Fiction Writing: Advice and Discussion

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Caveat that I banged that out over lunch in response to a Twitter discussion, so don't expect a hermetically sealed monolith of logic. But I'm glad it was useful!

# ¿ Nov 3, 2013 02:33

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

That makes sense, but I'm not sure it's something you couldn't get just by reading them a lot.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 21:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm not sure I'd agree that fantasy set in secondary worlds has trouble reaching the mainstream. If anything, I think big sprawling secondary-world epic fantasy is some of the most mainstream fiction. Between Tolkien and George R. R. Martin, fantasy sales were dominated by sprawling, fairly puerile save-the-world stories (which, like you say, appeal to pretty adolescent power fantasies). A lot of successful fantasy today is still set in secondary worlds, though you're right that superhero, zombie, and post-apocalypse stories have really taken off.

But a few writers - LeGuin is the first to come to mind, but I know there are others - managed to write genuinely interesting secondary worlds, and I think a lot of that comes down to their ability to texture.

The original set of tweets is right, I think, to connect the issue of worldbuilding to colonialism - basically, if you leave your secondary world hazy, people will fill it with their defaults, which are probably going to be white and sort of Ren Faire European. It's been pointed out to me by non-American friends, though, that if you're not a writer from a colonial power, your defaults aren't going to be particularly colonial.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 01:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The problem in writing racist sexist medieval Europe settings is that people usually botch the way the racism and sexism worked. Women had a fair bit of power in medieval society, and there were a lot of non-white people with roles in these societies beyond 'outsider' or 'slave'. Of course, both women and POC were constrained by the institutionalized misogyny and xenophobia of the system they lived in, and you can tell really compelling stories about those flaws. Just don't write a rape-happy world of whores and housewives while crying that women were never rulers and never soldiers and never powerful and call it a realistic depiction of medieval misogyny: you've elided both the actual roles that women played in medieval society and the ways they tried to resist or just live within the power structure.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 21:34

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Happy not to disappoint. :shobon:

I've been working on a project about a really dark, homophobic world, so I can only hope it's possible to write about horrible poo poo without being horrible.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 05:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Symptomless Coma posted:

Submitted to a couple of places, but nothing. I know there's a market for that sort of thing somewhere, but I'm damned if I can find it...

What length, what genre, where's it been so far?

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 15:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Symptomless Coma posted:

500w / Borgesian thought experiment _{seriously not trying to be a dick but I don't know what else to call it} / a comp for under-500w fiction, and a mag here in London called Cadaverine, but I really don't think that's what they're looking for.

But hey, you're welcome to have a look!

This is pretty legit! I know genre short story markets quite well, and my inclination is that you'd have a real shot at selling this piece if it were, unfortunately, ~1500 words longer. Which is a shame, because it's sort of an imagery piece as it stands, and if it gets longer it might only add dead weight.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2013 23:18

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The Saddest Rhino posted:

I Am Legend is arguably the easiest and the shortest, so start with that. Slaughterhouse is good reading, Clockwork Orange can be incredibly difficult if this is your first reading list, especially as it uses its very own vocabulary and you may have to refer to the glossary several times. King has many deriders, but he has an easy to read style. I would suggest you also take a look at King's On Writing.

On your criteria for reading, are you primarily looking at genre fiction? Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke have some good ones, so start with the short stories to see if you like them.

If you're looking at genre short stories, I'd actually suggest turning an eye to more modern writers. There's been a remarkable eruption of good short fiction in the field in the past ten/twenty years. I'm not immediately coming up with any authors that fit the themes you're after (this aimed at RamblingSoul) but I'm confident they exist.

This would also have the advantage of getting some women on your to-read list, which, especially in genre, I think is really important. The discourse of 'who's who in SF/F' has been remarkably effective at erasing some really, really important women authors.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 19:39

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I usually hear this component of writing described as 'blocking'. I dunno if that'll help you Google!

# ¿ Dec 19, 2013 21:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

RE: length, if you're planning to write a viable genre debut novel in (say) fantasy, shoot for 100,000 words. Do not go above 110,000. And if this is the first thing you've really sat down to write, embrace the fact that it's probably going to be awful and just power through it.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2013 05:48

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

At least in genre markets, simultaneous submission is really bad form, and if you're already at the stage of discussing payment then yeah, you should pull your story from the contest ASAP.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2013 16:37

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Huh, that's really weird. No pro-rate science fiction or fantasy market will accept simultaneous submissions for short stories (novels are a totally different matter). If you're working in another genre, or outside of pro markets, things are probably completely different and I don't have any useful advice. But in SF/F your only recourse right now would be to withdraw from the contest.

# ¿ Dec 30, 2013 19:46

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's not even a matter of sure thing vs. chance - under normal publishing etiquette (and, again, this may be an exception outside my experience...) you are now more or less obliged to go forward with the publication and to withdraw from the contest immediately.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2013 05:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah fair enough. I hope we're not all coming off as assholes, but every editor I've talked to considers this a huge problem so I don't want your first sale to cause you trouble down the road.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2013 21:41

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, agreed. 'Said bookisms' are one of the most commonly recognized and mocked marks of bad writing.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 21:42

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

FouRPlaY posted:

I flipped through my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and saw no mention of how to use "said." If it's not in the publisher's house style, it's up to the author to decide on how dialogue is tagged - if at all.

Sure, but it's perfectly compliant with the Chicago Manual of Style to tag your dialogue like this: "'Let's build a fort,' he said defensively." Or: "'Take cover', the burly detective growled gruffly. 'I can't see where they are!' his lissome companion shrieked.'"

Good writing, including dialogue tags, goes well beyond basic style and grammar. It's up to the author to decide on how their dialogue's tagged - but not all those decisions are good.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 23:06

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Ohhh we're talking specifically about the ordering. I feel like I went off a bit strong, then, as yeah, that's clearly more of a matter of personal style.

Nika posted:

I realize this is what people say, but I'm always confused as to how this became such a hard and fast rule. I mean, every single book I've got on my bookshelf uses words other than "said" for dialogue tags, though it's only a few times every several pages or so. And I sure as hell don't read THAT much YA.

This is an example of people following the rule. If they weren't following the rule, believe me, you'd notice :v:

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 23:21

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

magnificent7 posted:

I think I'm going to approach him with it, and ask him to refer to his favorite authors, or books.

It's absolutely a preference thing. If his favorite books are packed with it, then my opinion carries no weight, regardless what current writing books are saying. The concept of "show don't tell" was recently called out as old and out of date. poo poo changes. Nothing wrong with that.

But drat. It's like he's got the thesaurus open to "SAID" and is going hog-wild.

This is not a preference thing, it's just bad writing. Dropping synonyms for 'said' constantly is certainly Incorrect.

On the other hand the issue of 'Character said' vs. 'said Character' is much less clear-cut, as far as I know.

You should (maybe) not say this directly to him, but if he ever goes to a workshop or speaks to a professional editor he'll hear the habit of replacing 'said' with synonyms mocked in...probably the first five minutes of the lecture/conversation.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2014 23:41

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

blue squares posted:

For me, most places take weeks or months, and usually have a very low acceptance rate. If I write a story that I want to publish, chances are the first place I send it to isn't going to accept it, and neither will the second, third, and so on. Why are these places so special that I should tie my story up for ages waiting to be rejected one by one until I'm finally accepted somewhere? Whoever reads it and likes it first gets to publish it, the rest I'll withdraw it from.

edit: Ah, multiples not sim subs. Yeah, that I have yet to do.

Please don't do this: editors remember all those withdrawals and you'll burn your bridges before you even get to build them. Except at Tor.com, they might deserve it :v:

(I'm joking, High Editor Gorinsky)

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 19:35

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I sold the last two stories I wrote to Clarkesworld within a week. If I'd sim-subbed to Lightspeed, which has similar response times, there's a very good chance I could've been looking at acceptance letters from both markets one really awkward morning.

The chances may be astronomical on aggregate, but if you just look at Really Good Stories - the stories you write that are going to sell - you shouldn't be sim subbing. And since you don't know when you're going to cross from 'this will get 10 rejections' stories into 'everyone will want to buy this', just don't get into the habit of sim subbing. It can only burn you.

Of course, I just put blue squares' (anonymized) post to the collective SF/F short fiction editorial world on Twitter and they told me not to bother talking him out of it, so maybe I should stack arms.

e: I am probably coming off as a bit of a fascist about this, I apologize. Odds are you are not going to wreck your entire career with a few simsubs. Just, uh, keep it quiet.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Jan 3, 2014

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 19:53

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I'm sorry, I know that came off really dickish. Edited my post to sound like less of a writer Hitler.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 19:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I was super pleased, but it wasn't something I'd expected, and if it ever happens to anyone here it'd be really awkward to have to withdraw on account of prior sale to Lightspeed or another fast-response market.

I'm Seth Dickinson, I've sold a handful of short pieces.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 20:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yes. That said, you might be missing out on the best markets in your field if you're selecting only for those that take sim subs. What genre are you working in?

(Also, I hope someone's made it clear that very few people make a full time living as a writer, and no one as a short story writer - though I suspect you know all this by now.)

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 20:54

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

In general the game with sim-subs is to count on most markets rejecting most submissions. So you submit to Analog and to Doc Kloc's SF Mag, you get an acceptance from Doc Kloc's, and you gamble that you'll get a rejection from Analog in a couple months...or you bite the bullet and withdraw from Analog right then, taking the chance that Mr. Quachri will know (he'll know) what you were up to.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:02

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Martello posted:

When Clarkesworld tells me my story was "almost, very close, but not exactly what we're looking for. Please submit again." are they blowing smoke up my rear end or should I send em something else?

Is that verbatim what they said? That's a high-tier form rejection, maybe even a personal, which are very very rare from Clarkesworld. Someone deliberately chose to send you that instead of their stock form rejection. Absolutely submit there again, you genuinely did get close.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:12

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

It's a high-tier form rejection, yeah. I couldn't say if it's the highest, but it's a much more positive response than most authors are going to get from them.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 21:20

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, I'm at sethjosephdickinson at gmail.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2014 22:57

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

The shorter the better.

Dear [get the editor's name right, use full name, no Mr/Mrs. in case they identify differently],

Please find attached my [genre] short story "Name" (word count).

My work has previously appeared in XYZ and will soon appear in ABC. I am the winner of $award. (Rarely: This story is based on my professional/personal experience with $subject).

Thank you for your consideration.

Regards,
you

Other people might have other templates, I'm curious to see.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2014 05:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Yeah, I've seen it happen and I did get accepted. I think it generally indicates that you've mowed at least a little way up the chain.

# ¿ Jan 21, 2014 06:49

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

If I have learned anything from the past month it's that writing should be called Metal Gear Rising Revengeance because there's always something to cut.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2014 01:40

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I would say the vast majority of editorial advice I get is in line with those suggestions. I think they're a good starting point, not the whole of writing, but they're a very strong (if unsubtle) place to begin.

When I'm asked to make cuts it's usually along the lines of 'I think you could imply this information elsewhere in the story' rather than 'write a big ol' flashback'.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2014 21:45

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

If any of you are planning to vote I want to encourage you to check out Benjanun Sriduangkaew and Brooke Bolander. I'd also encourage you to look at me, but my first pub was December 29 2011 so I'm ineligible by three days.

# ¿ Jan 31, 2014 20:33

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Just got two offers from agents on my first novel and an interview at Bungie Studios for a writer position. To everyone mired in the loneliest, bleakest parts of writing, there is hope in this world :unsmith:

# ¿ Feb 12, 2014 17:52

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Brandon Sanderson is many things, but a boundary-pushing explorer of the fantastic is not one of them. He's a conservative fantasy writer in several senses.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2014 21:07

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

CB_Tube_Knight posted:

Stunning argument, but you don't actually prove anything without saying how he's the same as all the others. Like I said the creatures in the Mistborn books (the four of them thus far) don't resemble other fantasy creatures with the exception of shape-shifters. The magic system is interesting, well thought out and well explained/defined. At least the first two books are deconstructions of the average fantasy tropes ("the hero of ages has failed" and "completion of destiny"). Even the society isn't exactly placed in exactly the same kind of European style setting a lot of fantasy is. Female main character, which isn't uncommon anymore, but it's still not as common as male characters in the lead in high fantasy. Nor is the fact that the girl isn't just a man with breasts and a vagina. She behaves like a teenage girl.

Mistborn isn't incredibly written or ground breaking in most ways, but it isn't the typical fantasy story we see paraded out that might as well be another D&D game or Tolkien clone.

I was going to make an articulate response but it sounds like we're on the same page about Sanderson (he is pretty mediocre but far from the shittiest), so, uh, worth it? I just didn't want Impressionable New Readers getting the sense that he was a particularly cutting-edge author of experimental genre fiction.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2014 23:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Just cut to black unless there's vital emotional text/subtext that needs to be put in the sex scene. This is possible but rarely done well.

I am a straight guy, and I write almost entirely gay/lesbian characters, in part due to my background in the social sciences and what it taught me about how people learn attitudes. I will probably get called out for a mistake at some point, but so far across a dozen+ professional sales I've had very positive response. I'm not going to write queer characters as well as queer people, but I do all right.

My advice is to write your character as a human being and watch yourself rigorously for defaulting - slipping into cliched, easy imagery or thought. Whenever you detect defaulting (like describing your lesbian character from the third person with a male gaze, or writing her dress, gender presentation, or turn-ons using material you've drawn from the cultural presentation of lesbians), shoot it down and find a subtler, truer alternative. Show your reader that you thought about everything. Never take the easy route. I wouldn't even write an I Confront Homophobia scene or an I Come Out Awkwardly scene - the stock narratives about gay people in straight eyes - unless I felt it was necessary and true and I'd bounced it off some queer friends.

Make sure you are writing a character, who is queer, rather than A Queer Character whose 'characterization slots' - whatever you want to call the details you know and understand about a person you're writing - get filled up with 'is gay', 'deals with homophobia', so on. You should have a fully fledged character and they're gay. Which is not to say that being gay can't be central and important and critical! But it's not the whole of someone. It is a part of someone that does not substitute for any other part of what makes them interesting. They must have wants and needs and an arc and - man, I'm just finding news way to say, a human being like everybody else. And a real hero. Real human being.

And for the love of god, if you get called out for loving up, listen, apologize (if necessary), and do better. Don't argue or try to explain.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Mar 12, 2014

# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 07:23

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Nika posted:

This post owns, thank you.

Gender is very complicated, and it's something I think almost every writer needs to think about more, especially when doing historical work, or work in an SF/F secondary world. Our society does a bad job of teaching us where our gender behavior - the bundle of responses and behaviors tied to a gender - comes from. We assume a lot of it is biologically inevitable, or we find it so invisible we don't even realize it's there (the way men vs. women speak up in conversations, for instance - most men have no idea how much conversational space they swallow).

When you're writing you should try to think about every little quirk of blocking and dialogue and what it's saying about that character and how they perform their gender. I know this sounds kinda out there, but it's really useful! Men in all kinds of societies across the world today hold hands and kiss as an ordinary part of friendship. Polynesian societies have additional genders that don't fit neatly into any Western category. Men in the Homeric epics weep openly in moments of strong emotion. Medieval marriages often occurred for pragmatic business and legal reasons, sometimes between people of the same sex.

Yet fantasy and science fiction rarely explores this range of possibility. You hardly ever crack open your next ten-volume epic fantasy potboiler to find that God's dead and the Bane of Kings has seized the ur-Throne and, by the way, this culture's sexual gaze is female and men are the only ones called beautiful or delicious or whatever, while the attractiveness of a woman is more status and power-driven. Or, to get away from the cheap 'this world is the opposite of ours' construction, perhaps women are seen as better at mathematics and abstract reasoning, making them dominant in engineering and navigation and turning the stone and the sea into 'women's work' - leading to a society that no longer ties femininity so closely to domesticity.

There's a huge space of cultural and historical decisions available here that writers rarely touch. I would bet that most writers aren't even aware that the modern construction of 'being gay' is a pretty recent invention, that queer relationships were not just widespread in large chunks of history, but accepted enough that they didn't get their own names and social categories.

Think about gender! Use it! The rabbit hole goes really deep and every new world or character you create will give you a new set of tough, fascinating choices. And don't be afraid that thinking about this will turn your stories into esoterica nobody will read. People like and appreciate thoughtful writing.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Mar 12, 2014

# ¿ Mar 12, 2014 15:58

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

All stories contain ideology - you might as well examine and make it intentional, so it can serve the themes and emotion of your work.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 05:09

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I pretty much agree with your post except that I'm not sure how to connect your last paragraph with the rest. Explicating ideology through character, plot, and setting is exactly what I'm talking about. When you decide that this society's devotion to academic transparency gives it a technological edge over that society's blinkered priesthood, you're making an ideological point. (It may be a completely accurate and empirically grounded one!) When a character realizes she's been selfish in her investments and starts spending money to help her friends move out of their miserable artist lofts so they can focus on their work, you're making an ideological point.

Any time you connect a cause and an effect you are describing how you believe your fictional world operates. It might be very different from the real world (Catch-22 is full of 'unrealistic' causality, carefully designed to make a point). It might be completely subtle - say your story is a Starmaker-style cosmic history that mostly relies on physics, cosmology, and grand scale history, and the major plot points are facts like 'the proton will soon decay' and 'the universe is vast', without much room for 'the evil chicken explained that libertarianism was wrong and evil.'

Everything you write will come from you and you are full of ideas and assumptions about how the world works, taught to you by experience and the experiences of the people and systems around you.

So you have two choices: you are aware and in control of your story's ideology, or you are unaware of your story's ideology. Since you're a writer, and I think writers should care about intentionality in art, you might as well go for awareness.

I think your concern about authors seeming to 'make a point' is a false dichotomy. Stories don't have to be didactic. You don't have to push an agenda in a piece of fiction. The point is simply that all fiction contains scraps of ideological agenda, and since this is inevitable, you might as well try to understand and examine that agenda.

Again, I really want to highlight this against the inevitable flood of 'just tell a good story' posts: a good story, a great story, the simplest most direct most purely emotional story, will contain ideology. All stories describe a logic and a set of values. There's no reason not to learn to master that. Even if you want to write stories that feel agnostic to everything but their own internal momentum, you still need the skill to evaluate whether you're hitting that goal.

e: This is all abstract so here's a tangible example. While doing drafts of a fantasy novel for my agent, I started thinking about the narrative treatment of a certain character, Bel. He's a subordinate to the protagonist, a social rival who's desperate to escape her authority because he fears it will ruin his career. He comes from a society where high-class men are expected to use a lot of cosmetics, so readers view him as feminized.

Because the story moves pretty quickly through this passage, there's not much time to give Bel subjectivity or dwell on his side of things. Because he's not the primary antagonist, the protagonist views him more as an annoyance than a real menace. And because most of his maneuvers are social and indirect, he appears a little weaselly. All of these facts emerge from good decisions I made - keep the pace up, keep the protagonist so focused on major threats that she doesn't see smaller ones, show that soft social power is valuable and important - but together, they paint Bel as kind of a caricature: an unctuous, effeminate servitor constantly plotting to backstab. Because there aren't many other men in the story who have his gender presentation, the story now feels like it's associating his gender performance (makeup, corsets, rather like an 18th/19th century noble) with his behavior.

Now that I'm aware of the connection I'm accidentally implying, I can figure out ways to defuse or complicate it. I can give Bel some moments of clearer emotion so the reader can stop and sympathize with him. Or I can write other characters with the same gender presentation but cast them more directly and positively, to show that I don't think there's an inherent link between gender performance and shifty political intrigue. The story will hopefully be more powerful and engaging for it, and if anything it'll come off as more natural, less like it's trying to make a point. Bel will read as more of a fully fleshed out human being.

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Mar 13, 2014

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 16:04

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 21:27

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Martello posted:

Well then we're both in the minority. And that's why I wanted more clarity on Battuta's point. I hate it when an author disguises an idealogical tract as a novel.

Again, as I explained above, this is not about how to pack as much political preaching into a story as you can. This is about making a better story, because all stories will contain politics, and you want those politics to work for the story and characters, not against or orthogonally to them.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2014 16:15

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