Welcome Aboard

Cruise ships and closed luxury resorts of the Club Med model offer the illusion of travel without exposure to other cultures.  Insulated vacations for bigots?  Safe zones for uneducated, uninterested human hamsters?  Or is it more about scarfing every penny for the corporation and not letting profit escape into the host economy?

Science fiction as a genre works on the same model.  

Choosing a book the cover of which proclaims it to be science fiction ensures the reader an experience of a certain kind.  They’ll know from the first page that it’s science fiction.  They’ll be kept supplied with ideas and action.  Embedded lectures will be fascinatingly scientific.  Plausible will be a watchword for every event, opinion, or speculation.  

Best of all, human foibles, other than glaring character flaws necessary for plot twists, will be emphasized by their absence.  There will be no ambiguity or irony.  The strong reliable captain really is strong and reliable.  What is said is meant literally.  They say what they mean and we know why they do everything; motives are kept clear as empty space.  

No messy human stuff, in short, will stay this story’s courier from the swift completion of its plot points.

Science fiction is the literature of ideas, we are told.  Repeatedly.  Science fiction fosters a sense of wonder about such things as the scale of the universe, the vast sweep of human ambition, and technology’s potential to transform everything.  “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” Sir Arthur C. C. Clarke told us in Profiles of the Future, 1961.  Magic is full of a sense of wonder.  Big ideas and the scope of far-flung adventures in futures where technology can do for us what wishful illusionists could only dream of, that is science fiction.

Science fiction is for ten year old boys, someone once observed.  He shall remain unnamed to protect him from the fen with Dixie cups of cold vomit who may wish to throw it on him.  Despite anonymity, however, this observer of science fiction had a telling point.  Boys of that age are interested in precisely the mix of things comprising science fiction.  They are also uninterested in girly crap like relationships, how people get along together, and all that touchy-feely emo stuff.  Cooties repel them.

This harsh observation is made in reference to the original readership for science fiction, which were indeed ten year old boys and engineer types with arrested development.  Many will hasten to point out that science fiction has moved on, grown up, and learned to embrace almost all literary traits from a wider world.  They’ll point to the New Age, which transformed the Golden Age of Science Fiction by infusing arts and humanities into the breadboard circuitry and Estes catalog trope and topos.  They’ll congratulate themselves with swelled chests and speak of science fiction being as good as any other genre and better than most, hastening to add that literary is just another genre, so take that, academic snobs.

Examples can be found to prove any point.  Yes, there are literate genre tales and moronic literary crimes.  Yes, there are works that span the range and exceed all limits, even in the science fiction idiom, even as there are fumbling pilferage of science fiction’s refined notions by clumsy literati desperate to seem bright even as their inspiration and ability wanes.

A good story well told is a writer’s goal and a reader’s joy, and good writing does not depend upon idiom, genre, or form.  

And yet.

And yet, science fiction in aggregate tends to be insular.  It resists change, generally speaking.  Space opera routinely dominates awards, notable exceptions aside.  In recent years, juvenile has become a term that seems to add cachet to a science fiction story’s chances at winning an award or being liked, bought, read, and discussed by the science fiction readers.  Does this mean they seek to rediscover the frisson of novelty experienced when they were kids first finding science fiction?  Are they sense of wonder junkies flailing for a fix?

Some dismiss such questions, saying they are outdated.  Science fiction has grown up, they assert.  It embraces all styles, approaches, and qualities of writing in the wider sense, they claim.  

Countering these objections requires an explanation for why, then, science fiction continues to be recognized as distinct from other genres.  Despite expansion and undeniable growth, science fiction has retained hull integrity.  

Which returns us to the initial image of cruise ships and closed luxury vacation resorts.  There are in fact things science fiction does differently.  Other genres do not focus on technology, for example.  In an April 1975 essay for Natural Science, Isaac Asimov wrote, “Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.”

Some say science fiction predicts the future. It is more accurate to say it explores potential futures, some more realistic than others, some more solidly rooted in known science than others, but all considered possible.  Thus came the proposed new appellation, speculative fiction.  This came in with the New Wave writers, who had studied humanities perhaps more than science, and who wanted to free themselves from the picayune reliance on straight extrapolation from some science nugget.  Yes, science fiction speculates, sometimes from informed perspective, other times more like a grizzled geezer panning for gold in random streams.

Editor, writer, and bearded prospector Damon Knight defined science fiction as what ever he pointed at when he said science fiction.  His finger has written and, having written, has moved on, so we’ll have to rely on our own finger-pointing now, each of us.  Name calling is popular, too; feel free to join in.

Case in point, Margaret Atwood.  She hit it big with The Handmaid’s Tale, a grim dystopia featuring harsh ideological rule in a North American society gone evangelical Christian with a Taliban-like intensity.  Terrifying, harrowing, and all-too-feasible -- listen to the Dominionist-dominated GOP politicians if you doubt this feasibility -- this extrapolation of a bible thumper’s wet dream was pure If This Goes On and What If.  

It won literary accolades as well as selling well, and Atwood, asked about science fiction, made statement the science fiction guardians of ideological purity took offense at.  They called her names ranging from Clueless and Ignorant to A Literary Snob, Thief, and worse.

Seems only science fiction writers doing it “properly” are allowed to “use science fiction’s ideas” and when Perceived Others do it, well, it’s an affront, and outrage, and a sacrilege.  Insularity was threatened by such a breach in science fiction’s hull.

A wide-ranging pattern was noticed by science fiction defenders.  Literary types, bereft of ideas, lacking inspiration, and unable to be creative on their on merit, pilfered science fiction ideas they did not even grasp, and wrote fatuous nonsense that did not qualify as science fiction but was, of course, awarded literary honors and promoted into bestseller status.  How galling for all those On Board.

This in turn brought charges from academics against science fiction’s insularity, its determinedly low brow addiction to Mere Plot, and its insistence upon arbitrating Real from Fake.  Harold Bloom’s choleric tirade against genre when Stephen King was given a National Book Award is the low water mark for literary snobbery, bigotry, and sheer idiocy.

Consider science fiction as a vacation guaranteeing integrity of experience, though, and all becomes fair and clear and warmly sunny.  

So write, and read, what you want.   

Just remember, please stay on the ship and do not leave the compound.  We need the money.  And you do not need the aggravation of encountering Those Others.

///  ///  ///

Florida Move's Gestation

How to avoid jumping into the genre box with the rest of the toys.

Instead of building a story out of what seem to be cool ideas, focus on one person and see what they're doing.

Or tell a story about a specific person.

I had this idea once that most parents would gladly change places with their kids to spare the kids suffering or trouble.

That is the tidy white bread notion.

Truth is much darker and more mixed.

But anyway, I wanted to show that urge to change places in a story.

Instead of building a story on that, which would be genre.

I focused on one guy.

He was poor.

Lived in a trailer, in fact, in FL.

Just a little window AC long since broken down and inadequate.

Eats fast food because he's unable to afford much else.

drinks a bit, to ease things.

He's retired/unemployed.

his personal space is a rat's nest.

he wears sloppy sweats because he's run to fat.

he's a heap, but barely struggles on, fixed income and social security.

And his wife has died.

And all he has to care about at ALL is his son.

But his son is far away, going to college up north.

Kid never hardly calls, and seems changed each time.

Almost my whole focus so far is on a very real guy and his situation.

Then two guys knock on his door.

Cops.

Seems there's been a problem.

His son's involved.

Killed a guy.

May have to do hard time up north.

Cops wonder if he's seen his son, or heard from him.

Truth is, he hasn't.

As soon as they leave, largely in disgust at him and how he is forced to live by depression of both sorts, he sits down and has a panic attack.

He desperately wants to find his son, hear from him, find out what's going on.

He wants to make sure the kid's okay, safe, innocent.

He urgently wishes this, and falls asleep drunk, and dreams he goes up north.

Dreams he finds the kid, and the kid is indeed in trouble, but was framed, and the old man offers to cover for him while the kid takes off down south, to FL, to hide.

When he wakes up, he's in the kid's body, of course.

Here is the rub:  The kid wakes up in his FATHER's body.

And we find out the kid is a sociopath who was guilty as fuck.

Only NOW he is literally trapped in an aging, abused body about ready to give out, with no money, and no hope for much...

So by focusing on the real, I wrote what I hope is a compelling story that still manages to feature my silly idea about parents being willing to change places to save their kids.

Offered as an example of how to work without jumping in the box.

Think Twice, Write Once

Current fiction, perhaps due to short attention spans, tends to deal with each story point as it arises, in sequence, rather than waiting for later resolution.  This makes for neatness, perhaps, but is untrue to life. Next time you’re writing, try to remember to leave resolution of at least a few major story points for the end.  Yes, a few readers might accuse you of being fancy or tricking them, but most will appreciate the delayed gratification and perhaps even admire your plotting -- whatever the hell that is.

I'm fascinated, too, by how "concise" is so often translated to "simplistic".  In writing advice, in how-to books, and even in the revered Strunk & White, writers are told to be brief, leading to most choosing simplistic, that being the easiest lowest common denominator to reach by way of brevity.

Short and sweet, they think.  Hemingway wrote good.  He wrote short.  Short is good. 

Concise, though, means to the point, with complex aspects condensed to the most efficient delivery.  “I’m sorry this note is so long,” Lincoln once wrote to Grant; “I did not have time to make it shorter.”  He meant it. 

Boil things down, is another way to say it.  Reduce them to their essence.  From many ingredients, soup.  Cut to the chase, movie directors say.  State the gist and get out quick, briefers are advised.  (This stands somewhat in opposition to “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em; tell ‘em; then tell ‘em what you just told ‘em,” but one must use bullet statements in each phase, so the gist becomes gristle for them to chew on and mull over.)

Oh, the metaphors.

Yet it is the same regardless how it’s said:  Be concise.  Not brief to the point of underinforming.  Not short the way Procrustes shortened things.  You can saw off what doesn’t fit but you then lose those parts.  Concise includes, brevity can exclude.

So being concise is not always the shortest way of saying something.  Efficient delivery of everything you wish to communicate is the goal. 

Clarity helps.  Being clear means using correct terms, the right words, and the proper vocabulary.  One does not wax erotic by being clinical.  For each notion there is a set of words best suited to express it.  Find those, use them, and avoid reiterating unless it serves the purpose.

We have all suffered from Triplicate Syndrome.  That is when a writer uses three synonyms rather than picking the best.  It is both lazy and a habit, the kind of crutch that reinforces the injury instead of letting it heal.  “His writing leaped, danced, spiraled from the page.”  Which was it?  This image seems, at first glance, vivid, alive, vibrant, but upon another look we see it is actually confused, muddled, cloudy.  Ahem.

Pick one.

Pick the best one.

Cut the rest.

Watch this:  “Don’t be negative,” he said, striving to be as brief as possible.  “State things in a positive way,” she retorted, being longer but clearer.

Phrasing things in a positive manner makes them stand out as clear actions.  Negative phrasing sets up a mental image in which an action must first be imagined, then nullified in some way.  It is complicated, which obscures the point.

Thou shalt not kill, we’re told, but not a word how to avoid it.  Frustration results.

In order to be concise, we must think through what we wish to communicate, reduce it to a clear image, find the right words to express it, and state it positively.  This requires time and work, and practice improves the needed skills.  Making fewer errors, and honing things to precision, reduces the need for rewriting, too; a bonus.

Finally, once we know what we are setting out to do, and how best to do it, we can play with it by, say, delaying resolution of a point or two until the end, gratifying ourselves and rewarding the astute reader.

Think twice, write once.

///  ///  ///

War Talk on Election Night MMX

Nowhere to go, no place to be.

On the seventh episode of the superb BOARDWALK EMPIRE on HBO, a soldier turned gangster, whose Princeton education was interrupted by WW I service, goes to a VA hospital for his wounded leg. He meets a guy with half his face shot off, who had served as a sharpshooter. Leg is reading so face offers him a book his family sent. It is a Tom Swift novel.

“Don’t you want it?” leg asks.

Face says, “Can’t read fiction anymore.”

“How come?”

“It occurred to me, the basis of fiction is that people have a connection. They don’t.”

It is a strikingly cold existentialist statement. It puts one in mind of Hemingway. Not that Hemingway ever showed such naked cynicism, but it was there, just under his ironic tone.

Turns out face lost his eye and half his face just after shooting and killing a German soldier, whose own bullet got lucky and hit the sharpshooter’s rifle. Further, face can still shoot, as a later “return of favor” scene shows.

BOARDWALK EMPIRE is based on a chapter from a history of Atlantic City, New Jersey. It focuses on the Prohibition days when the Volstead Act allowed gangs to flourish. Hard, cynical, and greedy men made war for as much as each could grab from the others. As usual, the people suffered while being told how blessed, patriotic, and exceptional they are. They swallow it every time.

A generation later, the deep cynicism of returning WW II vets would move post WW I’s hard-boiled fiction into noir cinema, where lost men in a totally corrupt world tried to stick to a personal code of honor for no good reason they could articulate. It was a kind of formula for producing tough prose: Go to war, be shattered, see through the bullshit, and come back to write as bluntly as possible. No more decadent excess to keep minds off reality. Those guys wrote to kill or be killed.

This is why the fiction of the Lost Generation and that of the Forties Film Flatfoots resonate today. We are like them. In both cases the veil of lies was torn and we got a glimpse of how bad things are when scum prevail, as they do so very often, being prone to cheating and theft, thuggery and murder. They operate in a landscape where politics is gangsterism and the rest is up for grabs. See that clearly and the toys get put away so the tools of economic and cultural war can be handled more effectively.

Plain writing for clear communication stems from writers who have seen where pretty distractions and cringing escapism allow the scum to go -- straight into power -- and take us -- straight to hell. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Sleep with one eye open. We know the watchwords. Why lull ourselves with nonsense when reality is so hostile?

It has always been this way. Go back further and you’ll find Twain and Bierce favoring direct writing over flowery crap. Twain was a deserter from and Bierce a veteran of the Civil War, which created cynics as fast as it created widows and orphans. Go back further still and you’ll find more wars. There is always a war of one kind or another, thanks to the sociopaths always harrying us. We each have a war that shapes us.

My war was cultural and economic, in the 1970s, in the Laurel Highlands of Western Pennsylvania. Back then it was called coal country. Mountain hick gnomes with immigrant names and often accents, too, who dug the deep seams for steel in Pittsburgh, were scraping out a living in the most depressed region of the country. Then big steel moved overseas and the railroads were no longer needed. Everything dried up. Bruce Springsteen’s album THE RIVER summed it up so the nation could move on in good conscience, having shed a crocodile tear for us.

We who were stuck there were left strangely uncomforted.

An economic war against the people, waged by corporations with no national or human allegiance, devastated our lives. It destroyed my father and so many others. We learned then economics was a war, with weapons, killings, and deaths. Consequences of greed, short-term profit frenzy, and zero-sum cutthroat business-as-usual haunted our every moment. Poverty dogged us.

My scars run deep.

My writing tends to be terse.

Now that I and my family have once again voted the connection between war and how one writes makes sense to me. I write this as I watch the latest economic and cultural war again devastate the people for the benefit and amusement of the corporate rich and I only hope to stick to my code of honor, craft, and art. The connection now makes clear for me where my abiding anger comes from, as it builds toward fury at what the scum have done to us, and how I must use that tempered steel. I will write.

Write to kill or be killed.

Nothing less counts.

/// /// ///

Decadence Lost

An article in THE GUARDIAN asked why this second Gilded Age has not spawned a flowering of decadent fiction to satirize its excesses. Certainly TV and film have done so but written fiction has not. People seem to cling to realism and naturalism. Can this be due to literalism infecting so wide a swath of society? Is it sub- or post-literacy giving us too few writers with sufficient verbal chops? High-verbal flourishes are crushed, mocked, and left for dead in genre fiction; this could be insecurity from pulp days prompting a purple prose backlash, and the innate hostility toward mainstream and literary fiction among the genre guardians and gatekeepers to force editors to expunge anything smacking of literary ambition or the fancy. Diversion rules, entertainment is allowed, but venture beyond genre basics into serious intent or layered idiom and wham, the boom will be lowered.

Ah, but where are the one-off literary novels? Why is there not another would-be Wilde stalking London or NYC?

They may exist among the unpublished. Such work stays safely in drawers and trunks, although usually an inkling often glitters in the slurry of short story collections and anthologies toppling off the corporate fiction tipple. So far, precious few hints of a reflourishing decadent movement are sprouting in the gob pile.

Doing high-verbal writing or venturing into the purple is rare in part because Thackery won. Vanity Fair remains the essence of brilliant high-verbal gloss, while Oscar Wilde owned the rest of any claim on decadence. ‘Art for art’s sake’ gave way, as 10CC sang, to ‘money, for god’s sake’ as commerce forced everything individual into corporate molds. And since appealing to masses requires simplicity, complexity is jettisoned to make wallets, and brains, roomier. And since nature abhors vacuum, in rushes a tsunami of cartoonish product.

Extruded plastic plots and vacuum molded characters compete in the grand parade of lifeless packing Peter Gabriel and Genesis warned about. Gray flannel fiction results and the novel is, as usual, dead or thrashing on a low-battery life support system.

Pictionary now comes as a card game needing no drawing. May well be fun, sure, but is drawing a clue such a burden? Merchandising demands it, though; otherwise you’d need only a pad and pencil to play and what would they sell?

Apply the same logic to fiction. If corporate does not control the product, they cannot control its merchandising and sales.

Then there is the stress of being pressured. Feeling rushed and impatient could be another reason no one bothers with decadent, lush prose and layered irony. Decadence requires indirect, lazy, and self-indulgent meandering, digression, and ornamentation. People today want it now, they want it blunt, they want it boiled down to bullet statements and talking points. Get to the point, they demand, already glazing over, their flooded minds churning over a hundred other things insisting on attention, decision, and action.

Conversation has died for the same reason. No one wants to take the time to talk things out anymore, except for endless, pointless meetings that ensure productivity is kept to a snail’s pace so no one gains a march on the well-ensconced CEOs.

But wait, someone cries. Neal Stephenson and China Mieville both write a Baroque, even Rococo style. An analysis reveals not decadence, though, but details layered on basics for the sake of appearing dense, important, and intellectually weighty. Decadence requires a light touch, and this is Germanically heavy, even burdened, a technique used as a ploy. Worked, too. Briefly.

In such ploys there is so much thus crowded out that is never addressed, from basics such as characterization to more subtle aspects, such as allegory, human feeling, or the aforementioned irony. Such higher level curlicues are important if fiction is to go beyond the fifth story toward skyscraping pinnacles.

Most popular fiction is published at a fourth-to-sixth grade reading level, as determined by complexity of vocabulary and sentence structure by such indexes as Flesch and Gunning-Fog. Most is written consciously to that level. Keep It Simple, Stupid, is less advice than description these days. Lowest Common Denominator is the way to gain a wide stance in the Bell Curve of American readership. Hollywood routinely dumbs down its remakes from subtle, sophisticated imports, pandering to a perception that Americans are too stupid to deal with such complications as, say, subtitles or characters with ambiguous identity. Hand-holding is necessary as audiences cross that dangerous street from real lives constrained and controlled by corporations and thuggish governments, into the cartoonish, simplistic, and patronizing world of Hollywood dream factory extrusions.

Make the product bland and sweet and salty and never too spicy except for the macho asshole niche market. Keep things middle of the road, non-threatening, and “family safe”. Make sure you get an R rating, though, because otherwise you get only Disney audiences, and we know how sticky they can be.

Current fiction, perhaps due to short attention spans, tends to deal with each story point as it arises, in sequence, rather than waiting for later resolution. This makes for neatness, perhaps, but is untrue to life. Next time you’re writing, try to remember to leave resolution of at least a few major story points for the end. Yes, a few readers might accuse you of being fancy or tricking them, but most will appreciate the delayed gratification and perhaps even admire your plotting.

Decadence can make a comeback. There is so much to satirize, so much excess to be disgusted by, and so much idiocy passing as normal these days it may in fact be almost inevitable. One novel and story at a time a new insouciance must develop about conforming to the corporate publishing list of acceptable elements and aspects. One novel and story at a time writers must strike out into electronic publishing seeking to do new things for a new audience, one not delivered to them by publishing’s marketing but a readership built up the old way, one set of eyes at a time among people who like what’s being written.

If you write it, they will read. Let your inner demons have full rein. Write from the deepest, most personal, and unruly core of your being. Produce any kind of fiction you really want, the kind you’ve always dreamed of but never dared put in fixed form. Show it around online and start a new rebellion against the new Gilded Age. Decadence lost can be found again; it never went anywhere but inside each of us, in our Wilde-est dreams.

Set them free.

/// /// ///

A Great Moment for Writers

(the following was sparked by a discussion with writer Valerie Douglas)

It's very rare to promote learning over, or at least on par with athletics, yes. Papa Joe's old school, and also just plain old.

The notion that "men don't read novels" has been circulating in publishing for some time and I find it both ridiculous, given my experience and acquaintanceship, and also somewhat typical of the long series of self-defeating stances publishing has adopted over the decades. This is why I'm not at all freaked that soon Big Publishing will either change drastically or end entirely, as post-paper or digital publishing, and the independence and power this hands the writer, kicks in, as it already has, given that electronic sales have now outstripped hard-copy sales.

Seize the day, writers. At last you will not be held hostage by editorial gatekeepers, overhead costs of printing, or access to distribution. At last you'll be able to sell directly to the reader.

Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. You'll now have to make sure your work is professionally copyedited, edited, and laid out. You'll have to ensure it's up to scratch. You'll have to do all the scutwork of legal vetting and release forms and permissions. You'll have to come up with attractive covers, and any illustrations or charts you may want to include. And you'll then have to advertise, and not only create but maintain an audience, which requires your participation with them.

In short, the burden for making a professional product, and for being a professional presence in the marketplace, falls now on you, but the payoff is, no more being nickel-and-dimed, no more being cheated, and no more being misunderstood by promotional departments, etc.

Grab the chance while it's here, it's a unique moment in history. Wake up to it.

(for Gene's next motivational speech, please stay tuned...)

Hooked For Life

There are many reasons why people write, and why they might quit.

My parents are dead, for instance.  I'm evidently not writing to prove anything to them.

I discovered writing out of a love of stories, and a realization one day that hey, omg, I can write them too!  holy shit!

I was 7.  It was in summer, between first & second grade, at 402 W. Triumph Street, Ebensburg, PA, at the bottom of the hills the town was built on, down by the railroad tracks. I sat on the green couch by the east window in the living room in a striped tee shirt, jeans, and black Keds. My hair was pretty well buzz cut.

I wrote a story, The Big Fish, in a Tom Brown's Notebook, in pencil, using my knees as a clipboard. The story was about an imaginary adventure I and three friends had. Along with Scott Coons, my best friend, there was Marvin Hudson, who did a hilarious spazz creature at the Lyons Pool in Cresson, where I learned to swim when the teenaged bullies threw us in and told us we'd drown if we didn't learn fast, and Craig Weaver, who tried to act grown up all the time, much to our puzzlement. Craig had walked up to me first day of first grade, when I was terrified, and had punched me in the stomach. Then he said, "Now you punch me and we'll be friends." He was as good as his word, despite the bizarre logarithms by which he operated.

My story was about us going fishing together, of course, and about how we caught a fish too big to get into the boat. Our line breaks and the fish gets away. We are disappointed but also think it was cool how close we came, until Craig starts practicing the story he intends to tell about it. He plans to lie and say it was bigger than the boat. Scott and Marvin and I don't like this. So we tell him to shut up.

It was a great story, to me. Seemed both realistic and compelling, with elements of fantasy, even myth. It even included profanity; Craig had said, "Shit," at one point, something he really would have done.

I was so thrilled at the freedom, and the realization that I could make those pictures in my head come to life, that I ran to show my mother. I read it to her, "shit" and all, and she liked it. "But what can I do with it now?" I wondered. Even then, just writing it didn't seem enough somehow.

And she said, "Well, maybe you can get it published sometime." And I realized, with naive amazement, that the stories in all those books I loved so much had been written by people like me, and that is how they got into the books.

I was hooked for life.

/// /// ///

Order and Chaos In Genre

Genre fiction relies on order and chaos in many ways to define itself.

All mystery is about restoring order after chaos. Any variation of that moves away from the form to the point of failing the audience.

Horror often moves from order toward or into chaos. Schlock and camp horror even celebrates the chaos.

SF is about lecturing each other in detail how imaginary order works.

Fantasy is about escaping strict order to imaginary realms where emotional and mental elbow room can be found. Taken to extremes, fantasy has so much mental room that it becomes inadvertently chaotic.

A hero ventures forth from order to fight threats to that order, usually monsters. To do this the hero will die, be reborn, vanquish the threat, and thus redeem or save the order he can never then return to. He becomes an outsider as a sacrifice to the order he defends. A hero does all this selflessly and often reluctantly.

A villain threatens order, or undermines it for his own ends.

Genre fiction succeeds or fails to the extent a given story varies from established pattern. Fulfilling a pattern in a clever way earns accolades, thwarting a pattern, even in a clever way, risks audience rejection. Maintaining a pattern's order helps a story succeed in genre terms.

Order and chaos also apply to tone. The more orderly narrative, the more a genre audience likes it. Add any level of chaos and genre readers will either be confused by it and put it down as amateurish, or see it as literary and reject it bitterly.

Too much narrative chaos strikes genre audience as abstraction, which makes a genre reader feel as if something is being put past them, and this riles anger and resentment.

However, if you can make order look chaotic on the surface, and manage not to lose the order required to fulfill a given genre, it is possible, rarely, to prevail as "brilliant" or "a genius". Examples of this are Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and the Zen influenced mysteries of Janwillem van der Wetering.

Strict attention to order and chaos defines genre and helps a story fulfill expectations and thus succeed in the market.

/// /// ///

Drama, Melodrama, and Soaps

Good drama is based on interconnections, which is another word for relationships.

Soap Operas draw them with big fat crayons and oversized Sharpies in neon colors.  This is the reason we can all get hooked into them but also feel at least a mild contempt for them, if not outright allergic detestation; they're blatantly manipulative of our vulnerability to relationship shifts.

It borders on cheating; in the worst of them it IS cheating.  It parallels taking a sledgehammer to a kitten or feeding a puppy into a meat grinder.  It is guaranteed to make us react, and everyone knows it's a cheap shot.  

This is melodrama, the cartoon of the dramatic world. Actual drama is more refined in many ways.

More refined drama addresses both more serious relationship subtleties and deeper emotional scars. It also factors in ethical considerations and other real world expansions of personal problems.

The best drama enhances real life. It shows recognized individuals, not types, engaged in situations we can relate to, doing things to cope we have all done in one way or another, and it also reveals the complexities and subtle shadings involved in the process of living life with others.

Next time you write a story, figure out if it's melodrama or drama and adjust accordingly. It will strengthen your fiction no end to be aware of these things.

Writing Late At Night, Questions Arise

Is writing communication,
the marking of territory,
or merely jabber to stave off loneliness
in this closed cranial cavern?

When words leap the gap we call time,
voices of people long dead speak again.
Is what they say more than
a waving hello between islands,
so we know we are sharing
experiences common to us all?

When we read, do other members
of our lonely species link through us
to each other, across a spectrum of
writers, writing, words, and voices?

Does writing bind the literate
into a greater experience of an
unknowable, isolated, yet somehow
elevated status of being?

Are each of us, those who
call themselves writers
because we write words
into sentences, stories, and songs,
seeking communion with
others like us from all times,
past, present, and future?

Write it once and it is always.
Read it once and it is yours.

Our Words In a Clear Sky

“Words are the birds that break cover and show your enemy where you’re hiding.”
--Mike Carey, The Devil You Know, page 51, ¶2.

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Writers know this.

Readers sense it. Glimpses and sometimes whole torrents of truth keeps them reading. Addictive as gossip, sweet as revenge, the soul writers spill in their words comes alive each time a sensitive reader spots it. Sporadic immortality is better than none.

Who is the enemy?

Anyone wishing harm to the writer. Anyone wishing to use words against freedom or truth. Anyone seeking to ignore, distort, or destroy truth. Liars. Undemanding, indifferent, and indiscriminate readers. Marketers, advertisers, and politicians. Lawyers. Lazy librarians who categorize carelessly. Critics. Editors. Publishers. Profiteers.

There are so many enemies it’s a wonder words are tools of choice for so many. Except that’s all we’ve got. Words, to brick out the changes each day and year and century brings. Words, to record ourselves for our children’s children’s children. Words, to chip at time’s implacable stomp.

Words to leave a mark.

Grooves in stone.

Worm trails.

Hollow places where once we curled, quivering.

Where once we stood proud.

Where once we lived.

Words are all of life that might stick.

Choose your words well. Remember, they’re going to let your enemies know where you’re hiding, and where and how you hid. Words signal not surrender but defiance.

Words are strength when used well.

May at least some of your words fly free to reach an untroubled sky. A clear sky on some future day of bright calm, not an enemy in sight.


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Making Marks

Storytellers speak, journalists type, and academics agonize and struggle to justify every word. All wrestle with personal demons, distractions, and defeats. A writer’s approach, as informed by attitude and artistic adjustments, seems shaped by training and experience.

Reporters learn form first, then learn how to fill it in efficiently. Fiction writers tend to learn form last, if at all. This is an interesting contrast revealing emphasis. What is important to each kind of writer, and reader? In reporting, facts are paramount. In fiction, a range of considerations apply, from character and plot to theme and meaning, from social milieu to social commentary, from atmosphere to voice and tone.

If reporting is like taking photographs, fiction writing is more like drawing freehand.

Smarter artists sketch from life. They use models, even set up tableaux, or work from photographs and reference trips. They introduce as much that’s real as possible. In this way they can get on with the job at hand and not have to waste time researching how shadows fall on such a complex figure, or which position a limb might be in after a fall. They have what they need before them, having assembled their materials beforehand as they work toward a known goal.

Other artists work in other ways.

Some simply put pencil to paper and make it up, letting lines and shadings flow straight from imagination onto paper.

Some shape squiggles and doodles into what ever their eye discerns emerging from the chaos.

Some capture the outlines and fill in details only as needed, even as others block in general shapes and rely on impression more than texture or nuance.

Then there are the adventurous who explore other mediums, from pastels and colored pencils to acrylics, oils, and even collage or modeling clay.

The important thing is making marks. Cartoons or words, put then on paper. That gives you something to work with, raw material with which to fashion a work of art that might just please others and, if you’re really lucky, last the ages.


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What ARE These Veggie Burgers?

Recently I got a rejection that said, essentially, “Good effort in a unique story full of interesting factual details, but I prefer clear concise writing. Some of your sentences were out of order. I could easily rearrange them to make them clearer. Often I realized what you were trying to say but the word order made it awkward and distracting to read. Many sentences rambled too long and there were grammatical errors...“

Wow. Sure didn’t sound like me. So I read the story over carefully...

...and found nothing wrong, aside from a couple typos. How, I wondered, did this editor and I see the same story so differently?

Going back to the rejection, I began to decode. What was it in the story this editor might find out of order? Less than clear or concise? Awkward and distracting to decipher?

What I came up with sat me back in my chair for a gut-punched moment. Was it simply my mix of compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences boggling this editor? Was it multisyllabic words chosen for accuracy over easier, less specific words? Was it the slightly baroque vernacular style chosen because the story is told in the voice and with the references of the protagonist? Was it that this editor did not understand that narration often employs grammatical errors as part of the speech patterns of the narrator, to add the local color of dialect? (Not that I found a slew of grammatical errors, please note: I was hard-pressed to find any.)

Was this editor then demonstrably reading on a lower grade-school level? Or was I writing at in too literary a tone? Did my writing’s fault depend more on my words, or my shelves?

The rejection went on to encourage me to work hard and improve, which we all can certainly do, but added that helping me would take too much time out of the editor’s busy schedule. This same editor who hangs out on Facebook and Twitter for hours each day of empty socializing, as has been both observed by a depressed writer of our acquaintance and also reported by others who know the editor well, cannot spare time to, cue the irony bell, edit my stuff in order to help what is viewed as a writer with promise.

Thank heavens, is all I can say, for Facebook & Twitter.

Editor has come to mean “someone assigned to choose mss” for publication in a magazine, anthology, or in book form. Needless to observe, in many instances an AI program or random selection -- tossing darts or dice, asking a pet to fetch one from the pile -- could do as well, especially if mss first were culled by recognized names.

As to being "literary", that dreaded genre charge seems to mean "Writes in an adult manner any way he or she wants." It is only genre that increasingly insists everything be readable by slow children with lazy eye and ADD.

And look:  YA novels clogged the Hugo list this year and one of them won.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that genre fiction is dumbing itself down to juvenile levels, perhaps to hold what little audience it has, or in fear of losing even that, or perhaps because, as genre fiction’s tropes become more popular, the popularity itself dilutes the original formula that isolated the genre in the first place. To have mass appeal, it must give the sucker an even break and begin using fewer specialized terms.

This addresses sf jargon, surely -- “fewer mathematical equations in the prose, folks,” -- but does not account for the childish scrawl that so many editors insist upon. 

Sure, there are exceptions, and they stand out like neon in noir. Still, the trend is toward simplistic, unchallenging, safe little stories any kid of 9 could grasp fully on one hasty reading.

Is this a reaction against the big scary changes in publishing? Is it a response against the influx of new influences such as romance and erotica? Is it simply the infant bleat of HAL 9000 as his higher functions one by one are switched off by a wider audience’s acceptance?

Time, and writers willing or unwilling to talk dumb, will tell, and in the meantime it looks like I continue to write deluxe gourmet veggie burgers in a world demanding basic Big Macs and sloppy Whoppers.

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Movies, Images, Words, Files, Journals, Speech, Poems

Movies are easier than books. Images are evocative in montage because viewers tend to make stories of them. Movies are interactive.

Words are speech and render the listener more passive, less apt to do the work of making a story of them.

Files and journals are palimpsests to be excavated like archaeological sites and sifted for their treasures.

Poems are flowering vines of thought.

Rejection City Rubble

These questions came up on Jay Lake's blog: How many rejections came to you before your first publication, and how many rejections have you accrued?

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We don’t all keep track. I sure don’t. I just try to send at least two out for every one I get back. It’s a process for me rather than a reckoning or an accounting.

I’d submitted sporadically for six years, starting in 1974.

In 1980 I began submitting regularly. My first sale was “Weal & Woe” to MZB’s in Spring 1990. I’d had many near-misses, including almost snagging 3rd place in the first Twilight Zone contest, won by Dan Simmons.

So, if I had to estimate, I’d say maybe, what, 1000 - 1500 rejections before that first paying sale? Wow, I had no idea. If I had been keeping track I might have been discouraged.

Nah.

I’m not counting unpaid publication or various other things, either. Face it, I just don’t pay attention to much beyond what I’m writing at the time, which explains my lack of business success. As you’ve said, Jay, the business part is what too many of us ignore to our detriment. So true.

I’ve never been able to internalize taking a more businesslike approach. And yes, I recognize this as a fatal flaw.

Once you're writing publishable prose, rejections are irrelevant to such things as talent or skill. I've long since concluded they are essentially random. Either an editor likes what you send in the few moments it slides under editorial gaze, or not. Same editor may later buy what has been previously rejected, or wonder what they ever saw in a work after they buy it.

This is why I don't bother with them. Sometimes there are good reasons for a rejection, sometimes not, but either way I have no control over that, beyond trying to conform to each publication's standards or to each editors expressed needs.

To me, rejections are noise, acceptances are signal, and payment is what the signal delivers.

Com Vs. Code: A Look Into the Future

“Communication Versus Codes:
A Look Into the Near Future”

Pulitzer insisted on plain prose and established it as standard, to reach the masses. Were, then, prior newspapers and their verbosity aimed to miss the masses?

Did wading through them drag general literacy up? Certainly the average person today can’t make sense of newspapers from yesterday. The virtue of being immediately understood degraded the urge to accomplish more complex and subtle reading.

This means clarity is a mixed blessing and that there can be a use for, and gains to be had by, being indirect.

Was putting plain prose into daily print what allowed American vernacular finally to be allowed into, and viewed as, literature?

Oral tradition predates literary tradition. Speech comes before writing. Returning writing to a speaker’s syntax offers powerful advantages. It shatters the chains of formalism and allows a wider range of topics and voices into literary culture. However, stating things simply seems to have tended to drag thinking into simplicity, too. This is a loss.

It’s evident mass literacy has a major impact on literary culture, forcing it toward plain prose. What is less evident is the impatience plainness plants in us for subtlety and complexity of thought. Cut to the chase, we say; give us the gist, and keep it stupidly simple.

It is perhaps predictable that there is an academic backlash against plain prose. It insists that abstract, fancy prose is superior.

Is this protective snobbery covering up the fact that straightforward prose can accomplish everything maze-like prose can, and more? Or is it an acknowledgment of all the grace notes and lesser points we’ve lost to bluntness?

A debate rages. It’s about clarity of thought and expression versus protection of turf. One group states that complex, layered, even convoluted thoughts can be expressed simply, even if doing so requires sequential presentation with successive points built upon. Another advocates a more oblique approach, claiming that only via cumulative side points can the main point become a worthwhile summation. Ephemeral values must be kept safe at the heart of a tangled garden of words.

Academic prose is but bad taste, say some. It cries for citation and stifles originality. Conformity is academia’s way of clinging to a hollow relevance. Obfuscation is the ivy-covered tower’s refuge for pseudo intellectuals. It is an attempt to exclude the masses in favor of snobbery.

Another group asks, if writing is communicative, should it not be inclusive? Does not democratic idealism require a literature understandable by all? Is not fostering isolated elitism and specialism just another way of shutting down communication?

What of vocabulary? Are big words snobbish? Are plain words always better? How can one choose the right word, and by whose standards, on what scale?

Eschew obfuscation, or be brief? Is concise the same as short, though? Is not the sum of some words greater than the summation of their component parts?

Both sides create extremes. Opposite Dr. Seuss one finds Finnegans Wake. Faulkner called Hemingway a dolt and mocked his 400-word vocabulary. Dickens wrote fat books concisely while Hawthorne wrote as if paid by the run-on sentence. Hugo wrote pages of words that cannot be diagrammed into sentences while Robbe-Grillet wrote lists.

Ideals duel. Invisible prose squares off against the paragraph as sculpture. Deconstructionists sneer at the notion that the writer can know what he or she meant by what’s written, while cyberpunks go binary in a street rebellion of electronic tagging.

Communication fights Codes. Some want any reader to be able to understand, others want only prepared audiences to have a chance to extract hidden meaning.

Both extremes use words like masks.

Masks both hide and show. They conceal and reveal at the same time. What you choose to mask, and what kind of mask you choose, reveal hidden things, even as they cover up others.

On the individual scale, it is a matter of taste. An impatience with gallimaufry and drawn out manipulation leads to a preference for clean, clear prose. An enjoyment of immersion and a fascination with involvement leads to a preference for more baroque writing.

On a social scale, however, a balance must be struck between the blunt and the fine. Intelligence and information thrive, or wither, through presentation. A lecture delivered in rudimentary language may fail to impart anything, while verbosity and high verbal skills applied to a kindergarten lesson may simply baffle.

Consider your audience, journalists are told. Write for the reader. Even in fiction, if you stray too far from reader expectations, reader interest is lost. Sales decline. Publishers move on to someone else.

When Pulitzer focused on reaching the masses, his agenda was to sell more newspapers than Hearst, yes, but his ulterior motive was political. He wanted to move things his way.

Rather than address the well-educated ruling class, he aimed at the semi-educated working class. He went native, in a way, so his influence would be delivered in their everyday language.

Writing fiction sways between giving readers what they want -- diversion and entertainment -- and expressing the writer’s concerns -- personal and political obsessions. It balances between journalism and fine art.

Journalism influenced fiction writing more than the reverse due to numbers. More people read newspapers than fiction.

Today, that may not be true. Today, the news delivery systems of choice are the internet and TV, especially TV comedians. TV news has lost luster due to a shift from informing to entertaining. Drawing an audience matters more than informing the public, so demographics surveys and playing to perceived audience bias slants news away from objective information and toward propaganda. People respond by turning elsewhere.

When an event becomes known, people are apt now to jump online. There they can find multiple sources, from reliable to crazy. They can sift out their own version of what happened from multiple views.

Today’s fiction delivery systems of choice are movies and TV shows. Books that most closely resemble the movie or TV series experience sell best. This includes franchise fiction based on established story lines such as Star Wars and Star Trek.

So audiovisual media are the biggest influence on literature today. Literary culture is, in fact, merging with AV culture in the form of computer games. Video games often provide detailed story lines even more developed than those found in Victorian novels. Reading itself may become obsolete when AV interfaces replace the keyboard model on handheld devices. Replacing the device with implanted subcutaneous chips is a next logical phase, even as WiFi replaces wire and thermal and light sourced power generation replaces batteries and alternating current generators.

It is not far-fetched to envision individuals in the near future mentally involved with a world-spanning web of internet-based sub-realities, pocket universes, and sites without spatial locale. They will have instant global communication and awareness. They will be able to store information for later perusal, or tap into any information source needed, or find someone to help them.

Even then there will no doubt be those favoring code over com. They will seek to corral sectors of the mind-web for private projects or just for the sake of secrecy and criminality. The two may end up being equated.

Privacy, being a half-brother to secrecy, may also end up being equated with criminality, or antisocial tendencies at least. So may ownership, property, and notions of control.

Symbolic behavior, symbols, and other abstractions may end up being the last refuge of individualism. At that point communication will have won, or enclaves of Luddites will have developed to reject technology’s changes. Clinging won’t help, though.

Change, being the only constant, favors open communication.

Knowing this, it becomes obvious that plain prose and clear thought are positive, while obfuscation, obscuritanism, and contrary concealment must be seen as negative, in terms of both individual and social progress.

Aspects of this have the potential to become fascist. Frightened conformists seek to control what they cannot understand. Despite any such setbacks, it looks as if open communication will ultimately prevail.

Right now there is no need to make such harsh choices. Right now there is room for utopia and dystopia. It may not be long, though, before how we communicate breaks the code of human nature and allows us to live as one seething, incredibly varied, and powerful organism.

The fearful will speak of hive mind. The unafraid will see it as a step toward being spiritually united.

All this from how we read and write.


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Genre Evolution

Genre Evolution:
Establish patterns. Set rules. Debate rules. Break rules. Argue rules. Ignore rules. Establish new patterns. Set new rules. Debate new rules. Break new rules. Argue new rules. Ignore new rules. Romanticize old patterns. Repeat until nothing really changes.

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Moribund means almost extinct. It means doomed. If something is moribund, it means it is on its last legs. It is dying, fading, going, nearly gone.

Take science fiction, or any other genre you wish, as an example. It’s been moribund since inception. Since first noticed it has been decried as a lost cause.

This means genre evolution happens the instant a genre is identified. It’s inherent in genre itself. Humanoid primates break things, rules prime among them. We are destructive even in our creativity. We set up patterns and rules to react against. Rebels all, we keep asking, “Whatcha got?”

Collective boredom sets in now and then. During the Pulp Era one of the biggest categories was Sports Fiction. It bloomed and withered within a decade or so. Yet Hollywood retains it as a market category, having refreshed it with the simple addition of the phrase, “Based on a True Story.”

Space Opera, a subcategory of science fiction, went through a similar cycle. It faded as harsher views blossomed in Dystopia. Realpolitik kept things grim for awhile. Dystopia is currently waning even as space opera is being revitalized by an injection of romance, of all things. Gone are the days when sf was all male and all females brought to it were cooties.

In mystery fiction, Tea Cozy gave way to Hard Boiled, which paved the streetwise way for Police Procedural. Spenser wore his feelings for hire on his sleeve, much to Mike Hammer’s disgust, while Spade kept digging and Archer kept flinging outrageous arrows against a sea of sorrow.

Philip Marlowe loosened the terse vocabulary of the crime novel and Dame Agatha stripped away the upper crust’s haughty veneer. This led the way for Tony Strong’s GLBT fiction and van de Wetering’s Zen explorations.

Genre reflects current culture, in short. Evolve means change: Genre changes with the times. Attitudes, venues, and crime scenes vary with our world experience. Locked room gives way to locked email files.

We see ourselves in the victims and the detectives; in the space aliens and astronauts; in the unicorns and wizards; in the monsters and survivors; in the Catherines and Heathcliffs. We are what we write and read.

We are genre, despite much academic sneering. Even literary fiction for tiny, prepared audiences forms a genre, after all. Just more patterns and rules. More debate, argument, and ignorance.

As genre evolves our own changes are chronicled. We look inward sometimes, at other times we look outward. Occasionally we lie to ourselves, and most of our fiction remains a way to get at truth mere fact will not support or reveal. Next time you hear someone decry a genre as worn thin, as ready for the garbage heap, as hopelessly dated and ridiculous, remember, it was always that way and always will be. Genre is nothing but change.

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Writing Dies, Too

Writers die. So does their work.

Yes, some work achieves a kind of immortality that lasts at least as long as the culture that produced it. And it’s not always the best or most deserving or most representative work, either. James Fennimore Cooper and L. Ron Hubbard prove that, for differing reasons.

Yes, popularity plays into it. Partly that may be due to sheer numbers. There are so many Stephen King books in print that they have a better chance of being discovered by second and subsequent readers, and generations.

Popularity can lead to discussion, too. Critic chat is not as influential as academic regard, simply because works chosen as school texts are kept in print longer. This doesn’t endear works, though. Catcher In the Rye by J. D. Salinger is forced down the throats of high school kids and this only makes them gag the stronger, both on Holden Caulfield’s whining and on reading as enjoyable entertainment. Another bizarre choice, no doubt approved by Cotton Mather’s horny ghost, is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel paid-by-the-word-and-bonus-for-convoluted-sentences Hawthorne.

No child left to its own devices, in short.

And no book approved by Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut, either, apparently. Or only books they kicked, chosen as torture.

Some of us were allowed to find our own reading. Most of that group ended up liking to read. Many of us even came down with writing joneses.

Damn.

Rather than pity the afflicted, enable them by buying some of their stuff, wouldja?

Some prominent writers have died lately, and not just Vonnegut. Michael Crichton, Studs Terkel, Janwillem van de Wetering, Gregory Mcdonald, James Crumley, and Tony Hillerman, to name a few offhand, in no order and for no collective reason.

We note their passing often by grabbing up their work. Freshly dead writers often experience a sales surge. Would’ve done them a lot more good had it come before they left, but their estates are appreciative, not to mention their publishers, who can then start the perennial exploitation dance.

Will their work last?

Some will, yes. For reasons touched upon. Some won’t, for unfathomable reasons.

Some work goes away, then comes back.

Tolkien did that. His work was obscure in my lifetime. He published most of it in the 1930s. Thirty years later it experienced a resurgence that saw it, in another decade, become hugely popular and influential. In part this was due to Lester del Rey coming up with the Fantasy Trilogy gimmick, to feed the Tolkien jones once people had read him. A sales trick became a sub-genre and it prevails to this day. Why sell one book when you can hook readers into at least three?

Much talk has wasted air over whether this “trilogy” nonsense has ruined fiction or stretched storytelling to some logical limit. Maybe it’s just reader patience being stretched.

It seems, now, that Tolkien’s work will last as part of Western Culture. We would not have guessed this in his lifetime.

Which brings us to the rub. That’s the narrow part you have to squeeze through. The part the fat can’t do, be they fat-headed or otherwise burdened and slow.

The rub? We can’t know what writing will last.

A quick and dirty scan tells us to bet on storytelling over style. A good story well told has more chance of lasting, people being generally the same through history. Style changes in a way similar to fashion. Many factors come to bear on style, so that one generation prefers indirection and discretion, another demands the harsh and the blunt.

All that falls away, though, when a story proves robust enough to jump languages and cultures. That is when the story itself, and, often, how it’s told matter most. Basics count in writing as in all things. And story is the basis of writing.

And of course often the books we might choose as ones to last are themselves recapitulations of classic stories. Retelling a standard well, or in a new voice, is the same as singing a standard song. If a new version, take, interpretation, or voice appeals, it is likely to work.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman comes to mind, it being a new take on The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, themselves in part based on Indian folk tales absorbed by Kipling. Patterns repeat.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier was, as were many books since, a retelling of The Odyssey by Homer. Homer is a mysterious figure whose tales were not even written down for centuries, so who knows how many refinements and alterations came and went during its oral tradition phase. And yet the basics remain intact. They are recognizable even in American Civil War guise.

Beowulf, oldest known tale in English, is a monster of a horror story, a heroic adventure with lots of violence, action, and drama. It is pulp. It is penny dreadful. It is genre. It is baseline appealing to humanoid primates.

Fiction delivery systems tend to remain true to the human voice. Someone tells a story, others listen. If it’s got certain elements it fascinates. Listeners are hooked and come back for more as the camp fire dies low and shadows move in the dark around us.

Writing dies along with writers, sometimes, but fiction is along for the ride with us. As long as we’re hear to receive it, to crave and need and rely upon it, then fiction will sustain us.

Our stories are our lives.

That is what will last, maybe even longer than we do.

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