criticism in fan fic?

I'm not really into the fan fiction scene. My only brush with it was when I was much younger, reading fan-fic and parodies based on Star Trek: The Next Generation on various electronic bulleting boards. (I don't think slash existed back then, or if it did, people didn't admit to writing it - I'm pretty sure I would remember stumbling across any spicy scenes involving Klingon rituals and Picard's shiny dome.) Possibly I'm missing out. Regardless, self-described "academic/fan" Henry Jenkins has a lengthy and excellent article on his blog.

Jenkins looks on fan-produced works as criticism, not simply 'brand extension'. He argues that just as if the fan had written a critical essay on Harry Potter, which would be legally protected as 'Fair Use', so a fictional account set in the Harry Potter universe can also serve as criticism, and this should also be protected. And once you realize that the only legitimate arbitrator of whether or not a piece of fan fiction is intended in a critical light is the author, you have to admit that fan fiction should probably enjoy far greater legal protection than it currently does.

I have to admit, I find the idea of writing a piece of fan fiction that is critical of the "official, canonical work" pretty fascinating. Take the Boy Wizard for instance. Love the books, sure. But my major complaint about them is that Harry is the very worst kind of fictional hero, a hero who is heroic and noble apparently just because they were "born" that way, rather than because of their strength of character or moral choices. Discussions of morality in conjunction with HP can get a little dicey - people assume you want to go witch-burning or something. No, but if you flip through the books they are a catalogue of Harry doing things just because his friends were doing it, or because his emotions overwhelmed him, or even because he just stumbled into it by accident. Lenora Rose points out that in The Half-blood Prince Harry attempts to use the so-called "unforgiveable curse" and the only reason he does not succeed is because he's magically blocked. That is, as she puts it, a pretty shoddy moral lesson.

I think it would be pretty intriguing to do a piece of fan-fic where Harry's lack of a moral compass "lead him to the dark side", so to speak. That would be some cool criticism. Or perhaps such a thing already exists, and I'm just late to the party.

confessions of a tense shifter

I'm a tense shifter, always have been.

I don't know why this is the case, but if I do not carefully monitor my own writing I will shift almost arbitrarily from past tense to present and back, even in mid-paragraph. This is even odder considering that most of my reading material is genre fiction, which generally does not indulge in the present tense. Indeed, the presence of this tense is virtually shorthand for "this book is arty and literary." I don't particularly like arty and literary. So why do I do it?

You're right! Schizophrenia. And I'm taking pills for that. But there's another reason too, I think, and that is that deep in my subconscience is lodged the idea that present tense is a powerful tool for doing certain sorts of things in writing. And my subconscious is right, too, although if I could stop it from whipping out this particular tool any old time it feels like it, that would be grand. But I digress. Present tense! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing? No.

If you are going to buy a book on writing I recommend you make it Steering the Craft by Ursula K. LeGuin. LeGuin has some thought-provoking things to say about present tense. Specifically, she thinks that 'present tense' is an unhelpful misnomer and recommends replacing it with 'immediate tense'. Because that's what present tense does - it makes the the action, the scene, the moment immediate. A descriptive passage rendered in present tense is somehow more vivid, more real. Present tense places the reader very directly into the moment. Rather than letting the audience watch the show from the back row in a leisurely manner, looking at the curtains or getting up for bathroom breaks, present tense jacks them up against the stage and pries their eyelids open. Which is great.

Of course, present tense is a limited tool; it can't do everything. It's terribly awkward, for instance, to show the passage of time in present tense. Also, because present tense represents the worms-eye view of the action, it's a lot harder to convey background information without adopting Mr. Narrator Voice. These failings don't hurt literary novels much, what with their plotless existential angstiness, so perhaps that's why they favor it. On the other hand, genre authors have a story to tell and don't have time to sit around feeling the dirt under their fingernails, so past tense it is.

I've tried before, am currently trying, and will try again to use both tenses within a single story. Both tenses represent powerful tools in a writer's toolbox. Surely there must be a way to use them both and not be forced into an either/or decision. Obviously, if you're shooting for novel-length you can just use present tense for a few, select chapters and stick to the past for the rest of it. It's a bit trickier within the confines of a short story.

Here's what I'm currently doing - I'm working on a dialogue heavy short about two characters who are basically wandering around and talking. I know, it sounds like a blast. I'm trying very hard to keep it interesting; we'll see if I pull it off. But anyways, I'm writing the narrative in present tense which allows me to detail the feel of the air and the cracks in the sidewalk and little bits like that that I love, but the characters naturally speak and tell their stories in past tense, thus communicating the neccessary information.

I have no idea if it will work. It's possible that the effect will be too jarring. I'll run it by some beta readers and find out. If it is, out it goes. You can bet I'm going to keep trying to sneak it into my writing, though. My subconscious demands it.

a fire upon the deep

All hail the awesome power of teh interweb, where things you write may be read by people who care. Elizabeth Bear found my 'half review' of Blood and Iron, linked too it and - well hell, I'm bad at math. I think we're dealing with a power-log function, though. "Quintupled my traffic" doesn't even begin to cover it. So, thanks Ms. Bear!

We at Braun Industries are nothing if not fair and balanced, so you can check out her rebuttal (primarily in the comments) right here. She suggests that the clues are there if I would but look for them, and that's a fair enough argument. But I don't like to take notes while I read, and to persuade me to do so is going to take a very compelling book. I now await the inevitable criticism that I am not a deep reader. But I think there's a difference between challenging writing and writing that is simply a little more opaque than it needs to be.

I think that's all I'm going to say on this note, I am not interested in starting a flame war (or whatever they call it in the blogoshere) with an author whose book I am still reading! I should say something on the matter of kelpies, though - I've read a lot of fantasy as well as some folklore and swear upon the bald heads of my forefathers that I'd never heard of one before. Well, I shall know them better hereafter.

You know what, I have resolved to write a particularly inflammatory review of The Children of Hurin. Maybe we can get the ghost of Tolkien on the line.

fairy enchantment and other authorial hazards

A review of sorts: Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age.

The things we delight in the most have the greatest capacity to frustrate us. Do you know that feeling? You feel it when one of the protagonists of the TV show you're so attached to suddenly starts acting way out of character. When that band you love releases an album that just doesn't quite get there. If you had no interest in this thing and it suddenly took a turn for the worse, you reaction would be a shrug. But you are invested in it and so it's painful to see this new, wrong direction, and so there's the sensation of being simultaneously pulled toward it and pushed away.

That's the long-winded version of how I feel about Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron. It's not that I'm already a huge fan of Ms. Bear (I've only read one other book by her, a sci-fi novel called Hammered. It was 'aight.) The attraction here is the whole idea of the book: the intersection of the mythical world of the fairy and our modern century, a place where goblins and imps live in the shadows of Times Square, where Merlin is the lead singer of a band, where creatures of myth prey on unsuspecting souls near the waterfront, where a clan of werewolves live in a village in Scotland. That's the attraction, the pulling, the thing that made me plunk down twelve bucks for this thing at the cash register. And all these things are certainly in there between the covers, and more, done with style and imagination.

The pushing, aye, there's the rub. You see, in fiction, the magical and the fantastic must be given boundaries. If the reader is not clear on what the limits are, or more specifically, what actions are within the scope of the characters' abilities, the plot is drained of tension and its events become, to the reader, random and arbitrary. If the world of the novel, however fantastic, does not have well-defined rules it loses its concreteness, its density and degenerates into a series of overwrought descriptive passages. The need for concrete boundaries is all the more real when your fantastic world intersects with the reality that the reader is already familiar with. How does your reality square with my reality? Play fast and loose with something the reader knows well, and you'll lose them.

Blood and Iron suffers from these kinds of problems. Most of the main characters appear able, just for starters, to magically teleport almost anywhere. Yet occasionally someone has to swim a river of blood or chase a quarry down a dark alley and we don't know why this person could simply be there before but can't now. Not only that, but without a sense of movement scenes become senseless, lacking context. It's cool to meet characters like Morgan the witch queen or the mother of all dragons, but the author seems to simply float into the tiny cottage or the subterranean lair and then leave again on a whim. There is no tension and no logic to it.

Where the rules are defined, fascinating things happen. There is a character called Whiskey, a magical being of great power, who is bound to our protagonist, Seeker, at the beginning of the novel. We quickly learn three rules about the relationship between Seeker and Whiskey: 1) Whiskey is extremely powerful and dangerous and would kill Seeker given the chance, 2) If one person is bound to another they get three chances to kill their new master and break the binding and 3) if the master is killed by someone else, the bound servant also dies. These rules, clearly understood, concretely define their relationship and keep it very interesting. On the one hand, Whiskey is compelled to be a loyal servant to Seeker and might even willingly serve her in hopes of being voluntarily set free. On the other, he's definitely going to take advantage of his three chances.

The Whiskey/Seeker axis also nicely illustrates the problem with the book - it's never made explicit exactly what Whiskey even is, let alone what the lmits of his power are. Vague and flowery prose make it sound as though he's a horse made out of water that can also transform into a humanoid form. Whiskey's powers also seem to grow stronger with proximity to water. What, exactly, this entails is unclear. In one early scene he summons up a storm to drown Seeker, but she defeats him by casting a magical net at him. Um, OK, magical net beats storm? Noted.

Bear's characters spend a lot of time walking around, having cryptic conversations with powerful magical beings and shifting between the real world and the fairy world with great abandon. But again, the delineations of these physical and political geographies are always left quite vague, and so the reader is left to flounder in a sea of lovely prose.

I want so much for Blood and Iron (and whatever subsequent books follow) to be wonderful. But the more the author draws me into her magical world, the more she pushes me away.

I'm still reading, not even half way, and I certainly plan to push on through. Hopefully over the subsequent pages the author will communicate a firmer idea of her brave new world. On one aspect we are already quite clear - the world of the fairy is a dangerous place for mortals, and for authors.

sharing is fun

I occasionally do writing exercises to 'limber up' before working on... whatever it is I'm currently working on. I was rereading a couple of old exercises and came across one I'd completely forgotten. The exercise is to create a character portrait: start small, with the basic details, then flesh the person out, fill in some back-story. This is what I came up with, or I should say, the person that I met:

Isaiah is a soft-spoken man with large, gentle hands. He is always doing things with those hands: helping people. I’ve seen him cradle infants in them as tenderly as any mother. I’ve seen him lift a happy child into a tree with them, or pluck a frantic cat from the same tree. And he builds things with them of course, as you knew he would. He works wonders with wood, building chairs and tennis tables and beds and planters and anything else the people around him might find useful, for he gives it all away.

You read about people like Isaiah in books or literary magazines, but when you meet the real thing, an angel with human eyes and sloppy hair and a slight limp, you wonder how he came to be. They say that selfless souls are usually born out of great adversity. Now I don’t know all of Isaiah’s story, but I know that he was in the army once, and that he owned his own business, and that he was married. I also know that there’s a quiet anger in him that burns against the injustices of the world. He hides it, most of the time.

One day, when I asked him where he got his limp, he snapped at me. I was so shocked by this uncharacteristic behavior that I said nothing for a moment, and then he apologized, and told me a little bit of the story. Isaiah grew up in the back country, and he got his skill in woodworking from his father. That’s about all he got from him – his father was an angry man, frequently drunk, and he had a great distaste for work. Young Isaiah shouldered the burden of responsibility on the farm, looking after the many chores his father seldom got around too, lending his poor, beleaguered mother a hand, and keeping an eye on his little brother.

Isaiah’s little brother, whose name I didn’t catch, was much more like his father. He delighted in mischief and lacked any sort of a sense of responsibility. Naturally, he was the apple of his father’s eye. Where Isaiah’s efforts brought only criticism, his brother’s antics and even the dangerous and thoughtless stunts he sometimes pulled only made his father laugh. Isaiah got his limp from when his brother shot him in the leg with a hunting rifle. His father insisted he would heal up on his own for three days until he was near death with fever and infection. At last he allowed Isaiah’s mother to drive Isaiah to the hospital in the middle of the night. He says he’s lucky that he can walk at all.

Years later, maybe out of guilt for that and other things, his father loaned him the money to start his own company. Isaiah wanted to get into electronics and had developed some interesting prototypes just by tinkering. With the capital he had from his father, he rented a warehouse, hired a handful of employees and went to work. When the first payroll rolled around his checks started bouncing. It transpired that his father had given his brother access to the money under the theory that what he gave to one son he shouldn’t withhold from the other. Of course his brother took all the money and wasted it in the usual ways. Isaiah was greatly shamed by this.

His father has long passed on and his brother died a few years ago: drug overdose. Isaiah works quietly as an electrician for a large company now. He is content to live out his days without ambition, doing what he can for others. When you look into his eyes you can see a peace that isn’t present in the eyes of other men. Maybe he simply saw too many lives ripped apart by selfish ambition to follow that path himself. But if you ask him about it he’ll just shrug and smile. “I just like to help folks,” he’ll say.

you're an obsession

I'm starting to feel that I've gotten about all I'm going to get out of Evil Editor. It has been instructive and constructive to observe both EE and his 'minions' hold forth on the topic of writing. I really do think I'm a better writer for it. Too often I write in a total vacuum, showing my writing only to a few close friends who are not writers. So exposure to other writers and even a real live editor - invaluable.

But. Where a certain amount of criticism is freeing, too much can be paralyzing. My own inner critic is quite harsh enough, so often stopping my writing in its tracks to suggest that I not quit my day job. He doesn't need to be augmented with the suggestions of others. What I need to do is buckle down seriously to the business of writing.

So I'm going to try and cut down on hitting EE's blog every ten minutes. It will be hard, mostly because I have a slow job with an internet connection and I generally need some site to keep my occupied. But I think it's definitely time to find something else, as far as that goes.

I don't know if I will stick around here or not. Not sure that there are enough readers to justify it, although I've certainly enjoyed meeting everyone who has dropped by! That's been a real highlight of EE's blog, meeting some cool people who are also writers. But do more than three people read this? That's the real question. I know it's a lot to ask, but if you've been 'lurking' and you enjoy reading this - do me a favor? comment and let me know?

I do like writing about writing. I suspect it's the ultimate device for avoiding actual writing, but still. And it's not like I'm going to get any actual writing done at work. They might frown on that.

the easy part

I admit that I haven't done much actual lately. Most of the reasons are personal - there are times in life when you just can't write, ya know? But then early last week I sat down at my computer one night and it just flowed out of me. I had to make myself stop so I could have some hope of getting to work on time the following morning. OK, excellent, I'm back, I can finally get some writing done.

No such luck. Just two days later I came down with a lousy cold and haven't had a stick of creative energy in my since. Or any other type of energy, for that matter.

BUT. I was lying abed with aching head this afternoon, staring at the ceiling, thinking of whatever, when the usual flotsam and jetsam of random thoughts coagulated into something that sounded suspiciously like a story. Or at least the seed of one. I thought it over for a minute - yes, that could work, ok, that's pretty intriguing, wow!

I dashed over to the computer and opened up the trusty Story Idea file. I don't know if other writers have one of these, but you probably should consider it if you don't. It's a big list of ideas for short stories, for novels, or for elements of other stories. Now, my list has dozens of entries in it already. Some of them are pretty good and I really want to get around to them one of these days. Others need fleshing out. Still others would work in the context of some larger narrative. And there are some that no longer hold my interest at all.

Today's idea was pretty intriguing - but it would need a lot of fleshing out, and it's definitely not genre, so it would be more difficult to write. I don't always give names to my ideas, but after a moment's reflection I named this one Athena: it's about a woman who's almost perfect, and the idea came to me while I was having a headache. Heh.

For me, coming up with ideas for stories is the easy part. Planning them, nurturing them, writing them, bringing them to fruition - that's where I come up short. In addition to my poor attention span it just seems like there's never enough time and I never have enough energy. Alas!

So what about everyone else? What's the easiest part of writing fiction? What's the hardest part?

a quote

"There was never a golden age. It was always only iron."
- Lois McMaster Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt

I'll take 'Fantasy that Doesn't Suck' for $1000, Alex

I just finished reading Paladin of Souls. Spotted it on the shelf at the library and placed the title after a moment - the book won a Hugo award a couple years back. It's actually a little unusual for a pure fantasy novel to win the big award. And that's perhaps not surprising - for all that it's everybody's favorite genre, fantasy seems difficult to actually do right, at least if the amount of unreadable tripe that is published every year is any indication.

I'm not sure why that is. I love fantasy, many of my all-time favorite books are fantasy. Fantasy has an unparalleled ability to transport the reader to another time and another place. There are very few boundaries on what can be fantasy - a fantasy novel can be set in the everyday world with a twist, a lost corner of history or a universe that is entirely other. So why is it so often done so badly?

Paladin of Souls is fantasy done right. I read it in two days flat. So that's good. And the writing most definitely is - Ms. McMasters Bujold avoids the overwrought style that often afflicts fantasy, but leaves the reader in no doubt that they are in the hands of a competent stylist. So that's a huge plus. Another is the characterization. The characters are not cutouts but interesting and unique - our protag is a bitter, lonely middle-aged noblewoman who feels trapped by her life and abandoned by the gods.

Oh, the gods. This is the central conceit of Ms. McMaster Bujold's fantasy world - that there are five gods (Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall and The Bastard), they are real, and that they interact with humans and the physical world in very specific ways. In a way, this is just the author's particular system of magic, a la Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea system. But it works very well, and more importantly, it ties directly to plot and character. Our embittered heroine becomes an unwilling vessel of the gods when a dark evil invades a castle on the frontier of the five kingdoms. Whether or not she will put her life on the line to become the fulfillment of desperate prayers is a driving narrative force.

One little note on the plot - it is not particularly 'epic' or 'sweeping', and for this I applaud it. Not every fantasy novel needs to contain the ultimate showdown between good and evil within its covers. Sometimes the redemption of a character that resonates with us will do just as well. I don't mean to imply that the book doesn't have a grand sweep to it, but it doesn't feel the need to constantly impress upon us the Dire Import of events.

I'm not going to break the whole down for 'criticism'; instead I'll just say this book has a lot going for it - good writing, interesting characters, believable fantasy, and an engaging plot. I've already started in on the sequel.