Category Archives: Manifesto-esque Rantings

Aug 25

Treble and Bass: A Metaphor

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I woke up at two o’clock this morning and started thinking about fiction. (This is normal behaviour for a writer.) In the nonlinear way that brains work at 2am, my brain came up with a metaphor that I’d like to explore here.

Of the several ways in which fiction can be satisfying, here are two:

A. Events have an impact on characters.

B. Characters have an impact on events.

Those aren’t at opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re like sliders on a mixing board, which can be moved up and down independently. Let’s call them treble and bass, respectively.

equalizer
underwhelmer / Foter / CC BY

Here’s a theory. The “sad puppies” (if you don’t know who they are, rejoice, and bail out now, because this post won’t make a lot of sense to you) are all about that bass, ’bout that bass, no treble. (I’m generalising and exaggerating for the sake of a point; fair warning, I’ll be doing a lot of that, so take what I have to say with salt to taste.)

My speculation is that in the brief interval before they decided to engage in a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics, and then got hijacked by the king of the haters, the puppies may have thought, “We, and everyone we know whose opinion we respect, like fiction with lots of bass, and don’t care much about treble. These Hugo-winning stories have too much treble, and not enough bass. Since no right-thinking person would actually like them, there must be a conspiracy to distort the Hugo nomination process in the service of identity politics! That’s so wrong! We should do it too!”

Incidentally, in my view the short stories–not so much the novels–that have won Hugos in recent years do tend to emphasise treble a lot more than bass, reflecting a wider trend in the pro magazines and anthologies. The novels have more of a balance between the two–at least, the ones I’ve read.

I personally prefer a balance: both treble and bass. I find bass-only stories as unsatisfying as treble-only stories. But let’s think about why people might write stories that are strongly one or the other. Wild speculation, OK? I could be completely wrong here.

Let’s say you’re a member of a historically disadvantaged and disempowered group (for our current purposes, any such group will do). What’s your experience going to be? Might it possibly be that you experience being impacted by events more than you experience impacting events? And might your fiction reflect that experience?

And if, by contrast, you’re a member of a historically advantaged and empowered group, won’t you tend to experience, and think in terms of, your actions impacting events? And (here the speculation goes completely wild) might there be reasons that you don’t want to think too hard about how events impact people? Why you might want to live in a universe where everyone is stoic and unmoved, and nobody’s life is defined by things that happen to them without their consent? Particularly if your group’s experience of unquestioned power is waning, and is now being constantly challenged, with questions being raised about whether your advantage over others is a good thing, even whether it will continue to exist?

Now, I want to live in a world where everyone can experience both bass and treble. I think that world is coming, but it isn’t here yet. During such a transition, fiction becomes a zone of conflict, because fiction is inherently political, because it’s a cultural product produced by people, who can’t help being political even if they think they aren’t.

And that is all I have to say about puppies.

Jul 30

Genre Considered As a Restaurant

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If you’ve spent much time around writers, you’ve probably heard someone complain that “genre” is just a way for publishers and booksellers to impose marketing categories for their own convenience, and it should die in a fire, because we’d all be better off without it.

I’ve said things adjacent to this myself. After all, my first novel is set in a secondary world–like a fantasy, but with no magic–that’s loosely based on Shakespeare’s Italy, and combines the language of a literary novel with the plot of a serial-killer mystery thriller, told in diary entries. Consequently, it’s almost impossible to sell, because what’s the audience for that? What genre does it even fit in?

It’s easy, then, to fall into bemoaning the idea that a book even needs a genre. Recently, though, I’ve started to think about genre with a new metaphor: that of a restaurant.

We’re very fortunate in the 21st century to have access to the cuisine of so many cultures. My father, who grew up in New Zealand in the 1930s, once told me how much things had improved in his lifetime. When he was young, “going out” meant going to the pub for a roast dinner, which probably wasn’t even very tasty. At the time we were talking (the 1980s, I think), you could choose to get a meal from most parts of Europe and Asia, plus Latin America if you looked around a bit. These days, in most major cities worldwide, you can eat food from any inhabited continent.

That gives us a richness of choice which itself creates a new situation. We now have to ask ourselves, when going out to eat, which flavours, which experience, we want to have. What are we in the mood for?

Hence my metaphor of genre as restaurant, or rather, as cuisine. Different cuisines offer different satisfactions. Do we want the blended spices of India? The balance of sweet, hot and sour that Thai offers? The subtle flavours of France? Robust, earthy Mediterranean food? And if we want Mediterranean, is that Italian, Greek, Turkish, Middle Eastern, or North African?

Likewise, different genres offer different satisfactions too. Some of them are emotional: horror offers a thrill of fear, suspense offers a thrill of excitement, romance offers the warmth of intimacy, fantasy offers the imagined experience of having magical powers. Others are mental: mystery offers an experience of a puzzle solved, SF offers the exploration of a what-if. Our brains are wired to find these things satisfying, originally for survival reasons. The most successful genres, and the most successful books, I believe, combine emotional and mental satisfaction, but depending how you blend the flavours and which ones you emphasise, you can satisfy very different palates.

This is also why, although I read primarily fantasy, there are fantasy books (and authors) that leave me cold. Something in the blend is off. I had the experience, while in the US, of eating at a Thai restaurant where all the food primarily tasted sweet–no sour, no hot, just sweet. I love Thai food, but I didn’t love that.

I’m not always in the same mood, either. Just like I don’t always eat the same cuisine, I don’t always read the same genre or subgenre (or write it, either). Sometimes I want my fantasy to also contain mystery, or comedy, or be a thriller.

Just as there are different approaches to cooking, there are different approaches to writing. If you are working in a classic genre–French provincial cuisine, say, or noir detective–you have to get it exactly right. There’s nowhere to hide. You either produce an excellent, textbook example of the genre you’re attempting; you successfully update it into a modern version, without losing the essentials that made it great originally; or you fail, because you’ve created something that doesn’t match up to expectations, that isn’t well executed. And your failure is obvious, because we have well-known examples to compare with. We know what it should taste like.

If you’re being more experimental, or attempting “fusion,” using fancy techniques or ingredients, or combining ingredients that don’t classically go together, your possible failure modes are different. People may give you credit for attempting something new and different, but then go back to the classics for their next meal, because your imagination exceeded your ability to execute (for example, 99.99% of steampunk); or they may enjoy it, think you did it well, but decide that it’s not an experience they want all the time. Or they may become extremely excited if you pull it off, and come back again and again, and rave about it to all their friends–while struggling to express exactly what it is.

Genre, then, is like a restaurant sign. It tells us approximately what kind of experience we’re about to have. Covers and blurbs elaborate on this, which is why covers are so important, and why you need to have a cover that fits into your genre as well as standing out, and which doesn’t mislead readers about what the book is like. (This is a large part of the reason that I self-publish: because I don’t trust publishers to make good decisions about my covers.) And among the things I look for in a blurb (and in reviews) are the signals that tell me: this book is tragic, this book is funny, this book is action-packed, this book explores character deeply.

A bookstore, then, is a food court. And to market your book, you need to convey to people what they’re going to get when they consume it. One way, the easy way, to do this is to sit within an obvious genre, to, metaphorically speaking, call your food stand The Spicy Wok or A Taste of Turkish. If you’re going outside the well-understood genres, though, you need to think hard about who is going to want those particular flavours, and how you convey to them that that’s what you’re selling.

Mar 14

Spec Fic and Comedy

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Like millions of other fans, I’m saddened to hear of the death of Sir Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors. It seems like a good occasion to reflect on humour in SFF (science fiction and fantasy), a topic I’ve been thinking about lately in any case.

I recently read, or at least started to read, a single-author collection of supposedly humourous SFF. The humour didn’t work for me, as sometimes happens, and what that revealed, like mudflats at low tide, was that the stories weren’t particularly good stories, and the SFF consisted mainly of cliches (while the humour consisted mainly of silly names). I didn’t make it past halfway through the second story, a limp Lord of the Rings parody, neither funny, nor well-written, nor interesting.

I see this a lot in would-be comedic writing. I have to admit, as a reviewer I do often grant an author a pass for a dubious bit of worldbuilding, plotting, characterisation or what-have-you if the writing makes me laugh. The risk you run when you rely on this, though, is that if the writing doesn’t make the reader laugh, there’s nothing left to fall back on.

I maintain that a big part of the reason that Pratchett was the preeminent comic novelist since P.G. Wodehouse, responsible at one time for almost 4% of the entire British publishing industry’s sales, was that he wrote books that worked as stories. His characters in the early books may have been cliches and stereotypes, but by his long and productive middle period he was writing characters with depth, complexity, growth and development.

There’s a subtle, but detectable, gradient from cliche to stereotype to parody to character trapped in an unfortunate pattern of behaviour by habit and social expectation, and Pratchett showed us the full spectrum in the course of his career. He was an insightful observer of humanity, as all the best comedians are, but he was also a compassionate one – not just holding people up to mockery but reminding us that, whatever their failings, however small-minded and ridiculous they might be, they deserved consideration as human beings. (Even when they weren’t, strictly speaking, human beings, but dwarves, trolls, golems, vampires, Igors or goblins.)

He’s often compared to other writers, most frequently Douglas Adams and P.G. Wodehouse, but his stories have more depth than either. In Adams, there are cosmic stakes, but they’re minimised by the absurdity. In Wodehouse, the stakes are seldom higher than social embarrassment. In Pratchett, the stakes are high, and we care about them, and yet we’re laughing.

terry_pratchett
Sir Terry PratchettRaeAllen / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

I’ll make a comparison myself. There’s a fairly obscure American humourist called Damon Runyon. Most people who’ve heard of him know him through the musical Guys and Dolls, or perhaps the Shirley Temple movie Little Miss Marker, both of which were based on his work, but he wrote a great many short stories in the 1930s set in the more dubious parts of contemporary New York. They’re stories of revenge, lost love, family tragedy, violence and, occasionally, good triumphant with the help of rough, hard-bitten characters who have a sentimental side. Yet, mainly through the voice of the unnamed narrator (who observes much more than he participates; he’s never unambiguously the protagonist), they’re funny, both because of their wry, ironic observations and because of the distinctive language. They are, at the same time, slangy and poetic, and characterised by a total avoidance of the past tense.

My parents had an omnibus of the Runyon stories, and I read them a couple of times growing up. A while ago, frustrated by another would-be comic fantasy that I didn’t find funny or otherwise enjoyable, I set out to write my own version of the same premise, and for reasons connected with that premise I picked the Runyonese dialect to tell it in. To make sure I was getting the voice right, I re-read some of the Runyon tales, and I was struck by the fact that there’s often a dark, or at least heartwrenching, story going on behind all the humour. So I strove to make that, too, a part of the story I wrote, which you can read here.

I might never have thought of attempting that, though, if it hadn’t been for the example of Terry Pratchett. Death (the phenomenon) isn’t funny. Death (the character, who makes at least a cameo appearance in every Discworld book and is a main character in several), while usually serious himself, is a cause of comedy in other people.

Let’s reflect on that for a moment. At least one person dies in every Discworld novel. Often, it’s a minor character, but usually it’s someone with a name, though sometimes we don’t learn the name until Death says it in all caps. And these are primarily thought of as comic novels.

That, too, was part of Pratchett’s genius. Nothing in life, not even death, was outside his warm, human, comedic insightfulness. Now that he has made the transition himself, it’s up to us who are left to try to carry on his legacy, not only of funny fantasy, but of kindness, good storytelling, and reflection on the human condition.

Jun 17

How to be a Light Hybrid Author

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I recently participated in a thread on Google+ started by someone who was arguing for leaving self-publishing in favour of trad pub. Now, I’m not sure if he’s genuinely naive or just trolling, but his view of trad pub is, let’s say, rosier than the facts justify.

I’ve set out my views on traditional publishing before, but to summarise: the main remaining benefits of traditional publishing that I can see are wider exposure, including print distribution to bookstores, and some residual (and rapidly vanishing) extra credibility.

The two are intertwined. There are many podcasts, book review sites and the like which still only feature traditionally-published books and authors, often as a matter of explicitly stated policy, and the underlying reason is presumably that this gives them a straightforward filter to reduce the amount of crap coming across the transom. A high-profile site of this kind gets inundated with far more material than they can handle, and saying “no self-pub” reduces the volume by filtering out material that, additionally, is still statistically more likely to be of low quality.

The quality issue in self-pub is real, but things are shifting rapidly. As clueless trad-pub houses get rid of editors and savvy self-publishers take them on, the quality gap is shrinking. I have “shelves” (tags) set up on Goodreads for “needs-editing”, “seriously-needs-editing” and “well-edited”. At time of writing, I have 20 books marked “seriously-needs-editing,” of which 5 are from large publishers and one from a small press (the rest are indie). I have 39 marked “well-edited,” of which 33 are from indies. Now, disclaimers: I read a disproportionate amount of indie fiction, I’m pretty good at filtering out the bad ones, and out of those 33 well-edited books, 15 are by Debora Geary, who just doesn’t seem to put many typos in or else has an incredibly eagle-eyed editor. Regardless, the quality gap is smaller than it’s often portrayed, and as more and more of the most imaginative work is done in self-pub, the credibility gap will shrink.

Not only in editing, either. I occasionally browse the cover designs that Joel Friedlander features on his Book Designer website (link is to a post featuring a couple of my covers), and at a casual inspection, it looks to me as if they are getting much better than they used to be. Indies are aware now that they can’t stick a hideous cover on their book and expect it to do well. Trad-pub, on the other hand, can still put out cliched and awful covers sometimes. One of the reasons I choose to publish independently is exactly this: in trad-pub, the author is stuck with whatever cover the publisher comes up with, good or bad, even if it’s a terrible representation of their vision or undermines one of their main points. If that happens with one of my covers, I only have myself to blame, because I commission them and approve them.

As for print distribution, the value of that is shrinking rapidly, and Hugh Howey’s analysis shows that it isn’t financially beneficial overall (at least, not for the authors). It gets more eyes on your stuff, which is important in awards season, but it doesn’t get you more money if you publish with a traditional publisher who gives you low ebook royalties and print distribution to bookstores, vs getting higher ebook royalties and no print distribution. (In fact, if you publish through CreateSpace you can buy an add-on that gets you print distribution to bookstores, though whether it is worthwhile is another question – the answer will vary depending on the individual book, but my sense is that on average it is “no” unless you’re doing well already.)

The average traditionally-published genre book will have a couple of copies sent to each bookstore, where they will be displayed “spine-out” on a shelf in that genre’s section of the store for a limited period of time (3-6 months, I believe), after which they will probably be returned for a credit if nobody has bought them. That kind of exposure is increasingly not worth signing over lifetime rights to a publisher in exchange for low royalties.

I do have a point, which I’ll get to soon

I’m rehearsing these well-rehearsed thoughts (which many have stated before me) not so much for their own sake as in order to give background for my main point, which is this: there is another, backdoor way to get some of the “gatekeeper cred” and exposure that traditional publishing still, for the moment, grants.

If I did the submission dance and was fortunate enough to be one of the comparative few given a trad-pub contract – and I’m reasonably confident that I could eventually achieve that if it was a goal of mine – I would face four problems which are reasons I don’t participate in that dance (apart from the tedium of the dance itself).

The first problem is timeliness. From submission to acceptance to publication is a long and winding road in trad-pub. That’s time in which my work could potentially be earning me money, and in which I could be getting reaction to it which could influence the next thing I write.

The second problem is control. I’d have no control over the cover, no control over the price, no control over the blurb, and the final editorial decisions would not be mine. Now, you can argue whether my retention of that control produces a better or worse result. I think it produces a better result, but I do know this for sure: my preference is to have it.

The third problem is scope of rights. Under the usual traditional contract, my rights in that work – and possibly other subsequent works – would be severely restricted, and the publishers would effectively control them for what amounts to an unlimited period (from my perspective, anyway, since copyright freedom 70 years after my death does me no good). The problem here is not that the publishers have the right to publish the work – that’s what they’re buying, after all – but that they retain it indefinitely.

The fourth problem, of course, is earning potential, and anything I could say about that is covered much better at Authorearnings.

The Answer

So what’s the answer? How can I get the benefits of trad-pub (exposure and perceived legitimacy) without the drawbacks I’ve just enumerated?

The answer is short stories.

There still remains a vigorous, and if anything increasing, market for short stories, especially genre, especially fantasy and science fiction. There are anthologies coming out all the time, and numerous magazines, not to mention many competitions. There are different kinds of markets; some pay only royalties, others a token upfront amount, but many pay an upfront per-word rate ranging from 0.5c to 25c. Professional rates are considered (by fiat of the SFWA) 6c/word, and according to The Submission Grinder, there are currently 35 pro-paying markets for SF and 29 for fantasy (many of them, of course, the same markets).

Now, nobody’s going to get rich just selling short stories for 6c/word. But what the short story markets provide is a more flexible, more timely, less rights-grabby version of trad pub.

Anthologies, even from small presses, get reviewed in places that are closed to indies. The major short story magazines (and there are several) are highly regarded in the field. Short stories get on awards ballots; there’s a special place for them in several of the major awards. And all these markets have editors, so you can prove that someone other than you thought your fiction was worth publishing.

At the same time, their turnaround is relatively quick – few take as long as three months, much faster than the query process for traditional book publishing, and then publication usually follows in short order. That solves the problem of timeliness. (Exception: tor.com, a short fiction market which is owned by a book publisher, has a notoriously slow turnaround).

In terms of control, I don’t expect control over the cover of an anthology or magazine that includes my story among several others. I hope it’s not awful, and usually it isn’t, but nobody else thinks of it as representing me either, so if it is awful, the splashover onto me is minimal and people will believe me when I distance myself from it.

Scope of rights is something that short story markets mostly make very clear upfront. Usually, their submission guidelines will say something like, “We’re buying first serial rights with an exclusive period of X”. X can vary from zero (you’re free to use it elsewhere as soon as it’s published) to a year, rarely more, and seems to average about 30-90 days. Anthologies usually have a longer exclusivity period than magazines, since magazines have a faster churn time – once the next issue is out, they’re usually not worried about someone republishing a story that was in the last one. Anthologies are either one-off or annual, and in either case often call for a one-year exclusive.

And once that period is up, your rights revert, and you can try to sell the story to another publication (though not many take reprints, and those that do often pay less for them than they do for first appearances). Or you can put it on Amazon, alone or in a collection, and people can buy it from you there. (You might, if you’re lucky, get into a Best Of anthology of some kind, though some of those primarily pay in exposure.)

And that’s the earning potential issue addressed. Sell your story to the highest-paying market you can (knowing in advance how much you’ll get), potentially resell it to another market afterwards, then stick it in Kindle Direct Publishing and make some more money from it. You’re not stuck earning 25% royalty while the publisher cleans up for the rest of your life. You can rewrite it, turn it into a novel, collect it, whatever you like, because you have your rights back.

Pink Moped
Kanaka Menehune / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

I’ve got a collection coming out soon, in fact, from HDWP Books, including several stories I’ve published with them or elsewhere before, as well as some new ones. I joke in the back of the book that this makes me a “hybrid” author, though not like a Prius – more of a moped.

This, along with the good things it’s doing for my practice of the craft of writing, is why I’m working on short stories a lot these days. I’ve placed one in New Realm magazine (royalty-only, and I haven’t hit the threshold for a payout, nor do I seriously expect to – but it’s a publication credit, and the story is mine again now); three in the Theme-Thologies from HDWP Books (again, royalty-only, and I’ve had one small payout so far); and I just the other day got the news that I’ve sold one to the Alternate Hilarities 3: Hysterical Realms funny-fantasy anthology, which is another step up the ladder. There’s an upfront payment (at least 1c/word, and up to 8c/word depending on how their Kickstarter goes) and a share of royalties.

I have five or six more stories on submission and several more that I’m working on. My plan is to work my way up through the semi-prozines and semi-pro anthologies to the big time: Strange Horizons, Sword and Sorceress, Unidentified Funny Objects (to name three that have sent me encouraging emails saying they wished they could buy my stories but they weren’t quite right for this time).

All the street cred of traditional publication, without the lifetime rights grab and the long delays. More like being a contractor than being a low-level employee. This is how publication ought to work.

May 23

Is Speculative Fiction?

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I’m going to do a foolish thing here. I’m going to set up a distinction.

Nothing is more likely to lead to arguments than definitions, but here we go.

Speculative fiction. It’s a term that’s used to cover SF, fantasy and (supernatural) horror, and the bits and pieces that fall in between and across those genres. Bizarro, weird, surrealist, magical realist, slipstream – you could toss them all into a broad definition of spec-fic, though it’s more often used for SFF: science fiction and fantasy (“oh, and horror, I suppose” as an afterthought).

Let’s look at the first word, though. “Speculative”. Spec-fic is based around the idea of “what-if”. In science fiction it’s usually “what if this technology existed?”, and in fantasy “what if magic existed?”, though there are vast numbers of exceptions to those generalisations.

I’d like to argue, though, that after a particular trope becomes familiar enough, it’s not “speculative” in the strongest sense any more. It’s just a counterfactual setting. Everyone understands space opera, now. You have spaceships, probably warp or wormhole drives, quite possibly blasters and stunners, usually some kind of artificial gravity/antigravity, there’s interstellar trade, there are space colonies, there may or may not be aliens of fairly predictable types (comedic, antagonistic, just plain weird). A space opera that only uses these tropes, that doesn’t introduce anything new to them, can be an excellent and very enjoyable story, but it doesn’t really speculate all that much. It’s using a set of trope technologies established in the mid-20th century (notably, the computer technology isn’t usually very advanced, sometimes not even as advanced as our actual present-day tech in a story written today), and has not very much to do with the current state of science. Writing a space opera of this kind is like writing a planetary romance: it’s a literary genre that’s become established with a certain set of assumptions and understandings about how things work, and we continue to enjoy it even though we know now that things don’t really work that way.

Everyone, likewise, understands paranormal romance. There are supernatural creatures, most commonly vampires, werewolves, and/or Fae (in roughly that order of popularity). There may or may not be witches/wizards. These elements are, in many ways, background. They’re furniture. They’re not what the story is, in any strong sense, exploring, any more than a cosy murder mystery explores crime or a spy thriller explores international espionage.

In the short story field, in particular, referencing a trope can be a useful shortcut in a limited space, which enables you to get to the story itself without a lot of tedious explanation. I’ve become more aware of this as I write short stories. It’s one of the tricky things about short stories in my Gryphon Clerks setting, especially, which is very different from the usual tropes in ways that I don’t always want to dwell on, but which need to be conveyed somehow if the story is to make sense.

As well as these heavily troped settings, there’s also a rising phenomenon – you can see it in the award nominations and the Best Of anthologies – of “literary” stories that have small, sometimes vanishingly small, spec-fic or counterfactual elements. For example, the Hugo-nominated short story “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” while a good story, is not speculative fiction by any rigorous definition. It contains speculation, but the speculation is counterfactual within the world of the story.

Scaring !
blavandmaster / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Now, I’m aware that I’m not going to bring about a revolution in which we all agree to save the term “speculative fiction” for fiction that actually, you know, speculates, and does so in fresh ways, and in which that speculation is at the heart of the story and couldn’t be removed without killing the patient. For better or worse, and quite probably it’s for better, “speculative fiction” has a broad definition rather than a narrow one. It includes the troped settings in which no new speculation is taking place, and the literary stories with a minor counterfactual that may not even make a difference to how the story goes.

What I would like to do is start at least a small amount of discussion about whether we could do with a few more terms. Maybe a spectrum of “tropedness” for subgenres like space opera and PNR, so we can talk about whether the story has just taken all its furniture ready-made from the archetypal space opera and pushed on with the action, or whether it’s a story about what it might actually be like to be in space. Whether it’s a vampire romance according to the usual template (so far as worldbuilding goes), or whether it’s playing with, subverting, even adding to the tropes.

I’m starting to sound evaluative, so I want to make clear again: A heavily troped space opera can be highly enjoyable to read. Not having much original worldbuilding in your book can leave more room for character and plot, and if that’s what you do with it, more power to your arm. If I’m reviewing, I probably will mention that it’s on the familiar end of the familiar-to-fresh spectrum, and that I personally would like more freshness, but many other people will love it exactly because of the familiarity, and it is meet and right so to do.

Likewise, maybe a spectrum of “light” to “heavy” would be a useful way to talk about whether stories have speculative elements at their core or are using them more as decoration.

And finally, I personally would like more freshness and heaviness from time to time in my spec-fic. I hear good things about Anne Leckie’s book Ancillary Justice in this connection, and I will probably read it at some point soon, even though it sounds darker than I usually like. There are still people writing spec-fic with a high level of speculation. The trick is finding them when there’s not a clear vocabulary to describe such a thing.

Jan 08

How to Weaken a Scene

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This morning, someone in a writers’ community I belong to on Google+ posted a link to this Ars Technica article about how some of the changes in the Hobbit movies were necessary to strengthen the writing. (Obviously, both that article and this post contain spoilers for both book and movie, if you care about that, and in fact assume that you’re familiar with both.)

Now, even though I love The Hobbit dearly (it was one of my first fantasy reads, if not the first, and I’ve read it at least eight times), I agree with much of what the article says. There’s too much coincidence, luck and deus ex machina in the book. However, I think some of the changes made in the movie weaken the story rather than strengthening it.

Example: The spiders. Compare these two versions.

Book version: The dwarves and Bilbo, after many days of trekking through the forest, are out of provisions and almost out of hope. Bilbo climbs a tree to scout and falsely gets the impression that they are still far from their destination. In desperation, they disobey Beorn’s advice and leave the path, trying to reach the elvish feasts they can see in the distance, but the elves, who are isolationists, keep disappearing as soon as they come near. They get separated in the darkness and confusion.

Bilbo wakes up from sleep being tied up by a giant spider, and kills it by a desperate effort. He luckily guesses which direction the dwarves are in, puts on his magic ring, and sneaks quietly towards them (it’s been previously established that he’s good at sneaking quietly).

The dwarves have been captured by the spiders. Bilbo cleverly manipulates the spiders through taunts and thrown stones to get them away from the dwarves, though he only just escapes from being surrounded by them and sneaks again to get away. He then kills another spider which has stayed behind, and begins to free the dwarves (who are in a bad way from the spiders’ poison on top of their hunger and exhaustion). Before he can finish, the spiders come back, and they all have to fight. Bilbo cleverly draws them off again, and the dwarves make a desperate escape, having to fight repeatedly (with inadequate weapons) despite their weariness, hunger and the lingering effects of the spider poison. At a moment when it looks like the spiders will surround them and overwhelm them, Bilbo reappears and gives them the opportunity to escape. Bilbo fights so well and so determinedly, in fact, that the spiders eventually give them up as a bad job and go back to their nests.

The dwarves then realise that Thorin (their leader, and incidentally the only one with a decent weapon apart from Bilbo) has disappeared. He has been captured by the elves. The elves subsequently capture the rest of the dwarves as well, but Bilbo again uses the ring to escape and follows them.

Movie version: The well-supplied dwarves are having a bit of a frustrating time finding their way through the forest after what appears to be a few hours, so they send Bilbo up a tree to scout. He happily discovers that they’re close to their destination. When he gets back, though, the spiders capture everyone, including him. He wakes up for no particular reason, gets himself out of a thorough binding and kills the spider with no real difficulty, and the dwarves start doing the same with a variety of effective weapons. The spiders are, individually, low-level mooks and apparently not much of a threat, but there are a lot of them.

The fight goes on for a long time, killing spiders, killing spiders, killing spiders. Then we get elves ex machina who finish up the fight, drive the spiders off and capture the party, apart from Bilbo, who rings up and follows as per the book.

Wolf Spider Portrait
e_monk / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Yes, the book version uses a lucky guess (the direction in which the dwarves were), though it’s really more of an informed guess. But what gets established? Bilbo is resourceful, clever and brave. He can manipulate, sneak and fight. The dwarves’ situation starts out bad and gets worse, then improves thanks to the protagonist’s action, then gets worse again in a different way, and that cycle repeats several times. There’s a lot of desperation, for several different causes.

In the movie, all of this is lost. It’s flattened out to a straightforward fight in which Bilbo is, if anything, one of the weaker players. There’s no real escalation of tension, not much up-and-down movement of the tension graph at all, in fact, and most of the sources of tension (hunger, weariness, loss of hope, believing they are far from their destination, being poorly armed and weak from spider venom) are removed completely. The protagonist doesn’t solve the problem. We don’t get to see much increase in his abilities. He doesn’t show himself to be clever, resourceful or sneaky. The result is a bland bit of action with not much significance to the story or the characters, that isn’t even that exciting to watch.

Now, I didn’t write this just to sling mud at Peter Jackson and his writers. I think there’s something to be learned here about writing.

Turn the process around. If you have a bland bit of action with not much significance to the story or characters, here’s how you can punch it up.

1. Make the characters more desperate and/or weaker, so that the outcome is more in doubt. They’re out of supplies, they have inadequate weapons, they’re poisoned, they’re lost, they don’t know how far they have to go but it seems further than they can go. When desperate, weak characters triumph after a hard fight, it’s more exciting than if strong, competent characters triumph after an easy fight.

2. Don’t just write it as “they fight a thing, they fight another thing the same as the first thing, they fight yet another thing”. Write a series of problems from which the characters have to escape: One-on-one conflict. Drawing off the spiders. Spiders nearly surround Bilbo. He gets away and starts to free the dwarves, but the spiders come back before he’s finished. Spiders nearly surround the dwarves, Bilbo rushes in from the side and breaks through.

I watched an excellent example of this the other day: the truck chase sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s a thrilling sequence because it’s not just solving the same problem over and over, it’s solving a series of different problems in different ways on the way to an overall goal (escape with the Ark). Indiana Jones must pursue the truck on horseback, jump on, force his way in, overcome the Nazis inside, then he gets attacked by other Nazis who climb forward from the back of the truck (antagonists can struggle and be brave and resourceful too), he’s forced out, he climbs under the truck and is dragged behind, gets back up and in control of the truck again, has to contend with the other vehicles in the convoy (which he gets rid of by several different tactics), hides the truck in the village… It has variety, and every time he solves a problem he gets a new, and different, problem. We get a series of small releases of tension as he solves each problem, but the overall tension continues until the end of the sequence.

3. This deserves to be its own point: Give a variety of problems a variety of solutions. Not just “stab a spider, stab another spider, stab a third spider”.

4. Take the opportunity for character development. If Bilbo is going to encounter Smaug with any expectation of success, he needs to be clever, resourceful and sneaky. This scene (in the book) establishes that he is becoming all of those things.

5. Have the protagonist solve the problem. Tolkien is as guilty of violating this as anyone, but not in the spider sequence. It’s not fatal to have your protagonist rescued occasionally, but if it becomes a habit, they’re not much of a protagonist.

6. Have the problem be more than just “do they win the fight?”. Most of the fights in The Desolation of Smaug have no higher, greater or other stakes than “do the heroes win this fight?” Those are not very interesting stakes, especially when you’re pretty sure the answer is going to be “yes”. Will the heroes be eaten by the spiders? Will they find their way out of the forest? Will they starve? Where is their leader, and how can he escape? Can Bilbo continue to conceal his possession of the ring? All of these things are at stake in the book version, and they lead into and out of the fight, meaning that the fight is hard to remove as a story element. The movie version of the fight (and most of the other fights in the movie) could be completely removed as a story element and nothing else would need to be rewritten. That’s a sign of weak writing, and a scene that isn’t necessary because it doesn’t do anything except present a (rather dull) spectacle.

I’ll close with a link to another article: Why You Should Never Write Action Scenes for Your Blockbuster Movie. It’s excellent writing advice in general, and the summary version is: Don’t write action scenes. Write suspense scenes that require action to resolve.

Oct 14

Three Types of Steampunk

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I love the idea (or, as we’ll shortly see, ideas) of steampunk. The Victorian Era, only more wondrous. Why wouldn’t I love it?

Well, mainly because the execution so seldom matches the concept.

I’ve been trying to read more steampunk, and the books I’ve come across fall mostly into a couple of disappointing categories. I’ll talk about the third category, or what steampunk can be, in a bit.

Type One: The Big Brass Romance

The first type of steampunk is basically paranormal romance in something which is unconvincingly pretending to be the Victorian age, with characters who are very unconvincingly pretending to be English (since the author is American, and doesn’t know much about England, or the English, or the Victorian Era, or how to go about doing research, or for that matter how to use a comma). There are probably airships and/or automatons. There is certainly a Plucky Gel, with nonfunctional brass gears glued to her corset, who is simultaneously too awesome to fail and too stupid to live.

There is a Love Interest, or quite likely a Love Triangle. The Love Interest, or the ultimately successful male member of the Love Triangle, is a horrible human being with big muscles. The Plucky Gel at first tries to resist him, because she thinks he’s wrong for her (which shows atypical insight on her part), but ends up with him anyway after he’s rescued her a couple of times.

The text is full of homonym errors. Full. It is written by a woman who failed Feminism 101, and probably English Composition 101 as well.

Type Two: The Steampulp Adventure

The second type of steampunk is a 1930s pulp in a bad Jules Verne costume. It is also poorly researched, and unconvincing in its Britishness and Victorianness, but the setting is so sketchy it doesn’t matter so much. There are still probably airships and/or automatons, though they may be more central to the plot than they are in the Big Brass Romance. There is quite likely still a Plucky Gel, but she’s disguised as a boy or does boy things in defiance of convention, and she, or someone, has nonfunctional brass goggles attached to her top hat.

LuftFlotte Steampunk...
Stf.O / Foter / CC BY

There is a Big Bad, and there are chases, and explosions, and prison breaks, but not really enough of them to hide the fact that the author can’t write very well and is kind of winging it. The Big Bad is trying to overturn the status quo, and the hero must prevent this.

This text, too, is probably well equipped with homonym errors. It is written by a man, who has taken Feminism 101 (and Postcolonial Literature) into the back room, tied them up and shot them.

Type Three: The Voyage of Imagination

The third type of steampunk is the type I like, and can’t find enough of. Interestingly, hardly any of the examples I’ve found are set in the Victorian Era, and about half are in a secondary world. It’s a world where, at a generally Victorian level of technology and society, there are airships and/or automatons or other such contraptions, and this actually makes a difference to how people live.

Indeed, society is in transition, and questions of equality, of access to power, education and technology, are central to the story. Sometimes it’s about gender, sometimes about class or even race; often it’s more than one of the above, and these questions are personally important to the heroes.

The writing is competent. If it’s set in the real world, the author manages to demonstrate that they’ve been to the well of research, without making you drink from the bucket.

There may well be explosions and/or romance, but they’re not the main focus. That would be the characters.

So, what are some examples of good steampunk? Besides the indie steampunk novels that I recommend, there’s one trad-pub series I think highly of, even though it’s a bit Type 2 (it’s really well-done Type 2, what Type 2 should aspire to be). I’m referring to the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfeld. Yes, it’s YA, and yes, the heroine is disguised as a boy, but it’s good stuff all the same. It’s not Victorian, but an alternate World War I, and technically it’s dieselpunk.

I wish people would write more Type 3 steampunk, though. Get on that, would you?

Sep 10

My Accidental Romance

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I haven’t blogged for quite some time, and for the best of reasons: I’ve been writing the next Gryphon Clerks novel.

Actually, I’ve been writing the one after next. The next one (Hope and the Clever Man) is with my beta readers, and while I waited for their feedback I had some ideas for the sequel, and as I write this post I’m about to pass 70,000 words – all written since I started nine weeks ago.

This is a surprise. I’ve not written this fast or this easily before. I think it’s because I’ve never written a series before, and now that I have a good run-up, and the characters and world are clear in my head, they’re producing the story for me much faster.

Now, I know that I am actually producing the story. It’s a useful fiction to say that the characters are doing it. Useful, because it describes the experience I have when I’m writing a scene and a character suddenly starts talking about a painful experience earlier in his life that I was not expecting him to mention in this context, one that I knew would eventually come up but which I hadn’t worked out in any detail, and I’m writing away thinking, “I wonder what happens next?” And as I continue writing, I find out. That happened in the new book, and it was wonderful.

Although I’m making more use of outlining than I used to, I’m still what’s politely called a “discovery writer”, which means that for me, story generation happens mostly while I write. This has its drawbacks, in that I don’t always know what happens next and can get stuck, but it also has its advantages, in that I don’t always know what happens next and can be pleasantly surprised.

One of the surprises has been that Hope and the Patient Man (the current work-in-progress, sequel to Hope and the Clever Man) turns out to be a romance. I did not see that coming, though I probably should have, given the young man who turns up, unexpectedly to everyone including me, late in the first Hope book.

One of the current kerfuffles in the spec-fic field is over an article by an academic named Paul Cook on the Amazing Stories website called When Science Fiction is Not Science Fiction. In it, he basically says that he likes adventure stories, and that is what science fiction is, and ones with romance in them are for girls and not real SF. It’s not a sophisticated argument, and rather than dignify it by linking to it I’ll link to Lois McMaster Bujold’s excellent commentary on the issue. (I’ve chosen the Goodreads version of her post, because she also has some interesting exchanges in the comments.)

What I write, of course, isn’t science fiction by pretty much anyone’s definition, including mine (though it’s more sciency than most fantasy; I do have an approximate theoretical basis for the magic which kind of maps to some real-world science if you don’t look too closely, rather than just saying “a wizard did it”). It’s steampunkish fantasy, and to that I now need to add to the word “romance”, apparently.

Prarie Dog Love, #2
Thomas Hawk / Foter / CC BY-NC

Some things about that. Firstly, it turned into a romance because I think relationships are important. I’m married (15 years come February), and that relationship is extremely important to me. A friend of mine, who I met on our first day of high school in early 1981 and have stayed in touch with almost continuously since, has recently moved back into the same country as me, and bought a house in the same city that I live in, and we’re hanging out, and that’s reminded me of the importance of friendships for helping define who we are. How relationships define us is a bit of an emerging theme in the second Hope book, in fact.

It’s often said that characters are defined and revealed by taking action, by what they do in response to circumstances, and that’s true. It’s especially true in an action novel. In a novel that has more to do with relationships than with adventure, though, it’s also true that characters are defined and revealed by their connections to one another.

These are not exclusive categories. There are novels that are high-action and low-relationship, and vice versa, but most occupy some kind of middle ground, especially in the spec-fic field. Some of my favourite characters, like Lindsay Buroker’s Amaranthe Lokdon, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville, and (to choose a male character by a male author) Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, are remarkable because of their ability to collect people who are linked to them by ties of friendship, or at least shared interest, and who act as force multipliers for the characters when they want to get something done.

I’m grateful to the pioneers of the New Wave in the late 60s and early 70s for injecting more relationship into what had been a largely action-oriented genre, because personally I find relationships interesting as well as important. At the same time, I’m not going to go all Paul Cook and claim that only novels that deal with relationships are X (where X is members-of-genre-I-like, good, enjoyable, valuable, or other, as Lois McMaster Bujold puts it, valorising adjectives).

I do want to say a bit about romance as a plot element versus romance as a genre category, though. Romance as a plot element appears in all genres. Romance as a genre category has its own tropes, its own rules, its own recurrent themes, and I’m not planning to take all of those on in my writing.

I’ll freely admit that I’ve read hardly any genre romance, and am poorly qualified to comment on the genre as a whole, so I won’t. I will mention, though, particular kinds of romance that I find in other genres I do read, such as steampunk and urban fantasy, and some of the problems I have with them, and why I won’t be doing that.

Before I do, though, I think it’s uncontroversial to say that romance is largely written by women. Men who write it sometimes use feminine pen names, just as women who write science fiction sometimes take masculine pen names (or use their initials rather than their names). I’m not going to talk right now about whether that’s good or bad or problematic; it’s a thing that happens. Now, I’m a man (a cis man, if you like, meaning I was born male and have always identified as such; also a straight man; also a white, middle-class man, and yes, that’s relevant). It would be somewhat surprising, our society being what it is, if I approached writing about relationships exactly the same way a woman would, because I’ve been raised with a different perspective.

I also identify as a feminist ally, and as such, I find some of the romance plots I encounter in steampunk and urban fantasy problematic. Tracing, no doubt, a lineage back to Mr. Darcy and Heathcliff, among others, the “heroes” of these romances are often unpleasant human beings. They treat women poorly, but are forgiven because they rescue them when the women do foolish, headstrong things that place them in danger, and because they have firm muscles that make the heroine’s heart beat fast despite herself.

Now, I understand that there has to be a reason why the couple doesn’t just get together right away, otherwise what you have is not a plot, but an incident. However, it’s not essential or inevitable that this reason should be “it’s actually a bad idea to be with this guy”. To me, that’s simultaneously naive and cynical: naive, in expecting a relationship with such a flawed man to work out anyway, and cynical, in that it assumes that men don’t get any better than that.

I’m not going to point to examples of what I’m talking about, because they aren’t that hard to find and I don’t want to single out individual authors just because I’ve read them, when there are much more egregious examples that I haven’t read. I will, however, point to a counterexample, an urban fantasy series in which there’s a strong romance thread, in which there’s a clear reason why the couple doesn’t get together straight away, in which it’s not because he’s a cad and a bounder and a deceiver, in which the woman has agency and makes smart decisions and can rescue herself quite competently. I’m talking about Christine Amsden’s Cassie Scot series. This is how you do it! </Randy Jackson>

So, anyway, the romance part of my writing works like this. There’s a magic-based but in other ways realistic reason why the couple can’t just get together. They work on it together, because he’s a decent guy and thinks she’s wonderful and worth the effort, and she appreciates this. Along the way, he contributes to resolving some other issues, both inside and outside her head, but she is ultimately the one who has agency. He’s not trying to control her or live her life for her.

Part of the way that stories work is that they help us develop problem-solving skills. I have a real concern about some of the romance stories that are around, for that exact reason. So if my book is turning into a romance, I’m going to give my perspective – as a man, happily married to a woman with a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy, who’s also studied some psychology himself – on what a good relationship looks like. My hope is that it educates while entertaining.

In case it’s not clear from what I’ve said above about my writing process, I’m not forcing this stuff into the book. It’s coming up by itself, because I’m following the old principle of “write what you know”.

If all goes according to plan, you should be able to read Hope and the Clever Man sometime around November this year, and Hope and the Patient Man early next year. To get announcements when they’re published, sign up to my (low-volume) mailing list in the sidebar of the site.

Jul 30

Freshness and Familiarity: Finding the Goldilocks Zone

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OK, disclaimers upfront:

  1. Everything I’m going to say in this post is about my own taste.
  2. If your taste is different (entirely likely), that’s fine with me.
  3. Your taste being different doesn’t invalidate what I say about my own preferences, or, of course, vice versa.
  4. I nevertheless doubt that I’m the only one who feels this way.

Having got that out of the way, I want to talk about a spectrum in fiction writing that I’m going to call “freshness” versus “familiarity”. “Freshness” implies that the author is doing something new, seldom or never seen before, while “familiarity” means that they’re using elements (both genre elements and story elements) that have been around for a while.

Every book is somewhere on this spectrum. Finnegan’s Wake is probably about as far as you can go towards the freshness end without degenerating into random word-salad (and even that references earlier literature), and up the other end we have, I don’t know, fanfiction that’s just a rewriting of a scene in canon.

Now, straight away I’ve dropped an implication that freshness is better, and I don’t necessarily think that. I picked Finnegan’s Wake up once, and quickly concluded that I didn’t want to work that hard and probably wasn’t that smart, and put it down again. Certainly, though, freshness is harder.

Goldilocks
violscraper / Foter / CC BY-NC

For me, the Goldilocks Zone on the freshness-familiarity spectrum is a broad one. I can enjoy a book like Charles Stross’s Halting State, for example, written in second person, or one of his posthuman novels like Glasshouse. I can also enjoy a book that’s very nearly pure vanilla D&D-style fantasy, or off-the-shelf space opera, as long as other aspects of the book (the characters, the writing, the plot) are well done – and have some freshness to them.

There is, though, such a thing as too much, and that applies both to freshness and to familiarity. I abandoned Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi, for example, 25% of the way through, because I didn’t have a clue what was going on (and also didn’t care about the characters). I didn’t get past the sample for Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, for a similar reason, even though I love heist novels. When too much is unfamiliar, I become disoriented and it’s easy for the book to lose my attention.

On the other hand, if I come across an epic fantasy in which the blacksmith’s boy loses his parents in the first chapter (when cruel, heartless, evil people destroy their village) and joins up with quirky and assorted companions in a quest for an artifact which, as the Chosen One, he is destined to wield against the Dark Lord, I pass it by. I’ve already read that story, and when I read it before it was probably better written.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with tropes, whether genre tropes or story tropes. I’m highly trope-tolerant. Oh, regardless of how much death and destruction is raining down, all of the core characters always survive, shrugging off significant injuries in insignificant amounts of time? OK, it’s one of those stories. I can live with that. (Though some tropes are easier to tolerate than others, and the others are usually the ones that allow the writer to take shortcuts in character development and plotting.)

Where I start to have a problem is if the whole thing, or almost the whole thing, is constructed out of tropes, as if someone had built a character, plot and setting generator out of the TV Tropes website and run it, then filled in the resulting outline with poorly-written prose. I think of those as paint-by-numbers books. There’s too much familiarity.

Sadly, a great many indie writers look out on the vast ocean of possibilities represented by the indie publishing revolution, in which they no longer have to write what the big publishers are buying in order to have a chance to reach an audience, but can create something genuinely new and fresh… and then they write another vampire romance with a whiny, annoying teenage heroine who’s simultaneously the most awesome person ever and too stupid to live.

Freshness is hard, yes. And familiarity is important. But if you want to succeed with me, and readers like me, you’re going to need to strike for the Goldilocks Zone.

Jul 22

On Writing a Fiction Series

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Hope and the Clever ManI’ve just sent the first draft of Hope and the Clever Man, the second Gryphon Clerks book, to my lovely and talented beta readers. This is the culmination of a five-month-long writing process; a few of the chapters were recycled, having been cut from an earlier work, but most of them are new.

It’s also the start of an editing process that I expect to last two or three months. First the beta read, so I can get other eyes on the text for the first time and find out what’s missing, or not working as it should. Then an intensive edit from me, in multiple passes, strengthening and expanding. Finally, two passes through with my wonderful development editor, Kathleen Dale, who helped make Realmgolds a much better book than the one I initially gave her.

Hope is about a third longer than Realmgolds (80,000 words, at the moment, versus 62,000), following the usual law of series by which the later books get longer. It overlaps Realmgolds in time, which makes it tricky to avoid spoilers, but I think I’ve managed it. There are a couple of characters who appear in both books: the redoubtable Realmgold Victory strides in and orders people about several times, and the venerable Master-Magus is back too. There’s a brief cameo from Leading Clerk Grace Carter, just for fun, and the Realmgold’s clever man, mentioned a couple of times in Realmgolds, has, obviously, an important role. Otherwise, the characters are all new.

The idea is that either book acts as a point of entry for the series; you don’t have to read one before the other. I want to carry on that approach in future, creating a series more like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld than, say, The Wheel of Time. WoT lost me as a reader years ago when the books started to be spaced further apart, with the promised resolution nowhere in sight and a huge, complicated cast winding round each other before disappearing up their own backstories.

There will be recurring characters in the Gryphon Clerks, recurring groups of characters, even. I love my characters, so do my readers, and I enjoy leaving Easter eggs like a brief appearance in one book by a key character in another. You won’t have to read from the first book in order to understand what’s going on, though. (You also won’t have to read to the last book to understand what’s going on, which means that, while hopefully the fans will still stay eager for the next one, at least there’ll be a story that finishes in less than 20 or 30 years.)

Not having to start with Book One is important, because, while most of the reviews I’ve got for Realmgolds are four stars, even my greatest fans acknowledge that it has its flaws. I’m aware of that too. The first book of a series is frequently the weakest, or one of the weakest, even in series that go on to be hugely successful.

Look at Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Personally, I like Storm Front, having been into Jim Butcher since before he was cool, but a lot of people don’t, and even I freely acknowledge that the later books are much better. Fortunately, Butcher makes most of the early books, at least, reasonably self-contained, and does a good “who are these people and why are they angry” catch-up at the start of each new one, so you can read some of them out of order or even skip some without missing too much. At the same time, he keeps an overall arc going, which he’s said is going to take about 20 books or more to complete. (I don’t plan on doing that, partly because I’m not nearly the outliner he is.)

Pratchett himself didn’t really hit his stride until Mort (in my opinion), maybe even Wyrd Sisters, and those are the fourth and sixth books in the Discworld series. I’m a huge fan of the Discworld, but my top favourites start about 10 years after the publication of the first book, around Men at Arms, which is book 15. Not to say that there aren’t excellent books before that, but Men at Arms started a really strong run of writing which was deeper, more thoughtful, and consistently good, a run which lasted (again, my opinion) for another dozen years and 20 more books, finally broken, briefly, by Wintersmith. If everyone had to read 15 books before they started to be consistently good, I’m not sure the Discworld would have enjoyed the success it has. The multiple entry points ensure that they don’t have to.

Another approach to series which avoids the one-story-in-12-books-released-over-30-years issue is to write self-contained stories in smaller numbers of books, with these mini-series then potentially having some kind of link to each other. Trilogies, of course, are popular, especially in fantasy. Lindsay Buroker has recently concluded her Emperor’s Edge series, which is seven books, plus two other loosely connected novels set in a different part of the same world and some interstitial short stories. Because she writes fast, and they’re short, the whole series has wrapped up in three or four years. She now has the option of writing other stories in that world, or even with those characters, while also having a completed series.

When you’re writing fantasy or SF, worldbuilding takes a good deal of your time unless you’re using a vanilla off-the-shelf setting (which is usually pretty dull), and there’s definitely an advantage to being able to re-use it. Even Brandon Sanderson, who has the most insane ability to come up with new magic systems, writes more than one book in most of his settings. I created the foundations of the Gryphon Clerks setting over several years, and there is certainly plenty of space to tell stories in (we haven’t even glimpsed what’s over to the east yet).

Besides that, of course, it’s becoming received wisdom that a series will hook more readers than a standalone novel, for much the same reason that it’s easier to sell a novel than a novella, and easier to sell a novella than a short story. Readers, like writers, put a certain amount of investment into a setting and a group of characters, and if they like them, they want more of the same, only different.

Telling loosely connected stories lets me indulge my taste for novelty while also avoiding the work of building a new world each time, and hopefully will keep the readers hooked as well, while allowing them to skip a book or two if it isn’t to their taste.