Writing

I Get Creative

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I spent the afternoon in Bristol, attending a creative writing course. Specifically it was a (free) course on writing “fiction inspired by science”, run by Tania Hershman who has the cool job of being the Writer in Residence at the Bristol University Science Faculty. It was an interesting afternoon, at which I learned a lot about how to run a creative writing course. My fiction is still unutterably crap and derivative — no one can fix that in 2.5 hours — but at least I now have some ideas for exercises to make it better.

Those of you who are in Bristol might like to attend the open mic reading session that Tania and some of the class attendees will be having next Tuesday. Details on the BristolCon website.

Also, now I want to read this book.

Learning to Conform

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have finally caught up with this fine podcast from the Locus Roundtable in which Theodora Goss, Eileen Gunn, Cecelia Holland, and Paul Park talk to Karen Burnham about teaching writing. As people were noting on Twitter, it is particularly interesting about writing non-fiction. Personally I have always thought what they say to be self-evident, but I can quite see how the ability to write engagingly is drummed out of people in school, and indeed much later in life. When I first started working as a consultant it took me quite a while to get used to the fact that a consultancy report was neither a lab report nor interesting writing.

However, it is not just the ability to write engagingly that Karen’s guests take aim at. They also complain about how school kids are taught to pass exams rather than taught to think. As someone who was thoroughly put off literary criticism in school by the total ban my teachers imposed on actually engaging with the texts, I can emphasize with this.

Again, it is not just writing where this happens. Only yesterday Tim Anderson was complaining about how useless computing qualifications are. They don’t teach you how to program, they teach you how to pass exams that get you computing qualifications.

People get used to this way of thinking, and carry it on into later life. These days I’m self-employed because I’m pretty much unemployable, especially in the UK. However, I have always preferred working in small companies. That’s because in a big company so many of the employees are not at all focused on doing their jobs, they are just focused on what they need to do in order to get on in the company.

You can of course argue that I am being deeply naive here, and that I’m just running away from the way that the world really works. But conforming to expectations — always doing what you think people most want you to do — is no way to be creative, in art or in business.

Grammar Is Political

~ Cheryl ~ 17 Comments

One of the nightmares we editors have is people who are sticklers for correct grammar. You might think that is odd, but with fiction in particular, and even with creative non-fiction, writers have a habit of breaking grammatical rules for effect. Also what is viewed as correct grammar changes with time, and the sort of people who get fussy about grammar are often also the sort of people whose view of grammar was set in stone when they were in school and hasn’t changed in decades.

So most editors will have horror stories of long and tedious letters (or these days emails) sent by people who are outraged at what a poor job the editor has done of correcting the poor grammar in the work in question. “It wouldn’t have happened in my day, I tell you!”

But that, really, is part of the territory, and only rarely becomes a nuisance. This post is not about what is grammatically correct, it is what gets to become grammatically correct.

My friend Deanna Hoak (probably the best copy editor in the world, though Anne Gray is pretty darn spectacular too) has a post up on her blog about the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) which is, apparently, a pain in the butt if you are working with fiction writers. The good news is that the CMS is only for “formal writing”, but it isn’t at all clear what this means, and the phrase “formal writing” suggests an air of authority and superiority than could be socially important.

What caught my eye was the example that Deanna uses to illustrate her point. The latest edition of the CMS has issued an official ban on the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular, despite apparently having been prepared to allow it in previous editions, and despite noting that it is “common in informal usage.”

I don’t have a copy of the CMS to hand, but I am pretty sure Deanna would have mentioned it if there was an acceptable alternative, so what the CMS appears to be saying here is that you should not use a gender-neutral singular (except maybe “it”, which you would not normally used with a living being). And this, I submit, is a political decision on behalf of whoever is in charge of the CMS. What they are saying is that you should use either “he” or “she”, and I’m betting that what they really want is for people to use “he”. I don’t have to explain why, do I?

Variations on a Theme

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Much of my mail is still going to California and gets here as an when Kevin has time to forward it. As a result I have only just got the October 2010 issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction. In it there is an article by Clay Wyatt that looks at Milton’s Paradise Lost as Bible fanfic. In his introduction Wyatt explains as follows:

To quote James Hanford’s book, A Milton Handbook, as early as 1628 Milton wanted to “employ the English language in some lofty subject comparable to the Iliad or Odyssey“. In doing so, he created new scenes (the War in Heaven), expanded the background of a previously minor character (the serpent or Satan), refocused the story on the only available character in Biblical creation literature that met the requirements of an epic hero (Adam), and introduced a moral realignment by inserting his Protestant belief that everyone chooses their own fate (“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”).

Obviously there’s a lot more to the argument than that, and NYRSF is not available online so I can’t point to the original, so please don’t start nit-picking Wyatt’s ideas based solely on the brief quote above. What’s important here is that the idea of wanting to take an existing story an create your own tale in the same setting is by no means solely a modern phenomenon. Nor is it limited to fans. It is something that writers do (sometimes better than others).

George, Genre and the Booker

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

In the middle of October I had the pleasure of attending Octocon, a convention in Dublin. The Guest of Honor was George R.R. Martin, one of the most successful writers of epic fantasy. During his Guest of Honor speech, Martin said a number of interesting things about his approach to writing.

His bookcases, he claimed, were full of books that he had not finished because it was obvious how they were going to end, so he did not need to read further. Good fiction, he said, should keep the reader guessing.

Asked about his habit of killing off well-loved main characters in his long-running Song of Ice & Fire series, Martin noted that he strove for realism. When he writes a feast scene, he said, he wants the readers to be able to smell the food. When he writes a sex scene he wants the readers to become aroused. And when he writes a battle scene he wants them to be afraid, because in a real medieval battle anyone can die at any time. Obviously readers can’t be afraid of dying themselves, but they can be afraid that their “friends” — well loved characters — might die.

Martin also talked about his techniques when teaching at writing workshops. He mentioned two exercises that he was fond of setting for the students. The first is to write about the worst thing that you have ever done — a story in which you, personally, are the villain. The other is to write a story from the point of view of someone you would normally hate, and try to get inside that person’s mind.

None of these are things that are supposed to be typical of genre fantasy. Fantasy readers, we are told, like predictable plots in which the heroes win comfortably the in end. They want to be consoled with happy endings. And they prefer cardboard characterization in which characters are clearly either good or evil. Martin does not write books like that, and yet he is one of the best selling fantasy authors around.

While I was in Dublin, China Miéville was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Unusually for such a major literary event, the program included several panels on science fiction, I believe all curated by Miéville. One of the highlights was a debate between Miéville and literary critic, John Mullan, who has been famously dismissive of the merits of science fiction — so much so he even attracted the ire of Guy Gavriel Kay over in Canada.

Kay, one of the most mild-mannered people I know, described Mullan as being guilty of “Hall of Fame-quality idiocy,” and from the reports I have seen (here and here) on the Cheltenham panel he did no better this time around. A particularly asinine comment was when he apparently claimed that Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is not science fiction because it is about the present day rather than about the future. I’m finding it hard to name any science fiction writer I know who thinks he or she is really writing about the future. Indeed, one of the main reasons authors give for writing speculative fiction is that it allows them to talk more effectively about real world issues. For that matter, did Shakespeare write Macbeth because he was fascinated by the influence of witchcraft on Scottish history, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream because he wanted to explore issues of marital infidelity amongst fairy royalty?

Over at the BSC Review Hal Duncan has also leapt into the fray. He points out that a large number of fantastical works of fiction, and their authors, have in fact been lauded as “literary”. He also notes that science fiction fans are sometimes guilty of the same sort of knee-jerk exclusion.

Mostly what is going on here is that people are judging books, not on their quality as works of literature, but by superficial qualities such as content — does the book contain spaceships, dragons, talking squid? — or by the marketing category chosen by the publisher. Mullan in particular appears to have read almost no science fiction, yet feels qualified to dismiss it as tripe.

In reality I suspect that there are deeper issues at work here. After all, books containing spaceships and dragons (and possibly even talking squid) do get recognized as being literary. The issue at stake, I think, is whether the person making the distinction regards the author of the book as “one of us” or “one of them”). Mullan wants Ishiguro’s book to be “not science fiction” because Ishiguro is a writer he knows and respects. Gene Wolfe, on the other hand, is someone he has barely heard of and never read, but is published as SF and therefore clearly “one of them”. Hard core science fiction fans may reject Ishiguro and embrace Wolfe for similar reasons.

Do we really need to be so tribal? Could we not just read the books and judge them on their merits?

Lots of Linkage

~ Cheryl

It has been one of those busy days online, and as I’m getting ready to head off to Finncon I am being lazy and just linking:

– Jennifer Ouellette sums up a week of controversy in the science blogging field. While I share her dislike of “advertoiral”, I also agree wholeheartedly with her view that people should be allowed to earn a reasonable fee for writing blogs.

– Guangyi Li asks, “What does China imagine?”.

– Another great podcast from Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe, this time with added Elizabeth Hand and Peter Straub.

– Graham Sleight posts as fascinating talk about how literature works that he gave at ReaderCon.

Writers in Glass Houses

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

One of the things that irritates me most about newspapers and blogs is the seemingly endless stream of articles claiming the provide “rules” for good writing. At least the teachers who forced grammatical rules upon me at school had some semblance of consistency, even if it was only that we were not supposed to do something that you would not do in Latin. These days the rule-makers just make it up as they go along.

Take, for example, Juliet Gardiner in The Guardian, who sets out to tell us what we should and should not do when writing non-fiction. Some of her rules are simple and direct, for example:

And if you ever start a sentence with “meanwhile”, you have literally lost the plot.

Really? What it is about that word that caused it to be singled out for such explicit treatment? And how can one “literally” lose the plot if one is writing something that isn’t fiction and therefore doesn’t have a plot as such? Not that I start sentences with “meanwhile” very often, and I’d probably do so more often in fiction that in non-fiction. Just like every other word, however, it has its place. I see no reason to subject it to a blanket ban, let alone to start pointing the finger of doom at someone for using it.

Now you might think that this is a silly and trivial thing to get annoyed about, and you would be right. But later on in the article Ms. Gardiner starts a paragraph with this sentence:

But at least non-fiction writers are not usually advised to “wear their research lightly”, though all should try to, as should rather more novelists.

This, remember, is someone who purports to be telling us how to know good writing from bad. Is it really necessary to write like that while doing so?

New Linkage Collection

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Guess who has spent most of today staring at code rather than blogging.

– Alex C. Telander interviews AussieCon 4 GoH, Kim Stanley Robinson (podcast).

– The Guardian puts the boot in to bad fantasy character names.

– Mark Kelly starts gathering some interesting statistics about how SF&F books are published.

– A Western Australia newspaper has a very positive article about Aussiecon 4.

– Jeff VanderMeer has compiled a wonderful list of recommendations of good 2009 SF&F from many different countries.

– Charles A.Tan talks to the publishers of an anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.

– On Saturday I tweeted about a group of people in V masks who were demonstrating outside of the Scientology offices in Tottenham Court Road. I now suspect that they may have been the racist and homophobic group talked about here.

– The Scavenger has an excellent interview with trans activist, Julia Serano.

– The Guardian publishes another trans-positive article (which I note because it shows they are making progress).

– Australian resident wins the right to have no gender.

Glenda on Not Being Yourself

~ Cheryl

Should a writer use a pseudonym? It is a complex question – so much so that Glenda Noramly Larke has done a whole series of posts on it. The topics cover the pros and cons of being pseudonymous, how to choose a good pseudonym, and the legal issues that arise. Check it out here, here, here, here and here.

Meaning from Nonsense

~ Cheryl

I have it hand it to Andrew Brown, he does get me reading his blogs, even if I think they are very strange.

Today’s piece is apparently an attempt to diss religion by “proving” that religious thought is encouraged by being exposed to nonsense. I’m not going to get into that. But the research he points to, which analyzes how people react to absurdist fiction, may tell us quite a bit about how certain forms of fantastic literature work.

Brief Linkage

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I’m busy catching up with all of the Google Reader entries I accumulated while I was traveling. Here are a few highlights.

UK libel laws are so infamous that people with something to hide come here from all over the world to make money from suppressing free speech. Now at last there is a campaign to get something done about this.

Scientists in Sweden claim to be able to “fingerprint” authors based on their pattern of use of words.

The flood that filled the Mediterranean must have been truly awesome to behold. Current estimates suggest the water flowed in at around 300 kph, filling the basin at 10 meters a day, and taking less than two years to complete the job. More detail here. Sadly no mention of Felice Landry’s role on the event.

Some Linkage

~ Cheryl

Kevin and I are still struggling through the hamthrax infection. I’m now reasonably functional, but my head is still full of gunk and I’m finding it hard to concentrate on anything. In lieu of intelligent and incisive commentary, here are so links to people who are providing such so that I don’t have to.

There Need Not Only Be One

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Around this time last year I read Memoirs of a Master Forger by Graham Joyce (to be published soon in the US by Night Shade as How to Make Friends With Demons). It is the book that won this year’s British Fantasy Award for Best Novel (a.k.a. the August Derleth Award), beating Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book in the process. It is indeed a very fine book, but when I blogged briefly about it last year I said, “As always with Graham, it is great stuff. There’s one small thing I want to have words with him about, but as I won’t be at World Fantasy I shall miss that opportunity and I’ll probably have forgotten about it next time I see him.”

That was very prescient, because I had forgotten about it. Graham, however, had not, and at FantasyCon he took me aside to have those words. The issue, as you may have guessed, is that the book contains a trans character, and she’s not portrayed very sympathetically – not horribly, just not very sympathetically. Because I know Graham well, I knew that wasn’t a piece of deliberate transphobia on his part. Having heard his explanation as to why the character is the way she is I quite understand why he did it. Indeed, just about every character of any significance in that book is a liar or a fake in some way, and given that the portrayal of the trans character could have been much worse. So all is well with Graham, but the conversation got me thinking about this whole issue.

There are two common stereotypes that the LGBT community really hates in fiction. The first is the lone good gay character who is the only one who dies at the end of the story. The other is the lone bad gay character who is an extreme stereotype of a gay man and is also one of the major villains. You see these ideas repeated again and again in fiction, and people rightly get annoyed about it.

Unfortunately if you call people on this they often react badly. It generates conversations similar to RaceFAIL, in which one side berates the other for being EVIL and the other side complains it is being censored, obliged to implement quotas, having its creativity constrained and so on. Often, of course, it is the people who are actually bigoted who complain loudest about being challenged, because they want to have excuses to parade their phobias in their fiction. On the other hand, honest writers get very worried because they are afraid of being accused of being bigots.

One thing I don’t want to happen here is have people become afraid to put LGBT characters in their fiction for fear of being accused of using an offensive stereotype. We’ll do much more for the advancement of LGBT rights if LGBT people are commonly featured in all sorts of fiction, just like straight people are. Indeed, I’m all in favor of books in which some characters just happen to be lesbian, or happen to be trans, or whatever, and this isn’t actually a major plot point. Because, you know, being lesbian or trans or whatever isn’t a major plot point, it is just who people are.

So how is a writer to go about writing LGBT characters without fear? As far as I’m concerned, the most useful thing to do is to remember that that old Highlander motto isn’t true: there need not be only one. It is a bit like the Bechdel Test – there needn’t only be one woman in a book, and they needn’t only be there to talk about the men. Well there need not only be one LGBT person in the book, and those people need not only be there to die, or be villains. If your book really has to include a gay person who dies at the end, include another one who doesn’t. If there is a good reason why a particular gay character has to be an unpleasant person, include another one who isn’t.

Why does this work? Well, if you have only one character from a particular subgroup in your book then that character will appear to many readers as standing in for all people in that subgroup. It doesn’t matter whether you intended that or not, people will still read your book that way. And the more oppressed a subgroup is, the more likely it is that members of that subgroup will assume bigotry as the explanation, because so often it is. So you have to make it clear that you didn’t intend the bad example to be typical by providing a counter example of someone more likeable, or with a less horrible fate.

I’ll admit that this is more difficult with trans people. There’s really little excuse with LGB folks. If your book has more than 10 characters then the chances are that at least one of them is not straight. Trans people are rather more rare, so you might wonder about how you can justify including two of them. Well, one possibility is that members of minority groups tend to stick together, so if you have one trans person in your story the chances are that she has friends who are also trans. That’s a very easy way to introduce another character without seeming like you are writing a novel all about trans people.

If that doesn’t seem possible for some reason, and it is absolutely essential that your trans character have a bunch of negative traits, have your other characters talk about him. Remember, whether you like it or not, readers will tend to assume that you are talking through your characters. You can stop them doing that by providing a mixture of different messages from different characters. So if Jim is trans, and also a nasty piece of work, have Sally complain about Jim in a bigoted way, and Simon say that no, that’s just Jim, he happens to know other people who are trans but not like Jim at all. Obviously such a conversation can come over very stilted, but you are a writer, it is your job to be able to make such things natural and believable.

I know writers get very defensive when readers assume that their characters are speaking for them, or that the author approves of ideas expressed in a book. For a good writer that is by no means always the case. Nevertheless, it is sometimes true. Writers do sometimes advance ideas in their books, and even if they don’t readers may assume that they are doing so. Everyone approaches a book on their own terms. That’s just one of those things we have to live with. So if you don’t want your book to be yelled at by LGBT activists, or any other sort of activist for that matter, a little thought as to how they might read it, and perhaps a small amount of corrective action, can save a lot of heartache later.

I sent this post to Graham before publishing it to make sure that he was happy with my doing so. He asked me to add the following:

I was glad to have good chat with Cheryl about this issue. I try to make sure that nothing in my work reinforces negative stereotypes of minority groups. I don’t give a damn what other writers think about that: it’s just a position I adopted a long time ago. I don’t want to be adding to the pot of meanness and prejudice that’s at large in society by rehearsing it in a book that I’ve written.

Though there is a clear tension between that position and creativity, and if you’re not careful your character becomes an innocuous cipher rather than a blood-and-bone human being. I’ve erred on both sides of this.

Cheryl was very helpful on some differences in the psychology of trans people and some general issues where my understanding is weak. From a writer’s perspective I like to make all my characters flawed in some way (I’m a flawed human being – why shouldn’t my fictional characters be, too???) though if you’re writing about an Asian person (for argument’s sake) you have to be sure that nothing looks like a comment on all Asian people. Racist-minded people would certainly be happy to interpret things that way (heck a certain species of anti-racist would often like to see it that way too so that they can impose their agenda).

So you have to steer a path, and it’s a writer’s job so to do. Difficulty comes not with the major characters, which are easy to balance up if you’re prepared to give your creation a moment’s thought. With the minor characters, it’s much trickier, especially if they are just there to stand on stage and hold a spear.

If you have some very minor character who is gay (again just for example) and you want to invest them with some humane but negative traits, how do you do that without the patent and transparent solution of having another counterbalancing minor gay character? Hmmm. I’d like a world where we can call someone a dipshit and not have anyone think it’s to do with their colour, gender or orientation. Meanwhile we’re a long way from that, and la lotta continua.

On Giving Free Advice

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

For those of you following the ongoing debate in places like this and this, I have a little note of my own to add. Believe it or not, people occasionally ask me to critique their novels. Obviously they haven’t read any of my fiction. But just in case you are thinking of doing so, here’s my position:

Asking me for help in writing a novel is like asking Jeremy Clarkson for advice on how to engineer a better transmission system.

Got that? Good, thank you. 🙂

Genre v Literary: Here We Go Again

~ Cheryl ~ 13 Comments

The Genre v Literary “discussion” has spilled over today into The Guardian’s book blog. The post derives from a new item a few days ago in which Scottish Booker-winning author, James Kelman, speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival, lambasted his fellow Scots for writing “crap” about detectives and middle-class teenage magicians. Much local angst has followed, and today Alan Bissett takes up his sword (or perhaps claymore) on Kelman’s behalf.

Much of what Bissett has to say runs contrary to what Lev Grossman has to say in the WSJ. While Grossman felt that authors ought to write what people want to read, Bissett holds out against crass materialism and bemoans the focus of publishers on the profit motive to the exclusion of literary merit. It is an argument where I tend to come down on the side of literary merit most of the time but recognize that everyone has to earn a living. Much of what I do these days is intended to help people whose writing has literary merit earn a living. No one, however, is ever going to “win” an argument of that type. It is probably as old as Homer.

Where I take issue with Bissett (and for that matter Kelman), however, is one small sentence:

But genre fiction is, by definition, generic.

If that were true we’d have a lot less confusion.

Let’s step back a little. From the commercial point of view, the idea of “genre” is very simple. There are many readers out there who prefer to read simple, predictable books with happy endings. They want a particular style, a particular setting, a particular form to the story. So, for example, there are people who love to read books about clever detectives who solve mysterious deaths; there are people who love to read about young farm boys who discover, over 10 adventure-filled volumes, that they are long-lost princes; there are people who love to read about lonely girls from dull towns who go on holiday to an exotic country and end up marrying tall, dark handsome and very rich strangers. Much of of the book trade is geared towards fulfilling this sort of market. Often these books are very formulaic and are written by lazy writers making money from lazy readers.

But when people talk about “genre” they don’t talk about “a book with X type of formulaic plot”, they talk about “mystery” or “epic fantasy” or “romance” or, perhaps most confusing of all, “science fiction”.

Why is it so confusing to describe science fiction as a “genre”. Well, can you tell me what the stereotypical plot of a “science fiction” novel is?

No, when people talk about genre they often don’t recognize it by its plots, they recognize its by its tropes. So any book that has elves or dragons in it is “fantasy”, any book with a detective is “mystery” and any book set in the future or featuring talking squid in space is “science fiction”; and therefore, by Alan Bissett’s definition, is genre and has a lazy, formulaic plot and bad writing.

Except if the book happens to be written in 1948 but set in 1984; or if it contains talking pigs; in which case Mr. Bissett and his ilk will look at it with amazement and say, “that’s not science fiction!”

So by all means, Mr. Bissett and Mr. Kelman, complain about poor writing, encourage your fellow Scots (and the rest of the world) to write better. After all, I was unimpressed with Ms. Rowling myself. But when you do so, base your complaints on the quality of the book in question, not on the subject matter, or the label that the publisher might have given it, or its popularity.

Fiction Bloggers Wanted (near Cardiff)

~ Cheryl

My pals Gabriel Strange and Lydia Wood are doing a film studies course in Cardiff. They are putting together their final year project and the moment, and in film studies such things are serious business requiring fund raising and potentially catapulting the director to stardom. (The Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, was Nick Park’s graduation project.) As part of the project Gabe and Lydia are looking for some fiction writers to do some viral marketing for the film. He’s looking for 4-5 people to each write a blog post a week for 4 months. Each blogger will take on the character of one people in the film. There’s no money for this, but if could be fun and if the film does well you get to share in the glory. The catch is that they really want local people who can meet up, but I think I know a few budding fiction writers in Bristol…

Anyone interested should write to Gabe & Lydia at casimirfilm [at] googlemail.com. The film’s web site is here.

Oh No, Link Salad

~ Cheryl ~ 12 Comments

Sorry about this folks, but I do need to get some paid work out of the way before the end of the month. This is in lieu of proper blogging.

Jed Hartman pointed me at the Geek Feminism Blog, and in particular the Where are all the men bloggers? post, which is hilarious.

Justine is absolutely spot on when she says that wannabe writers tend to ask Very Wrong Questions.

Crochety claims that Jules Verne and HG Wells didn’t write science fiction because they didn’t call it “science fiction”, which I think is the stupidest thing I have heard on a very stupid topic for a very long time.

Damien Walter wants to start a Support Our Zines Day, and as he’s planning to donate money to Clarkesworld as part of it I’m certainly in favor, though there are, of course, many other fine zines out there that deserve your support.

Tim Holman has some more fascinating data, this time proving that urban fantasy is keeping the SF&F business afloat.