by Ian McDonald
Your style is lush, but not self-congratulatory. It draws on the poetic end of pulp; there’s a delightful purple tint to your prose. Does each sentence come out in all its majesty or do you have to shape and edit it over time? I guess the question is, how much editing do you do line-by-line and otherwise.
Thanks! One critic compared my writing style to Garth Marenghi’s, which I suspect was meant as a barb but I took as a compliment—my more bombastic passages are decidedly tongue-in-cheek, which, again, is something that I think some readers overlook. To me, humor can be much more effective, sublimely so, when its part of the very structure of the piece, rather than being relegated to comic relief plot twists, dialogue, or, in extremely sad cases, punning.
As for how much revising goes into the prose, it depends entirely on the project, hell, it depends entirely on the passage. I’m stronger at initially getting words down than I am at revising them, which is not something I’m particularly proud of. Editing is hard business, and I have (almost) nothing but admiration for those to whom it comes naturally (there’s a healthy dash of bitter jealousy stirred up in there, too). I’d hazard that all of my novels go through about half-a-dozen drafts, with some of the final pages being similar to their first incarnation and others being significantly touched-up, if not totally scrapped. Some of my best lines, or at least my favorite ones, came out perfectly almost without my thinking them up, and others took a ridiculous amount of revising and revisiting before I got them where I wanted them to be.
I should add that one thing which I’ve tried to do less editing on over the years is dialogue. Too much time spent on dialogue leaves you with unnaturally clever conversations where everyone, no matter their personality or character, is constantly ready with a witty riposte, rather than only thinking of a good retort hours later, when it’s much too late to employ. Whedonesque dialogue can be fun, sure, but it rarely rings authentic.
How do you go about deciding who “gets it”? What impact does the death of a central character have on the novel?
I try to have characters who make decisions that impact the plot, rather than a plot that guides the characters, and so it was never a question of “well, I need to off one of the poor saps, so who’s it going to be?” Things just took a turn, as things are wont to do, and of course the death of a close associate has a huge impact on those remaining characters, and thus a huge impact on the novel as a whole.
The Folly of the World seems neither slower nor more languorous than The Enterprise of Death, but . . . more mature in some ways. What are some of the things you did differently in terms of pacing?
In Folly, the action and plot are of a smaller scale and greater intimacy than in either Enterprise or Brothers Grossbart, but the pacing is much brisker . . . I hope! Life isn’t a series of exciting plot-points, after all, it has its own ineffable pacing that is almost impossible to predict or even keep track of—look away for a moment and you’ve lost all the time you thought you had, but pay too much attention and you’ll never get through a single difficult day. I endeavor to reflect that in my work.
So yes, pacing can be relative, and is too often conflated with plot. I’ve read novels wherein the fate of the world is being decided on nearly every page, and which are as tedious as a phonebook filibuster, and I’ve read novels wherein next to nothing of external consequence happens but which are totally gripping from cover to cover. I usually care more about characters than I do plot, and I think that my own writing reflects that—if you pick up one of my novels expecting to read ninety-nine cliff-hangers for every hundred pages, you’re going to be disappointed, because I try to make the priorities of the story the priorities of the characters, and that doesn’t always make for a thrill-every-page experience (though sometimes it does). Now, something interesting happens on every page, but that’s not always the same thing, is it? Pacing is determined by perspective, and perspective is determined by character, and as I give my characters quite a long leash (enough rope to hang themselves, as it were), so long as the reader finds the cast interesting, the pacing should feel neither rushed nor plodding.
You did a huge amount of research for Folly. How do you keep from getting buried under all that material?
I always bring a shovel and an exit strategy to the library.
About the Author
Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.
Another Word: Spoiler Alert!
E. C. Ambrose
How would you feel if someone revealed the ending of a story before you’d read it? Most of us say we’d be angry. We have even established protocols to prevent having a story “spoiled,” and the term “spoiler alert” has entered common parlance. So recent research like the study at the University of California at San Diego suggesting that many people enjoy a story more when they already know the ending seems counter-intuitive.
Aren’t people coming to fiction for plot: to follow an exciting series of events to a surprising, yet appropriate, conclusion? The UCSD experiment says otherwise—and I believe they’re right. The history of heroic fiction is full of spoilers, often employed directly by the authors themselves, and there are two key reasons why spoilers work to make a work more enjoyable.
Let me give you an example. A careful reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, reveals a heap of spoilers at the end of the prologue, in a section entitled “Note on the Shire Records.” The conceit of the prologue is that Tolkien is merely organizing and presenting a comprehensive version of a tale told in some older works.
During the course of this academic note, we learn who lives (almost everyone), who marries whom, who has children (and who does not), who becomes king, and who leaves Middle Earth forever. Tolkien reveals the happy endings and hints at the bittersweet ones for most of the protagonists you are about to meet. What is he up to? First of all, he wants to present the narrative as an epistolary text with a historical context. He intended his Middle Earth to be an invented history or mythology for England, and this academic and contextual approach enhances that impression. You don’t read history for plot, so the spoilers reinforce the notion that this is part of the historical record with which the reader may already be familiar.
The information that everybody lives and Aragorn/Elessar is king should reduce the tension of reading the book, shouldn’t it? However, it does not, and I’m willing to bet most readers of the work have forgotten this section even exists. I suspect, in part, that Tolkien wanted to reassure his readers—just as the grandfather in The Princess Bride tells his grandson that the princess “doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.”
Tolkien is letting us know that things will turn out well, in spite of all of the hardships these characters are about to endure. By relieving some of the tension of plot upfront, the author directs the reader’s attention to other, more important matters than mere life and death: he invites the reader to explore the work more fully beyond that concern.
However, the spoilers have another effect altogether. We skim over them because, at this point, we simply don’t care. We don’t care who lives or dies, who is king, who is married and who is not. The first time the reader encounters this passage, the names are meaningless and somewhat jumbled. The Aragorn/Elessar connection is not made clear, nor is “Steward of Gondor” a freighted title as it later will be. Readers of The Hobbit might be surprised and disappointed to find that Elrond will leave Rivendell, but first-timers have no connection to that name or place. Far from embedding his work in a dusty old book, Tolkien rather acknowledges that the writer’s first duty is, in fact, to make the reader care. Unt
il and unless the reader is invested in the characters who take the journey, plot spoilers have little impact.
Which brings me to my second point: Spoilers are a declaration of authorial mastery. By telling the reader the ending in advance, Tolkien announces his ability to make you care. The spoiler proclaims to the world that Tolkien is going to do his job so well that you won’t care if you know the plot, you will be desperate to keep reading.
Tolkien is not only an author of fantasy, and an academic writer, he is a student of the early history of story-telling. In many nations, the tradition of the bard includes spoilers up-front, in the form of a brief summary of the events about to occur. “Let me tell you the tale of the great hero, who encounters a dragon, rescues a maiden, and wins her hand in marriage.” Is the audience now done with the story, because the plot is laid out in plain language? Not even begun! The spoiler signals that something exciting is going to happen, and you’ll enjoy the journey—even if know where you’re going to end up.
In the case of many popular oral tales, even before the bard presented his summary, the audience already knew the stories. Written forms of epics like Beowulf proclaim the fame of their heroes even from birth, with the expectation that the listener has already heard the story. The Arthurian legends provide a far-reaching example. Generations of tellers elaborated upon them, with new characters added and old characters changing roles through the next several hundred years, but the basic plot remains the same. The listeners of those medieval bards already knew the story, just as the readers of contemporary Arthurian novels know the plot today.
The spoiler has always been both paternalistic and self-serving on behalf of the story-teller. Spoilers allow the reader a chance to relax and give their full attention to character, theme and authorial vision, the true skills the author wishes to display. It is not what is said that matters, but how it is said, and ultimately, by whom. Many Arthurian novels never transcend their plot, due to their less skillful authors.
In critique groups, the remark is often made that keeping secrets from the reader lessens the tension of the work, because the reader is more distant from the characters, and doesn’t have a chance to worry about how the character will overcome their problems. Note: it’s not what the problem is, or the fact that it will be overcome that readers worry about. I think the spoilers that people object to are not the significant points of plot, but rather the surprises the author embeds on the way to those points. Readers in most genres expect a happy ending—even if it’s bittersweet—and will receive it from an author who wants them to buy the next book. The astute reader expects that Frodo survives and that the ring is destroyed, but the manner of its destruction is meant to be startling. Again, it isn’t the what that’s important, but rather how it happens.
Perhaps the clearest evidence that readers don’t mind spoilers is found their own reading habits. There are some readers who never re-read a book, but there are many who do, who return to their favorite narratives over and over, never losing their love for the work simply because they know the ending already.
Authors play with spoilers in different ways. One version in contemporary fiction is that of a frame narrative, often employed with a first-person narrator. Even having a first-person narrator describing events in the past is a sort of spoiler, and some authors use this device to deliberately set up tension between the parts of a narrative. In Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, he lays out a tale you might have heard, then proceeds to allow the hero to tell you the truth—the story from the inside, which will be somewhat different from the legend.
Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, uses a spoiler structure by introducing the end of the story—the return of a single traveler from a failed voyage—then folding the story in half, building tension between the optimistic beginning of a more traditional space-travel narrative and the aftermath of the ruined trip. By revealing parts of the story to come, she makes the reader eager to know what happened in the middle, the event that links the two halves. Titles like King Javan’s Year, by Katherine Kurtz, or The Wreck of the River of Stars, by Michael Flynn, spoil the end of the work, but also serve as teasers to draw in the reader and give him or her something to worry about.
In each case, the author deliberately reveals something the ordinary narrative view would have kept secret, displaying it as a promise to the reader that the plot is not the purpose of the work. Nicholas Christenfeld, professor of social psychology and one of the authors of the UCSD study is quoted as saying, “What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing.”
The great tellers know this. They tease the audience with spoilers, information that should change the experience of the work, but which, instead, draws the reader even closer, manipulating the tension of the tale, until you are so invested in what you are reading, that you even forget you already know how it ends.
About the Author
E. C. Ambrose is the author of “The Dark Apostle” historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon to start in July 2013 with Elisha Barber from DAW books. E. C. blogs about history, fantasy and writing at www.wordpress.com/ecambrose and can also be found on twitter @ecambrose. E. C. spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.
2012 Reader’s Survey
Neil Clarke
Now that 2012 is over, it’s time for our annual reader’s survey. In this year’s survey, you’ll have the opportunity to select your favorite stories and cover art from our 2012 issues, provide some us with some feedback, and optionally, tell us a bit about yourself. Feel free to use the comments on this post to help promote your favorites. (No attacking other people’s choices.)
Participants that provide their email address will be placed in the running for one of three free copies of our next volume in our annual anthology series, Clarkesworld: Year Three. Contest is open to readers from all countries.
You can take the survey at
http://clarkesworld2012.questionpro.com.
This survey will close on January 28th and the results will be published in our February issue.
2012 Fiction
“Scattered Along the River of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard
“What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia
“All the Painted Stars” by Gwendolyn Clare
“And the Hollow Space Inside” by Mari Ness
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia
“All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions” by Helena Bell
“Sunlight Society” by Margaret Ronald
“The Bells of Subsidence” by Michael John Grist
“From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit” by Gary Kloster
“Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill
“Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen
“The Womb Factory” by Peter M. Ferenczi
“Prayer” by Robert Reed
“Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” by Suzanne Church
“All the Things the Moon is Not” by Alexander Lumans
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
“If The Mountain Comes” by An Owomoyela
“You Were She Who Abode” by E. Catherine Tobler
“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn
“The Switch” by Sarah Stanton
“Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers” by Sunny Moraine
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson
“Honey Bear” by Sofia Samatar
“Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente
“The Found Girl” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell
“Robot” by Helena Bell
“muo-ka’s Child” by Indrapramit Das
“A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones” by Genevieve Valentine
“England Under the White Witch” by Theodora Goss
“The Battle of Candle Arc” by Yoon Ha Lee
“(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky” by E. Catherine Tobler
&
nbsp; “Aquatica” by Maggie Clark
“Everything Must Go” by Brooke Wonders
“Your Final Apocalypse” by Sandra Mcdonald
“The Wisdom of Ants” by Thoraiya Dyer
“Sweet Subtleties” by Lisa L Hannett
2012 Cover Art
Rockman by Arthur Wang
Pilot by Alexander Trufanov
Dead Space Girl by Sergio Diaz
Place to Ponder by Steve Goad
Sci-fi Farmer by Jessada Sutthi
Target Detected by Max Davenport
Launch Day by Cristi Balanescu
Space Journey by Martin Faragasso
Awe at Thistledown by Angel Nieves
Breaking Through by Julie Dillon
New World by Ken Barthelmey
The Lost City by David Demaret
Thank you and Happy New Year!
About the Author
Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.