Desires, Fears, Beliefs: Characterization At Its Base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     [From Experiences]

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

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

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

     That’s how it’s done.

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

     The rest is just typing.

On Standing Out

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

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

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

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     From my vast collection of funny images:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Priorities are like that.

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

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

Assorted Thoughts On Character Selection And Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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     I inserted a large number of Marquee characters into Experiences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Story == People Changing.

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

What Makes A Novel Rereadable?

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

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

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

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

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

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     The major elements of a worthy bit of fiction are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Present To A Despairing Writer

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

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

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

The Bullies Of The "Book Community"

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

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

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

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

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

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

     We both know the answers, Gentle Reader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do You Care About?

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

Why do you [want to] write?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Not Quite New Fiction

     In fact, if you’re a Liberty’s Torch Gentle Reader, you’ve probably read them all already:

     This little collection pulls together the short stories that have appeared only at Liberty's Torch, and adds a few that previously appeared at Smashwords, from which I am gradually disassociating. Amazon won’t allow me to give it away, so I have to ask a price, but it’s only $0.99, so if you’d like a permanent copy of them, guaranteed to remain yours when the day comes that Google finally chases me off this service, it’s about a third of the cost of a cup of Starbucks coffee. Consider it a Christmas gift with a small delivery charge. Also, it’s without the horror of “Digital Rights Management,” so feel free to pass it around.

The Light Bill

     [A short story for you today. Copyright (C) 2018 by Francis W. Porretto – FWP]

---

     She looked up as he seated himself at the dinette table. The gloom in his face nearly shocked her out of her own seat.
     “What’s the matter, love?” She caressed the back of his hand. “You look like you just ate a whole lemon.”
     “I wish that were all I had on my mind,” he muttered. He picked up his fork and started to address his meatloaf, dropped it and sat back with his arms crossed against his chest.
     I know that look. It’s money.
     Presently he said “We can’t stay here.”
     “Sweetie,” she said, “if we have to cut back on something—”
     “There no way we can cut back any further,” he said. “Not enough to matter, anyway.”
     She waited.
     “The light bill arrived today,” he said.
     Her anxiety surged. “Bad?”
     “Crippling. Over a thousand.”
     It shocked the breath out of her. “For two months?”
     He nodded.
     “What was the previous one?”
     “Seven hundred and some.”
     That was bad enough. I couldn’t get a word out of him for days.
     She looked down at her plate. A scoop of mashed potatoes, a tablespoonful of peas, and a very modest slice of meatloaf. It was the most indulgent meal she’d prepared all month...and with light bills on that order, she wouldn’t be serving it for the foreseeable future.
     He’s right. We can’t stay here. Unless—
     “Sweetie,” she murmured, “why don’t we have a look around after we’ve finished our dinners? There might still be some ways we could bring it down, and once we’re fed—”
     He was shaking his head.
     “You did another sweep already?”
     He nodded. “We’ve done everything we can do, love. There’s nowhere we can tighten up any further, and I’m not willing to live in the dark. It’s not us, it’s the rates. They’ve skyrocketed.”
     She sought her own resolve, found it, and brought it forth.
     “Then we’ll move to Broadville.”
     He looked up sharply. “You’d be willing?”
     She nodded. “If we must, we must.”
     “I remember how thrilled you were to move here,” he said. “A beautiful neighborhood, peaceful and green. Clean streets. Nice neighbors. Everything you wanted for our children to come.”
     “Everything,” she said, “except affordable. The light bill was extortionate even at the outset. Now it’s insupportable. So we move. Besides,” she said, “Broadville isn’t so bad. Pam and I were over there to shop just a few days ago. The community has cleaned itself up pretty well.”
     His gaze was steady. He seemed to be in the process of decision.
     Trying to figure out whether I’m sincere about moving, probably.
     “You sure you’re okay with it?” he said.
     She nodded once, firmly.
     “Then I’ll put this dump on the market tomorrow.”

---

     They got an entirely satisfactory offer almost at once. The buyers were a young married couple with no children. They were obviously very well off. He told them frankly about the light bills they could expect. That didn’t seem to matter to them. The man immediately wrote a check for half the stipulated down payment and suggested a closing that very week. They left smiling.
     She retreated to her little home office, pulled her crocheting project out of the wicker basket beside her armchair, settled herself and set the needles to clicking.
     I can’t believe it was that easy. There has to be a catch.
     But there wasn’t. When he came home he assured her of it.
     “The check cashed with no questions,” he said. “We’ve got twenty-five thousand dollars in the bank, with another twenty-five coming on Friday.” He crouched before her and took her hands. “We’re going to move, and we’re going to be okay!”
     She smiled broadly. For the first time in months she felt her anxieties lift. An impish thought took her.
     “Let’s celebrate,” she said. “Let’s splurge.”
     He cocked an eyebrow. “What do you have in mind?”
     She rose. “Come with me.”
     She pulled him to the living room and gestured at the windows. All were tightly covered with blackout shades, just as they had been from the day they’d moved in.
     “Open them all,” she proclaimed. “All the way to the ceiling.”
     His mouth fell open. “The university—”
     “Damn the university. Damn the astronomers! Let’s have ourselves a revel. Just for tonight, sweetie!”
     Her wildness seemed to infect him. A wolfish grin formed on his features.
     “As you wish, my love.” He bared his teeth at the instrument of retribution. “We’ll just ignore them!”
     They went from window to window, raising the shades to their highest stops, often with a jerk nearly strong enough to rip them down. For the first time in months, light streamed freely through those windows, illuminating the otherwise pitch-black neighborhood they would soon leave behind.
     The phone began to ring almost at once. They let it ring.

---

     They found a suitable home in Broadville after a very brief search. They noticed at once that the windows were covered by venetian blinds, rather than the heavy blackout shades they’d endured for so long. They paid the entire down payment at once and demanded an immediate closing. The owners were happy to oblige them.
     The moving van had departed only minutes before, and they were in the process of unpacking, when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it.
     The man at the door was nattily attired. He carried the sort of briefcase one might see dangling from the hand of a lawyer. His smile was polished and impersonal.
     “I see that you’re new to Broadville,” he said with a gesture at the piles of half-unpacked boxes, “so you might not be aware of some of the most recent developments. May I have a few minutes of your time?”
     She glanced back at her husband. He nodded. She stepped aside to admit him. The three sat around their coffee table. Their guest set his briefcase on the table and popped the catches.
     “You’re in a tightly restricted zone,” he said, “so your application will be more demanding than most other Broadville residents.” From the briefcase he drew a segment of thick foam rubber. “This is the filling used in our wall hangings. Guaranteed to establish a twenty-eight decibel attenuation of secondary sound emissions. A number of attractive cover designs are available. Our products come with a five year warranty, with no pro rata and no return shipping charges. We also offer a liberal payment plan, thirty-six monthly payments at only three percent annually.”
     There was a brief silence. The salesman smiled calmly, as if their reaction were no more than he’d expected.
     “Anti-sound hangings?” she murmured.
     The salesman nodded. “You should get them up as fast as possible, Ma’am. The local seismographic institute will be on your case at once if you don’t. Fortunately, we have a crew working the neighborhood already, so I can pencil you in for the day after tomorrow.” He reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a clipboard loaded with blank order forms. “What credit card would you like to use? We accept all the major ones.”
     She turned to her husband. He stared open-mouthed, clearly in shock.
     He must not have known.
     “I think,” she said at last, “we should take some time over this.”
     “I understand,” the salesman said. He returned his sample and clipboard to his briefcase, fastened it closed, and rose. “But I’d advise you not to take too long. You don’t want to leave your house un-attenuated. Even for a properly shielded house, the sound bills in this district can be murder.”

==<O>==

From The “Why Am I Doing This?” Files

     Well, apparently Black Friday isn’t a choice day for a book promotion. Nor has Experiences set the world on fire just yet. But then, the stories I tell are pretty outré, so I shouldn’t expect them to be popular, right?

     So why do I write them?

     It’s a question I’ve asked myself before. I’ve also answered it before. However, owing to the amount of effort my novels demand of me, there are days the answer doesn’t pop out of the usual slot. So I compel myself to think about it afresh.

---

     On average, completing a novel-length story takes me about a year. That’s not a “standard,” 2000-hour work year typical of wage employment; it’s just the elapsed time from inception to release. I do other things during that time, of course, or I wouldn’t have a properly stocked larder, clean clothes, and an orderly house (and you wouldn’t get these sententious essays). My estimate for the average number of “labor hours” I put into a novel is about 700. I seem unable to speed up the process.

     That’s an average, Gentle Reader. Love in the Time of Cinema took fewer hours of effort; Which Art In Hope took far more. Each novel, however, has required an emotional commitment of a sort virtually every artist or craftsman will recognize: a dedication to the story as worthy of the effort regardless of how it will eventually be greeted by the reading public.

     In other words, the story must strike me as being worth telling in and of itself.

     I’ve occasionally lamented the fall-off in originality that’s afflicted fantasy, science fiction, and horror: the three “speculative” genres. But originality has its costs. One of them is the eschewal of trend-following: i.e., “getting on the gravy train.” Another is a near-constant state of self-questioning: the “why am I doing this?” of the title.

     Even the most dedicated creator will doubt himself. (Not the Creator, mind you; just us fleshbound types.) “Why am I doing this when I could be simulating traffic patterns / jumping my wife / finishing Rise of the Tomb Raider? Where’s the return on investment?”

     The return on investment must come from the work itself. The tangible ROI, for a typical indie writer, is likely to be paltry. Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m terrible at promotion.

     That’s why I emphasize the importance of theme.

---

     Every worthwhile story speaks of the nature of Man.

     The previous sentence is a slight misstatement for purposes of impact. In a more accurate formulation, “Man” would be replaced by “personhood.” There are ineluctable consequences to personhood. The requirements:

• Delimited existence;
• Individual consciousness;
• Limited powers;
• Inescapable needs;
• Individual wants and priorities;

     ...give rise to everything else: what philosopher Loren Lomasky called the nature of the “project pursuer.” They also give rise to the moral and ethical laws that bind us. Tom Kratman has called these properties “the eternal verities.” It’s the right name for them, for as Thomas Carlyle once wrote, they are “fixed by the everlasting congruity of things” and are not alterable by any artifice.

     The theme of a worthwhile story must perforce be the illumination some aspect of the nature of Man and the laws that flow from it.

---

     Just in case you’ve been reading this half-asleep – I know, a lot of my tripe reads better that way – this is a fiction writer talking about fiction from an existential perspective: a “why bother?” sort of inquiry. It’s inherently opinion rather than exposition. However, it explains – to my satisfaction, at least – why so much fiction is inherently forgettable:

A poor story illuminates nothing of importance to us.

     Please don’t mistake me. It’s not that we don’t know our own natures or the moral and ethical laws that flow from them. Our knowledge of those things is built-in, installed by God and communicated to us through our consciences. So it’s unlikely that even the best story will tell the reader something he never knew. It’s more likely to remind him of something he’s always known, though he might have temporarily mislaid (or overlooked) it.

     The desire to dramatize elements of that knowledge is why I write. A factual-logical argument for a baldly stated abstraction, no matter how imperative, doesn’t capture the allegiance of the listener nearly as well as a dramatic demonstration of how it would work among characters the reader cares about. Ayn Rand inspired more freedom advocates with Atlas Shrugged than the thousands of purely factual and logical arguments for individual freedom that came before her.

     The great persuaders have all known this. Start from Jesus Christ and work your way forward.

---

     My futanari stories have had several different principal themes. Innocents is about the importance of justice to the just and what it can compel them to do. Experiences dramatizes the power of the need for acceptance. I have a third novel-length story percolating as I write this – working title The Wise and the Mad — in which I intend to address the supreme question of our time: what is tolerable, what is not, and how to distinguish between them. (I think of this as the “one idiot allowed per village” problem.)

     Perhaps we already know the answers to the questions above. Perhaps, if pressed, any man could articulate the answers. But there’s more juice – more power to motivate – in a story about such things than in any dry academic argument about them.

     And with that, it’s back to my labors. Keep the faith.

For Those Who Want Them

     I really should have mentioned this sooner: there are now paperback editions of:

• Polymath
• Statesman
• Love in the Time of Cinema
• Innocents
• Experiences

     Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) section has made it so easy (and so costless) to release paperbacks that I could no longer resist the opportunity. Mind you, there’s nothing in the paperbacks that isn’t in the digital editions, but some readers prefer a hardcopy book. I should know; I have over 13,000 of them.

     Thus, all my novel-length works are available in both hardcopy and digital editions. Enjoy!

Free Fiction!

     Everybody else is having a Black Friday sale, so I might as well have one too:

     All day November 23, 2018, Innocents is free of charge at Amazon:

     A novel of the Onteora Canon, set in the very near future. Genetic engineering and zygotic microsurgery have produced both wonders and horrors. Wonders such as drugs tailored to attack a specific disease in a specific sufferer, or surgery to eliminate genetically borne handicaps before mitosis can begin. Horrors such as blindness or deafness deliberately inflicted upon unborn babies, or pitiable creatures whose bodies and minds are warped to satisfy the whims of wealthy perverts.

     Security specialist Larry Sokoloff is on vacation far from home, straining to forget a woman he loves but cannot have, when Fountain, a teenaged escapee from a malevolent institution, comes under his protection. What he learns of her nature and origins lays bare the darker face of the Janus of biotechnology, and catapults him and his colleague Trish McAvoy into a mission of vengeance and cleansing. For adults only.

     Innocents is the prequel to my recently released Experiences, so take the opportunity to collect the whole set and save a few bucks!

New Fiction! (UPDATED)

     It’s here at last:

     The long awaited sequel to Innocents:

     A neurophysiologist develops a technique for altering human desires...
     A college strictly for futanari finds its protective obscurity threatened...
     A romance novelist becomes the emotional target of a young transwoman...
     A young American genius unknowingly courts a futanari from distant China...
     A Japanese sex slaver whose business was destroyed by an American security company seeks vengeance...

     Once again, Father Raymond Altomare, pastor of Onteora County, has his hands full.

     Experiences is currently $3.99 in digital form.

     UPDATE: The paperback edition is now available, priced at $9.99.

     Also, I’ve released an omnibus edition of the three Athene Academy novelettes, priced at $1.99.

     Enjoy!

Serious Troubles Afoot

     Incredibly, Amazon is disputing my rights to one of my books. Here’s the email I received:

Hello,

     Thank you for publishing with Amazon. Copyright is important to us – we want to make sure that no author or other copyright holder has his or her books sold by anyone else. To publish your book, please respond with documentation confirming your publishing rights within four days:

     Love In The Time Of Cinema by Francis Porretto (AUTHOR) (ID: PRI-CXTSTTECFD9)
     Examples of documentation we cannot accept are:

     - A personal statement by you that you have the publishing rights
     - A copyright application for which registration has not been confirmed
     - Contracts that have not been signed by all parties

     Examples of acceptable documentation are:

     - If you are the author and you are republishing your book after your publication rights have been reverted to you, a signed reversion letter from your former publisher
     - A signed contract between you and the author granting you the rights to publish the book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected
     - An e-mail from the address listed on the author’s (or their agent’s) official website confirming that you have the rights to publish their book in the territories, languages and formats you have selected

     If you publish books for which you do not hold the publishing rights, your account may be terminated.

Best regards,

Amazon KDP

     I’m at a loss here. No one but Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has ever issued Love in the Time of Cinema. To the best of my knowledge, no one else is claiming to be its author.

     Here’s my reply to the email above:

Dear Sirs and Madames at Amazon,

     I don’t understand the reason for this demand. I am both the author and the publisher of Love in the Time of Cinema. Why is there any question about that? Has someone else claimed that the book belongs to him?

     I operate several websites, all of them on Google’s Blogger system:
     http://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com – My general commentary website.
     http://fwporretto.blogspot.com – If I have an “author’s official website,” I suppose this would be it, even though it doesn’t amount to much.
     http://face-press.blogspot.com/ -- This one is just a “vanity press” I invented myself.

     But at no time has anyone other than myself published any of my books. Indeed, at this time, all of them are available strictly through Amazon!

     Is it possible that there’s some confusion because I don’t consistently use my middle initial? Some of my books appear under Francis Porretto, and some under Francis W. Porretto. But both of those are the same individual: me!

     Please let me know what other information you need to resolve this, as I am totally dependent on Amazon for the sale of my books, including Love in the Time of Cinema.

Sincerely,
Francis W. Porretto

     Can anyone offer any insight? Any remedy?

Quickies: In Search Of An Idea

     (Leonard Nimoy, call your office!)

     As I await my cover artist’s creation, I’ve been maundering over what to do next fictionally. The Onteora Canon, as much fun as it’s been, deserves a rest, possibly a permanent one. Concerning the Spooner Federation Saga, with which I’ve had an equally good time (and which deserves at least one more novel), I haven’t quite worked up the energy for another volume in that especially taxing series. And I think I need to be away from Athene Academy and the futanari of Onteora County for a little while, for similar reasons.

     But I dislike idleness. To pause for a week or two after completing a novel-length story is one thing; to go on a months-long sabbatical away from fiction is quite another. Dangerous. I could lose my fictioneering chops and be relegated to nothing but these interminable op-eds for the rest of my days. So I’ve been casting about for a fresh idea that would sustain a novel-length story.

     Well, Our Lord and Savior has told us to pray for what we need, so this morning before Mass I asked Him – and His Dad and The Spook, of course – for an idea that would be:

• Suitable for a novel-length story;
• Usable in a fantasy or science fiction setting;
• Relevant to contemporary discourse on a subject of interest.

     And glory be! I got one.

     What’s of greater current interest than ecological balances, eh? Damned near nothing I can think of. Perhaps the most contentious issue within that envelope would be the role of Man in the Terrestrial ecology. the loudest voices are those that proclaim that Man is an excrescence upon Earth’s ecology: an intruder who can only do harm, and whose effects we are morally obligated to minimize.

     But there are arguments, good ones, to the effect that the reverse is true: that Man is an integral part of the ecology, and that his subtraction from it would give rise to what any objective observer would call catastrophe... that is, if there were an objective observer around after Man had been removed from the scene.

     Now, in our temporal reality we would look for destructive organisms and pernicious influences that would surge beyond control without Man to moderate them. But a spec-fic approach would not be restricted to what know of Earth in reality.

     Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, and Jerry Pournelle turned in a nice treatment of this idea in The Legacy of Heorot and sequelae. But that hasn’t used it up. There’s room for further exploration of the idea. A significant departure might include non-biological interactors with a planetary ecosystem: interactors that only Man can control.

     I’ll be tossing this around for a few days, I’m sure.

"Mr. Gone-Mobile"

     I’ve had a lot of fun, recently, owing to a kinda-sorta collaboration over my most recent novel, Experienced. (Yeah, yeah, I haven’t released it yet. I’m waiting for my cover artist, and I refuse to hurry her. She’s too good.) Because that interaction, conducted via email with a distant friend, was both productive and fun – it contributed materially to the final version of the novel – I thought I might extend the adventure. So here goes nothing.

     Regard the following character sketch:

     He’s in his early forties, unmarried and without children. He enjoyed enormous success in his trade, but he no longer practices it and is reluctant to talk about it. He drives around the U.S. in his motorhome, apparently unconcerned about the passage of time. He makes a point of knowing where the Catholic Churches are, and of attending Mass as often as he can.

     He’s six feet tall, weighs about a hundred eighty pounds, and is very fit. He takes pride in his appearance and his physical aptitudes, but he doesn’t brag about them. His outward presentation is unassuming: polo shirts or tees, khaki trousers or dark jeans, loafers or running shoes.

     He must have money, for he’s unconcerned by it. Now and then he takes a temporary job, but he’s never concerned about the pay. Moreover, the jobs are of every sort except office work. “I’ve had enough of that,” he was once heard to say.

     He can cook, but he eats out quite often, usually alone. His motorhome is impeccably kept and maintained. He doesn’t do much of that himself; he trusts the specialists who’ve made it their oeuvre...until they try to cheat him.

     His large motorhome contains several compartments that are unobvious to the casual observer, or even one who’s not so casual. One of them contains his firearms. A second is a walk-in refrigerator/freezer, equipped for easy sterilization. A third is large enough for two people to hide in. All of them are insulated against sound, radar, and infrared emissions.

     He’s seldom parted from his laptop computer. It’s a high-end model. He uses it both to read and to write. Now and then he’ll send an article to the op-ed section of the local paper. They’re seldom rejected.

     He likes people and makes a point of meeting the locals wherever he goes, but he’s disinclined to spend more than a week or two anywhere. There’s a lot of country to see, and he knows it could take more than a lifetime to see it all. That doesn’t keep him from becoming involved with the locals or in local affairs.

     Okay, Gentle Readers, here are my questions for you:

1. What’s his name?
2. Was he ever married?
3. Should he travel with a dog?
4. Does he have any living relatives?
5. What are his reasons for choosing a life on the road? Is a lost love one of them?
6. What white-collar trade did he practice that made him wealthy? Why did he give it up?
7. Where should his first story take him and in what sort of adventure should he involve himself there?

     Feel free to leave suggestions in the comments, or to email them to me at the address I use for the website:

morelonhouse
- at –
optonline
- dot –
net

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.

---

     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!

Free Fiction!

     My novel Chosen One, the first volume of the Realm of Essences series, will be free of charge at Amazon throughout today: Saturday, August 4, 2018:

     From his earliest days, Louis Redmond proves to be a prodigy: brilliant, powerful, and great-souled, a trailblazer of the spirit and a natural leader of men. Armies would follow him into the mouth of Hell. Yet tragedy dogs his steps, depriving him of family and friends. Hammerblow follows hammerblow, giving him little time to recover.

     But Louis is watched over by one who knows all the ways of Man: Malcolm Loughlin, immortal grandmaster of all things martial, who’s trained the world’s great warriors for two millennia. His wisdom, enough to elevate Louis to the throne of the world, is available to Louis, for a price...

     A price even a Titan would shudder to meet.

     But today, August 4, you won’t have to pay any price. So get it while it’s hot and cheap!