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1st August 2003: Sex, yes, gender, no.

Posted on by Jo Walton

I’m a woman. Furthermore, I’m about as heterosexual as people get, and I’m a mother. Also, I have long hair, like cooking, I’m married and I don’t earn as much as my husband. I sometimes wear jewelry and I like how I look. I think that’s absolutely it for standard female-identified stuff. All the rest of it I hate — sewing, clothes, make-up, messing with hair, flirting, shoes, being protected, being the angel in the house, skirts, being maternal, ick ick ick.

I hate definitions that try to prescribe, that say that as a woman I must be X. But I also hate ones that prescribe the opposite way, that say that all of X is boring and not worth consideration. If you say I need to know seventy-six shades of lipstick or be an ersatz man, I twitch, if you say living in any way other than as bears with furniture is a waste of time, I twitch again. I don’t care which parts of me you are trying to chop off to make the shoe fit, whether it’s the heel or the toe that’s still a sharp knife and bits of my body.

I once got accused of not being a real woman because I believe in following the laws of logic in debate. It took me about a year to think of the correct response to that, which would have been to burst into tears, because anything I said would lose me points, anything at all.

The thing about growing up female is it comes with a pile of baggage — women have been regarded as nurturing and gentle for a long time, and also as inferior, unimportant, differently important, all that sort of thing. I’ve had to do a lot of flat out fighting to be acknowledged as a human being with a valid point of view worth listening to, and it gets very wearying, and when you win — I win — what you have won is not an acknowledgement that women are people but that you personally are an exception, not really one of them.

It gets tiring and it gets boring and it leads into bad patterns of its own. And you have to fight it from both sides, from women who want you to fit in as well as men pushing you back into that box. But all the same, it’s easy (ha!) to get marked that exception. There’s a striking example of it in the film L’Auberge Espagnol where the guys are sitting on the sofa drinking beer while one girl cleans the kitchen and one of the other girls comes in, takes a beer and sits on the sofa arm. That sofa arm is available, it’s easy, and it’s a role called exception. I call it Mary, so much more fun that Martha. After all, you don’t want to be with her pushed back in that kitchen and unable to get out and talk.

In fiction, all too many of the strong women we see are Marys, and all too many of the Marthas are invisible. There are a lot more Marys than there were thirty years ago. It used to annoy the hell out of me that there were so few good girls parts. Now there are way more, but they are pretty much all Mary, Exception, they let Martha get on with cleaning that kitchen while they sit down with the guys and the beer.

It’s not the only choice. All of us could get up and clean the kitchen. Martha might have something interesting to say…

The place I started with making the world for the Sulien books was with the poem Thirty Sword, which is http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk/sulien/sword.htm and which is first person of a woman re-swearing fealty as a responsible adult, who has sworn it when young without understanding the weight of it. And I wrote that, and I thought “There has never been a time in our history that could have been spoken” because while there have been a lot of women who fought and even some who swore fealty, they were all exceptions, all Marys, they did it because they really wanted to and struggled to get there, they none of them did it realizing what duty actually was.

Well, in writing three books, or two volumes, or a 300 kword novel, however you want to look at it, to explicate the background to the poem, I did get across someone realizing what duty was, and what peace was, but I also failed with a lot of things. One of the reasons for this was because of Sulien’s POV — she’s emotionally dense, she’s oblivious to whole swathes of human experience, and I got some things in around that, but not enough. The choices I made about making her like that weren’t actually conscious, and worked out pretty well for me in some ways.

I did try to show other female choices, but it didn’t work that well. The other women in the alae had sex lives, Marchel, Alswith, Enid. Garah served as an example of a lot of things — class mobility, and the kind of options open to women outside the alae. Aurien was another kind of example. So was Veniva. So was Elenn, and that’s where I failed worst, which is why I wrote Prize, and if I failed with Elenn in Prize too, at least I failed in a different way. At the end of Prize you ought to know why Elenn didn’t come out of Caer Tanaga with Garah.

What I’m trying to do at the moment is tell a very simple story in a very complicated world, and one of the things I want is a Martha character with something to say, and for the story not to undercut that.

And what I’d like in real life is not to be an exception, to stop needing to fight that battle on either side. I’d like Zorinth not to be embarrassed about admitting to his friends that he made the cake. I’d like him to be proud of it, as if he were a girl.

We muddle along and do the best we can.

Posted in Lifelode, Sulien World

18th July 2003: I don’t know much about Art…

Posted on by Jo Walton

…but you have to think sometimes.

Names are weird things.

There’s a shoe store in the mall that contains Atwater metro, called Alibi. (I hesitated over whether to say “shop” or “store” there. That there are two different words for places where stuff gets sold reflects the fact that having places specifically to sell stuff came rather late in the development of our language. “Shop” comes from workshop, and “store” from storehouse, and British English settled on one and NorAm English on the other, but the places where we buy stuff aren’t really either.)

Anyway, we walk past Alibi all the time, because it’s between the metro and the bus stop. It’s open until ten o’clock at night, but there’s never anyone in there. Never. The place is deserted. It’s having a 70% off sale today, and still, no customers. We would wonder how they keep going, but in fact we figured it out from the name. The place is a front. “Where were you when the jewels were stolen?” “Buying shoes, officer, here’s the receipt and I’m sure the clerk will remember me…” Zorinth and I reckon they get ten per cent, and the back of the store is full of jewel thieves playing cards. It may even have bathrooms labelled “pointers” and “setters”, but we’re not sure about that, because it might clue the police in, if the police read Dortmunder, and there’s no saying that they don’t.

Across the road from Alibi, there’s another store called BDO. Rysmiel likes to think that you can order Big Dumb Objects in there, like Rama and Eos and possibly Arnold Swartzeneggar. We’ve never been in either of these places, of course. That would spoil them. The best part of them only exists in imagination, after all.

I’m digressing. I was going to talk about Art. I only have one Art story. (I did say I didn’t know much about him.) His name is Art Questor, and if you think that sounds made up, well, I can’t promise it was the name on his birth certificate, but it was the name everyone called him when I was introduced to him. He’s a real person, and this is the true story as I was told it at the time. He’s a friend of a friend of mine, which makes him a friend of a friend of a friend of yours, so if you repeat this story, nobody’s likely to believe it. I’m just warning you. (And if you found your name here in Google and you’re reading this, Art, how are you doing this long time! I hope everything’s wonderful for you.)

Art Questor lived in Lancaster, and one day he decided to sell all his worldly goods and travel the world. He held yard sales and auctions and parties and turned everything that wouldn’t fit into one backpack into cash, and set off to fulfil his dreams, starting in Egypt.

When he got to Egypt, almost straight off the plane he saw someone selling papyrus pictures, the kind you can find in ethnic shops in Lancaster. (They also have them in ethnic stores here. I saw some this morning, which is what reminded me of this story.) The papyrus sellers in Egypt were selling them for almost exactly half what the shops in Lancaster sold them for, and Art realized that he could literally double the money he’d raised from selling everything he owned, the money that was to take him around the world, if he could buy papyri in Egypt and sell them in Lancaster. So he bought as many as he could afford, and sent them off to my friend in Lancaster, asking him to sell them there for him.

The problem turned out to be twofold. Firstly, the shops might sell them for twice the Egyptian price, but that was retail, they bought them at wholesale prices, which were lower. Secondly, they didn’t actually sell all that much of the stuff, so the market was soon glutted. The rolls of papyrus sat in my friend’s attic, getting dusty.

Art came back to Lancaster somehow, after a few weeks in Egypt. My friend ran into him having breakfast at the Whale Tail. He was getting ready to do it all again, differently, better, making it work this time.

Art’s like that sometimes. You can take risks and set off with your hopes high, and maybe all you’ll end up with is a crashed dream and a pile of rubbish in someone’s attic. And then you start all over again and see what you can make of it this time. Art… or maybe I’m thinking about life.

I don’t know much about life, but I know what I like.

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

13th June 2003: On Re-reading Trollope

Posted on by Jo Walton

There are still sixteen Trollope novels I haven’t read yet, which is a very cheering thought. They aren’t in the library and they aren’t in print, but they exist and are out there and will turn up one day, along with the ones I’ve read from the library and don’t own. Even when I’ve read all sixteen of them, I’ll still have the comfort of re-reading the lot of them for the rest of my life.

I’ve just re-read The Warden. I first read it a little over a year ago. It’s the first Trollope I’ve re-read, as it was the first I read.

The thing is that I got put off Victorian literature by my childhood, in which I read a great deal of it because it was what we had. I didn’t just read improving children’s novels like What Katy Did and Elsie Dinsmore, I read the Bronte sisters, most of Dickens all most of Hardy. Indeed, I read quite a bit of Dickens and Hardy aloud to my grandmother — David Copperfield and Under the Greenwood Tree and Barbara Cartland and Wordsworth is not what I’d want read to me if I were dying, but it isn’t a situation where you want to argue about taste. I’ve always hated Hardy’s novels — though I like his poetry a great deal — but I’d have happily read my way through the whole shelf of them out loud if it had kept my grandmother alive to hear them.

In any case, when I discovered the twentieth century, and SF, and historical novels, I didn’t go back to older prose for ages. I’ve still read no more George Eliot than Silas Marner, and I didn’t read any Austen except the school set-text of Pride and Prejudice until 1997. (Ah, but in 1997 there they all were waiting for me and I could read her collected works in one week.)

I lumped Trollope with Dickens, and ignored him for years.

The Warden isn’t really a very good book. He didn’t have complete command over his voice yet, he didn’t have the sure touch he developed later. It’s not a first novel, quite, but it has a lot of first novel problems. (He’d written three novels about Ireland, none of which I’ve read, and which I probably don’t want to read, because I found Castle Richmond almost too much for me.) Re-reading it with a critical comparison to his later work, the wonder is that I went on from this to read more.

The reason I started reading Trollope was because of the Young Trollope’s website. ( http:///www.endicottstudio.com/yt.html ) In fact, it wasn’t because of that so much as a discussion of it on rec.arts.sf.composition.

On the website, it says lots of things about Trollope being a master of characterisation — which is true, by the way — and then it says “the main characters of one novel may appear at the dinner party of another, commenting on the action.”

I wanted that, and it was apparent to even the meanest understanding that I’d need to read more than one novel to get it.

Oddly, by the time I got it, I found it more irritating than anything. The way he does it in The Eustace Diamonds is positively intrusive, it would be a better book without. Yes, I got excited when I saw Phineas berating the heroine’s father in He Knew He Was Right, and I like it that the respectable firm of solicitors Bideawhile and Slow turn up so regularly, and I like the way he starts something as a joke and then thinks about it and makes it three dimensional — like the whole personality of the older Duke of Omnium. But the “What they said at Matchings” chapters of the characters of Can You Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn gossiping about the characters of The Eustace Diamonds seemed to me to be a mistake.

However, my imagination of how this would work was quite different, and to get what I imagined it would be like I was prepared to read my way through vast quantities of stuff like The Warden. Fortunately, I didn’t need to, because by Barchester Towers he had control of the omniscient voice and I had fallen in love. (I don’t recall now quite why I wanted this dinner-party bit so much, though it was only a year ago. But I’m very glad I did.)

I think Dickens ruined the omniscient voice, at least, almost everyone who has used it since has used either his version, which I call “bestseller omniscient” or fairy tale omniscient. “Bestseller omni” is like a series of tight thirds, skipping where appropriate, and without any actual omniscience in there at all. It uses any passing heads, it’ll use a desk clerk to look at the hero checking into the hotel and then forget him forever. It worked brilliantly for Dickens, who was a caricaturist more than anything, and his heirs are Michael Crighton and Frederick Forsyth and their ilk.

Trollope’s omniscient is a descendant of Austen’s, and a clearly evolved descendant. He does it so seemingly effortlessly, and with such incredibly precise control. It’s almost post-modern, it itself comments on the action of the story, it directs attention and emotion, it pulls back and steps forward, and best of all it’s funny. It really makes me laugh, over and over again, with the lightest of touches. Most of what is written to be funny leaves me cold and slightly embarrassed, from Discworld to Woodhouse. I laugh at Zorinth trying to raise his eyebrow and succeeding in contorting his face. I laughed at the brother-in-bed bit of L’Auberge Espagnol and i laugh at Trollope’s little asides. I’ve probably laughed more at Trollope than at everything else in the last year put together. (And of course, seeing it done like that, I naturally wanted to do it just like that too, and pastiched the style lock stock and gentle reader for my dragon book.)

The Warden seems a very slight thing on re-reading, with only glimpses of what is to come, and it’s not at all where I’d recommend someone else starts. All the same I am so glad I found it and persevered.

Posted in Books, Tooth and Claw

3rd June 2003: Structure

Posted on by Jo Walton

Structure, for me, is something very delicate that emerges either before or as I am writing. It’s not something I add later, and the very thought of adding it later fills me with horror. I’ve frequently found that it’s easier to write an entirely new chapter than to change one I’ve previously written, the kind of rewriting and drafts that so many people find so helpful are essentially useless to me, because everything that makes my writing worth having emerges from getting the words in the right order in the first place. I do characterization and incluing as I go along, and the kind of writing an additional piece in the middle I did yesterday requires a kind of simultaneous juggling and weightlifting act, and even then I can only do it if the space is there for it.

I do think about structure and tension and pacing, I think about them a lot, they’re part of the shape of the story, and I think about them in advance far more than I think about plot, if you have the tension right the plot will follow. Indeed, when I am starting a novel what I have of the shape of the whole thing could almost be written down as a piece of music or a coloured swirl, if there were a kind of notation that worked. A plot might be like a sideways S shape, with a complicated twist inside each curve, and that represents the structure and the tension without actual events, I might or might not have any idea of the events at any point of that shape, but I will know the shape. My shapes are usually really quite complex, and in more dimensions, but that’s the general idea.

For The Prize in the Game before I’d written any of it the structure was really clear, because there are four POV characters and the POV cycles in order all the way through, so that did things to structure and pacing that absolutely forced plot, and forced the shape into sections of four chapters each, absolutely inescapably, and then within that rigidity there was the Tain plot I was writing a variation of — Bricriu’s Feast and then the Tain — which has its own required shape, and that was stressed by the things I’d done. Oh, and there was also the stuff that wasn’t in the original stories but which I knew (because this was a prequel) had happened, like Conal and Emer, and like that Ferdia gave Elenn the dog — this last is totally invisible to anyone except me, but the dog Elenn has in chapter 31 of KP is the same dog Ferdia gives her in Prize. I didn’t know anything about the dog plot, but I knew the dog had to be in there somewhere, so there was a dog shaped question mark.

So I had those things in tension with each other, and what I knew was like a set of square box tops (the POV order/ chapter order) run through with a cat’s cradle in red that was the original plot shape and orange that was the things I knew were in there, and then with gold and dark blue and dark green and golden-green threads that were the characters moving it away from that, with two bits of utterly filled in tapestry which were the poems, which because they were solidly filled in affected the way all the threads could go. There was also the external constraint of what happened to the characters later meaning that there wasn’t as much character flex as normal. And then there were certain lines I knew would be there: “Often enough you do”, “She wished there had been time for her to weave a winding sheet herself” that sort of thing. And there was the dog, which was kind of like the shadow of a dog falling in among the colours, and when, part way through, I saw where the dog went, everything else became a lot clearer.

But looking at that, before any of it was written (or to be absolutely accurate, I sat down and did this consciously after the first four chapters, one in each POV, were written, which is when I thought about it — and that in itself did something for directing what came after) I could see the shape of it and adjust the level of tension and the pacing and the way the experience of reading it would be shaped — and I did that partly consciously and partly subconsciously, and mostly looking at a file marked “Plan” which is a tool for dealing with this stuff and reminding me of things.

Then as I wrote it, the tapestry filled in and constrained the unwritten parts more and more.

I actually think of this stuff as being like wyrd, and my role as being a lot like the fates, spinning and measuring and cutting the thread. There was a very weird moment writing the Sulien books when Urdo actually turned around and addressed me directly, as Fate, and the awful thing was that he trusted me. (Nor did I betray that trust. In the world I have control of, the kingdom held. That I know it didn’t really is a weird kind of meta-tragedy.)

There’s a really cool review of The Prize in the Game on Strange Horizons which actually managed to see what it was I was trying to do and how close I came to making it work.

Posted in Sulien World, Writing

5th May 2003: Thoughts on The Friendly Young Ladies, women and class

Posted on by Jo Walton

Thinking about the lack of options for respectable women and the way giving up respectability and slipping in class so totally wasn’t an option in any circumstances, it makes a great deal more sense of Elsie in Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies. I have always thought Elsie the next thing to pathological, but actually I see now she’s meant to be normal — insensitive, yes, but her axioms are the axioms of the day. I mean her expectation that she will live on her parents and have a dress allowance only, that she will not work, that life is to find a husband, and that life with her parents will be tolerable near a circulating library and with the chance to meet people.

This gives me a new angle on The Friendly Young Ladies, a novel I have read sufficiently often that lying in the bath thinking about it in detail suffices for re-reading it, more’s the pity. Leo’s struggle before meeting Helen is meant to be seen in that light, I think, as well as Elsie. “Young Ladies” in the title is clearly intentional. It’s astonishing how much context can be lost in such a short time, because I expect Renault felt she’d been quite clever, and there I was in a zillion readings seeing Elsie as much worse than she was. (She’s bad enough. But still.)

These people, well, Leo and Joe anyway, knew WWII was coming, and would have gone through it. Joe would have fought, possibly in the US army, but more likely in the British. If they’d gone to the US they’d have come back, I think. Leo would have worked in a factory or some such — unless she had a baby, or even if she did. (Can you see Leo with a baby? They had contraception, Marie Stopes and all that, I think she’d have had the sense to see what an impossible mother she’d have been. Though I don’t know.) Leo might also possibly have been a Wren or similar. She probably would, she’d have wanted to fight and that would have been the closest there was. It’s easy to imagine her in disguise as a man, but by WWII there were too many medical inspections.

Helen would have nursed, of course, and so would Norah, and Peter would have carried on being a doctor. Elsie would have had to be useful, and it would have been the making of her, and afterwards she would take it for granted that she kept on doing that. She’d have whined, because she always whined, she’d have whined on into the fifties about how you couldn’t get servants and money wasn’t worth anything, and she’d have worked in a factory or a cafe if she hadn’t been lucky enough to catch a husband, and I don’t think she would because she was so needy and desperate, and desperation is so very unappealing. Her parents would have been killed in the Blitz, and she’d have felt it was her fault, because they moved to London because of her running away.

Maybe Leo did have children and they’d have had their sensible aunt, Helen, and their dreadful aunt to be endured, who kissed and fussed them, Elsie.

I wish it wasn’t so hard to imagine Leo and Joe living together. Maybe Helen lived with them as well and made sure everyone had clean clothes and that there was dinner. That would work.

Posted in Books

25th April 2003: Time and history and how things fit together

Posted on by Jo Walton

I was once helping out on a dig in Greece. We’d start work early in the morning, knock off for the hot part of the day, then start up again when it got cooler. In the hot part, we’d generally go down to the taverna and eat, then go off and nap, or in my case lie down and read, because I don’t do naps.

One day, when we got to the taverna, I realized I’d left my book back at the dig. When I announced that I was going back, several people wanted me to bring things for them, a pair of glasses, a bag of apples. So I walked back up slowly in the very hot mid-day heat.

When I got there, there was the dig, deserted. There were our line measures, and our bags of stuff, and my book and the glasses and someone’s straw hat and the bag of apples, and there were the broken pots and the fallen pillars and the dropped coins, and they were all exactly the same. We’d gone to the taverna, meaning to come back, and we hadn’t come back yet. And they had gone out of the temple because the ground was shaking, and they had meant to come back just as much as we did, but they hadn’t come back. It was all the same, we were all the same, two and a half thousand years or not, if something prevented us coming back then the book and the glasses and the line markers I was stepping over to get them were part of someone else’s future site just like the pot-sherds. There was no difference. We were all intending to come back, and just as they did not know they would not, I did not, could not, know that we would.

It’s very quiet in Greece, at mid-day, and the sky is very blue and the sea is very blue and almost always in sight somewhere, and the olive trees are almost grey. The shadows are sharp edged, and the air very clear. The heat is very dry, so it feels like a weight you carry, not something that flattens you like the same heat with humidity. All of this would have been the same. I took the glasses and the apples and my book, and I walked back through the heat to the taverna, where everyone was drinking wine and eating watermelon and laughing and calling to me and meaning to go back.

This is how I have felt ever since.

Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

13th April 2003: A truly horrible thought

Posted on by Jo Walton

It’s possible to write an 850 page novel, well constructed, symphonic, and to feel, with the typical overharsh judgement people make about their own writing, that you’ve failed at making one of the characters sufficiently sympathetic. Then, a hundred and forty years later, it’s possible for it to be edited and introduced by a brainless moron who completely fails to see anything you were doing at all except the place you felt you failed.

I don’t know what the usually reliable Penguin Classics thought they were doing in employing Mr Kermode to edit He Knew He Was Right. I don’t often bother with footnotes, but these were particularly bad, spottily noticing the walk-on presence of characters from other novels and never when they’re not mentioned by name. (Phineas Finn appears as a young Irish under-minister for the colonies, but isn’t named, if anything ever needed a footnote saying “Look, look, did you notice, it’s Phineas, isn’t it cool!”) But the introduction, which I read after the novel, to avoid spoilers, managed to contain spoilers for half a dozen other novels, one of which I haven’t read, and to totally miss the point of the book. Totally.

Mr. Kermode thinks it’s a story about Louis Trevelyan’s jealousy, with a lot of rambling and minor characters to fill out the word count. He thinks Trollope isn’t sympathetic to women. He thinks that Victorian marriage customs are so unfamiliar to the reader that he needs to explain it all, and then gets the explanation wrong in the way you would if something is completely unsympathetic to you. (What he’s trying to explain is perfectly obvious from the text anyway.) He hasn’t noticed the fact that it’s funny — and this in a book that made me put it down to laugh twice and contains one of the most hilarious uses of the omniscient aside I’ve ever seen. (Trollope tells you on page 730 or so what there is left to do in the novel, but in such a way!)

So, in introducing a clever funny novel with a lot of shadowing and doubling and echoing, and one of the few Trollope novels where there is actually any tension about what is going to happen, he explains it’s tedious and rambling and doesn’t, as Trollope admitted, make Louis sufficiently sympathetic. He doesn’t give a thought to how difficult it would be to make him sympathetic. Do you think Shakespeare worried about whether Othello was sufficiently sympathetic? At least he didn’t leave a note saying so. I swear I’ll wipe my hard drive on my deathbed so nobody ever knows I feel I didn’t get chapter 32 quite right!

He also castigates Trollope for writing every day and keeping a note of his wordcount. He thinks this is churning it out. It would be better to be in awe of how much he achieved that way.

I wish I hadn’t bought this edition, though goodness knows I’m glad to have read the story. I shall look out for a Oxford World Classics edition, or even better an Everyman mini-hardback edition like the Phineas Redux I bought in Hay, and consign this one and Mr. Kermode to oblivion.

I can’t believe an editor who thought he put in a lot of characters to make the book longer, and that he didn’t like women, when in fact the book is an examination in major and minor keys of under what circumstances women in 1867 did and did not subject themselves to men.

Trollope might not have tied himself to any railings, and he might have made fun (in other books) of the excesses of some violent feminists, but he did see that middle and upper class women of the time were in a really horrible predicament.

Not one of those characters is extraneous.

And there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with doing a running wordcount.

Posted in Books

4th April 2003: Mode

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I was a teenager and started to write seriously, I discovered that I was allergic to how-to-write books. I was also too secretive (and also traumatised by the times I tried it) to show my writing to anyone so I didn’t go to any classes or workshops or anything, ever. I still never have. This meant that I was writing and learning to write entirely on my own, and that I didn’t have any words for the techniques I was figuring out. Therefore, I developed my own vocabulary for talking about writing, which I happily used for talking to myself about writing for the next fifteen years or so. I then acquired some friends who wrote, and acquired some of the proper words for talking about writing.

I also discovered that some of the terms I’d made up didn’t have proper versions, or didn’t map well onto proper versions.

Incluing — the process of giving information subtly without resorting to an infodump — they didn’t have a word for incluing? How do people do it if they don’t have a word for it? (Sapir-Whorf must be wrong!) The thing about this word (which got released into the wild on rec.arts.sf.composition by someone I’d used it to who had assumed it was a real word) is that it’s immediately clear what it means and immediately useful.

Most of my other terms were fairly easily translatable, but one that really wasn’t was “mode”. “Mode”, when I tried to explain it on rasfc, turned out to be very slippery to most people and a big problem to some others.

Mode is what I need before I start writing. Mode controls how I tell the story. It is a distinct thing. It controls voice and POV and what I call stance, but I’m sure there’s a proper word for. (Stance is where you stand to tell the story — close and involved, distant and ironic, reliable or unreliable — and where your percieved reader stands. The story then is shaped into the gap between — things like if you’re telling a children’s story you need to know the kind of vocabulary they’ll understand, the sort of jokes the reader can be expected to get without explanation, their expected perception of cannibalism…)

Mode controls what people normally call style and which I think is part of mode — sentence length and pattern and language use and the way the words fall, where the stresses are, the underlying pattern the words are part of. (I call this “cornerstones”, the individual words you know you have to have. It’s something much more obvious in poetry, but it’s there for me in prose as well. Delany talks about this in The Motion of Light in Water.)

Mode also controls stuff that’s usually filed under “genre”, things like where the magic is and where the tech level is, the story’s, as opposed to the character’s, understanding of the way the universe works.

Before I start writing, I need the mode. I need it before I write the first sentence. Once I have it, I have the synthesis of all that stuff, stance, voice, POV, genre, how the words fall.

I sometimes have a mode without having anything else at all. Usually I start with people in a situation, and the mode will come along with them. But sometimes, really, all I have is mode, I have files saved on my computer which are just little bits of mode. (If this is making no sense to you at all, it wouldn’t help if I showed you them. I did that on rasfc, and got a lot of blankness from the people who hadn’t understood the explanation. This seems to be something some people just don’t get.)

Now, “there are nine and sixty ways of creating tribal lays, and every single one of them is right!”

I’m the only person I know who needs mode first, which is probably why I made up a name for it and they didn’t. Everyone else seems to figure it out sometime in the process and then go back and revise for it, without calling it that. I also write atypically in order, and I revise atypically little. I’m weird. Nine and sixty ways.

But it seems to me, Peg, (if you’re still with me,) that what you were talking about this morning that looks to you like a character problem, might actually be a mode problem, and that what you’ve been doing all this time looks a lot to me like going through a process of looking for the mode, and identifying this problem at this time may mean you’re closer to having a good grip on where it needs to be.

Posted in Writing

10th March 2003: Up on the white verandah

Posted on by Jo Walton

Darkhawk asked me why the religions in my novel would be always not quite coping.

There’s a Bob Dylan song on the album Desire called “Black Diamond Bay” which begins:

Up on the white verandah,
she wears a necktie and a panama hat.
Her passport shows a face from
another time and place:
she looks nothing like that.
And all of the remnants of her reasoned past are
scattered on the wild wind.

It then goes on to be a song about a hotel in the last little while before a disaster, and how people connect to things in odd ways. (Oh, I’ve only heard that lyric, not seen it written down, if, by any chance, I have any of it wrong, please do not tell me. Thank you.)

A while ago, about ten years ago now, probably, when I was doing the research for GURPS Celtic Myth I had a dream in which I was that woman, and on that verandah. I was talking to the hotel’s janitor, who had a broom and was sweeping, and who turned out to be Lugh of the Long Hand. He told me that it was unusual for me to stay there long enough for him to talk to, these days people were going through there at such a speed, the wind I felt was souls whizzing through, none of them sufficient of an archetype to last as long as a leaf in autumn snagging on bark, and all of them leaving thin used up clear casings, (like empty plastic gloves, or very thin condoms) which he needed to sweep away. It used to be that there weren’t so many people or they weren’t in such a hurry, and they would go through that place, which wasn’t always a hotel, and most of them would go on and those who were strongest in themselves would stay and clot, and all those whose stories and natures were close to each other would become the same.

I know that this is a metaphor for the soup of story and all of that, and it also owes something to the forest in Michael Scott Rohan’s The Forge in the Forest, but in my dream the difference was that the archetypes were the gods, the real gods, and the place was the place between dying and birth, and a place where people went through to get to their dreams, an antechamber of all dreams, and a place in the Otherworld.

It used to be, Lugh told me, that almost everyone, in their dreams, would join up with some archetype, and many of them, after they died, would do the same, and the gods were strong. But now people were just blowing through so fast, Lugh said, leaning on his broom, and (and at this point, the metre of the dream did the thing where in the music of the song it goes up on “all of remnants of the reasoned past”) did I know that the hat would be all that was left of me?

Whereupon I woke up, and would you believe I didn’t have the hat?

So “up on the white verandah” is short-hand for the dream, and for the idea of archetypal gods existing in a place it is possible to walk to from here but with different laws of reality and where those with the strongest personalities become gods and the rest wear away like a sweet that has been sucked too long.

As you can see, in a world where you could walk to where they live if you set out in the right direction, and where the gods were like that, and took an occasional interest, being an organised hierarchical religion would always be fraught in some directions.

Posted in Lifelode

27th March 2003: Lurid as some of them were…

Posted on by Jo Walton

“The events of my childhood, lurid as some of them were, contributed more to my sense of independence and my sense of responsibility toward others.”

C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen 1988, III, p.24. (Scary Cyteen obsessive fact, I wanted to find the exact quote and it took me mere seconds.)
So, yesterday, after finishing writing and before going offline to make dinner, I checked my email. There was email from my aunt, which there generally is a couple of times a week, but this one had the heading “Mike”. Either, I thought, something really exciting has happened in the Archers, or my father is dead and she has somehow found out about it. I shouldn’t read so much rasseff, where a bare name is generally a death announcement.

I haven’t spoken to or heard from my father since 1984, not quite twenty years. He’d telephoned my aunt, saying he seemed to have mislaid my address (for nineteen years, as anyone might…) and thought she might have it. She didn’t give it to him, of course, but she did take his phone number, which she sent me. She thinks he imagined she wouldn’t be in close touch with me, so she might believe he’d had my address until recently. He told her he wasn’t surprised I was in Canada, which was all she told him while frankly, I’d have imagined anyone who last saw me in 1984 would be surprised, because I don’t think I’d ever thought about the existence of Canada twice for two consecutuve minutes in the nineteen years I’d been alive. He was trying it on. He does that.

Hearing that he’s alive and trying to contact me shouldn’t have sent me into a complete state of shock, but it did.

When Rysmiel and I got married last year, I had to say on the marriage certificate that I did not know my father’s profession, nor whether he was alive or dead. I thought he was probably dead, but maybe I under-estimate how likely alcohol is to kill you. Or maybe he’s stopped drinking, my aunt said he didn’t sound drunk, and it was evening there.

It’s complicated. I don’t know what I want. I spent half my evening explaining him to poor Rysmiel, who had heard most of it before and was very patient. My father is not like other people’s fathers. He’s my biological father, and I knew him when I was in my teens, and most people would probably judge him more harshly than I do.

I’d really like to give him back his copy of The Sirens of Titan.

I’m pretty sure I don’t want him to be in my life in any significant sense, unless he’s changed a lot, and if he’s changed a lot I don’t know him and it may well not be worth putting the effort in. The world is full of people I don’t know, after all, without their having history with me.

He was pretty much the age I am now when I last saw him.

If I had an address, rather than the number of a mobile phone in Greece — and that is so totally totally typical — I’d probably send the Vonnegut and write. I don’t know if I’d tell him my name and address — he doesn’t know my surname, I changed it when I married Ken. In some ways I’d like him to know I am OK, I have published novels, Zorinth exists. Zorinth, who I have not yet told about this, is in some dim biological sense, his grandson.

On the other hand, he can be a sponge, financially, emotionally. I like him in some ways, but the more I think about him the less I want him to be able to turn up unannounced, which is a habit of his.

I’m glad he’s OK.

But why does he want to be in touch now? My aunt has been in the phone book always. He was probably in Greece, and it reminded him of me, briefly and sentimentally.

I hate making telephone calls anyway.

If I tell him my name that’s it, I’ll never be able to get away from him again.

Hoom, hom.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face