Sarah Monette

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

On January 20, one of our cats passed away. He was almost sixteen; I’d had him since he was almost two, and I loved him dearly, but that’s not actually what I want to talk about.

You see, I decided to do a fundraiser in his honor, to benefit the Companion Animal Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison‘s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital, as a way of saying thank you for the care they gave him and the kindness they extended to me and my husband. And as part of that fundraiser, almost as an afterthought, I decided to do a chapbook of the four stories featuring Kyle Murchison Booth that were not collected in The Bone Key. I figured if the fundraiser did exceptionally well, I’d be able to donate $1000 or $1500.

As of today, the donations have passed $4000. And basically three-quarters of that is the one hundred sixty-one people who have bought Unnatural Creatures. As a comparison point, the auction of my last hardback set of the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Mélusine (OOP), The Virtu (OOP), The Mirador, Corambis) had only two bidders and raised only $150.

I think the chapbook sale has worked so well for two reasons:
1. it was something people wanted (I know, duh, but it surprised me how eager people were)
2. the price point was low enough that it felt affordable, even in the current zombie apocalypse

(Well, and #3, people like contributing to what they feel is a good cause.)

So the lesson learned is that it’s better to have a (potentially) unlimited number of a low price-point item than to have one, or very few, of an expensive item.

I’ve also learned a number of things about self-publishing in trying to put the chapbook together through Lulu.

1. Lulu would really prefer it if you’d use (and pay for) their formatting service; the option for the obstinate is to make your own .pdf

2. Making .pdfs is a PAIN IN THE ASS if what you happen to have is, you know, word processing software.

3. MS Word is the tool of Satan. There is no other explanation for the things it does to innocent documents.

4. Although Lulu will let you use any font you like in the interior of the book, it offers only a limited palette of fonts in its Cover Wizard, and some of them are very ugly. Unless you get lucky, as I did, and have someone volunteer to design your cover, Garamond is your best bet. (I went with Garamond anyway, because it’s an attractive and legible font, and it has the slightly old-fashioned air appropriate to Booth.)

5. Yes, you do want to order a proof copy before you commit to your big order. Even a .pdf doesn’t show you what the physical book is going to look like, and there will always be more errors to catch.

6. Full justification is necessary if you want the book to look competent and professional, and if you want the full justification to look competent and professional, you have to hyphenate. Whereupon, MS Word’s auto-hyphenation will sabotage you by mishyphenating an astonishing array of words, thereby making you look like an illiterate n00b.

7. Something I knew already: book production is a lot of work if you’re going to do it right, even when you’re keeping things very simple and taking the path of least resistance wherever possible. (And for this project, I don’t even have to think about distribution and marketing.)

This is why authors want there to be publishers, and why publishers, despite the sometimes egregious flaws in the system, are at bottom a good thing. Because there is an ENORMOUS YAWNING ABYSS OF DIFFERENCE between a complete manuscript of a story and a book, and the more time the author has to spend thinking about the book, the fewer stories s/he can write.

I’m not knocking self-publishing–obviously, since I’m participating in it. What I’m saying is that if you’re going to do a good job, it’s difficult and time-consuming. And although I’m happy to be doing this specific project and do not begrudge in the slightest the time and effort, I’d still rather be writing.

---

If you would like to buy a copy of Unnatural Creatures, go here. The sale will end when I’m ready to place the Lulu order, which I hope sincerely will be sometime tomorrow night (i.e., Tuesday, February 8, 2011).

Writing last month’s post started me thinking again about that hoary old chestnut and perennial panel favorite: “What’s the difference between fantasy and science fiction?” Since, insofar as I have an allegiance to any academic critical school, it’s to genre theory, I think about this a little bit differently than most people, and this round of thinking has led me to some interesting places.

First off, two caveats:

1.) “Genre” and “marketing category” are not the same thing. The latter is a label slapped on a book for the convenience of booksellers. (And I fully appreciate the need for quick, one-word, uncomplicated labels when all you’re trying to do is figure out how to put books where people will find them in order to buy them.) “Genre” has a complicated history, which I’ll get to in a minute. For now, I just want to point out that marketing categories strive for the absolute (though they don’t necessarily achieve it, even so): either something DOES go in the Romance section or it DOESN’T. Genres are all about relatives.

2.) I am not a prescriptivist. I don’t want to tell any story what it should be doing. Rather, I’m trying to find ways to describe what it is doing. So none of what follows should be construed as pronouncements from on high. It’s just me thinking about the stories I love.

All right. Back to the idea of “genre.” At the root of it all, genres are arbitrary categories which we use because we are hardwired pattern-recognition junkies. And I fully and cheerfully include myself in that. For pretty much as long as there’s been literary criticism, they’ve been used to try to impose value judgments on different kinds of stories and storytelling (think of Aristotle, think of Sir Philip Sidney), and as prose gradually supplanted poetry as the primary mode of storytelling in English (I can’t speak about any other language’s literature, because the only two I know anything about are (a.) pre-novel and (b.) dead), and the novel came to reign supreme over Anglo-American story consumption (I don’t know enough about other Anglophone traditions to discuss them), people started dividing novels into smaller and smaller sub-genres. And started, inevitably, making value judgments about them.

The divide between mimetic literature and fantastic literature is a relatively recent one, and judging by its effects, it went hand in hand with the effort to make prose fiction respectable, something critics and academics could take seriously, not just popular entertainment. And, whether by design or not, this bid for respectability involved disowning the fantastic. (I blame James Joyce, but only because I can’t blame Aristotle.) Fantastic literature became something suitable only for children and the ignorant masses–and notice the simultaneous denigration of children’s literature, and the way in which the two reinforce each other. It’s taken us most of a century to fight our way back from that completely arbitrary and artificial distinction. (Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. The way you elevate mimetic literature and denigrate fantastic literature is by comparing the 10% to the 90.) If you go and look at Western canonical literature, you’ll be hard pressed to find any of it that isn’t fantastic in one aspect or another until you get to Clarissa; Clarissa, while I wouldn’t call it particularly realistic, is definitely in the para-real rather than the contra-real or sur-real camp. (And that, of course, has a great deal to do with the origins of the novel in confessional literature . . . but that’s another topic entirely.)

My point is that I think most definitions of fantasy and science fiction (or fantasy vs. science fiction) are starting from premises that could themselves stand to be more carefully examined.

I’m going to define “genre” as stories concerned with the same set of narrative conventions and expectations. In other words, I see a genre as a series of questions which a story chooses to engage with. It may answer “yes,” “no,” or “giraffe,” but it is engaging with those questions, rather than another set.

It becomes immediately apparent, by this definition, that fantasy and science fiction are not genres. Horror is a genre, because horror brings a set of narrative expectations, just as mystery and romance do. You can put a romance into a fantasy story or a science fiction story, and nothing about the plot of the romance must or should change. But if you put the romance into a horror story–yes, something has to change. Just as you can take the same set-up–a dead body found under strange circumstances–and make it either a mystery story or a horror story; either one may have elements of the other, but fundamentally, whether you pick mystery or horror makes a difference to your plot and its outcome. They are genres.

Fantasy and science fiction, on the other hand, are like Western and historical. They’re something for which there isn’t a good word. “Setting” is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because it implies that the fantastic/sfnal/Western/historical elements of the story are merely window-dressing, and that is not at all the case. (Okay, here I am a little bit prescriptivist, because what I mean is that it shouldn’t be the case. In good fantasy, the fantastic element should be integral to–and also well integrated in–the plot. Ditto the sfnal in science fiction, the western milieu in Westerns, the historical in historicals.) But they aren’t genres, because there is no narrative expectation you can apply across the board. You can have historical mysteries, fantasy mysteries (Barbara Hambly, Elizabeth Bear, Jim Butcher, to name three off the top), science fiction mysteries. I’ve never seen a Western mystery, but there’s no reason you couldn’t write one. You can put horror in any of these settings, likewise. They don’t care what kind of narrative you apply to them.

(The other odd thing, while I’m talking about things for which there aren’t good words in English, is the way in which horror, aside from being transportable from one genre to another, can make back-formations and put down roots. A detective without a mystery is like something out of Pirandello or Beckett, and a romantic lead without a romance is even worse. But Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker is, among other things, a fantasy novel with zombies in it. Zombies are a horror trope, but they don’t make Boneshaker a horror novel, any more than vampires, likewise a horror trope, make Those Who Hunt the Night (Hambly) or New Amsterdam (Bear) a vampire novel. And yet the zombies in Boneshaker are still zombies, and Bear and Hambly’s vampires are most definitely vampires. (N.b., they do not sparkle.) It’s odd and it’s also marvelous that you can cut horror tropes loose from their genre moorings, and they keep working.

(I don’t know what to do with that, and the neat thing about genre theory, and the fact that it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive, is that I don’t have to know what to do with that. It’s okay to just sit and watch it work and be filled with delight.)

Under this schematic, fantasy and science fiction differ in world rather than in story, and I think this applies to Westerns and historicals, too. World, like genre, does bring with it questions a story has to answer, but it brings different questions, and they interact with the story in different ways.

… I guess for next month I can start thinking about what I think those questions are.

So, last month, I issued a plea for topics, and Sora Kess answered with an excellent question regarding Evil Hordes. There was a panel at World Fantasy, which I did not attend, in which apparently the consensus was that all secondary world fantasies have Evil Hordes in them. (If this is a misrepresentation, I apologize.)

Now, I reject pretty emphatically the idea that all secondary world fantasies have–or should have–Evil Hordes. That’s the same as saying all secondary world fantasies have quests. Or Dark Lords. Or magical MacGuffins. Certainly, many secondary world fantasies do have these things–hence Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland–but by the same token, surely the Tough Guide is a suggestion that maybe we could do something else instead? The fact that many secondary world fantasies have quests and Dark Lords and and magical MacGuffins and Evil Hordes, doesn’t mean that any of these things is a requirement. Or even a desideraturm.

In the Doctrine of Labyrinths (Melusine, The Virtu, The Mirador, Corambis), I was working deliberately to write secondary world fantasy that didn’t have all those things. I didn’t entirely succeed–the Virtu is, yes, a great big magical MacGuffin, and my poor protagonists do spend an awful lot of time tramping back and forth across the continent. But no one sends them or makes prophecies about them, and they’re not saving the world. Malkar Gennadion is evil and powerful (and kind of two dimensional, honestly), but he’s not a Dark Lord. And the wizards of the Bastion, with their military hierarchy and their ideology, still aren’t an Evil Horde.

(The relationship between the Mirador and the Bastion was based on my memories of growing up during the last decade of the Cold War. So the characters may think of the Bastion as an Evil Horde, but they aren’t, any more than the Russians were.)

In A Companion to Wolves, the trolls are, really, the epitome of an Evil Horde: implacable, inhuman, they don’t even have individual identities. But it turns out that to them, the humans (and wolves) are just as incomprehensibly alien and terrifying, and for me (as I do not pretend to speak for my co-author Elizabeth Bear), the end of the book–when Isolfr chooses to spare the troll kitten–is a rejection of Evil Horde-ism and its inevitable companion, genocide.

What Evil Hordes do is reduce human conflict to Us vs. Them. Moreover, since we’re talking about fantasy, “They” don’t have to be human at all, which makes the whole ethical dimension of the conflict ever so much simpler. No one agonizes, for instance, about the ethics of chopping zombies into mincemeat. It is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a no-brainer.

Zombies are kind of the quintessence of Evil Horde-ism. They are an inarguable, external threat that can only be dealt with by wholesale extermination. Negotiating with zombies is not an option. Generally, there’s neither room, time, nor need for debate, and we may be comfortably certain that any character who tries to espouse a more liberal position will be the first person eaten: not just mistaken, but totally, irrefutably, cosmologically, capital-W Wrong.

Zombies, of course, do other cultural work, which the Evil Hordes of secondary world fantasy may, or may not, participate in; the crucial point for my argument is that zombies make it very easy to see the dehumanizing impulse at work. George Lucas’ Stormtroopers are another readily accessible example. Their quite literal facelessnsess (and that handy Nazi reference, just in case) makes their deaths unproblematic and meaningless. Like zombies, they’re there to provide an external threat, and they’re there to be killed.

Fundamentally, these two things are the purposes of an Evil Horde: an external threat and an excuse for bloodshed (metaphorical in the case of Stormtroopers, who don’t even bleed). An enemy that it’s uncomplicatedly good (ethically, morally, narratively) to kill. And, by extension, good to exterminate, 100%, to the last zombie, Stormtrooper, or orc.

It should be clear by now that I have ethical and philosophical objections to Evil Hordes and the policy of genocide they lead to. I don’t think Evil Hordes necessarily represent any specific human cultural group (although they certainly can), but considering all the real world examples of genocide the last two centuries have seen, I think any pattern of thought that makes it easier to get to genocide as an answer–even, or perhaps especially, when divorced from reality–needs to be interrogated very carefully and approached with caution. If you’re going to use it, you should use it in full mindfulness of its baggage and its underlying darkness.

I am not, however, calling for an end to zombie stories. (I may be calling for an end to stories that treat nonhuman species like zombies; I’ll have to get back to you on that.) I understand entirely that sometimes we all need things to be just that simple and just that violent, and I think zombies are a fantastic way to deal with that in fiction, whether text, movie, or game. But I also think that that’s a catharsis, not either (a.) a plot or (b.) a useful solution to the ineradicable problem of conflict between humans. Which is to say, once you finish killing the zombies, you still have to settle who among the survivors gets the last spoonful of peanut butter. And that peanut butter is going to be the interesting conflict in your story, besides.*

Pepole who are not like us (whoever “we” are) may be frightening, but the reactionary answer of “Kill them all!” is, frankly, a bad answer. Fantasy, as a genre, needs to start coming up with better ones.

—
*For the record, I would like to point out that zombie novels like Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker already know this.

I’ve been racking my brains all day to come up with a post, and I got nothing.

If you have a topic you’d like to see me write about next month, please feel free to leave a comment. But to borrow Neil Gaiman’s metaphor about writing, this is one of the days when the bear eats me.

While my ankle mends and I struggle with Restless Legs Syndrome (which, by the way, I do not recommend ), I’ve been watching I Spy on Hulu. I Spy, which ran from 1965 to 1968 and starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, is awesome, but its awesomeness is not actually what I want to talk about for this post.

There’s a curious phenomenon, you see, of mid-sixties spy shows. Because on the one hand you have I Spy, and on the other, you have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968, starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum). (I’m not going to talk about Get Smart, because I haven’t seen any episodes since I was a small child, but it would be an interesting way to complete a trifecta.) Both shows, aside from their mid-60s runs and their stars named Robert, were conceived of as James Bond spoofs. Both feature an American agent (Culp, Vaughn) teamed with someone who is in some way an outsider to mainstream (i.e., white, middle-class) American culture: a Russian, an African-American–and I Spy does not hesitate to point out the prejudice Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby) fights against. Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Kelly Robinson (Culp) are very similar characters–a little feckless, very charming, easily ensnared by a pretty female face–just as there are a lot of similarities between Kuryakin (McCallum) and Scott: both are scholarly (Scotty was a Rhodes scholar, and Illya has a Ph.D. in Quantum Mechanics), both serve as straight men for their partners’ whimsical approach to life (although each gives as good as he gets in back-and-forth banter). And in both shows, the partnership between the two men is portrayed as the most important relationship in their lives, the single most important thing keeping them sane and able to function, the thing they will not and cannot betray. (Both shows have brainwashing episodes in which one partner is turned against the other. In both cases, the crux of the episode is the moment at which the brainwashing fails. Illya can’t kill Napoleon, just as Kelly fires at Scotty point-blank and misses.)

With all these similarities, you’d expect the shows to be very much alike, and yet they aren’t. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a very clair show (using “clair” here as the opposite of “noir”); it’s not a spoof in the sense that Get Smart (1965-1970) is, but it’s always very meta, very self-aware, and–especially after the first season, which dabbled in the shallow end of noir–very careful to keep itself divorced from the real world. U.N.C.L.E.’s main opponent is THRUSH, not any real world country (like, say, the USSR). Napoleon and Illya have no personal lives that we ever see; there are only the vaguest references to their families and backgrounds; they don’t take vacations. You can almost imagine Waverly putting them away in their boxes in between affairs. The stories The Man from U.N.C.L.E. wants to tell are about espionage in the abstract, about the tension between the ordinary world and the spies creeping about behind the wainscotting.

I Spy, on the other hand, is about espionage as the ordinary world. It was the first TV show to be shot on location (unlike The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which all airports really do look the same), and the episodes make use of the settings of Hong Kong, Mexico City, Madrid. Kelly and Scotty live in hotel rooms, and the show remembers that they live in hotel rooms. They talk about vacations (well, they bitch and moan about the vacations they don’t get), they have to explain their expenses to government officials, they walk a constant tightrope between maintaining their cover (as a tennis bum and his trainer) and getting the job done. We don’t know much about Kelly’s family, but both Kelly and Scotty write to Scotty’s mom in Philadelphia (it’s Kelly’s best threat: “I’m going to write to your mother!”); the show is built on the detritus and impedimenta of their daily lives as spies. And they don’t fight THRUSH, either. They’re up against Chinese agents and Russian agents–and the occasional freelance madman. (I find it interesting that the Russian agents are frequently human and sympathetic, while the Chinese agents are, um, not.) Scotty can’t save the heroin addict because she doesn’t want to be saved. Being tortured has psychological consequences; one episode deals with what is, in essence, Kelly’s nervous breakdown, although all the characters are very, very careful never to say so out loud. If The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is what you get when you refuse to take James Bond seriously, I Spy is what happens when you think James Bond through. Kelly and Scotty are tired and cynical; they believe in the ideals they’re fighting for (the most dated moments are the knee-jerk rhetoric about the Evils of Communism), but they’re frequently dubious about the means they have to employ, and always aware that they’re nothing more than replaceable parts as far as the higher-ups at the Pentagon are concerned. Nothing could be more different than the personal relationship Napoleon and Illya have with their boss, Mr. Waverly.

My point here, aside from the wonderfulness of I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is that these two shows, despite their extensive similarities, are very different creatures. They have different thematic concerns; they go in different directions. And they provide a lovely example of the relative unimportance of originality. Because with the same basic premise and many of the same elements, they tell entirely different stories.

It’s a truism among doctoral candidates that as soon as you get your thesis topic approved, a well-known scholar in your field will publish a book on the same subject. (And it’s a truism because it happens. It happened to me with Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and Purgatory.) The important thing about this truism, though, is that after the moment of white-out panic in which your entire academic career passes before your eyes, it doesn’t matter. The originality of your research doesn’t depend on your topic, it depends on what you have to say about your topic. And the same is true with storytelling. It’s not the idea of a James Bond spoof that’s original; it’s the difference between Napoleon Solo and Kelly Robinson, between Illya Kuryakin and Alexander Scott. It’s not WHAT you do that matters. It’s how you do it.

Last Sunday afternoon, I broke my ankle. (Posts with details here and here.) Obviously, I’ve spent most of my time since then stoned on first Percocet and then Oxycodone, so it’s good that the accident itself has given me a topic for a post–namely verisimilitude versus what my partner-in-crime, Elizabeth Bear, calls second order cliches. (I would never use another person’s broken ankle as fuel for my creativity, but using my own broken ankle is not merely thrifty, it gives me something to think about, which has been essential at more than one point recently.)

The accident occurred as I was walking across a slight grassy slope with a couple of other people, toward a barn in which people and horses were warming up for a Training level dressage test. (Yes, the irony is mighty. I was at a horse show and my broken bone has nothing whatsoever to do with horses.) I slipped.

I can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. I think that my right foot must have skidded out from under me from right to left (also downhill), but honestly, I can’t say for sure. I don’t remember that part. I do remember hearing my ankle break and knowing immediately and absolutely what it was. It was a wet, tight snap. It did not sound like a gunshot or a snapping branch or any of the other second order cliches that people use in stories. It sounded like a bone breaking.

The people with me were convinced I must have hit my head. That’s what my ankle breaking sounded like to them, like my head hitting a rock.

One of the people watching the warm-up was a person who had training for dealing with this sort of situation (and believe me, I am grateful to him beyond the telling of it). He said he heard my ankle break from the barn, a good twenty or thirty feet away. He knew immediately what it was, too.

Second order cliches are pernicious; they’re ruts in our use of English. (I have a terrible time with them, as Bear can testify.) In this specific case, they’re also misdirection: they obscure the truth not merely with the sort of soft cloud of familiarity they draw between reader (and writer) and story, but also by comparisons that change the nature of the event they describe. I’ve been thinking about this all week, while stoned on painkillers, and it has turned itself into a sestina. Apparently, Percocet makes blank verse easy. Certainly, it does make one’s thoughts turn back on themselves in ways that make sestinas inevitable.

Percocet Sestina

Untrue, the story: when you break a bone,
The sound is like a twig or rifle shot.
But it isn’t. It’s a stingy sound
And mean. Unmistakable, inside
At least. I knew the bone was broken truth
Before I hit the ground. Before the pain.

It’s good, that story. It says that when the pain
Comes down, it will not be your real bone,
But a twig, a bullet, anything but the truth
That you yourself are not the bullet shot
But, quivering, the doe rabbit, torn inside
And rent, every breath a sobbing sound.

Not a story, not a twig (the sound
Clean and dry, free of strength or pain).
You are not a twig, not dead inside.
You are meat and blood and broken bone,
And if you could escape, like a shot,
You’d run to story, leave behind the truth.

Stories–twigs and rifles–hurt less than truth:
The suddenness, the slip, the fall, the sound,
Not crisp like twigs, not distant like a shot,
But wet and all too close and thick with pain.
It is no safe-soft story, but your bone;
It breaks within your private story, inside

The border lines policed and watched, inside
The place where stories spin and toil, where truth
Is made. In this place, it’s not just bone
That breaks. The sound–the snap–is more than sound;
It tells your helpless imperfection, the pain
To come. It would be easier to be shot,

To end the story by firing squad: the shot
Like punctuation, nothing left inside–
No embarrassment, no circling pain–
But that’s a story, not the needed truth.
We know truth by the sound it makes, the sound,
Wet and sharp and cruel, of breaking bone.

ENVOY
The breaking bone, the petty sound of truth,
No shot, no story–not inside. But pain.

“I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.” –Alan Rickman

---

So I was talking with a friend the other day about writing and art and being, or not being, a pretentious asshole, and she said, “Why don’t you write a Storytellers Unplugged post about that?”

And I said, “Thank you for doing my homework for me.”

Because it is a problem, and I think it’s one we all go through, the pendulum swing from “I’m just playing around, there’s no need to take anything I do seriously” to “I am a Serious Writer and you must Admire my Art.” The key, I think, is the Alan Rickman quote I used as an epigraph, not least because he shifts the discussion from “art” to “work.” Frankly, “Is it art?” is something so subjective that it’s not a useful question for an artist to ask. Everyone’s answer to “What is art?” is different, and even something that seems to be a consensus may be overturned in another five years, or twenty, or a hundred. And it’s something that you can’t control. Whereas, “Is it work?” is a pretty easy question.

But it can be hard to get the balance right between taking your work seriously and not taking yourself too seriously, especially when there are so many factors conspiring to make you feel defensive about taking your work seriously. There’s a lot of pressure on people who do creative things to be self-deprecating about them, whether it’s the “it’s just a hobby” gambit or “I’m not really any good at it” or (if you are a professional) “I’m just a hack.” All of which are ways of abjuring the idea that one takes one’s work seriously.

When I was a teenager, I went militantly the other way. I had a teacher who disparaged genre fiction, and I bristled up like a porcupine and became very much, “This is my Art and I am an Artist, and I will make you see the error of your ways!” It’s the opposite reaction, but it’s just as much a defense as the other. And there for a while, yes, I was really hard to live with. I’m not sure what knocked it out of me, but I think part of it was learning that making art and Being An Artist are not the same thing. You can do one without having anything to do with the other. Making art doesn’t require starving in a garret or being crazy or doing drugs or getting an M.F.A. or any of the other thousand and one things our culture thinks artists have to do. All that making art requires is that you do the work.

You don’t have to be defensive about it, either. You don’t have to tear yourself down, and you don’t have to build yourself up. Neither one makes a difference to the work you’re doing, unless you let yourself become poisoned with your own propaganda. Self-deprecation and self-aggrandizement are about how the world sees you and how you see yourself, and goodness knows it’s something we all struggle with, but it’s also, from another perspective, missing the point. Because the thing at stake isn’t your self (arguably, your self is just sitting around getting in the way), it’s your work. For me, at least, it’s easy to say, “Oh, I’m not a very good writer,” but it’s quite another thing to say, “Oh, that’s not a very good story.” Because, dude, if it’s not a good story, why did I send it out? Why did the editor buy and publish it? And in my heart of hearts, while “I’m not a very good writer,” may feel true a whole freaking lot of the time, “That’s not a good story,” is going to feel like a lie. If I’ve gotten to the point of sending it out, I believe it’s a good story, and it’s nonsense to try to say otherwise.

For me, I think that’s the crux of the matter. Not whether I’m taking myself seriously, or not seriously, but whether I’m taking my work seriously. Because the rest of it, a lot of the time? Is just my self getting in the way.

This morning, I threw myself upon the mercy of Twitter, begging for topics to write about this month. And Twitter, in the form of my friend Victoria Janssen, answered; quoth Victoria: figuring out the real story of the story. This is a great topic. This is a topic I would actually love to see other people write about so that I can read their answers. Because I don’t know that mine is the best way to think about it. But as of right now, it’s the way I’ve got.

Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, I taught Creative Writing. This meant, among other things, that I spent a lot of time there for a year or two reading books about creative writing. Some of them were helpful, some not so much. Some of them infuriated me. And one of them taught me something I’ve been using ever since.

The book was The Triggering Town, by the poet Richard Hugo (available at Powells). I bought it for five dollars in a used bookstore. It’s a skinny book; it doesn’t take long to read. And in it, Hugo deploys a pair of concepts that I have found incredibly useful: the triggering subject (hence the title of his book) and the real subject. I’m going to go ahead and quote him here, since I’ve found the passage, and if I didn’t quote it, I’d just be paraphrasing it all over the place anyway:

A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or “causes” the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean, and which is generated or discovered in the poem during the writing.
(Hugo 4)

For the word “poem,” you can substitute “story,” and it works just as well. At least, in my experience. Because you have the thing that you want to write the story about–dragons, for example–and then you have the thing that you discover in the course of writing that is the thing you need to say about dragons. To show you what I mean, here are four different stories about dragons, two written by Elizabeth Bear, and two written by me:

• “Draco campestris” (Monette)

• “Orm the Beautiful” (Bear)
• “After the Dragon” (Monette)
• “Snow Dragons” (Bear)

All four of these stories have the same triggering subject: dragons. And all four of them have quite different real subjects, which the reader (like the writer) discovers in the process of experiencing the story.

Triggering subjects are a dime a dozen. Seriously. I have a word processor full of them. The hard part is never coming up with something to write about. The hard part is making the leap from the triggering subject to the real subject.

Some stories, like some poems, never do. They’re all surface and WYSIWYG. Sometimes, reading those, you find the place where the real subject tried to emerge, like a soft, shy, velvet moth from a cocoon, and died because the writer was not attentive, not receptive. Hugo says, just after the passage I quoted, that the writer doesn’t always know the real subject, and that may be true. (I think it’s more accurate to say that the writer may not know all the real subjects; some of them may be pointed out to her by readers. But I do kind of think she should have at least an idea of the deep parts of her work.) But whether the writer can articulate the real subject of not, he has to be open to it. He has to be willing to let it spread its wings, and he has to be willing to listen to its inaudible wing-beats.

I don’t have any good advice for how you convince the real subject to come out. That’s the part over which I personally have the least conscious control. Forcing it doesn’t work for me; I know that much. That way lies didactic literature and propaganda. I’ve found that I have to be willing to listen to the weird ideas my brain throws off around the story; even though they frequently seem unrelated or just plain nuts, they’re often the places where the real story is tearing its way through. And I have to be willing to change the story, to let go of my preconceived ideas about what I’m doing and follow the moth into the darkness. It’s scary, but I always get better stories when I do.

And for me, it helps just to have a vocabulary, to be able to say, “This is my triggering subject.” It lets me clear a bunch of distracting stuff out of the way, and it reminds me that no matter how cool my triggering subject is, there’s still a real subject to generate, and that that’s the thing that will make my story worth reading. That’s the story I’m trying to tell.

—
WORKS CITED
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. 1979. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1992.

Today, as part of the ongoing saga of Sarah vs. her uterus, I went to the University of Wisconsin Hospitals for an ultrasound. They’ve been remodeling the hospital, and they’ve done it over in the same style I’ve seen for a lot of airports recently, or a seriously upscale shopping mall. The floors are hardwood or stone, with inlays; there’s a natural stone fountain; they’ve named the corridors things like “Main Street” and “Atrium Way.” Aside from the people in scrubs wandering around, it hardly looks like a hospital at all. It was all very beautiful and gracious, and the fact that it made me uneasy probably says more about my innate perversity than anything else.

On the other hand, and in my defense, like all hospitals, it was bewildering. I could feel myself teetering on the edge of getting lost the whole time. And that constant, almost subliminal, anxiety made the hospital unheimlich–one of Freud’s more useful terms, which generally gets translated as “uncanny,” but which literally means “un-home-like.”

Sitting in the waiting room, waiting for my hockey-puck pager to go off, I thought, semi-idly, Visiting grandma in the hospital would be a great way to update Little Red Riding Hood. And then I started thinking about all the ways to map a hospital onto a fairy tale forest, the quintessence of the unheimlich. And then I started thinking about variations on the theme of Little Red Riding Hood.

I love fairy tale retellings, frequently more than I love the original fairy tales themselves, and there are a number of ways in which a fairy tale retelling is a great way to practice storytelling. First, the plots are simple. Mozart wrote a theme and variations on the melody which English-speakers know as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the goofy, elaborate things he does with it are achievable partly because the original is so simple. You can’t mess around very much with an original that is itself complicated or intricate before you make it unrecognizable. Second, your audience knows the story. Like Mozart with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or like Jimi Hendrix doing a Bob Dylan cover, no matter how crazy you get with it, your audience will be able to recognize the original melody line. They’ll be able to follow, and enjoy, what you’re doing. Third, by their nature, fairy tales come pre-loaded with symbolism and magical thinking, so they’ll stand up to whatever weight you want to put on them. (This is also another advantage of simplicity.) Moreover, the characters and events of fairy tales are always general, rather than specific. Little Red Riding Hood and her sisters (Snow White, Cinderella, Donkeyskin) are named for external characteristics. They aren’t Amelia or Charlotte or Susannah; they’re identified by a piece of clothing, or the color of their skin, or the fact that they’re always dirty. And their antagonists are The Witch, The Wolf, The King, The (Step)Mother. The simple act of giving these characters identities, of naming Little Red Riding Hood Susannah, already makes the story different, opens the door for you to bring your own meanings to it as you tell it.

And fairy tales, because they’re simple, because they’re familiar, because they’re symbolic and therefore focus on external action, offer almost limitless scope for shifting perspectives and points of view. Snow White looks very different from the Queen’s point of view. Rumpelstiltskin has every reason to be angry. Who can blame the ogre for hiding his heart? And what, really, is the truth of the struggle between Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and the wolf?

With the girl, the grandmother, and the hospital/forest laid out, the big question becomes the wolf. I did some brainstorming this afternoon, and I came up with these nine variations:

1. The most obvious is the wolf as serial killer. An orderly or a doctor who tempts L.R.R.H. off the path and into a convenient supply room. She gets away, gets hopelessly lost in the hospital corridors, finally reaches her grandmother’s room, and–in a classic horror movie move which echoes, of course, the original fairy tale–finds the wolf there waiting for her over her grandmother’s corpse.

2. The wolf is a werewolf, whom L.R.R.H. helps to escape from the Evil Doctors who have been experimenting on him. This one is clearly the urban fantasy/paranormal romance variation.

3. The wolf is L. R. R. H.’s irresponsible selfishness, probably conveniently externalized in a group of friends who want her to do something fun with them instead of visiting her grandmother. She’s tempted off the path, has a great time, and (the kicker), gets to her grandmother’s room just as the old lady flatlines. (This would be the After-School Special variation.)

4.The wolf is a hallucination, and over the course of the story we learn that L. R. R. H. is schizophrenic. She‘s not the one doing the visiting.

5. The wolf is a real wolf. This is the magical realism variation, in which the matter-of-factly unexplained wolf symbolizes L. R. R. H.’s chance to rebel against the societal expectations embodied in her grandmother.

6. The wolf is a doctor who takes L. R. R. H. aside and tells her the truth: her grandmother is dying. This is a story about the transition from childhood/innocence to adulthood and hard choices. The doctor/wolf symbolizes the disease “eating” her grandmother.

7.The wolf is a child patient from oncology. Here, the scary wolf, rather than being a monster, turns out to be a victim. (This, I suspect, is the children’s book variation.)

8. The wolf is a secret the hospital is hiding, as the wolf in the original fairy tale hides in the forest. The nature of the secret would, of course, depend on the kind of story you want to tell (mystery, thriller, science fiction, horror, etc.).

9. The wolf is hunger, rebellion, and rage (borrowing Matthew Arnold’s description of Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre). This is the horror version in which L. R. R. H. and the wolf are actually the same character–maybe a werewolf, if you need a label to stick on her, or a Fury.

They’re all recognizably Little Red Riding Hood, but each of them is a different story, doing different work. That’s the best thing about fairy tale retellings: although they’re old stories, deeply familiar, it’s easy to make them young again, to make them do new work.

Last month on the seventh, I was on my way to Tucson to spend a week hanging out and doing touristy things with friends. This month, I want to talk about one of those touristy things, namely the town of Tombstone, Arizona, and the questions that Tombstone made me think about.

Tombstone is famous for the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral–and that right there is an example of the thing that fascinates me about Tombstone, because, in fact, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral did not happen at the O.K. Corral. It happened half a block away, in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House. Now, on one level, this is only a detail: why get worked up over whether it was the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral or only the Gunfight near the O.K. Corral? But, from a different perspective, the place a gunfight happened is kind of an important detail about that gunfight. And, in the larger picture, this piece of misinformation, trivial though it may seem, is symptomatic. Nearly every detail about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is subject to this kind of uncertainty, from the exact events of the fight itself, to the motives of the participants, to that simplest and yet most difficult of questions, the question fundamental and beloved of the Western (a genre one of whose taproots is sunk deep in the clusterfuck of October 26, 1881): who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

#

The important thing to remember about the Gunfight at (or near) the O.K. Corral is that it breeds misinformation like stagnant water breeds mosquitoes. Some of this is due to deliberate lies, like the farrago of nonsense Ike Clanton produced in court; some of it is due to the fact that Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury were hardly dead before they, and the Earps, became symbols and pawns in the vicious political fighting between the Democrats and Republicans of the Arizona Territory; some of it is due to the inevitable erosion which the passing of time causes to the human memory. Wyatt Earp didn’t try to tell anyone his version until he was in his seventies, and other participants or near-participants likewise didn’t commit their stories to paper, or an interviewer’s tape recorder, until so much time had passed that it would be miraculous if there weren’t mistakes, conflations, narrative splices, and all the rest of the changes, subtle and otherwise, that go towards turning a historical event into first a story and then a legend. And even those witnesses who testified before Judge Spicer–and who were doing their best to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth–could give only partial views. And they contradicted each other just as much as they contradicted the versions presented by the participants. The truism about the untrustworthiness of eyewitness testimony is amply proven by the evidence of Tombstone. The entire thing is an object lesson in the action of the unreliable narrator.

#

We all know Han Solo shot first, but did Wyatt Earp?

#

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to condense the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral into a manageable precis. I can tell you, for instance that Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp, along with Doc Holliday, confronted Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury in the vacant lot next to Fly’s Boarding House; that when the dust cleared, Frank was dead, Tom and Billy were dying, Virgil and Morgan were wounded, Doc has been creased along the hip, Ike had fled, and Wyatt was unharmed. But that’s not a story. I can tell you that there’s no agreement on who shot first, or on how many of the Clanton/McLaury party were armed, or on whether they tried to surrender. But the story is in the why and the why of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is . . . It’s partial and complicated and I think it’s one reason why so many stories have been told about this gunfight.

Fiction likes actions to have comprehensible, consistent and, insofar as possible, singular motives; furthermore it wants the motives and the actions to belong to the same people. But that’s not how real history and real people work. From a fiction-writer’s perspective, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral doesn’t work. It’s too messy. Ike Clanton, who’d spent the previous twelve to twenty-four hours telling everyone who would listen that he wanted a showdown with the Earps, was clearly unprepared when he actually got one: he was unarmed. The McLaurys and Ike’s brother Billy may not ever have understood why they were fighting. (Nobody else was entirely clear on that either.) The Earps and Holliday were responding to Ike’s threats, but they were also acting on a piece of spectacular miscommunication by John Behan, the Sheriff of Cochise County, who led them to believe he had disarmed the Clantons and the McLaurys when in fact he had not. They weren’t ready for the gunfight, either. And as for Ike’s motivations in stirring up the hornet’s nest, from what we know, they don’t even make sense. About the most useful thing a historian can say about Ike Clanton’s inner workings on October 25-6 is, “Well, he was drunk.”

And so people make motives. Ike did it in his testimony, although he made them all Wyatt’s motives, not his own. Wyatt himself was prone to conspiracy theories, especially as an old man. Witnesses, gossip-mongers, story-tellers, historians, novelists (and on this particular subject, the dividing line between those latter two categories is not nearly as clear as one might like): everyone provides a different framework in which to place the gunfight, some plausible, some ludicrous. Although it’s nonsense on the face of it to think the Earps were involved in robbing stage-coaches, the idea persists, and it persists because it provides that singular, comprehensible motive that fiction wants, and it gives the motive to the men who acted.

Human beings are pattern-making animals. History and fiction are two of the ways in which we seek to pattern our lives, and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral shows the deep permability of the boundary where one leaves off and the other takes over. Because that boundary is where the discourse about the gunfight always has and always will take place.