Inkblot

Hi all. My name is Inkblot, in case we haven’t been introduced yet.

I’m setting out here to write a reasonably light-hearted and positive article about fantasy writing. One of the features of this site that spurred me to sign up here was the sporking. There’s a certain witty and cutting kind of sarcastic humor that I never fail to fall for, and it was present here in spades. Of late, however, it seems that affairs in Maradonia have degenerated into mostly profanity; I hasten to add that there is no blame to assign for this, as nothing drives a hardworking amateur or professional into an incoherent rage faster than hopelessly shoddy work in their field of expertise. So here we are; I only seek to lighten the mood for a little while.

Let’s talk about humor. First, a bit of stage-setting. It may just be an issue among the B-grade “lit” that gets made fun of around here, or it may be an issue with fantasy in general, but I think that a lot of these people are taking themselves and their work way too seriously. I would like to hope that every card-carrying member of ImpishIdea has at the very least heard the name Terry Pratchett before. His Discworld series is unique, as far as I know, in the realm of traditional fantasy writing. It is done in the fine old tradition of the British sense of humor; among Mr. Pratchett’s spiritual ancestors are such as Douglas Adams and Monty Python. There are now 38 books set in the Discworld universe, including the novels aimed at the YA crowd, which for the record is a hell of a lot more than the vague number I had in mind when I looked that up. The common thread of the series involves comedic deconstruction of different fantasy clichés from a wide variety of sources and mythologies. Back to that in a moment.

There’s this chap named Horace Walpole, and I don’t have any idea what he did or who he is, but he once said the following: “Life is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel.” It’s a pretty good quote. The important realization, of course, is that life is both. Everyone’s dealt with the heavy stuff: death, sorrow, failure, all the broken threads, snapped connections, and missed opportunities that plague this tear-stained world. But everyone’s also known the surprisingly vivid and poignant moments when the only response is laughter, the cleansing and critically unimportant froth of a good chuckle that lets us keep sliding through, lets us get up and have another go. Life just doesn’t make sense. It’s a vast, seething storm of everything that makes us up, all our emotions and experiences, and it can’t possibly all fit into a novel. But those novelists who come closest are those who manage to work both humor and sadness in, because in life we encounter both regularly.

What is humor? I once heard it defined as “The human mind’s response to a perceived inconsistency.” We meet something that doesn’t make sense. So we laugh it off. Thank whatever God you believe in that you never will have to meet the crushing weight of an entirely humorless world. It’s a powerful tool, and it makes us more human and less inhumane. I believe that it’s also somewhat lacking in fantasy, personally. This is, of course, because we influence our writing as much as it influences us. A work is the product of both the time it’s set in and the time it’s written in. Ours is an increasingly dark, brooding, and violent planet, but that’s no reason to let the flame of humor blow out; it’s rather an excellent argument for why we should keep it lit. We often make the mistake of thinking that our society faces a curse that no one has ever seen before. It’s simply not true. The demons and sins that plague humanity have been with us since the beginning, since age is the essence of evil. Only virtue is truly young. I give you War and Peace, Tolstoy’s most famous work, as an example. War has been an ugly scar on civilization since the day it was invented. The blood-red madness that drives men to slaughter each other has not been any less pleasing to the eye in any age. Tolstoy was a veteran of the Crimean War, a conflict in that curious time when men tried to civilize and tame war and ended up with cold slaughter, and that experience informed his writing. War and Peace is heavy stuff, a typical Great Russian doorstopper. There’s despair and drinking and suicide galore, as well as a pace of storytelling that can only be described as glacial. The opening scene of the book is an introduction of the Rostov family and some others, all of whom are important later in the novel. It’s an incredibly boring take-off; 82 pages are devoted to a party, the sole purpose of which is to introduce about twenty of the main characters, fifteen of the minor characters, and five or six people of no importance whatsoever. It is redeemed solely through Tolstoy’s keen knowledge of human behavior and neat little touches. The incident I want to discuss in particular involves Nikolai, a fifteen-year-old, and his distant cousin Sonya, thirteen, whose budding preadolescent romance is given exactly the treatment it deserves. Nikolai is joining the army soon; he’s a bit too big for his boots, and these little games are almost- but not quite – beneath him. Sonya is hopelessly in love with him and does her awkward best to flirt and draw him in. It’s adorable. It’s endearing, funny, and exactly true to life, and that one scene was what made me slog through all 850-and-change pages of this monster AND slog through the endless angsting and second-guessing of the ten or eleven principals, because that one scene made me care about what happened to the characters. In contrast, Crime and Punishment is a very similar novel with an entirely different premise: a young university student who believes he is the Ubermensch commits a murder for money, and his cat-and-mouse game with the police and his guilt eventually almost destroy his sanity. His name I can’t remember. He was a horribly tortured and broken human being who paid for his crimes many times over along Dostoyevsky’s trip into the deepest cracks of the pit of the soul, but he was not a person to me in the way that Nikolai and Sonya were. They both suffered and rejoiced the way I both suffer and rejoice. They were human.

A few counter-examples that I just thought of. First up is the whole genre of “dark fantasy”. Now I freely confess that I’ve never read anything that would fall into this genre, mostly because the all-too-common examples are “porn for women”. With that said, it seems like the common theme is either A: it’s a crappy novel and the main character(s) spend endless pages breathlessly choking on their insatiable lust or B: it’s a slightly less crappy novel or even a fairly good one and the main characters spend endless pages angsting about their fate/doing something violent/reflecting on someone else doing something violent/etc. The truth is that no human being can sustain a ravaging, dark emotion that’s deeply felt for very long at all. Some examples of these include a truly killing rage, the frightening state in which you really could take someone’s life, easily, or a really suicidal depression, or some others. There’s not too many of them. If you’ve ever felt one you know that they don’t last. You just can’t keep up the pace. Even on a lighter note, a traditional high fantasy where the Hero must Accept His Quest and Defeat Evil to Save The World From Itself is just a tad unrealistic. If you’re really curious, as an experiment, see how long you can keep your mind fully preoccupied with a serious, grave matter without being distracted in any way. Humor is stress relief, the little red valve in your brain that keeps you from going nuts. Even Dl’alang’hoy III, Great Warden of the North, has one, and forgetting that it’s there makes him/it into a robot. A particular example before we move on is that one truly awful thing with the dragons that they sporked on here a while back. You Slay Me, that was it. The cab driver dude, right, whassisname? The one guy who turned out to be like a cross between Keanu Reeves from Constantine and Chuck Norris? If you actually want him to be a character who’s the Human Normal, which as far as I can tell was the original intention, and you expect me to believe that he went along with all this crazy-ass Illuminati secret-society plotting without even once cracking a smile at the sheer raving idiocy of it all? Think about the cynical, world-weary cab driver indulging in a gut-busting laugh as the lady lead tries to tell him about the secret dragon bar or whatever the hell it was, and watch as he immediately pops into relief as a three-dimensional human being against the cardboard background of the plot. Sure, his salvation is at the expense of the plot, but there’s a way to work it in without destroying the credibility of the whole.

The best fantasy novel I ever read was The Once and Future King by T.H. White. I firmly believe that it will remain the best fantasy novel I ever read until the day I return to dust. If you’ve never read it, you owe it to yourself to make the time. It’s a fun romp through the storied halls of Arthurian legend, and hilariously takes apart some of the silliness of medieval glory in much a similar way as the Discworld novels do. I can’t furnish you with a page number or an exact quote, but there’s one scene where the boy Arthur and Merlin are watching two knights joust. T.H. White takes the opportunity to address the reader directly and mention that the weight of those glorious armor-clad knights meant that they couldn’t charge each other at anything more than a crawl. So the two champions laboriously make their way toward each other. They are quite polite and rules-abiding noblemen, engaging in chivalrous back-and-forth conversation as the duel progresses. One eventually falls off his horse and is unable to get up. The other, unable to see through the thin slit in his helmet, runs into a tree. Delightful silliness like this abounds in the first section of the book. There’s a noble knight floating around whose sworn familial duty is to chase a mythical creature; when he finally calls it quits, the creature takes to spending its days crying and moping about until he gives up in a fit of soft-hearted generosity and takes up his lance once more. Arthur is called Wart by everyone he knows. And this is where the true magic of this book lies. Without this charming, enchanting summer in the beginning, the truly heartbreaking moment when the reader and Arthur finally realize that the leaves have fallen, the birds have flown, the oaths are all broken and the magic is forever lost, and winter is coming on, would have little of its impact. There is no worse bitterness than the bittersweet.

On to Discworld. There’s a character in Discworld who is a vampire, a traditional vampire without any of that sparkly crap. This includes weakness to the light. His passion is photography with a box and plate camera, which of course requires a flashbulb. Here is the disconnect. Here is the humor. Every time he takes a picture, he screams in agony and turns into a pile of dust, which some Good Samaritan must sweep up and expose to a drop of cow blood from a bottle he carries around his neck. Note how this system is a system. It follows its own rigid rules of logic, in the same way that the universe and bureaucracy do. It just happens to be an amusing logic. Humor does not necessarily mean lunacy on a Catch-22 scale. Anyway, he is one of the most lovable characters in the series. He and others like him allow the reader to like the story. We like it. It made us laugh. When Pratchett decides to delve into serious topics, they become all the more vivid for the contrast. Sam Vimes is one of the recurring main characters, a violent, unrestrained alcoholic who keeps his old life and self tightly under wraps. His moral dilemmas and occasional breakdowns would not be as compelling without the entertaining pure silliness he must endure at the office from his completely incompetent subordinates, Nobby and Fred.

Another useful feature of humor is its ability to conjure up suspension of disbelief through (believe it or not) its logic. There’s a movie out there called Galaxy Quest. (By the way, you know you’ve got it made when you’re using Galaxy Quest as research material for a supposedly serious article. Whatever field you’re in, stay there.) It’s a straight-up spoof of the grandiose vision that was Star Trek, and there’s a lot of pretty funny moments in it. There’s one particular scene where Sigourney Weaver, the Token Female, and the captain (Tim Allen) are trying to find their way through their spaceship, which an alien race built by endlessly watching reruns of the Star Trek-like show they were actors in. Yeah, it’s pretty goofy. They reach one particular corridor where pistons with spikes on them are slamming down and across the path they must take. Weaver screams “Why is this even here?” The inclusion of humor and parody in Galaxy Quest enabled THAT world to actually make more logical, in-world sense than the world of Star Trek that it was spoofing. In fiction, a little joke made by one of the characters is a super-simple Lampshade Hang (and honestly, what’s more boring or annoying than an entire WORLD where every. Single. Person. is an accomplished wangster and no one is there to get the colossal joke?) You get the idea. I just wanted to bring Galaxy Quest in.

So I’ve gone on for quite long enough. I believe that the inclusion of a dash of humor in whatever fantasy world you’re writing is well worth your time to consider. Humor is escapism. It’s especially appropriate in dark or bleak settings because the sharp contrast makes people out of your characters. If you were a slave for a Dark Lord, you wouldn’t find something to laugh at accidentally and through great effort, because if you acted moody and emo, you just wouldn’t make it. Anger might keep you alive, but laughter is the only thing that would keep you human. In life, humor and tragedy are always hand-in-hand, and putting them together is a great way to bring a little more vividness to your creation.

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Those who inhabit the writers’ sphere of the Internet are generally familiar with the idea of the spork. At some point, we all encounter writing which is unusual in its offensive badness; some of us with more passion, energy, and general bad temper than the average take it upon themselves to exhaustively illustrate where these clueless scribes have gone hopelessly wrong. “Spork” has been adopted as a term for this process as being a fairly accurate descriptive of the material in question. Essentially, it can be argued that a spork tries to be both a fork and a spoon and fails at effectively doing the work of either – similarly, bad writing often fails on many, many different levels, which the conscientious sporker tries to explore as fully as possible.

(This explanation is cute and clever enough that I suspect I did not in fact invent it. Nevertheless, we plunge boldly on.)

To me it seems that the things that constitute bad writing have been relentlessly catalogued as far as they will go. However, and lamentably, the same careful attention has not been applied to good writing. This is partly because of what writing is – the expression in words of the psyche, of ideas, of emotions, of what is literally the deepest and most foundational essence of humanity. Take a step back and think about that for a second. So of course good writing is more difficult both to come by and to analyze, because good writing succeeds in capturing a fleeting, ghostly image of something beyond mere words. Break those words down, and the image disappears; however, I believe enough of the magic can be preserved with a careful treatment for some useful conclusions to be drawn.

Thus, I present you with the knork. A powerful tool, the unified might of fork and knife, capable of both cutting and spearing; in the same way this knork aims to cut out the individual elements that make good writing good and spear them so we can observe them more closely. As the extended metaphor is now screaming in agony, a heartfelt groan from you will hardly be noticed. Indulge yourself.

My library, being flooded with donations, is now in what I believe is the eighteenth consecutive month of a book sale. Recently I found six or seven titles I was interested in. I was informed at the desk that the price of my selection would be three fifty, but if I could fill out my stack of interesting reading material to be about yay high, it would be three bucks. No broke student can pass up a deal like that, so back to the shelf I went. I needed those two shiny quarters. One of the slim volumes I brushed off the shelf into waiting arms turned out to be Call for the Dead, by John Le Carre.

Le Carre has been an author on whom I hold mixed opinions. He is clearly a man of sporadic great talent, but his consistent quality (in my opinion) has not been high enough to firmly cement him as a Great Author (any book with his name on the cover is good). Russia House, for instance, I didn’t really like. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was much better. This book was excellent. It contains in the first twelve pages at least seven examples of really well-done description and character building, and I liked them well enough to try to share with you all.

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn’t left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This remark, which enjoyed a brief season as a mot, can only be understood by those who knew Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like a skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that “Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester.” And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince. Was he rich or poor? Peasant or priest? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann’s undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed luggage on the dusty shelf of yesterday’s news.

This passage is a joy to read. It’s quick, terse, packed with description, and bursting with clever, witty, and somehow sad asides. Let’s examine it in closer depth.

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.

An opening sentence is one of the most important ones in a novel as a whole. This one, though it contains evocative words like astonished and breathtaking, is not particularly intriguing. What is interesting, though, is that Lady Ann’s character is beginning to be defined from the very start. She describes Smiley as “breathtakingly ordinary”. Why? This combination of two words tells us Lady Ann is a flighty socialite – one of those people who see everything only in terms of its romantic and exciting potential and move on when they’ve exhausted that. He is exotically ordinary, strangely ordinary, a person whose alienness to her accustomed social circle makes him “interesting” to her. All this in two well-chosen words.

When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn’t left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This sentence is much more mysterious. The mention of the exotic, dangerous, thrilling Cuban driver confirms our subconsciously formed opinion of Lady Ann – but why couldn’t she have left Smiley? At this point we know nothing about him. The mention of the Viscount serves to frame the whole exchange in terms of high society, thriving on secondhand opinion and fabrication – but does he actually know anything about Smiley that the reader doesn’t? I don’t know, but it’s interesting to speculate. Not every loose end is worth tying up – and some are far more interesting as little mysteries.

Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like a skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that “Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester.”

Here we get into our first description of our character – for first time readers, he comes across as a British academic, a classic boring, stodgy middle-aged man whose very name means boredom. However, if you’ve already read another book with him in it, you know that Smiley is a member of the British Secret Service, whose profession is anonymity. In this light his description serves to remind us that he knows how to appear faceless. This character and these words are well-rounded and internally consistent, while rewarding people with previous experience. Since we’ve already met that fountain of wit, Sawley, the author can insert this clever, funny little jibe without breaking the flow or the mood. Note that if it were presented straight from the narrator it would be inconsistent with the somber and careful tone already laid down, but as it actually is the apparent oddity adds to the melancholy, the sense of describing someone else’s long-ago life.

And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

By taking this metaphor to its logical conclusion, the author gives us a very illustrative picture of Smiley’s movements, cementing him as overweight in our minds, and also makes a pretty funny though sour and cynical joke. All through here, my emphasis is on how these words can be made to have multiple meanings – made to carry as much weight as they possibly can. I have trouble with this (this essay is easily twice as long as the quoted material), so I focus in on examples of compact and double- or triple-meaning writing.

But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation.

This is a preachy aside which actually works. It uses words (gossip must), (sins followed with motives) that maintain a carefully neutral tone while managing to convey a tinge of the author’s disapproval of gossip. It’s also a penetrating, well-phrased insight into how people are simplified when described by others. You know you’ve found a good phrase when no other combination of words has quite the same meaning. In addition, this phrase is laying additional emphasis on the reader’s feeling that Smiley is not quite what he is presented to be.

And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard’s van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed luggage on the dusty shelf of yesterday’s news.

This passage gives a sense of time, of distance, and of sadness from the events described through the use of negatives (without, without, without, lost, destined, dusty, yesterday). As well, this metaphor is interesting and unusual enough to stick.

I unfortunately can’t quote the entire novel, but on page 3 Smiley is described as having left university prepared for a Fellowship in the analysis of Germanic literature. He is drafted into the Secret Service. There’s a long description of his new work, which is selecting good candidates for spy work, and his emotions on the subject, which are mixed. They always are. There’s a beautiful bit of description about how he misses England, the pretty hikes, the mountains, etc.

Then we get this, about six hundred words from the first mention of Germany:

…he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers. He resented, too, the way in which the Faculty had tampered with his subject – his beloved German literature. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937 when Smiley had stood in his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and a host of others. And Smiley, his damp hand cupped around the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.

This is brilliant exposition and character development. Note how Le Carre pulls no punches for the audience’s sake. The first sentence, if you are sufficiently knowledgeable about history, is clearly about the rise of Nazism, but done without the words Nazi, Hitler, Fuhrer, Party, fascist, or without the associations goose-step, heil, salute, and so on and so forth. The author could care less if you don’t get it. This kind of blunt, direct challenge is a hugely refreshing intellectual exercise – never forget how much fun it is to know you have to work to keep up. Also note how a familiar, tired subject can be made fresh and new by emphasizing parts of it that are not usually at the forefront, coming at it from a different angle. Smiley’s role in this is equally well-done. He is a superb reluctant hero – he doesn’t do this because it’s the right thing to do or to serve his country or because he thinks spying is cool – all justifiable motivations, but not ones that fit his character. He is in this because he is an academic, and no one can get more royally pissed off than an academic whose favorite subject is slighted and dishonored.
Word usage notes: The fire being described as “pagan” refers to the quasi-religious nature of Aryanism in the Nazi philosophy, as well as to how huge bonfires are perceived as being used in pagan religious ceremonies, and finally refers to how the students themselves perceive this fire as being a sacrifice of valuable things to their idealism and their vision. All that in one five-letter word.

One final example. On page eleven is this.

At Cambridge Circus he stopped the cab a hundred yards from the office, partly from habit and partly to clear his head in anticipation of Maston’s febrile questioning.

This minor detail would be useless and obtrusive here, were it not for the second “partly”. That last phrase ties it in to the events happening at this particular moment and makes it fade into the background where it can do its work. Part of writing a good spy novel is in constant repetition of and obsessive focus on the day-to-day complexities of spycraft, which slowly build up an idea of the painfully alert, paranoid, and fearful nature of its practitioners. So the mention of stopping the cab early, in order to approach on foot, unnoticed.

On page 18 is the following:

Smiley arrived there on foot just after eight o’clock the next morning, having parked his car at the police station, which was ten minutes’ walk away.

It was raining heavily, driving cold rain, so cold it felt hard upon the face.

This would not mean much without the page 11 excerpt, but in context with that it ties the whole narrative between together. It reinforces his cautious, careful, habitual nature – he’s been doing it this way for years and he’s stayed alive.

I find this fascinating material for thought. The relationship between words and thought is a powerful, deep, and strange one, and not to be taken lightly.

Of course John Le Carre did not write this as slowly and deliberately as I have taken it apart. The best writing is often done in a rush, when something clicks in the subconscious and everything comes pouring out tumbled together. However, in the off moments between writing I feel it is worth overanalyzing writing that you really like in order to find out how it works. This is known as engineering, and it is the reason we have machines that can fly without blowing up. Find out how it works, and then that information will be stored in your subconscious. What subconscious is that? The very same one from which your writing ultimately springs. If you study writing you like and understand how it is done well, the next time you’re banging along at fifty words a minute you will be incorporating those insights and ideas into your own work. The ultimate aim, as with practice in any skill, is to be able not to think about this stuff at all. Most writers here are at the level of no longer having to think about grammar or spelling issues – try to move to the next level of not having to think about style and technique issues, of automatically tying things in, reinforcing characters gradually, developing smoothly, keeping clues the audience will need dancing just before their eyes – then you will be free to focus on plot alone. It is one heck of a lot of fun to begin consciously progressing to this next level, so give it a shot.

FOOTNOTE ONE.
I was informed by Klutor the Ninth that a “spork” is a “spork” because it’s the ideal tool for digging your eyes out after finishing a particularly terrible example of bad craft. While this sounds logical to me, my metaphor falls apart with his version, so I blithely ignored it. I appreciate his review and edit of this article though – thanks man!

FOOTNOTE TWO.
Klutor also alerted me to the fact that not everyone has heard of this author. He enjoyed lasting fame as one of the masters of the espionage genre of modern thriller, along with Tom Clancy, although he has not written much lately. As I said, though, I’m only ambivalent on his ability – If you’re interested in a good spy novel, I’d first look at Tim Powers’ Declare, which is one of the best I’ve ever seen.

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