Category Archives: writing

Terribly mysterious

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As a writer, sometimes you want a character to be mysterious. In good writing this mysteriousness should either further the plot, or speed along one or more of your main character’s emotional arcs. Sometimes, the character just is mysterious because that’s how she or he first came to you, the writer. Whatever the case, once introduced, a mysterious character must be handled with care.

A comic book cover featuring Wolverine and the Hulk
Hulk #181, Nov 1974, first appearance of The Wolverine. (Click to embiggen)
Back in 1974 I stopped at the only drugstore in town and looked through the comic rack. This was my only means of buying comics, and while I was a fan, I wasn’t able to follow anything very faithfully because which comics came into the store from month to month seemed to be completely random. That I was a middle school student, with limited funds and easily distracted didn’t help.

Anyway, there hadn’t been an issue of Hulk in the rack in several months, so I had missed the previous few issues, and I didn’t know how the story line had gotten to this point, but there the Hulk was, and some strange guy in a yellow and blue costume seemed to be fighting him. Of course, I bought the issue. We didn’t learn much about this Wolverine guy in this issue. He apparently worked with the Canadian government and had been parachuted into the wilderness to try to stop the Hulk from rampaging, or something like that. Note the text in the black arrow on the cover: the world’s first and greatest Canadian super-hero!

Note that this is not an X-men comic. In 1974 the X-men were on hiatus. Their magazine was being printed, but it was reprinting stories from the 1960s, for reasons that must have made sense to an accountant, somewhere. The team had never been terribly successful before that. It would be a couple more years before the team was Re-booted (though we didn’t use that term back them), with a lot of new members and only a few of the old, and Wolverine began his off-again, on-again relationship with the X-teams.

For a long time he was a cool character precisely because he was mysterious and always seemed very reluctant to get involved with other people. It’s not exactly an original character type, but generally it worked pretty well. He’d come to help with a specific problem for reasons that weren’t always entirely clear, be gruff and business-like and morally ambiguous, betray a glimmer of affection or respect for one or two characters, then disappear for awhile, only to turn up again and repeat the process.

The problem with mysterious characters is that, if they catch the reader’s attention, the reader wants to know what’s behind the mystery. A writer may keep tantalizing and teasing readers for a while, dropping hints here and there, but you have to be careful, because there’s an extremely thin line between tantalizing and annoying to the point of wanting to take the writer by the throat and squeeze the life out of them.

An image of the masked man called the Sphinx.
The Sphinx – so annoying, you want him to die.
The latter type of annoying character was rather nicely parodied in the moveie, Mystery Men, in the person of the Sphinx. He tries so hard to be cryptic that he’s transparently shallow. His wisdom doesn’t even come up to the level of bad fortune cookies. He’s not just mysterious, he’s “well, terribly mysterious,” as the Blue Raja is at pains to tell his colleagues more than once.

You don’t want your mysterious character to turn into the Sphinx.

Cover image of the DVD of the movie Mystery Men
Mystery Men – one of the greatest movies of all time. (Click to embiggen)
There comes a point where a writer decides to show the reader the truth, to whisk off the shroud of mystery and intrigue, and reveal all. This can go badly. And in the case of the Wolverine, in both comics and movies, has gone, not just badly, not just very badly, but terribly badly.

One problem is that the revelations have been contradictory. Subsequent attempts to make the revelations less contradictory pushed his backstory into pure ludicrousness. And his characterization has consequently become worse and worse. He’s a loner, except that he’s joined pretty much every team Marvel has ever published. And has picked and consistently abandoned a disturbing number of adolescent female protegés/sidekicks. He’s supposed to be a highly skilled assassin, except he’s a chaotic brawler. He’s supposed to be an honorable Samurai (with all the training in the ritualized combat/politics of same), except he’s also a savage killing machine. He’s amoral, except he’s noble and self-sacrificial.

Now, when a character is appearing in a series, and written over a number of years by different writers, this sort of thing might appear to be unavoidable. Except that it doesn’t have to be. Batman, for instance, has a much longer publishing and movie history (first appearance in comics in 1939, first movie in 1943 {a delightfully cheesy serial that I happen to have a copy of, if you want to watch the WWII era special effects and dumb cliffhangers}), but despite all those reboots, retellings, et cetera, the central core of the character has been kept intact: witnessing the murder of his parents as a child, he obsessively trains and studies, eventually becoming a dark detective and vigilante who prowls Gotham at night, foiling criminals and bringing the worst to justice. At various points they’ve wandered into the quite campy, to the darkly romantic, and other odd places, but all of the writers have managed to bring the character back to that core.

I’m working with a mysterious character in my current novel in progress. The previous novel, to which this is a sequel, also had a mysterious character—one of my two protagonists. But she wasn’t a dark, brooding person with hints of a tragic past. She’s one of the most cheerful and optimistic characters in the whole book. There were simply mysteries about her from the beginning, hints were dropped here and there, until during the big battle at the end (it’s a light fantasy with epic fantasy tropes, so there has to be a big battle!) a chunk of the mystery was revealed. It was not revealed in a big bunch of exposition. A crisis was reached, and in an act that resolved her internal conflict at the same time as saving one of her comrades (and temporarily thwarting the big bad), her true nature was revealed. I think it worked. It is currently in copy edit, and does not yet have a publication date, so I will have to wait for the readers’ verdict.

I’m a bit more nervous about the mysterious character in this one. He’s specifically hiding his identity for reasons that are both in character and important to the plot. He’s not a protagonist, he is helping one of the protagonists. Because he is specifically hiding his identity, and because his sub-plot is built around trying to protect a young woman who various people want dead, a lot of his scenes tend to be dark, grim affairs. I hope, when his identity is revealed, that the reader goes, “Oh! Oh! Why didn’t I realize that? Of course it’s ______!” rather than, “Yeah, yeah, we saw that coming a mile away…”

Wish me luck.

Sentences that fill me with dread, part 1

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“I’m retired now, and thought I’d try to write a book about my experiences.”

This sentence might seem perfectly innocent. And anyone who has spent much time with me knows I’m always encouraging people to draw, write, sing, play instruments, and so on. I think everyone should try to make art every now and then.

I do.

But the above sentence fills me with dread when I hear it (and you may be surprised how many times I have heard that, or a close variation) in the context of someone just learning for the first time that I’m a writer (and editor and publisher). Because in that circumstance, it inevitably leads to them wanting me write their book for them.

They may not put it that way. They usually don’t believe that’s what they’re asking. They just want some advice, they say. They want someone to bounce some ideas off of, they say.

When I give them advice, they don’t like it. “First, you need to write. Don’t talk to people about your idea, sit down and start writing. Don’t know where to start? Here are some excellent books on writing. Here are my recommendations for software to use for the actual writing. Go to my writing web site (sansfigleaf.com), go to the Essays section, and click on the Writing tag. You’ll find over 60 essays I’ve already written on the writing process.”

My favorites are the ones who react to the list of books or the essays with, “I don’t have time to read all of that!” I’m only using the word “favorite” in that sentence half sarcastically. If they are that upfront with their unwillingness to learn on their own, they’re easy to deal with. “If you aren’t willing to read something that can help you achieve your dream, what makes you think anyone would want to read what you’re going to write?”

For a long time, the next most common objection was, “Why do I have to learn how to use a word processor? If my story’s good, won’t the publisher help me with that?” Trying to make them understand just how much time and expense is involved in transcribing a novel length story is always fun. Sometimes I can just go with a variant of the book answer: “If you think it’s too much trouble to learn how to do it, why do you think other people would be willing to do it for you for free?”

This usually leads to me having to explain that books which simply break even are the exception, and books that make large profits for all involved are rarer still. And no one can be certain which books will or will not take off in advance. No matter how awesome your story is, getting a lot of people to just look at it is an expensive undertaking. No one is going to take that chance on you if you make it even more expensive for them than other writers who submit completed stories in proper manuscript format.

There’s a special subset of these who will come rightout and say, “How about I tell you the stories, and you write them up for me? I’ll give you a portion of the proceeds!”

Computers have been ubiquitous in the American workplace for long enough now that fewer would-be memoirists balk at using them. But I expect a rise in the complimentary problem. “Here, let me show you what I’ve written so far!” And they send me a file that consists of a few hundreds words of babble. Sometimes it’s perfectly spelled babble, but it doesn’t make sense. Don’t get me wrong. I am the king of typos. If there is a circle in hell reserved for people who make too many typos, that’s where my soul is heading to in the afterlife. I’m not talking about typos. I’m talking about fragments that don’t quite make a sentence; sentences that don’t connect to each other; and either no paragraph breaks at all, or paragraph breaks that make no sense.

Don’t get me started on the pronoun problems. If I can find a few sentences that make sense to someone who doesn’t already know the people involved, the industry and its conventions, and so on, at all, then there will be a whole slew of he’s, she’s, him’s, and her’s with no way to be certain which he is which person.

No matter how they react to the other questions, if I keep having contact with them, they will ask for advice. However, in the middle of whatever advice I give, they will interrupt because I’m not giving them what they want. They want me to tell them some magic words which will make the whole thing just happen. Or they will try to recite one of their experiences to get me to tell them what part of the book it should go in.

The ultimate problem is that the person most likely to say, “I should write a book about my experiences” doesn’t understand books. A book, even a memoir, is not just a collection of interesting anecdotes. To be a book, there needs to be an overall narrative, something that shapes and unifies the whole thing; some sort of logical flow of one part into the next. If you’re going for a collection of barely related essays, something such as Sarah Vowel or a David Sedaris might write, each chapter or essay or whatever you call it has to have some sense of narrative completeness to it, with a theme that contributes to understanding the other sections.

Your anecdotes may be hilarious when told in person in small doses, but writing is a different language than speaking. An essay is not the same thing as an amusing anecdote. A book is more than just a collection of words. Stringing a few stories together isn’t writing a book.

There’s an old cliché that the difference between real life and fiction is that fiction must make sense. It doesn’t just apply to fiction. All writing, even writing about bizarre coincidences and strange behavior, has to make some kind of sense to the reader. A writer’s job is not simply to transcribe what happened. A writer’s job is to find that meaning, and convey it to the reader in such a way that they don’t notice that the writer is imposing a meaning on the events. A writer’s job is to fool you into thinking that the meaning he has carefully constructed is simply a fascinating experience you are having.

That isn’t something you can learn in a single evening over cocktails.

Telling

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Whenever we tell someone about something that happened to us, we’re telling a story. Humans tell stories to make sense of the world. And even when we think we are just recounting what happened, we’re actually making dozens of unconscious editorial decisions—emphasising some details, omitting others—to put a particular spin on the events in order to give them meaning.

For example, one morning I was a little early to my bus stop, and I decided to run into the drug store next to the stop to pick up one item. I thought I had enough time. But there was only one clerk working check out, and an older gentleman in front of me had a small number of items, but a huge number of coupons, and his transaction took so long that I missed the bus.

One time when I told that story, I gave a summary similar to the above paragraph, and concluded with a self-depracating comment of how silly it had been for me to risk missing my bus, when there was another drugstore close to my office where I could have stopped after getting downtown.

But the day of the incident, I was annoyed about missing the bus, so that night when I told the story, I went into great detail about how the man in front of me had argued and fussed with the cashier over every single price that rang up, and which coupons were expired, which ones applied to a slightly different item than the one he had, and particularly the long discussion he had with her about one bag of holiday-themed Hershey Kisses® that he was certain he had a new coupon for at home, and why she should let him have it at the lower price and how when she refused, which meant he berated her for a while before finally ordering her to keep the bag behind the counter because he was going to walk home, find the coupon, and come back.

And before he walked out the door he came back three times to interrupt her attempt to check my one item out to warn her about not putting that bag of candy back on the shelf.

Both accounts are absolutely true. But they sound like very different events, don’t they?

Because the day it happened, I was upset about missing my bus, and so the meaning of the events was how another person’s stubborness had messed up my day. Later, as I was walking past the second drugstore one morning after getting off the bus, I realized that the earlier incident had been my own fault for not thinking things through and planning better.

Same events, different perspective, different stories…

Theory and practice

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I’ve described before how I hear conversations in my head between various fictitious characters, and that’s where a lot of my story ideas come from. The other night, while listening to a friend’s band playing at their album release party, I suddenly heard one of my characters, the Mathemagician, explaining to someone:

“Zombies can be manifest in several different ways, though almost all of the spells or rituals that create them call upon the same principles of magic: Induced Cognition, the Principle of Correspondence, Induced Thaumaturgic Recapitulation–”

Then he was interrupted by his partner, Mier of the Tam Clan: “Oh, you’re over complicating it. All you need to make a zombie is: a corpse, a bell, a fresh egg, a pinch of tea, and most importantly, a drummer who can keep a beat.”

I’m not sure what caused that to pop into my head. It’s possible that a band member (or someone in the crowd near me) had made a comment about the drummer. Or not. Who knows how anyone’s subconscious works?

The exchange itself was interesting to me on several levels. First, it’s perfectly in character. The Mathemagician approaches magic from the perspective of rules and patterns. He’s big on futzing with theory, and he will tinker and fiddle with the theory until he needs to apply it. He’s an academic-style wizard. Meir is a shaman. He thinks in terms of analogy and intuition. He’s more concerned with getting things done than worrying too much about why things work.

Those two modes of thinking apply to all sorts of things, not just the world of fictional wizards. When I try to explain about the craft of writing, sometimes I feel as if I’m being the Mathemagician: what I’m explaining is true, but it might only be understood by people who already know it.

On the other hand, Mier’s style of explanation seems simpler and more practical. Yet one realizes, after a moment, that all he’s given is a list of ingredients. The recipe—instructions for how to use those things to create your very own unliving servant—has been left as an exercise for the reader.

Storytelling is more than a bit of a mysterious process. It isn’t a matter of following a simple recipe. But it’s more than understanding theory.

My third observation is, that I have no idea who they were explaining this to, nor do I know whether this scene belongs in any story which I’m currently working on that includes these characters. Yes, there is an evil necromancer and an army of undead in the novel I’m currently working on, but I’m not sure there is any reason, within the story, for these two characters to explain to someone else how zombies are made.

But I typed it up and saved it, just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.

Write it or lose it

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My writing goal for this last weekend was to complete the cleanup on a novel so I can send it to some people who have volunteered to copy edit it. This goal was set before the really bad hay fever I’d had all week turned into a cold Friday. By the end of my work day Friday the sore throat, low grade fever, and rundown feeling required a short nap before I could even discuss dinner with my hubby.

And since he had come home early from work sick, he was in the same boat.

I napped a lot Saturday. And slept in both days. Technically We could have opted out of going to the movie Sunday, but I’m not sure I would have gotten much more writing done if we had.

So of the 21 chapters, I got through three over the weekend. And a fourth Monday night. Not all of that was because of being braindead or asleep so much of the time. The other part was that my muse really didn’t want to work on the chore of consistency checking.

So at one point two of the characters started talking very animatedly in my head. And it was a conversation that is important to the plot… But it’s the plot of book four. I was supposed to be working on book one (yes, I’m writing a series; no, I didn’t plan to). The problem is, the conversation they were having concerned a part of the story of that book that I haven’t figured out yet, so I needed to write it down. Because if I don’t, some time later when I’m actually working on that book I’ll get to a tangled part of the plot and know that my subconscious has figured out how to solve that little thing in a clever way, but I won’t remember it.

That’s what it’s like in my head a lot. Ideas come out of the mysterious darkness and say, “Write about me! Write about me! Write about me or I’ll friggin’ go away!!!”

At another point, I read a single line of dialog in which the shrine guardian says, in answer to why he’s a kitsune trapped in an otter’s body, “It’s a long story…” And suddenly, in the back of my head, he and another character popped up and told me the fable-like tale of how it happened.

And I had to go write enough of it down so I could flesh out the tale, or I’ll forget some crucial bit. (I think it’s going to be called, “The Engraver, the Pearl, and the Impossible Customer,” but don’t hold me to it.)

I wrote down the outline and a few lines of dialog, but refused to let my muse distract me further to actually finish the story. Because if I follow all these distractions, I’ll never finish the previous tales.

Because my muse has super-hyper-ultra ADHD, and a tendency to hold some ideas hostage until I pay attention to its new shiny.

But every now and then we wrestle out a tale that makes me go, “Wow. Did I write that?”

Which is worth all the hassle.

(At least, That’s what I tell myself.)

Even a young earth is older than you think

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So, a few days ago I posted about one of my pet peeves in fantasy world-building, the writer who thinks 600-years ago is the dawn of time. A friend who read my post raised an interesting point. “If the series you’re talking about is the one I think it is, I understand that the author comes from a conservative Baptist background. Maybe she built her world, consciously or not, on the assumption of a Young Earth.”

We are talking about fantasy world-building, and an author is free to choose any premise they wish to build from. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series assumes that the world is a disc balanced on the backs of four giant elephants who stand atop a gigantic sea turtle that swims through space, for instance. It’s one of my favorite series of books, so I certainly can’t say a writer isn’t free to use some notions of Fundamentalist Creationism as the basis for their fantasy world.

However…

If the premise is that the Literalistic1 Interpretation of the Bible describes the physical origin of your fantasy world, it is absolutely impossible for the “first witch ever to exist” to have been born a mere 600 or so years ago.

In the book of First Samuel, chapter 28, one finds the story of the Witch of Endor. The Prophet Samuel has recently died, and things are going extremely badly for King Saul. Eventually, Saul goes to a famous witch in Endor, who raises the ghost of Samuel. Samuel’s spirit proceeds to tell Saul that God is tired of Saul’s disobedience, and that Saul will lose the battle the very next day, and that Saul and his sons will be joining Samuel in the land of the dead shortly thereafter. Saul leaves, understandably dismayed and devastated. He loses the battle the next day and kills himself.

So right there, in the Bible, we see a witch who has actual magic powers to raise the dead thousands of years ago, rather than 600 years ago.

Not only that, before Saul goes to this witch, he tried turning to prophets, to a couple of scrying devices the priests kept, and to dream interpreters to find out what he should do. In an earlier incident, while the Prophet Samuel was still alive, Saul drove all the magicians and necromancers from the kingdom of Isreal, clearly implying that there were a lot of them already in existence, so even the Witch of Endor isn’t the first witch ever on the Young Earth.

1. My Old Testament Professor at University insisted (and could quickly demonstrate) that none of the people who say they take the Bible literally actually do so. Instead, he argued, they use a form of filtered literalism, where some passages are taken literally, contradictory ones are ignored2, and other sections have imposed upon them notions that are not evident anywhere in the text.

2. The story of Samuel and King Saul is a particularly amusing example of this. Later passages refer to Saul as God’s chosen leader of Israel, but in the beginning of Saul’s story, the people of Israel keep asking Samuel to ask God to give them a king. Samuel keeps telling them that God doesn’t want them to have a king. Eventually, apparently tired of being pestered, God appears to relent (though the original text makes it unclear whether it is really God who relents, or if Samuel just picks someone and tells them that God has relented), and proclaims Saul King. Then, when a foreign power assembles an army and marches toward Israel, Samuel tells Saul to gather his own army, go to a specific spot, and wait seven days, at which point Samuel would arrive (presumably with God’s battle plans), and they could begin. Seven days came and went, Samuel didn’t arrive. More days passed, no Samuel. The army was growing restless, so Saul decided something must have happened to Samuel, and he ordered the army to make prayers and sacrifices, then prepare for battle. As soon as Saul had completed the sacrifice, Samuel suddenly appeared3, admonished Saul for taking on the role of the priest, and tells him God doesn’t want him to be king any longer. But, in the very next chapter King Saul is leading the battle, Samuel is giving him instructions, Saul wins, everyone (including Samuel) rejoice in the king’s victory. Samuel tells Saul that God wants him to slaughter not just the defeated soldiers, but every man, woman, child, and even the livestock of the defeated Amalekites. While doing so, Saul decides to spare some another tribe of people living among the Amalekites4 and doesn’t slaughter every woman and child of the Kenites. Samuel throws another hissy fit, and says God regrets making Saul King, and that Saul’s kingdom will soon be torn apart. Except in the previous chapter Samuel had already said Saul was no longer king, so nothing in this chapter should even have happened, least of all Samuel advising Saul, et cetera5.

3. My professor said, “As if he had been hiding in the bushes watching and waiting for Saul to screw up.”

4. God said “kill the Amalekites,” he didn’t say to kill the Amelekites and Kenites. Seems like a reasonable distinction, right? Certainly if you think that it’s reasonable for the same God who said “Thou shall not kill” without any qualifications, turns around and orders you to murder babies.

5. Reading the entire saga of Saul and Samuel, and taking every passage literally, it is hard to interpret the whole thing as anything other than either God or Samuel thinking of new ways to dick Saul around, giving him contradictory orders, impossible orders, and downright evil orders. Saul tries to follow all of them, and gets yelled at for disobedience again and again. On the other hand, David (the shepherd who defeats Goliath in battle and eventually becomes king after Saul dies), as King never obeys anything that God’s messengers tell him to do. He blatantly disregards commandments and instructions, but again and again the priests and prophets proclaim him beloved of God and a good king.

Putting the perfect into the flashback

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Because I have written (several times) and ranted (even more times) about badly used flashbacks, some people have concluded that I hate the flashback with the passion of a million burning suns.

Quite the opposite.

A flashback is the perfect tool for certain aspects of story telling. If it is done correctly.

In a recent online grumble about flashbacks, I described one good use of flashback. Open with an extremely (and I do mean extremely) brief scene of a character or characters in an strange predicament, and without giving anything away, cut to an earlier point and show how they got there. One of the most important aspects of doing this correctly: the scene you open with isn’t the ending of the story. The reader needs to carry past that scene, showing what happens after, as well as how the characters got there.

Another really good use of flashback is to provide context to a point in the “present” of your narrative. The character finds herself in dire straits, and is reminded of an event that got her here. Or perhaps a mistake she made that led to this, or even just a happier time with one of the characters here. This is most useful when referencing a piece of backstory: flashing back to a period before the beginning of your book, perhaps years before.

This is different than a technique used in film (and television, animation, et al) where a snippet of a scene from earlier within the film is shown (or sometimes only the voices from the scene) to indicate that a character is remembering something that should have been a clue or warning of what was to come. That isn’t really a full flashback. And in prose fiction, you do this usually with a single sentence or less. “I should have realized when I saw that broken latch” for instance.

That isn’t really a flashback, that’s a reference. But I do think that the way these sorts of references play in films encourages inexperienced writers to throw in more full-blown flashbacks than the story needs. You shouldn’t be repeating entire scenes of your story within your story. Just a quick reminder to the reader. I like them best in the dialog. “I did warn you not to trust any one…” or “Oh, that’s what he meant when he said…”

The Grammar Girl recently featured a post about the proper use of present tense, past tense, and past perfect tense while constructing a flashback. I don’t have any solid quibbles with it, but want to add a couple things:

First, if you want a more thorough explanation of past tense, past-perfect tense, and ways to use them in narratives particularly in relationship to flashbacks, check out Stephen Minot’s Three Genres. It is an excellent book on writing that I highly recommend.

Second, the Grammar Girl post cites Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates for the first example of how to do a flashback. The Anubis Gates won awards and is often considered a masterpiece, but it does some questionable things with flashback and other tricks of narrative structure.

I could go into detail, but will simply say that before you get to Chapter One and the example they use, you have to get through a lengthy prologue which happens to contain two flashbacks of its own. Which makes one wonder just what Tim Powers (or perhaps his editors) think the word “prologue” means.

The thing is, however, that although I am not one of the people who think the story is a masterpiece, I agree that it is a rip-roaring good yarn. Which brings me to a point I don’t remember to include in my postings about the craft of writing as often as I should:

I can’t tell you how to write.

I can tell you how I write. I can tell you things that work for me both as a writer and as a reader. I can tell you what doesn’t work for me, especially as a reader. And I can tell you why some things don’t work most of the time for most readers.

But the true test of whether something you are doing as a storyteller works is whether the audience goes along and enjoys the ride. You can create a story following strictly and to the letter all of the guidelines you find in a well-respected guidebook and still produce a lousy story. You can break some rules (as most writers do), and produce a story that makes readers write you to tell you how much they enjoyed it.

Which isn’t to say that you never listen to any advice or criticism. If the reader isn’t enjoying the story, you’re probably doing something wrong. But you have to decide what to fix and how to fix it. No one else can do that.

The value of advice from other writers isn’t as a prescription, but as a different perspective. Maybe someone will read the explanation I gave of how a certain kind of flashback makes the story boring because it tells the reader the ending a bit too literally, and even though their story doesn’t use a flashback, they realize that something else they have done in their tale gives away the ending too soon.

So, while any number of us can teach you how to write a sentence in past perfect tense, none of us can reliably write the perfect flashback. Fortunately, we can all point each other in the direction of good and better.

History is longer than you think

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I have complained before1 about fantasy authors whose world-building includes statements like, “the peace didn’t last long, because 400 years later…” because history isn’t just a time line, it’s also the way people perceive it. 400 years of peace would never be thought of as a brief interval, but rather the Great Golden Age or something.

Certain fantasy authors make the opposite mistake, of not understanding how long human history actually is. A particularly egregious example was a series which used as a plot point the characters needing to find a spell that was developed by “the first witch to ever exist,” and when they finally find it, it is revealed that this witch lived 600 years ago.

Bear in mind that this happened in a fantasy world where magic works and invariably that magic is invoked with drawing symbols, lighting candles, and chanting. That means that in this fantasy world there are unseen forces which respond to symbols and sounds and thoughts. That clearly means that these unseen forces could be tapped by any being capable of employing symbolism, making noise, and thinking. Presumably the first witches did this sort of thing by accident, but that’s how we learn everything in life.

These sorts of fantasy worlds always have some low level of magic use that is considered safe and does not rely about calling on demons or gods for power. There is usually some scene where a character is either being taught magic by someone else, or who is simply in a desperate situation, where simply by wishing something really hard, they are able to light that candle, or move the key, or pull that weapon which is just out of reach into their hand when the monster is dragging them to their doom. If you think logically from these situations, at least some of magic is simply mentally manipulating some form of energy that is freely available everywhere.

The earliest people who had the cognitive ability to imagine something that isn’t there were the earliest tool makers. This isn’t just a monkey picking up a convenient rock. These people had some tasks they needed doing, realized if they had an object with this kind of shape, hard enough to withstand the force when pressed this way into the that leg of mammoth, they can do this a lot faster than just using teeth and fingernails.

The first people capable of doing that weren’t technically human. They were hominids living in the Olduvai Gorge region of Africa 2.4 million years ago.

Not six hundred (600) years ago.

Not six thousand (6,000) years ago.

But 2.4 million (2,400,000) years ago.

Millions of years ago.

We’re not sure which of the different hominid species living back then made the tools we’ve found—Australopithecus garhi, Homo habilis, or Homo ergaster—but they were making choppers, scrapers, awls, and burins. That last one is especially important while thinking about the cognitive abilities of the brains that thought them up. A burin is for engraving. They were doing more than chopping, cutting, scraping, and making holes in things. They were engraving or carving shapes into wood and bone.

The tools were still very simple, so these pre-humans probably weren’t capable of really in-depth abstract thought that would seem to be required to imagine and enact the really complicated magical effects you sometimes see wizards and sorceresses throwing around in those fantasy novels, but that “pull a weapon to my hand in an emergency” level of magic, they would surely be capable of, in a magical world.

There is anatomical indication that Homo ergaster, at least, possessed verbal communication abilities much more complex than apes. We don’t know how complicated it was, but language indicates another level of abstract thinking2.

I could keep charting what we know about the development of other activities often involved in magic rituals of those sorts of fantasy stories—cave painting, carved figures, musical instruments (surely predated by a huge period of time by simply singing and chanting), and even dance3, but the point is that, if magic exists in the universe and can be manipulated by thoughts, symbols, chanting, et cetera, people will have been doing some forms of it long, long before the beginning of recorded history, (approximately 5,000 years ago—still a lot more than 600).

Even if you don’t want to think about hominid sorcerers, you have to realize that witches, sorcerers, and priests who could perform miracles exist in the very oldest written human records. So if you’re writing a magickal universe that is more or less based on ours, whether it’s a modern urban fantasy, something in a historical setting, or an alternate historical setting, some sort of magic tradition in your world stretches back much, much, much further than a mere six centuries ago.

Asserting anything else is simply dumb.

And don’t even get me started on the incredible stupidity of always having really ancient lore being far superior to anything that has come about now. Because that violates the thing that actually makes humans different than animals… but that’s a rant for another day.

1. Time doesn’t work that way. Think of today’s post as another in a series.

2. And this is just limiting ourselves to the hominids. Dolphins and whales aren’t generally thought of as tool makers, but they certainly have the raw brain power to do the thinking part. And there are other species outside the primates who use really simple tools, create games, plan and execute complicated group activities, including pulling practical jokes. This isn’t to suggest that a magic universe has to have animal mystics, but it could be an interesting alternative way to think about familiars and other animals that seem to respond to magic or enhance magic in folklore.

3. There is some fascinating work being done about the anthropology and evolution of dance (rhythmic, coordinated moving), including an interesting notion that rhythmical synchronized movement could make a group of small hominids appear to be one much larger creature, and thus not easy prey. It’s fascinating stuff. It’s very speculative, and difficult to find physical evidence to support, but still a very interesting topic to think about.

Is it worth the outrage?

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Another corner of the internet is boiling over. Linking to it serves no purpose. I already wasted too much time trying to figure out what everyone is so upset about—because the guess I made when I read the first outraged post seems to be the only one that makes sense.

Resentment is an ugly thing. As the oft-quoted proverb says, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.” It’s toxic and self-destruction and does no good to anyone.

This goes doubly true when one is an artist of any type who spends any time at all ranting and raging about how shallow, fake, and undeserving another (more well-known) artist is. The only people who don’t see right through your jealousy are other resentful people.

Every minute you spend seething is a minute you aren’t spending on your own art. You’re never going to get any of those minutes back. So stop trying to explain how untalented that person is. Stop pointing to examples of how bad their work is. Stop thinking up clever ways to insult the people who like the other person’s work.

None of that does anyone any good, least of all you.

If you don’t like someone’s work, don’t look at/read/listen to/share it. If you think there’s too much crap in the world, stop griping and make something that isn’t crap.

There are things worth getting outraged over. I do it all the time. It’s okay to be angry about discrimination, or greed, or oppression. Those things cause actual harm to other people. Pointing out the problem may get some help to those who have been hurt. Pointing out the problem may persuade some people to change their minds and reduce the amount of bigotry and hatred and suffering in the world.

No one is harmed by a bad poem. To what little extent bad art can diminish joy or entice people to do bad things (often a very dubious claim), ranting about it just spreads the bad stuff to more people. The exact opposite of making the world a better place.

Let it go.

Go make something better. Go live something better. Go be something better.

Misdirect, don’t lie or withhold

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The are times, as a writer, when you want to surprise your readers or give them a puzzle to solve. That’s clearly a major part of a murder mystery, of course, but you do it in other stories as well.

Anyone who has ever aspired to write mysteries has read about the rule of not cheating the reader. Cheating is when you completely withhold information required to solve the mystery. All information has to be available to the reader. It is okay to obfuscate it, but leaving it out entirely is a no-no.

The classic example of the wrong way is describing your detective, perhaps despondent, looking down at his feet and seeing something. He bends down, picks the something up, and then smiles as he slips it in his pocket and the narration informs the reader that this thing is the vital clue that makes everything fall into place. But the writer doesn’t tell the reader what the something is.

The proper way to hide a clue is in plain sight. I remember one mystery once had three characters talking about something, when the father comments on his daughter’s dress the night before, saying it was a nice shade of green. One of the other characters tells him the dress was red. The father goes, “Oh, well, I guess it is.” The way the scene is written it seems that the father is simply not very attentive or perhaps distracted. Later in the story, it is revealed that he suffers from a form of color blindness, and that is an important clue about an aspect of one of the murders.

I’m currently wrestling with a version of this issue in a non-mystery. My current novel in progress (which is a light fantasy) includes a mysterious masked person who has appeared a couple of times, thwarting an assassination attempt directed at a princess, preventing a sorceress from getting some information, and a few other things. In the very first scene his mask is commented upon, and an explanation for why he is hiding his identity is provided.

So I wrote a scene last week where he confronts the man behind the assassination plot. I realized midway through that I could make the scene far more creepy than it already is, but I think I would be cheating if I did.

It occured to me that I could have the masked man reveal his face to the conspirator just before killing him, and show the conspirator reacting with shock at the identity… But withholding the identity from the reader. Certainly movies, television shows, and comics have used that particular cliche many times, so one could argue it’s acceptable. But even then, usually the reaction of the character to the revealed face provides an extra clue about some aspect of the story other than the identity of the mysterious person.

Besides thinking the technique is overused in those media, I’m not sure it makes any sense for the masked man to do it. The most obvious reason, “I want you to know who defeated you,” simply doesn’t apply to this character and his relationship to the conspirators. Besides being out of character, it would also be a bit too self-consciously coy. By this point the theoretical reader is either curious about the identity of the masked man or already has a theory. A melodramatic nonrevealing reveal is more likely to annoy than fascinate, I think.

And this little mystery isn’t the main plot. If I’ve done the rest of my job correctly, what I hope the reader is more worried about by this point in the book is: whether one grief-stricken character will go through with killing some innocents to bring another character back from the dead, whether one protagonist will clear his name and rescue his nieces, whether other characters will prevent a war, and whether one villain will be redeemed.

My mystery man is important to the plot, and why he’s attempting to act incognito is totally in keeping with his personality while moving the plot along, but it isn’t the main concern.

A puzzle as a subplot can be fun for the reader. Keeping the reader guessing about a few things without annoying them is a tricky balancing act. You want to provide enough information so that your reader can guess, while leaving some doubt. You want the reader to feel almost as if he is your accomplice–as if both of you are exploring this thing together.

Doing something such as having the detective find something which you blatantly label a clue which you withhold from the reader, or the unmasking without showing the reader, is the equivalent of a stage magician declaring, “Ha! Ha! I know something you don’t know! I know something you don’t know!”

And that’s just annoying beyond belief!