Science Fiction: Gatekeeping, Fandom & Genre Stagnation

Caught this, and I have opinions, which are probably not fair given this guy is doing an informal video talk about his opinions. Here's the reply I left.

I'm going to have to go away and think about this. While a lot of the points raised are worth discussing, I found some of the conclusions weak. For example, Sci-Fi as a term, coined by Forrest J. Ackerman, who arguably was the first high profile SF media fan as opposed to SF literature fan.

I used to rankle at SF being called Sci-Fi or skiffy, but nowadays I don't think it really matters because any negative implications from the term have long been overcome by the ubiquity of SF as a genre. Looking down on the term says more about the person looking down on it than the genre; namely intellectual snobbery.

And that's my problem with gatekeepers for what is essentially something that no longer makes any sense in the world as it is now, as compared to the 1930s, the evolution through the genre from the 1940s and 50s, to the new wave of the sixties and early 70s etc.

I tend to agree that fantasy encompassing sword and sorcery, epic fantasy and the such is not trying to emulate the sense of wonder that SF achieves when at its best. And as you say, revolutionary ideas are different to the evolution of tropes.

However, placing publishing as gatekeepers who are upholding the traditions of the genre doesn't stand up to scrutiny. An equally convincing argument can be made that they've held back the genre because their goals are to make profits, not evolve the genre per se. And, I agree these are not mutually contradictory goals, but the evidence is in product on the shelves.

Also, writers like Kristine Kathryn Rusch are self-published, yet also featured in traditional magazines (she is a Hugo award winner back in the 1990s), and the problem is rather diminishment of publishing from corporate buyouts. If anything one can argue that despite the criticism of self-publishing as being slapdash, this is the only area where a writer can write what they want, rather than write to market.

Of course, I would concede that a large number of self-published writers will write to market, but this has always been the case. It is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. As such, there's room for all fiction to reach the market, but the problem I fear you're actually railing against is how to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

That's a problem that I have no answer to, except that broad sweeping generalizations about self-publishing, and arguing from what one prefers has led to the arguments we see in social media. The vastness of cultural products, their accessibility, and becoming jaded from a glut of books to read only leads to a cul-de-sac of refined taste, and and as such becomes largely inaccessible to the general book reader.

TL;DR: There's room for revolutionary stories and re-framed retelling's of old stories.

On Writing

 

To say things are a bit distracting is like saying water is wet, the sky is blue, and grass is green. Obvious and yet an understatement that belies the difficulty in understanding how things work now that Corvid19 is sweeping the world.

But enough of that. It is far too easy to be sucked into the distracting distress going on around us. So here's a list for those of my readers who might like to write during this time they are locked in their homes.

Story

A story is a character in a setting with a problem who has opinions.

The protagonist's story is driven by Things. Getting. Worse! Successes always leads to another problem, when things no longer get worse, the story is over.

The antagonist's story is driven by plans coming together until defeated. 

Plots

There is a Problem; Complications ensue, the character's life changes.

Scenes: Advance the plot; Explain the background or backstory; Deepen the characterization.

Basic Themes of Plots

Overcome the Monster

Voyage & Return

The Quest

Mystery

Rebirth

Rags to Riches

Comedy/Burlesque

Tragedy

Rebellion

Story Conflicts

1. Man vs. Man: The problem is another character (Bob needs to defeat Alice to become Class President).

2. Man vs. Self: The problem lies inside the protagonist (Bob doesn't know how to express his emotions to Alice).

3. Man vs. Nature: The problem comes from natural sources (Bob's town is destroyed by a volcano, or Alice is sick).

4. Man vs. Society: The problem is the social environment (Bob struggles to maintain his dignity in an ignorant community after receiving an Abomination Accusation Attack).

5. Man vs. God/Fate: The problem is destiny, eventuality, fate, or divine will (Bob does not want to fulfill a prophecy that he will lose his family).

6. Man Caught in the Middle: Of other characters or conflicts.

7. Male versus Female: Battle of the sexes.

8. Man vs. Machine, as in machinery. Most commonly told from the perspective of a worker being replaced by a machine.

Novels Structure

Novels have different structures for example:

1. Action structure: A leader of a team work to overcome the problems they face.

2. Puzzle structure: A person solves a puzzle, with people helping them.

3. Romance structure: two people meet, problems ensue.

Opening Chapters of a Novel

Prologue (optional)

Introduce the hero

Introduce the villain

Introduce the friends/mentor

Other POV to shock

Childhood's End

I've also been reading Jack Bickham's Scene & Structure book, the person who Deborah Chester was taught by, and there's definitely a fashion to provide a structure for the reader to understand the story.

Having recently watched the mini-series of Childhood's End I went back and re-read the story.  It's one of my favourite SF novels, as in when I had to downsize my collection it was one that I kept because I felt I would want to re-read it.

Clearly the reader demographic has changed over the last 60 plus years since Childhood's End was written, which is a thing, because to maximize sales (readers) one has to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and classic SF really doesn't do this. This may be a factor in why written SF is a small market.

For example, Childhood's End.  

Who is the protagonist?  

Who is the antagonist?  

Where is the character development?  

It's arguably one of the classic novels, yet today it would be a hard sell.

NB: Just to be clear, love Childhood's End, and Arthur C. Clarke remains one of my all time favourite writers.

The Fantasy Fiction Formula

This was one of the books I took with for my holiday in Provence, though I saved it for last, because I chose to read it as part of my interest in developing my writing, so work not fun.  However, the book was a revelation and I wish it had been published four years ago when I first started writing.  Though this assumes that I would have had the sense and wit to make the most of it back then, which is not a given.

Deborah Chester is the person who Jim Butcher learnt to write under.  For those of you reading this and thinking writing to a formula is somehow wrong, stop and put your assumptions to one side.  The formula referred to in the title is the list of things that a novel needs if it's going to work as a story.  In short, this is a book about the craft rather than the art of writing.

I'm now using it to help me work through my second novel and it has also helped me to understand the feedback I received that said my first novel was not straightforward enough.  What I can do to address this feedback is limited by my writing ability and all I can do is work at upping my game.

For anyone who is writing I can wholeheartedly recommend reading this book.

Nail Your Novel 2

I reviewed Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books & How You Can Draft, Fix & Finish With Confidence by Roz Morris here.  I liked it so much I bought both her other books and I have just finished reading Nail Your Novel: Bring Characters To Life.

Having finished my first novel Bad Dog, which is at a publisher being read, I've been using the space to consolidate my writing given the feedback I have received from my Beta readers of my second novel Strike Dog, where the main thing I took away was that my characters weren't differentiated enough, and even where they were, they were annoying jerks.  Roz Morris has some interesting things to say about both of these problems in this book.

I finished reading her book this morning just in time to received the feedback from my Alpha reader on my third novel Ghost Dog.  Fortunately, having written the first drafts of all three novels in 2013, time really does give one a sense of distance when having to deal with criticism, even very constructive criticism.  So this is me trying to assimilate advice and put it into practice as I work on re-drafting the current versions of both sequels.  As such, I can strongly recommend the Nail Your Novel books to anyone who is struggling to write a novel to a professional standard.

Nail Your Novel 1

I bought a copy of Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris to read because of the promise on the cover to discuss why writers abandon books and how you can draft, fix and finish with confidence.  This book does what it says, and not only that but it's a concise short read.  I finished it in about two hours and was driven to go and put the advice on writing synopses into practice.  As a result, I spent the rest of my Sunday working and ended up writing for about eight hours in fact.

Then Monday I rewrote my covering letter, tailoring it for another submission and then sent my novel off.  So, highly recommended.

Other than the above my week has been taken up with my job, which I'm enjoying but the work demands quite a lot from me emotionally.  Besides that it has been my birthday and my beloved bought me a new camera.  I'm very excited with my new swish bit of kit.  I'm so excited by getting it I plan to do a piece on photography for this blog too.

We watched season three of Defiance, its last, and again it managed to be better than it had any right to be.  The show runners seem to have taken a leaf out of GRRMs book and the season started with the excess characters being killed off so they could concentrate on finishing the stories of the main protagonists.  I even ended up liking Nolan who up to this point I felt a bit so, so about.

We also saw The Martian.  I mentioned reading the book here.  The film is very good, but the book has more details, which is usually the case and not meant as a criticism.  It also breaks the Hollywood superstition that films with Mars in the title bomb at the box office; they seem incapable of realizing that films bomb because don't appeal for any number of different reasons, but titles are only one of them.

We've just started watching True Detective and I will comment more when I've finished.  I will say it's intense, like watching The Wire or Generation Kill.  Off to PicoCon tomorrow and I plan on taking my new camera with me to test out.

Snow Gone in a Flash

We slept in late this morning having stayed up way past our usual bedtime watching the film Spy.  So we missed the snow in London this morning.  However, I can attest to how cold it is outside because we've just got back from shopping and I wish I'd worn a scarf.

During the last couple of weeks we've watched a bunch of  TV shows.  First Flash and then Grimm, followed by catching up with the last series of Warehouse 13.

Flash is by the same company that produces Arrow but if Arrow is a hamburger then Flash is Candy Floss.  That's not a condemnation, as Arrow's last season was over the top melodrama and Flash was a refreshing change of pace.  There's a very nice call back to the 90s Flash with Mark Hamil reprising his role as the Trickster that made us laugh out loud.  Also, I must mention Cisco, the team science/engineering genius/geek, who gets to be the genre savvy character on the show.  However, the standout performance comes from the actor playing Dr. Harrison Wells, Barry Allan's mentor and the series protagonist.  He is a magnificent bastard and he makes the show more than just the sum of its parts.
Grimm remains a police procedural that rolls out the Wessen (monster) of the week and yet manages to remain eminently watchable because of its characters.  In particular Monroe and Rosalie who are the supporting couple.  Season four also mixes the format's formula and brings in some big changes, including, at last, adding Sergeant Wu to Team Grimm.

Warehouse 13 is a lightweight, don't think about what's going on too closely, magical artifact of the week formula melodrama.  It makes the Flash look grimdark by comparison.  But the characters are engaging and we're addicted to it like some people are addicted to crack cocaine.  Season five is a super short six episode mini-series that ties off most of the hanging plot-lines from the previous seasons.  It feels a bit rushed but it made me cry at the end.  I wish there could have been more.

Anyway, back to Spy.  The film had a lot of good press and stars Melissa McCarthy a CIA 'agent' who supports field operatives.  Like the Austin Powers series by Mike Myer's ' movies it sends up the James Bond spy genre but from a female perspective.  It has an interesting cast and a good story.  But there's a s lot of swearing, and in the extended cut nudity, so not for those who find swearing or sexual content offensive.  It made us laugh even though the plot is implausible to say the least because Fridge logic rules;  everything is in service of the gag.

Reading wise, I'm still working through Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style which is messing with my head.  I shall come back to this and review it in full later.

I've started on the first revision of Ghost Dog.  The first step in the process of turning shit into gold or maybe shit into manure which can fertilize crops.  I've managed to do 22,043 words this week and have about 73,000 more words to wade through.

I've just gotten back the first of my three Beta readers feedback who made me realize that when I cut 6,000 words of stuff not directly related to the main story arc that I also managed to remove some exposition that explained stuff important to the plot.  Not withstanding the fact that said explanations are repeated later the information was needed earlier in the story.  Sigh!

Writing Plan

Click to embiggen.

Another week has flown by here, and I again find myself pondering the imponderable question of where does all my time go?  I can tell you what I've been doing, but everything seems to take longer than it should to get it done.

In this case I've been researching stuff about far away places for a new opening chapter to my novel Strike Dog.

This came about because I decided that the prologue of Strike Dog would work better as the epilogue for Bad Dog, which is titled Omake.  One thing leads to another and the result is I now have plans to go back and tweak Bad Dog again by adding some details to one chapter to punch it up a little more.

On top of all that I was reading Chuck Wendig's blog where he posted a plan for a novel.  This drove me to distraction, and I just had to go away and work through his list here.

This what I came up with.

ACT 1 

Hook

1. Hey look there’s a problem.

 

ACT 2 

Plot Turn 1

2. I’m going to go and fix the problem. Try Fail Cycle

3. OMG I’ve made it worse.

4. Somebody else is making the problem worse.

Pinch 1

ACT 3 

Mid-Point

5. Wait, I think I’ve got this.Try Fail Cycle 

6. Bugger, bugger, bugger. Try Fail Cycle 

7. It’s not just worse, it’s now a different problem. Try Fail Cycle 

8. Even more buggeration ensues.Try Fail Cycle 

9. Everything is so complicated.

 

ACT 4
Pinch 2 

10. All is lost. Try Fail Cycle 

11. Wait, is that a light at the end of the tunnel? Try Fail Cycle 

12. It is, but it’s not what you think it is. 

Plot Turn 2 

13. Wait I have an idea.

 

ACT 5

Resolution

14. Problem solved, but not in the way you thought it would be. 

So looking back at my diary I find I've only managed to write 2,130 words this week, but boy-oh-boy it has felt like an intense weeks worth of writing.

The Seven Basic Plots

I had thought I'd already written something about Christopher Booker's book The Seven Basic Plots on this blog, but having looked through when reorganizing tags and updating titles I realized I hadn't.  So I think it's about time I rectified this omission.

After all the book has its own Wikipedia page, and not only that its own TV Tropes page.

The book is controversial, in that some people don't like the way that Christopher Booker has quantified the sacred art of story telling.  Reading the TV Tropes page gives one a light & fluff overview of the work and mentions how long it is.  Wikipedia discusses the critical reactions to the book when it was first published.  Neither are the same as actually reading the book and making up your own mind for yourself.

It took me about three months to read this book, because I would pick it up and read it for a bit, make notes in the margins, put post-it notes in so I could to refer back to passages that I thought were interesting, and then put it back down.  It's not a book that is meant to be read in one sitting, being a scholarly work that took the author 34 years to complete.

My main criticism of the work is that Christopher Booker bases his analysis on Jungian archetypes.  At one level this is OK, because this is a study of literary history and criticism, but on the other hand using pseudo-scientific Jungian psychology (as is non-replicable and done without seeking to prove the null-hypothesis) as one's main analytical tool is a bit of a poor show (as in there are psychological models with more research validity to study the human condition).

Saying that I will, without reservation, recommend anyone who wants to write stories, whether conventional fiction or world creation stories for games etc, to read this book.

Don't undertake to read it lightly, it's a massive tome, a doorstop book of epic proportions, but it so put everything together for me about why I like some stories and not others.  So regardless of my caveat about Jungian psychology being less than scientifically rigorous, the use of archetypes in story connects with people's need to understand the world around us.

So until such a time as someone comes along and writes a book about plots from a cognitive behavioural perspective read this.

Sin and Syntax

I've been reading Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale.  

I would like to say it's a page turner, but it's not. There again I didn't expect it to be. I've been putting Post It tabs  in while reading it, and scribbling marks in pencil in the margins where I want to find stuff. 

It's what I tend to do when reading books that are basically research. In this case this is me reading to improve my writing. Something I've been working on after my first critiquing session.

I have at least one friend who will tell me that reading books about writing is not as good as reading well written books.

But I think my craft is weak; or perhaps I should say I fear that my writing is dull, uninteresting and boring. So I've set about improving my craft.

Because craft require graft.

Into the Woods

This is going to be me pontificating about John Yorke's Into the Woods book that has the subtitle of A Five Act Journey into Story. As I said before I found this book a very involving read that presented a compelling argument about the nature of stories, namely that they must have a beginning, middle and an end, which seems kind of obvious.

However, what is discussed is that what makes the middle of the story so important to the reader is the structure of the story; namely the acts that a story is broken down into.

What John Yorke discusses is that the modern three act structure is rooted in the older Socratic five act form, and that to understand that the drama comes from understanding the psychological necessity for the mid-point. 

At least if I've understood him properly that is? I'm sorry if that sounds a little quizzical, but given the academic nature of some of the arguments being discussed, more summary and less footnotes to support the thesis, antithesis and synthesis of the necessity of acts as part of the structure of story would have been a good thing.

I have one final quibble with the authors use of Freud and Jung to underpin his arguments for the development of characters in stories.

Namely that psychology has come on a long way since the days of Freud and Jung, and that their work doesn't meet the criteria of being evidence based and open to scientific testing.

However, I learnt a lot of things about story structure, the necessity of acts and their purpose that I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be a writer. It is that good.