Dense Words

Guide to Style

2012-02-07T12:27:00.000+01:00

I have spoken at (probably tedious) length about my attitude to grammar rules, and I even linked in my last post to a discussion on Kindle Boards that has both elevated and degenerated - if cordially - into a kind of challenge as to who can justify not applying the Chicago Manual of Style.

I'm not going to give you, though it would be my style to do so, a potted history of the CMS. You can find that out readily on Wikipedia and at the CMS website.

I will point out that the CMS self-identifies as 'recommendations on editorial style and publishing practices' - and does not identify itself as a Grammar Book or a style rulebook. In numerous places the CMS, in the long tradition style guides, humbly suggests that the writer make up his own mind and apply style in a way that judiciously favours good comprehension.

Style guides offer a comfort to the uncertain writer, and I often refer to them for suggestions, confirmation, support or arbitration. Occasionally I am surprised to discover that what I thought was common practice is not, or vice versa (I famously hadn't noticed that UK publishers had taken to using single quotes for direct speech. They don't all do it, but most do.).

All too easily, the comfort becomes a crutch, and eventually, a father figure, dispensing infallible wisdom from on high. I have seen many people quote Henry Fowler as the last word in an argument over British English usage. I think he would have been embarrassed.

So, getting back to setting out my stall: my primary guide for style when I am editing is The Complete Plain Words, by Sir Ernest Gowers (who also edited the second edition of Modern English Usage which is also a core text of mine). The reason why I use CPW is largely because of this:

Professional writers realise that they cannot hope to affect their readers precisely as they wish without care and practice in the proper use of words. The need for the official to take pains is even greater, for if what the professional writer has written is wearisome and obscure the reader can toss the book aside and read no more, but only at his peril can he so treat what the official has tried to tell him. By proper use I do not mean grammatically proper. It is true that there are rules of grammar and syntax, just as in music there are rules of harmony and counterpoint. But one can no more write good English than one can compose good music merely by keeping the rules. On the whole they are aids to writing intelligibly, for they are in the main no more than the distillation of successful experiments made by writers of English through the centuries in how best to handle words so as to make a writer's meaning plain. Some, it is true, are arbitrary. One or two actually increase the difficulty of clear expression, but these too should nevertheless be respected, because lapses from what for the time being is regarded as correct irritate the educated reader, and distract his attention, and so make him the less likely to be affected precisely as you wish. But I shall not have much to say about text-book rules because they are mostly well known and well observed in official writing.

The golden rule is not a rule of grammar or syntax. It concerns less the arrangement of words than the choice of them. "After all," said Lord Macaulay, "the first law of writing, that law to which all other laws are subordinate, is this: that the words employed should be such as to convey to the reader the meaning of the writer." The golden rule is to pick those words and to use them and them only. Arrangement is of course important, but if the right words are used they generally have a happy knack of arranging themselves. Matthew Arnold once said: "People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is. Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style." That was no doubt said partly for effect, but there is much truth in it, especially in relation to the sort of writing we are now concerned with, in which emotional appeal plays no part.

This golden rule applies to all prose, whatever its purpose, and indeed to poetry too. Illustrations could be found throughout the gamut of purposes for which the written word is used. At the one end of it we can turn to Shakespeare, and from the innumerable examples that offer themselves choose the lines

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy

which, as a description of what the rising sun does to meadows and rivers on a "glorious morning", must be as effective a use of thirteen words as could be found in all English literature. At the other end we can turn (for the golden rule can be illustrated from official writing in its observance as well as in its breach) to the unknown member of the staff of the General Post Office who by composing the notice that used to be displayed in every post office

Postmasters are neither bound to give change nor authorised to demand it

used twelve words hardly less efficiently to warn customers of what must have been a singularly intractable dilemma. At first sight there seems little in common between the two. Their purposes are different; one is descriptive and emotional, the other instructional and objective. But each serves its purpose perfectly, and it is the same quality in both that makes them do so. Every word is exactly right; no other word would do as well; each is pulling its weight; none could be dispensed with. As was said of Milton's prose in the quotation that heads Chapter VI, "Fewer would not have served the turn, and more would have been superfluous".

Gowers goes on to provide valuable guidance and necessary arbitration in detail in many areas where poor usage causes confusion, which includes points of grammar and of punctuation. Although CPW is ostensibly a manual for official document writing, Gowers uses examples from Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Kipling, Gibbon … this amply demonstrates his contention that the primary art and the primary skill of the writer are one and the same, as illustrated in the extract above: that writer achieve his intended aim (Gowers is disapproving if that aim is to obscure or conceal, however).

To me, language is political, and my peculiar pragmatic liberalism is particularly sensitive to the insidious vicissitudes of prescribed and proscribed language.

I really ought to delete that last sentence but it such a fine example of how horribly badly wrong my own writing can go that I'm going to leave it there. I wonder how many readers will switch off as soon as they reach it, and go read something less pretentious.

What I wanted to say is that Gowers is much more pragmatic, more honest, more reasonable, more fair, more just than I, and not at all anarchistic. It does me untold good to sit somewhere with a cup of tea and read him. It restores my faith in human nature to see how he weighs the gramaclasts against the grammacrats and finds both wanting, but both necessary.

Gowers' strength, his value, is not the guidelines he infers, but the attitude he imparts: all means of understanding and applying language are valid provided the reader is 'affected precisely as you wish'.

To me this has the same enlightening elegance as the Doctrine of Love or the Doppler Effect.

What to Expect from an Editor #4

2012-02-05T10:57:00.001+01:00

Who is the best editor?

Not every book needs a literary edit. I think that every book should go to a professional editor for style and format (copy-edit), but a literary edit isn't needed for everything. But how do you know if your work needs one or not?

I suspect the only way to know is to go through the literary edit process at least once. It also helps a great deal to talk to other writers who use, or have used, a literary editor. Those who can tell you why they decided they didn't need to will be the ones who help you to discover if you need to. So why not?

For one thing, it is expensive. A book of 120k words will take me anything from 30 to 50 hours to edit, more if you include communication with the author. Your first two or three full length novels will take longer to edit than later ones, which means that those who charge a fixed rate per word may have to do a lighter edit than your work really needs, and those who, like me, quote based on an estimate of the time required, will charge more to edit your early, weaker work than for your later, stronger work. This is one of the ironies of our profession - but it applies to everything that authors do:

The more you write, the faster you write, and the fewer errors you make. So even if you don't use an editor, the effort it will cost you to write your better work (the books you haven't written yet) will always be less than the effort you are investing now.

Many writers see using a literary editor as an investment. They hope that it will lead to their becoming a better writer faster. I hope this is so, too, since this is my main professional intent: to help you become a better writer. It is both a privilege and a pleasure to watch this happen, when I am the right editor for you.

There's the crux of the issue. Not every editor is the right editor for every writer.

It is far more important, in my opinion, that a writer find an editor who is a good match to his immediate needs, than the writer find an editor who is a good match to his purse, or who he perceives as being the best editor*.

This is a major reason for my posting the kind of things that I do here in my blog. I want you to have a chance to discover what sort of edit you will get, and to discover a little about my personality and my approach. I think that if the kind of things that I say appeal to you, then we can probably work together.

But you can't know if you have the right editor until you try him or her. There are plenty of us out here. It makes sense to try more than one. More than two.

And if you have a bad experience with an editor, it is likely that the editor was a poor match to your needs. Probably more likely than your impression that he or she was a "bad editor". If you found your editor on Kindle Boards, they're probably good. If they were recommended by another author, they're probably good.

Even for copy editing, a good match is necessary. Some editors will, unless otherwise instructed, edit spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary in strict accordance with an approved Style Guide. They are absolutely right to do so. Some authors find this sanitizes or anonymizes their work. Others are glad they don't have to think about those details. Some editors will copy-edit with a very light touch indeed; correcting obvious errors, but not standardizing anything. The are absolutely right to do so. But some authors find that certain (ahem, fussy) readers make comments that suggest that editing has been sloppy or nonexistant. You can't please all the readers all of the time; having an editor on board if only for a light copy edit can help you to go into this with your eyes open.

If you have an editor, and you think they are the best, then you have found a good match. Please gush about them on your blog in and in KB - but try to say why they suit you so well, and this will help other authors to find the right editor for them**.

***

Edit:

A discussion started on Kindle Boards a couple of days ago about editors and editing. The tone of the discussion is rather forceful in places, but as a crash course in what you should expect, what attitude and approach to take, and how to protect yourself from a bad experience, this is REQUIRED READING:

Editing Rant (via Kindle Boards)

***

__________

*You will notice that my style in my blog, occasional caveats notwithstanding, is very authoritative. That just happens to be how I talk and how I write. It doesn't mean that the opinions or statements in these posts are necessarily the most correct or the best - indeed I disclaim any such conclusion, and I strongly encourage disagreement. If you are impressed by what you read here, proceed with caution; get a second opinion; better still, prove me wrong. Comments that show either by argument or reliable cross reference that I have been talking bollocks are guaranteed to be published.

** So far I haven't had a customer who's been unhappy or even disappointed. But I do have customers who only come to me for certain specific types of edit, and who go elsewhere for other services. I don't take this amiss – on the contrary, it is a very sensible way to proceed. Once you have used a few editors, you will know what you need, and who you need it from.

A New Way to Tell Stories?

2012-02-02T10:19:00.000+01:00

At the release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (TES5), I blogged about my initial frustrations with the story arcs in Skyrim. Soon it will be possible to do something about it.

Just as a quiet revolution is taking place in the written word thanks to those Maverick Capitalistas at Amazon, so recent advance both in the technology and the culture of videogames is bringing about a similar revolution, possibly even a revival, of old fashioned storytelling. I am beginning to wonder if games like TES5 aren't part of the development of a new way of telling stories; the first new way to enter our culture since the tabletop RPG (for those of you in the Bible-Belt, this is a euphemism for "satanic cult" – for the rest of you, this is the technical term for Dungeons and Dragons and its myriad progeny).

In traditional storytelling, the teller uses a setting that is instantly familiar to all his listeners. In the 1001 Nights this is mythic Baghdad and it's environs; in Grimm it is the North Europe countryside; in Andersen it is the North Europe town. In Tolkien fanfic it is Middle Earth. In modern fantasy it's a mishmash of all these locations with a bit of romanticised Arthurianism and Gygax stirred into the mix.

In truth it doesn't much matter; what's important to the storyteller is that the setting is shared and familiar to his audience. (When, in a couple of weeks' time (late, I know), I will put my first "live telling" on my blog, the setting will be a very familiar one, though none of the above.) The familiarity of the shared setting liberates the storyteller from lengthy world-building, knowing that most of his audience is there for the tale - and a tale is discussion and action - wherever possible at the same time.

With TES4, Bethesda delivered a ready-made shared setting, which they populated with people (in gaming parlance, 'NPCs' (non-player characters)), and populated with stories (in gaming, as in fairytale parlance, 'quests').

Once they deliver the "creation kit" (announced for next week), it will be possible for the real storytellers to get to work, using their shared setting to tell new or retell old stories. The Creation Kit is a software package (sorry about that), but one much more rounded and fully developed than the one provided with the previous TES4 (Oblivion). It should make it possible for far more people to create not just apparel, weapons and furniture (the most commonly created items in TES4), but to write stories and then put them into the game.

Commercially, the benefit for Bethesda is that players will continue playing for the next 6 years (as they did with TES4) because they keep adding new stories, new people, new places to discover, new challenges, new ideas. This gives Bethesda time to develop the next game, and ensures that there will be tens of thousands of people eager to buy it even if it takes a long time to come to market. This is exactly what happened between TES4 and TES5.

Culturally, the benefit for storytellers and story readers, is that so many more of us will be able to create new stories and then play those stories. As a medium, the game world is somewhere between a written fairytale, a history play, a heroic fantasy film and a "choose your own adventure" book.

If it sounds like I'm doing my best to talk up a video game until I can argue that it has the same cultural status as a book, a play or a film (or indeed, a roleplaying game), that is because I am. As a storytelling medium, the videogame has come on in leaps and bounds in the last few years. Even so, it is still in its infancy. But the time is already long past where it can be dismissed as a time-sink or a distraction. It is fast becoming as much a developed cultural activity as filmmaking, and it is worth trying to see it that way.

As for me, I already have my name on a couple of game content projects. If you have come to this page looking for Skyrim modding help, I am available for free for dialog writing, story editing and voice acting, and I will (once I have learned it) also be available to give free advice and guidance on turning your idea for a quest into fully fledged game content.

Three Billy Goats Gruff

2012-01-24T17:26:00.000+01:00

I have been challenged over on KB to analyse one of my favourite children's stories, The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Here goes.

My mother used to deal in classic and collectable children's books, and could probably give you the Opie classification from memory. The best I can do is as follows:

Like many short fairy tales for younger children, this story has resisted attempts to pin an obvious moral on it. It is based on the archetypes:

protagonist achieves heart's desire through guile
protagonist overcomes antagonist through guile and main strength
three brother tale
the monstrous gatekeeper

The heart's desire is the green grass on the other side, but don't be fooled. There isn't a "grass is always greener" Aesop afoot here. On the other side of the river the grass really is better, and this is confirmed once it is tasted. You can argue until you're blue in the face about the lesson here, there isn't one. In many traditional tales, a wish to be fed is fullfilled, and lends weight to the idea that reading about a feast helps to alleviate hunger (as well as making it worse for some people).

The tale makes very strong use of rhythm - as announced by the title. It is possible that "billy goats" were selected as heroes for the rhythmic quality of the phrase "three billy goats gruff". Peasants will remember that male goats, even brothers, will rarely tolerate one another. So we can assume that they "aren't really goats". This is where it becomes a classic "three brother tale" — any hero who sets out on a quest that has already claimed the lives of his two older brothers is absolutely guaranteed to succeed. Where TTBGG makes this more interesting is that the first two brothers both meet the danger with guile, passing it on in turn to a stronger older brother. In the classic three brother scenario, it is the youngest who succeeds, usually through guile or with the aid of magical helpers or talking cats.

In this case, the eldest brother doesn't even take the time to complete the repeated rhythmic mantra, but directly, and with no fuss, overcomes the troll by the most direct means available: butting him into the river.

There are lessons for writers and storytellers in this story, not just lessons for children. I have often wondered what Aesop would have made of it. He was a smart man, so he would probably have thrown in the towel.

The monstrous gatekeeper addresses the injustice of feudal europe that is, sadly, hardly less present today: that a few individuals have power over critical structures or resources. This is a story that teaches that those who haven't the strength to rebel should use subterfuge to escape control, while those who do have the strength should rise up in bloody insurrection. Okay, maybe that's a bit strong, but the trope is there.

Finally, this story contains an essential staple of the fairytale, that of structural and verbal repetition. Indeed it takes the verbal repetition to a point where the children not only feel it is acceptable, but necessary, to join in. Each goat is bigger, so his feet make a louder sound, so each time the (poor) troll has to shout his challenge louder, and the balance of the defiant sound (trip-trap, trip-trap of the goat's hooves) with the troll's challenge (who's that trip-trapping over my bridge) provides the children with an advance warning of what will happen in the end.

In terms of its influence, the most obvious place is Roger Hargreaves, who frequently uses the same devices in his stories, and frequently subverts narrative convention in the same way that this story does. In Mr Tickle, the eponymous character has arms so long he can reach across more than one page. Terry Pratchett is both consciously and unconsciously influenced by this story. I suspect its legacy is very great indeed, as it tells storytellers that you can make a good story by combining strong conventions with deliberately misused conventions. It also tells us that we can, and should, be subversive in what we teach even to the very young!

Probable, reasonable, realistic — stories

2012-01-24T10:55:00.000+01:00

Supposing I set you a simple problem, that requires a little knowledge of the mathematics of probability:

A simple, discrete, independent and isolated test has two possible outcomes, A and B. The probability of each outcome when the test is run is 0.5 (one half). I run the test 10,000 times. Every time the result is A.

a) What is the probability of getting outcome A 10,000 times in a row?
b) If I run the test one more time, what is the probability of getting outcome A?

I remind you, the above is a math test question.

I think the answers are:

a) ¹/(₂10,000) (one over (two to the power ten thousand))
b) 0.5 (one half)

Now, suppose I ask you a different question:

This morning, I spent my time rather frivolously tossing an English Fifty Pence Piece. This is a standard coin minted in the UK to acceptable quality levels. It has a clearly distinguishable head and tail, and because of its shape, rarely lands stably on its edge.

I tossed the coin ten thousand times, give or take. Every time it came down heads. I was careful to vary both throw and catch height. Sometimes I allowed it to land on the floor, sometimes I threw it over my shoulder and sometimes I kept my eyes shut (to avoid quantum).

My questions are:

a) what are the chances of that happening?
b) will you take a bet of one dollar if I say that I reckon the next toss will come down heads?

***

I contend that there is only one approach, and only one answer to the mathematically expressed, theoretical question about outcomes A and B.

However, the real world example may be answered in any of three ways. Two are mutually exclusive, the third might be seen as a modified combination of the other two.

The first approach is the purely mathematical. It gives the same precise answer to a) as I gave above, and the same precise answer to b) as I gave above. Mathematically, it is correct. But I have been telling you an anecdote about a real-world event that took place this morning. Theoretical mathematics assumes that the test is subject only to the stated constraints. (In Rumsfeldian Notation, there are zero known unknowns and zero unknown unknowns.) The result is that we cannot trust the mathematical answer in the real world. Will you take the bet just because the math says that heads and tails are equally likely?

The second approach is based on what is often called The Law of Averages. This law arises from an incomprehension of the math of probability - or an attempt to infer a real world rule from a mathematical statement of probability. The Law of Averages states that if two outcomes are equally likely, then the more times you test, the more the number of times each outcome occurs will tend to equalize. It supposes, therefore, that each time I get heads, tails becomes slightly more likely in the next toss, so after 10,000 heads, tails is extremely likely. If you think like this you'll have taken the bet without hesitation. You will be just as wrong as the mathematician.

The third approach is known as induction or inductive reasoning or proof by induction. It doesn't matter too much why it is called that. In matters of repeated events, induction assumes that whatever happens most often is most likely. In real world situations, this assumption is the only approach which enables you to allow for unknown factors without even trying to know them. If you are naturally suspicious, you will already have assumed that I haven't told you everything about this mornings events, or that I am lying to you (shame on you!). Consequently you will assume you will lose your money and you won't take the bet. This is wise, but the wrong reason to refuse the bet.

If you reason from the evidence available: 10,000 reported heads; you will conclude that there is some unknown factor that is making heads much more likely. This is inductive reasoning. You use this for a whole lot of other things. It frequently gets called common sense, or intuition. In the real world, induction – evidence – is much more reliable than mathematical theory, and both are more reliable than the Law of Averages.

The Law of Averages and induction both arise from our tendency to turn everything into stories. The Law of Averages is a sort of "Story of Probability", while induction is a "story of evidence". Our ability to turn things into stories is essential in real life, where there are always huge numbers of unstated constraints - unknown unknowns. Without stories, we can't predict the future, and we need to predict the future to survive. If you don't believe this, just answer me this: do you wait until you are hungry before you eat, or do you eat at set times to avoid hunger? The former is reacting to the present, the latter is predicting the future by telling yourself a story. Probably one about a little bear who didn't eat his dinner. Which since this is my story, was probably salmon, rather than porridge. Or do bears have that for breakfast? Or was that little girls? One thing is certain. Little girls rarely eat bears. The is probably a story that convinces them not to.

I blogged recently about the chimera of Planning. Planning is also storytelling — people will judge your plan a good one if it makes a convincing story.

Much of people's behaviour is determined by which stories about the future they believe, and which they don't. Soap Opera exploits this by creating characters who constantly believe the wrong stories. The tension between the story that the character believes, and the one the audience expects, is the origin of almost all drama.

Even those of you who won't take my bet because you are suspicious are succumbing to a belief in a story that conflicts with the story I told you. The story you believe is that the coin must sometimes come down tails if both are equally likely. The mathematician will tell you this is not so, and you are a fool to believe the story. He is wrong. Conflicting stories, both of the past (evidence) and the future (expectation), are our best and strongest indicators of error, accident and misdoing.

Indeed, I did not toss a fifty pence coin 10,000 times. I do not own a fifty pence coin, and I don't have time for that sort of thing. I was telling you a story. I'm sure that's obvious by now.

What to expect from an editor #3: What to expect from me

2012-01-23T14:32:00.000+01:00

As I am planning an update of my website, I've been thinking about how I set out my stall. To this end I have been re-reading past posts that deal with my literary ideology, as well as those that deal with what I think editing is all about. By the end of this post I hope to come up with additional expectations for editors and authors.

Here are some past posts about this sort of thing. There are more, but this post is already long enough.

I have also made use of the wonderful educational tool, InspireData to help me think about how I think about editing:

Each of these diagrams shows the same set of editing "interventions" (e.g. spelling, grammar, diction, punctuation) sorted via Venn diagramming three different ways, first by general editing domain, then by the type of checks (or controls) used, and then by the origin or source of those controls.

The broad outcome of this analysis is that in my thinking, editing can be divided into four general domains, as follows:

Presentation. Presentation includes all interventions whose primary purpose is to assure and maintain readability in print. Much of this work is done by electronic typesetters (formatters). This is the expert in page layout, font and onscreen presentation. If you intend your work to be read on more than one type of device or screen, you should go to a formatter. The main work of the literary editor in this area is in aiding the author in making his choices, such as localization of spelling and punctuation, and selection and application of a consistent style and format.
Linguistic. Initially this was the domain that was hardest to define in such a way as to separate it from the others. You can see from the first diagram that nothing is solely in this category. (I could create an arbitrary intervention called "grammar" and put it there.) Linguistic interventions are all those that deal with word selection and word use, however there is significant overlap with the third domain, narrative, in features such as POV, person, tense - linguistic intervention in such cases concerns the consistent execution of these choices.

Narrative. Narrative elements of your book are based on your choices, conscious or unconscious. There are many features that appear only in this section, and those which overlap overlap with linguistic inasmuch as linguistic concerns will determine the effectiveness of your narrative techniques.
Oversight. Has no sector (since InspireData doesn't do four sector Venn diagrams). Those outside the other sectors are all ones which can be an embarrassment if they are not controlled. Practical concerns are those outside of the book itself, such as marketing and distribution. Factual is what it sounds like; authors and editors must verify information presented as fact, even in a fantasy novel. Originality deals with copyright, disclaimers and plagia (unconscious or otherwise). Inside the Narrative domain are three others subject to oversight: feasible, naturalistic, realistic. There is a close overlap between these three, but in short, feasible is concerned with whether an imagined thing is really possibly; naturalistic is concerned with trying to write events and people that occur and behave like in real life as contrasted with stories; realistic is concerned with whether the reader will be able to believe the story or indeed, suspend his disbelief.

The purpose of this analysis is not to create something new; it is to describe what I am already doing, what I have always done, and how it has evolved in the light of the indie publishing phenom.

Two major points arise from the co-evolution of indie-publishing and literary-editing-for-indie-publishing:

1. Formatters can do all the layout work. The opinion and advice of the formatter is valuable when making stylistic choices within the domain of Presentation. Editors and writers should both be aware of this.

2. While many editors will, for their own comfort or ease, or the comfort or ease of their writers, continue to apply style and format using the Chicago Manual or the Economist Guide; will continue to refer to dominant arbiters over word use and meaning, and over grammar and (especially) syntax, the author who is confident of the value and clarity of his personal preferences can ignore all authority if he wants to.

In the case of 2 above, I think that the author has a duty, and the editor a responsibility, to ensure that the author's eccentric, esoteric or merely mildly divergent choices remain consistent within a given book (so they do not confuse or alienate readers), and do not hinder clarity or accessibility.

Like never before, however, we writers and editors have an opportunity not merely to democratize publishing, but to democratize language; to celebrate regional variation; to experiment with alternative means and modes of expression. I for one feel that (f'rinstance) there are many situations where the common US and UK conventions for laying out direct speech are stifling and inflexible, and I would love to see more writers looking for something better (and simpler).

Great (and apparently, Irish) writers have in the past had to establish and fight for their own authority before being allowed to go outside the conventions (Joyce, GB Shaw). You don't have to. As long as you don't compromize comprehensibility, you don't have to compromize on your style.

So here are two additions to What to expect from an editor parts 1 and 2:

For part 1:

A good editor is aware of the greater literary freedoms that are possible with indie publishing, and will aid and encourage you to take advantage of them if you want to, but will also know how to shelter you from their uncertainties if that is what you need.

For part 2:

You can expect me to ask you if you have a preferred style manual, or what consistent style rules you apply. I will make a choice between proposing one of the commonly used conventions, that, with your agreement, we apply across the board, OR I will infer a set of personal rules for you from the choices of style and presentation that you make, and ensure that those are applied consistently.

Zombie Zeitgeist — the uncomfortable truth about why we love them so

2012-01-20T11:33:00.000+01:00

In 1951, celebrated Golden-Age Sci-Fi author Cyril Kornbluth* published in Galaxy magazine the story "The Marching Morons". In the fifties, Sci-Fi fell into two fairly narrow categories: pulp sci-fi was all about scare and schlock, alien invasions and monstrous creations. Pulp sci-fi was for the drive-in, and both catered-for and nurtured the public's fear of the strange, unknown, foreign and, of course, commie. Highbrow Sci-Fi (which later became literary SF) originated in the social sciences, indeed one of its authors (I forget who, possibly Philip Dick or even Ted Sturgeon) has claimed Sociology as the only true science. I need to go look that up as I haven't read some of these stories and essays in over twenty years. Kornbluth was resolutely in the latter camp, and if you haven't read Morons, go do so now.

Let's take a look at the first two really big Zombie Movies. These were the main influences on modern culture, with regard to the Zombie. They are the equivalent of Bram Stoker a source material for Vampires.

George A. Romero's seminal work has a small group of outsiders fighting off the numberless dead, ultimately trapped in an isolated farmhouse they are devoured one by one. The symbolism is much the same as Kafka (in The Trial or The Castle) or Camus (most notably in The Outsider). The dwindling group of survivors are you and me. The living dead are Kornbluth's Morons.

This is brought home ten times harder in Dawn, which is set principally in a shopping mall, and most of the Zs are dead shoppers.

As human animals, we have a hard time seeing strangers as actual people, and when those strangers are innumerable, they become entirely faceless, voiceless, doing nothing other than crowding us out, consuming everything, overwhelming our planet's (and our) meagre resources with no knowledge or understanding of the consequences of their existence, and worse, the consequences of their proliferation.

Zombie stories, with the exception of a few challenging and esoteric tales, fall into two broad categories. Those where there are some survivors at the end, and those where there are no survivors at the end.

In those where there are survivors, there is a certain wish fullfilment. The wish is to have the world to ourselves and our personal, carefully selected group of survivors (like Drax in Moonraker), and also to have free license to slaughter the Morons.

Those where there are no survivors are for those who can't stomach the necessary sociopathy of survival, and hence realize that the overwhelming human population will ultimately destroy the earth, itself and them.

Zombies are in the zeitgeist right now because now as never before, more and more people are aware that even if overpopulation isn't our number one problem (it is, IMO), then it is the largest, and most severe exacerbating factor. Never before have we been closer to Kornbluth's moron apocalypse.

And it will take a psychopath to save us. Good thing they're 1% of us.

______

*this name has lots of pronunciations (cornblue, cornblute, cornbluff, cornblooth, cornbluth) so take your choice

Pronunciation and Spelling — and The New Model

2012-01-17T09:59:00.000+01:00

In a FaceBook discussion about pronunciation it was recently brought home to me just how much my personal social ideology influences my choice of language, and my attitude to grammar, spelling, speech and vocabulary.

My great friend Holly posted this link: 100 Most Often Mispronounced English Words.

What I originally began reading with curiosity I soon found myself reading with horror and eventually revulsion, not at the nature of the common mistakes described, but the mockery of the poorly educated, and the arbitrary, high-handed, divisive nature of the "selection" of the "correct" pronunciation. Finally I was unable to read all the way to the 100th entry as I happened across more and more examples of entirely unresearched words, of which for me the worst offender was the claim that we should say "in paretheses" not "in parenthesis"*.

Obviously if you read my post on The New Model, you will understand that I object to the notion of "correct grammar" as it is understood by most people. In brief: grammar exists to allow specialists and enthusiastic amateurs to describe language to eachother. It does not provide a set of rules that everyone must follow in order to use language "correctly". In even briefer: grammar is descriptive, not prescriptive.

In the 1920's, the British Upper Classes (which still existed in recognizable form back then), in a deliberate effort to distinguish themselves both from the British proletariat and from the upstart ex-colonial rebels (um... if you're American, that's you), altered their own pronunciation of English. It was viewed at the time as a natural progression of an ongoing process of "refining" the language, particularly since the English spoken in North America had changed so little in the preceding hundred years. Yes, I am saying that US English is more authentic than British English. Americans would do well to realize this. Authentic because you didn't deliberately try to change your language so that you could more easily identify and preserve artificial social differences.

Parents and teachers are of course absolutely correct when they say that if your child doesn't learn to use his language in the way that is commonly accepted as correct or proper, that this will be a disadvantage for your child, whose intellect will be judged on his vocabulary, diction and pronunciation (what we call "articulacy"), not on his knowledge or skill.

Sadly, in trying to prepare children for this kind of injustice, we perpetuate the injustice.

Even if the list referenced above was prepared by someone whose motivation was to help people in North America to be viewed and responded to (and judged) fairly by those around them, what it really does is tell people that they are wrong. I believe, however, that there is little grounds to be generous when inferring the motivations of the writer. Many of the distinctions are true only in middle-class North America. Many are specious. Many are spurious. Many are plain wrong. But a much larger proportion are examples either from dialect, or from different variants of English. The reality of everyday life in a North American city is that there are many varying pronunciations, whose origins are both from different regions of North America, and from different regions of the world.

In such conditions there is not, and there will never be agreed, common, immutable correct pronunciation. Pronunciation will change and continue to change, faster than grammar, faster than spelling, faster, even, than meaning. And it will continue (as it always has) to radiate - to split and separate, as one generation distinguishes itself from the last, as one socio-economic group distinguishes itself from another, as one ideology distinguishes itself from another.

So what does The New Model have to offer to pronunciation: simply this:

to be heard, we must learn to listen

People who live in multi/polycultural (and multi-lingual) communities learn very rapidly to modulate their speech to match the expectations of the person they are speaking to. This is critical to articulacy, and it is achieved through a careful balance of talking and listening. If you have a hard time making yourself understood (and this is as true in the street, in the classroom, in the home, in the debate chamber, in the courtroom, in the newsroom), you have to stop talking and get the other guy to talk. And then you have to listen. Nothing will get you understood faster or more clearly than listening.

If this sounds like a koan, then I need to add a bit more:

The consequence of listening is twofold: first, it gives you a handle on how the other guy talks; how he expresses himself and how he understands his own words. Second, it will give you a view of his attitude. Attitude is way more important than opinion. Attitude is how you approach your own opinions and the opinion of others. You can't even begin to make yourself understood if you have no idea of how your opinion will be received. So you have to give it in small bites and see how each bite is received.

I'm not overly good at this. But I try.

I know there are people reading this because I look at the stats. You guys have to comment now. Otherwise I can't listen, and those of you who think my pontifications are introspective ego trips (while partly correct) will continue to think so indefinitely.

___

* In case you can't be bothered to look it up yourself, 'a parenthesis' is a word or group of words inserted into another clause, phrase or sentence, indicated by punctuation, most commonly the round bracket (curved or normal bracket, what this parenthesis is in). The name of the punctuation mark is "bracket" or "round bracket".

Mental Competence #5: Smart

2012-01-13T10:14:00.000+01:00

Although used much more North America than in the UK and other parts of the ESW, smart is nonetheless a frequent alternative to both clever and intelligent, but its meaning is not quite the same; usage seems to be more about some innate quality, and has some similarity with bright (used much more in the UK) – on which more later.

Webster:

4
a : mentally alert : bright
b : knowledgeable
c : shrewd <a smart investment>
5
a : witty, clever <a smart sitcom>
b : pert, saucy <don't get smart with me>

7
a : being a guided missile <a laser-guided smart bomb>
b : operating by automation <a smart machine tool>
c : intelligent 3

Wiktionary:

smart (comparative smarter, superlative smartest)

2. Sharp; keen; poignant.
3. Exhibiting social ability or cleverness.
4. Exhibiting intellectual knowledge, such as that found in books.
5. Good-looking.
a smart outfit
6. Cleverly and/or sarcastically humorous in a way that may be rude and disrespectful. Cf: (verb) to smart off; (noun) smarty pants, wise guy, wiseacre, wise-ass; (adjective) cute.
He became tired of his daughter's sarcasm and smart remarks.

Urban Dictionary:

Here are the first two definitions:

1. smart 1698 up, 279 down
Knowledgeable, witty, or intelligent. Not a popular thing to be in America these days.

2. smart 1465 up, 497 down
The opposite of George W. Bush.
'George W. Bush is so not smart.'

I included the TU and TD stats because it is rare in UD for a non obscene term to get more than 1000 TU's. The users and contributors to UD were, to start with, mostly rebellious teenagers, but clearly a number of them have both social and political sensibilities!

Webster's definition is really not very helpful. I have only included those definitions that denote types of mental competence. Definition 7, quite an important one IMO, is missing from Wiktionary, whose definition is as confused and disordered as you might expect for a problem word like this. Definitions 2 and 6 really ought to be together, as 6 is a figurative use of 2. Compare 3 and 4 with the definitions I've already given on clever and intelligent. Defininitions of mental competence tend to be rather circular!

UD's first definition is pretty good, since the most generalized usage of smart is as a generic term for mental competence:

"He's a smart guy!" Bob exclaimed.

"Smart clever or smart intelligent?" Alice inquired.

Here's the etymology from the highly esteemed Douglas Harper:

late O.E. smeart "sharp, severe, stinging," related to smeortan (see smart (v.)). Meaning "quick, active, clever" is attested from c.1300, probably from the notion of "cutting" wit, words, etc.; meaning "trim in attire" first attested 1718, "ascending from the kitchen to the drawing-room c.1880." [Weekley] In ref. to devices, "behaving as though guided by intelligence" (e.g. smart bomb) first attested 1972. Smarts "good sense, intelligence," is first recorded 1968. Smart cookie is from 1948; smarty-pants first attested 1941.

There is an alternative etymology but it differs little, for our purposes. The distant origin seems to be a Proto-Indo-European root (smel-) which has to do with burning. The Latin word acer means keen (in the sense of sharp), sharp, quick, swift, and is often used figuratively of a person to mean that he is "quick witted" or clever. This usage of words for sharpness, hotness, stinging or speed as figurative terms for mental competence (especially in social or other high-stress situations) is common to all the languages I know (c.f. the expression "so sharp you'll cut yourself".). This means that the modern sense that you find in Wiktionary's definition 6, smartarse (smart-ass in US English) is probably closest to early uses for mental competence.

However, as I suggested above, modern usage in North America is (outside of the idioms smart-ass, smart cookie, etc) is generally as a generic term, or to single someone or some group out from the others for general mental ability, aside from learning or cleverness:

"I wasn't one of the smart kids." Bob bewailed.

Thinking of your character as smart is not setting him apart in the same way that wise, or clever would, however. Smartness, when applied as a description of a person becomes a description of a personality, as well; the association with being smartly dressed gives the impression of someone whose mental competence includes discipline, and order. Contrast with intuitive, instinctive. A smart guy is a useful, go-to guy when you have a problem, but he isn't overloaded with brains, and won't, therefore, spend months being "fascinated" by a problem that you need a solution for within the next sixty minutes.

Mental competence #4: Wisdom

2012-01-10T14:46:00.000+01:00

This one is less of a problem for some, more a problem for others. Memorably, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™ reduces all mental capacity to a score out of 18 for Intelligence and for Wisdom. Intelligence is usually used for learned or technical matters and wisdom for innate or homely. If you view things this way you'll rarely have a problem with wisdom, but not everyone sees things that way.

Webster:

1
a : accumulated philosophic or scientific learning : knowledge
b : ability to discern inner qualities and relationships : insight
c : good sense : judgment
d : generally accepted belief <challenges what has become accepted wisdom among many historians — Robert Darnton>
2
: a wise attitude, belief, or course of action
3
: the teachings of the ancient wise men

Wiktionary:

wisdom (countable and uncountable; plural wisdoms)

(uncountable) An element of personal character that enables one to distinguish the wise from the unwise.
(countable) A piece of wise advice.
The discretionary use of knowledge for the greatest good.
The ability to apply relevant knowledge in an insightful way, especially to different situations from that in which the knowledge was gained.
The ability to make a decision based on the combination of knowledge, experience, and intuitive understanding.
(theology) The ability to know and apply spiritual truths.

Urban Dictionary:

Wisdom is knowing what you know as well as what you dont know.
Wisdom is not not simply knowing what to do, but doing it.
Many people will without invitation offer their "words of wisdom", wise people realise when it is not their time or place to do so.
A wise person does not think less of another who chooses not to follow their advice.
Wisdom is not undermining a person for their weaknesses, but appreciating their strengths differ from yours.

Webster, usually terse, is almost monosyllabic on this one. It asks us to choose between either knowledge (see the etymology), insight and judgement. Wiktionary, after making the correct references to "wise", certainly gives us something to think about. I think Wiktionary's offering #5 may be the most revealing. UD fails to supply a definition in the conventional sense at all. Indeed none of the other attempts (further down the same page: "wisdom" - UD) does any better.

I'm going straight to Doug; "wisdom" is formed from "wise", so here's what he has to say about "wise":

O.E. wis, from P.Gmc. *wisaz (cf. O.S., O.Fris. wis, O.N. viss, Du. wijs, Ger. weise "wise"), from pp. adj. *wittos of PIE base *weid- "to see," hence "to know" (see vision). Slang meaning "aware, cunning" first attested 1896. Related to the source of O.E. witan "to know, wit."

A wise man has no extensive knowledge; He who has extensive knowledge is not a wise man. [Lao-tzu, "Tao te Ching," c.550 B.C.E.]

Wise guy is attested from 1896, Amer.Eng. Wisenheimer, with mock German or Yiddish surname suffix, first recorded 1904.

As you can see, the etymology offers little help. Wise comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root as vision, and just means "knowing stuff". Doug's inclusion of a quotation from the Tao shows that he too is aware of some mystery, or at the very least, mystification of the idea of "wisdom".

It is my contention that we all observe, both in others and in ourselves, the occasional evidence of good or insightful judgement, in the absense, or at the very least paucity, of prior or learned knowledge. There seem to be situations and problems that we can deal with without recourse to trained intelligence. We call those who are able to do this wise. We observe that wisdom is more often found in older people, even though it evidently isn't an inevitable consequence of ageing. So we conclude that some people, through experience, become more wise over time.

I suggest that a great deal of what wisdom is has to do with the experience of being human, and being social. Much of what we call wisdom has to do with understanding other people and understanding how people behave as individuals and as groups. With this understanding comes the knowledge of how to handle difficult social situations, an, especially, how to pass-on both knowledge and wisdom to others.

When you describe (or even just think of) one of your characters as "wise", not only are you opening yourself up to a slew of highly subjective challenges ("you said that guy was wise; what he just did doesn't seem very wise to me."), but also obliging the reader to wonder what you meant by wise, yourself. This is, IMO, one of those cases where you need to show what the character says, and/or does and/or thinks, and let the reader come up with the description "wise" on his own.

Feel free to comment with your definitions of wise without copy/pasting from an online dictionary that I didn't use!

Mental Competence #3: cunning

2012-01-09T12:12:00.002+01:00

In this post I shall be using a word that is considered offensive even in the citation by some. Consequently I have added the tag "NSFW" to the post, but I have not labelled it "adult", as that doesn't conform to my view that it is impossible to give offense, only to take it, and that those that mind don't matter. This said, in the interests of everyone being able to access this, the word itself is included in an image, not in the text, so your filters won't catch it.

I apologise if my use of this word provokes you to take offense. If it does, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.

Today's word is "cunning". Luckily in modern English, the noun and the adj. are the same.

Webster:

1
: dexterous or crafty in the use of special resources (as skill or knowledge) or in attaining an end <a cunning plotter>
2
: displaying keen insight <a cunning observation>
3
: characterized by wiliness and trickery <cunning schemes>
4
: prettily appealing : cute <a cunning little kitten>

Wiktionary:

cunning (comparative more cunning, superlative most cunning)
1. Sly; crafty; clever in surreptitious behaviour.
2. Skillful, artful.
3. (rare) Cute, appealing.

Urban Dictionary:

A word to describe someone or sometimes something that's tricky, devious, sly or shady

"I'd stay away from that cunning chap..he's pretty weird"

UD, gloriously celebrates the shortest possible definition. Its example is characteristically oblique, however. Notice that the resolutely US Webster doesn't call its fourth definition "rare". This usage was common for a while in the mid C20, mostly in the USA. I know of one specific example of this usage in a Judy Garland song... I forget which song (c.f. cute). Also notice that Webster puts third what the other two put first. This is rather conservative of them.

Here's Doug Harper:

early 14c., "learned, skillful," prp. of cunnen "to know" (see can (v.)). Sense of "skillfully deceitful" is probably late 14c. As a noun from c.1300. Related: Cunningly.

Here's what Doug says about can:

O.E. 1st & 3rd pers. sing. pres. indic. of cunnan "know, have power to, be able," (also "to have carnal knowledge"), from P.Gmc. *kunnan "to be mentally able, to have learned" (cf. O.N. kenna "to know, make known," O.Fris. kanna "to recognize, admit," Ger. kennen "to know," Goth. kannjan "to make known"), from PIE base *gno- (see know). Absorbing the third sense of "to know," that of "to know how to do something" (in addition to "to know as a fact" and "to be acquainted with" something or someone). An O.E. preterite-present verb, its original p.p., couth, survived only in its negation (see uncouth), but cf. could. The prp. has spun off as cunning.

Here, about canny

1630s, Scottish and northern England formation from can (v.) in its sense of "know how to;" lit. "knowing," hence, "careful." Often used superciliously of Scots by their southern neighbors, implying "thrift and an eye to the main chance."

(Canny continues to be used in Scotland and the North of England, of someone with specialist knowledge or the particular knowledge required for a specific act or skill. It is also used as a purely positive variant for cunning. Usage is much rarer in southern England.)

There are a couple of important things to note about "can". First is that we can trace it to the (imaginary/theoretical) language "Proto-Indo-European". It is directly related to "know". The second is the first hint at an extremely long standing phonic and cognitive relationship with another lineage of words that I give here:

The last word in this set is "quaint", which Webster defines as follows:

1
obsolete : expert, skilled
2
a : marked by skillful design <quaint with many a device in India ink — Herman Melville>
b : marked by beauty or elegance
3
a : unusual or different in character or appearance : odd
b : pleasingly or strikingly old-fashioned or unfamiliar <a quaint phrase>

Doug Harper gives the etymology as follows:

early 13c., "cunning, proud, ingenious," from O.Fr. cointe "pretty, clever, knowing," from L. cognitus "known," pp. of cognoscere "get or come to know well" (see cognizance). Sense of "old-fashioned but charming" is first attested 1795, and could describe the word itself, which had become rare after c.1700 (though it soon recovered popularity in this secondary sense). Chaucer used quaint and queynte as spellings of c*seeabove*t in "Canterbury Tales" (c.1386), and Andrew Marvell may be punning on it similarly in "To His Coy Mistress" (1650).

Deliberate punning, in addition to the similarity of sound and meaning between can, coney, cunny, canny, cunning, c**t and quaint, have all contributed to the modern meaning of cunning, in particular the sense of slyness and unpredictability, fickleness.

Choosing cunning to establish your character, especially if you prefer it over clever, will lead your reader to feel that this character, while able and skillful, is skillful in deceit and trickery rather than ingenuity or machinery (c.f. machination).

There are examples of heroes who are supremely deceitful but remain sympathetic (one thinks of "Fantastic Mr Fox"), but most are more ambivalent; indeed the most famous, Brer Rabbit often seems to be cunning for the sheer joy of the discomfiture of his opponents, and his gleeful humiliations of Brer Bear and Brer Fox can and do become schadenfreude.

The classical example is Odysseus (Ulysses). Critically, however, Odysseus is a strong and skillful warrior who is counted among the battlefield heroes of the Greeks; he possesses great skill in deceit, but uses it only when it is needed, rather than using it for preference (to compensate for physical weakness) or for his own entertainment (as Brer Rabbit seems to).

Cunning when your character uses it as a tool of necessity will not make readers (and other characters) distrustful of him.

Mental Competence #2: clever

2012-01-08T13:19:00.002+01:00

I started with the noun, intelligence because the adjective intelligent is formed from the noun. With clever, the reverse is true, the noun, not often used, is cleverness.

Webster:

1

a : skillful or adroit in using the hands or body : nimble <clever fingers>

b : mentally quick and resourceful <a clever young lawyer>

: marked by wit or ingenuity <a clever solution> <a clever idea>

Wiktionary:

clever (comparative cleverer or more clever, superlative cleverest or most clever)

Nimble with hands or body; skillful; adept.
Resourceful, sometimes to the point of cunning. clever like a fox
Smart, intelligent or witty; mentally quick or sharp.
Showing inventiveness or originality; witty.

Urban Dictionary

Describing someone smart, intelligent or witty, opposite of dumb
''man he's really clever!''

Doug Harper is terse, but does throw in a quote from Dr Johnson:

late 16c., "handy, dexterous," from E.Anglian dialectal cliver "expert at seizing," perhaps from E.Fris. klufer or Norwegian dialectic klover "ready, skillful," and perhaps influenced by O.E. clifer "claw, hand" (early usages seem to refer to dexterity); extension to intellect is first recorded 1704.

'This is a low word, scarcely ever used but in burlesque or conversation; and applied to any thing a man likes, without a settled meaning.' [Johnson, 1755]

Evidently, in the C.18, the word had become rather like "nice". In some parts of the ESW (English-speaking-world) the meaning has reverted back to that of dextrous, and you will certainly hear this in both UK and US in phrases like "clever with her hands". Once it became a term for mental competence, it certainly seemed to have preserved for a long time the sense of dexterity or careful skill. It is possible that this meaning arose an association with the word cleave which in the late middle ages was pronounced somewhere close to 'clave/clahver'; this word had two distinct and logically opposite meanings. Here's Doug on cleave:

Cleave (1): "to split," O.E. cleofan "to split, separate" (class II strong verb, past tense cleaf, past participle clofen), from P.Gmc. *kleubanan (cf. O.S. klioban, O.N. kljufa, Dan. klöve, Du. kloven, O.H.G. klioban, Ger. klieben "to cleave, split"), from PIE base *gleubh- "to cut, slice" (see glyph). Past tense form clave is recorded in Northern writers from 14c. and was used with both verbs (see cleave (2)), apparently by analogy with other ME strong verbs. Clave was common to c.1600 and still alive at the time of the King James Bible; weak past tense cleaved for this verb also emerged in 14c.; cleft is still later. The p.p. cloven survives, though mostly in compounds.

Cleave (2): "to adhere," O.E. clifian, from W.Gmc. *klibajanan (cf. O.S. klibon, O.H.G. kliban, Du. kleven, O.H.G. kleben, Ger. kleben "to stick, cling"), from PIE *gloi- "to stick" (see clay). The confusion was less in O.E. when cleave (1) was a class 2 strong verb; but it has grown since cleave (1) weakened, which may be why both are largely superseded by stick and split.

In figurative language there are (allegedly) some examples of cleave being used in the sense of taking a decision, either as "choosing between two options" (cleave (1)) or "picking a side" (cleave(2)). Both of these are plausible, but I haven't been able to track down any positive examples of this.

In any case, this "decisional capacity" doesn't seem to be a major element of the modern sense of clever. In modern English, unless we are using the vague sense that the top TU'd entry in UD so precisely gives, most usage seems to be related to skill or quickness.

Use of clever when establishing a character will, therefore, give the reader a sense that the person has quick mental reactions, and skill with tricky or highly detailed problems – especially in terms of coming up with ingenious or original solutions in situations where others are too slow or at a loss. This can occasionally be taken too far, for example the invention of a gadget that while effective and ingenious is unnecessary – or making a remark that may be apposite, but is facetious rather than helpful, and is met with cries of: "Oh very clever!"

_____

Sharp readers will notice that I have used the US spelling of skillful – this is deliberate. I think the UK spelling is silly. I have also used my own spelling rule for dextrous. I drop the letter 'e' when it is it is between two consonants in a word where 90% or more of the ESW pronounce the word without adding a syllable for the 'e'. Bear in mind that if you publish independently you can normalize spelling with impunity AS LONG AS IT ISN'T TOO GLARING. English is spelled horribly, and we can change that. We just have to be really gentle about it. :-)

Words for mental competence - clever, cunning, intelligent,wise etc.

2012-01-07T10:42:00.000+01:00

A fascinating set of words, as they are in common use all the time, have changed very little since their earliest recorded usage, but we seldom differentiate clearly between them, and it is our loss. There are different types and different scales of mental competence, and different people (and therefore for writers, different characters) have differing degrees of competence in each of this group of skills or characteristics.

I'm going to start with what Webster, Wiktionary and the most TU'd entry in Urban Dictionary have to say about the modern meanings, starting with today's offering:

1. Intelligence

Webster:

(1) : the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations : reason; also : the skilled use of reason
(2) : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests).

Wiktionary:

Capacity of mind, especially to understand principles, truths, facts or meanings, acquire knowledge, and apply it to practice; the ability to learn and comprehend.

Urban Dictionary:

Something severely lacking on Urban Dictionary, for god sake at least know what you're talking about before you post a load of crap on here.

The eiffel tower was built by eskimos as a present for Jesus!11!! He then changed his name to Bob Dylan and formed an emo band!1!

No form of intelligence was used in the above statement, but you'll probably believe it because you read it on the internet.

The highly esteemed Doug Harper has this to say:

late 14c., "faculty of understanding," from [Old French] intelligence (12c.), from [Latin] intelligentia, intellegentia "understanding, power of discerning; art, skill, taste," from intelligentem (nom. intelligens) "discerning," prp. of intelligere "to understand, comprehend," from inter- "between" (see inter-) + legere "choose, pick out, read" (see lecture). Meaning superior understanding, sagacity" is from early 15c. Sense of "information, news" first recorded mid-15c., especially "secret information from spies" (1580s). Intelligence quotient first recorded 1921 (see I.Q.).

It is not always the case, but I think the key to differentiating intelligence from the others is in the etymology. Because of its evident Latinness, the word tastes newer in the mouth than solid Germanic terms like wise or canny, but you'll notice that it has hardly changed from classical Latin, and probably dates from the earliest common usage of words meaning to read.

The type of mental competence implied - indeed intended in classical Latin - is one that is learned, book-learned, but goes beyond the mere absorbing of information through the sense of inter – among, between. Intelligence is the capacity to read-into things, people, events; to see beyond or between appearance to what underlies it. Intelligence requires the capacity to learn quickly, and to observe detail. When we talk about the critical sense, about reading-between-the-lines, about subtext, we are talking about intelligence. Intelligence may be necessary in order to be subtle (another mental competence that I shall be dealing with).

Of all the types of mental competence, intelligence is the one most associated with formal learning, academia, but a lack of formal learning needn't hamper intelligence, only articulacy, and therefore, possibly, the ability to act on, or analyse, information acquired through intelligent observation.

When establishing a character, the writer should be aware that the adj. intelligent will give the reader an impression of bookishness or of effete, obscure or reserved "higher" mental ability. It is the least homely of this group of words, probably both because of its Latin character, and its close association with reading.

___

Tomorrow I shall take a look at clever.

Warning! Part Two.

2012-01-06T11:13:00.000+01:00

That is the same image as yesterday. Just to be on the safe side.

Let's start with WARNING.

This is from Old West Germanic, and means, predictably enough, a warning. OWG is the source of English, Dutch and German, but notice that modern German (D) just uses ACHTUNG ("watch-out"-ing). Dutch seems to have lost the "n" somewhere. Swedish (S) is speaking English, Finnish and Czech look as if they might be too…

Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Romanian and Slovakall seem to be using the same latin root "vert" - "warn". Not surprising for E, P I and RO. French, of course, has to be different, and is using a different Latin root "tend" - to reach towards.

The Greek, Polish and Hungarian are both Greek to me. The Turkish (TR) may well be the same as English.

The next word is "years".

Dominant are the German "Jahr" and the Latin "Annus":

jahren, years, år, jaar, (yasindan and éves may be related)
annos, anni, ani, años

Polish and Slovakshare roku and rokov, though lat is also used in Polish (e.g. pięciolatek - a five-year-old, and Sto Lat! a popular Song, meaning 100 years), and is the same as let used here in Czech. Finnish, Hungarian's main competition for uniqueness is the winner here.

Next up, "child".

The English word has no modern relatives but can be traced back through English to "Proto-Germanic" (P.Gmc), an imagined common ancestor of the Germanic languages. So for once, English wins the uniqueness prize. Languages generally find their most and least unique words in their most commonly used words - which is why this warning notice is such a special case. In almost all these languages, the most familiar terms possible are used. Even French has a hard time being wordy, pompous and obscure.

The German word kinder is the plural of kind, meaning child. This is also traced back to P.Gmc, but not unique as the English words kin (family) and kind (of a type) are both direct descendants of the same P.Gmc root, and indeed closer to its original meaning of "blood relative". Dutch uses the same word.

The French enfant is the English word infant, both of them come from Latin infans which means (figuratively) small child and literally means "not having yet acquired the power of speech". Spanish and Italian have recently (for languages, at any rate), replaced the use of this word with infantile diminutives: niños and bambinos, though forms persist with the meaning "childhood".

Portuguese uses crianças - which I can translate into French (nourrisson) but English is trickier.

Czech and Slovak share the slav det - which is also the root of the Russian word.

Swedish, Danish and Norwegian all use variations of barn. The Scottish word bairn and the English words bear and born are all from the same root, which comes, again, from P.Gmc, this time a word meaning to carry, bear, give birth to.

Some curiosities.

S, DK and N all share små - small. Pronounced "smor".

The Dutch for "Younger than three years" is jonger dan drie jaar. Just say it aloud (the 'j', is pronounced as an English 'y').

___

All this to show just how much time I can end up spending whenever I mark up my client's manuscript with that little code "ic". This stands for inconceivable.

"Are you sure it doesn't/does mean that, really?" they ask me, in defence of inconceivable usage. So I have to go trawling through current usage and etymology and whatnot, before either concluding YKB (you know best) or OYHBI (on your head be it).

Warning! Language can waste your time!

2012-01-05T10:49:00.000+01:00

In my opinion, I don't need to tell you what the picture is all about. Most of those translations are pretty good. I know this because they conform to standards, not because I know most of those languages. I can translate well or adequately from eight of them into English. Of the others, I can translate badly and very slowly from a further three.

Okay, that came out wrong. I was trying to be self deprecating but it actually just looks immodest. Let me try to explain why I can do what I can do.

My mother is trilingual in English, French and Italian, so although I wasn't formally raised multilingual, I've always had a familiarity with the second two of those languages. At school, I studied (among other things) French, Italian, Latin and Russian. Today I live and work in France, my wife is French and my children are formally bilingual.

These factors lead to several of these languages being readily accessible, as follows:

(British English) and (French, France) because I read and write in these every day. Not very interesting that one…

E (Spanish), P (Portuguese), I (Italian) and RO (Romanian) because they are all direct descendants of Latin (romance languages), and share most of their structure and most of their vocabulary. They are more curious in their differences than their similarities. We could add to this list BG (Bulgarian) which is usually written in cyrillic (Russian) characters, and although it "belongs" to the slavic group of indo-european languages is actually so stuffed full of romance vocabulary that translation into English is relatively straightforward.

DK (Danish) and (N) Dutch share a great deal of vocabulary with eachother and with English. Dutch often sounds like English spoken with a strong accent. Once you've got to grips with the spellings and diacritics (accents), these two start to reveal themselves, though I can't do either without a dictionary, even for relatively short sentences.

D (German) is my problem language. In spite of its obvious similarities with English and Dutch, and the presence of some of the most beautiful and the ugliest words I know, I have a hard time understanding written german. ERSTICKUNGSGEFAHR is a lovely word. It means "the presence of a risk of getting stuck".

H (Hungarian). My maternal grandmother was Hungarian, and when I hear it spoken it sounds familiar, and I can even read it aloud with passably correct pronunciation, however with the exception of the few words that I learned as a small child, I can't translate it at all. In the text, I know három éves is 'three years' as my grandmother used to count aloud in Hungarian, and add up aloud too during card games, though eventually she had to stop doing this as my sisters and I started to work out what the numbers meant.

PL (Polish). I can, very slowly, translate Polish as it has strong links with Russian, though it is structurally weird (though not as impenetrable as Hungarian).

So this has turned into a sort of ego-massaging biographical post, when I meant to spend it looking at the curious similarities and differences between the languages listed on the warning notice.

The point about the title of this post is I suppose that I spent an enjoyable half hour reading the warning notice from a box of Christmas crackers, with much the same pleasure that you get from doing a crossword puzzle or watching Mastermind or University Challenge*.

I also spent an hour this morning researching this post, and I will likely spend more than that tomorrow, going into the details of each language.

A number of linguistics scholars have published the opinion, and I suspect it is an idea that develops in everyone who is multilingual eventually, that there is really only one language in Europe, and around the world, only a small handful of languages in all. This thought would be more readily accessible to all had not the early twentieth century passion for national identity cause so many nations to pursue and reinforce their differences.

____

* Maybe someone can tell me what the US equivalents of these are

On the Feast of Stephen

2011-12-27T12:52:00.000+01:00

Today is Saint Stephen's day. As a teaser and a technology test for the readings and tellings I will be doing next year, I have recorded a little Stephen's day treat: my short story, Good King Wenceslas.

I have a slight head cold, so my accent is a little posher than usual, but don't let that bother you. I'm also trying out different editing software and some fancy camera features. Try to ignore the artefacts that arise from this. If necessary, shut your eyes.

Planning is a waste of time

2011-12-26T15:03:00.002+01:00

I have been asked to justify a remark I tweeted recently, and farbeit from me to refuse an excuse to blog, here goes:

I stated that "Planning is the worst waste of time ever invented". Some people think that this is a little unfair, but it may be worth stating that this comes from the mouth of a trained and experienced project-manager, who has worked in the highly regulated and highly documented world of clinical trials, who today works in the entirely unregulated though equally documented world of literary fiction.

In project management, Project Plans exist for one reason and one reason only: to convince those with the money to part with it, and fund the project.

In warfare, battle plans exist for one reason and one reason only: to dispose your troops on the field in such a way that they will cause as much difficulty to the enemy as possible. In modern warfare, there are no battle plans, since modern warfare has a much more civilized aim, namely to bring every confrontation to as swift a conclusion as possible.

Planning whose purpose is to decide what to do, and in what order, is strictly for novices - and a necessary part of the learning process.

(Even the logistics of the quantity surveyor are concerned with satisfying a consensus as to requirements, such that all parties submitting a tender will base their prices on the same set of materials; however when it comes to undertaking construction, the actual materials purchased and consumed will not be identical to the quantities specified by the QS.)

"Whenever a truly complex and difficult situation presents itself, the people with the money will always want quantification of the cost and the time needed to deal with it."

This is axiomatic in so many fields of endeavour today that a whole consultancy industry has grown up around the practice and principles of quantification before the fact. The promise of such quantification is to tell you exactly what is needed in terms of time and materials, and hence in terms of money, before you commit to beginning activity.

But any project is (as the etymology implies) an act of anticipation - of throwing yourself into the future. And it is akin to packing for a family holiday. Often akin to packing for a family holiday in the north of England.

You have a fixed, limited amount of space in the car, and you can be certain of some of your needs (like a change of underwear), but much, much less certain of your other needs, especially in terms of outer clothing. If every seat is occupied, is it even possible for everyone to bring everything he needs, let alone everything he might need.

Now most people, very sensibly, don't sit around a whiteboard brainstorming, before producing a twenty-page risk analysis, and a detailed list of items that each person is bringing ranked in order of priority-by-volume.

There are a number of reasons why they don't do this, but the primary reason is that it is not necessary. The fundamental reason for why it is not necessary is the same in every situation where risk is quantified and qualified, whether formally or otherwise:

The only future events likely to cause real difficulties are those that are impossible to anticipate.

By definition, you haven't thought of them in advance, and have done nothing to mitigate them. Any risks that you are capable of anticipating, you will already have acted to reduce. In real world project management, an "emergency fund" is set aside and ringfenced 'for the unexpected only'. These are the future events that test the success of any undertaking, and on which hang the success.

That is why a successful project depends much more on the experience of the people involved than on the thoroughness of the planning.

This doesn't - or shouldn't - turn preparation for future events into a dark art. If anything, it should turn it into an educational experience. Wherever possible, when mounting a project, the person with the main responsibility should look to involve people of varying levels of experience, so that all can learn both from eachother, and from any novel or unanticipated incidents or accidents that occur. As such, you continuously create people with the skills and experience necessary for future undertakings.

Well all have an extraordinary ability to create stories about future events, telling them to ourselves, in order to better prepare both for the expected and the unexpected. The storytelling urge that drives so many people to write fiction is a natural extension, sandbox and playground for this, our most important survival tool.

This is why when I do project mentoring (which I still do from time to time), I encourage all members of the project team to sit down somewhere comfortable, and tell eachother the story of the project as if they were telling a bedtime fairytale.

___

I really can turn almost anything into a discussion of storytelling.

The Poet Trap

2011-12-15T13:06:00.000+01:00

When an author says to me:

"The main character in my next book is a Physicist at CERN; the problem is: I don't know anything about the physics that is done at CERN,"

You can imagine the alarm bells ring. A persistent member of the "Writing Advice Top 10" is Write about what you know. It is, this good advice notwithstanding, my observation that a writer with sufficient skill can convince his readers that a character is a genuine nuclear physicist even though the writer has even less knowledge than, for example, a press officer for British Nuclear Power.

How do you convince the reader? You only need go so far as to say that your character is a physicist and holds a senior position at CERN and other characters treat him as if this is so. The writer can spoof all kinds of skills and expertise in this way, because the reader is never going to challenge him on it, for purely practical reasons.

A writer can go so far as to invent a character who is himself a far more talented and celebrated author than his creator. How? By just saying so. No reader is going to ask to read the character's books. In the same way, the writer can invent a demon violinist or the greatest composer the world has ever seen. To convince the reader all he has to do is convey the experience of listening to the music to the reader, or (more detached still), describe the consequences of listening to it; crowds of adoring fans, squaddies and schoolteachers in tears, and whatnot.

I admit that the last couple of examples require a certain skill. But this is a skill in writing, a skill that I tend to assume any writer is pursuing.

The poet, however, is a trap.

It is the very nature of poetry that the experience of poetry can only be communicated by the poetry itself. Go on, find someone who has never heard the 18th Sonnet, and try to convey the feelings it evokes without using either any words or any images from it.

I think there are very few fictional poets for exactly this reason. You have to be an outstanding poet to write a poet character because there is neither any excuse for giving no examples, nor any way to convince the reader that the character is a poet other than by showing his work. Racine managed it. Hugo managed it*. It took giants of technique and inspiration to convince readers that their characters were passable poets. Perhaps the most internationally famous example is the character of Cyrano de Bergerac in the play by Rostand. Not that Rostand's work is extraordinary - but since it is written entirely in rhyming couplets, we can easily accept that both writer and character are competent at poetry.

It even takes a certain skill to write bad, mediocre or otherwise indifferent poetry. It did occur to me that you might have some other character remark:

"The say the fellow is the greatest poet of his generation but if he is he's damn discreet about it. I've yet to hear so much as a troche."

However I fear all this will do is whet the reader's appetite all the more. Even if the damn poet is the victim (i.e. already dead at the start), his Eratian credentials still have to be established somehow.

I suppose the canniest author might make a selection of contemporary anonymous poetry and claim it as the work of his fictional character. That's the kind of devious thinking that you need from an editor, in any case.

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* At least, I'm pretty sure he did. But I can't find the reference and it's making me crazy. Please let me know if you know which character I'm thinking of. Please.

"What King?" — "Any king!"

2011-12-09T09:27:00.001+01:00

In typical self-deprecating style, Damon Courtney writes to ask me about my sloppy editing of his capitalizations, as follows:

What are the rules on capitalization when someone refers to someone else not by their name but by some other name? Such as:

"Yes, Master."

or

"Yes, My Dear."

Somewhere in my mind I want to capitalize those cases, but I'm not sure if that's right. You didn't note them in your copyedit, but there are some places I didn't do that, and you didn't note those either. So, either it doesn't matter, or I'm doing it wrong one way or the other.

Notice that it doesn't occur to Damon that I might have missed an error or (even worse) an inconsistency. Leaving aside the matter of undue deference to the editor, my reply is below. Check out my awesome UK punctuation mojo in the quotations. If there is clamour, I might blog about that later.

It doesn't really matter all that much, because it's almost impossible to infer a consistent set of rules for capitalization in English. If you go back to the 1930s, you'll find that anything that can defensibly be called a proper noun gets capitalized, and anything else isn't. The classic example is:

"Did you hear that? He called her 'darling'."

and

"Since it's what they call one-another, we all call them Darling and Dearest."

The idea is that in the first, we are just referring to a term of endearment, whereas in the second, we are declaring common assent to naming. Today, capitalization of titles, especially "honorifics" (commonly assented but not always formal or legal titles) is very varied. I'm reminded of the Buddhist schoolteacher who remarked "Many call me master but none call me Master.".

In your second example, you should capitalize in either of two cases: "My Dear" is the only form of address used by the speaker to his interlocutor, OR "My Dear" is being used in a special way in this single instance, for instance as sarcasm.

Bear in mind that the strict 1930's rule takes no account of the relationship between the people, only of the logic, hence:

"Yes Master."

but

"Yes, O my master."

The former is a direct address, hence Master is proper. The latter is a description of the relationship hence master is just an adjective. Here's another case that is at once revealing and confusing:

"We must tell the King at once!"

"What King?" / "Which king?"

"Any king."

This is logical, but looks daft on the page. Sometimes how it looks on the page is the only solution.

This conclusion is an example of The New Model in action. Clarity in transmission from writer to reader is paramount, and visual confusion caused by an impression of inconsistency becomes noise, and distracts the reader from the effect that the writer intended.

Roleplaying and Storytelling

2011-12-06T13:31:00.001+01:00

Roleplaying and storytelling are not the same, and should not be confused.

I have been playing a lot of Skyrim. Skyrim is one of those cultural phenomena that many people will dismiss as "just another computer game" in the same way that some British folks dismiss Dr Who as "just another TV SF series" or War and Peace as "just another lengthy Russian classic".

Skyrim is a big, diverse world, beautiful and curious; an amazing achievement that builds on the lessons of Morrowind and Oblivion (previous titles in the "The Elder Scrolls" (TES) series) by taking a long hard look at the work done by the vast modding community* and a good hard look at the success of the accomplished but troubled Gothic series that has dwelt in the shadow of TES, but held its own through quality and reliability.

Even with the work that was done to make Skyrim such a visually pleasing and amazing place, many of the first mods deal with making it even more visually stunning. The first mod I downloaded was a new, high resolution night sky. OMGIFOS!

Playing Skyrim is a matter of wandering around, talking to folks, creeping into dark caves, investigating mountaintops and getting quested. Players of "tabletop" rpgs like AD&D will know that when you speak to the innkeeper, he'll give you some bit of rumor or gossip, you'll go check it out and end up embroiled in a plot or saving someone's kidnapped spouse/child or trying to get your hands on a big pile of gold (GP) or enough experience (XP) to level your character. This is called getting quested. Getting quested can be a blessing or a curse. In the best cases, it is both. Getting quested is essential for roleplaying because it gives you an objective. Once you have an objective, it is up to you to decide how you intend to fulfil it.

Skyrim's creators went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that there were plenty of opportunities to get quested, and plenty of quests of all different sizes and shapes. And these quests can all be placed on a scale which has at one end "getting railroaded" and at the other "vague curiosity". Thankfully, the "Main Quest" seldom railroads, once you get over the initial irritation of being the unique chosen one with special blood. I happen to hate that kind of thing, but there are opportunities to pick sides and make moral choices in the main quest. That's amazingly impressive, even to the limited extent that it has been done.

One of the worst offenders for railroading is the Thieves Guild main quest. (Some people say the thieves' guild doesn't even exist…) This quest line is daft. A balanced character would find some of the tasks a little tricky, but my character is a stealth sniper. For the first 30 levels I did almost nothing other than sneak and shoot. The tasks were a walk in the park for me, and after completing these "little errands", the thieves promptly insisted that I become guild master. This actively pissed me off. Because I'm roleplaying in a way that only TES makes possible: I decided in advance what sort of person Clothilde would be, and I make decisions based on that. Since you can do that in TES, and more so in Skyrim than any other game I have ever known, it is very disappointing indeed how often you can't refuse an appointment (or even a title), or change your mind once you set off on a mission. I really hope there's a modder out there with plans to change quest options so that you can back out if you decide you don't like the direction a quest is taking.

I suspect that some (definitely not all) of the quest designers genuinely think that the only choice that players will make is between the three standing stones at the start of the game (where you decide initially - the choice can be refined or made again later - on your broad playing style, between fighter, rogue or mage), and once that choice is made you'll follow every quest you get hit with out of curiosity for the unfolding story. Those quest designers (House of Horrors anyone?) need to be hit on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, and then have it pointed out to them that Skyrim is an RPG environment. Compare and contrast with Assassin's Creed.

In AC, you follow a story - it's explicit in the scenario design that there is only one path; all presented objectives have to be met, and your only choices are in the fine details - concealed blade or throw him off the roof? AC is addictive because (like Skyrim) it is beautiful, but also, unlike Skyrim, because it has a single, highly compelling, storyline, and you keep playing because you want to follow the twists and turns of the plot. In AC you are reading a thriller. In Skyrim you are playing AD&D.

The next (techno)logical step is TES played in cooperation. Not massively multiplayer, but 4 to 6 players in a cooperative party, getting quested the way you do in AD&D. And, therefore, being able to build quests. This, we already can, though it is tricky and very time consuming (rather more than when you play tabletop).

My verdict for Skyrim? It started out awesome, and once the modders have had a couple of years with it, it will be the most complete roleplaying environment ever seen outside of the imagination of a party of experienced AD&D players.

Roleplaying is the undervalued branch of creative play. Everyone values as "culture" books, theatre, film; storytelling has been largely lost, and roleplaying is seen as something even less cultural, even more ephemeral. I think, however, that the best culture is ephemeral, because the best culture is created for, and created before, a live audience. Just as the script of a play is not the play, so the book of a story is not the story. It is natural and right and special and both humanly and culturally affirming to get together and roleplay - make up a story, a scenario, together. With Skyrim, computer gaming has taken another big step towards facilitating cultural activity instead of distracting from it.

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* modding is creating new content for an existing game. For free.

Online Story Telling

2011-12-06T11:21:00.001+01:00

I keep harping on to writers about the importance of live storytelling and how much I love doing it, until one of them challenged me to tell some stories aloud and stick them on Youtube. From January, I'm going to do two, every month. I have enough material of my own for a lifetime or two, but it would be much more fun to tell some of your stories.

Here's the catch: this is telling, not reading. I like to learn a story, so that I can tell it aloud. That isn't learning the words, but learning the story, and letting the words look after themselves.

I'm taking submissions as of now. Bear in mind that your story need not be kept to any strict length, as I will do that when I tell the story - I'll keep most of them to twenty to thirty minutes, but I'm quite happy to do short serials too. I'll also be looking out for guest tellers, every couple of months or so, so let me know if you're interested in telling your (or someone else's) story.

TES Fanfic: here it is.

2011-11-18T13:04:00.001+01:00

I actually wrote this before I wrote yesterday's blog post, which is why it sounded like the fanfic was in the post. Sorry if that disappointed anyone.

---

Diary Entry #1:

Everything happened so fast the last fewhours. Yesterday, I got paid employment carrying supplies over the mountains. Ithought it was either smuggling or bringing secret military supplies to anoutpost or something, because the guy who hired me was a thief or some othersort of petty criminal … which … I suppose … is what I am, too.

We got ambushed just below the tree-line.After that things got crazy. Executions, Dragons, escape.

To stand where I am standing today, Ikilled eleven men. Two Imperial guards. The rest were like you, at my feet.Bandits.

The first bandit I met, I tried to justwalk away. Leave well alone. He came after me with his weapon in his hand. Iwas nearly killed. Just before that, I had met the first person I saw since myescape. Friendly hunter. He sold me some food. I was not ready to fight. But Idid. That fight, it got my hunting spirit roused. I ran up the mountain, and Isurprised two more bandits. I didn't try to be friendly this time. The thirdone was on top of a ruined tower. I shot him and he fell. I don't know if myarrow killed him or the fall. I didn’t stay to find out. I wanted to know whatwas at the top.

At the top was a sort of ancient temple. Icrept around, until you spotted me. You didn’t say anything. You just shot mein the arm. It hurt.

This morning, you had something. You had asort of life. You had your two friends who came to defend you; you had thisplace, up here in the snow. All this beauty even thought the cold will kill youif it can. You had your own belongings, your freedom, your life.

I killed your two companions. This was noteasy, especially with you shooting at me whenever you got the chance. One ofyour arrows went through my boot. Grazed the arch of my foot. I nearly fell.

When your second friend, the big elf, died,I turned around. There was a block of fallen stone between us. Looked like adragon head. But you were on a ledge, in front of a buttress. You had nowhereto run and hide. I dropped my sword and ax, and took my bow off my back. Luckyit was undamaged. My arrows were less lucky, but I had five or six good ones.

I shot you. I think you were surprised. Ithit you in the gut, which is not where I was aiming but I was hampered by therock that protected me from your arrows.

Why didn’t you run? You saw your twofriends die. You got shot. You could have run away. I would have let you go.You kept shooting... slower. I shot you again. This time your armour did notslow it down. It looks like it killed you right away.

I wanted to ask you why didn't you run. Iwanted to ask you “WHO ARE YOU?” It was too late.

You still look angry, even with your eyesdead. You must have been beautiful, once. Big strong Nord girl. I was curious.I didn't come here to kill you.

Well, the snowstorm it is clearing alittle. So I sit you up against the wall, on your ledge so badly chosen tofight from. You can watch the view, so beautiful, while your blood freezes. Socold. I kiss you goodnight, Nord bandit woman. Your lips are cold already.

I say to myself: “I will hide, rather thankill; whenever I can, I will go by unseen.”

[Clothilde (left) watched by her faithful huscarl Lydia]

* * *

Barely half an hour later, I was killingagain, back in the rush of the hunt, my blood hot with joy. I think I may be abad person.

For the TES Fans. I try my hand at FanFic

2011-11-17T08:58:00.001+01:00

I got Skyrim installed yesterday. It runs really well on my three-year-old upper-mid-end system if I keep anisotropic down to 2 or 0. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, maybe the rest isn't for you.

I played Oblivion for the immersion, which after 5 years of modding is amazingly deep and detailed. In Blivvy I generally began with a character backstory, so I could develop a playing style that would be different each time. In Skyrim, I've gone back to my preferred style for the first playthrough. By nature I'm bookish, an alchemist, cook, trader, smith. In combat I'm a sniper. I like to stay hidden and take my enemy by surprise.

So I rolled up a young-ish Breton woman. I find it very hard to play male characters in 1st person RPG. I don't really know why, but I think it has something to do with the archetypes. The boys are all Alpha Males or Alpha Male wannabes, it's all about superiority for them. I find myself not caring about what happens to them. Each time I played a male in Blivvy I abandoned the character the first time he died.

My Breton woman is called Clothilde, and she has a strong French accent. I don't show her accent in the writing; just a few bits of odd diction. I think she speaks and writes well in several languages, so she knows how to spell. I worked out a lengthy and detailed backstory for her, and then began to play.

Skyrim is pretty good. There are a few niggles in the gameplay and quite a few minor glitches that I suspect will be sorted out by patching over the next few weeks. The influence of the Gothic series is evident everywhere you look, both visually and in gameplay - even in the design of dungeons. I also utterly utterly hate scenarios where "YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONE" or "YOU ARE THE LAST REMAINING…" but I got around this by having a character who is a misfit, and who rather dislikes all this too.

When I saved last night, she was standing on top of High Hrothgar with her recently appointed Huscarl, Lydia, having been taught some new tricks by the old men of the mountain. I imagined her turning to Lydia and saying

"What the fuck? I feel like a total fraud. An interloper. Three days ago I was a petty criminal, and a smuggler. I was saved from execution by accident, and I have killed more than ten people, human beings, in the last two days. Now some guy I met yesterday morning gives me a Title! And a retainer! And these old guys up here in the cold with their all mystical attitude are acting all impressed because I got some special power. It is stupid. I want a drink. Let's go get drunk."

Lydia is a Nord, and a simple, plain, loyal warrior. I'm pretty sure she didn't listen to most of that. I rekon she just heard the last two sentences. She'd reply:

"Okay. We passed an inn on the way here. Just before all those damn stairs."

… more tomorrow.

Benefits of staying off the path

2011-11-04T09:43:00.001+01:00

Here's an argument for educational reform that even a politician can understand:

It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged, memorably framed by Edison I think, that we don't know a millionth of one percent about anything. I assume that most people would agree that the sum of human knowledge is pretty big. Too big, in fact, for any one person to know, let alone understand, all of it. Indeed we frequently choose to approach a problem or project by collecting a team of people each of whom brings different knowledge and expertise, so that we may be sure that we have all the knowledge required to address the problem.

If this technique is so effective — and it is — then our education system should prepare for it. And, I hear the dear politicians protest proudly, it does. Up to age shmeu everyone learns the basics, and then each child gradually specializes until by age smee they are ready to enter higher education fully prepared for their narrow specialization that will make them such a valuable contributor in the future.

This is a really strong argument when you know exactly what the future holds. There have been times in the past where we (almost) have. Those times are looooooong ago now, and getting ever more distant and an ever faster rate as Moore's Law drives us ever faster into the future.

If the next generations are to be ready to face this unknown (and I suspect, unknowable) future, then we need to ensure that their range of knowledge is as diverse as possible, and furthermore, their range of approaches, ways of thinking, is as broad as possible. (Quick! Everyone out of the box!)

Diversifying their range of knowledge is the bit that I think the politicians can handle. We can tell them about it without their needing too much hand-holding. It goes as follows:

If you impose a national curriculum, that every child must follow up to age shmeu, (even if it then diversifies into specializations that are also imposed at a national level) then the greatest possible sum of all their knowledge is barely greater than the knowledge of one child. I understand that you want equality of opportunity and that ensuring that desire means assuring that the same level of education is available to every child, but it does not mean that the same education should be given to every child. Supposing you defined 10 different national curricula, and distributed them at random around the country. You would increase by an order of magnitude the total knowledge of your nation. It follows that if there were 100, 1000 curricula, you add two, three more orders of magnitude.

Are you out of your mind? 1000 different curricula?

Here's the part that will make the politicians sad: education has to be disestablished. Disestablishment is the separation of any institution from the institution of the state. In other words, you remove all Government control, and indeed most central control from education. Personally I think that individual teachers should set the curricula of their own classes and teach it as they choose. Naturally this makes comparative testing (competition) invalid. Individual teachers might use examination as a means of tracking progress, but a national exam "at the end" is nonsense. The politicians panic. "How can we prove that everyone is getting the same level of education?" they scream in horror. "Are you doing that now?" is all I can answer.

Ensuring that every child gets the same opportunity becomes a very different process. It would require inspectors who would check classroom by classroom, if need be, child by child, to observe that education is happening. The children are learning. Developing their ability to think, to express themselves, to engage with one another and to engage with the problems that they face in their daily lives, and some of them, with the problems of the wider world.

The validity of this model of education is that it seeks to prepare for the unknown future, by maximizing diversity. Compare with validating an education on the basis of how it prepares children for today, which is what politically motivated education does. Education is currently conceived, in most countries, on the basis that you can measure the progress of children's education through identical examination, and that you can measure the success of an education by how easily each school leaver gets a place in University or lands his first job. To call this a rather narrow view is to be very British about it.

Surely an education should be judged on its ability to prepare you (inasmuch as this is even possible) for your life.

So education needs to be free, not equal. So it needs to be off the path, as far from straight and narrow as possible.

Don't even look for a path

2011-11-03T10:39:00.000+01:00

Outside of crime and sin, what else does the straight and narrow involve?

It implies that a virtuous life is one that is strictly restricted to a single course, and a single goal. It implies that you shouldn't so much as look at the landscape as you go by for fear of curiosity leading you off the path. It implies that life is about having a goal, and working tirelessly, steadily, towards it.

I'll tell you, in case you haven't already worked it out for yourself, what lies at the end of the road of life:

Death.

Whichever way you look at it, and whatever you may believe about what does, or does not, come after, death is the point that you can't see past.

The injunction to stay on the path means something else, as well, therefore. It means "do as you are told"; "don't think for yourself"; "don't think outside the box"; "don't try to change what you are"; "don't try to learn for yourself".

By sticking to the straight and narrow you accept your lot in life, as defined by others. You permit yourself to be channelled into blinkered conformity, and because you only go forward (for fear of being left behind, quite often) and keep your eyes on that distant goal that all to soon you recognize as the end of the road, you never discover your own potential.

If you leave the path, you soon discover that you have a whole lot to learn. Off the path, there is so much to learn that noone even knows 1 millionth of 1 millionth of it. And the experience of two different people off the path can be so different that their views seldom coincide. But get this: there isn't only one straight and narrow. Different societies, tribes, religions, at different times and in different places define different ruts, but since all those paths lead from the same place to the same place (birth to death, if you like), those paths are all parallel. They never coincide at all.

How surprising is it that the differences between fundamentalist Moslims and fundamentalist Christians are irreconcilable. The key word is fundamentalist. Fundies always insist on the straight and narrow - they know that a little knowledge from off the path is all you need to discover freedom.

For me, what this is all about is two things: freedom and individuality. The straight and narrow is often defended by the "ideal" of equality. But I'm opposed to equality wherever it doesn't promote freedom. Gender equality is a perfect example of this. There are differences between all men and all women. I know this especially well as a man raised to try to think like a woman. The differences mean that equality is as meaningless as competition. Gender freedom is defined as the removal of all obstacles to self determination that are imposed on the grounds of gender. It's a kind of "right to try". My maternal grandfather believed that women should not even try to drive a car. That is restricting gender freedom. Gender freedom is ensuring that men and women can try to do the same things, without restriction or prejudice, and that each individual be judged (if need be) on the results.

If there is a current world financial crisis, if there is a population crisis, if there is an environmental crisis — I say "if" because there's always some sort of problem to overcome, and it really doesn't matter if these current media-sexy threats are true or not (though there are compelling reasons to think so) — then they will not be solved by conformity. Straight and narrow thinking has lead to all three. Off the path thinking will solve them.

When you go off the path, you discover, you learn, and you become different. Many people fear those who are different (most people fear those who are incomprehensible), and many people fear becoming different. This is understandable, but harmful. There are people in the world who are pursuing a dream of anti-gravity that uses gyroscopes and perpetual motion. There are people pursuing room-temperature (cold) fusion. They may be incomprehensible and uncomprehending crackpots, but they are off the path; they may not be expanding human knowledge, but they are broadening our culture. Culture needs breadth, if we are to survive. We need our crackpots and charlatans. We need our poets, artists and mystics. We need our free thinkers and yes, we need our lunatics. Whether they like it or not, they are exploring the extremes of what it means to be human.

Screw the straight-and-narrow, I say!

2011-11-02T11:03:00.002+01:00

The injunction to STAY ON THE PATH is one of those literary conceits that we take for granted. But all sorts of aspects of this idea annoy the hell out of me.

It is developed from an idea formed in the early Christian church which supposed that temptation, sin and wickedness were all around, but that if you keep your mind focussed on the attainment of a state of grace, and hence unity with God, you would be free from temptation, sin, and wickedness.

This allowed the Christians to introduce to our culture the idea that remains to this day: that everyone is subject to constant temptation; that it is difficult for everyone to resist, and that therefore those who resist are strong and virtuous, while those who do not are weak and wicked.

If your aim is to help others to avoid wickedness (however you may wish to define it), this is surely a valuable idea; but it is fundamentally wrong-headed. It assumes that all people are basically the same; that all have the same priorities, the same desires, and that all would, if they could, aspire to the same lifestyle, aspire to the same set of virtues. We see the consequences of this today: a huge range of behaviours are diagnosed (via the painfully dichotomous DSM) as illnesses – to be cured, treated or controlled – through the general acceptance by the mental health profession that someone who is excessively different will suffer as a result of his difference. I can (thoroughly unfairly) sum this up by the ruthlessly simplistic statement that "conformity is directly proportional to happiness".

Weirdly, the evidence is against this. You can see it for yourself, looking at crime, and criminal lifestyles in general. The crimes that I like to focus people's attention on are very petty theft (taking a pen home from the office) and petty fraud (exaggerating on an insurance claim form). It so happens that I can't do either of these (though I may have been capable of the former in the past). Many, many people have done one or the other or both. I know someone who happily takes apples from his neighbour's tree (for which he has to reach over the fence), but would never take leeks from his neighbour's vegetable patch (even though they are physically more accessible).

What leads people to choose to do some of these things but not others? I encounter two explanations. Sometimes they are kept distinct, sometimes they are combined. I call them "infantile parent" and "pragmatic parent" (neither of these terms is intended judgementally – I don't claim either is good or bad, right or wrong). Infantile Parent claims that people dare to commit petty crimes in proportion to their expectation of being caught or found out. Pragmatic Parent claims that people casually commit petty crimes in proportion to the harm they estimate is done. This equates to the advice always to carry a poor man's wallet.*

I suspect that in terms of what people will permit themselves, there is a very broad range, and the decision to do what is commonly agreed as wrong is taken on the spot, and takes account of an equally broad range of factors. After all, the same people who commit those acts of very petty theft and petty fraud, are those who have publicly declared their support for the illegality of theft and fraud.

So we are black and white in our public declarations, but shades of grey in our actual behaviours. How like marriage…

I'm not capable (for all sorts of reasons - some of which may be very obscure) of infidelity. But many many people apparently are. (To such an extent that Marital Fidelity probably ought to be defined as a personality disorder in the DSM.) People who declare, publicly, their intent to faithfulness.

So the idea of the straight and narrow has forced a paradox whereby everyone believes that they must declare that certain things are wrong, even while doing them. I wonder if this is the origin of guilt. I don't know, as it's an emotion that I know by sight and reputation only.

I don't believe that our capacity for understanding others has (oh, all right) evolved in order for us to try to set it aside in favour of rules that we all agree are right, but by which we cannot abide. I believe that our capacity for understanding others enables (many, possibly most of) us to consider the social consequences of each of our actions, and choose freely the social scale of our action (self / immediate family / extended family / close friends / extended network of friends / geographical community / society / nation / the whole of mankind / the planet (this list is not exhaustive)). Viewed from the point of view of the individual's expected consequences for whichever is his favoured social scale, there is no such thing as crime… though there may still be such a thing as evil.

The injunction at the top of the page in fact becomes an injunction to resist the temptation to favour a social scale below that of the tribe.

(more to follow – an explanation of the picture…)

---

* (In case you haven't come across this, I remember once being advised never to carry my money in an expensive wallet, in case I lost it. Supposedly, whoever picks it up will look inside, and if they find some cash, they'll take it, before returning the wallet. But the decision as to how much cash they take depends on a value judgement of both how much cash there is, and how rich they think you are. If you have an expensive wallet, and there's only a few dollars in it, chances are they'll not take anything. I you have an expensive wallet and there's 500 dollars in it, they'll take the lot, but still return the wallet. If you have a cheap looking wallet and there is only a few dollars, they'll take them, but if there's a lot of money they'll think twice about depriving you of it.

I'm not sure how much credence to give this. After all, the chances of the wallet being picked up by someone less sensitive than this are probably pretty high. One of my schoolteachers kept a typewritten note in his wallet that said "anyone who finds this can keep the cash if they return the rest".)

Negotiation - how I first learned to be a human being

2011-10-31T16:27:00.000+01:00

"Are you sure you know the way?" she asked me.

I stood in thought. This was one of the big mysteries of the adult brain — or so I thought — beyond yes and no. Shortly before, she had asked me if I knew the way to room 88. I did know the way, and at (I guess) age 12 or so, that was all there was, so I said so:

"Sure? You asked me if I knew the way, and I said yes. That's all there is. I know, or I don't know. I don't know anything about 'sure'."

She gave me one of those long, faraway stares that adults do when you give them an answer that bears no relation to the expected "yes" or "no". Scratch that – one of those looks that everyone gives me all the time. As far as I was concerned, she started it, by going beyond "yes" or "no" in the first place.

"So you're not so sure, huh?" I used to think this was trying to convince the child he must be in the wrong because he's a child. I have sometimes caught myself doing that to my own children, so other people must do it too, right? Sometimes though, I think it's just taking refuge in a familiar place: the child is getting pedantic, so he must be trying to distract from his lack of certainty.

***

"Are you sure you won't have another biscuit?"

I know that one mustn't get snippy with well-meaning elderly aunts. Although I still find this one a trial, I at least know what I'm supposed to do here. Aged 8 or 9 this time, the utterly baffling back-and-forth over who should do what for whom was a source of annoyance when I had to observe it in others and of acute personal discomfort when I got caught up in it myself.

***

It wasn't until I had children of my own that I learn just how relative yes and no really are. To children, the parent's "no" means something like "not until next time you ask me" or in worse cases "go ask your other parent". Similarly, the child's "yes" when asked anything along the lines of "have you done what you know you were supposed to do" really means "what kind of trouble will I get into if you find out the real answer is no?"

We paint ourselves a comforting fiction that a simple "yes" or "no" is equivalent to "done" and "not done" (to borrow from T H White) - that it can only mean one thing. And yet we know that when the kids in the back seat say "are we nearly there yet" that for a long time the answer will be "no", but at some point it will magically become "yes", even though the question and the conditions under which it is asked are unchanged. It is a short leap from this to asking for an icecream every thirty seconds.

Those negotiations over biscuits, those demands of sureness, are rather clumsy ways of getting past the artificial barrier of "yes" and "no", and through to real desires and the reliability of knowledge. Had I know that, I would have known that the proper response to "are you sure you know the way" was:

"I know the route seems a little convoluted, but I have to come here at least once every day."

I would also have known that the best reply over the biscuits was to get out of trouble by not answering the question but making a general statement:

"I won't have another biscuit."

or, more politely:

"I've had enough to eat, thanks."

***

Edward de Bono wrote a short book that I can strongly recommend called "beyond yes and no". He is dealing with the perpendicular issue of how yes and no often result in an attempt at a preconfigured solution to every problem, rather than what he recommends, which is to apply a general approach, which he calls "policy" or simply "P".

Insisting to ourselves on the sanctity of yes and no is to try to penetrate other people's thoughts by separating the cream from the coffee. What we know about what goes on inside others' heads is not polar. This is mostly because what we know, and what others know, is not clear, or certain. I am convinced that we cannot be "sure". However this doesn't invalidate yes, no, nor the question "are you sure". These are tools used in a process by which we discover what other people think they know, and then decide how reliable that knowledge is.

From this point of view, a simple iterative process enables you to decide whether to follow the (rather pompous) 12 year old schoolboy through the labyrinthine corridors of the Victorian school building.

You observe his demeanour when you ask "do you know the way?". Realizing that he is likely to have learned to appear confident in every response, you decide to dig a little further than his forthright "yes". You'd be smart to do better than "are you sure?" though. You could attempt "how do you know?" or even "why are you sure?". Anything to provoke a further response that is on topic. You'll respond to the tone, the body language, as much as to the words themselves. (After all, I could be lying about going there every day.) And then, according to your confidence or otherwise you'll either declaim "lay-on, MacDuff" or wander off in search of some other insufferable, spotty, floppy-haired public schoolboy.

***

"Answer the question, yes or no!"

This is always a ruse. Sometimes the answer isn't "yes" and it isn't "no". If so, stick to your guns. Insist. Give the real answer.

Off Topic #2: Design

2011-10-18T11:02:00.000+02:00

Following on from yesterday's not really off-topic post, here is another one, even less off topic, though perhaps seeming more so…

Design is dead.

Time there was in production, fabrication and construction, the designer was the single most important contributor to development. Today, few people even understand what, back in their heyday in the nineteenth century, designers actually do, and when I point out exemplary pieces of period design, many folks will comment "Oh yes, there's lots of design on that".

Somehow, design has come to mean "adding the pretty, nonfunctional details". Movements like Bauhaus are partly to blame. Bauhaus elevated design to an art form, but what made Bauhaus so aesthetically and ergonomically pleasing was its concentration on the principles that drove C18 and C19 engineering - the key principle being design. In the C19, design was the careful balance of functional requirements at all stages of the life-cycle of a product. The designer would, when deciding what his product would look like, take account of materials and their cost and availability, the cost, time and skill required for fabrication, the required durability, the costs of future maintenance, the necessity of future-proofing or backwards-compatibility (a couple of ideas that, under a variety of names, have been know since at least ancient Rome). The skill of some designers as the end of the nineteenth century approached was so great that they could afford to build-in beauty as a concomitant feature. In many areas of engineering, this idea continued through to the 1950s, and such visually divergent designs as Scotsman and Mallard…

… which solve similar practical problems but with strikingly different visual consequences. Both are beautiful, because their beauty goes so much further than external prettiness.

The high profile and high public approval of these kinds of design, combined with Bauhaus (and its imitators) elevation of aesthetics – or perhaps the elevation of Bauhaus by the popular press – resulted in a separation between the visual appearance of a product and its engineered function. Creative people with little or no knowledge of manufacture were brought in to "design" products to make them pleasing to the eye, popular, fashionable. These "designs" were then passed on to fabricators whose job was to find a way to manufacture something that looked like the designs.

This is how things are today. The real skill of fabrication is working out how to make something. Wherever this is understood, there are no designers at all; engineers invent, plan and build. The results seldom meet needs even when they meet requirements. (You know who you are.) Wherever there are designers, the engineers are woefully undervalued. Beauty has been divorced from function – indeed one often hears the two being described as in conflict: "a triumph of form over function" … "plain practicality".

To the engineers of the nineteenth century, as much as to the public who used their products, any design that solved a problem efficiently was inherently beautify, and the satisfaction that they derived from the inherent beauty of a good solution, gave them the confidence to draw the bold flowing curves of the Mallard, and put Greek and Roman column capitals on gasometers.

In creative writing, design is seen by many as a sort of sell-out, betrayal or even circumvention of the artistic process. I have encountered this attitude as much in commercial writing as in novel writing. Setting aside marketing copy, novel writing is not, as many authors think, storytelling.

It has been accurately stated that the written word is the worst thing ever to happen to storytelling. Storytelling truly is an organic, creative, social process. When you tell a story to an audience, the audience responds to you and you to them. The story changes as it enters the imaginative space between you and your audience, and is different at each telling. Those of your audience whose imagination is captivated, will pass on your story to others, and it will change for them just as it changed for you.

When you write it down, it is the same every time you read it.

This gives you a problem to solve. How to tell the story that you want to tell, how to reach your audience when you don't have their reactions and you don't even know who they are? When you have a problem to solve, there is value in having a design. How far you take it is up to you – and is probably a function of your knowledge and experience. I suspect that many authors write as if they were telling a story with themselves as audience – which would explain the common observation by the author that the story took unexpected twists and turns, and that characters appeared, developed and evolved in unanticipated ways.

This stage is the discovery of the story. In storytelling, you discover the story either by being told it, or by telling it to yourself. Once you know your story, the practical problem to which you must return is "how to tell it using the written word". Most authors apply an iterative design process. Drafting and redrafting. Many authors involve third parties like beta-readers, proofreaders and editors (each of these has a different purpose and they should be selected to match your design process. Not every author can benefit from a literary editor). I guess the big advantage of novel writing is the possibility of design-after-the-fact. (I nearly said that in Latin, but I suspect that italics and hyphens is going to reach a larger audience.) Once you know the story, and have tried it out a few times, you can have several gos at writing it. My client, new writer Damon Courtney, has just sent me a redraft where he has made very substantial changes to the book, in structure, character dynamics, setting - even the outcome of major events (a party that had been planned then cancelled in the previous draft actually takes place in the new draft). The new draft is nonetheless the same story. But Damon has redesigned the way it is told to better match the medium: the written word.

The differences between "The Resurrection of Deacon Shader" and the rewriting "Shader: Cadman's Gambit" and "Shader: Best Laid Plans" are more than substantial. It's more a case of a few passages and characters from Resurrection being re-used in a new book. New book, same story.

If you are already a great author, chances are you probably ought to carry on doing whatever it is you do. If you want to become a great author, designing a book is complex and difficult. But worth it.

Off Topic #1

2011-10-17T14:29:00.000+02:00

If you follow me on Twitter you will have realized that the Winter Veg season has started in earnest. Last week's basket from the AMAP included black radishes which are delicious raw, baked, deep fried, pan fried, in soup, stuffing or made into condiment. I went for soup, as follows:

1 large black radish
2 large potatoes
2 small onions or 3-4 shallots
2 saucisses à cuire
salt, paprika, cayenne pepper, cumin seed

Serves four hungry people or two Russian peasants. Enough for about 6 middle-class English dinner guests.

Chop the shallots into small slices and put them in a hot frying pan with about 2 teaspoonfuls of lard (I prefer mixed lard for this but you can use fatback or caul). My lard is unbleached, untreated and comes from a local farm that has its own butchery. In general I advise getting your lard direct from the butcher or preparing it yourself.

Peel the radish and potatoes, and chop the potatoes into chunks and the radish into thinnish slices. As the shallots start to brown, add the potatoes and radishes, about a teaspoonful of paprika, a pinch of cayenne and a dozen or so cumin seeds. Keep the pan good and hot, and toss frequently.

While it is cooking, heat up a litre or two of water with about half a teaspoon of salt, slice up the sausage and drop it in the water. Let it come to the boil. (It helps if you have already had the sausage before, so you know how salty it is. This can vary quite a lot. With the saltier ones, there is no need to salt the water.

Once the potatoes and radishes start to brown, tip the entire contents of the frying pan in the boiling water. De-glaze the frying pan with about half a glass of red wine. (One the pan is empty, get it good and hot, and tip half a glass of red wine into it. It will boil instantly, and spit a little at first. Swirl it around so it cleans the pan.) Tip the remaining contents of the frying pan into the boiling water. You may need to scrape a little with a wooden spatula. I don't usually drink the last 3cm of any bottle of red. Instead I pour it into a bottle that I keep for the purpose, which is now a horrifying mixture of old wine. This is the best stuff for deglazing, or as a base for an instant marinade, or to add body to any braised dish.

Boil the lot for about 20 minutes.

Separate out all but 2 or three slices of sausage, and re-fry them in the same pan. While you are doing this, put the rest in the blender and blend it until smooth and creamy (your guests may even think there is cream in the soup. This is part of the magic of lard, even in tiny quantities). If you need to add water to make it blend well, then do. It will probably be too thick at this stage anyway. Once the sausage starts to brown, put it back in with the soup. De-glaze again, but this time use less wine. About a quarter glass topped up to half way with water - or you could use Beaujolais. All it's good for IMO.

With a steady heat on, add a little pre-boiled water from the kettle until you get the consistency you want. I advice tasting it to judge the consistency, rather than just going on the stirring resistance.

Here's my top soup serving tip: if you're worried you haven't made enough, serve it too hot to eat with a spoon but with lots of crusty bread. Your diners will fill up with bread dipped in soup. In any case the radish will still be quite lively if you haven't cooked it too long.

Like any proper winter soup, this is very filling. Also like any proper winter soup you can make it with any damn vegetable. I did another this week with parsnip and salsify. The latter takes a little more preparation. I daresay I'll rave about salsify some time soon.

Translation Time

2011-10-10T16:20:00.000+02:00

It's reaching a point where significant numbers independent, e-Published authors are making big enough sales to think about getting translated.

I have worked as a freelance translator, and know a number of them. Freelance translators are the best way to go because they cut out the intermediaries and you get better rates.

All this is somewhat beside the point though, and the point is this:

If you already have a book written in English that is selling in the English-speaking world, you can do a simple bit of maths to see if getting it translated will be profitable. Supposing you have a 75k word novel that has sold a total of 5000 downloads for $1.50 (your profit - sales commission already deducted ). If your main market is US English, then include Canada, the UK and Australia to creep up to a population of about 500M. This isn't the size of your market, but it's the only figure you need to work out if translation will be profitable (or when it will be).

France has a population of about 60M. They all speak French well enough to read your book in French. "Standard" French is also spoken as a first or second language in numerous other countries around the world, though experience tells me that estimates of how many speak it as well or nearly as well, or the same way or nearly the same way as in mainland France are deeply suspect. Around the world, though, there are probably at least another 30M people who could read and enjoy your book in standard French, or slightly tweaked French (such as Quebecois). Official French figures put the size of the French speaking world at over 900M if you include all variants and all people speaking French as a second language. I'm going with the lower figure.

That gives you a target population of 90M - call it 100M for ease of calculation, so one fifth the size of the English speaking population. So one fifth of 5000 download sales at $1.50 or nearest local currency; call it $1.45 to factor in currency exchanges and fluctuations: $1450

Your 75k word book will cost you anything from $5000 to $10000 to translate into French. Horrifying isn't it? But anything lower is a slave-wage for a translator - and in any case a literary translation is complex and difficult, and as much a creative as an interpretive art.

You would need to sell 4000 downloads to make a profit. Lets try something a little more expensive:

Your 150k tome currently downloads for $5.99, and to date you have sold on average 500 copies per month. You can expect to sell 100 copies (or less) a month in French. Cost of translation $10k to $15k. You'd take 17 months to break even.

The point is that you can compare your sales in one language to potential sales in another to find out if translation will be profitable. As far as I can see, it should be profitable to translate anything relatively short (less than 80k words) that sells fast.

I'm already hearing rumours and ideas circulating among translators to set up translation and promotion services for any indie book that is already doing well enough in English to be profitable for translation. The French and German economies are large and affluent, "Global Economic Crisis" notwithstanding, and the sooner you break into these markets independently, the more you will encourage small, targeted intermediaries, rather than trad pub trying to get a stranglehold on translated releases by buying up foreign language rights and thereby maintaining their monopoly - albeit only on translated work.

Weird Words: The Cat that got the Canary

2011-10-05T10:48:00.000+02:00

In her new thriller, Cruel Justice, Mel Comley introduced me to the expression the cat that got the canary. This extremely evocative expression puts me in mind of Sylvester who, after long years of torment, finally manages to swallow that damn bird. In the context where Mel uses it, someone is feeling very pleased with themselves. An expression exists for this, and it is: the cat that got the cream.

This is an expression that has existed for a very long time indeed, and is an expression of smugness or self-satisfaction, as it describes the expression of the first cat at the churn, who gets to drink the cream on the top of the milk before the other cats arrive and have to make do with the milk.

This isn't quite what Mel was going for, though I think it would have fit. The cat that got the canary is somehow … predatory.

POV Confidence

2011-10-04T15:08:00.000+02:00

Point Of View (POV), sometimes called person, or viewpoint, is a much analyzed and much deconstructed narrative technique. I think this is a mistake.

It is a very simplistic view — indeed it is a lie to children — that the experience of reading a story is one of associating, sympathizing, identifying, with a main character, and thereby imagining yourself in his place. We don't experience real life in such an insular, individualistic, egocentric way. We experience real life (much of the time) as a group; we see events and experiences through many pairs of eyes. When you witness some event, you cannot help but see the effect it has on others who witness it, though the expression, posture, movement. When you are caught up in some event, you experience it not only through your own thoughts and feelings, but those expressed on the faces of your companions, and the faces of witnesses and bystanders. Even when you are wholly alone (without any human company), your environment is as much affected by you as you by it, and as you witness your effect on your environment, so you experience your own actions from a separate (albeit inanimate) point of view.

But it is easy to get caught up in the lie of a single point of view. Not only does it simplify and de-mystify the work of the author, but it gives him the illusion of control. And that control is where it all goes wrong.

Broadly speaking, I classify POV as follows:

1. First person or non-first person.

This is an easy one most of the time. If the narrator says "I did this, I did that," then this is a first person narration. If the narrator says anything else, then it isn't. The issue is complicated by the fact that first person narration isn't always first person POV. Eh?

When the narrative conceit is of an agonist in some past event who decides to commit his account of the event to paper (as is the case in the Sherlock Holmes mysteries), the narrator will use "I" when talking about himself, but might not always restrict himself to his own point of view. He can do this because he is narrating after the fact, and is in possession of additional facts and testimonies that he did not possess at the time. Here is a (made up) example:

While I conducted a thorough examination of the cellar, Holmes, wearing his customary expression of patient perplexity, returned to the library where he began a lengthy perusal of the late Duke's papers. Little did he know that he was being watched.

In the above case, the author is not slavishly restricting himself to what the (imaginary) narrator knew at the time, but uses what Watson must have found out later. I call this "what I didn't know" narration. It allows a first person narrator to go beyond his own point of view, and as such deliver a more rounded story, by which I mean one that includes witnesses other than himself.

2. Strong or Weak point of view.

Strong or Weak might just as well be expressed as structured or organic, disciplined or instinctive. "Weak" is not mean pejoratively. Strong POV is when the writer decides that the reader may know only what the current central character could know. As I have already suggested, this is a little artificial, but handled skillfully can lead to a real thrill-ride. Hitchcock uses this conceit in film (Vertigo, NxNW). Strong POV may be applied in either first or third person. (Or in extreme cases, second person. I fact when writing in second person, only strong POV is possible. And really, really odd. Try it sometime.)

Weak POV is harder to define. I can say that it leads to fewer problems for editor and reader, and is much closer to what I think of as natural narration, which is the way that you might tell an anecdote — for amusement or otherwise. Weak POV is a matter of telling the reader what the reader needs to know to experience the story as the writer intends. When different characters are acting in concurrently in mutually remote locations (or just mutually invisible locations), a gentle shift of POV allows the narrator to avoid lengthy recapping:

Sir Bedevere fought tirelessly; no matter the cost, he had to get through to the castle before it was too late. Robin was counting on him to save the Princess from a fate worse than … Bedevere wasn't thining about it, he was concentrating on the steady rise and fall of his sword.

Even as Bedevere fought his way to her, the Princess was not idle. Hearing the noise of battle, and sensing here fate was near, she had begun tearing the bedsheets into strips and braiding them together. She looked up at the bars on the window, then down at her hips. She would, she concluded, have to squash.

If I applied strong POV to Bedevere, then by the time the hapless knight will have fought his way to the Princess' bower, she will be long gone, and the narrator will either have to backtrack, or have Bedevere discover her means of escape, or worse still, have her recount her escape to him three chapters later when he finally catches up with her. In a good story, there is never time for explanation.

But strong POV leads to far worse excesses.

The twins, Alice and Bob, have, by the end of chapter four, become separated. The writer is having a blast alternating chapters from Alice' point of view and then from Bob's. In chapter 5, Alice sees Doctor Acula (the bad guy) for the first time. The narrator gives a suitably scary and ominous description of him, and he introduces himself and his evil schemes to Alice. Three chapters later, Bob espies Doctor Acula from a distance, and the writer finds himself in a rather silly quandary. How to describe the wicked Doctor such that the reader sense Bob's sense of foreboding without giving the reader the impression that Bob has recognized Doctor Acula, which of course he can't, since he hasn't met him yet? Of course, it can't be done without giving the reader the profoundly confusing impression that there are two very similar bad guys.

I encounter this over and over again. Even experience, well respected writers varnish themselves into this corner.

Here's another: Around chapter 10, an ambiguous secondary character, Craig, needs to be introduced. For his introduction he's going to do something dramatic: pull of a daring robbery. But to keep him mysterious, the writer can't use Craig's point of view. However, neither Alice nor Bob are present, but the writer has decided that every chapter must use a strong POV. So, the writer invents Dave the Security guard. Chapter 10 is written from the point of view of Dave, who is variously trying to prevent Craig from getting in, then trying to protect the Diamond, then trying to catch Craig before he escapes. At the end of chapter 10, Craig leaps away into the darkness and Dave falls out of a high window. End of Dave.

I know some writers will try to excuse this clumsy and blatant mechanism as pathos. I for one ain't taken in, and I reckon the same is true of most readers.

Finally, a word about head-hopping. Head-hopping is the much maligned practice of carelessly switching points of view within a single chapter, scene or even paragraph. At its worst it's really confusing, and it is really easy to mess up a narrative this way, so most editors will rightly discourage it, encouraging (I hope) using POV a little more weakly, or choosing one strong POV and sticking to it. However, head-hopping can be used to devastating effect.

In the first chapter of Mel Comley's new thriller, Cruel Justice, there is just one head-hop. It serves to accentuate the horror and brutality, and it is totally unavoidable. Read the first chapter here. Consciously or unconsciously, this is how to use POV.

POV isn't about what the character knows, it is about what the reader knows. EVERYTHING you write is about what the reader knows and what the reader feels and what the reader experiences. When you write, you aren't telling the reader what happened. You are using narrative to create an experience for the reader. The more you analyze and deconstruct your writing technique, the more you choose devices, styles, conceits because you like them, you know about them, you have seen others using them, the more you are writing for the benefit of the text, yourself, other writers and (heaven forfend!) critics.

Getting POV right is not about skill or technique, though. It is about confidence. And you get the confidence by knowing that you are telling the reader what he needs to know.

Do some live storytelling and you'll soon see.

Weird Words: Pair and Couple

2011-09-20T19:09:00.000+02:00

Not interchangeable. The biggest lie that your primary school teacher told you was the one about opposites. I daresay I'll rant about that another day. The biggest lie that your highschool English teacher told you was the one about synonyms. The lie in question is this: synonyms exist. They don't. Even the sound of words, the length, the spelling, has different effects on different readers. Synonyms are one of those things that grammarians invent to try to apply rules and boundaries to language. But language, like life, is messy. It doesn't conform to rules, no matter how carefully they are defined. Know this and know it well: there are no synonyms.

Example (how proud Anne Soper would be): Pair and Couple.

To have a pair, or to have a couple, you must have two things. But not any old mismatched twain. (Twain is an excellent word. It means two things. They can be (in the immortal words of Edmund Blackadder) about as similar as two completely dissimilar things in a pod.) You can't use pair and couple as synonyms, any more than you can use anything else. (What is a thesaurus for? See below).

A pair is two matching items. A couple is two complementary items. A pair is identical. Or similar. Or associated because of some feature they share. A couple can be opposites (ahem) provided they fit together. A couple is yin and yang (if you like that sort of thing). Jay and Silent Bob are a pair and a couple.

A Thesaurus is not there to help you find a different word. If you are looking for an alternative to the word you already used then you used it wrong the first time. A Thesaurus helps you to find the right word. The aposite word, by looking up a word that you know isn't quite right.

Backup

2011-09-12T13:46:00.000+02:00

Once your book is uploaded to Amazon or Smashwords or B&N, it's safe, pretty much for good. You've publicly declared that the content is your property and your responsibility, and it's joined some of the largest and most comprehensive distributed, "cloud based" backup solutions that the market has to offer. Your work will never be lost.

But if you're anything like me, your computer, your USB key(s) (thumb drives), phone, tablet and numerous notebooks are stuffed full of fragments of uncompleted stuff, previous drafts, shorts, character studies, notes and ideas for future work.

Notebooks (the paper variety) are at risk. You can spill coffee on them or drop them in a puddle. I've scanned my oldest ones but that is a long and laborious process, so I don't use handwritten notes for writing at all any more.

All that stuff on your various drives is at risk too. So how do you protect it?

I have had customers who've lost a year of accounting due to a hard drive failure. One of them had to spend about $ 1000 on data recovery after a server was "dropped" and both hard drives failed. Another was unable to recover anything...

Backup solutions are many. Your data is pretty safe from loss if you upload it all to your Google account. As to how secure it is... it depends on who you listen to. The bottom line is "belt and braces":

Store your data in more than one location.

On your hard-drive and copied onto a couple of USB disks
On your raid 0 hard drives and copied to an external drive
Printed to DVDs and on your hard drive

For writers, I think the best solution is to use multiple USB keys (thumb drives). There is some great, free, simple software for synchronizing them. It analyses each drive and makes sure that the most recent version of any file is copied to every disk.

The beastie depicted is a NAS Hard Drive - like a mini network server. I install these for my business customers for about $550 installation included. It contains 2 hard drives (identical copies in case one fails), and it manages all the backup itself. Even a fancy piece of kit like this can fail, however. Especially if you drop it. So I encourage my customers to keep copies of important files both on the NAS drive and on their own workstation.

It is also worth bearing in mind that your home or office could be burgled. If you have something like the Iomega StorCenter (20cm x 14cm x 10cm), when you go away for a few days, leave it with a neighbor. If you have a thumb drive or two, take one with you and leave another with a neighbor. The more copies of your work you leave lying around, the less will get lost.

Unless you are an Aubrey Beardsley or an Emily Dickinson, you probably don't want your notes to be burned in the case of your death. If that is a concern, it's probably best to keep your notes and sketches in flammable form, because as soon as you connect your work to a network, it starts to get harder to destroy.

Pacing — dialogue, read-speed, comma, semi-colon, colon, stop.

2011-09-06T11:11:00.000+02:00

I already discussed layout of direct speech, nametagging and said last month, but a feature of dialogue that I overlooked was the issue of pacing.

In real life, when people speak, they do a whole lot of other things at the same time, and in between speech. Some of this is unrelated to the conversation — breathing, eating & drinking, swinging an ax. Some of it arises from or illustrates the dialogue: shrugging, gasping, pausing for effect.

Imagine a game of squash between a pair of irritatingly competitive young executives, letting off steam after an important negotiation. I imagine them warming up on court, pounding the ball rather too hard for tactical practicality, and then playing a couple of games, discussing both during and between points, the behaviour of their colleagues and their client; pausing in their dialogue occasionally when the game gets difficult or strenuous.

How do you go about writing the dialogue of such a scene? I would have a little fun with the vocabulary and the imagery, by having Steve and Gary use exclusively physical metaphors when describing the meeting:

"We totally pounded them on the preference agreement," Steve hustled left and Gary had to back into a corner and swung his reply awkwardly.

"It looked as if Janet would drop that one, until you jumped in." Carefully evading Steve's fillibuster, Gary changed his policy and forced Steve to negotiate a tricky trajectory.

"Didn't matter how much they fired at us; Clive just kept batting it away."

Their exchanges intensified for a few seconds, and Steve, overtaken with determination, responded to Gary's every demand, until finally, reaching high and wide, he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

"Nice," said Gary, not needing to force good-humour in defeat; he'd already scored enough points in the meeting.

Apart from the language games, what I'm going for here is a sense of two things happening at once. On screen, in the theatre, action and words can be presented together. On the page, you have two choices: you can give them one after the other:

"I've got this one," Steve shouted as he ran across the court

Or you can try to give a feel for the action during the dialogue as I attempted in the earlier section. Whatever the type of action going on at the same time as the dialogue, the dialogue needs to be paced accordingly. Pacing is the art of convincing the reader to experience the action at the right speed, and the key to it is convincing the reader to read the same way that you would have narrated aloud — at the same speed, with the same pauses in the same places. The key to this, I increasingly think, is not punctuation.

You may have learned in school, or read in a style guide, that you can use punctuation to control the length of a pause, with the short dash (–) as the shortest break, followed in order of length by comma, semi-colon, colon, and full-stop (period). (The long dash (—) is fashionable at the moment in place of a comma or matching pair of commas, and some writers feel that it fits between commas and semi-colons in pause length). I suspect that this principle arises from a misunderstanding of part of the explanation of what these punctuation marks are for.

(Originally, commas indicated separations between related clauses in a paragraph. En-dashes indicate breaks, such as cut-offs or interruptions. Em-dashes indicate interjected clauses, such as a remark that breaks the flow and the content of a sentence (e.g. "Beverley, hung over, made her way — not her usual way mind you — drearily to the office."). Semi-colons indicate a change of section, such as a progression in a multi-stage argument. Colons indicate that what follows is consequent to the previous clause ("Jimi was loved and lauded the world over: his death was a shock."). Full-stops indicate the end of a grammatical logical closure (usually called a sentence). You can observe from this post that I use these marks much more loosely than this — but I think it is worth knowing.)

I do not think that punctuation is the key to pacing. Punctuation, like everything else in language, is subject both to regional variations, personal variations and the mercurial vicissitudes of fashion.

Strong diction is part of what makes for good pacing. Strong diction is taking time over the choice of words, and strong diction can sometimes completely countermand what I said in my previous post about the word "said". Consider:

“Holy macaroni,” Claudine repeated. “And how do you feel about the situation?”

You will infer that this is not the first time that Claudine has used this expression in the present exchange. In terms of telling us that it is Claudine who is speaking, the nametag is already redundant; doubly so, therefore, with the verb "repeated". And yet the nametag itself is serving the pacing. Suppose the author had said:

“Holy macaroni!” She paused in surprise. “And how do you feel about the situation?”

We now know what the nametag is there for: to provide a pause in the flow of speech. The pause that results from this explicit tag is slightly longer, and weakens the impact, compared with the technically redundant tag in the original version.

I think that the only reliable way to control the read-speed is by choosing the right words, and placing them appropriately. I attempted to demonstrate this in the first example using this paragraph as a pacing break:

Their exchanges intensified for a few seconds, and Steve, overtaken with determination, responded to Gary's every demand, until finally, reaching high and wide, he snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

While it doesn't take as many seconds to read as it probably took Steve and Gary to play the point, it serves to control the pace without resorting to the explicit (and too short):

They stopped talking to finish the point. Steve won.

Of course, pacing is also an issue involving the author's unique voice. And a reason, therefore, why the author should practice reading his text aloud, preferably to a live audience.

Evolution of the market to e-Pub; le mot de Hachette

2011-09-04T20:15:00.000+02:00

Hachette, is the largest French publisher, and the fifth largest publisher in the USA and the second largest publisher of school textbooks in the World.

Seven PM this evening, Arnoud Nourry, managing director of Hachette was interviewed by Frédéric Martel on French national radio station France Culture. He explained that in discussions with colleagues from other (unnamed) publishers he realized that they, himself included, had been both wrong, and surprised, by the development of electronic publishing.

The common belief (he said) in the industry was that electronic publishing would be limited to dictionaries, large picture books, cooking, travel and schoolbooks, but that paperback literary fiction would remain for a long time on paper. They had made this assumption because they believed that formats that would benefit from interactivity and connectivity were the ones that would take to electronic formats the most freely.

Nourry stated that First Quater of 2011, one in five books sold in the USA was an e-Book, and that "most" of these were paperback literary fiction - black on white content, intended for small simple readers like the Nook and the Kindle.

What has particularly been discovered is that the main adopters of e-Readers are the large volume readers (those who read a lot of books, not those who read big books! - translating as I listen folks), and that as soon as they have acquired their reading devices, the transfer much of their consumption to electronic formats.

This took the publishers by surprise, as they thought that the iPad would lead the way, with interactive and video content.

He went on to talk about their publications for schools, which are now systematically published in both paper and electronic formats - and in electronic format they are enriched with interactive content. He did not give details of the levels of adoption.

He went on to discuss the negotiations that Hachette has had with Google over Google's project to digitise all books that were out of print, and after lengthy negotiations Hachette has an agreement with Google that (while it doesn't really bring them in line with French copyright law) at least acknowledges the author and publishers rights. Every time Google digitizes a text originally published by Hachette, Hachette obtains a copy of the digital text for which they have full distribution rights.

In discussing Hachette's relations in negotiations with the big electronic publishers - Google, Apple, Microsoft - he was very positive about the future of Hachette, both because Hachette is very large, and because Hachette is protected by French law, and because Hachette has a positive attitude to the electronic future and a desire to seek, negotiated partnerships with the big players [I'm interpreting rather than translating here - these are my impressions from a rather vague and lengthy exchange].

The discussion moved on to the future of booksellers and in particular of bookshops. Neither I nor the interviewer was much convinced by his position that the bookshops were likely to suffer less than publishers from "dematerialization", indeed that they may benefit, as they have a key role in sorting and classifying books for the purpose of recommending them to readers. His supposition was that a bookshop would become a space where people go to discuss and discover. He did have examples to back this up. I invite you to voice your opinions on this...

Register

2011-09-02T18:07:00.000+02:00

Register, in writing or speaking, is the socially or contextually conscious choice of vocabulary and grammatical structure. Those people who are apt to adopt more than one register most commonly do so in formal and informal registers. In some cultures this is part of formal education — notably France where written language has a distinctly different register from spoke. In other cultures, changes of register are used by people who move between different social groups as part of their daily lives, such as teachers and social-workers. Register differs from diction in that it is socially or culturally aware (even if subconsciously).

Writers love register. It enables them to set the scene, the atmosphere, the social status, the background.

a) "Oh woe! Oh woe!" she cried, tremulous but stentorian, "we are undone!"

Whoever she is, her register is telling us something about her. At the very least, this is set in the past - anywhere from the middle ages backwards. If I put her in a toga, we are in ancient Rome, and she's a soothsayer.

b) "Lawksamercy if he hasn't gone and done it again," she hawked and spat, "and it's these old bones what'll have to clear up the mess if I'm any judge."

Now to demonstrate the extremes of register I'm going to put those two statements into the mouth of my son's favourite character, The English Butler.

a) "I'm sorry," he announced to the assembled guests, "but an incident has occurred."
b) "Ahem," the English Butler cleared his throat to gain the attention of the assembled company; "his Lordship has had one of his turns, and I must deal with it."

The English Butler's register is without emotion - and consciously so.

Writers can use register to great effect, therefore, to distinguish between characters, between time, place and setting. Between formal situations and informal; between characters who know eachother well and ones who are strangers. This has its pitfalls, of course. The two most common are register blindness and register seepage.

Register blindness is when the author has his own strong style, and it dominates to such an extent that all characters start to sound like the author - or whichever of the author's styles he happens to be using. I know that Derek Prior won't mind my mentioning that in an earlier draft of Cadman's Gambit, he had an aboriginal shaman who kept talking like Basil Rathbone, and a group of professional assassins who spoke like a gathering of English country vicars. It wasn't through poor characterisation, but through inattention to register. (I should add that in rewriting these parts Derek really went to town!)

Register seepage occurs when the characters' register creeps into the narration. Sometimes this is not an issue. In Mike Dennis' novels, strong first person point of view means that the register of narration is the register of the main character. In most chicklit and pretty much all romance, the register is informal vernacular with good grammar - so the narrator's register is the same as most of the characters'.

Register seepage is at its worst in historical and fantasy fiction. Heroic fantasy is set in the Forgotton Realms™ European middle ages, where everyone says "unto" instead of "to" and "wherefore" instead of "why" (or instead of "where" in the bad cases). You get an awful lot of Yoda-speak. (Word order change will you, and wise will you sound.)

This is okay as long as only the characters speak this way, but it is all to easy for the author to get swept along by the characters to the point where he uses "unto" in the narration. And "atop".

"Atop" is a bugbear of mine. It isn't a fancy way of saying "on". "Atop" means "on top of the highest point of". So in the missionary position, the man is "on top of" the woman, not "atop" her. But the Star can be atop the Christmas tree, however silly that sounds. YKWYA...

Register can be a powerful tool, and is a key part of the author's armoury, as it enables him to avoid lengthy character establishment and even to minimise nametagging in direct speech. It is something of which authors should be aware, so feel free to prod me for more if my explanation isn't clear or detailed enough.

Character Dynamics

2011-08-31T10:45:00.001+02:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that new writers have lots of really good ideas for new characters. Wait. That came out wrong. New writers put far to many characters in their books. I actually mine my first two books for characters to reuse.

The rule that many characters is wrong is one that I would encourage you to break. But before you do, practise and understand character dynamics.

Unless characters are joined at the hip (Merry and Pippin), each character has his own story. So if you settle on nine main characters, you will have nine stories to write (or eight in the case of LOTR). When the characters are together they will share the same story — so this makes it a little easier. When they are separated, there are TWO things to keep track of. The first — that most people get right — is spacetime. You have to keep track of where they are in space and how long it has taken them to get there. Fantasy writers are really good at space but hopeless at time. Chicklit writers seem to be the reverse. The second — that less people get right — is character dynamics.

Character dynamics manifest in two key ways, continuity and discontinuity. (The former seems to be harder for new writers.)

When characters who form part of a protagonist group or the protagonist's frequent entourage are established, their emotional relationship with the other characters should also be established. The development, evolution or steady condition of this emotional relationship should continue consistently. Example: brothers whose relationship is established as one of uneasy and unequal competition should continue in that competition until something occurs to alter the dynamic. Let's imagine they survive a dangerous encounter: subsequently, both attaches more value to his brother than to his own superiority, so rivalry diminishes, however we still expect to see occasional echoes of their former relationship.

Now the more characters you have, the more stories you have to write, and the more character dynamics you have to manage. Lets add a bit stat math to the question. Combination (nCr) determines how many different character relationships there are in any group. Taking Merry and Pippin as one character you get:

{Frodo, Sam} {Frodo, Gandalf} {Frodo, Aragorn} {Frodo, Merry & Pippin} {Frodo, Boromir} {Frodo, Legolas} {Frodo, Gimli} { Sam, Gandalf} { Sam, Aragorn} { Sam, Merry & Pippin} { Sam, Boromir} { Sam, Legolas} { Sam, Gimli} { Gandalf, Aragorn} { Gandalf, Merry & Pippin} { Gandalf, Boromir} { Gandalf, Legolas} { Gandalf, Gimli} { Aragorn, Merry & Pippin} { Aragorn, Boromir} { Aragorn, Legolas} { Aragorn, Gimli} { Merry & Pippin, Boromir} { Merry & Pippin, Legolas} { Merry & Pippin, Gimli} { Boromir, Legolas} { Boromir, Gimli} { Legolas, Gimli}

In all, 28 character dynamics. That's 28 stories for the character relationships alone. If, heaven forfend, you start to think about three way dynamics, you get 56 combinations. Tolkien wisely avoids some of the combinations above, and others he only touches on very lightly. Those that he does develop, he develops thoroughly. Those that he does not, he leaves well alone.

I find a helpful way to think about character dynamics is as a soap opera. Soap operas (and teen drama series) focus on character dynamics to the exclusion of plot - the whole key to continuity is the established relationship between characters, to such an extent that a moment of drama can be created by nothing more than having two characters whose history we know well meet in the street. Imagine Alexis and Crystal bumping into eachother in Starbucks.

Character discontinuity occurs when characters are separated, and undergo change, development or evolution while separated. When they meet again, their dynamic is altered. While this is more difficult to write convincingly, it is a ball that few writers drop, largely because it is a case where character dynamics influence plot dynamics. It's also, however, something that happens a lot more often in Real Life — but in real life its effects are generally subtler.

Character proliferation often arises from the naturalistic fallacy that I discussed a few days ago. RL is full of people that we know well. It is reasonably therefore that in a story that takes place in the protagonists home town, we will encounter an awful lot of characters, and many of them will influence the plot. To avoid proliferation, one of the storyteller's friends is recombination. This is taking several real people whose influence on the protagonist is similar and combining them to make one character. The other is using characters as emblems of their group – so make only one jock, one cop, one storekeeper – but let them voice the opinions and deliver the influence of the crowd they represent.

Finally I would advise every storyteller to be very clear on who is an agonist and who is just a character. A character is anyone who is established (described and depicted) for present or future use. An agonist is any character whose words or actions influence the plot, either directly or indirectly. Sometimes an agonist is a character we never meet, such as the hero's father who we get to know through the hero's reminiscences or reflections. Sometimes they are obvious, like an antagonist.

---

A footnote about Points of View. I'm sure I will talk about this more. Strong POV is when the author consciously chooses to narrate only what a specific character sees, experiences and knows. When the author uses strong POV he will typically point it out explicitly. There is a bit of a fashion at the moment to use strong POV, but where each chapter uses the POV of a different character. When this is done, the character's name is usually used in the first sentence of the chapter. Or the chapter title is the character name — a device that I think belittles the reader's intelligence.

Using this strong POV technique when there are many characters can work well, as long as the writer restricts himself to using only principal characters who are going to develop through the course of the story. When there is a chapter devoted to the POV of one random agonist, I guess it's okay, but it starts to get both difficult and (sometimes) annoying when every agonist has to have his own chapter, or worse, a random character gets a whole chapter to his POV because the author knew there was something the reader had to know, and none of the main characters were present to witness it. If the latter happens, then the plot is not compatible with the narrative technique, and one of them needs to be altered.

Weird Words #2 - Exquisite

2011-08-26T10:54:00.000+02:00

Wonderful word, this one. Common usage is as an alternative to "great" that sounds more expressive.

1. Executed with exquisite skill.

Coupling 'executed' with 'exquisite' and the further x of 'skill', and the whole phrase is redolent of finesse, precision and expertise.

2. The exquisite pain of romance.

Here the usage is possibly just the same - 'exquisite' is being used as an emphasizing word that has neutral connotations. Compare it with the following;

3. The wonderful pain of romance.

4. The terrible pain of romance.

'Wonderful' and 'terrible' are both providing emphasis, but the former with a positive slant, the latter with a negative. It is conceivable that the writer of 2 was aware of the precise denotation - even the derivation - of the word, but you can see how it may be used as an alternative to 'consummate' (adj.) which just means "complete" or "full" - or as a truss-word - it strengthens the structure of meaning without adding details.

One of the consequences of the use of exquisite purely for emphasis is that the adverb exquisitely often ends up as a fancy alternative to very. This, in my opinion, is a pity.

Consider the "standard" definition of exquisite which is "fine, precise, detailed, delicate", the which arises from the etymology, which means "sought-after". Here's why I think it's a wonderful word. If you didn't know the etymology, you are probably still using the word correctly. Consider 1 in the light of this; 'exquisite skill' would likely increase the value of whatever is being done so skilfully, hence make it more sought-after. Consider 2, and romance is certainly something that continues to be sought, even once we know that it can be painful.

The reader who appreciates the meaning of exquisite will feel that it has added meaning in these cases, whereas the reader who does not will not be further enlightened by your usage, but will nonetheless get a sense of what you seek to say.

This sense of rarity gives exquisite its connotation of desirability, and explains why the bad guy often uses it to describe unpleasant things. It's because he's educated, probably British, and he knows what it really means, but he's messing with the hero's head because he knows that the hero is blue-collar and thinks that exquisite means expensive.

5. You will be tortured exquisitely until you talk.

Amazon Tagging on the Moon

2011-08-24T16:47:00.000+02:00

A couple of days ago I was involved in a brief exchange of view on the meaning of the word "erotica" - used to tag novels on Amazon. Tagging is when readers select a category for a book, so other readers interested in the category will be able to find the same book.

During the exchange, which took place on Kindle Boards, I was caught out being knee-jerk defensive over the meaning of a word - and I was a little impolite to boot.

This rather brought me up short. I am somewhat inclined to pontificate (that's what this blog is for, after all), so I need to be called on it from time to time. After all, I am all for definition by consensus and I support rather than resist changes in meaning.

In UK English, hopefully, is used idiomatically to mean 'I hope', as in "hopefully it won't rain tomorrow". People of my parents' generation (including one or both of my parents) are sometimes offended by this, and almost always take a dim view of it. Decimate means to reduce in number by a factor of ten. It is usually used in modern English to mean "destroy", "obliterate" or just "defeat". As far as I'm concerned, that's just fine.

Nonetheless, I did get uppity about "erotica" being used to mean "anything that can cause sexual arousal in some people". I'm well aware that most of the time in English, erotic is used as a fancy synonym for "sexy". And most of the time, I suspect, that usage does no harm to the general (if rather vague) denotation of erotica.

If I got uppity, it was not, at the time, justified. But it set me wondering whether there were situations where defending the nuance between two very similar and highly subjective terms is justifiable. I think it may be that in tagging on Amazon, a case can be made for some sort of moderation of meaning. I suggest that in tagging a book I'm not just saying what I think of it - as I would if I used the same term in a review. The act of tagging is one of communicating - of suggesting, proposing, offering - the content of a novel to other potential readers.
If I tag Judy Blume's Forever as "erotica" because it contains a positively portrayed sex scene, then I am doing a disservice to Ms Blume, all her readers all her potential readers. Because her book is not about sex. Nor is it any kind of exploration of the psychological, emotional, physical or sentimental content of sex, even though each of those does feature. I am also doing a disservice to all those readers who are looking for "sex presented in a literary context as opposed to explicit pulp titillation" - the former I would describe as erotica, the latter I would describe as porn.

Thinking about this post, I began to realize just how difficult it would be, even dealing with tags that are not already muddied with the coyness derived from taboo. If you tag a book "horror" because you find it horrifying, someone else tags it "violence" because although they were not horrified, they were aware of a level of violence that they felt needed signaling. I for one don't find "Lady Chatterley's Lover" either erotic or sexy. I believe it is classed as the former because it was written by an established writer of literary fiction, but contains sexual words. Which would show that the traditional means of classification is itself corrupted with prejudice and favour.

On the whole, in the end, I come down in favour of consensus definition. At least on the Amazon page you can see how many times it has been tagged with a given word. I do worry that most of what is tagged as "erotica" is actually porn - Amazon.com has 2500 titles tagged as "porn", but over 24000 tagged as "erotica". Those numbers aren't enough to convince me that my understanding of the meaning of erotica is wrong (or even that its meaning is changing). They tell me that the American public is more comfortable buying something labeled "erotica" than something labeled "porn". Valuable information in my opinion.

For your consideration, I have linked to a collection of stories that is resolutely "erotica" in the Old Skool sense.

Writer's Pitfalls, #2: The Naturalistic Fallacy

2011-08-22T10:49:00.000+02:00

It occurs to me that this is more of a storyteller's pitfall, since it is all about the business of what stories are. (What they are for is for another time).

IN the theatre, Naturalism is a style of performance and of representation, and a style of writing, that seeks to represent Real Life (RL) - and distance itself from the stylistic, symbolic or mythological. It is accompanied by a style of acting which seeks to represent characters as if they were real, ordinary people. Movement is limited to what is necessary for practical purposes and speech patterns are those used in everyday life.

Plays written in a naturalistic style deal with small, local issues - both action, location and consequences are restricted to a small group - such as a family. The sources of drama are to be found in the everyday lives of the people; their choices, and the consequences of their choices.

The same principle, applied to literature, has far reaching consequences, because outside of the artificial environment of the theatre, there is nothing that obliges a literary treatment to be dramatic. It can describe real, everyday existence as it really is.

Here is the fallacy. In RL, shit happens for no reason. People can go through a whole series of episodes of misfortune or good fortune in RL without explanation, justification or lasting consequences. Bad stuff can happen for no reason at all and ruin your life. Good stuff can happen for no reason at all and change your life forever. That's the way RL is.

When naturalism is used intentionally in literature, this is either because the author has a literary or political agenda, or because the story is a true life (TL) story. It can work, and often does.

A typical TL story is the Sporting Hero or, as I usually think of it, Douglas Bader. The main character is a boy wonder who becomes and ace sportsman. Then he has some terrible injury. He has to struggle against a physical disability and his own self-esteem. By the end, he has once again become an ace sportsman.

Because there really are TL examples of exactly this story, we tend to think of this as an example of RL, but it isn't. Think of how many ace sportsmen there are who have a terrible debilitating injury and never play again. Most of them, probably. RL isn't about stories. The Sporting Hero archetype works because it is life conveniently fitting the pattern of a story.

Naturalism recognizes that life doesn't always follow the pattern of a story. RL is usually patternless. But. And it is a very big but, which is why it gets a whole sentence to itself. But readers expect patterns. We turn almost everything we see into a story if we possibly can. We see connections where there aren't any, we coerce unrelated events into relationships by telling ourselves that so-and-so is just naturally lucky while so-and-other is having a run of bad luck. We expect there to be unknown connections underlying coincidences.

And we read stories because we need them. They make sense of our lives, our language, our culture. Naturalism is not always fallacious, but it is when it is used where a story is expected.

Such as in the modern fairytale setting of heroic fantasy. You could write a heroic fantasy where the main protagonist is a peasant housewife whose son is murdered by bandits, whose daughter is eaten by a dragon and whose village laid waste by a goblin horde, and who herself eventually dies of starvation and exposure. But this wouldn't be a story, it would be real life in a fantasy setting.

It isn't enough to write real characters and put them in a fantasy or imagined setting, and then see what they do. An author needs to put those realistic characters into a story, and then see what happens.

The Naturalistic Fallacy then, is this: since real life is not composed of stories, then a novel need not have a story, just convincing characters, locations and events.

The very best naturalistic writers can convince you that there isn't a story when there is. In a story, all the events are related. There are connections between all the characters. Every action has a butterfly effect, and every item is Chekhov's Gun.

I will talk about the Butterfly Effect and Chekhov's Gun in the next installment of "Writer's Pitfalls".

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Remember, there are no rules if you can break them skillfully.

Editing Mike Dennis' The Ghosts of Havana

2011-08-18T17:24:00.001+02:00

I just completed editing book two of Mike Dennis' series The Key West Nocturnes. It came to me already well polished - needing very little input from me - all I needed to do was check the story, and make sure there were no errors. I spotted one or two, in accordance with rule 4^*.

What you get is noir, firmly in the tradition of the Maltese Falcon or Key Largo - the first person style has Chandler's flair and Hammett's grit. Even so, Dennis manages to deliver something that is in the present, something that is colourful, surprising and in places, new - all the while preserving the elements that make the 'hard boiled detective mystery': the slang, the violence, the drama.

I don't want to reveal anything about the story - it has so much in it, in terms of mystery and surprise; the tension drives you to read more - and I advise sitting down with a big glass of whiskey and reading aloud. In the end I had to stop editing and read through to the end, because I kept finding myself reading three or four pages without looking for faults.

Three words: read this book.

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* - rule four states that whenever you are looking for something of which there may be many, but hard to find, such as coins down the back of the sofa, a particular type of Lego brick or a shard from the glass you just broke, there will always be one more that you missed.

Controlling your Web-Rep

2011-08-17T14:49:00.000+02:00

The indie e-book market is about web promotion. Keeping your visibility high, by blogging, tweeting, getting blogged about, getting tweeted about, blogging about tweets, tweeting about blogs, FB-ing blogs about tweets about tweets about ... you get it. I get you get it.

Authors, and those, like me, providing services to authors, need to keep a hand on their web-rep. Anyone who is interested in you is going to Google you. As an author, they want to know more about you, because they're curious ... or ... creepy. As an editor, authors want some bona fides - they want to know you aren't a scam.

I added a new page to my commercial website. I call the page Harry Dewulf on the web, and I've put links on it to sites that you might find if you Google me. This is partly because I think it is a good idea. It's partly because I found out this morning that way back in march I got another letter published in my favourite periodical, New Scientist. You can go read it here.

p.s. I really love M.I.A. right now.

Who do you write for?

2011-08-16T11:09:00.000+02:00

Reading this thread in the Kindle Boards brought me back to the question.

I have never sought publication as a fiction writer, and I haven't written with any reader in mind other than myself. So I do wonder whether other writers are conscious of writing for someone in particular.

I wrote a lot of love poetry from the ages of 14 through 25-ish (most of which is mercifully lost), much of which was written for three real women. But some of it was written for an imaginary woman - and I developed a very strong sense not only of who she was, but of her existence as a real person, much as one does of a strongly developed character in a novel.

I realise that some writers have an audience in mind. A writer who is not a graphomaniac is typically a storyteller of some sort - and since a story is told, so the reader listens. One can easily imagine that much as a writer for children might tell her stories to a real child, so a writer for children might tell a story to an imaginary child. The writer might imagine herself as a child, and tell the story that she would have liked to have been told. This ties in to the issue of what stories are for; more on that another time.

I think that the novelist should - insofar as anyone can suggest what a novelist should - write with the act of telling in mind, and with the act of telling in mind, have in mind a strong sense of the listener or listeners. I would even go so far as to suggest that the listener should be as well developed a character as any of the characters in the novel itself - if not even more so.

I am well aware of the current (and in my opinion slavish, obsessive and infantile) fashion, especially in fiction for YA and non-adults, for the protagonist as reader avatar. I think this arises from a failure, perhaps largely on the part of Hollywood, to understand the process of identification.

While the protagonist ought to be someone that the reader can identify with, he ought not be someone that the reader identifies himself as. (Unless the aim of the author is to help teenagers through a difficult time, like the incomparable Judy Blume.)

The e-Book market is showing that readers like being kept waiting for the next part, and enjoy downloading it, and even paying for it. This is what the profession of storytelling was all about, before the advent of Big Publishing. Coming full circle: the Kindle Boards topic is about motivation to write. I think that a strong motivation can be knowing that your listener is there, waiting to hear the next part of the story. If he has wandered off to read comics, probably the story wasn't all that good in the first place. But if he's waiting impatiently to know what happens next, then not only do you have a good story, but you also have a business model.

Semiotics - the language of signs

2011-08-13T10:35:00.002+02:00

Coined by French author and critic Roland Barthes, semiotics is the study of the language of signs - and by signs, he means nonverbal clues.

In all nonverbal media (the graphic arts, theatre, film and television), semiotics is restricted to the use of visual clues that give you essential information, typically about character, setting or location. Barthes gives the example from professional wrestling, of how to recognise the good guy and the bad guy:

The good guy wears a mask that covers his upper face and (sometimes) his hair. The bad guy wears a mask that covers his whole face and head. Colour clues are also given - greens, blues, yellows, gold and white are used by good guys, combinations including black and red are used by the bad guys. (I don't watch professional wrestling but I'd be interested to learn if these signs still exist).

In film, he gives the example of how to recognise an ancient Roman (and distinguish him from and ancient Greek). Both Romans and Greeks in film wear togas, but Romans Have Fringes. This sign is so strong that even in recent years, film-makers have a hard time breaking free of it.

In verbal media, signs go under another name: symbolism.

Symbolism in literature is the use of visual clues, in the same way as in other media, however in literature it can go much further. From using an animal emblem for a character, through using repeated allusions to rotation, circles and wheels throughout your text to fix the idea of the Wheel of Fortune, semiotics in literature is rich and almost infinite in potential.

Arguably, the use of poetic imagery in literature is a subtle form of semiotics, as are analogy, simile and metaphor.

The author should therefore have a heightened awareness of words that have visual connotations. I just came across a borderline usage of "thundrous*" for a sound. Thundrous is normally a rolling, rumbling sound, but is often (carelessly IMO) used to mean "very loud".

'The thundrous beating of the rain on the tin roof' is one of those weird ones where while it isn't wrong, by associating it with rain, you activate the visual component - thunder makes you think of the sky when it thunders, of the sudden arrival of darkness, and clouds, dark with rain, heavy and pendulous... easy tiger. This might be what the author intended but in this case I didn't think so.

* I prefer the often supposed incorrect alternative spelling "thundrous". I think it should be encouraged. Your spell checker will tell you it is thunderous. Along with murdrous and wondrous.

Language Traps

2011-08-12T09:34:00.000+02:00

According to both neuroscientists and illusionists, we see what we expect to see, and with the right stimulus, we can be deceived into seeing things that aren't there, and to missing things that are. Philosophers are quick to latch on to this. Also, fortunately, there is serious research into perceptual phenomena, though it is not always taken seriously.

Writers who are aware of this kind of thing can achieve extraordinary effects on their readers - some of the time. Attention and perception are tricky, and your subtly misleading paragraph that will be understood quite differently the second time it is read may fail completely if the reader is distracted halfway through. Poetry, of course, relies on this kind of thing, and the writer would be well advised to spend some time with the masters. Donne, Marvell, Coleridge and Pope all display some skill at this (the links are to my favourites, but not necessarily the best examples of what I'm talking about). The absolute master in English is Shakespeare, who in both poetry and plays constantly peppers the text with both vocabulary and imagery that foreshadows later events without signposting them. Just count how many times blood is mentioned in Macbeth before so much as a drop is spilled - and once the first drop is spilled, how many more...

Mel Comley pointed out that I had made an error when posting about her work a few days ago which I think reveals a very simple but compelling example of perceptual effects. The first two DI Lorne Simpkins novels are called Impeding Justice and Final Justice.

Now go back and read the title of the first one again. I, along with a whole lot of other people, read that as impending until the error was pointed out. I suspect that this is because the second book is called Final. Impending and Final are a natural sequence, so knowing that final is coming, I bet a lot of people will see impending even though impeding is written in big impact caps.

Tangentially - though not off topic - I cannot recommend enough Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind. Not only does it reveal an awful lot about the author, it serves to teach a basic vocabulary of perception, and alert you to the way that you deceive yourself.

Context is everything

2011-08-11T11:00:00.000+02:00

English is not one of the easy languages. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is our spelling, which makes our language (or languages, if you prefer), not only troublesome for foreigners, but tricky for us, too.

In contrast to the romance languages that I translate from, English words frequently select their denotations not only from syntactic modifiers but also from context. Um... in plain English please.

In English, the meaning of a word can be changed not only by the words next to it in a sentence, but also by the situation being described. Examples:

The verb to get is one of my favourite words in any language*. On its own, to get is to obtain or acquire. Consider what happens when you add the preposition on to it:

The cat got on the table.

In this example, to get on is to change physical position, to a position where you are on top of something.

I'm getting on in plastics.

In this example, to get on is to advance your career. In plastics? A little outmoded isn't it?

I'm getting on with my homework.

In this example, you're doing what you are meant to do, rather than procrastinating.

Each time you change the context (cat, plastics, homework), you change the meaning of to get on.

This feature of English - present in other languages but by no means as common** - can make English both very tricky but also very rewarding. When you studied English at school, it is a pretty safe bet that your teacher encouraged you to avoid get, and employ something more explicit or more interesting instead (see my previous post on "said"). They may even have tried to encourage you to vary your vocabulary for variation's sake. In writing, this is not a good thing. English reads better if you take advantage of the metamorphic nature of words like get, and only use something more specific when you really need it.

In their defence, I don't think your teachers were wrong to tell you to do it, but they should have told you that the purpose of the exercise was to expand your vocabulary, but that slavishly trolling the thesaurus is not how to write good prose.

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* my absolute favourite word is causa in Latin. That is how much of a geek I am.
** feel free to cite examples of languages that I don't know where this is as common as in English; I'd love to know.

What to expect from an Editor, Part 2.

2011-08-10T10:57:00.000+02:00

This is the second part of my thoughts about editing. In the first part I talked a little at random about the qualities of a good book and a good story, and also the qualities of a good editor. Today I am focusing on what an editor should actually do.

Part 2: What to Expect from an Editor

All editors are not alike. Each will have his preferred methodology. Each will have strengths and weaknesses, just like a writer. I am aware that there are editors whose principle is that there are a few "standard" ways of writing a good (or saleable) book, and they will coerce your text into meeting the standard. This may well suit you. One might be tempted to divide editors into those who edit to create a commercial success and those who edit to help the writer improve his work. This would be wrong for a couple of reasons. Firstly, commercial success is too much of a chimera for an editor to be able to suggest a few changes to get. Secondly, editors are trying to make a living too. Thirdly, the landscape of the marketplace is changing due to e-publishing, and I hope ... expect that the change will favour authors' individuality. (More about this another time.)

As I intimated in Part 1, what a writer ought to get by working with an editor is a better book.

I'm going into opinion here - so don't hesitate to disagree, especially if you are an editor. An editor needs to be a rigorous, skilled critic, and an ally. Here are the things I think an editor must provide:

Detailed analysis of the flaws in your text, and some suggestions as to how to correct the flaws
Analysis of opportunities for improvement of your text. Opportunities are not missing elements (those come under flaws). Your editor must be able to show you where and how you can make additions to your narrative that will make it stronger.

There are also a couple of things that an editor should be able to provide:

A view of the possibility of favourable or unfavourable comparison with other books or writers, and suggestions of how to deal with this. This is especially important for new writers, but becoming less important for writers with a well established style in the indie market.
Mentoring. While a master gives instruction, a mentor shows you how to improve yourself. The best editors do this for their writers. And all writers can improve. I think an editor should be able to give advice and make suggestions that will help the author to write better next time.

So what in concrete terms should you get for your money? At the very least, you should get your text back from the editor with lots of notes in the margin. Much as I am loath to say so, MSWord is very good for this purpose. Some editors will not touch spelling, grammar and punctuation until you deliver a final draft. Others will do it as they go. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Any other changes that the editor makes should come with some explanation. I don't usually apply literary corrections directly to the text. I prefer to flag the problem, explain it, and let the author make the correction, as I think this helps the author to assert his personal style, and to learn.

I think the editor's job is to help the author to improve his book, not to correct the author's book for him.

I also like to provide a summary of my editorial notes. This includes a short literary analysis, and details of any general issues that I think the author needs to address. This is valuable because it is hard for the author to get a view of any global issues when reading notes in the margin. I also like to chat with authors (via Skype call) - though I understand entirely why this is not possible for other editors.

Announcement - now editing for Mel Comley

2011-08-09T20:58:00.001+02:00

I'm pleased to announce that I am now working on Mel Comley's upcoming romantic novel, A Time to Heal. Mel is best know for her thrillers: Impeding Justice and Final Justice, and a third novel in the same series is in the works. You can read the first chapter of Cruel Justice on Mel's blog.

What to Expect from an Editor, Part 1.

2011-08-09T10:09:00.002+02:00

Now that I am offering editing to independent authors, here are some thoughts about what I think you should expect from a literary editor. Part 1 is about editing and editors. Part 2 will be about what services I think an editor should provide, and what you should expect your editor to do with your text.

Part 1: What makes an Editor

What is a Good Book? I'm sure the reply is pretty much unanimous: a good book is subjective, personal. But just as I can tell a good violinist from a bad one, although I know nothing about playing the violin, so most people can recognize a bad book. So can most people be editors? I don't think so. Most people can be proofreaders^*, however.

Who is a good editor? Derek Prior and I both studied drama theory, and in the course of our studies learned the craft of textual analysis. Textual analysis arises on the one hand from the kind of literary criticism developed by F. R. Leavis and his contemporaries, and on the other hand from the desire to apply scientific rigour to the study of literature. I have applied textual analysis in every type of work and writing that I have done^**. A good editor needs to be able to combine his analytic skill with a deep understanding of what makes a story work.

What makes a story work? This is not as hard to pin down as what makes a good book, because what makes a story work is contextual rather than subjective. I have read manuscripts that contain no story - just a series of related events. Sometimes this results from the naturalistic fallacy (that I will discuss another time), sometimes just from narrative incompetence. Narrative incompetence is the inability to tell a story. As long as your manuscript features a story, your story can be made to work. How to make it work means getting down to the nuts and bolts of narrative mechanics, and putting right what is obviously wrong. Sometimes an editor's work is limited to this, but this alone does not make a good editor.

So what makes a good editor? A good editor needs to know what makes a good writer. After all, an editor needs clients, and a client who is a good writer will be good publicity for an editor. So a good editor will be able to show a writer not only how to improve his book, but how to become a better writer.

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* The techie culture surrounding indie publishing has made "beta-reader" the favoured term. Literally, 'proof read' means 'test read'. A proofreader is someone who reads as if they are the intended reader, whether for pleasure, information, study, who is able so state, thereafter, whether the book met their need.
** In French academia, there is a vast, rich, and mostly redundant vocabulary of technical terms that can be applied in textual analysis. I try to steer clear of this kind of thing, though some of the terms are indispensable.

Nonliterals

2011-08-08T11:55:00.000+02:00

The field of non-literal language is vast - it's one of those areas where the more you look for, the more you find. I have to use a negative nametag for it just because it is so big. Nonliterals applied to lit crit refers to the entire pantechnicon of description through analogy or imagery.

Broadly speaking, nonliterals can be divided into two categories, which, whatever you call them, are either local or general. Local nonliterals are those confined to single phrase or sentence, and the most familiar of these are simile and metaphor.
This includes everything from the mildly metaphorical - 'we're having mild weather' - through improbable simile - 'as obvious as a lead brick in a bowl of rice pudding' - to extreme mixed metaphor - 'his whole body was a sword which sang like a ribbon in the wind'.
General nonliterals are those that spread through a whole paragraph or engulf an entire novel. Symbolism is the most frequently named of these, and - though it's forms can be as myriad as your imagination - is one of the easiest to describe. Symbolism is the repeated use of symbols to evoke or enhance a particular theme or characteristic. Symbols are generally images but sometimes gestures or sounds, which carry a specific meaning. Imagery can be used symbolically, through repetition, such as associating a particular symbol with a particular character or type of event.

I have so much material on this stuff that I will be posting examples of the above, and more, in future posts. I had meant to devote this post to the following:

Unwitting metaphor

Those who know their Latin will know that classical Latin is a vocab-poor language. There are very few actual words in it, compared with modern languages. This is because the authors of the Classical Roman period deliberately restricted themselves to words of known Latin origin when writing and orating. So, when they had to describe a concept for which there was no single word, rather than neologising, they would prefer to use metaphor. A familiar example might be campus martius - a battlefield (also a fairly ubiquitous place name). Campus is a field, martius "of Mars" (the Romans' god of war). Indeed Caesar uses the this and that of Mars to describe all sorts of military matters, and I remember an example (those more learned than me can perhaps confirm whether it is Caesar or someone else) describing 'Mars moving among the armies on the field' as a way to convey the currents of activity on the battlefield.

I gave the example mild above because the expression mild weather, and its much less used counterpart inclement weather are fine examples of unwitting metaphor. This usage of mild in modern English is so familiar that it doesn't occur to most of us, meteorological anthropomorphism notwithstanding, that it is a metaphor. But mild means gentle, kind or merciful.

We generally describe as cliché*, any simile or metaphor that is so familiar that we tend to use it automatically ('rooted to the spot'), however it isn't general used for those single word examples like mild that have become so familiar (Doug Harper says that the earliest usage for weather is 14th century).

The writer ought to be aware of when he is using them. The editor has to be sensitive to every single one.

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*I will be coming back to this
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Yes, I am really pleased with 'meteorological anthropomorphism notwithstanding' !

Expostulated Janet!

2011-08-07T12:20:00.000+02:00

In Praise of "Said"

Dialogue is pretty easy to invent. Most people spend plenty of time imagining future conversations and recalling past ones. It's a short step to imagining conversations between characters. It's when it comes to writing them down that difficulties arise.

Various style guides will give you invaluable aid in laying out your dialogue* on the page, and there are all sorts of conventions about acceptable proportions when combining speech and non-speech in the same paragraph and what-have-you.

The most common difficulty seems to lie in maintaining the pace and flow of a natural conversation when reading, while at the same time giving indications of tone, gesture and other nonverbal communication, not to mention ensuring that the reader doesn't get confused as to who is speaking.

In French, there is a convention which while it is somewhat vertigo-inducing the first time, does away very nicely with all these problems at once:

Armand and Philippe were sitting outside their favorite café on the Champs-Elysées as usual when their attention was caught by the appearance of an elderly lady with a small dog, followed closely by a leggy blonde with a huge alsatian.

Armand

- they are together, those two, do you think ?

Philippe, laconic

- I do not think, Armand my friend, I only observe ?

Armand, gently teasing

- but what do you observe, Philippe my old chum ?

Philippe, smug

- Sultan and César are taking their ladies to the park.

Unfortunately this convention, present in French for at least a century, is not available in the English speaking world - though I'll get behind anyone who wants to use it.

Writing in English, you have to say who said what and how they said it.

Now a whole lot of you will have been enjoined by your English teachers to avoid "said", and use something "more interesting" or "more descriptive". Others will have told you to "use adverbs".

"They are together, those two, do you think?" Asked Armand.
"I do not think, Armand my friend, I only observe," Philippe replied.
"But," Armand continued in a gently teasing tone, "what do you observe, Philippe my old chum?"
"Sultan and César are taking their ladies to the park," Philippe smugly concluded.

How much do those complements really add? We know the first line is a question, even without the questionmark. What Philippe says can only be a reply, Armand then continues his earlier thought and Philippe concludes the dialog with a rather weak joke. These words are almost completely redundant - they are there only to hang something else onto. The first one tells us who speaks first, and the third and fourth enable us to attach some color.

Those aforementioned English teachers would probable have been disappointed that we didn't say inquired, reposted, insisted and declared, but these would have been no less redundant, and more than a little distracting. Indeed, the more you search for alternatives to "said", the more distracting it becomes, and the more your characters sound like schoolgirls in something by Elinor Brent-Dyer or Frank Richards. And not for nothing, since Frank Richards often used this for comic effect, though he was equally capable when using plain old said with adverbs. Notice especially the use of "repeated" in the second example, and why it isn't redundant.

So here at last are Philippe and Armand as I originally wrote them:

Armand and Philippe were sitting as usual outside their favorite café on the Champs-Elysées when their attention was caught by the appearance of an elderly lady with a small dog, followed closely by a leggy blonde with a huge alsatian.

"They are together, those two, do you think?" said Armand.
"I do not think, Armand my friend, I only observe,"
"But," Armand leaned forward, with the beginning of a smile, "what do you observe, Philippe my old chum?"
"Sultan and César are taking their ladies to the park."

In conclusion, if conclusion there be, I think there is a place where Janet can justifiably expostulate, but much of the time nametagging isn't even necessary, and when it is, said will generally do.

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* I use the UK spelling to differentiate between: dialogue - discussion or conversation and a dialog: an educational roleplaying exercise or political/diplomatic exchange. This may be a little fussy of me but it acts as a landmark.

New Writers' pitfalls #1 - assumption

2011-08-06T11:56:00.000+02:00

Talking about this recently with another editor, we concluded that if you asked 30 editors for the ten worst new writer pitfalls, you'd get 30 different lists. I have enough material to post a new pitfall every month for the foreseeable.

Assumptions

First time writers who know their story and characters well, and want to get to grips with the story, and want to get to the end of the book, are making a strong start. However the same writers can and will make a whole range of errors because of this strong start.

To assume is to take something to be so without evidence. Assumption (in spite of what your management training textbook might have told you) is not always bad. Indeed for a creative writer it is often essential. However there are certain assumptions that are almost indistinguishable from hope.

The author who wants to get to grips with his story as fast as possible will often assume that the reader will recognize the world of the book, and consequently he will forego description. Knowing his characters and locations well, he will omit to portray them to the reader - especially since he may find this a tedious distraction from moving the plot along.

If the characters are well developed in the author's mind, then by the end of the story the reader will have got to know them quite well - though not without a little frustration. If they are not well developed ...

Of course, exactly the same effect can arise when the author has done no preparation at all in conceiving characters and locations.

---

Literary commentary that purports to tell you how to write well is always open to debate, disagreement and controversy. A good storyteller can make almost anything work, and anything described as a pitfall might, in the hands of a skillful writer, be viewed as a strength. This disclaimer notwithstanding, the new writer would do well to seek to develop his skill by understanding his weakness.

I'm now offering editing to indie authors!

2011-08-05T13:03:00.000+02:00

After I edited Derek Prior's books, I have started offering Literary Editing services to indie writers. Check out my thread on kindle boards and my website for more details.
I got interested in the indie stuff largely thanks to Derek, who asked me to review some books for his Kindle boards review site (see the lynx on the right), and then started forwarding some editing work to me when he was overloaded with requests for editing himself.
It is more fun than traditional editing - basically you have to work fast and cheap.

Wierd Words

2011-08-05T12:32:00.000+02:00

I'm hearing more and more about "internet blogs". I suppose this pleonasm isn't too horrific if it is intended for the increasingly few people who can't even guess that a blog might be on the internet. Don't even get me started on "the Internet". Readers who know me from another place will know that I'm something of an Old Skool web geek.

Mainly this post lets me use the word "pleonasm".

Schlock

2011-01-19T15:14:00.000+01:00

I've been wanting to attempt a bit of Zombie schlock for quite some time, but I'm always troubled by two things.

1. I'm painfully aware that zombiepocalypse has two key elements of wish-fulfilment, which are a) culling the zombie hoard is essentially guilt-free and trigger-happy. You get to take out scores of people because they aren't really people any more. b) the personal currency (value, esteem or appreciation) of any individual survivor is vastly increased. In other words, no matter how idle, lame and useless you are, the other survivors will surely appreciate you for something.

I don't like wish-fulfilment when it is built into the scenario, as it tends to make tensions difficult to develop. Lazy writers get around this by building artificial character incompatibilities into the personalities of their small group of survivors - conveniently forgetting that most people will set aside their differences in order to cooperate for mutual survival. Of course, once a group of survivors is whittled down to a few dozen (far too many for a film, of course), all of those remaining will be very good at maintaining group cohesion, as this is the key to survival in this sort of situation. Tensions within the group are more likely to arise from their attitudes to theoretical questions such as their long-term prospects and strategy. These will not arise until the survivors feel secure.

2. I have a very hard time getting around the science. The film 28 Days Later does it best in my view by dispensing with the dead-raising capability - meaning of course that the zombies are still alive. I think this is essential unless the origin of your infection is an extra-terrestrial parasite or a prelude to an extra-terrestrial invasion. I suppose that either of these is acceptable in SF, but for pulp schlock to hit home, the science has to be a no-brainer (or near).

I feel that the science should at least be defensible. Resident Evil's T-Virus is utterly objectionable as it reanimates at a local, cellular level, but restores systemic features such as muscle coordination. Unless it is a Who Goes There?* style organism which has a sort of proto-intelligence that can piggyback on the host's brain. Mysterious atmospheric or cosmological events, while they excuse the author from providing an explanation, also limit the duration of his story - as does everything where the science doesn't add-up - since at some point, the survivor's strategy, short, medium or long term, will depend upon their understanding of the causes and especially future prospects of the pathogen or pathogenic event.

Survival of zombiepocalypse is extremely highly probable. Moviemakers, and to a lesser extent, novelists, need small numbers of main characters to keep a connection with their audience/readers and to maintain a cohesive narrative. This is fair enough, but misrepresentation of human behaviour, especially capacity for rationality combined with instinctive survival activities, is not a fair way of establishing a small group.

Below is a sort of prologue, where I have put myself in the mind of a slightly obsessive emergency management agent, such as you might find at FEMA, who, presented with the beginnings of a possible zombiepocalypse, records his thoughts on the best responses.

___________________
*see the film "The Thing"

Strategy is taking a broad view. A long view. Long in time, long in space. Strategy includes not just tactical advantage, but economics, sociology, politics ecology – geography as well as topography.

As soon as a crisis hits, someone has to be in there, thinking strategy.

On the ground, you need people who think tactics. Thinking on your feet; improvise; make the rules and the game as you go; evolve your objectives; take – and refuse – opportunities.

As soon as a crisis hits, there are people on the ground, thinking tactics. You need them. They get you through the first few hours.

The strategist spends a lot of time on theoretical problems. A strategist, after all, deals in the probable and the possible. There are factors that are the same between real and imaginary situations. The strategist's goal is to identify the desirable among the possible and make the possible probable.

He wonders, therefore, often, about how to strategise near extinction events. The most probable of these is epidemic – and the least probable epidemic is zombie attack. However the model of zombie attack serves as a strong symbol for society, and is a useful thought experiment for a strategist thinking of a society hit by an epidemic that has knocked out it's core institutions – those that provide food, shelter and organisation.

The zombie movies have it all wrong. There would be lots of survivors. Maybe as many of half the people would survive the onset of the crisis. One way or another. Even the cosseted, ignorant, dependent inhabitants of our most developed societies have not eliminated the basic survival instincts, which in reality resolve in human beings to two things: friendship and efficiency.

As soon as survival from one day to the next is the primary goal of an individual, far from becoming paranoid and selfish, the overwhelming majority of people become more sociable, and altruistic to a point of aggressive self-sacrifice. The group becomes vastly more important than any one individual, and noone needs to be told. People make friends and enemies more easily – but concern themselves with making more friends. They don't concern themselves about their enemies. They become efficient about them.

Efficiency can take many forms. Among the first that most people notice is that they eat and drink less, even though they exert themselves more. Another is ruthlessness, both in taking choices and taking opportunities. Indeed, when, as some inevitably will, they give their lives to protect the group, this might be seen as an obvious extension of efficiency to its logical conclusion. Efficiency is, of course, about thriftiness. All resources increase in value. However individual hoarding is rare – since it is both inefficient at potentially harmful to the health of the group.

All of this healthy survivalism leads to the presence of many survivors – and not just in isolated pockets, either. Even while the threat is still present – beit threat of infection, enslavement by extra-terrestrials or being consumed by flesh-crazed zombies – people will rapidly seek out other groups and establish regular links with them. Networks will develop.

So the strategist expects this to emerge – and emerge quite rapidly. These networks will establish rules, mostly with regard to the boundaries of territory and behaviour, which in a short time will become indistinguishable from laws. Lawlessness is therefore not a worry.

The strategist's main concern, indeed, is from a certain type of individual. These individuals are usually called sociopaths. The most dangerous are those who develop a strong understanding of the dynamics of human societies. Such people can and will move in and take over. The less intelligent ones will make their attempt too soon, and be recognised, identified as the enemy and encounter the aforementioned ruthless efficiency.

The more intelligent ones will wait until a sense of security has settled in a community or network of communities, and go about instilling a sense of unease that will eventually develop into paranoia.

Strategies for dealing with zombie attack:

1. Assure supply lines. This applies to all scenarios. Subsequent strategies derive from the number of zombies, defined as the z to non-z ratio.

a. Anything up to 4:6 (4 z for every 6 non-z), search and destroy is the general strategy.

b. Anything from 2:8 up to 6:4, an offensive siege strategy can be applied. This is where well backed up defensive lines are moved steadily forward into enemy territory, broadly seeking strategic dominance, rather than attempting wholesale eradication of the enemy. Once strategic dominance is acquired, strategies for eliminating the threat may be considered "at leisure" (as the old military textbooks put it).

c. Anything from 5:5 upwards, generally dependent on the mobility, durability and viability of the enemy, defensive siege may become necessary. Perimeters are established around key resources and the links between key resources. These perimeters are defended with minimal force required to maintain them in order to preserve resources. Strategies for eliminating the threat are then examined, though with rather less leisure.

d. Anything from 8:2 upwards, remote concealment, or in the worst case, nomadic concealment is required. Raid/forage and search/rescue operations are mounted at controlled intervals. The intervals are strictly governed by the rate of attrition to raiding and search parties.

Any one of a through d can become a long-term way-of-life.

Strategies for dealing with a highly infectious agent will all be based on infection control, which is achieved through isolation. Knowing the infection vectors is the first priority. Without knowledge of them, no long term strategy is viable, but in the short term, all known possible vectors are to be assumed. Havens are set up in remote locations, and between these and centres of population, a line of relay settlements is set up. The longer a person goes without showing signs of infection while taking all possible precautions, the further up the line they go.

The system is adapted as infection vectors become known. Further strategy is developed according to infection and survival rates, as well as the viability of the infectious agent outside of a host, and indeed outside of a human host.

Strategies for dealing with hostile extra-terrestrials must not involve any form of military opposition unless the entire population of the invader's race is present and marooned on Earth. When this last is not the case, it must be assumed that the invader's population and resources are vastly greater than ours. Strategies must be economic or environmental.

Economic strategies are those which make the invader's presence on Earth costly. In the early stages, sabotaging his equipment may be viable, but this will not work in the long term. You have to find ways to make whatever he wants on Earth annoyingly expensive to obtain, without giving him cause to suppose that the expense will be relieved by exterminating you.

Environmental strategies are those which make the Earth an unpleasant place to be. Once the invader resorts to robots and remotely operated machines to conduct his activities this method may become less effective, however cohabitation may become more viable.

Personally I consider invasion by hostile extra-terrestrials highly improbable, which is good, because I also consider almost all strategic responses highly unlikely to succeed.

Strategies for dealing with sociopathic Napoleons in post apocalyptic societies.

Option 1. Once the sociopath is identified, assassinate him at the first opportunity.

This is the only strategy I propose. I think there are very few situations where killing a human being solves more problems than it creates. This is one of them.

One of many prologues to the Grace Saga...

2010-12-27T15:59:00.000+01:00

... this one giving you as much background as you're ever getting on Harriet Black.

It was a hot day, but the streets were crowded, because this was July, but this was Istanbul. To be precise, July 1935.

Simon had said, rightly, though for completely the wrong reasons, that Istanbul was the most exciting place to be in the world. Simon's reasons were of course that it was a predominantly Islamic country that had just elected 18 women as members of parliament, and that Mustafa Kemal's programme of reform and modernization would bring about dramatic changes that would show the rest of the world, almost from one day to the next, that change was good, and that social progress was real.

Harriet Black couldn't care less. She had never once used her right to vote, in any of the countries where her citizenship – real or counterfeit – entitled her so to do. Harriet Black was in Istanbul because it was the hub of the Game. Widely considered neutral territory – the point where for thousands of years East meets West, someone whose loyalty, on the rare occasions where anyone was sufficiently foolish to test it, would always and only prove to be to herself, could find herself at ease, at rest, and in absolute control of her destiny.

Picture then, if you can, the hot, dusty but not altogether dry streets of the world's oldest Capital – never mind that a little more than ten years ago this country's official capital had been moved to the much more Turkish city of Ankara; Istanbul was still the capital of the world. Under the makeup of her architecture, under the flesh of her streets and houses, were the bones of the oldest city in the world, an among those bones, the bones of men of more nations, more cultures, more difference, than any other city. No wonder she was too western for the Young Turks: she was too eastern for most Europeans; small wonder nonetheless that when the ottoman had become sickly, it was on exotic Istanbul that the world's treasure-hunters had turned their greedy eyes.

Which was how Harriet had come there the first time. It was not common knowledge, but she had arrived in 1904 on horseback, aged 13, with nothing but the clothes on her back and a mismatched pair of stolen pistols for which she had no cartridges – though this she had rectified within a couple of hours. Several more days, numerous thefts and at least one probable murder later, she was installed in the hotel known as the Grand Byzantine* – an ostentatiously wedding-cakey affair so full of bell-hops and flunkies there was hardly room for the guests.

Today, she hardly ever thought of her first visit. It was a very different city today, even though, in so many ways, exactly the same.

Harriet sauntered down the middle of the street, her wide hips swaying, shuffling the black silk of her dress from side to side, leaving an oddly organic trail in the dust. The people in the street could be neatly divided between those who knew her silhouette well – most of the people who lived on the street were her tenants, after all – and those who had never seen her before. Since while the former would nod politely to her, and then sagely to one-another, the latter simply stopped whatever they were doing to stare, slack-jawed, a the woman with the explosion of black curls, the ice-white skin behind huge sunglasses, the scarlet smile almost as wide as her face, showing wide teeth even whiter than her skin; the black silk dress, open at the front to reveal a black leather bodice both discreet and practical – her décolleté covered by a black muslin veil – and black silk trousers tucked into black riding boots that were last in fashion in about 1913, if you were a Hussar, but which, if you knew Harriet Black, you would realize had probably been made only a few months ago.

On the street, Harriet Black was known as one of the richest women in a city of millionaires. In the Game, she was known as one of the most elusive and dangerous**.

And indeed, the other major reason why Istanbul was considered neutral territory was the presence of Harriet herself.

Our story starts, then, with her sauntering along a busy street, making towards a much busier one, where a dark mauve Rolls Royce is waiting for her, the rear passenger door open.

And busy though the street was, once she was within a couple of hundred yards of the car, the crowd parted, leaving her a path a good three yards wide which though people occasionally strayed across it, noone lingered long between the white woman all in black and her destination.

As she got into the car, two young men in tropical suits detached themselves from the coffee counter they had been leaning on, and wandered languidly over to a small two-seater. One of them handed a couple of banknotes to the boy who had been sitting contentedly in the driving seat, and he hopped out and disappeared into the crowd.

"She doesn't look a day over twenty-five," one of them observed.

"Legal records indicate that the city considered her an adult – and indeed a widow – in 1910. She must be over forty – even if she lied in 1910."

"They say that last year in Chicago –"

The older man cut him off:

"You will find, Brian, that there are an awful lot of 'they says' about this woman. Nonetheless, what I said before stands, and you would do well to remember it."

"She isn't on your side. If you're in her way she'll go through you."

"Good. And don't forget it. She has both charm and beauty, but she also has a sort of honesty... the tiger may smile, but never tries to pretend that he is not a tiger."

***

After a short trip up a couple of major roads, the Rolls Royce stopped outside a big, regular building, rather anonymous looking in spite of the distinctively Istanbul collision of styles known as "Ottoman Baroque". Opening her own door to get out, Harriet walked over to a door above which had been stencilled simply "HOTEL". As she stepped inside, the little two-seater pulled over, a little further down the street.

"What the bloody hell is she doing here?" said the younger man, but the other didn't reply.

Inside was a small lobby, where a man in a tatty green uniform stood behind an ancient polished counter. He didn't react in any visible way to the appearance of Harriet Black.

"Black, for Quest."

The man wrote something in a ledger, and then handed her a key. At the other end of the lobby was a new-looking lift, but she ignored it, and sprang lightly up the stairs.

Simon Quest's office was a long walk – almost half a mile if you included the stairs, and looked out of six romanesque arches over the Bosphorus, a stretch of water almost as crowded as the street on which Harriet Black had begun her day.

She walked in without knocking, served herself some tea from the samovar, and walked out onto the balcony. She smiled as she sipped her tea. This balcony had been the scene of her "little epiphany" – and Simon Quest its only witness. Ten years later, he looked, well, he looked ten years older. A slight man, only a little taller than her, thin and neat, close-cropped blond hair and a manner that would have been effeminate if it were a little less restrained. A man of astonishing knowledge, about the city, about people, about her.

Dangerous, maybe. Not because of what he did. Simon Quest wasn't a doer. Not because of what he knew. Simon Quest wasn't a teller, either. Dangerous because of what people would tell him. And what he would tell them. And what they would subsequently do.

As he stepped into the room, Harriet bounced uncharacteristically across to him and treated him to a peck on the cheek that lingered only a little longer than necessary. Needless to say his reaction was limited to a microwatt smile – that was nonetheless enough to get a gigawatt back from her. She served him a glass of tea, and poured another for herself.

"You're not going to like it," he began, matter-of-factly.

"No need to break it to me gently then."

"It's about the Library."

Harriet didn't bother to say that the subject of the Library had been put to bed; that they were sure that the Library was not here in Istanbul, and indeed that the Library was a fantasy. The two people who best knew this were the two people in this room.

"Hat, you've always played the game at street level. I'm expected to work a little higher up these days."

"So?"

"You know what the purpose of the Game is. War. The game is about war. When there isn't adequate grounds for open war, the game is used to attempt to establish adequate grounds. I know you don't play it quite that way. But that is what it is for. And that is what this is about."

Harriet stared out at the chaotic shipping and waited for him to go on.

"The powers think that their last chance is coming to achieve their European objectives. The Colonial Solution has failed – they have reached a stalemate – and they think that before long, another European War will be, for numerous reasons, impossible. So they will use the game, and you, and me I don't doubt, to establish adequate grounds for total European war."

She continued to stare at the glare of the sun on the waters.

"I bet you think that has nothing to do with the City, nothing to do with the Library, nothing to do with you. I bet you think that you and your city are unique. And I bet even you forget, from time to time, what I know about you."

She turned and stared at him, and began to say "You wouldn't..."

"No! Of course I wouldn't. But there is enough of that kind of thing elsewhere in the world, and enough people who will believe everything and stop at nothing that does not prove it untrue... people who will do anything to gain an advantage, no matter how small, in what is surely to come."

"Here and now," he went on, "here is what everybody thinks they know: the Library left Rome. The records at Herculaneum make that pretty clear. The Library went east. After the fall of Constantinople enough minor artefacts and rare texts left the City to convince a lot of people that there had to be more."

He went back in to fill up his glass, and finding the samovar a little cool, pulled on a pair of long cotton gloves, and carefully emptied and refilled it. He dropped a little tea and sugar in the kettle, and left it on the tray while the cistern re-heated, before coming back out empty-handed.

"Here and now," he picked up, "here is what we know, you and I: the historian Torsius deliberately invented the myth of the Library in order to perpetuate the idea that the Romans possessed the hidden knowledge of the ancients, and he deliberately sent many of the materials salvaged from Alexandria to Constantinople, knowing that Constantinople's already legendary possession of Greek Fire would encourage the Roman Legend. We know this because we have read Torsius' book. We've read it because we found the Annexe. Even so, we also both suspect that the Library, even if it isn't here, probably did exist and maybe still does."

"You've never said that before."

"Harriet, you have to go back to the Annexe and destroy it."

"You know I can't do that."

"Then others will find it. Others will read Torsius, and they will assume that if he lied about part of the story he could be lying about all of it. They will come here, and the war will be fought here and they will tear the city apart looking for it."

Simon Quest had, up to this point only ever seen two expressions on Harriet's face – a gigawatt smile or a scowl of intense concentration. Now, her face was twisted into a mask of confusion. You couldn't say if it was panic, or anger, or fear, or even anything human. He knew very well, of course, that Harriet didn't feel things the way that others do.

He watched as her face settled back into a familiar smile, but he could see the clenched fist, and he could see the waters of the Bosphorus turn suddenly choppy as a tremor crossed over from the eastern side to rattle the shutters, and stir up the dust. He walked calmly back into the room, and held the samovar gingerly by the two hot wooden handles as the tremor crossed the room, rattling the kettle and the glasses in the tray.

He looked up, and saw Harriet's curls bouncing and shaking in silhouette against the white sky like snakes coiling and uncoiling.

Simon went back outside to watch the dust settle.

"There have been some collapses in Sariyer. I have to go."

"Wait. Listen."

For a moment she had seemed pressed – hurried – to leave. Suddenly she was still, composed, listening.

"They will send their best people first. Most of them are probably already here. When you find them, deal with them in final and interesting ways. They'll keep sending more people but they won't get better. So you can keep dealing with them. It could get time consuming. And messy. If necessary, start a gang war. I see no reason to be discreet about this. To be honest with you, Hat, I'm getting a little fed up with the whole thing."

He filled up the kettle and balanced it on top of the samovar.

"And once everything is a real mess here, go and find the damn Library, and when you do, destroy it."

Harriet looked at him, smiling blankly.

"Go on, go, your city is waiting for you."

***

The mauve Rolls Royce sped north through the city, the little two-seater not far behind. Most of the way there was little sign of the tremor's passing, but up ahead there was a significant dust cloud, and, possibly, some smoke.

When the Rolls Royce arrived in Sariyer, it was no longer being followed by the little two-seater, a fact explained by it's later discovery wrapped around a tree in one of the many small parks along the way. Driver and passenger may or may not have survived the accident – but this was academic as both had been shot in the face with, the experienced Turkish Police concluded, a large calibre pistol. They further concluded that the murderer was long gone, and would not be discovered. As it turned out, they were quite right about the latter part.

____________________
* There is a "Hotel Byzantium" not far from where the Grand Byzantine stood, and though it is a rather more modest establishment, it looks very comfortable; I have never stayed there. The place known as the Grand Byzantine never actual had those words over the door, though I was assured by Frost himself that that is what everyone called it.
** Frost once digressed into the Art of War, and observed that one of the best times to conquer a neighbour was when the neighbour was beset by a natural disaster – flood, famine, earthquake. The equivalent in the Game was being beset by Harriet Black.

Trireme

2010-12-05T13:58:00.000+01:00

Nice little linguistic oddity: in French, when something or someone is lagging behind, we say of it (or them) ça rames, literally, "it is rowing". It is therefore natural that when the internet turned up here, net lag would be bewailed with the cry ça rames, and later, when a computer seemed to be slowing down, ça rames and indeed ça rames à fond (a conflation with another expression, à fond la caisse meaning (for rather convoluted reasons) to "go very fast").
People seem to understand that a common premier soin for a slow computer is to add more memory, or RAM. (Can you see where this is going yet?) I had already heard anecdotally of customers asking for "plus de rames" or "rajouter une rame ou deux"; yesterday I got my first primary evidence, in the form of a post-it attached to a cheque for an advance that a customer dropped in my letterbox. The post-it reads:

Mon mari demande si on peut également rajouter quelques rames

– "My husband would like you to also add a few extra oars."

I have been looking for a product name for the fastest computer I would sell, where money is no object. I think I'll have to go with quinquereme.

Fantasy and POV

2010-10-26T09:50:00.000+02:00

Beeda and I discovered a body by the road this morning, and it has led us to what looks like a whole story – if only the girl survives, and we can make head or tail of it. But I am getting ahead of myself. The man was in his early fifties; kindly looking, and wealthy. And unarmed. We followed his trail – it wasn't hard. He had been dealt a killing blow, and had been left to stumble away, maybe a hundred yards or so from the quiet grove, a little away from the road, where they had been ambushed. A perfect spot for a picnic – or an ambush.

There were six bodyguards. Serious looking fellows. Thier corpses were joined by two others – bandits by their dress... but by now I was already suspicious. For a well patrolled road this was a big armed guard. So the attack was either planned – tareted, or an accident. If the latter the bandits must have been extremely numerous, or they had assistance. They didn't seem to be have been numerous. We followed their trail – that wasn't hard, either. Beyond the grove was an open pasture, and beyond that, the forest proper. We followed the trail barely half a mile into the forest, until we came upon their makeshift camp. We could see five of them, but it looked like there had been more.

Beeda didn't wait to consult, but strung her bow and slipped into the undergrowth. The bandits in the camp were making quite a lot of noise. I considered trying my luck with an arrow, but in the woods, even when not very dense, these things are best left to the professionals.

As I closed in, it became clear why they were making so much noise. They were raping someone. Not all of them. One of the bandits was a woman. I drew my blade.

The action was brief. Beeda got two of them before I even raised my weapon. In seconds only the woman was standing, trying to pull a short mace free from her belt, she looked up, her mouth a perfect 'o'. Then Beeda put an arrow through her throat, by now at very close range. This was not pretty.

The girl had been stripped, beaten, struck in the face with either a flail or a morgenstern, and raped repeatedly. But she was breathing, and no bones seemed to be broken. I remember Beeda grinning at me, so I must have raised an eyebrow. We wrapped the girl as best we could in the remains of her clothes, and I slung her over my shoulder. She is heavier than I expected.

It was quite a way to our camp of the previous night, but now here we are again. As I write, Beeda is waxing her bow in front of the fire, and the girl is sleeping soundly. We talked a little on the way, and Beeda and I agree that the bandits we killed were not the ones who had killed the bodyguards. We also agreed, given the belongings we had found, that the girl had been in a wedding party, and that she had been the bride.

-------------

I'm a great fan of POV switching. There's no POV that can be used for everything - though people sometimes try with "omniscient narrator". 1st person is a good way to introduce a character, and in the above piece I am imagining that the character writes a journal - when he can. But since I know the backstories of the other two characters, I also know that neither of them talks very much. In their company, the main character (as yet unnamed) doesn't get to talk very much, and he is a bit of a talker. It makes natural sense to me then that he will talk to himself. There is a further advantage to having the character write a journal: he can't know what is going to happen next. 1st person narrators are often portrayed as telling a story that happened to them a long time ago - so they already know how it is going to turn out. This can spoil much of the discovery of the story and characters - as much for the author as for the reader.

Two things must the author have to write a good narrative:
1. The characters must be in a tricky spot most of the time. The characters' ease and comfort is inversely proportional to the author's ability to discover the story
2. The author must enjoy himself when writing. If he already knows the story in detail, writing it can become a chore.

A Convention of Unconventional Super Heroines

2010-10-20T20:41:00.000+02:00

Hamilton watched the three of them at the top of the street. She could feel the broad shape of Major Grace just behind her, though she knew that in the bright sunlight, if she turned to look, she'd see right through him. But he was there. She knew he would be. Creon Grace wouldn't miss this.

At the top of the street they stood, in the cold wind of a November morning.

Poppy, motionless. At this distance Hamilton couldn't see Poppy's eyes, but she knew they'd be motionless too. Poppy, so tall, her straight black hair, shining like hot tar as the breeze lifted it here and there; Poppy rooted to the spot like nothing on Earth, nothing imaginable could move her.

Beside Poppy, Harriet Black might almost have looked dumpy, if it wasn't for her posture of relaxed anticipation. Harriet in her Jackie O glasses, her wide mouth fashing scarlet lips in a broad smile that revealed her perfect, if rather large teeth. One hand on a substantial hip, her white leather jacket unzipped so that her black curls could tumble over her generous cleavage.

On the other side of Poppy, Cassandra Grace, a simple shift dress and sandals topped with her sensibly cut straw colored hair. So... odd. Hamilton couldn't think of a better word. Poppy who could stop an armored car barehanded; Harriet Black who had topped empires with a smile or a gun; beside them mild Cassandra Grace was what? A quiet, English hero? Cassandra certainly wasn't one for showdowns. Then again, Hamilton thought, if you were meeting the end of life as we know it, what better welcoming comittee than a murderous cyborg more alien hardware than human woman, a three hundred year-old soldier of fortune, and an enigmatic diplomat followed everywhere by the ghost of her great grandfather.

And Hamilton, too, of course. Hamilton had one or to tricks to pull. This thing was very far from decided.

----

Commentary probably isn't even necessary. Superheros are of course part of the Fantasy Genre but somehow they are mostly confined to comic books. I find this odd. In this vignette we have four of my favourite characters, all of which have short stories to themselves and occasionally run into one another. Brenda (Hamilton)* and Cassandra are both Blondes with Glasses - unconventionally beautiful, superintelligent, conventionally heroic. Poppy and Harriet Black are both Raven Haired Antiheroines - conventionally beautiful if in rather different ways, superintelligent, ruthless and uncompromising.

----
* I got the name "Brenda Hamilton" from the John Norman novel Time Slave. If you only ever read one book by John Norman, this should be it. And let's face it, you only need to read one book by John Norman because good solid sub/dom fantasy though it is, they are all very much the same.

New Densewords Website

2010-10-11T15:04:00.000+02:00

Actually, new site for both my businesses:
In'tique is here www.intique.fr
and
Densewords is here: www.densewords.com

Feel free to mock all the copy errors mercilessly!

Songs from Castle Country

2010-09-24T09:15:00.000+02:00

No more the galleries and the marbled halls,
No more the turrets and the curtain walls,
No more the gardens and the pretty maids around,
No more to lie with you on the warm soft ground.

Far from the fields and the smiling sun,
Where the neverending sky is done,
No more the comfort of your loving arms around,
No more to lie with you on the warm soft ground.

Unto the darkness where the way is blind,
Unto the rocky hard and the cold unkind,
Unto the smith that hammers men with it's dull and deadly sound,
There to find a place to lie on the cold hard ground.

"Castle Country" is my name for a universal medieval setting. Usually the stories I write for Castle Country don't have any magic or mythology. But they do have plenty of deadly combat, jousts, tavern wenches, intrigue, chaste princesses, sieges, more tavern wenches, conspiracies, adulterous queens, ostlers, hunting lodges, falconers, sighing princes, further tavern wenches, huge horses with feet the size of soup-plates, plotting Kings and a whole gamut of priests, monks, hermits, nuns, bishops and occasionally, popes.

Castle Country is an anything goes sort of place - but while you can get away with pretty much anything, you can also have your head randomly lopped off by the next passing Black Knight. It is a nasty, brutish setting which rather intesifies all experiences. It encourages exaggerations of both positive and negative social behaviors, like honor, jealousy, pride, lust, valour, cruelty, virtue. It exacerbates the visceral.

The poem at the top of this post is as much as I can remember from a 20 verse monster that I wrote as a teenager. I wrote it on handmade paper with a quill. I have no idea where it is now but I suspect that an ex-girlfriend may have it...

Parallel the Now

2010-09-21T10:15:00.000+02:00

Patiently, though not without a certain nagging urgency that he fought to suppress, Eldon searched through the archives of his suit computer. The thing had near infinite storage capacity, but it was necessarily small and slow, and the interface was only finger operated and the audio was poor. He had managed to find a few references to Keeble class vessels, but nothing like the kind of detail he needed. The thing had near infinite storage capacity, and this brought with it several serious disadvantages: when you had no AI to anticipate the information you needed you had to trawl through near infinite possibilities even when narrowed down by a finger-typed search (which Eldon had had to retype three times with his clumsy suited fingers). You also had to consider that though it had near infinite storage, it was a mere near infinite subset of the much larger near infinite quantity of information that was available throughout civilization. And with no AI to second guess what information you might need, he had to rely on associative algorithms and hope that some search he had made when in less dire circumstances (and therefore connected to a network) had in some way been related to the Keeble class.

In the background, his suit had been analysing the ambient radiation and the condition of the air in the airlock. The airlock would have been filled from a reserve tank in order to pressurise it, so it would be about 19% ox, and the rest would be a random inert (or near inert) gas - whatever happened to be available. This was sometimes problematic because if it wasn't nitrogen then the partial pressure would be wrong and he'd still suffocate (or get high, or poisoned). This at least was common knowledge - which meant it was something Eldon knew without having to look it up.

Finally, he found a brief but telling article about the Keeble.

"When the Keeble class was being designed, computer thermal efficiency was still a distant dream. Her processors were expected to run hot and unreliable, especially when managing the Yang-Hoffstein engines. This meant maintenance, which meant crew access which meant pressurised computing compartments. Keebles were originally going to have sealed liquid switching, so that the compartments could be de-pressurized during normal operation and radiate their excess heat into the vacuum of space, however an obscure casing defect meant that the liquid switches wouldn't stand up to repeated repressurizings. So the compartments had to be pressurized at all times. In the end, this was turned to the advantage of the Keeble class, because (unlike the Munsch class that preceded it) it did not need dedicated crew climate heating, since there was no harmful inonization in spite of the vast excess heat produced. Thermally, the computers were astonishingly inefficient, however the net thermal efficiency of the vessel was the highest that had ever been seen.

"It was ironic, therefore, that as the first hundred or so Keebles rolled of production, the first bromide based cold processors were produced commercially."

(Due to complaints from my public, the main character's name has been slightly adjusted. I want him to have a bit of a scifi name, but he shouldn't sound like something out of Tolkien...)

The title of this post refers to a key feature of old school scifi, which is that it has to reference current technology, mixing the familliar with a little bit of whatever is on the cutting edge. So in here I've paralleled FWS, wikipedia, computer cooling issues, data storage capacity, and I've also thrown in something about thermally efficient processors that I read about in NS a couple of weeks ago.

I've also put in some staple stuff about space-suits and airlocks. A lot of the drama of real-life technology comes from poor design, and poor design generally appears in the least convenient places. Several of the classic SF writers of the C20 make the mistake of assuming that in the far future, all design flaws will be ironed out. But even in the far future, there will be a shortage of engineering designers, so for some things, below average designs will have to be used.

Computer Archaeology

2010-09-19T16:17:00.000+02:00

Eldron, his head thumping as he ran out of ox, pumped furiously at the manual override to close the emergency hatch. As he felt it go limp, he let himself slip into the briefest of blackouts. Minutes later, his suit started to recharge as the slowly turning hulk presented the airlock window sunnyside. As the shielding was no longer needed, the purifiers could work, and Eldron rose unsteadily back into consciousness. He remembered catching sight of the red and black markings of the Keeble class hulk and thinking it was time to use up the last of his luck. The damn things lasted a long time, but it didn't seem all that likely that he could get it running. The computers used BLANE... if his aching memory remembered right. He could remember about BLANE. It was good stuff, they said, but it was ancient history even when he had been back at school. Time, thought Eldron, for some archaeology.

I have this idea for some old school scifi. I was thinking about the way that age is used as proof of authenticity, and the way that in science-fiction and fantasy, authenticity is the rarest of all commodities. Authors achieve authenticity when their readers know the worlds in which their stories are set as well as they do. Eventually, authenticity gives way to authority - such as in the Diskworld series - where the author hardly needs to work on the setting at all.

So how can you go about creating authenticity? In fantasy it isn't too hard to use age as a source. Tolkien is the absolute archetype of this, creating a world with thousands of years of history, language, culture and mythology which acts as a backdrop for and a source of the events in LOTR. But what if you want to set your story in the far future? George Lucas famously cheats, with the famous opening crawl of Star Wars telling us that the futuristic events we are about to see take place a long time ago. Instant authenticity, in a jar.

Way to go Mr Lucas, ya wimp.

The snippet above is a teaser for an idea I have to combine two things - one is my affection for the shaky science of old school scifi, and the other is the idea that if your future setting talks about lots of old stuff, you give it authenticity. In the example above, BLANE is a disk operating system. Eldron is the sort of astronaut you get in old school; he isn't a square jawed test pilot, he's an engineer. He is about to realize that his survival may depend on his ability to understand old tech - rather like an engineer from Toshiba who discovers that his survival depends on his understanding of steam locomotives.

The Three Body Problem

2010-09-17T18:10:00.000+02:00

The titular problem is a mathematical conundrum from Newtonian physics that is often equally applicable to other areas of physics and it boils down to the near impossibility of telling the future positions of three moving bodies all of which exert gravitational forces on eachother (such as the Sun, Earth and Moon).

The same problem of relativity arises when writing about the relationships - and especially related motivations - of three characters. Quite aside from confusions over pronouns - resolved generally by replacing them with their proper nouns, it makes for confusing, clunky and multi-claused sentences. I'm going to try to build the simplest possible example. Alice, Bob and Chris are friends. Chris and Bob are both in love with Alice, but Bob is prepared to give up Alice to make Chris happy.

"Alice loved Bob and Chris equally, but she knew that Bob's friendship with Chris was important to him - maybe more important than his feelings for her. That increased her tenderness towards Bob when she was with Chris, but Bob's affection for his friend often made her feel even more tenderness for him."

This is already horribly knotty. (Imagine how much worse it would be if all three were men!) But its knottiness actually creates an opportunity for the patient writer - I tend to think that this kind of issue is created by the writer being in a hurry to explain the situation. The opportunity it creates is one of extending the narrative, by presenting the relationship in a narrative structure. The writer who really wants to take the bull by the horns here will devote a chapter to establishing this three way relationship. If it isn't that kind of story (and it might not be), then you should at least devote a couple of paragraphs to it, and present it as narrative, giving yourself time to explain each relationship separately. A good setting for this might be an incident where Alice and Bob are alone together, and Bob is relating some past experience of his with Chris. Alice can react to what Bob says by comparing it with something that Chris has previously said to her - and concludes that she needs to tread carefully, since it is Bob and Chris' affection for eachother that makes them both so attractive to Alice.

Furthermore, by setting up the relationship through narrative, you will engage the reader's attention much better, and get him involved in the relationship, and get him to care about what happens - something that you won't get through plain exposition.

Editing: New Draft of Deacon Shader - Title TBA

2010-09-17T11:56:00.001+02:00

I'm currently editing a new draft of the story told in "The Resurrection of Deacon Shader" by Derek Prior, also the author of Thanatos Rising. I have a lot of fun editing Derek's work as it is proper, dense stuff. Also it's a damn good workout for me creatively since although there are many superficial similarities in our English, his approach to people and especially events is very different from mine.

Delineations

2010-09-17T11:04:00.003+02:00

I can often be heard banging on about how using grammar as a set of rules to write by is an abuse both of grammar and of the writer.

This little gem is I think as strong a vindication as any of my NSHO. The author of Delineations (once we start to look behind the hyperbole) routinely uses bizarre syntax, and invents words either by applying unconventional suffixes or by dropping syllables. Nonetheless, his meaning is amazingly clear, even separated from us by nearly 200 years, and by this almost infinitely broad vocabulary. The author is certainly verbose; there is hardly a single sentence whose meaning could not be expressed in less words, however there is something compelling in this verbosity. At first, it seems that the author wants to impress - in the style of French academics - with the breadth of his vocabulary and the intricacy of his syntax, but as we advance, we begin to discover that he is taking such liberties with language that reading it is rather like flying. There are no rules at all, and we can go wherever we want - and furthermore, unlike those French academics, he really has something to say, and information to impart.

"This latter mountain of Bein-Each is a Gaelic name, which signify in English tongue, mountain of the horses. It is likely appear and the purport of styling her on the denomination already mentioned, in consequence of some allegation that it was a remarkable for the excellencies of its pasture, or water, salutary for horses; which horses, bred there in time of old, choosed to outrun others at hardship."

Running

2010-09-17T09:57:00.000+02:00

Dimnas Splintax was running. He was having to compile the terrain ahead of him as he went and dispite the assistance of the implants he knew he wasn't working fast enough. He knew because the horizon was getting closer. He also knew because he could hear the Cawber getting closer behind him.

Soon it would catch him. Soon it would take him in its claws and rend his – what – his flesh? Could you call this flesh? Would it hurt?

Running certainly hurt. And Dimnas Splintax was looking for certainty. That was why he was here, wasn't it?

From time to time, partly as an experiment, and partly to get the damn things out of my head, I write fragments like the one above. This one has the feel of an opening passage, and starting with someone running away like this is certainly a cliché. Such a strong cliché, that it is even a cliché if it is subverted or reversed.

The New Model

2010-09-13T09:13:00.003+02:00

Language is culture and culture is language. Language is thought, too.

It seems that for a long time there has been a recognition in our shared cultures that people need ways to use language without restrictions, in exactly the same way as people need to be able to tell stories about things that have never and could never happen. And just as in fairy tales, when we break the rules of language, we almost immediately create new ones. We oblige the farm-boy to go on a journey wherein he becomes a hero, solves the riddle and finds the magic sword. Only then can he return home and defeat the dragon that we met in chapter one.

Traditionally, when in the written or spoken word we break the rules, the new rules we impose are those of poetry. Generally, these rules are quite arbitrary - metre, for example, provides rhythm, which makes lines intended for memorization easier to learn - however there are many metres to chose from and the poet can affect profoundly through his choice.

Let me make another analogy: a painter may vary his paints, his brushes, his canvas (in both size, shape and materials). He may also vary his precision; he may be vague and blurry; he may be sharp and photorealistic (a horrible word that Turner would have loved until some bastard explained its intended meaning). A painter may also apply these same variations to content - content may be clear and obvious, or merely hinted at, or completely abstract.

We excuse the poet when he does the same. Here is a poem I wrote at school. If I tell you the title it may spoil it:

Slip ponderous selfish shoe,
Slip upon paths smeared with sludge.
Did a desperate deity decree you,
Forced with fearsome threats of fudge?

In this poem I have submitted to a few chosen rules of poetry, in order to get away with refering only obliquely to the object of my observation.

There is a literary convention called "heightened language" which allows us the same sort of tradeoff - literally that we can ignore normal rules provided that we impose others. Heightened language is often used in poetry but can be used in prose as well. Journalists and demagogues use it often, and the latter will deliberately break rules, often logical rather than grammatical either to make you think or to prevent you from thinking.

Here's a sentence from a book I am working on at the moment. The book (which is not intended for publication) is full of experiments in heightened language, but I chose this example because it is rather plain.

“The dogs were again silent, and the forest, more silent still.”

In critical language (the rigorous register in which I normally write articles), I would never have used that second comma. It is there to force a pause, because I'm looking for a very specific set of responses in my reader, and I think the incongruous comma draws special attention to the words around it. In addition, the sentence contains what would be, in rigorous language, a logical nonsense: silent and "more silent". Silence, we generally say, is an absence of noise. You cannot therefore have "more silence". However, heightened language allows us to connect the words in this sentence, and take their meanings, and in particular, their associated events and connotations together. We have been told that "the dogs were again silent". The connection of dogs and silent is, we suspect, telling us something special. They are listening to something? They have heard something important? Yet we are also told that the forest is silent - even more silent that the dogs. The logical nonsense of "more silent still" is telling us much more (I hope) than had this been rendered with better logic:

"The dogs fell silent again, and the forest was also silent."

If heightened language is the application of poetic freedom to prose, then what are the additional rules that we have to apply to heightened language to ensure that it is not unnacceptable to the reader?

This is where the New Model comes in. The New Model is what I call the rules that I apply personnally to my own writing. The primary rule of the New Model is this pompous outburst:

1. "A correct sentence is one which lacks ambiguity and whose meaning is readily accessible to as many possible of those for whom it is intended", shall be the whole of the law.

Such a rule excuses us from correct spelling, grammar and punctuation, doesn't it? It sets communication of meaning on a pedestal, stating that any other consideration is unnecessary. But supposing we are writing poetry or heightened language where we don't intend (as in my poem above) to tell the reader exactly what we are describing, hoping that he will take pleasure in guessing - or suppose we want to get a feeling, an emotion, something as vague as uneasiness from the reader, such as in the sentence about the dogs. In both these cases there is much room for interpretation, inference, ambiguity. If communication of meaning has been placed at risk to such an extent, how do we avoid alienation of our readers? We do it by applying other, sensible rules:

2 "Punctuation should be discreet, necessary, logical and congruous."

3a "Chekhov's rule* shall be applied to all grammar, 'correct' or 'incorrect'..."

3b "... however grammar should generally conform to expectations."

I think that 3b is implied by 1.

Have we come full circle? No. So what's the big idea? Why the pompously titled "New Model".

When European Cultures started introducing "education for all" it was with a very specific purpose that had nothing to do with equality. It was with the intention of creating generations of efficient workers and obedient soldiers. It was therefore necessary in the highly stratified societies that existed to ensure that everyone continued to know his place. Standard of education was and still is a key differentiator for people who like to judge in this way. They use your knowledge of grammar to determine where you are both on the scale of education and of class/background relative to them. Such people tell their children that their grammar MUST BE CORRECT to ensure that they are not judged incorrectly. To a similar extent (and in some places, probably greater), people are told that their grammatical errors may lead to opportunities being denied to them - by showing that their education is poor. All this is, of course, true. But it should not be our motivation for knowing our language well, and for using our language skillfully. We should not be motivated by fear of what others think of us.

We should be motivated by a desire to communicate our thoughts clearly.

If this is our motivation it is almost inevitable that we will want to master the use of our language, and an understanding of its grammar is very helpful (and may be essential to a complete mastery). I suspect that thinking this way about communication makes us better at thinking.

Those people whose meaning is clearest are those whose language is simplest. But their language is simple because of their mastery of it. This is grammar as kung fu. A minimum of action for a maximum of effect.

*AKA Checkhov's gun - "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Never mind

2010-06-18T10:42:00.003+02:00

I recently found myself saying that this expression was among the most powerful of sentiments. I have stopped making any distinction between the language used to express a sentiment and the sentiment itself; the two are so closely related that one begets the other. To put it bluntly:

If I feel "never mind" I say it so:

"never mind"

And if I say "never mind" I don't mind.

It is supposed that, "never" originates as an emphatic form of "not" (ref.) which makes the expressions amazingly ancient and unchanged - "mind" as a verb being to think about, keep thinking about or "hold a thought". Expressions which endure unchanged generally do so because they come not merely to encapsulate linguistically the intended meaning, but to represent it so symbolically that there is little functional difference between the sentiment and the use of the phrase to express the sentiment. To put that one bluntly:

Saying "never mind" is the same as not minding.

Preternatural Acts

2009-07-16T14:28:00.003+02:00

Writing fantasy fiction is walking a tightrope. On the one hand, if you use too many fantasy clichés - words like "eldritch", "etherial"; characters like pointy-eared elves and gruff, grumpy dwarfs - you're in danger of annoying readers whose tastes run to other genres, not to mention boring readers who read only fantasy, and, which is more, failing to stand out from the fanfic crowd.

On the other hand, slavishly avoid all the clichés, and you will either alienate most of your target audience, or find yourself searching the thesaurus for alternatives and grossly inflating your text with descriptions.

Cliché is good, in moderation. Think of the trouble you'd have describing your main character when he is casting a spell if you can't use the word "glow". Whether "eldritch", "other-worldly" (which is the literal meaning of eldritch, btw), mysterious, supernatural, eerie, wierd, queer (can't really use that one any more), casting magic is almost always associated with a glow of some sort. If you want to avoid this cliché, you have to come up with a new and refreshing way of indicating that someone is doing magic. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success.

The problem is that unless your story pivots on this different kind of magic, you'll spend and awful lot of time describing how it works, and not advancing the plot.

The Cliché is Often Right

Eldritch, as I mention above, means "from elsewhere". Usually this is used to mean "beyond the grave". It's wrong to use it if all you mean is "creepy" or "scary". It's right and proper to use it if you mean "other-worldly" or "from beyond the grave" AND creepy and scary.

Unnatural is often a much more unsettling word than "supernatural". Supernatural is now so over used that it is almost impossible to say it with a straight face. Indeed, many readers take it to be the author saying: "use your imagination, I can't be bothered to". Hiding it behind near-similes like "preternatural" or "eldritch" just looks cheap, or plain wrong. Theres a significant difference of denotation between super- and preter- natural. Supernatural denotes "above or beyond the natural". Preternatural denotes "more than is usually natural". There need be no magic behind it at all, although there can. If Herman the Hero is the greatest swordsman in the known world, then his skill is preternatural. If his arch enemy, Dave the Dark Lord gets his amazing skill with a Poleaxe from the Amulet of Totally Amazing Skill with a Poleaxe, then his skill is supernatural.

Use the cliché words with precision, and they cease to be jarring and irritating. Don't be afraid to use them repeatedly if they mean exactly what you want them to mean.

Homophonemes

2008-11-12T14:06:00.000+01:00

Words that are wrote differently but said the same. There aren't all that many of them, and most of them are short. One syllabic.

They don't confuse us when we say them aloud, so why do we write them different?

There is an honest answer, and a dishonest one.

The honest answer is short, incomplete, and not very satisfying, although it is, as forestated, honest:

convention

Convention means that we have all agreed, and that latecomers agree that they also agree, as they arrive, that we will all do it the same way, and having thus agreed, he will cause consternation who chooses not to agree with, and follow, said convention.

(A little aside on consternation. Normally one person can't be consternated, or consterned - neither participle really exists, but consternation is a description for groups only - rather like convention and for similar reasons. I like to coopt consternation for the feeling of confusion that arises from an idea being expressed in a form of words that is sufficiently exotic, eccentric our outlandish (all of which mean the same thing, and are therefore heterophonic homologs) that it causes a moment's hesitation whose wellspring is the confounding of "did I hear that right", "did s'he really say that", "is that what s'he meant", "is s'he trying to confuse me" "?" (The question mark is for all four. It looks wierd in the middle of a sentence.)

Convention is handy because it means that we don't have to provide a justification for something that we just feel suits us. The last phrase is my test for a convention.

The dishonest answer is that we spell them differentwise to avoid confusion. Now I may have already mentioned that we aren't confused when we're speaking aloud. The dishonest answerer goes on to say that yes, well, but, when you speak aloud there are all sorts of additional clues as to the meaning of words, such as body language, intonation, facial expression.

Do you think you need these additional clues in order to differentiate "there" from "their" or "one" from "won" ?

"Their one won there."
"There won one their."

Wierdly, the first is a "correct" sentence, the second is nonsense, but if you say them aloud they mean the same thing.

In French, noone ever confuses a bucket, a seal (wax) , an idiot and a jump, even though seau, sceau, sot and saut are all nouns! (And pronounced exactly the same, regardless of what some linguists may claim.)

The truth* is that it is a convention, and while unnecessary, it is sometimes handy - like describing in print the difference in meaning between "their" and "there", the reader knows which one you are referring to.

*For a given value of quince jelly

Grammar (we love you)

2008-11-12T13:53:00.000+01:00

Stephen Fry's blog of last week (here) raised some points that needed to be raised, and raised them in his necessarily extensible, and indeed extended verbiage.

Long, and rightly so, in his criticism of the pedants - that I like to call Grammar Nazis, who believe that there is such a thing as "correct English".

I believe there is such a thing as comprehensible English. I encounter it all the time. Truly incomprehensible English is a very rare thing indeed, and usually requires a special skill, not to interpret it, but to create it.

Ibelieve there is such a thing as correct grammar, too. It is any grammar that correctly describes a given figure of speech.

Following the rules of grammar is rather like following the contours on an ordnance survey map, instead of following the roads. The contours are there to describe the landscape, not to keep it from floating away. Shall I nail it down? I shall though. Following the rules of grammar is not correct, nor is it safe, helpful, or likely to result in clarity, or even comprehensibility. The rules of grammar are there to help people to talk about language, possibly to help them understand their own language, and certainly to help people to make sense of a foreign language.

Grammarians are there to invent the language that describes language. Grammar is there to describe language.

I do not, and neither do, nor should, you, follow the rules of grammar. We lead them.

The Proof of the Blogging

2008-10-31T15:33:00.000+01:00

Bloggers fall into three categories.

Those who don't proofread their entries before posting because it's a blog
Those who don't proofread their entries before posting because they've never heard of proofreading
Those who don't proofread their entries until after posting

The proof of the blog is in the posting; something about the act of committing something changes the state of mind of the author, and he can suddenly spot errors much more easily. Outside the blogosphere this generally manifests itself as the discovery of glaring errors in your document when you see it, upside down, printed out on your boss's/customer's desk, or indeed when your customer has approved it for publication.

At least in a blog we can go back and make corrections to something already published at almost no cost at all.

I therefore advocate proofing of blog entries, but only after publication.