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Years ago while watching Soap I came across the dictum that if you grow up with a Jewish Mother eventually you become one.  (I assume this only applies to girls but I’ve never explored the question that closely.)  It seems to be another truth that if you grow up with a writer  eventually you become one.  Even the younger boy is being dragged to the writing side even if kicking, screaming and attempting to pull out eyes.

The older boy has been a lost cause for longer than that, having written and published several short stories, starting at thirteen.  At thirteen, also, in a fit of insanity, he sat down to write a novel.  He finished at fourteen and we started trying to sell it.  The problem, for those of you who know Robert’s writing, wasn‘t so much that it was odd.  It was more that it was SO odd it could not be classified.  Half the people who read it thought it should be YA because it has talking cats.  But that entirely ignores the sex (okay, it’s mostly lustful thoughts) and violence (so a lot of it is screamingly funny, but still).  Then some people thought that it shouldn’t have cats using implements and drinking tea, as though the fact that the cats use magic weren’t a bigger violation of the-world-as-we-know-it.

Finally, Naked Reader Press decided to bring it out.  Mind you, they too weren’t too sure what to make of it, but since Robert’s story Bite One is one of the press’s bestsellers, they figured they’d risk it.  It wasn’t until the copy editor read it that we got a perfect description for it when he said, in a stroke of genius “It’s like Watership Down meets Terminator.  With cats.”

Take a world in which the mountain at the end of the universe on which a birdie wipes its beak every thousand years is not a metaphor.  Then make that our world.  There is only one more beak wipe left, and once the bird does it — no more universe.  The cats are the only ones who know about this.  For aeons two magical cat-forces have arrayed themselves for and against The Bird (whose name incidentally is Happy).  The cat royal family has always stood as protectors of the universe, their mission being to kill the bird before it does the deed.  But now the last heir of the royal family was killed, leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend.  Or is he the last heir?

Told in a style reminiscent of what would happen if a Heinlein novel collided with a Pratchett novel at high speed, the book contains sex, violence, squirrels grasshoppers, eagles, prairie dogs and very odd magic and it’s coming out from Naked Reader Press in a week or two .  With permission from the house, I’m posting the beginning below.

Cat’s Paw

Robert A. Hoyt

Extended Eternity

Many humans know there is a mountain at the end of the universe to which a bird flies every thousand years to sharpen its beak, until the end of the mountain comes, and thus the end of eternity.

What few know, however, is that a rather unimaginative power-that-once-was had, in a fit of originality, named the bird Happy.

Thusly, the bird also had the sort of monumental chip on its shoulder which could only come from spending several billion years with the name Happy. To add insult to injury, it was also the dullest grey bird in existence, which seemed to it a disgraceful state for a creature of its stature.

And, more the worse for humanity, is that the entire fate of the universe was in its wings.

***

It was about half past noon at the end of the universe, and a sort of pale light which had no discernible source poured in, flowing into the air like warm butter in sponge cake.

Happy was within sight of the mountain, which was not a very great distance, because, at this point, the mountain was little more than a pebble rooted in semi-existent turf. The Bird landed and, with great ceremony, bent over, scraping its beak until it sent up brilliant white sparks which died with little pops.

Somewhere behind Happy’s mad little red eyes, his brain could process the idea of the universe ending. That was fine by him. Overall, he hadn’t been too impressed with the universe to begin with, and several millennia had not improved his opinion.

Casually, the way one might realize they had forgotten to buy cabbage on their last trip to the market, he remembered his most recent master would be dead by now. It would be time to find another one.

Fortunately there were always creatures ready to provide shelter for an innocent-looking, harmless grey bird.

Not that this made him feel any better.

After five minutes, he was contented with his beak’s edge, and took a quick look at the remainder of the mountain.

Only one more trip there. Just as well, my wings are getting tired, he thought. A malevolent little smile decorated his drab features. Serve them right to find themselves nonexistent. Humph…Happy.

At the end of the universe, something was listening — in an equal state of discontent. Anyone present would have been certain the wind was swearing.

The trip back would prove to be filled with extensive grudge-keeping on Happy’s part. And after so much time, The Bird was very good at keeping a grudge.

***

One thousand years later, Mr. Beaconcaw stepped out into the dawn rising over the city. Or at least what passed for dawn in his much befuddled mind. From a technical point of view, there were no stars; but then again, there was also no sun. However, the faint red traces at the horizon signaled the possibility of it rising, and a dyed-in-the-wool pigeon hobbyist is up before the chickens.

His penthouse apartment had a lovely rooftop loft. Mr. Beaconcaw was in possession of a fortune of the sort of undefined size which suggested he could buy a small city, so the landlords just sent him regular bills, thoughtfully adding their tip to it so he wouldn’t have to bother himself about it.

Fortunately, he never noticed, since he was also in possession of the sort of mind that would buy a small city, and then shortly thereafter misplace it somewhere among candy wrappers and stale bread.

He only really cared for his pigeons. Or anything vaguely pigeon-shaped.

His newest acquisition was an extremely boring bird in a cage which appeared to have been pieced together by a master rust craftsman. It seemed as old as time itself, and was his latest and most single-minded interest.

He walked slowly to each pigeon cage, sloshing coffee about as he attended to the various birds.

Thanks to the caffeine-soaked food he owned some of the most alert pigeons in the country.

But he attended to the grey bird with extra care. As far as his failing eyesight could determine, he was looking at a solid grey pigeon, a valuable and beautiful bird.

As far as the bird was concerned, he was looking at a large absentminded lump of food.

Mr. Beaconcaw was now to the point where the bird took enough regular chunks out of him that it really had no need for other means of feed. But today he got a bitten finger for a different reason.

There was a clink of an opening cage, a piercing scream which woke up a city block, and a solid thud as a coffee cup hit the ground, falling down so straight not a drop was spilt.

A very disappointed pigeon hobbyist watched as far as his failing eyesight would allow as his new bird flew out of sight. For a second he nursed his bleeding finger. Then, bending, he picked up the coffee mug, took a sip of stone cold. pigeon feed infused coffee and then turned around and very quietly walked down the stairs, having forgotten why he was looking at the sky.

It was a lovely day for the universe to end.

***

Tom was spending what he considered to be a very productive morning in the dumpster behind Penne Pizza. Penne Pizza was not your classy eatery — cockroaches often turned it down over hygiene issues — but Tom was not a classy cat. It was a dumpy building which gave the impression of having been drawn in pencil and much smudged, with a cracked cement facade and a clientele list that was very similar to the college frat house assignments. Saturday night encased the building in a visible cloud of alcohol fumes.

It was this smell that attracted Tom, a disreputable-looking cat with a white mark on his chest that could have been a cravat. Granted, it would involve wishing very hard, and squinting harder.
Tom also liked beer. He didn’t think about why. He just told girl cats that he drank to forget.

But then, being as he had started drinking beer four weeks after birth in the dumpster his mother had birthed him in, he had forgotten just shy of everything.

Sometimes, when he finally passed out from a pleasant stream of alcohol, he was thankful for that much. The nightmares he had while inebriated were enough to make a fellow take to the bottle.

Carefully he worked through the beer bottles, his black and white fur acquiring a fine layer of dust, while Tom gained the interesting world view held by a cat who had long since departed sobriety.

It was eight ‘o’ clock, and the beginning commuters for Broxton, Colorado, were flooding the sidewalks.

It was Tom’s favorite time of day, since the rest of the feral cats around the city were hiding in dark corners catching oversized city rats — unless the rats happened to catch them first. This meant that Tom was free to enjoy the beer leftover from those in the city who had no reservations about drinking liquor in vast quantities.

Halfway through managing to stick his tongue completely into a lovely bottle of Guinness, Tom suddenly sensed a newcomer in his alley. He also caught on that the newcomer was female.

Pulling his tongue out of the bottle, Tom looked her up and down. She was a beautiful white Persian, who looked like someone who had gotten lost in her mind and couldn’t find anyone to ask for directions.

She had a faux diamond collar, which as a cat either meant you were an indoor cat or you were a hard case; in the former, because your owner didn’t want you lost, and in the latter, so you would never run out of people who you could beat up over eyeballing you.

Tom immediately decided on indoor, if only because trying to imagine her in a fight was like imagining a small, dense rock as an Olympic sprinter, and then only if everyone else got a head start.

She was, however, definitely Tom’s type. Not that this was hard, since his type ranged between animate and inanimate objects, and — on one memorable occasion – both. But she was a cute, uncorrupted bit of fluff, a state which he hoped to change.

Tom abandoned the beer bottle. Sitting up, he made a half-hearted attempt to groom himself, up until the point he he realized this was impossible.

Dizzily, he sidled up beside the girl cat.
In as sultry a manner as an extremely drunk cat could, he spoke.

“Hello kitten. Need some help?” His tone implied that the word help had several contexts.

For a moment, she continued to look intensely at nothing, and then turned to acknowledge the extremely tipsy apparition standing in front of her train of thought.

“Do you know where the mountains are? I don’t see any out here.” Her question took Tom by surprise. He wasn’t used to geography anywhere near foreplay. The gears in his head ground to a nerve-racking full stop, as lust met trivia head on.

In the middle of the collision, another fact cut in. He was beginning to become aware of an unpleasant smell about her which he recognized all too well. It had a disappointing tone to it, best defined as a bucket of cold water in the face.

Edgily, he answered the question. “You would be referring to those big blue lumps in the distance, right?”

She looked in the direction of his outstretched paw, and brightened up.

“Oh, those aren’t very big; I’ll be there by the end of the day. I would have thought this business would be harder. Thank you.”

Something about the words “this business” had caused the bits of Tom’s brain which managed his love interests to tell him to cut his losses. His alcohol impaired nose almost had a fix on the smell he recognized. Against his better judgment, he forged on.

“You don’t get out much, do you? Mountains aren’t known for being small. They are, however, several miles away. Exactly why do you want to go there, anyway?” Suddenly, the smell clicked into place. His amorous ideas shattered painfully.

After a second he added, “And more importantly, are you pregnant?”

***
Eye sat on the carved throne at the head of the cave. Around it, ten foot thick columns supported a cavernous ceiling like giants holding up the sky. Carefully hewn statues of creatures not seen since the dawn of time ringed the cave, staring at the mass of followers.
Eye was ancient. The scars about his body bulged on layers of muscle unnatural for a cat of his age. His blood-ringed sightless eyes shone an unnerving red in the darkness. But then, vision would have been an unnecessary distraction to Eye, considering his impossibly accurate hearing.

He listened studiously to the chanting of his followers, bouncing off the walls of the cave, and forever telling him what the room looked like.

Indeed, it was better than sight — he could feel the room around him. He waited patiently for the hymn to end, and then rose to his feet in the silence.

It was a massive motion, like ten thousand mountain ranges rising in chorus.

He towered above his audience; easily four or five times the size of anyone present. When he spoke, his voice battered the walls like a cannon, hard and metallic; No trace of compassion tainted his speech.

He did not speak above a low growling whisper, but everyone heard him.

“Brethren. You all now know of how I destroyed the royal family, their proud King and their arrogant Queen, and put to death four of the royal princes with my army so that they might no longer hinder us,” The crowd nodded, and a general sound of agreement, in a low, deep, growl echoed.

“One of my loyal followers has brought news of the fifth. Talon, step forward,” A beautiful Cornish Rex materialized out of the shadows behind him. Eye could sense the minute light reflecting off of the brown and black tortoiseshell fur that made her glinting golden eyes startling in the blackness.

He felt the air shift as she bowed deeply “You summoned me, lord?”

“What of the prince? Have you dealt with him as bidden?”

“Yes, my lord. With him, we have disposed of the last of the princes.”

“Well done, Talon. I shall see to a reward for you.” He turned his head to face his audience, and with a new passion began “And yet I see in your hearts that still are unsatisfied. Some among you even dare to doubt I deserve to rule above the royals…” He smiled.
It was an incredibly unpleasant smile, which chilled your heart and made you wish overall that you had lived a much better life.

“…And say that I should have dealt with them myself, to prove that I was worthy. To which, I reply that you needn’t wait any longer – the last of the royal line will come here, and I will eradicate them myself. When I am done, I will crush all those who dared to oppose me as well.”
He noted those who shuffled, weighed every echo of those who coughed, before finishing his speech. They would find guards waiting at their doors, and be taken publicly as an example.
“Rest assured, the noble lineage of the brothers will live, and with the end of the Royals, the bird which shall destroy the universe will fly unopposed. Our long awaited rise will come, and we shall recreate all things again as it pleases us,” He paused for a second. Time stood still, and the air itself seemed to be anticipating the next thing he would do. Finally, his voice came, more quietly than before.

“I dismiss you, Brothers — I shall summon you again, when the Royals arrive.” And he turned his back to the assembled congregation.

In a voice like the crack of doom, the cats replied “Hail Eye, Seventh Lord of the Bird.” It was an ancient tradition, and the age made itself felt as it was spoken. The sound echoed off the walls and returned joined with the harmonics of more ancient voices. As the last trace of resonance died the acolytes filed out swiftly and silently.

When the throne room was empty, Eye called out to his adviser.

“Beak, come to me.” From the shadow beside him stepped an incredibly old Manx cat, its flesh withered by the ravages of age and disease, its voice cracked and dusty.

“Lord?”

“I have listened carefully of the prince’s last hour. Keep an eye on the female whom the prince impregnated. Never let her out of your magic’s sight. I must know everything she does now. The prince has told her to return to the mountain — he didn’t know we had destroyed the palace. He’ll have sent her there for safekeeping, among the servants whom we killed. Tell me all that occurs.” He turned away as Beak departed.

“Talon, come.”

“My lord?”

“Despite what I said there is no use my fighting a pregnant female; at best it takes my time, and I doubt it will calm those in the order who are insufficiently loyal — I’m depending on you to arrange an accident for her. It must, however, look as though you were not involved, to avoid unnecessary upheaval. Beak will be most obliging in keeping you abreast of her movements. I can gloss it over in my court, and then I will put you to the task of destroying those disloyal elements. When we rebuild the world, you shall see your just reward.” Talon bowed deeply, touching the floor, and then disappeared into the inky blackness without a sound.

Eye sat alone, listening blindly in the darkness.

***

“It started when this boy cat came to the window of my master, Mrs. Apron. He was terribly handsome, and he seemed exotic, and he wanted do something that he said was fun. Only it wasn’t really all that much fun… But he made a huge fuss, yowling to wake the whole neighborhood. Anyway, he hung around for a little while, climbing the fire escape to see me…”
Tom’s patience was wearing thin. The bit of fluff was babbling at several hundred words a minute, and it was getting old.

“But then another cat got in his way. I ducked, because they started fighting, and when I came back to the window the boy cat was a mess, torn to pieces. He said go to the mountain… The big building there… it’s safe and then he went to sleep.” Tom winced for a second, considering shattering her naiveté, then thought better of it. Her ability to imitate sounds was uncanny, but apparently she paid little to no attention to what they meant.

“Look, sweetheart, that’s very nice and all, but I’ve made a long career of not being a homebound father to a litter of kittens and I certainly don’t intend to break a perfect record. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a bottle of lager I’ve been saving for last.”

Tom’s mind breathed a sigh of relief. He had finally come to his senses.

The girl cat’s train of thought, having only barely recovered from Tom’s intervention in the first place, now flew off of the suddenly foreshortened track. She stood very still, as she realized that the other end of the conversation had disappeared. After a while, very quietly, she began to walk away down the alley.

Well done, went the voice in Tom’s head, Now all you need to do is walk away and find some other pleasant distraction.

Tom started to obey.

You know, he told himself, she hasn’t got the common sense to find her way out of an empty room without walls. She has less than no chance of making it to those mountains. There was something else there too, a nagging little kitten who knew what it was like to be lost and alone in the world. Tom promptly classified the thought as irrelevant.

Don’t start getting all ethical on me, the voice said. Let some other chump do the job. You and I both know you’re no tour guide.

Tom considered this. He tried another angle on his voice, without quite understanding why. In the most insouciant manner possible, he sidled up to his own libido.

She is a fine piece of tail. This guy has to have had a reason for sending her into the mountains. He probably has contacts up there to keep her safe. She can have the kittens and leave them up there. That way, we get a shot at her too.

Tom’s mind, or at least something he thought with, considered his very convincing argument.

He’d never stuck around long enough to find out what happened after he got his payoff. He judged that between motherly instinct, and getting back into the game, a female cat probably would be more than happy to leave the bleating balls of fluff with friends. His voice concurred.

The business can’t take too long, can it? But mind you, at two days, maybe three at the outside, we cut out… I’m not ready to make cats the next species to mate for life.

Fair enough, Tom shook paws with his mind, and turned around. Bit of fluff had left the alley.

He ran to the end, tripping on garbage and a drunkard due to wake up in about an hour with a headache the size of Atlas.

He looked one way, and then the next. Suddenly, through the wall of people on the sidewalk, he saw her near the corner. She was about to walk into the middle of the street.

Tom crashed franticly through the commuters and briefcases, doing a fair impression of a bolt of lightning crossed with a pinball.

In a tumble of fur and adrenaline, he pounced on the girl cat just as she was about to walk out into the middle of the street, slamming into her at subsonic speeds.

She looked up, dazed. Then, her expression turned icy.

“Oh, you again. I thought you were too busy to come along. Go on then, what are you doing jumping on unsuspecting cats for no reason?”

Tom sped around the edge of the gaping hole of a situation he was somehow being yanked into.

“I changed my mind,” he said, and switched the subject while she was off balance. “Tell me, what possessed you to try to walk into the middle of a street on the ‘don’t walk’ symbol? That little flashing orange hand is an indication not to walk in front of the cars.”

The girl cat looked vaguely confused, and then seemed to notice the two walking signals on the signposts. Slow revelation dawned on her face.

After a second, Tom thought to ask, “What is your name anyway?”

The girl’s eyes crossed desperately. She dug deep into her mind, as if she had just been posed with an incredibly difficult question regarding quantum physics.

“Fluffy” she finally said.

Fluffy…. Bit of Fluff….well anyway, I wasn’t that far off, was I? Tom thought.

Look, I’ve talked about how you’ll never be able to write exactly the novel in your head, right?  I’ve talked about it till your eyes bled in reading it.  In fact, you’re probably nodding your head right now and going “Not that again!”

Okay, not that again.  Or at least not exactly that.

One thing you might realize when I tell you you’ll never be able to write exactly what’s in your head, is that you really don’t want to.  No, not even if you could.

If your head is like mine, the story in your head and the characters in your head are as close to real life as it’s possible to be.  Meaning if I asked you could probably, with very little thought, tell me what your character had for breakfast, or what the name of her first cat was.  Don’t tell me.  No, really.  Not unless it has a bearing on the story you’re trying to tell.

Okay, fine, a little extraneous information might be good for rounding out the narrative and making it seem real.  This is something I’m still coping with, okay?  For years on end, I held onto the narrative so tight it couldn’t breathe.  I excised enough pages from Ill Met By Moonlight to make another two novels.  (What do you mean can you buy the cut scenes?  You’re sick, you know that?  It’s an illness.  You probably want to buy my grocery list, too.  No, don’t answer that.  I don’t want to know.)  It wasn’t till Draw One In The Dark that I allowed in a scene that didn’t advance the plot – I thought – what I call the “three guys in the car scene.” It wasn’t until years later that I realized it did advance something.  That’s the scene in which the three male protagonists, two of whom are rivals and antagonists, become brothers at arms.

However, if you write too many extraneous scenes, you won’t have a story in the end, you’ll have soup.  Even if you’re writing slice of life, you need to control what goes on the page, otherwise people will wonder what the story is, and what is the filler material.  Look, life isn’t a story.  There is no steady thread of narrative through people’s lives.  Story is the narrative we superimpose on our lives.  We naturally make some events stand out and leave the others in the background.

No?  Right.  Think of an important day for you.  Say, your wedding day.  You’re going to tell me you remember everything about it, right?  Sure you do.  At what precise time did you get up?  What flavor of toothpaste did you use?  How many steps between your bed and the bathroom sink?  Did you put the toothbrush down forcefully after you brushed your teeth?

Don’t tell me that’s not important.  Of course it isn’t.  Those are the bits you leave out of the narrative.  Instead, you remember your clothes, and standing next to your future spouse as you said your vows, and the way you felt, and the guests at the reception, and the first dance.  The IMPORTANT stuff.  Narrative is like that.  The human mind – even the non writing mind – is a mechanism for making story out of chaos.

Unfortunately one side effect of this is that it tends to make your characters seem “smaller.”  I.e., your genius comes across as less than amazing, if the reader only got the relevant facts about him.  Your madman might seem less obsessed if you only see him occasionally.

There is a distancing factor to fiction.  My husband and I realized this when watching Friends – yeah, okay, so deal.  It was after 9/11 and we set in front of the TV watching re runs of TV series.  That’s when we became conversant with Buffy and Friends.  Normally we don’t watch enough TV to follow series – and thought the characters were so quirky that if they existed in real life, they’d all be taking drugs to control their issues.  But on TV they seemed believable.  Because you really need to emphasize traits, when you only see people in brief intervals.

And you can’t let us see people’s contradictory traits because then your novel becomes a Christopher Marlowe play.  The good have enough bad and the bad enough good that you have no clue whom to cheer for.  Yeah, yeah, it’s real life, but that’s NOT what you’re writing.  Keep your villains villainous (which doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have perfectly reasonable reasons for what they’re doing – remember no one is a villain in their own eyes.  But make them still evil) and your heroes heroic.

Don’t be afraid to give your characters outrageous characteristics or to make them larger than life.  Even if you’re writing “real life” you’ll need to do that to some extent, or people will think they’re blah and boring.

Look, in real life, no man would approach Athena Hera Sinistra as written – well, not without wearing a protective cup.  And Kit?  He’s uh… attractive in a brooding way on the page.  But I had to exaggerate the brooding so it came across, and if a real man were like that… well…  She’d be telling him “Stomp your foot once for yes, twice for no.”

Don’t be afraid.  Make that character larger than life.  On the page, he or she will appear just right.

Dialogue Done right“So how do you write convincing dialogue?” He leaned over her kitchen table, pen hovering over his notebook.  “I can’t seem to do it right.”

“What?  I didn’t hear you.  Wait a second.  The teakettle is boiling.  Ah.  There it goes.”  She grabbed the teapot, opened the whistling spout, and poured the boiling water over a tea bag in a cup.”   Nothing like a good cup of tea, I always say.  Now, what were you saying?  About writing what?”

“Dialogue.  How do you go about writing it, so it doesn’t sound like… you know… an interrogation scene.  Or a lecture.”

“Oh.  That.”  She brightened up. “First you learn how real people talk.  Did I ever tell you I used to go into diners with a notebook and–”

“Yes.  Yes you did.  And about the guy with tattoos and his landlady.  Never mind that.  This is about writing.”

“Okay, okay.”  She fished the tea bag out of the tea and tossed it, then came to the table, both hands wrapped around the steaming cup as if for warmth.  “So, what do you want?  Rules?”

“Something like that.  Principles, at least.”

“Um… the most important one is that people don’t talk linearly.  You don’t have a question and then an answer all nice and orderly.  Real people interrupt each other all the time.”

He made a face.  “Isn’t that terribly rude?”

“Probably.  But… Do you remember when that woman at our writers’ group waited till everyone had shut up to talk?”

“Right.  She just kept getting madder and madder.  I thought she was going to explode.  And none of us had any clue why.”

“Yeah.  There’s some amount of cuing.  I mean, most of the time we don’t actually talk over each other as such,” she said.  “Well, maybe we do, but–”

“Not exactly.  We wait for the momentum to slow, right?”

“Right.”  She took a sip of the tea and tapped his notebook with a finger.  “The other thing is, give the characters tags or something, when you have page after page of unbroken dialogue.  Otherwise, people won’t know who is talking.”

“You mean, give one an accent or something?”
She looked at him over her glasses.  “If I ever catch you writing accents phonetically,” she said.  “I will wash my hands of you.  You have no idea how hard those are to read to non-natives or people who don’t hear very well.”  She took another sip of her tea.  “Besides, your perception of the accent might not be what most people hear.  Do you really want to make this a test in phonetic transcription?  Or are you writing a story?”

“Story, story,” he said, showing both empty hands, in a gesture of appeasement.  “So, give them different levels of discourse?  Like one of them is illiterate?”

“Not always appropriate to every story.  Consider stage business instead.”

“The thing with the dog?”

“What?”

“Shakespeare,” he said.  “You know, the bit with the dog.”

“TMI about Shakespeare,” She said, then laughed at his shocked expression.  “I’m joking.  Never mind.  No, I mean give your characters something to do, like one is drinking tea.  Or one smokes, or something.”

“Contrived.”

“Not really.”  She put the cup down, but kept her hands around it.  “It becomes more or less invisible.  You know, people don’t usually just stand there and talk.”

“Okay, but what about when a character has a lot of information to impart to the other.  How do you get past a page or so of it without it seeming like a long lecture?  I always hear that readers don’t like unbroken text, but how do you switch to another paragraph?”

“Oh, that’s easy.  You just have your character talking along and then, if you need to switch paragraphs, you just leave the end quote off the line.

“Then you start the next paragraph with a quote, and everyone knows the same character is still talking, till you get to the end of that paragraph, when you close the quote.  However, if your character is going to run to multi-paragraph speeches, you really should consider stage business to mark it’s still the same person talking.”  She filled the teakettle again and set it on the stove.

“You see,” she said.  “It’s much more natural that way and people won’t wonder if you just accidentally forgot the end quotes.”

“Besides–” She rinsed her cup, got a fresh tea bag and put it in.  “You know what copyeditors are like.  They might close that quote, and you might not notice.  And then your readers will be all confused.”

“I heard stories about copyeditors.”  He wrote something in his notebook.  “Like the guy who corrected the made up language.”

“Of course you did.”  She poured water over the tea bag.  “If we were fictional, we would now be engaged in maid-and-butler dialogue, which, as you know, is a no-no.”

“So, I have to become a butler?  And I never thought of you as a maid.”  He eyed the unwashed dishes on the counter.

“Nah.  It’s called that because it was used in old English comedies of manners, in which the maid and butler talked, telling each other stuff the other already knew, as a way of introducing the master and mistress to the reader or watcher.  It’s pretty silly, really.  No one talks like that in real life.”  She seemed to realize something, suddenly.  “Hey.  I’m sorry.  I never offered you tea.”

“I can’t have tea,” he said.  “Seriously.  We don’t even have names.  If I were drinking tea, too, then our similar speech patterns would become too confusing to the readers.”

“You could always take up smoking.”

Or How Not To Go Insane In One Easy Lesson

No, this is not about finding your own true voice in your books.  Well, it is, maybe, but not that voice.  not the style of writing that’s so clear and precise and so indelibly yours that readers know you under any pen name, in any format.  I’d like to do a post about that, but while I’m – I think – finally finding my voice, I’m not yet at the point where I can look at the process and write about it in a way that other people can follow.

This is more important.  No, I’m serious.  Important as a true and individual voice is, this is way more important, because if you fail at this you will never, ever find your writing voice or be successful at writing… possibly you won’t be successful at anything else, either.

To be at risk of this you need to be a character writer.  By which I mean, whether it comes to you first or not, the character is the most important element of the story to you.  (Here, Sarah clears her throat, professorially, and points out that without a good plot, your brilliant character will never be seen by the readers the way you see him or her in your head, so, you have to be both a character and a plot writer.  But some of us feel the characters more than others.)

Look, you’re in this business because your stories have an almost hypnotic quality, right?  You want to make them real for the readers, right?  And here’s the thing… first they become real to you.  And first the characters become real to you.

And there a lot of beginner – and not so beginner – writers run into a snag.  When you do this well, and you can “hear” the character in your mind (by which I’m saying you can think of their words.  Yeah, I know some colleagues who describe this as auditory – and sometimes visual! – hallucinations.  Yes, I’ve read The Bicameral Mind.  My own experience is just of thinking up both sides of a dialogue) it can become hypnotic and addictive.  Your fantasy world, if it’s good, can become an addiction just like any other form of escapism.  And like any other form of escapism, you can crawl into it and let the real world go by the wayside.

So, here’s how not to go insane… or at least not to go more insane than any other writer who does produce work and make money from it.

First – always know which voice in your head is yours.  By this I mean, don’t let the character start dictating how the story should go.  From whichever subconscious impulses you dredged up this character, if you start letting him or her start “telling you” the story without any effort at control or plot, you’ll end up with something that reads like this “I had eggs for breakfast.  Then I cleaned the living room.  Then I went to a great party,” for four hundred pages.  It’s not saleable and it’s ONLY fascinating to you.

Second – remember which side of the head your characters are in.  They’re inside your head.  Meaning, they have no existence and no real power in the outside world.  Yes, some of them have become so real to me that I expected to find them when I walked down the street.  But I didn’t.  It’s important to remember this, because at some point your character will try to give you advice on how to live.  Remember who’s plotting whom.  Oh, okay, so I took laundry advice from one of my characters, but that’s because the solution made rational sense.  I figure the part of the brain I had the character on was what used to think of laundry.  Or something like that.  BUT I wouldn’t take a character’s advice on my love life, my investments or child-rearing.  They’re not real.  They’re INSIDE my head. [From my friend Doctor Tedd Roberts: remember at all times – which voice pays the bills – Oh!  Maybe that’s not such a good idea after all.]

Third – Kill them.  If a character is taking over your book/series/universe, kill him/her.  This is very important because…  Well, for those of you who read Heinlein: Lazarus Long.  Need I say more?  Yeah, I love the character, but after a while it was “What?  Him?  Again?”  The longer you live with a character, the more you become attached to him or her, the less conscious you’ll be of how irritating he or she can be to readers.  It’s sort of like a long term marriage.  You no longer notice your spouse’s knuckle cracking, but it will drive a stranger batty.  Not good for the paying side of the writing, no matter how good to the daydreaming side.

Fourth – Remember creating the characters and making them “real” is sort of like lucid dreaming.  It’s a nice stage, but you can’t live there forever.  Again, remember the bill-paying thing (Thanks, Doctor Roberts.)  You’re not living in their world, you’re living in ours.  And you have to cope with reality.  And if you crawl completely into the dream – kind of like crawling into the bottle – no one will ever share that dream.

Your daydreaming has to end and become work, in order for your dream world and dream characters to go on in other’s minds.

So, stop dreaming and write.  You can always dream more later. And then write that…

The Unfinished Work

When I was a kid, I read in school about “the incomplete monuments.”  I can no longer remember exactly their names and locations, but there were monuments that Portuguese kings started, whose building exceeded their lifetime.  Sometimes the heirs chose not to finish them, and so they were left for posterity as incomplete monuments, works of art but never finished, sad and beautiful in their incompleteness.

At some point every writer realizes their work, is, by definition, incomplete.  What’s more, it will always be.

I cannot envision the day when I will look around and say “my work here is done.”  I can’t imagine not having another idea – no, a list of other ideas – clamoring to be written.

It is in fact a lot like getting cats.  Until you get the first one, no one offers you kittens; a cat doesn’t walk through your backdoor; you don’t find starving kittens by the side of the road.  After you somehow stumble onto a cat and let him or her own you, all of a sudden people are shoving kittens at you, kittens are coming up and begging for food, and you end up with more cats and not-your-cats than you reasonably wanted.  Same thing.  Once you let that one idea out of your head and onto paper, there’s a “sucker” sign over your head, and other ideas attack at the most unexpected times.

This is good and bad.  Good because you can’t imagine ever getting bored.  Bad because many a beginner has left a trail of incomplete works and has nothing finished to show for it.

So, to be successful – or at least paid, which often comes to the same – you need to come to terms with incompleteness.  Not incompleteness as in leaving stories unfinished.  I know it’s picky on the part of readers, but they truly object to being sold a story that ends midair.  (Unless you have terminally literary readers in which case carry on.  Well done, you.)

No, first you need to finish the story or novel, in whatever form you think will be satisfactory to the reader (and somewhere along the line I’ve talked about your contract with the reader, right?  If not, I will, but not here.)  Then you need to revise it until it doesn’t read like you wrote it while smoking the contents of the spice cabinet.

And then – listen closely, this is very important – you need to realize it will never be perfect.  This is incompleteness of a kind.  You need to polish it to a point, but you cannot make it into a perfect gem of writing.  No, not even if you spend your entire life on it.  At some point you need to let go.  (I set myself an arbitrary number of three go overs, and one or two more for typos, as a limit – otherwise I’d go on forever.)

So, what do you do with that sense of incompleteness?  You take all your drive into the next novel or short – you’ve been writing down ideas in a notebook, right? – and carry it forth.  And make it better.  And then the next one better.  And then the next one…

At some point – sorry, but it’s inevitable – someone will pry your cold dead hands off the keyboard, and there will hopefully still be hundreds of story ideas in a notebook.

And your whole work will be an incomplete monument – that next thing of beauty never finished.  And that will be part of its beauty – the feeling that it could be so much better and go so much further.

Learn to live with that, as well as with the flaws.  Your body of work, as such, will never be done.  It will be imperfect and flawed.  But that’s fine, because so are your readers.  Leave them something to dream about.  Make your peace with your work never being done.  Unlike you, it is immortal, and will go on in the dreams of others after your dreaming is done.

To quote Leonard Cohen – in whom I often find inspiration (Yes, it IS an acquired taste.  Why?) – “There is a crack in everything.  It’s how the light comes in.”

One of the things I liked about Portugal was both the sense of “deep time” – there were marks, structures, customs going back sometimes thousands of years.  There were stories of my ancestors in the same place I grew up going back hundreds of years.  There was a connection, a sense of belonging to the region and the region to me – and the (perhaps illusory) ability to know what life had been like long before.

A lot of this was illusory.  I used to think that the pine forests, dark green, hemming in the village, had been there forever.  But they hadn’t.  Areal photos on the net show the scars of buildings and villages and roads amid what remains of the forest, and I bet the rest (more at the edges) had them to.

I should have known this, since one of my favorite things on weekends was going for walks with dad and finding ruins with Latin inscriptions.  (Usually of the sort that went “This land given by Emperor Trajan to xxxx for completing a term of service.”) and also since the forest in the lower village – close to my parents’ house, instead of my grandparents – had roman mines still extant.  Heck, from the terraced look of land around there, I suspect a lot of the rest of it was fields in Roman times.  But the mind doesn’t always correlate these disparate bits of information.  I used to love that forest and to feel like it had always been there, that my ancestors had seen it and walked through it.

I know this is going to sound stupid, but it gave sort of a bolster at my back.

It also made me grow up with a sense of seeing not just in space but in time.  A place I sat down in was a nice flagstoned courtyard, and also it had been a threshing yard for centuries, and also, judging from a structure in the corner, it might once have been the access area to a little private chapel.

I don’t know if you can get what I mean, because in the states it goes back at most three or four hundred years, which feels like yesterday to me – and the fact that it feels like yesterday to me is part of the way this feeling molded me.

But it wasn’t just the stones or the remnants of buildings.  it was the customs that came through that felt old, in varying degrees.  May day when we went to gather may flowers – branches with little yellow flowers that grew wild – and put them on every opening of the house so ill luck wouldn’t come in.  Where did the custom come from?  I don’t know.  I also have clue zero where the custom of putting a red ribbon around a child’s wrist on the first day of spring, to prevent sunburns during the year.

More conventional customs, like saint-day feasts I knew where they came from.  They’re obviously medieval in origin.  Or at least parts of them, not necessarily the parts I liked best – I liked the rides and the cotton candy, neither of which, I think, could be medieval.  But the set-pieces were much older.  Each saint feast for instance had a special kind of vendor setting up stalls.  This was often a seasonal produce.  Watermelon for a spring feast, chestnuts for a fall one.  But it could also be crafts.  Pottery was, for reasons known only to people long dead, the domain of St. Benedict, the patron saint of broken crockery.  Before you mended crockery you prayed to St. Benedict. (And the fact that a crockery mender came by once a week tells you a lot about the relative wealth we have now.)  There was also usually a procession mid day.  This procession involved people dressed as saints, usually in payment of a promise.  If it sounds unbearably corny, well… it was.  But most of the people who got dressed (in payment of an adult’s promise) were kids, so it was like mini-Halloween for them.  (Beyond the fact Portuguese dress for Carnival, not Halloween.)  And at night there would be a fireworks display.

Why did this give me a sense of deep time?  Well… there was one a month – at least – within a ten miles radius from April through October.  And the pieces that came from long ago were … repetitive and a little lame.  It gave me the impression of how boring life must have been then, that these were the high points of people’s existence, and people lived from feast to feast, each with strict customs and set pieces.

Another thing that gives you a sense for how boring – beyond calm.  Well, often it wasn’t calm at all.  Even my grandmother’s stories from HER grandmother talk of famines (though that was probably the Napoleonic invasions.)  But it was still boring – life could be in the past is what everyone in the village did on Sundays when I was little.  They sat on their stoop, up and down the main street.  And when I say stoop I mean stoop, since most of the houses didn’t have a porch or any sort of garden up front, unless they’d been built in the seventies.

Actually families would bring chairs out and people would sit in front of their doors on Sunday afternoon.  The women would crochet or knit, the kids played and the men smoked.  And they watched.  What did they watch?  Their neighbors, starting with those around them, of course, but also those odd ducks who walked somewhere.  This usually included my family who walked up the length of the village to catch the streetcar to my maternal grandparents.  It also included any young couples who might be going to a show or a feast in a nearby village.

Yes, that was the ONLY entertainment, and less you imagine a crowd thronging the sidewalks, well, there really weren’t sidewalks (traffic was so rare, people just walked up the street itself) and people might walk by every ten minutes.  In between you talked about the people who’d walked by before.

It might not be any different from clicking through channels on the tv, but it couldn’t be summoned on command, which made a difference.  Oh, also, vendors would walk down the street selling sweets – mother-in-law’s tongue was this long, rolled up waffle, like a waffle cone without the ice-cream – and chips “fried potatoes English style.”  This livened up things about like an ice cream truck driving through a suburban American street today.  If you’re having trouble picturing these men, they carried on their backs long metallic, cylinders – somewhat like a small water heating tank – painted white, with a lid that opened to dispense the treats.  They took the bus from village to village.

I know it sounds deprived and boring, but it was fun.  However, it gave me the impression of another time, when entertainments were yet fewer and lamer.  When anything at all happening was fun.

This ties in with writing of course.  You might think the current “sound bite style” is sad, but try reading an early novel, in which people meander about nothing in particular, and entire novellas on unrelated subjects are put within the novel.  Then try pictures the level of boredom needed for putting up with it.

Of course, like most humans, I prefer life to be more interesting than that, if not terminally so.  But I try to bring this sense of bucolic peace, of need for excitement, with me into my historic or fantasy worlds.

And in all this, what do I miss most?  I miss walking into the woods with my dad and everything being so quiet, except for bird song and the tiny winding ribbon of my brother’s transistor radio (the only one in the village.  He usually took off to study in a clearing in the woods, and in the silence it could be heard for miles.)

About ten years ago Dan and I and the kids got lost in the Portuguese mountains – hills, really but they call them mountains – and came out on this road in the middle of a pine forest.  As we got out of the car, I found again the silence of my childhood broken only by the tinny sound of a portable radio.

I had the oddest sensation of being back in time and that, should I walk towards that sound, I would find my brother as a teenagers, sprawled on the clearing, doing his school work.

I didn’t follow the sound, of course.  I don’t know which would be worse, finding I really could travel back in time, or finding some stranger listening to his portable radio  (Which, I hasten to say, I know is what would happen.  Intellectually.)

But for a moment, for just a moment, I got back a piece of a place and time I wasn’t even aware of loving when I was there.

This might seem like a pretty funny post from someone who has at various times said at panels or written on her business card “I tell lies for a living.”

It is however something that needs to be said.  The truth often is.

I was teaching a workshop in Texas last weekend and one of my students wished to write the “Truth” which in his case meant the religious truth – entirely his right, no, his duty given his beliefs.  This is not about him, since he doesn’t wish to write fiction.

But at the time I told him all of us writers try to write the truth, otherwise what would be the point of it.

And then Amanda Knox’s case obtruded on my consciousness.  (No, I didn’t know about the case.  I live under a rock in multiple universes.)  And I realized there are many many writers who don’t even try to tell the truth.  Instead of the observable truth, instead of the real world (for given values of real) they write about a conventional world – a world that has become accepted by rote repetition and where the mechanisms of reality have nothing to do with this universe you and I live in.

What does Amanda Knox have to do with fiction?  Oh, let me count the ways.  To begin with, and before my comments become a free for all – I only heard about this case in the last week.  I don’t have an opinion on the young lady herself.  And no, I’m not going to put my hands in the fire she never killed anyone.   I’m not going to put my hands in the fire that anyone but me has never killed anyone.  How the heck could I?  The Shadow might know what evil lurks in the heart of men.  I claim no such power.

I am, however, going to say that not only is it highly unlikely she committed the murder for which she was imprisoned, we can’t judge any of the circumstantial evidence OR her character from anything that came out of Italy or Italian sources.  Most of it makes NO sense, to begin with.  Again, it’s not the way “any human would act” – and I’m not talking about the murder itself.

Take the girl who said that Amanda Knox asked her if she was a Jew then said “my people tried to kill your people” and “laughed and laughed.”  Okay, um… first… is this the first time a twenty year old American met someone who is Jewish?  She had to go to ITALY for this?  REALLY?  HOW?  Because the US is Judenrein?  Not impossible, but highly unlikely.  (Though it might make perfect sense for an European’s view of the US.  They tend to believe we live in race-and-religion-segregated communities.)  Second: my people… Knox is a German name?  Since when?  The woman reporting this seemed to assume Amanda Knox was of German ancestry.  Perhaps she is.  However, nothing about her indicates this prima-facie.  And most German Americans don’t consider Germans “My people.”  Second “laughed and laughed” – um…  Demeanor is different in different countries.  I don’t know enough about Italy to talk about that.  Also, perhaps she was tipsy.  But the whole anedocte is nonsensical and it’s either someone dredging up a story after Amanda was convicted OR and quite likely – as someone who was an exchange student – this was in broken Italian/English mix, and what the girl got out of it was not what Amanda was saying.  Was it likely that Amanda had never met a Jewish person?  No.  Is it likely that by “my people tried to kill your people” she was talking about World War II and Italy being on the other side?  Or some combination of the two?  Is it possible the laughter was about her own linguistic ineptitude?  Heavens, one of my Dutch “classmates” in my exchange student group pronounced “smile” “smell” – he heard it, he just couldn’t correct it.  This caused more instances of inappropriate laughter than I care to mention.

So, again, I’m not making a judgement on the young woman’s character or what she actually did, because we can’t tell.  We can tell, though, that most of the stuff coming out of Italy is the stuff of insanity – not hers, but the perception of her by everyone around – and we can tell where that insanity originates.

Take the murder.  They immediately captured a man with a record, whose DNA was all over (and inside) the rape/murder victim.  Amanda’s and her boyfriend’s DNA was IN MINUSCULE amounts supposedly on a bra clasp and a knife handle.  This knife, btw, was NOT used for the murder.  It doesn’t match the imprint of the murder weapon – in blood – on the bedspread.  EVEN if her DNA and the victim’s DNA were somewhere on the knife in minuscule amounts and even if the boyfriend’s DNA WAS on the bra clasp, this wouldn’t make them guilty.  Look, I’ve had female roommates, okay?  Finding a bra on the breakfast table wouldn’t even begin to be weird.  Usually it would mean someone set a laundry basket there on their way upstairs.  For the boyfriend to grab it, carry it upstairs and give it to its owner would be the work of a moment.  And enough to leave minuscule traces of his DNA.  The excuse btw, for why there was almost no DNA of theirs on the scene, but plenty of the third man’s DNA and also his bloody footprint on the hallway floor is that Amanda Knox and her boyfriend apparently cleaned the scene with bleach.

Guys, it doesn’t work that way.  You can’t selectively clean your own DNA from the scene and leave someone else’s.

There is also a welter of other things they supposedly did which we simply can’t tell if they’re true or not, including a lot of inanity about hearing the victim scream and accusing someone else.  Why can’t we tell?  Because they interrogated Amanda Knox for FIFTY TWO HOURS straight.  The main reason against using this for interrogating terrorists (which would never be allowed to spend that long on the spot) is that you don’t get good information.  I’ve been awake for forty eight hours and at the end of that I was hallucinating.

I can only imagine being FORCED to stay awake for days while interrogated in a language I’m not fully fluent in, by strangers, with no advocate present.

So, that’s all garbage.  Leave it out of my comments, please.

Let’s us however examine the STORY the persecutor thought was reasonable enough to explain the rape/murder and which a panel of judges and/or a jury (I’m not sure how the initial trial was conducted.  Italy operates under Napoleonic law.  QUITE different from ours.) thought reasonable enough to convict on.

He thought Amanda and her boyfriend got high on pot – this is important – and decided to ask this acquaintance to join in on a rape/murder for thrills.  He thought this story was perfectly reasonable.  A suburban girl with no record of violence goes to Italy, gets high ON POT and immediately decides to join in rape-murder.  No, wait, decides to DIRECT rape murder.

Does this sound likely?  I don’t know about you, but not where I’m from.  She didn’t have the history for this sort of thing.  Her boyfriend didn’t either.  Also, pot is a depressant.  It doesn’t cause someone to indulge in rape/murder.  It might cause someone to react weirdly to finding a corpse, but that’s about it.  Does this story sound familiar though?  Oh, h*ll yes.

This sounds EXACTLY like the plot of any of a dozen of “teenage wasteland” summer movies.  No, I don’t know their titles.  I have watched their type a lot though – all of us have.  Perfectly normal teenagers+intrusion of disaster or dislocation = murderous psychopaths.  Who, then, btw, return to their normal life without ever betraying what they’ve done.

This is a “truth” that exists only in those movies, which all seem to take lessons on human behavior from Lord of The Flies, which btw, by itself made sense only in the universe inside Sartre’s mind.  (No, I don’t care if it’s a classic.  It’s stupid.)

Or rather, these movies are produced for the thrill-and-shock value, and for a frisson of insinuating that “no one is decent or normal” a “revelation” that might have been thrilling in the twenties but which is now a big, jaw-cracking yawn.

They are accepted and watched as fantasy in the US, because we KNOW none of our teens are like that.  Or at least none of our relatively “normal” teens.  (Defined as wasn’t actually raised in hell and isn’t an habitual crack user.)

BUT – and this is very important – anyone outside the US doesn’t KNOW.  They consume our fables and they take them at face value.  They think “Our kids aren’t like that, but American kids must be different.  Otherwise, why would ALL these movies tell the same story.  And why would Americans watch them?”

I can’t begin to tell you the mythic dimensions the US assumes in foreign minds.  We’re the land where stories happen – and most of them happen as narrated.  Even I, when I came to the US in the early eighties, thought American teens lived lives of debauchery and drugs.  (Yes, in Stow, Ohio.  Why do you ask?)  It took me months to realize these kids were both less sophisticated, less deviant and more – yes – “decent” than my classmates in Portugal.  (This is no slur on Portugal.  I attended a large, urban high school, though, as compared to a little suburban high school in the US.)

Every time I go back to Europe I am confronted with this mythical US – beyond the teen thing.  Take the conditions in Portugal, at the moment.  Home invasions are so common that my parents – who live in a relatively safe and relatively prosperous area – have contingency plans within contingency plans for should it happen to them.  Also, most homes have bars on the windows or shutters that effectively make the house impregnable.  The cars are outfitted with ways to remove anything of value, and occasionally the wheel, while parked in even the “safest” areas.  My husband jokes next time we go over they’ll remove everything from the car, fold it and put it in their pocket.  Because it’s the only way to prevent theft.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, I often forget to lock my car for days.  (Okay, once we’re fairly sure someone slept in it overnight, but the car was still there.)  Our windows don’t have bars.  Our next door neighbor leaves her door unlocked.  In fact she doesn’t know where her key is.

But every time I go back I hear some variant of “I’d love to visit the US but I don’t know if I could take the daily rape/mugging.”  And they won’t believe me when I tell them the truth, because, duh they’ve seen the movies.

We won’t even mention how I was convinced for months that my future BIL was a rapist/murderer because he wore a biker’s chain holding his wallet in, had a beard and rode a motorcycle.  I had seen movies.  I KNEW.  (In retrospect, let us be grateful that David never guessed that.  As a self-consciously “bad boy” he’d have had a field day with that.)

So, what is this all about?  Am I going to prevent people from writing fiction, because it’s not the truth, and because it might give people abroad ideas?

No.  You guys know I don’t want to prevent anyone from writing whatever insanity they want to.

I just want to plead with you, when you write, to make sure the truth that shines through is YOUR truth, not anyone else’s truth.  There is a risk when you pile on someone else’s cliche that was once shocking and startling of your feeding an alternate reality which, yes, could hurt other people.  There is even a greater risk you’ll cause your readers to crack their jaw while yawning.  And there is an even greater risk that you’re creating an image in people’s minds that has nothing to do with the reality they live in and thereby making the young and impressionable act in ways that will hurt them.

No, I’m not arguing with the “conventions” of each genre.  Of course the boy and girl KNOW when they meet that they will be in love forever.  That’s a genre convention in romance, and most people see past it by the time they’re fourteen.  Ditto with the amazing detective who out thinks the police.  Or the fact that every SF hero is a born engineer.  Or that every Fantasy female is an expert swords woman while wearing medieval garb.  All of those are conventions without which the genre book wouldn’t exist as such and must become one of those 1000 pages slice of life tomes.

I’m arguing for each writer observing real behavior, which wasn’t got out of fiction books or bad movies.  I’m talking about going out there and mingling with real people and, yes, reading autobiographies or biographies and seeing how real people react to being marooned in an island, say.  I’m talking about building your character arcs in ways that don’t cause the gods of rationality to cry to the heavens for vengeance (no matter how many times the irrational way has been used, so that it’s like a literary convention, now.)

I’m talking about telling your lies in a way that the truth shines through.  Will you always be successful in getting to some ultimate truth?  No.  But at least you won’t be piling on to a “big lie” which makes people – abroad or here – react in ways which in this real world we live in will seriously hurt them or others.

The life you save might be your own.

*Barely had the pixels dried on yesterday’s post when I had a ping in my email saying “we’re not ducks, we’re lab rats.”  My friend Tedd Roberts proceeded to argue this point until I told him “Just write it as a guest post.”  He did.  I’d argue for this model it is still essential he tells me who’s altering the maze and recording the results.  While I feel like Manny in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that “I don’t know who is cranking, I’m just glad he doesn’t stop cranking.” if someone is actively experimenting with me, then I want to break out of the maze and bite him.  Okay, okay, I’m willing to take for this that like we are a self-taming species we’re also a — perhaps unwittingly — self-experimenting species.  IOW we’re so sharp we cut ourselves.  Frankly, I’d very much like to hear more from Doctor Roberts about the ways our nervous system faces and adapts to change.  I think it might bring some light to what seems to be irrational behavior on the part of vast sectors of publishing.*

Not Ducks, but Lab Rats

by Tedd Roberts

As a follow-up to Sarah A. Hoyt’s blog yesterday, in which she predicts that in the very near future we may find ourselves following in the mold of Donald Duck – one day a beautician, the next a janitor – I thought of a counter proposal.  Those who know me may recognize the theme, and no, this isn’t going to be one of “those” posts…

In reality, we are all Lab Rats.

When I mentioned this to Sarah, her first question was “Who, then, is the experimenter?”  While this is indeed an interesting question, both from philosophical and metaphysical viewpoint, it is not the primary focus of this blog.  Rather, consider with me the viewpoint of the common laboratory rat:

“Day 1:  I was put in a large wooden enclosure.  There are walls all around.  I smell cheese somewhere.  I can scurry around some of the walls.  Usually I find more walls, but sometimes there are openings.  It took a while, but I found the cheese.  It was good but there wasn’t enough.  Now I’m thirsty.”

We, as lab rats, have just encountered our first maze.  There are many different types of mazes, and many different purposes to the test, but the lab rat does not know any of this.  It only knows that there is a maze and there may be cheese at the end.

“Day 2:  I was put in a large wooden enclosure.  There are walls all around.  I smell cheese somewhere.  I can scurry around some of the walls.  Usually I find more walls, but sometimes there are openings.  It took a while, but I found the cheese.  It was good but there wasn’t enough.  Now I’m thirsty.”

“Day 5:   I was put in a large wooden enclosure.  There are walls all around.  I smell cheese somewhere.  – Wait, I’ve been here before.  If I turn left, right, right, left, then make all rights I will get to the cheese.”

Now we have familiarity with the maze and can find the cheese faster.  From an experimental context, we have demonstrated that lab rats have memory.  Once we have performed the same task a few times, we learn to do it faster, more efficiently.  We do it better.

“Day 10:   Whoa.  This is different.  I tried my usual path and there was no cheese.  I can smell it, but I can’t find it.  I’m hungry.”

Now the maze changes.  If we are flexible, if our “memory” does not impair us, we can adapt and eventually find our cheese.

“Day 11:  Back again.  No cheese, but I can smell it.  Maybe I’d better keep searching…”

There you have it.  We are lab rats in a changing world.  Each day we truly do not know if the maze is the same one we ran yesterday.  If it is, our memory can help us run the maze faster.  But if the maze is different…

Memory can be a help and a hindrance.  In neuroscience we have a term for persistent (sometimes pathologically persistent) memory – it is called perseveration.  Animals and humans with damage to certain areas of the brain lose the ability to alter or even over-write memory.  They keep doing the same old task without being able to change to perform the new task.  The ability to change is called “behavioral flexibility” and it is a highly appropriate topic for Sarah’s, Kris Rusch’s and other posts about changing strategies in publishing.

A popular saying among some groups such as the Baen Barflies is that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.  Likewise, insanity is doing different things and expecting the same results.  Yet sometimes we have to change strategies in order to get a better result, as in the transformation from traditional to indie publishing.  I’m not an “insider” to this phenomenon, but I certainly  recognize the signs and symptoms from behavioral psychology.

The lab rats that yield the greatest scientific data are those with behavioral flexibility.  The ones that learn a maze, run it quickly and efficiently, but then are able to change strategies and learn a new maze or a new task quickly, and no less efficiently.  Such flexibility is not inherent in the lab rat, it must be learned, and like the lab rat, we all learn by *doing*.  PhD candidates learn this quite early.  Frequently we find ourselves completely changing our field from grad school to post-doc, from post-doc to first faculty position.  Unfortunately we often specialize, and change in direction becomes difficult and traumatic.  If only we could remember what we once knew as students!  Still, many of us are able to make subtle or even fundamental changes even late in our careers.

While I’ve been talking of lab rats in the concrete sense of experimental subjects, and “Lab Rats” in the metaphorical  sense of those performing the experiments, the lesson is applicable to us all.  I have watched my father reinvent his job and specialization even into his 80’s (yes, he is still working at age 82).  He is happy and quite flexible, able to make his jobs fit himself, just like the lab rat in our picture above.

It’s not a bad thing at all to be a lab rat.  After all, there’s cheese at the end of the maze!

 

Update:  Doc Roberts has expanded on this here:  http://teddysratlab.blogspot.com/2011/10/value-of-repetition.html