DeepGenre

Constance Ash September 16th, 2007

The following is from an article in the current Times Literary Supplement around a new book about the Inklings, by Diana Pavlac Glyer, The Company They Keep.

[ There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said�. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King.

However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.
What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met for seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their number. It was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the scene, marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of substance to a narrative which had already swollen far beyond the “second Hobbit� requested by his publishers. Glyer suggests that this incident typifies the way in which the Inklings affected one another’s work, despite the fact that in later years its members were frequently to insist that their meetings acted more as a social club than a writers’ circle, brushing aside any suggestion of real influence. ]

That the TLS article begins with the pub, reminds me of last week’s discussion on the LJ BlackGate fantasy magazine site, bg_editor, re taverns and Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery.

Love, C. 

• Craft , Fantasy , Storytelling , Worldbuilding
• Comments(16)

Carol Berg August 28th, 2007

Last Saturday I served as a judge in a regional multi-genre writing event. Slightly - really only slightly - reminiscent of a certain TV show, the volunteer contestants stood before the three-judge panel and read from their current work-in-progress for two minutes. Then the three judges gave three minutes of critique. No, we didn’t take Simon, Paula, or Randy roles. Honestly, we weren’t even mean…unless you define mean as including some hard truths along with writerly encouragement and positive feedback.

First off - writers who put themselves through such a ordeal must be commended. To open your work - yourself - to critique in front of an audience is courageous. Indeed, in this case, the potential rewards were significant - reviews by a couple of excellent agents and freelance editors.

The results? For the enthusiastic audience and the writers themselves some valuable writing tips, (so they told us!) For the three judges brain fatigue certainly. Listening so carefully to eighteen readers without benefit of printed pages, while coming up with comments both diplomatic and meaningful was intense. But the effort was rewarding as well. Several writers demonstrated a truly excellent grasp of concept, characterization, plot movement, description, tension - all the elements of story. To be able to award them even so small a “leg up� was a pleasure. One writer showed us a superb “voice� – the bitter edgy angst of a young bipolar male - but the author didn’t quite know how to get this character into a story. How fun to match this person up with a writing coach!

Even those who didn’t make it into the winner’s circle showed some grasp of the craft – pleasing narrative, original ideas, sensual imagery. The deficiencies that kept them out of the roses were clustered in a couple of areas. We’ve talked about most of them here on Deep Genre, but I thought it might be useful to review notes “from the field� as it were.

First and foremost: getting into the story.

Most readings were openings - which for a two-minute reading was generally (though not always) the most useful selection. Many openings consisted of extensive rumination over past conflicts, several were lengthy character exposition that had nothing to do with the conflict of the story, and one was an extended metaphor that introduced the first character only in the last line. As a writer friend of mine puts it, “One character on stage thinking is not a scene,� thus rarely provides a dynamic opening for commercial fiction.

Another opening problem: meaningless activity parading as an “active� opening. Dialogue does not necessarily equate with action, especially banter accompanied by internal monologue that has no relationship to the matter of the story. Nor does mere frenetic activity serve the purpose, unless it somehow introduces us to character or essential conflict. Even palpable danger does not ensure a successful opening if the reader has no context for the conflict and no reason to care about those involved.

And one more problem: the persistent use of dreams or car accidents as opening scenes. We saw at least four examples. Careful, careful, careful, fellow writers! Only touch these overused opening tropes if you have a truly fresh approach. (We heard one that certainly did. But I won’t tell. I hope he gets it published.)

The writers were supposed to give a log line, a one line “elevator pitch� to describe the thrust of their story before beginning to read. Out of eighteen candidates, less than a third gave anything near a concise, coherent description of a story. A few of those who did give a good description, read nothing in those first two minutes that evoked any particle of the log line. Give it some thought. I certainly am. One of the benefits of critiquing is how it causes us to re-examine our own work!

Carol

• Craft , Storytelling
• Comments(7)

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!

Continue Reading »

• Characterization , Craft , Novels , Reviews & Criticism , Science Fiction , Storytelling , Style , Worldbuilding
• Comments(67)

Carol Berg May 1st, 2007

In the fall of 2003 I heard a story on National Public Radio called “The Last Lighthouse.” It was about the last manned lighthouse in the US. But it wasn’t the story that interested me so much as the title. I got thinking about lighthouses and how they both warned people away from danger and welcomed people to safe harbor. And that got me thinking about history and who knows what all…and somehow I began to wonder if there was anyone back in the fifth century who had the vision to foresee what would become of Britain once the Roman legions withdrew. Which led to a story idea about a place that wasn’t Britain, and to this cheeky fellow named Valen who had ended up in a very unlikely place, when all he wanted to do was stay anonymous. Which led to a sale and two-and-a-half years of writing and a book that grew too big and had to be split into two…

…and today the first of the twins, Flesh and Spirit, has been released. Whew!

You can check out the “Our Books” section for more or see my website for more info.

Now back to our regularly scheduled…

Carol

• General Announcements , Storytelling
• Comments(11)

Carol Berg April 23rd, 2007

Lynn wrote:

I have one author who writes the first half of a one chapter story in the first person singular, and then in the second half, she changes to write in the first person singular of the opposite character. When I told her it was confusing, she lashed out at me about how she was a teacher and it was correct writing.

OK, I found myself writing a long answer to this question and decided not to bury it at the bottom of the My First Novel pile, because first person narration is dear to my heart. I love the feel of living an adventure so close to one of the participants - both reading and writing. Before Transformation was published, I never knew there were readers who held an antipathy to first person. Many of my all-time favorite books are first person, and, I suppose, what bad first person books I’d read would have been bad no matter what “person” they were written in! But since I’ve been reading more pre-published fiction, I understand way better. (And I’ve a few other pet peeves to go along with bad first person, but I’ll leave them for another time.)

So on to Lynn’s query…

There is certainly nothing technically wrong with multiple first-person narrators. It is no more “incorrect” than using multiple third-person points of view or present tense or omniscient POVs or whatever else. For those of us who love first person done well, multiple narrators can alleviate the biggest downside of writing first-person narrative, which is getting only one character’s view of the action. All of my nine books are in first person, and I have used multiple narrators in four of them.

Of course, as with any technique, you have to work at it. Here are a few things I concentrate on:

- first and foremost, I always make sure the reader is clear about whose head we’re in. I only switch at chapter breaks, and I always delineate the speaker in the chapter head. Some writers switch at scene breaks–or even more often, which gets dicey, in my mind–but I prefer using a chapter break, even if it means variable length chapters. On the other hand, I do try to minimize switching, giving a sequence of chapters in one voice, and then one or more in another. But, of course, the storytelling must ultimately decide this. I would like to think that my characters and their voices are distinctive enough that they are instantly identifiable - but every reader is different and I don’t want to pop them out of the story by leaving them confused. Continue Reading »

• Storytelling , Style
• Comments(19)

Constance Ash March 10th, 2007

I’d like to add a new title to the lists of new fantasy, that may well become classic: The Name of the Wind, Day One in the KingKiller Chronicle, by Patrick Rothfuss, coming out this month from DAW.

I don’t work for DAW. But DAW did send me the galleys to this novel last fall. The story and characters pleased and interested me very much. It was so pleasing that, daunted by the pile of pages, and with so much to do with our New Orleans book, over a continuous period of nights before bed, I read the whole thing and was sorry when it was finished, and wanted the next installment now. I wouldn’t even allow Vaquero to do his usual ‘read Constance to sleep,’ because I gave that time of the night to this novel.

The Name of the Wind presents a new voice and imagination at play in this Big Fantasy sandbox. The author has a deep comprehension of the fantasy tropes, and what their purpose are, and how to best employ them for the weave and exposure of his story, and when. These are Big Fantasy tropes, though the Quest Fantasy ones are not included, at least not in this first volume. (I particularly noticed this, since I, personally, am not an admirer of Quest Fantasy generally, unless it it LOTR.)

FYI — a sense of what I will and do read, in terms of Big Fantasy, here’s a short list of authors I admire:

Kit Kerr, Kate Elliott, Jacqueline Carey (particularly her “LOTR Upside Down” GODSLAYER duology), Robin Hobb, GRRM.

I don’t read that many Big Fantasy novels these days, having not as much time, but The Name of the Wind left me eager for the next installment. Thus if you like the authors mentioned in the previous paragraphy, you probably will like reading Patrick Rothfuss too.

I don’t even like “Prologues.” But –here’s a sample from The Name of the Wind’s prologue. I was caught, just as Peter S. said he’d been, and predicted I would be too.

[ It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn's sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music ... but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained. ]

Writers and editors will generally agree that describing something in terms of negatives, particularly starting a large narrative with negatives, is a no-no. But this is an example where the author uses the very reasons that negatives are no-nos for his own purposes, which is to get the reader to understand that things are not right, that things are not well, that things are not normal here in the Waystone Inn. It also, from the second statement connects (the lack of) wind to the title the novel.

Love, C.

• Storytelling
• Comments(24)

Laura J. Mixon March 1st, 2007

I’ve been thinking about special effects, in part because they are making a movie of my husband, Steve Gould’s, book JUMPER. They made some significant changes to the story, as Hollywood is wont to do. And frankly, I ain’t complaining, because they paid enough to do so to take a lot of financial pressure off Steve and me. Some of the changes they’ve made appear to me to have been chosen specifically to make the work have lots of visual appeal. Iow, for the sake of cool special effects. Again, I ain’t complaining; I love cool special effects.

However, the changes have had this sort of ripple effect that I’ve watched Steve wrestle with (successfully, fortunately) in the prequel he has written. One of Steve’s great strengths as a writer is that he really thinks through the logical consequences of everything in his books. Every single thing that happens, every piece of technology, every character’s motivations and actions, Steve has examined all these story elements from every angle, and fitted neatly together into these tightly plotted, cleanly written tales whose characters feel so real, you really care about them. Watching how he has managed to turn what were, imo, things thrown in just for visual effect, and making them make sense — making them “real” in that way that good stories feel real — has been interesting to watch. He is truly an masterful craftsman, in addition to a great storyteller. I’ve learned a lot as a writer, just watching him work.

And one thing Steve never, ever does, is put things into his stories that don’t strictly serve the needs of the story. Doesn’t matter how cool the special effect is. Doesn’t matter how much he’d love to throw in bells and whistles and kitchen sinks. If it doesn’t serve the story, no matter how much he may want it to be there for other reasons, it’s out. (He does like explosions; I’ll give him that. But in that case, he finds a way to make it have meaning.) He has tremendous self-discipline.

I have a very different process than Steve’s. One of my biggest challenges as a writer is that one of the things that keeps me writing is the cool ideas and stuff. So I have this impulse to keep throwing more stuff in: more plot twists, more weird tech, more character interactions, more world building. By the time I am 100 pages in, I am staggering under the burden of all the stuff I’ve given myself — and the reader — to carry.

I don’t think I’ll ever be as pared down as a writer as Steve is. But with this current book, I’ve decided to clear through some of the brush — sacrifice some of the coolth, for the sake of making what remains more “real.”

I think I’ll put a big sign on the wall above my monitor: “Does it serve the story?” If no, out it goes.

Thanks, Stevie.

• Craft , Science Fiction , Storytelling
• Comments(12)

Constance Ash February 25th, 2007

The following pull comes from today’s NY Times’s Art section, in an article about the photographic artist, Justine Kurland.  You can find the article here, with a slide show of some of her work.

[ “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist,� she said. And in a sense these new works also relate to the aesthetic of late 19th-century landscape photography, which “was really about this idea of projecting an idealism onto a landscape,� she said. “It was a way of settling the West.� ]

Her vision of past, present and idyll, is an interesting companion to the ideas raised (yet again! you’d think BY NOW, primatologists, at least, would get it, that the female of our species never was a passive beggar at best to great big alpha males hunting to get the food to feed herself and children) in the article about chimp mothers creating hunting weapons and tools.

However, most of all, I was struck by Kurland’s statement, “There’s something political about creating a world that you want to exist.â€?  Not always, but often, this would fit those of us who make worlds that don’t exist, as a matter of course.  It states succinctly, as well, why we make worlds like Sherri Tepper does, for instance, that are our deepest terrors.  Without political advocacy and activism, we cannot avoid the worlds that are our terrors, or bring into existence worlds that are better than a world of terror.

Kurland is a photographer, not a fiction writer.  This is something else I liked about her statement.  It shows us all that fiction is not the only path to envisioning worlds within which we could live comfortably, with our children, other creatures and each other.

Love, C.

• Miscellaneous , Storytelling , Worldbuilding
• Comments(34)

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 19th, 2007

Thalia weeps while Melpomene is still no doubt staring glazedly at the screen, giggling uncomfortably.  I must rant while this is all fresh in my mind.

I just had the instructional if less than pleasureable experience of watching The Half Hour News Hour on Fox News.  It’s supposed to be comedy, but about the only thing funny about it was the unintended irony of it actually addressing news-worthy subjects, such as global warming and candidates for the 2008 presidential race, contrasting rather sharply with the “straight” news item that followed, more breathless coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith, who died, like, a week ago.  This is more coverage than they did for the death of Gerald Ford or for that matter, Saddam Hussein.

For those uninitiated, THHNH was created by Joel Surnow, who also created 24, about my favorite suspense spy thriller show.   THHNH is Fox News’ answer to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show & The Colbert Report.  It’s supposed to be right wing comedy, but only comes off, at best, as embarrassingly lame playground humor.  This is not because there isn’t anything funny on the left, but because there are certain rules of comedy that must be respected if it is to have any hope of success, and for Thalia’s sake, I learned these on the playground.  And while I have a rather liberal bias myself, I’m more offended by bad right wing comedy than the idea of right wing comedy period.

So lo, I call upon Thalia, Muse of Comedy, to help me to best iterate the Rules of Comedy and the various infractions thereof, as evidenced by the first painful episode of THHNH:

I. Thou shalt not laugh at thy own jokes (This be a lesser sin if they be funny, but a mortal sin if they be not)

Perhaps the gravest sin of THHNH is the laugh track.  It’s bad, the laughs are obviously recycled from a tape, but worst of all, they follow lame jokes.  If a joke doesn’t fly or otherwise dies, you can recover by simply skipping on to the next one, but if you insist that it was supposed to be a joke by laughing at yourself–or having your canned laughter laugh for you–then your audience can’t simply ignore it.

II. Jests be as birds–smile gaily when they fly, look grave when they fall flat, then move on to the next.

It’s acceptable for comedians to smile and nod after delivering a punchline and pause for laughter, but if no one smiles, laughs, cheers or otherwise signals their appreciation, simply move on.  Really.  Honestly.

THHNH is obviously hobbled by not having a live studio audience; the actors have nothing to play against except each other and their own tin ears.

Maybe this will improve.  Somehow I doubt it.

III. The Joke of the Day is best fresh from the Marketplace, not day-old, week-old, month-old or worse.  This be because the News of the Day oft be a wittier jester than thee.

Let’s see, example from THHNH: joke about Britney Spears shaving her crotch.  A throwaway gag, hardly lingered over, but far less funny than the simple fact that yesterday Britney Spears shaved her head.

This could be followed by gags about Sinead O’Connor (the last female singer who did such a thing), jokes about K-Fed’s reaction (ex-husbands are always funny), or just random bald jokes made safe because of the simple fact that Britney Spears is a woman who shaved her head by choice, not a guy who went bald.  The news is its own amusement.

IV. Whether low and base or high and refined, a jest must relate to its subject.

The best example of this from THHNH: There was a long and extended (and generally tiresome) bit of business about Barrack Obama having a (completely fictional) magazine devoted to him and his life, with this as the knee-slapper: It’s called B.O. magazine!

The trouble with this is that the relation of the gag is tenuous at best and is a pretty thin thread to hang the rest of the segment upon, especially since Senator Obama isn’t noted for any body odor.  Worse, the joke could have been used effectively if used as part of a gag about “What sort of parents name their child ‘Barrack Hussein Obama’?” with a back and forth answering that “Barrack” is a fairly ordinary name in some parts of the world (Barruch in Hebrew) and that the parents had no way of looking into the future and knowing that “Hussein” and “Obama” might one day have unpleasant associations, with the final zinger: “What sort of parent sends their child to elementary school with the initials ‘B.O.’?” and a response about “Well, fortunately for Senator Obama, he attended elementary school in Indonesia” followed by a bit of business about the lengths parents have to go to to protection their children after unfortunate naming choices.

V.  Do not tackle the Unspeakable Taboo unless guarded by the Aegis of Truth and armed with the Sword of Hilarity!

Okay, case in point: THHNH had a mostly forgettable and boring running gag about environmentalist actor Ed Begley coming to the studio in his electric car, having it run out of juice, refueling it with human waste (I’m not making this up), having it run out of “gas,” then getting picked up as a homeless person and thrown in prison where rival gangs were fighting over him.  “As a center for prison basketball?” (Begley is notably tall)  No, for something else….

Yes, a long running gag is finally ended by a prison rape joke.  And it’s unforgiveable because, instead of having any degree of truth or even poetic justice, it’s just a sadistic fantasy.  And this is the last gag of the whole stinking show.

VI. Thou Shalt Not Open with Thy Strongest Joke or Thy Claim to Fame and follow with something banal

The best bit in the whole show was the opening act, the already leaked skit with Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter as President and VP in 2009.  I’d actually thought it was rather lame one the whole (though Limbaugh did deliver a good line about being upset that Pelosi had his phone number), but really, that was it?  Two famous right wing personalities as guest stars followed by four comics I’ve not only never heard of, but who had considerably less flair and stage presense than Limbaugh?

Good gods.

• Craft , Definitions , Reviews & Criticism , Storytelling , Style , Television
• Comments(1)

Constance Ash February 16th, 2007

The writing process facilitated by recourse to queries of the Vertigo Tarot Deck.

Scroll down to:

inkwell.vue.292 : Neil Gaiman, “Fragile Things”
permalink #3 of 46: Elise Matthesen (lioness) Tue 6 Feb 07 20:08

Vertigo Tarot, King of Swords: “Is the inner world of a story too big to get onto the page?”

You can view the Vertigo Tarot (published by Vertigo Comics / DC) here.
Love, C.

 

• Craft , Miscellaneous , Storytelling
• Comments(0)