Nominated for the PKD Award

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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.