More from today’s Guardian: Guy Gavriel Kay writes about the privacy threat inherent in using real people in your novels. He doesn’t go anywhere near the minefield of real-person slash, but he does make an eloquent argument for using fantasy as an alternative to claiming that your fictional character is an accurate portrayal of a real person.
Writing
Future Human – Bad Idea?
OK, another silly headline. Let me explain.
Bad Idea is a fiction magazine that also runs fun events in London.
Future Human is their September 10th event at which they will be workshopping flash fiction on the theme of the future of humanity. The guest panel will be: Cory Doctorow, Gwyneth Jones and Ian Watson, whom you should all know, plus Matthew de Abaitua, author of Clarke Award-nominated The Red Men.
The event is taking place at the totally awesome Old Operating Theatre Museum (the same place that we did the Lambshead Guide launch). And it is sponsored by Hendrick’s Gin so there are free cocktails with the price of admission.
Tickets only £12 and space is limited. More information, including how to submit your story for consideration, here or on Facebook (but you need to friend them first).
New Fanzine: Wellspring
Today brings the welcome news that my good friend Anne KG Murphy is to launch a new fanzine. It will be called Wellspring, and it will be available both on paper and electronically. I’m looking forward to it. I think that Anne will make a really great editor. (And yes, I do plan to submit articles every so often, but given some of the people that Anne hangs out with I may not be good enough to get in.)
How Others See Them
Yep, crime writers get fed up of being treated like ignoramuses for writing “genre” fiction as well.
(Hat tip to Juliet Ulman via Twitter)
Guardian on American Women Novelists
One of the articles I flagged for follow-up over the weekend because I was too busy to read them was this one from The Guardian. It talks about how the literary establishment in the US not only routinely ignores women writers, but has actually developed a vision of the Great American Novel that more or less demands that it be written by a man.
Many thanks to Maura for reminding me about it this morning. (Useful thing, Twitter.)
Le Guin on Lavinia
Via GalleyCat I found the following video of Ursula K Le Guin talking about her most recent novel, Lavinia, and (amongst other things) about why science fiction isn’t necessarily about the future.
Challenger #29
I almost forgot to post about this because it isn’t online and the paper copy is in California. Issue #29 of the multiply Hugo-nominated Challenger has been released into the wild of the postal service. In it there is an article by me explaining why cricket is the ideal sport for novel readers. You are free to disagree, but you are of course wrong if you do so.
The zine will presumably appear online at some point, and I’ll let you know when it does, but why not get some paper copies. You need to read it for Hugo voting, right?
The Moore Philosophy
Everyone in the media is trying to get a piece of Alan Moore at the moment, and The Guardian actually succeeded. You can find the interview here. One of the things that everyone is mystified about, of course, is why Moore is willing to give away potentially huge sums of money by not taking the credit for movie versions of his work. He says:
“To me, all creativity is magic,” he says. “Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It’s an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that’s not the most important thing. It’s the work itself. That’s the reward. That’s better than money.”
I know what he means. Most of what I do I very much enjoy. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of creating something that lots of other people enjoy too. On the other hand, when you are stuck 5,000 miles away from your home and your partner, primarily because you can’t earn any money out of what you do, there is a temptation to wish that you were good enough that someone would actually want to pay you.
Busy Day Catch-Up
The last couple of days appear to have gone past in a whirl and I haven’t got nearly as much done as I had hoped, but so it goes. The important thing is that I’m mostly packed in preparation for heading off to London tomorrow. Here are a couple of things I wanted to say more about but have failed dismally to do so:
- Mary Anne Mohanraj continues to be awesome on race issues over at Whatever
- Sarah Monette talks intelligently about the meaning of “genre” (and clearly needs to read Rhetorics of Fantasy)
I also haven’t spent as much time at Flycon as I would have liked, and of course tomorrow I’ll be on trains. If any of you have been spending time there, I would be interested to hear what you made of it.
Paid by the Word
Teh intrawebs, or at least that part inhabited by writers, have been getting excitable over this LiveJournal post. It is a spectacularly bad piece of prose, but the first thing that sprang to mind when I read it was, “that’s Fanthorpe!”
So I Googled Ron Miller and found that he’s actually a very successful artist. He even won a Hugo (at ConJosé, no less) for a book about Chesley Bonestell. He has also written a number of novels, but his art credits include a cover or two for Fanthorpe novels. I sense a connection. Either the great RLF did some ghost writing here, or Mr. Miller was inspired by the magnificent awfulness that is March of the Robots.
As mysterious as anything in the great mysterious universe, unless of course you know that Fanthorpe was getting paid by the word and working to ludicrous deadlines.
Guy Kay on Reader Relations
Via Jay Lake‘s daily link post I found this article from the Toronto Globe & Mail in which Guy Gavriel Kay talks about the changing relationship between writers and readers in the age of blogging. There’s not a lot new there, but it does usefully bring together a number of issues.
Wheeler on Coraline Variants
Andrew Wheeler has a blog post up reviewing a number of graphic novels, including the Coraline adaptation. He has some interesting points to make about how different mediums work:
That’s the great gulf between a novel and a movie, of course: a movie can only show what’s happening on the outside, though it can hint and imply mental states, while a novel can dive right into a stream of consciousness and make the reader know exactly why a character did something. Graphic novels, at their best, hybridize the two forms — they can’t be quite as visually exciting as movies, since they don’t move, but they can come very close. And they can show the inner life of a character just as fully and in as much detail as a novel can.
This is good stuff, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. During the post-gig party in Dublin Neil was talking about Coraline, and about his discussions with Neil Jordan over The Graveyard Book. He made the point that when he creates something scary in a novel he can often leave much of its nature up to the imagination of the reader. He just has to hint at something awful being there. In a movie, however, the monster has to appear, if only partially, at some point. That’s a problem that a skilled director has to worry about.
It is also a more general problem. I remember, for example, people saying how disappointed they were when the Cloverfield monster finally put in an appearance. I wonder how one could ever film that non-Euclidian geometry that drives men crazy, or how one might go about filming House of Leaves. Prose, comics and movies are all different mediums, and in translating between them you have to make changes.
I am sure this will be lost on many of the people who write about Watchmen over the next few weeks.
Nick Lowe on Hollywood
Over at the Locus blog, Graham Sleight is talking about his BSFA interview of Nick Lowe, the excellent Interzone film reviewer. Graham got Nick to talk about Hollywood and why their movies end up as they do. He has some interesting points to make as a result, but I’d like to go off at a tangent. This bit caught my eye:
Secondly, he argued, Hollywood has become wedded to a model of how narrative works that’s increasingly narrow and prescriptive. He called this the “protagonist” model, whereby a story has to centre on a single person whom the audience has to find sympathetic and who has to grow or learn something about themselves in the process of the film. And (to finish paraphrasing Nick’s point) we have to find them in some sense heroic by the end of things.
I recognize that narrative structure all too well. People occasionally blame it on Joseph Campbell, but he didn’t really invent it, he just codified it. And it isn’t just Hollywood that is wedded to that structure. You find it in a lot of fiction too, especially fantasy.
The reason you see so much of it is that it is very popular. It is the classic escapist formula: “give me a character that I can identify with, and have them make a huge success of their lives”. In essence it is the basis of all romance literature. Many readers lap this sort of thing up, and commercial entities such as Hollywood make sure that they provide it.
This also tends to be the sort of narrative that newbie reviewers castigate as a “Mary Sue” plot, because they assume that the author has created this character as a reflection of herself, rather than as someone for the reader to identify with.
I don’t think that there is anything we can do about this. There will probably always be more readers who want escapist literature than who want literature that will challenge them. All we can do is continue to promote more challenging works and hope that some people will give them a try.
Why They Get Rejected
One of the standard themes of the publishing industry is wannabe writers complaining that there is a vast conspiracy of publishing professionals that is preventing their brilliant novels from getting published. Well today agent Colleen Lindsay has been going through her in-box and tweeting about why she rejects most of the queries she receives. The whole tweet stream is collected on her blog. Hopefully a few people will learn from it.
And you know, as a very minor cog in the editing business, I am very surprised how few people actually read submission guidelines.
Real Life Not Fiction
This morning Nalo Hopkinson produced this entertaining blog post about an author reacting snarkily to an interviewer who assumed that his novel was somehow autobiographical. The snark itself is amusing enough, but it got me thinking about why this sort of thing happens.
Journalists, I’m afraid, like to link writers to the characters in their books because they are looking to spice their interviews up with a bit of “real life” drama. They do that for pretty much the same reason that reality TV exists – people like to think that real life is full of drama.
But, as Mr. Whitehead pointed out, it isn’t. And consequently we humans spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to make it so. I don’t just mean people getting overly dramatic on LiveJournal, though that’s clearly part of it. The whole conspiracy theory thing is also part of the same phenomenon. Kevin is fond of saying things like, “never assume conspiracy when a simple cock-up could have produced the same result”; but people do, all the time. Even the quest to find “meaning” in the failure of the Seattle in 2011 Worldcon bid is a natural part of this basic human tendency to try to find the “real story” behind mundane an often accidental events.
PZ Myers might comment that the whole of religion arises from the same impulse. Natural disasters happen, we humans need to find meaning in this, so we invent gods.
Generally I’m pretty positive about the role of fiction in society. I think it is good for us to think about how other people live, and how the world might be different, but sometimes I think that our loves of stories can also be a cause of much stupidity.
How Not To Write A Novel
You wouldn’t think that was something people needed a guidebook for, given how many truly awful novels get written each year, but according to The Independent the purpose of Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark’s book is to help people avoid basic mistakes. The book is subtitled “200 mistakes to avoid at all costs if you ever want to get published”.
One piece of advice that they may have missed is not to get involved in train wreck flame wars like this, which turned up in one of my Google Alerts.
Colleen Nails It
Over at The Swivet Colleen Lindsay tells it like it is on the subject of whether authors should have to do any promotion for their books. That post ought to be required reading for all young writers.
In The Drink Tank
Where are The Pogues when you need them?
No, seriously, not that drink tank, The Drink Tank, the famous Hugo-nominated Chris Garcia fanzine of that name. I have an article in it. And you can find the issue on eFanzines.com.
Taral Wayne tells me that he doesn’t do girl dinosaurs with big boobies, and that I should try Marc Schirmeister instead.
Research Material for Ghost Stories
A review in today’s Independent has alerted me to a book that should be of interest to horror and dark fantasy writers. It is not fiction, Servants of the Supernatural, by Antonio Melechi is a study of Victorian attitudes to the supernatural. It sounds like it would be very useful in getting your period atmosphere right, and may even spark some story ideas.
Besides, I love the idea that Victorians had a passion for “rappers”.
Bear on The Other
The “can you write a character who isn’t you” gets aired fairly frequently on teh intrawebs. As I recall, Jay Lake re-visited it last week. But today Elizabeth Bear has come out with a whole lot of good advice as to how to get it right. Worth reading.
And yes, writers, please do keep trying to write a diverse selection of characters.