Deeds & Words

I just posted my response to this Nebula-award winning novel.  Now I want to make a more personal comment about my reaction to the book.

One reason I comment on other books is that reading analytically helps me see what works and what doesn’t work in a story or a novel.  Theoretically, I can then apply that skill to my own work.

I commented that The Windup Girl had a plot that was slack in the first half, and I found that to be a problem.  Let me put that remark in some context.  The draft of the novel I am currently working on has enough slack in the plot to host a double-Dutch jump-rope tournament.

While I was reading Windup Girl, and while I was drafting my post, I had two epiphanies; two places where scenes in my book  that are fun but do not advance the story can be cut or at least condensed.  One involves our heroes stopping to buy a black market car.  At one point, something happened there that made that scene necessary; but now it isn’t.  It’s about seven pages–I can cut it to one paragraph.

I would not have made that connection, tiny though it is, is I had not been looking at Bacigalupi’s novel through the lens of a tighter plot.  Thank you, Mr. Bacigalupi!

I paid extra at the conference to have a consultation with an agent.  This is standard conference practice and really is the reason many new writers go to conferences.  They hope they’ll find an agent. I came to MCWC the first time nursing that hope as if it were a flame in a windstorm.  I met a wonderful, interesting encouraging agent who does not represent fantasy and science fiction, but told me to call her when I wrote something that wasn’t category fiction.  Now I think that I’ll never find an agent at MCWC, but the consultations are still interesting—and, you never know. 

I’ll call the agent Julie Faber.  This isn’t her name, but she was a really nice person and I’m going to make fun of her, so, name-change.  I was her last consult before an hour long break, just in time for lunch. Julie had wavy brown hair, drawn off the sides of her face with slim amber-colored barrettes.  Before she struck out on her new career, she edited a well-known short-story magazine, and no, it’s not Glimmer Train. 

We exchanged pleasantries.  She asked which story was mine, and then said, “Oh!  The dog bite story!”  My story opens with a woman being attacked by a fighting dog. 

“I’ve been bitten by dogs several times,” Julie said. 

I thought, oh, great, let me just reopen that trauma for you. 

“What I meant was, your opening is authentic and scary.” 

“Oh,” I said.  “Oh, good.  Thanks.” 

“And I like your writing.  I like the detail. You’ve got convincing characters with real problems.” 

She picked up the manuscript and started paging through it.  The pages made that shoop-shoop sound as they brushed against each other.  Shoop, shoop, shoop.  “But I had some trouble at the end.” 

“Uh-huh,” I said.  Usually, when a story fails, readers think the ending is the problem.  “It falls apart at the end.”  You hear that a lot.  The ending is usually not the problem; it’s just a symptom.  That could have been what was happening here, but I didn’t think so.  I thought I knew what was coming. 

“She, um, there’s a change in your narrative voice.  A complete change.  It’s very strange.  Suddenly she’s a. . . does she change?  Into a, a dog?” 

“A wolf,” I said.  “It’s a fantasy story.  She turns into a wolf.” 

“A wolf?” 

“It’s a werewolf story.” 

She peered at me, the way I peer at people when they’ve thrown a non-English word into a sentence—like je ne sais quoi—and I have to confirm that I heard it right before I can interpret it.  “Oh.  I wonder how I would know that.” 

How, indeed.  Here’s one way; you are reading a story about an ordinary young woman, only she doesn’t seem quite ordinary.  She seems to have secrets.  Then she transforms into a wolf.  Then you think, “Oh, it’s a werewolf story.”  That’s one way you could know. 

Before I said that, or something less snarky but still snarky, she said, “I don’t read fantasy.  I can’t understand it.” 

I did not say, “No!  Really?”  And I did not say, “Sure you can! You don’t give yourself enough credit.  Look how fast you figured out she was something in the canine family!” I don’t think I actually said anything. 

The magazine she used to edit runs stories that go like this: 

There is a man.  He lives in an apartment.  His apartment is dreary.  The man is depressed.  The man looks out his window and sees a foggy, dismal street.  There follows a paragraph of breathtaking lyricism, describing the foggy dismalness of it all.  The man is building a scale model of the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks.  The man lost someone close to him; maybe an ailing parent, less likely a partner, most likely a child.  The man remembers something surreal, like an angel hovering over the toothpick Taj Mahal.  Sometime later, the story ends. 

The angel is not fantasy, however.  It might be psychological, or it may be symbolic, but it isn’t fantasy, because these stories are literary. 

People like Julie have no trouble believing in situations where no one has to pay the rent and they can stay in their dreary apartment and build toothpick Taj Mahals, but cannot accept that a woman might turn into a wolf, because, that’s, you know fantasy, and they can’t understand fantasy. 

However, there was more to Julie than I might have supposed, because she asked me where I would market a story like this.  I told her.  Then she said, “What kind of story can you write, in fantasy?” 

“Any story you can tell in category fiction or mainstream, you can tell in a fantastical world,” I said.  “It could be a mystery, a family saga, an adventure.”  I tried to think of an example.  “For instance, have you read Toni Morrison?” 

She shook her head.  “No.” 

No?  Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison?  Haven’t read her?  I said, “She has a book called Beloved.  It won the Pulitzer.  One of the main characters is a ghost.  That’s fantasy.”  Less hopefully now, “Have you read Michael Chabon?” 

She looked unsure, started to shake her head. 

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  It’s a police procedure set in an alternate world.  That’s fantasy.” 

She nodded. 

I did not say, “Shakespeare, ever hear of him?  Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s fantasy; The Tempest, fantasy,” because that would have just been mean. 

I thanked her for her time and left. 

Later I was whining to the others about this experience and Donna said, “That’s interesting.  She was educating herself.” 

So maybe this intelligent, personable young woman is not a complacent bigot after all, and is going to experiment with the world of fantasy.  Maybe she’ll step off Main Street into that narrow, overgrown side alley. What’s the worst that could happen?  The thing all the anti-fantasy bigots–that all bigots, actually, secretly fear; that she’ll grow to love it.

Here’s hoping.

The Harbor Lite Hotel curves around the top of the harbor, two stories of dark brown wood,  just over the long bridge at the mouth of the Noyo River. The place caters to tourists who fish, with a cleaning station on the ground floor and polite signs scattered about asking fishers to please keep their catch in a cooler and not in the mini-fridges in the rooms.  My second-floor room, room 309 –no, I don’t get it either—had a redwood balcony with two metal patio chairs and a small round table. Looking out from it, I could see the tall pylons and the bridge, the stretch of businesses south of the bridge, the curve of the river, the parking lots and buildings of the waterfront,  the boats and the seals. The marina is actually farther southeast around the curve, so most of the boats I watched were either coming out or going in. 

Most mornings, the cup of the harbor was filled with layers of thick gray condensation.  Thursday and Friday, the fog never broke, so I came back in the afternoon or evening to a gray landscape. 

The Harbor Lite didn’t have the laminated “Do Not Disturb/Maid Service Please” signs that you hang over the door.  Instead, they had a little switch on the door, level with the peep-hole.  Crank the switch one way, and a metal plaque saying “Maid Service Needed” popped into view on the outside of the door.  Crank it the other and it read, “Do Not Disturb.”  I have never seen this before, anywhere but here.  It seemed very retro, sort of 1970’s state-of-the-art.  I decided later that is showed some “green” sensibility, since they never have to replace the laminated cards.  

Friday, when I got back to my room, I flipped the switch to “Do Not Disturb.”  I don’t know why I did this; housekeeping had come and gone.  It’s a habit.  I also shot the deadbolt because I tell myself I’m big on hotel security. I wasn’t planning to go anywhere for dinner because just an hour earlier I had eaten a scone, with a coffee drink, at the Headlands Coffee Company.  I had crackers and cheese, some fresh blueberries I had brought from home, and a nectarine.  That seemed like a good-enough dinner, especially since I had a Lee Childs thriller, Nothing to Lose, as a complement. 

About eight o’clock I was sitting on the edge of the bed, one leg tucked under me, one on the floor, reading and sipping from a plastic glass filled with ice and fizzy mineral water.  Someone thumped on the door three times.  I jerked and splashed water on my pants.  They thumped again.  

I got up and started for the door.  My heartbeat jolted a little when I thought it could be some kind of emergency.  Another pace, and I wondered if it were someone from the conference.  Donna, Mark, Cheryl and Jerry were staying across the highway at the Emerald Dolphin, but there were others from the conference staying here.  How would they know my room number, though?  “Who’s there?” 

Someone warbled, “Housekeeping,” in a falsetto.  As the word implies, a fake high-pitched voice.  I stopped in front of the door.

 Several years ago I went to Orcas Island, in Puget Sound, to visit my dad and stepmother.  I stayed at the Orcas Hotel, the refurbished Victorian Inn across the street from the ferry landing.  I had made it onto the island that day, had dinner with the folks, and about nine pm I was in pajamas and a robe, under the covers with a book, when someone pounded on my door.  “Come out, gorgeous!” a man bellowed.  It freaked me out.  There was a popular bar on the ground floor; now I was going to have to interact with some guy for whom happy hour had lasted 180 minutes.  Sighing, I slipped my feet out from under the blankets, when the same man, sounding less hearty and more tentative, said, “Marion?”  It was my stepbrother. 

Later he said, “With my luck, I thought I had the wrong room.”  Then he told me a story about his uncle, who had stopped at a hotel where he knew sister-in-law was staying.  After a couple of beers in the lounge, his uncle went up and pounded on the door, saying “Come out, gorgeous!”  And he did have the wrong room. 

It was not likely to be either of my stepbrothers standing on the threshold of my Fort Bragg hotel room. 

I looked through the peep-hole at a slender young guy with short blond hair, wearing a camo T-shirt, who peered back in my general direction.  His skin had a golden tone and his eyes looked dark.  He was grinning.  I didn’t know him.  I already felt bad, knowing I was going to spoil the joke. 

I unlatched the bolt and opened the door.  So much for hotel safety. 

His eyes widened.  “Oh, fu—uh, um, I’m sorry!” he said.  He looked over his shoulder, over the railing into the parking lot.  “You guys!  You told me 309!” The intended surprise was clearly on him.

 From below, “That’s what he said!” someone shouted back. 

I smiled. “Wrong room?” 

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said again. 

I felt like I should say I was sorry for dashing his expectations, but I just smiled again and closed the door.  

I hope he found the right room eventually and was able to carry out his surprise.  This might be a cautionary tale, though; for him, not for me.  It’s not about opening the door.  Maybe the moral of the story is about the benefits of doing your own research.

Sunday,7:57 am.

I pulled into a parking space right in front of the narrow one-story blue diner. The sign read “Open,” but no lights were on inside. A small silvery SUV pulled in next to me. In the passenger seat, a thin woman, her brown hair scooped up on top of her head, fumbled with her shoulder harness, twisting back and forth. I recognized her from the last time I had eaten here. She shoved open the door and bounced out.

I said, “Good morning. Are you going to be open?”

“Sure, sure, let me get some coffee started and we’ll be open,” she said, shrugging out of a quilted black jacket and tossing it into the back seat. “You can hang out.” The driver, the man, walked in ahead of her without speaking, keys in one hand. I followed them in. The man’s sweater was a brownish green color, like the algae you can find along the edges of the Noyo River in the late summer. There was no breakfast menu posted.

The unlit room was cool, smelling of fish and charred wood. I walked to the table at the end of the dining room. The air got colder as I walked. Pale yellow crumbs dotted the table like pebbles. I used my forearm to brush them off.

Behind me, metal squealed. I turned. The man held up a spill of newsprint, lit it, and fed it into the open maw of the woodstove. He peered over at me. His eyebrows winged up at the ends and his eyes matched the color of his sweater. “Did you open that window?” he said, pointing past me.

I shook my head. I hadn’t touched anything except the table. He shut the stove door and walked over. “I’d better close it then.” He slid the window shut. “I guess that was open all night. That’s not good.”

“You don’t want the raccoons getting in.”

“People break in here,” he said. “They have. They, they go for the wine.”

I nodded, surprised. I had thought he was going to say, “cash,” even though I’m sure they empty the till every night.

While the coffee brewed I walked outside onto the wharf. The fog, which had been drifting in steadily since dawn, had condensed, turning the buildings on the cliff rim into blunt shadows and the bridge into a trailing arch of silver under gray. I took a couple of pictures and watched a seal stitch its way in long loops through the dark green water.

Saturday, the day had dawned with a faint sparkling of mist around the edges of the harbor cliffs, which soon evaporated, leaving a glorious day filled with blue skies and a blue ocean, complete with a cool breeze. This morning, checking out of my hotel, I said to the clerk, “Yesterday sure was pretty.”

“We have a name for that up here,” she said. “We call it a miracle.”

Back inside the restaurant, the coffee was ready. The woman served it in a white cup with a curlicued handle, a small blue flower on each face of the cup. The coffee was not as strong as it smelled, but it warmed my tongue. I got into a conversation with the man in the green sweater. It started with him asking where I was from. I told him; he decided that made me almost a local.

We discussed the standards for “local;” he said they had moved there ten years ago and were still not considered locals. I told him about my parents moving to Puget Sound in the 1970s and how twenty years later people on the island talked about them as “those new folks down at West Beach.” He talked about the web of related families on this stretch of Mendocino coast; the businessmen, fishermen and homeless bums who all went through school together, married each other’s sisters, and that you can’t break into that. Even when they hate each other, even when they feud, they’re family. I said that I had noticed that many of the names in Fort Bragg, Caspar and Mendocino went back several generations and he agreed.

He asked if I were a teacher. “You’re very verbal,” he said. “Articulate, I mean. Most people like you, when they come in here and start asking questions or strike up a conversation, they’re usually teachers.”

I told him I wasn’t, that I’d been here for the writing conference.

“I used to teach writing,” he said, “In Arizona at a private college. Twenty years ago, before I blew up my life with drugs and politics. I got out. I had to do something really different. Now I don’t read fiction, hardly at all, maybe one book a year.”

“Well, that’s sad,” I said.

He disagreed. While he was talking about TS Eliot, Melville and Faulkner, which kids used to read in school (but not anymore) the woman brought me my French toast. The thick slices of battered bread were piled overlapping on the diagonal, forming a starburst, wedges of cantaloupe, pineapple and kiwi interspersed. The cook brought the same eye to her food presentation as she does to her fractal paintings which lined the inner wall. I told her that. She gave me a smile; the muscles around the mouth moved but the ones around her faded-denim blue eyes did not.

While I was excavating my way around the architecture of my breakfast a couple came in, about equal height, slender. She had short russet hair highlighted with strands of gray. He had a trimmed gray beard and gray hair.

“Now these folks, they don’t talk at all,” said the man in the green sweater.

“Not a word,” the woman said. “Here’s what I’d like,” and she ordered without seeing a menu, all side orders, nothing that had been printed on the broadsheet I had been given.

The man pulled out a small laptop and opened it. He shared some footage, apparently, with the Green Sweater man. At the end they laughed and all said, “Good dog.”

Green Sweater Man came back over to my table. He said he wanted to recommend a book to me; he didn’t remember the author but the title was Story. It was a how-to book about writing for Hollywood, and he knew people who swore by it. I agreed that “Story” was an easy title to remember and said I could probably look it up on Amazon.

“The writers’ conference is right over the bridge,” I said, pointing with my fork. “Maybe next year you could go.”

He started shaking his head. “Nope. Nope, can’t do it.” He made a swinging gesture with his arms, embracing the restaurant. “Can’t do it.”

I nodded and took a bite of French toast. The outside was crispy and the interior soft, and it had soaked up just enough maple syrup.

He said, “People who can talk your ear off—like you–people like that, we’re important. The world needs us, needs the people who can talk.”

I swallowed, took a sip of coffee. I didn’t have anything to say.

I ate about half of the French toast. It was delicious, and I was stuffed, and starting to quiver from the intake of real coffee. I watched a white fishing boat pull up alongside, tried to take a picture through the slatted fence, gave up, and settled my bill. I wanted to leave a good tip, but I didn’t want to seem condescending, especially since the woman hadn’t really smiled at my compliment to her artwork. So I did some arithmetic and came down in the area of “rube,” “mark” or even “math-challenged” rather than “stuck-up city folk.” I hoped.

Outside, transparent blue smoke snaked around the chimney-head of the wood stove, diluting itself in the silver fog. I backed out slowly, thinking. I thought about Arizona, and the Mendocino coast. I thought about drugs and politics, and what a strange yet natural combination that was. I thought about the conference I had just left, and showing not telling, and writing in scene and using dialogue and how unusual it was that, at the end of the conference, some random person would suggest a book called Story.

The world needs us; the people who can talk.

Here’s another fun thing to do instead of actual writing.  It’s called the I Write Like analyzer.  Copy some of your deathless prose and paste it in, click Analyze and let the algorithm do its thing. 

The first several times I did it (yes, I’ve done this many, many times) I pulled some text from my most recent short story.  I Write Like told me I write like. . . JK Rowling.  I glanced at the copy and noted that the section I had chosen (a social worker has been attacked by a fighting dog) had short sentences and people speaking with exclamation marks.  That made sense. 

I pulled some text from Chapter One of my novel and found out I write like. . . Harry Harrison.  Okay, cool.  Sci fi novel to Golden Age sci fi writer.  I’ll take it. 

Then, just for fun, I analyzed two blog postings.  In one, I wrote like Stephen King.  In another, I blogged like David Foster Wallace.  That’s just weird. 

Then, last night, I started making stuff up.  Here’s what I put in: 

It was a dark and stormy night.  Rain lashed the windows and in the distance a dog howled, ululating like the spirit of a lost soul.  In the slim, rectangular house that thrust up from the sand like a shard of redwood crystal, the children huddled under one blanket, the bluish neon light of the blackberry illuminating their pallid quotidian faces.  Fresca, the eldest, cupped the device in her broad farmer’s hands. Sanjo, the baby, only just three, yawned, and yawned again, leaning against his sister Pumpernickel’s plump shoulder. 

“When will we all meet again?” Pumpernickel wondered, staring dazzle-eyed through the fluid silvery glass at the spears of rain beyond.  “And will it all be worth the pain?” 

Fresca’s blunt fingers flittered over the device’s keys, which were the size of a baby’s teeth.  “On Tuesday,” she said.

And it said I write like
Vladimir Nabokov 

(Yeah? It was the Pumpernickel, I think.)

I wrote: 

The lounge and grill, open since 1963, was six and two-tenths miles from Census Tract 047 or what the atlas referred to as the city center.  Seventy-three pink plastic flamingos, many faded by sun and age to translucent white, filled the grassy area, eight feet by ten that separated the rippled parking lot from the porte cochere and the heavy double doors.  Frank Jones Senior had built the place and run it for thirty-seven years before retiring and moving to Bali where he meditated on a beach in a Speedo and carved demon figurines for gullible tourists.  His daughter Trixie assumed management of the lounge.  At forty-two, Trixie, who stood five feet and two inches tall and weighed one hundred three pounds, was an attractive woman who had spent too much time in the sun.  Her face looked like the same fine-grained leather as the Coach bag she wore slung over her shoulder.  Trixie favored four inch stiletto heels, backless slings in the summer, and clinging knit dresses in primary colors. 

And it told me I write like:
Stephen King 

Oh, my gosh, it is kind of like Stephen King. 

So, instead of digging in and figuring out why you’re suddenly stuck in Chapter Thirteen, try this!  You can waste hours, it’s fun, and you can rationalize that you are learning about your writing style.

On his blog Fiction is So Overrated, Chad Hull recently posted an essay on well-made books—the physical book. He was evaluating  Easton Press. He discussed the merits of hand-sewn signatures rather than glued-in pages, the importance of low-acid papers and other things that make a book an object of quality or even art, beyond the printed words it holds. 

The Sig-O and I have been having experiences at the other end of the quality continuum. Two weeks ago I picked him up a Simon Green book.  It wasn’t one of that British author’s series with which we were familiar; it looked more like traditional fantasy.  It’s called Hawk and Fisher; a collection of novellas and short stories featuring characters with those names.  The Sig-O said he would have liked the book better if twenty-five pages hadn’t been missing in the center.  This was a trade paperback, purchased new.  It didn’t come from a used book store where the pages could have been torn out, or where the book got wet and the glue softened, or so on.  This is a new book. In production, one signature did not get glued into place.  If it happened to one book, odds are good it happened to a thousand in that particular print run. Or, I don’t know, maybe it is just a hiccup in the machine and it just happened a few hundred times in some random order. 

I told him that between the two of us we broke even, because  one of the Cherie Priest books I had purchased, as new, had twenty-five pages repeated in the first third.  The whole book was there; I had just gotten a bonus—twenty five pages I could read again, after I had just finished reading them. 

These are quality control problems that shouldn’t happen.  I won’t go so far as to say they never happened in the good old days.  I read plenty of paperbacks in the 1970s that had typographical errors in them, at least (although, I have to say, not as many as today).  And I remember being horribly disappointed by a copy of DH Lawrence’s book The Rainbow, which I did buy used—and rather battered—when I got to what I thought was going to be the end and found that 30 pages had fallen out before I purchased it. That was a used book, though. I paid a buck-fifty and I knew the risks when I bought it. 

Paperbacks in the 70s were made on bad paper that already looks a hundred years old, with cheap covers that tore and split.  They weren’t meant to last, but they were usually intact when you got them at least.  

Apparently the companies marketing fantasy and science fiction now don’t care whether you get the entire book you bought.  I suppose these errors could just be an effect of automation—clearly there is no human entity checking the books at the end of the assembly line.  This may be unfair, but I can’t help thinking that when books were produced by publishing companies, rather than conglomerates that got started making shoes, there was some tiny spark of pride in what was being produced.  Clearly that is not the case now.  

Caveat emptor, with books, used to mean that you might not agree with what you read; that you might find the work offensive or poorly written.  It really didn’t mean, “Good luck getting the whole thing you purchased!”

In the 1980s I took a writing workshop from Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm.  Knight was a paladin from the Golden Age of science fiction.  Wilhelm helped define New Wave before moving on to mysteries and legal thrillers.  They were—Kate still is—wonderful teachers, consummate writers and great people.

They had a model for teaching the workshop.  They were not holding it up as a recipe, although they could have done.  It was just a way of looking at how fiction, how a story, gets developed.  They talked about four elements:

Character

Setting/Background (those two are different)

What If?

Story/Plot (the “what happens” and the “how it happens”)

First, Character

Kate started us off by having us write a character study.  She wanted it to be detailed.  So let’s pretend you came back to the workshop the next day with something like this:  “Annabeth is a twenty-seven-year old Nobel-Prize-winning astrophysicist who loves to run marathons and do salsa dancing.  She went through a bad divorce a couple of years ago, and zealously guards her independence.  To show her quirky, spontaneous spirit, Annabeth frequently wears a bright red beret atop her glossy raven-black curls.”

Kate might say, “Hmm, lovely image with the hat.  Now, about Annabeth.  What’s her favorite color?  What’s her favorite food?  Does she get along with her parents?  Her siblings?  What’s her ethnic or cultural background?  What’s her greatest strength?  What’s her weakness?  What’s her hidden strength? What’s her dark secret?  Everyone has a dramatic incident from childhood, maybe good, maybe bad and frightening.  We all have one.  What’s hers?”

This made you spend time with your character.  It doesn’t mean that any of the answers to those questions will end up directly in the story, but by immersing yourself in the character you begin to uncover motivations for the actions of the characters, the actions that will drive the plot.

Setting/Background:

If your story is set in a small town in northern California, is it near a freeway?  When was it founded?  Are there mountains nearby?  Is there a river or a bay nearby?  Where are the power plants?  Where are the sewer plants?  Is it a commercial city, a college town, an agricultural town?  If the action takes place mostly in a sprawling, spooky old house, you need to decide where the rooms are relative to each other.  What’s on the second story?  Which way do the windows face?  Where is the staircase?

If you’re using a real place, go there if possible.  At least buy some maps and look at it on Google Earth, so that you don’t do things like have your San Francisco based character paying a toll while heading northbound on the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance.

For fantasy and science fiction, you have to take this to a different level.  It is neither fair nor good writing to set a story on another planet and say, “They terraformed it so it looked just like Earth,” or, even worse, “. . . so that it looked just like Ohio in the 1950s.”  What does the native flora look like?  Are there any left?  Are there machines to maintain the atmosphere or recirculate the water?  Where are those machines and what do they look like?

Let’s say that, in Annabeth’s world, The Catholics managed to crush the Protestant movement in the mid-1500s and England never developed as a world power. A Spanish-Catholic themed consortium colonized North America.  Annabeth may still be an astrophysicist, but she may not have won the Nobel Prize, because in this alternate timeline, Alfred Nobel may never have been born.  (And Annabeth probably wouldn’t be divorced.) What other changes would four hundred years of Catholic rule have brought to this country?

The What-If:

It’s still not your story, but it’s getting close.  For science fiction or fantasy, this is the thing that differentiates your book from a literary novel, a mystery or romance.  It’s the thing that differentiates your book’s world from this one.

In China Mieville’s The City and the City, it’s basically, “What if string theory were not just a theoretical model, and there was a completely different city right here where we’re standing?  And what if, sometimes, the two dimensions bleed through?”

What if a virus became sentient? (Or, what if a sentient virus from elsewhere invaded us?)

What if you found a completely original, perfectly authenticated, new Shakespeare play?

What if the elder gods existed still?

What if someone found a map to the Holy Grail?

What if magic worked?

What if people could travel in time?

These are the what-ifs.  Note that you can take any one of those and write almost any kind of story around that question.  Take The City and the City, for instance, and those neighboring dimensions. Annabeth could discover a portal to another dimension, and need to hide it from the Vatican (or take news of it to the Vatican; it works either way).  Bad people want to stop her.  Action/adventure.  Annabeth’s ex-husband/partner/mentor/rival is murdered and manages to pass the secret of the dimensional portal to her—mystery. She has to prove its existence to some kind of board or tribunal, and the “devil’s advocate” is a hunky young brother who has not taken his final vows.  Bam!  Romance.

The Story

Your story is what happens (see above).  Your plot is how it happens.  Much has been written about story and plot, so I’m not going to spend much time on it.  The story should have an arc and a resolution.  Change should happen, either to your characters or to the world (they save it, they change it, whatever). Events follow a dramatic model, and your character drives the action by his/her actions and reactions.

Kate Wilhelm’s theory was that in good fiction these four elements are so interwoven, so bonded, that to remove one causes the whole work to collapse. 

The motive for the murder that starts The City and the City would not exist without Mieville’s what-if and his setting.  The book would have neither the solution nor the resolution it has were it set in London, Los Angeles, or New York.  To see Tyador Borlu, the main character, as a “typical” detective-noir cop is to miss the point of the book.  It’s an origin story.  Tyador’s clever, competent partner could have solved the murder herself, but it would have been a different book, because she, unlike Ty, will not willingly commit breach. Ty’s city shaped him; the background and the setting shape the plot, and Ty acts on the plot because of the person he’s become living in Beszel.

I just finished Fathom, by Cherie Priest.  In it, the four elements are not as tightly woven as they could be.  Physical setting is practically perfect.  While it’s possible, I think it would be a stretch to imagine an ocean goddess menacing mortals in Ohama, Nebraska.  Florida, surrounded on three sides by water, with a magical tower nearly in its exact center, make the perfect battleground for the tale.  The characters of Gaspar and Nia, in particular, seem shaped by their environments. Priest’s “what-if” (what if the elder gods existed?) lends power and even a certain dignity to Arahab the water witch.  She isn’t just a random monster out to destroy the world.

The gap in the seam comes with the time period.  There’s no real need that I can see for the story to take place in the 1930s.  Any time from the 1890s to the 1950s should have worked.  Because the 30s are associated with a serious economic depression, choosing it sets up an expectation that the Great Depression would play a part in the story, and it does not.

Notice how, in Boneshaker, there are no gaps in any of the seams.  The elements are as tightly woven as a Pomo basket.  Briar and Zeke could not be who there are if they didn’t live in the shattered Seattle of the book, and neither would Minnericht.  Only a woman with Briar’s history could effect the book’s ending.  This go-round, the time is perfect and Priest’s alternate universe, with an extended American Civil War that is slowly bleeding the national treasury and has kept the territory of Washington out of the union, answers lots of questions the reader might have about why something hasn’t been done.  The characters in “downtown” Seattle only developed the way they did because they live within the Blight; and only the gold-blinded, pioneering types who thrived on this frontier could have started the sequence of events that led to the Blight in the first place.

Priest probably just wanted to write a steampunk novel with zombies.  The point is that she did it for real.  The zombies are not tacked on.  They emerge as an inevitable consequence of other actions.  The long civil war explains the presence of the dirigibles, and Briar’s choice of weapon is fully explained by her upbringing.

In The Glister, John Burnside creates an eerie, exquisite setting and background, a great what-if, and he has, in Leonard, an engaging character.  His story, however, drifts between the fate of the five missing boys and the more important fate of the inhabitants of the town.  In his case, he did not pick the story that meshed with the setting, background, character and what-if.

Yes, it all looks so easy. . . from this side. Anyway, the recipe works.  Try it out for yourself.  And pick up some of Kate Wilhelm’s books, while you’re at it, if you haven’t already.  You can thank me later.

Where I work, there’s a signal that gets used in the women’s restroom whenever one of the paper towel dispensers runs out of paper.  A scrap of paper towel (presumably the last scrap) is stuck on to the handle of the dispenser.  It’s been this way for twenty years at least, and everyone, even the janitorial staff, knows its meaning.  It makes sense; it’s not like you’re necessarily going to have a notepad and a pen with which to write a note. This evolved organically; there’s no section in the department manual or memo on our intranet about it.  Believe me, I’d know. 

The other day I went into to restroom and saw that on the door of the far stall, a scrap of paper towel had been tucked into the door.  I looked at it for a couple of seconds.  I mean, the stall doesn’t have a towel dispenser.  Unless this is a way to let us know that there is no toilet paper. 

Aha!

This is the quote I originally planned to use, from Endless Things:

“. . . For readers, time in a novel goes only one way; the past told of in the turned pages is fixed, and the future, nonexistent till read.  But actually the writer, like God, stands outside of time, and can begin his creation at any moment in it.  All the past and all the future are present in his conception at once, nothing fixed until all of it’s fixed.  Then he keeps this secret from the reader, as God might keep his secret from us:  that the world is as though written, and erasable, and rewritable.  Not once but more than once; time and again.

” Which isn’t so, of course; which isn’t so.  Only in here.” (p 190)

This quote came from a Huffington Post article about the Goldman Sachs thing.  Do they mean you shouldn’t sell products that you know will fail, or that you shouldn’t sell to investors you know will fail?  You be the judge.

“Knowingly selling junk to investors that you’re expecting to go bust is fraud.”