are beyond help.  Aspiring evil overlords and wicked enchantresses would do best to not list these on their resumes.)

I’ve written a lot of books.  Traitors’ Gate (due August 09 USA with Tor Books USA and early Sept 09 with Orbit Books UK) will be my 19th published novel.  That’s counting The Golden Key, the collaboration I wrote with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson, but not counting the two early unpublished works which are unpublishable and will remain that way because they’re also really embarrassing.  Hey, I was young once, too.

That’s not my point.

My point is, that I continually strive to improve as a writer.  I want to write better books, not worse ones.  I want to get more disciplined, not more lazy.  I want to hone my craft, not become dull and stagnant.

So obviously, this being my goal, I work to make each book better than the ones that came before.  I use the usual methods.  I try to recognize and repair my weaknesses and continue to play to and heighten my strengths.  I attempt to keep an artisan’s eye on repetitive flaws so I can get rid of them or at the least lessen their impact on the text.  The things I’m good at, I remain alert about so I don’t get sloppy.  I try to push myself.

Many books ago, I decided that one way to push myself was to choose a specific craft goal for each book as I was writing it.

By that I do not mean that I only work on one craft element per book.  I’m always working to build on what I’ve learnt before.

What I do mean is that with each book I pick a specific element or trick or device or thing I think has been problematic, and flag that as my craft goal for that specific novel.

I wish I had kept a list all this time, because I’ve forgotten what my various goals were for the different books, and it would be interesting to trace the progress of my goals.

They might have been things like:
1) work on narrative drive, on trying to make the narrative implacable

2) channel emotional intensity in interactions (don’t keep emotional distance)

3) focus on making all third person description of landscape and other people’s reactions fit the particular pov, that is, would be the things the character would notice, which will change with each pov shift

4) tailoring details to fit the tone or intensity of each scene

With Shadow Gate, the goal was:  cut extraneous verbiage and make every detail and digression count.  (This is a huge problem for me.)

With Traitors’ Gate, I worked on two specific goals.

The first was specific to this particular novel and would not necessarily have been applicable to any given novel I had written or might write, in that I had an extremely complex plot with multiple pov characters that had to be layered down exactly the right way and at the right time to make the plot work AND to make sure I completed this plot in this volume, because I was very very determined that this not become a four volume trilogy.  So in a way, that goal doesn’t quite fit the “craft goal” model as it was too specific to the book in question.

The second was to work on how small character actions and movements (literally) are handled within scenes.  I wanted to emphasize using them to point and intensify character interaction in a way that would create and enable the emotional impact received by the reader.  I admit that during the period I was writing Traitors’ Gate I was also watching the first four seasons of the HBO series The Wire, and I was pretty heavily influenced not by the content but by the execution of that series as I thought about how I wanted to write and execute scenes in Traitors’ Gate.

Again, it’s not that I don’t do these things or attempt to do these things as I’m writing all my books.  But I am not a perfect writer;  I make lots of mistakes, and if I were to try to focus to that deep a degree on every problem I have with every book I write, I would lose my grasp on all the threads.  By giving special attention to a single specific craft goal for any given book (without losing the usual awareness of trying to write the best book I can), I think it helps me really knead that skill or device or element down through my process so I can more readily continue using it in subsequent books.

Well, while I don’t want to give any spoilers, Fox has put Dollhouse alongside The Sarah Connor Chronicles in what makes sense as a scifi block, but had promos with Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku that, if the sound were turned off, looked pretty much like 976 commercials:  “SciFi girls want to talk to you.  Just call them.  They’re waiting….”

Regardless, there was talk at the party about how Fox had asked for revision up on revision so that the first few episodes had been turned into something other than what Joss was wanting.  Something with more cop drama and explosions.  But since I can’t really discuss the truth of this without spoilers, they’ll be there after the fold:

Here’s what I saw in the pilot.  We’ve got this girl named Caroline (Dushku) who gets into some nameless but undoubtedly bad trouble such that she makes a Faustian bargain with Unpleastant Authority Figure Lady (hereinafter UAFL) such that UAFL gets to scrub her mind and use her body for five years, after which point UAFL puts her memories back and all the unpleasantness goes away for good.

After being brainscrubbed for UAFL by Blond Geek Boy, Caroline is rechristened “Echo” (with nice mythological resonance, but with the scifi explanation that all the dolls’ names are just military lingo for the alphabet) and goes to live in the Dollhouse, which looks rather like a fancy health spa except for the electroshock therapy sessions going on upstairs where they scrub people’s minds and download them onto old zip drives.  (It’s amazing the uses you can find for old technology.)

The Dollhouse requires a great deal of suspesion of disbelief.  One is that scientists with a health spa filled with childlike innocent dolls will let them just wander around anywhere they want, including into electroshock therapy sessions which Echo finds understandably upsetting and not the massage therapy she was looking for.  We also see Amy Acker playing a young Geek Girl With a Significant Facial Scar Not Covered by Make-Up.

More problematic than that, the basic premise is that ludicrously rich people are paying for the dolls to be downloaded with personalities for their own personal “Fantasy Island” weekends, whether that fantasy is sex or assasination or something in between.  Which is fine, except that in the ubiquitous world of cell phone cameras and MySpace pages, its not that credible that the dolls would remain anonymous for that long, especially with the high class circles they mingle in.

Which of course gets us to another of the players, the Handsome Cop Guy who’s out to track the Dollhouse down.  We find out that he has a hobby of being a boxer, but I’m thinking that a few less headblows and general thuggery and a bit more sneakiness and eavesdropping and he’d already have tracked it down.

Anyway, we find that Echo’s first mission is to be fantasy motorcycle party girl for some guy who pays for the perfect weekend and the perfect girl to go with it, then finishes it off with giving her a Kay Jewelers cheap gold heart pendant which looks rather sub-par for someone in the gazillion tax bracket.  Regardless, she gets her memories scrubbed, becomes Echo again, then becomes super negotiator woman to save the kidnapped daughter of some latino mob boss.

As super negotiator woman, we find that Echo has been downloaded with not only real people’s personalities, but also their disabilities.  She’s now nearsighted so she can wear sexy librarian glasses and asthmatic so she can pull out an asthma puffer and have attacks at dramatically important times.  This is explained by Blond Geek Boy, basically him saying that all the dolls are roleplaying game characters and you have to take some disads to get extra points to put in the stuff you want.  Really.  Well, those weren’t his exact words, but pretty much.  I was wanting to ask him what would happen if one of the dolls was downloaded with the memories of an amputee or someone of the opposite sex.  Or both.  “My legs!  I have legs!  I can walk again!  And I have breasts too….  WTF?”

I expect this is something we’re not supposed to think about too hard, or at all, but in any case, Echo is paired with Former Cop Guy (and token African-American cast member, so don’t confuse him with Handsome Cop Guy) who helps her along with the negotiations until things go south since it turns out that one of the memories that Echo was imprinted with came from some woman who was formerly a victim of Child-Abusing Kidnapper #3, which is why she became a super negotiatior, before commiting suicide and having her brain put on a zip drive by Blond Geek Boy (or maybe Geek Girl with a Significant Facial Scar).

It’s actually a cooler plot twist than it sounds, and the first episode ends with another cool plot twist of someone watching old sorority videos of Caroline in the middle of corpses of the people who possibly were the former owners of the sority videos.

In any case, that’s the pilot of Dollhouse, which has some intriguing characters, but more cops and former cops shoehorned in than any non-cop show really needs.  Instead of a dogged FBI boxer, why not a reporter?  It certainly worked for The Hulk, and would be easily modernized to a blogger.  And I’m really not certain why The Dollhouse is employing a former cop either, except in that I strongly suspect some Fox exec got it into their head that they need to put cops in everything, so Joss compromised with a former cop.

Scuttlebutt has it that of the next two episodes, one will be better, one will be worse, then the show should hit some sort of stride.  Which I dearly hope for, since I’ve enjoyed Joss’s previous shows.  This?  Well, there was an awful lot crammed in.  But we’ll see where it goes.

Some good things have come out of this, though: some very thoughtful, intelligent posts, many of them by bloggers whose words I would not otherwise have discovered. One of these was Mary Dell’s New Criticism vs. Post-Modernism, with a Side of Privilege. It got me thinking about the great reader/writer relationship.  Go read it: I’ll wait.

Back?  Good.  Okay, here’s the thing.

When I read, partly because I was trained this way, I can be very interested in the author’s world view, place in history, all the things that informed the writing of the book. I can be interested, or at least aware of, critical response (by critics, or just by friends who’ve discussed the same work).

When I write, I am somewhat aware of my own influences (largely because, when I’m working in an historical or fantasy milieu I’m trying to defeat some of those influences in pursuit of a sense of other.  And I try to be aware of my readers’ influences as well: I don’t use the historically accurate word “dude” in the Regency because, well, dude.  No one would believe it.

But when I’m reading (because I wasn’t raised as a post-modernist, I suppose) I am often completely unaware of my own influences, my privilege, my prejudices.  If I react negatively to a written work I tend to think it’s the work’s fault: usually because it was predictable or boring or ill written or didactic.  But now I’m wondering if I don’t put those labels on a book that might have offended me for some other reason: it was predictable because it was sexist.  It was ill-written because it was anti-semitic.  When some of these values are subtle, I might not see them at all.

So my new New Year’s Resolution (because it’s still January, I figure I can make New Year’s Resolutions) is to try to be a little more aware of what I hadn’t been seeing, and a little more aware of what I’m bringing to the table.  It’s only fair.

One of the standard Words of Advice that writers–new and old–get, is to avoid clichés.  The advice itself is rather a cliché but, like all clichés, it is based in truth, and it would be wrong to reflexively ignore it.  

But.  There’s always a but.  I think cliché has its place, for both the writer and the reader.  I’ll grant that over-reliance on cliché is not only a problem on its own, but often signals a hoard of other problems, of which lack of originality is only the first.  And we all want to be original, don’t we?  Except when the pursuit of originality starts driving the whole process of writing to the detriment of the work….

Lemme ‘splain.  I’m sitting out in my chilly little office, trying to get a few thousand words written before I go on to my next project (that would be dinner).  I want to say that something my hero has encountered was simply obvious: plain as day, plain as the nose on his face, plain as black and white. Except that I don’t want to use any of those phrases because they’re, like, clichéd. So instead I stop to figure out a better, more elegant, more original way of getting across the same idea.  By the time I’ve done so, then fiddled with it for another while because it sounds forced and like I’m trying too hard, I’ve been fiddling for half an hour and lost the momentum of my story.

In this case I should have just written “plain as day” and kept moving on, like a shark, swim-or-die.  There’s always the opportunity to come back and fix it later.  And unless every sentence includes a “plain as day” or “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” it’s probably not going to kill anyone, even if you do miss eliminating this one cliché.  If everything else in the story is working the way it should–the characters are people, the plotline is believable, the setting vivid and compelling–a cliché here and there not only doesn’t hamper, but may help your process.

As for the readers?  I don’t like stumbling over trite images and clichés any more than anyone else.  If I notice them, that is.  I don’t tend to notice them if they’re not used too often, and if everything else is working as it should.  What do I notice?  I’ll tell you one thing that will stop me, if you’ll pardon the cliché, dead in my tracks: too much damned originality.

By which I mean the sort of pained cleverness that feels more like auctorial “lookit! lookame!” behavior than thoughtful writing.  Too much emphasis on an original style, without a real understanding of what an original style might be, can cause this.  Trying to come up with a new! fresh! image to the detriment of common sense can also stop me (I am reminded of a much-published, much accomplished writer who, in a draft of a book I was reading, said something about a waitress in a tight uniform–a uniform that “truncated” her full breasts.  Owww.  He changed it).  When I have to work too hard, as a reader, to justify a phrase the author has used, something is wrong.

One of the aims of good writing is not to get in the way of the reader.  Good writing sets up a world, a mood, a series of expectations for the reader, and that can be done with new turns of speech, rhetorical tricks, prose as dense and rich as fruitcake.  But even voices which are, in service of worldbuilding, theme, or style, ornate, flowery or dense, should not stop the reader cold.  Original imagery works best when you read a sentence and think “I’d never thought about it, but that’s it, exactly!”  

More, particularly when your style is dense and rich as fruitcake: you have to give the reader a moment to rest from time to time.  Simply using tried shorthand for an image or action can provide the reader that breathing space, even in the most beautifully written prose.  

So yes, you want to avoid cliché in your writing.  Except when you don’t.  Clear as mud?  Always glad to help.

First off, let me make one thing clear: Departure from the source material is fine.   The Wizard of Oz dumped the scene in the Dainty China Country from the movie adaptation because it was boring, extraneous, and painfully lame.  Glomming the Good Witch of the North and Glinda the Sorceress of the South together makes sense from a dramatic perspective, though making her a bubbly airhead was a bit much (although the MGM version does have her fans).  Having the Wicked Witch of the West be responsible for the poppies is fine for purposes of drama, and having them be foiled by snow as opposed to field mice is likewise fine for purposes of staging.  Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks do not contain Nazis, musical numbers, a young Miss Price, or magical football matches with talking animals–though all of these things are very fun in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a movie I adored as a child and had to thank for introducing me to the equally good (if significantly different) book.  And Alfonso Cuaron’s version of A Little Princess took numerous liberties with the original novel, including but not limited to moving the setting from London to New York, making Becky black instead of Cockney, and most significantly, having Sarah’s dad not be dead of bad investments in India but instead poisoned by mustard gas and MIA in WWI.

The difference here is that The Wizard of Oz, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Cuaron’s A Little Princess are all great movies.   The reason The Seeker isn’t is not because elements were changed, but because elements were changed for the wrong reasons and the wrong way.

The biggest, and wrongest, change was making Will Stanton, and his entire immediate family, American.  This was inane.  The filmmakers had some waffle about how this was done to emphasize Will as being an outsider and yadayadayada and various nonsense to cover up the fact that some executive thinks American theatre-going children only want to see films about American kids.

This is rubbish.  It’s not that it can’t be done–the boy in Roald Dahl’s The Witches is made American rather than British, and Mr. Darling is made an American computer game designer rather than a British economist for the live-action 101 Dalmations–but in this case it doesn’t work for the simple fact that, unlike the two counterexamples, it cuts the heart of the character.  Will Stanton is not an American child discovering the magical and mystical Britain (or at least the ability to blow up cars with his mind) but a British child with a stable and supportive family discovering magic and danger waiting for him right there in his home village.

Making Will fourteen rather than eleven?  Another problem, and a significant one.  Apart from all “Who buys popcorn?” charts nonsense, and concerns with dealing with child actors, eleven is an age for exploration and independence without having to really bother with hormones or even the societal pressure that one needs to deal with hormones.  The “love interest” plot pasted into The Seeker?  Completely extraneous and stupid.  Making Miss Price younger and prettier in Bedknobs and Broomsticks is fine because the heart of the character is the same: She’s an independent woman living on her own and studying witchcraft who suddenly has her secret discovered by a trio of children.  Whether she’s late thirties or late fifties is immaterial, and her romance with Mr. Brown–either version–is a matter of slowly growing affection, not something she’s actively looking for.

This goes double for all the manufactured family drama that wasn’t present in Susan Cooper’s original book.  Your protagonist has enough trouble dealing with the Dark without also having to deal with his eldest brother angsting about dropping out of college.

Changing the time period of the story from the late 60s to the current day is not an issue except in the way that it’s dealt with.  There is a problem with a movie when one of the more interesting and magical scenes takes place in a mall.  But whatever you do, don’t make a big fuss over giving your character a digital watch.  Digital watches weren’t even cool in the eighties, let alone the present day.  And for god’s sake don’t have him travel back in time and trade it to a Viking.

And changing “The Sign of Fire” into “The Power of the Human Soul”?  One supposes the script writer was not familiar with “What sort of lame power is Heart anyway?”

The sad thing is, there would be any number of ways to kick up the action of the book to make it more dramatic onscreen without having your protagonist blow up cars (even more troubling given that the Sign of Fire was edited out, despite the fact that giving actual powers to the Signs wouldn’t have damaged the original storyline and would have indeed made it more dramatic).

Of course there are any number of sad things about The Seeker, the main one being that it will now be a number of years before anyone can get together enough money to do a proper adaptation.