Writing Fiction

British Columbia's best neglected writers

The Tyee has published my article Who Are BC's Best Neglected Writers? Excerpt:

This province has a literary history going back over a century, but we seem to have forgotten most of our key authors. These ten managed to write a kind of collective history in fiction of British Columbia. 

Fortunately, their books are still available in the Vancouver Public Library and several post-secondary libraries in the lower mainland. You can also preview some of them in Google Books, and order full copies online.

Click through to read the list. And as long as you're on The Tyee's site, I've got another piece up today: BC's Literary World Online: Key Links. It includes publishers, authors, little magazines, and writers' groups.

A good site for writers

I've just found out about Creative Writing Now, which looks like a good resource. An excerpt from the home page:

Creative Writing Now was created as a free service by writing teachers to provide a supportive and friendly place for authors and poets at all stages in their writing lives. 

If you're just starting out, you can reach the next level in your writing with our free online writing courses and easy step-by-step guides to writing short stories, novels, poetry, and drama. 

No matter what your level of experience, you're invited to participate in our free creative writing contests for the chance to get published and win prizes.

I've added a link to it in the Writers' Resources list.

The novel's backstory

I've been exploring a novel I started long ago, changing it from first person to third. It's going surprisingly well: The point of view is still that of my hero, an aging US Marine general in 1935 who is very much a child of the late 19th century. So I'm getting away with a slightly old-fashioned style that suits him.

This is an alternative-history story: a disaster has effectively ended the British Empire early in the 20th century, and the world is of course quite different by 1935. I remembered having written a summary of the history of that world, and dug it out of an old file. It may need a lot of changes.

But it brings up a point worth thinking about. Your novel, ideally, begins as close as possible to the climax, at the moment when the protagonist is launched on a fateful trajectory. 

Think about the classic western High Noon. It starts just a couple of hours before the climax, when the marshal is getting married and about to start a new life. We don't need to see his courtship of his new bride, or his arrest of the gunmen who are now out of prison and coming to take revenge. That gives a huge intensity to the events between the morning wedding and the high-noon arrival of the gunmen.

But we always need to know the backstory. You should have at least a summary of what's been going on in your characters' lives before the incident that triggers the story. But it can take other forms as well. 

One way to do it is to write your protagonist's resume, though not one that he or she would ever submit to an employer. It would include all the routine resume information, but also include items such as hangups, fears, medical history, sexual preferences, and philosophy of life in a single sentence. You will be amazed to find out what's really going on with your characters when you fill in the blanks of such a resume.

Another way to deepen the backstory is to write an account by your protagonist (or antagonist) of the worst thing that ever happened to him or her. I did this for Mike Henderson, the rather taciturn hero of Henderson's Tenants. It turned out to be his wife's desertion when he came under pressure from the government because nanotechnology had suddenly become the Politically Convenient Threat of the Year. 

And the way Mike described that desertion—to my surprise—told me he was both furious about her desertion and bottling up that fury. That gave me ideas for events that would reflect his feelings and his efforts to deal with them.

So spend some time working out not just your plot, but the origins of that plot: What your characters want to achieve, why they're choosing particular ways to achieve it, and how it will lead to the trigger event that sets off the novel itself.

Don't expect to put the whole backstory into the novel itself. Key events will be useful exposition as flashbacks or as topics of your characters' conversations. Much of it, though, will be just stuff that you know about your characters but don't need to put into the story itself. Tolkien knew a lot more about the history and culture of Middle Earth than he ever told us, and I'm glad he didn't. We know just enough.

A little periscope writing

Walking dogs is a good way to get ideas. This afternoon I was in the woods with Merlin and Lily, thinking about an alternate-history novel I started back in the 90s. The premise (which I decline to share) was pretty good, but the narrative misfired: It was told in the first person by an aging Marine general in 1935, facing a war allied to a semi-fascist France against a communist Germany while reflecting on a world disaster early in the century.

The story didn't get even as far as 10,000 words, and I dropped it. But while the dogs did their thing, I reflected on the story and considered how it might work in third person. I could still tell the story in two strands, the general's old age and his youth at the dawn of the 20th century, but in third person I wouldn't have to deal with a man revealing more than he's capable of.

So this afternoon I got out the stub of a manuscript and did some periscope writing. That's what I call an experimental venture into the story's world: What does it look like, what does it smell like, from the character's point of view? It doesn't even have to find a place in the manuscript.

For all I know, my peep into the general's world will only teach me to kiss the story good-bye. But I cranked out a thousand words without much trouble, and had some fun in the process--in this 1935 world, TV is about where it was in our 1950, and H.L. Mencken is the anchor on the evening news. FDR is not the president; he's the War Secretary, and never had polio.

So the dogs can expect more walks in the next few days, followed by my raising the periscope into a world that may deserve more exploration.

When to seek an agent?

A reader just wrote: "I am currently approximately 2/3 through writing my first novel, with roughly 125,000 words. At what point should I start contacting literary agents, now, when I'm finished, etc.?"

For some general advice on researching agents and publishers, see chapters 16 and 17 in my online course Write a Novel. For a first novelist, I suggest a two-stage campaign: First, find all the agents who deal in your kind of fiction. Some agents are highly specialized and just won't bother with books outside that specialty. Second, finish the novel and then start sending queries to the agents you think are most likely to look at your work. They're much more likely to consider a completed ms. (promoted with a good query letter) than a work in progress.

Are these writers overrated?

In The Huffington Post, Anis Shivani writes a deliberately provocative article: The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers (PHOTOS). Excerpt, then a comment:

Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity?

The question is harder than ever to answer today, yet it is a worthwhile exercise to attempt (along with identifying underrated writers not favored by bureaucracy).

It's difficult to know today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand.

Since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by "theorists" who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature.

As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical "reviews" announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes (hence my inclusion of Michiko Kakutani).

The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat--awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation.

The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there's no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism--very desirable in this time of xenophobia--is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed "dangerous," and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)

I've done the same kind of thing as this article. It's harmless fun, and sometimes it makes people think. Shivani's list makes me think because it includes not a single writer I've ever read, so I have no opinion on his assessments.

But maybe that's an opinion in itself: As I approach 70, I read almost no fiction except for a little SF and an occasional revisit to García Márquez and the "mainstream" novelists I read in my youth.

Instead I read nonfiction, hugely: biography, history, politics, and science. Sometimes my reading gives me an idea for my novels in progress, but the novels don't progress much and I don't worry about that. Writing fiction for me is a matter of figuring out how to dramatize interesting ideas in technically interesting ways, but I'm no longer on fire to find an audience.

Mainstream "literary" fiction, like all fiction, is an industry—a cottage industry. Like the Scottish crofters who used to weave tweed fabric, writers work alone or in small groups to crank out product.

And like tweed, our fiction can go in and out of fashion. If we're really interested in making money, we're in the wrong business. We can't even claim to be doing "art for art's sake," because only others can judge if our work deserves to be called art (or if it's merely overrated).

But text and textile come from the same root word. Writing and weaving are crafts, demanding careful attention to tiny details in the service of a larger pattern. It's easy to learn the basics, but it takes a lifetime to explore their implications.

So if we don't write art for art's sake, we can at least try to master craft for craft's sake—and for our own.

The wisdom of Charles Stross

Paul Krugman, some months ago, tipped me off to the novels of Charles Stross. I was not disappointed, though I was certainly astounded by his imagination and energy. Now Krugman has sent me to Insufficient data - Charlie's Diary, which every aspiring SF writer should read. It's about the number of people you need to maintain a technologically advanced society. Excerpt:

Firstly: no, you can't simplify a complex society that runs on just-in-time delivery and a host of specialities. You need a huge training back-end to provide for the thousands of skilled graduate-entry niche occupations. You need an efficient just-in-time delivery system to keep everyone supplied with food, water, power, shelter and whatever else they need — it's that, or accept huge inefficiencies in your supply chain that wipe out the gains produced elsewhere.

Secondly, seemingly similar artefacts (cars, phones, airliners) have invisibly accreted complexity. The complexity makes them better (safer, more economical, more luxurious) than their predecessors, but vastly more difficult to engineer; stuff that used to be fixable by shade-tree mechanics and jobbing electricians has receded over the horizon.

Back in the early 19th century, the complement of a sailing ship could expect to maintain the ship in every significant way using tools and expertise that they could carry aboard the ship. Today in the early 21st century, that's not an option with airliners or probably even automobiles.

Thirdly, the complexity embodies in these new products means that their production is dependent on a complex web of lower-level specialities.

Fourthly, there are more side-effects to keep track of. Exotic materials mean exotic contamination events from waste dumping, for example.

Fifthly: space colonization? Get back to me when you've tracked down how many people it takes to design and build a space suit. (The number is in the hundreds, if not the thousands.) More realistically, we won't have autonomous off-world colonies unless and until they can cover all the numerous specialities of the complex civilization that spawned the non-autonomous, dependent-on-resupply space program.

Or, to put it another way: colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.

This is the "bottom-line" SF I've been talking about in my book on writing this stuff. It drives me nuts to think of novels where the long-suffering taxpayers on Earth cough up the trillions to send folks out into space for no return on their investment.

After all, putting a fighter jock on the moon so he could practice his golf didn't get us anywhere. Why should someone trying to pay his mortgage want to put some genius on Mars? And why would the genius want to go?

Here's an idea for the taking: Someone discovers a cheap hyperspace gateway to anywhere in the universe where you can walk through for fifty bucks, put up a tent, and start living well. After several thousand years of cheerful prosperity, someone decides to build a personal spaceship and explore the vast nowhere between stars.

This is like rowing across the Pacific; it's been done, but only as a personal stunt. But suppose this crank gets out there and discovers something no one expected. What happens next?