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Monthly Archives: March 2009
Monthly Archives: March 2009
A love story on the holodeck, no words.
Sadly, my first thought on seeing this was, in a world of real holodecks, how many ugly holo-sites there would be, designed by incompetant nimcompoops like yours truly.
Imagine the worlds. Orange and pink buildings covered with heart blinkies.
Stone skins that don’t quite reach the edge of the buildings. and roofs that don’t fit.
Of course most of the holo sites would be dedicated to porn. And pop-in naked girls would appear in your holo world trying to get you to visit them. Or sell you viagra, or renew your car warranty.
On the other hand, think of all the new jobs for vitural architects, virtual interior designers and vitural landscapers.
http://www.pw.org/content/agents_and_editors_qampa_four_young_literary_agents?article_page=4
KLEINMAN: What I hate is when you don’t know if something is out with other people. I had this woman, and I should have known that she had her book out with other agents. I wrote her this nice rejection letter, gave her my comments, and thought I was sort of done. Then she calls me up and we have a conversation about the freaking book. Then we meet at some conference and I talk to her about the book. She implements everything and sends me the book, and a week later I get, “I have an offer of representation.”
ZUCKERBROT: But maybe she was taking comments from a whole bunch of agents.
KLEINMAN: Probably.
ZUCKERBROT: And you could have asked her.
KLEINMAN: Oh, yeah, I totally should have. But I don’t think about it.
BARER: You don’t have to give exclusives to agents, but you have to be up-front and say, “Other people have this.”
ZUCKERBROT: I hate it when I’m in the middle of reading something and somebody e-mails me and says, “I just want to let you know that I’ve received an offer of representation and I’m taking it.”
BARER: Yeah, kiss my ass! Thanks so much for giving me an opportunity! But I think it’s okay to say, “I’ve gotten an offer, I’m considering it, and I’d love for you to read it as soon as possible and let me know.”
ZUCKERBROT: That’s the way to do it.
BARER: There’s no clock on this. If one agent offers you representation, and you have the book out with other people, that offer, if it’s genuine, will not evaporate. Take your time. Ask questions. Give other agents a chance. Don’t jump at the first guy who offers you a ring.
ZUCKERBROT: But they get scared. The other thing to remember is that you’re hiring an agent to work for you. It’s been flipped in such an odd way. You have all these writers who are so desperate. But the truth of the matter is, they’re hiring us to work for them.
KLEINMAN: So much of it’s about responsiveness. My favorite story is about this book I got from a doctor in San Francisco. He’d written this novel. He sent it to me on a Wednesday, and I was doing the whole “I’m going to be an important literary person” thing and I thought, “I’ll read it on my at-home reading day on Friday.” So I took it home on Friday and read the book and totally loved it. I called the author and said, “I would love to represent you.” He said, “Well, Elaine Koster just offered representation, and I’m going to go with her.”
LAZAR: Oh, man.
BARER: Not even a conversation.
KLEINMAN: The book was called The Kite Runner. [Extended whooping and laughter.] And I think he did absolutely the right thing. She was totally on the ball.
LAZAR: You lost The Kite Runner? I lost The Art of Racing in the Rain, but you lost The Kite Runner? That trumps everything.
Do you ever re-write the same scene from the PoV of more than one character? Do you include the variation in the novel, or just use it for reference?
I do both.
A lot of my stories play with Point of View. Not everyone in my world sees things the same way — literally, because depending on their powers, they can see some forms of magic (some Chromas) but not others.
So as I comb over my new version of Chapter One, I am examining the meeting between my main character, Dindi, and the arch-nemesis of the whole series, Lady Death.
A bit of my dialogue is overblown and melodramatic, and I don’t want that. Plus, Lady Death knows a great many things Dindi would like to know, but Lady Death has no intention of revealing them. Accidently, however, Death does let slip out a few clues to her plans — and her vulnerabilities. I have to make sure the secrets and slip-ups make sense from Death’s perspective.
So I am re-writing the meeting scene from Death’s PoV. (In Death’s PoV, she even has a human name, but this is one of the things she will never tell Dindi). This scene, from this PoV, will not appear in any of the books. But it’s useful in showing me where to adjust the dialogue. Ah, now I see, I realize as I re-write, Death is actually thinking this when she says that. But Dindi won’t realize it.
Does anyone else do this?
UPDATE:
I also want to distinguish between writing the same scene from a different PoV to be INCLUDED in the book, and writing a scene from a different PoV solely as character study. I do both.
As an example of a single scene retold from mulitple PoVs, I have a sequence which is told from a son’s PoV and then, in a later book, from his mothers. The action and dialogue is all the same, but in one version we see what the son thinks of his mother (and what he thinks she thinks of him) and in another we see what the mother thinks of her son (and what she thinks he thinks of her).
Neither character would dispute the facts of what they did and said to one another, but hopefully the reader will still see the miscommunication and misconceptions which can arise even between two people who love each other very much.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter-bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
-Stephen Crane
In the discussion of literary vs genre fiction, two points were brought up regarding litarary fiction. One, is that it is especially important in literary writing to make every single word shine. Two, literary fiction should bring up existential questions.
Scott Bailey put it like this on Lady Glamis’ blog:
Literary fiction, as far as I’m willing to define it, is as much concerned with form as with anything else, and where the subject matter is the experience of life, and the purpose is to give the reader a chance to experience life in a broader way than before. Or, to quote C.S. Lewis, “passion is present for the sake of imagination, and therefore, in the long run, for the sake of wisdom or spiritual health–the rightness and richness of man’s total response to the world.”
I don’t consider myself a literary writer; I reserve the right to toss magic-wielding barbarian hunks and kung-fu ten-headed rakshasas at my heroes, as well as to marry them all off to live happily every after. However, there are aspects of literary writing I try to sneak into my books in between the gratiutious magic, sex and cannibalism.
Even a pulp fiction hack like me has to make every word count. Mary Lindsey addressed this in her blog. An early rejection told her, essentially:
Your story and characters are intriguing. I was disappointed that the writing didn’t live up to the premise.
Ouch. (Note, she doesn’t have this problem any more!) This is exactly what I fear agents are thinking about my work. (My other fear is that they might say, “The writing is lovely, but the story makes no frinky sense.” Or even worse, “The quality lacking in the writing of this manuscript perfectly captured the hackneyed plot.”)
Writing quality is even more crucial if one is trying to slide existential questions into a plot-driven story. I suppose the difference between what I write and a literary novel (as I understand it) is that I seek to conceal weighty questions of Life and Death beneath a frosting of mind candy. This is the purpose of having Death as a living, breathing (and, in my story, mortal) character. You can accept the story on two levels. If you want, you can read it as an exicting action scene, in which a hottie in black leather fights off a bear.
There is also another level to the story — nothing so crude as a straight allegory, but hopefully a fairy tale or mythic level, like the folk tales from around the world. That’s what I hoped to capture, it’s what my writing ability may or may not be able to express. The best fantasies all work on many levels: The Earthsea Trilogy, the Lord of the Rings, The Curse of Challion, Harry Potter and several other favorites.
There is also another level to the story — nothing so crude as a straight allegory, but hopefully a fairy tale or mythic level, like the folk tales from around the world. That’s what I hoped to capture, it’s what my writing ability may or may not be able to express. The best fantasies all work on this level: The Earthsea Trilogy, the Lord of the Rings, The Curse of Challion, Harry Potter and several other favorites.
Fairy Tales / Myths / Origin Legends are probably the oldest form of story telling. Most of them date from the days of purely oral culture, and so are simple in form, limited by what both speaker and hearer can remember without notes and convey in one sitting. Modern fairy tales don’t need to duplicate this simplistic structure, but if one is trying to capture