Sur l'arte d'écrivaillon II

Writing. Mostly complaining about what other people say on the topic.

• Here's a hint, Penelope Trunk. When you feel like writing about writing, don't say, "No one could write in the Middle Ages, when the good writers wrote in Latin and everyone else spoke colloquial languages like French and English, which priests told them were too lame for real writing." You just outed yourself as a historical ignoramus, an anti-Catholic bigot, and, most relevantly, illiterate short-bus luggage.
  
  Because hey, braintrust? Whole genre of writing, invented in the Middle Ages, named after the fact it was written in "colloquial" languages (by which I assume you meant vernacular, which is not the same thing, as you'd know if you'd learned the word from actual literacy, rather than a thesaurus—Beowulf was in the vernacular, West Saxon specifically, but kennings and alliterative caesura-couplets are not colloquial speech). Namely, "works written in the contemporary language of the people [of the Roman Empire]"—Romance. Not to even mention the poetic vernacular literature. Heard of Beowulf? Chanson de Roland? Yeah, last I checked, "Hwæt! we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum" and "Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes" were not Latin. And that first one was written down by a priest.
  
  There's a general principle here: if you're going to argue from history, make sure you know the damn history. Admittedly, you'd have to screw up pretty bad to equal this level of zipper-rusting bladder-incontinence, which has certainly invalidated Trunk's whole argument (not that it wasn't laughable on its merits, anyway), if not her claim to legal majority.
• Well, I feel cleansed; onto calmer discussions. I am somewhat hesitant to publish (aside from the fact that everything I've ever written is wrong wrong wrong and needs to be rewritten now my crazy perfectionism), because my fiction is only mildly less fond of controversy than this blog—and reread that last bullet point, to establish a baseline. I hate preaching, but the fact remains huge swaths of everything I write is dialogues or thought-experiments on political and ethical ideas that interest me.
  
  The problem is, people in this society (I blame the Cold War) think, if you say X, or don't say Y, that they also know what you will say on Z, W, U, and V. For instance, the whole "Tolkien is racist, because Orcs" thing—plainly, you have no, well, Inkling (rimshot!) of where that man was coming from. The Orcs are no different from the Combine guys in Half-Life; they're actually canonically elf-derived bioroids engineered for sociopathy. Orcs are not meant to resemble any human people, apart from a few cosmetic similarities to bashibozuks (who were so bad, Vlad the Impaler really was the good guy by comparison); orcs are, just like the guys in Half-Life, a commentary on eugenicist utilitarianism.
• This. Just read it. It's pretty much the last word on the subject, though, again, I don't intend to let that stop me.
• I was reading a bunch of Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique stories, which are somehow online, and all linked from the Wikipedia page. His prose is more manageable than Lovecraft's—he deploys words like "inenarrable" for definite tactical advantage, not just for the hell of it. My favorites are The Charnel God and The Black Abbot of Puthuum; tell me that second one wouldn't make a helluva D&D adventure.
  
  But I realized, the cosmic nihilism that is the basis of Lovecraftian horror (my two favorites, there, are "weird fantasy", which isn't quite the same thing) is a very interesting literary theme—it's one of my favorites. Just like how gangster movies tend to gloss over a lot of things, though, that sort of fiction requires a peculiar sort of suspension of disbelief. And, much as I like that kind of thing, I can't do it myself; I need more verisimilitude in my own work, or it just nags at me (remember how it bugs me to have carriages in a quasi-12th century setting?). The cosmos is not as the Lovecraft Circle portrayed it—and to one who knows real philosophy, even the Great Old Ones are so much comforting anthropomorphism.
  
  Speaking of Zothique, which is in the "Dying Earth" genre named after a Jack Vance series, only the first volume of which is any good (don't you hate when you buy an omnibus edition and discover that?), Adventure Time is pretty much officially in the same genre.
• So I'm reading the light novels of BakaTest. They're pretty good, though the light novel format—present-tense narrative, most of the action having to be conveyed through dialogue—is kinda annoying. But the German occasionally used by Minami (she's the girl who's in the F-class because her grades in everything but math suck, since, having been raised in Germany, she reads Japanese at an elementary school level) is just...awful. I think they fixed it for the anime—at least she doesn't use nouns as verbs in that, that I recall.
  
  The moral of the story is, "Don't use machine translation." If you want dialogue in a foreign language, you freaking do the translating by hand. Trust me, it's not that hard—you only need a dictionary and a grammar overview. I've managed to write original dialogue in all sorts of languages, including Chinese and Nahuatl (I'm not terribly confident all my Nahuatl is correct, but the language only has a million native speakers, most of whom are unlikely to read self-published American urban fantasy).
• Far too many writers' rules for writing are so...there isn't a word for it in American English so I'm going to steal from the British (turnabout is fair play) and say twee. Why is this? For example, here's a huge list of various authors' rules. It is an all-singing all-dancing cavalcade of "Wait a minute, you wrote this? Why would anyone listen to you about writing?"
  
  On the other hand, Umberto Eco's rules are awesome...because each one breaks itself. It is irrelevant whether they are actually good rules or not (I'd say about 60/40, but again—irrelevant!).
• Speaking of the whole "you are giving advice on writing when you are not good at it" issue (and if you write mainstream lit-fic, you have deliberately cultivated a bad style), why do the schools teach such bad writing? Aeons ago, I think around 2003, I took a journalism course—and the damn thing did stuff to my writing I practically have PTSD from. Everything of my own that I wrote during that time had to be rewritten in actual English. But for some reason, much of our education is designed to produce that same journalese sub-prose.
  
  There are two issues. One is that English classes, like journalism classes, are geared toward "effective" business writing, which is also the kind of writing you get in (too much) academic writing and in journalism. While the "five paragraph essay" may be a useful organizational tool, considered purely as prose it's garbage. You'll often get trolls, probably shirking their 10th-grade English homework, who try to imply that various online columnists are illiterate because they didn't have "a thesis statement", or other such rubrics designed for children.
  
  The other issue is, to the extent that English is not merely geared to business/academic/journalistic writing, it is generally artsy. I.e. when not servile, it is the most decadent possible phase of the liberal. Far too many English teachers think writing should be either a legal brief (and not a very readable one) or freaking Updike-lite ultraviolet prose. Look at the kinds of "poetry" they have you read. I read Swinburne online while ditching class, he certainly never appears in the curriculum. Shelley? Byron? Who the hell were they?
• Incidentally, I don't believe, as many who criticize the non-stories in lit-fic seem to, that fiction should be all action all the time. Sometimes, you show the characters' normal lives—the characters are supposed to be real people, and real people, even if fighting is their job, work to live, they don't live to work.
  
  I think anime is a useful model here. Even in the most action-packed stories, simply eating together actually makes up a surprising portion of the scenes. People who wield power on par with a Green Lantern spend about half their time on-screen bathing, eating, or sleeping; only that first one can be chalked up to fanservice.
  
  Also, these simple day-to-day activities have two other advantages. One, you can use them for characterization very easily, since "What's he like at the table" is something everyone notices about everyone else. Think of Van in GunXSword, always ordering all the condiments (I think it's because, like Ray, he can barely taste anything after Elena died). The other advantage is, by showing them eating, like you or I eat, as dogs and cats eat, you dispense with the need to tack on soap-operatic character flaws in order to make them relatable. Or as Chesterton said in What's Wrong with the World,

  All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. Those who will not begin at the bodily end of things are already prigs and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

• Speaking of, why does making people have a bunch of Jerry Springer flaws make them "relatable"? Aren't you assuming things about your audience that they'd punch you for saying out loud?
  
  Obviously, the way to avoid the Ayn Rand type of hero, whose actions always follow automatically from their knowledge of the right thing to do (which is totally how Aristotle thought ethics work...), without having to have a moral Idiot Plot (if you think being unclear as to right and wrong is a typical human characteristic, I for one decline to leave you unattended near my valuables), is to write about temptation. Your hero never has to break rules and angst about it—angsty tormented heroes are generally at least as bad as unerring Übermensches—but he should want to. Break rules, I mean; unless you're writing a satire on the Emo subculture nobody should ever aspire to angst.