Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

fter yesterday's blog, and my latest "woe is my video card" update, I got an email with some advice from James.

And frankly, it's the best advice I've had yet.

Seriously it seems like a defective card. An old one of mine started doing a similar thing, except with pink lines and BSOD'd. At that time I chucked it and upgraded (again). I mean shit, if it doesn't function in 3d mode with the drivers that came on the original CD... return the POS. Also I used to be a diehard nVidia fan... but now I like ATI's products. I'm not sure why but there stuff is just better nowadays.

The problem lies in the fact that you don't have your UPC anymore. MAYBE just maybe they will let you exchange on a "faulty equipment" basis. Then again maybe not and your totally screwed. On that note you should let someone get use of the WoW
account! :-)

The other problem is that the box and receipt say, repeatedly, that no repairs or exchanges can be made at the place of purchase, and that it must be returned to the manufacturer if defective under warranty. So I suppose I'll have to look into that, since as James points out, if the goddamned thing doesn't work straight out of the box with an older title, what good is it?

As for the WoW beta, I've been sort of hoping that some crazed fan would get word of it and offer to send me $250 cash via Fed Ex since he just had to have a working account now now now.  Since that's not happening, and I think the beta will go on for months and months and at some point during that time Malaya and/or myself will surely want to play it some, I'm holding onto it for now.  Like a greedy son of a bitch.

One news item today, a long one that hit very close to home, and then I've got a short discussion of novel structure that grew into a long essay on novel structure, with numerous digressions to talk about my own work.  So all of you guys who tell me that you enjoy it when I talk about my fiction should be happy.

Or as close to happy as any of us can ever truly be in this mad, mad world.

¤ This story is a worrisome one. A student in a college creative writing class wrote a very graphic serial killer story, passed out copies to everyone in his reading group, and ended up being expelled for it.  How does this happen?

The teacher didn't see the story until after the class (which is SOP), and while in the old days she might have just talked to the student about his presentation, and suggested he lighten the violence or consider that readers weren't as interested in gore as he was, these days his misguided story became a really big deal.

The quiet freshman from Seattle who sat in the back row had submitted a disturbing short story, a fictitious first-person account of a young serial killer. The story was so rife with gruesome details about sexual torture, dismemberment and bloodlust that the teacher panicked, wondering what to do now that she had already handed out copies to her class to take home and read.

"I've read a lot of student stories where they're trying to emulate some shock genre," Richman said last week. "This was different. It was full of sex and violence, incest, pedophilia. There was no story, no character development -- just hacking up bodies."

The teacher was worried about things a bit, and went to her department coordinator for advice, and he had some good thoughts.

Tom Molanphy, head of the school's writing division, read the student's story and took notes. Richman said Molanphy suggested the instructor have her students read the first chapter of Alice Sebold's recent bestseller, "The Lovely Bones, " a novel about a 14-year-old rape and murder victim, for comparison. That story was a good example of grisly details presented in the service of literature. The student seemed to need a lesson in avoiding gratuitous repulsiveness.

So basically the department head was a realist; nothing in a story is out of bounds, it's just in how you present it that determines if it's a decent story or pornographic trash. The author is young, untrained, and in his violent-loving phase (I wrote a number of things not all that different from this one in my early writing days.) and needs to get that out of his system and realize that just because he gets a thrill from writing very gory stuff, other people aren't going to like it.  So the professor's advice, which I think is very good, is that he should compare his work to that of a professional writer, to learn how to present the same material in a form that readers would get more use from.

And yes, this is something I had to learn myself, back in the old days, though it was never presented to me in such plain terms.  Like most everything I know about writing, I taught it to myself through practice and observation.  And it was just common sense, once I was past the "let's make something as gross as we can think of just because that sort of thing fascinates us" phase.  I took creative writing for several semesters, mostly since it let me write a lot and read a lot and get an A for doing it, and while I enjoyed the classes and wrote a lot for them, I can't say I really learned anything specifically useful in them.  It was all just self-teaching through practice and life experience. Would it have been different if I'd had a better instructor?  Perhaps.

My experiences aside, I was at least fortunate enough to be writing my early, raw and bloody stories back in the early 90s, before seemingly every school administrator in American became an idiot with no sense of reality.  Nothing of mine ever made a big enough wave to get me in trouble with the administration.  The kid in this current story was far less fortunate.

News of the story shot up the administrative ladder, from Eileen Everett, chairman of the liberal arts department, to Vice President Sue Rowley and to President Elisa Stephens, granddaughter of the school's founder. By the time Richman's weekly class was set to reconvene, the university's director of security had called in the San Francisco Police Department's homicide division.

After a brief interrogation in his dormitory, the student, who did not respond to The Chronicle's requests for comment, was put on a plane and sent home to his family. The next day, according to Richman, the young man's parents called the university, alleging that their son had been encouraged to write about violence after reading a short story assigned in Richman's Narrative Storytelling class.

The article goes on and on and gets more and more depressing, but the final outcome was the student being expelled and banished, and not only that but the teacher was fired (well, not re-hired the next semester, but that's the same thing when you're adjunct), despite having excellent student evaluations.  Listen to this gutless administrative weaseling:

Senior Vice President of Public Relations Sallie Huntting would not acknowledge the fate of the student and the instructor, citing a university policy prohibiting comment on "personnel matters."

"Certainly there is a lot of creativity, and we encourage that," she said. "But when there is a questionable or disturbing issue, we contact the proper authorities.''

I regularly post news about some junior high or high school administrator who seems to lack anything even resembling common sense, but it's pretty rare to see that in college.  A kid in a creative writing class writes a creative story that's got a murderer and lot of violence.  Just like half the best seller list. And the school administrators are so scared, gutless, stupid, and pathetic that they can't tell the difference between fiction and reality, and not only do the expel the student, they even fire the teacher of the class.

So how are things going at the school now?  Have lessons been learned from this debacle?  Not exactly.

One of Richmond's former colleagues, who declined to give his name, said he considered the administration's actions to be a matter of image control. "They don't want parents seeing sensationalized violence and sex," he said. "It's a marketing issue for them.''

...such scrutiny "makes the students feel like they could get expelled for what their imagination gives them,'' he said. "It puts a real chill on writing classes.''

In the aftermath of the incident, students and teachers say they are the ones being victimized in an atmosphere of hysteria.

Kaufman said one of his students had recently been asked to leave the school when she submitted a paper alluding to suicide threats. Like Richman, the instructor approached his superiors for advice on possible counseling services, only to see the student swiftly expelled.

And this is at an art college in San Francisco!  It's not like they're at a community college in Oklahoma or some place conservative where you'd expect cluelessness and confusion on the part of the administration.  How can these people be so dumb, and so profoundly out of touch with modern tastes?  Are they unaware that there are about 15 movies and 30 best sellers a year about serial killers?  Don't they know that there are numerous books in their school library and dozens of titles in the campus book store that contain material that would apparently get a student expelled for writing it?

I don't recall every story I wrote back in my college days, and I don't remember which ones I turned in to class and which ones I wrote just for myself, but I can guarantee you quite a few of them had a ton of violence, weird sex, and other unsavory subject matter. And so did lots of others that I read.  I never did one that was just out and out murder, gore, etc; there was always a story and some reflection on things, but still, if some lawsuit-fearing idiot of a school administrator had read one, and not known the difference between fiction from an angry young man and the careful planning on the next Columbine killer, what would have become of me?

I suppose lawsuits from stupid parents are what we've got to blame for this.  Kids do stupid stuff, and rather than letting it be, or taking responsibility for it, or just letting the blame go to the kid, parents (of the killer or the killed) very often feel a need to find someone to blame.  And schools have money to pay big lawsuits, so if anything, ever, of any kind, goes wrong in schools, the parents blame the school and sue, and maybe they get lucky. This puts all administrators in a permanent CYA mode, which is obviously very non-conducive to learning and creativity.

And leads to rules that mandate kids be suspended or expelled for taking an Advil in class, carrying a plastic knife away from the cafeteria, cracking a dirty joke, etc. It's really a sad commentary on the society we've created for ourselves, and it depresses me far more than any offensive content material in any story I've ever read.

Speaking of writing (not that I was), I got several good hours in on the novel last night, and finally got to write some new stuff, rather than just doing more boring review, so I enjoyed it.  I even worked on it for a couple of hours this afternoon while Malaya was out visiting with her mom, and I'm planning on getting back into it tonight as well.  I try not to think about the whole thing and how large it will be, since that would just distress me. It's like eating an elephant. One bite at a time.

I know I've got months and months yet of steady writing to even get a good rough draft finished, and I'm pretty sure I'll have to do massive rewriting since I'm going so long on the early chapters, as I delve ever-so-deeply into the thoughts of the main characters, the history of the land, and so on.  It's not bad, but I'm not objective, and basically I'll have about 1.5 books worth of material, if you went by how long it would be for most authors writing the same number of events, yet my version of it will be closer to 3-4 books worth, length wise.

Or perhaps it'll all work out; after all, I'm very self critical and I'm comparing my work to the best-structured fantasy novels I've ever read, and wanting to do better than they did.  In fact, I've read very few novels in my life, of any type, that are all that well structured.

What's novel structure anyway?

Stephen King, for example. He's not a formulaic hack, but he writes very consistently and logical structured novels.  They start off with an intro to the main characters and some inkling of what the overall plot will be.  More characters come in, you get to know the main ones, you see the conflict being set up, and then stuff starts happening.  Weird stuff, interesting stuff, etc. The main characters start to come into conflict, if they weren't already, plot threads tie up, and so it goes.  More things happen, the plot advances, you see where it's all going, and in 300 or 400 pages it wraps up relatively neatly, with a satisfying conclusion.

I should point out here (or possibly a paragraph ago) that this is my definition of "novel structure" and not something I read somewhere, though I'm sure each and every competent (flattering myself) analysis of the structure of a novel will have a lot of overlapping areas of agreement.

Anyway, it's very possible to buy too much into the "good structure" style of writing, and become formulaic. Dean R. Koontz would be a good example of that, where basically everything he writes sounds just like everything else he's written.  In his case it's not just because of the A => B => C => D... style of writing, but because he has the same stock type characters in every book, and they always do more or less the same thing.  Strong but vulnerable man with a troubled past, woman in jeopardy who needs his help, super smart child or animal, weird world-threatening pseudo-scientific peril, vast forces of conspiracy the man/woman battle against, and he always is healed by her love, her terrors are cleared up by his bravery, and they face the ultimate enemy and triumph, changing the world fundamentally in the process.

This doesn't describe every single novel of his, and since I haven't read any for at least 8 or 10 years he might have managed to change some by now, but of the 15 or 20 of them I read back in the late 80s and early 90s, this describes all but 1 or 2 of them.

This isn't necessarily bad; lots of readers love formulaic novels by mediocre writers. All romance fiction, most spy novels, most horror/suspense stories, most of the medical thrillers, etc.  You read 2 or 3 novels by a given writer in a given genre and you've read them all. But if you enjoy them, why not?  Every episode of CSI and Friends and other such shows is essentially the same, but people still enjoy them.  It's comfort TV or comfort fiction, even if the events depicted are anything but comforting. And to be honest, quite often the authors of such works are crucified by their fans if/when they try to break out of the mold and really do something different. People don't want major changes in their favorite shows and book characters.  For all the shit authors get for endlessly repeating the same stuff over and over again, they probably have even more fans who don't mind, or who wouldn't like the new stuff if they did change radically.

I should also point out that a formulaic novel doesn't necessarily follow the usual novel structure, and a novel that follows the structure isn't necessarily formulaic. Koontz chooses to write very structurally sound novels, that use very formulaic characters. In his work you are introduced to the important characters early on, you learn more about them as the novel progresses and the plot thickens, and there is a pay off with a big chase or some wild action before the resolution and conclusion.

This isn't a bad thing, it's just that of the novels I've read that are really good, even great, very, very few of them follow the structure religiously. It's like music, there are lots of catchy, fun songs that are 4 minutes long, open with some music, and go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, music, chorus, winding down chorus, end. It's the best, easiest, most efficient way to structure a song.  But it's very predictable, and you've probably got some favorite songs that deviate wildly from the norm, and are far more memorable and satisfying for doing so. 

I suppose I'm saying that structured novels are like paint by numbers artwork.  No matter how brilliantly someone stays within the lines and how well their colors enhance each other, it's still going to be pretty plain.  Novels that paint wildly, all over the place and not at all between the lines can be harder to follow and harder to read and are often train wrecks. But the ones that pull it off are the ones that really stick in our memories.

King's The Shining and Salem's Lot and Pet Semetery and many of his other most popular stories are very novel structured, but the events and characters are so good that they are hugely enjoyable despite being somewhat formulaic in structure. You can even go superstructure, and follow the approved structure, but exceed it in some massive way. Stephen King's The Stand is a good example, since it follows the novel structure format almost religiously.  It just takes a lot longer to get to the end since it's such a sprawling tale with so many things happening and so many major characters.  This can be boring and overlong, but in The Stand, at least IMHO, it works well and makes the ultimate conclusion much better since you care so much about so many of the characters by then.

However I should also note that the line between "so long you fall in love with the characters" and "so long I was bored and just kept reading to see how it ended" is very, very thin, and changes location for every reader. 

Lord of the Rings is another novel with excellent structure.  It has more digressions and side trips than is normally approved, which is why it takes 3 books to tell a story that could/should have been fitted into one (at least going by the professional style guide). It's got more events than a normal novel, it relates them with far more words, and it takes more digressions, but the whole "introduce characters, introduce conflict, develop plot towards clear conclusion" thing is very clear and strong in LotR.  There is a long epilogue-like section after the book ends, and that's way out of the novel structure, but other than that it's very true to the approved outline style of writing a novel. It's just a very long one, like The Stand is. (My novel is very long, ALA LotR, but it's also quite a bit off of the novel structure format.)

The three George R R Martin novels in his Song of Fire and Ice series are good examples also, in an even larger way.  The plot unfolds slowly and gradually, very very slowly and gradually.  So slowly that he's written three novels in the 7 or 8 book saga (he's said he's not sure exactly how many books it will take to tell) and we're now just to the point that the main plot is really getting going. The books are vast and sprawling and have an amazing amount of things happening, but that's all just decoration on the central structure, which is proceeding according to the professional outline.  Just very, very slowly.

I'm not much on the novel format style of writing, and have been much more influenced by non-structure novels, such as Clive Barker's best work (Weaveworld and Imajica, for example). Those stories start off with a few characters, and seem to be the main building towards the main event, until by page 200 or 300 you realize that what you initially thought the book was about is not what it's about at all, and that many of the initial characters you had grown attached to aren't really the most important characters at all, and that new ones who have come in (or will come in around page 400 or 500) are actually far more important to the conclusion then the ones you knew in the first 50 pages.  The overall plot and direction of the story is usually quite serpentine and hard to predict, and the endings are ambiguous and you're left with as many questions as answers.  All of these traits are very much not proper novel structure, which says to keep things linear and tie up every loose end neatly.

This probably explains why Barker writes a new novel every few years, amidst working on his numerous other projects, and formulaic types like Koontz churn out a new one every 6 months.  As well as why Barker is popular but far from a guaranteed best seller, and Koontz can check off 6-8 weeks on the NYT Bestseller list every novel, as his fans get their comfort-suspense fix and forget the story the minute they turn the final page.

Basically, it's a lot harder to think up 10 detailed, interesting characters, all of them with their own quirks and agendas, and logical motivations. In so many novels, movies, TV shows, etc, the majority of events and character actions exist solely to advance the plot. If you watch/read something, and stop to think, "Why would he actually do that?" you'll often realize that he wouldn't.  There's no reason the killer would plant clues to his nature or identity, or that the cop would take those crazy risks when he didn't need to.  It was just something that had to be there to advance the plot. That's why you constantly get those wacky odd couple movies with clashing partners, (Lethal Weapon, Beverly Hills Cop, Rush Hour, etc) who are forced to work together by their boss when they actually want nothing to do with each other. And they, of course, turn out to really get along once they get to know each other, and bond against their will.  Very formulaic, but my point was that there's no logical reason they would be together, or that they'd risk their lives constantly, or that the bad guys wouldn't adapt when they see the cops catching on to them.  The mismatched buddies are paired by a force beyond their control, the bad guys exist solely to be bad and provide a foil for the good guys, and everything works out in the end.

I faced this problem in my ongoing novel, when I got to the end of Chapter One (the original, now much-modified version of which you can read here) and had Vena and the Necromancer together in that cave.  I had many ideas for their further adventures over the rest of the book, and knew challenges they'd have to surmount, ways they could aid each other, additional characters who would come in and change everything, etc.  But I realized that I had no reason for them to stay together, into Chapter Two.  In fact, in the initial version there's really no reason for them to be together even that long. Vena thinks constantly about ditching the Necromancer and vanishing into the shadows, and while I was writing it I realized that was what she should do, and what she would do, if given a chance, if she were a real character. So I put in more about the guards who were resurrected recognizing her, and there's more about the Knights seeing her and marking her face in the final version of the chapter.

However that only got me to the end of the chapter, by giving her a reason to flee the city of Balain with the Necromancer. Why should she stay with him in Chapter Two and beyond, when she doesn't like him, trust him or feel safe near him, with all of the other forces in the world after him.  So I had to think up a logical reason for her to be with him, and I couldn't just have their police captain order them to work together, like they do in the movies. (Does that happen in real life anyway?  I mean isn't the main thing you want in a manager an ability to put together smoothly-meshing teams of his underlings, and wouldn't common sense dictate that when you have two people who are fighting constantly, you put them with other partners they won't fight with?)

Also, as you might be itching to raise your hand and point out, I'm only addressing Vena's motivations. It's obvious to think more about what she wants, since the chapter is written mostly from her perspective.  However, what about the Necromancer's desires and motivations?  Why does he need her for a second after her benefit to him, guiding him through the unfamiliar city, is done? He should probably cut her throat from behind the minute he's out, and run off without her, since she just slows him down and eats more than half the food.  Right?  I mean he wasn't ordered to work with her by the cranky but loveable police captain; and he's in this for himself.

And that was a challenge. I had to think of a compelling reason for him to keep her along, and I wasn't just going to give him some strange infatuation with her that would eventually deepen to a love that neither of them could have anticipated.  Or something cheap and convenient, like only she, improbably enough, knows the location of some ancient artifact he wants.  Or a password he must have.  (Or only she can be sacrificed to end an ancient curse, ALA Pirates of the Caribbean.) Or anything cheesy like that.

Rest assured that I thought of something good, and that I apply that sort of critical thinking to all of the characters and events in the book.  I'm very picky about that sort of thing, and while just throwing characters together for the convenience of the plot is the easy way to go, and most readers will never notice one way or the other, I try to avoid the easy way out.

This is something I see a lot of in the real world, in politics and foreign affairs and such. Most people want to cast themselves in a positive light and think of themselves or their side as both the heroes of their story, and other people as the bad guys. And as we all know, in movies the bad guys are there to be bad and oppose the good guys. Their own goals and ends are often unclear or unimportant; what matters is that they want to stop the good guys from stopping them.  This is a fun way to view the world, but it's childish and seldom correct.

Take President Bush. As he says, he sees the world as "us vs. them." If you're not "us" you are "them" and in his mind, all "they" do is cause problems and oppose "us."  He's got no ability to see that "them" are people living their own lives, trying to do what they think is best, and what's best for them or their cause. The terrorists aren't just figures in some video game, popping up and causing mayhem and existing to be shot down.  They're people who think what they are doing is the best thing they can do, or is the only choice they have.  They have their own goals, their own dreams, families they love, etc.  If you regard other people solely based on how they fit into your own schemes, you'll never get an accurate view of the, and can never hope to understand them.

There are "bad guys" in my novel, and while they provide convenient enemies and sword targets for the good guys, they aren't just mindless monsters who pop up when it's time for an action sequence. The bad guys are doing their own thing, and in their mind they're the good guys and they want to succeed for what they see as the betterment of society.  And while the reader will probably identify with the main characters, and regard the forces opposing them as the bad guys, I still want the "bad guys" to do things for a reason, to advance their own goals, and to want to win.  And who knows, they just might.

I've digressed again, and I could go on classifying authors by the degree to which they follow proper novel structure, or I could just keep talking about my novel, thought that would get difficult since I'm doing it without revealing any plot or character developments past the very old version of chapter one that any of you but Malaya have read. But the hour grows late and my Boca burger is calling me. (I dug one out last night that was stuck to the top of the frost build up on top of the freezer, reminiscent of Luke frozen to the roof of the snowman's cave in Empire.  I was amused. Briefly.)

In conclusion, I don't think much about how long my novel will be and how big a project writing it is, since I'd get dismayed.  I can't write it all at once, so I just have to keep on going, and I'll get there eventually. You glance at the peak of the mountain to give yourself motivation to keep climbing; you don't count up how many steps it will take to get there, and think how tired you are already.

And when it comes to plot structure, my novel does not follow the easy, conventional style.  You know nothing about the ultimate goal of things for several chapters, you don't meet some of the most important characters until well into the novel, and most of the main characters change quite a bit over the course of the novel, while all doing things that make sense to them, no matter how maddening it might be to watch it happen. I'll freely admit that this is a Clive Barker influence, since I love how he keeps things moving and changing and dynamic.  I'm certainly not saying he invented that style of writing, but he's done it very well in several novels I love and admire, so he's the example I use.

I also realize that while this story, this novel(s) I'm writing does not fit into the conventional novel structure format, I'll quite likely have ideas later in my life/career that do, and if I do, I do.  I'm not going to try to chop up or tell half through flashback or throw in random unimportant characters just to keep the story from advancing normally. I'm not a believer in King's frequently-stated metaphor that stories are like fossils and the author is just digging them up as they are.  I think they're formed by the author and can be almost anything.  But there are limits to this, and if you've got characters and an idea that will work very nicely if you write it in a format that Dean Koontz would love, you don't need to fight against it just to feel like you're special and original.

And no, I wouldn't have admitted or agreed with that when I was 20 and determined to reinvent the literary wheel with practically every sentence.

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