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Author: Violette Malan

Where are You When You Turn Out the Lights?

Where are You When You Turn Out the Lights?

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Winter-Castle2-smallLast week I was talking about travelling, and the journey, in Fantasy, and SF. I noted that since most Fantasy uses a pre-industrial setting, journeys are generally undertaken on foot, via horses, or by (sailing) ship. However, there’s another aspect of pre-industrial living I’d like to address.

We recently had a bit of an ice storm in my area which left a lot of people  without power for several days – I say a bit of one because I lived through such a storm about 15 years ago which left quite a few more people without power for several weeks. I learned many things about living without electricity which possibly have no bearing on writing fantasy novels. For example: the Amish likely didn’t notice; it stops being an adventure after the third day; it’s considerably easier to deal with if you live in the country, in a house that predates the use of electricity; people always want to borrow our Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalogue after any prolonged power failure.

And I learned and several things which do.

For one thing, the lack of electricity or other reliable power sources has an impact on where people live, and therefore where you can set your story. You may have noticed that there aren’t a huge number of stories set in the winter, or that even northern barbarians don’t hang around their homelands very much. Bad weather of any kind is generally used as a plot device, but severe conditions take too long to deal with and use up too much story-telling time – unless, as I say, “always winter but never Christmas” is actually a point in the story.

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You Can’t Get There From Here

You Can’t Get There From Here

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The Charwoman’s Shadow Unicorn-smallAre Fantasy and SF the genres of travel? I think so. With the exception of brilliant pieces like Julie Czerneda’s recent Turn of Light – where the whole story takes place in one remote valley – most Fantasy novels, and a great many SF novels, involve travel or journeys in a significant way.

The Odyssey, with its hero’s encounters with Cyclops, gods, witches and other monsters, was probably the first fantasy story of any length. Nowadays we tend to think of “epic” as having something to do with scale, but all literature originally designated by that term involved a journey.

LOTR is the most obvious, and likely the most influential example of the modern Fantasy journey, but there are others.  Lord Dunsany’s The Charwoman’s Shadow, and The King of Elfland’s Daughter, offer shorter travels, but predate Tolkien. We’ve seen quite a few more recent examples, such as  Elaine Cunningham’s Winter Witch, Tanya Huff’s The Silvered, and Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, in which the journey forms the backbone and structure of the novel.

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You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

You Can’t Go Home Again . . .

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A princess of mars-smallLast week I talked about my Window Theory of Emotional Response and I got some responses from people telling me about some books and films they’d encountered after the window had closed for them – and one or two who talked about works they’d loved once, but no more. Works where the window had once been open and was now closed.

It was pretty clear that I wasn’t talking about stuff we merely liked, or thought well of, but rather stuff that changed the world for us. Where the earth moved, the stars realigned and our understanding of the world was either fundamentally reordered or fundamentally approved.

We all know you can’t go home again. You’re not going to be able to relive that feeling of shock and awe, that feeling that the world just re-oriented itself, by rereading the book that did it for you or re-watching the movie or the TV series. Sometimes it happens that revisiting Parnassus leads us to feel it’s just a hill in Greece.

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When One Window Closes . . .

When One Window Closes . . .

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Princess BrideA friend of mine has stated – many times – that he won’t date anyone who doesn’t love The Princess Bride, or Rioja wine. It’s the former that’s important to me at the moment, even though I love a good Rioja myself. Actually, my friend thinks that Princess Bride is the best movie of all time, and I think he’s absolutely right. Except that he’s also absolutely wrong.

We’ve all had the experience of sharing some beloved book, or film, or piece of music with someone, and being disappointed by their tepid reaction. You know. They’re like, polite. What’s more, we’ve all disappointed others in the same way. Like it or not, when this occurs, we do feel differently about each other. And neither side is wrong, but neither side is right, either.

Welcome to my Window Theory of Emotional Response. Otherwise known as the Princess Bride Paradox, the Star Wars Syndrome, the Heinlein Hypothesis, or – dare I say it? – the Frodo Phenomenon. In a nutshell, here it is: for you to have a deep emotional response to something cultural, your exposure to it has to have come at the right time for you.

My theory builds from the phrase many of us have used in other contexts, “that window’s closed.” AKA “that ship has sailed.” Both phrases imply that there was a period of time when something was possible, that the window was “open,” and then, it wasn’t. The opportunity is lost. For a piece of culture to move you, to change the way you think about yourself and the world around you, you have to encounter it at precisely the right age, or the right level of emotional maturity or development or – call it what you will.

Or you haven’t, and that window’s closed for you.

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This Will Be On The Test

This Will Be On The Test

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Treasure IslandI don’t know whether it’s the controversy over the character Turiel in the upcoming The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but there’s been a big swell of interest lately in the Bechdel Test. You know what that is, right? Generally applied to movies and TV shows, it determines whether women are represented equitably. In order to pass the test,  there must be two female characters who have names; they must at some point speak to each other; they must speak about something other than men. Seems simple.

I remember my father once telling me that Treasure Island had no women in it. He seemed to think this was a good thing. He was wrong, of course, except that he was also right. What he didn’t realize was that the film he was familiar with had no women, but that wasn’t also true of the book. Jim Hawkins does have a mother.  We could argue, however, that the film guys got it right, since Mrs. Hawkins does little or nothing to forward the plot.

So Treasure Island, whether print or celluloid, fails the Bechdel Test.

Most films/shows don’t pass the test, even the ones we fantasy and SF lovers love the most. Big Bang Theory doesn’t pass, even though there are three named female characters (and not because Penny, as my friend Jim Hines has pointed out, has no last name). Stargate passes, at least SG1 – they were smart to make the doctor a woman, since that gives plenty of room for non-guy related conversation. It’s been a while, but I believe that Star Trek: Voyager passes (between Captain Janeway, B’lanna Torres, and Seven-of-Nine) and TNG as well – remember, the doctor’s a woman.

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Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

Why Did the Genre Cross the Road?

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Red Plant Blues Last week I was talking about dystopias and satires, urban fantasy and paranormal romance, and further thought has led me to observe that genre can be a tricky thing. Of course, I was really talking about how definitions change and evolve, and how we all fight the changes we don’t agree with. I didn’t really talk about the difference between nouns and adjectives. I didn’t mention that something can be dystopian, without being, actually, a dystopia. Or that something can have satirical elements, without being, technically, a satire.

After all, practically everything we read – or watch for that matter – has a romantic element, but that doesn’t mean we’re reading romance novels, or watching rom-coms.

Total aside: is there a rom-trag genre? Wuthering Heights, maybe? Rebecca? Truly, Madly, Deeply?

Anyway. I’ve actually had a romance novel published, so I think of myself as someone uniquely qualified to talk about that aspect of crossing genres.

As with any other genre, romance has characteristic conventions, but what really makes a romance novel a romance novel is that it tells the story of a very precise portion of the protagonists’ lives. Specifically, it tells the story of how they met the person they love, and began spending the rest of their lives together. Other things are very likely happening to the characters at the same time. They have work lives, social lives, family obligations. They may have crimes to commit or solve. But if the main plot concerns their love life, then it’s a romance. If there’s also a mystery/crime, that means there’s a mystery element, one that exists only to allow the characters to meet, interact, and so forth.

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“You Keep Using This Word… “

“You Keep Using This Word… “

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utopia thomas more-smallDid you know that in the 18th century, “conscious” meant “guilty”? People have always played fast and loose with terminology and definitions, and we’re all bothered by the ones that bother us, and not by the ones that don’t.

For example, there’s been a bit of an outcry lately over the changing definition of the word “literally.” While I understand – and sympathise – the fact is that new definitions don’t replace old ones, and that English is a language that’s been evolving forever. What’s more important, it seems to me, is that we decide which definitions we’re using at any given time, and we make sure that all other parties to the discussion are using the same ones.

So much for the definitions of words. What about when the word itself is the definition?

I always thought I knew what “Urban Fantasy” meant. You know, a novel set in a city, with an element of fantasy added in. Usually, but not always, a modern, our-world city*. A novel where the story couldn’t be set in any place other than a city, using the tropes, paradigms and conventions of fantasy. That’s what makes it a fantasy novel, just as the necessary setting makes it an urban fantasy.

Then I was invited to be on a panel where we were to discuss whether it was possible for urban fantasies to have male protagonists. I was confused. I wasn’t aware that to a great many people “urban fantasy” is coming to mean “paranormal romance.” Which is, you know, a romance novel with an element of the paranormal added in. Using the tropes, paradigms and conventions of the romance novel. Which is what makes it a romance novel.

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The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

The Plot Thickens. Or Maybe Stretches.

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NovelistI had occasion to look into John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist for something totally unrelated to the posts I’ve been doing lately on plotting and plot devices. While I was checking through the book for the quote I needed, however, I found a few things he had to say about plot that I thought you might find interesting.

For those of you wondering, this is not the British John Gardner who was tapped to write the 007 pastiches in the 1980’s, but the American one who wrote all that Old English literary criticism, who’s one of the best known teachers of creative writing, with his book The Art of Fiction considered one of the seminal works in the field for students and teachers alike. For those of us in the Fantasy and SF community, however, he’s likely best known as the author of novels like Grendel, and Freddy’s Book, and October Light.

I’m going to share these observations in the order in which they appear, for the most part without regard to context. I won’t apologize for all the male-centric pronouns, I’ll just  point out that the book was published after Gardner’s unexpected death (so no changes could be made in later editions) and that male-centric was the default back then (pre-1982), even for most female writers. Here we go:

The wise writer counts on the characters and plot for his story’s power, not on tricks of withheld information, including withheld information at the end . . .

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Plot, Plain and Simple

Plot, Plain and Simple

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Writing the Novel From Plot to PrintI may have mentioned this before, but now that I’ve started talking about problems associated with plot, I’ll mention it again: There’s a lot of talk out there about plot-driven narratives versus character-driven narratives, where the former is “bad” and the latter is “good.”

Here’s the skinny: these are terms useful to the book reviewer or critic. They’re not useful to the writer and here’s why: There is no plot without character and there is no character without plot. Specifically, there’s no action without a character to perform it, and no characters without actions to define them. Nothing happens unless someone decides to do it, and unless someone does something, there’s no plot. In fact, there’s no story. This is true for every novel, every short story, every film, every TV show, and an awful lot of poetry. Regardless of genre.

There are things like allegories and satires, in which this might be debatable. Of course, the primary purpose of these is not to tell a story, but to get a particular point across, so screwing with the narrative is okay and even expected. But the best of these will at the very least pretend to include character and plot.

Last week, I talked about how badly-used plot devices often arise out of the writer ignoring character and “making” something happen, often to manipulate the reactions of readers and viewers. You can avoid this by asking yourself some simple questions right at the start. Many of us start writing with character in mind, so we ask ourselves, “Given this type of person, what kind of interesting things can happen to her?” Even if you start somewhere else, however, one of the first questions you’ll have to ask yourself is “Whose story is it?”

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Excuse me, Are you Using that Plot Device?

Excuse me, Are you Using that Plot Device?

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Crossing LinesThe other day, I was watching a new Canadian show that I’m not sure is even airing in the US called Crossing Lines. It stars, among others, William Fichtner and Donald Sutherland, and promises to be a kind of Agents of Shield without the Marvel universe – a group of police officers from different countries come together to solve international crimes as an arm of the International Court. So far so good, except for . . .

In the second episode, a tender moment occurs where two characters bond over similar family issues. They look warmly into each other’s eyes and promise to talk about it later. I call out “Dead man!” And of course I was right. One of them was dead by the end of episode, leaving the other feeling bereft. And leaving me rolling my eyes.

While “Dead man!” can be fun to play (as can “She did it!”) it’s a sad commentary on the state of narrative that these games can be played so often.

Okay, I hear you say, so it’s a plot device, and maybe it’s a bit overused (where “a bit” means I’m understating). Is that really so wrong? Yes, yes it is. The problem with this kind of thing is that because we recognize it, we feel manipulated, and when your viewers, or your readers, feel manipulated, you’ve lost them. You’ve reminded them that not only did you make this bit up, you’ve made all of it up. When your readers start considering the structure of the narrative, they’ve taken a step back from it. And bang, as they say, goes your willing suspension of disbelief.

We could argue that this kind of manipulation doesn’t happen as much in novels or short stories as it does in television and movies. Maybe not. Novels, for one, have time enough to make readers genuinely care about a character before she gets killed. And plot devices are actually useful things; both as readers and writers we love them, except when we hate them.

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