Black Gate

First up on my summer reading is Black Gate submissions. That’s first up on my reading list all the time, any more. I’ve been sending out responses and have about forty more to read in THIS batch before I move on to the last 75 submissions. I also need to finish up my contributions to the gaming and review sections of issue 11. John’s got the issue all lined up, with just a few holes to plug in, article and review wise, from the stockpile I’ve accumulated from our talented contributors. You can see a preview of issue 11’s cover at the Black Gate web site.

I’ve taken a little time for reading for fun; more than I’ve been able to take for three or four years, really, as there wasn’t much time for fun reading while working on the master’s degree. I tore through a book Eric Knight sent me, Fatherland. I sure wish I could figure out how Harris made all that description and world building so interesting, but I’m still scratching my head. Maybe it was in the creation of the alternate world as a character, but that’s too simple an answer.

Me reading an entire novel, and a thick one, like Fatherland, is a rare occurrence at this point in my life. What with the recent madness of the degree and the move and remodel, before that reading subs for Flashing Swords and now for Black Gate, and having children, well, anything but short stories feels like an impossible barrier rather than something to look forward to.

Speaking of looking forward to reading, though — I had the rare honor of reading something many have desired to see but few have ever held in their hands. Shortly before their death, L. Sprague de Camp and his wife Catherine related that they had finished the manuscript together reading on the floor of de Camp’s study because they couldn’t put it down. De Camp called it one of the best Conan pastiches he’d ever read, but Catherine de Camp just came right out and said that it was THE best Conan pastiche she’d ever read. No small wonder, since its writer had drafted Conan and the Emerald Lotus, which remains near the top, if not at the very apex, of most people’s Howard pastiche list. John C. Hocking really captured the character of Conan — the complexity, the atmosphere, and the style. The de Camps liked Emerald so well they pulled it out of the slush and published it, and the second, Conan and the Living Plague so well that they were going to try to take it to hardback. Hocking thought he’d be drafting many a Conan tale in years to come.

But it was not to be. The de Camp’s were older, and the market was changing, and the Conan property changed hands. Hocking’s book got lost in the shuffle despite being championed, and later companies opted to publish Turtledove’s Conan (which was pretty much thoroughly blasted by Conan fans). No other Conan novels have followed, despite continued interest from Conan fans in this “lost” Conan novel. They know Hocking wrote Plague, and still bring it up from time to time on forums even today, almost a decade later. Hocking himself shrugs his shoulders about it and doesn’t seem to bear anyone ill will for what happened, but then he’s a gentlemanly fellow.

So what’s Conan and the Living Plague like?

It was glorious. Anyone who loves an out-and-out sword-and-sorcery romp would thrill to this ride. Hocking pretty much nailed Conan, who’s far more complex a character than most people realize, and came amazingly close to Robert E. Howard’s style, not to mention ably capturing the whole Weird Tales atmosphere. Here’s the one guy today who should have been tapped to write Conan pastiche, if there’s going to be any pastiche. It’s a great piece of work, and it will probably never, ever, see print. A somber thought.

In happier news, I’ve been getting some reading for fun in another way, and that’s by reading to my children. In the last few weeks they’ve heard Robert E. Howard’s “Garden of Fear,” and Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon (a.k.a Sea Kings of Mars) as well as Enchantress of Venus. My little girl’s a little too young to enjoy them yet, but my boy is loving them. He’ll occasionally stop and say “wow, that was a great sentence.” I remembered that I loved The Sword of Rhiannon and Enchantress of Venus, and I still did, even after a span of years away from them. I did get pretty tired of all the typographical errors in the Millenium Press collection of Brackett’s work, however, and am going to have to track down The Sword of Rhiannon in paperback once more just so I can read a cleaner version.

Thankfully Robert E. Howard’s work’s finally easier to find, although I fear that not all of it will be collected, and I darned well wish that it was available in a hardback set. Brackett too is getting some long overdue packaging, courtesy of Haffner Press. Ah, if only all book companies put the love into their products that Haffner Press does. I don’t know that I’ve ever found any kind of typo on Steve Haffner’s publications. The bindings are excellent and so are the covers. At the Windy City Pulp and Paperback con Haffner told me that the second of three Brackett volumes would be ready by some time mid-year, pending only an introduction from Ray Bradbury. Brackett fan that I am, I’m more excited about seeing this second book and reading some potentially unread Brackett (unread by me, I mean) than I am about the new Harry Potter book. As her husband, the late, great, Ed Hamilton said, “this gal can write.” Boy could she.

Last week John O’Neill sent a response to a writer who’d wanted some more detail about why his story had been rejected, and John, as you’ll see below, answered in more detail. We thought this might be interesting to Black Gate readers and writers and perhaps help further explain what we mean when we ask for more original world building, etc. Take it away John!

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I appreciate your interest. I’m always happy to elaborate.

You ask:

>What constitutes an original plot, setting and character?

This is the kind of question that begs a lengthy answer. I don’t really have time for that, so I’m going to take a shortcut and get right to the point: what I really mean is I’m looking for interesting plots, settings, and characters.

Being original is a huge step towards being interesting. Let’s take your opening scene, for example: a young man in a barbarian village is helping his father create a sword. Suddenly a group of men ride into the village with weapons drawn.

This isn’t very interesting. First, because I already know that those men are there to pillage the village and gather slaves. I also know that the boy’s noble father will die a heroic, but inevitable, death. I also know the boy will fight valiantly and be defeated, but not killed. And all that came to pass in your story, over the course of about 15 pages.

How do I know all that? Because I’ve read that plot, with that setting and those characters, more than once. More than a few times, actually.

Is it an unpardonable sin to re-use a recognizable setting in heroic fantasy? Probably not. It’s the same with familiar characters archetypes — the evil sorcerer, the noble barbarian — and even classic plots.  But each time you use a familiar element, your story gets less interesting. 

You did add some fresh elements — I was quite taken with your villains, and your intriguingly well-thought out approach to magic, for example. But when the first 15 pages of your tale presents a plot, setting, and characters I’ve seen before… it’s not for us, not matter how well written it is, or how fresh the villains are.

I hope that’s been helpful. Let me know if you have any additional questions.

Warm regards,

— John

I’d been planning to reprint some excerpts from an interview I conducted with David Smith last year, then realized we had another interview with David Smith in the Black Gate web queue… and then I bumped into David Smith at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention!

Below you’ll find some excerpts from my interview with David related to the writing of fantasy adventure fiction, most particularly sword-and-sorcery. For the complete interview, visit here. And for the more recent interview, visit the Black Gate web site.

In case you don’t know David Smith, I stole this quick introduction from our very own web page, courtesy of Black Gate web guru Leo Grin:

During the fantasy boom of the 1970s and ’80s, the work of a young Chicagoan named David C. Smith consistently kept sword-and-sorcery readers enthralled with tales that heralded back to the pulp S&S adventures of old.

So now you know. David’s a talented writer and has some gifted insight into the craft. Even if sword-and-sorcery isn’t your cuppa tea I think you’ll find his answers of interest.

In other news, I’m still working my way through submissions and sending out responses. Ditto for John. In about a week we’ll have to step away from that and put finishing touches on issue 11 so it can go to press on time.

Interview with David Smith

What do you think is the appeal of sword-and-sorcery?

It’s pagan. And no matter how sophisticated we think we are or how much inside our heads we are, we know that that is the truth of the world. A lot of sophists and intellectuals and otherwise very bright people operate on the premise that we’re basically rational and sane. We aren’t. We’re animals, we’re pack animals. We are somewhat domesticated and we are well-trained, but we are animals. I think that the best sword-and-sorcery fiction takes us on a walk along that thin line, hints at this truth, is frank about this truth, and lets us exercise our imagination in the face of this truth.

Just as important, though, and perhaps more important, is the existential awareness in sword-and-sorcery fiction. I call it looking into the abyss. It’s more than just facing our mortality; it’s a visceral reaction to ultimate meaninglessness. It’s not just that we’ll die one day; it’s the fact that we really don’t matter, and that we have no ultimate control over anything. There is always that shadow nearby. And that’s what the monster is, or the abyss, or the flying apes or whatever. The best sword-and-sorcery fiction recognizes this aspect in the genre and deals with it in some fashion. It’s no accident that this genre came out of the same alchemy that gave us H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, and Clark Ashton Smith’s. I think that they were responding to the zeitgeist, the sense of purposelessness that existed after World War I. This uncertainty and ambivalence about life was pervasive in the 1920s. It was what Sartre would call existentialism. Lovecraft answered this dilemma, responded to this by expressing it as gothic science fiction horror, this awareness of our insignificance. Robert Howard’s characters threw themselves against it with all of their might and went down fighting. Clark Ashton Smith’s stories are the most sublime because they exhibit the wit and insight and irony of cultivated black humor. He was an extremely good writer, as well, the best of the bunch.

Also, if you’re going to write this stuff, it can’t hurt to have an emotional or behavioral disorder or to have a cranky streak or a bit of murder in your heart. Even if you just take it out on flies and bugs, the ability to be an s.o.b. once in a while is probably an advantage.

What do you say to the charges leveled against sword-and-sorcery? Particularly that it is sexist and that the genre is played out?

A lot of sword-and-sorcery is sexist. Or at least it was. Most of the books written in the sword-and-sorcery boom of the late ’60s and early ’70s were written by postwar guys. It had its root in men’s fiction of the postwar era. And after the success of The Sword and the Sorcerer and Conan the Barbarian, there was a tidal wave of so-called sword-and-sorcery movies written by really bad scriptwriters — bad even by Hollywood standards — that emphasized beefcake and cheesecake. But a lot of sword-and-sorcery fiction is pagan, earthy, natural, sexy in this way. It’s blue collar. It’s the Heartland. It has a blue collar appeal. This makes me wonder whether the charges of sexism actually have their roots in classism, in class bias. We actually have advanced slightly in the past 30 years or so, you know. We’ve just come through a generation of raising awareness about gender, and we’ve had a lot of debate about social issues, and we’re better off for it. So by this time, I think the criticism is about class or taste more than anything else.

The other thing is that these stories, like all genre stories, quickly can become reduced to a formula, to a ritual, the same thing told the same way over and over. It’s hard to find worth in expression that offers so little originality. Reading these stories and writing them — is that going to be ritualistic behavior each time? Or are we going to try to gain a sense of wonder or insight? Are we going to feel the keenness of life? Turn characters this way and that, turn the plot every which way, come out with something satisfying, something honest, not hollow? Can you tell that story and create a sense of vindication, or of vitality, or of insight, or accomplishment? Sword-and-sorcery can do that. Any kind of story can do that. Can we do it well, and frequently? That’s the question for sword-and-sorcery: Is there anything in it to be taken seriously?

If sword-and-sorcery remains only fanboy stuff, then it deserves to be marginalized. If it can adapt and be used imaginatively in ways other genre fiction has done, then it will become or remain a worthwhile genre. Detective and mystery fiction did this. Westerns did it. Science fiction did. Even horror. Is sword-and-sorcery a satisfactory genre in its own right or is it some sort of subgenre of fantasy? Well, hardboiled is a subgenre of mystery. Romance has its own subgenres. Labels, labels, labels.

Sword-and-sorcery has been treated as a subgenre of fantasy because when Howard was reprinted in the ’60s and ’70s, it was at the same time that Tolkien was reprinted. But sword-and-sorcery is men’s adventure fiction. Morgan Holmes and others have discussed this. It’s Westerns. It’s hard-boiled fiction. It’s noir. But Tolkien created this quasi-Middle Ages with Middle Earth, and Howard had a made-up map, too, so these two writers and their creations were conflated by publishers. And Howard had some stories with castles in them, and we were hit over the head endlessly by pictures of castles and gnomes and sunsets painted by the Brothers Hildebrandt, and it was all basically Victorian kitsch.

If you go back and look at what Howard started with — because sword-and-sorcery fiction starts with him — you find that it wasn’t centrally about making up funny names and building worlds. It was about experience on an elemental level, and he explored that through these quasi-historical stories of his. Patrice Louinet and Rusty Burke have pointed out that Howard was really writing historical adventures with the Conan stories. He preferred to write history, but the research can be daunting and he needed to keep turning out copy, so he answered the drive that way. And he created something original. This material was fresh and immediate in its time, and the other writers of his generation who came after Howard, some of them, continued to develop the genre. Now, there was a lot of hokey, shallow imitation, too, because once you develop something novel, people are going to pick up on the literal elements of it and package it and market it to the nondiscriminating. But we also were graced with stories by Fritz Leiber, for example. And when the second wave of sword-and-sorcery occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, we had a new generation of writers who took the concept and ran with it. Karl Wagner did acid gothic fantasy or whatever he called it. Charles Saunders created Imaro. Jessica Salmonson did woman samurai stories. Dick Tierney and I probably veered closest to being back in the 1930s and writing material that was “Hyborian” or whatever you want to call it. And there are writers nobody mentions anymore or who almost got into the game before everything changed. Ted Rypel wrote a big series about Gonji, a samurai warrior who finds adventure in medieval Europe. Those books sold like crazy. How come no one talks about Gonji anymore? David Madison had some good stories in Space & Time at the same time that Charles Saunders and I were being published there. Joe Bonadonna placed a few stories but just missed selling a big epic he was writing. The timing was off.

Anyhow, even if we can develop sword-and-sorcery into a new direction and write it well, it will never be regarded as wholly legitimate by intellectuals and academics because those people tend to be snobbish, and the element of physicality annoys them. You know, it really is about sitting around the campfire and looking up at the stars and wondering what is over the horizon. It might be a castle, it might be a monster, it might be any kind of adventure. As far back as we can go in human history, the evidence is overwhelming that human beings always were on the move. That’s a big part of this genre. That and the dark, whatever’s out there just beyond the light of the campfire. I think that this is where the existential element comes in. This is where Lovecraft and Howard are joined at the hip. It’s amusing that some of the Lovecraft fans have to hold their noses when they discuss Howard. That sure isn’t the way Lovecraft himself thought about Howard. But it goes back to intellectuals and academics being inside their heads too much. You know, their guy never sweats. Lovecraft never sweats, but Howard is out there in the Texas sun every day, isn’t he? Lovecraft is a scholar; he’s inside at his desk. Robert Howard is out there shooting rattlesnakes or riding his horse or something, being vital. And the rest of us who write this fiction are out there with him, too. But there is a long tradition to this disdain. It’s the city mouse and the country mouse. Anything physical or having to do with the outdoors is boys’ adventure fiction, or in some other way it doesn’t qualify for serious thought. You know, for ten thousand years, we sat around the campfire telling stories about killing animals and boasting about physical contests and fighting the elements, and I honestly think that we would like to put that behind us. We have gotten comfortable and material, and it is brain power that has gotten us here. The brainworkers have created the modern world, not the physical laborers. I think this bias runs deep in the modern Western psyche.

Something else to keep in mind is that sword-and-sorcery does not grow specifically from the American experience the way Westerns and hardboiled detective fiction do. Sword-and-sorcery is about swords instead of guns. That limits its appeal right there. There are plenty of fans of edged weapons, to be sure, but when you think about America, you think about firearms.

Anyhow, to write good sword-and-sorcery, you need to write good stories, and that’s not easy. Give us characters and dialogue of interest. Show us how the characters grow and change. Show us who they are. Have them look into a deep hole — and have the hole look back at them. That’s what sword-and-sorcery needs. Come up with plots that grow out of people, not props. Throw in some interesting reverses and twists created by characters. Get past this Manichaeanism, this good-versus-evil bullshit. It’s not how the world works. Tell stories about grown-ups, people in desperate situations. That’s sword-and-sorcery.

Sword-and-sorcery virtually disappeared at just about the same time you and Charles Saunders and Richard Tierney and Lyon and Offutt all disappeared — and, of course, Karl Edward Wagner passed away. Sword-and-sorcery has been all but comatose for a long time. What do you think led to this? Why do you think the most promising writers of ’70s and ’80s sword-and-sorcery had either to walk away from the genre or walk away from writing altogether?

There’s a common denominator to all of the writers you mention. I’m not sure who Lyon is, and I can’t speak for Andy Offutt, but the rest of us have several things in common. First, we came out of the pulp tradition, and in many ways we represent the end of the line of pulp fiction as it had flourished from the 1920s through the 1970s. Second, most of us came out of the fanzines, the amateur publications of the 1970s, which is where the pulp tradition was kept alive. Third, those of us who came out of the fanzines achieved professional status but weren’t able actually to build careers because the machinery wasn’t in place for that. But the machinery was never meant to accommodate masculine adventure fantasy fiction, anyhow.

Fantasy fiction in the ’80s and ’90s became domesticated so that it could be regulated by publishers to serve as a corporate profit center. This was a marketing decision. Steering fantasy in this direction grew out of the popularity of the Tolkien pastiches. It also was an expression of the women’s movement. Publishers used the model of Tolkien fantasies, like The Sword of Shanarra, and promoted this sort of domesticated fantasy. It’s about packaging a product, creating a brand, and selling people the same thing consistently. You’re selling a ritual, you’re selling conditioning. The editors and publishers were very successful at this rebranding, your unicorns and elves and dragons and paperback covers with attractive young people walking with staves in the deep forest.

Sword-and-sorcery fiction was dropped in favor of this more lucrative demographic. The marketers of fantasy fiction redefined the genre to optimize mass-market sales, but it left a bunch of us out in the cold. We were the schmucks who were just gearing up to write some really interesting masculine fantasy, and we wound up hanging out there with nowhere to go. Can you imagine if Farnsworth Wright had decided in 1933 that suddenly he wasn’t going to publish any more of a certain kind of story? What if John Campbell had made a sharp turn in the 1940s and decided that he didn’t want to publish any more of some kinds of stories? What if Harlan Ellison had said, Well, I want stories for Dangerous Visions, but not those kinds of stories, or these kinds of stories?

Other kinds of masculine fiction, such as sci-fi war stories, still were published. But for individual reasons, those of us who wrote sword-and-sorcery fiction stopped producing it. Karl Wagner’s output diminished. DAW let it be known that they were no longer interested in publishing any more Imaro stories. I got tired of not having my career advance and dropped out. Dick Tierney returned to the small, private publishers. I’m not sure what happened to Andy. He and I corresponded for a while, and I know he sincerely championed Oron. I wonder whether he ever paid a price for that in the sci-fi and fantasy community!

But there was never a cohesive sense in the marketplace of sword-and-sorcery fiction. No one publisher took it upon himself or herself to champion certain writers or to promote this genre. In retrospect, it looks neat and tidy, but that was not the case at all. It was catch-as-catch-can. Sword-and-sorcery was more viable when we were all publishing in the fanzines. But the only authors who appeared in the digests, for example, were Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson. I don’t think any of us broke into Fantastic. I’m not sure any of us even tried. We went to the paperbacks. And someone would buy a book here or some books there, but it was taking advantage of the interest in the Howard stories and it played off the comics and movies. We did have a viable genre of sword-and-sorcery movies there for a while, and they were terrible. A few of them are dumb fun, but as we know, most of them aren’t even stupid fun, they’re just bad. So the few authors who were writing serious, dark, energetic sword-and-sorcery moved on or stopped. There was still S&S Lite. You had some anthologies of stories. But it had all taken on this quasi-Tolkienesque feel.

If you want to create a viable genre out of this, you have to get enough writers and editors and publishers and readers together to create a dynamic, to get it to the point where it is self-sustaining. I’m not sure that that can be done. It’s such a specific kind of story with a unique appeal, and I’m not sure that enough people are sufficiently entertained or interested or intellectually motivated to explore that possibility. You need enough people involved so that you have some creative tension going on, competition and cooperation at the same time, a movement.

On Showing Rather than Telling

I was planning to post on a writing topic today, and I see here that Eric Knight’s got another great one on Showing/Telling. It’s definitely worth your time to read. Then you should think about it. Then you should read it again.

On Learning Writing Lessons the Hard Way

I’ve been working on a novel for several years now. I knew it had some issues, and sent the most recent draft out to some loyal friends and colleagues for some fresh perspectives. They found more issues than I anticipated, and some of them left me shaking my head at my own processes. Had I really made THOSE mistakes? Indeed, I had.

So as I launch into the next revision I’ve been trying to figure out how I can avoid these same painful mistakes so that it doesn’t take me three MORE years to finish. I have other books to write, after all. 

I think I pretty much have point 1 licked, but then I’ve had that mentally posted to my head for 10 years and really do try to remind myself of it whenever I sit down to write. As for the rest: I realize that all writers have different strengths and weaknesses, so a lot of this may not apply to you. It’s a list I wrote for me, and the issues I’m dealing with in my novel-in-progress at this time. I’ll post it here in the hope someone else can find my hard lessons instructive. I hope that I have the wisdom to do so myself! 

1. Know what every character in the scene wants before you start writing.

2. Your longer works need DETAILED outlining. Always. You can work out plot problems, motivation, etc. in a rich outline so you don’t waste time writing, and rewriting, and rewriting just to get the structure right. As you’ve been doing… Have you noticed how painful that is yet?

3. If you have to start inventing scenes for a POV character you probably don’t NEED that POV character… refer to point 2, because if you’d outlined properly before writing you’d probably have noticed you had nothing for that POV character to do later on.

4. Remember how you’re supposed to give your story a clear through line? Really? Then write that way. The character HAS to have a driving goal that both she and the reader know. And it should be one that can be easily summarized: Indy’s looking for the headpiece to the staff of Ra so he can find the Ark of the Covenant.

5. Don’t coast. When revising, what was once the best scene in the earlier draft may not hold up any more. Look at it critically.

6. If you find a flaw and try to excuse it through character dialogue just so you can leave some scenes the way they are… you’re going to regret it. You need to look at that flaw from another angle. It will probably entail changing some scenes, threads, character arcs, or other painful things. Suck it up and make the changes.

7. Sometimes it is more important to spend all of a day’s writing time contemplating the story than worrying about how many words you get down – remembering this will help you overcome point 6. Quality, not quantity. You do NOT work best to set word counts. Remember that.

8. Remember those episodes of The Next Generation you hated because it felt like they would have a moment of character interaction that had NOTHING to do with the rest of the story? It drove you nuts that it wasn’t interwoven with the plot. NEVER do that. If you feel like the reader needs to know something about the character, don’t jam it in, just keep it in mind and it should come out, eventually, if your characters are well-envisioned. Refer again to point 2.

9. It’s great that you know what happened during the entire boring scene, but you can summarize it. More likely you’re doing number 8, though, which seems to be your new secret weakness, and means that the scene doesn’t need to be summarized so much as completely freakin’ REMOVED.

10. You tend to think that once you understand something that you’ve learned it. By this time you should know better. Continue to refer to this list, because if you’d really learned all this stuff you wouldn’t have had to write this list in the first place.

Sage Advice

Eric Knight has another great writing post this week; you can find it here. If you’re not familiar with Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, take a look at his example and become so, and if you are familiar, it’s definitely worth a revisit.

Black Gate Update

I hope everyone is enjoying their Black Gate 10s. What, you don’t have one? Go remedy that! If you want to chat about it, use a link to the right and visit the newsgroup.Responses to some of the submissions I’ve forwarded to John have started going out as he sorts through a horde of treasures. I’ve started into the August-October slush, and am almost through readying the gaming and book review material for issue 11. John has long since readied the fiction for the issue and I believe all the art is in. In short, stay tuned.

I will be meeting jolly John O’Neill, the mighty John Hocking, the aforementioned Knightly Eric and hopefully a few others at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback con this coming weekend; we will convene in the Black Gate rooftop headquarters, high over downtown Chicago.

As far as Black Gate presence at other cons this year the only one I know we’ll both be attending for sure is the World Fantasy Con. I MAY be going to Archon this year in St. Louis, but the summer schedule is pretty full right now already. I need to decide soon, as I hear hotels are already full up anywhere close to the con.

Howard

James Van Pelt has posted some great articles on writing the last two days — one on April 23, one on April 24. You owe it to yourselves to check them out here:

A few years back, when I was reviewing for Tangent and reading widely to get a better feel for various markets, I ended up reading a lot of stuff that wasn’t my cup of tea. James can be found in all sorts of magazines, and I quickly discovered that he always delivered a nice story, even it it wasn’t the kind of tale I usually enjoyed. More to the point here — he really seems to know what he’s talking about, technique-wise, so I hope you’ll see what he has to say.

In the spirit of writing techniques, here’s some thoughts I jotted down for Daniel Blackston a few years back on description and ended up putting on the swordandsorcery.org site. I thought it might have some relevance to story beginnings as someone asked about last week.  A lot of tales I reject start with laborious descriptions of the main characters.

Writing Descriptively

I look on description as my camera. If I am analogous to the director of the film my readers watch, then description controls many of the aspects of that story experienced by the reader. That camera is critical for conveying pacing, setting, character, and plot.

Description does not sit statically — it has a purpose. Like makeup, it is applied sparingly to highlight or emphasize what we wish to show, to draw attention away from what we do not. It cues the reader as to what is critical to the story and ensures that a tale maintains momentum.

Either in the opening paragraph or within the first few lines of dialogue, our camera pans over the scene so that the reader sees the environment through which our characters move. Usually the characters are seen as well.

Lin Carter, editor extraoirdinaire and author of many thrilling tales of fantasy and science fiction, wrote Imaginary Worlds, on the history and techniques of writing fantasy, which should be a required read for all fantasy writers. Such writers also should run, not walk, to purchase Poke Runyon’s Drell Master, wherein is printed a letter from Carter about describing fantasy heroes and setting more useful than many semesters worth of writing classes. Here is a brief excerpt from that letter:

Notice how Burroughs describes a hero? Just a few brief sketches:

Tarzan is golden bronze like a Greek god. Fierce eyes under black mane. Moves with regal dignity and pantherine grace. That’s all. That’s enough. Or John Carter: lithe and sinewy, his naked body clasped in the Barsomian warrior’s harness, crusted with badges of rare metal and glittering gems, gem-studded butt of radium pistol, rapier hilt, dagger. Boots.

We do not need to know the color of every ring upon our hero’s finger, nor the subtle shape of his chin. Details in excess overwhelm.

Robert E. Howard was a master of description. Consider the following excerpt, the opening paragraph to “The Slithering Shadow” (also known as “Xuthal of the Dusk”):

The desert shimmered in the heat waves. Conan the Cimmerian stared out over the aching desolation and involuntarily drew the back of his powerful hand over his blackened lips. He stood like a bronze image in the sand, apparently impervious to the murderous sun, though his only garment was a silk loin-cloth, girdled by a wide gold-buckled belt from which hung a saber and a broad-bladed poniard. On his clean-cut limbs were evidences of scarcely healed wounds.

In this short paragraph we see setting, character, and even some hint of the challenges that lie both before and behind the protagonist. Howard fastens our eyes upon the interesting and we do the rest. Take careful note that the description of Conan doesn’t start at the top of his head and work down. Showing someone in that manner may be an efficient way to construct a prose painting, but it is rarely how we view people. We see them in motion, reacting to the environment through which they move.

Lest you think all successful description must read like Howard, consider Lord Dunsany, writing in a very different style as a neglected rocking horse remembers its master in “Blagdaross”:

…we would pass by night through tropic forests, and come upon dark rivers sweeping by, all gleaming with the eyes of crocodiles, where the hippopotamus floated down with the stream, and mysterious craft loomed suddenly out of the dark and furtively passed away.

These two enormously gifted writers, seemingly miles apart in subject matter and style, share much in common. They let verbs do the work. They carefully avoid was, were, and other forms of “to be.” Adjectives are used precisely to convey mood. And both writers anthropomorphise.

Let’s look at the first line of Conan’s paragraph. Howard might have written “the desert was shimmering in the heat waves” or “the desert sat shimmering in the heat waves” but he wrote “the desert shimmered in the heat waves. BAM. He wasted no time conveying his image. He avoided was, he used but one verb, and he avoided the “ing” form of the verb, a present participle in this sentence (although “ing” verbs are frequently gerunds).

Careful reading shows that skilled writers use action verbs. They do not zealously strip every gerund and every to be verb from their work (successful writing is never that simple) but rather employ those forms sparingly. We don’t see “Conan the Cimmerian was looking” we see “Conan the Cimmerian stared.” In Dunsany we don’t have the “hippopatumus was floating” we have “hippopatumus floated.” Without the to be verb and the gerund clogging our way the action is conveyed directly.

Particularly egregious would be “was floating” because it wastes time with a to be verb followed by a descriptive verb. You don’t need both. Use only the verb that paints a picture in the mind of the reader. Does your character head up the stairs, or does he race, stroll, pound, drag? To “head” up the stairs provides no picture. If you state merely that “he was a tall man” you waste the potential for emotional reaction, or even simply an interesting camera angle. “He towered over the other warriors,” say. Strive for both precision and economy, but do not employ these tools to such exclusion that your prose reads like parody.

Some excellent writers slather on adjectives to wonderful effect — but overuse of adjectives is more often a sign of bad writing. In the examples above Dunsany and Howard wield adjectives shrewdly to present pictures with just two words: “dark river” and “tropic forest,” or “blackened lips” and “murderous sun.” These words instantly present images.

There are schools of thought today that instruct writers never to use anthropomorphism. This is folly. We cannot help but ascribe motivations to the unliving objects around us; it is how humans instinctively think, and writers should use this inclination to their advantage. Shakespeare certainly did, and he should be studied devotedly by any who wish to succeed at writing. Consider Macbeth, who has tomorrow creeping at its petty pace and yesterdays lighting the way to dusty death. Howard’s murderous sun and aching desolation, and Dunsany’s mysterious craft passing furtively demonstrate how ably a little unscientific attribution dresses a scene.

Pacing and description are vitally linked. Too much description during an action scene and the moment conveys no excitement, too little and the moment is confusing. In dramatic sections the sentences or phrases should be crisp and short — flowery phrasing is fine for describing a melody or a sunset, but when the pace quickens, urge the reader along with fewer words. In a scene from Leigh Brackett’s The Sword of Rhiannon the protagonist, Carse, leads slaves to rebellion:

With belaying pins, with their shackles, and with their fists, the galley slaves charged in and the soldiers met them. Carse with his whip and his knife, Jaxart howling the word Khondor like a battle-cry, naked bodies against mail, desperation against discipline.

Note how the camera pulls back; in painting terms the scene is shown in broad strokes. In other instances the camera needs to focus tightly, providing the illusion that it shows every movement (it doesn’t—the eye should still be pointed only to the crucial aspects so that the reader does the rest). Still there is an economy of words to preserve momentum. Consider this excerpt from Harold Lamb’s “The Winged Rider:”

They swerved into the fire and out again, their blackened boots smoking in the snow. Then Skal grunted. One of his ribs had broken. Ayub, grimly silent, tightened the grip of his steel-like arms.

Skal’s twisted face grew black and he screamed suddenly, choking as the breath was driven from his lungs. His arms went limp and he lay in Ayub’s grasp, his ribs cracked, his back broken.

While it should never be forgotten that all elements of a story are interlinked, when you contemplate description you should most remember precision, action, economy, and pacing.

Riders of the Steppes

This Friday I turned over the final, revised version of my master’s thesis, which pleased me mightily. And last Friday I received an especially pleasant surprise. What should I find pulling up to my home but a delivery truck with a box full of Harold Lamb’s Cossack stories. Volumes 1 and 2 were released last spring; volumes 3 and 4, the final books, have just been printed.

As a teenager I dreamed of being able to read all of these rare and uncollected stories, and as I slowly tracked them down over the years I dreamed of preserving them all, of finding a way to get them between book covers so that other readers and I myself could have the pleasure of holding them. My dream came true this week. It was years in the making, but it came true, and Bison Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, has presented them in lovely covers by Darrell Stevens, with a lovely interior map, and S. M. Stirling, David Drake, Eric Knight, and Harold Lamb’s cousin Barrie Tait Collins have written the introductions. I was privileged to write the forewords to each volume, for over the course of tracking down and assembling the stories and finding a publisher I’d accidentally become an authority on Harold Lamb and his work.

So who’s Lamb and what’s all the fuss? I spent an entire master’s thesis analyzing why he’s important.

In 1917 Harold Lamb was a young man writing for the pulp magazines. He broke into the prestigious Adventure and started work on a cycle of remarkable historical fiction stories set in locations as fabulous and unfamiliar to most readers as Burroughs’ Mars.

Where many adventure tales are predictable from the first word, Lamb’s plots were full of unexpected twists. He wrote convincingly of faraway lands and dealt fairly with their inhabitants, relating without bias the viewpoints of Mongols, Moslems, and Hindus. His stories are rarely profound psychological drama, but Lamb nonetheless breathed humanity into his characters, endowing them with realistic hopes and fears. Unlike almost all of his predecessors, his pacing still feels modern — he never stopped for slow exposition. His plots thunder forward as though he envisioned each one for cinema the moment he slid paper into the typewriter.

The most enduring and complex of all Lamb’s heroes was his first, Khlit the Cossack. Before Stormbringer keened in Elric’s hand, before the Gray Mouser prowled Lankhmar’s foggy streets –before even Conan trod jeweled thrones under his sandaled feet, Khlit the Cossack rode the steppe. He is the forgotten grandfather of all series sword-and-sorcery characters.

The Cossack is already old when his saga begins, late in the 16th century in the grasslands of central Asia. He is an expert horseman and swordsman, unlettered and only a step removed from barbarism, but wise in the ways of war and men. Gruff and taciturn, Khlit is a firm believer in justice and devout in his faith, though not given to prayer or religious musings. He is the friend and protector of many women, but leaves romance to his sidekicks and allies.

Lamb became one of the most popular writers for Adventure magazine and remained so for almost twenty years (he then turned to writing well-respected histories, biographies, and screenplays for Cecil B. Demille). Robert E. Howard named him as a favorite author, and many modern authors still sing his praises, but until these volumes, all of these stories have been out of print. These four books present every single Khlit the Cossack adventure, in order. Some have been unavailable since the 1930s and some have never been printed between book covers. They include all the stories of Khlit’s allies and fellow Cossacks, as well as more than a half dozen standalone Cossack stories, behind-the-scenes letters, and introductions from the aforementioned authors.

Pardon me if I sound briefly like a marketing guy, but this is great stuff, and anyone who loves heroic fiction ought to look into it. Journey now with the unsung grandfather of sword-and-sorcery in search of ancient tombs, gleaming treasure, and thrilling landscapes; match wits with deadly swordsmen, scheming priests, and evil cults; rescue lovely damsels, ride with bold comrades, and hazard everything on your brains, skill, and a little luck.

Wolf of the Steppes 

Warriors of the Steppes

Riders of the Steppes

Swords of the Steppes

I hope your Fridays will deliver good news to you as well.

Next up — either a look at my favorite adventure fantasy beginnings, or a few thoughts on making description work.

Howard

 

Reading Submissions

Responses to all e-subs sent prior to early August 2006 have now been sent out. There were a few bounces, unfortunately (although none for which I had good news). Of the 130 stories from this batch I forwarded some dozen to John O’Neill for further consideration. Since I started reading I’ve gone through a little over 550 Black Gate submissions, and of those I’ve sent some 50 on to John.

It doesn’t take too much mathematical effort to realize this means I turn over about 1 in 11 tales. Sometimes there’ll be a string of really good ones in a row and sometimes I’ll read dozens and find nothing that catches my eye. It’s not that I’m looking to pass on 1 in 11; that’s just how the numbers average out.

Because John’s currently evaluating the submissions I forwarded from the last two batches I don’t yet have solid numbers on what percentage of forwarded subs get approved, but I do know I’ve sent on more tales than we can possibly accept, and that this, of course, only accounts for half of Black Gate subs, as there are still regular, hard-copy submissions.

I thought it would be interesting to provide you with a rough statistical breakdown of those other 10 subs. After all, if I’m only passing on about 1 in 11, what’s wrong with the other 10?

1. 1. It’s just wildly inappropriate — it’s a gangster story, moreover, it’s an entire gangster novel, or it’s modern poetry with no fantastic elements.
2. 2. It begins with a very, very long infodump describing the history of the fantasy world, or the science fiction world, or the demon world.
3. 3. It’s a fable or a myth that leaves us far removed from the characters.
4. 4. It is overloaded with familiar elements like elves and quests and dragons and quests and wizards and quests OR monsters (oh no, it was REALLY a vampire!) handled in familiar ways.
5. 5. It’s a bleak story about the end of the world and the few human survivors scrabbling over what’s left as they all die off. I’ve seen some very, very good versions of this story, but I’ve turned them away. If the point is that we’ll all die with a whimper, we won’t be publishing it, even though on some days I’m inclined to agree.
6. 6. It opens in generic medieval tavern A and is populated by extras from D and D central casting, or begins in the midst of an adventure that reads like dungeon module B with extras from D and D central casting.
7. 7. It’s a Twilight Zone style horror story or science fiction story where it’s all about the twist and not the characters.
8. 8. It is dripping with adjectives but virtually devoid of character, as though whoever wrote it has been locked in a room reading Clark Ashton Smith and H. P. Lovecraft night and day for a month before putting hands to keyboard (and it must be said that it NEVER sounds as lovely as CAS, no matter how hard someone tries).
9. 9. The writing’s good, but the story doesn’t have any fantasy or fantastic elements, or it’s all about the characters emoting rather than actually DOING something. Sometimes it’s a fine story and it’s just not an adventure.
10. 10. The writing shows promise, but is rough around the edges. Stories like this sometimes garner a rewrite request, sometimes a “close but not quite” kind of letter, with an invitation to try again. Occassionally the writing’s quite good, but the story’s just not as original in character or world building as the last I sent on to John. These are the hardest stories to turn away, but I have to do so, because, as I mention above, we already have more good stories than we can publish.

I can usually tell in the first paragraph whether I’m going to read very far into the story. Traits like what I call “word echo” (repeated use of the same word in nearby sentences), plodding pacing, infodumps, over abundance of gerunds or adjectives, generic characters or situations, even subject matter, and the names of characters and places can clue me in pretty quickly. If my attention isn’t caught by the first page and I’ve seen weak world building or matters like those I mention above, then you’ve probably lost me and I’m on to the next. I’ve had some people get angry with me once they realize I don’t read every word of every submission, but really, if I’m not interested in the first few pages, then why would a Black Gate reader be? If my attention is caught, I keep reading. Statistically, you can see my attention is caught enough to read all the way through in only 2 or 3 out of every 11.

Oh, and if it’s really a satire on fantasy and sword-and-sorcery conventions, I won’t be interested. Our slots are few, and we want to use most of them to provide adventure, not parodies.

Coming Soon: Issue 11

There are a few hundred more submissions to go before I’ve read everything in stock, but before I can turn to those I need to make final decisions about a number of book reviews for issue 11, not to mention write a few game reviews for issue 11. By the time John’s finished looking over the forwarded e-subs and some paper subs we’ll have all the non-fiction in hand and then 11 will be just about ready for the printer, right on time.

Breaking (Stuffing) the Envelopes

I spoke with John O’Neill today from our rooftop headquarters overlooking downtown Chicago. The undead minions finished stuffing the envelopes with copies of Black Gate and shambled over to the post office Saturday. Subscribers should receive their copies of the issue soon. As mentioned previously, preview snippets can be found here: https://www.blackgate.com/bg/issue10.htm

Having dispelled the eldritch creatures, John is now reading through physical submissions as well as a number of fine stories I’ve forwarded to him from the e-submissions. I, meanwhile, still have about 100 responses to write before I can dive into the next batch of e-subs. Following that I need to wrap-up choices for the book reviews for issue 11 and write up a few game reviews for that volume as well, because it’s going out in short order.

Submitting

Last year was a busy one for me and I fell behind on all of my fiction writing goals (moving and writing a master’s thesis will suck up your time, believe me). I’ve been doing much better this year. The problem is that markets keep closing, and responses are slow. I thought many of you would appreciate that I too am on the receiving end of long response times. I was pleased to learn a story I’d submitted last year was accepted at BAEN’s Universe, but disappointed to learn that they’d closed to submissions for a few months. As a result, I sent the follow-up I penned for them over to Weird Tales. I bopped back by the WT site today to verify that I’d followed the submission procedure correctly, only to discover that the Weird Tales site seems to have gone missing. Alas. I assume that it is only temporary.

Howard