Category Archives: Writing

Vanity Googling Hits Pay Dirt

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Today I was poking around on that big ol’ Internet thing, and I decided to Google ‘gizo’. He is the Millennial Office Holder and all. It turns out that the top reference that refers to a human being is our gizo, but there are several links to an island in the Solomon chain that come in ahead of him. It’s not much, but I offer this link to gizo‘s home page to help boost his ratings, and to encourage folks here to drop by and say hello over there.

Yes, I know that gizo probably doesn’t care where he ranks on Google.

Then, of course, I searched my own name, and I was nineteen out of the top twenty matches. This is what happens when the spelling of your name is an unusual variant and you’ve been cluttering up the Web for a long time. Ancient threads about Java coding practices, links to this blog, imdb listings, my photo gallery, and so forth. One link caught my eye, though, that spurred me to write this episode. It is from the Web site of a major European university, giving course materials for a class on American literature and culture.

An excerpt:

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Report 1: Give a brief presentation of 1950s conformity.
Suggested sources:
U.S. Department of State, “The Culture of the 1950s“
“1950s: Pop Culture Explodes in a Decade of Conformity“
“Social Trends of the 1950s“

Report 2: Comment briefly on the value placed on the open road in American culture.
Suggested source:
Jerry Seeger, “American Road Myth 01“

So the oldest University in the Nordic countries is using my writing as a source when discussing John Updike. I think that’s pretty darn cool. Makes me think maybe I should get around to writing more of that intended series. Purely coincidentally, the short story I’m noodling on right now is rooted firmly in that mythos.

Thanks!

Rhetoric and Fiction

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Somebody over in the Hut forums tossed out a link today. It was to a series of essays by Orson Scott Card about the art and the business of writing. Uncle Orson wrote some of my favorite ever stories. Although we have parted ways lately (I wonder if he misses me…?) I have a great deal of respect for the man both as a dude and a writer. My first exposure to his work was long, long, ago, when I read a novella of his in Analog. He later turned that into Ender’s Game, a novel that did pretty darn well and (I assume) laid the foundation for his career. I expect he cringes now when he reads it, seeing all the things he could have done better, and by now there is a large body of critics devoted to finding things Uncle Orson could have done better.

Anyway, today I was reading thoughts on writing from a man who is both a successful writer and a successful teacher of writing. The essays I read were on the issue of style. He was answering the question “How do I improve my style?” and his response was that you can’t improve your style, except you can stop yourself from thinking too much about your style and therefore making your style artificial and forced. That’s not earth-shattering news, but his solution was one I had not heard before. A rough paraphrase: Tell the story. Find the most effective words to convince people and make them care. That’s rhetoric. Hone your rhetoric and your style will shine free and unencumbered.

That’s a very rough paraphrase (the ‘free and unencumbered’ part is all me), but the message is there, one that I could really benefit from. Mr. Oxford says rhetoric is “the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, esp. the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.” Who doesn’t want to be good at that? Hell, it’s an art! I often describe my short stories as ‘atmospheric’, but I need to remember that the atmosphere must have rhetorical value; it must promote a story.

I’ll never give up atmosphere, though. I love it too much. Sometimes the mood is the reason.

Mr. Scott Card’s point is well-taken, however. His use of the word rhetoric in the realm of fiction caught me off-guard (although that may just reflect my less-than-literary educational background), but once I read it, it was obvious. Suddenly seslf-aware, I look back now at the last few paragraphs in this episode and chuckle at the briar patch of rhetorical devices.

It’s something I think I already knew, something I was already aware of at the functional level, but by stating the idea explicitly I have been granted a very powerful question to ask myself when evaluating my own work. Beauty doesn’t matter if the words don’t do their job.

Thanks!

On the cover at Piker Press

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If the top story in this week’s Piker Press seems familiar to you, that’s because it is an improved version of a story that appeared here first. It was, in fact, the favorable response from readers here that encouraged me to fix it up a bit and give it a life beyond the blog. The story takes place on the first warm day of spring, so in a sense it is antiseasonal. Yesterday I enjoyed tea on a bench outside a coffee shop on a chilly day that left no doubt that winter is fast approaching.

If you want to leave a comment about the story, you have to go to its dedicated, photoless page. You can see a list of everything of mine that has appeared in the press here.

The accompanying photo is also by me (though enhanced by the Piker editorial staff), snapped from a location near the beer window mentioned in the story.

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Feel free to steal this idea.

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I want to write a werewolf story with this in it:

Werewolf (charging at hero): Kill! Kill! Eat!

Hero throws frisbee

Werewolf: Kill! K– Oooo! Chase! Chase!

Perhaps the ultimate weapon for fighting werewolves would be the silver tennis ball.

Thanks!

Too much left unexplained

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In fact, should I rate a tombstone, I’d be all right with that. I got a rejection today that at first glance was just another impersonal note stuffed in the return envelope. I almost didn’t read the text of the note; I’ve seen it before. This rejection was different, however, for two reasons. First, the text of the note actually was different: it said in part, “… your work shows a great deal of promise, and we’d very much like to see more from you.” They don’t have to ask me twice. Second, and even better(ish) was the personal message scratched at the bottom in handwriting worse than mine. The message read, “Some nice writing, but too much was left unexplained.”

Too much left unexplained. I’m trying to explain more now, really.

The reviews of “Memory of a Thing that Never Was” were generally good. There were a couple of professional critics that really liked it, and a bunch of armchair critics who thought it was pretty good. On the other hand, there was a minority of folks who said “I didn’t get it. What happened?” This issue of the magazine had been promoted to the blogosphere, promising free copies in exchange for honest reviews. That would seem like an open invitation to the nutjobs, but I read many reviews and most of these folk stepped up with fair and well-reasoned criticism. Those who rose to the challenge really were passionate about the genre, and ready to help it grow. So, when they ask “What happened?” it’s worth remembering that they are avid readers and champions of the genre.

Too much left unexplained. Some of my good friends here have said the same thing. (It takes a good friend to say something like that — caring enough to risk giving offense and trusting enough to know that the criticism will be taken constructively.) Graybeard, when he read “Memory”, thought for a bit and said, “this should be 600 pages.” From Graybeard, a brutally honest individual, that was for me a great compliment. “Memory” hints at a lot of other things that would take pages and pages to explain, but wouldn’t enhance the short story.

A lot of my stories have holes in them. It seems I’m not writing the holes well enough. Sometimes when I write a short story I’m trying to create a single instant, a moment in a person’s life. A mood. These are my favorite ones and the ones that are the most difficult to write. I worked at a pace of about a paragraph per hour on the rejected story’s opening. The time was well-spent, I think, as the Rejecting Authority appears to have enjoyed the prose. Often I write background bits that I subsequently delete because I see them as distractions. Unfortunately many people find the lack of background to be distracting. If I were to add that stuff, however, it would change the nature of the story.

Thinking about it, I write plenty of stories in which everything is explained. Some of them I even like. (My hard drive is a graveyard of stories written that will never see the light of day, unless I decide to hire some poor slob to find the ones I dropped only because I was in the wrong mood when I reviewed them a week after writing). But my favorites are the very short, very dense stories that are more like a painting than a movie; a single frame in a longer narrative.

Tonight I looked at the rejected story with some frustration. I really thought I was hammering on the important parts, almost embarrassingly so. There is much unknown, but no one in the story knows the answers. They even say as much. The story is about a moment of awakening, but one that has happened many times before. So what can I clarify? The mountains are forbidden. Why? I don’t know. Nobody in the story knows. Why is not important; what matters is that they all believe it enough to kill a friend rather than let him get there. In a novel or even a novella I would explore those questions, but there’s not time for that now.

Obviously I have some work cut out for me as a short story writer, but at the same time I can’t help but think that there is a readership that likes to fill in the blanks. I am more appreciative than ever of the people at Fantasy and Science Fiction for having faith in their readers to put a more difficult story in their pages.

I joked tonight that perhaps I should write my stories in czech because the last thing they want here is an answer. Of course that’s silly; I’m blaming the audience (or actually in this case, a single underpaid slush-pile reader) for failing to understand me when it is my job to be understood.

Too much left unexplained. Isn’t that just like life.

Thanks!

The Bohemian Quarter

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I awoke lazily this morning, enjoying slipping back and forth between sleep and semi-wakefulness. While I lay there I thought of how much fun I’d had in the Bohemian Quarter recently, exploring it’s twisty-turny streets, the architecture from an earlier era, and the carnival atmosphere. I remembered being lost and stumbling into a small amusement park. I had to wander the streets of the quarter for quite some time before finally getting a feeling for the layout of the place, using a monument in a little square as my anchor point.

That memory was followed by a moment of confusion as I realized that Prague has no Bohemian Quarter. Still my memory of the place was so complete (new details easily recalled, emotional resonances, a seamless whole rather than a framework of invention), and my experiences there so varied, that I cast about trying to figure out where the real Bohemian Quarter is. I can’t find it, and the only place left to look is in a story I haven’t written yet.

Thanks!

But wait, there’s more!

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In the immediately previous episode I mentioned reading a Japanese comic that eventually became rather tiresome. The manga is called Bleach, and while the story starts off strong, eventually it crumbles under its own weight, becoming an endless series of battles. Most of those battles follow a form of gradual escalation that is common in literature from all around the globe. Just when the good guy thinks he has the bad guy beat, bad guy pulls out a more effective weapon, and suddenly the tide changes.

The question in a confrontation like that is “why the hell was the bad guy screwing around with lesser weapons in a life-and-death struggle? Why leave your life to capricious chance when you have a devastating first strike at your disposal?” The question, while rhetorical to most readers of these august pages, is direct for the people that write these stories. Think about it. You have a gun and a sharp stick. Which are you going to lead with?

As with any cliché, using it artfully yields magical results. In The Princess Bride, one of the best parts of one of the best books I’ve ever read is when Inigo Montoya meets the Man in Black at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity. If you’ve only seen the movie, you’ve only caught a pale shadow of the scene. Inigo has seen the Man in Black in action, and hopes that, perhaps at long last, he’s going to have a good fight. He wants a worthy adversary more than he wants life itself. He decides to start lefty to give the Man in Black a chance. The Man in Black reaches the top of the cliff, and Inigo waits courteously while his enemy catches his breath. Why? Because he needs this to be a fair fight.

After a few minutes the Man in Black stands and draws his own sword. Inigo smiles when he sees his opponent is left-handed. Strength against weakness. They join battle.

The battle is amazing, and the Man in Black pushes Inigo to his limit. Inigo has not been happier since before the six-fingered man killed his father. The Man in Black corners Inigo, who says (something like) “ask me why I’m smiling.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because I am not left-handed.” Inigo moves his sword to his right hand and now the battle steps up. They go all over the place: terrain, footing, tactics, and physical conditioning all come into play, written in so naturally that you think you’re an expert on fencing when the battle is over. Finally Inigo has the Man in Black cornered, and his mysterious opponent is smiling. “I am also not left-handed,” the Man in Black says.

Now, see? If you want to escalate the battle gradually, that’s how you do it. Give the combatants a human reason why they would not open with their most devastating blow. In The Princess Bride it is a mutual love of the contest. In The Monster Within, I notice now that without consciously thinking about it, I did all right with the escalation because the opposition’s goal evolved from testing to intimidating to eliminating. In The Test, no opponent ever holds back. The tension comes from battles pending and battles avoided, but when confrontation occurs, the action is swift and fierce, and everyone, even timid little Jane, bites for the throat. The Test is also different because while there are very bad people, there is no evil. Evil is a cheap excuse to make the bad guys do irrational things.

Which brings me back to where I started. Japanese comic book. Evil in this narrative is not simple, but there is still evil. Where the story gets good (and eventually tiresome as they work it to death) is when the toughest opponents are not the classic evil folk but powerful people with misguided ideas. This one does pretty well with the evil beings, explaining their lust to eat human souls to replace the one they only vaguely remember having themselves. Even within the soul-hungry horde, there is a scale of sins.

Ah… foolish mortal. Do you not know of the power of nantuki?

“Well, crap, if I’d known that, do you think I wouldn’t have mentioned the power of USS Iowa?

Thanks!

glown

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“Have your eyes ever glown red?” sounds so much better than “have your eyes ever glowed red?” I have no reference that would allow me to use this, however. Any help out there? (Keeping in mind that I’ll use any word I want, but going against the grain is a conscious risk.)

Thanks!

Illustrators wanted!

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We here at Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked ideas are going to turn up the audience participation a notch. Why? Because we care. Yep, for any of you with an artistic bent, now’s your chance to emerge from the comments and get your stuff on the front page.

Elephants of Doom is turning out to be a pretty big story (2000 words in and no ivory-billed woodpecker yet), but I have written a couple of bits that might be fun to draw. If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments and I’ll send you the part of EoD that I have written.

I thought of turning this into a contest, but hey, if more than one person supplies a picture, I’ll just include them all — with, of course, full credit to the artist and a link to your page if you would like. My goal is to release Elephants of Doom to celebrate visitor 50,021, which will happen a few days from now. Sorry about the short notice. If you send an illustration later, I can still add it, and make sure that everyone sees it.

In fact, now that I think about it, feel free to illustrate any of the stories I scratch out here. Some of them are certainly more illustration-worthy than others, but any of them would be improved by a nice picture. (It’s hard to imagine why you would, but if you choose to illustrate Quest for the Important Thing to Defeat the Evil Guy, Episode 1, please be careful.)

Thanks!

Why being a writer makes it more diffucult to learn another language.

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Each week I receive as homework a set of sentences to render in czech, each carefully designed to stretch my abilities with the language without breaking it. In the past three weeks the scope of these sentences has taken a gratifying and very enjoyable step forward. I will see a sentence, something that would seem quite ordinary, but it represents a whole new range of things I’m able to say. Heady times.

Last week one of my sentences was, “In the middle of my room, there is a chair.” This one really didn’t push any new grammar boundaries, but it was nearly the last sentence of my homework that I did. It seemed like a good opening sentence for a story. There’s a lot packed into that sentence, the narrator’s only room has a chair, seemingly alone, in the middle. It raises lots of questions. It was only the because my lesson was in two hours that I managed to keep on the homework. Homework completed, lesson survived, and a Czech movie with my teacher viewed, I was ready to sprint for the keyboard.

Which is a bit of a pity, because Iveta left the question, “so, what are you doing now?” out there, and I answered with “I’m going to go sit by myself and work.” It’s probably a good rule of thumb, as a single guy, that when a pretty girl asks me something like that, I should keep other answers handy.

Anyway, that sentence was pretty much all I could think about. The chair is in the middle, which puts everything else, narrator included, at the edges. What happened to give the chair such importance? The story’s not finished yet (it’s another of the ‘difficult’ style), but so far so good.

On another homework-related note, for the past two weeks I’ve been assigned to writer a few sentences about my day. The idea was for me to write sentences like, “Yesterday morning I got up at six,” simple uses of the past tense and handy day-to-day vocabulary. I have been unable to perform this seemingly simple exercise. My failure stems from my complete inability to write about something as boring as my life, and all in short sentences, to boot. My first attempt started “Alas, my life is not very interesting, but I did do a couple of things this week.” I managed that sentence all right, and the bit about posting a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer was all right except that “post” (in the sense of upload) and “download” were nowhere to be found in my prehistoric references. After that, I tried to tell about a story I had written, and I got deep into things I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to do.

This week I did a little better, telling the story about trying to tell a joke in czech. A little better, but not much. This week I’m on notice. I’m to write simple sentences that apply what I’ve learned, and grit my teeth and ignore cadence, flow, and expressing relationships in complex ways. In other words: No rambling. Do you know how hard that is?

On another side note, Iveta is picking up a very bad habit of saying things in Czech and expecting me to reply in the same language. The gap between my written and spoken comprehension is vast. It takes me quite a bit of work to separate the words and more often that not some word or cluster completely defies my parsing abilities. I’m considering hooking the TV back up, just so I can practice listening.

Thanks!

The Quick and the Deadly

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For the last few days I’ve been focussed on short stories. I’m not sure if that’s the right thing to do, except they’re a hell of a lot easier to get published and a bit of name recognition can only help my novel-flogging efforts.

Maybe three days ago I was struck with a mental image that I could really get my brain around. It’s been done before, but everything has. Ideas are worthless; it’s what you do with them that matters. I sat down to craft that moment into a story. With the image came a voice, and I’m not sure why, but that voice is really stinking hard to write. The story is told in broken fragments by a broken man, but there is a transformation taking place, revealed (in retrospect) through sensory impressions, and every word is critical. Roughly seven hours in I have six paragraphs, which still need to be fine-tuned. Perhaps a tenth of the story. Hopefully the pace of writing will pick up as the story moves into the confrontation.

At roughly paragraph four I had another idea. I took a break from that story and cranked out a rather fun 1700 words about why demons are so cranky when summoned. A lighthearted tale in three brief acts, it teaches us the importance of being polite — especially to powerful demons. That story spilled out through my fingers, and after some revision today has that flash-of-light-off-the-corner-accompanied-by-the-high-pitched-bell-ring of “marketable”. (Note to newcomers: We of the Muddled Empire are not afraid of hyphens. In fact, we are doing our level best to alleviate the worldwide hyphen surfeit. As with all gluts, China is to blame.)

Now it’s back to the slow one. I’m at what may be the most challenging paragraph. Man, I wish I could get confirmation that the style is working, but it’s going to be a long haul before there’s enough there for someone to evaluate. However, I am very happy with the dark and desperate atmosphere of the piece so far. Gotta have faith, brother, and the result might even be good. Nobody said this job was easy. Well, almost nobody, anyway.

Thanks!

Be careful what you wish for…

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In a comment to a story I posted a week or two ago, I mentioned another story I had sent to a smaller publication because I didn’t think it was A-list material. In the intervening time I went back to make it better for the next submission, and I decided that it was better than I had originally thought. In fact, I was starting to feel that it was pretty darn good. So I expressed hope that the small mag would reject it, so I could throw it into the shark tank in more visible markets.

Well, I got my wish.

The only thing is that the rejection was by far the most perfunctory dismissal I’ve ever received. Now I think the story sucks again.

Thanks!

Adapting to immobility

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When it comes to writing, I’m a creature of habit. Writing, for me, now means getting the hell away from the Internet and drinking way too much caffeine as I scratch out rough prose, all twitchy and birdlike and generally neurotic. Hey, it’s my idiom. But lately the laptop hasn’t been up to the trip, so I’ve taken up the ol’ pen and paper. In the last couple of days I’ve drafted two pretty cool short stories (one has a lot of work ahead of it). I think in the last three days I’ve scribbled about eight thousand words in my notebook. Words that must be revisited from scratch as I enter them into the land of ones and zeroes. As these stories play out into final versions it will be a very interesting test of writing styles: discrete revisions versus continuous editing.

Tonight I wrote a story I really quite like. It’s there, sprawled over a few pages in my notebook (I fit a lot of words onto each page) and it hangs together pretty well, even if it is a series of three fragments. Laura K. Hamilton meets the nitty gritty of everyday life. It’s a love story, not a lust story. I want to share it with you. Hell, I want to sell it. It’s on paper. Paper! Who thought of this crap?

Thanks!

Another baby step

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I got an email from an agent yesterday, which said (more or less): “We probably won’t take you on, but we’d like to see more of your work to be sure first.”

[Edited post because I decided it’s best not to talk about business negotiations while they are going on. I don’t think there’s any big deal in this case, but it just seems like a good policy for down the road. Sorry for the tease.]

Still, it beats the hell out of a “no”.

*”partial” refers to sending a part of the novel to an agent. For many agents, the process goes something like this: Writer sends a query. A query is a one-page letter describing the work, possibly the first five pages of the story, and sometimes a brief synopsis. If the agent is intrigued by the query, she will request a partial. A partial means a bigger chunk of the story (often the first three chapters or so), and perhaps a more detailed synopsis. The agent may also begin to take an interest in personal information about the writer. Should the partial pass muster, then the agent will request a “full”, and will at long last commit to reading the whole damn story. That’s a big deal for an agent, because reading generally happens in her “free” time. Once the agent reads the story, she will ask herself “can I sell this?” which is itself a complicated question, and “can I work with this writer?” Should both those questions came back with a “yes”, the agent will contact the writer and the two will discuss the possibility of working together. Even then, it’s not a sure thing.

Thanks!

Language Log is Ruining My Life

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I mentioned before that I have added a link in the sidebar for Language Log, a blog that is the product of the musings of some (I am led to understand) pretty heavy names in the linguistics biz. That their writing is (generally) as accessible as it is interesting is a credit to them and a drug for me. It’s nice to find eggheads with a sense of humor.

Today I was drifting through the archives brushing up on profanity — how it’s encoded, and how it’s legislated, and what makes something taboo in the first place. Recently they have been posting comic pages that go “meta”, stepping outside the frame to look at just what is coming out of their mouths, as when Beetle Baily asks Sagre how a little flower symbol snuck into his invective. It reminded me of a time I actually laughed at The Wizard of Id:

PEASANT: I’m here about the job in the stables.
STABLE BOSS (holds out small object): What’s this?
PEASANT: Shinola
STABLE BOSS: You’re hired.

I laughed because a clean, family-oriented comic made a joke that was funny for no other reason than it made the reader think of the word “shit”. (It’s like saying to someone, “You’re full of something, and it’s not shinola.”) Certainly the lads in the stable refer to shoveling and various other animal waste-related activities, but this time, there was no escaping the shit — not the substance, but the word. The word is far more taboo than the offal it represents.

After that I read some stuff on recent debates about the nature of language. Some heavyweights in the field, including Chomsky (whose value to the science seems to be his ability to start fights), have proposed a definition for human language that damn near rules out Hemingway’s version of English. Some of those arguments were, admittedly, beyond me, but there is no doubt that my writing here, wandering and layered, a double-jointed drunkard lost in the desert (“recursive” is the word the wonks are all going on about these days), qualifies as human. The argument is that no other animal has true language, because other animals are not able to embed ideas within other ideas, and this embedding makes a language able to convey an infinite variety with a finite number of words. Or something like that.

Personally, I’m new to this game, and dangerously ignorant. As far as I can tell these arguments are all about the mechanics of the language, not what is done with it. If those guys asked me, the two distinguishing characteristics of humans are the ability to misuse tools and the ability to use metaphors. Other animals have developed primitive tool-using behaviors, but only people have invented screws and screwdrivers yet still pound screws in with hammers. Similarly, if you told Koko the gorilla, “You’re pounding a screw in with a hammer,” meaning she was going about something the wrong way, she would be confused because she did not even have a hammer. (Don’t give gorillas hammers. Trust me on this one.)

I’m pretty sure the folks in Language Log Plaza would consider the metaphor bit not to be germane to the current argument, which is OK for now as they are finding plenty of things to argue about already. But if they ever run dry, I’ve got a reservoir they can tap.

What a great job to have, where a major part of the job description is to sit around arguing about esoteric shit. To Koko, there is no shit that can’t be thrown.

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Thanks!