Posted on by Eileen Young

Factors in World-Building

I grew up in the Cariboo, a region of central British Columbia whose economy centers around forestry, ranching, and tourism. These are important things to know about the Cariboo, as they shape life there. As a member of the community there, I planted trees, owned cowboy boots with real cow-shit on them, and was in the Billy Barker Days parade more years than I wasn’t (and, going to their site to link it here, saw that my kindergarten teacher won first prize).

With my mom involved in several facets of the community and my dad involved in cycling, the dog sled races, the local paper, and the local news station while he was there, I grew up enmeshed in a small town, even though Quesnel has all of thirty thousand people.
For me, this led to several important facts, in no particular order:
-I have ridden a draft horse.
-I have been outside in -52 degrees Celsius
-I never want to be outside in -52 degrees Celsius ever again
-I can name five types of salmon off the top of my head
-I pay attention, in stories, to how sensibly a city is brought about.
This is especially important in speculative fiction and fantasy, where the worlds are more likely to be completely separate from our own, but also in literary or mainstream fiction. If your city is in the middle of a desert, with no obvious water supply, it will ruin the whole story for me. If your small town is surrounded by impassable mountains and no one could get in until a tunnel was blasted through and there is no apparent wealth (mineral or vegetable or animal) there, why does anyone live there in the first place?
Similarly, how does the town run? In large cities, this can be mostly excused, as they find ways to perpetuate long after the original reason is gone. In small towns, though, where a single industry can be the beating heart of the town, what is the industry? Does it have one? Having also spent time in the Midwest, I’ll accept farming as an answer, now, though grudgingly.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Voice

Finding one’s voice is made much of all over. We want our writing to speak from us as people, but us made sparkling and witty and insightful, with a thin veneer of fiction if that’s what we write. Some writers I know retreat to cabins at the beach to be isolated and more easily themselves, some take Hemingway’s approach and drink, some outline from their dreams as closest to their concepts and isolate themselves with orchestras to hammer them into shape.

For me, it’s in large part a matter of balancing the things I want to say with the way I want to portray my characters, as I largely write fiction. I try to consider the ways in which their thinking would differ from mine.
Most of my characters, for example, do not read quite as much non-fiction as I do, or at least not for fun, so they don’t have the wide general knowledge I do. Or they don’t value reading at all. But a voice that disdains reading isn’t quite the voice I want to write with, thus the careful balance.
I’ve mentioned other points of consideration before, relating to gender and the construction of a character’s world. But having writing sound like mine is another point, and one that changes as I do and becomes more or less important in certain kinds of writing.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Write 1 Sub 1

I didn’t get the dictionary. I was too torn on whether I really needed more books, and then it was gone.

The possibility of missed opportunity seems to be a huge motivator for people in general, but most observably for me in writers. Despite accepting submissions year round, the three days before the deadline on both of the magazines I work on have more volume of submissions than any three weeks the rest of the year.
Such violent fear is easily circumvented by planning, but it’s easier to plan the writing than what comes after. That’s why Write 1 Sub 1 seemed like such a fantastic thing when I heard about it in January. Deadlines for magazines are less of an issue when you have personal deadlines at much more frequent intervals.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Changing Fields

I had someone write to me the other day that they find my interest in literature rare.

It surprised me, as I live surrounded by people with literary bents, and I see numbers on a regular basis about ebooks an selfpublished books as they take off. I think interest in literature in a general way is stronger than ever, but it is less of a central culture; genre fiction is immensely popular, and indie authors tend to find more success in physically local markets.
With Oprah retired, we have no central figure telling us what to like; the New York Times bestseller list shows what people already like an buy, not what they might like in the future. This is where the proliferation of all manner of small decentralized communities comes in: if you like steampunk, you can find communities that discuss it, that can recommend and review and dissect various authors and novels in the genre.
Interest in literature has just become more specialized, more genre-based, as genres and our ability to expose ourselves to only what we want expands. It’s an interesting direction for an ever-changing industry.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Gendered Language is like ‘Black’ Only Worse

“Am I speaking to the lady of the house?”

“Well, I’m not a man, and I live here.”
The above conversation is one I overheard my mother having. Being a former hippie, she’s part of a movement that understood ‘lady’ as a trivializing term, whereas I understand it as a respectful term in most contexts.
But what does your reader understand it as? Your main character? Are they the same or different?
Worse, if you’re writing for anyone under 30, what do you do for those characters for whom a gendered pronoun is not appropriate? “That person,” “they,” and [name] can be hard to navigate for the length of a thousand-word short story, ignoring completely the challenge of novels. First person can be a way around dealing with it in narrative, but what about how characters react to them? Does the entire cast have the same biases about a character of non-obvious gender, and if so, is that on purpose?
Even if you’re keeping to gendered characters, there’s the question of terminology to reference significant others; “partner” is en vogue, but with some subcultures it connotes a same-sex partner, while with others it connotes someone with whom the relationship is too serious for them to feel comfortable using “boyfriend” or “girlfriend,” but which is not headed for marriage.
Gendered language is a similar minefield to that of finding politically correct skin-colour/ethnicity terms. It’s worse, though, in that melanin content can be described as “Oh, you have a high melanin content.” That makes for awkward phrasing, but it’s possible without turning too many verbal backflips. Gendered language, though, can be broken down by people who subscribe to a gender binary, people who consider it a spectrum, and people who present socially as one thing but consider themselves another (drag queens are one example of that in play).
It’s going to be impossible to please everyone. But in writing, it’s a good thing to consider as part of who you’re representing in your fiction and who you’re speaking to.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Full Fathom Five

Full Fathom Five is James Frey’s latest project. We all remember Frey, right? The notorious author of the ‘memoir’ A Million Little Pieces, he’s now using his notoriety – er, sorry, industry contacts – to get young and bright-eyed MFAs published, with aims at movie deals for all of them.

Sounds great, right?
Except that said MFAs don’t get to claim credit for it. Their names appear nowhere on the published book. The recent movie I Am Number Four was put out by Full Fathom Five, and the author has sued for the right to claim in public that he wrote the original novel. He’s now allowed to talk about it, but his name still doesn’t appear on the book.
It’s an interesting concept, a think tank for coming out with cool young adult novels, surrounded by other people trying to do the same thing, with someone acting as literary agent for the whole group. Even the idea of branding as a think tank more than as a collection of individual writers is kind of fun, in concept.
Where Full Fathom Five falls off into creepy and exploitative is that James Frey is modeling it after Damien Hirst’s art factory – it’s all to be rewritten to his orders, and bear his stamp more than that of the writer, or even of the collective, for low wages and no recognition. The contract is a nightmare.
Which is why, despite pretty people and sparkly special effects in the previews, I will not be seeing I Am Number Four, or any future project from Full Fathom Five that makes theatres.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Akrasia, and the necessity thereof

Akrasia, as defined over at Wikipedia, is “the state of acting against one’s better judgement.”

For example, venti creme brulee lattes with whipped cream are bad for me. They contain dairy, which I react badly to, caffeine, which renders me strung out, and whipped cream, which renders me fat. Also sprinkles, sometimes. I know, logically, that they are bad for me and that I should not drink them. But they’re also delicious.
And sometimes delicious wins. That’s akrasia.
As an aspiring rationalist, I want to avoid akrasia as much as possible (that’s why I have tea in front of me – that and holiday beverages being over of the year).
Since I like to have characters that represent a fair spread of humanity, there are some characters who are aspiring rationalists, too. They fall victim to akrasia infrequently, since they’re specifically looking to avoid it, but they still do, since they’re still aspiring rationalists. And, in my stories, they end up in extreme situations where their best interests might not always be clear, making akrasia nearly inescapable.
For non-rationalist characters, akrasia is much more frequent. They do things like go off on adventures to save the world, when staying where they are and filing a complaint with their local representative or calling the police would be more practical and be the more logical decision, as there are agencies which are more effective than they are as an individual and present lower risk to life and limb.
It’s important to separate akrasia from the character judging outcomes using only the information they have, as opposed to information the author has. If the character has let their dog outside and hears a scratching at the door that sounds just like their dog, but the author has shown that it’s a ravenous wolf scratching at the door, the character is acting in their best interest as far as they know when they let the wolf in. To a reader, it’s achingly stupid, but the character is using the information they have available. To present the same character in a situation that really would involve akrasia, install a window next to the door. The character has heard stories on the news of wolf sightings in town. It’s dark out, and the shape is canine, but distinctly not that of his dog. He wants it to be his dog, since otherwise it means something has happened to make his dog not send up an alarm. Does he keep the door closed and call animal control, or let hope rule and let in the wolf?
Take out the possibility of akrasia, and you as a writer remove a great deal of suspense from your writing. The three main conflicts are man against nature, man against man, and man against himself. A rationalist who acts always towards what is best for themselves removes the third conflict. An aspiring rationalist, however, may simply elucidate that conflict more than many.
In fiction, akrasia serves a purpose, and can be good. It adds conflict, and makes characters more relatable to we flawed mortals who don’t choose rationally at all junctures. If the main character of Alexander behaved in a rational way, I’d never have made it past Chapter One with that particular story. This post is a result of more ruminating on the differences between good fiction and good life.
This post is also up at my group writing blog, Lunatic Writers.
And now, blog post complete, I shall go and drink something with sprinkles.
Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Writing Software

Another frequent topic of debate is the technology used to write. Most frequently I see pen and paper vs computer, but not nearly enough do I see comparisons of the writing software available.
Microsoft Word and Notepad are the most obvious tools, since they come bundled with a Windows package on almost any PC you can buy commercially. But if you’ve had to wipe your hard drive and have lost your discs or are more interested in freeware in general, there’s OpenOffice. It has a lot of the same features as Word, except it can save in more formats. The default format isn’t Word, and Track Changes is hard to translate to another machine that doesn’t run OpenOffice, but it’s free, not particularly buggy, and has lots of online support. Probably not best for absolute computer beginners, but if you can google “how do I ___ in OpenOffice” and aren’t particularly set in your ways with Word, it’s a nice way to go. And if you feel bad about using freeware, you can just donate: a substantial donation at OpenOffice.org can still be cheaper than Word.
But what if you’re frequently switching between machines, and can’t keep track of a flash drive to save your life? What if you’re collaborating on a project with six people and can’t keep track of the latest version? What if, like me, you don’t want your hard work tied to your hardware? Then there’s Google Docs. Available anywhere there’s internet, they have a few fewer formatting capabilities than some software, but are free and perfect for collaboration. There’s a bit of a learning curve for using it, but it’s been well worth it for me.
Then there are the writing-specific softwares, like Dramatica and StoryWeaver. The only one of these that I’ve tried is yWriter5 (which everyone will be shocked to find is freeware). I found it interesting, the way it encourages planning and structure and pre-writing, but didn’t find that it gave me any appreciable advantage that couldn’t be filled by a spreadsheet. For people with large, sprawling worlds and huge casts of characters, it might provide more of an advantage.
Like every other aspect of writing, it’s a matter of finding those tools that work for you.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Why are your aliens wearing Prada?

Writing science fiction opens up a plethora of fascinating aspects to explore: “physics”-enabled magic, cool weapons, thought experiments on everything from economics and ethics to the viability of a nitrogen-based lifeform. It can be what-ifs for how we would deal with disaster if it struck in the next week to far-future scenarios on Earth or Earth-parallels or on spaceships dealing with revolution or alien encounters or just internal politics or relationships against this new background.

That last part is key: no matter how futuristic and strange the world, there are characters acting on that stage. And, unless those characters are all time-travelers, they come from a society shaped by the technology available in the story.
That’s what baffles me most in some sci-fi stories I read: the world changes, but the social mores don’t: in fact, they’re about mid-90s and a little conservative, with no obvious in-world reason they’d be that way. Technology alters culture. Look at what the printing press and the industrial revolution and the Internet have done to society. It’s the industrial ‘revolution’ for a reason.
How human beings react to new situations is the point of all fiction. More so in speculative fiction, where inherent social conditioning can be more easily examined by removing or changing the conditioning the characters have. If their conditioning is the same as that of an average modern person, it’s removing an entire dimension from the story.
Of course, one doesn’t want to completely remove those elements of a character which make them relatable. But everyone needs air, food, shelter, companionship no matter their environment nor their relationship with it. How they approach their search for their basic needs (are they employed? living in luxury in a post-scarcity economy like someone from Heinlein or Doctorow or Stross? do they get their social interaction in person? for pay? online?) illustrates a world as well or better than all the ray guns you can fit in the prop room.
So when an otherwise promising story has characters who might as well have grown up in the 90s in North America, I’m disappointed: we can all do better.
Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Networking 2.0

It’s no secret that most business decisions have always happened in old boys’ clubs, over drinks or golf or both. But now we do a lot of our socializing online. How many startups have been born from interest-based communities on the internet?

The same necessary camaraderie springs up just as easily from internet associations as from face to face ones for me, and for many people accustomed to socializing on the internet. Part of that is a paradigm shift from when I first started using computers, where I was explicitly warned by mentors that most of the people I met online would be predators and liars, and I’d never know who they really were or how old they were or where they lived, so I should never, ever give out personal information lest I be kidnapped.
This was before Facebook.
Now, while we don’t bandy our mailing addresses about on public forums, those people I’ve met on writing forums I know as people, not Random Internet Strangers. We’ve talked story ideas, bemoaned the night shift, watched the hilarious faces one of our number makes when she has to take her cold medicine. And, when one or more of us has an idea, it’s this network of like-minded individuals who come together and discuss it.
I’ve had a couple major ventures come out of my online networking; Theory Train and Lunatic Writers. They never would have come into existence if it weren’t for my finding a group of like-minded friends on the internet.
As valuable as local groups and workshops are, it never hurts to be open to the possibilities inherent in new media.