writing

Dojo Summer Sessions: An Imaginary Reply to Tim Minchin

Dana Hunter2 Comments

During Neil Gaiman’s appearance at Seattle Town Hall, Neil mentioned a discussion he’d had with Tim Minchin the night before.  Tim wanted to know why, since Neil was a rational sort of person, everything he wrote was fantasy.

Neil made a suitably witty reply, which I shall not attempt to transcribe as the audio was teh suck at that point and big portions of it are unintelligible.  But it got me to thinking.  It’s a good question, actually: why would otherwise rational people write fantasy?  Terry Pratchett is a rational man, Douglas Adams was; SF is filled with atheists running around writing about myths and gods and so forth.

Why not write about the real world instead?

I know my gut reaction to Tim’s question was, “Are you kidding?  Why wouldn’t he write fantasy?  He’s bloody brilliant at it.”  I’m sure he’d have been very good writing about really real things and doing very realistic fiction and such like, but no way that could have had the power of Sandman, say, or American Gods.  Myth is enormously powerful.  And you can use it to say real things that may be a little too real.

I’ve never met Tim Minchin.  Possibly never will.  But let’s imagine, for a moment, that after I have achieved some modest success and have some SF books out that don’t suck, Tim Minchin and I sit down to dinner under some very odd circumstances, and he asks me that very question.  “Dana, you’re a rational woman.  You’ve written non-fiction and you’re good at it.  Why are you writing fantasy?”

Because I love it.  That’s first and foremost: I love speculative fiction.  I love science fiction, and I love fantasy, and I love mythic stories, and I love creating worlds.  I love my story people and want to do them justice.  That’s the first thing.

The second is this: the stories I want to tell are human stories, but they can’t be told here on Earth.  That’s just the way it is.  I can’t force my characters into an earthly skin; they wouldn’t fit.  I don’t want to write stories about the real world.  If I’m doing that, I might as well write non-fiction and be done with it.  But the real world deeply informs my imaginary worlds, and there’s the turn.  There’s the prestige.  You see, I’m working a little bit of magic, here.

Because I realized something long ago: people sometimes need imaginary things to help them see what’s real.  We’re surrounded by real things all the time and very much want to escape sometimes.  I do.  When I pick up a novel, I’m not looking for a perfect reflection of the real world.  I don’t want to read about ordinary lives.  I want a mirror held up, but not just any mirror: it must be one that doesn’t reflect reality faithfully, but twists it around a bit.  And I know there are a lot of people like me.  They want something fantastic.  They want something imaginary and weird and wonderful.

But we only think we’re escaping reality.  That’s the turn, you see.  The little magician’s trick to make us think we’re getting something we’re actually not.  But reality slips in, sometimes very difficult reality.  I could go through each and every fantasy novel I own, the ones with staying power, and I could point out to you a place or two or several where very difficult truths got told.  I can show you where something I had no interest in became interesting.  Things I wouldn’t have touched in a non-fiction book or looked in to on my own because I thought they were too boring, or too grim, or irrelevant, or I simply didn’t know exist.  They are things that made me think about very difficult issues, like prejudice, or torture, or morality, or politics.  They are things that introduced me to science.  I would not be sitting here with you, an atheist with a passion for science, if I hadn’t read fantasy first and started dreaming of other worlds, which in turn led me to explore this one.  I didn’t know it was going to do that, but that’s what the very best fantasy does: it changes your perspective.  It makes you think, and it makes you wonder, and it makes you explore.

Let’s take my peculiar passion.  If I write a book about geology, people who are interested in geology will read it.  And there the matter will rest.  But if I write a fantasy novel that has got geology in it, people who thought geology was just dull old rocks, people who never would have in a billion trillion years picked up a book about geology, will find themselves reading about geology.  They may not realize that.  It’s just part of the milieu of that novel, and what they’re reading about is characters in very interesting situations.  But they’re getting exposed to geology in the process.  And some of them, perhaps a lot of them, will find themselves intrigued enough by the geology bits to go out and explore on their own.  Same thing with the biology and the chemistry and the physics I slip in there.  Same thing with the other things: myths and legends and religions and atheism.  Same thing with the politics and the psychology and the moral dilemmas and – well, I could continue the list, but I think you’re getting the point about now, so I’ll stop.

Because it’s fantasy I’m writing, I can get away with a lot of things that might have sent readers away screaming if they’d been in a more realistic work.  That’s the beauty of fantasy: people expect something strange and different in it, so they’re not much fussed when I expose them to strange and different things.  Things that would’ve had them howling, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, you’re not going on about that?” if I’d presented it in another format.

We need fantasy.  We get very comfortable seeing the world in certain ways, and it all becomes very ordinary.  What fantasy does is changes our perspective.  We can use it to explore things from a different angle, perhaps an angle we’d never considered before.  It invites us to turn things around and upside down and inside out.  And when we do that, we may notice things we’d never noticed before.  It makes us think in ways we’re not used to thinking.  That can lead to all sorts of things.  That’s how discoveries are made.  That’s how the world is changed. 

And that’s the prestige.

Haven’t you heard those terms before?  What we fantasy authors are doing is a kind of magic, so let me explain.  Actually, let me let someone else do it and save myself the work:

The Pledge: wherein a magician shows you something ordinary, but it probably isn’t. The Turn: where the magician makes the ordinary object do something extraordinary. The Prestige: where you see something shocking you’ve never seen before.

That’s really what fantasy is, in the end.  That’s what it comes down to.  The ordinary, extraordinary.  Something shocking you’ve never seen or thought before.  All in the form of entertainment, because even those of us realists most passionate about reality like a bit of entertainment now and then.

The real world is phenomenal.  It is brilliant and beautiful and endlessly fascinating (as well as awful and terrifying and ugly, let’s not sugarcoat), but sometimes we have to get out of it a while so we can approach it afresh.  Fantasy takes us far, far away.  We go on a journey, and we see incredible things, and then we come back with our imaginations refreshed.  We can see the world with new eyes and new minds.  Fantasy can help us gain perspective, one we never would have had without.  That’s its power and its glory.

So that’s the speech I’d give.  The bugger then might turn around and ask me why I’m not writing pure science fiction, then, but that’s an imaginary question and reply we’ll leave for another day.

Dojo Summer Sessions: An Imaginary Reply to Tim Minchin
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Dojo Summer Sessions: Neil Gaiman's Sage Advice

Dana Hunter

A brief intro for those who have been a) living under a rock, b) out pounding on rocks (hey, most of my friends are geologists, so it’s distinctly possible) or c) brand new to the cantina: Neil Gaiman is the writer I place at the head of my personal pantheon of writers.  He gives outstanding writerly advice, which writers of fantasy and literary fiction and even non-fiction science stuff shall find very useful indeed.  And he was at Town Hall Seattle on Sunday night, wherein much wisdom was shared and laughter flowed freely.

I hereby pass along his wisdom, and maybe a few of the laughs.


Writers get this impossible question, “Where do you get your ideas?”  And maybe you’re a writer already and now have that “oshit how do I answer that/I hate that question!” face, the one where everything twists up like you’ve just stuck a whole and very sour lemon in your mouth.  Or, perhaps, you want to be a writer, and you’re thinking, “ZOMG please tell me where do they come from?!”  In that case, you’ve got that please-please-ooo-pick-meeee! puppy-in-the-window face on.  Either way, Neil Gaiman can answer that question.

Here’s where the idea for American Gods came from: “And it was a scene, I didn’t know what it meant, which is often the best place to start any story, is with something that you don’t actually understand.”  He saw a fragment merely: a man on an airplane, who’d gotten there via a crazy sequence of seemingly random events, sitting down at last next to a man he couldn’t possibly know, who then turns to him and says, “You’re late.”  Neil didn’t know who they were.  But he found out, and a lot of other things, random and scattered things, bits and pieces from previous works and various experiences with the weirdness that is America and sleeplessness in Reykjavik and so much else besides, came together and became something magical.

Remember that, when you’re beginning a story or novel or any other project: you do not in any way have to understand what it is just yet.  There’s just this something making your mind itch.  You write to find out why it’s making your mind itch.  Because if your mind is itching, it’s quite possible the readers’ minds will itch, too, and they’ll need to scratch just as much as you did.

Or perhaps your story will come from somewhere else.  Neverwhere and Stardust, for Neil, were both books about homesickness.  He’d just come to America from England, and these books were ways back for him.  He loved re-imagining them, he said.  And that is an exile’s tale.  Perhaps there’s something in you trying to get back to, a place you knew well and deeply miss.  Perhaps you’ll faithfully reproduce it, or, perhaps, like Neil, you’ll imagine the way it never was, but could have been.  Fertile ground, that.

Neverwhere also emerged from a board game of the London Underground he’d known as a child.  He’d look at the stations and try to figure out what they were like from the names: were there knights in Knightsbridge?  These are other places ideas come from: childhood imaginings revisited and remembered, familiar things seen through new eyes, taking things literally that aren’t meant to be literal and figuratively when they’re meant to be actual. 

“The point of fiction for me,” Neil said, “is that it allows you – not necessarily intentionally, you shouldn’t start out going ‘I’ll take a metaphor and make it real’ – but it allows you to do that.  And it allows you to do that with power and passion and talk true things.

“Imaginary things are often the most powerful.”

You know that.  You’ve felt that.  It’s why you love fiction.  You’ve felt those characters live, you’ve immersed yourselves in their lives and their worlds, and hasn’t it at times seemed like those people and places are far more real than the ones you know?  Even if you’re writing non-fiction, if you’re a scientist doing science and you plan to write about it someday, it’s imagination that drives you.  Imagining what things may have been like back in deep time, imagining how atoms behave, imaginings that arise out of data points and mathematics and, in one famous case, the image of a snake biting its tail.  Imagination drive stories, and discoveries, and stories about discoveries.  That power is yours. 

Whether fact or fantasy, you’re telling a story.  And as for storytelling, “[I]t’s always about magic,” Neil said.  “It’s always about the way you take reality and you turn it forty-five degrees so that you could show people things that they’re very, very familiar with, and show them these things in a way that they’re not familiar with; you show them things that they’ve seen a thousand times and show them to them for the  thousand and first time, if you can.”

Do you see why I want all of you, fiction and non-fiction writers alike, to pay heed?  Because that’s the essence of telling a story.  Take the familiar and show it to your readers again for the very first time.

As for research, there’s always this ongoing debate as to how much or how little an author should do.  For a non-fiction work, of course, research is essential.  What about fiction?  What research did Neil do for American Gods, for instance?  He had his research assistant find out populations of various towns (this was before the intertoobz could provide those answers in an instant).  He drove around and looked at stuff.  Remembered stuff.  He must remember a hell of a lot, because the only gods he did much research on for this particular book were the Slavic ones.  He couldn’t find much: only about three pages’ worth of useful material.  So he resorted to making stuff up.  For instance, he added Zorya Polunochnaya to the other two Zorya known in Slavic mythology, just made her right up.  He says he felt faintly guilty about that, but thought, “Who’s gonna know?”

And that is why this Wikipedia page has three Zorya rather than two.

I can see three lessons here.  First, when you’re writing fiction, and your research has gaps in, you can indeed make stuff up.  That’s rather the point of it being fiction, am I right?  Don’t be afraid to add the odd goddess or non-existent city or what have you, if the story calls for it and everything hangs together as a whole.  Second, if you’re doing research for, oh, say, a book on mythology, don’t use a fiction novel as an authoritative source.  And lesson the third: check the copyright date on the sources Wikipedia cites, to see if maybe the only mythology book to mention a third Zorya came out after American Gods did.

Toward the end, Maria Dahvana Headley asked Neil for his advice to young people who want to write fantasy.  Let’s rephrase that a bit, because it applies to all writers who are at the beginning of their careers: what is his advice to people who want to write fantasy?

He started with general advice for all aspiring authors: write, and finish what you write.  He said people stare at him like he’s withholding some big secret, but that really is the secret to a successful writing career.  You must write, and finish what you write, or you won’t get anywhere at all.

“But if the question is, ‘What would I tell a young fantasy author,’ I’d tell you a bunch of things,” Neil said.  “I’d tell you, ‘Stop reading fantasy,’ or at least, not to derive inspiration from fantasy….  Fantasy’s wonderful and you should know what else is going on in your genre, but you should read everything else.  That’s Number One: read everything else.

“Number Two is read primary sources….  Go for primary sources wherever you can.  Go for as primary as you can possibly get.  And read everyth
ing, read outside your comfort l
evel….

“And then, write.  Tell the stories.  Don’t do that thing of going, ‘I really like Lord of the Rings, I will write Lord of the Rings.’  Somebody else has already written Lord of the Rings, and has done it better than you ever could.  So, when you’re writing, try and tell the stories that only you can tell.  That’s the one thing that you have as a writer: any young writer has this special thing, which is you’re not anybody else.  Nobody else has had your life, nobody else sees the world from the place that you see things.  And, as a writer, the only thing that you have – there will always be better writers than you, there may be better plotters than you, there may be people who put a sentence better together than you – but there’s nobody else who can tell your stories better than you.  So the quicker you move from writing other people’s stories – and every young writer starting out starts out writing other people’s stories – and the quicker you write your own stories, the better.

“And that is the piece of advice I would give to any young writer of fantasy.”

All of those things are important.  All of those things are true.  And they’re useful for any genre: just adjust the terms a bit.  So, if you want to be a writer, if you want to tell stories, the very best stories you can, listen.  I’ll even embed the video I shot of that bit so you can listen.

Okay.  So you’ve written the book.  You’ve re-written, and re-re-written, and written the book again.  Let’s say you’ve done all that, and actually got it published.  Now what?  Promotion, of course!  And this is where Maria Dahvana Headley really brought the house down, because she announced the idea of the Author Sex Tape.  Alas, the audience was laughing so loud and so long through her subsequent explanation that the audio’s mostly unintelligible, and I was laughing so hard I can’t remember half of what she said.  But it’s a genius idea.  Drum up interest by leaking a sex tape.  There’s something very important said sex tapes must have: a catch phrase.  George R.R. Martin, she said, has a catch phrase: “Winter is coming.”  She waited for us to finish laughing our lungs out, and then asked Neil, with an amazingly straight face under the circumstances, what his catch phrase was.

“You’re asking somebody who’s written something out there on the table next to you that the end of Chapter One [next bit unclear due to audience hysterics] a gentleman disappears inside a prostitute,” Neil said.

And Maria, without missing a beat, shot back, “You could shout ‘American God’!”

If laughter is the best medicine, the audience is likely immortal.

Neil is a writer who can (and has) written very nearly everything: fiction and non, screenplays, comics, children’s books, articles – he’s a writer well worth listening to.  Never mind that he’s a bit skeptical about the whole “Author Sex Tape” idea.  We writers who want to achieve great things with our writing learn from those who came before, those who have already mastered the art, and Neil Gaiman is one of those authors who will never let you down.  So listen.  Then write.

And absolutely do not ever miss the opportunity to see him live if you can.

Dojo Summer Sessions: Neil Gaiman's Sage Advice

Neil Gaiman in Seattle FTW

Dana Hunter6 Comments

ZOMG, my darlings, Neil was here.  I last saw him ten years ago, and I’ll tell you something – aside from the beard, he hasn’t changed.  He’s still the warm, wonderful, blisteringly funny and deeply profound writer he was then.  He still has humility without humiliation.  And my god, does he know how to work a crowd.



Even his “please turn off your cell phones” speech was hysterical.

The event was recorded, and I’ll post that for interested parties when it becomes available.  I’ll also have a deeper post delving into some of the things he said come tomorrow.  Tonight’s just for the fangirl swooning.



Yeah, that’s me holding a signed copy of Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?  He signed 3,000 bloody books.  The man is a machine.  Alas, his fame has reached the level at which personal signings would take eight or nine hours, so they didn’t do one tonight.  But it doesn’t matter.  It’s a Batman comic, written and signed by Neil Gaiman, and that is teh awesome.

Speaking of teh awesome, I met an ETEV reader in line there at the venue, and she is genius.  She’s just been to Alaska and has kindly agreed to share photos and geological delights from that trip, just as soon as she can.  Something for all you all to look forward to.  I got to see some preview pics, and I think I drooled on her just a little bit.

There were so many people there that they had to start late.  This turned out fine, because Neil had drafted Molly Lewis to play the ukulele for us. 

People.  She’s amazing.  She did a song on the Lincoln assassination that shouldn’t have managed to be tragic and funny at the same time, but is.  And then she performed “An Open Letter to Stephen Fry.”  I won’t try to describe it.  Just listen:

(Sorry, I probably should’ve told you to finish any drinks beforehand, huh?)

I can’t think of a better opening act for Neil Gaiman.  Set us in the proper frame of mind.

And then Maria Dahvana Headley introduced Neil.  She’s utterly divine.  Funny and sharp and brilliant. 



She got her digs in, oh, yes.  Just look at his face.  You know how some people are capable of teasing the people they admire, and the entire audience worships, in such a way that everyone shares a good belly laugh, including the supposed victim?  She’s that kind of person.  Fabulous interviewer, and if she writes anything like how she talks, then I must have her books.  I wish I’d known when I was at the merch table, because I could have walked out with a signed copy of Queen of Kings.  Le sigh.  Ah, well, she’s from here, so I’m sure I shall have another opportunity.

And Neil.  Oh, Neil.  He read from American Gods, a profound bit and a funny bit.  He answered the most difficult question, “Where do your ideas come from?”, with aplomb.  We got to see a bit more of how his brain works, and believe me, when you’re aspiring to become someone of his caliber, that insight is extremely helpful.  I’ll have some of those insights for you tomorrow.  I figured that’s as good a Dojo subject as any, am I right?

(Now we’re on to some personal introspection, and if you wish to stop right here and go do something else, I’ll understand completely.)

This was an interesting experience not simply because Neil is an interesting person and one of the best writers living, but because things have changed.  Ten years ago, I was a fangirl clutching the first edition of American Gods in my sweaty hands and trying desperately to come up with something decently intelligent to say to a man who might as well be my writing god.  I looked on in awe as he and Will Eisner spoke, and as Neil took the panel discussion by storm, and stumbled out of the whole experience with a pole-axed sensation.  I didn’t have anything but aspirations and a few stumbling stories at that point.

So much has changed.  I’m not the world-famous SF author I want to be, not yet.  I’m not writing for a living.  Still a phone jockey at a call center.  But I’ve got a reasonably successful blog (not to mention utterly phenomenal readers and fellow bloggers).  I’ve gotten over wanting to be someone else and just want to be Dana Hunter when I grow up.  My fiction, while not ready for publication, has matured.  It’s now its own thing, not trying to be Neil Gaiman or Tolkien.  Instead of hanging on his every word of writing advice, I could nod at some of it.  “Yup, done that, working on that, definitely doing that.”  There’s a certain confidence level I didn’t expect that comes from all that.  I know, now, that I can do this.  It’s a certainty (which certainty I sometimes don’t feel when I’m struggling with the words or worldbuilding, but every author suffers that).  I’m sitting down, putting the words one after the other, and they’re my words, my worlds (and never mind I’m writing fan fiction right at the moment – it’s fan fiction on my terms, in my world, and the character I’ve filched just a method for getting to know that world in greater depth).  I know the stories I want to tell, and I know I have the ability to tell them.  I had none of that the last time I saw Neil. 

And I didn’t have you.

You’ve made a huge difference, my darlings.  When that stupid niggling voice of doubt starts whining away in the back of my mind, I’ve got your comments to combat it.  I’ve got brilliant people, quite often fantastic writers in their own right, who find my words worthwhile.  I can’t ever explain to you how valuable that is.  That’s validation, and it’s a goad.  It’s a long damned road, from wish to concept to novel to publication, but we’re some distance along, and you’re there.  When I want to give up, you’re giving me ye olde pep talk.  When I stumble, you’re there with a steadying hand on the elbow.  When I’m tired and want to stop, you keep me going.  So what I am and what I become, in large measure, is down to you.

Thank you.

And thank Neil for being a very admirable North Star, and reminding me tonight that writing great novels and making people happy is not only something that can be done, but something very much worth doing.

“We owe it to each other to tell stories,” Neil says in his poem “Locks.”  True stories and fanciful stories and yarns and myths, there are so many stories worth telling, and so many wonderful people to tell them to, who will tell their own in turn.

It’s a magnificent old life, this.  Especially when a ukulele player opens for an author, and marketing involving author sex tapes is considered.

And, because I am a writer and a bit cruel because of it, I shall leave that last bit dangling tantalizingly before your eyes without explanation, until tomorrow, when all shall become clear.

Turn the page…

Neil Gaiman in Seattle FTW

Dojo Summer Sessions: Giving Yourself Permission to Suck

Dana Hunter1 Comment

I’ve probably gone on about this subject before, but it bears repeating: with a few incredibly rare exceptions, a written work does not emerge whole and complete and beautiful on the first go.  We writers are not Zeus, and our stories are not Athena, sprung fully-formed from our foreheads.

This can be hard to remember when staring at a blank page with your Inner Editor screaming “You must be instantly perfect!” in the background.

Allow me to allow you to eavesdrop on just such a conversation I had the other night with my own Inner Editor, whose sadism is second only to that of my Muse:

Me: [staring at blank page] I wonder how this scene should start.
Inner Editor: [shouting] You’ve already started with landings too many times!  The story must move!  There should be action!  If you screw this up, no reader will read anything by you ever again in the whole of eternity!
Me: Dude, that’s not helping.
Inner Editor: [still shouting] Where is this scene going?  What is its purpose?  What is its dramatic tension?
Me: [looking up pictures of Mediterranean trees and pretty vugs in limestone on the intertoobz] HellifIknow.  I just started the damned scene, you jackass.  Actually, I haven’t started the damned scene, because you won’t STFU.
Inner Editor: [screaming] There must be a hook!  There must be a reason!  Why are you wasting your time on trees and vugs which will only have to be cut out later?!
Me: [looking up sphalerite on Wikipedia] Because I need a good feel for this place, and because I’m hoping you’ll get bored and go away.
(Eventually, the scene starts.  There is a lingering in a grove, and a lizard, and a nice vug in limestone, with trees looming overhead.)
Inner Editor: [flecks of spittle flying] No one will want to read this! It’s boring! It has no tension, no action, it does nothing to further the story!
Me: [looking up calcite on Wikipedia and then chasing after scalenohedra]  Yes, well, I’m writing my way in, aren’t I?
Inner Editor: [tearing out handfuls of hair] No one will even know what scalenohedra means!
Me: So?  I do.  Now.  And isn’t this the bit you’re insisting we’ll have to cut later anyway?
Inner Editor: [apoplexy imminent] That is no excuse for writing badly!
Me: Dude, it’s fan fiction.  The whole point of writing fan fiction was to get you off my back while I have a good romp through my world and poke in a bunch of crannies.  It’s never going to be revised, much less published, much less even shown to anyone except Garrett and he’ll think the techonobabble fits the character anyway.  So go the fuck away so I can get everybody out of this copse of trees and on to the action.
Inner Editor: [veins in neck exploding] But – but- but –
Me: Fan.  Fiction.
Inner Editor: ….

Only mostly dead, alas, but at least we got some brief peace.  And I went on to enjoy the company of a sexually-confused lizard, wander through a lovely little valley and vineyard, and find out about one of the most badass women in Xtalean history.  I can’t wait to introduce my readers to her.

Is what I wrote that night perfect?  No.  Not even close.  But the point is, it doesn’t have to be.  It’s words on a page that I didn’t have before, a person and a place I didn’t know until now.  Time and rewrites (although not of this particular work) will take care of teh suck.  That goes for academic writing as well.

So, when faced with that blank page, give yourself permission to suck.  Not only that, give yourself permission to suck so badly that you’ll be contacting a computer consultant to wipe all traces of the first draft off your computer.  Invest in duct tape for your Inner Editor, and, should that not work, engage in a little justifiable homicide.  And then just get on with it.  Get sidetracked, go off on tangents, let the story lead you around like a very confused, easily distracted, yet very enthusiastic small child.  Because, and this is the important thing, there will always be a gem among the dross, and there will always be some way of fixing it, if not on the second go, then on Rewrite #42.  Even if you throw very nearly every word away, you’ve at least had the pleasurable experience of telling your dread Inner Editor to go suck it.

Go forth and write.

Dojo Summer Sessions: Giving Yourself Permission to Suck

Dojo Summer Sessions: Morality and Writing

Dana Hunter1 Comment

Fair warning: there are no “answers” in this session, just some pondering and a lot of questions.  Of course, every Dojo session is mostly that: nothing should ever be taken for Writing Law.  As Captain Barbossa so famously said, what’s said here is “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

With that caveat emptor in place, let us proceed.

I find myself struggling quite often with morality in my writing and the morality of my writing.  If I’m very, very lucky, what I write will have some impact on a reader or two.  And the last thing I want is for them to come away from the story believing war is glorious or that killing is always justified or that it’s perfectly all right to be a sociopathic son of a bastard as long as you’re on the side of the angels.

But.  I have to tell a good story, and a difficult story, and if I reduce everything down to bright lines and paint it all in stark black and white and never, ever made the reader confront shades of gray, I won’t be doing a very good job.  So there’s a cutting edge to walk, every time I put fingers to keys.  It’s hard.  It should be hard.  We’d like to reduce things down to simple matters of right and wrong, but it’s almost never that simple.

And it’s not simple for my characters, either, even when they pretend it is.

Right now, I’m confronting the morality of killing two billion people.  Think about that number for a minute.  2,000,000,000.  If each of those people had one page in a biography, and each biography was five hundred pages, that would be four million books.  If it took you one minute to read each page, and you read continuously, it would take you nearly four thousand years to read all of those biographies. 

We have to reduce them to numbers, not faces, to think about them, but something important should be remembered.  Each of those people meant something to someone.  Each of those people had a story.  Those are not trivial lives.  They’re not just numbers, to be shuffled about and added and subtracted without care or concern. 

Put a face to a few of them.  Plug in friends and family and coworkers and people you don’t know personally but quite like and have had some impact on your life.  Turn the number 2,000,000,000 into a representative sample of names, faces, personalities, and life’s works.  Make sure you include some children in there, because that number doesn’t reflect just adults, people who can be said to have lived their lives.  There are infants and toddlers and tweens and teenagers.  There are young folk who never had a chance to get started with discovering who they are and who they’d be when they grew up, and there are young folk who were just embarking on that journey, and never got a chance to get underway.  Think of people in your life who fit that bill, and slot them in.  It’s hard, but do it, because they’re standing in for two billion people, so they’ve got to stand out, clear and whole in your mind.

(Even now, I’m shying away from it.  Let me just force myself to make a little list: my mom, who took me on adventures and takes care of my senile old grandad, who made me the beautiful wooden box I still have on my shelf.  My dad, who turned me into a survivor when I might have been a victim.  My stepmom, who became mother to my adult self when my own mother was too bipolar for the task.  Nicole, who is not only one of my best writer friends but has two beautiful young children, a toddler boy and a baby girl.  Suzanne, who rescued us when we were stranded, posts gorgeous sunsets and wonderful words and has a brand new granddaughter.  Kaden, my coblogger, who’s just barely out of high school, working in a job where he takes calls from frantic people and gets help to them, and is working on a book that’s been evolving since he was fifteen.  My intrepid companion, who accompanies me on all sorts of zany adventures and introduced me to the Doctor and has been there to rescue the hard drive that included my life’s work.  George, who always knows just the right thing to say and sent me his rock hammer.  And now all of the people I know, all of the people I love, old friends and lost loves and my geotweeps and crazy coworkers and the Seattle Skeptics and my dad’s brothers and my aunt and cousins and so many people, so many I can’t keep up, come crowding into my mind.  That doesn’t even address people I admire but don’t regularly converse with: Dawkins and Myers and Greta Christina and Jen McCreight and Eric MacDonald and every blogger and writer and activist and producer and actor/actress and this enormous expanding cloud of people who have touched my life.  All right.  So I have them clear in my mind.  There are a lot of people in this world I cherish.  More than I could name and do any justice to even if I gave over the rest of my life to telling their stories and why they matter.)

I have them in my mind, now.  Do you have yours?  Good.

Now ask yourself: what could possibly justify killing two billion such people?

How could anyone forgive you for doing it?

How could you forgive yourself?

These are not easy questions, and there are no easy answers.  There shouldn’t be.  My characters have to face hard choices, and I won’t let them retreat into easy justifications: “Well, if I hadn’t done that, everybody would’ve died!”  That may well be true.  Still can’t be taken for granted.  Still doesn’t make it easier to bear.  It just makes it possible.

And you know something?  These are things I didn’t struggle with before I became an atheist.  Because now I can’t just say “Someone like unto a god did this, and therefore it was moral.  QED.”  Being an atheist has forced me to face the fact that these individuals with individual biographies are dead, and there’s no great and glorious afterlife waiting for them.  Their lives ended.  There isn’t another one.  And that makes you dramatically more careful with life.  That makes you consider really carefully before pointing to anything that could end that one life they’ve got and calling it the right thing to do.

Ultimately, there may be no answers.  Just the question, and imperfect solutions, and doing the best you can.

Dojo Summer Sessions: Morality and Writing

Geologic Paen and Plea

Dana Hunter3 Comments

I’m discovering I can’t write about a place without knowing its geology.

It wasn’t always this way.  I’d just make up landscapes willy-nilly, choosing stuff that fit with vague imaginings of a location and we were off.  I mean, it’s a fantasy landscape and I can do what I like with it, right?  Only then, I got sick of so many fantasy worlds that were not much more than a blob of land with an ocean stuck on.  I mean, no offense to Robert Jordan and dear Professor Tolkien (maytheyrestinpeace), but seriously, is this it?
Robert Jordan’s world
Middle-Earth

Open up most fantasy books, and if there’s a map at all, this is typically what you get: a blotch of land with some mountains and rivers stuck in.  Or, if you rotate it a bit, you might see the trace of a familiar coastline, as somebody’s turned the map of Europe upside-down and copied it. 

And, at first, that was my methodology: draw an irregular splotch of land, color all the open bits blue, and call it good.  No rhyme or reason.  No history.  No geology.

Mr. Bennett changed all that, with his physical geography and his plate tectonics and all that.  It became clear to me that landscapes shouldn’t just do what I wanted them to: there were things to take into account, like rainshadows and latitude and so forth.  So I broke up ye olde big blotch of land and spent an instructive few evenings sailing the bits around a blank oval, seeing what crashed into which and what bits pulled away and ending up with something that resembled a world where the continents behaved like continents dragged around by plates.  Where they collided, in (up?) went mountains.  I even did up a map of the ocean currents.  And while it was just a crude approximation, at least I’d tried.

But that was just the large-scale stuff, the shape of things.  I hadn’t got down to the rocks.  And for Athesea, for the most part, I still haven’t, not yet.  But when I started working on Xtalea in earnest, because I wanted that world to live in all its particulars, I started really thinking geology.  Which is why I started studying geology.  And, incidentally, how I met most of you lot.  Without Xtalea, there would have been no geological explorations and long missives thereupon and hence no adoption by the geoblogosphere.  But I digress.

I’m finding out I can’t really write about a region of Xtalea without knowing the rocks.  I can’t just start a scene in a new place.  No matter how interesting the people involved are, no matter how fascinating the events, unless I have its geology at least outlined in my mind, I can’t get a good start.  I have to know, because the character of a place is so intimately tied to its geology.  I know that now, feel it in my bones.  If I don’t know at least one hundred million years of its history, I might as well be writing about a featureless void.

Right now, I’m about to send my characters over to Nyaanovos, the town in the Southlands where Jiiren Naaltoba was born.  I’ve got an image in my mind: a very narrow inlet, steep cliffs, the waves booming as they pound themselves into this deep gash in the coastline.  Just down the way, there’s a lovely bay.  It’s on one of the mainlands.  And it is very, very old, a place where the ancient bones of the earth emerge.  I get a metamorphic sense, with perhaps some uncomformities and some youngish horizontal sedimentary layers capping the lot in places.  It seems to me a place like mainland Greece, and as I was casting about the intertoobz in search of a suitable bit to serve as a model, I came across Cape Sounion by way of a sea cave.  That at least put me in a general region, and I now have about a gajillion PDFs open on various aspects of Greek geology around Attica. 

Already, just from a few skimmings as I try to fill my abyssal ignorance with some good, solid facts, I begin to get a feel for this place.  There’s a bay – obviously, we shall have a bit of a seafood industry, and fishers sailing past cliffs of very old stone.  It’s the Southlands, and I know a bit of Naaltoba’s family history, so I know there are military people about, but this wasn’t a military town.  So what else did people do?  Think of the geology, and that gives me careers: there will be quarries about, with a healthy trade in cut stone.  Silver mines?  Possibly.  Perhaps even probably.  All of this carefully done, because while resources are important things to have, so is a livable world, and I know Xtaleans take exquisite care of the place, so even in the mining districts we aren’t facing great gaping wounds and polluted streams.  The soils here probably aren’t thick, but a bit of farming goes on, and there are hardy trees clinging to the cliffs.  Is there any forestry?  Not so likely.  But there’s a thriving trade in various plants, and perhaps a vineyard or two back in the hills. 

Think of the geology.  This is a fractious region, a crazy-quilt of jumbled tectonic plates, and coastlines raised or dropped by earthquakes.  The citizens here face a good hard shaking on a semi-regular basis and have planned accordingly.  They face the chaos with equanimity.  And they know the value of building things in such a way that they don’t fall down so easily. 

I think at one point folks on the cape could get a good view of a volcano erupting, way off in the distance.  No volcanoes just here, though, I don’t think.  I don’t get a volcano feel from here, just a seismic feel.  And an old-land feel.  This is where the world stretches its old bones in the sun, groans and sighs and settles back for a good long lounge.  This is the feel I get from this place, and so I’ll be searching for geology that reflects that, and for the mechanisms that led to it.  The world, you see, must make sense.  The world itself is a character, and just like with carbon-based characters, history matters.  Knowing what a person has been tells you a lot about what they are now and might be in the future.  Same goes for a world.  And if there’s something out of character, it must be known and understood and remarked.

This, I probably don’t have to tell you, is a lot harder than bunging a blob on a map and calling it a day.  But I think it makes for a better, richer tale.  It connects people to their world in ways that wouldn’t be possible
otherwise.  And it shows me aspects of the world that would have gone unrevealed if I hadn’t taken the time to seek them out.  Just consider what happened in the Siaan: I got to thinking about karst landscapes, which led to cave complexes, which led to a major plot development which I shall tell you all about in due time.  That plot development never could have arisen had I not known that we were in a karst landscape where networks of caves could be found.  Who knows what may come of knowing the geology of Nyaanovos, and the province it’s in?  If nothing else, it will allow me to evoke it, whole and complete and shining against a wine-dark sea.  It will provide a better backdrop than a mere generic rocky cliff near a bay.

So here’s what happens next, before any words can be exchanged between characters: I’ll read up on the geology of Attica.  I’ll search the intertoobz for pictures of the Aegean coast, until I have a file full of visual references.  I’ll study up on the local rock types, until I understand them better.  And then I’ll use mere fragments of all that work, because the scene I’m writing now isn’t about the geology of that region.  It’s about a grand old man at the end of his life, listening to the waves thunder and boom in a very narrow inlet, and three people who very much want to meet him.  It’s about the philosophy of war, and how there can be no philosophy in war, and perhaps a little about transformational sacrifices.  It’s about getting an autograph and revealing a secret.  And it’s about going home, long after the people who raised you and the people you grew up with and the town you spent the first decades of your life in are dead or gone or changed nearly beyond recognition, except for some of these old bones of the earth, which haven’t yet succumbed to wave and wind and quake.  It’s about place and purpose and finding peace, settling accounts with the past where you can and letting them go where you can’t.

Would most of this have been possible without the geology?  Yes, but it wouldn’t have felt as grounded.  The world wouldn’t have felt so real.  There’s something very real about a rock, especially one that makes sense in its context.  The geology of a place informs its character.  Nyaanovos wouldn’t be the same place without its geologic history.  Neither would the people who emerged from it, and came to it.

I said in the title to this post that there was not merely a paen, but a plea.  And the plea is this: if you know of any resources on Mediterranean geology, I could use them.  Blogs, websites, geologic maps – whatever you know of.  If you can, and if you have the time, drop me a comment.  Help me build a better world.

Geologic Paen and Plea

What Can I Possibly Say?

Dana Hunter1 Comment

In a few weeks, I’ll be seeing Neil Gaiman for the first time in ten years.

For those of you who don’t know, Neil Gaiman is one of the greatest fantasy authors ever, alive or dead.  He wrote Neverwhere, and American Gods, among many other novels.  He’s done film, and television, and just recently wrote one of the best Doctor Who episodes I’ve ever seen.  He wrote the only comic that ever won a World Fantasy Award.  In fact, it was Sandman that introduced me to Neil, and made me realize that comics could tell dark, powerful stories that could change a life, because Sandman completely changed mine.

He’s my North Star.  I think most writers have one author who claims the greatest influence over them.  Neil Gaiman is mine.  I’ve gotten over trying to become him.  It’s been long enough now that I’m comfortable becoming Dana Hunter.  But this ship still steers by him: he’s the one who taught me the power of myth, and that an atheist can still draw on these old stories to make something enormous without killing ye olde atheist cred.  He taught me the value of humility without humiliation, and that power should be wielded very wisely the more powerful you become, and that treating your readers with kindness and respect is far preferable to bitching about how They Just Don’t Get You, or taking them for granted. 

In November 2001, I got on an airplane and went to Chicago despite everyone else’s fear of flying, because he was at the Chicago Humanities Festival with Will Eisner and nothing on earth could have prevented me from going.  There, he said the most valuable thing a writer has ever said:

“Being contentious is what you should be doing.  You should be shaking people up.”

Every time I try to go for the soft option and avoid writing something because it might upset someone somewhere, I hear those words.  Then the only question is, “How do I want them shaken by this?”  Fiction shouldn’t be tame or safe or easy.  That’s not the fiction I want to read.  That’s not the fiction I want to write.  And Neil Gaiman kept me from believing I had to write it.

So I might possibly get a chance to say hello to this North Star of a man.  What does one say?  I already told him one of the most important things: “Thank you.  You’ve never disappointed me.”

What now?

I think there’s only one thing I could say:

“Neil, stop trying to give Steven Moffat all the credit for all the awesome in ‘The Doctor’s Wife.’  And thanks for shaking me up.”

What Can I Possibly Say?

Dojo Summer Sessions: It Was Never About…

Dana Hunter4 Comments

I spend a lot of time worrying about making things as realistic and accurate as possible.  Tear my hair out about the science I don’t know and the science that directly contradicts the direction the story wants to go.

So it’s a bit of a relief to read something like this:

It was never about how accurate the science was in science fiction.
It’s about the wonder and excitement of the unknown. It’s about the attitude of characters like Spock and Data, how they attacked problems head on and came up with creative solutions. It’s even about building a interdimensional portal in your basement. That’s what inspired me to want to become a scientist. And maybe this means we’ll never have warp drive or transporters like they have on the Enterprise. But we’ll create something better.

And no, that’s not a writer apologizing for being a complete ignoramus who just can’t be bothered to get the science right.  It’s written by a scientist in a post entitled “How Science Fiction Made Me Want to Be a Scientist.”

So how did a lot of dreadfully inaccurate science lead a kid to grow up to be a really real scientist?

Because science fiction isn’t just about science.  It’s about possibilities, no matter how far-fetched.  It’s about characters using the science of their story worlds (even the science the writers just made up on the spot) to discover, to overcome, to do really awesome shit.  Science fiction doesn’t need 100% accurate science to work.  It needs internal consistency, and an enormous sense of wonder, and strange new worlds (or strange this world, for that matter).  It’s about asking “what if?” and spinning out the implications.  It’s not afraid to hit the really hard issues head-on.  Creatively, even.  It’s about doing impossible things.

And it’s about people.  At core, they’re what matter.  You can have the most deplorable sciency-sounding sillyness going on, and it won’t matter as long as the people in the story are interesting and facing attention-grabbing situations.

Science is gorgeous, and I want to get as much as possible right.  A lot of science is far more fascinating than anything my imagination can dream up.  But I can’t know everything.  I can’t be an expert in every discipline.  There will be times when I’ll have to fudge it or fake it.  There will be times when I’ll have to say, “Look, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in our universe, but it happens in theirs, m’kay?”  Times when I’ll have to say, “It’s only a story, and you should really just relax.”  Times when I’ll have to quote that essential line above: “It was never about how accurate the science was in science fiction.”

All I have to do is write a ripping good tale with enough science to make it all work.  Just enough science to spark imagination, and get people exploring on their own, and make them wonder, and make them want to know, and inspire them, and fire them up and fire them off to a life they otherwise wouldn’t have had.  Not all of my readers will become scientists, but I hope most of them will put the books down with a greater appreciation for it.  I hope they come away seeing the world through new eyes.  I hope at least a few, possibly many, wonder “What if…?” and go on to make advances in science that wouldn’t have otherwise have happened, all because they wanted to find out what would happen if they tried to make my made-up science work in the real world.  I hope I inspire some folks to careers in science that have nothing to do with anything in my books, except for the fact they fell in love with science there.

No, it doesn’t have to be accurate, not completely.  It just has to tell a ripping good tale.

And a good thing, too, because otherwise it would be impossible to write this stuff in the course of one human lifetime…

Dojo Summer Sessions: It Was Never About…

Dojo Summer Sessions: Mah Sooper Sekrit Projeckt

Dana Hunter3 Comments

So, for almost three months now, I’ve been writing like mad.  I’ve often compared writing to volcanoes: there are times when the magma chamber’s empty, then over a period of time it fills, you get your basic harmonic tremors, and then an eruption that lasts days, weeks or months, depending.  That’s how it’s been for these past many weeks: one sustained eruption that’s disrupted the airspace over this blog and rained ash all over my relationships.  Even the cat’s been deprived of premium cuddle time.  I am Busy Writing Fiction, by the gods, and there is nothing that can pull me away from it for long.

I’m up to 169 pages over the past 12 weeks, and that’s not counting over 100 pages of writing journal and various handwritten scribbles.

With all that, by now, my Wise Readers are saying, “Well, then, Dana: where are the damned excerpts?“

There’s a good reason I haven’t posted a single word of all this mad, frantic fiction on ye olde writing blogge for your reading pleasure (or displeasure, depending).  That’s because it’sfanfiction.
Artist’s Impression of Reader Response

Deep breath.

Screw courage to sticking place.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S FAN FICTION, ALL RIGHT?
Artist’s Impression of Reader Response

Now, don’t be that way.  There’s nothing wrong with fan fiction, and I’ll tell you why.

For one thing, lots of us get our start writing fan fiction.  Think of it this way: it’s like learning how to play the guitar.  Most folks aren’t virtuosos from the start.  They learn by imitation, drive people mad by playing “Stairway to Heaven” ninety-seven times a day really badly, and eventually, after stealing borrowing bits from the professionals for many years, become skilled and confident enough to strike out on their own.  You can learn a lot about telling stories and handling characterization and all those important but difficult aspects of writing by getting your feet wet in other writers’ worlds.

But after you’ve gotten your feet wet, once you’ve learned how to swim (or, switching metaphors, play something that is not “Stairway to Heaven”), you should never, ever write fan fiction ever again, right?

I mean, you’re just wasting time that could’ve been spent on your own magnum opus.

You’re grown up.  You’re past that, now.

It’s silly.  Immature.  Useless.

And those are things you can tell yourself in order to stay on track with your own work rather than reverting to young writerhood, but let me ‘splain why, after having given myself the “Stay focused, you’re too grown up for fan fiction, you shouldn’t waste time, etc. etc. Peter Cetera etc.” lecture, I’ve plunged into writing fan fiction anyway.

It’s because I needed New Eyes.  Not Wise Reader eyes.  Not New Character Eyes.  They weren’t helping.  I’d got bogged down in the minutiae of my created universe and couldn’t see the forest for the trees.  Hell, I couldn’t even make out some of the trees for the trees.  I knew there were places where I was stuck, where my imagination wasn’t grasping the essentials, but I couldn’t for the life of me see what they were or how the hell I could extract myself.  Also, I am teh suck at action scenes, and I’d grown tired of page after page of nothing much going on.  Okay, so lots was going on, psychological drama and all that, but still.  Everything felt stagnant.  And you know what happens when things stagnate.  Ain’t pretty.

Around the time I was about to write this winter writing season off as a bad job and bugger off to do something else, my intrepid companion hauled Doctor Who up for our Monday entertainment.  And there they were.  My much-needed New Eyes.  I didn’t mean to write fan fiction, I really didn’t, but a story presented itself and then (as things to do when the Doctor’s around) spiraled a bit out of control and now we’re pushing two hundred pages, and I don’t begrudge an instant of it because chucking him into my universe is allowing me to see it in ways I’ve never seen it before.  Thorny problems that plagued me for years are resolving nicely.  And I’m improving on the action scene front.  And it’s fun.

There’s nothing not to love here.

When I go back to writing non-fan fiction, I’ll have a fresh perspective.  Not to mention all that lovely exercise.

So here’s my advice to you writers who might be stuck: don’t run away screaming if the possibility of writing some good old fashioned fan fiction presents itself.  If you can fit someone else’s character into your world for a bit, and you feel like trying it, try.  Unleash your imagination.  Because here’s what it does:

1.  Forces you to write from an unfamiliar perspective.  If your characters have all started blending in to each other, or slotted themselves into neat little types, filching other people’s characters and writing from their viewpoint for a bit can break that vicious cycle.  And it’ll improve your characterization chops in the process.

2.  Helps you see your world afresh.  What’s intimately familiar to you and your characters is completely new to other people’s characters.  They’ll notice things you and your own characters wouldn’t pay any attention to.  And sometimes, that will lead to creative revelations.  You might even find yourself quoting T.H. Huxley: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”  You’ll find yourself questioning assumptions and seeing things differently and asking those questions that make writing a process of exploration and discovery rather than a plodding one-word-after-another slog.

3.  Gives you practice with different techniques and situations.  If your mad writing skillz suffer in a particular area, and you know you need to polish ’em up, using an established character who’s an old pro at this sort o’ thing can give you that polish.  There’s already a template to follow.  And after tracing the template until you’re good at it will allow you to toss the template out and strike out confidently on your own later.

4.  Gets you excited again.  After so much time exploring every detail of your world, you might be suffering the old “familiarity breeds contempt” malady.  Not to mention, you have performance anxiety.  Fan fiction allows you to spend some time writing without suffering those complaints, and hence can recharge your fictional batteries nicely.  It can allow you to fall in love with your own writing again.

5.  Gives you practice for that great day when, as a famous author, you’re asked to write a reboot of your favorite fiction.  Look.  There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, is there?  And you never, ever know.  It could happen.  You might even make it happen.  And in case points 1-4 weren’t enough to convince yourself it’s really okay to spend a little time playing, this last one might be just the permission slip you need.

There are other benefits, I’m sure, probably quite a few I haven’t discovered yet or won’t discover because they’re not relevant to my situation, but might be for yours.  You won’t know until you’ve tried.  And you might never try.  You might never need to write fan fiction in your entire life.  But if you’re stuck, consider this as a way of unsticking yourself.  And enjoy the hell out of it.  And if people sneer at you for piddling around with fan fiction when you should be spending your time being a Really Serious Original Writer, there’s just one response:
Artist’s Illustration of Proper Technique
Dojo Summer Sessions: Mah Sooper Sekrit Projeckt

Dojo Summer Sessions: What Use is Creativity?

Dana Hunter1 Comment

Well, quite a lot, actually:

In fact, I’ve just published a study that shows that almost all Nobel laureates in the sciences are actively engaged in arts as adults. They are twenty-five times as likely as average scientist to sing, dance, or act; seventeen times as likely to be an artist; twelve times more likely to write poetry and literature; eight times more likely to do woodworking or some other craft; four times as likely to be a musician; and twice as likely to be a photographer. Many connect their art with their scientific creativity.

Go read the whole thing.  And the next time you doubt the utility of creativity, or someone tells you to stop dreaming, read it again.

Without creativity, we’d still be scratching out a meager living as naked apes alone in the wild.  Remember that.  And dream.

Dojo Summer Sessions: What Use is Creativity?