Entries Tagged 'Words' ↓

I’m incredibly happy to report that my story, How I Got Here, has just been published in the latest issue of Weird Tales.

I wrote it at Clarion, in the bowels of UCSD’s wonderfully strange Geisel Library, in three days. Usually it takes me weeks to pound these guys out, so this one was a gift. Thanks Muse! Maybe we can do this more often?

And, awesomely, my friend and fellow Clarionite Peter Atwood has a story in the same issue. I read All In at Clarion, and it’s freaking fantastic, so check it out if you get a chance. You can also listen to an audio version here.

Clarion photo from Flickr user gruntzooki used under a Creative Commons license. Originally taken by Tania Mayer.

So it took me about twenty years to figure out something pretty fundamental about writing characters. I just finished a story about this kid, his father (who thinks he’s a god) and his mother (a depressed alcoholic). When I first started writing it, the story focused almost exclusively on the boy and his dad; the mother was just a sideshow, a sort of shrill mommy dearest who popped in every so often to inject some arbitrary malevolence.

But she evolved as the story did, so that, by the end, she became — in my mind, at least — a fully-formed, three dimensional person. Still an alcoholic, still criminally neglectful of her son, still shrill — but a real person who arrived at her plight for real reasons. A tragic figure.

Unfortunately, she didn’t quite make the transition on the page. The woman in the story that I turned in a couple of weeks ago is several steps above the cardboard harridan she started out as, but she’s still not much to look at. Still pointlessly vindictive, I think, and still prone to acts whose meanness is either odd or just outright inexplicable.

I didn’t give her a fair shake, and I feel terrible about it. Not because I’ve written something badly. Jobs knows, if I self-flagellated every time I committed that particular sin I’d be a mass of quivering scar tissue by now. I feel terrible because I didn’t give her the respect she deserves. Because I think you have a responsibility to the people you create: you don’t have to go easy on them, or make them sympathetic, or even like them, particularly. But you have to respect them. You have to give them their due, and let them grow into people, and invest the time and effort necessary to communicate who they are.

What’s worse is that I wasn’t just being lazy. There was a part of me that thought the plot would be better served if I left her just a tad undeveloped — if I made her do stuff that she plainly would not. I was wrong about that too. Because character is plot, of course, or at least its most atomic element. If you tinker with that — if you’re at all dishonest with your basic materials — then you warp the whole thing.

I mean, yes, the story may not fall out the way you want if you just let the characters be who they are. But then again, it wasn’t supposed to.

My story, Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe, just went up on Strange Horizons!

Just ran across a review of a book called Starbucked, which describes the mechanisms of Starbucks’ unlikely success. There’s a lot of focus-grouping involved in creating the Starbucks “experience”, apparently, and it grows out of a culture of new-age cookie-cutterism and aggressive homogeneity-breeding. This has the reviewer feeling a bit dyspeptic:

There is something ironic about a society that supposedly prizes authenticity and individuality buying in so readily to what is a patently ersatz experience: unlike the Italian specialty coffees that serve as their inspiration, Starbucks’s concoctions are produced by an automated process that removes any kind of artistry from their creation; all the barista has to do to pull an espresso or a cappuccino is to press the correct button on the espresso machine. (Clark slyly refers to this as the “bionic” Starbucks.) What Starbucks actually provides is not sustenance for the soul, but a carefully mediated, calculated, and replicated experience that is closer to the fast food template of McDonald’s than to the individualistic and highly idiosyncratic cafés of Paris or Milan. Schultz’s peculiar genius, as Clark shows, is in convincing us that we are being sold sophistication, when in reality we are simply drones in a giant corporate machine that grows ever more entrenched, at the rate of six stores per day.

Well, yes. I can see all that, I suppose, but it’s kind of a narrow view of things. Granted, I’m not exactly an impartial witness here — it’s 8:30 in the morning, and I’m writing this from my second Starbucks of the day — but it seems to me that, while there’s certainly something to be said for quirkiness and individuality in your haunts, it’s also important to have a place that’s comfortable, staid, and familiar enough to serve as a launching pad for your own brand of quirkiness. That’s something Jeff Vandermeer told us, once: find stability and routine in your life, and you’ll have a platform steady enough to release the unfettered chaos you need to make art. ¹

So I don’t really care that everything from the color of the walls around me to the music playing above me is carefully tuned to offend as few people as possible, and replicated more or less verbatim in thousands of other Starbucks, all over the world. Ubiquity and conformity aren’t necessarily bad things. Starbucks works.

Argus the Fractal Ant, that craggy anchorite, uttered only twelve worlds in his whole life, all of them in the instant before his death. “I have never known a man,” said he, “more jackrabbit than ravine cold cuts.” And jabbed defiant antennae at an unfeeling sky, and gurgled, and died.

There were three in attendance that day: Pastafarian Joe, Call Collect Anteater, and Bloviator Prime.

Said Pastafarian Joe: “Well, isn’t that something.”

Said Call Collect: “Yes, by definition. The question is what.”

Said Bloviator Prime: “Eep.” For Bloviator Prime had run afoul some years ago of a troupe of malevolent gypsies, who grew weary of his incessant blather and cursed him with the Eep curse.

“It is my belief,” said Pastafarian Joe, “that Argus was railing against the apocalyptic glee of our divine oppressors.”

“Nonsense!” said Call Collect. “He was simply bemoaning his principled stand against non-hexagonal pancakes.”

“Eep!” said Bloviator Prime. “Eep eep!”

“Imagine, living one’s whole life under the thumb of a god who you are obliged to praise incessantly for the unremitting agonies he inflicts upon you,” said Joe, affecting his best doleful.

“Imagine living one’s whole life without the benefit of pancakes,” said Call Collect. “Or waffles. Or any form of breakfast pastry.”

“Eep,” said Bloviator Prime.

And so they held their hats in their mouthes, and bowed their heads, and said a prayer to all of the dead gods who clustered even now around Argus the Fractal Ant’s empty exoskeleton, keening their absolutions.

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is a nasty blight on the English language, and the former excludes half our user base. So that’s not cool.

Yes, I know that “he” is generally supposed to apply to both sexes, and when I’m in my more combative moods I’ll use it with a feigned lack of compunction. But really I always feel bad about it. I read a book once where this race of beings did have such a pronoun, aer, but I think they had elements of both male and female in them, or something, so it doesn’t work for us. Also I object on principal to words that start with two vowels.

Sometimes I wish you could upgrade languages like you upgrade software. And that I was in charge of the process: the cranky Torvalds of the English language. I’d add the new pronoun, but I’d also immediately deprecate such horrors as “incentivize” and “retort”. All of the ugly constructs creeping inexorably into the language — like “step foot” or “could care less” or “irregardless” — would throw runtime exceptions as soon as they’re used, and take down the entire surrounding sentence. Exclamation points would be limited to one per ten thousand words.

I’d probably also introduce a debugger to diagnose writing failures — I have a whole hard drive full of stories that are badly in need of debugging.

English 2.0 — now with gender-neutral pronouns. Upgrade today!

My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back.

A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each of them really means. So if, in the course of your reading you come across something that seems a little symboly, you can flip quickly to the back of the book to confirm your suspicions. Oho! you can say to yourself. I knew that scudding bank of clouds was kind of arbitrarily scuddy. And no wonder! It turns out that it symbolizes our hero’s thwarted sexual longing!

There’s only one way to look at a symbol index: as a dictionary of arbitrary obfuscation. Ie: here’s what the writer really meant, but was too much of a pretentious elliptical prick to just come out and say. I remember finding the whole thing pointless and depressing. Why not just come out and tell us? What’s the point of dragging your readers through this kind of arbitrary indirection? Symbolism, framed this way, becomes little more than an exercise in mildly clever transposition.

It’s taken me two decades to get beyond that experience, and in that time I’ve come to some partial understanding of what symbolism really is. But, first, what it isn’t:

1. It’s not a way to get around saying something you don’t want to come out and say because it’s too obvious or silly or embarrassing. You should either say those things, or not say them. Period.
2. It’s not about demonstrating your talents for clever allusion. Nobody cares about your mastery of the minutiae of the book of Revelations, dude. Just get to the goddam point (I’m looking at you, Joyce).
3. It’s not a way to make your stuff seem more profound. Profundity is a feeling, never a technique.

So what is symbolism, then? It’s a last resort. It’s what you do when you’ve got no other choice.

I’ve talked a lot about the limitations of language in this blog. Clearly, language is a beautiful thing, so crucial to our development as a species that it’s pretty much wired into the hardware. But its powers are largely utilitarian. It does a bang-up job of communicating your desire to buy a grapefruit or run a country or marry your true love, but it kind of fails miserably when it comes time to tell someone how much you love them, or describe your zeal for your country, or expound on your abiding and irrational passion for grapefruits. It’s just not built for that.

Granted, all of this is possible, but it takes a special talent. Ian McKellan does it with Atonement, Craig Thompson with Blankets, Kazuo Ishiguro with Never Let Me Go. I came out of those books — not transformed, exactly, but deeply affected in ways that linger on, years and years later. All these guys managed to slip past the literal wall of my mind into that muddy territory where more elemental, unstructured things live: love and hope and faith and all that stuff. And once they’d done that, I was pretty much theirs.

So how do they manage it? By being great wordsmiths, yes, but also by finding images and characters that transcend the page to reach into our collective consciousness, to stimulate us in ways that go beyond verbal. This is the ultimate power of language, as an artform: it can’t reach these things directly, but it can wend its way into the firmament of shared experience, and draw on that to get what it wants.

And that’s what a symbol is, to me. It’s a way to say what can’t be said, and it draws its power from its ability to illuminate, not create. We have a fund of universal feeling that predates our ability to write, and the only real way to hit people where it hurts is to find your way into it and use what’s there. Music and art have more or less direct access to that place, but words have to work harder: they operate in the corner of our eyes, drawing shapes in the penumbral gloom between consciousness and id — and then waiting for our minds to do the rest.

Holy crap. Weird Tales accepted another one of my stories. If there was an emoticon for “capering around room and hooting like a madman”, I’d definitely be using it right now. But there isn’t. I am struck, once again, by the stunted expressive power of emoticons.

The last time I got published was in high school, in the literary magazine. It was called Ladyfair, a sort of heavily-veiled stream-of-consciousness paean to a girl I was infatuated with at the time. I remember that pretty well, but I can’t remember the girl’s name anymore, or what she looked like. My memory routinely betrays me like that — on any given day, I can barely remember what my high school was called, or what color socks I’m wearing, or how many hands I have. But I still remember that story. So my poor leaky brain is capable of holding onto stuff, if it finds it important enough.

The first Weird Tales story, Creature, comes out in March, in the 85th anniversary issue. I think I’m going to remember that, too.

I’ve blogged about Jeff Vandermeer before. His City of Saints and Madmen didn’t just blow me away — it helped me understand that 500 pages of insane twisted effulgence can be beautiful, touching, human.

Anyway, I’ve got a guest post on his blog! My entry is part of a promotion that Ann Vandermeer is doing for Weird Tales, whose helm she’s recently taken. Ann accepted one of my stories for her magazine, proving, once again, that it really isn’t possible to die from happiness, no matter how violently happy you might become.

Jeff and Ann were two of my instructors at Clarion, and the week I had with them was so transcendently amazing that I still haven’t found a way to express it in words. There was one memorable ten minute period where Jeff sat me down and described, in more or less perfect detail, everything I wanted to do and be as a writer, all of my worries, needs, dreams, foibles, thoughts. It was like he was reading my mind, except he found stuff in there that I didn’t even know about. It was one of the most stunning, illuminating moments of my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

ps … Two of my fellow Clarionites, both fantastic writers, have guest posts on Ecstatic Days as well: Peter and Caleb. Check them out.

Sometimes dreams do come true, even dreams you didn’t know you had. Which is to say: they’re making a movie out of Sweeney Todd!

Sweeney Toddy: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of a London barber who, wrongly exiled by a judge who sought to steal away his wife, returns to exact his bloody revenge. It is also, in my humble opinion, the best musical ever written. My certitude in this matter is not in any way compromised by the fact that I’ve never actually seen the play — I’ve listened to the soundtrack about a billion times, enough to wear little digital holes in the mp3s, so I’m pretty sure about this. The music, the lyrics, the story, the twisted, macabre humor: it really doesn’t get much better.

And the movie seems to have a lot going for it. Johnny Depp as Sweeney is an inspired choice, Helena Bonham Carter is a really fantastic, versatile actress who’ll do wonders with Mrs Lovett — and I can’t think of a better director than Tim Burton for this play’s mixture of whimsy and menace.¹

I am, of course, setting myself up for a crushing disappointment. I can only remember three times in the past decade where I’ve been this excited about a movie: (1) The Fellowship of the Ring, (2) The Matrix: Reloaded, and (3) Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. Fellowship more than lived up to my expectations — but the second Matrix and the fourth Star Wars damaged me in ways from which I will not soon recover.

So I’m keenly aware of the danger here. But, seriously, the previews look great, and Depp’s singing voice — while not the deep baritone I’m used to in a Sweeney — seems more than adequate. I’m hopeful. I’m confident.

But please don’t suck, Sweeney Todd. I beg of you.