Babel Clash

Thank you to Bill, James and Matt.  It’s been a great conversation.

Peter & Max didn’t get its fair share of time as a featured title, so I want to take a moment to recommend it.  If you’re a fan of Fables, then you’ll love Peter & Max.  That’s a given.  If you haven’t yet read this award-winning comic series, then thankfully, the novel stands on its own merit.  Bill puts his own unique spin on the classic fairy tale of Peter Piper.  Learn the secret history of the Piper family and then enjoy a classic battle of wills and wits between Peter and his evil brother.  It’s a well told tale by a storyteller who now deserves equal admiration as both a novelist and a comic writer.

Now for our next guest.  I’m honored to welcome R. A. Salvatore to Babel Clash.  Salvatore is the author of the Drizzt Do’Urden novels, including the brand new The Ghost King.  Among his other notable series is the Saga of the First King.  The lastest volume in that series, the Dame, is also available in stores and on Borders.com now.

It looks like we’re out of here, to make room for the next duo, or group, or solo act of writers to come along and pontificate. In the American presidency it has become a tradition for outgoing presidents to leave a letter in the desk for the new, incoming president. I’ve long thought that was a nice tradition, so I am going to leave this note for the next one(s) to come along here in this place.

Dear Person(s) to Come,

I presume you’re a published writer in the genres I love. I may not have read your books before, but I will, if you talk about interesting things here. Before this short conversation began I wasn’t at all familiar with James Enge’s books. But he was interesting and engaging, even when I disagreed with him, so now there are two of his books on my nightstand. I was already a reader of Matt’s books, by the way.

I love lucid and thoughtful conversations about our shared craft, always on the lookout for new insights into why we do what we do. I think a forum such as this — especially a hit and run format like this — works best when it’s not so much about the hard mechanics of how to write (that’s much too long a conversation), but about the underlying philosophy of why we’re compelled to write, and tell these sorts of stories.

I would have loved to hear from Edgar Rice Burroughs what he thought about his most famous creation. I’d like to know what Robert E Howard thought about Conan. Did he like the fellow? Would he like to have actually met him? (I suspect not. One wrong word and — ).

So here’s a few things I wouldn’t mind if you addressed during your sojourn here.

Why did you chose to tell the stories you told? What do you think about your characters? Are any of them a spokesman for your own thoughts and opinions? Who among your cast would you want to share a beer with? Who among your cast do you absolutely loathe (and perhaps love to loathe)? Do you hope to teach your readers something? Should you? What do you owe your readers? What do you absolutely not owe your readers?

Then again, you might have a host of more interesting things to address, in which case, talk about those instead.

I pondered this question all weekend. What lessons could Midwinter teach aspiring writers? The self-flagellating artist in me immediately responds, “Nothing. It’s a mediocre book at best; derivative, not descriptive enough, goes off on a far-too-wide tangent about 2/3 through. If aspiring writers were to learn anything from it, it would only be from the massive pile of mistakes I made in it.”

Midwinter can definitely teach you that a beautiful Chris McGrath cover is something that's nice to have.

Of course, this is hyperbole. Sure there are things I could have done better, but all in all, I think Midwinter works just fine. Great literature? Probably not. A solid fantasy read? Sure. Certainly a journeyman first novel. Even downright clever in places.

Maybe this is what it can teach you. Unless you are one of those supremely confident individuals who never second-guesses him/herself, and also happens to be brilliant, you are very likely to have misgivings about any story you embark upon. The bigger the story, the more moving parts, the more trepidation you are likely to experience. You will probably spend some time in the midst of writing it (somewhere just past the halfway point seems to be my personal favorite spot) thinking that it is the worst novel ever written, and any smart person would abandon it now. Other days (maybe the next day), you might find yourself thinking that you are a genius who can do no wrong. (continue reading…)

Bill’s and Matt’s posts about reading really struck home for me. I like to think of stories (anyone’s stories) as a script for a performance. And I’ve learned the most about storytelling by telling stories (without any script) to live audiences, starting with my kids.

A live audience has a lot of power over the story that gets told them. They can demand a specific one, for instance. “The one about the monster!” was a regular demand of my then-preschool-age kids. The first time I heard them say this I was confused: I’d told them lots of stories about monsters. It turned out that the story they wanted was one I’d improvised about a monster eating our car. This became their favorite story and I must have told it hundreds of times before they grew out of it and we started reading storybooks at bed-time. (That seems like a long time ago now… because it was, I guess. I just asked my kids about Super Walrus, and they only vaguely remembered him. All stories are mortal, and Super Walrus was a story, therefore…)

(continue reading…)

If you’ll take a glance just a wee bit below, you’ll see that our host Morgan asked a question that’s going to be difficult to answer, because it’s almost impossible to predict what other writers, new or long-established, are going to take from our books. And if we instead discuss what we hope others will glean from our books it’s going to be hard not to start bragging. We can on occasion be an egotistical lot (not just we three, mind you, but all storytellers in general, since it’s not an occupation for the overly humble and timid).

But with that said, he did ask, so I’m going to take a shot at providing something approximating an answer. Here’s what you might learn from Peter and Max. First, if you didn’t enjoy the book, don’t try to do something similar. Don’t set your story in the vast Black Forest of a long-ago German like fantasy world. Don’t make the central conflict revolve around a family struggle to see who gets the best flute. And certainly don’t do anything that involves your hero stuffing his wife into a pumpkin shell. (continue reading…)

Reading Bill Willingham’s post from a couple days ago, I was reminded of some of my own thoughts about the act of reading. Bill talks about the collaboration between the writer and the reader, and how the reader actually does most of the heavy lifting in that process. I agree, but I might put it in slightly different terms.

When we think of the performing arts, we think of dance, music, theater, that kind of stuff. I don’t know too many people who would place “reading” on that list. But if you think about it, reading is a performance just like any of those. In any performing art, the performer takes a composition (choreography, a musical score, a script) and brings the composition to life by performing it (a ballet, a symphony, a play). As far as I can tell, reading is just like any of those things: the only difference is that the performance typically only happens in the reader’s mind (or at bedtime, when I read books to my kids). (continue reading…)

James, Matt and Bill,

You’ve spoken a lot about influences.  What might developing writers find to be most influential in your own new books?  Can you speak to how or why Midwinter,  This Crooked Way and Peter & Max might prove influential on impressionable young minds?

Hey Matt: I agree about the explosion in pop culture at the moment, and it is a blast. I worry that it might be more of a Silver Age than a Golden Age, though–that it might be more allusive (and re-use-ive) than creative.

I felt that way a few years ago when all of a sudden sf/f seemed to be one of the genres acceptable on prime time TV—-but almost everything networks were putting on were remakes, retakes and pastiches. Remember when NBC (a network with notoriously poor judgement) thought the world needed a remake of The Bionic Woman (but darker! edgier! more somber!). Even something like Heroes, though not explicitly a remake, was openly borrowing from generations of comic books. Not that this was bad; it was one of the good things about the show… until they lost their way around the middle of the first season and apparently never found it again. (I stopped watching years ago, so maybe the show is golden now. But I guess I’ll never know.)

There was a burst of shows like this on US TV a few years ago, which have mostly dribbled out. The biggest successes have been remakes (Battlestar Galactica) and sequels (e.g. the Stargate series–now on its third title, I think)–and, of course, the British shows. Which are mostly remakes and sequels (e.g. Dr. Who and its spinoffs).

I could never bring myself to watch Battlestar; the original show wasn’t one of the happy memories of my childhood. I’ve seen a couple episodes of Stargate, Who and Torchwood and generally liked them. But I’m missing the newness that used to be the hallmark of genre—-or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place.

(continue reading…)

I think that we are living in a Golden Age of popular culture.

At least, for the me and the other members of my generation, we are. I imagine that older generations must think us insane. All of the things that allured us as children, the onslaught of trash culture and science fiction and fantasy and horror have all come home to roost in the current generation of writers; the obsessive quirks of very smart people reeling in a torrent of inputs both sublime and ridiculous, sacred and profane. And now the ones who were raised on all that stuff–everything from H.R. Puff-n-Stuff to Stanley Kubrick to Kurt Vonnegut to Spielberg to Star Wars to Star Trek:whatever to Conan the Barbarian to Raiders of the Lost Ark–are now the ones producing it. We grew up imbibing the distiled essence of twentieth-century pop culture, created by people who themselves had been nursed on Burroughs and Lovecraft and Poe and Superman comics and Tex Avery and Universal monster movies. The things that our generation has assembled as a result are the purest distillation yet, managing to cram a pressure-cooker of allusive play and substance together in a bright mishmash that defies tradition and genre while embracing and celebrating it at the same time. (continue reading…)

Burne-Jones, "Beguiling of Merlin"

Hey Matt: I had some ideas about this mainstream/genre thing, which will hopefully show up on SF Signal next week when they unveil Part Two of this Mind Meld. (I raved about the same subject here, too.) But, like you, I have sometimes wondered why we keep asking ourselves this question. Also, I wonder who the “they” is that we’re sure is scorning us.

For one thing, academia doesn’t really canonize literary works anymore. For good or for evil, postmodernism changed all that. Now in academia anything can be studied (from Madonna’s costume over the years to the underwear of Homeric heroes) but nothing may be revered. In a way that’s certainly good: working at a university doesn’t give anyone the power of infallibility (literary or otherwise). In a way it’s bad: if profs can’t articulate the stuff in a work that makes it worthwhile, interesting to read not just study like a dead bug, they may find students drifting away from them and their subjects (which I think is sometimes certainly the case). I know little about the more rarified heights of nonacademic literary criticism, but I would be surprised if the same thing weren’t true: apparently it’s not easy to find an audience for new booklength literary fiction.

Another question is: what is the mainstream?

(continue reading…)