Inkless

Organized By the Highlights Foundation

It’s been quite a while since my last post. My only excuse is that I’ve been trying to get the writing-blogging balance right ever since I got back from the Highlights Foundation Whole Novel Workshop, and even before that, when I was preparing for the week-long intensive. Hopefully what I can share of that experience will be worth the wait.

Someone to Read the Whole Thing; And a Published Someone, At That

Please feel free to drop me a comment on this post if you’re thinking about applying to attend this conference. In general, I think it’s a great experience for a writer. One of the topics brought up by editor Stephen Roxburgh at the conference was how important it is for writers to enlist the help of readers before submitting to an editor. Mr. Roxburgh suggesting finding readers who aren’t writers (because writers may try to craft your story to their style more than dedicated readers). But certainly the opinions of a dedicated reader can be well-complemented by readings by published authors.

I was fortunate enough to have Martine Leavitt, a children’s writer published in both the fantasy and mainstream genres, read the story I’m currently working on, Thornwood. One of the other attendees had her husband read the feedback she’d gotten just before the workshop and he said that it was worth the price of attending (around $2500) on its own. I wouldn’t go that far, but I would say I made back the price of attendance at least twice over during the course of the week. In large part that stemmed from my ability to discuss macro story elements (did I rush through this scene? Does the tone shift too much over the course of the first half of the story? Any ideas for seeds I could plant in chapter one that might bear fruit by chapter 16?)l.

While the value of the workshop was most demonstrated in specific guidance for my story, I also picked up some advice of more general use.

Showing Emotion

This advice came mostly from Carolyn Coman, the other manuscript reader and workshop organizer besides Martine. In working with her husband and publisher Stephen Roxburgh, Carolyn finds that he is constantly asking her how her character feels at any particular moment, and also how she would like her reader to feel. Their advice is that if you are unsure about either at any point in your story, you need to find out (perhaps by doing a little fiction research). This advice holds true regardless of whether you are writing in 1^st person stream-of-consciousness or 3^rd person omniscient.

A second way to better articulate your character’s emotions is to never give the character a generic emotional reaction, to which I would add that you also should keep some undercurrents of emotion relatively persistent.

If you’ve participated in a critique group for a while or attended readings at seminars, you may have noticed there’s a lot of yelling in stories written by beginners. This is because beginners know a story should have strong emotions to keep reader interest, know that anger is a good emotion, and can easily find the exclamation point on their keyboards. An emotionally fraught drama as easy as pressing Shift-1!

Consider just a few of the ways that real people show anger: passive-aggressive resistance to future suggestions from the antagonist, a “slow burn” form of resentment expressed not at the time when the person was angered, but at a seemingly innocuous time, by-the-book Anger Management “You doing this makes me feel…,” “furious” concentration on whatever task or fidgeting behavior the person is engaged in at the time, a slight twitch at the corner of a person’s eye, begin speaking in a flat, monotone voice that is scary in its lack of emotion, scornful laughter, public revelation of the antagonist’s weaknesses, icy retort, bullying someone less powerful shortly thereafter.

Essentially, whatever emotion your character has, the emotion should be experienced in a way specific to that character, and expressed in a way specific to that character. Avoid cliche in emotional expression just as you avoid it in other circumstances.

Flashback

Before you decide to introduce a flashback, you should be sure it is absolutely necessary, because since it has already happened, it cannot contribute to the dramatic progression of a story as well as in-story events can. When you write a first draft, you are likely to write a full flashback: a full scene with a fade-in, fade-out, and large amount of surrounding detail. For every draft after that, you should try to cut the flashback down to the absolute necessity.

My model of spare flashback is a great little scene fragment from Martine Leavitt’s book Heck Superhero. In it her main character Heck, is talking with a friend of his. Heck’s mother has disappeared, and he’s homeless, living as best he can on the street with no money. His friend wants him to come live with his family, but Heck is reluctant, and has also run into a homeless kid even more troubled than he.

Heck tells his friend he can’t come home yet, and anyway he’s got to try to take care of this other homeless kid he’s found. To which Heck’s friend says he couldn’t take care of a goldfish. We then get Heck’s thought: “I should have never told him about the goldfish.”

You know what happened to the fish, you got everything you needed from a flashback, and yet even by the loosest definition, you only have a few words of revelation from the past.

Once you have a flashback scene you need an excellent trigger to bring it on, but then it can be introduced with nothing more than the word “had”. Anything the reader can follow is acceptable.

But that reminds me of another great lesson I learned at the Whole Novel Workshop…

establishing a setting for your story without making it seem dated

When Anthony Burgess created his masterwork A Clockwork Orange, he didn’t get his slang by simply transcribing ideas from high schoolers. He created a lexicon for his near-future hoodlum based on a reasonable assumption (in 1962, when it was written) that the Soviet Union would remain a powerful force far into the future, and that rebellious youth might integrate Russian into their slang as part of their rejection of the society around them. This makes the book tough to get into at first, but rewarding enough to earn a great deal of critical praise (I particularly like how they could put The New York Times followed by Roald Dahl on the back cover).

Used well, slang can not only add to your story, but become a major part of both plot and character.

However, if you do create your own slang, don’t cut corners. I recently finished the children’s book Dragon’s Milk by Susan Fletcher, and the author clearly tried to give the story a quickie fantasy makeover: all her characters talk with ploddingly normal diction, with the one exception that every time they use the word “not” they put it at the end of the sentence. Always “I know not” or “I like it not”, and never “I don’t know”, “I don’t like it”. Even worse is the naming convention: the main character’s two sisters are named Lyf and Mirym, step-mother Ryfenn, grandmother Granmyr, and three young dragons she takes care off named Synge, Embyr and Pyro before handing them over to a dragon named Byrn. Rather yrrytatyng.

Fletcher may have been able to get away with these sneaks—her primary audience in 1989 was made up of girls around eleven or twelve—but these ticks don’t add to the story.

So what principles could we follow to create work like Burgess’s? To me, it seems our goals should be very similar to those of the Do-It-Yourself movement.

Simple, Cheap

The materials DIYers work with are not exotic or expensive. A DIYer is, by definition, not a professional, and a DIY slangmaker is not a linguist (except if the slangmaker is Tolkien). When crafting slang, a DIYer should not get too fancy, at the risk of creating slang that detracts, rather than adds, to the meaning of the story (even Tolkien could probably have cut down on the number of times the elves busted out grandiloquent songs of mourning).

A few subtle and smooth changes to diction can sometimes produce a much greater effect than major grammatical changes: see my entry “Speaking in Tongues“. (logo done by me using a free gif from this site)

Repurposed, Recycled

If you have any foreign language knowledge, and Anthony Burgess had a lot, you can draw on a wealth of foreign ideas and usages in creating new jargon. Don’t create from scratch when you can borrow. For some of the fun words I’ve found in other languages, see my entry “No Direct Translation“.

Useful

One of the greatest strengths of the DIY movement is the emphasis on utility: eschewing flashy and wasteful features. This is the core value for DIY slang.

If you have read much speculative fiction, you have probably come across stories in which the warlike race has a language with way too many consonants. Well, Polish and Czech are pretty consonant-heavy languages, and the Poles and Czechs don’t seem any more warlike than the rest of us.

As an alternative to repeating the “harsh sounds-bad man” stereotype, try looking at language from a utility standpoint. Ask yourself this question: Would this word or this usage be of value to this character? Better yet, start from your character’s daily life, and find something for which there is no word in English and name it. But don’t stop there. Also create some set phrases and “translate” them: this allows you to produce alien ideas without adding too many italicized unpronounceables to your work.

For example, you could give the warlike people eight common words, twelve more slang words, ten euphemisms, and a couple dozen signature phrases all describing killing. Having different kinds of words, as well as phrase- and sentence-level constructions about killing will add more to your story than having one slang word you repeat over and over. If some of them even sound pleasant, all the more sinister.

Good luck with your DIYalog!

What Makes a Good Time-Travel Story?

As a general rule, I dislike time-travel stories. On the thematic side, many wind up being blunt and bludgeoning “commentaries” about what’s wrong with the world today (similarly to zombie movies), or condescending and superficial cultural missions to the ignorant. On the technical side, science fiction stories can quickly become irritatingly unbelievable given that characters have the superpower ability to disrupt the chain of cause and effect: they can act on hindsight preemptively (to go back in time before problems develop and nip them in the bud), or create hordes of paradoxes (such as the killing-one’s-own-grandfather paradox and others).

I was thus rather bemused to find that (without intending to) I’d read three science fiction stories in May that all dealt with time-travel and liked two of them: To Say Nothing of The Dog by Connie Willis, The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein, and The Anubis Gate by Tim Powers.

A Little Light-Hearted Paradox

Austin Powers II is only an OK movie, but it has a great bit of handwaving about the problems with time-travel (image via: this site):

Austin: So, Basil, if I travel back to 1969 and I was frozen in 1967, I could go look at my frozen self. But, if I’m still frozen in 1967, how could I have been unthawed in the 90s and traveled back to the 60s? (crosses eyes) Oh, no, I’ve gone cross-eyed.

Basil Exposition: I suggest you don’t worry about those things and just enjoy yourself.
[turns to camera]
Basil: That goes for you all, too.
Austin: Yes.

Essentially, the movie deals with the paradoxes inherent in time-travel stories by not taking them seriously. Many of my favorite movies about time travel (and most famous time-travel movies) are comedies (Back to the Future, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). If your goal, like Bill and Ted’s, is to bring actual famous historical figures to southern California for a high-school class presentation, I’m not going to be spending too much time looking for technical inconsistencies.

Restricted Travelers

Back to the Future was was also light-hearted, so one might expect the creators to have been breezy about the rules. But take a look at this list of answers posed to them, you can see they were not. One example:

Q: What happened to old Biff when he staggered out of the DeLorean in 2015?

A: Our intention regarding old Biff was that upon his return to 2015, he would be erased from existence because he had changed his entire destiny by giving his younger self the Sports Almanac. (Probably, Lorraine shot him sometime around 1996!). After old Biff clutches his chest and staggers (the same symptoms that Marty exhibited in Back to the Future when he was beginning to be “erased”), we actually filmed him falling onto the street and vanishing, and we previewed the movie this way (see The Secrets of the Back to the Future trilogy). However, the vast majority of the audience did not understand it, so we decided to cut it out, leaving the answer ambiguous, and subject to various interpretations—besides the above explanation, you can believe that Old Biff had a heart attack from the shock of time travel of from flying the car, or from something that happened to him in 1955. (image via: IMDb)

Even in this lighthearted comedy, the directors obviously felt it was worth their time to understand and account for the potential paradoxes of time travel. A novel writer is going to have a lot more audience time to work with than these directors, and so should be held to a higher standard.

The primary way to make a believable time-travel system is similar to that for creating a believable magical system: limit the ways in which powers can be used. In Back to the Future, they needed a massive amount of electricity, high speed, and bizarrely complex technology. In The Door Into Summer, Heinlein subjected time-travel to a variation of Newton’s third law of motion: in order to send something a certain amount of time into the past, a person must send an equal mass an equal amount of time into the future. Furthermore, one can never be certain which of the two items will go forward and which backwards, and there was a significant chance of miscalculation (whoops, you appeared eight feet underground). Add to that the good old standby of a government coverup, and you have a story world in which you can believe time-travel is nearly unheard of.

Self-Healing and Immutable Timelines

In To Say Nothing of the Dog (as well as The Doomsday Book, which is set in the same world), Willis uses an even more clever control mechanism—one I’d never seen before. She controls time travelers by giving the universe the ability to “heal” inconsistencies. Willis first draws a distinction between significant and insignificant events. While travelers are able to change minor events, the universe itself will prevent them from changing major events by blocking them from entering time portals, sending them to the wrong time or place, or when travelers think of clever ways to set off large chain reactions with small action, the universe will also set off a group of of events that cumulatively nullify the impact of the catalyzing action.

In the (exemplary) short story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, Ted Chiang takes this method even a step further: his narrator and the creator of his time portals are both devout Muslims in a unspecified time probably around the late Middle Ages. In it, the world has a strict timeline: travelers will never be able to change the past, even if they think they can. Unlike the movie Twelve Monkeys, which posits an unchangeable but impersonal timeline, in “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, the immutability of the timeline is conceived of as being ensured by God.

Don’t Look at My Time-Travel System, Look at My Characters

Finally, since time-travel systems are often fraught, another way to deal with them is to shift the focus of the story away from being plot driven and towards being more character driven.

The Door Into Summer includes some of Heinlein’s prescient predictions about the future (the story was written in 1957 about a character who travels to 2000), but some extremely off predictions as well (the hero’s inventions are targeted at very 1950s housewives, presumed to still be the majority of women in 2000). Plot-wise it’s a basic, old-fashioned “triumph of the tough guy” story. In order to make it really carry, though, Heinlein needed a main character compelling enough to round out a standard plot with the difficulties of time-travel, and I thought he did.

In contrast, I never warmed to the main character of Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate enough to enjoy the story. With such a convoluted storyline it was always going to be more plot driven than character driven, but for me, the plot so overwhelmed the character that it seemed pushy: I couldn’t get into the story, because I always felt aware of Powers as he moved his characters around.

Though I liked The Door Into Summer, I liked Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog much more. The story’s base time (from which the time-traveling characters originally travel from) is 2057, but the majority of the story takes place in Victorian England. Willis’s insight was to give the entire story pacing and style modeled on that of Victorian writers, particularly Jerome K. Jerome (the book takes its title from the subtitle of Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat).

The flowery and anachronistic language, comedy of errors convolutions, and eccentric characters left me cross-eyed but amused. I don’t think the story was free of self-contradiction. (She sets a precedent that time-travelers will see the results of their actions when returning to the future, but at the end of the book Ned seems to see a woman at Coventry whose history he’d changed—who should no longer have been there. If you can explain this, please let me know!) However, her focus was on the characters and her tone was sufficiently lighthearted that I didn’t worry too much about the time travel. When I did, the work she’d done to create her self-healing timeline satisfied me.

Done as well as Willis did, a time travel story can become a marvelously contorted tale.

Insurmountable Disadvantage in Science Fiction

Everybody loves to think that it’s the size of the fight in the dog, not the dog in the fight, that determines things. I like them so much so I was probably one of the only people who could really suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy the Ewoks in Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Of course, I was eight at the time, and mostly I’m still able to enjoy them due to a combination of nostalgia and contrarianism against the Empire Strikes Back crowd…

The little two-foot teddy bears of Star Wars are the icons of Plucky Baseline characters: creatures or people that are hopelessly technologically backwards and yet still manage to overcome their hyper-advanced technologically- and sociologically-developed opponents (link is to the Orion’s Arm – a cooperative sci-fi universe project, a decent argument against the character type, though laced with the group’s own jargon).

Pluck in Action Movies and Fantasy Stories

For fiction set in our own world, plucky characters can usually get away with quite amazing upsets. Action heroes, especially, count on great indulgence from us in suspending our disbelief so they can win gunfights against dozens of opponents, jump vehicles over, around, and through bizarre obstacles, and generally act like one-man armies. Perhaps my favorite example of relatively believable pluck is when Sean Connery, playing Indiana Jones’ dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, manages to defeat a German WWII plane by scaring up a flock of geese to jam the plane’s propeller.

In fantasy stories as well, since the rules of the world are largely author-defined, writers can embed trade-offs in the rules of their universes that provide opportunities for Pluck. Usually the most powerful “technology” in a fantasy story will be magic, and thus the powers of wizards will need to be curtailed strongly in some way.

The default way to give non-wizards a chance is to make magic required extreme mental effort from wizards. I’ll mention I just finished Tim Power’s The Anubis Gate, and wizards in the story are limited both by the need to be close to “sources” of magic to perform greater feats, and the physical toll magic takes on them (pain and weakness, bleeding from the eyes, fatigue…). Role-playing games have even quantified the mental effort: a wizard has only a certain number of points of magical power which must be replenished after using magical abilities.

Other popular controls on magic are to make casting it involve inescapable vulnerabilities, or require devilish bargains, great sacrifices, virtuoso precision, vast amounts of time, or rare materials.

Moreover, at the heart of almost all magical stories are human or human-like characters with strengths and weaknesses recognizably similar to our own.

Inhuman Perfection

The major difference in space-age science fiction is that there will be inhumanly advanced characters. We are already able to greatly increase the toughness of human beings, and may soon be able to significantly increase human intelligence, and this is in the 21st century. A casually spacefaring future population will have centuries of improvement, advancement, and strengthing, and increasing of longevity behind it.

In such a battle against more recognizably “human” opponents (which would be the likely be the “good guys”, because empathizing with an inhumanly advanced group would be much more difficult), the advanced race would win every time. Not most every time—absolutely every time, regardless of pluck. The battle wouldn’t be conceptually like Drake vs. the Spanish Armada, it would be like a herd of sheep vs. Boston, Massachusetts.

If a military dictatorship has access to mass genetic modification and cloning technologies, energy weapons, and super-advanced alloys, it will not lose to Ewoks. The dictatorship would not make the soldiers’ strength or reflexes, armor or equipment, susceptible to the sticks of little savages any more than it would create them with exposed brains.

(images: walker, ewok)

Hitting Above Weight Class

Of course there are lots of tropes in science fiction that stretch believability: that’s part of the fun. So of course stories of pluck certainly can have a place in science fiction. But to really draw in readers (less credulous than I was at eight) a science fiction writer will need to put together a force better than Fightin’ Ewoks.

Readers are unlikely to believe your featherweight can take on a heavyweight in the ring, but a middleweight could do it.

Here are a few ideas for putting enough firepower in the hands of your overmatched heroes to make their upsets believable. If you can think of more, please respond with comments—I’m just improvising here.

1. if your advanced opponents are divided, a minority of them may either tip the balance by joining the heroes weakening the primary opponents
2. in a more sinister twist, a high-level third party may actually be found to have manipulated the heroes, carefully guiding them to victory for its own purposes
3. technology at the fringes of an advanced society may be sufficiently up-to-date to pose a reasonable challenge to superior opponent technology (provided you set the stage with sufficient communications to keep the fringes sufficiently “in the loop”)
4. since some technologies are so advanced and as-yet scientifically unproven to be indistinguishable from magic (according to Arthur C. Clarkes old adage), you can use the fantasy tools such as trade-offs and critical weaknesses to give them vulnerabilities (an example of this would be in Larry Niven’s Ringworld, when humans defeat more militarily capable opponents by improvising a weapon out of spaceship thrusters)
5. throttling back the technological advancement of your societies makes it easier for humans like us to compete—if you want less of a gap between us and frontrunners, set the story closer to the present
6. while it’s a recognizable sci-fi cliche, another way of making normal people important in the future is to have everyone live in the wake of the collapse of a superior civilization. Whatever destroyed that civilization or broke it up conveniently leaves some of the tools behind—allowing access to futuristic technologies without the insurmountable intellectual gulfs that would necessarily accompany them. As I said, though, this is a cliche and that means it would take more work to make a fresh story with this premise

This is the seventh of the eight categories in the Story Gamut, my way of classifying story elements on a scale from micro-elements to macro-elements. A number of very big issues gain predominance at this level, mostly focused on story cohesion and creating a recognizable path through from beginning to end. This includes plot and story arch.

I’ve also included theme and focus here, though I’m not as decided on those elements. One or both of them may get migrated to the chapter section as I develop the Story Gamut.