Category Archives: Writing

Face Value

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 I’ve been thinking about the concept of surprise as it relates to fiction and specifically the relationship between writer and reader. Readers like to be surprised, as a general rule, but it has to be the right sort of surprise. We’re all familiar with the iconic “Twilight Zone” story where the payoff is an ironic twist. That works in small doses, but do it time and again and it becomes too much like a parlor trick everyone’s seen once too often. The punch goes away and the surprise is no longer surprising. I’ve talked about ending before, and how it has to be the “right” ending for the story. The right ending will always have a sense of inevitability about it, whether the reader sees it coming or not. But is it really better if they don’t? And, if so, what can be reasonably sacrificed to make that happen?

This is the balance that concerns me, because I find it’s one aspect of storytelling that we have to deal with all the time. Fiction is a consensus illusion created between the writer and the reader. As a writer you craft a dream that the reader, for a while, shares. Yet their experience reading will never be the same as yours writing. They will never quite see the characters as you do, and they will interpret intent and meanings with their own perspective. That’s not a problem, that’s just the way the game works and all writers have to be aware of it. But the writer who goes for surprise has to be especially aware of and, in a sense, manipulate that perspective, and the primary tools are omission and misdirection. Continue reading →

Playing Fair

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I know I’ve talked about this before, but now and then I read something which shows me plainly that not everyone got the memo. I can just about understand it. Playing fair sounds almost quaint, doesn’t it? So 20th or even 19th century. Certainly everyone already knows that life itself isn’t fair, to which I can only say “Hallelujah!” Let’s be honest, here–most of the time life’s unfairness actually works in our favor. Or as Shakespeare nailed it some years ago, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?” Yet fair play is alive and well in one place at least–the act of writing. It has to be. Readers will put up with a great deal, but one thing they absolutely will not forgive is cheating. Continue reading →

Muse and Writer Dialogues #6 – “Anger Management”

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 FADE IN

 A room that passes for an office. There are bookshelves on one wall, a motley assortment of carvings, signed storyboards, and framed magazine covers on the free wall space. On the far wall is a medieval-style heraldic wall display of a cockatrice and a banner in bad Latin “Pullus non Est.”  Horizontal files sit beneath the window , and on top of those a free-standing rack holding Japanese swords, and a pile of unsorted papers, old mail, receipts. The computer desk is on the wall nearest the door, facing away from the window. Beside that is a printer on a stand. It’s a bit dusty.

Enter the Muse. Her appearance tends to change every now and then, but mostly she appears as a Greek goddess type in a flowing chiton. She is glaring at Writer, who  is sitting at his desk, but he’s not looking at the screen. He is also glaring, though at nothing in particular.

MUSE (tapping foot): Why am I here?

WRITER: You’re my muse.

MUSE: This I know. I mean why am I here now? You’ve got a project to write and you’re already well into it. I will appear at various times to give you little shoves in the right direction, but that’s it. Nothing of the sort is currently indicated.

WRITER: The Ideal of Inspiration is not confined to writerly projects. What if I need help with something else?

MUSE: Such as?

WRITER: Well…why am I so damn angry?

Continue reading →

Word of Podcast

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If you’re interested in the sf/f field in general, the SF Signal web site is probably already familiar to you. This week they’ve put up one of their regular podcasts, this time a panel discussion on the state of the Swords & Sorcery (S&S)subgenre and where the genre is at the moment, (Episode 108): 2012 Sword & Sorcery Mega Panel Part 1
.    Panelists were:

Lou Anders is the editor of Pyr Books, Scott Andrews is the editor of  Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Violette Malan and James Sutter are authors, Jaym Gates and Patrick Hester are the SF Signal podcast moderators. Besides being an interesting discussion in itself for anyone even remotely interested in the subject (and I’m looking forward to part 2), it was interesting to me personally because my name came up several times as a modern S&S author in connection with the Lord Yamada stories.

I can see it. For one thing, as subgenres go, S&S is pretty mecurial. Any subgenre that can encompass at various times Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Joanna Russ, G.R.R. Martin, and Michael Moorcock, has to be a bit of a moving target. For another, at various times in my development I was very deliberately writing S&S. For one thing, I went through an early phase where I didn’t read much else. For another, when I was first trying to break into the fantasy magazines (all maybe three of them at the time), S&S was in the ascendant, as hot or hotter than Steampunk is now. I wrote a fair bit of it, and apparently I still am.

I’ll grant you, I wasn’t thinking of Yamada as S&S when the series first came to me. I had him envisioned more as a Heian-era noire detective, sort of Sam Spade with a tachi. He quickly grew past that limited conception, and thank heavens for that, but the tone remained that of a generalist fantasy with mystery overtones. And yet the stories still easily fit under the S&S umbrella. I hadn’t thought of them that way, but it’s true, and perfectly fine with me.

Categories aside, I think this is the first time that my name and work has come up in a podcast that wasn’t a podcast of one of my own stories. Getting a reminder now and then that other people do read and like what you do doesn’t entirely suck.