Whose Story, Yours Or Your Editor’s?

     I’ve been making the acquaintance of an increasing number of other indie writers lately, in consequence of having joined Gab.ai. Quite a few of them have expressed frustration at their difficulties in completing a project. Many of the complaints come from writers who have quite as much to say about their frustration with their editors.

     At least one category of the complaints involves the editor acting as if he were the creative force, and arrogating to himself the privileges thereof.

     To make that plainer and more sharply pointed, such an editor criticizes not the grammar, spelling, punctuation, timing, scene-setting, characterization, plausibility of sequence, naturalness of dialogue, or other technical or quasi-technical matters but the causal underpinnings of the story: in other words, the author’s theme. The editor then tries to steer it in a different – sometimes wholly contradictory – direction. And many a writer, insufficiently sure of himself and his aims, allows such an editor a wholly inappropriate degree of influence.

     An editor who does such things doesn’t deserve to be heeded; he deserves to be fired. But that, too, is often beyond the confidence of a relatively new writer.

     Maxwell Perkins, one of the most brilliant and effective editors of all time, was scathing about such editorial assertions of a co-creative role:

     “The first thing you must remember: an editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to its author. Don’t ever get feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing....If you have a Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare, or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain. Because in the end, an editor can get only as much out of an author as the author has in him.”

     Perkins edited F. Scott Fitzgerald, Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway, among other literary giants. No doubt the great gifts of those writers helped Perkins to remember his famous credo – “The book belongs to the author” – but he worked in the same, self-effacing fashion with other, less well known writers.

     Contemporary editors, both of Pub World and free-lance, have largely failed to grasp Perkins’s lesson.

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     I’ve worked with a couple of gifted editors who did understand the Perkins maxim. One of them, Rafe Brox, was responsible for cleaning up On Broken Wings. The other, Kelly Tomkies, was instrumental in grinding the burrs off Shadow Of A Sword. I won’t go so far as to say their efforts were what made those books readable, but it wouldn’t be too far from the truth.

     By contrast, I’ve also worked with an editor, who shall go unnamed just in case he’s repented of his sins, who wanted to recast my story in a wholly different direction. Ultimately, I ignored his “suggestions.” (It was made easier by his predilection for exclamation points and writing in ALL-CAPS.) Though it took a while – I was a newly fledged novelist and still tended to pay excessive attention to an editor – I sensed, that what he and I both wanted to do was to write the book. I decided that he could jolly well hare off and write his own novel, without my financial contributions.

     Now, there’s a moral in this. Many an editor is himself an aspiring writer. Why he hasn’t struck out on his own might be a mystery, but that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the author’s authority and the editor’s proper place in the scheme of things. Maxwell Perkins got it right. You, the author, should enforce Perkins’s dicta on any editor you entertain the notion of hiring.

     That can be a difficult undertaking, especially as many a free-lance editor requires payment before undertaking the job in prospect.

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     The great irony of the overly intrusive editor lies in this: the most effective editor for your book will be someone who genuinely enjoys the kind of story you have to tell. Thus, he’s highly likely to be a writer himself, and one who writes in your chosen genres, at that...and that will predispose him to the very over-intrusiveness of which I speak here.

     It doesn’t matter. You must be firm. If you’re not, he’ll succeed in twisting your tale to point in a direction alien to your wishes. The final product might well contradict the premises with which you started your project. Indeed, it might express a theme you believe to be wholly incorrect, perhaps even evil.

     That makes membership in a critique group of like-minded writers one of the most valuable alliances a writer can form. Writers who hold to common moral and ethical values can serve one another as editors, often to far better effect than many a “professional.” Of course that, too, has its costs. The largest of them is obligatory reciprocity: if he agrees to critique your manuscript, you are morally obliged to do the same for him.

     I needn’t go on about this at great length. Remember, “The book belongs to the author.” Don’t allow an editor to snatch it out of your hands and transform it into something you never intended. Imagine the shade of Maxwell Perkins looking down on you from heaven and clucking – not at him for his unholy cheek, which is all too common these days, but at you for your boiled-vermicelli spine.

     [Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.]

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.)

Finishing Things

     Readers of my fiction have asked me on several occasions why there are significant gaps between my issuances of new books. I received another such query just yesterday. It’s an uncomfortable question to face, not because I don’t know the answer, but because I do.

     Many writers enjoy the process of composition: the actual writing, as opposed to the conceptualization that precedes it. I’m fairly sure that some of those writers “make it up as they go:” they start with a couple of Marquee characters and a plot embryo, and let the characters tell the story to them. I know from experience that it’s an entirely valid approach that offers considerable positive feedback while the process runs. The late Georges Simenon made it his method in composing his Inspector Maigret novels; he actually told an interviewer that it was what made his stories interesting to him.

     However, in these latter years I find that I need a much fuller concept of the plot and cast of characters before I can even begin a new novel. The embryonic plot that matured into On Broken Wings would not suffice to get me into motion today. The reason is that I’ve become afraid that I won’t finish what I start.

     Yes, Gentle Reader: writers have their own special fears. This is mine.

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     With one exception, each of my novels is prefixed with a dedication that includes:

And to the greater glory of God.

     Of course, I’m a believer: a Catholic Christian. If I were a nonbeliever, I would hardly include that phrase. More to the point, my faith is an important element in my fictional undertakings: not because I intend them as polemics for Christianity, but because the act of artistic creation – in my opinion, the only human act that can justify being called “creation” – is itself an act of worship. You might even call it a form of prayer. I dislike having a prayer interrupted; there’s no guarantee that I’ll pick it back up where I left off.

     I write fiction for several reasons, but that one, if memory serves, is one I haven’t previously disclosed. Well, now you know.

     It’s all of a piece, really. I write:

• To depict genuine heroism;
• To explore difficult moral and ethical conundra;
• To extend the range of thought about important “secular” subjects;
• To show readers Christians and our clerics doing what we should be doing;
• And as a prayer of thankfulness to Him who equipped me to tell stories of that kind.

     One of the saddening things about our milieu is how dismissively most good storytellers treat religion. The typical well-received novel makes no room for faith whatsoever, even though here in the U.S., complete nonbelief – atheism – is a view held by a small minority. The most recent Gallup poll (December 2015) reported that 75% of Americans self-identify as Christians of one or another denomination. Another 15% are distributed among other religions. Only about 10% profess complete nonbelief. So why does contemporary fiction fail to depict churchgoing, behavior animated by sincere religious conviction, or the typical religious practices of an American believer?

     Actually, it’s even worse than that: when religious belief plays a part in a plot, it’s almost always in a negative way: e.g., clerics who practice pedophilia or the antics of highly intolerant sects such as the Westboro Baptist congregation.

     To make it worse yet, most writers who allow religious elements into their stories in a positive way surrender to the desire to preach. Unless you’re C. S. Lewis, you should leave preaching to the preachers. Readers of fiction want to be entertained, and perhaps to learn a little something along the way. They don’t want to be hammered with religious doctrine.

     So I take a special interest in allowing the majority of my protagonists to be religious and to do good things out of religious conviction and / or affiliation. I see it around me often enough that I know it to be the way ordinary people really behave. However, that approach also charges me with a special responsibility: to finish what I start.

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     There are a few fiction writers today who treat religion as an important positive component of their stories. Theodore “Vox Day” Beale is one. John Conroe is another. Declan Finn is a third. Tom Kratman is a fourth. But the tendency among the great majority of writers is to exclude it. It’s possible that that’s not a conscious decision. It’s also possible that it’s motivated by that greatest bugaboo of our time, the fear of offending someone.

     (Funny that the writers who reflexively treat religion as evil and destructive don’t share that fear, isn’t it?)

     Anything one writes is guaranteed to offend someone. There are seven billion people alive today. Every last one of them finds some range of things offensive. A significant fraction of them seem to go out of their way looking for reasons to be offended. The probability is damned near 100% that one of those, at least, would be offended by any arbitrarily chosen novel. So I don’t let it bother me.

     However, I do concern myself with God’s opinion of my crap. If there’s a Christian element in something I’ve begun, I feel I must finish it or face His disapproval. So In recognition of my failing energies and dwindling years, I don’t begin unless I can clearly see the end...and given he sort of story I tend to write, seeing the end is often very tough.

     Here’s an admission for you. If you’ve read Shadow Of A Sword, which concludes the Realm of Essences trilogy, would you have imagined that until I actually wrote the climactic scene, I had no idea how to end the story? Three quarters of the way through the book, I still didn’t know:

• How to contrive the face-off between Malcolm / Franz and Zlugy / Tiran;
• How to tie off reform developments within the Onteora police;
• What to do with Aaron Randall / Anatoly Rodionov;
• Who the ultimate hero would be.

     There were days I sat down to work on that manuscript almost paralyzed by my fear. I had to finish it. Leaving aside my personal convictions, I’d promised it to a large number of readers – people all over the world who had written me personally to plead for a conclusion to the story arc. But how could I write something without knowing what I would be writing about?

     I got lucky. I was inspired exactly when I needed to be. The inspirations covered all my needs, including the proper treatment of several Supporting Cast characters who really deserved more closure than I’d originally intended for them. But it was a harrowing experience and one I’ve grown reluctant to chance again.

     There’s a possibly apocryphal anecdote about an exchange between Winston Churchill and his air defense commander, shortly before the Battle of Britain during World War II. Churchill asked the commander what his plans were founded on. The commander replied that he was “counting on radar and trusting to God.” At that time radar was a relatively new, barely tested technology. That caused Churchill to reply that “It sounds as if you’re counting on God and trusting to radar.”

     Though I believe that God does give us what we need, I’m reluctant to assume that He’ll tap me on the shoulder with a perfect plot resolution while I’m sitting at the keyboard, staring at a blank screen frozen with terror. It just seems sort of...presumptuous.

     And that, Gentle Reader, is why my novels are taking longer to produce!

Originality: A Writer’s Rant

     I’m a writer. Therefore, I read.

     A bit too much of a jump for you, Gentle Reader? Nevertheless, it is so. A writer must read. Nonfiction writers must read to know what’s going on, and who’s covering it, and to what effect. Fiction writers must read for pretty much the same reasons. The penalty for stinting one’s reading is unoriginality: If you don’t read, you’re practically guaranteed to reproduce the works of others. Something about the “great oceanic racial unconscious,” or some such rot.

     However, the reverse is not true: reading widely and determinedly doesn’t guarantee the originality of one’s own work. As exhibits 1 through 10¹⁰⁰ I offer just about everything that’s been written these past fifty years.

     This is of particular importance in the speculative genres: fantasy, horror, and science fiction. These genres exist solely to provide room in which to explore possibilities that go beyond the realities around us. But one who reads extensively in those genres can’t help but notice that the same motifs and tropes are being used to exhaustion. The sin is not confined to a few hacks; it’s afflicted damned near everyone in the field.

     Fantasy – especially fantasy set in the present day – is particularly badly afflicted by unoriginality. Vampires. Werewolves. Shapeshifters. Zombies. Magic. Every now and then, an angel. Find me a writer of contemporary fantasy who’s completely eschewed those motifs. There aren’t many.

     I know, I know: A lot of writers are afraid to try something new for fear that it won’t find an audience. It’s a legitimate concern, though it was more so before indie publishing exploded. But what does it profit it a man to gain an audience at the price of seeing someone else’s reflection in the mirror?

     Why do something others have done before you – possibly more vividly than you?

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     If you’re a writer, probably the worst advice anyone has ever offered you (or ever will) is about your “voice.” “Find your unique voice.” “Respect your voice.” “Don’t imitate the voices of others.” Bah! For reasons beyond human comprehension, this “voice” crap has almost completely obscured the most important aspects of storytelling:

1. Plot,
2. Characterization,
3. Theme.

     For those who consider those “undefined terms,” I will elaborate:

1. Plot: The events in your story and the causal connections that link them together.
2. Characterization: The values, motivations, and individualities of your Marquee and Supporting Cast characters.
3. Theme: The aspect of human nature you intend to illuminate with your story.

     These are the meat and bones of a good story. And none of them have a single damned thing to do with “voice.”

     What’s that you say? What about your style? Permit me to guffaw. If you’re at all concerned with your “style,” you’re more concerned with self-glorification than with your story.

Tell the BLEEP!ing story!

     Tell it clearly and transparently. Resolve not to become a part of it: i.e., not to inject your desire to be noticed into the text. Be guided by how you would tell it orally, to a friend or acquaintance sitting next to you. What would you want from such an effort?

• His undivided attention from beginning to end;
• His apprehension and appreciation of the reasons your characters did what they did.

     You won’t get either of those things if you permit yourself to become concerned with “style.” Yet “style” has become so important to so many writers that they’ve ceased to care about plot, characterization, and theme.

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     The above segment might appear to be a digression from the opening subject of originality. It is not. It’s a look at what too many writers are focused on at the expense of their stories. Originality lies in the story, not in “voice” or “style.”

     I have a naughty suspicion that when Flannery O’Connor said:

     Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

     ...she had this obsession with “voice” / “style” in mind. On another occasion, she said that “The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.” There is nothing of “voice” or “style” in what one is “able to make live.” That’s a function of human nature: what God has made us.

     By implication, we cannot be original about our themes, for they must proceed from human nature and the way it operates among us. There are also severe limits on originality in character construction: some from the extent of the writer’s acquaintance with others, still more from human nature itself. But at the minimum we can be original about the setting into which we cast our characters and the events in which they become embroiled.

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     A few nuggets for consideration, specifically for science-fiction writers:

     Space travel as a motif is all very well...but why are your characters doing it? What do they hope to gain, and what price must they pay for it? What conflicts will arise among them along the way?

     Superhuman powers? Well, they’ve certainly been used quite a lot...but the patterns SF writers have followed have worn the tread off most of them, and as for the comic-book industry...well, perhaps we shouldn’t go there. Can you come up with a new one? This writer did.

     Time travel? I’m not sure you want to go there. The problems involved are so great that even Gregory Benford, one of SF’s true geniuses, had trouble making such a story consistent – and his story won the Nebula Award.

     Indefinitely prolonged life? This is another extremely familiar motif in SF. Many have fantasized about its attractions...but who has written even a word about its drawbacks? Who has dared to speculate upon the emotional maladies that would afflict one who cannot die – or is afraid to die? Who has dared to write about the upheavals that would arise in a longevity-capable society in which some choose to live no more that threescore and ten? And what about the possibility of an unanticipated, severe contraction in human lifespans? Who has written about what would flow from that?

     Use any or all of the above if you must -- I did -- but try to do something new with them. Find a conflict no one has thought to use before. Make it one that forces your Marquee characters to come to grips with desires or fears others have not thought to address. If you can, give them antagonists that aren’t merely standard-issue villains.

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     I’m about ranted out for the moment, but I trust the message is clear: If you must write, be original. Produce something that, at least as far as you know, is yours alone – and by that I don’t mean a story written entirely in anagrams, or every third word in Esperanto, or told without use of the letter “t.” Readers everywhere are desperate for new experiences, experiences that go beyond what the writers of the past have explored. They want to feel the great emotions, and they’ll be very generous to you if you can take them on such a journey, but in the name of God give them a new vehicle in which to do it.

     I have spoken.

Quickies: For The Other Writers In The Audience

     Perhaps you’re familiar with the relatively recent phenomenon of authors putting playlists at the ends of their novels. Sometimes they’re presented as a notional soundtrack to the action of the book. Sometimes those lists of tunes are simply what they were listening to while they wrote. The latter case has always struck me funny, because I can’t listen to music while writing. I can’t deny it my attention, which of course deprives the story on the drawing board of the attention it requires.

     It’s a bit of a handicap, for two reasons. First is my tinnitus, which can be as obtrusive as anything audible. The second is that playing music helps to shut out other background noise that can be just as distracting. Anyone who shares his home with children or animals, or who lives in a busy area, will know how annoying those background noises can be.

     However, I may have made an important discovery: the genuine soundtrack, which is entirely without vocals and usually designed merely to enhance the emotional impact of the action on the movie screen. I’ve tried playing one of those as I wrote this morning, and not only was it not distracting, it served admirably to blot out the noises from the regiment of plumbers laboring over my pipes, the groundskeepers mowing my front yard, and the gentleman I’d engaged to power-wash the house.

     Here’s the first one: the soundtrack to The Bourne Identity:

     The second of the soundtracks I played this morning wasn’t for a “real” movie but for a video game: Tomb Raider: A Survivor Is Born:

     They worked excellently well for me, providing coverage for the background noise (and my tinnitus) while allowing me to concentrate on my prose. If not being able to play music as you write has been a problem for you, try the above and let me know about the results.

Realism In The Speculative Genres

     (This is what a writer who’s down in the dumps about his spell of low productivity does, Gentle Reader: Instead of writing, he writes about writing. At any rate, it strikes me as preferable to wallowing in my old fan mail. -- FWP)

     We who write in the speculative genres – i.e., science fiction, fantasy, and most horror fiction – are often torn over questions of consistency. This is a subject with iceberg-like proprtions: only a few percent of it shows above the waterline of auctorial consciousness.

     A storyteller starts with a story to tell. Why does he want to tell it? Perhaps it strikes him as a good bet for increased revenue. Or perhaps he thinks it will illuminate an important truth about Mankind. Or perhaps, still more imperatively, his wife has threatened to poison his Chianti if he doesn’t get his ass into gear and finish the series of stories she’s come to love. One way or another, he has a reason to write it. But he has a problem.

     To make the story come out the way he wants, he needs an element that’s implausible under current circumstances:

• Science Fiction: Faster than light (FTL) travel, time travel, mental powers, and the like.
• Fantasy: Magic, magical creatures, pantheons at war with one another, etc.
• Horror: Monsters of some sort.

     This is the speculative-fiction writer’s special challenge, one that “mainstream” writers don’t face. His “what if?” isn’t just the premise for a plot line; it’s a request for an alteration of the rules of reality as they’re enforced between the covers of his book. To make it play requires the reader’s willing suspension of his disbelief. And Mankind is sufficiently various that there are millions of readers willing to make that suspension, for which God be most profusely thanked.

     But the problem isn’t limited to the writer’s opening premises. It also embraces the plot itself. Some plot developments require the amplification and extension of the unreal premises. That’s where consistency comes in, and with it the problem of realism.

     My first science-fiction novel, Which Art In Hope, made a “conventional” suspension-of-disbelief demand upon its reader: He was required to allow for:

• Psi powers, including telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance;
• The possibility of a sentient entity whose body is an entire planet.

     These are known motifs in science fiction. Thus, many who’ve been reading SF for a very long time are familiar with them and ready to allow them. However, newcomers to science fiction would have to “swallow hard” to get past them for the sake of the story. That willingness to suspend disbelief determines whether one who’s never read science fiction before can “make the jump.” (Alternately, you have to get your story out of reality’s gravitational singularity before you can engage the FTL engines.)

     One of the things I didn’t ask the reader to swallow in that first book was the possibility of faster-than-light travel. I didn’t need it; indeed, the existence of FTL would have contravened one of the essential conditions of the story I wanted to tell. But when reader demand made me contemplate a sequel to that book, it became a requirement.

     That forced me to think about the challenge involved in making my science-fiction setting internally consistent. How realistic would it be to have FTL developed by this colony world of pacifistically inclined anarchists?

     I pulled it off in Freedom’s Scion– at least, I think I did – but it took a fair amount of hard thought. The technological base of the Spoonerite society of Which Art In Hope would not support ab initio the development of an FTL drive even if it were physically possible. So my realism problem went beyond the physics of the thing.

     Magic-based fantasy has a version of the problem that isn’t immediately apparent to most readers. Broadly, it goes like this: Magic must have a basis in the laws of the universe. It must be available on certain conditions; it must be powered by something; and it must observe certain limitations. Those requirements imply that magic must have one of the following inner natures:

1. Magic is either a property of the magician, which arises from certain characteristics he possesses that others do not; or:
2. Magic is available only by persuading non-human entities with greater-than-human powers to act on the magician’s behalf; or:
3. Magic, in Robert A. Heinlein’s memorable formulation, is merely “something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out” – in other words, a matter of science yet unexplored and technology yet undeveloped.

     (In the above partition, I’m omitting the tiny subcategory of fantasies about omnipotence. I contend that such stories are inherently unappealing, since there are no rules – the protagonist can arrange to have whatever he wants, on any conditions he wants. Thus, he faces no problems that present non-trivial difficulties to be overcome. As a plot premise that’s undramatic and unsatisfying, and anyway, God doesn’t approve of such stories.)

     One way or another, all magic-based fantasy will fall into one of those slots. By implication, whatever the protagonists do must conform to the overarching rules of its sort. That allows for problems that even a sorcerer will have difficulty solving – and that’s at the core of all drama.

     Realism is ultimately a matter of sticking to the rules, whatever they happen to be. The writer must decide upon the rules before he sets forth. He must make them plain to the reader early in the game. Thereafter, he must adhere to them rigidly, for to depart from them would reduce his story to a kind of RoadRunner cartoon.

     Realism is quite as important in speculative fiction as it is in any other sort of entertainment. Failures to abide by the requirement for realism result in implausible, unsatisfying stories. Which is why so many writers who attempt to write in a speculative genre eventually find themselves muttering that “this is harder than I thought.”

     (Cross-posted at my op-ed site.)

A Safe Distance

     We’ve heard a lot about “Mary Sue” characters: i.e., characters written out of an author’s fantasy about a perfect woman (or man). The “Mary Sue” is usually a Supporting Cast character, but not always. Sometimes such a character will be cast as the protagonist.

     That can cause one of the worst of plot-construction sins: sparing your protagonist harm, difficulty, or unhappiness.

     The genesis of such a misstep is simple: having imbued his protagonist with every attribute he deems admirable or desirable, the writer falls in love with him. He wants nothing but the best for him. He contrives to have him come out on top regardless of the conflicts, and usually without even mussing his hair. Therein lies the death of drama, for:

Drama only exists when men’s virtues compel them to pay a price – i.e., when they must suffer for being good.

     I’ve edged up to the “Mary Sue” line at least twice. In one case, it crept upon me unawares; in another, it was a largely conscious act that required several varieties of corrective action. So let it be known that, though I pontificate against this particular failing, it’s from experience rather than innate wisdom.

     Alongside the excessive love of a character lies another “Mary Sue”-derived problem: the weakening of your theme. A good theme derives from what writer Tom Kratman calls “eternal verities:” the truths about right, wrong, and human nature that are written into the laws of the universe. The very best sort of plot involves people acting out those verities -- after having tried to deny and defy them. At the end of such a story (if it’s been well told), the reader feels that he’s learned a “home truth,” or at least has had one reinforced. Even if he doesn’t consciously realize it, his awareness of how people act, and how they must act to get what they want without creating chaos where order belongs, is brighter than before.

     But the “Mary Sue” protagonist is too perfect to be “people.” He cannot enact such a theme without being wrong, and seriously so, at some point in the story...which would diminish his perfection in the author’s eyes.

     This argues for the maintenance of a “safe distance” between the author and his characters.

     By that I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t love your characters. You should, and the more ardently the better. But neither in real life nor in fiction should love demand perfection. If you’re able to dispassionately enumerate your Marquee Character’s characterological strengths and weaknesses, you’re better off than you would be if you were simply starry-eyed about him, for you can contrive to put him in situations where his weaknesses are being used against him and he cannot deploy his strengths without paying a stiff price, including the enactment of your theme.

     There’s a seeming contradiction in this. All the best fiction overflows with passion: the author’s passion for his characters, his agonies at their trials and sufferings, his regret for the prices they must pay to remain faithful to their virtues, and his determination that what is best in Man shall triumph nevertheless. But that passion must be tempered by a counterbalancing dispassion: the ruthless determination to make your hero endure the sufferings that his decisions entail.

     Yes, you’ll suffer as he suffers. You’ll leak tears at every loss he incurs and every wound he suffers. You’ll wish more than once that you’d never set your fingers to the keys.

     But Nietzsche was right about one thing, at least: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Your vicarious trials will strengthen you by testing your convictions about how things are and how they must be. And you will become better able to produce good fiction thereby.

More On Series Writing And Reading

     I read a great deal. A great deal. Perhaps four to six hours of my every waking day are put to consuming the words of others rather than producing any of my own. (That might have something to do with my low output of late, but that’s a subject for another time.)

     Time was, I eagerly awaited new offerings from several writers who had wholeheartedly adopted the “series” approach. That is, they wrote book after book in the same setting, or about the same protagonist(s) and / or antagonist(s). Some writers can do that without sacrificing originality or freshness. Such writers are jewels to be cherished...but not necessarily imitated.

     This is on my mind this morning because of a recent discovery in my own decision making as a reader. I’d stumbled upon and purchased two book-sets – in each case the first three books of a series that continued on from there – by writers previously unknown to me, and had read both sets with enjoyment. Yet, at the conclusion of each such set, I thought about purchasing the next volumes in the series, and decided against it.

     Why? One who goes through as much reading material as I should happily continue to read a series that’s begun worthily, no? Time was, I’d have thought so, at least in the abstract. But in the real world, I consciously decided not to go on with those two series. It required some thought to elucidate my decisions.

     These days, series tend to go on forever. At least until the death of the writer...and as some recent examples would suggest, even that’s not an absolute barrier to their continuation. When a reader suspects that he’s begun to read such a series, at some point he will decide to continue on with it or not. What basis for decision is he likely to use?

     If he hasn’t enjoyed what he’s read, the decision to stop is automatic and requires no explanation. But if he has, and suspects that the series will continue for the life of the writer, he must decide:

• Whether the setting and / or the characters are sufficiently attractive;
• Whether the overarching themes and the characteristic motifs are appealing enough;
• Whether the gestalt would support further, sufficiently imaginative and intriguing plots;
• Whether subsequent volumes would illuminate the conflicts and the Marquee Characters’ key decisions satisfyingly;
• Whether the prose itself is good enough.

     The evaluations of those considerations tend to be subconscious. The reader might not be fully aware of his decision. This is more often the case when the reader decides not to continue with the series: that requires no effort, and inaction is easier to “understand” than action. Indeed, the reader might tell himself several times that “I’ve got to get to the bookstore / Amazon / wherever and get the next book in this series sometime soon,” and never do so.

     I’ve had the experience of discontinuing my consumption of a series even with writers I greatly admire, whose other books and other series I’ve continued to read. Lawrence Block is an example; I read two of his books about professional thief Bernie Rhodenbarr and enjoyed them, but never went on to the subsequent ones, yet I slaver after his stories of private detective Matthew Scudder.

     Clearly, there are pitfalls in series writing. The tale can grow stale; the hero’s decisions can become mechanical, predictable, and unsatisfying. The writer himself might become irritated with the series. It’s happened more than once; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was desperate to kill off Sherlock Holmes, but his fans wouldn’t allow it!

     He who embarks upon a series must remain aware of the trend lines in his work. He must judge for himself – in this regard, his readers will be less helpful – whether his stuff is becoming clichéd, repetitive, or otherwise unsatisfying. And he must be willing, albeit with many a tear, to kill off favorite heroes and to terminate adventures that were once exciting but have devolved into formula.

     Otherwise readers such as I will report his deterioration to him through his sales figures...and that hurts worse than any other kind of negative feedback.

Uninteresting Places

     Homes, offices, shopping centers, and sidewalks. They’re where most human drama takes place. And how could it be otherwise? They’re where most of human life takes place. That poses the fiction writer with a number of questions.

     Many a young fictioneer is obsessed with description: the enumeration and depiction of the physical setting in which his characters act out their dramas. This can lead to some ludicrous fiction: stories in which the bulk of the verbiage is about inanimate objects of no particular importance. John Brunner’s two laws:

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

     ...should suffice to steer a writer away from such pointlessness, and toward the narration of actual events: scenes in which his characters make the decisions upon which the plot of the story rests.

     Are there exceptions? Yes, of course. Sometimes elements of the inanimate scenery become important to the evolution of the plot. They might provide evidence about what’s going on that a character needs to notice. For example, imagine a drama set in a hospital, in which the Marquee Character is a pediatric doctor. He completed a routine operation, perhaps a tonsillectomy, on a young patient a couple of hours earlier, and is on his way to check on the lad. He comes to the door of the boy’s room only to find a “crash cart,” laden with the gear used to revive someone after a cardiac arrest, immediately outside. The character must notice that cart – and the reader must hear about it.

     But such decisions are dictated by the plot. They don’t arise out of the luminiferous ether. If, in place of the “crash cart,” the doctor were to come upon a food trolley with the leavings of meals on it, all the object’s significance would presumably vanish. A description of the trolley would be pointless.

     Once in a great while, description for description’s sake will be desirable. Perhaps it will be militated by the need to indicate a sharp transition between contexts. Here’s an example from the great J.R.R. Tolkien:

     Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness. [J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, "The Two Towers"]

     Tolkien used the contrast between the lands Frodo and Sam had been traveling through and the wild beauty of Ithilien to give momentum to their travels: the sense of motion through lands as various as those of England. Could it have been done another way? Possibly, but we must admit that Tolkien’s method worked very well. He who writes not of grand quests pursued through ever-changing lands populated with multifarious wonders and terrors, but rather of persons situated in familiar environments where most of our lives are spent today, will seldom have such a need. His need will be to keep the story moving, and in the great majority of cases, the best approach will be to speak of his characters’ interactions through word and deed.

     In other words: Don’t worry about the shape and color of that sofa, or that desk, or that tree, or that storefront. Unless those things matter to the plot, that is...but how often is that?

Your New Genre

     So! You’ve come up with an entirely new kind of fiction! Something the world has never seen before...but which (you hope) it’s hungered for since the invention of movable type. And you’re so excited for its prospects that you can’t wait to present the world with your first efforts in this new genre. Away with the editors! Away with the critiquers! All you need is your word processor’s spellcheck and a stock image or two, and you’ll be ready to rock and roll. Fame and fortune will surely follow.

     Slow down there, champ. Have you thought at all about why your new genre is new? That is, why some other bright boy hasn’t explored it before?

     The sad truth about new stuff – all new stuff; fiction is just a special case – is that 90% or more of Mankind’s innovations crash and burn. In the usual case, they fail so completely that no one not connected with their genesis ever hears of their existence. Which means that your hyperlink-festooned fusion of Zombie Horror with Medieval Fantasy and Bodice Ripper might have been attempted by some earlier defier of established categories. Some justly forgotten defier of categories.

     That’s not to say that your efforts aren’t worthy; just that you might not receive the thunderous acclaim you were hoping for. Well, yes, there are...lesser possibilities, too, but let’s not dwell on those. You’ve put your heart and soul into your prose, perhaps quite a lot of prose generated and refined over God knows how many months or years. Let’s assume that you have something to offer, and muse instead over the possibility that it might not find a readership.

     Readers have certain problems that writers don’t. Perhaps the worst of them is choice. If we were to consider only conventionally published fiction, a reader unmoored from other guidelines would have to choose from among roughly 8000 novels published each year. Since the explosion of independently-published fiction, especially as eBooks, their problem has grown by at least an order of magnitude. How are they to determine what sort of fiction entertains and edifies them?

     Of course, the typical reader has certain stars to steer by:

• Recommendations from friends and acquaintances;
• Prior familiarity with the works of certain writers;
• Reviews from reviewers he trusts;
• Established awards for fiction;
• The existing genres.

     Given that your new, independently-published book:

• Starts life unknown to anyone;
• Comes from a writer without a fan base;
• Is unlikely to gain the attention of a prominent reviewer;
• Hasn’t won any awards (of course, there’s always hope);
• And doesn’t fit into any of the existing genres used to market fiction;

     ...how are the readers whose tastes would be gratified by your book supposed to find it?

     No, it’s not impossible. But it is an uphill battle, and one you’ll probably have to fight alone.

     Consider the writers you enjoy reading: those whose books you can reliably find in the stores, who command a fair readership and are likely to be stocked from the day they’re published. How many of them started their careers with a novel that neither they nor anyone else could categorize? I’d wager you can’t name any.

     Yes, in part that’s because of the existing system of promotion, distribution, and retailing. But that system exists because those whose business is publishing fiction, and whose continued existence depends upon persuading people to pay money for it, have found that it works better than the known alternatives. Indeed, even if you were to make your book free, you might find it difficult to persuade readers to take a chance on it. When a reader commits his time to a book, he implicitly forgoes any other activity to which he might have given that time. Thus, even a free book exacts a cost from its readers, though there are those who argue that such “opportunity costs” aren’t as meaningful as a monetary price.

     I speak from experience here. My Realm of Essences series is a case in point. I was unable to interest a conventional publishing house in any of those volumes for a single compelling reason: they don’t fit into any of the established genres. Rejection letter after rejection letter expressed some variation on “I like it, but we could never market it.”

     The path of least agony – always assuming you have adequate storytelling gifts and writing skills – is to start your writing career in an existing genre. Accumulate a readership first; then dazzle the world with your hybridization of Time-Travel Romance with Slapstick Comedy. This is not intended as a denigration of your experiments. You might be a genius; indeed, you might be the next Faulkner, Hemingway, or Steinbeck. But you’ll be far less likely to end as an unsung genius if you establish yourself by first exploiting the foundations already laid: the system of categorization that dominates every bookstore in existence...the system employed by Amazon and other Internet retailers as we speak.

WriterScams: Websites That Supposedly Assist Writers

     Many are the scams that have afflicted aspiring writers. The pseudo-agent that charges you a fee, rather than earning his living by marketing your books, is well known among us. So also is the old-style vanity press that will manufacture your books for a handsome price, but will never approach a distributor or a retailer with them. There’s also the free-lance “editor” who never “edits:” to persuade him that you are worthy of his attention, you must first send him a brief sample of your manuscript and an “application fee.” He’ll reliably reject your sample on nebulous grounds...while keeping the “application fee,” of course.

     Now that eBooks outsell physical volumes and anyone with a computer and a word processor can aspire to “publication,” we have the fake promotional website. Such a website will claim that its services are “free to all writers.” In most cases, the “free membership” comes with nothing but your “registration” in “our database of published authors;” to get anything more requires up-front payment of a fee. In a few cases, the website is a front that promotes “writers’ services:” editors, pseudo-agents, publicity mills, and vanity presses, each of which has a subsidiary agreement – the discreet term for paying a kickback – with the website. Of course, the website will promote those “services” to the writer relentlessly via email. It can be a lucrative racket, while it lasts.

     Writers tend to be optimistic sorts, more trusting and hopeful than is generally good for us. Which is why the following is set in very large font:

You Get What You Pay For.

     There’s a corollary that should be respected:

Anything “Free” Is Worth What It Costs.

     Very few persons will put their painstakingly honed skills at your service for no compensation beyond the warm glow from having done a good deed. Serious craftsmen expect to be paid for their craft. Accordingly, as a matter of policy you should beware anyone who purports to offer you a “free” service, whether analog, digital, physical, virtual, animal, vegetable, mineral, or spiritual.

     No, I’m not about to “name names.” My negative experiences have educated me in the folly of merely providing a tabulation of malefactors; there’s always some new scamster riding into town. So take the above – please! – as a general guideline. For lagniappe, have a snippet from Robert Sheckley, who appears to have understood the principle down to its root:

     “I don’t want any.”
     “Yes you do,” a voice from the other side of the door replied.
     “I’ve got all the encyclopedias, brushes, and waterless cookery I need,” Edelstein called back wearily. “Whatever you’ve got, I’ve got it already.”
     “Look,” the voice said, “I’m not selling anything. I want to give you something.”
     Edelstein smiled the thin, sour smile of the New Yorker who knows that if someone made him a gift of a package of genuine, unmarked $20 bills, he’d still somehow end up having to pay for it.
     “If it’s free,” he said, “then I definitely can’t afford it.”

     [Robert Sheckley, “The Same To You Doubled.”]

On Letting Your Characters Do It For You

     A common occurrence in my “fiction writing process” – note the three initials – is a need for me to stop and ask my Marquee characters “What are you all about, really? And how does it bear on what’s happening in this scene?”

     Such moments are important to me. You see, I don’t really have a process of the formal sort. Some writers outline or synopsize; I do that too, but I almost never cleave to it in the actual act of writing. Some writers write character biographies; I’ve done that on occasion, but the finished product seems to diverge from my early conceptions rather dramatically. Some writers write out backstories to which they can make reference as needed; as useful as that seems, I find it more productive to make actual, publishable stories out of something that demands that much work. So ultimately, I’m flying by eye and feel rather than a process of the sort other writers that prefer more preparatory organization would recognize.

     That makes it important that I become intimate with my characters. (No, not in the Biblical sense. Get your mind out of the gutter.) I need to be able to “ring them up” on my mental telephone and converse with them when my plots get thorny.

     Sitting across a cafe table from Louis Redmond, Todd Iverson, or Stephen Graham Sumner can be a most helpful experience. Their voices are familiar to me, as you would expect of an old friend. A chat with one of them can often help me to break a mental logjam about how to resolve a critical conflict. Louis is particularly good on morality and ethics; Todd provides all the engineering expertise anyone could use; and Sumner’s grip on the law goes all the way to its finest details.

     Of course, others of my Marquee characters are harder to converse with. For example, before he was wounded in that assault on Morelon House, Martin Forrestal made a great conversational companion. These days, he’s always trying to remember how he felt about this or that episode. He usually fails. Martine Arnault could be good company, but getting her out of Evenings to Remember is tough and keeping her from returning to it is damned near impossible. As for Devin MacLachlan, forget it. All he wants to talk about are his books.

     Of course, I’m half-kidding here. The inventions of my mind can’t converse in any real sense. Nor can they “know” anything that I haven’t taught them. Still, by compelling them to speak in characterologically consistent ways, I can reacquire my grip on the most important element of any story: the motivations of the Marquee character group.

     It’s a bit like Stanislavsky method acting. If you know your context to a sufficient degree of specificity, and you know which of your characters’ desires, fears, and convictions would come into play in that context, you can get them to write their own lines – in effect, to write your scene for you. That conduces to the kind of fictional plausibility we call realism.

     What do you think, fellow scribblers? Have you used a technique of this sort? If so, how well did it work for you? If not, consider giving it a try and let me know!

Heroes And Realism

     I’m aware that my sort of hero – the genuinely good guy who’s a shade or two larger than life – is not in favor. He’s supposedly not realistic. Everyone has flaws, runs the gospel. If you fail to account for human imperfections, you flaunt your defiance of that reality. And to account for it properly, you have to show your guy giving in to his flaws, at least now and then.

     I dissent for a single, overriding reason: paying attention to the voice of one’s conscience is exactly what distinguishes a good guy from a bad guy or a mostly good but relatively less important Supporting Cast character...and one of the reasons I write fiction is to depict that contrast and encourage my readers to think about it.

     I had my most popular character very much in mind when I wrote Polymath. Louis Redmond is so popular among my readers that not a week passes that I don’t receive at least a dozen emails begging for more stories about him. From the first it was clear that Todd Iverson, the book’s protagonist, could not and would not compare to Louis in the most important ways. As important as I intend to make Todd in the future mapped out by the second Realm of Essences trilogy, it’s critical that he have a number of significant weaknesses. Louis had only one: his suspicion of anything pleasurable that struck him as unnecessary.

     Will Todd give in to those weaknesses? Perhaps. You’ll have to read the books to find out (snicker). But in the main he’ll attend to the still, small voice quite as closely as Louis ever did, because Louis is his hero and model in all human things. When others who matter to him fail to make the right choices, he’ll observe them, and the results, dispassionately, determined to learn from their mistakes. That all-important skill, and the willingness to use it, make the biggest difference between the common run of Mankind and the truly exemplary among us.

     In short, my attitude toward realism goes like this:

1. There is a pole, determined by the behavior of real people, toward which character decisions and actions should bend.
2. However, genuine heroes know when it’s vital that they ignore what “everybody else” would do.
3. They learn such discrimination by watching “everybody else” and pondering their words and deeds.
4. For a properly happy ending – i.e., one that nevertheless requires that the hero pay a proportional price – he must choose the right path even in full foreknowledge of what it will cost him – and that knowledge and willingness are what really qualify a hero.

     In fiction, there is such a thing as too much realism. Really.

For Those Who've Requested It

     ...and anyone else who likes a (relatively) decent short romance: This collection comprises my short romances written since 1995. Sex? Yes, a little. Love? Yes, quite a lot. And optimism about the human heart and soul.

     Only $0.99 at Amazon. Enjoy!

The Mating Cries Of The Social-Justice Warriors

     Isn’t that what the nearly continuous ejaculations of “Racist!” “Sexist!” “Homophobe!” “Fascist!” and the like are about? I mean, they usually have no impact on their target, who laughs gaily and goes on with his day. So it has to be some sort of mating signal, like the yowls of a female cat in “heat.” Right?

     All kidding aside, the air is thick with denunciations of those awful, retrograde, women-and-minorities-hating “Sad Puppies.” Their offense, of course, is that they dared to do what the SJWs had been doing for about twenty years now: slate voting for the Hugo Award nominations. Having invaded the Hugo process with their insistence that Sf and fantasy should be entertaining, rather than merely politically correct, they’ve polluted what the SJWs had decided was territory duly conquered and occupied. And as is always the case with the Left and its many annexes – wait a second, shouldn’t the plural of annex be annicies? Index, indices; vertex, vertices; apex, apices; Tampax, Tampices...but I digress – the SJWs are apoplectic about it.

     Here’s a recent bile sample:

     The clock is ticking for the public vote in this year’s Hugo awards, which celebrate excellence in science fiction. Sixteen categories are up for grabs, from best novel to short fiction, fan writing, art and dramatic presentation, and the deadline is 31 July. But this year the prizes are not just about celebrating science-fiction – it’s political war.

     There’s usually a kerfuffle of one kind or another – popular authors habitually campaign for fans to vote them on to the list, but 2015 has proved the biggest drama the award has ever seen. That’s because two linked online campaign groups, known as the “Sad Puppies” and their more politically extreme running mates, the “Rabid Puppies”, have been campaigning hard to register supporters and bump their preferred titles on to the shortlists. They have managed it, too: this year’s Hugos are packed with Puppies titles. There’s no avoiding the politically partisan nature of this campaign. Its leading lights range from respectable rightwingers such as US authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgerson, through to those with more outlandish views such as John C Wright and Vox Day (also known as Theodore Beale). It’s the Tea Party of contemporary US sci-fi.

     The Puppies are complaining that recent Hugo winners have been too highbrow, and argue that winners such as Anne Leckie’s smart gender-deconstruction of space opera Ancillary Justice, or John Scalzi’s witty Star-Trek-inspired metafiction Redshirts are too experimental and literary.

     More importantly, as Sarah Lotz says, they’re also suggesting SF has been hijacked by a conspiracy of “social justice warriors” or “SJWs”, intent on filling the genre with progressive ideological propaganda.

     The Puppies’ real beef is that SF, and society as a whole, has become too feminist, too multiracial, too hospitable to gay and trans voices. Anti-SJW rhetoric, most of it proceeding from angry straight white men, has flooded online discussions. It’s been ugly. It’s also proving self-defeating. George RR Martin’s intervention, urging people to register and vote in order to defeat the plans of people he call “assholes”, has galvanised the counter-vote.

     Well, we’ll see about that “self-defeating” bit. The important thing here is the hypocrisy: the slate of works promoted by the Sad Puppies does not discriminate in any detectable way. It contains books and stories by men and women; by conservatives and liberals; by theists and atheists; and by persons of all three recognized races. The SJWs are merely furious at having their tactics used against them – successfully.

     That’s the Left for you. They always proclaim their victories final, so it really frosts their buns to have ground taken back from them.

---

     I find myself remembering another SJW-driven contretemps of a few years ago: the claim, made at the time Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were popular, that those movies, and the Tolkien trilogy itself, were racist. The SJWs argument? There are no nice Orcs!

     I highly doubt that any of those making that absurd claim were familiar with the genesis of the Orcs: the Great Enemy, Morgoth, derived them from captured Elves that he tortured and modified. Tolkien mentions it in the “Old Testament” of his saga, The Silmarillion. There were Elves of corrupt and vicious character from the very first, which I would imagine gave Morgoth his “seed material.” In any case, when the One Ring is destroyed at the conclusion of the trilogy, Tolkien describes the effects upon Sauron’s Orc army thus:

     “The realm of Sauron is ended!” said Gandalf. “The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his quest.” And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out toward them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.

     The Captains bowed their heads; and when they looked up again, behold! Their enemies were flying and the power of Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind. As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope.

     The creatures of evil genesis fell when their Maker fell. Sauron had allowed no speck of rightness or justice to remain in them; therefore, without him they could not live. How could it be otherwise?

     But you can’t say that to an SJW. His premises don’t include the possibility of absolute evil. The very idea! It might disturb his carefully cultivated moral relativism.

---

     It’s been said many times, and by writers far better known than I, that no end can redeem an evil means. A means must be judged by the same moral standard as all other things. Therefore, a tactic, regardless of the end in view, will be either morally acceptable or morally unacceptable. If it was acceptable for the SJWs to promote the works they favored, then it was acceptable for the Sad Puppies to do the same. Inversely, if the Sad Puppies’ campaign for its slate must be condemned, then so must the use of that tactic by the SJWs. The difference between the two is the degree of concealment applied, and nothing else: the Sad Puppies did what they did in full view of everyone involved, whereas the SJWs preferred sotto voce consensus-building among the like-minded and whispering campaigns against works they despised.

     Ultimately, what will matter most will be whether F&SF is at all improved by the contretemps. Second to that will be whether the Sad Puppies’ campaign widens the field of F&SF fandom, specifically that portion enthusiastic enough about it to participate actively in the Hugos and similar things. The theory of democratic processes holds that the results will improve as participation increases. The Sad Puppies hope to draw more F&SF readers into the Hugo processes. The SJWs hope to limit participation in those processes to themselves and the like-minded. To me that says it all, though your mileage may vary.

Romance In Science Fiction

     This is a subject about which some writers get defensive, and others become apoplectic. It’s become a front-burner issue over the past few years, as unprecedented numbers of women have begun writing books heavy with romance and romantic themes, but nevertheless are billed SF.

     No, they haven’t gone to the “bodice ripper” cover styles yet. And let’s be judicious about dismissing all such books as “romances disguised and marketed as SF.” Some of them are quite worthy. They merely contain more romance than earlier, predominantly male SF writers injected.

     I have to declare a particular bias here, as my books are “cross-genre” too. That’s why I had to go independent: the conventional publishing houses have so much difficulty marketing cross-genre work that a writer of such has to strike them as the next James Michener to have a decent chance of getting their approval. (The odds are somewhat better for a writer who: 1) writes explicitly for a susceptible demographic, such as teenagers; and: 2) conforms to one of the trendy fads: e.g., vampires.) So I have a certain sympathy for lady writers who find themselves drawn powerfully to opportunities to insert romantic motifs into the topically neutral genre of science fiction, as lady writers have been throughout history.

     I suppose the question is which “feel” predominates: the idea-and-adventure oriented “feel” of SF or the emotion-oriented “feel” of romance. There’s a fat gray area in there, which is why the fusillades over it have been so furious.

     What frosts a number of fannies in the “SF world,” if it’s at all proper to speak of such things in the wake of the Sad Puppies controversy, is that the writers of romance / SF hybrids, including some whose books might have borne the Harlequin Silhouette sigil a few years ago, have acquired considerable popularity, and their fans have become active within SF fandom. In consequence, a substantial cohort of voters for the major SF awards now give their votes to such books, which some of the older, “traditionalist” writers and readers have come to resent. A few of the “traditionalists” have been vocal about it, on occasion to their own detriment.

     Ultimately, of course, for conventionally published SF it’s entirely a matter of bucks for the publishers, and of course the tastes the readers exhibit with their purchases. Publishing is and will remain a business, and businesses exist first and foremost to make money. That’s not a slam against publishers, merely a recognition of the realities. Therefore, they’ll continue to publish books they believe, on the strength of the sales of other books, will sell well, and will ignore books that don’t accord with those parameters. The fires of the controversy will be hottest when conventions and awards are involved, as such things have been important to a writer’s sales in the past, and though they’ve proved less so in recent years, the future is...well, the future.

     Indie writers don’t have such problems; we only want to write and gather readers. Those of us who don’t dream of conventional publication and the riches of Croesus, at least.

The Feel-Good Story

     Yes, yes, it’s been a while. Forgive me.

     Quite recently I penned a group of short romances, all of which are available at Smashwords and most of which are free of charge. None of them have any great degree of tension or conflict in them. They’re essentially “feel-good” stories, happy narratives that don’t involve the sort of weighty problem that’s “supposed” to be at the center of a good piece of drama. Nevertheless, I’m happy to have written them, and from the feedback I’ve received, my readers are happy as well.

     There’s a place for feel-good stories. There’s certainly enough going on to feel bad about, especially as regards relations between the sexes, and counteraction is easy to justify. All the same, the “critics” – why yes, those are “sneer quotes” – are merciless about such things. Their critical treatment of feel-good fiction is about half a degree warmer than what they give to Harlequin romances. (That’s half a degree Fahrenheit, not Centigrade.)

     Why? Dogmatism, perhaps. Also, quite a bit of the “literary” world has a relatively dark, pessimistic Weltanschauung. It serves them in strange and inscrutable ways. Must be a bitch to get the wine and Brie stains off it, though. (Is there anyone out there who actually enjoys Brie? To me it tastes like ammonia. Well, de gustibus and all that.)

     Among movies produced outside the “Hollywood system,” one of the most successful of recent memory is Nia Vardalos’s 2002 gem My Big Fat Greek Wedding. In case you haven’t seen it, this movie is feel-good fiction on the big screen. Viewers’ reaction to it was almost unanimously positive. Oh yes, they all agree that it’s “fluff,” without “important social impact,” destined to be forgotten if it hasn’t been already. But they enjoyed it. They don’t regret paying the price of admission. And no few of them sneak it onto their DVD players when the kids and the Significant Other are conveniently otherwise occupied.

     In short, there’s a market for such fiction. You can make a few bucks writing it, if you have the chops. If you don’t have the chops, the easy-to-write, creatively unchallenging feel-good story is one way to develop them.

     What was I, the relentlessly serious and intolerably sententious author of Chosen One, Which Art In Hope, Priestesses, and similarly weighty fare, doing writing such mental candy floss? Relaxing, dude! Trying to shrug a little of the weight of the world off my increasingly overburdened shoulders. And perhaps pandering a wee bit to my own need for such things. I’m not so rock-solidly self-assured that I never need a break from the load.

     In a way, this is about “guilty pleasures.” There are some pleasures about which one should and must feel guilty -- licking the doughnuts and putting them back on the store shelf is one -- but preferring one sort of innocent entertainment to others, rather than requiring yourself to endure what other people say you “ought to like” is not among them.

     Anyway, don’t you want to feel good, at least now and then? Isn’t that what we all want? Why else do masochists keep company with sadists, after all? (Cf. the above comment about people who claim to enjoy Brie...and the people who serve it to them.)

     Enjoy what you want. Write what you want. Let the critics gnash their teeth. A little harmless Schadenfreude won’t keep you out of heaven. Probably not, anyway. Though I think I’ll say an extra decade of the Rosary tonight. You know, just in case.

     (No German philosophers were harmed in the making of this post.)

Audience Participation

     These days, a writer who allows it will get plenty of feedback from his readers. I encourage it; it helps me to know what I’m doing badly, what I’m doing well, and what I could try that I haven’t yet thought to do. But there are pitfalls to the practice, some of which are less than obvious.

     For one thing, people who merely want to piss you off have as much access to you as those interested in an honest exchange. I’ve received a fair amount of such “input.” I hardly need to tell you that I don’t care for it, but it taught me an important lesson: not to respond. The response, to quote master cartoonist Chris Muir, is what such nuisances want. You have a better chance of getting them to cease and desist if you deny them that reinforcement.

     Another pitfall is excessive praise. It’s in the nature of such feedback that your correspondents will exhibit an “undistributed middle:” nearly all of them will either love you or hate you. The reader who was left essentially unmoved by your stories won’t bother to write to tell you so. You can go quite as badly wrong by wallowing in paeans and dithyrambs as you can by allowing yourself to get riled by insults and condemnations.

     But there’s a third trap, about which I’ve only just learned: the praise that tempts you away from your proper path.

     My principal themes are freedom and Christianity. My love of those things provides the motive power that makes my storytelling possible. I seldom deviate from them, and when I do, I’m even less often satisfied with the result. Which is the “backstory” to today’s little homily.

     Some of the folks I correspond with are other indie writers. They aren’t all oriented as I am; in fact, I can’t think of one who is. I like them as people. I trade thoughts, ideas, and miscellaneous commentary with them just as I would with an in-the-flesh buddy. When one of them hits me with a challenge, I take it seriously, as an avenue that deserves to be pondered and possibly explored.

     Not too long ago, I received such a challenge. It came from another sometime writer of erotica, who likes what I write well enough, but thought I should put my hand to something different. Here’s the meat of what he suggested to me:

     Your erotica is nearly always extremely gentle. You focus on love rather than sex, which is an unusual bent for such stories. I’ve got no quarrel with that, but I’ve several times yearned to see what you could do with a premise that compels you to think sex first and foremost...or a premise that forces you to set aside your religious convictions just to write about it!

     So try this: a story entirely about futanari. Women with “a little something extra.” Have them come by it naturally rather than surgically, so it’s not a matter of willful gender transformation. How would you cope with that premise? How would they?

     You’re a Catholic. You believe to the very bottom of your soul that God does not make junk. So how would such persons, women in all but the members hanging from their groins, cope with their condition? And how would you craft a story – your sort of story, not mine – around them, but without mentioning Christianity?

     I’ve made it a policy not to turn down such challenges, as long as they’re not facetious. So I ran with it. And I had a fair amount of fun doing so.

     (Sorry, I can’t post the story here. It’s not for the eyes of the underage.)

     My writer friend was pleased. He thought the story displayed more skill and sensitivity than he’d previously thought I possess. But that’s not the end of the adventure.

     Quite a lot of readers were pleased with it, too. Readers of a sort I’d never connected with before this. And they’ve descended on me in a body, demanding more...more...MORE!

     It would be ungracious for me to be unhappy about those demands. Nevertheless, I thought of “A Place Of Our Own” as a once-only sort of undertaking. I met my friend’s challenge, but I’m not sure I should do any more along those lines. Indeed, I’m not sure I could.

     But those hungry readers...I really hate to disappoint them.

     See what I mean about the dangers of praise?

Stories That Fail Of Their Purpose

     When a writer sets out to produce a polemically-oriented fiction – i.e., a fiction intended to present a political, social, economic, moral, or religious point of view in a fashion intended to persuade readers to it – he enters upon dangerous territory.

     Granted that several well-remembered works of fiction were written to make such points. Granted that when it’s done skillfully, polemic fiction can be as entertaining as any other sort. Granted that among the reasons any storyteller sits down to his computer / typewriter / drafting table / box of slowly drying mud is to express a theme of great importance to him. None of that diminishes the hazards involved in consciously crafting a polemic.

     The principal danger is shortchanging the reader on entertainment, for the sake of the theme. There are several variations of this trap. The writer can have characters preach to one another. He can make the antagonists too obviously “bad guys.” He can violate the “show, don’t tell” rule so the reader will be certain the various actors in his drama are thinking what they’re supposed to be thinking. He can head-hop – i.e., he can shift narrative viewpoints arbitrarily within a scene, confusing the reader as to whose eyes are really seeing the action. There are other ways to err, but those are the ones most common among polemically oriented writers.

     In a way, it’s all one sin. The writer might be there to make a point, but the reader is not. The reader is there principally for entertainment. The entertainment value of a story inheres in the emotional journeys of its Marquee Characters and how vividly the writer can bring them out. If the writer’s need to drive his theme home is too strong, he could easily slough that journey completely...and in so doing, lose the reader and his purchases of the writer’s future works.

     This is becoming a rather important subject. An increasing number of polemicists are writing fiction. The birth of the independently-published fiction movement has elicited a huge number of such writers. Not many of them are capable of avoiding the pitfalls of their orientation. The stories from the less capable ones often get rave reviews from persons who already agree with the writer’s positions, but they’re unlikely to persuade others.

     I’m in the middle of such a novel now. No, I won’t tell you its title or the author’s name; suffice it to say that the author asked me to read it...some time ago. He’s received a great many five-star reviews on Amazon, but they’re all from persons who shared his views before they picked up his book. Mind you, I share his views, which is almost certainly why he asked me to read his book. But I’m not entertained by it. Indeed, it’s such heavy going, its action so relentlessly telegraphed, the good guys so good and the bad guys so bad, that I might not finish it.

     “Preaching to the choir” is wasted effort. It might bring in some revenue, if “the choir” is large enough...and easily enough pleased. But it will fail its larger purpose, the purpose for which the author created it in the first place. The irony here is that entertainment that persuades successfully does so with incredible effectiveness – which the author probably knew when he first set his fingers to the keys. But it must be entertainment first and foremost.

The Discriminating Reader

     That’s the reader at whom I aim my stuff, just as the graphic at the head of this site says. Do I always hit the mark? Probably not. But nevertheless, he – the reader who won’t accept second-best – is my target.

     But how shall I know what he wants to read?

     Part of the answer is provided by one’s existing readers. These days they have a lot of ways to let a writer know what pleases them. The most persuasive of all the methods is his revenue stream, but not far behind that are their reviews, emails, tweets, and other phenomena of our effortless-communication era. These things carry more weight with a writer than any self-appointed “critic” with a column in the New York Review of Books...and they should. A serious writer doesn’t write for the “critics,” any more than a serious director works to please the film critics.

     The discriminating reader seeks the works of the discriminating writer.

     That’s the seed material for today’s screed.

     A discriminating writer is one who crafts stories:

• About believable characters,
• In imaginable situations,
• Confronting imaginable crises,
• And coping with them according to their natures.

     Though those appear to be easy targets to hit, the great frequency of published books and stories that manage not to hit them testifies to the contrary.

     Of course, this is all purely opinion, right? It’s just about tastes, and everyone knows you can’t argue about tastes, right? Besides, all science fiction, fantasies, and horror stories start out completely unbelievable, right? So that loudmouth Fran is just venting again, trying to present his preferences as commandments from God, right? Right?

     Have you ever seen or heard the saying “Buy the premise, buy the flick?” Said about a movie, of course. It’s the same with fiction, really. If the protagonists and antagonists, however many there are of either, confront a situation plausible within the context premised by the genre and the specified setting, and respond to it plausibly according to their natures – both what they are and who they are – the result will please the discriminating reader. Always assuming it’s been properly proofread and formatted, of course.

     This is a large part of the reason I can’t abide contemporary horror fiction that features “benevolent” vampires. A vampire is, by nature, an apex predator. His attitude toward Mankind must be essentially predatory, no matter how straitly disciplined. Over thousands of years, some vampires would evolve toward a kind of carefully managed symbiosis with living men, but the process would undoubtedly be protracted, painful, and marred by many a misstep.

     John Conroe’s Demon Accords series, which I enjoy greatly, narrowly skirts that abyss. His vampires are predators, and make no mistake about it. But the more successful ones police themselves ruthlessly, and continually seek ways to lessen their dependency on humans as feedstock. Conroe has obviously given some thought to the contradiction of the “benevolent vampire,” for at several times in his books he notes their essential, indelibly predatory nature and the obvious dangers they would pose if unchecked. I tried to do something similar in my little story “Class Action.”

     I want to please the discriminating reader. I want no plaudits for “technique.” I want my reader to finish a story or a novel thinking “yes, that’s what they would have done, and that’s how it would have gone,” and perhaps feeling a bit better about his sense for the natures of men...or five-eyed pentapodal Aldebaranian colony organisms. I will always be happy to recommend to him the works of some other writer whom I’ve encountered, and who’s done it notably well. And I will cherish even above whatever praise I receive the thoughts of such a reader who can show me, in any particular story or novel, where I’ve fallen short of that standard.

     That is the Creed of the Discriminating Writer -- my creed.