Montages and Leveling Up

I’ve come to dislike the montage, despite its clear utility in modern storytelling, especially in visual forms like television and movies. I mean, I get it. As a viewer it’s not exciting to watch the mind-numbing repetition of martial arts training or the boring minutiae of repairing the space ship while adrift in alien space or documenting the research that goes into finding the likeliest place to start looking for the lost city where the artifact that will save (or destroy) the world has lain hidden for millennia, only to be discovered now by the worst possible antagonist. It’s a great big derailment, putting the story on hold while a character or team get ready for a mission or a boss fight or final arguments before the jury. Skip the boring parts is Storytelling 101, right? Get on with the plot.

The problem with the focus on plot is that it distracts you from the narrative, which Chip Delany taught me is a different beast altogether, and far more significant for a storyteller (and, I would add, a person; more on that below). The plot is a sequence of connected events, and indeed affects the narrative. But the narrative is what drives the plot, the why that produces the what. As heroines and heroes of our own personal stories (I really do believe human consciousness is best understood in narrative terms), what connects us to stories emotionally is the narrative. If we don’t care about characters or what’s at stake then what can a story really tell us? It’s why so many modern science fiction movies fail to stick. So much more thought and effort goes into the eye candy aspect than goes into creating multidimensional characters or situations that you can guess each character’s fate from their first onscreen appearance nine times out of ten.

From a plot perspective, the hero’s confrontation with the big bad is the culmination of the movie. But the story, properly understood, is not the fight scene and who wins, but what the hero undergoes in becoming the hero, how she develops and changes and reconciles inner conflicts in order to risk all for some greater good. In any good story, she experiences setbacks, and must level up in some significant way (usually leveling up as a person as a byproduct of the requisite dedication). Without this period of meditation, preparation, hard work, and evolution, the hero doesn’t qualify for the final showdown.

Without character development, basically, it’s not much of a story. Continue reading “Montages and Leveling Up” →

Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women

I’ve been meaning for a good long while to set aside a period to read only women authors. It’s not that they’re unrepresented on my shelves or in my to-read pile. But if I’m honest, I’ve read way more books by men than by women. Having realized the disparity, I felt a certain compulsion to address it. But I put it off for a long time, for whatever reason I could think of when the disparity re-intruded on my consciousness. Again, if I’m honest, my resistance was rooted in discomfort, as much as anything at the realization that my personal pre-sets, left unchecked, had brought about the disparity in the first place. If I did something about it, well, that meant it was a real thing, a disparity between my aspirational and actually-lived selves.

All the more reason to do something about it, and so a few months back, I made a conscious decision to read mostly books by women for a while. And I am surely glad that I did. Not for some consciousness-raising epiphany about men and women and society and literature (though there surely was that), but because I’ve found a rich vein of work that tickles a personal and particular sweet spot that I had been previously unaware existed, and that I had fervently wished was out there. Turns out my pre-sets had just prevented me from seeing it (thanks, patriarchy).

See, I’m a bit of a rare bird in reader culture, or so it seems to me. I love and identify with both speculative fiction in most of its forms and with more highfalutin quote-unquote literary fiction, with all its inquiries into history, psychology, language, and well, you name it. I came up reading both, love both, and wish they got along better in public. As a writer I try and draw from both sources. As a reader I crave works that weave the two together. Despite the continued snootiness of the literary set and the flagellations of spec fic’s misogynist rump, the overlap between the two is growing, and the correlation with the increasing prevalence of women writing speculative fiction leaves little doubt the phenomena are connected.

There’s so much great work being done right now. It’s a really exciting time for a reader like myself.

In celebration of that, and in honor of Lightspeed Magazine’s Women Destroy Science Fiction! issue, here are five great speculative fiction books by women that I’ve read recently, and why I think they are awesome and you should read them, too, whatever kind of books you like to read. Continue reading “Five Great Speculative Fiction Novels by Women” →

How’s the Writing Going?

I get this question a lot, and it’s a hard one to answer. Usually I go with something innocuous, like “It’s going alright” or “It’s kicking my arse” or “I hate it with the passion of a million white-hot suns.” Sometimes, if circumstance permits, I might go into a bit more detail, but I have to stop myself from opening the can up too wide, because I could literally talk for hours and most people don’t have time to hear, much less digest, the full report. I’ll give you an example.

There’s a story I wrote last summer, about woodworking and a zombie apocalypse, among other things. Call it Story X. I worked on it for a few months, did some research, got it banged into what I thought was a pretty good shape, and went ahead and submitted it a couple of times, receiving (relatively) quick rejections. I knew the beginning, vivid and prettily-worded though it was, wasn’t accomplishing enough, so I went over it again, basically rewriting what I’d written before in a way I hoped would be more compelling. As I learned when I submitted it to my writers’ group (which is what I should have done in the first place), I was not particularly successful, and every one of my estimable colleagues saw through my prosaic hand-waving and called me out on it (for which I thank them). At the time I’d started in on a novel, so I set Story X aside and tried not to think much about it. A month or two later I took a hiatus from writing altogether, and have been slowly easing myself back into it for the last month or so. Since I’m not quite ready to get back into novel mode I decided to bang my head against Story X for awhile and see which cracked first.

So far I’m slightly ahead.

Continue reading “How’s the Writing Going?” →

Works of Art Are Never Finished…

Only abandoned.

Here’s me, about nine months ago, talking about a work-in-progress called Cowboys and Indians.

I think it needs one more going over, and maybe the final section needs a little tweaking, but I think this one is almost ready to go out into the world, and I’m really happy about that.

It may not surprise you to know that I turned out to be wrong, and that Cowboys and Indians has been significantly revised at least twice in the intervening months. Continue reading “Works of Art Are Never Finished…” →

What I Like is Better Than What You Like, or It’s Not Genre if Literary Writers Do It

Literature is like pornography: no one can tell you what it is, but they know it when they see it. Such is the underlying assumption behind this cry for help from Arthur Krystal in the New Yorker, which allows him, among many other logically-suspect things, to claim unto literature’s greedy penumbra several works which are clearly speculative (that is, genre) fiction. It allows him to say that works like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are simply a literary sensibility working with genre, and not in it, as if some aesthetic prophylaxis were involved, allowing said literary giant to wade into the post-apocalyptic pool and take a swim without getting any of it in his hair.

What is the nature of the distinction? I’ll let Krystal answer for himself. Continue reading “What I Like is Better Than What You Like, or It’s Not Genre if Literary Writers Do It” →