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Zeno’s mountains

25 January 2013 by 53 Comments

A new essai to follow ‘Death carries a camcorder’. The meme that gave rise to my original LiveJournal pieces asked for ‘ten things I hate in a book’; but being under no obligation to stick to the original terms, I add to the list ad libitum.

According to local legend, one of the first tourists to visit Calgary (then a Northwest Mounted Police fort with a few civilian outbuildings) was an Englishman of energetic habits but not, it seems, with any wide experience of the world. One morning, having rested from the rigours of his journey, he decided to take his morning constitutional by walking to the Rocky Mountains and back.

In those days you could see the mountains easily from the N.W.M.P. fort, small but sharp and clear on the western horizon. In England, of course, nothing looks sharp and clear more than a few miles away. In that mild and humid air, every distant object is more or less obscured and coloured by haze: minor English poets can always eke out their verses with facile rubbish about ‘blue remembered hills’. In the dry cold highlands of Alberta, there is no such haze; objects on the horizon, on a sunny day, are very nearly as clear as those immediately at hand. But our English tourist knew nothing of this, and set out with the idea of visiting the mountains and getting back to the fort in time for breakfast.

Five or six miles out, the Englishman, who must already have been rather footsore and perplexed, clambered up the long ridge that would later be called Signal Hill. Cresting the ridge, he would have been appalled to discover a wide plain sloping gently down for several miles before him. Beyond that rose the first tumbled range of the true foothills, towards which, disappointed but not daunted, he plodded on. Behind that range is the Kananaskis valley, and then the last range of foothills before the beginning of the actual mountains — some fifty miles west of Fort Calgary as the crow flies.

Several days later, a searching party found the Englishman and brought him back to the fort to recuperate.

Something rather similar happens to writers who visit Elfland; even today, when the map of that country has been scribbled over with marked trails and motorways, the lesson of distance is one that every traveller must discover for himself. [Read more…]

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Death carries a camcorder

14 January 2013 by 21 Comments

The fifth essai in a series, following ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.

 

Fiction is, among many other things, a game between writer and reader, a kind of mental strip-tease in which the writer slowly reveals the details of the story, and the reader tries to guess at their significance. Mystery stories exhibit the game in its purest form, of course; but the element of guessing ‘whodunit’ turns up in every kind of fiction.

As stories have grown more complex, and the telling more elliptical and compressed, guessing out the storyteller’s meaning has become a difficult and demanding skill. Usually we don’t think of it in those terms, because as readers, we began to develop that skill early in childhood; it was fun to do, and after all, children can take delight in the most fiendishly elaborate games. Generally speaking, we don’t notice the skill involved until it stops working — that is, until the writer breaks the rules of the game. [Read more…]

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J. Gordon Smith on literary fiction

10 January 2013 by 2 Comments

Literary fiction is the fancy wine of the publishing world. The grapes have to struggle against chalky soil and harsh hot days with chilly nights. And then there is the two-buck-chuck blind taste off and what do we have? Or the incident where French and American wines were blind taste tested by French reviewers and the American wines won.

—J. Gordon Smith, on The Passive Voice

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Teaching Pegasus to crawl

10 January 2013 by 7 Comments

The fourth essai in a series, following ‘Tyrion 13:4’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.

 

As I said earlier, the choice of an appropriate prose style for a fantasy tale is a decision fraught with peril. We are tempted to choose a style that will convey the proper sense of wonder and adventure, and the air of old times and alien cultures; or would, if we only had the skill to pull it off. If we lack that skill, our stories will sound rather like an untrained singer trying to do the lead in Rigoletto — ambitious, but inept. And this will get us laughed at.

It is safe to say that none of us enjoy being laughed at. So for perhaps forty years past, there has been a reaction in the opposite direction; and I am afraid that is an even worse error. The sensible reaction would be to learn how to produce the effects that we wanted; the real reaction, for far too many writers, has been simply to give up trying and settle for a bland quotidian style. Their stories are inept without being ambitious. And this is worse, for unless they are very lucky, it gets them ignored and forgotten. They may truly be hearing the horns of Elfland in their heads; but they cannot play that music. What they do play is a tuneless mishmash compounded of slovenly description, spin-doctoring, and rhetorical fog. [Read more…]

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Defining ‘literary fiction’

10 January 2013 by 9 Comments

Geoff Burling says, in a comment on The Passive Voice (same article as the last):

One problem I have with Friedman’s post was that she insisted on an artificial distinction between “literary fiction” — I’m guessing she means fiction that is written well but is not bestseller material — & “genre” fiction (e.g., romance, mystery, action, science fiction): until a few decades ago, any fiction writer published with the hope her/his book would get on the bestseller lists, that everyone would want to read the book. (I bet even Herman Melville wanted Moby Dick to be a best seller, & was disappointed when it sold poorly.) A work is classed as literature long after the author is dead in most cases, anyway.

I reply:

Actually, the ‘literary fiction’ racket has been going for over a century, and it is, indeed, a racket. It is based not on quality of writing (though, to keep its rights to the moniker ‘literary’, it does tend to insist obsessively on fine details of prose technique at the sentence level), but on exclusion. [Read more…]

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Tyrion 13:4

9 January 2013 by 109 Comments

The third part of the series, following ‘Quakers in Spain’ and ‘Gwladys and the Ghraem’lan’. As with those two, an earlier and shorter version appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.

 

Most readers like formed stories; I have this taste to an unusual degree. I have never lost, or as the sophisticates would call it, ‘outgrown’ the taste for a well-turned plot that I drank in — not with my mother’s milk, for I was raised on cheap commercial substitutes — but at any rate with the oldest stratum of my father’s teaching, with the earliest books (after Dr. Seuss) that he gave me to read. A child is not subtle; a child likes stories to be marked by clear signposts, and would rather have five spoilers than one ambiguity.

Partly this is because a child has not formed a pattern of expectations about stories. Grown people dislike spoilers, I suspect, largely because they have read (or watched) so much fiction that they generally know what to expect: a real surprise, to them, is a rare and precious thing, and if you deprive them of one, you do them a real injury. Every turn in a story is a surprise to a child, and the suspense can become too hard to bear. It was a master-stroke when William Goldman, in the film version of The Princess Bride, had the grandfather interrupt his telling of the tale to reassure his grandson that Buttercup ‘does not get eaten by eels at this time’. To an experienced reader, any peril that threatens to kill off the heroine a third of the way through the book is an obvious bluff. A very young reader has to find out the hard way.

Nowadays, even the average six-year-old has imbibed enough stories, chiefly through the medium of television, to be wise to the obvious tricks; in sad consequence, even a six-year-old may be angry at spoilers. But there are less naked ways to signal the phases of a story, ways that can be made subtle enough (and misleading enough) to please the palate even of a very old and sophisticated reader. One of the best devices for this purpose is the chapter break, with or without a title. [Read more…]

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Wendy S. Delmater on ‘The Wheel of Time’

8 January 2013 by Leave a Comment

It’s one thing to beat a dead horse. It’s another thing to marry it.

—Wendy S. Delmater, publisher & editor of Abyss & Apex

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Gwladys and the Ghraem’lan

7 January 2013 by 25 Comments

This essai follows ‘Quakers in Spain’, and like it, is a revised and expanded version of a piece I wrote and put up on LiveJournal in May, 2006.

 

If prose style in fantasy is fraught with peril, naming is a plain old-fashioned minefield. Fantasy writers have a tendency to throw together names from any and all sources that strike their fancy, without thinking how such disparate words came to be in the same language together, or even in the same world. Writers who are very good at other aspects of their craft can still inexplicably fall down in this one area. I am sorry to make a bad example of my friend Jonathan Moeller, but when I first began to read his Demonsouled series, and the first two characters I met were called Mazael and Gerald, I was thrown out of the story long enough to cry aloud to the unheeding night: ‘Mazael is good; Mazael is right and proper. There ought to be a fantasy hero named Mazael, and now, thank God, there is one. But why on earth is he hanging out with someone whose name is a foreign monstrosity like Gerald?’ In Le Guin’s terms, Mazael is from Elfland and Gerald is from Poughkeepsie, and there needs to be some explanation of how they ever came to meet.

There are two bad ways of coming up with fantasy names; or rather, of the many bad ways that one could devise, two are much more popular than the rest. [Read more…]

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Quakers in Spain

7 January 2013 by 14 Comments

I wrote part of this essai in response to an Internet meme, ‘Ten things I hate in a book’, which I got from Glenda Larke by way of Sherwood Smith and others. It first appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006. I have had requests for this material since; but the first few parts of the series are, in my maturer judgement, sadly inadequate, for I only gradually relaxed and began to speak my mind at full length as I went on. Here it is, updated, extended, and (I hope) brought into better harmony with the whole.

 

Prose style is an endless source trouble for writers in the imaginative genres, and fantasy above all. There is always the temptation to write in an entirely modern, journalistic style. Such a style is like an Interstate highway in America: smooth, fast, easy to travel, with no dangerous or distracting bumps. The drawback is that you can drive from coast to coast without ever really seeing anything but the road itself. Such styles and such roads are good for getting to your destination in a hurry. But experienced tourists, and experienced readers, find it more fun to take the scenic route.

If you are a writer of some ambition, then, you will try to build a scenic route with your prose. [Read more…]

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‘Fairy Tales’, by G. K. Chesterton

6 January 2013 by 2 Comments

Collected in All Things Considered (1908).

 

Some solemn and superficial people (for nearly all very superficial people are solemn) have declared that the fairy tales are immoral; they base this upon some accidental circumstances or regrettable incidents in the war between giants and boys, some cases in which the latter indulged in unsympathetic deceptions or even in practical jokes. The objection, however, is not only false, but very much the reverse of the facts. The fairy tales are at root not only moral in the sense of being innocent, but moral in the sense of being didactic, moral in the sense of being moralising. [Read more…]

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