Yesterday, on Salon Futura, Cheryl Morgan published an essay called What is Genre Anyway? Personally, I disagree what a lot of what was written and hold a slightly different view on what genre is. I feel the argument presented was a work of apologetics rather than definition. But perhaps this is symptomatic of my age, upbringing and increasing feelings of alienation from “The Conversation.”

Those feelings aren’t going to be discussed here. What I want to counter is an idea presented four paragraphs into the essay. I don’t think that the wrongness of what was written invalidates Cheryl’s entire argument. Although it did reduce my sympathy for what followed.

The paragraph I disagree with is:

Another common complaint leveled at science fiction and fantasy is that they are “not real”. Apparently far more skill is required to set a story in the real world than in an imaginary one. This is a bit odd, because the job of a writer is making things up. Making up imaginary worlds is hard, at least if you want to impress discerning science fiction fans. Then again, I know people who complain that the likes of Picasso and Dalì are bad painters because their works don’t look like anything real. “Why can’t they paint like Constable,” such people ask. It is an opinion, but it is not one you’d find expressed by serious art critics, so why do serious literary critics cleave so to the real?

I disagree. I disagree with every fibre of my being. Everyone has an imagination. Everyone day dreams. Every night thousands of people spend their free time inventing stories in groups playing table-top role-playing games or writing stories of their own. Making things up is the most natural thing in the world for humans to do. It is an important component of what makes us all intelligent creatures. Even if a person is not creative with their imagination they still dream. To say otherwise is to demean others from a position of insipid and false superiority. The art of impressing “discerning science fiction fans” I believe is less about inventing fantastic imaginary worlds, but instead finding how far the real world can be pushed until it becomes not credible to the “discerning science fiction fan”.

When an author is attempting to write about the real world, that author has to look at the world and their position in it. For an author to produce a work of fiction which carries some measure of truth involves looking very hard at themselves as an individual and considering how exactly to represent their place in the the world. It involves a level of introspection that I believe is missing from most science fiction even so long after the transrealist manifesto. In some societies when the work is actually about real life this has a tendency to get the work banned or even the writer imprisoned.

So yes, I think the act of writing about the real world ungarnished by the fantastic is harder because it forces the writer to confront who they are with nothing to hide behind. Writing about the real world is at the very centre of every good story written, fantastic or not.

Where the hell is science fiction’s Raymond Carver?

I am slowly waking up to face the new year. Christmas was fine. I read a lot, although not as much as I’d like to. Mostly free from drama, although one relatively minor health problem cropped up which I’m only just starting to recover fully from. There is also a bureaucratic nightmare that I’ve got to deal with later today (Wednesday). Apart from those nasties, all is well.

Now that I’m used to signing the date as 2011 instead of 2010, it is time to come set some goals for the new year. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about them, and in my not-so-private notebook¹ there are three goals written down. Only one of them matters. The phrasing is slightly different, but in effect my goal for 2011 is to climb the equivalent of 12,000 meters of mountain/rock. Ideally I should climb more than that. However, if I can average one thousand meters a month I’ll be content.

You will notice there are no public personal writing goals. They are useless and self-defeating. Art is not a competition. The only thing that counts in the end is how beautiful and how true your art is. Fuck word counts or total number of stories/novels written in a year. I reject this, ultimately, childish desire to grind your way through the game without exploring the full map. It is the journey that matters and not the number of tokens collected along the way.

Now I am going to start to deal with that nightmare and if I get the time before bed read a little bit about the Mourne Mountains. Music for tonight shall be David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy.

Have an interesting year everyone. I hope to climb a lot more mountains. Maybe some of you will join me.

¹ – My ubiquitous moleskine isn’t private. If I write something down I don’t have a general problem with it being read.

This year unlike the previous two years I am not taking park in NaNoWriMo. This isn’t because I think that the exercise is a bad or worthless one, I don’t. But I also don’t think that it is the right exercise to encourage the habit of writing in everyone, and that some of NaNoWriMo’s flaws are serious if you hold a specific philosophy towards writing. The reason why I am not doing NaNoWriMo is that it makes me by week two terribly unhappy and depressed.

This is because of my own individual approach to writing. I will illustrate this with a wonky, imprecise extended climbing metaphor. You have been warned. Bouldering is a discipline of rock climbing dedicated to the act of climbing short, but technically hard “problems.” Sport climbing is a form of free climbing that can vary in length but uses fixed bolts in the rock for the climber to clip their rope to so they don’t, er, die. As in bouldering the expectation is to generally be climbing on the edge of one’s ability, but falling off, failure, is OK because you can keep working a problem/route until you have climbed it.

This is perfectionist climbing, and I think quite a fitting analogy to the process of writing short fiction which is my current interest. Write a bit, evaluate it, rewrite it until I’m happy with it.

What then is NaNoWriMo using this climbing metaphor? Well, let’s say that NaNoWriMo to me feels like a long walk up a flight of stairs with a lot of company. This hike is fifty thousand steps long and it doesn’t matter if you walk in full strikes or tired, weary dragging of the feet. It doesn’t matter, just as long as you climb the flight of stairs in a month. Yes, this is a much less poetic description than the camp I rest in, but, eh, that’s how it feels to me and it just doesn’t appeal or get me writing.

Just writing fifty-thousand words doesn’t make a novel. While E.M. Forster’s definition of a novel as being any text over fifty-thousand words is generally pretty sound, it does come with a couple of implicit assumptions about dramatic structure and the overall shape of the text. Most texts written during NaNoWriMo aren’t likely to be the first draft of a novel, let alone a good or bad one. Maybe draft 0.5. This comes back to my preoccupation of writing as a highly technical exercise, like climbing, where the individual moves and the overall sequence of moves matter. So while everything I write doesn’t have to be perfect I do like to revise and rework as I go. I like to fall off, have another look and a think and then try again repeatedly until it is right.

NaNoWriMo isn’t for me. It isn’t a problem of discipline (I write most days all year round) just of attitude and temperament.

I must add that I do deeply approve of the social side of NaNoWriMo, even if the exercise doesn’t work for me, and that I am typing and rewriting this from my composition book during the local area write-in for NaNoWriMo.

Will Ellwood
Coffee Republic, Leicester
Sunday, 7^th November

It is readily accepted by most sane people that much of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction is his best work. Many of these stories are not what today we would call short stories, but instead are perfect examples of flash fiction. A few weeks ago I bought a copy of “The First Forty-Nine Stories” from Amazon and I have devoured its contents. I am very fond of the story “Old Man at the Bridge.”

Still a mystery remains for me about one aspect of the collection. I have not been able to find any reference to this anywhere, so maybe someone will provide more information. A quirk of the collection is that between many of the short stories listed in the contents are other stories always less than a page and always given a chapter number.

Personally, I find many of these mystery stories are the best stories in the book. The topics covered are fairly similar: most of the stories are about The Great War or bull fighting. Quite a few of them feature Nick Adams. Always, however, the stories are tight and say just enough to convey a point.

These are fine examples of precision storytelling. Take a look at the story called “Chapter V”:

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

There are no simplistic rules for wannabe writers to be found here. All I will do is ask you a question which takes you down an interesting avenue of thought for both readers and writers. (This question can also be applied to games, films, comics, whatever.) How much can be taken away from a text until it becomes incoherent?

You have your homework. I encourage you to think about it. And if anyone thinks that Hemingway’s six word story is a clever answer, they are wrong. Generally most attempts to tell stories in such a confined space rely on abandoning the techniques of normal length fiction and rapidly become uninteresting experiments with no real substance. It is also the obvious answer and provides little added understanding. Think harder!

1. Where possible sentences should only be as long as the page is wide.
2. Facts kick the shit out of fiction.
3. Rules are arbitrary, but restrictions do foster creativity.
4. Compression. Less is more. Iceberg theory.
5. Genre: see rule #3.

I am a reluctant gamer. Sure I played video games as a kid, and while at university I dabbled pretty heavily in tabletop role playing games, but I don’t think, except for a couple of years in my early teens, that I was ever a serious gamer. It was never a lifestyle for me, just a thing I did occasionally.

Now there are a number of reasons for this, but the main one is that my true love and passion is stories. Games, even tabletop role playing games, are not about stories. In a video game you are not in control of the story, there is only the illusion of control. The stories that are generated in table top games are not interesting stories. They are emotionally rich experiences, I will give them that, but they are not detailed or anything more than shadows of the stories they invariably attempt to imitate. At best they are compromised by the limitations of being collaborative and improvised.

There is nothing wrong with this. There are people who do get enjoyment from playing the game, and not the story. There are also plenty of people who aspire to and succeed in enjoying a modern day and paraphernalia ridden version of a camp fire tale. Rich emotional experiences.

I am not one of these people it turns out.
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My old laptop has been replaced. It has been dying for a couple of years, and had become a tool to be fought with instead of used invisibly. Of course the Toshiba laptop was four years old and had a hard life of international travel, finishing a university degree and, well, just being used daily for four years by me.

It had some extra memory installed into it a few months ago in the hopes that’d extend the life of it, but that wasn’t helping with the heat it was generating on my lap and terrible sluggishness of Windows XP, so it was time to replace it with a new machine. A lighter and more ergonomic machine.

Thank God for birthdays!

The machine I’ve gotten is an Asus Eee PC 1001HA and it is a nice little computer. It came with Windows XP (yuck!) pre-installed and as my instillation plan went wrong because I erased the Windows restore partition I’ve decided to compromise and duel boot with Ubuntu Netbook Edition instead of just having Ubuntu installed as the single operating system on the computer. This was after spending all of Saturday afternoon making an image file of the Windows XP partition.

Oh well, we all make stupid mistakes, and the Ubuntu partition still has 100Gb to play with.

As Ubuntu is my desktop OS of choice I’ve not noticed any difference between using this netbook and my desktop. This is a good thing. There were a few small problems to deal with once Ubuntu was installed: namely having to install a wireless driver and change a setting in the bootloader to allow all the hotkeys to work. This was no big deal really, especially after the fuck up with the partitioning.

A big pink sticker has been applied to the back of the netbook already but for some reason I’ve not yet removed all the horrible little branding stickers on the front of the computer or the transparent sticker applied to the screen yet.

There’s always a strange period between computers. The time when all the files you need aren’t quite all transferred and everything is quite how you expect. But I suspect that me and Rashomon¹ and me should work well together.

I am very pleased with my new toy.

¹ – The netbook’s network name is “Rashmon” because the Ubuntu logo reminds me of the stylized flower seen on front of many translations of the Hagakure.