Category Archives: Writing

Short stories vs novels

On the difference between short stories and novels
What I learned as the short story evolved is this: The dogma says “one idea per story”. To my mind it is not, it is one theme per story, one statement per story. As many ideas can go in as will fit – and the story is just packed with them – but there has to be a unifying theme. All the little dipoles must line up. The novel allows scatter, allows dipoles to be arranged in all orientations; the short story doesn’t.

So back to drawing board – or at least, to Archive CD Rom. Pull out several short stories which never quite worked. Decide on one unifying theme. Let the dipoles align.

The essential nature of quotation marks

Started taking another pass through Opal, in the first chapter muttering darkly, “I don’t know how I could have made this any plainer,” because, dammit, Noon was being downright gracious (for Noon). However, I started to notice difficulty in chapter 2. Couldn’t figure out what it was, because the text was all there, and then realised I could hardly see my punctuation marks. When Orion published LEGACIES, the copy editor switched all my double quotes to single quotes. So subsequently, I wrote with single quotes. However I’ve also been in the habit of switching off smart quotes, because of the way they get gibberished by UNIX systems. That, coupled with my bottom-end laser printer’s spacing added up to make my quote marks almost invisible in a lot of places, so dialogue, description and interpolation are all running together. I know I can’t stand reading even mundane work that’s unpunctuated, never mind the kind of complexities I’m throwing in in OPAL. So I think part of the problem is the punctuation. There are other problems: Noon is not nearly so gracious later on, when he’s unsure of himself. And there are sections of the story I have to rethink. But just putting in proper quotation marks may well make a considerable difference. Assuming my toner cartridge holds out. A trip to Staples may be on the cards this weekend.

Thank you, Dr. Wallsgrove

For saving the sanity of a poor harrassed SF writer. I have spent most of the weekend on line and at the library researching two crucial topics. I wanted to find out about alternative possibilities for proteins, and their compatibility with our form of life. Unfortunately, having a Ph.D. in biochemistry and some years of work in protein structure, and having had the lifelong handicap of not being able to BS my way through things I haven’t thought about properly, I have to have worked out whether the biochemistry I’m envisioning is plausible and would have the effect I want it to have – even if it is never talked about in the book. I kept running across references to 150, 300 or 700 non-protein amino acids found in plants, but nothing specific about those amino acids – particularly their effect on our biochemistry. But finally – found a whole book on amino acids in higher plants. Yes!! And some of them have been found hitchhiking on meteorites. They are out there. Before that, while still thrashing, I had a chance to reaquaint myself with the Astrobiology Web and its page on Extremophiles (check out Deinococcus radiodurans – bug with 3000X the radiation resistance of humans; it reassembles its genome from fragments), and with the Astrobiology Institute at NASA, and what’s going on with Europa (the IR spectrum of the red streaks on the surface bears an interesting resemblance to the IR spectra of certain extremophiles) and Lake Vostok. I am partial to Lake Vostok (subglacial lake thought to have been isolated by Antarctic ice for millions of years – problem is getting into it without contaminating it).

"Making characters come alive"

… was the title of one of the panels I did in Seattle. Here’s the list I came up with:

  • Desire – they have to want something and be prepared to go after it. To my mind essential for the central character or “engine” of a story. An inactive central character is a terrible burden for a story. I don’t say it can’t be done, but it’s “advanced writing”.
  • A certain amount of unreasonableness. Bloodymindedness, I call it. The disinclination to listen to sensible arguments.
  • Faith. I realised, writing the list, that my characters have some fundamental faith in something, whether deity or equation. They believe the universe is ordered. This probably betrays my Presbyterian origins. The world is ordered. But it could be ordered better. Both my heros and villains are out to order the universe better.
  • Blindspots: imperfect knowledge of themselves or estimation of others. Characters who are decieved by others aren’t nearly as interesting as those who at risk of decieving themselves.
  • Appetites. Kind of goes with desires, but not entirely. The example I use was the wonderful bit of characterization of the political officer in Babylon 5, the voracious little blonde who turned up to subvert and seduce John Sheridan. Usually when one has a slim and wicked woman on a TV show, if she eats at all, she sips a drink and nibbles on a salad. But this one noshed! I think she had three meals, and at one point was tucking into what looked like pasta! (Or maybe it was gagh!) That was characterization!
  • An area of mastery. I like writing about characters who are good at something.
  • Weird hobbies. They have to have some area of interest that is completely irrelevant to the story. It may never make it into the novel – they may be running too fast to indulge in it – but I know it’s there.
  • A distinctive way of expressing themselves. Ideally, I’d like any sustained bit of dialogue to be immediately identifiable as being theirs.

Limp cabbage

Came close to giving up on a Sunday’s writing this morning as I trudged through a scene with all the suspense of limp cabbage, while characters wandered in and characters wandered out and I, the writer, did a lot of staring at and describing of the tiles. True, they’re interesting tiles and highly communicative of my world’s history and society, but the POV character didn’t have the knowledge to interpret them. It finally dawned on me that I was telling the whole chapter from entirely the wrong point of view: it was the other character who already knew the information I needed to convey and was going to make the choices that at that point were going to advance the plot (ie, cause trouble). I was going to shift into her viewpoint for a second chapter, but now I’m going to rewrite the first from hers as well, and in the meantime I accumulated 3 700 words of a visit to a village in a bottle, which will be the set for a murderous climax, a rather more balanced and charming archnemesis to Creon than I’d originally envisioned, her children, whom I didn’t expect, and the answer as to why Creon and company get shot down. Why can’t I just send groups of characters in quests off to the ends of the earth without having to have them INTERLOCK so tightly it has me practically doing calculus to figure out who has to know and say what, when. But then when I read groups of characters going in opposite directions I tend to only get interested in one group and start skipping chapters. But then I’m also the kind of reader who will take a peek at the end of a book if I get to like someone and the body count is going higher, or the author is showing signs of a predisposition to doing particularly crushing and nasty things. In short, I cheat.