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The Urban Fantasy Anthology

The Urban Fantasy Anthology

ed. Peter Beagle, Joe Lansdale

Fiction is usually about people.  Mainstream fiction is nothing but character studies; genres are characters plus something else.  A mystery isn't about a mystery; it's about a detective:  Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poroit, Monk, Sam Spade, Mma Precious Ramotswe—they're all outlandish, fascinating characters, and most readers remember them long after they've forgotten what the mystery was.  Horror is about emotion, and life, and our true fears.  Comedy is about character, as any stand-up comedian can tell you.  And romance—well, the stereotypical Harlequin romance is more like characters minus:  Characters with everything but their love relationships played down or stripped away.

But fantasy and science fiction are funny.

As a writer, you'll be told that all stories, even science fiction stories about sentient wristwatches and fantasies about talking ponies, must really be about the emotions of early 21st-century humans.  I believe this less than almost any other author, but I break this rule less than most genre authors.

Most authors don't think they're breaking this rule when I think they are.  That's because they have a different opinion of what "about" means.  They think that "about X" means "the story contains X".  I think that "about" means "the story makes me feel X or think about X".

I might write a story where someone drives a car, flies a kite, and whittles a carving.  That wouldn't mean the story was about driving, kites, or whittling.  In the same way, just because a story has people in it doesn't make it about people.  Suppose a monster in a horror story chases two people, and they run away, and one of them makes it and the other doesn't.  What is the story about?

If the story makes me feel their horror, then the story is about that fear.  But what if it doesn't?  What's it about then?

Nothing.  The story isn't about anything to me, because it doesn't make me feel and it doesn't make me think.  It doesn't matter how many zombies and beheadings it has, it isn't about anything.

The funny thing about fantasy and science fiction is that it's especially easy to unwittingly write a story that isn't about anything.  You can flash dragons and unicorns or ray guns in front of the reader, and hope that each time you do that, it tugs on the emotions that each of those things were connected to by the real stories about dragons and unicorns and ray guns that your readers read in the past.  You can pile so many of these trappings on that you don't notice your story isn't about anything.

You can even become famous and win awards doing that.  Literary types these days are keenly attuned to style.  All the stories in this book are written with a mastery of style that makes me salivate with lust and hunger.  But style is not enough.

The Lord of the Rings takes place in a fantastical world, but it is only secondarily about that world.  You can write a good fantasy that is primarily about a fantastical world, like Dune.  And I think you can write a good science fiction story that is primarily about technology or sociology, like Last and First Men (though these are exceedingly rare).  What is much more common is for writers to think they're doing that when they're just rehashing old ideas and worn-out trappings that don't make you think.  And if the story doesn't make you think and doesn't make you feel, it isn't about anything.

The Urban Fantasy Anthology contains only stories by recognized masters of that vague genre genre.  And I'm going to use it to explain what I mean, by telling you which of these stories I think are about something, and which aren't.

Stories that are about something

"A Bird That Whistles", Emma Bull

This story is about a faerie (the old, dangerous kind) who loves to play the fiddle.  His love for the fiddle brings him into close contact with humans, and he can't help but observe and be puzzled by love and friendship.  The viewpoint character loves a woman, and she loves the faerie, and the faerie loves no one and doesn't know how.  The story is about what love and friendship are, and why we love the wrong people, and the unfairness of life, and the power of music.

"The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories", Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman writes a hopefully-fictitious story about himself, going to Hollywood to write a screenplay.  Everything happens in a haze, with a continually-changing cast of studio executives whose titles and real authority are never clear, none of whom ever read any of the scripts or summaries that he writes for them.  Story decisions are made by the executive's assistants. Meanwhile, he forms a kind of friendship with an old hotel employee, who likes to talk about the movie folks who used to stay there back in the day, back fifty and sixty years ago, and the grandness of character they had.

The story is about a lot of things.  Mostly, what people value, and what they give up for it.  The old man who cleans the pool is the only man in Los Angeles not trying to play the game.  Neil tries to play the game, but finds himself distracted by the germ of a story, a real story that he can write down and tell to people without butchering it for ignorant executives whose only reason for mangling the story is to prove that they're somebodies.  The virtuous, contented old man dies and Neil leaves, and the Los Angeles game goes on.  It's a little simplistic and moralistic, and I don't understand why the old big movie stars are being held up as anything different from today's big movie stars.  But Neil's choice to leave isn't easy, so the story is still about something.

"Hit", Bruce McAllister

God hires a hit-man to kill a vampire who's the son of the Devil.  In exchange, God will forgive him everything.  Or at least that's what the angel offering the deal claims.

The story has some mystery, and some tension, and some violence.  But it's about this hit man and how he feels about what he does, and about selfishness, love, and grace.  It's a hell of a story.

"The Bible Repairman", Tim Powers

Torrez has a special kind of soul—one that he broke himself.  This makes him valuable to the witch-doctors who can use pieces of his broken soul or vials of his blood for their magic.  His sould is doomed to hell anyway, so he thought he might as well sell it off bit-by-bit, until he loses his mind.

But he has stopped.  He's trying to hang on to what he has left of his soul and his mind.  Then someone comes to him with a plea for help, a chance to save a real live girl.  He brings as a gift the stolen soul of Torrez' own little girl.  This gift does not have its intended effect, as Torrez is more interested in reconnecting with the ghost of his daughter than in doing the job.  But he can't reconnect; the ghost is just a ghost, empty and selfish, not worth saving.  And he feels he, too, is empty and not worth saving, and he goes to his death to save the stranger's daughter.

This is a puzzling story, but it makes you think.  It is about selfishness, relationships, duty, and identity.

Stories that might be about something

Then we have the stories that are like modern art:  You look at them and you know that they might be too deep for you to understand, or they might be con-jobs, and you can't tell which.

"Make a Joyful Noise", Charles de Lint

Zia and her sister are crow spirits, or something like that.  They are ancient and powerful and witless and generally well-intentioned, if not overly concerned about mortals.  Zia helps the ghost of a boy resolve his issues with his mother and move on, to whatever comes next.

There are stories within this story.  The boy's story is about how children can fail to understand their parents' love, and how parents can fail to express it.  I have a suspicion the story about Zia might be about something too, though I can't tell what.

"On the Road to New Egypt", Jeffrey Ford

Maybe it's about how religious people take themselves way too seriously, and whoever the forces are behind this world, they're probably jerks.  Maybe it's about how Good and Evil, saints and demons, have a lot more in common with each other than with ordinary folk.  Or maybe it's just the result of too many drugs.

"Julie's Unicorn", Peter S. Beagle

Julie finds a unicorn in a 500-year old tapestry, captive to a knight and a maiden.  She feels so sorry for it that she calls on her grandmother's magic and lets it out of the tapestry.  But it remains tiny, and she finds herself its custodian.

The unicorn wants something.  She and her ex-lover, who was involved by chance, puzzle out that the unicorn is looking for a monk, who must be in the tapestry.  They return it to the tapestry, but into the care of the monk, almost hidden in one corner.

Like many Peter Beagle stories, it's hard to say what the story is about, but I have the feeling that it's about something.

"Companions to the Moon", Charles de Lint

A woman thinks her husband is cheating on her.  She follows him, and discovers he has a secret life as a prince of Faerie.  The old, dangerous kind.  Now that she knows, he must leave her.

Maybe the story is about trust?  It would have been an indictment of the woman, if it had been written 400 years ago.  But the modern author is, if anything, accusing the man of keeping secrets.  Maybe it's about how you can know someone for years, and suddenly find a side of them that you never knew existed.

"On the Far Site of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks", Joe Lansdale

A nasty, vicious, vulgar criminal is chased by a slightly-less-nasty bounty hunter, in a world where zombies are a commodity.  He captures the criminal, then they're both captured by some weird religious cult that wants to kill them.  They agree to work together until they escape.  They do.  Then they kill each other.  The end.

Maybe this story is about how even the most vile, selfish people can have a code of honor.  I don't know.  It's well-written, but I don't know if there's anything more to it than an adventure story with a couple of revolting yet fascinating protagonists fighting zombies and dominatrix nuns.

Stories that aren't about anything

Finally, sadly, we have the stories that aren't about anything.  They have plots and witches and stuff, and they may combine them in new ways, but they don't touch on anything deep or controversial, they don't suck you in and make you identify with a character, and they don't have introduce any new genre trappings novel enough for that to be interesting on its own.

"A Haunted House of Her Own", Kelley Armstrong

In this story, Nathan and his wife Tanya buy a "haunted" house in order to renovate it and charge tourists high prices for staying there.  But the townsfolk believe the stories about the house, and Nathan finds increasingly-convincing evidence that the haunting is real.  He finally dies in a construction accident.  The townsfolk assume it was the ghost.  We then discover the whole thing was a scheme of Tanya's to kill her husband.

So what?  We can't feel Nathan's fears, at least not after finishing, because we find out that his fears were the wrong ones.  We can't feel anything for Tanya.  And there is nothing very interesting about a scheme to kill a husband by blaming it on a ghost.  I'm not saying it's about nothing because there was no ghost.  I'm saying it's about nothing because the author thought that having spooky events and a plot and a twist made it a horror story.

"She's My Witch", Norman Partridge

Boy and girl are lovers.  They take revenge on the school bullies.  Who murdered him.  He's dead, you see.  She's the witch who revived him.  They plan to go back to school.  The end.

"Kitty's Zombie New Year", Carrie Vaugn

Kitty's new year's party is crashed—by a zombie.  Not a brain-eating zombie, but the real thing, a woman whose ex-lover damaged her brain with drugs he ordered on the internet, hoping to stop her from leaving him.  The zombie confronts him, kind of.  His crime is exposed.  The police take him away.  The end.

You could say this story was about love, and what you might do to keep it.  But it isn't, because it doesn't make you think about those things.  Maybe he loved her?  But the reader never thinks, "Gee, I see his point.  I see how, in the same situation, I might do that."  The reader never sympathizes with him, and can't very well identify with the zombie.  The whole horror/zombie/supernatural angle was just a really long, convoluted way of saying "He abused his woman to make her stay," and the reader condemns him and approves as the police take him away.

"Boobs", Suzy McKee CharnasA woman is taunted by male school bullies who want her body.  She becomes a werewolf.  She pretends to be willing to have sex with them, then eats them.  She enjoys it.  The end.

"The White Man", Thomas M. Disch

A little girl from Africa is taught by a lunatic that white people are vampires.  Jesus was the first vampire.  She knows about vampires from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Eventually, she kills a white man, who may or may not have been a vampire.  The innocent? man's death only strengthens the community's belief in vampires, since the death was a thing that happened.  The end.

If anything, the story is about how stupid people are, and how insane beliefs can seem perfectly reasonable.  Mostly, though, it was a "What the hell?" story.  Why did the white man in the story put creepy vaguely-racist messages in his window?  What was the point of having the girl's school exploit her to hand-write scam letters?

"Gestella", Susan PatwickA woman is a werewolf.  She marries a man who only wants her for her body.  She grows old as quickly as a dog.  After a few years with him, she is old.  He takes her to the pound to get rid of her.  The end.

The story is supposed to be about how sad it is that some men don't value women when they get old.  Yes, that's sad.  But I couldn't identify with her, since it was obvious almost from page one that her husband didn't love her.  When you find yourself screaming repeatedly at a character, "Don't go into that basement!", it makes you more aware that they are not you, and destroys identification.  Then the story can't be about feeling what they're feeling.

So we're left with the story trying to be about the fact that some people are jerks.  But I already knew that.  A story where a jerk behaves exactly as you expect him to behave isn't about the fact that some people are jerks, like a story where a fire hydrant works as expected isn't about fire hydrants.

You might notice I listed only five stories by women, and four of them are stories where either a man kills his lover or a woman kills her lover, and I put all of those in the "not about anything" category.  Maybe I don't appreciate these stories because I'm a man, and I just don't relate to the whole vengeance-for-treating-me-that-way thing.  I don't know.  I just call 'em as I see 'em.

Review: The Hobbit

Review: The Hobbit

On Saturday morning, I saw The Hobbit, in the company of about a hundred Tolkien fanatics.  We discussed it before and afterwards.  If you've read the book, there are no spoilers here.

There were some new humorous touches.  (Four words: Mini goblin zipline stenographer.)  Did they throw something more dignified away in order to get laughs, like Lucas did when he had Yoda fight a comical light-sabre duel?  LotR has a grand tone that might suffer from slapstick and silliness.  But I think it's okay to have some silliness in The Hobbit.  The "crack the dishes, smash the plates" song was silly to begin with, and it was wonderfully choreographed--I wonder how many takes they did and how many dishes they went through.

The changes made were mostly difficult story trade-offs.  The way Bilbo left the Shire is an example.  In the book, Gandalf and the dwarves bullied/tricked him into leaving, by saying he looked "more like a grocer than a burglar".  He got upset and said he'd make a great burglar, and suddenly he found himself leaving with them, befuddled about why he had done so.  This was so it could have an arc at the beginning when Bilbo is very foolish, and you don't trust Gandalf, and you feel frightened that Bilbo may have fallen in with a bad crowd.  Not all of this would work in the movie, since everyone seeing it has already seen Gandalf in the LotR movies, and won't even think about distrusting him.  In the movie, Bilbo is not upset by the grocer comment but agrees with it, and makes a long, deliberate decision to have an adventure.  This highlights the Baggins / Took conflict within Bilbo better than in the book.  It also starts Bilbo's character arc further along; he is already mature and not easily manipulated.  This is all done so that we can spend less time on Bilbo, and more time on Thorin and battle scenes.

Many changes were, IMHO, an improvement.  The scene with the trolls was clever.  I think Tolkien hadn't decided how powerful Gandalf would be when he wrote that scene, so he showed Gandalf as perhaps not powerful enough to confront the trolls, and using trickery instead.  It was a great scene in and of itself, but stuck out horribly when later on Gandalf is much more powerful in battle.  The fanatics and I had already went over the 4 possible ways of handling this scene proposed by "Riddles in the Dark".  I said all of them were bad:  The original way was bad (Gandalf too weak), having a long battle would be bad because there were already too many battles, Gandalf just blasting them with magic would be boring, and the trolls just being stupid would be deus ex machina.  In the movie, they gave Bilbo the cleverness instead.  This was rushing Bilbo's character arc a little, making him too clever too soon, so that we can spend more time on Thorin and battle scenes.  But I can't think of any better way of handling the scene.

They made Radagast into an interesting character, and added a lot of movie time showing him and his animals which I found entertaining.  The riddling scene was especially well-done, introducing Gollum's split psyche earlier than Tolkien did, and in an entertaining yet frightening way.

I'd never have understood some of the details my more-fanatical friends did.  It seemed bizarre when Gandalf mentions the blue wizards, "whose names I cannot remember at the moment."  There are 4 other wizards, whom he's known for thousands of years, and he can only remember the names of two of them?  That was a dig at the Tolkien estate, who wanted to charge the movie producers considerable extra to license the material in Unfinished Tales, which is the only place where their names are mentioned.  I also wouldn't have known about Figwit, who has a slightly-larger role in this movie.

The only nonsensical big change I noticed was when they held a White Council mini-meeting in Rivendell on Gandalf's arrival.  That is a major fail in three ways:  It means Gandalf has no reason to leave the dwarves to attend the White Council; they didn't invite most of the members; and it makes no sense, since no one knew Gandalf was coming, not even Gandalf.)

Writers always tell would-be authors to read a lot, but they never tell them to watch movies.  Watching movies is important for writing!  Movie directors are better at thinking cinematically than writers are.  See enough movies that you get a sense for the cinematic, and that how something is seen, camera angles and lighting and all, pops into your head while you're writing.  There's a scene where Bilbo walks through his silent, empty home in the morning, deciding whether to go or stay.   There's a scene where he sneaks up behind Gollum, meaning to kill him, and sees the terrible misery in Gollum's face, and spares him.  There's a scene where the dwarves gather around the fireplace and sing that sad song about their home.  If you didn't have pictures in your mind, you'd have a hard time describing in words what happened and why.

The songs, BTW, were well-done.  I love the melodies in the old Rankin-Bass version, and even the songs Tolkien didn't write, like "The greatest adventure" and "Where there's a whip, there's a way".  (I know Tolkien die-hards hate them because of their modern sound.  Bite me.)  But the melodies in this one are good too, though I was disappointed that they cut "Fifteen birds in five fir trees" (due to the need to rewrite the story to change it to a battle scene that rushed Bilbo's character arc and his reconciliation with the company).

The "mistakes" that I predicted were adding more battles and making the existing battles bigger and longer.  There's a long battle flashback added to provide Thorin's motivation, which I would like to have seen summarized in a few lines of dialogue, but that's because I think the movie is about Bilbo, not Thorin.  It was wrong for the tone of the first half of The Hobbit.  The book opens pastorally, and I like that.  I like some time spent travelling across the wilderness, feeling the bigness of it, slogging through the mud between sudden and dramatic fight scenes.  This movie doesn't do that.

That's a problem with this Hobbit:  Too many battle scenes, and too many characters spending too much time hanging over precipices.  It has the pacing of an action movie.  The action segments were overdone and unbelievable.  The long, LONG fight scene inside the goblin mountain was so ridiculous, I had to look away--what with each dwarf killing dozens of goblins, despite being outnumbered about a thousand to one, and falling hundreds of feet onto rock with no ill effects, not once, but twice--that's twice per dwarf--I felt I was watching the Keystone Kops.  Thorin uses a ladder as a shield against archers, and all their arrows conveniently lodge in its rungs.  Later, they're caught in five or six devastating rock slides and crushed between two mountains slamming against each other, but no one is injured.  That's the level of ridiculousness.  I can't fear for these dwarves anymore; they're obviously made of dwarfonium.

(My fanatical friends did not mind the unreal fight scenes, but were upset at the implied rate of travel possible over the Misty Mountains via bunny sled.  This probably says something about the geek psyche.)

The other problem with this Hobbit is that Bilbo peaks too soon.  We've only gotten to the end of the first movie, and he's already become heroic and finished his character arc (in an added, unrealistic fight scene).  I said this to someone else in the group, and he thought that Peter Jackson didn't think The Lord of the Rings was about Frodo; he thought it was about Aragorn.  Likewise, Jackson probably thought The Hobbit was about Thorin.

That does explain a lot about Jackson's version of LotR.  Still, I laughed at the idea that anybody would spend hundreds of millions making a film of a book called The Hobbit and put it in the hands of somebody who thought the story was not about a hobbit--until someone read out loud part of an interview with some of the development team, who said that The Hobbit was really Thorin's story.  Ugh.  Hollywood.

I kept being struck by how much Tolkien re-uses the same themes and plot elements in the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and LotR.  He plagiarizes from himself.  This didn't bother me as much in the books, which were about Bilbo and Frodo, who are strong enough characters to carry a book.  But with the movies instead being about Thorin and Aragorn, neither of whom are interesting enough to support one movie let alone three apiece, the similarities start to annoy me.  The Arkenstone, the rings, the Silmarils--they all serve similar story functions.  Bilbo and Frodo are variations on a theme, as are the company of dwarves and the Company of the Ring.  I don't even remember how many kings seeking to restore their kingdoms Tolkien has.  He has two dwarven kingdoms carved out under a mountain that the dwarves were driven from after their riches attracted enemies.

One good thing about highlighting Thorin early on is that it fixes one of the book's major failings.  The book opens with the dwarves being nasty money-grubbers who are all about the gold, and around chapter 10 it drop-shifts into being a king's quest to reclaim his kingdom.  The movie introduces the king's quest right off the bat.

At least Thorin isn't as dull a character as Aragorn becomes once he leaves the Shire.  This raises the issue of character flaws.  You might think Aragorn is dull because he has no flaws.  I've said on this blog that writers who tell you to make your characters interesting by giving them flaws are wrong, and I stick by that.   Aragorn is dull because he speaks and acts the way we expect noble warrior kings to.  Gandalf, on the other hand, also has no serious flaws--you could even accuse him of being a Mary Sue, if he weren't absent so much of the time--yet he is a very interesting character.  He just has his own way of doing things.  You don't need flaws to make a character interesting.

We discussed what it meant to the story for Thorin to be young instead of old.  Most of us thought it was just to draw women to the movie--I asked why they couldn't have made one of the dwarves into a hot babe for my sake, then--but someone turned up an interview with someone on the development team who said it was to allow Thorin to fight more energetically.  IMHO, a key consideration is how it makes you feel when Thorin presumably dies in the end.  In the book, Thorin's death was sad, but, honestly, the guy was pretty old already, and so instead of being a tragedy, it was more of a "circle of life" moment, and an "at least he saw his home again before he died" moment.  If this young Thorin dies at the end, it will change the tone of the story.

Story structure: A Canterlot Carol

When you read GhostOfHeraclitus' new story, "A Canterlot Carol", you might imagine that he wrote it in a mad dash of inspiration, like Coleridge writing the opening to "Kubla Khan".  He did in fact write almost all of "Twilight Makes a Cup of Tea" that way, only under the influence of some particularly-nice tea (I assume) rather than opium.  But I have an inside line on ACC, so I can point out some of the deliberate story structure choices.

Let's look at an outline of the story.  SPOILERS EVERYWHERE.

Scene 1: Dotted's office.

Humorous opening with Santa Claus

Scene 2: Spinning Top's office.

Continuation of Santa Claus humor

Introduction of Zebra / Blueblood subplot

Dotted insists that Spinning goes home for Hearthwarming with her family

Dotted has plans for Hearthwarming

Scene 3: Zebrican embassy.

Heightening of tension over meeting Mkali

Discussion of the meaning of Hearthwarming

Vital discussion of the economics of Zebrica-Equestria trade relations

Dotted has plans for Hearthwarming

Scene 4: Dotted's office.

Dotted insists Leafy goes home for Hearthwarming

Dotted has plans for Hearthwarming

Scene 5: Dotted's office.

Dotted's plans for Hearthwarming are to work at his desk so everypony else can go home

Dotted is lonely and sad even though he won't admit it to himself

Scene 6: Celestia's study.

Celestia also missed Hearthwarming because she was doing Dotted's work for him just as he was doing that work for the other ponies

Dotted puts a blanket over her, takes the paperwork, and returns to his office, re-invigorated by the Princess' example, its proof of his importance to her, its vindication of his own actions, and his ability to be useful and repay her love

Nice Christmas colors, Bad Horse!

They are nice, aren't they?  They are about Christmas, because the story is about one meaning of Christmas.  But they're also color-coding the story.  Elements that address the story's theme are green.  Elements that grab the reader and string her along between the green bits are red.

Neither of us were able to think of a subplot introducing the theme that was short and funny enough to open with, so he came up with the Sandy Claws opener, which is funny, short, and doesn't set up any distracting expectations.  After that hook, almost everything in the story derives from the theme, which is told in scene 3, discussion of the meaning of Hearthwarming, and shown in scene 6.  GOH came up with a "plot" revolving around the Zebra ambassador because she, an outsider, can ask what the meaning of Hearthwarming is.  GOH threw out some earlier plots because they didn't directly contribute to the theme, and because they set up a conflict and an expectation for a confrontation with the antagonist and a resolution of that conflict, which would have derailed the story.  He changed Dotted's "meaning of Hearthwarming" explanation from what it was previously (more in line with standard Christmas theory) to what it is now so that it made his story's theme clear:

"I guess you could say it is about being thoughtful. A reminder to not only love, but to be mindful of that love, and to be grateful for having somepony to share it with."

The tension with Mkali  is just long enough to create some tension and drag the reader along, then be defused before the reader's forgotten about the true conflict driving the story, which was planted in scene 2:  Dotted wants to make sure everypony else gets home for Hearthswarming.  We immediately return to that in scene 4 with Leafy, and from there on it's all theme, all the time, until the clincher at the end, repeating the refrain Dotted has been repeating throughout the story, which was first optimistic, then tragic, and is now triumphant.

THIS IS WHY I LOVE THIS STORY.

Bonus meta-rant:  See, analyzing something doesn't ruin it by taking away the mystery!  It makes it better.

2012 in review

I'm stealing bookplayer's Year in Review questions. This is mostly for my own benefit.

Fic total:

29 stories and about 90,000 words, depending how you count.

Overall impressions:

It's much more fun to write when you can immediately find out how many people read your story and how many of them liked it, read their comments, and even get to know some of them. If you guys hadn't read, liked, and commented, I wouldn't still be here.

It's also much more informative. For the first few months I broke my stories up into short chapters and watched the view count on each chapter to find out where people stopped reading.  (Half of readers stop somewhere on the first page, no matter how short or long it is. 90% or more of those who go on to the second page will finish the story.  The critical area appears to be the first 500 words. Grammar doesn't matter.)

And I scan the other stories on the site, and see how popular they are, and learn what readers like. Writers have never known this stuff before. Nobody knows how many or what kind of stories editors reject or how many people read each of the different stories published in a magazine, and while we have sales figures for books, they're so distorted by the different amount of marketing power put behind each book as to be meaningless (unless you know the marketing budgets as well!)

I've told this to other writers, but most scoff. I went from being afraid my family would see my fanfic, to telling them how to find it, to asking them to read it, to no avail. People outside fandom won't touch it, with few exceptions.

TL;DR: Fanfic is my secret weapon in my competition with the other writers of the world. Not because I keep it secret, but because they won't listen.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

I didn't mean to write fanfic at all. I still don't. I meant to write television scripts. Somehow one pony story became two, became three, and so on.  I was surprised that I could write 70,000 words of final draft in half a year of weekends when I was trying not to write.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

My Little Pony. Shipping. A bit of Lunestia. (Don't ask. It's bad.)

What's your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?

The stories that make me happiest are the ones that make me saddest. Is that twisted? I guess favorite story goes to The Detective and the Magician. But favorite moment goes to this exchange from A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy:

DERPY HOOVES hurries on-stage, followed by a COLT and a FILLY.

                                       FILLY AND COLT

          Derpy derpy derpy!

Big Mac gives the colt and filly one look and they hurry off.

                                       SCOOTALOO

          Were they teasing you because you're a pegasus?

                                       DERPY

          Naw.

                       (her ears flick down)

          They always do that.

                       (to Big MacIntosh)

          Why're you sitting in the street?

                                       SWEETIE BELLE

          He's mad because Farmer Seed won't sell him a carrot for

          Fluttershy because she's a pegasus!

Scootaloo pushes with her helmet against Big Mac's side, trying and failing to budge him.

                                       SWEETIE BELLE (CONT'D)

          It's so romantic!

                                       DERPY

          You're just gonna sit there?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

          A pony can sit.

                                       DERPY

          Because Hay Seed won't sell carrots to pegasus ponies?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

         Eeyup.

                                       DERPY

                       (beat)

          Will that help?

                                       BIG MACINTOSH

          Nope.

After a long pause, Derpy sits down beside Big MacIntosh.

I still like that story, though no one else did. Literally. It has zero likes. Equestria Daily Pre-Reader #12 said (paraphrased), "We give stories three strikes before rejecting them completely. But this one is so bad, I'm giving you all three strikes right now."

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

I tried writing comedy. I thought I'd hate it and be awful at it. It was fun!

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Severus Spike.  Wow, a lot of people disliked it. Apparently there's an unwritten rule against rewriting scenes from one fandom with characters from another. I can only imagine what they'd think of Borges'  "Pierre Menard". I found exploring the parallels and differences interesting.

Most fun story to write:

The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn

Also the fastest, at 15-20 hours per chapter.

Story with the single sexiest moment:

If I tried writing a sexy scene, it would probably come out like this.

Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:

Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

Detective & Magician, because I disliked Trixie.  Burning Man Brony, because the structure forced me to portray all the Mane 6 positively, even the ones I don't like. (Not telling.)

Story I learned the most from:

Fallout: Equestria taught me you can write stories that are both interesting and exciting.

How to Do a Sonic Rainboom gave me a revelation about relating plot and character.

Being a developmental editor for A Canterlot Carol was an education in the connection between plot and theme.

Mortality Report taught me that I need to align the surface associations between what is present, what is happening, and what the characters are feeling, with the deep thematic causal relations between these things (which I failed to do, confusing hundreds of readers).

The Snowpony has the style I wish I could write with.

I don't yet know what I learned from So Be It. It disturbed me a lot. Hopefully I'll yet learn something from it.

Hardest story to write:

The ones that died on the operating-room table (The Real Reason, Moving On, Second-Best Pony), and the ones I rewrote repeatedly and almost gave up on (Mortality Report, Burning Man Brony, Twenty Minutes). Detective & Magician wasn't as intensely painful in any one place, but it took an absurd amount of time. I still can't believe it's only 14,000 words. It felt like writing a novel.

Biggest disappointment:

Trying and trying and revising again and again and still not getting a fresh, poetic style, which some despicable nameless people seem to produce as easily as pissing.

Equestria Daily refusing to read Friends, With Occasional Magic ("Avoid people from the fandom"),  Burning Man Brony ("No brony-in-Equestria"), or Twenty Minutes ("No featuring of Fallout: Equestria stories").  Fimfiction not allowing me to publish "A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy" ("No scripts").  Not being able to get "Friends, With Occasional Magic" moved to my Bad Horse account.

Biggest surprise:

Mortality Report and Twenty Minutes. People hated the first, second, and third versions of each of those.

Most Unintentionally Telling Story:

The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn was, unintentionally, an allegory.

Fanfic Resolutions:

Stop writing fan-fiction.

Write more fan-fiction.

Mask of the Sorcerer: Too much wonder

Mask of the Sorcerer: Too much wonder

I'm going to do something terrible. I'm going to "review" a book by a brilliant writer without finishing it, because I don't think I'll ever finish it.  But my purpose isn't to review the book; it's to make a point about writing.

Darrell Schweitzer may be the smartest, most-creative person who's ever written fantasy. I see him as a tragic figure. I've watched him for many years, as he shows up at every science fiction convention on the east coast, aggressively selling books in the dealer's room and in the hallways.  I'm his stalker.  I'll spend an hour listening to him on one panel (where he will speak more than his "fair" share, which is fair, as he has more interesting things to say than everyone else).  Then I'll follow him to another panel and listen to him for another hour, then follow him to the con suite and sit a little distance away in a chair and just listen as he goes on for another hour, pouring out facts and ideas about the Byzantine Empire, Aboriginal petroglyphs, or another funny but tragic story about Philip K. Dick, connecting them all together with reasoning as crazy and yet obvious in retrospect as a Tim Powers novel.

I may be the only person in the world who finds him so fascinating.  The other people he talks with more often seem irritated at not being able to inject their ideas into the conversation in the face of Darrell running at full steam.  I'm usually the guy crowding other people out of the conversation, but Darrell is one of the few people who is so interesting that I'd rather hear what he's going to say next than to speak my own thoughts.

He works so hard, and he loves fantasy and science fiction.  He did many of the best interviews of all the grant masters of the past fifty years, and has collected them in a series of little books called "SF Voices" or "Speaking of the Fantastic", which you can buy from him in the dealer's room of any major science fiction convention between Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Boston.  I've been rooting for him for years, waiting for his breakthrough novel, for him to get the recognition he deserves, but just watching him get older and greyer.

Funny thing, though, is that I never read any of his novels.  His short stories, his interviews, his essays, yes.  Not his novels.  I have a huge reading list, and I never read books unless they're strongly recommended by many people.  No one ever recommended his books to me.  He hasn't written many; if you search for his novels on Amazon you won't find them, because he's edited so many books--mostly collections of Lovecraft, horror, mystery, and pulp adventure that are not nearly as good as Darrell's own writing.

But when I realized, after posting some unsuccessful ponyfics, that I was an unpopular author because I tried to put too much abstract reasoning into my stories, I wondered if there might be a clue as to what I was doing wrong in Darryl's work.  So I bought Mask of the Sorcerer, which he recommended as his best.

It's a little unfair to treat this as a novel, because the first 4 chapters were originally a short story.  The novel's main failing is that those first 4 chapters are a complete story, meaning you have little motivation to continue on to chapter 5.  But there's more to it than that.

The hero is the son of a magician.  They live out over the water on the end of a great pier of an exotic city, which worships and fears the river gods, who are very real.  The magician becomes a sorcerer, summoning the dead to mysterious rites in their house at night.  He sends his son out into the river among the crocodiles and spirits at night to receive a great vision.  The son receives the vision; he returns to find his mother has disappeared and his father will not say how.  The sorcerer calls up a great storm which wrecks the city; he dies; the townsfolk burn the house; the boy seeks out the Sybil; the Sybil pronounces his fate; the boy returns home to see his sister stolen away by his father's spirit and to receive a threat from a zombie.  The boy journeys down the river of the dead in search of his sister.

That's, like, the first two chapters.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.  This book contains too much wonder.  Almost every page introduces something new and wondrous and amazing, which recasts the underlying reality of the story world and your understanding of what is possible and what is good.  Never at any point in the first four chapters did I have the slightest clue as to what might happen next.  Darrell let loose and blasted me with a firehose of fantastic beings and events, and it was too much.  Everyone the main character cared about was soon dead or worse, but it wasn't clear how much that even mattered in this world, or whether getting them back was possible or would be a good thing.  I had no ground to stand on, no context to use to decide what I hoped would happen.

Ergo, I didn't care what happened next.

The book has wonderful things in it.  The theme is something about destiny.  The main character doesn't want to become a sorcerer, but can't escape his destiny, which seems to be to become horrible, inhuman, and god-like.  But the only piece of firm ground to stand on was the main character's desire to throw off his destiny as as sorcerer and return to his teacher, to learn to copy and illuminate manuscripts.  That dream is ripped to shreds in chapter 5.  So you're left with a protagonist whose main goal is not do everything that he has to do, and with befuddlement over what you should be hoping for.  And, perhaps most importantly, the suspicion that none of this is relevant to you, because the world and the main character's destiny are nothing like your own.

Fantasy can't exist without the mundane.  All wonder and no normality is like all Pinkie Pie and no Applejack.  Er.  Or something.

Clarion Writers' Workshop, and a fimfiction scholarship

Clarion Writers' Workshop

I know you guys are all stolid, respectable members of society.  But I thought there might be one or two crazy people out there who are into ... dare I say it ... writing fantasy.

If you want to write fantasy or science fiction professionally, you should apply to Clarion.  Clarion is to science fiction & fantasy what Harvard is to high-powered law firms and Wall Street sharks, but (sadly) without the evil.  Like Harvard, it's a great learning experience, but that's not why you need to go.  You need to go because if you send a story or book into a science fiction or fantasy editor, and you write on your cover letter "I went to Clarion", they will read it, or at least some of it.  I spent years writing stories and getting dozens of photocopied rejection letters.  After Clarion, I sold the first two stories I sent out to the first places I sent them out to.  (One of the checks bounced, but that wasn't Clarion's fault.)  I haven't seen a rejection letter since.  Mostly because I haven't written anything but fan-fiction since.  But that's not important.  What's important is that if you want to become a professional F&SF writer, you should apply to Clarion.

When I went to Clarion, they put us all up in tiny 2-person dorm rooms with window air conditioners that roared like jet engines, so that you couldn't write, let alone sleep, with them on (because of the noise) or with them off (because of the heat).  So Lister Matheson, who ran Clarion at the time, gathered about a dozen standing fans of all different types from the pocket dimension where he always managed to find at the last minute whatever Clarion needed, and distributed them to our rooms.  I remember typing stories on a word processor—literally, a machine that was not a computer and did nothing but word processing, with a four-line LED screen—but I have no idea whose it was.  Now they tell you to bring your own laptop.  They provided a printer.

Once a week, you write a story, print up 18 copies, and hand them out.  Each morning you all sit in a big circle and spend 3 hours critiquing about 4 stories, every person giving their opinion in turn.  We had the official Clarion Black Stetson Bad-Guy Hat to put on if you thought the story stunk.  (I was heavily black-hatted the week that I had no story and instead put my name on the first four pages of the Eye of Argon and handed it out.  Don't do this unless you can handle an entire week of covert, frightened glances from your classmates.)  Then the instructor gives their opinion, and everyone hands their marked-up copies of the story back to its author and moves on to the next story.  Then you have lunch, and return to the dorm to read other people's stories, mark them up with red pen, and work on your own story for next week.

What did I learn?  Well, you're getting critiques from other students, so mostly you'll get line edits (grammar, word usage, awkward sentences, wordiness, repetition) and story content reactions (I didn't care about this person, this threat wasn't threatening, this contradicts that, I didn't understand what happened).  Seeing critiques of other stories is as valuable as reading critiques of your own stories.

I wouldn't go back to Clarion now, because my problems now are mostly things I do over and over that I'm already aware of, or that require a theoretical understanding of story to fix (bad dramatic structure, unclear theme, competing themes, subtext that contradicts theme, scenes whose relation to the story problem are not immediately clear).  Nor could I; you may go to Clarion only once.  But my writing post-Clarion was noticeably better than before Clarion.

Perhaps more importantly, I spent six weeks getting to know people who care about the same crazy kind of stories that I do, who can write pretty well (even if most of them scorn my fan-fiction), and whom I'm still in contact with today.

Applications for the2013 Clarion Workshop will remain open until March 1, 2013.  On February 15th, the application fee will increase from $50 to $65.  The 2013 faculty will be Andy Duncan, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Robert Crais, Karen Joy Fowler, and Kelly Link.  You must include two complete short stories, each between 2,500 words and 6,000 words in length.  No novels, poetry, essays, or screenplays.  No word back yet from Karen on whether you can submit fan-fiction.

The workshop fee is, yikes, $5000 (including room & board).  It was cheaper when I went.  Most people get a scholarship, but the size of the scholarships hasn't increased with the price of tuition; most are still about $1000.  Don't bother asking exactly how much; they're a lot of different individual scholarships--little independent bookstores will fund one student, or a regional science fiction convention will fund one person from its state.  There are special grants for students of color (I don't which colors count; yellow usually doesn't), students age 40 and older, students who are affiliated with Michigan State University, and students who are affiliated with UCSD.

These are some of the people who went to Clarion before starting their writing careers:

Octavia Butler

Ted Chiang

Cory Doctorow

Scott Edelman

Nicola Griffith

Nalo Hopkinson

Richard Kadrey

James Patrick Kelly

Geoffrey Landis

Kelly Link

Vonda McIntyre

Pat Murphy

Tim Pratt

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Felicity Savage

Darrell Schweitzer

Lucius Shepard

Dean Wesley Smith

Bruce Sterling

Other SF&F Writing Workshops

There is also Clarion West, in Washington State, which is modelled on Clarion.  This year, their instructors are Elizabeth Hand,Neil Gaiman,Joe Hill,Justina Robson,Ellen Datlow, andSamuel R. Delany.  Application fee is $30 thru Feb. 10, then $40 until midnight of March 10.  The workshop costs $3600 (including room & board).  Writing sample 20 to 30 pages of manuscript (that's about 5000-7500 words).

Can you submit fan-fiction for your writing sample to Clarion West?  Neile Graham says:  "They can, but I strongly recommend against it. It's riskier than submitting original fiction, because the tendency of most fan fiction is to rely on the original source for much of the characterization and world-building issues, leaving fiction that isn't as strong out of context, especially for readers not familiar (or not sympathetic) with the source."

Odyssey is also modelled on Clarion.  Application fee is $35.  Tuition is $1920, textbook $100, optional college credit $550, housing $790, food about $500; total without college credit (not offered at Clarion): $3410.  Writing sample maximum 4000 words.  Applications must arrive there by April 8.  No electronic applications.

Jeanne Cavelos says, "We don't prohibit applicants from submitting fan fiction as their writing sample.  But if someone asked my advice, I would advise them to submit something else, since fan fiction probably won't showcase their skills in characterization and world-building."

Both these other workshops also have good reputations.  I promise not to think much less of you if you go to a lesser, Johnny-come-lately knock-off of Clarion.

Regarding $$$:  A FimFiction Scholarship

Most of the people I'd like to go to Clarion, can't afford to.  I'd like us, fimfiction as a whole, to sponsor somebody to attend one of these workshops.  Ideally there would be a non-profit escrow fund, like for the Wollheim Memorial Scholarship (which is split among people from the NYC area who are admitted to Clarion, Clarion West, or Odyssey), but for now, making pledges on this blog post would suffice.

I don't want to collect money myself, because I know screaming and accusations would inevitably follow on our lovely little community here.  So here's my plan:

A writer qualifies for the fimfiction scholarship if they were registered for fimfiction as of January 1, and they have at least 2 stories published on fimfiction totaling at least 5,000 words, or 1 story on Equestria Daily, by March 1.

To donate, post a comment on this blog saying "I will give $X by paypal to fund fimfiction writers to attend these writing workshops if one is accepted," where X >= 5.

If you are a qualifying writer and you're accepted into a workshop, PM me as soon as you find out, tell me your real name, the workshop you'll be attending, and a made-up secret word, and I'll get in touch with their organizers and verify that you were accepted and you are who you say you are (using the secret word).

I will get the participating workshops each to set up a paypal account or other method to receive fimfiction donations and list it on their websites (to prove they control those accounts).  Neile Graham of Clarion West says that a Paypal account is complicated for non-profits (they have extra paperwork to set one up), but they can arrange something similar.

I will then post a blog saying who was admitted, where they're going, and how to contribute to their fund.  This is not tax-deductible in the US, because you're donating to a specific person rather than to the workshop.

I, Bad Horse, will match all received contributions up to $250 if we have someone accepted to any of the workshops.

(You can't use a kickstarter campaign to fund a scholarship.  I checked.)

Writing: Show and tell, part 1: Francine Prose

Writing: Show and tell, part 1: Francine Prose

Someday I hope to write a longer post on this, but today I need to type in this passage from Francine Prose's excellent Reading Like a Writer, which I recommend you get immediately if you're serious about writing, with the caveat that this is very advanced and dismayingly difficult stuff to emulate and will likely give you nightmares about your inadequacy as a writer.

The opening of "Dulse" by Alice Munro:

At the end of the summer Lydia took a boat to an island off the southern coast of New Brunswick, where she was going to stay overnight. She had just a few days left until she had to be back in Ontario. She worked as an editor, for a publisher in Toronto. She was also a poet, but she did not refer to that unless it was something people knew already. For the past eighteen months she had been living with a man in Kingston. As far as she could see, that was over.

She had noticed something about herself on this trip to the Maritimes. It was that people were no longer so interested in getting to know her. It wasn't that she had created such a stir before, but something had been there that she could rely on. She was forty-five, and had been divorced for nine years. Her two children had started on their own lives, though there were still retreats and confusion. She hadn't gotten fatter or thinner, her looks had not deteriorated in any alarming way, but nevertheless she had stopped being one sort of woman and had become another, and she had noticed it on this trip.

Prose writes:

        ... Finally, the passage contradicts a form of bad advice often given young writers--namely, that the job of the author is to show, not tell. Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out--don't tell us a character is happy, show us how she screams "yay" and jumps up and down for joy--when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language. There are many occasions in literature in whcih telling is far more effective than showing. A lot of time would have been wasted had Alice Munro believed that she could not begin her story until she had shown us Lydia working as an editor, writing poetry, breaking up with her lover, dealing with her children, getting divorced, growing older, and taking all the steps that led up to the moment at which the story rightly begins.

        Richard Yates ... Here, in the opening paragraph of Revolutionary Road, he warns us that the amateur theatrical performance in the novel's first chapter may not be quite the triumph for which the Laurel Players are hoping:

The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed up halfway its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.

        When we ask ourselves how we know as much as we know--that is, that the performance is likely to be something of an embarrassment--we notice that individual words have given us all the information we need. The final dying sounds ... silent and helpless ... blinking ... hardly dared to breathe ... naked seats ... raspingly.

This second passage is a mix of showing and telling, or telling disguised like showing. "Silent and helpless" is not really showing--how does an actor look helpless?  How does one see that they "hardly dared breathe"? A truly talented group would be described as "talented", not "damned talented"--is that little bit of information showing or telling?  This passage illustrates that the important question isn't whether you're "showing" or "telling", but whether you're using the right evocative words, in your narration and your dialogue.

Show & Tell 2: Extreme telling

A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry

Act I, Scene 2

MAMA:  You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity to... Now here come you and Benetha--talking 'bout things we ain't never even thought about hardly, me and your daddy. You ain't satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don't have to ride to work on the back of nobody's streetcar--You my children--but how different we done become.

Act III, Scene 1

WALTER: Talking 'bout life, Mama. You all always telling me to see life like it is. Well--I laid in there on my back today... and I figured it out. Life just like it is. Who gets and who don't get. Mama, you know it's all divided up. Life is. Sure enough. Between the takers and the "tooken." I've figured it out finally. Yeah. Some of us always getting "tooken." People like Willy Harris, they don't never get "tooken." And you know why the rest of us do? 'Cause we all mixed up. Mixed up bad. We get to looking 'round for the right and the wrong; and we worry about it and cry about it and stay up nights trying to figure out 'bout the wrong and the right of things all the time... And all the time, man, them takers is out there operating, just taking and taking.

.

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Act I

WILLY: Bernard is not well liked, is he?

BIFF: He's liked, but he's not well liked.

HAPPY: That's right, Pop.

WILLY: That's just what I mean, Bernard can get the best marks in school, y'understand, but when he gets out in the business world, y'understand, you are going to be five times ahead of him. That's why I thank Almighty God you're both built like Adonises. Because the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want. You take me, for instance. I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. "Willy Loman is here!" That's all they have to know, and I go right through.

LINDA:  Then make Charley your father, Biff. You can't do that, can you? I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. You called him crazy--

BIFF: I didn't mean--

LINDA: No, a lot of people think he's lost his--balance. But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. The man is exhausted.

HAPPY: Sure!

LINDA: A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salaray away.

HAPPY: I didn't know that, Mom.

LINDA: You never asked, my dear! Now that you get your spending money someplace else you don't trouble your mind with him.

HAPPY: But I gave you money last--

...

BIFF: Those ungrateful bastards!

LINDA: Are they any worse than his sons? When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch--they're all dead, retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he's exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him any more, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man's mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn't he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it's his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I'm sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character? The many who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that? Is this his reward--to turn around at the age of sixty-three and find his sons, who he loved better than his life, one a philandering bum--

HAPPY: Mom!

LINDA: That's all you are, my baby! [To BIFF] And you! What happened to the love you had for him? You were such pals! How you used to talk to him on the phone every night! How lonely he was till he could come home to you!

.

Act II

BIFF: And I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody! That's whose fault it is!

WILLY:  I hear that!

LINDA:  Don't Biff!

BIFF: It's goddam time you heard that!  I had to be boss big shot in two weeks, and I'm through with it!

WILLY:  Then hang yourself!  For spite, hang yourself!

BIFF:  No! Nobody's hanging himself, Willy! I ran down eleven flights with a pen in my hand today. And suddenly I stopped, you hear me? And in the middle of that office building, do you hear this? I stopped in the middle of that building and I saw--the sky. I saw the things that I love i nthis world. The work and the food and time to sit and smoke. And I looked at the pen and said to myself, what the hell am I grabbign this for? Why am I trying to become what I don't want to be? What am I doing in an office, making a contemptuous, begging fool of myself, when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am! Why can't I say that, Willy?

WILLY:  The door of your life is wide open!

BIFF:  Pop! I'm a dime a dozen, and so are you!

WILLY:  I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!

BIFF:  I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them! I'm one dollar an hour, Willy! I tried seven states and couldn't raise it. A buck an hour! Do you gather my meaning? I'm not bringing home any prizes any more, and you're going to stop waiting for me to bring them home! ... Will you let me go, for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens?

.

King Lear

Act I, scene 2

EDMUND:  Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines

Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?

When my dimensions are as well compact,

My mind as generous, and my shape as true,

As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us

With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take

More composition and fierce quality

Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,

Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,

Got 'tween asleep and wake? Well, then,

Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:

Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund

As to the legitimate: fine word, -- legitimate!

Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,

And my invention thrive, Edmund the base

Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:

Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Hamlet

HAMLET:  Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play:

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe

(But note Hamlet is making a point about King Claudius' lack of true feeling.)

Act 2 scene 2

HAMLET:  I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation

prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king

and queen moult no feather. I have of late -- but

wherefore I know not -- lost all my mirth, forgone all

custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily

with my disposition that this goodly frame, the

earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most

excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave

o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted

with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to

me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how

express and admirable! in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the

world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,

what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not

me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling

you seem to say so.

What not to write, and breaking rules

If you’ve read some of my stories, think back on them and guess how many words were in each one (mouse over to reveal):

Story                                                   Words

Behind the Scenes                                1392

Burning Man Brony                              9567

The Corpse Bride                                  2765

Dark Demon King etc.                           4317

The Detective and the Magician        14179

Fluttershy's Night Out                          4981

Mortality Report                                    4296

Pony Tales (all 11 stories)                      8526

Sisters (my 2 stories only)                     6521

Trust, not including alternate ending  1435

Twenty Minutes                                       3361

Twilight Sparkle and the Quest etc.      1754

Did you guess high or low?  Probably high.  I write succinctly.  When I try rewriting someone else’s story, it usually comes out about one-third as long.  I guess that’s my “style”.  It’s deliberate, mostly.  It’s my strength and my weakness.

One way I make things short is by summarizing things that don't need to be said explicitly.  One comment the first EqD pre-reader made on “Moving On” was, “You have a habit of narrating over what could have been interesting interactions.”  I defended summarizing parts of the story that don't move you towards the goal:

Being interesting isn't enough reason to put something in a story.  Every paragraph must do something to achieve at least one of the story goals, and preferably two or more.

Then I quoted one of the summaries in question:

Stepping forward, she floated out the card and introduced herself as the head librarian. The only proof she had of her story was the card and the brightly-colored "Ask a Librarian!" button attached to her cardigan, but the ranking guard brightened immediately at Starflower's name.

This short paragraph does several things.

The guards are the first obstacle to seeing Luna.We see Twilight has low self-esteem.We see that Twilight thinks her main qualification to see Luna is her job.We will later recall that Twilight did not tell them her name.We see that Starflower's name carries some weight here, which increases Twilight's jealousy and lowers her self-esteem even more.

Expanding the conversation would require repeating information we already know about Starflower and the library card, and wouldn't accomplish anything more.  Neither Twilight's attitude toward the guards, nor their personalities, nor anything else I could show in their dialogue would contribute to the story.  It would be boring dialogue because the guards don't want anything and so aren't really story characters.  Summarizing was the right decision here.

Then I looked at the other summary Pre-Reader 63.546 singled out, in scene 5:

Eventually he went back to talking about Derpy, and that seemed natural, just as every long conversation in Ponyville eventually mentioned Pinkie Pie. He leaned over and touched her foreleg lightly. "Did I ever tell you about when she invented the 'banana split muffin'? One banana muffin, one cherry muffin, one chocolate-chip—all at the same time! Just stuffs them all in and starts chewing." Twilight giggled—it was all too easy to imagine exactly how Derpy would have grinned while eating it. "So just then this cello player from the orchestra comes in, mane all tidy, spotless grey coat. Derpy sees her and runs over to tell her how good it is! Only, her mouth's still full of muffin, see?"

Joe went on to describe the inevitable scene of muffin-induced shock and outrage, and Twilight laughed as he did, less at the story than at hearing Pony Joe switch between his thick Fillydelphia accent and an eerily accurate imitation of the Canterlot mare. She re-envisioned the scene in her mind. It was so easy to imagine Pinkie and Rarity doing the same thing.

That section is supposed to:

Bring up three parallels between Twilight's friends in Ponyville and ponies now in Canterlot, suggesting that Twilight could make new friends in Canterlot if she tried.Show that Twilight can find Joe's unscholarly talk entertaining and interesting.Show that Joe and Twilight are physically closer and more comfortable with each other than in the previous scene.

And it does that.  Expanding the summary into a blow-by-blow account wouldn't accomplish anything beyond that.

Yet, expanding the summary seems to be better.

"So just then this cello player from the orchestra comes in, mane all tidy, spotless grey coat. Derpy sees her and runs over to tell her how good it is! Only, her mouth's still full of muffin, see? So she leap-flies over there and gets right in the dame's face, who I don't think even knows her 'coz she says "Oh, I say" and backs away right up against that wall there." Twilight snorted and barely suppressed a whinny at Joe's eerily accurate imitation of a Canterlot mare. "And Derpy's grinning and flapping her wings and going 'Mrph mrmble mrf MRFFN!'"

Twilight re-envisioned the scene in her mind, but instead of Derpy and this Canterlot mare, it was Pinkie and Rarity. She could see exactly how Rarity would arch her eyebrows and look not quite directly back at Pinkie.

"The poor mare is frozen, she's got banana-chocolate-cherry muffin crumbs bouncing off her face like she's a statue. And then—" He tapped her foreleg again. "—and then all of a sudden she shuts her eyes and shouts, 'LENTO! LENTO'"

Twilight leaned back and took a deep breath. If only they hadn't ....

He struck the table with one hoof and laughed. "Lento!'"

Hadn't not followed her to Canterlot?

Is it better?  Why?  I like contrasting (my) Joe's boisterous nature with Twilight's reflective one.  I like that there are some exclamation points there, in a story that doesn't have many.  I wish I had a better explanation for why I should break my "Every word that doesn't work towards a story goal should be eliminated" rule here.

But I should have remembered that was a rule.  And all rules are bad.  Even this one.

On Moving On

I measure how much readers enjoy stories by counting what fraction of readers who read the first chapter go on to the second chapter.  I call this the Reader Retention Ratio (RRR).  Things are tricky when the first & second chapters aren't released at the same time, but with a big enough sample size, you get a good idea how stories are ranked.  I had a big sample—counts for the first 40,000 stories published on fimfiction.  The average RRR was 0.71.

I test troublesome stories by releasing them on ponyfictionarchive.net or fanfiction.net and checking the RRR for each chapter.  "Moving On" is a troublesome story because there's no action and a lot of introspection.  It probably doesn't help that Twilight's problems in the story are problems most people don't even think about before their forties.  (It really should be tagged "mature".)

When I tested "Moving On", it had a reader retention ratio of 0.02.  That was the fourth-worst out of all 40,000 stories.  Readers liked 99.99% of the stories on fimfiction better than "Moving On".

After figuring that out, I wrote "Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy" and "The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn".  They were fun stories and I'm proud of them, but it made me a little sad to think that I had to give up the idea of writing stories like "Moving On", that they just couldn't be told.  I'm not under the illusion that it's a great story, but it is the kind of story I wanted to tell, about the kinds of things I worry about.

Now, almost a year later, it's on EqD.  I don't think stories like this will ever be tremendously popular, but maybe they can at least be told.

Story recommendation: Biblical Monsters

Biblical Monsters by Horse Voice.  Dark, sad, tragic, compassionate, and so very well-written.  It is sad, but not a dreadful so-far-pointless nightmare-inducing sad like the first chapter of “The Heart Thief”, which I regret reading.  I left a comment on the story giving my opinion, which you probably should not read because it reveals my evil nature.

Adams did not answer. He was looking at a shiny spot on the table. I wondered what he was thinking about. Would he have an answer?

I realized then that the spot had not been there a moment ago. I saw dust particles move through an angled shaft of space that stretched from the table to the window, and realized that spot was where the sun reflected off the table's finish.

I looked out the window. In the sky above, there was a gap in the slate, through which I saw a shade of blue that had not appeared above Cook Point in almost a month. It was tiny, but it would grow.

The year's halcyon days had come.

Out of context, this sounds slow, even boring.  Within the story, it’s a silent scream.  This is the turning point where our protagonist realizes he’s doomed, that there is no happy ending to this story, that someone in the house is a monster and maybe it’s him.  This is how to write.

Do writers get better?

Recently I heard an author give advice I've heard many authors give: "Just keep writing, and you'll get better."

Is that true?

I can think of painters who got better over time, like Picasso and Van Gogh.  I can think of bands and composers who got markedly better, at least for a while, like Beethoven, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Pink Floyd, and Sting.  But I can only think of a few writers who got better with time: Mark Twain, Jack London, and Tom Stoppard.  This is so few that the most likely explanation that they got better is simply chance, or poor judgement on my part.

I can think of plenty who wrote an early breakout work and then never rivaled it: Lorraine Hansberry, J.D. Salinger, S.E. Hinton, Stephen Crane, Jorge Luis Borges, Douglas Adams.  I can think of plenty who wrote consistently over their careers from the time they published their first book: John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C. S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Tom Clancy, Terry Pratchett.  I can think of many who got worse: James Joyce, E.E. Cummings, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov.  The first story Robert Heinlein ever wrote was about as good as anything he ever wrote.  John Kennedy Toole won the Pulitzer for his first (and last) novel.

More writers get worse than get better once they've been published.  Why?

My theory is that people don't get any better at anything than they have to be to stop being confronted with failure.  This is why most women are terrible lovers, Keannu Reaves is still a bad actor, and so many athletes and beautiful women are poor thinkers.

Writing isn't like juggling or riding a bicycle.  You can't tell whether you did it well.  Maybe it's like non-contact martial arts.  You can spend years kicking the air, but if you never hit anybody, you might be doing it all wrong.

(If you're getting EqD rejections for poor grammar, this and what follows don't apply to you yet.  Someone points out your mistakes; you learn the rules; you stop making those mistakes.  Simple.  Do it and move on.  Grammar is part of writing only to the extent that bricklaying is part of architecture.)

In writing, I'm trying to strike you, dear reader, though not always to hurt you.  The comments let me know what I hit.  Most writers stop workshopping and reading reviews of their works soon after they get published, and they hear little from their readers, which may be why they stop getting better.

But even this advantage over professional writers isn't enough for me.  Even where I can detect that I've failed, like ALL MY DIALOGUE AND DESCRIPTION ALL THE TIME, I don't know how to improve.

There are four basic learning methods:  Example, logic, gradient search, and evolution.  By example means you watch someone else and do what they do.  It's fast!  Logic means you model what you're doing to predict things that might work better.  It's not quite as fast.  Gradient search means you can tell whether changing things a little more one way or the other along one dimension will make things better or worse.  It's quick to improve along dimensions that you're already aware of, but seldom produces anything surprising.  Evolution means you change things randomly and splice together combinations of things that worked well.  It's super-slow, but is the most powerful, if you can tell whether something is good or bad.

I use all four methods to try to improve my writing.  I feel like I'm learning all the time.  But mostly, I'm learning how to do better the things I already do well, like plotting.  I'm aware of those; I can see whether I failed or did well.  The things I do poorly, I don't improve on, because they're a mystery to me.  Even when I see where someone else has done it well, I can't put my finger on what makes it better.

The stories I write now are much better than the ones I wrote 20 years ago, but not obviously better than the ones I wrote 15 years ago.  The first two pony stories I wrote, both over a year ago, were "A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy" and "Friends, With Occasional Magic."  They seem to me to be as good as anything I've written lately.

It's hard to tell because they're dead to me.  I re-read part of "Moving On" today, and it seems fake.  The dialogue seems forced; the settings like scenery drawn with markers on cardboard for a grade-school play.  Same for "Fluttershy's NIght Out" and "Twenty Minutes".  I can see the strings on my puppets.  I can't laugh at my comedies or feel anything from my sadfics.  The main reason I think they're any good is that people whose stories I like sometimes tell me they are.  Another is that I keep reading books on writing, and have the naive faith that they must be doing me some good, though when I try to recall what they said I usually can't remember.  (The third reason is my enormous ego.)

Can writers get better?  If so, how?

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Scriptnotes podcast did an entire episode earlier this year analyzing Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Click on this link to download the MP3 or the transcript.

John and Craig said that Raiders isn't, as I'd thought it was, the story of a hero retrieving the Lost Ark from the Nazis.  No, Raiders is the story of a man who lacks faith and who is obsessed with things instead of people, gaining faith and learning to value people over things.  Indy starts as the only person in the movie who doesn't believe the stories about the Lost Ark.  He just wants the thing.

Belloc, one of Indy's main antagonists, is Indy's shadow.  He is Indy, with the same strengths and flaws, but just a little farther along the trajectory of that character flaw.  He shows what Indy will become if he doesn't change.

I like that interpretation a lot, because I like stories with ideas and character arcs.  I believe the idea is right, and that Larry Kasdan (the writer) had that in mind.  But did it matter?  I bet less than 5% of the audience thought that Raiders was a story about Indy learning not to be so attached to things.  They enjoyed it anyway.

Did having that character arc make them enjoy the movie more, even if they didn't know it was there?

High-entropy writing

PrettyPartyPony's blog post yesterday got me thinking about what we mean by "wordiness". We don't mean having "too many" words. Then we would just say "long". We mean having words that don't do much.

High-entropy writing

In 1948, Claude Shannon published "A Mathematical Theory of Information", an essay (or very short book) that's surprisingly quick and easy to read for something with such profound mathematical content. It's one of the three cornerstones of science, along with Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia. It provided equations to measure how much information words convey. Let me repeat that, shouting this time, because the implications surely didn't sink in the first time: It provided EQUATIONS to measure HOW MUCH INFORMATION WORDS CONVEY.

These measurements turn out to be isomorphic (that's a big word, but it has a precise meaning that is precisely what I mean) to the concept of thermodynamic entropy. The exact method Shannon used to measure information per letter in English is crude, but it's probably usually within 20% of the correct answer. The important point is that, for a given text and a given reader, there is a correct answer.

The implications of being able to measure information are hard to take in without thinking about it for a few decades [1]. For writers, one implication is that the question "Is this story wordy?" has an answer. I could write a simple program that would analyze a story and say how wordy it was.

The caveat is simple, subtle, and enormous: A given text conveys a well-defined amount of information to a given reader, assuming infinite computational resources [2]. Without infinite computational resources, it depends on the algorithms you use to predict what's coming next, and there are probably an infinite number of possible algorithms. I could easily compute the information content of a story by predicting the next word of each sentence based on the previous two words. This would warn a writer if their style were cliched or vague. But it would miss all the information provided by genre expectations, our understanding of story structure and theme, psychology, and many other things critical in a story.

But you can be aware of the information content of your story without writing that program or understanding how to measure entropy. One simple way is to be aware of the information content of the words you use. Writers say to use precise words and avoid vague ones. But that's not quite right. What they really mean is, use high-entropy words. A high-entropy word is one that can't be easily predicted from what came before it. The word "fiddle" is usually unexpected, but is expected if you just said "fit as a".

Fill in the blanks:

She headed to the right, past the empty bar and the plastic display case of apple and coconut creme pies, towards a tall, lean blonde in a faded orange miner's jumpsuit who was sprawled on a chair at the end of a booth, tilting it backwards into the aisle, her arms dangling.

— some hack writer, Friends, with Occasional Magic

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

See how the words in the second passage are harder to predict?

High-entropy writing can simply mean putting things together that don't usually go together:

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

An AMERICAN wearing a jungle hat with a large Peace Sign on it, wearing war paint, bends TOWARD US, reaching down TOWARD US with a large knife, preparing to scalp the dead.

— From a 1975 draft of the screenplay for Apocalypse Now by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola

When you use a word that's true and unexpected, it's poetry. When you tell a story that's true and unexpected, it's literature [3]. So aim for the unexpected plot and the unexpected word.

Meaning-dense writing

This is taken a bit too far in modernist poetry, which has very high entropy:

dead every enourmous [sic] piece

of nonsense which itself must call

a state submicroscopic is-

compared with pitying terrible

some alive individual

— E.E. Cummings, dead every enourmous piece

The problem with measuring information content is that you would produce the most-unpredictable sequence of words by choosing words at random. Meaningless text has maximum information density.

What you want to measure is true, or, better, meaningful, information [4]. Writers often use words and tell stories that are technically low-entropy (the words aren't unexpected). But whenever they do, if it's done well, it's because they convey a lot of extra, meaningful information that isn't measured by entropy.

To convey a mood or a metaphor, you choose a host of words (and maybe even punctuation) associated with that mood. That makes that cluster of words appear to be low-entropy: They all go together, and seeing one makes you expect the others.

The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.

— William Gibson, Neuromancer

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.

— William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

— T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

— Carl Sandburg, Fog, 1916

(Wait, did Sandburg really blatantly rip off Eliot's most-famous poem? Yes. Yes he did.)

In a metaphor or a mood, the words convey more information than you see at first glance. That someone would compare the sky to a television channel, and that the world's channel is dead, tell you a lot about Gibson's world. That men and women are "merely players" conveys a philosophy. An extended metaphor doesn't just tell you the information in its sentences. It points out which parts of the two things being compared are like each other, in a way that lets you figure out the different similarities from just a few words. That is extra meaning that isn't measured by entropy (but would be by Kolmogorov complexity). It may be low-entropy, but it's meaning-dense.

Rhyme greatly decreases the entropy of the rhyming words. Knowing that you need to say something about a frog that rhymes with frog reduces the number of possible final words for this poem to a handful. Yet it's still surprising—not which word Dickinson picked, but all the things it meant when she suddenly compared public society to a ...

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell one's name—the livelong June—

To an admiring Bog!

— Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who are You?

Sometimes you use repetition to connect parts of a story:

‘Twas the day before Hearthwarming, and a nameless horror had taken residence in Dotted’s chimney. Again.

...

‘Twas the day before Hearthwarming, and a nameless horror had taken residence in Spinning Top’s chimney.

... or to focus the reader's attention on the theme:

“It’s just that I’ve plans for Hearthwarming and—”

... “Don’t you worry about me. I’ve plans for this Hearthwarming."

... “Indeed, Your Excellency. I’ve plans for Hearthwarming.”

... “Yes. I am. Now go. I’ll keep. Don’t you worry. I’ve plans for Hearthwarming.”

... He had plans this Hearthwarming.

— GhostOfHeraclitus, A Canterlot Carol

... or to make a contrast:

Smash down the cities.

Knock the walls to pieces.

Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and homes

Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black burnt wood:

You are the soldiers and we command you.

Build up the cities.

Set up the walls again.

Put together once more the factories and cathedrals, warehouses and homes

Into buildings for life and labor:

You are workmen and citizens all: We command you.

— Carl Sandburg, And They Obey

That's okay. The repetition is deliberate and is itself telling you something more than the sum of what the repeated parts would say by themselves.

Predictable words are vague words

Vague words may have lots of meaning, yet convey little information because we're always expecting someone to say them.

What words do I mean? I refer you to (Samsonovic & Ascoli 2010). These gentlemen used energy-minimization (one use of thermodynamics and information theory) to find the first three principal dimensions of human language. They threw words into a ten-dimensional space, then pushed them around in a way that put similar words close together [5]. Then they contrasted the words at the different ends of each dimension, to figure out what each dimension meant.

They found, in English, French, German, and Spanish, that the first three dimensions are valence (good/bad), arousal (calm/excited), and freedom (open/closed). That means there are a whole lot of words with connotations along those dimensions, and owing to their commonality, they seldom surprise us. Read an emotional, badly-written text—a bad romance novel or a political tract will do—and you'll find a lot of words that mostly tell you that something is good or bad, exciting or boring, and freeing or constrictive. Words like "wonderful", "exciting", "loving", "courageous", "care-free", or "boring". Read a badly-written polemical or philosophy paper, and you'll find related words: "commendable", "insipid", "bourgeois", "unforgivable". These are words that express judgements. Your story might lead a reader toward a particular judgement, but stating it outright is as irritating and self-defeating as laughing at your own jokes.

Our most-sacred words, like "justice", "love", "freedom", "good", "evil", and "sacred", are these types of words. They are reifications of concepts that we've formed from thousands of more-specific cases. But by themselves, they mean little. They're only appropriate when they're inappropriate: People use the words "just" or "evil" when they can't provide a specific example of how something is just or evil.

Avoid these words. Don't describe a character as an "evil enchantress"; show her doing something evil.

Sometimes they're the right words. Most of the time, they're a sign that you're thinking abstractly rather than concretely. More on this in a later post.

It's meaningful for characters to be vague!

The flip side is, have your characters use these words to highlight their faulty thinking! Pinkie describes Zecorah as an evil enchantress to show that Pinkie is jumping to conclusions. Rainbow Dash calls things "boring" to show that she's just expressing her prejudices and isn't open to some kinds of things.

[1] 70 years later, my current field, bioinformatics, is crippled because biologists still won't read that book and don't understand that when you want to compare different methods for inferring information about a protein, there is EXACTLY ONE CORRECT WAY to do it. Which no one ever uses. Same for linguistics. Most experts don't want to develop the understanding of their field to the point where it can be automated. They get upset and defensive if you tell them that some of their questions have a single mathematically-precise answer. They would rather be high priests, with their expertise more art and poetry than science, free to indulge their whimsies without being held accountable to reality by meddling mathematicians.

[2] And assuming some more abstruse philosophical claims, such as that Quine's thesis of ontological relativism is false. Which I have coincidentally proven.

[3] When you tell a story that's false and expected, it's profitable.

[4] The best anybody has come to defining how much meaning a string of text has is to use Kolmogorov complexity. The Kolmogorov complexity of a text is the number of bits of information needed to specify a computer program that would produce that text as output. A specific random sequence still has Kolmogorov complexity equal to its length if you need to re-produce it. But you don't need to reproduce it. There's nothing special about it. The amount of meaning in a text is the amount of information (suitably compressed) that was required to produce that text, and that is small for any particular occasion on which you produce any particular random sequence.

[5] People usually do this by putting words close to each other that are often used in the same context (the same surrounding words), so that "pleasant" and "enjoy" are close together, as are "car" and "truck". This work instead took antonyms and synonyms from a thesaurus, and pushed synonyms towards each other and pulled antonyms apart from each other.

Alexei V. Samsonovic & Giorgio A. Ascoli (2010). Principal Semantic Components of Language and the Measurement of Meaning. PLoS One 5(6):e10921, June 2010.

Review: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

From the book jacket:

Release date: September 2, 2008

Renee is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully-constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with society's expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this facade lies the real Renee: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her loge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Renee lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours [no; the man who moves into his place] will dramatically alter their lives forever. By turn moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became the top-selling book in France in 2007 with sales of over 900,000 copies to-date.

I’ll confess: I didn’t read the entire book. But this is one of those books where you can skip entire chapters and not feel like you’ve missed anything.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It certainly isn’t plot-driven; it has only 3 plot events. It gives us a long, leisurely, intimate tour of its main character/s’ thoughts, which are usually clever, interesting, novel, funny, and well-written. Very French.

This book has four big problems. The biggest is its length. A standard novel or movie has a catalyzing event that complicates the protagonist's life and makes things interesting. Conventional wisdom is that this should be on page 10 of a 120-page screenplay, or in the first 3 chapters of a novel. Here, it's past the halfway point. So the reader spends the entire first half waiting for this event (which was given away on the book jacket). This first half is clever, but not dramatic.  For example, Renee takes 2 chapters to explain why Husserl’s phenomenology is a fraud. Maybe this is a comment by the author on how Renee scorns Husserl for his detachment from reality, while she herself mirrors it. Clever, but too long and not made clear to the reader.

The second big problem is that the first half of the novel has 2 viewpoint characters who have the same strengths, weaknesses, vices, and attitudes. They think the same thoughts about the upper class, cassoulets, and Japanese culture. They are both self-taught geniuses who hide their intelligence from the world, and are focused entirely on themselves, never thinking of the lives of other people except as those people affect them, churning through endless cycles of scorn, superiority, and self-pity. They are the SAME PERSON. The author writes Paloma's sentences using shorter sentences and a more colloquial style. Paloma uses sentence fragments; Renee writes complete windy sentences. Paloma prefers dashes; Renee favors semi-colons. That is the only difference between them. They should either have been made distinguishable, or combined into one character, converting the novel into a short story.  And Paloma should not have been stuffed into the body of a 12 year old, then made to writes sentences such as "The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects," or, "That should simply incite us to take special precautions with them as we would with very fragile objects." She’s smarter than Ender and more erudite than Harry Potter of Methods of Rationality.

Problem three is that the characters never confront, and the author seems unaware of, their fatal flaw, which is that they care too much about art and not enough about people. They spend all their time studying paintings, poetry, novels, and music, and justify their lives by their erudition. It isn't clear whether Mr. Ozu breaks them of this habit or not, as their warm feelings about him are all associated with his agreements with them about art. It’s a lengthy character study that nonetheless fails to provide convincing reasons why they are that way, or explorations of the consequences. It’s never clear whether the author realizes that her main character/s, who spend all their time looking down on the intellectual shallowness of everyone else, are themselves just one or two onion-layers deeper. As I said, very French.

Problem four is the ending. The climax is Renee overcoming a childhood memory, in standard Freudian manner, that forbade her from believing she could have upper-class friends. Yet, though the author wrote an entire novel in which the character's arc is to realize that she can transcend class boundaries, she didn't believe it herself. Instead of transcendence, we get a sudden tear-jerker ending that has fate deny that transcendence in just the way Renee had supertiously expected, entirely contradicting the novel's theme.

The sentences are beautiful, and the characters and their thoughts are interesting enough to sustain 30,000 words (not 90,000). But it's too long, too superficial, and the author wasn't, I think, certain what the story was actually about. Katherine Mansfield could have made a beautiful short story out of it.

Art is hard

I don’t know a lot about competing in the Olympics. I’m not good at figure skating, fencing, diving, basketball, or curling. But I have a rule of thumb that I nonetheless expect works for all Olympic sports:

If you’re not willing to break a sweat, you’re probably not going to the Olympics.

Art is the same. Not because suffering makes art better. Because many people do it, and no one is so much better than everyone else that they can be the best without working hard.

I say this because of some animations, some stories, an essay, and a blog post.

The animations were by the Quay Brothers. I had an extended argument online with several people, all of whom love the Quay Brothers’ animations for their quirky, creative visuals. I said that was all very fine, but they didn’t have interesting characters or interesting stories, so they were bad animations.

It may seem unfair to demand the kind of quality from homemade animations that I demand from an animated movie made by a team of 1000 people. But fairness doesn’t enter into it. If you’re not a writer, and you’re not willing to go the extra distance to hire a writer to write a story for your animation, you will make a bad animation. I don’t care how talented you are; there are other people who are willing to go that extra distance, and some of them can do the visuals every bit as well as you can.

The stories came from the Atlantic Monthly. I read them to learn what is currently considered a good short story by the literary elite. They were all written with great style. Most of them didn’t speak to me in any way. They were convincing, detailed, emotional stories about realistic characters doing stuff. But I couldn’t figure out how they connected with anything outside of themselves.

The essay, “Don’t write what you know”, by Bret Anthony Johnston, also came from the Atlantic Monthly. It cautioned writers against writing things in their stories because they happened in real life. As has often been said, “Stories must be truer than fiction.”

I thought that quote meant that real life doesn’t package things in a way that makes sense. The purpose of the artist, whether a writer or painter, is to draw connections, and interpret life meaningfully.

But Bret Johnston said the opposite. He said that stories should not be like life because they should not have meaning: "Aboutness is all but terminal in fiction. Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.... The idea of a writer “wanting” to do something in a story unhinges me. At best, such desire smacks of nostalgia and, at worst, it betrays agenda.... And writing what you know is knotted up with intention, and intention in fiction is always related to control, to rigidity, and more often than not, a little solipsism. The writer seems to have chosen an event because it illustrates a point or mounts an argument."

Well, yes. That’s what writers do. I like Dramatica theory, which is a little crackpot-ish, but insightful. It says that every story is an extended argument for or against some proposition.

But now I understand why I don’t understand the stories in the Atlantic Monthly. I thought that I just wasn’t smart enough to make the connections and figure out what the stories were about. But this essay, probably selected by the same editor who chose those stories, says stories shouldn’t be about anything. The most difficult step in writing a story, of figuring out what it is about and directing everything towards that, is (Johnston says) superfluous.

Most of the writers I admire, like Fitzgerald, Kafka, Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Borges, Joseph Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell, deliberately wrote stories that were about something. Perhaps they didn’t know what their stories were about when they began, but they figured it out by the time they were through. If they were like me, they then went back and re-wrote them to focus on what they were about.

The blog post was by Amit. The post was about Fiddlebottom’s stories. Nothing I say here is about those stories, which are disturbing, but have a sense of about-ness to them.

In the post and the comments, some people explained why they like terribly violent and brutal stories. Amit said, A Fun Day “is a work of art; the unending, unyielding sadism and the depiction of Scootaloo's ever-present consciousness is continued well past the point one might expect it to go. There is no looking away or back; there is no cop-out or palliation. It is a constant train of the completely unabated infliction of misery. The characters stay as true as possible to their roots and in doing so they make me laugh a little even as the bile rises in my throat. It goes to the heights of delightful absurdity and masters the idea of saccharine horror.”

This sounds intellectual. But I don’t trust strings of big words. What do they really mean? Apparently to vary a story, and have some things extreme and others not extreme, or to have pacing sometimes fast and sometimes slow, or some characters who are sadistic and some who are not, is a cop-out. The very things that I think of as key to the art of a story disqualify a story from being art.

No. A Fun Day is not a work of art. I assert this even without really understanding what Amit is saying, because AFD is simple. See "If you're not willing to break a sweat" above. The author didn’t have to make any difficult choices or trade-offs. There’s no dramatic structure to speak of, no theme, no connecting arcs to draw together. One must simply begin with cruelty, and continue with it until Scootaloo is dead. It isn’t even as sophisticated as farce.

Several people commented on paintings that are simply a single color painted onto a canvas, and said why they are or are not art. I again say that if one can make a painting in 10 minutes, it is probably not good art. Someone equally skilled who is willing to take 20 minutes can probably make something better.

I also referred to John Cage’s song 4’33”, which is simply four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Again: Easy to make; not art. Or take twelve-step music, or art of any kind that is made according to a theory and a formula rather than by hard work.

I haven’t made any good arguments that these things are not art. That would make this a much longer blog post. I instead offer a single simple explanation for the praise heaped on all these things.

I think what has happened is that people have found it is easier to make impressive-sounding arguments that something is art, than to make art. Those who are adept at these arguments out-compete people who are skilled at art. They’re able to produce their “art” and their arguments faster than people who work hard at it. In an academic environment, where there is no consumer market to speak of, only those who have a stake in the outcome have any impact on what is judged to be art. What eventually dominates is whatever viewpoint is most advantageous to the most people in the debate. As most people can’t or won’t produce the best art, most people prefer arguments that imply that they can produce great art if they just have a moderately-clever idea.

Clever ideas may (let’s suppose) be necessary to produce great art, but they are not sufficient. I don’t mean that sweat itself makes art better. I mean that if someone shows you something and says it is art, and yet they haven’t bothered to do some of the basic work in that art form, such as getting a story for an animation, or having figures within a painting, or building a dramatic structure within a novel, or figuring out what a story is about, or trying to understand and confront a bleak situation rather than simply hyperbolizing it, it probably isn’t very good art compared to things made by other people who took those extra steps. If appreciating it depends more on listening to a complex explanation than on experiencing the work itself, it's suspect. If it could been produced by an eighth-grader, it’s more likely that it’s something people have persuaded themselves is art in order to persuade themselves that they can produce art without great effort.

Take bad advice

It’s helpful to take bad advice sometimes. Three examples:

Bad advice that is bad

Three readers complained that Twilight was too emotional in scene two of The Corpse Bride. I rewrote that scene to instead have Rainbow be emotional, and have Twilight give a calm, rational, and ironically correct explanation (ironic because her tragedy came from not taking her own advice seriously).

All three readers were pleased by the revision, so I guess I didn’t botch taking their advice. I liked the new ironic twist. But I still didn’t like the new version as much, and GhostOfHeraclitus [1], Cypher [2], and the Equestria Daily pre-reader all also wanted more emotion from Twilight there.

The advice sounded reasonable, so why didn’t it work?

– I wrote the story with a flat, matter-of-fact tone and pace that Twilight’s emotional outbursts contrasted nicely with, like sudden gusts of wind in a still November forest.

– In the first version, when Twilight kills Fluttershy, she commits the hubris of believing that she knows what is best for Fluttershy out of empathy, and we sympathize even as we see what a terrible thing she is doing. When she explains herself calmly, she’s just a twit with a theory. [3]

I’m good at thinking analytically, so it’s easy for me to take one scene in a story, divide one character’s business among two separate characters, and rewrite it. Pacing, and whatever you call the equivalent of pacing with regard to tone and mood, are things I don’t understand analytically. I feel the story’s shape intuitively. I learned explicitly why I had intuitively written the story the way I did by writing it the way that I didn’t want to, and seeing the result. I also learned that if I write a story the way I feel it, then go back and change one part radically without re-imagining the entire story, I'm liable to ruin it.

Bad advice that means there is a problem

The first Equestria Daily pre-reader for Big Mac Reads Something Purple said that the writing was flat, and needed more description. I had written the first 500 words sparsely, because it was Big Mac, and I wanted him to be hiding his feelings inside, only able to speak them disguised as a story. There wasn’t much that I could do to create tension or drama before he began telling the story, so I hurried through the scene setting that up.

Nonetheless, I rewrote it to be more descriptive and resubmitted it. This time, the pre-reader said that the story was “Big Macintosh doing his best at not been particularly interesting.... What is the conflict?” He had, I think, completely missed the story.

Both times, the pre-reader was correct that there was something wrong with the story. I think the problem was that the conflict began in the story within the story, but Big Mac gave up almost instantly within that story when the CMC challenged him. That made it easy for that conflict to slip past the reader. And if that happened, the reader would never see the connection between the story that Big Mac told and what happened after he told it. Adding description only made the problem worse, because the lengthier opening buried the critical part of the story even deeper. But if I’d just said, “This is bad advice,” and dismissed it, I’ve never have realized what the problem was.

“Bad” advice that’s good

You can’t know for sure that advice is bad until you try it. The first EqD pre-reader for Moving On said that I had a tendency to summarize scenes that could have been dramatic. I wrote a lengthy justification of my summarizations. But then I rewrote one of them in detail. It worked much better. I looked at the other places where I had summarized, and saw that sometimes it was justified, but sometimes I was being lazy.

TL;DR

You can’t learn much by taking only advice that you think is good. You already understand the advice you think is good. Stuff you don’t know yet will probably sound like bad advice. Most advice is bad advice, but if you take some losses following advice that sounds bad, you might learn things you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. So take my advice.

(How much this advice generalizes beyond writing is left to the reader as an exercise.)

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Whom you already know has a keen understanding of story.

Whom you may not know has a keen eye for subtle details of language and story.

That we sympathize with someone who does the wrong thing when carried away by emotion more than with someone who does the wrong thing due to faulty reasoning, probably proves that humans are broken. But it’s mostly true.

Art in context

I’m reading Talking Heads frontman David Byrne’s book, How Music Works. The book is largely about his claim that context is the most important thing in determining musical form.

The same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning. Depending on where you hear it— in a concert hall or on the street— or what the intention is, the same piece of music could either be an annoying intrusion, abrasive and assaulting, or you could find yourself dancing to it. How music works, or doesn’t work, is determined not just by what it is in isolation (if such a condition can ever be said to exist) but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it and when you hear it. How it’s performed, how it’s sold and distributed, how it’s recorded, who performs it, whom you hear it with, and, of course, finally, what it sounds like: these are the things that determine not only if a piece of music works— if it successfully achieves what it sets out to accomplish— but what it is.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 44-50). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

In a sense, we work backward, either consciously or unconsciously, creating work that fits the venue available to us. That holds true for the other arts as well: pictures are created that fit and look good on white walls in galleries just as music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not in both). In a sense, the space, the platform, and the software “makes” the art, the music, or whatever. After something succeeds, more venues of a similar size and shape are built to accommodate more production of the same. After a while the form of the work that predominates in these spaces is taken for granted— of course we mainly hear symphonies in symphony halls.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 90-94). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

He explains that different types of music, including African drumming, Gregorian chants, Mozart’s chamber music, symphonies, jazz, and rock ‘n roll, should not be seen as part of a progressive evolution of music towards some higher form, but as designed for the spaces that they were played in. Drums are loud enough to be heard when played outdoors. Stone cathedrals have too much reverberation, at too large time-scales, for anything with rapidly-changing notes. Mozart could play trills and add frills because the private homes he played in had plush furniture and tapestried walls that absorbed sound. Improvisational jazz developed so that musicians could accommodate the whims of dancers. The crooning of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby was only possible because they had microphones. Disco isn’t bad, unless you’re trying to listen to it instead of dance to it. Hip-hop is music designed as an acoustic weapon [my interpretation] or as a way of participating in a re-performance [his interpretation] by blasting it at people from cars.

But none of this seems to apply to fiction. There are hipster graphic artists who say that the font or the paper make a significant difference to them. They don’t, for me; and I’m inclined to believe that readers who are strongly affected by presentation are poor readers. The text is supposed to disappear; the story exists in your head, whether you read it on Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College or on the subway. Awareness of your surroundings while reading means the story is failing.

But Byrne says this is true for all kinds of art!  “Context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.”  Is that right? I’m uncomfortable disagreeing with him, because he’s a genius. (And I don’t just mean a musical genius. This guy could have done well in semiotics or nuclear physics.) So what role does context play in fiction?

Story, Byrne suggests, can emerge mystically when the space of possible stories is restricted by some artificially-imposed constraint:

Writing words to fit an existing melody and meter, as I did on Everything That Happens and many other records, is something anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively— every rapper improvises or composes to a meter, for example. I had been encouraged to make this process, which is usually internalized, more explicit when I was writing the words for Remain in Light. That was the first time I tackled a whole record of lyrics this way. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, somewhat surprisingly, in words that have an emotional consistency and sometimes even a narrative thread, even though those aspects of the texts weren’t planned ahead of time.

How does this happen? With Remain in Light and even before that, I would look for words that fit pre-existing melodic fragments that I or others had come up with. After filling lots of pages with non-sequitors, I would scan them to see if a lyrically resonant group emerged. Phrases that would hint at the beginning of an actual subject often seemed to want to emerge. This might seem magical— claiming that a text “wants” to come into being (and we’ve heard this said before), but it’s true. When some phrases, even if collected almost at random, begin to resonate together and appear to be talking about the same thing, it’s tempting to claim they have a life of their own. The lyrics may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story” in the broadest sense emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.

Byrne, David (2012-09-12). How Music Works (Kindle Locations 3103-3114). McSweeney's. Kindle Edition.

That’s interesting, and might be an effective way of writing, or of developing a theme. But it’s internal to the story, so I don’t think it’s context.

Maybe the context for fiction is on a larger scale: The culture that you live in, the life experiences that you’ve had, and your view of what the world is like. Frank Miller’s graphic novels work best for people who believe that the world’s problems have simple, often violent solutions, and are caused because men are too weak and corrupt to implement them. One of my favorite stories is Jorge Luis Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (even though it was the fore-runner of most pretentious post-modern literary critcism). Borges describes an author who rewrote Don Qixote line-by-line centuries later, and then reviews this work, finding it to mean something very different from the original by Cervantes:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

I briefly had the ambition to write a children’s story that would seem charming to a child, and dark and chilling to an adult. Unfortunately the market for such a book is probably small.

But these games with worldviews seem unsatisfying. A musician can switch from concert hall to subway platform, and adapt to the new surroundings. Neither a writer nor a reader can switch, within a day, into the worldview of another culture and another life-stage. The kinds of contexts that Byrne is speaking of are alternatives that can be used creatively; the context of a story is a mental straitjacket.

Genre is a context. It creates expectations. But it doesn’t seem to be a context the way Byrne talks about them. If someone reads your fantasy as autobiography, you can say that they are wrong. You can’t change a story by moving it into the wrong anthology; you can only mislead the reader. And it would be very hard to take a story that was a good example of one genre, and rewrite it in another genre.

Am I missing something? What good can it do an author to imagine the circumstances of the reader? How can an author use context creatively?

Double Rainboom

Before I spoil the mood by getting snarky, I’d like to give a big thanks to Wanderer D, who moved my first story on fimfiction, “Friends, With Occasional Magic”, to my Bad Horse account. And thanks to Boss Pony, my 600th watcher. He’s not even one of my sock puppets!

Have you ever wondered how I produce these beautifully-formatted blog posts?

No?

I'll tell you my secret anyway. Create a story, "Blog posts". Write your posts in Google docs. When done, create a new story chapter & upload the blog to it using the "Import from Google Docs" green up-arrow. Then Edit, ctrl-a (Select All), Copy, Blogs, Add new blog post, and Paste.

Now, the promised snark.

I’m really impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of all those folks from the Savannah College of Art & Design who got together and made Double Rainboom. Putting a crew of artists together and keeping it together for an entire year is probably the hardest job in any art. I don’t hold a grudge against them at all for premiering it during my panel at Cloudsdale Congress. Not a bit. And I’m grateful to Hasbro for letting them do it.

(Right in the middle of my panel. Just across the hall.)

But as a writer, it’s a bit of a slap in the face when a crew gathers 40 animators, 34 artists, 10 special-effects experts, 10 voice actors, 5 puppeteers,  4 sound artists, and zero writers. Because writing is just, you know, writing words, and anybody can do that.

Kind of like when you go to a brony convention and the schedule has 4 pages listing the bios of musicians and artists, and one sentence saying there will be some writers. Or like when a big brony convention in England has one panel on writing... and staffs it with musicians who write a little. Or like when you watch most movies from big Hollywood studios. Or like one of my first jobs out of college, with a computer game company whose president, a computer scientist, hired a scriptwriter, then told him what to write. You haven’t heard of this computer game company. Guess why.

Maybe writing really isn’t as hard as animating or composing. People have written excellent stories very very soon after they started writing, like S.E. Hinton, Carson McCullers, AbsoluteAnonymous, and Quixotic Mage. (The bastards.) But it ain’t nothing.

I don’t think the Double Rainboom crew was aware that they spent an entire year slaving over the graphical details of a story that was the literary equivalent of a stick-figure drawing. Animators are great at understanding character and emotion, at devising little bits of business that show you economically what a character is feeling and thinking. They focus on that, just like a composer friend of mine reviews movies by talking about the score. And there’s a long tradition in the animation business of mostly story-free animation, just one-dimensional characters in one silly scene after another (ACME rocket rollerskates, anyone?)

But it’s arrogant to assume that professional studios are just stupid for hiring writers. It reminds me of rock bands made entirely of guitarists, who assign vocals and drums to the worst guitarists. (You’ve never heard of them, either.)

Bronycon

BronyCon was huge! I asked the reg staff how many people were attending. 8,400. That’s a few thousand more people than have ever attended any WorldCon (the big yearly science fiction convention). Still small compared to the 30,000 who attended the baseball game next door on Sunday, though.

I went toward the convention center, looking for ponies.

Me walking towards the convention center. Still no sign of these "cosplayers".

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The convention center was guarded by Equestria’s finest

There were parties, panels, & a giant dealer’s room filled with swag! So I’m told. I didn’t go to any of those things except a couple of panels. I missed most of the con thru stupidity. I got there after registration closed Friday (late finishing the hooves for a costume I didn’t wear), & they wouldn’t let me into anything. I spent most of Saturday hanging out in Quills & Sofas or going places with people I met in Quills & Sofas, a writers’ hangout that Applejinx organized (in addition to half the writers’ panels at the convention). I had a great time hanging out with Professor Plum, who is British and therefore suave and able to make the word “horsecock” sound sophisticated. I didn’t remember until that evening when I checked his user page that I hated him. Oh, well. Guess I’ll call off that drone strike.

Benman & bookplayer

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Wanderer D & Obselescence

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Applejinx making his move on some devilishly handsome stallion

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Sat. evening the hotel borked my reservation, so I drove home. I left my badge in the car overnight, not even taking it into my house, just to make sure it would be in the car on Sunday. Then I went to bed & crashed hard, sleeping until about 2 in the afternoon, leaving enough time to drive back & see Wanderer D’s panel at 4pm.

I got in the car and checked that my badge was on the seat beside me. Traffic was terrible. Why is traffic around DC terrible on a Sunday afternoon? It took me 2 hours to get to Baltimore. D’s panel was half-over by the time I got there. And when I did, the badge was NOT on the seat beside me.

I spent half an hour searching the car for the badge. No luck. Called JMac to see if I could use his badge—he’d already driven home. Hung out by the entrance & tried to buy a badge off bronies leaving for home—no one would sell. Some bronies. Where’s the friendship? Went inside & spoke to con ops, waited 10 minutes to hear that they couldn’t help me. By that time the con was over, so I just walked into the convention center. There were still people checking badges on the way in, but all I had to do was walk around the other side of the escalator, which wasn’t guarded, and sneaky-stylie on through back to Quills & Sofas.

(Next day, found my badge in the trunk of my car.)

But I had come back on Sunday mainly to attend the writer’s dinner that Sunchaser had organized. He’d made reservations at the Cheesecake Factory. They took the reservation instead of telling him that they don’t take reservations. When we got there, they said it would be a 2-and-a-half hour wait. So we went to an Irish pub on the waterfront, because it was the only place that had room for 30 people on no notice.

Professor Plum, in the pub, with the fork

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I recommended the crab cake to Prof. Plum. Sorry! It was not a devious scheme for me to get two crab cakes for the price of one. It just worked out that way.

Cap’n Chryssalid

Writers of horse words

Too many people to name (or get permission to name). Jake the Army Guy is holding the sign. I’m in the front row in a purple shirt.

Most Commanding Presence: The Descendant

Most Unlike their Avatar: Obselescence

Younger Than Expected: Pen Stroke

Nicer Than Expected: Professor Plum

Just as Nice as Expected: bookplayer

Most Work Making BronyCon Author-Friendly: Applejinx

Most Heroic Personal Life Story: also Applejinx

Authors I Recommend Against Picking a Fight With: Aquaman, Jake the Army Guy

I had another costume, but as I was getting it ready, I noticed these words in the con brochure:

Help keep BronyCon a family-friendly convention. BronyCon welcomes fans of all ages and we want to make this a fun weekend for everyone. If you wouldn’t see it on the show, please don’t bring it into the convention.

Now, I think the show’s had plenty scarier things than this on it. Nightmare Moon! Cerberus! Hydras!

What do you think? Yes or no?

[redacted]

If we ever do see something like that in an episode, I’m sure it will become one of my favorites.

The hoof boots don’t show up well in that photo, which is a shame, because they’re cool & were a pain to make and even more of a pain to learn to walk in. I bought these sexy high-heeled women’s shoes (size 13) with giant hoof-like toe pads, cut off the heels, then patched over the cut spot with clay & painted the clay black. I wasted one pair of boots because I couldn’t cut through the steel staples holding the sole onto the heel. Why couldn’t I saw through a staple with a hacksaw? I don’t know, but I spent half an hour trying to & failed. I had to switch to my backup boots & cut thru the heel lower down.

Also, I learned that women have huge ankles. I’ve paid plenty of attention to women’s ankles, but I’ve never measured them. My feet fit perfectly into size 13 women’s boots, but the legs of the boots were tight. I understand that women don’t have big muscular legs. But the ankles sagged like empty bags! What’s that about?

Making the hooves in that costume was a disaster. I was following the instructions on this web page. It said to make them out of epoxy. Michael’s Crafts didn’t have epoxy, so I got modeling clay. Same thing, right? Wrong.

I made one hoof out of air-dry clay and one out of polymer clay, just to make sure the project would still be a failure even if one of those actually worked. Polymer clay is difficult to spread & join, but it’s strong & light. Air-dry clay is real clay, so you can smooth it & blend it easily with water, but then it collapses in on itself in a mushy heap. You’d need a screen mesh, not just a few wires, to form it on with real clay. And the resulting hoof is heavy and weak. Air-dry clay makes a huge mess that’s easy to clean up with water. Polymer clay leaves a few small stains on your fingers and under your nails which are impossible to remove until you shed and regrow that skin. Neither lets you build & bake the hoof in stages as epoxy does--you’ve got to get the whole thing done in one go. Sort of. I managed to build the polymer hoof in two stages, by baking the first stage only halfway, then spreading clay across the floor of the hoof for the second stage and spreading it out and over everything built in the first stage.

Wire frame to attach clay to. I used duct tape instead of solder for the joints. Much stronger.

After applying polymer clay. The platform in the back is to grip the hoof so it doesn’t fall off.

After baking, I realized that shelf to hold onto wasn’t going to work, so I strung some wire from side to side across the inside, anchoring it to that V in the middle, and bent it so I could put my fingers under it & hold onto it. Much better than the original design!

Detail of wire for handhold. Sock with heel cut off glued to inside front.

Here’s what the bottoms look like. The handhold on the underside of the clay hoof is broken; it only lasted for a few minutes of wearing.

Instructions said to bake the polymer clay 15 minutes at 275 Fahrenheit for each quarter-inch of thickness. I baked it for 8 hours & it still wasn’t set. (It did dry out after a day.) It had a nice black finish, but I found when I tried to sand it down that it was white just below the surface!

The air-dry hoof needed a day to air-dry, and I didn’t have a day, so I baked it in the oven at 175, & it cracked all over. No worries: I’d patch the cracks with Bondo!

But my Bondo was about 5 years old & dried out. I mixed it & smeared it in the cracks. It smelled like a chemical warfare agent. The instructions said it would dry in 5 minutes. I set it in the August sun for 5 hours, & it didn’t dry one damn bit. It was still just a stinky, gooey mess. So I scraped & sanded away what I could, then sprayed the whole hoof with black paint in the hope that would seal in the stench.

It did not.

This was too much work. Better to make a 3D design on the computer, print a dozen of them with a 3D printer, & sell the extras on ebay. They’d be lighter, stronger, & faster to make.

On Mary Sues

Something happened at Bronycon which changed my opinion on Mary Sues. One of the first MLP fanfics I read was about a classic first-person Mary Sue—bulging muscles, godlike powers, and everypony from Twilight to Celestia wanted to sleep with him.

I had read many comments by its author on other stories. He was smart, diligent, and generous. And he took his Mary Sue story seriously and was proud of it. He loved that story. It was well-written and had many positive reviews, as well as hateful ones telling him he had written a Mary Sue and should feel ashamed. I could never tell how much of it was serious and how much of it was tongue-in-cheek. I didn’t know what to make of it all.

I met him at BronyCon and learned a little bit more about him. He had a rough childhood. He could have used a powerful magical alicorn to come and make everything right, but he didn’t have one.

I may be totally off base in drawing a connection between that, and his fanfic. But if he gets something that he needs out of a story in which he is powerful and loved, who the fuck are you to tell him that’s bad art?

Why We Read

Fiddlebottoms pointed me toward an interesting, if bloated, article by Jonathan Franzen from 1996, “Perchance to Dream”. Here’s an excerpt about why people read, according to a sociologist (with sentences boldfaced by me):

Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”--places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She rode public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports.... She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time. She visited summer writers conferences and creative-writing programs to grill ephebes. She interviewed novelists. Three years ago she interviewed me, and last summer I had lunch with her in Palo Alto.

[But she doesn’t seem to have published anything about any of this. -  BH]

To the extent that novelists think about audience at all, we like to imagine a “general audience”--a large, eclectic pool of decently educated people who can be induced, by strong enough reviews or aggressive enough marketing, to treat themselves to a good, serious book. ...

Heath’s … research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, … one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this. Parents in the privileged classes encourage reading out of a sense of what Louis Auchincloss calls “entitlement”: just as the civilized person ought to be able to appreciate caviar and a good Burgundy, she ought to be able to enjoy Henry James. Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as a way to exercise the mind. ...

According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. ...

I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate--the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. … What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you--because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.“

…

For Heath, a defining feature of “substantive works of fiction” is unpredictability. She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability. Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives have not followed the course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, men from conservative families who lead openly gay lives, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers’. This last group is particularly large. There are, today, millions of American women whose lives do not resemble the lives they might have projected from their mothers’, and all of them, in Heath’s model, are potentially susceptible to substantive fiction.[6]

In her interviews, Heath uncovered a “wide unanimity” among serious readers that literature “‘makes me a better person.’”She hastened to assure me that, rather than straightening them out in a self-help way, “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life.” Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive--my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.”  ...

With near unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not.”

“And religions themselves are substantive works of fiction,” I said.

She nodded. “This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn’t mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend.”

The first section seems implausible or just trite. It sounds like all she’s saying is that some people read for social reasons, and some for non-social reasons, pretty much like every other activity. This is a theory that doesn’t predict anything. Also, telling someone that “from an early age you felt different from everyone around you” is a cold-reading trick.

The second section is more interesting. Perhaps it’s also trivially true. She may have defined “substantive works of fiction” in a way that excluded readers unlike the group that she “discovered”. But it does describe what I like in fiction.

I agree that fiction is the only place where most people grapple with difficult problems in nontrivial ways, and might possibly change their minds. There are plenty of forums for debate; I just seldom see debate change anybody’s mind. I have better ways of arriving at truth than through fiction, but not of communicating it. Fiction manipulates your emotions to make you perceive facts differently, using stories as Trojan horses to smuggle in ideas and attitudes that your mental firewalls ordinarily keep out.

But its methodology is so sloppy that it’s hard to believe it can on average bring you closer to truth, rather than farther from it. Good writers aren’t especially good philosophers, so most of their ideas may be bad.

If fiction does more good than harm, it’s probably just by shaking readers out of their local minima in thoughtspace. A random walk through mostly-bad ideas may eventually arrive in a place that’s clearly better.

Lead your readers

Dancing is a romantic couples’ activity because it’s a metaphor for romance, or at least for sex. Usually, the man “leads”, and the woman “follows”. But it’s more complicated than that sounds. The degree to which the man “leads” can vary from Victorian dances or a circle-sweeping Viennese waltz, where everyone knows when to step where and the man’s leading is a mutually-agreeable deception; to salsa or swing, where the woman may find herself spun in a circle or turned upside down with less than a second’s notice. But whatever the dance, the man doesn’t drag the woman around the floor. He senses where they both are already going, and adds a flourish or twist. His movements should be congruent enough with what they're both doing to be anticipated, but not so predictable as to be expected, much as your girlfriend anticipates a present on Valentine's Day, but doesn't want to tell you what to get her.¹ By leading well, a man proves he's capable of being sensitive to a woman's desires. Leading is thus also a kind of following.

(In contemporary club dancing, by contrast, there is no leading, no following, no synchrony of movement, no interaction of any kind other than eye contact sometimes followed by grinding bodies together. Make of that what you will.²)

Let’s see how well this metaphor applies to writing.

The reader chooses a book or movie because its genre, cover/poster, and first page/trailer lead her to expect a story with a certain form and feel to it. Different genres and styles, like different dances, promise different degrees of energy (salsa vs. waltz, pulp vs. memoir), unexpectedness (swing vs. square dancing, independent vs. Hollywood), and intimacy (tango vs. rhumba, first person vs. third omniscient). The author leads the reader through a story respecting those expectations, providing details and turns that are anticipated but not expected.

The dance is about the woman; an observer’s eyes go to her, not to him. He is the frame and she is the picture. Similarly, the story is for the reader more than for the writer. Writing that draws attention to itself, rather than to the story, is like a salsa shine, where the man pushes the woman away and struts up and down the floor. Some people like it, but I find it contrary to the spirit of dance.

When learning a dance (learning a genre / writing a story), the man (writer) first learns the steps (tropes / plot). Only after that can he figure out how to lead the steps correctly. When I rewrite, I try to make sure all the important story points have arrows somewhere pointing at them. That’s what I mean by leading. I can’t do it in the first draft.

Leading in writing isn’t just foreshadowing. It’s leading the reader through the mutual creation of a story. If your character’s throwing a pot away symbolizes a rejection of love, you’ve got to draw the reader’s attention to it. Just tossing it out there is like trying to spin a woman without lifting your arm beforehand. But having a character look at the broken pot and think it was “broken, like my heart”, is like yanking the woman’s arm to make sure she makes the turn. It gets you both through it, but it's more work and it isn't much fun for either person. Following has to be challenging, or it isn't really dancing. A proper dance, like a proper story, is the work of two, not one.

To learn how to lead well, you must learn how to follow. Dancing the woman’s part teaches you which parts of the man’s movements are the leads, just how obvious they need to be, and how irritating they are when overdone. It’s easy to know when you’ve missed a dance lead, because you stumble and run into people. But you can't tell when you’ve missed an author’s lead; you just think the author is being stupid. So you need to pre-read for other authors and ask them to tell you what you missed.

Dancing the woman’s part also teaches you that the key to leading is not doing anything that feels like leading when you’re not trying to lead. That’s the TL;DR of this post. When I fail to follow some clue the author planted, it’s not usually because the author planted that clue poorly. It’s because the author wrote many other beautiful things that looked like clues, like a dancer who keeps tugging at the woman’s arms even in the middle of a step.

Things look like clues if they’re vivid, unexpected, or repeated; if they stand out stylistically; if they get a lot of words. When William Gibson wrote, “The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel,” it wasn’t just because the sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. Writing “The sky was grey” in such a long and unexpected way was like highlighting it in yellow and writing “Symbolism!” in the margin.

Have you ever bought a used book from the college bookstore and found it had every sentence on some pages highlighted? Don’t do that. Seriously. It makes photocopies and scans hard to read. Also, don’t highlight everything in your story with a vivid or startling description. If you have a loving description of how the tramp handles his cigar, but it’s just a cigar, you may want to dial it back a bit if you don’t want to foreshadow a certain narrative turn. After the reader’s wasted enough time puzzling over red herrings, she’ll assume everything that stands out is just another meaningless yank on her arms.

All this is doubly true in fan-fiction, where the reader assumes—justifiably!—that anything that sticks out in your story is probably just a mistake. When I had Celestia go ballistic on Trixie in “Trust”, readers didn’t say, “Oh, that’s very strange; this issue must be especially emotional to her right now for some reason” as often as they said, “That’s too out-of-character.” When I had Holmes suggest physically assaulting Trixie in “Detective & Magician”, that was supposed to be a key indicator that there was something wrong with this incarnation of Holmes, but could easily be read as bad characterization. Many times I’ve missed clues planted by other fan-fiction writers because they were fan-fiction writers and I assumed they just screwed up. Aquillo’s stories are loaded with subtle clues, but if you read them in fan-fiction mode, you might not find them unless you already know his stories are loaded with subtle clues, which you won’t know unless you… you see the catch-22. Just being on fimfiction rather than in a Norton anthology makes leading the reader more difficult.

It doesn’t help that rather than relaxing in the tub with a single paperback, I’m reading on a screen that has a large icon at the top telling me I have 324 stories queued up to read after this one. Fast reading, like fast dancing, makes subtle leading harder. I'm afraid faster and faster reading is in store for us, as the supply of free fiction keeps increasing. Getting on EqD, or getting followers, doesn't just bring you more readers; it brings you readers who will cut you more slack and take more time to look for your leads. The more reputation you have, the more you can get away with, and the more people will like your stories. (This is just one of the reasons that if you're a new writer and you want to be as popular as me, you have to be better than me.³)

A final aspect of leading in dance, whose metaphoric equivalent may or may not be true, is that the better you get at dancing, the fewer people you can dance your best with.⁴ You can't dance just as well with any partner. The most exciting dance moves require a great lead and a great follower expert at that particular dance. There are writers, like James Joyce or e. e. cummings, who seem to me to have been very good, and then to have become unreadable. Whether that's because they were corrupted by too much praise, or because they went beyond my ability to dance with them in their own specialized style, is probably unknowable, if it is even the sort of question that has an answer.

It's not my fault that we have a "sex" tag, but no "sexist" tag.

I count it as a victory for the men.

Except for GhostOfHeraclitus. That was obviously just luck.

I speak from observation, not from experience.

Pacing

I know nothing about pacing. I’m not even convinced that it’s a thing. If I’m reading a story and get bored, I don’t say the pacing is slow. I say it’s boring. That tells you more ways and more specific ways to fix it. If a story has two breathless action scenes in a row in a way that doesn’t work for me, like the opening to End of Ponies, I don’t say the pacing is too fast; I say something is missing. Raiders of the Lost Ark is just as fast, but it isn’t too fast.

I’m not convinced there’s such a thing as “too slow” or “too fast”. There’s such a thing as too boring, and such a thing as too many questions per second. The opening action scenes in End of Ponies continually increase the reader’s uncertainty and pull her attention in different directions, because the information they provide is outweighed by the questions that information immediately leads to (What happened to Equestria? What happened to Rainbow Dash? Where were the princesses?) The opening action scenes in Raiders give us more story-relevant information than questions. (This is one advantage of an OC, BTW: The opening scene of Raiders is interesting partly because we’re finding out who Indy is. It would be almost boring if we already knew.) They don’t open troubling new mysteries on us in the beginning or middle of an action sequence.

If there’s a correct ratio between slow and fast, or a correct interval at which to alternate between them, I don’t know about it. But I’ll play along for now and assume “pacing” means something measurable and useful for a story.

I was scanning in “Scene and Structure” by Jack Bickham when some of the highlighted words in the chapter on pacing caught my eye. As often happens, though I read it only two months ago, I had no recollection of any of it. I think maybe some alternate-universe stupid me underlined it, because he underlined the wrong parts. It said some shocking things that I would have remembered, or at least highlighted, if I’d read them.

Jack Bickham divides stories up into what he calls scenes and sequels. A scene shows a conflict; a sequel tells what the main character thinks about it afterward. Bickham’s theory of pacing is that scenes are fast, and sequels and interior thoughts within a scene are slow. So his prescription for making a story’s pacing faster or slower is to change the ratio of scenes versus {sequels and interior thoughts}.

This has the counterintuitive results that you can make something faster by making it longer, fleshing the scenes out with more detail, and you can make it slower by making it shorter, converting weak scenes into summaries (which are then sequels).

I at first mapped “scenes” to “showing” and “sequels and interior thoughts” to “telling”. This is close, but not quite right. I talked in my Vault interview about writing “Mortality Report” versus writing “Twenty Minutes”. The first was boring because it was all telling, and I added scenes to make it less boring. The second was boring even though it was all showing. I thought that the problematic opening was all a single scene. Why was the “pacing too slow” if it was all scene?

Then I realized it wasn’t a scene at all by Bickham’s definition. A scene starts with a protagonist who wants something, and an obstacle. I had a protagonist with a problem, but the reader wouldn’t learn what it was until the second scene. So my opening “scene” was neither scene nor sequel, according to Bickham, but an unclassifiable thing that you should not write.

So I don’t have to believe in “too fast” or “too slow” to benefit from his advice on pacing. I can think of “pacing” as just meaning “the ratio of scenes to sequels”, and this turns out to be useful (and more precise) information.

Here’s my theory of pacing, which I just made up at this moment: Pacing means balancing the load across your reader’s processors. Your reader has, at the very least, a graphics processor (GPU) for visual and perceptual scenes, a CPU for logical thought, and an EPU (Emotion Processing Unit) that decides how she feels about all these things. Bad pacing means fully-loading one of these processors with multiple tasks while another of them sits idle. Your reader’s CPU can still be crunching on the consequences described in the previous sequel while her GPU is absorbing the details in the current scene. If you put too many parts in a row that task only one of these processors, you’re not challenging your readers.

The 8 Creepiest Things About My Little Pony

8. Males are useless

Well, not useless. They're useful for pulling plows, moving big things, and pulling carriages. In the feminist paradise of Equestria, mares travel in carriages pulled by stallions. You sometimes see males in the background, standing around in fields staring at nothing, waiting for a chance to be useful to some female. The Equestrian royal court is full of stallions standing around in armor and flexing their withers, although whenever there's an actual military threat Celestia leaves the boys at home and sends a cadre of untrained adolescent mares to deal with it.

In a show about friendship, not a single named character has a single male friend, unless you count Twilight's "friendship" with Spike (see slavery below).  But there are male characters. There's King Sombra, a personification of evil. There are Flim and Flam, who try to take the Apple family's farm. And there's Discord, another personification of evil.

Not all males are evil.  There's also Snips and Snails, who are morons; Snowflake (also a moron); Shining Armor (prince of surfer dudes and donsel in distress); Blueblood (a cad and a moron); and the Diamond Dogs (morons with bad breath).

There are positive male role models, too. There's Big Macintosh, who pulls heavy things all day for Applejack, doesn't try to think, and limits his speech to "yup" and "nope" as males should. There's Mr. Cake, whose sole object in life is to avoid upsetting Mrs. Cake. And there's these guys:

Featherweight and Pipsqueak are the perfect males: They don’t say much, and they’re small enough to step on if they get out of line. The message for little girls is that males may seem cute and harmless when they're little, but unless properly disciplined, they'll grow up to be evil and stupid.

7. Ponies are control freaks

In the land of Equestria, ponies raise and lower the sun and the moon, herd rainclouds and schedule storms, tell the plants to grow, feed the animals, shake the leaves from the tree when  they want them to fall, and decide when winter will come and go.

All those things used to take care of themselves. There's one place in Equestria where they still do—the Everfree Forest. It's seen as a place of evil and nightmares. The words "everfree" strike terror into the hearts of ponies, just as they did into the heart of this man:

Not as controlling as Princess Celestia.

6. Ponies are imperialists

In "The Crystal Empire", said empire appears magically, temporarily freed from the despotic rule of King Sombra (a male, 'nuff said). The Equestrians send a crack force of adolescent mares to prevent Sombra's return, to—free them? No; to place one of their own spare princesses on the throne and add the Crystal Empire to their dominion.

5. Ponies are racist slavers

Fluttershy keeps chickens in a coop and eats their eggs. In "Applebuck Season" we see that ponies herd, rope, and milk cows even though they're intelligent enough to speak. Perhaps more disturbing is how Twilight pretends to be a mother or sister to the baby dragon Spike. Spike was stolen from his true parents as an egg (probably by Celestia), given to Twilight to experiment on when she was just a little filly, and when against all odds he survived, she made him do all her scut-work from then on without pay and sleep in a basket on the floor.

4. Fluttershy kills some animal friends to feed to other animal friends

In "One Bad Apple" we see Fluttershy, kind, gentle, friend to all animals, making friends with fish. In "Dragonshy" we see her killing those fish to feed them to ferrets, without even asking whether the ferrets are hungry. This isn't kindness; it's obsession. Now we just need an episode where she throws baby birds out of the nest so she can tend to their broken wings.

3. Princess Celestia sends anyone who doesn't obey her to some kind of hell for a thousand years

In the first episode, we learn that Princess Celestia, benevolent ruler of Equestria, had a little sister who refused to obey her. So Celestia exiled her to the gray, dusty, airless, silent surface of the moon for a thousand years. And never wrote.

In season two we meet Discord, a being of supreme evil whom Celestia turned to a statue in her garden for a thousand years for not doing what she said. On actually encountering the guy, we discover that he's basically—a guy (see males). He doesn't do anything very dastardly; he just thinks Celestia's perfectly-ordered world is boring (see control freaks above). When he talks to her, he takes the high moral ground: "It's quite lonely being encased in stone. But you wouldn't know that, would you. Because I don't turn ponies into stone!" But there's a happy ending: He ends up encased in stone again. The really creepy thing about this episode, though, is that Celestia's sculpture garden where Discord is imprisoned as a statue is full of other statues.

Her cousin Jadis arranges hers more tastefully.

“But Celestia had no choice! She had to sent Luna to the moon. (And never write.) She had to turn Discord into a statue.”

In reply, I have compiled this list of characters who have defied Celestia and not suffered a thousand years of torment:

(nopony)

One out of many is a tragedy. Two out of two is a policy.

2. Hell actually exists in Equestria

In "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle encounters Cerberus, the three-headed dog, and worries that this means the damned (who presumably once disobeyed Celestia) may be escaping from the underworld. The actual lines from the show:

Twilight Sparkle: That's Cerberus! He's supposed to be guarding the gates of Tartarus, but if he's here, then all of the evil creatures that have been imprisoned there could escape and destroy Equestria!

Spike: Destroy Equestria?!

Twilight Sparkle: Yeah, isn't it great?

1. Twilight Sparkle murders a room full of innocent ponies

In the episode "Too Many Pinkie Pies", Pinkie uses the magic Mirror Pool to make copies of herself, so that she can attend all the different events that her friends are having at the same time. This multitude of pinkies proves supremely annoying. Instead of exporting Pinkies to towns that don't have any and creating a profitable party-catering franchise, Twilight solves the problem by getting them all together in one room, then murdering all but one of them by blasting them with magical energy from her horn.

But it's all in good fun! See how much fun they're having as they watch their fellow clones being killed off one by one?

“Look, even her blood is pink!”

So people shouldn’t worry that we’re gay pedophiles because we’re bronies. They should worry that we might murder them, sell them to Somali slavers, or vote for Hillary Clinton.

Making story art with the GIMP

I used to commission story art, but this year, I've put together most of my art myself using the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), though I can't draw at all.

GIMP is photo editing software, very much like Photoshop, available free at www.gimp.org. This is not a GIMP tutorial, just a demonstration of how I've used GIMP for cover art. GIMP lets me combine and modify existing art. Ponies are easy to manipulate in GIMP because they're vector art, so colors are non-textured and stay the same over large areas. Trying to modify things with photo-realistic shading is much harder.

The simplest use of GIMP is to crop pictures and erase unwanted details. I use Microsoft Paint for cropping, but GIMP is better for erasing. I erased the Hub logo in this picture today for my upcoming story "Pony Play":

To do this, just play a video, stop on the frame that you want, use screen (active window) capture, and (in Windows) paste it into Microsoft Paint. Crop it some—not quite as closely as you want; leave some extra edges in case you want them back later. (In the GIMP, unlike in Microsoft Paint, you can clip things out of the canvas without deleting them from the layer they are on.) Then save it as a .PNG file (not a JPG; I think that removes more details), and open that PNG with GIMP.

(If anyone knows a good video player that lets you single-step through frames, please tell me.)

Then, select the brush tool. With vector art, you usually set both brush "hardness" and "opacity" to 100%. With curved lines, you're going to work with the circular brush. (The other brushes are rarely helpful. There is no square brush; for fine squarish detail, you'll have to take the circular brush down to 2 to 4 pixels.) To erase, right-click somewhere very near the thing you want to erase, which sucks up the background color from that spot. Then push the left mouse button down and hold it while you rub that color over the hub logo. Release and then hold the button down again periodically; this pushes what you've done so far onto the undo stack, so if you wipe something important out, you only lose the last erase stroke made when you undo.

To do more than this, give yourself a half a day to work through some tutorials. Or open a photo in GIMP and start playing around. As with Photoshop, the key things to understand are layers and selections. Your work will be divided into different layers, with objects on transparent backgrounds on the upper layers, shading and lighting on the middle layers, and backgrounds on the bottom layer. Your selection is a two dimensional boundary on all the layers, usually outlined with a dotted white line. Any time you use a tool, it will draw (or erase, magnify, or whatever) only in the intersection of the layer you have selected, and your selection area.

Layers, layers, layers. Use lots of them. A picture with 3 objects can easily have a dozen layers, for background, atmospheric shading, shadows, and invisible copies you made before rotating or stretching things so you can go back to them if you change your mind.

I assembled this cover art for "Big Mac Reads Something Purple" by clipping, scaling, rotating, and transforming separate pictures of the library, a desk, a book, the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and an image of Big Mac clipped out of the cover art I commissioned from blackm3sh for "A Carrot for Miss Fluttershy":

Notice I reshaped the desk, removed the hearts (as described above for the Hub logo), and used the rotation tool to rotate the book to be flat on the desk, and the brush to give Big Mac a slight frown. I should have added shadows under the desk.

For this, I had to do clipping, a common operation. First, choose the layer with the object to clip, and execute "Layer->Transparency->Add Alpha Channel". After doing this, deleting things removes them from the layer, instead of just painting them white. Then select & delete everything but the object you want from that layer. There are some fancy auto selection tools that try to let you automatically select areas by color or border, but they don't usually work well. I just zoom in very close on the object I want to clip, then use the "Free Select Tool" to draw a line around its boundary, select the areas around the object, and delete them. Don't try to be exact; you're probably working on an image 1000-2000 pixels wide, and it's going to be downsized to 250 pixels wide for fanfiction cover art. (EqD cover art can be about 800 pixels wide, so be more careful with that.) Don't try to delete everything all at once; you may end up spending 20 minutes tracing a detailed contour, and then losing everything because you accidentally clicked once in the wrong place. GIMP has multiple-level undo to undo any deletes, but it does not have any way to recover a contour selection if you accidentally close it. So delete one piece at a time.

For "Behind the Scenes", I clipped out a picture of human hands holding a clapper board, pasted it into its own layer, and used the text tool to write a different title onto a layer above the clapper board. (The image is scaled down too far for you to tell, but it says, "Celestia Does Equestria.")

For "Mortality Report", I started with this clip from the show of Celestia writing on a scroll. Nice, but a little too cheerful to be writing about Twilight's death.

So I erased the original eyes, clipped the sad eyes out of this picture,

pasted them into a layer, stretched and rotated them, and used the brush to redraw her smile as a frown:

(Unfortunately, the frown is almost completely invisible on the fimfiction image.)

For "Long Distance", I drew a crappy white tower as a set of rectangles, clipped off some corners, made four copies of a window/door object for the opening at the top and the arrow slits, pasted Twilight into the top of it, cut & pasted some trees and bushes from screenshots in front, clipped some clouds from a photo & added color to them with a gradient filter, and to the background with another gradient filter:

Then I merged Twilight, tower, windows, trees, and bushes into a single layer (using Merge Down), and stretched it all using the Perspective tool, and added cliffs from a screenshot underneath. (You can tell I added the cliffs separately, because the perspectives on tower and cliff don't quite match. They were already in perspective in the screenshot. Tower and cliffs could also use some shading or reflected light. Dammit, now I see it isn't quite vertical, either.)

I showed in a blog post the three images I combined in GIMP to make my avatar. Notice the top hat is stretched and rotated. More subtly, I darkened the area immediately under the top hat to be in shadow. I just added a layer and drew a partly-transparent dark shape on it. It's small but makes a big difference. Even more subtly, I dodge/burn/blurred the ears where they meet the hat in the right photo. Borders between things taken from different photos often don't look right without some touch-up. I used alternate Dodge & Burn on the mouth, just around the end of the cigarette, to make it look like the lips are bunched up around the cigarette, holding it.

Left: Without shading. Right: Shadow added under hat.

Light and shade is easy to get wrong when you're pasting together things from different pictures. The Dodge/Burn tool is your best friend for shading. I make a separate layer for shading, so I still have the original objects in the GIMP .xcf file if I decide to put things together differently. Focus is also tricky. If a background object is in sharper focus than the foreground, blur it. The cigarette here might ought to be blurred.

For "Burning Man Brony", I combined a picture of myself at Burning Man with a frightening drawing of Discord by Noben.

The original artwork had lettering over Discord's horns, and I had to erase it and draw in the missing pieces, which took a long time, as I can't draw. Fortunately they're at the very top, mostly transparent, so you can't see that they are not quite right. I made two copy layers of Discord, and clipped the dark background out of one, so that I could get his head less transparent than the background. There are also two copies of the photograph, one as the background, and the other partly transparent. For both the transparencies of the photograph and of Discord, I used a radial gradient filter, to make my face more transparent and Discord's more opaque as you move towards the center. I added another layer of transparency for Discord's horns, which otherwise disappeared in the gradient. To use a gradient filter, do this:

Right click on the layer to fade in the Layers window & select "Add Layer Mask". Click Add, checking default "full opacity" is selected.

Select Blend/Gradient tool. Set gradient to "FG to BG". Set shape to "Radial" (in this case). With the gradient tool, you draw a line, and a color gradient is made along it. With radial gradient, the first click will be the center of a gradient circle. Draw a line from the center out to one edge of the circle. "FG to BG" vs. "BG to FG" detemines whether it fades out or in as you move outward.

Right-click on the layer and "Apply Layer Mask".

For "Fluttershy's Night Out", I used the paint tools to remake the wonderful "Bitter Alcoholic Fluttershy" by White Diamond into an apprehensive, tense Fluttershy:

This took an entire day (probably longer than it would take a real artist to do an entire picture). I had to erase many different parts of the picture and fill in the background (for instance, the wall behind the wings, which I matched to the existing walls using blur and diffusion filters), completely redo the eyes, and redraw the shadows on the new right forehoof (mostly using the smudge and dodge/burn tools). I erased the WD because White Diamond hates this picture, as she feels the posture and neck extension is wrong (it is). And the right forehoof is the wrong size and shape somehow, though I redrew it three times. She kindly allowed me to use it anyway. It shows how much someone who can't draw a bit can do with the GIMP and a lot of patience.

(I started modifying the picture to show WD what I was aiming for and see if I could commission her to modify it. She didn't have time, but you can use GIMP to outline ideas for a commission.)

There are three things you'll find puzzling about GIMP. One is trying to draw and not seeing any change on the picture where you expect it. This usually happens because you're looking at a layer other than the one that is selected, or because you're trying to draw outside the selection area.

The second puzzling thing is that when you use a transformation tool, such as to copy or rotate something in one layer, it often removes that object from the layer its in and puts it in a "floating selection", which is a useless thing that will trick you into losing your work unless you right-click on that floating selection immediately and click on "To New Layer", turning it into a layer. As far as I can tell there is never any reason not to do this immediately. Notice that the thing you have operated on is usually now missing from its original layer, so you should copy a layer before using any transformation tool on it. In many cases, you will then delete the layer you modified, as it will no longer contain anything visible.

The third puzzling thing is that different tools behave differently. Some of them operate directly on a layer, and some of them produce their results in floating selections. Each tool is a plug-in to the software, and can behave pretty much any way that it wants to. Some of them, like the cage transformation tool, are completely their own thing. Just learn each tool separately.

Avoid merging layers together unless you have to. Try to keep all your original objects as separate layers. They don't have to be visible; you can just keep them in the file so you know where to find them if you want to reuse those objects. Make copies of layers profligately. Much better to waste a few megabytes of disk space than to have to reconstruct art.

The last things to do with your file are to set the canvas borders, save it, scale the canvas down, and export it as a PNG or JPG. Set the canvas borders instead of cropping in case you want the stuff outside the borders back later. Save before scaling down. Never save the GIMP .xcf file after scaling it down, or you'll overwrite all your work except for the crappy lo-res version. Keep a backup just in case you accidentally save it after scaling down.

I always export to PNG or JPG at compression level 1. Default is 9, which sucks, and doesn't save much space. Compression level 0 makes files that are much larger than compression level 1, and look about the same. Fimfic cover art is always 250 pixels wide now. Try to make covers that are tall and narrow; you get extra screen space for free, up to 400 pixels tall. Making it wider than 250 pixels will just shrink it vertically. Plan ahead for the eventual 250 pixels wide. I knew the Twilight in my tower would be barely visible at that resolution, but that was the effect I wanted, because Long Distance is about her being too far away, feeling like she's receding into the distance. I didn't plan ahead with this picture I commissioned for "Severus Spike"; it had a lot of detail that was lost at 250 pixels wide.

On today's thumbnail front page, at 50 pixels wide, it would look like this:

You can't get a decent picture in 50 pixels, so just try to get something that has enough plain background area that it doesn't look like food stains. Think of the thumbnail and the story page version as two different pictures; make something that will work for both if you can.

It's surprisingly fun to make things with GIMP. Making stuff you can see is gratifying in a different way than writing. I think learning how to use it is worth it for that alone.

Axe Cop

I dislike modern art. I'm lumping together all those precursors and offshoots after Impressionism—Dadaism, Cubism, Futurism, even postmodernism (1). Yet one of my favorite bookmarks, which I just used today, out-moderns modern art. It's a sheet of white notebook paper, folded in four, with multicolored hairballs of scribbles. Orange, blue, brown, red, and black lines spiral and zig-zag at random, with no symmetry or color coordination. I found it in a used book I bought through Amazon.com. I imagine it was drawn by a child just old enough to hold a crayon.

Most modern art is supposed to express a theory, such as the idea that surreal visions seen in dreams present pure art untainted by reason, or the idea that only pure platonic shapes could capture “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” (2). This piece of notebook paper tells a story. It tells me about a small child just discovering that he or she can change the world and make beautiful bright colors appear on a blank surface. This is a more meaningful and more accessible story to me than whatever it was Matisse was trying to say with his poorly-drawn nudes.

Any time an author tries sincerely to express something that moved him/her, that story will at least tell a story about that author: How he/she thinks, what is important to him/her. Maybe not a story engaging enough to keep reading, but something that puts me inside someone else's head.

The flip side is that I can dislike even things that are expertly written if they tell a story of an author whose head is a nasty place to be (Frank Miller), or who has stopped growing (Hemingway). Same goes for the audience. Badly-written Halo crossovers in the featured box don't annoy me because they're badly written. They annoy me because seeing them in the box puts me in touch with the thousands of readers who put them there, and it's a bad touch. I don't want to believe that I've joined that herd.

Hence my mixed feelings on learning last week that Axe Cop will be the first web comic to be turned into a television show.

Web comics are the "amateurs", while print comics & graphic novels are the "professionals", yet all the good new comics in this century have been web comics. If I listed my top favorite 100 comics or graphic novels that have come out since Sandman ended, it would be Bone, The Eternal Smile, and 98 web comics. There's a rich lode of wonderful imaginary worlds for television producers to mine. They chose Axe Cop.

Axe Cop charmed me, briefly, when it came out. But — and I hope no one shows this to its author, bless his heart — in an absolute sense, it's one of the worst web comics ever made. It reads like it was written by a five-year-old. It's a long rambling narrative, the type that little kids tell each other on campouts (or that sometimes appears in the featured box) where one crazy thing happens after another, with dragons, monsters, and people with super-powers all fighting each other. It's like Adventure Time without the humor or character.

That's because it is written by five-year-old.  His father is an artist and does the drawing. It was cute when I could read it as a story told by a five-year-old. It's revolting when a media conglomerate decides, no doubt after months of studies and focus groups, that this is the best web-comic ever made, the one that would draw the most viewers if translated to television.

But I have a horrible suspicion that they're right (3).

It's almost sweet that in America, it's possible even for a five-year-old web-comic author to hit the big time. It's horrifically depressing that in America, only a five-year-old web-comic author can (4).

To entertain a baby, just keep doing random things. The baby will be thrilled every time something, anything, unexpected happens. It's cute to see a baby react that way. It's not cute if someone gets into the featured box or prime-time television by doing the same thing.

I make an exception for Salvador Dali.

Bad Horse's 32nd maxim: Anytime anyone other than a chemist uses the word "purity", they are full of shit.

See Family Guy.

Actually, I think he's 8 now.

Writing: Culture & sentence length

Cold in Gardez recently blogged about sentence length. I commented that my renter, who translates between English, Italian, French, Spanish, and German, claimed that English speakers like short sentences, while continentals prefer long sentences.

Here’s a sentence from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time / Remembrances of Things Past, chosen almost at random:

It was one of those old townhouses, a few of which for all I know may still be found, in which the main courtyard was flanked — alluvial deposits washed there by the rising tide of democracy, perhaps, or a legacy from a more primitive time when the different trades were clustered around the overlord – by little shops and workrooms, a shoemaker’s, for instance, or a tailor’s, such as we see nestling between the buttresses of those cathedrals which the aesthetic zeal of the restorer has not swept clear of such accretions, and a porter who also did cobbling, kept hens, grew flowers – and, at the far end, in the main house, a “Countess” who, when she drove out in her old carriage and pair, flaunting on her hat a few nasturtiums which seemed to have escaped from the plot by the lodge (with, by the coachman’s side on the box, a footman who got down to leave cards at every aristocratic mansion in the neighborhood), dispensed smiles and little waves of the hand impartially to the porter’s children and to any portion of tenants who might happen to be passing and whom, in her disdainful affability and her egalitarian arrogance, she found indistinguishable from one another.

There are many such sentences in this book, which many people claim is the greatest novel ever written.

This sentence frustrated me because it didn’t let me slow down to think about anything in it. Perhaps the continental preference for long sentences results from a preference for style over content. Perhaps the reason for writing long sentences is to prevent the reader from thinking. The writer may wish the reader to bathe in the sounds and connotations of the words, as if they were poetry, rather than to be distracted by the details of what is said. I daresay you could throw out 19/20th of the words in this novel without losing any of the story; what would be lost would be its scent and flavor.

Poetry, however, is extremely short rather than extremely long. I don’t respect Proust for being able to spend ten pages describing the feelings aroused in him by the name of an old estate. I respect the writer who can describe those feelings in ten words.

When translating Proust from French into English, should one chop the long sentences up into short ones in order to translate them into English cultural expectations, if doing so would be more likely to evoke feelings in English people similar to those that Proust wished to evoke in French people?

Writing: Plot in Cormac McCarthy's "All the Pretty Ponies"

A follow-up to Crutches:

I’m in the middle of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Ponies. There’s a big middle section of the story where “nothing” happens. I think this is intentional.  The central question at this point is why the two boys have run away to work on a Mexican ranch, and why they want to stay there instead of going home as might be sensible. The author needs us to understand what the characters want, which is just to be cowboys, to live on a ranch and work with horses.

So he describes ordinary things going on at a ranch, putting the plot on hold in the meanwhile, except for the introduction of a love interest. There may be all sorts of symbolic things going on here – breaking horses can be a metaphor for many things, and how the ranch hands treat and gain respect for the boys is also a story — but plotwise, it’s mostly horses. He makes the daily activities of a horseman interesting enough that we want to stay with the story. Once we realize that we keep coming back story just to read more about working with horses, then we’ve understood why the characters do, too.

Writing: "All the Pretty Pony Princesses" vs. Charles de Lint: The conscious vs. the subconscious

SPOILERS EVERYWHERE!

I’ve been trying to figure out why I wrote this terrible story “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”, and how I should have ended it. My problem is that, as Ghost said, there's no point to the story--no explication of character, no lesson learned, just hopelessness.

AugieDog suggested giving Twilight a pony-world epic quest which she plays out in the real world to disastrous results. That would put a complete dramatic narrative in the story, but I don’t see how it would add meaning to the story. Completing the dream-world narrative would present a red-herring story closure that would compete for attention with whatever direction the real-world narrative took. But working towards it would give time to take the real-world narrative somewhere conclusive.

But where?

I remembered some Charles de Lint stories I read recently that are similar to my story:

“Freewheeling”:

Zinc is probably insane. He gets arrested by the cops for “setting bicycles free”. He claims that he cut the locks and they rode themselves off to freedom. The story never tells you whether he’s hallucinating, or whether they really go free, and gives you strong clues both ways. In the end he’s killed by a police officer, and his friend Jilly reflects on… some crazy shit about how he isn’t dead, or the magic isn’t dead, I don’t know; I don’t understand this story. It has the same elements:

main character who’s batshit crazy and hallucinating an alternate world

the crazy person keeps getting in serious trouble

sane character tries to keep him out of trouble

sane character can’t keep him out of trouble

The difference is that it’s dipped in a vat of new-age/hippie “the crazy people are the only ones in their right mind and that’s really cool and far-out”, so you’re supposed to come out of it feeling good about the crazy kid, his crazy friends, and their crazy self-destructive lifestyle choices.

I didn’t want to romanticize clinical insanity as spiritual insight. If I’d wanted to go in that direction, I’d have subverted the trope, and had Fluttershy romanticize Twilight’s insanity, then end with something terrible happening that is indirectly Fluttershy’s fault for not reining (heh) Twilight in. But that Sixties trope is already so dead, it hasn't even got a tvtropes page.

“Coyote Stories”:

Albert is a ne’er-do-well homeless Native American who tells stories about Coyote, confusing himself with Coyote. Albert’s craziness allows him to stay truer to the old Native American spirits and ideals than other people who are distracted by reality.

I think of religious extremism as something like that. It makes some of my friends & family crazy in some ways, but also admirable. To go in that direction, I’d show Twilight’s insanity benefiting others, by (for instance) bringing them together and making them see themselves in a positive light. That’s what I did in “Friends, with Occasional Magic,” but with optimism rather than out-and-out insanity.

But I don’t think I could easily or sincerely do the same thing starting with insanity, even as a metaphor. I know only one person who has the kind of gentle selfless insanity portrayed in “Coyote Stories” or in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and his real-life saintliness led to a horror-show of familial dysfunction and suffering that isn’t over yet. (I also have some inside dope on Mother Teresa from someone who worked in one of her convents that’s just as bad.) And the precedent here for using benevolent insanity as a metaphor for religious extremism is Puddleglum's defense of Christianity in "The Silver Chair", which some of my Christian friends have quoted approvingly:

Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

Artfully written, but it's a possibly-valid justification for altruism, love, and morals, which are in so little need of defense that C.S. Lewis manages to gets mileage out of it only by abusing it as a defense of religion. For me to take this approach, I'd have to make insanity a metaphor for say, friendship, and, well, just making that metaphor would be bleaker and more depressing than anything I've written.

The only way I can think of for me to use this theme together with insanity would be something like “Somewhere Only we Know” (which Solitair brought up). In FWOM the healing optimism is justified because it’s still sane and may improve reality. In SOWK, the healing belief in the dream-world is justified because the real world is inescapably horrible, and so insanity is crazy-sane. But SOWK is the optimal version of that story for ponies. I’d just be retelling the same story, but not as well.

“In Which we Meet Jilly Coppercorn”:

This story says that we cannot see things (it uses goblins, but it could just as well be unicorns) until we first take their existence on faith. This is a truth (what you expect affects what you see) simplified past mere absurdity (different people inhabit different worlds) to the point of being a falsehood (fact and fantasy are the same). That would require ending the story with some kind of mind-fuckery showing that “unicorns are real after all, if you believe in them”, except that first my keyboard would short-circuit from the vomit.

So maybe this is what happened: Its events parallel those of many powerful stories closely enough that my subconscious grasped onto it. Given my conscious beliefs, I was unable to conscientiously complete it in any of the possible ways presented by those models. But because there were so many different ways of completing the basic pattern, I could never recognize that I had rejected them all except by consciously enumerating them. Instead, I vomited out the basic pattern common to them all, as if it were a story.

Or maybe it is a complete story. I still don't know. I like Twilight's optimism and caring attitude in the story. Does that make it a character study? Could it be the point, if the story went on a little longer, say to a scene where Twilight showed compassion on Rarity?

I don't think I'd feel comfortable with that. That, and all of the six different things done with this premise by the six different good stories I've mentioned above are positive spins on bad situations. I'm tired of positive spins on bad situations. Too often they're dragon tyrants.

Why fan-fiction does twists better

A lot of my stories have twist endings. Twist endings are hazardous because the twist itself is typically a small idea that could be expressed in a few sentences, but you need an entire story leading up to it to make the reader care enough that the twist will have impact. It’s easy for the twist to overshadow everything else in the author’s mind, which results in 20,000 words of limp story followed by a one-paragraph zinger/

So you really have to write two stories: the twist, and the story that makes you care about the people involved in the twist. The twist in Memento or The Crying Game can be described in a paragraph, but you need an entire movie with its own plot just to draw the viewer in for the twist.

Then you must make sure these two stories match thematically. The twist in The Crying Game is that after already having gotten misty-eyed over a dead man’s love relationship, the main character suddenly learns the dead man was gay, and has accidentally stumbled into understanding with uncomfortable clarity a point of view that he previously thought was utterly alien to him. The entire movie leading up to that point, the IRA and terrorism and kidnapping, was constructed to mirror that single moment, by leading the anti-terrorist soldier to understand the viewpoint of the IRA terrorists. It’s an extra story that gave us a character we cared about, that can hand that character off to the twist ending story without clashing with it thematically.

Twist endings are much easier to write well in fanfiction, because you don’t need to write an entire second story just to make us care about the characters. I wrote two very short twist-ending stories, “Trust” and “Game of Immortals” (in “The Twilight Zone”, formerly “Pony Tales”), that can be as short as they are because we already know the characters. My latest story, “Happy Ending”, is an even better example of this, because its structure is based on a famous 1948 short story by Henry Kuttner, also called “Happy Ending”. The 1948 story is clever, but you have to wade through perhaps 15,000 words of an unremarkable space-conquest story just to get to the clever twist ending. (That was a depressingly common problem with science fiction stories in the 1940s and 1950s, exemplified by the many short stories Isaac Asimov wrote that were merely set-ups for a bad pun.) I think my story works much better, partly because it has an extra twist, but mainly because I didn’t have to spend 10,000 words  developing a new character.

(Although now that I think about it, I completely rewrote Blueblood, so perhaps I did develop a new character. Many science fiction authors still say the best science fiction story ever written is Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”, which takes 14,000 words to build its characters up just enough to throw them away for an utterly-implausible twist ending less entertaining than the single sentence uttered by John Campbell that was the prompt for the story. Really, 1940s science fiction has a lot to answer for.)

“Happy Ending” is Safe For Ghost and Other Sensitive Souls. It’s tagged “tragedy” and “dark”, but it should be tagged “impish”. My goal is for you to say “Bad Horse, you bastard,” not “Bad Horse, you monster.” Also, it has a happy ending. Heh. Much thanks to Cypher, who explained to me why the original version of the story was lousy, and pointed out three rough spots in the second version.

“Happy Ending” has been in the EQD queue for three months now. I clicked “submit” just now before hearing back from EQD because my last three EQD stories (Moving On, Long Distance, Alicorn Cider) weren’t featured. “Alicorn Cider” got about 3,000 views and 230 likes in its first three days, which I think was more than any stories that were featured at that time, and it didn’t even crack the top half of the “Popular Stories” sidebar. So I think knighty changed the featured box algorithm to measure fraction of viewers that like, or favorite, a story (though number of comments also appears to be relevant now). EQD readers are only about half as likely as fimfiction readers to like or favorite, probably because many of them don’t have fimfiction accounts. So, whereas a year ago releasing a story on EQD and fimfiction at the same time made being featured a sure thing, now it might prevent you from being featured. It certainly doesn’t seem to help.

Writing: Compleness in stories, poems, and songs

I’ve been thinking about what makes a story complete since writing “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”. It occurred to me that that story would be considered complete if it were a song. Stories, songs, and poems can all be recognized as being complete or incomplete, but the standards for them are very different.

Is this sensible, or merely convention?

You find songs that would be regarded as complete stories in certain genres—ballads, country, & Christmas carols, for instance. “Good King Wenceslas” self-consciously, though not very successfully, tries to imitate story structure with an obstacle in the middle verse. “The Little Drummer Boy”, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “The MTA Song”, “Ode to Billy Joe”, and “A Boy Named Sue” are also complete stories. “Norwegian Wood” is a story once you know that the original final words were “Knowing she would”. But even within these genres, we usually find songs that would not be considered complete if they were stories. “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is your basic plotless sadfic, introducing a bunch of characters, killing them off, and then holding a funeral for them. Songs and poems routinely present a single emotion, like a single scene in a story. Love songs live in a single moment of bliss; sad songs have no resolution.

Poems, also, can be complete stories. Many Robert Frost poems are (“Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Tuft of Flowers”). Some, like New Yorker “stories”, are tantalizingly close to being stories (“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”). But most poems are not stories. They’re more like songs. They choose one moment in time and invoke its mood, with no plot or dramatic structure or climax or resolution.

It seems that stories are a strict subset of poems and songs. Anything that could be written as a story could be written as a (perhaps overly long) poem or song, but not vice-versa.

Poems are allowed to jump from particulars to universals in a way that stories are not. Here’s “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct” by e. e. cummings:

Buffalo Bill 's

defunct

                     who used to

                     ride a watersmooth-silver

                                                            stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

                                                                                                                        Jesus

he was a handsome man

                                                            and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

It gives details from the life of Buffalo Bill, then stops abruptly on informing us that he is dead, the author leaping through the fourth wall to grab the reader by the collar and say, "This is not about Buffalo Bill; it is about you." But you couldn’t just drop the narrative and conclude with “He’s dead now, as we all will be” in a story. Poem readers have come to expect that sort of thing. They don’t forget themselves in a poem the way they do in a story; the deliberate obtrusiveness of style keeps the reader always aware of the poet’s presence.

Consider the poem “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1897), later turned into a song by Simon and Garfunkel.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Here again we jump from the particulars of Richard Cory to a universal statement, this one about happiness and fulfillment. If you tried to do this in a story or movie, readers would be bewildered and demand an explanation of what he was thinking and what led up to it.  Citizen Kane is just such a movie. Were it a poem, it could’ve ended after the first scene, with perhaps one extra paragraph of explanation.

Modern story readers won’t operate at the level of abstraction needed for “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct” or “Richard Cory”; they expect the characters to be real people, not morality-play cutouts standing for Everyman. The convention used to be the opposite: Medieval plays frequently used an Everyman protagonist and caricatured villains, and, I suppose, jumped to universals at the end (or all the way through, as in Pilgrim’s Progress and other allegories). (The friendship report at the end of an MLP episode doesn’t really do this; it is not the dramatic focus of the story the way that “Mister Death” is the focus of “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct”. It’s more like a human’s tailbone, a shrunken remnant of something that used to play an important function.)

Here’s the beginning of a story:

A sister, ignored and bitter. An evil released. Nine hours of useless negotiating. Thirty-five hours of night. My greatest failure. Six Elements, lost due to the relationship broken. A majestic capital, wiped out. Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three square acres of land rendered inhospitable due to the damage from my failure. One hundred and seven thousand, thirty-five citizens displaced.

Now change the format:

A sister, ignored and bitter.

An evil released.

Nine hours of useless negotiating.

Thirty-five hours of night.

My greatest failure.

Six Elements, lost due to the relationship broken.

A majestic capital, wiped out.

Six thousand, nine hundred and seventy-three square acres of land rendered inhospitable due to the damage from my failure.

One hundred and seven thousand, thirty-five citizens displaced.

“Statistics” has a story’s dramatic structure, but it doesn’t work nearly as well when formatted as a story rather than as a poem. Perhaps this is because the line breaks introduce needed pauses. But perhaps it’s because we’re trained not to accept the bare bones of a story without more connective tissue between them. Formatting it as a poem tells us to shift into a different mode with different standards.

Songs without a dramatic structure to the narrative sometimes have a dramatic structure to the melody, at least your basic verse and refrain structure, usually elaborated on by changes in instrumentation and voicing. (That’s what I dislike about so many of Daniel Ingram’s songs, such as the one from Rarity takes Manehatten: a lack of melodic structure; monotone sound and emotion.) And yet poems have a bit of structure, even free verse, but hardly enough to make up for a lack of a dramatic structure. If songs were allowed to have incomplete stories because the musical performance provides structure instead, we would require the text of poems to be more complete than the text of songs to make up for the lack of that auditory structure — and yet, we do not.

It is not possible that this distinction makes any absolute sense. Prose, poetry, and song all exist to have an impact on the reader or listener. It can't be acceptable for a song, but not for a story, to bring alive one moment in time. Any prose that accomplishes the same thing as a song is a good and complete work of art. It’s only historical accident that prevents us from accepting it as such. At least, that’s the only conclusion that makes sense to me.

This conclusion unfortunately means that it is impossible to devise a theory of story, because our notions of what makes a story are tightly constricted by arbitrary cultural conventions.

The best way to test these ideas would be to compare English stories to those of cultures isolated from them: Native American, Asian, Indian, Arabian, African, Polynesian. I haven’t read enough of those to do that. I suspect that the stories from those cultures that we find translated into English are only the ones that match English expectations of story. But if it turns out that all those cultures have similar rules for what counts as a story and what does not, then I am wrong, and there is some objective explanation for why we expect different things from stories, poems, and songs.

Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions

Another color annotation: "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions", available free here, This is by Jeffrey C. Wells, whom you may know from Tales of the Starbuck Avenger, Skin Horse, or "Princess Celestia Hates Tea".

Same color-coding as before, but I'm coloring "telly" speech tags maroon (pomegranate?), as they get the same kind of criticism as adverbs, and adding four more categories at the end:

red = adverb

maroon = "telly" speech tag

green = simile or metaphor

blue = an adjective, adverb, or verb that isn't literally correct (metaphorical)

lavender = body language

gray = mundane things

yellow = lions

bold = things that make the main character seem insane

underlining = things that show Simon has become a better and happier person

The first five are to compare how this story works to the previous annotation of the climax of The Last Unicorn. I added those last annotations to look at how this story works thematically. I used bold and underline instead of another color because those things overlap so often with other things. We're multitasking here; we're looking at use of telly language and body language, but also at theme.

STORY & THEME

Skywriter calls this a comedy, and it is funny, but it's also very serious. This is a difficult story to analyze; it doesn't fit the usual pattern in which the narrative describes a protagonist facing and overcoming or failing to overcome an obstacle, and changing as a result. It describes the protagonist after he has already changed and overcome an obstacle which he was perhaps not even aware of. This change was unintentional. The kickoff event happened seven weeks before the story, when Simon used the machine of death to find out how he would die.

The protagonist is admirable not for being a man of action, but for his attitude. The "conflict" here, if there is any, is between our assumptions about what is important and what makes us happy, versus what we really need. Simon's response to learning how he is to die seems insane to everyone, including himself; yet it is admirable.

It's a kind of story that's much more unusual than it ought to be: A celebration of a man's virtuous character, rather than his virtuous actions. There is no action within the story. It wouldn't be exciting to show the triggering event. The real story, as I read it, is this: Simon's problem appears to be that his life is boring. The real problem, though, was his attitude to it. Confronted with a gruesome destiny, he reacts by grasping it with desperate gratitude as a sign that his life will be exciting and unusual. Paradoxically, this hope makes his present life more exciting and enjoyable. He's always had the power to go back to Kansas. All of this happened before the narrative — you read the narrative to figure out what the story was.

This probably wasn't Skywriter's intent, but I think the story also has something odd to say about love. Simon loves the lions who will devour him. This reminds me of a story some historian told about the election of Napoleon III in 1848: He asked an old man whom he was voting for, and the man said, "I, I who lost one leg in Napoleon's terrible Russian campaign — whom could I vote for but the heir of Napoleon?" Somehow, being drafted into Napoleon's army, forced into a disastrous and poorly planned campaign which they lost, and losing one leg in the process, made him love Napoleon. (Perhaps my disposable minions feel that way about me. I imagine I could get attached to them, if they ever survived long enough for me to remember their names.) And there's some kind of love in even the most dysfunctional parent-child relationships. We seem to love people and things that give us importance, that put us in the center of a good story.

TELLY LANGUAGE, BODY LANGUAGE, & POETIC LANGUAGE

The story comes in four parts:

1.  A telephone conversation. Almost no body language or metaphors.

2.  Two office conversations. Some body language, one critical closing metaphor.

3.  An awkward boss-employee conversation. Lots of body language to indicate how tense and awkward it is for the boss. A couple of similes, but humorous ones, not serious.

4.  A descriptive interior monologue with no dialogue, hardly any body language, and most of the metaphoric language.

So body language is used when multiple people are physically present, largely to convey how they feel about each other. It's especially useful to indicate a tense mood, perhaps because a tense scene should have slow dialogue, and body language stretches dialogue out in time. We saw before that it's useful in action sequences, which should happen quickly, but require specificity about what is physically happening.

Poetic language (such as metaphor) is used in internal monologue, descriptive passages, and critical or concluding sentences. There are almost no blue annotations here, quite the opposite of The Last Unicorn, and telly language is sprinkled throughout, like seasoning. I think that's related to the theme. More about that after the story.

I'm misquoting a bit--I pasted the beginning from the intro to this reading of it. The original text has a large fourth paragraph that I think slows the opening down and adds nothing, and I couldn't bring myself to add it back in.

“Missus Murphy, I will have you know that I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions.”

Simon Pfennig was fully aware of how strange he must sound.

He had no choice. It was too exciting not to share.

Eventually, the silence on the other end of the line was broken. “…Excuse me?” Mrs. Murphy eventually managed.

“I,” said Simon, “am to be torn apart and devoured by lions.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Murphy. “Weren’t you just talking to me about insurance a moment ago?”

“I was,” said Simon. “Now I’m talking about lions.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Murphy, apparently unsure of what to make of all this.

“Did you know that an adult male lion can consume up to seventy-five pounds of meat in a single meal? And that said meal will often have to last him an entire week?”

“I, er, did not.”

“That’d be two whole meals, out of me alone!” said Simon. “I’m guesstimating a bit, because I am not made entirely of meat.”

“Well. Who is?” replied Mrs. Murphy, gamely.

“Exactly. For one thing, there’s the matter of bones. I’m not quite certain how much my bones weigh. Lions don’t eat bones; they leave them behind for the hyenas to consume. But, you see, that doesn’t matter as much to me, Missus Murphy. Because I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions, not by hyenas.”

“So you said.”

“I will be long dead,” said Simon, “before the hyenas ever get ahold of me.”

“Ah…hah.”

“Naturally, though, I don’t expect myself to last the whole two weeks. Far from it! After all, as you know, I am to be torn apart and devoured by lions, plural, not ‘a lion.’ And it is uncommon for male lions to travel together, unless they’re roaming the savannah in unwed bachelor groups.” Simon leaned back in his chair and studied the single fluorescent fixture mounted above his tiny cubicle, imagining it for a moment to be the red-hot sun of the Serengeti. “No,” he continued, “far more likely, I am to be torn apart and devoured by lionesses, a group of huntresses intent on bringing food back for their leonine patriarch.”

“I…see.”

“As you might expect,” Simon went on, “I’ve given this some thought, and I have eventually come to the conclusion that the word ‘lions’ doesn’t necessarily refer to the male of the species exclusively. Good news for me, you understand, because I must confess to harboring this romantic notion of how it will all play out.”

Mrs. Murphy smiled into the phone; you could hear it in her voice. “Just got your prediction today, did you?”

“Actually,” said Simon, “it’s been seven weeks now.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Murphy.

“But, I’m sorry, you’re quite right. We should probably go back to talking about life insurance now.” Simon cleared his throat, straightened his tie and put his salesman voice back on. It was a good salesman voice, keen and enthusiastic, and it bore shockingly little resemblance to the one he’d been using his entire workaday life up until that day about two months ago, the day Simon now liked to call “Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions Day.” “Missus Murphy,” the new, exciting Simon began, “did you know that in the event of your sudden, accidental death, your family might incur miscellaneous costs of upwards of—”

“Ah, see, there,” said Mrs. Murphy. “I’m sorry, I was waiting for something just like that. I’m to kick off from colon cancer, lad, not a stroke or a heart attack or anything quick like that. Plenty of time to get my affairs in order.”

A common response, these days. Simon knew the company rote. “Many of our potential customers come to us with this same story, Missus Murphy,” said Simon. “Truth to tell, though you may believe that you know the circumstances surrounding your eventual demise based on your prediction alone, the fact of the matter is that the specifics can often be surprising. To both you and your loved ones.”

Mrs. Murphy chuckled. “Come now,” she said. “Have you ever heard of anyone crossing the street one day and getting hit by a runaway colon cancer?”

Simon had to admit that he had not.

“I’m fairly certain that I’m destined to pass away peacefully in a hospital bed, lad,” said Mrs. Murphy. “All shrouded in white and surrounded by my family. Probably in some pain, too, mind, but there’s little helping that.”

“Missus Murphy, if I might—”

“Lad,” said Mrs. Murphy, “I have my fantasy, just as you have yours. And I am unwilling to cheapen it by banking on the possibility that the chips might not fall that way.” Her voice smiled again. “You clearly have one of your own. And I think that if you think about it,” she said, “you’ll understand.”

Simon thought about it. And he did.

“Well,” he said, after a moment. “Good day to you, then.”

“To you as well,” said Mrs. Murphy. “May God bless. And say hello to the lions for me.”

“Will do, Missus Murphy,” said Simon. There was a click as Mrs. Murphy disconnected the line, and then a low, steady drone. Dutifully, Simon’s auto-dialer started in on another number.

“Dude,” said Scott, the guy in the cubicle next door. “You gotta cut that out. Armbruster is going to be mighty horked if he ever catches you in the middle of that.”

Simon pulled his chair closer to his desk, fully intending to ignore his wall-mate, as per usual. After all, he had insurance to sell.

“You can’t let this Death Machine crap run your life, man,” continued Scott, heedless, as Simon waited for his line to pick up. “I mean, geez, look at you. Ever since you did that stupid prediction thing, you’ve gone, like, totally mental on us. With the suit, and the tie, and—”

Simon’s line picked up; it was an answering machine. Simon dropped his headset to his neck for a moment and rolled his chair back. “Customers can hear the tie, Scott,” said Simon. “Just like they can hear a smile.”

“Uh huh,” said Scott. “So d’ya suppose they can hear this little stain here on my shirt, too?”

“I believe they can,” said Simon.

“Wow,” said Scott, with feigned amazement. “Those are some really keen ears right there, Simon.” He snickered and spun his chair around a couple of times. “Dude, you have lost it, man,” he said.

Simon pulled himself back to his desk, replacing his headphones just in time to hear the answering machine disconnect. “To each,” he said, with measured patience, “his own.”

“I’m sorry, what?” said Scott. “I couldn’t hear you there, dude. Between my stain and your tie there’s just too damn much noise goin’ on around here.”

Simon just shook his head as the auto-dialer worked its magic again, preparing to serve him up another golden opportunity. It was hard to get too angry with Scott about his little jibes. After all, thought Simon, Scott was likely bored and a bit depressed and was probably compensating for it by taking his frustrations out on the people around him. But he was fundamentally a good guy. He just needed a life goal or two; it would fix him right up.

It had certainly fixed Simon right up. He himself had two life goals: (1) being torn apart by, and (2) being devoured by, lions.

And that had made all the difference, really.

The morning rolled on in a series of polite refusals, and soon it came time for lunch. Standing by the break room microwave, Simon marveled at how quickly the day was going. It was to be a short lunch; Simon had been thinking of ways to improve the company’s sales script, and since the auto-dialer gave him only limited opportunities to hash them out on work-time, he was thinking of devoting some of his break to the task.

“Hey, Simon,” said one of his co-workers, coming up from behind. Brad. Blue-eyed, fair-haired and a bit on the pudgy side. Simon and he had joined up with the company about the same time, and Brad had quickly latched on to him as a conversational partner. Simon didn’t mind; Brad was, also, a fundamentally good guy. “I’m’a head to Mickey’s in a minute. You want I should pick you up some fries or something?”

“Not today, Brad!” said Simon, twirling an empty little coated cardboard box in his hands, the erstwhile contents of which were now warming pleasantly in the microwave nearby. “Today I’m having Rosemary Chicken with Vegetables.”

“Rosemary,” said Brad, frowning. “Is that an herb or something?”

“Indeed it is,” replied Simon.

Brad thought about this for a moment. “So you’re eating herbs now?” he said, eventually.

“Yep,” said Simon. “It’s only polite, I figure. After all, you are what you eat. Right, Brad?”

“Well, I guess I pretty much gotta be a triple-stacker roast beef melt by now,” said Brad.

“Quite possibly,” said Simon, diplomatically. “But for me? No.” Simon smiled to himself, his eyes going distant. “No, Brad, from here on in, I intend to make myself exceptionally, even exquisitely, healthy. And, if possible,” he added, “herb-flavored.”

Brad narrowed his eyes. “Wait a sec,” he said. “This isn’t the thing about being eaten by the lions again, is it?”

“It will always be the thing about being eaten by the lions, Brad. From here on in, until it occurs.”

“You’re obsessed, guy.”

Simon grinned. “Perhaps,” he said.

“Totally!” called out Scott from his corner table. He sneered at them around and through a mouthful of sandwich.

“Hey, shut up,” said Brad.

“Make me, fatboy,” Scott replied. Then he chucked a piece of onion at him.

“Little snot,” muttered Brad, picking the onion out of his hair. “Look, Simon,” he said, putting his hand on Simon’s shoulder. “Little friendly advice. You don’t have to be a Machine of Death slave like this. Don’t be trapped by it. Use it to free yourself.” Brad spread his arms wide, exposing his substantial midsection. “I mean, look at me.”

“Can’t not,” said Scott, swallowing his latest bite. “You take up our entire visual field.”

“Hmph,” said Brad, raising both his chins in a dignified fashion and turning his back to Scott’s table. “Look at me, Simon. Here I am, going to die in a car crash or something. So, I don’t worry about the roast beef melts anymore. I don’t worry about the soda refills. And I don’t worry about getting the chili and the cheese on the fries instead of going healthy and eating them without.” He smiled amiably. “You see?” he said. “Little changes. I know it won’t matter what I eat, so I eat what I want. And I’m happier for it.”

Brad shook his head, then. “But you, Simon. You’re thinking about this thing all the time now. It can’t be good for you.”

“I want to think about this thing all the time, Brad,” said Simon, earnestly. “I am looking forward to it. Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“For Pete’s sake, Simon,” said Brad. “Why?”

“Because,” Simon replied, his pale brown eyes as wide as the veldt itself, “it will be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Brad shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But I read in this self-help book my mom gave me that you shouldn’t sacrifice your now just because you’re looking forward to being eaten by a bunch of lions at some point in the future.”

“Don’t worry,” said Simon. “I’m not sacrificing my now. I’m happier, healthier, and more vital than I’ve ever been.” He smiled. “The thing is, Brad,” he said, “everything I do for my lions? It makes my life better too.”

There came the sound of a throat clearing from the door of the break room. Simon looked up.

“Pfennig,” said Paul Armbruster (Vice President In Charge Of Targeted Media Solicitation), leaning into the room. “When you have a moment. My office, please.”

Silence. Simon gathered his smile. “Certainly, sir,” he said, tossing the box from his frozen dinner into a nearby waste container and stepping toward the door.

“After lunch is fine,” said Mr. Armbruster. The tips of his moustache lifted in a tiny grimace, as though someone had invisibly popped by with an eyedropper full of lemon juice and given him a bit. “But soon. We need to talk about your…performance.”

Simon’s smile did not falter. “‘Performance’ in the sense of ‘how I’m doing relative to the quota’?”

“No,” said Mr. Armbruster, sucking on his tongue thoughtfully. “‘Performance’ in the sense of ‘Ooh, ooh, look at the dancing bear; now look, he’s riding a little unicycle.’ That type of performance. Specifically,” he added, “your performance earlier this morning, Pfennig.”

“Right,” said Simon, his smile still adamant. “After lunch, then?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Armbruster. “If you please.” He then vanished from sight.

The subsequent quiet was broken only by the noise of Scott sniggering quietly to himself in the corner.

Brad smiled at Simon, sheepishly.

The microwave went ‘ding.’

“Pfennig,” said Mr. Armbruster, motioning to the chair opposite his desk with one hand and taking a moment to fine-tune his rather heroic combover with the other. “Sit down, please.”

“You wanted to speak with me, sir?” said Simon, taking a seat.

“That is, in fact, why you are sitting in my office right now,” said Mr. Armbruster.

A moment passed as Armbruster sucked on his tongue again for a bit. Then he leaned forward and nudged a small brass dish out from behind a fancy little wooden desk clock and over toward Simon. “Malted milk ball?” he asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” said Simon, cheerfully helping himself to one.

Armbruster regarded Simon as he sat, there, crunching. “You understand,” he began, “why I brought you in here today.”

“I think so,” said Simon, swallowing his candy. “You’re about to tell me a piece of bad news.”

Armbruster sighed. “Simon,” he said. “I want to start by telling you that I’ve been really quite pleased with your new-found gumption and enthusiasm for selling insurance policies over the telephone. You show a level of dedication that is…well, let’s say, uncommon in these halls. You remind me a bit of myself when I was your age.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Simon.

“That having been said,” said Armbruster, leaning forward even further, “I need you to stop describing to our potential customers, in gruesome detail, how you’re planning on going to Africa and getting eaten by a lion.”

“Lions,” corrected Simon, politely.

“My point,” said Armbruster, “remains a salient one.”

“I see,” said Simon, biting his lip. “‘Gruesome’ detail, though, sir?” he asked, then. “I mean, I realize that I’ve been a bit chatty on the fact to some of them, but—”

Armbruster reached beneath his desk and produced a portable cassette player. He clicked at a button. “—organ meats!” came Simon’s voice. “Not as desirable as the muscle meats, mind you, which are frequently claimed by the dominant male of the pride, but certainly full of good, nutritious—”

Armbruster clicked the ‘stop’ button.

The clock on the desk ticked a handful of times.

“Well…yes,” said Simon. “I can see where you might—”

“I don’t know if I’m imparting the proper gravity to this situation, Simon,” Mr. Armbruster interrupted. “So I will make it perfectly clear to you that I have no desire to see Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual become known as ‘That Place With The Guy Who’s Always Going On About Lions.’ To this end, I am warning you that I absolutely, positively will not tolerate any further behavior of this sort. Do we understand one another, Mister Pfennig?”

“Mm hm!” said Simon, cheerily.

Armbruster narrowed his eyes at Simon. “Let me try this again,” he said, picking up a pencil in an attempt to add emphasis to his words. “We are talking about you losing your job with us, Simon. You don’t want to be unemployed in this city. Not in this economic climate. Trust me.”

Simon nodded brightly. “I understand, sir,” he said.

“You don’t seem like you understand,” said Mr. Armbruster. “I’m looking for a little solemnity or something.”

Simon pondered for a moment. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“This isn’t the military, Simon,” said Mr. Armbruster.

“Well,” said Simon. He gathered himself. “The thing is, sir, it’s really hard for me to get worked up at the prospect of losing my job, sir.” He raised a hand against Armbruster’s objection. “Now, I don’t mean that,” he continued. “I will try to restrain myself from talking about my lions to the customers from here on in. But if I can’t…?” Simon shrugged. “Well, another job will be on the way. After all, I have to fund my African safari somehow.” He smiled. “These are more than just idle hopes and dreams now, Mister Armbruster,” he said. “They’re part of my destiny.”

Armbruster regarded Simon for a moment, then shook his head. “You are a strange little guy,” said Armbruster. “If you were any less of a salesman, I’d be handing you your pink slip now and personally ushering your behind out of this building while I instructed Stacy to prepare an invoice charging you for the milk ball. But for every lion mutilation story I’ve got on tape, there’re two or more instances of you winning over a stubborn customer on attitude alone. And that’s the kind of attitude we need around here. Desperately.”

“‘Desperately,’ sir?” inquired Simon.

Armbruster tapped his pencil on the desk a couple of times. “I don’t know if I should even be talking with you about this,” he said. “According to the last Board of Directors meeting, Consolidated Amalgamated Mutual isn’t doing so well. It’s not bad,” he added, quickly. “But comparing our first-quarter sales to how we were doing two years ago, well, it’s sobering. To say the least. And that’s company-wide, Simon. It’s not just Targeted Media Solicitation. It’s across the board.”

He sighed, deeply, and tossed his pencil back into the little cup on his desk. “It’s this damn Machine of Death thing, Simon,” he said. “We’re in the uncertainty business, here. All we’ve got to offer the world is protection against the frightening, unpredictable future. You give the people something, anything, to latch on to, something that gives them a sense of control—even a false one—and suddenly, well, they don’t need us anymore.”

“I’m sure we’ll come through this all right,” Simon volunteered.

“Oh, I know,” said Armbruster, pushing his chair back and rising to a stand. “I know. We weathered that damn ‘no-call list’ thing all right, and I suppose we’ll pull through this, too.” Armbruster rounded the desk and patted Simon on the back; Simon stood, sensing his cue. “But to do it,” said Armbruster, “we’re going to need all our salesmen giving us one hundred and ten, or perhaps fifteen, percent. Can you do that for me, Simon?”

“Yes, sir!” said Simon.

“Good,” said Armbruster, ushering him to the door. “Now get back out there and sell us some policies, all right?”

“Will do, sir!” said Simon, disappearing out the door.

“And NO LIONS!” added Mr. Armbruster, calling after him. But if Simon Pfennig had a response to this, Mr. Armbruster did not hear it.

He sat back against the corner of his desk for a while after Simon had gone, listening to the whirr of the air-handler and the steady ticking of the clock.

“Wish I were looking forward to my heart attack like that,” said Mr. Armbruster.

Night. Home. Simon stood at the sink, washing the last few remnants of tonight’s dinner of lamb and parmesan orzo out of his good dishes. In fact, Simon only had good dishes, nowadays. He had long since donated the bad ones, and even the slightly dodgy ones, to the local thrift shop. The window over his sink was open to the cool night air, and the crickets outside yammered excitedly among themselves, unable to contain their enthusiasm that evening had arrived again, right on schedule. The dishes had been a bit crusty, as they had been left sitting for several hours, and it felt good to Simon to get them all cleaned up. Easier, perhaps, to have tackled them right after dinner, but Simon had run out of time to wash them before his show had come on the television, and the show took clear precedence because it happened to be all about lions tonight. Simon had, naturally, enjoyed every minute of it.

And Simon knew how ridiculous this all must seem, this arrangement of his entire life around the concept of being Torn Apart And Devoured By Lions. Particularly ridiculous, he felt, was the poster (lionesses, of course) he had tacked to the ceiling—preteen-girl style— right above his bed, so it’d be the last thing he saw at night every night of his life. The lion-themed comforter, too, he knew, went a bit beyond the pale. But really, honestly? The whole thing. Ridiculous.

And, as always, Simon had to conclude that there really was no choice.

It was just too exciting.

The dishes done and dripping in their wire rack, Simon moved on to an invigorating workout on the shiny new exercise bicycle he’d purchased at the mall, and from there on to a relaxing shower. Thusly cleaned up for bed, Simon dressed himself in his lion-print pajamas, snuggled down beneath his leonine blankets, and waited for sleep to come. And, as ever, the last sight that greeted him before he finally shut off his bedside lamp was of his lionesses, all in a row, waiting patiently for him and him alone.

At night he dreamed of them, low and tawny, their eyes luminous in the charcoal African dusk. He welcomed them to him like he might a lover, inviting them in to the limits of his light, inviting them to feed.

“Come, beautiful ones,” he whispered to them as they circled close. “Come.”

The alternation between gray (mundane) and yellow (lions), and the overlap between gray (mundane), bold (crazy), and underlined (improved), are key to this story. Each scene ends at or near an underlined passage, because each scene shows how his obsession has changed him for the better. Many of the underlined passages are also in bold, indicating where those things that make him a better person also make him seem crazy to others. Many of the gray passages are also underlined, showing that his new attitude affects every part of his life, and suggesting that you can't partition the magical from the mundane, that what makes something special is how you approach it, not what it is. He seems crazy to us because he now takes the kind of pride in himself and his everyday life that we usually reserve for "special" things, but it's we who are crazy for not doing so. A very Buddhist message.

That, I think, is why we have a lot of red text, little green text, and almost no blue text (though to be more sure, we'd need somebody to annotate another Skywriter story to compare). Poetic language makes something seem less mundane, whereas there's something homey and un-epic about the mediocrity of telly language. This story is about transcendence within the mundane, or argues that there is no such thing as the mundane. Simon's life can't be elevated by comparing it to something grander. Simon contains grandness within him, adverbs and all, now that he believes his life is grand.

Writing: Telling vs. body language

Did you know that besides posting random brain farts, I also do question-and-answer?  Neither did I! But apparently I do, as I just received a question, from Idylia:

Hey there, Bad Horse.

I'm a follower of yours and often an admirer of your blog posts on writing conventions, but I've recently come across something that's been bothering me a lot that I'm not sure how to remedy. Your name sprang to mind as someone I might be able to go to for advice/direction to advice, so here I am.

When I began writing I found I was able to churn out many thousands of words a day. Quickly, though, I became enraptured with ridding my writing of cliches like telling, unnecessary dialogue tags, etc as these things became apparent to me. The downside of this, though is that I've been learning a lot of what not to do with little guidance towards what to replace it with, and so I feel my writing as of late has become a bit too sterile.

The subject of my specific ire is body language. Body language was a very easy replacement for me to make in place of traditional 'telly' phrases and such, but I find now that it's become such a go-to for me that it's nearly all I ever sprinkle in the midst of my scenes, besides your average exposition.

I wanted to ask if this is something you've ever felt about writing, whether it be in your own writing or in pieces that you read. What other kind of goodstuff can I use to keep a scene interesting? Internal dialogue/thoughts are fine, but in scenes where lots of speaking is happening or I'm trying to do something tonal or stylistic with removing direct dialogue to the reader it's not something I can rely on. Many times when I'm very excited to be writing something, I use so much metaphorical language that editors or proofreaders will call my writing overdramatic or too purple.

Maybe this is something that I just need to generally use my creative brain to work through as I notice it, but I'd  much appreciate hearing your thoughts on it, if you have any.

Good question. I struggle with the same problem myself, often at the behest of Equestria Daily prereaders, some of whom may look for phrases like "Amazing,' she gushed" or "He looked anxiously down the street" and ask you to replace the "telling" verb or adverb with body language. But do this too much, and your characters jerk like spastic robots, and your narrator sounds like an alien anthropologist (I think that's GhostOfHeraclitus' phrase) taking notes.

The annotations of the climax of The Last Unicorn indicate that most human body language involves the arms and hands. If you're befuddled about body language, it would be easier to practice it in non-pony stories. Pony body language is hard! They don't have hands, we don't know for sure what they would do to indicate different emotions, and I doubt we have as precise a vocabulary for describing them. And sometimes, we know that horses do the opposite of what humans do to express some particular emotion--I forget the particulars, but I've had a couple of these pointed out to me--and then what do you do?

By body language, I mean descriptions of where body parts are or what they are doing: "He raised one eyebrow", "He shuddered." This is a bit of an etymological enterprise. I'm counting "shuddered" because the word "shudder" applies to describe the motion of inanimate objects, and when applied to animate objects, we imagine them making that same movement. "Her face reddened" is body language because it can be applied to any object ("the sky reddened").

Adverbs don't usually count, since "body language" is often what we are asked to replace adverbs with. But I'm tempted to count adverbs that could apply to inanimate objects as body language: "She threw the ball awkwardly" isn't body language; "She threw the ball jerkily" might be.

I'm less sure about "She shrugged her shoulders", because "shrugged" is a verb describing a stereotypical motion of an animate body, and nothing else.  "She blushed" is similarly a verb that takes only animate agents. If we count "she blushed", should we also count "she ran", "she hit the wall", and "she snuck past" as body language?

The criterion of the people who tell us to use body language seems to be specificity. Anything with multiple possible interpretations is not body language. "Her face reddened" is body language; "she blushed" might be; "she looked embarrassed" definitely isn't.

I don't count blocking (stage directions) as body language ("She stood by the door.") There are borderline cases where the blocking implies more ("She stood with her back to the wall" suggests being threatened, pressed, and tense).

The next part of the question is what to use instead of body language. The best thing to do is to look at some great stories, and see what they do. Hence the previous (and forthcoming) story passages with adverbs, body language, and other descriptive devices annotated.

The excerpt I posted a few days ago from Chapter 8 of The Last Unicorn is very visual and descriptive. Let's go through it and look for the body language:

He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.

That's straight description. Adjectives and similes.

For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and she turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after her.

Some action. Verbs, and another simile.

The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. She was immortal, but she could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill her - they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.

Now we deviate from literal description into a description of what she might be thinking and feeling. "Fear blew her dark" isn't the least bit literal, and neither is "the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky". They're metaphors that describe her feeling and the source of his anger in physical terms.

Still no body language, though.

The trees lunged at her, and she veered wildly among them;

There it is! She's veering wildy... oh, wait, that's just a verb and an adverb.

she who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything.

There — she's slipping softly... oops, that's just an adverb again. (You can't apply "slipped softly" to inanimate objects.)

... a great branch clubbed her on the shoulder so hard that she staggered and fell.

That's... no, still no body language; just precise verbs.

She was up immediately, but now roots humped under her feet as she ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path.

See, "burrowed as busily as moles"... wait, no, that's a verb followed by an adverbial phrase that makes a simile.

Vines struck at her like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees,

Two more similes.

This passage is full of similes and adverbs, but has no body language at all, despite having a good deal of action in it.

I'll try to post a few more annotated excerpts this month, looking at body language and other descriptive devices. Next up, "Torn Apart and Devoured by Lions" by Skywriter. If, OTOH, people are getting worn out by too darn many Bad Horse posts, I'll try to rein myself in for a bit.

Beyond Ponies

Yesterday I went to a meeting of a local writing group. I’ve been before; I already know I can find more useful criticism here. I just wanted to socialize.

They asked me what I was writing, and I hemmed and hawed, and said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”

I spend so much time on fimfiction because I’ve learned so much and met so many talented, hard-working, and helpful people here. I’m proud to be a part of it. I imagine sometimes that this is what Paris in the 1920s felt like, when half of the future great writers of the Western world were gathered together in a single city. (Hey, I can imagine.) Yet when I meet other writers in other places, I pretend to be a newbie who’s written nothing rather than endure that special scorn reserved for fan-fiction writers.

I want to change that.

I’ve tried to get outsiders to read some of our best stories, but something about pony makes their brains seize up faster than a Mazda RX-8. My friends won’t read my stories, let alone those I recommend. I told an editor I know at Tor that I could introduce him to great new unpublished writers. I sent him links to stories by four authors. He never read them.

I kept thinking that we need one book of great non-pony stories by pony writers. One book that people who are just a little curious about fan-fiction can read, even if they’re hoping only for something to ridicule. I tried to get the Tor editor interested in producing an anthology, but he was afraid of legal problems. He seemed to think that anything we wrote would necessarily infringe on something, as if we were incapable of anything original.

Then I thought: Why not do it myself? Choose some non-pony stories from pony writers, get non-pony art for them from pony artists, put them in an e-book, publish it on Amazon for about $5, and advertise it on fanfiction sites and on the authors' blogs.

Then I put it off for a year.

No more putting it off. The pony train isn’t going to last forever. When it finally stalls out or runs off the rails, I don’t want that to be the end. I hope all of us who’ve worked so hard here can transition to a post-pony world. I understand as well as anyone how comfortable it is once you’ve settled in here, but it’s a temporary refuge. Like Paris in the 1920s.

So I want to do this anthology. I want to gather at least a dozen great stories by ponyfic or fan-fiction authors, bundle them into a book, market it, advertise it, and sell it. And I want the authors to make real money doing so, even if it isn’t very much, so they experience that “I got a check for my writing!” feeling. If we advertise it on fimfiction, we should sell at least a few thousand copies, I’d think.

But I want people outside fandom to read it. I want a write-up in Wired Magazine saying the future of fiction is online and these are the people who will write it. I want ads on goodreads, and a piece in The New Inquiry that uses the words “ponies” and “decontextualizing” in the same sentence.

If it sells enough, well, we could do it again. Even start a small publishing house. Publish original novels. Bypass the mad world of traditional print publishing entirely.

But first, I need stories.

Some big questions you can help answer are:

Will it be just ponyfic authors, or authors of any kind of fan-fiction? I’m open to all, but I don’t know how to find good authors from other fandoms. It would be probably end up with 15 ponyfic authors and 2 from all other fandoms, which would be silly. Do any of you know how to find the best authors in other fandoms?

Should it be a themed anthology? If themed, what might the theme be, and should I pick it before or after choosing some stories?

What kind of stories would not be accepted? “Pornography”, but how about other explicit stories?

Should it be open to everybody, or by invitation only?

On the last point, if I’m going to read all the submitted stories, there are three key factors:

A. I can only read so many stories, but

B. I don’t want to spend an entire day sending PMs to each author I want to invite, and

C. I don’t know if anybody will actually submit anything for it.

So my policy at present is this: I am open to submissions from anyone who:

has published a story on EQD, or

has over 1000 watchers, or

has published a story in a market that paid at least 3 cents a word, or

has a story in the Vault or the Royal Canterlot Archives, or

has been reviewed by Seattle's Angels, or

has gotten 3 or more stars from Chris (though I think that implies being on EQD), or

has gotten a "Highly Recommended" from PresentPerfect, or

has been invited to submit by me

I will sort unread submitted stories according to what I know about their authors, acknowledge receipt, and read them when I’m able to read them. That might mean I read a device heretic story when it comes in even though there are already others ahead of it, or even that I never read some of the stories, if there are a lot. Sorry. If I get a lot of stories, I’ll ask others to help screen them. For money, or a percentage. None of this volunteering business. I want to do this like grown-ups.

I’ll give fair warning:

I want these to be great stories. Stories that people will want to write review columns about, and not in a “Dog rides bicycle” way. “Good enough for Equestria Daily” is not what I’m aiming for. No slight on EQD, but they publish a story every day. Hell, they even published one of mine today. I don’t want one-a-day stories. I want one-a-month stories. That said, “good enough for Equestria Daily” does mean “good enough to submit”.

I plan to be a bastard activist editor, the kind who might send things back and ask for changes, like John Campbell in the 1940s (or EQD in 2013).

I will keep accepting stories until I have enough great stories, or I give up.

I will start accepting submissions immediately. I may later announce here and on the google forum (below) that I’ve chosen a genre or theme based on what’s been submitted so far.

Seriously, I need help thinking of a themed anthology that could work. I don't think a genre is a good idea; the purpose is to show that we have good authors, not good hard SF authors or good epic fantasy authors. And part of my pitch to literary people is that fan-fiction defies genres. A theme that's broad enough to encompass a wide variety of genres would be best.

To submit something,

Join the Google forum beyond-ponies-forum.

Write a non-pony, non-copyright-infringing, non-pornographic story or poem in Google docs that is under 25,000 words.

“Share” the doc and set it to “Anyone with the link can comment”, because I eventually want the authors of accepted stories to critique each others’ stories.

Email a message with the following to [url=mailto:beyond-ponies-inbox@googlegroups.com]beyond-ponies-inbox@googlegroups.com[/url] and [url=mailto:badhorse43@gmail.com[/url]badhorse43@gmail.com:

        - Mail it from an email address that I can reply to & can share with others

        - Your fimfic username and a link to your user page

Mention whether you've got a story on EQD, in the Vault, in the Royal Canterlot Archives, etc.

        - A short description of the story

        - The link to your doc

You can put “Copyright , 2014” on the doc if you want. That isn’t done in the Real World, but I don’t mind. Sending material to me is not selling it. That requires you to sign a contract. You can submit a synopsis instead of a story and get feedback, but "Trixie and Twilight get lost in the Everfree and have to learn to cooperate" is not a synopsis. A synopsis for a 20,000-word story should be at least 1000 words. (I'm making that number up, because in the Real World you don't write a synopsis for short stories.)

There are also questions about legal matters, anonymity, and how to define, divide up, and distribute profits, which I’ll address in a separate post if stories start coming in. I’m thinking no up-front payments, with profits split up 20-25% for reading, choosing, & editing stories, commissioning & selecting art, & formatting; 5-10% for marketing and promotion write-ups outside fimfiction and personal blogs; 40% for writers; and 30% for artists. If we use Amazon, authors can use Amazon affiliate links and get an additional commission on copies bought through their blogs. Legal crap (incorporating, filing 1099 forms, writing contracts, sending checks, figuring out how to pay people outside America) and advertising will count as expenses before profits, and I expect to front that money myself.

Simultaneous submissions are okay, but say so if you’re doing so, and email [url=mailto:beyond-ponies-inbox@googlegroups.com]beyond-ponies-inbox@googlegroups.com[/url] immediately if you sell a submitted story somewhere else. Avoid previously-published stories. Most likely I’ll want to purchase first world electronic rights, and I can’t do that if you’ve already published it electronically. And your ability to promote your story to your followers is useless if you’ve already given them a link to a free online copy.

I feel like an ass for posting two grandiose schemes in two days. This is the one that’s more important to me. I need stories from you folks to make it happen.

Writing: When only to show

Sometimes you shouldn't "tell" at all. Hemingway and Elmore Leonard want their protagonists to be "manly" and not show external feelings, so they use little telly language.

Here's a different but common reason not to tell. This is a long passage from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, end of part 2, with lots of body language and almost no "telling" at all. After it, I'll give my opinion on why that is. (You don't need to read the spoiler at the end.)

I have to qualify that in two ways. First, there is telling. John Singer complains "furiously" and is "beside himself" when the slot machine doesn't work. The humidity oppresses him, and he has a headache. But these things are indirect. He isn't furious because of the slot machine, or because of the heat, and you need to figure out why he has a headache. This is similar to what Mystic calls "Implication outside the initial scope." You need to figure out what deeper feeling caused these feelings.

Second, there's a continuum from telling to showing. Categorizing things into "showing" and "telling" is a simplification. Maybe I'll post on that later, with examples.

And, yeah, she uses "listlessly" too often.

I changed the "telly" speech tag from maroon to brown, so you can distinguish it from adverbs, which in this passage are not very telly. Key:

red = adverb

brown = "telly" language

yellow = sensory language that describes Singer's feelings in a non-telly way

green = simile or metaphor

blue = an adjective, adverb, or verb that isn't literally correct (metaphorical)

lavender = body language

At the asylum he sought Antonapoulos first in the sick ward where he had been confined before. But at the doorway of the room he saw immediately that his friend was not there. Next he found his way through the corridors to the office where he had been taken the time before. He had his question already written on one of the cards he carried about with him. The person behind the desk was not the same as the one who had been there before. He was a young man, almost a boy, with a half-formed, immature face and a lank mop of hair. Singer handed him the card and stood quietly, his arms heaped with packages, his weight resting on his heels.

The young man shook his head. He leaned over the desk and scribbled loosely on a pad of paper. Singer read what he had written and the spots of color drained from his cheekbones instantly. He looked at the note a long time, his eyes cut sideways and his head bowed. For it was written there that Antonapoulos was dead.

On the way back to the hotel he was careful not to crush the fruit he had brought with him. He took the packages up to his room and then wandered down to the lobby. Behind a potted palm tree there was a slot machine. He inserted a nickel but when he tried to pull the lever he found that the machine was jammed. Over this incident he made a great to-do. He cornered the clerk and furiously demonstrated what had happened. His face was deathly pale and he was so beside himself that tears rolled down the ridges of his nose. He flailed his hands and even stamped once with his long, narrow, elegantly shoed foot on the plush carpet. Nor was he satisfied when his coin was refunded, but insisted on checking out immediately. He packed his bag and was obliged to work energetically to make it close again. For in addition to the articles he had brought with him he carried away three towels, two cakes of soap, a pen and a bottle of ink, a roll of toilet paper, and a Holy Bible. He paid his bill and walked to the railway station to put his belongings in custody. The train did not leave until nine in the evening and he had the empty afternoon before him.

This town was smaller than the one in which he lived. The business streets intersected to form the shape of a cross. The stores had a countrified look; there were harnesses and sacks of feed in half of the display windows. Singer walked listlessly along the sidewalks. His throat felt swollen and he wanted to swallow but was unable to do so. To relieve this strangled feeling he bought a drink in one of the drugstores.

He idled in the barber shop and purchased a few trifles at the ten-cent store. He looked no one full in the face and his head drooped down to one side like a sick animal’s.

The afternoon was almost ended when a strange thing happened to Singer. He had been walking slowly and irregularly along the curb of the street. The sky was overcast and the air humid. Singer did not raise his head, but as he passed the town pool room he caught a sidewise glance of something that disturbed him. He passed the pool room and then stopped in the middle of the street. Listlessly he retraced his steps and stood before the open door of the place. There were three mutes inside and they were talking with their hands together. All three of them were coatless. They wore bowler hats and bright ties. Each of them held a glass of beer in his left hand. There was a certain brotherly resemblance between them.

Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.

He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose.

His head was still inclined to one side and his glance was oblique. He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation. And when they had paid for the rounds of beers and were ready to depart they did not suggest that he join them.

Although Singer had been adrift on the streets for half a day he almost missed his train. It was not clear to him how this happened or how he had spent the hours before. He reached the station two minutes before the train pulled out, and barely had time to drag his luggage aboard and find a seat. The car he chose was almost empty. When he was settled he opened the crate of strawberries and picked them over with finicky care.

The berries were of a giant size, large as walnuts and in full-blown ripeness. The green leaves at the top of the rich-colored fruit were like tiny bouquets. Singer put a berry in his mouth and though the juice had a lush, wild sweetness there was already a subtle flavor of decay. He ate until his palate was dulled by the taste and then rewrapped the crate and placed it on the rack above him. At midnight he drew the window-shade and lay down on the seat. He was curled in a ball, his coat pulled over his face and head. In this position he lay in a stupor of half-sleep for about twelve hours. The conductor had to shake him when they arrived.

Singer left his luggage in the middle of the station floor. Then he walked to the shop. He greeted the jeweler for whom he worked with a listless turn of his head. When he went out again there was something heavy in his pocket For a while he rambled with bent head along the streets. But the unrefracted brilliance of the sun, the humid heat, oppressed him. He returned to his room with swollen eyes and an aching head. After resting he drank a glass of iced coffee and smoked a cigarette. Then when he had washed the ash tray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.

(I marked "wild sweetness" as non-literal because wild strawberries are not sweet at all, so presumably the author is trying to convey something else with that word.)

The author (Carson McCullers, a mere 23 years old when she wrote this) doesn't tell us how Singer feels because Singer doesn't know how he feels. Exploring feelings that we don't understand and can't name is one of the main purposes of literature. One mark of great fiction is showing characters have feelings that there are no words for. You can describe it with words, but not with a single word; I recall a line from my annotation of The Last Unicorn: "She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand." For this, you need to show rather than tell. So great stories are likely to have sections that show but don't tell. Causation doesn't run the other way, though: Showing but not telling doesn't make something great.

When to show & when to tell

We’ve been kicking around show vs. tell a lot lately, so I want to keep a list of all the reasonable-sounding theories on what’s good about showing or telling. I’m just trying to organize my thoughts here. I have no doubt that you, my alarmingly clever readers, will immediately poke them full of holes.

It’s traditional at this point to give a list of examples of badly-written tells vs. well-written shows, but that’s cheating. We need to consider real examples of both shows and tells, and figure out what circumstances makes one or the other better. And first we have to have some idea what “showing” and “telling” mean.

One definition is that “showing” means things that could be shown in a movie: bare facts such as setting and events, body language, and facial expressions. “Telling”, respectively, then means describing a character’s thoughts or feelings.

Another interpretation is that “showing” describes things as they happen, while “telling” summarizes them, whether they’re externally-visible events or internal thoughts and feelings. In this view, transitory, sensory feelings are “shows” (“The subway car was hot”), while moods (“Jill had never been so happy”) or attitudes (“The bar was unnaturally quiet. I didn’t like it.”) are tells. Consider this passage from Camus’ The Stranger:

A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs.

Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed on the revolver.

Camus could have written this:

His knife glinted in the sun. Sweat blinded me. I pulled the trigger.

The first passage is all internal monologue and descriptions that are symbolic or impressionistic rather than literal. The sun makes no noise, the knife does not gouge into his eyeballs, there is no gust from the sea, the sky does not crack in two, and no sheet of flame pours from the sky. You couldn’t have shown any of that in a movie, so by the first definition above, it’s all telling. But it’s not summarizing anything; rather, it presents a series of sensory impressions that flash by, after which the narrator discovers the gun has fired, almost on its own. So by the second definition it’s all showing.

The first definition is easier to use, but I think the second is more useful.

A third definition, which several comments below mention, is that "showing" gives the reader clues that they must assemble, while "telling" spells out what the author wants the reader to know. Mystic writes about "implication outside the initial scope", quoting someone else:

There is a technique where you baldly state how a character feels or what a character thinks about something, and that statement can imply things far beyond the scope of what you wrote. If you've ever read Bubbles you might remember how the style is very simplistic, with Derpy telling the reader all sorts of things that other writers might try to show instead, like the things that makes her happy, or her favourite foods, or what might make her sad. The thing is, telling here is not an error, because what the writer was trying to portray subtly is not Derpy's emotions or her interests. The thing the writer was trying to infer here was Derpy's simplemindedness, and the relationship she has with her mother.

By this definition, that is "telling" us individual things about Derpy, but "showing" the big picture of Derpy that we put together from those things.

Showing

Catlett's voice said, "I like you to meet my associate, the Bear. Movie stuntman and champion weight lifter, as you might've noticed. Picks up and throws out things I don't want."

Chili looked at the thickness of the guy's body, at red and gold hibiscus blossoms and green leaves on a field of Hawaiian blue, but wouldn't look at his face now. He knew they were hibiscus, because Debbie used to grow them on Meridian Avenue before she flipped out and went back to Brooklyn.

Now the guy was saying, "I know Chili Palmer. I know all about him."

The Bear sucking in his stomach and acting tough, his crotch right there in Chili's face. This guy was as nuts as Debbie. You could tell he had his stomach sucked in, because the waistband was creased where the guy's gut ordinarily hung over and rolled it, the pants as out of shape as this guy trying to give him a hard time. But Chili didn't look up.

Catlett said, "We think you ought to turn around and go back to Miami."

Chili still didn't look up. Not yet.

The Bear said, "Take your ten grand with you, while you still have it."

And Chili almost looked up—this guy as much as telling him he had been in his hotel room, nothing to it, saw all that dough and left it—but he didn't. Chili kept his eyes on the guy's waist and saw the stomach move to press against the elastic band, the guy still putting on his show but giving his gut a breather. Chili looked at the guy's crotch one more time before moving his gaze up through the hibiscus till he was looking at the guy's bearded face.

Chili said, "So you're a stuntman," with the look he'd use on a slow pay. "Are you any good?"

What the Bear did in that next moment was grin and turn his head to the side, as if too modest to answer and would let Catlett speak for him. It made the next move easier, the guy not even looking as Chili grabbed a handful of his crotch, stepped aside and yanked him off the stairs. The Bear yelled out of pain and fear and caught Chili's head with an elbow going by, but it was worth it to see that beefy guy roll all the way down the stairs to land on the main floor. Chili kept watching till he saw the guy move, then looked up at Catlett.

"Not bad, for a guy his size."

          — Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty

Singer went inside. For a moment he had trouble taking his hand from his pocket. Then clumsily he formed a word of greeting. He was clapped on the shoulder. A cold drink was ordered. They surrounded him and the fingers of their hands shot out like pistons as they questioned him.

He told his own name and the name of the town where he lived. After that he could think of nothing else to tell about himself. He asked if they knew Spiros Antonapoulos. They did not know him. Singer stood with his hands dangling loose.

His head was still inclined to one side and his glance was oblique. He was so listless and cold that the three mutes in the bowler hats looked at him queerly. After a while they left him out of their conversation. And when they had paid for the rounds of beers and were ready to depart they did not suggest that he join them.

          — Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

A movie couldn’t show you that Singer “could think of nothing else to tell about himself”, so by the first definition above, it’s a little telly. But it describes what passes through Singer’s head, rather than summarizing it as “Singer was too depressed to say anything else,” so by the second definition it’s more showy.

On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of humankind. He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in a sort of eternity. Dahlmann was warmed by the rightness of the man’s hairband, the baize poncho he wore, his gaucho trousers, and the boots made out of the skin of a horse’s leg, and he said to himself… that only in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

Telling

Long after separating from Oki, she was shocked to read in A Girl of 16 that on his way to meet her he would be trying to decide how to make love to her, and that he usually did exactly as he had planned. She found it appalling that a man’s heart would “throb with joy as he walked along thinking about it.” To a spontaneous young girl like Otoko it had been inconceivable that a man would plan in advance his lovemaking techniques, their sequence, and the like. She accepted whatever he did, gave whatever he asked. Her youth made her all the more unquestioning. Oki had described her as an extraordinary girl, a woman among women. Thanks to her, he wrote, he had experienced all the ways of making love.

When she read that, Otoko burned with humiliation. But she could not suppress her lively memories of his lovemaking; her body tensed and began to quiver. Finally the tension was released, and delight and satisfaction spread through her whole body. Her past love had come back to life.

          — Yasunari Kawabata, winner of the Nobel for literature, Beauty and Sadness

For the hours that Gogol is at nursery school, fingerpainting and learning the English alphabet, Ashima is despondent, unaccustomed, all over again, to being on her own. She misses her son’s habit of always holding on to the free end of her sorry as they walked together. She misses the sound of his sulky, high-pitched little boy voice, telling her that he is hungry, or tired, or needs to go to the bathroom. To avoid being alone at home she sits in the reading room of the public library, in a cracked leather armchair, writing letters to her mother, or reading magazines or one of her Bengali books from home.

...

From the beginning he feels useless. Moushumi makes all the decisions, does all the talking. He is mute in the brasseries where they eat their lunches, and in the shops where he gazes at beautiful belts, ties, paper, pens; mute on the rainy afternoon they spend together at the d’Orsay. He is particularly mute when he and Moushumi get together for dinners with groups of her French friends, drinking Pernods and feasting on couscous or choucroute and arguing around paper covered tables. He struggled to grasp the topic of conversation — the euro, Monica Lewinsky, Y2K — but everything else is a blur, indistinguishable from the clatter of plates, the drone of echoing, laughing voices.

          — Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the Pulitzer for literature, The Namesake

When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist — somewhere in some hexagon.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, winner of the Pulitzer for international ilterature, “The Library of Babel”

They went outside, and while there was no hope in Dahlmann, there was no fear, either. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that on that first night in the sanatorium, when they stuck the needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta. He sensed that had he been able to choose or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or chosen.

          — Jorge Luis Borges, “The South”

The usual formula for showing is that a scene is shown, with some told embellishments (e.g., the first Borges quote). For telling, a passage’s purpose and critical information are told, and are rounded out by the details shown (e.g., Lahiri, Borges).

Here are some reasons proposed for why and when showing is better than telling:

Showing is more engaging

That’s the reason Ezn gives in his guide’s section on show vs. tell. But this begs the question: More engaging in what way? This is not a useful theory, because I don’t know what “engaging” means, and because it doesn’t tell us when telling is good. We need an explanation that gives us a test for when to show and when to tell.

Showing gives more specific images

Consider these pairs:

Jenny was happy. / Jenny skipped down the sidewalk.

Ben was embarrassed. / Ben’s face reddenned.

Rarity revelled in the joy of creation. / Rarity hummed a tune as she passed a long strip of red cloth through her sewing machine. (from Ezn’s guide)

Some say that the showing is more specific than telling. But is it? No; it paints a more specific image, but is more ambiguous about abstract emotion and thought. The examples on the right each give us a visual image, but Jenny may skip while bored or restless, Ben may be hot or angry, and Rarity may be looking forward to her hot date with your OC that evening.

Telling gives more specific thoughts & feelings

Telling is better when you need us to know exactly what a character is thinking. It’s essential when there’s no way to show what they’re thinking. How could Lahiri have shown that Ashima missed Gogol? How could Borges have shown that Dahlmann was thinking back to his time in the sanitarium?

Conversely, as GhostOfHeraclitus noted, showing is better if you want a character’s motives or feelings to be ambiguous, as for instance when describing the actions of a suspect in a mystery.

Showing vs. telling is a trade off of being specific about visual imagery (showing) versus internal thoughts and feelings (telling). These two approaches appeal to different types of people. The kind of person who goes to see movies because they have great special effects and doesn’t care about plot or character will prefer stories that show. The kind of person who prefers fiction about ideas and feelings should be more tolerant of stories with a lot of telling.

I don’t know if that’s the case. Harry Potter has more telling than the idea-laden writings of Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino. But certainly action scenes need showing, because action is kinetic and visual. And if Ezn’s statement that telling is more “engaging” means “has more action scenes” (e.g., “Peter Jackson made The Hobbit more engaging”), then showing is more engaging than telling. But I wouldn’t use the word “engaging” that way myself. I found Tolkien’s Hobbit more engaging.

Jhumpa Lahiri could have shown Gogol remaining mute while Moushumi and her friends talked, and failing to grasp the conversation. But we could have inferred many other things from those bare facts, and wandered down many digressing lines of thought. We might have thought the author meant for Monica Lewinsky or Y2K to be metaphors for something. Summarizing the conversation tells us that they signify nothing and we should ignore them.

Showing lets you communicate feelings that we don’t understand

That’s the claim I made in my annotation of that excerpt from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Carson McCullers, the author, shows us for three pages what John Singer does, without entering his head and describing his feelings, because Singer does not understand and could not describe his feelings at the time.

GhostOfHeraclitus responded that we can also use telling to express feelings that aren’t lexicalized, such as “the emotion of wanting something, being ashamed of wanting it, but being unable and to an extent unwilling to give up that want”, or “the admixture of melancholy and nostalgia which happens when you return to a place you haven't been for a very long time and see the fragments of your past life scattered and decontextualized, familiar yet foreign”.

If you understand what you’re trying to get across well enough to summarize it, then you could tell it, probably in many fewer words. But to do that, you need to analyze that feeling, and you risk getting it wrong, because:

Telling states an opinion; showing pretends to reserve judgement

That’s one of the points I made it in a blog post I wrote last year and haven’t posted yet called “Superman Taught me to Kill”, and again in a comment on that same annotation post: Good authors deal with things that they don’t entirely understand, and if they tried to summarize them, they’d probably get it wrong. A reader can rarely tell whether a long explanation makes sense or is possible in the real world, but can easily tell when characters act unrealistically. Showing keeps the author honest.

Jorges Luis Borges argues the opposite in his short stories “Funes the Memorious” (a man who remembers so many details about everything that he understands nothing) and “The Immortal”:

I reflected that Argos and I lived our lives in separate universes; I reflected that our perceptions were identical but that Argos combined them differently than I, constructed them from different objects; I reflected that perhaps for him there were no objects, but rather a constant, dizzying play of swift impressions. I imagined a world without memory, without time; I toyed with the possibility of a language that had no nouns, a language of impersonal verbs or indeclinable adjectives.… I asked Argos how much of the Odyssey he knew. He found using Greek difficult; I had to repeat the question.

Very little, he replied. Less than the meagerest rhapsode. It has been 1100 years since last I wrote it.

… [several pages of detailed show-don’t-tell autobiography intervene]

A year has passed, and I reread these pages. I can attest that they do not stray beyond the bounds of truth, although… I believe I detect a certain falseness. That is due, perhaps, to an overemployment of circumstantial details, a way of writing that I learned from the poets; it is a procedure that infects everything with falseness, since there may be a wealth of details in the event, yet not in memory.

Borges seems to be saying that telling is less truthful because it presents too many distracting details (and says something similar in “Funes”). I am saying that summarizing—choosing which details to keep and which to throw out—is the main source of falseness. I could argue that the purpose of literature is to pursue arguments that are too complex for humans to reason about logically. Writers who summarize will inevitably get some of it wrong.

Telling invokes conscious reasoning; showing bypasses it

One might imagine that it would be more difficult to write propaganda using showy language, if it is more honest. This is not the case. Triumph of the Will is imagistic and therefore showy.        While showy language does not distort what it presents, the person who chooses what is shown can still control its message. Telling risks being false by making a logical mistake, but it states its opinions explicitly, putting the reader on alert. Showing risks being false by choosing a misrepresentative set of things to show, and can slip lies by the reader more easily because it never gives them a chance to argue.

Telling gives information; showing makes the reader work for it

Showing the reader pieces of information that they must piece together may be more satisfying to them. Have you read a mystery where the solution comes entirely from one critical piece of information? I hate that. The more different pieces of information that come together to form the solution, the better the mystery.

The theory is that this operates in all forms of fiction, and readers enjoy / are more engaged with stories when they have to work harder to understand them. I think, though, it may be more important that conclusions they draw for themselves are more convincing than ones they are told.

Showing is masculine / sociopathic; telling is feminine

Stereotypically, women like to talk about feelings, and men do not. Romance novels are overstuffed with long telly monologues. Pornography only shows.

Hemingway seldom talks about his heroes’ feelings. In Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, the narrator tells us that Chili (“chill”) Palmer, the hero, is a man to whom right action is instinctive. He doesn’t dwell on things. When a woman wants to sleep with him, he is neither surprised nor excited, and doesn’t wonder why. He acts in ways that would seem to require planning ahead, yet we never see him plan ahead. He is behaviorally conditioned by life on the streets so that he acts immediately and impulsively in the correct way, whether this is punching or shooting a man at the right time, or leaving the key to a locker full of drug money outside the airport before going in to examine it. A rich internal life would only trip him up. And Leonard uses Chili’s voice as the narrator’s voice regardless of which character’s point-of-view he’s in.

You can see something similar in Camus’ The Stranger, whose main character claims not to have strong feelings, and who is supposed to represent the human condition (but appears to me to deliberately misrepresent it). Camus wrote The Stranger in first person so that we could get inside the narrator’s head and verify that he is unaware of having normal feelings. The story shows the narrator’s actions throughout events that should be charged with emotion (his mother’s death, a sexual romance, a killing). Even with his interior monologue, he has only sensory impressions that he can never translate into the expected emotions.

Anthony Burgess’ narrator in A Clockwork Orange, by contrast, is a different kind of sociopath, one who feels intense emotions, but doesn’t care about the feelings of strangers. His life is ultra-”masculine”: He is a gang leader who thinks only of status, sex, and violence. So his narration is mostly showing, though he sometimes uses adverbs to tell us how much he enjoys “the old ultra-violence”.

I’ve included two quotes above from Borges’ “The South”. The old gaucho, who represents masculinity, is only shown, and takes the pivotal action yet says nothing. Dahlmann, who is aware of his unmanliness, tells and talks.

Showing is remote; telling is intimate

This is a generalization of “Showing is masculine”. Bradel suggests this as a reason for the showing in that same scene from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Showing Singer from the outside moves us further away from him, which might be appropriate because of spoilerish plot issues described in that comment. In the excerpt from The Stranger above, the narrator doesn’t “pull the trigger”; he watches his grip close on the revolver, as if from a distance, moving himself outside of his body. Telling, conversely, draws us in closer to a character’s point of view.

Showing is slow; telling is fast

Nobody wasted their breath pretending to feel very sad about the Riddles, for they had been most unpopular. Elderly Mr. and Mrs. Riddle had been rich, snobbish, and rude, and their grown-up son, Tom, had been, if anything, worse.

          — J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, quoted in Titanium Dragon’s annotation

In many great novels, things are told mostly when they would be difficult or time-consuming to show. Here we’re learning backstory. Back story is, by definition, not the story, and can usually be summarized. (But see Titanium Dragon’s comment below.)

Writing: Show us the theme

[I'm notifying people who favorited "The Corpse Bride" because I discuss it at the end.]

Why do we write stories rather than essays (or jokes, in the case of crack-fics)? Writing a story is harder and takes longer. But a story can do some things better than an essay can. The civil rights and gay rights movements didn't succeed using logical arguments, but with fictional and true stories about black and gay individuals. A story can bring you into someone's world, make them a non-stranger to you, and suddenly you find your attitude towards them has changed, without an argument. A story can explain someone's behavior in terms of their previous experiences, and we may understand them better by imagining how we would respond to those same experiences than by following a chain of logic in a psychology journal.

This may be due to the peculiarities of the human mind. We've evolved to understand other humans, not essays. We can comprehend a person who is a mass of contradictions better than we can comprehend an essay that dissects the epistemology of a tangled philosophy. Stories are our native language, and we may perceive things in them more easily than if they were stated formally.

(More easily, not more reliably. Stories are a dangerous methodology for discovering truth. This, again, is due to the peculiarities of the human mind. See my author's comments (if you dare; they're long) on "The ones who walk away from Equestria". Certain things only "make sense" as stories because they trigger context-insensitive emotional responses that short-circuit logical thought. So storytelling is a double-edged sword: It can convey truths that can be perceived only in a story, and lies that are convincing only in a story, and it's difficult to know which you are doing at any given time.)

This is the true root of show versus tell. A story, fundamentally, shows. An essay tells.

Neither stories nor essays are mere communication. They're creative. Communication passes on chunks of information. Creativity takes chunks of information and assembles them in new ways. If a story doesn't give us any new or interesting combinations of old familiar chunks, we get the uneasy feeling that it wasn't really a story, and it wasn't.

"Showing" means, I think, that we can picture the assembly of those chunks in the real world and mentally simulate what they'll do. "Telling" means we are given the chunks, and a sentence or formula to plug them into.

That is far from meaning that body language is "showing" while adverbs are "telling". The chunks that we assemble may be entire chapters of a novel. I previously cited an example that Mystic gave about "implication outside the initial scope", quoting someone else:

There is a technique where you baldly state how a character feels or what a character thinks about something, and that statement can imply things far beyond the scope of what you wrote. If you've ever read Bubbles you might remember how the style is very simplistic, with Derpy telling the reader all sorts of things that other writers might try to show instead, like the things that makes her happy, or her favourite foods, or what might make her sad. The thing is, telling here is not an error, because what the writer was trying to portray subtly is not Derpy's emotions or her interests. The thing the writer was trying to infer here was Derpy's simplemindedness, and the relationship she has with her mother.

You are told many chunks of facts about Derpy. These chunks describe events or pictures in the world. You assemble them in your model of the world, and you see a bigger picture of Derpy emerge. That's showing, but on a higher level of abstraction than that of body language or adverbs.

A good essay uses showing to give examples of its points, and a good story may use telling to build its chunks (as in the Derpy example). So what's the difference between a story and an essay?

If the top-level creative concept is shown, it's a story. If the top-level creative concept is told, it's an essay.

Some of the same people who have stricken the adverbs from my stories have written "stories" in which the top-level concept is told. This is often the case in crack-fics; a classic example is "To Serve Man". I think it's okay in a crack-fic, since there's no need to distinguish between a crack-fic and an extended joke (think of a crack-fic as a long stand-up routine). But I'm never left satisfied by serious stories in which the top-level concept is simply told.

I don't want to give specific examples from fimfiction, but many of them are stories with twist endings. A twist makes you reinterpret a story. That means the twist has to involve the theme. But if you've avoided discussing the theme in order not to give away the twist, you haven't shown (or told) us pieces of the theme, and can only baldly tell it in the reveal. Any story where the twist is that pony W is a changeling, pony X is just imagining things, or pony Y secretly loves pony Z, is at risk of being a "story essay".

The story of the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov is almost entirely "telling" dialogue. Christ returns a second time to earth, and is immediately jailed by the Catholic Church. The Grand Inquisitor explains to Christ why they must kill him, and his reasons sound convincing.

If the story ended there, it would be an essay. But it goes on for one more paragraph:

When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: 'Go, and come no more... come not at all, never, never!' And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away."

The kiss is Christ's response to everything the Inquisitor has said. We feel that Christ has won the debate, and yet no one can tell why. There is no shorter way to explain the story than the story itself, and that is what proves it is a story.

Here's one of my own stories that didn't quite work out in this respect: "Special". On a family outing, Pound Cake says that Discord is hiding behind a rock just beyond the shoreline. Everyone else thinks he's just playing, because that would be a silly thing for a god to do. The twist is that Discord really is hiding behind a rock, and he's doing it just to destroy Pound's faith in his parents and in society at large, and prepare him for a role in some larger plan.

The story before the reveal should have touched on the importance of growing up with parents you can trust, the danger in thinking you alone know the truth, and so on. Then the reveal would have been the final piece needed to assemble all of those things into a picture of how Pound should have grown up, and another picture of how he will now. But instead, I rushed to the reveal, trying to write the shortest set-up necessary for it, rather than the one that would give it meaning.

I think I did this better in "No Regrets", which was very short, but showed specific times when Twilight had avoided Derpy, explained why, and related that to her relationship with the ponies she considered friends. It gives enough pieces of story to put together in a big "show" by the end. AbsoluteAnonymous' "Two Cups of Tea" also did this pretty well. It gradually reveals Rarity's feelings and dreams, and how they are crushed, and how she can handle that.

It's harder to do with a twist ending, but I think I did all right in "The Corpse Bride", because the build-up to the reveal planted many things to show that Twilight and company were not living up to the ideals that Twilight expressed in her speech. Also, the ending reveals the twist (Fluttershy loved Discord), its cause (they are over-confident in their perceptions) and the other consequences of that cause (they had abandoned their friend; they have murdered Fluttershy). And I did all right in "Trust", which also has a twist ending, but the story before it explains the significance of the reveal to Celestia, and shows specific instances of misplaced trust.

The key distinction is whether the story leading up to the twist just plants clues about a fact that is to be revealed, or plants clues about the causes and consequences of what is to be revealed, which the reader can assemble into a theme. The latter is a story; the former is a story essay.

Write-off: Yay me!

The results from January’s write-off are in, and my story, Moments, took second place. :yay:

Before you click that link and read it, you should know I’m pretty sure I’m going to add three more chapters and publish it on the infection. I’ve figured out one way to make it a happier story. (By ‘happier’ I mean everypony will finally get to die in the end. No, wait, really; it’ll be sweet. Trust me. :trixieshiftright:)

(My voice recognition software hears ‘fimfiction’ as ‘the infection’. I can’t argue with that.) [1]

If you want to look over just some of the competition stories, go to the discussion thread and read Pav Feira’s reviews. He’s good at highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of stories. (It’s a shame about that terrible accident he’s going to have before the next write-off. He keeps winning them, you see.)

Does placing second actually mean anything? Meh. It means something, but I see my favorite stories from the competition spread out all across the results, from “All of it, For Her” at the top to “The Ponies we Love” by new author Axis of Rotation (incomplete, but still more intriguing to me than any of the others--separate post on that later) at the bottom. The competition was tough enough that the final ranking was IMHO almost arbitrary, more noise and personal preferences than true quality.

And yet I realized, as 2AM approached, that I cared about my story’s ranking. I cared a lot. Why? I already have my opinion of it, and the opinions of some people whose judgement I trust more than voting results. And I don’t believe ranking comedies, slice-of-life, and tragedies against each other is meaningful. My opinion of my story wouldn’t change if it came in first or if it came in last. For some stories it would, but not this one.

So do I care because I want to know that other people like what I wrote? I don’t think so. How much of a warm fuzzy feeling (or deliciously cold and dark) I get from my stories isn’t affected by the thumb counts. That just affects my opinion of the general intelligence of the human race.

I guess I just like the acclaim. Hmm. Not very logical of me. Or else completely logical, if my mammalian brain is making me write fan-fiction to increase my reproductive success. (If so, it really shouldn’t let me write My Little Pony fan-fiction. I should start craving Twilight.)

[1] Ghost, do you see those things like ( and ) up above? They’re called ‘parentheses’. They’re like footnotes, but without the aggravation and wasted time.

Write-off: Why I love "The Ponies we Love"

"The Ponies we Love" took 2nd-to-last place in January’s write-off. I want to explain (and in doing so figure out) why I thought it was the best story in the competition, despite being incomplete.

I liked the style, certainly, but that's not a big factor with me, at least if by “style” we mean an author’s grammar and preference for big or small words, long or short sentences, showing or telling. Content matters more to me. Halfway between style and content is the choice of what to focus on and what words to use, and that matters to me, too. Let’s look at content and word choice. Here are the first lines:

The gentle taps on the door rang clearly throughout the hallway.

Celestia stood before the grand entrance, hoof still raised and poised for another strike, waiting for a response from within.

Luna always did take her time acknowledging visitors.

In the silence she gazed at the intricate, inlaid patterns on the pair of doors; they drew one’s eye upwards to a grand arch resting above, giving any visitor the sense they were a foal looking up to a tall and imperious pony. Celestia smiled sadly at the thought.

“Come in sister,” Luna called. Her voice was strong and authoritative in tone—very professional. It yielded a sense of Luna’s commanding presence, something Celestia had watched fluctuate over the years as she swayed back and forth, uncertain in her image.

We've got setting and action, but each paragraph is also characterization. Celestia's taps were 'gentle', yet 'rang clear', a description of Celestia herself. Celestia stands "hoof still raised and poised for another strike, waiting": ready for action, yet also patient; and we recall the second meaning of "poised". "Luna always did take her time acknowledging visitors" tells us this Luna is haughty, or plays status games. "... giving any visitor the sense they were a foal looking up to a tall and imperious pony. Celestia smiled sadly at the thought." reinforces this, and shows us how Celestia feels about that. Then "... something Celestia had watched fluctuate over the years as she swayed back and forth, uncertain in her image" follows through to explain why Luna is playing these games, and why it makes Celestia sad.

Everything that follows after that builds on that initial relationship set-up.

(Notice that “They drew one’s eye upwards to a grand arch resting above, giving any visitor the sense they were a foal looking up to a tall and imperious pony” and “Her voice was strong and authoritative in tone … [giving] a sense of Luna’s commanding presence, something Celestia had watched fluctuate over the years as she swayed back and forth, uncertain in her image” both nest metaphorical showing inside telling inside literal showing.)

Then there’s a section in which we see the mayor worrying about Twilight, who isn’t able to deal with the responsibilities of administration for some unknown reason. The mayor is supposed to report on Twilight to Celestia, who is worried about exactly this happening, but the mayor conceals it, as a misguided favor to Twilight.

Then Rarity and Fluttershy interact, in a section that wanders farther afield from its plot line, but has this charming exchange:

“Hi, Rarity.”

Rarity gave a sharp jolt, the wheels in her mind jumping tracks. “Er—hi, Fluttershy dear.” She gave a pleasant laugh to cover her ruffled state.

Fluttershy smiled demurely. “I didn’t catch you in the middle of an Inspiration Search, did I?”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. She had forgotten Fluttershy knew she did that, and more so, that she knew what it looked like. But that would mean…

Carefully, she worded her answer. “Why yes, actually, I was,” she said in a flippant manner, and then, more slowly, “you noticed?” And interrupted me anyway.

A tremble rumbled through Fluttershy. “Um, well, yes, but not before I said hi.” She plastered a thin smile on her lips. Rarity saw it for what it was: a silent apology. The form of repentance the two of them had, over the years, come to tacitly agree upon—when it came to little, personal faux-pas such as these. Following suite, Rarity let her annoyance slide away, returning her silent forgiveness: a sincere, friendly smile. Fluttershy’s thin lips blossomed into a radiant grin of appreciation.

We now know Rarity & Fluttershy are close; that Rarity likes keeping her thoughts private; that Rarity prioritizes her art very high, sometimes above her friends; that she operates on the level of things unspoken; that Fluttershy also understands these things and finds Rarity’s displeasure, even when merely implied, painful; that Rarity and Fluttershy have managed to agree on what constitutes an offense and what weight it should be given (as opposed to, say, Rarity and Applejack). It also gives a clue that Rarity is dominant in their relationship (since everything is calibrated to her preferences), and that Rarity may be unaware of this.

Two reviewers complained that this story was boring, or took too long to get to the action. But this stuff is more exciting to me than “action”. This is the sort of slow-yet-absorbing opening that I’m jealous of Skywriter for being able to write.

That's why I love this story. It sets up suspense and conflict based almost entirely on the relationships between ponies. Not just shipping relationships, but relationships of power, affection, status, obligation, proof of worth, concern, and contrasting values. (Which, surprise, are a big part of real-life romances, if it’s shipping you want.)

And it's almost the only story in the competition that takes pony-pony relationships as its primary subject! There's one or two others that try to, but not as diversely, deftly, subtly, realistically, and precisely. There are very few short stories on fimfiction (possibly none) that raise three complex non-shipping pony-pony relationship issues within their first few thousand words.

It was written by Axis of Rotation, who hasn’t published anything on fimfiction so far.

Writing about rape, again

>>38140963814096

I appreciate your politeness in speaking about a very emotional topic, though I doubt my answer will satisfy you. I don’t know how personally painful the issue of rape is to you. Possibly you should stop reading this now. I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m not here to help you. The issue of whether society should tell authors what to write or how to write it is painful to me, and I’m here to say my piece about that. It took me six hours to write this, and the only reason I wrote it was that I didn’t want you to feel that I was ignoring you. So please take that as a sign of respect and concern.[page_break]

1. Rape is a real thing and should be treated like other real things

Was it because you as a writer are ready to treat this painful subject with the great compassion, sensitivity, and gravity that it deserves, or are you simply using it as a plot device in order to quickly generate sympathy and drama?

Short answer: I didn’t “treat” rape. I used it as a plot device. I needed some triggering event drastic enough to cause the mayor to finally intervene.

We can usually only focus on one thing in a short story. Everything else leads up to or points to that one thing. If you’ve read my blog posts, you’ll know that this story bothers me because I don’t know what its purpose is, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that one thing is. It even has a warning up front advising you not to read it! The story came to me and demanded to be written, but I still haven’t figured out what it’s about. But I know it’s not rape.

Stories are about characters who go through horrible things. We write about people giving up on their dreams, suffering from prejudice, losing loved ones, dying, and, yes, being raped. And often those horrible things are merely there in order to talk about something else. Because that’s how stories work.

Take, for instance, orphans. Harry Potter was orphaned in the backstory of that series. Was that treated compassionately in the story? Yes, I think so. The author worked Harry’s feelings about it into the story many times. Okay, now how about Batman? We all know that Batman watched his parents being murdered. Was that treated well? Some people would say it was used compassionately, to help give Batman a vulnerable side. Some people would say it was a cheap writing trick, playing the orphan card to win sympathy and excuse his bitterness and self-isolation. In the Little Orphan Annie comics, the orphan card is played to win sympathy for Annie, and as a plot device to pair up a plucky, sympathetic, lower-class American with a jaded, wealthy capitalist pig industrialist; if she misses her parents, we never hear about it. In The Pirates of Penzance, the orphan card is lampshaded and played for laughs, as characters repeatedly claim to be orphans to take advantage of the pirates’ soft-heartedness.

But I’m pretty sure neither D.C. Comics, Tribune Media, nor any acting group staging The Pirates of Penzance, have gotten letters from orphans complaining about them treating orphans without compassion.

But rape doesn’t only happen to women, and it’s not the only thing that happens to women. You can lose your job, your house, your car, your kid, your best friend, your business, your family, your faith, your following, your office. If men are reaching for the worst thing that can happen to women and choosing rape out of a deficit of imagination, then that’s having a character be sexually assaulted for shock value. If you want to tell a story that’s about the worst thing that happened to a specific woman character, you should be thinking very specifically about her and less about your and the audience’s default answer to a question.

If you believe that, then you should accept that rape can be a story element, just as losing your job, your house, your kid, etc., can. If every problem as traumatic and as important as rape were treated as sacrosanct, writers would be unable to write anything at all.

2. Telling people not to talk about rape is bad, not good

I have a story about racism that one reader said struck close to home for him. I have a story that takes place in a war, and it upset one person who'd been through a war, to the point that he still sometimes has nightmares about it. This present story has a character who's mentally unstable, and I've gotten private messages from people who have their own experiences with or fears about that, who found it very upsetting. But none of those people said I shouldn't have written what I did because it hurt them.

And yet, it’s common for male writers who write about rape to get letters complaining about it, no matter how they write about it.

Why is that? Is it because being orphaned, or an oppressed minority, or going through a war, or mental illness, is so much less traumatic than being raped? I don’t think so.

The reason, I think, is that our reaction to rape is screwed up. An orphan can admit in public to being an orphan, and it isn’t nearly as awkward as for someone to admit to having been raped. An orphan isn’t tempted to blame themselves, or feel “tainted”.

Being a bastard, not an orphan but an unacknowledged child, in the Middle Ages, was probably similar to being raped. It was considered shameful to be a bastard. The problem wasn’t that people talked carelessly about being a bastard. The problem was that society had social roles defined by inheritance, and weird religious beliefs that sin could be inherited and that your virtue determined your social role. Bastards were conceived in sin, and both that and their loss of their inheritance and social standing proved their lack of virtue. “A bastard” meant “a child born out of wedlock,” and also, “inferior, adulterated [notice the root of that word!], untrustworthy”.

The solution to problems like that is to get people to think about these beliefs, and about real bastards. The way society does this is gradually, accidentally, by telling stories that have some of these elements in them and are not false.

There have been many societies, and there still are some, in which marriage and slavery were hard to distinguish from institutionalized rape. In the most extreme form, let’s say among Vikings, or Alexander the Great’s army, or the Mongol horde, forcible rape was the usual way of beginning a marriage. I’ve often wondered how a society functioned with so much trauma. Few people recorded how those women dealt with it, but I suspect that its being out in the open, rather than taboo, helped them.

But what is happening instead is that there is a movement to suppress writing about rape. I Googled these phrases:

“Writing about mental illness”:

Sue Sanders wrote about her husband’s bipolar disorder. She received vitriolic letters from readers—not because they wanted her to treat the subject more sensitively, but because they thought her husband was a jerk and should man up and stop being bipolar.

Time to Change asks people to blog about their experience with mental illness and discrimination.

Rob Delaney explains why he wrote about his mental illness, and why it’s important for other people to do so.

“Writing about orphans”:

Joe Bunting advises writers to have their main characters be orphans, because it’s an easy way to make their character arc more dramatic.

An interview with the author of Orphan Train

Sick Heroes asks why so many characters in 19th-century novels were orphans, and suggests they symbolically represented social problems.

Several books note that Charles Dickens loved writing about orphans.

“Writing about rape”:

Jim Hines sets out rules for when and how it’s acceptable to use rape in a story. A good piece, BTW, which I’ve seen somewhere else before.

Rules for journalists: How to write about rape incidents in a way that shapes social consciousness about rape properly

“How to write about rape prevention without sounding like an asshole” castigates people who tried to suggest steps women could take to reduce the chance of being raped, because they’re “blaming the victim.” It actually says,“DON'T write "how not to get raped" columns in the first place.”

Some of the articles about other sensitive topics practically begged writers to write about them. None of them implied that people should avoid writing about them. But all of the articles on writing about rape were cautions not to write about rape except in certain circumstances or certain ways.

So while I prefer to write about rape and other troubling topics respectfully, the collective message of all these requests is to shut up about rape. And that only makes the problem worse.

Instead of seeing so many people accuse authors of exploiting rape in fiction, I’d like to see people accuse bloggers of exploiting rape to push a political agenda. Anyone who writes, “DON'T write ‘how not to get raped’ columns in the first place” is not concerned about actual rapes, or they wouldn’t get angry at people for trying to prevent them. They are more concerned about the social attitude toward rape, and how they can use that. There are many Republican politicians who rave against abortion, and are secretly grateful for it. And there are strong parallels with the successful movement to forbid whites from writing about race, which succeeded in its political aim of making public discussion of race in America completely one-sided. So please forgive my cynicism.

3. A story is not an essay

Another problem with asking a writer to treat a topic respectfully will be difficult to understand if you don’t write yourself: I don't know how to tell the difference between treating something with sensitivity and using it as a plot device. I never ask myself, "What plot device can I throw in here to generate drama?" I imagine things that could happen, and some of those things grab my imagination more than others. I can't tell whether that's because they're thematically important, or because my subconscious wants cheap entertainment. A story is not an essay.

4. Asking a writer to treat a topic respectfully is a category error

I can’t treat a topic with "compassion, sensitivity, and gravity". A topic doesn’t have feelings. I only know how to treat characters with compassion, sensitivity, and gravity, and I believe I did that. This sounds flippant, but understanding this distinction is core to understanding the difference between stories and essays. Stories can only approach truth through the eyes of characters. They don’t deal with topics so much as show characters dealing with topics.

A writer’s responsibility is to avoid falseness

I take my responsibility as an author seriously, as seriously as anyone I know. I take that responsibility to be to present the world, or at least a tiny part of it, as it is, without lies. I can’t wrap this story up nicely with a quick bout of psychotherapy, or say that Twilight’s innocent and pure worldview makes her happier and wiser than us, or have a deus ex machina solve the problem. I would think very hard before writing a story about rape in which someone brought it on themselves, or enjoyed being raped, or recovered from it quickly. Not because I’m guessing at the social implications, but because it would misrepresent reality.

Even so, I may have done that. Rape is a central plot point in “Twenty Minutes”. There’s a point where the mare who’s recently been raped hugs a strange stallion out of desperation. I wondered for a long time before publishing it whether that wasn’t too unrealistic, whether she would have been able to do that in those circumstances. I finally concluded that a), I didn’t and couldn’t know, b) nobody else could know either, and c), I would publish the story anyway, because rape was not the central thematic point, not the issue the main character was dealing with, so I could tolerate some improbability.

Writing is making compromises. Everything is two steps forward, one step back. I’m doing the best I can. If you think I’ve written something false, show me. But don’t write me a vague letter asking if I treated a topic with respect because I mentioned it in a story. That cripples writers, and stories. If I’d written a story that used rape as a source of humor, a comment criticizing that would be called for. But when you ask me to justify myself for having implied in a story that there had been a rape, without having made that the focus of the story, you are just hardening me against your concerns.

The annihilation of art

Here’s some music for you to listen to while reading this blog:

Youtube Video

About a week ago Daemon of Decay made some insightful observations about poetry in a comment on the latest Seattle’s Angels reviews. I’m not anti-poetry, and I don’t think he is either, but he makes a good point: Poetry has for decades been caught in a vicious cycle of self-isolation. An elite chooses experimental, inaccessible poems and fills the journals and anthologies with them. Readers drift away from poetry, deriding it as pretentious. The elite learns to associate inaccessibility with quality, and criticism with amateurism, and produces more and more inaccessible works, which it is capable only of praising, never of criticizing. Their tastes drift farther away from the mainstream, casting more and more readers out. Poetry that does not meet their criterion for obscurantism is not published; poetry that does, is not read.

You mention that to many people you know, poetry is "too difficult, too vague, or too subjective." I would argue that in many cases, this seems a very accurate description.… And likewise, poetry is often allowed to succeed where other forms of art would not. Many poems are so highly impressionistic that listeners and readers are left struggling to find meaning in the words….

With music or prose or artwork, we can point to something exact and have our opinions judged fairly. I dislike the singing; the characters are bland; the colors are mismatched and give me a headache. All valid criticisms. But when you approach poetry, criticism from the uneducated is treated as such….

For poetry to escape the taint of elitist disdain, it needs to rid itself of the shell that is formed around it. Is this a condemnation of all poetry or even most poets? No, not at all. But the popular conceptualization that poetry is a pastime for a small group of intellectuals, as unfair as it might seem, is grounded in a subjective grain of truth. For the people looking in from outside, poetry is often not some beautiful song waiting to be digested, but a pretentious chunk of purple imagery that revels in its own depth and inaccessibility. Which is, I think we can both agree, a sad state of affairs that harms those on either side of the window.

… We've all heard people say they dislike rap, or country, or dubstep; the most common response amongst those respective genres is to attempt to convert the doubter with "good" examples from that genre…. In my personal existence, poetry was never handled the same way.

This isn’t isolated to poetry. Orchestral music has taken exactly the same march into isolation and cultural irrelevance since about 1920. Jazz followed later, starting maybe around 1960. Literature started down that path with Ulysses, and Joyce kept going down it for the rest of his career.

The visual arts, meanwhile, went in a similar but weirdly opposite direction, taking the quickest and easiest route to driving away the common folk. By the 1930s, the goal in architecture, sculpture, and painting was to make everything as simple, boring, and ugly as possible. This 1938 building in Brooklyn wasn’t a slapdash cost-saving construction project; it was a celebrated design by a famous modernist architect:

And it wasn’t long ago that if you walked into a modern art museum, all you’d find would be a hundred variations on this:

and this:

That YouTube video at the top? That’s a composition by Brian Ferneyhough. My renter is a composer. He’s trying to earn enough money to go back to grad school in music composition, and Ferneyhough, he says, is widely regarded (among composers) as the greatest living composer. That piece isn’t modern at all—he composed it in 1966. 48 years ago. It represents the pinnacle of the past eighty years of orchestral composition.

To get accepted to grad school, my renter has to write something like it. He has seven folios full of his attempts.

I asked him if it bothered him that he’s spending his whole life struggling to make a kind of music that, if he succeeds, no one outside of academia will want to hear. It will never be played on the radio; it will never appear in a physical music store; it will probably never be played in a concert hall outside of western Europe. He says that this is only to be expected; few people have the intelligence to understand the greatest works in any art form.

An art form that is completely detached from culture. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Is it art, or is it a cult?

I asked him if it was an arbitrary social convention, or else if it was the next logical stage in music—if you rewound the clock and played the 20th century over again, slightly differently, would it inevitably lead to that kind of music, like geometry inevitably led to topology? He said he believes so; that Ferneyhough is not just different than Beethoven, but superior to him.

During the 1930s, the entire European artistic landscape seemed determined to drive people away from art. I think this made nationalism and fascism possible. People outside the elite sensed that culture had deliberately rejected and ejected them, and so they united to destroy it.

It's seldom a good sign to find yourself in agreement with Hitler. But if Ferneyhough is great, I don’t want to be that great.

The march to self-isolation always starts with great works by a great artist—Picasso, Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot,  Miles Davis, Joyce. People imitate them, and try to take it further. Then it goes too far, and no one can admit it’s gone too far because by that time everybody in the elite power structure of that art has gone on record praising it.

Is this a uniquely 20th-century event? Has it happened before in history that the leaders of an entire art form deliberately isolated it from the masses? As far as I know, it hasn’t.

I think this couldn’t happen before the 19th century because art was funded by patrons, and the artists had to please the patrons. The patrons didn’t have careers in art, so they didn’t have to always find something new and weird to try to stay ahead of the crowd. There were professors of art and of music, but their opinions didn’t matter much.

It bothers me a lot. Orchestral music was, I think, humanity’s greatest achievement, and now we have annihilated it, and many other art forms, and no one understands why.

How and why did a single generation of artists destroy half of the West’s artistic heritage? Is there a single cause behind 20th-century elitism in music, poetry, sculpture, art, and literature? Why didn’t it succeed in literature? How can we make sure it never does? I really wish I had answers.

And I really want to know whether the stuff is actually good, and I’m just too dumb to see it. But I don't see any way of ever knowing that, even in principle.

Structure: Scene+sequel

I tried to refer back to my blog post on Scene & Sequel, and found out I’d never written it. So here it is.

Dwight Swain wrote a book about 50 years ago called “Techniques of the Selling Writer” which says your book must be comprised of units with the “Scene-Sequel” structure. This is the same scheme you’ll find in Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure. The Scene-Sequel structure looks like this:

SCENE

Scene

        A. The main character in the scene has a Goal. This is, more generally, the SCENE’s Question (typically, Will she or won’t she achieve her Goal?)

        B. The main character has a Conflict which threatens that goal. The conflict may be with herself, other characters, or forces of nature.

        C. The main character suffers a Setback. (Swain calls it a “Disaster”, which gives the false impression that it needs to be a major setback. Using only major setbacks is a formula for writing bad action/adventure stories like those Bickham wrote.) More generally, it is the Question’s Answer, which can be “No” (failure), “Yes, but…” (success, but introducing an even worse Setback), or “No, and furthermore…” (failure, and introducing an even worse Setback).

Sequel

                A. the emotional Reaction of the POV character to the setback

                B. The main character thinks about this Problem. (Swain calls it a “Dilemma”, which I don’t like because “dilemma” means “two options”.)

                C. The main makes a Decision on how to react to the setback.

                D. The main character Acts on that decision, beginning the next SCENE.

Watch out! We now have three kinds of “scenes”:

scene: What most writers mean by a “scene”: A sequence of events without a sudden jump in time, location, or point-of-view (POV). This has nothing to do with the other two!

Scene: A Goal-Conflict-Setback unit.

SCENE: A Scene and a Sequel.

The Scene-Sequel structure seems like a good default structure. I don’t think about it consciously when I write, except sometimes when I run into specific trouble areas and don’t know why the story isn’t working. Buy the books, or google scene and sequel, if you want to read about its merits. I’m here to talk about its problems.

The standard presentation of Scene and Sequel, like everything emanating from Writer’s Digest, has been oversimplified to the point where it does advanced writers more harm than good. Bickham says you should present the components in order, clearly spelled out to the reader, and then on finishing the Sequel, jump immediately into another Scene. Iterate until the protagonist achieves his/her novel Goal, and the book is finished. Eliminate everything from the book that is not a Scene+Sequel.

Doing this makes it more likely you will write forgettable pot-boilers like Jack Bickham did. Have any of the people quoting him read his books? They lack theme, insight into human nature, or, well, anything other than one damn thing after another. Also, Bickham didn’t limit himself to scene+sequel structure. Twister contained many omniscient-viewpoint scenes describing weather and storms which had no characters at all.

Here are the big problems I see with scene-sequel theory:

Typical explanations of scene-sequel theory give examples of SCENE which are also scenes. This rarely happens in the wild. Rather, a complete goal-conflict-etc. SCENE is spread across multiple scenes. Each scene may contain numerous small, usually incomplete goal-conflict-etc. SCENEs. These match the SCENE template so poorly, however, that it might be more fair to Swain to consider them to be “motivation-reaction units” (another part of his theory).

The scene-sequel structure isn’t used serially. It’s used hierarchically, from top to bottom: The entire novel is a hero with a goal, a conflict, a disaster, and a reaction; each chapter is a lesser goal / conflict / setback / reaction / reflection / decision; and each chapter is likewise composed of smaller SCENEs. More or less. A Scene-Sequel structure may split across chapters, particularly with cliffhangers.

The formula is written for a single-protagonist story. Great books often don’t fit that pattern. Even a straightforward single-protagonist action-adventure like The Hobbit can't be easily stuffed into single-protagonist scene+sequel format, because the protagonist shares the problems and goals of the entire party.

Each character in the story has their own scene+sequel structures, and these overlap with each other. The "antagonist" will be having their own scene+sequel, and its Disaster may play a different part in the "protagonist"'s scene+sequel. Various compromises and POV problems prevent each of these scene+sequels from having all their parts visible.

The scene+sequel components often aren’t presented to the reader in chronological order.

Goal, Setback, and Decision are often either absent or hidden. POV restrictions often prevent the Goal from being stated. The Scene may have a stacked structure, such as Goal-Conflict-Goal-Conflict-Setback or Goal-Conflict-Setback-Conflict-Setback.

Other things happen to affect the goal stack, such as fortuitous assistance or discoveries, or goal changes.

Scene-Sequel is most appropriate in action/thriller/genre novels. But even there, it doesn’t take the simple form Bickham prescribes. I just spent a couple of hours trying to find it in the wild, and the pure SCENE is a rare beastie.

Right now I'm reading Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (MOTW), and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Reading about a dozen pages from each, and recollecting what I still can of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, I found no instances of a Scene-Sequel structure meeting Bickham’s requirements.

Literary fiction often has main characters who don’t know what they want, or don’t know how to get what they want. It has more protagonists and fewer antagonists, and so it may have several main characters in one SCENE. It has fewer decisions, in part because the setback may pass unnoticed by the main character, and because more characters drift from scene to scene without direction, or carried along by forces beyond their control. It has more dialogue and less action. And each character in the story has enough psychological depth to need their own goals, reactions, etc. This structure, when used, should probably apply to every character present.

Bickham says all the elements must be explicit and occur in that order; it appears that literary fiction requires this not to be the case. If a narrative section resembles Scene-Sequel structure, some part of it must be implicit or hidden until later. The elements occur in chronological order within the story world, but may be presented in a different order. A Passage to India might have some Scene-Sequel structures in it; but if so, they’re well-hidden. People rarely explicitly state their goals, and the multiple main characters and POV limitations means there’s no way for the narrator to tell us their goals.

The entire first chapter of MOTW’s three chapters is Frankie, the main character, trying to figure out what she wants, and to understand her reaction to the main “disaster” (her brother’s wedding). Hence the protagonist has no conscious Goal and so there are few places within that chapter with all the parts of this Scene-Sequel structure. Where it fits, it’s some secondary character who has a goal, not the main character.

The first chapter presents a Setback: Frankie’s brother is getting married. Frankie strongly feels this as a setback, but doesn’t know why. The bulk of the chapter is Reaction and Problem, showing how Frankie feels, and how she struggles to grasp her situation. Only at the very end of this rumination does Frankie realize that her Goal is to find some group of people she belongs with, “the ‘we’ for her ‘me’”, and Decide on an action. So the first chapter fits the Scene-Sequel structure, but doesn’t present its elements chronologically. And the Disaster of the chapter is not really a Disaster in Swain’s sense. It’s not a plot complication, but an incident that highlights the Goal Frankie had at the start but didn’t know she had.

I try The Last Unicorn. There are goals and conflicts and disasters, but they are distributed among the characters. Who is the protagonist? Schmendrick? Molly? Lir? The unicorn? I can’t apply the formula when there are four protagonists.

Now I’m reading through The Hobbit, an adventure story about a single protagonist facing Disasters and Deciding how to respond to them, so it should be chock full of Scene-and-Sequel.

The story opens with a long description of a hobbit-hole. This shows Bilbo’s Goal: Continue living a quiet, respectable, adventure-free life in his hobbit hole. Gandalf scratches a sign on his door, and dwarves begin arriving. Bilbo has a Conflict (be respectably polite, yet don’t run out of food or miss his own dinner or allow his plates to be damaged), which is a manifestation of the larger Conflict (adventure vs. respectability) of which he is not yet aware.

What’s the Setback? There is none; there is an Opportunity, a re-evaluation, a Discovery that Bilbo has some Took longing for adventure within him. Rather than trying to defend his Goal of quiet respectability, he decides to set it aside for a while. So instead of Setback, let’s say the third element of a scene is a “goal challenge”, and the protagonist’s Decision may be to abandon his Goal.

Continuing through the book, I come at random to Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”, in which the dwarves are taken captive by the wood elves. We switch to Thorin’s POV, and he is thrown into a dungeon. The only way to fit this into Scene-Sequel is to consider the whole span of events, starting from their being captured, to their escape, as a single SCENE from Bilbo’s point of view. That means that when we see Thorin being thrown into a dungeon, we should think of it as being a problem for Bilbo, who doesn’t even know yet what has happened.

Within that big SCENE, we have smaller units that resemble Scene-Sequel, but they result in Discoveries, Goals, and Decisions, but no Setbacks. The companions are already in a dire situation, and there’s no need for further Setbacks. Bilbo makes a series of Discoveries (where Thorin is held, the river leading out of the caves; the King’s wine cellars), and pieces them together into a plan. The chapter’s story arc, from capture to escape, has a Scene-Sequel structure; but not one of the scenes within the chapter has a Scene-Sequel structure.

So where have I used Scene+Sequel? I’ll look at my most-likely stories, “The Magician and the Detective” and “Moments”, which are adventure fics.

Magician & Detective

The entire story arc is one SCENE from Holmes’ point of view:

Goal: Apprehend Trixie for her crime, but more importantly, figure out how she did it.

Conflict: Chapters 3-9.

Setback: There was no crime.

Reaction: Admiration

Problem/Thought: He does not think he is worthy of what is offered him.

Decision: He will remain as he is.

Action: None.

Trixie, meanwhile, experiences the story as this SCENE:

Goal: Seduce Holmes.

Conflict: Holmes is uninterested in love.

Setback:The unusually destructive tea-party.

Reaction, Thought, Decision: Not seen, due to POV.

Action: Writes desperate letter.

Chapters 1-3: Not SCENEs in any way.

Chapter 4: Trixie’s Goal is to for once in her life successfully use her great ability to perform a magic show that the audience will appreciate. This is certainly odd in Scene-Sequel theory; the first Conflict in the story appears to be a threat to the antagonist’s goal, not the protagonist. (The reader won’t discover until chapter 10 that Trixie’s situation is symmetrical with Holmes’.) Before this first SCENE finishes playing out, Trixie introduces a Holmes-centered SCENE by challenging Holmes, but we don’t know her Goal. This is the start of Trixie’s story-length SCENE; note it begins in the middle of her smaller SCENE, which will conclude shortly.

Chapter 5: Trixie demonstrates that she could steal the painting, but does not threaten any of Holmes’ goals. The way she does it implies she can and will make problems for Holmes, and dares him to catch her. Holmes responds to the Conflict by taking an Action that ruins Trixie’s show and ends her SCENE in disaster, although the reader doesn’t know that until Trixie tells Watson in chapter 6 what Holmes did in chapter 5.

Chapter 6: The first direct Holmes-Trixie confrontation. Holmes’ Action in response to Trixie’s challenge has ruined her show, and her Action in response now prevents Holmes from his Goal of examining Trixie’s luggage. In the middle of this Holmes-centered Holmes-Trixie conflict, we have a Holmes-Watson-Trixie conflict, which can’t be broken down into two sides: Holmes wants Watson to stop her; Watson wants to stop her but chivalry forbids; Trixie takes advantage of this to leave unmolested. This conflict does not fit the SCENE pattern, but its resolution (Trixie leaving) is the Setback to Holmes’ Goal to inspect her luggage.

Chapter 7: Holmes and Watson’s Sequel, in which they Decide to find Trixie’s hotel by process of elimination. Their Action is interrupted by a lengthy scene discussing magical theory, which does not fit Scene-Sequel theory. At the end of the chapter, their Action leads not to another Conflict, but to unexpected intervention from Trixie which is both a help and a dare to Holmes.

I could continue, but I think the pattern is clear: There are a multitude of Scene-Sequel-like structures here, but they are on different scales, for different characters, overlap each other, have missing or concealed components, are not always presented in chronological order, and may result in advances or final Goal defeats rather than setbacks. Trixie appears to want to escape but really wants to draw Holmes further in, and Holmes wants to catch her but wants more to know how she did it. So though they appear to be protagonist and antagonist, they are secretly cooperating, each deliberately extending the chase rather than acting to achieve their apparent Goals. That is, the Goals in their chapter scenes are false Goals, and the true underlying structure is more complicated.

Conclusion

My overall impression is that Scene-Sequel, like the Hero’s Journey, or character archetypes, is a template that you can hold up against your story to identify possible problem areas, but that is more likely to be used by lazy or bad writers to churn out formulaic fiction. It is certainly not, as its advocates claim, a formula that you need only iterate enough times in order to produce a good book.

The true pattern of SCENEs is more general than Swain or Bickham say it is. Instead of a Setback, you may have an Opportunity which leads to abandoning a Goal. Within an overarching Scene+Sequel, you may find the smaller structures have Discoveries or other Advances instead of Setbacks, which move the main character further forward toward their goal. And the Goals may not be true Goals at all; a significant part of the novel may be the characters trying to understand what their Goals really are.

All in all, the Scene-Sequel structure is IMHO not as useful as just asking yourself 2 questions at all times:

What motivates each of my characters to do what they’re doing?

What motivates my reader to keep reading?

Unfortunately, like most bad writing advice, Scene-Sequel theory is infiltrating the writing community and will inevitably change our expectations and conventions so that scene-sequel stories seem better to us, just as sentences without speech tags now seem natural when they were initially merely bad prescriptivist grammar. I went to see the movie Gravity last night, and I thought it was very good; but it was a perfect Bickhamesque scene-sequel scene-sequel scene-sequel, from start to finish. Would it have been written this way before Bickham, or would the writers have given us something with a little more structure?

Donald, the problem is that good stories don't usually use scene and sequel in the simple, stereotypical way Bickham presents it. There are multiple complications:

First, the "Scene" in scene+sequel has nothing whatsoever to do with scenes in a story (continuous narrative without location or time or POV jumps). A Scene may contain many scenes, or a scene may contain many Scenes.

Scene+sequel are used hierarchically, not sequentially. The entire book is a single Scene+Sequel structure which ends in goal satisfaction. Roughly each chapter is a smaller scene+sequel, and each chapter is made of many yet smaller and more vaguely-scene+sequel like structures. The low-level scenes seldom have the complete scene+sequel structure; chapter-size units are more likely to, but are interrupted by smaller structures.

The formula is written for a single-protagonist story. Great books seldom fit that pattern. Even a straightforward single-protagonist action-adventure like The Hobbit can't be stuffed into single-protagonist scene+sequel format, because the protagonist shares the problems and goals of the entire party.

EACH CHARACTER in the story has their own scene+sequel structure, and these overlap with each other. The "antagonist" will be having their own scene+sequel, and its Disaster may play a different part in the "protagonist"'s scene+sequel.

Most Disasters are merely Setbacks. Using Disasters all the time is a formula for writing bad action novels like Jack Bickham wrote.

Point-of-view restrictions often prevent describing a characters' goals.

Characters often don't know what their Goals are, and the plot of the novel involves the search for or disentangling of these Goals. This is often the case in literary fiction.

The scene+sequel components often aren’t presented to the reader in chronological order.

The pattern is much more general than Swain or Bickham say it is. Instead of a Setback you may have an Opportunity which leads to abandoning a Goal. Within an overarching scene+sequel, you may find the smaller structures have Discoveries or other Advances instead of Setbacks, which move the main character further forward toward their goal.

All in all, the structure is IMHO not as useful as just asking yourself 2 questions at all times: “What motivates my characters here?” (ALL of them), and, “What motivates my reader to keep reading?”

CYOA and Moments

Some people loved where “Moments” went. Some people hated it, and believed something different should have happened. But I can’t satisfy everyone.

Or can I? I’m thinking about rewriting it as… drum roll...

…a choose-your-own-adventure clopfic.

Wait! Ow! Put down those pitchforks! I can explain.

I wanted to stuff a lot of different things into this story, and only some of them got in. And it is an adventure story, which lends itself to the choose-your-own format.

As for the clop… well, that was one (or two) of the paths I didn’t take in the original story.

This raises some questions:

CYOA books often have different branches that are incompatible with each other, because they reveal inconsistent facts. Interactive fictions like Infocom made were always consistent with each other—there was a single realized story world, and you explored it by taking different paths through it. CYOA-style explores possible worlds; Infocom-style explores possibilities within a single world. What are the pros & cons of each?

Similarly, different branches could diverge into different styles. Does a CYOA get more stylistic/atmospheric leeway, to change between branches? As a linear fiction, I can take Moments through a chapter or two of black comedy, but I can’t end there. As a branching fiction, I think I can have some branches that end in black comedy, as long as others don’t. Not every story leaf (an ending to a branching structure) has to have that final consistent closure, because it doesn’t have the final word. How far can I stretch those endings? Can one branch end in cloppy comedy?

While graphing out the tree structure, I found I couldn’t go straight from chapter 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, or 5 to 6 in a CYOA format as they’re written now. The CYOA format needs to end a chapter with a question, such as, “Go to chapter 8 if you think Twilight should tell the townsfolk that they’re going to die.”

In order to do this, you have to have presented some new info in the scene, and then had your protagonist reflect on this information after the scene, so that that action doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is exactly the “scene and sequel” structure advised by Dwight V. Swain and Jack Bickham. Whereas “Moments” currently leaves out the “sequel” portion in chapters 3, 4, and 5, so that you have to start reading the next chapter and infer what Twilight was thinking. And those chapters in particular seem to have lost readers--they kept reading the story, but they disengaged emotionally and started wondering about plausibility (see this comment by Titanium Dragon).

So maybe a good test for story continuity is to take your completed story and imagine rewriting it as a CYOA. If there’s a chapter break that you couldn’t end with a “Should the protagonist do X or Y?”, and follow it immediately with the next chapter, there’s a problem.

AFAIK, nobody has ever written a “serious” CYOA. All the ones I’ve seen are pure adventure fic, without any theme. Why? Can CYOA not support “literature”?

Thoughts on listening to Mahler

In “The annihilation of art”, I griped about the path toward ever greater chaos and dissonance that orchestral composition has taken, to the point where it sounds random to me. I tried to appreciate Brian Ferneyhough’s music, but couldn’t. The folks who like it claim that it’s a natural progression from Beethoven to Ferneyhough. I figured that to understand Ferneyhough, I’d have to back up a half-century or so and first try to appreciate something in-between Beethoven and Ferneyhough. So while driving across Pennsylvania, I popped in a CD of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (1902).

I’ve long been frustrated by my inability to remember Mahler’s compositions. Beethoven’s can get stuck in my head to days, to the point where they give me migraine headaches. Mahler’s, I can only remember snatches of. I was determined to play the CD until I could remember how it went.

I played it all the way to Pittsburgh, and still can’t remember it. Mahler’s Fifth isn’t going to get stuck in my head anytime soon.

The symphony opens with single trumpet repeating a few ambiguous notes, then rising in a dramatic minor chord. Suddenly, the entire orchestra joins in a triumphant shift to a major key. And just as suddenly, it shifts back to minor. That exemplifies everything that is wrong with Mahler’s fifth symphony.

When you have a host of brass make a sudden dramatic reversal like that shift from minor to major, it should mean something. But it doesn’t, because we only stay there for a few seconds before there’s another, equally-dramatic reversal by that same brass section back into a minor key. And that doesn’t mean anything either, because we were in major for all of about two measures.

Observer 1: Look, up in the sky!

Observer 2: It’s a bird!

Observer 3: It’s a plane!

Observer 1: Naw, it’s a bird.

The dramatic equivalent of the opening of Mahler’s Fifth.

The piece didn’t earn that shift back to minor. And that’s what it’s like throughout: Sudden, ostensibly dramatic transitions between keys, tempos, rhythms, and motifs, in a desperate attempt to be unpredictable. All those transitions did nothing for me, because they were so unpredictable that I didn’t care where the music went. It was like an action adventure flick that, to keep you entertained, jumps from one cliff-hanging action sequence to another without ever letting you find out who the characters are. Too try-hard, Gustav.

This is especially apparent in the fourth movement, which is the most boring piece of classical music I’ve ever heard. I am definitely in the minority about this, as it’s regularly found on “The Most Soothing Classical Music” collections, but then I don’t listen to music in order to cure insomnia. I could not pay attention to nine minutes of very pretty but disorganized wandering about in various major and minor keys. I find myself repeatedly zoning out and ignoring the music every time I listened to it. Music this slow and lacking in harmony needs more repetition and regularity for me to grasp hold of.

In “Information theory and writing”, I said art should have high entropy. The entropy of a thing is the number of bits of information you would need to replicate that thing. Something with high entropy is unpredictable. The huge caveat is that measures of entropy say that random strings have very high entropy, and yet random strings are boring.

The British mathematician G. H. Hardy once visited the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in the hospital:

I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."

If we could perceive the unique qualities of each random string, we might find each random string as interesting as Ramanudran found each number. But we don’t. Random strings are boring because we can’t tell them apart. What we want is an entropy measurement that tells us how many bits of information it would take to replicate something like the item of interest, from an equivalence class for that item. Something sufficiently similar that we wouldn’t care if one were substituted for the other. (Assume we have a random number generator available for free; randomness does not require information.) A random string of 16 bits has 16 bits of information, but it would take zero bits of information to make another string “like” it, if any string will do.

This equivalence-adjusted entropy would be a measurement of complexity. Measuring complexity is a difficult problem in the study of complex systems (an early review of the problem is here).

Cellular automata (CAs) are simple model complex systems. A CA is a set of rules that operate on cells. The cells are usually laid out as squares. Each cell is in one of K states. (For the game of Life, the most-famous CA, K = 2.) Each rule says which state a cell in state k should change to on one cycle, given the states of itself and of its neighbors.

Steve Wolfram, studying cellular automata (CAs), found that there was a class of rules that quickly produced static, unchanging CAs, and a class that quickly produced random noise, and a narrow class in-between that produced strange, beautiful, non-repeating patterns. He called these patterns “complex”. He found a single parameter that predicted whether a CA would be complex. Probably he could have used entropy, but he did not. He used λ (lambda), which he defined as the fraction of transition rules that turn a cell “off”.

These three graphs below from (Langton 1992) show typical results, for four-state CAs: A set of rules with λ = .40 quickly leads to a static, “dead” state, and a set with λ = .65 quickly blows up into random noise, while a set with λ = .50 shows interesting, non-repeating patterns for quite some time:

The curious thing is that entropy (unpredictability) is maximal for these four-state CAs when  λ = .75. Increasing λ increases the apparent complexity up to a point, but past that point, although it  it is still increasing unpredictability, it generates noise, not complexity.

Figure 3 from (Langton 1992) plots transient length (one measure of complexity) versus lambda. Transient length peaks suddenly in the area with middling lambda, then just as suddenly falls off again as lambda and unpredictability continue to increase:

Gregorian chant was very predictable: one part only, no instruments, and almost no rhythmic or dynamic variation. Music became steadily more complex and less predictable over the next several hundred years.

It seemed like a good rule to say that the less-predictable music became, the more complex and better it would be. And in fact, the commentaries on Mahler’s Fifth are full of references to the “complexity” and “interest” generated by its dissonances and irregularities.

But music does not become more complex the more unpredictable it is. After some point, increasing unpredictability makes it less complex. Instead of complexity, we get mere noise.

This, I speculate, is what happened to music. Composers internalized the theoretical belief that unexpectedness made music more complex and interesting, rather than just listening to it and saying whether they liked it or not. They kept making things less and less predictable, even after passing the point where complexity was maximal.

Once they’d passed that point, unpredictability only made the music boring, not complex. Like Mahler’s Fifth. That created a vicious circle: New music was noisy, unstructured, and boring. Composers believed the way to make it less boring was to make it less predictable, which only made it even more boring, pushing them to make newer music that was even less predictable. This led inevitably to Ferneyhough’s random-sounding music.

And the inevitability of the entire progression was taken as evidence that this was progress!

“But, Bad Horse,” you might protest, “you’ve based this on the idea that there are equivalence classes of musical compositions. But what counts as equivalent depends on the listener. To someone who understands music perfectly, each composition might be distinct! Then each equivalence class has exactly one member, and randomness equals complexity.”

There is something to that objection. The more one studies music, the more distinctions one can easily make in music. But if you really believe that’s a valid objection, you must conclude that all possible music is equally good.

I don’t know how to deal with subjective equivalence classes, but we don’t have to base our measurements on something subjective. We can use an objective information-theoretic measure of complexity. Mutual information, for instance. The mutual information between two variables is the information they have in common. If both are very low-entropy, this is low, since neither contains much information. But if both are high-entropy and uncorrelated, it’s low again, since you can’t predict one from the other. Here’s a plot of mutual information versus lambda, again from (Langton 1992):

This appears to have a maximum around lambda = .25 instead of .5, which might be a problem. But I don’t think lambda makes sense as our measurement, since it depends so much on the arbitrary choice of which state is the “off” state. Entropy would probably be a better measure, and using it might remove the discrepancy between which lambda givese maximum MI and which gives maximum transient length.

My point is that we can choose some objective scheme for measuring the complexity in a score. For instance, go through the score three measures at a time. Call three measures in a row A, B, and C. You can measure P(C|A,B) and P(C|A) for each set of three measures, and then compute how much information about measure C you get from measure B but not from measure A. This will be small for compositions so predictable that measure B doesn’t add much information, and it will be small for compositions that are so random that neither B nor A helps you predict C.

We could argue endlessly about how to make the measurement, but we could actually make such measurements (if, say, you got an NEA grant to spend a few months on the problem). I believe that any reasonable measurement would prove that Ferneyhough’s compositions are less, not more, complex than Beethoven’s.

Chris Langton (1992). Life at the edge of chaos. Artificial Life II.

Speech tags: Results

I compiled your the results, and did 5 more books myself from 1720-1826. Here’s a graph of 30 datapoints from 30 books. I combined types 1a, 1b, 2a, and 2b together into “1+2” because they all behaved similarly over time.

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There are two trends. One is that types 3 & 4 were hardly used until 1796, when type 4 suddenly became acceptable. Usage of type 3 trended upward from 1800 on.

Raw data (tab-separated):

1605 1885 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote 20 9 1 0 0 0

1720 n/a Daniel Defoe Captain Singleton 25 5 0 0 0 0

1749 N/A Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 15 11 4 0 0 0

1759 late 18th c. Voltaire Candide, ou l'Optimisme 25 0 0 0 0 5

1774 1779 Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther 10 3 11 2 2 2

1782 n/a Fanny Burney Cecilia 20 10 0 0 0 0

1790 n/a Ann Radcliffe A Sicilian Romance 26 4 0 0 0 0

1796 n/a M G Lewis The Monk 9 6 0 0 0 15

1798 n/a Charles Brown Wieland 18 1 1 0 0 10

1818 n/a Mary Shelley Frankenstein 14 8 1 0 1 6

1826 n/a James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans 8 4 10 2 2 4

1833 n/a Edward Bulwer-Lytton Godolphin 14 4 1 1 1 9

1846 n/a Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado 13 0 2 0 0 15

1847 n/a Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre 10 4 3 4 0 9

1852 n/a Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin 19 0 1 1 3 6

1868 n/a Louisa May Alcott Little Women 11 9 2 1 1 6

1880 1912 Fyodor Dostoevsky The Brothers Karamazov 17 5 1 2 3 2

1884 n/a Mark Twain Adv. of Huck Finn 15 0 0 0 0 15

1887 n/a Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet 10 0 8 2 1 9

1897 n/a Bram Stoker Dracula 21 3 4 0 1 1

1899 n/a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness 21 4 0 0 5 0

1930 1965 Vladimir Nabokov The Eye 14 0 12 0 2 2

1938 n/a P.G. Wodehouse Code of the Woosters 0 3 3 0 3 21

1942 1982 Albert Camus L’Étranger 18 8 0 0 4 0

1959 n/a Walter M. Miller Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz 6 11 0 3 5 5

1961 N/A Joseph Heller Catch-22 19 3 0 2 4 2

1961 n/a Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land 3 1 0 3 7 16

1965 n/a Frank Herbert Dune 7 1 6 0 11 5

1969 n/a Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five 13 1 6 0 1 9

2003 n/a Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake 15 3 6 1 2 3

As I Lay Dying

Review, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

This is one of the most-famous novels in American literature. I came in with pretty high expectations. I wasn't exactly disappointed: It does what famous 20th-century literary novels do, which is combine insight into characters with stylistic innovations. But it sure has a lot of flaws.

Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy invites obvious comparison with Faulkner's work: Both are written by country folk about country folk, are full of details of rural life, and focus at least as much on their characters' psychology as on action sequences. Both have a unique style that combines startling poetic passages with complete disregard for whether the reader can tell what the hell is going on.

STYLE

Let me start with the style, as that's the most divisive thing about both men's writing, but in different ways. Both of them have a flashy big-S Style, and a precious little-s style.

By little-s style I mean the way they construct sentences, supposing someone told them what each sentence had to say and gave them a bag of words they could use. Both make unusual choices about apostrophes, speech tags, and clause-joining. In Faulkner's case he seems to have decided to lexicalize certain contractions but not others, to avoid deliberately-ordered sentence structures such as this one, and to avoid all speech tags but "said". In McCarthy's case it's just one aspect of a general juvenile rebellion against grammar, whose transparent purpose is to keep his books from being shelved together with Louis L'Amour.

The problem with Faulkner's little-s style isn't that it's bad in Faulkner's work; the problem is that it leads to Cormac McCarthy. So many critics have praised Faulkner's style, but it's hard to tell when they're praising the good things about his style, and when they're praising him merely for being weird. McCarthy learned all the wrong lessons from Faulkner, throwing out quotation marks, apostrophes, and commas as an act of rebellion and a declaration of literary intent rather than because his characters talk that way. Faulkner avoids semi-colons because his characters never plan their sentences, and a semi-colon occurs only where a speaker has thought about the structure of the sentence before speaking it and broken it down into clauses and sub-clauses. McCarthy just converts semi-colons into commas, to look like Faulkner. Faulkner uses "says" everywhere to be simple. McCarthy omits quotation marks and speech tags everywhere to be simpler, with the result that he has long dialogues with no speech tags that are literally impossible, as he lost track somewhere in the middle of who was speaking, and comes out the other end having swapped speakers.

By big-S style I mean the way Faulkner's characters come out with sudden poetic metaphors, or the way McCarthy lingers over the landscape and then explodes into a long run-on burst of poetry. Faulkner is dazzling but distracting. He takes care to have characters say things the way country folk would say them, then ruins it by sprinkling bits in their internal monologue like "her leg coming long from beneath her tightening dress: that lever which moves the world; one of that caliper which measures the length and breadth of life," that no country person would ever say, let alone about his sister. He tosses five-syllable Oxford English Dictionary vocabulary and avant-garde analogies into their internal thoughts at random, just because he thought of it at that point. These are uneducated country folk, and I had to use a dictionary to figure out what they were saying sometimes. McCarthy uses his poetry and metaphors strategically, focusing the reader on important elements and important transitions. Faulkner jizzes metaphors all over inappropriate characters at inappropriate times. McCarthy is in control; Faulkner seems to be writing drunk.

Both Faulkner and McCarthy have problems with ambiguity. In McCarthy's case, it's mere carelessness. If you find a "he" or a "him" in one of his sentences, there's no guarantee that you can look to the left and to the right and figure out who it is. Important dialogue might be unattributable to a specific character, or in Spanish.

In Faulkner's case, it's deliberate pretension. Either he wants to force the reader to play continual guessing games, or somebody told him that ambiguity was sophisticated. He loves to introduce a character into a scene without telling us who it is, or whether they are male or female, or how old they are, until later; or even to slip the character in in a way designed to mislead us into thinking it's someone else (as is done at a critical point in Addie's chapter, portraying her infidelity in a way designed to mislead us into thinking there was no infidelity).

Ambiguity has been fetishized by literary critics. A fetish is something that has been involved in sexual pleasure frequently enough that the pleasure is associated with that thing, and it seems as pleasing to the fetishist as the original stimuli. Valid literary ambiguity is when the characters have ambiguous thoughts or feelings. That's like at the climax of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when John Singer doesn't know what he is feeling.

Faulkner specializes in phony ambiguity created by deliberately concealing critical parts of a character's thought. This is a valid literary technique when an unreliable narrator is deliberately concealing things from the reader. But it's just a gimmick when Faulkner use it to create ambiguity. Dewey Dell obsesses over Peabody and thinks how he could "make everything right for her," misleading us into thinking she has romantic feelings for him, until we find out much later that she wants him to give her an abortion. But Dewey Dell knows perfectly well what she wants from him, and this "ambiguity" only detracts from the story being told by fooling us into constructing some other story, in a way that real life does not. When Addie narrates her infidelity in a way to conceal the fact that the man she was screwing was not her husband, this wasn't a valid literary technique to show that Addie is deceiving herself; it was Faulkner leaving the necessary words out. Addie knew perfectly well whom she was screwing, and the words of her narrative showed that she thought of it as infidelity, which is why it was confusing. When Vardaman spills his stream-of-consciousness internal monologue on us in early chapters, we have no idea what he's talking about until nearly the end of the book, at which point we can and understand. But Vardaman knew exactly what he was talking about! This ambiguity isn't a reflection of life's and language's complexity; it's a distracting guessing game that conceals the story unnaturally.

CONTENT

When I began the novel, I thought Faulkner had the clear win in this regard. McCarthy tells westerns. They may dwell on the thoughts and feelings of the characters more than Louis L'Amour does, and they may be disguised as "literary" by bad grammar and punctuation, but the stories themselves are westerns about strong, virtuous men thrown into bad circumstances and fighting their way out. Faulkner seemed to be writing about normal people with normal problems. But as usually happens with Faulkner, I gradually realized he had assembled a Gothic Southern freak show. If the Bundren family were here today, they would get their own reality show. Instead of normal people dealing with normal problems, we have a highly dysfunctional family creating their own problems of flood, fire, and insanity. This ruined the last third of the novel for me, because by that time I realized the entire novel was simply a bunch of individual plotless sadfics mushed together. Cash is a good man with bad luck who doesn't stand up to the morons around him. Jewel is his own worst enemy. Dewey Dell has lost her virtue. Addie didn't love her husband. Etc. The characters acted on each other only mechanically, as weights and pulleys, never emotionally.

The strength of the novel should then be in portraying each of the characters realistically. But Faulkner falls down repeatedly. Character portrayal is always two steps forward, two steps back. The Gothic Southern problem runs through all of Faulkner's work, making it implausible and not very relevant for people who aren't insane or from dysfunctional families. Another aspect is the stylistic problem I already mentioned, throwing jarring academic language into the thoughts of "simple Southern folk". And Faulkner sometimes throws one such startling metaphor into one character's thoughts, and then reuses it, using the same words, in another character's thoughts later, not only disrupting both characters but homogenizing them.

Then we have the most-irritating problem with Faulkner: Stream of consciousness. It's what he's famous for, and he's terrible at it. As I mentioned before, he uses it to throw phony ambiguity everywhere. Paragraphs, sentences, or words in internal monologues are italicized at random. Sometimes the italics indicate an intrusion into this character's thoughts by some other unidentified character or characters, but usually it's just a section of their ongoing monologue that is continuous with what's around it, but set off by italics in random places, as if Faulkner had a sticky key on his keyboard. Again, this is Faulkner playing cute by not telling us things. If you want to do a stream of consciousness, fine; but then give us the whole stream. If a character, during one conversation, mentally recollects an earlier conversation, he also recollects who he was talking to, and when and where it was. Faulkner just jams in the dialogue with no indication of who is/was speaking, deliberately disorienting us in a way that is not true to life.

Another problem with his stream of consciousness is that he likes to use children and mental defectives as narrators, but has no idea how such people actually think. It seems like he just grabbed a fifth of whatever alcohol was nearest when he needed to write such a character, then vomited drunken meaninglessness across the page. Here's a section that is supposed to represent the thoughts of a child:

The train is behind the glass, red on the track. When it runs the track shines on and off. Pa said flour and sugar and coffee costs so much. Because I am a country boy because boys in town. Bicycles. Why do flour and sugar and coffee cost so much when he is a country boy. "Wouldn' t you ruther have some bananas instead?" Bananas are gone, eaten. Gone. When it runs on the track shines again. "Why aint I a town boy, pa?" I said. God made me. I did not said to God to made me in the country. If He can make the train, why cant He make them all in the town because flour and sugar and coffee.

This isn't how little kids think. They don't even talk quite this disjointedly, but imagining that they think like this, well, only someone who doesn't interact with children and has completely forgotten what it was like to be one could do that.

Here's the way he writes the thoughts of a man beginning to go crazy:

In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied

for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And

when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I dont know what I am. I dont

know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not

know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not

what he is and he is what he is not.

Or maybe it's just a man starting to fall asleep. Ordinarily I'd say no, since the narrator never said anything like "And then I lay down and tried to sleep," but Faulkner wouldn't give us plain statements of fact like that in a critical spot, because that would spoil the fun of puzzling out what the hell was going on.

Another problem is that Faulkner's "simple folk wisdom" keeps making his characters phony. The worst example of this is Darl. Darl thinks too much, so he goes crazy. I reckon that's what happens when you get too much book-learnin', Floyd. We have genetic determinism in the horses and in the character of Jewel. And we have the "Christians are all fanatics and hypocrites" meme in Cora and the minister, and the way Anse uses the word "Christian" to manipulate people.

I had maybe more problems than I should have with simple plausibility issues. There's one point where Darl says Jewel is following them 300 yards behind, and then gives a detailed description of what the folks 300 yards behind are doing and look like. There's a crucial scene fording a river, which is described as being nearly 100 yards wide normally and the water so high now you can't even tell where the river is. Aside from the insanity of trying to drive a wagon underwater through a ford after a long thunderstorm, we then have people diving into the river to retrieve all of the tools that they dropped when their wagon was swept away. Now, a river under such circumstances is wild beyond endurance, and as much mud as water; and those tools would be spread out over an area 100 feet wide, 10-20 feet deep, and half a mile long, and the description of them diving into it and retrieving the tools made me want to set the book down and laugh.

But my biggest problem was the lack of basic cues that would help us figure out who these people were and what their relationships to each other were. Things like what century it is, whether the town they're in is big or small, or how old they are. Addie dies. Of what? Was she old or young? She could be 70, and she could be 35; we can't tell. We're told lots about Anse's reluctance to do hard physical work, but not whether he's young or old, which would help us interpret this. Jewel bullies the brothers about and seems to be the oldest son; near the end of the book we find out he's 10 years younger than Darl. (When someone has an entire novel about a set of brothers and we can't tell which one is the oldest, they've failed.) I think Dewey Dell is a little girl, maybe thirteen, then find out near the end that she's 17 and beautiful, and this is crucial information that would have helped me understand what she was doing all through the book.

CONCLUSION

The novel has many great things about it, which I didn't emphasize because I'm so ticked off about it being admired and imitated for all the wrong reasons. It's recognized as a classic for its use of stream of consciousness, and for its realistic portrayal of realistic people. I got more out of it than I did out of All the Pretty Horses, but I think its stream of consciousness was a gimmick, poorly done, that was part of a larger infuriating game Faulkner was playing called "confuse the reader". The characters were not very representative of reality, and their portrayals were a mix, stylistically and in content, oscillating wildly between realistic and insightful, and fake, unbelievable, and shallow. Most importantly, the family members didn't seem to have a history with each other and their stories didn't connect with each other, which you could say was a meditation on the loneliness possible in a large family, but that I, having experience with large families, would call sloppy writing. I find myself wondering whether someone in search of honest portrayals of country folk wouldn't be better off reading a James Herriot book.

Review: Ivan Turgenev's Rudin (1856, Russian)

Ivan Turgenev, Rudin (1856, Russian)

Novels about the "superfluous Man", the intellectual who couldn't act effectively, were trendy in Russia in the 1850s. Rudin is admirable, ambitious, learned, talented, and noble-hearted, yet unoriginal in his thoughts and ineffectual in everything that he does. The novel seems intended to show how enticing a flashy, copycat intellectualism can be, and why it is useless.

It doesn't really do that, though. We see that Rudin is enchanting, yet not original or creative, and lacks conviction in his beliefs sufficient to act on them. But the novel fails to argue that these three qualities go together, or to clarify which of them is responsible for Rudin's failure. You could call that a flaw, but I call it realistic ambiguity.

Stylistically, it's very 19th-century: Third person omniscient, long paragraphs, lots of adjectives, a mixture of showing the simple things and telling the complicated internal thoughts. 19th century novels that are later translated into English are sometimes easier for me to read than novels written in English in the 19th century, because the translator unintentionally takes some of the stuffiness out of it. I don't know if it's thanks to the translation (done in 2012 by Dora O'Brien), but I found Rudin easy and pleasant to read.

Rudin is a man nearing middle age, still unmarried, regarded by all who meet him as brilliant, yet who never has any great success in anything he does, due to—something. He has a chance at love, and turns it down due to practical considerations. I quickly realized it was a cautionary tale about how not to be like me, and I read it quickly, hoping for some advice or inspiration to help me not be Rudin.

But this is a novel, not a self-help book, so there's no such simple advice. At various times we're told that Rudin's failure is due to his inability to persevere and follow through, his idealism, his cowardice, his shallowness, his social naivete, or his always overreaching his abilities. Perhaps Turgenev even meant that idealism is just the perfect storm of all those flaws. The novel is about Rudin and his tragic flaw and its consequences, but you can't pin down just what his flaw is.

That's a good thing. Turgenev may have had his own opinion about what Rudin's flaw was, but he didn't force that onto his character, and created something realistic enough that even the answers he never thought of are hinted at. That, after all, is the purpose of novels.

The Rudin archetype comes down to someone whose head is in the clouds so much that he cannot accomplish anything on earth. Does this bit of folk wisdom reflect reality?

Perhaps it did in Russia in the 1840s. Yet Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a head-in-the-clouds intellectual, and we don't consider him ineffectual. Worse than ineffectual, possibly; but not ineffectual. Turgenev may have thought that the contrast between Rousseau and the French Revolution, and highly-pragmatic Ben Franklin or George Washington and the American Revolution, confirmed rather than refuted his thesis. If so, his thesis must be complicated to include highly-effective and influential "superfluous men".

Today, examples of this archetype might include Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Craig Whatsisname of Craigslist, and Bill Gates. The "superfluous man" character type is less likely to succeed, but more likely to succeed spectacularly. We need these "superfluous men".

We can even see this in the last chapter, with a little imagination: Rudin dies on the barricades in the unsuccessful June 1848 Paris uprising. Perhaps Turgenev meant to show that Rudin finally acted on his convictions. Or perhaps he only meant to show his unselfish and idealistic nature, or his uselessness and inability to succeed. But we can hardly blame Rudin for the failure of the 1848 revolt. It's just the opposite: People like Rudin are the ones who cause such things to succeed, when they succeed.

The problem is that Turgenev had to show Rudin failing in life, and everyone else in the story succeeding. The novel's world, therefore, is one in which every person has complete control of their fate, and success or failure depends only on one's character. We see that Rudin must fail over and over again, and die alone; everyone else inevitably succeeds at finding themselves married (if they want) with comfortable livelihoods. This is odd for a novel set in Russia in the 1840s, when slavery was still legal, in which all of the characters have roles and lives that were set for them at birth.

When Turgenev simplified his world by making it deterministic, he abstracted away one of the crucial elements to be considered: Chance. Courage and conviction is needed, in love and business; but so is luck. Is it really better, as the novel suggests, to do a boring thing safely and well enough than to aim for the stars? When is it better to settle, and when to hold out for more? Answering that question requires weighing the payoff against the chances, and there is no chance in Turgenev's world.

But this is a general failing of novels. We always see a single outcome in a novel, not a distribution of outcomes. Novelists, and humans in general, have not yet come to terms with probabilistic truths. Rudin didn't answer my questions, but it gave me a lot to think about for 50,000 words.

Writing: Buildups and resolutions

I’ve blogged before about what makes a narrative a story, and in particular noted that “All the Pretty Pony Princesses” is complete in the way poems should be but not in the way stories should be. Lately I’ve been reading stories in literary journals (the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Tin House, Narrative, The Kenyon Review), and trying to figure out what they want.

What they want seems to be the same kind of non-story as “All the Pretty Pony Princesses”—a narrative that establishes a situation, a mood, an inconclusive ending, and (though not all journals require this) a bleak and hopeless outlook on life. I don’t like these kinds of stories, though I can see some merit to their incompleteness. More on that in a later post.

Writers for literary journals often talk about wanting a story to grab them, shock them, make them feel something, wring them out. They sounds like women explaining why they love a man who beats them. I think they like these incomplete stories because they hurt more. They bring the reader to despair and then leave her there.

One reader said by PM that AtPPP threw him into a fearful and depressive rut for an entire day. It was like he couldn’t get out of the story. It took him to an awful place and then just ended, leaving him there.

Maybe that's why traditional stories have conclusion and closure—so they don't take people into an altered state and leave them there. They need something to say, "You are now exiting the story." Maybe the usual purpose of fiction is to talk people through intense emotions in a controlled way: foreshadowing what’s going to happen, warning them when things are about to get bad, giving them something to hold on while taking them through something terrifying, then carefully, gradually setting them back down on the ground.

I vaguely remember a passage from a short science fiction story that I read in college, that went something like this:

We walked down the broad stone staircase toward the Potomac. A jogger in an orange sweatsuit sat halfway down the stairs, shading his eyes and staring dully at the water while sipping from one of those plastic water bottles with a permanently-attached straw. A few pigeons clustered around him hopefully, ignoring us as we passed.

The river was beautiful, I suppose, but the wind blew off the shore, and the water was so far below us, and so well-guarded by railings and hedges, that it was more like an ornamental backdrop to our conversation than a place. We paid more attention to the squirrels that regarded us with mixed curiosity and indignation as we walked impudently across their lawns. Unlike the tourists who passed us going the other way, the squirrels weren’t afraid to make direct eye contact. She kept trying to lure them in closer by pretending to have food in her hand. A friend had told her that she’d touched a squirrel on the Mall, and now she didn’t want to be outdone in communing with nature, even though the squirrels were so fat and slow that their claim to membership in Nature was just a technicality.

We were passing by the Kennedy Center, across the street from us, and she wanted to go up and walk around its terraces. I said we didn’t have time. She gave me one of her impish grins, and dashed towards it, and a bus splashed her across a dirty white Honda Civic parked by the side of the road.

When I read that I stopped, shocked by the sudden violence. But the writer part of me was wondering, “Why haven’t I read anything like that before? It’s so effective.”

Writers just don’t throw the reader into horror suddenly and without warning. Yet real life does. Tolstoy was in an artillery regiment during the Crimean War, and his book War and Peace is sometimes praised for its realistic portrayal of war. What struck me most about his war scenes was how boring they were. Tolstoy somehow managed to describe bloody battles up close in a way that wasn’t exciting, just confusing and exhausting.

I haven’t been in a war, but I bet that a big part of why war isn’t (usually) fun and exciting is that it doesn’t have a soundtrack or dramatic lighting to tell you what to pay attention to. For a conflict to be exciting requires some certainty: Will this next scene decide something? What’s my motivation? What am I trying to do? Am I, in fact, in danger? A character in a novel usually goes into a conflict with a cause worth fighting for, some specific tactical objective, and a clear threat to watch and overcome. A character in a Tolstoy war scene wanders around the battlefield in a haze of gun smoke, unsure where the battle is, how much longer it’s likely to go on, or what he should be doing. Men around him fire muskets blindly into the smoke, or work on their cannons like auto mechanics, or stand around waiting for orders, and every now and then, many minutes apart, one of them is dashed to the ground by a cannonball or a stray musket ball.

I bet that a lot of the reason war can be traumatic is the suddenness and unexpectedness of violence. It can teach people that just because things are quiet right now doesn’t mean you won’t be covered in blood two seconds from now.

This isn’t what we read fiction for. We want, if anything, fiction that helps us cope better with the world. That’s why stories have build-ups and resolutions. They’re going to hit us with some strong emotions, maybe good, maybe bad. But they’re going to walk us through it slowly, so we can be ready for it, like a fencing instructor teaching a move in slow motion. And they’re going to take us out of it and close it off, so we know we’re safe again.

When have you seen a writer do something suddenly, without warning, or end a story without closure, and you thought it was the right thing for them to do?

50 questions

The Princesses:

1. How old are Celestia and Luna?

No one knows. They started using fake IDs to get into Valhalla nightclubs well before the legal age of one millenium, and now they’ve forgotten their original birth years.

2. How old is Cadance?

Trick question. Toy advertisements, even ones 44 minutes long, aren’t canon.

3. Were Celestia and Luna always alicorns, or did they ascend?

All ponies are devolved from alicorns. The protection and charity of the princesses ensures that no pony ever dies of predation, hunger, or stupidity, so the entire population is composed of degenerate, physically and mentally handicapped alicorns who will all eventually devolve into earth ponies, as we see happening with Scootaloo.

4. Are Cadance and Twilight immortal?

I still don’t know who this “Cadance” is, but if Twilight isn’t immortal yet, she can probably figure it out.

6. How much authority do Celestia and Luna have in Equestria?

Celestia rules Equestria with an iron hoof, and likes to pretend that Luna is her co-ruler. It’s also convenient to have somepony to blame when, for instance, you’re too hung-over to raise the sun. Hah! That was a good one. Luna will see the humor in it eventually.

7. Does Shining Armor rule The Crystal Empire along side of Cadance?

If I were to risk rupturing a frontal lobe by entertaining the hypothesis that the extended toy advertisement referred to above were canon, I would say that Shining

a) should not be trusted with anything more complex than a surfboard, and

b) is pussy-whipped and loving it.

Ponies and Equestrian Culture:

9. Are there still cultural differences between earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns, or is the culture homogeneous by the time shown in canon? Are there cultural stereotypes (positive or negative)?

You think you’re pretty smart with your big words, don’t you, hornhead?

16. Are there roughly an equal number of male and female ponies?

At birth, yes. By the time they reach mating age, only the strongest males remain. (Don’t get too attached to Pipsqueak or Featherweight.) Most of those remaining are claimed by the princesses for their personal royal “guard”.

17. How informed are most ponies about things that happen in other parts of Equestria? What about other parts of the world?

They’re just as informed about other places as the average American is.

The Main Characters:

18. How old are the Mane Six? Spike? The CMC?

They’re ponies not quite reaching maturity, so the Mane Six are almost 2 years old. You can thank me next time you read your clop.

25. Is Scootaloo an orphan? Will she ever be able to fly?

Look, I’ve already explained I had nothing to do with Scootaloo’s parents. Sometimes ponies just explode.

26. Will Apple Bloom’s cutie mark involve an apple in some way, even if it’s unrelated to farming or baking?

Apple Bloom has shown her talent for engineering, and her cutie mark will be an apple and a hammer, to signify her special talent for building things out of apples. The unsuitability of apples as building materials will leave her destitute and homeless. Fortunately she will be able to rely on the charity of the princesses, as noted above, and will be able to nonetheless found a dynasty of equally-useless descendants.

28. Is Mr. Cake the father of the Cake twins or not?

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9VGVxsSeyk]

You tell me.

29. Are Big Mac and Cheerilee an item, romantically?

Thanks for bringing this possibility to my attention. If I find out that Cheerilee is cheating me with Big Mac, or that Big Mac is cheating on me with Cheerilee, I’ll kill them both.

30. How did Prince Blueblood get his title?

He starting calling himself “prince” one day, and ponies are so trusting and stupid that they immediately moved him into the palace and gave him his own personal staff.

31. Is Silver Spoon equally as bad as Diamond Tiara?

I don’t understand the question.

33. Why does Daring Do publish her stories as fiction?

The same reason I do.

Other Species:

35. Does Equestria differentiate between speaking and non-speaking species, in terms of respect, rights and legal responsibilities? Is there some other line or scale used? (For example, how are cows classified? Diamond Dogs? A chimera?)

Under the enlightened rule of the princesses, every speaking species contributes to the welfare of all according to their ability. Cows, for instance, contribute milk; chickens contribute eggs; pigs contribute pork; and ponies contribute the management skills and discipline necessary to maintain this equitable social order.

36. Do other speaking species form their own nations, or are all nations largely integrated, with some having larger populations of a species than others?

Species with something significant to contribute to Equestria are integrated as described above. The rest inhabit the deserts and low-lying swamplands surrounding Equestria in which oil has not been found.

37. Are minotaurs related to cows at all?

To those who say yes, I ask: Have you ever tried to milk a minotaur?

41. Is the lack of buffalo presence in Equestria cultural, or simply because most pony towns aren’t built to accommodate a full grown buffalo?

It’s a cultural matter, by which I mean the manifest destiny of culture to supplant the uncivilized.

50. Is there something that wasn't asked about here, but you feel like you need to explain to everyone?

        I don’t need to explain anything. I wasn’t there and I didn’t do it.

EM Forster on character: Tell, don't just show

Aspects of the Novel

E.M. Forster, 1927

E.M. Forster, author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and Howards End, wrote a book about novels. It isn't explicitly a how-to book, but you could use it as one. This isn't for the beginning writer; it tackles questions such as "What is the purpose of the novel?" and "What is the relationship between character and plot?" Forster attacked these questions using the skills of a novelist, illustrating abstract ideas with concrete metaphors and poetic language. I haven't finished it, but I can already tell it's going to go on my short list of "books writers should read". There is a neat summary of chapters 2-5 here, and I'd guess the rest is summarized somewhere nearby in web-space.

He has two chapters on characters. The first of them presents a theory about characters that amounts to a theory about the purpose of the novel. (It says many other things as well.) Forster doesn't see the novel and the play as alternative ways of telling a story. The distinctive thing about the novel, he says, is that the author can tell us what characters think and why we do things, and so we understand them better than we understand people, even ourselves, in real life. The purpose of the novel is to imply that people make sense:

They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.  And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

He contrasts this with plays and movies, which he finds comparatively vulgar spectacles of incompletely-realized characters who are pushed around by a story-line that does not generally aspire to the level of a plot, but is merely a chronologically-ordered spectacle pulling the viewer along with "What next?" He argues in other chapters that most people want only an endless string of events that pique and then satisfy their curiosity, while a novel requires memory and thought, and so appeals to only a few:

A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan [a reference to 1001 Nights] or to their modern descendant the movie-public. They can only be kept awake by "and then—and then—" They can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties.... The man who begins by asking you how many brothers and sisters you have is never a sympathetic character, and if you meet him in a year's time he will probably ask you how many brothers and sisters you have, his mouth again sagging open, his eyes still bulging from his head.

Aristotle said that all emotion in a drama must be expressed through action. This brings us back to our old chestnut, "Show, Don't Tell," which also comes from Aristotle. We've had arguments over "show, don't tell." The greatest counterexample in drama is Shakespeare, who expresses most emotion in his dramas through dialogue, or even monologue. You could find many other counter-examples, like Death of a Salesman; you could point impishly to Waiting for Godot, in which emotion is expressed through inaction. Yesterday I saw A Raisin in the Sun, which is a good play but given to Shakespearian-length monologues, and so seems fake to ears more used to Tarantino.

But Forster ignores all this and cedes the point: "Show, Don't Tell," and the rest of Aristotle, is good for plays but bad for the novel. (He would perhaps say the telling plays listed above should have been novels. A literary realist certainly finds a stink of unreality about them, but on the other hand, the demand for realism in our artificial spectacles is a modern dogma.) Forster believes some stories should be plays or movies, and some should be novels, but none should be both:

The plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg. In vain it points out to these unwieldy creatures the advantages of the triple process of complication, crisis, and solution so persuasively expounded by Aristotle. A few of them rise and comply, and a novel which ought to have been a play is the result.

(So ixnay on movies made from books!)

This leads to a surprising conclusion: Novels must tell, and not merely show. Showing is fine, but doesn't enable an author to describe a character hyper-realistically, in more detail than is possible in life, and so a story that can be only shown, should be, as a play or a movie.

I don't agree entirely. I think, first, that most things can be shown, given enough length. The novel doesn't give us a qualitatively new way of looking at people so much as it makes it possible to condense a character, through telling, so that more can be said in fewer words. Second, even when you are showing, not telling, words can focus more precisely and nimbly than a camera. My recent story "Experience" had to be completely shown, not told, yet it would have been difficult in a movie. A movie could show a sunrise photorealistically, but couldn't as easily romanticize it, and couldn't direct the viewer's attitude through word choice.

Later, Forster argues that the requirement to bring things to a conclusion might also not be needed in a novel, and ruins most novels because the characters are too much alive for the writer to rein them in at the conclusion. This foreshadows the contemporary literary short story, which is not allowed to have a conclusion.

EM Forster, chapter 6: Fantasy

Aspects of the Novel

EM Forster, 1927

Chapter 6: Fantasy

Chapter 7, "Prophecy", is a remarkable chapter. It illustrates why literary critics should be writers: Forster posits an elusive quality of some novels that has no name, and that he is not entirely sure even exists. A critic striving to understand what a novel means or how it fits into the writer's biography would not even sense its presence, and would certainly not be able to describe it if he did. Forster is at his limits as an author just finding the metaphors to explain it. This should not surprise us. If the essence of a novel could be communicated in a straight-forward manner, without metaphor, analogy, connotation, or drama, that novel should have been an essay instead.

But to understand what Forster means by prophecy, you must first understand what he meant by fantasy; otherwise you may think that's what he means by prophecy. So this post will talk about chapter 6: Fantasy.

Forster senses something strange and outside the elements of character, plot, setting, etc. Yet he finds this mysterious fifth flavor in works of drastically different sorts; so he divides it into "fantasy" and "prophecy":

Perhaps our subject, namely the books we have read, has stolen away from us while we theorize, like a shadow from an ascending bird. The bird is all right—it climbs, it is consistent and eminent. The shadow is all right—it has flickered across roads and gardens. But the two things resemble one another less and less, they do not touch as they did when the bird rested its toes on the ground. Criticism, especially a critical course, is so misleading. However lofty its intentions and sound its method, its subject slides away from beneath it, imperceptibly away, and lecturer and audience may awake with a start to find that they are carrying on in a distinguished and intelligent manner, but in regions which have nothing to do with anything they have read.

...

The novels we have now to consider all tell a story, contain characters, and have plots or bits of plots, so we could apply to them the apparatus suited for Fielding or Arnold Bennett. But when I say two of their names—Tristram Shandy and Moby Dick—it is clear that we must stop and think a moment. The bird and the shadow are too far apart. A new formula must be found: the mere fact that one can mention Tristram and Moby in a single sentence shows it. What an impossible pair! As far apart as the poles. Yes. And like the poles they have one thing in common, which the lands round the equator do not share: an axis. What is essential in Sterne and Melville belongs to this new aspect of fiction: the fantastic-prophetical axis.

...

When we try to translate truth out of one sphere into another, whether from life into books or from books into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong, not suddenly when it might be detected, but slowly. It is not possible, after it, to apply the old apparatus any more. There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by “more” I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.

Forster does not intend either word, fantasy or prophecy, to denote the supernatural. "Fantasy," he writes, "implies the supernatural, but need not express it."

The supernatural is absent from [Tristram Shandy], yet a thousand incidents suggest that it is not far off. ... There is a charmed stagnation about the whole epic--the more the characters do the less gets done... facts have an unholy tendency to unwind and trip up the past instead of begetting the future... and the obstinacy of inanimate objects, like Dr. Slop's bag, is most suspicious. Obviously a god is hidden in Tristram Shandy, his name is Muddle, and some readers cannot accept him.

I'm sure he'd say that Tolkien wrote fantasy, but I'm almost as sure he would not consider Game of Thrones to be fantasy at all. It's merely a world in which magic does certain things in the same way that electricity does certain things in ours. I doubt that he'd call Harry Potter fantasy either. I'll draw an analogy with something he wrote in chapter 3:

If we were to press her or her creator Defoe and say, “Come, be serious. Do you believe in Infinity?” they would say (in the parlance of their modern descendants), “Of course I believe in Infinity—what do you take me for?”—a confession of faith that slams the door on Infinity more completely than could any denial.

I think that Forster would like to capitalize Magic as he capitalized Infinity, and if, when asked about Magic, you nodded and said, "Yes, yes; you can do magic if you have the right genes and a good wand from Ollivanders," he'd say that wasn't Magical at all. Magic was Star Wars before Midichlorians. Magic is what you find in The Last Unicorn:

But he had judged them too easily. They applauded his rings and scarves, his ears full of goldfish and aces, with a proper politeness but without wonder. Offering no true magic, he drew no magic back from them; and when a spell failed — as when, promising to turn a duck into a duke for them to rob, he produced a handful of duke cherries — he was clapped just as kindly and vacantly as though he had succeeded. They were a perfect audience.

Cully smiled impatiently, and Jack Jingly dozed, but it startled the magician to see the disappointment in Molly Grue's restless eyes. Sudden anger made him laugh. He dropped seven spinning balls that had been glowing brighter and brighter as he juggled them (on a good evening, he could make them catch fire), let go all his hated skills, and closed his eyes. "Do as you will," he whispered to the magic. "Do as you will."

It sighed through him, beginning somewhere secret — in his shoulderblade, perhaps, or in the marrow of his shinbone. His heart filled and tautened like a sail, and something moved more surely in his body than he ever had. It spoke with his voice, commanding. Weak with power, he sank to his knees and waited to be Schmendrick again.

I wonder what I did. I did something.

If he called My Little Pony fantasy, it wouldn't be because of the unicorns and levitation. It would be because Equestria is built more along the plan of Keats than of Newton; something of our hopes and dreams are built into its physics.

He tries to distinguish them:

The general tone of novels is so literal that when the fantastic is introduced it produces a special effect: some readers are thrilled, others choked off: it demands an additional adjustment because of the oddness of its method or subject matter—like a sideshow in an exhibition where you have to pay sixpence as well as the original entrance fee. Some readers pay with delight, it is only for the sideshows that they entered the exhibition, and it is only to them I can now speak. Others refuse with indignation, and these have our sincere regards, for to dislike the fantastic in literature is not to dislike literature....

So fantasy asks us to pay something extra.

Let us now distinguish between fantasy and prophecy.

They are alike in having gods, and unlike in the gods they have. There is in both the sense of mythology.... On behalf of fantasy let us now invoke all beings who inhabit the lower air, the shallow water, and the smaller hills, all Fauns and Dryads and slips of the memory, all verbal coincidences, Pans and puns, all that is mediæval this side of the grave. When we come to prophecy... it will have been to whatever transcends our abilities, even when it is human passion that transcends them, to the deities of India, Greece,Scandinavia and Judæa, to all that is mediæval beyond the grave and to Lucifer son of the morning. By their mythologies we shall distinguish these two sorts of novels.

To demonstrate fantasy, he cites a passage from Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm--one with nothing definitely supernatural in it; you'll have to click on the link to read it--then writes:

Has not a passage like this—with its freedom of invocation—a beauty unattainable by serious literature? It is so funny and charming, so iridescent yet so profound. Criticisms of human nature fly through the book, not like arrows but upon the wings of sylphs.

Humor has something to do with his distinction between fantasy and prophecy. Fantasy can be humorous; prophecy cannot. He compares fantasy to a flute, prophecy to a song, probably an operatic aria. The fantasist knows what he is doing, and if he's trying to make a point, he makes it, like Tolkien with his message that the world and Man were created perfect and have both gone downhill ever since. The prophet wants desperately to tell us something, but doesn't know what it is.

If it still isn't clear what he's talking about--and I don't think it is--you can read the whole thing here. It might become more clear when I go over chapter 7, but honestly, I doubt it will.

forster 7 prophecy

Aspects of the Novel

EM Forster, 1927

Chapter 7: Prophecy

The word "prophecy" is a little misleading, because Forster is among the few people in the past thousand years to use it correctly. It means, or meant, not predicting the future, but speaking for the gods.

Forster isn't sure that what he discusses here is real, because it happens so seldom: "Though I believe this lecture is on a genuine aspect of the novel, not a fake aspect, I can only think of four writers to illustrate it—Dostoevsky, Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Emily Bronte. ... Always, at the back of my mind, there lurks a reservation about this prophetic stuff". He's conscious that it's different from most other chapters (lectures) in the book: "For the first five lectures of this course we have used more or less the same set of tools. This time and last we have had to lay them down." You don't need to understand or use it to be a great writer; few have. But if something will help me write like Dostoevsky and Melville, I want in.

Before reading this, you need to read my post on chapter 6, Fantasy.

This is a confusing chapter, perhaps more confusing than chapter 8, Pattern and Rhythm, which I don't intend to review. I'd better just quote Forster's opening of the chapter:

WITH prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us today—what we must respond to, for interest now becomes an inappropriate word—is an accent in the novelist’s voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to “say” anything about the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall have to answer “not too well”: the singer does not always have room for his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a drawing-room after an earthquake or a children’s party. Readers of D. H. Lawrence will understand what I mean.

Prophecy—in our sense—is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the faiths that have haunted humanity—Christianity, Buddhism, dualism, Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what particular view of the universe is recommended—with that we are not directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of style. We shall have to attend to the novelist’s state of mind and to the actual words he uses; we shall neglect as far as we can the problems of common sense. As far as we can: for all novels contain tables and chairs, and most readers of fiction look for them first. Before we condemn him for affectation and distortion we must realize his view point. He is not looking at the tables and chairs at all, and that is why they are out of focus. We only see what he does not focus—not what he does—and in our blindness we laugh at him.

I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality in the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour. Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration.... But humility is in place just now. Without its help we shall not hear the voice of the prophet, and our eyes will behold a figure of fun instead of his glory. And the sense of humour—that is out of place: that estimable adjunct of the educated man must be laid aside. Like the school-children in the Bible, one cannot help laughing at a prophet—his bald head is so absurd—but one can discount the laughter...

Forster contrasts a passage from George Eliot with one from Dostyevsky. Both are scenes of, I think, repentance. Eliot's is straightforward Christian dogma. Dostyevsky's is a dream sequence. Again I can do nothing but quote:

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asked as they dashed gaily by.

“It’s the babe,” answered the driver. “The babe weeping.”

 “But why is it weeping?” Mitya persisted stupidly. “Why are its little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?”

“Why, they’re poor people, burnt out. They’ve no bread. They’re begging because they’ve been burnt out.”

“No, no,” Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. “Tell me, why is it those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?”

And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way. And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the dark-faced dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once, regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs. . . . And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward towards the light, and he longed to live, to go on and on, towards the new beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!

“What! Where?” he exclaimed, opening his eyes, and sitting up on the chest, as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep an hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head, which hadn’t been there when he leant back exhausted, on the chest.

“Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he cried, with a sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as thoughsome great kindness had been shown him.

He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch’s little secretary had compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole soul was quivering with tears. He went to the table and said he would sign whatever they liked.

“I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen,” he said in a strange voice, with a new light, as of joy, in his face.

Mitya's dream drives him to despair, but when he awakes and finds that someone has put a pillow under his head, him, accused of murder, it redeems humanity in his eyes.

The first writer is a preacher, and the second a prophet. George Eliot talks about God, but never alters her focus; God and the tables and chairs are all in the same plane, and in consequence we have not for a moment the feeling that the whole universe needs pity and love—they are only needed in Hetty’s cell. In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them...

The world of the Karamazovs and Myshkin and Raskolnikov, the world of Moby Dick which we shall enter shortly, it is not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction, but it reaches back.... Mitya is a round character, but he is capable of extension. He does not conceal anything (mysticism), he does not mean anything (symbolism), he is merely Dmitri Karamazov, but to be merely a person in Dostoevsky is to join up with all the other people far back. Consequently the tremendous current suddenly flows—for me in those closing words: “I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen.” Have I had that good dream too?

...

The prophet—one imagines—has gone “off” more completely than the fantasist, he is in a remoter emotional state while he composes. Not many novelists have this aspect. Poe is too incidental. Hawthorne potters too anxiously round the problem of individual salvation to get free. Hardy, a philosopher and a great poet, might seem to have claims, but Hardy’s novels are surveys, they do not give out sounds. The writer sits back, it is true, but the characters do not reach back. He shows them to us as they let their arms rise and fall in the air; they may parallel our sufferings but can never extend them—never, I mean, could Jude step forward like Mitya and release floods of our emotion by saying “Gentlemen, I’ve had a bad dream.” Conrad is in a rather similar position. The voice, the voice of Marlow, is too full of experiences to sing, it is dulled by many reminiscences of error and beauty, its owner has seen too much to see beyond cause and effect. To have a philosophy—even a poetic and emotional philosophy like Hardy’s and Conrad’s—leads to reflections on life and things. A prophet does not reflect. And he does not hammer away. That is why we exclude Joyce. Joyce has many qualities akin to prophecy and he has shown (especially in the Portrait of the Artist) an imaginative grasp of evil. But he undermines the universe in too workmanlike a manner, looking round for this tool or that: in spite of all his internal looseness he is too tight, he is never vague except after due deliberation; it is talk, talk, never song.

...

The extraordinary nature of [Moby Dick] appears in two of its early incidents—the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.

The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher... works up and up and concludes on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace.

I think he's getting at something like awe.

Melville... reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory.

There is an emotion religious fanatics have when they believe they are seeing the awful perfection of God, which gives them joy despite having nothing joyous in its parts. It is like what Buddhists have when they meditate on the tragedy and pointlessness of the universe to a point where suddenly it flips and becomes a thing of beauty. It's like what Jorge Luis Borges described in "The God's Script", in which an Aztec priests, through years of study, sees the mind of God encoded in the spots on a jaguar. He engaged in this study to gain the power to free himself from his dungeon and kill the Spanish; having gained the power, he sees everything that is as beautiful and will not change it. It's something like what some scientists feel when, say, they look at the history of human love, hatred, greed, deception, and nobility, and understand what produced it, and how astonishing the end result of simple principles is. And it's something like the fascination of Cthulhic cultists, enraptured by something so far beyond them that seeing from its perspective erases the distinctions between good and evil.

I think that might be what he's getting at. Don't ask me more questions as if I knew the answer. That's as far as I can go now.

From sadfic to literature

Fics

This week I heard high praise for three pony stories that were well-written, but left me unsatisfied because they were just sadfics. I use the words sadfic, happyfic, darkfic, grimfic, etc., for stories that just want to make the reader sad, happy, etc., and so they describe one event that is sad, happy, etc., and then stop. Then readers fill the comments with "DAWWWW!"s. "Cupcakes" is a grimfic. (Okay, I haven't actually read "Cupcakes". Maybe it is a masterpiece of dark humor. But that's not what I've heard.)

It seems most just-fics are sadfics. "From the Mouths of  TheFillies" is a sadfic. (I deliberately picked a story by somebody who isn't following me, so please don't PM him to tell him about this post.) Derpy has cancer. Dinky doesn't understand. Derpy dies. The end.

Being a fic doesn't mean something is bad, I guess. I haven't read or watched Old Yeller in a long, long time, but my recollection is that it 's just a sadfic. But a lot of people liked it. Pull on the heartstrings hard enough and something becomes a (children's) classic.

But your sadfic about Twilight crying on the graves of her friends won't be, unless you add something else:

Tension

Something may be lost and something may be gained. The reader is in suspense.

Decision

Someone must make a choice between two outcomes. A classic decision story is "The Lady or the Tiger?".

(Must it always be two things? In fiction, the choices presented are always between exactly two options (although a clever protagonist may respond with a third). Is this good writing, because more options is less dramatic; or is it just lazy?)

Tension and decision almost require each other. We usually call a resolution of tension without a protagonist's decision a deus ex machina, and call it bad. And a decision without important consequences is seldom interesting.

The decision doesn't have to be between the two outcomes that oppose to make the tension. In The Deer Hunter, in the Russian roulette scenes, the tension is between living and dying; but the decision is whether to play, or not to play.

In On the Beach, there is tension with no decision: Will everyone in the world die from nuclear fallout, or has someone in Seattle found a way to survive? The characters seek the answer to the question but have no control over it. But the main focus of the novel is not that tension, but how people respond (see below) to knowing they are all going to die soon.

Maybe Citizen Kane has tension without decision. Everybody wants to know who Rosebud was. The viewers eventually find out. But that's just a frame; you don't keep watching the film to find out who Rosebud was.

The only contemporary exceptions I can think of which have nothing but either tension or decision are weird existentialist fiction. The characters in Waiting for Godot must choose whether to keep waiting; one of the points of the play seems to be that their choice has no consequences. It is a decision without tension. "The Trial" by Kafka is a story about the fact that the protagonist never gets the chance to make a decision; it is tension without decision.

You might think horror and action movies have tension without decision, but they don't, as far as I know. Faceless cannon-fodder can be killed off at random, but their deaths don't resolve tension--they help create tension by showing that the characters we care about are at risk. Characters we care about almost always get to make a decision before being killed. And if some don't, well, that's just to make us more nervous about other characters who do.

Stephen King called horror a conservative, Republican kind of fiction. Characters get killed as punishment for some social infraction, like a woman choosing to have sex outside wedlock, or a man being kind of a jerk, or trying to learn secrets man was not meant to know. In Saw and its sequels, people have to choose between being maimed for life and dying. (I haven't seen them, but I've been told the people were chosen because they didn't value their lives, making it a punishment and making Saw another conservative horror story.) The people killed off in And Then There Were None were all themselves killers.

Even in action stories where you know the hero will succeed, he or she must make some decision near the end in order to succeed. Luke must trust the Force; Indy must both believe in the power of the Ark, and give up on ever seeing what's inside it. There are action movies where the heroes don't make any such decision. They are bad.

This strikes me as very peculiar. If fiction is supposed to be realistic, shouldn't it have plenty of stories where the outcomes  are not in the heroes' own hands? The rarity of such fiction must be a clue to why we read fiction.

Drama

Drama is tension with a dramatic structure: The story builds up to an emotional climax where some issue that the reader's been worried about almost since the start of the story must be decided. I said "decided", not "resolved", because although tension in real life is usually resolved by outside forces, tension in a modern story must be resolved by a decision, as noted above.

Tension in Greek drama didn't always need to be resolved by a decision. The Greeks believed in gods who were not benevolent; the question of fate was therefore very important to them. Could the gods condemn them to a horrible fate even if they lived virtuous lives? Oedipus Rex is a 2500-year-old existentialist drama in which the resolution is that the prophecy was, inevitably, fulfilled. Like "The Trial", it's a story about the fact that Oedipus could not make any meaningful decisions; his fate was pre-ordained. Today, and especially in America, we believe that we control our fates, and so our stories operate only within the small set of possible worlds in which this is true. There's a reason existentialism didn't originate in America.

Tension and decision without drama is possible.  Exhibit A: "My Little Dashie." The narrator decides that he wants Dash to be happy, even if it means (I think) that his life with her, the only valuable thing he ever had in his life, will never have happened. If it just happened without his assent, it would be a sadfic. If we'd known he'd have to make that choice, it would be a drama. But the story leading up to the decision doesn't dramatize (literally) the decision; it lays the groundwork so that we understand the consequences of the decision.

Response

Take a sadfic, then show how a character deals with the tragedy. Better yet, just infodump the entire sadfic in the first paragraph of the story, and go from there.

"Somewhere only we know" is a response fic. Rainbow doesn't have any choices; there is no hope and hence no tension. Rainbow responds to her horrible situation with a beautiful dream, and in the circumstances, it's kind of heroic. Rainbow is escapist, but this fic isn't escapism. On the Beach is another response fic.

"Pinkie's Last Party" sometimes gets accused of being just a sadfic: Pinkie dies. Be sad. But it's got more than that, especially in those last few paragraphs, where Pinkie feels sorry for Death and offers her a cupcake. That's a small but grand response to death that is perfectly Pinkie. That, not Pinkie dying, is what brings the tears, and they aren't tears of sadness.

Theme exploration

This is my favorite. Literature, it seems to me at this moment, could almost be defined as what you get when you take a story--something that would pass on fimfiction for a complete and proper story, with character and plot, and could get featured and published on EQD--and take that as a starting point for something bigger. The original story is like a lattice, and themes are like vines which the writer plants around it. As they grow he weaves them into the lattice. In the end, you can still see the shape of the lattice, but the vines may outweigh it.

In "Flowers for Algernon", Charlie is a mentally-retarded man who becomes a test subject for a treatment, then becomes a genius, but the effect is temporary, and he becomes stupid again. That's a sadfic, but the writer didn't stop there. He used it as the framework to build a much richer story on. The story built on it is about what his friends really think of him, why they value him, what friendship means, and the relative value of happiness, intelligence, and truth.

What's a theme? Maybe it just means "an idea". "Pinkie's last party" hints that you should live your life like it was a party: "I know that the worst way to ruin a party is to drag it out, trying to preserve a feeling that was always meant to be fleeting." Is that a theme? I think so.

Bonus points for more universal themes. I guess every theme has to be universal to be a theme at all--if a story kept returning to the point that the poorest countries have the best stamps, you wouldn't call that a theme, you'd call it OCD. But some themes are more universal than others. In The Natural, Robert Redford plays the world's greatest baseball player, who is gunned down before his first major-league game. 20 years later, he tries again. Everyone laughs at him because they think he's too old to play baseball. But he isn't. There's a choice at the end of The Natural, but that isn't the only thing that keeps it from being just a happyfic. It's also got a universal theme: You're never too old, or some bullshit like that. It may be a lie, at least in the specific case of pro baseball,  but it's an answer to a universal question: Is it time for me to give up on my dream?

Character explanation

I didn't say "character exploration". Telling us things we already know about Celestia does not get you bonus points. Writing your own head-canon about her may get you bonus points, but doesn't, for me, rise above the level of the fic unless it's something important and non-obvious.

Chris just reviewed "Let's Just Say" (description: "Suppose I killed them all?") and concluded, "... there's not really a lot here other than the promised hypothetical." Sure, there's a crackfic here: Celestia muses about, just hypothetically, killing everypony off and finally having some peace. But I think there's a lot more than that. Imagine the story had instead been Twilight thinking, "Suppose, whenever somepony returned a library book with pages torn out, written in, or highlighted, I... just killed them? Would that be so bad? If a book makes its author immortal, then destroying it is murder..." and then ended with a knock on the library door. That might be funny, but it would be just a crackfic, because it wouldn't give us any new insight into Twilight.

(Yes, I saw "Testing, Testing!" I'm talking about my head-canon, non-canon, actually-gives-a-shit-about-library-books Twilight. I can only handle so much character dissonance.)

"Let's Just Say" gives us a whole new head-canon about Celestia: Ponies follow her night and day, adoring her, asking her questions, "looking out for" her, making she fulfils her many royal duties. She feels like a prisoner, and she feels very tired:

She felt free for a flickering moment. Not free enough to forget that she was still the Princess and that inevitably, invariably she’d be found and brought back, but so what? ...

She was technically away from it all.... The ponies. Her loyal subjects. There were no sycophant upper-crust Canterlot ponies in these woods, nor were there any of the rustic Ponyville types, who’d throw themselves off a cliff if they thought their Princess would like the sound of the splatter. It was nice to be ten miles distant from either of them. She was, at any rate, sick of both of them.

... There were a few ponies who didn’t make her despair, but those were few and far in between. Most of the populace, though... Well, there was something wrong with them....

A squirrel scampered by, twisting and turning its way past her legs. Birds who hadn’t the good sense to go south already chirped in a lovely little chorus. Yes, this was lovely. The sort of thing a Princess needed when she wanted to get away from it all.

Not away from it all forever. She’d never get away from it forever.

Unless...

I hadn't imagined Celestia thinking things like that, but once Obs puts it out there... is it so hard to imagine thoughts like that sometimes flit behind her royal smile? Is this really just a crackfic?

"The Light Goes Out" could have been just a Twilight-is-dying sadfic, but it has a lot to say about Twilight Sparkle:

"I don't want my accomplishments be tied to the expectations others hold of me. I don't want them to be defined by somepony else. Not even you." ...

Meticulous, precise, and organized to the last, needing permission, needing structure. Even as she claimed she didn't want her purpose to be dependent on another, those who loved her knew better. She needed the authority of it. She needed to know that she wasn't disobeying any regulations, wasn't breaking any rules. ... Twilight Sparkle sat before her teacher, seeking her final grade before allowing herself to be dismissed.

Theme and character blend together when a story investigates human nature. Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" is more than just a darkfic because it's about human nature. A lecturer I heard talk about it kept describing the actions in it as "inhuman", but that was exactly wrong: The actions are human. That's why it's a great story. ("Inhuman", oddly, is only ever used to describe things that only humans do.) It's believable enough that some readers thought it was real, and wrote The New Yorker to ask where they could watch such a lottery.

Putting it all together

So take your sadfic and add one, two, three, or all of these things to it. Some examples from my own stories:

The Corpse Bride: Sadfic + Drama + Themes. Twilight kills Fluttershy, again, and that's sad, but it is the outcome of a drama, and it's used to talk about friendship and hubris.

Twenty Minutes: Sadfic + Character. Chapter 1 is about a pegasus who's a sex slave, and that's sad, but  the story is really about the zebra who tries to help her, and why he does it, which is why chapter 2 is there.

Alicorn Cider: Sadfic + Tension + Decision + Themes + Character. Mac loses/gives up Twilight, and that's sad, but it also says a lot about how Mac sees himself, and says something at the end about birth and freedom vs. destiny, service/religion as love, and the grace of offering such with no expectation of repayment.

Fluttershy's Night Out: Sadfic + Drama + Character. Fluttershy oh heck you can guess, and that's sad, but it happens only at the end of a drama and after a series of bad decisions, and is used to explore how Fluttershy feels about herself, both before and after, and show the vicious cycle she's in that has made her the mare she is at the start of season 1.

The divide between commercial or genre fiction and literature used to be something like this:

Commercial fiction: Must have drama. Character explanation is nice, but not necessary (see Twilight, The da Vinci Code). Should preferably not have controversial or upsetting themes, because we don't go for that literary crap.

Literary fiction: Must have themes. Should not have much tension, and certainly not action/adventure, because we are not circus entertainers.

Today, though, the short stories published in literary magazines today all (and I mean that literally, as in I don't recall a single clear exception in the dozens of lit-mag stories I've read this year) is, rather, to throw out the plot entirely, so that rather than starting with a just-fic and building on it, there isn't even a just-fic. There are vines, but no lattice. Character explanation is supreme. There is probably no tension, and drama is forbidden. A decision may be considered, but will be shown to be impossible; the characters must continue on as they have been doing. Themes may be present but must not be clear, and the author's opinion on the matter must remain ambiguous.

There's another distinction between commercial and literary fiction that has to do with the type of themes allowed. I think that literary fiction is supposed to challenge people, while commercial fiction is supposed to reassure them. But that's a subject for another blog post.

Saul Bellow's short stories

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. I've been reading his Collected Stories (1951-1990). The introduction says this of Bellow, and I think it's true:

One might say  that Bellow reprieved realism for a generation, the generation that came after the second world war, that he held its neck back from the blade of the postmodern; and he did this by revivifying traditional realism with modernist techniques. His prose is densely realistic, yet it is hard to find in any of the usual conventions of realism or even of storytelling. His people do not walk out of the house and into other houses — they are, as it were, tipped from one recalled seeing to another — and his characters do not Obviously dramatic conversations. It is almost impossible to find in the stories sentences along the lines of "he put down his drink and left the room." These are at once traditional and very untraditional stories, both archaic and radical.

I'm ashamed that I didn't even notice this while reading the stories. He writes careful descriptions of the people, their thoughts, any unusual or significant things they see, their reactions, but almost nothing about the rooms or the cars they are in.

What is obvious is the similarities between the stories. I only read four of them, but they all went something like this: The narrator is a Jew, from Brooklyn or Chicago. He is old, probably his family's last survivor of his generation, probably dying. (There is always a death, usually two.) He is probably an intellectual, a writer or a professor. He thinks back and recalls the events of one day in his youth. He lists all the members of his family, how Jewish they are, how they make their money, and how much money they make. There is a female relative, somewhat older than him, who is short and fat and mean, but nice to him. There is an older male relative who became a success in some kind of business and is now the family patriarch, respected but also resented. There is an older male relative with energy and vitality who has plenty of sex with good-looking women. These last two may be the same person. The narrator thinks about sex but never gets any. At some point the relative with vitality takes the narrator somewhere in a car (there is always a car, or at least a streetcar) and leaves him there while he goes into a building, where he stays for a long time. Later the narrator realizes it was a brothel. There is an incident or conflict in the second half of the story, and this is the part that makes the stories different. If people outside the family were involved, we will be told what country each of them is from. Nobody is born in America, except Jews, who are American, but Jewish first. The incident is connected with his family and with a death. The boy reflects on it, then the old man telling the story reflects on being that boy. He is unhappy with his life. He has earned the respect of his family with his intellectual work, but he wishes he had been the businessman who made a lot of money, or the vital man who screwed a lot of women, though he doesn't say any of this. Then the story ends.

So every Saul Bellow story is, probably, Saul Bellow's autobiography, expressing his regret at becoming a writer instead of making a lot of money and screwing a lot of women, wrapped around a story about family and death. The funny thing is that he spend 40 years writing these stories about regretting his wasted life as a writer.

The preface, by his wife, describes the gradual development of one of the stories, "The Bellarosa Connection". It's only about 25,000 words, but he worked on it full-time every day for about a month, just to write one first draft, then start over and write a second first draft of it.

I wish I could read the stories and figure out  the author's style. Some people can just look at things and see the style. Those are people who have style. I tried reading style magazines for one year. The had page after page of photographs of things that were stylish that year, without a word of explanation or even a counter-example; the reader was supposed to intuit the rules of style from those pictures. I never could learn one damned thing about style from them. I don't seem to be able to do any better at picking up style from writers. Since I'm left with nothing but the story, I don't think I'm going to finish this book. I already know that Saul Bellow wished he had had more sex instead of becoming a world-famous writer, and this is not encouraging for a man wanting to become a writer.

I'm reading another famous literary yet non-modernist writer, Philip Roth, and it might not be coincidence that he's also Jewish. A storytelling culture may provide the strength to resist literary trends.

"Dark" means pessimistic

You agree! Congratulations on being right. Please return to the original post before commenting.

"Dark" means scary / gritty / gruesome

Or something like that. You think a story is dark if it passes through a dark place. (Return to the original post to comment.)

I am not a serial killer

I am Not a Serial Killer, Dan Wells, 2010

The setup is a lot like Dexter: The protagonist works with dead bodies (embalming them), is fascinated by them, and also fascinated by killing. He uses his evil nature for good, ridding his town of a real (supernatural) serial killer, while fighting his own demons. He has a set of rules to follow to stop himself from killing.[page_break]

A lot of the Amazon reviews called IANASK a teen book, because the protagonist is a teenager. This is stupid. (Most of the Amazon reviews were stupid, in a variety of ways. No one there seems to have understood why the book works.) The problems the story deals with are not everyman alienated-teen-growing-up issues. The story reminded me a little bit of Dorp Dead, a strange magical-realist young-adult gothic horror novel that scarred me when I was very young, that is an alienated-teen book. IANASK has that vibe of creepy, desperate isolation, but it’s much bleaker. The protagonist is an alienated teen, but not one that the typical alienated teen should relate to. There is no hope at the end that he will outgrow or overcome his problems.

IANASK is in first-person, and Dexter (the TV show; I’ve never read the book) has voice-over narration. Both these stories have first-person narration, because a key part of the story is that someone just watching the protagonist’s actions would impute the wrong motives to him. So they show, but also tell.

It’s better-executed than Dexter in a few ways. Dexter is supposed to be a psychopath, but TV has watered that down enough for him to come across as a nice, caring guy you can empathize with. He’s a normal guy who had a traumatic childhood experience that twisted him. Which is wrong. There are different plausible theories about what makes someone a psychopath, but that isn’t one of them.

John, the 15-year-old protagonist of IANASK, is a creature that would never be allowed to be the star of a TV show, because he is modelled more on real psychopaths, and is much more disturbing than Dexter. You can’t empathize with John because he explicitly doesn’t have the right feelings to empathize with. He knows fear, and longing, and fascination. But he can’t love. He is less than human. He can’t be redeemed by therapy or pills or the magic of friendship. Wells has some idea what is going on inside John’s head, and it is more consistent than the mishmash of caring and psychopathy we see in Dexter.

Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those things are there for in the first place.

In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't; trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It ears everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are— brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't “get by.” Fire does.

But you can sympathize with John. He would like to be a real boy. He knows something is missing inside him, that he isn’t a real person and can never fit in. His attempts to reach out to people always go wrong.

“I have rules to keep me normal,” I said. “To keep me . . . safe. To keep everyone safe. One of them is that I have to hang out with you because you help me stay normal, and I haven't been doing that. Serial killers don't have friends, and they don't have partners, they're just alone. So if I'm with you I'm safe, and I'm not going to do anything. Don't you get it?”

Max’s face grew clouded. I'd known him long enough to learn his moods—what he did when he was happy, what he did when he was mad. Right now he was squinting, and kind of frowning, and that meant he was sad. It caught me by surprise, and I stared back in shock.

“Is that why you came here?” he asked.

I nodded, desperate for some kind of connection. I felt like I was drowning.

“And that's why we've been friends for three years,” he said. “Because you force yourself, because you think it makes you normal.”

See who I am. Please.

“Well, congratulations, John,” he said. “You're normal. You're the big freakin' king of normal, with your stupid rules, and your fake friends. Is anything you do real?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I. . .” Right there, with him staring at me, I couldn't think of a thing.

“If you're just pretending to be my friend, then you don't actually need me at all,” he said, standing up. “You can do that all by yourself. I'll see you around.”

“Come on, Max.”

“Get out of here,” he said.

I didn't move.

“Get out!” he shouted.

“You don't know what you're doing,” I said, “I need to—”

“Don't you dare blame me for you being a freak!” he shouted. “Nothing you do is my fault! Now get of my house!”

I stood up and grabbed my coat.

“Put it on outside,” said Max, throwing open the door. "Dangit, John, everyone in school hates me. Now I don't even have my freak friend anymore." I walked out into the cold and he slammed the door behind me.

“How'd you like to live with a Mom who thinks you're a robot? Or a gargoyle? You think you can just say anything you want and it will bounce right off? 'John's a psycho! Stab him in the face—he can't feel anything!' You think I can't feel? I feel everything, Mom, every stab, every shout, every whisper behind my back, and I am ready to stab you all right back, if that's what it takes to get through to you!” I slammed my hand down on the counter, found another bowl, and hurled it at the wall. I picked up a spoon and threw it at the fridge, then picked up a kitchen knife and prepared to throw it as well, but suddenly I noticed that Mom was rigid, her face pale and her eyes wide.

She was afraid. Not just afraid—she was afraid of me. She was terrified of me.

I felt a thrill shoot through me—a bolt of lightning, a rush of wind. I was on fire. I was floored by the power of it, of pure, unfiltered emotion.

This was it. This was what I had never felt before—an emotional connection to another human being. I'd tried kindness, I'd tried love, I'd tried friendship. I'd tried talking and sharing and watching, and nothing had ever worked until now. Until fear. I felt her fear in every inch of my body like an electric hum, and I was alive for the first time. I needed more right then or the craving would eat me alive.

I raised the knife. She flinched and stepped back. I felt her fear again, stronger now, in perfect sync with my body. It was a jolt of pure life—not just fear, but control. I waved the knife, and the color drained from her face. I stepped forward and she shrank back. We were connected. I was guiding her movements like a dance. I knew in that instant that this is what love must be like—two minds in tandem, two bodies in harmony, two souls in absolute unity. I yearned to step again, to dictate her reaction. I wanted to find Brooke and ignite this same blazing fear in her. I wanted to feel this shining, glorious unity.

        (John’s relationship with his mom, BTW, stuck out as artificial. According to the narrator and his sister, his mom is almost too awful to live with, and has driven his sister away with her cruelty. But in the story she’s a perfect mother. John keeps complaining about how awful she is, and she seems to think she’s an awful mother, and yet we never see a hint of anything less than wonderful about her. Intentional? Maybe, but if so, it harms the story by making John even less sympathetic, and doesn’t fit with John’s rigorous introspection into his own situation.)

        Spoilers ahead:

John may still be a little too sympathetic for reality. John does care. It’s only second-order caring; he cares that he doesn’t care. I don’t know if real serial killers do. That’s the novel’s only big flaw: It waffles on the question of what John really feels. He doesn’t care about other people, yet he wants to be a good person, and in the climactic scene, temporarily acquires nobility and humanness because he admires the self-sacrifice of another character. I just don’t know if that works. It’s a bit of a cheat, or at best a mystery.

A lot of the Amazon reviewers complained about the novel’s supernatural aspect as being unnecessary. But it isn’t. The novel’s pathos comes from John realizing, as he stalks Mr. Crowley, the demon in his town, that although the demon isn’t technically human, he’s still a lot more human than John is.

“On what wings dare he aspire?” said a voice. I spun around and saw Mr. Crowley, sitting a few feet behind me in a camp chair, staring deeply into the fire. Everyone else had left, and I'd been too absorbed in the fire to notice.

Mr. Crowley seemed distant and preoccupied; he was not talking to me, as I assumed at first, but to himself. Or maybe to the fire. Never shifting his gaze, he spoke again. “What the hand dare seize the fire?”

“What?” I asked.

“What?” he said, as if shaken from a dream. “Oh, John, you're still here. It was nothing, just a poem.”

“Never heard it,” I said, turning back to the fire. It was smaller now, still strong, but no longer raging. I should have been terrified, alone in the night with a demon—I thought immediately that he must have found me out somehow, must have known that I knew his secrets and left him the note. But it was obvious that his mind was somewhere else—something had obviously disturbed him to put him into such a melancholy frame of mind. He was thinking about the note, perhaps, but he was not thinking about me.

More than that, his thoughts were absorbed in the fire, drawn to it and soaked into it like water in a sponge. Watching the way he watched the fire, I knew that he loved it like I did. That's why he spoke—not because he suspected me, but because we were both connected to the fire, and so, in a way, to each other.

“You've never heard it?” he asked. “What do they teach you in school these days? That's William Blake!” I shrugged, and after a moment he spoke again. “I memorized it once.” He drifted into reverie again. " Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?'“

”It sounds kind of familiar,“ I said. I never paid much attention in English, but I figured I'd remember a poem about fire.

”The poet is asking the tiger who made him, and how,“ said Crowley, his chin buried deep under his collar. ” 'What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?'“ Only his eyes were visible, black pits reflecting the dancing fire. ”He wrote two poems like that, you know—'The Lamb' and The Tiger.' One was made of sweetness and love, and one was forged from terror and death.“ Crowley looked at me, his eyes dark and heavy. ”'When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears—did he smile, his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?'“

The fire rustled and cracked. Our shadows danced on the wall of the house behind us. Mr. Crowley turned back to the fire.

”I'd like to think the same one made them both,“ he said, ”I'd like to think it.“

The trees beyond the fire glowed white, and the trees beyond those were lost in blackness.

Mr. Crowley had arrived, with Kay alongside, and they were talking to someone just ten feet away. He was crying, just like Brooke—just like everybody but me. Heroes in stories got to fight hideous demons with eyes red as burning coals; my demon's eyes were only red from tears. I cursed him then, not because his tears were fake, but because they were real. I cursed him for showing me, with every tear and every smile and every sincere emotion he had, that I was the real freak. He was a demon who killed on a whim, who left my only friend's dad lying in pieces on a frozen road, and he still fit in better than I did. He was unnatural and horrible, but he belonged here, and I did not. I was so far away from the rest of the world that there was a demon between us when I tried to look back.

        John studies Crowley but can’t figure him out until a talk with John’s therapist. John couldn’t understand Crowley’s actions because they were based in love. And this love, which connects Crowley to humanity in a way John never can be connected, is the weakness John will use to kill him.

        The novel’s tension comes partly from Crowley’s killing spree, and his and John’s mutual attempts to kill each other, but also from John’s struggle against his own desires. Like Dexter, he has a set of rules to follow. But he finds that in order to save his town from Crowley, he has to begin breaking his rules. To save his town from a monster, he must become a monster himself--and he may never be able to go back afterwards.

        If you’re worried about gore, there isn’t much. The murders aren’t gory. The goriest scene is at the very beginning, where he and his mother embalm a corpse. I read it while I was having surgery--a very poor choice of book to bring with me--and I still got through it.

        I’m impressed with this novel. The emotional structure is well-thought out. Yet it didn’t affect me as strongly as many other novels, because the main character is, deliberately, not someone I can relate to. His problems are abstract to me. I can feel something for him, but feel almost foolish for doing so. It’s like feeling sorry for a cat, while knowing the cat would never feel sorry for you. The story comes across to me almost as a philosophical problem: Supposing such people exist, what can we do with them? And supposing human relationships are such a strange, illogical thing, what does that say about us? But I like philosophical problems, and it’s rare to find a novel that spins one out as an adventure yarn rather than as a sermon.

Post-modern dialectic as improv

Post-modernists "mean" what they say

George Steiner is a literary theorist who has had appointments at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Geneva, despite not believing in literary theory. While reading his 1989 book Real Presences, I suddenly understood how post-modern thought works, and why it is self-consistent. All you have to do to understand it, it turns out, is believe that they mean what they say [1].

I had just read Steiner's description of modernism (p. 87-100), and was puzzled that he never used the word "modernism". I flipped back to the index to see if it listed modernism. No modernism, and no post-modernism either. In fact, there were no concepts of any kind in the index. It listed only proper nouns. Steiner, it seemed, organized his thought entirely around references to previous philosophers, artists, and works of art.

I went back to reading and came across this sentence: "Mallarmé breaks (rupture becomes a cardinal term) the covenant, the continuities between word and world" (p. 104).

This struck me as strange. I've read similar sentences in many other works, but could always interpret them as sloppy short-hand for something like "Mallarmé was the first to act as if there were no covenant between word and world."

But Steiner doesn't do sloppy short-hand. He says what he means and means what he says. He studies every word and clause, alert to its connotations and etymology, unpacking idiomatic expressions to make sure their original historical meaning is also in tune with his intent. If Steiner says that Mallarmé broke the link between words and reality, he means that there was a link between words and reality before Mallarmé wrote, and there was not afterwards.[page_break]

How could one lone Frenchman's poetry rupture the nature of reality? It can't. No words can. Words have no connection to reality for Steiner:

Whatever their prepotent claims to abstract universality, whatever their imitatio of scientific theory and crucial testing, these constructs of supposition are precisely bound to the language-circle. They cannot transcend the medium of their own saying. (p. 75)

To ascribe to words a correspondence to 'things out there', to see and use them as somehow representational of 'reality' in the world, is not only a vulgar illusion. It makes of language a lie. (p. 95)

Used (misused) as some kind of representational grid or facsimile of 'the real', language has indeed withered to inert routine and cliche'. Made to stand for inaccessible phenomenalities, words have been reduced to corrupt servitude. They are no longer fit for poets or rigorous thinkers (poetry being thought at its most rigorous). Only when we realize that what words refer to are other words, that any speech-act in reference to experience is always a 'saying in other words', can we return to a true freedom. It is within the language system alone that we possess liberties of construction and of deconstruction… so boundless, so dynamic, so proper to the evident uniqueness of human thought and imagining that, in comparison, external reality, whatever that might or might not be, is little more than brute intractability and deprivation. (p. 97)

When Steiner says there was a link between words and reality, he means that before Mallarmé, everyone agreed there was such a link. When he says there is no more link, he means people now agree there is no such link. That is all that matters. The surprising thing is that, given certain peculiar environmental conditions, this can be a self-consistent worldview.

Steiner isn't a model post-modernist, and might not like being called a post-modernist. He's Catholic, and where your typical post-modernist says, "Words can't access reality and so have no meaning," Steiner says, "Words can't access reality and therefore it is God who imbues them with meaning." But this discussion is entirely about how one can believe that we can know nothing about reality and be self-consistent, not about how one can believe that we can know nothing about reality and escape nihilism. Steiner is an adequate guinea pig for this purpose.

Post-modernism as philosophical behaviorism

That's why his index contains only proper nouns. Modernism? What's that? A concept that does not correspond to anything in the world. Where is "modernism" in the time between books? Nowhere. It is no-thing. Steiner does not refer to "modernism", but only to the relations between the words in particular works and of particular thinkers. It is a philosophical analogue of behaviorism: There are no concepts in the world, just as there are no concepts in the brain.

Philosophical rigor requires dealing only in the word-streams that emanated from previous individuals, not in false "concepts" reified from those word-streams. Steiner makes many exceptions to this, of course; otherwise he could not use language at all. But he does not think of writers as discovering things that exist in the world. Post-modernists introduce metaphors ("rhizome"), processes for creating post-modern art ("bricolage", "pastiche", "mash-up"), and endless terms to describe different ways of relating art / word to meaning / reality / original ("camp", "différance", "incommensurable", "indeterminacy", "kitsch", "language games", "parody", "simulacra") and text to text ("intertextual", "metafiction", "meta-narrative"), but these are not the kinds of words that show up in indices. They are relationships and attributes, but not in themselves things one talks about as bridges or sine waves are. Post-modernists aren't taxonomists. The world of things is irrelevant to them.

Post-modernism as improv

This also explains why Steiner never worries whether the things he says are correct, contradictory, or sensible [2]. He never asks whether the sources he cites are correct or contradictory. A citation, to him, is the same as a proof. The only criteria of a proposition's admissibility is that it has already been accepted into the game [3]. Dialectic requires embracing contradictions; it moves forward by pasting them together in aesthetically-appealing ways. Given only statements that don't contradict each other, a post-modernist could say nothing.

That's why Steiner only rarely says anyone is wrong, and never anyone who is an accepted part of the literary canon or of the post-modernist word-game. Because the first rule of the word game is: You cannot say anything is wrong once it's part of the game.

This is also the key rule of improv comedy. A member of an improv troupe might say or do something that appears to paint the sketch into a corner, but the other members must never contradict it or deny it. Postmodern dialectics should not be thought of as an attempt to be correct, but as an extended game of improv.

Even when post-modernists wish to make the ultimate condemnation of a viewpoint, they don't say it's wrong, they say it's "dead" (implying it was once alive and vital) [4]. Arguments are not wrong or right; they are in fashion or out of fashion. It isn't a question of whether a statement corresponds to reality; it's a question of whether the person who said it was playing the game correctly at the time. Aristotle can get away with talking about truth because the game demanded belief in objective truth when he wrote. A citation to something he said is a proof; a restatement of it is idiocy.

The post-modernists have been trying to explain this to us all along. They say it over and over: Words do not correspond to reality. Understanding this leads to the "freedom" to say anything. Philosophy is a word-game. Philosophical discourse is done via dialectic, in which you take two contradictory earlier views and combine them without resolving their contradictions.

Once you have all four principles, enough like-minded colleagues to play word-games with, and no fear of your games having any personal consequences to you, you can play your word-games forever.

Post-modernism versus science

Steiner devotes p. 69-86 to this puzzle: How does science produce things that work when it relies entirely on the false belief that its claims are objectively true? "The ultimate grounds of this contract [between theory and fact] remain enigmatic. Why it should be that the external world, in the naive, obvious sense, should concur with the regularity-postulates, with the mathematical and rule-bound expectations of investigative rationalism, no one knows." (p. 71)

He suggests (p. 72) that science works because God deigns to indulge it. But he insists that science and "theory" [5] have no place in literature and the arts, and presents as proof his statement that theories of art cannot be tested, and a list of famous works of literature he has read that are all different from each other (p. 75-76).

It's difficult to make sense of this section, but it is clear that Steiner doesn't think scientists are playing the game. Of course they violate the first rule, by calling some statements wrong, but it's much worse than that. He equates theory and scientific thought with computation (p. 83-84). Science and theory, for him, are mere calculation, the turning of a crank after the appropriate meat is dropped into the grinder. Science is not as rich as language: "No formalization is of an order adequate to the semantic mass and motion of literature, to the wealth of denotation, connotation, implicit reference, elision and tonal register which envelop saying what one means and meaning what one says or neither. There is a palpable sense in which one can see that the total explicative context, the total horizon of relevant values which surround the meaning of the meaning of any verbal or written utterance is that of the universe as human beings, who are beings of speech, inhabit it." (p. 83)

He does not address the question of how theories, which do predict reality, can be developed by playing the language game; his remarks in other sections insist, repeatedly and emphatically, that statements in language can never escape the circle of language to refer to reality. I think he is unaware that theories are things humans create by thinking. He also does not notice that he has explained the surprising power of science by saying it is less powerful than what he does when he thinks.

But he does not need to address these things. He has cited Wittgenstein; he can move on. His post-modernist colleagues will not ask whether he has used Wittgenstein "correctly", as long as he does it with passion and style. He goes home, turns on a switch, and the room is lit; he turns a faucet and water comes out. Science works its magic, as it should. It would be beneath his dignity and the nobility of his thoughts to concern himself with such brute mechanical concerns.

Post-modernism versus the environment

Consider the environments that the most-prominent post-modernist philosophers did their major work in:

Jean Baudrillard: Paris

Jean François Lyotard: Paris

Michel Foucault: Paris

Jacques Derrida: Paris

Jacques Lacan: Paris

Richard Rorty: Princeton

The post-modern mind-view is so hard to grasp because one immediately perceives that regular encounters with reality would shatter it. Like a hothouse orchid, it can survive only in one environment: a mind that does not interact with its environment. This is found only in city-dwellers with academic tenure in the humanities. The "freedom" they worship is not freedom to think or act, but freedom from consequences. They are free, quite literally, from reality.

For two things to interact means each has an effect on the other. The natural state of humans is one of constant interaction with the environment. Consider an early European settler of the American plains. The environment continually acts on him, forcing changes in his behavior: Winter is coming; he must gather firewood. It looks like a storm; he must put off his trip to town and gather the animals in the barn. He continually acts on the environment: He builds a cabin, digs an irrigation ditch, builds a fence. He must continually model and predict the world, and take steps to achieve favorable outcomes.

Now consider a tenured post-modernist literature professor in Paris. If it is cold, he turns up the thermostat. If he is hungry, he goes out into the street and exchanges little pieces of paper for food, at stores that are open 365 days a year, nearly 24 hours a day. He never has any need to model or predict the environment. He lives in an apartment, works in a school, and commutes there by train; the sum total of the environment's effect on him is to determine whether or not he takes an umbrella.

The main source of unpredictability in his life is the train he takes to work. Imagine our post-modernist waiting for a train that is to arrive at 8:25. At 8:26, it has not arrived. A non-postmodernist might say, "The schedule said the train would arrive at 8:25, but it was wrong." If he were a railroad employee, this would matter; he would have to realize the train had, in fact, not arrived, and figure out what had gone wrong and how to correct it. But a post-modernist is free instead to say, "The schedule says the train will arrive at 8:25. My eyes say the train did not arrive. Life is full of unresolvable contradictions." He is so occupied in this reverie that he fails to notice as the train pulls in, and everyone else on the platform boards. After it has left, he notices, and says, "Fascinating! For them, the train arrived. For me, it did not." Because he has no impact on the train, and because missing the train and being late has no impact on him (he has tenure), he is free to deny the objective reality of trains and their arrivals.

Likewise, he has no opportunity to influence the environment. His apartment is rented; he may not modify it. Every inch of the street he traverses is owned by someone else and subject to a thousand regulations concerning its use.

The only things that affect him are word games, with his colleagues, students, and the administration. Even gaining tenure and climbing the ladder to an administrative position are word games. The only effects he has are in word games. He does not inter-act with the real world beyond the word games.

This seems contradictory at first--aren't many post-modernists political activists? Yes, but they would never participate in politics on the local level, knocking on actual doors to get votes to build an actual local community center. They are interested only in grand political visions: Marxism, Revolution, Globalization, Humanity. Frederic Jameson describes post-modern politics as "without a party, without a homeland [patrie], without a national community . . . without co-citizenship, without adherence to a class." This is essential, because any would turn its own sword of deconstruction against itself. The post-modernist must engage in political word-play, but must never have any effect.

The self-consistency of post-modernism

Steiner and many other post-modernist philosophers have literally crazy beliefs, but they can hold those beliefs and be self-consistent, because they live in a world where other people deal with reality for them. Indeed, a scientist put in the shoes of a literary critic would fail miserably; he would play the language-game all wrong and be kicked out of the game. Once they're in the game, the natural human neural mechanisms that reinforce behavior that is rewarded will only strengthen their faith in the way they see the world.

[1] Post-modernists don't "mean" anything in the sense of believing it, or even ascribing objective meaning to it. But the sentences they utter convey the propositions they intend to convey. You can't ascribe the most-sympathetic interpretation you can imagine to anything a post-modernist says; that would nearly always mangle their meaning.

[2] He implies the Greeks believed Anselm's ontological argument for a monotheistic God (p. 88). He implies undecidable languages are languages in which every sentence is undecidable (p. 61). He claims to know the motives of Cro-Magnon cave painters (p. 211). On page 78 he says Aristotle's "Poetics" is a theory; on page 86 he insists it is not. He says critics should not write about literature other than the classics, then criticizes them for all writing about the classics. He says each sentence conveys infinite meaning; he says no sentence can convey any meaning at all. In the space of a few pages, he provides his second definition of all art in all media, criticizes the arrogance of people who create theories of literature, and then presents his third all-encompassing theory of what makes good art. He admits his own discipline has generated almost nothing but uncountable useless books and articles every year for hundreds of years, then dismisses experimental approaches to literature as "barren" after about five years and a hundred papers. The thesis of his book, that good art requires logocentrism, contradicts two of the primary claims he invokes to support it--that (1) we must accept the modernist critique of language, and (2) the modernist critique of language destroyed logocentrism.

[3] Note the resultant extreme concentration of power: Claims are evaluated not according to their truth, but according to whether members of elite institutions read and comment on them. Post-modernism is therefore evolutionarily fit as a meme in any elitist discipline, because it gives more power to those already in power.

[4] This is after Nietzsche, the ur-post-modernist, who said "God is dead; we have killed him", not "there is no God", and may have meant it.

[5] Steiner appears to think that a "theory" is a set of rules that can deterministically predict every last detail of the object under study (p. 77). A theory that claims to explain Hamlet, in his view, must be able to write Hamlet.

testing

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Love

(Folks say that if you blog, you should blog predictably.  I'm gonna try to blog every Thursday evening.)

They say the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow.  Or they used to; it’s become a bitter debate among linguists, worsened by Franz Boas’ status as a pioneer of gender-neutrality and by the fact that you can’t call people Eskimos anymore.

But anyway, they distinguish many types of snow.  If you’re going to walk five miles across ice fields to hunt seals when it’s fifty degrees below, it matters.

But 50 terms for snow would hardly be excessive.  thesaurus.com lists 52 synonyms for the adjective angry in English.  And 53 synonyms for the verb hit.

It lists only 18 synonyms for the verb love.  I’ve used thesaurus.com for years, and that’s the fewest synonyms I remember seeing for any word.[page_break]

If love is important to us, why have we got so few words for it?  Even the “synonyms” we have are no good: admire, cherish, choose, go for.

We haven’t got a word to distinguish romantic love from motherly love or brotherly love.  We haven’t got a verb for ‘lust’ or ‘friendship’.  We have a shocking paucity of words for love.  So few that ‘love’ is barely a word.  It's used in so many ways that it hardly means anything at all.

If the Eskimo Inuit, Yupik, and various other tribes have many words for snow because it’s important, does that mean love is unimportant to us?

No; just the opposite:  We have only one word for love because it’s so important that it’s dangerous.

When you talk about snow, you want people to know precisely what kind of snow you’re talking about.  When you talk about love, you want people not to know what you’re talking about.

Imagine you’re a man, and your girlfriend or wife asks you, “Do you love me?”  This is a question that is best answered without thinking.  You are, as stipulated, a man, so odds are your greatest act of introspection into your feelings was two years ago when you finally decided to switch from Busch to Yuengling.  How strong does liking have to be, to be “love”?  It’s not like she’s a football team. Let’s be honest:  there are many women out there, and only one Pittsburgh Steelers.  It’s not a fair comparison.

Now imagine there are 50 synonyms for love, and each night, she asks you about one of them.

Awkward.

If we named as many varieties of love as we’ve named ways of moving slowly, I suspect the word for the predominant romantic emotion that most women feel when they say “love” would be one that most men have never felt.  And wouldn’t that make for some interesting late-night conversations?

But that’s not an explanation.  If there’s an international male conspiracy to obliterate synonyms for ‘love’, I wasn’t told about it.

(Though that’s just what I would say, isn’t it?)

I think ‘love’ is like ‘God’ with a capital ‘G’.  When there were many gods, people ascribed different qualities to each.  But after Plato said ‘god’ had a single abstract essence, and Jesus said that essence was perfection, every good thing became part of God’s definition.  (Hence at one point in time, some philosophers believed God must be a perfect sphere.)

So every good and positive human emotion got sucked into the word ‘love’.  Still, that doesn’t explain why any more-specific terms disappeared.  And it’s still suspiciously convenient.

Magica Madoka

No cow is too sacred for me to piss on.  I’ve insulted Shakespeare, Hemingway, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Philip K. Dick.  Now I’ve finally worked up the courage to take on

Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion

There are a lot of things to like about this movie!  The animation is continually fresh and compelling, maybe even more so than in the TV series.  The characters aren’t developed any more from the original, and the main character (Homura, not Madoka) is even taken down a notch and made into more of a plot device, but they’re still good characters.  The plot builds on the fine structure of Madoka Magica, and it has three nice twists. In fact, this movie has everything going for it, except for the climax which everything else in the movie exists only to support. That part sucks.

But it sucks in an interesting and illustrative way.[page_break]

You can write a story, like a computer program, top-down or bottom-up.  Top-down means starting with the big picture:  the themes, the character arc, the target audience demographics.  Bottom-up means starting on the ground, with little pieces:  a lamppost in a forest (the image CS Lewis claimed began the Narnia chronicles), a hobbit-hole.

The top is where ideas have significance. The ground is where the concrete events that inspire emotions in monkeys happen.  Writers call the top-down writers “plotters” and the bottom-up writers “pantsers” (writing by the seat of their pants). (They probably call them something different in England.)

Stories written bottom-up have characters and story that develop naturally and feel real, but they often wander without focus and might not seem to have much of a point.  Stories written top-down have a tight plot structure, and a theme, if the author wants one, but their characters are often wooden and their events feel plotted.

Animators are visually-oriented people.  They think of scenes, or even of exactly how somebody turns his head when startled or jumps when she’s happy.  They’re trained to think this way; Walt Disney said every movement by every character must convey that character’s personality.

That’s why films made entirely by animators, like Double Rainboom or the short films of the Quay brothers, are beautiful and suck.  They start at the bottom and never look up.

If you start at the top, you’ve gotta connect to real, believable situations and events at the bottom. And that’s where PMMMtMPIII makes its epic, face-grinding fail.

The climax, where the story reaches out and grabs you, has to connect the top and the bottom.  Hamlet’s long-brooded rage bursts out in a sudden bloodbath, re-asking the question whether ‘tis nobler to suffer outrageous fortune, or by opposing end it.  Aslan is crucified killed, then resurrected, conveying Lewis’ theme that the Bible is true.  Darth Vader is what, you don’t know?.  The plotter can studiously tie together scenes and plot points according to the advice of Jack Bickham, but it won’t make anybody feel anything unless somewhere among the things on the bottom being connected together is a beating, bleeding heart.

PMMMtMPIII didn’t have that.

I know it didn’t have that because the climax was obviously written entirely, 100% top-down. The writer said, “At the climax, Homura has to die because it’s the only way to save Madoka, and Madoka has to die because it’s the only way to save Homura, and then the Power of Friendship will overcome all of the anybody having to die for anybody, because that is the most-emotional thing possible!” Then he spun out a bunch of Trekkish technobabble to pretend that was a coherent plot instead of three mutually-inconsistent statements.

The problem isn’t the technobabble or the logic.  The problem is the climax was planned entirely in the abstract and has no connection to real events or necessities. The abstract conditions the climax was supposed to meet were not even theoretically possible of being realized in any concrete reality, but even if they had been possible, the climax still would have sucked, because there was no blood in it.  There was no concrete image or event that inspired the climax.  Only the abstract idea that these girls really really loved each other.

That’s not a story.  That’s a mission statement.  It didn’t make sense because there was no ‘there’ there, in the same way that an action scene description might make no sense if the author never bothered to figure out where everybody was standing.

If you’re a huge anime nerd, you’re probably already in the comment box typing furiously: “... but the exact wording of Homura’s wish in episode 10 means that…”  Just stop. I don’t give a shit.  I don’t care if you can cobble up a post-hoc logical explanation.  I’m not even going to talk about the third plot twist where Homura becomes a demon (which the writer complained bitterly about being forced to write), because the movie had already crashed and burned by that point.  Nobody in the world watched that movie, followed the logic of your brilliant explanation and understood as a consequence the true tragedy of PMMMtMPIII.  No; they followed the tears and shouting of the magical girls and understood the only thing that the writer had understood:  These girls are all willing to die for each other.  And then they cried.

Or not.

Thursday thoughts: My Princeton interview

That Princeton fan-fiction course finally posted my interview on their blog… 2 weeks after the course ended, so nobody read it.  But you can!  It was posted here, but no point going there.  You can’t leave comments there, and the slightly-improved version is right here:

AN INTERVIEW WITH BAD HORSE

by Evan Cole, Cara Hedlund, A. J. Ohiwerei, and Chet Reyen

Thank you very much for agreeing to interview us! We’re fans of your work – the “The Magician and the Detective” was assigned in our class as required reading, and we thoroughly enjoyed it – and we were looking to get your perspective on both the FiM [My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic] fandom and fanfiction writing in general.

Cara: What is your process for writing fanfiction?

Sometimes my starting idea is something one character and no one else would do (“It’s a Trap!”, “No Regrets”, “The Quiet One”, “Fluttershy’s Night Out”). Sometimes they’re character-independent propositions or “high concepts” (“Interior Design Alicorn”, the central analogy in “Keepers”). Sometimes they’re just moods (“All the Pretty Pony Princesses”) or plots (“The Mailmare,” stolen from David Brin). “Pony Play” began with the mood that Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body left me in. “Elpis” was a reaction against Harlan Ellison’s “The Deathbird.”

I think the best ideas are two or more of these things simultaneously, inextricably. “Experience” is a concept that applies to only one character (the one pony who loves sunrises the most can never really experience them herself). “Corpse Bride” is a plot that hinges on Twilight’s arrogance. “Bedtime Stories” is a subversion gimmick, but also a character. “Moments” began with a mood of desperate tenacity that’s half heroism and half Twilight’s obsessive-compulsive neuroticism.

For long stories I write an outline. For tricky stories I may start at the end and write backwards to the beginning.  When I start, I know the plot, but usually not the themes.  If I’m lucky, a theme emerges.  “Moments” turned out to be about Twilight believing she couldn’t be a princess or a mother. “Magician and Detective” turned out to be about pride, racism, and self-loathing. “Mailmare” turned out to be partly about pragmatism versus morality. “Alicorn Cider” turned out to be about… feudalism, I think.

I do want my stories to be about something. Very old-fashioned of me. My opinions on what makes something a story, as opposed to just a narrative or something published in The Atlantic Monthly, are like those expressed by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their excellent (really, you should read them instead of this) books Understanding Fiction and An Approach to Literature: Fiction is an imaginative enactment of life which increases our knowledge of the possibilities of the self. A piece of fiction represents the writer’s ideas and feelings about life and its meaning. A short story should usually have a plot and a theme, where parts of the plot symbolize parts of the theme. We inhabit the characters, feel the plot as they push on and are pushed by it, and through the plot, we feel the theme that it symbolizes. (Some good stories don’t fit this pattern. Many bad ones don’t.)

Tony Earley said it more simply: “A story is about a thing, and another thing.” See “The story isn’t over when you wrap up the plot.”

When I finish the “first draft” (after rewriting most sentences several times), I send it to a few people and hope one of them can tell me what it’s about. Once I know, I rewrite it. I may set it aside for weeks until I figure out what it’s missing, or how to fix some structural problem. Sometimes I never do.

Between stories, the idea that I could type interesting words about fake people seems absurd. Samuel Johnson and Robert Heinlein said that anyone who writes for anything but money is a fool. But nowadays, the person who writes for money is also a fool. Ipso facto, writers are fools.  I know writing is impossible; I try not to write; somehow, like a wino waking up in the gutter, I always find myself doing it again.

I never sit down to a blank page with no idea what to write. The story has to make me write it. I don’t get writer’s block. I get writer’s fork, when I have to choose one story path and set aside all the others.  I'm always either knitting or unravelling.  If you're lost in the woods and don't know how to go forward, you did something wrong; go backwards.  (Unless you're actually and not metaphorically lost in the woods; then you should probably sit down and wait for someone to find you.)

I don’t “write for myself”. The last time I did that, I ended up with three pages of Celestia lecturing Twilight on the connections between deism, Buddhism, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Christianity, and BDSM.  In fan-fiction, it’s just you and the readers, and you know how many read your work and what they think of it. It forced me to admit that I want a lot of people to like my stories. I want it enough to choose ideas they might like over ideas they won’t. I’m a popular writer now on fimfiction, but only because I once sat down and asked, “What can I write that people will read?”, and came up with “Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy” and “The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade, Interior Design Alicorn”. I prostituted myself for popularity, and it was a lot of fun, and afterwards some people hung around to read my other stories.

(I said that I don’t write for myself, and that the story has to make me write it. These sound contradictory, but it doesn’t feel that way.  I’ve internalized my goal to write for others enough that stories compel me more when others might like them.)

Evan: Despite mostly being based in the FiM universe, your works display a diversity of writing styles. Do you edit your works to specifically fit certain modes of writing after completion, or do you find yourself able to channel your style of choice even while working on the initial draft?

I check afterwards  that my style is consistent, just as I check each character’s voice, but I need to find the style early on. Sometimes the style guides the story more than its seed idea does (Moments, Pony Play, Old Friends, Bedtime Stories, Elpis).

Having a personal style is overrated. Nobody read Charles Dickens or Henry James for their style. Having a personal style only became a big deal in prose in the early 20th century, when modernists decided reality was unknowable, and so art should be about art, not about the world. Becoming famous became a matter of contributing not great art, but a new style. (This began earlier in painting, probably because of photography.) Ironically, this made it hard for art to progress, because any style distinctive enough to make one famous is too idiosyncratic to learn from. If you borrowed Van Gogh’s or Hemingway’s style, people would say “Nice Van Gogh parody” or “Nice Hemingway pastiche” without being able to notice whether your painting or story was good or bad. If it was un-ironically good, that would make it bad.

As a result, the true importance of style is underrated. You do need the right style for the story. Different stories require different characters with different voices. Style is the voice of the story itself. The prose writer who has only one style can tell only one kind of story. Think Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy. They’re great stories, but there’s a sameness to them. The more distinctive the style, the less that can be done with it. I love Lovecraft’s mythos, but you only need to read one Lovecraft story. They’re all basically the same.

The fetishizing of style has conspired with the agendas of literary critics and publishers to focus our attention on writers with narrowly-constrained minds, like Hemingway, [1] Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, or Philip K. Dick, who wrote beautiful stories but circled obsessively around the same few themes over and over. They can be more easily summarized, shelved, and sold than Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, or Karen Joy Fowler.

Bruce Lee allegedly said of martial arts, “The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all,” meaning he knows and can use many styles at will. The architect Bjarke Ingels said that your style is the sum of your inhibitions.

Cara: Is there any writing you’ve produced that you’ve been disappointed with stylistically, or that you wish you could edit now that it’s up publicly?

Maybe “Friends, With Occasional Magic.” “Mailmare” has some flat, sparse sections. “Happy Ending” is dry. But those bother me only because the story and the style sag in the same place.

I often do edit my old stories. Sometimes I incorporate suggestions from readers.

Chet: When you decide to write a work of fanfiction, do you generally create a narrative scenario based on the world you want to write about, or do you instead pick a particular facet of the source material to focus on? For instance, in The Magician and the Detective, I found the discussion of ‘cutie marks’ as they related to Holmes, as well as his interaction with magic, to be particularly interesting consequences of the existence of the character within the world of FiM. Do concepts such as these motivate you to write specific stories, or are they simply natural functions of transposing characters into alternate universes?

More the latter for me. They’re the things that mold themselves around the story once I’ve cast it in the FiM universe. I’ve asked some authors to de-ponify their stories for a non-pony anthology, and it turns out that the better a story is, the more tightly everything in it holds together, and the harder it is to de-ponify.

Evan: Have you noticed any particular trends within the themes, style, or content of FiM fanfiction as the years have passed and the fandom has evolved? What about fanfiction in general? Do you tend to adapt your own writing to match these trends, or has your artistic vision remained largely constant?

I can’t think of any definite trends. I don’t read in other fandoms because I don’t know how to find the good stuff in the slush pile. I don’t think I have an artistic vision beyond wanting to make my readers cry the sweet, sweet brony tears that I feed on.

A.J: In your blog post about Fallout: Equestria, you mention that published books are required to endorse certain lies and omit certain truths while also abiding by a set of rules about plot structure that can never be broken. In your own fanfiction writing, do you find yourself defying these conventions in the way that Fallout: Equestria does? If so, in what ways and why? Do you think that fanfiction is a medium that generally abides by these conventions or subverts them?

I tried to in “Mortality Report”, in which Celestia’s immortality forces her to see how being nice to today’s ponies is cruel to their descendants, but most readers subverted my subversion. In “Mailmare”, the good (save the world) and the just (punish the guilty) turn out to be mutually exclusive. But usually, just writing a good conventional story is hard enough for me.

But if you choose to either observe or subvert a convention, you’ve already yielded to it.  You’re still bound by its assumptions.  Few people can escape these chains of thought intentionally; it almost has to be done out of ignorance.

For example, Tolkien said, “A fantasy world is one in which moral and magical law have the force of physical law.” (See my post “Fantasy as deontology”.) If you act virtuously, a fantasy world’s karmic forces will conspire to give you victory in the end. That’s the point of classic fantasy. They’re all about that one scene near the end where Frodo lets Gollum go, or Luke switches off his targeting computer, and the virtuous fool defeats the pragmatist.

Contemporary writers may subvert that trope, writing gritty fantasies where awful things happen to good guys, or everything is shades of grey. But to do so they must assume that the world should have karmic justice, and so their subversions are cynical, bitter, and post-modern.

Fallout: Equestria never invoked that logocentric expectation of the world, and so went beyond modernism in a way that post-modernism never could, just by honestly not caring about its concerns. Many fan-fiction writers would say, if they thought about it, that the two-thousand year old artistic tradition of seeking the logos, and the one-hundred year old tradition of angsting about its disappearance, are equally silly. They never expected there to be a logos in the first place.

Fan-fiction writers aren’t just writing outside the box. They may not know there is a box. They’re re-inventing literature almost from the ground up, not by theory, but often blindly, by Darwinian evolution. They birth hundreds of thousands of hopeful monsters, some few of which crawl, swim, or fly in strange new ways.

Evan: As a fanfiction writer who writes primarily in the FiM fandom, why do you think that the franchise has succeeded to such a great extent in an age group that was not meant as its target market? Typical reasons given for FiM’s success with older fans focus on its intelligent writing and mature themes, as well as Hasbro’s healthy relationship with and encouragement of the “brony” community. Do you agree that these aspects of FiM are what has made the series so popular among adults?

I wouldn’t call the show’s themes “mature” if that means “too complex for children to understand.”  But I wouldn’t call shows made for adults mature, either. There’s a very limited market for mature stories, maybe not enough to support a TV show. We sacrificed the word “mature” years ago just to have a shorthand for sex and violence, and nobody complained. [2]

My post “Why the New My Little Pony is 20% Cooler” suggests some story-based reasons for its popularity. These include:

– not wasting (much) time fighting villains, who suck up screen time without developing anybody’s character

– characters who each have lives, goals, careers, and problems of their own

– rejecting the Aristotelian idea that characters have “strengths” and “flaws”, in favor of the idea that characters fit or fail to fit their qualities into a social context

Another reason is that adult shows today are edgy, ironic, and full of derisive humor. It’s hard to find something nice. Sometimes South Park just isn’t funny enough to make up for the pain of watching it. Sometimes a guy gets back from his third tour in Iraq and just wants to watch ponies for a while.

I think anime paved the way for MLP. Japanese culture lets men appreciate cuteness. It’s given us a weird blend of cuteness and violence for years, in anime like Pokemon, One Piece, or Madoka Magica (an anime about schoolgirls who giggle, wear frilly clothes, angst about their crushes, and die horribly in magical fights to the death).

Thanks for getting this far!

[1] I originally included Flannery O’Connor in this list because nearly all of her stories that I’ve read are about some person who acts very foolishly and then either dies or causes someone else’s death at the end, in a sudden final orgasm of despair.  I took her off the list because her reputation is very high and she’s written a lot of things I haven’t read.  Your thoughts?

[2] I didn’t want to get into the question of whether Hasbro’s relationship with bronies is “healthy”.

Anonymous Dreams comments

Several different sources converged onto this story.

The first and most important was Alfred Bester’s astonishing story [url=www.lunsfordnet.com/get/pdf/26205]“5,271,009”[/url], which I read, gosh, 30 years ago.  It’s about an artist who’s gone mad, regressed to childhood, and believes that his dreams are the source of his artistic inspiration.  It’s also the story of a mysterious art connoisseur with mysterious powers, who was the catalyst for this artist’s madness and now seeks to restore him to sanity.  It turns out, in the end, that this mysterious man is exiled from his home world for his own childish dreams, and helps this artist out of sympathy--though his help comes with a great cost.

The mysterious man leads the artist through a series of dreams.  The artist has only childish wish-fulfilment dreams.  The mysterious man starts taking over all of the characters in all of his dreams, Being John Malkovich-style, and disrupts them in humorous ways.  I ripped this scene off:

The General Assembly was filled when Halsyon entered. Hundreds of tall, gaunt, bitter diplomats applauded as he made his way to the podium, still dressed in convict plasti-clothes. Halsyon looked around resentfully.

"Yes," he grated. "You all applaud. You all revere me now; but where were you when I was

framed, convicted, and jailed ... an innocent man? Where were you then?"

"Halsyon, forgive us. God damn!" they shouted.

"I will not forgive you, I suffered for seventeen years in the Grssh mines. Now it's your turn to

suffer."

"Please, Halsyonl"

"Where are your experts? Your professors? Your specialists? Where are your electronic

calculators? Your super thinking machines? Let them solve the mystery of the Grssh."

"They can't, old whiskey and soda.  Entre nous.  They're stopped cold. Save us, Halsyon.  Auf wiedersehen."

Judith took his arm. "Not for my sake, Jeff," she whispered."I know you'll never forgive me for the injustice I did you. But for the sake of all the other girls in the galaxy who love and are loved."

"I still love you, Judy."

"I've always loved you, Jeff."

"Okay. I didn't want to tell them but you talked me into it." Halsyon raised his hand for silence. In

the ensuing hush he spoke softly. "The secret is this, gentlemen. Your calculators have assembled data to ferret out the secret weakness of the Grssh. They have not been able to find any. Consequently you have assumed that the Grssh have no secret weakness.  That was a wrong assumption."

The General Assembly held its breath.

"Here is the secret.  You should have assumed there was something wrong with the calculators."

"God damn!" the General Assembly cried. "Why didn't we think of that? God damn!"

"And I know what's wrong!

There was a deathlike hush.

The door of the General Assembly burst open. Professor Deathhush, tall, gaunt, bitter, tottered in.

"Eureka!" he cried. "I've found it. Goddamn.Something wrong with the thinking machines.Three comes after two, not before."

The General Assembly broke into cheers. Professor Deathhush was seized and pummeled happily. Bottles were opened. His health was drunk. Several medals were pinned on him. He beamed.

"Hey!" Halsyon called. "That was my secret. I'm the one man who on account of a mysterious mutant strain in my—"

The ticker tape began pounding: ATTENTION. ATTENTION. HUSHENKOV IN MOSCOW REPORTS DEFECT IN CALCULATORS. 3 COMES AFTER 2 AND NOT BEFORE. REPEAT: AFTER (UNDERSCORE) NOT BEFORE.

A postman ran in. "Special delivery from Doctor Lifehush at Caltech. Says something's wrong with the thinking machines.Three comes after two, not before."

A telegraph boy delivered a wire: THINKING MACHINE WRONG STOP TWO COMES BEFORE THREE STOP NOT AFTER STOP.VON DREAMHUSH, HEIDELBERG.

A bottle was thrown through the window. It crashed on the floor revealing a bit of paper on which was scrawled: Did you ever stop to thine that maibe the nomber 3 comes after 2 insted of in front? Down with the Grish. Mr. Hush-Hush.

Halsyon buttonholed Judge Field."What the hell is this?" he demanded. "I thought I was the one man in the world with that secret."

"Himmel Herr Gott,” Judge Field replied impatiently. "You are all alike. You dream you are the one man with a secret, the one man with a wrong, the one man with an injustice, with a girl, without a girl, with or without anything. God damn. You bore me,you one-man dreamers. Get lost.”

I didn’t capture the humor in that scene, nor the general humor of Bester’s story.

The second source was my dissatisfaction with the Biblical God.  Christians make a big deal out of God’s “love,” yet that love ends up tossing most people into a furnace for all eternity.  It seems to me that the guy who designed humans shouldn’t be shocked and horrified and blame the humans when they act like he designed them to act.  And it seems to me a real loving relationship would be one that likes or at least accepts something about the beloved, rather than one that is entirely conditional on the beloved adopting the correct attitude of respect towards the lover, and which declares that the “beloved” is so worthless that he “must be born again”, that he is so worthless that the very best thing even an almighty God can do with him is crumple him up, throw him out, and start from scratch.

I don’t want to start an argument about that right now; my point is that I wanted to depict a better God, one who exemplified a God-like love.  That’s where the story began:  with a scene of a brony, dreaming a horrible rape fantasy about Luna, and getting caught at it by Luna, and her reprimanding him gently, but not being surprised or shocked, and then telling him, right then, that she still loves him.

The third source was, of course, the featured box.  I did research for this story.  I read second-person Anonymous stories.  They weren’t all that bad!  In fact, the Anon stories by darf and Crowley were a step up from the usual featured-box fare (though the one I read by Crowley makes me think there might be somethin’ wrong with that boy).  The soldier-in-Equestria crossovers might have been a more just target, but would’ve made a boring story.

Luna enunciates several “lessons” or “morals” throughout the story:

Dreams are meant to be shared with others and made real.  Her view is that dreams are the motive force in people’s lives; the dream must come first, the reality follow.

One can have only one dream.  The idea that you can have enough time and energy to pursue multiple dreams, or that you can pursue other dreams as mere entertainment that are rooted in a fundamentally different way of looking at the world, are things most people take for granted, yet in my experience seem to be false.

Shame is a useful fiction.  This needs explication, but roughly, Luna has seen into everyone’s heart, and the game-theoretic implication--mylittleeconomy could tell you all about it--is that while she still encourages people to spurn those whose shameful thoughts are exposed in waking life, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do the same to everyone whose shameful thoughts she sees in their dreams.  The usual social conventions don’t apply with her.  That is how she’s able to love from a God’s perspective.  That’s the prompt tie-in, BTW.

“Do as thou wilt” is the one true law.  That is, subject to some qualifications, not my own “belief” (I don’t believe in beliefs; I believe in statements that improve predictive accuracy), but a view which I think most people would be better off following than the dictates of any church.  All organisms naturally want to do what is, by some measure, good.  Humans and ponies naturally want to do what is good for the herd.  It’s certainly unpopular and useful enough to put it into a story, for the reader’s consideration.

The simplest summary of the qualifications I impose is that it’s meant for well-socialized humans, living under conditions in which group selection is a significant evolutionary force, in a state of evolutionary equilibrium with their environment (so that their instincts are guaranteed to be socially good).

I like to imagine Celestia as the yang, the bright encouraging leader everyone loves, and Luna as the yin, the keeper of dark necessary unpopular truths, so it seemed right to put those words in her mouth.  I was shocked and dismayed when I Googled “Do as thou wilt” to check the grammar and found it was a quote from Aleister Crowley, a generally unlikeable man.  But the brief reading I did on Thelema, his religion, indicates that he meant pretty much the same thing by it as I do, and then I was pleased that it had happened to fall to Luna, the only speaker of early modern English, to utter that line.

It is therefore not wrong to devote oneself entirely to pleasure, at least not in certain circumstances.  The modern world does not need everyone to pull together just to beat down the barbarians, as they did in the middle ages.  There was more on this that there was no space or place for in the story.  And who the hell is Luna, with her eternal youth and her crown, to tell some nobody to buck up and face reality?  Some people have the short ends of all the sticks, and it’s cruel to deny them the little pleasure they can get.

But, if your pursuit of pleasure seems unworthy and childish, it probably isn’t what what you really want, because “do as thou wilt” often works backwards.  It doesn’t necessarily mean “Do whatever you want and that’s okay”; one interpretation is “you already want, on some level, to do the things you ought to.”

The first thing I realized was wrong with the story, the morning after submitting it, was that I didn’t clarify why Luna cared.  A reader could easily say, “Here Luna is saying, ‘Do as thou wilt,’ and yet Luna is the one who became the Nightmare and nearly destroyed Equestria.”

Yes, that was the point.  Luna, like the reader, was following baby dreams, not realizing what was truly important to her, and the consequences were terrible.  She wants to keep him from making the same mistake she did.

The next thing I realized was that I’d split the point where the reader rides Luna from the point where she says she loves him, and maybe that diminished the impact.  I don’t know.  I also toned that rodeo scene way down.  I think it should be much more sexualized, maybe enough to get a mature rating.  (And ditch the lava; what was that for?)

I got a lot of good feedback pointing out other problems.

>>44907024490702 : this story’s target audience is people who read base second-person power fantasies, but these people are unlikely to be able to really understand the ending and cobble it all together.

I think the hard-to-understand things are secondary.  There’s that long bit at the end about shame, but that’s not the main point.  The hard part is showing, not telling.  Maybe the story can be easier to understand if it’s longer.

>>44917344491734  I think he did a good job evoking the feelings he was aiming for.  But here's the thing:  In doing so, he produced a story that I did not particularly enjoy reading.

That’s a problem.

>>44931474493147  Add that to the fact that nothing that “I” did is even remotely close to what I would do, and we have a story where I am completely incapable of relating to “myself.”

Somebody made a similar comment, to the effect that the “you” was kind of a jerk, and TD commented that his dreams were too infantile to be interesting.

I think I can make the protagonist a lot more likeable.  That’s the most-fixable problem with this story.  Maybe I can even hit TD up for advice on making more-sophisticated power fantasies.

Brooks & Warren on Showing & Telling

I say 1 A.M. Tuesday still counts as Monday.  :derpytongue2:

I think I’m going to post part of the introduction to each chapter of Understanding Fiction by Brooks & Warren, 3rd edition (1979), to summarize their main ideas about fiction.  This one is a digression, so you get it out of order.  In the intro to chapter 3, “What Character Reveals”, they talk about showing versus telling while talking about characters.

(BTW, this intro to chapter 3 is completely new in the third edition (5 pages, vs. 1 in the 1st ed.)  They revised everything in the 3rd edition, even the discussions of the same stories, although those generally make the same points.)

        Warning:  They use the term “indirect” to mean “showing” and “direct” to mean “telling” when they talk about describing a character, and “direct” to mean “showing” and “indirect” to mean “telling” when they talk about dialogue. It makes some sense, since they use “indirectly describing” as a double-negative. They mean “indirectly summarizing”, which means “indirectly not directly depicting”, or “directly depicting”.

How shall the author present his character? Directly, with a summary of his traits and characteristics [telling], or indirectly (that is, through dialogue and action [showing])?  The very nature of fiction suggests that the second method is its characteristic means, yet direct presentation is constantly used in fiction, often effectively.  Much depends upon the underlying purpose of the story and much depends upon matters of scope and scale.  If the author made every presentation of character indirectly, insisting that each character gradually unfold himself through natural talk and gesture and action, the procedure might become intolerably boring.  “The Necklace” indicates how direct presentation—and even summary presentation—can be properly and effectively used.  (Look back at the first three paragraphs of this story on page 66.)  But when he comes to the significant scenes of the story, the author of “The Necklace” discards summary in favor of dramatic presentation.

The danger of direct presentation is that it tends to forfeit the vividness of drama and the reader’s imaginative participation. Direct, descriptive presentation works best, therefore, with rather flat and typical characters, or as a means to get rapidly over more perfunctory materials.  When direct presentation of character becomes also direct comment on a character, the author may find himself “telling” us what to feel and think rather than “rendering” a scene for our imaginative participation.  In “The Furnished Room,” for example, O. Henry tends to “editorialize” on the hero’s motives and beliefs, and constant plucking at the reader’s sleeve and nudging him to sympathize with the hero’s plight may become so irritating that the whole scene seems falsified.  Yet in D. H. Lawrence’s “Tickets, Please,” we shall see that direct commentary--and even explicit interpretation of the characters’ motives--can on occasion be effectively used by an author.

…

An author’s selection of modes of character presentation will depend upon a number of things. His decision on when to summarize traits or events, on when to describe directly, and on when to allow the character to express his feelings through dialogue and action, will depend upon the general end of the story and upon the way in which the action of the story is to be developed…

Indirect discourse [telling], like [“direct”] character summary and description, is a quicker way of getting over the ground, and in fiction has its very important uses.  Notice, for example, in “War” that the husband’s explanation of why his wife is to be pitied is indirect discourse: “And he felt it his duty to explain… that the poor woman was to be pitied, for the war was taking away her only son.” But the speeches of the old man who argues for the sublimity of sacrificing one’s son for one’s country are given as direct discourse. The importance of the old man’s speeches to the story, the need for dramatic vividness, the very pace of the story--all call for direct discourse.

Pixar's Inside Out

I just saw Pixar's Inside Out.  I think it's a fantastic movie.  It has 98% approval from critics on rotten tomatoes.

It had an unpromising opening, with a close-up of a baby girl.  I'm a tough audience for movies that rely on the cuteness of babies.  Fortunately the girl inside her was cuter--at least, one of them was.  The movie is about the homunculi who live in our brains and make our decisions for us.

So it opens with weirdness and wonders, and an introduction of a strange cast, then quickly establishes the initial conflict: The girl whose head we're (literally) in has to move, from Minnesota (why be more specific than that?  it's Minnesota) to San Francisco.  Several scenes show why she's unhappy in her new home, and then we get to the second conflict, which is that the little people mess up somehow, and her emotions start shutting down as she goes thru a crisis.  I wish that the second conflict mapped onto a cause in the girl's life or choices, but you can't have everything.

Popular scriptwriting advice today, which is probably based on something Syd Field wrote, is that each script has to have 3 plot points, at exactly one-fourth, one-half, and three-fourths of the way thru the movie.  Some readers expect to see these points on pages 25, 50, and 75 of a 100-word script, which is stupid, but that's what I hear they teach now.

I think the people who claim this and watch a movie stopwatch in hand (this is a good idea if you want to write) tend to grab whatever big event happened closest to their desired marks and call them the plot points.  I think this movie had 4 or 5 main plot points, not 3; the first 2 happened pretty quickly; and the "realization" point (where the main character realizes what the story is actually about) didn't happen until somewhere shortly before the final plot point, IIRC.

Pretty early on I started feeling sorry for Sadness, and then wondering what they were going to do with this character.  They went pretty much where I thought they should with that, which of course means they did exactly the right thing.  :)

It was a lot of goofy yet not meaningless fun, and a couple of moments so poignant it’s hard to believe they’re in an American movie.  The scene where Joy is surrounded by once-treasured childhood memories, silently replaying themselves as they fade and then crumble into dust, is something I’d have expected from Miyazaki.  The one soon after that--you’ll know it when you see it--is the saddest scene Pixar’s ever made, or at least would have been with better character development.  It’s short of Old Yeller territory, but still something most people won’t want their 4-year-olds to see.

The film’s message is pretty daring for a kid’s movie.  I think the best recommendation for the film is the number of hateful 1-star reviews on IMDB.com from parents angry that their children were exposed to ideas:

This movie intends to chip away at the innocence of little girls, forcing them to mentally confront things which they should not be thinking about...   I expected to see more negative symbolism and/or propaganda, and there's a hint of feminist propaganda, but mostly it just is what it is, a movie designed to MIND-RAPE your children! This movie was made by the same "liberal" types that want to teach Kindergarteners about anal sex in public schools...

PLEASE! Don't expose your children to this! PS - My children were not exposed to this filth because I have taken the precaution of pre-screening everything my children view…

Is it a kids’ movie, though?  Eight and up, sure.  Some of the jokes are only for adults.  Younger kids might not understand what’s going on, and might find some parts pretty upsetting.

It's funny, though probably not as funny as Toy Story.  Its one great failing is that it has no memorable characters.  But it has a fast pace, and some big ideas and metaphors.  Toy Story gave kids a lot of funny lines and a toy merchandise bonanza.  Inside Out gives them a different way of thinking about people and about their emotions.

The Mystery of Mysteries

Mysteries. Everybody thinks they know what they are. No one does.

Scholastic’s genre chart says:

Purpose: To engage in and enjoy solving a puzzle. Explore moral satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) at resolution. Consider human condition and how to solve or avoid human problems.

study.com says:

The purpose of a mystery novel is to solve a puzzle and to create a feeling of resolution with the audience.

education.com says:

The plot usually begins with action, intrigue, or suspense to hook the reader. Then, through a series of clues, the protagonist eventually solves the mystery, sometimes placing himself or herself in jeopardy by facing real or perceived danger. All information in the plot (clues) could be important in solving the case, yet in some cases, the author presents misleading information (a red herring) to challenge the reader and the detective. With foreshadowing often used to heighten the suspense, there usually will be several motives for the crime, lots of plot twists, and plenty of alibis that must be investigated. The solution to the crime must come from known information, not a surprise villain introduced in the last chapter of the book; however, the clues must be cleverly planted so that the mystery is not solved too easily or too soon

PBS says:

The formula Conan Doyle helped establish for the classic English mystery usually involves several predictable elements: a "closed setting" such as an isolated house or a train; a corpse; a small circle of people who are all suspects; and an investigating detective with extraordinary reasoning powers. As each character in the setting begins to suspect the others and the suspense mounts, it comes to light that nearly all had the means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime. Clues accumulate, and are often revealed to the reader through a narrator like Watson, who is a loyal companion to the brilliant detective. The detective grasps the solution to the crime long before anyone else, and explains it all to the "Watson" at the end.

Wrong. All wrong![page_break]

Sherlock Holmes Stories are About Sherlock Holmes

I started thinking about this because I’ve been reading a lot of books on writing, and I keep seeing Sherlock Holmes used as an example of a shallow character. I think the people who do this must not have read many Sherlock Holmes stories. Their reasoning appears to be thus:

Genre fiction does not have interesting characters.

Mystery is the simplest genre, and so should require the simplest characters.

Sherlock Holmes is the best-known fictional detective.

Therefore, Sherlock Holmes is the simplest of characters.

Sherlock would not approve. :trixieshiftright:

Sherlock Holmes is the original source of fan-fiction. People are still obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. And it takes only a passing familiarity with either the original stories, or with the fan-fiction, to see that what fascinates people with Sherlock Holmes stories is Sherlock Holmes.

Because I seldom read mysteries other than Sherlock Holmes (since, as we all know, they have very simple characters), I thought for a long time that this accusation of simplicity was uniquely unjust to Sherlock Holmes. Then I remembered Monk, television’s obsessive-compulsive detective. He was another exception. And Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton’s soft-spoken detective. And Sam Spade. And Rick Blaine from Casablanca. Even The Pink Panther’s Jacques Clouseau. Almost every detective I knew was an exception—and all in similar ways!

What are Genres?

Let’s back up for a moment. What are genres? Why is there a genre called Western in the bookstore, when the world’s output of Westerns today is smaller than fimfiction’s output of ponyfic?

I think that every genre originates around a central narrative about a way of looking at the world. If I use that as a definition of genre, a lot of things become genres that we currently think of as styles, like Medieval painting, romantic poetry, and Nazi propaganda posters.

Once a genre is established, it mutates and splinters into sub-genres. It gets subverted, meaning its message is reversed. It gets parasitized, its subjects and tropes used as a host to camouflage content from other narratives. (For example, John Keats wrote neo-classical poems in the surface style of romantic poems, and Star Wars is a fantasy masquerading as science fiction.) And it gets hollowed out, retold by hack writers who copy all the trappings of a genre, but never notice that a story is more than a plot.

I see these as the core narratives of some existing genres:

Fantasy: The world is fundamentally just. Virtue will be rewarded in the end, even when it defies logic. See my post "Fantasy as deontology”.

Subversion (Black Company, Game of Thrones): The world is fundamentally unjust, and the virtuous will suffer.

Horror: Evil in the world comes from bad people who’ve been corrupted, and the way to fight evil is to identify those who are impure or corrupted (e.g., vampires, zombies), and kill them.

Subversion (Heart of Darkness, Fallout: Equestria): Evil comes from good people.

Romance: A good man is a bad man who loves a good woman.

Science fiction: The world fundamentally makes sense. Everything can always be understood. Problems are caused by misunderstandings and inadequate information.

Subversion (“Frankenstein” (the book, not the movie), Michael Crichton): Science is spiritually arrogant and inherently dangerous.

Science fiction is an oddball genre, because its original form (ignoring “Frankenstein”), hard science fiction, is uniquely non-character-oriented.

Western: The world is a violent place that cannot be ruled by law, society, or authority. Government is inherently corrupt. Only lone virtuous violent heroes, unconstrained and uncorrupted by social structures, can cleanse society of its parasites.

Subversion (High Noon): Society doesn’t deserve to be saved.

Subversion (The Searchers, Unforgiven): Good guys are just bad guys with good luck and good press.

Mysteries and westerns seem similar. Both conventionally star a lone, eccentric hero who solves problems no one else can, through violence in westerns and logic in mysteries. But the attitudes feel different to me; westerns are drenched in testosterone and self-righteousness in a way that mysteries aren’t. Also, 64% of western readers are men, while 70% of U.S. mystery readers are women. So I won’t assume mysteries are just westerns for nerds.

(Notice that the core narrative of every genre is a dysfunctional, sometimes psychotic ideology. I wonder why that is? Are genres a type of cult?)

So what’s the core narrative for mysteries? Let’s start by looking at famous mysteries.

Famous Fictional Mysteries

The earliest mysteries are Edgar Allen Poe’s stories starring his detective Auguste Dupin: “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). (Although the word “detective” didn’t yet exist.) Dupin has super-human powers of observation, concentration, and analysis, but explains his deductions as being simple and obvious. He has an odd detachment from humanity which manifests in his voluntary seclusion, his preference for leaving his home only at night, his lack of interest in being recognized for his accomplishments, and his boasting that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms.” He disquiets his unnamed Watson by responding to the gruesome murder of a mother and daughter by saying, “An inquiry will afford us amusement.” He is active, bold, and delights in laughing at the police and in concealing how far he has gotten in order to make a sudden dramatic revelation. In short, he is the model for Sherlock Holmes. Jean-Claude Milner claimed that Dupin is the brother of the genius villain D___ in “The Purloined Letter”.

Sherlock Holmes appeared in stories written from 1887-1927, and is based on Dupin, as evidenced by many similarities between them, by Conan Doyle's citing Poe's stories as a model, and by Holmes resenting being compared to Dupin in the first Holmes story and immediately claiming differences between them which do not, in fact, exist. Holmes is superhumanly observant and intelligent, arrogant, detached from humanity, never visibly emotional, and seemingly unwilling or unable to fall in love. He had no respect for conventional thought or morals, and sometimes let criminals escape when he judged their crimes justifiable. Between cases he often descends into depression and drug abuse. His lifetime adversary, Professor Moriarty, is a sort of evil Holmes.

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown (1910-1936) is a humble, unimpressive priest who solves mysteries. In many stories, some other characters laughs at the little priest’s plain appearance, jokes about the priest’s presumed simplicity and superstition, concludes the mystery has a supernatural explanation, and is then humiliated when the priest reveals a natural explanation. Unlike Holmes, who uses reason guided solely by empirical observation, Father Brown uses reason guided by observation but also by intuition, a reflection of medieval scholasticism.

Agatha Christie’s Hercules Poirot (1920-1975) is a physically unimpressive old Belgian exile in England, introduced as “a small man muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache.” He speaks apologetically yet impudently, is neurotically fastidious about his appearance and the shine on his shoes, and tries to always keep a bank balance of 444 pounds, 4 shillings, and 4 pence. One of his techniques is to make people dislike and underestimate him:

It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say – a foreigner – he can't even speak English properly.... Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, "A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much." … And so, you see, I put people off their guard.

He sometimes lets criminals escape, or to be punished extra-judicially. In 1960, Christie, probably a little tired of him, called him a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep". I haven’t read these stories.

Sam Spade, the semi-hero of The Maltese Falcon (1929 novel, 1941 film), was the original hard-boiled noir detective. I think this story is especially illuminating. It is to the usual detective story as a story in which the hero fails to change is to stories in which the hero changes. This is symbolized by the fact that, though Spade unravels the murders that happen, he never solves the original mystery--he never finds the falcon.

Wikipedia says, “Sam Spade combined several features of previous detectives, most notably his cold detachment, keen eye for detail, and unflinching determination to achieve his own justice.” Sam gives his view of the world towards the end of the novel:

“Now on the other side we've got what? All we've got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you."

"You know," she whispered, "whether you do or not."

"I don't. It's easy enough to be nuts about you." He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. "But I don't know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won't. I've been through it before--when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I'll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I'd be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I'll be sorry as hell--I'll have some rotten nights--but that'll pass."

        Sam does not love her, and she doesn’t love him, not in any sense that wouldn’t degrade the word. She’s an evil bitch and he sends her to prison. But his debate with himself shows that he thinks maybe he does love her, because what he feels for her is the closest he can think of as to what “love” might mean.

The novel ends on a note of psychological horror: Sam tries to flirt with his secretary Effie, teasing her a little cruelly for her innocence, but she shrinks from him in revulsion at—what? What he did? What he is? Or that he can do such things and not be broken by them? Sam turns pale on seeing the distance between them, and turns instead to his dead partner’s wife, whom he doesn’t like very much but had been banging—which is, I think he realizes at that moment, all he’ll ever know of love.

The girl's brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist to her mouth. She stood beside him, staring down at him.

He raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: "So much for your woman's intuition."

Her voice was queer as the expression on her face. "You did that, Sam, to her?"

He nodded. "Your Sam's a detective." He looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip. "She did kill Miles, angel," he said gently, "offhand, like that." He snapped the fingers of his other hand.

She escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. "Don't, please, don't touch me," she said brokenly. "I know--I know you're right. You're right. But don't touch me now--not now."

Spade's face became pale as his collar.

The corridor-door's knob rattled. Effie Perine turned quickly and went into the outer office, shutting time door behind her. When she came in again she shut it behind her.

She said in a small flat voice: "Iva is here."

Spade, looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly. "Yes," he said, and shivered. "Well, send her in."

Isaac Asimov wrote a series of detective stories and novels (1953-1986) starring Elijah Bayley, a human, and R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot, in a world in which robots have no freedom or rights. The robopsychologist Susan Calvin, a human who identifies with robots, also appears in some stories. The plots usually turn on questions of how to interpret Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, while their themes often deal with human prejudice against robots, and the philosophy of good and evil.

Dr. Who (1963-today) is called science fiction, but the plot is often a mystery: The Doctor appears someplace and sometime where things are not as they at first appear, and he must puzzle out what is happening, and prevent some bad thing from happening. The Doctor’s character is a warmer, fuzzier Sherlock Holmes, who travels with one or more semi-disposable Watsons and finds humans silly but endearing rather than tiresome. (That photo is of Tom Baker playing Dr. Who playing Sherlock Holmes.)

The Pink Panther’s Jacques Clouseau (1964-2009) is a bumbling idiot who solves cases mostly by accident. Yet he’s also dedicated, energetic, and creative (witness his elaborate training methods). Much of the humor comes from Clouseau misunderstanding everything that he sees and, far from being a detached observer, managing to remain all the time in his own fantasy world.

        Including The Pink Panther here is like including Spaceballs in an analysis of high fantasy. I don't expect it to match thematically, since it's a parody, but it will share some attributes.

The Great Brain (1967-1976) is a series of children’s detectivish novels whose child protagonist, Tom Fitzgerald, alternates between solving crimes and committing them. He cheats his neighbors so often that the other kids eventually kidnap him and put him on trial in The Great Brain Reforms. His younger brother J.D. is his Watson. The stories often contrast Tom’s intelligence but lack of empathy with J.D.’s lesser intelligence but greater humanity, and show Tom mastering the world intellectually, but not really understanding how to relate to it.

Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee (1970-2006) solve crimes on a Navajo reservation. I haven’t read any of them, but I’ve been aware of them for a long time. I’ve read that they’re usually about conflicts between Indian and white culture, religion and materialism, and rich and poor.

Mma Precious Ramotswe is the detective in Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (1998-2015). She’s a woman who was educated in Mochudi, the 10th largest city in Botswana, then moved to a very small village, where she decided to set up a detective agency. She believes she values Botswana’s traditional ways more than the modern white ways, yet her independence, modern upbringing, and dislike of marriage bring her repeatedly into conflict with the village’s strongly patriarchal and family-oriented attitudes. [If you’re gonna read just one detective novel, I’d suggest one of these.]

Adrian Monk is the consulting detective in the TV series Monk (2002-2009), whose obsessive-compulsive behavior causes him to be unable to hold down a job or function in society, but also makes him aware of tiny details that help him solve cases. Much of the humor of the series is that crimes that are impossible for most people to solve are easy for Monk, yet everyday tasks that most people consider trivial are impossible for Monk.

House, a TV series from 2004 to 2012, stars Dr. House as a sociopathic but brilliant surgeon who is basically a less-fuzzy Sherlock Holmes.

Dexter is the forensic expert / detective / serial killer star of a novel (2004) and a TV series (2006-2013). His father taught him to use his uncontrollable homicidal urges for good, by killing very bad people.

A Mystery is About the Detective

Why do mysteries always have just one or two detectives? Why don’t we see great mysteries in which a team or a town cooperates to solve a mystery, like on CSI, or Scooby Doo?

If mysteries are simple whodunits, why are the detectives in great mysteries always so eccentric and so finely-detailed?

Because the central narrative of the mystery isn’t about the mystery. It’s about the detective.

What can we say about the detectives in great mysteries?

1. The most-important trait of a detective in a mystery is not intelligence. It’s that the detective is a misfit.

The detective is a stranger in a strange land who sees its inhabitants more clearly and objectively than they see themselves. Yet, despite this--or because of it--he can’t establish normal emotional connections with them.

Detectives are Misfits

Auguste Dupin: Exiled from the aristocracy, lives in seclusion, only comes out at night, sees humans as a source of amusement. Single.

Sherlock Holmes: Prefers anonymity, scorns emotions, emotionally crippled, dangerously depressed and bored with humanity. Single.

Father Brown: A deliberate misfit, he dismisses the world’s values and represents Catholic values in contrast to it. Single and celibate.

Hercules Poirot: An oddball foreigner who does not care whether people like him. Single.

Sam Spade: An almost nihilistic mercenary whose crucial strength turns out to be his cold, unemotional self-interest. Single.

R. Daneel Olivaw: Literally inhuman. Single.

Dr. Who: Literally an alien. Single, except for whatever he’s got going with River. I haven’t kept up.

Jacques Clouseau: Lives in his own fantasy world. Single.

The Great Brain: Verges on sociopathic; unable to make friends.

Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee: Living between and mediating between the Indian and the American, the religious and the secular, the rich and the poor. Joe: Married for one book, widowed for eleven. Jim: Single and dating for 11 books, married for one.

Mma Precious Ramotswe: A fiercely independent woman trying to do a “man’s job” and refusing (for several novels) marriage offers; a city person in a small African village; a traditionalist who isn’t traditional. Single; later marries.

Adrian Monk: Freakishly weird; unable to cope with even simple social interactions. Widowed.

Dr. House: A sociopath with a live-in prostitute.

Dexter: A homicidal psychopath. Single; dates. Should be faking his feelings, but the show never had the nerve to portray psychopathology honestly.

2. The detective stands outside or above the law and conventional morality.

He may consider his own justice (Sherlock Holmes, Hercules Poirot, Dr. Who), or his tradition of justice (Father Brown), superior to conventional morality or the law. He may solve crimes for entertainment or revenge that other people would solve out of moral outrage or patriotism (Dupin). He may be a part-time criminal or con-man himself (Sam Spade, The Great Brain, House, Dexter). He may not be recognized as a person under the law (Daneel Olivaw). If there is a criminal mastermind, the detective will have more in common with that mastermind than with other people (Sherlock & Moriarty, Auguste Dupin & D___, Dr. Who and his two great enemies, The Master and Dr. Who).

Notice that the two examples that fit both #1 and #2 least well are the two cross-cultural detective series, by Tony Hillerman and Alexander McCall Smith. I predict these are going to represent some variation on the pattern. In the standard detective novel, we have two worldviews: the conventional worldview, and the world of the detective. I expect that in the cultural mystery, the two worldviews are those of the two cultures coming into conflict, and the detective is someone with one foot in each. The detective then does not need to be especially odd, nor to stand outside both cultures.

So, the purpose of a mystery is to contrast two worldviews. Can I be more specific? Well, usually either the detective laughs at or scorns the follies of the world (Dupin, Holmes, Spade, The Great Brain, Dr. Who, House),or the world laughs at the detective (Father Brown, Poirot, Clouseau, Ramotswe, Monk). The detective considers himself or is presented as superior to his clients (Holmes, Father Brown, Great Brain, Dr. Who, House) and/or the clients consider themselves superior to the detective (Holmes, Father Brown, Poirot, Clouseau?, Monk, Ramotswe). Yet the detective often feels his isolation from society painful, and the reader is asked whether the detective’s talent is a blessing or a curse (Holmes, Poirot?, Spade, Daneel Olivaw, Dr. Who, The Great Brain, Monk, House). That last one covers all of them except Dupin, Father Brown, Clouseau, and the cultural detectives, so I think that’s the key.

Here’s one possible point 3 to conclude from all this:

3a. The social function of a mystery is not to show that humans are foolish and that a detective with a little logic is superior to them, but quite the contrary—to reassure us, by showing the detective’s incomplete and solitary life, that our foolishness is wisdom, and careful analysis or greater intelligence would only make us unhappy.

Alternately, the function may be 3b. To argue that neither worldview is complete, and that no worldview can be complete—to gain empirical understanding, you must give up something else. This would make detective novels fundamentally modernist, and very similar thematically to the second book of Don Quixote, and to Henry James novels!

        Neither conclusion maps back well onto all of my dataset. Not onto Clouseau, but I didn't expect it to. Not onto Father Brown or the cross-cultural mysteries. Let's handle them separately:

4. The social function of a cross-cultural mystery is usually to contrast an older culture with a newer culture that now dominates it, and heighten respect for the older culture.

        Hillerman and Smith’s mysteries are noted for the respect they show for Navajo and traditional Botswanan (sp?) culture, not for the respect they show for Western culture. The Father Brown stories, by this understanding, are also cross-cultural mysteries; they’re meant to heighten respect for Catholicism [1]. This still leaves us with Dupin, Daneel Olivaw, and Dr. Who unaccounted for.

[1] Father Brown is also an exception because the stories are from an entirely different artistic tradition—the tradition that I call propagandist, which includes nearly all medieval fiction, in which art is used not to ask questions, but to claim that the authorities already have all of the answers. That's why it doesn’t present its two worldviews (Catholic and secular) even-handedly; the Catholic always comes out on top.

The anti-intellectualism of 3a may account for Dr. Who's strong anti-intellectualism, which is most peculiar in a show that calls itself science fiction. The Doctor is not an intellectual. He never plans anything; he rushes into situations that he's grossly unprepared for and trusts that he'll come up with something. He refuses to carry a weapon despite running into literally hundreds of situations where a weapon would be very helpful. He solves problems with sudden inspiration or intuition rather than logic. He refuses to use consequentialist ethics; he won’t harm a Dalek, or an insane Time Lord who means to destroy the Earth. Any sufficiently advanced intellect is indistinguishable from magic; the Doctor is magic.

        The keys to the Doctor must be those ways he diverges from the pattern: his lack of Sherlockian angst, the magical way the universe's coincidences accommodate his lack of planning (rather than disrupting his plans, as it does most protagonists), his God-like status as protector of humanity and the universe, and most especially his embracing of conventional morality and virtue ethics over reason. Like a traditional detective, he holds up our culture for inspection. (This is why he spends so much of his time on Earth, rather than exploring new worlds, as is more common in science fiction.) But he doesn't represent the logical, as Sherlock does. He represents the authors', and the audience's, ideal, the supra-logical God who has the right to judge humanity. He's a Christianized Sherlock Holmes. He still functions to reassure us that our foolishness is wisdom. Not by contrast with it, but as the Platonic ideal of it.

        My memory of R. Daneel Olivaw is dim, but those stories certainly weren't meant to reassure us about conventional morality. Humans were inferior to robots intellectually and morally. I think that Asimov was inverting the mystery narrative to fit it to the science fiction narrative: Knowledge is not bad, but good for us. The traditional mystery says logic and humanity are opposed, presumably because humanity is spiritual. Asimov's stories say logic and humanity are opposed, because humans are stupid. Robots are more logical and as a consequence more "spiritually" developed.

While looking up the other Dupin stories in a Poe anthology, I discovered that the version of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” I was using was a bastardization, a simplified and much-expurgated version written for a schoolbook. It omitted a long introductory essay in which Poe himself spelled out the key to Dupin.

Dupin is a misfit, yet his powers of reasoning are idealized. Dupin fails to validate our conventional lackluster intelligence by being gloomy, because Poe refused to admit that scientific analysis was useful!

That first essay contrasted chess with whist. A second essay in “The Purloined Letter”, given by Dupin rather than by the narrator, said the same thing, only instead contrasting math with poetry. In it, Poe tried to re-purpose both the words “abstract” and “analysis”, to exclude mathematics and to include… poetry. It sounds preposterous, but he was quite explicit about it, and at great length.

Poe attacked chess and mathematics as developing abstract skills that are useless for everyday life. It's a bit confused, since he used the word “abstract” to mean what we would call the real and concrete, calling real life abstract, as opposed to mathematics. He considered logic to be a system that could be applied to either kind of entity, and said it was useful for life only when applied to “abstract” (concrete) entities. This implies deep misunderstandings of both mathematics and logic. Yet its conclusion, that logic can apply to all of life, is closer to truth than is the standard narrative of artists, which assumes just the opposite (that math is strictly abstract, while ordinary life is strictly concrete and cannot be represented in mathematics). In its particulars it is most similar to Aristotle’s position, which was that numbers are all well and good if you want to build a boat, but isn’t really logic.

A small excerpt from Poe’s second essay:

“You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect.”

“You surprise me,” I said, “by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.”

… “The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term ‘analysis’ into application to algebra…. I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation—of form and quantity—is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom fails. In the consideration of motive it fails; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability—as the world indeed imagines them to be…. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who would be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.

“I mean to say,” continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, “that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded."

Edgar Allan Poe. Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Kindle Locations 6981-7013).

What Poe was trying to do with Dupin, then, was make a pre-modernist argument, the precursor to the mystery narrative. The mystery narrative tries to deal with the evident fact that scientific analysis produces much knowledge that makes us intensely uncomfortable by making a sort of “separate magisteria” rebuttal: The detective can use scientific analysis to solve crime, but not to solve his own life problems.

Poe’s mystery, written in 1841, tries to deny that quantitative analysis is analysis, or that it produces anything useful. The Sherlockian narrative is a Hegelian dialectic between conventional and scientific thought. Poe meant his Dupin stories as a last-ditch defense of conventional thought against mathematics and the scientific method, using instead psychological analysis and intuition. I did not expect this, since he published another mystery at the same time, “The Gold Bug”, which was largely mathematical.

Masochistic weightlifters

(I think I posted the first part of this 2 years ago as a quiz, then deleted it and never posted the rest because you guys were too smart to fall for the “P(B|A) ~ P(A|B)” fallacy.)

Half of undergraduates at ivy league schools scored at the 98th percentile or above on their SATs.  (This is the true value, accurate to about 2 decimal places. I computed it myself from the 2011 and 2012 data for all 8 ivy league schools.)

If someone in an American undergraduate college scored in the 98th percentile or above on their SATs, what are the chances that they’re in an ivy league college?

P(X|Y) means the probability that X is true given that Y is true.  So we can restate this question as:  Given P( 98th_percentile(A) | ivy(A) ) = 0.50, what is P( ivy(A) | 98th_percentile(A) ) ?

A) 10%

B) 50%

C) 90%

The answer, which I also computed myself: P( ivy(A) | 98th(A) ) = 0.0876.

Just because P(X|Y) is high doesn’t mean P(Y|X) is high.

[page_break]

I've been reading stories from the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Kenyon Review, trying to figure out what they want. Instead of a wild ecosystem of stories of all kind, they feel to me like most of them were written by the same author. The only ironclad rule literary magazines have, as far as I can tell, is that they will not publish anything that has a beginning, a middle, and an end that work together to tell a story. Anything with a clear interpretation is, presumably, not subtle enough.

I don’t like these kinds of stories. The reader comments on All the Pretty Pony Princesses” (which is a story like that) made me think there can be some merit to an incomplete story like that. The different possible interpretations in the comments showed that the story made people think and let them participate in the story telling. I usually call that explanation “pseudo-intellectual wankery”, but I guess… maybe there’s some use in reading a story like that, every now and then.  But I don’t think every last goddamn story in every literary magazine in America should have to be like that.

Literature deals with things that can't be reduced to logic and examined in an essay. Instead of clearly defining your terms and delineating your argument, you work with a web of associations and connotations. You grab onto it, pull, and see what comes up.  Cleanth Brooks wrote a famous essay about this called “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, which is chapter 11 in his famous 1947 book The Well Wrought Urn describing his theory of poetry.  To put it more geekily:  You can't summarize a poem, because a poem is its own minimum-length description.  A logical summary of the poem's meaning, using well-defined terms, would be much longer than the poem.  Poetic language communicates more efficiently, and possibly with less error, because it uses roughly the same fuzzy categories and connotations that our brains do.  The "inaccuracy" of language is, I think, a form of data compression.

So great literature is usually subtle, indirect, and ambiguous. It fades when you stare at it directly.

But P(A|B) <> P(B|A).  P( subtle(X), indirect(X), ambiguous(X) | great(X) ) > .8  does not imply P( great(X) | subtle(X), indirect(X), ambiguous(X) ) > .8.  Great literature may usually be subtle, indirect, and ambiguous, but that doesn’t mean that subtlety, indirectness, and ambiguity make great literature.

Stories in literary magazines are, I think, deliberately opaque. They take vague themes and approach them obliquely to create something difficult to comprehend.  This became fashionable in the 1920s with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Ulysses, which were deliberately crafted to be subtle and ambiguous.

Chapter 1 of Cleanth Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn says that the basis of poetry is “paradox”:  the expression of two apparently contradictory truths.  Brooks seems to believe that poetry is artfully-constructed tension between opposing attitudes.  This suggests it is the difficulty itself that we enjoy.

I believe, however, that there are no true paradoxes, so manufacturing them for our titillation hardly seems a worthy goal for art.  I prefer to say that good literature confronts apparent paradoxes, not because paradoxes are good, but because resolving them is good.  Literature wants to bring us closer to that resolution, or at least make us more aware of its difficulties.  A poem that honestly showed the tension between the values of Democrats and Republicans would be good.  A poem that successfully resolved them would be even better.  It’s just not feasible.  A poem is unlikely to resolve things we’ve argued over for a century.  Anything that can be resolved in a poem isn't worth writing a poem about.  We've probably already resolved it.

Truly great literature isn’t difficult because difficulty is good.  It’s difficult because it’s trying to do something difficult.  It’s trying to say things as clearly as it can. There is still some paradox, ambiguity, and confusion unavoidably left after the author has tried to make everything as focused and clear as possible, because literature deals with difficult and ambiguous issues.  Lack of clarity is an inevitable side-effects.  It is not therapeutic.

Suppose you want to be a weightlifter.  You go to the Olympics and watch the competitors grunt and strain, their faces contorted in pain, as they lift.  Some of them strain a muscle or tear a ligament.

You conclude that the secret to being a great weightlifter is to lift the weight in a way that causes you pain.  You go home and practice different ways of lifting, and devise these principles of weightlifting:

Avoid stretching or cooling down.

Arch your back as much as possible.

Use machines to isolate weak points such as knees and rotator cuffs.

Jerk the weights up, and let them fall down using gravity.

Lift with your back, not with your legs.

etc.

You're doing it wrong.  In order to lift as much as he can, a weightlifter wants to lift with a form that minimizes pain and stress.  When you see him lift, he is at the limits of his endurance.  That's because every time he learns how to lift a weight with less stress, he adds more weight.

Take a great not-really-modernist work like A Passage to India, The Member of the Wedding, Tess, or anything by Dostoyevsky or Turgenev. You can tell exactly what the author is writing about; you can see the different arguments and counterarguments being made. Yet you're left with doubt and debate, not because the author deliberately hid things, but because the subject matter is difficult.  There is nothing difficult about Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor except that he is human.

But academics don't like to study literature that's written so well that it's easy to understand what it's about. They want works that require a priesthood to divine their purpose and meaning. Like the philosophers in The Hitchhiker's Guide, they demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. They want puzzles, not literature. That's why they prefer Hamlet to Julius Caesar, and William Faulkner to Pat Conroy. And that's why so few people want to read what they publish.

77. The history of show, don't tell

I've accumulated historical instances of the advice "show, don't tell," which, taken together, indicate different takes on what it means.  Here they are, chronologically.  I've blogged a couple of them before.

The Wikipedia page on "Show, don't tell" lists some more recent ones.  (If you read that page, be aware that while Hemingway was a "show, don't tell" writer, "iceberg theory" is a claim about depth of backstory, not about "show, don't tell".)

China, 551 – 479 BC, Confucius

Confucius asked his students their ambitions. The first to answer said that he wanted to help weak countries get stronger. The second said he wanted his people to live a well-off life. The third said he wanted to be a master of ceremonies.

The last student said, "In Spring, having put on my spring clothes, I would like to bathe in the Qihe River with a group of adults and children and, after bathing walk back together, singing as the wind blows our hair dry. This is my ideal, teacher."

Confucius made no comment on the first three grand ambitions but commended the last. The sage could see from the carefree scene the student described his social ideal and political ambition – of people living and working happily in a peaceful and harmonious social environment.

                — retold in "Confucianism and Chinese Art"

Greece, 350 BC, Aristotle

Aristotle said something that sounds, in retrospect, like “show, don’t tell”:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude… in the form of action, not of narrative. … Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.  Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse.  Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions.  Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.  Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.

                — Aristotle (350 BC), Poetics, Translated by S. H. Butcher.  From Part 6.

But while he was emphasizing the importance of action, he was contrasting men’s actions with (and judging it more important to drama than) their character.  So on second thought, it sounds like he was saying something different.

But on third thought, character can be revealed:

by description:  Scrooge was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!

by the character’s spoken declarations about ethics:  “It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's.”

by another character’s description of the character:  “He was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge!”

by the character’s speech acts:  “Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?”

or by action:  At the ominous word ‘liberality'’, Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.

1, 2, and 3 are “telling”.  4 and 5 are “showing”.

In dialogue, ancient theater used character revelation types #2 and #3 almost exclusively.  #4 is a more modern technique that requires the playwright to be more aware of multiple perspectives, and to let different characters state different ethical views--which Victor Schlovsky (I think; I’ve mislaid his book) said Greek playwrights didn't even do until Euripides.  #1 is not available in drama at all, so Aristotle had seen mainly #2, #3, and #5.

Now, what did Aristotle mean by “character”?

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents….  Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character.

                — Aristotle, Poetics, Translated by S. H. Butcher.  From Part 6.

Adding this to the context that Aristotle is contrasting “character” with “action”, it seems that by “character,” Aristotle meant what the character is or says; by “action”, what he does.  So in Aristotle’s context, in which only #2, 3, and 5 are available, “action [#5] is more important than character [#1-4]” is indistinguishable from “show [#4-5], don’t tell [#1-3]”.

Spain, late 12th century, Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn ʾAḥmad Ibn Rušd (Averroes)

Poetry should not employ the weapons of rhetoric or persuasion.  It should simply imitate, and it should do so with such vivid liveliness that the object imitated appears to be present before us.  If the poet discards this methods for straightforward reasoning, he sins against his art.

                — Umberto Eco (1959), Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages.  Yale University Press 1986.  Translation of “Sviluppo dell’estetica medievale” from Momemti e problemi di storia dell’estetica, vol. 1, 1959.  Summarizing Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, p. 310-44 [name of book not given!], who was citingAverroes, the 12th-century Islamic scholar known to the West (through Aquinas) as “the Commentator” on “the Philosopher” (Aristotle).

Russia, 1886, Anton Chekov

Many websites attribute this great quote to Chekov:

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

quoteinvestigator.com tried to track this quote down.  The oldest instance of it they found was in a 2002 book, The Quotable Book Lover.  The closest thing they could find to it that Chekhov wrote was this letter he wrote to his brother Alexander in May of 1886:

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you’ll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

                — Anton Chekhov, The Unknown Chekhov: Stories and Other Writings Hitherto Untranslated by Anton Chekhov, Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. Noonday Press (New York, 1959).  “Introduction”, p. 14.

America, 1927, E. M. Forster, with a contrary opinion

"CHARACTER," says Aristotle, "gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.”  We have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of disagreeing with him.  “All human happiness and misery,” says Aristotle, “take the form of action.”  We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access….

There is, however, no occasion to be hard on Aristotle. He had read few novels and no modern ones… and when he wrote the words quoted above he had in view the drama, where no doubt they hold true….

The speciality of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious. A man does not talk to himself quite truly—not even to himself; the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality.  The novelist has a real pull here.  He can show the subconscious short-circuiting straight into action (the dramatist can do this too); he can also show [tell] it in its relation to soliloquy.  He commands all the secret life, and he must not be robbed of this privilege. "How did the writer know that?" it is sometimes said.  "What's his standpoint?  He is not being consistent, he's shifting his point of view from the limited to the omniscient, and now he's edging back again."  Questions like these have too much the atmosphere of the law courts about them. All that matters to the reader is whether the shifting of attitude and the secret life are convincing, whether it is πιθανον [“likely”, says Google translate] in fact, and with his favourite word ringing in his ears Aristotle may retire.

                — E. M. Forster (1927).  Aspects of the Novel. Harcourt (Orlando, Florida, 1955),  p. 83-84.

America, 1947, Cleanth Brooks

Having in mind the scheme proposed, one could say that a poem does not state ideas but rather tests ideas. Or, to put the matter in other terms, a poem does not deal primarily with ideas and events but rather with the way in which a human being may come to terms with ideas and events. All poems, therefore, including the most objective poems, turn out on careful inspection to be poems really “about” man himself. A poem, then, to sum up, is to be judged not by the truth or falsity as such, of the idea which it incorporates, but rather by its character as drama - by its coherence, sensitivity, depth, richness, and tough-mindedness.

                — Cleanth Brooks (1947), The Well Wrought Urn. Harcourt & Brace (Orlando, Florida, 1975).  Appendix 2, “Problem of Belief and Problem of Cognition”, p. 256.

America, 1979, Cleanth Brooks & Robert Penn Warren

Warning:  When they talk about describing a character, they use “directly describing” to mean “summarizing” (telling), and “indirect” to mean “indirectly describing”, by which they mean “indirectly summarizing”.  That in turn means “indirectly not directly depicting”, or “directly depicting”, which means “showing”.  When they talk about dialogue, they reverse the terms: by “direct discourse” they mean writing out everything the characters mean, or “showing”; by “indirect discourse” they meaning summarizing what they said, or “telling”.  I’ve inserted [showing] and [telling] to clarify.

How shall the author present his character? Directly, with a summary of his traits and characteristics [telling], or indirectly (that is, through dialogue and action [showing])?  The very nature of fiction suggests that the second method is its characteristic means, yet direct presentation is constantly used in fiction, often effectively.  Much depends upon the underlying purpose of the story and much depends upon matters of scope and scale.  If the author made every presentation of character indirectly, insisting that each character gradually unfold himself through natural talk and gesture and action, the procedure might become intolerably boring.  “The Necklace” indicates how direct presentation—and even summary presentation—can be properly and effectively used.  (Look back at the first three paragraphs of this story on page 66.)  But when he comes to the significant scenes of the story, the author of “The Necklace” discards summary in favor of dramatic presentation.

The danger of direct presentation [telling] is that it tends to forfeit the vividness of drama and the reader’s imaginative participation. Direct [telling], descriptive presentation works best, therefore, with rather flat and typical characters, or as a means to get rapidly over more perfunctory materials.  When direct presentation of character becomes also direct comment on a character, [the]http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/368624/honeycomb-on-show-dont-tell&sa=D&ust=1458184878673000&usg=AFQjCNFkn3pqCrhKseWS53f0lCwPvsShHQ]the](https://www.google.com/url?q=[url=http://www.fimfiction.net/blog/368624/honeycomb-on-show-dont-tell&sa=D&ust=1458184878673000&usg=AFQjCNFkn3pqCrhKseWS53f0lCwPvsShHQ) author may find himself “telling” us what to feel and think rather than “rendering” a scene for our imaginative participation.[/url]  In “The Furnished Room,” for example, O. Henry tends to “editorialize” on the hero’s motives and beliefs, and constant plucking at the reader’s sleeve and nudging him to sympathize with the hero’s plight may become so irritating that the whole scene seems falsified.  Yet in D. H. Lawrence’s “Tickets, Please,” we shall see that direct [telling] commentary--and even explicit interpretation of the characters’ motives--can on occasion be effectively used by an author.

…

An author’s selection of modes of character presentation will depend upon a number of things. His decision on when to summarize traits or events [tell], on when to describe directly [tell], and on when to allow the character to express his feelings through dialogue and action [show], will depend upon the general end of the story and upon the way in which the action of the story is to be developed…

Indirect discourse [telling], like [“direct”] character summary and description [telling], is a quicker way of getting over the ground, and in fiction has its very important uses.  Notice, for example, in “War” that the husband’s explanation of why his wife is to be pitied is indirect discourse [telling]: “And he felt it his duty to explain… that the poor woman was to be pitied, for the war was taking away her only son.” But the speeches of the old man who argues for the sublimity of sacrificing one’s son for one’s country are given as direct discourse [showing]. The importance of the old man’s speeches to the story, the need for dramatic vividness, the very pace of the story--all call for direct discourse.

                — Understanding Fiction by Brooks & Warren, 3rd edition (1979), from the intro to chapter 3, “What Character Reveals”. (Not present in the 2nd edition.)

Follow each chain of thought to its end

You can figure out what you ought to do when writing a look at what writers do. It’s harder to figure out what you shouldn’t do, if the writers you read don’t do it. This is a “shouldn’t do”.

I wrote this yesterday for the intro to “All the Pretty Pony Princesses” (or, “the season 3 finale as written by Joss Whedon”). This morning I realized there was something wrong with it.

The mayor still hadn’t looked at her. She kept frowning at Rarity, who had the mayor by her left forehoof and was leaning in close to tell her something, then at Fluttershy and Applejack, clustered together on her right, and then down at the hard chalky dirt at her hooves. She didn’t look at Rainbow or Pinkie at all. The two police mares with her studied Twilight guardedly. They were probably intimidated by the bright Element of Magic around her neck, flashing in the noon sun, which they kept glancing at.

This description brought me up short when I reread it the next day. It seemed to jerk to a stop when it mentioned the Element of Magic.

I think this is because describing a scene from third person limited point of view is following one character’s thought process. The description can end before getting around to everything in the scene, but it may end only at points where a person’s thought process would switch to something else. No one would turn their attention to what the mayor is looking at, down at the ground, then to the two police and what they are looking at, and then stop on reaching the Element of Magic without that leading to any further thoughts, at least not unless they were interrupted by something urgent.

I added this at the end of the paragraph:

They were probably intimidated by the bright Element of Magic around her neck, flashing in the noon sun, which they kept glancing at. Twilight had hung it on a string that Rarity had thrown in the trash, just until she could find a proper gold chain for it.

Note that I didn’t describe the Element! But I had to go somewhere from there; I couldn’t end the paragraph on something that no one would end a thought on. Long descriptions should either break when they are interrupted by a story event, or else trickle off when they reach a point where a person's attention might turn to something else.

Review- The Clockwork Muse, by Colin Martindale 1990

The Clockwork Muse: The predictability of artistic change

Colin Martindale, Harper Collins, 1990 (on Amazon)

You know how I always gripe that nobody does literary theory anymore? This is real literary and artistic theory. Martindale studied thousands of poems, paintings, musical compositions, and a few pieces of fiction, using tests with human subjects and with computers. He came up with interesting questions, and tried to form hypotheses, conduct experiments to test them, and evaluate them using sound statistical methods.

I say “tried” because, unfortunately, he didn’t understand the principle of conservation of evidence, and didn’t understand statistics. But he raised interesting questions, answered some of them, and showed how to answer more of them. His work is remarkable for almost successfully taking a scientific approach to art.[page_break]

The extent to which literary theorists ignored him is also remarkable. But Martindale was a professor of psychology, and published most of his results in psychology or computer science journals. I don’t know whether this was by choice, or because literary journals wouldn’t take them. He published quite a few in Poetics. I don’t think Poetics is a mainstream literary journal, since its guidelines request papers in sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics.

The Good

Martindale did a lot of experiments, mostly in support of his central thesis (see under “The Ugly Details”):

Artists are always trying to make their work more strange or surprising.

They can make their work more surprising either by using more “primordial content” (basically randomness), or by creating a new style.

New styles therefore appear at a regular rate over time, when the content presented in the previous style has become as random as it can be.

This accounts for almost all stylistic change, throughout all of history, across all art forms.

If his analyses had been correct, he would have an overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of this (repugnant) thesis. As it is, it’s hard to say how much evidence is left when you throw out all the bad statistics, optimistic curve-gazing, and post-hoc rationalization, but I think it’s significantly more than zero.

The irony is that other aesthetic theorists had no way of knowing how bad Martindale’s use of statistics was. They knew even less about statistics. They ignored him correctly, but unjustifiably. Or perhaps this incident justifies their ignoring scientific incursions into literature, and explains the hostility between C. P. Snow's "two cultures" (the sciences and the humanities): Anyone from a scientific discipline can rush into a humanity and terrorize its inhabitants, brandishing graphs and chanting p-values, and if they admit that science works, they'll be helpless against him, because they won't be able to tell whether his science is good or bad. (Let us suppose, in the name of democracy, that the same holds for incursions from the humanities into the sciences.)

Chapter 7, "Cross-National, Cross-Genre, and Cross-Media Synchrony", section 2 on cross-media styles: This experiment showed that the terms "baroque", "romantic", and "neoclassical" mean something other than just "what people did during an arbitrarily-bounded time period". Martindale said this is now an unpopular belief.

Martindale doesn't get into any of this, but I'll explain why I think post-modernists are suspicious of the idea that "baroque" by itself means something other than an arbitrary, socially-agreed-on time period. It's important. Well, if you care about philosophy or art theory.

A lexeme is a word or set of words whose semantic meaning is not clearly composed of the semantic meanings of its parts. "Run" can be a lexeme, but when it's in "run up a bill", that whole phrase is the lexeme, because "running up a bill" doesn't involve anybody running, or any movement up, and you can't "run up a credit" or "run up a reputation".

Post-modernists believe that the meaning of any lexeme doesn't ultimately reside in properties of the thing or event the lexeme refers to, but in the position of the lexeme in a giant graph describing the relationships between all the lexemes of the language. Call that belief S (for "Structuralism"). For example, we might say that the meaning of the term "love" was that two people who were in the relationship "love" had mutual intentions towards each other with positive emotional valences (wishing each other good health, respect, satisfying work, wealth, etc.), while "hate" referred to a relationship between people who mutually held intentions with negative valence towards each other (wishing each other harm, humiliation, and financial ruin).

A post-modernist additionally says meaning is indeterminate. That means that if we met an alien species which used the terms "mikto" and "klaanbart" to refer to relationships between people who held mutual intentions of the same valence, we would have no way of ever knowing which meant "love" and which meant "hate", because we couldn't feel the valences of their emotions, and might misinterpret their facial emotions and all other indicators in the systematically wrong way. To be more precise, the post-modernist would say that we can't be wrong in this fashion, because "love", "hate", "mikto", and "klaanbart" have no meaning other than enabling you to predict that if Jerry "loves" Sally he is more likely to give her chocolates than scrapings from the bottom of his shoe, and if Freemulo miktos Gromblat, ze is more likely to frondle zim than to blammo zim. (This sort of argument comes from Quine.)

If you try to enumerate the set of relationships baroque music is in, the instantiations of "baroque music" are all instances of music, and not instances of painting, literature, or architecture. If the true "meaning" of "baroque music" were found at such a high level of abstraction that it also applied to instances of music, painting, and literature, that would imply a degree of coherence and orderliness to reality that is at odds with post-modern semiotics. So post-modernists are likely to treat "baroque music" as a lexeme, and say that "baroque music" "means", mainly, the set of relationships between the people using the term, the music, the instruments used, the musicians, the composers, and so on.

The belief S was posited by Saussure as an alternative to the belief that the meanings of words are "grounded" in reality, which I'll denote by G. Philosophers see S and G as both mutually exclusive, and as covering all possible cases--there are no other possibilities. (There's no reason to believe either of these things, however. In fact it's generally impossible to try to list the (verbal) relationships between words without running into relationships that imply facts about the entities that are grounded in reality. We might, for instance, find that baroque music was usually commissioned by the Church or by extremely wealthy patrons, and so was played in churches or very large private residences, which had large dimensions and so had long reverberation times, and this led to the use of low-pitched instruments and slow tempos. Trying to list the "structure" of relationships that define "baroque music" has led to a quantifiable, measurable property of the music itself, which grounds its meaning in reality.)

Let D (for "Decomposability") denote the belief that "baroque" in "baroque music" has the same meaning as "baroque" in "baroque architecture", even though there are no instances of art that are both baroque music and baroque architecture. There's no logical reason to think that D => G or that G => D. The term "baroque music" could be a lexeme whether or not its meaning is grounded in reality, and even if "baroque music" is defined structurally, it could be that "baroque" has its own structural definition. But philosophers appear to assume that D <=> G, though I don't think anyone's analyzed the issue carefully enough to notice they're doing that.

So, given the false assumptions G <=> not(S) and D <=> G, the post-modern commitment to S implies not(G), which implies not(D), which implies that "baroque" can't mean anything on its own.

Martindale showed people who didn’t know much about art pictures of paintings, sculpture, and architecture, and played them recordings of music. When he asked them to put them together into groups, in any way they chose, they put the baroque music with the baroque painting, the baroque sculpture, and the baroque architecture, and so on with classical and romantic, more than you’d expect by chance.

The rub is that I don’t fully trust that Martindale knew how to know what you’d expect by chance, because he said subjects created an average of 9 groups (p. 253), then used math assuming they had created 3 groups (p. 254). It reveals a worrying inconsistency--the accuracy he claims subjects had on average wouldn't be even theoretically possible if they'd made 9 groups. But the error, if there is any, is in the direction of making his results stronger than his analysis indicates. The musical data chosen is peculiar, excluding Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner from the romantic, but their inclusion would only have made his results stronger.

Chapter 8, "Art and Society", the only chapter in which he adjusts for multiple hypothesis testing, presents some good data indicating that prosperity for the working class correlates with collective thought, cultural references, and a de-emphasis on nature; conservatism correlates with concrete words and references to culture, while liberalism correlates with thought, emotion, and action. The work is interesting, but cast into doubt by the great inconsistency between the British and American data.

In Chapter 9, "The Artist and the Work of Art", discussing the common theme of a hero's descent into an underworld, he pioneers the use of word frequency counts to disclose the theme of a story.

We can use coherence of trends [in word usage] to decipher what a narrative is about: that is, if a narrative is about overcoming evil, the trend in evaluative connotation should be stronger than the trend in primordial content. If a narrative is about alteration in consciousness, the reverse should be the case. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, shows a clear trend in primordial content but no trend at all in the use of good versus bad words: it must be about alteration in consciousness rather than good versus evil. This conclusions conforms with what a Tibetan Buddhist would probably tell you. The descent into Hell in book I of Homer's Odyssey is more about good and evil than about alteration in consciousness, though it seems to be about both. In this case, the trend indicates that Hell is a better place than earth, and is consistent with pagan conceptions of the afterlife. ... Moby Dick [has trends in primordial content, but not in good/bad word frequencies, so it] doesn't have much to do with ethics but does seem to symbolize alteration in consciousness.... Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is an exception: it has no trends at all in either evaluation or primordial content. The story is about something else. (p. 329)

We can use some simple equations to delineate the plots of such narratives.... They can help unlock the hidden or symbolic meaning of a narrative. Narratives have more than one meaning. We do not need to leave it to the whimsy of the reader to decide which interpretation is most important. We can examine the coherence or orderliness of trends in the usage of different types of words to make an objective decision. Book VI of the Aeneid and Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' are both about alteration of consciousness and about confronting and overcoming evil. (p. 339)

I think he overstates the strength of conclusions based on word counts, but I admire his vision. He also looks at Dante’s Divine Comedy and other major works. I haven’t seen anyone use word frequency analysis to investigate the themes of different books, or of the different parts of different books. I want to start testing this idea myself.

The Bad

He presents his theory as being about the evolution of music, but didn't understand what evolution is. When he says "evolution", he means its opposite: genetic drift in the absence of selection pressure. He says this is essential: "Evolution" only occurs when art proceeds without any interference from society. He calls selective pressure from society "non-evolutionary pressure" (p. 169). He assumes that whatever aesthetics is, it is not anything that real people like or want; their preferences can only contaminate aesthetic evolution. That’s not just saying artistic quality or popularity isn’t objective; it’s saying, from an “evolutionary” standpoint, that it’s bad. (Again, though, this is a popular position among aesthetic theorists.) He seems to have forgotten that he theorized that arousal potential (AP; see “Ugly details” below) was important only by arguing that it increases hedonic value = aesthetic fitness.

He ought to spend more time explaining what "primordial content" (PC) is, since he spends the entire book measuring it. It comes from psychoanalysis and indicates regression into... something. The subconscious? The collective? The pre-human? His attempted explication (p. 49), equating primordial thought with noticing similarities, and conceptual thought with making distinctions, is just a repetition of a common prejudice against "analytic" science that we have inherited from the Middle Ages and the romantic poets, of scientific thought as only dividing and never synthesizing. It has no real bearing on whatever it is that his construct measures.

So the entire theoretical underpinnings of his research is extremely shaky. Fortunately he has lots of data. His interpretation of it, though, is usually statistically flawed. On p. 166-167 he describes computing a correlation using 150 samples, and says it results in "a marginally significant correlation of .14 with time.... If we [group datapoints together into 15 groups and use their means], the correlation is much higher--.66--and clearly significant." This proves that he has no idea what statistical significance means or how to compute it, and so every claim in the book about significance is worthless. He tells us that his theory works with Hamlet, Cymbeline, and The Great Railway Bazaar (p. 318), but not how many books it didn't work with. This concealment of his selection process reduces much of his quantitative data to anecdotes.

The most-common problem is that he would do some experiment rating people or works of art on, say, 20 different dimensions, most of which he didn't specify in this book, and nearly all of which, when revealed, are synonyms for either "primordial content" or "arousal potential" (AP). Then he does data fishing to find the two subsets of those 20 which have the highest correlation with PC and AP. Then, wonder of wonders, he finds one out of the ten million or so possible small subsets which correlates with those variables. Those numeric results are worthless; I’d be surprised if they’re better than random.

If you look on page 188, you'll find an experiment with Italian paintings in 20-year periods from 1330-1729. He had subjects rate painters along 24 dimensions, and then do factor analysis. Then he informs us that two of the resulting 5 dimensions corresponded to primordial content and arousal potential. We'd really like to know what the other factors were, and their relative importance, but he doesn't tell us. This is suspicious. Worse, when he tells us which dimensions correlated with arousal potential (active, complex, tense, disorderly) and which correlated with primordial content (not photographic, not representative of reality, otherworldly, and unnatural), it becomes clear that most of the first set were designed to measure arousal potential, and the second set are all synonyms for primordial content. So the experiment didn't validate his two dimensions; it just asked people to rate paintings along them, then (surprise) pulled his planted measurements out of the factor analysis.

He's guilty of cherry-picking data. On p.178 you'll find a chart of primordial content in pop music lyrics. He states that "there was a significant increase in primordial content from 1952-53 to 1958-59." But if you start at 1953 instead of 1952, it becomes a decrease; even more so if you end at 1960 or 1961.

He had no conception of degrees of freedom. The section on cross-national synchrony in Chapter 7 is outrageous: He fit equations to explain how trends in one art in one country are influenced by trends in other arts in that country and other countries. But studying the equations on page 242, we realize that each of his fits has 17 degrees of freedom! And in most cases he constructs these to fit fewer than 17 datapoints! The first mystery is that they don't fit exactly. The second mystery is how he found these fits--there wasn't enough computer power in the world in 1990 to optimize the fit of a 17-dimensional equation, so when he says one set of parameters gives the best fit, he can't possibly know that. Probably these mysteries explain each other--his solutions don’t fit the data exactly because he explored the parameter space incompletely.

His quest for periodicity used tests that would (and often did) find periodicity in random walks. Every time he plots a bunch of points and says that the oscillations around a curve are statistically significant, count the number of times that a segment goes through one point before re-crossing the central curve, and the number of times it goes through 2 or more points. If those numbers are roughly equal, it indicates that the oscillation around the central curve is a random walk, and is not statistically significant. (You can prove this using the binomial theorem.) Out of figures 7.5, 9.1, 9.2, 9.4, 9.20, and 9.21, only figures 9.1 and 9.21 pass this simple test. He's generally guilty of optimistic eyeballing of data. He analyzes Dante's Inferno and finds that "the main trend takes the shape of an M with an extra up-flourish at the end" (p. 323) Looking at figure 9.18, it's hard to imagine how any realistic data could look less like his description of it.

The book is full of post-hoc rationalization. (That is, he never predicted a test's outcome; he found the outcome, then justified it, often with some accommodating exceptions). For example, his study of American painters (p. 193-198) finds a single dip-rise in primordial content from 1800 to 1920, and so instead of admitting that he didn’t find dips and rises for the different styles during that time, he designates that entire 120-year period as "American style". By never stating up front what he expects to find, he always interprets his result either as having proven his hypothesis (when they are consistent with it) or having proven something peculiar about the data (when they are not).

Sometimes he claims to have proven both at the same time. On p. 191, he reports finding results for his Italian paintings experiment that match the time periods for the styles late gothic, renaissance-mannerist, baroque, and rococo. But what's "renaissance-mannerist"? It's a mashing together of two periods because the data doesn't come out as it should if they're two separate periods. "If one accepts the idea that primordial content rises once a style is in effect, the present results support the idea that mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style rather than a separate style" (p. 193). Okay, but you can either assume A (mannerism is the final stage of renaissance style) and use it to prove B (that primordial content dips then rises within a style), or you can assume B and use it to prove A. You can't assume both A and B in order to prove B and A simultaneously!

The Ugly Details

Primordial Content

Martindale also thought he'd found the principal component of art, starting from theory rather than from data or observation. This principal component was "primordial content" (PC, p. 57-59), which seems not to mean content that’s primordial = primal (e.g., sex, hunger, pleasure, terror), but content that’s dream-like, hallucinatory, unreal, nonsensical, chaotic, incoherent [1]. Martindale doesn’t get much more specific than that. He justifies this by saying that Nietzsche’s Apollo / Dionysius, Jung’s eros / logos, McKellar’s A / R (?), Berlyne’s autistic / directed, Werner’s dedifferentiated / differentiated (?), and Wundt’s associationistic / intellectual dichotomies, all mean the same thing. “Thought or consciousness varies along one main axis, as is obvious to anyone who studies the topic.” (p. 57)

Not quite. Those are all dichotomies with logic on one side, but they have one of two very different things on the other side: either sensuality, or associationism / dream-logic [2]. I don’t think those things (Dionysian abandon, and drug-induced hallucinations) have anything in common. The former is very agentive; the second is entirely passive. The former leads to Lord Byron, Wagner, the Moulin Rouge, and heavy metal; the latter (I would say, based partly on my own limited experience), to Celtic knotwork, Bach, Salvador Dali, Carlos Castaneda, and electronic / trance music. It became obvious as I read on that Martindale was measuring dream-like content, not sensuousness.

Also, because those other dichotomies oppose logic to something, they’re about processes of thought, while Martindale’s “primordial content” is static. It’s something you can see in a picture, like dark shadows or bat wings, or words you can count in a poem, like “rock”, “flame”, or “kiss”. And he doesn’t oppose primordial content to logic; he opposes it to… less primordial content. That’s not actually a dichotomy; it’s just a category.

But that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter how he came up with the category if he can state clearly what’s in it, and gets strong results from it. He does that [3].

[1] My guess is he was thinking of Freud’s “primary process thought”, and used “primal” in its obsolete sense of “primary”, even though Freud’s “primary process” is neither primal nor primary.

[2] If there is a historic linking of these two kinds of dichotomies, it’s probably through the yin-yang. Women were historically stereotyped as being (a) sensual and (b) illogical. So if your main dichotomy is male / female, and “female” = sensual and illogical, then of course Apollo / Dionysius and directed / autistic mean the same thing.

[3] He built something called the Regressive Imagery Dictionary that’s a big list of PC words, among other things.

I mislead by calling PC the principal component of art. If you had a principal component, you’d explain variation in art in terms of variation of that component. Martindale’s explanation isn’t that simple. It’s complicated and not very compelling. (Don’t worry. Things gets better once he starts experimenting.)

Arousal Potential

"Arousal" is a very general, very vague concept from psychology that’s used to measure the strength of an animal’s response to stimuli. It can mean the number of steps an animal takes per minute, how much time it spends awake, its blood pressure, sexual arousal, or pretty much anything else an experimenter can measure that seems more active than passive.

Like Willie van Peer, Martindale begins by describing the Wundt curve (p. 42):

This curve shows that people get the most enjoyment (“hedonic value”) out of things that produce one particular amount of “arousal”. Play music too quietly, and it’s not very arousing. Play it too loud, and it’s painful. Same thing for other senses.

Also like van Peer, Martindale forgets the shape of the curve immediately after presenting it. He assumes for the rest of the book that artists always seek to increase arousal, although looking at the Wundt curve would suggest instead that they always seek to keep it at its optimal value. He uses the term “arousal potential” (AP), because he’s talking about a property of works of art, not a measured response to them.

Habituation

He doesn’t forget about the curve entirely. He dismisses it by talking about habituation (p. 45). Habituation is a very general behavior, found in humans, mice, snails, and even planaria. It means that an organism responds strongly to (is aroused by) a stimuli the first time, but its response grows weaker with time. So a given type of art should arouse the same person less and less the more they’re exposed to it. This, of course, is why, after reading science fiction books for a few years, people will get tired of them and switch to romance or mystery novels, and why old people can’t stand to listen to the music or re-watch the movies that were popular when they were young, but continually seek out the newest and latest. So this is why artistic styles must change: They produce less arousal over time, and people grow tired of them. The main problem is thus always to produce more arousal, to get back to optimal AP.

Except, wait, humans don’t act that way. Habituation is routinely used in theories of art, but it doesn’t match human behavior at all. Humans do exactly the opposite: They imprint on what they read or listened to as a teenager and generally seek out more of the same for the rest of their lives.

Also, if music entered the classical style around 1750 because people had become habituated to baroque, why don’t we just switch back to baroque now? The idea that we, in the 21st century, know fugues better than Bach did, is ridiculous. The habituation explanation for changing artistic styles requires Lamarckian inheritance of habituation. Martindale takes up this objection, which has been made before, and rejects it with an argument on page 49 that is, frankly, too nonsensical to summarize.

Pure Aesthetics: Content Doesn’t Matter

Martindale began by assuming that artistic change is internally driven by the quest for increasing AP. The only way to increase AP, he believes, is either to increase the primordial content (PC) of art, or to change to a new style. This is so obvious to Martindale that he doesn’t explain why. I think I’ve figured out why: Martindale adhered to a “pure aesthetics” theory of art.

It is not what Gibbon said—it is not meaning—that makes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a work of literature. It is how he said what he had to say that makes it literature… In other words, the meaning of a text is not really relevant to literature. (p. 15)

He never considers the possibility that the content of a poem, or a story, or a picture, can be artistically significant. He says the point of all art is its style (p. 71). If someone likes a work of art, any part of that liking that can be explained in terms of, say, their personal experience or morals, must not be aesthetics (p. 169). (Indeed, being likable or not likable is generally not thought by theorists to be properly part of aesthetics--rather odd, considering aesthetics is defined as the study of what people like.)

I would like to be able to say that Art, to him, is whatever is left over after you understand it. The aesthetic value of a piece would then be literally the soul of its appeal, in that it’s a hypothesized essence that can contain only whatever you don’t yet understand. That would mean he was chasing a ghost.

That’s a horrible thing to say, but I can’t be even that generous, because he says what he considers to be the soul of art: Surprise. When he talks about French poetry, it becomes apparent what he thinks art is. Like Apollinaire, he prefers poetry that makes no sense to poetry that does, because poetry that makes no sense is surprising, while poetry that makes sense, isn’t (p. 82-86). It seems that “art” is, to him, approximately synonymous with “shock”. (Unfortunately, I think this may also be a common view now in aesthetic theory.)

For the most part, this doesn’t matter, since he’s working with data rather than armchair philosophizing. His poor understanding of how art operates only becomes a burden when coupled with his weakness for rationalizing away results. (In the section on short stories, he explains away some unexpected results using a very crude model of what a story is; e.g., p. 172, 175, 313.)

But it’s his unspoken justification for assuming that there’s a very simple dynamic underlying all of art, so that taste, artistic merit, or external factors. He doesn’t feel the need to justify his expectation that artistic appeal can be measured by a single number (AP), since he already believes, from his own taste in art, that it is composed of only one factor (surprise), which means about the same thing as “arousal potential”.

Artistic Change is Scalloped

PC, Martindale says, goes down and then up within an artistic style. The more PC a work of art has, the more AP it has. But PC is hard to generate. The artist has to regress (perhaps by becoming alcoholic, acting like a spoiled brat, and/or moving to the Village). So artists generate just as much PC as they need to out-do the artist before them. (A better explanation would be that artists generate just enough additional PC to compensate for the diminution of AP below its optimal level due to habituation, but Martindale has long since forgotten that AP has an optimal level.)

When artists invent a new style, they can slack off on the regression and not generate so much PC, because the new style, and incremental changes to it, provide enough AP to exceed the AP of the previous style. (Similarly, a better explanation would be that they must include less PC, to avoid producing art with too much AP.)

Once the new style has completely replaced the old and has been completely developed, PC must increase to keep increasing AP. Eventually an artist’s work degenerates progresses to complete incoherence, or his liver gives out, and he can only increase AP by switching to another new style.

So you expect a plot of PC over time to go up and down, and each local minimum of the graph should be the midpoint of one artistic style. And this is what we see, sort of, in this plot on page 231 of PC in European music from 1500 to 1900:

Here we see the main problem with Martindale’s work: It involves a lot of staring at graphs and wishful thinking. Yes, there are curves going up and down. But how could there not be? Are these curves any different than we’d see if we plotted a random number from a normal distribution for each point?

If a point goes on a random walk, at each step it has a .5 chance of changing direction. So if you cut a random-walk’s graph into pieces at every local maximum or minimum, half of the pieces should have 2 points, ¼ should have 3 points, ⅛ should have 4 points, and so on. If the walk isn’t random, but instead you plot points from a normal distribution, then there should be fewer long runs; reversion to the mean should be more common. Pieces with 2 and 3 points should be more common, and pieces of 4 and 5 should be less common. I’m too lazy and stupid to figure it out, so I wrote a program to brute-force it. Let’s check:

          Pieces  2     3     4     5

Italy:        15   11   3     1     0

France:    10    4    3     2     1

Britain:     12    5    6     1     0

Germany: 13    5    7     0    0

_____________________________

Total:       50   25  19     4     1

RWalk:     50  25 12.5  6.2   3

Normal:   50   31  14     4     1

"RWalk" are the numbers we'd see in a random walk. "Normal" are the most-likely numbers we'd see if the plots were from a random number generator with a normal distribution. I’m not impressed.

And, yes, we see that the labels for the periods B1, B2, etc., seem to come at the beginning of a decline in PC. But the declines didn’t come where those labels were; Martindale put the labels where he saw the declines. I know this because they’re in a different position for each graph (France, Britain, Germany). The standard division is as follows: Baroque 1600-1750; Classical 1750-1800; Romantic 1800-1900 [4].

Wikipedia divides Baroque music into Early, High, and Late. Martindale has only Early and Late Baroque. Hmm. On the German graph, which is the only one that matters for this period of music [6], the labels B1 and B2 appear after points 4 and 8, which would locate them at the years 1570 and 1650. Interpolating between his points, Martindale locates the start of the Early Baroque around 1555, and the end of the Late Baroque around 1695. His entire “Baroque” is shifted 50 years too early. It would be more accurate to call the dip labelled “C” on his graph (1700-1760) “Late Baroque” instead of “Classical”. And if you check the other graphs, they’re even worse: he has the Baroque in France as 1520 to 1680!

[4] Wikipedia approaches it differently; it gives overlapping periods of 1580-1760, 1730-1820, 1780-1910, and 1890-1975. Averaging the endpoints gives the same results.

[6] The Italian graph would matter during the Baroque, but it’s totally out of whack with Martindale’s theory.

His graph begins the “Early Romantic” in 1760, 40 years too soon, and ends the “Late Romantic” in 1880. Wikipedia lists a single Romantic era. Throughout the book, Martindale divides recognized eras into as many styles as his graphs seem to say they have, rather than stating up-front how many different styles he expects to find. So, again, what would the data have had to look like for Martindale to say it didn’t confirm his theory? Pretty strange, I think.

Implications

Suppose Martindale’s thesis about artistic change were correct. What would that mean?

Well, it would at least mean that all of the essays and manifestos by all artists of all time were meaningless twaddle. Artists creating new styles are sometimes quite vocal about why they’re doing it, like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood painters, realist novelists, existentialist playwrights, and modernist poets. When they’re not, critics will often jump into the gap and explicate their work for them. All of those explanations are incompatible with Martindale’s. He says that a new style is good if, and only if, it is strange. No amount of theory matters. The theories all offer only false justifications for new strange things. At best, they're rationalizations artists must make to themselves to produce something new and strange.

It also leaves no role for quality, content, or even skill. I’d like “arousal potential” to include these, but Martindale has been explicit throughout that it does not--it only includes depth of regression (primordial content), and degree of surprise. He maintains this even when it’s patently absurd, as on page 313, when he says, “A writer must … either increase depth of regression or change styles in order to increase incongruity, complexity, and the other devices that constitute arousal potential … in an individual work of literature.” In other words, action, plot, suspense, surprising events, engaging characters, and even steamy sex are all incapable of increasing arousal potential, and so have little or no bearing on the artistic fitness of a book. Logically, I would conclude from this that the best thing I could do to my stories to make them more popular would be to use bad grammar, or no grammar at all, to increase their incongruity and "complexity".

Taken as an absolute, his thesis is simply wrong--there is more to art than incongruity. But if even a quarter of his tests held up under appropriate statistical techniques, it would indicate that the judgements of posterity, on who were great artists and what was great art, have very little to do with skill, quality, or anything other than novelty. It would mean that we don't know how to art. I'll have more to say about this after I review Pitirim Sorokin's Social & Cultural Dynamics.

Even if Martindale's thesis is entirely wrong, it's still valuable as an insight into the horrible implications of Ezra Pound’s “make it new!” Martindale’s book drives home, page after page, graph after relentless graph, a totalistic vision of art as lust for novelty. That Martindale can be so conversant with these many types of art, and value them only for their incongruity, proves that humans can theorize themselves into a numbness to art. Or, worse, that there are people who have no other aesthetics. (This would explain Axe Cop and a lot of Random fics.) That this vision of art is so compatible with 20th century ideas about art is a warning sign about the latter.

Conclusion

I like Martindale’s approach very much. He gathered a lot of data, framed a lot of hypotheses, and did a lot of tests, in many different art forms, covering the past 700 years. He just screwed up almost all of his analyses. His analysis is plagued by a failure to account for multiple hypothesis testing, a crippling failure to account for degrees of freedom, confusion of statistical significance with significance, and post-hoc rationalization. So most of his conclusions are at best suggestive, and at worst bogus.

But his experiments could have been analyzed correctly. He showed us many creative ways to experiment quantitatively on art. He just didn't get the logic and math right.

And he did several important experiments correctly, providing strong evidence for some interesting, contentious, and broadly-applicable theories about art. But if you haven't got a strong background in math, you'll never be able to tell which of his experiments are the pearls among the rubbish.

The geography of story

Screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin said something interesting in their ScriptNotes podcast on Follies, Kindles and Second-Act Malaise:  Geography symbolizes story.  They didn't say it that way, but John said that one of the things that bothered him about the Broadway play Follies was returning to the same stage sets, and that doing so made him feel like the story wasn't progressing.  Craig talked about Star Wars:  You can return to a set if it's a vehicle, like the Millenium Falcon, that's going places, and you can return to a set if it has been destroyed to prove that you can't go back (Luke returning to his foster parents' house and seeing their burnt skeletons outside its wreckage).

I immediately came up with counterexamples:  Death of a Salesman takes place almost entirely in the family house.  The "third act" of Jaws stays on the boat.  Night of the Living Dead takes place in one room.  So do Rear Window, Wait Until Dark, My Dinner with Andre, and The Breakfast Club.  Marty McFly returns over and over again to his hometown in the Back to the Future movies.  Characters return to where they started in The Hobbit and Toy Story.  My Dinner with Andre and The Breakfast Club are oddities because the "journeys" the characters are taking are not physical.  But the others are exceptions that prove the rule.

Death of a Salesman, Jaws, Night of the Living Dead, Rear Window, and Wait Until Dark all have something in common:  The people in the story are trapped.  The boat, the house surrounded by zombies, and the apartments are all death traps.  The characters in Death of a Salesman are trapped in the house by the mortgage and the refrigerator payments, just as they're trapped in their small lives by Willy's deluded faith in the power of friendship and of being liked.  The characters return to or stay in the same scene to show that they're trapped.

Marty keeps returning to his hometown, but in different time periods and alternate universes, so that it's a strange and alien place.  The changes he discovers in it are the plot.  The Hobbit and Toy Story have triumphant returns, where the victory is for the protagonists to be able to return, and to show how much they've grown after doing so.

Maybe screenwriters think about this consciously.  I never have.  Is this real?  Is it important?  Can you come up with examples of great stories where movement between physical locations does not symbolize the movement of the plot?

Writing: Jack Bickham, my strange hero

Scene and Structure is a good little book by Jack Bickham with several simple formulas that work to keep stories engaging.  Jack Bickham wrote many action/adventure/suspense novels, although he's better-known for the columns and books he wrote for Writers' Digest.

But I noticed that Bickham only uses examples from action/adventure novels. He's always talking about car chases, gunfights, and mine accidents. And the prose in his examples is terrible. So I bought some of his novels, to better understand how to interpret his advice. It's not a good sign when you list an author's books in order of popularity, and the top seven are books on how to write books.  Those who can't do, teach.

Jack Bickham was in many ways a terrible author. I say this after skimming two of his most-popular novels, Twister[1] and Tiebreaker. His minor characters are sometimes a little interesting, but his major characters always break down cleanly into good guys and bad guys—and the good guys are all basically the same person. (One of Bickham's pieces of advice is to keep the character and motivations of the protagonist and antagonist simple, clear, and free of all shades of gray, so the reader roots whole-heartedly for the protagonist and yearns to see the antagonist crushed. This makes the story less interesting, but it does keep you turning pages, at least for a while.) His stories have no themes worth mentioning. The plots, characters, and dialogue are hackneyed and uninteresting. Yet it's hard to stop reading.

Jack Bickham had very little talent or art. He wanted to write, and he studied long and hard and figured out how fiction works. And that was enough. He didn't have keen observational powers; he didn't have deep insights into human nature; he had no good ideas; he couldn't create complex characters or write poetic prose. He didn't have the gift. But he powered through with brute-force analysis and willpower, and made his living writing stories that entertained people. He's the Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger of writing, and he actually made it for a while.  That makes him a kind of hero to me.  Not the kind I want to be, but the kind I have to admire, and who can give me hope of a sort.

[1] Not the basis for the movie Twister, or at least he wasn't credited for it.

The Firefly effect

My recent story "Moving On" has 1904 views right now—enough for me, but not many for something that was in the feature box and on Equestria Daily.  It's seems to be a story that means a lot to a small number of people.  Per view, it has a lot of thumbs-up, and it has 471 favorites—almost twice as many as "Fluttershy's Night Out" with 7812 views, and half as many as "Mortality Report" with 12,108 views.  It also has a lot of comments (118).

I glanced over my list of stories and noticed something funny.  The more views a story had, the fewer comments per view it had.  So of course I graphed it.

(Not that I'm a nerd.  I just know you guys are.)

The horizontal is views.  The vertical is comments per view.  I thought people coming from Equestria Daily might leave fewer comments because they don't have fimfiction accounts, so I marked the EqD stories in red.  The story with the least comments per view, Fluttershy's Night Out, was on EqD but not in the featured box, and got mostly views from EqD, while DDKRN above it at <8192, 0.03> got most of its view from fimfiction.  So there is something to that notion.  But it still looks like less-popular stories get more comments per view.

The obvious explanation is that the people who read the less-popular stories read fimfiction fanatically, or are Bad Horse compleatists, and might be more likely to leave a comment.  Or, seeing pages of previous comments makes people less likely to leave their own comments.  I know that's true for me.

A more-interesting explanation is that popular stories don't speak especially strongly to anyone, while less-popular stories might.  I don't know if I believe that.  Star Wars and Lord of the Rings speak powerfully to a lot of people.

Either way, this suggests that as your audience grows, they become less-involved on average.

Setting

Here’s a couple of tricks taught by my strange hero Jack Bickham in his book Setting.  I don’t think Setting is very good, because it spends most of its time telling you obvious things like “Don’t set your story in the old west if you want to talk about urban slums.” But it gives a few specific techniques, the kind Bickham excels at and great writers never mention because they are too pedestrian and make writing sound like bricklaying.  I haven’t tried these myself, but they sound reasonable.

You can only change so much at one time

Specifically, when you change from the point of view (POV) of one character, back to the POV of an earlier character in a place we’ve already seen, do not describe anything in the earlier setting that we haven’t seen before until the reader is re-oriented. Specifically mention things that the reader has already seen, to help them figure out the transition. If you really want to talk immediately about the clock tower when you switch back to an earlier setting, mention that tower in the previous scene in that setting.

This doesn’t apply only when changing POV. Any time that so much is happening that the reader is in danger of becoming disoriented, reduce the confusion by turning new things into old  things, by planting references to them in earlier scenes  That includes the setting. Recently I was reading a famous pony fiction that began with two long action scenes. In the second, the protagonist walked through a strange setting to meet a villain, then had a fast action scene running back out the way she came in while fighting. I could have visualized it a lot more clearly if the author had described on the character’s way in everything that the character saw on her way out, because the fight on her way out was too fast to stop and describe things clearly.

Casting against setting requires using stereotypes

Bickham says that fish-out-of-water characters, like Gene Wilder in The Frisco Kid or Dr. Fleishman in Northern Exposure, must begin as stereotypes of people from their original setting. If your point is to show how the character’s background clashes with their present circumstances, making a realistically complex character who does not exactly fit the expectations of their background blurs the distinction between adjustments the character makes to the new setting, and the characters original idiosyncrasies.

I write like...

The text analyzer at I Write Like says I write like:

Behind the Scenes: Vladimir Nabokov (um, thanks, but I don't think so)

Big Mac Reads Something Purple: James Joyce (?)

Burning Man Brony: William Gibson

Changeling Dream: J. R. R. Tolkien (???)

Corpse Bride: J. R. R. Tolkien (?)

The Detective and the Magician chapters:

Arthur Conan Doyle

J. K. Rowling

Arthur Conan Doyle

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming

6/ Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Fluttershy's Night Out:

Neil Gaiman

George Orwell

Neil Gaiman

Friends, With Occasional Magic: Chuck Palahniuk

Long Distance: Leo Tolstoy

Mortality Report: J. K. Rowling

Moving On chapters:

Neil Gaiman

Dan Brown

William Gibson

Chuck Palahniuk

J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling

J. K. Rowling

Pony Tales:

Happy Thoughts: J. R. R. Tolkien (wrong)

Mare of the Rings (Tolkien parody): J. R. R. Tolkien

The Green Hills of Equestria (a Hemingway parody): Stephen King

Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa: Rudyard Kipling

Shipping Costs (comedy): James Joyce (?)

No Regrets (sad): Chuck Palahniuk (okay, it's a fair cop)

The Pony Side (Star Wars parody): Cory Doctorow

Twenty-One (comedy): Chuck Palahniuk

Game of Immortals: Oscar Wilde (ooh, nice catch!)

The Pony (Edgar Allen Poe parody): J. R. R. Tolkien

Poe's "The Raven": William Shakespeare

Sombra's Curse (comic horror): H. P. Lovecraft (also a fair cop)

The Ones who Walk Away from Equestria: J. R. R. Tolkien (kinda sorta)

The Saga of Dark Demon King Ravenblood Nightblade:

Neil Gaiman

Stephanie Meyer — dammit, this thing is obviously broken!

Severus Spike: J. K. Rowling (well, I should hope so!)

Sisters:

Socks!: J. K. Rowling

Betting the Moon: J. K. Rowling

Trust: Ian Fleming

Twenty Minutes:

Ian Fleming

Harry Harrison

Twilight Sparkle and the Quest for Anatomical Accuracy: Dan Brown

I don't think this analyzer knows very many writers. Looks like I need to read something by Ian Fleming.

Scene structure cures dialogue dysfunction

Dialog killed several of my stories. Long stretches where one character had to communicate something complex to another character. Boring.

Equestria Daily wanted the dialog livened up with more description and more body language. This never helped. But I gradually realized a different way to deal with the problem after reading chapter 4 (“The Scene”) and chapters 7 & 8 ("Dialogue" and "Details") of Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure, from Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, and from studying Augustus Burroughs’ thrilling prose about mundane things in Running With Scissors.

Every scene, Bickham says, must:

Have two characters who have opposing goals

Start by establishing the protagonist's goal in that scene and how it's important to the story goal

Have active conflict between the two characters

End in a setback for the protagonist.

Scene goals, Bickham says, must not be vague or philosophical, but specific and immediate, so that the reader can say at the end of the scene whether they were achieved.

Dialogue, Prose says, must always do several things at once. It conveys literal information between characters, but also their attitudes towards each other, towards life, dominance and submission, attention and inattention, and, to the reader, their true intentions. Above all, each character in the dialogue must have a goal, a reason to be talking or listening, to determine what they say and don't say.

Description, she says (and I'm paraphrasing heavily), is not like setting a stage or taking a photograph. She emphasizes the use of small details, but the lesson I take from her examples from famous stories, and from Burroughs' writing, is a different one: Don't describe things because they're in the room. Describe things that pop out to the viewpoint character because of what they're thinking.

This requires you to know what they’re thinking. And that requires them to be thinking.

Similarly, body language should not be used just to space out the dialog. Filling out bland dialogue with generic body language–"she bit her lip," "he stamped his hoof," "she blinked"–is not very helpful. They're not bad. I probably use at least one of these three expressions in every chapter of every story. But if all the character is experiencing is a generic emotion–anxiety, impatience, shock–then it suggests that what you have is not a character, but a plot device. A character has a goal in every scene, and this goal colors their perceptions, and that is what suggests what details the character notices and what they do with their body. Making every character have a goal or at least a train of thought, rather than just being a plot device, will give you the body language, descriptive details, and conflict to keep dialogue exciting.

Here’s a version (story draft 3, revision 3, if you’re curious) of one scene in a story that gave me a lot of trouble called "Moving On". Twilight has just fled the palace after failing to get in to see Luna.

She wasn't sure how much later it was when a bright light shone in her eyes, the door pulled away from her, and she fell inward and landed sprawled on the tile floor of the donut shop. She wiped her eyes and saw Pony Joe looking down at her.

"Well! If it isn't Twilight Sparkle!" he boomed. "Ponygirl, just knock if you want a donut that badly."

"Thank you," she said quietly, taking the hoof he held out to her and pulling herself to all four feet. "Sorry to bother you. I was just leaning, on the door, you know. Catching my breath."

"Yeah, sure," Joe said, shutting the door behind her. "Come on, catch your breath at this table here." He led her to the table she'd seen through the window, then disappeared behind the counter. All the shop's shelves were bare. She heard him pulling trays out of racks, then shoving them back in with a huff of irritation, before finally saying, "Hah! Gotcha!"

He trotted back out with a large paper bag in his mouth, which he dropped onto the table. "Just what you wanted! Day-old muffins!"

Twilight opened the bag, drew out a muffin, and stared at it wonderingly. "Cranberry," she said.

"Yeah, I save the left-over berry ones for Derpy. Otherwise she just digs through the trash for them." Joe shook another muffin out of the bag and took a bite out of it.

"Derpy's in Canterlot?" Twilight asked through a mouthful of crumbs.

"You didn't know? She was getting a little old to fly all over Ponyville. She's got a foot route now." Joe took another bite, grimaced, and swallowed. He grinned. "Hoo boy! These are terrible. I made 'em this morning."

Twilight laughed, spitting muffin across the table onto Pony Joe's white hat. "I wasn't going to say anything!"

Joe reclosed the bag. "Let's just save the rest for Derpy. She ain't very fussy, but that girl sure can eat." He leaned across to Twilight and touched her foreleg lightly. "Did I ever tell you about her 'banana split muffin'? One banana muffin, one cherry muffin, one chocolate-chip—all at the same time! Just stuffs them all in and starts chewing." Twilight giggled—it was all too easy to imagine exactly how Derpy would have grinned while eating it. "So just then this cello player from the orchestra comes in, mane all tidy, spotless grey coat. Derpy sees her and runs over to tell her how good it is! Only, her mouth's still full of muffin, see?"

Joe went on to describe the inevitable scene of muffin-induced shock and outrage. Twilight re-envisioned it in her mind. It was so easy to imagine Pinkie and Rarity doing the same thingas the players.

She realized that Joe had stopped talking and was just looking at her, and that she was crying again. "It's nothing," she said. "Just thinking about some old friends."

"Nothing wrong with that," Joe said. "I bet you got some stories too."

Twilight wiped her eyes, and started talking. She told Joe about how special a treat donuts were when she was a filly, and how grown-up she'd felt when she could finally afford to buy donuts herself. "Even now, knowing that I can just walk into a donut shop and buy a double-glazed if I want to makes me feel powerful."

Then she told him about the night of the Gala. "In the end," she concluded, "all the fancy food and music and dancing wasn't as sweet as sharing donuts with friends."

"Aw, I coulda told you that," Joe said.

Bleah. This is realistic, the boring way life is realistic. Joe is trying to be entertaining, but why? He’s chatting, projecting some personality; but without a purpose, it’s just aimless small talk. He’s flirting, but only in the automatic, disinterested way habitual to dominant males. Twilight passively listens to Joe ramble aimlessly. The scene does what my outline said it had to do (“cheer Twilight up enough for her to make another try”), but that structural task doesn’t engage the reader. Nopony has a goal.

So I decided on a “grass is greener” scenario: I’d already shown that Twilight feels her life is empty because she’s given up having a family for meaningless and abstract academics. So she envies Joe for being a physical creator, and sees his creation of food that sustains life as analogous to creating life as a mother, though she feels no romantic stirrings. Joe, meanwhile, had a thing for Twilight in the past, and is eager to impress her, but feels his humble profession must seem boring to an important pony like Twilight. I didn’t plan any of that when I first put Twilight in Pony Joe’s shop. The setting and characters suggested it.

Twilight’s goal at this point in the story is to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The question running through her mind in the scene is now, “How does what I’ve done with my life stack up against what Pony Joe has done with his?” Pony Joe’s goal is to impress Twilight, and he achieves it even while thinking he’s failed. These aren’t the kind of specific, yes/no goals Bickham wants, and the scene isn’t strictly protagonist/antagonist as Bickham wants, but I think that’s Bickham’s problem, not mine.

Here’s the final version of the scene. Joe doesn’t laugh at himself so easily, or maintain continual good cheer. His muffins embarrass and depress him. When Twilight compares making muffins to giving birth, meaning it as a great compliment, and when she brushes crumbs off him as if he were a colt, it just insults his bruised masculine ego more. The things described—Joe's gray hair and bright eyes, the bakery’s bare racks waiting eagerly to be filled, the helpless muffin, the crumb on Joe’s hat, his scent of yeast (a living thing)—are described because they’re relevant to these goals and to the trains of thoughts they create. It’s much longer and yet, I think, more interesting.

Notice I described things relevant to Joe’s thoughts even though we’re in Twilight’s point of view. That might be the wrong thing to do for some stories. But Twilight is oblivious in these scene, and yet I wanted the reader to catch on to what Joe was feeling.

She wasn't sure how much later it was when the door pulled away from her, a bright light shone in her eyes, and she fell inward and landed sprawled on the tile floor. She wiped her eyes and saw Pony Joe looking down and blinking at her. He had some gray in his mane as well, but his eyes soon lit up as brightly as ever.

"Well! I ain't going crazy in my old age! It is Twilight Sparkle!" he boomed. "Ponygirl, just knock if you want a donut that badly."

"Thank you," she said quietly, taking the big hoof he held out to her and pulling herself to all fours. "Sorry to bother you. I was just leaning, on the door, you know. Catching my breath."

"Yeah, sure," Joe said, shutting the door behind her. He ran one hoof over his cap, straightening it. "Come on, catch your breath at this table here." He led her to the table she'd seen through the window, then disappeared behind the counter.

The shop's shelves were bare. The counter, the drying racks, the narrow, downward-sloping wire trays on the back wall that were lined with paper and filled with donuts during the day, were spotlessly clean, waiting for the day, full of purpose.

"Joe? It's okay. I don't need anything. Really, I should be going."

"Just stay right there," he called. "Won't be a minute." She heard him pulling trays out of racks, then shoving them back in with a huff of irritation before finally saying, "Hah! Gotcha!"

He trotted back out with a large paper bag in his mouth, and dropped it onto the table. "Just what you wanted! Day-old muffins! On the house."

Twilight opened the bag and drew out a muffin. She hefted it, felt its weight. This was a real thing, that real ponies wanted, and Joe had made it, here in his workshop of wheat and hay. "Cranberry," she whispered.

"Yeah, I save the left-over berry ones for Derpy. If I try throwing 'em out, I have to bag 'em real tight or she'll like as not smell them and dig them right out." Joe shook another muffin out of the bag and took a bite out of it.

Twilight's muffin crumbled too easily, disintegrating into a dry, tasteless powder that stuck behind her gums. "Derpy's in Canterlot?" she asked through a mouthful of crumbs.

"You didn't know? She was getting a little old to fly all over Ponyville. She's got a foot route now. Still wings it sometimes. Don't have to, though."

"I don't know how she does it," Twilight said. "Trace over the same route, day after day."

Joe stopped chewing and swallowed. "Guess that seems pretty dull to somepony like yourself, Miss Sparkle." He checked his cap again, then glanced around the shop with the air of a pony who unexpectedly found himself entertaining Canterlot nobility in his home and hadn't even had time to clean up. Which, Twilight realized with a start, was technically the case here.

"I musta baked about a million muffins here," he said. "And three million donuts." His foreleg fell to the table, hoof up. The remaining half of his muffin rolled out, flopped over, and lay upside down like a helpless turtle.

Twilight reached over and laid her hoof on his. "Joe." He looked up. "Your muffins are amazing."

"Yeah?" Joe took another bite and grimaced, as if noticing its dryness for the first time. "Hoo boy. You're being nice, Miss Sparkle. These are terrible."

Twilight laughed, spitting muffin fragments. A large brown crumb landed in the center of Pony Joe's white baker's cap and stuck there. "I wasn't going to say anything!"

"I made 'em this morning. You shoulda been here then." Joe shook the muffins to the bottom of the bag. The crumb on his cap rocked back and forth as he folded it closed again. "Let's save the rest for Derpy. She'd eat a muffin-shaped rock and like it." He noticed Twilight's eyes on his cap, and felt around until he found the crumb and flicked it off. "Sorry I tried to give you these lousy muffins, Miss Sparkle. But I haven't got anything else."

"Joe. I don't mean these particular muffins are amazing. I mean, you take bags of flour, sugar, all those things, and you mix and knead and roll and bake. And then...." Twilight remembered once watching Joe take muffins out of the oven. She remembered feeling the warm air wash over her, and that powerful odor, the kind only things that are or have been alive ever have. The rows of muffins swiftly but carefully extracted onto a drying rack, small round tops perfect as foals' hooves, all the same yet all different. "It's like giving birth."

Joe scratched the back of his head. "Uh, thanks." He bit down on the bag of old muffins, yanked it off the table, and scuttled back into the kitchen.

"I mean, in a masculine way!" Twilight called out over the abrupt scraping and banging of metal shelves. "It's, uh, Joe? I mean, it matters. Baking food, feeding ponies—it gives you a purpose."

Joe shuffled back over to the table with a brush, held in his mouth as if he were an earth pony, and began whisking the crumbs off the table carelessly, getting several on Twilight and on himself. He finished and spit out the brush. "My purpose is to make you donuts?"

"Oh, Joe, I didn't mean it like that." She took a step toward him and brushed off the crumbs still clinging to his apron, ignoring those on herself. "I mean, look at me. I manage the library budget, hire and train and sometimes fire, write flattering letters to donors. But my purpose, my reason for being, is to help ponies check out books. If I ... vanished, all that would happen is that a few ponies would wonder how they were going to get their next bad romance novel."

Joe stared at her. "I don't get it," he finally said.

"You don't?"

"Making donuts is just what I do. You're a smart pony. You should know that." He moved on to the other tables and brushed them each off in turn, bending down low to inspect each tabletop from a low angle.

"Huh," Twilight said. "I'm not sure I understand."

"Ask Derpy. She knows," Joe answered without pausing in his work.

Twilight walked across the room to look over Joe's shoulder. "Joe? Are you mad at me?"

Joe sighed and set down his brush. "No, Twilight, I ain't mad. Just tired."

"Sorry." She headed for the door.

"Wait."

She froze where she was.

Joe walked up from behind and stood next to her in front of the door, breathing heavily. The entranceway was a little small for two ponies. He smelled like yeast and flour. "I ain't that tired. Can we start again?"

Twilight turned her muzzle towards his. "Do I have to fall down on the floor again?"

"You don't have to," Joe said. "But it was kinda cute."