alecaustin, posts by tag: theory - LiveJournal

So several of my friends (most proximately mrissa) have been blogging about their current projects and writing process as a part of a Writing Process Blog Tour. The questions in the prompt were interesting enough that I figured it wouldn't be bad to join in. (You can find Marissa's post here.)

1) What am I working on?

My current project has the working title of Coup de Grace. It's a military science fiction novel set in a North America wracked by demographic transitions, climate change, and the after-effects of a coup that turned New York City and Washington DC into radioactive craters, triggered a continent-spanning civil war, and has led to the decades-long military occupation of much of the American South.

Carl Olson and his classmates are cadets at a military academy in Minneapolis which trains the security forces of the Pan-Columbian Republic (a state formed by the union of the US, Mexico, and Canada). They're sworn to defend the Constitution of the PCR-- which has been suspended as long as they've been alive-- against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But when the Commandant of the Academy has them rescue a dead Senator's heir from Separatist guerillas, it becomes clear to Carl and his friends that the line between patriotism and treason is a blurry one, and that hard-liners in the the Army and Senate regard them and their instructors as enemies of the state.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

The impetus that prompted me to write Coup de Grace was what I perceived as the cookie-cutter template of many dystopias. Take an oppressive central government, add in one or more young people who, through inclination or circumstance, are primed to rebel, and give them an external group of freedom fighters to join. Don't get me wrong: there are books which use that template that I've enjoyed. But it made me wonder what a differently-biased dystopia, which actually tried to address the complexities of politics and political violence, would look like.

As such, the Pan-Columbian Republic is more like present-day China or Russia than the Districts of the Hunger Games. The rebels fighting to overthrow it aren't noble freedom fighters-- they're largely neo-Confederates, Dominionists, and other reactionaries who feel they would be justified in killing large swaths of the (majority-Hispanic) population. Meanwhile, our protagonists are a part of the system, and have reasons to love their country as well as an acute awareness of its flaws and internal divisions.

While Coup isn't near-future SF, the PCR's long war and censorship regime have both slowed and maintained technology to the point where the tech permeating everyday life is recognizable, rather than being in decay, or so advanced it might as well be magic. Carl and his friends play for the Academy e-sports team, and wear headsets which function as cell phones and computers (as well as heads-up-displays in combat). People still drive cars, though they're all hybrid or electric, but everyone except cops, truckers, and the military takes buses and light rail to get places. The future is unevenly distributed, and it's left much of the PCR behind.

I'm also doing my best to take the military dimensions of the novel seriously, without letting the jargon and command structure overwhelm everything. Because Carl and his friends are both soldiers and cadets, they have to do PT, take classes, and have to practice and qualify with their weapons. They swear a lot, in both Spanish and English. They have a chain of command, rules of engagement, and have to follow orders. They practice muzzle and trigger discipline.

They also kill a lot of people, and have to live with the consequences.

3) Why do I write what I do?

I tend to joke about how upbeat and cheery my work is, but I don't set out to be dark. It's just that I'm hyper-aware of the conventions of (modern, popular, English language) narrative and how they tend to produce a very constrained range of content, characters, and points of sympathy. One of several ways I respond to these constraints is to twist things around; to interrogate the conventions that annoy me and follow through on the implications of what I find. (For example: the Braveheart trope, or all freedom fighters are good! Or raw jingoism, where anything Our Boys do is good! Yeah. About that...)

Another factor that motivates a lot of my narrative choices is compassion. I ask myself questions like, "What would drive someone to join the Nazgul?" and try not to stop at the first (read: glib) answer. People mostly aren't cardboard villains or cartoon heroes, and it doesn't add to our stories when we portray them that way. Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite creators for this reason. See his depictions of Princess Kushana in Nausicaa, Lady Eboshi and Jigo in Princess Mononoke, and Yubaba in Spirited Away. These are nuanced and comprehensible characters, even when they're being selfish, proud, or opposing the protagonists.

That doesn't mean they're always right, mind you. But how boring stories would be-- and how alien the characters in them would seem-- if they were always right!

4) How does your writing process work?

My writing process, such as it, is often kick-started by coming up with particularly vivid set-pieces. Once I've got one or two set-pieces to drive toward-- a magister who can turn his staff into an powerful electromagnet facing down a hallway full of crossbowmen, for example-- I start poking at the implications and consequences of a world where such things make sense. Often the initial phrase or image that inspired a book or story doesn't survive the development process. That's fine; ideas are cheap.

Once I feel like I have a clear idea of what happens first, I start writing. My process from there involves a lot of sitting around figuring out what needs to happen next. Some people can think on the page, throwing stuff at the wall during their early drafts and seeing what sticks, but that doesn't usually work very well for me. Doing my thinking before I start writing frees me up to improvise within constraints, rather than first being paralyzed by possibilities, and then paralyzed by the conviction that I've taken a wrong turn and won't be able to continue until I figure out how many of the pages I've just written need to be thrown away.

That said, while I often need to pause and think about what comes next (and sometimes research specific topics, like riverboats of the Yangtze, or political philosophy), I usually have a fairly clear notion of where I'm going. Especially with longer works, like books or novelettes-- I've never written a novella, and given how few places are looking to buy them, I don't mean to start-- I tend to have both a bunch of snippets from the end of the story written before I write the middle, and elaborate playlists and mixes made up of songs that will get my head in the right space and remind me of the emotional and dramatic beats I intend to hit. The typical result of this is that writing the middle of any story is the hard part-- by the time I get to the end, I tend to have a lot more clarity, as well as bits of prose that I can incorporate or discard in my wild rush to the finish.

Anyway, that's what I'm working on, and how I think about and do these sorts of things.

The standard way of doing this "tour" seem to have three people lined up to follow you next week, but I don't really like pushing chain letters or posts on my friends. So here is Marissa Lingen's process post (also linked to at the start of this post), and Michael Merriam's. If you feel like continuing things with a post of your own, indicate that in comments.

So my guest post for the Book of Apex 4 - The Rhetoric of Blood - is up at Many a True Nerd. In it, I talk about the conflation of "realism" with darkness in fiction, why I write dark stuff, and how some topics are inherently dark while others get depicted that way for other reasons.

If that sounds at all interesting to you, go check it out.

So I've been reading a dystopian YA novel for research purposes. And yesterday I hit a bit where my brain rebelled and told me what just happened in the book is impossible and completely wrong for umpteen different reasons, and therefore the dude who supposedly got killed by having a kid hurl a (non-throwing) knife into his heart from a significant distance must have been killed by someone else.

Spoilers: There is no conspiracy and he did not get killed by someone else.

Part of what's going on here, of course, is that there is a strong tendency for certain genre YA novels to privilege aesthetics, drama, and emotional response over plausibility. This is especially true when the kind of plausibility in question isn't regarded as common or interesting - say, knowledge of what tank treads do to the surfaces of streets, or the logistical base required to maintain an effective air force of any kind (hello, Hunger Games). Often this is even true on the part of the audience-- many moviegoers of my acquaintance will tell people to "just go with" various implausible things, because "it's just a movie".

Now, "It's just a movie," is not a very compelling argument. It's clear, though, that some readers or viewers will accept implausibilities and others will balk at them, and my hypothesis is that reader knowledge, expectations, and interpretive protocols determine their reactions.

If the filter a reader is processing a work through is "Stupid action movie," then they are going to have many of their critical faculties tuned down, so only the most implausible and ridiculous set-pieces will prompt a "Oh, come on!"

In contrast, if a reader is processing a work as serious mimetic literature, they're going to be hyper-sensitive to any perceived deviation from the world and human behavior as we know it.

My suspicion is that both my knowledge (of violence and the military) and my reading protocols are askew from the intended audience of this book. The author wants the set-piece to prompt an aesthetic or emotional response-- the protagonist's brother has been tragically slain! REVENGE!-- and not a skeptical or intellectual one-- Wow, that's some BS. What are the odds of that happening?

I strongly suspect that one of the things that's silently dividing the SF field internally, as well as dividing SF from YA, is the degree to which different audiences' reading protocols skew towards privileging aesthetics and emotion vs. intellect and pattern-matching. (I don't feel like this maps precisely or even closely to the Fantasy/SF split at this point, though people keep on trying to make the conversation about that, which I feel does a damn good job of obscuring what's actually in play.)

There's a whole 'nother post to be made about plausibility and the rhetoric of realism in fiction, but I don't have the time or bandwidth for that right now.

So I'm still trying to work through all of my thoughts on this, but I've been noticing a fair amount of SF lately (often, but not always, alternate history) that seems to treat extrapolation - examining the consequences and implications of its premises or rules - as optional.

This alone is only moderately frustrating. I don't usually write the hardest of hard SF myself, so I'm not exactly about to start throwing stones at people for not calculating out all the trajectories in their story via slide rule and graph paper. But what worries me a bit is when some of these stories get lauded as amazing and rigorous and full of great and rigorous extrapolation, leaving me wondering if the people who are praising and nominating them for awards read the same story I did.

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Why, you ask, does this matter? Well, because when we like and enjoy something, especially in these days of hyperbole inflation ("Best thing evar!") there is a tendency to praise it to the skies as *so* moving, and *so* well-done, and *so* rigorously imagined. There are a number of novels which have been up for major awards lately that have had a lot of people saying this sort of thing about them, and it makes me want to shake people, because words have meaning dammit.

To put it another way, there seems to be a growing conflation of the performance or appearance of rigor ("I came up with something cool I wanted to do and slathered it with handwavium!") with the actuality of rigor ("I put a lot of thought into the implications of my fantastical premise.") And I find that a bit alarming, because I feel like actual rigorous extrapolation, and not just the appearance of it, is valuable.

Like I said earlier, I don't want every - or even most! - stories to be the hardest of hard SF, or the most rigorously grounded of historical fantasy. Not every story needs to possess every virtue, and in fact many literary virtues are contradictory. (For example, if the Paarfi books omitted needless words, the world would be a sadder place.) But since I like reading stories where world-building has consequences and far-reaching implications, and I know that many of you do too, I figured I would put this out there and see if anyone else had noticed the same sort of thing.

So swan_tower picked up the ball from my information density post and ran with it in a post of her own. I'm curious what people's thoughts are on the specific sorts of examples she gives and questions she raises. Go forth and read!

So this is more of a half-formed thought than an actual argument, but I've been pondering the question of "invisibility" in Fantasy (using the 4th St. definition, which includes SF) lately, not just of classes of people, but also of concepts, economics, and other forms of political and historical complexity. The fact of the matter is that narrative and the desire to turn events and ideas into stories tend to be a simplifying, flattening force - see this recent post from Aliette De Bodard talking about how to include an element she wanted in her story, her depiction of it had to become a caricature because of space concerns.

The "culprit" here is the cold fact that fiction needs to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio in order to work for most readers, where 'signal' is immediately relevant story content and complicating or background details are classed as 'noise'. While there are people who would read Kim Stanley Robinson for his infodumps, there are lots of other readers who want immediacy, immersion, and tropes and patterns they can recognize. (A parallel problem crops up all the time in games if you try to front-load your tutorials. People want to play the game, even if that means you need to teach them on the fly.) Readers want story, and they want it now, and they don't want too many characters to confuse them, or a lecture about the history of kingdoms X & Y.

The trouble, of course, is that often "don't want too many characters" means the cast gets pruned down until there aren't any servants, or merchants, or people making the kingdom run. The trouble with only slipping in history through evocative details is that not every kind of history is amenable to being boiled down to easily referenced soundbites. And so on.

Also, when we write stories, we don't get to cover even a fraction of the issues that are relevant to a particular world or time period. We rarely get to delve deep into technological innovation in stories centered on court politics, for example, and when we're following an outlaw and his nemesis on a chase to a hidden tomb, questions of public health won't usually get much page space. That said, I feel like this creates an even greater responsibility for authors to think through the implications of the choices they make and the aspects of their world which they depict. I sympathize with the desire to cram more things in, and the temptation to make them simpler and easier for people to wrap their heads around, but... I guess I feel like the pressure to simplify and flatten complex issues is already massive? The standard narratives of our culture demand clear sympathy and easy answers, and sometimes that's okay. But it's not okay if it's all we produce, or all we promote, and I get uncomfortable when people make claims about story that implicitly or explicitly denigrate complexity, and exalt emotional appeals over intellectual ones.

Anyway, like I said, half-formed thought. I'd be curious to hear what other people think about these issues, as I feel like there are a whole knot of them in dynamic tension with each other.

(My internet continues to be horrid, which is why this is going up at nearly 3 am rather than any kind of civilized hour.)

I keep meaning to write this post and not getting around to it, so I am going to hack out a draft in order to prevent The Perfect from being the enemy of The Good. (The spur that got me over the hurdle of beginning was this Greg Benford guest post, which is sufficiently loaded down with unexamined appeals to taste hierarchies that I felt a full and proper demolition of it would require me to acquaint my readers with the concept in question - though awards season is a highly relevant motivator as well.)

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the sociological idea of taste hierarchies in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste - a study of the tastes of the French public, as determined by survey, published in 1984 by Harvard University Press. Taste, Bourdieu argued, is a social construct that exists within a specific cultural context, such as (in this case) that of the French class system.

The tendency of the French upper classes to (for example) prefer classical music over popular music, Bourdieu argued, was a learned social behavior, and whether deployed consciously or not, the associated taste hierarchy - wherein classical music is deemed 'better' or 'more refined' than tunes favored by the vulgar mob - reinforced class distinctions, separating the world of music-listeners into the cognoscenti and the plebes. (The plebes, of course, had their own taste hierarchy, which while not supported by social institutions like orchestras or opera halls, had both economic consequences and a real presence in society. To claim to subscribe to the upper class's taste hierarchy would be read as "putting on airs".)

One hopes that the relevance of this idea to literature, especially in the SFF vs. Mainstream discussion (as well as the endless SF vs. Fantasy conflict) is immediately clear.

Some points about taste hierarchies before we go on:

1) Taste hierarchies are not inherently bad or good. The idea that works of literature written by authors fully literate in a language, which are properly copy-edited, and are not near-copies of prior works are better than illiterate, error-ridden works of plagarism is a taste hierarchy. So is the idea that the most tedious mimetic tale of faculty adultery is superior to any science fiction novel, by virtue of its "realistic" subject matter. I think most people reading this essay would subscribe to the former hierarchy and abominate the latter.

2) The deployment and invocation of taste hierarchies is unavoidable if we want to make meaningful distinctions between works of literature. (Or movies, or games, or music, or...) Simply narrowing the field of what you're talking about invokes an implicit taste hierarchy, which is that what you are talking about is (at least momentarily) of more interest than the field of books or stories you're not talking about.

3) Taste hierarchies can be either implicit or explicit, examined or unexamined. Mostly they remain implicit and unexamined. This allows those invoking them to assert that their taste hierarchy is not a social construct they are deploying to bludgeon you into submission (or at least silence), but the one, singular Truth! Strangely, this often helps conceal the fact that they are defending their privilege, power, and/or economic position.

4) It is much better for critics and reviewers, even (or perhaps especially?) amateurs discussing which stories and books they liked from the last year, to be aware of what taste hierarchies they are applying to generate their lists of "the best" works.

Speaking of applying taste hierarchies, let's talk a bit about the hierarchies that are likely to be in play around Hugo and Nebula nominations, shall we?

The most obvious taste hierarchies within the field are those on display in the Benford post I linked to above - SF vs. Fantasy, Hard SF vs. that mushy soft stuff, Literature vs. SF (and of course, its popular converse, SF exceptionalism...), Boldness and Innovation vs. Comfort and Passivity. An observant reader will probably notice the tendency towards the unmarked, privileged, and male-identified being preferred to the marked, unprivileged, or female-identified in these oppositions, with the main exception being the attempted reversal of SF's marginal status re: mimetic literature via the (gendered) hierarchy of Boldness vs. Comfort.

There are, however, a variety of other, less obvious, taste hierarchies in play as well:

Seriousness vs. Humor: While there are exceptions, "serious" works tend to dominate humorous ones by virtue of the implication that humorous SF and Fantasy is frivolous and not addressing Important (i.e. Bold and Innovative!) topics.

"Ungendered" vs. Gendered: While the genre's core taste hierarchies and the conflicts around them can be read as gender oppositions, it's worth noting that sub-genres which are read as strongly gender-aligned haven't done terribly well in awards voting in the last few decades. This includes both romance and unalloyed military SFF, though alloying the two (Bujold's Vorkosigan books) seems to get authors past this hurdle, possibly because mixing the two allows more readers to perceive the "core genre" appeals that said books also possess.

Hip vs. Unhip: Very few SF fans were (or are) particularly hip. As such, when something in the field comes along that is perceived to have the luster of coolness, a certain portion of fandom usually latches onto it. See the New Wave, and Cyberpunk, and the New Weird. The rhetoric of literary movements nearly always invokes the Boldness vs. Comfort hierarchy, but it also positions the movement and its members as new and cool, as opposed to the (presumably) old and stodgy folks who haven't joined this decade's revolution.

Famous vs. Obscure: There's a reason people marketing books as bestsellers works, and it's because many people are willing to outsource critical thought to whether they have (or "should have") heard of someone/thing or not. (See also, nominating or voting for things one hasn't read based on the author.)

Print vs. Online: Arguably a subset of "Famous vs. Obscure", but there has historically been a lot of deference to 'The Big Three' magazines in awards nominations and voting, and I feel that said bias is worth keeping in mind.

I'm sure that my readers will be able to supply other taste hierarchies that are rarely made explicit but underly people's voting behaviors. ('Safe' novelty vs. unfamiliar/uneasy novelty is an interesting one. People think they know a lot of untrue things, and stories that challenge those false assumptions instead of playing to them often don't fare well.)

Once again, absent specifics, taste hierarchies aren't inherently good or bad. Speaking only for myself, I feel that most "humorous" SF is neither effective humor nor good SF. That said, I think very highly of Marie Brennan/swan_tower's Love, Cayce, and I expect to be nominating it for a Hugo this year. I could have gone, "Oh, right, that's not serious enough to be award-worthy," but I prefer not to leave my taste hierarchies unexamined. Humor isn't unworthy of awards: stories that fail to be funny, or that don't do other worthwhile things as well as their humor aren't. (c.f.)

As discussions about the best books of the last year and which stories should be nominated for awards continue, I ask only that we pause to consider the taste hierarchies we're invoking and supporting when we assert that a given set of works are worthy of recognition, and others are not.

Personally, I'm going to be doubling down on supporting literate, non-plagarized works that didn't bore me to tears. A partial list of which may, internet willing, be posted soon.

I recently bought and read Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for the first time, since I wasn't aware it had been reprinted by Wesleyan (way back in 2009) until Patrick Nielsen Hayden mentioned it to me at Viable Paradise this year. Those of you who are longtime readers will know that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Delany's critical work, even when I don't agree with him, and this remains true of most of the essays in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. That said, I feel the initial essay, "About 5,750 Words" (written in 1968) establishes a premise upon which Delany constructs much of his critical apparatus (such as his criticism of the opening of The Dispossessed), and I feel that this premise - in light of variations in how people read and recent discoveries about human memory - is fundamentally flawed.

I'm going to skip past Delany's equation of form with content, which I feel is at least partly based on the claims he makes about reading. (The short version of that argument is that there is no separation between style and content in fiction, because the change of a single word in a novel can be "all-important".) Delany argues that:

A story is not a replacement of one set of words by another-- plot-synopsis, detailed recounting, or analysis. The story is what happens in the reader's mind as his eyes move from the first word to the second, the second to the third, and so on to the end of the tale. (Ibid., p. 4)

This might seem reasonable until you realize that Delany means it entirely literally - that he is claiming the transition from "The" to "The red" to "The red sun" is actually a meaningful and significant part of the story process:

[Words] sit in numerous inter- and overweaving relations. The process as we move our eyes from word to word is corrective and revisionary rather than progressive. Each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before. (Ibid., p. 4)

This claim, and the micro-focused narration of Delany's 2.5 page word-by-word response to reading the sentence "The red sun is high, the blue low," followed by the bald assertion that "Though it ordinarily takes a quarter of a second, and is largely unconscious, this is the process," made me stop and gape in disbelief. Because that is not the process as I understand it, nor is such an understanding of human literacy conducive to a philosophy of writing that properly accounts for human variation and frailties.

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...or, Alec is a snob, part CMLVII. Via thanate:

1) Say something worth reading. A cute idea isn't enough. A joke ending isn't enough. I'm not saying that every story or book ever written has to be laden down with capital-M meaning, but seriously: Say something cool or funny or interesting or awesome - preferably several things! - or else you're wasting your readers' time (and your own).

2) Don't flinch. There are enough ways to fall short of the mark in writing without pulling your punches needlessly. Don't cop out. Follow through on the implications of your premise and your character's choices, within the parameters of the tone and setting you've established.

3) Aim high. (If you miss the moon, you might hit London.) Don't be afraid of trying things that seem hard, or beyond your reach. You learn more from your own failures than from doing the same safe thing again and again.

4) Regard pronouncements with irreverence. Interrogate people's rules and claims, to see what about them you endorse and what you disagree with. Then interrogate *why* you feel that way. Knowing what you think on a topic and why is far more useful than clinging to unexamined wisdom, especially if it turns out to be a glib and pithy catchphrase.

5) Have the courage of your convictions. When you're talking about craft, don't be a jerk, but name names. Be dispassionate and specific. Concrete examples advance a conversation, while vague wittering and platitudes end conversations before they begin.

6) Read widely and deeply. Know the part of the field you're working in, but read other things as well. If you don't read widely, you'll have far fewer models to draw on when you want to do something cool.

7) Genre is a conversation. Find stories that stick with you, put your finger on why, and write your own stories in response. This is a good way to help make sure you write something worth reading.

8) Write for smart readers. Seriously. Would you rather the people who email you or talk to you about your work at cons be smart and interesting, or not? I know my preference.

9) Have standards. Don't send your stories to markets or editors you don't respect. Don't send anything out that you wouldn't be proud to see your name on. Know which of the books and stories you like are amazingly crafted, and which of them are fun but flawed. Don't emulate the latter.

10) Write however works for you. Some people fix things in second draft. Some people write every day. Don't fixate on what other people do or say to do. Try things out, figure out what works for you, and do that.

So in the course of discussing the idea of a single work as a 'masterclass' with some folks, I had some thoughts which I figured it would be worth reproducing here.

(NB: While this post was prompted by vcmw's comments at 4th Street, I don't want to come off like I'm picking on her. The intent here is to work through my ideas on how learning from example[s] works, or should work... or at minimum, how it works for me.)

Without diving into the mire of definitions, I think the first thing worth addressing is the concept of a 'masterclass'. In music, it's a class with a master composer or performer, with them performing a piece and then critiquing their students' performances. This obviously isn't what we mean when we describe a book as a 'masterclass'. What's usually meant by such a reference is that X author in Y book does Z thing so well that people should take note of it, learn from it, and emulate it - with the implication that doing so is tantamount to learning from X author directly.

As you might gather from the fact I'm writing this post, I don't think things are quite so simple. There are several reasons for this, so I'll address them one at a time.

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...I suspect that the stuff behind the cut may go a long way to explain why I am so incredibly judgmental about books when I feel they aren't living up to their potential. Oh well, no matter. It's not like any of you were suffering from the delusion that I was a mild-mannered young man with a kind word for everyone, right?