Collection

Fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old me would have of course DIED of this piece of news, just because: Cornwall! Tintagel! There is nothing here, of course, even theoretically pointing to a young Arthur learning literacy and practicing at a windowsill. Still I would have come up with the dreamy idea.

Medievalist intercessionality.

Tony Mattera has a beautiful piece on patriotism and our times. A short, perfect read.

Women are perpetually asked to be the cops, the police, the bosses of their bosses, the judges of their judges; the ones held responsible for patrolling and controlling and meting out punishment against — or graciously forgiving — men who trespass. And God help us if we get it wrong.

The Cut has an eloquent discussion of the current Bill Clinton moment - which, as timesome as it is and he is, does bear consideration right now.

In related non-news, the Patterson brand and the Clinton/Patterson ghost(s) aren't great authors. Who knew? Absolutely everybody. Gary Sue, let'r rip. Two reasons I will not read this book - incidental and not even applicable anti-Muslim villain naming, and egregious use of the term Dark Ages. Y'all know how I feel about *that*.

Unfortunately, the title, “The President Is Missing,” depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is.
--WaPo

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA! Also: oh, SNAP.

Collection, With A Lot of Villainy

It’s the wrong Donald, Gromit.

Apparently (in certain others' minds, anyway) I am a ... PANK. Hm. Sounds distasteful. I'm not persuaded this is a label worth accepting - indeed, I'm not entirely persuaded by this article. Still, it's interesting to note that, invisible as I am being an old biddy aunt, I'm an impressively fast-growing demographic.

NPR did a piece today on why villains are always the interesting characters. I'd argue against the old "good guys are always boring" routine; a good writer doesn't leave the protagonist drab. As good writing goes, "good guys are boring" is lazy right there. It is right after they say villains are always the interesting ones, using Shakespeare's Iago (I am NOT linking that for you, if you don't know the reference, look it up) as a juicy example, that I immediately think of Claudius. Not Graves' Claudius (nor Derek Jacobi's), but Hamlet's. He does not steal the show. James Bond villains often don't either - Bond villains are MacGuffins, simply there to set everything in motion. Captain America: Civil War was the same - a villain we spend no time with, care about not one whit, and who in the end has nothing to do with anything at all. Surprisingly good movie, out of that.

But still. The montage of famous villains' voices at the top is worth the ride. Could use more of the Star Wars evil march music, though.

The MOST fascinating part of this story is its point regarding villains' never thinking they ARE bad guys or women. No matter your place on the political spectrum - right now, this year, there is no way around seeing that as a reference not to movies, but to this election.

EXPOSURE

It's not always a good thing for your writing to be seen. Janet Reid's post today somewhat touches on this theme - in a classic example of the old "How can you know my writing isn't good enough!?" rant which exemplifies where the writing is weak.

My own example today was at work. In an interoffice envelope from some other quarter of the company, I received a letter forwarded along to my boss, but actually addressed to "Mr. Contact Unknown, Owner" (incorrect company name).

Rest assured that my boss will see this letter, and its envelope - both identically incorrect - but not for the reasons hoped-for. I shared the thing all over my corner of the world, because everybody needs a laugh. The consensus was twofold: one, that we NEED TO DO BUSINESS with these folks as quickly as possible. And two, that my planned response of "Actually, it's Ms. Contact Unknown" is the best possible one.

Best. Mail merge. Ever.

Also, nice putting your best foot forward, company.

Image: Wikimedia

All this has only the most cursory relation to writing, or even to Janet's post, linked above. Mostly, I'm sharing it because it's funny, and I hear humor is a good way to prevent blog readers' boredom. And I care about y'all. I really do. I don't want you coming here getting bored.

So you're welcome. Mr. and Ms. Anonymous Reader. Happy Monday.

At the 16:44 Mark

Janet Reid's post today was about deconstructing characters in the BAD way. Reducing women to anatomy and tossing hair - or, for that matter, men. Janet's sensitivity this poor writing has increased in the current political climate, but pointless physical descriptions of characters has irritated me for YEARS now. I can remember the time I had to tell a guy for whom I was beta reading, "If I NEVER read another scene in which a woman looks at herself in the mirror and mentally assesses her physical appeal, it will be too soon" and he had absolutely no idea that was bad. He'd read it so many times ... and, unfortunately that alone wasn't a hint in itself.

I will admit to having a little fun, early on in my work on the WIP, writing a scene in which my at-that-time MC visited her mother's homeland in Gaul, meeting Clovis I (her uncle), and describing him in some detail. His whole court.

This sort of cutting-room-floor personal amusement is the reason I say even *now* anything I "write" in the WIP is subject to trashing.

One of the most memorable descriptions of a character I ever read was in Pippin, the moment we get a paean of joy to the arch of a foot. Colleen McCullough once arrested my attention memorably with a sex scene that started with a description of the line of downy, soft hair that descended from a woman's nape down to her spine; a feature which in this day and age might well be used to delineate a woman's irredeemable hideousness.

Writing Clovis, I used almost no descriptors at all; for a first-person novel from the POV of a character little concerned with his lieutenants' looks, to do otherwise would have been disingenuous. His physical interest in his wife is palpable, but through his eyes we see little more of her than the mole that charms him and her slender, tiny hands (a feature I borrowed from my oldest friend in life, TEO, and even then gave little detail). One character I did "draw" to resemble myself. She dies early in the going, and that was an intentional reminder to myself: my characters are not my avatars.



It's at 17:55 things truly get epic with Julia Sugarbaker's epic takedown above, but starting in at 16:44 is good for context. Give it a few minutes. Donald Trump does crop up, and it's absolutely perfect.

PowerPoint is Like Twitter

One of the things you run into if you work in almost any office is the ubiquitous misconception that PowerPoint is an program in any way suited to creating a text document. PowerPoint is not Word, and there are umpteen reasons for that, but it also *is* used – perhaps more than not – for documents other than presentations, at least in-person, spoken, before-a-live-audience presentations. PPT has a certain fame outside its drily intended purpose(s) thanks to David Byrne, and that is sometimes my saving grace when painfullystakingly working to edit a report we produce weekly, which some of my kids think is like a book report.

My theory regarding PPT's unique uses and misuses is that the concept of “slides” versus “pages” makes it seem to the brain that there is a buffet table with multiple individual offerings of information, whereas Word can seem like one stupendous serving of text. Excel is a dizzying menu you can’t read from where you're standing, and when you get close enough for your glasses to help you, you find out the whole thing’s in Swahili, and darn if that’s not on your list of spoken (nor read) languages.

The problem with the buffet is, given the limitations of the sideboard, each element on it has only so much space.


This space is best not set out as if it were a full, sit-down supper. This space should not come with its own separate plates, utensils, napkins, glassware, and so on.


And, given the parameters of a pot luck smorgasbord, this space is always going to attract some cooks who will insist upon overdoing their contributions.

You cannot equip text on a PPT slide with full grammatical formality. You cannot indulge in full sentences, elegant (or not) descriptors, nor (for Maud’s sake, even I can’t tolerate this anymore) DOUBLE SPACES AFTER PERIODS. Forget about using “a”, “the”, and any conjugation of the verb “to be”. Put out the dish you have to serve, present it with pride, and be done. Garnish is for the graphics, but the text you write must be simple – and short.

I had a boss once, positively obsessed with pithiness. So much so we called it pith. Good times were had.

Such an imperative to brevity could wear on a wordy wench like me, but even I, for a paycheck, understand that sometimes KISS doesn’t stand merely for Keep It Simple Stupid (nor even Kids In Satan’s Service – hah), but Keep It SHORT Stupid.

As with Twitter, sometimes you find yourself in PPT, figuring out which grammar crime to commit in order to stay within the limitations.

I can get pretty criminal in PPT. I commit crimes against my beloved mother tongue which in any other context would be, for me, all but unthinkable.

But I am a morbidly driven cuss when it comes to PPT, and I *insist* upon dealing with it on its own terms, and so my own terms become necessarily secondary.


This is what it’s like having any job, really.

Even writing – you write for yourself first, but if you want to sell, you revise, and eventually you realize there are readers out there.


Going to work as a whole is like Twitter; you edit yourself to fit the 140 character limit. Some folks cover their tatts, some try to remember not to swear, most of us have, to some degree or other, to “leave home at home” even as others have to remember to leave work at the office. We’re all varying successes; what a PowerPoint extravaganza of poorly considered graphical results humanity might be.

Sometimes, you really feel the limits, those tiny boundaries seeming to compress your own resources. It can be hard to stay inside.

When life is churning up enormous emotions: you have to choose which social crimes to commit, at the office. You have to conserve your reserves of good cheer when it’s difficult to synthesize, but you can’t expend negativity in its stead. You constrict, you shrink, you spend a nod instead of a smile and “how are you” – you only have 140 expressions for the day, and they have to be good ones.

PPT can be a poor medium for text.

Offices can be poor medium in which to store your heart, forty hours per week.

Character limits. Suddenly: some layers in that phrase – one of them being “irony” …

The Thing About Reading

… specifically, the thing about reading multiple works by one author – is that, unless they’re exceptionally good, you learn their go-to strategies. If you’re smart and/or fortunate, you begin to feel your own. It’s not always repetition of words per se, but this is certainly a matter of the linguistic patterns on which we depend.

I have some suspicion that my tendency toward overwrought clauses and loquatiousness comes from some fear of simplistic repetitiveness (and very definitely from a family full of Impressive Speakers – for good or ill), but I also have decreasing illusions about the patterns I do have. Some readers go bananas dealing with my parentheticals or dash interruptions … I pretend to try to keep ellipses to a minimum, but know all too well I use them more than most writers ever would.

An acquaintance online once identified my “voice” unerringly by dint of recognizing my tendency to overuse the word “just.” Ever since, I’ve been overly aware of its presence whenever I type it; yet it’s hardly alone in calling me out. I have an extreme problem with “actually” which, even aware of the problem, I have not reformed. Adverbs generally, one of those tools of our language so many publishing professionals would love to see banned and which therefore I defend and adore like the contrarian I am, are a pretty easy identifier. Too many writers use them in pointless ways; and none of us needs the padding. Yet they are a limber and lively part of our tongue, and it would be a great pity to kill them off wholesale thanks to those who use them poorly.

Ahem.

There’s one writer whose mass of termonological tics render every character’s voice identical, no matter their setting, mood, education, or demographics. The tics transcend character voice and insert an all too literal authorial voice which, because it spans dialogue, exposition, action, and all elemenets of novel upon novel upon novel upon novel, is distracting; unwelcome. It’s cumbersome and even maddening. Yet, because I’m a stubborn ass, I won’t put down a given novel – but will edit it in pen.

This is justified both by the fact that some works are re-run reads for me, and I want to be able to read one, ever, without having to mentally correct it all over again, tiny mental rants bursting forth over and over on every page spread. Oh, and by my smug-assed presumption that (hopefully …) it makes ME a better writer.

Learning from someone else’s mistakes.


I’m not as prescriptivist as I once was, and indeed have come to love the quivering weirdness of the written word, as it synthesizes the spoken, or thought, or comveys a story in simple ways, or dresses up in beautiful words and parades around making a magnificent spectacle of itself. If it does this by breaking rules, or breaking what people THINK are rules, all the better.

Still.

If it does this encumbered: writing sucks. If it’s shackled to an author’s own preconceptions or prejudices, ignorance (writing creatively, without research, is wonderfully valid, but writing in wilful blindness is not; see also, the geological unlikelihood of William Golding’s island for Lord of the Flies, on which we are nonetheless stranded and harrowed and broken down … versus any tale populated by lazily caricatured Mary Sues, none of which I will name for charity’s and safety’s sake) … it’s going to enchain an audience, rather than enfold and transport them.

And so it is, having just finished a cycle of reruns I will not repeat for years yet, I choose to finally spew a bit about the patterns____ repetitions thrust through my suffering wee and paltry little brain of late:

• Beginning. Every. Other. Sentence. With the word AND. It’s not a rule I give a crud about, but please quit flogging me with *unneccesary* and’s, and interminable riffs of this.
• Peppering single sentences with and, and, and; and and—and and. Paragraph-long sentences formed with these.
• “And then,”
• “Of course”
• “Suddenly” and "Immediately"
  (If there is any better way to slow the pace than constant repetition of these two descriptors: I don't want to learn it.)
• “Utterly”
• “Now”
• “That”
• “Which”
• “In sum”
• "Slowly”
  (Even I, adverbial defender that I am, can hardly identify an instance in the entire literary world where this is honestly a necessary descriptor; and, even if it’s important to specify, there are so many more interesting words than this one.)
• Stating the rules of the world even as deep as the END of a novel, by which point we really know these rules, authorial voice, we really really do and would beg you to stop explaining.
• Doing this even in the briefest of unnecessary clauses. You’re treating your audience like idiots. Seriously, stop it.
• Describing characters’ extreme attractiveness at every possible moment of a scene. Extra bonus points OFF if you insist upon detailing every point of an ensemble in doing this. Every time.
• All the characters are attractive. Even the extras. EVERYONE is attractive, and beauty equals goodness – even if the goodness is merely angst-ridden, terminally melodramatic evil. Hooray for pretty!
• Describing by fancy maker, pattern of drapery/upholstery fabric, age and theme of bric-a-brac, country-of-origin of rugs, ostentatiously tasteful paint color, and at all times most-expensive-possible materials comprising every possible corner of a room in which one single scene should take place in five minutes, but which I have to read about for six pages, because – these characters are conspicuously well off, get it? THIS IS WORLD-BUILDING, GET IT? (This author, not incidentally, happens to be obscenely wealthy, and I could give a hang less how they choose to (clearly) decorate their own personal home. Get on with it. This is not story.)
• Describing by artist or composer, and with exhaustive critical opinion, every overwrought piece of music with which the author has mentally scored, scene by scene, every single instant of a novel. I don’t give an aching damn what you were listening to while you wrote this, and once you’ve done this eighteen times in a single novel, I know you are just showing off how much you think you know about music, and it’s just as boring as when that one guy does it in a bar so he can prove how he is too good to hang out in bars and is really a wildly overeducated, intelligent, super sensitive snob I knew I didn’t liike in the first place and now find completely insufferable in the second place.
• Constant. Racist. Descriptions. CONSTANT. If anyone appears anywhere in any of these works, who is not whiter than a sheet of modern copy paper, they are: dumb, superstitious, and *strictly* present as accessories to the white people’s stories.
• No, seriously.
• The actual, explicit worship of the very words “white” or “pale” are impossible to ignore. And this is not a 19th century novelist whose attitudes can be glossed over. I mean, this writer makes The Ax and the Vase look progressive, and Ax doesn’t even contain diversity.

Oh my, that felt good – if unseemly.

I may even be able to read one of these books ever again.



Just not within the next decade … or two. Actually. ()—and and and and. BOOP!


(Please feel free to initiate drinking games making fun of MY myriad tics and pretentions. All I ask is you comment and tell me about them, so we can all have fun. Cheers!)

There's Writing, Then There's ... Babel Fish, Maybe?

Reading an article earlier online, I ran across this little punisher of a sentence:

While Capitolinus had kingly dreams even, he attacked Camillus actually with precisely such kinglike accusation.

Sometimes, I understand why there are people who hate adverbs.

Writing and Communicating

There is some irony, perhaps, in the fact that, though I’m a novelist and can barf out a block of text topping several hundred words in no time flat, when I’m at work and see an email consisting of more than about 200 words in paragraph form, with no formatting to highlight key points or organize information visually, messages are lost on me.  It was a fun fact of life at my last job that “messaging” was commonly effected by the Giant Block O’ Text method, and sometimes I still find this true at the “new” (now nearly a year old!) employer.  When working on communications with one of my own kids, I’ll massage a message (har) with at least a bit of formatting, especially when it comes to emails we’ve got to share with big groups.

When working on anything, ever, in PowerPoint, I’ll gnash my teeth and go mad at Giant Blocks O’ Text, flat out.

Perhaps precisely because I’m guilty of producing giant streams of NON-information in excess, when I see actual information treated to the essay format (or, Maud help us, novel lengths – which you all must have seen yourselves in pointless emails), seeing GBOTs in forms definitively unsuited to it (PowerPoint, I am looking at you) hurts my head.

GBOTs hurt *everyone’s* head.  It is unkind and unproductive to try to stuff a Word document into PowerPoint or an email.  PPT and email are visually and cognitively rotten vehicles for anything but the most high level media.

For pushing twelve years, let it be said, Mr. X and I have brought novel-length emails to the level of an art form – I won’t pretend that when options are limited, you use whatever medium you can.  But even then, once there is any exchange, we have always reorganized big blocks into smaller chunks of dialogue, responding to each other point by point in a visual equivalent of real time.  Sometimes, if we don’t read an entire email before responding, the results can be curious – amusing – even disastrous, of course.  Limitations.

But the point is, given constraints, the only kindness to our fellow beings is to work within them.

Because PowerPoint, for instance, is theoretically designed as a presentation software (often used to present without an actual speaker or even a meeting involved, of course), it is optimally used to illustrate data, plans, concepts, or team information at the highest level, eschewing detail.  The idea, again theoretically, is that a big-picture chart or bullet list allows a speaker to expound further than what’s on screen and make their speaking role relevant while perhaps more dynamic, with graphics and other visual/auditory information supporting them rather than the other way around.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever watched a presentation in which 100% of what a speaker said was emblazoned at great magnification directly behind them on a big screen.

Yeah.  That.  Or, really:  NO ("noooooooooooooooooo!!!").  That.

It’s torture, waiting for a presenter to catch up with their plodding, hyper-pedantic slides.

It’s torture, too, going through email and getting a message the sender passionately believes is crucial for you to understand, and it’s half a screen of black-on-white prose in ten point font.



When we’re being paid to read and receive information, spelunking for it when it’s buried in paragraph form in a copious message can be bitter work and wasted time.

When we’re alone on a train or at home, reading a book we chose out of interest and hope – no matter how long – the same is still true.  The nature of the reading, the working of our brains, the organization are completely different – but the need can be very similar:

“Give me the story.”

This doesn’t mean rich descriptions and context and world-building needs must be pithy – or that, literature forfend, prose should be organized in some other way than a wonderful block of text, perhaps even topping four hundred juicy, pulpy pages of reading goodness.  It just means that everything contained in those pages ought to be serving something, ought to be accomplishing something (even if that something isn’t pushing out the sales figures for Q3).

The luxury for authors is that what we’re out to accomplish may be conveying something as subtle as the alluring turn of an ankle, the way a character’s walk romantically captivates another (or, as in “Pippin”, the arch of a foot!).  We may need to place a reader in a moment of stillness which, redolent with some flower’s exotic scent and the soft, golden light of evening, may be broken at any moment.  The need may be to leave our audience wondering whether we’d rather stay in the stillness or heedlessly throw ourselves into the next action, the next sound, the next rapture or disaster …

There just should always be some need.  That “tension” our beta readers like to go on about, that agents get so excitable about.  Even if the tension isn’t that of a spy rifling through a drawer just as the Russians are coming back to the office.

If we have a Giant Block O’ Text going, but its essential message isn’t apparent, we’re doing no better work than the Communications experts who bury the lead (lede, if you prefer …) and render it invisible with too much pointless verbiage.

Like this post, if you will.  Which started with a 532-word intro before I revealed the point.


Was that clever context and tension … ?  Or just torture?

Home Collecting

Yesterday's lawn-mowing adventure cam out nicely, however there was that one moment where I had to yank the mower off the small stump of a boxwood cut down last year, and today I appear to be paying for my bravado in back pain.  I'm not being miserable and I seem to have everything I need - it's just the clear need for a muscle relaxant making me out of sorts.  Once I take it, I'll be out of commission mentally - so I'm doing a little poking around online, and looking at the editing work before I cave in and zonk my brain out.

I'd make a cruddy drug addict.  Ah well, my cross to bear.

And onward with the post.  Leila Gaskin has a good look at the irritant that is a chain letter ... and she takes an interesting left turn worth considering!

Janet Reid gives us four pieces of useful advice from the query pile.  Her #1 is probably my number one as well.

Finally, The History Blog takes a look at the way resources influence fashion - with a look at the Argentinian development of a Spanish fashion for hair combs.  Fashions and fads in history can throw such a fascinating light onto attitudes and the mechanics both of popularity and decline.  (Wearing something that speaks of the "Federation of Death" might sound odd to us today - yet that famous anti Semite still permeates our stylistic generation upon generation, so don't sneer if you love Chanel.)

Also:

... why didn't anybody TELL me how absolutely rotten that Synopsis is, just right over there >>>>

???

It stinks!

Working on that.  Sheesh, y'all.  Feedback's always welcome, y'know.  If I wanted a diary I wouldn't be writing here, and all this would be locked in a pretty pink vinyl book under my pillow.  C'mon!

Quote, Interrupted

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard

This quote cropped up in my random reading this evening, and it struck me negatively for some reason.  I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but quickly realized that, beyond simply reducing an entire universe of communication to a selfish world of useless indulgence, it's fundamentally in error.

Writing is almost never formed in a single, glutting, go.  It is by nature almost nothing BUT interruption.  Few authors, scriptwriters, essayists, working in ficiton or non, in short form, long form, poetry, or even graphic work - nor any other writer - creates an entire piece in one sitting, without revision.  Ever.  For the sake of the reader, writing almost *must* be interrupted, and for the sake of the author's message, story, issue, interest - likewise.  For clarity - interruption.  For entertainment - interruption (who can build tension, perfectly, with nary an edit?).  For every possible purpose - staying on point, getting the story told well, evoking a setting (fiction or non, we're always *somewhere* when we read) - interruption.

Writing is the art of perfecting your OWN interruptions.  Of learning to use them - the down times between having the actual moment to write.  Of winnowing inspiration by the process of editing - learning how to use the interruptions in time, the interruption of revision, the interruption of feedback, refining, polishing.  Writing is the *cultivation* of interruption, in order to write well, to engage.

Talking without being interrupted is just self indulgence.  It isn't writing.  Not good writing.

Drafting

In the continuing series of posts on drafting a short story, today I haven't gotten beyond the intro still - but have begun to at least blearily take some of the advice from previous comments.  To wit:

She ran from the king's house, weeping.  Cholwig stood in the stockade yard, watching the small building from the deep shadow within the wall.  He waited only a couple of minutes, then went and knocked at the door.
Childeric lay on his back, peering into darkness unbroken by the upset of his partner's departure.  The room still smelled of sex, but the king lay inert - not relaxed.
Cholwig wondered when last Childeric had slept.  He drank sometimes, and sometimes not.  He took women to his bed almost without fail - some dutiful, some hateful, as this night's companion apparently had been - some even eager.  None of it exhausted him, none of it gave him any rest.
He lit the little rush lamp on a tiny table, the only object of furniture in the cramped royal closet other than the bed.  "Dominus, they are angry with you."
Childeric's eyes crept across the wood of the ceiling, pushing toward Cholwig with little purpose and less speed.  "One too many wives?" he drawled, "Or one too many daughters?"

Fire away with feedback - but keep in mind this still doesn't progress beyond the intro piece, and my wee paltry little brain is a bit compromised today.  Oh, and also - this is still a draft, y'all.  Drafts don't get purty in a hurry ...

Drafting - An Exercise

Yesterday at RavenCon, I joined the writing workshop.  Unable to join the second session today, I still followed through with my homework.

The assignment was to write an intro to a short story, 100 words or fewer ("not 'LESS' - and if you don't know the difference, you should not be here" ... fantastic), providing the reader with a character, a setting, some kind of action, and a hook to lead in to more reading.

Here are my two drafts:

She ran from him at last, weeping.  Childeric rolled onto his back, peering into the darkness, seeing more from memory than with light the long grain of the wooden roof.  His bed was redolent of her.  Of him.  Of all the remembered women, girls.  Those who had wept, and those who cried out with pleasure.
Still he could not sleep.  Even with drink, even slaked with the release before the girl’s desertion.
And the night wore on.
When his eyes were creeping across the wood in morning light, Cholwig came to push the king back to the work of the day.
“Dominus, the men are angry with you.”
“One too many wives? Or one too many daughters?” Childeric drawled.

***

She ran from the king’s house, weeping.  Cholwig stood in the stockade yard, watching the small building from the deep shadow within the wall.  He waited only a couple of minutes, then went and knocked at the door.
“Your men are angry,” he said without emotion, but an unmistakable warning.
Childreric lay across the bed from which he’d just released the reluctant girl.  “One too many wives?” he drawled, “Or one too many daughters?”
Cholwig fought his frustration with his king, with his lifelong companion.  “It’s all the same.  And they are weary enough to betray you.”
Childeric was curiously sluggish to the alarm.  Yet he would have to leave, if he were to survive.  The question was whether he cared to.

The feedback I received went along these lines:

• That (of course) introducing a rapist as the central character is a bit of a trick (as you who've been here before will know, that was born of this bit of musing).
• Tighten or focus the POV - my solution to this, oddly enough, was to remove the omniscient somewhat from Childeric, though he will remain the MC.  When the MC is offputting, distance seemed a wise solution.  This being only draft #2 - and this being only the first 100 words - this too may change.
• Provide a reason to care for Childeric ... I may not have done this, but I provided a conduit to him in Cholwig's eyes.

The work is nothing anyone would ordinarily ever see.  It's draft, in no way fit for public consumption (even an appealing MC is still not presentable at this stage) - and a lesson in the profundity of editing.  In a simple 100-word snipped the entire piece changed radically, even though the same story is being told.  The action did not change whatsoever, though the timing was altered a little in version 2.

I'd be interested in any kind of comments these snippets might produce.  Content, process, effectiveness, tangents - all are welcome in the comments.  Please don't be shy!

"Diane L. Major, You Get In This Story Right Now!"

Some years ago, I read a friend's MSS, in which every chapter opened from the point of view of another character, and each one was introduced by their full names.  One chapter, quite fatally, involved that scene that always boils my nerves - the woman spinning off a musing mental exposition of her own character - while looking at herself in the mirror.  And describing her prettiness.

Ugh.

The MSS, I know, got that note more than once, and the author revised - and I hope he's seeing success.  The work was a fascinating slice of WWII history.

Today, in the writing workshop at RavenCon, we were introduced to at least four characters by their full names.  As a writer who refuses to indulge in much description (and who is blessed with characters little burdened by middle or given names - it's not like Clovis was called Clovis Lee Meroviginus), the full-name thing drives me bazoo.

There are ways to provide full names without their showing up in stock dialogue.  Mothers or friends stipulating every formal syllable of a character's full given name, even if she doesn't go by "Henrietta" but only "Henny" - soldiers saluting with full titles - clunking chunks of woodblock exposition, not cooling the drink, just taking up space in the cocktail of one's writing.  Give me ice, or serve it neat.

How do you provide your characters' full names - or do you ?

Game of Violence

At the outset:  this post will in no way but here refer to Game of Thrones.  The title above refers to this post, the title of which might be confusing for most of my readers.  GOTY is the acronym for "Game of the Year" - a popular discussion amongst video gamers, discussing personal opinions on the subject and analyzing winners/losers.  Just like the Game of Academy Awards, but with a lot less emphasis on the products put together by stylists.

At Historical Fiction Online, in two threads, rape and sexual violence have been under discussion, and it brought me back to the link at GOTY - which, sincerely, I can NOT recommend highly enough as a powerful and not overly long read.  It goes to unexpected places, but it's an important view of a terrible part of our world.

And that part - rape, violence, violation - is a part of history, too.  This brings me to a post I put up just now ...


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It isn't necessary to pretend rape away for it not to happen in a novel - yet the frequency of it in "World Without End" begs a lot more questions than whether the work feels authentic. Sadly, at least for me, many of those questions end up being about the author, and the context of the writing, rather than the novel itself. Why is it necessary to heap nine (I'm not being hyperbolic - I think I'm under-counting, but refuse to re-watch WWE to verify my own tally) rape scenes into ONE single episode of a miniseries? Why are the women in this work presented strictly as a) incestuous mothers, b) victims, or c) Mary Sues? What is in that author's head? Do I really want to know?

Ugh.

Realism is not a problem for me. I recently read a deeply stunning post about violence against Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider game, which came to brutal and incredibly affecting conclusions. As apropos to this thread, I cannot recommend reading it highly enough; though the specific issue is not rape, it looks at violence against a female character with an unblinking gaze, and ends in forgiving realism so powerful it actually triggered an abuse victim into a pretty bad state.

This said: I do not believe that a work LACKING violence (against women - sexual or otherwise) also lacks realism. My MC was no priss about breaking out an ax, but he was the son of a king who was banished by his own people for profligate behavior - and so I felt, given what primary sources did have to say about him, that rape and promiscuity (much less battery) could not be a part of his character. Perhaps if I'd written about the father - history doesn't say he was a rapist, but it would hardly be a stretch to think a king dethroned by those with a deep belief in the spiritual right and charisma of his position might have had to behave outrageously (by our view, criminally) to earn an ousting. Had I been writing that story, now that I think about it, I almost can't imagine NOT including rape in it, even multiple violations. My duty is to the story and not my personal "squicks" about what happens in it.


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The reason I'm posting here, apart from my personal axes well ground about rape culture and the war on women, is that final couple of sentences, the whole last paragraph.

We talk a lot, as authors, as readers, about how intimate the process of writing can be, or the experience of reading.  This is my intimacy.  The power for a simple chat online - albeit one about a difficult issue - to turn me to serious consideration of stories that might have been.

Stories which, perhaps, even should be.

I've never found a subject that inspired me to short form histfic, but honestly the idea of taking on Childeric's banishment suddenly fascinates me.  He appears in fragmentary form in The Ax and the Vase; it would be impossible for the father of a king like Clovis (a king who came to the throne so young) not to feel the presence of his own father, even if the character does not appear.

Adverbial Adversarial Again and Wonky Strunky Grammar

I won't rewrite my own post on this, but these two essays were so good I felt the first was worth a revisitation and the second worth the new post!

Bad Copy

"Assuming that your manager OK's" ...

Spotted in an employee communication today about time off requests.  The term "okays" would be only one single space longer than OK's is.  And it would not cause me mental anguish.   Please fix this.

Thank you.

*Expiring in a puddle of unpunctuated goo*

Headline

"Obama Meets C.E.O.'s As Fiscal Reckoning Nears" ...

Good lord, what punctuation addicted profligate wrote this?  For the NEW YORK TIMES?  And what editor let it fly?

And - the President is  meeting with a CEO's what, exactly?

My brain hurts.

Writerliness

I found this post in the Drafts file - one I thought I had published months ago.  Since it saves as of the date you wrote it, but publishes in real time - please accept that this was written in April, but still says some relevant things (to my mind!).



Okay, Arianna Huffington on Colbert says "The Huffington Post is not about Right versus Left, it is about Right versus WRONG ..."

Oh, honey.

And I read HuffPo from time to time.



But THAT.  Is writerliness.  And this finally gets me off my bum to write that Writerly post I've been thinking and saying I was going to get to soon.


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Okay.

Writerly writing goes past self-consciousness and ends up in self-satisfaction instead, skewing either twee or superior depending upon its point.  And it always has a point, which itself is tiresome.

More often than not, the latter seasons of M*A*S*H represent for me the sins of writerliness - the didactic sentimentality, the heavily over-ground axes - but it is popular even in journalism.  In fiction, it can get pretty thick.  Fiction peopled with auto-characters, avatars for an author's self (or dreams of self) modeled into *ary *ues, cheap exposition working to be clever, would-be clever verbiage straining to teach.

The writerly writer can be heard finding their own work witty and charming.  On television, Sorkin productions sometimes fluff a writerly writer.  Sitcoms of course do it, see the old war horse referenced above.  In the seventies, before irony, archness, and meta came along (we did not know of these concepts of course, the human race before Teh Intarwebs), earnestness was done to a scale which might appear ostentatious to the wiser eyes of today.  (Is Diane being writerly?  The world may never know.  But as Mr. X knows, I was never suBtle.)

Cleverness and sincerity had a dangerously passionate relationship, and of course audiences had no critical eye for it.  This stuff was ENT-ertaiment!  (*Cue Lovitz doing his Thespian character.)  Even the quiet writerly moment - *especially* the quiet writerly moment - was thick with portent.  "Portent!" these moments cried, with their contrived intensity.  "Portent ..." they whispered, with the profundity of Lesson.

Ahh.  Writerly writing.

It's hardly gone the way of the dodo, since all us hayseed pre-'netters grew up and got iPhones.  Even reality TV occasionally falls prey to writerliness, don't kid yourself.  And reality serves us up intimate, powerful personal monologues by the multi-ton.

If only we could keep it out of "JOURNALISM" ...  Whatever that even is, anymore.  The best ones out there are Colbert and Stewart.  What does that say about our supposed non-fiction writers??

Bad Author Moves

We read the occasional but pretty regular stories about ignorant unsigned authors who throw public tantrums regarding feedback on their works.  It's a lot less usual for established authors to use thin veils to scarcely obscure fake identities, with which they then bestow silly praise upon themselves and heap scorn on their peers.

It is, however, quite a good way to earn even more scorn than those shrill, bitchy noobs bring on their own heads.  So, congrats, R. J. Ellory, on a very bad idea indeed - and the contemptuous teasing, with your own identity showing regularly, over a course of four years.  All class, all the way.

Author image from The Daily Mail

R. J. Ellory.  The man who singlehandedly inspired the Crime Writers Association to introduce a code of ethics.