Short fiction: transition or rediscovery?

Having, like most writers early in their careers, worked my way into short fiction and the occasional published story, and still looking at short fiction as part of my studies in creative writing, I was deeply interested in this recent piece in Public Books, on the short story in transition.

I'm particularly happy to see the short story move from its rather austere, elliptical and domestic form of modern realism towards something looser, more experimental and broadly imaginative. But this is hardly a transformation so much as a shift towards and even a recovery of older, more entertaining or speculative forms.

I felt the same dissatisfaction with the formal boundaries of contemporary short fiction (particularly the literary journal sort) when I started writing in the area, and so I moved steadily into the fabulists, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi, and Borges. I also felt the imaginative influence of the science fiction I had read as a child and teenager: Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin and the classic SF collections. These writers opened up the possibilities of the short story again. And now we find contemporary writers such as Karen Russell and Junot Diaz retracing the footsteps of Borges and even Poe (whose Gothic tales were entertainments, not slices of reality).

Slow Reading The Lord of the Rings, part II

The Two Towers remains the volume of The Lord of the Rings I relish most, perhaps because in the context of my 'slow-reading' project it is not just a bridge between beginning and end but a wonderfully developed story on its own (though, when reading time is short, I start to question the length of the Treebeard passages).

The Two Towers is really two books, or two stories. One, a heroic epic, a tale of battles and strange encounters with magic and myths; the other, a more personal quest, a journey built around character and the subtle triangulation between Frodo, Sam and Gollum, and the delicate moral and practical choices imposed on them.

To my mind, the battle sequence around Helm's Deep is particularly fine, since Tolkien's epic view allows him to balance the movement of armies and great forces with personal struggle, and the action is expansive but never unclear. But what sticks for me in the slow reading is rather the brilliant confrontation with the defeated Saruman, for the voice of Saruman in the modern context represents the peril and corrupting power of political language, the elegant and insidious lie that worms its way into thought and cannot be stilled even in the midst of the destruction it has brought. Saruman is defeated, of course, but how many political Sarumans remain, still persuading us from the ruins of their towers?

The mountains of New Zealand and the paths, steps and ravines around Ithaca, NY are now permanently fused in my imagination when I think of the climb towards Cirith Ungol.

Worldbuilding and the maker's hand

Worldbuilding has been on my mind recently, following the AULLA Conference at The University of Queensland, this item on the '7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding' on io9.com, and my own efforts at shaping the world of my new novel, A Hangman for Ghosts.

Writers of speculative fiction are often positioned at the forefront of worldbuilding, encouraged to consider everything from consistency to tactile detail. The late Iain M. Banks was a masterful world builder because his worlds were vibrant, present and sturdy, and he could shift between them effortlessly. The Raven's Seal was also an effort in world-building for me, because the city and its society had characteristics that were critical to the mystery, but the true pleasure as a writer was to animate that world and make it feel like a lived experience rather than a static stage-set.

But as I argued recently in a paper at AULLA, I've come to suspect that worldbuilding in conformance to elaborate rules of procedure and solely in service of verisimilitude is in danger of making fictional worlds dull, prosaic, uninteresting even. Invented worlds can never be complete, and trying to catalogue all their features and account for all their internal mechanisms is a mere technical chore. The economy of Airenchester can't be found in micro-economics. The prison colony of A Hangman for Ghosts is not merely an administrative relic. Worlds come alive when we see them not as constructs, but as metaphors, figures, characters. This is something that Iain M. Banks understood implicitly, and this is what drew me to the complexities and wonder of worldbuilding in the first place.

A new review of The Raven's Seal

An excellent review of The Raven's Seal from novelist and reviewer Judith Starkston can be found on her blog. Starkston identifies some of the thematic and figurative elements of The Raven's Seal and describes them deftly (if I may say so).

Resolve, write, revise

A particularly interesting piece (for the practising writer as well as reader) in the Boston Globe on how technology and our ideas about writing and expression have changed writers' approach to the business of drafting and revision.

I draft, I revise, I revise again. To my mind, the process is like transforming a sketch into a painting: laying down rough marks, and redrawing and colouring until the final work emerges.

Dickens, writing from number to number in serialisation, had an opportunity to correct the page-proofs based on his hand-written pages but could never return to drafting and reviewing his work. Although later in his career he relied on more notes and memoranda to plan, there remains a directness and unrehearsed liveliness about his writing that our careful processes of word-processing and editing cannot capture.

This may be what we lose by revision, but for the mystery writer, revision is also the power to refine the mystery even as the first draft becomes a rougher series of notes and approximations, an exploration of the idea rather than its final expression.

A speculative review of Sorcery! - The Shamutanti Hills

I've been reading -- if that's the right word, because you could also say 'playing' -- Inkle Studio's impressive e-book version of Steve Jackson's classic gamebook The Shamutanti Hills, the first volume of the Sorcery! series. The Shamutanti Hills is a game, a map, and a story: an interactive fiction in which the reader exerts choice over the path he or she takes to the end of the book.

Now, all fictions are interactive in that they involve engagement, the creation of a world between the reader and the text, and the play of speculation and imagination: guesses, expectations, and reversals. But interactive fiction enhances the possibility of interplay by giving the reader choice over the path of the narrative at key points. The most popular of these, and the ones that have interested me for some time, are those based on games and quests. The idea of a path is not incidental: the gamebook often resembles a map or chart, or even a labyrinth, where the ideal play is to find the optimal path through.

The Shamutanti Hills does a fine job at this. What I most admire about it is the sense that the hills constitute a real, if fantastic, terrain: a landscape of mines, villages, hills, woods and ruins, inhabited by goblins, giants, witches, elves and wizards, villagers and monsters, that one can pass through and explore, rather than a simple series of challenges. One feels that the stories of the hills intersect and carry on their own life, and this is enhanced by the game aspect of surviving and mastering the various challenges that the hills represent. The Shamutanti Hills rewards play because each play-through reveals something new about them.

Although the fantasy quest provides a way of structuring the forking narrative of the gamebook, I speculate that the form could also be applied to the mystery. Imagine a mystery in which the reader takes up the role of investigator, choosing clues, hunting leads, suspects, uncovering the plot (or not), building the case on the basis of decisions made in reading.

Guest post on The Maiden's Court

There is a new guest post related to The Raven's Seal on The Maiden's Court, a blog dedicated to reviews of historical fiction and movies.

In this post, I take a closer look at the delicate matter of the relationship between Cassie and Grainger. The interesting thing for me about these posts is how they force even the author to look at their own work from a new angle.