When I was a child, I bought The Cave by Richard Church from a jumble sale for 10p. It was a paperback with a blue cover that showed a boy with a torch (flashlight) whose weak beam illuminated a few feet of cave. On the back cover it said words to the effect of “In The Cave some kids get lost in a cave and have an adventure. But that isn’t the good part. The good part is that the kids grow and develop and change because of this adventure.”

I was nine, I think, and I’d recently read the complete works of Nicholas Fisk as they existed in the school library, which included not only the well known and totally excellent (if you happen to be nine) Space Hostages but also High Way Home which is about some kids having an adventure in a balloon, except that that isn’t the good part, the good part is that the kids grow and change, and at the end when they are safe and rescued the hero feels flat and miserable, and his father says to him, in words that should be right up there with “Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit” (and in fact now I come to think about it are “et haec olim…”) that when he, the father, came back from fighting in WWII he felt “As happy as you are now” and the kid understands what that means, and so did I.

Nicholas Fisk’s characters are cardboard, delineated with the minimum necessary broad strokes, and his plots are fast and exciting, and yet he managed to use them to demonstrate a basic human truth.

Richard Church, however, didn’t. I could tell the difference. I remember thinking about it, looking at that blue torch-lit cover of the book I owned and thinking about High Way Home which the school library had bought essentially for me because it was Fisk’s new book, but I still had to give it back so I didn’t have it at that moment. I couldn’t articulate the difference between these two real world adventure stories, but I could certainly see it.

Richard Church tried so damn hard and stopped the story so damn often to tell me what the characters were learning from their experience, and he didn’t have enough about their actual experience and he had way too much analysis of what it Meant. He tried so hard that he let it get in the way of telling the story. Character development should happen in the story, not just on the same page with the story. I got totally disgusted with Church and put him on my list of Authors To Avoid.

(Incidentally, talking about Authors To Avoid, a year or so after this when staying with my Auntie Flo in Hastings, her daugher Judy offered me a Malcolm Saville book. I declined it on the grounds that I had read other Savilles and not liked them. “In this house,” she said, drawing herself up, “We don’t take any notice of the name of the author.” The only difference between their house and our house, as far as I knew, was that they were Catholics. I, who already held taking notice of author names as an article of faith, took this for a piece of Catholic doctrine, and for years believed that this was one of Luther’s 99 Theses, and one I could really get behind. I sometimes think about this when people talk about members of minorities being ambassadors for the whole group. I generalised my cousin Judy’s personal idiocy into something that could actually justify religious persecution.)

But anyway, Richard Church was trying too hard and overloading his story. This kind of thing is, or anyway was, a fairly common fault of children’s books.

In a separate but related point, there was a whole category of children’s books written in the twentieth century which I defined as “books about Ireland” and refused to read. (It is in fact possible to write a book about Ireland without trying too hard; Ian McDonald has done it twice.) The books I rejected weren’t necessarily about Ireland specifically, what they were about was “issues”. They were just starting to be around when I was just getting too old for them, there are a lot more of them out there now. “Issues” overload a story even more than trying to be significant about character development does.

When I came to read adult SF at a hundred miles an hour a few years later, I was glad to learn that trying too hard at character development didn’t seem to exist. If you were good at characters (Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner, Roger Zelazny) you did good characters, if not, you put in ciphers and got on with the story as fast as you could. This, at twelve, was perfectly acceptable to me, and to be honest, it still is. If you give me a lot of ideas and the smell of alien planets, the characters can be as flat as you like, they’re not what it’s about anyway. I would, then and now, rather have characters if they’re available, but if they’re not, I can live with that.

In recent years, I’ve come across SF that’s trying too hard on this front.

I think the first one I read was Greg Bear’s Moving Mars. I read it several years ago, and I retain fond memories of the science and the amazing SFnal end. I haven’t re-read it because I retain less fond memories of a female central character with traumas that went on and on. Then I read Janine Ellen Young’s The Bridge, which unlike Moving Mars is a book that would be much less tedious to read if she hadn’t given the characters long complicated back-stories of child abuse that needs to be overcome. The actual first contact story might well have been OK if it hadn’t been trying to do so much else character-wise that just wasn’t necessary.

I recently read Nancy Kress’s Crossfire. I like Kress, generally, though she’s one of those people like John Varley where I always think her short fiction is absolutely terrific while the novels are more hit and miss. Crossfire though, is a traditional old fashioned SF story that ought to work because it ought to move fast. I ought to love it. It starts off with a ship full of people and their stuff going off to colonize an alien planet. (I love that scenario so much that Ken and I used to run it at Eastercon every year for years.) I shouldn’t care that the science if iffy and the aliens are cliched — and in fact, I wouldn’t care about those things at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that the story gets slowed way down to give the characters depth they don’t need for their jobs in the story, depth which feels fake, which feels like set up for plot, which it is, but which when it then happens doesn’t feel real.

All three of these books would have been better reading experiences for me with cardboard characters.

One of the things people don’t talk about often enough is pacing. (In compensation, I expect I talk about it too much.) Plot is what happens, and story, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden puts it, is a force of nature, and pacing is what keeps everything happening at the right speed for the story. Whatever your particular story is, there’s a pace at which things need to happen, and if you mess that up it’s not the plot that doesn’t work, the plot can work like clockwork, it’s the story. The backstory of the characters, the character interactions, the politics and relevance, the world, everything needs to be inclued the right amount at the right time. If anything gets overloaded, the pacing starts to tilt, and you can end up with a story getting derailed. If you’re stopping the story anything, there’s a problem. You should never need to stop a story for the characters. and I react to that in exactly the same way I reacted to The Cave. (If you’re stopping the story for the issues, I react to that the way I reacted to those books about Ireland.)

I keep wanting to give examples, but every time I think of one, I think of ways it could be made to work, if someone wrote it right. You need to be very good to do that sort of thing right, and maybe the problem is people trying things that are beyond them. It would be hard to say to people “if you’re not good at characters don’t try”, because you can’t get better if you don’t try, and books with characters are indeed better than books without. You just can’t stop the story to do the characters. The characters have to be the story. (Nancy Kress anyway has written some wonderful characters in the past.)

What I want to say is much more what I would have wanted to say to Mr Church when I was nine and sat there staring at the cover of that disappointing book: “Stop trying so hard. Just tell the story and if there’s a point, don’t you make it, let the story make it for you.”

The whole “Mundane SF” thing leaves me cold. It doesn’t do anything for me as a reader.

What SF and fantasy give me is that moment when I as a reader don’t know, when the strangeness turns around and looks back. I see them both as ways of approaching what Tolkien called “history, true or feigned”, and increasingly I don’t see a difference between the way I approach them as a writer. History, true or feigned, doesn’t have to do with plausibility, but the entirely orthogonal concept of feeling real.

When, to take an example of an utter absurdity E. Nesbit has a quarry suddenly full of magical gold coins, it feels real because she talks about the children burying one another in it as they would with sand at the beach, but with the gold being so much heavier than sand it soon becomes uncomfortable. Oh yes, you think, it would be. When Cherryh makes my stomach clench at the thought of going through Jump without drugs, and there is no Jump and the idea that humans need drugs to survive it is entirely made up, that’s the same thing, and I don’t believe it because of the scientific likelihood of FTL working that way, I believe it in my gut.

What I want from my SF is not more science, more accountability, more plausibility, but more moments when what I thought I knew turns out not to be the case, and yet that feels right. I want histories that are not our history, worlds that are not our world, dilemmas that are not our dilemmas, and I want to believe in them. And as a writer, that’s what I want to write.

Likewise, it is as a reader that I entirely dismiss Orson Scott Card’s reported comment that all writers are rapists raping the reader. That is so different from my experience as a reader that I can’t map it onto my experience as a writer even slightly. I can see a writer “raping” their own experience and their friends experiences, as in Martin’s chilling “Portraits of his Children” and indeed A.S. Byatt’s The Game. There’s definitely a grain of truth in that.

But when I read I am not being violated, nor even seduced, as Elizabeth Bear suggested. My metaphor for that is that I am standing where I am standing, shaping my side of the story being told in the space between me and the writer where the text unfolds. When I’m writing, I’m standing on the other side of that space, working in bas-relief. This is why it’s so hard to read one’s own work as a reader, because doing both sides of that at once is difficult.

It’s really odd to try to apply metaphors of sexual violence onto what appears to me to be collaborative art. It makes me wish Mr. Card, who I’ve never met, but was one of my favourite writers for years, better reading experiences in future.

[Then this was the next day, from comments]

Shewhomustasked in the comments to my last post:

I wonder if you are saying as much about “being a writer and reading” as about “being a reader and writing”. That is, is the very active, collaborative reading process you describe something that writers are inclined to do? It doesn’t really describe my reading process, but a couple of writers I’ve talked to have both confessed to being unable to read a book without mentally re-writing it (“I would have put it like this, I would have resolved the plot like this…”).

I replied to this:

No, that’s not what I mean at all, not even slightly. I hate doing that, that’s my reaction to a badly written book that doesn’t draw me in. I don’t want to read thinking about how to mentally fix it, the editing process had better be somewhere else entirely.

I’m genuinely talking about the ordinary experience of reading.

You read: “She looked in the mirror and tried to accept the fact that she was middle aged. Of course, she knew she was. Eight hundred years old, yes, and she remembered every day of it, but inside she still felt twelve.”

Now as those sentences unfold, with the introduction of the character and the surprise of the actual age, you’re building up an understanding of what’s going on, of the character, of the world — no plot there, but never mind. That process of understanding the words and making sense of what’s happening is the collaborative process I’m talking about, the mirror of the process of making the words up.

Now if I wrote: “Distrained by glimmerodes, compassed by cimmerons, she bobbed in a ocearine, solitary.”

It had better not be the first sentence, because if you read on after that, with the awkward structure and the combination of odd use of real words and incomprehensible made-up words, it’s purely because the rhythm promises eventual comprehensibility. It doesn’t actually make any sense. You’re trying to build it up, and it isn’t there. You can’t do your side of it as a reader, or only in a very abstract way. I might have a reason for starting with that, and the reason would be to do something to your expectations, to put you in a place where you could read on making different assumptions. That’s the way you shape it from your end.

As a writer you need to think about what the reader knows when for it all to come together, what to mention, pace of revelation. As a reader you need the clues set up in the right pattern for it to make sense in the right way at the right time. That’s what I mean by collaborative reading.

Does this make sense?

Shewhomust replied:

OK, yes, that makes sense. The word “collaborative” made me think of a more active participation, as did your metaphor about “shaping my side of the story”. I wasn’t suggesting that you were mentally re-editing the text, only that you were describing something more active, less pasive, than my reading experience. But yes, I read, I aim to understand.

That said, there’s a process of considering what I have just read, and what it implies for the story, which I see something other rhan reading – a standing back and putting pieces together. If I know I’m doing that (as opposed to doing it subconsciously as I go along), then I’ve probably paused in my reading. It’s also an enjoyment of the text, but it’s a different one. Is that the sort of thing you’re describing?

If I have a metaphor for how I read, it probably involves swimming…

I think the whole process from the way one word follows another to considering what’s happened and what it implies, paused or not, is reading, is engaging with the text. Swimming is a perfectly reasonable metaphor for immersion. I’ve said before that plot is the path the writer lays down for the reader to take through the story, with its twists and turns and occasional broad vistas where what was glimpsed before becomes clear.

I think this is actually easier to think about if you look at the kind of poetry where there are no distractions of plot and characters and rearrangements but you still read and it still unfolds as you read.

Phantomwolfboy then said, of

“Distrained by glimmerodes, compassed by cimmerons, she bobbed in a ocearine, solitary.”

Except that, confronted by that sentence, I would want to read on and find out what it means. Maybe I am strange?

Strange? Maybe, but on the other hand maybe not strange at all. You read SF. I deliberately wrote it to be a sentence that could make sense, that hinted at sense, that used the rhythm of language, the obscureness of the real words, and the sound-patterns of the made up words, to hint at a comprehensibility it didn’t attain. It took me ages to write it, using some methods previously only seen in forms of obscure Welsh poetry which puts sounding good first and actually meaning something ninety-fifth. I wanted the deliberate effect of something that couldn’t begin to build up anything but which had the effect on the reader of making them go: “Huh? Where’s this going? Let’s see.”

I’d read on from it if I trusted the author at all.

I wanted it to seem like a sentence that in SF, could be the first sentence of something where it would make total sense as the last sentence, by which time you’d know what glimmerodes and cimerons and ocearines were, and possibly seen people pouring over engineering diagrams for one of them and considering the degree of terraforming necessary for one of the others.

It seems to me that language choice is part of characterisation, and whether or not it works for the story depends on whether it is correct characterisation for the POV character. So yes, what you’re saying, I think you’re right.

I always say everything is part of characterisation, but I’m really serious about this.

It’s easy to see how description is character. Everything you describe, in first or tight third, is seen through the POV’s POV. If they see a flower, you’re doing it wrong, one person sees a rose going to seed that should have been pruned days ago, another sees a rose that is a poignant reminder of what might have been, another thinks that rose would look just wonderful pinned to a lapel just a little broader than this one, another sees a plant so peculiar that it has a cluster of petals spread out evenly around its stamen, and so lightly balanced on the branch that it sways at even slight atmospheric motion, while fifteen others walk straight through the garden and in at the door. And I haven’t said anything about the colour of the roses…

The word choices, the rhythm of the words, the use of technical words, the use of Latinate vs Germanic words, the use of metaphor and simile, all of it is characterisation, and needs to work as that if it’s going to work at all.

If it works as characterisation, it works as prose. If you look at something like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is one of the lushest books in the world, it’s just as “grabby” as something really stark, because the prose belongs with everything else.

Diamond Age (which had been mentioned elsewhere in the thread) is in omni, incidentally, though I think our division of things into first (there are at least three firsts) and third (third is a very weird POV and I think there are at least four that I know of) and omni (at least three, and it’s possible to see omni as a special case of first) isn’t actually as helpful as it might be.

Expanding that last bit:

Most of the literary terms we use come from literary criticism, and they’re very useful when you’re looking at a written text, but not so much so when you’re writing one yourself.

The normal division of POV into first, third, and omni, leaves a lot out.

There’s first reflective, like Renault’s The Persian Boy and my The King’s Peace where you have a “memoir” context in which the first person voice is telling a story after the fact for a specific reason. Brust’s Vlad books are a very interesting case of this, because when and who Vlad’s telling the stories to becomes actually plot-relevant in later books. Also, Brust specifically addresses the issue that first person narrators lie. Even when they don’t lie on purpose, they’re inherently unreliable by definition, even when they’re not intended as unreliable narrator per se. They’ll see things from their own angle. They have their own sympathies. Disadvantages are the limitation of the POV, you can show one character brilliantly, but you can never show other characters directly, they’re all filtered.

These last things also affect the POV I call first headlong — best example is Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, written in diaries as the plot goes along. First headlong has a peculiar charm. It’s used a lot in YA. I used it for the alternating first POV in Farthing.

Then there’s first present — best example Piercy’s Braided Lives and lots of short fiction. First person, present tense, no reflection, no knowledge of what will happen, no shaping of story by the narrator. I tend to find this a very immediate way of writing because there’s no selection filter. It’s great for up-front description of moment-by-moment events. I strongly recommend it as an exercise. If reflective is a memoir and headlong is a diary, present is a core brain-dump. My unpublished novel The Rebirth of Pan is written with alternating chapters in multiple first presents.

With omni, there are three main forms still in use. One is the Dickensian “bestseller omni” which is like a case of third person with no POV discipline. Everyone gets their two paragraphs of POV. It’s popular, easy to tell stories with, because hey, you can give everyone’s POV. Examples would be the kind of bestseller you pick up in airports, and Dickens.

Then there’s the Trollope omni, also seen in Jane Austen, where you have a narrator directly addressing the reader. This is actually a special case of first. While your omniscient narrator knows all and tells all, that’s all through their filter. In omni, like first reflective, you can stop and address the reader. (I wouldn’t recommend doing it too much, but it’s a delicious temptation.) This is what I used for Tooth and Claw. The main problem is distancing and causing the reader not to care. In my experience, distance is weird in omni, because the more you close up the further you get away, it’s better to let things stand for themselves. Trollope omni’s always going to be a little distanced. You’re not going to feel the bones crack between your own teeth. But that’s OK.

Thirdly, there’s fairy-tale omni, the “once upon a time” style used to tell fairy tales. There’s a narrator, there, and it’s a whole mode. This is what I used for my short story On the Wall and a ton of unpublished fairy tale retellings and the alternating chapters of The Rebirth of Pan.

Then there’s third, which is actually a whole bunch of stuff and very weird when you think about it, but because it’s been so popular in the last century it has got to look normal to us. I wrote The Prize in the Game in four alternating tight thirds, and also the alternating chapters of Farthing. All the same, I don’t feel I have a handle on it the way I do on the various firsts and omnis. Third isn’t a traditional way of telling a story. It isn’t “No shit, there I was” and it isn’t ‘Once upon a time” and it isn’t “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, it’s something like first present, but without being either first or present, and it’s conspiring with the reader to not exist, to not have any notice taken of it, as if the prose were invisible, and yet shaped, always shaped, by the underlying characters. Third doesn’t necessarily put you in someone’s head. it’s very different from first with the pronouns changed. Third is just plain weird, and I’m not going to try to categorise it here.