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Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

Borges, the Vulcans, and I

The estimable Alana Joli Abbott, whose novels Departure and Into the Reach are now available via DriveThruRPG, posted a few days ago on the fun and games of featuring authors in fiction.  She’s especially intrigued by the show Castle, the titular character of which is a James Patterson-esque super-mystery writer brand.  Richard Castle has actually published novels in “our” world, which (by virtue of the show’s popularity) have become NYT best-sellers – so Richard Castle, the fictional character played by Nathan Fillion, is a real-world bestselling author.

This Borgesian trick tickles my fancy, too.   It has a long and noble lineage in science fiction and fantasy, the best example of which that springs to my mind is the author Kilgore Trout.  Trout’s a character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novels Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions, and was intended as a fictional parallel to the author Theodore Sturgeon.  In Vonnegut’s books, Trout writes science fiction halfway between the gutter and the stars (as Fatboy Slim would have it) – Trout’s stories are mostly published (in Vonnegut’s world) by porn mags as filler, because text is cheaper than photographs.  The stories aren’t pornographic, they’re just side-by-side with the naked ladies.

Of course, there has been a real science fiction novel written by Kilgore Trout, a book called Venus on the Halfshell that’s hiding in my storage closet somewhere in Tennessee.  It feels like an American 1960s version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: everyman evades Earth’s destruction and travels the galaxy in search of one particular space babe.  Thing is, Venus wasn’t written by Vonnegut.  It was written by Philip Jose Farmer, one of the giants of SF and fantasy.  So, we have a fictional author based on a real-life author, who then serves as the pseudonym for yet a fourth author who writes a real book.

As if this wasn’t funny enough, Farmer and his daughter shows up in Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Place stories as time-traveling police officers from an alternate reality.  Confused yet?  To keep score, that’s a real writer, fictionalized, writing a book for a fictional writer who is himself a fictional version of a real writer.

I’m not enough of a PoMo nut to talk with proper words about what’s going on here, but I love the way fictional and real worlds intersect, especially when they’re used playfully.  (Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy takes itself too seriously to be fun, to my mind.)  I wrote a book a while ago where a sci-fi author from “our” world gets chased across the universe by characters from an apocalyptic novel that he wrote.  These characters, having become aware of the existence of their writer, naturally believe that he’s responsible for the destruction of their home planet and the death of billions.  Good clean fun!

There’s an interesting theological consequence of all this mixing of real and fictional worlds.  Alana mentions in her post that Yann Martel (who I’ve never read) prefers to write as if there is a God, because that makes for a better story, and how this dovetails with Castle’s tendency to solve crimes by looking at them as if they’re mystery stories.  The funny thing is, Castle’s right not because real-life criminals work like characters in books (often they don’t), but because he and everyone he knows are characters in a mystery TV series.  For characters in books, God exists beyond a shadow of a doubt – she’s the chick holding the pencil.

So what are we to make of books where the characters want to kill God?

My Black Swan Review

“It’s a wonderful time to be alive, at least until the Mayan calendar runs out next December and the sun goes dark.  It’s 2011, the internet rules, I have a magic box in my pocket that can access the sum total of human knowledge, and a ballet-sploitation wereswan horror flick is a serious contender for five Academy awards.”

Read more on Flames Rising’s website.

I review things for Flames Rising now.  Flames Rising is cool, as the Doctor would say.  I hope to do a few more of these in the near future.  Watch this space!

Playing the Hunger Game

On the bus this morning I watched the people around me.  What were they doing, as they waited for their stop?

One young woman puzzled over a crossword.  Another read a book.  A third scanned the news on her phone.  A short-haired man watched a video on his phone, while a gray-haired guy in a blue shell jacket squinted at the newspaper.

We do these things because we want to do them, of course, but why do we want to do them?  What hungers do we have that a crossword puzzle could sate?  As a writer, I find this question fascinating, because characters are defined (in part) by their needs.  Writing is on some level a game of hunger: moving and balancing needs, one with the other, to build tension and create story.

Here are notes for a list of hungers:

  1. For the Answer – the hunger to find some concrete answer to some concrete question.  This is related to the next hunger, but distinct from it.
  2. For the Question – the hunger to be confronted with some situation so baffling that even its outlines seem mysterious.  Some mysteries (like fair-rules stories) cater to the hunger for the Answer, some to the hunger for the Question (The Big Sleep).
  3. For Victory – the hunger to beat something – anything.  Mario Brothers.  Basketball.  The stock market.
  4. For Challenge – the hunger for something so big and overwhelming that victory, if possible at all, would be miraculous.  I Wanna Be The Guy.  Nintendo-hard video games.  Running a marathon.
  5. For Agency – the hunger to do something that affects the world, whether or not it involves Winning.  Cooking a good meal.  Tapping on a cell phone to make the screen change.
  6. For Sensation – the hunger to be affected by the world.  Climbing a mountain for the view.  Stargazing.  Hearing a symphony.
  7. For Story – the hunger for a narrative, whether in history, your life, or fiction.
  8. For Companionship – the hunger to feel as though we are part of a group.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, obviously, and many of the hungers run into one another.  Some people do science to find Answers, some to find Questions, some because they like watching chemicals change color (Agency), and some because they want to be part of the great sweeping narrative of history.  Some people read the news because they want to put a story to the world, some because they want Answers, others because the act of flipping pages or clicking on a scroll bar makes them feel they have control over the world.

Can you think of any hungers I’ve missed?   I’m hoping to get a model with more fine gradations than Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  Anything deeper?

Regression Testing for the Novel

I edit a great deal.  I wish I didn’t have to, but in general, after a single draft, my work is compelling but shaky.  Getting from that stage to the point where I can happily shelve a project takes draft after draft.  For novels, the process generally looks something like this:

  1. Read through the book.
  2. Notice lots of problems.
  3. Fix these problems.
  4. Return to 1.

“Ah, but how do you know you’re finished?” you may ask, reading these steps.  You never know you’re finished, because you’re never finished.  Someone once said that works of art are only ever abandoned, which makes sense to me.  Michaelangelo would still be painting the Sistine Chapel today if they hadn’t kicked him out.

One of the dangers of repeated editing is that you risk undoing a previous draft’s work.  A given sentence may seem awkward at first glance.  Ah, you think, why didn’t you write it this other way, which rolls better off the tongue?  The answer, if you’ve edited your work enough, may well be: “because the more natural way sounds barbarous when read in context with the rest of the paragraph.”

This doesn’t mean you should abandon the awkward sentence-the goal is to rewrite it in a way that sounds natural, yet avoids your earlier problems.  To do this, though, you need to remember what your earlier problems were.

In software, when you fix a problem with your code you write a test to make certain your fix works.  Those tests stick around after the problem’s gone; whenever you adjust your code, you run your tests to ensure you haven’t broken any prior work.  I wonder if the same kind of thing could work for editing.  Maybe a better versioning system would help (Track Changes, superhero edition), or perhaps a good commenting framework.  Food for thought.  For now, I’ll live (and edit) in uncertainty.

Guest Blog for Fail Better Games

Quick update on the state of the life:

  • I’m guest-blogging at Fail Better Games!  Those of you who aren’t familiar with FBG should check out their wonderful browser-based RPG Echo Bazaar, which is the focus of my post, Uncorking Mystery.  Echo Bazaar is a sharp experiment in narrative style and form, wrapped in a browser game shell.  My essay discusses what I think they’re doing, and why it’s so cool.
  • Matt’s and my experiment in Chinese Poetry Translation Theater continues at Two Guys Three Hundred Poems!  Matt’s post this week starts his series, which will run through the end of the year, on Li Bai’s Midnight Songs.  I recently finished my series on Zhang Jiuling, which was a great experience, and I look forward to seeing where Matt goes with Li Bai.
  • The end of Twin Serpents Rise remains tantalizingly within grip.  I can taste the end, and it tastes like victory.  Unfortunately, it tastes like victory that’s about 20,000 words too long for a novel in this publishing climate.  Oh well!  That’s what many, many successive drafts are for.

See you all around.

Devil and Commodity Fetishism

I’ve taken to raiding the lady wife’s divinity school bookcase – she’s accumulated some mindblowing reads in the last year.  I’m currently near the end of Michael Taussig’s The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, an intense anthropology / sociology book that talks about the intersection of mysticism and myth with changing historical, political, and economic conditions in Bolivia and Columbia from the 19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Apparently, in peasant regions of both countries, the dominant myth-structure for work on one’s own farm or on the farm of one’s neighbor is one of entreating divine support and exiling demons.  When these same people go to work in tin mines or on sugar plantations, though, the dominant myth-structure for work is Satanic.  Gods (both Catholic and local) rule personal production; demons and magic rule capitalist production.

It’s wild to see the same ideas I’ve been thinking about in Three Parts Dead and its sequel in a seminal anthro text!  I should send a copy of my book to Michael Taussig.  Writing life aside, I’ve never seen an account that treats so well on economics and myth as complementary realms of human experience.  Check this one out if you have a chance.

Else the Puck a Liar Call

Blue skies, clouds, April breeze – out of the office, walking fast as I can to make the carpool to Middletown, to cheer on a friend’s production of Midsummer on Shakespeare’s birthday. Seems like a pretty good life to me.

“The Four Modernizations,” Available Now!

Like China? Like zombies? Like being afraid? Who doesn’t! So read my new short story, “The Four Modernizations,” available in the most recent issue of Necrotic Tissue magazine. Buy it on Amazon.

I’m very excited by this one: the magazine prints up beautifully, has a range of horror stories from the unsettling to the grotesque, and I’m tickled to see my name on the cover next to the rotting corpse.

Storytelling and Risk (Financial as well as Social)

Passing through Alyssa Rosenberg‘s excellent pop culture blog, I found a link to Dylan Matthews’ unfriendly review of Jonathan Franzen’s “Perchance to Dream.” I haven’t read Franzen’s article so can’t comment on Matthews’ analysis of it, but as a novelist I find Matthews’ stated position that “text is an inferior way of telling stories to video” worth a brief comment.

Matthews doesn’t provide any argument to support this position (that’s not the point of his article), nor could I find such in a quick due diligence search of his site.  However, this statement did get me thinking about my love of novels, and what they offer that video doesn’t.

There are a lot of answers to that question, but the difference that struck me the most was cost. An author can write one good book of moderate length in a year. Costs for publishing, distribution, and marketing can rack up pretty quickly, but one estimate I’ve heard puts the cost to publisher for an average mass market paperback at $150,000.

Avatar cost between $300 and $500 million depending on who you read; Firefly cost around $2 or $3 million per episode, and a $10 million investment for the pilot (for sets, costumes, developing initial special effects, etc.), and I’ve heard a price tag of $17 million attached to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries.

People invest money looking to make it back, and the more money they invest, if they’re reasonable people, the more they want that investment secured. If I’m sinking $300 million into a really fun movie about pseudo-Native American space smurfs, I want to be positive it will do well, so I become worried when the movie takes risks and breaks ground in its story. I become worried if the story is slow, or doesn’t have an up ending, or pisses off the pro-military crowd without appealing enough to the anti-military crowd. I become worried if the audience isn’t able to cheer with unalloyed joy for someone at the end of the film.

Please don’t think of this as an attack on Avatar; I watched that film and liked it a great deal. But a publisher can afford to put out individual books that take more risks and push more boundaries because there’s less money tied up with each story. In extremity, if you’re DH Lawrence and nobody wants to publish your Lady Chatterly’s Lover, you can self-publish out of pocket these days using sites like lulu.com or createspace.com; by comparison, even a very inexpensive feature film like Rian Johnson’s amazing Brick costs $450,000 and requires the dedication of maybe a hundred people to make it happen. Possible, but well outside many artists’ budget, especially if you’re writing something you feel certain will piss some people off.

Would Faulkner have been able to get a movie that would be an even remotely reasonable and faithful approximation of Absalom, Absalom financed in 1936? Could Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man have been made as a television series or film nearly as hard-hitting as the original in 1952? What about Willard Motley’s Knock On Any Door (1947), my father’s favorite book? That one was actually adapted into a film, and look what happened: the book was the life story of Nicky Romano, a young, innocent boy we follow through the shaping of a rough neighborhood and a rough economy into his life as a hoodlum, hustler, and gay prostitute, and ends with him on trial for murder; the film is a courtroom drama starring Humphrey Bogart as a good guy court defender who stands up for Nicky despite Nicky’s bad attitude, and excludes, to my knowledge, a lot of the true nastiness and social and moral import of the novel.

Okay, Max, you say: so it was hard to make good novels that highlight problems of race and society into equally hard-hitting movies back in the Bad Old Days. Surely we’re better now, right? And besides, you’re a science fiction writer—what does it matter to you?

That’s a fair point, though it’s worthy to note that even in 2003 they couldn’t make a version of A Wizard of Earthsea which accurately portrayed the main characters as people of color, and the forthcoming movie The Last Airbender, based on the other Avatar, has cast white folks in the lead roles of an adaptation of an animated series whose heroes are Aleutian islanders and Chinese analogues, while allowing the villain, who comes from a country that looks an awful lot like Japan, to be portrayed by a South Asian guy. So yeah.

You certainly can shoot an action scene more lovingly in video; blood is bloodier, sex sexier, and you need to be one hell of a writer to convince me that the Death Star is as big in a book as it appears on screen. But a lot of stories challenge too much for people to comfortably invest even half a million dollars in them, let alone $10 million or $100 million, when they are at their most relevant. For those tales, the best medium is probably the one where a small number of people can take a chance, stand up for what they believe, and make a difference.

Heck, that sounds like a cool story. Maybe someone should write a movie about it.

Interview on Eposic Diversions Blog

The wonderful people at Eposic Diversions, who published my short story “On Starlit Seas” in The Book of Exodi, will soon publish another story of mine, “Zach and the Thunderbird,” in their forthcoming anthology Out of Order, a collection of short stories about tomfoolery with time.

Andrew from Eposic Diversions interviewed me earlier this month about the two short stories; I talk a bit about inspiration, process, and time travel. Check it out!