Reasonable Expectations

     When I have occasion to look at one of my own novels, it is sometimes the case that I spot a flaw in what I’ve written. It might be a homophone error, or an extra-word or missing-word error, or perhaps a minor problem in formatting. Whatever it is, the discovery will irritate me greatly, in an “I should be better than that” sort of fashion. The reaction is an expression of my expectations for myself, and the responsibility I feel toward my readers.

     In these days of Independent Publishing Triumphant – and it is triumphant, Gentle Reader; sales of indie fiction now far exceed those of conventionally published fiction – this brings a serious question to mind:

Given that the typical indie writer is a person of modest means who mostly “goes it alone” from story conception to production, editing, packaging, distribution, and promotion, should our expectations of his “error quotient” be somewhat more relaxed than what we would impose on fiction from a conventional publishing house?

     Today’s fictioneer does have better tools at his disposal than a mere typewriter. Moreover, they’re not at all expensive. Some of them are essential to producing a publishable manuscript at all. We can reasonably expect that a writer will use the facilities built into those tools, spelling checkers being at the top of the list. But as anyone who’s ever bruised his fingers against a keyboard can tell you, spelling checkers can miss quite a few kinds of errors. The same goes for grammar checkers. And there are problems of other kinds, including some quite serious ones, whose detection and capture isn’t currently automated.

     Given our awareness that the job is large and demanding and the indie is all alone in doing it, what is it reasonable to expect from him?

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     Since I became involved with indie fiction about ten years ago, I’ve read some brilliant, meticulously produced stuff, some unconscionable crap, and a great deal of fiction that stood between those poles. I recall one writer, whose stuff grabbed me by the collar novel after novel, who seemed to disdain proofreading. His stories were incomparably better than their physical instantiation. Errors of every kind in the book could be found on every page of any of his novels. But the originality of his story concepts and the brilliance of their expression got me past those technical flaws.

     Just now I’m working my way – mild emphasis on working — through a military SF series written by an indie whose name you might know. The stories aren’t entirely original; indeed, they fall into a category most readers of that subgenre would have encountered before. They aren’t all that well told, either. The author is low on technique and seems unaware of certain conventions that could have made the books easier to write and easier for the reader to follow. There are also many low-level errors: misspellings, wrong-word errors, missing-word errors, and so forth. (I can’t be any more specific than this without revealing the identity of the writer, whom I do not wish to embarrass.)

     But I’m reading them. I do have to suppress irritation at the errors and poor storytelling technique, but I’m reading them. I find them valuable for their themes, which aren’t the sort the barons of conventional publishing would find appealing. Indeed, the climate of political correctness and rampant leftism that reigns in Pub World would probably get these books rejected without any consideration whatsoever. The central character is something of a role model for the profession of arms: the sort of figure one who aspires to a military career would do well to study.

     Now, while it might be arrogant of me to feel thus, I’ve been itching to volunteer my services to the author as a technique tutor and editor. I have a feeling any such offer would be indignantly rejected; after all, no mother wants to be told her baby is deformed. But the impulse is an expression of the value I find in the works even as they are today. It’s also a gauge for the importance of indie fiction as a conduit for stories and themes the conventional houses are unwilling to consider. There’s a moral in there.

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     Sturgeon’s Law, unlike Theodore Sturgeon himself, is alive and functioning in the realm of indie fiction. You have to wade through a lot of garbage to find a jewel...and at that, some of the jewels are semi-precious at best.

     Even so – and believe me, I’m fully aware of how far indie fiction still needs to develop – it’s a field of great promise. Indie is where the originality is. Yes, there’s a lot of hackneyed stuff in the indie orbit: vampires, zombies, space wars, Tolkien derivatives, and other clichés. But the stodginess of the conventional houses is such that hackneyed crap in well-traveled subgenres, easy to categorize and market, is essentially all they’ll publish. Genuinely original fiction has essentially no chance of making it past their gatekeepers. How can we know it will sell? And indeed, that is the crux, for conventional publishers must sell lots of books to meet the bills, whereas the indie is usually under less pressure to do so out of his book revenue.

     So I’m in favor of cutting writers who tell decently original stories with important themes a lot of slack. It’s bit like a taste for moonshine: You can’t get it in the store, so if you want it, you have to be willing to accept a jug without a label or a Surgeon General’s warning on the side. Hell, you might be socially obliged to commune with the vendor over a jelly-jar full of the stuff while he complains about his no-account brother in law, his lazy kids, and how his bunions are just killing him.

     Thoughts?

Notes On Characterization: Learning From A Master

     I find it worthwhile to revisit old favorite books from time to time. I find it instructive to contemplate what it was about them that struck me most powerfully on my original acquaintance, and to ponder whether I feel the same after many years and writing adventures of my own. Sometimes the lessons are more powerful for having been so long delayed.

     Here’s the introductory passage of a novel that bowled me over in 1971, when I first read it. You might recognize it:

     “Pain is instructive,” Duncan Chalk wheezed.
     On crystal rungs he ascended the east wall of his office. Far on high was the burnished desk, title inlaid communicator box from which he controlled his empire. It would have been nothing for Chalk to sail up the wall on the staff of a gravitron. Yet each morning he imposed this climb on himself.
     A variety of hangers-on accompanied him. Leontes d’Amore, of the mobile chimpanzee lips; Bart Aoudad; Tom Nikolaides, notable for shoulders. And others. Yet Chalk, learning the lessons of pain once more, was the focus of the group.
     Flesh rippled and billowed on him. Within that great bulk were the white underpinnings of bone, yearning for release. Six hundred pounds of meat comprised Duncan Chalk. The vast leathery heart pumped desperately, flooding the massive limbs with life. Chalk climbed. The route zigged and backswitched up forty feet of wall to the throne at the top. Along the way blotches of thermoluminescent fungus glowed eagerly, yellow asters tipped with red, sending forth pulsations of warmth and brightness.
     Outside it was winter. Thin strands of new snow coiled in the streets. The leaden sky was just beginning to respond to the morning ionization poured into it by the great pylons of day. Chalk grunted. Chalk climbed.
     Aoudad said, “The idiot will be here in eleven minutes, sir. He’ll perform.”
     “Bores me now,” Chalk said. “I’ll see him anyway.”
     “We could try torturing him,” suggested the sly d’Amore in a feathery voice. “Perhaps then his gift of numbers would shine more brightly.”
     Chalk spat. Leontes d’Amore shrank back as though a stream of acid had come at him. The climb continued. Pale fleshy hands reached out to grasp the gleaming rods. Muscles snarled and throbbed beneath the slabs of fat. Chalk flowed up the wall, barely pausing to rest.
     The inner messages of pain dizzied and delighted him. Ordinarily he preferred to take his suffering the vicarious way, but this was morning, and the wall was his challenge. Up. Up. Toward the seat of power. He climbed, rung by rung by rung, heart protesting, intestines shifting position inside the sheath of meat, loins quivering, the very bones of him flexing and sagging with their burden.
     About him the bright-eyed jackals waited. What if he fell? It would take ten of them to lift him to the walkway again. What if the spasming heart ran away in wild fibrillation? What if he eyes glazed as they watched?
     Would they rejoice as his power bled away into the air?
     Would they know glee as his grip slipped and his iron grasp over their lives weakened?
     Of course. Of course. Chalk’s thin lips curved in a cool smile. He had the lips of a slender man, the lips of a Bedouin burned down to the bone by the sun. Why were his lips not thick and liquid?
     The sixteenth rung loomed. Chalk seized it. Sweat boiled from his pores. He hovered a moment, painstakingly shifting his weight from the ball of the left foot to the heel of the right. There was no reward and less delight in being a foot of Duncan Chalk. For an instant nearly incalculable stresses were exerted across Chalk’s right ankle. Then he eased forward, bringing his hand down across the last rung in a savage chopping motion, and his throne opened gladly to him.
     Chalk sank into the waiting seat and felt it minister to him. In the depths of the fabric the micropile hands stirred and squeezed, soothing him. Ghostly ropes of spongy wire slid into his clothes to sponge the perspiration from the valleys and mounds of his flesh. Hidden needles glided through epithelium, squirting beneficial fluids. The thunder of the overtaxed heart subsided to a steady murmur. Muscles that had been bunched and knotted with exertion went slack. Chalk smiled. The day had begun; all was well.
     Leontes d’Amore said, “It amazes me, sir, how easily you make that climb.”
     “You think I’m too fat to move?”
     “Sir, I—”
     “The fascination of what’s difficult,” said Chalk. “It spins the world on its bearings.”

     [Robert Silverberg, Thorns]

     That passage is about 750 words long. Consider the enormous amount we learn about Duncan Chalk and his associates from it:

• We learn of Chalk’s enormous bulk;
• He chooses to do something difficult, painful, and dangerous to start his day;
• He revels in the pain of the ascent to his office;
• He controls an “empire,” about which we’ll soon learn more;
• His associates are vicious jackals;
• They’re also sycophants;
• However useful he finds them, he holds them in contempt;
• Pain is exceedingly important to him.

     Though it describes only one event – Chalk’s climb to his office – the passage throbs with power. It shows the reader a creature of vast appetite, hints at his essential nature, outlines his emotional gestalt, makes clear his relationship to those around him, and underscores what’s most important of all things to him: pain.

     Duncan Chalk is a pain vampire. The suffering of others is his critical nourishment. His “empire,” an entertainment corporation, thrives by purveying curiosities and grotesqueries to a public ever hungry for more. He feeds on the agonies of his subjects as he vends them to the viewers.

     Robert Silverberg was only thirty-two years old when he wrote Thorns. At the time he was pumping out novels and stories at a rate that boggles the mind. According to some sources, he sometimes produced 10,000 words of fiction per day. He’s rumored to have released four novels in a single month, three of them under pseudonyms...and we can’t be certain we know of all the pseudonyms he’s used.

     On a good day I might manage a thousand words...much of which will later be rewritten. I’ve never produced anything as striking and evocative as the above passage from Thorns. I doubt I ever will.

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     Thorns, an exploration of human suffering and the parasites who live on it, isn’t to everyone’s taste. Moreover, it was published at a time when science fiction was generally thought of as adventure fiction, “all rocket ships and ray guns,” unsuitable for consumption by sophisticates. It could easily have been overlooked by “traditional” science fiction readers...but it wasn’t. Its popularity resulted in a Hugo Award nomination and a second-place finish behind Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. It was also nominated for the Nebula Award, which was won that year by Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection.

     The success of Thorns underlines the most important aspect of effective storytelling: the importance of knowing what your reader is there for. The juvenile reader might be there for the “rocket ships and ray guns.” Indeed, that’s more often than not the case. But the adult reader is almost certainly there for an emotional experience. Such a journey is inseparable from good characterization.

     How did your Marquee characters arrive at the situations they’re in? Why are they doing what they’re doing? What’s the basis for their decisions? How do they relate to those around them? What’s their principal emotional need? What actuates them – and equally important, what inhibits or restrains them?

     The answers are your characters. Yet the ironclad rule to “show, don’t tell” commands that you reveal them without stating them baldly. You must show their characters acting and reacting, to developments and to one another. The reader’s emotional experience comes from inferring your characters’ desires, fears, convictions, and beliefs from what you put them through.

     Robert Silverberg outlined a monster in the cited passage. He gave the reader reasons to continue learning about Duncan Chalk, whose evil becomes more fascinating, and ever more vivid, as we watch him go about his business. And there were more characters to follow: Chalk’s chosen victims, mutilated spaceman Minner Burris and discarded experimental subject Lona Kelvin, from whose agonies Chalk contrives to feed.

     While the story told in Thorns is anything but pleasant, the novel is a master course in the delineation of character and its exposure through action. Few readers escape it without being deeply moved by its terrors and its pathos. It’s especially worth your time if you write.

Fantasy, Science Fiction, Or What?

     Yesterday, David L. Burkhead addressed one of the most contentious subjects in speculative fiction: whether there is any clear distinction between science fiction and fantasy, or whether those terms are largely a matter of opinion:

     Some folk have given long, involved definitions about when something is Science Fiction and when it’s Fantasy. Me? I like one similar to Orson Scott Card’s from one of his writing books. Science Fiction has rivets and engineers. Fantasy has trees and elves.

     It’s a good piece, if you’re interested in such arguments (which I am). As I write tales that have been called by either term and was feeling intellectually frisky, I decided to take it up with him. We’ll never come to any conclusions, but the discussion itself is the sort that stretches the mind, even a rigidified old boulder like mine. And just a few minutes ago, it occurred to me that the border between F and SF, even if one can argue cogently for its existence, moves with time and technology.

     For example, David, who believes the terms to be expressions of opinion rather than objective meaning, noted this:

     Psychic powers on one hand and the genius who understands things that are impenetrable to other are both well establish SF tropes, as is the alien who can do things that humans cannot.

     Psi powers, which I’ve employed myself in a tale that’s generally regarded as science fiction, are an interesting case. At this time, they’re definitely fantastic; the brain, being a direct-current organ, cannot muster the power required to transmit a perceptible signal beyond the confines of the skull. But we’re learning how to interface the brain with devices of all kinds. It might well be the case that someday, an implantable device will make “telepathy” possible. It might not resemble “traditional” telepathy. Indeed, it might be confined to the transmission of Morse code. But head-to-head communications of a sort that resembles telepathy would then be a matter of technology rather than fancy.

     Consider also the case of “elves.” Now, Tolkien’s elves – potentially immortal beings with magical powers – might be a stretch, but as we get more capable with genetic engineering, beings that physically resemble the “traditional” elf might enter the realm of possibility. A great deal would be required, including the ability to create a very unusual zygote that would survive full-term gestation. Nevertheless, the possibility is difficult to dismiss.

     If we venture a century or so into the past, we can find cases of the dividing line having moved since then. Consider Jules Verne’s early tale From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. Both were deemed fantasies when they appeared. There was no technology capable of propelling living human beings to the moon; Wells’s “Cavorite” and Verne’s giant cannon capable of propelling a vessel to the moon were plainly fantastic. The same is true for Edward Weston’s solar-radiation-powered interplanetary vessel in C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.

     But technological development since then has allowed men to reach the moon, albeit at great expense, with great difficulty, and at great danger. The line has moved to make interplanetary travel scientifically plausible. Whether it will move further, such that casual travel among the planets – say, for a weekend jaunt by a couple weary of “city life” – no one can say at this time. As for interstellar travel, let’s just say I don’t expect to see it in my lifetime, and I doubt you will either.

     When the late Poul Anderson, a highly accomplished writer of both fantasy and science fiction, addressed this subject some forty years ago, he took a position similar to mine here, except that he omitted to consider the possibility of technological developments unimagined at that time. Anderson was regarded as the foremost practitioner of “hard” science fiction – another fuzzy term – before the ascendancy of Larry Niven. His novel Tau Zero, which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award (and lost, albeit narrowly, to Niven’s Ringworld) was a valiant attempt to write a completely plausible tale of an interstellar journey gone really badly wrong. (I shan’t spoil it for you if you haven’t read it.) He came very close...painfully close. But he had to postulate zero-loss recycling to do it, a blatant violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. So even the greats have to fudge a little. (Ask Alastair Reynolds about his “Conjoiner drives” someday.)

     As I said, conclusions are difficult to reach, and could well change with time. But it does keep the brain from petrifying completely. Meanwhile, I’ve got this fantasy novel on the anvil that’s been giving me absolute fits. As a former physicist I have a really hard time with anything involving magic, so I’ve been toying with the idea that the utility of sorcery is merely a matter of very small changes to a couple of fundamental physical constants that divide our “real” universe from the one where my tale is set. Eventually, of course, we learn how to alter those constants within a defined region, and...oh, never mind.

Short Cuts And Long Delays

     When I embark on a new novel-project, I’m usually tempted to look for a short cut, a quick way to “get into” the effort. Sometimes I find one. Sometimes it’s suitable. More often, it proves to be a detriment, though that might not be obvious for some time.

     The kind of temptation that’s proved least destructive to the ultimate creation is the substantial fund of short stories I’ve written over the decades, some of which prove extensible, with enough thought and effort. Love in the Time of Cinema emerged from such a story, and I’d say it worked out well. But needless to say, not all short tales lend themselves to being used in that fashion. I’m working on and with one such today, and it’s been giving me fits.

     The most destructive temptation – and I’m pleased to be able to say that it’s one I’ve successfully resisted – is the one that whispers “Just borrow this idea, add a couple of characters and a few grace notes, and call it your own!” It’s not necessarily plagiarism to do so; the narrative archetypes are few, and their skeletons can be detected in every decent story ever written. But unless he can come up with an original motif or two and frame the story around them, the writer cannot honestly call the tale his own creation.

     Yet innumerable writers copy well-trodden paths, add nothing significantly original or fresh, and publish the results. That’s the prevalent practice in fantasy today, especially “urban” fantasy. I have little respect for such “creators.” I disdain to read their “creations,” once I can discern their lineaments. But many of them are far more successful in dollars-and-cents terms than I.

     In all fairness, it’s extremely difficult to remain within the confines of a long-established, strongly patterned genre yet produce something genuinely new. The difficulty romance writers have with it gave birth to the Harlequin line, which recycles a publication back to pulp after it’s been on the shelves for a single month. The grooves are too deep. They admit of too little innovation. Such books appeal directly to the reader who wants to keep reading “my favorite story” over and over and OVER.

     The “short cut” available from such a strong, innovation-averse pattern can result in a long delay in a writer’s maturation – and no, I don’t mean “finding his voice.”

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     The late Isaac Asimov, when asked the most common of all fan questions – “Where do you get your ideas?” – replied that story ideas are all around us; just reach out and grab one. They practically attack the attentive writer, for a simple reason: they’re about people struggling with problems. Usually they’re problems of the sort people have always had.

     If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ve seen these before:

John Brunner’s Laws Of Fiction:
1. The raw material of fiction is people.
2. The essence of story is change.

     People’s problems are about the challenges they face and must surmount: from their surroundings, from their personal limitations and inhibitions, and (of course) from other people. Some problems are too trivial to produce drama – to the best of my knowledge, “He needed a clean pair of briefs and didn’t have one!” has never inspired any writer to greatness in storytelling – but there are innumerable ones that writers have used to evoke drama, heroism, and the reader’s sense of the breadth and depth of human existence. Even a barely educated person will be familiar with many such problems and their fictional exploitation.

     In a way, the reason for the speculative genres – fantasy, science fiction, and horror – is that they allow the imaginative writer to shed new light on a classic problem. Consider the problem of survival. While there’s still ample room for stories of survival against great odds in the here and now, the unique moral-ethical cast it can acquire from a science fiction setting can enable it to stimulate readers who might never have considered its complexities. Perhaps the problem is how to defend an innocent against a predator, or a predatory force. A technological motif can make such a contest vivid in a way tales of Mafia dons or serial killers cannot. Possibilities abound; reach out and grab one!

     Some short cuts can be useful as a “leg up” to prominence. For example, now and then, a precast setting, created by a successful writer, is offered to other, less well known writers as an environment in which to tell a tale and gain an expanded readership. This has become fairly common in the speculative genres. Larry Niven’s “Man-Kzin Wars” anthologies are a good example, as are George R. R. Martin’s “Wild Cards” collections. On August 6, military SF writer Tom Kratman will release an anthology of that sort, centered on his imagined colony world of Terra Nova. Our beloved Co-Conspirator Dystopic/Thales (he uses both monikers) will have a story therein, so don’t miss it. But such supports should not be regarded as reliable in perpetuity; to mature and earn personal distinction, a writer must strike out on a path he can justly call his personal creation.

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     “Short cuts make long delays,” saith John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He would surely know. If you aspire to write fiction, be aware of the dangers inherent in mimicry. It can trap you as surely as quicksand, and to the same ultimate effect. A leg up here and there is one thing; walking slavishly and undeviatingly in the footsteps others have left is another. The only way to become a writer others will respect – and I don’t necessarily mean other writers, but I don’t necessarily not mean them, either – is to create your own brand from the fertile if tangled resources of your imagination, experience, and heart.

     Get busy.

Story Recipes

     I’ve made such an obsession out of originality that at times I can blind myself to the possibilities that could arise from a different perspective.

     No, I’m not talking about exploiting the enormous commercial possibilities from hopping onto one of the current “hot” bandwagons and showing the world what a real storyteller can do with it. What I have in mind is more what a creative cook does when he seeks a new approach to the preparation of some basic item.

     Even the most creative cooks don’t invent entirely new ingredients. They work with what God has given us: the minerals, plants, and animals that already inhabit the Earth. They look for new combinations of those things that might prove pleasing to the palate. I have no doubt that an adventurous cook would need to discard the results of many unsatisfactory experiments...always assuming he didn’t face the severe choice of eating them himself or starving to death. But when he finally hits on something both new and genuinely pleasant, he presents it to the world with pride as his creation. It is legitimately his even though, as with “the figure in the marble” a sculptor seeks to reveal with his chisel, it was always there to be found by anyone sufficiently determined to seek it out.

     Recently there have been some impressive breakthroughs of this sort. E. William Brown’s “Daniel Black” and “Alice Long” novels come to mind, as do Margaret Ball’s “Center for Applied Topology” series and her recent novel Salt Magic. The “atomic” elements that underpin those creations have been around for a while, but the way Brown and Ball assembled them, in each case previously untried, made them into something new and fresh – i.e., original.

     By contrast, I rack my brain for completely original “atomic” ideas around which to craft my stories. As that organ already has sixty-seven years of wear and tear on it, it doesn’t produce such things simply for the asking. It involves a process that takes time and the convergence of a variety of stimuli (usually including copious amounts of port or sherry). All the same, now and then I find one, and – wonder of wonders! — it manages to sustain a tale. To those who’ve wondered why my books are so widely spaced in time, that’s half the answer; the other half is the agonizing difficulty, as Ernest Hemingway once put it, of “getting the words right.”

     Since the release of The Wise and the Mad, which concludes the “Futanari Saga,” I’ve been casting about for another genuinely new idea, something that would take me in a completely new direction. I haven’t found one, and it’s been giving me fits. At intervals I’ve wondered whether I might have shot my wad. So as of yesterday evening, the pain from that frustration, liberally sauced from a freshly opened bottle of Villa Bellangelo’s exquisite “Elizabeth” port, has me thinking about the “recipe” approach instead.

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     J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, considered to be the bedrock for fantasy of its kind, was actually derived from the Arthurian legend, albeit with a twist. King Arthur had his magical artifact – Excalibur, “the sword of power” – and a villain to defeat: Mordred, the son of Arthur’s half-sister Morgawse, who desired the throne of Britain for his own. Tolkien adapted the Arthurian pattern by exchanging Excalibur, a weapon loyal to Arthur’s hand, for the One Ring, a wholly malevolent creation of Sauron.

     Because Tolkien worked with a richly imagined world with an intricate backstory, populated by a variety of creatures with special characteristics, the relative simplicity of his “plot drivers” was no impediment to the telling of a long, persistently gripping story. The combination of those drivers with that elaborate backdrop, largely derived from Catholic theocosmogony, and with Tolkien’s gifts for storytelling made his tale a new creation that’s enthralled readers for decades. It continues to be the iconic work in its genre, against which all other works of “high” or medieval fantasy are judged.

     C. S. Lewis wanted to spin a tale from the Arthurian loom but wanted to emphasize the Christian elements and set it in modern Britain. His Space Trilogy has some explicitly Arthurian elements, notably his use of Merlin as a character in That Hideous Strength and his elevation of his protagonist Dr. Elwin Ransom to “Pendragon of Logres,” Logres is an ancient name for Britain in the Arthurian tales. Lewis transformed it into a mystical society whose function is to keep political Britain on the moral straight and narrow. Note, however, that the revived Merlin takes the place of Excalibur as the critical magical “artifact.”

     The patterns these two master talespinners created from Arthurian elements are so compelling that the great majority of their successors in the realm of “high” fantasy have proved unable to depart from them. There have been a few exceptions, notably Orson Scott Card’s “Alvin Maker” series. However, the Arthurian / Tolkienian pattern continues to exhibit a tractor-beam-like effect on writers who approach “high” fantasy today. It suggested to me that the vein might be “played out”...or it did until this very morning.

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     I resisted suggestions that I try fantasy until I had the inspirations that produced a handful of short stories: “The Object of His Affection” and “The Warm Lands,” my two magic-based fantasies, and “Foundling” and “Class Action,” my two vampire stories. Paradoxically, these relatively minor expositions are more popular with my readers –i f I go by email feedback, at least – than all the rest of my fiction taken together. I’ve received many, many requests for continuations and “sequels” in each of those “worlds”...and have been unable to produce them. The original ideas in them fought being extended into longer tales, and I could not find new ideas that would supplement them compatibly.

     But as of this morning, owing to the cooking analogy from the first segment, one of those tales has gripped me afresh. I’ve found ways to combine well-worn elements used by other writers to create a wholly new “recipe.” At least, I can’t think of any existing work that follows the pattern I have in mind. So with dedication, perseverance, and a spot of luck, some, at least, of those aforementioned vainly importuning readers will have something to gratify their yearnings, later this year or early in 2020. Beyond that, deponent sayeth no more...for the present!

Unfinished Stories, Unfinished Lives

     Unless all the Marquee characters die in the final scene – Hamlet, anyone? – the story is inherently unfinished. Life goes on; people continue to age, hopefully grow, and probably have other interesting things happen to them before they die. But a story is supposed to feel finished – i.e., that it ends conclusively, such that at least some major aspect of the characters’ lives has been settled for good. How is that to be done, especially if the author knows that that’s not the case?

     As simple as it looks, this is actually one of the unsolved classical problems of the fictioneer. It’s one of the reasons I find writing this stuff so hard.

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     Not long ago I posted a plaint about my inability to find fresh reading material that isn’t an element in a never-ending series. It was heartfelt, but it definitely went against the current trend. These days everyone writes never-ending series. The creator’s desire to tie the thing off can be thwarted by his publisher – or by his readers. It happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Indeed, it can happen to anyone.

     In part, the unbounded series is motivated by its creator’s desire to economize on one of the most arduous of the fictioneer’s tasks: the creation of an attractive, plausible hero. Once you’ve concocted such a character, it can seem a shame to “waste” him. Moreover, such a character becomes your readers’ focus. Those who thrilled to your first opus about him will want him to return for further adventures. But there are other forces involved as well.

     What does the hero do after the story is over? Maybe he’s the sort that simply must have further adventures. In such a case, his creator’s hands are tied; his tale must go on. But maybe he settles down to “Standard Life:” marriage, suburban home, 2.4 kids, et cetera. While novels have been cast in such settings, it takes the talents of a Judith Guest to make them worth reading. So how does the writer convey to his readers the sense that “what follows would be too boring to read about, much less to write about” -- ?

     It really is an unsolved problem, Gentle Reader. And it keeps coming back to haunt me.

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     A character with enough appeal to power a novel can be awfully hard to “put down,” fictionally at least. One contributing factor is the well-known phenomenon of Main Character Immunity. It afflicts more writers than not. Sometimes it compels an author to say, in effect: “Aha! You thought he was dead, but I was only joshing!” That’s what happened with Sherlock Holmes after Conan Doyle’s first attempt to put an end to him.

     I can’t seem to kill one of my heroes dead enough. The little bastard has just too much appeal. He keeps coming back, largely through my exploitation of open areas in his timeline into which I can insert more involvements. But at least that timeline is bounded by his quite definite demise, written unambiguously into the novel in which I first employed him. At some point – hopefully I’ve reached it already – he’ll stop popping into my narratives.

     And then, there are some heroes that are just too...too something. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is like that. You could hit him with a nuclear-armed cruise missile and he’d just fling it back at you. John Conroe is developing a similar problem with his characters Christian Gordon and Tatiana Demidova, the central actors of his “Demon Accords” series.

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     There is something to be said in favor of the seemingly immortal hero, though. If he’s really that much more appealing than the norm, the writer can please both his readers and his broker with an endless parade of stories about him, at the price of a single spate of character construction, at that. I sometimes wonder if Tom Clancy’s series of novels about Jack Ryan, who single-handedly saved the world over and over, came to an end because Clancy willed it, or because Clancy himself passed away. (Note, however, that others have made use of Ryan since Clancy’s passing, assuredly with the permission of his estate. People want additional stories about the poor guy, so he can’t be allowed to rest.)

     But all things must pass. If we except characters such as Christian Gordon and Tatiana Demidova – John Conroe’s two self-Fallen angels of the “Demon Accords” series – heroes all die, just as we normal folks do. The problem is that no one wants to read about that. The writer has to shuffle the hero offstage in a fashion that mollifies those who’ve loved him – and the more they’ve loved him, the harder that will be.

     Just now I’m grappling with how to deal with several such figures:

• Christine D’Alessandro,
• Kevin Conway,
• Larry and Trish Sokoloff,
• Rachel MacLachlan,
• Althea Morelon,
• and several figures from the Futanari stories.

     And to add a pinch of salt to the wound, every now and then I’ll toss off a short story that prompts my readers to add a character to the list: Evan Conklin and Gail Kristof from “Sweet Things” are the latest such.

     Granted, characters too appealing to dispose of aren’t the worst problem a writer could have. But they can pose a trial to a writer who itches to set off in some totally new direction. Especially when he sees his bank balance running low.

A Dollop Of Reinforcement

     Every now and then, someone who’s read one of my books actually, demonstrably “gets it.” Note the “demonstrably” part. I’m sure there are other readers who “get it” but don’t bother to let me know. I cherish them equally. However, it’s the ones that express their revelations who provide me with the reinforcement a writer needs. One reported in just yesterday evening:

     [Porretto] attempts to ask questions along the lines of "what should a good person do in this particular situation?"

     Exactly. That is my reason for this enterprise, my answer to the question “At an age when you could justifiably declare yourself forever finished with productive work and dedicate your remaining years to relaxation, the enjoyment of the lighter pleasures, and chasing pretty women in short skirts and high heels downhill, why have you chosen instead to do this agonizing, time-consuming, monstrously difficult thing?”

     It’s to get the reader thinking.

---

     Most people make the overwhelming majority of their decisions without thinking. I can’t fault anyone for that. Thinking is strenuous. It takes time and effort away from other things that might seem more urgent. Worst of all, it can lead you in the wrong direction. As Robert A. Heinlein wrote in Glory Road:

     Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won’t work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

     The wrong premises will lead to the wrong conclusions every time – and it’s remarkable how seductive certain wrong premises can be. As Arthur Herzog wrote in The B.S. Factor, a paranoid is just a logician with a fractured premise.

     Part of our inheritance is a vast trove of “pre-made decisions” that apply nicely to a great many known situations. The child’s learning process is largely about absorbing those lessons. Because those decisions have been tested against the situations they fit many times, we can rely upon them – something we often learn by attempting to “go our own way” in such a situation and getting our fingers burned in the process.

     But that inheritance covers only a portion of the human experience. There are infinitely more possibilities than any amount of received wisdom can cover. When such a possibility arises, it’s necessary to think.

     The Futanari Saga is the most challenging of all my fiction to date. It tackles situations many persons would recoil from considering, some of which are active elements in our current sociopolitical milieu. It embeds several speculative elements – the existence of genetically (rather than surgically) produced futanari; human cloning; Rachel MacLachlan’s desire-control technology; Fountain’s apparent miracle-working – but I wrote it principally in the hope that those speculations might help to illuminate some current, real-world controversies.

     Any light arises from the reader’s decision to think: to apply his premises and his logical powers to the unprecedented situations into which I throw my Marquee characters. Without that, the stories are merely transient entertainment, and perhaps not particularly satisfying entertainment at that. But the possibility, however slender, that I could get people thinking about current controversies from an entirely new perspective is why I decided the effort would be worthwhile.

---

     At the completion of each novel I kick back for a few weeks, mostly to recover from the effort, but also to consider certain questions afresh:

1. Am I entertaining my readers or just pontificating at them?
2. What would make my stories more entertaining?
3. Am I “finished?”

     The answers are never perfectly certain. They can seem more nebulous after the release of a novel than before it. But I must face them squarely, for the reasons I outlined in the first segment.

     If, by contriving novel situations with a degree of relevance to real life and putting believable characters into them, I can get a few readers to think more actively and broadly than before, I’ll answer Question #3 above with a resounding “No!” I’ll keep going. Of course that compels me to face the question “If I’m not ‘finished,’ then what comes next?” But that can wait until I’ve emptied a few more bottles of Harvey’s.

A Correction, For Whoever Cares

     In the past, when one of my novels has been mentioned in the Ace of Spades Sunday Book Thread, it’s been a modest stimulus to sales. Not this time, I’m afraid – and the reason grieves me deeply. Here’s what Oregon Muse, the Book Thread’s proprietor, had to say in announcing the availability of The Wise and the Mad:

     Available on Kindle for $3.99.Or you can get the entire collection for $6.99. This also includes The Athene Academy Collection, which consists of 3 novelettes.

     I have to warn you that these novels are rated NC-17 for sexual content. And if you're unfamiliar with the word 'futanari', you'd best not google it. Especially not images. I'm dead serious about this. Because what you see cannot be unseen. Francis has written other books that aren't quite so hardcore, for example the 'Realm of Essences' series, the first of which is Chosen One, which I've mentioned on an earlier book two three years ago.

     I can’t imagine what Oregon Muse was thinking. There’s virtually no explicit sex in any of my futanari series novels. I can only hope he hasn’t read them, because if he did, there’s no excuse for what he wrote above. Those three novels took me three years and a lot of painstaking effort to write.

     I have no idea what to do about this, but I’m definitely not happy about it.

The Project That Lurks

     This one is for all the writers, both actual and aspiring, who’ve ever contributed to “the trunk,” that charming Nineteenth Century metaphor for cherished mementos of one’s failures. As a frame for my main thesis, allow me to include two pithy statements by persons of almost exactly opposed convictions:

Nothing ever goes away. – Barry Commoner
Never throw anything away. – Robert M. Pirsig

     What’s this? Nothing ever goes away? Preposterous. Of course things go away. Sometimes they don’t go as far away as we’d like, but go they most certainly do. I could tell quite a tale about the many things that have gone away from me – in some cases, without my prior consent.

     And what’s this? Never throw anything away? Even more preposterous. Why, it verges on balderdash! If we never throw anything away, eventually we’ll have no room left and no way to move around. Our homes would resemble those that were featured on Hoarders. And let’s not forget what the neighbors would say about the stink.

     Writers know this. It’s a regular feature of our lives that things go away, and that sometimes we throw them. But they don’t always go away forever.

     Way back in the chaotic year of 1997, I started a novel. It was founded on two science-fiction motifs that, to my great surprise, had never been employed by another writer. However, the year was a poor one for me, fraught with difficulty and strife, In consequence, I carried that project forward by about 30,000 words and then…just left it lying there. But I didn’t throw it away.

     In 2009, I stumbled over that novel-fragment in the process of moving from one computer to another. After I’d read it over, I found that I could not remember what it was that kept me from pursuing it to completion. My old passion for the ideas in it flamed afresh, and I drove it to a conclusion that the earlier me would not have contemplated.

     You may have read that novel. It’s Which Art In Hope, the first volume of my Spooner Federation Saga. Many of my readers consider it my best. Sometimes I do, too.

     Something like that may have just happened again. I was reminded, a couple of nights ago, of an idea I popped some years back, just after finishing On Broken Wings. I pursued that idea for about fifty pages and…stopped. I can’t remember why. If memory serves, it’s been in “the trunk” since about 1997. Twenty-two years…but yesterday morning I unearthed it and reviewed it, and it will surely be the next novel-project I address.

     I could have thrown both those fragments away. I didn’t, and I’m glad. But now and then it’s necessary to let an aborted project “go gently into that good night.” I’ve started a project or two of that sort, as well.

     In 2007 I was struck by sudden, unaccountable inspiration. I turned out a novelette that was highly original by the standards of its genre, I was immensely proud of its backstory, plotting, and characterization. It was a hit with my readers as well. Within days after I released it, they began to hector me to fashion a novel from it. And being eager to please, I tried.

     I tried, and tried, and tried. God knows I tried. I’ve been trying for twelve years. Every attempt leaves me more frustrated than the previous one. I’ve come ever so reluctantly to the conclusion that I can’t do it.

     No, I haven’t thrown that novelette away. It’s still available. But I’ve discarded my unsuccessful attempts at extending it to novel-length, and all the ambitions that went with them. It was necessary, that I might get the idea off my mind to make room for things I can do.

     Such judgments are tough calls. Mine cost me a fair amount of anxiety. It’s impossible to be certain that they’re correct, whether at the moment or long afterward. But they’re part of a writer’s life. If you aspire to such an existence, you must be ready for them.

     You see, there’s a project lurking in your subconscious. It might have been there for a very long time, fermenting, gathering force, waiting for the best moment to spring itself upon you. You might or might not know its name. Those things don’t much matter. What’s important is the project’s existence in that murky realm below your conscious perceptions and deliberations.

     If that project has left a few bread crumbs in your trunk, stored there by an earlier, less hopeful you, you could well stumble upon them at any time, find them nourishing, and complete a proper meal from them. That’s why you must exercise restraint about throwing things away. But when that project elects to surface, there must be room for it. That’s why you must make the tough call, now and then, to discard some goal that’s proved unreachable de facto, not worth the grip it has on your efforts and thoughts.

     These considerations arise in every writer’s life. You’ll face them in your turn. You will suffer over them; that’s in the nature of the decisions involved. But it’s part of the price inflicted by the desire to create, and you will be forced to pay it.

     If you’re a writer, that is.

Desires, Fears, Beliefs: Characterization At Its Base

     The political news is still all about the Mueller Report and the reactions of various talking heads, so let’s allow that to rest for today. I have a fiction topic in mind, one that a lot of fledgling writers have a great deal of trouble with.

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     In my little tome The Storyteller’s Art, there’s an essay on “The Sin of Over-Management.” Its core thesis runs thus:

     Once you have defined your characters -- i.e., once you've given them their powers, their desires, and their constraints -- you must allow them to act in accordance with those things. Beyond that, you must permit the reader to learn about your characters from the characters themselves.

     Some of that is too obvious to require further development. For example, a character defined as a reasonably ordinary human being must not suddenly develop super powers. Alternately, a character defined ab initio as subject to an inability to face danger must not suddenly become profoundly courageous. These rules are understood by all but the idiots. (Yet one of the best known of science fiction’s progenitors, H. G. Wells, actually broke one of them in his novel The First Men in the Moon. It’s an amusing illustration of human fallibility.) But the part about characters’ desires seems not to be well appreciated.

     The most important thing about your characters is what motivates them: their desires, fears, and beliefs. A character may change in the course of a story – indeed, if none of your characters change at all you don’t have a story – but the changes must be traceable to the events he experiences and the contexts in which they occur. Moreover, he cannot jump an excessively wide gulf: to have a character morph from totally evil to totally angelic simply doesn’t work. The prudent fictioneer leaves that sort of “story” to God.

     Once you’ve defined a character, you must then allow him to act in accordance with his desires, fears, and beliefs as you’ve postulated them.

---

     Of the four indispensable elements of story, characterization is regarded by most writers as the most challenging. A writer wants his Marquee characters to be both relatable and interesting. There’s tension there. To be relatable, a character must seem familiar enough to the reader for some degree of identification. But to be interesting, that character must differ enough from the common run of Mankind to stand out, to make his decisions at least somewhat off-axis. The launching pad for all of that is motivation.

     “What people want,” from the 30,000 foot perspective, can seem fairly uniform. We want to prosper. We want to be safe. We want acceptance, admiration, and affection. And we want the sense that we’re progressing: getting better, or at least wiser, as time passes.

     But of course at the individual level the details will vary. Not everyone defines prosperity the same way. Not everyone has the same threshold value for “safe.” And so on. It’s within the details that distinguish us as individuals that characterization takes place.

     You can’t make a relatable character completely and utterly fearless. (In Joe Haldeman’s formulation, “the kind of person who would face certain death with a slightly raised eyebrow.”) Automata incapable of conceiving of their own elimination could be made fearless, but not flesh and blood humans. Neither can you make a character completely and utterly selfless. Your decisions about what he fears and to what extent, or what will cause him to sacrifice his own interests for others, are critical – and once made, they must be honored. If they’re to change, the changes must be justified by his experiences in the story.

     How is that done? Ah, it’s time for more coffee!

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     The old maxim “Show, don’t tell” relates specifically to how your characters must be revealed to the reader. There are three channels for this:

• What your character says;
• What your character does;
• What other characters say about him.

     Those are the only valid methods. This often chafes the fledgling writer: “Why can’t I just tell the reader what Smith is all about?” Simply put, because it’s intrusive. It’s un-organic. It’s like finding an op-ed essay in the middle of a novel: What’s that doing here? It’s the writer inserting himself into the story, instead of standing back respectfully and narrating the action to us. In other words, it isn’t storytelling.

     The temptation can be strong. It’s your duty to resist. Your readers-to-be are counting on you.

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     If you’ve done your characterization well, your character’s decisions and actions will be convincing. The reader will be able to see him as a believable person. To achieve that standard, the best of all aids is backstory.

     Backstory is “the story before the story.” Your character didn’t spring from the brow of Zeus just as the story began, did he? So he has a past you can create, just as you created him. Thereafter you can exploit it as a basis for his decisions and actions.

     Little bits of backstory will make their way into the story proper. It’s not wise to incorporate all of it, of course. But elements from “story past” can, should, and will make their way into “story present.” Here’s an example:

     “What I’m about to tell you,” Holly’s lover said, “I’ve never told anyone else. Shortly before I left for Cambridge I made some inquiries about surgery. You know the sort.”
     Holly said nothing. Rowenna sipped from her glass.
     “It wasn’t that I wanted it for myself, love. I knew I could never be a fully normal woman. But I hoped that if I could just contrive to look normal, it might mend the rift with...”
     “With your father,” Holly whispered.
     “With Sir Thomas,” Rowenna said.
     “But you didn’t go through with it. Why not, Ro?”
     “Because it would have killed me,” Rowenna said. “The surgeon said my body wouldn’t withstand the shock.”
     “Did he know you were...naturally the way you are?”
     “He did,” Rowenna said. She finished her wine and set down the glass. “He was familiar with the condition. He said I wasn’t the first futa to explore the possibility with him. He’s of the opinion that futanari are stuck as we are, that as strange as our condition is, our nervous and endocrine systems are too tightly integrated to endure serious alterations. He said he’d made inquiries among his colleagues, and that they’d left very little room for doubt.”
     I have more options than she does.
     I never would have guessed.
     Holly reached for her lover’s hand. Rowenna looked up and said “Don’t!” Holly pulled back at once.
     “You must hear the end of it,” Rowenna said. “I went to my...to Sir Thomas and begged him to listen to me. I told him what the surgeon had said. He listened, and when I’d finished he pulled out his checkbook, wrote a check for a hundred thousand pounds, and handed it to me. He said it was all the same to him. He said he wanted nothing further to do with me, that I could do whatever I pleased as long as it was far away from him.” She met Holly’s gaze once more, and Holly could see that her face was wet. “And as I had attained my majority, he ordered me to leave Norfolk and not return.”

     [From Experiences]

     Rowenna’s explanation of the rift between her and her father (Sir Thomas) is part of the justification for her extraordinarily strong bond with her lover Holly, a transwoman of the usual sort. While it has moderate importance in Experiences, it blossoms most completely in The Wise and the Mad, which I expect to release this summer.

     (There’s an interesting sidelight here: I’ve been continuously developing Rowenna through two novelettes and two novels. Much that was hidden about her in the early stories comes to light in the later ones. In that sense, backstory can become “story proper,” but great caution is required, that you not slip into “telling” rather than showing character. I may expand on this in a subsequent essay.)

     Rowenna fears to lose Holly. Her fear is founded on the most important difference between them: Holly is the way she is by choice, whereas Rowenna, a futanari, is not. Holly has the option of renouncing the changes she has imposed upon herself and going back to masculinity. Rowenna has no such option…and she fears that Holly, whom she’s known for only a short time, might exercise her option and leave her behind.

     That’s how it’s done.

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     Desires, fears, and beliefs. Make it your mantra. They’re what move all of us out here in the “real” world. Let them move your characters as well. Don’t imagine that you can get away with instant, unjustified transitions from evil to sainthood, or cowardice to heroism. Tell the story – or rather, let your characters tell it to you.

     The rest is just typing.

On Standing Out

     Anyone involved in that elusive pursuit called marketing will tell you: You’ve got to differentiate the product! If what you’re doing doesn’t differ from what scads of other makers and vendors are doing, you’re unlikely to receive enough attention to repay your efforts. So distinguishing your offering from the rest of what’s in your chosen market space is important to the point of essentiality.

     But differentiating the product carries its own risks. Your chosen distinction might not “sell.” It might even antagonize potential customers, poisoning them against your other offerings. In the world of fiction, considering how long it takes to produce a novel, those are hazards to respect.

     Unless you couldn’t care less about selling or being read, of course.

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     From my vast collection of funny images:

     If you want to sell books, “being different” is not a good thing to have at the very top of your priority list. In point of fact, “being different,” without regard for any other consideration, is pretty easy. What you seek is an appealing difference: a difference that will connect you to a readership that appreciates your work. That’s not quite as easy...and yet, when I survey the fields of speculative fiction as they stand today and note the trends and fads that dominate them, it strikes me that it “should” be easier than many writers find it.

     (NB: The word “should” is what Douglas Hofstadter once called “a push into fantasy.” It refers to a condition that might not exist...indeed, that might be impossible. That’s why I tend to put quotes around it. Yet there are persons to whom “should” means “If it’s not that way, it’s not fair!” Avoid these persons; they are vexations to the spirit.)

     One way of “being different” is countertrending: take some current trend in your genre and contradict one or more of its premises. Some writers have already done this with some of the larger fads. Another approach, particularly applicable to science fiction, is to set your tales in contemporary reality rather than the past or future. A third is role inversion: make heroes out of your villains and vice-versa. There are other ways as well; it’s a subject that deserves its own essay. Ponder it on your own time.

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     A correspondent took me to task over the following snippet from yesterday’s column:

     The aim of the 20BooksTo50K writers is to keep their readers reading them. The method is write fun stuff; write rapidly; keep the pipeline filled. (I hardly need to say that I would never fit in there.)

     My correspondent’s question was “Why wouldn’t you fit in there? Don’t you want to sell books?” It’s a fair question. Yes, I do want to sell books, but I have priorities higher than volume of sales. For one, I refuse to do what other writers have already done, or are currently doing. For another, I want what I write to have some bearing on contemporary concerns. For a third, I am that most terrifying of all creatures, a perfectionist. I know my own abilities, and I won’t release anything that I feel isn’t the very best I could have done. Those three higher priorities are a limiting factor on my sales volume. While I want to sell books, I won’t do so at a cost to any of them. I’ve made my peace with it.

     I look at the sales volumes of much more dollars-and-cents successful writers with a mild envy. I’d like to have their sales figures. But I can’t see myself doing what they do, which is, in the usual case, following a trend. (In some cases it’s a trend the writer has created, but to remain overlong in a groove one has cut for oneself constitutes trend following with a side of irony.) Neither will I rush my work. I’m not quite the fanatic that Ernest Hemingway was, but I come pretty close. And of course, one who writes with attention to some contemporary issue is unlikely to please everyone.

     Priorities are like that.

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     So yes: by all means “differentiate the product.” The 20BooksTo50K writers have chosen to do so by emphasizing productivity, escapism, and fun: qualities seldom found in the works of “traditionally published” F&SF writers of today. If the sales volumes I’ve been told about are any indication, they’re getting what they want. As their readers are apparently pleased by what they write, this is all to the good.

     But know your priorities. Know what matters most to you. If it’s sales, then so be it. But if it’s not, ask yourself “What, if anything, do I value more than big-time sales totals?” Answer as honestly as you’re capable of doing. Only when you’ve done so can you decide on your particular way of standing out, and be happy with what you’ve chosen.

Assorted Thoughts On Character Selection And Design

     When I’m in the middle of writing a novel, I seldom take the time to think about the fundamentals of the enterprise. I’ve done enough of this to have internalized those principles. However, some recent experiences have caused me to revisit a subject a lot of fledgling writers struggle over: what makes a character, particularly a Marquee character, plausible and attractive.

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     In my little tome The Storyteller’s Art, I posited a three-tier scheme for characters:

• Marquee Characters: The persons whom the story is mostly “about.”
• Supporting Cast: Persons involved with the decisions and actions of the Marquee Characters, but whose fates are of less importance.
• Spear Shakers: Persons who appear where they do in the story simply because there has to be someone in that slot; unimportant except as human stage dressing.

     Broadly, a good story will pose its Marquee characters with conflicts, non-trivial decisions to make, and above all else tests of their values. By implication, they must have values, arranged in some sort of priority scheme. The story will then compel them to confront those values and ponder what they’re willing to say, do, pay, or sacrifice to uphold them.

     The writer’s decisions from that point forward will center on manifesting and demonstrating the Marquee characters’ values through the events of the story. This makes it fairly “obvious” that character design must come first.

     No plot idea is sufficient to make a story “work” if it isn’t first matched to characters who will act out their values through it.

---

     I inserted a large number of Marquee characters into Experiences:

• Neurophysiologist and businesswoman Rachel MacLachlan;
• College dean Amanda Hallstrom;
• Novelist Holly Martinowski;
• Holly’s flatmate Rowenna Walsingham;
• Holly’s “fangirl” Irene Carroll;
• Security specialists Larry and Trish Sokoloff;
• “Star-crossed lovers” Daniel Loring and Ching-nien Chen;
• And Onteora County’s Catholic pastor, Father Raymond Altomare.

     These interacted with one another and a gaggle of Supporting Cast characters of varying importance.

     Ten Marquee characters is about twice as many as even a large novel normally contains. At one point I found myself wondering whether I’d crafted an unmanageable mess for myself. I spent some time dithering over whether to “thin the herd” in the interests of keeping the story coherent. After a while I decided to tackle the challenge around the waist, as the central theme of the story – the power of the human desire for acceptance — required all of them to be depicted in its fullness. It proved to be a great deal of work, more even than Innocents had cost me, though I was ultimately pleased with the result.

     However, the price of that decision has followed me into the sequel to Experiences, tentatively titled The Wise and the Mad. Seven of the Marquee characters from the former book will appear in the latter one, along with a few new ones whose significance to the story is yet to be fully determined.

     If I weren’t already bald from “natural causes,” this would do it to me for sure.

---

     It’s a blessing to have your characters “snatch the story from you:” i.e., to dictate what the course of events must be, once the setting and initial conditions have been specified. Strong characters can do that for you. Indeed, the stronger they are, the more likely it is. But you must be ready to accede to their demand for control of the story.

     I’ve mentioned this before, which prompted fantasy and science fiction writer Margaret Ball to comment as follows:

     On moderately bad days the characters storm through the ms informing me that they never said anything like the vapidities I've ascribed to them. On really bad days I'm reduced to begging the characters not to hurt me.

     I got a big chuckle out of that, largely because I’ve often felt the same way. Nor is it a condition restricted only to us two. Indeed, I’ve begun to wonder if it’s a condition that should be striven for...but I must admit that I can think of no way to bring it about, apart from making your Marquee characters as vivid as you can.

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     Another blessing, this one a bit more mixed than the one above, is to have a Supporting Cast character grab you by the lapels and shout “I deserve to be Marquee status!” That’s happened to me several times. In one case it caused the complete redesign of a novel, and the reorientation of its sequel. In the others I’ve “promoted” the assertive Supporting Cast member to Marquee status in a subsequent novel.

     Now for the “mixed” part. Apart from the eventual benefits, no writer actually enjoys rewriting. As for a large-scale redesign that forces you to discard your original outline, synopsis, and notes, let’s just say I’d rather have another root canal. But there are few assets of greater value than a character strong enough to carry a novel on his own shoulders, so one must learn to pay the price for it.

     Larry Niven, well known for his way with invented words among other things, has counseled us to “Save your typos!” It’s good advice. To that I will add: Don’t just carelessly toss off your Supporting Cast characters, expecting to use them just once. Be willing to think deeply about them. Some of them could be hiding heroic (or diabolic) stature of which you’re currently unaware.

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     If there’s any more important brief maxim than John Brunner’s Two Rules of Fiction:

1. The raw material of fiction is people.
2. The essence of story is change.

     ...I’m unacquainted with it. The most fundamental rule of all is therefore:

Story == People Changing.

     If the changes are dramatic, the story will be arresting...but that requires that the people -- the characters -- must be plausible and vividly colored. No plot, however original or convoluted, can save a story populated by pallid or implausible characters. On the occasions when I’ve gotten them right, all else has followed. On other occasions...let’s not go there, shall we?

What Makes A Novel Rereadable?

     As I’ve mentioned before, here and elsewhere, I own a lot of books: physical volumes, not eBooks, though my collection of those is growing too. At last count I found over 13,000 of the little buggers on shelves, in boxes, and stacked precipitously on assorted surfaces throughout the Fortress of Crankitude...and that was a lot of years ago.

     You could easily get the idea that I like books. And I do. Not only do I read a great deal, I find it next to impossible to give one away, even if I found it inane, insulting, or otherwise offensive. So they accumulate.

     Yet I read so much, and so swiftly, that I often lack anything to read that I haven’t yet read. Most contemporary fiction bores or otherwise displeases me. I can’t abide unoriginality, bad grammar, lack of fundamental storytelling skills, or a story that lacks moral and ethical standards. (Sarah Hoyt has called that last fault “grey goo.”) I also draw the line at “SJW preaching.” That category comprises all “stories” intended to make the reader feel bad for not being a wholly “converged” social-justice asshole warrior to whom the sole worthy purpose of a life is to harangue other people for not being equally assholian virtuous. So even though the independent-writers movement is producing fiction at a rate to boggle the imagination of a Manhattan publishing magnate, I often find myself rereading.

     Mind you, not all of those 13,000 physical volumes get reread. For one thing, a lot of them are textbooks or reference materials. You can only spend so much time on the 2018 Statistical Abstract of the United States before it’s superseded by the all-new, all-thrilling 2019 edition. The same goes for the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. So my rereading is almost entirely of novels.

     Not all novels, however much I may have enjoyed them at first acquaintance, are rereadable. I could reel off hundreds of titles of books I enjoyed – and still own – that I wouldn’t reread. So there must be some characteristic that divides the rereadable books from the ones that lack that grace. Indeed, I’d hesitate to say that there’s only one such characteristic. So let’s have a go at it.

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     The major elements of a worthy bit of fiction are:

• Plot,
• Characterization,
• Style,
• Theme.

     Those four elements are the power cells of all worthwhile fiction. There are other aspects to a novel, of course: premises, setting, its balance between narration and dialogue, dark-light pairings, and still others. But those are less likely to install a book inextricably in the reader’s memory.

     I don’t think a novel must have a complex plot to be rereadable. I’ve certainly read enough such fiction – I’ve enjoyed many a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller, and such a novel normally has a complex plot – but I can’t think of a book I’ve reread specifically to re-experience its plot convolutions. Similarly, a striking character or set of characters isn’t by itself a reason to reread a book. Many books are animated by important themes (“eternal verities,” as Tom Kratman styles them), but once I’ve encountered them they aren’t enough by themselves to move me to reread them.

     However, there are synergies possible among a book’s plot, characterization, and themes, which strike me as evidences of exceptional auctorial insight and skill, that do cause me to come back to it. These might best be summed up under the heading of drama.

     Not many people could give you a definition of drama. Indeed, the dictionary definition raises more questions than it answers:

     drama noun: any situation or series of events having vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results.

     But what sort of “situation or series of events” produces “vivid, emotional, conflicting, or striking interest or results” — ?

     For me this is the question that separates the truly great stories, the ones that can be reread many times over the course of one’s life, from those that are mere transient diversions and entertainments.

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     For me, drama has always emerged from a combination of the following:

1. A well-characterized protagonist with quite definite values;
2. A morally or ethically challenging situation involving events that clash with the protagonist’s values, whether or not those events were brought about deliberately by a conscious agent;
3. A high price for the resolution of that clash, which only the protagonist can pay.

     There’s conflict. There’s an emotional coupling between the protagonist and the challenge he faces. And there’s the price to be paid, which should be almost as high as the value the protagonist seeks to defend, on the grounds that nothing valuable can be cheaply purchased.

     Mind you, there’s an under-layer of necessities that shouldn’t be neglected here. They fall into the category of a fiction writer’s tools: valid methods of characterization, viewpoint management, proper use of time and place, and the effective exploitation of Supporting Cast characters. The writer must be proficient with these tools, or his fiction, no matter how potentially dramatic his conception, won’t come off. But that’s a subject for another screed.

     As I type this I’ve been thinking about the stories I’ve found most rereadable. All of them follow the outline I sketched above. Some embellish on it, for example by embedding distinct plot threads that take a whole novel to converge, or by having multiple protagonists who are all good guys but have conflicts with one another. One way or another, the elements I’ve cited are present in all of them – and I’ve returned to them several times each over the years, usually when I was in a “how on Earth can I bring this off?” quandary about one of my own stories.

     I once wrote that drama only exists when men must suffer for being good. It strikes me as a compact encapsulation of the ideas expressed above. It’s also consistent with the books to which I return repeatedly, whether for technical instruction, for characterological insight, or simply for the moral uplift from the stories they tell.

     Such books are the exact opposite of “grey goo.” In a world in which the hero is becoming an endangered species and moral and ethical distinctions are all too often blurred – sometimes by the deliberate action of persons with evil intentions – they make enduring, valued companions. Especially for a writer who repeatedly asks himself “how could I imagine that I might ever equal that achievement?”

A Present To A Despairing Writer

     As Experiences is a sequel to another novel that didn’t sell well, I knew that reviews would be hard to come by. Most reviewers are fair-minded – thank You, God – and won’t review a book whose prequel is, shall we say, “outside their experience.” (Cue the laugh track, Ed.) But look what I found under my Groundhog Day tree!

     A brilliant interweaving of storylines continues the complex issues raised in “Innocents.” Porretto’s ability to illuminate social issues with challenging sf hypotheses is the more impressive given that these books are relatively short and quite fast-paced, making them compelling reads. Many writers say less and take twice as many words to do it.

     That review is by Margaret Ball, a writer of considerable ability in her own right! I think I’ll just bask in this for a while...

The Bullies Of The "Book Community"

     There are some things that cannot be said too often. Some of them are hardly said at all.

     Have you heard about the tragedy of Amelie Zhao? If not, it’s about time:

     Amelie Wen Zhao is a Young Adult author whose debut sci-fi/fantasy novel, Blood Heir, was set for a June release from a major publisher, as part of a three-book deal. When the deal was announced a year ago, Zhao, who is just starting her career, made her excitement public....

     Well, guess what? The book, which had positive buzz ( Barnes & Noble called it one of the most anticipated YA releases of the year ), has been the subject of a massive Social Justice Warrior pile-on on social media, as Jesse Singal discussed in a tweetstorm. Very few people have even read the novel, but the mob attacked it as racist for a variety of reasons, one of them being that Zhao created a fantasy world where “oppression is blind to skin color” (this, from the press release). It’s a fantasy world, and people haven’t even read the book, but the mob was certain that Blood Heir is racist, and that its author — a young woman raised in Beijing, but now living in New York City — ought to be shut down.

     And guess what? The SJW attackers got their wish: Miss Zhao voluntarily withdrew the book from its scheduled publication.

     Amelie Zhao seems to be a perfectly sweet and decent young woman with a real storyteller’s gift – and she had achieved a lifelong dream. But her SJW attackers have destroyed that dream out of...what? A desire for “justice?” There’s some sort of “justice” in bludgeoning an innocent young woman into surrendering her achievement?

     We both know the answers, Gentle Reader.

     Larry Correia lit into Miss Zhao’s attackers with a furious and exemplary incisiveness. It’s too good to excerpt; please read it all. Not that it will have the slightest effect upon those vicious monsters, but Monster Hunter Correia is the right man to give them the shellacking they’ve earned.

     Will Miss Zhao recover from this brutalization? Possibly in the long term. But the moral of the story “should” be “obvious.”

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     I have no interest in the sort of Pub World acceptance Miss Zhao pursued and achieved. At this point I regard the conventional publishers with disdain. They’re dominated by SJW thinking. Worse, as Miss Zhao has learned the hard way, they make juicy targets for the SJW hordes.

     Indie is the way to go. With the exception of Baen Books, there are no traditional publishers with the courage God gave a cabbage. Moreover, the ongoing extinction of the brick-and-mortar bookstore in favor of Amazon and comparable outlets has reduced what a traditional publisher can offer a new writer in the way of marketing support to barely more than what a diligent indie can accomplish on his own. And not only does the indie writer retain absolute control over his book; he also gets to keep a much bigger slice of his revenues pie.

     Best of all, the indie writer is “bully-proof.” Anyone who can be shamed out of reading a book by SJW hysterics would be unlikely to read it in the first place and even less likely to enjoy it or recommend it to his friends.

     All that having been said, it remains the obligation of good men to whack the SJW bullies across the chops – preferably with a tire iron – whenever and wherever they poke their heads above the slime line. I salute Larry Correia for having done so unambiguously and thoroughly. There are other places where the job needs to be done, most notably in the ever more antisocial “social media” and in reviews at Amazon and other online outlets.

     It’s a form of support your preferred indie writers need quite as much as your dollars. Please don’t stint them.

What Do You Care About?

     This one is for the other fiction writers out there, whether already practicing or still just “loosening up.”

Why do you [want to] write?

     It’s a question many of us never face squarely.

     I’ve known people who were avid for what they imagined as the “lifestyle” of a writer. Seldom did their imaginings bear much relation to reality.

     I’ve known people who wanted to memorialize certain events through a fictional lens. They found those events to be supremely important, and they knew that fiction is better than exposition at expressing the underlying themes of human action and human nature.

     I’ve known people – including one of the most gifted writers I’ve ever met – who merely saw fiction as a way to augment their incomes. The great majority of them have been bitterly disappointed by the returns on investment.

     And I’ve known people who just wanted to see their names on the cover and spine of a book: the “now I’m somebody” syndrome that more often plays out in the context of one of the performing arts.

     But why do you want to write? Is it one of the reasons above? If not, then what?

     You really should know, and quite clearly, before you set your fingers to the keys. It will determine everything.

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     One of the foremost science fiction writers of the Twentieth Century, Robert A. Heinlein, said on several occasions that he wrote “to buy groceries:” i.e., simply for what he could earn that way. You sure as hell can’t tell from most of what he wrote! They’re replete with insights of all kinds: into government and politics, social structures and their evolution, religion and human speculations about the supernatural, human motivation, the limits of the achievable, and so on. A few of his books might seem lightweight at first. A couple of them, toward the end of his life, were self-indulgences (e.g., I Will Fear No Evil and The Number of the Beast). But by far the greater part of Heinlein’s oeuvre is rich with thematic content of the sort that renders them usefully instructive – intellectually durable – memorable for the best of reasons.

     I could name other writers, alive and producing, who claim to be “in it for the money” but whose stuff has the thematic heft and solidity of Heinlein. A dear departed friend who sought to make his living from fiction discovered that he couldn’t do it. He cared too much about the quality and thematic content of his stories to pour out saleable hackwork. And I will tell you something I’ve never told anyone before: I couldn’t do it either. My first agent encouraged me to “lighten up,” to write stuff she knew she could sell because it was already flying off the shelves. I tried...and gave it up long before I could produce even one novel-length tale.

     At this point I’ll stop circumnavigating the shrub and tell you baldly what you need to know, fellow storytellers and storytellers-to-be:

You’d better know what you care about the most, because that’s what you’ll write about.

     And there is not one single thing you can do about it.

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     Fiction writing is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort. It’s frequently frustrating, too. No one can dedicate himself to something as prolonged, arduous, and intermittently maddening as the creation of a novel unless he’s getting exactly what he wants from the process and its products.

     Storytelling can be like mining coal, or it can be like searching for diamonds. The market for coal is much, much larger and steadier than the market for diamonds...but you must be willing to accept the grime and the drudgery of coal mining to reap the profits available from that market. And what you get for your labors is weariness, black fingernails, and coal. There’s no kidding yourself about that.

     So know, clearly, explicitly, and beyond all possibility of self-deception, what you care about sufficiently to embrace the labors of the storyteller. I’m here to tell you: storytelling is the hardest work I’ve ever done.

     I have no doubt that you’ll feel the same.

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     You might be wondering why I chose this topic for today. Simple, really: I’m serving as a countervailing voice to a writer I like personally who apparently feels otherwise. Sarah has a lot of books available. I haven’t read most of them, and most of the ones I’ve read have failed to affect me. However, Sarah is a respected figure, at least among speculative-fiction writers and fans. For that reason a lot of aspiring writers and newly fledged ones will take her sentiments to heart. That makes it important that other perspectives are available to them.

     This one is mine. Make of it what you will.