Story develops from character and situation. Narrative and theme develops from story.
Friday 29 April 2011
Thursday 28 April 2011
Clickety-Clack
Posted on 12:15 by Unknown
I was chatting with Jon Courtenay-Grimwood last night, after the Clarke Awards, and we got onto the topic of switching from typewriters to word processing, and how it changed our work habits. Amongst other things, we both retyped final draft pages if we made more than five mistakes when using a typewriter, and we both wrote to the end of the page at the end of a work session; if this meant stopping in the middle of a sentence, then we wrote the end of the sentence on a scrap of paper and the next day inserted a fresh sheet of paper in the machine and carried on from there. I doubt that anyone, now, reaches their self-assigned word (rather than page) count and stops dead in the middle of a sentence. You just keep going, chasing that blinking cursor across the screen. And if you're in the middle of a particular juicy and exciting scene or section, there's a temptation to keep going until the end - which means that the next day you have to cold-start the next scene from the very beginning, and risk getting blocked. Always leave something you want to write for the next day.
I have a small nostalgia for the steady clickety-clack* of the keys imprinting thoughts onto paper letter by letter, but none at all for the messy task of ribbon-changing, of having to stop to disentangle keys that jammed together because I was typing too fast, or of waiting for a streak of Tip-Ex to dry. And I never was (nor am I yet) a touch-typist. As soon as personal computers became affordable, I bought one, learned how to use WordPerfect 4.2, and never looked back.
The mechanical, linear process of typewriting meant that serious revisions were left until the draft was completed. Now, of course, you can worry away forever at what you've just written, and the changes are writ on water instead of paper. The process is a lot more playful than it once was, takes place on the screen as well as inside your head, and is kind of . . . indefinite. When you typed the final word of a manuscript and ripped the paper from the typewriter's platten, there was a real sense of completion, albeit momentary. For even in the days of typewritten MSS, there was a nagging feeling that there were still changes that needed to be made once the story or novel had made it, after editing, copy-editing and proofing, into print. That sense is perhaps a little stronger now. Unless you print it out straight away, there's a temptation to go back time and again to a word-processed document: to tweak and fiddle and adjust this or that sentence, to endlessly fine-tune. Nothing is ever really finished. Instead, you have to let it go.
Which brings me to the ongoing novel, which has now about three-quarters finished in first draft, and has reached the point where, rather than start to tie everything up and aim it towards the last sentence (I do know what it is), I have the growing urge to start over, change everything that needs fixing or revision, and cut away all the persiflage. As usual, I didn't discover the theme of the novel until it had progressed a fair way. The plot has grown far too complicated, as I followed all kinds of exciting leads. And just the other day, I realised that I'm missing a whole section that really needs to be included, and not just because it will contain some cool stuff about the fate of Earth, a chiliastic crusade, and involve the hero in some difficult moral decisions. Well, it can be dropped in later. Right now, this thing, like a shark, needs to keep moving forward. That imperative hasn't changed, at least.
*(UPDATE) Of course, the keys really went clack clack clack, but (this isn't an original thought; I can't remember who said it) the human mind imposes a narrative on everything, turning the steady tick tick tick tick of a clock into a time-directional tick tock tick tock. Does Chinese water torture work because the intervals between drips are just long enough to prevent the subject imposing a tick-tock narrative? Does the lack of coherent narrative drive us crazy?
I have a small nostalgia for the steady clickety-clack* of the keys imprinting thoughts onto paper letter by letter, but none at all for the messy task of ribbon-changing, of having to stop to disentangle keys that jammed together because I was typing too fast, or of waiting for a streak of Tip-Ex to dry. And I never was (nor am I yet) a touch-typist. As soon as personal computers became affordable, I bought one, learned how to use WordPerfect 4.2, and never looked back.
The mechanical, linear process of typewriting meant that serious revisions were left until the draft was completed. Now, of course, you can worry away forever at what you've just written, and the changes are writ on water instead of paper. The process is a lot more playful than it once was, takes place on the screen as well as inside your head, and is kind of . . . indefinite. When you typed the final word of a manuscript and ripped the paper from the typewriter's platten, there was a real sense of completion, albeit momentary. For even in the days of typewritten MSS, there was a nagging feeling that there were still changes that needed to be made once the story or novel had made it, after editing, copy-editing and proofing, into print. That sense is perhaps a little stronger now. Unless you print it out straight away, there's a temptation to go back time and again to a word-processed document: to tweak and fiddle and adjust this or that sentence, to endlessly fine-tune. Nothing is ever really finished. Instead, you have to let it go.
Which brings me to the ongoing novel, which has now about three-quarters finished in first draft, and has reached the point where, rather than start to tie everything up and aim it towards the last sentence (I do know what it is), I have the growing urge to start over, change everything that needs fixing or revision, and cut away all the persiflage. As usual, I didn't discover the theme of the novel until it had progressed a fair way. The plot has grown far too complicated, as I followed all kinds of exciting leads. And just the other day, I realised that I'm missing a whole section that really needs to be included, and not just because it will contain some cool stuff about the fate of Earth, a chiliastic crusade, and involve the hero in some difficult moral decisions. Well, it can be dropped in later. Right now, this thing, like a shark, needs to keep moving forward. That imperative hasn't changed, at least.
*(UPDATE) Of course, the keys really went clack clack clack, but (this isn't an original thought; I can't remember who said it) the human mind imposes a narrative on everything, turning the steady tick tick tick tick of a clock into a time-directional tick tock tick tock. Does Chinese water torture work because the intervals between drips are just long enough to prevent the subject imposing a tick-tock narrative? Does the lack of coherent narrative drive us crazy?
Monday 25 April 2011
(A)temporality
Posted on 05:41 by Unknown
The London Underground is an old system. Its pioneer and prime mover was born in the eighteenth century. The system itself was built before the unification of Italy and before the creation of Germany. Its first travellers wore top hats and frock-coats; there are early photographs of horse-drawn hansom cabs parked outside the underground stations. Oscar Wilde was a commuter on these subterranean trains, travelling from Sloane Square station to his office on Woman's World at the bottom of Ludgate Hill. Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin could both have used the Underground. The coffins of William Gladstone and Dr Barnardo were both transported beneath the earth in funereal underground trains. Jack the Ripper could have travelled on the Underground to Whitechapel: the station was served by the East London Railway.Peter Ackroyd, London Under
Thursday 21 April 2011
Gollancz SF At Fifty
Posted on 12:12 by Unknown
Victor Gollancz Ltd, founded in 1927, started publishing science fiction and fantasy in 1961. Many will, like me, remember hunting down Gollancz hardbacks with their distinctive yellow jackets in library SF & Fantasy shelves in the 1970s and 1980s. The family firm of Gollancz was sold by Victor Gollancz's daughter, Livia, to Houghton Mifflin at the end of the 1980s. A few years later, Houghton Mifflin sold Gollancz to Cassell, which was bought by Orion in 1998; the Gollancz name lives on as its SF and Fantasy imprint. And now Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy is having a little contest to celebrate its anniversary. Pick what you consider to be the best title from 25 SF and and 25 fantasy books published by Gollancz, and you might win a subscription to SFX magazine, and a copy of each of the top 10 titles from both lists. And gosh, my novel Fairyland is up there in the best SF list...
Fairyland was my sixth book with Gollancz. My first, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published 23 years ago, in, yes, a yellow jacket, when Gollancz was still independent publisher Victor Gollancz. My editor was Malcolm Edwards, and I still remember our first meeting. Gollancz was housed in a Georgian building with a tall narrow frontage on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. (Later, I would discover that the company owned the property backing on to the townhouse, creating a Dickensian maze of offices and corridors and odd spaces that ran through the block (was there a courtyard? Were there clerks making entries in ledgers with quill pens?) to the next street.)
As I recall on that first visit, the reception wasn't a place to linger. No comfy sofas, coffee tables, vases of cut flowers. There were piles of books wrapped in brown paper and a couple of motorcycle dispatch riders kicking around the small, dimly lit room. The receptionist, working behind a counter, directed me upstairs. All the way up to the top, several floors of winding rickety stairs to a kind of penthouse with a lot of glass looking out over London rooftops, where Malcolm presided with unflappable affability over his first empire. He moved on just before Gollancz was swallowed by Houghton Mifflin; I stuck it out until just before Cassell, and Gollancz, was bought by Orion, under the direction of . . . Malcolm Edwards. It's a small world. Now I'm back with Gollancz, and my old titles have or are coming back into print, and I'm working on my nineteeth novel. Twenty-three years. As Matty Ross says towards the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.
Fairyland was my sixth book with Gollancz. My first, Four Hundred Billion Stars, was published 23 years ago, in, yes, a yellow jacket, when Gollancz was still independent publisher Victor Gollancz. My editor was Malcolm Edwards, and I still remember our first meeting. Gollancz was housed in a Georgian building with a tall narrow frontage on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. (Later, I would discover that the company owned the property backing on to the townhouse, creating a Dickensian maze of offices and corridors and odd spaces that ran through the block (was there a courtyard? Were there clerks making entries in ledgers with quill pens?) to the next street.)
As I recall on that first visit, the reception wasn't a place to linger. No comfy sofas, coffee tables, vases of cut flowers. There were piles of books wrapped in brown paper and a couple of motorcycle dispatch riders kicking around the small, dimly lit room. The receptionist, working behind a counter, directed me upstairs. All the way up to the top, several floors of winding rickety stairs to a kind of penthouse with a lot of glass looking out over London rooftops, where Malcolm presided with unflappable affability over his first empire. He moved on just before Gollancz was swallowed by Houghton Mifflin; I stuck it out until just before Cassell, and Gollancz, was bought by Orion, under the direction of . . . Malcolm Edwards. It's a small world. Now I'm back with Gollancz, and my old titles have or are coming back into print, and I'm working on my nineteeth novel. Twenty-three years. As Matty Ross says towards the end of True Grit, time just gets away from us.
Wednesday 13 April 2011
From My Red Left Hand
Posted on 10:19 by Unknown
I'm pleased that most commentators took my previous post in the satirical spirit in which it was intended. It's true, as Ilya2 remarked that you can find no (or hardly any) SF novels written after the 1980s entirely constructed from cliches, but plenty of movies (movie directors and producers are always about thirty years behind the bleeding edge of written SF, perhaps because they are inspired by the SF they read in their childhoods). But as others point out, these kind of cliches do keep recurring. The problem with cliches is they're strange attractors. They're the first thing you think of when constructing a scene or a scenario. They're seductively simple to use. The trick is to turn them upside down and take them apart and put them back together in a new an interesting way. Make it bigger and noiser. Go back to the reality, instead of a blurred fourth-generation photocopy. Or do something else instead. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to construct similar very short novels out cliches mined from fantasy, horror, literary and other genres. Or as per Lois Ava-Matthew's suggestion, to extend this one into a trilogy.
Onwards. Two of my horror short stories have been taken up for reprint inside a week. One, 'Inheritance', was my ninth published story, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction no less; it will appear in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, edited by Stephen Jones, and will be published by Ulysses Press in the autumn. The other, 'Take Me To the River', will appear in New Cthulu: The Recent Weird; edited by Paula Guran, it's due to be published by Prime Books in November.
I've always loved the horror genre; in the my formative years in the 1960s and early1970s, I read every one of Herbert van Thal's anthologies, tried to catch every Hammer film that appeared on TV, and was so thoroughly chilled by Jonathan Miller's TV adaptation of M.R. James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' that I chased down everything by James that I could find. Writing horror stories isn't merely an homage to these primal influences; it's also a kind of left-handed exercise that allows me to flex a different set of writing muscles. Most especially, it allows me to write something contemporary, and to draw on stuff from my life 'Take Me To The River', for instance, is set in Bristol - where I lived for seven years - during the long, hot summer of 1976, and recasts some of my experiences of the free festival scene.
Oh yes, here's the list of contributors to Paula Guran's anthology. I hope old H.P. would approve:
The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman's Other Model (1929), Caitlín Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R'lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Miéville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb
Onwards. Two of my horror short stories have been taken up for reprint inside a week. One, 'Inheritance', was my ninth published story, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction no less; it will appear in Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead, edited by Stephen Jones, and will be published by Ulysses Press in the autumn. The other, 'Take Me To the River', will appear in New Cthulu: The Recent Weird; edited by Paula Guran, it's due to be published by Prime Books in November.
I've always loved the horror genre; in the my formative years in the 1960s and early1970s, I read every one of Herbert van Thal's anthologies, tried to catch every Hammer film that appeared on TV, and was so thoroughly chilled by Jonathan Miller's TV adaptation of M.R. James' 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' that I chased down everything by James that I could find. Writing horror stories isn't merely an homage to these primal influences; it's also a kind of left-handed exercise that allows me to flex a different set of writing muscles. Most especially, it allows me to write something contemporary, and to draw on stuff from my life 'Take Me To The River', for instance, is set in Bristol - where I lived for seven years - during the long, hot summer of 1976, and recasts some of my experiences of the free festival scene.
Oh yes, here's the list of contributors to Paula Guran's anthology. I hope old H.P. would approve:
The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman's Other Model (1929), Caitlín Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R'lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Miéville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb
Monday 4 April 2011
How To Write A Generic SF Novel
Posted on 11:58 by Unknown
Your hero must be likeable and sympathetic at all times. Like James Bond in the Roger Moore era, he’s quick with a quip, and is unruffled by any situation. No amount of exposure to suffering or slaughter should alter your hero in any significant way, although he is allowed to shed the odd manly tear or to express cold steely determination to do something about the death of a loved one. This makes him even more sympathetic. But all trauma is temporary; showing genuine emotion is difficult, and can hold up the plot. A secret past is always good -- you don’t have to deal with the parents. No bad deed goes unpunished; no good deed goes unrewarded; anyone who disagrees with your hero must suffer for it. Everyone’s behaviour has a rational explanation -- Freud is useful in this respect. No one refuses to get with the plot. Everyone acts their part, and is in character all the time. All problems are solvable. Traditionally, SF heroes solved problems by application of intelligence and scientific knowledge. These days, you can substitute lasers or AK-47s for scientific knowledge. Or swords. The equivalent of the internet or mobile phones are used only when the hero needs to find something out. Usually someone else does the actual typing. Don’t include any science that might frighten the readers. Anything found in SF written before the 1980s is usually okay. Nanotechnology is basically magic. So is genetic engineering. Also quantum mechanics. Virtual reality is more or less the same as a video game. Planets can be treated as a single country, with uniform climate and culture, and no more than three unique features that distinguish them from Earth. Always include some non-Americans for local colour; like the Irish steerage passengers in Titanic (the movie), they're cheerful, deferential, and possess a quaint and lively culture. Also include either a kickass woman who can do the unacceptable things that would make your hero unlikeable, or a wise old soothsaying woman who speaks in parables and knows things that can’t be found on the internet. See also: sidekick comedy robot. Infodumps can put off readers. Have your characters tell each other about their situation instead. Bars are good places to do this. Bars are also great places to meet people. Unlike airport bars, spaceport bars are packed with colourful characters who all know each other. Aliens can usually be found in the corners of spaceport bars, or in a mysterious rundown quarter of the city attached to the spaceport. They’re basically cats. Or turtles. Or some other pet animal. They often lack a sense of humour, which puts them at a disadvantage when dealing with humans. Interstellar merchants can be found in another corner of the bar, trading in spices, exotic liquors, and rare elements. No matter how technologically advanced your future society might be, its sociology and economics are basically those of the seventeenth century. Also its battle tactics. All spaceships are big. Very big. Except the one owned by the kickass woman. And they never run out of fuel, power, breathable air, potable water, food, or reaction mass. Despite possession of gigantic highly-advanced starships, wars are usually won by your hero and a few good marines. Death is optional. At the end, everything is as it was before, except your hero is richer, more powerful, and married to the right woman, who is never the kickass woman.
There’s your story.
Goodnight, children.
There’s your story.
Goodnight, children.
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