Happy New Year of the Cat/Rabbit for those who celebrate. (I’m firmly in Cat territory)

Part 2 of the Codexian blog tour, in which the amazing Nancy Fulda tells us about writing and sculpture:

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The Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo once said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

He also said: “The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.”

In this, I think, sculpting is not so very different than writing. As authors, we stand like Michelangelo before the lump of our incompleted stories, stupefied not by lack of ideas, but by their plethora. An unfinished story is full of potential. It might become anything: an action-adventure saga, a conflicted character story, an incisive satire.

It is this potential that dazzles us. And it is this same potential which so often causes us to stumble.

A story is defined, not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Faced with the rough surface of a draft that has not yet been freed from the stone, the writer might feel tempted to do it all: concentrate on character and plot and symbolism and prose style. He is afraid to cut away too much, and so his chisel strokes are awkward, and hesitant, and ultimately unsatisfactory. The angel within the stone remains buried beneath a jumble of beautiful clutter.

Michelangelo said, “The more the marbles wastes, the more the statue grows.” This is, I believe, an early incarnation of the well-known injunction to Murder Your Darlings.

All life is nurtured by death, and a story is defined not so much by what it is, but by what it is not. Our fiction cannot take on life unless we are willing destroy all of the beautiful possibilities but one: the best one. We must be willing to slay the poetic character story in order to set the action-adventure free. We must murder the satire so that drama can rise from its ashes.

I hear objections shouted from the crowd already.

Yes, of course it’s possible to mingle plot with characterization. Like Abraham, we are sometimes spared from destroying something precious in the pursuit of something we treasure even more. But let’s remember something about Abraham: he was firm in his priorities.

You want a deeply conflicted protagonist who fights bad guys with paperclips, and by the way, he loves to compose limericks? Fair enough, but you’d better figure out which of those three elements is most important to you, because if any of the others get in its way, you’re going to have to clear them out. Failure to do so will imprison your angel.

This is why critique groups can be so frustrating, by the way. Each critiquer gives voice to one of the thousand Stories-That-Might-Have-Been. Each of them calls for a distinct, if superficially similar, narrative. It’s no wonder new authors sometimes feel lost in the babble.

The only solution is to find your angel. Your angel, not anyone else’s.

In other words, find your rough draft’s dominant draw — the aspect of the story that ignites your aesthetic passion, the part of it you love most. That’s your angel.

A story’s ending is often indicative, here. Critiquers may complain that the end doesn’t mesh with themes presented earlier. That’s because the writer was still exploring ideas. At the end of the first draft, when it’s time to wrap things up, his subconscious emphasizes those elements which have become most meaningful to him — and they are often not the same elements that dominated the opening scenes.

For heaven’s sakes, folks, don’t smother your angels! Be very cautious if someone tells you to change your ending. Ask yourself whether it’s the beginning that ought to change, instead.

Find your angel, writers. Don’t stop carving until you’ve set him free.

And if it seems like a lot of work along the way? And if we’re tempted to feel jealous of the people who do it better than we do?

Well, a certain Renaissance sculptor once said: “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.”

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Nancy Fulda’s fiction has appeared in venues including Asimov’s, Jim Baen’s Universe, and Norilana Books’ Warrior, Wisewoman anthology. She is a Phobos Award recipient, a two-time WOTF Finalist, and an assistant editor at Jim Baen’s Universe. Nancy also manages the custom anthology web site at http://www.anthologybuilder.com, where visitors can assemble a print-ready anthology of stories by prominent authors. Nancy keeps a blog at http://nancyfulda.livejournal.com. She lives in Germany with her husband, their three children, and no cats. You can order a collection of her short fiction here.

Blog’s going dark–will respond to comments and other pending stuff in a bit. I’m off to finish drafting that %%% book before the internet can terminally distract me.

In the meantime, the Codex blog tour is under way, and you can find me over at Nancy Fulda’s blog, Suite101 (courtesy of fellow AR author Colin Harvey), and Lawrence M. Schoen’s blog. Many thanks to my wonderful interviewers for lending me a bit of space on the internet–and stay tuned for more guest posts on this blog (after the novel is done, of course…)

Also, my short story “After the Fire”, originally published in Apex, has been reprinted in Descended from Darkness Vol 2, a compilation of Apex short stories for the past year. (a sneaky way for me to share a TOC with the always awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz).

That’s all. I’m off to usher in the Apocalypse….

So, in the coming weeks, I’ll be taking part in the Codexian blog tour, which aims to feature fellow Codex writers–in this particular case, through guest blogs. First at the bat is Gareth D. Jones, who talks about languages and translations.

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For a relatively little-known author, my stories have been translated into a surprising number of languages – 20 at the last count. I’ve always been interested in languages, leading me to investigate other tongues that don’t have any established markets for genre fiction, make contact with friendly translators and ask them to translate some of my very short flash fiction. My 100 word story ‘The Gondolier’ is now available in 33 languages, many of them appearing on my own website. Altogether you can read some of my stories in 38 languages, from Afrikaans to Welsh.

Aside from having my work translated, this interest has led me to spend quite some time considering how to deal with languages in my fiction. It’s easy to create characters who all speak English and share a cultural background similar to mine, but a large portion of science fiction is set somewhere in the future, or on another world, or amongst alien species. It’s not very likely that they’ll all conveniently speak English.

The problem is, I don’t feel very confident about creating characters from other real-life cultures who speak different languages. I have no problem creating a new species or inventing a culture, but I’m afraid that if I populate my story with, for example, French characters, I’ll end up writing horribly clichéd dialogue that will make genuine French people cringe. It will be like those characters in US dramas with fake English accents using American expressions that British people don’t use.

There are several ways around the language dilemma, and my experience with translations has given me some insights on the matter:

• Ignore it. Don’t even mention language. After all, in my stories that appear in Greek, everyone speaks Greek.
• Have everyone speak a common language, as in Jack Vance’s Gaean Reach, or Asimov’s Empire. Add planetary accents for variety.
• Oblige everyone to learn an artificial language. In Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld everyone learns Esperanto. This allows you to include cultural variety without worrying about language barriers.
• Supply Universal Translators, or a Protocol Droid fluent in 5 million forms of communication. Once the concept is introduced, you can write all the dialogue in English (or whatever language you happen to be writing in).
• Mention at the outset which language everybody is speaking, but then write in English anyway. This introduces the problem of using idioms and expressions that don’t appear in the language you’ve chosen, and phrases that rely on
  homonyms to have any meaning.

If I set a story in a far-future galaxy-spanning culture, do I assume that individual planets will maintain cultural identities inherited from Earth, or will mankind have become homogenous? The answer doesn’t always have to be the same. It doesn’t have to be politically correct either – there’s no reason to assume society will maintain the same values thousands of years from now.

Here are some of the things I’ve tried in various stories:

• A story set in Wales, where I’ve taken expressions my relatives use to make the characters sound authentic.
• A far-future tale where various ethnically diverse, bio-engineered colonists have settled on the same planet and have almost become separate sub-species. A human translator is needed for part of this story, but I’ve made him a character in his own right so that he adds to the translation rather than being a distraction. Others speak a common tongue, but in a Tolkienesque way they maintain their own ‘old tongues’. It was fun to work out how they would interact.
• A section of the novel I’m writing takes place on a Scottish colony planet. I’ve had a genuine Scot translate some of the dialogue into Scots for me. The worry now is that it will be too difficult to read and may have to be Anglicised. And how would that ever be translated into another language?

I am constantly impressed by the work of the translators. In the Catalan translation of ‘Roadmaker’, the translator resorted to a footnote to explain an untranslatable point. This was for a homonym that the character gets confused over. Evidently the equivalent words in Catalan are not at all similar, so there is no reason he would get confused in that language. It’s at this point that I have to stop thinking too hard on the matter, for fear that I’ll end up writing in simplistic language to make it easier on the translators.

There are six thousand languages and dialects on Earth. It’s worth including at least some of them in our fiction.

Gareth D Jones is from the UK. His stories have appeared in over forty publications and twenty languages. He also writes reviews and drinks lots of tea. Work of his is forthcoming in The Immersion Book of Steampunk, published by Immersion Press.

Coming up next: Nancy Fulda talks about writing and art.

I completely forgot to post about this, but book 3 now has an official title: Master of the House of Darts (yes, I know. It looks kind of the old unsuitable title, but after thinking it over AR feel that the coolness of it offsets the, er, sheer length of the thing). Release date: November 2011.

I’m currently around 75% of the way in, entering the big ugly climax with a ton of dangling plot threads. The H assures me this is business as usual 🙂

Has it never struck you that the word for “mama” is about the same in so many languages? It’s hardly a 100% scientific survey, but we went through French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Vietnamese, Russian and Romanian [1], and it’s pretty much always a combination of “m”s and “a”s? (“papa” varies across languages, but “mama” doesn’t)

So, what? Is that a combinations of syllables that are easier to pronounce when you’re a baby? Did I miss the memo on universal bits of the language?

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[1]just in case you’re wondering why those particular languages, it’s not some sinister conspiracy–just the particular subset of languages that happened to be known by the assembly at a friends’ party where we discussed this.

-A few Harbinger reviews: Falcata Times, Gillian Polack, the Outhousers. And a less enthusiastic, though still very interesting one over at Solar Bridge. Money quote: “De Bodard is dangerously addictive.” Can I put that on my website?

-Orson Scott Card interview over at Goodreads

-Shweta Narayan’s excellent “Eyes of Carven Emerald” from Clockwork Phoenix 3 is online at SFSignal. I love her approach to steampunk (think Hindu/Muslim), and her narrative structures are always interesting. Here, a tale of Alexandros’ conquests is interleaved with excerpts from a fairy tale set in India. Check it out!

-Via the World SF blog: The Rough Guide to Modern Malaysian Science Fiction and Fantasy. Fascinating read.

-Reposting a fascinating comment by Dylan Fox on ebook issues (which came either from John Scalzi or Paul Cornell, we’re not sure): publishers think that readers buy hardbacks for early availability, so they priced early release ebooks the same as hardbacks or higher. Whereas readers tend to buy hardbacks “because they look good and last longer, they’re more tactile and look better on our shelves, which are the exact qualities that ebooks lack”. Interesting…

-And, talking about ebooks…. Six e-book trends to watch for in 2011. Some interesting stuff in there.

–Jeff Vandermeer on short fiction anthology Leviathan 5: “This anthology, the latest in the World Fantasy Award winning and PKD award finalist series, will focus on weird fiction and fantasy from newer writers, probably defined as writers with two or fewer books published in English. We are going to do something fairly unprecedented in the history of genre and have between 15 and 20 associate/foreign language editors in other countries so that many writers who do not write in English would be able to submit. Up to 30,000 words of the 100,000 words might be fiction newly translated for Leviathan 5.”. I’ve ranted enough about the prevalence of English language on the SF scene, and this seems like a great way to showcase a more diverse set of writers to the English-speaking crowd. More at the link–including various ways to help out the project.

Well, not for me, but “The Shipmaker” is obviously getting some massive doses of love this year. It’s been picked up by Allan Kaster for his The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 3, which is going to be available as an audio book and as a ebook some time in April. Haven’t seen a TOC, but I believe it will include “The Things” by Peter Watts (also on the BSFA shortlist and in Dozois’ Year’s Best) and “Re-crossing the Styx” by Ian MacLeod (also in Dozois’ Year’s Best). Pretty good company so far.
(I’ve actually known this for a while, but clean forgot to post about it due to some RL stuff).

This post brought to you by the department of shameless self-promotion. See previous post if you want actual blog content.

There has been a lot of debate on the internet about the ethics of ebook piracy, a lot of which boiled down to “piracy is stealing”. I’m not saying I disagree with that, but…

Well, you should check out this links roundup from troisroyaumes over on dreamwidth, which is a little more measured. Specifically, it focuses on problematic issues with intellectual property rights seen the Western way. The part that especially resonates with me, book-wise (but there’s more here than that), was people discussing the availability of books (whether physical or electronic) in developing countries, and their price–which is a not-insignificant part of the problem. I’ve always thought that asking people to pay US prices for books or DVDs was ridiculous: take Vietnam, where the average salary is 50$. With that, if you’re lucky, you can buy maybe two English hardbacks? (and I’m being nice here, because I’m assuming said hardbacks aren’t subject to import duties). As qian points out, in Malaysia, an imported English book can cost 7-8 times the price of a meal, and getting it is a terrible hassle. I can see why it would give her the unpleasant feeling that “in almost every case, the author is not even contemplating that somebody like you will be reading it. You quite simply do not exist in their world.”

I’m already getting that impression of being ignored from all those ebook piracy posts–and I live in a developed country with high salaries, reasonable access to English-language books (amazon, book depository, few or no import taxes). I can imagine how much freaking worse it would be for people in developing countries.

ETA: fantasyecho has a further links roundup–some overlaps, but there are a few not in the original DW post. Like the earlier one–don’t agree with anything, but a lot of points are definitely worth taking into account.

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Also, one of those linked posts has a very valid point, which is that “illegal” is not a synonym for “immoral”. A lot of those blog posts about piracy don’t make a clear distinction between those two words. “illegal” is what the state thinks is bad. “immoral” is what you think is bad according to personal ethics–and if it’s exactly the same as “illegal” for you, no more, no less, you’re demonstrating a scary amount of trust in your government…

Wow, that was fast. Courtesy of Andy Cox and the Interzone editorial team, you can now find “The Shipmaker” online, over at the TTA press website. Do feel free to come back here and comment on it after you’ve read it–any and all feedback appreciated.

(while you’re at it, you can read another shortlisted story, Nina Allan’s “Flying in the Face of God”, which is definitely worth spending some time with)

I swear there will be actual content on this blog soon, and not shameless self-promotion–but for that, my %%% fever is going to have to come down (`tis the season to be sick, apparently. 39°C and counting…)