2005-06-13 - 9:24 a.m.
I read for pleasure, dammit!
Welcome to AoD's amazing store of random things you never thought you'd have to know, but hey, you can't ever tell when something might come in useful. I hang on to things I read. It's a curse. I can remember the plot points of bad novels I read as a child (and some I read fairly recently, then burned in the woodstove because dismemberment was too good for them). Fortunately, I remember the good ones, too. I also am a fount of goofy trivia that really never comes in handy except when people are playing the "ask Laura something really obscure, because she knows *everything*" game (Bob plays a variation of this I've mentioned before: "tell Bob the title of a song written between 1950 and 1980 and he can sing it for you"). Seriously. But - I picked up several good books on Elizabethan England yesterday, and the Michael Moorcock "Jewel in the Skull" quartet that I haven't read since I was 9 years old, but still remember most of the dialogue from. (Yes, I know mountains-worth of useless trivia, but I always end my sentences in prepositions. Deal.) I look forward to reading it again, then going "huh - why did I think this was good?". I have a tendency to do that with books I haven't read in many years - the taste of a ten-year-old differs rather from a person of 35 (usually). Maybe I'll be lucky, and it will still seem good, but in the past, I have learned that I can never read anything by Piers Anthony or Anne McCaffrey (with one exception) ever again, and that the Lord of the Rings should really have met up with the Lord of the Editing Desk before publication (I tend to skip large wads of the story these days). I am a curmudgeon about fantasy writing, I know. That's because I used to love it so much, and read and re-read all my books to the point that I knew them by heart, and could simply recite the book to myself when I was lying in bed, unable to sleep. I adored my books - I still do. The reason I have so many (that aren't research books, though I've got an assload of those, too) is *because* I read them over and over again - sometimes I go thrift store hunting just to find a book I remember from twenty years ago, and I want to read it again (Alibris and Amazon have shortened this exercise considerably, but I still go thrifting first, because it's cheaper). Once upon a time, I could recite the entire "Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" radio script - not because I thought it was cool, but because I'd read it so many times (and listened to the record, but I used to read it over and over again - I was a hit at sci-fi conventions, I can tell you). Somewhere along the way, though, the bottom dropped out of my love affair with fantasy. Partly it was because my real life was so happy - who needs to escape into a book when life is good? - and the alternate reality was no longer needed (unlike my rather fraught teenage years), but I think it was also that fantasy writing just sucks for the most part (vis. K. Vonnegut: "99% of everything is crap"), and I couldn't block that out anymore. Bob, who writes extremely well, says that no matter how good your hook is, if you don't have a good plot and a dramatic story to tell, it's going to suck. Some of my favourite fantasy writers - Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham, Vonnegut, Susan Cooper (children's author, but even better than J.K. Rowling for crafting an intelligent, well-paced, *exciting* book) - all had hooks in their stories. But they all wove the story around the lives and/or motivations of their *characters*, not the hook. The hook draws you in, but it has no substance; it's the people that keep you there. The other trouble with a hook is that it has a limited shelf life (har!). When the hook has gone stale, you need to find a new one, not try and revive the old one with smelling salts and cold compresses (sespecially since some of them were so weak to begin with that CPR wouldn't help). The current trend of incredibly long serial book-writing (Book Ten in The Fourth Trilogy of the Seventh Encyclopedia of the Blah Chronicles!) doesn't work well because the hook and story is like a sponge - once it's squeezed dry, you're stuck with either going back to the well for a new hook, or sucking on the sponge until you have really bad breath, and no-one wants to buy your books anymore. (And that last paragraph, ladies and gentlemen, is why I don't write fiction.) This endless series writing encourages lazy writing, too - the author doesn't have to wrap up the story, just write another book. If the first couple of books are good, then fans will automatically buy all the rest, no matter how bad they get, and the publishing house loves it, because they have a cash cow they can milk for years. There are very few books out there that are part of a longer series that also stand well alone - the first few books of a series (I'll be conservative, and say the first three or so) are often whole stories, but after that, after the drama starts drying up, the writing gets lazier, and characters start appearing that make no sense unless you've read the previous five books, which are invariably out of print. The running dry on an idea has happened to most writers I liked - the Xanth series, the Thieves World series, the Myth books, Christopher Stasheff's Wizard books (and he mentions the SCA in his books), the Dragonrider books - they all wither away eventually because, like network TV, drama is what makes a book interesting. Either the drama dries up, and the events start to look contrived (how unlucky can one person be), the last big drama in the last book was so huge that it's really hard to get worked up over the next one ("okay, we saved the planet - what's next?"), or the same people keep screwing up their lives so badly, it starts to feel like an episode of "Cops", not a tragic epic. Even Odysseus went home eventually. I find continual conflict depressing to read - I get enough unsolvable conflict-watching from the real world. I could never read Marion Zimmer-Bradley, for instance, because the people in her novels were all leading such *depressing* lives. If I run into people like that in real life, I avoid them - she created whole *worlds* of catastrophically unlucky and bad-tempered and bitter people. ...actually, that dislike of depressing stories would explain why I find Anne Rice so excruciating to read as well - depressed vampires, no matter how cute, are *so* not enough to drive a series of books. How about some Vampires that actually *like* themselves and don't screw up all the time?. *sigh* I used to love fantasy novels so much. There are still some I love, re-read, and would recommend to anyone - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's one-off novel "Inferno" is fantastic - funny, thoughtful, and cheering, in a rather fatalistic sort of way. Ray Bradbury's short stories transport me every time I read them. Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" is the story I use to explain why people can be such bastards to those who are exceptional in any field, and you know, though I am bored by most of Anne McCaffrey's books now, I still *love* "Restoree"; another one-off book that is a delightful love story and a fun read. I like Science Fiction writing more - though SF is often really just fantasy in space/the future, especially from John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson. I love horror novels, too - fantasy that explores the side of things we're more uncomfortable thinking about. Proper horror novels, mind you, not cheap thriller crap. Stephen King and James Herbert and Peter Straub and Bentley Little - they're less about nasty things than about the whole world slipping sideways into a fantasy land - a dark fantasy, but still clearly a fantasy. James Herbert is the best at this - if you're interested, I reccommend "Once...", "The Others", and "The Magic Cottage". Obviously, I like supernatural stuff better than psychos. Psychos are just people more screwed up than me - in a world with John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Dennis Nilsson, Freddy and Jason and Norman Bates don't seem that scary (though the first two are somewhat supernatural, their chosen mayhem is too prosaic to count as fantasy). I hope the "Jewel in the Skull" lives up to my memories of it. I got my first copies at a book fair held by my primary school in 1979 - for 50 pence. This set cost me $9. Then I shall have to go back and visit with Mr Bradbury again. "The October Country" is his finest set of short stories, and you should all read them. Fantasy lives.
Dorsal - Ventral
Funnier than me: James Lileks disclaimer!
all words copyright Laura Mellin 2000-2005
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