Suspension

I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in the responses to “Waiting for Beauty.” (You can read it for free online; go ahead and click. It’s less than eight hundred words long.) Multiple people have said something to the effect of “I could tell where it was going, but I enjoyed it anyway.” And this has inspired Thinky Thoughts about predictability in fiction.

Normally my metaphors for writing tend to revolve around textile arts (weaving, embroidery, sewing, etc), but I’ve been having misadventures in piano lately, so this time I’m going to go with music. There’s a thing called a suspension, which you’ve heard many times even if you don’t know that’s the term for it. You know how sometimes, before a piece settles into the final chord, it hangs there for a moment being not-quite-right? That’s a suspension: a note from a different chord persisting before at last resolving into the sound you expect.

Suspension works because you do expect the resolution. You hear it before it happens; you know where the music is going. Resolving into another chord entirely might be a clever trick, but it isn’t “better,” and if you use that trick too often you’ll annoy a lot of your audience.

We tend to talk about predictability in fiction as if it’s a bad thing. The word itself has a negative connotation — and heck, some writers decry “resolution” as being the cheap and easy way out of a story in the first place. But we crave resolution; we derive satisfaction from that feeling of knowing where the music is going, and following it to the end. And it’s true in fiction, too. Predictability is only a bad thing when it’s done badly.

Okay, tautologies are tautological. What’s the difference between doing it badly and doing it well? If I knew that for sure, I’d be selling my wisdom to the masses. But I can suss out three factors, at least, the first of which is that the suspense (in the musical sense of the word, more than the thriller one, though the breathless anticipation of the camera panning around to show the murderer is often suspense of the music-analogous variety as well) — right, that parenthetical got too long. Let’s start over: suspense should not overstay its welcome. “Waiting for Beauty” is less than eight hundred words long because its central conceit can’t bear a heavier weight than that. If I wanted a five-thousand-word story, I’d have to bring in other material, delay for as long as possible the introduction of that element — and that still might not work, because whatever filled the first 4500 or so would have to be substantial enough that it would probably take over the story.

The second factor is that the material of the suspension has to be worthwhile in its own right. “Waiting for Beauty” depends heavily on the specificity of the details along the way, the image it builds up, brick by brick. If that doesn’t work for a given reader (as it hasn’t, for some), the story itself will fall apart on the spot. For other stories, it might be the vivid emotion leading up to the revelation of what the reader has seen all along. Or the clockwork precision of disparate plot elements falling into place. The point is, the general point of “the writing has to be good” becomes critically true when the unexpected ceases to be one of your selling points: you need the reader to admire the journey for its own sake.

And the third, of course, is that the final chord — the thing the reader is anticipating — has to be something they want. One of the things that makes M. Night Shyamalan’s later movies not work for me is that when I see where they’re going, I really, really wish they would go somewhere else. To some extent this ties into the issue of cliches: suspension turns into predictability (in the negative sense) when the thing you’re making the reader wait for is a thing they’ve seen a bazillion times. But it’s possible to be not a cliche, and still undesirable. The Sixth Sense is arguably more cliched than Shyamalan’s subsequent films, but I like the former and dislike the latter because of where he’s leading me in each one.

As obvious as it seems to say that predictability is okay — even beneficial! — if you do it well, I feel like sometimes we lose sight of that in our rush to condemn “easy” storytelling. Some of Shakespeare’s plays start with a prologue that spoils the entire plot; we still keep watching. Uncertainty is not the only thing that can create suspense; sometimes, in a different way, certainty can do the same.

more at Book View Cafe

Banned Books Week is wrapping up at BVC, with some posts on sensitive topics:

And, this being Friday and two weeks since my last post there, I’m back with something completely unrelated to Banned Books Week: “A Good Saxon Compound,” talking about the origin of the word “folklore” and the field’s concern with nationalism and identity. Comment over there!

Thirteen years ago today . . . .

. . . I finished writing my first novel.

It seems an appropriate date to put up an Open Book Thread for Lies and Prophecy, the much-revised descendant of the book I completed that day.

The floor here is open for questions, comments, etc on the novel and related topics (including “Welcome to Welton”). Needless to say, this will involve spoilers, so you have been warned.

Now if you’ll follow me behind the cut, I’ll talk a bit about how the novel came to be.

When I was but a wee n00b . . . .

Twenty-five years of my life

It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Princess Bride (the film; the book had its anniversary a while ago). I, of course, celebrated by watching it again.

I had things I needed to do tonight, and I figured I could do them while the movie was on. More fool me: it’s been a while since I sat down and watched it, and I quickly realized I really just had to give it my full attention — mouthing, as I usually do, all the quotable lines* as they were said.

I can’t pick my favorite book, or my favorite song, or my favorite food. But I can pick my favorite movie. The Princess Bride is the reason I studied fencing; it’s also the reason I studied Spanish. (Can you tell which character I imprinted on?) I don’t know if it’s the first movie I saw in a theater, but it’s the first one I remember seeing. It’s one of the few fantasies from the ’80s that I would say is genuinely good, instead of just lovably cheesy.

It is, now that I watch it with a professional eye, a fantastic example of good storytelling. I could go on for a good half-hour at least about all the intelligent decisions Goldman made with the script, the elegance of the structure, all the places where the dialogue leads you perfectly along its path. It strikes that beautiful balance between comedy and drama, where the laughter makes the occasional punch land all that much harder. (Inigo’s storyline as a whole — which gained extra impact when I found out about his father dying of cancer, and Patinkin channeling his grief from that into the final confrontation with Count Rugen.) There are almost no wasted lines in this film, no random chatter to fill the time. Every bit pulls its weight.

I don’t know anymore how many times I’ve seen it. I used to keep count; I started when I could still remember all the occasions, and I kept a record on our old VHS box — the one taped off TV, eventually replaced by an official copy, eventually replaced by a DVD, eventually replaced by the Dread Pirate edition that has d_aulnoy in one of the special features. But somewhere along the line, I lost my record of the count. The last time I was sure of it, it was in the low 60s.

There is no movie in the world I love as much. They’ll never see these lines, but to William Goldman, Rob Reiner, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Andre the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, Peter Falk, Carol Kane, Billy Crystal, Bob Anderson, and all the other cast and crew of this marvelous film: thank you.

*Approximately seventy-five percent of the script

Books read, September 2012

I should totally have a “Piano Pieces Played” list to explain where the rest of my month went, except that it would get really boring as I listed “Solfeggietto” and “Roslin and Adama” over and over and overandoverandover again. (I’ve been practicing.)

Blackwood, Gwenda Bond. Picked this one up on the basis of her “Big Idea” feature on Scalzi’s blog. Roanoke disappearances! History tying into the present! Alchemy! John Dee! It had so many elements I love . . . but it turns out the problem with that is, I have Opinions on the elements, and get increasingly ticked off when I think they’re being used badly. I don’t want to spoil this for anybody who’d prefer to avoid spoilers, so I’ll rot13 my rant:

Wbua Qrr vf gur ivyynva. V pbhyq cbgragvnyyl pbcr jvgu gung, ohg hasbeghangryl, uvf ivyynval nyfb vaibyirf uvz npgvat ZNFFVIRYL BHG BS PUNENPGRE. Gur Ebnabxr pbybal nccneragyl pbafvfgrq bs n ohapu bs nypurzvpny phygvfgf naq jnf Qrr’f fpurzr gb znxr uvzfrys vzzbegny, naq ur jnagrq gb qb guvf fb gung ur pbhyq bireguebj Ryvmnorgu (hu, juhg) naq gnxr bire gur jbeyq be fbzrguvat. Vg snvyrq orpnhfr ur tbg orgenlrq, juvpu erfhygrq va uvf phygvfgf orvat guebja vagb fbzr xvaq bs nygreangr cynar, naq abj gurl’er onpx naq cbffrffvat crbcyr ba Ebnabxr vfynaq gb svavfu gurve arsnevbhf fpurzr, juvpu vf nyfb xvyyvat nyy gur jvyqyvsr va beqre gb znvagnva Qrr’f haangheny yvsr.

V pbhyq unir tbar nybat jvgu guvf vs Qrr jrer abg n) zrtnybznavnpnyyl cybggvat gb gnxr bire Ratynaq naq o) fubjrq erzbefr bire gur pbfg bs uvf npgvbaf; vg pbhyq unir orra cerfragrq nf uvz oryvrivat gung vzzbegnyvgl jbhyq or fb tbbq sbe gur jbeyq, gur pbfg (gubhtu erterggnoyr) vf jbegu vg. Hasbeghangryl, vg srryf yvxr Obaq, be znlor ure ntrag be rqvgbe, qrpvqvat gur nagntbavfg arrqrq gb or chapurq hc gb jbeyq-guerngravat fgnghf. Gur fgbel jbhyq unir orra orggre jvgubhg gung.

Right. Disappointing. I finished the book, but only through sheer bloody-mindedness (it’s a quick read). There were other flaws, too, but I’ve ranted for long enough, so I’ll leave it at that.

Tam Lin, Pamela Dean. Re-read, as a treat to myself on the publication of Lies and Prophecy (which, as I’ve mentioned before, was partially inspired by this book). I hadn’t read it in a number of years, so it was interesting going back through it this time: I noticed so many details that had slipped past me before, like why Nick’s and Robin’s accents shift when they recite. This is very much a comfort book for me, so I’m not sure what I can say about it to people who don’t already know and love it, but short form is: my favorite ballad, retold in the context of a 1970s Minnesota liberal arts college. With lots of excessively literate and well-spoken characters, and some phrases that have stayed with me for near on twenty years now.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself into Print, Renni Browne and Dave King. maratai offered this free to the first person who asked for it a while ago, so I asked. I was sad when her marginal comments petered out, because those were entertaining me. 🙂 As for the book itself, it’s trying to be a 200-level-ish “how to write” type thing — going beyond the basic platitudes of writing books and into things like proportion (paying attention to, and trying to appropriately scale, how much attention you devote to certain things) or breaks (sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters). That part is good; the part where the authors seem to think absolutely everything should be done via dialogue was less so. (They are rather anti-description, anti-dialogue tags, anti-“beats” — by which they mean descriptions of movement used to break up dialogue — etc.) And then I got to the chapter on “voice” and ranted on Twitter about the meaninglessness of that word the way most writing books, this one included, tend to use it. Augh nonsensical platitudes aaaaaaaaugh.

So, very much a mixed bag.

The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Discussed elsewhere and else-elsewhere.

Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Yeah, I went ahead and read this one, even though I won’t be blogging about it until November and December. I wanted to be able to read things like the wiki and Leigh Butler’s recaps without hitting spoilers, and I was having a bad week where I really just wanted a GIANT BOOK I could trust to entertain me without requiring much from my brain. (That part kicks in when I do the analysis, later.) Also? I really just wanted to know what happens next. Which is a good feeling to have, going into the end of the series. Anyway, commentary will come later. [Edited to add: commentary is now here.]

Banned Books at BVC

No, not our books being banned. (Though some of them may have been. And writers always joke that a banning attempt is fantastic publicity. Can you imagine if some parent challenged Lies and Prophecy for promoting witchcraft? I mean, it really kind of does, except for the bit where we haven’t undergone a minor apocalypse that left half the population with pyschic powers. But trying to keep a book out of the hands of kids is a great way to get them to read it.)

Where was I? Oh, right. It’s Banned Books Week, and over at the Book View Cafe, we’re celebrating with a bunch of posts on the subject. Sherwood Smith kicked it off with a look at censorship through the centuries, and there are other posts about 50 Shades of Gray, the mechanics of banning, torching books for fun and profit educational purposes, and a church-sponsored burning, along with cheeky pictures of BVC authors with dangerous books.

I believe there are more planned throughout the week. I think it’s fascinating, looking at the entire phenomenon of censorship and the means by which people try to pursue it. Fascinating, and scary. Because I have grown up in the absolute belief that suppressing the written word is wrong-headed at best and evil at worst, and try as I might to understand the position of those who seek to do so, I’m never going to sympathize with it.

Re(Visiting) the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (analysis)

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

And now we talk about structure.

I don’t envy Sanderson the challenge he faced, picking up the end of this series and trying to wrangle it into something like order. Jordan may have insisted that by god it was going to be ONE MORE BOOK, but I don’t see any way in hell that could have ever worked — and I say that without even having read Towers of Midnight yet, let alone A Memory of Light. There’s enough here in this book that unless both of those are Crossroads of Twilight-level bogs of plotlessness (which I very much doubt), a single volume would have read like the Cliff Notes version of the finale.

But Sanderson didn’t have a terribly good foundation to build on, structurally speaking, as he went into the final stretch. Card-weaving would make an ideal metaphor to describe the situation here, but since very few of you know how that works, we’ll go with architecture instead: he, as the construction manager, inherited a building with four good, solid stories at the bottom, three or so dodgy levels above that, three ramshackle levels held together with increasing quantities of baling wire and duct tape, and then one that makes a valiant attempt at being structurally sound. Atop this mess, he had to build one (eventually three) final levels, and make them as habitable and pleasant as possible.

Spoiler-cut time, as I start dissecting this book to see what makes it tick.

Icon winner and new buy links

alessandriana, you managed what I couldn’t; you got the Tower card to be big enough to make out, while still getting the title in the image. Thank you! Just let me know whether you want an eventual print copy of the novel, or tuckerization in the sequel I hope to write. And my thanks to everyone who submitted an icon: you’re all far better at this than I am.

Apropos of Lies and Prophecy making money, you can now buy it at Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, and Apple, along with Amazon and the actual publisher, Book View Cafe. If you have a preferred e-book vendor that isn’t selling it directly, please do let me know; I can’t promise I’ll be able to get it there, but I can look into it. (BVC sells both epub and mobi formats, though, which should work on pretty much any device.)

I will have an open book thread for Lies and Prophecy soon, but I’m waiting for a specific date. (You’ll understand why when we get there.) In the meantime, enjoy!

Comets, now conveniently sized for your pocket!

A Star Shall Fall is out today in mass-market paperback. Apart from being, y’know, smaller, with a slightly different cover, it should also have various errata corrected (like the bad arithmetic when Irrith goes to get bread). I say “should” because I don’t yet have my hands on a copy to check, but I did have the opportunity to send in corrections, and I think I caught all the places where they were needed. Famous last words . . . .

BTW, since the past couple of days have been crazy, I haven’t yet chosen an icon. I’m extending the deadline until tonight, just in case somebody else wants to hop in.

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (reactions)

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

I’ll be doing two posts apiece for the final three books, the ones written by Sanderson — not because Sanderson wrote them, but because the story in them is actually new to me. (I should have also done this for Knife of Dreams, on the same grounds, but I’m not going to backtrack that far now.)

In order to keep my remarks something like organized, I’m splitting them into my reactions as a reader, and my analysis as a writer. Of course, it won’t really be possible to keep those two things entirely separate: my reader-reactions will inevitably include some analytical comments, and my structural analysis will perforce be colored by my feelings as a reader. But this will at least allow me to have two lengthy posts, rather than one unreadably long monstrosity.

Reactions first. And these are as spoilery as spoilers get, so let’s go behind the cut.

(more…)

Yuletide nominations are open

For those who are interested, Yuletide nominations have begun.

Note that this is an optional part of the process, even if you want to do Yuletide; it’s only necessary if there’s something specific you know you want to request. (Or offer, since some people nominate based on what they’d be interested in writing.) If you do have something in that vein, though, nomination is the only way to be sure it will be available this year.

(If you’re not sure what Yuletide is in the first place, or want more info, there’s finally an up-to-date FAQ you can consult.)

you knew this was coming

My general incompetence with image manipulation continues. So: who wants to make me an icon for Lies and Prophecy? (You can find a large version of the cover here.) It can be animated or static, it can show the hand or just a card or whatever looks good at 100×100 pixels.

I’ll pick one on Monday, to give people a little time to work. And the winning artist can have their choice between a print copy of Lies and Prophecy once I have ’em, or tuckerization (that is, the use of their name) for a minor character in the sequel — presuming, of course, that L&P sells well enough for me to write the sequel, which I hope it will. I promise to make it a cool character, though.

more Driftwood!

My short story output has been dismal lately, but I did manage to complete and sell another Driftwood story: “The Ascent of Unreason,” now live at BCS (not to be confused with BVC, which is what I originally typed), both as text and as a podcast. (And if you check that last link, you’ll see that there are also e-reader versions available — pdf, mobi, epub, etc.)

I have work I really ought to be doing today, work with deadlines attached . . . but I sort of feel like writing a short story. I may poke at my various seedlings and see if any of them are ready to sprout.

Mitt Romney, Bubble Boy

In light of Romney’s self-inflicted gut wound this week, I find myself dwelling on this piece by Jeremiah Goulka, about how and why he ceased to be a Republican.

The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted — from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.
[…]
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.

Goulka says a lot more, going into detail about how Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War pried the scales from his eyes, but that’s the part that I keep thinking about — because it’s the only way I can make sense of Mitt Romney.

I think the man has spent his entire life in a socio-economic bubble so hermetically sealed that he doesn’t even realize the world outside it exists. That’s how he can see forty-seven percent of this country as moochers selfishly glued to the governmental teat, shirking personal responsibility while the virtuous men of his class keep the country going. That’s why he thinks people making two hundred thousand dollars a year are middle class; that’s why he can say, with a straight face, that he “inherited nothing.” By his standards, those statements are true. But his standards are so skewed, the skew has completely vanished from his field of vision. He’s a poster boy for privilege: carrying so much of it, and so utterly blind to the knapsack on his back.

And it means that when he opens his mouth around people from outside his bubble, he comes across as a condescending dick. It’s happened again and again on the campaign trail, despite what I presume are the best efforts of his handlers to teach him less counter-productive habits; it happened on a massive scale at that fundraiser, because he never meant those words to be heard by the hoi polloi. It happens when they send Ann out to be his surrogate, because she’s been living in the same bubble, a world where she and Mitt were “struggling to make ends meet” back when they were living off his stock portfolio.

During the 2008 campaign, I remember somebody writing a cute post wherein they pretended the presidential election was a piece of fanfic, and criticized it for Obama’s Mary Sue qualities and the OOC way John McCain was being written, betraying all his principles in a cynical bid for the win. If 2012 were a workshop story, I’d be bleeding ink all over the page, lambasting the writer for saddling the Republican party with such an unrealistic caricature of arrogant, wealthy, self-interested self-absorption as their candidate. Because even when I can explain Mitt Romney, I have trouble believing that this really what we’ve ended up with.

Writing Fight Scenes: Smooth Moves

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

I’ve said before that you don’t actually have to give a blow-by-blow description of your fight in order to write a good scene, and in fact you often don’t want to. Going into detail slows the action down and risks confusing a reader who can’t visualize the movement very well.

But sometimes, at key moments, it can be good to describe specific moves. The sequence that leads to somebody being killed or disarmed or knocked to the ground can be worth focusing on — a brief snapshot that shows a character’s desperation, competence, etc. So let’s talk for a moment about how you can work that out, even if you don’t have a lot of training.

Warning: it involves looking like a complete weirdo. 🙂

Kids: try this at home!

things I have forgotten

Dynamics.

Oh, I remember what they are. Pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, etc. But what do they sound like? How quiet is mezzo-piano? How much louder than that is mezzo-forte?

I know this is a matter of interpretation, not actual decibels. But I’ve lost my sense of proportion for such things. And it’s even more complicated when you’re playing a digital piano: this thing has a volume knob and you can adjust the touch, so what constitutes quiet vs. loud depends not only on what I do with my hands, but what settings I’ve got the instrument on. It’s going to take me a while before I re-develop my feel for the dynamics of the pieces I’ve been playing.

Also, I should mention in passing that I didn’t realize how accustomed I was to playing pieces out of instructional books until I started playing lots of new-to-me music that doesn’t have suggested fingerings marked on the page. <g> Howard Shore is a particular challenge on that front, or rather whoever arranged the Lord of the Rings score for piano is.

But I’ve had the Precious for nearly a month now, and I’ve played it virtually every day (barring when I was in Boston this past weekend — and even then, I managed to play a different piano one afternoon), so I think it’s safe to say that I’ll get plenty of practice in the months and years to come. 🙂

Lies and Prophecy

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and prophecy.

Kim thought majoring in divination would prepare her for the future. But even with her foresight warning her of trouble, she’s taken by surprise when an unknown force attacks Julian, her enigmatic classmate and friend. Her gifts can’t protect him against further attacks and an inexplicable string of disappearances . . . and if she’s reading the omens right, Julian isn’t the only one in danger.

Kim knows she isn’t ready for this. But if she wants to save Julian — and herself — she’ll have to prove her own prophecies wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present my Book View Cafe debut?

Lies and Prophecy is, as anyone who has been reading the “Welcome to Welton” scenes will know, an urban fantasy set in a version of our world where about half the adult population has active psychic gifts. (At least, “urban fantasy” is the short description for it. I have sometimes been known to refer to this book as “near future alternate history mildly post-apocalyptic semi-YA urban fantasy with some mystery and romance in and maybe a smidge of science fiction if you squint right.” But they don’t really have a category for that.)

It is also available for purchase! You can buy directly from BVC, in both epub and mobi formats, suitable for iPads and Nooks and Kindles and so on, or whatever your e-book reading device of choice may be. BVC is the best route to go, in terms of benefit to me-the-writer, but if you prefer to order from some other venue, you can get it through Amazon right now, and other e-book retailers in the near future. If you prefer a dead tree edition, there will be one of those, too, but that (alas) is going to take a little while longer to happen. I’ll definitely announce it here when that becomes available, though, probably with pictures of me hugging it and squeezing it and generally acting like Gollum.

See, this is the first novel I ever finished. It’s been through more revisions than I can count, over a period of (yikes) thirteen years, but it is still my first, and that means it is very near and dear to my heart. These are the characters that never quite left my head, the story I kept revisiting and refining. And now it is, at last, out there for other people to read. I am more happy than I can say, and I’d like to take a moment to thank the BVC crew in general, and those who produced this book in particular: my cover designer Amy Sterling Casil, my formatter Chris Dolley, my copy-editor David Levine, and most especially Sherwood Smith, who has been my BVC mentor since I first approached her at a con and said “I think I’d like to join your group.”

I’ll have more to say in upcoming days, but for now, I hope you enjoy the book. 🙂

I am an aunt!

Directly, that is, as opposed to by marriage. (I have been an aunt-by-marriage for about two years now.)

A multitude of congratulations to my brother and his wife on the birth of their son.

Welcome to Welton: Kim (11/11)

Earle’s dining hall was a low and sprawling place, claustrophobic enough that I’d avoided it until now. I preferred Hurst, whose floor-to-ceiling windows made it feel more open and pleasant. But Liesel had recruited me for a social project tonight, and it wouldn’t kill me to eat here once, before I swore off it for the rest of my undergraduate life.

The space didn’t make it easy to find people, though. Liesel rose up on her toes to scan the room, then dropped down and shrugged. “I don’t see him. Let’s get food, then try to grab a table.”

Read the rest at the Book View Cafe.

And that’s the last of them! But tune in tomorrow for an announcement . . . .