The Plodding of Our Trade

Little pen, little fountain pen, little vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, whither have you led me, and why cannot you learn the plodding of your trade?
—Hilaire Belloc, "On 'Mails'", Hills and the Sea

Thoughts upon the pen-pusher's trade, occasioned by much reading of advice upon the matter. Careful, though: there's another Belloc quote, namely, "Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."

Ahem.

• Why, why, why, are we supposed to have our protagonists doubt themselves? I don't know, maybe it's something rich people do. I certainly never doubt myself, it's the rest of you I'm not so sure about. Put less flippantly (but seriously, hands where I can see 'em), my awareness and your mind have no method of direct intercourse, therefore I have to go by what you tell me. But my own mind: not only am I aware of it at all times, it and my awareness are entirely coterminous.
  
  I think on some level it's Platonism, a conflation of knowledge and action. A healthier philosophy would be to have your protagonists suffer temptation. Not only is it sounder metaphysics, it lets your characters have internal conflict and yet not require them to act like idiots and deny things they know full well, like morals. Far too much "self-doubt" in fiction is just a species of Plot-Induced Stupidity.
  
  The only moral conflicts other than simple temptation, are "prudential judgment"—which permitted courses of action are most likely to secure optimal outcomes?—and the question of whether one has sufficient understanding of a given situation to even come to a decision. But those aren't self-doubts.


• You know the correct way to write about religious characters? I don't know, why don't you just write about believable characters, and then work in the religion? Apparently people who write articles about "putting faith into fiction" don't know that there's been, y' know, some small amount of work done on the question of integrating religion into human life. Pretty recently, I admit, just 6000 years or so.
  
  Now, sure, fiction shouldn't preach, but if you can't have characters explain their beliefs in a natural-sounding way, brother, you're in the wrong business. A Buddhist character in my SF book, upon hearing about the Post-Human/Hermetic guy's plan to upload his mind, declares it to be akin to rebirth as an Asura. The vampire-hunting priest in my dark fantasy explains the metaphysical underpinnings of the vampires, with appropriate mention of Purgatory, the Greek Orthodox concept of Hades, and Lewis' the Great Divorce.
  
  Your job is to convey ideas to your readers' minds in an interesting fashion. I was not aware religious ideas were exempt from being thus conveyed.


• Oddly enough, I realized there's an exception to the "don't write about writers" rule, in fiction (you know, the one Stephen King has based his career on violating, with predictably painful results). The exception? Manga.
  
  Manga about manga-ka are actually good. Dojin Work and Manga-ka-san to Assistant-san to are among the best screwball ecchi comedies in all of mangadom (they're by the same guy). Bakuman is by turns fascinating, hilarious, cute, and genuinely badass—if the scene where Niizuma Eiji refuses to let the heroine act in his anime (because she'd promised the hero she'd act in his), doesn't affect you exactly like the gesture of chivalry between rivals that it is, I'd be curious to know what life is like as a heartless lizard beast.


• Back on the topic of characters with internal conflicts and flaws, apparently we love "rascals"? I don't know (then again I know the word's older connotations are somewhere between "scumbag" and actual profanity), a lot of the protagonists you try and give me as "loveable rascals" or "sympathetic because of their flaws", I mostly just want to get a knife into. Case in point: Mal Reynolds. Thanks to ODST I've really warmed up to Nathan Fillion, but not even he can salvage Mal—mostly because Mal is Whedon's self-insert.
  
  Here's an alternative perspective, from Chuck Dixon, whose toilets Whedon is not fit to tongue-wash. He's talking about comic books, but the same holds for all fiction. There are, in fact, two problems with your quaint Nihilist Realism, comrades. One, restrain your Puritanical insistence that everything be a sermon, artwork's chief good is pure aesthetic beauty. And two, as Dixon says, inspiring work is actually more mature, not less.
  
  My favorite line from that article:

  ...most of the folks writing comics don't ever talk to "real" people and have no idea what they talk like. Uh...you know? "Real" dialogue in comics these days means that the writer has written as close to the patois of a Quentin Tarentino movie as his talents will allow. It means that he has watched enough episodes of Buffy to get the characters speech patterns down.

  Preach it, brother.


• So apparently many of the blind taboos in grammar, e.g. "the passive voice? Unclean! Unclean!", is due to Strunk and White. I ignored that book in English class, but then, I ignored everything in English class, after my teacher complained that my literary analysis of Pride of Chanur had too many weird names, like Pyanfar, Khym, and Sikkukkut(nice lady, and a decent teacher, but basically Diane, from Cheers; when a 17-year-old consistently feels that you've led a sheltered life, you have led a sheltered life).
  
  Here, a bloke from the Chronicle of Higher Education lights into them.


• Huh. Where I come from, "Dark Fantasy" is that branch of Urban Fantasy that uses the trappings of Gothic, rather than of fantasy proper. But apparently, nowadays, "dark fantasy" is being used for "fantasy that deals with dark themes". Which, again, sigh, is part of Low Fantasy. Dark Fantasy, yeah, again, is basically Horror creatures and settings used to tell action/adventure stories (if they're used for romance, that's Paranormal Romance, a subdivision of Dark Fantasy). As TV Tropes says, or used to:

  In short, put a single vampire (or a few) in something, and it's Horror. Put an entire hidden society of them in there and mention the phrase "vampire politics", and suddenly it's Urban Fantasy.

  Maybe we ought to call the proper holder of the Dark Fantasy title "Gothic Urban Fantasy" (come to think of it, my wurrwilf books have the boogieman, magic, and Thor in them, so I guess that shoe fits), and let the Darker and Edgier Fantasy call itself "Dark Fantasy".
  
  I just call it "juvenile shit", though.


• I have often railed against people substituting "have I seen it before" for an actually rational criterion, in judging writing, but actually, come to think of it, my stuff is pretty iconoclastic. Why? The semi-feudal warrior Empire are the good guys in my SF books. The industrialist is the protagonist, in my superhero story (though she's a criminal; the crime-fighters are the antagonists)—and she built her powered armor to let her copy superhumans' powers and mostly uses it to crush eco-saboteurs. The vampire hunters are the good guys, in my wurrwilf story—indeed, your "oppression" narrative version of vampires (True Blood, anyone?) is how mine come into existence.
  
  Without even meaning to, I hit on a perfect anti-cliche: my heroes are, by and large, the Emmanuel Goldsteins of your Anglo-liberaltarian orthodoxy. Either people will like it despite that, freeing themselves just a little from their Pavlovian conditioning, or they won't, and I'll have the satisfaction of demonstrating what hypocrites they are, with their endless yammerings about free speech and artistic expression.