Peeking into the rock

I'm not talking about what writers should do. I'm talking about a certain thing I'm doing here, and it seems to be the thing I'm for, maybe. One nice thing about the Potlatch writers conference is that they liked that story for what it was really doing, and that was interesting. They used the word "gritty," which I've been repeating to myself over and over. I used it a little to describe the setting of The Conduit but I have just begun to think of it as an overarching quality. But it's not what I used to think people meant when they said "gritty," which was grim and stark and monochromatic -- either despairing or lost-cause-determined. And I'm not doing that. There are lots of colors, spring flowers, bright yarn acquired by raveling old sweaters, sunsets, sunrises, breezes, poignant pretty sensory things. And there's, I hope, a sense of wonder both for the world as it is and the world as it could be. And hope, I think, in the face of terrible things. Or harsh ones -- I don't want to write gore and torture. (this is only a little bit residual from my childhood superstition that anything I created would become real and I would be responsible for the sufferings of my characters)

Okay. The manifesto part is this.

It's possible to have triumphant characters who don't leave their "gritty" milieu and become Lords of All Space. It's possible to write about honor and not have the characters be either mafiosi or the scions of great houses. It's possible to have a sense of wonder in a world in which people work for a living and the mechanics of food production and service and transportation are visible. It's possible to have interesting conflicts that are not about admirals and sorcerors. It's possible for creatures to be beautiful if they are neither elves nor dragons. It's possible to write and love work like this without dissing the work that it's different from.

And there you have it.

My manifesto. Thank you. I'm going to go back to work now.

1400 or so words today, bringing the second vignette ("The War is Over") to 2300+. Something recalcitrant is happening here and I don't know what it is. I think that the revelation I had a while back -- that I was going to have to get into the proximate causes of the war more, and I was going to have to assign specific villainies to specific groups -- is nibbling at my brain, asking me to lay some groundwork here.

That's all right. I can figure that out. I did something neat with the protagonist that I didn't before, and I'm happy with that. Also I've worked That Building into the chapter in two minor places already so I may not have to do anything clunky. But I think I want the celebratory trip to the top of That Building anyway. I think that there's a lot I can do about it.

James Nicoll (where's that personhead when I want it? is it here? http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll/ nope, let's try this:exampleusername no, let's try this:[Bad username or site: james nicoll @ livejournal.com] okay, let's try this:james_nicoll
) has been rightly taking folks to task for not taking more advantage of the known qualities of real star systems. My problems with that are twofold. One, I am never writing about things that depend on the known qualities of real star systems -- or maybe that's not true, since Esperanza Highway is in some ways all about terraforming, and one way to write about terraforming is to deal with the physics of the star system you're mucking about with. But more importantly, I am haunted by an article I read as a child, in a short-lived periodical called "PS: your Past and Promise" -- the article was called "The Lovely Lost Landscapes of Luna," I think, and it was either written by, or collaborated on by, or contributed to by, Isaac Asimov. And it was all about how the old science fiction writers had written these gloriously imagined worlds in our own solar system and it just wasn;t the same any more now that we knew none of it was like that.

All of science fiction has a little of this problem, this thing where we're actually living in the science fiction future and so therefore some of the stuff that used to be the symptoms of wonder are already here and are so normal nobody cares, and also therefore some of the things that we used to say would become the everyday pieces of our world just aren't. And it makes it harder in some ways to grapple with the heavy work of imagining things. But in other ways it has no effect at all, because the world couyld always be different. I suppose this is one of the lures of alternate history: it sidesteps that old future-goods problem.

It doesn't stop me, though it sometimes worries me about specific questions. It doesn't stop me because of my ace nin the hole: the Law of Uneven Development. Dog knows that it means something different from what I mean by it, but it doesn't matter. What I mean by it is that there's a little bit of ancient in every modern and a little bit of modern in every ancient, that the future is not clearly demarcated by an impenetrable border -- it's as porous as Arizona, and as motley as New York City. Which means that the story, as usual, dictates the setting, the technology, the culture, the mores, the species and the characters and what have I missed?

So, anyway, the Metaregion is on one of those boring unspecified planets with the characteristics I need it to have, instead of one of the fascinating real planets in real star systems that James is exploring. I'm sorry. Maybe next time (probably some time, if I live long enough, now that James had planted the irritating little seed!)

SPeaking of seeds, I'm enjoying The Family Tree by Sherri S. Tepper very much. It's hilarious in spots. Tepper is uneven, sometimes she'll knock my socks off and sometimes I'll think "dang, I'm a feminist, why do I have to read this?" But when she's on, she's on.

Aiee. I have to do something about the job search now.

Nowadays people mostly mean protagonist villain when they say antihero, but I think the term was originally coined to mean the kind of protagonist I seem to mostly write about -- heroes without heroic qualities. The editor at Baen kindly suggested I might want to "recast" Esperanza Highway so as to transform Chuy into an action hero. I don't actually think he meant me to take the suggestion literally: he seemed to be an intelligent person who would have noticed that "recasting" in this case would have been "writing a different book." -- which is what I think he was really suggesting, only being gentle about it.

Okay, here's the manifesto part:

Action heroes are not the only interesting protagonists in the world, even in genre fiction.

As a manifesto goes, that's pretty mild, isn't it? But that's the mild thing I want to say. I think my guys are interesting. I think the guy at Baen thought Chuy was interesting too, and that's why he thought I might want to write a different book about him. -- though I'm afraid that the major contenders for "different book" about Chuy are either grim, or dark comedies, and we all know I'm too much of a wimp to write something altogether grim (my brother remarked how sunny my brooding vampire story was), and I don't have enough of a sense of humor to write a dark comedy.

But enough of my shortcomings. The thing I want to say is on a different plane altogether. The interesting thing about my passive characters is not that they're passive, but that they are both passive and active. They're stymied by circumstance and their own personalities, but they do try. And they win, not the fate of the universe, but their own souls, and something to do with the world. Chuy saves another man's life (after that man tries to kill him, I might add), and he gets the boy (mostly by not trying to get him). My refugee wins by living at all, and by managing to be a husband and father and a union member at all. Terry in the vampire story wins by finding that place where you can give yourself but still keep yourself. And my guy in this current piece wins by being enough of a mensch that Araceli makes the one wish that frees him. No, she doesn't cut off his hands and feet like in the fairy tale, but she does remove his one real power, which is of no use to him.

So these are kind of like "The Goose Girl," in which the heroine gives up everything and goes completely abject to achieve her happy ending, but I hope less icky. I suppose I shouldn't worry about icky. Icky is a special case of my Rule: "all other things being equal, the weirder the story, the better." The truism that's based on, naturally, is: "unless something untoward happens, there is no story."

And I think there's a reason these are men, and it's not because I'm not enough of a feminist to write women protagonists. On the contrary, I think it's because at this stage in our cultural history it's more problematic to look at the kind of stymiedness I'm interested in, when it's embodied in a female character: that the cultural, political, and economic reasons for a woman to be stymied would overwhelm the story I'm interested in. When I write about these guys, it's mostly men's relationships with other men that enter into it, and the relationships are usually all about friendship, not about lovers (even when they are lovers, it's friendship that's the character of the relationship I'm interested in), not employers, not members of a hierarchical organization -- even when such a thing exists. And I think the reason this is interesting for me to write about is that it pares things down, so that I can concentrate on the things that are interesting to me, and I can allow those things to get as complicated as they want to.

I think I'm on to something, and I think it's only that I have too much in common with my characters that these are not already highly popular and controversial items.