For Writers: Another Grab Bag - Characters, Plots, Inspirations for Booker Awards

 Things I have run across that seem to me to have enough value to pass along.

Star Trek Needs New (and Better) Villains (Reactor) struck me first as a possible source of amusement and ended with a serious idea about writing: compelling characters. 

But all of that appears to have fallen by the wayside. Our enemies have become monsters, mindless killing machines, manifestations of Satan on Earth against whom we can enact consequence-free violence. Meanwhile, in real life, we spend every day watching genocidal violence play out on our handheld devices, underwritten by American taxes, with leaders commanding us to despise and drive out the Other—the immigrant, the disabled, the person of colour, the transgender, the Palestinian—with other Others soon to come, and don’t you doubt it. 

So yes, Star Trek needs new villains; and I don’t just mean another “Gabriel Lorca”-style pastiche of MAGA politics (though even that might be too much to hope for under America’s—and Paramount’s—new censorship regime). Rather, we need Star Trek to do what Star Trek has always done best—present us with an Other in whom we can see ourselves. Recall that back before the Gorn were “monsters,” they were a rival spacefaring power who sought only to protect their own territory from colonization—a motive that Kirk found sufficiently resonant to spare their captain’s life. And one of Trek’s few “satanic” aliens who actually worked for me was the entity from “Day of the Dove,” who stood-in for the dehumanizing horrors of war and could only be defeated by finding common ground with the Klingons. A good villain is a foil for the heroes—illustrating who they are by way of contrast and forcing them to acknowledge uncomfortable truths about themselves. So the question becomes: what do we want to illustrate about the Federation, a fictional civilization that pulls an increasingly awkward double duty as both an imaginary ideal and a mirror for the liberal world order? 

(Too many links lost in quoting, so do go read the original article.)

I could go on; I’m sure that you could think of any number of options and I encourage you to lay them out in the comments. But one thing is for sure: a villain who is simply Evil—“the evil that predates doing evil”—isn’t an interesting foil. Because when the villain is Evil itself, all that it tells us is that the heroes are on the side of Good; and, as history and current affairs show us, once you believe yourself to be automatically on the side of Good, you can excuse doing anything, no matter how evil. A villain in whom you can see yourself is a moral corrective for this tendency.

NCWID 2023 - Keynote Speech: Isabel Waidner has been on my Watch Later list for YouTube for some time. It is almost an hour long. Listening to it, I am embarrassed by my procrastination (not an unusual event in my life. The speech covers a lot of territory that will apply (should apply?) to binary, non-queer writers: the use of genre fiction in literature, starting out writing, negotiating the publishing process, a call for creating literary communities. If that doesn't interest, sorry. Everyone else listen to this video.

From that video, I checked out Comma Press on YouTube. I do not recognize the writers captured in their videos - I suspect them being mostly British - but the topics do not seem bound by nationality.

Far more conventional, even somewhat superficial, is this short documentary on Marcel Proust:

Proust is not someone I thought I would ever read, and if I read that I would like. Wrong. After reading the first two novels of The Remembrance of Lost Time, I worry that will never get back to reading the remaining books. Another thing that I gained from going to prison.

This video on the mistakes made in short stories is staying on my YouTube Watch Later list. I want to study it.

sch 10/19
  

Sarah Moss's The Stinging Fly Annual Lecture Losing the Plot is fascinating to me:

There are, I think, ways in which the novelist remains indentured to literary tradition. Form is form, there is nothing beyond or without it, and also I am a firm believer in constraint as the enabler of art. If you’re going to be a novelist, you write something that is recognisably a novel and that means accepting at least some and probably most of the rules of novels, which include some form of plot and setting because there is nothing without time and space, and some form of narrative because that’s how it is, that’s why readers and writers turn up. 

You can do a yellow polka dot sky if you think it’s worth the effort, and have disappearing dragons roosting on chimneys. You can play with whatever magic occurs to you, and I recognise the political and artistic power of fantasy for those whose real histories are dark. Within the world of the novel, magic, surrealism and the supernatural still have to be plausible and make sense on their own terms. 

I try not to be snobbish and old-fashioned about fantasy and sci-fi, but I find the forms of reality in my own experience quite rich and strange enough for my purposes and anyway I’m interested in the mundane, in the days in which we live, while also seeing that that ‘we’ is a dangerous little word. We white people, we middle-aged women, we Europeans, we mothers; I hope that what I mean is we on this earth at this time, in this place we are destroying under our feet through negligence, weakness but mostly our own deliberate fault; plagued by our particular wars and plagues which are similar to but different from all the other interesting times and, I truly believe, terminal. This thought makes me want to divert towards the purpose or justification for making art at the end of the world but I resist.

And so I remain approximately faithful to literary realism, at least, still in love with it, though as with most lifelong loves not blind to the flaws and weaknesses. Though I can now dissect the history and ideology underlying the tradition in which I write, I continue, more or less, give or take the odd talking raven, to write in that tradition, or at least from it and maybe to it. My novels are all founded in research, the kind of research for which you need a university library and it helps to have a PhD. I like to know exactly what happened to whom in real life before I start inventing what might have happened to someone imaginary had they been there and then. I care about the textures of daily life, the movements of hands and the feel of clothes. Days are where we live, and bodies are where we live; it seems increasingly odd to me that anyone has ever been able to imagine the mind as distinct from the body partly because as anyone who has survived an eating disorder or a diet or a famine knows, the mind runs on the fruit of the vine and work of human hands. Without food, no thought; with less food, less thought. Art as much as sport depends on dinner.

***

You cannot write a novel in which shit just happens for no reason. I was going to say you can if you like, there’s no law against it, but it is my long experience as writer and teacher of writing that in fact you can’t. Writing creates plot, the linear nature of clauses and sentences and paragraphs concocts meaning, cause and effect, almost as a consequence of grammar. The plot may be slight and lack suspense—as the years pass I am less interested in the artifice of events in fiction—but it will make itself. 

sch 10/21

Reactor again for a bittersweet Five Anticipated Books and Stories That Remain Unpublished. Consider a cautionary tale for readers and writers!

Storytelling: What is a Plot? (Writing Forward)

Plots are built around conflict, but there are only a few conflicts to choose from. There is some debate about how many conflicts exist. Some traditions argue for three; others identify four or more. Here’s a list of six:

• Human vs. human
• Human vs. nature
• Human vs. society
• Human vs. self
• Human vs. machine
• Human vs. supernatural

 And:

Tips for Devising a Compelling Plot

• Goals and motives. Build a plot around the protagonist’s goals. What does the hero want? What does the antagonist want? What do the other characters want? Why do the characters want these things? Goals and motives are the driving forces behind the characters’ actions and decisions.
• Stakes. Tensions rise and stakes get higher as the plot unfolds. What will the characters gain if they succeed? What will they lose if they fail?
• Momentum. Make sure every scene and chapter move the plot forward in a meaningful way. If a scene can be cut without changing the story, then that scene is unnecessary.
• Plot versus character. Avoid plots that overshadow the characters, and avoid characters who do little more than guide readers through the plot. A good balance of compelling characters and a gripping plot results in the best possible story.
• Originality. Don’t worry about being original. Focus on developing fresh ideas for your story. Use the other elements—characters, setting, and theme—to enrich your plot and make it feel innovative.
• Resolution. When you finish your draft, make a list of the subplots. Are all subplots and the central plot resolved in a satisfactory way? If you’re planning to write a sequel, did you close the main plot but leave a story thread open?
• Plotting and planning. Making a list of your plot points gives you a good overview of your story, which you can quickly review to check for flow, pacing, conflict, and tension.
• Page-turners. Not all stories are page-turners, but if your goal is to keep readers glued to the story, plan plot points that intrigue and entice them.

sch 10/23 

‘I had a year to write it from scratch’: the 2025 Booker finalists on the stories behind their novels (The Guardian)

A newspaper report about a missing girl, the memory of a midwinter emergency … Susan Choi, Andrew Miller, David Szalay and others on what inspired their shortlisted books

sch 11/16