Monthly Archives: July 2012

how Skyrim stole your people

About six months ago, all I heard about was Skyrim. Everyone was playing it. People were being made widows by it. No one could adequately explain what was so cracktastic about it – or even what it was.

About two months ago I bought it for special k. He started playing, full of high expectation – but two hours later his reaction was, “Meh.” Three hours later his reaction was, “I could play this game forever.”

For those of you who haven’t heard of it – or haven’t had the pleasure of trying to speak to your husband while he’s playing it – it’s a computer game set in a fantasy landscape. Think Lord of the Rings, with some other races thrown in, and a Hogwarts-type school for adults.

There are lots of reasons to enjoy playing it. The landscape is vast and spectacular and you can interact with every part of it. Seasons change. Days pass. Every village has its drama and you can follow characters about and get involved in their story lines. There is a surfeit of story lines. One day special k’s moving up the ranks of the thieves guild, the next he’s walking around inside a mad god’s head, trying to wake him up. It leaves you to make morally ambiguous choices without one outcome ever being prized over the other.

But this is why I think it’s so successful:

Special k was making his way down a huge river, in the middle of nowhere, trying to find his way out of a valley. He came to the river’s end, beneath outcrops of stone so huge you couldn’t even see the sky any more.

There were only rocks – and the huge, hairy corpse of a troll hitting against the rocks with the river’s movement. Beside it was a chest, still full.

There was no explanation attached – it had nothing to do with his mission, and didn’t send him on a new mission. It was just three small details that between them evoke a whole drama that had already played out, and was done.

It’s tip-of-the-iceberg storytelling at its best. It makes you feel like you’re in a complete world that doesn’t need you inside it to function. Other things are happening and have happened.

So next time your protagonist finds themselves in a river – remember to add a dead troll who hasn’t been robbed.

be bold, be uncompromising

I’ve just finished the second book in Dunnett’s House of Niccolo series, which means – and I should be getting used to this by now – my heart is broken. Actually, the sensation’s a little bit more like having someone slam the heel of their hand into your sternum hard enough to shatter it.

This quality of Dunnett that is heartbreak but feels less of the heart and more like shock comes from the fact that she’s 100% uncompromising. She’s such a hardass she doesn’t even give the pain anywhere to land.

Last weekend the Melbourne Romance Writers Guild was lucky enough to have Anne Gracie give us a workshop on how to get your book noticed in the slush pile. She talked about really books. You know, really funny, really dark, really passionate. It’s the only way to describe what makes an editor read a well-written manuscript with a plot and competent characterisation and go, “Meh.” Probably wasn’t really anything.

This is something Cat and I talk about a lot. Going fully into an idea and pushing it to its furthest, deepest end. Not being scared of the places your id wants to go. Actually, we’ve refined that one to the point where if one of us is blushing and reluctant and freaked out in response to an idea, we know we have to go there.

As Anne Gracie put it: Don’t flinch away. Be bold.

Then there’s Dunnett.

We’re told to put our characters in a tree then throw rocks at them, but while Dunnett’s characters are busy fending off the rocks she’s razing the land underneath them, so that they have no home to come back to when they find their way down.

She simply does not flinch away. And she pulls it off by having these uncompromising moments happen within a gripping, breathless, joyful, gambolling narrative. It’s not all bleak doom. But when those moments come – she gives no quarter.

I can’t give any specific examples, because they’d all be massive spoilers, but try on something like this:

Think of the one person who gives meaning to why your character does what they do. Who is the sun in your character’s universe? Now kill that person. Now take away every outlet for grief your character might have. Now surround them with people who will take them apart if they are vulnerable for a second. Now make your character clearly, deeply aware of the impact of this death. Now make every one of their best qualities useless in the face of it.

The woman has nerves of steel. There’s no way I can do, yet, what she does.

let her eat cake

So I have been weirdly haphazard about sharing this news, but: I sold my first book! It’s a teen romance that will be published by Hardie Grant next year. I sold it on a pitch, so I’m working away at getting it written now.

Some of the reasons there haven’t been trumpets and confetti are:

1) it’s not a book I’ve spent years slaving and doubting and delighting over (and despairing that anyone will ever think it’s worth buying) so this isn’t the SUDDEN FULFILMENT OF YEARS OF ANXIOUS DREAMS;

2) I’ve been working in a professional way for six months now, so this feels like a continuation of that (not like “because I obviously totally deserve it” – just like, I’m working professionally and here’s some paid work);

3) it’s not in the genre I want to make my career in (historical romance), so it doesn’t feel like launching my career; and

4) “the call” (or in my case “the email-and-meeting”) really does just happen in an everyday sort of way – there are no actual trumpets – so it’s all too easy to just take it in stride.

All that being said – I am incredibly excited. I sometimes just think, “I’m being paid to write fiction!” and the world is a lovely place. No more awkward pause after the “Have you had anything published?” question. Also, Hardie Grant are a wonderful publisher, and the way they view the market and their books falls exactly into line with the kind of stuff I want to write. I’d gotten the impression the age of chivalry towards authors was dead, but my meeting with my editor is proof that it’s not.

And while in my numbered list above I was trying to be as honest as possible about my feelings, and might have come across as a little ungrateful…this is the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. I’m very clear about that.

I even managed to actually celebrate the occasion. Special k took me out for cake and tea, and put these photos directly up on facebook without me realising.

A proud husband is a good thing! (And it means cake.)

The book has no title yet, but it’s about a chick called Lexie who is vain, has impeccable manners and is determined to become an actress. Her family is forced to move to the country before she can finish year 12, and she thinks she’s going to die of anonymity until she finds out a reality show is being filmed about the local golden boy. She’s pretty desperate to get in on the action. Only problem is, the first day she met him she insulted him to his face…

I met my husband like this:

I’m a massive fan of birthdays. I believe in broadcasting it to everyone for a good two weeks beforehand, and spoiling myself silly on the day. That doesn’t mean spending lots of money – it means on this one day I do whatever the hell I feel like. Mostly I feel like pancakes.

When I turned twenty-three I had a nuclear group of friends who were like family to me. They also liked drinking beer at the park in the afternoon. Twas a golden era.

The boy I’d been breaking up with for about nine months threw me a birthday party – and by party I mean small, intimate dinner with my ten closest friends. There were homemade pizzas. I didn’t find out until I was there, that one of my friends was bringing her boyfriend’s friend who’d come over from Glasgow, Scotland. (I’ll give you a second to get that one straight.)

This did not make me happy.

I remember very particularly thinking: At least if he’s big and ginger with a thick Scottish accent there’ll be some novelty value.

Special k looks like this:

(Heh. He’s so cute.)

And like this:

And also this:

Big and ginger, he is not. Also, his accent could pass for American. Or Irish. Or maybe Danish, on a bad day.

I think all I said to him the whole night was “Hello”, and I don’t think I said it in a nice, welcoming sort of way.

The next time we met the first thing I saw were his boxing boots, which were just like mine. Then I heard him beatbox. And then I tackled him to the ground in a game of footy and cut him open with my fingernail.

The first time he hugged me, I felt this shock of surprise, like, “Huh. He’s so human.”

I was reading a review on Dear Author the other day that got me thinking about the way love interests tend to “hate” each other when they first meet. The first two thirds-or-so of a romance is taken up with bickering and insults and arguments. And kissing, of course.

In the context of a whole life together, my period of conflict with special k is pretty tiny. But it goes to show there’s something to the idea that dislike can be the earliest incarnation of really-like.

It’s the way we express attraction as kids, isn’t it? Hair-pulling. Seaweed throwing. I once called a very pretty boy a dickhead, for not logical reason. Why do we express attraction through insult? WHY???

(That’s a serious question, by the way. I’m stumped.)

The review made me think of it, because the bickering of the hero and heroine just sounded pretty odious. The hero won’t leave the heroine’s restaurant until she agrees to hook up with him, even though she’s asked him to leave many times. He spouts clunky innuendo at her while she’s serving cake to some old women. Ugh.

A couple in a romance have to challenge each other. They have to expect unreasonable things, and unsettle and push each other. Romance and love couldn’t happen without it.

But I can’t help feeling we get so used to reading “bickering” as “attraction” that we lose track of what’s beneath it – what it actually means. What drives a person to be awful when they most want to be lovely?

(Again – no answers here.)

I was cold to special k because I was immature, and I thought I knew all there was to know about him sixty seconds after I met him. Falling in love was a bit like following lanterns down a dark path. Piece by piece he surprised and delighted me as my expectations were overturned.

I watched him eat ice cream. (There’s an ice cream cone engraved on the inside of my wedding ring.) I watched the sun rise with him from the roof of the Pascoe Vale swimming pool, and he looked at me from under the brim of his blue Glasgow cap. He hid from me at Heathrow until I was forlorn then hugged me for twenty whole minutes without letting go.

Maybe people are just better, when you have misunderstood them entirely.

some history lessons from the masters

Last year I read Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, and it changed my life. Or my brain. Or something. It challenged me to think while I read. It screwed my emotions tight and then didn’t let me go and then screwed them tighter again.

Those six books, the most incredible series I’ve ever read, were Dunnett’s learning-to-write books. I’ve just started her eight-book series House of Niccolo, which are her I-am-a-master-craftswoman books.

Special k always knows when I’m reading from the gasps and laughter and “Oh my God, Oh my God!” that emanates from the couch.

But really, I want to talk about writing history.

In my last post on writing within a genre, I raised the question of how detailed a description I should give of the famous London gentleman’s club White’s. This sparked a fascinating conversation on twitter about how much detail is expected in romance, and whether this should be redressed.

And here’s one of the reasons I love twitter: Jo Bourne, who I cited in that post as the master of detail, was right there in the fray giving her thoughts on the subject. She made one statement that started fireworks in my brain:

You want to describe something at Almacks, you describe a moth on the window.

Just pause and soak in the brilliance of that statement. Instead of the particular wallpaper Almacks had that year – which would take hours of research, and come across as a researched detail, a historical detail – we have a moth on the window: a right-now, visceral detail that connects me as a modern reader directly to the historical character. It’s a common experience between us.

It achieves what I ultimately strive for in writing in a historical setting, which is to evoke characters who live in the modern world, staring down change and industry and the sense that global disaster waits just around the corner. It’s difficult to do, because when we write history it’s through a lens, looking backwards.

This is where Dunnett’s genius comes back into play. More than any other historical writer, she places her characters right at the front of the charge into the future. Her lawyers know their law and are still part-student, her doctors are clever with their potions and her city council parades are tacky affairs.

One of the ways I’ve noticed she manages this (and trying to figure out how Dunnett does anything is not simple) is that her details are completely unconscious of the modern reader. For example: There’s a short description of a woman sitting by a window, with a rug thrown over the sill. I suspect other writers would be tempted to explain the rug, because it’s a detail that’s alien and interesting to a modern reader. It would look something like, “As the windows had no glass pane, the window sill had a rug thrown over it to reduce the chill and as decoration.” In Dunnett’s world the rug is simply there, because that’s the way things are done. It is a complete world that doesn’t question or explain itself, just as I wouldn’t think, “I am sitting on the couch with my laptop because it is wireless and doesn’t require to be on a desk.” It just is.

I’ve been thinking lately about leeching – that old medical practice that seems barbarous, almost farcical to a modern mind. Of course you don’t take pints of blood from someone already weakened by illness.

In romance novels, I’ve noticed, you can tell whether a character’s supposed to be good or evil by their stance on leeching. No hero or heroine worth their salt would believe it to be a good idea.

I want to read a physician-hero who believes whole-heartedly it is the right thing to do. The mad-inventor heroine I’ll be writing a few books down the line is going to think the battery heralds a whole new world, with an unlimited power-source that will close the class divide.

I want people who are passionately, integrally of their time – visionaries who see not the future we know followed, but the future their world suggests to their imagination.

the genre debate is never done

Last week Ursula Le Guin posted a great piece on genre vs literary fiction in response to Krystal’s article ‘Easy Writers‘ in the New Yorker in May. I don’t know that this debate will ever be done, so I see each of these pieces as the next part of a conversation – the next voice around the table.

For me, the most interesting piece to date has been Grossman’s reply to the same article. I can’t recommend reading it enough. He looks at what exactly “escapism” means, suggests that literary criticism has failed genre fiction, and concludes that genre fiction is disruptive technology. He also uses the sentence: “Because the shades of grey here, they are many.”

When special k started reading a draft of My Lady Untamed, he couldn’t immediately place himself in White’s Gentleman’s Club – didn’t know what it was, or that such a thing existed. He wanted description. He wanted to be placed firmly in a context.

When a contest judge read the same draft she wrote, “You probably only need to say ‘White’s’ – your readers will know what you mean.”

Let’s put aside for a moment the fact that if I could write like Jo Bourne everything would be present in description in the most vivid, unobtrusive way possible.

These two pieces of feedback brought forcefully home to me what it means in real terms to write within an established genre. I don’t describe White’s, because I imagine that the readers of Regency romance have, like me, their own default image of White’s that they call up each time a book takes them there. I work within a preconceived framework that allows romance to be the central, organising element of my narrative.

This is the shared “cultural encyclopedia” that Remittance Girl talks about in her post on erotica as literature. If I write with the expectation that my readers have no knowledge of the Regency I might appeal to a broader audience – but in the meantime I’d be losing my romance audience. Or at least covering ground they’re so familiar with it’d bore them to tears to read it again. I write with an assumed level of knowledge and expectation in my readers.

Grossman writes about plot:

But conventions aren’t the iron cage they’re made out to be. Sonnets are bound by conventions too, but that doesn’t stop them from being great, and wildly various. Conventions are more like the rules of chess: a small set of constraints that produces near-infinite complexity. They’re not restrictive, they’re generative.

My book is a 100,000-word love letter to the romance novels I read. It defers to and challenges the genre. It exists within a context – a long, constantly evolving history.

This is, for me, the practical implication of writing genre fiction. It’s why I don’t agree with Ursula Le Guin that all written fiction should simply be termed “literature”. Unless you’re defining “literature” as “literary fiction”, this is already the case. The way I would level the playing field is to acknowledge that literary fiction is its own genre as fully as romance or sci-fi, with its own set of markers and shared cultural encyclopedia.

We can’t attempt to level the playing field by making all written fiction the same but different, because the truth is that I’m not writing for anyone, I’m writing for a particular audience. It’s my hope that anyone could enjoy reading my novel – but I’d be shooting myself in the foot if I lost sight of the genre it belongs to.

was that army there a second ago?

We watched Super 8 last night – the JJ Abrams alien movie that’s a 2-hour ode to the adventure movies of the 80s. Rag-tag band of boy-misfits? Check. One fat kid? Check. Mile-a-minute articulate banter from the mouths of babes? Check. One enormous personal problem mirrored by the world at large? Check.

For the most part, I really enjoyed this movie. It was set right at the beginning of the 80s (if I’ve put all the pop-culture references together right), and that in itself is interesting to unpack – why that era lends itself more to the boys-adventure movie than this one. But I’m not gonna go there, or we’ll be here all day.

There was a specific aspect of the storytelling I really loved, that I can’t wait to apply to my sci-fi adventure novel. You know, if I ever have time to write it.

Five boys and the town drunk’s daughter are making a zombie movie together on super 8 film. Their passion is taken very seriously – and their grown-up/childish conversation is wonderful. One boy’s mother was recently killed in a factory accident, and his grief weaves through the narrative, shaping his relationships and the choices his friends make.

And in the background, there’s an alien invasion.

The narrative is so firmly focussed on the kids and their movie that we only really see the alien story as it intersects with them. The first intersection is a massive, spectacular train crash in the middle of a scene they’re filming. So it’s not a small, background kind of thing. But it’s entirely filtered through the main event narrative, which is “Can we use any of that in the movie? Production value!” and “Is my camera completely wrecked now?”

The best part of this technique was that all that laborious army-invades-town-goes-to-war-with-alien stuff was done in a series of escalating background vignettes. First there are army trucks driving through town. Later, the army’s blocking off roads and searching houses – which is great production value, so the kids shoot a scene in front of it. Then the army are lighting fires and evacuating the town. Then they’re at full-out war.

Because the point of view of the narrative was so firmly with the kids this never felt farcical. It felt more like a true experience of war, than the absolute focus of a war movie. My German teacher in Berlin grew up in East Berlin. He would just shrug when we asked him about it, and say, “We were just living. That’s how our world was.”

It also means the characters are pulled naturally into the action as it pushes harder on their world. They’re each pulled in according to character, and by the time the kids are involved in full-out war tactics, the two narratives have pulled seamlessly together.

It was essentially an action movie, so the action plot was obviously important. However, doing it this way around meant it could also be a wonderful character movie, with a powerful, interesting narrative arc.

By the end of my sci-fi novel my protagonist has to find herself embroiled in civil war, whose implications are going to be felt throughout the universe. But I’ve never wanted the civil war itself to take up the bulk of the narrative, or to overshadow her personal quest to find out why her mother won’t wake up.

I had a sense that the civil war needed to boil in the background – that the reader needed enough markers that by the time it exploded it was surprising, shocking, exciting – but entirely believable. Even expected, in a sense.

Until watching this movie I hadn’t really seen an example of how I could do that. Now I think: Right. Make this a story about a girl trying to heal her mother, and let everything else happen in the background until it pushes so hard at her world she had to push back.