Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

At the end of each chapter of the Novelist’s Essential Guide to
Creating Plot there’s a plotting exercise. One of them was the very thing
I had planned to do with LMB’s Komarr: do a plot summary of a
novel you enjoy.

Now that I know that switching back and forth in Komarr was
really parallel plots, I don’t think I’ll try the exercise on it. Instead, I’ll probably
use this excuse to reread another LMB book - preferably one more similar to what
I’m aiming for.

Since I keep skipping the exercises, the plot book is turning into just a
paean to plot. Back in the Poetics section, I learned that the
Ancient Greek for plot is mythos, which also means theme, story
or speech. So when I found that Chapter One of the Seven Saga lacked an
essential
storiness,
it was just plot after all.

Funny how defining things (or reading paeans to things) can pin down
very fuzzy uneasiness about your stories and their storiness.

Mike suggests Christopher Vogel’s The Writer’s Journey; it sounds familiar, but I tend to pick up bad habits from these how-to books so I’m trying to cut down. (That reminds me - it’s time to summarize The Wrong Prequel in the first sentence.) I was thinking that it might be instructive to take a good book (say, Komarr) and outline it after the fact, for a real-life example of subplots, viewpoint characters et cetera, but I was too lazy to do it today.

Instead I just wrote up my outline and tried to add subplottage. I’m not sure when I figured out that the sorta-bad guy would win after all. I may have been influenced by Charlie Stross’s description of his Bad Guys Who Study The Evil Overlord List, in a subthread of that thread on rasfc (rec.arts.sf.composition) about the wacky NovelMaster writing method: Writing a Space Opera: the blind panic method.

I need to write the first 40,000 words before I hit the blind panic stage.

After six months holding at 20,000 words, I’ve decided that The Wrong Novel can’t go any farther until I figure out the hero’s in-laws’ political situation. This, unfortunately, means writing The Wrong Prequel, which has itself been holding at 300 words for nine months. This time, I’ve decided to do it the right way - make the outline, name the bloody characters already, and so forth.

So, of course, now that I’ve resolved to do something, it’s time to procrastinate. The best place by far for that is the newsgroups, in this case, the rec.arts.sf.* hierarchy. There I found a link I had to share: The Novel Blueprint from Daniel Steven’s Suspense Novel Workshop. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m glad I looked at it. I was worried that I was introducing the hero (a.k.a. VP #2) too late in the story, but it turns out he’s not supposed to appear until Scene #6. I’d almost introduced him too early.

Whew! That was a close call. Back to my outline…

I’m still discovering the wonders of OSC’s page. Here’s a stolen survey I thought said a bit more than the general run of blog surveys. It was called Behind the Words.

1. Name the book (or books) that made you say, “I want to do this, I want to write.”

Two people get the blame: Ayn Rand and Lois McMaster Bujold. Rand basically wrote her own scripture in novel form - telling a story powerful enough to reverse people’s political or moral opinions (at least while they’re reading it) is quite the apologia. I’d like to do that. LMB, on the other hand, is someone you want more of, even if you have to go and write it yourself.

2. Please name five books you would like to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island.

I’m going to cheat like OSC with the one-volume editions:

a bible, bilingual with commentary
an etymological dictionary to go with it
a one-volume Lord of the Rings
a big fat edition of Chaucer in the original
The Faerie Queen (which I would, therefore, finally read)

3. If you were a high school English teacher, what five books would you assign?

Lord of the Flies
The Swiss Family Robinson
Pride and Prejudice
1984
The White Mountains trilogy by John Christopher

4. Name three magazines that you read regularly.

Commentary, Analog, Scientific American

5. What CD’s get you in the mood to write?

The Buffy! The Musical soundtrack, ABBA, and any other cheesy 70’s music - it’s not just for filking anymore. But once I start writing, I don’t hear a thing. I can have the radio on for hours and I’ll have no idea whether India blew up Pakistan, because I blocked it all out.

6. What do you read for fun?

I’m not in school so I read what I enjoy or what I’m curious about - mainly sci-fi, science, fanfic, and Victorian literature.

7. How did you first get started writing?

I read way too much J/C fanfic in the course of a slow week at work, and the muse decided to roll her own. I tried to stop her, but she was determined.

8. How did you first get published?

It depends on what you mean. I got my nonfiction published by disagreeing with one of the editors of a newsletter I subscribed to. They published my essay, and later asked me to replace a retiring columnist. My fiction is pretty much unpublished, unless this website counts.

9. How often do you write?

I try to do that 1000-words-a-day thing, but it hasn’t been working for a while now. So I try to at least edit every day.

10. What are your three favorite forms of procrastination?

Blogging, emailing and watching Buffy.

11. Where do you write?

On the bed or in a chair with my laptop. It’s pretty bad for my posture, but that’s the price I pay for art.

12. Is writing an excruciating process for you or a cathartic one?

No, it’s just writing. When the muse does it all herself, that’s quite enjoyable to watch. When I have to edit the results, it’s not bad either. Sometimes it seems like it goes on forever, though.

13. What would you be doing if you couldn’t be a writer?

What I am doing, I suppose. I was considering farming at one point.

14. How do you know when you’ve written something good?

If reading it gives me that feeling that I get when I read something good by somebody else.

15. What other titles were you considering for your [work with the astoundingly bad title]?

I’m usually good with titles, but “Delta Quadrant Babes in the Mirror Mirror Universe” wasn’t one of my best. The trouble was it was supposed to be more slapstick when I slapped that title on it, and I never thought up a new one.

16. Is writing your day job? If not, what do you do to make a living?

I’m a webmaster, CGI programmer, database administrator, support phone person, linux sysadmin and network administrator, and none of those things are what I was actually hired to do.

17. What was the most unusual job you’ve ever held?

I worked for a company in California that made subdivisions. It was strange for me because in large chunks of New England, you buy a plot of land, get the phone and electric lines connected (and more recently, cable), and otherwise you’re on your own. If you want water, you dig a well, if you want sewage, you lay a leaching field, and if you want natural gas, you buy a tank of propane. The idea that a big company would go in and negotiate with the local government to be reimbursed for laying utilities for you and a hundred other houses at once was just odd.

18. Writers are known to have quirky personality traits. What are yours?

I’m a great believer in rational thought and logical argument. It’s a shame that’s considered a quirk rather than a requirement, but there it is.

19. Do you have pets? If yes, what are their names?

No pets, and you can’t paint the apartment. If you do paint the apartment, it must be white or off-white. Thus sayeth the lease.

20. Please name your five favorite movies.

The Sound of Music
Henry V
Dead Again
The Usual Suspects
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Date of Birth: the 60’s

Place of Birth: far, far away

Literary Awards: a few ASC awards, mainly

;Education: far too much

Current Home: Boston, Massachusetts

Influences: G. K. Chesterton

This is the inaugural entry in my new sci-fi category, for the moment. Eventually, my other blog will get imported into MT and there will be plenty of back-entries on the topic. I’ve learned a lot from fandom, and one of the most important lessons is never let your real opinions slip out. But I’ve already alienated everyone who wanted to be alienated in fandom - an unintentional slash-and-burn, but a useful one nonetheless - so I can move the other blog here without any major worries that David Brin will hate me forever for my personal opinion of his fiction.

I went shoe-shopping yesterday, and, as usual, found no shoes. I came home with a bag full of used and remaindered books, though. You should have seen the one that got away… One of the ones that got away was a new anthology by Orson Scott Card, of the best stories of the century. I glanced through the table of contents and was pleased to see my favorite short story in there: “Dark they were, and golden-eyed,” by Ray Bradbury.

I wandered over to OSC’s page today to track down the title of the anthology, but I was distracted from my quest by his Open Letter
to fellow Mormons about whether he plagiarised the Book of Mormon for one of his novels. There are bits of the letter that are rather interesting, especially the part about science fiction being the only practical method of discussing moral and cosmological issues across the gulf between worldviews. He seems like quite an interesting guy. I had no idea he was a Mormon, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

For reader convenience, here are some (non-contiguous) quotes from OSC’s open letter:

You can read the original Ender’s Game on OSC’s page. And don’t click on the “More” link below unless you’re ready for a slam from a Big Name Writer. (Don’t make me say I told you so…)

(more…)

Why don’t people understand that it is just as hard work to be a minor writer as a major one? - Robert Warshow

The Joy of X

I decided that my fic deserved version control. I used it when I wrote my thesis, and though I rarely rolled anything back, even to look at previous versions, it was very comforting to have old versions around. Installing TWiki in various places brought to mind RCS, that BOFQ of version control programs that makes the little version numbers at the bottom of the page in TWiki. RCS is a bear to install on Windows - or rather, it’s easy to install but impossible to coax into working properly. But I had to have it for my fic. The muse deserves the very best. With all the chopping and overhauling and POV-shifting of fiction-writing, the ability to grab that paragraph you wrote in your first draft and cut out during the mad night of the third edit, in order to use it again in the same story or another, is priceless. I don’t know how I wrote without it.

I wasn’t looking forward to building RCS on my Mac, though, not after my several unsuccessful attempts using precompiled binaries for Windows at work. Nevertheless, I bravely downloaded the source and prepared to compile. Then I had one of those “Mac is Unix” moments, and I thought, maybe RCS is already around here somewhere. Mac is Unix means you can just type: which rcs at the command line, and lo and behold! /usr/bin/rcs

As an added bonus, when next I opened my lovely Emacs for Mac OS X (it’s not just a text editor, it’s a way of life), I found Version Control right there in the tools menu. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. It’s just like being back on that decrepit Sparc running SunOS 4…well, never mind about my misspent youth. You, too, can use RCS on Mac OS X, but I should warn you that I’m not sure it came on the first disk. It may have appeared later, once I installed the developers’ tools in order to compile Emacs. That’s the third disk that came with OS X, the one you look at suspiciously and put away in a dusty corner until you notice that make won’t make without it.

  Puppy:  off
  Word of the day:  Romantic

I bought The Romantic Manifesto the other day and read it on the T. I found it even more helpful than the how-to books I’ve read: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card and The Science of Science-Fiction Writing by James Gunn. The former is the industry standard, featuring the secret MICE system of writing sf/f. I’d hoped the latter was about science in sci-fi, but it wasn’t. It was barely about writing sf at all - it was more interesting as a biography of Asimov.

Anyway, back to Ayn Rand - she’s a wonderful read, if only to hear someone refer to famous works of literature as “vile” and their authors as “evil”. Technically, The Romantic Manifesto is not about the mechanics of writing but about the philosophy of art, but it still manages to cover most of the MICE mechanics, explain what the problem is with sci-fi and touch on Rand’s own motivation for writing - all on the side, as it were, of her aesthetic philosophy. She also discusses the difference between moral and aesthetic judgment of novels, and includes a fun short story at the end.

I read The Romantic Manifesto a decade ago, so it’s the most likely source of my own ideas about plot. Ayn Rand insists that the novel be plot-driven - every point of character and theme must proceed from the plot. You could think of it as a book-wide version of “show, don’t tell”. She insists that the heroes, at least, have as much personal volition as the plot has action (and the plot must have action), and she gives contrasting examples of both characterization and style.

To Ayn Rand, a novel is its own justification - it is not a gravy-train, or a morality play, or a disposable piece of entertainment. The function it serves for the reader is escapism - the reader escapes into the ideal world, the one that matches his own ideas and feelings about life, for the duration of his time between the covers. That makes it doubly strange that Rand dislikes sci-fi. (Atlas Shrugged is, arguably, sci-fi.)

Science fiction, she claims, is a mixture of the good (Romantic) and the bad (Naturalistic) tendencies of the novel. An sf plot is always Romantic (idealized, with plenty of action, a notion of good and evil, and heroes working towards the good) but the characters tend to be Naturalistic Everymen swept along by external events, sketchily drawn with little psychological consideration. No one will argue that character has always been the great weakness of sci-fi, so that when someone like LMB comes along the difference is shocking. (I had to get her in here somewhere.)

I highly recommend The Romantic Manifesto to writers; even if you disagree with Ayn Rand, she’s always a good example of what it means to have a reason for doing what you do - in this case, writing. The goal of her novels was to exhibit the ideal man. In the process she made a kind of bible out of them, which she readily refers back to to make her points. Literature is a means of conveying ideas, she mentions, that it would take reams of philosophy to explain - but you have to have something to say.