![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This refers to this discussion here. A sidelight was "why does some fantasy writing about food fascinate, and some is boring?" I was trying to answer that when Teresa's blog machinery took exception to some bull-move keystroke I made and wiped out everything I had written, irretrievably. This happens over there, and at Patrick's too.
(Emma, go read that thread in the link up top. See if you have anything to tell the old folks about it)
I have developed a few little rules about writing. They are descriptive, based on my experience as a writer and reader, even if they look like they are presecriptive -- I mean I hold out the possibility that there are forms of fiction writing for which my little rules are irrelevant.
1. All other things being equal, a longer novel is better than the same novel shorter. Up to a point which I will not define. This is because it takes time to tell things, and if you tell more, it takes more time. Notice the "all other things being equal" and the "up to a point." This is not about padding. This is about doing the job thoroughly. If the book is too long, it's too long, and it has useless writing in it, which makes all other things not equal.
The other rules explain the first one, though they were revealed to me independently.
2. All other things being equal, a novel is better when it's stranger. The corollary: there is no story unless something untoward happens. And there's a limit on this, too, which I discovered the hard way last week reading a Southern gothic. If your book could be easily tweaked to be a Southern gothic, you've passed the limit, most likely, and it's most likely both tedious and disturbing and not in a good way. How this relates to the first rule: for some types of writing (mine) it takes time to establish what normal is and how the events of the story are a deviation. Especially since the two processes do not happen in that order. And normal-looking things sometimes have to be revealed as not being normal after all. And vice versa. And sometimes double-crossed. And if the novel is just really very strange -- a far alien setting where nothing is as it is here and now -- you've got to take the time to build that.
There's another piece to this: really very skilfull writers, and really very inspired ones, can write shorter books and get the same quality as someone else who's just competent, but only if that's what they write.
Okay, even though those two came first, they're not the important rules. Here are the important rules:
3. Every thing in a story must do at least two things for the story. Notice there's no rule about which two things? Any two things, so long as they are the right two things. All the usual story functions apply here, like furthering the plot, revealing the characters, developing the characters, establishing the setting, marking change in the setting or the characters or whatever, foreshadowing, motif building, theme stating (something I'm still a little vague on), comic relief, and also functions that you might not think of like that, like pulling in associations that make the story richer, differentiating attitudes of the author and the characters, signalling when lies are being told, marking genre so the reader brings the right (or usefully wrong) expectations, etc. There is no specific limit to how many things a story thing can do for the story, as far as I can tell. I mean, there's probably a practical limit, but I don't have the slightest idea what it is.
Now, of course, the things in the story are also going to do things that the writer didn't plan on. But the writer can't plan on those, mostly, though hopefully one has enough control not to allow story things to undermine the things that the writer wants to do, or not to allow story things to do things that are inimical to the writer's purpose (did I just repeat myself? I was up too late last night).
4. The corollary of this is that every thing in the story should be supported by at least two other things in the story. Things should not just be hanging there.
It doesn't take much to make a story thing do something new for a story: a couple of words, sometimes, or even a bit of white space. Sometimes, it takes a new chapter, but hey, if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
I have more than once had the experience that a reader thought something was too long, it dragged, and then by adding stuff to it I made it seem shorter and zippier. Because the things that were draggy and log were that way because they weren't doing enough things for the story. If they can't be cut, they may have to be lengthened, so they can be connected up and perform more functions.
Am I repeating myself?
Anyway, now I'm ready to talk about food.
I could never read The Worm Ouroboros because a few pages into it there's a description of the great hall or maybe a gallery or a mirador or something in some grand building, and dog darn if there aren't at least five pages devoted to this (well, it might be shorter, but it seemed that long to me) -- every gargoyle, every precious stone including some with unintenionally hilarious names (heh heh, he said carbuncle: let's light it on fire), in every damned pillar, and the description of the pediments, which are never where they sound like they ought to be, and the floor, and the windows . . .
I like description. But all this verbiage was only doing one thing for the story -- as far as I can tell in retrospect -- and it wasn't a big enough thing.
Sometimes a meal in a story can be like that. If all you want to do with the mention of the food is to note that the Duke is very rich and careless with his money and wants to impress his guests, you don't need the whole menu and every implement and every sensation to do that work. Selected details will do the job. But the more you want to do with that feast, the more details you can afford to spend on it. But there are limits even here: you can't have the length of the description of the feast spoiling the pacing of the other things in the story. I should have a little rule about pacing, but I haven't figured out how to state it yet. You do need to have a way of keeping all the story events from happening at once, or in such close succession that they blur together. And you need to have things happen fast enough that the reader hasn't forgotten the connections that have already been made. And you need to have the right rhythm -- but the right rhythm isn't just one thing.
Anyway, back to food. The food can do a lot of things. In sf, food can be enlisted to establish wonder, or strangeness. It can be used to delineate relationships, to express hardship and prosperity. In life food is often a ritual thing. But if you even so much as say that they had dinner, the fact that they had dinner has to do at least two things for the story -- one of them can be pacing. You need to say something about the time that's passing, for example, because a lot of things just happened in quick succession, and you need a lull before you smack them with the huge event that's brewing. Okay. But that means you now have other opportunities: do you want to surprise the reader? -- so the dinner can be used to pull their eyes away from the hand that's stuffing the rabbit into the hat. A pleasant meal in which problems seem to be resolved, or one where a red-herring problem is introduced, or one where a different problem is worked on for a while. Or maybe you want to ratchet tension. You can have a meal in which there are innuendoes with every bite, threats in the cutting of meat, double entendres in the pouring of wine. But if you just go on for a page or two about the meal, that doesn't guarantee that you did all this.
There's of course the dinner in Tom Jones. There's tea with Ilisidi, Tabini's grandmother (I do not want toi describe the gyrations I had to perform to retrieve that name. Memory like a sieve) in the Foreigner books. Then there are books where many many and maybe most of the story functions are performed by food -- Like Water for Chocolate, Dona Flor and her two husbands, The Stars Dispose . . .
You can delineate relationships in very thick ways with food. Look at this scenario: A white woman invites a black woman to dinner. They're both Southerners. Dinner is fried chicken, corn on the cob, stewed okra, turnip greens with chitterlings, and watermelon. What has been done here? Given the right context, maybe the white woman has declared war on the black woman and has set out to insult her deeply with a charming evening, delicious, well-cooked food, not an ungracious word -- but foods which have been used to stereotype and ridicule black people enough times in the past that there are many who won't eat them. But that's not the only thing that could be done with this same menu. What if they've been bosom buddies for years, and the black woman is homesick for food her family has been refusing to eat for thirty years, and the white woman is sympathetic and also longs for these foods of her childhood? But wait! That's not all! What if the white woman is a well-meaning bungler, of an actually lower social status than the black woman, trying to ingratiate herself with back-home foods, and the black woman has experienced a deep humiliating epiphany around the old watermelon thing? You get the idea here. You could do a lot of different things with that dinner.
Of course, you hardly ever start with a dinner and then figure out all the rest. Well, I might, but usually (and why, yes, I have written enough novels now to say "usually" even if I can't point to a pile of published,bound, sold books. I'm trying to be more professional right now!) a novel starts with a conversation, for me. Usually, though, you have a story chugging along and you have these developing relationships and events that are needing some support and some connection to each other, and at some point you have an opportunity to use a meal like this. How about if the POV person is terrified -- terrified they're blowing it, terrified they are going to be killed by someone they're enraging at this moment, terrified that the situation is completely out of control? The light might be a little too sharp, and glare off the brilliant steel of the steak knives -- especially useful if the character comes from a tradition where you don't use knives at table, and these barbarians he's living among use steak knives all the time. Or the vegetables are too red, or the smell of the food is a little too reminiscent of a charnel house. Or what if you've stepped back into omni, and you;re headhopping during the dinner, showing how one person is appalled by the woman who always drips food on her bosom (that's me, in case you wondered), another thinks she's revealing her mental weakness, another thinks she's endearingly fluttery . . .
That's what it is. Food is interesting when it does more than provide calories. Food is boring in books when it just sits there like a list. Or when the author enlists the food to do those story things, all right, but doesn't do it right, or use the right food to do the right thing, or doesn't trust the food to do the job that's been assigned to it and STICKS IN ALL THESE SIDE COMMENTS THAT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING and attempt to force you to notice and make the connections that should be organic to the story.
Yeah, I like organic food better, too.
(Emma, go read that thread in the link up top. See if you have anything to tell the old folks about it)
I have developed a few little rules about writing. They are descriptive, based on my experience as a writer and reader, even if they look like they are presecriptive -- I mean I hold out the possibility that there are forms of fiction writing for which my little rules are irrelevant.
1. All other things being equal, a longer novel is better than the same novel shorter. Up to a point which I will not define. This is because it takes time to tell things, and if you tell more, it takes more time. Notice the "all other things being equal" and the "up to a point." This is not about padding. This is about doing the job thoroughly. If the book is too long, it's too long, and it has useless writing in it, which makes all other things not equal.
The other rules explain the first one, though they were revealed to me independently.
2. All other things being equal, a novel is better when it's stranger. The corollary: there is no story unless something untoward happens. And there's a limit on this, too, which I discovered the hard way last week reading a Southern gothic. If your book could be easily tweaked to be a Southern gothic, you've passed the limit, most likely, and it's most likely both tedious and disturbing and not in a good way. How this relates to the first rule: for some types of writing (mine) it takes time to establish what normal is and how the events of the story are a deviation. Especially since the two processes do not happen in that order. And normal-looking things sometimes have to be revealed as not being normal after all. And vice versa. And sometimes double-crossed. And if the novel is just really very strange -- a far alien setting where nothing is as it is here and now -- you've got to take the time to build that.
There's another piece to this: really very skilfull writers, and really very inspired ones, can write shorter books and get the same quality as someone else who's just competent, but only if that's what they write.
Okay, even though those two came first, they're not the important rules. Here are the important rules:
3. Every thing in a story must do at least two things for the story. Notice there's no rule about which two things? Any two things, so long as they are the right two things. All the usual story functions apply here, like furthering the plot, revealing the characters, developing the characters, establishing the setting, marking change in the setting or the characters or whatever, foreshadowing, motif building, theme stating (something I'm still a little vague on), comic relief, and also functions that you might not think of like that, like pulling in associations that make the story richer, differentiating attitudes of the author and the characters, signalling when lies are being told, marking genre so the reader brings the right (or usefully wrong) expectations, etc. There is no specific limit to how many things a story thing can do for the story, as far as I can tell. I mean, there's probably a practical limit, but I don't have the slightest idea what it is.
Now, of course, the things in the story are also going to do things that the writer didn't plan on. But the writer can't plan on those, mostly, though hopefully one has enough control not to allow story things to undermine the things that the writer wants to do, or not to allow story things to do things that are inimical to the writer's purpose (did I just repeat myself? I was up too late last night).
4. The corollary of this is that every thing in the story should be supported by at least two other things in the story. Things should not just be hanging there.
It doesn't take much to make a story thing do something new for a story: a couple of words, sometimes, or even a bit of white space. Sometimes, it takes a new chapter, but hey, if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
I have more than once had the experience that a reader thought something was too long, it dragged, and then by adding stuff to it I made it seem shorter and zippier. Because the things that were draggy and log were that way because they weren't doing enough things for the story. If they can't be cut, they may have to be lengthened, so they can be connected up and perform more functions.
Am I repeating myself?
Anyway, now I'm ready to talk about food.
I could never read The Worm Ouroboros because a few pages into it there's a description of the great hall or maybe a gallery or a mirador or something in some grand building, and dog darn if there aren't at least five pages devoted to this (well, it might be shorter, but it seemed that long to me) -- every gargoyle, every precious stone including some with unintenionally hilarious names (heh heh, he said carbuncle: let's light it on fire), in every damned pillar, and the description of the pediments, which are never where they sound like they ought to be, and the floor, and the windows . . .
I like description. But all this verbiage was only doing one thing for the story -- as far as I can tell in retrospect -- and it wasn't a big enough thing.
Sometimes a meal in a story can be like that. If all you want to do with the mention of the food is to note that the Duke is very rich and careless with his money and wants to impress his guests, you don't need the whole menu and every implement and every sensation to do that work. Selected details will do the job. But the more you want to do with that feast, the more details you can afford to spend on it. But there are limits even here: you can't have the length of the description of the feast spoiling the pacing of the other things in the story. I should have a little rule about pacing, but I haven't figured out how to state it yet. You do need to have a way of keeping all the story events from happening at once, or in such close succession that they blur together. And you need to have things happen fast enough that the reader hasn't forgotten the connections that have already been made. And you need to have the right rhythm -- but the right rhythm isn't just one thing.
Anyway, back to food. The food can do a lot of things. In sf, food can be enlisted to establish wonder, or strangeness. It can be used to delineate relationships, to express hardship and prosperity. In life food is often a ritual thing. But if you even so much as say that they had dinner, the fact that they had dinner has to do at least two things for the story -- one of them can be pacing. You need to say something about the time that's passing, for example, because a lot of things just happened in quick succession, and you need a lull before you smack them with the huge event that's brewing. Okay. But that means you now have other opportunities: do you want to surprise the reader? -- so the dinner can be used to pull their eyes away from the hand that's stuffing the rabbit into the hat. A pleasant meal in which problems seem to be resolved, or one where a red-herring problem is introduced, or one where a different problem is worked on for a while. Or maybe you want to ratchet tension. You can have a meal in which there are innuendoes with every bite, threats in the cutting of meat, double entendres in the pouring of wine. But if you just go on for a page or two about the meal, that doesn't guarantee that you did all this.
There's of course the dinner in Tom Jones. There's tea with Ilisidi, Tabini's grandmother (I do not want toi describe the gyrations I had to perform to retrieve that name. Memory like a sieve) in the Foreigner books. Then there are books where many many and maybe most of the story functions are performed by food -- Like Water for Chocolate, Dona Flor and her two husbands, The Stars Dispose . . .
You can delineate relationships in very thick ways with food. Look at this scenario: A white woman invites a black woman to dinner. They're both Southerners. Dinner is fried chicken, corn on the cob, stewed okra, turnip greens with chitterlings, and watermelon. What has been done here? Given the right context, maybe the white woman has declared war on the black woman and has set out to insult her deeply with a charming evening, delicious, well-cooked food, not an ungracious word -- but foods which have been used to stereotype and ridicule black people enough times in the past that there are many who won't eat them. But that's not the only thing that could be done with this same menu. What if they've been bosom buddies for years, and the black woman is homesick for food her family has been refusing to eat for thirty years, and the white woman is sympathetic and also longs for these foods of her childhood? But wait! That's not all! What if the white woman is a well-meaning bungler, of an actually lower social status than the black woman, trying to ingratiate herself with back-home foods, and the black woman has experienced a deep humiliating epiphany around the old watermelon thing? You get the idea here. You could do a lot of different things with that dinner.
Of course, you hardly ever start with a dinner and then figure out all the rest. Well, I might, but usually (and why, yes, I have written enough novels now to say "usually" even if I can't point to a pile of published,bound, sold books. I'm trying to be more professional right now!) a novel starts with a conversation, for me. Usually, though, you have a story chugging along and you have these developing relationships and events that are needing some support and some connection to each other, and at some point you have an opportunity to use a meal like this. How about if the POV person is terrified -- terrified they're blowing it, terrified they are going to be killed by someone they're enraging at this moment, terrified that the situation is completely out of control? The light might be a little too sharp, and glare off the brilliant steel of the steak knives -- especially useful if the character comes from a tradition where you don't use knives at table, and these barbarians he's living among use steak knives all the time. Or the vegetables are too red, or the smell of the food is a little too reminiscent of a charnel house. Or what if you've stepped back into omni, and you;re headhopping during the dinner, showing how one person is appalled by the woman who always drips food on her bosom (that's me, in case you wondered), another thinks she's revealing her mental weakness, another thinks she's endearingly fluttery . . .
That's what it is. Food is interesting when it does more than provide calories. Food is boring in books when it just sits there like a list. Or when the author enlists the food to do those story things, all right, but doesn't do it right, or use the right food to do the right thing, or doesn't trust the food to do the job that's been assigned to it and STICKS IN ALL THESE SIDE COMMENTS THAT EXPLAIN EVERYTHING and attempt to force you to notice and make the connections that should be organic to the story.
Yeah, I like organic food better, too.