On Writing on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

Re: Re: Boss, here’s my not exactly a pen name (Roxana Kiril)

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 20:12:27 +0000

Jim McGovern, the big boss of the small publishing house I’m writing for, wrote this blog post, musing about authors and their mysterious pen names. Why do we have them? Well, he proposes the obvious: going for the other gender’s target audience, or hiding your true identity, or there already being someone with your name writing stuff out there.

And then I got to this part, which I’ll quote:

Some of our authors at BigWorldNetwork.com use pen names, and I never ask why. It really isn’t my business as a publisher.

Well, in my case it’s clear, but I’m taking this as a challenge to reply. My nom de plume is a more readable version of my real name, obviously. My real name’s perfectly fine in Romania where you have about a lot Chirilă people running about, including an annoying musician. Romanians can pronounce my name just fine. But foreigners, well… their struggles are funny, but usually off the mark. So calling me Kiril is fine. Say it out loud and it’ll probably be similar enough to my real one (Kiril-uh) that I might recognize myself.

Now, my editor’s name is Amanda Meuwissen, and that’s the name she writes under, because she’s a bit evil, I’d wager. I had to listen to her reading her series to figure out what I was supposed to call her in my head: May-vessen. I kept calling her Mew-vise-en.

So, anyway, Amanda writes a series called Incubus, which she also narrates. It’s a nice, romantic, and adventurous sort of series which at some point reaches a steamy sex scene or three. Which she narrates. See, that’s another reason to choose a nom de plume: not ever letting your family find out what you did, especially if what you did was write stuff that might be classified by older family members as „erotica”, but said as a four-letter word beginning with „p”. She didn’t choose a nickname, and I didn’t either despite writing some questionable stuff myself, but then again no matter how damned proud I am of Flight from Hell, I have not given dad the link to my story. He’s not really into reading, which is part of why I’m not using a nickname (and I run from mum whenever a new episode comes out).

Jim mentions something else in his blog post: JK Rowling writing mystery novels under a nickname to disassociate those novels from Harry Potter. Which is fine for her, since she’s very rich and successful and need never earn any money again, but without her fame, one of her new novels barely sold 1,500 copies in hardback in the first few months. Once she revealed that Robert Galbraith was her, sales skyrocketed, obviously.

And that’s one reason against nicknames, or against switching between them: spread yourself too thin and it’s like you’re a new writer again and again and again.

Roxana Kiril. Here’s my writer’s name, both real and fake, neither loved by me, nor unloved. When sending in the first episode of Flight from Hell, I considered calling myself something special. Hell, no, even before that I spent a long time wondering what name to choose as an author. Should I invent something? Something pretty, with a lot of ‘a’s and not much krl-ness. I came up with some ideas, and some were great and elegant and suave. I loved them, and they loved me back. Except, unfortunately, I am a person who finds it very hard to commit to things such as names (or initial plots, for that matter: Amanda never commented on how I strayed from the summary I sent her last summer).

No, I decided, I’d rather my pen name was following me around, forcing me to keep it.

Now, there would have been another option. Since I am a woman, I could theoretically have it changed permanently and commit-fully* through marriage: since I’m not a huge fan of my name, I might use this little technicality to grab someone else’s. But whose? Not being clairvoyant, I can’t exactly choose the name of my future husband and run with it. And even if I could, prior to being married, it might be a bit of a faux pas to do so.

Obviously, my writing could not be put on hold for want of a name. I couldn’t wait to get married in order to write, since I’m not part of the chaste-writing club, or whatever the hell I’d need to be part of for such an oath. Nor could I get married in order to get a name, obviously. I could make a name for myself as a porn writer, which I’d never want to get associated with my real name, so I’d need a nickname anyway – but then I’d have to write porn bad enough to never want it known that I wrote it, which… nah.

Nearly real name it is, then. But it wasn’t an easy choice.

Yes, I make up words. Shush.

The author is not physically dead

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:37:01 +0000

The moment I found out that JK Rowling went ahead and said that she ought not have paired off Hermione and Ron, but Hermione and Harry, I felt angry: she has a history of dropping anvils on people during interviews. You know, Dumbledore is gay. The arm on the Weasley family clock dedicated to Fred fell off when he died. Dumbledore is gay. Whatever.

So now I thought, „publicity stunt”. I thought, „shut up, Rowling”. I thought, „it’s too late”. I thought, „you should’ve done that in the books, if you wanted it there”.

I started writing a blog post which would have been similar in point, but not in tone, to this one. It would have said „The moment the text is out in the world, it’s over. You don’t get to decide who interprets what how, you don’t get to decide what the ‘real’ reading is. You just let things take their course.”

And I wrote half of it, too. I mentioned my favorite bit of literary theory, „The author is dead”, by Roland Barthes, which says exactly what I put in quotes in the previous paragraph.

Then I realized that I couldn’t write all that, because books don’t fall out of the sky. You write stuff and it seems like a good idea at the time, or you were told you were supposed to do something, so you do it. You panic, come up with something, change it, try to make things better, make another attempt at fixing stuff. And later on you might wish you could change things. Which is what is happening with her.

The author is not perfect. As a person, the author isn’t Moses, to set down the Word of God into perfection and then never have another thought of it. The author writes. The author publishes. The author thinks back on the text and discovers new things or reconsiders old ones.

JK Rowling is just as entitled as any of her critics, fans, reviewers and general commenting people to come up with interpretations of her own work. She can say that Dumbledore is gay, although she never said it in the books themselves. She can say that after years of deliberation she can see Hermione and Ron wouldn’t work out.__ If she goes wrong anywhere, it’s in thinking it makes any difference now that the books are published. If her readers go wrong anywhere, it’s in thinking the very same.

The article in line with what I initially thought goes:

Because yes, Rowling created Harry, Ron, Hermione and co.; yes, she made them famous (and vice versa); yes, in the real world she owns the rights to them, and other legal vernacular blah blah blah. But they’re not _hers _— not anymore; they haven’t been hers since the first copy of The Philosopher’s Stone hit the shelves. Now they’re ours.

No, see? They’re not just ours. They’re her own as well. If anybody asked the writer of the article I quoted what she thought about a character – for example Remus Lupin, she would have answered. And she did say what she felt about Lupin, she said she was very angry he wasn’t gay.

Why would JK Rowling not be allowed to voice her own opinion as we do? If we deny her that right, if we tell her to ‘shut up’ and ’leave it be’, it means we didn’t understand the point about the author being dead. It means that in a way she’s still a threat, in a way people still feel that she can influence the narrative ‘beyond the grave’ as it were. She can’t. That is the gist of it. Even if she were to pull a John Fowles and write a revised edition years later, she would be unable to modify the already existent Harry Potter series. It will continue being there. It will continue saying what it says, and not a word less or more.

The books are there. They’re finished. They say what they say and you base your interpretation on that alone. The author, in that sense, is dead. But the author is not physically dead. Don’t act as if she were supposed to be.

Flight from Hell – the end of season 2

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 15:07:27 +0000

There’s still a bit to go before the last episodes of season 2 of Flight from Hell are available online, but I’ve already sent them out. (which reminds me, a new episode was posted today)

For the past few days I felt lost. I’ve written 2 seasons of Flight from Hell – 12 episodes each, so 24 in total. About 3000 words/episode, give or take. About 70-75 thousand words, I think. Unless my maths deceive me. And I know where the story is going and who the characters are, but there’s a point in anything I write when I wonder if the story isn’t, in fact, dull, crap, stupid, cliche or unreadable… or all of them together. That point, for Flight from Hell, is now.

Once upon a time, that feeling was absolutely correct. I wrote crap. That’s what teenagers and beginners do. It’s how you learn, by smearing the paper with what you think is brilliance and seeing later that you sound like a childish drama queen with a speech impediment and a slight IQ problem. These days the feeling is usually wrong (not always, but usually). As such, it’s something that I need to deal with. I need to push myself through doubt, through indecision, through the desire to flee and abandon the novel.

This is why last year I thought writing a serial novel is a brilliant idea: I’ve already made a contract to go on. As well as being a series of physical, on-paper contracts, writing for the Big World Network is a metaphorical contract with myself, a promise that no matter what, I’ll go through with it. Flight from Hell might not be the best thing I’ll ever write (I should hope not; it’d be disappointing to write my best work at 25). It might not even be as mind-blowing as I wanted it to be. But I’m hoping it’s good and I’m trying to make it so. You aren’t a real writer if you only ever write in your head. So eventually I had to take the big step and step on insecure ground, exposing myself to failure and criticism – but mostly, to being disappointed in myself.

This morning, feeling like I was about to curl up in a corner and hyperventilate because I was so afraid of screwing things up, I re-read a pep talk I got on NaNoWriMo a few years back. It was by Neil Gaiman, because of course it was. And it started like this:

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone[…] You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that […] it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

So true.

It turns out many writers have doubts. Including Neil Gaiman. Including 75% of the writers his editor knows. I assume that out of the rest of the 25%, you have at least 5% who think that they’re the best thing since Shakespeare and that perfection flows from their pens like lava out of the Vesuvius, cca. 79 AD.

So I got myself an Irish Coffee, which is basically coffee with whiskey in it. I rarely indulge in alcohol, but it’s fucking brilliant with anxiety. The amount of alcohol in an Irish Coffee is usually perfect: enough to lower my inhibitions, but not enough to make me think I’m funny or brilliant when I’m blatantly not.

I wrote.

I now have 1129 words of the 25th episode of Flight from Hell. And I’m in love with it again. Not because alcohol makes any novel idea looks pretty, but because I loosened up enough to remember why I love writing it.

The only thing I hate is that I write from a single character’s point of view and it’s frustrating not to know how to reveal others’ POVs as well. I know them, I know what they’re thinking, and Nakir is a bit clueless. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.

Last time I finished a season, I wrote an article called „12 episodes, 12 quotes” to entice people to check it out. But fuck it. I didn’t feel like advertising this time around. I’d rather celebrate, because it’s a fun novel and when I sent that first episode to the Big World Network last year, I had no idea that it would actually be a novel, and one people like reading, at that.

Writing, video games and so forth

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 11:55:18 +0000

I don’t often write blog posts because somebody says „Be part of this! Write about this topic!” And yet here we are, because I find a certain topic interesting.

Cathy Day, whom I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog, wrote the following:

I’ve never played a video game, but I recognize that it’s a narrative experience that lots and lots of people value. No judgement. But in my fiction-writing classes, I often read stories and novels that read as if I’m watching someone else play a video game. There’s plot, action, scene, all great, but virtually no interiority, which for me is *absolutely necessary* in fiction. My students have always used films and TV shows to talk about fiction, but now they also reference video games. “This is like Bioshock,” for example, and I have no idea what that even means. I wonder if other creative writing teachers have noticed this quality in student fiction or these references? I wonder if people who play video games could give me some tips about how to help my students make the transition from gaming to writing narrative.

She wrote it on Facebook, then she posted it on her blog and asked for opinions. I like the question and it’s part of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s a slightly different take, and I’ll start from here: what is up with literature, anyway?

I’ve run into endless discussions concerning whether listening to an audiobook counts as reading the book. Some say it’s less valuable to listen to a book than to read it – because it’s lazier. And then, of course, people often say that books are superior to movies/TV shows, because the latter are less valuable/more commercial/easier to follow. Theater is above TV, but I’m not sure where it is in relation to reading books. Probably a bit lower on the scale of values, unless you’re watching some damned difficult crap. Video games are, of course, at the very bottom of this scale of values, because Pacman can’t compare to Tolstoy, or something like that.

Which is all fascinating and, in my opinion, all wrong. I describe myself as a writer, but what I actually mean by it is that I am a storyteller whose main medium is the written word. But man, I love other mediums, too. I write my own novel and I do my own audio recording of it. If you read it yourself, you get to add intonations and moods yourself. If you listen to it, you get my interpretation of how the story and the characters sound like. You might think this is good, right? I am telling a story, I naturally want to get it across my way, no? No. Sometimes it helps me. At other times, I am very sad that my own voice, no matter how good, will never echo in your mind in the same way as your own soundless inner voice.

The fun part is that no matter how a story gets told, we never get the whole of it. We recreate it from what we have, but in the end we all see our own version of that story. Fans put this in practice: they often write their own crazy stories based on small gestures which are definitely there, but which meant something entirely different to the scriptwriter, director, actors. And that’s perfectly alright and normal and I love it.

So where am I going? Well, to this: there’s no ‘right’ way to tell a story. There is no ‘perfect’ medium. Art is a lie: it makes us think we’re getting the full story, but it’s always giving us more of something, less of something else. There will be things you will wish you had been able to leave out, but must add. A movie will never manage to have an indistinct background as well as a comic series can. It’s easier to hide background details in film than in literature: in literature you need to mention them, but keep the reader’s attention focused on something more exciting. In film, you literally put them in the background.

Here’s what I mean. Look at one of the pages of Exiles, a number of The Sandman, from the volume The Wake:

Look at the subtlety of the black and white, at the elegance of the drawings. The scenery is barren, or maybe it barely exists at all. Different fonts to suggest different types of speech, but they don’t tell you anything about what characters’ voices sound like. I can’t change fonts in a book: it’s too odd, it jumps at you. What you can’t do: add music; describe actual voice pitch; add every gesture. There is a lot of suggestion here – and in other mediums, that suggestion would need to be done in different ways. Literature would use vague words, cinema might use filters and carefully considered sets.

It is unfair to compare a medium with another from a value POV because they all do different things.

But what about video games and fiction writing and what Cathy Day said? I’ve taken you on a ride, but we’re finally arriving at our destination. She mentioned no interiority from the characters. Well…

In video games the main character can be a shell that the player enters (usually first-person games: shooters, Portal, Amnesia). Or s/he can be very clearly defined as a character (Monkey Island’s „Guybrush Threepwood, mighty pirate!”). In the first case, the player’s psychology substitutes that of the character’s, doesn’t it? There is still psychology going on, but you don’t see it because it’s yours. You put it all in. It’s something you simply can’t do with books, they need psychology.

Well, the problem with video games from this point of view is that they don’t teach you how books look like. Which is an odd thing to say, I suppose, but I think it’s the basic problem that Cathy Day encountered: her writers might have stories to tell, but they aren’t familiar with how literature tells stories.

Oh, no. What is there to be done?

Well, the short answer is: read books. Read more books. Look at what it is that books do. Grab books from various different genres, different countries, different times and see what they do and how they do it. What catches your attention? What makes them interesting? What makes you read on? Study books, don’t just read them. If you like a page, figure out why you like it. I am not saying you should do this as a reader. As a reader, you really ought to give in to the story and enjoy it. But as a writer, that’s how you learn how to do things. By studying others.

C. Day is asking about transitioning from one medium to another.

Well, transitioning is a bit like translating. The theory of translation says the following: a translator doesn’t go from language A to language B. Instead, he goes from language A to a certain meaning, which he then moves into language B. In other words, „Mary goes to the market” is English. It is then translated into the idea of Mary going to the market, in present tense, which then needs to be retold in, say, Romanian: „Mary merge la piață.” This can lead to several choices for the translator (Do I call her Mary, because that’s her original name? Or do I call her Maria, so Romanian readers can feel closer to her?).

The same is true for changing mediums, I think: you have the story in medium A, which you then translate to yourself as a complex web of plot, character and details, which you then try to get across in medium B, with medium B’s tools and techniques. But the story is, to my mind, the central thing.

I haven’t played Bioshock, but I’ll talk about Tomb Raider, which is new, shiny and well-known, okay?

Lara Croft struggles there against two types of opponents: ones who catch her and ones who don’t. This division is important because those opponents transmit two different things: the ones who don’t catch her are at a distance. They have guns and other such. They can shoot her and kill her, but you can evade them. They are there to underline her skills with a gun/bow and arrow/weapon of choice. They create a stealthy Lara, who works hard at not being seen, who is a scared woman, but a deadly woman. They make you feel strong.

The enemies who catch her are up close and personal. They grab her. They hold her. You need to hit a sequence of buttons at the right time to escape their grasp and you often can’t. This Lara is more scared than skilled, more desperate and in difficulty than on top of the situation. I did wonder for awhile why the hell I needed to press left and right in quick succession to evade a crazy psycho, but the answer is this: because it’s effing hard for her to escape.

This is how the story works for games: is it difficult for Lara? The player will struggle. Are stealth and skill needed? You get ten opponents and alarms everywhere.

Literature is more subtle. You don’t have to kill ten opponents to prove stealth. One or two are enough. Four are numerous. I will disbelieve you at ten. Explosions don’t affect us much, because it isn’t the idea of an explosion that really makes an impact on us: it’s the sound of it, the light, the way things fly all over and are destroyed. You need to describe that.

Video games are explicit. They need to hit you over the head with a hammer to get a point across. Literature is subtle and relies on small things, on details and observations.

Here’s how it can be done. Lara against opponents who don’t catch her:

My knee scraped against the ground as I fell, but I couldn’t scream. They would hear me, and then they would kill me. I hurt all over, but I needed to find a way out, so I searched for something, anything, a rope, a surface I could climb on, but seconds ticked away and they got closer and closer…

Lara caught:

She felt his hands running across her body as he whispered words in Russian that she couldn’t understand. Lara had no idea whether he meant to kill her or rape her, she wanted to curl up into a ball and cry either way, but that wasn’t an option…

If you want to transition, you need to switch modes of expression. What can literature do that video games can’t do (as easily)? References, thoughts, impressions, feelings, moods. It comes down to learning what your medium can do, what has been done so far and how. Which is why writers need to read books.

(But you can pick up stuff from other mediums as well, of course. And as for video games, I really recommend that people should play some. You might eventually realize that they Aren’t Your Thing, but they are an experience of their own, no? A whole new type of telling stories.)

Flight from Hell – the end of a season

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 21:43:40 +0000

I’m currently uploading the audio for episode 12 of Flight from Hell. That’s the last episode of the season – seeing as I won’t be taking the opportunity for a prolonged holiday, season 2 will start on the tail of season 1, with just one week’s break to mark the change.

I’ll be offering little quotes and teasers in a post on Sunday or so (tomorrow I’ll be visiting this Turkish city, forgot its name, with a bunch of Erasmus students, never knew their names).

Stats say that people enjoy Flight from Hell. Well, either that, or they click on its links a lot – it’s a bit hard to tell which is which, considering the limitations of today’s technology. It makes me happy, even if I don’t know who they all are, or what they think or such. Except my mum and Linda and this friend of mine who was one of the first people to ever read my stories (back when they were truly crap). They say stuff from time to time.

I kept expecting people to complain about things, or to get my usual insulting trolls saying stuff. But they never did. (except mum, but mothers do that)

And I got to kinda love the Big World Network team. They’re not perfect, but they damned well strive to be, from the editors who read my mind and edit my words accordingly (but are still open to discussion), to the friendly tech support which reads my e-mails and gets things fixed yesterday.

I have a nice writing rhythm now – no more periods of non-writing, no tendency to abandon the project (since I need to stick to it). It’s beautiful and it gets easier every week.

So. I’m a proper novelist-person-thingy. Which is cool. Should be writing some more now 😀

The mystery of the 1-star rating

Mon, 09 Sep 2013 19:57:27 +0000

Currently my rating for Flight from Hell over on the Big World Network is of 4.6/5 (with 9 votes cast). You can see it here. But not so long ago it was 4/5 (with 4 votes cast). Reverse it and try to figure out what the possible votes could be: 4*4 = 16, therefore the 4 votes amounted to 16.

Possibilities: 4 ratings of 4; 2 ratings of 5, 2 of 3; 3 ratings of 5, 1 of 1.

I’d already checked the rating before and it had been 5/5 with 2 votes, therefore only the latter two possibilities existed. But this is the internet where ratings of 3 are rare, so I was willing to bet that the last option was the correct option.

Three people had probably voted 5, one had voted 1.

Now, I’ve yet to see a bestseller with a perfect 5 and no book I love has ever lacked haters. I doubt that I will manage to enchant everybody like a mythical storyteller, so it was only a matter of time until that perfect 5 was marred by different opinions.

Still, a 1-star rating. Since the Big World Network more often has ratings than comments, there was nothing there to motivate the choice and I found that I really wanted to know why I got that one. Did the rater hate the premise? The choice of words? The pretentiousness, perhaps, the long sentences, the idea about Hell, the… well… What did the rater hate?

After all, knowing what they hate is a gateway into figuring out what they like, what they appreciate, what you do right and what you do wrong. It’s not just that they hate, it’s why they hate, and isn’t that fascinating and psychological and maybe you can use it sometime?

But I was most certainly never going to find out. So I figured I’d have to wait until the first bad review to be relieved of curiosity.

Luckily for me, my mother eventually said, „Ermmm, I was debating on whether I should tell you this.”

Me: „Yes?”

Mum: „I shared your novel on Facebook.”

Me: „Yeah…”

Mum: „And a friend clicked and she gave you a one-star rating.”

Me: „!!!!!!!!!”

Mum: „I’m sorry…”

Me: „Why? Why did she? She must’ve said.”

Mum: „Well, it’s stupid, really.”

Me: *dying to know the answer*

Mum: „She was looking for the ’like’ button, to share it with others on Facebook, but she only saw the stars and clicked on the first one and only realized her mistake later.”

Me: „…”

Mum: „Don’t be mad.”

Me: *bursts out laughing* „You have no idea how long I poked that rating, trying to figure out what had happened there. This is too damned funny.”

So, note to everybody out there who gets really weird ratings: sometimes, it’s really not about you 😀

Discussions on literature (consider us drunk)

Sat, 24 Aug 2013 19:07:49 +0000

Linda’s come over, all the way from the other side of the country. Which is really cool. And conversations are getting really weird. We were talking Flight from Hell and we got to incubi and succubi.

Linda: Do you remember how incubi and succubi used to be so rare in fiction? And now they’re all over the place.

Me: I swear to God I didn’t know Amanda had a series called Incubus before submitting to the Big World Network.

Linda: Speaking of Incubus. *fangirls* I really, really like it. It’s fun!!! But no, I mean, all over the place. Everywhere.

Me: Remember where vampires were a metaphor for sex?

Linda: Yeah.

Me: So we just decided to drop the metaphor part.

Linda: Remember that English lit class?!

Me: YES!!!! O_O

*flashback*

15-20 students are sitting around a table during a literature seminar.

Professor: So, how would you like to die? [note: In her defense, we were talking about Emily Dickinson]

Student: By incubus.

Class: *stupefied silence*

Linda: Do you know what an incubus is?!?!?!?!

Student: Yes. *confused*

Class: O_O *more stupefied silence*

Professor: *starts snickering*

Student: I want to die peacefully in my sleep.

Professor: *barely stops from laughing out loud*

Linda: *dramatically* But they suck your soul and drag you to hell!

[…]

Me: But do you remember that class in which a professor asked what the fuss about vampires was?

Linda: *falls over laughing*

*flashback*

Professor: What’s the fuss about vampires?

Student: [something-something metaphors, literature, symbolism]

Professor: No, I still don’t get it.

Annoyed student: They’re hot, sexy hunks used as sex metaphors!

Professor: Ooooooooooooh. I understand now! *gets wistful look*

[…]

Me: *checks her blog stats* OMG, somebody came from Google Plus! That place is alive!!!!!!!!1 This is the first time this happens. I should write a special ’thank you for sharing my post, single G+ actual user out there!'

[…]

Me: I never meant to put any actual gay stuff in Flight from Hell. Aside from Ashmedai-the-pansexual-devil being a threat in the background. I thought I could just skirt the issue constantly and have Nakir escape him over and over. Then I realized, Ashmedai would go for him in immoral, creepy ways. He totally would.

Linda: *does that dreamy thing fangirls do*

Me: And Nakir’s weak and confused and trying to play reverse psychology at one point and Ashmedai, well… „Lead us not into temptation, because we’ve already been there and proved we were abysmally bad at it.” [note: I have a thing for that ’lead us not into temptation’ saying recently]

Linda: *wiggles her eyebrows*

Me: Not that anything actually happens, mind you. Not really. Not beyond this one thing, this short, clothes-on thing which ends fast and makes the threat and Nakir’s confusion so much worse.

Linda: *does a sad face* I would love to see them together. Maybe all three of them. That would be fun.

Me: Bad idea in the text.

Linda: *puppy eyes* How about in the Alternate Universe Christmas Special?

Me: There is no Alternate Universe Christmas Special.

Linda: There could be. Hey, I knew this author who wrote fanfic of her own stories, ever thought of doing the same?

*conversation dives straight into the gutter*

[…]

Me: So sometimes, I look at the editors’ comments, and they’re, like, so confused, you know? Trying to solve that old question, which for once makes perfect sense: what did the author mean to say over here?

Linda: I only ever get giggles in the margins.

Me: I get confusion. What did the author mean?… And then the author shows up and says, no, no, no, wait! That’s not what I meant! Oh, crap. Let me change it. In chapter two, I had the devil say that thing, you know? *quotes from memory* „For that I, and not your husband, must be their father.” Except the first time I said it like crap and it was confusing. So when the editor modified it for clarity, there was this confused scene between the queen and the devil. He was like, „I won’t be your husband.” And she went, „Good, I’ve already got one of those.” And I went, „ooooh, wait, he was actually saying ‘I’ll be knocking you up myself’. Which is a bit different.”

[…]

Linda: I never thought I’d say this, but I am so happy to get rid of the romance subplot with my story. It didn’t work. At all. So right now I’ve taken the romance down and I’m adding a lot more crazy.

Me: Like?

Linda: Well, there’s a whole new plot with the Physics Department. Some klutzy students did some experiments and that’s why it’s… missing. Carmen goes off to search for the missing South Wing.

Me: You have a vanishing university.

Linda: Pretty much. Oh, and I have to figure out how to put in the vampire bounty hunter. Because I said there would be one – and there will be, dammit.

Why I always edit chapters before sending them in

Sun, 18 Aug 2013 15:22:14 +0000

Characters’ emotions before editing:

        /           
   /  /      /
  /  /      /          /
 /          /          /  
                       /
                      /
                     /

Characters' emotions after editing:

¯`·.¸¸.··.¸¸.·--·.¸¸¸.·´¯`·.¸¸.¸¸¸..·´¯`·.

My tendency to make them go overboard is quite acute (pun not intended).

Seriously. On every edit of first draft dramatic moments and fights, it’s like I’m reigning in psychos with quadrupolar disorder and trying to make them look human again.

I love swear words

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 11:05:04 +0000

Swear words do this amazing thing in language, that no other category of words does quite as well, or with as much versatility. I’m not referring to insults here (although that’s supposedly their main function), but to the fact that they intensify the meaning.

If something is awesome, then it’s awesome. If something blew your mind and made you feel very enthusiastic about it, it’s fucking awesome. If you’re awed and a bit shocked, then it’s bloody awesome. If you’ve been raised in a very clean (and probably British) environment, it’s ruddy awesome. Or, if you feel like it (and probably American), it’s freaking awesome.

They give you hints about the mood of the speaker as well: „I feel awful” is one thing – it tells you that the speaker is feeling, well, awful. It can be a whine, or a snappish retort – you won’t know. But that’s about it. „I feel bloody awful” suggests the anger/strength of the speaker.

And you can throw some of them just about any-fucking-where. Like in the middle of the word. Abso-bloody-lutely. Can you picture that done with any other word? „She was abso-cool-lutely beautiful” – …not really.

The more common of swear words have a way of migrating from nouns to verbs to adverbs – they can be turned into nearly anything you want them to be. All other words are tidy little things waiting to be used in the right way, but swear words? They’re your bitch. You can do whatever you want with them. They slip below the radar because no proper, snobbish teacher will ever explain that you can’t say ‘Fuck the fucking fuckers’ because it’s stylistically repetitive, or because ‘fuck’ can only be used as a verb. That teacher will be so busy trying to remove the devil from your vocabulary that you can go on abusing the damned word.

Linguistically speaking, these words are one of the most interesting things going on. Versatile, with their original meaning long ignored (is ‘fuck’ even sexual most of the time? Is ‘bloody’ blood-related when used in casual conversation? Has ‘damned’ got anything to do with hell or Christianity?), and with their current meaning shifting around as needed, they’re the wild cards of language, the things you can best use to show (intense) emotion or feeling.

It’s kind of fucking awesome of them and I love the bloody bastards. They get a lot of bad publicity, but they’re fulfilling their part in getting meaning across like no other words do. You’ve gotta give them some credit.

Presenting: Flight from Hell by Roxana Kiril (coming next week)

Fri, 26 Jul 2013 19:44:37 +0000

My novel is nearly here. Just a bit over a week and, on August 4th, the first chapter/episode will be launched on the Big World Network.

Until then, I’ll be procrastinating with you and sharing little tidbits. Let’s see… where to start, what to say…

About 9 years ago I realized being a writer was an option.

Picture it: somewhere in Transylvania, there is a village. It has a castle (a very tiny castle) and the castle has a domain. It isn’t much of a domain, but there’s a forest that’s been tamed into a park (or a park that went wild and became a forest). And there’s a lake. It’s a small lake, but everything else is tiny, so why not. And on the lake, there is a very small island. And on the island there’s a table with two benches, all covered by a roof. They’re painted in yellow. Around the table there’s around 10 people. They’re writers.

Wellll, the ‘writers’ claim is dubious. I think one or two actually wrote on a regular basis. I certainly did not. But for all intents and purposes, on that occasion they were writers. Because it was a writing workshop and the people who attend those and scribble are writers, no?

So the workshop coordinator asked me: „What sort of stories do you want to write?”

I said, „Children’s books.”

Give me some slack. I was 16. No, I didn’t want to write for a younger audience. I just wasn’t aware that ‘fantasy’ was its own genre. I knew, what?… The Chronicles of Narnia, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland. I wasn’t aware you could write this sort of stuff for, you know, adults. For all of its reputation with vampires and werewolves, Transylvania wasn’t really brimming over with knowledge of this sort of literature. (and I don’t remember if I had even heard of the mysterious ‘anime’ and ‘manga’)

Fast-forward nine years. I’m still writing what I thought back then that I’d be writing, except now I know what it’s called. It’s called fantasy. Except, when I wasn’t paying attention, they went ahead and made up this new category they called ‘supernatural’, so yeah…

Flight from Hell is (apparently) a supernatural story. It’s got an angel. It’s got devils. It’s got Hell and a werewolf and incubi and succubi. And that little ‘18’ in the corner stands for ‘You have to be 18 to read this’. So much for children’s books.

The main characters are Nakir (an angel I stole from the Muslim tradition) and Sara (woman of infamous kick-ass-ery). At the beginning of episode 1 they’re standing in the Hell of succubi and incubi, led by the devil Ashmedai. Nakir, the angel questioning the faith of the dead in their graves, questioned his own role and the justice of God. He never found his way back up to Heaven. And Sara… she tried to bring someone back from the dead. Needless to say, she failed and suffered the consequences.

I enjoy writing every second of it, from the action scenes to the disturbing imagery. But I won’t spoil that.

Just a teaser of what the novel feels like. If both Nakir and Sara had songs that represented them, they’d be something like this:

Sara’s would be „Our Solemn Hour” by Within Temptation:

Because she thinks of herself as larger than life, strong, exploding with energy and fighting spirit. And there must be a woman doing amazing things with her voice in there. She has something about her that’s questioning, confrontational, rebelling – and screaming in Latin and English while comparing herself with Winston Churchill in stressful situations is not entirely out of the question. Definitely prone to thinking of herself in mythic terms.

Lyrics best fitting her:

Is the heart of stone, no empathy inside?
[…]
If we can’t restrain the beast which dwells inside
it will find it’s way somehow, somewhere in time
Will we remember all of the suffering
Cause if we fail it will be in vain

On the other hand, Nakir:

Entirely different sort of beast. Mellow, confused, tired, wary. Uncertain of anything, not much into struggling with fate. Asking himself questions, but finding no answers. And if he dies, well, he’s going to die wishing he didn’t die. He likes thinking the universe has some sort of harmony and order – even if he resents being kicked out of that order.

He carries burdens and fears – and the deep, deep thought that he deserves it all. Even if he doesn’t want it. Closer to resignation than desire to escape.

Lyrics for him:

Been a long road to follow,
Been there and gone tomorrow,
[…]
Is somebody there beyond these heavy aching feet?
Still the road keeps on telling me to go on…

Something is pulling me
I feel the gravity of it all

Both neat songs, but they don’t fit. And that’s why this story might be supernatural, and apparently it’s horror, but nobody ever suggested it should also be romance.

Thoughts around my novel

Thu, 11 Jul 2013 07:17:30 +0000

I’ve finished recording the audio version of the first episode of Flight from Hell and I’ve sent it off to the Big World Network. Meanwhile, I’m writing episode four, which turned a bit surreal on me. Novels do that, I think. Surprise you. You think you have stuff figured out and then there’s this extra bit of richness or of fun lying about, ripe for the writing.

Flight from Hell is the sort of thing you don’t plan on writing. Its setting, its plot, its characters – they were all a side-story in another story, the sort of thing where someone goes „Sara?… Sara was in Hell. And now she’s damaged goods.”

But one night I was bored and I felt like typing a bit of crazy, a bit of oppressive atmosphere, a bit of sharp bitterness against the world. Unkind characters and a hostile universe, things going wrong even when they go right, beauty found in bleeding and in pain. Flight from Hell was meant to amuse me during a sleepless night, but since I liked the idea of publishing I sent it off to the Big World Network, alternately telling myself that it would be the best thing they ever published and the worst and most unfitting story that’s ever been sent to them. Sometimes I feel like I need narcissism to get read, megalomania to withstand the onslaught of criticism, masochism to read suggestions for improvements. Otherwise I’ll only remember that outside of me there are written worlds so beautiful that they make me cry and I’ve never managed to get to that point. The crush would be too great, so I do declare myself brilliant. I must be.

Episode four of Flight from Hell is surreal and I’m letting it carry me around. I know where it must end (perhaps that particular bit will end in episode five, if I can’t squeeze it all in ten pages), but the road there can wind any way it likes. I’m having fun with ideas, alternately putting them on the page and washing them away, remembering what little things need to be in there and editing them in or out, spinning them around until they look like they’ve always belonged. Which they did, I suppose. Stories are marvelous that way. By the time you write them to the end, they will have always been meant to be that way.

What fascinates me is that I’ve always known Sara. She was around long before this novel, doing things, fighting, failing, trying, loving, broken, going on. I know what she thinks, I know who she is. I know what she thinks of Nakir, of this angel she chose for a companion, of Hell, of escaping, of herself. I know her fears and desires and motivations, the whole bit. I thought at first she’d be the one lending her voice to Flight from Hell, but Nakir took over. I’m just getting to know him – and he barely knows anything of Sara, but he’s watching her from behind, guessing, thinking, speculating, judging. I’m writing what I don’t know, against that silly advice of writing what you do know. Where would you be, if you always did that?… Spinning around in circles, that’s where I would be. No, exploration is the best way to go, the way I see it.

I can’t wait to see it published. And I’m curious about what cover they’ll come up with, what little song bit before the audio version of each episode. I have no talent for visual arts, no idea what I’d want as a distinctive sound. I’m waiting to see those to figure out what others think Flight from Hell is like, to see what they see it as.

Ellipses are like kisses of courtesy

Wed, 03 Jul 2013 22:02:59 +0000

Ellipses are exactly like kisses of courtesy. Not because they’re a way to bond with someone else and to be polite and friendly, but because they differ from place to place and the wrong way of doing things can cause you endless trouble.

As far as kisses are concerned, you courtesy-kiss even not-very-close acquaintances on the lips in South Africa (on special occasions, at least; so one of my professors in uni has told us – a peck on the lips). Women friends or opposite-sex friends might often be seen kissing both cheeks in Romania – especially on special occasions; I’m not sure how fond guys are of doing it (I’ll have to admit I never paid careful attention to it). I remember reading an article saying that in a province of France you’re supposed to kiss one cheek-the second cheek-back to the first cheek. Then of course we all know that in the past there was a lot of hand-kissing, which is antiquated, but might still happen today. In some cultures you don’t kiss lightly.

It’s a mess! Try imagining what would happen if somebody left South Africa and went to Japan – where they’d try kissing a teacher at the end of year. Yikes. Trouble.

Ellipses are the same. We’ve got antiquated Victorian ellipses, which are . . . with spaces between each dot.

When I was a proofreader for Project Gutenberg, the standards explicitly said that ellipses were to be separated from words … with spaces on both sides, unless they had extra punctuation near them…. That punctuation would get added (and the ellipsis would be pushed against the preceding word). This happens because ellipses are treated like words there. Well, mostly.

Of course, some would say that if you omitted a sentence, then things would be different. … You’d have that space between sentences. Others say that the omission of a sentence needs greater signalling. […] Like these brackets surrounding the ellipsis. (I agree with that)

In Romania, as far as I can tell, dots stick to words… no matter what. And there’s always only three of them, even at the end of a sentence…

And right now my editor said: „I did notice one instance where you added a space after an ellipsis, which is incorrect. Unless the sentence is trailing off and ending. In this case you were trailing off and continuing the same sentence, so the ellipsis need to be connected to the words around them.”

I went T_T. Yet another standard. And I hadn’t thought of that…at all.

I think …that the only way I haven’t been asked to type them was to push them against …the word after them, instead of the word before them.

Writing on the novel (vs writing on TV scripts)

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 14:21:22 +0000

I’m under the weather again today. Somewhat dizzy, somewhat nauseous. It’s either some sort of flu, or the meditations of my ’enemies’ are actually working for once (yes, I live in a context in which people meditating for my downfall is not entirely out of the question, even if I think it highly unlikely – I’m not important enough).

I would go to the gym, but I’m already working out with the lightest weights in existence and there’s nowhere to downgrade to. I’m also quite certain that the people owning the gym would be less than happy about my fainting there.

So I’m working on „Flight from Hell”. Chapter 3. Technically, I need to send it in by July 15th or so (unless I calculated the date wrong). But I prefer having things done a bit earlier.

Once upon a time I worked on TV scripts. I had a ‘reality’ show on my hands and I was supposed to provide a 40-page script on a weekly basis. It was hell on earth and it was probably the worst work I’ve ever done or will ever do in my life. Like, seriously. I’ve come a long way as a writer since then and even now I wouldn’t be able to write 40 pages of quality TV show script from Thursday to Sunday (especially not with the conflicting demands from the other scriptwriter, my supervisor, the director and the bosses). Not sure what I’d do today. Probably kick some ass, demand that they tell me what they want me to write on Monday, so I’d have a full week and tell some people to shut up and let me do my stuff. But then again, I’m much more self-confident now…

Maybe I could write a romance novel about it (romance so it’d be lighthearted). It would work.

Anyways, the Big World Network (whom I’m writing for) are sort of like television in concept. They publish an ’episode’ a week from all their stories. 12 episodes/season. I suppose I should find the concept worrying, considering how badly it worked out for me last time. However, it’s an entirely different sort of thing and the main reason why I submitted my work to them in the first place. They’re sane. They require relatively short episodes – and it’s your story, so you don’t have to come up with something quick on Thursday to be able to throw something on the site not far from then. They do real storytelling, not „Scandal! Scandal! Throw in scandal, because that’s what the audience wants!”

The format appeals to me, when stripped of madness and bad taste and rushing and impossible demands.

Reading a story episodically is an entirely different experience from reading a whole novel in one go. I’m a fangirl and I’ve read a lot of fanfiction, which is published one chapter at a time, unless the author really decides otherwise. Most of the time the distance between chapters in fanfiction is flexible – sometimes the first chapters come quickly, the later ones come hard. At other times the story is abandoned. Sometimes you have somebody like silverkytten who updates twice a year, if you’re lucky (unless she wrote everything beforehand). Or RosieB, who updates whenever. And the excitement! Have you heard, have you heard, there’s a new chapter of „Shades of Grey”, or of „Beside You in Time”, of „Touched”/”Contact”, of „Off the Record”?! Have you read, have you seen, you must!

The news spreads like wildfire amongst fans, the chatter goes a level up and you understand that you’re not alone in appreciating this story or that, that it’s alright to love and enthuse and speculate and wish and desire and demand of the writer – „But when are Sesshoumaru and Kagome getting together?!”

And then you wait some more.

There’s fanfiction writers who are amazingly good at writing regularly, but they’re rare. Still, they’re excellent. There’s lightning on the wave, who updated nearly every day for over a year, writing an amazing 3 million word series which has me crying with love whenever I re-read lines of it. Unfortunately I didn’t catch that one as it was being written, discovering it barely two years ago or so. (and it made me want to read and understand poetry)

My first experience of weekly updated fanfiction was phoenix.writing’s „The Problem with Purity”. I caught it when it was 20-something chapters in and I rushed over the beautiful writing which took its time to describe things properly. I waited for the new chapter to be released on Thursday, I cried out in joy when the author released an extra chapter on special occasions.

Reading something episodically is an experience stretched over time. It lets characters walk with you longer. Immersion in the story happens from time to time, in small batches – but then you get to come back over and over, take another step, see something else go on. It’s a different sort of adventure. I’m happy that the Big World Network decided to throw this sort of experience back into the world of books and literature.

Because yes, it’s been done before. Over a hundred years ago, Dickens and Thackeray and so on would have their huge novels published chapter by chapter in the literary magazines of the age, before bringing everything together in a single volume. But then those magazines eventually died and novels published as novels became the standard – and indeed the only way most people think of stories existing.

I’m happy about the Big World Network. I’m happy they like my novel and I’m happy that we can work together. I debated long and hard whom I should submit to, looking at experiences with writers, at royalties and sales and so on – and then I realized that this was the most fun option and the one I was most excited about from a writing and story experience point of view.

And the best surprise thus far is the editor. Who seems to be a nice person, but who is also a careful professional. I think I nearly cried with joy when I realized she used notes and tracked changes on the first chapter of „Flight from Hell”. To compare yet again with my TV experience, there I never found out which changes had been made to my words (which I have been assured happens with some small publishers, too, although I haven’t had that experience myself).

Yeah. I’m totally procrastinating on writing the novel.

"Flight from Hell" on August 4th

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:01:45 +0000

Just a short announcement: my novel, „Flight from Hell” will be launched on the 4th of August on the Big World Network. Keep an eye out for Roxana Kiril 😉

The genre(s): Horror/Supernatural.
Rating: 18+. Apparently I can’t write stuff for a general audience even if I try. Not that I was particularly trying to.

The first episode (chapter) will be available for free. After that, reading is subscription-based, but the subscription is barely $3. And you can get the audio version as well. I’ll be reading it (I’m not that bad).

When the novel’s all said and done, it’ll (probably) be gathered into a volume and sold as paperback, audio and full electronic version, in some sort of pricing combos.

Yeah… Not feeling up to writing anything more fascinating in this blog post right now. So laterz.

Misconceptions concerning writers

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 09:56:58 +0000

There is this wide-spread misconception concerning writers, which I suppose comes from literature lessons in high school: that writers need ideas.

False.

I have yet to meet a writer lacking ideas. They might have a bad case of writer’s block („Ok… Got to this point, what now?”), or writer’s procrastination („I will write the greatest novel ever!… Tomorrow.”), or writer’s stylistic suck („I swear I sounded different than a whiny 15 year-old last time I tried this”). One thing I’ve never seen a writer lack is ideas. Maybe ideas concerning a story, or a theme, or a title, or maybe they just lack good ideas right now. But ideas in general?… Not really.

I am currently trying to keep track of all the ideas I never wrote, which were awesome ideas (I throw away decent ones if they stick around for too long, because they’ll always be at the bottom of the story stack). It’s a nightmare. Lucky me, for the past few years I kept most of my crappy first drafts in a single folder, which comes with me everywhere thanks to the miracle of syncing.

…I’ve heard of yogis wanting to do retreats in caves and dark rooms and stuff. I wonder if any rock-playing cafe would be willing to take me in for a writing retreat. I am getting tired of jazz-playing cafes, I can’t even begin to explain… Plus, they don’t provide accommodation and I end up needing to leave.

Omg. like. Cafe retreats for writers. That’s a brilliant setting for a story! Throw it at some point in the future, since the future is the best place for quirks and… yes. And there’d be a guy writing super-sophisticated stuff. And a chick writing fantasy. And a young man writing romance. And deadlines!

They’re there because of editors. The editors are dead sick of their breaking deadlines, so they were thrown here to work. It’s like a prison/work camp/retreat.

And a murder mystery.

Because, you know, a big-ass Stephen King-like writer decided to play at re-enacting Fowles’s The Magus in his own original, mad style (it’s not a real murder).

Somebody NEEDS to write this. This could be awesome.

(Seriously. I came up with this in 10 minutes. While I was writing the blog post. Do you see what I have to deal with?! And let me tell you something – all ideas look genius at first. They’re like half-naked chicks in front of men imprisoned for the past seven months.)

Note to self: Sucker Punch soundtrack

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 21:25:02 +0000

Definitely writing music. The wonderful White Rabbit cover, the awesome Sweet Dreams, the strength of I Want It All/We Will Rock You.

(actual note to self: Keeper for Mangaka, 2$ and a chocolate bar, the odd bits of Flight From Hell, The Missing – with the Queen medley.)

On Writing: Stealing ideas from Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 23:56:41 +0000

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has an amazing style, no? So beautiful, so flowing, so thoughtful and clear and enchanting, making you dream of magic and wish to live in another, more beautiful country.

And it’s all done through words. All the magic there is in G.G. Marquez is visible in every single book that he wrote. I could talk about his plots, his world, his whatever – but I actually want to talk about a single aspect of his writing: sentence structure.

Prosaic? Why, yes. But sentence structure is to literature what formulas and circles and gesture use is to magic. It’s what brings things together and makes them work.

So, let’s see! What does Marquez do? And how do you write like Marquez?

1. Long sentences.

No huge secret there. Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets. Dickens wrote novels. Marquez wrote long sentences. It’s kind of his thing. Even the damned wiki of „The Autumn of the Patriarch” says it: „The book is written in long paragraphs with extended sentences.”

Why long sentences? Because they’re cool. Because your mind reads things aloud inside your head and it adds the right stops and commas wherever they’re needed – and a long-run sentence sounds cursive, as if the narrator didn’t stop from place to place for breath or for a change of idea, but kept going on and on, lost in the story.

Is that all? Heck, no. My textbook on Victorian literature also contained long sentences, but they weren’t really a pleasure to deal with.

2. No returns

Here be a quote from „The Autumn of the Patriarch”:

She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you’ll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother.

What I mean by „no returns” is this: in the flow of ideas within one sentence, do not suddenly return to a previous point, to a previous idea, to a previous setting. Keep going on with the narration, not back. Why? Because the reader will have to go back to the previous point as well, breaking his/her flow of the story. Maybe he/she will even be frustrated, because of the need to recall something that has already passed into an image that appeared in the past.

In other words, none of this: „She had said I’m tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which one speaks of the death of a distant relative, because in her heart God, too, was now dead„. The bold part is my mundane, non-impressive addition. What would this return do? Well, several things. It would round up the sentence and make it seem like a self-contained story. It would underline the idea said before. It would stir the reader into thinking they discovered something to hang on to – and they would hang there, so you would appeal to their mind rather than their dreams, on a certain level.

It would end a part of the story of the woman – and so would disconnect it from the other story, in which she asked her son to return bottles.

Also, returns, coupled with enough mysterious grammar, can create confusion. Sometimes it’s unintentional, sometimes it’s intentional. Check out John Milton’s opening sentence of „Paradise Lost”, which was definitely intentionally obfuscating:

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth
Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

I know it by heart. Why? Because it was only after reading it for what seemed like a couple hundred times that I could piece it back together into coherence. In case you’re curious about what’s there, but don’t have that much time/inclination, what it basically says is this: Muse, sing about the tree that got humanity kicked out of Eden until Jesus allowed us to get back to Heaven. You’re the one who talked to Moses and [who did other stuff], so I invoke you to help me do things that nobody else tried to do.

The sentence structure comes straight from hell in that one. Intentionally. Which is a situation extremely opposed to that of Marquez – because Milton had other purposes in mind. So, not saying returns are bad in and of themselves, but it really depends what you want to obtain in your writing. What you obtain also depends on…

3. Categories of words used

First of all, all categories here are arbitrary and they represent binaries because that’s more useful when it comes to illustrating my point. Don’t take them very seriously, but try to catch my point.

a. Concreteness vs. Abstraction

The more concrete and world-rooted you are, the more vivid the imagery. The more abstracted and concept-rooted you are, the more you encourage mental associations and the more you tell people to reason rather than feel. I’m not saying „Show, don’t tell” – this contains „Show, don’t tell.”

Marquez „The Autumn of the Patriarch” quote:

Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

That’s the opening sentence.

Concrete words and phrases: weekend, vultures, presidential palace, pecking, screens, balcony windows, flapping, wings, stir, stagnant, dawn, Monday, city, awoke, lethargy, breeze, man, dead, rotting.

Abstract words and phrases: time, centuries, great man, grandeur.

And I’m not sure about that divide. It’s not a very strict divide, but the fact is this: even if you look at ‘city’ as abstract for some reason, or consider ‘weekend’ abstract and ’time’ concrete, the general pattern is to have a lot of concrete details interlaced with a few unexpected abstract words. That’s why the audience can picture it so well – lots and lots of concreteness there, even if it’s some sort of metaphor.

Also, part of the concreteness: things are not named through abstraction, by category – but they’re named through specific instances. You can visualize some vultures pecking away at specific screens on certain balcony windows because Marquez implies these are specific objects in the world. Contrast to Hesse below.

After that, he can afford abstract philosophy, because you are already filled with sensation and you transfer it over the things which are nearly not at all concrete:

invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny.

Contrast Herman Hesse, who had a much more abstract style:

Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him.

Now, over here we have doctor, lawyer, engineer, curriculum, examinations – which could all be concrete types of words, representing something very specific in the world. But they’re not. They’re talking about generalized categories. It’s not this university, this doctor, this lawyer, this engineer, the Law curriculum. It’s simply ideas. Much less involvement from our senses, much more from our mind. He is telling us, not showing us, as it were. But it’s not a bad thing here, because Herman Hesse aims for entirely different goals than Marquez.

b. Adjectives and Adverbs vs. Nouns and Verbs

I was initially going to say ‘metaphors, comparisons and other such vs. direct description’. But that was a sucky title and not all that true.

When I was in primary school, in Romanian classes we had to learn about these things called „beautiful expressions”, which my mum hated so much that she probably set me forward on my path to becoming a decent writer by telling me to never use them. „Beautiful expressions” were these hackneyed comparisons and metaphors that had the role of ‘beautifying’ the text. I will translate a few I’ve just picked up from the net: (winter-related) „the clouds started sprinkling silver stars”, „snow settled over the land like a dazzling, white coat”, „the silver coat [of winter, aka snow]”, „shining silver flowers settle on the window”, „icy flowers painted on windows”. And so on and so forth. If you’re not native, they might sound interesting. If you’re Romanian you’ve probably heard them or variations thereof about a million times. You’ve been told to use them in stories as a primary school kid, as a homework assignment. Or stuff like that.

Well, guess what? Hackneyed expressions suck even when you’re in first grade. They ruin your creativity and make you think you need to use artifice for literature, which is false. We don’t live in Classicism anymore and even if we did…

Besides, as Marquez proves, you don’t need them to write amazingly beautiful prose. Going back to the quote which began with not wanting to beg God:

on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son

Mundane phrasing is quite alright, as long as the details are interesting and evocative enough: a basket of empty bottles. ‘A lot of empty bottles’ doesn’t cut it, because while we believe it to be true, it doesn’t bring up the same imagery, or it conjures too little. Add the basket and you get more than just a basket: you get a bent arm, or clenched fingers; an emphasis on the emptiness of the bottles, because you can almost hear them clinking as she moves, because we know how empty bottles sound; you get deliberation and the image of a careful, old-style woman. The parade, the ovations and the music are nothing special, wording-wise. But the image remains strong through its very direct, no-nonsense descriptions. It makes you a bit more involved with everything, less likely to be awed because you’re told this is where you get awed, but more likely to picture it and feel.

It’s a pattern Marquez tends to maintain: less flowery, more descriptive. Although it’s not universal (again the Patriarch novel):

the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory… announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.

But this is where you need to feel the awe, to take a step back and think of it, understand it abstractedly. Still, it’s brought up after a lot of time of doing the exact opposite of this, therefore increasing its strength, keeping metaphors fresh as a stylistic device, lending you much, much visceral understanding of the world and of what the concepts mean.

What I’m trying to say is: the less you use something, the stronger the use of that thing will become. In a story with barely any dialogue a single line stands out. In a concrete tale, an abstraction built on concreteness stands out.

There are probably other contrasts to be found. And other texts might have others. Binary categories are useful because if you understand what each side of the category produces, you can use that understanding to fuel your own text.

4. Richness and Succinctness

When you have a hell of a lot of exposition and not enough space, do what Marquez does: write the bare minimum and put it in less than a paragraph . This is why those long, long sentences shine for him: they’re full of additional background details, of short stories, of anything and everything. The amazing bulk of background, which gets some people launching into impossibly long (and boring) expositions, is turned into the frosting and decorations on the cake, is slipped in and made short and beautiful and interesting and mysterious.

Here’s a beautiful blend, same Marquez novel, not a whole sentence:

in shadows we saw the annex where government house had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unresolved briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from progress in order, the sleep-walking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.”

The bolds are mine. Look at that! How many stories are there? One about 5 generations getting married. One about a stable that used to be grand. One about a plague which a wagon had survived. One about a comet. One about a century of peace. And more! Does it need to say more?… No. Tantalizing bits, or bits referring to past events that the readers know, are already enough to fire up the imagination.

Marquez writes like he fits the whole world on the page by filling in little details where others would place adjectives. It’s not an old wagon, a battered wagon, a wagon falling apart. No. Those are all direct. It’s a wagon from the time of the plague – reference to a huge event in the past, glossed over.

Sometimes to cut things very, very short means to provide richness to your text. To throw the light in such a way as to make it seem that there are many shadows which could hide doors to other worlds and times.

But does this help you write?

That’s enough for today. It’s late and my article is too damned long. But hopefully it’s helpful.

The short answer is: yes. Yes, it might. It helped me. Here’s how: don’t use it in your story. You’ll probably hate it. Instead, open a new file. Try it on. See how it works for you. See if you can get the hang of it. Trust me, after a few hours of practicing this sort of thing it becomes so natural that if you think „I want something that has a nice flow and [this other trait]”, you’ll just do it automatically. No more of this concrete/abstract, no return, mini-stories for richness crap. It’ll just work because you’ll have the hang of it. And, of course, you can turn it on or off.

The humanities are crap at writing

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:02:37 +0000

Dear Humanities Peers, This Is iRrAtionaL

A year ago, when I was a Master’s student, I complained to a clever friend (also a web developer) about one of the texts I had to read for university. I told him it was horrible to read, that I could barely understand what the author wanted and I wasn’t entirely sure I got the point.

„Why didn’t the author draw a picture?” he asked me.

I thought, wow, this guy really doesn’t get it. He’s never been in the humanities! So, I set about explaining that this was a Serious Text and the humanities needed no illustrations, that books with pictures were more difficult to make, that the concept was too subtle to be shown through images, that… well, basically, I threw every single reason I could basically come up with at him and as I went through each one I realized that it was absolute crap.

The real answer is this: the humanities are bullshit at writing. And they are crap at explaining.

It’s a paradox. We’re all Men of Letters around here, or People of Culture. Words are the tools of the trade, explanations and debates are what we do. We throw ideas, we juggle concepts and yet we seem to be unable to find a single damned good editor who will cut that 7-line sentence into smaller pieces and make it comprehensible at a first reading. And I’m not talking about people who aren’t good at what they do, either. I’m talking a generalized, pathological issue: the Men of Letters find themselves unable to string together two sentences in such a manner as to allow a lay person to follow their point.

Here’s Some Trees From That Forest We Can’t See

Don’t believe me? Here’s some quotes illustrating the problem. And this isn’t at all about the quality of the ideas in the text, it’s about the insane level of complexity the sentence and paragraph structures reach. I’ll start with my own professors, because I know them and I know their works. They know their stuff, but they’re often close to unreadable.

Second year of undergraduate studies, Victorian Literature. Ioana Zirra’s textbook „Contributions of the 19th Century – the Victorian Age – to the History of Literature and Ideas”:

What J. Hillis Miller identifies as the general starting point for the Victorian writer’s subjective structure of identity, i.e., the painful momentary separation or alienation of one member of the community who will become (apotheotically) reintegrated at the novel’s end into the social system corresponds with Frye’s characterisation of low-mimetic literature as a kind of comedy in which the sharing of the etymological ”comos” is foregrounded; Frye also mentions the new order triumphantly installed at the end of comedy as a qualitatively superior avatar of the same ruling social type which has been only momentarily tested or disturbed (by the, psychoanalytically speaking this time, confrontation of society with its other) only to be reborn in a perfected form (which, speaking in critical theory or ideological Marxist terms, is tantamount to ”the legitimation” of society). (chapter 4)

That is a single sentence, my friends. And it takes a bit of re-reading to understand what it says. I remember re-re-reading it before the exam and thinking, „Wow, I hope she doesn’t ask any punctual questions, because I can barely remember what some terms are.” She did. I didn’t do so well.

Another quote, this time from Sorana Corneanu’s book, „Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition”, which I’m reading right now. It’s a splendid book and I love the topic, because right now I’m very interested in rationality, but I am honestly having difficulty following her.

Epicurean echoes in this general moral sense can also be detected in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), which includes a section on the way experimenting itself is “usefull for the cure of mens minds.” It can be that, Sprat argues, owing to its active nature. The passions of men’s minds (the “violent desires, malicious envies, intemperate joyes, and irregular griefs, by which the lives of most men become miserable, or guilty”) are mainly due to idleness, so that the “medicine” lies in “earnest employments” coupled with “innocent, various, lasting, and even sensible delights.” (page 80)

More humane in sentence structure, but full of quotes from the originals, often in their nigh-original spellings (I say nigh-original because I have the suspicion that the obsolete long S-es were replaced with the normal ’s’ that is still in use today). The book contains long paragraphs, often spanning more than half a page. If you’re not used to reading English from back when ‘useful’ was spelled with a double ’l’, your reading gets difficult, it slows down. Involuntarily, you can find yourself pausing a bit at the quotes as your mind is trying to signal that there’s something different in the text now than there was a second ago.

But are my former professors alone in this disease of complication? Definitely not. Let me quote Ricoeur’s „Oneself as Another”:

This sinister — though not exhaustive — enumeration of the figures of evil in the intersubjective dimension established by solicitude has its counterpart in the series of prescriptions and prohibitions stemming from the Golden Rule in accordance with the various compartments of interaction: you shall not lie, you shall not steal, you shall not kill, you shall not torture.

Yes, you can read it. Fluently? No. And that’s not just me. I’ve run across some goodreads reviews in my search for Ricoeur. One claimed that ‘15 pages per hour are a good pace’. Is it just because his ideas are so hard to get?… No. It’s also the language.

Jacques Derrida is similarly hard to read: he even coined the term différance as a deliberate homophone of différence. Come on, reader, spot the difference! Or maybe I should mention Bourdieu („the habitus is the work product of inculcation and appropriation necessary for those products of collective history that are the objective structures (eg, language, economics, etc..) able to reproduce The form of lasting dispositions in all organisms (which can, if you will, call individuals) permanently subject to the same packaging, then placed in the same material conditions of existence” – I’ve picked a random quote from Google, I don’t even care much where it’s from).

So, here I come and ask: why.

Let me make this clearer: WHY!

Why exactly are we doing this? Why are we, as humanists, accepting this situation in which our most profound texts must be our most obscure? Why do we never draw pictures? Why do we speak in winks and subtleties, in references which everybody should get (but maybe not all do), why do we seldom explain, why do we seldom bother to make our texts readable, pleasant, to let ideas shine through?

The humanities are crap at expressing themselves. We have no easy way to introduce new people into the system. We have few places where our core concepts and trends are explained in a friendly, easy manner. I see communities of programmers easing new people into programming languages, into concepts, into ideas and methods, providing help and support. What do we do? We huddle close together and sniff snobbishly at those below us – or, if we don’t, we just lose ourselves in our ivory towers.

A year ago, when my web developer friend suggested that we’re doing it wrong, I thought he was committing a sort of sacrilege. An academic book in the humanities is Something Special. It’s meant to be complex and hard to read, it’s not for everybody to understand. It wouldn’t stoop so low as to have pictures, or friendly diagrams, or a very comprehensible style. It’s not something you read easily and it shouldn’t be.

Well… Let’s stop there for a second. Why not? How much of the value of our ideas would be destroyed by saying them in a simpler way? Would Derrida’s theory of the infinite chain of signifiers be rendered invalid if I were to say it in a simple sentence? Or, God forbid, write it as computer code?1 If the answer is ‘yes’, something is obviously not right. It means that what we’re doing here is like a strange sort of art, like a Glass Bead Game that is very sophisticated and scholarly and referential and beautiful, but ultimately random and aimless. The theory somebody exposed would matter too little, as long as it held close to our standards of how things are done.

Or maybe the answer is ’no’. Derrida’s theory would still be Derrida’s theory. Ricoeur would still be Ricoeur. The humanities would not tumble and fall. In that case, why do we do it to ourselves? Why do we write impossible books and articles?

Look at science books. Do you know what stands out first? Structure. Clear chapters and subchapters, paragraphs, short sentences. Clarity. It’s funny how clarity in communication is not a staple of people who have to do with philology and books, but of engineers and programmers, of scientists and anybody but us. Heck, if you have wikipedia open to compensate for not knowing enough physics, Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity is easier to read than Derrida or Ricoeur.

At one point I thought this was natural. It’s how the humanities do it. Right now I find it a headache and just a generally wrong direction to be wandering in. Why are we doing this?

Maybe we have a sort of Freudian… erm… phallic envy. Programmers and scientists are so difficult to understand that everybody respects them. Maybe we want to prove that we’re the same. We can be difficult as well! We can be pretty incomprehensible to the layman. It’s not all ease and empty words, it’s hard!

Or maybe we’re so damned high up on our high horses that we can’t take lessons. Screw editors, our egos need to be fed. No word of ours shall be changed, no phrasing can possibly do but our own. We are the rulers here and we take no directions, we let nobody impose anything on us!

A sadder case would be if we can’t act any differently. If indeed many people out there are right and we can’t, in fact, keep our ideas coherent enough in our heads that we can express enumerations as bullet-point lists. Maybe we can’t draw a simple rectangles-and-arrows sort of logical image that would help others understand our theory. Maybe we simply can’t put stuff in a table because our brains are muddled from too little maths. We can’t tell what we’re all talking about, so we’re wandering about in the dark, touching things – and whenever we come across something that seems new, we coin a new word. Or we come up with a new theory. We change the meaning of something. Instead of trying to come closer together and get some sort of general map of the things we deal with, we indulge in strife, in an aspiration for uniqueness which are so blinding that we barely see past our own noses. The world goes on and we wonder why nobody cares, why nobody realizes what amazing treasures our own little corner of knowledge holds.

Or perhaps this is the way it’s always been done? For all of our supposed innovation, we’re sticking to old norms that have always been around. This is the way texts before us have been written and this is how we will write – if we were to write more freely, more simply, more coherently, using smaller words and providing clearer explanations, we might lose our respectability.

But in the end, this is how it is: with just a few rare exceptions (like Linda Hutcheon or some of the fanfiction-theorizing authors I encountered in my reading for my MA paper), we suck at writing. Our heroes suck at writing. Our professors and colleagues and all those around us suck at writing. Instead of seeing this as the handicap it really is, we treat it like a badge of honor. Instead of searching for simplicity and elegance of style, we search for big, pompous words. We hide behind notions invented by bigger names than our own and dodge criticism by becoming obscure.

What we’re actually doing is turning a weakness into a subtle art and we’re either not noticing that we’ve done so, or we’re pretending it’s a quality.

Who’s willing to make the overdue change to readability already?

Footnote 1: I've wanted to do this ever since I understood what Derrida was all about.
There's something about this one theory that reminded me of my high school Turbo Pascal
classes. I could just see the crazy code flying.
So.
-create a Word class, with one variable for spelling and one for pronunciation
-add a pointer variable, which you call Meaning. Have 'Meaning' refer to another Word.
-put in a number of Words and make certain that all their Meaning variables point to other
Words (no NIL references)
-start a while loop, saying that the meaning of the word is equal to Word.Meaning; the meaning
should, of course, be a Word, so it can be referred to by your pointer.
-the end condition for the while loop is 'when Word.Meaning is not a pointer'

Congratulations! You now have a system in which every word's meaning refers to the meaning of
another word, never taking you to any actual, real thing that would be what the word really
means. You can go on forever and ever searching for that meaning.

In other words, yeah. You've got an infinite loop. Welcome to Derrida 1.01.

NaNoWriMo had an idea (but didn't mention it)

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 12:07:45 +0000

This post is in English because whatever.

So, apparently the biggest „Let’s write!!!” thing in the online world, NaNoWriMo is hosting a very stealthy event on April 13: the NaNoWriMo Writing Marathon. Where you sit down for 8 hours and write, or something of the sort.

For the record, I love NaNo. It’s the sort of thing that gets you to sit down and start writing instead of sitting down and thinking of writing. 50.000 words in November. Well, the combo of writing too much, keeping your eyes on the word count and not taking the time to think things through usually means that the actual output is crap… But whatever. I love NaNo because it kicks people into gear and gets them to do something. And the bigger it gets, the more chances you have of getting in touch with other writers in your area and therefore meeting interesting new people.

I’m not sure I’ll join the April 13 event. I’m already writing 😛 But if you’re interested in a bit of writing hype, well, why not?

One thing I don’t get, however, is why they decided to make what is essentially a fund-gathering event a hushed up, silent event. Sure, I got a notification via e-mail telling me there’d be an April 13 Writing Marathon, but there’s nothing about it on their home page. Nor can I see any „Marathon” button in the menu. It’s like an invite-only donation derby. O_o