Tag: full of theories

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Robin Hood and the Problem of Domestic Fantasy

So I’ve been thinking, off and on, about why it is that we see a lot of novels about King Arthur and not a lot of novels about Robin Hood. You get Robin Hood movies, sure, but books, not so many, only a handful. I was rewatching Disney’s animated version not that long ago, and a particular image got my attention.

Robin Hood and Little John were doing their laundry.

While Disney’s Robin Hood is really great on gender stuff–Robin Hood clearly can’t cook because he’s a lovesick fool, not because he’s a guy and Little John, who can, fixes the ruined stew for him; they do laundry; when Lady Cluck says “this is no place for a lady!”, she clearly means “for a gently reared person,” because she charges immediately into the fray herself, to the tune of On Wisconsin*–this is not the only Robin Hood that features laundry in Sherwood Forest. In fact Sherwood Forest is strikingly domestic, for a mythic setting.

I think this is perhaps the problem with getting it into novels.

Jo Walton, when talking about writing Lifelode, has discussed the problems of domestic fantasy, how conflict and war tend to creep into books that are otherwise trying to focus on the daily and the smaller-focus, just structurally–that we have an addiction to the grand and the dramatic, as a genre, even when we are trying not to. And I think that the Robin Hood myth actually runs into this problem. Sure, there is swashbuckling. There is the dramatic. But it is the dramatic image. It is the arrow going into the target; it is the Merry Man swinging into a tree. It is not the dramatic tension, because we all know the precursors for the ending are historical, not personal.

Because of Robin Hood’s near-unique place in western legend, straddling myth and history so neatly, the story’s ending can’t be refitted without upending actual history. The end of the Robin Hood story is that actual, historical Good King Richard returns from the Crusades and ends the usurped reign of his brother, actual, historical Prince John. So…what, exactly, are Our Band of Merry Men doing? They can’t actually resolve their own problems in any lasting way. And fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham starts to look an awfully lot like doing the laundry if you’re never allowed to either beat him (slay/depose him) or have him beat you on any permanent basis. Oh, it’s Monday: time to wash out our green jerkins and hassle the Sheriff’s men. Oh, it’s Tuesday: time to go to market for turnips and shoot some arrows into Prince John’s tax collectors’ hats. But not into the tax collectors themselves! Because resolution is not in our purview. We resist. Others resolve.

The jerkins will get dirty again, the turnips will go again into the stew, the taxes will get collected again. The camera can fool the eye with pageantry into feeling that there has been progress from arrow shot to arrow shot. But on the page of a novel, it’s very hard to make a holding action against entropy feel like heroism. Even though it’s the main heroism any of us achieve on a daily basis. Even though it is a heroism worth having.

Try again, someone; I would have another domestic fantasy, or a Robin Hood novel that grapples with this, or both. But for the moment at least, I am not the one to write it.

*Multiple associations with north of one place or another. Willingness to throw shoulders in a brawl and clown for children. Bosom capacious enough for storage. Can we say “Marissa’s identification character?” CLUCKY I LOVE YOU.

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Back from Starry Coast

So last week I spent a week in a beach house in Charleston doing the Starry Coast writers’ workshop with ten strangers. No longer strangers after a week together! I had very little idea what to expect, other than the immediate practicalities, but I went in with a great deal of hope, a bunch of chocolate to share, and a theory that I could deal with almost anything for a limited time.

It. Was. Great.

I am used to coming out of critiquing sessions and having to think a long time about what I want to do with the ideas I got there. While the ideas here were diverse and sometimes contradictory (as they should be!), I got so much clarity of path that I’ve been doing the revisions right away before my local writers’ group meeting, rather than waiting to triangulate from it. I really loved how much variety in project there was, and how the structure of the workshop let us line up with the manuscripts we had the most to say to in the in-depth critiques. I came out of it so energized and ready to do this project and also the next, completely unrelated one. I am also prepared to boost the other projects when they’re done and ready for some cheerleading, because there is some serious stuff going on there. You’ve seen the post-workshop smugs of, “I got to read that first!” before, and I’m sure you’ll see them again from me. (Because I did.)

When I’ve read other people talking about this sort of workshop setting in the past, they have burbled about sitting out on the porch looking at the ocean to critique their novels, and I have gone, yeah, okay, ocean, porch, whatever. But! We sat out on the porch looking at the ocean to critique our novels and it was so great! I think it was Desirina who pointed out that a certain amount of relaxation helps, and that was definitely the case here. For one of the crits it was raining gently. There were dolphins in the sea going by.

And the sea. Oh my dears.

So…the vertigo, as I told you before I left, continued terrible. But I wanted, oh, how I wanted, to go in the Atlantic anyway. In addition to having no sense of balance whatsoever, I have gas permeable contacts–you know, the little tiny ones that wash easily out of one’s eyes–and no sport goggles or even sport band for my glasses. So: no sense of balance, no ability to navigate the beach with my cane or get into the water safely, no ability to tell up from down once in the water, very limited vision.

I packed my swimsuit anyway. I knew I couldn’t do it by myself. I thought, well, if there isn’t a time when the weather is good, if there isn’t a way the beach is situated so I can do it with help…most importantly, if I don’t decide that I can trust anybody to help me…we’ll just see what happens. No assumptions.

You can see what’s coming. Everyone there, everyone, everyone was beyond wonderful about my vertigo. Seriously. All week long. I’m choking up writing this, because I literally cannot imagine that they could have been better if it had been planned around me, which of course it wasn’t. Nobody was sitting around fussing, that would have been far worse. People went off and did things without me that I couldn’t do all the time, and that was great, that was how it should be, because if they were hovering going, “Now…no one can do anything if Marissa can’t do it too!” that would have been awful. But. I cannot think of one single person who did not very casually help me out, offer assistance when it was needed, take a moment to seamlessly take their turn being the one to see that something was bothering me and lend a hand. Every. Last. Person.

If you haven’t dealt with a balance disorder, you might be thinking, oh, well, good, you got nice people. Or even “good people.” And I did. But nice people, good people, even people who know me well, screw this stuff up all the time. I’m pretty sure that at least one of the four people who kicked my cane out from under me coming home in the Atlanta airport was probably a very nice person–they just weren’t paying attention. For the workshop I got nice, good people who happened to be observant in the right ways to make dealing with my very nasty health problem as easy as it could possibly be under the circumstances. I am so grateful to every single one of them for that.

So on Friday when we didn’t have anything else going on, Molly and Michael helped me into the ocean. They each took an arm and held me steady, and they helped me out as deep as I wanted to go and let me experience it, vertigo and all. It was amazing. It was a three-dimensionally utterly disorienting experience, because the sand does what wet sand does under your feet, and so the only solid points of reference I had in the universe were their arms. But I felt utterly safe. They were not going to let anything happen to me. And Molly is a natural at guiding people with a balance disorder, saying what the terrain is going to do and what’s going to happen with the waves. In the middle of it all, the sun came out from clouds and was even more dazzling to my vision, and my inner ear started doing very slow backflips (that is, axis of reference doing complete spins so that up was at some points literally down), so if there was some kind of space station salt water sand and pool system, it would probably be very much like that, terrain leaving under your feet as you stepped, water coming up at intervals utterly unpredictable to you, light feeling more or less omnidirectional, only sensation and the safety of trust in other humans doing what they said they would.

I referred to going in afterwards as “sobering up,” because it very much was. The aftershocks stayed with my system significantly for hours and hours afterwards, the sensation in my feet and my balance system of who-knew-what. Unnerving. Fascinating. Worth it.

The thing about a balance disorder is that you get very accustomed to what you can and cannot do safely, and having something that feels new, that is new, but that is also completely safe–that’s rare and precious. I haven’t captured a tenth of it here. It was a great gift.

There were other lovely things that were much more mundane and easy to describe–cooking and eating other people’s cooking/baking, going out for meals, going to the Hunley museum, playing games, hanging out talking until all hours, companionable reading in the common living area–so great, so great.

I’m paying for it now. I did basically the second half of the workshop entirely on adrenaline. Food is not at all my friend right now (I failed at gelato, just for reference–I made a try at a bowl of homemade gelato and failed), and I am so disoriented that when I woke up in the middle of the night the other night, I had zero physical cues for where I might be. Like, up, down, sideways, who even knows. It was the level of disorientation where you hold very still because the bed might or might not decide to abandon you, and without any sense of gravity, you have no idea which direction will be the wrong one that will make it do that. So I’m trying to get a little better rested, hoping that the meds will kick in (ANY MINUTE NOW DAMMIT)…and still revising this novel as many hours a day as I can manage, because the next one is breathing down its neck.

Everyone needs to spend time on how to get better. No matter what stage you’re at, no matter what kind of thing you’re doing, you need to spend the time with other people examining it, turning it over, thinking about what makes it work and what could make it work better. And this was a week dedicated to that in some very concrete ways. I wish that for all of you, whatever it is that you’re doing, at whatever level.

So: workshop. Yeah. Hell yeah.

I didn’t catch up on things like posting the link to the interview F&SF did about my story, and then tonight I saw a best stories of the year so far link on IO9 mentioning that very same story. I am pleased and abashed and feeling like I am not doing my share to promote the issue of F&SF it’s in. But honestly, at the moment the thing about “I would forget my head if it wasn’t attached” is particularly apropos because it doesn’t feel as though it is. So if there’s something I should be doing for you in the next little bit and you’re afraid I’ve forgotten, please remind me! I don’t mean to have forgotten.

Oh, one last somewhat relevant thing in that regard: I had already read Robert’s gorgeous first novel The Glittering World before the workshop, and now I know him, and he is doing an audiobook Kickstarter! Audiobooks are important for access! Audiobooks are fun for the whole family!…um…the whole parts of the family you will allow to listen to really dark fantasy, anyway. Maybe just the more grown-up parts of the family in this case. Anyway, go check it out.

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The bits you bring along

Most pieces of writing advice have a flip side, especially since most pieces of writing advice can be interpreted multiple ways. One of my favorites to shake my head over is “omit unnecessary words.”

Kids, it’s the unnecessary words that make a story come to life.

The things that feel necessary to you but are unnecessary to other people: that’s style. (Tim said that, and I think he’s right.) That doesn’t mean that you should slather on adverbs. It means that you’re the one who sees from your eyes, and that has repercussions in every inch of the story.

Let’s talk about Ghostbusters. Say you’re trying to describe the very first Ghostbusters movie, what it’s about, who’s in it. If you were trying to do it from scratch from a plot or characters, you could set it anywhere. You could set it in an everycity Gotham. And in fact Tim and I entertained ourselves mightily imagining Venkman or Stantz going around the US selling rights to Ghostbusters franchises and what those would be like–the Chicago franchise laying Old Lady Leary’s ghost to rest, the very bored Cedar Rapids, IA, franchise, and of course the giant, shifting, almost completely African-American and Seminole cast of hundreds that is the New Orleans chapter of the Ghostbusters. (Anybody who would not watch Ghostbusters: New Orleans for at least, like, six seasons, do not bother to notify me, just see yourself quietly out.)

And y’know–New York is not the oldest American city. It’s not the ghost-iest. (See above re: NEW ORLEANS.) What it was–was the city that the people who were making that movie at that time needed to write a love song to. It was the extra part they brought with them. That kind of extra that is not strictly necessary makes all the other parts sing. It gets you up the Statue of Liberty instead of the Sears Tower at the end. Instead of up the CN Tower, or instead of out in the harbor on the Constitution, or instead of on the Ambassador Bridge, or wherever your love song to your city takes you.*

Because this stuff is extra. It really is. You leave it out of the synopsis for a reason. Because if you put in your synopsis, “Dear Editor and/or Agent: This book is about how much I love my city, or my mother, or that color the sky turns when the sun is gone but it’s not quite night yet,” it doesn’t help them know whether you’ve pulled it off, and it makes them suspect you didn’t do the other bits. So you have to say the necessary bits, the “This movie is about four men who love each other very much even though one of them is a jerk and they just met another one, and they make slimy ghosts go away and have witty banter” part.

But if you didn’t bring the part that didn’t look necessary, no one’s going to care.

If every part of the story is a part where you could have handed someone the plot synopsis and they’d do it the same as you, well, let ’em try.

People phrase this as “tell the story only you can tell,” but then they go on to talk about there only being [2, 3, 4, N] plots in the world. It’s not the necessary parts that are going to be yours alone. It’s the stuff that seems like it could get filed off and it wouldn’t matter. You write with the messy stuff that seems like it’s optional. The whole thing is optional. Except when it turns out it isn’t. Except when it’s a darn good thing it isn’t.

*The Lake Harriet Rose Garden, most recently. I know, I was as surprised as you are. Well, maybe not quite as surprised, if you’re not from here and don’t even know we have a Lake Harriet Rose Garden. But still pretty surprised.

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Critique sentimentalist

There is a curious hollow feeling that comes from sending a draft of novel off to be critiqued.

It has been eating focus, attention, concentration, energy–it has been monopolizing as much brain as is available and then some–and now it is done. Gone. Off to other garner other people’s thoughts. Not productive to fiddle with it any more for awhile, and yet not done either.

I’m doing something new this time. I’m going off for a week at the end of September to participate in a peer workshop–other people who have had either novels or a bunch of short stories published will converge on an undisclosed location, and we will all critique each other’s openings, and then we will do smaller-group in-depth critiques later in the week. (Seriously I’m not sure how undisclosed it’s supposed to be, I just haven’t seen anyone else talking about the details, so I’m staying vague.) I sent them a draft of Itasca Peterson, Wendigo Hunter. And we’ll see how this goes. I don’t know any of these people very well, but their work is cool, so that feels, if anything, even more interesting than if it was a retreat with people who were already close friends. And then I will come home and do critiques of the same work with people I know much better, so parallax is our friend, people, parallax is definitely our friend.

And…this is a thing I honestly love about writing. I really, really love this. If you catch me in the wrong mood, I will wax sentimental and get a little choked up. Because in writing, in speculative fiction in particular, we take it for granted–it is a totally normal thing to do–that we will get to look at other people’s awesome things and help make them a little more awesome. Think about that for a moment. There are some other jobs for which it works that way, sure–for which a project is primarily someone else’s and it is assumed that you will get to take your time and help make it better. But mostly not. Mostly you are either working together on something or you’re not helping.

I like helping.

I like cooperation.

Last weekend we had a marathon crit session for someone in my regular group. We hadn’t met for several months, but there we were, back at it again, here’s what I think the heart of this book is, here’s what I think didn’t quite do what you wanted it to, have a homemade cookie and enhance the emotional core of your creative work.

Isn’t that an awesome thing?

Well, I think it is.

So I am behind on all sorts of things. Like, I have not posted about my story “Ten Stamps Viewed Under Water,” which is in F&SF for Sept/Oct, and I have not posted about Alec’s story either, and I have generally had my head in fierce 11-year-olds who hunt monsters. But honestly that is a great place to have my head, and I like it. And also in crits, and I will continue to have my head there for awhile.

And also I get to write short stories now, and you can’t imagine how excited I am. Maybe you can. But honestly I am one of those people who likes to write rather than liking to have written, so it was less “Yay book done” and more “Yay get to write stories now whew.”

Except for having to take days off sometimes. That’s still a thing.

But yeah. A curious hollow feeling. And a love of cooperation. That’s where we are right now. Hi.

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Translation, regionalism, colloquialism

A few weeks ago now I read this New Yorker essay about Camus, specifically about the first line of The Stranger. And around the same time, I was reading Kazuki Sakuraba’s Red Girls, translated from the Japanese by Jocelyne Allen. And I ended up with thoughts.

The thing about the Camus essay is that it doesn’t really go into why “Mom” feels like a wrong translation of “Maman” to the author. It does, I agree, but my theory is that as far as I know (and my French is not that great), “Maman” is casual, familiar, intimate…but not regional. I have been in Montreal, and I have been in Paris, and I have been in Normandy, and I have heard small children shouting, “Maman!” in all of them. Whereas “Mom” is…American. And “Mum” is Commonwealth. (Canada, in my experience of Canadians, is a maternal middle ground where you’ll hear both depending on the person or family.)

Translating from non-regional to regional vocabulary is tricky; going from regional to regional is, if anything, more fraught. In several anime–Azumanga Daioh, for example–a character with a regional accent in Japanese is given a corresponding regional accent in English. Osaka in Azumanga Daioh has a southern accent in the translation I heard; in some apparently she is given a Brooklyn accent. While her accent is a non-trivial part of the character and needs some equivalent to be translated, the fact that translators couldn’t agree on which of two extremes of American English she should speak seems pretty indicative of how difficult this choice is.

Allen, the translator of Red Girls, used a lot of word choice to indicate regional and informal dialect in the original. This is a book where you see a lot of “nothin'” and “uh huh” and similar word choice. Unfortunately, it ended up reading to me like she had chosen a High West American dialect (think Montana, Idaho, Wyoming) and then gotten some details of it wrong. It ended up being somewhat jarring, especially because the language used by the older generation who hadn’t been much exposed to mass media when forming their accents and speech patterns was very, very similar to that used by a young generation who had turned to gangs (or, more accurately, started them). It was one of the main things that I complained about while reading the book–and okay, yes, I am a translation nerd, I am likely to snag on things like that. But my point is not that Allen did a bad job, it’s that she had an incredibly hard job to do at all.

And it’s worth doing, because otherwise…otherwise we are only translating things we read as “standard” in one language into things we read as standard in another, and a lot of richness is lost, a lot of books whose content and ideas simply do not meet that description. The ones that do have a homogeneity to them that doesn’t reflect human life.

How much you want to give the accurate feel of the original vs. giving an accurate feel of things like characterization can also be hard. There’s paragraph length, which varies from language to language as well as from person to person. And then there are details that would be telling details if applied to someone from one culture that are just cultural norms in another. Two examples: how often does someone grunt in conversation? You can describe someone as grunting and give a very vivid picture of them in English, just by how often they do it. (I am currently rereading the Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries, and Dalziel, for example, is a grunter.) But then listen to your Cantonese-speaking friends. Possibly, you might think, I am just mistaking foreign words for grunts. Okay, then listen to your friends who speak other Chinese languages make fun of your Cantonese-speaking friends. Whether it’s linguistically or culturally, grunting is very much expected in Cantonese speech. In translation, should you portray that every time it happens? Should you leave in enough to give the “feel” of that difference without overwhelming the Anglophone reader? Hard call, dependent on each circumstance. Or take for example endearments. So far as I can tell from Danish TV, there is only one endearment in Danish, and that is “elsker” (approx. “love”). Everyone is “elsker” every time you would have wanted an endearment. Waitress offering a refill on your coffee? Elsker. Your mother having a heart-to-heart with you? Elsker. Your mother having a special moment with your father? Elsker. This is fine when you’re translating from English to Danish, but if you pick an endearment to map to elsker–whether it’s “love” or “hon” or what, it’s going to read repetitive to the Anglophone audience. Which would be great if “elsker” was a weird word that only people from Aarhus used, actually–you could pick something like “petal” that you see regionally on Vera and go to town with it. How regional is the Danish of Aarhus vs. the Danish of Copenhagen? How do you measure regionality from outside?

Word are hard. I think that’s my grand conclusion. Words are hard.

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Dystopias Are Made Of People.

So some people have read my new story, “It Brought Us All Together,” and even talked about it, which is always great. (Hurray, readers!) One of the things they’ve said is that a few people have described it as dystopian. And I am not opposed to people thinking of it as dystopian, but it doesn’t strike me that way personally, and I was trying to figure out why.

(Note that “fight about exact genre boundaries” is one of the most boring kinds of fight in the world, yes? So what I am doing is descriptive, not prescriptive. I am describing my idea of dystopia to you rather than telling you it should be yours. If you have completely other ideas, fabulous, would love to hear about them. Clear? Okay good.)

For me a dystopia is about human relationships. It can have bad government or bad lack of government, but the dominant relationship between people on average in this society needs to be exploitative, destructive, or otherwise negative. If not, I don’t see it as a dystopia.

This leads to me sounding really hard-core, saying things like, “Oh, sure, it’s about a fungus-ravaged landscape, but I just don’t see that as dystopian.” But I don’t. It’s not about fungal plagues not being bad enough, it’s that they’re on a different axis of bad than dystopic/utopic/non -topic society. I could write a utopia set in a crashed spaceship inside a volcano–if the people in that culture were on average good to each other.* I could write a completely depressing dystopia in a green and pleasant land.** Because the challenges the universe hands you feel different to me than the challenges other people give you gratuitously.

And “gratuitously” is important, because “hey, my family is dying of fungus in their lungs” is an other-people challenge! It really is about dealing with other people. It’s just…dystopia is if the government infected your family with this lung fungus on purpose. Or if an evil corporation controls so much of the world that it can withhold cures for the fungal plague that is ravaging the landscape. The bit where people just flail around and don’t entirely know what they’re doing and some of them are jerks but most of them are at least okayish…that’s not dystopia, for me. That’s life.

*Actually…if half a dozen of you want that, I’ll make a good go at it.
**This one not so much.

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Cumulative, repetitive

One of the things that came up with the Fourth Street writers’ seminar is that some people have taken it multiple times. It’s intended to be a beginners’ seminar, but it covers different things each year, and also people “begin” at different rates, so there’s no rule against doing so. And I think that in general this is a good thing, that people are themselves the best judges of what continues to be useful for them, possibly with some nudges from friends and family who know them well.

But it actually highlighted something for me: that one of the important things about trying to get better at writing–and this is definitely a place where writing is like everything else–is distinguishing when you’re doing something that is forming a practice or forming a rut. “Practice” is key for most skills–this is where the truisms about “you have to write a million words of crap” come in, or the idea of ten thousand hours of practice before you get good at something. But some things are better repeated than others. Professional musicians will play scales or chord progressions all their careers–you’ll hear scales in warmups if you go to the symphony before the concert starts. But what you won’t hear is “Hot Cross Buns” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” repeated over and over. Not every repetition is useful repetition.

So…how do we tell the difference between cumulative knowledge/skills and pointless repetition? I think one of the ways to figure it out is to be very specific when we ask ourselves, “How am I improving because of this practice? What skills/knowledge will it bring or sharpen?” Young musicians play scales because their instructors tell them to; more mature musicians play scales because they know that being able to run with quick control through those sequences of notes will be useful in a variety of pieces. (And this is why you don’t see, for example, guitarists who are mostly “rhythm”/chord guitarists playing a lot of scales: because it’s not nearly as valuable for the kinds of chord progressions they’re playing as it would be if they were playing melodies on the guitar.) Be specific and precise. “It will be good for my writing” can easily be cover for “I’m in this habit, and I’m not sure what else to do.”

The other important question, of course, is, “Is this practice getting me the improvement I want to see?” Say that you’ve been attending a particular seminar or discussion with the same set of other writers for years. Is your writing improving as you discuss things with them? Can you point to insights and skills that they’ve helped you with? If so, great! If not, perhaps what you’re getting from them is not “write better descriptions” or “improve pacing” but rather “hang out with friends in atmosphere of camaraderie” or “pass on ideas and skills to people newer than self.” Which are great things to get!–as long as you recognize that you need to do something additional to get the boost you want in description, pacing, etc. Different people learn and improve from all sorts of different input–it’s good to keep tabs on what you’re actually managing to accomplish vs. what you’re trying to do–in writing as in all things.

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Things I didn’t get around to saying at 4th St.

One of the great joys of a good panel is that there’s always more to say about the topic than will fit in the panel slot. When I was moderating, I had probably twenty names on my “so-and-so has a comment, call on them next” list, and almost all of them were people I already knew, and all the people I already knew were people I knew to be smart and insightful. And we often get smart, insightful new people too. Never enough time!

So! Here are some bits and pieces of things I didn’t get around to saying, labeled if I can remember when/why I wrote them down. Also a few things other people did say, because I wanted to pull them out and look at the shiny.

(Does the arc of fantasy bend towards justice? panel) I think one of the hardest parts about countering the narrative of the American White Secessionist South is that almost all the story templates we have are of the empire enforcing things on an unwilling populace being a bad thing. That makes the empire the villains. We don’t tend to tell the stories of the empire enforcing civil rights on a populace that is attached to keeping them from a minority. And it’s particularly difficult to construct that narrative because we’ve seen the (very very) down side of colonialist narrative about Bringing Enlightenment To The Savages. Yet I think that at least some counter to the dominant “if you’re rebelling, you must be on the side of right” narrative would be a really positive thing if people can figure out how to construct it–both as a social good and as a different story.

Post-apocalyptic lit references I didn’t get to talk about on the post-apocalyptic lit panel: Kathleen Ann Goonan Queen City Jazz, in which the serious disruption comes from positive-ish or positive-looking tech developments; Nalo Hopkinson Brown Girl in the Ring; Gwyneth Jones Bold As Love; Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu The Shadow Speaker; Nick Sagan Idlewild; S.M. Stirling; John Crowley Engine Summer; Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle; Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz; Robert Charles Wilson, king of sudden disruption; “Attack on Titan” (anime); “Wall-E” (movie); Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith Stranger; Kim Stanley Robinson The Wild Shore and the climate change trilogy; Laurie King/Leigh Richards Califa’s Daughters; Michaela Roessner The Vanishing Point; “Tank Girl” (movie), which we later categorized in conversation as Lori Petty battling the camera and winning; Karina Sumner-Smith Radiant; Lois McMaster Bujold The Sharing Knife; Suzy McKee Charnas Walk to the End of the World; Orson Scott Card, The Folk of the Fringe; Lisa Goldstein A Mask for the General; Gregory Frost and the 7th Day Adventist apocalypse that wasn’t; Bradley Denton’s Blackburn and Laughin’ Boy, two of the best personal/individual apocalypse books I know, completely the feel of post-apocalyptic.

Yes, we did manage to talk about post-apocalyptic books even excluding all of the above. There is quite a lot to say. Max Gladstone said, “If you love something, smash it with a hammer,” and that was good, and Sarah Olsen said, “We’re searching for what’s valuable in our culture to preserve,” and that’s good too, especially the verb tense she chose, and then Elizabeth Bear said, “One of the most exciting things about post-apocalyptic literature is that you can treat society like a character.” Which is a fun thing to do generally but almost required in post-apocalyptic. And Emma Bull noticed that everyone is necessary for the rebuilding in John M. Ford’s The Last Hot Time, which, yes, oh yes, thanks Emma and as always thanks Mike. We are all needed. We are none of us optional.

Starting a comment with, “I’m probably the only one here who’s read this,” is not very useful and just makes you look pompous. People will have read things or won’t have. Flagging obscurity is not necessary unless the discussion is explicitly about highly popular works, and flagging it in that particular way is just self-aggrandizing.

On the music panel, people ended up talking about thinking through who in a scene was carrying the melody and who was doing different kinds of harmony, and I thought that the concept of ensemble-building analogies with musical groups would be useful in building an ensemble cast in general–that if you don’t have enough rhythm and/or enough bass in your character list, the whole will fall over. Also suddenly my proclivity for low-pitched instruments lined up very well with my preference for supporting characters in semi-ensemble cast shows, and all was clear.

Max Gladstone was talking during the sex panel about different lines between private and public behaviors/standards/etc. in different cultures, and I really would like to see people do a lot more with that. There are some ways in which the author’s choices of what to show and how to show it in depictions of sex and sexuality can either mirror or distinctly contrast with what privacy/publicity would be expected in the culture portrayed, and that would be cool, but also playing with the private/public lines for non-sex issues gets a big thumbs up from me.

I would also like to see more speculative fiction that’s extrapolated from current culture and doesn’t assume that religious developments will be linear. Because as Mark’s recent rantings about naked Anabaptist parades demonstrate, things that are directly motivated by a known religious context can still go off completely unpredictable haywire directions.

Elizabeth Bear said, “The absolute hardest thing about writing is limiting your options.” This = true. It’s one of the reasons that people who are depressed struggle so much with their writing: because depression worsens choice paralysis. So basically people who manage to write while depressed should get ALL THE PROPS EVER from the rest of us, because it is a Harrison Bergeron sort of deal and they are MAKING IT ALOFT ANYWAY DESPITE THE GIANT WEIGHTS.

(Ahem. Strong feelings: I have them.)

A friend of mine commented that they had not thought through the emotional difference between having a meal alone at a con because you know (and like!) dozens of people and did not make the logistics work and having a meal alone at a con because you’re new and know nobody, but once somebody pointed it out, friend felt that it was very clarifying. So good then.

Relating also to new people and their reception, I feel that there is a line at about six friends. If you have one or two friends at a con, it can be pretty scary, and while it’s still a good idea to reach out to people you don’t know, you don’t have as much of an emotional base for doing it with one or two friends. It’s harder. But once you have six or more friends at a convention, if you complain that it’s cliquish but you don’t reach out to new people, sorry, you are part of the problem. Six friends gives you a base. It gives you a place to stand while you reach out. It can also give you your own clique while you are complaining about the cliques of others. I know it’s hard for some people to make social overtures, but “I have a hard time making social overtures” is a different problem from “other people are behaving exactly like I am, but when they do it, it’s bad.” Especially if you are not visibly a minority at the convention you’re attending. Especially if you’re a published pro. Especially if you’re not struggling with health problems. Etc. But in general: a good convention comes with a lot of reciprocity, and if you have half a dozen friends there, you’re in a much better position to make the first conversational move than some people.

You can always choose not to reach out to people. That’s your prerogative. But choosing that while complaining about how they are not reaching out to you…is pretty sketchy at best.

Skyler White had two comments on the same panel that fit really well together for me. It was the panel on how you play the cards you ain’t been dealt–that is, how to get better at things that are not natural to you. Skyler first said, “Asking yourself progressively better questions before you start writing is one of the best ways to deal with the cards you weren’t dealt.” Ooh. Yes. Then later she said, “Anything I do before I start writing, if I do it past the time when I could have started writing, becomes a handicap.” That has nice nuance and edges to it. It balances out the thinking/questioning with action, and it can be iterated throughout a long writing process, and…yes. Go Skyler.

I felt that Steven Brust demonstrated the importance of the vivid detail when we were all deciding on That’s A Different panel for the end of the con. He proposed a panel complete with a slate of panelists. Entirely possible that his topic would have won anyway, but he gave the audience the crucial ability to imagine themselves at that panel by saying who would be on it. Very meta. (And not a technique limited to Steve, if people find themselves strongly partisan about a particular panel in future similar circumstances.)

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Priorities

Linda Nagata has a great post on quitting writing, from the perspective of someone who’s done it and come back. Go ahead and read it now. I’ll wait.

The thing about this, the reason I want to signal boost, is that there is so much of writer culture that is pushing uphill. It’s pushing against a world in which not writing is the default, and it’s trying to make space for an unusual activity. And this is good. More room for the creative and unusual! Hurrah!

But…not writing should be the default, because not everybody writes. Not everybody wants to write. (Not everybody wants to have written, either.) And among the people who want to, I would hope that they also want other things. Friends, family…hobbies…other jobs, other pursuits…time to read, even. You’re allowed to change the priority order of the things you want, as your life goes on, so that something that was previously secondary becomes primary or vice versa. Or further down the list than that.

You are allowed to love to do more than one thing. You are allowed to be there for more than one person. And “yourself” is one of the people you may need to be there for, and that takes all different shapes.

This may sound like it’s the exact opposite of the advice I give college students, which is to make room for the things that are your priorities now rather than pushing them off until some magical day when you will have more time, because that magical day will never come. But I think the key word there is “magical.” When there is something you want to do that you are not doing now, the question is: what will be different later? And sometimes there is a clear, factual answer to that question. Sometimes what will be different later is that forming a habit of working out in a gym would require purchasing a gym membership when you’re no longer getting one for free in college–for some people that’s motivating and for some quite the opposite. But it is a difference. For some people, college is requiring them to write papers, and that’s taking all their writing energy, whereas they intend to get a job that is not writing-heavy. For others, college has more room to put writing their “own” stuff in their schedule than grad school or work life will, so it’s a great time to start incorporating writing into their lives automatically. People vary. Situations vary. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.

And sometimes if you say to yourself, “What will be different later, that I will have more time for writing?”, the honest answer is, “I will not have a newborn.” Or, “I will not be caring for someone in the final stages of terminal cancer.” Or, “I will not be in the middle of a move across multiple time zones.” Or even, “I will have had a chance to rest.” These can all be honest, important answers. If you find that you always have an honest, important answer for, “Why not write?”, the answer may be that writing is not a priority for you. That is okay. Now may not be your time. We all have some times when we are not up for writing. Some people find that they last eight hours and end with the alarm clock; some find that they last a decade. But the person whose time for not-writing is “only when not conscious” if not morally superior to the person whose time for not-writing is “when my kid is tiny” or “while I am getting this degree in a field I like.” Due to the vicissitudes of life, they’re not even guaranteed to be a better writer–on nearly any axis.

The more writers I get to know, the more writers I value as whole people. The more I want to encourage self-care. For some people, that absolutely means “carve out x hours of writing time a week; I am better for it.” For others that means, “not this year, perhaps next year.” Again: variety is not a bug, it’s a feature.

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Opening night

I am tracking how many first lines I write for this book. So far it’s five. Alec asked me if I had discarded any of them, and I laughed, because yeah, I’ve discarded four of them. I wouldn’t have come up with the others if I didn’t need to replace them. I don’t count the times that I delete an adverb or strengthen a verb as separate sentences. These are five completely different starting places, varying in book time from a few seconds apart to a few days. They are doing different things, and what thing they need to do is evolving as the book evolves.

I have talked before about writing out of order, about how every piece of the book affects every other piece and how for me that means that writing them all linearly just won’t work. And I secretly think that everyone else is at least a little bit like that too. I have met zero people who revise each line into perfection and then never change it. I’m sure there was some historical figure who did that, but currently: really not. Everyone needs to look at their work as a whole and have some parts of it evolve based on how other parts look once they’re down on the page. It’s just that I do that with a lot more temporal variance, I think.

Anyway: the five first lines don’t mean the book is going badly, they mean that the book is going well and giving me more stuff I’m excited about writing every day. So seriously yay that.