The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I’ve just finished N.K. Jemisin’s ‘The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms’ and a damn fine book it is too. In turns intriguing, terrifying and exciting it follows the story Yeine Darr a formerly outcast scion of the family that rules the world (the eponymous Hundred Thousand Kingdoms) who is summoned unexpectedly to Sky, the centre of all power, as part of a Machiavellian succession plot. Now I like castlepunk but this takes palace intrigue throws in half the spice cupboard and a shelf full of metaphysics and turns the heat up to eleven. I had really good time reading it and that’s what counts for me.

From a craft perspective I was particularly struck by how cleverly Jemisin starts the book. Yeine Darr, the narrator, keeps restarting her story as she remembers things that she needs to tell you before she can continue. Done skilfully, as it is here, this allows Jemisin to lay down some serious pipe without holding up the story or breaking reader immersion and give us an insight into Yeine’s own mental state. I’m looking forward to the next book.

Writing the Other 2: It Depends on Who the Camera is

First some caveats: I have no academic training whatsoever and the following blog has been written because I’ve decided to articulate some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for ages now(1). I make no claims to academic rigour or any other perspective than the tools I have devised to successfully write things down and then sell them. I hope some of it will be useful but I offer no guarantees. Anyone stealing this material to form the basis of an essay or, god help you, a thesis or something had better be prepared a) for abject failure or b), in the unlikely event of procuring a passing grade, to provide monetary compensation(2). Anyway moving on…

Since I write Science Fiction and Fantasy my definition of the other is quite wide and some issues that apply to some others don’t apply to other others(4). This blog will strive to differentiate and classify the various others into groups and then look at the relative levels of knowledge required to write with confidence(5).

Others, for the purpose of writing fiction, have two principle characteristics: one) what I think of their basic type, contemporary, historical and the fantastic, and two) their prominence in the fiction; point of view, foreground and background. We will deal with prominence first since this is the easiest.

A background character is precisely that; a character that exists only because you don’t want to have your principles act(6) against a void. In this case you can get away with a few telling details, often just a name, mode of dress or verbal tic providing, and this is important, you don’t step on a cliché bomb(7). Heinlein does a lot of this in Starship Troopers to show that his Terran Federation is an equal opportunities fascist state and my favourite example is a line from Robert Holmes’ classic ‘Talons of Weng Chiang’(9) “I was with the Filipino Army during their final advance on Reykjavik” which conjures up a far future in which the balance of power has radically shifted away from where it rests now.

Never get background characters confused with background; if your main characters are operating in another culture, say Feudal Japan, then you’re going to need something more than a verbal tic to get you through the chapter.

A foreground character, or culture come to think of it, is one who interacts enough with your point of view characters for the reader/viewer to get a real sense of their personality. If their role is tightly circumscribed within the work, they’re the pathologist in a crime story, for example, and we only meet them in the lab during autopsies – then as with a background character you can get away with a few telling details. If you’re planning to portray a truly multicultural society then you may have no choice but to treat some of your characters this way – just think about what you’re doing and have some respect for your own ignorance(10). Americans face a particular pitfall when writing about Europe, particularly Ireland and the UK, in thinking that a shared history, literature and pop culture(11) equates to a real familiarity with a particular culture(12). To write a foreground character with confidence you need, what I’ve decided to call on this instance, a working knowledge of their culture.

Point of view: writing point of view, which includes close 3rd person, of a character requires more than a working knowledge of their culture - you must be able to think yourself into their heads and that requires you to embrace the other to the point where it ceases to be the other and that, my friends, is a whole different ballgame(13)…

Next time on Writing the Other ‘Oi! Who are you calling the other?’

(1) Along with the Glee cover version of Amy Whitehouse’s ‘Rehab’.
(2) I’ve had some hard times(3) and this has eroded my sense of humour about copyright infringement.
(3) I wanted to put ‘Will write for food’ on my card but my agent said no.
(4) Or indeed to other’s other others.
(5) They tried to make me go to rehab but I said no, no, no…
(6) I’m using ‘act’ in the broad sense of the word here.

(7) Cliché bombs and how to avoid them will be covered in a later blog but for now the rule of thumb is to avoid getting your telling detail from: i) film or TV, ii) background characters in other authors works, iii) some vague recollection about something that guy you knew did years ago…(8)

(8) If only you could remember his name.
(9) Both of these works have their own problems however.
(10) Surgeon’s Law applies to your casual knowledge of other cultures; 90% of everything you think you know is bollocks.
(11) And language of course.

(12) A good example of this is Lt. Susan Ivanova from Babylon 5 whose characterisation, while strong, is the product of the Russian Jewish immigrant culture of America with a few cold war cliché’s thrown in – rather than any imagined St Petersburg of the 23rd Century.

(13) Possibly one day cricket(14).
(14) I’d rather be home with Ray I ain’t got seventy days…

Mokit on a Tricycle

Spring is in the air, daffodils are thrusting their way through the dog poo, spontaneous singing can be heard from the high rise blocks and film crews are out gambolling on Primrose Hill. This is a favoured location for film crews, not only does it have good sightlines, a spectacular view over London but being Primrose Hill the producers can pop back to their nearby £1,000,000+ Regency Townhouse for a quick spot of lunch and sex with the nanny.

This particular crew were filming a young kid cycling down the steep slope of the hill and, because dead children can cause productions to over run, they had child, tricycle and camera mounted on a motorised flatbed. There was, what back in the 1980s we used to call an AFM (assistant floor manager), standing at the bottom of the hill with a walkie talkie trying to keep unsuitable people out of shot.

We exchanged cheerful nods and I opined that I'd never seen a mokit on a tricycle before, he gave me the glassy eyed grin of someone being forced to talk to weirdos all day, and I walked on whistling cheerfully in the knowledge that my fat backside was waddling away in at least one of the takes.

Writing the Other: The Thing About Pimp Culture

The epigram on this subject is that you should write the other only when it ceases to be the other. This is both glib, true and, on its own, not very helpful. Over the next few weeks(1) I will be looking at how I approach writing the other in the hope that it might prove useful to other writers. Later blogs will look at what we mean by ‘the other’ and what actions we can take to make the other not the other. So to start off we’ll ask the question – why should you care?

Once when I was young, stupid and not enjoying myself at a party (2) a white art school student was enthusiastically telling me about the influences on his film project. ‘I’m really into pimp culture,’ he shouted over the music, ‘I want to start this film with this guy in the suit and the hat and he turns round to the camera and says “Get down you ho”.’ He didn’t specify that the guy in the suit and the hat were black (3) but I think it’s a fair assumption that he probably was. I remember staring at him and thinking ‘what the fuck?’ but being too drunk and stupid to say anything coherent in reply.

Now that I’m older and wiser and have had things carefully explained to me(4) I can articulate what was bothering me(5). This young man, who would have been mortified to have been described as racist, had not only drawn his information entirely from film and TV(6) but planned to use the caricature without any thought to the political and cultural context that had created it in the first place. In other words he thought it was up for grabs to use as he saw fit(8) he thought he knew what he was talking about..

Anyway, moving on, if you want to write about the other with confidence then the other must become so familiar to you that it ceases to be the other.

Which leads to the question – what is the other? And that is the subject of the next blog.

(1) Unless I wander off and lose interest.
(2) The bulk of early 1980s.
(3) Or even African-American.
(4) Often in a loud voice.
(5) Apart from the staggeringly ignorant racism obviously.

(6) I will be discussing why film and TV constitute the least useful source of information about the lives of anyone other than rich white media professionals in a future blog, or possibly several future blogs depending on how worked up I get(7).

(7) See footnote (1)
(8) There’s probably a sociological term for this.

My Mellifluous Cephalopod

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just done a 3 book deal with Del Rey the first book to be published in spring 2011. The announcement by my agent is here and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank John and John, my agents at Zeno, for the brilliant job they’ve done flogging the manuscript and Andrew Cartmel for his continuous support during the writing process. Watch this space for further announcements.

Plodding: A Decree from on High

On the orders of my agent I am supposed to try and make a post to my blog at least once a week. Those that know me know that this level of productivity is very un-me but I'm going to give it a try.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Rejection Letter

Today I received a rejection email from Sheil Land Associates exactly 6 months and 4 days after I first submitted my work to them. The email was obviously copied from a standard template and was signed by someone called SUBMISSIONS, a terrible name to inflict upon a child, but it did finish with the comforting news that my work would be recycled - as firelighters I assume.

I can't be hard on poor old Submissions because he'd already rejected me, for the same work, 3 months previously which indicates a worrying level of overwork on his part. However this duplicate rejection (so good we said no twice) reminded me that I'd planned to give a brief account of my hunt for an agent for the edification of those amongst you who plan to follow suit.

Between the 15th of July 2009 and the 5th of August I submitted sample chapters to 43 different agents. I received 9 requests for the full manuscript and from amongst those 4 requests for a meeting. I was rejected 32 times with the latest, not counting our confused Mr Submission, arriving 4 months and 9 days after submission. 10 agents have never bothered to respond and will remain nameless bastards until I'm rich enough not to care about who I offend.

In the light of my experiences I recomend the following method...

1. Write a really good manuscript.
2. Compile a list of agents using such sources as the writers and artists handbook.
3. Before submission call each agent to determine that they're open for submissions.
4. Make your submission following the guidelines given by the agents.
5. Try to make 5-10 submissions a week and keep submitting until every single eligible agent in the world has a copy.
6. Wait for the rejection letters to roll in.
7. If after six months you still don't have an agent return to step 1 and start all over again.

Good luck, I've done it so it can't be that hard.

My Malignant Ocelot

As reported in a previous post I finished my contribution to world culture at the beginning of July. For a couple of month my manuscript scurried hither and yon from agent to agent flaunting itself wantonly in an effort to get noticed. I am pleased to announce that after flashing its chapters at random strangers it has finally managed to secure the services of an agent. I am now signed with Zenos Literary Agency and thus stage two of masterplan is completed - now it is time for stage three; getting a publisher. Something that I am deliriously happy to leave in the hands of Mssr. Berlyne and Parker.

More Blake's 7

Amazon are already taking pre-orders for The Dust Run/The Trial, the latest addition to the Blake's 7: The Early Years audios. This one, featuring Carrie Dobro as Jenna and is written by the fighteningly fecund and swift Simon Guerrier.

As readers of our production blog can discover script editing is not the non-stop round of glamour and excitement that you might imagine it to be but it's always a thrill to see the covers out there in the world.

Writer's Block

I just found this in the Xmas 1995 edition of Ansible...

... the infallible Robert Sheckley cure for writers' block. He said he tried a drastic exercise to get things flowing again (an enema for the muse, as Nick Lowe liked to say): making himself type 5000 words a day, any words so long as he met the quota, grimly bashing out stuff like ... Oh words, where are you now that I need you? Come quickly to my fingertips and release me from this horror, horror, horror ... O God, I am losing my mind, mind, mind ... But wait, is it possible, yes, here it is, the end of the page coming up, O welcome kindly end of page....

After days and days of this, Sheckley made the great discovery that it was now actually easier to write a story than go on suffering. And so he did, quite quickly and happily. I have passed on this sure-fire advice to several aspiring authors who believe there is a Closely Guarded Secret to it all, but none of them ever thanked me. (Incidentally, it was Robert Silverberg who, when once asked if he'd ever had writers' block, said: 'Yes -- it was the worst ten minutes of my life.') [3/93]

Setting yourself a word target, say a Greene a day, is a very useful way of making progress, even if it is, as James Swallow says, like grinding your teeth down on a concrete block. If procrastination is more your game then you can certainly do worse than work way through the entire Ansible back catalogue - interesting, fun, rewarding and very, very time consuming.

Andrew Cartmel is a Sound Fellow

Also the best script editor I've ever worked with, writer of comic plays (my favourite kind), has lent me money when I was skint and is soon to be a famous overnight success.

He also has a new blog at this address.

At Last Someone Has Died!

The Evil Monster Boy has just shouted this, apparently the 7 minutes of build up in today's Miss Marple was too long for today's youth.

Jan Chappell is.......

...playing a Cally in Blood and Earth my latest epic from B7media. It's going to be on the same release as Flag and Flame, also featuring our favourite clone freedom fighter, written by Marc Platt who has been revived from cryogenic stasis purely for that purpose. It will be released on August 24th but you can preorder it now from the B7media Website.

My Magnificent Octopus

Finally, 134 days, approx 105,000 words (with a 10% discard rate) later I have finished the first draft of my novel. That's 837 words a day - which is fast for me.

I'm not going to reveal any plot details except to say that it's a contemporary fantasy set in modern London. Over the next month or so I shall be hawking it around literary agents in the hope of getting a bite, that done the, at this moment hypothetical, literary agent will hawk it to publishers in the hope of getting it published.

So while this process starts its back to the day job, Blake's 7 and Terra Incognita; Chapter Two; In the colonies a trench was a small hole in the gound, two metres by ten was considered a handy size, five by thirty if you were feeling ambitious. On Earth they didn't do it that way at all...

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Just back from seeing the Evil Monster Boy in his school's production of a Midsummer Night's Dream. It was done in the promenade style where the audience walks from scene to scene and I could tell that the cast were having a lot of fun. Predictably the school extroverts were cast as Puck and Bottom but Oberon and Titania managed to carve out some space for themselves. Of the Athenian lovers props goes to the young woman who played Helena as a stocky spitfire all sad romantic longing crossed with barely suppressed rage at the unfairness of it all.

While I was waiting for the Evil Monster Boy to get changed I suddenly realised that I'd once played Sly in a performance of The Taming of the Shrew with a cast that featured, amongst others, the future Mrs Brown, in that very same hall. I wonder how my son's cast will fare in the next 25 years.