How wonderful were those early books? I loved those illustrations.Actually, I want to talk about something that shaped American fantasy as we know as well as a series that I encountered early and have loved ever since and that’s L. Frank Baum’s Oz.
I’ve been reading Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, by Michael D. Riley, which is about Baum’s life and the worlds that he created. It’s a folklore that feels very American, and yet it’s a mythology that few have drawn on: John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Tad Williams’s Otherland (which has some delightfully demented riffs on Oz) are two that occur to me. I’d love to see more using it for sure. A recent anthology, Shadows of the Emerald City, holds short stories influenced by Oz. (I was delighted to find it for $2.99 on the Kindle and am looking forward to reading it.) (Later edit: Let me add Tom Doyle’s well-done story, “The Wizard of Macatawa,” to the list of Oz-inspired works.)
At the same time, it’s part of Baum’s theory of fantasy that can be used to lead the discussion back in the direction of urban fantasy (beside the alternate direction where I go on about how much I’d like to see urban fantasy that draws on Oz and what forms that might take). Baum posited six kinds of fantasy:
Stories that deal with marvelous machines and inventions of the future.
Stories that take place completely in the imaginary world without the appearance of any character from our own world.
Stories that explain origins (like Baum’s story about Santa Claus)
The adventures of American characters “in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches”
The adventures of fairies in our own world
The animal fairy story
Urban fantasy falls into that fifth catagory, with “fairies” standing in for a multitude of supernatural creatures (I just picked up a Judith Fennell one with a male mermaid). Sometimes the protagonist is human – maybe fifty-fifty, maybe a little more in one direction or the other – but supernatural creatures are always there, in one form or another.
Does that seem like a fair thing to nail into a definition of urban fantasy?
That really hits he nail on the head, although it’s really the term “urban fantasy” that I disagree with. However, I have no suitable alternative, so I go with it.
Cat, that’s a great question. I’ve been reading quite a lot of urban fantasy and there’s a tremendous variety of style, structures and even primary themes, but ultimately, it’s about “fairies living in our own world”, if you use the term “fairies” as a metaphor for any kind of mythic being. So, yeah, it definitely seems reasonable to tack that into the definition.
I just read Walter Jon Williams’ excellent This is Not a Game, and thought that it, too, was a kind of urban fantasy. Instead of fairies, he gave us pitch-perfect Platonic geeks and hackers, trolls and other dwellers online – all starting to live and interact in “our own world”.
Thanks for the tip about the Kindle book. Instant gratification!!
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5 Things To Do In Your First 3 Paragraphs
A frog on a hosta leaf - which is more green? Your first three paragraphs need to arrest and intrigue your reader.1. Engage the senses. You don’t have to hit every sensory stop – but it sure helps. Vivid visuals are great, but they are even better when backed up with visceral, precise taste or touch or sound.
2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:
Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you. You enter the walls of the city early in the evening, when the cobblestones are a mottled pink with reflected light, and cold beneath the slap of your bare, bloody feet. You ask the man who is guarding the gate to recommend a place to stay the night, and even as you are falling into bed at the inn, the bed, which is piled high with quilts and scented with lavender, perhaps alone, perhaps with another traveler, perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustached that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn’t ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When you sleep, you dream about the long white distances that still lie before you. When you wake up, the guardsman is back at his post, and the place between your legs aches pleasantly, your legs sore as if you had continued walking all night in your sleep. While you were sleeping, your feet have healed again. You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it.
Holy cow, talk about grabbing the reader with bravura and effortlessly stuffing them full of story. Second person is such a wonderful and reckless choice and it works here in a way not all second person narratives do. There’s physical pain, the bare bloody feet, and sensory beyond the visual with lavender and high-piled quilts and pleasant aches. And beyond that there is both an external conflict, the enforced journey, the drive in her dreams, and an internal conflict, a shame that, because the narrator is so careful not to look at it, makes us achingly aware of its existence: You were careful not to kiss the guardsman on the lips, so it doesn’t really count, does it. (The rest of the story is even better, and Link’s collection Magic For Beginners is worth picking up for its craftsmanship as well as the enjoyment its fabulous stories offer.)
3. Display your command of language. It’s worthwhile for a writer to think about poetry, and all its devices like assonance and alliteration, metaphor and allusion, internal rhythm, even meter. Save scraps of speech that you like, stud those paragraphs with wonderful things and spend with wild abandon from your store, because this is the make or break moment, when your reader decides whether or not to continue. You cannot lavish enough attention on your reader in the form of these paragraphs.
Look at how Carol Emshwiller’s “All of Us Can Almost…” begins, with a fancy hook made of punctuation attached to the title, like an elaborate latch on the door opening into the story:
…fly, that is. Of course lots of creatures can almost fy. But all of us are able to match any others of us, wingspan to wingspan. Also to any other fliers. But through we match each other wing to wing, we can’t get more than inches off the ground. If that. But we’re impressive. Our beaks look vicious. We could pose for statues for the birds representing an empire. we could represent an army or a president. And actually, we are the empire. We may not be able to fly, but we rule the skies. And most everything else too.
That conversational tone doesn’t come easily – it’s beautifully wrought, wonderfully precise.
4. Intrigue the reader while establishing the rules. Thomas M Disch’s “The Wall of America” sets the tone, narrative distance, and time frame (now to near future) while establishing a question (what’s the Wall?) that makes the reader want to keep going:
Most people got more space along the Wall than they could ever use, even the oddballs who painted leviathan-sized canvases they couldn’t hope to sell to anyone who didn’t have his own airplane hangar to hang their enormities. But if you did work on such a scale, you must have had money to burn, so what would it matter if you never sold your stuff? The important thing was having it hung where people could see it.
5. Use interesting, active words. You can never go wrong with this. Here’s James Tiptree Jr. at her best, full of poetry in “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”:
Hot summer night, big raindrops falling faster now as she swings along the concrete expressway, high over the old dead city. Lightning is sizzling and cracking over the lake behind her. Beautiful! The flashes jump the roofs of the city to life below her, miles of cube buildings gray and sharp-edged in the glare. People lived here once, all the way to the horizons. Smiling, she thinks of all those walls and windows full of people, living in turbulence and terror. Incredible.
All of these count in titles too. Here’s an exercise: write down ten first sentences or titles, playing with one of these concepts in each. Then pick the most promising and go write that story.
Tips For Writers: Examining Your Own Writing Process
We had the first session of the advanced workshop last night. I’m delighted by the mix, and expecting wonderful things from the class. Some are published already, some are just breaking in.
Unlike the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories class, we are not focusing on one of the basics each week, like characters, plot, or world building. Instead, I am trying to let the class drive itself where it can. My hope is that everyone, by the end of class, has not just been critiqued a couple of times, but has a better sense of their writerly process and how to make it more efficient, more confidence in finishing stuff and getting it sent out, and new ways of moving story from idea to finished draft.
So here is the assignment I gave them, in the hope that it will prove useful for other writers trying to figure out their process:
I asked them each to make an account at the Submissions Grinder, even if they already were tracking their stories in another way. I said I would like them to send out at least one submission and track it in the grinder, but if they couldn’t manage that, then I wanted them to identify at least one market that they wanted to send something to. We spent some time looking at my old submissions spreadsheet, since the question came up, after how many rejections do you trunk story? My answer is that you don’t trunk a story unless you would find it embarrassing to be published. I have some stories that were out over a dozen places before finally finding a home.
We did an in class writing exercise to make them think about their writing process. I want to them to try varying their process three times over the course of the next week. They can vary their process spatially, by changing the location where they write: outside under a tree or in a coffee shop or at the library or in their closet. Or they can vary it temporally by writing at a different time than they usually do. Or they can vary it according to process: using pen and paper instead of the keyboard, for one, or by writing with outline if they don’t usually use one. Or they can even look at their work and see if there is a pattern they want to vary, such as always writing in past tense.
Finally, they were assigned to read this and come in prepared to talk about how the writer creates emotion in the reader. That’s a piece that I personally cannot read without crying, so I think it will prove an interesting discussion, and hopefully provide some guidance for creating depth of emotion in their own work.
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4 Responses
That really hits he nail on the head, although it’s really the term “urban fantasy” that I disagree with. However, I have no suitable alternative, so I go with it.
Cat, that’s a great question. I’ve been reading quite a lot of urban fantasy and there’s a tremendous variety of style, structures and even primary themes, but ultimately, it’s about “fairies living in our own world”, if you use the term “fairies” as a metaphor for any kind of mythic being. So, yeah, it definitely seems reasonable to tack that into the definition.
I just read Walter Jon Williams’ excellent This is Not a Game, and thought that it, too, was a kind of urban fantasy. Instead of fairies, he gave us pitch-perfect Platonic geeks and hackers, trolls and other dwellers online – all starting to live and interact in “our own world”.
Thanks for the tip about the Kindle book. Instant gratification!!
Cheers
-Jeffle
Thank you for the mention!
It’s a great story, Tom. 🙂 Glad to help make other people aware of it.