He wrote:

Alternative fiction is not comfortable, not expected. There are heroes, yes, but the world they bring us stinks of change and betrays all the faith that we once had in the sky above our heads and the ground below our feet.

This is what I call realistic fiction; the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world.”

I’m not sure that all speculative fiction does that. Some of it is backward looking — nostalgic, a reminder of virtues that if not widely held were more widely valid in the past: things like honor and courage. But just because that type of fiction exists, doesn’t mean that Mosley is wrong: the core of both science fiction and fantasy are engaging in speculation (thus the term speculative fiction [a term that is not loved by all, but one that I find useful]) and one can’t do so, I don’t think, without engaging with where are, where we have been and where we are going as a society. And, of course, literary fiction can be nostalgic as well.

And I think what Mosley is saying is that to engage in the fantastical, the speculative is to remind us that we can imagine other lives, other worlds, other timelines, other technologies than these. If literary realism gives us a snapshot of time, attempting in so doing to provide some sort of psychological portrait of a segment of society, speculative fiction gives us moving pictures. A dynamic view. Motion. Change (a world that stinks of change, according to Mosley).

I posted about this issue last year when Lev Grossman defended genre in the Wall St. Journal. What I like about Mosley’s post is that he doesn’t engage in any of the three weak defenses that we often see. He also speaks not just of achievements but also potential. I think this is also good. No literature ever fully arrives — that’s why we keep writing and reading.

In that previous post, I made the point that genre fiction should be defended “by showing what you can do that other genres can’t.”

I’d like to amend that statement:

I think that the onus here is on literary realism (and I do like how Mosley twists that term and claims the terms realistic fiction and alternative fiction for genre fiction) to prove what it does that other genres of fiction can’t. That is, the default position shouldn’t be literary realism, which is, after all, just a blip on the timeline of storytelling. It also can’t be an argument of degree (it does this,  but better) because the argument that genre fiction ignores poetic prose or characterization or that it doesn’t experiment with structure or style or point of view is no longer true. In other words, I think we should treat genre fiction like everything that happened in the field of literature (the turn towards theory, the debates over canon, the hi-lowbrow collision) actually happened. And then we woke up from that fever dream and realized, hey, we still have all these novels and people reading them and maybe the genre lines don’t matter as much as the fact that fiction is being written and published and read.

Fassler pulls out a great quote from Stephen King:

The short story and novel are like two respected nations sharing a vast, ill-defined, and sordid border region. “At some point, the writer wakes up with alarm and realizes that he’s come or is coming to a really terrible place,” King intones, “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic called the ‘novella.’”

I, as a reader, love the novella/novellette form. That’s due in no small part to the fact that my focus for my English lit degree was the period 1860-1930, which was the heyday of the form. It’s also because I studied German literature (with, again, a focus on the late 19th century), which produced quite a few great novellas.

It also would seem to be my natural form. I seem to be best at either less than 2k or 8-15k word stories. Always too slight, I am.

But above all, what I want to point out here is that science fiction and fantasy embraced the novella and kept the form alive when literary fiction all but abandoned it. And it’s to been to the benefit of the field — some of the best works of speculative fiction over the past five decades have been novellas or novellettes: “Sandkings” by George R.R. Martin, K.J. Parker’s  ”Blue” and “Gold,”The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang, “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey,  ”The Empire of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick etc.

It’s tempting to think of voice simply as stylistics: the choices made in relation to syntax, word choice, structure, point of view, etc. Stylistic elements are important, but I think it’s more than that. It’s reflected in not only how we craft our narratives, but also in what narratives we choose to tackle and the point of view we bring as we explore them (that’s the author’s worldview as point of view not narrative viewpoint, although that has an impact as well). In that sense, I think voice is heavily influenced by what we’ve read over our lifetime. Non-textual experience, both artistic and daily life, also has an effect. Stephen King is an interesting (and tragic, in my opinion) example of this (I’m thinking in particular of the turn his Dark Tower series makes partway through Wolves of the Calla).

I wonder too if how our audience experiences our authorial voice is affected by how they perceive us as authors. For example, will a story dripping with irony be read as meaner or more tongue-in-cheek depending on how the reader perceives the intentions and beliefs of the author? Will overblown prose seem more purple or less purple depending on what the author’s skills and personality are thought to be?

Steven Brust makes for a productive study of authorial voice. Compare the books in the Vlad Taltos series to those in the Khaavren Romances. The first time I read one of the Khaavren Romance titles I was impressed by how Brust was able to deploy a very different style. And yet, for all the difference, for all that it shows amazing range, the core voice seems to be the same: cool, intrigued/intriguing, reluctant heroism that always comes at a cost.

The Vlad Taltos books show a more subtle, but just as fascinating difference in voice. The earlier novels don’t fully interrogate the “kick-ass assassin/organized crime boss” attitude; the later titles back off on that, and Brust explores the true costs of getting involved with (and even more importantly out of) organized crime. And that’s not just for reasons of character development (although that’s a big part of it). It seems to me that the author himself has changed during the course of writing the books and has focused on different concerns, set different tasks for himself. Vlad becomes less of a cool rebel and more of a tragic, complex hero. Not an anti-hero or a hero-hero — just a hero.

Robin Hobb is another good example of how voice is influenced by authorial interests. Her stylistics tend to be fairly standard. A bit more lyrical than other speculative fiction others but not majorly poetic. However, her keen interest in relationships (of all types: dragons and humans, peers/friends, romantic, captain and crew, etc.) is a key feature of the Farseer, Liveships Traders and Tawny Man trilogies (as well as the Rain Wilds Chronicles offshoots). This affects the voice of the novels because much of the dialogue that occurs centers around relationships (as does much of the thoughts we access when she dives into the minds of the POV characters). Narrative progression, then, isn’t just the action, but also the emotional journeys the characters make. Her voice, I think, very much reflects this interest in exploring relationships, especially unusual or taboo ones.

This suggests to me that voice is a byproduct of the complete author package. That is: the drive to reflect on aspects of the human experience; an abiding love and engagement with fiction as way of exploring those aspects; and the craft to transmute such explorations into a coherent, compelling narrative that uses a particular and appropriate prose style.

I can produce 1,000 words in about 3 hours, and I bet you can too. Ideally, I split those in to either 2 or 3 writing sessions per week of 45-90 minutes each. That’s doable. I know very few people who couldn’t find 3 hours per week, even if they had to do it in 30 minute increments.

And that’s being conservative. I often can hit 1,000 words in 90 minutes. You might even be faster — or get faster once you get some practice in or select the right project. So least optimistic scenario: during the course of a year, you end up with 50k words and thus are 40-60% of the way done with a novel or have produced 5-15 short stories/novellas. If you can write faster than that, then you have an entire novel (in most genres).

Now, full-time working authors usually need to produce more than one novel a year. But not us. What we need to do is just get some stories told so that we have something to submit, and, more importantly, so we get better as writers. All those other worries are secondary. For now, there’s only this:

Make a reasonable monthly writing goal. The key word here is reasonable. Make it a specific word count. Do what needs to be done to free up just a few hours each week. Outline a project (make it as loose and vague or as specific as you need it to be). Hit that word count. Repeat.

Editors are evil. They’re monsters: vampires who suck the life out of your manuscripts; werewolves who tear your stories to shreds; zombies with vacant stares who repeat the same vacant phrases (Show don’t tell!) while at the same time sucking out your brains. No, scratch all that — editors are mad scientists. They kill your story, cut up your corpse, sew on various mismatched limbs from who knows where (or actually make you sew them on) and then reanimate it with their own evil green energy. No, actually editors are mummies, desiccated corpses wrapped in strips of first and second and third drafts who bar the way to the treasure, which gleams just beyond the pyramid door. And if you try to get past them, they will clutch you in their fetid embrace and curse you and confuse you and turn your journey of self-archeology, your textual discoveries, your personal excavations into a scene of horror and self doubt.

Or to state it more succinctly: Editors are evil, and they have claws.

I should know — I’m one of them. But I’m also writer. I know the pain of the editor’s claws.

The first news release I wrote as young PR pro came back to me with so many red marks it looked like a typographical massacre. And that was just a news release — not a piece of fiction that I was personally invested in. I can still conjure up the raw feelings of some of the feedback I received from the Irreantum editors on “Speculations: Trees.” And those were minor things. And, of course, looking back both of those editors were right.

Editors, or at least good editors, are almost always right. Knowing that, though, still doesn’t always make things easy on the author.

In the writer’s eyes, by the time a story reaches an editor is a finished thing — a corpus, a text, a complete product, a story that has been told. Mentally, that separation has to exist. The author has to feel like the work is done in order to cut it off from the process that has gone into it and send it on its way. At some point the thing has to be done.

For many writers, cutting the story loose is a painful process, but they do it, they create that separation, and then with trembling arms they offer the creation up to the editor who callously rejects it (despair!) or accepts it (joy!). But then, once the joy of the acceptance quickly fades (as it always does), hands it back to you all clawed up and expects you to fix the poor thing up again.

An author often sees those claw marks, those tears in the text as wounds. It’s not unusual for one’s initial reaction upon receiving an edited manuscript back to think: What happened? It looks like it’s been mauled. This is especially true when it comes to marks that are deeper than the basic plastic surgery one expects (e.g. the proofreading, the corrections for style and punctuation) — those marks that we call, cruelly, “developmental edits” (um what? it wasn’t already developed?).

But the editor doesn’t see those tears as wounds. They are gaps to be filled. They are slashes at the pupae or the husk or the shell that help the text slough off its old self and be born as its more beautiful self. They are necessary. Which doesn’t mean that they are always easy to inflict, because editors — good editors — are sometimes like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: at war with themselves. Good editors have to constantly resist the urge to rewrite and instead find ways to prod the author to find the fixes for him or herself.

Although I had edited many works (both fiction and nonfiction) prior to Monsters & Mormons, I had never edited so much fiction in so little time. And sometimes I found myself being evil — keenly aware of the pain I was inflicting, but doing it anyway.

Bad editors aren’t evil. They are clumsy. Or blind. Or tone deaf. Or arrogant. They try to refashion the story in their own image. Or, even worse, they are just clueless. They don’t see what’s wrong with the text or they misdiagnose it.

But good editors (and I hope that I am one) are evil. They are unsparing with their pen, not afraid to wound, and, if needed, wound deeply. Good editors have claws. I suppose I could go for a surgical metaphor here, but that’s not quite right — good editors aren’t quite so clinical and sterile. They rip and bleed and as they do so, they also feel the wounds. They feel the wounds because they are aware of what they are asking. They ask anyway because they can see the text in ways that the authors can’t. Whether it’s for reasons of audience or coherence or aesthetics or genre or clarity or characterization or continuity, good editors capture the author’s vision for the story and then force him or her to stretch it and grow it.

When the process works, the end result is satisfactory. At which point the editor, job done, retracts his claws, steps back into his cave and lets the author parade the finished, fully healed, beautiful thing — the story — out into the streaming, warm light of day.

Captain Arkady was a truthful man in his relation with himself. He was, in fact, incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he was going to return from his current mission. He could not at this date delude himself, that he, a washed-up former military man turned mercenary commander stuck on a tub of a ship with a crew of misfits and castoffs was not on anything less than a suicide mission. All he repented of was the fact that he had not succeeded better in negotiating hazard pay in the slim chance there were any survivors. Death benefits would have been a good idea too. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his XO, his crew and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal the nature of this mission from his XO if he had anticipated that the knowledge of it would have had such an effect on him. He had never clearly thought out the subject, but he had vaguely conceived that his XO must long ago have suspected what the true mission orders were. He had even supposed that he, a worn-out man no longer young nor spry, and in no way remarkable or interesting, merely a good second in command, ought from a sense of fairness to take a pragmatic view of the situation. It had turned out quite the other way.

Here are the major potential ending points that I see:

Genre/Literary: it ends when Quentin is granted his third wish from the Questing Stag, and it ends right as he fades to go home or appears on the street in Brooklyn. This is the not-deal-fully-with-the-consequences ending. It’s a perfectly valid one. The reader is left with bittersweetness, the losses experienced in Fillory still somewhat fresh in mind. It’s also the most natural place to stop and set up a sequel. And I think it could be viewed as either a literary or a genre ending. Certainly the fade to black, the leaving to go home is an ending that has been used in many literary and genre novels.

Literary: it ends when Quentin uses the iron key and returns to Brakebills. We are given to understand that this is a retreat from engagement with the world. It is a failure to reach maturity. It is a giving in to defeat.

Genre: it ends when Quentin uses the iron key and returns to Brakebills, but there is an epilogue where it shows that he ends up staying on there as a faculty member, inspiring future generations of magicians, but also having about him the whiff of tragedy and failure.

Literary: it ends with Quentin giving up practicing magic and settling into a mundane existence. That mundane existence is portrayed as a grinding never-quite-reached atonement for his naive devotion to Fillory and the losses of life and innocence that occurred as a result of that longing.

Genre: it ends with Quentin giving up practicing magic and settling into a mundane existence, but there is a wistfulness and a hint of magic and the slightest hope that things go better for him in the future.

Literary: it ends with Quentin either settling into an uneasy relationship with Emily or realizing that he can’t enter into a relationship with her. Or he sleeps with her once, and it ends with his realization that the only thing they have in common is their trauma.

Genre: it ends with Quentin realizing he can’t have a relationship with Emily and that what he really wants to do is to go back to Fillory and rule as a king with his original love Julia by his side as queen. This is (more or less) how it actually ends. Now this isn’t a pure genre ending because we’re still living with the point the Alice makes–that Quentin will never be happy. There’s nothing to contradict it.

One of the reasons I went through this excercise is that it does seem to me that the ending is more genre than literary. And I don’t think I was expecting that. I suppose that once you peel back the sort of kick-ass of image of Quentin’s friends blowing out the window of his office and floating there in the air with Julia looking hot and in full hedge witch mode, there is some complexity there because of the ground that’s already been covered. We as readers may see behind the seeming awesomeness and realize that this is a sad decision to make. On the other hand, Quentin is given a way out. And he takes it. And it happens in kind of a bad ass way. In the movie version, this would be a total scene of triumph — it’s like the end of The Matrix or Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s like, dude, it’s time to ride. Oh, and here’s the hot chick you love.

Meanwhile, of course, Alice — the most talented of them all — is dead. But that happened several chapters ago.

So I’m not sure I’m really satisfied with the ending. It reinforces too much the emo vibe of the book. I think it probably should have ended earlier and the scene of Quentin leaving his office should have kicked off the next book.

On the other hand, I’m also pleased that Lev Grossman goes for more of a genre ending than a literary one.

And I’m sure everything all goes to hell in the sequel.

Rigorously question your story premise. Before you get started on your next project ask whether this one is strong enough. Many books fail for lack of a memorable premise. Is your premise clear to you? Is it too complicated? Questions like these are legitimate and crucial.

I actually grabbed the last four sentences of the paragraph and pasted them at the top of my FICTION-Ideas text file. I have the sense that this is important advice for me. But I must admit that I’m also a bit unsure about what it means. How do I know if a premise is clear to me? What are the signs of that? And especially: how do I know if it’s too complicated? How does that complicated-ness manifest itself?

And what about the reverse? How do you know if a premise is too thin?

By my reckoning there are the following contexts:

1. What various characters represent and enact in the text
2. What the narrator and/or implied author signals in the text in relation to those characters
3. What the author says about the text and/or other works of fantasy
4. The various critical and readerly receptions to the work itself
5. The history and context of fantasy novels
6. The history and context of theorizing about fantasy
7. The history and context of speculative fiction novels and theorizing about speculative fiction
8. The same as #7 but in relation to genre fiction
9. The same as  #8 but in relation to all fiction
10. The same as #9 but in relation to all forms of narrative art (including film)
11. The same as #10 but in relation to all forms of discourse and semiotics
12. The socio-cultural and socio-political spheres the text, the author and its reception are embedded in (and those operating both in time and space [history and geography])

I could probably tease out quite a few more, but those are the key ones that I can think of right now.

What this all means is that a) people who make comments about texts and authors should signal as well as they can what contexts they are specifically dealing with and what contexts inform their analysis and b) people who engage with what others have written/said about texts and authors should pick up on those signals and productively engage with them.

Now, of course, that’s not going to happen. And it’s particularly problematic, but also apt when it comes to secondary world fantasy for a few reasons:

1. Because, as a genre, it so influenced by one particular work — The Lord of the Rings — that has embedded in it all sorts of assumptions about race, gender, geography, etc. No other genre has quite the UR-text that secondary world fantasy does.
2. Because fantasy is neither mimesis (realism) nor extrapolation (science fiction), the excuse of “I’m just reflecting certain societal attitudes” counts for less because secondary worlds are, technically, malleable to a rather high degree. The world that is constructed comes directly out of the author’s choices about what type of world to construct. Yes, the same is true of other genres, but not to the same extent.
3. Because secondary world fantasy happens in the past. Not our literal past, of course. That’s the whole point of secondary worlds. But rather the materials that are broken down and used to construct the secondary world come out of our past, which invariably means that any work that reflects attitudes that are not contemporary. Things, of course, get blurry with urban fantasy and science fiction fantasy, but  secondary world fantasy is dominated by pre-silicon age (and usually pre-industrial) settings.

Laying it all out like that make it seem like writing about any fantasy novel would be impossible and exhausting. I’m not saying that every review, every piece of criticism needs to account for absolutely everything. But I do think it’s good to be aware of all of the above when entering the fray.

January: 4,044 words; 11 ideas
February: 4,330 words; 9 ideas
March: 7,216 words; 10 ideas

Not too shabby. I’ve also learned some things about myself as a writer and my own writing process. Now, I’m not exactly a rookie: prior to all this I had completed 15 stories plus some humor pieces, a few of which have been published, and plotted out or have partial first drafts on another five or six stories. But it’s always happened in fits and starts. I haven’t been intentional about it. And the major thing that I’ve learned in the past three months is that being intentional about it is everything. I’ve also learned some other things:

Writing Frequency

You’ll hear people say you have to write every day. My friend Joe says you should have one writing session every two days. Neither of those frequencies works for me right now. I’ve managed to average twice a week and that works for me. I’ve also had two stretches (once in February when I got sick; and once in March when I got busy) where I went more than a week. I find that if I go more than three days without a solid 30 minutes to write, I do start to get antsy.

That’s good. But I also am finding that as long as I’m within reach of my goal, I can turn my attention to other things if I need to and not feel guilty or angry. This is important: I do have a lot of other commitments in my life. And it’s is why I established such a modest words-per-month goal, and why, even though I blew way past my goal in March, I’m leaving it at 4,000 words. This will be especially important since I’m going to be doing a lot more rewriting, copyediting and formatting in the months ahead. Then again, I’ve also revised two stories for publication and done some semi-substantial worldbuilding during these past three months (along with continuing to keep up with my blogging*) so I’m fairly confident that I can produce new fiction and still fit all that other stuff in.

Rough Rough Drafts

Being able to come to grips with the notion of rough rough drafts was crucial for me. It runs counter to my instincts (I’m an editor and critic, after all). And it’s something I still have to fight with at points. But unlike in years past where I would hit a rough patch and so drop the story for weeks or months or years, I now dig deep and fight through it. My mantra has become: I can fix that in post. Post = postproduction. it’s a film term, and I like it better than thinking “this is just a rough draft; don’t worry about it.” Because I am going to worry about it. But I can postpone that worry because I have the confidence that I can fix it in post. Once I have a completed first draft to work with, I’m in my comfort zone — it’s getting to that point that has been the problem in the past.

Prewriting

Prewriting saves time. Whether it’s a very short, rough outline, or just taking a minute or two near the end of a writing session to jot out some notes of what comes next — or capturing those if they occur to me during the course of writing and having the confidence to just put it in notes rather than trying to write it all out — prewriting makes all the difference in me being able to dive back into the story the next time I can carve out 30-90 minutes for a writing session and being able to kick out a steady stream of words.

In addition, I’d say that the idea generation goal has been a rousing success. Some of the ideas are barely anything, and some are lame. But already, I’ve mashed two different ideas together for a short short story that I completed the first draft of last month. And I think that the overall quality/usability of my ideas is getting better as the weeks go on. Having a storehouse of ideas also impacts my prewriting in that I’m a) keen on getting drafts done so I can move on to the next cool idea and b) when I do finish a first draft, I’m not then giving myself a break to think up new ideas — there’s no excuse to get writing because there are plenty of ideas to start playing around with.

Writing Environment

I have generally not needed a specific writing environment. That has begun to change as I’ve done more consistent writing. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing. At the moment, when it comes time to write I need my laptop at the kitchen table with my headphones in and iTunes playing music. The music helps me focus. The table is at a nice height for the keyboard. The chair is comfortable, but not too comfortable. I’m not going to argue with the results, but I do worry a bit about becoming too accustomed to one particular writing environment.

Summing Up

This all seems to be working. Of course, the starting is always the easy part. This next quarter is going to be the real test since I’m going to need to keep my goals while at the same time revising and submitting some of the work I’ve produced this quarter. But the bottom line is this: I have written 15,590 words of new fiction, which I’m pretty sure makes 2012 already the most productive fiction writing year of my life. Onward!

* In fact, between my two blogs, I wrote 27 posts. This has got to have been the most non-work/school writing I’ve ever done in my life.