Immortals

On this lovely afternoon I've been thinking about immortality ... not so much as a personal preference, but the way it's presented in fiction.

You can't dip your toe into a paranormal without coming across some character who is an immortal vampire or minor godling. My problem is, these folks don't seem to have learned anything from their centuries or millennia of life. There ain't no wisdom on display, no accumulation of knowledge, no self-control, no long view.

I mean ... I'm not the same person I was fifty years ago. I don't say half a century has made me noticeably wise, but I have some perspective.

I don't think this shortfall in characterization is an authorial failing. It's authorial choice. The fiction I read is created for amusement and gentle distraction. Readers want to see characters they understand and identify with. This kinda precludes writing characters who could realistically have been around for centuries.

ometimes Dr Who gets this right. Mostly not -- but they make plausible choices.

The Non-violent Heroic Confrontation

I came across this in my reading. 

The article considers,
"How does the hero confront violence without becoming violent themself?"
and,
"How intrinsic is violence to the idea of heroism?"

Interesting to me. Maybe a thought-provoker for others who write or review.

The Setting as Story

I’ve been thinking about “The Setting as Protagonist.” That is, when setting acts in the story. When it has its own narrative.

Fr'instance, consider All Clear by Connie Willis. This is a Time Travel SF that moves from a small town in the English countryside in WWII, to the evacuation at Dunkirk, to Bletchly Park, to the coastal defenses, to London during the Blitz. Time travelling protagonists see the era's awfulness and bravery through modern eyes.

Willis' use of London-as-a-character is clearest about midway through the book in scenes of the air attack on St. Paul’s Cathedral.

How does she do this? Well ... Lots of prior description of St. Paul's physicality. Vignettes of members of the Fire Guard. She purpose-builds two Cockney moppets for use in the Blitz subplot. The protagonist argues that destruction of the cathedral would be a final blow for British morale.

So. Not just extended metaphor. Setting can be a symbolic equivalence. Can clarify and add an emotional gloss. I find myself rooting for St Paul's as if it were an old friend.

 cf Tolkien's the "Cleansing of the Shire." Burnett’s Secret Garden. 

Adding Backstory

Since I took time off from all extraneous pursuits a month or so ago I've not only been getting my head together, I've found time to do some of that reading.
(That's part of getting my head back together.)
It's been TBR-bookshelf time.
A self-indulgent immersion in story.

I'm looking at how to fold in complicated backstory in First Person.  Ben Aaronovitch Rivers of London,  Jim Butcher's Storm Front, and Seanan McGuire's Rosemary and Rue  

Backstory be like (1) lay out the backstory on the bones of the plot, (2) take your time. 

I'm mentally highlighting my way through the books in three or four different colors and see how they're woven together.

Interesting that the three authors who immediately come to mind for introduction of backstory are all writing First Person.

Do we introduce backstory and infodumps more easily in First Person?
More to think about.

Whatever gods there be

I'm thinking tonight about how characters deal with the acquisition and use of immense magical power.

How do you write this?

Ilona Andrews, Patricia Briggs, Nalini Singh, and Charlaine Harris handle this by giving other characters lesser but still important powers. The mucho powerful character is part of a continuum. There's shared experience and a knowledge base. There are systems in place.

Often their power arises from discipline, work, study, diligent effort. The character's attitude toward power is signalled by a history of deliberately building that power. They're not so much conflicted. The character gets a magic sword because they've
trained in swordfighting since childhood.

This is Iron Man's power arc or Batman's. Not Spiderman's. You may still get reconsideration of motive and responsibility in use of power, but it's late in the arc.

Often characters develop new abilities in immediate response to threat. The action separates acquisition of new power from a later intellectual exploration and emotional response to it. The emotional response may be explored in scenes of relative quiet with a trusted advisor.

But the internal response is explored. In an earlier posting I looked at a book where the two protagonists are destined to in some way become an abstract universal constant.
Like becoming Pi or E=MC².
This sounds uncomfortable and destructive to a sense of self,
but we don't see the emotional and intellectual internal fallout in the characters as they grow and change.

The author leaves the story before the characters get more than a taste of their universal constant-hood. The author is not looking at that aspect of the story. We don't take step into the apotheosis because is simply not the author's intent.

How is this handled? How well does this work?

I feel as if  the author deliberately moves the story slightly into mythos mode. Into traditional storytelling. Eastern European Folk tales and American Indian Folk tales show surreal illogic of character motivation. There's virtually no internals and self examination.

I'll have to reread Zelazny's Lord of Light and see how he handles this.

How else?

Well, there's a magical child growing up to be a more-than-human avatar in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Two of them, in fact.

We got Bran who is the Pendragon, son of King Arthur. He's a minor character with magic. 
How does he feel about all this?
We don't see deeply into his POV so we're not sure.

This works okaybecause this is a tertiary character. And the author responsibly tidies his story neatly away in the end. In the series farewell scene, we see Bran renounce his potential for magical power. He will be a vanilla human to do human work in the world. 

In a couple hundred words Cooper shows us what's been going on in Bran's mind the whole time. It makes an emotionally satisfying wrap up and we didn't have to overbuild a minor character to look at this.

Will Stanton is the more interesting character problem.

Eleven-year-old Will learns he's one of the Old Ones — human incarnations of magic, born to save the world from a rising evil. In four books we see him sweat and suffer and fear his way to agency and power. His internal growth from boy to a powerful adult in a kid's body is convincing and, in many ways, tragic.

The author shows Will knowing and regretting the distance that opens between him and his family and friends. At what point does he cease to become a human boy? Some good internals there.

***

Romance genre studies human emotion. What do the protagonists feel? Authors flay it out on the dissecting table for all to see. They build the plot structure to reveal those feelings. They stud the page with internals and emotional conflict.

Mostly Romance explores the love relationship and at least one emotional conflict. It's interesting to look at magical power as the emotional conflict
Lots to think on.

 

       

Technical Topic - Thinking About Saying Stuff Twice

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tl:dr summary:

Don’t say stuff twice.

I don't know about you, but I do this all the time. My final editing is full of me sitting in coffee shops muttering, 
"I've just said he can see over the crowd. I don't need to say --'Because he was tall he could see over the crowd.' 

What's the reader going to think? 
That he got up on a chair? That he went jump jump jump? That he has a periscope?
They've figured out he's tall. 
This is how I tell the reader he's tall.
Jeesh."  

Take this early draft example of a man walking into a room. The purpose of the two paras . . .
(Every paragraph and page and scene has a purpose and you should be able to figure out what it is) . . .
is to show the reaction to his entry and to make the reader wonder What Is Going On Here?

He was late for dinner. They’d started without him. Their plates were already full and the footmen had finished serving the vegetables round. Everyone fell silent when he walked in. They turned, their forks in the air, looking annoyed and more than a little offended that he’d been so impolite. Well, he was here. They’d have to make the best of it no matter what reservations they harbored. His seat was midway down the side. Empty, of course. Waiting for him. His father and brothers and the guests turned to watch him as he found his place. The footmen pulled out his chair and settled him among the others. They’d been well trained. Blank faced, they bustled to bring the platters back and offer him what the others were eating. Roast duck and vegetables. Sauces to go with them. Spicy garnishes along the side of the plate.

He didn’t bother to make apologies.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily read my way through that with any care and I wouldn't pick up what's important if I did and most of it is boring because it blathers on and doesn't say anything new.. 

Let's cut the wordage in half.

When he walked in, everyone fell silent. His father and brothers and the guests turned, forks in the air, annoyed and offended. Well, he was here. Let them deal with it. His chair waited for him. Blank-faced footmen bustled to seat him and offer roast duck and vegetables, sauces, spicy garnishes along the side of the plate.

He didn’t bother to make apologies.

I’d argue that the second version keeps the action and conveys the feelings. It shows the visuals of the scene. Most importantly, it still poses all the questions that are supposed to draw the reader onward. 

Questions like:

Why is he late?
Why do family and guests have to like it or lump it?
Why do they keep his chair empty and ready for him?
Why doesn’t he apologize?

There's no change much in the order of action or the responses. The difference is that the second version hacks away the kudzu of needless repetition. There is so much the reader will assume even when you don't say it.

Trust the reader.

So.

Lookit the first three sentences of the original passage:

He was late for dinner.

They’d started without him.

plates were already full and the footmen had finished serving the vegetables round.

Now, none of this is throw-the-book-at-the-wall-awful stuff, 
but “Forks in the air,” is all we need. 

That four-word phrase contains late for dinner,
they haven’t waited for him,
they’ve started eating, 
and
he's not VERY late, they’ve got as far as the first bites but not further. 

“But” – you may say – “I want to paint a picture of what’s going on.
I need to give the reader details."

And there is much to be said for doing that. But sometimes description can more usefully be wielded in a spot where it serves a couple of purposes and also doesn't get underfoot.

I will talk about that in the next post.

Technical Topic -- Fiddling with Words in the Second Draft

 

There are folks who get the words right the first time they lay them down. I am not one of those people.

Think of it as shooting an arrow. Some folks let it fly and it hits in the gold. I shoot and the arrow lands all bent up at an angle and it's somewhere out in the third ring, which is blue. So I go over and take it out and try again. Or I sneak it out and move it a bit inward and decide whether I like it there.
And I usually decide not and move it a bit ... and move it a bit more.

Because that’s how I roll.

So anyhow, here's the process.

I've taken a paragraph of the new WIP and put down the decisions that lie in the slow, tedious process whereby I move Draft One to Draft Two.

I’m sure you will all be fascinated by this.

This paragraph is way early in the first scene.
Its purpose is threefold:
-- I lift the top of the POV character’s skull and show what she’s like.
-- I describe some scenery.
-- I signal the reader that we got a Time Traveller here.

what the jug/pot would have looked like

The Draft Two paragraph:

A jug nudged at her from the left, passed over by Hishisha who was at the blinky, giggly stage of mead imbibing. She was fifteen or sixteen, tall even in this crowd, snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type]. She was one of the unmarried sisters, half sisters, cousins, and god knew what who lived in the house of Medkarratu, chief man of the village. They’d amiably gathered in a stranger, here for the festival. More than gathered her in. They’d shoved over and shared the furs of their bed with her, chatted with her endlessly and incomprehensibly, sprinkled generous helpings of fresh seeds and berries on her gruel, and combed and braided her hair into the same knots and interweavings they wore.

Here’s how I arrived at it:

First DraftL:

Hishisha who was at the blinky, amiable stage of mead imbibing

In the Second Draft it becomes:

Hishisha who was at the blinky, giggly stage of mead imbibing

Why:

Giggly is visual and specific. Amiable is less so. And I probably want to use amiable somewhere else.

Draft One:

 She was fifteen or sixteen, marriageable in this wherewhen, tall and slender as a New York model, (or tall for this ethnic,) blue eyed, snub nosed, fair skinned but brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type].

Draft Two:

 She was fifteen or sixteen, tall even in this crowd, snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type].

Why:

The sentence is supposed to give an immediate picture of one person, and by extension, the crowd that surrounds the POV character. I want to put the one person in a historical context.

And I want to pull out every word I can. This “person description” is exactly the sort of thing the reader’s eye skips right over.

Let me go back and unpack my choices, phrase by phrase:

fifteen or sixteen. This imprecision is consistent with the POV character not being well acquainted with the girl. This works.

marriageable: This is true and interesting and it’s the sort of thing an anthropologist or other  scientifically trained observer would think. It sets us in a historical context.
But it also takes us haring off with the girl’s marriage prospects in our teeth and we’re not going there. This info is not visible in the immediate scene. We want to stay in the scene.

Wherewhen: One of my made up words. I’ll use it later in dialog, not here in narration. We don’t expect the narrator to be the first to drop jargon on us. When the word appears in dialog, it’s the character laying a neologism down and dialog has looser expectations and rules than narrative.

tall and slender as a New York model. Oh Pleeeease! Jo, this is dreadful.
I put this in to emphasize we have a modern POV here. But my POV character wouldn’t think in pop culture terms. This is (1) imprecise, (2) not appropriate to the character’s mind, (3) not suited to the mind-set of my likely readers. Tawdry phrasing. Ugly. Kill it with poison.

tall even for this ethnic. which I put in to see if it was better, isn't. It's maybe something an anthropologist would say -- I'd have to find out -- but “ethnic” is a quagmire into which I do not want to step. Let’s just not.

tall even in this crowd. I like the informality of “crowd”.  It's idiomatic, modern phrasing. But this isn't right either.  But it doesn't sing. I dunnoh.

blue eyed, snub nosed, yellow haired, fair skinned but brown with the summer

becomes

snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer.

This is fewer words and fewer images but it conveys the same picture. Nine words instead of thirteen.
If I say she’s tanned I don’t have to say she’s fair skinned. If she’s pale blond we can assume she has light-color eyes. Who looks at or thinks about eye color anyway unless they are gazing at length, close up, into the eyes of their beloved?

Fair skinned is another clumsy-footed word choice in 2018. 

Draft One:

one of the unmarried sisters or half sisters and cousins, women who lived in the house of

Medkarratun, chief man of the village.

Draft Two:

one of the unmarried sisters, half sisters, cousins, and god knew what who lived in the house of Medkarratu, chief man of the village.

Why:

I changed the name Medkarratun because I’m trying for a made-up Celtic name that doesn’t look so much as though it’s been filtered through Latin.

The line up of relatives who live in the chief’s house is fiddled around a bit for clarity and to simplify sentence structure.

Draft One:

They’d amiably adopted the visitor, here for the festival.
Draft Two:

 They’d amiably gathered in a stranger, here for the festival. More than gathered her in.

Why:

When I look at some bit of writing and say “This is not good writing” it’s usually because the wording is not exact. One common type of "not exact" wording is exaggerated, overstated, overdramatic, purple prose.

The women in that chief’s house didn’t “adopt” her. They gave her a warm, sincere welcome, not a lifetime commitment of sisterhood. Let us be prosaic for 99% of what we're talking about. This makes the occasional forays into purple pack a little more punch.

Draft One:

given her generous helpings of fresh seeds and nuts on her gruel

Draft Two:

sprinkled generous helpings of fresh seeds and berries on her gruel,

Why:

"Sprinkled" is a more exciting and visual verb than "given". And if it’s midsummer they won’t have many nuts yet, but they will have berries

Draft One:

braided her hair in the same complex of knots and interweavings they wore.

attrib kwarner

 Draft Two:

 combed and braided her hair in the same knots and    interweavings they wore.

Why: I added “combed” because I have so many pictures in my head of Celtic combs. They’re a big part of the toolkit for these folks.

(We are not going to mention lice. No. This is a Romance-y sorta story and we are not even going to think about them.)

I pulled out “complex of” because I just wrote that bit so I could use complex as a noun. This is me showing off. I convey that the hair is complex plenty fine when I talk about knots and interweavings. I don’t have to say this twice. 

Time to simplify and toss out my fancy usage.

Also, if I use interweavings that’s enough showing off for a couple of pages.

Should I make that" braided into knots and interweavings" Hmmm ...  Can you braid an interweaving? Whatthe hell is an interweaving anyway?
This is why I have Third Drafts.

[anthropological  skull type]. Brachiocephalic? Whatever. I do not mind going all science-y but I have to look it up. I think a nice long technical term fits nicely here for cadence or something. 

So there you have it. That's what I was thinking as I moved from earlier words to later

ones. While this is a single case here, working on a single paragraph, it's pretty much how I do this part of wrestling words.

It's a lot faster to d than to  write about, thank goodness.

 

Doin' It Your Way

I wrote this elsewhere in response to somebody worrying they were not doing their plotting 'correctly'. I think they were worried about not using an outline maybe.

So this is what I said:

Writing is not like the Olympics where, as I understand it, athletes watch computer images of themselves and train to lift the left elbow a half inch on the turn so they conform to the optimal mathematical conformation. Nor is it necessarily a Tai Chi kata where one finds enlightenment by interpreting centuries-old patterns.

photocreditAlainDelmas

Writing is more like a bar fight -- not that I have been in a bar fight.

You will doubtless have noticed that writers follow many paths to plotdom. These may or may not include cats.

What we all have to do is find what works for us. We have to re-find this with every book, really, since we learn as we go along and we change as people and maybe the baby stops taking naps and some books need to be coaxed out of their cave with soap and railway shares while some need to be struck repeatedly across the head with a 2 X 4.

So take all the 'you have to's and use them to provide better drainage in the gully at the bottom of the hill and do what seems right to you. (This is known as 'The Great Permission' and you have to give it to yourself, though other writers can lend you theirs for the weekend. You will probably find used ones on e-Bay.)

You need not expect the first method to work. It might. It might not. Keep trying.

Talk to me

I was advising a young person I know about writing.

(I continue to be amazed that kids aren't taught grammar anymore, but that's a separate issue.)

Anyway. Pretty good writing overall.

I noticed something interesting. The writing was good, but when we chatted casually online about what they wanted to convey -- what they wanted to 'say' -- that was BETTER. I could lift this phrase or that from the back-and-forth convo we were having and stick it into the writing and it was fresher, more original, cooler, more apt.

So I come away thinking --
a writer needs to engage with the page as if it were a person.
We need to hold a conversation with the page.
We need to talk to the page.

Technical Topics -- Breaking Comma Rules for Fun and Profit

... or, like, not

 
Punctuation Rule Breakage
Pro or con?

Elsewhere somebody talked about leaving out commas when he didn't like them. This is a response I made.
I'm assuming this is breaking hard rules, not just using the great expanse of stylistic wriggle-room Chicago Manual of Style and its brothers leave us.


I came up with five consideration to think about when playing fast and loose with commas. This holds true with a lot of writerly eccentricities besides comma punctuation, I suppose.


First off,
Let's say you leave out commas that do not, for some reason, please you on a case-by-case basis.

The publisher's copyeditor will have to laboriously add or remove those off-brand commas.
She really has no idea which comma-errors are done on purpose and which are true mistakes. She has to mark them all.
While she's doing all that comma work, she's not fine-combing your manuscript for other problems.
She's only got a set number of hours, most likely .
What do you want her to work on?

Managing Editore: Been a hard week

When you're confronted with her copyedits, you now have many hundreds of editorial marks and comments that you have to go through and leave in place or stet.

Then the Managing Editor picks up this complicated mess and says "I got an author here who doesn't know basic punctuation" or worse, "He's doing this on purpose?"
The Managing Editor's job is to look at every stet and say 'yes' to some and 'no' to some. You've given him work. Much work.
You have just pissed off the Managing Editor.
This is not a good thing
for anybody.


There will be some important stets you want to make. It's easier to argue for that one important stet if you have not just been stroppy over 800 missing-comma stets.

Sometimes we don't want to innovate

Whatever the outcome, the copyeditor, the Managing Editor, and you have wasted a lot of time and effort.

 

Finally --

While most readers won't notice commas one way or the other . . .

the ones who do notice intermittent use of the Oxford comma or failure to set off essential relative clauses with commas
will not only be distracted from the flow of your fiction,
they will see these as mistakes arising from the author's ignorance
rather than considered authorial choice
and in their heart of hearts, they will think less of you.