Don’t Develop a Style

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An unfortunate piece of advice is to tell aspiring writers to develop a style. Aargh! No no no no no! That’s the LAST thing you should be doing. You can’t help having a style any more than you can help speaking with a particular accent. It’s literally not possible.

Now your writing might suck, but not because you don’t have a style. Maybe it SUX because you don’t understand subject-verb agreement or when to use apostrophes. Maybe it SUX because you try to be funny but aren’t, or are funny unintentionally. That equals SUX. It’s also true that lots of stuff that sux, sux in the same way – e.g., a lot of people don’t, in fact, know how to wield apostrophes – but what matters is the fact that it sux, not (only) the fact that it sux in a way that’s similar to other people’s sucky writing.

That’s a different problem from not having a style. If you’re “trying to develop a style,” you’ve got it all wrong.

Writing is a human mind on paper, and reading that writer’s work takes you into his/her mind. It takes you into their world. Borges was pure imagination and intelligence; his prose was crystalline (even in translation this is obvious) so you could perceive the ideas with no distractions. Heinlein was optimistic and folksy, and his amusing dialogue (after his first few stories) conveys this. Susanna Clarke is very English, at least from this American reader’s point of view, and is interested in what England circa 1800 would have been like if the old, dark fairy tales had been true. She explores this in the style of a novel of around that time. (Hence the comparisons to Jane Austen, if Austen had been on acid.) Bester was all about intense, driven characters, and his relentless, flooring-the-gas-pedal pacing is part of a style that matches his subjects. Lev Grossman, in The Magicians series, takes you into what magic would actually be like if actual North American twenty-something hypersmarties actually got their hands on it. He presents his fictional world with asides about particle physics and cellular automata, the way they’d view it. And so on.

The point is: If you self-consciously “try” to develop a style, you’re muting your own unique view of the world. DON’T DO THAT! Let your own style, your own take on things, flow out of you naturally. It’s one of your few items of stock in trade, and the only one on which nobody else can compete with you.

You don’t have to limit yourself to one kind of work. You can (and probably should) write humor and drama, etc. But your kind of humor story and your kind of drama story should – must, if you are to be any good – be yours, naturally yours, not the result of you trying to do something other than write naturally, the way [insert your name here]’s mind writes.

Shades of gray I

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Tolkien has them, frequently-made claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Some examples just off the top of my head. (And while I’m a fan of The Hobbit, I’m not particularly a fan of The Lord of the Rings; a fan could probably come up with more examples.)

• Thorin Oakenshield. Greed exerts a regrettable influence over his behavior throughout The Hobbit, especially toward the end. Obviously he’s not evil, but he’s not exactly an angel either.

• Beorn. How do you categorize this guy morally? He’s basically benign, because he just wants to be left alone. But he’s also a threat. Bilbo and the dwarves are urgently warned not to leave the house while he’s outside it in bear form. He captures a goblin and kills it, which is morally fine since the goblins are planning on attacking a nearby human settlement. But he also lops off its head and mounts it on a stake outside his property, and skins the warg it was riding and nails the skin to his wall. Presumably the goblin and warg were in no position to care by then, but it’s rather Hannibal Lechter. You want to ask Beorn, “Um, dude? Are you…okay?”

• The wood elves of Mirkwood. Tolkien sums them up as, on balance, “good people” and “not wicked folk.” But also, “If they have a fault it is distrust of strangers…They differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise.” That’s putting it mildly. When the dwarves, dying of hunger and thirst, approach their revels to try to beg some food and drink, the elves’ response is to disappear. Three times. Later they take the dwarves prisoner. Their King, in particular, is completely unreasonable about holding them prisoner – even if they wait “a hundred years” – just because they won’t tell him what their quest is. Like it’s any of his damn business! (And he’s avaricious: “If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems; and though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more…”)

• Sauruman. Starts good, happily allows himself to be corrupted by dreams of power.

• Gollum. Good (as Smeagol long ago), then bad, then good, then bad.

We could also include some marginal cases:

• Tom Bombadil. Now Bombadil plainly is good, not evil, by temperament. Still…he won’t join the fight against Sauron, and in fact acts indifferent to the whole War of the Ring. He just lets other people fight that fight. That is not heroic behavior.

• Even the hero of LOTR, Frodo, succumbs to temptation at the end. This is a marginal case because he’s been exposed at length to the most powerful malign magical object in the world, which, we’re told, no one can resist. But still. One could make a similar point about Boromir, by the way.

Of course there are also lots of good characters and evil ones.

So all in all we have some unambiguously good characters, some unambiguously evil characters, and some morally in-between characters. In other words, everything. This is more “broad-viewed” and “nuanced,” not less so, than work that only has morally ambiguous characters! What’s broader: A work that has black, white, and shades of gray, or one that just has shades of gray?

None of this should be taken as a denial that LOTR is essentially a good-versus-evil story. But to say that everything in Tolkien is black or white, with nothing in between, is to depart with breezy nonchalance from the actual text.

A Vision: Fantasy Unchained

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No world-building except that necessary for the story.

Fantasy does not need complicated genealogies, fully-worked-out artificial languages, or laboriously detailed history. Freed of such distractions, fantasy flies. Fantasy is
Unencumbered
Unrestrained
Unchained.

Q: “So you’re on a crusade against world-building?”
A: Not necessarily. There’s no need to choose one approach; that would be like saying that a toolbox should have either a hammer or a screwdriver, not both. However, one might suspect the detailed world-building era was just that, an era, a historical episode in fantasy and the other world-building genre, science fiction.

Think of the best-loved world-building works in fantasy and sci-fi. In fantasy it’s The Lord of the Rings and in sci-fi it’s Dune. The reason people admired the world-building in The Lord of the Rings was that it was the first work in fantasy to feature such detail, and Dune was, if not the first, one of the first in sci-fi to feature it. That is, a lot of the appeal was the novelty. More than half a century after The Lord of the Rings, and more than a third of a century after Dune, the novelty has worn off. At least, the super-detailed world-building should be allowed to lie fallow for a while.

Also, world-building has become a self-indulgence of some authors. It is a self-indulgence when a story that could unfold in 350 pages unfolds in 500 due to the inclusion of unnecessary background. I once flipped through a fantasy novel that described mourning rituals at funerals in excruciating detail. It was utterly irrelevant to the story. There is something almost masturbatory about it. It is especially pitiful when the author obviously thought, “By God, I spent 100 hours fleshing out this world, and I am damn well going to get some use out of that 100 hours, so I’m going to shoehorn in the names of all 68 of my fictional religion’s deities if it kills me!”

In constructing my fantasy setting I could have dumped a kiloton of material from my area of expertise, which is relevant for world-building, into the novel. But why? It would hurt the pacing and really, would just be me showing off.

There is a venerable notion that “Human beings live by the stories they tell.” You have never heard “Human beings live by the fictional elf languages they create.” There is a reason for this.

If I’ve done my job the way I wanted to, I grab you by the hair and take you on a divebomb from the front cover to the back cover. You barely remember to breathe or blink, let alone be detained by the heroine’s genealogy.

Imperial Teen Magazine

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Who’s the man behind the mysterious mask? An interview with the Emperor’s right-hand man Darth Vader, page 16

When Darth Vader arrived on Coruscant for the first time as a ten-year old boy, it took his breath away. “I had never imagined in my wildest dreams anything remotely like it,” the Emperor’s right-hand man told our reporter in a recent interview. “The lights, the sounds, the species from all over the galaxy, the sheer size of the buildings—it all combined to literally knock me speechless!”

He had little time to see the sights; a Jedi apprentice, he was immediately immersed in the rigorous training of the order. “The Jedi was your life while you were in it,” Vader explains. “There was very little time for extracurricular activities.” As a six-year-old, he had been recognized by the Jedi as a youth of impressive potential and they recruited him aggressively. They even made an exception to a long-standing Jedi rule just for him: Normally, six years is too old to begin Jedi training, but so impressed were the top Jedi that they decided to admit young Vader. “It was very flattering,” he says, “but also a little overwhelming. You ask yourself, ‘Am I good enough? Will I live up to the faith all these people have in me?’”

The answer was yes, and then some. Darth Vader quickly displayed outstanding talent in the Force, which according to Jedi tradition is what gives them their fighting skills, and he mastered the lore, the fighting techniques, and the code of the order. When the Clone Wars broke out he fought with distinction, making the difference in several key engagements between the Imperial Army and secessionist forces. “We won some battles due to Lord Vader’s presence,” says an Imperial officer who fought alongside him in several engagements. Vader soon was recognized as a superb tactician, strategist, and fighter pilot. “He’s not just among the best pilots,” says the officer, “he’s the best.”

————————————————–
Darth Vader: Fast Facts

Title: Formally, he is Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith. Normally one would address him as Lord Vader.
Rank: Special assignment, reporting directly to the Emperor.
Bio: Details must be closely guarded to prevent Jedi assassination attempts.
The Sith: An order of Force-sensitive individuals like the Jedi. The Sith believe one should humbly accept the Force in all its aspects, instead of arrogantly trying to judge that some aspects of it are “good” and some are “bad,” as the Jedi did.
————————————————–

Emperor Palpatine, always quick to notice and encourage exceptional talent, took the youth under his wing and became Vader’s trusted mentor. And late in the War, Lord Vader became the youngest Jedi ever admitted to the Jedi Council, the group of senior Jedi who headed up the order.

But all was not well. Vader began to have doubts about the Jedi when he realized they were focused more on increasing their own power than protecting the defenseless. “I didn’t realize it all at once,” he says. “It was an incident here, an incident there. It built up over time.” The Jedi resisted any oversight from neutral third parties, interfering with or outright refusing Emperor (then-Chancellor) Palpatine’s attempts to bring them on board the democratic process. Lord Vader explains, “The Chancellor wanted me to be the Senate’s representative in the Jedi Council. The Jedis’ response to that was to ask me to spy on the Chancellor for them!” Vader’s conscience wouldn’t let him, and he warned the Chancellor about the Jedis’ increasingly aggressive attempts to amass power. And he reluctantly began to consider the possibility of resigning from the Jedi.

But even Lord Vader and the Emperor didn’t realize just how vicious the Jedi could be until the Jedi tried to assassinate the Emperor. A particularly dangerous Jedi Master named Mace Windu was tasked with killing the leader of the galaxy. Vader, who witnessed the whole thing, recalls what happened: “They [the Jedi] actually brought me in on their plan. Apparently it didn’t occur to them that I might find it morally wrong to kill the leader of the Galaxy! So I was in the room when Windu tried to assassinate the Emperor. He had his lightsaber inches from the Emperor’s face!” With the leader of the galaxy moments from death, Vader instinctively shoved the menacing Jedi away from the Emperor. Still snarling with hatred, the would-be assassin fell out a window to his death.

Vader has no regrets. “The only reason the window was open to the air was that he [Windu] shattered it when he swung his lightsaber at the Emperor. If he hadn’t tried to kill the Emperor he would still be alive.” He pauses and then adds, “It’s bad enough to be obsessed with power. But when you try to take advantage of the strife and chaos of a civil war to increase your own power, well, that’s just over the line.”

The assassination attempt was the last straw. From that moment Vader realized he could no longer in good conscience remain a Jedi, and he broke with the order. “It was a real eye-opener,” he says.
*****************************************************
So who is this mysterious former Jedi Knight hidden behind the confining mask? That must remain a closely guarded secret, and here’s why.

The Jedi were furious at Vader for foiling their assassination attempt and in revenge they sent a new assassin to kill him, as well as another assassin to attack the Emperor. Both of the intended victims escaped alive, but Lord Vader was badly wounded in the fight with his assassin. The wounds inflicted by the vicious Jedi included damage to Vader’s lungs, necessitating a special breathing apparatus of which the mask is a part. But the mask has a silver lining, in that it shields his identity from remaining Jedi who might have been away from Coruscant when events unfolded and so don’t know who Vader is. “It’s a way of making it harder for them to get to me,” he explains.

Lord Vader admits that it can be a burden. “It definitely can be frustrating at times because it cuts you off from human contact. I’ve always been a guy who likes to look people in the eye, you know, make that connection. But now it often feels like there’s a barrier there.” When you’re a people person like Darth Vader, it’s especially grueling.

But he’s still upbeat: “There’s a lot to be happy about. Hey, the good guys won the war and we held the Galactic government together. Ultimately, the Jedis’ assassination attempts and efforts to take over failed. The Galaxy went through a rough patch in the last few years, but in a lot of ways we’re stronger for it.”

In one last act of vindictiveness the Jedi planted rumors against Vader as they fled Imperial police forces. “I’ve heard all kinds of things,” he recounts. “I’ve heard people say that I’m really a secessionist spy, that I killed younglings, that I tried to kill the Jedi who was sent to kill me, that he was just fighting in self-defense. And when they’re not saying stuff like that they’re trying to make me look ridiculous. One rumor I’ve heard is that I wear the mask just because I’m so darned ugly!”

————————————————–
Darth Vader: Myth vs. Reality

• Was formerly a Jedi Knight. Status: True.
• Fought with distinction in the Clone Wars. Status: True.
• Took part in a “Jedi purge” in which many Jedi were massacred in cold blood. Status: Myth. Almost all Jedi fled justice or were arrested, tried, and jailed. A few were killed resisting arrest, and this eventually gave rise to a rumor about a “purge.”
• Is Emperor Palpatine’s right-hand man. Status: True. “Lord Vader is an extremely capable man, and the Empire is lucky to have him,” the Emperor has said.
• Saved the Emperor from a Jedi assassination attempt. Status: True.
• Was the intended victim of an assassination attempt by his own former Jedi master, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Status: True. Kenobi remains at large and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you know of his whereabouts, do not attempt to apprehend him yourself. Notify the local Imperial authorities.
• On the Emperor’s orders, slaughtered unarmed Trade Federation members near the end of the Clone Wars. Status: Myth.
————————————————–

Do these nasty rumors bother him? “Not really,” he says philosophically. “In the long run I think this sort of thing will hurt them more than it hurts me.” What about the story that Imperial forces murdered innocent Jedi in cold blood? “That’s a total lie!” he exclaims. “First of all, there were no innocent Jedi; they were all in on the plotting. And secondly, a few were killed resisting arrest by Imperial police forces. The Jedi who didn’t resist arrest were unharmed. They were put in protective custody and they all got fair trials.”

“But I’d like to add something,” he continues. “I don’t mind so much when people spread these rumors about me; it just bounces off. But the Imperial troops who arrested the Jedi are brave and competent professionals. The Jedi can be very dangerous fighters, believe me; I know! The troops that pursued them were risking life and limb. It really bothers me when the fairness and professionalism of our boys are called into question like that.”

So does he harbor resentment against the Jedi? Not really; while he’ll be pleased to see them brought to justice he’s not handling that matter, leaving it up to Imperial police instead. “Basically,” he says, “I’m too busy to worry about things like that. We’ve got secessionist holdouts in a few places to mop up, the Emperor has plans to reorganize the Senate to make it more streamlined and efficient, and there’s an advanced new defense installation the Emperor has commissioned to make the Galaxy secure against future attempts at destructive civil war.

“Hey, it’s a big galaxy, and we’ve got an Empire to build!” ■

Comment: It’s appalling how easy it is to write this tripe: The opening paragraph with the “gosh-wow” reaction to the big city; the humble “I wonder if I’ll live up to their expectations,” the casual dismissal of “rumors” against oneself combined with noble defense of others when “rumors” are set against them, the combination of truth, half-truth, and outright lies. The good news about this sort of fluff piece is that it’s obvious that it’s tripe (one hopes).
My favorite line: “When you’re a people person like Darth Vader…”

Rhett Solo

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There’s a much-admired American novel called, er, Swept Away by the Gusts. A major male character in Swept Away by the Gusts is a man by the name of Han Solo. No, wait, that’s Star Wars . The main male character in Swept Away by the Gusts is a man named, um, Rick Servant. But forgive my confusion, reader, because the parallels between Rick Servant and Han Solo are remarkable.

Both are cynical bad boy types. Both are experienced, worldly-wise, and comfortable in low company. Both are smugglers. Both are known to be good with their milieu’s hand weapon, blaster or pistol, as the case may be. Each commits a killing which appears cold-blooded on the surface but is justified. In the case of Han Solo, it is his smearing of Greedo without warning him or giving him a chance to draw. (This is how it went down originally, before George Lucas became a wussy and changed it to have Greedo shoot first.) Solo is of course justified because Greedo has just announced his intention to kill Solo. In the case of Rick Servant, the details (which we hear about as backstory) are thus: Servant escorts a young lady on a carriage ride, unchaperoned. Apparently in the South at this time, if two unrelated adults of opposite sex were alone together it was just assumed that they’d had sex (sheesh, and I thought I had a dirty mind). It is clearly stated that the girl isn’t knocked up. The young lady’s family demands that Servant marry her, and of course he tells them to get over themselves. The girl’s brother challenges Servant to a duel; Servant accepts and kills him.

Both Solo and Servant leave military service in an officially unapproved way. Servant is expelled from West Point for “some scandal involving a woman” and Han Solo was in the Imperial fleet before he was court martialed and dishonorably discharged for some sort of insubordination.

Leia tells Solo “I like you, when you’re not acting like a scoundrel,” to which Solo replies,

You like me because I’m a scoundrel. There aren’t enough scoundrels in your life.

The heroine of Swept Away by the Gusts – Crimson O’Homa – tells Rick Servant that she likes him sometimes, “when you aren’t acting like a varmint,” to which Servant replies, “I think you like me because I am a varmint.” (Chapter XIX of Swept Away by the Gusts .) Both Solo and Servant explicitly tell the main female character “I don’t care about your rebellion, honey; I’m in it for the money.” Later, both change their minds and join her cause. Han Solo returns in the Millennium Falcon and knocks Darth Vader out of the fight so Luke can destroy the Death Star; Rick Servant decides he has to fight on Crimson’s side of the Civil War. That is, from the heroine’s point of view, each is the canonical “bad boy who really has a heart of gold” (a stock character of dubious realism; sorry, ladies).

Blog Post of Doom: “Literary” edition!

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(With apologies to Mark Twain.)

Blooming molybdenums dotted the the field that gently fell away to the shore. Above, a spandrel circled, catching heliotropes on the wing. To the west a herd of brunts grazed, the young hillocks gamboling playfully about the adults. On the porch near me a girl plucked at a five-string zephyr, playing in a corinthian scale with strangely sweet dissonances.

Such a great start, but I just can’t come up with a second paragraph that does justice to the first. Sigh…

Isomorphisms

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Every now and then a critic of lit or film or whatever will slag a new work of art for not really being new, but rather falling into some standing category. One person claimed that Star Wars is essentially “a buddy movie.” Another claimed that Alien is essentially a “haunted house movie.” One’s first reaction to this last is disbelief: How could someone think a movie about an alien infesting a spaceship is a haunted house movie?!

Then one realizes these people are thinking in terms of gross similarities of structure. Suppose your education trained you to ignore details of a movie you were reviewing and attend to the broad shape of the plot. For someone trained this way, interpreting Alien as a “haunted house movie” is not outrageously stupid. After all, the plots are the same, at a sufficiently high level of abstraction: some people are trapped in an enclosed structure with a dangerous non-human entity and are picked off one by one. To a person for whom ignoring details is not only not a bad thing, but is in fact a point of pride (“I’m seeing through the details and focusing on the essence”) categorizing Alien in this way is not unreasonable. In fact, taken strictly on its own terms, such taxonomy makes sense.

However, it is easy to see what is wrong with this approach: at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, all plots are the same: Some events occur. Does this mean all stories are “really variations of the same story”? Or how about this, which fits the vast majority of published fiction: Some conflicts occur. Then they’re resolved. So again, most stories are really variations of the same story?

Hmmm, something’s not right here. Details do matter, at least for the enjoyment of the audience, which is the ultimately the whole point.

Neophobes and Neophiles

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In Illuminatus, Shea and Wilson divided the world into cool people and wussies, or as they put it, neophiles and neophobes. Greek roots, people: neophobe means “total wuss”, or, as a Greek teacher would put it, “one who fears the new.” “Neophile” means “stone-cold stud hombre,” or as a Greek teacher would put it, “one who loves the new.” As one of the characters in that great work of literary genius put it—I’m paraphrasing—“We neophiles seek out and embrace new ideas. Ninety percent of the things we try are mistakes, but we move so fast our mistakes never catch up with us. And the other ten percent is responsible for all the progress that has ever happened on this rock.”

Extreme examples of neophobes: Fidel Castro, who proudly boasted on his 75th birthday or thereabouts that he still believed exactly what he believed when he was twenty. Jerry Falwell. Etc. Best example of a neophile that I can think of up the top of my head: Phoebe from Friends: Weird, unconventional, unintentionally messes with your head. Your chance of predicting what she’ll say or do next is the same as the chance that Jabba the Hutt will become a spokesbeing for Slim-Fast. Another good one: Camille Paglia. Completely undoctrinaire, allies herself with no pre-existing political or intellectual movement.

The best intellectual: A neophile disciplined by logic.

Querying and Entropy

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Information theory tells us that the more information there is in a text string, the less compressible it is. Similarly, the better a novel, the more it resists being summarized. Of course, in information theory, “information” is maximized when the string is completely random. Hmmm, that’s not how we use the word “information” in everyday discourse. Straddling both meanings, the less predictable the string/novel is, and the more there is going on in it, the more resistant to compression/summarizing it is. A good novel will surprise you.

But better novels are written by better writers. Better writers might be more skilled at summarizing, as well as writing novels. Er, maybe. Overall, it seems likely that the difficulty of summarizing a brilliant novel overwhelms the better skill.

Me: “I’m having a hard time writing a query I’m happy with.”
Claude Shannon: “Fantastic!”