I'm Going to Continue on This Topic a Bit Longer

I thought of another story which seems to me to be a classic neat idea tale: "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov. It's about an alien planet where night falls only rarely, due to a lot of suns. When night does fall, and people see the stars, they burn everything they can find out of terror -- and their civilization collapses.

The last time I reread it, I noticed it is not well written. But it will stay with me till my memory fails.

Asimov was not an especially good writer, but I remember the Foundation stories and the robot stories. Is there anyone reading this blog who cannot recite the three laws of robotics? How about psychohistory? Do we all remember how it works?

This kind of story is core to SF, as are ideas. I suspect ideas are not as important to fantasy, though there's a lot of fantasy written by science fiction writers that turns on ideas.

For example, a very simple story by Avram Davidson, about what happens when the U.S. government breaks a treaty with an Indian tribe, which is supposed to last -- per language in the treaty -- "as long as the sun shines and grass grows."

Davidson was a fine writer, but the story is mostly about its idea.

Implicit in Justine's remark (I think) is the idea that SF is about character and plot and style and mood.

Nope.

I'm not sure any kind of fiction is ultimately about character, plot, style and mood.

Jane Austen's novels are beautifully written and plotted and full of wonderful characters, but what they are about is the English upper classes' blood-chilling focus on money, in spite of all their talk about morality and sentiment.

And they are also about the fact that women in the upper and middle classes have to focus on money, because they have no reasonable way to make a living. If they don't marry well, they will be poor.

These are ideas.

I suspect that any fiction which does not have an interesting idea at its core is not worth reading, except as entertainment. Not that entertainment is bad.

I don't think there are any ideas in P.G. Wodehouse, though I keep looking for one. His writing really is about his amazing skill as a writer.

And one could argue that producing concept free art is itself a kind of idea about art. "Look," Wodehouse says. "Art need not be about anything except a dazzling performance. It can be utterly pointless and still be thoroughly satisfying."

Finally, a personal note. I grew up around avant garde artists, and their art really was about ideas. Although I write popular fiction, my basic values are the ones I learned as a kid. Art should do something new. It should ask questions and push limits.

My apologies to Kelly and the rest for hammering this into the ground.

Continuing the Preceding Post

This is more about ideas. Maybe it tells you something silly about me, but I am very proud of places where I did something that strikes me as a bit new. I once ended a story with five morals -- five good and useful morals -- because you are not supposed to have morals at the end of a SF story.

When I started sending out stories, editors kept telling me that they didn't see the point of the stories. What were they about? So my second novel ends with my characters spending fifty pages discussing the meaning of their adventure. It's been years since I read the novel, so I can't remember their conclusion.

The discussion struck me as neat and funny. It meant readers -- especially editors --had the explanation they wanted, and I was not in any way responsible for the explanation, since it came from my characters.

I had given readers the meaning requested, but since this meaning came from chracters within the novel, it was a meaning in the novel and not the meaning of the novel, the author's meaning.

No one has ever complained about the ending of the novel or told me that they couldn't figure out what the novel was about.

When I do things like this, it seems to me I'm dealing with ideas, not character or plot or mood. Can you end a story with a moral and still have it work? Well, yes, but why have only one moral? Can you end a story with a long explanation and not have the readers turn against you? Yes, I think so, though I can't remember any reviews of that novel. I am pretty sure I did not get any angry letters.

Yet Again Ideas

I keep feeling, without having much evidence, that ideas are not easy. I wrote a story titled "Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota," which was a time travel story. These are hard to write, because time travel is supposed to be impossible; and I felt -- if the story didn't have something new to say about time and time travel, it was going to be about nothing. I struggled with the story for months and years, collecting copies of Science News and New Scientist with articles about time travel and odd quantum effects. The problem with time travel is mostly one of causality. Physics says that effects cannot precede causes; or maybe it doesn't say this. There are theoretical physicists who think time travel is possible.

Anyway, in the end I did some hand waving. But the story actually does say something about time and history, though nothing based on physics theory.

Sometimes the ideas are less difficult than the working out of the ideas.

The idea that is the basis of my hwarhath stories is simple: what if there was a society where homosexuality was normal and heterosexuality was perverted? I think had to figure out in detail how this kind of society might come to be and what it would be like. In the end, I wrote two novels and ten + stories about the hwarhath and their society, mostly to explore the consequences of my original "what if."

Plot ideas come fairly easily for me. I never worry about my ability to work my way out of plot problem.

But saying something new and original is not easy; and I'm not claiming that I always manage to do this. But I do abandon stories, if they are becoming familiar -- hey, I've already said this, and I don't have to say it again; and I do stop and rethink stories, if I feel they are becoming ordinary or inevitable.

More on Ideas

I started this off as a response to Eleanor's post, but it metastasized, so I'm moving it up front.

My take on ideas as the easy part is that producing the basic idea isn't all that much work by comparison to the other parts of writing a book. It can take no more than a few minutes and sometimes happens as a subconscious process.

Doing the research, blocking out what to do with the idea, and writing and polishing the book can take anywhere from months to years of hard work. That's certainly been the case for me. The core of even the best of my story ideas have happened in a flash or the length of a dream. Crafting that idea into an actual story is what takes real time and major effort.

I'm a relatively fast writer--I've written a 5,000 word story that sold in single day and a novel that went on to be published in under six months. In that same six months I came up with dozens of new story ideas. Most of them were discarded, but a few went into the ideas file, a few got plotted out for possible later use, and one even became the next novel. I've had hundreds of novel ideas that I think are really cool and thousands that I've thought would make a decent book. I've only written a dozen because the writing is where the work and the effort go.

Is the production of the initial idea easy in absolute terms? I suppose that depends on the writer. In my case, I can't not produce story ideas in job lots.

Is it easy by comparison to taking the core of the idea and doing the research and reshaping needed to make it into something you could hang a book on? That's certainly been my experience. Is it really easy compared to the actual months long day-in-day-out effort of writing and polishing the actual novel? Again, that been my experience.

More than that, idea generation is pure unadulterated joy, especially if you can get someone else to do the fiddly bits. One of the most entertaining things we do as writers group* is sit around and brainstorm solutions to story problems. I always find that to be an electric experience. Dozens of ideas get thrown out in a matter of minutes, batted around, added to, twisted, knocked down, thrown out--it's like eight-way tennis with ten balls, some of which have really strange properties. And, if it's not my story we're talking about, I don't even have to make the implementation work.

So yes, I think idea generation is easy for a certain value of easy.

--------------------------------------
*at least for me.

Ideas

I'm not sure ideas are the easy part. There's a whole tradition in SF of neat idea stories, where the writing is competent at best, and the characters don't really matter, but the ideas are wonderful. Think of the best Heinlein: "All Your Zombies" and "The House That Jack Built."

These are the stories that C.S. Lewis talks about, when he talks about myth. What matters is not style or character or mood or whatever, it's the story itself. These stories retain power when you simply describe the plot.

I don't remember much about Fire on the Deep, the Vernor Vinge novel, except that the basic laws of physics varied by where you were in space, so fast interstellar travel was possible in some regions, but not others; and the entire galaxy had an Internet, so as the novel's action line developed, there was constant interstellar commentary on what was happening. Two nifty ideas. The plot is gone from my mind; I don't remember the characters; but I remember the ideas.

I need a reason to write a story, and a lot of times the reason is an idea, or several ideas. I don't usually finish or keep a story that doesn't have a point, which is also usually an idea.

I realize as I write this that I don't really know what Justine means by idea.

The Sweetest Words...

The Sweetest Words in the English language: THE END.

I wrote them last night on the first draft of Dead If I Do (which is due at the publisher at the end of this month.) Now it's off to my beta readers, who will no doubt give me lots of suggestions for improvement, which I will follow. Then my partner reads it last, and I make final changes and usually copy edits.

So, it a way it's not an ending, but the beginning...

Head Full of Goo

This is my official apology to all allergy sufferers for any lack of sympathy I might ever have shown on that front. Never before in my life have I been in the position of hoping that I was coming down with a cold. Unfortunately, at the moment I don't think that I am. I think instead that I have developed some sort of pollen allergy after 40 blissful years of not being significantly allergic to anything. My head feels like it's packed with cotton, I can't stop making typos, my left eye keeps tearing up, and my nose is doing an amazing impression of a faucet with a bad washer. Since it's all naso-sinal (or however that should be expressed) even the eye thing and there are zero secondary symptoms I'm afraid that I must assume the worst. Bleah. Bleah! BLEAH!

Calling all WisCon authors

Attending Wiscon this year? Have books in print? Let Elizabeth at Dreamhaven know...yesterday would be best.

Doing a panel at Wiscon and have books you're planning to recommend? Likewise

Email address to use for both these things is:

wiscon (at) dreamhavenbooks.com

Any assistance in passing the word along is greatly appreciated.

Elizabeth needs to order books NOW (actually, last week would have been better) and she doesn't know who's going to be there.

Brasstrolabes, anyone?

The New York Times, no less.

Steampunk has definitely arrived.

And they didn't mention Jay Lake. Odd.

Smart Things--Genre Feuds

So, PNH at Making Light had a link to Charles Stross's tongue in cheek manifesto on the The New Eclectics, which is in and of itself a smart piece of work critiquing the whole manifesto thing and carrying a lot of water in very light bucket. In turn, the Stross piece seems to have been generated by a comment thread on Elizabeth Bear's lj which came out of a very brief post and link to an incredibly smart piece by Richard Morgan on the wasted energy involved in F&SF genre feuds.

All very fun and very smart and part of why I try not to get involved in comparisons of the relative merits of genres and sub-genres. I do do it occasionally, but I invariably regret it.

Smart Thing--Ideas=Cheap and Plentiful

Justine Larbalestier is saying smart things about ideas being the easy part

Re-Direct: More on SF Publishing Woes

Though not directly addressing the issue of why fantasy outsells science fiction, John Scalzi has an interesting take on adult SF vs. YA: Who Lost Scott Westerfeld?

Regarding the Wombat

(Originally posted in December 2006.)

"[The wombat] burrowed in the ground whenever it had an opportunity, and covered itself in the earth with surprising quickness. It was quiet during the day, but constantly in motion in the night: was very sensible to cold; ate all kinds of vegetables; but was particularly fond of new hay, which it ate stalk by stalk, taking it into its mouth like a beaver, by small bits at a time. It was not wanting in intelligence, and appeared attached to those to whom it was accustomed, and who were kind to it. When it saw them, it would put up its forepaws on the knee, and when taken up would sleep in the lap. It allowed children to pull and carry it about, and when it bit them did not appear to do it in anger or with violence."

—Everard Home (1809)

Platypus Unbound!

They have sequenced Senor Platypus!

Just because that creature is the effective outcome of the four blind men/elephant story.

Bad Reviews

I don't know how Lyda and Tate manage to be so even tempered about bad reviews. They go into me like a knife.

The really bad ones are usually by readers, Critics usually treat me more gently, maybe because they know how sensitive I am; and I think most critics have better manners than many readers. They know they are going to have to meet writers or the friends of writers at cons.

I've had readers go all frothy about about how I am a man-hating feminist. I am certainly a feminist, but I have never thought of myself as especially hostile to men. My partner is a man. My brother is a man, as are many cousins and a lot of my friends. These are all people I like a lot.

I don't like prejudice, and I don't like social hierarchies. I try to take individuals as I find them.

I got the frothing response to a story titled "The Garden," which is very sweet story about a hwarhath man who doesn't want to go into space like all the other men. He wants to stay home and tend his garden. I call it my Ferdinand the Bull story. How is that hostile to men? It's a story about how people ought to have the right to make decisions about their lives.

Anyway, bad reviews sear themselves into my brain.

What's your wish?

Everyone has a wish list. From from a shiny new toaster oven to world peace, from a finished draft of your new novel by your next birthday to that long-awaited phone call from your agent--from the mundane to the transcendental--what's on yours? Top five items only, please.