The Wolf at the Door

Ruv's Trainer-wheel Recipe for Short Story Writing

2008-01-16T10:00:00.000+11:00

About a year ago, I turned to writing shorts when I realised that I needed more practice in story design. Since it was the design rather than the writing I wanted practice in, the more stories I wrote, the better -- hence shorts.In moving to shorts I also moved from spontaneous to planned writing, so that I could get a more conscious handle on design -- and keep my stories short.

For learning purposes I didn’t mind if my stories weren’t stunning and life-changing – I just wanted them competent and reliable, and have some impact. So what I wanted was a fool-proof formula for belting a short story out, so that I could focus on the ideas of the story rather than the form or the process. That's how I arrived at this recipe.

This recipe is a learning recipe. It probably won't turn out award-winning shorts, but it has helped me turn out shorts that are readable, contained in size, focused and have a point, which is what I wanted at the time. Once I was able to do this reliably, I could then explore ideas for themes, and subsequently work on other ways to design shorts, which is what I'm doing at the moment.

Anyway, here’s my recipe. A worked example follows.

RUV'S TRAINER-WHEEL RECIPE FOR SHORT WRITING

Ingredients:

A theme. This is an observation or idea, and will be the ‘point’ of your story. Your theme should be of the form ‘If X then Y’, or ‘When X, Y too’. Your theme can be anything. It doesn't have to be true -- just interesting, but you should have some reason to think it true. E.g. 'When cats stare at us, they're reading our minds.'
Notes:
1) If you're used to starting without a theme (with a character or situation instead say), please bear with me. Put your character or situation aside and start with a theme instead. It pays off later.
2) This is a strange form for a theme, I know. But it helps you slide your plot between X and Y.
3) If you want to write a genre story with this method, you need the right choice of theme. I have some suggestions for different genres below.
A situation and a setting in which the antecedent of your theme (X) could be true.
A Main Character (MC) who lives in that setting, and experiences the situation where X is true. Make this character interesting – a person, not just a role.
An objective that the main character wants because of this situation. Make this objective somehow link to the antecedent X -- seeking something or avoiding something related to X.
Some opposition to this objective, which makes getting the objective difficult or dangerous. This should emerge from the setting and situation, but it needn't relate directly to 'X'.
The risk of disaster – something that may befall the main character, or people the MC loves if the objective is not met. Link the disaster to the consequent Y in your theme, and to the character and situation. The disaster might arise from Y happening, or from Y not happening.

You don't strictly need them before you write, but the following two ingredients help a lot (like Bread Improver if you're baking bread):

An idea for a Climax scene – where the disaster must be fought or avoided
An idea for an Ending and how the MC will feel. Does the MC succeed or fail? How will we know? Will the audience feel good or bad about this?

Method:

This method is meant to keep your short short and focused.

Write eight scenes at one line per scene. Each scene must feature your MC either attempting something difficult (action scene) or reacting to something new and significant (reaction scene). In listing the scene I often list the location too. (Note: the location doesn't have to change in each scene. The object of the scene is to crank the tension up a notch each time.)

To keep it short you have a scene budget as follows:

Scenes 1-2 (Introduction): Introduce the character, setting and situation. Introduce the objective and opposition.
Scenes 3-6 (Complication): Make the character’s objective difficult, dangerous or complicated
Scene 7 (Climax): Here have the MC struggle mightily to prevent disaster from happening
Scene 8 (Ending): Here, describe the aftermath.

If you want to meet a word count then divide the words by the number of scenes. That’s your average word budget per scene. (Note: these scenes don't have to change location. They each just move the tension on one notch.)

IMPORTANT GENRE COMMENTS

If you want to write genre using this method, you must start with the right sort of theme. If you pick the wrong sort of theme you may get something that looks like fantasy or horror or romance say, but doesn't feel like it. Try the following kinds of themes for these genres.

Fantasy: Write a theme about morality, psychology and society. Pick one that you can explore using interesting symbols. E.g. My theme might be: 'If we forgive too soon, we make things worse'. Forgiveness might be represented by a princess. Badness might be represented by an ogre.

Science Fiction: Write a theme about the 'people' face of technology or frontiers. 'Technology' could be machines or just methods and sciences. 'Frontiers' could be any place or state in which we're uncomfortable and out of our depth. Think about your theme from the perspective of a consumer, a victim or a pioneer, and make it something you could explore theoretically. E.g. 'If we could all read minds, we'd go mad from the amount of evil hidden inside us'. (This is a 'frontier' theme - breaking down the barriers between people)

Horror: Write a theme that focuses on exaggerating, inverting or perversifying something we want to believe. Make it personal and emotional. E.g. 'When your mother is at her kindest, she hates you most', or 'If you tick off a policeman, he can become the worst enemy you've ever had', or 'Cats are not pets in pitch dark'.

Mystery/Suspense: Write a theme that focuses on challenges to community expectations, social order or justice. Make it something that could be investigated factually. E.g. 'When parents give their children everything, then nothing has value', 'Sometimes the best revenge is to fail', 'If you can't find a motive, maybe there isn't a crime'.

Romance: Write a theme that focuses on morality, relationships and personal growth. Make it something you can explore from personal, emotional and sensory perspectives. E.g. 'When he always knows exactly what you want, it's because he's making you want it.' 'If you can't stop thinking about her then you're in love -- even if you hate her.'

WORKED EXAMPLE

For this example, I've chosen a SF story using my sample SF theme above: 'If we could all read minds, we would go mad from seeing the evil hidden inside us.’ (As I said, it doesn't have to be true - just interesting). Here is my choice of ingredients

Situation and Setting: It’s modern day in our world, and scientists make a breakthrough on a retrovirus that helps people read minds. The retrovirus works by increasing the production and connection of mirror neurons in the brain. (These neurons are thought to be responsible for empathy and learning - so maybe some autistic kids have problems with them?) Intended to help autistic children; the mind-reading is an unexpected side-effect.

Character: Mary Lee supports her young autistic brother Simon. (Note: she needs more character detail than just that, but this is just a sketch!)

Objective: She’s heard of Glass – the experimental retrovirus that’s supposed to help autistic children learn, and wants to get her brother put onto a course.

Opposition: While the treatment has near-miraculous results, the scientists insist on giving it to only the worst cases of autism, and only to the young. Simon is a teenager and not profoundly autistic.

Disaster: In cases where users already have near-functional mirror neurons, Glass gives them such high empathy that they can actually read minds. But this sends them mad and often suicidal – because human minds are actually far more nasty than we realise.

Climax: After getting Glass for Simon, Mary’s shocked that his rapid improvement is followed by terrible deterioration. In desperation she takes Glass herself to try to gain understanding of what’s happening to him.

Ending: Mary begins to see into peoples’ minds and she realises just how horrifically evil and selfish we are underneath. Horrifically, she realises that she is going mad -- as her brother already has.

Scene Outline (Action, reaction scenes are marked (A) and (R) respectively)

(Intro) At home, Mary struggles with the difficult task of helping her autistic brother Simon through dinner (A)
(Intro) At Simon’s special school, Mary hears about Glass – how one of the school children has improved, but how difficult it is to get on the program (R)
At the offices of the manufacturer (invent a name), and despite Mary’s strenuous arguments, Simon is refused entry to the Program on grounds of age and condition (A)
At work, Mary seethes over the injustice and fakes Simon’s application (Note: it might help if Mary’s job would assist this – eg a medical clerk) (A)
At home, Mary sees the marked improvement in Simon (R)
At home, as Simon starts to deteriorate, Mary tries helplessly to save him from self-harm (A)
(Climax) Desperate to save her brother’s life, Mary takes Glass herself to try to understand what he needs (A)
(Ending) Looking out with her brother’s eyes, Mary realises just how much evil is hidden in peoples’ minds – and prepares her own death and her brother’s (R)

COMMENTS

This method isn’t for utter beginners. You need a reasonable understanding of character, setting, narration, plot, dialogue and tension for it to work. It’s meant for writers who understand the basics, but are still having some trouble producing solid short story designs.

This is a learning method. The whole point of this method is to put some discipline and focus around the design process so you can think about other writery things (like themes and characters and settings and narrative and dialogue) instead. If you hate discipline and focus -- or if you already have enough discipline and focus through some other good method -- then don't even think of using this!

Using this method, key to getting a good story is to start with an interesting theme. If you're writing genre, you should realise that what makes genre feel like genre is common concerns and common treatments. Pick a theme that reflects a genre concern, and that makes it easy to treat using genre conventions. Regardless of whether it's genre or not, the theme should be easy to 'prove' when you set up the story.

Another key to a good short is to have the MC either change drastically or make a strong, definitive character statement just at the climax.

This eight scene structure is based on a conventional Three Act structure (Beginning, Middle, End), and adapted for shorts. You can make it shorter by dropping some middle scenes or even scene 2. You can also add some more middle scenes if the story requires it – but I find that 4 middle scenes makes a fairly happy medium.

Scene length may vary depending on story and style. It might be as few as 100 words, or as many as 1,000. It’s often good practice to try and make your scenes as short as possible, and pack the most punch into the fewest words.

Cut down, this method adapts okay for some flash fiction, but I wouldn’t try and beef it up for novella or novel design. I feel that it’s too inflexible and predictable to deal with the way that novels need to unfold. Use another method.

Using this method, you can produce some very capable, workmanlike shorts. But there are some shorts you can’t tell well in this structure, and there are many shorts that just tell better in other structures. However, once you have shorts popping out reliably, you can think about other ways to design and tell your story ideas.

I hope this is useful. If you try it, let me know how it goes!

Genre Signature - Horror

2007-12-21T21:51:00.000+11:00

In an earlier article I wrote that I think we can define simple signatures for the classics of our genre literature: these signatures comprising common elements of theme and treatment for that genre. This is an initial attempt at a signature for the horror genre.

The horror genre is immensely diverse. The settings, imagery, characters and plots can be almost anything.

The last time I worked on a genre signature it was for Sword & Sorcery. I did it by reading millions of words of classic S&S novels over several weeks, trying to winnow out the common thematic and treatment elements. For a horror signature I haven't had time to do that (and there is far more classic horror than classic S&S), so I'm doing it largely by memory. Since the signature itself may direct what I remember -- or even how I remember it -- it may be unreliable.

Here's what I think a horror story needs:

A through-line in which the familiar or the trusted is perverted, inverted or exaggerated to the point of menace and/or revulsion
A through-line in which someone is either seduced or engulfed by danger
A through-line in which someone is helpless and dependent
A through-line driven by suspense, with a growing sense of doom
Vivid imagery and stark contrasts
Unpredictability in some or all of the through-lines above

In putting this together and trying to validate it, I reflected what I remembered of the stories of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Daphne DuMaurier, Stephen King, Wes Craven, HP Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, August Derleth, EA Poe, Colin Wilson, Dan Simmons, Thomas Harris and a lot of B-flicks... Inasmuch as my memory serves, all the good horror stories have all of the signature elements; the bad horror stories have most of the signature elements, but typically also suffer from poor suspense, plot-holes, weak characterisation, laughable imagery and too much predictability.

Here's why I think these elements in particular work so well in the stories of masters of horror.

Horror hinges on the familiar, the trusted and the intimate becoming alien, untrustable and inimical -- and in watching what happens to people when that occurs. Our sense of delight in that is pure schadenfreude -- a morbid fascination that the world may not be as we think it is, and a cathartic relief that it's not happening to us.

A horror story then contains two critical transformations, typically run as consecutive arcs:

A trusted part of the world transforming from being familiar and safe to being alien and unsafe
A major character transformed by the reality and the realisation of this -- the character is either shattered and ruined, reforged into heroism, or is left shaken and bewildered, or some combination of these.

The key through-lines work to bring these two critical transformations about.

The transformation from familiarity to perversion is the through-line that carries the first transformation above. It's the key premise of the 'big bad' and like a flash-bulb it's really only useful for one story. The first time we see Frankenstein's monster or Dracula it can be terrifying; after that it becomes familiar and laughable.

The danger seduces or engulfs the character because the horror is by its nature unthinkable: if it were truly understood, the character would never dare approach it other than in desperation. The more clever stories lay the foundations for seduction or engulfing early, so that when it comes, it's a surprise.

The use of helplessness and dependence is to prevent key characters from fleeing, never to return. They must face the horror in its totality. Often the dependence might be a family member, a loved one or a client. In the case if Misery or Rear Window or The Cask of Amontillado it's a major character being confined.

The suspense is used to hold the audience in place - to toy with their expectations. This enhances audience appreciation both of the Evil Transformation and its subsequent impact on the characters. It's also the area that I think is done weakest in many imitators of the classics (how many times have shower scenes, or 'it's behind you!' been used?)

The stark contrasts are a mood control mechanism. They let the author move from the familiar to the alien by foreshadowing and outright switches. One of my most chilling childhood memories is a still photograph from Hitchock's production of Du Maurier's The Birds, which (if memory serves) showed just the legs of a bird-pecked woman sticking out from behind a hedge, with an umbrella beside her. It contrasted daily banality with alien horror. Even without having seen the movie, it terrified me.

Unpredictability is necessary, since the horror has to be unthinkable. Since audiences are very savvy, the masters of suspense and horror use a sort of mental judo: give the audience what they expect then twist it.

Stylistically I think of horror as difficult to do well. It's not finding the horror premise (the thing you want to pervert) -- you can pervert almost anything. It's finding a treatment that shows the premise in good light, lulls the audience into a false sense of complacence and then pulls the rug out from under them. There's real storytelling craft in horror -- if it's done well.

I hope this signature might help someone write a good horror story. I also hope that if the signature is wrong or incomplete, that someone will find me a counter-example or weak spot to help shore it up.

Genre Signature: Sword and Sorcery

2007-12-21T21:07:00.000+11:00

My NaNoWriMo '07 story being a Sword and Sorcery tale, I've spent the last couple of months reading or rereading as many of the S&S masterworks as I could lay hands on: Howard, Lamb, Leiber, Moorcock, Vance, Zelazny. I also revisited some good sites like BG_Editor's and swordandsorcery.org to refresh myself on what makes a good Sword and Sorcery tale.

In the context of genre signatures I began to wonder what, if anything captures the signature of a Sword and Sorcery tale from a thematic and treatment perspective.

Having read or reread millions of words of S&S stories back to back over the last several weeks(and still reading), I think it takes all of the following:

A through-line with a growing sense of doom
A through-line in which a character solves problems in a ruthless fashion (by wit or brawn -- I call this the 'sword' through-line)
A through-line in which symbols of tainted morality, twisted psychology or corrupt society dominate (I call this the 'sorcery' through-line, though magic may not be involved)
A through-line with headlong pace
Beautiful, hideous, poignant or bizarre imagery to enhance the above

This signature is comparable to the one described by Howard Andrew Jones from Black Gate (he lists: pacing; somber, headlong drive; dialogue is principally used to reveal character; atmosphere), but some of those signatures are just for particular S&S authors; the signature I've defined seems to work right across the authors I've read. Here's what I think the signature elements do for the story:

The doom seems to be critical to both the atmosphere and the pace. Every protagonist is either dealing doom, bearing doom, fleeing doom, fighting doom, suffering doom or lamenting doom. As I remarked to another S&S author recently: Doom is mood backwards!

The doom must apply to at least one through-line. It might be a through-line about a dying world, or an evil sword, or an implacable hatred of an enemy, or a character's own inevitable demise. Sometimes it sits in just one through-line, but in the case of Zelazny's Amber tales, it sometimes jumps through-lines: e.g. first Corwin senses the doom, then suffers the doom wrought by another, then brings the doom, then races to fix the doom that is now part of the world.

The doom gives some character (usually the main character, but it needn't be) license to be ruthless. To out-wit or out-muscle the foe. Part of the audience's delight comes from ruthless action taken in extremity. Corwin, Elric, Conan, Fafhrd and the Mouser, Khlit the Cossack -- all do it. In the simplest form, the ruthlessness takes the form of a sword. But sometimes it's simply setting up the foe to be destroyed. In many cases, these intense, ruthless conflicts transfer the doom from one through-line to another -- often transforming it, activating it, quelling it or forestalling it.

The tainted morality etc... links the doom to the ruthlessness, and provides a moral dimension to what otherwise would be a straight tale of desperate problem-solving. Often the ruthless sword is pitted against twisted magic, as with Conan or Fafhrd; sometimes tainted magic is pitted against ruthless physicality, as with Elric or Rhialto, or against further magic itself. Sometimes the symbol is not innately magical but simply weird and unearthly -- a bizarre ape-creature, or a decaying city. In all instances this symbology plays a dominant role in the story -- it isn't simply fleshing out setting; it has a through-line that either generates problems or must react to its own problems.

Head-long pace seems critical to Sword and Sorcery, and differentiates it from many other kinds of fantasy (like the meandering Epic fantasies). The pace is visible in the dialogue (e.g. used to just reveal the character - the action reveals the situation and the narrative sets the background); it's visible in the preponderance of action scenes (the symbology serves to sequelise and show the characters' reactions). This head-long pace resonates with the Doom through-line; it gives a sense of a rushing train-wreck and the pace justifies the ruthlessless.

Finally, exquisite imagery highlights the ruthlessness, corruption and doom so that there is an aesthetic positive to lighten the heaviness of the story. Even while the characters are headed for disaster, the environment is hostile, there is delightful description to make the experience eerily pleasant.

It's the simple synergy of these signature elements that makes the genre so compelling in the hands of a master. Remove an element and the beauty diminishes; add an element and you lose the ruthless simplicity of the tales.

If the signature is accurate (and having read a lot of S&S lately, it surely feels accurate) then it opens all manner of interesting twists, based mainly around which characters carry the through-lines, how they relate, and how the key through-line characteristics are implemented.

I look forward to trying out a few unusual ideas as shorts -- both to test out the signature and to see if the resulting stories resulting still feel like they fit in the same genre.

Genre Signatures

2007-12-21T11:40:00.000+11:00

If a 'genre' can be defined at all, it should be the classics that define it. Not the strange crossover literature at the fringes, the failed experiments or the fad bestsellers that fade away into obscurity later, but the timeless stories that shape our thinking, become part of our consciousness, that we tell and retell.

And that raises the question: if you gather together the classics of the genre, is there a common signature that binds them, and differentiates them from classics of another genre?

I believe that there is.

And more than that, I believe that if writers understand that signature, they can (if they so choose) produce strong, original works at the middle of the genre, instead of seeking (as they so often do) to innovate so far that they inadvertantly push their writing out to the fringes.

Not that I object to fringe and crossover writing in principle; I do object though to its abundant mediocrity. It bespeaks writers who don't really know what they're writing or how to write it; they're just trying to be different. To create a good 'fusion' dish between two classic cuisines (say French and Japanese), you must master both (as does say, the chef Tetsuya Wakuda); you can't simply dabble. If anything, it should be more difficult to write crossover than writing in a single genre -- and perhaps the lack of good crossover confirms that.

So if genre signatures exist, then to be a good genre writer or a good crossover writer, we must master them.

And if the genre signatures exist, where would we find them? In the plots? In the settings? In the characters? The dialogue? The narrative?

No -- in none of these places. Firstly, these elements vary wildly among the genre classics. Secondly, because imitators copy these things from the classics all the time, and the results are often atrocious. A good genre signature, if you follow it, should yield good genre story design. It should bind the genre together while offering infinite flexibility in the stories you tell and the way you tell them.

I believe that if genre signatures exist, then they exist in two places: the themes (what the story's really about) and the treatments (how we reveal themes to the reader).

Let me illustrate.

Among the classics of fantasy I'd include stories like Gilgamesh, Heracles, Beowulf, King Arthur; works by the brothers Grimm; Andersen, the stories of CS Lewis, Tolkien, Dahl, Le Guin, Lucas etc...

If you had to pull out the themes from the stories here, what would you find? Well, when I did it I found that the themes were all about morality, psyche and society. Historically, fantasy stories are morality stories binding our psyches to the world, and binding our communities together. I can't think of a classic fantasy story that doesn't cover at least two of these three areas in its major themes.

The other interesting element of fantasy is in how it treats its themes. Like all stories, fantasy stories carry their themes in their through-lines: in the way that characters understand their problems, and how they go about solving them. In fantasy stories, characters typically perceive and solve their problems through the use of symbol. King Arthur doesn't produce paternity papers -- he draws a sword from the stone. Heracles and Beowulf (and their many successors) display herohood by slaying monsters. Cinderella doesn't match lipstick with a smudge on the Prince's collar -- she puts her foot in a glass slipper. Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star with a tiny but precise symbolic act. What makes fantasy magical (whether or not it contains magic) is that thematic problems (relating to psyche, morality and society) are articulated and solved primarily through symbol.

What this means for the genre though (if you accept my 'fantasy signature') is that stories with dragons (say), or sorcery, but not a classic fantasy theme -- or where the dragons are faced not with symbol but with (say) Howitzers, are not sitting close to the fantasy classics. Indeed, they may simply be purporting to deliver fantasy without having the same significance to the readers that the classics did and do. Or put another way, such weak imitations may be cheating their readers of the full, rich fantasy experience -- rather like packet cooking vs made from scratch.

If we run the same exercise on SF, we can list classic SF authors like Shelley, Wells, Verne, Huxley, Orwell, Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Bear. If you consider where they draw their themes, you might get a list like: technology, frontiers and people. By this I mean the following:

Technology: -- systems, methods and know-how (not simply physical machinery)
Frontiers -- places we haven't been or don't understand (including both inner and outer frontiers); also cultural and psychological boundaries and temporal boundaries
People -- producters, consumers and victims of the technology; people at or affected by the frontier

If you look at how SF classics treat these themes the thing that is most evident is the rational, analytic and systematic approach. This contrasts markedly with the symbolic through-lines we see in fantasy. Characters investigate things; analyse; hypothesize; test. Problems have rational answers. Investigating gets you somewhere.

What's interesting about this is that it's not just the themes or just the treatments that offer a signature for fantasy and SF. It's the combination together.

It's not that SF can't deal with a morality theme (say), but if it does so it will typically be a moral question relating to technology or frontiers. E.g. "Should robots have voting rights?"; "Should immortals have the same justice system as mortals?" Moreover, take a SFish theme (e.g. space-ships) and give it (say) a symbolic treatment (e.g. the space-ship runs on love) then you begin to get something quite outside the SF classics -- something that looks more like science fantasy.

If you do the same with mystery classics then you may find themes drawn from justice, order and human failings, and through-line development based on investigation, analysis and empathy.

And so on...

At core, the idea of genre is a cultural construct; it's not inherent in a single story but rather in the socialisation of the way that we create, disseminate and appreciate stories. Marketers like the idea of genre because it helps sell more fiction. Authors like the idea of genre because it lets them meet other authors who understand their work. Readers like the idea of genre because they can find authors who reflect their interests and passions.

But cultural constructs are never arbitrary. They're built on shared values, shared objectives and shared methods. Cuisines, schools of painting and schools of music are also cultural constructs.

In trying to capture genre signatures I've pinned them to those places deep in the story where I think that values, objectives and methods reside. Not in the superficial elements of plot, setting or character, but in the more cultural domains of theme and treatment.

Whether my guess at what makes the "definitive" SF or Fantasy signature is right or could be improved is probably not the point. What concerns me is that we can begin to identify and improve on these signatures. Because in understanding what they are, we should be able to help writers write better, and increase our critical appreciation for what they have written. We should also be far less confused when a novel appears on the genre shelf, but doesn't supply anything close to the reading experience we expected.

It also means that the marketing schmos of the publishing houses and the clerks in book-stores don't get the last word in what our literature is about.

Literature in Life

2007-12-17T11:43:00.000+11:00

I've been reflecting lately on the author's favourite 'why' question: 'Why write fiction? What do I seek to achieve with it?' This question underpins a bunch of 'who', what' and 'how' questions, like: 'Who is my audience?' 'What would I like to communicate to them?' 'How best to reach them?' 'How can I ensure that what I write is worth reading?'

This morning I watched Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize lecture, 'Art, Truth and Politics'. It's well worth a view. For his skill and ability to expose, Pinter is one of my favourite English writers. But also as a literary professional I admire him too. Here is a man recovering from oesophagal cancer, in frail health, still pushing his views in the strongest, most eloquent terms he can and subjecting the world to the most analytic, unflinching scrutiny of his personal conscience. The issue isn't whether you agree with his views, but the commitment and courage it takes to inquire, think, form views and then express them unflinchingly -- which he does in his fiction and also his professional life.

If fiction has any purpose beyond distracting us, it's surely to help us reflect on how we are and how to be. In an Information on Demand world where at a few keystrokes, I can learn how to build a cabinet or grow azaleas or make my own ice-cream or any other doing question, I think it's very telling that being questions yield no more answers than we could have gotten 500 years ago in searching a library. For instance, I Web-searched the following this morning, without any useful result:

How to write unflinchingly
How to improve your conscience
How to like people better
How to care about things we can't see

While there are certainly 'how to' books that try to answer these questions, the answers are typically either bundled with some 'doing' question (e.g. 'How to write a novel') or some take-it-or-leave it ideology (e.g. the sort you find in any religious admonishments, or psychospiritual texts like the ones Ken Wilbur writes). The problem with the first kind of text is that it doesn't go deeply or widely enough; the problem with the second kind of text is that it argues a particular view, and in many ways pre-empts you exploring matters yourself.

But literary fiction has a unique place in human thought: it has the ability to go deeply, and also present you with thinking that is multidimensional, ambiguous, conflicted and symbolic. Literature helps you explore the confusion of our existence and work out your own ways to be. Through metaphor, analogy and allegory it lets you take ideas and explore them in all kinds of different uses.

But do we still need that? In a world where every practical problem has a 'For Dummies' answer, do we still need literature about being? I think that we do.

Our world is obsessed by doing and having. Increasingly, we assess being only in terms of what we do and what we possess. If we do more and own more then we're somebody; if we do less and own less then we're nobody. But this view makes nugatory all thinking, all feeling and all perception. Since we're just functions, our consciences are irrelevant; our empathy is mere formulaic platitude, our motives disregarded and our inner potentials as people, ignored.

But literature reopens our minds to conscience, empathy and motive. Better than any other form of fiction, it puts us inside other viewpoints, challenges our own perspectives. Our very obsession with what and how makes literature more needful nowadays than ever before.

In his Nobel lecture, Pinter said that writing exposes the author to chill winds, and I believe that's true. He wasn't talking about poverty of writers, but rather critical backlash against a writer's own perceptions. In this bizarre world of 'I'm okay/you're okay' behaviourism, this tolerance is only extended to you while you conceal what you think. We live in a society happy to accept a wide range of behaviours as long as their own views are not challenged.

I despair of this. Conscience can't develop in a vacuum and neither can empathy. Do we really want to replace our individual perceptions with a franchise of 'isms'? Are we really so fragile and comfort-driven that we can't look outside our cushioned beliefs to grow ourselves inside?

If the answer to this is yes, then we don't need literature any more. We can do without stories that put us inside the heads of people we don't like or don't understand, and rather content ourselves with recycled myth rehashing our uncontested cultural values of comfort, consumption and retribution against anyone who challenges these things.

Some writers write because they must; I'm not that sort of writer. Writing doesn't soothe my hurts or help me make sense of the world. (And I don't personally believe that the world makes any sense -- other than the sense we give it.)

I endeavour to write because I feel that I ought. I'm worried that our drive for comfort and consumption is robbing our breath, dulling our wits and stifling our sensibilities. In terms of achievement I'd be content if my fiction would help to get us talking again: not about what we do or what we own, but who we are. My audience is whoever wonders (or wants to wonder) about such things, and I suppose that whatever I write is worth reading if, at the end, people do.

So maybe, if there are being questions I want to ask, but can't find the answers to in a Web-search, then my writing should be about trying to answer those questions.

Hope and the Pope

2007-12-07T14:38:00.000+11:00

Rather serendipitously, it came to my attention that Pope Benedict wrote an encyclical on Hope last month. I'm about the last person who'd ever expect to review a papal encylical, but the Roman Catholic Church is unquestionably the most enduring defender of the notion that Hope is a critical Virtue. Given my recent position that Hope is not a virtue but a frequently dangerous illusion, I thought it'd be poor form of me not to read what the Pope had to say on the subject, and comment on it if I could.

Entitled Spe Salvi, (Saved by Hope) and around 19,000 words, it's a very gentle and learned document tracking the history, meaning and modern relevance of hope from a Roman Catholic perspective. It makes a few jabs at Marxism, materialism and atheism (only some of which I agree with) but they're scholarly jabs at what the author considers to be flawed doctrines and practice, and endeavour to be logical rather than hate-mongering rhetoric. I wasn't offended at any of it, and understand the need to jab - I've wanted to take a few jabs at some philosophies myself at times.

This is a review, but it's a philosophical review rather than a theological one. My interests lie in writing and history and human thought. I'm not interested in using this forum as a theological platform. For all I care, what metaphysical meaning people wish to make out of the world is up to them. But of course the philosophy and theology intersect in a document like this, so whatever I say about one thing inevitably has implications for the other. I won't explore those implications here or in correspondence. I'll leave them to you to work out, if you care to. Suffice to say though that from a personal perspective, I believe that good philosophy must dictate good theology, and not vice versa.

This is also not a review of the Pope's biblical scholarship, which I'd be the first to confess, vastly exceeds mine. I've taken all his scholastic claims at face value.

This review is about the ideas in the encyclical, their applications to thought and society and the degree to which they correspond with what I think of as our collective experience.

Ruv's Hope vs the Pope's Hope
The Pope acknowledges that hope and faith are fairly confused in Christian doctrine, and I'd have to agree with that. They're used almost interchangeably, except that at times they're listed separately (as in the Theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity). Regrettably, he doesn't differentiate them clearly in his encyclical either, but describes the sort of Hope Catholics work with as "a positive desire with some evidence for it", rather than as I do as "a positive desire with some evidence against it" (of course, a particular subject of hope could have both).

It's hardly surprising that the Pope would choose that definition, and I think it's included in my own -- at least potentially. What His Holiness thinks of as a subject of hope, I'd call a prospect or an opportunity: a prospect if I have reason to suspect that the potential good is there but I don't know for sure; an opportunity if I know that it's there, but I just don't know if I can achieve it.

By way of illustration, if I want a new job and I cold-call some company I'd never met, that's a prospect. They're prospective employers - they're likely to want to hire someone sooner or later; I just don't know if they're hiring now, or if not now, when. On the other hand, if I see their advertisement in the newspaper, then they're an opportunity. I know that they want someone; I just don't know if they'll want me.

The applications to writing markets should be fairly obvious here. A prospective market might not be soliciting manuscripts right now. An opportunity market is.

For aesthetic reasons if nothing else, the Pope probably wouldn't like me calling Heaven a "prospect", and salvation an "opportunity", but functionally I think that's what he's talking about. Both prospects and opportunities can be objects of Hope under my definition because you can construe adverse portents as well as favourable portents. (I won't try to explore what the adverse portents to the Catholic view of Heaven might be - I'll leave that to comedians like Dave Allen - but some image of selection criteria and selection panels did occur to me).

What I can't tell you is whether a Catholic view of salvation is a subject of personal hope for you. I can't discern whether you desire it, or whether you think it's a certainty or has adverse portents, or whether if it has adverse portents for you, you believe you're going to heaven anyway. For the purpose of my review though, that doesn't matter. Let me stipulate for the review that for some people it's a hope, and take it from there.

The Good of Hope
Unsurprisingly, the Pope talks about Hope as being a source of inspiration, an incentive to do good and seek good, and the importance of collective Hope rather than just individual Hope. He also hints at what a world without Hope looks like (as the Pope conceives it, it looks much like Stalinist Russia, or perhaps equally, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four).

But here again, His Holiness and I differ on definitions. I strongly support that prospects and opportunities (to advance our condition, relieve our suffering) can motivate and inspire us. I also strongly believe that collective prospects and opportunities can build better good than merely individual prospects and opportunities. But I have a few objections too...

Firstly, prospects and opportunities don't just lead us to do good. They also lead us to cut corners and hurt people, and leave people behind in the dust. If you've ever seen salesmen fighting for a sale, or scientists squabbling over grant submissions, or artsts smiling at each other through gritted teeth at awards ceremonies, you know what I mean. In history too, even pious individuals have at times treated spiritual prospects and opportunities as a competition, or to put it in the Pope's terms, placing individual good above collective good. So while prospects and opportunities can lead us to change, I feel that we need to have some thought about what change and how. Prospects and opportunities don't create good; but moral behaviour, suitably inspired, does.

The second thing is that throughout his encyclical, the Pope talks about the benefits of sources of hope (i.e. the opportunities and prospects of salvation themselves), rather than the benefits and/or costs of the act of hoping about them. Since Hope is considered a virtue (i.e. you're supposed to hope - not simply that there are meant to be sources of hope), this surprised me.

His Holiness spends some time on a tale of the liberation and salvation of the African slave Josephine Bakhita, who lived in the late 19th century. He describes the salutory change in her condition, but glosses the interesting bit -- which is what she did to achieve that. In the Pope's story I saw evidence of Ms Bakhita's desire (to be free, to have dignity and purpose), and her celebration of that when she finally was. I saw possible causes for hope (prospects and opportunities if you will). What I didn't see was her journey. I didn't find out whether she spent her time Hoping against adversity, or whether she worked her butt off with determination, courage and faith against constant adversity. I rather suspect the latter though.

The conclusion that the Pope draws though is one I support: give people good prospects and opportunities and they can better themselves -- individually, collectively, materially and spiritually. Faith can help you overcome adversity.

The point that he fails to make (largely due to confusing terms) is that the Hoping itself is or has ever been a virtue. By the argument he puts forth, the three Theological virtues need only be two: Faith and Charity, because Faith overcomes adversity, Charity creates prospects and opportunities for those in need, and the sources of Hope (according to the Pope) already have plenty of evidence for them.

Well, he can't have it both ways, I think. If you're Hoping then there must either be some lack of evidence, or some evidence against. Or if there's not a lack of evidence then you're not really Hoping. You're simply exercising Faith that the good you already know is accessible to you.

(Also on the subject of the three Theological virtues, if we take Hope out, then I wonder if Generosity shouldn't be in there alongside Charity. Charity is just kindness to the poor; but nowadays I think that the rich and comfortably well off need a lot of kindness too. Being well off doesn't mean that your heart is well. Or maybe we need a new definition of "poor"?)

Hope and Prayer
The Pope's encylical draws a strong link between hope and prayer: Prayer gives Hope; Hope leads to more Prayer, and that's a good thing he says. In the Pope's view, prayer is a petition of desire. In the encyclical at least, he doesn't differentiate between benevolent desires and purely selfish desires; desires that improve oneself and desires that merely indulge oneself, but I assume that he has an opinion on it expressed elsewhere.

I consider private reflection (whether by prayer or meditation) to be very valuable -- but only if it's about the right things and in the right way. Using private reflection to care about people is valuable; using it to reflect on improving yourself is too. Using it to indulge yourself... well, that's rather cheap. If you need to indulge yourself do it loudly, briefly and with friends. Celebrate! Then put it down and get back to living.

On the subject of using reflection to Hope for something that indulges you... hrmm... Just... hrmm.. I don't know if the Pope has seen the 4am Televangelists at work, but they do work the "prayer for indulgence" line pretty hard. The Pope did make some pointed comments about collective vs individual good that might cover it -- if you consider praying for a Mercedes to be a petition for individual good.

Yes, I have a point to make here: I can't think of anything guaranteed to mess your mind up quicker than obsessing about a particular good -- if that good is principally to indulge or reward you. Winning the lottery might settle your debts, but so might hard work and careful budgeting. If you're going to Hope for one, which are you most likely to Hope for? If you're going to pray for one, which will it be?

I'm not opposing desires here; I'm opposing compulsively Hoping for them. Want what you want, but be agile, is all.

Conclusion
Il Papa's encyclical was a very pleasant, thoughtful and well-researched read and I think that some news reports didn't do it justice. On the other hand, I think his title is inappropriate, and he's failed to make his thesis.

His encyclical isn't about salvation through hoping, but rather that salvation is a hope, and he strives to argue that: a) this Hope does good and b) you can't really do much good without that particular hope.

I think he makes the point that the prospects and opportunities offered by his religion have helped do great good (that's not a hard point to make), but he fails to make the rest of the argument. He also doesn't acknowledge that: a) you can also do bad by a Hope if you don't act well; b) it's the acting that does the good - what he calls the Hope is merely the inspiration; c) a belief in common, transcendent good is not simply confined to his own particular faith, and doesn't come in the one flavour or a single metaphysics.

In the end, I think that the theology tried to drive the philosophy rather than vice versa. (And politically, probably it couldn't be otherwise.) From a personal perspective, the encyclical helped clarify in my own mind the difference between the need for prospects and opportunities (whether material or spiritual), and the act of hoping about those things, as opposed to simply desiring them, and acting on the desire. The encyclical didn't move my position, but it did help me clarify my terms.

Had you told me a year ago that I'd have reviewed a Papal encyclical I'd have laughed in your face, but it's a good, well-written document and if you have interest in such things, it's worth a read. Its principal audience is meant to be Catholic bishops, but I think it has a general philosophical appeal. I'm not going to subscribe to them (you actually can), but if I have reason to look at another one, it won't be with the same fear and trepidation that I approached this one.

NaNoWriMo '07 (IV)

2007-12-06T16:04:00.000+11:00

This is the last of my NaNoWriMo reports, and about a week later than I'd expected.

Firstly, the all-important word-count (or crudictivity as I've been calling it): around 34K. While that averages at 1100+ words per day over the 30 day period, in fact there were five days I didn't write at all, so it's more like around 1200 per writing day. Since my daily writing average before NaNo was around 800 words, I'm proud to report that my first NaNo helped make me 50% more cruductive.

Jokes aside, that's actually useful because I'm a very fast editor. I've realised that it's far more efficient for me to belt out crap rapidly and then edit it, than to drip my pearls with tweezers and not.

Provided, of course, that the story design is right in the first place.

Here's where the Nano experience has been most useful for me. The rush to meet word targets has crashed me through a couple of barriers to good story design that have dogged me in the past. It's not that the barriers stopped me. It's that, rather like a blind hurdler, the moment I hit one, I'd spend days or weeks tapping around it with my cane. These days, while I don't leap them like a graceful gazelle, I stop briefly, take a run up and jump them like a er... Jack Russell terrier, yapping all the way.

In an earlier article I mentioned what the two design insights were: 1) how questions are almost always who and why questions in disguise, and 2) throughlines are critical to understanding what next, and avoiding cliché in challenge, responses, consequences and descriptions.

I also think that I've finally mastered the plot point planner in Dramatica Pro. This is the tool's way of mapping out throughlines, and so it's critical to use as a story design planner. I think I went through four designs all for the same NaNo story concept, and it's only now after NaNo that I have one I think is actually right. It's not that the other designs were wrong, and I had to change them; it's that they were simply inadequate. (If anyone's having problems with Dramatica's Plot Point planner, you're welcome to contact me in comments; I might now understand enough to help you). Initially I had no real idea of how long it would take to tell this tale -- I accepted NaNo's 50K words as an arbitrary target -- but now I think it's around 70K, which gratifies me, since I don't think anybody buys 50K fantasy novels any more.

My NaNo story (now a Work In Progress) is a sword and sorcery tale. I chose S&S because it's not something I'd normally write, and because it's often done so formulaically these days. In consequence of having worked on it for a month, and studied a bunch of S&S masters (Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny and rediscovered a little-known master called Howard Lamb), I think I now get what the subgenre's about. I should mention that comments from BG_Editor and SwordandSorcery.org were very helpful too.

The biggest challenge with these stories is there's actually a very narrow range of plots you can use - far narrower than other fantasy subgenres. The subgenre requires characters to survive on wits and brawn, so you rapidly find yourself writing about deceit, betrayal, doomed love, eldritch monstrosities and overwhelming odds. No problem with any of that, but if you want to make it look and feel original, you really have to think about setting, perspective and theme.

S&S has an only partly-deserved reputation of being about rippling-thewed heroes, buxom and willing lasses, ale, slavering monsters and overly long swords. That imagery has a certain limbic masculine adolescent appeal, and gets its share of criticism for that. To make my story's imagery more memorable I've tried to aim for a sort of weird beauty. It falls short of China Miéville's "New Weird" in imagery, but it's hopefully quirky enough to be memorable. The setting avoids "generic mediaeval", "plains barbarian" and "doomed decadent city"; it's either contemporary or twisted fantasy, or somewhat Victorian.

For perspective, the challenge I set myself in designing my NaNo story was not to try and write it for a female audience (I think that would have been a mistake!) but to try to write it for a more modern, and hopefully more sensitive male audience. I chose a viewpoint character who isn't the story's protagonist, but rather a passenger, and rather than piling on gratuitous action scenes, I tried to make the story about personalities and psychology. That doesn't mean there are few action scenes (it's around 90% action scenes of one kind or another); it just means that the characters are doing a lot of push and shove in, around, and through the action.

The themes are more suited to a High Fantasy story than S&S, but still fit the subgenre I think. There's a coming of age story alongside issues of trust, betrayal, courage, vengeance and forgiveness.

I'm fairly happy with what's there, and will be working to complete a first draft over this and next month. It's certainly more than just an exercise, though I'll reserve judgement about its marketability until I see the first draft completed.

The Hype on Hope

2007-12-06T14:54:00.000+11:00

I found myself wrestling with a fellow OWW writer recently on the subject of hope. It's put a bug in my brain that (hopefully) writing will put to sleep.

Western tradition holds that hope is generally a good thing, but I don't see it. The earliest Hope story I know is the tale of Pandora's Box. In an older parallel to the story of the Apple and the Garden, a curious woman (why is it always the girls?) opens a box that she shouldn't, looses all manner of nasties on the world, but in the bottom of the box is Hope - a salve for when times are blackest.

Well, there's no doubt that Hope can make you feel better in bad times, but so too can love, sympathy, exercise, laughter and being kind to other people. Where Hope differs from those other remedies though is that it's pure denial; an approach to thinking rather than a strategy for doing, and it's not a terribly constructive approach at that.

Hope: n. A belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. Hope implies a certain amount of perseverance — i.e., believing that a positive outcome is possible even when there is some evidence
to the contrary. (from Wikipedia)

Well, when isn't there evidence to support an adverse outcome, if we choose to look for it? Life is uncertain, its portents ambiguous. If your only strategy for dealing with adverse portents is to Hope your way around them, then you're probably screwed for starters.

If you're seeing portents that bother you, you have a few choices:

Act on them - change what you're doing
Monitor them, but don't worry about them
Dismiss them
Explore them and see what's causing them, or
Defer thinking about them until they're more pressing, or other matters are less pressing

The only choice above that actually requires Hope is choice 3 - but it's also the least useful of all choices. If you can do 3, then surely you can also do 2 and you'd be better off for doing it.

And if you don't need Hope in times of bad omen then you sure as heck don't need it in good times either.

My conclusion? That hope is for the helpless - people who can't or won't help themselves. It's not for the merely struggling, uncomfortable or beset.

Now, hope is not faith though people often confuse it. Faith is to believe in something good, absent any evidence. Hope is to believe in something you want in the face of adverse evidence.

To see the difference, consider. Suppose that I want to buy (say) apples from a greengrocer. He didn't have apples last week but when I call to check he says that he's expecting a delivery in the afternoon. So when I go to the store in the afternoon I don't know he has apples, but I go in the faith that he will.

On the other hand, if I know that he hasn't had apples for the last six weeks due to continuing problems with suppliers, I can go to the greengrocer in the hope that he has apples.

Faith is very useful - it lets us handle things like risk. Whenever we deal with a stranger or visit a new store, or ask a friend for advice, we use a measure of faith. Hope, on the other hand, is not so useful. It's a story to tell ourselves while we're doing something that might not be the wisest course in the first place.

The reason this matters to writing is that the writing of fiction is a risky and time-consuming enterprise. Whenever we attempt a new story we need some faith that we can complete it -- otherwise we'd never start. But if we lure ourselves along with hope too, we may be setting unrealistic expectations, or blinding ourselves to the reality of the quality of the writing.

Writing is an act of transformation, of change. We have to move from being the person who can't write the story to become the person who can, and then did, and then (eventually) could have written the story better. The essence of neurosis is to wedge us between two conflicting desires. On the one hand, we want to succeed; on the other hand, if we're going to fail we'd prefer to fail early and move on to something else. Writers who proceed with Faith break through this neurosis. Writers who proceed with Hope, cave to it. The trick (I believe) is to use options 1, 2, 4 and 5 in the right sequence to produce the best work you can.

Hope is over-hyped in Western thought. Eastern philosophies hardly use it at all, and do just fine. I think that Hope is holding us back. At best it's a distraction; at worst, it's a delusion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hope gets flogged to death in Western literature too. Most of our escapism sees our characters Hoping their way through the challenges of the plot. But the most egregious example is the Leap of Faith which is used to signpost the transformation of major characters. How often have you seen "Just trust me" in Hollywood dialogue? Or "Use the Force Luke", which amounts to the same: "Just trust me, Luke. I've trained you right." Or put another way "Shut your eyes and hope for the best". Some of these Leap of Faith actually are Faith - there's no evidence one way or the other. But much of it is merely Hope in disguise - the evidence is against you, but you leap anyway. So very often we're really dealing with a Leap of Hope rather than a Leap of Faith.

In other words, it's pure escapism.

In some cultures, a Leap of Hope does not denote miraculous transformation, but rather tragic desperation, or humorous folly. In a Japanese movie, a couple leaping from a cliff are almost certainly desperate and about to die. In an Australian movie, they're liable to catch themselves in the branches of a tree.

A Leap of Faith is largely symbolic. It marks the beginning or end of a change. A wedding is a Leap of Faith, but it's the marriage that changes you. A high-board dive may be a Leap of Faith, but the real change occurred in the training beforehand. So you can use Leaps of Faith in literature to symbolise change, but it doesn't explain the change. To do that you need to explore the character.

But a Leap of Hope doesn't even do that. It's deus ex machina masquerading as a symbol of character change, and often unsupported by evidence of the change itself.

In other words, it's cheap dross.

The best uses of hope in literature, I feel, are to manipulate the reader's expectations. Set hopes high and then dash them. Set them low, and then overleap them. It's a manipulation; a confidence trick.

Hope is after all, pure illusion.

Unpacking Boxes (II)

2007-12-06T08:33:00.001+11:00

In an earlier post I tried to find an automated "box unpacker" for people who wanted to move between blog-sites. The one I found was Paul Cooley's Blog2Blog, which does the basics very easily. It moves articles en masse in two swift clicks, but doesn't copy comments or labels over, alas. I'll manually re-label my older articles as I find time, but at least all the crockery is now in the cupboards, and all the newspaper is in the recycling bin.

Unpacking Boxes (I)

2007-12-06T06:08:00.000+11:00

What I like least about moving homes is not packing to go, but unpacking at the other end. The last time I moved it took years to unpack the last box.

Well, here I am having moved from ruvdraba.livejournal.com (now defunct and deleted), back to Blogger, with all my Livejournal boxes packed automatically -- thanks to the LJarchive software. LJ has a very good writing community, but a recent change of ownership got me concerned about privacy/data security issues.

Ah, but how to unpack my old LJ articles? That's the question.

Flakey Ruv

2007-11-26T14:51:00.000+11:00

If nothing else, NaNoWriMo has revived my Inner Flake.

This may seem like no accomplishment at all, but you need to understand the effort I'd gone to, to kill my Inner Flake in the first place.

Between my undergraduate years, my PhD, years of measuring time and budget with an eye-dropper as a project manager, running a consulting company and numerous other disciplined activities for the last two and a half decades at least, I thought by now that I had time-management, people-focus and attention to detail etched into the DNA of my bone-marrow. To give you an idea just how tight my time discipline is for example, I can usually tell you what time it is to within a couple of minutes - even if there's no clock in the room and I'm not wearing a watch. I can run a 30 or 60 minute meeting to time without ever having to check what the time is. I've never owned an alarm-clock, and for the last 20 years I've slept no more than 6 hours a night. My feet usually hit the floor about 20 minutes before the sun's fingertips grasp the ledge of the horizon like a mantling rock-climber.

Well, it only took about two weeks of full-time NaNoWriMo'ing for my Inner Flake to lob on my door-step, attired in tracksuit pants, kung fu shoes, T-shirt and grave-mold, still sporting the innumerable knife-wounds I'd inflicted on it before I buried it under the backyard compost back in the 1980s -- and looking for a bean-bag to crash on.

It began with a general deterioration of my attire, progressed to a contempt for food and mealtimes, and blossomed into a form of agoroknerosy -- which is sort of agoraphobia driven entirely by laziness rather than a more respectable shut-in's neurosis. And last night, I found myself sleeping eight hours. Eight! And today I turned up five whole minutes late to a meeting at a café two minutes' walk away. And last week, I almost forgot to release my staff's monthly salary.

Scary times!

NaNoWriMo '07 (III)

2007-11-26T13:29:00.000+11:00

This post's a little late because for the last week I've been struggling with the dreaded Middle Doldrums.

Usually I don't have troubles with the middles my stories. If a story troubles me, it's normally in lining up the ducks properly in the ending, so these Middle Doldrums are a new experience for me.

And what a bizarre experience they've been! I started off knowing the architecture of my story: I knew the key driving relationships and objectives, the major personalities. I also knew the key tension points and roughly how the story would progress to meet them. And none of those things have needed to change. I still have the same story concept I started with over three weeks ago.

So why then should I have hit Middle Doldrums?

Before I say why I think they've occurred, let me tell say what I think they're not about:

What My Middle Doldrums Aren't About

They're not about changing vision. The story architecture, key tensions, characters and key relationships haven't changed much. The characters have deepened, and some have taken on other roles, but the story has accommodated this just fine.

They're not about motivation. I've literally been thinking of nothing but story for the last month. I've been making time to write and been writing all of the words I can find. My cruductivity has varied from my usual daily average of 800 words through to around 2300.

They're not about fun. If anything, the story has been getting more fun as it has progressed. I'm enjoying the characters more, and the plot is getting rich and interesting.

They're not about poodle-faking, boondoggling, apple-polishing or editing text. Other than occasionally returning to make some line-notes early in the story, I haven't even bothered to look at the text of the manuscript-in-development. That's for later.

They're not about distractions. Aside from the occasional phone call or bit of administrative work for my company, I've had hours and hours every day to write.

So what's the problem then? I think it breaks down into a three interconnected things: fine detail, originality vs cliché, and story sensitivity to scene selection.

My Middle Doldrum Problems

Fine detail: What does my fantasy prison look like? How do my fantasy societies view criminality and punishment/reform? What forms of martial arts exist? How do demons change their shapes? How do they heal? How do different fantasy races manage their economies? How do they manage foreign policy?

The level of fine detail required has been enormous. While this detail is often incidental to the plot, it's critical to the characters, to the reader appreciation of the setting, and to the way that individual scenes play out.

Superficially, the fine detail should be a sheer joy to do: just let your imagination run riot. However, as I've discovered your first two thoughts in answer to any question are generally cliché (see below); your next answer derails the story themes. Somewhere in answer four or five is the right answer -- and frequently it's the answer to a question you didn't initially think to ask.

Originality vs Cliché: As a sword and sorcery story, my tale is about 90% action scenes. I believe that every single one of them has to be original. By that I mean, they can't look like too much anyone else's action scenes -- especially in terms of setting, imagery, challenge and/or resolution. While the average Hollywood action movie these days is just recycled choreography and staging, the old S&S masters never wrote that way.

I thought that action scenes would be easy to write, and the reaction scenes would be hard. In fact, the reverse has proved the case. Action scenes are hard to write well because your first two thoughts come subliminally from some movie or book -- and the third (see fine detail) is just wrong.

In this last week, I've spent whole days chewing over an ambush scene; or an overpower-the-guard scene. Stuff that takes scant seconds to read, but leaves an indelible impression on the reader. It shapes the spirit and feel of the story, so you have to get the ideas right, even if the expression is clunky.

Story Sensitivity: I should have realised this one earlier, but if the story is a house of cards, it's the critical middle that holds the house together. Zig when you should zag, and one of your through-lines falls apart. No matter what you write subsequently, your story is flawed. Because I'm not allowed to edit, if I catch the problem in the same writing session I can replace the bad idea with a better idea (if I can think of one). If I catch it in a later session then I can write some line notes back in an old session to remind myself to change the idea. But more often than not, my intuition refuses to let me zig. I simply stall.

It's taken me over a week to realise that when I get stalled on a detail of setting or some nuance of action, there's invariably a piece of through-line at stake.

Ruv's Answers to Middle Doldrums

To be fair, these aren't so much answers as answers-in-development. I need to work up the methods and test them more before I'll be entirely comfortable, but here they are.

More prep: I think that the answer to fiddly fine detail is to prepare more. In small quantities, I enjoy making up answers on the fly - but I don't enjoy getting those answers wrong and having to change them afterward, or the stop-start nature of having to make up a tonne of critical answers when I'm trying to meet deadlines. I think that in future I need to prep critical pieces of fine detail in the world. In particular, fine detail that links to problem-solving in the story. So, if I want to write about a prison-break, I'd better know everything about the nature, strengths and weaknesses of that prison before I start to write it. Likewise, if I have a species with exotic abilities, I'd better be clear on how most of those abilities work before I start bringing them into an action scene. I'm much chagrined and ashamed to confess that while I did many weeks of prep for this tale, I didn't always do the right prep. Lesson learned.

Holly Lisle's Create a Culture Clinic looks as though it may be useful for this. I've read it, but didn't use any of the forms for my current story - preferring instead to create dossiers of my own using Liquid Story Binder.

Originality exercises: I've found that I've needed these a lot for this story. I'm using two sorts: free association exercises (where you just blather for a fixed period of time, then reflect), and structured exploration exercises (where you state all the assumptions and conditions about the situation, then methodically explore possibilities). I've used both these exercises in the past, but am now re-learning to do so -- and teaching myself to recognise when I have to do this. These exercises use a different part of your brain to the part that writes, so just as you need to know when to write and when to edit, you also need to know when to innovate and when to analyse. I've found Ken Rand's From Idea to Story in 90s helpful for this, but even more so is De Bono's Lateral Thinking exercises, which I first played with in my teens.

Story sensitivity: Through-lines, through-lines, through-lines. I can't emphasise this enough. When your story looks logical but still feels broken or uninteresting, it's almost certainly because of a broken through-line, or a through-line that fails to progress. Here's an example.

My main character is rescuing from prison a father that he hates and fears. A curse is forcing him into this task, for which he is entirely unsuited - and he's accompanied by some allies of his father's to help. Having finally found his father, the old man wanted a distraction to help him escape and (quite naturally as I thought), sent the son off with the distraction party as being expendable. Both father and son were happy about this, because neither could stand the other. Fair enough, but...

Try as I might I could not write distraction scenes that were interesting and devoid of cliché. I wasted a day churning through originality exercises, and conjuring up interesting fine detail, and still wasn't happy. After a day of grumbling, muttering, banging posts and kicking an imaginary dog the realisation came to me just as I was laying down to sleep:

Writing a series of distraction scenes with the son did nothing to develop the father/son through-line. And it was critical that this through-line develop at this point in the story.

With that realisation I woke up, rejigged the group so that the son stayed with the father while others went off to create the distraction, and suddenly Bang! The words flew. Why? Because the father and son had things to say to one another - even if neither of them wanted to say those words.

Progress to date
Cruductivity (my term for producing unedited, highly line-noted, poorly expressed story that's conceptually sound and headed in the right direction) is just under 30,000 words, with 4 days to go. I expect that by the end I'll have 35,000 - 40,000 words, so 10,000 words (or about a week) short of the target.

Although it rankles to have no chance at all of completing the target 50,000 words, I must say that I'm delighted from the learning that's coming from this exercise. I'll save the lessons learned post-mortem for after the month is done, but to take under a month to learn some of the lessons above strikes me as being immensely valuable experience.

NaNoWriMo '07 (II)

2007-11-16T18:54:00.000+11:00

This is the second of approximately four weekly NaNoWriMo reports.

Notionally nine chapters into the story now, with a cruductivity measure of around 18,300 words. That's less than the 25,000 or so that it needs to be to meet the NaNo word-count target, but more than I would normally write per day.

My daily cruductivity output varies from around 1,100 to 2,500 words. The 1,100 is typical of when I'm problem-solving. The 2,500 is more typical of when I'm just blathering, which is only useful at some particular times. NaNoWriMo encourages you to blather regardless, but I'm only willing to blather under certain conditions. Here's why:

Blathering is not writing. Blather is a problem-solving technique used to solve open problems. But it's only useful when you have an open problem to solve. Many mid-story writing problems are not open problems but closed problems. All the answers are there - just hidden in characters and environment. Blather is a very inefficient way to solve closed problems; other techniques are better. They're mostly about finding new angles on the same set of information. So I think I'm stuck with 1,100 words a day until I can find a faster way to solve my closed problems. I'm reluctant to trade good answers for blather - even if it means living with a lower cruductivity metric. I think it's self-deception.

One good closed problem technique I've used in the last week is the character interview, and it's been very useful. Many of my 'how' questions have turned out to be 'who', 'why' and'what' questions instead. For example: how does a guy with very little thiefly or warrior training break into the most heavily defended prison in the universe and break his father out? The answer is that he can't, of course, but he might know someone who can and who may want to. The character interview helps reveal that. It also throws up more detailed motives and concerns, which helps deepen the story.

Another technique is to info-surf: images, music, articles... I've been devouring such stuff voraciously just to keep my head fed. I've learned more about mountain climbing than I even knew to ask; have picked up on three obscure martial arts I'd never heard of before; and have some dossiers with very beautiful pictures to inspire me about people and places.

Because I don't have a scene-level outline, I'm building one as I go. I'm being very meticulous about scene boundaries. They're not so much defined by who and where but by what: What decisions are being made? What actions are being attempted? Every time a critical decision is made or insight is formed; every time a critical action is attempted, I know to put in a scene break not long after. One side-benefit is that I'm not writing long infodump scenes; I'm 'laying pipe' as the story unfolds. So hopefully less pacing edits later. It's producing too many scene-breaks but consolidating is easier than breaking, I think.

Over the first few chapters, my pallette of 8-10 major characters has collapsed into around 4-6. Entering the mid-story phase I can see that I may need a few more, which will require me to fit some of them back into the story. The roles for those characters are also shifting. Several characters whom I thought would be obstacles are proving helpful - albeit in interesting, tricky ways.

In my first report I mentioned that I have a fairly passive, reactive character as the centrepiece of a sword and sorcery story. This is making for some great intrigues and surprises, but is always problematic whenever there's a big action scene. S&S tales sink or swim by their big action scenes, and each is a closed problem. Blather alone doesn't produce credible storytelling here. Because the character's simply not up to solving the bigger problems himself, I need to bring in other characters with their own agendas to solve them for him - and then make him pay the price of their agendas, which is where the tension comes in. It's anyone's guess whether this will support a whole story, but the early indications are that it might: he's changing, influencing other characters and the problems are being solved credibly.

Because going back to change old text is a no-no for NaNo, new assumptions or directions create continuity problems with the story. I've making heavier use of line notes in this writing than ever before, and it makes me glad I'm using Liquid Story Binder for this, because it actually treats line notes differently to other text.

NaNoWriMo predicted that in the second week, characters would begin to do their own thing - and that has happened. E.g. some obstacle characters have become helpers; other characters have already put their hand up for a particular role in the ending. But not all major characters have clear arcs yet (I have a sidekick who doesn't know where he's going or even why he's there), and I'm anxious to clear that up as early as the plot will allow.

I have vague hopes that the cruductivity will improve as the mid-story takes clearer form - simply because fewer problems to solve will mean more words on the page per day. But it's equally plausible that it will slow down as the weight of plot and character arcs require defter weaving to bring them to conclusion. I can't predict what next week will bring. It's a comfort though that I'm maintaining a steady pace. My pauses are problem-based pauses rather than simply distractions and excuses, and they're currently resolving either same-day or next-day, which is much faster than they've done on my shorts.

(Now looking for a carborundum nose-sheath to make it easier to keep it on the grindstone...)

NaNoWriMo 07 (I)

2007-11-09T07:57:00.000+11:00

This year I entered NaNoWriMo. I took an idea that I thought would stretch me, and spent a couple of weeks mapping it out. One week in, this is the first of what I expect will be weekly posts on progress and reflections.

Design concerns
The story is a sword-and-sorcery tale. I chose the subgenre for its punch, brevity and high action. Also because you just don't see many good S&S stories any more, and because I'm interested to explore what a modern S&S looks like - many of the older ones tended to be rather insensitive to race and gender.

I mapped the idea out with Dramatic Pro, and produced 28 plot points, with 7 points each for over-all plot, main character development, impact character development and the development of their interactions. This serves as a loose story outline at a sort-of chapter level. I didn't have a strong enough handle on the story soon enough to do a scene-level outline -- and figured that mightn't be useful to me anyway.

The story's set in a modern world with an urban fantasy flavour, so it needed research and design mythic races and places, and a background cosmology, which I also did in advance.

The design has 6-10 characters that are likely to figure significantly in the story. I did detailed design for the major ones (main, impact and some of the key plot-driving characters), and light design for the others, figuring that they'd probably mutate anyway. My detailed design consisted of character background, personality, key plot motivations and relationships. For the major characters I also wrote journalistic-style 'interviews' to get a feel for their voice and psychological cohesion.

Over-all I did around 12,000 words in design prior to starting on manuscript. I'm using Liquid Story Binder on this story to keep the design and manuscript organised. It also has some handy work and productivity tracking features. I was sorry to bid goodbye to yWriter3 for this project - it's stood me in very good stead for the last few shorts - but I needed something that would help me track all my design and background stuff as well as the manuscript, plus side-notes and idle musings along the way. But I miss some of the fine things it does, already.

Writing Concerns
I'm a linear, planny sort of writer. I hate wasting manuscript words, so I like to know where I'm going and how I'm getting there before I write. I also normally take frequent design breaks in between bursts of manuscript writing, to realign my ducks.

For NaNoWriMo, I've imposed the discipline of writing manuscript every day, regardless of where my design is at. This is driving me cuckoo. Early in the week, I'd bash out manuscript in the mornings, because my design was still robust. As the characters started to change the design, my manuscript writing has shifted into the afternoons and evenings while I spend my mornings working out what the heck my design is doing.

Usually when I write a light edit suffices to polish the story - the ideas are there, in roughly the right proportions and all of their parts; it's just a matter of polishing expression and emphasis, and occasionally clarifying something. Either the design is good or it's not; either the expression works or it doesn't.

But because I'm forcing myself to write manuscript every day regardless, I can see a major rewrites looming - scenes out of place; ideas in the wrong order; continuity errors, mutating characters... I feel like someone has gotten me drunk on wood alcohol and asked me to build them a pergola using off-cuts, a nail-gun and wax. If there's any benefit accruing to the resulting story, I've yet to see it. Calling the resulting product a 'novel' would be like calling vomit 'cuisine'. Really, all it's producing is a scrapbook of the subconscious ranting on a theme. It's something, but it's not really a story. It's a junk-pile that a good writer might turn into a story.

But in terms of writing process, I think there is some benefit. The courage to proceed in ignorance; suspension of disbelief in the muse, the magnificent wasting of time catering to an undisciplined, erratic subconscious, the indulgent meanderings of characterisation - and perhaps most importantly milestone-based writing.

My manuscript output is normally around 800-1000 words a day, but they're generally pretty good words. My current output is 1200-1400 words of crap per day, and gradually rising. I think that the name of this metric is cruductivity and I don't want to dignify it with a word-meter or daily postings about how more more cruductive I am today than yesterday. (If it matters, the corpus of crud is a bit over 10K words in length).

But improving cruductivity is somehow helpful, because I think that the number of good ideas per day is increasing significantly. Whereas I'd normally squeeze out one decent idea every couple of days, I now think I'm spitting out two or three a day. 'Good' in this case meaning an idea that has merit, whether or not it fits in the story. So cruductivity is helping problem-solving which will hopefully help quality of story, and that's very valuable.

Although I expected to encounter grumpy inner resistance to daily writing, or occasional blockages where I get nothing done all day, I haven't found much of that. When I'm puzzling a design problem I've been discussing it with whoever will listen (Mrs Draba, or on-line friends, or just myself while going out for walks). When I'm dry of ideas I've been collecting relevant art from the Internet, and making up pretty dossiers for places and people. I now have over a dozen of dossiers, which are actually quite stimulating.

I don't normally write to music, but I put together an MP3 collection of thematically-linked stuff. I don't know that it's helping the quality of my cruductivity one bit, but perhaps it's helping quantity.

Story Thoughts & Next Steps

At the current point in my story I've established the major characters, relationship tensions and the initial situation. The next 2 weeks will be about complicating their lives, and hopefully the last week will be about resolving the issues and catching thematic points.

One thing I have learned is to become impatient with design problems that don't resolve quickly. I've adopted a couple of methods to accelerate the process:

1) Change 'how' problems into 'who' and 'what' problems. How does my Main Character use his magical powers to get around the world? Simple: who is he, what is his style, who does he want to meet there, what is his style, and how can the travel bridge these two things?

2) If in doubt, suck hard on the Internet. Got no idea how the main character fights off four flying attackers while climbing a sheer cliff-face? Watch YouTube videos of famous climbers climbing sheer cliffs. Get some awe-inspiring pics of craggy rocks. Research terminology and techniques in climbing. Mull, and spit out some crud.

Of the 10 characters I've designed, about half haven't appeared yet except by mention, and I suspect that a couple of them won't appear at all. Instead, I think that some other characters are doing their jobs. This is maybe a good thing, since it increases character complexity and interest.

I'm very surprised at how many of my early scenes are reaction scenes rather than action scenes. They're still interesting scenes in that they have dilemmas and choices and consequences - they're not just blather - but I'm concerned that if all this reaction continues then I might not have a Sword and Sorcery story, but something else instead.

On reflection I think it's because I put a reactive, reluctant character into the main character role. He's a punk who gets beaten up into taking action. This is something that you see a lot in High Fantasy, but not much in Sword and Sorcery. I'm hoping that during the Complication, he'll turn around and start taking charge. In fact, that's exactly the design consideration I'm pondering today prior to my manuscript cruduction.

NaNoWriMo promises great character-driven story from some time in week 2, and I'm looking forward to that. Presently I have only Draba-driven story, and a leg-dragging MC.

It's about time my characters shouldered their load!

Astrology is stupid

2007-10-29T11:26:00.000+11:00

This article from a discussion with Mrs Draba this morning.

Astrology is stupid. It's a crock.

It's not absolutely stupid -- any more than copying memes in blogs is stupid. Astrology as entertainment is fine. Astrology as platitudinous comfort is fine too.

What's stupid is using astrology to guide your life, just as it's stupid to use blog-memes for the same purpose.

So, why?

Well, firstly, there's plenty of good advice around. Some of it is given by astrologers too. Be kind in your relationships. Be considerate of your spouse. Remember to temper your ambition with humility. Don't forget to take breaks, and be careful of illness during change of seasons. Motor cars are dangerous; drive carefully - especially when you're flustered.

This advice is good advice no matter when you were born. Even if it's not directed specifically at you, you should take it.

But you don't need to mystify it with symbolism and nonsense around your birth-date. In fact it's mildly dangerous because if you only read the stuff with your particular zodiac logo on it, you might overlook advice you really need.

Why is astrology nonsense?

Well I can't be absolutely sure that it is because I don't know everything. But I can have the same confidence about the deception of astrology that I have about the deception in Nigerian email scams -- because neither provides reasonable answers to reasonable questions. Questions like these:

Why should stars significantly influence my personality and destiny? Why not the weather, or what food my mother ate? Or, my upbringing or my education?
Why should the particular stars you name influence these things more than the billions of others?
If the stars do influence my destiny, why should the influence be based on the time of my birth, rather than my current physical location and my body mass say?
If my personality were going to be influenced by the stars, why not at the moment of my conception?
How do you know that the actual time of my birth is correct? Mother might have been in labour for hours or days, and who knows what the administrator decided to write on my birth certificate?
How do I know that you performed the right calculations? Can you point out where Jupiter is in the sky right now, please? Can you tell me the period of Mars around the sun? Could you please solve a quadratic equation for me, or tell me how to calculate the focal point of an ellipse?
Are you aware of the precession of the equinoxes and the fact that the sky has slipped around 30 degrees in the last 2,000 years? Have you taken this into account?
Why should my horoscope resemble that of 550 million other people who happen to be born in the same period as me?
Should astrologers ever die of preventable or treatable diseases? Why then would famous astrologer Athena Starwoman die of breast cancer?
How do you know when you've given an accurate prediction? Do you measure your performance as an astrologer? Are your data unbiased? Do you run double blinds? Do you perform better than a charlatan cold reading a subject? Do you know what the Forer effect is? What confirmation bias is? How do you evaluate your predictions to remove those effects?
If the stars are infallible, do your predictions come with a time-based, event-based guarantee?

I know a lot of people who believe in astrology - smart people. I'd be very comfortable if they just enjoyed astrology. It's the belief though, that bothers me.

If astrology were a clothing store, the sales staff would have guessed your size from a baby photo, given you clothes one season out of fashion, dressed you in summer sandals, a bikini and a raincoat, and written your name on each of them so you knew they were yours and then had to sew you into them anyway because they were never made to fit you. Having had no training as a tailor they'd have made the clothing unwearable, and not fit to last the day -- and all the while chanting how important you are in the universe, how great you look and how this is definitely your colour.

Astrology: Just say no.

(Thanks to skepdic.com for supplying a nice jumping-off point into this discussion)

A Taxonomy of Betrayal

2007-10-17T08:59:00.000+10:00

For a while I've been interested in betrayal as a literary theme, and I'm considering focusing on that in a possible NaNoWriMo novel. In preparation I've been chewing over what betrayals are and why people do them. These notes capture my current thinking and may be of use to other writers. Some of these thoughts came from discussion on oww-sff-writing - so thanks to the people who contributed there.

What is betrayal?
Betrayal is breaking an established social trust. The trust might be explicit, like marital vows or the Hippocratic oath, or it could be implicit, like the trust between parent and child, or between friends. One can also betray oneself, e.g. in breaking personal commitments or principles. I should mention from the outset that postmodernism has put a funny cast on betrayal: in a morally relativistic world, people don't really live in the same culture or society -- everyone is an island that occasionally cooperates, and every interaction is transactional. In that sort of view, you can disappoint others and let them down, but you can't really betray anyone but yourself.

I don't believe that. I believe that humans strive to build cultures, and that this requires some sacrifice and setting aside of differences. When we do both those things we create mutual trust, and when the trust is broken it's betrayal. So I'll proceed on that basis.

In determining whether a betrayal has occurred you need to decide whether there's an established trust and whether it's broken. With trusts made explicitly it's easy to determine. With trusts made implicitly, it's often open to interpretation: What do parents owe their children: safety? truth? love? health? development? What do friends owe one another: honesty? candour? loyalty? companionship? intimacy? What do we owe our pets: food? shelter? health? safety? companionship? exercise? What do we owe ourselves: integrity? health? development? love? esteem?

Some betrayals are deliberate -- one doesn't accidentally cheat on one's spouse. Some are simply negligent -- I might forget to feed my dog, or reveal information that I shouldn't. Some betrayals are malicious -- I want someone to suffer; others are simply selfish -- I want something and don't care if someone else suffers.

It seems to me that the more we can understand and spell out what our trusts are, the less confusion there is, and the easier it is to keep them in mind so that we don't betray them negligently or selfishly.

Why we betray
I've already mentioned that one can betray through misunderstanding ("I didn't realise I was entrusted with this!"), negligence ("Oh yeah, I remember I agreed to set the VCR for you") and selfish indifference ("Oh, were you saving that piece of cake?"). We can also betray by having to resolve conflicting trusts. ("You want me to lie for you?"). From a literary perspective though, perhaps the most interesting betrayals are the malicious ones. In any case, I'll try and cover as much ground as I can on motive below.

There's a sense in which every betrayal arises from a conflict of need -- and that's why I think it's interesting dramatically. To get an idea of motive for betrayal it helps then to understand character need.

For this discussion I'm borrowing psychologist Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. This hierarchy is a simple, convenient model for writers -- though some psychologists find it too simplistic. The hierarchy is often represented as a "pyramid" which you can see here, with basic, material needs appearing below more abstracted emotional, psychological and spiritual needs. (image source: wikipedia; reproduced under the license listed here. If the picture is too small, click on it to see the original.)

For the purposes of this discussion I won't go deeply into the model - either in the definitions of categories or their relationships. I'm just going to use the categories "as-is". In particular, I'm interested in the conflict of needs that gives rise to the betrayal. This raises two separate questions: why we betray (covered in this section); and
how we betray (covered in the next).

For this section I try and list the way that unmet needs and desires might motivate us to betray. For each category of Maslow's hierarchy, I list the churning emotions and motives that might take us down the betrayal path.

**Motives for betrayal**
Need	Possible motive
Physiology	Competition for food, shelter, breeding
Safety	Environmental hazards, bullying and extortion, competition for employment & promotion, competition for resources (like water, oil, minerals, hunting rights, land rights, farming rights, trade rights), intimidation, war, fear of contagion, contamination, pestilence, famine, bad luck, greed, moral beliefs
Love & Belonging	Jealousy, desire to ostracise, reject and cast out, xenophobia, competing personal or group loyalties, to hide previous betrayals, spite, hatred, revenge
Esteem	Envy, status anxiety, ambition, scorn, humiliation, contempt, blackmail & compromise, pride
Self-Actualisation	Indifference, negligence, distraction, immorality and amorality, prejudice, confusion, ideology, impatience, ego, boredom, amusement, competing priorities

As you can see there are a lot of motives for betrayal (and there may be some I've missed - if so, tell me!). Some motives are selfish - e.g. many of the physiology and safety motives; some are indifferent and negligent - e.g. many of the self-actualisation motives. Some are simply malicious - e.g. most of the Love & Belonging and Esteem motives.

The next question to think about is how we betray.

How We Betray
A betrayal is really breaking a trust, and I believe that trusts exist to meet our needs, so we can think about betrayals as being a failure to fulfill a trust that meets the needs of the betrayed. Thus, we have another Maslow table:

**How we Betray**
Betrayed Need	Methods of betrayal
Physiology	Suffocation, poison, starvation, sterilisation, castration, sleep deprivation, neglect, contamination, constipation.
Safety	Physical torture, mutilation, maiming, crippling, disfigurement, disemployment, dispossession, vandalism, physical sabotage, arson, theft, rape, intimidation, extortion, fraud, swindling, embezzlement, damnation, excommunication, curses - or the application of any of these to our families and loved ones.
Love & Belonging	All betrayals betray our sense of love and belonging because they attack our trust. But there are special betrayals that attack our love and belonging in particular, including: Gossip, infidelity, favouritism, ostracism, hate, vengeance, retribution, dishonour, deceits, rejection, denouncements, disloyalty.
Esteem	Libels, slanders, mockery, humiliation.
Self-Actualisation	Slavery, indenture, coercion, compulsions, imprisonment, discouragement, distraction, deceits and misinformation, manipulation, seduction, imposed addictions.

There is sometimes a connection between why we betray and how we betray. For instance, we might respond to feelings of jealousy by trying to make someone else jealous. We might respond to fear of hunger by starving our foe. Where such betrayals are in retribution for perceptions of past betrayal we may consider them to be "poetic justice".

Sometimes we use betrayals for punishment (in one sense, virtually all punishments are a form of controlled betrayal). When society imprisons a criminal as a punishment, it withdraws the social contract that allows freedom, in measured response to whatever betrayal the criminal inflicted.

When needs are in conflict we sometimes try and pick the betrayal that betrays least. For instance, parents financially unable to look after their children any more might put them up for adoption - betraying the child's need for love, but protecting the child's need for food and safety.

At other times, there may be no connection between why we betray and how we betray. We may simply pick whatever method of betrayal is open to us. A lover might slay an unfaithful lover simply because they can.

The Worst Betrayals
When we think of betrayals we often compare them to see which is worst. Whose is the worst betrayal in Shakespeare, for instance? Brutus' who killed his colleague and friend Julius Caesar? MacBeth, who killed his king and his friend? Hamlet, whose betrayal killed his mother, his stepfather and Ophelia? Hamlet's mother, who betrayed her husband and her son?

The answer depends on your morality and the society you live in. The strength of betrayal depends on how we view the bond of trust that is broken. A sacred bond of trust (e.g. parent to child) counts higher than a merely practical one (e.g. of employer to employee). The other factor is the impact of the betrayal itself. A betrayal that destroys reputation, shatters relationships, drives the victim mad and finally to suicide counts more than a betrayal that simply costs the victim a few dollars.

Vengeances
Vengeances go with betrayals like pepper goes with salt. Many vengeances are for past betrayals (e.g. "You toucha my car, I breaka you face"), but not all are... Someone can offend and affront you even if there's no bond of trust with them.

On the flip side, many vengeances use betrayals (e.g. the lover who has an affair to punish an unfaithful partner). But some vengeances are not betrayals because there's no trust involved. (E.g. bombing another country who bombed you.)

One question I'm pondering as a writer, is whether, in a given society, for a particular betrayal, there's a perfect vengeance: one that attacks the betrayer at their place of original motivation and also reflects the impact of their original betrayal. Alexandre Dumas' novel, The Count of Monte Cristo explores this to some degree, and also the theme of justice vs vengeance vs forgiveness. But there are other possible angles one could approach it from. I'm also interested in what is the very worst betrayal you can imagine -- and what is the perfect revenge on it.

Another thing I'm interested in is good quotations on betrayal. Revenge has many pithy quotations, but betrayal has few. Why is that?

How Big Should My Fantasy Story Be?

2007-10-05T06:11:00.000+10:00

As fantasy novels get thicker and thicker; as series get longer and longer; as book retailers rush to phones ordering extra bracing and extensions for their fantasy shelving; as stocks in paper mills gradually recover from the tragic news of Robert Jordan's demise, perhaps it's time that someone stopped to ask the hard question:

Just how big should my fantasy story be?

The traditional answer -- to let market forces decide -- is clearly not working, and the risks to both the economy and public health grow.

Bigger is always better - right?

Of course it is!

Except in certain pathological cases like Enron, Worldcom and the Wheel of Time.

Some things alas, grow too big too fast, and it's always the Mum and Dad (and brother Johnny and sister Sue) investors who suffer. A simple analysis of Wheel of Time character arcs shows that to complete it at his average rate of output, Robert Jordan would have had to live to 189. Had each instalment carried an appropriate Product Disclosure Statement and an appendix with a current medical certificate we would not now be in this parlous state. As the dust settles, we can only reflect ruefully on how alluring it is to invest in sub-prime fantasy markets -- and how dangerous such speculation is in the longer term.

But while analysts deliberate over the macroeconomic implications in the overnight collapse of the 'J' row of fantasy shelving, we risk ignoring more immediate and pervasive questions to public health.

I refer of course to pandemic levels of Potter's Elbow (known in some places as "Rowling Wrist") - a repetitive strain injury arising from the prolonged reading of books so thick that even NBL players can't grasp them one-handed -- books that turn an afternoon's light reading into the equivalent of a three hour Bowflex session. The syndrome is evocative of the old "Belgariad Biceps" of the 80s, and "Dune Deltoids" of the 60s, except that it's afflicting child punters these days too. Though pundits speculate a 20 year loquacity cycle -- the so called "Prolixity wave" -- this ignores the more urgent question of what to do with the uncontrolled outbreaks of prosification we're currently faced with.

The joys of free market capitalism aside, I believe that some regulation is inevitable. Pondering the matter over breakfast this morning, I was inspired to read the following words on my cereal packet:

This product is sold by weight, not volume. You can be assured of the proper weight of product, although some settling of the contents may have occurred during shipping and handling.

The parallel should be fairly evident.

What I think is happening to fantasy novels is that the product is either settling on the shelves, or not being mixed properly when it's pumped out in volume. Being light-weight, the characters are all slipping to the front of the story, while the ponderous plot is slipping to the back. This is leaving vast tracts of empty space in the middle, which the industry calls setting. I believe that Jordan for instance, had planned on releasing some plot to the Wheel of Time, but not until 2032 when all the hills and yurts and tribal hair-braiding ceremonies had been fully described.

Galvanised by this insight, I tried a vigorous shaking of my more massive titles to see if I could remix the ingredients into a palatable balance. But aside from a rupture and aggravation of old Belgariad Bicep injuries, it didn't achieve much. So I've come reluctantly to the conclusion that the stories are being mixed in the wrong proportions in the first place - much like pouring museli and getting three sultanas and a bowlful of dessicated coconut.

And this brings me to the chief idea of this article: a proposed regulation standard for fantasy descriptions, based on the item being described. The parallel with Recommended Daily Intake of nutrients in breakfast cereals should be apparent; the benefits obvious. I set out some draft guidelines below:

Elves and other effete aesthetes: 500 word budget for the first one; 50 for the second and 5 for each one after that
Hobbits and other comedy relief: 750 words for the first one if it's colourful; 10 for the second; 3 for any subsequent instance
Swords and other fell weaponry: 500 if it's magical; 200 more if it has a personality or dark purpose; 50 for any subsequent sword if it has a name; 5 if it doesn't.
Dragons and toothie beastes: 300 words for the first one; 10 each for any later ones if they're different. Colour changes don't count.
Gnomes, orcs, trolls and other ugly spear-carriers: 20 words for the first instance of each race. 3 words thereafter
Pretty waifish fae: 10 words each; 10 more if they're being killed by an ugly spear-carrier when we meet them
Dwarves and other taciturn pragmatists: 50 words total. Spread among as many dwarves as you have.
Wise Guardian of Virtue: 4 words, including name. We know it's Gandalf. Move on.
Pastoral delight: 200 words for the first lot; 300 words more if there's a storm or dark omen; 20 words for each new pastoral location after that
Arborial splendour: 100 words for the first lot; 10 words for each new location. Get over yourself. They're just trees.
Rolling hillside: 20 words. If you need more, add some trees and borrow from your "Arborial splendour" budget.
Forbidding mountains: 50 words in total; you are free to exchange any unused surplus with your Dwarf budget.
Urban quagmire of dissolution: 400 words for the first one. If you need a second one, write a sequel.
Stygian mines of doom: 10 words per instance. Get a grip. It's dark down there!
Rings and other jewelry of power: 10 words per item; 20 if it's a concealed body piercing, fleetingly exposed.

Applying these standards we see that we can reduce all the locations of Pern for instance into a single Lonely Planet pocket guide. Rendered in 6-point Palatino, the whole abridged Wheel of Time series fits neatly onto the back of a bus-ticket.

Fantasy on a fridge magnet? Of course it will sell! But have we gone too far, you ask?

Well, not really. Because you see, these standards only apply to description of setting. Some authors will naturally find ways to abuse this regime -- for instance by "padding out" the all-important setting descriptions with old, unfashionable literary techniques like developing character and advancing plot.

But I won't tell them if you don't.

Three Act Stories vs Six Act Stories: A Worked Example

2007-09-23T08:31:00.000+10:00

Many stories are designed as Three Act stories, with a Situation, a Complication and a Resolution. This approach dates back to Aristotle's Poetics. An expanded, Seven-Act model can be found in dramatist Gustav Freytag's Die Technik des Dramas (1863), which uses Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Turning Point, Falling Action and Dénouement/Catastrophe - the so-called "Freytag's Pyramid" and which is depicted here.

Is either model "right"? Is either model better or worse for some kinds of stories? In this post I take a look at the strengths and limitations of these Three and Six Act models using a simple worked example: the story of a conflict between a cat and a mouse.

Story summary:

Once a timid mouse lived in a mouse-hole in the corner of a city flat. The mouse dined well on spilled food-scraps and lived a quiet life, hardly ever seen by the couple who lived in the flat. But then that couple moved out, to be replaced only weeks later by a solitary accountant who owned a fierce cat. After weeks of privation, the mouse was at first delighted to see the new occupants, but then appalled to find the cat unrelenting in its vigil. After several desperate attempts to get food, the mouse ended up befriending the cat - who let it forage for food in exchange for the mouse entertaining it while its owner was out, and letting it nap in the afternoons.

If you tell this story from just the mouse's pespective, you have a natural three act structure:

The Mouse's Tale

Situation: A timid mouse is in desperate need of food as its neighbours change
Complication: A vigilant but bored cat thwarts the mouse's every furtive attempt to find food
Resolution: The mouse overcomes its timidity to befriend the cat and make alliance; entertaining the cat in exchange for afternoon forage rights

You might tell this story in as few as seven scenes. Here's one way of telling it:

Scene1: Hungry mouse scampers around an empty pantry, thinking about the last tenants and how great the food was then
Scene2: Mouse watches new tenant move in, and smells wonderful cheeses
Scene3: Mouse makes a furtive attempt on the food and is nearly killed by cat
Scene4: Mouse makes a second, even more furtive attempt and is nearly killed by the vigilant cat
Scene5: Mouse arranges a distraction for the cat and makes a bolt for the food. Mouse is caught by the cat this time just when it thought itself safe.
Scene6: Mouse argues for its life and is spared by the cat because of the fun distraction it organised
Scene7: Mouse and cat play in the mornings; when the cat sleeps in the afternoon, the mouse feeds undisturbed

This story falls naturally into three Acts:

Act1 (Beginning): Scenes 1-2
Act2 (Middle): Scenes 3-6
Act3 (End): Scene7

As is common for Three Act stories, the beginning is around 25% of the story; the middle fills around 60% of the story and the end is around 15%.

You could also divide the story into six Acts according to Freytag if you preferred:
Exposition: (Scenes 1-2) "A hungry mouse forages for food in an empty apartment as a new tenant moves in"
Rising Action: (Scene 3-4) "Mouse makes multiple unsuccessful attempts to get food - and is almost killed each time"
Climax: (Scene 5) "Mouse organises a distraction for the cat - but is caught!"
Turning Point: (Scene 6) "Mouse argues for its life with the cat, and discovers that the cat is bored"
Falling Action: (Scene 6 - Ditto)
Dénouement: (Scene 7) "After entertaining the cat in the morning, the mouse forages quietly for food in the afternoon as the cat sleeps"

As you can see, Scene 6 does double duty as two Acts, because the turning point is also the falling action. This might be an argument for a weakness in the Freytag model - or it could be an argument that Scene 6 should be split into two: 6a) Mouse argues for its life; 6b) Mouse agrees to keep the cat entertained. But there isn't really a strong case for that, I think.

Which model is better for designing or describing this story? The Freytag model gives you slightly more detail, but it's a bit more confusing too because Scene 6 represents two Acts.   I marginally lean toward a Three Act structure for this tale.

But you could also tell the story from the cat's perspective.

The Cat's Tale

Here's the cat's tale, recounted in a three-act structure:

Situation: A cat is bored and homesick in its new apartment
Complication: A mouse constantly irritates the cat with its scampering and foragings
Resolution: After catching the mouse, the cat grudgingly agrees to a friendship based on companionship and entertainment

Here's a telling of this story - also in seven scenes.

Scene1: Cat arrives in a new apartment, and finds the telltale smell of mouse
Scene2: Cat is homesick, bored and trapped as its owner goes to work. It thinks with longing about the last place it lived, which had a back yard.
Scene3: Cat's bored reflections are interrupted by mouse foraging. It almost kills the mouse; its irritation rises.
Scene4: Cat takes vigil, but is really thinking about the better life it had. The mouse barely escapes. The cat is now very cranky: Homesickness, a boring flat, and now this irritating MOUSE!
Scene5: A contrived distraction confuses the cat, but it eventually realises the mouse's game, dives on the retreating mouse and catches it
Scene6: In talking to the trapped mouse, the cat realises that it needs the companionship. It also feels grudgingly sorry for the mouse. So when the mouse makes an offer to entertain the cat, it agrees.
Scene7: The mouse still irritates the cat, but the cat is content to play for now. The cat promises itself to kill the mouse one day, but ends up sleeping each afternoon away.

Here's the Freytag model of this tale. It has the same Scene 6 problem that the Mouse's Tale had:

Exposition: (Scenes 1-2)  "A bored, homesick cat moves into a new apartment and notes that a mouse lives there"
Rising Action: (Scenes 3-4) "The cat hunts the mouse as it forages, but really just wants to sulk and mope"
Climax: (Scene 5) "Almost falling for a distraction created by the mouse, the cat finally traps the little critter"
Turning Point: (Scene 6) "The mouse talks for its life, and makes the cat an offer it can't refuse: to keep it entertained, and allow it to sleep undisturbed in the afternoons"
Falling Action: (Scene 6 - Ditto)
Dénouement: (Scene 7) "The mouse still irritates the cat, but it grudgingly accepts its presence in the flat"

Combining the Stories

Which is the better story - the Cat's Tale, or the Mouse's? I think they're both entertaining. I love the mouse's desperation and resourcefulness - and the mouse is obviously a sympathetic character, but I I think that the cat's character is richer; the cat story is a little more realistic too, because it's obvious that the cat hasn't really changed its personality.

In a sense, neither story alone is complete. If we see the story only from the mouse's perspective, the cat's agreement to befriend the mouse looks implausible. If we see the story from just the cat's perspective, the mouse's problem-solving feels somewhat dissatisfying. Surely the protagonist should solve its own problems? Really, each tale needs something of the other to support it.

So what happens if we blend these two tales into a single story? What dramatic structure might it produce? And which model (if any) works best for representing it?

There are lots of ways of telling this combined story. Here's one designed to keep the subjective storyline intact without using too many scenes.

Scene1: A hungry mouse scampers around an empty pantry, thinking about the last tenants and how great the food was then. It notes the sound of the removalist van arriving
Scene2: A bored, homesick cat moves into the apartment, still thinking about its old home. It notes with irritation that a MOUSE lives in the apartment.
Scene3: Drawn by the scent of food, the mouse makes an attempt to forage and is almost caught by the cat.
Scene 4: Thwarting the mouse's second attempt to forage, the cat broods about how its life has taken such a turn for the worse; it pines for a quiet, undisturbed spot in the sunshine.
Scene 5: The mouse plans a desperate attempt to distract the cat
Scene 6: As the mouse executes its plan, the cat almost falls for it, but tumbles to the plan at the last minute. Furious, it pounces on the mouse, determined to destroy it.
Scene 7: The trapped mouse talks desperately to save its life, and in doing so discovers that the cat is bored and homesick. It overcomes its fear enough to feel sympathy and to make an offer. Nonplussed, the cat agrees.
Scene 8: (Days later) Sleeping in the sun, the cat reflects on its entertainments of the morning. It still resents the presence of the mouse, but is now at peace. It promises that one day it will kill that mouse, but is content to drift off to sleep.

This story is one scene longer than either the cat's or the mouse's tale individually. The additional scene is Scene 5 - where the mouse plans but doesn't execute its distraction. Then we cut to how the executed plan looks to the cat, since that's where the cat's character arc is peaking.

What's interesting here is that the crisis for the cat is when the mouse plays its trick. (Scene 6). The crisis for the mouse though is when it has to talk its way out of dying (Scene 7). The mouse clearly changes its nature to do so - it becomes a friend and entertainer: that's the turning point of the story. The cat clearly doesn't change its nature - it remains a cat.

Here's an attempt to capture the combined story in a Three Act structure:

Situation: A bored and homesick cat moves into an apartment occupied by a hungry, furtive mouse
Complication: Cat and mouse find themselves in battle over control of the apartment as the cat thwarts the mouse's repeated attempts to find food. Eventually the mouse desperately tries to distract the cat, but is caught anyway.
Resolution: Realising that the cat is bored, the mouse makes the cat an offer to entertain it; the cat agrees. Cat and mouse learn to cooperate: the cat being entertained and the mouse being grudgingly allowed to forage for food in the afternoons while the cat sleeps.

This description is accurate but I dislike it. The Situation and Resolution are fine, but the Complication misses the key part of the story, which is the competing perspectives of Cat and Mouse. What it has done is objectivise the story, when the interesting part of the Middle is actually the subjective part. Really we need two middles: the cat's version and the mouse's version.

Here's the story summarised in a Freytag structure:

Exposition: (Scenes 1-2) A hungry mouse forages for food in a vacated apartment;  a bored, homesick cat moves in and broods on its past life lost
Rising Action: (Scenes 3-5) Cat and mouse fight over control of apartment; Mouse plans to distract the cat so it can forage
Climax: (Scene 6) Cat almost falls for the mouse's trick but finally traps the mouse
Turning Point: (Scene 7) In arguing for its life, the mouse realises that the cat is bored and homesick; It makes an offer that the cat can't refuse
Falling Action: (Scene 8) Cat reflects on the entertainment and grudgingly defers hunting the mouse for another day.
Dénouement: (Scene 8 - ditto)

The Freytag structure does a better job of capturing the critical subjective part of the story - we see this especially at the Turning Point. We get a much better sense of how the story works. But the Falling Action Act isn't really needed - we just need the Dénouement act.

Really, what I think would work best is if we had three descriptions of the story: a three-act structure for the cat's tale, a three-act structure for the mouse's tale, and a five-act structure for the combined tale. You could see these as two character arc descriptions plus a subjective plot description.

Conclusions

The conclusions here come from only a single worked example, so we can't generalise too much. But we can point to insights about possible limitations of the models, and come up with ideas for how to overcome them.

Many authors like describing their story as a Three Act structure and for many stories you clearly can - but doing so may come at the cost of understanding what the story is really about. Really, a Three Act structure works best when your story is written from a single character's perspective (or maybe some objective perspective). Once you start complicating the story with additional perspectives, the Three Act structure may become less useful.

The Freytag structure elaborates the Three Act structure somewhat, but not all Acts may be useful in each story. In our example, the Falling Action Act was either blended with other things (e.g. Turning Point), or not really needed. The Freytag structure looks like it could sometimes be better at picking up some subjective elements of the story, but I think it still isn't as powerful as the following method:

Capture the character arcs of the protagonist and antagonist in whatever format suits you (in this example, a Three Act structure was sufficient)

Capture the objective and subjective plots using either one or two descriptions (in this example, one was sufficient).

Finally, I would suggest that if you're having problem with the "middle" parts of a Three or Six Act story, it may be because the interplay of character arcs and plot isn't clear enough. It's very useful to think about what creates turning points in each character, what the turning points are about, and what leads up to that. As we saw in our example, not every character changes. Mapping the changes out and why they occur may help get more sense out of the terra incognita of the daunting "Middle Act".

A three level view of story development - and how to reconcile conflicts

2007-08-31T13:17:00.000+10:00

Introduction
I have two writing objectives, each equally important: 1) writing good stories on topics that interest me, and 2) minimising the effort it takes me to do that (so that I can write more good stories or do other things too if I want).

Over time I've discovered that I'm working with a three-level model of story development, and that this model is shaped by both goals. This article explains what the three views are, how they interact and what I do to reconcile them when they conflict. I should mention that these ideas aren't specific to writing - the three level view is used in a lot of planning and design -- from homes to cars and software. I've also seen these ideas appearing piecewise in discussions with other writers, so this article just brings those thoughts together from my own perspective. I'm not making great claims to innovation here.

Vision, Design and Execution

The three levels I work with are called vision, design and execution. Here's how they break down:

Vision: where am I going with this story and what impact do I want to achieve? Vision captures questions of themes, high level plot (what the key conflicts and stakes are), key characters (the bits that engage the plot), and setting (enough to get a feel for mood, imagery and conflicts), and target audience. You can capture vision in half a page of description.

Design: what are the key things I need to get where I'm going, and how do they fit together? Design elaborates setting, key characters and plot. It covers all the detail I'll need to know to understand the conflicts and tensions, how the main characters are going to develop, and enough setting detail to understand how I'll be creating mood and supporting conflict and character development. Design could be written in as little as a few pages of plot , character descriptions and setting notes -- or if there's a lot of original design in setting (e.g. world, culture, language), then it could be substantially more. Some writers call this planning, but I think of planning as more to do with my work schedule and resources, so I prefer to say design.

Execution: Elaborating and fitting the design elements together. So, narrative, dialogue, mood, imagery, voice, links and transitions, quotations etc...

I believe that all good stories need a good vision and a good design well executed. If the vision is lacking then you might have an entertaining story, but it will be forgettable. If the design is poor then you might have good writing, but your story will be boring, confusing or frustrating in places. If the execution is poor then you might have some good ideas, but the text will be turgid, opaque, tiresome to read. So you need all three for the story to work.

But that doesn't mean that an author has all of those things at the start, or has them in the right order, or arrives at them easily or consciously or in sensible ways.

I'm not going to write here about what goes into a good vision, or a good design or a good execution, or how you can transform one into another, because people write whole books about this stuff. For this article I'm concerned with just the interactions between the levels, because I and every writer I know finds this quite frustrating to deal with.

When They Don't Connect: the Misery of Revisions

While I would very much like to go from a clear and stable vision through a flawless and effective design and into elegant execution in a single, smooth pass, in practice it never happens that way. I might have a flawed vision (e.g. I'm asking the wrong questions in my themes), or a poor design (it's not doing what i wanted it to), or weak execution (I just don't have the skills to meet the demands of my design). Or maybe I just see a way of doing things better part-way through... either way, I can feel the inevitable headache of revision coming on.

One of the biggest enemies to writing productivity is rework. It's not just that it saps your energy and enthusiasm (though it does). It forces you to relearn the same lessons over and over again...

Not all rework is evil and to be shunned; some is expected. Everyone expects to do at least one revision before they submit some writing, and one more revision from editing. What I'm talking about is the endless tear-down/build-up/polish-polish that afflicts authors who are lost, angst-ridden and undecided.

A great deal of that can be attributed to inexperience, poor organisation, poor focus - or as I've discovered, failure to deal with conflicts between the three levels of story development in a timely and effective manner.

I'm not going to talk about inexperience and organisation here. One can be addressed by education, training and practice; the other is a matter of good habits and discipline - and may be the subject for a future article. But I will cover poor focus and managing conflicted vision, design and execution in this article. Here's my suggested approach.

Holding Vision, Establishing Design, Framing Execution

These are the principles I use to try to keep focus detecting conflicts early, and dealing with them efficiently.

Always have a vision - even if it's interim.

I always try to know where I'm going before I set out, so I always have a focus. Even if my ideas change along the way, at least I'm conscious of what I think I'm doing. That way if my vision starts to stray, I can stop and ask myself whether I'm going somewhere new and better, or just different. That way I don't let sheer whimsy or boredom direct my revisions.
If it's going to take more than a few hours to write, then at least sketch the design

Again, this is about focus. It's fine to spend an afternoon on experimentation, but if my effort is going to run into days, I need to know that those days will likely lead to something. Design is like the scaffolding you use to keep your skyscraper from collapsing. The bigger the skyscraper, the more design effort is justified. A day of writing might justify an hour of design. Months of writing might deserve days or weeks of design.

I don't believe writers who say "I couldn't design; it would stifle my creativity". What I think they're really saying is "I don't like being disciplined or accountable - even to myself". Design does not constrain creativity -- except to insist that your creativity leads to your vision.

I'm not saying that you must do all your design work in advance, or that you must be neat and orderly about it - or even that you must write all or any of it down. But some time you had better make sure that your scenes add up to plot and character development, that your setting is consistent and relevant, that the whole connects with your themes, and that there's some control over pace and tension. The sooner you can do this, the less risk there is of excessive rewrites, so sooner is generally better -- when you can.
Check against vision and design every time things change

Whenever the character changes or the plot advances (so usually at the end of each chapter), I pause for breath to see that my vision is intact, that my story is still in its scaffolding and still standing upright. If it's not, then I start thinking about why not and what to do about it.

When it runs off the rails

Farmers deal with droughts and floods, potters deal with cracks and glazes that didn't take, writers deal with stories running off the rails.

When your story starts to run off the rails it's tempting to shut your eyes and steam ahead, going for the magic word-count, hoping that it will right itself. But in fact, it probably won't.

If you don't have a clear vision then what you'll get is a story with maybe a cool character, interesting situations, a nice background and decent writing but that has no real impact. In the best case, you'll need to tear it down and rewrite it from scratch with a completely new direction. In the worst case, you'll polish and submit it to rejection after rejection "Nice story, but not right for us".

If you don't have a viable design, or if you have two designs competing for the same story then you'll likely have truckloads of wasted and flawed scenes, whole chapters overblown or out of sequence, swatches of inconsistent setting, characters that don't develop when they should, and probably aren't right for the story anyway. That's one, two, maybe three or more rewrites depending on how long it takes you to work out what the design should really be.

So, suppose that you stop for breath every so often and you detect a wobble? Maybe you get a niggle that your original vision isn't as good as you thought. Or you look at your design in execution and think: I could do better. Do you have to rewrite?

Well, it depends. See the following steps.

If my vision changes substantially, I stop and redesign, always. Vision is an extremely unreliable indicator of story goodness until you have a design to support it. (If you don't believe me, look at the visions of some classic successes and flops and ask if you could ever have guessed how they'd turn out: Waiting for Godot -- the story of two men waiting for another man who never arrives. Death of a Salesman -- the story of a retired salesman at the end of his life having arguments with his family. Waterworld -- Mad Max with catamarans and jet-boats. See?)

If you don't have a clear vision supported by good design, then you are not within cooee of a good story. It's as simple as that.

Once I redesign, I do step 2.
If my design changes substantially, then I update my design and check against vision. You can't build a straight building if the scaffolding is leaning over - so fix the scaffolding first.

But should I rewrite my WIP to date, or should I rather just steam on and pretend that it's all fine - then go back and change it after?

Again, it depends.

It's important to realise that any rewrite of your WIP to date is what an accountant would call a "sunk cost". You'll have to spend the effort on that rewrite - the only question is when. Like paying credit cards "as late as possible" is probably not a bad idea, since your design may change again.

But you also have to protect your future writing from potential rewrites, and some of that may depend on the execution of your earlier writing. So you need to look at what dependencies lie between your WIP-to-date and the rest of the story. If the rest of the story depends heavily on parts of your WIP-to-date then you might be well advised to rewrite those parts. And if those parts depend on other parts then you may need to rewrite them too... and so on.
If my execution changes, I live with it as long as my design can cope and the vision is unchanged. The reasoning is that the later you rewrite, the less likely that the rewrite is subject to a vision or design change.

But...

If the execution is leading me to breaking design I need to put my head up for air, and stop and consider why. Sometimes it's that the design can be improved, in which case it's back to Step 2. Sometimes it's that I don't have enough skills to execute the design, in which case I might need to experiment or do some exercises - or try another design. Sometimes it's just that I've gotten carried away with the scene, and forgotten my design - so I can go back and fix that right away.

If my vision is changing, then I also must stop and consider why. Sometimes it's because in exploring themes I've come across deeper questions - so it's back to Step 1. Sometimes it's because better drama lies outside my design - so it's Step 1 followed by Step 2. Sometimes it's that I'm just not being disciplined enough, in which case I smack myself refresh my understanding of design, and push on.

Adopting these principles won't guarantee that you write a good story: that comes down to the quality of your vision, the craft in your design and the skill of your execution. But we can spend a lot of time floundering around with almost-good stories, and not-good stories before we find the good ones. This approach is meant to help reduce the time we spend in writing and rewriting almost-good and not-good stories so we can spend more of our time on the good ones.

Developing Settings: A location-based approach

2007-08-16T11:15:00.000+10:00

This article adapts and extends earlier contributions to the oww-sff-writing newsgroup. Thanks to the OWW participants who helped challenge, refine and add to my initial ideas.

1. Introduction
Settings can be a problem to write in any fiction because there are so many choices. In speculative fiction the problem can be worse because the setting may be largely imagined. How much detail does a setting need? Where should you start? How do you know if you have a good setting? Here's an effort to help.

The approach described here is to build the setting "bottom up" from locations tied to key situations in the story. This approach is distinct from a "top down" approach in which you design a whole world or environment - often before you know the plot. A bottom-up approach is very useful in "realistic" settings where you already know what's around, and it's quite useful in "imaginary" settings (provided that you don't need a very large number of locations). Its main benefit that you only design setting that you plan to use, so you don't spend excessive amounts of time on wasted design. You can also get into the "writing" part more quickly.

I don't recommend this approach for stories where you have a large number of imaginary locations though, because you can run into some big consistency problems. So you wouldn't use this approach to write a High Fantasy story like Lord of the Rings . It's also not terribly useful if your story is mainly about an imaginary world itself -- you wouldn't use it to write a story like Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy or Larry Niven's Ringworld. It's probably not a good idea to use it on a big series like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. And finally, if you're collaborating with other authors in an imaginary setting it just saves a lot of time if you're all designing in the same setting, so you wouldn't use it for a project like Thieves World . For these I recommend a "top down" design approach -- and that needs its own article.

Anyway, on with the show.

2. The Job of Setting
I think that the setting has three main jobs, in no particular order:

to be a backdrop that supports and contrasts with the protagonists

to be a fecund breeding ground of interesting plot elements

to throw up imagery that supports mood and key themes

A good setting does all three, and helps bind the story elements together. A weak setting does only one or two. A broken setting does none of these. (You can tell a broken setting because if you replaced it with some other setting the story would be largely unaffected.)

3. Getting Started
Suppose you have the beginning of an idea for a story, and want to add some setting to it. You might have an idea for a main character, or some sort of plot, or perhaps just a theme. (Or maybe you've already got a setting, in which case you can skim this section).

This method helps you develop some locations for your story. A location is just a part of your setting where something occurs. The most interesting locations are those where there's some action going on: a protagonist tries something but meets some resistance, so we focus on those.

The method I propose for developing locations is simple:

Find a situation that supports your character, plot or theme (whatever you've got so far)
If you don't have a character in the situation already, add one
List some "obvious" locations that fit this situation
Use these to invent an inobvious location that provides contrast with the character

The key to this method is that you develop locations that fit the situation but contrast with the main character in the scene. As you'll see in the examples below, this contrast goes a long way to lifting the drama and also helps to develop the story.

Example: From Character to Location
Suppose you have an idea for a character, but no idea for setting or plot. Let's say that the character is a lonely librarian who can predict peoples' future by visualising scenes from famous stories. You don't know the plot yet, but because she's psychic, you figure it will probably be some sort of mystery. How to make a setting for this? Well, let's put her in some situations, and give the situations locations.

She's a librarian and she's lonely, so let's pick two situations for her: psychic at work, and lonely at home. So now we need to flesh out the work and home locations.

Psychic at work: She works in a library and we know we need a modern setting because we want to use modern books for her psychic visions. A cliche'd sort of location might be a quiet urban or small-town library. But what if we went for some contrast? She sounds like a dreamer, so let's think about a setting that contrasts with that. Is there a place where people don't dream much, or keep their dreams to themselves? How about a modern urban ghetto?

Okay, let's go with a librarian in a public library in (say) the South Central LA 'hood. Right away we have drama and tension from the interplay of the location with the character. Who comes to her library? (Maybe the elderly, teachers, schoolkids and gang-members). Why do they come (maybe to read, socialise, take refuge, or do gang deals). How does that interplay with her psychic gift? (She can see their home lives and troubles, and she often knows when there's something bad going down).

Lonely at home: It's easy to imagine a quiet, neat little flat with perhaps a cat for company. But let's create a contrast and use what we know about other locations. Suppose she lives above a night-club with the noise of revellers until all hours of the morning? How does that interact with her loneliness? (She hears a lot of people having fun, but she also hears a lot of troubles. Maybe her place gets broken into frequently, so she never has anything nice. Perhaps she is naturally neat, but keeps the place messy to discourage burglary).

As you can see, contrasting location with character creates interest and tension. You can also see that creating the contrast means that the setting begins to exert an influence on the character and the plot.

Example: From Plot to Location
Say you have a plot idea but aren't sure yet about your main characters or setting yet. E.g. aliens are using MP-3 players to mind-control young people by sending secret messages on a high frequency that only they can hear. Some situations might be: 1) a concerned school-teacher wants to confiscate a kid's MP-3, and the kid goes mad; 2) a series of missing persons - each a twentysomething commuter on their way to work

Teacher and kid with MP-3 player: An obvious location for this is a class-room. You've got the rebellious kid and the authoritarian teacher, with students watching on. But that's too cliché for words! Little better is teacher confronting student in the playground or carpark or in detention, or in the locker-room. Done to death! Can we find a contrast?

This is a horror story with a theme of alien mind control. We can perhaps find a contrast with the student/teacher relationship (one of trust and obedience). What if the location were the teacher's home, and the teacher were seducing the student? How would this location interact with the plot? (When the teacher is attacked, perhaps the kid won't be blamed. Or maybe the attack is so vicious and by such an unlikely suspect -- e.g. a small female student -- that it attracts the major investigator)

Young people go missing on way to work: This is an "investigation" situation. Typical locations are wherever they're last seen - say, bus-stops, cab-ranks, abandoned cars... But what if we contrast the location with the person who went missing? So, suppose a yuppy banker's car is found abandoned outside a crack-house in a bad neighbourhood, or a video store clerk was last seen wandering the exclusive backyards of Bel Aire? How does this interact with the plot? (Maybe it gives clues as to the aliens' purpose or methods)

Example: From Theme to Location
Suppose that the theme is "Dogs secretly hate us". The situation is a dog-owner whose mutt chews his newspaper every morning. A clichéd location is the front doorstep, because that's where newspapers are normally delivered. But what if this dog lies waits until the owner is relaxed and reading before he mauls the newspaper? Or lies in wait up the street to savage the whole contents of the paper-boy's basket? The contrast here is with the dog -- dogs are normally passive, territorial creatures. The contrast of location makes this pooch look calculating and malicious. How does that interact with the theme? (Dogs secretly hate us, but the hatred becomes a campaign of war when...)

In all the examples above you can see that drama and interest lifts when location contrasts with the main character - and this contrast gives the location some influence on the story, so it integrates better.

4. Real vs imaginary locations
One of the choices a writer faces is whether to use a "real location" (i.e. a location based on a real place) or an imaginary one. A related choice is whether you give a place a real name, or a fictitious one.

Real locations
A real location gives people something recognisable and believable. If it's familiar to you then it comes with a lot of rich background material that you can borrow from. If it's not familiar to you then you need to do some research and you may need to take some liberties with the place regardless. If you use a real place-name then readers will expect you to do your research. But you can base an imaginary place on a real location (e.g. Batman's Gotham City is loosely based on New York).

Imaginary locations
An imaginary location gives you the flexibility to put in what you want - but there's more design work (and perhaps some research) to do. There are times when imaginary location may be preferable to a real location, for example:

You want to remove cultural cues for reasons of aesthetics or marketability.

It's a speculative location (e.g. Ganymede or Faerie-land)

You need a particular environment for reasons of plot or theme, and you just can't find one in reality.

The more different imaginary locations you have, the harder it gets to use this bottom-up method - because you get increasing problems of consistency and continuity. At some point it may make more sense to try a top-down approach to setting design -- hence my earlier comments.

5. Fleshing out location
If you are using a real location then it may not need much fleshing out -- you may just need to pick out elements to help your story. But if it's an imaginary location then it will need some development.

Because this is a "bottom up" design approach, we don't design everything that might be in the location. Instead, we focus on just those bits that help us write about the situation. In particular, things that will:

help your protagonists

hinder your protagonists

set mood

contrast with your main characters

echo motifs from other parts of the story

We add those in whatever way is consistent with our idea for the location. So in our library location, we might add a section of classic books that nobody reads (but which gang-members use to make drug-deals). Near the librarian's home there might be a back alley that's unsafe to walk at nights, and in which people are often assaulted.

6. Checking consistency
What we end up with is a string of related (real or imaginary) locations that together make up the setting of the story. Since we've been designing each location in isolation (and because we might use the same location in multiple scenes) it's possible that we might have made continuity errors, so it's necessary to check consistency (and if it's a real location, verisimilitude). Such checks include:

Geography - distances, directions, climate

Culture - language, dress, beliefs, values, customs, arts and crafts, ceremonies

Environment - flora, fauna, agriculture, farming

Technology - tools, processes

Commerce - prices, scarcity and abundance

Organisation - governments, politics, security These checks don't require you to flesh all this information out, but rather make sure that you don't talk about "oak trees" in the location at one time, and "rolling wheat" the next time.

7. Conclusion
This location-based method is a useful one when you're building a story up from fragmentary ideas. By designing locations based on situations, you'll avoid the need to design excessively. By finding ways of making your locations contrast with your characters you'll help make your settings more interesting, and integrate better with the story.

If you need to (or just want to) design your setting top-down though, then you'll need another method. Such a method begins with Step 6 (consistency checks), only instead of checking, you need to design. But once you do that, you can (if you wish) adopt a location-based approach.

Happy writing!

A Quickish Method for Plotting Short Stories

2007-08-10T11:30:00.000+10:00

Here's a fairly quick method for plotting a short story. It arose in response to a question on the oww-sff-writing newsgroup.

This method is aimed at producing shorts where the design is driven by an idea for a situation -- these are the most common shorts I see. At the end I have some suggested adaptations for using this method if you're starting with an idea for character or theme instead.

Key to a Good Short
You need to catch your protagonist at a critical time in its life: a time where it's about to change in a significant way, or make a definitive statement about who it is. This motivates our method. If you have more than one protagonist then you have to do it for each -- which is perhaps why shorts generally don't have more than one or two protags.

Here's the method in summary:

Choose three elements: Setting, Situation and Character Arc
Derive three more: Objective, Opposition and Disaster
Flesh it out: Names, Backgrounds, Personalities
Write a logline
Optional additions: speculative elements

1. Choose three elements: Setting, Situation and Character Arc
A simple way to start is to choose a setting, a situation and a character arc.

The setting is whatever setting you'd like to write about today (e.g. on a fishing boat). Make it something you'll enjoy writing about.

The situation needs to be hooky enough to grab the reader right away, and consistent with the setting. I like to use

eeknight

's "Wouldn't it suck if" question here. E.g. "Wouldn't it suck if a friend fell overboard while you were shark fishing".

You can either pick the situation to fit the setting, or pick a setting to fit the situation -- it doesn't really matter.

The character arc is a before/after snapshot of where the protagonist is going to head from that situation psychologically or emotionally. You want something that's consistent with the situation, and dramatic to write about.
(e.g. from anger to forgiveness)

2. Derive three more: Objective, Opposition and Disaster
The next bits depend on your earlier choices: you need an objective, some opposition and a risk of disaster.

For the objective, you know where the character arc starts (e.g. anger), and the situation (friend's fallen overboard in shark-infested water), so you pick an objective consistent with that. (E.g. stop him from getting back in, and throw fish-guts into the water). It helps if you justify this objective with some motive (our protag is angry because our friend has been sleeping with his girl.)

The opposition must oppose the objective. Build it out of the setting and situation. (E.g. the friend has gone under the boat. Did a shark take him? Has he drowned? Is he hanging onto the anchor cable?)

The disaster is anything that raises the stakes and threatens ruination. Build it out of everything that's come before. (E.g. a coast-guard cutter is approaching. Should our protag pretend there's been an accident? Try to rescue his friend? Act like everything's normal? Can they see his friend's body?)

3. Flesh it out: Names, Backgrounds, Personalities
Finally, you need to flesh out the characters - give them names, backgrounds, personalities. It's perhaps a bit odd to do this last, since characters are among the most important parts of a story. The reason I do it last in this method is that the the tension is driven mainly by situation (which is the most common kind of short story I see). You need just enough characterisation to make the situation come alive. Starting with character risks giving you too much detail and weakening the situation - so I leave it till last. (If I were writing a more psychological short, I'd do it in a different order.)

4. Write the logline
Once you have all the bits, you can write it up as a logline - that's a short "25 words or less" description of the story - normally done in one to three sentences.

When Marty confesses his affair with Jerome's wife, Jerome wants to kill him, and is delighted when a happy accident on their fishing boat sees Marty in the water among the sharks. But a coast-guard cutter is coming, Marty's somehwere under the boat, and Jerome has already poured fish-guts over his head.

5. Option: adding speculative elements
If you want the story to be speculative fiction (e.g. fantasy, sci fi or horror), then you need to add some speculative elements. Those will normally appear in the setting, the situation, the objective or the opposition. If you already started with a speculative element in one of those spots, you're done. If not, you can simply substitute a mundane element with a speculative one. E.g.

Change the setting: What if the fishing-boat is an asteroid miner, and the sharks are drifting mines?

Change the situation: What if Marty didn't fall overboard, but is being lured by a mermaid?

Change the objective: What if Jerome is actually a sea-god cultist and planned all along to sacrifice his friend to his ancient Ichthyan deity?

Change the opposition: What if Marty is eaten by a shark, and it's his ghost that's present when the coast guard comes?

6. Variations: Starting with Characters or Themes
This method is aimed at letting the situation shape the story. But what if you have a great idea for a character you want to write a short story around? What if you have theme you'd like to explore?

Starting with a Character
If you're starting with an idea for a character, then you need to catch it at some point in its life where it changes dramatically, or makes some definitive statement about itself.

This means that you have to put it into a situation where what it wants is being taken away - that's your initial situation. You also need to know how it will change or redefine itself in response - that's gives you your character arc. Finally, you can pick a setting in which this will occur. Once you have situation, character arc and setting, you can use the method above.

Starting with Theme
A theme is an idea about the world as it might be. It may be an aesthetic idea (e.g. "All lizards are beautiful"), or a philosophical idea (e.g. "Love conquers nothing"). The idea doesn't have to be true - fiction can makeit true.

If you're designing a story from theme, the first thing to do is to write the theme as a definitive statement that you can "prove" by example. Don't write your theme as a question "Why do cats get fat?" Write it as a statement: "Cats get fat because they gorge themselves when nobody is looking". Once you have your theme as a statement, your job is to "prove" the statement by telling a story. For this you need:

A protagonist for whom the statement is meaningful and relevant (E.g. "Jane adores her cat")

A situation that supports the theme (E.g. "Jane's cat gorges on mice when she sleeps")

A setting in which the story will occur. The setting needs to offer imagery that will support the theme. (E.g. "Jane lives in a flat with thin walls, so the gluttinous sounds of the cat gorging can be heard by all her neighbours")

Some way for the situation to impact your protagonist (E.g. "Jane is outraged to realise that her cat is breeding mice to gorge on"). Once you have this, you have a character arc for Jane: in our example, Jane moves from adoration to outrage.

Once you have all these, you can continue with the original method. You might end up with a logline like this:

When Jane finds mouse-droppings in her little flat, she congratulates herself on the purchase of her adorable cat Tibbles. But as Tibbles grows fatter and fatter, neighbours begin to complain about the late-night noises.

Prophetic or Pathetic?

2007-07-20T13:43:00.000+10:00

This came out of a discussion on oww-sff-writing: how to use prophecies well in a story?

A prophecy is a prediction about the future. We usually think of prophecies as being magical in nature or divinely inspired - and so the province of fantasy and horror, but there's nothing stopping prophecies from occurring in hard science fiction (e.g. AI predictions), or crime stories (e.g. criminal profiling), thrillers (e.g. in the predictions of double agents), or romance (a disturbing dream) and so on.

The main feature about a prophecy is that it's oracular. You get some sense of what is predicted, but not much grasp on why or whether it's true. It's this feature that shapes how it gets used in literature.

To create suspense: You know what will happen, just not how and why (Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane -- Macbeth) Or will it happen?
To create tragedy or horror: the protagonist struggles and just barely fails to avoid the prophecy (To: Mate with [his] own mother, and shed/ With [his] own hands the blood of [his] own sire -- Oedipus Tyrannus)
To set a theme: A prophecy helps inform the audience about what's important in the story (e.g. in a romance-novel a fortune-teller tells the heroine that a lover will be inconstant with her -- setting the theme of constancy for the tale).

There are some places though where prophecies fail badly, and that is where they are used to prop up weak characterisations or poor plot.

The acid test of a good story with a prophecy is whether it would work well without. There's no doubt that Oedipus is more poignant because he fulfills the prophecy of patricide and incest, but even without that prophecy there's a good story - an abandoned child becomes a hero, inadvertantly slays his Dad, marries his Mum and comes to regret it.

The stories where prophecies fail are when (for example), the hero becomes great just because the author gives him a special break to fit the prophecy, or despite an aeons old prophecy, a villain fails to protect himself against a known weakness.

The better versions of Arthur drawing the sword from the stone demonstrate his nascent virtues before the sword proclaims him to be the rightful king - or at least serve him the pain of Kingship the moment the sword is out, so he has to prove himself immediately. The worse versions elevate him for no reason other than that he yanked it out, and give him a smooth ride thereafter.

When Macbeth is warned about Birnam wood coming to Dunsinane, you can bet that he had guards watching for just such an improbable event -- and sure enough, he's warned immediately, though he still doesn't know why it will be his downfall.

Another facet of prophecies that authors often overlook is that they're cheap. If there's one, then there will probably be hundreds -- all conflicting. We see this in our own lives with politics, religion and the stockmarket. Once people listen to one pundit saying something, they'll listen to another saying something else. Thus it really irritates me when the only prophecy in a story is the one in the prologue, and everyone accepts it unquestioningly.

Prophets themselves are interesting bods. The Greeks generally made their prophets tragic: Cassandra was doomed to be always right, but ignored. Tiresius was made blind. You ignored these people at your peril. But prophets can be reluctant or zealots, honest or charlatans, wise or fools, and this may shape the prophecy and how it is perceived.

Adapting advice I gave in an earlier blog entry on magic: prophecy is a spice, not a flavouring. Use it sparingly to set theme, add suspense, create tragedy or horror, but make sure that you have a decent story underneath. And recognise that prophecies exist in a social context. A society that has one prophecy will probably have scads more, and not all will agree; and the credibility of the prophecy is often tied to the credibility of the prophet.

Magic in fantasy - what, where and how much?

2007-07-20T13:06:00.000+10:00

This came out of a discussion in OWW-sff-writing. Most of the modern fantasy we see on the shelves nowadays is of the High Fantasy sort: Epic plots, world-changing events, lots of travel -- and of course, hefty dollops of spells, enchantments and the like. It has gotten to the point that "how soon should you see the magic" has become a question for fantasy authors. Which I think means that authors and readers have gotten lost.

Despite what the market is doing, fantasy is not at all about magic -- it is about imagination and symbolism. Fantasy is at core, the fiction of the impossible. So George Orwell's Animal Farm is a fantasy story (as well as being satire) - because farmyard animals don't talk and organise themselves. But there are no spells: just pigs acting like politicians and sheep acting like average voters. Many Arthurian cycle tales are not magical but are still fantasy -- they're mythical, symbolic, imaginative and not only didn't happen, but could never have happened.

I see magic as a spice like cinnamon, not a flavouring like chocolate. You use it sparingly to add to your story, but you need a good story to start with. Adding magic won't prop up weak characters, unimaginative settings and lame plots. But it's good at two things: highlighting theme, and enhancing mood.

You can see magic at work with themes in the works of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock. The magic of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings highlights themes of industry, arborialism, pastoralism, militarisation and corruption. The magic of the Earthsea stories highlights themes of moral consequence, purity of intention and restraint. When magic occurs at all in Lewi's Narnia stories (very rarely), it embodies a themes like temptation, pride, guilt or redemption. When Moorcock cuts loose with magic in the Stormbringer series you can bet that doom and regret will follow.

On the mood side you can see how gradually increasing magic helps shape mood in places like Tokien's Mirkwood or the forest of Galadriel. But there you notice that magic is understated;Tolkien doesn't rely on magic alone to shape mood.

I reckon that the best places to use magic are:

Near the start of a storyline, to establish the theme. E.g. a magical plague besets the rotting city of Lankhmar. The heroes must investigate. (Symbolically, the magic plague represents the corruption of the city. Investigating it will bring the protags into contact with the very worst that the city holds)
At a point of transformation or climax, to let the theme speak directly through the action. E.g. Young Arthur, coming into his power, draws the sword from the stone. (He's on the cusp of becoming king. The sword coming out tells us that this is so.)
At a denoument, to consolidate symbols or resonate with the outcomes. (The King awakening from his deathly sleep, wherever he travels the sere land blooms - the land and the King are one; to save the King is to save the land.)
Anywhere the mood needs to change - especially from real to surreal. In that case, keep it understated, and mix it up with non-magical mood devices.

So, here are my checks for effective magic use:

Is it in step with my theme and drama?

Is it symbolic? Are the symbols meaningful and consistent?

If you take the magic out, is the mood preserved?

If your usage passes those checks, then I think you have used magic sensibly as a spice. If not, you may have been trying to make it a flavouring. If you're doing that, then it might be time to take the additives out, and look at the quality of ingredients underneath.

So Over Moral Relativism

2007-06-29T11:59:00.000+10:00

I know I'm not the first person to write this, but I am so over moral relativism.

So over what, Ruv?

Moral Relativism. You know, the thinking that says "Perception is reality; your morality is inherently subjective, self-interested and suspect. You can comment on your own conscience, but not the consciences of others." What follows is a little rant about moral relativism in society and in fiction.

Back in 1949 when (as Wiki tells me) the Postmodernist movement was first taking off, moral relativism grew as part of it. Archaic institutions and the moral absolutes that supported them were breaking down. Old empires had been gutted; new empires were emerging. Consumerism was taking off. Immigration was up, and cultural diversity was on the rise. Women had a substantial and growing footprint in the paid workforce and the old paternalism wasn't going to cut it any more. The Nuclear age had begun. The Monkey Trials had come and gone. Light was both a wave and a particle, the observer changes the observed. Relativity had surplanted Newtonian mechanics. Religion and Science were both losing grip on their claims to physical and metaphysical truth; parental values were losing their relevance too. Welcome Rock and Roll, the first of the Generation Gaps, the Rebels Without a Cause, the first of the variously flavoured "me" generations, and the forerunners of today's moral relativism.

Moral relativism has had its up-side. It opened avenues for innovation and diversity. It challenged the self-interest upholding rigid thought structures, and offered a sanity-check against excessive dogmatism and inflexibility. Like a good acid-bath, it made a great rust remover. But like an acid-bath it doesn't discriminate between old rust and new machinery of thought -- it simply eats away at everything. So it's become a rhetorical tool of choice for anyone who doesn't want to be held accountable, or just doesn't like what other people have to say.

Why should anyone care about this? A few reasons; take your pick:

An involved, active community needs a shared conscience; presently we're trying to make do with polite indifference and individual consciences, and our communities are falling apart.

Power corrupts on a good day; when there isn't a community conscience then that problem gets worse.

Children and young adults have few role-models and mentors worthy of the name. They suffer enormous pressure to succeed, but have little encouragement or recognition for being.

A free market does not create conscience, but does react to it. If you want a strong economy to support a good society, then social conscience is a key binding force.

Humans are not good at managing their consciences unaided. We need other people to encourage us, hold mirrors to us, set examples for us, chasten us. That only works when we're pulling in the same direction.

What has this to do with a blog about writing? Moral relativism makes for crummy stories with no moral dimension to consequence. It gives us liberty without accountability, vengeance without justice, individuality without responsibility, infatuation without commitment. It makes for clever heroes with little personal integrity; plots that let the hero off the moral hook; heroes that don't grow as people.

They're poor stories and poor guides for thought. We ought to do better.

I'm not saying go back to reasserting Old Time Values. But how about playing with new value sets? It's just fiction after all.

New from Old: Jazzing up well-worn ideas

2007-06-26T11:11:00.000+10:00

This came out of a chat with an OWW writer. Many ideas in speculative fiction have been well-trodden over decades. If you'd like to write on a subject that has been visited before (e.g. space-ships or werewolves or time-machines or faeries), how do you produce something fresh? Here's a method for mutating ideas that may help. This approach is a variant on one used to spawn new research ideas in science.

Step 1: Survey the literature
You don't know what's original until you know what else has been done. Let's say you want to write a ghost story. It's highly helpful to know what the best ghost stories have been. If you don't have tons of ghost anthologies on your shelves, you can do a quick Web search... A good term is "X in fiction", where X is your subject. For ghosts it turned up this handy link that identified a lot of famous ghost stories, and listed some of their key themes.

Step 2: Classify the major themes and genres
If you take the famous ghost stories you may find common themes like:

Ghost as Messenger, e.g. Hamlet's dad

Tormented Ghost, e.g. Ann Boleyn

Seductive ghosts, e.g. many Hong Kong action movies

Ghosts as avengers, e.g. The movie The Ring

Misunderstood ghosts, e.g. Casper the Friendly cartoon Ghost

Ghosts have been used in many genres including horror, romance, crime, adventure, comedy and science fiction.

Step 3: Brainstorm new opportunities
You can find new opportunities by either:

picking on an established theme/genre and finding a new twist; or
finding a new theme/genre that hasn't been tried much; or
blending themes or genres in novel ways

E.g.
1) Twisting Ghost as messenger: what if ghosts run a postal service delivering messages from beyond the dead?
2) New theme: I haven't seen ghost animals used much. Why not do a ghost animal story?
3) Blended genres: what about a seductive spectral avenger told as a SF/crime story?

The idea is to brainstorm a lot of ideas here, rather than fixing on the first one you find. Get yourself a good half-dozen or so.

Step 4: Invent sucky situations for each idea
This borrows a step from E.E. Knight's excellent "So you want to write a novel" blog post. It's the "wouldn't it suck if..." step, in which for each idea you came up with in step 3, you try and find a situation that would suck the most. E.g.

Ghost as messenger: What if you were a ghost on your nightly round of delivering omens and portents, and you discover that the message you must deliver is that a cataclysm is coming? Suppose that you have to deliver the message to your ex-wife?

Ghost animal: Suppose you were a ghost dog who continued to faithfully protect its mistress from harm, and you discovered that your mistress' new husband planned to kill her? Or what if you were the woman trying to court a new fellow, and you discovered that your ghost dog didn't like him?

Seductive Spectral Avenger: Suppose you were a private eye with a space-wraith partner you didn't want? Suppose your partner kept closing your cases before you did -- and killing the culprit?

Step 5: Pick the one you like, and elaborate Setting, Characters and Plot
By the time you get to this point you should be choking on interesting ideas.

I find this process fun, but exhausting. But I think it's worth the effort when you're working with well-trodden ideas. Far easier to start with something original then develop it than to take a completed work lacking originality and trying to add novelty.

Hope this is useful.

The nature of evil

2007-04-27T23:49:00.000+10:00

This came out of a roleplaying discussion about how to craft evil characters. It's just opinion. If it's useful, tell me. If it doesn't catch a kind of evil you like, tell me too.

Three Kinds of Evil Characters
Evil characters come in three kinds: the bad, the mad, and the sad. (I once heard a jail warder say this about prison inmates - it's stuck with me and I think it applies here).

Let's not worry about what evil is morally in real life, and for dramatic purposes simply call it the creation of misery with which the audience sympathises.

The bad does evil because it either delights in creating misery, or is indifferent to the misery created.

The mad does evil because it is afflicted with a compelling yet flawed view of the world. It never reflects enough (or clearly enough) to overcome the flaws, so the evil is sustained.

The sad are those who are aware of the misery they create, regret it but are unwilling or unable to prevent the harm they cause. They suffer misery with each act of evil they do, but grow increasingly powerless to prevent more.

Plots for Evil Characters
The basic plot building blocks for an evil character are the same as those for any protagonist:

Character concept: i.e. basic personality, background, history. If the character is already evil, pick "bad", "mad" or "sad" as part of the personality, and set up the background to support it.
Situation: something that provokes the character to want to do something
Objective: the thing that the character wants to do, in consequence of the situation. Make it interesting and challenging
Opposition: something that makes the objective very difficult, expensive, risky
Disaster: something terrible that will happen if the character fails - something it cares about very much.

If the character is bad, then it will react to threat by deliberately transferring its disaster to others. Its story ends only when the disaster has landed - your job in this arc is to build the strongest, most interesting apportionment of disaster that you can.

If it is mad, then it will pursue its objective in a way that increases the threat - i.e. it either makes the disaster worse, or brings it forward. Its story ends when the disaster hooks in a ton of other characters and makes them pay a huge price - your job in this arc is to bring as many characters down with your protagonist as you can, as far as possible, as interestingly as possible - or maybe the protag worms out just in time.

If it is sad then it knowingly slides toward disaster while grasping ceaselessly at an objective that grows further from reach. Its story ends when it relinquishes its objective to reform itself, gains its objective at great cost, or slides into the abyss while elevating its objective to a pinnacle. Your job is to make readers weep at the poignancy of your tale or gasp at the cost of the character's sacrifice.

Evil protagonists, antagonists
This frame seems to work okay for both. If it doesn't, let me know.

Porn in Literature

2007-04-24T21:12:00.000+10:00

This came out of some discussion on oww-sff-writing about sex in fiction. In the discussion I couldn't really see much difference between titillating sex in fiction and titillating violence, death, glamour etc... in fiction, so I thought I'd bring the discussion here and call it "Porn in Literature". In this article I'm trying to strike some sense of balance between art and titillation, and jot some personal views.

"Pornography" was a term coined in the 1850s, to mean the writing of prostitutes. Originally created for scholarly discussion, it quickly took on a derogatory meaning. Pornography is normally taken to mean imagery created for prurient interest, while the term erotica is often used to connote art about the same subject - but presented from an aesthetic or religious viewpoint. So there's something in the intention and execution that people feel separates the two, and later I'll try and talk about what.

But in a more modern colloquial sense, "porn" means any sort of imagery meant to arouse desire. Nowadays people talk about "foodporn", "carporn", even "gardenporn". In even fairly serious articles (e.g. this one), and you can find smatterings of musicporn, cultureporn... It's pervasive. What these images have in common is that they render their subjects nakedly, intimately, but also with an artifice that makes you desire to possess/consume/experience them. As in the time of the Greek prostitutes, porn today remains a form of sensorial advertising. At its best it arouses us to greater awareness in preparation of some aesthetic pleasure; at its worst it baffles, distracts and misleads us into hunting chimaerae - unattainable pinnacles of illusory experience.

In the broad sense, fiction is full of porn! When it's not sexual porn it's angstporn, smartsporn, toughsporn, glamporn, gunporn, swordporn, clothesporn. The teen protag whose unremitting social agonies are ten times worse than our own could ever be; the detective whose powers of observation and deduction defy credibility; the gumshoe who sees three beatings a day but still keeps plodding; the high-powered lawyer who works 100 hour weeks and has a mansion at age 23; the tough-as-nails street-cop with eight concealed weapons; the oiled barbarian and his ornate head-cleaver; the elegant countess and her endless wardrobe of hand-sewn designer outfits -- all are essentially fantastical conceptions created as a hat-rack on which to hang elaborate imagery, which the author then entices us to drool over. And the thrills are not always pleasures, the desires not always light - we have goreporn, disasterporn, revengeporn, painporn, cadaverporn and psychoporn to appeal to our schadenfreude too.

The mere excitation of emotions doesn't make it porn; that it seeks to arouse desire in us doesn't make it porn either. What makes it porn is the unrelieved artifice it uses, and the impact that has. Porn works by isolating circumstance and context, contriving motive, exaggerating imagery, colouring language and distorting consequence and meaning -- all to give us the unrelenting hit of a particular desire. In essence, it's the artifice of escapism distilled into a prolonged, monotonic thrill. Critics of sexual porn have said that it objectifies and depersonalises sex and sex-partners - which is fair. But this is not less true of revengeporn, cadaverporn, clothesporn, homeimprovementporn, carporn or any of the others. Ultimately you need to create a glamorous, sociopathic fantasy to realise the hit. And therein lies the ethical problem for the writer - is that really how you want to engage the audience? Some illustrations below.

If you asked writers why they write porn scenes (and they responded honestly) their answers might be found among the following:

The cynic: Porn sells; I'm out to make a buck. Of course I'm trying to manipulate the market. Videoclips do this. Car companies do this. Winemakers do this. Literature is a lifestyle product too; I'm serving up what you don't have so you can mainline it. Enjoy, baby!

The whipped: Actually, my publisher won't buy my stuff unless it will sell - and this is what they want to see. I'm writing the porn scenes under sufferance, but I'm not comfortable and I try and write them as minimally as possible. At least they're short; if you don't like them, please skip over them - there's plenty of other stuff in the work that I'm proud of, which I hope you'll appreciate too.

The geek: Actually, I'm an enthusiast about X. I want to convey my passion to you, in the hope that you'll share it. I think it would be the best thing in the world if more people got seriously into X.

The tragic: Porn? Whaddayamean it's porn? It's evocative description! Great writing! Art, baby! It has impact! I get great feedback from my readers on these scenes!

The aesthete: Actually, I wrote this scene from a character's perspective knowing that it would have resonance with some readers. If you track through the character's arc, you'll see that the character's views actually change - this is just my way of capturing that. And in a sense, I'm also provoking the readers on their own initial reactions.

The activist: I wrote it this way because I wanted to shock! Freedom of speech, hon! That's what it's all about! I wrote it because I can and you can't stop me!

The copycat: I really admire the style of Writer X and this is the kind of thing he writes.

Of all these answers, a few have some respect for the reader, but most are highly self-interested, and some are quite arrogant too. And there's the problem at its nub: if you write porn of any kind you're narrowing your communication to just a single desire or thrill... and you're saying something about your audience - that you want to engage them as creatures of desire, rather than beings of perception. Your intentions might be benevolent; they might even be respectful, but you run a risk that they will not be perceived that way. It's not simply that the content may be offensive; the manner of engagement itself may insult.

Which leads me to a parting piece of advice that harkens back to an earlier article of mine on writing ethics. If you don't want your stories to be construed as "the writings of a prostitute", then you will need to check that your scenes have the right Focus, are presented Appropriately, and have a resonable sense of Balance. I don't believe that this has anything to do with subject matter. I think it relates to proper intention and capable crafting. If you consider these things and have reasonable craft then I think it will be impossible for you to write porn inadvertantly, no matter what you're writing about! Because even if someone is offended by your content, you can reply: this is why I had that focus; this is what I thought was appropriate, and this is how I tried to balance it. In other words - however successful I was or wasn't, I was thinking about you as the reader while I was working.

Please see here, here and here for some ideas on what I think these things are about.

Ruv Retreat

2007-04-23T14:52:00.000+10:00

I'll be largely incommunicado from 2 May through 18 May as I steal Mrs Draba off to the vastness of Canada for a much-needed break. As with all our overseas vacations, we generally book flights at the very last moment and make no plans at all until we get there - "there" in this case being Vancouver.

I know nothing about Canada beyond travel brochures suggesting boatloads of slender, white, middle-class American retirees looking awe-struck at fjords... Not having a great deal to say to SWMCARs, and Canada having a deplorable dearth of crocs to feed with them, I think Mrs D and I will avoid the larger tours and maybe just tool around in a hire-car.

Fiction, Psychology and Ethics

2007-04-20T11:10:00.000+10:00

Some follow-up thoughts to a recent article by on the topics of fiction, psychology and ethics. In particular: to what extent can fiction be blamed for or reflective of mental disorder, to what extent can writers be held accountable for what they write, and readers criticised for what they read?

Fiction certainly has some impact on social thought, or propaganda and advertising wouldn't work. But its impact on individual thought and sentiment is limited - otherwise fiction would be used more in psychiatric therapies. So it's a fairly cheap, sensationalist shot to consider dark fiction as "causing" mental disturbance in individual cases.

That said, what we consume does reflect our desires and interests to some degree; it's self-deception to pretend otherwise. But what it doesn't reflect is our decisions about those desires and interests. Readers of romantic infidelities don't necessarily want to be unfaithful themselves - they may simply want the thrill of the idea without the cost or consequence. Readers of the Old Testament don't all want to stone people or pour molten gold on their heads. Also, while reading is evidence of interest, it's not evidence of why you're interested. There are many legitimate reasons for reading about terrorist methods other than a desire to become a terrorist.

Many writers write what they like to read, so there is some sort of broad link between our fiction and our desires. But for reasons of marketing, most professional writers tend to write more narrowly than they read, so what they write may not be at all representative of what they think. Horror writers can be very compassionate, for instance; fantasy writers can be very practical; crime novelists may abhor crime in real life.

But I believe that writers do have some accountability for what they write; it just isn't that kind of accountability. Writing is communication; like all communication it exists in a moral context and like any other profession we have ethical responsibilities associated with it. Freedom of expression gives us the liberty to write about any subject, but we're still accountable for how we treat those subjects and how we market what we write.

If nothing else, I think it fair for society to comment on the focus, appropriateness and balance a writer brings to a topic. See here for my more detailed discussion on this.

While I don't think it makes any sense for society to comment on or control what a responsible adult reads, it does make sense to comment on the decisions you take that affect others. You shouldn't be able to determine criminal guilt from the evidence of what fiction someone reads, but you should be able to admit it as evidence of mental state and interests, if you put it in the proper context.

On effective use of Fantasy in stories

2007-04-04T12:32:00.000+10:00

Fantasy has been described as literature of the impossible. A topic came out of OWW crit discussions recently – how much fantastic is enough? How much is too much? How can you tell when your fantasy is working for your story, or against it? My opinions are below.

What works in fantasy depends on how and why you’re using fantastical elements in the first place. When I tried to think of why you might want to put fantasy in your story, I came up with three reasons:

1. Aesthetics: to enhance the impact of the story itself with unusual and exotic imagery

2. Plot: to develop a plot that you couldn’t otherwise accomplish without a fantastical element

3. Theme: to use fantastical elements to highlight or focus symbolically on certain ideas that support a key theme in your story.

Obviously, you could have a combination of these reasons too. I’ve put down some notes on what I think governs the success of fantasy in aesthetics, plot and theme, in turn.

Fantasy in aesthetics

Fantastic imagery offers us the ability to create things that have never existed – to discover beauty, horror, wonder outside our every day experience. But imagery alone is no substitute for story craft. A good writer can inject beauty, horror, wonder into any scene – a poor writer can’t. Therefore you can use fantastic elements to enhance the impact of good story-crafting, but you can’t use it as a substitute for good story crafting.

Aside from the quality of story-crafting itself (narrative, setting etc…) I think that the key success criteria for creating story aesthetics with fantasy elements are originality, drama and balance. A bit on each below:

Originality: aesthetically, the job of fantastic imagery is to surprise us, so it doesn’t work to use templated imagery for aesthetic purposes. It needs to be original. Black Gate editor Howard Jones picked this up well in a recent blog article.

Drama: Using fantastical imagery is like using highlighter pen. It draws our attention to some things and not others. It doesn’t work to highlight the whole page in highlighter pen, and in the same way it doesn’t work to saturate a story with fantastical imagery - a little goes a long way, so you’ll want your fantastical imagery to highlight the dramatic. If you look at Lord of the Rings, there are perhaps two dozen fantastical elements in three volumes, and most of the time those elements are doing fairly ordinary things – e.g. the Ring is quiescent, Sting isn’t glowing, the Nâzgul are riding around like average joes, and the elves are acting like skinny humans. It’s only when something dramatic happens that the fantastical elements begin to act fantastically – the rest of the time they’re very subdued. Contrasts make the fantastic special.

Balance: Fantastical imagery always creates (or should create) an emotional response. We are delighted, frightened, awed, repelled by it. If it works, it will be memorable. For that reason, the balance of fantastical imagery in evoking responses needs to reflect the emotional balance of the story.

In summary then, fantastical imagery is no substitute for good story-craft, and more is not better. It needs to be original, focused on highlighting the drama of the story, and balanced according to the story’s emotional tone. If you find that your fantastical imagery isn’t doing these things, then an interesting experiment is to delete the imagery and see what happens – you may find that crafting the mundane elements of the story will do more for the tale than adding too much ornamentation. Or you might find that the imagery is masking flaws in story-crafting that need to be redressed before the imagery can work.

Fantasy in Plot
Borrowing Robert L. Ferrier’s Plotting Technique we can carve a plot into five basic elements: Character, Situation, Objective, Opposition and Disaster. Robert’s article has a description of each of these and how they work. You can use the fantastical for any of these elements, but I think there are do’s and don’ts for each. Here they are in turn:

Character: Fantastic characters are different from mundane characters. They have unusual abilities and weaknesses to intrigue us, and shape what they can do in the story. But they also should have different beliefs, attitudes, values, aspirations to our own to reflect their very different place in the world. Making a character fantastical is no substitute for good characterisation – indeed, characterisation for a fantastical character can be harder than for a mundane character because you have to think through the consequences of its different nature. Further, there should be something that your fantastical character adds to the plot than a mundane character wouldn’t – something about what it can do, or can’t do, or what it believes that somehow adds to the interest or tension in the story. Otherwise, you’re probably better off using a mundane character in the same role.

In Lord of the Rings hobbits don’t have many remarkable powers or limitations. What makes them successful as protagonists in the story are their values and attitudes. Had it not been for the way they view the world, the One Ring could never have been destroyed.

Situation: Fantastical situations include all kinds of things like transformations, curses, blessings, gifts, geases, miraculous journeys… the thing they all have in common is that they put us out of our depth. Fantastical situations challenge the reader to adapt and anticipate – and they’ll typically challenge the protagonist too. Most especially, fantastical situations are transformatory – readers should not leave the story the same as they arrived, and (unless it’s a comedy or satire) protagonists too should be changed.

This means that fantastical situations are harder to write than ordinary situations. The drama is higher, the reader focus is more acute, and the character’s stakes are in the balance. So you can’t use fantastical situations as a substitute for the ability to write good ordinary situations – you have to have the story-craft right first.

Objective: Fantastical objectives are the striving for the impossible: find the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth; bring your dead love back from the grave. These situations often symbolise readers’ own hopes and dreams. They are usually undertaken by means of a quest: a transformative journey seeking the impossible. The key things about quests are that there are special rules you can’t break – things that you must or must not do; you are not guaranteed to succeed, but you are guaranteed to be transformed.

Good stories use fantastical objectives to make characters stretch beyond their own capabilities – to stumble, to fail, to learn… perhaps eventually to succeed or fail dismally or be destroyed. Poor stories use fantastical objectives as deus ex machina solutions to bad plot: find the magic whosis that will destroy the evil Bad. As always, you have to have a good plot before you can enhance it with a fantastical objective. But more than that, a good fantastical objective is integral to the plot and the character arcs – you can’t just add it as an afterthought, like garnish.

Opposition: Fantastical opposition to a character’s goal is like regular opposition, only more mysterious and more potent. Opposition can include curses, guardians, magical portals, supernatural foes. Their key ingredients are a mysterious rationale, some test or challenge to be overcome, and some symbolic meaning to the characters or themes. If you don’t have all three of these things then you don’t need fantastical opposition – mundane opposition will suffice. Overcoming fantastical opposition marks a transformation point in the character’s story. Fantastical opposition is inherently dramatic, and the readers look for story significance there.

In Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship have to pass a magically locked portal to enter the mines of Moria – so they have some fantastical Opposition. The portal needs a password, and the clue is “Speak friend and enter”. The answer is the elven word for “Friend”. This is significant because the Fellowship is an uneasy alliance of races, which subsequently falls apart. If the clue had been “Speak the name of the best cake in the world”, then the Opposition would have been meaningless to the story.
Therefore, make sure that any fantastical opposition has a sensible rationale, a significant challenge and some meaning in the story.

Disaster: Disaster, or its threat, is what gives a story its tension and drama. Fantastical threats are like regular threats except that they have a bigger reach and a bigger scope. For instance, a fantastical threat can mess with your psyche, your soul, your identity, the fabric of society or the laws of reality. A mundane threat might destroy a city, but a fantastical threat might destroy the world. You only need a fantastical threat if you’re going to reach something that wouldn’t normally be reached, or affect something that’s beyond the scope of a mundane threat. Don’t threaten a fantastical disaster if a mundane disaster would do!

Fantasy and Themes

This is my favourite part of fantasy writing – weaving symbols into your story to support your themes. Fantasy has always been at heart, a psychological literature. Its symbols exaggerate our hopes and fears. Fantasy is more than the literature of the impossible – it’s the literature of symbolic exaggeration of our own psyches. The important thing to realise here is that every fantastic character, image or event you introduce will have some psychological impact on its readers. It will create ripples of associations in their minds that can either work for your story, or work against it. That’s why I think it’s important to pick your fantastical elements with a keen eye for their thematic alignment. Because whether you intend it or not, readers will find symbolism in what you’ve concocted.

Let’s say that you give your character a magic sword. Aesthetically, it’s a beautiful sword. Plot-wise it’s hooked up properly – it has an impact on the story and on the character arc. But what’s the symbolic impact on your themes? There are three memorable magic swords that I’d like to contrast: Excalibur from the Arthurian cycle, Stormbringer from Moorcock’s Elric series and Sting from the Lord of the Rings.

Excalibur isn’t the sword that was drawn from the stone as Disney would have it, but a blade gifted to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake. It goes back into the Lake when Arthur dies. The sword is a symbol of Arthur’s right to rule – but also of his virtues, the most notable of which are justice and the courage of his convictions. Plot-wise, Excalibur doesn’t do much in the Arthurian cycle, although it is instrumental in the death of Arthur’s son Mordred. But symbolically it’s very potent. If Excalibur had not been a magical sword but rather a magic pudding, it wouldn’t have worked at all.

Stormbringer’s a nasty magic sword that sucks out the souls of its victims. Aesthetically beautiful, it also plays a major role in Elric’s story – either by turning the tide of events, or occasionally killing off people that Elric loves. But more than that it is a symbol of Elric himself and his race – it is all that is chaotic, puissant and cruel about them. It has a nascent personality, and it’s in direct contrast to Elric both aesthetically and psychically. Had Elric brandished a singing sword that turned its victims into butterflies, the Elric saga would have been ruined.

Sting is an interesting sword because it doesn’t play a pivotal part in the Lord of the Rings. Its sole virtues are that it glows blue when orcs are near, and hurts orcs enough that they fear it. It’s beautifully depicted but you could replace with a regular sword and not hurt the plot at all. Sting’s value is symbolic. It’s a light in the darkness, a small fistful of courage when all around is fear. It represents the fierce, modest courage of the Hobbits themselves and makes a great adjunct to their story aesthetically and symbolically. The Lord of the Rings would be a much poorer story without Sting making its occasional appearance.

The lessons here are: pick your fantastical elements to support the key themes of your story; render them beautifully, use them sparingly, at appropriately dramatic moments and look for the resonances between them and character, story events and other fantastical elements.

Conclusion

Nobody said that writing good fantasy is easy but I think that sometimes people under-estimate how hard it is. This article illustrates a few points that I think are important:

You need to be able to write a mundane story well before you can write a fantasy story well

Fantasy is not garnish and sugar frosting on a mundane plot. It plays a critical role in story design at key points. In particular at the thematic, dramatic and character levels.

The aesthetics of good fantasy are not trivial, and the resonances of fantasy images are potent. Moreover, it’s very sensitive to originality and expression. You can’t simply design fantasy stories by picking clichés from other stories and adding them to a story haphazardly. You have to understand what it is that fantasy does to a story and to its readership, and craft that in deliberately.

Some people can write fantasy stories intuitively; others have to work at it consciously, and many writers do a bit of both. For intuitive writers I hope this article helps you understand why certain things work or don’t work in your stories. For writers who work consciously, I hope this helps demystify some of the process and makes it easier to plan and check.

For myself, I’ve wanted to write this article for quite a while – to remind myself what to check in my own stories, but also to capture something of my frustration at the slew of fantasy stories that have beautiful imagery but are still terrible stories, and the cynical writers (especially of Hollywood movie scripts) who think that fantasy is all just about flashy special effects and makeup grafted onto mundane plots.

Fantasy has an ancient and important literary role and there are literary crafting skills peculiar to it. I hope that this article helps writers to take it seriously, crit better, write better, and engage their craft with more skill and confidence.

On Impatience

2007-03-08T11:05:00.000+11:00

Further to my investigations of ambition and friendship, I've been pursuing thoughts of impatience in ambition. This was prompted from an essay by Dr Anthony Grayling, suggesting that the chief problem with ambition is not how far we stretch, but how impatient we are to get there.

Some quotes and reactions on impatience:

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return. - W. H. Auden
Yes - or less metaphorically impatience can make our happy lives miserable and hurt the lives of others. Good onya, Wystan.
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. - Franz Kafka
Franz, that's like saying that all errors are avoidable. A fine Polish/Teutonic sentiment, but it only works in hindsight. A weaker but more accurate statement is that impatience can lead to error - but sometimes you have to act anyway. You've clearly never managed a company nor had a family you depressive intellectual prat. Sorry, no sale.
Impatience is the mark of independence,/ not of bondage. - Marianne Moore
I half agree, Marianne. It's the mark of a brat, and brats are notoriously independent. Is Necessity the mother of invention then, or is it imPatience, her shewish sister?
Impatience makes Americans fat.
Believe it! Instant gratificaction gives little thought to consequence and no thought to tomorrow. And we must be gratified now - it's the only consolation for living our indifferent, self-centered, transactional, postmodern lives.

I think that impatience arises from unrealistic expectations, and lack of faith in the future. I feel that in Western society we have a lot of both.

Our expectations of wealth, power, beauty, influence, happiness, comfort, ease and joy are shaped by our myths - and our modern myths tell us that all these things are simultaneously available and mutually compatible. We just need to find the right job, the right formula for our relationships, the right selection of products purchased at the right time, and we'll max out on all the good things for life.

At the same time, our confidence in the future has never been shakier. We don't trust our jobs, our relationships, national or domestic security, environment, financial security, or health security. I think that makes us impatient.

I'm not sure where one can find realistic yet satisfying expectations nowadays - perhaps we need new myths, and new values to go with them. But certainly, we owe it to ourselves and coming generations to create a future that can be trusted.

Ambition vs Friendship

2007-03-06T13:59:00.000+11:00

A while ago I started work on a story in which I was trying to bring out the theme of ambition in contest with friendship. This is an entry for anyone who'd like to discuss this theme in literature or in life.

Rationale
You don't really need a rationale for a theme, but I think this one has special relevance today. Here are some thoughts on why.

Our economy, our society and much of our professional relations are driven by a presumption of ambition. We're expected to want promotions, to want more money to buy more stuff. We're expected to harbour secret hopes of being famous, wealthy, idolised - to be not simply successful but conspicuously successful. We're held to account as being inferior, less respectable, less desirable, less worthy of honour if we don't accede to ambition - if we don't make the work of our lives to build the largest shrine to our own existence. No matter what your occupation, it's not enough for you to say "I'm doing what I like". You're expected to be on your path to somewhere better. No matter what house you live in, car you drive, you're supposed to have a plan to improve it or replace it. No matter how decent and respectful your children, you're expected to induce them to somehow win in the competition of life. In short, there's no middle ground: if you aren't on a path to making people envy you more, you'll be held in contempt.

The word ambition originally comes from Latin - it meant "to go around" - soliciting votes. To garner support, in other words, for some grand achievement of public office. Subsequently the world evolved to mean "eager for preferment or honour." Nowadays we think of it more as achieving a difficult or lofty target - but the honour and preferment idea is still lurking there.

The history of ambition in human thought is a fairly ambivalent one. On the minus side, the Bible connects it with pride; Buddhism associates it with desire - even obsession; Shakespeare links it to betrayal. On the plus side, we also connote innovation, courage and self-sacrifice with ambition, for instance in our idolisation of inventors, leaders, artistic greats or sporting heroes.

My favourite essay on ambition is by Dr Anthony Grayling, who has collected some delightful quotes on the topic but has also neatly managed to draw the line between benefits and risks of ambition. He writes:

The difference is well illustrated by the contrast - to employ a familiar example - between the person who says he "wishes to be a writer" and the person who says he "wishes to write". The former desires to be pointed out at cocktail parties, the latter is prepared for the long, solitary hours at a desk; the former desires a status, the latter a process; the former desires to be, the latter to do.

The risk of ambition, argues Dr Grayling, is not that we stretch too far, but that we grow too impatient to reach our goals. We cut corners, elbow into queues, betray friends, slander rivals, flatter the flatterable and misrepresent ourselves, and continue to persist in doing this, despite getting caught. We see this in politicians, salesmen, scholars, artists and sports stars. Grayling attributes it entirely to the impatience of ambition.

Literarily, the price of ambition tends to come high. Shakespeare kills off his most ambitious characters - like Macbeth - and even those who only are supposed to be ambitious - like Julius Caesar. Or as Robert Southey put it: Ambition is an idol, on whose wings / Great minds are carried only to extreme; / To be sublimely great or to be nothing.

Ambition can be very hard on friendships. When you aspire to an ambitious destiny, how do you manage to hold onto friendships that are either in rivalry with you (as in Brutus with Caesar), hold you to a higher standard (as Banquo with Macbeth), or simply become an anchor to your balloon (I think Will Smith was once quoted as saying that one of his secrets to success was that he cut away the friends who held him back)?

Our families may be the custodians of our innate strengths and weaknesses, but our friends are often the custodians of our ambitions, fears, and our integrity as human beings. When your ambition begins to outstrip your friendships, what do you do? Do you keep your friends and moderate your ambitions, or simply replace your friends with allies?

In our modern world, ambition uproots us. We travel to far-flung lands to get better jobs, better property prices, more opportunities. Our friends seldom make the transitions with us. We disrupt our social lives and roles when we trade up careers. It's hard to know nowadays what a friendship is, and how to reconcile it with the ambition we're encouraged to develop.

The most apt quotation I found for this tension was unattributed one at 43things.com: Never let the grip of ambition outreach the hand of friendship.

Fine. But when does it outreach, how do you know that, and what do you do about it?

Review: Pan's Labyrinth

2007-02-25T18:30:00.000+11:00

Despite high expectations set by reviewers and punters whose opinions I respect, Guillermo Del Toro's written/directed movie didn't come close to meeting them. An promising movie spoiled by weak attention to storycraft and indifferent direction.

The Hook:

In late WWII, the imaginative girl Ofelia is taken by her mother to a mill in the Spanish countryside to live with her authoritarian stepfather, Captain Vidal, who works for the fascist Franco régime. But what faerie secrets lie in the ancient pagan labyrinth in the millhouse garden, and how does this relate to the struggle of the nearby communist rebels to resist Fascist occupation? And what critical role awaits Ofelia as the military conflict comes to a head?

The good:

Imaginative imagery - a mandrake baby, a Lovecraftian baby-eating horror with eyes in its hands, some creative use of chalk , a grotesquely interesting faun, and a nice labyrinth
Direction - kept the tension happening and kept the audience thinking about the characters. - until it was too late and you realised that the tension was empty and the characters were going nowhere.

The rest:

Two potentially interesting stories never connect thematically or causally. Ofelia and her mother have no bearing on the communist resistance, nor any role to play. It's a separate story with separate protagonists, connected only loosely by the antagonist of Ofelia's stepfather. There's no symbolic connection between Ofelia's faerie fantasy/experience and anything to do with the rebellion.
Ofelia's faerie experience is arbitrary and devoid of consequence. She undergoes three tests, succeeds in the first, fails the second and succeeds in the last, most important test. But what do the first two tests demonstrate, and what are the consequences of success or failure? Nada. What does she learn and how does she grow? She doesn't. How does it connect to her life as a fatherless girl out of her element? It doesn't. How does it connect to the communistas vs fascistas? Not at all.
The faerie Premise: A faerie princess dies in the mortal world and is reincarnated - eventually. Her Dad the King knows that the girl will return. And she has a birthmark on her shoulder to prove her birthright. But what special virtues does this fae darling have herself that demonstrates she belongs in another world? None - unless you count gluttony and refusing to put a knife through her baby brother as special virtues.
The faun: "I am known by many names... " Sure dude. But presumably one of them is "Pan", so why not say so? And what's your purpose in 1944? (Edit: Original Spanish title is El Labirinto del Fauno - so perhaps he's not the former Greek pastoral god)
The threat: What is the threat? It's not that the Fascists will win - the Communists have plenty of hope thanks to an allied invasion, 50 promised reinforcements and a woman on the inside. It's that faerie may disappear from the world. Well, fine. But what's the consequence if it does? And how will the world change if it doesn't? Answer: no difference. So why do we care?
Gratuitous sadism presented for entertainment: this might have meaning to a Spanish audience for whom the mutilation of prisoners from each side might be symbolic. It had no meaning for me.
Acting: credible protrayals, but uninteresting flat characters with seldom more than one motive each

Over all I felt this film was created for pure sentiment. The imagery and plot were wasted; the story-line fell apart for lack of coherent vision. I was left feeling under-fed and manipulated by an indifferent screenplay, and direction that was playing it solely for the "wow" and ignored the "so what".

2.5 stars from me.

What Keeps You Motivated Under Stress?

2007-02-22T16:32:00.000+11:00

I read this on a whiteboard once, about the things that motivate people under stress. I'm curious how it affects writers.

(If your main motivator under stress is fear, then which one of the above are you most afraid of losing?)

Controversial Stuff

2007-02-19T14:05:00.000+11:00

On the oww-sff-writing list Larisa Walk recently asked Is it me or did anyone else notice that in some pro magazine there are no stories with controversial issues of our time, such as religious orientation and politics?

This led to a discussion about what a "controversial topic" means and what are good ways of dealing with them. This is a note on my present thoughts.

What makes a topic controversial?

A controversial topic is an issue that we're reluctant to fully face. It's an issue in which our stakes sometimes overwhelm our good sense. Our personal wisdom can lead us astray, so we need to rely on a dialogue with others and collective wisdom to help us find clarity. The value of fiction in controversy is that it can help nucleate and focus that dialogue, and explore conflicting issues in hypothetical circumstances. Fiction can help shed light.

Yesterday's controversies are sometimes today's hard slog, and sometimes they go away completely. Discussions about gender identity could get you thrown out of dinner parties in the 1950s and 1960s, but today it'll barely cock an eyebrow. Suffrage for women was a hot topic in the late 19th century, but 100 years later nobody would even blink.

There are plenty of "hard slog" topics in speculative fiction. Environment, racism, gender identity, empowerment of the poor can generate plenty of good fiction. But there's not a lot in them that's controversial.

What are the controversial topics then? And are they getting written about? If not then why not?

Some controversies by their very nature are either unsolvable or trivial. I've tried to avoid these and instead, focus on those that might yield to better information and good discussion. So you won't see Michael Jackson's sex life below, or discussion about when a life becomes human and/or sacred. Instead, there's focus on community, culture and inter-community issues.

Does the right to religious freedom give you the right to institutionalise hate? If so, why? If not, what are the humanitarian accountabilities for religious groups, and how can they be held to account?
Does the right to free association and community direction give you the right to exclude others from your community, and if so, how far should you be allowed to push that?
Does occupation of some geography give you the right to manage all its resources? What about those resources that are critical to the world as a global entity? What are the right accountabilities here?
People are very attached to the education of their children. Does the right to raise a child according to your values also include the right to educate your children in untruth? If not, what are your accountabilities to the child and the world, and how should they be managed?
In times of crisis, tribes sometimes sacrifice a few of their own members in fear of losing the whole. Especially, they pick on those members who symbolise whatever "sin" is attributed to precipitating the crisis. What are the rights and wrongs of doing so, and what protections can a society put in place to prevent witch-hunts and similar hysteria?
As our world gets more globalised, increasingly nations hold their citizens to account for actions they undertake outside the national jurisdiction. This has always been the case in times of war, but now it's becoming the case in times of peace too. Is there a broader notion of citizenship emerging, and if so, what is it?
When linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, religious diversity increase every year, nations are becoming a polyglot of minorities, and some regions are becoming a tesselation of ghettoes. When a nation ceases to share culture, language, religion or economy, what does nationhood mean? And how are people coping with that?
Information and communication technologies have transformed our notions of privacy and accountability irrevocably. What are the rights and wrongs of this, and how can we begin to resolve the issues?

The interesting thing about these topics is that it's easy to find a gut-level opinion on them. It's also possible to find other views on these topics, and just as easy to ignore them. But I think that all of these topics are pivotal in how we manage broader issues like cultural diversity, national identity, national security. It's only when you begin to unpack them that you see that they have complex dimensions, and apply in ways that we largely ignore and overlook. I think that all these topics have or will have a big impact on how we live and shape society for future generations.

Dealing with controversy in fiction

Fiction is an important vehicle to help us explore controvery, but here's an ethical question about how we deal with controversy in fiction. The challenge in dealing with controversial issues in fiction is in getting the balance and information necessary to help advance the discussion. To Gregory Benford is attributed the "Law of Controversy" that says Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

If our purpose in writing is benign and more than simply self-interested, then it behooves us to provide balance, information and some clues to helping resolve the controversies we tackle. I link this to my earlier article on Focus, Appropriateness and Balance in fiction.

But where are the controversial stories?

I don't think we will ever see very many of them at any one time. It's very challenging to write something informative, provocative, balanced *and* entertaining on an issue where your reader may already have strong opinions. Is there any fiction more difficult than that?

I think that most authors don't tackle controversy most of the time, and most authors aren't up to doing it well. It's easy to write with passion, without useful information or insight and without reasonable balance, and just go for cheap emotive shots.

But too there are better and worse times to try to offer provocation to the reader, and right now I think it's a worse time. English-speaking societies are obsessing about security and economy, in denial about a range of deep, domestic social issues and flinching on environmental issues. I think it's a quite difficult time to sell provocative literature as entertainment.

That doesn't mean that it's not worth trying, though. Good works find their own market. And the more that society retreats into emotion, comfort and security, the more important the need is to provoke thought and forethought.

What's your "10"?

2007-02-15T09:52:00.000+11:00

In the oww-sff-writing discussion group jonp referenced an article by Steve Pavlina asking what would it mean to you to score a "10/10" in your own writing. The original article recognises that the scale is both a subjective and a shifting one. My 10 may not be your 10, and my 10 today may not be my 10 tomorrow.

I think this question is a useful guide to thinking about what is "the realistic best success of your best next step."

If you look at it that way, then it's a sensible thing to aim for. Recognise the best that your best next step might realistically
accomplish and then aim for all of that.

Under that interpretation my 10 is to write something I like that has an impact on someone I respect. In my mind, that unpacks to a good choice of subject, competently covered, with a bit of good insight, well rendered.

Good subject: something significant that we either don't think much about, or think about mainly in limited and self-defeating ways.

Competent coverage: taking a theme or angle on the subject that's relevant and interesting, and articulating it through a strong human interest situation.

Good insight: the raison detre for me writing at all. To present some halfway original thoughts that readers wish they'd had.

Well-rendered: an engaging and entertaining presentation of character, setting, plot, narrative voice - it's the core craftsmanship that we normally crit on in OWW.

Impact: after reading the work, the reader either is glad to have those thoughts - or it stimulates thinking that the reader wanted to have anyway.

Respect: my appreciation of the reader as a being of conscience, integrity, reflection and enquiry.

An interesting question to ask is "what would happen to your goals if you scored a 10?" I don't know that they'd change. I might simply lift the bar. Or I might aim to score 10s more consistently. Or, I might lose interest and go and do something else.

Write What You Love? Bollocks!

2007-02-13T16:26:00.000+11:00

Under the title Potato Chips, tightropegirl recently wrote a very inspirational article about writing what excites you. In other words, if you love writing slash, write slash. If you love mangy dogs, write about mangy dogs. It's a very thoughtful and encouraging piece, and deservedly got a lot of praise.

The problem is that I don't believe it.

More particularly, I don't think it's right for every writer, and I'm pretty darn sure it's not right for me.

I don't write fiction to transport myself, to escape my present circumstance, to delight in the beauty of the written word; I write fiction to explore an idea in the laboratory of the imagination. Fair enough, you may say - it's the idea that excites you. No, actually the idea is something that bothers me. Here are some examples:

I'm bothered at how naïve we are about organised international crime. There's no Mr Big; a lot of it doesn't do physical violence to anyone. Yet it ruins economies, corrupts communities and destroys lives. We need some myth about this that's up to date and informative. If I knew what that myth was I might be excited about it, but at the moment I don't.

I'm bothered about the lack of good male role models in fiction - especially genre fiction. I'd be excited if I knew what good male role models looked like, and how to portray them mythically but I don't.

I'm bothered about how naïve is the portrayal of female leaders in genre fiction. I don't think authors do nearly enough research on what female leadership means or should mean, and what price women have to pay for it. Again, we need good, informative myth about this. I just don't yet know what it looks like.

I'm bothered that people think slavery is a creation of the evil in peoples' hearts, rather than the product of particular cultural and economic forces. I'm bothered that ordinary modern people create slavery by their own social and economic behaviours without recognising that they're doing it. I'd like to create a mythic mirror that displays this, and also shows how we can do it differently - if only I knew how to forge one.

I'm bothered about the adverse effects of Political Correctness on social cohesion. I think it bought society a respite while it tried to grapple with globalisation, but I think it's now a mire of confusion, obfuscation and power-grabbing. I think we need myth that blows up the hypocrisy in Political Correctness, and lays foundations for a more honest and humanitarian view. I don't yet know what that myth is.

Personally, I'm excited by scuba-diving, boxing, archery, blues music and the twanging strains of a single cone resonator guitar. I have no desire at all to write about these as topics. I'd much rather just do those things. If I did write about them, I'd write non-fiction; fiction doesn't do them justice.

Fiction writing for me is about solving problems. And problems begin with being bothered, not being excited. Sure, there's excitement along the way, somewhere... but that's not what drives the thinking or the writing. Most of the writing is just slog. The payoff is not excitement but satisfaction in seeing a hole mended, some loose threads knitted.

Does this mean that my writing is uninspired and uninteresting because I'm bothered rather than excited?

Actually, I'm sorry to say that yes it does - at least, for now. I have to go through some tortuous multi-level problem-solving before I can find the right myths to solve my problems, and then render the myths into a form that people will want to read. I have yet to work out reliable ways of making this interesting.

As much as I like the writing and thought of Umberto Eco, my worst fear is to end up writing in a similarly academic conceptual style that alienates everyone but the intelligentsia. What I really want to do is solve complex, abstract problems through the vehicle of popular myth. Name of the Rose more than Travels in Hyperreality, only more engaging. Maybe that's too much to ask, but it's what I'd most like to do. I don't know that it can be done, but I don't know that it can't either. What I am pretty sure of though is that I can't do it by writing frothily about pentatonic scales, skipping-ropes, fletching jigs and reef ecologies.

It's delightful to have the luxury of abundant potato chips in our world. I'm a beer-and-crisps fan myself.

But it's not all about the carbs.

Voice Exercises - Lessons Learned

2007-02-09T11:42:00.000+11:00

This article reflects some lessons learned on a Voice Exercises activity undertaken in a closed group on my Live Journal.

With activity on the Voice Exercises now down to a sporadic trickle, I propose to close commentary to the voice submissions within the next few days.

In the meantime, here are some lessons I've picked up, which are open for anyone to comment. Also some proposed next steps.

Ruv's Lessons
What is narrative voice?
Not so long ago I thought that narrative voice was just a form of auctorial branding. When you got good enough you developed a fixed style of narrative voice that made you a Chandler or a Hemingway. I've heard other writers say that your narrative voice is your "inner you" -- something unique to who you are and the stories you like to write. Somehow you are supposed to excavate your subconscious to reveal this style and polish it like some grubby diamond-in-the-rough.

I was already doubting such claims but since the workshop I no longer believe a word of it.

Narrative voice is a critical part of the bridge you build between your subject and your audience, and you do it by creating the sound and sentiment of the narrator's persona. It is wholly synthetic and crafted; while drawn from an author's sensibilities it no more reflects the author than a mask reflects an actor. You don't have a single distinctive narrative voice in your writing; you have as many as you care to construct.

Why it's important
Narrative voice is critical to expressing the sentiment of a work. You can't escape having a narrative voice, because you have to make a decision (whether conscious or unconscious) in what and how you narrate. In business or scholarly communications, writers often aim for a bland, neutral voice but they still imbue in that voice a respect for the subject and the reader. In fiction the range of narrative voices is much larger, and in poetry it's larger still. Your choice of narrative voice can make the difference between whether your reader cares or does not care about your characters, your themes and your plot. In particular the more important it is to conjure a certain sentiment or attitude to a subject in the mind of the reader, the more important it is to have control over narrative voice. So narrative voice is important in all fiction, but critical to fiction of strong sentiment, including romances, adventures, thrillers, suspense, fantasies and horror.

Some writers are renowned for having a single narrative voice - for instance, Raymond Chandler's voice is very distinctive. This has led some pundits to think that an author can or should only have a single narrative voice. I disagree, or rather agree in only a qualified sense. If you're an author who writes in a single narrow genre and has the same attitude to all his subjects then you can probably perfect a single narrative voice and get away with it. Chandler and Hammet both do this; John Wayne , Arnold Schwartzennegger and Sylvester Stallone all do this.

But if you want diverse treatments of broad subjects then you'll want a toolbox of narrative vocalisation - just as Meryl Streep or Robert de Niro do.

Elements of a narrative voice
The most important lesson I learned from these exercises is that narrative voice is poetry. Or turning it inside out, poetry is the sentimental treatment of a subject created through a distinctive narrative voice. Appreciation of poetry and song gives you appreciation for narrative voice; conversely, the ability to create poetry in your narrative is the ability to create voice for your narrative. It's really clear from participant feedback that the most successful voices in our exercises were the most poetic. The more prosaic the treatment, the less people could recognise the voice, and the less persuaded they were by the voice.

That isn't to say that every piece of fiction should have a poetic narrative voice. But what it does say is that the more sentiment you want in your narrative, the more you'll want to lean on poetic devices. I'm not suggesting that "more is better" for these things - quite the opposite. There's an elegance in "least sufficiency" for narrative voice just as there is in the rest of writing. So: if you want to brush up narrative voice, you could do worse than study poetry and song.

I think that a good narrative voice needs three elements, which I define beneath:

A persona;
An attitude to subject; and
An attitude to audience

The persona carries the dramatic role of the narrator. Just as a telemarketer or a phone helpline staffer has a persona, the narrator has one too. The persona determines whether the narrator is an informant, a confidante, investigator, supplicant, confessor, provocateur, soother, appeaser, plaintiff, flatterer and so on.

The attitude to subject reflects the narrator's emotions when dealing with different elements of the subject. These attitudes are turned into expression by filtering them through the persona. The reader then reacts to both the events and the narrator's attitude. These things together help shape the reader's emotions.

The attitude to audience reflects the narrator's changing emotions as the reader reads. This simulates a dialogue between the narrator and the reader, in that the author anticipates reader responses, and respond to them through the narrator. If the audience grows outraged, the narrator may choose to become placatory. If the audience goes into helpless laughter, the narrator may begin to tease and tickle. The purpose of responding to reader emotions is to help give the reader a feeling of voice and participation in the story. Sometimes you may wish to do this; sometimes you may not. In about half our submissions, the attitude to audience was one of distance or indifference - the narrator was absorbed almost entirely by the subject.

One lesson that emerges from this is that for a given narrator, the persona tends to remain fixed or change only slowly. But attitudes to subject and audience can change quite quickly. So you need to get the right persona settled early.

Some Principles in Narrative Voice Construction
These came about from observations on what worked (or didn't) and why. I've tried to order these in terms of how much impact I think they had on the voice.

Strong, active verbs: No surprises here - strong, active verbs are critical to getting a good narrative voice. Participants read more emotion from verbs than from any other part of the narrative
Rich sensory imagery: Colours, shapes, smells, sounds, textures, movements, activities and the things they evoked were almost as strong as verbs in creating voice. Since our exercise was just scene-setting we were able to get excessive here, and often did. But in general we found that more is better. Interestingly, where verbs carried a lot of attitude to subject, nouns sometimes carried some notion of attitude to reader. I called the subject a "blousy bitch" in one narrative, and it immediately provoked a reader counter-response, something that colourful verbs seldom did.
Context, framing and juxtaposition: The more successful voices made strong use of context, framing and juxtaposition. This included techniques like using weather or environs to create mood, putting the specific in the context of the general to highlight idiosyncracies and nuances, and juxtaposing unlike things to underscore emotions.
First, Second and Third person: As you might expect, first and second person had a very strong impact on sense of narrator's persona and attitude to audience. Third person had neutral impact.
Simile and Metaphor: We got a lot of mileage out of this. Simile and metaphor let us tie sentiments to subjects, but also helped us create attitude to audience - because our similes were chosen from our audience's experiences.
Cadence and meter: This was used at times to create undercurrent of emotion, and to shape the narrator's persona.
Repetition: Repetition of certain tags or particular sentence structures worked in much the same way as cadence and metre
Alliteration and assonance: I was surprised, but nobody remarked on this specifically. It's unclear to me what impact it has on voice, if any.

Other Lessons
For the given subject, I asked each contributor to write in a voice shaped by three emotions. There were a few observations about this:

The emotions shaped the attitudes to subject but left us free to vary persona; we got a lot of different personas from doing the same exercises, and some interesting attitudes to audience.
Some emotions went together better than others. In particular "positive" emotions didn't always work well with "negative" or "weird" emotions.
Some emotions were hard to differentiate - e.g. cynical vs bitter vs angry vs resigned.
It's quite hard to write to an "emotions" brief, and there was a sense of "failure" if the reader didn't get the "right" emotion. In retrospect I think it might have been easier and more constructive to write to a "persona" brief instead, and let the emotions be whatever they are.

Proposed next steps
I'll post this Lessons Learned summary to oww-sff-writing for info and propose to post a subset of submissions and comments. Since all submissions and comments remain property of their contributors, please can you let me know which if any, I am allowed to cross-post. I'll assume that I'm not allowed to cross-post any unless you tell me otherwise. (If everyone is happy to make these public then I'll make them visible and close off comments.)

Meanwhile, participant comments on lessons learned are very welcome. Comments and questions by non-participants are also welcome. Thanks to everyone who has participated to date. I've found it very worthwhile.

Voice Exercises

2007-01-31T11:37:00.000+11:00

This is a closed entry for participants in the Jan 07 Voice Exercises originally mooted att oww-sff-writing.

Rules of play:

Write up to 150 words on a subject described below.
Write in one of the voices describing the subject, but don't say which voice it is
Post your entry to the Comments section of this article.

Only one voice per entry, but you can post multiple entries
Describe each element of the subject that's listed, don't add new elements
You can detail the elements however you like, and use whatever motifs you want to help create the voice
No mention of protagonist - the idea is that the emotions come from the narrative voice, not from a character in the scene (like stock cubes, we're looking for the flavour of the chicken without the actual chicken)
Participants can say what voice they think you're using, and how it comes out.

Type your cut contents here.

Ideas:

Challenge yourself! Pick voices that you don't normally use
Consider the persona of the narrator - and its attitudes to subject and audience
Consider sources of inspiration like music, spoken word and literature to help shape the voice
Consider the use of sentence forms, pacing, metre and cadence, choice of words, alliteration and assonance, motifs, simile and metaphor to help create voice
Consider how two authors can create a voice with similar emotions and attitudes in very different ways

Subject:

It's a bright, sunny day. There's a well-kept castle on a grassy hill, with birds flying overhead.

Voices:

Excited, joyful, optimistic
Grave, ponderous, stern
Anxious, uncertain, fretful
Spiteful, sinister, perverse
Elegant, friendly, quirky
Terse, bitter, angry
Dreamy, wistful, yearning

Women in Fantasy - More Provocations

2007-01-30T16:28:00.000+11:00

Garnished from sff-writing-controversy, and kept here for posterity. I should emphasise that I am not bashing female fantasy writers here. I'm concerned that we're not doing a good enough job of building good female role models in fantasy literature.

Current fantasy fiction spends a lot of time exploring modern issues of female self-determination, and that's all to the good. There's need for new myth here because the old myths just don't support what women want to do. However, the new myths are so glamourised and romanticised that I feel that they risk creating misleading expectations for their readers. In particular, I think that the harsh realities of mediaeval life for women are under-represented, and the personal challenges of female protags are often trivialised to an extent that reflects neither historical accuracy nor current reality.

Type your cut contents here.

Ethically, I think that there is an open challenge to writers to catch both the historical reality and some symbolic breadth in the challenges that modern women face. I think that doing so can offer benefits like greater education in how power is developed and used, better role-models for women as leaders and in living self-determined lives, and a more realistic understanding for readers that one can't always have power just by lobbying for it: one needs to grasp the tools of economy, culture and leadership and know their uses and costs. Too many women I know want power, but don't want to dirty their hands on the tools that bring it, or pay the price it comes with.

I feel that fantasy literature has an inportant role to play in this issue exactly because of its grounding in history, and its power of symbolism. While I realise that glamour and romance sells, so too does provocative literature, well-written. I feel that to overlook this opportunity is somewhat shameful for the profession of fantasy writers as a whole, and that as a profession we should be encouraging one another to take some risks here - not simply for commercial reasons, but for ethical reasons.

The choices of what to write and how to portray it remain vested in individual writers. But in the degree to which we feel or wish to feel that our work has social value, I think we should seriously consider how much we're serving the community in dishing up only romance and glamour, in trivialising the true struggle in such stories, in dumbing down the mechanisms by which such struggles are actually won, and in understating the costs of winning.

In short, I think we need to encourage one another to do our homework better, to get grittier and more honest, and to push our audiences just that bit harder when we serve up female fantasy literature.

The Ethics We Don't Want

2007-01-30T15:24:00.000+11:00

Having discussed the issue of ethics in fiction-writing with several esteemed colleagues, I'm now convinced that we need a code of ethics even though we don't want one, but more urgently we need to understand the difference between ethics and censorship or nannying. This article is about that.

Type your cut contents here.

I should declare some interest before I go on. I have a background in consulting and software engineering, and I've watched my field gradually develop from a ratbag crew of arrogant, introverted, sociopathic narcissists into something resembling a benevolent profession. It's been a hard road, full of denial and resistance, but it's paying benefits. Some lessons learned (often painfully) are that:

Conscience is not ethics. Conscience and ethics inform one another, but ethics are stronger than conscience. Our consicence only reacts to what it sees, and what it sees tends to be very self-serving. To be genuinely benign, our ethics need to be bigger than our individual consciences. They need to make us look at those things we don't want to see.
Ethics need candour. We rely on our professional colleagues to tell us when we're being blind or putting self-interest above community interest. Our colleagues need to be brave enough to be candid with us. If our colleagues are too self-interested to challenge us, then our ethics fall apart in the execution, no matter how noble the conception.
Ethics need humility. In particular, the humility to acknowledge when we're misguided or excessively self-interested. These provide valuable lessons learned for ourselves and others.

What are professional ethics?

Professional ethics are a code of behaviour that places the interests of one's society, profession and customers ahead of one's own interests. Ethics are a code of benevolence that seeks to ensure that others receive at least as much good from our deeds as we ourselves receive, and that our own benefit does not result in avoidable harm to others.

Why I think we need professional ethics

Fiction-writing is a profession: it's comprised of individuals with specialised skills performing a critical social function. If you took away the fiction-writing you would reduce our myths to just oral tales. I don't think oral myths can support the cohesion needed in societies of the size we now have. Fiction-writing is a critical force for social cohesion and direction-setting. Take it away, and I believe that society would fly apart. I also think that as societies grow bigger, more diverse and more complex, there's a greater burden on fiction-writing to deal with this, and speculative fiction in particular, shoulders an important burden because it's a bridge between perspectives and possibilities.

It follows then that it's in the interests of society and the profession that we write with this in mind. I believe it's also in our own interests since the more conscious we are of our impacts, the better the fiction we can write.

Professional ethics for fiction writers are merely whatever common code the profession wishes to adhere to, to advance social cohesion and development. This is not to say that writers can't have individual differences of approach and belief. If we at least share common professional principles, then we can discuss and grow our role in society.

Why ethics are not censorship or nannying

It's the nature of a profession that its practitioners have much more skill and knowledge than the society they serve. This is true of lawyers, doctors, accountants, scientists, academics, engineers, journalists and (I believe) fiction-writers. In any profession, the responsibility for applying ethics is vested in the individual professional; the job of the profession itself is to discuss, develop and promulgate the ethics. In extreme cases, the profession can censure or sanction its practitioners if they're clearly doing harm. But this is very rare in most professions and I think rarer still in writing.

Ethics are in direct contrast to censorship or nannying because the choice of how to apply the ethics remains vested in the practitioner.

Why I think we don't want it

Most writers I've met have a strong conscience, and they think that this is enough. But conscience can be a very self-interested mirror on the world. In particular, it is often blind to those things that don't affect us.

Ethics and conscience inform one another, but there are times when ethics are stronger. Ethics help us realise our own ignorance and hidden self-interest, and confront it. We can only do that by trusting and relying on the advice of fellow professionals who have similar professional values and principles to our own - and similar experiences.

But to achieve that, we don't just need strong consciences. We need candour and humility. Candour in the sense of telling our fellow writers if we think they're not serving society or the profession well, and humility in recognising, learning from (and teaching from) our own errors. In my old profession of IT, many practitioners are introverted and proud of their smarts. The introversion leads to lack of candour, and the pride leads to lack of humility. From my chats with writers, I suspect that the profession of writing is similar. Certainly, the codes of behaviour I've seen for writing do not encourage or demand candour or humility from their practitioners, whereas (for example) codes of journalism and IT professionalism do.

Finally, writing is hard. Certainly, I find it more difficult to do well than any of the science or business endeavours I've been involved in. It also doesn't pay terribly well - usually. I think there's a sentiment among writers to not worry about ethics because writing's hard enough, and if we're not getting paid well, then why should we care? Underneath this argument is a sentiment of "What's in it for me?" I can't answer that because if you're writing just for yourself then you're not going to be interested in my other arguments.

From an IT perspective, I can attest that an ethical framework with all the trimmings helps do better business, which increases the value of IT services, which translates to more respect and lucre for its practitioners. But in all honesty, that's not the right reason to adopt ethics. You adopt them (if you choose to), because you care and because you're wise enough to realise that your own perceptions are unreliable.

Individual Ethics

Some of the writers I've spoken too have been far more comfortable with the notion of individual ethics than collective, professional ethics. Given that writing has a professional reputation of idiosyncratic introversion I can sympathise with this view, though regretfully -- because what it really means is that writers don't trust each other much professionally. (And in the early 70s, neither did IT professionals)

If you can't get collective professional ethics going then it's possible to practice ethically yourself. However, conscience alone is not enough. You need to constantly examine and re-examine your values, your reasons and your methods, and even then there are no guarantees that you don't have some whopping blind-spot somewhere. Far better, I think, if you rely on fellow professionals to advise you and encourage you at times. In the absence of strong professional etehics, I'd shoot for small group ethics above individual ethics.

My Own Developing Ethical Code

I'm not an experienced fiction writer or a trained ethicist. I'm just an amateur who pulls stuff apart a lot. My current, nascent code is just a frame I wanted to put together to help me examine what I do from an ethical perspective. I've chosen three criteria in dealing with the fiction I write:

Focus: Is my treatment sufficiently clear on its subject and themes? Have I researched what I need to as thoroughly as I need to? Do I know who my target readers are, and what they need?

Appropriateness: Does my story make a suitable bridge between subject matter and target readers? In other words are they somehow better off for having accessed the subject using my bridge than if they'd gone some other way? Are consumers able to recognise whether they are my target readers?

Balance: Recognising that people form opinions and make decisions from fiction, have I provided adequate balance in treatment of subject and key themes that target readers can make informed, sound and balanced opinions?

These criteria have very little to do with aesthetics; they have a bit to do with marketability and a lot to do with how my works inform and (where applicable) inspire my target audiences. Anyway, those are the ones I'm starting with. I need them to be criteria that I can discuss with others in a fairly impartial fashion.

Not listed here are the commercial and communicative ethics associated with being a writer - the notion of fair, honest and open dealings with peers and allied industries, the idea of being honest with the public and accountable for what one writes. I didn't mention them because to a greater degree, they apply to many other industries too.

It still remains to test and develop this frame, but I thought I'd place it here for commentary and discussion.

Does Fiction-Writing Need a Code of Ethics?

2007-01-25T13:26:00.000+11:00

This question came up in sff-writing-controversy after initially being posed by

mnfaure

. As far as I know, there isn't a code of professional ethics in fiction writing.

My current thinking is that fiction writing (and writers) would benefit from a professional code of ethics.

Here's the argument in short:

In commercial dealings there's as much argument for a code of ethics for writers as there is for any other provider of skilled services
In publicity and communications, the argument for ethical communication is the same as for journalists say
For the writing of fiction itself, there's a question of representing social interest as well as the author's interest, and that suggests the need for an ethical framework.
The ethics of writing fiction are not about censorship so much as the responsibility with which material is treated. This might span anything from the quality of research and honest of attribution through to the way that themes and issues are presented and marketed.

Leaving aside for now the details of what might actually go into such a code and how it could be managed, what sorts of benefits might the profession see from such a thing? Here are some initial ideas:

Professional ethics are an excellent defence against censorship. If an author can demonstrate that material is well-researched, balanced and socially relevant (say) then there's a case to show that censors are not serving public interest by suppressing the material.
Subscribing to a respected code of professional ethics increases respect for the profession. This is noticable in the IT profession, for instance.
Professional ethics provide a basis for engagement with allied industries. In discussions with agents, editors, publishers, publicists and media, for example.
Professional ethics protect authors from allegations of ratbaggery and unprofessional conduct. If you adhere to a professionally respected code of ethics, and can demonstrate that you do so, then you're protected to a greater degree from criticism of your conscience, methods and sensibilities.
Professional ethics help authors resolve problems of conscience. It's easy for an author to hit a crisis of conscience when tackling a difficult issue. A professional code of ethics would help authors leverage the experience and wisdom of other authors.
Professional ethics help keep you from writing things you'll regret. It's easy to get so caught up in a subject that we may forget the longer term impacts. An ethical framework helps to create some distance.

From a speculative fiction perspective, what kinds of ethical issues might arise? Here are a few that came to mind:

Quality of science research in Science Fiction
Quality of historical research when writing stories set in historical milieux (e.g. historical fantasies)
Quality of research in portrayals of "real world" legal and medical situations
Balance and sensitivity when dealing with distressing situations based on real events (in horror and elsewhere)
Accuracy, balance and sensitivity when dealing with recognised social problems such as self-harm, suicide, mental illness, eating disorders, domestic abuse, drug and alcohol dependence, cultural conflicts, etc...

As you can see from this list, professional ethics are about more than just picking the politically correct terminology or a socially acceptable stance. They're about getting to know your subject and presenting a view of your material that helps readers make better decisions - while still providing the entertainment they've paid for, and being faithful to the setting and concept.

In my discussions on sff-writing-controversy I've discussed these sorts of issues under the headings of Focus, Appropriateness and Balance. In particular:

Focus: Have we researched the material adequately? Are our imagery and premises aligned with our themes? In other words, does our material make unresearched commentary just for shock/entertainment value, or have we made a considered, relevant and well-researched statement?

Appropriateness: Have we built a good bridge between our reader and our subject-matter? Do we understand our readership, and are we sensitive about what they need to know?

Balance: Recognising that people form opinions and make decisions from fiction, have we supplied enough balance in our treatment to support the kinds of decisions that people may wish to make? Are we erring by glamourising the harmful or trivialising the difficult or dangerous? Are we setting unrealistic expectations in ways that the reader may not recognise?

What might be the costs of having a professional code of ethics for fiction writers? Here are some initial thoughts, but they seem pretty light:

A professional body to form, manage and promote them (such bodies already exist at the genre level)
A framework for critique of the ethics of fiction-writing
An increased sense of professional responsibility for authors - in other words, recognising that responsible fiction-writing is more than writing "whatever I believe in" or "whatever sells".

For the thinking SFF Author...

2007-01-23T11:04:00.000+11:00

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sff-writing-controversy

An excerpt from the charter:

This group is for open discussion of potentially controversial issues relating to the writing of speculative fiction (Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy). Topics may include:

* SFF and Society
* Art and Craft of SFF writing
* SFF and relationships to other literature or other Arts
* SFF and Censorship
* SFF and Human Psychology
* SFF Trends
* Ethics and Professionalism in SFF writing
* Critique method in SFF (not critiques of SFF works or authors
except by way of example)
* Any other potentially contentious topic that directly furthers SFF writing

The vision of this group is to share ideas and stimulate thinking, not to score points or win. Feel free to be creative, passionate, even ludicrous as long as you observe the rules of engagement.

Keeping the cliche out of horror

2007-01-22T15:43:00.000+11:00

mikandra asked:

how do I un-cliche my horror?

Horror isn't cliché when it first appears, but it quickly becomes cliché through repetition. The first time we see a man made out of parts of other men, we are shocked - how can such a thing be? But soon it becomes just a symbol.

This article sketches my thoughts on the bones of horror and makes some suggestions as to how to avoid cliché. I wrote it for my own use, but I hope it might have some use for others.

What makes horror scary (and why we like it)
I believe that the job of horror is to make us confront what we dare not think; to express what we dare not say. Our frustrations, anxieties, neuroses and psychoses find their expression in horror. At the same time it excites us in the way that any danger can.

While horror makes us feel unsafe and uncertain, it also helps us wrestle with those things that bother us, which we may otherwise suppress. There's a degree of enlightenment that comes from terrifying yourself.

There are lots of classifications of horror. One I like is Justin D. Davis' classification that divides horror into psychological, sociological and allegorical. My paraphrasis follows.

Psychological horror: An internal horror about the mind. Typically horrors about perception, identity, sanity are psychological.

Sociological horror: An external horror about our relationship with society. Horror to do with protection, belonging, love, power & status are usually of this form. Psycho slasher horrors are of this form, for example.

Allegorical horror: A horror that draws on symbols of other (internal and external fears). Typically horrors with a lot of supernatural elements have allegorical or symbolic meaning.

Hunting a Horror Premise
Just as with science fiction, good horror needs a strong premise. But where science fiction largely comes from rational extrapolation of what we know, horror comes from the symbolic, exaggerated and shocking exploration of what we don't.

Premise is the meat of horror, and there's so much cliche in horror premises that it can be hard to find a good one. There are several ways to find a good premise:

Invert a statement that makes us feel safe or secure: E.g. "The policeman is your friend"; "Mummy loves me"; "I think therefore I am"; "Good things come to those who wait". This can give you statements of menace. E.g. "The policeman wants to get you"; "Mummy hates your guts"; "You think but you really are not." or "You are, but your thoughts are not yours."; "No matter how long you wait, it's not coming", or "It's coming and you're not going to like it.". The trick here is to find a statement that doesn't get challenged much, and an interesting angle on inverting it.

Exaggerate something that makes us feel unsafe or insecure: E.g. "I hate crowds" or "Drains are scary". Look for things that bother people, but which they don't think about much.

Pervert something we trust or rely on. E.g. we depend on our house for safety; what if the house itself makes us unsafe? We depend on food for nutrition, but what if our food eats us?

Key Plot Elements
Like most stories, a horror plot has a Protagonist in a Situation, who has an Objective, which suffers Opposition and risks Disaster. But for the story to be scary there are some constraints on this line-up.

Protagonist: Should be someone we can closely identify with
Situation: The protagonist never chooses to face the horror; it is always seduced, surprised or engulfed by it.
Objective: Always includes trying to escape the consequences of an inverted, exaggerated or perverse world
Opposition: Whatever manner of inversion, exaggeration or perversity assails - this is the horror premise
Disaster: Includes threat to someone who depends on the protagonist; the stakes are always higher than one's own comfort and survival.

Some Key Elements of Horror Exposition
Elsewhere I have described fantasy as the art of symbolic exaggeration. By that definition, I consider horror to be a special case of fantasy. It's symbolic exaggeration that leads to a sense of menace and terror.

The Familiar: The more comforting and familiar the setting, the more impact the horror can have later. Familiar situations with recognisable character helps give the horror its meaning and relevance.

Themes: The themes (psychological, sociological) must be well grounded in the premise.

Symbology: is critical to all kinds of horror, and of course especially important to allegorical horror. Symbols are used to exaggerate the inversion, perversity and import in the horror premise. The more resonance the symbols have, the more successful the horror. The more thematic the symbols, the more compelling the work.

Imagery: When we are afraid, our senses are hightened, but our focus narrows. The use of imagery - especially rich sensoria - increases the excitement of horror and can be used to make us feel as though we are afraid even if we really weren't.

Suspense: is also critical to sustaining the tension and delaying the denoument. Especially suspension of the protagonist's (and reader's) knowledge of the situation, nature of the opposition and the true magnitude of the disaster.

Surprises: Horror conoisseurs love being surprised. Plot twists - especially those that you can't see coming, but which make perfect sense as they occur - are the spice of a horror writer's life.

Transformation: Horror must always transform or destroy its protagonist because the situation is unthinkable and impossible to sustain. The transformation is key to the audience's satisfaction. It has strong symbolic meaning; it's the point of catharsis, and it should reconcile whatever themes the horror has opened.

Writing Fiction for Boys

2007-01-22T11:55:00.000+11:00

This came out of some discussion in oww-sff-writing about how to write stories that keep men interested. I'm putting it here for reference because I may want to use it myself, and some other contributors said that it's interesting not just for story-shaping but for helping with design of their male characters.

Girls and boys think differently; our emphases are different, and it's hard-wired. Girls have an extra receptor in their eyes for the colour green[ref needed] - they can literally see more colours than boys can, especially in the green part of the spectrum. The part of their brain that does empathy is larger[ref needed] than the corresponding part in a boy. The white matter in a boy's brain that solves spatial problems is thicker, and is also used more than a girl's [ref needed]. These physiological differences affect how we solve problems, though it turns out that our total aggregate cognitive ability is about the same[ref needed]; we just often solve problems in very different ways.

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When it comes to the fiction that attracts us, it's shaped by our past experiences, but also our cognition. Boys for instance, can walk into a room and within seconds tell you where all the exits are and where they lead; girls can walk into a room and tell you what all the significant relationships are.[ref needed]

The purpose of this entry is to record some personal opinions and observations about what sort of things appeal to guys. There's nothing authoritative, comprehensive or even scholarly about this. It's just personal observation. It's meant to help if your style tends to attract more girls than boys, and you want to balance it out... or if you want to target male readers... or if you have a masculine character and you're trying to get a handle on its thinking... But I'll be the first to acknowledge that this entry might not be useful at all. Anyway, good luck.

Basic Tension
The tension from guy stories arises from competition and sacrifice. More on these below.

Competition:
Fight the foe, beat the other guy for the job, win the race. Guys get hot over striving to achieve when there's an adversary who's as strong as you or stronger. A competition needs an adversary, a prize and a price.

Adversaries: We don't care if it's a human adversary, an animal (e.g. Moby Dick), or even an environmental adversary (e.g. a mountain). We like our adversaries to be concrete, material and well recognised, so we can compete with them. The bigger and tougher, the better. It drives us crazy if our adversaries are diffuse, intangible and unknowable or frequently shifting. We need to know who our competition is, or we'll feel that the game is rigged.

Prizes: The best prizes for guys are based on the things that turn us on most. No bones about it here. We love power, wealth, social status and access to the best chicks. This is all in aid of giving us healthy brawny progeny who look up to us and respect us.

Prices: A strong adversary always exacts a price. We're willing to pay something that we don't value so much to gain or protect something that we do. In increasing order of importance to us are:

pain & discomfort < bodily integrity (e.g. having all our organs) < health < wealth < safety < belonging < power & status < justice < our dignity < procreation rights < our children.

The order of these things can change some over our lifetimes; I think this list most suits 20-50ish male readers.

If we trade lower value for much higher, it's probably a happy ending. If we trade higher value for lower, it's a tragedy. If we trade higer value for much lower, it's a farce. If the two things are close in value but we come out slightly ahead, it's bittersweet. Simple, huh?

Sacrifice: This is about paying the price to claim what we want or defend what we have. Part of being a male hero is knowing just how much you have to pay up front, then paying it willingly, and bearing the price stoically. The bigger the sacrifice, the better the hero you are. But if you don't know the price and it gets taken from you without your knowledge, then you're a fool.

Sample Themes

A lot of themes in guy stories come about from variations on basic guy tension. E.g. Talent vs Experience, Ambition vs Friendship, Independence vs Dependence, Courage, Honour, Justice, Equity, Sacrifice, Duty, Leadership, Loyalty, Tribes & Cultures. The tensions arising from these themes depend on how the themes hook up to our masculine value system, and this affects the kinds of stories you can tell. For instance, if you place Ambition (Power & Status) vs Friendship (Belonging and Justice) you're probably either going to tell a bittersweet story or a tragedy.

Exposition Ideas

Guys respond well to stories told in terms they can grapple with. We are waaay better with space, objects and tangibles than intangibles like relationships and emotions. That's why we like to know who the competition is very early on.

A lot of guys can't immerse themselves in pure emotion for long. We don't know how to handle it. You can give us intense emotion as long as there's some problem-solving or doing to be done. So prolonged sentiment for its own sake is a no-no, but sentiment tied to
challenge or conflict is a winner. Give us an emotional problem and we'll often shove it to the back while we paint the fence.

I once described a typical guy inner monologue as "Gotta do this thing. Gotta do this thing... Man, it's gettin' tough here, but I
gotta do this thing." This in contrast to my take on a typical female inner monologue as "What if.. yes, but what if... On the
other hand, what if... But still.. what if..."

Don't ask us to empathise or understand other people from the inside-out, or even worry about it too much. We're okay at
predicting externally from behaviour, but we can't necessarily say why the behaviour occurs.

Tribalism (Belonging) is our substitute for intimacy. Guys often get the same sense of value and worth by doing stuff together (especially silly or unusual stuff - the "male bonding" thing) that women can get by sharing intimacy. I feel that tribalism is a real issue for guys today, because there's tension between values-based tribalism (Tribes who believe the same things), and fetish-based tribalism (Tribes who own and display the same things). Thus Belonging and Justice make for good topical stories just now.

The "BFG" factor counts. Guys like tools, because tools are Power and Status for us. It doesn't have to be
guns - it can be anything that leverages power, solves problems and makes us more efficient or effective. We scout and hoard such stuff like a squirrel hoards nuts. Many guys take a perverse satisfaction in having the right tool for the job.

We also like trophies - they convey are Status which ranks highly with us. Guys will die for medals and pennants. A kiss on the cheek by way of thanks is nice, but a hanky to tie around the head is better - especially if it's a token of access to the Breeding Women, or a symbol of Justice or Dignity.

Viscerally we find it hard to resist a test of courage, endurance, strength, charisma or wit, because winning enhances our Status and our Dignity. Add a trophy and we're hooked - especially if it's a one-of-a-kind multi-purpose tool that opens the lock of someone's chastity belt.

In terms of lust, most guys are visual. We can get excited about a blancmange if it's the right shape. As a secondary factor we like to
be admired. Especially in those things in which we like to be tested.

Skimming over my list, if you dumb it down and bang it together you have the tropes of 1930s pulp fantasy, for instance. But the challenge is to *not* make it dumb. Guys aren't dumb - only our visceral programming is simple. So make your stories smart, challenging, interesting. Tie in topical themes; abstract the tropes and make them more sophisticated.

There's no reason that this stuff has to appear on its own either. You can add it to stuff of appeal to women too, or stuff that is of
general appeal. Jokes aside, guys aren't really allergic to "girl cooties" - the problem's that when that's all there is, they can lose interest because it doesn't hit them viscerally enough.

Converting Themes into Fantasy Plots

2007-01-17T16:16:00.000+11:00

I've been wrestling with this one for a while. If you have a theme that you'd like to explore in a fantasy genre, how can you develop it into a plot that is interesting, suitably tense and justifies the use of the fantasy genre?

It is way easier to take an idea for an interesting fantasy story and develop the themes, than the reverse. The problem is that any theme can be explored in so many ways. Moreover, stories often have more than one theme, but inventing a story that can explore two distinct themes seems extremely difficult. Anyway, here's an approach that I'm looking to try.

Explore the theme through real-world situations- Seek examples that bring out the human face of the story, and that throw the competing issues into stark relief. Try to find situations that offer a good crucible, and that relate to your target audience.
Convert the issues and stakes into symbols - Turn fears into monsters. Turn strengths into items. Turn inner wisdom into external advisors. Turn personal development issues into quests. Carve conflicting viewpoints into competing characters. Consider the use of metaphor and allegory from fairytale or any mythological source. Don't overlook mythic stories that may already have covered these themes. Ensure that the symbols will be of interest to your target audience
Exaggerate! Use the freedoms of fantasy to exaggerate and dramatise the conflicts, the stakes and the opponents. Fantasy is largely a caricature of reality.
Reset: Reset the characters and real-world situation and its symbols in a fantasy setting that offers a good crucible. Sketch the key elements of that setting
Redraft the plot: Retell the plot in the new fantasy setting. Check that the fantasy magnifies the tension, represents the themes you wanted, makes the story more accessible, interesting and engaging than the original story.

Example
I want to write a fantasy story targeting twentysomething males, about the difficulties of holding friendships while you pursue ambition. I feel that this is a topical theme for them because of the immense pressure they're under to succeed, and the level of competition they have with one another at that age. Moreover, Gen-Y men have a very cynical, transactional view of relationships that makes it hard to form close friendships, and yet their friends are the only people who really understand the pressures they're under.

Real world situations

A bunch of these come to mind, e.g.:

(i) Two young friends competing for the same job and one may be cheating or be tempted to sabotage the other.
(ii) One friend has to manage another friend, and is forced to fire him.
(iii) A subordinate knows that his friend is screwing up, but might replace him if he lets it happen.
(iv) A rival company offers one guy a huge promotion if he screws his friend and workmate.

I like (iv) best. Let's go with that. Here's some meat for the bones:

Modern Storyline Draft:

Two childhood friends grow up together, and one saves the other's life at some peril. They pledge to always remain friends. They go to the same schools and colleges and eventually both become attorneys. One becomes a public prosecutor while the other goes into a defence practice. But when a high profile murder brings them into conflict, the defender uncovers scandalous information that will free the guilty party and destroy his friend's career.

This is meaty enough to be a good story in itself. Now let's look at making a fantasy story out of it.

Fantasy Symbols

I think we need key fantasy symbols for their jobs, their friendship, their conflict, the temptation and the betrayal.
Mythically, there are some great betrayal stories, such as Adam and Eve, MacBeth & Banquo, Romulus & Remus, Cain and Abel, Arthur and Launcelot. But none of these jump out at me, so lets just look for symbols.

Their jobs: in the modern context, they are lawyers - champions of justice. That suggests knights perhaps, or samurai. They're also investigators, and that could mean a wizard, an inquisitor or perhaps even a priest. Knights are the most promising, but lets keep the options open.

Their friendship: it's easy to save one another's life in a fantasy world, but it would be good to give their friendship pledge a symbol - a ring is suitable. It doesn't need to be magical - it's just a symbol.

The conflict: In the modern context it was a legal battle over a murder case. That works fine in a fantasy context too - especially if they're knights. So let's go with that. For the conflict to work, each knight would need to be a champion of a rival party - say, two rival noble families.

The temptation: They're ambitious knights, and so a reward like lands or a noble title would make for a nice temptation.

The betrayal: Honour is vital to a knight. A scandal that dishonoured him would destroy him. So that can be the betrayal.

Exaggerate!

It's a fantasy world, so let's go to town here. Here are some ideas:

When the friend saved his buddy's life, it was defending him against a huge bear. He has terrible scars from it, and a limp.
The ring of friendship is beautifully crafted with a suitable motto: "Friends unto death"
The murder isn't just a shooting for money, say. It's a treacherous poisoning for power
The knights aren't just sparring in a courtroom - they're forced (reluctantly) to duel each other for justice and their very lives!
The "defending" knight is offered poison to use against his childhood friend - so he's being tempted into betrayal too

Reset

This is a fantasy kingdom with rival noble families competing for power. A weak king holds the throne, and treachery and intrigue is the norm. Justice is administered by knights, but their upkeep is paid for by the noble families, and so it's hard to keep politics and honour separate. Being a knight is a great and noble thing, but it's expensive and requires a patron, and that is why the two friends become knights of rival families. They joust one another in friendly rivalry at tournaments, but never imagined that they would be forced to fight to the death one day.

The New Story - Draft

When young Seriol saved the life of Cynhafal, the childhood friends swore a pact: that they shall both become knights together, and always remain friends. Fifteen years later, they are now successful and ambitious knights, but they are sponsored by rival noble families, and a weak king is on the throne. When Sir Cynhafal is ordered to investigate a suspicious death in his patron's family, the evidence leads to proof of a poisoning by Lord Marok, the patron of Sir Seriol, and the promise of title and lands for the young knight. But when Sir Seriol is also implicated, Cynhafal is forced to confront his childhood friend to fight for justice, and his very life.

Sanity check

Do we still have the right themes? I think so. We still have loyalty vs ambition - especially if Seriol is implicated in the poisoning. A theme of justice vs ambition also crept in during the modern story, but that hasn't hurt the tale at all. The roles of prosecutor and defender have swapped in the fantasy version, but I don't think that's a big deal.

Is it more interesting, engaging, accessible? I think so. The stakes are higher, and I think this story has broader appeal - to teens, say and older men too. The fantasy has allowed us to exaggerate, add more sentiment to the story, and I think it's better off for that. It's also made the story much less about evidence and concept and more about relationships and values, which was the intention.

Lessons learned

This seems like not a bad way to devise fantasy plots from modern themes, provided that you can tell a modern story as an example of the theme, and provided that you have a lot of fantasy symbols to draw from. Choice of the right fantasy symbol is critical. My first attempt with this method used apprentice wizards, and it got stalled because wizards are less like lawyers than knights are.

Secrets of boy fantasy: theme ideas

2007-01-17T13:07:00.000+11:00

Oh gawd.. I know I'll get a bunch of pron links to this entry; I'll have to make it friends-only.

Someone once said that fantasy is the art of symbolic exaggeration. (Actually, I think it was me.) The best fantasy takes an idea that puzzles or bothers us, exaggerates the hell out of it using speculative elements, then tosses it in a pot and sets it on boil. Examples include Red Riding Hood (innocence vs lust), Lord of the Rings (Pastoral vs military/industrial England), Wizard of Earthsea (ambition vs humility).

Girls have plenty of fantasy just now to keep them occupied. Themes include things like love vs independence, love vs duty, independence vs duty, safety vs independence, honesty vs belonging... Not all of the themes are specifically girly (though a lot are), but the treatments (created by choice of character, situation, imagery) are often quite girly regardless.

Boys don't get as good a shake in fantasy just now - or so I feel. So in this post I'm looking to brainstorm a few topical, modern boy-friendly themes and situations and see if I can't come up with some ideas for boy-friendly fantasy.

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I may or may not write about any of these. If you're on my friends list, you're welcome to have a crack at any of them, regardless. If you like one, grab it and let me know. If you want to add any, you're welcome too. If there's joint interest in any of them, then it may be an opportunity to help one another or compare notes.

I'm listing them in table form, in the following format: Topic (general subject matter), Theme (specific aspect considered), Rationale (why I think this is relevant). For some themes I'll develop sample situations later on and show how speculative elements might exaggerate and enhance the issues.

**Fantasy Theme Ideas for Younger Guys**
Topic	Themes	Rationale
Career	Talent vs experience Status vs age Ambition vs friendships	Modern young men can have enormous ambition, and want rewards instantly and frequently. The failure of their environment to reward them creates internal stresses - especially when their friends are competing with them. In cases where they succeed ahead of their age, they can suffer stresses over friendships. This can create a great deal of cynicism and reserve.
Relation-ships	Independence vs finances Commitment vs insecurity Friendships vs success Ambition vs reciprocity Convenience vs loyalty Trust vs self-sufficiency Respect vs envy	Young men can bridle at their dependence on their families, but feel trapped by economic dependence created by high real estate prices. They often have no vision for long-term relationships, and no confidence in their ability to sustain the relationships they have. I'm not clear how their friendships and social networks will survive their own successes. They are growing in a cut-throat world where ambition and convenience contend with notions of reciprocity and loyalty. They seem singularly ill-equipped to recognise or resolve these issues.
Spirit	Faith vs cynicism Courage vs caution Generosity vs avarice	Young men live in a world bombarded by advertising, manipulation and deception. They are expected to be self-sufficient early, and therefore mistakes come hard, and are difficult to get past. They believe that the world is indifferent, and are therefore reluctant to be brave when their own stakes are at risk. Born to a materialistic world they think there is never enough - and so generosity is hard to come by, while envy is easy.
Society & World Events	Tolerance vs traditions Passivity vs interventionism Values-based vs Fetish-based tribalism	This is the first generation born and raised to environments of political correctness and enforced multiculturalism. In an environment where conflicts of culture and tradition are generally avoided and denied, how do they handle it when cultural clashes come to the foreground and in their face? Globalisation and economic interdependence is driving increased military and economic interventionism in other countries. Since these are the young men who typically spearhead the activities, how do they feel about what they are doing? Guys often depend on tribalism in the same way that women depend on intimacy. But who is our tribe? Is it the people whose values we share, or is it the ones who own and display the same symbols? This is increasingly confused, especially for young men.

Who Let the Chix Take Over Fantasy?

2007-01-14T20:07:00.000+11:00

Dragons with long eyelashes, talking ponies, clever prostitutes, swirling capes, pretty-boy bards who don't actually do anything... Who the hell let the girls take over Fantasy!?

Why, we boys did, of course.

Speculative Elements in Psychological Stories

2007-01-13T08:28:00.000+11:00

I've been experimenting with how to get speculative elements to support psychological stories... this in an endeavour to reconcile what I want to write with what I most frequently read.

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Psychological stories can work well with almost any genre. Among the speculative genres (horror, science fiction and fantasy) we have psychological stories like The Silence of the Lambs., Minority Report and Soldier of the Mist. There's a whole sub-genre of horror called psychological horror; in fantasy there's a subgenre called magical realism that's also very psychological. But nobody's invented a name for psychological Science Fiction that I know of.

Integrating speculative and psychological elements isn't trivial. You can't just tell a psychological story in a fantasy world, say, and have it work. Here's one I did as an experiment and posted to OWW-sff-writing, for example:

Log-line:
When spoiled merchant-son Siel was introduced to the famous Gerol in the capital, the Master Bard was delighted by the young man's sensibilities, and took him immediately for an apprentice. But when Gerol dies while travelling four months later, Siel is left penniless in a harsh and remote mining town that neither values nor respects his musical talents. Encumbered by an extreme delicacy of disposition, can Siel manage to survive and find his own destiny?

Draft synopsis (broken by scenes):

In a rough mining town, a bizarre altercation with a coachman over picky details leaves Siel without transport or coin.
We learn that Gerol is buried in a rude grave nearby.
Flash back to Gerol meeting Siel's parents, who introduce their son. We learn of Gerol's fame and arrogance;
Siel's delicacy and some hint of the reasons for it, are also revealed
Having dispatched a plaintive letter to his family for help, and another to the noble whom Gerol was to have visited, Siel tries to earn lodging by playing music in an inn. His attitude offends the patrons.
He tries to work off his lodging in the kitchen, but botches that too.
He is beaten, his fine instrument wrecked, and he spends the night by Gerol's grave.
Days later, now ill and starving, he falls in with some "flash gentlemen", lured by their lifestyle, but finds himself duped, wounded and dying.
A butcher's girl takes him in, and the kindness of her family indebts him. He begins to work alongside them in a job that
he finds very distasteful.
Despite the gruesome work, the family treats him with respect and good humour.
While listening to the butcher's wife sing, he begins to realise that his musical talent was never really as good as he
thought, after all.
He discusses this with the wife, and begins to realise that who he is, is more important than what he has or what job he does.
A carriage arrives from Siel's family, but he sends it away.

Discussion:
This is an okay story-line maybe - I mean, it hangs together - but it's not grabby. Here's what I think is wrong with it:

Character's aren't very exciting: Who cares about some talentless kid and some blustering master bard? We don't empathise with them, but we're not adequately repulsed or horrified by them either. Some of that could be corrected in the story-telling, but a more interesting line-up would help too.
It's set in a world we're not going to care about: the world somehow needs to connect with the story. This would be a better tale set in the Wild West say, with a Parisienne cellist. Or a modern rock-star in the remote Australian mining town of Katherine. They're richer settings for the story, and you don't need to do any world-building to access them.
Speculative elements have nothing to do with plot: if it's a fantasy world, say, then how does the magic link to Siel's situation? What's the role of music in magic?
Imagery doesn't yet support theme: a key theme here was derived from one of the aspects of Gluttony - Delicacy. Psychological stories can capitalise greatly on imagery of setting, but there's nothing special in this setting that does so.

So this tells me that if you want to write a psychological story, the speculative elements should help to: make the setting and characters more exciting and relevant, the plot more interesting, and the imagery more vivid.

Actually, thinking about it, this probably applies to spec fic in non-psychological tales too.

Duh!

Escaping the Escapism

2007-01-13T08:14:00.000+11:00

I've been fond of speculative fiction since I was a kid. Even though my tastes broadened through my teens and adulthood, I still make a bee-line for the SFF and horror shelves whenever I enter a book store. But is it just me or has there been a general decline in spec fic quality in the last 20 years?

Sure, the good stuff is still pretty darn good, but it's a long time between drinks and the less than good stuff has gotten worse than mediocre. There's a lot of escapism these days (e.g. in fantasy/romance, paranormal/romance and science fiction/romance), and not much bite. Increasingly I recoil from the sheer amount of romance on the spec fic shelves, and take refuge in the crime or literary shelves - not that I object to romance, but I do object to a diet of pure romance stories.

Critics of Spec fic may say things like:

Like other genres spec fic is mainly escapism. It shouldn't be seen as "serious" literature because it's not challenging or confrontational enough. (This strikes me as both arbitrary and self-fulfilling. If it's literary like Orwell's 1984 then it immediately sheds its spec fic stigma and jumps to another shelf in the bookstore.)
If it comes to escapism, I prefer thrillers, crime or romance anyway because they're just more relevant to what I care about - namely: world security, public order, and finding a decent relationship. (Actually, I think this is a fair point; the onus is on a genre to keep itself relevant to its audience; and maybe thriller, crime and romance genres have absorbed some of both spec fic content and market)
Devotees of spec fic are generally nerdies who get married at Star Trek conventions, wearing Spock ears; I don't want to be thought of as a nerdy and so I don't want spec fic on my book-shelf. (Sadly true; I don't know why spec fic conspicuously draws readers with poor social skills while crime, romance and thriller genres seem to have quite normal devotees)
Sure - JK Rowling, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Steven King, Clive Barker, Anne Rice and others have made bazillions from spec fic, but that just proves that the only successful spec fic these days is franchised, syndicated and mass-produced. (Or rather, that the dwindling market for spec fiction is now conservative in both readership and publication/production, and responds best to strong branding, big budgets, simple storylines and established marketing formulas)

I have no wish to wave a "Save Speculative Fiction" placard. There's a general move from written fiction to oral fiction anyway just because of the changes to entertainment technologies, and that affects all authors. Since mid last century, our concerns have indeed moved more to social issues, world security, law and order and relationship security, and that is inevitably reflected in the fiction we buy - both in content and how it's marketed. Thrillers, crime stories and romances have gotten more speculative (e.g. the emergence of paranormal romance as a subgenre), while science fiction, fantasy and horror have grown more romantic and social - so there's a shift in categories.

But I do wonder whether spec fic authors are asking themselves why they're using speculative devices in the first place - is it just from habit, or is there some particular point?

Speculative devices used to be engaged to help explore technologies (though now people are more interested in society than technology), justify wonderful, low-cost character transformations (does anyone believe in those any more?) or explain the existence of something really creepy to readers whose world was fairly safe (most readers now don't feel safe on their block).

I question whether those old uses are really so relevant any more. Our audiences are cynical, well-informed, worldly-wise. While they're now free from the fears of the Cold War, the modern fears of local and international crime are if anything, more immediate. Technology is no longer mysterious and alluring; it's a commodity. Our biggest horrors are our neighbours and co-workers.

I wonder whether speculative elements should not be used now to exaggerate and dramatise new issues, rather than reprising old issues, whether our "genre blinkers" are still so tight that authors are blindly following genre traditions laid fifty years ago and more - trying to recreate the stories that entertained them, rather than carving new and more interesting paths for a changed readership.

Fiction is not escapism if it challenges us to reflect more clearly, and think in new ways. At its best, that's what speculative fiction, like any other fiction, has always managed to do.

Nuts and Bolts of Designing Psychological Fiction: Plot

2007-01-13T08:06:00.000+11:00

I read fiction fairly eclectically - most genres, mainstream, classics and poky little things it's hard to give a name to. Since I started trying to write fiction in earnest though, I noticed that I enjoy a psychological story better than most other kinds of fiction.

More about the nuts and bolts of psych fiction plots here.

What is a psychological story? Wikipedia describes it as:

a work of prose fiction which places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization, and on the motives, circumstances, an internal action which springs from, and develops, external action.

Put simply, a psychological story focuses on the changes inside a character, and the nuts and bolts of those changes.

For this reason, psychological stories are more a quality of fiction than a marketing category. You can find them in genre fiction (e.g. crime, horror, romance, fantasy, science fiction) and mainstream literature too. Because it's a quality rather than a category, you can say that a story is more or less psychological, but you can't really say that a story is or isn't psychological - if it has characters with motives then there will be some sort of psychology in there somewhere.

Take the example of Shakespeare's MacBeth: you have a successful leader, driven by pride and ambition to do things that we wouldn't normally do: he kills his King, betrays and kills his friends. That he does this isn't terribly interesting. What attracts us is why someone so successful would push it so far and subsequently destroy himself - what makes him different to us? At core, it's a psychological story.

In regular fiction the interest and tension can usually be captured by five basic elements: You have a Character (or set of characters) in a Threatening Situation, and there are certain Objectives which are somehow hindered by some Opposition, and the hindrance can lead to some kind of Disaster. (This is nicely summarised and illustrated by Robert L. Ferrier in his Fiction Craft series).

But because the scope and scale of psychological fiction is different, the starting line-up is a bit different too. The scope (or what's in the story) has a strong internal focus, and that often (but not always) means less external focus. The scale (or where the emphasis is) tends to focus on the minutiae of the character's perceptions, thoughts and feelings. I have tried to find a good essay that describes a nice starting line-up for psychological plots, but haven't tracked one down. In the interim, I drew on some ideas from psychotherapy.

In trying to understand a patient, a therapist may look for:

Personality: what kind of person they are
Patterning: the habits and strategies by which they deal with stress and conflict, and pursue their objectives
History: the historical reasons that those patterns exist, and why they're strong. Also the influences that shape self-image and self-direction.
Trigger: whatever situation it is that's making this become problematic - i.e. what's the cause that's bringing them to therapy?
Impacts: the comparative costs or potential costs of facing/not facing the problem

Linking that to our story line-up, we have something like this:

Character: personality, history
Pathology: some kind of patterning that is going to cause the character problems. For MacBeth it's his ambition. This substitutes for "Opposition" in a regular story line-up.
Situation: this is the Trigger that makes the pathology suddenly a major problem
Stakes: something to do with personality, history or pathology that puts the character into internal conflict; in a psychological story a character usually has conflicted Objectives.
Impacts: this does the same job as "Disaster" in a regular story. Psychological stories are usually stories of double-binds... you're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't.

What attracts me about psychological fiction is that it makes us question ourselves. Psych fiction usually has either a sympathetic character in a strange situation, or an unsympathetic character in a sympathetic situation - but seldom a sympathetic character in a sympathetic situation - because then it's hard to get the inner tension.

The Wolf at the Door likes psychological fiction because wolves are merciless and highly effective psychologists. They use psychology all the time in their own socialisation and hunting, and I suspect that they would often laugh at our own feeble and hamstrung psychologies, if they ever bothered to think about them.

(Thanks to Mrs Draba as well as E!, Margaret Fisk and other contributors of OWW-SFF-writing for the conversations that assisted this discussion)

Why a Wolf at the Door?

2007-01-13T08:00:00.000+11:00

Wolves are the most romanticised, idealised, demonised and misunderstood creatures on earth. They're precursors of dogs, yet they're not dogs and in trying to understand them as "wild dogs" we do our heads in. There's substantial evidence that wolves civilised us and in doing so, became dogs. I love them for it.

More about wolves.... and Doors.

Wolves are civilised, but theirs is not a human civilisation. They bite, but only as much as they intend and only when it's appropriate under their own laws. They can take offense and punish you for it, but they're not predisposed to do so, and they give plenty of warning. They are playful and curious, but it's the play and curiosity of a predator. It's a wicked world; they're adapted to enjoy it.

I envision my writing as playing the role a very large, solitary wolf sitting in your back-yard, watching you hang out the laundry, or poking its nose into your kitchen, watching you work. You may not be aware of its regard at first, but eventually you are.

Wolves have learned to be afraid of man for good reason - we have persecuted them terribly. They don't usually poke their noses into peoples' affairs. But what if they did? What if, knowing us as well as they have for hundreds of thousands of years, they started asking questions?

I want the wolf's regard to make you self-conscious and uncomfortable without savaging your leg or ripping at your sheets. I want it to remind you where you came from and what you really are. I want it to make you think about your morality and aspirations, how they came about and what underpins them. I want it to make you question your relationships, your habits, your personality, to see both dark and light in these things and to see that in the end, those things don't matter so much as how you engage the world you're in.

Sometimes it helps to have a smart predator watch us work.

(Thanks to the US Fish and Wildlife Service for the public domain wolf images used on this site.)