Story on the Brain

I knitted hats and caught up with Stargate Universe and Bones last night, which was totally awesomely fun of course! And one is done and another is 3/4 done, again with the awesomeness, rock! But both shows are giving me THOUGHTS. And the thoughts are pestering me and so out of my head they must go, so I can do all this paper grading that's 14 inches high on my desk. I so wish that was an exaggeration. Stargate Universe seems more and more like a soap opera for men. It's clearly about the men, no question--the women are peripheral in every way, either supporting or sleeping with (or not sleeping with) the main characters: Rush, Young, Eli, Scott. I don't have a problem with that, for real. It's a great show. It's just really male-oriented in a way that Battlestar was not and that's what's completely fascinating to me, because on paper the two are strangely similar, but in practice they're polar opposites. Battlestar has utter equality built into its fabr...

I had one of those sudden revelations again. Aha! I like to consider social metaphors in the sense of trying to fit an imaginary segment of society into our real society. So, what if witches are like plumbers? What if they're like academics? What if they're like the gay community? What if they're like the post office? What if they're like the NBA? What if they're like symphony orchestras? I always thought that was sort of poorly imagined in Harry Potter, the way that the magical world interacts with the real one. She didn't so much gloss over it as whistle and look the other way. Suppose you find out you're One Of Them. Like a super tall athlete, or a gifted violist, or a boy attracted to boys? How do you join that community? How do you build (or fight) that thing in yourself? How does it change your life, your family, your choices for the future? What if you're a gifted violist from a family of plumbers? Or vice versa? What if you have to get hired by a...

One of my biggest problems in writing is that I want to write something else. No matter how much I love my current book, other ideas intrude. Of course at the time they seem like the greatest idea that's ever been had, like it would be an absolute crime not to go write them right away, now now now! I am trying not to do this. I'll go write excited notes about a thing, but then ideally come back to my current one true love. No cheating on your book! Today BLDGBLOG just wrecked my ability to do that by posting about two different books that are such great inspiration for that book I've put on the back burner that I'm hopping up and down to go write that right now. Jeez! I don't usually use other books when writing MY books. Is that weird? I don't really do research except for bits of information--where is this town, and are there mountains nearby? what is the law on x?--and I don't like to let other fiction have too much to do with my own because of my chamele...

I just reread The Witch of Blackbird Pond for the first time in about, oh, say 30 years. And what struck me suddenly 24 hours after I got done was: power. People who accuse other people of being witches are afraid of their power. And the characters in this thing I'm writing who are just perfectly normal humans who sort of pathetically *want* to be witches, they WANT power. Isn't it cool how a position that was persecuted for its power is now sought for its power? I think that is so interesting. Is that what's behind all the vampire fanaticism? It also gave me a terrific new character to complete my trio. Except I might have just suddenly changed her to a boy, and not just any boy but the object of affection of our heroine. That gives us three main characters who are doing stuff and one that is going to get the metaphorical axe to the head for being tremendously awful in those understandable, sympathetic, selfish teenage ways. Oh yes. I also added in some excellent estranged...

I remember loving these books as a child but I had forgotten how much I skipped over. Re-reading childhood favorites is dangerous, but in the case of the Dark Is Rising books, you really should not do it. What I loved was the Drew children, because Stone Over Sea is a wonderful book and I kept reading to get more of them. But everything having to do with Will Stanton was so outrageously irritating, I nearly didn't finish the fifth book, Silver on the Tree. Good lord. He magically gets all these outrageous powers with no effort, goes through all this pointless contrived rigamarole, then is a rarefied Old One and crucial to the survival of the world. He's all smug and humble and knows more than everyone. I just could not stand Will Stanton. First off, I hate it when people get superpowers without any cost. Second, Will is boring. He just is. He doesn't have to fight for anything and he gets all the credit, whereas the Drew kids are way more fun and do much more of the work. T...

But I DO have standards. And by "not hierarchical" I mean, my standards are not higher than someone else's, or lower, or whatever. They're just mine, see? For instance I'll never read a Dan Brown book because a Trusted Resource told me they are incredibly badly written, along the lines of the Left Behind series, one of which I actually read once but it was because I was teaching a class called Heaven and Hell, okay? It was for work! Oh good golly those books are so very very badly written. YIKES. So anyway. On the other hand, I read and adore a lot of things that your standard judger of literary quality wouldn't maybe find so very high on the list. Also I might punch out a judger of literary quality who said bad things about Meg Cabot or, I don't know, Stargate Atlantis. Which I realize is a tv show, but it's the same thing, see? Here are my standards: 1) Things have to happen. I cannot stress this enough. There has to be a STORY. You have to be able t...

Okay, I got the outline done at least in large strokes for the cozy mystery. It involved a lot of talking out loud to the computer and then petting the cat, who comes running if I talk out loud. Also I invented the Bryson Grant, which sends people to travel around the world recording oral history, or in this case, oral mystery. I'm way too tickled about the Bryson Grant. Also, I totally want one! Mostly I got things done because I was ranting and raving about how happy writing makes me, like happy in a slightly deranged way, like somehow I got cross-wired and writing presses the endorphin button and leans on it. Seriously, it's not normal. And then my friend said, "So what are you writing now?" and I gave the thumbnail, and then said, "But I'm stuck on the outline." Then I decided I HAD to whack it into shape this weekend, before I get students turning in paper drafts on Monday. I need my road map! It turns out I was trying to throw everything into the s...

Go and read! You don't have to have read The Demon's Lexicon to read this, but the characters are mentioned or appear in it at a much later date. This is a gorgeous, heart-breaking story. Sarah knows how to do it right!

Not to force kids to read anything they don't want to read, right here . I'm not sure everyone resists the books that are forced on them, but no doubt it's extremely common. Since I just got done making up, oh, my syllabus, I've been kind of thinking about this anyway. The classes aren't literature, fortunately. But even with rhetoric and composition, it can be really hard to get students past "I hate this" about any given piece of reading, to get to the interesting analysis, or even to the point where they can extract the content. "I hate this" is where resentment of the process carries over to the subject itself. I don't know if any of us ever grow out of that. There are movies I've hated purely because I was on a hideously uncomfortable plane when I saw them. How is that any different? So at that point I lose a movie that I might have liked otherwise, no great loss. But when it's my own writing I have to work on, dear oh dear. Edit...

Read this and this . But I have to argue with Sarah's argument about character A and character B in The Demon's Lexicon. Because one of them is a deeply awesome person in complete control of his environment and the other is a wannabe (nothing wrong with being new to something, but it's intrinsically less awesome than having mastered it) who switches her affections from one person to another person and seems to toy with both of them and hurts at least one, yet somehow without any panache, which might excuse it. Sarah argues we don't like the second one because she's a girl, but actually it's for the reasons I just stated. So there you go. Except she's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about everything else in the whole article, especially Harriet Potter. Writers punish and/or undercut awesome girls. It's a fact. There is also a scene where the other three all mock that character for her admittedly silly outfit and laugh at her and put her down, and she gets embarrassed, ...

Okay, so, yesterday I wrote a whole giant batch of book and I am VERY VERY pleased about that. I'm doing all my usual things wrong, of course. Understatement is the worst. Would you have predicted that was a writing flaw of mine? Well, it is. I'm a criminal understater in third person. I'm not entirely sure I know how to write at all in third person, though I think I've got it pretty well in first person. Blah! In third I go back and look at it later and think, "Oh, that's nice, except I left out everything important because I didn't want to bonk you over the head with it." Must learn to bonk you over the head with it! Okay! But I'm still extremely happy with what I wrote. You can't fix it until you do it in the first place. I mean, criminy. Essentially everything turned out awesome and great except you have not the slightest idea what the main character is thinking or feeling about anything, or what motivates her, or what she wants or plans or...

Isn't that a miraculously apropos subject to find? This article was pretty eye-opening. I don't know how anyone can generalize about teaching writing--this author doesn't, by the way--because it's all so very specific. What one person needs is completely different from what another person needs. And even if they need exactly the same thing, you might have to use completely different techniques to get there. I remember a student who wanted to write novels, who already had a contract to write for some kind of cookie-cutter series of fantasy novels. He was doing great, right? But he had not the slightest idea how to do anything more. Fortunately he knew that and came to me for answers, so we had a semester-long running battle over it because he was so utterly frustrated. It sounds absurd now, but he couldn't see what made one book better than another and wanted to know how to tell the difference. It was like teaching color to the color-blind. And then to try to d...

Reading Roald Dahl's book The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I read a million times when small and which of course had me staring into candle flames and trying to see what was on the other side of playing cards. I got pretty good at it, too! As far as I remember. The book ends with the first story he ever wrote, but right before that is his novella (or something) called Lucky Break, the story of how he became a writer. Basically he had not the slightest intention of doing so, was flying fighter planes and all but got injured and sent to some embassy, but one day C.S. Forester walked into his office to ask questions about the war, and they went to lunch and couldn't eat and write things down at the same time, so Roald Dahl offered to write up notes for Forester to use in his story. Easy, right? C.S. Forester gave him only these directions: "Please, let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelac...

I like figuring this out. You have to know exactly how the science/magic works in your SF or you are going to make incredibly stupid mistakes all the time and also nothing will make sense or hang together. I like it when it costs. I mean in the sense that if your spaceship flies from point A to point B, somebody has to foot the bill. Fuel costs, maintenance costs, there are cranky people at the docks, there are taxes and inspectors and all sorts of annoyances. I like when magic costs. If kayaking knocks me flat for a day, then surely exerting any other kind of force should also. And it should change you, just like kayaking, which builds certain muscles (no, I'm not wearing linebacker shoulder pads, that's just me) and supposedly burns off other things (I see no evidence of this but what do I know?) and you get sunburned and there's sand in the car and now you have less Jungle Juice and sunscreen and your hat is icky. I am a big fan of the consequences. Maybe that's why ...