Tag Archives: writing

Recalling

life, , ,

I was listening to a story on NPR years ago. An author had set out to write a book about his immigrant grandparents. Among other places, he traveled to the village in Northern Ireland where his grandparents had lived before immigrating.

He visited an infamous tree in a field just outside of town. It was infamous because once when his mother was a little girl, a “local boy” who was involved in one of the Irish Independence movements, had been lynched in that tree. And for many days afterward, the local British soldiers stationed guards on it round the clock, to prevent anyone from cutting the body down and giving the young man a proper burial.

The author’s mother, grandparents, and aunts and uncles had all told the story many times. His mother had a particularly moving way of describing herself as a small child, clutching her own mother’s hand as the stood in the tall grass, close enough to see, but far enough that the soldiers would ignore them. His grandmother had agreed, even explaining how she had argued with some neighbor about whether her daughter should see such things.

The author was able to verify all the particulars of the young man’s lynching, his long delayed funeral, and so forth. It was that tree, in that field where it had happened. There was only one problem with the identical story that all of this relatives who had been there told. The young man had been lynched exactly 6 days after the author’s mother was born. So, while it was possible that his grandmother had carried her new born baby out to the field to see the atrocity, there was no way his mother could have remembered it. And certainly, as a six-day-old infant, she would not have been standing on her own two feet in the tall grass, clutching her mother’s hand.

The author realized that what must have actually happened is that some years after the incident, his grandmother had taken his mother, her young daughter, out to the field in question, to look at the empty tree and hear the story of the horrible thing the soldiers had done. It’s quite possible there were several such trips, before the family left Ireland and moved to America. The description his mother had heard from her parents, other older relatives, and neighbors, of the body hanging in the tree with the soldiers standing guard, had evoked a vivid image, which his mother had interposed onto her actual memories of visiting the field.

And the grandparents and other relatives similarly modified their own memories when, over the years, they would tell the story to new acquaintances, and the author’s mother (first as a young girl), would interject her own recollection of the day. The first few times perhaps one uncle might have said, “Really? I thought you would be too young to remember,” but our memories don’t have timestamps on them, and it’s easy to lose track of exactly how long one event (the gruesome death of a neighbor) took place after another (the birth of a niece).

The author wound up talking to a lot of experts on memory, and instead of writing a book about his ancestors, wrote a book about memory, and how it grows, mutates, and reshapes itself to fit our perception of the meanings of our life.

I had my own rather dramatic experience in realizing that I had edited my own memories. I have a couple of friends, J and K, that I have known for over thirty years. When I first met them, they had recently broken up after having dated for a while, but they were trying to keep it amicable. Over the years they were both part of a large group of my friends that attending sci fi cons together and participated in related activities. For a while, J lived in California. During that time, K started dating L. K and L broke up. A few years later, J had moved back to Washington, she and K started dating, and eventually married.

Some years after that, I was telling another friend about this particularly funny event that had happened at a sci fi con, and mentioned both J and K’s parts. J didn’t remember the incident at all. I told a few more details, K chimed in with some supporting evidence. J admitted it sounded like something she would have said, and we moved on to another topic.

And then it hit me. Feeling horrified, I turned to J and said, “Oh, I am so sorry…” She started laughing, because she figured it out from the look on my face. It hadn’t been J experiencing the fiasco with us, it had been L. I apologized probably a bit too profusely, because J laughed and said that K did the same thing all the time.

I spent a while afterward trying to remember those couple of years when K had been dating L and also hanging out with our gang. I could only recall four incidents, total. All of them were ones which, from my perspective, exemplified L’s worst personality traits. I couldn’t recall one single incident in which she was not being pretentious, condescending, or disdainful.

I know that can’t be accurate. No one is awful all the time, and K would never be comfortable hanging out with someone who was, let alone nearly getting married to her. Obviously, I made the decision that K’s involvement with L had been a mistake of such proportions that I wished it hadn’t happened. And my subconscious has dutifully excised any pleasant memories of L from my memory. Any memories that have been kept, have had J substituted for L, in accordance with the other judgement I came to that J and K belong together and always have.

It was disturbing when I first realized it had happened. I still find it disturbing that I have to wrestle with my own memories when talking about events with these friends. I can make myself remember that it was L, not J, in the one story. But it makes me wonder what else in that memory has been emphasized, or obscured, or maybe borrowed from some other similar experiences.

It’s scary to realize just how unreliable one’s own recollection can be.

Telling

writing, , ,

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

writing, ,

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

writing,

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.)

A good day to die

literature, , , , , ,

Readers can be like addicts. Once they fall in love with a fictional character, they want to read more, and more, and more about the character. A good-selling series of books can set a writer for life.

But it can be something of a gilded cage.

When Arthur Conan Doyle was a struggling young physician, he found himself sitting for rather long stretches between patients. So he started writing stories during his down time, and would sell them to various magazines of the time. He soon found that he had a knack for mysteries, not always crime stories, but stories in which there was a puzzle for the characters (and the readers) to solve. One day Conan Doyle started writing a long story about an independent detective. He based this detective on one of his medical school teachers, Dr Joseph Bell.

Bell was an early advocate of what would now be called forensic diagnosis. He told his students to pay more attention to physical clues about a patient’s illness. Close observation and deduction he said, were more important that what the patient told you. To demonstrate his method, he would have people pick out strangers in a crowd or on the street, and just by looking at the person (how they were dressed, wear patterns on their clothing, the presence or absence of callouses on various portions of hands, and so forth) deduce their occupation and recent activities.

Sherlock Holmes was a man who used Bell’s methods to solve crimes. A Study in Scarlet was published first as part of a Christmas Special (though it has no Christmas theme) in 1887. It was republished as a standalone book the next year. Sales were good enough to justify a second edition, more expensively bound, to be produced the next year. Conan Doyle was commissioned to write a second novel, The Sign of the Four (he was republished the next year in various journals throughout the empire, often with the slightly modified title The Sign of Four), which became an even bigger hit.

Conan Doyle was commissioned to write a series of short stories starring Sherlock Holmes for The Strand magazine, and they were published monthly from June 1891 through July 1892. As he neared the end of the series of 12 tales, Conan Doyle was finding himself growing tired of Sherlock. So he planned to kill him in the twelfth tale. Conan Doyle made the mistake of mentioning this fact at a dinner party at his mother’s home. His mother was upset, not so much about her son killing the character, but she felt the way he planned for Holmes to die (mauled to death by a vicious guard dog as Holmes and Watson rescued a young woman from a particularly disturbed couple) was entirely too ignoble for such a hero. She made him promise that Holmes would not die in the story. So, Conan Doyle changed the ending of the “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.”

The stories were so popular, that people were literally lining up outside the offices of the Strand on publication day to get a copy. Holmes was not the first literary character to evoke this response. Many years earlier (1841) people had lined up in anticipation of the final chapters of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. The Strand commissioned more stories. Conan Doyle couldn’t really turn down the money, but he was getting even more tired of Holmes. So he kept completely mum about “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes is killed by Moriarty. Moriarty dies along with him.

“The Final Problem” has a lot of problems. Its internal logic is laughable (Holmes must disguise himself lest the killers find him, but he travels with Watson who is completely undisguised, and Watson booked their train, boat, and second train passages in his own name). Moriarty had never appeared in any story before this one, and there is absolutely no hint of his existence. That later prompted the producers of at least one television series that tried to follow the stories faithfully to insert Moriarty as the mastermind who supplied the plan to the robber in “The Red-Headed League,” just to get the character on the scene and in the viewers’ minds.

Conan Doyle never thought of his Holmes stories as serious literature, or of much importance. Which is why at different times he has Dr Watson refer to himself as “James” instead of “John.” In the original Moriarty story, the Professor’s first name is not mentioned, though the Professor’s brother, Colonel James Moriarty is mentioned by name. Later stories to feature Moriarty refer to him as James Moriarty. There are many other contradictions.

When Holmes was killed, the public was shocked. Some people dressed in full mourning clothes. People wrote Conan Doyle, pleading with him to bring back Holmes, and so on.

For years Conan Doyle ignored the pleas. Then, while visiting friends in the country, when one friend told about a local legend of a ghostly dog, Conan Doyle said it would make a wonderful basis of a Holmes story, but he could never write it since he’d killed Holmes. One of the other friends suggested the idea that the story could begin with Watson explaining that he had sworn never to tell this tale while certain innocent persons were alive, but now he could. So the story would be set before Holmes’ death in 1892, but could be published in 1902. And thus The Hound of the Baskervilles came to be.

The pressure to bring back Holmes increased (and the amount of money both American and British publishers were willing to offer for new Holmes stories skyrocketed), so in 1905 he relented. In “The Adventure of the Empty House” Watson is shocked (in 1894) to discover that Holmes is alive, having faked his own death in order to lure Moriarty’s confederates into mistakes so that the rest of the criminal organization can be dismantled. Thirteen stories are included along with “The Adventure of the Empty House” in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, featuring adventures that supposedly occurred after the time of Holmes’ faked death, but before the publication of his return.

Conan Doyle wrote a fourth Holmes novel, which marked the return of Moriarty, though this story is set in time before “The Final Problem.” Conan Doyle remained adamant that Moriarty’s death in “The Final Problem” was not faked. He wrote another 26 short stories about Holmes until his death in 1930.

Readers always wanted more.

So I wasn’t terribly surprised to read that the author of the Sookie Sackhouse/True Blood series is getting a lot of grief for announcing that the next novel is the finale, ending the series once and for all. I have never read the stories, nor seen the insanely popular HBO series. So I wasn’t aware that she had originally planned to kill one of the main characters and end the series in the ninth book some years ago.

Sometimes a story has run its course. Sometimes it’s time to tell a beloved character good-bye.

Even though I sympathize with her fans, I hope Charlaine Harris is happy with how she’s ended things, and goes on to tell whatever other stories she likes.

Artistic license

books, , , , , ,

Certified Dictionary Thumper t-shirt.
A close up of the t-shirt.
Recently a couple of different friends sent me a link to that day’s Shirt-Woot. A t-shirt with a dictionary joke. Of course it’s the perfect thing for Gene.

It is rare to find a t-shirt with a dictionary joke, so of course I ordered it. But I commented to one of the friends who had sent me the link that there was one problem. There is no way that the dictionary pictured is unabridged. Look at how easily the person is holding it with only one hand. It would need to be a fairly thin dictionary to be held that way.

Seriously, look at the picture on the t-shirt. He’s not even using all four fingers! The pinkie, at least, is curled under.

Trying to hold the dictionary
Trying to hold it one-handed
I own four unabridged dictionaries. I got out the smallest of them, and tried to hold it as they are in the picture. I can hold it with one hand for a short time, but notice that I have to cup my hand under it, to support all the weight. Three fingers are on the front, but the pinkie is still helping, by stabilizing the dictionary’s weight. You can’t tell in the picture, but it was hard to hold it still, because it’s too heavy and awkward.

The friend thought I was being silly to point this out. And it is a silly t-shirt, which I was delighted to order. I’m going to wear it and let people laugh at the joke. And it’s true, it would be extremely painful to be literally thumped with a hardback book the size of one of these unabridged dictionaries.

Labeling myself a dictionary thumper is not inaccurate. I can be pedantic about the meanings and usage of words. I also get that way about syntax, which would make me more of a style guide thumper, but that joke wouldn’t work as well. People know what a dictionary is, but a style guide, not so much.

I’m nowhere near as pedantic about grammar as people expect. And I’m not pedantic about words in the way that people expect, either. Being a technical writer by profession for over two decades, I can’t begin to count how many times co-workers and other colleagues have come to me with questions about spelling and usage that fall on the fringes of what I think the heart of language is. See, folks think of grammar and usage in very stiff and absolute terms. They believe that there is always one and only one correct way to use a specific word. I’ve always assumed this comes from having been admonished in school for doing something incorrectly, so that they think of grammar as a long list of prohibitions: “Thou shalt not dangle thy participles” and so forth.

Holding the dictionary two-handed
It really takes two hands.
But there are no official lists of rules handed down from on high. Language has rules that have evolved as we’ve used it. Word meanings change over time. New social, cultural, and technological situations require new ways of describing or discussing what’s going on. And the beauty of English is that there are thousands of correct ways to construct a sentence to convey a particular meaning. “The man walked down the road” means the same thing as “He walked down the road.” Structurally those things are nearly identical, so they barely count as two ways, but we could also say “He plodded along the street.” Or we can add more details, “The man, stoop-shouldered and sun-burned, trudged beside the highway.” We can turn the structure around, “The crumbling road guided his footsteps to his destination.”

All of those are correct ways of explaining the same basic situation. But they all evoke different moods and details. What makes a particular version of each of those right or wrong is the context, which is not a matter of grammar at all.

Besides saying “Certified Dictionary Thumper,” the t-shirt includes a slogan. “Have you been soteriologically extricated?” Soteriology is a synonym for salvation, deliverance, or liberation. Extricated means to be disentangled, rescued, or released. So the slogan literally means “Have you been rescued in a liberating way?” Or more simply, “Have you been saved saved?” Which is redundant. If I were feeling the need to use the multisyllabic soteriologically, I would have chosen the slogan, “Have you been soteriologically explicated?” Since to explicate is to define something to have had something defined or explained to you.

I strongly suspect that that was the original joke, probably told to the artist by someone else, and somewhere along the line someone misheard. Explicated and extricated sounding quite similar when spoken aloud.

Of course, that just gives me more to explain if someone asks what the shirt says. Which, for someone like me, makes it even more of a win-win.

Even a young earth is older than you think

writing, , ,

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

writing,

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.