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Sunday Inspiration: The Pen Is Mightier…
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.
—Alexandre Dumas
Blunt Metaphors Trauma
This is your brain on metaphors.
[I]n their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By,the linguist George Lakoff (at the University of California at Berkeley) and the philosopher Mark Johnson (now at the University of Oregon) revolutionized linguistics by showing that metaphor is actually a fundamental constituent of language. For example, they showed that in the seemingly literal statement “He’s out of sight,” the visual field is metaphorized as a container that holds things. The visual field isn’t really a container, of course; one simply sees objects or not. But the container metaphor is so ubiquitous that it wasn’t even recognized as a metaphor until Lakoff and Johnson pointed it out.
From such examples they argued that ordinary language is saturated with metaphors. Our eyes point to where we’re going, so we tend to speak of future time as being “ahead” of us. When things increase, they tend to go up relative to us, so we tend to speak of stocks “rising” instead of getting more expensive. “Our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature,” they wrote.
Write What You Know
Selah Janel reminds writers everywhere that we may know more than we think we do, and can apply that knowledge even to writing about fantastic settings and situations.
Here’s what people forget when faced with the “write what you know” comment. When you walk down the street, everything around you is what you know. The scent of food from the nearby café is what you know. The people you pass on the street are who you know. Everything that you see and how it makes you feel is what you know. The internal monologue that passes through your mind throughout the day is what you know. Every little thing that makes up your life is what you know. Your family experience, the quirks you were born with, how make your coffee, your friends, the things you do in your spare time, the way you earn your living—those are all important things that you can draw on and morph to fit a fantasy setting. You may not need all of that, but they’re there for you to draw on. They’re all tools in the belt, waiting to be used.
Those (and all that come before) are good words, especially the section on knowing people who can help you. As Selah writes, we may not have had the same occupations or life experiences as our characters, but it’s likely we know someone who has.
Having recently conversed with an accommodating family therapist of my acquaintance about the possible real-world repercussions of some of the events described in my second novel, The Devil’s Due, I feel much more confident heading into part three (tentatively titled Oak, Ash, and Thorn). And I would be remiss not to mention the amazing crash-course in all things equestrian my friend Jennifer Becton provided while putting The Devil’s Due together. (I’m gratified to have been able to return the favor with a new series she is working on.)
The key, I think, is to take a fearless inventory of what we don’t know—and then work on knowing it at least a little bit better.
The 2014 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners Have Been Announced
Always a highlight of my year!
Elizabeth Dorfman of Bainbridge Island, WA, is the 32nd grand prize winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest that that began at San Jose State University in 1982. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels and takes its name from the Victorian novelist George Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who began his Paul Clifford (1830) with “It was a dark and stormy night.“ Although Lytton did not originate the line, he exploited its familiarity to begin his novel, as have several other writers who followed him.
In the Fantasy category, we find these literary gems:
Winner:
As he strolled among the Kenthellians, through the wide parndamets along the River Elinionen, thrimbening his tometoria and his Almagister’s scrollix, he thought to himself, “Wow, it is sure convenient there’s a glossary for made-up fantasy words on page 1048.” —Stephen Young
Runner-Up:
After years of Dame Gothel’s tyrrany, Rapunzel was only seconds from freedom, until, with an agonized scream, the prince plunged to his death in the thorns below, grasping a handful of detached blond strands—the golden stair having been irreparably weakened by the deficiency of Vitamins B3, B6, and B7 in his love’s new celiac-friendly diet. —Kevin Hogg, Cranbrook, BC, Canada
Dishonorable Mention:
The Swan Queen spread her wings with all the quick grace of a businessman hailing a taxi in NYC and leaped high into the air like said businessman swearing and jumping back from the curb as the taxi he was hailing speeds past and splatters him with sludgy city puddle water, but in a more graceful way than the second bit. —Thor F. Carden, Madison, TN
The Changing Face(s) of Fantasy
Adam Dalton describes the continuing relevance of the fantasy genre in this insightful article over at Fantasy Faction. He writes,
Things move on. Things evolve. It’s healthy that the fantasy genre does so too – it keeps it fresh, vibrant, progressive and alive. It keeps is strongly ‘relevant’ to new readers. There are some genres that are far less progressive (in literary terms), and that are beginning to fail. A clear example is the genre of horror. Book sales have all but died off entirely (although in TV and film horror still does well). Many Waterstones stores have entirely done away with their horror sections (hiding them in their Scifi/Fantasy sections or relabeling them as Dark Fantasy sections). Unless you’re Stephen King or James Herbert (RIP), you simply aren’t going to sell many books if your book is labelled ‘horror’. Horror is literally dead. Ironically dead. Dead. Justin Cronin’s The Passage was first launched as a horror, and it hardly sold. It was relabelled scifi and relaunched. Again no sales. Then it was launched as a literary fiction and it became a best-seller.
Because scifi in terms of book sales is also in massive trouble. Brian Aldiss…puts is down to the fact that we now ‘live in a scifi world’ and that we therefore no longer need to read scifi so much. ‘Every week there’s some new device or invention that comes out and we don’t know how it works! Strange and confusing technology is all around us.’ Mr Aldiss has put his finger on it for me – current readers just don’t see scifi literature as being as ‘relevant’ to them as past readerships did.
Yet fantasy survives and thrives! Where it was the poor cousin to scifi in the 1970s, it now utterly dwarfs (interesting verb!) scifi. How does fantasy do it? What’s the secret? Well, it’s the magic of fantasy, isn’t it? Magic is at the heart of that genre. It tricks, distracts, bewitches and bespells, where other genres merely appal or confuse. And it’s learnt to be relevant, to reflect the shifting dreams and fantasies of its readership, to reflect the current state of society. ‘The current state?’ you might frown. ‘But fantasy isn’t real. It’s precisely the opposite of that.’ Precisely. Look, you can’t get a job as a philosopher these days, so you have to become a reader or writer of fantasy. Fantasy is the fairground mirror to the real, the extension and twisted exploration of the real, the different way of seeing that enables real change.
I feel as if I owe an apology to the professors of philosophy I know for that line about not being able to get a job as a philosopher these days. But I didn’t say it, so you’re on your own.
Bracketology for Story Plotting?
Well, I certainly didn’t expect this! But it just might work, if you’ve got the mindset to pull it off:
Brackets in sports are used to match up opponents, and then show how the winners from those matchups go on to compete in turn.
The simplest kind of story to use this pattern would involve different characters who were each out to kill the others, ruin them, best them in a competition, or otherwise force them out of the plot.
Outlining till It Hurts
While I’m waiting for The Devil’s Due to come back from my beta readers, I’m trying not to jump ahead and start working on the things I’m fairly certain they’re going to tell me about where the story could use some work. But I am filing away this nice piece of advice from Charlie Jane Anders about getting rid of the extraneous verbiage and making one thing flows from another in a logical manner.
Are you ready? Here’s the surefire advice for cutting without hitting muscle or bone: outlining. Specifically, keep outlining until it hurts. Outline things you’ve already rewritten a ton. Outline backwards. Do micro-outlines of every scene that’s not working.
The magic of outlining something you’ve already written and rewritten is, you can see where the actual beats are, and get a rough sense of just how much space each of the beats needs to have. (Not that pacing is an exact science, of course. Quite the reverse.) Outlining and re-outlining lets you see where you might have jumped a groove or had someone behave illogically, and also where you’re repeating steps.
And outlining backwards is magic. Start with the end, and then put “because” after that, and keep going back. This happens because this happens, because that other thing happens, and so on, back to the beginning. If you can’t stick a “because” between two things that are supposedly causally linked, that’s a bad sign.
Trinity Syndrome, or: What Was I Thinking, Writing a Female Protagonist??
Tasha Robinson laments the loss of many Strong Female Characters (a term she acknowledges is “more a marketing term than a meaningful goal”) to what she calls Trinity Syndrome:
For the ordinary dude to be triumphant, the Strong Female Character has to entirely disappear into Subservient Trophy Character mode. This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene.
I’ll be the first to admit I have a lot to learn about writing female characters—which is kind of sad, since Children of Pride and its coming sequel, The Devil’s Due, are chock-full of them! Readers can decide if I’ve written “strong” female characters. Following the checklist Tasha provided, I’m at least on the right track. At any rate, I’m at least fairly sure I’ve written interesting female (and male) characters: motivated, complex, fallible, and, on some level, familiar.
The concluding paragraph is an excellent diagnostic:
So maybe all the questions can boil down to this: Looking at a so-called Strong Female Character, would you—the writer, the director, the actor, the viewer—want to be her? Not want to prove you’re better than her, or to have her praise you or acknowledge your superiority. Action movies are all about wish-fulfillment. Does she fulfill any wishes for herself, rather than for other characters? When female characters are routinely “strong” enough to manage that, maybe they’ll make the “Strong Female Characters” term meaningful enough that it isn’t so often said sarcastically.
Wit and Grit in Fantasy
Sebastien de Castell explains why you need both in a very nice post at Fantasy Faction.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragic play fraught with intrigue, betrayal, and murder that makes us question the very foundations of human nature.
It starts with a joke.
To be more precise, the first scene is a series of puns in which a nobleman is made ridiculous to the audience by a cobbler who refers to himself as a ‘mender of soles’ (which, of course, the nobleman hears as ‘souls’.) It’s a remarkably clever scene that no doubt set the audience of the Globe Theatre in 1599 falling out of their seats from laughter. But what follows is the destruction of friendships, the breakdown of civil society, and an unending series of killings until the world of the play becomes utterly desolate. So why on earth does Shakespeare start with a joke?
World-building: Extensive, Minimal, Top-down, and Bottom-up
Philip Overby has a new post up at Mythic Scribes about that perennial topic among fantasy writers, world-building. Philip lays out the pros and cons of both “extensive” and “minimal” approachs to world building, and he does it quite well. I’ll go ahead and state my preference for extensive world-building—as long as it doesn’t bog down the story.
I commented:
I think of it sort of like a flower garden. People who come by to admire your roses and petunias don’t really care what sort of fertilizer you use or how you decide when to plant or the brand of your favorite set of clippers. They care about the finished product, not the process. And yet, when the other members of the local gardening society come around, they love to talk shop, share tips, etc.
I’m not sure what proportion of fantasy readers are like the members of the gardening society and want to delve deeply into the appendices in the back of the book (or the Wiki or whatever). I am fairly confident, however, that that number is greater than zero. 🙂
In addition to “extensive” and “minimal,” I find it helpful to think in terms of either “top-down” or “bottom-up” world-building. Top-down world-building gives you the big picture of what is actually possible in this new, fantastical world—and why, given this broad context, things actually happen the way they do.
I’m thinking here of the basic mechanics of the world, the elements that inform the overall direction of the story. Top-down world-building looks at the sorts of broad subject matter one could study about our own world: history, technology, geography, religion, politics, etc. Add to this the things that would be a part of a well-rounded education in our world if, in fact, our world was a fantasy setting: How does magic work? What sapient species (elves, dwarves, fauns, talking animals, etc.) exist, and how do they all get along?
It’s a good idea for writers to have a pretty firm handle on these sorts of issues. Philip is right that at least some of this work really should be done before writing commences. I would urge, however, that writers spare us the info dump. If the world is engaging enough, I’ll certainly ask for more “behind the scenes” information. But I don’t want all this fascinating detail to get in the way of a great story. Rather, let these kinds of issues bubble up organically from within the story itself.
Bottom-up world-building is different. These are the elements that lend a certain tone or “color” to the narrative. They may very well be the sorts of things writers dream up on the spot to give their world a greater sense of verisimilitude or simply to entertain the readers.
One good example of what I mean by bottom-up world-building is the in-universe terminology characters use to talk about the various features of their world. What sort of slang, shorthand, technical terminology, or even profanity grows naturally out of the way your world is put together? You can develop an entire magical system using generic terms like “non-magical person,” but doesn’t it add something to the story’s texture to call such a person a “Muggle” (if you’re Harry Potter) or a “straight” (if you’re Harry Dresden)? For me, bottom-up world-building usually begins when I say, “I need a term used by group X to refer to concept Y” or “I need a weird or magical way people in my world would perform ordinary activity Z.”
I’ll be honest and admit that some of my bottom-up world-building takes the form of puns and gags. My purpose is to entertain, after all. So maybe my protagonist is listening to a country-western song in which the cowboy-wizard’s three-headed dog runs away. Or maybe my elves fire “elf-shot” from a twelve-gauge rather than a bow and arrow. (I actually decided to include that last one in Children of Pride fairly late in the writing process. Fortunately, I already had enough of the magic system worked out to explain [to myself!] how it could work. Maybe someone will explain it to my protagonist in a later volume…)
Top-down and bottom-up complement each other. In fact, the two can even build upon each other as the writer reflects on how his or her world is taking shape.
Darrell J. Pursiful 