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.

Awards, Campaigning, And “The Hamlet Question”

     Recently, the world of science fiction was profoundly and righteously shaken by the so-called “Sad Puppies” affair. (It was “so called” because that’s what the organizers called it, so....) I wrote a little about it over at Liberty’s Torch, my op-ed site, here, here, and here. To my way of thinking, it was all to the good, both because it involved a larger number of SF readers in the fan-awarded Hugo nominations, and because the aftermath revealed the hypocrisy, venality, and mean-spiritedness of the “social-justice warriors” who had contrived to dominate the nominations process in recent years.

     I thought I was done with the subject, but it rebounded on me. My readers started asking me why I hadn’t taken part in the Sad Puppies campaign. After all, I write science fiction...kinda-sorta, anyway...so why not lend a hand? It might result in one of my books being selected for such an honor in the future.

     I appreciated the enthusiasm and admiration of those readers. However, I could never take part in such a campaign -- not because I have any moral qualms about it, but because I avoid any involvement with groups, regardless of their nature or agendas, with a fervor some have characterized as “religious” and others have deemed “psychotic.”

     “To be or not to be a joiner?” Hamlet would have cried...if he were a kinda-sorta SF writer named Francis W. Porretto. Yes, that is the question...and the answer is a resounding Hell, no! Allow me a quote from a favorite book: Clarence Carson’s The American Tradition:

     In a conversation with one other person, you have discovered that person to be sympathetic, polite, and thoughtful You may go away from such an experience concluding that you have met and are coming to know a genuine human being. Your next meeting, however, may take place in a group. Here the person who was congenial when alone with you may make cutting remarks and align himself with the others of the group against you on matters upon which you were sure you would agree. A little reflection should convince us, if we are not entirely unusual, that we have done the same thing ourselves....

     Anyone who has worked with aggregates of people should have noted some differences between groups and individuals. Groups do not think or reason; that is solely a function of the individual. On the other hand, individuals, feeling the strength of numbers, are emboldened to do things which they would be afraid to do alone. Children in a classroom will become defiant if they sense the class is with them, and one may observe them darting their eyes about over the room to assure themselves that the others are behind them. At a more serious level, anyone who has endured the abuse of massed pickets when he crossed the line can testify to the loss of inhibition which accompanies the merging with a group. People tend to lose their sense of individual responsibility when they become part of a crowd.

     Now, Dr. Carson was mainly concerned with the sociopolitical importance of groups, and the proper measures by which to civilize them. But the essence of group campaigns, regardless of the cause involved, is the submission of the individual will to the predominant will: at some times the will of a powerful or charismatic leader figure, at other times the will of a majority.

     I cannot subordinate my will to that of another person, even theoretically. How, then, should I ally myself with a group substantially more likely to do so and more capable of doing so?

     Perhaps it’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. All the same, the inhibition is a strong one, erected over the decades by youthful involvements and mature interactions with groups and evangelists for groups. I consider it a protection for my integrity, and I will not work to dismantle it.

     Besides, who needs awards? I want readers first and foremost, and a modest amount of revenue after that. True, an award widely recognized as a mark of excellence would help me to get those things. But now that such awards have become prime targets for politically oriented groups – especially left-liberal groups – they are no longer reliable indicators of quality, being more an emblem of the writer’s endorsement for some common political viewpoint.

     So I tend to dismiss literary awards as significant signs of quality fiction, and eschew campaigns such as Sad Puppies. As healthful for the SF field as “Sad Puppies 3” could be, it has already elicited a counter-campaign by “social-justice warriors” determined to re-establish their hegemony over the Hugos. Thus, future Hugo nominations and awards will be more about political alignments and less about good storytelling than ever. That’s the sort of contretemps I prefer to watch from a distance...preferably with a Daiquiri or Fuzzy Navel at hand. (They go great with a good book.)

The Besiegers And Demeaners

     If you plan to expose your stories to the world, you have to be ready for the condemnations and derisions that will follow.

     Sounds like an “of course” statement, doesn’t it? At one time I’d have said so myself. But not today. Today, there are legions that exist solely to condemn those who express certain viewpoints – and they’re as vicious about it as they can be but still slide past the slander laws.

     I get a lot of that sort of thing, because:

• I’m a Catholic;
• I’m opposed to abortion;
• I mock the “cult of the victim,” regardless of the victim at issue;
• I consider homosexuality disgusting, and in-your-face homosexuality a social offense;
• I’m a believer in sharply limited government, and that no “cause” is sufficient justification for transgressing Constitutional boundaries on government power or activity.

     So I get it five different ways: from the militant atheists; from the abortion worshippers; from the victimists (i.e., the feminists, the racial mouthpieces, the ethnicists, and the “social-justice warriors”); from the homosexuals; and from assorted “cause people” (e.g., the enviro-Nazis). And I won’t kid you: at first, it was daunting.

     At first. Then I realized something: those idiots have never contributed one single thing to my well-being, my edification, or my entertainment – or anyone else’s. All they deserve is contempt.

     Why concern yourself about the derision of those you hold in contempt?

     Of course, there is a line that must not be crossed. Those who cross that line – i.e., those who threaten or attempt to do me actual harm – must be dealt with, and I do so. Happily, there are few such, as most of the abovementioned idiots are as cowardly as they are mouthy.

     The cowardice is easily detected. They almost never reveal their right names. They slink about on the Web behind a gaggle of “handles” – back when actual teaching took place in the schools, we called them “pseudonyms” – to obscure their identities and histories. And of course, they never argue or present evidence; they can’t. They merely howl at the tops of their lungs. It’s the only thing they can do that has a chance of silencing you.

     I don’t generally advocate feeling superior to others...but allowing yourself to feel superior to useless cowardly cretins is fully justified. Especially if you’re merely trying to entertain while promulgating a social, economic, or political point.

     Tell your stories without fear. If they’re entertaining and true-to-life (which really means that you’ve portrayed plausible characters in a plausible setting acting plausibly according to the laws of Nature), your point will come across regardless of what it is. Even those who disagree with it will at least have enjoyed your tale, which is the most important thing a writer can do. It’s the sine qua non of this occupation.

     And if you succeed in making converts to your point of view, well, that’s a bonus. I can only congratulate you on it. That doesn’t mean I won’t argue against it...but I won’t condemn you as an enemy of all that’s right, true and good. Unless you happen to be one, that is!

"Where Do You Get Your Ideas?"

     Isaac Asimov once wrote that “where do you get your ideas?” is the question fans asked him most often. He found the question frustrating. Ideas for stories are all around you, he said; just reach out and grab one. That indirectly expressed the facility he had for seeing the vast number of phenomena that a curious mind can mine for attractive ideas.

     Let’s go to the bedrock and work our way up from there: What constitutes an idea that would be grist for a fiction writer’s mill? Categorically, mind you; not specifically. Because “idea” is a label for a very general class of things. We want a definition for a more specific category: “an idea for a story.” Let’s see: what characteristics must attach to “an idea for a story?”

• It must pose a problem for people to confront;
• The problem must be non-trivial.

     The first of those requirements flows from John Brunner’s Laws of Fiction:

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

     So your idea must involve people – the characters your story will depict – facing a problem and straining to cope with it.

     The second requirement is tougher. There are a lot of trivial problems to be solved, and each of us solves a multitude of them every day. As a mathematician might say, they’re problems with known solutions – in the usual case, many known solutions. We pick one, apply it, and continue on to whatever comes next. It’s a familiar process; we call it “life.”

     But no one wants to read a story about the trouble you had choosing a pair of socks, or washing the coffee residue out of your favorite mug. Trivial problems are...well, trivial. They involve no ingenuity, no hard thought or effort, and change nothing of significance about you or the world around you. A reader wants to see your protagonist “work for it.” His problem should put him through a wringer, whether he solves it or not: something that would change him or others in a definite way. The alien monster must not take one look at the hero, scream, and commit suicide. Neither should the girl swoon and throw herself into his arms without some effort on his part.

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     One of my favorite stories, which appears in this collection, arose from an utterly ordinary phenomenon: abandoned babies found on the church steps. That’s been a common way for a mother who can’t (or won’t) care for a baby to divest herself of the problem ever since women first had unwanted babies (and churches first had steps). The Church has a policy of always taking in such infants and doing the best it can for them, whether that means turning them over to an order of nuns to be raised, finding willing adopters, or whatever. But caring for some infants brings more trouble than others. After all, wasn’t that true of yours?

     I was reading about a case of that very sort when the idea struck me: What if the abandoned infant were a vampire? What would the Church do then? Imagining the terrible contradiction that would confront the priest who finds such a baby, and imagining the differences of opinion that could arise among his brothers in the cloth, gave rise to my story “Foundling.”

     “Foundling” is a very emotional and deeply religious story: the former entirely because of the latter. It would have been a lot harder to write for someone who has no faith. But there’s no guarantee that a particular idea will suit the orientation and skills of the writer who comes up with it. That’s just the way the dice fall, sometimes.

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     Yesterday’s story made use of a problem I’d been suffering from for a while: the scourge of post-nasal drip. No, it doesn’t kill you; it just makes you wish it would. And millions upon millions of tormented souls are suffering from it as you read this. But what if you were to find an effective remedy? And what if that remedy had a side effect that’s too terrible – or too funny – to be borne? Such that unless your protagonist does something clever, he won’t be able to reap the vast fortune his remedy would otherwise provide him?

     Now there’s a fine story idea! It’s a problem a pharmacologist must face and solve, and a serious one at that: Either successfully suppress the side effect, or no vast fortune!

     And with that, I was off to the keyboard. But where did the idea come from? Why, from my very own post-nasal drip...and from my realization that whoever could beat this terror from the depths of Hell would be able to open his own mint.

     I didn’t have to look too far away for that one, did I?

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     “The more you look, the more you see,” wrote Robert M. Pirsig in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Truer words were never spoken, written, or encoded in Braille. Just looking at people, noting their trials and travails and what they must often do to surmount them, will provide a writer with more story ideas than he could use up in one lifetime. That’s the biggest reason a writer must have a life away from the keyboard; he who isolates himself will run dry of ideas faster than you can chug a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. Inversely, he who immerses himself in the life of Man will have the inverse problem: time and energy enough to use all the fascinating possibilities that occur to him as he strolls along, watching others live their lives.

     And speaking of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters, infinite improbability drives, tea properly made, and the like, where do you suppose the late, hilariously funny Douglas Adams got the idea for the opening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, hm? Might it have been from a condemnation order against his home, or perhaps a neighbor’s, to make way for a new road? Pretty commonplace stuff...but the idea behind it was priceless, as is Adams’s first and best novel.

     There’s more to say about ideas, of course: plot ideas versus character ideas, picking the best setting in which to stage a story around a particular idea, what sort of protagonist would suit your new idea, what length the story should be, and so forth. But let’s leave that for another day. I have a lot to do today, and I’d like to get in some fiction writing time before I turn to the more mundane chores. You see, I was just thinking about the icky mess that collects at the bottom of the cats’ litter boxes, and it gave me this idea...

     Later, Gentle Reader.

Concerning "A Place Of Our Own"

From the instant of its release, I was braced for a passel of shocked reactions to A Place Of Our Own, and I was not disappointed. What surprised me was that about half my correspondents were shocked at the subject matter – they must have missed the part about it being a fantasy -- while the other half were incredulous for a wholly different reason: “You call this erotica? There’s practically no sex in it!”

Well, yes. That’s because in my view, erotica is about the evocation of desire. Anyone can write about sexual mechanics...and quite a lot of people have done so. I find that sort of “fiction” about as arousing as a medical journal. (Does your patient suffer from prolapse of the anus, Doctor?)

Good fiction must be about people and the changes they experience. When the subject is human desire, the changes can be quite dramatic, which is why sexual desire and its consequences are so important in so much fiction. But sex per se doesn’t evoke desire; it quells it. That’s the whole point!

Desire...longing...the idealized image of one’s unattainable beloved hanging eternally in the mind’s eye: these are things that motivate human contemplation, action, and the consequent changes. Not pleasant friction on the mucous membranes...or anywhere else on the body.

Knowing Why They're There

Today’s subject was inspired by two stimuli. First, there’s Stacy McCain’s tribute to the late Jack Vance, from which I quote:

For what my opinion is worth, Vance has no equals in his mastery of both description and action. His books are filled with desperate deeds and heroic acts done in strange landscapes and bizarre societies, and all of them excellently described.

I concur...but let’s not stop there. Vance’s gifts go beyond those two admitted strengths. His heroes are unique and inspiring. His prose style is incomparably rich and vivid. Like Heinlein, his devotion to human excellence and the sort of milieu in which it flourishes is consistent across all his works. Even his semisatirical “Dying Earth” tales exhibit those strengths, albeit in many cases by counterexample and contrast. Readers unfamiliar with Vance should savor his short novel The Blue World for a concise example of his strengths.

If I have an idol among fiction writers, it’s Jack Vance.

Which got me to thinking: Do I read and love Vance’s stuff because his strengths are so many? Or do I seek out his books for some particular aspect that he does better than all the others...and better than other writers as well?

I can’t answer the question – but questions one can’t answer are the best imaginable prods to continuing hard thought.

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The second impetus to today’s subject is a letter I recently received from a reader who sensed from this piece that I might be a bit disheartened about my fiction:

I know that Louis Redmond is imaginary, and that the Planet called Hope is made solely of fairy dust, yet Louis's story never fails to make me want to be a better man. That if I wished to live in a place like Morelon House, I must be as they are: Honest, hardworking, generous, kind, and loyal. If we wish that the President was Stephen Sumner, We must act like him first, and a man of his Character will naturally rise out of a people like those of Onteora County.

I am reading my children the Hobbit, because Bilbo Baggins is a better role model for them than anyone in the newspapers in the last 30 years. When the time comes, I will let them read about Todd Iverson, & Kevin Conway, & Louis Redmond. I would rather my children wish themselves alongside Louis Redmond, lost in the Land of make believe, than wish to be a celebrity, which is equally as likely, and not nearly so edifying. Britain conquered the world with Macaulay's lines on their lips

"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods."

...Your stories, Fran, can give men Hope, and strengthen their Faith, and help them fall in Love. Please do not be discouraged, you have already given a greater gift to the world than you know, and I eagerly await more of your stories. God Bless you and have a blessed rest of Lent and a Joyous Easter.

No writer could ask for – or receive – a higher tribute than that. I hardly deserve it. But the praise is really the lesser of the bounties my correspondent had bestowed upon me. The greater one is this: he told me explicitly what he values in my books.

A writer who discovers why his audience reads his work has been given the keys to the kingdom.

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Writers all yearn to find an audience. It doesn’t matter whether we write fiction or non-fiction; what we desperately need to know is what we do that most appeals to those who’ve happened upon us, have loved what they’ve found, and continue to seek our stuff.

The contemporary fiction market offers writers the possibility of easy, non-threatening feedback from our readers, via email and interactive websites (e.g., blogs). Thus, discovering why your readers like your stuff is easier than in previous decades. But once you know, what should you do with the knowledge?

One response is to strengthen one’s weak areas. Do your fans love your action scenes? So practice description and scene-setting. Do your fans love your evocation of emotions? Maybe you should try writing more active stories. This isn’t exactly wrong, but it can lead one astray. For example, at a time when I lamented what I thought was a weakness in my powers of description, I started forcing descriptive passages into stories that couldn’t carry them. It took feedback from a candid test reader to nudge me off that track.

The opposite response, to concentrate wholly upon one’s strengths and slough all other considerations, can be just as treacherous. No one can write “pure” action, or “pure” description, or “pure” anything else, for reasons beyond the scope of this tirade. Even Shakespeare, who concentrated upon depicting the great emotions, had to say something about what the backdrop should look like. Yes, his stage directions are classically brief, but they’re there. Fortunately for him (and us), the brilliance of his characterizations and dialogue makes more ornate descriptions of setting irrelevant.

All the same, one direction is the better of the two. Just as with a good field commander, a smart writer who knows why his fans like his stuff tries principally to reinforce his successes: i.e., to do what he does well better still, albeit without neglecting the other essentials of his craft.

It’s not a hard balance to strike. Acquiring the necessary insight is the hard part...and only your readers can give you that.

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After I’d taken a few days to reflect upon my correspondent’s thoughts, I wrote back (in part) as follows:

I’ve let this much time elapse before replying because your note had a large effect upon me. To be brief (which I seldom am, so savor this occasion!), you’ve reminded me of why I write fiction: because when done well, fiction conveys ideas and moral themes better by far than the best nonfiction opinion writing.

I consciously set out to create heroes: men and women in the vein of Macaulay’s Horatius. Readers are more affected by a convincing hero than by the finest, most involute of arguments. A good hero evokes precisely the response of which you wrote. But heroic fiction has a problem these days: plausibility. Contemporary readers all too often greet a genuinely good, genuinely heroic character with “Oh, come on! There aren’t any people like that.”

The cynicism of our age can make life difficult for a writer whose stories have a polemic tilt. When C. S. Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy, the world was a much different place. The West actually had behaved somewhat heroically in the recent past. I doubt his protagonist Elwin Ransom (whom he modeled on his close friend J. R. R. Tolkien) was greeted with the cynicism that Louis Redmond, or Armand Morelon, or Todd Iverson, or the siblings of The Sledgehammer Concerto often arouse.

My goal in writing fiction has always been, in the words of a writer friend, “to illuminate eternal verities:” the truths that envelop all human experience. I do that by creating heroes – and if I may judge by the feedback I’ve received, it’s my heroes that such fans as I’ve acquired value most. Note the causal sequence: the eternal verities aren’t a mere spinoff of the heroes; the heroes exist to actuate the verities. Lewis’s Ransom didn’t create the importance of faith and courage; he depicted them through his adventures. Tolkien’s Frodo didn’t create the importance of dedication and self-subordination to a higher cause; his journey merely illustrated it. Yet the characters are essential, for no quality of men can be depicted at all, much less strikingly or persuasively, without men to depict it.

I’ve said before, and more than once, that good fiction is a more powerful polemic vehicle than any other. Yet the polemic cannot be overt. It’s the heroes who persuade, even if they do so without argument. The verities themselves just sit there waiting for someone to illustrate them, whether by conforming to them or attempting to deny them.

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If you write, the most precious knowledge you can obtain is why others read you. Stacy McCain and my unnamed correspondent have helped me to remember that. I wasn’t in any real danger of ceasing to write, but now and then every writer gets mired in his darker thoughts and needs a little goose in the caboose to get back into motion. I’m no exception.

But how does one ferret out the pool of readers who’d love your work as your existing readers do, but haven’t yet happened upon it? That, Watson, is a three-pipe problem!

Messaging Versus Entertaining

Sarah Hoyt notes the hazard in trading entertainment value for a socially approved message:

[A] story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such as making sure your reasoning makes sense throughout, or that you have established the character’s traits to evoke an emotional response from the reader and catharsis at the end of the story....[I]ntroduce a minority character, be it racial, sexual or religious, in one of the approved “categories” and the readership, which are “fans” of social justice will immediately imbue that “victim character” with all the characteristics of noble victims ever penned since Jean Jacques Rousseau rode the noble savage into the sunset.

Because of that, “message writing” will always be inferior to “entertainment writing” when viewed in the dispassionate cold light of day....

But there is more moral peril to “message writing” because of the very mode of thought it encourages amid its practitioners; a mode of thought best described as “seeing oppressors under every bed.”

Sarah's target in the above-cited essay is the "social-justice writing" crowd that seems to be entrenched beyond all possibility of removal at the conventional publishing houses I usually call Pub World. Both her points are valid, but it's the second one that has enduring importance.

When your culture screams that you're a victim, you're far more likely to accept that that's what you are, unalterably. When a culture tells an entire demographic that it's a victim-group, that group is likely to exhibit all the most unfortunate features of such groups throughout history. The worst of those features is the "victim's" tendency to define himself in relation to his "oppressors."

The case of a true victim class, the enslaved Negroes of pre-Civil-War America, is most illustrative. The Negro slave defined his entire existence relative to that of his owner. He had no choice in the matter, for his owner dictated the conditions of every moment of his life. Even once the slaves were emancipated, the former slave tended to view his cone of possibilities from the vantage point of his prior enslavement. That persistence of outlook gave rise to the tenant farming / "sharecropping" economy that flourished in the South for some years after the war.

In contrast, members of the ersatz victim classes of today voluntarily adopt such a perspective. Some of them do so insincerely: i.e., in pursuit of advantages available to officially recognized, legally privileged groups. Some do so for reasons deriving from their personal circumstances, for there are still social pockets in America where the great majority exhibits disdain for members of certain minorities and treats them unfairly. But a great many, perhaps most, do so because the culture in which they're immersed tells them loudly and multifariously that they're oppressed.

The culture, be it ever remembered, swaddles all of us at every instant of our lives. It's embedded in our journalism, our entertainment, our commercial and social conventions, our prevailing modes of dress and conduct, and our habits of speech. Though it cannot dictate with godlike force, it can condition us, cause us to look away from certain possibilities, and refuse to admit that certain alternatives to "the way things are" even exist.

Culture, like motivation, is a field-like force. It presses all of us in the same direction.

“A mechanical process can reverse a bit at random, but motivation acts like a field — the elements won’t change unless the field does.” — James Tiptree, “Faithful To Thee, Terra, In Our Fashion”

Some will resist the urgings of culture, and some of those will be successful. But the pressure will still be there.

---

One of the best reasons for conservatives to reclaim the American culture is that it's probably the only way, short of mass bloodshed, to put an end to the cult of victimism that pervades today's legal and political environment. The proliferation of self-nominated victim-groups has become absurd. Everyone seems to want to be classified as a victim of some sort, and why not? There are legal privileges to be had. There are social accommodations for victims, all the way from support groups and twelve-step programs to victims-only movie nights, dating websites, and fetish clubs. (Watch out for that "Fifty Shades" stuff; there's no telling what could follow it into your neighborhood.) Companies large and small chafe under de facto hiring quotas designed to mollify victim groups -- and once hired, many such victims demand and receive special accommodations. If we omit government itself, there's no more noxious influence on our social order.

A reclaimed culture that emphasizes individualism and self-determination is the winning counterforce to the victimist tide:

• A journalistic culture that refuses to treat crimes differently according to the races, sexes, and creeds of the perpetrators;
• An entertainment culture that refrains from valorizing characters because of their group membership;
• A commercial culture that ignores group membership and recognizes only performance;
• Social conventions that recognize race, sex, and creed without privileging particular ones;
• True tolerance of freely chosen "roles," especially traditional masculinity and femininity;
• A lexicon and a diction that are indifferent to the assumed sensitivities of various groups.

The heart of this prescription is individualism. Your membership in a group means only that you're a member of that group: i.e., that you conform to the genus and differentia that define the group. If the group is known for certain disagreeable patterns of conduct, it's your job to demonstrate that you diverge from that pattern. This is especially important in matters of race, sex, and creed. It becomes critical when stereotypes are involved.

Something the celebrated Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, once said strikes me as apposite. A mother had written to her about worries about her teenage daughter's social circle. Apparently that group was trending in a destructive direction -- the specifics elude my memory at this time -- and Mom was worried that her daughter would succumb to "peer pressure." Martin's reply was stunning: "Tell your daughter, 'You're a peer too, so why not start some pressure in the other direction?'"

Why not, indeed?

---

The connection to my personal concerns is, of course, through fiction. Sarah's essay reminded me of a complaint I got from a reader about the religious connotation attached to the name of an antagonist character in one of my books. I was nonplussed. My reader was offended by the idea that a person of her faith might ever turn out to be a villain. Though I let her complaint slide off my back, it has remained with me as a reminder of the insistence activist groups have placed on being represented in some venues and being excluded from others.

Have you noticed how seldom the villain in a contemporary police or detective drama turns out to be a Negro? Yet I can't name a show in which none of the good guys are black -- possibly because I only watch television between paragraphs -- and to cap the irony, the black character is usually cast as a master of technology or some other sort of bulging brain. Impossible? No, not at all. But given what we know about academic proclivities and occupational distributions, how likely is it?

That's rankled me for quite some time. I allowed it to influence certain decisions I made in the Realm of Essences books -- in the reverse direction. Call it my contribution to re-establishing true proportionality. After that set of adventures, when I tackled the Spooner Federation saga, I resolved not to mention race at all.

That's how our fictional culture is formed. Those already in the arena have made their decisions. It's high time those of us who love freedom got in there, too. But, please: always make entertaining the reader your first priority. Don't risk boring or alienating him for "a pot of message."

Prosodies, Threnodies, And Maladies

---

The indie-writers movement is a thing of great internal variety. Indeed, the one thing we have in common is that we publish our own crap. However, our offerings do display some differences, statistically at least, from the drivel that Pub World puts out. In particular, Pub World fiction puts more emphasis on style than does indie fiction. Indies tend to emphasize plot and excitement.

That cleavage probably derives, at least in part, from the reason we write: the kinds of stories that thrilled us as readers have become rare among Pub World offerings. That’s certainly part of my motive power: at one point before I decided to try my hand at fiction, I felt I’d gone a whole year without encountering a hero-protagonist I could wholeheartedly admire and root for – and I read 150 to 200 novels per year.

But just as tedious is the prevalent demotion of plot in favor of just about anything else. Were it not for murder mysteries and the Clancyesque military thriller subgenre, Pub World fiction would lack plot almost completely. It’s as if Ayn Rand’s caricature of a writer from Atlas Shrugged – the one who opined that “plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature” – had taken over the publishing industry.

Ponder the sentiments of one such denigrator of plot:

Eva Brann cares.

Brann teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is driven by the classics and professors are known as tutors.

Years ago she read one of Stephen King's books. She was greatly disappointed. "It was mere plot," she says. "Everything was geared to stimulation by way of action."

Asked if she could recall the name of the King novel, she says, "It left no impression. It left no impression whatsoever." That, she says, is a characteristic of popular fiction.

"There's a pornography of sex and a pornography of the nerves," she continues. The No-Stylists, she says, are penning the latter type of porn. "Things happen -- crude, wild, exciting things. They have no human depth. They're just occurrences."

A derisive, backhanded dismissal of one of the most gifted storytellers of our time! This Brann babe must have some chops of her own, wouldn’t you think? Yet an Amazon search turns up no fiction published under her name. Maybe she publishes under a pseudonym. At any rate, that would help her to avoid having her stories contrasted with King’s. Whatever the case, it’s plain that Miss Brann is very sad about the state of modern fiction.

I don’t write to please the Eva Branns of the world. No indie of my acquaintance does.

The point of storytelling is...well, let’s not go there, as there’s more than one answer. But the principal requirement of storytelling is to entertain the reader. Style fails to address that requirement.

---

One of the happy discoveries I’ve made since embarking on this adventure is that a writer’s personal style becomes distinctive as he writes, even if his sole aim is to tell a particular story, eschewing stylistic considerations of any sort.

I didn’t set out to coin a style of my own, as if I were composing a signature by which the reader would immediately know he was consuming a genuine FWP product. I had stories to tell. I told them in as straightforward a fashion as I knew how. That’s all I know how to do. But have a gander at the following email I received shortly after I self-pubbed Which Art In Hope, Chosen One, and On Broken Wings:

I greatly enjoy your op-eds, and always look forward to new ones, but your fiction blows me away. But something puzzles me. When you write about fiction writing, which I hope you'll do more of, you always seem to be running down style as a factor in good fiction. Yet you have one of the most unique styles I've come across in all my years (don't ask how many) of reading. What gives?

I read that email in a state of bewilderment. I couldn’t get a grip on what my correspondent was talking about. I just tell the stories as my characters relate them to me. If anyone was responsible for the “style,” whatever it is, of those books, it would be their protagonists, through whose eyes the story is told. I was just the typist.

I had to come back to those books much later, to read them as if they’d been written by someone else, before I could get any sense of the thing. There is a consistent character to the prose of those novels. It screams that all three were written by the same person. That’s what’s usually meant by a writer’s style. I didn’t intend any such thing...but it happened even so.

This seems to be the pattern among the indies whose works I’ve read.

---

So in one corner we have indie writers, happily churning out the sorts of tales they most love to read, while in the opposite corner are the writers beloved of Pub World, the majority of whom spin plot-deprived non-stories about antiheroes and victims of fate who spend most of their time lamenting their lots in life. Who’s ahead on points? Hard to say, as Pub World houses tend to keep sales figures confidential from everyone outside their orbit. But if Amazon is a gauge, there are more indie writers than ever before, and they’re producing books at a really impressive rate. Some of them are even good.

One of the recent critical “responses” to developments in contemporary fiction went like this:

    The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer "How should novels be?" but "Why write novels at all?"...
    The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is—the novel very much included—the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in [sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's] analysis, the only real value that "refined" tastes have.
    It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of "transcendence" must have seemed 30 years ago....
    We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, "like"-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd....
    Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. But pop-Bourdieuvianism deprives them of the sense of high-canonical purity with which they've traditionally consoled themselves....
    To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even for—assuming it’s not just another cultural widget....
    This is where "The Marriage Plot"'s titular enjambment of literature and love—those two beleaguered institutions—is so clarifying....
    This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary "literary fiction" aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It's just that, if the art is to endure, they won't be quite enough.

If you’re an indie writer, as I am, the above should elicit approximately the following reaction:

“What the BLEEP! is he talking about?
Did he go off his meds?”

It should also reassure you that the “critics” no longer matter to any substantial degree.

Tell your stories and let the chips fall where they may. Trust your readers to let you know whether you’re getting the job done. Mine always do.

The Culture War: A Reflection

It’s a commonplace that fish aren’t aware of water. Humans aren’t fully aware of their cultural matrix for the same reason: it’s omnipresent and unceasing. Yet there’s hardly anything more important to the national spirit or our individual tendencies when confronted by some question of significance.

When we deign to notice the fusillades in the culture war, it’s normally because some noisy interest group has made a stink about the “marginalization” of its mascots. Consider homosexuality as a case for study. Get into your DeLorean, fire up the Flux Capacitor, and go back a mere thirty years. How many openly homosexual characters were featured in prime-time television shows? The number is approximately zero. What accounts for the heavy statistical overrepresentation of homosexuals on TV in our time?

Hint: It’s not heterosexuals’ vast, previously unexpressed desire to see homosexual relationships and homosexuals’ interactions with normal people portrayed on our giant-screen HDTVs.

I could go in a myriad directions from here, but I have a specific one in mind.

---

Unless you’ve spent the last several weeks immured in a Turkish prison, you’re surely aware of all the Sturm und Drang that’s arisen around Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster movie American Sniper. I hardly need recap the movie for those of you who’ve seen it; it’s too powerful and memorable to need my tender mercies. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, see it. Now.) Those who hate it, and they are far more vociferous than numerous, seldom admit to their true reasons; those who love it aren’t always capable of articulating theirs.

The script does inject a few fictional motifs into this otherwise faithful biopic, drawn from Chris Kyle’s book of the same name. Whether those injections were vitally necessary to the movie’s impact is open to debate. What seems indisputable to me is that what elicits the rage of its detractors isn’t the drama but the depiction of the life of Chris Kyle himself. To the pansified cultural elite that dominates arts criticism in our media, Kyle is a major affront – an embarrassment. His patriotism, dutifulness, commitment to his undertaking, moral clarity, and absolute lack of regret or apology for his deeds – for me the most stirring line of the script was “I’m willing to stand before my Creator and answer for every shot I took” – paint him in the sort of pure masculine colors that the glitterati would prefer not to exist.

More succinctly, Chris Kyle was a man. His detractors are not.

Perhaps those detractors would have passed over Kyle’s book without comment had Eastwood not picked up the movie rights. Perhaps they would have dismissed the movie had it not shattered every box-office record for a January release. Perhaps the denunciations wouldn’t have been quite so thunderous had Eastwood and his scripting team injected some harsh statements about the “Bush wars” into the movie. We’ll never know.

What we can and do know is that Eastwood’s portrayal of Chris Kyle has upset the cultural applecart, at least for the moment. The glitterati aren’t happy for the rest of us to see fictional portrayals of unabashed patriotism, moral clarity, and courage. They’ve put too much work into their efforts at portraying whining self-nominated victims and moral deviates as the proper heroes for today.

It testifies to the ineradicability of Americans’ native moral sense that a single well-made movie could so dramatically countervail the glitterati’s counter-valorization campaigns.

---

One of the reasons I write fiction – indeed, perhaps the most imperative of all of them – is my desire to provide readers with heroes of the kind I favor. There aren’t a lot of heroes of that kind in the fiction coming out of Pub World; the reader pretty much has to go to the independent-writers’ movement for fare of that sort. (Back when I was fool enough to think that a conventional publishing house might take an interest in my novels, several of the rejections I received for Chosen One and On Broken Wings specifically criticized my protagonists’ moral standards.) Some does slip through, of course; the military-fiction pioneered by Tom Clancy and the espionage/special-agent-oriented books Vince Flynn wrote have too large a readership for Pub World to dismiss them. However, it’s noteworthy that Clancy couldn’t get a hearing until The Hunt for Red October was picked up by the tiny Naval Institute Press, and Flynn had to sell his books out of the trunk of his car before a Pub World house picked up Term Limits. Only the prior success of those writers as independents persuaded major New York houses to offer them a slot in their catalogs.

The dominance of Pub World by left-leaning editors began in the Sixties: a part of the cultural-colonization effort Antonio Gramsci called “a long march through the institutions.” It was contemporaneous with efforts of the same sort in cinema, the performing arts, education, and journalism. They who undertook that campaign of cultural transformation weren’t merely acting on their personal preferences; they were openly, avowedly promoting the destruction of the prior American cultural norm. The removal of the traditionally masculine, morally straight hero in favor of a variety of anti-heroes and morally ambiguous figures was central to their efforts.

I’m not prepared to say that it was a conspiracy, in the traditional sense of a coordinated effort plotted in secret and orchestrated according to a defined plan...but neither am I prepared to say that it wasn’t. It was probably more of a hive effect, in which subliminal signals and indicators effect a wide-scale coordination whose participants only recognize it consciously a posteriori.

Whatever the case, its effects have included the demonization of every traditional attribute of iconic American masculinity, with patriotism, courage, and moral clarity at the head of the list. And it was terrifyingly effective; ask any American man who came to maturity in the Seventies or afterward.

---

I am effectively convinced that Andrew Breitbart’s most famous observation – that “culture is upstream from politics” – is the all-important truth in the battle for the soul of these United States. Yet conservatives and libertarians, as the worthy Ace of Spades has noted, talk politics almost to the exclusion of culture. Our attention turns to the cultural matrix only when something either excites us or irritates us out of our ruts.

That inversion might cost us all possibility of success at restoring freedom and justice to America. Have a little C. S. Lewis:

[W]e continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

A nation whose cultural institutions make vicious slanderers such as Michael Moore rich while they sneer at Clint Eastwood could hardly have expected any other result.

---

The Last Graf is exactly what you’ve expected – indeed, what I and others have been telling you all along. Reclaim the culture. If you have a creative bent, use it and push the products thereof. If you consume any of the arts, especially fiction whether in prose or in the movies and on television, aggressively support those that agree with your standards and boycott, at the very least, those that diverge from them. Refuse to back down from those standards. Be aggressive about promoting those works you find most supportive of them.

The powers of darkness have all but monopolized our journalism, our entertainment, and our educational institutions. With only those bastions, they’ve managed to “de-Americanize” at least two generations of young Americans. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they aren’t about to stop now. We have a lot of catching-up to do. You have a part to play...possibly a more important part than you imagine.

Get started now.

(PS: Yes, it’s snowing heavily. We’ve already received about ten inches and are likely to get fifteen to twenty-five more. I’ll be going out to start the snowblower in a few minutes. If you pray, please pray for everyone in the Northeastern U.S. We need it.)

On Thrillers

As an indie writer, I take an interest in other indies, their achievements, and the degree of success they experience. Many indies craft thrillers by preference. That might be because that’s the genre they most enjoy; indeed, I’d say that’s the overwhelmingly most common reason. But sadly, most of those writers haven’t bothered to master fundamental writing skills – and that includes many who have plotting and storytelling gifts that their lack of writerly chops under-serves.

I’m not talking here about stylistic arabesques of the sort identified with “literary” fiction. Anyone who’s been reading my thoughts on fiction for any length of time will already be aware that I regard gratuitous verbal vermiculations as the writer’s equivalent to masturbation – and in public, at that. No, I’m thinking first of the sort of sins for which grammar-school children were once castigated, and second of some egregious sins against the reader’s patience that a really accomplished storyteller would instinctively avoid.

That first category is, of course, about slovenliness in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Such slovenliness is often made manifest in the writer’s promotional blurb, which once moved me to publish this mini-tract. For there’s no better guide to a writer’s seriousness than the care he puts into a length-limited bit of promotional prose intended to sell his wares. If that fails the grammar-school-kid test, I pass by his novel without a backward glance.

The second category is at a more advanced level, but not so advanced that its principles should be incomprehensible to a reasonably intelligent writer – say, intelligent enough to format a book manuscript for Amazon’s CreateSpace publishing subsidiary using Microsoft Word. Those principles are quite few in number:

1. Maintain viewpoint consistency. (In other words, don’t “head-hop.”)
2. Avoid the expository lump.
3. Use description to tell your reader what he needs to know and nothing more.
4. Show character; don’t “tell” it.
5. Your reader is there for an emotional journey; respect him and it.

It’s possible that many of the indie thriller writers who’ve recently perplexed me have never even heard of those principles; there’s no way to tell from their novels. They certainly violate them often enough. The violations can turn an otherwise engaging adventure story, the sort that many men who read specifically seek and enjoy, into a trial of the reader’s endurance.

Gentle Reader, I could give classes on those rules. Many, many indies desperately need to learn them. Sometimes I think it would make for a good retirement career. Yet the typical indie thriller writer seems to think he’s “got it knocked” already. Many of them dribble on, novel after novel, repeating the same sins.

I assure you, the tragedy is more than superficial.

---

The reason the late Tom Clancy was an important writer has little to do with the overall quality of his novels. It’s far more about how his fiction drew men back into the fiction reading marketplace, which had largely become a women’s preserve. When The Hunt For Red October was first published, the trends in fiction were all feminine, politically correct, and dreary beyond words. Even my own long-time favorite genres (as a reader), science fiction and fantasy, had grown so tiresome that I’d all but abandoned my search for worthy new works in those fields. Nothing could be more distressing to an addict to the printed word.

Clancy’s first book was virtually an instant success. Despite being the offering of a small, virtually unknown press and the target of an ocean of critical contempt – when the critics deigned to notice it at all – it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in hardcover and millions more in paperback. The predominant buyer was one who had long been absent from the fiction marketplace: the adult American male.

The rush by the major publishing houses to “get in on the gravy train” was almost as swift. Thriller writers and their novels multiplied like toadstools after a rain. Most of them, of course, were nowhere near as gifted (and were received nowhere near as enthusiastically) as Clancy, but the sheer number of them was enough to imply that something important had happened...as it had.

It is a testament to the impact of that development that the proliferation of thrillers continues today, with indies pitching in as never before. But that merely sharpens my ultimate point.

---

I read thrillers. Indeed, these days they seem to constitute the bulk of my fiction reading. However, I don’t write them, which will cause many an indie thriller writer to shrug off this tirade as that of a “non-practitioner” whose opinions are of no value. That is as it may be; I stand by them nonetheless.

The ultimate determinant of success in entertainment is the “bottom line:” how many units one sells. In the indie-fiction world, that can be tough to determine; a single copy of an eBook is often passed around to several readers, yet only counts as one sale. That’s not really a negative thing, despite the near-term impact on the writer’s revenue, for “eyeballs today” engender “revenue tomorrow.” A writer who keeps on writing – hopefully growing more skillful and more confident as he goes – will ultimately benefit from eBook lending, just as writers have always benefited from lending libraries.

Nevertheless, the fundamental skills must be there. Should the thriller market be deluged with eBooks replete with the sins I’ve decried here, the “Clancy trend” will be reversed: male readers will abandon the fiction market once more. The PC crowd and the dreary, too-precious-to-be-borne litterateurs will regain dominance.

This matters more than you might think. What a nation reads with pleasure and enthusiasm is a barometer of its ethics, its convictions, and its overall attitudes...which suggests that this piece is about politics after all.

Human Wave, Or Humans Waving?

Yesterday, a dear friend of mine -- some of you from the old Eternity Road days will remember Duyen -- sent a young friend of hers named Minh to me for writerly advice. In this case, young doesn't mean "a few years younger than I am," it means young. Duyen felt ill-equipped to counsel Minh on her writing efforts, for two reasons:

• Minh writes fiction; Duyen never has and, she says, never will.
• Minh writes erotica. Really heavy-duty erotica, with all the horns and hooves still on it.

So, in an irony to eclipse all ironies, my sweet Catholic friend Duyen sent Minh to her not-quite-so-sweet Catholic friend Fran -- your humble Curmudgeon Emeritus -- for advice on who, what, when, where, why, and how to go about publishing her efforts and establishing herself among other writers of erotica. Minh sent along a story of which she said she's particularly proud, with a plea for my comments.

Glory be to God! I thought I'd seen everything. It's amazing how wrong I was. I must remember. When I finished reading Minh's tale I felt I should wash my brain out with soap. Lye soap.

But it was good. Really good. Well plotted, well characterized, and well written. It edifies while it entertains. More, it's true to life, instructive despite the coarseness of its subject matter and the shudders it would induce in many of its readers. How much more can a reader ask of a story?

And it left me wondering what I could say to this young woman who'd approached me, quite humbly, for advice on how to pursue, improve, and promote her fiction. "Don't be so in-your-face about the sex" -- ? Nope. The sex was the central driver of the human drama, as it so often is. "Soften the characters' edges" -- ? Nope. She wrote them as what they had to be, in every sense. "Refine your vocabulary" -- ? Nope. As rugged as they were, the words Minh employed were the right ones for the tale.

It caused me to think over some of the comments I've received about Freedom's Fury, which includes a plural marriage -- one man, two women -- as a critical motif. Several readers have written to say "It was great overall, but why'd you have to put that in?"

I "put it in" because it was necessary. It was essential from the very first; indeed, I'd unwittingly written the requirement for it into Freedom's Scion. From the first it was the path my characters had to follow. Had they turned away from it, the story would not have worked.

Take the admittedly rough sex and sexual language out of Minh's story, and it wouldn't work either.

---

There's an aspect of fiction writing that most non-practitioners would find surprising, perhaps even contradictory: the need for humility.

I'll admit there's also a requirement for a certain amount of brass. After all, you need to believe that you've got worthwhile tales to tell, the chops to tell them, and can get readers' eyes onto your stuff despite the millions of others who believe the very same things. But the humility requirement is subtler.

John Brunner's famous Laws of Fiction tell us that:

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

Both these laws are titanium-clad. A writer violates them at mortal peril. The consequence of ignoring either one is the very worst thing that can happen to a storyteller: his stuff will be boring.

The first-order implications of the laws are, of course, the point:

1. People have a nature that must be respected to make one's characters and their actions and reactions plausible.
2. If a tale's Marquee Characters experience no changes, particularly no emotional changes, there is no story.

The requirement for humility lies in never violating -- indeed, never even toying with the idea of violating -- either of those precepts. No matter what motifs you choose as drivers for your story, you can never allow your characters to act in a fashion that violates what we know of human nature, no matter how badly you'd like to have them do so. More, they must change in reaction to the story's developments, even if the change seems ugly or bizarre. More still, the changes they undergo must be consistent with the way you've defined them.

And with that, we come to the Human Wave.

---

Sarah Hoyt's "Human Wave Manifesto" is an important, valuable piece of thought. It unflinchingly addresses the critical diseases that have infected the speculative genres, and slightly more arguably, modern fiction overall, and prescribes a batch of remedy-principles for averting contagion. Yet as with every set of rules or guidelines for doing anything, Bruce Lee's Maxim applies: "Respect the principles without being bound by them." There are bits of Sarah's prescriptions and proscriptions that simply must be violated when writing about certain subjects in certain contexts. Take this one:

Unless absolutely necessary you will have a positive feeling to your story.

The qualifier is important: unless absolutely necessary. When addressing certain subjects, such as the one Minh addresses in her short story, you cannot have "a positive feeling to your story." Indeed, in some cases doom must be approaching, and obviously so, from the very first sentence, even if it takes a meandering path to get there. If you choose to write about such a subject, prescribing a positive feeling is a violation of Brunner's First Law. Indeed, it's an illustration of the importance of writerly humility.

I'd say that in the majority of cases where a writer tells a reader that "My character(s) had to do that," he's simply citing Brunner's First Law and his submission to it. He might have struggled with the decision beforehand, much as I struggled with the need to have Althea seduce Claire in the early going of Freedom's Fury. The struggle might have been as unavoidable as the decision. It's the willingness to be humble before the First Law that matters.

So Minh's story, which I found worthy and illuminating despite its rough character, might not qualify as "Human Wave." Yet it does qualify as "Humans Waving:" characters taking a course they might have known better than to take, while striving to "wave aside" the inevitable consequences, but suffering those consequences all the same.

There is room for such tales. An uninterrupted diet of them would be very unpleasant, of course, but as leavening for more positive fiction they provide an important contrast. You can probably hear my Catholicism coming through in that. After all, we're a fallen, fallible race. Mistakes, including the very worst mistakes of judgment, will be part of human existence until the Second Coming.

Which is an important perspective, not only on fiction, but on Man in general.

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If you want to read Minh's story, it's here. Just don't say I didn't warn you. By the way, Duyen met her in church. Draw what conclusions you will.

Assorted Fiction Natterings

1. The Death Of The Masculine Hero.

Quite a lot of the science fiction and fantasy currently emerging from conventional publishers strikes me as androphobic. That is, the writers – nearly all women – are either unwilling or unable to write a believably masculine protagonist. Neither will their protagonists be at all feminine: she’ll be a “tough chick” of the sort currently in vogue, who will display contempt for both conventional masculine and conventional feminine tastes, pastimes, and attitudes. If there’s a male co-protagonist, he’ll either be markedly subordinate to her or will factor into the plot principally as a love interest.

I have no problems with female-centered stories. I’ve written a few myself. But when a writer establishes a pattern of avoiding masculine – not merely “male” – protagonists, I start to wonder if there might be a disability involved...if not something worse.

“Worse” would be a dislike of masculinity that demands its subordination under all circumstances. It seems to me that there’s a lot of that in contemporary genre fiction coming from Pub World these days. That says some unfortunate things about that industry and its prospects for the years to come. When your market is confined to women, you’d better remain appealing to double-X tastes...and there are no guarantees about that sort of thing.

Ironically, successful male writers in the speculative genres display equal facility at crafting both masculine and feminine protagonists, and no reluctance to craft stories around either sort. That, too, says something unfortunate...but I’ll leave the inference thereof to you.

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2. Series Writing.

The series protagonist has become a dominant feature of contemporary fiction. When done well, a series protagonist can give a series of novels a sense of growth and thematic continuity; when done poorly, it can make the product banal or worse. There’s also a side effect on the writer of locking himself into a series character: he can deaden his ability to innovate characterologically, and sometimes with regard to plot as well.

If you really like writing series of novels that feature a common protagonist, one way to avert the negative effects while positioning yourself to reap the benefits is to write two or more series concurrently...each with a distinct protagonist, of course. Several writers I’ve recently encountered have adopted that tactic, and to my eyes it’s served them well.

There is a downside, of course: the writer must learn to “keep it all straight.” Events in one of his fictional realms must not bleed over into the others. Characters and settings must be forbidden to cross over. This implies that the temptation to go for a “grand unified” scheme of the sort that successfully seduced Isaac Asimov in his final novels must be resisted. Nothing else is as likely to draw “Oh, come ons” or jeers of disapproval.

So far, the writers I’ve seen attempt this have done reasonably well by it...but that “grand unified” temptation is lurking in the shadows along each of their paths. We shall see.

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3. Undying Characters.

While we’re on the subject of series characters, I must include that I’m afflicted by one that I tried (Lord knows I tried) to kill off. Conclusively. Never to rise again. I even wrote about his soul detaching from his body and flying toward God’s arms. It was, of course, Louis Redmond of Chosen One and On Broken Wings.

Louis is by far my most popular character. Yet I created him with a very specific end in mind, and when I say “end” I mean end. His death in On Broken Wings was foreordained by the role for which I created him. But he refuses to stay decently buried, mainly because readers who’ve loved him keep telling me how angry they are at me about my murdering him and demanding that I bring him back for a few dozen encores.

So the novel in progress, working title Polymath, will include a role for Louis. However, Louis won’t be the protagonist; he’ll be a critical Supporting Cast character who (I hope) will help to tie Polymath properly into the developing “Onteora Canon” while simultaneously placating the screaming hordes of readers protesting his death.

I’m between two weeks and a month from finishing this thing. I’ve already contacted my favorite cover artist, and she’s locked, loaded, and peering over the trench lip. Watch this space.

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4. Another Popular Character Whose Return Has Been Demanded...

...isn’t coming back just yet...but soon!

Among readers of my dreck, just after Louis Redmond in popularity stands presidential candidate Stephen Graham Sumner, lineal descendant of the great William Graham Sumner, ardent Constitutionalist, and generally good guy. The demands for more about Sumner, his quest for the presidency, and his tenure in office – of course he’s going to win – have been almost as strident as those clamoring for the return of Louis.

Yes, there have been a few scattered stories about President Sumner. I could write a few more, release them as a modest collection, and hope that his admirers would let me off the hook, but that feels like a cop-out. He deserves to be the protagonist of a novel of his own, or at least co-protagonist to a figure of comparable stature. The latter approach is what I have in mind: currently contemplated title Statesman. I expect that will be the next effort after Polymath is off my desk.

No, don’t hold your breath while you wait. It takes me a year, on average, to turn out a novel. But there will be one, so hang in there. Momentous events will soon come from – and upon – the world-shakers from the Shire-like realm of Onteora County, New York. Will the nation survive? Will the forces of Transnationalist Progressivism and Moral Relativism finally meet their match? Will wrongs be righted, villains reap their just deserts, and Christine D’Alessandro finally find a sweetie who isn’t doomed to an early death? And what about Naomi?

Stay tuned.

The Indie Writers' Movement Part 3: Prisoners

The Prisoner is my long-time favorite among television serials: for its originality, for its consistently excellent scripting and acting, for the presence of Patrick McGoohan, and for its exploration of the meaning of freedom, a thing of inestimable value to me. Over the decades that have passed since McGoohan's iconic production first graced the small screen, nothing even remotely comparable for theme, quality, or style has emerged.

It brought home to me the magnitude of one of the worst sins of modern fiction and its practitioners: our propensity to leap onto the current bandwagon as if we were incapable of an original thought. It's saddening beyond measure that that sin against one's own imagination has become just as prevalent among indie fictioneers as it is among conventionally published writers.

A few years ago, when I was also maintaining Musings of an Indie Writer, I wrote:

Fiction, like other forms of entertainment, is frequently afflicted by fads. Readers of contemporary fantasy are already aware of the fads for vampire and werewolf-oriented stories. Science fiction recently experienced a fad for stories about the extremely far future, and before that, what a friend called the “my artifact is bigger than your artifact” trend. And of course, “high” (medieval) fantasy often seems like one enormous, decades-long fad for quest adventures.

Many a writer will hop onto a fad in the hope of gathering a little of the gravy while it’s still flowing copiously. Being a devout capitalist (among other things), I cannot and shall not condemn such writers; they’re following the star most important to them. But the samenesses of faddish currents in fiction don’t speak well to the creativity of the participating writers.

Of course, a genre can experience two or more fads concurrently. Right now, contemporary (a.k.a. “urban”) fantasy is enduring trends for zombie-oriented stories, along with all the dreck about werewolves and vampires. Possibly it started with the “Resident Evil” series of video games, which were enormously popular and spawned an equally popular movie series starring the beautiful and talented Milla Jovovich. One way or another, we’re being overrun with zombie fiction. It’s become a campy motif: We have parodies such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the hilariously funny movie Zombieland, op-ed essays that use a plague of zombies as one pole of a sociopolitical comparison, and assorted bits of humor such as the bar that posted, as a reason to drink there, that it’s well prepared for the “Zombie Apocalypse.”

...and so forth. But leave aside for the moment the readiness of the reading public to consume mass quantities of fiction about vampires, or zombies, or whatever. What accounts for writer Smith's decision to produce such material, given that there's already so much of it out there?

Smith might be personally fascinated by the central motif of the fad. Or he might think he has a truly original idea for exploiting it. Or he might be a hack, who just wants to slurp up a trickle of the gravy from a booming subgenre. Or -- and this is the part that fascinates and saddens me, because my review of other indies' works makes it seem the most likely explanation -- he might not have any original story ideas, but wants to write anyway.

If you have no original ideas, why write? Why inflict your story on a reading public that has seen too many such already? Isn't the first lesson of success in business -- any business -- that you must "differentiate the product" -- ?

As for the "striking experience," here's the morning's illustration of how desperate many readers are for something they haven't seen before:

I don't wish to comment on the main topic, which I have never seen and do not intend to amend that fact. Your "about the author" made me laugh so loud it made my children come running. Keep writing. You've got your "writers' voice" you just need to find your wider audience. And you will good sir, you will.

The sweet woman who penned that comment wasn't even interested in the subject matter of my article. She was merely surfing PJ Media and her eye caught on my piece: specifically my "About the Author," which I copied from my SmashWords profile page.

What tickled "Katherine in RB" so greatly? She's probably seen as much humorous prose as any casual Web reader. My self-deprecating pseudo-bio -- alright, yes, I do have bad acne and crooked teeth, but I have no effect on local property values...I think -- isn't even all that funny. But it's a contrast to the praise so many indie writers have heaped upon themselves, to say nothing of the plaudits they award their own books.

Lack of imagination and "bandwagoning" even afflict writers' self-descriptions.

Yes, there are considerable risks involved in striking out on a wholly new path. For one thing, you can fool yourself about the degree of originality of your ideas. For another, they might not provide sufficient substance for a novel-length story. And for a third, there might not be any readers interested in the motifs you've employed or the themes you've chosen to highlight; as one who writes explicitly Christian-themed science fiction and contemporary fantasy, I know that particular risk very well. But there's an even greater risk in blandly following the crowd.

The crowd has power but no mind. Its decisions are approximately random, and often randomly destructive. By submerging yourself in it, you surrender your imagination, your latitude of action, and your self-respect. Should the crowd take you somewhere you'd rather not go, there'd be no guarantee that you'd be capable of freeing yourself.

If we eschew original thought for the current fad and its evanescent appeal, we cease to be independent minds. We become prisoners of others' decisions. Is that a status to which an "independent" writer should aspire?

Food for thought.

The Indie Writers' Movement Part 2: Room For Everyone

If anything is likely to promote the independent writers' movement from "promising" to "has hit the big time," it's most likely to be independent publishing's absence of barriers to forms, motifs, and themes disfavored by conventional publishers.

Of course there are no such barriers in indie fiction. Who is there to erect and defend them? Writers won't do so against themselves, while publishers, publishers' editors, and literary agents are completely excluded from the field. So elements and approaches of all sorts that would never be accepted by Pub World will proliferate in indie fiction to the extent the market will bear.

That is: as far as "the market will bear" and no farther. When no one stands between the creator and the consumer, the market is the sole arbiter. Those who attempt to defy the market simply won't sell. Over time they'll cease to try. New entrants, observing what works and what doesn't, will emulate the successful, as is the case in all commercial arenas. And of course, as tastes change, so will the market's winnowing dynamic.

Here's a quick survey of the currently most conspicuous divergences between Pub World fiction and the indie world:

1. Military fiction.

During Tom Clancy's glory years, Pub World grudgingly made room for his sort of military-adventure fiction for a simple reason: it brought millions of men back into the fiction market at a time when all the major publishers were hurting badly. However, it's noteworthy that they had to have their self-inflicted wound rubbed in their faces. Clancy's first, overwhelmingly successful novel of naval adventure, The Hunt For Red October, was rejected by every major publishing house and no small number of lesser ones. Only after it was picked up by the Naval Institute Press and became a multimillion seller were Pub World's major players willing to concede that they might have overlooked a profit opportunity.

But note: since the decline of Clancy's market power -- which preceded his demise by some years, sad to say -- Pub World's attitude toward military fiction has reverted approximately to its previous condition. Whether that's because no one of Clancy's stature has arisen since he, Stephen Coonts, and Dale Brown dominated the field is impossible to say, but with so little military adventure coming from the big houses, we cannot be sure.

2. Masculine protagonists and feminine leading ladies.

Gender-war feminism and Robert Conquest's Second Law have worked upon Pub World's purchasing patterns to eliminate, for practical purposes, traditionally manly men and feminine women from their offerings. This is in part due to the rise of "tough chick lit," in which a heroine with traditionally masculine assets, including physical strength and courage, uses them to prevail in a conflict that would once have centered on a male hero. However, even in stories that lack a "tough chick" protagonist, we seldom see a female Marquee Character who's feminine by the standards that prevailed before the rise of gender-war feminism.

It's not impossible to create a strong, brave heroine who's also feminine in outlook and in her relations with men. I've done so. Indeed, I've done so more than once, not merely to demonstrate that it's possible. But you wouldn't know it from the novels that emerge from the Big Six publishers, nor from most of the smaller establishments.

In this regard, the recent tumult within the Science Fiction Writers of America is highly illustrative. For as I mentioned only yesterday, writers' associations are as subject to Conquest's Second Law as any other kind of organization -- and have the added pressure of assisting their members in marketing their products, as well.

3. Freedom.

Given that freedom has come under attack both rhetorically and in practice, perhaps it shouldn't surprise anyone that novels that celebrate it, or that portray protagonists willing to fight and sacrifice for it, are rare among Pub World's offerings.

Writers to whom freedom is a critical theme get very little shrift from Pub World. Hearken to one such writer, whose cri de coeur just happened, coincidentally or otherwise, to appear on Bastille Day:

Things started changing for so many of us in the publishing industry when there was finally a viable alternative to traditional publishing available to us. No longer did we have to keep our mouths shut about how we felt for fear of having our options dropped or of being blackballed in the industry. Still, it was a slow journey into the light. We’d hidden our political beliefs for so long and had been so indoctrinated with the belief that admitting we were libertarian or – gasp – conservative would lose us readers.

But then events started happening that pushed us to the point where we could no longer hold our tongues. Looking around, authors who had been hiding in the political closet for so long saw the new indie authors saying what they thought in social media and on their blogs. Looking at the best seller lists on Amazon, hearts beat a little faster and a spark of hope flared to see authors who shared the same libertarian values these long-silent authors held not only selling their books but selling well.

Clearly, if we go by population movements, there remains a great hunger for freedom. That hunger extends to entertainment, particularly fiction. Longtime readers will be aware that I have a dear friend named Duyen who risked her life and future on a homemade bamboo raft to escape from North Vietnam and find freedom. You'd expect someone like that to be sensitive to the subject when she encounters it in a story...and she is.

Among recognized publishers, only Baen Books has provided an outlet for freedom-promoting, freedom-celebrating fiction. Baen sells a lot of books. Its roster includes some of the most popular SF and fantasy writers at work today. You'd think that, were profit of great interest to Pub World, it would draw the moral. So far, it hasn't.

4. Christianity and Christian Ethics.

This might be the most tragic of all the exclusions practiced by the major houses, in part because of the way it operates. I don't speak here of "Christian fiction" as such, because, not to put too fine a point on it, most explicitly religious fiction of any kind is narratively abysmal and unbearably preachy. There's another aspect to the thing: conventionally published fiction's treatment of religious clerics and religious characters generally. Protagonists with deep, sincere religious convictions are rare; even honorable Supporting Cast members are exceptional.

As I'm a devout Catholic, I'm particularly sensitive to this, but once again, market indications ought to constitute a corrective force even if simple decency is lacking. Taken together, I've sold over 75,000 copies of Chosen One, On Broken Wings, and Shadow Of A Sword, all of which are explicitly Catholic in protagonist and theme. For that matter, one of the best selling novels of all time, The Lord Of The Rings, is explicitly Christian in theme and treatment -- and J. R. R. Tolkien said so right out in front of God and everybody.

Everything Pub World disdains has flowered in indie fiction, as if it had been waiting for the outlet to emerge. Granted, the indie milieu is equally open to the sort of tale Pub World embraces, but that's only as it should be. The point is that the independent writers' movement has room for everyone, that it spurns no one and no kind of story, and that the success or failure of some new subspecies will depend solely on its progenitors' storytelling ability and the market's reaction to their offerings.

A businessman of acuity knows that the most precious of all things is an underserved market segment. Verbum sat sapienti -- and there are more than 1300 such words here.