The other day while driving to Denver for Greek greasy spoon food (hey, listen, buddy, you have your addictions, I have mine.) Dan and I found ourselves in the urgent need to discuss the implications and ramifications of The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag with the boys.
And I found myself thinking of it in terms of writing. (Look, I realized I was in serious trouble – possibly of an eternal kind, if one believes in such things, and this one does – when I answered the eternal “Why would a just G-d allow evil in the world?” with “Because otherwise it would be a pretty boring plot and no one would read it.” [Am now trying to fight the horrible suspicion that what He’s writing is actually a series called “World Wars and The Fall and rise and fall of civilizations.]) Update: This is a common perception of writers, hence my son’s post, here.
This led me by one of those sideways mental jumps one does to wondering about young writers and shoddy work. And no, I’m NOT referring to Jonathan Hoag. I’m referring to the story in Jonathan Hoag where – SPOILER – the world is the creation of a young artist, who painted over an early and shoddy work.
And I thought of the experience I went through with writing this last book. (Actually the last three.) And realized that while there is the tendency, which I mentioned before, for young writers to end stories badly because that “feels” serious, it’s an odd sort of thing because you often feel that less than the smaller movements in the work of a more seasoned artist.
There is a line in Murder In Retrospect in which Poroit talking to the murderess talks of her not knowing: All the grown-up emotions – pity, sympathy, understanding. The only things you know – have ever known – are love and hate.
It is sort of like that for beginner writers. It’s not easier to paint in primary colors, but it might look that way to the young, inexperienced and/or lacking in confidence. It’s certainly easier to make an impact. Paint a house so huge and so black (or red, or yellow) it can be seen across the room and people will notice it. They might even admire it…
But it’s not grown up work. The shading isn’t there, nor the fine tuning. It’s unlikely you’ll cry at the sight of it, like grown ups can be brought to tears at the sight of some of DaVinci’s work. (well, I can. Your mileage may vary.)
Perhaps this is because I started attempting to write seriously very early, or perhaps – and my mentoring experience seems to indicate this – it is a curve every writer goes through, predicated less on lack of experience in the world than in lack of experience in expressing it.
The curve seems to be that you start out doing primary colors and big blocks – or in other words, dramatic emotions, big events. Your character faces the death of his entire family. And they were buried in a rain of fish. And the entire world was turned into a fish fry. And…
And none of it feel like much of anything, perhaps because they’re lost amid other blocks, all of them competing for attention. It can be pulled off in a short story, but less so in a novel.
Then you start having a suspicion your work is crude and rough, and you try to refine it. At the end of this process, you find yourself trying to avoid the big movements of the earlier work and all you have is small events, small actions, small emotions. It’s all an indistinct pastel. Very pretty at times, very artistic, but pastel.
If you get stuck in this phase, you get prizes and university professors speak of you in reverent tones. And, if you’re very lucky, normal readers will keep your book on the bedside table for those nights they can’t sleep.
If that’s not your goal and you go past that, you find yourself where I’m now. I’m not painting the big blocks of shouting color anymore, but I’m not afraid to have the occasional rotting fish fall on a character, or even have one or two of them killed by a plague of gnats. Weirdly, I’m getting the other extreme in too which I could never do earlier – the humor – so that hopefully sometimes the reader finds himself crying through his/her laughter.
At least I hope that’s what I’m doing. I might be doing a pastel background with the occasional blobby bit of red building. Who knows?
But what it feels like is like I now have the softer emotions, but the occasional hard note too. And those hard notes hit hard and seem to strip me of all defense and occasionally turn me inside out. The impact is that much stronger, against the pastel background.
All this to explain why I now don’t need to destroy the world to “feel” it. Sometimes it’s enough to give my character a bad day. If the character is lovable enough. If the day is bad enough.
[On reading my old stuff, etc, another collection of short stories “Five Unlikely Foretellings” (narrowly beat out Five Unlikely Ukases) is up on Amazon, Smashwords and B &N.]
According To Hoyt 
Sarah: Cusine? _Denver_. Hmmmm. I experienced the previous, smaller Airport at Denver, and even blame their baggage-smashers for losing my luggage when I left there for a trip to Casper, Wyoming, one winter. But I cannot claim that I found any stuffed grape leafs anywhere in Denver…. Finding such must be a skill-genetic, an automatic ability in the folk who invented Port Wine, eh?
Regards,
Neil Frandsen
from Lethbridge, Alberta, on the High Plains of Alberta!
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Oh. Dropped into the wild I can find the Greek Diner in the area. Since my area had any number of Greek colonists, maybe that’s it. The diner we go to in Pete’s — ever other week or so — is Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax. If you’re in the area and go in, look at the corner booth. There’s a chance (albeit not large) that my family will be sitting in it.
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When contemplating questions of the nature of evil and deity’s role therein, it’s smart to remember a few things:
1) Deity is smarter than anybody we know.
2) Deity knows more, too.
3) Deity does not need our approval, but we all need his.
I believe all theodycy is sinful because we lack the moral standing to either judge or defend Deity. It is rather insulting for a vagrant like me to come along and thrust himself into business of his betters that he knows nothing about.
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Yes, I know. But there is a minor heresy that writers are prone too of starting to think of life as a plot and Himself as a writer. ;)
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But is he a Plotter or a Pantser?
See, knowing this we could determine if evolution is directed directly or directed by “physical laws” previously locked into the creation, creating natural selection on random mutations.
And are we picking up vibes from the past/future/parallel worlds when we write those characters who seem so real, just not here?
Ahem, I’m not so much a skeptic as wide open to any and all possibilities. And if this is a VR game, it’d better be taking place while I’m in cryo on the way to the stars in a slow ship. Else I’m going to be really annoyed with the Big Game Designer in the Sky.
(And to those of you tempted to say “Don’t open your mind so wide your brains fall out–too late, that happened years ago.)
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I suggest point #1 be amended to read as follows: Deity is smarter than everybody we know.
I also propose the addition of 4) Deity’s purposes for us are not necessarily the same as our purposes for ourselves.
The problem with the question of the nature of Evil is that Evil is a natural consequence of the exertion of Free Will. Suppression of another’s Free Will is Evil (sigh. pedants, please insert the following qualifiers as appropriate: the other is adult, causing no harm to any other, your mileage may vary). Ergo, to suppress FW is Evil and to permit FW is to permit Evil, thus Evil is unavoidable so long as not all men are angels.
Is a doxieology a hymn in praise of “loose women”?
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Carried! And yes of course. Asking about evil always struck me as nursery level thinking. BUT the thought that it’s plotting (and good plotting at that) is irresistible.
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Of Course it’s plotting. See point #4: His purposes are not necessarily the character’s purposes.
Of course, assuming the Deity is OUTSIDE Space & Time, said Deity is able to retcon all plot elements seamlessly.
(Years agon I SWEAR I read a SF short premised on the idea that the Deity amused Self by retconning the Universe to make it comport with contemporary scientific theory, e.g. inserting the fossil record once Man had conceived of Evolution. Can’t recollect title or author, although I have my suspicions.)
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Eric Flint. Anyway, the point is that yeah, I’m outside space and time for my books too. And this brings up Robert’s piece. I’ve made all of you read it, right? http://robertahoyt.livejournal.com/2008/08/05/
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Mmmmm, no, I think this story would predate Eric Flint’s work by a decade or two. I’ve been reading SF for more than four decades but not much short format published since the 70s. For some reason I am thinking Harrison, but it could have been Reynolds, Laumer, Tenn, Kuttner, Fred Brown, Budrys or any of a fistful of others. Doesn’t seem like the kind of idea Niven or Zelazny would have turned out and if it had been Sturgeon or Heinlein I am fairly confident I would remember.
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As usual, WAAaay late to the party.
If an SF writer wrote the “insert fossils” plot, he or she also came late to the party.
It’s known in biology as the Omphalos Hypothesis, asserted by Phillip Henry Gosse in his eponymous book of 1857.
JJB
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For appreciation of the work of a mature craftsman, I heartily recommend the works of caricaturist Al Hirschfield. His ability to capture the grace and movement of Astaire or Chaplin with what is essentially a single line is a reminder of the importance of simplification and focus on necessary elements. Study, then apply it to writing. Grand phrases and significant metaphors are all well and good, but first tell a damn story, else all the writing flourishes don’t matter. Don’t show off your wonderful phrasing unless it advances and richens the story.
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Late to read this but I like.
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I like Philip K. Dick well enough, but he mostly stayed stuck in Heinlein’s “Jonathan Hoag” “They” “All You Zombies” mode and didn’t move on and didn’t do that as well as Heinlein.
Flannery O’Connor was absolutely convinced she was painting stories in bright, primary colors for the nearly blind, but it doesn’t read to me like that.
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Charles, it didn’t read that way to me, either, and full disclosure to the Flannery O’Connor haters — I did my thesis on O’Connor.
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Yeah, it may have been some weird joke. She was gone, so young, too, before the lit people could bug her about such stuff.
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