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23rd February 2004: The Dyer of Lorbanery (Spearpoint theory)

Posted on by Jo Walton

There comes a point in writing, and it’s a spear-point, it’s very small and sharp but because it’s backed by the length and weight of a whole spear and a whole strong person pushing it, it’s a point that goes in a long way. Spearpoints need all that behind them, or they don’t pack their punch in the same way.

Examples are difficult to give because spear-points by their nature require their context, and spoilers. They tend to be moments of poignancy and realization. When Duncan picks the branches when passing through trees, he’s just getting a disguise, but we the audience suddenly understand how Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane.

Shakespeare there is making a spearpoint out of air — goodness knows, maybe it was in Holished, but that doesn’t matter because he couldn’t have expected his audience to know it. There are all sorts of things you can expect the audience to know, that you can rely on them essentially bringing along their own spear-shafts for. Card talks about hurting children as a way of creating sympathy — hurting children is something where people bring their own spear-shafts to slot into the point you give them.

There are a whole lot of things like this — though sometimes they change over time, and readers of another age, without the spear the author expected, laugh or are confused when they learn that a character has lost a hat, or had sex with his boyfriend. Coffeeandink wrote a little while ago about what a non-revelation hidden homosexuality is these days, when writers as recently as the 1970s could confidently expect a certain kind of spear coming ready to the hand there.

For a writer using that historical period now to get that spear-point effect (the one Sumner Locke Elliott’s The Man Who Got Away gave me in 1980 and didn’t give Mely in 2003), it would be necessary to do a lot of set-up about the significance of male friendship in the context of the time, and even then it wouldn’t be a revelation in the same way.

Sometimes the spear has to be very long — the events at the end of Dunnett’s Pawn in Frankincense don’t reliably work without the spear reaching all the way back to A Game of Kings, just reading Pawn hasn’t been enough for two readers that I know of. Likewise some of Bujold’s spearpoints work much better with the longer context, although they do still work without.

When writing SF and F, it’s possible to make the whole spear out of air and know that’s what you’re doing. The example I usually give of this is Cherryh writing about people going through Jump without drugs. There’s no such thing as Jump — FTL hyperspace — and humans don’t need drugs for it, she made it all up, but she also set it all up such that by the time the reader gets to it, it’s a spear-point.

Another is the one I used as a title for this — in The Farthest Shore, a minor character shouts out her name for all to hear. For someone who read that page alone, this would be inexplicable and possibly silly. For someone who has come all the way through Earthsea as far as Lorbannery already, it’s terrible and revelatory — and when Ged does the same thing later, quoting his own name in what Orm Embar says to him, there’s an even longer spear-point that goes back to Ged’s naming at Ogion’s hands near the beginning of A Wizard of Earthsea.

Now we get to what I wanted to say.

It isn’t always possible to build the spear so that it will work the first time through.

If you keep stepping back to show the reader that there is irony here, that there is a wider context, that things work out this way, you risk losing absolute raftloads of immediacy. You can do that now and again, but not too much. You certainly need to do a lot of set-up, carefully, towards what you want to do later, and the reason for that is so that when you actually get to doing it, it can stand alone at that point, be that point, because the spear needs to be behind it, and a spear-point supported right there with scaffolding doesn’t have any impact at all.

It needs to be moving when it hits you, and it needs to have the spear already there, whether you and the reader built the spear together along the course of the book or whether the reader came into the room with it. And if you’re building the spear, you have to come by it honestly, even though you’re doing set-up, it all has to fit with what’s there it all has to work in its own context or you won’t end up with anything but a pile of splinters.

And sometimes you don’t have room and it isn’t going to be fully there until afterwards, and I think it’s better to suck that up and trust the reader to think, to come back and re-read, to get the impact then, than to try to hammer the spear-point in when there hasn’t been time to build the spear, because what happens then is telling in the way that people mean when they tell you not to do it, and distancing, which can blunt the impact not just the first time but always.

Posted in Books, Writing

9th January 2004: Clarification

Posted on by Jo Walton

[I’d posted asking for recommendations]

I don’t want twins, I want the situation where someone takes on the persona of someone else and has to act with people who know the original person as if they are that person, while working out exactly what is going on. So The Prisoner of Zenda and the first two Secret Country books definitely work, and the reason Mirror Dance doesn’t is because this is only the case for the first two chapters or so.

Also: Brat Farrar, a long term comfort book so frequently read that I haven’t read it for ages. Re-reading it yesterday, two things struck me. Firstly, is this clearly a strong influence on the Secret Country books or what? No wonder I like them so much. Why did I never notice this before? Secondly, what the heck year is it supposed to be? Not the 1949 it was written in, that’s for sure, not with the parents having been killed on their way home from a jolly holiday in France eight years ago. A projected 1957 is possible. 1937 is also possible… but the tech, the cars, no, most likely is a 1949 in which WWII happened (Brat’s mother and Hammond the dentist were killed in it) but lasted only until the end of 1940, whereupon Chamberlain made peace, with Hitler holding all of Europe. The social changes of WWII did not happen, Europe, including the France through which Brat travels (“one also needs papers”) is fascist, and the America he works in training horses, extreme isolationist. This works really scarily well. I don’t think it was what Tey intended, but reading it like that I could see all the details of the Bures agricultural show as incluing about how different the world was and how people dealt with it. This is a world where all the stuff that happened psychologically to Britain in WWII didn’t happen.

I probably thought this because of reading Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat immediately before, a book set in a 1956 in which the details of WWII loom so huge and cast so large a shadow and are taken so for granted by the author and characters who have lived through them that this almost unbalances the book when read almost fifty years later.

Posted in Books, Small Change

18th October 2003: Under Milk Dune, a Child’s Christmas on Arrakis

Posted on by Jo Walton

You’re going to be missing huge chunks of context if you haven’t read (a) Frank Herbert’s Dune and (b) Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Under Milk Dune: A Play for Voices

First Voice: It is night, night in the deep desert. Listen. Only you can hear the song of the stars in the high dark, the sough of the wind on the sand. The stars lie in drifts like the starlight-diffracting sand, and here between them there is only the night.

Listen harder. Far down beneath the sand are the worms, turning, the makers turning water into spice, making the worms way, the hard road, the fast road, the thread that nets the stars together.

Walk with me now across the sands, feel the chill of night under the unsleeping stars, walk with slow sliding steps with no rhythm, no thump to call up the wild worm-howling sudden out of sand. Walk slow and slant across the wind-humped dunes and rock-studded sloughs of the sands. Stop here, look, here in the shadow of the rock, here, asleep, a mother and son tucked up close in a cloak, as snug as babes on far Caladon, snug and water-fat, snug as nobody should be here in dark desert Arrakis where water is wealth and hope and life itself.

Look closer. The boy is waking, blinking, look into his eyes, blue as noonday, dark as space between the stars. Is he the Kwisatz Haderach, the promised one? He has crossed the stars to come here. His eyes close again and he goes down into sleep. Shall we follow? Shall his dreams show his messiah mind? Dreaming he goes forward and back, back and forward like the swift-tailed desert-mouse. Dreaming he sees:

Chani: Me, Chani, daughter of the desert. Fremen from my Stillsuit covered head to my stilsuit covered toe, but utterly delectable all the same, and knowing it. And knowing the value of water to the nearest micro-millilitre. I lean towards him provocatively in his future-foretelling dream letting him see the shape of me, me who he hasn’t met yet, but will soon, and I croon gently “Tell me about the waters of your birthworld, Usul.”

Paul: Oh Chani, Chani, am I the messiah?

Chani: It’s a cold night in the desert and you’ve come to save us, if that’s not the messiah what is?

Paul: Then it must be Christmas morning. Jessica and Leto will be bringing me presents.

Duke Leto, sadly: I’ve no head to bring presents to you now, son.

First Voice: Paul stirs, but does not wake, and in his dream the dunes of Arrakis are covered with ornament-dangling light-sparkling Christmas trees, and there is the sound of sleigh bells.

Posted in Whimsy

6th November 2003: Being able to talk about things

Posted on by Jo Walton

Thank you everyone who posted on my previous entry, I really appreciate the support and sympathy.

I’m fine, and Zorinth (of course) came home without any problems and we had dinner and he told me way more than I wanted to hear about Pirates of the Caribbean.

We’re very fortunate that we live in a period with such good medical tech and relatively few dangers, because death for us is something comparatively rare, something we can treat as unusually awful rather than as the part of everyday life it was in most historical eras. I do see this as a good thing, but it does mean that there’s an element of embarrassment to talking about it — not my embarassment, other people’s. Whenever I mention it, people start feeling, to quote Kate, like “insensitive clods” as if they shouldn’t have mentioned it or I shouldn’t have mentioned it or… at that point, it’s worse for them than for me, I am used to it. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, so for a while I didn’t talk about it, or I talked about it very cautiously. This made simple questions from well-meaning people like “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” or “Why do you walk with a cane?” a minefield. It also meant I essentially couldn’t talk about my childhood, because I didn’t have an “I” childhood, I had a “we” childhood, and I couldn’t mention a simple normal thing about my childhood without bringing death into the conversation and entirely derailing it.

So a few years ago I decided to just go ahead and talk about it when I wanted to talk about it — this was pretty much when I was writing The King’s Peace/Name and one of the things that story is about is grief as a real thing. You don’t get over, you do go on. (I really hate the way that’s dealt with in most fiction.)

Anyway, thank you again for being there and coping with talking about things that can be difficult to talk about.

Posted in Among Others, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

5th November 2003: Why I am brave

Posted on by Jo Walton

It’s November 5th, and I have let Zorinth go to see Pirates of the Caribbean on his own, and come back on his own.

November 5th 1976, my sister and I were crossing a road, on a zebra crossing near home and she was killed and my leg got banged up. (That’s not why I walk with a cane. I walk with a cane because I then spent the week after, the week while the doctors were deciding she was actually dead and giving up hope, walking around on a broken hip. Don’t try this at home, especially if you are eleven and still growing.)

November 5th, in Britain, is Guy Fawkes Night, Bonfire Night, celebrated loudly and enthusiastically with fireworks. Every bang and scream and explosion of pretty lights has lacerated me for years. It’s not just that it is the anniversary of my sister’s death, it’s also that people are celebrating it loudly. It was almost worth emigrating just to be away from that. The combination of memories and bangs and the dying of the light always put me into a depression at the beginning of November.

For some years, I wasn’t able to go out on the fifth. I’d stay in bed the whole day. Eventually I started being able to deal with it a bit better. In daylight. If it wasn’t raining. Headlights and belisha-beacon lights and flashing blue-lights on rainslick roads can get to me all year, but on November 5th they remain beyond bearing.

It’s really stupid to let an anniversary get to you, but knowing that doesn’t actually help, if it does. I’ll miss her at all kinds of cues, this isn’t missing her, it’s remembering…

…starting to cross a road, talking, being in the middle of a conversation, and then lying in the wet road afraid that a car would come from the other direction. Standing up, on a leg that hurt, and seeing her down in the rain, on the road, in the flashing lights, and knowing people’s heads do not do that, and standing over her body in the road until a car going the other way stopped and they got someone who got police and ambulance.

(The original car, and drunk driver, had run. They caught him but he had no penalties because he had a disabled child at home and needed his license and his drink. These days the law wouldn’t be that pathetic.)

The ambulance men dragged me away from her. They asked my address. When my grandfather and my mother got there five minutes later (I said it was near) they’d been assuming I was the one unconscious, because I had told the police Emma’s name, but not mine. They were relieved, for which I have actually never forgiven them. All the same, for the first second, I was almost pleased to see my mother, that’s how bad it was, until of course she started behaving naturally and made everything worse. They let her go in the ambulance, but not me. I didn’t ever see Emma again after that, and I quite consciously felt like Eowyn standing over the body of Theodyn and signally failing to defend it.

Let’s just not talk about the similarities between my mother and the witch-king of Angmar for the moment. That’s not the point.

There’s a Pink Floyd song on the album The Wall which contains the line “Mother’s going to make all of your nightmares come true. Mother’s going to put all of her fears into you.”

I’ve tried really hard not to do that with Zorinth.

Consciously, I know tonight is no different from any other night, no more dangerous. He’s thirteen, I let him take metro and buses on his own.

He’s had a Ped day (random teacher day off, what they call “Baker days” in Britain) and we’ve done some stuff and now he’s gone on his own to a 16h15 showing of a two and a half hour film, he’ll be home about 19h30. I let him go, quite cheerfully, and I am home on my own. It would have been a lot harder in Britain, with wailing and banging fireworks. But I am being brave, I’m staying in on my own, I am not putting my fears into him, I am letting him take his own risks at least a little bit, even when I am (and I am) irrationally afraid.

There are good things about knowing, knowing all through, that someone can die and be gone forever between one sentence and the next. It can make you appreciate the moment. It can make death generally easier to deal with thereafter. But it can also make you clingy and over-protective when you love people. I try hard not to be, with mixed results.

But he’s out there, and Rysmiel is in Seattle and all of you are where you are, and I am here, and we’re all OK.

Posted in Among Others, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

5th October 2003: Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth

Posted on by Jo Walton

Tom Stoppard is definitely a genius; in fact he’s clearly one of those geniuses who are proverbially close to madness.

We saw Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth at the Player’s Theatre in McGill, performed by the same university group who put on The Real Inspector Hound last year. They’re pretty good, they’ve got the timing to play Stoppard, which is the most important thing.

The play opens with adults dressed as schoolchildren talking nonsense — words of English deliberately used to mean something else. The acting is comic, symbolic, exaggerated. The teacher comes in and berated them, there is humour in the word for “sir” apparently being “git”. (This may have been funnier to us that to the rest of the audience, I’m not sure “git” is used in Canada, I haven’t heard it.) Slowly we become aware that we’re starting to understand the language. A guy arrives with a lorry full of stuff to deliver, speaking English, which they don’t understand, and he doesn’t understand them, but he manages to unload his pile of props and help them arrange them. A woman gives a prize-giving speech, and the teacher announced that there will follow a performance of “Hamlet Bedsock Denmark, yeti William Shakespeare.” A brief comic version of Hamlet follows, cut-down but Shakespeare’s English, in the same way a British school might put on a production of Moliere in French. It’s really funny.

This is followed (after a brief encore in which the actors run through it again at top speed, making the “Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged” version we saw last year seem like plagiarism of this) by an interval in which the three of us sat around speechless with our mouths open, occasionally exchanging words we’d managed to decipher or wondering if the second half was connected.

At first it appeared not to be connected. The scene opens on a suburban living room, with the owner cleaning it. Then actors appear and begin to perform Macbeth — again cut, but played dead straight, apart from the fact that they’re in a suburban living room. The knocking that will wake Duncan comes from the door we all came in through, and reveals a policeman, who reveals, through haranguing cast and audience that we are in Eastern Europe, that we are all dangerous intellectuals watching and performing Macbeth in a living room as an act of subversion and faith in art and the human spirit. He sits down on stage to watch the play, which continues cowed — until the arrival, through the French windows, of the delivery guy with the van, this time speaking the nonsense language. He completely baffles the policeman, but the cast pick it up, Cahoot, one of the actors, explains it’s called Dogg and you don’t learn it, you catch it. Macbeth continues in Dogg, the policeman is drawn in, as MacDuff, the language liberates them, the play moves on with “Burnham” and “Dunsinane” as occasional loan-words in the Dogg, Macbeth begins his famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech “Dominoes, Dominoes, Dominoes” and I understand it perfectly, and the absurd rescues and frees art even as more policemen rush onto the stage and tie up the cast and the first policeman.

Apart from the occasional cross-over absurdity, like the “two-ton artichoke” the guy has parked outside, the second half is played entirely realistically, a million miles from the exaggeration of the first half. And the Macbeth is deadly serious. And art is liberated by nonsense.

This was deeply weird, I’m not sure it entirely worked, I have no desire to see it again but I’m very glad it exists and that I’ve had the chance to see it once.

Wow.

Posted in Theatre

16th September 2003: Writing is weird, some more

Posted on by Jo Walton

The thing is, when you tell a story you already know, you’re not telling the same story. It’s like all the versions of fairy tales, they all have the same plot and the same characters but they are different stories. It’s because telling stories isn’t, as Kitto put it, moving around figures from a Noah’s Ark, everything changes. (Zorinth found this out when he was quite small, when I told stories, as opposed to reading them, things moved about and acquired motivation. “It’s not supposed to have motivation, it’s a rock!”)

So I start thinking “Mansfield Park” and there’s this kind of dynamic of essential stuff and people and looking at that, right at once, I’m telling a story about three young people whose father dies and the eldest makes one choice and the middle one makes another choice and the youngest one… and what starts coming out is Mansfield Park the same way Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is “Tam Lin” and Robin McKinley’s Deerskin is “Donkeyskin” and in a really really different way from the way Bridget Jones Diary and Raptor Red are Pride and Prejudice.

What I’m presently writing about is the character who exists to be Mrs. Norris heading off in a spaceship to the moons of Saturn

All this is only partly because it’s set in the twenty-fourth century where being female is an economic condition you don’t want to get stuck with long term.

Posted in Poor Relations, Writing

15th September 2003: Writing is weird

Posted on by Jo Walton

There’s something very weird about the act of actually telling a story. This is a lot more noticeable when you’re telling a story you know already, as opposed to making up a story.

I’m stuck and conflicted on my Lifelode story, so I thought I’d try starting the Mansfield Park space opera, to see if that would go, because writing anything is better than writing nothing and being grumpy about it. It’s going — a thousand words plus in the last hour. So, Mansfield Park, OK, I start telling it, got to start a bit before, well, be more specific with backstory because that is where it starts — how the heck did Mrs Norris get to become a sympathetic character?

If you’d asked me one hour ago whether I had any sympathy for Mrs Norris, if I had one jot of sympathy for her, I’d have said no.

The reason people talk about inspiration as something external, the Awen, whatever, is that it isn’t really a definable thing, it isn’t logical, it can twist what you think you know.

I thought I knew Mrs Norris and couldn’t stand her.

But telling the story in a different setting in a different way, even though I’m writing about an earlier stage of someone who’s going to have the plot role and the characterisation of Mrs Norris, suddenly I know how she got like that, I am sympathetic. I didn’t design this world to make Mrs Norris more sympathetic!

I knew the story would come out different, because I know what happened when I put Framley Parsonage in at one end and got Tooth and Claw out at the other. But I didn’t expect, within a thousand words of starting, to feel things turn that upside-down.

As I said, weird.

Posted in Books, Poor Relations

3rd September 2003: Gravy Bath Coriolanus

Posted on by Jo Walton

Theatre is something it’s only possible to have in civilization. There are barbarian poems and stories and carvings and paintings, but only in settled communities have people come together to co-operate in this strangest of arts. There is a script, which is the thread that lasts. There is direction, there are actors, there is an audience, there are props and lights and clothes and music, the thread is woven into wide bright tapestry and then, as it is woven, burned up, destroyed even as it is realized. There is no reference copy. A script is a thin dark thread to burn so brightly, but that’s the thing with theatre, whether at the Dionysia in Athens or last night in Montreal, only the actors and the audience saw it, and when it’s over, it’s over, there’s only the script and the memories.

Being a theatre critic must be the worst profession in the world, bearing the weight of knowing that what you say about this production will be the closest any future person can come to it, and that what you say must of its nature be inadequate.

I think I mentioned that Gravy Bath Productions are amazing. These two productions, the “New Classical Theatre Festival” (Rysmiel says it’s very Montreal to call two plays a festival) playing alternate nights at the Saidye B, couldn’t be more different. They’re both terrific, but in very different ways.

The Portrait of Dorian Gray was a production full of nouns, the stage was cluttered with things, it slowly uncluttered as the performance went on, but there were little tables, sofas, flower arrangements, tea-cups, little cakes, an easel, all the impedimenta of Victiorian life. The play was the words, the acting too, but mostly the words and the pauses between the words. When, as we had to, we walked across the stage to and from our seats, it felt like walking through a drawing room, carefully avoiding the furniture. Wilde or Shaw would have recognised it, even if there was no fourth wall. (“Who’s Shaw?” asked Zorinth. “An Anglo-Irish playwright.”)

Coriolanus in absolute contrast was kinetic, full of movement and images. The boards were bare, props were spare, sticks, lengths of cloth, rolling spools, everything used and re-used in different ways.

Thinking about the contrast in theatricality leads me to think of films. Films, delightfully, are the same every time, can be seen in Madison and Manchester as well as Montreal. Film is an outgrowth of theatre, but it very much isn’t the same thing, because film forces your focus, it directs your attention, with close-ups and panning and all the techniques it fixes attention in one direction. But beyond that, because it is close up and because it is film it has its own conventions of realism. Theatre can be iconic in a way that isn’t possible for film, which has its own ways. It can do so much in unreal ways to make things seem perfect, with effects, that it can’t give you ten people with stockings over their heads and quarterstaffs in their hands, balletically representing a battle. It can show you dead bodies and staring eyes, but it can’t have six pairs of people take empty clothes out of suitcases, cradle them, lay them out carefully in such a way as to show the individuality of each set, cover them all in sheets to show how they are united in the sameness of death, and set up the suitcases on end at the head of each to be tombstones. It would show you the bodies to a certain kind of music, and not to a wild Gregorian chant, prefiguring the use of a Gregorian chant version of a Metallica song later…

A film of Dorian would have been different, both more and less representative and realistic, but it could have been recognisably the same thing. Nobody could film this production of Coriolanus without it being a film of a play. Yet the influence goes both ways, and the theatricality of some of it owes something to film, to slow motion, to the battle at the beginning of Gladiator even, Zorinth says, to The Matrix. When the spears fly to kill Martius at the end, the light changes, everyone freezes except the man walking with each spear in turn, then sound and motion begins again as each spear hits.

All the same, last night’s Coriolanus, in the long thin space with 72 seats to left and right, was theatre that Nikeratos and Euripides would have understood.

Usually, coming out of Shakespeare, I am drunk on words, this time I was drunk on motion, on faces, on ways of using sticks and swathes of cloth, on the starkness of the tragedy.

The play began in mime, with a tramp waking up in a dustbin, getting up, finding a suitcase, and taking from it a set of hats and a pile of little toy soldiers. The whole play in some sense concerned the tramp’s imagination of the hats and the toys. The actors came on in silence, in black, stocking masked, and put on the hats and the roles. I initially thought of the tramp as a homeless person — that’s how he was dressed — and it wasn’t until Zorinth used the word “tramp” in the first interval that I thought about the iconic significance of that, through Chaplin and Beckett. (“Who’s Beckett?” Zorinth again. “A Franco-Irish playwright.”)

I can’t describe it, though I feel I should, the tribunes conspiring, the people agitating, Martius striding through disdainfully, bred to the wars, and his awful mother gloating about his wounds, Aufidius bending over the spool to move the toy soldiers, the tramp wandering alternately delighted and horrified, the long red ribbon that was blood winding through the battle becoming the triumphal cloak, Aufidius and Martius banging their staves at each other because war was the language they had in common and the only safe communication they could have.

There were, as of last night, seats still available for Sunday afternoon’s additional performance of Coriolanus. (There were none at all for any of the remaining performances of Dorian, we checked.) We’re intending to go again. If you want to go and need somewhere to stay in Montreal, let me know.

After Sunday it will be gone forever, as Shakespeare’s own production is gone, and all the productions between then and now.

I’m never going to write any more plays.

Posted in Human culture, Theatre

18th August 2003: Poor Relations

Posted on by Jo Walton

Is there anything actually preventing one from writing Mansfield Park as a space opera?

Well, I guess the physics. And not being able to read it while one was writing it. But think of being able to fix the end! And it could go in my universe where gender is an economic status.

Hoom hom.

Posted in My Books, Poor Relations