Tag Archives: literature

The thinks you will think…

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We saw a musical last weekend.

Several years ago, when Michael and I had season tickets to one of the local theatres, we saw a national touring company of Suessical the Musical, with Cathy Rigby (former Olympic gymnast most famous since for playing Peter Pan in more than one revival on Broadway and numerous national tours) as the Cat in the Hat. It was fun.

This last weekend we saw the musical performed by a bunch of middle-school kids, one of whom happens to be my godson. It was also a lot of fun. And that isn’t just my prejudice as a doting godparent.

At least some of the fun is remembering what it was like being on stage around the age, and not feeling at all as fearless as these kids seemed to be. It was quite amazing to hear the voices on a few of those kids, who did not sound like “kids” at all.

It was also fun to remember all that Seuss. The musical takes elements from a bunch of Dr. Seuss books (most prominently Horton Hears a Who and Horton Hatches an Egg) and weaves them together to make one story.

It would be easy to be cynical and dismissive of the play, what with the themes of accepting yourself for who you are, loyalty, and respecting others. And since people usually accuse me of being the opposite of cynical, it should surprise no one that I’m not going to go there. In fact, what I found myself thinking about most during the drive home was how easy it was to fall into the imaginary world with very simple costumes and minimal props. You don’t need a lot of special effects to believe that a group of monkeys are trying to steal a clover with a dust spec from an elephant. Just a few hints and a bit of body language is all that’s required.

Which was a good thing to be reminded of while I’m slogging away on my novel, occasionally wondering how words on a screen can compete with animation and music.

It’s the story and the characters that matter. Everything else is window dressing.

The dust of daily life

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A number of years ago a reader wrote in to tell how much they had enjoyed a specific story I’d written, which was very flattering. Unfortunately, he also said he was happy that I had returned to writing something “more realistic.”

Now, since the story he was praising was a science fiction murder mystery set 1500 years in the future, and my detective was a genetically engineered lioness, I was more than a bit curious about what, exactly, he thought was so much more realistic about it than anything else I had written. And so, perhaps foolishly, I wrote back to ask.

His reply was a long, polite, and extremely thoughtful email. The first story of mine that he recalled reading had been co-written with two of my friends. It was an epic action adventure tale about the crew of a cargo ship who discover that the containers of farming equipment they have brought into port are actually full of weapons intended for a local revolutionary army. The crew is soon running from both the law and the terrorists. Not surprisingly there is more than one gunfight and a lot of people die. The story includes a lot of grim moments.

He loved it.

Then he cited several more things I had written, all of which he categorized as “light and fluffy,” which he didn’t like. Since one of the stories involved an astronomical disaster in which an entire inhabited planet is destroyed, and another one was a murder mystery, I was a little confused as to why he considered them light and fluffy. Fortunately, the rest of his email explained it.

All of those stories, he wrote, had an unmistakeable air of optimism about them. They generally had happy endings, for instance. He disliked such stories because in reality, he said, nothing good ever lasts, people fail far more often than they succeed, and bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it.

I had more than a few quibbles with what he said, but there was one thing I knew he was right about: my stories probably do all have an underlying thread of hope. I realized a long time ago that a fundamental part of my temperament is an unshakeable certainty that there is no problem that can’t be solved. Worse than that, there’s no problem that I couldn’t solve if only I had the time and the resources. However much I may know, intellectually, that lots of problems are unresolvable, at a deep, emotional level I seem to be incapable of accepting that.

It’s not that I set out to prove that with any of my stories. The dichotomy between optimism and pessimism is usually the furthest thing from my mind when I’m working on any given tale. However, since a hopefully arrogant perspective is a fundamental part of my personality, it will always color things I write. Because, no matter what the goal of a particular story, painting, song, or other piece of art is, no matter what topic the artist is tackling, no matter what things he or she may have the characters say or do in the story, some aspects of the artist’s core beliefs will manifest in the art.

It’s a not that it’s a conscious decision on an artist’s part. These core beliefs are seldom significant plot points, for instance. We are certainly capable of writing stories (or songs or movies or plays or comics) that seem to argue persuasively against our core beliefs. The specific story which started this conversation with this reader has prompted other readers to write me to argue about completely different things which they felt were “the message” of the story simply because one of the main characters espouses a particular belief or philosophy in the dialog, for instance.

The type of core belief I’m talking about informs how an artist sees the world. In some works these things manifest most prominently in minor aspects of the work rather than the major theme. I suspect that is why my story about the disaster which kills one billion people came across as light and fluffy to this guy, even though I thought it ended on an ominous, rather than hopeful, note. There are probably aspects of the ways some of the characters go about trying to figure out what happened that provided some hint of a glimmer of hope. I’m guessing.

Because these core beliefs inform and color the way a creative person sees everything, it is impossible to completely separate a work of art from the artist who created it.

A work of art is more than the person who made it. And in an ideal world, a work of art should be judged on its own merits, without regard to who made it, or to other things which that person made. All humans, artists and audience alike, fall short of our ideals.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. —Pablo Picasso

I thanked the reader for explaining. I said I was sorry he didn’t enjoy some of my stories, and that I hoped he would occasionally enjoy more of my stories in the future. But I suspected he wouldn’t, because I could see that we had diametrically opposed perspectives on the world. And even though I have written plenty of tales since then which have included things I think are far grimmer than anything that was in the two stories he liked, I also know that the glimmer of hope I always believe will be there is bound to continue cropping up in my work.

I myself had found writers and artists whose work, while technically good, even excellent, just rubbed me the wrong way. Sometimes I was able to put my finger on why they did so, but many times not.

Art should move us. Art should also challenge us. I don’t think that we should always agree with everything a piece of art appears to be saying, any more than we should demand that an artist agrees with all of our opinions. But challenging art should engage us in a re-examination of our beliefs, or prompt us to see things from a new perspective. It should act as a lantern illuminating different paths which we may or may not choose to follow.

Sometimes the way that a particular piece of art challenges us does not wash the dust of daily life from our souls; it hammers us down and grinds our souls into the dust. And no one should feel obligated to submit to such hammering.

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

It’s been done

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I watched a teaser for a movie I’m looking forward to seeing later this year, and accidentally got sucked into the comments.

As a rule, I try to ignore comments on the internet. Wiser people than I have written extensively about why some of the worst humanity has to offer seems to congregate in the comments sections of articles and the like. Sometimes, on some sites, you can’t help be see at least the first few comments while you’re looking at the actual content.

This comments section began with someone writing a long rant about how the movie, and previous entries in the related franchise, were not original. They had borrowed this element for an older series, and that element for an older movie, and so on and so forth.

Except, of course, none of the things he cited had been original in their use of those elements, either.

Humans have been telling each other stories, constructing various finds of flights of fancy, for tens of thousands of years. Every twist of plot has been thought of, in some form, thousands of times before, for instance. Technology and cultural changes allow some of the details and contexts to change, but in some ways only on the surface. If you abstract any idea out far enough, it becomes a trope or cliché that’s been around for ages.

Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to distinguish between a genuine effort to tell a story that is yours, and a lazy copy of someone else. But it does mean that pointing out some element or bit of a story “has been done before” isn’t saying anything terrible profound.

And certainly not original.

What’s it about?

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A friend recently asked our monthly writing group for advice about a novel idea that he had been struggling with. His specific question was whether the story was worth finishing. I asked him what the story was about.

He began explaining about the story’s setting, the history of the planet, and a number of complications. If I reproduced it here, it would have gone on for several paragraphs.

At a point when he paused for breath, I interrupted to say, “You haven’t told me what the story is, yet. All you’ve given me are complications. Who is your protagonist? And what problem is he struggling with?”

Another friend participating in the conversation put my same question a different way. Referring to a story we had just finished critiquing. “That story, even though it was only 10,000 words, had a lot of complications and subplots, right? But what the story is about is, ‘Ian gets suckered into delivering a stranger’s ashes to a temple.'”

That summary evokes a story. You don’t have to know who Ian is. You don’t have to know exactly what culture he lives in. You don’t have to know what sort of temple it is. “Character gets suckered into delivering someone’s mortal remains somewhere,” sets up a dramatic situation.

What will make the story interesting and uniquely yours are, indeed, all those background details—the character’s personal history, the importance his society places on funeral rites, the character’s acceptance or rejection of those expectations, any difficulty or surprises he or she encounters on the way, and so on—that make the tale an entertaining or enlightening experience.

But the spine that holds it all together is that central dilemma. In that particular example, the word “suckered” tells you that he is at least somewhat reluctant to be doing it. It also tells you that the person who tricked him into it must have had reasons they were even more reluctant to undertake the journey. The fact that it is someone’s mortal remains and there is a temple involved hint at some of the kinds of difficulties the character may face along the way.

When I asked the original question, this is what I was really looking for: did the author know what the spine of his story was? Exactly what the spine is doesn’t matter when asking whether the story was worth finishing. Neither do all of those other details, background information, and complications tell us whether the story is worth finishing.

What tells us whether this is a story that you need to tell, is if that central nugget is at the forefront of your mind when thinking of what the story is about.

From all the information he gave us, I could come up with such a central, one sentence, summary of what that story might be about: John receives a message from the heavens that reveals his whole life is a lie.

But that’s the conflict I pulled out of it. If that isn’t the story which my friend wants to tell—nay, needs to tell—then it isn’t his story.

And even after all that, the original question of whether the story is worth pursuing has to be answered by the author. Does re-evaluating the unfinished work he has now make some sort of central dilemma jump out at him? Perhaps a completely different central dilemma: maybe the story he needs to tell is the story of John’s sister, who is dealing with her brother’s sudden onset of insanity, then begins to wonder if he really is insane; or perhaps it is the story of a city elder who has to deal with this fanatic, John, who is trying to destroy civilization.

If such a dilemma jumps out at him, if he feels the need to tell that story, then yes, absolutely, it’s worth finishing. Otherwise, it’s probably time to set it aside to work on something else.

This time it’s (not so) personal

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When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic conflicts which have gone on for generations as a counterexample. I had almost talked about that in the original post, but decided that might be one digression too many.

It’s certainly true that such conflicts have raged on for many generations, sometimes spanning centuries. The key here, I think, is that word “spanning.” People aren’t just holding a grudge about the injustice visited upon an ancestor 11 centuries ago, they are holding a grudge about indignities and atrocities they have witnessed themselves (or experienced the aftereffects of themselves), which they perceive to be a continuation of hundreds of other injustices going all of the way back to that original one.

For instance, a young man may grow up hearing tales from a very young age about how his father was killed by those evil Freedonians when he was just a babe, just as a couple of uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, and so on where unjustly arrested, or tortured, or raped, or killed previously. The Freedonians have always hated the Sylvanians, he is told. Since he is a Sylvanian, they must hate him, too. Everything bad that happens to him in his life, he blames on the Freedonians, either directly because a Freedonian is present, or indirectly because he believes his hardships would be fewer if they hadn’t taken his father from him.

The historical narrative of the many past conflicts between Freedonia and Sylvania provide a context to his personal frustrations and disappointments. Tales of particularly egregious atrocities from the past serve as a rationalization for any actions against Freedonians he takes. Or excuses for any atrocities that others may point out Sylvania inflicted upon Freedonia.

There is also a sort of compound-interest effect. The young man was raised by people who had internalized their own victimization until it metastasized. People brimming over with hatred are not very good at nurturing. The more generations in a row this happens, the less likely each new generation is going to be to empathize with people they perceive as “other.”

The problem is that anyone who has not been raised in the same culture, has not witnessed similar injustices, has not experienced first hand the animosity between the two groups, has a very hard time understanding what the fuss is all about. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard someone ask about troubles in the Middle East, or Subsaharan Africa, or Eastern Europe, “Why can’t they just come to a reasonable settlement?”

Which gets us back to the author’s difficulty.

In order to make a reader care as much about the injustices inflicted by the Freedonians as your Sylvanian protagonist, you have to put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. It’s not enough to have one of your characters lecture another, “As you know, Bob, the Freedonians are a merciless, hateful people.” You have to show them being merciless. You have to show your protagonist suffering at their hands.

That requires telling the story of how these sorts of age-old hatred are perpetuated because they are renewed again and again with each new generation. Even then, most readers are going to see all those past actions as abstractions. They may sympathize with your protagonist, but they’ll also wonder why he can’t see how odd it is to hold a person living now responsible for actions that took place hundreds of years before that person was born.

Which is a good question to raise. There’s a lot of good drama you can wring out of that sort of situation. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, go for it! But that means going all in. No half-measures. No long expository dump where one character lectures another about the 1200 year history of mutual failed (but not for lack of trying) genocide between Freedonia and Sylvania.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Nothing wrong with history

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When I wrote about the problematic way some fantasy authors treat time, I alluded to some historic events from 1100 years ago in the real world in order to make my point. Since one of the points I was making was that events hundreds or thousands of years in the past are poor choices for motivating your characters, my allusion might appear to be a contradiction.

But there’s a difference between using history and misusing it.

In the previous post, while I alluded to historical events, I tried to do so in such a way that a reader who knew nothing about the events would still get the point. I happen to be one of those people who is interested in history, so I knew a little bit about Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, who happens to be an ancestor of the current English Royal Family. So I could make the allusion.

Whether you are writing epic fantasy, far future science fiction, or even contemporary fiction, some of your characters will know a lot about the history of their world. But a lot of them won’t. And even the ones who do, aren’t likely to make day-to-day decisions based on that distant historical data.

In the fantasy novel I’m currently working on, for instance, some plot points hinge on something which happened 70 years prior to the current date. At that time, a supernatural creature bent on conquest was thwarted. The creature is trying again, but most of the characters in the current plot don’t know about those past events. For instance, one of the main characters begins the story being accused of murdering someone just a few days before the novel begins. His motivation is to find out who actually killed the other guy and why. And since the victim was his former mentor, he’s probably going to want to exact some revenge when he finds them. As the plot unfolds, as he learns why the victim was killed, he becomes aware of those events 70 years prior, but when he resolves his plot at the end of the story, his motivation will be avenging his friend and clearing his own name.

Because it is a fantasy novel (I usually describe it as a light fantasy in an epic fantasy wrapper), some of the characters are longer-lived than a typical human. One of the other main characters is old enough that she was actually involved in the events 70 years ago. She provides most of the link to those events for the reader. But even so, her motivation in this story is to try to recover a holy relic which has recently been stolen, and figure out whether an old friend who has been implicated is responsible or not.

There are a few other characters who are aware of the events either because they are history buffs or, like the one mentioned above, they are old enough to have experienced them. Those include a couple of supernatural beings who are also aware of somewhat related events going back much further in time. Most of those things are never going to be mentioned in the story. The few that are, will be mentioned in passing to provide a bit of verisimilitude. Or to set up a joke (it is a light fantasy, so humor drives a lot of my decisions as the author).

As the author, I have to be aware of the history of the characters in order to write them. But sometimes that awareness is in broad outline. The Mother of All Dragons, who is a peripheral character in this novel, obviously is extremely old and has a memory spanning back millennia. I haven’t written down an extended timeline of her life spanning all those centuries. There are a few key events in her life that I have nailed down, but the rest is left open. In part, because the more time I spend figuring that out and writing it down, the less time I spend telling the story I want to tell. I don’t need all the rest of that detail for this story.

And the needs of the story must trump everything else.

Many tasks facing a storyteller are similar to tightrope walking: one must strike a balance while moving forward. While it’s perfectly true to tell someone attempting to walk across a tightrope of the dangers of leaning too far to the left, that does not mean there is no danger in leaning too far the other way.

Time doesn’t work that way

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Last year I bought an audiobook based on the recommendation of an acquaintance, along with several favorable reviews. The opening chapter was a bit heavy on the description for my taste—I don’t need to know the precise color, width, and material composition of every article of clothing on every character with a speaking role in order to follow the plot, for instance.

But when the author finally stopped describing the characters and let them interact, the dialog was good and the characters engaging.

Around about chapter four the author fell into the trap of many epic fantasy-type tales by having the older, experienced character give a long lecture about the history of the world to the younger, inexperienced character. This is a trap because the world background is seldom as interesting as the authors who do this sort of thing think. Also, a surprising amount of information can be conveyed about the setting of the world in little tidbits sprinkled through the dialog over many scenes. Just have a character mention imperial troops at the border, for example, and the reader will fill in a lot of the gaps accurately enough for the purposes of most plots.

Unfortunately, the lecture then took a terrible turn. “It all seemed settled, but the peace was short-lived, because 400 years later…”

And I hit the stop button right there. When I got home, I deleted the book from my iPhone. I will never recommend this author to anyone, and if anyone asks about her books, I will warn them away.

Why? Because time doesn’t work that way. It had already been established before this chapter that the middle-aged human character was considered almost an old man in this medieval-style settings. Which is entirely in keeping with the realities of that sort of technological level. Therefore, a span of 400 years is approximately 20 generations. No one considers a peace which survives for 20 generations as “short-lived.” Particularly not in largely illiterate societies where the vast majority of people get all of their historical data by word of mouth.

It’s a mistake that writers—particularly writers dabbling in science fiction or fantasy for the first time–make all the time. Starship crew stranded on a habitable planet, is discoved centuries later, and the great-great-great granddaughter of the original ship’s captain is the leader of the community. Not only that, she still knows the passcodes for the computer in the part of the original ship still orbiting. Even more important, she’s similar enough that the computer responds to her voice commands, mistaking her for her ancestor!

Or the rival prince plots the destruction of a neighboring kingdom because an ancestor was betrayed by the other king’s ancestor 1000 years ago.

Really? Do you know who your great-great-great grandfathers were, let alone what any of them did for a living, or where they hid their valuables?

Now, I realize for the more successful royal families, at least some of one’s ancestors are known going back scarily long times. Queen Elizabeth II, for instance, knows her line of descent from Alfred the Great in the Ninth Century. But that sort of thing is the exception, rather than the rule. And even in that exceptional situation, if Her Majesty has any feelings toward Denmark, it is very unlikely that the wars fought over 1100 years ago between Alfred the Great, King of Wessex and Guthrum, King of the Dans, loom as large in those feelings as events that have happened in her own lifetime.

Epic fantasy gets its name from the tradition of Greek poetic tales outlining the grand sweep of the history of a nation or many nations. So I understand where the impulse to plot that sort mythic chronicle comes from. But even Homer’s Iliad, despite covering vast aspects of the Trojan War, remains focused throughout on the anger of Achilles and why it is directed at Agamemnon. The poem alludes to (and sometimes goes into detail about) historical and legendary events that led many of the supporting cast to the situation, but the story itself is about just a few weeks at the end of a war.

And at least the epic Greek poets had the excuse of having gods taking active roles in the action, so that beings whose memories span the centuries of history behind the events are actually walking around, talking to the other characters. If your characters are all ordinary humans living ordinary lifespans, history is going to be more of an abstraction. Zeus can hold a grudge for centuries, but John the Farmer will be motivated by events within his personal experience and memory.

And that’s the sort of motivation you can make your readers care about.

Related:

Not all reasons are reasonable

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Several years ago I was browsing in a bookstore.

Now that I think of it, a lot more of my personal anecdotes probably ought to begin with that line than usually do. But I digress…

I picked up a paperback that had an interesting title. The back cover description gave the impression that the book was a parody of noir detective novels such as The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, but with demons and faeries and werewolves and the like. I’ve been a fan of both science fiction/fantasy and detective stories for longer than I can remember, so this could be right up my alley.

Except, as I said, the description made it seem like a parody. Sometimes parodies are great. Sometimes they are just mediocre. And sometimes they are nothing more than mean-spirited dreck.

The back cover also had a photograph of the author. And the photograph was not encouraging. Everything about the stern-faced man’s pose, expression, and even hairstyle typified a kind of fan or writer I had met far too many times throughout my years in the fandom. They espoused a philosophy of social darwinism that holds most of the human race in contempt. Their idea of humor always involves belittling others while drawing attention to their own superior command of vocabulary, or (alleged) facts, or logic.

The only thing I enjoyed less than having conversations with them was reading anything they wrote. So I was quite certain this guy’s idea of a parody would be all about the mockery, with a healthy slathering of self-importance and self-congratulation at his clever turns of phrases.

The very brief author bio included beside the photo mentioned martial arts.

Every one of those aforementioned unpleasant fans who had been martial arts enthusiasts had been misogynist homophobes who were constantly explaining to people that they weren’t racist, but…

I put the book back on the shelf.

Several years later, through a series of coincidences including recommendations from friends who were the opposite of the kind of person I had inferred the author to be, I found myself downloading some sample chapters of the audiobook version of the first book in the series.

I enjoyed the sample. I found the main character very engaging and I wanted to know how the story ended.

So I bought the entire audiobook and listened to it. It was nothing like I expected the book to be, based on my reading of that back cover.

I was still buying books from the Science Fiction Book Club at the time, and they had some omnibus editions collecting the first seven books in the series into a few volumes, so I bought those. They arrived about a month or so before I was laid off at my previous place of employment.

One day, between contracting gigs, I started reading the first book—a few very short days later I had read all seven that I owned. I couldn’t put them down.

I needed to get more.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the author in person, even spoke to him very briefly in an autograph line. I spoke with his wife for a teensy bit longer. Between reading his books and short stories, reading some of his commentary, hearing him talk about his life and writing, and seeing him interact with his wife, it’s clear that my assessment was completely wrong. For one thing, those douchebags I had incorrectly lumped him with would never, even with a gun pointed at their head, willingly hold hands with their wife in public—let alone do a sneaky-pinky lock with a sidelong glance and a wink while being interviewed on stage

Which shouldn’t be surprising. I had based my assessment on a photograph and a single phrase in the author bio. The stories aren’t parodies, either. So that description from the back of the paperback was just misleading. As many are.

I could laugh the whole thing off as a very amusing case of forgetting the adage about judging books by their covers. But it isn’t that simple.

The assessment came out of personal experience. I can’t count the number of guys I’ve met—mostly in fannish circles, but not exclusively—who shared that particular combination of beliefs and attitudes. In person, the attitude usually manifests fairly quickly. And they usually just as quickly place me into one of the categories of people they hold in contempt. Of course, since they seem to hold most people in contempt, that isn’t surprising.

They aren’t just unpleasant to be around. Whether they are active in politics or not, they spend a lot of their time trying to convince people of the validity of those social darwinist ideas I mentioned above. That means they advocate policies that threaten me and people I love (not to mention society as a whole). So I have really good motivation to identify people with those attitudes, if for no other reason than to minimize the amount of time I have to spend with them.

We make decision like that every day, without even thinking. While walking down the street, or up a grocery aisle, standing in line at the bank, or selecting a seat on a bus, we assess people on a variety of superficial characteristics, then act accordingly. That gut reaction, that ability to put together a bunch of nonverbal cues to identify people we should be cautious around is a valuable survival trait.

But, having spent my entire life fighting for respect and acceptance in a world that rejects gay men (or any one who doesn’t confirm to certain gender expectations), I understand the dangers of misjudging people.

The reasons behind our gut reactions aren’t logical; they don’t conform to the rules of deductive reasoning. That doesn’t mean they are always wrong. Even if they did conform to the tenets of logic and rational analysis, they wouldn’t always be right, either.

The best we can do is keep as close an eye on ourselves as we do strangers we meet throughout our life. When we recognize a mistake, we can correct it, and learn to be a bit less hasty in the future. And when we’re right, we can feel a little less guilty about the times we weren’t.

Birds black as coal

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I’ve never been particularly good at symbolism—at least not in my own writing.

When symbolism happens in my stories, it is entirely subconscious. I remember some years ago another writer commented on one of my stories that she was deeply envious of the symbolism I’d pulled off. When she explained it to me, I looked at the story and realized that the repeated symbolic occurrence of pastiche/patchwork was there beginning in the first paragraph and continuing to the final scene. But I hadn’t planned it or even been aware that I was doing it.

Even back in school I always had issues with the notion of symbolism in literature. I remember reading one time that snow is always symbolic of death, so if a birth scene happens during a snowstorm, the scene isn’t about the beginning of a new life, it’s about the inevitability of death. Or it foreshadows a premature death of one of the characters. Or something.

And my immediate thought was, “what if the person just happened to be born in December or January?” I was foolish enough to raise that question in class. I was told not to be ridiculous; literature is totally under control of the writer, so things should never happen due to chance. No good author would set a birth during a snowstorm without meaning to allude to death, you see.

Which seems more than a bit artificial. Sort of like saying that a painter can never use the color yellow except in a painting about joy. Yellow symbolizes joy or delight or summer, right? So an artist can never depict a sad person under a lemon tree? And why does yellow symbolize joy? When a book is very old, the paper pages turn yellow with age. Or someone’s skin turns yellow while experiencing certain health issues. Why can’t yellow symbolize decay?

The answer is that, of course, yellow can symbolize either, depending on how it is used. Or it may not symbolize anything. Sometimes a lemon is just yellow, right?

Similarly, crows and ravens usually are assumed to symbolize death, but in the real world crows can be aggressive, clever, or clownish. I’ve witnessed more than one incident of crows skirmishing with seagulls over the contents of a public trash receptacle. It’s impossible to walk around certain parts of town without witnessing such an occurrence with some frequency. If a story I read mentioned one, it would evoke a lot of memories. Depending on how it was described, it might symbolize petty squabbling between family members, or disproportionate responses, or scarcity of resources. And while death can certainly result from petty disagreements or competition, it doesn’t have to. Crows fight with other birds over dropped food and so forth. It’s just something that happens.

Symbolism can add verisimilitude to a scene or story. The reader doesn’t even have to consciously be aware of the meaning of the symbols in order for them to work. But paying too much attention to them, as either a writer or a reader, can be a distraction.

As an author I can choose the setting, period, and characters of my story. I decide which details to describe, and which to leave unmentioned. But that includes the ability to include details not because they have a traditional literary meaning, but because they sometimes happen in the real world in the setting which I have chosen for the story. I shouldn’t include details that don’t serve the story. However, they should be included only because they serve my story, not in accordance to some academic prescription.