My interview with the website/e-zine Liberty Island went live today. Liberty Island is a self-described home to the ‘counterculture’ in science-fiction/fantasy that struggles against the woke conformity dominating its upper reaches.

What Culture War?

I have not personally been involved in any of this (I am far too much of a new and small fish for anyone to give a crap about what I think), but there is a lot you can read about a small cadre of incestuous Old Guard conspiring with each other to maintain their choke-hold on once-valued awards and institutions, challenged by more populist writers who do not worship at the altar of Marx.

The main example of this fight (that I know about, anyway) seems to have been over the Hugo awards, once the premier award in science fiction. Winners and nominees include Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert, Ursula LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Aurthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling, and others who have written SFF books of quality and impact. Until recently, anyway.

In 2016, an authoress named Nora Jemisin won for book I of a trilogy.

Also, in 2017, for book II of her trilogy.

Also, in 2018, for book III of her trilogy, tying Robert Heinlein for the highest number of Hugo awards won by any person. It is also basically the only time someone won multiple awards for a single story (though Card won for both Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead, an indirect sequel), much less three for a trilogy.

Three Hugo awards for three books in a single trilogy must be for the most amazing science fiction story of all time. It’s like Lord of the Rings in its impact and universality.

What, you haven’t heard of her? Don’t worry. No one has. But she wrote polemical books about racial oppression and climate change, and she’s black and a girl, so she’s among the greatest SFF writers in history according to modern standards, and if you disagree you’re a racist hater who should be driven from the industry. The idea that awards should be given to authors based on the quality of their story-telling rather than their inborn traits and willingness to repeat leftist pieties is racist/sexist/homophobic/whatevershutup.

As you might guess, the Hugo is now a joke; a sort of participation trophy for whatever author makes the voters feel the wokest. Members of the counterculture rebellion (such as Larry Correia) regularly outsell Hugo winners by the hundreds of thousands.

And it’s not a one-off. Aside from actively blocking new authors from the industry for being insufficiently woke (a holocaust of ideas that you never see because that’s what gatekeeping is), the establishment at large actively hunts for heretics to destroy. Here’s a semi-famous example, where a writer was coerced into canceling her own book because the wokescolds decided it was problematic. Note the suiciding author herself was a female, immigrant, ‘person of color’ writing about problems from her own culture, but hypocrisy doesn’t matter to the mob. Conformity does.

The mob most recently came for George Martin for being insufficiently woke. Note that the 2020 lineup of nominees was, by sheerest coincidence, entirely female.

Book Update

I finished a solid first pass of chapter 15 a couple of weeks ago, with an outline of chapter 16 a couple of days ago. Since this book is planned to go for 18 chapters, it’s now more than 80% done. My initial timeline was release by the end of this year. That’s still possible, but with cover art, a couple of first-to-last editing passes, and other logistical matters, it might not be until early next year (when I’m scheduled to go out of the country…).

Related, I had an alpha reader who regularly edits SFF works and who hasn’t read The Mountain Throne go over this one. In addition to spotting missed typos and cleaning up the occasional syntax issue, he had this to say: “This work of yours is clearly a masterful epic!”

That was nice, especially coming from someone without the background of the first novel so all the characters, conflicts, and settings were being shown to him for the first time.

So without blowing expectations up too much, I now have reason to believe this novel is good enough to appeal even to people who aren’t familiar with the first. He even really liked a character that my main editor hates, which I think is a good sign for characterization. If everyone feels the same about a character, they’re probably not really a character; they’re an archetype.

Jeeze, I haven’t written anything here since September?! I mean, I can tell you why, but that’s still longer than I thought.

PROGRESS ON BOOK II

From October to December, there wasn’t a lot to report. Finished up Chapter 13, then re-wrote it because I didn’t like it, then ran into chronology issues (a repeat problem when you have limited, rotating perspectives and intertwined plotlines). Then, several high profile projects in famous locations, a hacking school, and regular work kept me on the road almost continuously from January until the Great Stupid Plague Shutdown. Used this time to solve the chronology issues and decide how this book is going to end (probably), and am now about 75% complete. I intend to be finished by the end of the year. Even have cover art picked out.

WRITING DIALOGUE

When last we ended, I was discussing aspects of writing because that’s what people ask me about the most: X is neat, how to you do X? So, today, I’m going to address a writing topic that is often under the radar: dialogue.

Inter-character communication is supposed to be a given. Every real story has it, and its presentation typically passes without comment.

Until you screw it up. THEN it’s a major criticism that will drive people away from your work and possibly future works. After all, who wants to read a communicator who cannot portray routine communication?

Judgments on dialogue are subjective and so opinions vary, but I think the chief crime against language committed by writers in the realm of dialogue is stylistic slavishness. That is, a writer commits to a genre or style and limits their writing (and, therefore, their dialogue) to the tropes and stereotypes of that category. This lends itself to melodrama and absurdity.

An example of this crime from a popular book was Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s series I read years ago.

These books are set in not-France and filled with bastardized elements of not-Celtic, not-Jewish, and other looted mythologies. The first book follows the British romance-style social/political adventures of a masochistic courtesan in her quest to defeat an invasion of not-Germans with the connivance of not-Vichy locals.

As I’m sure you can guess, I have zero respect for the “world-building” of these books. The primary appeal is the Pride and Prejudice social and political gamesmanship that has enticed generations of women, sprinkled with S&M sex scenes from a masochistic submissive’s perspective. In fact, the lame world-building was possibly by design so as to not distract from the chick-bait.

But this is about dialogue and style. And there’s a twist regarding this book, because the narration is first-person past, like an autobiography. So the entire book is written ‘in-character’ as a form of speech. ‘Dialogue’ in this book is inseparable from narrative style.

A style I hate. HATE. It’s artificial and pretentious, like someone’s idea of literary sophistication came from watching Jane Austen stories on Lifetime. “Betwixt” these (p. 3), “mahyap” that, “daresay” the other (p. 1), with ‘atrembling profundities and elocution, betimes.’ Fucking gag me.

This is a prime example of what I mean by stylistic slavishness. This is supposed to be a female-centric, Franco-philic novel about social maneuvering. Ergo, the style must be faux-19th century make-believe language as imitated by poser sophisticates.

WTH? No, lady. Just no. Have you ever even been to France? No one talks like that. No population EVER talked like that. The only individuals who do are pseudo-intellectual half-wits pretending to be literary salon-goers, aping caricatures like living parodies because they don’t know any better.

This is the kind of thing satirists do if they want to make fun of something. They take an identifiable trait, like tropey dialogue, and play it up for comic effect. An episode of Big Bang Theory where Leonard started writing a novel did this. It was a mystery, and all the scenes were filled with mystery stereotypes, including stereotypical characters, the locked door trope, and melodramatic noire-ish language. It was funny. It was mockery.

And this lady wrote two whole series of books like this that sold like gangbusters. Rather like Fifty Shades of Grey. So, you know, bad writing isn’t an impediment to sales so long as it’s full of masochistic porn.

*sigh*

BACK ON TRACK

Now that I’ve undermined my own point by admitting shitty dialogue can make you a millionaire so long as it’s about whips and chains, let me move on to writing good dialogue.

The essence of good dialogue is fidelity to reality. Verisimilitude. It needs to read like how people really speak. I know that sounds easy, but writers screw this up all. The. Time.

Reason 1 is the stylistic slavishness I first mentioned. They’re writing in Genre A, and so everything is colored by that. Everyone in fantasy talks like Elrond telling an epic legend, everyone in the murder mystery sounds like Humphrey Bogart, and everyone in the sci-fi story sounds like Spock.

Reason 2 is over-writing and unnecessary complexity. Some people are so concerned about showing off their vocabulary they sabotage their own writing. Thanks to its bastard history, English is an unusually rich language full of good, purposeful words. But they’re often ignored in favor of buzzwords and thesaurus favorites.

This crap pervades the government. Perfectly intelligent people who otherwise communicate well lose their damned minds when asked to draft an official document. Everything is ‘utilized;’ nothing is ‘used.’ ‘Capabilities,’ ‘endeavors,’ ‘support,’ and ‘synergy’ replaced ‘powers,’ ‘efforts/attempts,’ ‘help,’ and ‘cooperation.’ Their desire to sound ‘official’ ruins their writing and makes the final product ponderous and difficult, and further contributes to the impression that that’s how all government writing must be.

Genre writers are often just as culpable.

Finally, Reason 3 is that many writers are introverts with relatively little experience in real life conversation. For these people, most of their ‘knowledge’ of dialogue is itself filtered by whatever art they consume: comic books/graphic novels, genre fiction, TV shows, Internet culture, whatever. When your real experience is limited to rote interactions with everyday social situations, you can’t plausibly write how people speak in extremis. And so the sorts of situations that are interesting to write about and make for good stories are alien to them.

Consider modern Hollywood and the military. Almost zero Hollywood screenwriters these days have any military experience at all, and most of those who do (that I’ve seen; I didn’t go hunting) seem to have been single-tour enlistees. So portrayals of the military in American cinema are almost always wrong. Like, really wrong. Basic, fundamental mistakes that no real service member could ever make. Like in Basic, that one of my drill sergeants made people watch as a punishment to try to identify all the fuck ups. I still remember seeing Jackson’s character wearing E-4 rank when he was supposed to be senior enlisted. Even The Hurt Locker, that most people like, is full of screw-ups.

And that’s not addressing the military dialogue. Most movie soldiers don’t talk like real soldiers, don’t act like real soldiers, and otherwise have no more resemblance to real soldiers than comic book characters. Our real speech included a lot more “high speeds,” “squared aways,” and “jacked ups” and fewer “SNAFUs” and “oh-six-hundreds” [real soldiers know that time is ‘zero-six’].

Everyone has heard the “write what you know” advice. Well, there’s a corollary. “If you try to write what you don’t know, get help.” And that includes dialogue.

HOW TO WRITE NOT-BAD DIALOGUE

I can tell you how to avoid Reasons 1 and 2. Reason 3 is an actual limit on the writer’s own ability, so there’ no avoiding that. Instead, compensate and run your work past people who aren’t introverted bookworms, specifically for criticism of the dialogue.

But to avoid the stylistic pitfalls of 1 and 2, do this: write contemporary dialogue. Write what YOU might say as that character. Don’t limit words or approaches to what you think ought to spring from your chosen genre, at first.

Afterward, when the scene is complete and you’ve decided what they need to say, revise it for style and anachronisms. A gruff character should have their words adjusted for brevity and stripped of social niceties. A powdered aristocrat should probably undergo the opposite. A child will know fewer words and have more limited perspective than an adult. Et cetera.

Regarding anachronisms, an idiom from modern sports won’t make any sense in a story set in Renaissance England or a fantasy world. Likewise, many 21st century curse words would be unknown. And some of these can be sneaky. For instance, the word “spartan” in modern context can just mean ‘with minimal niceties,’ but it is derived from a real place with a certain culture at a certain time and is therefore unsuitable for a fantasy universe that never had a Sparta.

The point of this approach is to make the words contextually appropriate without artificially limiting the character’s abilities to say what they should mean. This will help you avoid the traps of stylistic slavishness and overwriting.

LET’S GO DEEPER

That will avoid some common errors, but will it make it good? Maybe not. There are a couple more matters to keep in mind for good dialogue.

First, over-explanation/narration. Many characters need to speak less. Some writers over-rely on spoken words as an easy exposition machine. Even if the dialogue is competent, characters end up as little more than robots, appearing in scenes to explain things before wandering off. A lot can be delivered by actions, facial expressions, tone, attitude, hesitance v. eagerness, and so on. Real people don’t narrate their lives when they speak, and neither should your characters. “Show, don’t tell,” yeah?

Second, plausible behavior and character tropes. I doubt anyone in history has ever carried on an extended internal monologue and then physically shrugged to themselves, complete with a facial expression. But the number of times this ridiculousness has been written into fiction must surely number in the thousands. Try to keep your bullshit detector on.

Finally, characters should sound different. Without just adopting stereotypes, word choices, speech patterns, pronunciations, and so on should vary. Even members of the same family speak differently; sometimes on purpose. Slight accents and cultural mannerisms hint at character backgrounds without having to state it outright. Elevated speech and concerns can imply delicate sensibilities or foppishness. Crude speech can imply a difficult past or contempt for social rituals.

And these messages are delivered subtly, as much by what is missing as what is present. This, in effect, makes your character’s dialogue doubly meaningful.

SUMMARY

Don’t be a slave to style. Don’t overwrite. Get help when you need it. Speak less, act more. Stay plausible. And tie a character’s words to his background and personality.

This is going to be brief. I had a nice personable, friendly toned post with thoughtful stuff on writing process, but this stupid-ass program ate it. “You are navigating away from this page before you’ve posted.” “What? No I’m not. Cancel.” “Fuck you, I’m deleting everything anyway.”

*save draft*

In short, the two extremes of process are Type 1: “plan nothing, write stream of consciousness babble” and Type 2: “plan everything, succumbing to paralysis and almost never finishing.” They both suck. Here’s what I do, in parts.

World Building

Verisimilitude is important to me. I think stories and worlds that make no sense are stupid, so I try hard not to be like that. I use a sub-process called “facts and implications” I picked up doing geopolitical analysis back in the day.

*save draft*

For instance, the presence of a river has implications regarding trade, the ease of civilization with an abundance of food and water, the cultural effects of flooding, and the cosmopolitanism that results from more foreign travel and exchange of goods.

The presence of mountains implies barriers between regions, an arid side and a rainy side, cultural isolation for the mountain-dwellers, unique species of animals, and so on.

The existence of a monotheistic faith carries social and spiritual implications, just as syncretic polytheistic practices and beliefs do.

And so on. Every implication you logically draw from a given fact helps build out the world and ensures that it makes sense. Likewise, contradicting logical implications must be explained or that element of your story will not make sense.

*save draft*

Obviously, this part of my process is like Type 2. It resists paralysis because there is a finite number of implications to be drawn from any fact, and you inherently don’t bother with facts that are irrelevant; ergo all your work is relevant. And since virtually none of it addresses individual characters or plot elements, you don’t suck the creativity out of that part. Instead, you’re building out your world, which is supposed to be mostly static anyway.

PLOTTING

Plots must be planned, even if only loosely. But you really fundamentally only need to know the beginning, the end, and a handful of meaningful points in the middle. I call these “milestones.”

Example: If your book is about a farmer boy discovering a magic weapon and using it to defeat the tyrannical lich king, then you need to know the farm boy’s origins, that he defeats the lich king, how he got the weapon, and roughly how he gets to wherever the lich king’s source of power is. Everything else is negotiable; secondary characters, additional plot items, reveals and mysteries, characterization, why the lich king is tyrannical, what kind of weapon it is, and so on.

*save draft*

Beyond those big milestones, I write synopses of each part of the story as if it were a badly told tale by a drunk; loose, easy, and fuzzy on the details.

Example: Chapter 1 – ‘Piggy the farm boy is a good lad who always does what he’s told. One day he’s out watching the sheep like his dad said when a strange man approaches on a horse. Piggy is suspicious and readies his crook for trouble, but the man collapses. He’s wounded. He gives Piggy a heavy bundle and begs him to take it to a nearby hero; and he names Piggy’s father, Porker! Then he dies. Piggy takes the horse back home, leaving the sheep. Porker dresses him down for abandoning the flock, but becomes very serious when Piggy explains. He tells Piggy to go throw it down the well outside. Piggy goes to obey, confused, when a troop of the lich king’s soldiers arrives; they tracked the horse. Piggy hides behind the well. They go the house and search it, confronting Porker. They they spread out to search the rest of the farm. Porker sees Piggy hiding behind the well with the weapon and tries to distract them. They stab him and set the farm on fire and leave. Piggy rushes to Porker, who is dying. Porker tells him he comes from a line of noble heroes who had to go into hiding when the lich king took power, and the weapon is a magical hereditary item. He wanted Piggy to destroy it because he thinks resistance is useless, but he’s dying and it’s not his decision anymore. It’s Piggy’s.’

*save draft*

This is a form of Type 1 stream-of-consciousness writing. It’s more useful and less self-destructively stupid than pure Type 1 because it’s naturally bound by the edges of a chapter. It can’t go on too long before it becomes ponderous and rambling; whenever that happens I trim it down or split the content over two chapters. And whatever synopses I make are subject to revision both 1) because they’re just not that detailed, and 2) they’re intended only as a guide. What about the rest of Piggy and Porker’s family? Is this is a simple origin story in high fantasy, with archetypes and clear good/evil lines? How low level should it get with regard to dialogue, details of the farm, and family interactions? How dark will this story be? A deathbed quest given by secret disillusioned hero father is going to be different in theme and character from an anti-hero revenge tale motivated by rape, torture, and murder. All of this is subject to change as you go.

My worldbuilding technique and plotting technique. Oh the secrets I share with those few anointed who read this page. That’s enough for tonight, especially since I had to type most of this twice.

I have returned to the good old US of A (or “the States,” as every single person abroad says) after a few months hopping around several undisclosed, sandy countries. It was only moderately unpleasant, and work went well enough I got several attaboys and two job offers, so I consider it all a success. Unknown when I’ll be leaving again. Was going to be next week, but that got delayed.

But who cares about work? What matters is what writing got done! While away, I finished two more chapters and have started on a third, bringing total completion to about 66%. I didn’t get as much done in my off time as I expected, but have confirmed I’m productive when sitting around airports with nothing else to do. I took a break after first getting back, but added a new section this past weekend. It involves sorcerous murder!

Now, I think I promised a post answering some questions I’ve been asked. This one is from just a few days ago. Why do I write?

WHY I WRITE

Short Answer: Because I must.

Long Answer: I’ve always created. I’m driven to. I started making fantastical worlds when I was five years old. I wrote humorous short stories based off Indiana Jones when I was seven, on my grandmother’s old typewriter. I tried outlining my first intended book when I was eight or nine. It was a military epic, with fleets and named ships, heroes, armies, towns, and the like. It went nowhere, of course, but laid the groundwork for some intricate maps and maritime concepts for when I was eleven, some few of which survived to be included in my present work. In middle school, I wrote a satirical history of local BBS culture written in revelatory, mythic style with vaguely blasphemous names for the chapters; Genocide, Excrement, and Deuteranopia, if I remember right. I sketched the grandfather of Terryth’s current map when I was in high school, on some powerful drugs for wisdom tooth removal. I even managed to get myself hired out as a freelance background writer before I went to college, through the magic of the Internet.

So you can see this goes back quite a way.

And this bizarre, inexplicable creative impulse probably poisons my attitude to writing, in comparison to other writers. People seem to think that I should view The Mountain Throne as a triumph, a milestone achievement of my life. My first published book. Such wow.

Except I don’t, really. It was exciting, of course, because it was all new and everything was on me (speaking of which, I’ve since discovered a minor typo in it…), but it’s just the highest reaching of many creations. I’ve written a complete tabletop RPG (and GM’d a playtest campaign for it), just for fun. I’ve made several board games, which were also successfully playtested (with two favorites; one long and political, one fast and automotive). I’m confident there will be more later.

I even draft things at work when I don’t have to.

So, I write because I must.