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Mucking with the Mundane

Mucking with the Mundane

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Gloriana, the Unfulfill'd QueenFantasy readers expect the world of a fantasy novel to be different from our mundane reality.

There’s magic afoot — of course the world operates differently. The author paints the fantastical milieu and we enter it primed to believe, donning those 4-D glasses that let us accept strangeness. It’s a more-than-willing suspension of disbelief.

We don’t ask for justifications, as long as the fantastic elements of the world are internally consistent. It’s in the tradition.

But with fantasy as re-imagined history or a re-imagined place, we enter a slightly different relationship with the story. Now we’re in a realm that is accessed, not through a portal or straight immersion in a new world, but through a delicate balance of writer allusions and reader indulgence. Readers know they’re being seriously mucked with. And the author must go the extra mile to pull it off.

There’s something logically different about creating an imagined world — like Middle Earth — versus fiddling with the actual world and its history. After all, it already happened the way it did. So the reader must swim against the mental tide of a different narrative, that of history.

Depending on your preferences for justification, you may want an explanation of how it all came to be, or you may wish the author would just get on with it.

One way to coax the reader into abandoning “real” history is with parallel worlds. Michael Moorcock uses this framing device in Gloriana, the Unfulfill’d Queen, set in a twisted Elizabethan-style court and a very changed history.

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The Hunger Games and Kids: When to Say When?

The Hunger Games and Kids: When to Say When?

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Mockingjay_PinOn a recent visit, my sister was shocked to discover that my boys had with them a copy of Mockingjay. At first, she assumed it was Corey’s (Corey is nearly thirteen), and was therefore even more horrified to learn that it was Evan’s book. Evan is eight.

My sister accosted me later that night (with my boys and hers all tucked up in various beds, visions of Minecraft dancing in their heads) and asked how I had come to the decision to let Evan tackle The Hunger Games books. She did not approach on an attack vector ––“How dare you let him read this trash!” No, no. Opinionated my sister certainly is, but she’s a smart (and tolerant) cookie.

Even so, my answer took the better part of twenty minutes to deliver, because I myself am puzzled by why Evan is reading The Hunger Games and why I (having viewed The Hunger Games and read Catching Fire) am at least tacitly condoning his choice.

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Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?

Why is it Always a Northern Barbarian?

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Taras BulbaMy mother was Spanish and my father was Polish, so there was a little north vs. south going on in my home all the time as I was growing up. My mum would encourage us to watch Zorro and El Cid, my dad was all for Taras Bulba and whoever else Yul Brynner was portraying that week on late night TV. When my mother would make remarks about the superiority of the Mediterranean culture, my father would remind her that the Spanish culture, at least, came mostly from the Moors, and that Rome fell, crushed beneath the heels of the – you guessed it – northern barbarians.

Aside to the historically educated: Yes, I know that isn’t exactly what happened. Otherwise, why did it take Gibbon seven volumes to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire? I’m not talking history here, I’m talking popular (mis)conceptions.

Last week I took a look at the rise of the hero in popular culture – by which I meant not just among our genre-respecting selves, but with all those other people. This week I’d like to take a look at where heroes come from – or where we expect them to come from.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Battles, Reluctance, and Service to the Sea of Stories

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Battles, Reluctance, and Service to the Sea of Stories

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We’ve come to the last installment of my review of Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros. It’s a peculiar book, different in several ways I have talked about before from other books on writerly craft. It’s specialized by both genre and cluster of techniques, and each chapter shows a noted author using examples from his or her own work to demonstrate how to use a particular technique well (or, in the case of early drafts, badly, followed by advice on revision). Although the book is, by design, most useful for the newcomer to writing fantasy, it has something to offer more seasoned writers, and it’s of great value to teachers of writing who specialize in, or are at least willing to engage with, genre fiction.

Paul Kearney’s piece on large-scale battle scenes is just what I hoped it would be. You know all the familiar gripes about fantasy warfare that fails the suspension-of-disbelief test: the army never seems to eat or excrete, never needs to get paid, charges its horses directly into walls of seasoned enemy pikemen, and so on. “So You Want to Fight a War” addresses all those mundane things an author must get right if the fantasy elements of her story are to feel real to the reader, and then Kearney pushes past the gripes into solutions that any conscientious author can learn to implement. It’s that last bit that I found truly refreshing — many discussions of military verisimilitude get bogged down in griping. Kearney assumes throughout that it’s possible for his reader to get this stuff right, with enough good models, research, and practice.

As in Brandon Sanderson’s chapter on “Writing Cinematic Fight Scenes,” the reader is urged to map the combatants’ positions in space. Of course, with at least two armies’ worth of combatants, what one does with the map is a little more complicated this time around:

Keep the map beside you as you write, and as the narrative progresses and the lines move and break and reform, annotate your map. By the end of the battle it should be covered in scrawls, but you will still see the sense within it. It should also have a scale, so that if you want one character to see another across that deadly space, you can gauge whether it’s possible or not. Battlefields can be large places, miles wide. Our ten thousand men, standing in four ranks shoulder to shoulder, will form a line over a mile and a half long, and that’s close-packed heavy infantry such as Greek spearmen or Roman legionaries. If your troops are wild-eyed Celtic types who like a lot of space to swing their swords, it will be even longer.

Okay, that’s a little daunting, but Kearney also offers things like a breakdown of pre-gunpowder tactics into a set of relationships that he likens, persuasively, to rock-paper-scissors. If you can remember how that kindergarten game works, you can avoid some of the biggest beginner blunders in the genre.

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Sword and Soul Revisited

Sword and Soul Revisited

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Imaro Charles SaundersFive years ago, I embarked on a writing and publishing journey, finally fulfilling a lifelong dream. By doing so, I unknowingly became a part of a legacy that began long before I decided to set fingers to keys to write my first novel.

Decades earlier, Charles R. Saunders sat before a different type of keyboard to create a character that added an important perspective to sword and sorcery, Imaro.  His motivation was similar to mine, although we came to the same conclusion years apart.

After falling in love with Robert E. Howard’s Conan and other stories and heroes that comprised Sword and Sorcery, he began to see the inequities. So to rectify the situation, he created Imaro, a man whose skills rivaled that of Conan’s, but whose world was grounded in African culture, history, and tradition.

My journey was sparked in a similar way, leading me to create my first Sword and Soul novel, Meji. Meji is a celebration of the diversity of the African continent, told through the story of twin brothers Ndoro and Obaseki.

It was coincidence that Charles and I were sparked to create characters from the same source; but it was fortuitous that we met through a mutual friend. It was Charles’s positive review of my Meji manuscript that convinced me that my decision to self-publish was the right thing to do.

But enough about me.  What’s been happening with Sword and Soul in the five years since my publishing company MVmedia hit the ground running?

A hell of a lot.

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For Want of a Nail… Jack Campbell on The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

For Want of a Nail… Jack Campbell on The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Guardian

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The_Lost_Fleet_Beyond_the_Frontier_GuardianThere’s an old poem in which the lack of a nail in a horseshoe causes the loss of a battle and a kingdom. The poem is usually seen as a proverb about how small things can cause major outcomes. But it also contains an important lesson for storytellers. In SF and fantasy, we create worlds that can include anything that we want them to have. That can produce cool stories, or it can create traps that ruin stories.

What is any story about? A problem. Whether it is one ring that has to be destroyed or a love triangle that threatens a kingdom or an invasion by aliens who really don’t like humans, the problem drives the story. The characters have to figure out how to solve that problem, which might require a lot of walking down the yellow brick road, the occasional detour, and numerous dangers, threats and other opportunities to excel.

As characters face all of the obstacles in their path, the writer faces the trap. Because, you know, if your hero only had a nail right now, that horseshoe would stay on, the battle would be won for certain and the kingdom saved. If your spaceship only had a means to counter that alien weapon, maybe by recalibrating the frequencies on the thingamajig, then the aliens would be defeated just like that.  Or if someone invents just what they need just when they need it, or someone finds a bottle with a magic genie inside, or God decides to intervene…

There’s a phrase for that trap. Deus ex machina (literally “god from the machine”). Ancient playwrights came up with the idea when they couldn’t figure out how to fix their plots.

No predicament is impossible when a god can step in. Got a dilemma that you can’t resolve? The Deus appears and fixes everything. The horseshoe has the nail. The thingamajig can destroy all of the aliens. It’s all happily-ever-after.

And readers are left feeling cheated. Where was the conflict? Where were the tough decisions? The sacrifices, the drama, the pain that we all know from real life are required to fix serious problems? The truth is that easy solutions make for bad stories.

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The Kids Are Alright: The Fate of the Novel lies in the Hands of Teenagers

The Kids Are Alright: The Fate of the Novel lies in the Hands of Teenagers

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Dinner at Deviant's PalaceLike many authors, I teach writing to help make ends meet. Teaching part-time at a college and an arts high school doesn’t exactly make you rich, but I for one find it very satisfying. One of the obvious perks for me is getting to teach alongside steampunk progenitors Tim Powers and James P. Blaylock, both of whom are fascinating, brilliant men.

The other perk — the less obvious one — is the students themselves.

On one hand, I often find myself wringing my hands like an old fuddy-duddy about how this youthful generation is enslaved by technology. I’ve had two college students this year write about how they were “catfished,” for example, and it’s hard to understand a generation that has made the act of duping someone into having a phony online relationship so commonplace.

And then there’s their obsession with smart phones, providing a constant distraction in the classroom and leading students to shamble mindlessly down the hallways between classes with their phones in their faces, heedless of who or what they bump into. The zombie apocalypse is here already, I tell you!

On the other hand, I’m constantly inspired by my students, both by their creativity and their exuberance for crossing genres and mediums. And really, it all stems from the ubiquity of technology in their lives. Yes, even those damned smart phones.

At the behest of a handful of my high school students this year, I taught a class called Writing for Alternative Mediums (WAM), meaning writing for video games, phone apps, web comics, and whatever else the kids could dream up.

Like any savvy teacher who has no expertise or experience on a given topic, I “taught” the course as a seminar, meaning the students were forced to perform their own self-guided research, develop a project, and then present their work to the class.

The big winner ended up being me.

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Are We Looking for a Hero?

Are We Looking for a Hero?

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DrWhoThe other day, an issue of Entertainment Weekly arrived in my mailbox. Doctor Who was on the cover. Let me repeat that, because it’s significant.  Entertainment Weekly had Doctor Who on the cover. What’s next? Good Housekeeping? Vogue? The New York Times Literary Supplement?

And there’s more. Out of the last fifteen covers, six featured genre work: the new Superman movie, Game of Thrones, World War Z, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Catching Fire. Counting the Doctor, that’s seven genre covers out of sixteen. And each with a feature article, of course.

Where am I going with this? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough to remember when it would have been UNHEARD OF for any genre work to appear on the cover or front page of any widely or popularly-read entertainment information vehicle. No newspapers, no magazines, no book or movie review sections. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

 

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Revenge of Son of Writing Fantasy Heroes

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Revenge of Son of Writing Fantasy Heroes

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I’ve been writing about Jason M. Waltz’s Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros for a couple of weeks now. It’s specialized, far more specialized than most classic how-to-write books, which usually talk about fiction generally, or process generally, or a whole genre at a time. Examining every permutation of a particular technical challenge in a particular genre is a weird thing for a writing book to do. The essays Waltz has assembled here are also structurally similar in an uncommon way: in each essay, the author walks the reader through passages from his or her own work, sometimes in early draft, with comments about choices that worked or didn’t. The how-to-write book is a genre beset by the Problem of Terrible Sameness, but Writing Fantasy Heroes is different from any other writing book on your shelves. While it may not have the universality of John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, it will help a great many new writers already know how they want to specialize.

Howard Andrew Jones’s “Two Sought Adventure” details the problems and potentials in stories that have more than one hero. A story with multiple heroes is very different from a one-hero story with a sidekick, love interest, foil, nemesis, or whatever. There are plenty of straightforward techniques for using secondary characters to reveal a single protagonist’s character. Using two (or more) heroes to do this for one another in a way that feels balanced and gratifying for the reader is a tougher trick.  Dialogue is crucial, and Jones offers close readings of dialogue from his own work and others’ that illustrate ways to welcome the reader into the shorthand, in-jokes, and shifting tones in conversations between longtime friends. He also addresses a problem I’ve seen in too much professionally published fiction: the duo that bickers like an old married couple, to the point where you wish they would split up, go away, or get eaten by the monster already. Friends have conflict, and friends engaged in epic heroics may have epic conflicts, but bickering is only entertaining in small doses, and it’s rarely illuminating. Jones offers a variety of specific alternative ways to handle conflict between heroes, and to interweave it with a story’s other conflicts.

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Pass the Salt, Please

Pass the Salt, Please

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DinnerAccording to some people, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about food. That’s right, I’m one of those people who start planning lunch while we’re still sitting at the breakfast table. But, see, there’s a reason for that: something might need to come out of the freezer, or come in from the garden.

I also have a good grasp on where my food comes from. As a child, one of my aunts kept chickens in her patio, and we kids used to flush rabbits for my uncle and his friends to kill with sling shots – real slings, by the way, not catapults.

Now that I live in the country, I buy meat and cheese from the people who produce them – my neighbours. I also have a very large garden where I grow my own produce, and as it happens, there’s not a lot about freezing, canning, and preserving that I don’t know.

One thing’s for sure: it takes up a lot of time. And in a pre-industrial age – the time period that most of us use for our secondary world fantasies – it took up almost all of the time. So why don’t we see more of it in our books? Well, it’s just that, for most of us, how to get dinner, where dinner comes from, how to pay for it, grow it, etc. isn’t the story we want to tell – nor the story our readers want to read.

But as I’ve suggested already (and no doubt will again), this is information we need to know. Not doing this right – or not doing it or at all –  is the mark of an amateur. Sometimes, in our modern technological world, we’re so far removed from how the food gets produced, that we can easily make serious mistakes – or worse, overlook significant motivation – by not understanding where food comes from, and how it was produced in a pre-industrial age.

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