Digging in the dirt
Feb. 27th, 2006 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyI should be doing page-proofs. I know it and you know it.
Shhhhh.
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misia, it was your birthday recently. Belatedly, happy birthday!
matociquala is thinking about the Singularity.
Soscott_lynch, in the course of accepting matociquala's dare, talks a little bit about the things got him started writing as a kid. It's an interesting question--why do we start writing, if it isn't some outside force compelling us? [ETA: like school assignments, I mean, not muses or other higher powers.] If creativity is like an engine, what turns it on? (Mind, I think this question is equally compelling in other media--I just can't answer it. I've got some technical competence in both music and art, but if the engines are there at all, they're cold and dark and nonfunctional.)
I started writing stories when I was eleven. I don't remember exactly what the impetus was. I know we'd just gotten a new word processor. (WordPerfect for the Commodore Amiga--like backing the megatherium in the evolutionary Preakness), and I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to write a letter, which was the only thing I knew about that you wrote if it wasn't for school.
That was in the period where I was reading every anthology of ghost and horror stories I could get my hands on. They scared the absolute living daylights out of me, so I don't know why I kept reading them--and kept searching for them, like an addict searching for a fix.
But in any event, somehow these forces combined to create a two-page ghost story. It's lost, but I can tell you the plot (and there wasn't much more to the story than the plot): Girl gets lost in swamp. Family and fiancé despair. Girl is carried into the house by a strange, pale man. She's fine. Man leaves with a few enigmatic words. Grandmother sits down in a hurry. Man is her fiancé who was lost in the swamp sixty years ago. Fin. It was narrated, I think, by the family doctor.
What's interesting here--in light of what would shortly transpire--is that although that story was as derivative as heck, it wasn't a direct lift from anything in particular. (At least, not that I can remember. If you recognize that specific plot, say so please.) And--speaking as someone who's gone on to write a lot of them--derivative is kind of the name of the game in ghost stories.
I showed this two-page marvel to my sixth-grade English teacher, and bless her heart, she said something encouraging. Excelsior! quoth I. (And, yes, it does say something very pointed about me that I showed things to my teachers, not my friends.)
The second thing I wrote is a very direct lift from David Eddings' Belgariad (there are Silk, Hettar, Polgara, and Barak analogues, and by "analogues," of course, I mean "clones"). I didn't realize it at the time (the ghastly truth did not strike me until at least four years later), but oh the blatancy. The bits that weren't David Eddings were Frances Hodgson Burnett and there's a pet griffin that I would say was Mercedes Lackey's fault except that I didn't start reading Lackey until I was in college. It's Anne McCaffrey's fault. Because I was reading the Harper Hall books.
The Frances Hodgson Burnett was at least deliberate.
I do still have that story, because my teachers encouraged me to submit it to a contest for which you had to make your own book--write the text by hand on nice paper, draw the illustrations, sew it into a book and bind it. I have to say, the red faux-brocade I chose is probably my favorite thing about it. The title is The Pendant Quest; it has a map as the frontispiece (you can't say I didn't know my genre tropes, even at the tender age of eleven), the world of Megar, with such countries as Re Jea, North and South Carturia, Rombala, Ankar, and ... The Evil Land.
(I am so not making this up.)
The first paragraph, in my best and ornatest handwriting, after the heading AMERICA, is: A young girl stood on the doorstep next to a tall woman with carefully styled blond hair. "That's a big house," the girl said as the blonde woman reached forward and pulled the bell-rope.
The girl is, of course, our heroine. Her name, as will be revealed on the second page, is Thyme Louise Dupont.
(I am still not making this up.)
The happy ending involves Thyme and her uncle Alister and her pet griffin going to live in a cottage in Megar. And the happiest part of the ending is that it means Thyme never has to go to school again.
This is what unmediated, unadulterated wish-fulfillment looks like.
And it took second place in the contest, too.
I have a theory, which is probably a bad theory, that a lot of learning how to write is done through imitation. This is not the infamous million words of shit, because I don't think you get to that until you're really trying with all your heart to tell your own stories. So the story I wrote that's a confused attempt to make The Tombs of Atuan into the story I wanted it to be (I have that one, too, made into book-form for the same contest, and the best part about it is the illustration of the skeletal priestess; her skull is australopithecine, and I copied it from one of the illustrations in Lucy), and the lost saga that was part Heinlein-juveniles, part McCaffrey, and part Yolen (dragons! dragons in space!)--those are like finger exercises. They're imitations of the writers I liked. And please note, "imitation" is not the same as "fanfiction" or "pastiche." I'm not talking about projects in which one sets out deliberately to reproduce some part of a received work, whether it's characters or prose style or what; the hallmark of "imitation," in the very narrow sense I'm using, is that it's not deliberate because you don't have enough control over your own craft to be doing it on purpose.
And after you do it long enough, you get enough experience points to gain a level (or get your consciousness raised, whichever metaphor floats your boat), and the question of modeling your work on other people's becomes at least partly a conscious choice. (I don't think we ever get to be consciously aware of all our influences, but I don't have to stay eleven all my life, either.) This doesn't mean you're a good writer, and it doesn't imply any value-judgment about the choices you make; it just means your million words of shit can begin.
And like I said, this is a personal theory, and it may be wrong as wrong can be.
But by my theory, my million words of shit began like this: In the middle of the Heart's Love Mountains, there is a break in the mountain chain caused, long ago, by a violent eruption from a mostly subterranean volcano. Directly in the center of that thirty-six square mile plain, there is a lonely plateau (the last above-ground remnant of the forementioned volcano) that the people of Rocallion call Black Heart Mountain. Due to an oddity of the lava flow, in the exact center of the plateau there is a hollow spire of black rock known as the Pinnacle. The Pinnacle had been inhabited by a demonic presence since the beginning of time. When it had been a volcano, the demon had lived in the volcano. When it became a twisted spire (like something belonging to a nightmare unicorn), the demon lived in a twisted spire. He was flexible.
Which is the beginning of a story I started writing when I was fifteen. It was a terrible story in a lot of ways, but it was mine.
So the people responsible for getting me started are David Eddings, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Heinlein, and Jane Yolen.
Now there's an elevator to be trapped in.
Shhhhh.
misia, it was your birthday recently. Belatedly, happy birthday!matociquala is thinking about the Singularity.So
scott_lynch, in the course of accepting matociquala's dare, talks a little bit about the things got him started writing as a kid. It's an interesting question--why do we start writing, if it isn't some outside force compelling us? [ETA: like school assignments, I mean, not muses or other higher powers.] If creativity is like an engine, what turns it on? (Mind, I think this question is equally compelling in other media--I just can't answer it. I've got some technical competence in both music and art, but if the engines are there at all, they're cold and dark and nonfunctional.)I started writing stories when I was eleven. I don't remember exactly what the impetus was. I know we'd just gotten a new word processor. (WordPerfect for the Commodore Amiga--like backing the megatherium in the evolutionary Preakness), and I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to write a letter, which was the only thing I knew about that you wrote if it wasn't for school.
That was in the period where I was reading every anthology of ghost and horror stories I could get my hands on. They scared the absolute living daylights out of me, so I don't know why I kept reading them--and kept searching for them, like an addict searching for a fix.
But in any event, somehow these forces combined to create a two-page ghost story. It's lost, but I can tell you the plot (and there wasn't much more to the story than the plot): Girl gets lost in swamp. Family and fiancé despair. Girl is carried into the house by a strange, pale man. She's fine. Man leaves with a few enigmatic words. Grandmother sits down in a hurry. Man is her fiancé who was lost in the swamp sixty years ago. Fin. It was narrated, I think, by the family doctor.
What's interesting here--in light of what would shortly transpire--is that although that story was as derivative as heck, it wasn't a direct lift from anything in particular. (At least, not that I can remember. If you recognize that specific plot, say so please.) And--speaking as someone who's gone on to write a lot of them--derivative is kind of the name of the game in ghost stories.
I showed this two-page marvel to my sixth-grade English teacher, and bless her heart, she said something encouraging. Excelsior! quoth I. (And, yes, it does say something very pointed about me that I showed things to my teachers, not my friends.)
The second thing I wrote is a very direct lift from David Eddings' Belgariad (there are Silk, Hettar, Polgara, and Barak analogues, and by "analogues," of course, I mean "clones"). I didn't realize it at the time (the ghastly truth did not strike me until at least four years later), but oh the blatancy. The bits that weren't David Eddings were Frances Hodgson Burnett and there's a pet griffin that I would say was Mercedes Lackey's fault except that I didn't start reading Lackey until I was in college. It's Anne McCaffrey's fault. Because I was reading the Harper Hall books.
The Frances Hodgson Burnett was at least deliberate.
I do still have that story, because my teachers encouraged me to submit it to a contest for which you had to make your own book--write the text by hand on nice paper, draw the illustrations, sew it into a book and bind it. I have to say, the red faux-brocade I chose is probably my favorite thing about it. The title is The Pendant Quest; it has a map as the frontispiece (you can't say I didn't know my genre tropes, even at the tender age of eleven), the world of Megar, with such countries as Re Jea, North and South Carturia, Rombala, Ankar, and ... The Evil Land.
(I am so not making this up.)
The first paragraph, in my best and ornatest handwriting, after the heading AMERICA, is: A young girl stood on the doorstep next to a tall woman with carefully styled blond hair. "That's a big house," the girl said as the blonde woman reached forward and pulled the bell-rope.
The girl is, of course, our heroine. Her name, as will be revealed on the second page, is Thyme Louise Dupont.
(I am still not making this up.)
The happy ending involves Thyme and her uncle Alister and her pet griffin going to live in a cottage in Megar. And the happiest part of the ending is that it means Thyme never has to go to school again.
This is what unmediated, unadulterated wish-fulfillment looks like.
And it took second place in the contest, too.
I have a theory, which is probably a bad theory, that a lot of learning how to write is done through imitation. This is not the infamous million words of shit, because I don't think you get to that until you're really trying with all your heart to tell your own stories. So the story I wrote that's a confused attempt to make The Tombs of Atuan into the story I wanted it to be (I have that one, too, made into book-form for the same contest, and the best part about it is the illustration of the skeletal priestess; her skull is australopithecine, and I copied it from one of the illustrations in Lucy), and the lost saga that was part Heinlein-juveniles, part McCaffrey, and part Yolen (dragons! dragons in space!)--those are like finger exercises. They're imitations of the writers I liked. And please note, "imitation" is not the same as "fanfiction" or "pastiche." I'm not talking about projects in which one sets out deliberately to reproduce some part of a received work, whether it's characters or prose style or what; the hallmark of "imitation," in the very narrow sense I'm using, is that it's not deliberate because you don't have enough control over your own craft to be doing it on purpose.
And after you do it long enough, you get enough experience points to gain a level (or get your consciousness raised, whichever metaphor floats your boat), and the question of modeling your work on other people's becomes at least partly a conscious choice. (I don't think we ever get to be consciously aware of all our influences, but I don't have to stay eleven all my life, either.) This doesn't mean you're a good writer, and it doesn't imply any value-judgment about the choices you make; it just means your million words of shit can begin.
And like I said, this is a personal theory, and it may be wrong as wrong can be.
But by my theory, my million words of shit began like this: In the middle of the Heart's Love Mountains, there is a break in the mountain chain caused, long ago, by a violent eruption from a mostly subterranean volcano. Directly in the center of that thirty-six square mile plain, there is a lonely plateau (the last above-ground remnant of the forementioned volcano) that the people of Rocallion call Black Heart Mountain. Due to an oddity of the lava flow, in the exact center of the plateau there is a hollow spire of black rock known as the Pinnacle. The Pinnacle had been inhabited by a demonic presence since the beginning of time. When it had been a volcano, the demon had lived in the volcano. When it became a twisted spire (like something belonging to a nightmare unicorn), the demon lived in a twisted spire. He was flexible.
Which is the beginning of a story I started writing when I was fifteen. It was a terrible story in a lot of ways, but it was mine.
So the people responsible for getting me started are David Eddings, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Robert Heinlein, and Jane Yolen.
Now there's an elevator to be trapped in.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-28 03:00 am (UTC)In addition to being popular, I would argue that the theory isn't bad, because it's true. I don't have my copy of Samuel R. Delany's On Writing to hand, but there are quotes in there to the effect of, "the only way to learn how to write is to read extensively" and "you can't write a book better than the best book you've read in the last six months", which (combined with my own experience) suggests that the imitation of good models is the most reliable method of learning how to write with any degree of eloquence.