Category: Writing

The World We Write About

My colleague Fonda Lee (author of Zero Boxer and Jade City, which I recommend) brought up the question on twitter of feeling conflicted about dealing with book release issues (readings, signings, &c) when, well, the world is going to Hell.  I mean, you hear about another mass shooting, and then you’re expected to go to a bookstore and talk about your fantasy novel? How can that not be weird and uncomfortable?  The thread is worth reading, if you’re interested

She got some excellent answers from various people that I can’t improve on, but it set me off in a different direction.

I’m going to repeat something I said a few years ago, in a comment on the World Socialist Web Site:  “No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.”

I still agree with this, and, in fact, as the pressure-cooker of our society intensifies, I think it becomes more true. One might, of course, “inject” political and world views into one’s fiction, but that almost invariably comes across as clumsy, artificial, and gratingly didactic. The point I want to stress is that these stories we tell, whether we want them to or not, are powerfully influenced by our experience and our interpretations of that experience, and that means by the society in which we live our day-to-day lives. To be sure, the influence is often disguised and can appear in contradictory ways: sometimes an outraged rebellion against the status quo can turn out deeply normative; sometimes the cry for a return to an imaginary simpler time, reactionary in feel, can be subversive or even revolutionary in essence.

We, as writers, are observers who turn those observations from vague feelings into precise words, which, in turn, form images and make connections to the experience of the reader.  I know some writers who can capture taste, smell, touch, and express them in words that make me cry. I know some writers who observe and describe individual human interactions in a way that permits me to see many of my past experiences in a new light. Others are skilled at noticing, deducing, and illuminating the motives behind seemingly inexplicable actions.  Other are able to reveal and explain hidden social contradictions.  And so on.  And all the while they delight us with the thrills and fights and narrow escapes and wit and striking phrases for which we read adventure fiction.

What I’m getting at is this: The things that infuriate, sadden, or terrify us in our world are already there in our work. The degree to which we wish to bring them to the surface is up to us, but they are there whether we are consciously aware of them or not. When, as we write, we remind ourselves not to cheat, what we are really reminding ourselves of is that our job is to tell the truth, and the more we manage to do that the more successful (and moving) is the story.  And when we go into a bookstore to do a reading of our tale of elves and dragons and unicorns three hours after a mass shooting or Trump’s latest threat of nuclear war, it will feel strange and uncomfortable, and to some degree it should—being aware of that contradiction simply means one is a decent human being.  But it is worth remembering that our stories do not come out of nowhere, that the same world that has produced these horrors, has also produced our story, and that, dialectically, our story can have an effect on that world.

Predictability is Death

I’ve been watching Torchwood for the first time, and most likely the last.   It has various problems: I find none of the characters except Jack engaging, there is little or no display of the kind of the competence that makes us love teams (Leverage!),  and I keep getting the impression that Torchwood made things worse more often than better.  However, it was early in the 2nd season (Episode 3) that I was able to isolate the biggest reason it kept irritating me.

Look at it this way: It is perfectly all right, sometimes, to have the audience emotionally engage with a character , then kill off that character.  It can be cathartic, and it can also raise the stakes—it lets the audience know you’re serious, that no one is safe, that the danger is real, and so on.

BUT.

If the only time there is emotional engagement you know that it will turn out bad, that there’s no chance of it working out, then all of a sudden you’ve lowered the stakes, usually to zero; I find myself saying, “Oh, look.  It’s a sweet romance; I guess that he’s going to leave so I can feel all sad for her.  Whatever.”  Or, “Hey, an extremely likable character.  He’s going to die.  Yawn.”

Just as the possibility of sorrow increases the tension and makes us engage, if there is no possibility of happiness, we just stop caring.

Some Reflections on a Bad Book I Wrote

I’ve been rereading the Vlad novels in preparation for writing the next one, and, eventually, finishing the series if I live that long.  I’ve been going through them looking for guns I left on mantelpieces, so I can pick them up and have them go off together in ways that will make people go, “Wow!  He had all of that planned from the start?”  Well, and to remind myself of stuff I actually did know from the start.  Anyway, in the course of this, I just finished a reread of Yendi and had some thoughts about it that might be useful to other writers.

Yes, I still think it is a bad book (although with some moments that, in retrospect, I’m quite proud of), and this post is not intended as a platform to argue that.  Let me have it as a given and make my point.

My second novel was To Reign In Hell, and it was quite an experience.  For one thing, I decided my biggest weakness was characterization, so I wanted to write a book that simply wouldn’t work unless I nailed the characters.    It was hard, for that reason and others.  It was an ambitious project for me.  At one point, about a third of the way through, I spoke to Will Shetterly, and told him, “I should wait ten years before writing this one.  I don’t have the chops to pull it off yet.”  He said, “You’re right, you don’t.  You should write it anyway.  In ten years you’ll write something else, and what you learn doing this one will stay with you.”  It turned out to be one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten.

After finishing it, I was exhausted, beat, done, wiped out.  It felt like I’d been doing hard labor.  I was emotionally drained and, for a while, wondered if I’d ever write again (it turns out, this is fairly normal for me after finishing something; I need a few months to recover.  But I didn’t know that at the time).  Once I did start getting the itch to write again, I was still sort of bruised from how hard it had been.  Now, my first novel, Jhereg, I had thought of as a standalone.   I put in hints of backstory and foreshadowing and stuff, but not with the intention of returning to the world, only because, well, I love it when books do that.  But after finishing TRiH, it hit me that what I needed was something fun, something I could just kick back and enjoy writing without a lot of sweat or effort, to remind myself how much fun writing can be, and I realized that I already had the world and characters set up, I could just go back there and tell another story.  To make it easier, I could use the backstory I’d already hinted at, plus throw in a bit of “foreshadowing” for Jhereg (like, Vlad remarking that no one would ever steal from the Jhereg Council, stuff like that).    Because I felt a need to challenge myself at least a little, I decided to work on a different aspect of characterization than I had in TRiH, to wit, on finding the telling detail for each character that would make that one memorable.

Between these two goals—making characters identifiable, and kicking back and having fun—emerge the two problems with Yendi.  First, it’s got too many characters; some of those folk are just in there so I could practice with them, and I would probably have removed them if there’d been a well handy.  Second, it’s sloppy.  It’s just kind of slapdash, thrown out there, with a few accidental contradictions, and not much substance.  There is, in my opinion, nothing wrong with “a good tale well told,” but if that’s all there is to a story, well, it should be really well told, and that one was only fairly decent.  That is why I’ve always regretted that book, and badly wished I could do it over (which, in a way, I did: Orca is in some sense the book Yendi should have been).

I should say, I’ve always regretted that book until now.  Here we get to the point of this post, to what might be useful for new writers to think about.

Yes, because I was sloppy with that book, it has haunted me.  I cringe when I think about it, and what it ought to have been, and still remind myself not to get lazy.  BUT.   I was right.  It comes back to me that the book did exactly what I wanted it to: it reminded me how much fun writing can be, how to take joy in the process, and evil, cackling delight in imagining what I was going to do to the poor reader.  And this has stayed with me.  Of course, there are the horrible, wracking moments of where do I go? and  how do I make this work? and  how do I turn these concepts into a story? and what happens next?  Of course those still happen.  But underneath, since writing Yendi, I haven’t forgotten that at the bottom, I do this because I love it.

If you can keep that feeling at the price of one book that is weaker than you wish it were, well, I call that a fair trade.

 

Followup On Fourth Street

Had a long talk with a good and smart friend, who conveyed to me some of the confusion over my opening at Fourth Street. She says that it could be interpreted as regretting the “good old days” when women could be freely preyed on by pros at conventions.

It is difficult to explain why I chose to use “safe spaces” and “threatened” in that talk without a long explanation which is inappropriate to this post, though I’ll happily get into it in comments if anyone wishes. I had thought that when I referred to physically safe and “no unwanted harassment” (a stupid phrase, sorry; I mean, as opposed to the more usual wanted harassment? Sheesh, Steve) that would be sufficient to make clear that I proposed no such thing.

Evidently I was wrong. And, while one can always blame the reader for failing to understand, when enough readers get it wrong, one begins to side-eye the writer.

So let me state clearly and for the record I do not support that kind of atmosphere, I do not want that kind of convention, and I deeply apologize for any pain or fear that was caused by anyone thinking I did mean that.  My fault, not yours.

ETA: It’s worth pointing out that it isn’t just a matter of reading, but that this was a speech, not presented as text, and a speech that, moreover, I deliberately opened with a shocker.  This makes more reasonable the number of people who went past the “physically safe” and “no harassment” parts.  Again, my bad.

My opening remarks at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention

This last weekend Fourth Street Fantasy Convention took place.  At the beginning I made an opening statement that has generated discussion, dispute, and even some hard feelings. I have exactly no interest in perpetuating one of those idiotic feuds or convention brawls that plague the science fiction community like aphids on tomato plants, but as the discussion is continuing in various places, it seems appropriate to permit those discussing it to have the text at hand.   Though these conversations often, alas, degenerate into personal attacks, I am hopeful that the issues themselves will receive some discussion.  For those of us who love fantasy fiction, and want there to be better fantasy fiction, it should be obvious that, at least, the issues are important.

(The closing statement, which addresses the same issues from another, perhaps opposite perspective, was delivered by Scott Lynch and can be found here.)

There are two  points I want to make about my remarks:
1) I thoughtlessly permitted my statement to be interpreted as coming from the Fourth Street Board, rather than being my own opinion.  That was a mistake and I regret it, and I apologize to the board and membership for that confusion.
2) I stand by what I said.

 

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention is not a safe space. On the contrary, it is a very unsafe space. Of course, it ought to be safe in the sense of everyone feeling physically safe, and in the sense that there should be no unwanted harassment, and it should be free of personal attacks of any kind. But other than that, it is not safe.

Your beliefs about writing, and my beliefs about writing, and what is good, and how to make it good, should be sufficiently challenged to make us uncomfortable.

The interaction of art and politics is getting more and more in our faces. Whether this is good or bad is beside the point (although I think it’s good); it reflects changing social conditions, intensification of conflicts. Anyone who thinks art is independent of social conditions is as hopelessly muddled as someone who thinks there is a direct, simplistic 1:1 correspondence between them.

The result of this is that political understanding, unexamined assumptions, agendas, are very much present in the art we create and thus in the discussions of that art.

If no one feels unsafe, or threatened during these discussions, we’re doing them wrong. The same is true in discussing technique, because technique, content, form, attitude toward the creation and role of art, and understanding of society, are all interconnected, and in challenging one, we are liable to find ourselves challenging another. Am I interested in turning a discussion of writing craft into a political dispute? No. I’m here to talk about craft. But I recognize that there is no clean separation, and that the one can lead to the other, and I’ll not shy away from it when it does.

If our primary goal in such discussions is to make sure everyone feels safe, then we must above all avoid the very sorts of passionate dispute this convention was created for. At that point, the convention has lost so much value that I, for one, would rather spend the weekend writing. I come to Fourth Street to have my assumptions and opinions about fantasy writing challenged and threatened; I come here to feel unsafe. If you aren’t here in order to have your assumptions and opinions challenged, then one of us is at the wrong convention.

If no one feels unsafe, we’re wasting our time here.