. Let’s start the week off with a brand new asshat, U.S. Attorney Timothy Morrison, from the Indiana Attorney General’s Office. You might think with my ranting about AIG bonus witch-hunts and such that Mr. Morrison might be guilty of making some grandstanding proclamations about nefarious evildoers who, somehow, have Read more…
No, I didn’t get a new book contract. I did however get interviewed over at Tor.om, check it out. Unrelated video just for the hell of it:
Io9 had a recent blog post about Story vs. Plot, which was interesting (though I’m not sure I buy the argument it posits, but that’s another post for when I’ve had more sleep) and embedded in it is this little bit of commonly accepted wisdom I decided to take issue with:
When people talk about a “plot-driven” science fiction book or movie, they’re usually implying that the characters are as wafer-thin as the exploding mint in Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life.
Yea, the woeful canard of the Plot/Character duality, that has way more currency than it should. I don’t know where it originated, but it rightfully deserves to be stomped. If your story has paper-thin characters that just move around your authorial pinball machine bouncing from plot bumper to plot bumper, you don’t have a plot-driven story. You have a story with rotten characterization. Plot and character are not opposing poles on some creative spectrum, they are not mutually exclusive, any more than setting and narrative, or dialog and exposition, or any of the other ingredients of a full blown work of fiction. If any one of these ingredients, as written, suck, well the suck will affect the story. This applies to the cardboard action hero as much as the deeply introspective antihero in plotless literary porn.
I’ve learned a few things so far on Wolfbreed #2, a number of which relate to getting the thing done. As you can see by the rather swift progress I’ve made on the meter below. I’ve had creative spurts before, but oft-times they’re short-lived affairs that burn out after a Read more…
This past weekend I gave my worldbuilding lecture at the Western Reserve Writer’s Conference. Most of what I covered is in the essay I have posted here. But I have updated it for the 21st Century (I removed the reference to pagers) and I added some additional introductory material. I thought I’d repost the new material here:
The term “world-building” is thrown about quite often, most often in regards to SF or Fantasy. Less often is it mentioned what is actually meant by the term. After all, all fiction takes place in some sort of world constructed by the author. Even in fictions that take place in the real world as the author happens to know it. A literary novel about a English professor has a “world” constructed only by placing words on the page. That “world” bears no more essential connection to reality than a alternate history where the zombie apocalypse happens during the Battle of Hastings.
I just wanted to give you two uncredited quotations from folks talking about Prophets: Quote one: Swann is a libertarian and makes that abundantly clear in his work: Organized religion and authoritarian statists? – really bad; hegemonizing collective consciousnesses with godlike powers?-probably even worse. Quote two: The author seems to Read more…
I’ve been doing ~1500 words a day since the beginning of March, and we have officially passed the 1/3 mark on Wolfbreed II. Over 33K so far. Can’t blog much though, got to get back to writing the novel. Tomorrow I’ll blog about the cool performance I was at on Read more…
First off, I’m exceeding my prior stated goal of 20K by today, hitting 24K as of this writing. Go me! Second off, I got my highest-profile internet review to-date on Prophets on io9. Go me, squared!
A comment responding to my Big Idea post on Whatever led me to thinking about the sfnal concept of the Singularity. It seems quite popular to dis the concept. in fact, outside some Transhumanist circles, it seems that twice as many electrons are used on the interwebs to dismiss the concept than are used to promote it, or even defend it. There is an irony to this, as the Internet itself is a form of Singularity.
These are a pair of concepts that tend to hound beginning writers, especially beginning writers who come from an academic environment. This is largely due to the fact, I think, that a lot of higher education, even of writers, is less about writing than it is about reading. Colleges spend a lot more time on analysis of fiction than it does on its creation, after all it’s a lot easier to teach in a systematic fashion. But the tools one brings to bear in understanding what someone has written are much different than what you use to write something. Theme and symbolism are two such tools. Wielding these twin swords, a talented person can take a novel and dissect it like a chef at a Japanese steakhouse, leading to all sorts of insights. . . But you need to remember something, that as a writer in this instance you’re not the chef, you’re the cow.