The Big Lie

One of the most important ingredients to modern genre writing -- especially horror -- is the creation of an intensely mundane 'real world' into which the nasties intrude.

I think this is related to a political concept, the thing Hitler and Goebbels called 'The Big Lie' (that's Große Lüge for the kids at home).  The concept behind the big lie is simple: if you're going to bullshit the public, go huge.  Don't mess around with small exaggerations or minor misstatements*.  Tell the people, "trees cause global warming," or that Democrats are advocating 'death panels.'  These are statements so outrageous they seem plausible -- simply because to lie about something that wild is unimaginable for most people.  It's just too crazy.

The flip side of that is the matrix in which the big lie appears.  It's got to be real life, as warty and stinky as possible.  The more pressure people are under, the more their lives are kicking their asses, the more susceptible to the big lie they will be.


Stephen King nailed this real-world thing in his early novels, with his use of famous brand names and authentic lower-middle-class details.  He usually portrayed characters or communities just sort of hanging on by their fingernails, absorbed in their little troubles.  Then along comes the big scary fucking holy shit weird thing -- the fictional equivalent to the big lie.  And the weirder it is, somehow the more we believe it.


If Carrie had happened in some less accessible community -- say, among the Amish, or in a wealthy gated suburb -- the book probably wouldn't have gone on to become a best-seller.


This isn't a rule, and it's not a confirmed fact.  I'm just musing on the similarity between the mechanisms -- the fictional device and the political lie.  Telling your readers that fairies are real, or there's a UFO buried in the woods behind somebody's house, requires a rock-steady backdrop of right here, right now.  The same thing applies if you're telling them the president is a foreign-born socialist Manchurian candidate.


To test the hypothesis, look at the flipside.  Millions of Americans believe we didn't really go to the moon.  They do believe 9/11 was an inside job.  And Kennedy was killed by the Mafia.  Why do they believe these things?  Because what happened is impossible to believe.  I mean, I look at the moon and I cannot imagine, despite a lifetime devoted entirely to imagining things, that a bunch of bird colonels played golf on that distant satellite.  But they did.


So when real life sounds too nuts to believe, we don't believe it.  When lies, on the other hand, sound too nuts to believe, we give them the benefit of the doubt.  That's human nature.


The difference between lies and fiction is that fiction is not intended to deceive.  

But it's the same set of tools.


*The word 'misstatements looks completely wrong, but that's how it's spelled.

Proofreader's Marks

Learn these.  Use them.

I lifted this chart from here; I don't know where they lifted it from.

I Got Your Story Right Here, Buddy

Every clever-boots in the business wants to tell you how many stories there are, and what they contain.  You'll hear about the 36 plots, the 7 plots.  Rubbage.

There are two plots, comedy and tragedy.


Comedy: yes, no, yes.


Tragedy: no, yes, no.

That's it, kids!  All further stories consist of adding fur and plumage thereto.

My Basic Philosophy

This applies to writing, life, and everything else.  Especially playing the banjolele, which I play so poorly that it may be responsible for the rash of birds falling dead from the sky.  I think this is an old Buddhist thing, but I may have made it up and I forgot and now think it's an old Buddhist thing.  So it might be a middle-aged Buddhist thing.  Either way:

If you want to dig a gold mine, save the trouble and kill yourself now.  On the other hand, if you want to dig a mile-deep hole, you're in luck!  Because you might even find gold at the bottom.

Everything I do, I do because I love digging mile-deep holes.  The minute I'm digging for gold, it's over.

On Writing Women

I write mostly female protagonists in my fiction, and find it can sometimes be a challenge to navigate the straits between virgin and whore, where about 99.9% of all real women exist.  I personally know several of the .1% excluded from the above, and wish them the best, as well.

In order to be admissible as a typical character, the fictional 'whore' must be driven by urges she cannot control, perhaps lust, perhaps a 'daddy complex'; the virgin, on the other hand, has to be damaged, afraid of intimacy, needing only the right pecker to arrive on the scene in order to unleash her inner whore.
 
Writing in the space between these assumptions is somewhat like dealing with the autocorrect on an Iphone, for me -- I try to express the ambivalence of real sexuality, the balance of desire, opportunism, caution, short- and long-term considerations, personal history and outward circumstances that dictate how real people (I include women in the general appellation 'people') will behave. 
But this Manichean cultural gender norm, like the Iphone that changes a crisp Anglo-Saxonism into 'ducking,' insists on correcting 'woman' to read 'virgin' or 'whore.'

This isn't universal, of course.  But neither is it just me.  A wealth of literature exists in which women are women, men are men, and the spectrum of shadings between frigidity and promiscuity are fully represented.  The trouble is, I write genre fiction, or in other words stories that adhere to a thematic device.  Genre conventions (for any genre) are fairly rigid, a kind of template into which the narrative must fit.  That's a blessing and a curse.  Genre conventions allow a great deal of story matter to be assumed, rather than tediously explicated; otherwise every science fiction yarn would have to back all the way up to the present and explain exactly how mankind ended up scattered among the stars, etc. as opposed to simply announcing, "they approached the unknown planet at sub-light speed."

However, genre tropes take up story space.  Sci-fi requires (among other things) that a percentage of the story be spent on hardware; in fantasy you're going to be world-building.  Detective fiction needs procedural details: clues, interviews, cups of cold coffee on scarred desks.  Romance novels have the most rigid set of requirements, I think, of any genre -- weirdly enough, the greatest of which is that the protagonists in them be either whores or virgins, rescued from one or the other state only by a sure cocksman, preferably a wayward Scottish laird or similar.  

With 'straight' fiction -- that is, the stuff composed only of the ordinary world -- the author need explain almost nothing before the characters can be developed.  The story is the characters.  Dash in a setting, spread out your cast, then force them to reunite, and you're off to the races.  There's room in a non-device-driven story to birth female characters who are as complex as the real women born by non-literary means.  Now, a really good writer won't run into any limitations imposed by genre, because she or he can express all of human experience with only a few well-chosen words.  So I make no claims to greatness.


Here's why this comes up for me at the present time.  I'm tinkering with a particularly loony story which happens to include militant lesbian fairies, some ancient, evil monsters, and a relatively liberated young woman completely covered from chin to footsoles in tattooed talismans.  It's a sort of riff on the 'urban fantasy' genre, which tends toward:

"...Jaxxie Hornwolff is nobody's fool: a tough, heavily-pierced, large-breasted motorcycle mechanic by day, a werewolf by night.  Until she meets Bram Ravenwylde, a smoldering hawt vampire who knows the secret destiny that Jaxxie must soon confront.  She can't resist him, but she knows she must: will he save her soul or send it to hell?"
 
 ... So I wanted to fool around with those peculiar conventions, and to write something equally absurd, but to make it believable and rich -- to convince myself of it first, so I can convince my readers later.  Which might be more ambition than good sense.  The trouble is, the instant you jump into these waters (particularly as a man writing women), you realize Scylla and Charybdis, the virgin and whore, stand on either shore, waiting to kick your inadvertently sexist, male-chauvinist, peenie-centric ass if you venture an inch too far in either direction.


My protagonist meets a smoldering hawt guy, for example, and she's got a wicked letch on for him.  He's not a vampire, and she's not a werewolf, so I've got that going for me -- but I'm conforming to genre, at least to some extent.  Until the moment Mr. Horsehung arrived in the story, I was in pretty good shape.  My heroine isn't a prude; she enjoys a good, raunchy duck just as much as the next Iphone user.  She's also not a nymphomaniac out there conquering the men by parting her wayward knees at the drop of a trouser.  She considers her options, weighs outcomes, listens to head, heart, and hormones like we all do.  But now that "the guy" has appeared, it's very hard to retain those more subtle aspects of character -- because the whole point is, she's totes into him.  Attraction is like that.  Caution is defenestrated.

The enormous weight of assumptions that surround the genre are pushing her in those binary directions, even if it's not on the page.  Henceforth, I have to be extra-scrupulous about expressing this stuff.  She really, really wants to get it on with this dude, and he's ready to go.  In real life, we understand there are a million little calculations that go into such liaisons: whether we have work the following day, the contraception situation, how drunk we are, and so on.  But laying it all out (so to speak) would stop the story in its tracks, especially when the most interesting thing isn't the fucking (I'm not writing this on an Iphone) but rather the reaction of the tiny militant lesbian fairy, who is in love with the protagonist.


I don't have a particular conclusion to offer.  It's just interesting to note how some pretty offensive gender stereotypes are so deeply rooted in our storytelling tradition that it's difficult to avoid them even if that's the whole point -- and they can't be subverted, because the act of subversion requires the stereotypes be firmly established before they can be upended.  Once they're established, the subversion comes off as poorly-conceived posturing.

Or maybe that's just me.  I'll try to write harder, in future.  Women deserve the effort, even fictional ones.





Note: the above outburst evolved from a comment I posted on another blog; I haven't linked to that here because the context isn't particularly germane.

Word

Every draft is a sacrificial offering to the story; the final draft is the one of which there's nothing left to sacrifice.

Take This Tip To Your GRAVE

I've probably said this before, but you're not reading that far back, and neither am I.  So, to reiterate:

DO NOT end your day's work at a convenient stopping point.  Stop right in the middle of a sentence.  Stop halfway through a line of dialogue or three letters into a ten-letter word.  But don't finish up writing somewhere that looks finished.

Why not?

Because when you sit down to write again, the muse is out of the room getting a sandwich, your head is full of other things -- bills, kids, chores, that fling you had with the FedEx man -- and if you left things at a good ending-point, it means you have to start all over again, as if the piece you're working on was an entirely new one.

If you sit down, on the other hand (here we see punctuation at work: I could have written "if you sit down on the other hand" without the comma and the whole sentence would appear to be advice on one-handed writing) and look at the last few lines you wrote during the previous session, and it ends like this: "Mrs. Thudwidge and old Vicar Pimpleshave walked into the garden, each carrying one end of the" ...and you know they're carrying a billiard table in the scene, you commence your new writing session by simply adding "billiard table."  And just like that, you're off to the races.

I stop writing mid-sentence pretty much every time I break from the work, which I do at regular intervals because of the relatively long sessions of writing I prefer when in the thick of a project.  Yesterday, for example, I churned out around 5,000 words; if I'd written all that straight through, a trip to the emergency room would have been required, because I'd have bedsores on my ass.

But I got up to make tea innumerable times, ran a couple of errands, walked the dogs, ate meals, waxed the electric goose python, practiced the banjolele, and so forth.  And on each occasion, I just stopped at a random point, as if an invisible test-monitor in high school had suddenly announced "pencils down, hand in your results."  Sometimes it was at the end of a sentence with an obvious phrase to follow; sometimes it was in the middle of a thought.  I never stopped where I couldn't easily see what came next, of course.  Otherwise it's just like starting cold.

Think of it this way: writing is like bicycling.  You wouldn't stop your bicycle on a blind curve halfway up a steep hill, right?  So don't stop your writing there, either.  Find somewhere flat, with a good view ahead, and then dismount.  You'll thank yourself when it's time to get back on and complete the next leg of the journey.

Now excuse me, I have to get back to

A Brief Note For The New Year

A popular piece of advice for writers is "character is action."  Like most writing advice, it's been carefully honed so it's not useful to anybody that hasn't already figured it out on their own.  So I'll give you a slightly expanded version here... but not too much, leaving you to struggle because I'm cruel that way.

Character is action upon motive.

There you go.  The three ingredients of fiction: who, what, and why.  For narrative purposes, once you have the what and the why, you can generally figure out the who.  That's character.

Here's to a novel or two completed in 2011; here's to getting published, attracting readers, and making up stories.  May we all get on.