The Archonate

Locus Magazine review of The Other

2012-02-05T10:38:00.000-08:00

The estimable critic and Jack Vance aficionado, Russell Letson, has given my PKD Award shortlisted novel, The Other, a long and positive review in Locus Magazine, and put it on his recommended reading list. He says the novel ". . . is as convincingly and pleasingly Vancean as Hughes's earlier Archonate stories -- together they constitute an homage that manages to maintain its own particular flavor and sensibility."

Review of Limbo, by Bernard Wolfe

2012-02-01T07:31:00.000-08:00

My review of Bernard Wolfe's 1952 classic sf novel, Limbo, has been posted on the SF Site.

http://www.sfsite.com/02a/lm361.htm

Interview with me (again)

2012-01-31T02:23:00.000-08:00

A couple of months ago, Stephen Theaker interviewed me for his downloadable magazine, Theaker's Quarterly Fiction. He's now posted the interview on his blog.

http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2012/01/every-dialogue-scene-is-duel-matthew.html

A confabulation debate

2012-01-28T04:32:00.000-08:00

I posted a link to the confabulation piece on rec.arts.sf.composition, a remnant of the old usenet. It prompted a debate with another author, Ryk E. Spoor, that I found interesting.

I don't know if many people have newsgroup readers anymore -- I don't -- but you can always get there by way of Google groups.

Our friend, confabulation

2012-01-26T07:43:00.000-08:00

"A ship out on the ocean."

When I was teaching genre writing, I would say this line to the class, wait a couple of seconds, then say it again, just in case anyone had missed it.

Then I would ask if everyone had a mental image of a ship out on the ocean. And, yes, everyone did.

I would then do a "hands up" session: "hands up, everyone who saw a sailing ship." A few hands would go up.

"Hands up everyone who saw a warship." Another few, usually all male.

"A tanker or freighter?" "A yacht?"

And so it would go. I'd ask if the ship was coming toward them or sailing away or going left-to-right or right-to-left.

Was the sea calm, choppy, stormy? Was it day or night?

Each person had a well realized image of a certain kind of ship on a certain kind of sea, doing this or that, under sun or moon or cloud.

But none of that extra information was included in "a ship out on the ocean." So where did it come from?

From the writer's invaluable friend: confabulation.

Confabulation is a deeply human quality, although we surely had it even before we became human. It's the inherent power of the mind to take a small piece of information and fit it into its more complete context.

It was the power that let us glimpse a sliver of yellow or orange through a screen of leaves and know that the full image was of a piece of fruit that we could eat. Or to see a tawny patch between the stalks of the long grass and know that it was a lion that could eat us.

It's also the power that, in a famous psychology experiment, convinced several students in a classroom that the person who had just burst in, threatened the professor, then run out again had been brandishing a gun. In fact, it had been the professor's grad student assistant wielding a banana. But, because the situation seemed to call for a gun, the beguiled undergrads' minds had conjured one up.

Interesting stuff, confabulation, and part of the reason why the courts are now understanding that they can't rely on eye-witness identification as iron-clad evidence.

But, to come back to writing, the reason why confabulation is our friend is because it means we don't have to create long, tedious descriptions of our characters and settings. Instead, we need only concentrate on the few details that will become the dots our readers connect for themselves.

An old king on an even older throne, with hands that knew how to grasp and ears tuned against flattery. For most readers, that's all that's needed. Now show the king in action, doing what he does that makes him who he is -- and especially what part he plays in the story -- and you can get on with telling the tale.

All the rest of it -- the lines on his face, the crown on his snowy hair, the brocaded robe, the carvings on the throne, the throne room itself -- will be confabulated-in by each reader. They will, like the ships and the ocean, be different as to detail. But that doesn't matter, does it?

It doesn't matter, because this is no real-world king that needs to be described accurately. It is only a character that exists in the reader's mind while reading the story, and perhaps in moments of reflection when the book is closed and put on the shelf.

So choose your details carefully, get them down, and keep the story moving. Let confabulation do the heavy lifting for you.

More observations about characters

2012-01-15T03:52:00.000-08:00

In a response to an earlier post, Robert noted how many writers who are still learning their craft devote too much energy to describing the physical appearance of their characters. Some thoughts in response:

Yes, description is a bugbear for many beginners. They believe that the reader won’t be able to picture the character unless they’ve given a complete physical description. Which, of course, is not true. And it compounds the error to stop the story, or at least throw it into low gear while a succession of unneeded details about hair and eye color, height and weight, and so on are doled out.

I’ve written entire novels in which the lead character’s appearance is not described. I mean, not at all. Not a single word. In The Damned Busters, for example, Chesney Arnstruther is described merely as a young man. The reader probably gains the impression that he has not spent any time in fitness centers or on playing fields, but his physique is not dwelt upon. Nor are his eyes or hair or lips or chin.

He is described by another character as “high-functioning autistic,” but the astute reader will have grasped that facet of his personality long before the phrase is uttered. Yet he carries the story along because he is constantly doing something to address the problems that, inwardly and outwardly, confront him.

But, for those writers, who don’t feel comfortable unless they give at least a minimal description, here’s a technique I use: give a general description, add two or three details that say something about the character’s character, then add one characteristic motion. The motion is important, I think, because it is easier for us to envision moving objects than still ones – something to do with our evolution as creatures that were more likely to be prey than predators.

Here’s an example from The Damned Busters, describing Billy Lee Hardacre, the labor lawyer/novelist turned tv preacher:

He was broad-shouldered, tall, and fiftyish, with silver hair that looked as if it had been poured into a mold and let to set overnight. He wore tailor-made suits with western-style piping on the lapels and a big gold and diamond ring that flashed as brightly as his piercing blue eyes whenever he raised his hands to call down divine blessings--or, more often, wrath--on some celebrity whose behavior had caught his attention over the preceding week.

If I've done that right, you should have a pretty good mental picture of Billy Lee, and at least the beginnings of a sense of what kind of guy he is.

Luff Imbry stories, cheap

2012-01-15T02:10:00.000-08:00

Synchonicity at work: just days after my novel, The Other, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, seven short stories about protagonist Luff Imbry -- the corpulent master thief, forger and con man of the far-future Old Earth in its penultimate age -- have become available at the Angry Robot eBook store.

They come in various e-formats for a mere 59p each (less than $1). If you take all seven you can add three more from other authors and have your own mini-anthology for three-and-a-half pounds, which is less than five bucks.

The stories were previously published in Postscripts, F&SF and the tribute anthology Forbidden Planets.

http://www.angryrobotstore.com/short-fiction/order/2/

Interview about The Other

2012-01-12T01:57:00.000-08:00

Now that my novel, The Other, is drawing some attention because of the PKD Award nomination, I thought I'd repost a link to an interview (pdf) about Luff Imbry and the genesis of the book and character that Underland Press ran a couple of months ago.

http://www.underlandpress.com/uploads/MHughesInterview.pdf

Nominated for the PKD Award

2012-01-10T11:55:00.000-08:00

My Luff Imbry novel, The Other, is one of seven nominees for the 2011 Philip K. Dick Award. For a guy like me, who used to read Dick back in the sixties, this is one cool day.

First chapter: http://www.archonate.com/other

A few observations about characters:

2012-01-02T03:26:00.000-08:00

Some writers obsess about how to create real, living people for their stories. They needn't, because they can't. All any of us can create are characters.

Characters are not people. They're much, much simpler. Somewhere in his On Writing -- highly recommended as a manual of technique -- Stephen King notes that, compared to the simplest of real people, the most complexly, carefully drawn character in a story is "nothing but a bag of bones."

People have lives. Characters only have roles within a story. They have no other existence than within the story, even if they seem to live on in your head after you finish reading.

Take Yossarian in Catch-22, a story about a man being driven to make a choice between two evils, one of which will kill him physically, the other morally. We come to know a lot about Yossarian in the context of his situation and his dilemma.

But where did he go to school? Does he have brothers and sisters? What's his favorite color? Is his navel an innie or an outie?

We don't know. We don't even know his first name, John, until well into the second half of the novel. That's because we don't need to know. Probably Joseph Heller didn't know when he created Yossarian.

Characters always have problems. Or agendas. They all have something to do, because they're all part of a story, and stories are about doing. If you have a character in your story who doesn't actually do anything to make the story happen, you have to ask yourself, "What's this guy doing here?"

If you can't give the character a role in the story, then he's not part of the story, and you'd be better to take him out -- even if you carefully drew him based upon your recollections of your most beloved high-school teacher.

Characters have two kinds of problems: external and internal. Major characters' problems, whether innies or outies, are big -- see Yossarian's case above.

Minor characters can have big external problems if the story requires it, but they don't need big internals, because the story is mostly about the major characters, and you just don't need to make every card in the deck a king or a queen.

A major character's external and internal problems interrelate. Dumbo can't fly until he has self-esteem, and he can't have self-esteem until he flies. Yossarian has to find a way to live without being part of a senseless killing machine, and he does it by realizing that there's a third option to which he's been willfully blind.

Bringing the character to a climactic point where the external and internal problems satisfactorily resolve is what storymaking is largely all about.

There are various ways to reveal character. In ascending order of usefulness, they are:

· the narrator tells us what the character is like;

· other characters tell us what the character is like;

· the character himself tells us what he is like;

· we see what the character is like by what he does.

Although modern literary fiction often goes to great lengths to use the first technique, it is not recommended for genre authors. You are a lot better off if you show your character in action -- that is, in characteristic action -- because characters are what they do.

And that characteristic action should involve conflict, because there is no story without conflict. People have tried to boil down the essentials of story to twelve or ten or seven basic plots. I reduce them to three: man versus man; man versus the universe; man versus himself (for "man" you can read: woman, boy, girl, robot, alien, talking rabbit, typing cockroach).

Whether you get it down to twelve, seven, or three, the key word in each one is "versus." Stories are struggles. Whether the characters win, lose, or (as with Yossarian), transcend the conflict you set for them, they struggle to get something done -- even if, as with Hamlet, it's just to make up their minds.

Reviews and an interview

2011-12-31T03:47:00.000-08:00

This morning brought a flood of good reviews. First, Andrew Wheeler, former editor of The Science Fiction Book Club, blogged a review of The Other, calling it “a sparkling, wonderfully amusing novel, full of great dialogue, odd situations, and quirky characters; it's a lovely, masterful souffle of a book, and I can think of no reason why any reader wouldn't love it.”

Then something I’ve been awaiting with great anticipation: Stephen Theaker, doyen of the British Fantasy Society, interviewed me a while back for his Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction and Paperbacks. Now the magazine is out (meaning it’s available free in pdf, Kindle, Epub, and Feedbooks formats, or as a paperback from Lulu). Just follow the link and scroll down.

In the same issue, Stephen also reviews all three Henghis Hapthorn novels – Majestrum, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Hespira – and says, “Reading all three together like this was one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of my life.”

Outlining

2011-12-29T04:32:00.000-08:00

I let this blog slip because for a couple of months I was without a reliable internet connection, deep in rural southern Italy where I'm housesitting. But things seem to have stabilized so I thought I'd go back to giving advice to writers.

The Canadian novelist Russell Smith has a piece in today's Globe and Mail about how to write your first novel. All of it good advice, I thought, except for the bit about outlining. I added a comment to the article, which I've reproduced below:

I have fourteen novels in print and have done some teaching and mentoring, too. I agree with all of what Russell is saying except for the point about outlining. For some people, it's an absolute necessity; for others, it's a potential book-killer.

I've only outlined a book once, and that was a for-hire job under a pseudonym, writing a novel about the X-Man, Wolverine. The rights owners, Marvel, required a full beginning-middle-and-end outline before they would approve the project. It was the most difficult part of the assignment.

In every other case, I've started with a character, a situation, and the event that triggers the conflict that will form the heart of the story. I also have a general idea, which becomes sharper as the work proceeds, as to what the story is about.

"What the story is about" is different from "what happens in it." Dumbo, for example, is about a hero who can't accept his own heroic nature, until he is brought to a climactic choice where he must be a hero in order to save the only person whom he loves and who loves him. The first Star Wars movie is essentially the same story.

If you know what your story is about at that basic a level, beneath the happenings of flying elephants and feuding droids, you'll know what has to happen in it to make it work out all right.

One last bit of advice. Writing a first draft is like hitting the beach on D-Day. You don't stop to tend the wounded or mourn the dead. If you don't get off the beach, you'll die there. Which means: the point of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written. Don't go back and rewrite the first chapter until you've finished the last. Get off the beach. Otherwise, you may never get past page twenty.

Catching up

2011-06-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

I haven't been able to update this blog lately, largely because we went through a period of not-so-much internet, which is one of the perils of living in rural southern Italy. But not much has been happening. other than a few new reviews of The Damned Busters, most of which were kind. The Drying Ink blog has followed up with an interview with me, which some might find interesting.

In other news, I've bought a membership for Fantasycon in Brighton at the end of September. I look forward to meeting some of the new fans that Chesney Arnstruther's adventures are bringing me.

I've written about 13,000 words of a new Luff Imbry novella, as yet untitled, which will be out from PS Publishing next year. I mean to finish it in the next couple of weeks, then perhaps write a couple of short stories for magazines. In the fall, I'll start the third To Hell and Back book.

I finished a third draft of the on-spec thriller, One More Kill, with the invaluable assistance of notes from my agent, John Berlyne, who helped me bring the central character into better focus. The ms is now being submitted here and there. Fingers are crossed.

And I received a few pages of notes from James Sutter, my editor at Paizo, for whom I've written a rogues' adventure tale set in Golarion, the Pathfinder role-playing-game world. The notes helped me avoid any clashes between what I'd written and the complex reality that Golarion has developed into over years and years of gaming-scenario evolution. The book has now acquired a title -- Song of the Serpent -- and should be out later this year. When I get a firm date, I'll post it here, and I'll put up the first chapter on my web page.

Pitching and catching

2011-05-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

A little advice for those of you who write as well as read: any kind of writing is a case of pitching and catching. The pitching is when you put the words on a page; the catching is when somebody reads them. And, in between, things can happen.

When you put the words down, you do so with a certain context in mind. When the reader picks them up, a whole different context comes into play. So what you said may not be what the reader reads.

This observation stems from a blogged review of The Damned Busters. The blogger read a couple of chapters then decided she (the blogger's gender is an assumption-from-context on my part) knew where it was going and didn't bother to read the rest, but skipped forward to find a few words that confirmed her prejudices.

What can you do when someone trashes your book without reading it? Nothing. And it's not just unprofessional bloggers who do this sort of thing. My second novel was professionally reviewed (and positively) in the Toronto Globe and Mail by a critic who obviously read the first chapter and the last few pages.

Again, what can an author do? Nothing, except keep on pitching

A year in Italy

2011-04-10T07:07:00.000-07:00

I'm now at a villa on an olive farm (fattoria di oliva) outside the town of Vieste, on the Gargano Peninsula in the Puglia region of southern Italy. We're scheduled to housesit here for the next year. It will be interesting, to say the least, because most of the people speak no English and I speak about three words of Italian. Still, I expect to learn, since the alternative is to starve to death.

It was a grueling trip to get here: a thirteen-hour flight from Auckland to Hong Kong, followed by a fourteen-hour flight to Rome. We slept off some of the jet lag, then began a train and bus adventure that landed us in a parking lot in central Vieste at 11:30 at night. Italian rural cell phone service can be spotty, so our hosts received none of the messages we'd left, and were not there to meet us. We ended up walking through the empty streets until we came to a hotel where the night clerk gave us a room. He spoke no English, but we managed to communicate in rudimentary French.

In the morning, the English-speaking manager of the hotel helped us connect by internet with our hosts, and we were collected and brought to the farm. In gratitude to our rescuer, I'd like to recommend to anyone thinking of a visit to the Italian Adriatic coast -- which is stunningly beautiful -- to pitch up at the Hotel Falcone. We paid only 65 euros for a well-appointed room and as much Italian breakfast as we could eat.

The farm is called Vallecoppa (because it's in a cup-shaped valley). Parts of the villa are rented out to tourists during the season, if anyone is looking for a different kind of vacation. It produces the best olive oil I've ever tasted -- the lemon-flavored variety is apparently Prince Charles's favorite.

The main building was built in the thirties by an Italian-American millionaire, over the core of a centuries-old farm house. Benito Mussolini used to stay here when he came to the surrounding Forest of Umbra to shoot wild boar and deer. The two palm trees that flank the entrance to the yard are said to have been a gift from il Duce.

An amazing coincidence: the young British couple who own the fattoria, Joanne and Oliver Driscoll, picked us out of the various prospects on a housesitting site housecarers.com where we've gotten most of our sits. It was only after we were corresponding with Jo to arrange terms and logistics that Ollie discovered that he had had one of my books on his shelves for fifteen years. It was a copy of my short-lived thriller, Downshift, that he'd picked up while backpacking around Vancouver Island during those few brief months in 1997 when it was actually for sale. Considering that there are, at the most, 750 copies of the book in existence, and most of them in Canadian libraries, the coincidence is astounding.

Writing scenes

2011-03-30T18:44:00.000-07:00

Following on from my earlier post about showing, not telling, here are the basics and a few useful tips on writing scenes in genre fiction . . .

Scenes are the fundamental building blocks of genre. They are the venues in which the stories are shown, not told. Scenes may be connected by narrative writing -- "telling" -- and a given scene may contain some necessary narrative description to establish the setting and convey any details that are essential to the action, but they will be mostly about characters in conflict with each other, with their environment, or with their inner selves.

A scene in a genre story or novel is there for a specific purpose: it either advances the plot or it develops the character, and ideally it does both. If the author happens to be a literary genius, a scene may instead evoke mood or make a symbolic statement, but those of us who are not in the genius business are safer if we stick to the plot/character standard.

Now, an aside to establish a definition, because the word "scene" means different things in different media: a scene in a genre novel or story is not the same thing as a scene in a play or a movie. In a play, a scene is the action that takes place in a specific location. In between scenes, the curtain closes (or at least the stage goes dark) and we wait while the set is changed for the next location. In a movie, a scene is bounded by much the same considerations, although one follows fast upon another, because editing takes out all the lag time between showing us what happens on the bridge of the Titanic then cutting to what's going on in steerage.

In genre fiction, a scene is bounded by its content. Just as every novel or story asks and answers a dramaturgical question -- will Hamlet finally make up his mind? will Dumbo come to have faith in his ability to fly? -- so each scene poses and answers a smaller question that's part of the big one that frames the story.

So, in a detective story, we may have a scene in which the sleuth, tipped off, goes to a warehouse at midnight to look for the evidence that will solve the case. The scene's dramaturgical question is: will he find the evidence? The answer, as in most scenes, is liable to be either yes, nor, or not yet.

Say that when he gets to where the evidence is supposed to be, he's jumped by the bad guy's henchmen, beaten up, and hauled off to meet the boss. At that point, we've answered the question and the scene is over. Probably, we go on to the next scene where the confrontation between the bad guy and the sleuth poses a new question: say, will the confrontation yield new information that moves the plot along? And again, the question will be answered -- yes, no, not yet -- by the action in the scene.

Because it's about asking and answering a question, every scene, long or short or inbetween, has a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is where the conflict inherent in the action begins, the middle is where the conflict develops, and the end is when the conflict resolves into the answer.

The key word in the above para is conflict. Every scene is built around a conflict of some kind, be it physical, verbal, emotional, spiritual, or any other form you can think of. The protagonist of the scene struggles against some kind of opposition to fulfill some kind of agenda. A scene without conflict is just travel writing or character sketching, both of which are fine in their own milieus, but not what the genre fiction reader is looking for -- which is story, the basis of which is conflict.

Scenes also have a sense of time passing. Things happen, one after the other, and the reader is carried along from moment to moment, action to action, with an illusion of immediacy. Even though most genre fiction is written in the past tense, the reader is led by the "show, don't tell" technique to experience it as if it's happening right now.

To write a scene, you must first settle the issue of whose point of view the scene will be told from. In narrative (or "literary") fiction, the point of view may be that of an omniscient narrator who describes characters and editorializes on their strengths and foibles. In genre fiction, the author is advised to choose either a first-person pov or what is called third-person-limited.

In first person, the warehouse scene would open something like this: "I opened the door to the warehouse and slipped inside, my trusty Smith & Wesson sub-nosed .38 ready in my hand." In third-person-limited, it would go: "Dick Tracy opened the door to the warehouse and slipped inside, his trusty Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38 ready in his hand."

The reason the latter is called "limited" is because it is restricted to the pov of only one character in the scene -- in most scenes it's usually the story's protagonist, although scenes shown from the pov of a supporting character or even the antagonist (the "bad guy") may be useful to the story-telling process. So, even though other characters may come into the scene, like the henchmen waiting in the warehouse shadows, the reader will experience them only through Dick Tracy's sensorium -- seeing what he sees, hearing what he hears, feeling the pain of the blows he suffers. If we want the reader to know anything about what another character is thinking or feeling, it will have to be funneled through Dick Tracy's senses and perceptions.

Leaving a pov character's frame of reference to dip into another character's in the same scene is called "head-hopping." It's acceptable in literary fiction, but not genre. So we can't write, "The one with the squashed nose, a genuine sadist, was enjoying hitting Tracy in the same part of his belly over and over again, doubling and redoubling the pain."

Instead, it has to be something like this: "The one with the squashed nose threw a second punch that struck Tracy in the same spot as the first blow. The pain flared up like a fire when gasoline is thrown on it, and the detective's vision became a tunnel framed in red. He looked into the thug's eyes, saw the pleasure there, and knew that he was being beaten by a genuine sadist. The man's knowing smile as he slowly drew back his fist for a third strike showed that this was not just business. The bastard was enjoying himself."

The more you use the pov character's senses in describing what's going on, the more you'll draw the reader into the scene. So try to avoid generic descriptions like "The air in the room was chilly," and instead describe from within the character's sensorium: "The chill air raised goosebumps on Tracy's bare arms and sent a shiver through his back muscles."

Minimize description in scenes, because it slows down the action. Choose a couple of apt details to put the reader in the picture and let the reader's power of confabulation -- that's the human mind's ability to create a complete picture from just a few clues -- do the rest. For example, the thug above with the squashed nose and knowing smile needs no more embellishment.

A tip for beginners. Most us, when starting out, have a tendency to write a lot more than is necessary. In writing scenes, that includes writing your way in and writing your way out. Modern readers, especially, have been educated by the rapid-fire editing of contemporary movies and television shows. They don't need the written equivalent of the establishing shots that bygone generations of movie-goers were used to.

So in the warehouse scene, we wouldn't bother with how Tracy got to the place. We would start the scene with him opening the door and going in, because that's where the conflict begins. The reader will understand that he got there somehow. And we would end it when the scene's question has been answered. The warehouse scene could end with the bad guys putting a black bag over the detective's head and everything going dark. There's no need to describe his being shoved in a car, driven across town, dragged out, manhandled into another building and shoved into a chair. The next scene can begin with the hood being pulled off his head so the confrontation with the bad guy can get underway.

When you're going over your draft, look for those "ears" on the beginnings and ends of scenes, the places where you wrote your way in and out, and cut them. You'll get a faster-paced story.

Finally, every character in a scene has an agenda, something he or she (or it) is trying to achieve. It's the clash of those agendas that makes for conflict. And conflict is the indispensable tool of the genre fiction writer.

Free copy of Welcome to the Greenhouse

2011-03-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

As I post this, it's only three hours since Gordon Van Gelder sent out the email, so there may be time for the early adopters...

O/R Books, publishers of Welcome to the Greenhouse, the anthology of science fiction about climate change (that Gordon edited and in which I have a story) is giving a free copy to the first twenty people who send them an email and promise to blog about the book. Details are here.

Majestrum review

2011-03-15T20:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a recent blogger's review of Majestrum, the first Henghis Hapthorn novel. The blogger, Hornrimmed Magpie, says, "The idea that you will, in time, be subsumed by something that is you and yet your opposite is profoundly unsettling, and Hapthorn's attempts to soldier on, to make allowances, and yet maintain the upper hand are mesmerizing." It's a welcome comment, because it goes to the core of what the Hapthorn books are really about. They are a study of a proud (hell, hubristic) man having to come to terms with his own inevitable diminishment, as indeed we all do when we come to realize what age will eventually do to us.

Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, is also the editor of a themed anthology, Welcome to the Greenhouse. All the stories (including a lightweight, humorous offering of mine, "Not a Problem"), are about climate change anthology. He recently did has done an interesting radio interview on the book and on short sff in general. My name comes up midway through.

I haven't been posting much lately because I'm trying to get as much done as possible on the spec thriller I'm writing, before I have to up-stakes and relocate from New Zealand (beautiful place) to Italy (just as beautiful, but of course different). I've got 50,000 words in the can and the central character, an ex-soldier dying of leukemia who kills people who really deserve it, is evolving nicely.

Showing, not telling

2011-03-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

If there’s one stumbling block that trips up people who are trying to write genre fiction, it’s the challenge of “show, don’t tell.” Some people don’t seem to be able to grasp the difference, and so they keep churning out narrative-based stories (“telling”) that editors reject because what they (and the readers) are looking for is scene-based writing (“showing”).

I think part of the problem is that narrative is the natural way we tell each other stories off the page. We say, for example, “My grandfather was in the merchant marine in World War II and on his first convoy crossing, his ship was torpedoed off Newfoundland.” We don’t verbally construct a scene, saying, “It was cold on the open bridge of the SS Minerva, two days out of Halifax. The old freighter’s constant dip and climb through the deep-troughed waves of the North Atlantic threw up a heavy spray, most of which froze on the chilled steel of the bulkhead -- but the rest seemed to be aimed directly at the beardless face of young Pete Hammond, making his first voyage into the longest, most murderous battle of the Second World War. He thrust his fists deeper into the pockets of his sailor’s pea jacket, tucked his wind-numbed chin behind his closed collar button, and counted the minutes until the ship rang four bells, when old Albert would come up and relieve him.”

But if you want to write sf, fantasy, mysteries, romance, westerns – any of the genres – you have to overcome your default storytelling instincts and acquire a set of tools that let you create the illusion of immediacy of action (i.e., of “being there”) in the reader’s mind. Those tools are:

· sequentiality – the action happens, step by step, before the reader’s eyes;

· detail – rather than generic, generalized descriptions, you draw the reader’s eye (and ear and nose and sense of touch) to specific, precise details from which the reader will confabulate the whole;

· point of view – genre fiction is told from the point of view (pov) of the characters, rather than from the god’s-eye view of an omniscient narrator; the preferred pov is called third-person-limited, i.e., each scene is anchored in one (and only one – that’s why it’s called “limited”) character’s view and appreciation of what’s going on in that scene, and that character is referred to as he, or she, or it, as the case may be. First-person pov, where the point of view is that of the protagonist or another character who refers to him/her/itself as “I,” is less common in genre fiction, but is acceptable. Second-person pov – as in a story that begins “You open the door and ease yourself into the room” – is usually not an easy sell;

· character sensorium – you deepen the illusion of immediacy by showing the action in the scene through the pov character’s senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and the other lesser senses (balance, hair-raising response, etc.) to vicariously stimulate the reader’s own sensorium; using the technique effectively requires picking the right sensory details that will best cause the reader to confabulate and identify with the character’s situation;

· conflict – every scene is built around a conflict, whether major or minor, whether physical, verbal, spiritual, psychological, and the scene begins when that conflict begins and ends when it ends.

Now here is an example of the same action being told in narrative and shown in scene writing.

NARRATIVE

Armored and with sword and shield slung across his back, the brave warrior Arctor scaled the windy heights of Bran Covin. The way was steep. At times, on the bracken-covered lower slopes, he stooped to all fours, and at the end he must scale a sheer cliff, clinging by toe holds and fingertips. All day he climbed until, high up where the air grew thin, he came at last to a wide ledge backed by a dark-mouthed cave. From within its shadows came the troll Blodmir, roaring and wielding a great club of lighting-blasted oakwood set with stone points. They fought until Arctor's shield was battered to a shapeless mass and Blodmir bled from a dozen cuts, yet still either might have won the day. But, though weakened from the battle and the scant air, the hero delivered a cunning stroke that lamed the troll, then thrust him bodily out into the empty air beyond the ledge, to fall to the sharp rocks far below. Then Arctor entered the noisome cave to claim the treasure he had won.

SCENE

The sun was just clearing the eastern horizon as Arctor set a booted foot on the lowest slope of Bran Covin. The massif reared high above him, its upper heights bare rock wreathed in mist, its steep lower slopes clad in dense heather and clumps of thistle that tugged at his coarse leggings with each step. The morning air was chill against his face but soon he felt trickles of sweat coursing down his ribs beneath the padded linen hauberk and the tight-ringed mail that covered his torso.

By mid morning, he had reached ground so steep that he stopped to sling his shield across his back, cinching its carrying strap tight across his chest. He yanked on the baldric that supported his scabbarded broadsword until it too hung from one shoulder. Then, bent-kneed and with hands grasping at the bracken, he pushed and pulled himself up the precipitous slope until he came to a field of stones that had broken off and fallen from the heights above. Beyond the jumble of sharp-edged debris a gray wall of weather-cracked rock rose sheer before him.

It was noon now and he sat on a boulder, drinking from his water bottle and chewing a lump of field bread as his keen eyes sought for a succession of crevices and outcrops that would be his route up the cliff. An hour later he was high above where he had sat, and higher still above the slope where he had fought the bracken. Now his face was pressed against the sun-warmed stone, fingertips blindly seeking above him for the next crack while the inner edge of his boots rested precariously on another small imperfection in the vertical rock.

At mid-afternoon, he found his way blocked by a outcrop that bulged out of the cliff face. Sweat stinging his eyes, his fingers torn and nearly numb, his shoulder muscles afire from the strain of the sustained climb, he worked his way sideways and found the base of a crevice that went straight up. It was a perfect width for him to climb by pressing his palms and boots against the rock and he made good progress.

Near sundown, he levered himself up onto a ledge three times as broad as Arctor was tall, backed by a wide-mouthed cave. Up here the air was so thin that the hero must take deep breaths to keep his head from spinning and his sight from blurring. The inhalations brought him the rank odor that emanated from the cave, a mingling of long-unwashed flesh and the sweet stench of rotting meat. He kept his eyes on the darkness as he loosened the cinch of his shield so he could swing it forward and slip his left arm through the padded brace, while his sword hand went over his shoulder to grasp the sword's hilt. The long blade slipped from its scabbard's oiled embrace with a sound like a serpent's hiss.

From within the cave he heard the faint rasp of a claw upon stone, then from the darkness rushed the red-eyed troll Blodmir, half again Arctor's height despite his bent-kneed gait, his lipless mouth sending a roar of red rage past dagger-sharp teeth. With one clawed hand he raised a length of lightning-blasted oakwood, black and iron-hard, as long as Arctor's leg, its thick end studded with points and blades of razor-edged flint.

Arctor took the club's first blow on his upraised shield, felt the shock race up his arm to his shoulder even as the clash of wood on iron rang in his ears. He swung his sword in a lateral slash at Blodmir's ribs, the weapon's edge laying open the pebbly skin but bouncing off the stony ribs beneath. The troll roared again, pain mingled with rage, and brought the club down once more. The upper rim of Arctor's shield buckled inward, and the force of the impact numbed the hero's shield hand.

He stepped back, feinted to draw his opponent off balance, then tried a straight thrust at the troll's naked belly. But Blodmir swept the sword away with the back of one great hand, ignoring the wounds the honed edge opened on his fingers, and again he hammered with the length of blasted wood on the shield rim, driving Arctor almost to his knees.

The shield was no use, the man saw. As the troll came on again, he flung it, edge-on, at Blodmir's red eyes and followed with another thrust that pierced the opponent's hip. The troll seemed to feel no pain but swept the club in a sideways blow that would have crushed Arctor's ribs had he not leaped back. Still, it was a near thing -- a flint set into the head of the cudgel scratched across the rings of Arctor's mail, striking sparks.

And now it was cut and duck, slash and spring back, his aim to bleed the troll into weakness while avoiding the long-armed sweeps of the crude weapon. The ledge grew slippery with Blodmir's blood and Arctor's deepest breaths of the thin air were barely enough to keep the dizziness from slowing him. His vision grew red at the edges and he labored to draw air into his lungs, the sword growing ever heavier in his hand.

But Blodmir was slowing too, the rage in his eyes giving way first to a look of puzzlement, then doubt. Limping from a wound in one calf, he blundered forward again, swung his club at Arctor's ankles. But the man leaped over the cudgel, then tucked and rolled between the troll's bandy legs, springing to his feet behind Blodmir. The effort caused his head to spin and the red in his vision darkened to black. But he saw the tendons where they stood out in the back of the monster's knee and thrust his sword's point at them.

The cords parted in a rush of blood. Blodmir's roar was more of a bleat as the torn leg collapsed beneath him. He tried to turn, meaning to strike at Arctor but the man went forward, the sword held level before him like a quarter staff, and shoved against the troll's hip. Off-balance, teetering on one leg, Blodmir staggered back a step and Arctor came at him again, shoving with the flat of the sword.

The monster moaned, tried to raise the club for one more strike, but Arctor stepped beneath the uplifted arm and, panting, his head aswim, he used the last of his failing strength to push the troll back another step.

It was a step that brought Blodmir's splayed foot to the edge of the precipice. The friable rock split and cracked, and in a moment the troll toppled over and out into the empty air. Arctor saw him fall, the club swinging at nothing, the lipless mouth open in a roar the man could not hear. Then the body struck the jagged rocks below and burst like a bladder of blood.

Arctor stepped back, set the point of his sword against the stone beneath him and leaned on it for a long moment until his lungs could get enough from the air to keep him from swooning. When his vision cleared, he looked to the cave. In the darkness something glowed with a light of its own.

On still trembling legs, the hero stepped into the foul-smelling lair to collect the treasure he had won.

Polls don't matter

2011-03-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

I keep seeing stories in the US papers that say the Republicans are way off base with their cuts-and-misery agenda because polls consistently show that the majority of Americans want government action to solve the unemployment problem.

The trouble is, it doesn’t matter what the majority of Americans want, because the majority of Americans don’t vote. The Republicans changed the make-up of the Congress by motivating some 22 per cent of the electorate to come out and vote for them.

The first criterion for winning a battle is to show up. As long as most of the US electorate is more interested in Charlie Sheen and American Idol, the results of public opinion polls aren’t worth a tinker’s dam.

I think we’re seeing the same trend in Canada. The Tories pursue a nasty, attack-ad style of politicking, in continual campaign mode. It energizes their base and turns off more moderate voters. The result: election turn-outs decline, and a determined minority can hijack our democracy.

First review of The Damned Busters

2011-03-06T17:50:00.000-08:00

A pleasant surprise: here's the first review --http://thecelebritycafe.com/reviews/damned-busters-matthew-hughes-03-06-2011 of To Hell and Back: The Damned Busters, appearing well before the book's release in May. Reviewer Eric Gordon gives it five stars and calls it "a supernatural adventure that blends a rich and unpredictable story, with a tone and wit that provides plenty of laughs along the way. A great balance of action and comedic situations with some romance thrown in for good measure, albeit an awkward romance, this is a great read."

For those who missed the original short story, "Hell of a Fix," in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, I've put up the first 10,000 words at http://www.archonate.com/db

Growing up poor

2011-03-02T14:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a little piece I wrote as a letter to the editor for a local paper in the Comox Valley years ago:

The thing about growing up poor that is not understood by people who haven't grown up that way is that some of the fundamental baselines are different. The non-poor take for granted certain underpinnings of life: you'll have a roof over your head next month; you'll eat lunch every day next week; when your shoes wear out, you'll get new ones; nobody will come and take your furniture away. For the poor, these are not givens, but variables.

There are also less basic, but no less significant, givens: you'll get something for Christmas; you'll break the monotony of everyday life by going on a vacation or to summer camp; you'll go to college; if you work hard, you'll get what you want.

The non-poor live in a firmer, more dependable world. It gives them a degree of self-assurance that they are not even aware of, because they have never known the absence of the conditions that cause it. They don't have to take gravity into account every time they take a step, because gravity has been a constant throughout every moment of their lives. But the poor don't get reliable gravity. Sometimes you go to take an ordinary step and find yourself spinning off into space.

It makes you different in a way that the people who don't share that difference can't understand.

Angry Robot looking at unsolicited manuscripts

2011-02-28T12:10:00.000-08:00

Throughout the month of March, one of my publishers, Angry Robot Books, is willing to look at unsolicited manuscripts in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres. I've found them very good people to work with, and this is a genuine shot at publication if your book is good enough and right for their list.

Here's where to find out more: http://angryrobotbooks.com/open-door-month-guidelines/

First Post

2011-02-25T20:28:00.000-08:00

I'm finally starting a blog, now that I hear they're being replaced by tweets. I plan to post news items from my webpage -- www.archonate.com -- as well as advice to writers on the craft and the business.

I may also sound off on whatever takes my fancy.

Here's something I wrote for the Canadian Writers Guide (I think that was the title) some years ago. It's still good advice.

START YOUR STORY WHERE THE STORY STARTS

Every novel has a point where the hero(ine) embarks upon the main conflict at the heart of the story. It's when Dumbo wakes up in a tree; it's when a Louis L'Amour cowboy dives for cover as a shot rings out.

That's the place to begin your manuscript. Why not first establish the character and setting? Because you may have only a few lines to hook that most crucial of readers -- an agent.

I've heard a major New York agent tell this story at writers conferences: one Friday afternoon each month, he and his associates gather around a table that holds a stack of sample chapters they have asked to see, after winnowing through several hundred query letters. Now they decide which chapters to read over the weekend.

Each manuscript is passed around. Agents read the first page. If the ms grabs someone's attention, it goes in a briefcase. If it doesn't grab anybody, it's gone.

If that was the opening of a novel you spent years writing, that Friday peek was your only shot. Your story catches fire on page three? Too bad; page one didn't hook anybody.

So put your main plot point in the first para of page one. Get your story started, and then layer in the back story as you keep going. Your chances of landing an agent will take a quantum leap, and that is the first step into the big leagues.

Besides, once you've sold the book, you and your editor can always rewrite the opening.