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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

When We Were Very Young

4/27/2020

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I had an interesting question asked of me the other day: why do I love fantasy and science fiction to the point where that’s what I write? Why those two particular genres? Why not mystery, or horror, or something else?
 
Why, indeed? On one level, the question’s almost impossible to answer. One might as well ask Stephen King why he didn’t wind up writing Harlequin romances for a career. (The mind boggles at what a Stephen King Harlequin romance would look like. And actually, I pretty much can guess what he’d say, based on interviews I’ve read where he was asked similar questions: you write the ideas you’re given. I believe he answered the question as to why he writes horror by asking a question of his own, namely, what made the interviewer think Mr. K actually had any choice in the matter?)
 
I suppose you could say that we’re all attracted to different genres for different reasons. Even though it wasn’t called speculative fiction way back in the Dark Ages when I was a kid, forming the reading habits that would prove lifelong for me… I think the speculative aspect of fantasy and science fiction was a really big personal draw. Worlds way beyond my own mortal and rather drab one. Yeah, yeah, I know there’s beauty and such in our world, even when we’re doing our level best to mess it up, but… I think, as a kid, I found my world pretty prosaic. And later on, when I began to be out and about in the world and experience what Will termed the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” I could add the adjective “grittily” to prosaic. And there it has, more or less, remained. I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining. Well, I suppose I am, to a certain extent, but not in many ways. I had a long and (mostly) fulfilling career as a secondary school teacher, a (mostly) loving family, and a standard of living that probably about 90% of the world’s population would cheerfully kill for (and some, of course, do). But there have been times in my life when I am inexorably reminded of Edwin Brock’s famously depressing poem Five Ways to Kill a Man --- especially the final lines. Brock spends most of his poem chronicling really awful ways humans have engineered to kill each other… but then at poem’s end, dismisses these techniques as ‘cumbersome,’ saying all you really have to do to kill someone is plop them down in our current world… and leave them there. Yikes.
 
Sorry. It’s not my intent to be on a real downer today. What I’m attempting to do is explain, in my own usual roundabout way, why fantasy and science fiction appealed to me so much that they’re the genres I write. So, I guess it was a combination of several things: in science fiction, the really cool gadgetry; the environments, so different than the one I lived in; the strangeness, the wonder of it all… even though a great deal of fantasy and science fiction deals with highly dystopian worlds in desperate need of fixing (just like us). But there, you were on these quests --- these heroic quests --- to right the dystopias, and unless you were reading George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, said dystopias usually were fixed by story’s end. Not without cost at times, certainly --- as Frodo found, to his sorrow, at the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings. And your heroes, like Frodo, could really be pretty ordinary people who didn’t fancy themselves as heroic material in the slightest.
 
At the top of this post, I’ve included some of the earliest works in both genres that I’d say were seminal for me. (And I was around all of 11 or 12 when I discovered them… I was kind of like Matilda in that regard… although, regrettably, never discovered psycho-kinetic ability. Drat. That would have been pretty damned handy when life’s prosaic-ness got gritty.) The White Mountains --- three boys about my age off on an adventure, fleeing before monstrous machines to find freedom and refuge --- great stuff. It was about the first science fiction I recall being exposed to (aside from numerous Tom Swift books) --- a friend’s grade 5 teacher read it aloud to his class, and he recommended it to me. Today we’d classify it as YA, but again, back in the Dark Ages, there was no such classification. YA was simply ghettoized in the “children’s” section of the libraries and bookstores. The City and the Stars didn’t labour under any such disadvantage --- it was clearly adult science fiction --- but I don’t remember being unduly distressed over the distinction.  I think --- it’s rather a longer time ago than I want to admit --- I simply picked it up on spec at my local indie bookstore. And, of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings… well, what can I say? I was enthralled. I’d never read anything like them before. My mother picked up The Hobbit for me --- don’t quite know what possessed her to do that --- although I read LOTR before I came back to Hobbit. But This. Was. It. As far as literature was concerned, I’d found my niche. This ancient, vast world with all its diverse cultures; the titanic struggle between good and evil; the absorbing characters. It was all there.
 
I read Hardy Boys mysteries, too… and Lassie books… but while they were entertaining, they never quite captivated me in the same manner as fantasy and science fiction. Which may explain why I don’t write mysteries or animal stories.
 
It’s definitely not about writing what you know --- especially if you’re writing fantasy and science fiction. Most of us haven’t flown in starships or battled dragons. It’s about writing whatever strikes that mysterious chord deep within you. It’s about writing about the human condition.
 
The circumstances under which it takes place are just a little different, that’s all.
 
 

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A Fine Madness

4/13/2020

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I had an experience the other day which I expect is familiar to many writers and creative types: I was woken from a sound sleep at 4:30 AM by my subconscious, with the fully-formed text of a lengthy and detailed conversation between the protagonist of my current work in progress (WIP) and his significant other. So I did what most of us do in that situation: I tried negotiating with my brain, and we had a little conversation of our own, which, for your entertainment and edification, I present below. (This is not as weird as it sounds --- come on, admit it, you have two-way conversations with yourself; we ALL do. All the time. And I’m sure it’s totally, merely coincidental that I recall my brain’s mental voice sounding exactly like HAL, the rogue, sentient computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Either that, or I’m in serious trouble.)
 
ME (placatingly): Okay, that’s really interesting and all, a truly great conversation… so, let’s remember it, and I’ll record it at a more civilized hour. In the meantime, I wanna go back to sleep.
BRAIN (insistently): No, Dave, I really think you need to get up and write it down now.
ME (peering blearily at bedside clock): You do know it’s 4-fricking-30 in the Ay Em, don’t you?
BRAIN (maddeningly calm): Creative genius doesn’t keep regular working hours, Dave. You, of all people, know that. Get up.
ME: But---
BRAIN: Besides, you know you won’t remember it in the morning. It has to be now.
ME (firmly): We’re going back to sleep.
BRAIN (hesitates, then can’t help itself, recalling one of the film’s most famous lines): I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.
ME: (mentally making snoring noises) ---
BRAIN: I’ll fixate on it and stay awake...
ME: ---
BRAIN: Fine. You leave me no choice. (Gets on the interior phone.) There. You have to pee now. Get up.
ME: (wearily) !@#$
 
So, yes, Virginia, I went and wrote the conversation down (after stopping in the bathroom on the way, of course). And it was a pretty good conversation, too, if I do say so myself. The written one, not the one with my brain, that is.
 
Now, the reason why I’m relating this is because there’s a couple of interesting points to be gleaned from this pre-dawn insanity (well, I think so, anyway):
 
First: the problem with the conversation I was given (!) is, it quite obviously doesn’t take place at the point in the narrative where I am right now --- you know, the sentence where I stopped the evening before, did my final save, and shut ‘er down for the night.
 
(BTW, I like to call that point the ‘mine face,’ because there I am, miner --- AKA writer --- slaving at the end of the literary mine tunnel with my word processor/pickaxe, hacking pearls of prose from the hard and unforgiving rock face… hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go…) (Thanks. I think it’s a pretty good metaphor, too, he said modestly. In fact, I wrote a post on writers as miners; you can find it here if you’re interested.)
 
Anyway… what does one do about that problem?
 
Well, the answer is quite simple: write it down anyway and find a suitable place in the narrative for it later. Maybe really soon later, maybe quite a while later. Doesn’t matter. The important thing, as HAL --- err, my inner voice --- said, is to get it down AND realize you don’t need to write the damned story linearly, or even necessarily chronologically. I used to tell my students this; you don’t have to sweat through introduction, first, second, third body paragraphs, then conclusion in that order. If you know your third body paragraph will knock ‘em dead, why not write that first, while it’s still incandescent in your mind? In fact, you may want to hold off on that intro for the last thing you do.
 
Second: the conversation I was given isn’t critical to that sacred cow, AKA Moving The Plot Along. It falls in the category of something I referred to in class as Texture. (Which is, frankly, every bit as important as MTPA. Maybe more so, at times.) So I will include the conversation, once I find a suitable place in the narrative for it.  You see, I happen to think there’s too many writing coaches/teachers out there waaay too obsessed with MTPA. If it doesn’t advance the plot, they say, kill it. And they do. They ruthlessly excise anything and everything in an insanely relentless obsession to Pare It Down.
 
I have no idea where or when this lunacy was conceived. My own private theory is it’s a result of our modern society’s manic infatuation with Having It All, Right Now. Ever noticed that? Nobody has any patience anymore. Nobody wants to leisurely sip the heady elixir of details; they just vulgarly chug the whole thing down at once, then move on at warp speed to the next fixation, with all the finesse of a bulldozer.
 
Texture is material that doesn’t necessarily advance the plot --- at least, not immediately or in a crucial manner. But it’s vitally interesting stuff.
 
Now, it so happens that the Master, AKA Stephen King, agrees with me on this. He calls it chrome, not texture, and in the forward to the second edition of The Stand, he uses the story of Hansel and Gretel as an example. He says you could strip from the story all extraneous details that don’t immediately relate to or advance the plot, but the story becomes flat and uninteresting --- just bare, dull metal, no chrome. It’s the details, like Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs; the woodcutter showing his wife two rabbits’ hearts to convince her he’s killed Hansel and Gretel, and so on --- none of which are, strictly speaking, necessary to the plot --- which actually make the story more than the sum of its parts.
 
So thanks, HAL --- err, me. That early morning wake-up call wasn’t as irritating as I originally thought.
 
But it was just as weird, though.
 

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

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

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