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Music hath charms...

8/29/2015

...to soothe a savage breast.” Indelibly true. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. No, I’m not wrong; you are if you think it’s ‘to soothe the savage beast.’ It’s an all-too-common misquote. And it’s not Shakespeare, either; an Englishman named William, aye, but it was Congreve, not Shakespeare. And he was after Shakespeare. The line is from Congreve’s 1697 play The Mourning Bride. Act I, Scene I. Now you know. You’re welcome. (A student once sarcastically responded to that smart-aleck ending with, “Well, pardon my ignorance.” To which I quoted Robert Silverberg’s famous riposte, “Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.” Teaching adolescents for over thirty years has honed my quick-retort ability to razor-sharpness. So don’t even try, kids. It’s not an even battle. But I digress.)

Where were we? Ah, yes, music. I listen to music all the time while I’m writing. And working, too; I say that because as far as I’m concerned, they’re totally separate, distinct things... and one is much more fun than the other. I also have my classes listen to music while we work, too. In fact, it’s one of the first discussions we have at semester’s beginning. I inform them I don’t want their iPods or MP3 players etc. in class; if music is required, I’ll provide it. To which they want to know why they can’t listen to their own music. I ask them if they want the diplomatic answer, or the honest one. They usually start by choosing the diplomatic. “Because most of your music is not conducive to a productive learning environment,” I reply. Then, naturally, because they’re perversely curious, they ask for the honest answer. Gotcha. “Because most of your music is crap,” I reply sweetly. Well, they walked right into that. Then I add, “Besides, most of your music involves vocals, and you guys can’t multi-task to save your lives.” Sure they can, they protest. Gotcha again. “Nope,” I say cheerfully. “You cannot multi-task. In fact, most of you suck at doing one task at a time, never mind several.”

And it’s quiet while we’re working in class, too. As I gently point out, they have work to do, and while discussion absolutely does have a place in class (especially an English class --- I am not a complete dinosaur, he said haughtily), the tragic problem is that much of students’ casual discussion tends to focus on topics that have nothing whatsoever to do with what they’re supposed to be doing. To mimic Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to talk, and a time to be silent. A time to discuss together, and a time to create in the solitary splendour of one’s thoughts. And never the twain shall meet. (Yes... I do talk to students like this. Why do you ask?) But we’re digressing again, aren’t we? Sorry. Classes for a Brand New Year start in three days, so my teacher mentality is cranking into high gear. It’s a kind of Jekyll and Hyde season for me. Time to don the benevolent tyrant persona again.

Just kidding. Sort of.

Music. While writing. Terrific idea. It stimulates the soul, inspires the imagination, hauls on the heart strings, encourages the emotions, and a whole lot of other alliterative writing-type things. As long as it’s music of the right type. There’s that Goldilocks Factor I mentioned last entry, rearing its long, gorgeously blonde locks again. What’s the right type of music?

Well, among rational beings, I guess that’s a matter of personal preference, although some choices make a lot more sense to me than others. Notice I emphasized ‘rational.’ That’s why I choose what my students listen to. (An eminent psychologist said adolescence is ‘a time of transitory psychosis.’ To which I amend, yeah, well, more transitory for some than others. I am not making this up. You can’t make stuff like this up.)

My preference for music while writing is instrumental, not vocal, for the reason I give my students: I don’t believe you can focus on song lyrics and writing at the same time. I was mildly horrified to learn the author of a famous/notorious (pick your adjective) series concerning vegetarian vampires listens to hard rock groups like Muse while writing. How on earth does one focus on one’s writing with angry young men shrieking in the background? Not my idea of inspiring music.

So what do I listen to when writing/working? Film soundtracks, primarily, from multiple genres, not limiting myself to fantasy or science fiction. I’m looking for atmosphere. When I’m writing intense action/fighting between protagonist and antagonist, I want something reflecting that. When I’m writing triumphal, I want that music. When I’m writing tender or intimate or melancholy, I want music mirroring those things.

I go by composers, not the films they’ve scored. Hans Zimmer is sublime. I enjoyed James Horner and was saddened to hear of his recent passing. Patrick Doyle, James Newton Howard, Thomas Newman, John Williams, Howard Shore, Alexandre Desplat, Harry Gregson-Williams have all done terrific work on multiple films. (Ironically, I can’t listen to Shore’s Lord of the Rings while working... I know it too well, know what various characters are doing at precise moments in the soundtrack and so become distracted.)

Ilan Eshkeri, Ed Shearmur, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, Dario Marinelli and Stephen Warbeck have done sterling work, too. On TV, Bear McCreary’s work in series like Battlestar Galactica and, more recently, Outlander, is great. And don’t underestimate some of the composers for video games. Marty O’Donnell did tremendous stuff for the Halo franchise. The man can go from majestic to brooding to poignantly tender in the blink of an eye. The team working on the Mass Effect games is frequently brilliant, as are the folks working on the Assassin’s Creed series. And everything is available for purchase through iTunes or CD.

So there I sit in my little hole, hunched over my venerable laptop, stringing words together, listening to tunes on my iPod. Because, as the Bard said, “Here will we sit and let the sounds of music/Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night/Become the touches of sweet harmony.”

Indeed, Will, indeed.

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The devil is in the details... or maybe not

8/22/2015

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tex-ture n. 1. The character of a fabric, determined by the arrangement, size, etc. of its threads 2. The arrangement of the constituent parts of anything
- Webster’s New World Dictionary

tex-ture n. 1. visual and especially tactile quality of a surface: rough texture. 2. the characteristic structure of the interwoven or intertwined threads, strands, or the like, that make up a textile fabric: coarse texture. 3. the characteristic physical structure given to a material, an object, etc., by the size, shape, arrangement, and proportions of its parts: soil of a sandy texture; a cake with a heavy texture. 4. an essential or characteristic quality; essence.
-Dictionary.com

As you see, we associate the word more with weaving or touch, but I apply it to the writing process with two distinct uses: details that enrich and enliven a setting or story; and to define an essential or characteristic quality to a story.

When we say ‘the devil is in the details,’ we’re not usually being positive, rather, that our magnificent vision floating effortlessly above the earth can swiftly get shot down when we have to apply practicalities to it. But in the context of writing, detail provides the texture to make an okay story great. And it’s something in our attention-deficit plagued world that often receives short shrift, which is an enormous shame. (To say the least. Don’t get me started.)

You can actually tell a story very quickly, if you want. In fact, I use exercises of that sort with my classes. One involves taking a story --- or film, because it works with that, too --- and boiling the plot down to 15 or 20 statements, cutting everything but essentials. Another gets them to take a novel and summarize it in 50 words, then doing the same again... in 15 words. Funnily enough (almost counter-intuitively), most have more difficulty with the 50 than with the 15. Why? Because 15 words allows absolutely no wiggle room. You must be very economical, or you’re not going to make the count. (Not unlike the 140 characters you have when tweeting, but on steroids.) Complete economy of scale is imperative. But with the 50 word summary, suddenly, you do have wiggle room. Not a lot, but enough to start asking questions: what to leave out? What to include? Ah, the torturous choices!

However, in both exercises, texture is, of necessity, gone. What you’re left with is a desiccated corpse, the skeleton of a story without any fleshing out. It’s a terrific way of honing the ability to summarize (an essential life skill)... but an awful way to tell a story.

The printed medium demands texture in a manner that the visual does not. In one sense, film is really a lazy way of getting a story, because all the creative decisions have been made for you. What do the characters look like? Settings? Atmosphere? Everything’s there. It’s limiting. (For example, I thought Sir Ian McKellen made a terrific wizard in The Lord of the Rings films... but it’s hard after that not to see his face every time I read about Gandalf in the book.) But that problem is not applicable to stories. Your imagination has to paint the picture. To do that, it relies on the texture the author provides in the narrative. (I mention to classes that, when I’m reading, after a while, I don’t even see the printed words on the page anymore. My eyes are obviously taking them in, but in front of them is a vivid picture constructed by my imagination from the words given me by the author, and that’s all I’m aware of seeing. Sometimes I’m met with knowing nods... but all too often these days, though, I’m met with blank stares of incomprehension. Sigh. Don’t get me started. Again.)

Texture is adding details that may not directly contribute to plot advancement, but that’s not necessarily wrong. Think of the entire Tom Bombadil segment in The Lord of the Rings. Think... wait a minute. Did somebody just ask who that is? Out, illiterate barbarian! Yea, verily, we cast thee into darkness! (Even as you’re feebly protesting that you watched The Lord of the Rings, thereby unwittingly revealing that you committed Cardinal Sin #1: You Watched the Film Without Reading The Book. First.)

Tom Bombadil doesn’t contribute much to moving the plot forward, but when I mentioned this to my editor, he pointed out, quite rightly, that Tom’s presence is active character development for the world of Middle Earth. That more than meets both definition and justification of texture. The description of the Old Forest... the River Withywindle... the hot, humid afternoon by a brownish, torpid river, willow leaves floating down... that is terrific texture. If your imagination cannot take that and paint a vivid mental image of that scene... and the hobbits in panic as they discover Old Man Willow’s menace... Tom’s careless arrival and nonchalant response to the threat posed... then, my friend, you have my pity.

However, like everything, texture is about balance. Aye, there’s the rub, isn’t it? Including enough detail to make the story fascinating without cramming in so much that the narrative grinds to a halt under a bewildering barrage of adjectives, tangents and opacity. How can you tell whether there’s too much or too little texture? Ah ha. Through what I call the Goldilocks Factor --- applicable to many things, but not really quantifiable and therefore extremely irritating to the more literal-minded. (The literal-minded also tend to be imaginatively challenged, he whispered a touch condescendingly.) If the Goldilocks Factor is in play, then it’s Just Right. Not too much. Not too little. Just right.

But how will I know? you whisper in exasperation. (And you may have a point, I concede, because such knowing seems a vanishing skill among all ages nowadays. Gads, what a depressing thought.)

However, trust me, if you have any sense of writing at all, you will know. Because the story’s exuberant eloquence will give us the details we need without hindering the telling... the story will flow like a sparkling mountain torrent...

...you’ll know it...

...and more importantly, so will your readers.

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An Exercise in Masochism... or... Why Writers Write

8/15/2015

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For many of us, writing is one strange and temperamental beastie. Look at the process, and it can seem weirdly masochistic. Trying to find the right words, or knowing what to write, is an agonizing ordeal at times. The solitary nature of writing isolates you from your nearest and dearest as you devote scarce free time to it instead of them. The uphill battle to get noticed in the Babel of voices out there, particularly since the explosion of the Internet, is nigh on impossible. If you do manage to get published, only the lucky few can support themselves solely on the words they churn out. And everybody’s a critic, sometimes savagely so, even though you’ve exposed your very soul in your work. So why do writers write?

This issue came into focus for me just last week, which, as I remarked on both my Facebook page and Twitter feed, was a red-letter day for a writer: I received my first ever royalty cheque from my publisher for copies of my novel sold during this year’s second quarter. Wow, I thought! I’m actually getting paid for my words. What writer doesn’t dream of that? (I ask seasoned pros reading my post to be gently tolerant/indulgent, to smile and think back nostalgically to their first time. No, no... I’m talking about their first royalty cheque. Get your mind out of the gutter.)

Now, admittedly, in my case, we’re not talking about bags of money. Given that my novel was only published part way through June and has not yet found a wide audience, the kindest thing that could be said about that royalty cheque is that the amount was extremely modest. But it was still exciting. So... there’s a natural question that follows, and I’ve actually been asked it: is it the money?

No, a thousand times no. It’s nice to get the cash, don’t get me wrong, but it’s got to become much larger before I could support myself on it. More importantly, what the cheque said was that some people were interested enough in my work to take a chance and, quite literally, put their money where their mouths are. But the money is, really, just a fringe benefit.

James Branch Cavell once wrote of a man desiring to be a writer, who cried out, “I am pregnant with words! And I must have lexicological parturition, or I die!” That’s a little pompous/self-absorbed… well, it’s actually a lot pompous/self-absorbed… but I think there’s more than a grain of truth in that cry.

So here it is in a nutshell, at least as far as I’m concerned: you write because you have to, and you write because you want to. You write for yourself, and you write for others.

In part, you have no choice. Some of us just have to tell stories. Or write them, anyway. It’s hard-wired into us. And once you’ve started a piece, it becomes an imperative to finish. Salman Rushdie has said that when he’s working on a book, if he’s away from it for too long, “the story sulks.” After only one book of my own, boy, do I understand what he’s saying.

You want to write, because it’s balm to the soul to see a story you’ve created unfold, to breathe life into people and places and events. (A junior act of Creation!) It’s a place of refuge when the vicissitudes of life become just a little too much to bear. And writing can be therapy. I’ve mentioned this before… it’s how and why I started my novel.

You write for yourself; particularly, as Stephen King says, during that first draft (he calls it writing with the door closed, a nice turn of phrase). You want to experience your world. You want that same feeling you got when you went through that beloved story that mattered to you, like The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) for me. Frodo (and later, Sam) left us at the end. They deked out at the Grey Havens, and like Pippin and Merry, we were left standing there mourning the end of all those great adventures. (I mentioned in my last post that our capacity as humans --- or hobbits --- to romanticize things, to forget the bad while only recalling the good, is absolutely phenomenal.) But we want more. We’re quite insatiable that way: when we like something, we really like it, and that means more. I think, for me, anyway, that’s how it started. I wanted more Middle Earth. I wanted more LOTR. And I’m sorry, but The Silmarillion and such just didn’t quite do it for me. It was interesting in a scholarly kind of way, but it lacked the “human” drama of LOTR. So I started writing for myself.

Now, to be clear, I didn’t want to write about hobbits and Middle Earth. Frankly, it never even occurred to me to do so: Middle Earth belonged exclusively to Professor Tolkien, and to complacently presume to add on to that world seemed blatantly derivative at best, arrogantly plagiaristic at worst. (I confess that I don’t really understand the motives behind fan fiction. And there’s such a lot of it out there. Why would you want to ride on someone else’s coattails? If you love something that much, go out and create something uniquely your own.) What I did want was to create my own rich world, like Professor Tolkien did, a world with magnificent and terrifying realities, attention to detail, riveting storyline and characters I could care as deeply about as if they were real. So I did. Well, tried to, anyway.

And finally, you write for others, at least if you’re trying to be published, which is the majority of us. I doubt there are many writers who don’t want to share their stories with anyone. As a writer, you’re looking for personal validation with your work. An audience. Someone who wants to read your work because they like it. And yeah, someone to tell you that they liked it. Ah ha! you say, writers are needy! Well, to a certain extent, I think so. Some more than others.

But then again, aren’t we all?

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Once Upon a Time...

8/8/2015

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Why do we love stories?

I read stories to students in my classes all the time. It’s how we explore literature together. They have printed copies, and my expectation is they follow along silently as I read the story aloud. How dreadfully archaic of me, you gasp. Hasn’t modern educational pedagogy moved beyond that? Yep, probably. But nobody has told my students that, bless their questing little hearts, and so they sit raptly as we unlock brave new worlds. Anyway, thirty years of teaching has given me a pretty good idea of what works with kids, unlike university professors and politicians who talk learnedly about best classroom practices even though it’s been decades, or maybe never, since they were actually in front of ordinary hormonal adolescents in a classroom. And I want to be clear that I read with all kinds of expression, including accents where appropriate and different voices for different characters. Reading aloud can be deadly if the reader isn’t good at it. (One of the nicest compliments I received was when a student said recently I should narrate an audiobook version of my novel.)

I’ve met very few students, among the thousands who have walked through my classroom door, who didn’t like to go through stories in this manner --- and that's including all the grades I’ve taught, from grade six through grade 12. Yep, even too-cool-for-their-own-good high school students love to be read to. Kids who hate reading love to be read to. Brilliant kids who would read all the livelong day, if you let them, love to be read to. (Although as we read, I can see them pulling away from where the rest of our monolithic group is flowing along at my spoken pace. That’s okay. I know they’re so in the story’s grip that they just can’t wait, and I have nothing but respect for that kind of literary impatience.) And the kids in between, the severely normal? Well, they love to be read to as well. Everyone loves a story.

(Well, yes, okay, I know. Not everyone. There are the Neanderthals out there who do not. But they don’t count, he said dismissively, and anyway, my response to them is Henry Tilney’s from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey: “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” In other words, a big, fat, literate raspberry. Yeah, Neanderthal, I’m talkin’ to you. If you can even understand me. Stop draggin’ yer knuckles on the literary ground and walk.)

Anyway... again... why do we love stories?

I think, very simply, it’s because we want to be entertained, enthralled, and diverted... in short, lifted out of lives that frequently seem to have little or none of the magic, adventure or romance that stories relate. (Sometimes we also want to be educated... but that isn’t the primary reason. Most of us don’t relish being hit over the head by a club with life lessons as we read. If we did, we’d just wander over to those self-help and advice-on-living tomes in the bookstore’s mammoth aisle under the “Didactic” sign.)

Note that I’m not saying our lives, as they are, can’t or don’t contain magic, wonder and adventure. I sure hope they can and do. But in stories, especially the fantasy genre, we frequently read about people experiencing things that just don’t usually crop up in everyday lives. And in that vein, I suspect we also love stories because it’s a great deal more fun to read about fighting dragons than it would be to actually battle them. Siegfried Sassoon, famed English poet, put it really well in his First World War poem Dreamers, where he talked about how soldiers don’t dream of heroic deeds or dying gloriously in battle, as they might have in their mundane lives prior to becoming soldiers. No, they dream of very ordinary things: taking the train to the office on a weekday morning and going on holiday outings... precisely the sort of things they despised back when they were doing them.

Or to put it another way, using a source I regularly refer to: it’s great fun to read about Frodo and Sam struggling their way up Mount Doom to destroy the Ring. Ah, the heroism! The noble self-sacrifice! The sense of comradeship! It’s enough to reduce some of us to puddles of weepy joy and treacly sentimentality. However... it would be quite another thing entirely to actually be toiling up the slope of an active volcano, starving and parched, wearing a tiny piece of jewellery hanging from your neck with the weight almost literally of an anvil, your mind filled with the soul-destroying presence of unbelievable evil nearby, breathing poisonous fumes and dodging volcanic vomit, knowing with sick dread that what you’ve signed up for is a one way ticket because you’re not a character in a story and there’s no helpful author who’s going to write a last-minute convenient escape in the form of enormous eagles or whatever...

So... it’s one thing to read it from the safety of our favourite armchair, steaming mug of Earl Grey on the side table, fire roaring comfortably in the grate; quite another to be out in the field of action, taking the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ on the chin while icy rain credibly imitates the Flood. I think most would prefer to be in that armchair... and if you have your own thoughts from that armchair about why we love stories, I’d love to hear from you.

On a final note, there is, of course, a corollary to the question about why we love reading stories: why do writers/storytellers love writing/telling them? I’ll explore that next. It’s particularly germane for me at the moment, because I received my first ever royalty cheque yesterday... which is originally what I was going to make this post about. But in a terrific example of one of the things I adore about writing, this morphed into something quite different. You know, I just love it when a plan doesn’t come together.

Sometimes.

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Oh, The Choices You'll Make!

8/1/2015

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(with apologies to Dr. Seuss)

Congratulations!
Tonight is your night.*
You’re off to Your World
Where you’re always right!
You have ideas galore.
You have visions aplenty.
You can choose who says what,
To whom, how and a-gently.
You rely on your thoughts and your deeper insight
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide what to write.

( *I don’t know about you, but I frequently choose to write at night. Why? Be patient. I’ll get to it.)

I’m pleading Ogden Nash in writing this verse. Not his talent, I hastily add --- I have never regarded writing poetry as my strong suit (no need to agree quite so vigorously, thank you very much) --- just his comic penchant, as I often point out to my students, of frequently and deliberately misspelling words or otherwise torturing them to make his rhymes fit. (To which they ask why they can’t do the same. “Because he was rich and famous, and you’re poor and anonymous,” I reply sweetly. It’s a sad truism that fame excuses a multitude of sins, isn’t it? Although it does provide a teachable moment with my scholars, bless their hormonal little hearts.)

I penned this doggerel because several people asked me about choices in writing (although they’re probably regretting it after my dreadful poetry). How does one choose characteristics for a character, for example? Gender, height, weight, eye colour, hopes, fears, abilities, baggage, etc.? How does one choose how a plot unfolds? The setting of a given scene?

Well, I think there’s three ways: Dictated, Deliberate, or Random.

Dictated choices are the ones where, really, you don’t feel you’re making much of a choice --- or get to choose, ironically. It’s there mentally, always been there, and you have absolutely no say in the matter. Sometimes, I think it’s very much as C.S. Lewis said: “I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.” As I mentioned in a previous post, for example, my gryphon Aquilea just was a girl, and there was no use arguing with myself about it, because it was an Immutable Truth. I don’t know why it was so, but it was, and with those sorts of things, it’s as if the Muse looks at you sternly and says, “Don’t you dare tinker with it, mortal author. At your peril.”

(I’ve been asked why I made Rhiss a boy instead of a girl --- quite a lot of popular literature lately, especially Young Adult, features female protagonists. Was I making a deliberate statement for a strong male protagonist? Well, no, not really. It was more the dictated sort of decision. ‘They’ say that your first novel tends to be autobiographical, and there’s probably some truth to that, as I have poured much of me into Rhiss. So his viewpoint was simply male from the get-go.)

Other things --- quite a lot of things, really --- are not as set in stone, and you’ve got deliberate decisions to make. And boy, they’d better be good decisions, or that Classic for All Time you’re writing is not going to be anywhere near as eternal as Shakespeare (something beyond most of us mere mortals, anyway). I’ve said before that I usually plot things out in advance. I think you have to do that a goodly chunk of the time, or you run the risk of your story slowly degenerating into chaos/nonsense. Although occasionally, something that seems Immutable turns out not to be so. For example, Arian, my protagonist’s mentor, was originally Arias (Ah RYE as). Male. For the first draft, maybe two, he was a crusty old man guiding Rhiss through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And then I got to thinking... Gandalf. Brom. Ben Kenobi. Priest in The Count of Monte Cristo. And so on. In an awful lot of stories, the mentor is an old man. What about, I thought, turning that on its head, making the character female? And boom, Arian came into focus. That’s an example of a deliberate choice. (If you want to know what Arian looks like --- at least as far as I’m concerned --- Google the late Canadian/American actress Colleen Dewhirst playing Marilla in a 1985 production of Anne of Green Gables. That’s Arian to me --- right down to the gravelly voice and perennially exasperated manner.)

Sometimes, as I’ve also mentioned before, something you thought was immutable --- a character’s behaviour or a situation or some such --- suddenly rears up, assumes a mind of its own, and the outcome is as unpredictable as it is wondrous. If that character or situation is flowing well, my advice is to simply ride the wave and let it happen. I think it’s a sign your work has really come alive: the characters are behaving like real people with wills of their own.

Random choices... I don’t think those happen very often, at least in my experience. And frankly, I don’t they should. If you’re making writing decisions and choices with no plan or agenda in mind, you should question why you’re doing this at all. Occasionally it will work, but not often.

Finally... that pesky little asterisk at the beginning. Writing at night. Well, it’s partly prosaic, partly romantic. Writing is essentially a solitary occupation --- at least to begin with, although the odd thing is that we simultaneously write for ourselves and others --- and it’s hard to do when the world is awake and noisily stomping about its business. I frequently write after my nearest and dearest have given up on me and departed for the arms of Morpheus (who, by the way, was the Greek god of dreams long before he was Neo’s mentor). When the house is quiet, there’s a stillness that seems to facilitate moving between worlds, especially if one is a night owl, like me. I can sit there in my den, listening to my iPod (we can talk another time about music while writing), imagination unleashed as I watch characters come alive and do the most incredible things. It’s joyous... and hugely rewarding.

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D.R. RANSHAW

Music hath charms...

The devil is in the details... or maybe not

An Exercise in Masochism... or... Why Writers Write

Once Upon a Time...

Oh, The Choices You'll Make!

D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

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