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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

Son of...

4/29/2019

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I was doing some cleanout in my classroom the other day --- in anticipation of a Certain Upcoming Major Event, he said portentously --- and while excavating, came across a weathered copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah on one of the bookshelves. I don’t exactly know where the book came from; I certainly didn’t place it there, and I rather suspect I inherited it from the room’s previous occupant, who left all kinds of things for me to dispose of when I moved in, lo, these many years ago. Now, we can discuss my (shudder) Marie Kondo behaviours another time, if I --- or you --- happen to be interested in doing so, but this post, I’m discussing a train of thought touched off by the discovery of Mr. Herbert’s little work.
 
Dune Messiah was the sequel to Dune, a 1965 science fiction classic. My nerd confession for today is that I first read Dune in grade 8, if memory serves. (Which it pretty much usually does --- I have an encyclopedic memory chock full of useless information. Want more proof? The book was recommended to me by a gentle classmate named Lori. In the school library. Yes, I remember her last name. No, I won’t print it here.) Anyway. I thoroughly enjoyed it --- the book, not the grade, that is. Grade eight was as physically and spiritually awful as only the middle year of junior high school can be, speaking as one who has seen it from both sides/perspectives, student and teacher. (Although the second time, I was able to be a lot more dispassionate.) But I digress. (Besides, as far as nerd claims go, I can top my Dune one myself, having first read The Lord of the Rings in the summer betwixt grade six and seven. Nyah, nyah, nyah.)
 
Dune, I loved. (No, I’m not going into plot summary. Look it up if you really want to know.) It was painted on a grand canvas, replete with an intriguing storyline and settings and endlessly interesting and diverse characters. We’ll return to that, but first allow me the following minor rant. Dune Messiah, I did not love so much (sorry, Herbert fans). Like pretty much most of us who adore a given story, when I’m done reading something really compelling, I Want More, and so I eagerly sought out Dune Messiah.
 
Meh. Disappointing. It didn’t really go in the direction I was hoping it would (for example, the protagonist is --- gasp --- blinded, and dies at the end!), wasn’t as compelling as I hoped it would be, and through it and the remaining four following sequels Herbert wrote, the books gradually became impenetrably denser and turgid and pretentious, filled with endless soliloquys and Deep Philosophical Musings that even Chekhov and Tolstoy would have shied away from. And so, I lost interest. But when Herbert died, that was the end of it, right? Nope. Nothing as trivial as death can stop a literary epic cycle. His son entered into the void and took over, penning, according to Wikipedia, fourteen --- count ‘em, fourteen --- Dune novels. Plus short stories. Not to mention the films and attempted films and comic books and television series and role-playing games and video games and soundtracks and lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Oy. Talk about repeatedly going back to the well. And draining the damned thing dry. Why do we allow authors’ children --- or their estates, for that matter --- to do this? I’m really not sure it’s a good idea. (For example, Christopher Tolkien has done the same thing with his father’s notes and rough stories, creating an entire cottage industry of books bearing the Tolkien name --- and now there’s some sort of film series in the works.) No, no, you don’t need to tell me… I already know the answer. In fact, I let it slip a minute ago: it’s the consumer’s dictum of I Want More. So the kids obligingly step in, once their parents’ voices are silenced, and do just that. (All for ars gratia artis, of course, he said with a knowing wink).
 
To be fair, it’s not just literary works we do this to. Films. My gosh, the film industry, he groaned. It’s bloated with sequels, crammed with sequels, replete with sequels upon sequels… and now their newest awful progeny, the Reboot. Let’s do the whole thing over again! With new actors and new effects and new… All pandering to that obscene chorus of shrill voices all wailing I Want More.
 
It’s in comics, too. When Charles Schultz died, we thought that was the end of Charlie Brown. However, once again, nope. It’s rather like the old Ginsu steak knives commercials on TV: but wait, there’s more!
 
It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, you know. One terrific example I often use with students is that of the grand Arthurian epic. This is a tale that --- we think --- germinated from a kernel of historical truth somewhere around 1500 years ago, from which the initial story arose. And then was added on to, over about 1000 years, by a number of different authors working independently over centuries, until we finally arrive at the epic story we recognize today about Arthur, Rex Quondam et Futuris (the Once and Future King). A romance here, a best friend who’s a knight from across the sea there, a wizard, a Grail, an illegitimate child… all kinds of disparate elements combining together to create a literary masterpiece. But that’s not the same as an author’s child attempting to carry on with mommy or daddy’s writing, not at all.
 
So. Um, I have a confession to make: rereading my post, this is not really what I intended to write about today at all. As I alluded to about four paragraphs ago, I wanted to talk about thoughts of character as inspired by my inadvertent discovery of Mr. Herbert’s sequel.
 
Oh well. The best laid plans and all that. Next time, then.
 
But this was fun.
 
I love a good rant now and then.

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Pilate, We Hardly Knew Ye

4/22/2019

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12 From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free, but the Jewish leaders kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.” 
13 When Pilate heard this, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judge’s seat at a place known as the Stone Pavement (which in Aramaic is Gabbatha). 
14 It was the day of Preparation of the Passover; it was about noon. “Here is your king,” Pilate said to the Jews. 
15 But they shouted, “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” “Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked. “We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests answered.
16 Finally Pilate handed him over to them to be crucified.
                -The Gospel of John 19: 12-16
 
It was Easter in the Christian tradition yesterday, which brought to mind --- among other things --- Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor large and in charge when Jesus Christ was brought before him on trumped up charges by Jewish authorities intent on ridding themselves of what they perceived as an enormous threat to their power.
 
So… how’d you like to go down in history --- two thousand years’ worth of history --- with your name immortalized as the stooge who ordered/acquiesced to the execution of the Christian Messiah? Yikes. Who was this guy? Well, besides the accounts of the four Gospels, we really know very little about Pilate, and much of what we think we know is apocryphal. We do know he was reluctant to authorize the crucifixion of Jesus… although, in the end, as he watched the crowd become more and more restive, he crumbled under the pressure and did so --- although he feebly attempted to tell the crowd, “This Is Not My Fault. It’s Yours.” (C.S. Lewis dryly observed that “Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”) If not a true villain, at least a cad of the first order, right? Thoroughly unlikeable/disgusting character.
 
And yet… it is possible to view Pilate in a sympathetic light, I’ve found. (Although, to be clear, I’m not trying to exonerate him.)
 
What brought all this to mind? Why, watching The Green Mile the other day, the Frank Darabont film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, of course. The protagonist is a modern Pontius Pilate. Really.
 
No, I’m not in a dissociative state, thanks very much. Nor have I lost my marbles.
 
For the benefit of those unfamiliar with it, The Green Mile is a 1999 film primarily set in 1930s Louisiana (told in flashback from present day) by an aged version of the protagonist, Paul Edgecomb (played with his usual folksy charm by Tom Hanks). Paul is a prison guard responsible for death row, and one day an extraordinary prisoner arrives on his block: John Coffey, a physically enormous but mentally slow black man convicted of raping and murdering two little white girls. Just another prisoner to be sat down in due course in Ol’ Sparky (the electric chair) on the Green Mile (so nicknamed for the green linoleum covering its floor). Except he isn’t. As the plot progresses, Paul starts to realize John has a truly miraculous ability to heal --- anything from a urinary tract infection to terminal cancer. And John is innocent of the charges against him, although the manner in which Paul discovers this is completely supernatural, and therefore not going to stand up in any court of law. So what is he to do? John is, in Paul’s own words, “a miracle of God.” How can he execute John, knowing that?
 
In real life, this is a terrible situation to be in, one that we all justifiably pray we never have to face. But from a writing standpoint, it’s a great dilemma to put a character in. Having created a totally likeable, decent, thoughtful man in Paul, the author throws him this awful conundrum. No flashy pyrotechnics or tired plot devices, just a real no-win scenario. (I don’t know whether Stephen King deliberately set out to tell the story of Pilate or whether that kinda just happened in the telling, but I do know he deliberately made John Coffey a Christ figure.) How do you come out the other side of that decision in a way that satisfies moral obligations and society’s requirements? The answer is, you don’t. They are completely irreconcilable wants. Something in that equation has to give, and that generates great inner conflict. Which is what Paul feels. And what Pilate may have felt, although he didn’t have the relationship with Jesus that Paul has with John.
 
In the end, of course, Paul does the same thing as Pilate: he crumbles under the pressure and does the safe thing, which I suspect --- although I’d like to think otherwise --- is what most of us, probably including me, would do. It’s an all-too-human trait, and Lewis was bang-on in his (pessimistic) observation.
 
Unlike Pilate, though, Paul knows full well what he’s doing when he supervises John’s execution, and more importantly, doesn’t try to shrug off responsibility.
 
And that is refreshing.

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The Horror! The Horror!

4/1/2019

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It was spring break last week (and sunny in the city by the sea, although there was a pretty fresh --- read chilly --- breeze blowing), so my wife and I took a little visit to the West Coast, there (in part) to listen to my youngest daughter’s French Horn Master’s recital. We also went to get-away-from-it-all and spend some leisure time in each other’s company. All in all, a very pleasant little break. And, oh yes, by the way, I took my trusty old Dell Inspiron laptop with me.
 
This is not something that usually meets with my wife’s approval (unless we’re specifically heading to one of our sporadic mountain weekend retreats, where writing is explicitly listed as a weekend’s goal), but I have explained to her it’s a thing very closely associated to Lemony Snicket’s dictum regarding reading material: “Never trust someone who doesn’t bring a book along.” As readers gotta read, so too, writers gotta write. She was actually fairly gracious and didn’t kick up too much stink about it, once it became clear I was committed to bringing it along. (It? I should name my laptop, don’t you think? We do tend to anthropomorphize so much of our gadgetry these days… like it’s some kind of subconscious rebellion --- or maybe appeasement --- against the coming Takeover Of The Machines. Hey, it’s not just me… Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have both expressed concern over this.)
 
Anyway… my purpose today is not really to examine the struggles writers face with spouses over time taken to write (that can be a discussion for another day), but rather to discuss what I actually did with that writing time, and so muse on something that’s long befuddled me. (Your hint for that purpose --- your fairly broad hint --- is in the quote at the top.)
 
A little background first. My current WIP (work in progress) is Gryphon’s Awakening, the sequel --- or continuation, if you will, the word I prefer over sequel --- to my first novel, Gryphon’s Heir. At the moment, it stands at roughly 157,000 words, a number that tends to mean almost nothing to non-writers, except for them to note it sounds impressively like a helluva large number. Which is true to a certain extent, although not so much as they might think. At any rate, I think we’re in the home stretch of its storyline. I say “think” because the characters, bless their contrary little hearts, have a tendency (by turns amazing and exasperating --- sometimes simultaneously) to say and do things I neither expect nor predict, with the result that the story, to paraphrase Professor Tolkien, “grows in the telling.”
 
Now, we’re at the point where I’ve spread out several different narrative threads, and it’s time to start bringing those threads together… because, if I don’t, we run the risk of the Whole Damn Thing Collapsing Like A Jenga Tower. So I printed the last thirty or forty pages of the MS (manuscript) and took it along on our holiday.
 
And edited it.
 
And (this is the part I feel compelled to whisper the awful news) enjoyed doing it.
 
I didn’t strive to slash the Gordian Knot the storyline currently is looped in. I reread what I’d written recently (over the last month or so) in order to get a look at the forest, as opposed to individual trees, which is something that can happen all too readily when one is in the thick of the writing process. It put me in the position of sensing where things need to go next, and I managed to lop off --- prune, to keep the trees metaphor --- several hundred unnecessary words. What were they? Mostly qualifiers, connective words, double adjectives, general loquaciousness, things like that. I note I still, after many years of writing, have a weird fondness for double adjectives that’s totally not needed. Most writers fall into this trap: we like to ask, why use one word when six will do? Or, as Frasier Crane said, “If less is more, think how much more more will be!” Ah, yes. The struggle is real.
 
I haven’t always enjoyed editing. And I know, from my social media feed, many writers seem to regard the process with the kind of peculiar dread usually reserved for watching grisly horror films. Back when I finished the (bloated) first draft of Gryphon’s Heir --- it clocked in at 202,000 words --- I was completely convinced each and every one of those words was a pearl of great price, to be zealously protected from nasty literary people with metaphorical knives who wanted to, in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s famed saying, “murder my darlings.” I was like Mozart in the film Amadeus, protesting to the Emperor, “I don't understand. There are just as many notes, Majesty, as are required. Neither more nor less.”
 
But I learned. Under protest, I went back to the MS and began hacking away. I wound up cutting over 20,000 words from that first draft. Then added more story. Then cut more. Added. Cut. And ended up, several drafts later, with a tale that clocked in at about 186,000 words, but had way more to it than the first draft. It was tighter and much leaner. Better.
 
That said, I’m baffled why so many writers hate editing. Jeremy, the teenage protagonist of the cartoon strip Zits, told his long-suffering mother, “Perfection is the enemy of the done, mom,” and in a very narrow sense, that’s true. But as Mr. K pointed out in today’s opening quote, none of us do our best work the first time. Point of fact, we often make horrendously embarrassing errors which, if not caught, cause the world to question our competence as writers.
 
So, do yourself a favour, get out your (literary) knife, and murder a whole bunch ‘o darlings.
 
You might even find you enjoy it.
 
 
 

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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