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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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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing Fantasy Heroes

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: More on Writing Fantasy Heroes

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Writing Fantasy HeroesLast week I began a review of Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros, Jason M. Waltz’s collection of essays on craft. Most of the authors seem to assume the reader is a newcomer to fiction writing, but some of the advice is sufficiently specialized that many veteran writers will also find it useful. It’s also a pleasure to see the authors pull back the curtain on their own work, walking the reader through passages, sometimes in early draft, that illustrate the particular technique or concern of each chapter.

Picking up where we left off last week, we find Ian C. Esslemont coming up with something genuinely new to say about the old adage, “Show, don’t tell.” For the benefit of newer writers, he goes over the familiar territory: why to avoid infodumps, how to recognize them in one’s own drafts, ways to replace them with opportunities for dramatic action, classic blunders like “As you know, Bob” dialogue. Stick with Esslemont to the end, though, despite the groanworthy title of “Taking a Stab at Sword and Sorcery,” and he complicates the choice between showing information and telling it with a third possibility I’ve seen handled in other ways, but never right in a discussion of “Show, don’t tell.”

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What About Second Breakfast?

What About Second Breakfast?

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hobbit-book-coverThere are seven official mealtimes in Spain. The important one for our purposes is “segundo desayuno,” or second breakfast. Now, I can’t prove that this is where Tolkien got the idea, but I like to think so.

Last week we were talking about food and drink in Fantasy and SF, and how it can be used to give details of setting and character. Since the LOTR films, the term “second breakfast” is always going to be associated with Hobbits, with their lifestyle, and their attitudes to the world around them. Not that it started with the movie. Think about what we learned about Middle Earth in general, and Hobbits in particular – food, social customs, and etiquette – from the dining scene in The Hobbit.

It’s been suggested that we find more mention of eating and drinking in Fantasy than in SF. I don’t think that’s necessarily so, but it’s true that including food and drink in secondary world fantasy doesn’t require much in the way of technological invention or extrapolation – though it does require a little research. Most secondary fantasy worlds are facsimile versions of the past of our world – medieval era, renaissance, etc. –  whether the  basic setting is western European, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern or Asian. Pre-industrial is a pretty good way to think of it.

Food and drink is just as useful in giving necessary details of setting and character here as it is in any SF story or primary world fantasy. Maybe even more so. Besides, our characters still need something to do while they’re talking to each other, and travelling from place to place.

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Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Writing Fantasy Heroes

Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Writing Fantasy Heroes

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Writing Fantasy HeroesI’m a few essays into Writing Fantasy Heroes: Powerful Advice from the Pros. The editor of Writing Fantasy Heroes, Jason M. Waltz, was being published in the pages of Black Gate back when Black Gate had literal paper pages and I was just a glimmer in the slushpile. The book has been mentioned on this site a time or three by others, and will certainly come up again, so I wanted to get a look at it for myself. It turns out there’s enough variation among the essays to keep me busy for more than one post, too.

So far, what’s most striking to me is how different the authors’ imagined readers are. The imagined readers all want to write heroic fantasy, of course, but how long have they been writing? How plugged in are they to the traditions and cliches of writing workshops and fiction manuals? How much life experience have these imagined readers gathered? One of the things I’m enjoying about Writing Fantasy Heroes is coming unstuck in time, relative to the writerly life cycle. From the essay I would have needed when I was in my teens, I turn the page to find the essay I need right now, which is followed by the essay I could hand my students next week.

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Centurion on Kickstarter: After Action Report

Centurion on Kickstarter: After Action Report

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Centurion RPGSword’s Edge Publishing’s great Kickstarter experiment – Centurion: Legionaries of Rome – has completed. I’m still waiting for the final tally on actual money raised (I’ll get to the discrepancy between promises and cold hard cash later), and while I count it a success, only slightly so. That’s not Kickstarter’s fault. Totally mine.

The biggest problem I faced was one of planning. I did a fair amount of it, and my Kickstarter page was ready to launch eight days before my deadline. I verified Amazon payments two weeks before the campaign was to launch, and then could get the approval from Kickstarter more than a week before my drop-dead date. That was due to planning and the fear of delays pushing my launch date back.

If you’re out there building interest in your campaign, you’re likely giving people a date when they can expect the Kickstarter to – sorry for this – kick off (heh heh). Now, one way of avoiding screwing yourself with delays is not to have a hard launch date. I could have said something like “first week in March” or “early in March,” and that could have given me a good buffer of time. I mean, if people were excited, they would likely have seen the multiple messages I sent through comms in the month of the campaign.

Here’s the thing: I needed to do a lot more publicity than I did. I hit all the social media I regularly used – and even went to Facebook, which I really only use to share photos with friends, so really don’t have a business presence there – and did a few podcasts. Not enough.

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Are You Going to Eat That?

Are You Going to Eat That?

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VattaA mystery writer friend of mine once remarked that he didn’t care for crime novels that included either cats or recipes – unless they were recipes on how to cook cats. My friend was kidding (mostly), but I’m sure plenty would agree with his sentiments. Not everyone is fascinated by food or cooking, and that can affect readers’ reactions when they encounter these things in the books they’re reading.

But like it or not, there’s a purpose being served by every mouthful of food and every drop of drink in every book or story we read – or write.

No matter the genre, food and drink can certainly provide motivation in terms of characters’ taking action to acquire some. Every book that has a trading empire at its core (think Elizabeth Moon’s Ky Vatta books, or Robin Hobb’s The Liveship Traders) deals at least in part with the availability of foods, especially spices.

As a general rule, however, food and drink don’t drive the plot. Even in the mystery novels, the recipes aren’t usually directly involved in either the crime or the solution – though the same can’t be said for the cats.

But I digress.

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