One of the common complaints about much of the fantasy genre is that modern writers are so used to instantaneous worldwide communications, rich and deep libraries and knowledge, and other common physical and intellectual extensions of their selfhood that they have a hard time really grasping the vast well of ignorance about the world through which most of their characters move. In the real world, even the best-informed prince received knowledge that was months out of date, and reactions had to be gauged based upon a very real understanding of the limitations of that knowledge. Better writers try to write with this in mind, and I’ve seen Gene Wolfe and Joe Abercrombie pull this off admirably.
I’ve been reading Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, a history of what life was like after dark, and (as it’s been resting on top of my copy of Sails and Spells, an anthology of magical fantasy on the high seas) I find myself realizing just how poorly even the best writers deal with nighttime.
Ekirch’s book makes it clear that nighttime, at least on the European continent between Rome and the advent of the light bulb, was a damn scary place. Beer was plentiful- even the kids drank it- and the night was just mindbogglingly dark. None of the safety implementations we’re comfortable with today existed. Adults and children who wandered out after dark frequently died of drowning and falling at a rate that would be shocking today. Fire was a constant terror, especially as urbanization butted one house up against its neighbors, such that “if one house caught fire, the whole town is obliged to burn down.” Crime was also prevalent it a way we cannot even imagine, so much so that London courts accepted “sleeps in the daytime” as cause to suspect one was a burglar or other “nightwalker.”
In Ekrich’s telling, the Church used the fear of fire as a way of holding off the spread of artificial illumination (falling asleep with a candle lit was a frequent cause of whole city blocks going up in flames), and held that the night was the time when one’s soul was in peril, one should stay indoors, and sleep or pray. Towns would not just close their gates but drag large logs into throughfares to prevent men and horses from moving about the city willfully at night.
I’m not sure if it’s personal artificial illumination, or light pollution in general, but it seems to me that most fantasy writers treat night as if it were daytime, only darker, and coincidentally a time for eating and sleeping. Nighttime only becomes siginificantly different from daytime when it’s convenient. (I’m looking at you, Jacqueline Carey.)
If part of the magic of speculative writing is to create a sense of a genuinely different place and time, writers could do better to handle the very real terror, mystery, and intrigue of the night itself.
Ekrich makes a strong case that, in pre-modern times, a very different and persistent culture emerged after dark, one with its own sensibilities that were rarely invoked in daylight. Are there writers who you think handled this well?
6
Dec
2008
Petri Dish, Fixed
6
Dec
2008
Several people pointed out to me that the most recent story, Petri Dish, seemed to be cut short, and so it was. By one word, “drink,” which I have added, along with the correct punctuation.
I knew there was a reason I kept the actual stories in plain text. Makes fixing these kinds of mistakes so much easier.
I was reading Karin Huxman’s romance novel, Sea Change (New Concepts Publishing, 2005), and I have found much to mock.
The book is set in the era of Melville, of whaling and whale ships. We have our hero, Jonah, a merchant marine captain famous among captains for his sea knowledge and his never having lost a crewman. We have our heroine, Marianne, a recently widowed sea captain’s wife who can’t quite bring herself to mourn the end of her functional but loveless marriage.
Huxman starts off with a pair of interesting foreshadowings. The first is when Jonah touches shore on Cape Cod:
Then he began to move and a path opened before him. He heard snatches of whispered conversations eddy in his wake. He’d always heard them.
“Jonah, bad luck name for a sailor, mate….”
“Never lost a ship or cargo to storm, heard tell….”“Swims like a fish….”
Jonah grimaced at that one. The truest of the lot, yet no man had ever seen him swim. If he had, Jonah would have lost his foothold in this world.
My first reaction when reading that, and probably not what the author intended, is, “Oh, interesting. A ship’s captain who can’t swim.”
Of Marianne, we learn of her childhood:
Her home had been in the hills of Jamaica, the ocean visible but distant. It had called to her as a child. She’d begged to be allowed to visit it. Her papa, who shared her sea-green eyes, finally allowed a visit. Her nanny had strict orders to keep Marianne dry, but the child had been too fascinated to heed the woman’s calls. She’d plunged into the waves wide eyed. She swam as if made for the water, and when they finally were able to pull her out, she remembered crying for hours.
That had been her one and only trip to the beach as a child.
So now the set-up seems obvious, if a bit of role-reversed. Jonah is a hard-charging sea captain who can’t swim, and Marianne is a lonely woman who’s been denied her love of the sea by social mores. This is a pretty formulaic setup and every romance writer knows what to do next: Let’s put these two in a small space together and see what happens.
What happens is fail.
First, an aside: show, don’t tell. Even worse, don’t show, then tell. Don’t do this:
Marianne had never been one to sit around idle. Her books did not intrigue her as they generally did. Her knitting and crocheting were nothing more than games to keep her hands busy. In short, she was lonely and bored, and didn’t much like herself for either feeling.
“In short, reader, I think you’re too much of an idiot, and I’m too lazy a writer, to type out a few paragraphs showing Marianne’s frustration with her idleness and isolation, so I’ll just tatter off a sentence or two and then tell you the rest.”
Back to the fail. It’s pretty simple to illustrate. After a paragraph or two in which Jonah contemplates the dolphins riding in the ship’s wake, Huxman drops this anvil on us:
He stared out the portholes and considered. His time in the world of men was almost over. He must return home before the moon was full again, or never return at all. His father, the king, was anxious for Jonah to marry and fulfill his duties to the throne. Though the Mer people were long-lived as compared to human lifetimes, they did have finite lives. Dynasties depended upon princes like Jonah to propagate and secure the throne.
Oh, good grief: Jonah’s the Prince of the Merpeople!
Note: I don’t think that’s a bad schtick. Forbidden romances with supernatural creatures is a perfectly fine set-up for formula romance.
What’s wrong with this paragraph is how Huxman info-dumps this overwhelmingly major factoid right in the middle. She blows the mystery, the suspense, and just about everything interesting about Jonah in that weak mid-paragraph sentence starting, “The Mer people…”, as if she were tentative about introducing this idea that Jonah was from Beneath The Sea to the reader.
There were so many other ways to go about this. She could have done it in chapter two, Jonah’s first chapter, and made the tension about how Jonah goes about reconciling his more-than-human conflicts; she could have done it in chapter five, when the ship is wrecked and the now much fishier Jonah has to rescue her, and the tension becomes how Marianne deals with this revelation just when she was starting to feel feminine again, especially toward him.
Huxman gives us only one major tension in the first half of the book: will they or won’t they? Well of course they will: it’s a goddamned romance novel. It’s the rest of the revelations about character that make a romance novel interesting, and Huxman just drives past one opportunity after another, missing each one and moving on, hoping you won’t notice before she gets to the boink.
24
Oct
2008
Dear Muse….
24
Oct
2008
Dear Muse:
Yes, I understand that the change we made to chapter 2 of A Pleasing Shape complety changes the tenor of the story and that heavy lifting is required. On the other hand, that is no reason to make the current ending so boring. Even if it’s not the ending we’re going to use, it’s still supposed to be competent. I know you feel it would be a waste to keep working after 23,000 words, but still, you could at least try to give me an ending with all three of them content with each other.
On the other hand, thank you so much for the new Yowler story Silent Night With Daggered Books. I’m sure we’ll be able to work it into the schedule somewhere.
I’m sorry, but I felt it necessary to throw away Soul Searcher. The original is lost on an Amiga floppy somewhere, and I was never going to be able to re-write in and recapture that.
And I agree that Wishing Well: Epilogue is nicely finished.
p.s. Your suggestion for Under the Big Gun is interesting, but getting into Leysa’s head right now would be particularly difficult. Didn’t you say you wanted to look at what it would take to make Honest Impulses a retailable novel?
16
Oct
2008
First draft progress: A Pleasing Shape
16
Oct
2008
I passed the 20,000 word mark this morning, meaning that I’ve managed to write about a half-Lake on the weekdays (less on weekends) (A “Lake” is 2500 words per day. Jay Lake, whose work I admire greatly, manages that when he’s in novel writing mode.). I’m noodling (20,000 words is “noodling?”) around with a silly three-way romance between my loner artist-with-no-past Darzi, his tabula rasa robot Jouet, and his chain-well-not-exactly-smoking furball of sarcasm and lust girlfriend Peren.
I’m not even sure what I’m trying to say with this story, other than that loneliness sucks and you can overcome it even if you feel like you have very little to offer the world by offering to help someone else out of their loneliness. Still it’s nice to be writing something again, even if it’s somewhat in my comfort zone.