Friday Fictioneers – the Copenhagen Interpretation

July 12, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 98 Comments

janet-webb-french-still-life — Photo Prompt © **Janet Webb**

Sam was a man. Not a special man, he passed everywhere pretty much unnoticed. The probability he was outside equalled the chances he was inside. He was everywhere and nowhere. And thus he made his living. He could pass through locked gates and stout walls, ferreting-out secrets, spying on clandestine meetings.

One day a woman noticed him. Or rather, the exquisite workmanship of the bracelet he was fingering. The observation collapsed his wave function, and he was in full view. At that moment Sam opted for the many-world hypothesis and slipped sideways, at right angles to reality.

Note on physics: the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics holds that, until the act of measurement, the location of a sub-atomic particle can only be described by the device of a wave function which describes the probability that it is in a particular place. The alternative many worlds interpretation says that the wave function is real and that all possible positions exist across a multiplicity of worlds.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot.

Bomaru’s Quest Part IV – Scrivener’s Forge 7

July 9, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 4 Comments

This is my submission for the Scrivener’s Forge exercise on plot. I confess I cheated on this one by using a story I’ve already published, but it exemplifies so well the “go in late, come out early” advice.

Bomaru’s Quest Part IV

The creature’s head punched round, leathery scales abrading his skin. Bomaru held tight, the sinews of his arms corded like autumn branches, slowly forcing the winged reptile’s head to the ground. Teeth sharp as spear-points snapped, close enough for the clash to shiver through his straining grip, and the stench of the creature’s foul breath to taint his nostrils. It was no ordinary strength that maintained his grip. He knew sweet Farlaine would die if he failed, and the knowledge lent him the force of ten. Bomaru twisted with a desperate might. With a sickening crack, the dragon’s body gave one last twitch and was still.

‘Wow! You just killed a dragon with your bare hands,’ Michael observed. ‘Hard to believe isn’t it?’

Michael was heartily sick of Bomaru and Farlaine.

Yet bold Bomaru strode on over the evil creature’s carcass, undaunted by his ordeal, and rifled through the dragon’s hoard, until he found the blade, Srithanthril. Farlaine’s father had borne that sword in battle before he fell to the Worms on the plain of carnage. None but Srithanthril’s wizard-honed edge could sever the bewitched bonds holding Farlaine shackled to the promontory.

‘Cool, you got the magic sword.’ Michael’s tone held acid mockery. ‘Bewitched bonds, tum-ti-tum.’

Bomaru raced sure-footed down the hillside, pebbles slithering and rolling. It was almost as if the earth itself bore him forward to Farlaine, hastening her release. Farlaine’s roots were deep in the land, and the land ached at her peril.

When Bomaru reached the foreshore, the tide was lapping around his beloved’s ankles. She screamed and strained against her bonds.

Michael’s attention was captured by the wild, age-carved, crags, while Bomaru’s was on the huge kraken that reared up, reaching clawed arms towards the sacrificial virgin.

‘How do you like them apples?’ Michael sneered at Bomaru, and turned away from the combat to watch the sea birds, wheeling lithe in the thermals that rose from the cliff.

When he gazed far, Michael saw the birds soar at the cloud-front that roiled against the updraft, unable to press forward over the ocean. It entranced him. He was seeing the wind itself in the invisible barrier that held the creatures firm as Farlaine’s bonds. When he studied close, Michael discerned the rough porosity of the cliff-face, the tiny cavities and crags made by an aeon of the insistent sea’s soft probing fingers. He peered into one crevice, with a scrutiny deep and searching, and detected, in a jumble of twigs and seaweed, the ghosts of a guillemot’s past home. He heard the minute skulking of the lives folk never have the patience to notice.

While battle raged below, Michael probed the mysteries of the promontory. The woes of men meant no more to that ancient headland than the ephemeral scrabblings in the nooks and crannies of reality. Farlaine’s cries, as Bomaru hacked and hewed, troubled him no more than the calls of the kittiwakes. Michael marked the transit of the sun against the rock, striving to capture the slow shifting of colour. He saw subtle reddening where there had been only grey. He witnessed crags and boulders that leapt up from the escarpment, like footpads from an alley, as the light picked them out in relief.

The strife behind him quieted. ‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?’ he quoted to Bomaru. ‘Oh frabjous day. Calloo! Callay!’

The headless body of the kraken was sinking into the waves, while Bomaru clove Farlaine’s bonds with the enchanted blade, Srithanthril.

Michael frowned and tore his thoughts from the precious secrets of the eternal cliff, and the slow march of time. Farlaine was freed. The realm was saved. The people rejoiced.

‘One day, one goddamn day,’ said Michael, ‘I will kill you, Bomaru. One day, I’ll be able to live free of you. I’m better than this. I can perceive the world in a guillemot’s nest.’

‘Perhaps,’ Bomaru scoffed. ‘But not this day.’

Michael sighed, and began the writing of Bomaru’s Quest, Part V.

Friday Fictioneers – Erasure

July 5, 2017July 5, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 83 Comments

claire-sheldon — PHOTO PROMPT © **Claire Sheldon**

The artist sketching by the riverside was young, his long brown hair stringy and unwashed. But his pencil captured with clean lines the dark surging water, grey cloud lowering close, and granite houses on the far bank.

“Wanna buy it?” he asked, noticing my attention. “It’s yours for a tenner.”

The deal done, I rushed my prize home, spread it on the desk and took up the rubber. My hand lovingly consumed his effort, erasing the lines to pristine whiteness. I only ever work on other artists’ canvases. One day I will acquire a Michelangelo sketch and create a masterpiece.

Note for US readers. A rubber in British English is what you call eraser, not what you first thought.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on plot.

88. Ideology and fiction

July 4, 2017July 4, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 8 Comments

Does a writer have to eschew ideology in favour of empathy?

This topic was heavily explored in an online writing course on Identity and Social Issues that I have just finished with the University of Iowa. Ruel Johnstone, for example, argued that a writer, even a political writer, must take off ideological lenses. You have to look at people, he says, much more closely than in ideology. Jane Bledsoe argued that explicitly trying to push a political agenda or a social justice agenda usually fails. Kia Corthron, Inara Verzemnieks, Tim Bascom, Janine di Giovanni, and Vladimir Poleganov all argued similar points.

When so many people agree, they must either be expressing an obvious truth, or they must be speaking from a similar point of view. It is, of course, a defining characteristic of a dominant ideology that its adherents believe they have no ideology. George Orwell wrote that “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’” How might we tell the difference between these two alternatives?

neoliberalism20160420_630_630 — Image: Outlook

There does seem to be a self-evident truth to the Iowa argument. As readers, we identify with characters, and so a writer must approach political or social issues through their impact on the character. But, then again, who anyone is and what they want depends on where they sit in society.

And several of the presenters in the course acknowledged they were still expressing an ideological position, and that the reader would probably figure this out. Some offered advice about how to slip information in, so the reader wasn’t aware of it. So the neutral empathetic stance of the writer is not all it seems to be at first sight. Sneaky people those writers!

The dominant view in Western cultures is some form of liberal tolerance. But that’s not necessarily how things really work. Equality of opportunity, for example, is meaningless without the opportunity of equality first. It seems to me that it’s a writer’s responsibility to explore and expose how things really work, to show the clockwork beneath the mask.

Ideology is part of character

I think we need to approach the question by thinking carefully about what ideology is. Ideology is not false consciousness. On the contrary, it only works because it makes sense of a person’s lived reality and experience. For the investor, it is his (or her) money that creates wealth. For the worker, it is her or his labour. For the person who loses their job to a foreigner, immigration will seem a problem. Ideology isn’t false consciousness, any more than being kind or religious or miserly is false consciousness. It’s simply reality as viewed through the personality and experience of an individual.

In other words, ideology is a part of character. When we render the mental and spiritual world of a character, we are, among other things, rendering that character’s ideology – that character’s understanding of why the world is as it is. If we don’t understand our characters’ ideology well, we will render it as a stereotype. And that will lead to stereotyped characters because it’s poor writing, not because it’s ideological.

If, for example, we want to explore why ordinary decent people in the right circumstances can be persuaded to engage in genocide, it just won’t do to label them as monsters and say “never again”. Because it does keep happening again, and again. We need to get inside their heads and explore their ideology, and the very human hopes and fears that drive it. They’re people pretty much like us.

We never just let the reader come to their own conclusions

I think it’s a fantasy that we allow the reader to come to their own conclusion. How could they? We select the events, we craft the order in which they’re told, we polish and shape in order to create the effect we desire. Creative writing describes events in the light of the ends we ordain for them. The open-endedness is an illusion. Of course, no two readers ever render exactly the same story in their minds, I accept that. They may even disagree with our conclusions, depending on their own concerns and life experiences. Even so the writer is not only witness, but also advocate, judge and jury.

An alternative approach

If we want to authentically render the way the social realm shapes character, we have to build character on more than just individual psychology. In the Iowa course, Karim Alrawi advocated starting from relationships, rather than just the individual. He described his own practice as in his novel Book of Sands set in the Arab Spring, of seeking out and dramatizing the underlying metaphors, not people or events. And Jennifer Cognard noted that identity is never singular, it’s always plural.

The Scrivener’s Forge 7 – Plot: Go in late, come out early

July 1, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 9 Comments

This is a classic principle of gripping screenwriting. You create more drama in a scene if you enter it with some action already underway. You avoid the boredom of a drawn-out conclusion if you leave it once the action is done (preferably even adding another hook to the next scene).

Exercise:

Write a scene that starts slam bang wallop in the middle of the action. No introduction, no back story. Use what you’ve learned in previous exercises about character, description, and action to fill in any details we need.

Click the little blue frog to post your exercise.

Friday Fictioneers – Fairy Tale

June 28, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 73 Comments

A thousand years of footfall and cart wheels had worn grooves into the slabs of the alley. Cool arches, crafted by stonemasons gone half a millennium, shaded Rick from the Mediterranean sun. History lay heavy as a lover on this place.

And yet time had gnawed it hollow. Beneath his feet, metal lids covered the entrances to tunnels. Trunks of piping and gossamer threads of cabling slowly strangled the ancient street. Rick hacked through the undergrowth. He knew at its heart would be a secret, sleeping in a glass case. A kiss would awaken an old and terrible beauty.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Fancy sharpening your skill with writing exercises? The Scrivener’s Forge offers a new exercise every month to hone one aspect of your craft. Take a look at this month’s exercise on character and action

87. How to succeed as a novelist – the facts

June 27, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 10 Comments

At last, there’s some real data, which busts a lot of myths. Jim Hines, a fantasy writer, published a survey of 246 novelists and now we know what the elements of success look like. The sample is probably not representative, being made of people who chose to respond to Jim, and it seems to be biased towards writers of YA, fantasy, sci-fi and romance. It also defines a successful author as one who earned an advance of at least US$2,000. Though the data is far from clean, it’s a great deal better than the hunches, prejudices, and sheer opinions that I’ve had up till now.

People tell you all kinds of things about how to succeed. Get an agent. Self-publishing is the way to go and you’ll net an offer from a traditional publisher. Others folks say, put in your time publishing short stories to earn your spurs. Do an MFA. It’s all in who you know. There’s no shortage of contradictory opinions. But which, if any, are true?

What the data says is:

You do need to put in the time learning your craft. The average time writing before first getting a novel published was 11.5 years.
The average age of debut novel publishing was 36.
A track record in publishing short stories is not necessary. The average number of stories sold before their novel was accepted was 7.7, but fully 116 of the 246 authors had zero prior sales of short stories. It looks like a portfolio of short story publication hasn’t been necessary since the 1980s. This was a revelation to me, since I decided last year on the basis of good advice to stop writing novels and concentrate on building up a track-record in short stories first.
Getting an agent helps a lot. Most of the sample (55%) achieved publication through an agent. Selling the first novel without an agent increased the time spent writing before breakthrough by 3.3 years

Having an agent is not completely necessary. 29% of the sample successfully submitted directly to a publisher. Direct submission to publishers was more common in the past. 100% of those who first published in the 1970s went this route. This dropped in each decade, particularly for YA and fantasy novels, while romance novels showed a small increase in direct sales to publishers. By the 2000’s only 27.7% of the whole sample successfully submitted directly to a publisher, while 67.3% went through an agent.
Self-publishing is not a good route to getting an offer from a mainstream publisher. Only 1 of the 246 authors self-published their novel and went on to sell it to a publisher. This is not to say it isn’t a valid route to making sales
You don’t need a degree in English or Creative Writing to get published. Only 38% of the sample had such an undergraduate degree and only 10% had a Masters.
Networking may help, though the effect isn’t clear. 61% had attended a writer’s convention and 59% were members of a writing group. Having attended conventions reduced the number of years spent writing before publication of the first novel by 2.5.
You don’t need to know an agent or publisher beforehand. Less than a quarter of agented authors had been recommended by a friend, and only 5% knew the agent beforehand in a personal capacity.

For those of you who’re interested, there’s a detailed statistical analysis of his data by Steve Saus

Friday Fictioneers – Departure

June 21, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 58 Comments

ted-struts-in-the-rain — PHOTO PROMPT © **Ted Strutz**

Muffled in mist, the shouted words are indistinct. But she hears the rattle of heavy chain and the clangour of metal. The ship is making ready to depart for another week, and seven days’ aloneness descends again.

The ship’s horn gives a last bass call, like a circling raptor. Go and open the door, she thinks, but is afraid of the creatures that will populate the silence. Go and open the door. Death won’t be standing there in his dark fedora.

She opens the door, but drizzle shrouds the vessel heading into the sound. There is moisture on her cheek.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here.

Friday Fictioneers – Duet

June 14, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 78 Comments

dale-rogerson4 — PHOTO PROMPT © **Dale Rogerson**

This was a technical exercise, a challenge to myself to write two different stories each using the same fifty words in a different order.

The man sobbed as he had forced the pony trap up the rolling road. A fear loomed, and gnawed for his heart. Eyes took in the castle, silhouette against the sunset, knew he had left it too late to save her from death, and a shadow of gates was all.

The castle heart was a man-trap. The pony knew too, her eyes rolling in fear. Save for the late sunset, all as he had left it. The gates loomed up, took in and gnawed from his silhouette. He sobbed and forced a road, had to, against the shadow of death.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

Friday Fictioneers – Beam me up

June 7, 2017 ~ Neil MacDonald ~ 52 Comments

sp-overgrown-summer-house — PHOTO PROMPT Sarah Potter

Almost nothing survives of the Old People. The radioactive rubble, of course, will endure for tens of thousands of years. And they left twisted metal and crumbling concrete. But of the people themselves, nothing. Save this one fragment of a letter, written in Anglish by a young man to his lover in Birmingham. He plans to visit her.

It is from this letter that we learn they had mastered matter transference. Perhaps they are not gone. Maybe they beamed to new homes in the stars. We only know this unnamed writer was coming to her in his “beamer”.

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here. For readers whose first language isn’t English, it may (or may not) help you to know that beamer is slang for BMW, or more generically a cool car.