Post Partum

     Here I am again, having completed (at long last) the novel-in-progress and waiting for my test reader and cover artist to report back. It’s a difficult period in any novelist’s life: he can’t go forward while his thoughts are wrapped around the book he just finished, and he can’t go backward with the revisions he’s already thought of until the others involved have registered their various contributions. That’s me, just now, on this 29th of September in the Year of Our Lord 2020...and dear Lord, what a year it’s been.

     So, as I’m at a low ebb, here are a few semi-connected thoughts about the adventure just behind me: what I set out to do, what I wound up doing instead, and what I’ve learned from it.

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     Back in the mid-Nineties, when I first decided to try my hand at a story of novel length, I had a clean sheet of paper before me: no obligatory setting, no required characters, no mandatory theme, and no prescribed genre. I was free to imagine, and to concoct, in whatever way I pleased, for my idiom was as yet undefined.

     As a reader my favorite genres have always been the speculative ones: science fiction, fantasy, and horror. I was confident that they would be the ones my stories would occupy, as well. But much to my surprise, I didn’t start out that way.

     The first requirement of any storyteller is a mating between characters and crises: people upon whom to impose problems they must solve, or at least cope with. I developed a bunch of attractive character sketches almost by accident – I still wonder from time to time where those fictional figures really came from – and immediately found ways to cast them into conflict with one another.

     But characters don’t struggle with their problems and one another in some sort of white space separate from all else; at least, mine don’t. They need a place to be. I had to pick a place, or conceive of one, that would provide a suitable stage on which to act out their destinies. Thus was born Onteora County, New York: that fabled land of heroes and geniuses who sniff at the merely difficult and sneer at the all but impossible. Nestled safely within the part of New York State that virtually no one who doesn’t live there is familiar with, it has proved a fertile field in which to plant the improbable figures I like to write about.

     Fertile...and damned near inescapable. Of the sixteen full-length novels I’ve written to date, only four have stayed completely outside Onteora County: three far-future science fiction novels and one magic-based high fantasy. The others have wound up there regardless of where they started or where I wanted to put them. Worse, the characters from my other Onteora Canon novels keep insinuating themselves into my new fictions. I’ve been unable to keep them out without killing them off...and in some cases even that expedient failed me.

     A recent short story of mine, “Sweet Things,” starts in Hamilton (a real place) and swiftly moves to Onteora. Because the readers of Liberty’s Torch praised it fulsomely, I started to toy with the possibility of developing a novel from it. My short romance Love in the Time of Cinema had proved popular, so I adopted the general approach I took in that novel for the new one, which I’ve titled Love in the Time of Capitalism.

     And by jingo, it happened again! Characters from just about every other Onteora Canon novel started insisting that they belonged in this new one. I managed to fit a few new faces into the tale, but the “old Onteora crew” is there in force. Hopefully the reader will find their contributions to be positive ones.

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     I intended Love in the Time of Capitalism to be a romance / love story. Yes, that element in present, but it’s not alone. There’s music. There’s technology. There’s political intrigue. There’s even a spot of warfare. It’s a stew of many ingredients...possibly too many.

     While my lovers Gail and Evan are involved in all of it, I strained throughout the composition to keep their deep involvement with one another at the heart of the tale. Still, rather than a feel-good romance of the sort I’d initially envisioned, it seems I’ve produced a hybrid of about four different genres: romance, musical fantasy, near-future science fiction, and political thriller.

     I don’t feel an urge to go back and “straighten it out.” I plan to publish it essentially as it is. There are a few elements I’ve decided need buttressing, but not to the extent of “de-hybridizing” the book as it stands. I look forward to hearing what its readers will think of it.

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     The remarkable thing about novelism (hey, if journalists practice journalism, why can’t novelists practice novelism?) is how little of one’s initial plan actually “survives contact with the enemy” – i.e., the actual construction of the story. My initial plan, whether expressed as an outline or a detailed synopsis, turns out to be mostly a way to recognize how little I really knew about my characters and their trials when I set out. It’s been that way through sixteen novels, and probably will remain so through however many more I produce. The other novelists with whom I occasionally swap thoughts report essentially the same experiences.

     However, that’s not a reason not to produce the initial outline / synopsis. If it weren’t for that planning document, I don’t think I could get started, much less produce something coherent. I think this has some connection to Mike Gancarz’s sermon about the Three Systems of Man, which he first related in his little book The UNIX Philosophy. My copy, alas, seems to have migrated to other hands.

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     I have at least a few days of nervousness before me, wondering what my test readers will have to say about the book, and wondering what my cover artist, the estimable Cat Leonard of Adelaide, South Australia, will come up with for a front cover image. I’d like to be able to think about the next book, but I’m too close to this one to think of anything else. That condition will persist until the thing is burnished, proofread, equipped with a cover and released.

     I can’t help but wonder how many more books I have in me. I’m old, and not in the best of health. But storytelling is an addiction, a tough one to shake. And I imagine that those damned Onteora characters, settings, and institutions will continue to have their way with me. At least, they have so far.

The Last Lap

     I set out to write a short romance, something like my popular Love in the Time of Cinema. I had my Marquee characters. I had my setting – Onteora County, New York; where else? I even had a plot line, and I had solemnly sworn to follow it faithfully. I looked forward to a quick development and an early summer release.

     Then I started having ideas.

     I don’t recall who, but some chess grandmaster long dead once quipped that “When you don’t know what to do, wait for your opponent to get an idea – it’s sure to be wrong!” He might not have been serious...but he spoke the truth. Ideas, you see, are dangerous. Yes, they’re useful as well – sometimes. But an idea that tempts you to rip up several months of work and redo it completely should be regarded with maximum skepticism.

     I tend to get ideas of that sort, ironically enough, when I’ve reached the point from which I’m able to see the goal I’ve sought. One such idea caused me to delay the completion of a novel by several years. Please don’t ask which one; the answer would do you no good and might even upset you. The experience taught me to do something I’d long known about in another context:

     Write it down and go back to what you were doing.

     The “plains of hesitation” quote above is a good one. When the finish line is in sight, don’t pause for a quick change of costume. Don’t stop to contemplate the beauty of the tableau. Don’t call your companions together for a pre-celebration. Cross it. As the Philosopher-King of the Bronx once said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

     And watch out for the ideas. When you’ve begun the last lap of the journey, they become almost certainly destructive: Satan whispering in your ear. If you’d like to save an idea for later consideration, write it down. Have a pen and notebook handy for the purpose. (In my experience, ideas you don’t intend to use at once are better saved on paper than in your computer. Writing them down gives them a serious feel. Besides, you could easily misplace a short digital document. It’s happened to me often enough.)

     This most recent intrusion of an idea stopped me for a while. It was seductive in that it was quasi-relevant to the tale I was writing and was connected to other things I’d intended to write...other ideas. And it very nearly derailed me from my romance-under-construction.

     A confession: I did use part of it. And it has cost me some time and effort in backtracking through my manuscript, shoring up passages here and there to provide the required support. I don’t think it’s ruined the tale, though it has compelled me to think of the novel as something other than a pure romance. The readers, whoever and how many they prove to be, will get the last word on that.

     But do watch out for those ideas.

When No Real Locale Will Serve

Stephen King has Castle Rock, Maine.
Scott Turow has Kindle County, Illinois.
William Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.
And I have Onteora County, New York.

     There are no such places, of course. Yet quite a lot of interesting stuff – headline-making, really – happens in each of them. I have no idea whether King, Turow, or Faulkner’s ghost is ever asked this, but one of the questions I get most frequently from readers of my fiction is “Why did you have to invent a fictional county to site your stories in?”

     Well, sometimes no real place will serve. Sometimes the general knowledge readers bring to the fiction they select is just too great – too likely to undermine what every storyteller must get from his readers: the willing suspension of disbelief. I know I’d be lost without it, because of the strangeness of my tales and the larger-than-life heroes I prefer to depict.

     It’s best to avoid the use of real places if your aim is to speak of world-class intellects and men of unprecedented moral courage. There’s a shortage of both varieties. The problem intensifies if you intend to create a whole lot of them – which I did.

     In part this is an aspect of the prevailing cynicism: the “people just aren’t like that” / “no real person would take such risks or make such sacrifices” attitude that’s endemic to our time. Yet it’s my firm conviction that people need heroes. We need to admire their deeds and hope someday to rise to their level. It’s why good parents still tell the great myths of Greek legend to their youngsters...and why far too many youngsters who never hear a heroic story grow up admiring sports figures and entertainers.

     But if you need a place where a gaggle of heroes can germinate and blossom into national or global stature, a fictional place will probably serve you better than any real locale.

     There are variations on this practice that ought to be compared. For example, consider the current trend in romance toward the employment of a very rich male co-protagonist: a multimillionaire or billionaire. There are a slew of such books out there, and from what I can determine they’re very popular. Yet how many ultra-rich persons are there really, and how many of them make it into their thirties and forties without being securely mated, pre-nuptial agreements and all, and thus romance-proof?

     I’ve used that motif too. However, I “flipped the script” in my short romance Love in the Time of Cinema, by making the girl the multimillionaire. That’s certainly a valid approach...but candidly, it’s even less realistic than the prevailing tendency, in which the male protagonist is the rich one. (“You can’t do anything the usual way, can you?” – my wife. Heh, heh, heh! Just wait till she reads Love in the Time of Capitalism!)

     Of course, the “extreme” pole of this practice occurs in the outright speculative genres of fantasy (The Warm Lands), science fiction (Which Art In Hope), and horror. Some things require whole new worlds – even whole new universes. That’s the case when you want to break a few of the laws of physics, not just those of Congress. And once again, the great ones, the Tolkiens and Benfords, do what they must to make it work.

     As I wrote above, it’s about the willing suspension of disbelief: getting the reader to accept the premises of the story. If you can’t win that from him, he won’t get full value from your tale. But this is a special case of the much larger subject of the rules of storytelling: doing what you must do to please the reader with the tale you hope to stell him. Ultimately, that’s the one and only absolute rule. All the others are useful guidelines. The aspiring writer must absorb and respect them, but as he matures he will learn that each of them, like all rules for doing anything practical, has a proper domain of application. Outside that domain – the regions on the storyteller’s map marked “Here there be dragons” in Gothic Blackscript – he may sometimes set them aside to his advantage.

     If he has a hero’s courage, that is. For that, too is an essential of the good storyteller. Why else would it be “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” eh, hero?

Boil Them Down!

     Slowly, the Mule bowed his head, as anger and despair cornered his mind completely, “Yes. Too late–Too late–Now I see it.”
     “Now you see it,” agreed the First Speaker, “and now you don't.”

     [Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire]

     The period between the completion of the first draft of a novel and embarking upon the changes required to reach a final draft is, for me at least, one of great intensity. Sometimes it tells me things I seriously needed to learn – and not just for the refinement of the current novel-under-construction.

     In my stories, the driving force is always character. More specifically, my stories are about the reasons people do things. Tom Kratman has said that illuminating the “eternal verities” is his fuel. That’s a good short way to put it, for the eternal verities are immutable facts of human nature – and the most important of those facts, at that. So as I write, the characterization process is continuously uppermost in my thoughts.

     That doesn’t mean I always get it right.

     A friend I shan’t name has served as an indispensable test reader for Experienced, which is drawing near to release. Her observations have proved critical to unearthing flaws and under-exploited motifs in the story. But the most valuable thing she’s done for me is to illuminate, to and for me, a stunningly important guideline to characterization.

     There are only three ways to characterize a character:

• Through what he says;
• Through what he does;
• Through what other characters say about him.

     My friend illustrated this for me by capturing each of the Marquee and Supporting Cast characters in Experienced in no more than three sentences. And in reading her summations I had a brain flash that damned near incinerated the BLEEP!ing useless thing:

A character’s character – i.e., his animating desires, fears, and convictions – must be summarizable in no more than three sentences.
If you can’t do that, you’ve got a problem.

     That comes pretty close to being a fictioneer’s Philosopher’s Stone.

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     Characterization is critical to any writer who has a theme of importance in mind. If Smith wants his story to impress the importance of some idea on his readers, he must do so through the decisions and actions of his Marquee characters, and through the changes they experience as they travel his fictional landscape. Bad fiction will fail at this; good fiction will bring it off beautifully.

     The novelists of centuries past often missed this point. I find it relatively easy to excuse them; after all, the novel as a form was still in its infancy, and what works / doesn’t work was still being discovered. We of today have no excuse.

     Theme is closely coupled to the emotions we feel at seeing a character triumph or fail, or be exalted or destroyed. In my little tome The Storyteller’s Art, I wrote:

     [I]t's the passion evoked by the theme that's really important. However, the writer can't simply scream at his readers, “Feel deeply for my characters!” That would be akin to an actor trying to evoke audience emotion without a script, by the sheer power of his expressions and poses. That's called “emoting,” and no self-respecting theatergoer -- or reader -- will stand for it.

     Theme, as embodied in plot and character, is the conduit by which the writer transmits his passion to his readers. There’s a conservation law at work here, though not one you’d study in first-year physics: passion can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transmitted from artist to consumer.

     This approaches tautology. Yet the heartily detested maxim ”Show, don’t tell!” which fledgling writers have resented since Ug first scrawled on the wall of his cave is about nothing else.

     And as always, the fewer words you need to capture a character you’ll use to transmit your passion to your readers, the more likely you’ll be to depict that character in a maximally effective way.

     So: Once you’ve decided on your theme and Marquee characters, for each character, write three sentences, no more. One about the sort of things the character will do. One about the sort of things he’ll say. And one about what the other characters will be prone to saying about him. Strain for concision in each sentence; concision is the best imaginable aid to clarity. For best results, do this before typing the first sentence of the story. Print the results on a 3” x 5” card, prop that card in front of your monitor, and make a point of reviewing it before you begin a scene.

     It’s the cure for what ails your stories, and it’s available without a prescription. Trust kindly old Dr. Fran. Might help with your rheumatism, too.

Chekhov's Law

     (No, not that everything was invented in Russia!)

     You’ve seen me discourse about it before:

     “Everything not essential to the story must be ruthlessly cut away. If in Act One you say that a gun hung on the wall, then by Act Two or Act Three at the latest, it must be discharged.” – Anton Chekhov

     Anton Chekhov was principally a writer of short stories and plays. His sense for the constraints that apply to those forms animated his Law. He applied it as ruthlessly as he commanded the rest of us to do, even in his longer works.

     Myself, I prefer Mikhail Bakunin’s two rules for anarchists:
     Rule 1: There are no rules.
     Rule 2: Rule 1 is not binding.

     Nevertheless, I do appreciate the thought behind Chekhov’s Law. It pertains to dramatic unity: the sense that everything the reader has encountered will figure in the ultimate climax of the tale. And in the construction of a short story or novelette, it’s a far, far better thing to abide by it rather than to imagine oneself free of such a requirement.

     But hearken to one of the foremost storytellers of his time, the late, great Roger Zelazny:

     [A]ny story we tell is as much an exercise in omission as inclusion. Our death sentence reflexes normally take care of this, so that we hardly think of the bits of scenery, stray thoughts, passing faces, unimportant physical details we are leaving out.

     Somewhere, sometime early I came to believe in tossing in a bit of gratuitous characterization as I went along. It seemed to add something to the story as a whole if – by means of a few extra sentences – a stock character could be shown to have an existence beyond his walk-on role. I remember doing this with the civil servant Briggs – and showing something of the bureaucracy behind him – in Isle of the Dead. This I suppose to be a corollary of the Hemingway principle – an indication of the presence of things perhaps important in their own right but not essential to the story itself – actually the reverse of cutting an essential item and hoping that its light shines through. But I believe the effect is similar – in making people feel something more than they understand. It works to expand the setting of the entire piece and to provide evidence of the larger reality surrounding the action by giving the reader a momentary, possibly even subliminal, feeling that there is something more there.

     [“The Parts That Are Only Glimpsed,” in Unicorn Variations]

     Today this matter of “giving the reader a feeling that there is something more there” is pursued mainly by crafting interminable series of novels that feature a gaggle of characters the writer can’t seem to stop writing about. You know, like the Onteora Canon.

     So we have two great writers, separated by many years, on opposite sides of a critical “rule.” One tells us to abide by it; the other says it can be broken to good effect. Where, then, is Truth?

     I’d say it's here, in Uber-Rule Zero:

Carry yourself with enough brass,
And you can get away with anything.

     Note that this rule is far wider of application than Chekhov’s Law.

     I’ve been dancing around the edges of Uber-Rule Zero ever since I started writing fiction. I’ve played with implausibilities of many kinds. I’ve used themes that nearly never appear in contemporary fiction written for a general audience. I’ve contrived plots to which Rube Goldberg would say “Aw, c’mon!” I’ve crafted characters that will strain any reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief: immortal supermen, great geniuses, priests of great wisdom and benevolence, and politicians with consciences to which they actually pay attention. And I’ve done my best to act as if it’s utterly natural, “all in a day’s work.”

     Because the one and only true requirement of fiction is that the reader buy it and derive entertainment from it. That requires that the writer maintain a seamless pretense of auctorial nonchalance, as if his decisions are so swift and unstressed that he need say nothing about them...except for the story, of course.

     A caveat about the above: It’s not a prescription for the novice fictioneer to discard all the wise precepts successful writers have set down for him. Craftsmanship matters. So does a keen sense for the way people really act and speak. A coherent plot requires respect for the motivations of your characters. And of course, you must have a story to tell.

     Still, once you’ve mastered a certain degree of craftsmanship and have learned enough about people to be able to construct plausible stories about them, there’s a sense of liberation about it all. After all, fiction writing, as Lawrence Block has told us, is about “telling lies for fun and profit.” It’s very much like that greatest of all characterological assets for real – i.e., non-fictional – people, sincerity: if you can fake that, you can get away with anything. Really!

Being A Proper Authoritarian

     No, this will be an entirely nonpolitical piece. What’s on my mind this morning is a phenomenon I’ve long wondered whether any other writer shares: the sense that we lack complete authority over our own works-in-progress.

     The late Florence King, in one of her book review columns, wrote that it’s the role of an author to be an authoritarian. However, I don’t remember what she was commenting on at the time and can no longer find the link. What I’m thinking of is the curious authority of the words themselves, once they’re in the manuscript.

     There are several necessities involved in putting a novel together:

1. Settling on a theme;
2. Imagining a plot that would dramatize it;
3. Conceiving of characters suited to acting out the plot;
4. Composing a series of events to generate the necessary clashes;
5. Setting those events in a timeline that’s both plausible and compelling;
6. Working out both the resolution and the pointers forward into the unwritten future.

     Yes, it’s a lot of work – and after you’ve managed all six of those steps, you still have to write the BLEEP!ing thing. So it’s understandable that a writer will be reluctant to do it, or any significant parts of it, more than once in a given novel-project. But sometimes it’s imperative...yet at those moments it can be even harder to face than usual.

     An example: I submitted my first draft of On Broken Wings to an excellent free-lance editor – Rafe, if you’re out there anywhere, I hope you’re well and happy – who gigged the manuscript for a number of minor blemishes and one major one. The major one involved a love scene, which had cost me enormous effort to write. Rafe criticized it as unbearably sappy. While I eventually came to agree with Rafe’s assessment, I was massively reluctant to resculpt that scene. Indeed, it seemed impossible.

     Why? For a supremely bizarre reason: it was there. It was “in the past.” My characters had already acted it out. That alone made it seem immutable.

     Pretty weird, eh, Gentle Reader? I mean, you already knew that I’m fairly strange, but...well, never mind. My reluctance to excise the offending scene and write a replacement was stronger than you can imagine. I eventually did, of course, to the considerable improvement of the book. Still, that bizarre sense of the author’s lack of authority over his own work has recurred on several subsequent occasions, including in my most recent novel, Innocents, and in Experienced, the sequel under construction.

     It probably has something to do with the characterization process. If your characters are “strong” – i.e., if you have a vivid, nicely detailed conception of them that propels how they respond to the crap you put them through – substantially altering a particular scene can make you feel as if you’re being untrue to them. It can be tough to retain your conception of your characters, especially your Marquee characters, when you have to put a scene significant to your vision of them “under the knife.”

     What is more valuable to a novel than vividly conceived characters? You certainly wouldn’t want your major protagonists and antagonists to be weakly colored. Yet the “stronger” they are in that sense, the more likely it is that you’ll need to do major surgery on one or more scenes in your first draft: not merely rewording a few sentences here and there, but removing the originally narrated action and replacing it entirely. And that requires being a proper authoritarian: declaring to your characters that “Thou shalt not behave the way I originally had you acting,” and redoing their deeds and / or the scene in which they occur.

     It strikes me that this is less likely to be a significant concern to short-story writers. In a short story, the animating idea is all; the characters can’t be allowed a lot of room for hijinks. However, we do have one classic and very funny case available: the famous “tandem story” of Laurie and Carl:

Rebecca and Gary
English 44A
SMU
Creative Writing
Prof Miller

In-class Assignment for Wednesday:

     Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.

     At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

     Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. “A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,” he said into his transgalactic communicator. “Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far...” But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

     He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. “Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel.” Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth—when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.

     Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu’udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu’udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. “We can’t allow this! I’m going to veto that treaty! Let’s blow ‘em out of the sky!”

     This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.

     Yeah? Well, you’re a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.

     You total $*&.

     Stupid %&#$!.

[Professor Miller: A+ I really liked this one!]

     I would have loved to be a fly on the wall the next time those two encountered one another. But back to my main query: Are there any other writers out there who’ve had the sense of lacking the author’s proper authority over your own work? The public wants to know!

Fiction Writing Notes

     The admirably prolific Sarah Hoyt has something to say about writing and the “Muse” canard:

     My writing career (though it was 10 years before I sold a story) could be said to have started the night my husband told me writers write every day. He's a musician you see. (Not for a living. He's a mathematician, but the two afflictions often go together.) Musicians practice every day. I told him I wasn't even sure that I could write commercially in another language (this was the year I moved to the US). And I might never have been good enough, and besides, well… besides, I really couldn't force myself to write when I wasn't inspired. He looked at me like I had two heads and told me, no, if I wanted to be a writer I had to write every day. Practice has a magic of its own. Just write it....

     The second thing I can tell you is that the muse or inspiration is a lie. Sure, sometimes it strikes and you write stuff in white-hot joy. That's great. But you know what? You can do it when it doesn't strike too.

     Sarah’s observations are worthwhile, but I must add a caveat.

     Yes, writers write. Yes, writing every day is a salubrious way to defeat your hesitance and develop the “habit” of writing that a productive writer would need. But there is a price, and it can appear rather stiff to the aspirant who’s unprepared for it.

     Some of what you write will be bad. Embarrassingly bad. The day after you’ve written it, it will assault your eyes and rattle your brain. You’ll cringe away from it, desperate to believe that you had absolutely nothing to do with its creation, that some evil entity stole your graceful, piercing prose and substituted a deformed mutant changeling. You’ll be tempted to swear off writing forever.

     And there is nothing to do for it but to plow onward.

     In one of his books on writing, Lawrence Block relates a tale about a writer friend who’d contracted to write the libretto for an opera. The friend called Block in a panic. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t catch the rhythm of the thing. The story failed to energize him. Every sentence he wrote frankly stank. But he was under contract, and the deadline was nearing.

     Block gave his friend this bit of entirely unexpected advice: “Then write a bad libretto.” And the friend took it.

     Sometimes there’s no way out. But he who perseveres might find a way through.

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     A favorite subject of mine, when conversing with other indie writers, is methods of promotion. I’ve learned a fair amount from such conversations. However, I’ve also noticed that very few fiction writers put much effort into their promotional blurbs. It’s a skill that’s worth refining.

     Terry Lacy recommends an approach:

     Archaeologist Indiana Jones has to get the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis. He wins the treasure and the girl.

     Twenty-one words. The concept is simple enough and one of the many assignments I had to master in grad school. It's based on the simple idea that—according to some psychological study somewhere—if you meet a stranger, you have twenty-one words to get them interested in your idea. That's whatever you're selling, and we're all selling something, from an insurance policy to a novel I want you to read, to a pleasant conversation in an airport lounge, it's all one big sales pitch. If you hook them in 21 words, they continue to listen. If you don't, they tune you out—their minds go elsewhere.

     Now before you decide this is stupid, think about it. It's the elevator pitch, only shorter. You don't have an entire elevator ride—you have a sentence—maybe two—before your audience decides if you are worth their time. If that sounds mean, it's a mean old world out there—and in the faceless world of the internet, it's only getting worse.

     This exercise is valuable for more than one reason. Obviously, a concise, well-focused “elevator pitch” is useful in approaching busy Hollywood executives. But beyond that, it respects one of the ugly facts of fiction marketing: the potential purchaser won’t spend more than about 60 seconds on his decision to buy or not to buy. And if old Will will forgive me, that is the question, isn’t it?

     And, entirely apart from promotional considerations, practicing “precision writing” — producing a coherent narrative in a fixed number of words – is excellent exercise for cultivating the habit of precision in all modes of expression, including oral communication.

     Allow me a brief vignette. A few years ago, a young colleague, more or less out of the blue, complimented me on my “clarity,” both spoken and written. He asked how I’d learned it and whether he could make use of the same technique. It gave me pause for thought.

     After a moment’s reflection, I said “Meetings.”

     “Huh?” he said. “How did that come out of meetings? At the meetings I’ve had to attend, people drone on and on and seldom if ever make a point!”

     “Exactly,” I replied. “They horrified me. I became so determined not to be profligate with others’ time that I concentrated on boiling down what I have to say to the irreducible minimum. It turns out that that doesn’t just shorten your meetings; it makes your statements clearer as well.”

     And he smiled.

---

     In recent years I’ve become easily irritated by caricatures. Until recently, it hadn’t occurred to me how easy it is to create caricatures among one’s Supporting Cast characters. Some are more irritating than others – the greedy businessman who worships profit and will trample anyone who stands between it and him; the brain-dead housewife who knows nothing beyond Kinder, Kirche, und Kuche; the “crusader” whose motives are pure as the driven snow and whose policies never evoke a second-order effect – but there are many kinds, and all of them are detrimental to the plausibility of a story. The consequences are worse than the typical indie writer thinks.

     Lately the one that’s acted on my nerves like grade 0 sandpaper is the hyperzealous, utterly intolerant Christian cleric who wants his flock to get out there and fight “sin” (as he defines it) physically. Such stick-figure caricatures of priests and ministers appear regularly in fiction about persons from some “oppressed” minority. The use of such a character as a major antagonist can destroy an otherwise worthy story, entirely because of his implausibility.

     (Yeah, yeah, I know: Westboro Baptist Church. Now name another one.)

     A good story does require some sort of tension or conflict, but if the tension or conflict arises solely because of a caricature antagonist, it won’t persuade. It will work serious damage on the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief,” the asset which above all others the writer must strain to preserve. Without that – the acceptance of the “story universe” and its premises as true enough for the purposes of the entertainment offered – the story becomes trite. Cartoonish.

     If you’re laboring over a fiction that depends upon such an antagonist, I sincerely and solemnly urge you to reconsider. Your “story universe” already has two strikes against it. You can do better, and you should.

---

     That’s all for today, I think. To those who’ve written to inquire about the status of Experienced, I’m still at work on it...and it’s a lot more work, of more kinds, than I’d expected it to be. I’ve already thrown out two false starts and am straining to develop a third approach wholly divergent from the others. But never fear: it will be finished. I just hope it won’t finish me.

     Enjoy your weekend.

Advances In The Art

     As I’m rather old, I have memories of pleasurable past experiences that retain a kind of glow. In some cases the glow is not really representative of the experience in any objective sense. Rather, it derives from my tastes at that time, which were...other than they are now. This is particularly striking when it comes to the science fiction I once read and enjoyed.

     Now, I read voraciously from an early age. A very early age, actually. And it does stand to reason that a child’s tastes will be less well developed – not to say immature, though the word cannot be summarily dismissed – than those of the man he will become. All the same, reacquaintance with the affections of those early years can be seriously embarrassing, even if no one else is around to witness it.

     “What’s this about,” you ask? Simply, an encounter with some old, much loved books that have left me wondering how I could have been so easily pleased, and pondering the considerable improvements in the writing we find in genre fiction today.

     (Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. Ovid said it, I believe it, and that settles it.)

---

     There was once a science fiction writer, much beloved by his readers, who wrote long series of novels that vaguely prefigured the interminable series of today, except for one thing: they ended. Apparently this writer, a widely knowledgeable man who was highly accomplished in his chosen field, was able to create the conditions for an extremely long and complex plot, and foresee how it must be resolved six or seven novels down the road. Anyway, that’s what he did in his two best known series, to which many thousands of young readers thrilled in his heyday.

     I’m not going to name that writer. I don’t want to besmirch his reputation any more than necessary to make my point. But it’s possible, if you’re near to my age and have been reading SF for a comparable length of time, that you have his name in mind already. That writer deserves credit for his strengths. He was very imaginative, and took risks in scientific and technological speculation that other SF writers of his day elected to avoid. He also dared a political speculation the possibility of which few today would be willing to entertain even for the sake of an entertainment. In short, he was no lightweight or pansy.

     However, if you were to put his writing alongside recent, widely approved examples of the genre, you would be hard pressed to rule it competent, at least by contemporary standards. By those standards he committed a number of mortal sins:

• Uncontrolled narrative viewpoint;
• Frequent narrative intrusions not bound to a character’s viewpoint;
• Dialogue exchanges poorly suited to the context;
• Quite a lot of unbelievable dialogue, as in “people don’t talk that way and never have;”
• Wildly excessive, cloyingly florid descriptive passages;
• Habitual use of far too many adjectives and adverbs, especially in their superlative forms;
• Exclamation points a outrance.

     He never, ever relented from those practices. They can be found throughout his major series. And in reading his books with fresh eyes, I find myself embarrassed as much for his sake as for my younger self.

     We might think of him as science fiction’s own John Galsworthy, an early Twentieth Century English writer of great renown. Galsworthy’s best known novels are soap operas about the Forsyte clan and its offshoots. They were amazingly popular; indeed, they made him one of the most popular writers in the world. He got the Nobel Prize in Literature for them. But they’re not well written, at least by the standards of our time.

     Such is the natural condition of an infant genre.

---

     As a genre matures, so do the skills of its practitioners. No one could get away today with writing like that of the SF writer I left unnamed above. Even the allegiants of the “Pulp Revolution” and “Pulp Revival,” movements which are demonstrating considerable vitality, don’t allow themselves such liberties and extravagances. They hew to contemporary standards and contemporary tastes.

     This is all to the good. While it’s commendable to mine past treasures for their virtues, it’s equally important to recognize their flaws and to move beyond them. SF, fantasy, and horror writers are more proficient today, in part because their readerships are more demanding. It could not have been otherwise. Our fictional forebears wrote for smaller and younger audiences that had self-selected according to their preferences for imaginative speculation. Indeed, it’s possible that many of those younger readers were thrilled by extravagance, floridity, and narrative intrusions that embellished earlier extravagances.

     But we grew up. We heeded God’s commend to “be fruitful and multiply.” In the process we bequeathed portions of our reading tastes to our children. But as the audience for speculative fiction grew, and the writer’s prospects for becoming established in one of those genres expanded, it became more demanding. After all, there were other things an adult could read...in some cases, that he had to read. His tastes became more discriminating. In the everlasting nature of things it was inevitable that he would discriminate.

     And the writers of old who had delighted us with their less disciplined but highly imaginative works were slowly but inexorably left behind.

---

     We hope to get better as we age. We hope general conditions will get better as time passes. In a free society, this is usually the case. But as with all other things, there is a price.

     The price is the recognition that one’s childhood loves weren’t up to the standards of today. When one elects to revisit those loves, the reverie will be mixed with considerable embarrassment: “How could I ever have thought this was great storytelling?”

     Well, perhaps that’s a bit unfair. It certainly pleased our younger selves. That’s what it was intended to do; therefore, it was a success. And perhaps the right perspective on those early genre delights, for those of us acquainted with more disciplined and refined writing, is simply to say, “That’s the way it was.” (Alternately, “Ah! Those halcyon days of yore!” If you want to confuse those who have no idea what you’re talking about, anyway.)

     (Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)

Solving The Tough Problems

     Well, ho-ho-ho and I hope you’ve all had the merriest of Christmases! As a lot of my Web colleagues have apparently decided to take the Christmas season off from their various publications, and as I haven’t penned an original piece these past few days and have begun to feel a bit “backed up” because of that, I figured I might as well throw a few hundred words at this dive. You know, to see if any of them will stick. But — you knew that was coming, didn’t you? – in keeping with the spirit of the season and my generally good mood, I’ll avoid the subjects of politics and public policy. The rest of the year is sufficient for that sort of bilious crap, isn’t it?

     So let’s see: what shall I address? The weather? No, no....My health? Good God, no! Unusual egg nog recipes? I think we’ve had enough of those for a bit.

     Nope. Got to be fiction.

---

     If there’s a most plaintive question I get from aspiring writers, it would be this one:

“How do I get started?”

     (I’ll allow that there are a lot of possible replies to that one, some more sarcastic than others, e.g.: “You want to be a writer but you have no idea what to write? Hmmm...” However, as I’m a famously sympathetic soul with a heart of purest gold who absolutely lives for the chance to help others with their deepest and least tractable problems, I try to respond constructively. Believe me, a lot of thought goes into it.)

     Most of us who are entranced by fiction and the power it has to shape men’s thinking have some central passion we can call on to direct our efforts. In the usual case, such passions become our themes: the ideas that envelop, power, and shape the stories we write. Mine are Christianity and freedom. A writer who lacks such a passion has a harder time getting started.

     Nevertheless, there are substitutes. If you can become fascinated by any kind of human problem, you can find within yourself the fuel and the material with which to write. Caveat: It must be a tough problem. No one will take much interest in a story about how hard it was for you to decide which shirt to wear to work this morning.

     But stories are not about “problems,” per se; they’re about what people do about problems. More specifically, they’re about how addressing a problem changes the people confronted by it.

     The great problems fall into a total of categories:

• The quest for love and acceptance;
• Threats to one’s well-being, or the well-being of one’s loves;
• The discovery of one’s own convictions, priorities, capacities, and limitations.

     That’s right, Gentle Reader: only three. A problem worth a reader’s time will always come from one of the above categories. As they’re very broad categories, that’s not a problem for most of us.

     The process by which a chosen problem becomes a viable story involves matching that problem to a character or characters:

1. What sort of protagonist would find the problem both important and difficult?
2. Does the problem require an antagonist?
3. Does the problem require other characters with whom to interact?

     The first two questions define the Marquee Characters. The third one defines the Supporting Cast.

---

     The above concisely outlines my personal approach to beginning a new story, whether it be a short-short or a multi-volume saga. In the usual case, an appealing protagonist has been in the back of my head for some time, waiting for a problem worthy of him. Presently a problem occurs to me that works well against his definition. I choose from among the settings I prefer, combine the three, dress with subsidiary characters and a bit of sass, toss lightly, and serve.

     Innocents, my most recent novel, conforms to this pattern in all particulars. Larry Sokoloff had been “sitting on the shelf” since mid-2011, when I released Shadow of a Sword. The poor guy simply screamed for a story properly mated to his character as I’d envisioned it. It took some time for me to come up with a problem he could get his teeth into.

     As I wrote the above, an important codicil to my procedure became clear in my head: The problem must be one the protagonist must change and / or grow to solve. The solution can’t be obvious and immediately applicable, nor can it be in the protagonist’s “wheelhouse.” There are some interesting implications to that codicil.

     The first implication is that the protagonist will likely be frustrated at first. Change and growth are hard. They require both acceptance of one’s “incompleteness” and the willingness to put forth effort to extend oneself. Most persons who confront such a challenge do a lot of hairsplitting, rationalizing, and general farting around to avoid facing the problem directly.

     The second implication follows from the first one: The protagonist will expend a fair amount of his time and effort dealing with matters other than the central problem. In part that will be because those matters are more easily solved by a man with his abilities, but in equal or greater measure it will be to avoid confronting the core of the problem. That provides opportunities for interaction with Supporting Cast members, and time in which he can experience the sharpening tensions and conflicts the problem presents.

     The third implication is my favorite of the bunch: A problem the protagonist cannot solve easily with his defined abilities and resources makes room for reader misdirection. It allows the writer scope for mystery, and for the development and emergence of an “unsuspected hero:” the seemingly secondary character who contributes the real solution, whether or not he’s the one to implement it.

     Quite a lot of fiction conforms to this pattern. That the pattern is so common doesn’t render it banal. It’s common because of our common human nature. That’s just the way we are. It’s also common because reality is a real bitch...just in case you haven’t noticed.

---

     I wrote some time ago:

     The distribution of writers attempting the e-publication channel goes something like this:

• 90% or more: Persons who cannot write and should not try.
• ~7%: Persons with a fair command of English, but who have no stories to tell that anyone else would want to read.
• ~2%: Persons with a fair command of English who have stories to tell, but whose styles and preconceptions are unsuited to telling them in a winning fashion.
• ~1%: Capable storytellers, including a significant number who could crack the “traditional” publishing channels (or who already have).

     If I may go by my experiences in reading other indie writers’ stuff, that distribution remains accurate. But that doesn’t mean that you, Gentle Reader, should consider yourself pre-assigned to one of those bins and therefore predestined either to fail laughably or to experience roaring success. If you have a story bouncing around in your head, a little time to give it, and a taste for adventure, you have little to lose by trying to write it. The opportunities to garner a readership have never been better.

     So if you’ve been tempted to try fiction but have been wondering “Where do I start?” consider the above piece my Christmas present to you. No, no, don’t thank me; just buy, read, and review one of my books. I’ll take that quite happily.

     (Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)

“Why Did You Write This?”

     The news remains drearily predictable, and I have no high philosophical insights about politics or public policy to regale you with this morning (“Does he ever?” rises the mumbling from the peanut gallery), so I thought I might entertain you with some thoughts about why writers of fiction do what we do. It’s freshly on my mind anyway, as another writer who’d just finished Innocents asked me the title question about that novel.

     Fiction writers are as varied as any other walk of life. Our reasons for doing what we do range all over the motivational map. Many would take the title question as an affront, raise one eyebrow in a silent expression of haughty disdain, and stride purposefully away – and not because the answer is “obvious,” for whatever value of “obvious” you might care to apply. That having been said, the answers tend to cluster into categories:

• Money: Robert A. Heinlein maintained to the end of his life that he wrote “to buy groceries.” I never believed it, but it was his consistent answer to the question, and no doubt it would apply to many other writers.
• Entertainment: Many a writer simply likes to entertain, and likes being known as a capable entertainer. It’s the same motive that causes some partygoers to tell endless jokes and vignettes, thus becoming known as “the life of the party:” “You can’t throw a decent party without him.”
• Message: For all the scorn that’s been poured on “message fiction,” there are many writers who write to promote a particular view of Man and reality. Military SF writer Tom Kratman put it thus: “I write to illuminate eternal verities.”

     Those categories probably envelop the great majority of writers’ reasons for writing fiction. But there are some that don’t fit in any of them. My reason for writing Innocents was one of them: curiosity.

     I chose the critical plot element of the book before I wrote it, of course: the emergence of a biotechnologically enabled subculture of perversion and enslavement focused on futanari. But I didn’t want to make the story a simple crusade against this new evil. Instead, I decided to impose one of the “products” of that evil industry on a good man as his personal problem: “What do I do with this girl?” It was only then that I set my fingers to the keys and began to write.

     But even then, I had no clear idea of where the story would go. I had to write it to find out.

     I had a gaggle of useful characters already “in stock” from previous stories: Larry Sokoloff and Father Raymond Altomare, from Shadow of a Sword; and Dean Amanda Hallstrom and her students at Athene Academy, from “A Place of Our Own” and “One Small Detail.” I’d explored their motivations and reactions in those earlier tales, and I was curious how they would cope with the two new Marquee Characters: Fountain, the story’s “problem,” and Trish McAvoy, Larry’s seemingly “difficult” colleague.

     There you have it: I didn’t know how the characters I’d loaded into Innocents would proceed with this new problem. I wrote the novel to find out. To do so, of course, I had to get even more deeply into the mindsets, assumptions, preferences, and convictions of those characters than I’d gone before. I got to know them to a new and startling depth.

     Georges Simenon, who wrote nearly two hundred novels, had the same underlying motivation. He once spoke of his indispensable conditions for producing one: he had to be completely alone and undisturbed for a couple of weeks – often he took up residence in a hotel – and he had to have a problem whose solution he could not foresee: “Otherwise, it would not be interesting to me.” It spurred him to a degree of productivity few other writers have attained.

     While I don’t aspire to Simenon’s level of output, I can testify to the power of curiosity as a motivating force for a fiction writer. I’m unsure about recommending it widely – writers are as individual as snowflakes, and what works for one could prove poisonous to another – but it’s my necessary fuel, as critical as a good supply of coffee and Oreos.^® And for those of you contemplating giving “National Novel Writing Month” a spin, it might be worth exploration. I mean, if you know how the story ends, why bother to begin it, much less finish it?

Text Versus Subtext

     When you’re bogged down in writing the conclusion of a novel that’s taken far too long to complete, you tend to look for inspiration (and explanations) in a myriad places. Inevitably, many of those places will have absolutely no relation to what you’re attempting (and precious little of anything else to offer you). But you’ll keep looking...if only to take your mind briefly off the fictional corner you’ve painted yourself into.

     Yes, I’m venting about my own agonizingly protracted labors. All the same, now and then the quest for insight yields something worthy of commentary...a good thing, as I’m having an increasingly hard time writing about politics, public policy, and the cavalcade of idiots, swindlers, and miscellaneous con men that we call the government in these United States.

     As it happens, fledgling writers come to me, a veteran of the indie fiction movement, every so often for advice on this or that. Some of their questions are more easily answered than others. In a great many cases, the answer is itself a question:

“Why are you writing this?”

     As it happens, it’s a question that has only one right answer – a curious thing when there are so many to which millions of answers are both acceptable and potentially constructive:

“I’m trying to illustrate X.”

     ...where X is some aspect of the eternal laws of human nature. This is the fourth, and in my opinion the most important, of the components of a worthwhile work of fiction: theme.

     Mind you, themeless works of fiction abound. Some of them make quite a lot of money. Others are what an acquaintance of long ago called “poolsiders:” something to read merely for the sake of filling otherwise idle time. But works that people will remember for a long time after having read them will have a point to make– a theme – and will succeed in dramatizing that theme through the decisions and actions of their characters.

     However, a book that hammers the reader over the head with its theme is inherently a failure. That’s the biggest demerit against Ayn Rand’s novels: never for a moment are you permitted to be anything but fully conscious of the point she’s screaming at you. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are remarkable achievements, to be sure, but they’d have been better if she hadn’t been quite so relentless about her theme.

     So the writer must tread a middle ground: his theme must be present, and must actuate the most important decisions and actions of his Marquee characters, but the story must not be reduced to a Jeremiad that demands the reader’s explicit attention to its theme at all times. This is where the items in the title of this essay, and the effective use of the tension between them, become relevant.

---

     When I speak of the story’s text, I have in mind the key elements of the plot and how they bear upon the writer’s intended theme. In John Brunner’s analysis of plots and their expressions, he distinguishes among three plot families:

1. Change that occurs because of the Marquee characters’ interactions with others;
2. Change that occurs because of the Marquee characters’ introspection (i.e., self-examination).
3. Change that arises when the Marquee characters confront a challenge from the world around them.

     Since a story must speak of change within and among its characters, it is quite probable that the above three plot families comprise all possible (worthwhile) plots. However, a really involving story will usually have one or more subplots: “action within the action” used for characterization and the insertion of important contextual matters.

     Subplots are an important vehicle for conveying subtext: secondary motivations and emotional currents that make the Marquee characters more real to the reader. Very few of us have a single, all-consuming motivation. Anyway, smart people avoid monomaniacs: they usually have a fistful of petitions they want you to sign, and we’re all way too busy, to say nothing of the dangers attendant upon signing anything these days. The sort of character the reader will enjoy reading about will have several motivations of importance, and some tensions among them that complicate his life.

     Consider in this connection a fairly common protagonist character: the lone-wolf hero, who habitually eschews emotional involvements. Such a hero might have any of a number of reasons for his emotional isolation. However, love and acceptance are primary drives; no one can suppress them completely and permanently. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, perhaps today’s premier lone-wolf hero, repeatedly has fleeting love affairs with extremely impressive women, only to pick up his nonexistent luggage and move on alone at the end of his main adventure. Child uses this motif in just about every Reacher novel, in part to leaven the action, but also because it’s vital to soften the character that much if he’s to be accessible to the reader.

     While this is an important tool in Lee Child’s fictional toolbox, he’s careful not to let it overwhelm him or his protagonist. Imagine the violence it would do to the reader’s expectations were Reacher to fall completely and inescapably in love, renounce his nomadic existence, flip the bird to the conflict that the reader was led to believe is the core of the plot, and settle down to a tranquil life in the suburbs. There are limits!

---

     I’ve just started reading a novel from a writer of “fantastical, futuristic, down-home salacious kissery.” All by themselves, those words intrigued me. I enjoy a couple of writers of science-fiction romance, and I was impressed by the author’s playful extravagance in the quoted phrase, so I bought her book. But from the very first pages of the novel, she appears to be unwilling to decide which plot thread is the text and which is the subtext. To be more specific, the romantic tensions between the protagonists, a pair of mercenary assassins who’ve contracted to capture or destroy a rare android, are given equal time to the external conflict in which they’ve embroiled themselves.

     Beware, indie writers: here there be tygers.

     A good story must have a main thread of plot development and causation: the text. Whatever subtexts the writer decides to add must be subordinated to the text. If the reader can’t decide which is which, he’ll be unable to discern “why you’re writing this.” In this trap lie the corpses of a number of SF romances.

     Indeed, much of the criticism that’s heaped upon crossbred stories – specifically, stories in the speculative genres that also embed a strong romantic current – arises from the writer’s inability or unwillingness to declare his text unambiguously. That is: “Are you writing a romance with some science fiction / fantasy / horror elements for a backdrop, or a science fiction / fantasy / horror story that includes a romantic motif?” This decision must precede setting one’s fingers to the keys.

     In our time, when brick-and-mortar bookstores have paled in importance because of Amazon and other online retailers, that decision might be a hair less important than it once was, as online retailers don’t need to “put your book on the proper shelf.” But it’s still important to reader satisfaction, and therefore to reader word-of-mouth...and therefore to how well your novel will sell.

     Need I say more?

Vocabulary: A Writer’s Plaint

     The patrons of Liberty’s Torch have seldom said anything negative about the vocabulary I wield. They probably figure it’s their job to look up any terms I might use that aren’t familiar to them – and they’re right; that is their job. Moreover, most online op-ed writers share that attitude; they select the words and phrases they’ll use for their utility and their impact; anyone with an Internet connection is expected to be able to find an online dictionary, should he decide that he needs one.

     Fiction readers tend to hold the opposite opinion. At least, I’ve been gigged more often for “obscure words” than for any of the other supposed fictional sins. The premise seems to be that a story “should” be comprehensible to anyone who was passed out of eighth grade, without any need for him to expand the size of his lexicon.

     Until fairly recently, I allowed such comments to trouble me. Then I had a flash of insight:

You cannot buy an eBook without an Internet connection.
Therefore, fiction readers also have access to online dictionaries!

     Whereupon I decided that being deemed the William F. Buckley of 21st Century fiction isn’t all that bad a fate.

---

     Other writers, including some of considerable fame, have allowed themselves to use words that were probably known to very few beyond themselves. Only in the postwar period has anyone dared to demand that readers’ ignorance be considered privileged. It might have something to do with the deterioration of American schooling; I, having been very well educated by a gaggle of Dominican nuns who brooked no nonsense and who regarded it as my duty to win all the county spelling bees, cannot say.

     Be that as it may. I write the way I write. I don’t limit myself to the vocabulary of a marginal graduate of eighth grade from an American public school. Readers who enjoy my work are many; readers who don’t...well, I can’t say, as I hear from very few of them.

     So when I find that I’ve written something such as:

     A Dream Of Freedom was a ship that had once been a world.
     It first entered the Solar System in 2117, moving at ninety-three miles per second, at a slight angle to the solar ecliptic. It was a near-perfect sphere with a diameter of twenty-one miles. It had a nickel-iron surface, but showed a considerable luminosity in the gamma-ray portion of the spectrum. Its trajectory would bring it to a perigee of one hundred forty million miles, about two years after its first sighting.
     The International Astrophysical Congress assigned it the identifier X3J11 and immediately dispatched grant petitions to the world's one hundred eighty States. All one hundred eighty petitions were rejected; the war with the Spooner Federation was entering its final phase, and all resources had to be husbanded toward that end.
     The IAC continued to watch the object. As it approached, the great orbiting telescopes gradually made out more details of its composition and structure. Numerous cavity radiators became apparent in the gamma-ray images. Anomalies in its trajectory as it passed the outer gas giants caused the watchers to ponder its density. Shortly before X3J11 passed the orbit of Jupiter, the watchers could tell that the interstellar wanderer was honeycombed.
     The United Nations' combined forces had pushed Spoonerite resistance back to upper Yukon. The Spoonerites dug in for a last stand above the Arctic Circle, and the States massed their forces for the blow that would put an end to Spoonerism on Earth.
     Supreme Commander Ewan MacDonnell planned for a three-pronged strike, two land forces and an enormous amphibious group. There were ample forces available, though the supply lines were a chore to maintain, especially in view of the underenthused participation of the Russians. His staff labored for three months, calculating the affair to a nicety, allowing for an overkill factor of three and permitting no conceivable routes of egress from the killing zone. The two hundred ten thousand Spoonerites in MacDonnell's sights would have nowhere to run.
     The word went out quietly to all commanders, down to the battalion level: Spoonerite surrenders should not be deemed trustworthy. The taking of prisoners was strongly discouraged.      X3J11 approached perigee. The watchers of the IAC were electrified by what they saw. The spectra from the planetoid's cavity radiators indicated an immense core of nuclear fuels. Millions of tons of something dearer than pitchblende or carnotite resided at the center of the worldlet.
     IAC petitioned the States again, and belatedly received their respectful attention. Funds flowed into the watch group. Government representatives and advisors were attached to the effort. Spacecraft that had gone unused for more than a century were pulled out of mothballs, and a frenzied effort to recommission them began.
     MacDonnell's meticulously planned triple assault began exactly on schedule. For a full day's advance, it encountered no resistance at all. For the first few miles, he and his troops assumed that the Spoonerites had run out of fuel, or ammunition, or hope. When the advance guard first came upon abandoned Spoonerite emplacements, well stocked with shot and fuel, they began to wonder.
     The wonder culminated in a pillar of fire seen on United Nations broadcasts by more than three billion people. It was followed by another, and another, and another.
     Maddened beyond all restraint, the UN forces slew and spared not. The inner core of resistance around the Spoonerites' makeshift spaceport was incredibly tough, but before the massed military power of all the States of the world, it had to fall. The victors eventually counted nearly two hundred seven thousand Spoonerite corpses within the Arctic redoubt. The Secretary-General proclaimed the viciously immoral ideology of Spoonerism to have been extinguished for all time.
     Statists say things like that.

     ...I don’t trouble myself over the terms “ecliptic,” “perigee,” “luminosity,” “trajectory,” “cavity radiators,” “pitchblende,” “carnotite,” “egress,” or “redoubt.” Learn enough to read the book and enjoy it is my mantra. Inasmuch as a healthy sample of the book is available before one is required to make a purchase decision, I sleep untroubled by the decision. If it costs me readers, they’re readers who probably wouldn’t have comprehended the rest of the story anyway.

     (I cited that passage because it baffled a writer who’d importuned me for a review of his book: a “science fiction novel” that was a waste of perfectly good pixels. But I digress.)

     But on a lighter note, would you be surprised to hear that someone actually gigged me for the use of the word slew? “What’s that? Something to do with cole slaw?” he wrote.

     Gentle Reader, I kid you not.

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     Some write for “the masses;” others write for those who seek something out of the ordinary. I’m in the latter group. If I were determined to have an audience of millions, I’d write in simpler terms, the sort a bright twelve-year-old would grasp without needing his Webster’s Unabridged near to hand. That’s not my ambition. I seek readers who can grapple with a difficult issue set against a challenging backdrop. Readers who’d as lief immerse themselves in prime-time sitcoms are of no use to me.

     Some writers write entertainment, nothing more. I seek to challenge my readers’ assumptions. If I must challenge their intellects to do so, very well. Matters of vocabulary run a distant third.

     So to anyone out there who might be thinking of purchasing one or more of my novels: Of course I’m flattered by your interest, and of course I hope you’ll enjoy what you’re about to read, but please, please don’t assume that the journey will ask nothing of you.

     If you find that my fiction writer’s diction goes a bit “over your head,” before you toss my book aside – or as you do so; I’m no dictator – perhaps you might ask yourself, “Where ought my head to be?”

     Just a quick tirade, Gentle Reader. Ignore it if you prefer. We now return you to your regular Friday evening debauchery.

     (Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)

Cancerous Lumps Continued: The Dreaded Prologue

     As yesterday’s piece on this subject has proved surprisingly popular, it’s impelled me to think further about the subject, particularly as it connects to the all-important realm of backstory.

     Every writer struggles with backstory. It’s a particular challenge for those of us who work in a speculative genre: science fiction, fantasy, or horror. SF writers, in particular, are under immense pressure to explain things: the sociopolitical nature of their fictional world; the scientific discoveries and technological developments that have occurred in it; the social, economic, and political positions of its most important figures. There’s this sense that the reader needs the information to grasp what will follow: what brought about the story’s initial conditions and why the actions of the characters are rational (if they are). That sense is not always incorrect. (NB: The periphrasis in the concluding sentence of the paragraph immediately above should imply something. That’s the only hint I’ll give you. And now, back to our Swedish movie.)

     To serve that sense of a need, the writer will often resort to a prologue.

     The purpose of a prologue is to convey backstory information to the reader. It can be as narratively clever as any segment clipped from the story-time present, but it is not part of the story; it is prior to the story, often separated from story-present by a large number of years. In most cases, no one involved in the prologue participates in the story’s present events.

     Just now, Pub World editors deem prologues to be bad things. They have a good case, for a prologue puts the reasons the reader bought the book some distance from the front cover. A long or awkward prologue can cause the reader to toss the book aside. If the writer has done his job really badly, that can happen in the bookstore.

     Yet there are cases in which a prologue is vitally necessary. I’ve written one that I felt the novel couldn’t do without. I might have been wrong, but so far no one who’s gone on to read the whole book has complained about it. Of course, that omits the opinions of those who didn’t read the whole book, which might be the most important ones.

     The need or lack thereof for a prologue will always be a judgment call. No one but the author is qualified to make it. Accordingly, it behooves us to consider the following questions:

• What makes a prologue desirable?
• How can a prologue enhance the story?
• How can a prologue discourage the reader?

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     One of the most important architectural techniques in fiction goes by a Latin name: In media res. In English, that’s “in the middle of the matter.” It denotes the technique of dropping the reader into the middle of the action without any preparation: i.e., without prior acquaintance with the setting, the characters, or the backstory. The reader is immediately confronted with events important to one or more of the Marquee Characters and is compelled to claw for a purchase on them. The opening to On Broken Wings provides a good example:

     At first, there was only darkness, and a dim sense of upward motion, like swimming through dark water. Then there was light, and noise, and incredible pain.
     Christine half-remembered the crash, but had no idea where she was or what was being done to her. The flood of pain from her face blocked her rational powers. The perception of restraint threatened her sanity. A single phrase roared through the torture.
     "She's coming awake!"
     She surged upward against whatever was holding her. Strong hands pressed her back. Something metallic attached to her face, pulling upon it, tore loose and fell off to rest against her ear. Her scream could have shattered stone.
     A needle pierced her arm. Her terror flew beyond any recall. She dropped back into the darkness, certain she would never see light again.

     What’s happening in the above? If you’ve read the whole book, you already know, but did you have a firm idea before you proceeded to the subsequent material? If I managed to pique your interest with the opening, such that you felt a strong desire to discover what was going on, then my employment of in media res architecture was a success. If you frowned, muttered “I don’t have time for this,” and tossed the book aside, then I failed.

     When in media res works, which is often, it obviates the need for a prologue. Indeed, it makes adding a prologue a redundant notion, something that would insult the reader’s intelligence. But it will only work if the subsequent narration introduces the necessary information about what the reader has just read in a smooth and timely fashion: i.e., without creating any significant expository lumps. That, too, is a judgment call...one the author isn’t guaranteed to get right.

     Perhaps the most famous dispute over whether a prologue was necessary concerns J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The first volume thereof, The Fellowship of the Ring, contains a fifteen-page, single spaced prologue packed densely with important information about hobbits, the Shire, and the world of Middle Earth. Quite a number of Tolkien’s critics considered that prologue unnecessary, owing to the existence of The Hobbit, his earlier novel about the adventures of the young Bilbo Baggins. Yet a considerable percentage of those who’ve read The Lord of the Rings did so without having read the earlier novel. Perhaps for them, the prologue was vitally necessary. Needless to say, the matter will never be unanimously agreed.

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     A prologue can enhance the subsequent story when:

• It’s kept brief;
• It doesn’t digress;
• It functions as a story of its own.

     Brevity, of course, is relative. Tolkien’s five thousand word prologue to The Lord of the Rings is followed by a half-million word fantasy adventure. The ratio is appropriate. But were that prologue attached to a shorter novel, it would look grotesquely disproportionate.

     The prologue to Which Art In Hope is just under 1800 words long. I fretted over it, fearing that so much precursory narrative might detract from what follows. Nevertheless, I found that I couldn’t reduce it in length without omitting details I felt the reader had to have before I dragged him into the story proper. In any event, “what follows” proved to be longer and wider in scope than I’d anticipated, which eventually allowed me to relax about the length of the prologue.

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     A prologue can discourage the reader in several ways:

• By being overly long or discursive;
• By drowning the reader in too much detail;
• By being unappealing as a separate narrative.

     I trust the first of those conditions is self-explanatory. No one picks up a 50,000 word novel – approximately 200 mass-market paperback pages – expecting to slog through a 50 page prologue. Proportion is essential. So also is a sense for the proper degree of detail. It’s vital to remain rigidly within Chekhov’s Law:

     “Everything not essential to the story must be ruthlessly cut away. If in Act One you say that a gun hung on the wall, then by Act Two or Act Three at the latest, it must be discharged.” – Anton Chekhov

     If you violate that precept in your prologue, you risk the very worst sort of “loose end:” the sort that has the reader wondering “why did he tell me that?” throughout the rest of the novel. So don’t!

     The third condition discriminates between narrative prologues, which tell a brief, dramatic story of their own, and “encyclopedia” prologues, which do nothing but convey information. The latter are inherently dry, anti-fictional. They’re very hard to get away with. It’s been done – see the earlier material about The Lord of the Rings -- but successes of the “encyclopedia” sort are rare.

     If you decide upon a prologue for your novel, try to structure it as a narrative of its own. Imagine a Marquee character or two within it, even if none will actually appear, and write it from their perspective. One constructive approach is “a story told around the campfire.” I heartily recommend it.

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     So much for prologues. If you intend to pursue “conventional” publication, remember that the majority of editors frown upon them. If you decide to “go indie,” there’s still reason for caution. You want readers; more, you want those readers to finish the book. If they don’t, how likely are they to purchase your next book – or, God help us all, this one’s sequel?

     Best of luck.

Beware: Cancerous Lump!

     In your fiction reading, have you ever run into a passage that reads like a segment cut and pasted out of an encyclopedia, or perhaps a geography text? Perhaps something like the following:

     At last, after eleven years of traveling at trans-light seven, the Earth colonists had arrived at the planet his grandfather, Emilio Nandez, had discovered almost a century ago. Suspecting conditions on the planet were favorable for life, Emilio had convinced the Colonization Alliance of Independent Nations to send an auto-ship on a scouting mission. What the ship found exceeded even Emilio’s wildest dreams.
     Even though the planet had one small continent above sea level, it offered an interesting geological formation: a huge fissure that split the continent in half. Millions of years ago, the planet’s tectonic plates had formed a mountain range, leaving two valleys on either side. Dark green moss covered the thousands of canyons of the planet’s large valley, which was thousands of kilometers in length and stretched for hundreds of kilometers in width.
     Rivers, some a kilometer or more wide, and others narrow enough for a man to jump across, ran through the canyons, which split off from the large valley like branches on a tree. Spectacular waterfalls fell thousands of feet to the valley below.

     Behold, in all its dread beauty, the expository lump.

     What’s above is only half of the lump. It goes on for two more long paragraphs: approximately 400 words in toto. I simply haven’t the patience to type out the rest. It’s one of the most egregious cases I’ve seen lately...and it’s from a writer who prides himself on his writing and will tell you so.

     Anyone can fall into this trap. I certainly have. It had to be pointed out to me by a crack editor. It was a harsh but quite necessary lesson of a fundamental sort:

The reader is there for an emotional journey.

     The writer’s fascination with his imaginings (or his skill with words) is of no importance to the reader. The reader is there to experience events and changes in the lives of your characters, especially your protagonists. This flows from the never-too-often repeated Two Great Commandments of Fiction:

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

     A landscape can be attractive, but what’s more important to the fiction reader is how the viewpoint character reacts emotionally (if he does) to the landscape. The backstory events of a novel can be critically important, but again, what really matters is how they influence the viewpoint character as he remembers them in the context of some significant story-time event.

     When a writer departs from the lives of his characters for a sizable expository lump, he risks causing the reader to disaffiliate himself from the characters – in other words, to lose his reason for reading the story. No matter how important the facts being conveyed in the lump, it’s a bad bargain. It risks a reader reaction so deadly that it’s usually referred to by its acronym: MEGO, or “Mine eyes glazeth over.”

     As if more were necessary, the innate dynamic of the expository lump, like all cancers, is to expand. The lump swells; the reader’s distance from the characters’ story-time lives and events tends to grow. The narrative loses focus from being drowned in exposition.

     The lethal power of the expository lump is one of the reasons for Elmore Leonard’s famous advice about descriptive passages:

Avoid writing passages the reader will be tempted to skip.

     Long descriptions of physical settings are the most obvious kind. Backstory exposition is just as poisonous to reader involvement, though often less obvious. There are other temptations toward the creation of an expository lump, but these are the most important ones.

     If you’ve ever encountered the fiction writer’s maxim “Show, don’t tell,” it’s advice that should immediately warn a storyteller away from such lumps. At the very least, he should be ready to recognize them when he rereads his own work. A number of indie writers I’ve encountered recently seem never to have heard that maxim. A pity.

     As a writer of fiction, your principal task is to engage the reader’s emotions and take him for a dramatic ride. No matter how charmed you might be by the factual details of the setting you’ve imagined, your reader will stay with you – if he does – because of the drama you depict. Drama is about emotion, and emotion stems from the changes in your characters’ lives. It can be found nowhere else.

Frame Stories And Interlocutory Narration

     Many a storytelling technique has gone by the boards these past few decades. Though novelist and critic David Lodge has told us that “everything is in and nothing is out,” nevertheless it’s obvious to anyone who reads widely that certain forms are less frequently found in contemporary fiction than was once the case. Consider, for example, the epistolary novel: a tale told in letters sent by and to the story’s characters. I’ve encountered only one recent example of such: Steven Brust and Emma Bull’s Freedom & Necessity. (Wikipedia, however, lists several other contemporary examples, including Andy Weir’s The Martian.)

     A format such as that is often called a “frame story” or “framing device.” In effect, the writer tells two stories, one enclosed by the other, in a single volume. The “outer” story might be separated in time from the events of the “inner” one; indeed, this is usually the case. However, the two stories are linked in an unambiguous fashion: by protagonist and subject matter.

     “Frame stories” can achieve an end that was once pursued in a different fashion, via another technique deprecated today: the omniscient narrator, not bound to any character’s viewpoint. The writer can use the frame to introduce a narrator other than himself. He then permits that narrator some of the liberties that were once marks of the omniscient-narrator style.

     Among the requirements of the “frame story” technique is that the writer must have “two stories to tell.” They needn’t be wholly separate. In fact, they shouldn’t be, for the “outer” story exists to narrate the “inner” one. Therefore, they must be firmly linked, whether through their characters or their focus.

     Focus is always important. The “outer” story, however important to the characters in it, dictates the focus of the “inner” one by the selection of scenes and events described. Whatever the circumstances of the “outer” narrator, he must be principally concerned with the “inner” narration. The Kevin Spacey / Kate Winslet / Laura Linney movie The Life Of David Gale is a highly dramatic example of this requirement: the “outer” narrator, David Gale (played by Spacey), is facing execution in a few days’ time...but his focus is on the key events of his life other than the one that brought him to that condition, rather than on his “outer”-time jeopardy.

     I’m fond of this technique, as anyone who’s read Chosen One, Polymath, Priestesses, or Love In The Time Of Cinema might imagine. One of my two novels-in-progress uses it as well. A few readers have bridled at it – I can’t imagine why – while others have noted it with surprise and pleasure. I find that it often goes well with my subject matter, which is episodic though focused on the life and times of a single Marquee character.

     One of the criticisms that’s been leveled at my stuff is its patina of archaism: the resemblance between my style and that of writers of bygone days. The frame-story approach and the interlocutory narration it supports, approaches no longer favored by contemporary writers, are part of that. But when your core story is episodic in nature, being spread over a long time interval and omitting the greater part of the events thereof, framing is exceedingly useful for emphasizing what really matters. Much of the history of even the most significant, most active, and most compelling character is “just day-to-day life.” It would be boring to the reader to need to sift through it all, to say nothing of the burden it would impose on the writer.

     Episodic novels are also disfavored today. There’s a notion going about that dramatic unity is impossible when the events of the novel are widely separated in time. Needless to say, I disagree. Dramatic unity isn’t just an artifact of causally linked events closely spaced in time, but by the evolution of the Marquee characters’ natures and significance: more specifically, the reasons they do what they do, and the effects they have on those around them.

     The speculative genres – science fiction, fantasy, and horror – feature few examples of the episodic novel, and therefore few examples of the frame story. In part, this is because the technique is unsuited to the sort of adventure tale most frequently told in those genres. But in equal or greater measure, it’s because the events in speculative novels tend to occur over short time spans. Nevertheless, some examples exist; the ones that leap to mind at once are Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, in which the “narrator” of the frame is the Encyclopedia Galactica, and Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, in which Heinlein’s perennial rogue-hero Lazarus Long tells of the high water mark events of his two thousand year life.

     What examples of frame-story narration have you encountered in your reading? When has it struck you as suitable and well exploited, and when has it seems an unnecessary intrusion upon the “real story” you were being told by the interlocutor character or device?

     (Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)