Ambrose & Elsewhere

This week’s Writer’s Five.

Questions about where your main character lives

Answered for Morlock, as usual.

1 – What type of home is it?

Morlock is essentially homeless, so he lives wherever he is. By preference he’ll live in a cave, but he moves around a lot; he might be camping out or sleeping in an inn on any given night.

2 – What city do you live in? or if not a city where?

Anywhere from the deserts and jungles of Qajqapqca to Wuruyaarria, the werewolf city in the far north of Laent.

3 – Is your home messy?

Not too much. He wants his things where he can get them when he has to move on, which might be any time. He’s lost almost everything he once had, so he may be somewhat irrationally protective of the stuff he has left.

4 – Do you live alone?

Usually, but not always. Sometimes he travels with other people, and he once had an apprentice who lived and travelled with him.

5 – Where do you eat the majority of your meals?

Wherever he happens to be. He’ll buy them made if he’s in or near a town, from a tavern or a cookshop; if he’s on the road he’ll make them himself. But it would never be haute cuisine; food is just fuel as far Morlock is concerned.

More from Howard V. Hendrix. (Then I first saw the name a few days ago I thought it was a legal case–Howard versus Hendrix.) This installment by way of GallyCat. He regrets the inflammatory choice of words (without reference to his pixel-stained magnum opus) but doesn’t seem to have rethought his thinking, insofar as I can follow it.

The pixel-stains on my virtual fingers were fading a bit, so I engaged in a bit of technopeasant wretchedness by updating my egomaniacal shrine to myself website. Most of the changes are to the stories page, where I shifted things around a bit and added a link to the preview for the latest Morlock story.

Actually, I did this to celebrate the arrival of Black Gate 10, which has been a long time coming, but worth the wait.

I’ve been reading and enjoying the stories, and will probably post later about them. In the “Letters” column there some kind words from readers about “Payment Deferred”.

Kurt Vonnegut died last night in Manhattan (according to Reuters and the NYT).

This week’s Writer’s Five

Time to get your Evil on – Questions for your WIP’s villain –

Answering for the insectlike, mountain-dwelling Khroi who afflict Morlock (and vice versa) in an upcoming novella in Black Gate; I’m hoping they will also make each other’s lives miserable in a sequel I’m struggling with at the moment.

1 – What is your villain’s main pet peeve?

Spiders.

2 – What is the most depraved thing your villain has ever done? (even if it’s not all that depraved)

Genocide.

3 – What is a redeeming quality your villain has? (if any)

They’ll pay anything they see as a debt.

4 – Does your villain think he’s evil?

Yes. (But not because of the answer to question 2.)

5 – What is your villain’s justification?

It’s for the children.

(Poetry meme filched from eeknight.)

If they told you I’m mad, then they lied. I’m odd, but it isn’t compulsive. I’m the triolet, bursting with pride; If they told you I’m mad, then they lied. No, it isn’t obsessive. Now hide All the spoons or I might get convulsive. If they told you I’m mad then they lied. I’m odd, but it isn’t compulsive. What Poetry Form Are You?

I like linguists and linguistics but a recent post at Language Log about the proposed California “Compassionate Choices Act” (AB 374) reminded me why linguists, like anyone else, need a smack with a wet fish every now and then.

Geoff Nunberg says in the offending post that

The law doesn’t actually mention the word suicide. In part, that’s because the use of word tends to have a huge effect on people’s opinions about this issue. In a 2005 Gallup survey, 75% of respondents agreed that doctors should be allowed by law to “end the lives” of patients suffering from incurable diseases if the patient and his or her family requested it. But when the question was worded as permitting doctors to “assist the patient to commit suicide,” only 58% of the respondents agreed.

Intent only on the issue of the wording, Dr. Nunberg assumes that the mere form of the wording is the only issue. But allowing doctors to “end the lives” of terminal patients might easily be construed as allowing doctors to withhold “lifesaving” measures or turn off life support on persons who are actually or effectively dead: far less controversial measures than assisted suicide.

Are linguists terrible people who want to kill our ill and elderly over their weeping protests? No. But, intent on words, they may miss the thing the words are intended to signify.

The relevance for writing fiction? Maybe there’s none. But I think here’s a danger for writers, especially writers who want to write well, to fixate on the word over the thing, the signifier rather than the signified. In a way, this makes sense: stories are made of words, not things (except insofar as words are also things).

It’s sensible, but it’s death. Here, as always, I think of Le Guin. Quoting from memory: The artist says what cannot be said with words. A writer is an artist who uses words. Therefore, a writer is an artist who uses words to say what cannot be said with words. I take this to mean that we write not with words but through words, using words to direct the reader’s inner eye toward things we’ve imagined that it might not otherwise see. If the reader stops at the surface of our words and sees only them, we’ve failed.

What is the “truth” about the “Titanic” (if that was its real name)?

For more “truth” if you can “handle ‘it'” see the official website for the Titanic Truth Movement.

(Glommed from eeknight‘s LiveJournal.)

This week’s Writer’s Five, answered for Morlock again.

1. Does your protagonist have a hobby?

He makes things. But it’s more like a vocation than an avocation.

2. Does your protagonist have a best friend or a confidant of sorts, someone he/she can turn to for advice or just to talk through a tough time?

No. And if he did, he probably wouldn’t.

3. Does your character have a quirk not dictated by the plot?

He gets seasick easily and would never travel by water if there were another option.

4. Does your protagonist like their job?

Morlock isn’t employed in the usual sense of the word. When he needs money he makes some.

5. Where does your protagonist go when they’re down and out? (i.e. a favorite dive bar, a friend’s house, a cave in the mountains)

He goes somewhere else. (He moves around a lot.)

A while ago I was trying to plot a story which was (and is still) giving me some trouble and suddenly my brain plotzed. I had one of those mental crises where I realized I didn’t know something I thought I knew.

What is a plot?

Dictionaries are useless for this sort of thing, of course. Here’s the OED: “The plan or scheme of a literary or dramatic work; the main events of a play, novel, film, opera, etc., considered or presented as an interrelated sequence; a storyline.” So if I take out the non-main stuff, what remains is the plot. Sort of like defining a statue as what’s left when all the non-statue marble has been removed. Thanks, OED Rex!

Aristotle’s Poetics is a little more help: “the plot being a representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.” There’s more about the plot–what’s a good one as opposed to a bad one, etc.–but it’s mostly focused narrowly on tragedy.

And anyway, I didn’t even look at that stuff until my crisis was over. I got up and walked around muttering to myself, my preferred way of resolving any issue. (It makes me very popular on transatlantic flights, or so I am willing to believe.)

Plot, I decided, isn’t just a set of events, even significant events. It has to be a sequence of events that are causally linked somehow. But even that isn’t enough. If I want coffee, I make it or buy it, and the events in that sequence of actions are causally related, but they’re not especially significant, even to me: it’s the end result that matters. If some significant events happen in the course of acquiring the coffee (e.g. I find a silver dollar while ransacking the house for change; I have to kick my way through a pack of wild spotted dogs to get to the door of the coffee place; etc.) so much the better (for storytelling purposes). But what really matters, what distinguishes a plot from other event-sets, is that it is a significant series of causally linked events. The events may or not be significant, but their cumulative effect must be.

Significant to whom? is the salient question. To the audience, certainly, but more immediately to some character in the story. This isn’t actually necessary. You could write a story with a lot of ironic force where the events, meaningless to any viewpoint character, matter to the reader. But usually it’ll be the other way: the reader measures significance by the impact on some character or characters in the story.

With that out of the way, I stopped plotzing and went back to plotting.