Jul. 9th, 2010

gillpolack: (Default)
Should I tell you all that the question thread open till Sunday is the last until after AussieCon? No, for that would be a useful thing to do and I'm not in a useful mode. Not even for myself. I start things and leave them half finished and then start them again and then leave them more half-finished. Like the washing in my machine. Let me just get it to the next stage of never-finishedness and I'll be right back. (allergies require extra laundry completed at unexpected moments and the early wattles must be in bloom)

Just now I'm thinking about a bunch of modern fantasy writers. It's a very particular group, from the sixties right up to the present. They get their inspiration and worldbuilding from other fiction. Some use Shakespeare, some use folktales, while others breathe their version of the nineteenth century view of the Middle Ages into life. There are rather good writers in that group.

Today I worked out why I have such strong negative reactions. Their work dates more quickly than their writing skills and talent ought to allow. I'm reading such a book right now. Dated despite lovely writing and a grand plot.

I'm not really reading it now, not while I'm typing, but in between typing and half-finishing things, I'm reading a book that was published in the 1970s and makes me want to weep. If the writer had gone just a bit further in understanding how a society worked and moved a tiny bit beyond the tropes in the literature from which the world was developed (Robin Hoodish, for the record), this novel would have been delightful, even three or more decades on. It's another kind of half-finishing, where the writer does just enough thinking to write the story. If the thinking had been more solid and the understanding of the underlying social patterns and what makes a place and time unique, the work would shine. Would have shone. Would have been a classic.

Whether a writer moves beyond the obvious and into deeper understanding is the difference - for a talented writer - between writing something that is likeable immediately and something that is special.

I re-read an exchange last night that explained it all. I was hunting stray food history material for the cookbook, and some of it was hidden in my email system. I found an argument between two writers in there. One writer said that any sword (or house or garment or education system) is good enough if it serves the plot. The other was saying "Find the exact sword/house/garment/classroom that fits the exact situation."

That second writer was me. It's one of the things I say quite often when I'm talking to people who want to write historical fiction. Specifics are far more important than generics in bringing an historical novel to life.

What I am seeing in today's book (and in the books from those old reviews of mine) is how moving away from the generic would make a difference for a fantasy writer, too. A street from a package saying "City Streets - urban fantasy" will leave the reader less involved than a street that the reader feels they have walked.

Being not-a-genius-writer, I'm better at teaching than I am at doing, but I do try. For my time travel novel, I know the exact streets and paths I need in the book - I have pictures of how they look today. I know the rocks underfoot and the smell of the herbs in the wind. Not a generic scent, but the actual combination of plants local to that area. Not that region - that couple of miles. I've been checking these things out, painstakingly.

How much of my understanding of place and time makes it to my page and how effective my writing is at establishing a specific place and time where the reader can live for a few hours relies on my actual writing ability, which is something that's hard for me to judge. What I can judge, however, is that there are some very fine writers who make me cry inside, because they create forest glades without knowing what a forest is* and they have places and times that are based upon the places and times of other writers that are based on the places and times of yet other writers. It's all diffused. It's all half-finished.

Why do I care so much? Because to find tolerable reading or good reading where I ought to be caught up in the wonder of it all is a bad thing. It's a tragic loss of something that could have been special. It's telling detail that tells awry.

I'm not going to give you the name of the book. I admire the writer too much. When s/he writes other things, their writing works with all the magic it should. Just as I don't expect anyone to judge me by a day like today, where everything's half-done, I don't expect to judge a writer by a single half-done work. Still, I wish I could read the book the way it would have been written, on a normal day, where tasks are completed and one thinks things through.



* Forests are complicated things. Especially in England. I like them best when they have houses and neat gardens, because it proves a point about what forests are and what they are not. What they are not, is what I read in fantasy novels based on fantasy novels based on fantasy novels. Sometimes I feel that all fantasy novelists who use any variant of England as a setting should do a day of landscape history and a half day of forest law. Simply reading historical maps and analysing landscape would solve most problems, though.

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