The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

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This book is a delight, but some stage-setting before getting to specifics:

Like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, this is a fantasy that is also a commentary on fantasy, a fairy tale that is also a commentary on fairy tales. Such works are more common now because the fantasy genre has a long enough history that, inevitably, current work is read to a significant extent in light of previous work. Cliche avoidance has become a major concern. Indeed, we are now in the second generation, at least, of cliches, in which the reactions against first-generation cliches have themselves become cliches. One example is the “sand-blasted with grit” approach, as one commentator put it, in which everyone says the F word a lot, rape and incest abound, elves become terminally depressed and drink themselves to death, etc. Another second-generation cliche, closely associated with the first, is the dark, conflicted anti-hero or sort-of-hero who has significant flaws. (Reviews of such works inevitably use the phrase “shades of gray.”) Another is the princess who feels stifled as a princess and wants to be a warrior or scholar. Typically the irony is leavened with a large measure of affection for the classics. I don’t think I’ve ever read such fantasy-commenting-on-fantasy that seemed spiteful in its intent.

One more prefatory point: Certain things are “cliches” because either they’re artistically sound (e.g., the protagonist’s achievement comes only after a struggle, otherwise there’s no dramatic tension) or because people like them (the good guys win in the end). People like the classic coming-of-age story because it involves struggle and because it’s everyone’s story (excepting people who are still living in their parents’ basement when they’re 35, I guess). People like to see a person confronted with a hard choice and, in the end, make the right choice. Also, there are only X basic plots, as we are often told, where X is typically a single-digit number. This unavoidably biases things in the direction of “cliches” (many of which might equally aptly be termed “eternal truths of the human soul”).

In this context comes Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (2009), a pleasurable and occasionally profound mezcla of classic fairy tale elements. At the start September, a 12-year-old girl, is whisked off to Fairyland by the Green Wind, the embodiment of a Harsh Air. He tells her, before bringing her to Fairyland, “Obviously, the eating or drinking of Fairy foodstuffs constitutes a binding contract to return at least once a year in accordance with seasonal myth cycles.” They pause at a border town where he explains, “Fairyland is an old place, and old things have strange hungers.” Accordingly, some of the requirements for entrance into Fairyland: Give something up. There must be blood. Tell a lie. Right here at the start, it is plain that Valente is pulling this stuff straight from some sort of fairy tale Well.

The book’s ancestors are both the ancient oral fairy tales and the written ones of relatively recent provenance like the Narnia books. In Fairyland September encounters dragons, witches, and marids. She frees someone from an evil queen’s prison. She learns that True Names contain great magical power; you must guard yours closely. In several cute little meta moments the author directly addresses the reader, a common occurrence in the written tales in Fairyland’s bloodline. She also occasionally addresses the reader indirectly, as when a dragon tells September, “[T]he geographical capital of Fairyland is fickle and has a rather short temper. I’m afraid the whole thing moves around according to the needs of narrative.”

A human can enter Fairyland as one of the Stumbled or one of the Ravished. For the Stumbled, think of Alice plummeting down the rabbit hole into Wonderland and Lucy wandering through the wardrobe into Narnia. The Ravished, in contrast, are taken to Fairyland by magical beings (e.g., the Wild Hunt, people made prisoner of faeries because they’ve eaten faery food, the abductions carried out by Susanna Clarke’s Gentleman in Green and Raven King). Brought to Fairyland by the Green Wind, September is technically one of the Ravished. This turns out to be important later.

Soon after arriving September learns that Fairyland is in the thrall of a powerful evil queen. Cliche? No. Yes, but… no. This is where things get thick, and events both do, and don’t, develop in ways you expect. September agrees to help some witches get their magical spoon back from the queen, who stole it. At that point her adventures become less meandering and more purposeful.

Valente creates some gorgeous moments. E.g., just arrived in Fairyland, September sees a signpost shaped as a four-armed woman. The arm pointing east says, To lose your way. The arm pointing north, To lose your life. The arm pointing south, To lose your mind. The arm pointing west, To lose your heart. September goes west. The narrator remarks,

You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out, Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do. … Behind her, the beautiful four-armed woman who pointed the way closed her eyes and shook her birch-wood head, rueful and knowing.

I won’t give away the ending, but Holy Crap it’s not what you expect. You will not see it coming.

Mostly this is a paean to fairy tales. If it were an academic monograph, the back of the book would say that it “Summarizes and extends the crucial research in the field.” What’s the fiction-ish equivalent of that? That’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.

Tight writing II

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Another problem with “writing as tightness” is that it would prevent the writer from surprising the reader. This is because, if writers only included vital details, eventually readers would figure out that every detail is vital. This would let them anticipate things that were supposed to be surprises.

An example: Suppose that in the last ten pages of your novel, it turns out to be vital that the hero knows how to speak Russian. You must set this up earlier in the novel to avoid a deux ex machina, so on page 30 you mention that when he was in college, your hero took Russian language classes. Now your readers know that this will be vital later, because they know you only include vital details. Thus they anticipate the rabbit you were hoping to pull out of the hat later. In contrast, suppose you’re not a devotee of the “only vital stuff” theory. When you mention that your hero took Russian language classes, you also mention that he took a classes in English Lit, Music Appreciation, etc., and that when he was in college his favorite beer was Imperial Stout. Because you’ve hidden the essential in the inessential, the reader cannot anticipate your surprise.

One might respond, “But then all that other stuff is essential: It’s essential for surprising the reader.” Certainly. But that’s different from being essential to the plot. This is the whole point: Things that aren’t essential for the plot may be essential for other important elements of the novel. I could tell the same story actually writing on page 30, “By the way, reader, at the end the main conflict is resolved due to the fact that the hero knows Russian.” Yes, it would be the same plot, but it would be a very different novel. It certainly would be a different experience for the reader, who would be denied suspense or surprise.

Tight writing

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Writers frequently admonish other writers and aspiring writers to omit everything that doesn’t advance the story.  This is bad advice, as one can see by imagining what would happen if anyone ever actually followed it:  Every novel would be a half page of bullet points.

Take Gone With the Wind.  Margaret Mitchell was so wordy!  The novel would have been better if she had written this:

• It is 1861 in Georgia, USA.  A young woman, Scarlett, is in love with Ashley.  (Ashley is a man; this isn’t “hot girl-on-girl action!”  More’s the pity.)
• Ashley loves her but they can’t hook up because he’s engaged to marry someone else.
• The Civil War starts, disrupting everything. Scarlett goes to Atlanta and Ashley goes off to fight the Yankees.
• A scoundrel named Rhett Butler occasionally bumps into Scarlett in Atlanta.
• Scarlett has romantic feelings for Ashley and Rhett (though she takes a long time to admit to herself that she feels anything other than annoyance for Rhett).
• The Union forces invade Atlanta and Rhett helps Scarlett escape.
• Scarlett returns to the plantation where she was raised and through sheer determination ekes out a hardscrabble living.
• She marries Rhett Butler, but she treats him poorly and he leaves her.
• Scarlett, the consummate survivor, faces the future knowing that it will be hard but that she will abide.

There!  So much better than that redundant pleonastic bundle of excessive surplusage that is the original version!  It hits all the crucial plot points, while taking up less than a page.  Imagine how much lower the publisher’s printing costs would have been if they had pared it down to that.  Didn’t Mitchell have an editor?

Ok, sarcasm off.  What’s stupid about this approach?  Well, what’s stupid is this:
The point of telling a story is… telling a story.  Presenting a list of bullet points is not telling a story.  Also, the purpose of telling a story is, above all else, entertainment, that is, the pleasure of the reader.  Telling a story is entertaining (if it’s done well).  The only way to make a list of bullet points entertaining is to include a reference to hot girl-on-girl action.

A good example of a writer who ignores the silly advice to axe everything that doesn’t advance the plot is Neal Stephenson.  Stephenson includes anything and everything that pops into his little head, provided it’s entertaining.  For Stephenson, a plot is merely a structure upon which to hang entertainment.  And it’s a good thing, too, or we’d miss Jack Shaftoe’s syphilis-induced hallucinations of singing skeletons (Quicksilver), a description of a witch’s sabbat that our hero blunders into (Quicksilver), and a duel at dawn, carried out with spare cannons from a warship (The System of the World).  We also occasionally get some beautiful prose, as when a man enters a church in Quicksilver and the sun shining through the stained glass windows turns them into “a matrix of burning diamonds.” Story-wise, do we actually need singing skeletons or a matrix of burning diamonds?  No.  But they make these works more enjoyable, which is the point.

Stephenson is something of a maximalist, and I am not suggesting that most authors should try to emulate him.  The point is, you can pull off a hell of a lot of digressions from the main thread, as long as you pull them off with pizzaz.

Check it at the door, kids

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In recent years it has become increasingly common for reviewers of fiction to judge works by political criteria. This is unfortunate (I say this as someone who has never had such a review, or indeed, as of this writing, had any review, heh) for several reasons:

• It is discourteous to the review’s readers, most of whom presumably don’t want a political lecture but an evaluation of fiction as fiction.

• It is unfair to the author, who deserves to be evaluated as a producer of fiction.

• It’s lazy. It reminds me of a certain Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. Calvin is taking a test in which one of the questions is something like, “When did the Punic Wars occur?” His response is, “Modern physics shows the concept of time rests on shaky foundations,” or some similar nonsense. He then turns to the reader and says, “If you don’t know the answer, attack the terms of the question.” Indeed. It’s a little too, shall we say, leisurely, to refuse to engage with a work of fiction on its own terms.

• It is unfortunate for reviewers who indulge themselves this way, since they deprive themselves of the pleasures of fiction. If you’re shouting “This is too Maoist/not Maoist enough!” you’re missing the gorgeously subtle characterization and thrilling plot twists.

The problem is the intrusive replacement of the author’s interests and the potential reader’s interests with the reviewer’s interests. If the author has written about a 19th century Transylvanian vampire, it seems ill-bred to criticize the work for failing to be a screed in favor of, say, higher or lower tariffs on imports. It is like criticizing it for failing to be a screed in favor of, say, low-impact aerobics. It simply isn’t appropriate for reviewers to interpolate their own interests that way. Obviously there’s a time and place for politics, but it’s not all times and all places.

Nevertheless, some works cry out to be evaluated – at least partially – by political criteria. Which works? Why, the ones that have a political element introduced by the author him/herself, of course.

Thus I propose this rule of thumb for reviewing fiction:

If the author has introduced politics into the work, then reviewing it according to political criteria is appropriate. If the author has not done so, then reviewing it according to political criteria is not appropriate.

So, e.g. Atlas Shrugged and The Handmaid’s Tale  – to take two particularly obvious examples – are fair game, because their authors made them fair game. Those works are overtly political. But the rule also applies to an otherwise non-political work in which the author couldn’t resist making one or two political side comments. (Some writers think that if they only do this once per novel it’s subtle. Actually, it’s like having a glaringly wrong note in the middle of an otherwise perfectly-executed piano recital.)

Of course there will be fuzzy cases, but this rule of thumb will take care of most cases.

World building: It doesn’t have to be a pointless masturbatory self-indulgence

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Scott Lynch:

…when you have an interesting city you want to set a story in, you cheat your worldbuilding to support the existence of that city, you don’t just woefully hang your head and leave the city out because you forgot to draw enough farms on your map or something. I’m not at all a fan of the “begin by simulating the tectonic plate movements of your fictional planet several billion years before the story begins” style of worldbuilding; as far as I’m concerned, you write what you want to write and you shuffle things around ex post facto to support them. Or you just don’t fucking explain things at all– the mere existence of your big beautiful boondoggle should, in itself, imply that somewhere, somehow, something makes it all work, even if that background detail isn’t important to the story.

Indeed. Do we demand that the author of a fictional world pause to establish that there is enough plant biomass to produce all the oxygen the people are breathing?*

When the author needs to make sure that things are working internally consistently, it typically should be “off-stage” so the reader isn’t detained by it. An example: I have a work in which some of the people have a very low mortality rate from natural death. In order to make sure that the population dynamics wouldn’t drive them to a population of 100 billion in short order and lead to uncomfortable encounters with Dr. Malthus, I had to put limits on their reproduction rate and establish some ways that they might have non-natural deaths. My thoughts on this are archived in a file that has a differential equation and a couple of difference equations describing the population dynamics. But you never see the equations in the novel, of course. It’s in the background.

Larry Niven mentions a similar point about his novel with Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye. In N-Space Niven mentions that the faster-than-light drive in that novel was supported by a page of differential equations in the authors’ notes. They didn’t feel a need to include the equations in the novel.

For some reason differential equations keep popping up here. The point is not differential equations; the point is that the default setting should be to either just assume that the world functions, per Lynch above, or do the intellectual work to make sure it functions but leave that work off-screen. You must do some explaining about some things, but don’t explain unless you have some specific reason to.

*Actually, yes, when it comes to Dune, Hoth, and Tatooine. On desert or frozen worlds, where is the plant life that produces oxygen for those people? But the point is, you needn’t worry about such unless a particular feature of your fictional environment makes it necessary.

So you wanna be a writer?

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Man, you’re lucky. Writing has no barriers as there are with, e.g., movies. You don’t need studio approval and tens of millions of dollars to write. You just need your brain and something to write with. Your creativity is unlimited; it doesn’t matter whether you’re thinking of a couple of hipsters talking in a coffee house or a six-headed dragon attacking a castle. The cost is the same, essentially zero, and it’s constraint-free! It’s the best possible situation for creating your ideal work.

Head ➞ Desk

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I just noticed that in a query letter I sent to a few agents I had “crises” where I should have had “crisis.” Ouch. Now I look like an idiot who doesn’t know the difference between the singular and the plural. Is it a big deal? Yes. While agents read so much slush that they might skim past such a mistake without noticing, they read so much slush that they are looking for any excuse to reject, so if they notice it…

In my day job I’ve been on a hiring committee for a position that had 170 applicants. I was looking for reasons to weed, and some of my colleagues on the committee were absolutely brutal: Rejecting people for comma-that-should-be-a-semicolon stuff. When you’re on the crowded side of the market, you can’t give them any reason to reject.

I am, however, patting myself on the back for one thing: I only sent that version of the query to three agents. This is exactly why I didn’t send a single version of the query to more. There’s always the possibility of an error that you’ll catch after sending something out.

Let’s test quotes

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From Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:

We’re more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.

End quote.