SF Signal just posted a podcast dealing with the aftermath of the writer Genevieve Valentine being harrassed at ReaderCon, which included the fall-out from ReaderCon not following its own zero tolerance policy. The panel consisted of Stina Leicht, Mur Lafferty, Jaym Gates, and Carrie Cuinn with Patrick Hester asking the questions. Hester didn’t do the best job in the world this time around, in my opinion, but the input from the interviewees is excellent.

One thing not related to Valentine or ReaderCon that came up during the podcast discussion was a report from a prior World Fantasy Con about an editor trading off of his influence to hit on women writers, especially up-and-coming writers where the power imbalance is very severe. The suggestion being, put up with this because I can help your career.

I mention this because I think it’s important that every writer, beginning or otherwise, know that this is absolutely, terribly, awfully wrong and no one ever should have to put up with this kind of behavior. Or any lesser variant of it. And also that no one editor out there has enough influence to have a dampening affect on your career if you have to tell them where to go. And that most all editors out there will be horrified and pissed off to hear of such behavior by a colleague and want to punch their teeth through the back of their face.

Beyond the harrassment, Valentine also was on a panel during which she was heavily condescended to by the male moderator. This is also not okay, should never be okay, and I don’t think it’s entirely out of bounds for audience members to address such an issue as it comes up—or other panelists to do so. The other general issue being men talking over women panelists, not listening to them, etc. Also not okay. Which should be obvious. (For my part, I tend to get into manic modes that sometimes coincide with being on a panel, and I will happily shut the fuck up if told to shut the fuck up, should I forget to stop going on and on. Although I also do try my best to self-regulate and be a responsible member of all panels I’m on—a good moderator is always appreciated in this regard, too.)

***

In a different context, I got to thinking about the editor-writer power balance in general, outside of toxic situations. Which is to say, although I personally am beginning to enter the Old Fart stage of my career, I still often feel like an up-and-coming outsider—and that is certainly the vantage from which I usually conduct my conversations, whether in email or in person. I do not see much distance between myself and some writer in their twenties. If I drop a newbie writer a line, it’s generally in a relaxed and informal mode, for instance. But what I’ve come to realize is that no matter how I might see things, some beginners will attach more weight to your words than you yourself expect. And this, quite frankly, horrifies me. I love that people enjoy the books we put out, but please don’t give too much authority or…whatever the word is…to any editor or writer. Seek out those who produce books you love, learn whatever you think you can from them, and that’s it. (Besides, it has a calcifying effect on Old Farts…we tend to turn to stone much sooner, babbling out of our rapidly solidifying mouth-parts ridiculously boring anecdotes from the old days.)

This blog post feels as if I only kind of got at the meaning I wanted to convey, but hopefully it’s good enough.

(Photo by Taylor Lockwood—all rights reserved.)

The following short essay was originally presented as part of a longer powerpoint presentation given in various forms, including at a London architectural conference and at the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine.

Sometimes it’s useful to think in abstractions to more clearly see the effects we are trying to achieve in fiction. For example this idea: Everything we see around us, whether functional or decorative, once existed in someone’s imagination. Every building, every fixture, every chair, every table, every vase, every road, every toaster. The world we live in is largely a manifestation of many individual and collective imaginations applied to the task of altering reality.

If this is true, then nothing we see is entirely inert. Everything around us has, to some degree, a point of view. Thus, it may be useful to think of objects and other things embedded in your narrative as characters, too. Which is to say, that they have their own stories and agendas at the micro level of narrative. Paying attention to the possibility in these stories can be closely allied to characterization generally.

In extreme situations, these points of view become powerful influencers of behavior and history. This is the case in the imaginary city of Ambergris as described in my novel Finch, which I offer up as an example. In the novel, the subterranean inhabitants of the city, the gray caps, have Risen and taken over the city, occupying it and trying to maintain power over the human inhabitants through what can only be described as thought viruses given flesh. Their version of the city can be seen as an operational reality in competition with the reality of the original, indigenous peoples and the settlers who supplanted both them and the gray caps.

These operational realities do not play well with one another and the Rising brings everything to a boil. For a long time before this, the majority of Ambergris’s population—the descendants of Manzikert’s whaling clan, and new settlers—had the luxury of forgetting that they live in one of three possible versions of the city. This is something you see often in our real world, and this is also why you see the sparks of seemingly “new” conflict in some cases—because there is something there that has never been resolved. People on the ground have to live with that, and the dissonance it creates. (This is somewhat comparable in some ways to the more personal conflict and interpersonal dynamic between two individuals. It could be said to be a type of macro-characterization when applied to fiction.)

(more…)

I’ve been meaning to link to this post by Rose Lemberg for awhile, about not “limiting the range of female characters to the kick-ass heroine,” although that description reduces it down too much, so go read it. The comments are also insightful and interesting. I have to say—this is what I thought it was always supposed to be about. Creating individual, unique people in terms of your characters, attempting as much complexity and inconsistency and strength and weakness as we all have.

***

A tangent: I think to at least some extent, we’re also seeing a kind of push-back against the kind of shrink-wrap, pre-packaging of cliche across several fronts, in part because the commodification of fiction, the reduction of it to just one aspect of the publishing process–as commercial product—is often incompatible with dealing in nuance, complexity, and individuality. This affects many aspects of a novel but is most noticeable, of course, in the context of the characters.

Cliche, stereotype, thinking in terms of types rather than individuals, not putting enough thought or imagination into our decisions…these things don’t just create bad writing, they diminish us as writers because it means we either don’t care enough about really exploring and investigating human nature or we simply aren’t capable of doing so.

My WONDERBOOK: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction for Abrams Image is well on its way to being finalized, with publication set for 2013. This will be the first creative writing guide that doesn’t just supplement text with images, but replaces text with image. In fact, its 300 pages will include over 175 diagrams, illustrations, and photographs. The diagrams will be radically different from what you find in most writing books, and the integration of the text with image will also be something you haven’t seen before.

The cover above is a rough, but close to being final—it’s by Jeremy Zerfoss, who is doing the majority of the art, and the design of the book. The image below is an example of one of the ways in which this approach can be useful in teaching creative writing. Writer and filmmaker Gregory Bossert is planning to create an animated tutorial around the prologue fish.

The main text will include chapters on Inspiration, Elements of Story, Beginnings & Endings, Writing & Revision, The Bleeding Edge, and a special chapter on writing exercises that I think will blow most people’s minds visually—and will set out all of the things my wife and I do in our workshops and masterclasses. Elements like Characterization will be woven into the discussion in all of the chapters, since separating out the people from the story seems pointless to me.

In addition, the book will feature short essays on a variety of writing-related subjects by Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, Karen Joy Fowler, Lauren Beukes, Charles Yu, Karin Lowachee, Catherynne M. Valente, Michael Moorcock, and several others, as well as a long exclusive discussion about craft with George R.R. Martin. A comprehensive list of over 700 essential non-realist novels is just one item of interest in the appendices. The format of the book will allow annotations and asides in the margins for additional value.

Another unique aspect of the book is that it makes no distinctions between artificial boundaries between mainstream and genre, and it takes as its foundation fantastical literature. Which is to say, Wonderbook will be of use to any beginning or intermediate writer, but assumes a default of the fantastical. On facebook awhile back I indicated I was trying to create a new visual language for teaching creative writing. In retrospect, that was a grandiose claim. But I do think we have accomplished something special regardless.

Corollary: As a reader, I don’t care what you think about current events or international politics or what you had for breakfast or your hangnail, so get off social media…

and

Heed the Leaf

Furious fiction interview with me above, and Jenn Brissettinterviews me for the Gotham City Workshop, with questions about writing advice. I want to spotlight this bit, since these people were so important to me as a beginning writer:

“I had a creative writing teacher, Denise Standiford, in high school who introduced me to Angela Carter and who took me seriously. That was more important than any advice. In college at the University of Florida I was fortunate enough to fall under the wing for three very well-published writers. The first was Jane Stuart, the novelist daughter of Jesse Stuart. She also took me seriously, even when my work didn’t perhaps merit it, and she critiqued it, too. At the same time, the novelist Meredith Ann Pierce allowed me to be part of a workshop she ran. Pierce really looked at my work and offered great comments. And also during that period, the poet Enid Shomer critiqued my work and was very kind to me. All of these women during my formative years as a writer made it clear to me that I had some talent and that I should pursue my writing. I’m sure they all gave me great advice as well, but you can find advice anywhere. What you can’t always find is faith.”

Athena Andreadis has an interesting and useful post about rape over on her blog, which also includes a re-posted Evolutionary Psychology bingo card that I found quite illuminating. I think my favorite one was “Believes women out-talk men but keeps talking nonstop” since I’ve seen that one in action many times before. (I’ve also been guilty of the over-talking myself.)

(more…)

This post was written in solidarity with Booklifenow, which has been publishing lots of wonderful and unique content—check it out!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the protocols of fiction in terms of story and novel beginnings, in part because of my own recent resurgence in writing fiction but also from reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (more on that later). Inherent in the idea of a beginning is a sense of what kind of story or mode of fiction you are about to enjoy (or hate). Some approaches to this riff off of the idea of formula, not necessarily in a bad way—it’s just as a shorthand to guide the reader to the right set of precepts for what the writer intends. Examples include prologues or first chapters of noir novels that contain certain elements—down-and-out detective, beginnings of a case—that create expectations. There will be a mystery. The main character will operate within certain constraints of opinions and options. Constraint can be a great way to write an amazing and original character, the original cliché become simply…original.

Other types of fiction require different approaches. A sloppy opening to a mystery still more or less serves the function of letting you know what you’re reading, whether the writer intends to support or subvert that expectation. But what if you’re not working off of a common pattern? For fiction that aggressively wrenches the reader out of existing patterns and modes it is even more important that the writer show the reader how to encounter the story. This is not to say that the writer is trying to straitjacket the reader, but that without an idea of the reading protocols, the reader may well feel adrift and the intended effect or effects of the story will not be part of the reader’s experience of the story. For example, take the beginning of “No Breather in the World But Thee,” a story I wrote recently and which is out in submission at the moment:

The cook didn’t like that the eyes of the dead fish shifted to stare at him as he cut their heads off. The cook’s assistant, who was also his lover, didn’t like that he woke to find just a sack of bloody bones on the bed beside him. “It’s starting again,” he gasped, just moments before a huge black birdlike creature carried him off, screaming. The child playing on the grounds outside the mansion did not at first know what she was seeing, but realized it was awful. “It’s just like last year,” she said to her imaginary friend, but her imaginary friend was dead. She ran for the front door, but the ghost of her imaginary friend, now large and ravenous and wormlike, swallowed her up before she had taken ten steps across the writhing grass.

What does this opening accomplish? Well, in some ways it may provoke whiplash in the reader, so there’s a risk involved in the approach, but in terms of an expectation set for readers it tells you that this is a story that will travel from point of view to point of view. Indeed the narrative then opens up after this paragraph into several connected set pieces from different perspectives, although at a more leisurely pace. The story is also telling you what it is and what it is not. It is a story of the weird, but it is not a traditional story of the weird. Giant birds, dead fish staring, imaginary friends, etc., all could be deployed in fairly conventional fashion in a story. Here they are not. Yet, you probably want to know what happens next.

In other cases, like my story “Komodo,” which will appear in the next issue of Arc magazine, the opening takes the opposite approach, in that the teaching to read will take place across the entire narrative:

Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the mariachi band plays out in the courtyard…I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me, need to know I’m telling them this for a reason. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. So I hope you’ll stay awhile. It won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

It starts in a strange place, I’ll admit, inside of a giant green plastic alien head. I was all dressed up. I was on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not even because of looking forward to the party but to the after party. The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

I use a whole two paragraphs from the opening of “Komodo” as an example because the story is constantly redefining itself, in part because the narrator is acutely aware that too much information too soon will only confuse the issue and erode suspension of disbelief in those she is telling the story to. Thus, she is constantly finding comfortable analogies or lies to feed said listener to contextualize the story she is telling in familiar elements. Her hope is that as the story becomes stranger and stranger this approach will serve to keep the listener from becoming confused. Perhaps sneakily, perhaps not sneakily at all, this approach also saves the reader from discomfort in terms of concepts and context—especially since not only did I want to write a story that was continually unpacking and redistributing its context but also use the idea of rich nodes of exposition as tiny but satisfying explosions of micro-story within the main narrative, all framed by an engaging and energetic narrator with a personal stake in the described events. Which is to say, a more conventional approach that simply gave the full context in the first couple of paragraphs of the story would, in this case, have made the story less accessible; it also would not at all support the central conflict nor the narrator’s role in it.

Despite the complexity of these various elements, “Komodo” is still focused on just a couple of effects repeated multiple times in an order that provides a hopefully pleasing and continually eureka-ing effect. But what if you are telling a story that wants to do several diverse things, achieve more than one effect? How do you establish reading protocols for the multi-various? The most effective technique almost seems like indecision: it requires not committing immediately to any one set of protocols, with the danger that the reader may find your story at first adrift, unfocused, even if the individual scenes are quite precise and effective. But it’s all about not creating the distinctive tell in the reader’s mind that this is a particular type of tale.

In this case, there has to be a compelling reason to continue to read even as you’re not quite sure what kind of story you’re reading…and here we come back to Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312. It is an epic science fiction story on the one hand, a character story of the person Swan on the other. It is a love story between Swan and a man named Waltham, but also a tale of interplanetary intrigue. Robinson could have started with any of these things. He could have started with Waltham meeting Swan. He could have started with the first disastrous attack that sets off the intrigue. But he doesn’t. Instead, we start with Swan by herself, engaged in an interesting activity. From there, we are gradually are clued into the various elements of story and how they will work in combination. This serves the useful and obvious purpose, too, since it is an SF novel, of acclimating the reader to Robinson’s vision of the future. However, this inclination not to choose a position, so to speak, to foreground neither love story nor intrigue allows Robinson the space to privilege both strands, to make the novel somehow deeper and more real, less like fiction. The risk (slight in this case) is that a few readers may indeed be confused as to the point of the story for a few chapters, not to mention reviewers. At least one reviewer wrote all about the interplanetary plot and mentioned the relationships not at all, even though close to one-half the book may be said to be about Waltham and Swan. But this issue is irrelevant next to the more important point that 2312 is a better novel because of this approach.

This relates, too, to the ways in which writers sometimes destabilize their fiction to provide a more comfortable entry-point for the reader—you see these kinds of suggestions often from editors or agents, and they are not without validity; even the pushback against these ideas can provide interesting third options, or help strengthen other parts of a novel. To another writer reading such material, the destabilizations can read like deformities of structure or character; to many readers, it’s invisible and all they notice is that the launch-point into story is easy. Some would thus argue that the deformity is actually an enhancement and I’m not going to take issue with that here, in part because I think it also marks an ideological difference of opinion on what the beginning of a story is supposed to do. Some writers will argue that distortion is worth it if it provides a more efficient and readable delivery system for weirder/less conventional material embedded later on. (I personally find it irritating and disappointing more often than not.)

Sometimes the very genre creates an expectation that is more commercial—Alistair Reynolds’ early novels in particular are very, very strange, but the subgenre of space opera and the expectations the words “space opera” conjure up provide a smooth entry point for the reader, who once engaged finds themselves in marvelously weird territory indeed. So this smooth launch-point can come naturally as a function of the writer working within a recognizable and established genre, and thus it is an integrated element of the approach. I’m not arguing that the only difference between, say, China Mieville and Michael Cisco is the entry point, but if you look at Mieville’s beginnings as opposed to Cisco’s, you will note an easier time being had reading Mieville. There is no time to acclimate to Cisco. He’s not particularly interested in reader comfort levels and his idea of audience is probably very different from Mieville’s. (Yet, would Cisco’s novel The Narrator have reached more readers more easily with a different entry-point?)

I think about this issue more and more, in part because I’m working on so many different kinds of novels right now. This is nothing new for me. I had pieces of Veniss Underground and all three Ambergris novels done well before I completed them, and I can no longer tell where one started and another began. The new batch is accumulating much the same way, and in contemplating their effects, I need to think about beginnings, and where one approach makes more sense and where it doesn’t, where an easier way is a deformity as opposed to simply an enhancement, and so on and so forth. In all of it, too, you must think about what affects the reader and how, within the context of your idea of the ideal reader for the work. This is separate from the Reader that permeates the internet, the Reader that is generalized and for whom we are told all sorts of things that may or may not be true about their tastes, their wants, and what may or may not interest them.

Beginnings, then, are about levels of commitment—to the text, to the reader, to yourself. The possibilities are endless, and important.

Thesis: This entry from C.W. Hart, Jr’s A Dictionary of Non-Scientific Names of Freshwater Crayfishes (Astacoidea and Parastacoidea), Including Other Words and Phrases Incorporating Crayfish Names contains all of the elements needed to inspire and create fiction. Therefore, story exists all around us, everywhere, and is inhibited only by the limitations of the imaginations that surround it.

Discuss.

***

Shrimp “(A) crevice, first a spron frey, then a shrimp, then a sprawn, and when it is large then called a crevice.” ASTACIDAE [U.K.] Randle Holme (ca. 1688), quoted by Phipson, 1883:435. [I was unable to find this quotation in Holme.]

“One of the courses was whole crevisses in a rich sauce….The guest of honor…muttered… ‘What do I do now?’ …[B]ecause I had struggled before with the same somewhat overrated delicacy…I winked at him and said, ‘Watch me.’ I picked up a shrimp between my left thumb and forefinger….” [France: Dijon] Fisher, 1943 (1954): 430 (Noble and Enough); and:

“The season for shrimps is short, and Madame Mossu paid well for all the boys and old men could find in their hundred icy streams.” [Switzerland: Chatel St Denis] Fisher, 1943 (1954):506 (I Remember Three Restaurants); and

“A light curry of shrimps or crayfish tails.” [Unspecified locality] Fisher, 1943 (1954):708 (W is for Wanton).

Fisher’s apparent lack of attention to her crayfish/shrimp food-stuffs is puzzling, considering she is (was) an important figure in gastronomy. In the first reference she speaks of ecrevisses and shrimps as if they are the same animal; in the second she is undoubtedly speaking of crayfishes that live in the streams of Switzerland; in the third she paradoxically distinguishes between shrimps and crayfishes. I suppose, like so many people, she just didn’t care. See also crawfish, crayfish and ecrevisse.

Sometime in the past month or so I must admit that I had a kind of panic attack, one that had me stressed and depressed at first—especially in the context of so many writers producing a novel a year. Although I’ve never thought this was necessarily a good idea for me, except career-wise, it still exerts a kind of pressure if you start thinking about it too much.

My panic attack occurred while I was looking through a copy of my last novel, Finch, which came out in 2009 in the US and 2010 in the UK. I suddenly realized that I was still months away from completing my next novel. How could I have let that happen? What in the heck had I been doing the last few years?

The answer was that I’d done a lot of anthologies, like The Weird, which is after all like producing about seven anthos in terms of word length. Not to mention the nonfiction book The Steampunk Bible. Between The Weird, The Steampunk Bible, and our Lambshead Cabinet anthology, I along with Ann (and on the Bible, SJ Chambers) had dealt with over 800 creators, which is in itself a kind of crazy time-suck. Getting our ebook imprint Cheeky Frawg off the ground had taken more time, as had creating Weirdfictionreview.com and doing a lot of work for the Shared Worlds teen writing camp (a recurring, annual time commitment).

So, I told myself, with some sense of relief if not a bit of sadness at perhaps losing sight of my priorities, I had a great excuse. All of these other projects had taken up my time. That was the simplest explanation. It’s not healthy to beat yourself up for not being able to do everything simultaneously.

But then I took stock again after looking at what I did have in the works fiction-wise—and a different picture started to emerge. There had been a lot of time spent on a long film treatment entitled Jonathan Lambshead and the Golden Sphere that had taken a whole summer (and may still bear fruit). More time had been spent on conceptualizing a space opera trilogy, another project for the future. More importantly, I realized I had written about two-thirds of a novel entitled Borne, about three-fourths of a novel entitled The Journals of Doctor Mormeck (serialized on this blog), and another twenty-thousand words of another novel which we’ll just call Mainstream Novel #1 for now.

Seeing the amount of fiction I’d actually produced, even if most of it wasn’t finished, made me look back at the previous “cycle” of novels: Veniss Underground, City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, and Finch. I realized that there had been significant overlap between those books, in terms of partial rough drafts. Veniss had lain dormant with about half of it done while I worked on much of City of Saints and Madmen (the first of my Ambergris novels), then come to life again. Shriek had been conceived of while writing the last parts of City of Saints—I had a 12-page summary of sorts—and a very early section of what became Finch was sparked by the original illuminated manuscript cover of City of Saints. I had about seven thousand words of proto-Finch well before finishing the extended City of Saints. While working on Shriek, additional ideas for Finch accrued over a period of years. Shriek itself took several years of work, although no one noticed the gap because Veniss was published after City of Saints.

Even though Veniss stands alone, it partakes of the same aesthetic as the beginning of the Ambergris Cycle. The two books speak to one another in some ways, and then Shriek and Finch, although written in different styles, are pursuing and following up on themes and issues first brought up in City of Saints. Thus, coming to the end of Finch was like coming to the end of the first part of my career.

People think I’m prolific, but part of that is simply that I initially had so much trouble finding publishers for my work and thus I had a back-log. So I think I’m only just beginning to see the complete outline of my long-term work cycle, obscured in part by the pattern of publication, not creation, of my prior novels. It may seem odd to not have recognized this, considering I’m 43 and been writing for three decades, but sometimes you need to take a step back to really see everything clearly.

Now I feel that I’m at the beginning of another cycle, one that’s more various despite certain connections between Borne and The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. And to some extent the process is similar: stops and starts on the novels prior to publication, overlap in writing parts of each of them, and a slow inching toward completion. At this point, I’m not entirely sure which novel will be finished first, because I’m equally passionate about each of them. What I do know is that they will be finished, especially because in each case I have a good idea of the overall structure and an image in my mind that corresponds to a rough understanding of the ending of each novel.

I’ve come to recognize that it’s important for me to realize that after living in Ambergris for so long it was natural that there be a break before the next book—and to give myself a break about that. It’s even more important to realize I’ve actually made significant process over the past couple of years—enough so that if I had just been working on one novel, it would have been completed and turned in. Understanding that this is part of my process, remembering that I’ve worked on multiple books in the past, is now helping me relax into this next phase of finishing the novels. I just have to be patient and ignore the idea of turning in a novel a year. Right now, apparently, I’m working simultaneously on the novels that I’ll have published over the next few years.

Still, I have to say that the part of me that requires instant gratification is thankful for finally returning to short fiction. It was a weird feeling to realize that a story I finished last month, “No Breather in the World But Thee,” was only the third story of any kind I had finished since Finch, the others being “The Quickening” in my collection The Third Bear and a story for a Vance tribute antho. (Not including, of course, meta-fiction for Steampunk Reloaded and the Lambshead Cabinet and something set in the Halo universe).

Now I’m working on another story entitled “The Last Redoubt” and a long novella entitled “Annihilation” and I’m excited about completing both. But I’m no longer stressed about the situation with the novels. I know I’ll finish them eventually and I’m confident that my organic approach to them is the right one. The fact is, your career has to follow and fit your fiction and the rhythms and cycles of that fiction—the needs of a career can’t dictate those things. Not if you want to remain sane and retain whatever makes you unique as a writer.