Glenda Larke

A friend emailed yesterday. She had been telling me for ages how hard she was finding the writing of her new contracted book – it was coming along far too slowly and each page had to be wrung out of her. Where, she asked, had all the joy in writing gone? In addition she was often unwell with a chronic health problem.

Enough to have many writers toss the keyboard across the room and moan that they have writer’s block and can’t write any more…and some do just that. Othes stop writing because they are scared of failure, particularly if they have had a phenomenal success and don’t think they can repeat it.

But my friend is 100% professional. She kept on writing. Struggling every inch of the way – but she did it, hoping that in the end what she produced would be good.

Yesterday she wrote to say that she had an epiphany – saw where she had been going wrong and how to correct it. The zest returned, the joy was back. And with it the speed of production…

I know how she felt. I’ve been there too. I’ve thought at times that a book I was working on was crap, that nothing was going right, that the flatness of my prose would be obvious to a reader – but I ploughed on. Because that’s what you do when you are professional about your work, whatever your work may be.

And sooner or later, it all comes right – the joy returns, the mistakes are corrected, the plot zings. That would never have happened if I’d stuck the book in a drawer and packed the computer away.

Are there times when you should give up on a particular work? Probably, if you are still learning your trade. The novice wood carver who ruins his piece of wood has to throw it away, after all.

But for someone with a proven track record to say they have writer’s block is a different thing altogether. It’s the job of a professional to work until you get it right. A professional should have the tools to do that, to take the synopsis and rework it into something different if the first approach didn’t come out right. To take that flat, lifeless chapter and turn it sentence by sentence into something that sings.

Writing is more than just a brilliant idea. It’s work, just like any other job.
Writer’s block? I have no time to think about it.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Friday, 4 August 2006 (5 Comments).

One of my favourite fantasy authors, Guy Gavriel Kay, has been interviewed in the September issue of Locus Magazine, and he has – as one might expect of such a talented and interesting storyteller – some wise things to say.

“I’ve been saying for years that good fiction is interesting things happening to interesting people. In a lot of the commercial bestsellers (any genre, any form, any field), you’re going to have interesting things happening to stupefyingly uninteresting characters, and in a lot of the lauded literary contemporary fiction you’ll have carefully thought-out characters with nothing remotely engaging happening to them. But it’s not a zero-sum game, not either/or. It’s difficult to deliver both, but that’s our mandate when we write.”

In the above paragraph, he really sums up what writing an interesting story is all about.

There is another element, of course, which most of us take for granted: the writer has to be able to write a decent sentence; you know, with the commas in the right places and the words in the right order.

[Here’s a bit of a digression:
Ask any published writer, and they will have tales of being approached by wannabe-published writers (often very young ones) shoving their stories into your hand or into your computer, when they don’t yet have the elementary tools to write a story.

Here’s a brief example lifted from the beginning of a story submitted for criticism that I read recently, and almost every sentence had an equal number of elementary mistakes:

“What did you just say”! He asked in a soft voice, “Marissa, you should ….” and so on. From the context, it is obvious that the “He asked in a soft voice” applies to the “What did you just say”.
Ok, so the capital H is probably a function of Word making an automatic change – but what kind of a writer then submits a passage for criticism with it (multiple times) still like that? And how can you think you’ll succeed if you don’t know that inverted commas (quotation marks) go outside the punctuation of the speech? Or that an exclamation mark followed by “in a soft voice” isn’t going to make sense? Or if you don’t know what constitutes a complete sentence in the first place – see the comma after voice?]

You may possibly get published with a book that doesn’t have interesting things happening to interesting people, but you will never get published if you don’t take time to conquer the tools of your trade.

The other element of a good tale, to me, is a plot that holds together and is believable. Now, the non-fantasy readers among you may raise an eyebrow at that. How can fantasy be believable? Well, that’s the function of a good writer: to make it so. (I could also add that the majority of the people of this world do accept the fantastic as real, on pretty little evidence, in their every day lives, but perhaps I had better not go there.)

And to tell the truth, I am constantly surprised at the number of novels that do get published even though they have plot holes so large you could sink a couple of oil rigs into them and still have room. The Da Vinci Code is a good example.

But anyway, here’s my formula for a good novel:

I had a radio interview with Grant Stone on Faster Than Light today. (That’s in Western Australia). I don’t think I was very coherent on one question he asked, which arose out of my portrayal of the main protagonist in Heart of Mirage as a strong, powerful woman.

The point I was trying to make is this, that if a writer wants to portray a society where women have equal opportunity (not a particular accurate definition of a “feminist” society, I realise), and the work is a fantasy set in a pre-industrial world, they said author is going to run into problems of believability.

I’m not saying it can’t be done – but the writer has to understand the dynamics of such a world and adjust their plot accordingly.

Think about a pre-industrial world and this:

• Muscular power is exceedingly important in any non-industrial world (as anyone who has tried to mend something without proper tools knows)
• Physical protection probably involves physical strength to a large degree.
• You have to have some kind of birth control. Women can’t be equal if they are forever pregnant or lactating or child caring. They find it hard to be the explorers and adventurers, too, if they have a toddler clinging to their skirts – yeah, I just got reintroduced to the curtailing effect of a two-year-old.
• If she doesn’t have access to really good health care, a woman is at a disadvantage because she is childbearing and often dying as a consequence.
• If there is any basic inequality in a society, who is usually the loser – the group that is the inherently physically stronger? Not in my book…

Probably the only way you could achieve a truly equal opportunity land, would be to develop the magic to even things up.

Of course, women did achieve power in non-technological societies, but they were the exceptions, not the rules.

And women often did achieve a certain level of cultural and social and even financial clout in some societies, for a variety of reasons – sometimes religious, sometimes because of the way men worked or warred (when men marched away to fight, they could be gone for years). It’s an interesting exercise to consider just why women achieved high status. (Often it was at the expense of other women – i.e. the servants or slaves.)

And interestingly enough, my husband was born into a matriarchal society. That’s right, even in today’s Muslim world such things exist. Property is passed down the female line. A man moved
into his wife’s house, not the other way around. Just to make it even more curious, the head of the clan, of which my husband’s family is a part, is always a man. In fact, it would have passed to my husband, except he didn’t want it.

I love reading the kind of book where you start and then it’s like entering a tunnel. Everything on all sides just disappears – the people around you, the sounds, sights, all that stress, all those niggling guilts about what you should be doing…the book holds you spellbound, oblivious, and you are doomed to stay that way (with possible temporary exits for food and water or work!) until you emerge from the tunnel at the end.

And that’s the kind of book I would like to write. It’s what most fiction writers dream of doing to their readers. But alas, it is all too easy to jerk the reader out of that realm of yours and bring him down with a thump because something you wrote didn’t ring true. It could be getting a fact wrong (talking about tigers roaming Africa, for example). It could be using a word wrongly or a spelling mistake (mentioning a breeching whale as I did once…*blush*). It might be just plain poor grammar or convoluted sentences that need re-reading several times to understand. It might be a historical fault – referring to people of eating potatoes in Europe before potatoes arrived from the new world.

Or it could, in fantasy writing, be the use of a word that jolts the reader because it seems inappropriate. The use of modern slang just doesn’t sit well: “run that by me one more time” or “that is so not on!” I just read a review of a (sff) book about the Franklin Expedition, which review criticised the author for several solecisms, including having his British ship’s crew use the American word “ass” – not possible,especially back then.

But what happens when you, the author are technically correct? Neal Stephenson was chided for talking about the Kit-Kat Club back in Regency London…come on, says the reviewer.
But there was such a club. It existed. Yes, 200 years ago. Correct the reference may have been, but it jerked the reviewer out of Stephenson’s world.

So, if I refer to “kids” in my pre-industrial fantasy, am I wrong? The word, used meaning children, has existed in written works for at least that long, and presumably a lot longer as spoken slang.

And what about “foreign” words in my made-up fantasy world? Can I use “paramour” or “clientele” or “vice versa” or “ying and yang” or expressions like “the lotus position” or….? You get the picture.

Sometimes my beta readers will seize on words that I think are absolutely harmless. “Clientele” in my fantasy world brothel? And “vagina”? (Ok, so what do I call it – politely – otherwise?)

But the fact is, for that beta reader, it didn’t work. She was back in this world, where I don’t want her to be. So I sit up and take notice, at the very least, even when I think I am right…

What do you think? What are some of the horrendous gaffes you’ve come across?

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Thursday, 6 December 2007 (2 Comments).

The usual Sunday post on grammar and style…

Let’s get the easy one out of the way first.
Whose and who’s.
Simple. Who’s means who is. Always. Just like it’s always means it is. No exceptions.
You can’t say “Who is book is this?” can you? So here it must be whose. You can’t get much easier than that.

Now the more difficult one: whom and who.
Well, in fact this one is also pretty easy, but there is one problem – whether we should use whom at all.

Now I’m from the olden times, back in the days when school wasn’t expected to be fun and teachers happily taught forty minute classes of pure GRAMMAR. I actually say things like, “Whom did he give it to?” Yeah, I know. People like me are anachronistic leftovers from a bygone era. I admit it.

Anyway, let’s look at the basis for the difference first.

Who is the subject of a verb, like he or she. Subjects do things.
Whom is the object, like him or her. Objects have things happen to them.

Who is that? [Who is the subject. ]
Whom did she see? She saw whom? [Here, “she” is the subject. Compare: Did she see him?].

“She likes him.” should become in a question “She likes whom?” or “Whom does she like?”.

The man, whom they all knew to be a doctor, came running into the room. [In this sentence, the subject of the main sentence {in red} is “the man“. Ignore that part of the sentence and look at the other part. The subject of the blue bit is “they“. They all knew him to be a doctor. – So you can’t use “who” in this part of the sentence.

Compare that last sentence to this one:
The man, who was a doctor, came running into the room.
In this sentence, the man is still the subject of the main [red] part.
He’s also the subject of the blue part. He’s a doctor. This time, there’s no other subject like we to worry about. He was a doctor. Which is why we use whoand not whom.

We use whom after prepositions too: by whom, with whom, to whom etc. Always. At least always if you want to be grammatical…*grin*.
The people with whom I travelled were all from Nannup.

Another problem with the preposition + whom is that it so often ends up with a hanging preposition which is just plain ugly. Look at this: He didn’t know whom to give it to. And yet He didn’t know to whom to give it sounds stilted.

Ok so now you know: you can’t say “Who did you give it to?” [in other words, “To who did you give it?”] Bad grammar. And hands up everyone who’s going to obey that grammar rule…?

Which brings us to the real problem. Whom has gone out of fashion. Put it in your writing and you can sound really staid and out of date. On the other hand, if you use who when you should use whom, it is going to grate on old pedants [one of whom may be the editor you are trying to impress] like me. So what’s a poor writer to do?

Well, if you are writing a modern novel, I would not use whom in your dialogue [unless someone from a past age like me is speaking!]. If you are writing a period piece on the other hand, and your speaker is a well-bred lady/gentleman, then perhaps you should.

And in your text? Tough one. Theoretically you should be grammatically correct. But…you don’t want your book to sound like a nineteenth century tome. So dodge whom altogether whenever using it just doesn’t ring true to your writer’s ear. In cases like that, rewrite the sentence to avoid it. I know I do.

Originally posted in Glenda’s blog on Sunday, 25 June 2006 (9 Comments).