February 2009 Archives

I should warn you that when writers talk about their books and writing, they're continuing the process of fiction that they live by.

E.L. Doctorow

The monkey story, the first draft of which I finished over the weekend, had its genesis in a 277-word fragment that I tossed up onto my old blog back in 2005. I was casting about for something to write because I'd hit a dry patch with The Book, so I started poking around on the hard drive. That fragment turned into a short story of about 4,000 words. The interesting thing--to me, anyway--is that no trace of that original fragment remains. Once the story sprouted, it outgrew its inspiration, and I ended up cutting all of it.

I've got far more fragments and unfinished pieces than I do completed pieces. I used to regard them as evidence of my dilettantishness (new word! Dilettantocity sounded wrong). Now I treat them like little pokes in the noggin that might possibly lead to bigger things. When the creative well seems to be running dry, I just read through the fragments, and see if anything inspires me.

As it turns out, the second-person stuff went out the window along with the fragment, but while I was shuffling through other fragments last night I came across this, which I scribbled down at some point in 2007 and post here now in the spirit of The Orphan:

If I were to say to you, "This is your story," you would laugh, and deny it.  Because I don't know you, and you don't know me.  The idea that a stranger can tell your story is absurd.  That a stranger can tell your story, and that you are one among many readers of it, is beyond absurd.  It is impossible.  Nevertheless, I will be your narrator.  And when I have finished, you will know the truth of your story, and how I came to know it.

I am sitting across from you now, and writing this sentence about you, and you have no idea.  What will become of the two of us...what will transpire over the next eleven days...that is in our future.  When I wrote the first sentence of this paragraph, it was the present.  Now, it is in the past.  I have lifted it from my notebook, and placed it here, effective time travel.  There is no future, not yet, and when there is, and I place it here, it will once again become the past.

I'd love to know the rest of that story. If I ever figure out what it is, I'll write it down.

The monkey story I'm currently working on uses second-person in a few places, which is risky. Via  BoingBoing, I read this interesting bit of Science!

"Research published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that, while frequently annoying, the use of the second person in fiction compels readers to form more vivid identification in literature."

In the comments, author Charlie Stross writes,

[There is a] trick I had to learn to write HALTING STATE -- namely, when you're writing second person narrative, the one thing you absolutely must avoid doing at all costs is to tell the reader how they react. (You can describe their actions and physiological symptoms, but their internal emotional state is strictly off-limits to you, the author, lest you set them up for cognitive dissonance.)

The study itself comes to us courtesy of the US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center (NSRDEC) and Tufts University:

In these experiments, volunteers read sentences describing everyday actions. The statements were expressed in either first- ("I am..."), second- ("You are...") or third-person ("He is..."). Volunteers then looked at pictures and had to indicate whether the images matched the sentences they had read. The pictures were presented in either an internal (i.e. as though the volunteer was performing the event him/herself) or external (i.e. as though the volunteer was observing the event) perspective.

The results, reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicate that we use different perspectives, depending on which pronouns are used. When the volunteers read statements that began, "You are..." they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However, when they read statements explicitly describing someone else (for example, sentences that began, "He is...") then they tended to view the scene from an outsider's perspective. Even more interesting was what the results revealed about first-person statements (sentences that began, "I am..."). The perspective used while imagining these actions depended on the amount of information provided - the volunteers who read only one first-person sentence viewed the scene from their point of view while the volunteers who read three first-person sentences saw the scene from an outsider's perspective.

The researchers note that "these results provide the first evidence that in all cases readers mentally simulate described objects and events, but only embody an actor's perspective when directly addressed as the subject of a sentence." The authors suggest that when we read second-person statements ("You are..."), there is a greater sense of "being there" and this makes it easier to place ourselves in the scene being described, imagining it from our point of view.

Between Charlie Stross's experience and this military research, perhaps I can add a touch of Psy-Ops to my tale. To a certain extent, fiction is about manipulation. You're telling a story, yes, but if you're being crafty you also have a desired impact, and you work towards achieving that. Sometimes it doesn't work. I doubt that Charles Dickens intended to make Oscar Wilde laugh, for example, which could be attributed to a failure of execution or the unfortunate intersection of sentimentalism and cynicism. Either way, as an author Dickens had an intention, although only he could ever be the true judge of his success or failure in that regard.

In my case, I'm using second-person to set up the narrative framework of the story and to convey certain information about characters. It's a peculiar device, and I'm not sure that I can pull it off. But the tasty data I've excerpted above gives me a much better sense of how I might be able to use it as a tool to achieve what Poe called "the unity of effect or impression."

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¹Damn. I went through three titles trying to come up with one that didn't ape Cory Doctorow's actual post...and ended up nearly duplicating the post's title, without noticing. I are creative and observant like!

When I told my friend of the difficulty I was having in trying to bring this tale to an end, a difficulty that far exceeded any I'd known from my previous (literary) births, he said: "That's because you think of it as your last labor before your well goes dry."

He had called on me after a long climacteric "vacation of despair," which he'd spent outside the country, as befits that sort of vacation. Much to my delight, he commented on what he characterized as the "belated rejuvenation" he saw in my demeanor, even though my nimbleness had waned, and my confidence that I'd be able to ascend to the seventieth step of Methuselah's ladder wasn't what it had once been.

"You look," he said, "like someone starting his life all over again."

I said: "Is there any alternative?"

Emile Habiby
Saraya, The Ogre's Daughter

Most writers have "favored" words or phrases. These aren't words or phrases that they like, necessarily, they're more like tics, things that pop out easily, particularly when they're in the flow. Often, the writer won't notice them while editing, because the tics operate at a nearly subconscious level, and their eyes scan over them without seeing them. They're unitary clichés, overused within a population of one.

One of mine used to be "of course," which appeared as a sort of mutant dependent clause at the beginning or end of a sentence. Eventually I noticed that it was popping up too frequently, and usually added nothing to the work. So I tried to become more aware of it, and removed it whenever I noticed it. These days I don't use it very much at all, and if it shows up, I stop and consider whether it belongs there.

Yesterday's post revealed a new one: "Which," or "Which is not to say that..." In under five hundred words I used the former four or five times and the latter twice, which is once too many.¹ See? There it is again. I have a phrase tic! Curses.

This is why good editors are vital. With their new eyeballs they spot that you've used "Of course" three times in a chapter. Or that you've described two different things in two different chapters with the same adjective or phrase. "Azure skies" and "azure eyes?" You'd better be doing that on purpose, buddy.

Ideally, though, I prefer it if I can spot these tics myself. It keeps me mindful, for one thing. For another--and I think this is more important--it trains me in the Way of Killing Darlings. Just because something comes easily and flows and feels all tingly while I'm writing it doesn't mean that it adds anything to the story. If I can march through my pages crushing the life out of little bits like "Of course" and "Which is not to say that" and "Apparently" with my great bolshy boots, then it's somewhat easier to kill that favorite line, paragraph, or subplot that's nice and showy but pointless. It's just a difference in scale.

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¹Don't bother looking. I fixed it.

"The trusted friends who steer novelists away from cliche"

An excerpt:

Aspiring authors who struggle to steer clear of hackneyed cliches in their writing can breathe a sigh of relief, after it emerged yesterday that even Booker prizewinners can find the odd "flickering log fire" slipping into their writing.

Ian McEwan, it turns out, has a triumvirate of friends whom he entrusts with his novels before anyone else, with the poet Craig Raine scolding him whenever his writing becomes too formulaic (the pair will mark FLF, "flickering log fire", in the margins of each other's work whenever it falls into cliche). McEwan won't even let his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis near his books before completion, preferring to trust it to Raine, Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash and philosopher Galen Strawson.

Via Justine Musk.

Asked why writers were often troubled souls, [neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Lieberman] said that the writing itself may be a reaction to severe emotional problems.

"I am sure that it is one of their motivators to write," he said. "You have to ask yourself what they would be like without the writing.

Well, I know that I certainly feel like crap when I'm not doing it, but there's always the question of whether I feel like crap because I'm not writing, or whether I'm not writing because I feel like crap. Sure, I may become a deity when crafting my tales, but it's a peculiar sort of god who risks descending into neurosis and curtains-drawn depression if he stops creating, isn't it? Did YHWH go on a pill-popping, vodka-snorting bender after he rested on the seventh day? Hell no. He was up bright and early Monday morning creating mankind, planting the garden of paradise, and growing a shitload of trees.

Over the past several days, I've been very aware of output. That is, of all the activities that result from energy and intention flowing from me and out into the world. This includes creative output, but also all of the other things that require focus on something or someone outside of myself. And once I thought about all that was going out, I naturally starting thinking about what was coming in, which includes any sort of energy and intention flowing into me, or simply being focused upon by someone else.

I realized that I haven't had much in the way of input recently, and this may account, somewhat, for my lack of output. Which is not to say that I haven't been putting out--hurrrr--but I haven't been creating as much as I've wanted to. I recorded some vocals yesterday, on a tune that's been bouncing around since late 2007, but I had been intending to start work on a whole new thing, and never quite mustered up the juice to create that new project file in Digital Performer.

This, in turn, brings to mind the volumes of research about the highly social nature of humans and other primates, and how social deprivation turns baby rhesus monkeys into head-rocking basket cases. I haven't been huddled up in a ball in the corner keening and hitting myself in the head with clenched fists, not at all. But I'm very aware that I've got to do something to keep the mental battery packs charged up, whether that's reluctantly consenting to associate with my fellow primates or just leaving the frakking apartment to go look at the goddamn ocean being all blue and wobbly and soothing. Hell, I've got mountains here too, I could drive up one of them and pretend to be master of creation, or at least the portion of it where Oprah lives.

Old habits die hard, and I've observed that creating new ones is, for me, a stop-and-go process. I'll have a swinging few weeks in my new routine, and then I'll get knocked off of it for one reason or another, and it's terribly easy to slide back into the well-worn grooves of prior habits.

Bloody annoying, if you ask me. I blame neural plasticity, and the tastiness of cheese.

Later...

As of 3:28 AM, 528 shiny new words on the monkey story. Broke the deadlock with:

"Did you catch that bit about 'defiling our women?'" the pen wanted to know. "What do you suppose that was about?"

So, take that, creative malaise. I crush you!

My head, that is. And the highly-pressurized bony spaces within it. And my eyes, which are reddened and thrusting forth from their sockets, eager to be free and plop about the carpet. They don't know about the ferret, though, so the joke's on them.

Anyway. Mucous. Hydraulics. Fuzziness in the thinking and slowness in the fingers. Words are stuck until the mentality regains its equilibrium.

Also: Burma!

I panicked.

There is now a Twitter thingumbob as well, which is not something you'd know about if you rarely visit the actual site unless I post about it.

Which I've just done. So...go and dig that, I guess.

...a lunacy of sorts, and enough of a bribe to keep the heart from falling off into nowhere, an attempt to make true what simply cannot be: a controlled grace, constantly upholding, never letting go, never letting down. It is a trick, of course. An attempt to fool the I/eye, to shield us from a simple truth: out in the world, art is graceless and hapless because it is all wrapped up in our surface-ridden bodies, held together by the tangle of imaginings that harbor the self within.

Rebecca Emlinger Roberts
The Art of Looking Down [.PDF excerpt]
The Georgia Review, Fall 2008

I first caught a whiff of this over at Mr. Ellis's establishment, and now there's more on it at Slashdot. To wit: Realms of Fantasy is ceasing publication, and rumor has it that all three major American fantasy and science fiction print magazines will be going to a bi-monthly schedule.¹

Times are tough for magazines in general, what with this Intratubes thing the youngsters these days are using to steal food from the mouths of Metallica's children while refusing to pay to read Paul Krugman, and the ceaseless videogamery that eats up their free time while turning them into soulless, efficient killing machines. But these magazines, Asimov's and Analog in particular, are giants, institutions of the genre. I've still got my rejection slips from all three of them somewhere, well-deserved responses to the terrible stories I sent off to them during my teens.

Subscribing to all three of them for a year would total exactly one hundred dollars and ninety-one cents (although that might change if their publishing schedules get halved). I can't really swing all of that at once, but I do believe I'll start having at least one of them sent to my home soon.

This is for entirely selfish reasons. I don't think that the future of periodical SF publishing lies in printed matter.² But I want them all to hang around in meatspace long enough for me to get at least one thing published, so that I can run my grubby little paws over the pages of an issue that I've somehow managed to get into. After that they can ascend into virtuality if they need to.

With that in mind, I've stepped up work on a short story with an eye towards making the rounds of the big three. It's got cyborg monkeys and poets in it. A shoe-in for sure! Everybody likes cyborg monkeys.

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¹F&SF has in fact already done so.

²See Jim Baen's Universe.