Raven, Emerging from a BoxI’ve got a sick cat that I’m anxious about at the vet today so it’s hard to write. I’ve been picking away at what I can and started jotting down some stuff for a piece of the trilogy that’s excerpts from a guidebook to Tabat. I’d realized something about the morphology of the name when I was on the bus and I was riffing on it, including quotations from fictitious historical accounts, when it came to me that one of the more important historical characters that I’d thought in my head was male should be female instead.
Weird little things happen like this when you’re working on something big. It’s like a lens clicks into place and you perceive a section better. And that perception spreads out, affects the view you have of the overall piece, the unruly profusion of plot lines, each with its flowers of action scenes and climatic moments, that will become the lavish bouquet of the book’s world.
So, to the very few of you who know what I’m talking about: Verranzo’s shadow twin is female. All the shadow twins are the opposite gender of their counterpart. Why? I don’t know. It just makes better sense in my head that way and lets me do some additional interesting things.
I had a moment like that when I realized that an important secondary character (who drove events in the past) was angry with his mentor, and why. Suddenly, the entire THEME of a trilogy I’ve been working on for years clicked into place. Huzzah!
And I hope your kitty gets better. I know how upset and anxious I feel when my cat isn’t feeling well.
The daemons in His Dark Materials are (all, mostly?) opposite gendered. I loved that subtle cue to the fact that we are complex beings. And yeah, I love it when you realize something true about your work and it starts to gel.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera
It is difficult to describe how Catherynne M. Valente’s new book Space Opera manages to be so wonderfully resonant of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy yet so insistently, inimitably her own. And yet, that’s the challenge.
Valente’s skill manifests in a book that bounces right along, full of glorious, funny, wonderful, sparkly explosions of humor and wit that still, just as Adams always did, manages to say Insightful and Interesting Things about Human Nature. And it’s funny. Did I mention that this is a funny book? It’s the story of failing rock singer Decibel Jones and his dysfunctional band, the Absolute Zeroes, who have been chosen to represent their world in an interstellar challenge that determines whether or not the Earth will be destroyed.
But it’s more than an updated Adams. It’s a little deeper and a lot better about things like gender pronouns and interestingly diverse cast. It has much more fashion and quirky stylistic details than HHGG, with fabulous living starships that resemble coral reefs, so much music of so many kinds, and enough eyeball kicks on every page that one fears sometimes for the safety of one’s figurative vision.
The first two chapters are admittedly slow going. The book doesn’t really find its legs until a bit into chapter three, after we’ve finally been introduced to protagonist Jones “lying passed out on the floor of his flat in a vintage bronze-black McQueen bodysuit surrounded by kebab wrappers, four hundred copies of his last solo album, Auto-Erotic Transubstantiation, bought back from the studio for pennies on the pound, and half empty bottles of rosé.”
At this point the alien invasion that’s been textually hovering in the wings for a while hears its cue and manifests:
“¦in everyone’s rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug. Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s.
This passage demonstrates the clean virtuosity of Valente’s prose in Space Opera. I’ve loved her other works, particularly The Orphan’s Tales, but this is a very different style for her and it’s truly impressive to see her execute it with the same seemingly effortless grace. Omniscient point of view is handled beautifully, and shows how well suited it is to large scale works like this one.
Space Opera will delight Valente’s fans and undoubtedly bring a new crowd her way, because it’s just plain good and funny and wonderful. I can’t imagine what Valente will pick for her next project. At this point I’m convinced she could make a set of instructions for assembling an IKEA dresser beautiful and engrossing. And I’m looking forward to that read.
if you're looking to find some of my recent work, I have a novelette, All the Pretty Little Mermaids, in the March 2014 issue of Asimov's. I've also got a non-fiction interview with Bud Webster in Analog.This came up in the advanced workshop – how does one grab a reader and have an impact on them? Because surely this sort of emotional identification that makes a reader experience a story as though it were a blow aimed directly at their heart is crucial to the best storytelling. The student pointed at an interview with Yoon Ha Lee in Clarkeworld magazine where she says:
The whole point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. You don’t have the time or the space to go to war or do large maneuvers, you can’t do chapters of elaborate setup, there’s much less room for character development””a good writer can get more character development in, but that isn’t my particular strength. Anyway, everything in the short story has to drive toward a short sharp point, whatever it is you’re trying to leave the reader with at the end of the story.
I say “assassinate” and it sounds hostile, because it is. I work better when I can think in terms of opponents. The thing is that I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack. Tactical sense, I guess, in the context of the story’s setup.
Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. “Ghostweight” is a good example of this; it doesn’t pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar. I am not sure my math professors would approve of the use I am making of my college education, but there it is.
To me this is connected to something Michael Swanwick told my Clarion West class: in a short story, pick your antelope out of the herd and chase it whole-heartedly. If you change course midstream because that other antelope is limping or that other one comes with a garnish, you are likely to have no antelope at all.
So you must determine your antelope, by which I mean, you must figure out what’s the emotional core of the story, what’s its heart? What does it say about the state of existence? And once you know that, you can construct a narrative that grabs the reader through devices like sensory engagement, identification with the main character, and other beguilements until you have them trapped, at which point you force them to confront some fact of existence that may be normally unseen or even actively avoided.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
2 Responses
I had a moment like that when I realized that an important secondary character (who drove events in the past) was angry with his mentor, and why. Suddenly, the entire THEME of a trilogy I’ve been working on for years clicked into place. Huzzah!
And I hope your kitty gets better. I know how upset and anxious I feel when my cat isn’t feeling well.
The daemons in His Dark Materials are (all, mostly?) opposite gendered. I loved that subtle cue to the fact that we are complex beings. And yeah, I love it when you realize something true about your work and it starts to gel.