Hello Old Friends

I was working on my deck Friday. The weekend was nearly here and I was wrestling with a software fault with my head down. I heard a clunk and looked up to see my wife, Mary, had dumped a box of books off the edge of the deck into the grass. I didn't appreciate the disrespect with which they had been treated but I understood why.

The box had sat next to the furnace in my basement and collected a little dust in the several years it resided there. Before that, it sat for many years next to the furnace in my father's basement. I should say furnaces, because while the box resided in Dad's basement, he had a coal-fired furnace, a natural gas furnace, and a wood-fired furnace. Between the coal and wood smoke the box was well sooted.

Dumping the box's contents into the lawn was the first step in removing the cobwebs, dust, and soot from my books. There was such an accumulation of dirt because the box has sat in one basement or another since the the 1970s.

After my wife finished dusting off books and asking me which ones she could discard, she got another box that was likewise filthy. And another.

I kept an eye out for an old friend, but didn't see him. I knew my dusty copy of The Green Hills of Earth had recently been in one of those boxes. Turns out my wife had already cleaned it off and shelved it. But another book, just as old, from Junior High was in the first box. It was a paperback anthology of space travel stories edited by Groff Conklin, Great Stories of Space Travel.

After I finished work I picked it up and started reading. I know that I had read all the stories a few times since I'd bought it in the '60s for half a buck. But enough time had passed that I'd forgotten all but general impressions of the stories--many of which were written in the 1940s. This was probably the book, or one of them, that got me into Science Fiction in the first place.

If you are a reader, you probably have the same emotional reaction when you return to a book after a long time. The stories and characters reside in a special place in my heart. Revisiting a story is like a reunion with its characters who are now old friends.

If enough time has elapsed, it gets interesting, because there are changes.

I noticed something when I picked up my copy of C. S. Lewis' non-fiction book Mere Christianity. I was reading an argument Lewis was making about the existence of God and it was completely unfamiliar. I knew the line of reasoning, because the night before I'd said something similar, but different, in an email to an agnostic friend. The unfamiliarity of Lewis' words made me think my 18-year-old self had paid insufficient attention at the time.

Then I saw it. My handwriting on a note in the margin. The note was on point and proof that I had indeed been paying attention. Yet, the words were unfamiliar. And I'd said the same thing in my own words decades later.

The changes were in me. I felt a bit like Bruce Willis in Looper talking in the diner with his 30-years-younger self.

In this case, I'd digested what Lewis was saying, incorporated it into the structure of my thinking, and reworked it over the years into a form that fit me so well that Lewis' original expression was unfamiliar to me.

I saw this in a different way when I was going back through Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars novels. I'm cool with John Carter being a Virginian and veteran of the Civil War. I'm also cool with him becoming an uber-powerful warlord on Mars with children who are likewise members of elite Martian society. BUT when I started one of the later novels that hinges upon the villain insinuating himself into Carter's son's household as one of the slaves, I thought, "Slaves? The hero keeps slaves?" I got off the train. Back in the '70s I would have just shrugged and gone on. I've become less tolerant of some things and I've become more tolerant of other things.

These changes make me wonder which of the stories I've hated in High School or College that I might like were I to read them again today. I saw this with Hemingway, but I rather suspect I will hate Holden Caulfield even more today than back in 1972.

Most of my old friends are still friends, and I suspect just as many of my old irritants are just as irritating. The good thing is that nobody can make me do assigned reading like they did in High School.

Curtail Your God-Envy

You may not believe in God and I'm not going to try to dissuade you, but you realize that others believe in God. Christian dogma characterizes deity with three omni-words: Omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. Deity can do anything; deity is everywhere; deity knows everything.

When I was a tender lad I would daydream about these omnis and of them I figured omniscient was the best. If you know everything, you can compensate for not having the others. (I think humans commonly fantasize about deity and all religious conflict is between competing fantasies.)

There's a problem with omniscience I did not recognize as a youth: My brain ain't big enough.

When you're a tender lad and everything's new you think your mind is Limitless (great movie by the way). After you acquire a few college degrees you realize the old noggin can't hold everything. So, despite my God-envy, I just don't have the hardware capacity for the job.

Christian dogma says that man is made in the image of God.

MY dogma says that the writer performs in the image of the Creator.

The writer knows what he's thinking about when he sets the valise down on the train platform. S/He does not know Hemingway's lost manuscripts are in the valise. S/he knows why the girl waits outside the train station for a passenger who never comes. And s/he knows the boy kept her picture tucked into the edge of the jet's artificial horizon. The writer knows the last thing he did was touch that picture when he crashed in Pakistan. The writer knows that years later the other boy will never learn what his wife is thinking when she looks wistfully to the west.

Did you get all that? I left out some connective tissue in that last paragraph. Omniscience can be hard to follow. That paragraph had only a finite number of words. Each word bears a finite semantic content. Its length is limited by your attention span and my ability to articulate.

So, the takes his exhaustive knowledge of the story, then chooses the parts that will fit in a novel. The poor writer does not realize s/he's doing this and s/he chooses poorly. I advise you think of all the sensa impinging upon your body right now. A lot of that never makes it to your consciousness. Like the temperature of your left heel right now. Your mind filters out the unimportant sensa and you are aware of what's left, like I'm aware of the words on the screen right now.

(When someone advises the writer to "show, don't tell" that is an exhortation to write words that depict sensa to the reader for the reader to interpret. Interpretation should be left to the reader.)

To solve these problems the reader needs to define a Point Of View (POV). Most commonly, this means you decide upon a POV character whose sensa, perceptions, and some interpretation are presented to the reader. The best way to think of a POV character is as a lens through which the story is projected to the reader. God or some other omniscient being may be chosen as the POV character.

This brings to mind another problem of omniscience. Omniscience causes trouble for storytelling. In a whodunnit, the omniscient storyteller knows it was Mrs. White with a Rope in the Library who committed murder most foul on page one. The omniscient storyteller is just holding out on you as s/he/it strings you along for the next 250 pages.

That's why you want to think very carefully about what you the writer knows about the story, and what you want the reader to know about the story. In each scene you need to choose someone in that scene who can present the narrative to the reader. Sometimes perspective is in-your-face obvious like Rashomon or Arrested Development season 4. Often it is less so.

This is a decision you need to make when you're writing your story.

A rookie mistake is to start a scene in the POV of one character, and then in that same scene disclose to the reader things that the POV character cannot know.

One of the coolest things I noticed when I started writing was a trick I saw Ernest Hemingway do. In "The Killers" he tells the story from the POV of Nick Adams. Toward the middle of the story, the narrative shifts to events that happened in another room.

For a moment, I thought, "Hemingway freakin' committed POV drift!" Then I read a little more and Hemingway explains that the cook was in the other room and the cook related the events he'd witnessed at that time to Nick Adams. Then I thought, that's awesome.

I know some writers tell the whole story from a single POV character. I think those are the best writers. Others will stick with one POV character in a chapter and change only at chapter breaks. Or even scenes within a chapter. I generally growl at my friends in writers group when they move from one POV character to another POV character without some clear line of demarcation in the prose.

I had a lot of fun once writing a first-person POV character who I kill off in the second-to-the-last chapter. The last chapter consists of his ghost floating to the enemy starship's bridge moments before he witnesses it blow up and he's joined by a lot more ghosts. It's a gimmick, and if you think you want to try something like that, have fun.

You know your story and you should think of what your POV character can directly experience in the story. This argues against making your space opera hero the Galactic Emperor, or an Admiral of a giant space fleet (and it generally feeds into that avoid superlatives and Mary Sue's  thing). Instead, a guy whose job is to swab the decks may have the better view of the action. Emperors and Admirals tend to do nothing but sit in meetings and read reports. Yeah, that'd make for riveting action.

If you've got a space marine, you'd better get him cross-trained in sensors or something, because you owe it to your readers to let them know what's going on. And if he's in mushroom mode (kept in the dark and fed horse dung) that'll be less interesting than those meetings & reports in the last paragraph.

So, take a look at your story from 10,000 feet, and pick through the most interesting events therein. How can you plausibly put one character at the center of all those events. Then ask yourself, can I tell this story from that character's POV? Curtail your God-envy.

A Word Is A Terrible Thing To Waste

#30    Remove things that “go without saying.”

Consider these sentences:

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

The reader can reasonably be expected to know that hats are worn on the head, as opposed to the knee, wrist, ankle, or elsewhere. Moreover, unless your story is about reincarnation, a person has no other lives in which to do something like that.

John removed his hat from his head.

Joan had never done something like this before in her life.

These sorts of accretions on your prose generally come about when you're dashing off prose. When you turn the words in your head into the words on paper, you can easily hold a couple things in mind where only one should be written down.

This is an easy thing to find and fix. The easiest and best editing is often done with just the delete key.

I think that well written prose is something like a Japanese painting where each stroke of the brush contributes to the picture with nothing extraneous added. Remove everything that is not needed and no more. You know what should be conveyed to the your target reading audience. That knowledge should reflect what you put on to the page.

Some readers need a few more clues than others. When I was in high school, I didn't appreciate the one Hemingway story I had been assigned because I hadn't lived enough to put it in its proper context. Sure I grasped the atmospherics of a gray Michigan weekend in late autumn, but not the alienation of breaking up with a fiance. (This is why you don't want to assign Hemingway to high schoolers.)

What went without saying to a serious adult was lost on a callow youth such as myself. Some cultural referents may be missing from your audience. What is obvious to an American reader may fly over the head of a British reader. or vice versa.

You may cut too much, but this is the exception, not the rule. If there are two things in your prose that support the same point, look for the one which best makes your point and cut the rest. If there's something your reader can reasonably infer from the rest, delete it. Every word must contribute enough to the story to justify the reader's time spent reading it.

Though you might cut too much, but you should cut nevertheless.

What just happened? That just happened

#26     Alternate slow scenes and fast scenes.

A few years back the second Indiana Jones movie came out. He's in China and he gets shot at and he takes poison and he gets the antidote and he escapes on a plane and the plane is about to crash and he jumps out and he slides down the mountainside and and and...

I'm exhausted.

The story's first act had a relentless pace. In the words of my favorite Bluegrass band, "That just happened!" Because the first act was a dervish of spinning action the audience could not process what was transpiring.

Given the choice between two stories I'll take the one with too much action over the one with not-enough action. But this needs balance, too. Something has to happen in a story, or I'm going to toss it against the wall. I don't care if he is William Faulkner, he'd better do something in the story or I'm tossing it and it'll take an act of congress to get me to look at anything else by that author.

So, the writer must navigate between the Scylla of nonstop action and the Charybdis of inaction. In a fast-moving scene, there's no opportunity to explain the meaning of what is happening. In a slow-moving scene, nothing much is happening. So, it makes sense for the writer to alternate fast and slow scenes to introduce cool happenings and then to explain them.

If you are prone to wax rhapsodic with beautiful words, do so in your slow scenes between fast ones. The slow scenes let you woo the reader with chocolate and flowers, candlelight and soft music. Then use fast scenes to consummate the relationship with the reader. Then enjoy a cigarette and an afterglow in each others arms.

Too much of one and you bore the reader. Too much of the other and you wear her out. And she'll probably complain of a headache next time you want to sell her a story.

I've got to be careful here, because I don't want to give the impression that I think slow scenes are boring. They may not be exciting, but they can be incredibly interesting. If your story introduces some really wild ideas, slow scenes are where you want to play those cards. If your story includes the secret of life, the universe, and everything, let the reader savor it in a slow scene. (And I suppose that if you want to HIDE a little bit of foreshadowing, add it to some of the dust thrown up in a fast scene.)
 
When you see a guy exult when he shoots the charging water buffalo and then catch a bullet in his brain, the reasons for his intense happiness and the reasons for his wife's murderous act are much more interesting than the gunplay. Likewise, when you see the waiters tie butcher knives to a chair and pretend it's a bull fight, the anticipation of "this won't end well" is as satisfying as the actual unfolding of manslaughter.

Slow scenes and fast scenes are two sides of a coin. The slow scenes should establish the context of what happens and afterwards explain what happens, and the fast scenes is where something happens.

Since I'm On Vacation...

I'm on vacation. Thus I've been letting accustomed duties lapse--like thinking of something clever to say on this blog. My bad. If you want to move on, I understand. It's my fault.

However, I wasn't always on vacation. A while back I read and reverse-engineered Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." I wrote it up elsewhere and for your reading pleasure, I've reprised it here.

I present to you a summer rerun: Reverse Engineering Hemingway:

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

I recently heard a reading of this short story by Ernest Hemingway. When it was done, I went "Wow. What a great story! How could he write that?"

First off, a story like that with a WOW climax is designed from the beginning with Francis Macomber's sudden death. Step backwards, how does he die? His wife shoots him. Step back, why does she kill him? They have an unhappy marriage. Why? Because they despise each other. Why don't they divorce? Because he is terribly rich and she's too old to find a richer husband. Because he is a coward.

A coward, eh? What disturbs the status quo that causes her to kill him now? He finds his nerve. Not all cowards are doomed to stay that way, some grow up and become men. (Remember, this is Hemingway, and men are men and Women are cruel decorations.) If she doesn't kill him right now, he'll leave her.
All right, what setting will have a man manifest cowardice and shortly thereafter find his nerve? Hemingway likes Africa, the American reading public likes Africa, and a big game hunt is a pastime of the rich where there are lots of guns about. Easy enough to make the murder look like a hunting accident. And with Africa being fairly remote you don't have much in the way of law enforcement about, and African big game guides make for better characters than, say, Canadian Indian guides.

Moreover, Hemingway has spent his money from the other stories he's sold going to Africa and doing manly things there. He can use his journals as filler until he gets the word count he needs.

OK. If I were Hemingway, I'd have the outline of the story set (in my head at least and if I'm me, i'll have it on paper). With the outline clearly defined, we can drop a few clues to foreshadow the climactic murder scene, but give them a plausible non-murderous meaning in the immediate context so as not to spoil the surprise when Macomber catches a bullet from his wife.

All right, now Hemingway can start writing.

No, wait. Not yet. He needs a hook. Something that'll cast that "can't put it down" spell on the reader. Start with a celebration that has a dark shadow inside it. Yeah, they return from the hunt with the bearers carrying Macomber to his tent while he's miserable, his wife is openly sorrowful, but subtly contemptuous, and the guide is disgusted and wondering how the rest of the safari will go. OK. everybody's unhappy and the reader doesn't know why?

Great, start writing...

Wait, spin the ending so that the reader isn't quite sure if its murder or not. Yeah, ambiguity is good. 

 

And, no I have no idea whether Hemingway thought this way or not. He was probably a pantser.