Negative Onlies
September 25, 2009 at 1:37 pm | In Writing | 5 CommentsTags: English Language, Negative Only, Usage
There are certain words and phrases that have accumulated in cultural parlance for which the positive use is vestigial, but the negatory enjoys widespread use.
For example, whenever somebody retains their faculties through a surprising, or violent occurrence they are referred to as “unfazed.” But rarely do you hear somebody relate: “I was completely fazed!” Faced maybe, depending on their vices, but never fazed.
When was the last time you heard someone telling you how great requited love feels? Or described their composite mixture as adulterated? If irregardless is an incorrect version of regardless, what is the form one should use when they want to admit that someone’s point is valid, regardful?
Also there are words referencing a thing’s opposite that are never really applied to that opposite. People refer to old people as “Spry” to indicate that they aren’t bunched up or gnarled or stiff, but you never hear young people, commonly thought of as vigorous/flexible/gymnastic, referred to as spry.
What other ‘Uns’ or negative onlies can you think of?
Twitter Story Published @Outshine
September 7, 2009 at 9:31 am | In Writing | Leave a CommentTags: @Outshine, Fiction, Micro, Nanofiction, Twitfic, Twitter
I have a humorous, near future, optimistic story up at the twitter magazine @Outshine. For those of you linking to this blog from there, welcome! Take a look around, you can find some posts about writing, science fiction, and some advice from the pros on worldbuilding for the short story length.
For those of you unfamiliar with @Outshine or twitter fiction in general, basically they publish stories that are 140 characters or less. There are a few of them out there, paying and for the love markets.
@Outshine
@Thaumatrope
@TweettheMeat
@Nanoism
@7×20
@seedpodpub
If you would like to follow me on twitter I am @jonrock.
Some HP Lovecraft influences
August 18, 2009 at 8:20 pm | In Writing | Leave a CommentTags: David Gerrold, Eternal Darkness, Gene Wolfe, GI Joe, HP Lovecraft, Innsmouth, Necronimicon, Stephen King, Technique
Last week I read some HP Lovecraft on vacation. The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror. I couldn’t help but reflect on just how many people this writer has influenced. Some of the stories were so overwritten as to be almost unreadable. Imprisoned With the Pharoahs struck me as particularly punishing. He ghost-wrote this one for none other than Harry Houdini who seems to have successfully pulled off the “I have an idea, you just write it for me” maneuver that is so popular. Here is an excerpt, the last paragraph of the first part:
“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible — hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and demoniac – one moment I was plunging agonizingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on batwings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua…Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of conscioussness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore harpylike at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”
Then there are stories like The Colour Out of Space, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Festival. Those three grabbed me like a rigored grave fist and drew me along each chilling event and dread discovery. There are times when the prose gets so purple it makes Barney look like the Kool-Aid Man, but the narrative hooks so strongly, the stories so effectively creep you out and make you wonder that instead of being a detriment, like most of Imprisoned with the Pharoahs, it lends to the mounting stress in the atmosphere. In fact in some it works brilliantly. Feast on this quote at the end of The Festival lifted as it were from the Necronomicon:
“Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy is the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnal clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of the corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
Stephen King has often remarked on what a great influence HP Lovecraft was on him. Gene Wolfe’s last novel, An Evil Guest strikes a remarkable amount of resonances with The Shadow Over Innsmouth – Deep Ones, Gold in the sea, Walakea. Some of the most influential SF for us children of the eighties – GI Joe Episodes: Season One’s “Skeletons in the Closet” and season two’s “Sins of Our Fathers” deal with a very Lovecraftian monster that Destro’s family has worshipped/sacrificed to for generations at their ancestral castle in Scotland.
But you’ve read On Writing by Stephen King. You know that adverbs should be assassinated no matter how useful. (By the way I am being facetious here. I think some adverbs add powerfully.) So what was it about Lovecraft that was so great? Huh? I mean, let’s face it, you may be a great writer capable of amazing works. But will something you write inspire people like Stephen King, Gene Wolfe and Saturday morning children’s television? Because “diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua” did. Well, maybe not that particular phrase.
One technique that I think works for him is one that Dave Gerrold pointed out in his book Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Dave noted that you can create a mood by thinking of all the strong words you know of that evoke that mood and peppering them through your narrative. Now these days this is better the more subtle it is, but obvious or not, Lovecraft nailed this one.
Another is that his stories often begin with a very detailed real world setting and description. You feel like you can see Innsmouth, the failed town, and you could point to it on a map of New England even though it’s not there. When the weird stuff starts intruding you accept it because the setup was realistic.
Don’t make me do all the heavy lifting here. Part of learning and growing as a writer is recognizing what makes the good stuff good. What else about Lovecraft do you think put him in the books as an inspiration to those of us who walk behind?
I just thought of some more influences. One of the best video games I ever played was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the Nintendo Gamecube, man was that pure Lovecraft! Also the movie, In the Mouth of Madness.
Messing with the method
August 1, 2009 at 7:19 am | In Writing | Leave a CommentTags: how do you write, Writing methods
Do you need a particular setup to write? Locked door, absolute silence, Chai by the keyboard? Study redolent of pipesmoke with leatherbounds crammed on shelves and a deep buttoned chair in front of a massive desk?
I needed the locked door and the keyboard anyway. If I played music it had to be instrumental or in another language to keep from breaking my focus.
But that had to change. First, know that I am a night writer. For some reason, I am capable of producing nothing better in the morning than a prodigious eye booger. Second, know that I am married to a morning person. Thirdly that for reasons of internet cabling in my house the computer must needs reside in the bedroom. My keyclicks were keeping my wife up at night.
So I started writing longhand in a notebook, and you know what? My productivity went up. I can’t write as fast as I type, but I was writing more regularly. And I found that typing it in gave me a good first-pass edit. Now I have a good setup: A headlamp with red led and the Uni-ball Power Tank pen. The pen allows me to lie in bed next to my wife and write on the vertically held notebook without losing ink, and the red led produces significantly less glare than a white light would, so as long as I do not rattle the pages too much she can sleep and I can write. The only drawback as I sit with my hair sticking out between the elastic straps of my headlamp, is that my wife thinks I look like a dork in bed, which no husband wants, but one must suffer for their art.
But that had to change. Because I also have a daughter who joyfully takes up all at-home time until she goes down for the night, at which point I actually want to sleep, go fig.
So lately I have been writing during break and lunch at work, longhand on a pad of paper which I made from cover-sheets from a shared printer, stapled face-down to cardboard. I write in a noisy break room, ignoring the conversations around me and conscious of the 15 minute or 45 minute deadline I have to stop by. At home I would never be able to just write for 15 minutes, I’d be like: “What’s the point?” But at work I snork my coffee and then put the pen on the paper and go. I have been able to consistently crank out 300-600 words a day like this. Not the same wordcount I had when my nights were my own, but still enough to give me a sense of accomplishment and get the dang words across the page. Then if I get a free night to write a couple thousand words, that’s icing. The downside is I miss out on breaks and lunch with my coworkers, but then, an artist has to suffer, right?
I have gotten a lot less pretentious about the conditions surrounding the act of writing, and by shoehorning it in here and there it has become a less intimidating process to begin. I am not trying to MAKE ART, I just want to get a few words in.
Gene Wolfe once said in an online interview: Well now dangit. I can’t find the interview! If anyone can, please link to it in the comments. Now I’ll have to paraphrase.
Basically he said something like if you only have 30 minutes to write each day, you’ll be able to do it in the back of a pickup truck going 35 down a country road.
You get the point. The quote would have been better though….hmmph.
Throw some Jerks in your Fiction
July 4, 2009 at 5:09 pm | In Writing | 4 CommentsTags: Character, Fiction, Firefly, Han Solo, Jerks, John Scalzi, Old Man's War, Short Stories, Stephen King
Dramatic scenes thrive on conflict. A powerful technique is to include jerks. I mean, obviously it helps if your villain or antagonist is a little jerky, but in your next tale throw a jerk in your group of good guys too.
Don’t think this works? Who would use this technique? John Scalzi does, for one. In Old Man’s War John Perry’s original roommate fills this role to create some tension in the otherwise edenic trip to the CDF. In the Ghost Brigades, Jared Dirac must contend with a fellow elite forces trainee who severely dislikes him. In the Last Colony John Perry must govern a new colony and keep in line an ambitious political leader.
Okay, so one enormously successful author uses this, can you name another? How ’bout the big guy? I dare you to find one Stephen King story that doesn’t include at least one jerk in the protagonist’s group.
When your characters are trying to succeed/survive, mixing in a selfish person makes the audience wonder how it will shake out. Worry of betrayal keeps things on edge even in scenes when the monster is not chasing. It makes for sympathetic protagonists as we see them giving jerks grace. It can also set up scenes of reconciliation which add weight to our protagonists when the good guy displays magnanimity and the jerk comes to respect them. Sometimes the jerk can even become one of the favorite characters, like Jayne on Firefly or Han Solo on Star Wars.
Life is full of jerks and fiction which seeks to imitate it should fill that role also. What other jerks have you seen used to great effect in stories, TV and Film?
Create a believable culture for your story.
June 27, 2009 at 11:45 am | In Writing | Leave a CommentTags: Babylonian Life and History, Culture, E. A. Wallis Budge, Gene Wolfe, Ohio, Shadow of the Torturer, Worldbuilding, Writing
How much research/worldbuilding should I do for a speculative fiction story? The question rose to my mind the first time I read Gene Wolfe’s brilliant The Shadow of the Torturer. The cultures he built for that novel are astounding. I found some of the smallest details made it seem concrete to me. We learn the denominations of coin, even the ones not accepted everywhere. They drink maté and have jobs like Torturer and Costume Shop owner. So the heart of the question is what details should I know about the culture of my setting, and on the heels of that, what details should make it into the work.
As for the second part of that, your story will be your boss, but surely we can come up with some way of categorizing the details we need to know. With this in mind I theorized that the most believable cultures were ones that we know existed. I urge you to go pick up a book at the library or your local bookstore on actual cultures, the weirder the better – Babylonian, Egyptian, Ohio. I grabbed a book, E. A. Wallis Budge’s Babylonian Life and History. In a chapter called The King and His People I found facts that I decided to play Jeopardy with. When I read the fact I formulated a question that I could use on any culture, real or imagined.
Babylonian Life and History
Here is my list:
1. What powers does the King (or ruler or government) have?
2. What classes are the people divided into? Babylonians had Aristocracy (Amelum), Serf (Mushkin) and Slave (Wardum). What classes are responsible for what civic duties? Who fights in war time? etc.
3. What are the roles of men in the family? Women? What are each’s roles in Marriage? Divorce?
4. What do people do to try to ensure children? Which gender is more prized? What happens to unwanted children? What ceremonies and public registries do children make necessary when born? What level of education do children of each caste receive and what is included in that education?
5. At what age could children get married? How were marriages arranged? Dowry? What was ceremony like? Monogamous? Concubines? What celebrations surrounded the marriage? Under what circumstances could they divorce? Polygamy? Polyandry? How does the culture handle childlessness? Adultery? Abandonment?
6. What kind of houses? Furniture? What are vessels for cooking made of? Where did they keep their clothes? What did they wear, if anything, and how did the dress change by caste? What color are their outer garments? How often did they change clothes? What did they wear on high days or holy days?
7. How do they wear their hair/beards? Do insects affect hair (Egyptians shaved their heads and wore wigs to counter lice from the Nile)?
8. Climate affects the need for washings. Dusty? Lush? How often do they bathe? Do they use perfumes? Lotions? Unguents? Eye paint for glare? Beauty Products? How do men and women make themselves attractive? What are bathrooms like? How do they get clean? Jewelry? Incense? Candles?
I suspect that the answers to these will lead to more questions culminating in a heightened understanding of the people of your world. This is not the way. But it’s one you might try. Had I purchased a book on American Indians or the Victorians or somesuch I might have come up with some different questions, but I think these offer a good entry point to get this culture you are inventing under the microscope and start turning it this way and that.
Have fun. Feel free to post any questions that occur to you. Building believable cultures will generate the concrete details we need to add richness to our stories.
Now get to thinkin’!
Can Writing Be Taught?
June 20, 2009 at 12:26 pm | In Writing | 6 CommentsA recent blog post at I Should Be Writing caught my attention. Can writing be taught? Is it something you can learn in a class or workshop? Or is it a you-have-it-or-you-don’t kind of thing? Before you answer read this article from The New Yorker.
Personally, I say no, workshops do not teach writing.
I took 2 creative writing workshops in college, was active in Critters and co-founded the Kazoo Books Speculative Fiction Writers’ Group with John Wenger (I frequently confound them as well). I would love to go to Viable Paradise or Clarion or Odyssey someday. Why would I spend so much time on this if I didn’t think it could teach me how to write?
Writing is a personal, internal business. That’s why it is scary. Creating is so subliminal, almost magical. Personally, while writing a first draft I am considering none of the “rules of writing” in my head while I go. It’s a trance. I don’t even know how to describe what I do when I do that, much less to teach someone else how to do it. I think this is why writers are so frustrated by the constant repetition of the question “where do you get your ideas?”
If flying is controlled falling then writing is controlled dreaming and it’s meaningless to compare a good dream to a bad one in the sense of quality. When people talk of a bad dream they usually are remembering a dream that produced a strong negative emotive experience (but was it a dream good at being a bad dream, for its impact?). If you have ever been bored to tears by someone recounting to you a dream they had that was so interesting you will see what I am getting at here. The impact of the dream loses something in the translation. Especially when their interesting dream is full of non sequiturs and object or person plasticity. They cannot convey to you the feelings their dream produced in them.
This is where the workshop teaches me.
Workshops teach you how successful you have been at recreating the story you experienced in your head for your audience. You don’t learn how to write, you learn how to revise, how to rewrite, how to edit the feelings you want into the code you have typed out. It’s not so much of a “do this this way” type of teaching as a “that didn’t work, try something else” method. The Wiley Coyote method, if you will.
I have learned a lot from the critiques of my writing, but I learn most from comparing my critique of some material to the others’ critiques of the same. Rules of Writing are not passed down in this method (I don’t know that they exist) but the Principles -Leviathans swimming in the murky depths- can be glimpsed in part. Those principles you get an inkling of, you can’t describe them fully, but they go right to the subconscious and THAT can inform the things you make up when you are in the trancelike state of writing a first draft.
Do you agree? What else good are workshops?
Tobias Buckell in your ear
December 6, 2008 at 10:51 am | In Writing | Leave a CommentTags: podcast, Speculative Fiction, Writing
I am learning a lot about writing from podcasts, but one voice consistently helps me think about my progress and learning: Tobias Buckell. His recent interview on Dead Robots’ Society Episode 58 is jam-packed with goodness. It is really too bad the way the episode begins. I skipped it three times before I listened long enough to hear Mr. Buckell because it starts with a juvenile swear-fest that is definitely not safe for work (NSFW). But once one hurdles the unprofessional tirade and wades through to the interview Toby gives great insight into his upbringing, creating outlines for novels, and some background on how he came up with some parts of Crystal Rain and Sly Mongoose.
I found particularly useful what he said about how not enough writers focus on Story in their development. Spinning a good yarn that grabs the readers and pulls them through the tale. This is useful to ponder. Earlier in my development as a writer I would have heard that and thought, what the heck does that mean? But now, it’s not just about how to write the story in mind. . . lets learn how to manipulate the space between the reader’s eye and the words on the page. How to massage their expectations? Lead their emotions? What gets them asking themselves how they’d solve the situation and speculate on where they think it’s going? I think answers to these kind of questions are what Tobias means when he says: “story.” We don’t want to tell them what happened in our world. . . We want to stinkin’ mesmerise them! Ask, in addition to: “what is the dang thing?”- “what does it do to the reader?”
I think that upping the stakes is one part of it. It is very clear in Crystal Rain when the stakes up – when the Azteca boil through Mafolie Pass the story takes off. We need to learn how to connect the points of tension, laying hooks into the narrative that consistently pull our readers a little farther.
In an interview on Adventures in SciFi Publishing he makes the point that details are “reader velcro.” I am reading Crystal Rain now and he definitely uses the details to put me there. The scraping sound of hands on the salt encrusted ship rails stands out as an example.
I get especially excited when I see a new AISFP in my google reader. Twice now, Toby has answered my questions on the Ask a Writer segment, one on Novella length and one on POV. (It’s late, maybe I’ll come back and link those later.) I had been writing stories that were weighing in at around 30k words. Way too long for a short story, way too short for a novel and way too unpublishable for a newbie. He suggested that I may be trying to put everything I had thought up into each story. He told me that writing a short story was like shooting an arrow, it should be about one thing and hit it. To tell you how helpful that was I will just share that the next two stories I wrote came in at 6 thousand words. Thank you, Mr. Buckell.
And finally if you haven’t listened to the six part: Getting Past Being Joe Blow Neopro on Telltale Weekly you are in for a great listen.
He is not the only voice out there sharing powerful insights. I get a ton out of Holly Lisle. She is so generous with her expertise! Her website offers a staggering amount of free workshops, articles, and books as well as some premium content. Mark ye, whenever two of these pros say the same thing it is gold. Tobias talked in the Dead Robots podcast about starting his novel by amassing a bunch of scenes that are too cool not to use. Holly, in her free 1 month Plot Outline course (which I am going through right now) talks about “candy bar” scenes that you are so excited to write being used to get you through the transitional scenes.
The other voice that is significantly upping my game is the basso profundo of Michael A Stackpole. His podcast, The Secrets, comes out infrequently, but when it does it is dense with knowledge. He also co-hostsThe Dragon Page Cover To Cover podcast. This pro’s fingers prod the pulse behind the jaw of publishing’s changing face and he is playing web2.0 to the bone. Do you want to thrive as a writer in the upcoming paradigm shift?
This listing would be incomplete without She Who Came First for many of us, Mur Lafferty and I Should Be Writing. Her podcast is a Bird By Bird for the wired generation of writers.
In Stephen King’s On Writing he makes the point that a budding writer could do worse than take a subscription to Writer’s Digest magazine. That is still good advice, but there is so much insider info coming out for free on the podosphere that you owe it to your craft to listen to these podcasts.
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