Starling House and Unattractive Male Leads

This week I finished "Starling House," a novel by Alix Harrow about a spooky house in a dying Kentucky town. 

There's a lot to love here.  The prose is gorgeous and evocative.  The history of the house is presented through several different versions of the story of Eleanor Starling, the builder of the house.  The differences in the stories depending on who's telling them tell a lot about the biases in the small town and how those biases are still around to affect out main character.  The similarities in the stories give credence to which might be the "true" story.  And you know I like that kind of thing--how stories are told and retold, how they change both in their telling and in their meaning.  

Also, a large part of the story is about cleaning up a haunted house.  Down to the nitty-gritty of wiping the base boards and Windex-ing the windows.  I've been kicking around a story about cleaning up a hoarder wizard's mansion for years, so I love stories like this.

But the thing I found myself thinking about the most with this story is how the male lead is ugly.  The main character, who has a first person point of view in this story, describes him in very unattractive terms, and then straight up calls him ugly multiple times.  This does not stop him from being the love interest.  And every time it came up, I thought, "If this was a genre story, he would be hot."  You see, even though this book has magic, with nightmare beasts and a bewitched sword and dream logic and a house magical enough to change and defend itself, I wouldn't call it a fantasy novel.  

It's a literary novel.  You can tell from the slower pacing.  (The slow pacing really did slow me down.  I've had this book checked out for a while even though I enjoyed reading it.) You can tell from the rich prose.  You can tell, because the love interest in unattractive.

I think it has something to do with how this novel isn't trying to whisk the reader away.  It's not trying to be escapism.  A hot guy is escapism.  An ugly guy is realism.  Even though this book has nightmare monsters and a magic house, those are tools to tell the story of a woman on the outskirts of society in a dying town in Kentucky where the coal is drying up and classism and old prejudices run as deep as the muddy river.  I don't want to go there.  I don't want to be any of the characters.  It hurts to hear about their struggles.

In my ongoing quest to talk about literary fiction and genre fiction, I'm not strictly saying that literary fiction is "realistic" and genre fiction is "escapism."  But I would say that the two genres emphasize different goals.  And a hot love interest is a data point to think about.

I Read Project Hail Mary

 

I read Project Hail Mary in two days, and I need to rant about it a little bit.  This book is a wild ride, and I need you all to read it so I can talk about it.

I usually hate it when people tell me to go into a book or a movie without knowing anything about it.  Of course I should know some basic things about it before I dedicate substantial time to it!  What if it's something I hate?  What if there's something I love and I would have been way more excited earlier if I had just been informed that Baby Yoda is there and he's adorable?  So I understand that it's hypocritical of me to say that now about Project Hail Mary: it's better if you don't know.  But the thing that worked for me in this regard was that I did know a fair amount about what to expect even if I didn't know where the plot was going.  The front cover has a guy in a spacesuit, floating in space, so I had an idea of the setting.  I've read The Martian, so I know Andy Weir loves writing  solitary men doing math and cracking dad jokes.  And that is exactly what this book is. 

A guy wakes up alone with amnesia.  He gradually pieces together that he's on a desperate mission to save humanity.  And that's all I'm telling you, and I think you'll know if you're onboard or not.

There are some emotional moments that got to me, especially since there are two characters that I am absolutely obsessed with (Rocky and Stratt, neither of whom are the main guy).  The pacing is great and the tension is terrific.  But what really blew me away was the structure.  Impeccable structure.

First of all, our guy wakes up with amnesia.  I've talked about this a fair bit with Breath of the Wild (a Zelda video game that maybe I like a little too much).  In that, the main character wakes up with amnesia, which means you, the player, are discovering the world along with the character, even though he ought to know where everything is.  It also means you uncover memories and piece together what happened as you play, giving you an unfolding story in a game where you can do anything in whatever order you want.

Although the functions and the outcome are different, this book reminded me of that.  Our main character wakes up knowing nothing along with the reader, so to a small extent, he's an audience proxy.  You figure out what's going on as he does.  And there's a lot going on, so this structure makes it so there's no huge info dump at the beginning of the book.  It also means the stakes at the beginning are fairly low: he's in a room and there are robot arms and he doesn't know where he is.  Where is he?  How will he find out?  Well, he can do a small experiment to learn more!  Then as more is uncovered, the questions get bigger.  What's that?  What's THAT?  Where is he?  How will he fix that problem?  Well, he can do some bigger experiments to learn more! 

So in this way, the reader isn't overwhelmed, there's a sense of wonder about each new discovery, and the stakes build and build and build.

Every now and then, he will remember something, which results in the story having two timelines: one while he's an amnesiac trying to save the world and one before his adventure where Earth was falling apart. The order that the memories are revealed is pretty much chronological, which I guess isn't very accurate to memory retrieval for amnesiacs, but that means the stakes in the memories get bigger and bigger as the situation on Earth grows more and more dire.  That way the stakes in both timelines track together. 

But also something will be happening in the present timeline that will trigger a memory of the past that's thematically similar or that explains some of the science.  At first this felt like just a convenient way to convey information.  The amnesia felt superfluous and we could have just had flashbacks.  However, there's a point towards the end where it all comes together and I no longer felt this way at all, and at that point I started raving about structure.  The dual time periods start to give tension to each other, like when we figure out enough to know how the story in the past ends: with disaster. Then there's tension when you learn more about what's at stake.  The dual time periods mean that there's some interesting explorations of themes from different points in our main character's life.  There's juxtaposition between personal tragedy and global tragedy playing out in both time periods.

And I think it's awesome how all this could thrive because of the use of structure.

Someone's Ranting about Dog Man

 The latest publishing drama/hate click bait is an article on The Cut.  I'm not going to give the link, because they don't deserve the traffic.

In the article, the author posits that there are no "good" children's books.  It seems they are specifically referring to middle grade books, although they don't use the term "middle grade."  They also never define what would make a "good" book.  They say that their children are voracious readers, and although the author seems to be pleased at how much their children read, they're upset that everything the children read is garbage.  They then go on to describe how it is impossible to find more books, as if they have never heard of librarians, recommendation lists, Goodreads, or Google.  

Now, there are many conversations to be had around this (the relatively small offerings in middle grade as opposed to young adult, how juggernaut titles take over genres, how adult sensibilities need to be set aside to write fiction an 8-year-old will love, etc etc).  But this article does not engage with any of those.  In fact it spends most of its word count singling out Dav Pilkey's "Dog Man" and complaining about how annoying it is.

If you're not familiar with Dog Man, let me give you the skinny.  The whole thing is a comic drawn by two middle school boys, George and Harold, who are the main characters from another Dav Pilkey series called Captain Underpants.  The art (in early books in the series) looks like it was done by middle schoolers, and there are spelling mistakes and words that are misspelled, crossed out, and then rewritten.  The story is that, once upon a time, there was a police officer and his K9 unit.  They were in a horrible accident caused by Petey the Cat, where the cop's head was died and the dog's body died, but someone had the great idea to combine the surviving parts, creating Dog Man!  Half cop, half dog.  The first few books are Petey having an evil plan (which are as ridiculous as you would expect from the Dog Man premise), Dog Man catching him and throwing him in jail, and then Petey escaping again.

But then, Petey has an idea.  He can clone himself and then there would be two of him to be twice as evil!  However, when he clones himself, he creates Little Petey, who is a little kid, hopeful and innocent, and with none of Petey's jadedness.  Petey is infinitely frustrated with Little Petey's childishness.  Over the course of several books, Little Petey starts to wear Petey down, thawing his icy heart.  And here the series starts to get into deeper themes: not just that Petey's literal clone is good and maybe there's good in Petey too if he just chooses kindness, but it also gets into cycles of generational trauma.  One of my favorite parts is that when Petey is in jail, Little Petey lives with Dog Man, which ends up being "on the weekends," which is a set up similar to kids with divorced parents who have to travel between houses.

Also there are a lot of fart jokes.  And fart songs.

The author of this article does not like the fart jokes (and yes, for me--an adult--they get old).  The author of this article doesn't like that the jokes repeat over and over again (and, yes, for me--an adult--they get old).  My kid cackles every single time, rolling around in his reading spot, scream laughing as he sings, "Stinkle stinkle little fart!"  But I think the author of this article fails to understand several points about the humor. 1. Kids think that's funny, and the book was written for kids and not for adults. 2. Even if the joke wasn't repeated multiple times across several books, your kid would read that one section over and over and roll around and cackle.  3. This actually is teaching children humor (now hold on a second, let me finish).  Kids learn by repeated exposure.  That's why a lot of modern curricula are set up as "spiral curricula" where you keep coming back to the same concept over and over and over.  Yes, these books tell the same jokes over and over, but each time your kid learns a little more about structure and expectation.  At one point, Petey (who is also furious that Little Petey keeps telling the same joke) explains about the structure of knock knock jokes and why they're funny, which in turn is a perfect set up for one of Little Petey's jokes that ends with "popped on your head."

And that got me thinking.  The writer of this article:

• Comically dislikes Dog Man.
• Hates that they keep telling the same bad jokes
• Wishes that everyone could just grow up already

Y'all.   I think Petey wrote this article.

And that makes me feel better.

First of all, even though I know this is click bait and I should ignore it, it's much easier to ignore it knowing that Petey wrote it.  It's just Petey being Petey. Ignore him.

But also, one of the big critiques of this article that keeps cropping up is a concern that this parent's disgust for their child's choice of reading material might result in the child feeling shamed and no longer wanting to read.  But if this is Petey writing this, then we know how that's going to turn out: Little Petey will not be deterred.  Eventually Petey will see the light and let kindness into his heart.

And if Petey didn't write this article, then at least these children are reading Dog Man, and they have Little Petey as a role model of how to not give up.

Tension and Paw Patrol

Lately, my son has been watching a whole bunch of Paw Patrol.  For those not in the know, Paw Patrol is an animated show from Nickelodeon with two fifteen-minute episodes, or the occasional half hour episode.  In it, there is a team of dogs, called the Paw Patrol, and each dog is a kind of community helper (police officer, firefighter, bulldozer driver, recycling truck driver, etc.)  Each episode, doofy townspeople have an issue and call up Ryder, the little boy who coordinates the Paw Patrol, and he sends the dogs that would be helpful out to fix the problem.  It teaches about community helpers and problem solving and teamwork.  It's also very formulaic, which kids like, and the theme song plays a lot and is super catchy. 

If you still have "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher" stuck in your head, I know how you could fix that.

There are a couple things that absolutely fascinate me about Paw Patrol.  The first is how quickly the stakes escalate. 

There's one episode (we tend to watch the same episodes over and over) where this kid, Alex, has a big-wheel that he's McGuivered together out of duct tape and spare parts.  He hits a curb and the big-wheel falls apart.  Pieces of his big-wheel are in the street, and it wouldn't be safe for him to get them, so he calls the Paw Patrol for help.  Ryder calls the dogs together and sorts out that the Police Pup will stop traffic around the scattered parts and Recycle Pup will help put the scattered parts back on the big-wheel.  They explain this plan, then follow through on the plan, and huzzah!  Fixed big-wheel!  But then, Alex takes off on his newly fixed big-wheel and careens down a hill straight toward a busy intersection.  What will the Paw Patrol do about this?  Well, Police Pup can block off traffic in the intersection and Helicopter Pup can help bring Alex to a stop.  Okay, that's a good plan!  Which they execute and it succeeds, and Alex learns a lesson about going slow on his big-wheel so he's not hit by a car.

There's another episode where there's been a bunch of snow, and the Mayor's car swerves off the icy road into a snowbank and gets stuck.  She calls the Paw Patrol to help tow her out.  Ryder calls the dogs together and decides that Bulldozer Pup will clear the roads like a snowplow and Police Pup will use the winch on his Police Pup Car to haul the mayor's car out of the snow.  This plan is successful, and everyone feels good about themselves.  Or at least they do until Ryder gets a call from a train engineer.  There's a bunch of debris on the track and the train is going to hit it and derail, and he can't slow down because the tracks are too icy.  Oh no!  Well, what should the Paw Patrol do about this imminent emergency?  They can have Police Pup clear some of the little debris and Snow Rescue Pup remove the big debris and Bulldozer Pup scrape the snow off the tracks with his bulldozer.  Does that sound like a good plan?  Good!  Yay!  They execute this plan and the day is saved and there's no train derailment.

Sometimes Paw Patrol makes me anxious.  There is a boy on a big-wheel hurtling towards traffic, and you're going to call a dog in a helicopter in from across town and talk about your plan before running after him?  Ahhhhhhhh!  But the other thing that's fascinating about Paw Patrol is how much it doesn't freak out my easily freaked-out kid.  By stopping the ticking clock, which is essentially what happens in this time dilation moment when they have time to make a plan--as my kid sees it--that means the ticking clock must not exist.  They have all the time in the world to decide on a step-by-step plan about what they're going to do.  And that step-by-step plan is comforting even in the face of a train derailment or an erupting volcano or a sinking boat.  The Paw Patrol's calm is comforting.  While taking their time makes me (an adult) anxious that they're not going to get to that kid in time, it actually lowers the stakes as my son understands them.

The episodes are also set up to mimic the way kids play.  You can think of it like there's a group of kids and they each have a different pup toy, and one of them comes up with a problem.  "Oh no!  There's a tree on the tracks and the train can't stop!" and the other kids jump in and say, "Police Pup can use his wench to move the tree!"  "Let's call in Snow Rescue Pup!  She can shove the rest of the trees off the track!"

It's the opposite of what you would do in a story written for adults, where you want the tension to be high and you want the reader/viewer to feel the danger.  For instance, I would have Police Pup tear after Alex the second he started going too fast down the hill, and Police Pup would rolling tackle him off the street right before he drove into the intersection.  So in a way, this show is demonstrating things not to do when storytelling: Don't stop and talk about your plan in the middle of an action scene.

But also, maybe I have such problems watching this show--maybe the reason it makes me so much more anxious than it should, is that it doesn't follow traditional story telling structures that appear in adult stories.  The beats are off, and I find that jarring and stressful.  So maybe that's a lesson too: do something jarringly to disrupt story beats to create a different kind of tension.  Get back to the story!  Oh my God!  Ahhhhh!

Link's Awakening and Player Buy-in

Spoilers for Link's Awakening, a game that first came out in 1993.  And if you're wanting to play it for the plot...I'm happy to offer up some suggestions for different Zelda games that will scratch that itch for you.

So, Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening was first released on the Game Boy.  The big Game Boy.  The one where I had a power adapter that plugged into the wall, because my mom refused to buy any more AA batteries.  The one where I had a designated Game Boy playing chair with a lamp (because the Game Boy was hard to see) and my power outlet.  And--not to brag, but--I had the fun magnifying glass attachment that I thought would make people want to talk to me. 

Recently, they re-released it for the Switch and updated the graphics and the music and everything.  So I recently bought a Switch to play this game again. (I know, okay.  I know.)

Now, if you haven't played this game, it's a weird one. At the beginning, Link is sailing a tiny boat alone through a storm, when the ship is destroyed and he washes up on an island.  In order to escape the island (according to a random owl), he must wake the Wind Fish, and he must do this by gathering the eight fancy instruments (each at the end of a dungeon) and playing a song in front of the Wind Fish's egg.  None of the recurring cast appears in this game.  There's no Zelda.  No Impa.  Not a single reference to Ruto.  And there are weirdly a bunch of enemies from the Mario games.  But the weirdest part of all is that about half way through the game, it becomes clear that the sleeping Wind Fish is dreaming the whole island.  All the dungeons and monsters are part of his dream.  But so are all the people who live there, along with all their histories and hopes and dreams.  Waking the Wind Fish will cause the island to vanish and everyone who lives there to disappear.

And yet, the designers of this game intended for me to keep playing.  I continue to collect instruments and interact with people who are going to cease to exist because of my actions.  And I just keep on going.  But I feel bad knowing that the "right" thing to do would be to stop collecting instruments and live a nice, quiet life on this fairly nice island.

Why doesn't he just...not?  Why don't I just stop playing?

In part, I kept playing in hopes that maybe there had been a mistake.  Maybe they've changed it so after I beat the final boss, it turns out that that owl giving me directions is evil and I have to fight him to save the island.  Maybe there's not going to be a cut scene at the end where I see every character that was kind to me go up in a flash, and then I'm left floating in the ocean on the few pieces of driftwood while the Wind Fish sails away.  Or maybe I've forgotten that the Wind Fish gives me a ride back to Hyrule...

Oh...No?  Okay...Bye, Wind Fish!  See ya in hell, I guess.

These dilemmas actually pop up a lot in Zelda games.  The most glaring being if you ever play through Ocarina of Time for a second time (or eighth time).  In that one, Zelda has this great idea to gather up these magic stones to open a door to the spirit realm, and Link goes and does that, but when he opens the door to the spirit realm half way through the game, it unleashes unspeakable horrors and the second half of the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic environment.  So on the second play through, you think "...Wait a second.  If I just did nothing, there would be no problem and the world would not need saving."

There's another part like this in Skyward Sword when you finish up a dungeon and right as you get to the end, Impa pops up and yells at you for taking so long, and thank goodness she was here to handle everything, and if you're not going to do better, why don't you just go home?  And, chastised, I wondered...why don't I just go home?  I mean...Impa looks like she's got this, and who am I anyway?
And the answer here for why I don't just stop playing is that there is more game to play, and it's still enjoyable even if I ought not be doing it.

The real problem comes when this happens in a novel, and I start to question, "Why don't you just go home?" "Why don't you just not try to date this dude?"  "Why don't you just use that magic mirror Sirius gave you to talk to him in case of emergencies?"  It's not a plot hole; it's a failure of motivation.  And it's the worst.

I worked really hard in my last novel to make sure my main character's motivation made sense, that the reader bought into why he NEEDED to do all this nonsense.  I wanted the reader to understand it was a bad idea, but also understand that it needed to be done.  I worked so hard on it.  And I succeeded, by which I mean no one has called me on the beginning since I worked on it so hard. 

They called me on it at the 2/3 mark.

The nonsense escalates, and it gets to the point where the reader asks, "Why is anyone else letting him keep doing this?  Why don't they just stop him?"

And I banged my head against a table.  Because they're right, and I need to devote a big chunk of time to working on that.

I forget where I first heard the best piece of parenting advice I've ever received.  It's this: If anyone ever starts their advice that starts with "Why don't you just..." that advice is bad.  That word "just" implies that the solution is easy, and I'm just too wrapped up in my own drama to see that simple solution, that I'd rather complain about how my life is so difficult than do something easy that will fix my problem. 

And when I was new at this parenting thing and doing everything wrong, that implication that it was easy for everyone else just made me feel worse.  Is there a simple answer, and I'm just too stupid to make it work?  Clearly no one else has this problem, and I am a disaster.  But being able to recognize--to have a key word like an alarm that would go off--made it so I could say, "Wait.  No.  This is bad advice."  It would stop that spiraling before it could get started.

In writing it's the opposite.  When a reader asks, "Why doesn't he just..." it means there is an easy answer to the problem, and the reason the writer doesn't have the characters do that is because they want the book to keep going.  If the characters don't answer a call to adventure, there's no story, and the writer wants there to be a story.  If I stop playing Link's Awakening because I don't want to destroy the island, then I'm not playing the game. If Harry Potter calls Sirius on his mirror phone and Sirius picks up and says he's fine, the whole last act doesn't happen.

When someone says, "Why doesn't the character just..." that's when you, as a writer, need to pay attention.  That's when you have a horrible problem and a big revision in the future.

When they say, "Why don't you just..." and then they suggest some way to fix something that's broken in your story...that maybe you can ignore.

The Dark Crystal and thoughts on Fridging

I have more to say about the Dark Crystal TV show.  Once again, I'm going to spoil things, so if the show sounds like your thing, go watch it and then come back.  And if it's not your thing, then join me as I talk about fridging.

You're probably familiar with the concept of fridging.  Basically, "fridging" refers to when a female character is killed for the sake of progressing a man's story.  A girlfriend is killed, setting the hero on a quest for vengeance.  The girlfriend wasn't really a character so much as she's an inciting incident.  The term was coined by Gail Simone, and refers to an event in Green Lantern when he comes home to find that a big bad has killed his girlfriend and stuffed her into a refrigerator for him to find and grieve over.   Sometimes the woman can be a mother or a sister or a daughter (but it's usually a girlfriend or wife) and sometimes she's not killed but assaulted or de-powered or put into cryo-stasis (talk about putting her in a refrigerator!).  But is it always a woman?  Yes!  I suppose there could be a boyfriend who is killed off to progress a woman's story, and that would say something about how the boyfriend was characterized, but that happens so infrequently that pointing out examples proves the rule, and women in refrigerators happens so often that it says a lot about 1. how female characters are treated like non-entities in fiction and 2. how male characters in fiction are driven by the ideas of women in their lives and how them taking vengeance for things that happened to their girlfriends is seen as perfectly reasonable motivation.

In the first episode of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, Rian's girlfriend is fridged.  "I knew that was coming," my husband said, "because her puppet wasn't as good as the other ones."  It's a big deal in the story because it's the first moment when the Skekses are outright violent against the Gelfling.  Before, they'd done things to negatively affect the environment, and cause problems for the animals of the planet, and as an indirect result affected the Gelfling, but in this instance, they suck the life force out of Rian's girlfriend.  It's also a big deal because it shows that this show is going to be dark.  Characters are going to die.  Rian's girlfriend's death becomes a rallying point for the Gelfling as they turn against the Skekses.  Hey, the Skekses are literally sucking our souls out of our bodies and then eating it.  That's BAD.  Let's not be confused by how bad the Skekses are.  Remember Rian's girlfriend!

Other women die on this show, and I'm not side-eyeing their deaths.  But the fridging in the first episode was an unfortunate choice.  I think that's mainly because in the first episode, we don't know yet that there are loads of strong female characters who I'm going to love and who won't be treated as plot devices but as fully formed, flawed characters.  There are three main characters and two of them are ladies.  The Gelfling are a matriarchal society, meaning most of their leaders (and therefore most of the secondary characters) are women.  There are fantastic moments between the royal family of three sisters who love each other and are irritated by each other, and don't know how to react to each other and they're just trying so hard!  This show has great female representation.  But in the first episode, I don't know them yet, and I'm presented with the possibility that they're going to get fridged too.  In the first episode, I'm presented with "This is a show that will kill women to forward the plot."  Are all these ladies just going to end up serving Rian's story?  I don't know.  It's the first episode, and they haven't given me any evidence that that's not where this is heading.

Rian then sets out to convince the rest of the Gelfling that the Skekses murdered his girlfriend, and they need to rethink their relationship with the Skekses and take steps to protect themselves.  But instead of framing her death as a rallying point for an entire society (which is what it is), her death is framed as a personal trauma of Rian's.  She's not fridged so that the whole of the Gelfling can change the fabric of their society, she's fridged so Rian can go on an adventure.  By the time the rest of the Gelfling come around on this, other Gelfling have had their essences sucked out and it stops being about her at all.

And, honesty, one of my least favorite aspects of fridging is that the guy is so set on his vengeance, but the love he carries for his lady friend tends to wane the farther he gets from the incident.  He moves along from his girlfriend's death and starts making eyes at other characters, which is weird considering, "Remember Rian's girlfriend!" is supposed to be a rallying cry.  Add to that that later in the series, Rian's dad dies and Rian seems to carry that grief much more deeply.  (Which makes sense that he would grieve different relationships differently, but the differences are stark.) They have a funeral service for his father.  Rian talks about his complicated relationship with his father.  The loving handling of it just compounds how lazy his girlfriend's death was.

So what I've been wondering lately is "Was there a way to have her die and have it not be fridging?" And I think what would have made it better for me is if she wasn't Rian's girlfriend.  What if they were colleagues who worked in the guard together?  Then the way he moves on wouldn't be so strange, and his adventure to go and spread the word that the Skekses are awful wouldn't have the bitter after-taste that he's in action because the Skekses messed with his stuff.  As weird as it is, I think if it tried to be more impersonal, it would have worked better, because it felt impersonal.

The Dark Crystal and Thoughts on Doomed Endings

My husband and I recently watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.  It's a 10 episode show that acts as a prequel to the '80s Jim Henson classic, "The Dark Crystal," which has a darker tone than most of Jim Henson's other offerings, and is also a marvel of absolutely wild and groundbreaking puppetry.  You should check it out if you have the means and you're into that kind of thing.  And, let's be real, you know if you're into the Dark Crystal or not.

It goes without saying that the puppets are amazing, as are the sets.  Every single visual detail is exquisite.  But I'm a writer, and I want to talk about story, and some places where it stumbled.  Obviously, I'm going to spoil larger chunks of Age of Resistance.  If you want to watch it and haven't, go do that, because it's a triumph.  If you don't care about it, then let's talk about how weird prequels are!

The Dark Crystal movie starts the statement that there are only ten Skeksis left and with the fact that the Skeksis killed most of the Gelfling, leaving only a few survivors who are in hiding.  So when Age of Resistance starts with a full civilization of Gelfling happily living under Skeksis rule, you know from the jump that things are going to go poorly.  Between the start of this show and the start of the movie, there's going to be a genocide and probably the individual murder of all the Gelfling characters the show makes you love, along with a couple Skeksis I grew real fond of in the show who I know aren't in the movie.  The last few episodes are kind of like watching the last act of Star Wars: Rebel One.  Aw, crap, these people are all going to die, aren't they?  Maybe they'll take down a few Skekses along the way?  Maybe the show is aiming for a second season, so the finale here won't be everyone dying?

Add to this that we also know from the jump that the Skeksis are bad, either from the movie or from Sigourney Weaver's introductory voice over that tells you that once there were aliens who got split into good and bad halves and the Skeksis are the bad half who are misusing the big magical crystal with which they were entrusted to make themselves immortal that the expense of the environment.  But that exposition seems unnecessary really. We know they're bad because they openly and unapologetically treat the Gelfling like crap.  To their faces.  And yet the Gelfling remain subservient and reverent of the Skeksis.  I kept asking, "How do the Gelfling not know the Skeksis are evil?  Why are they putting up with this?  Why did they hand their planet over to the Skeksis in the first place?"  And the sad fact was that I could see how it happened, because similar nonsense is happening in my country as we speak.  "Why are we letting them do this?" I ask, "Why are these people still in charge when they so flagrantly don't care about us? Why do people still believe that our leaders are doing what's best for us?"  This depressing realism, paired with the certainty that things weren't going to go well, made it cringe worthy to get the next episode started each night.  I didn't want to watch people try to make a better life for themselves and ultimately fail.

Of course, this hesitation diminished every night as I watched, because the show is so immersive that I forgot about the real world until the episode was done and I had a moment to think back on it.
Ultimately, the show (this season, at least) is much more uplifting than I expected.  So in a way, it made a happy ending seem like an inversion of expectations, when if it wasn't a prequel where I knew what would ultimately happen, I would have assumed that from the beginning.  That sounds great!  Well done, writers.  But, then again, I could ask if it was worth it being anxious the whole time.  I'm going to go through this process again next season, when my heroes have another chance to be murdered, and when I get to face the fact that resistance in my own life may utterly, epicly fail if we don't...ban together?  Do better?  The show doesn't offer this kind of solution.  Just a warning.  Is this what I want from my escapism media?

No.  But The Dark Crystal is still my kind of thing, and I'll still be pumped next season.

On Writing Review

We haven't seen a book about writing in a while on here, so this week's book is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King.

The first half of the book is, indeed, a memoir of Stephen King's life as it relates to the writer he became.  It's interesting and his anecdotes are sometimes funny, but the kicker is that he's showing how he got to where he is, because that's what he knows how to explain.  How you get there may be different.  The second half is what he calls "a toolbox" of writing.  It goes from nuts and bolts like vocabulary, grammar, and a hatred for adverbs to theme and symbolism to process.  

The way it's presented works well because not only is each piece of advice put in an anecdote, but the whole thing is couched in this idea from the introduction of "where do I get off talking about writing?"  He admits that even though he hates adverbs, they still crop up in his work and he shows that successful, beloved writers hit a lot of his pet peeves that he just said to never do, and yet they are still successful, beloved authors.  It worked for me because I got it that this is what works for him, and I can take it or leave it.  I feel assured that I'm not going to be forever judged by Stephen King for not doing things his way.  And why would I even care about that?  I shouldn't care about that.  Good thing this bypassed the irrationally defensive and easily bruised part of my brain. 

His big take away is to be a writer you have to read a lot and write a lot.  "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write."  You may notice, I completely embrace this idea.  I learn what I like, what I don't like, and what I need to stop doing by reading, by observing the language and thinking critically.  So, yes, I am 100% on board with this.  In fact, I think I'm going to change the tag since I've pretty much settled on only talking about books and not movies and TV shows and comics.

The other key point that stuck out to me was about the first draft, the second draft, and moving from one to the next.  This is probably because I just finished the first draft of the Firebird story and I've just started the long process of editing it.  I tried Anne Lamont's idea and wrote the most terrible first draft in existence.  I'm going to clean it up, remold it, and the second (or third) draft will be ready for a few readers and some good, hard outside criticism.  Then another draft before I even start thinking about it being good to go.

King says a lot of things that almost match up with this.  He says you should write your first draft with the door shut.   That means you don't think about what everyone will say, or whether your research is accurate.  You close the door, download your story from your brain onto paper, and make yourself a first draft.  He talks a lot during this about "uncovering the fossil" of the story, or finding it as you go, meaning he's of the school of thought that you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip.  He also says you shouldn't tell anyone about your story during this time, because you don't need anyone else's opinion.

This sounds a lot like Lamont's shitty first draft.  Don't worry about it, just get it down.  However, King then says that when you're done with that draft, it's time to open the door and let a few select readers have a go at it.  And that's where the methods differ, because there's no way I'd let someone read this terrible draft until I've gone through it.  My door is still shut, thanks.  And that's the real difference here.  It sounds like King only writes two or three drafts, so his process is condensed.  But, if I adjust this advice in my head, I can replace "third draft" every time he says "second draft" and it works for me.

Aside from the input of readers and whatever research needs to be done, King also gives the advice that the second draft should be 10% shorter than the first.  When you're writing the second draft, you can really hone in on the story and remove all the excess flailing in the beginning that he wrote not knowing where the story was headed.  (I did this decimation with my dragon book.  It worked.)  He also says that when you read through your first draft, themes will start popping out.  The second draft is for leaning into those themes and making them clearer.  He advises not to write your first draft with those themes in mind, but rather to write and then see what comes out.  That's some quality advice.  I have a list on the back of the first page on my first draft with a list of things that need to come through more.  When I heard this explanation, I thought, "Oh.  That's what I'm doing."

***

Next week: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black

The Magicians

I just finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

This book was recommended to me as "Harry Potter for grownups," which turns out to be an accurate description.  In it, Quentin, an overly intelligent guy who's constantly depressed because he's waiting for his real life to begin, for the big adventure that's going to make his life worthwhile, goes to a secret college for magicians.

From the outset, it seems that just the idea of going to a secret magic school and entering the hidden community of the magicians would make it like Harry Potter, and the inclusion of swearing, sex, and violence would make it for adults.  But there's more to it than that.  The way in which the magical world is presented echoes the prose in Harry Potter.  Details of the magical world are presented simply as existing, then there is a line about how the students feel about it or the subtle effect it has on their lives, and then the detail is never mentioned again*.  The difference is that in The Magicians, the students' response is some variant of "Ugh.  Fuck that."

"Quentin spent very little time in the Brakebills library.  Hardly anybody did if they could help it.  Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility."

The fact that little details like this are never mentioned again in a way makes the culture and traditions and history alive and immersive.  The characters take them for granted almost as part of the scenery, which makes the world feel lived in.

*Of course, in the Harry Potter books no detail is safe from being a major plot point later.  But in order for these details' importance to stay a surprise, they have to be buried in a bunch of other details that are unimportant or they'd be too obvious.

The Magicians extends this treatment of details to descriptions of characters.  The descriptions are minimal and focus more on Quentin's response that the color of each character's eyes and hair and nose shape.  This is something I love to read and love to write, even though I should do it more often than I do.

"Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass."

The other thing I was really taken with was Lev Grossman's ability to tell the story of a series of books that the characters in The Magicians have read.  The series is called "Fillory and Further" and are basically a fictionalized Chronicles of Narnia.  A family of children visit the magical land of Fillory through a magic portal and there become kings and queens and talk to horses and rabbits before being send home by a pair of ram gods.  The exposition of the plots of these books are interwoven into the plot of The Magicians with exceptional skill.  Quentin loves these books, and so their plots and characters are presented in a similar way to the details I've already mentioned.  Quentin knows these books backwards and forwards and doesn't need to stop and explain.  He thinks about them often and he thinks about them well before they're needed in the plot of The Magicians.  It's cool.

So the Magicians and Harry Potter present the magical world in similar ways, but The Magicians is for adults because of the themes it explores.  Where Harry becomes an angsty teen, Quentin becomes a depressed man who has no one to understand his genius and his beautiful ennui (especially not women who could never understand him).  Where in Harry Potter, his life changes to what it's meant to be when Harry goes to Hogwarts, Quentin is still waiting for something better when he goes to magic school, he's still waiting even after he's graduated.  While in Harry Potter, bad people use bad magic and all the magic the good guys use is good and useful and harmless, The Magicians has a running theme that magic is dangerous and corrupting in how much power it gives to users.  It lets them live lives of excessive luxury where they lose themselves.  It lets them cause horrible accidents that get people killed and disrupt the boundaries between worlds.

"Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods.  They're just kids, Quentin!  With all that power!...It's amazing that place is still standing."

Two-Month-Old Reading Preferences

I have vivid memories of giggling uncontrollably as my mother read The Monster at the End of this Book in her best manic Grover voice.  So, of course, I got this book for my son as soon as I started building a library for him.  I pulled it out with a grin and cleared my throat for my best grover voice. 

He hated it.

He did not like how upset I got and started crying in response.  He's also not at the developmental level yet where he turns pages, which is most of the fun of that book, and it's also like I was turning the pages, then yelling at myself for doing it, then doing it again.

Since then, I've learned that he's not ready for pretty much any children's book I remember enjoying.  He gets bored with a lot of them and only this week even started looking at the pictures.

We had to reassess, and we found that two-month-olds like lyrical language and stories with structure.  Or maybe my son just has a persnickety personality.  Who knows? 

He likes books that rhyme and have a distinct meter.  He likes books that have a set, predictable format, where optimally the last word or phrase of each verse would be something that everyone in the room can shout together  and wave their hands as if to say "ta dah!"

"Is your mama a llama?" I asked my friend Dave.
"No, she is not," is the answer Dave gave.
"She hangs by her feet, and she lives in a cave.
I do not believe that's how llamas behave."
"Oh," I said.  "You are right about that.
I think that your mama sound more like a
BAT!"

A BAT!  YAY!

He goes nuts.

He goes nuts for Goodnight Moon and Time for Bed too. 

And there were three little bears
sitting on chairs
and two little kittens
and a pair of mittens
and a little toy house
and a young mouse
and a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush
and a quiet old lady who was whispering "hush"

Every couplet, he kicks his feet and beams like chairs and mittens are the cleverest things he's ever heard.  He really  likes it, but it's not a bedtime book.

Misleading Prologues

My husband the other day told me that he likes prologues that have nothing to do with the story.  This boggled me, and I realized that I'd been thinking around this topic a fair bit lately without approaching it directly.

"Really?" I said.  "Because I hate that.   It's like I've been tricked.  I get emotionally invested in this first character and then they never show up again."

Maybe this is left over from my high school English class where we learned that a book teaches you how to read it, what to expect, and then spent the year analyzing the first lines of everything we read.  Or maybe it's from college where my Film Studies class said that the first scene teaches you how to watch a movie.  Or from grad school, where they said that a video game teaches you how to play it, the internal rules, the implicit expectations.

"I like seeing the story from different characters' points of view," he explained.  "Especially from characters that aren't involved.  It gives things a sense of perspective."

He pointed out that this happens a lot in movies.  The first scene will focus on the bad guy, showing just how awful they are and what their evil plot is, when the good guys won't be able to see it for themselves (and therefore it wouldn't come into the story if you stuck with their POV) until much later.  Sometimes the first scene will focus on the victim of a crime: it'll show the event that sets off the rest of the story, even though the main characters aren't involved in that sparking event and aren't called in until later. 

These make sense and don't bother me that much.  But I find they are more common in movies than they are in books (or maybe that's just the kind of books I read).  It's narratively efficient to show things this way.  But in a movie, the prologue will be just a few minutes, where as in a book, reading it can take twenty minutes or so.  20 minutes out of a movie would be a sizable chunk of time.  So it makes sense to me that I'm more upset about prologues in books, where I've already sunk a decent amount of time only to find out this is not the character I should care about.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a book I ready recently, did this.  The book starts from the POV of a book rep from a publishing house, come to sell the winter collection to a small book store on an island.  The rep has her own problems and back story outside of this set up, and it looks like shes the person we're going to get to know for the span of this book.  I assume she's going to learn something about small town island life, or wax poetic about books, or something will happen to her at this meeting that will set off the rest of the novel.  (At some point, I must have read the back cover of this book and then just completely forgotten it by the time I got around to it on my To Read list.)  About ten pages in, she leaves the book store and the POV shifts to the owner of the book store, who is the actual main character of the book.  Bah!  Why?  I liked the sales rep and this guy was kind of a jerk.  The first time I tried to read it, I didn't make it too much farther into the story before turning to something else.  Turns out she comes back later as an important character, and that the book makes a note (in a kind of lampshading, wink-wink way) that in novels, sometimes they follow random side characters for a few pages to flush out that they're fully developed.  So there's a reason, but I didn't get far enough in the first attempt to learn that.


I've also been thinking about it with respect to my own work.  I've been working on this beginning for way too long, which is silly because I'm positive that once I have a full draft, I'll end up completely rewriting it and making it so now there's an explosion or something instead.  But one of my earlier attempts focused on the rival from down the street instead of on the main characters responding to that rivalry.  It made it seem like the rival was going to be the main character, even from the first few paragraphs.  When I switched over to the people I really cared about, the jump was jarring.  So I refocused even though this was on a much smaller scale than a misleading prologue.

The Effect of Heavy Editing on Atticus the Dog

With today's release of Go Set a Watchman, I figured it was a good time to talk about how the book's portrayal of Atticus Finch is not the fall of a hero.

In the months leading up to its release, Go Set a Watchman was promoted as the long lost sequel to the national treasure that is To Kill a Mockingbird.  It's set 20 years later, in the 50s, with an adult Scout returning home to Maycomb, Alabama with characters from Mockingbird making appearances, which certainly sounds like a sequel.  Then the early reviews started to come out, shocking absolutely everyone with facts that come to light in Watchman: Atticus Finch is a huge racist.

What? 

But--What?

Yeah. 

While Mockingbird presents issues of racism and the end of innocence by creating an upstanding moral hero for Scout to look up to, Watchman covers the same themes by having an adult Scout realize that her father, who she always considered to be a moral compass, is not as great as she thought he was when she was a child.  So Watchman pretty much ruined everyone's childhood, including Scout's, and has made things awkward for everyone who named their children and pets "Atticus."

Atticus the dog was a little awkward anyway.

For me, there are two ways to rationalize this.  First, take into consideration that Mockingbird is written from a child's perspective, and therefore her father was a great man who did great things and formed her into the person she became.  It's only after she grew up (in Watchman) that she was able to look back and see that things weren't the way she interpreted them at the time or that things weren't as shiny as they are in her memory.  And we, the readers, can go through this horror with Scout, since we too believed him to be a shining example of morality.

This way of looking at it makes sense, and may hold even more of an emotional punch than if Watchman hadn't been released at a point long after Mockingbird had become a renowned part of the American Literary Canon and Atticus had taken his place in our hearts.

But I prefer the second way to look at it: Watchman is not a sequel.  And not in the "Lalala pretend it didn't happen" kind of way.

Looking at the history, Go Set a Watchman was actually written first.  Then Lee's editors told her to rewrite it, focusing more on the charming stories of Scout's youth.  In rewriting, she came at the same themes from different directions, changing the point of view and time period, along with characters' personalities and plot points.  So it's as if Watchman is a first draft of Mockingbird.  (a lot of reviews are calling it a "bad first draft.")  We can see this in the fact that several sections (mostly descriptions of setting) appear verbatim in both books, like they were reused in Mockingbird because they were worth keeping and Watchman was never going to see the light of day.  Furthermore, some facts are altered between Mockingbird and Watchman, most notably the outcome of Tom Robinson's trial.  Yeah!  In Mockingbird, a huge plot point is that he was accused despite lack of evidence, but when it's mentioned in Watchman it's stated that he was acquitted.  That kind of continuity error doesn't make a lot of sense if Watchman really is a sequel.

So it's not that we didn't know Atticus or that we were fooled by an unreliable narrator.  It's that these Atticus Finches are different people with the name held over between the two drafts.

I prefer this way of looking at it, because it shows how much books change in the editing process, and I personally find that more fascinating.  How did these ideas start?  What did this book used to be?  What changed and what was kept?  How did it evolve?  We can actually look at the progression of To Kill a Mockingbird, like looking back through fossil records.  It makes me feel better about the massive overhauls I've done on stories and makes me feel better that even if what I'm writing is crap, there are ideas there that have the potential to flourish.

Audience Surrogates through Sequels

I was more excited for the premier of Jurassic World than I was of any other movie this summer.  I watched all the trailers and read all the articles.  I made sure we got VIP tickets at the Icon (the 18+ balcony attached to a restaurant, where you can bring your drinks and cake and fries into the theater and set the plate on the side table next to your comfy chair) so that the seat would be big enough that I could squirm around when my back got sore.  The publicity photo of Chris Pratt and the velociraptor has been my background picture for months. 

Not many other people were as excited, and I set out to figure out why.  Why was I so enthusiastic?  Why weren't other people?

The main reason, as far as I see it, is the audience surrogate in Jurassic Park.  I've long held the belief that Jurassic Park is terrifying, and it's more terrifying to me than it is to my mother because when we went to see it in theaters, I was the same age as the little boy and all the traumatic things happen to the little boy, Tim.  No, really.  Think about it.  A bunch of adults die, but they are mostly attacked and eaten suddenly.  They have time to think, "Oh no" and maybe scream and then they're gone.  With the kids, it's strung out.  The T-rex terrorizes them in the car before throwing the car over a cliff and into a tree.  Tim then has to escape the tree with the car falling on him.  He then gets electrocuted.  Then the kids are chased through a kitchen and then through the ceiling by velociraptors.  Even though Dr. Grant is with them through most of this, fewer traumatizing things happen to him.

Additionally, the kids act terrified, while the adults manage to keep it together a bit better.  As a kid, I reacted to their fear.

People who were older than eight-years-old when the film came out, didn't relate to the kids in the same way.  They had audience surrogates like Dr. Grant or Dr. Sattler or Dr. Malcom.  How boring.  They see some rough things, but they aren't as traumatized, so neither are the people relating to them.

It also, of course, has a lot to do with how, as a kid, this movie is just more scary than it is for an adult.  There were scenes I couldn't watch except from behind my fingers until I was in high school, at which point I got over it.  I was thinking when I came out of Jurassic World that I wasn't worried for the kids in that movie at all, because--Come on!--they're not going to kill a kid.  This is not that kind of movie.  There's an unspoken agreement between the film makers and the audience that this movie is going to be fun, action packed, have dinosaurs, and not kill children and puppies.  They're not going to violate that contract.  Which got me thinking (and I feel kinda stupid now for not realizing it sooner): they were never going to kill Lex and Tim in Jurassic Park either.  As a kid, I wasn't familiar enough with narrative tropes to realize this, but as an adult, I'm intuitively aware of it.

So this explains why Jurassic Park had such an impact on me and was just an okay movie to other people.  It explains why other people wouldn't be as excited about it, since the first film didnt have as big of an emotional impact.

But why was I so excited?  It's not just because I love the first movie, because I didn't care about The Lost World or Jurassic Park III.  The less said about them the better.

It's because I was terrified of velociraptors for years, and this movie--when I now relate more to Chris Pratt than to the little boy--has my audience surrogate clicker training the velociraptors.  Now that I'm an adult, my fear has been conquered, not just by my more mature brain that no longer needs to sleep with the light on and won't eat green jell-o, but by the movie itself.  The movie has taken these terrifying monsters, and put them under a measure of control, and done it while respecting that the velociraptors are still dangerous and still deserve respect.  It's a victory.

I'm Spending My Vacation at the Library!

I got a Chicago Public Library card yesterday, and spent probably too much time this afternoon transferring my To Read list from Goodreads to my For Later list on the CPL website.  Apparently, like Goodreads, on the CPL website you can write reviews, make lists, and follow people.  I haven't investigated it too much other than to see that four of the books I want to read are available right now at my preferred library location. 

Four out of ninety-six.  Alright!

When you select books for your shelves, you say what format you want: book, eBook, paperback, audible book, etc.  I said "paperback" whenever I saw it and "book" otherwise, and now I'm wondering if they maybe have more of the books on my list but in non-paperback form.  And I wouldn't mind checking out the eBook program, but that's a project for another day.  I'm also wondering if CPL has an inter-library loan, like if the book is at another branch and I request it, they'll send it over and I can pick it up.  So it's not as bad as the 4/96 stat makes it look.  All 96 books are in the CPL system somewhere, and it's a long enough list that I don't need every single one of them available to me right this second. (But that would be fantastic.)

So those are future reading projects.  Let me tell you what's going on with my current reading projects.  I don't usually read this many things at once, but--eh--what can you do?

• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.  "A novel"  I picked this up from the library because I didn't feel like using the card catalog to look through my mighty list of books I need to read and I saw it sitting in the middle of the shelf and thought "hey, that's on the list."  The reason I noticed it is that it's less a book and more a raw material to build a small house.  I have three weeks to read it before it's due back at the library.
• Sandman.  I picked this up at free comic book day and since I've been interested in it and heard good things, I picked up the first volume to check it out.  Did you know that Batman is in this?  Also John Constantine.  The fact that this story is situated inside the greater DC universe turned me off tremendously, but I will keep going with it and maybe change my mind.
• To Be or Not to Be.  This is a Hamlet choose your own adventure written by Ryan North and it is fantastic.  Since it's a choose your own adventure, it's hard to read the whole thing, so I mostly do one adventure before bed.
• Baby 411.  This is a book about babies and all the stuff they do and don't do.  It's good because they use science and cite research and I like that.  But it's also overwhelming and my coping strategy is along the lines of "just not thinking about it" so it's taking me a while.

Breaking up is hard to do

Yesterday, for the fourth book in a row, I gave up on a book because of the second act breakup.  A second act breakup takes place after your main romantic leads have fallen for each other and everything seems like it's going great and everything looks like it might turn out okay. 

But wait!  She's suddenly had a brain wave that they're too different after all and maybe this won't work out.  Or the mobsters to whom he owes money track him down and he has to break up with her for her own protection.  And...did you lie to me about that thing???  Unforgivable! 

Also he's keeping his secret wife in the attic.

It's in most stories, especially most romances, and it has completely valid reasons for being there. 

1. Stories need conflict.  If they get together too fast and have a happy, healthy relationship and that's the entire focus of the story, then that's boring.  And also like 20 pages long.  So if you have a romance story, something has to keep them apart.
2. This structure lines up well with the hero's journey.  There has to be a low point of the story from which the hero or heroine can bounce back.  This initial failure usually mirrors the climax in some way: they fail at first, but then get stronger or learn and then overcome it at the end.

Now, I've written second act breakups, and I'll probably write one again.  But they've really been getting on my nerves lately.  I think mostly because I'll be enjoying a book and then this will come completely out of the blue.  One of them will suddenly go, "Wait!  I'm not good enough for you!" and run off without talking to their partner, who could reassure them that that's bogus.  One of them will need to do an outside thing and go, "I could talk to my partner about this and get their help with it, but instead I think I'll lie about what I'm up to and then go it alone." 

Gah.  Nope.  I'm done with this book.

If the conflict of your story could be solved with a single conversation, something's wrong.  This would solve a lot of stories' conflicts, but not all of them.  A chat between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader (although enlightening) isn't going to keep Alderan from getting blown to bits.

So I've been thinking (since I've written this and started wondering if I'm as irritating as the stuff I've been reading lately) and I've come up with some ideas to break out of this structure.

• They don't get together enough to break up until the very end.
• They get together and have a happy, healthy relationship that grows over the course of the story, but the main conflict is outside of their relationship and they face it together instead of having it tear them apart.
• They have a big fight, but work through it and they're back together by the end of the chapter.  Bonus points if this happens every chapter and every time the fight is different.
• The break up is a ruse!  They'd planned it together to confuse their rival families. 
• There's a second act breakup, but it's because of spiders.

Crime and Punishment

I recently saw an info-graphic about how long it takes to read famous books.  It's pretty interesting, but it mostly reminded me of my Crime and Punishment story.

When I was in high school, like a lot of high schoolers, we had to read Crime and Punishment.  What makes this story unusual is that we had three days to read it.  We got the book on Tuesday and had a test on it on Friday.  The reasoning for this escapes me now, but I think it had something to do with the end of the grading period, how long we spent on Wide Sargasso Sea, and the fact that our English teacher didn't really like the book that much.

So we tackled this book in indignant, panicked frenzy.  We tried to finish other homework, study for more reasonable tests before staying up late, trying to get one more chapter read, two more chapters read.  We hurried between classes so we could get a couple minutes of reading time in.  We read over lunch, in a group around a table, all of us buried in our books in silence, eyebrows pulled together and shoulders hunched.

All the teachers made fun of us.  This was terribly hilarious to all of them and they showed no sympathy at all.

I don't remember how our English teacher managed it--what she said, how she guilted us--but the level of energy and fruitless effort put into reading this thing was surreal.  We were nerds, sure, but we were math and science nerds.  And we were seniors, who had decided that previous projects weren't worth it and thrown in the towel.  Surely this was a fruitless effort and running ourselves ragged would prove counter productive.  But no.  For some reason, we were crazed to get this book read.

I got the audio book so I could listen on my hour long commute to and from school.  But looking at the box, I frowned and calculated that there was no possible way I was going to finish, even if I secretly listened through my blow off classes.

Thursday night, my friend Matt called at 8:00 with a plan.

"Okay.  I went to the video store and rented the movie.  Come over."

Normally, this would be a ridiculous suggestion since we all knew that movie adaptations from the video store were created with the sole purpose of leading lazy high school kids astray, and that the whole English department had movie night or something where they watched the adaptations and then wrote test questions to trick you into admitting you didn't read the book.  They were sneaky and were really proud of themselves for it.

But this was a desperate situation, and so far no one knew how the damned book ended.  I don't know why none of us knew about cliff notes.

"Okay," I said, said goodbye to my mother (who laughed at me and wished me luck), got in my car, and drove to Matt's house.

At Matt's house, Matt and I exchanged terse nods.  Our friend James had his book in hand, like that might help.  And Matt's father laughed at us.  We glared at him.  This was serious.

Matt's dad made popcorn, then ate it while watching us set up the VCR.

I remember it being a three hour movie, but IMDB now says it's only two.  Either way, both Matt and James fell asleep and missed the ending anyway.  When the movie ended, I explained it to them.

For those like Matt and James who don't know, there's a guy, Raskolnikov, who decides (based on divine compulsion more than anything else) to murder his neighbor and rob her.  He kills her with an ax, then freaks out, kills her sister too when she catches him, then flubs the robbery part and only takes like $20.  This much we had all managed to read.  The guy spends the rest of the novel wracked with guilt--a guilt that burns and builds and eats away his sanity.  He's pursued by a detective who knows he did it because he's the most suspicious, guilty person on earth.  There's drama involving a sister and a prostitute with a heart of gold, and in the end the guy turns himself in.

Matt and James were disappointed with my synopsis.

The next day, we slouched into English class, curling in on ourselves in guilt, ready to face the music.  No one pulled out their book to try to read one more page.  We sat in silence and waited for our teacher to come.

I looked around, so overwhelmed with spending every spare moment wrapping myself in this story, and thought, "We are all Raskolnikov."

"Alright!" Ms. McDonald said, clapping her hands and taking her place in the middle of the room.  "What'd everyone think?"

Silence.

Silence.

"We didn't finish."  Someone said it.  We all said it.  Heads in hands and slumped into desks.  Tired eyes giving up and flagging in defeat.  We confessed.  We surrendered.

Ms. McDonald smirked.

We are all Raskolnikov.

And none of us had finished the book to realize it.

World Building Over-share

I said last time that I wanted to talk about unnecessary world building, so we can kind of think about this as a Part 2 of that rant.

Sometimes authors do world building that just isn't necessary.  I once heard the advice that when you're editing, any scene in your story should do two things (plot development, character building, setting the scene, etc), and if it's only doing one thing, you should cut it.  I like to think of world building the same way: if the world building isn't supporting the plot or characterization, then it's superfluous.

So for example, let's talk about languages.  Let's say there's a character that speaks a fictional language.  Now, this could do a lot of things to help plot and characterization.

• It could highlight cultural differences between the character and the people she has to interact with who don't speak the language.
• It could be a point of contention between the character and her mother.  The mother wishes our character spoke the language of her people, while our character is rejecting that culture.
• It could be a plot point in that two characters can communicate in secret to plan their escape from the villain's clutches.

However, if it doesn't do anything else besides "be there" or get a response of "well, that's kinda different, I guess", then it's it's only there because the author wanted to make up a language. 

And there WILL BE things in world building that don't help the plot or characters. 

Did you know, that in this alternate history story I'm writing, Thomas Jefferson didn't invent the hideaway bed???  How unusual!  I'm clever!

But does this fun fact in any way affect the story I'm telling? 

No.

Well, then there's no need to mention it.

You can, in fact, not mention a lot of things.  As long as your reader is not left wondering about them, you're good to go. 

Where did the first vampire come from?

Who cares?

That's not important to the story.  What's important to the story is the current culture of vampires and how they live their lives and how their presence affects the world around them.

We can black box that and no one will question it.

 
And this brings me to the main point I want to make: over-sharing the world building to the point that the story no longer makes sense.

"The Maze Runner" by James Dashner is a good example of this.  Now, usually I don't like saying negative things about books I've read, but this is a New York Times Best Seller and it has a movie in production, so my criticism on my little blog will not hurt anyone.  (Also, I'm about to spoil the end of this book, so turn back if that bothers you.)

In this story, kids appear in a labyrinth with no memory of who they are or what they need to be doing, and subsequently try to escape.  The world building of the maze is wonderfully done.  It's eerie and pervasive and everything you'd want out of world building.  The kids build a society for themselves, which is flushed out an organic, and catches art my attention because even though they bicker with each other, there are no pig heads on sticks.  The maze changes every night, and the monsters that wander the maze are really interesting.  The kids don't know why the maze is there or why they're in the maze or if there even is a way to get out.  It's a great book up until about the last chapter.

Then the mystery of the maze is reveled with further world building that makes absolutely no sense and spoils everything that has come before.  We learn that the kids were put into the maze because a solar flare (what?) caused the Earth to go post apocalyptic (what?).  In an effort to get the best minds working on the project, some scientists gathered the best and brightest children, educated them, and then gave them all amnesia and put them in a maze (what?), because when they made their way out of the maze, they'd be smarter and more prepared to tackle the problem of solar flares (what?).  What's even worse is that very few children survive to get through the maze, so several of their best minds (kids who found important solutions to problems within the maze) were killed off and could not contribute later to the solar flare problem.

This last bit of world building has so much that isn't working for it.  1. The science is just bogus.  2. It comes out of nowhere and is completely unrelated to the story I'd just read.  It's tonally jarring at the very, very end.

3. The response to the flare makes no logical sense.  There is no natural progression from "get smart kids to work on the problem" (which sounds good to me) to "put them in a deadly maze with amnesia."  No.  That is not even remotely a solution to the problem.  It makes the maze overly contrived, I don't see how it gives the kids better skills to solve their problem, and it drastically thins their pool of genius children even though they've learned from the maze that they do best pooling their intelligence an working together.

And 4. the world building is purely there for exposition.  It does not give us a better insight into the characters (because none of them remember this) and it doesn't even really help the plot.  This did nothing to support the story, and instead caused massive problems. 

I would have greatly preferred it if the "why" of their presence in the maze was left a mystery, if it were black boxed in the same way as "where did the first vampire come from?"  They could leave the maze into a white light, and the book could end ambiguously, and I would have loved this book.

World building done well: what we can learn from Tolkien

And we're back!

I've been having this ongoing feud (with fisticuffs and harsh words) with a friend of mine about world building.  My view of it is "If you're writing speculative fiction, you better be thinking about world building.  Reading lazy world building is one of the worst things ever."  His view (as far as I can tell) is "Thinking about world building is not what I like about writing.  Some people get carried away with it.  And I am disdainful of the whole thing." *

Which is a completely valid point.  Not liking something doesn't mean you're not going to do it on a finished product, and we all have our favorite and least favorite parts of writing.  And, yes, some stories get carried away with unnecessary world building, which I'm going to talk about in a later blog post.

But let's talk about why it's important, and what good world building can do for your story.

One of the great examples of world building, because there's just SO MUCH of it and because it's done really well, and often the first example people think of when talking about world building is The Lord of the Rings.  Now, I'm in no way saying that you have to do as much world building as this in order to have a good speculative story.  I'm saying that it does a lot of stuff right, and we can learn from it.



First of all, it's pervasive.  The history and culture of the different peoples of Middle Earth is sewn into every scene.  I've talked before about what a difference this makes, but it never hurts to have another example.

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”

What do any of those words even mean?  So many proper nouns to parse through.  But the cool thing is that I don't really need to know.  It says, "This one group of people say this sea sounds like music, and it's kinda eerie," but it hints at a deeper history. 

• There is "the Music of the Ainur" which must be recognizable and unique enough to be singled out in this description, and we can get some idea of what it must sound like if it sounds kind of like a roaring sea.   
• "It is said by the Eldar" means that the Eldar have enough culture to have their own stories or proverbs or sayings.  They say this.  Other groups don't really.  And is there more to them saying this?  Is there a story there?  It implies something deeper.

Secondly, history set up in world building directly affects character's motivations and actions.  Part of the world building tells this story that back in the day, the king of Gondor and his descendants went into hiding because Sauron was after them.  This left the kingdom of Gondor without a king, so a steward took over and led the people, and his descendants have been ruling ever since.  Okay?  hat's the world building.  Now, that's all well and good, but what makes it great is that this event has direct reprecussions for characters in the main story.

When Aragorn (who is of the line of kings who went into hiding and is therefore heir to be King of Gondor) shows up, Boromir (who is next in line to be Steward of Gondor) says, "Hell no, you're not our king.  We haven't had a king in centuries.  The stewards have ruled over Gondor while you were off dicking around.  You've lost your claim, so GTFO."  Which makes perfect sense!  He's kind of a jerk about it, but he's got a valid point.  And his take on this issue reflects the point of view of a large portion of the people of Gondor.

On the other hand, there's Boromir's brother, Faramir.  He says, "The Stewards are stewards, and their job is to take care of things while the king's away.  That was the deal in the beginning, and the noble thing would be to keep his seat warm, take care of the people, and hand power back when the time comes and the king returns."  This makes sense too!  And again, it's the same point of view as a good chunk of the population of Gondor, who are like "Huzzah!  The king has returned!"

Now, what we can take from this is that this event from the past as part of the world building 1. informs the characters decisions in the main story of the book and 2. highlights differences in the two brothers' personalities.  That's great world building.




* He probably wouldn't start a sentence with a conjunction.  But it's my blog, so eat it!

React and Reveal

There's this idea in film where you show the reaction of the characters before you reveal what they're reacting to. 

• Our hero stares in wide-eyed horror as the camera pans to film him from a high angle.  
• Cut to the giant monster that has risen to loom over him.

• Our hero walks out to the parking lot.  He stumbles.  His face falls.  "No, no, no, no, no," he says.
• Cut to show that a piano (which we'd previously seen in preparation to be hauled into a third floor window) has fallen on his Honda, crushing it in a mess of twisted metal and broken glass.

•  Our hero's face falls into the most beautiful smile.  He's speechless.  He's tearing up.
• Cut to his daughter, who isn't dead after all!

This puts an emphasis on the emotional aspect of the reveal.  It tells us specifically what this event means besides a cool effect or a plot twist.  Furthermore, it sets us up to expect something great.  "This is going to be something shocking.  Oh my God!  It is!"

Once this trick was pointed out to me, I realized that it translates to writing as well, and I realized that I've been using it.  In the first sentence there will be a character reaction.  The sentence afterwards, I'll tell you why.  "He opened the refrigerator, and stumbled backwards with a yelp.  Something horrible had happened to the beer, leaving the fridge a mess of sticky brown liquid, froth, the remains of exploded aluminum cans, and the smell of hops."

So I've been thinking, "Neat.  That's a cool thing," and left it at that.  But I'm bringing it up today, because I read a book the other day that did this trick and it didn't work.  Basically, what happened was that the characters would react.  They would react some more.  They would talk to each other about what this meant.  They would argue.  Then a page and a half later, we'd be told what had happened.  It was too long a delay.  I would be confused during the characters' discussion because I didn't know what was happening who whose side I should take.  The suspense didn't last as long as I think the author intended, so my sitting on pins and needles wore off and didn't last through the whole thing.  Instead I was just waiting to get through it so I could know what happened.  But then, by the time they'd gotten around to explaining and no one had died or anything, I knew that it wasn't the most important thing ever.  I didn't even really care what had happened.  Or I cared much less than I would have.  Let's say that.

It's pretty interesting to see these tricks stretched to their limits, it gets me thinking about where those limits are.

GPOY

One of my favorite things when reading, is when I see my experience reflected back at me, and I say, "Yes!  This is exactly what it's like."

I love it on small scales.  A comment about how old socks have stretched so now the hole in the heel is up around the ankle.  A note about the cheap, boxed cookies that some grad student brought for after the guest lecture.  The way the night sky is sometimes pink from light pollution, or the way the CTA guy pronounces "Balbo" like he's a little surprised.  Mentions of families taking pictures in the wild flowers on the side of the highway.  Any mention of fixing a bra with tape or pliers.

It validates my experience.  It celebrates these images that make up my life.  It makes me feel less alone, because someone else has seen these things and felt these feelings.  (And here we could get into a big essay on why representation is important.)

I've talked before about how details make the story breathe and draw the setting up around you.  But I think it's not only that the experience seeps into the details, that these details exist, but also the way that these details are presented.

I enjoy it most when they're presented like it ain't no thing.  It's just how it is.  It's so entrenched that the characters, the narrator, and the reader all take it for granted.  That's why it's so stunning when it's presented to you.  You realize that, yes, that's how it is.  That's this small part of my life spelled out in words, and I've never thought of it before, but I've always known it. 

Which makes it a little tricky.  It's mentioned, and the very act of mentioning it means it's important or gives it "significant presentation."  But if too fine a point is put on it, if it's explained too thoroughly, or presented like "Let me tell you about this thing that you don't know, even though you already know it, because I clearly know it better," it doesn't work.  I get incensed or offended or my suspension of disbelief is ruined. 

It reminds me of that time that I didn't laugh at this guy's joke about Babe Ruth (because it wasn't funny) and he went on to explain to me that Babe Ruth was this famous baseball player.

Dude.  Just no.

I got on a friend's case about this the other day in a story of his I was reading.  I didn't realize how big a deal this is for me until I'd written a page log, ranty response to a sentence he wrote.  It got me thinking about what makes these details work and what makes them not work, and I've come up with two rules for how to warm my heart strings when it comes to presenting real life situations that I have experienced.

• It has to be presented with the same level of acknowlegement that I give it when I encounter it.  So if I don't really think about it, but the character or narrator makes it into a big deal, I'm going to think they're new here.
• It has to be presented with the same level of respect that I give it when I encounter it.  Some things I meet with fondness and nostalgia.  Some things are irritating, but a fact of life, so what are you going to do?

 So clearly, this means that something I find a perfect representation of my experience might mean absolutely nothing to someone else.  Something that falls flat for me might resonate with another person.  You can't please everyone because not everyone has had the same experience. 

Except when I hit just that right note in my writing, when someone tells me "you nailed what I've never been able to put into words," it's the most amazing thing.  It's something to strive for.  It's the heart of all writing.